The Quantum Garden

by Derek Künsken

  Victory? Freedom? For whom? For the politicians posturing on Bachwezi? Or for the people positioning here for control of the Expeditionary Force? Did they deserve the victory Iekanjika might deliver if she could not stand on honor or duty?

  But maybe she held her honor too highly. She could sacrifice herself for her people, so why price her honor above that?

  Iekanjika came to the air-fill station beside the general HQ. MilSec secured many parts of the surface base, but the air-fill station wasn’t one of them. A simple key-card swipe and tanks could be refilled without going inside. The system cross-referenced to the supply system and the personnel system, so air use could be accounted for and audited. They’d set it up this way in the hopes that accounting would net them a few unwary Congregate sleeper agents. She connected a hose to one of her tanks, pulled out a pad and began reading the files behind the refill accounting system.

  Lieutenant-General Rudo had given her many small passwords and administrator codes in addition to the big one she’d used yesterday. She logged onto the system with a low-level auditor code, crossed virtually to the personnel system, and queried for Lieutenant Nabwire.

  Information appeared. Lieutenant Zesiro Nabwire. Male. Aged 26 years. Engineering specialist. Posted to the Ngundeng at the launch of the Sixth Expeditionary Force as a junior security officer. Attached to MilSec on Nyanga.

  None of the unimportant information was there. The record didn’t list his favorite color or why he’d joined the navy, or whether a spouse and children waited for him. He wasn’t a person, and she didn’t need him to be to kill him. If he had a family, they would wait in vain, like all the families of the Sixth Expeditionary Force, until, in about fifteen years, the loss of the Force was declassified and a mass in absentia funeral was held. On behalf of the Sixth Expeditionary Force, she’d visited the graveyard on Bachwezi. It had been an eerie, hollow experience, being fêted like a returning hero in a place she’d never been, near the empty grave of her mother. The Lieutenant Nabwire living now certainly had an empty grave there too.

  And the Nabwire living now had an unsurprising schedule. A lot of power, comms and network systems had to run along the ice from building to building and to the transmitters and antennae. He lead a crew to maintain the hardware and inspect it for security breaches.

  He and a team of MilSec technicians were due outside this evening. It didn’t say what they’d be doing, but parts of their work schedule lay outside camera range. She studied the map of the terrain. Tactical possibilities bloomed in her thoughts. Angles of fire and vision, separation of lights and people. She could make this work.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  BELISARIUS TRUDGED BACK to Barracks D. His fingers hurt, but the pain wasn’t overwhelming. He could route sensation to different parts of his brain and create filters, as much as he could in the interior of the time gates. He’d failed to save a man’s life. It wasn’t about that man though. He’d seen humans and Puppets die before. He was perhaps a terrible person because death hadn’t mattered so much to him then. Now it did because it was chasing down his own people, like a lion stalking a herd of gazelle. Every death seemed enormous.

  “That didn’t go well,” Saint Matthew said.

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry, Mister Arjona.”

  He cycled through the airlock into the kit area. Some air had escaped his suit, but he’d cranked his tank feed up to maintain internal pressure. He cracked the seal on his neck and took off his helmet.

  Beyond the kit area, quiet snores and slow breathing filled the barracks. Among the hanging vacuum suits and tools and small equipment, a few insomniacs huddled around a card game played on an ice block. One of them, a private, saw Belisarius’ fingers sheltered under his arm and turned suspiciously. They might think he had a weapon. Belisarius exposed his glove with the blackened fingertips and the man put down his cards.

  “Whoa, you need help?” the private said in accented Shona.

  “Looks worse than it is,” Belisarius answered in similarly halting Shona. Finding the right level of linguistic inexpertise was more challenging than just learning a language properly, but he’d built an algorithm to introduce common mistakes and mispronunciations, and that helped. “The electrical cable shouldn’t have been live.”

  Indignation flared across the private’s face. “You want to report this?” he said, switching to French in his anger. “Whoever cocked this up should be pulling some serious shit jobs.”

