The Quantum Garden

by Derek Künsken

  “I’ve read the reports. Despite the poetic musings of a few officers, the vegetable intelligences are underwhelming. Vegetable is the key word.”

  “Then there’s no harm in me talking to them.”

  She pursed her lips as if looking for a reason to object, but apparently found none. She went to her bunk, rolled herself into the blanket and shortly began snoring. Belisarius’ mind quietly calculated soothing nonsense patterns from the colors in the icy ceiling.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  BELISARIUS STEPPED DOWN his vision and turned his face up at the glowering brown dwarf. Dwarfs were dim, steady objects, stellar embers mostly cooling in stately quiescence in the visible spectrum. But even from more than half a million kilometers away, the knotting of its magnetic field lines faintly tilted the angles of billions of magnetosomes in his body. Brown dwarfs didn’t flare often, and even when they did, they often flared weakly. But from time to time, these failed stars could blast out enough energy to melt vast parts of Nyanga. All that destruction was going to visit the vegetable intelligences, forever silencing them.

  During the night, Saint Matthew had discreetly queried the quartermaster systems and found the devices used to translate vegetable intelligence speech. The translator had been designed, built and then left aside when the Expeditionary Force found out the vegetable intelligences had nothing useful to tell them. The vegetable intelligences were actually of such low priority that the lockers storing the translators were in one of the minimum-security tool sheds.

  A half dozen other crew starting their shifts were already in the shed kitting up. Belisarius waited his turn. Iekanjika shouldered past him and pushed past another crewman. She dragged Belisarius in her wake, pulling past cursing soldiers and to the locker. Saint Matthew opened the lock, falsifying credentials and the associated work order. They pulled out two big translator packs and then pushed their way out of the shed again.

  The vegetable intelligences formed a large circular herd of perhaps three thousand beings centered on the time gates. Under less light than a full moon, and from a distance, glacial movements rocked their pitch-colored fronds, fooling the human brain into seeing the nighttime waving of grass-tops.

  The Expeditionary Force let the vegetable intelligences walk around the time gates, because they posed no threat. Slow-moving and incredibly fragile, a single crewman with a metal bar could have demolished the entire herd. But MilSec was nervous enough that they didn’t allow unauthorized people around the gates. Belisarius and Iekanjika stopped beyond the illumination of the spotlights, fifty meters from a lightly populated area.

  The vegetable intelligences had a strange speech. They had photoreceptors, but signaling to each other with light or even infrared took more energy than they could spare. Nyanga’s thin atmosphere attenuated sound, making speech impossible. And they produced no electrical signals, so they communicated by smell.

  In the vanishing atmosphere of Nyanga, smells at least traveled in straight lines. Months ago, the Union deciphered about a thousand individual odors of the vegetable intelligence language. The translating devices organized these logograms, these picture scents, into a lexicon. The Expeditionary Force synthesized the smells, loaded them into a thousand tiny sprayers, and built a receptor plate to receive the ‘words’ sent by the vegetable intelligences. While crude, their translators had served at least to tell the Expeditionary Force that these creatures were too alien and primitive to be militarily or scientifically useful.

  “The flaring Rudo mentioned,” Belisarius said, looking at the clouds of iron skating through the upper atmosphere of the brown dwarf, “it’s going to be bad isn’t it?”

  “The records of our core samples show periods of melting dozens to hundreds of meters of depth,” she said, “including periods overlapping with the vegetable intelligences. They’ve had their entire species completely melted many times in their evolutionary history.”

  “But this time you took the time gates,” he said. “Aren’t they using them?”

  “They didn’t get violent, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking. You’re bitter at me for taking the time gates to research the universe, but you stole them from a garden to make weapons.”

  She didn’t answer, but he doubted he’d made a point. He crunched slowly across the ice again, into the vegetable intelligence herd. Iekanjika followed. They emerged from the waist-high black alien plants onto a broad plain where all the ground cover had been trampled. Here, the tirelessly lumbering feet moved the vegetable intelligences around from the faint wind that dragged their pollen into the past to the gasping, empty wind from the future. Many more vegetable intelligences stood on the margins of the slow procession, absorbing the shine of the spotlights. Belisarius moved towards a few big, weathered vegetable intelligences basking under a spotlight tower.

  “Where do they come from?” Belisarius asked Iekanjika. “The dwarf is too young for them to have evolved here.”

  As soon as he said it, he realized that all assumptions of astronomical or evolutionary time had to be thrown out when the system included a time travel device. The Expeditionary Force had made impossible leaps in weapons and propulsion technology in just forty years. For all he knew, the vegetable intelligences had evolved from nothing to mobility and language in a few thousand years around the time gates, perhaps several times over due to the instability of the brown dwarf.

  “Genetically-related, sessile, unthinking forms infest the comets of this system,” she said, “but that’s it.”

  The intelligences reacted to his presence, with fronds slowly tilting towards him. Despite the insulation of the vacuum suit, he was probably leaking enough heat to appear bright in the infrared. What did the vegetable intelligences think of humans? Was he one of many hot, fast-moving angelic beings? If irony was especially cruel to the vegetable intelligences, perhaps. Iekanjika and he were the next two owners of their time gates.

