The Quantum Garden

by Derek Künsken

  “Can you compensate for the lumpy gravitational field, Mister Stills?” Saint Matthew asked.

  “Fuck off, wrist-sweat,” Stills said.

  “Transferring control to you then,” Saint Matthew said.

  “What do you want, prancy-pants?”

  “As soon as you enter the wormhole, your instruments won’t make any sense,” Belisarius said. “Use dead reckoning to come to a full stop a hundred meters after you clear the mouth. Cassie will navigate from then on.”

  For no reason other than apparently to bother them, Stills twitched the controls to get the feel of the cold jets. They all had to grab something. Then, Stills drifted them towards the flat face of the time gates, compensating for the uneven gravity with deft touches to the jets.

  “I guess you don’t want me scuffing the paint of your pretty ship on the sides of the wormhole?” Stills said.

  Belisarius didn’t answer. The mongrel was fishing for compliments or just challenging him. Stills had thirty to fifty centimeters clearance even at the widest section of The Calculated Risk. He would never have made a piloting error any more than he would have lost a race. Too much pride. Stills piloted them through and space changed. The dead visual stillness of the shadowed asteroid gave way to an eerie subconscious throbbing that made Iekanjika wince.

  “Puta!” Stills said over the comms.

  Human nerves had evolved to respond to a very narrow set of visual, auditory, chemical and pressure cues. Setting out to colonize other worlds had sometimes left some senses unfulfilled as people lived in tiny, artificial habitats. Here, the opposite was true. In this eleven-dimensional cathedral, every kind of nerve was triggered from within by phenomena that had nothing to do with human senses. Blotches of purple spattered sight like interference on a transmitted visual, while an unwholesome stew of phantom tastes hit them all. Homo quantus brains could create algorithms to subtract false signals, and even retreat into savant if they had to. Iekanjika, Stills and even Saint Matthew were exposed though.

  Iekanjika was tight-lipped and wide-eyed. But she mastered her reactions quickly, walking her expression back until even Belisarius couldn’t tell she was disturbed. Beside him, Cassie, in savant, began calling out navigational instructions.

  Full stop. Forty-five degree rotation around the q-axis. Full stop. Ninety degree rotation across the r-axis. Two hundred meters per second for twenty-eight seconds, spin the racer one hundred and eighty degrees for braking, then full stop and the next rotations...

  Belisarius watched Iekanjika. He couldn’t afford to have her harmed by exposure to being in here. Beyond the cockpit window was a weird, alien space, mostly impenetrable to baseline human eyes, and even most kinds of sensors. Shifting curtains of light crept through the dark interior of the time gates. And while it was as cold as a shadowed asteroidal crater, stray gamma rays and the occasional anti-particle zipped past. Stranger than the view were the eerie sensations of additional dimensions opening around them. Iekanjika probably felt the small twists in her stomach, in her balance and in her vision without knowing what they were.

  And it would be a lie to say that he and Cassie were immune to exposure to hyperspace. They were equipped to rationalize and compartmentalize the sensations, but their novel senses made new vulnerabilities too. Gravity and electromagnetism traveled differently in eleven dimensions, and even moreso depending on which axes of the interior they followed. Portions of their trajectory briefly gave them two temporal dimensions instead of one, which Belisarius felt through his magnetosomes and disliked.

  He wondered what Iekanjika thought of all this. Did she still resent that all this hostile space and time could have been hers? Or was she not even thinking about where they were and instead busying her mind with what they’d find thirty-nine years ago? Only her fingers, tight on the arm rests of her seat, betrayed her tension.

  “Mister Arjona,” Saint Matthew said into Belisarius’ ear implant. “The colonel’s data wafer contains a sleeper virus that is programmed to infect the racer. At some point, it is supposed to start sending homing signals to the Union.”

  You’ve neutralized it? Belisarius typed into his data pad.

  “Of course,” the AI responded. “But if we can’t trust her...”

  We never expected to, and she doesn’t trust me.

  “What a fucked up place,” Stills said.

  “Are you alright?” Belisarius asked.