  Belisarius shook his head, following the private into the African-accented French of four decades past. “It was my mistake.”

  Belisarius snapped open the seals on the glove and took it off. Angry red blisters covered his fingertips.

  “Doesn’t look too bad,” Belisarius ventured in French.

  “Hmm,” the private said. “No need for your sergeant to hear about this, I guess?”

  “I learned my lesson.”

  “I think Jumisse keeps a box of mismatched suit parts. Hey, Jumisse!” the private hissed at the players.

  In short order, they brought him to the first aid station and found him a second glove for his vacuum suit. While he bandaged his fingers, his brain analyzed their card game. He didn’t recognize it, but Jumisse was deftly bottom-dealing and a woman called Pojok was trying to count the cards. The others weren’t bad. He very quickly inferred the rules with ninety-five percent confidence. He could have easily won. He longed to sink himself into probability and statistics for a time. But that wasn’t why he was here, and it would also have blown his flimsy cover.

  He resealed his suit, thanked the private and was soon resolutely out on the ice.

  The Homo quantus as a species suffered from intellectual impatience, but Will Gander had taught him to fight it. Confidence schemes demanded patience. The mark had to come to think the con was their idea. Greed had to simmer before boiling. And while the marks simmered, the con man had to feign indifference. Belisarius wasn’t conning anyone right now, but he knew he had to be patient.

  Luckily, an alien garden blossomed all around him in the weird, faint magnetic interference from the time gates. The only sensing device in civilization with the resolution to feel the interference waves was the set of billions of magnetosomes in the billions of Homo quantus muscle cells. The tactile press hinted at a world built of the things humanity couldn’t see.

  Belisarius stopped about three hundred meters from the time gates, at the limit of most cameras and sensors. The faint light from the brown dwarf offered little illumination, especially with the surface covered with dark plants. He knelt. Thin, fragile stems and tiny fanning canopies of pitch-colored leaves covered the ground. Boots had recently crushed nearby plants and torn the surface film, revealing a mix of crushed ice and oily black tar. The geometries of the image fascinated his eye. His brain rotated and flipped the images a dozen different ways as if trying to see how the puzzle fit together. But this became too limiting and his brain represented the pieces as smaller shapes and ran arrayed linkage analyses.

  Anatomical and biochemical hypotheses formed in his mind, that the oily black plastic was the plant itself. Like the vines, it had no structure capable of holding itself above the ground. It had to climb onto something to get to the weak dwarf light before competing plants did. The Nyanga version of weight-bearing plant stems were rods of branching water ice. The plants were hollow, living on the outside, but the ice structures themselves were not naturally occurring. They had plant shapes, a sign of convergent evolution. Any time iteration, selection and competition played with each other, certain branching shapes became predictable.

  His brain ran a series of parallel models, weighing and discarding, mixing and matching possible growth algorithms and energy budgets until he found something that might explain the shapes of the ice. The black, tarry plants could absorb infrared from the brown dwarf, using the energy to melt minute quantities of water. In the moments before the water refroze, the plants moved the liquid upward, shaping t
he stem-like substrate upon which they could grow.

  The possibility that the plants of Nyanga could use dwarf heat to sculpt the surface of their world was beautiful. They rode their own ice sculptures to compete for light. The idea was hopeful, haunting and quiet.

  Farther from the well-trodden paths, the plants grew into larger bushes and even low, fragile trees. In the anemic gravity and the thin atmosphere, the trees and bushes needed only the finest of stems and branches to reach out to catch the red and infrared light of the brown dwarf. Belisarius walked between the taller plants. He tried not to touch them, but in places they were so closely-spaced that the breaking branches sounded faint and blurry on an atmosphere too thin to carry the sharp snapping of ice.

  He neared the spotlighted security perimeter around the time gates and stopped. Any closer and he would trigger alarms, but he was still close enough to see the high-standing fronds of hundreds and hundreds of vegetable intelligences. After a few moments, their glacial movements became apparent.