  The vegetable intelligences possessed an eerie beauty. Their legs had two joints, like ankle and knee, but no real foot, just a hard black pad. Their four radially symmetric legs splayed at ninety degrees to each other. That radial symmetry carried upward into a big vase-shaped torso that was just a barrel of icy ribs with black skin pulled drum-tight across them. In places, damaged skin revealed bright ice beneath. Flowering crowns of fronds stood high above the chests, taller than Belisarius. It was from these that pollen launched itself onto the ghostly wind. No face was apparent to hint at which side Belisarius should speak to. Yet that facelessness comforted, rather than bothered him.

  Their glacial movements suggested pensive deliberateness, contemplation, like the Homo quantus. They might have other similarities to the Homo quantus too. Union records showed that the environment under the brown dwarf varied so much that the vegetable intelligences experimented with the number of chromosomes they carried, like flowers. Union biologists commonly observed pollen with four or even eight sets of chromosomes, meaning that some vegetable intelligences carried eight to sixteen copies of their genetic information. So genetically, they were like a superposition of states, a mix of possibilities, trying all genetic combinations at once. The image appealed to the quantum logic hardwired into Belisarius’ brain.

  Belisarius brought up the translation software onto his helmet projector. An empty display area floated in front of his sight, and the possible words he could use were in a column along on side. The chest plate carried only nine hundred and seventy-eight olfactory logograms, a small vocabulary for a conversation. He triggered emission of the smell for communicate. The chest plate hissed momentarily. On his display, the word appeared in the middle of the blank workspace.

  One of the vegetable intelligences moved, turning slightly to Belisarius. Fragments of ice clung to dangling bits of inky skin. The slight movement made them knock together silently. He imagined the sound of chandelier crystal tinkling.

  The word communicate hadn’t faded. Union resea
rchers had tested the chemistry and neurology of discarded skins. Unlike human neurons, the nervous cells of the vegetable intelligences did not relax quickly after firing; they felt stimuli for longer. A flash of light to Belisarius might be a sober still life lasting minutes to the vegetable intelligences, overlapping with other sensations that might come many seconds before or after, making a fiction of simultaneity and blurring causality. The very concept of the present probably meant something different to them.

  Words appeared on his display, near his own word communicate.

  Elder.

  Gene/word.

  Right parentage/truth.

  He wasn’t sure what to make of the second or third word unit. The Union had attached to a single smell two meanings: gene and word. And the display was counter-intuitive. He’d expected the Cartesian thinking of the Expeditionary Force to have laid out the words in vertical or horizontal lines. However, the words clustered radially, gently drifting, elder and gene/word slowly gravitating towards his word, which was fading imperceptibly.

  Why had the Union organized the display like this? He’d seen their other display styles. All Cartesian. So it had to be something relevant to communicating with the vegetable intelligences. His engineered brain snuffled for patterns and hypotheses.

  He’d offered to communicate. They had responded with elder, either referring to themselves, or asking about him. They didn’t have a word for name, but maybe they were asking what he was. What was he? Homo quantus was meaningless to them, and he didn’t have the logograms to explain it anyway. Human wasn’t any simpler to communicate. And as much as he didn’t like it, he was now one of the leaders of an offshoot of humanity.

  Elder, he sent, causing his chest plate to briefly hiss. Variant parentage, he added.

  He was different from the vegetable intelligences and from Iekanjika. His first word communicate was still fading, but his variant parentage overwrote the words right parentage/truth as if the question had never been asked. He hadn’t expected that.

  He had erased some of their words. He and the vegetable intelligences were writing a conversation only loosely associated with causality. The history of the conversation was not fixed. It was a very quantum way of thinking.

  He rethought his assumptions. The long relaxation time of the vegetable intelligence neural cells wasn’t the only thing expanding their present. What must perception and time be like for intelligences who routinely received reproductive material from the future, and sent it to the past? They lived under a cooling brown dwarf that, no matter how stable, would eventually flare, radically rewriting their environment.

  The pollen the vegetable intelligences sent back in time contained genetic information about what had survived the unpredictable future. This genetic feedback loop would accelerate adaptation. And it would tend to create a conceptual space where the future not only affected the past, but changed what language and information could mean.

  Billions and trillions of pollen grains traveling to the past were statistical information. The vegetable intelligences didn’t send hard facts back in time, but probabilities, a language the Homo quantus spoke very well. If the information from eleven years in the future and past were considered sensory input, then the present perceived by the vegetable intelligences might be immense. The real-time exchange of information might make their concept of the present twenty-two years wide, a great rolling cylinder of now.

  From the leading edge/future, the vegetable intelligences said in their scent-based language. These words appeared over variant parentage but did not overwrite it. Both phrases occupied the same space, making them hard to read. Their phrase clarified his, but didn’t erase it; they interfered like quantum probabilities. Was this their way of posing questions? Both states existed until a choice was made, like Schrödinger’s Cat.

