“You’re a human being, Ayen,” Arjona said. “All of this would be hard for anyone to face.”
“Don’t lecture me about humanity, Homo quantus,” she said. “Never doubt that I can do my job. Let’s get the locations of the other Axes Mundi.”
“This causal problem is serious, colonel,” he said. “If Rudo or her confederates kill your mother before you’re born, the results will be catastrophic.”
“It didn’t happen, Arjona,” she said. “I’m here.”
“But we don’t know how much we ourselves directly contributed to you having survived,” Arjona said.
Iekanjika walked off a few paces. Too much. Too fast. From doubting her commanding officer and senior wife for lying, she was now faced with the thought of her wife being her mother’s assassin. She didn’t know where to start to hold this. Where did reason start and emotion end? What was the tactical and strategic terrain? Arjona left her to walk alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
BELISARIUS WATCHED IEKANJIKA for a time before turning his face once again up to the cool brown dwarf, feeling the slow, distant movements of its magnetic field washing over all the magnetism of the base. But his thinking was far afield. He was starting to turn his observations of the Hortus quantus into models and theories. He was almost convinced that not only did the Hortus quantus incorporate some quantum phenomena into their life cycle, but that this was mediated through the time gates. He didn’t understand the mechanisms, but his models couldn’t work unless this was the case. Something very special and unique lived here under a kind of death sentence and he didn’t know what to do about it.
“You can’t just stand here, Mister Arjona,” Saint Matthew interrupted. “It looks suspicious.”
“This is all a disaster. Maybe you were right. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken the job.”
“Well, you did. And so did I. We can’t change the past. We can only come to terms with it.”
Belisarius walked towards Iekanjika, but she was already turning towards them. “We have the drilling equipment,” she said with a trace of exhaustion in her tone. “Let’s get the core sample.”
She led them across the black skin of plant growth covering the frozen valley, to the quartermaster’s building. It stood eight meters tall, made of thick blocks of ice. Outside the building, she showed her service band to a scanner and the door slid open. Maps appeared on their service bands, leading them to one of several automated compounds half a kilometer away in a field of industrial equipment and chips to run them.
The Sixth Expeditionary Force had certainly not traveled with the tractors and bulldozers and drills in this lot; they’d been a squadron doing fast armed reconnaissance. They must have built all the equipment beneath this failed star with asteroid-mined metals. They’d done so much in such a short time. They were impressive.
Iekanjika inserted the control chips into a metal-wheeled truck with a large flat bed and a front loading arm. She drove it slowly to an area where drilling attachments, extra batteries and metal core tubes were stacked with other kinds of construction equipment, and programmed the arm to load the truck. It would take a while.
Belisarius neared the colonel as she surveyed the job. He wanted to press her further about her mother and Rudo. She might act on whatever conflicting emotions tangled in her and he could help. And selfishly, part of reaching out, making contact, might calm the roiling of his own worries. But they didn’t have that kind of relationship. Reaching out would be worse than leaving her alone.
“What happens to the Hortus quantus after you leave?” he finally asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “We took specimens of a few with us, to keep the pollen flowing into the past for another ten years, to make sure that we didn’t disturb what we observed when we first arrived on the planet. I suppose that those that stayed behind did whatever they always do after their dwarf flares. They must get back on their feet after being knocked down.”
“Yes,” he said uncertainly, “but in the other cases, the Hortus quantus had the time gates around to resume their reproductive cycles. What happened to them when you took it away?”
“They can reproduce with or without the time gates.”
“But not the way they do now. And I’m starting to think that their intelligence may be an evolutionary response to having a time travel device in their life cycle. And their life cycle is wrapped around it. We just don’t know how. The solar flare is a habitat stress, but losing the time gates is habitat destruction.”
“I’ve only so much pity to go around, Arjona,” she said. “A moment’s distraction on my part could mean the death of a Union soldier, the loss of a ship, or the loss of the single Axis we hold. The strong survive and the weak die out. That’s always been true and maybe this is the end for the vegetable intelligences. It’s a pity, but I have no tears to shed for them. Their end by the flare would have come whether we’d found them or not.”
“But that’s the thing. An active brown dwarf can flare every few thousand years. The Hortus quantus haven’t been wiped out, and they can’t have evolved intelligence in the few thousand years since the last big flare. Somehow, with the time gates, the Hortus quantus can survive on both sides of the disaster.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Arjona. If they’re wiped out in the present, they’re wiped out in the future.”
Belisarius struggled with the concepts mixing quantum logic and causality, things that didn’t usually go together. At the edges of what even his engineered brain could hold together, his thoughts leapt between extrapolations, balancing on theories and hypotheses extended past what could be proven.
“There’s more to the Hortus quantus than just their bodies,” Belisarius said. “The bodies that will be melted in the flare might be the least important part of them. The interaction of genetic information across time may be like quantum interference patterns. A single environmental event can influence that, but not destroy it.”
“I don’t understand the point of this conversation, Arjona,” she said. “It’s all academic.”
“Information can’t interact and interfere across time without the time gates.”
“You have the time gates now, Arjona! Give them back if you feel that strongly. But the Expeditionary Force needs them right now, so we’re going to take them,” Iekanjika said. “That’s history. Observed history. After the flare, who knows where the time gates would have been. Frozen under ten meters of ice? Blasted off into space? The gates won’t be a tunnel for a gentle wind.”
“Your people found that the gates have been here, and that pollen has been blowing through them, for a hundred thousand years, through flares and calm periods,” he said, finding something to hold onto in her words. “What kept the time gates oriented during all that time? Maybe the fact that information is flowing across twenty-two years of time stabilizes the position and orientation of the gates, like a kind of angular momentum.”