  “I’m always fuckin’ A-okay, but I got weird sensor shadows. Have you pulled a physics theory out of your ass to explain why the place reflects back images of ourselves?”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “It’s faint and inconsistent, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller,” Stills said, changing the view in the projection to a fuzzy, tube shape kilometers behind them that grew and shrank. It was almost identical in size to the The Calculated Risk, but additional dimensions did strange things to perspective and relativity.

  “I got a good sense for echoes and that ain’t an echo.”

  Whatever it was vanished and didn’t return.

  “We haven’t figured out all the kinds of visual and electrical echoes inside the time gates when we move across time axes,” Cassie said with the distant enthusiasm of a homo quantus in savant. “We’re staying away from those to avoid paradoxes. What if what you just saw was us, on the way back?”

  Belisarius watched the empty image, checked it in other spectra and watched contaminated data roll in from sensors not made to work in this environment. Nothing.

  “Fuuuuuuck,” Stills said. “Don’t pull that shit with me, princess. I ain’t lookin’ to meet another me.”

  Cassandra continued issuing navigational instructions. The stops and starts, the rotations around strange dimensions made even Belisarius a little queasy. But at last the projection changed, and a flattened oval appeared about two hundred meters before them. As The Calculated Risk rotated around its final axis, the disk expanded into the familiar shape of the time gates.

  “The pastward mouth?” Saint Matthew asked quietly.

  “Opening thirty-nine years in the past, on the planet where the Union found the time gates,” Belisarius said.

  No one spoke. A directionless sense of dread crept over him.

  “Well, shit!” Stills said loudly. “No one’ll ever believe this.”

  Belisarius briefly took Cassie’s hand, and despite being in savant, she squeezed it back.

  “Are you ready, colonel?” Belisarius asked.

  Iekanjika squinted, peering into the gloomy weirdness beyond the cockpit. She nodded curtly.

  Belisarius and Iekanjika sealed the chests, hoses and gloves of their vacuum suits. Belisarius became Private Wedu Abugalo and Iekanjika became Corporal Upenyu Manyika. Iekanjika’s hands shook slightly; not so much that anyone else would notice, even Cassie in savant. Cassie hadn’t trained herself to read meaning in people’s behavior. Will Gander had trained Belisarius to interpret all the cues and tells his marks showed, so he picked up on Iekanjika’s nerves.

  Belisarius took Saint Matthew from the cockpit console and put him around his wrist as a service band. They’d modified the band to match the style that the Union wore forty years ago. Cassie exhaled a long breath, the kind she made when emerging from savant. She unstrapped and came close, putting her hand on the neck ring of his suit. Her eyes were worried.

  “We’ll wait here for the next hour,” she said. “Then we’ll move onto an axis where we can see the wormhole mouth across a broad stretch of time, so whether you’re back in two hours or two weeks or two months, we’ll see you and move to pick you up.”

  “If you can figure out any of that, prancy-pants,” Stills said, “power to you.”

  “Come back,” Cassie whispered to Belisarius.

  “I will,” Belisarius said.

  She pressed her lips to his until his heart started beating more quickly. Hers did too, in the resonance that Homo quantus learned as children to help with fugue spotting.
r />   “I will,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  IF TIME INSERTED intervening distances between moments, separating events from one another, then the vitrification and petrification processes collapsed time. Events separated by fifty years, or a hundred, maintained an unnatural clarity, as if seen through a telescope. In a petrified brain, life and memory were connected by lenses rather than time.

  Many of the lenses in Scarecrow memory revealed informants, those bricks and mortar of espionage work. As a young intelligence officer posted off Venus, he’d cultivated his own informants, inherited others from his superiors. He’d plied them, bribed them, threatened them for information. Their likenesses were sharp-lined in memory, as if under glassy water, but they had no names. They all had code-names, or names he could no longer remember.

  His own name was gone too, as if he were just someone’s informant too, some part in the great chain of intelligence and espionage. His name wasn’t important though. The Congregate was greater than the sum of the Houses and families floating in the clouds of Venus and knowing what Venusian House he came from might dilute the Scarecrow’s loyalty to the Congregate.