  On the nearest, a stumpy leg swung forward in achingly slow motion, the whole body leaning. After thirty-eight seconds, the foot touched the ground, slowly rocked the body, lifting the trailing foot. The joint of that trailing leg took another five hundred and twelve seconds to melt enough so that gravity could help lower the foot.

  Those that moved lumbered around the time gates, fanning large fronds above themselves. Belisarius zoomed in with his ocular implants, stepping up the gain in the infrared and ultraviolet. The gasping wind moving towards the time gates pulled light pollen from the fronds, carrying it into the past. Nyanga’s faint atmosphere was denser in the future, which drove a slow wind backwards across time.

  On minimum energy paths through the interior of the time gates, the pollen would emerge eleven years in the past, about a decade before the Sixth Expeditionary Force would discover Nyanga. Yet no pollen emerged on the wind arriving from eleven years in the future anymore. The Union would shortly steal the time gates and would hold them for thirty-nine years. Eleven years in the future, there were no vegetable intelligences to send their pollen back. And in about twelve years, the scientists of the Expeditionary Force would begin sending scientific results into the past, encoded in synthetic pollen. Belisarius was a participant in all this, because in thirty-nine years, he would acquire the time gates in another act of theft.

  Something tickled at the back of his thoughts, something that didn’t add up. His brain was running other calculations, modelling ecological energy budgets. The plant life received so many watts per hour of insolation from the brown dwarf, but they needed more calories than that to melt and shape minute quantities of ice for the movement he was seeing, to say nothing of running intelligence. He had no precise figures for the energy budgets, because he didn’t know what chemical systems they were using, but they would have to be remarkably efficient to do all those things under a brown dwarf.

  The cosmos was a great heat engine, distributing and mixing energy. Life eddied in those flows, briefly diverting energy for their own purposes. Most of the time they did this remarkably inefficiently. Any signs of highly efficient energy use hinted at the involvement of the quantum world. Photosynthesis in Earth plants was far more efficient than it ought to have been; its electron transfer processes incorporated the equivalent of quantum tunneling. Nyanga’s anemic ecosystem probably couldn’t power movement and intelligence without the involvement of quantum processes. And the nature of the intelligence here would affect his estimates.

  He strengthened the microcurrent from his electroplaques to the millions of magnetosomes in his body, increasing his sensitivity to the ambient magnetic field. The brown dwarf’s tense field lines were stable and distant, but the textured magnetic field of the time gates pressed at him slightly differently than he’d felt around the time gates in the future. The field was more richly timbred, but so subtle that he hadn’t noticed until now.

  Was the nature of the quantum interference around the time gates different in the past?

  The thought teased. He watched the field of vegetable intelligences, wondering how their quantum processes might work. Their glacial movements hinted at some other time scale they might inhabit, like slow-growing trees and still lichens. All the human bustle around them might be flashes of quick light, and the coming flare that would melt this face of the planet in months might feel like tomorrow to them.

  If he’d had better access to the quantum fugue and all of its parallel processing power and sensory insight, he might have been able to puzzle it out, but he wasn’t even sure how to interact with those senses anymore. The Union records he’d broken into on the Mutapa had mentioned that the Union had found a mechanical way to speak to them, but at the time, he hadn’t followed that thread.

  He wanted to speak to the vegetable intelligences.

  “Mister Arjona,” Saint Matthew said, “someone is approaching. It’s not Colonel Iekanjika.”

  Belisarius’ brain clung to the strange interference patterns, using up most of his processing power, but he looked back in irritation. A private strode through the low thicket of bushes, stomping straight over them, shattering everything in his path under thick soles. The man was thickly built and stood at almost a hundred and ninety centimeters. He stopped in front of Belisarius and pointed a sidearm at him.

  Belisarius had no cover story. He’d been trusting Iekanjika for that. Rudo had told them to stay outside and be inconspicuous. The only work he had to look inconspicuous with was trying to come up with a cover story.