  Leading edge, Belisarius said, which translated into smells that hissed out of the tiny stomata covering his chest plate. His answer made the overlapping phrases vanish. And their conversation, the consensus reality they built became elder, leading edge, communicate. The rest vanished, as if it had never been under consideration, or as if the final conversation emerged from a pool of possibilities after an observer collapsed the superposition of states.

  The word people appeared on his screen, to the right of the cluster they’d made, semi-faded.

  A question?

  Distant, he replied.

  He tried to write in danger but the lexicon of logograms had no match. The closest was shadowed/absence of pollen, and he used it. The two words appeared on his helmet display, above and below people. His people were distant and shadowed. And he was the leading edge elder, seeking to communicate.

  The fronds of one of the elder vegetable intelligences tipped towards the time gates, where pollen streamed from now into the past, and yet nothing emerged from the future.

  Wait andpollen/wisdom appeared on his display, between the two clusters of words.

  Was that advice, or a statement of what they were doing? Were they waiting for their present to reach the future so that they would know why their future had stopped sending pollen back in time? They associated pollen and wisdom. Did that mean they understood that their wisdom was statistical in nature, buried in gene frequencies contained in the pollen? The vegetable intelligences might be more similar to him than the humans with whom he traveled, creatures of questions and probabilistic knowledge.

  Unfortunately, his knowledge wasn’t probabilistic in this case. He knew with near-certainty why their pollen had stopped. Either the impending flare or the theft of the time gates would end the pollen because there would be no more vegetable intelligences in the future to send pollen back in time. Some spores and pollen might survive in the ice, but these elders and their wisdom would be sanded away by the flare, restarting their culture from zero. He tried keeping in mind that this had all happened thirty-nine years ago, that he moved among events frozen in the amber of the past, but it wasn’t easy.

  Wait, Belisarius added, reinforcing their wait, in agreement.

  That was what he was doing. That was what his people were doing.

  “Patrol,” Iekanjika said. “Let’s get back to the shed and get less conspicuous tools.”

  There was no logogram for goodbye, nor any similar concept, so he backed away, wondering what the vegetable intelligences saw or thought as Iekanjika led him away. Did they see retreating angels, minor astronomical phenomena, or monsters?

  “That was a waste,” Iekanjika said. “We should get started on thinking about where to drill.”

  At a smaller tool camp between some crude buildings, they set down their chest-packs. The rush of shift change was behind them, and they picked up surveying equipment and a pair of picks for quick and dirty sample collection. When Rudo could get them the heavy drilling equipment, they would want to start right away.

  If she got them the equipment.

  They walked back out onto the ice. Belisarius had read the equivalent of a master’s degree in ice planetology sublimation and sedimentation before they’d left the future, and here, his restless brain had already played with calculations of brown dwarf luminosity, planetary albedo, interaction with surface plants and average flare activity. It was barely interesting enough to keep his attention as they walked.

  The time gates were located in a wide valley a hundred kilometers in diameter whose edges sliced the starview at the horizon. Nyanga was tidally locked, always presenting one face, so that the ice under high noon sublimated constantly, layer by molecular layer. Some of this thin new atmosphere traveled into the past through the gates, but most expanded outward, cooled, and snowed onto the edges of the valley. The pollen measurements in the Expeditionary Force’s crude ice cores suggested that the time gates and the vegetable intelligences had been here for more than a hundred thousand years. Several sites in the valley would give him the data he needed to calibrate the time distance across the gates. It depended now on where would give them the most cover an
d draw the least amount of attention.

  As they surveyed across the dark, plant-encrusted surface, part of his brain kept pondering the vegetable intelligences. The more he measured the faint light from the brown dwarf, the more certain he became that quantum effects were at the core of the metabolic pathways keeping the vegetation on this world alive.

  He modeled different molecular pathways of photosynthesis for Nyanga, from possible receptors to electron carrier mechanisms. None of them were efficient enough to turn the weak infrared into enough energy for movement and intelligence. The only way the energy budgets for life could work is if their metabolic efficiency was above ninety-nine percent. Terrestrial photosynthesis achieved this through a kind of quantum coherence, and it wasn’t that surprising that the evolution of a photosynthetic lifeform would converge on the same solution as those on Earth.

  But that was still nowhere near enough energy for intelligence too.

  “Your people studied vegetable intelligence anatomy?” Belisarius said. “Did they have any chemical energy sources or energy storage organs?”

  “You’re still thinking of them?” she said.

  He didn’t answer, but examined the terrain from a crouched position.

  “Researchers dissected a number of corpses,” Iekanjika said. “I never read anything that they were other than photosynthesizers. That’s why they move slowly.”

  Maybe he was coming at this the wrong way. Mammalian brains at thirty-seven degrees needed a lot of energy. His brain was so active now that he had a low fever all the time. But the vegetable intelligences weren’t mammalian brains; they ran at a hundred degrees below zero. The metabolic math would be very different.

  “What did you find in their brains?” he asked, marking the location in their pads as a possible drill site.

  “Neurons?” she said.