  Bribing informants in the Congregate was increasingly difficult. The Congregate was born of scarcity, but for decades had been moving into a new post-scarcity world. The people of Venus were born of generations of separatists, who themselves were born of other separatists, and forced to move out to one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system under the thumbs of the Banks. No one who lived through that period of want and poverty could forget it, but a society could forget it, trading memories away as the price of raising children in the light of wealth.

  The Scarecrow had lived on both sides of the divide. Haunted-eyed parents and all the old ma tantes and mon oncles obliged him to remember their sacrifices, all that came before his games of tag in the clouds, back when the Banks had tried to own and invade them. It was old history to him, but he learned.

  The bright side of the scarcity divide was a strange world. He didn’t need to work. He didn’t need to do anything. But where was meaning in such a world? He found it in service to the Congregate, in the espionage forces, but that cut him off, first from all those who did no service, like his brother Adéodat, and parents he could no longer remember, and second from all those who harbored discontent with the Congregate in their hearts.

  Bribing informants in this new world was hard. Loyalty became a new currency, coming with social status and its own set of dividends. And among his peers, the other new currency was immortality, as a Scarecrow. His fellow intelligence officers strove to prove their loyalty, for advancement, better postings, and maybe for one day being born in a second petrified, vitrified life. He hadn’t. He’d never believed he had what it took, nor believed he was any better than his fellow intelligence officers.

  He was good with informants, a talent that hadn’t faded with age or petrification. And one of his informants had spotted the Homo quantus Arjona on the Union flagshipwith one of the high-level rebels, Colonel Ayen Iekanjika. The substance of their conversation was unknown. Arjona later left the Mutapa, and a day later Colonel Iekanjika did so as well.

  The Scarecrow had followed the colonel’s command fighter, running in stealth mode, nearly invisible against the stars. He rode in the casing of a casse à face missile fitted with an experimental reactionless drive. The Scarecrow needed no air, no life support, or even space beyond its robotic body. The drive burned no fuel, so only active radar pings would reveal it, but the colonel moved too stealthily for that.

  The command fighter made for one of the deep-system relays, an artificial satellite of Epsilon Indi that boosted communication signals on their way across the solar system. The fighter came to a stop, and for long minutes, waited at the satellite before it darted back the way it had come. The Scarecrow would have followed it, but it detected new emissions from the satellite. Thermal. Something human-sized emitted infrared near body temperature, alongside a large, cooler object. The command fighter had disembarked someone with equipment.

  The Scarecrow weighed its options. The weaponized AI was capable of complex espionage and counter-intelligence functions, but its primary role was counter-insurgency. The command fighter was far enough from its forward base that it might be captured for intelligence analysis. But intelligence was not the same as rooting out the rebellion. The Scarecrow transmitted a progress report to its team on the cruiser Port-Cartier, twenty light-minutes away, and waited.

  Fifteen minutes later, a larger craft approached, decelerating at five gravities. It had low reflectivity and IR emission and no running lights of EM emissions from its drive. It was a very quiet inflaton ship, trying to be even more quiet. It stopped at the satellite and loaded the secretive passenger and the cargo. Then, it accelerated away at four gravities. The Scarecrow followed at a distance, and transmitted another tight-beam report to the Port-Cartier.

  The inflaton ship made a number of course changes, some drastic, and the Scarecrow had to run on silent and make corresponding maneuvers long after the inflaton ship had pulled far ahead. After three hours of this, the inflaton ship decelerated near C99312, a chondritic, bi-lobed asteroid. The Scarecrow did the same, maintaining telescopic distance.

  The small bay doors on the inflaton craft opened, removing something from its hold. The EM emissions were strangely inconclusive, colder than the rest of the inflation ship. The object’s luminosity was faint and variable, with a spattering of x-rays. Through their faint infrared emissions, the Scarecrow watched robotic automata move this cargo into a shadowed ravine. Shortly, the inflaton ship closed its bay doors, turned and entered the ravine.