  “Stay on a low local channel,” the man said in choppy Shona. “Someone wants to talk to you, but if you make any fuss, I can blow a hole in your chest.”

  Belisarius lifted his hands warily. The big man took his sidearm and discreetly led him across the ice. The private kept his sidearm holstered, but his hand stayed close to it. They crunched along the plain, along a track of broken frozen bushes and plant tar that had been trampled by countless sets of boots. The other surface workers and security cameras in the distance wouldn’t notice anything wrong. Belisarius could try to shock the man with his unburnt fingers, but the private was just a symptom. Who wanted to see him?

  “Got any ideas?” Belisarius subvocalized to Saint Matthew.

  “I can only think that if you hadn’t taken the original job,” Saint Matthew said, “we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “You’d be sitting in an empty chapel in Saguenay Station, and I’d be sitting by myself in the Puppet Free City.”

  “This is better? I haven’t spread the faith to a single person. The Homo quantus are homeless. And this goon is bringing you to a shallow grave!”

  “They can’t kill us.”

  “Sure they can!”

  “Yes, they can,” Belisarius admitted.

  They neared a small hut in the dark. It was only a few meters on each side. He made out an airlock in grainy low-light magnification.

  “Cycle it, soldier,” the private said in his helmet.

  Belisarius opened the outer airlock door and they squeezed in together. The man had his sidearm out again, and Belisarius could feel steely muscles pressing the muzzle against him, a lot more muscles than was needed to keep the gun on him even if Belisarius struggled. An electrical discharge could probably take the man out, but the resulting seizure might also cause the trigger finger to convulse.

  Belisarius spun the second door and stumbled into a small lit space. The private followed him and shut the airlock behind them. Then he holstered his sidearm. A short figure in a vacuum suit stood in the corner of the hut.

  “Take off your helmet,” Captain Rudo transmitted.

  His suit measured point seven atmospheres of air at minus forty Celsius. That was probably the warmest the hut could do against the hundred below outside. Belisarius cracked his helmet seal, took it off. The icy air touched him. Rudo did the same. The brute beside him didn’t.

  “He won’t hear us,” Rudo said.

  Of course. White noise
was probably playing in the man’s ear pieces.

  Rudo gave a signal and a heavy fist rammed into Belisarius’ side. Air whooshed out of him and he crumpled. He didn’t drop far. The private held Belisarius up with one hand and drove his first into Belisarius’ stomach, so hard that he would have vomited if he’d actually eaten anything.

  “Mister Arjona!” Saint Matthew said in his ear. “Do something!”

  The private looked back at Rudo, as if doubtful about whether he should go on. Belisarius had wilted. Rudo nodded and the private punched him so hard that he fell to his knees, clutching his stomach as he tried to breathe. Belisarius’ helmet rolled on the icy floor. The man’s boots stepped back two paces.

  “You’re no soldier,” Captain Rudo said.

  “I... get that a lot,” Belisarius gasped.

  “What kind of consultant are you? Who hired you?”

  Belisarius rolled back to a sitting position, wincing. He leaned against the wall and groaned. He snapped the seals on his gloves, dropping them both onto the ice and probed at his ribs.

  “Answer or he uses boots,” Captain Rudo said.

  “I’m a science consultant,” he said slowly. “You don’t want to know much else about the future, do you?”

  “I want to know everything about the future.”

  “Are you some kind of idiot?”

  He didn’t see the signal, but the big man’s boot, heavy and fast, hit him. Belisarius blocked with his arm. It numbed with pain. He didn’t hear a snap, but that wasn’t a convincing diagnosis.

  “Talk fast,” Rudo said.

  “Mister Arjona!” Saint Matthew said. “Say something! Even if it’s a lie. We can’t kill her, but she can kill us all she wants without creating a grandfather paradox!”

  “Whether I tell you lies or truth,” Belisarius said, “it could change your future, and mine.”