  Then the Scarecrow could not detect it.

  The Scarecrow scrutinized its telescopic observations, but only the slow cooling of the robotic automata was visible. No ship. Had it entered the asteroid? Not likely. The asteroid would have been hotter in the infrared if it had housed even a lookout station. The Scarecrow reviewed its telescopic observations again. The thing they’d taken out of the hold was far colder than the ship. And it emitted faint radiation and scattered x-rays of a very peculiar kind.

  Strange.

  Delicately, on cold jets, the Scarecrow approached C99312. From fifty kilometers, the Scarecrow lasered the little robots in the ravine, enough to burn them out, but not enough to melt them and destroy the possibility of conducting a forensic examination on their inner workings. A faint magnetic field centered on the asteroid, so faint that at fifty kilometers, Epsilon Indi’s own field almost swamped it.

  The Scarecrow reached the ravine, ready to respond to any attack, but nothing moved or signaled. A few meters away from the nose of the casse à face missile, the inscrutable Cherenkov radiation and trace x-rays shimmered.

  No observers had ever recorded any wormhole so small, so small that only a narrow shuttle or missile could fit through, and the inflaton ship had vanished. The Scarecrow shot a tight-beam report to the Port-Cartier, with instructions to secure C99312 immediately. The message would reach the destroyer in twenty minutes, and it might need another ten minutes to induce a temporary wormhole and arrive on full alert. But by then, the trail of the Union colonel might be cold on the other side. And the colonel was either with Arjona or could lead him to the Homo quantus. The Scarecrows were not grown to feel trepidation or fear, only unwavering loyalty to the Congregate and deep affront when faced with threats. Although the far side of the Axis might be defended, high-value intelligence was on the other side.

  The Scarecrow crossed the insubstantial surface of the wormhole mouth.

  Everything became immediately incomprehensible, with nonsensical visual, gravimetric and electrical signals. Automated system diagnostics activated, showing weird time discrepancies, energy readings and impossible internal pingback delays. The Scarecrow came to a stop. This was no normal wormhole. It lacked a throat structure. Instead, a vast, trackless space opened, and readings made no sense.

  The
inflaton ship floated, barely visible, a kilometer ahead. It had also stopped and was rotating on cold jets. But as the Scarecrow watched, the inflaton ship shrank and vanished. It didn’t recede. It didn’t pass through the horizon of a wormhole mouth. It shrank along an axis, squashing and vanishing.

  The Scarecrow moved precisely on cold jets to the last position of the inflaton ship with readied weapons. The region, although writhing with weird, sourceless energies, was empty, bereft of obstacles or any cover where the ship might have hidden. There was no such thing as a cloaking effect, unless the Homo quantus had invented one.

  Where had they gone?

  The Scarecrow rotated exactly as it had seen the inflaton ship do. The view of the interior of the weird space changed. Some colors shrank and disappeared. Others kaleidescoped through frequency and apparent direction. Despite being an AI with powerful processing capacities, the Scarecrow hadn’t been so disoriented since its construction decades ago.

  The kaleidescoping effect pulled an image of the inflaton ship into visibility, six hundred meters ahead; at first minuscule, then small, then growing to full size as the Scarecrow completed its rotation. The stern of the inflaton ship was visible, moving off.

  The Scarecrow couldn’t understand the shrinking and growing ship. No element of perspective or movement could explain it. Nor could anything explain the strange time discrepancies with the speed of internal diagnostic pingbacks within the missile system. Something very, very strange was at play.

  The Scarecrow didn’t understand this space and what it saw, nor the speed of its internal pingbacks. And it also realized, with unfamiliar dread, that it couldn’t see the wormhole mouth anymore. It had only advanced a couple of kilometers into the Axis, yet the Scarecrow hadn’t controlled its drift precisely in its urgency, so even reversing its course exactly would not necessarily bring it back to the wormhole mouth, if it could ever even find it again.

  The inflaton ship was rotating again. Its pilot knew how to navigate this space. How long had the Union and the Homo quantus been working on this treason?