“I’m not interested in your maybes and mights and could bes, Arjona! I have a practical objective to achieve. Are you proposing we leave the gates here and change the timeline? Fine, let’s do that! Then you don’t get to steal them and we don’t get to come back here. I find it ironic that I have to explain causal paradoxes to the great quantum con man.”
Belisarius stood uncertainly as she kept moving. All he had was intuition and feeling. This kind of mental space, where he had to create patterns without data, was unfamiliar. He hurried after her, catching up. He had to lay out facts and principles for both of them.
“The events of history are set,” he said, listing them on puffy gloved fingers in front of her. “The Union took the time gates. We came back here. You were born. Your mother was assassinated. But parts of history are unwritten. We can touch those. Maybe we can preserve something of the Hortus quantus.”
“There’s nothing we can do right now except endanger the future of my people and yours with distractions, Arjona.”
Belisarius grasped for
something else to say, something to make her feel the same unease, the same tickling sense of unresolved mystery, but a gulf of biology yawned between them. They were no longer the same species. He had thousands of additional genes and hundreds of anatomical differences. She could lean on instinct and reason that had been tested by Homo sapiens over two hundred thousand years of human existence. The Homo quantus could easily tilt at windmills with false positives in their hunt for patterns and relationships. He couldn’t even be sure of the patterns he found.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
THE INTELLIGENCE OPERATIVE, shorn of name, came to a kind of consciousness cold and grating. Painful sounds crackled, limbs creaked, and raw light punched helplessly unclosing eyes. The world was not spongy from half-sleep but possessed of a marrow brittle and hard.
A face came into sharp focus behind the spidery limbs of auto-surgeons. The woman’s face hung over his, rendered in gritty, pixilated detail, washing false colors of ultraviolet and infrared over pale features. Virtual reality?
“1D446,” she said. Her voice broke into digital information, divided by sampling into approximated amplitudes, tones and frequencies, and rendered into graphics annotated with physiological responses testing for falsehoods. “Réponds, 1D446.”
“1...” he began, but the electronic voice he heard stopped him. The sound of it was graphed beside hers, narrow bars, monotonal distributions, digital to digital. “1...” he tried again. It was his voice. He was speaking through a prosthesis. Where was his mouth? His face?
“Réponds, 1D446,” she repeated. She sounded slow. He felt instants between the syllables, but the pacing of her speech hadn’t changed. He was thinking faster, in a digitally surreal awareness.
“1D446,” he finally said and the alien voice filled his ears. More graphs crowded his thoughts.
After long long moments, her face withdrew, saying only “Bon.”
He was alone with graphs and the hard light and the harsh tread of thought. An internal chronometer counting microseconds spun relentlessly in the deep internal displays in his thoughts. Long seconds ticked past.
Then another face filled his vision, a Scarecrow, an early model. The metal and carbon mesh cloth over its head was lumpy under its painted mouth and nose. One camera eye bulged, as if ready to burst open as it considered him. And in that lens, he saw only mats of wires and lenses and electrical busses in the reflection. Where was he?
“1D446,” the Scarecrow said.
“Oui.”
“Are you prepared to serve?” the Scarecrow said.
“Oui,” he said desperately.
“In all ways,” the Scarecrow said, the motto of the Intelligence Service.
“Oui.”
“What do you remember?” the Scarecrow said.
“I...” There was no way to complete the sentence. The crackle of his own electronic voice, analyzed through machines, was graphed and plugged into his inflexible brain... this wasn’t I. He remembered being an intelligence operative. He remembered the enemies of the Venusian state. He remembered flying through the clouds. “1D446 is prepared to serve in all ways.”
“1D446 is gone,” the Scarecrow said. “The Scarecrow Corps needs new operatives, loyal operatives.”
Scarecrow Corps.
They wanted him to be a Scarecrow? Why him? He didn’t deserve it and he didn’t want it. Was there any ‘he’ left? Scarecrows were all machine, AIs grown on biological templates. For a new Scarecrow to exist, 1D446 must be gone, destroyed in the building process.
Destroyed. He was gone. What he’d been, a man, was gone. And no one mourned intelligence operatives. They just vanished. Their numbers were retired. 1D446 was gone, man, name, body and legacy consumed like anything that fell into the acid clouds of home.
“Prepare for testing,” the other Scarecrow said.
Testing. Hard, sharp thoughts circled the word, transformed it, looked for synonyms and definitions. He couldn’t possibly pass the testing of the Scarecrow Corps. He’d never wanted this. He wasn’t made of the stuff needed for Scarecrows. He didn’t want immortality.
New images were forcefully presented to his brain. New sounds began to fall upon him, a torrent of sound and feeling and information, faces, names, intercepted messages, movements of people and money, associations and grouping of spies, traitors and insurgents, all falling over his brain in an unending cataract.
“Begin testing,” the other Scarecrow said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CASSANDRA’S STOMACH FLUTTERED a bit. The pilot’s chair and its straps felt confining. The recycled air smelled of charcoal, humidity and sweat. The fans, while quiet, had discordances and chaotic rhythms that only the brains of the Homo quantus would ever notice. She wasn’t used to this. To any of this. Roughing it, like a soldier or... she didn’t know what. She’d been raised in an environment where comfort was the base condition so that thinking would be undistracted. Not even the birds made noise in the Garret. The economical construction, hard seats and expedient angles of The Calculated Risk were off-putting and distracting.
This very minor bit of self-pity immediately stung. At least she was out getting new data. How many Homo quantus were in comfort now? The Garret was gone. They were all running for their lives, perhaps even Bel. And she, the mayor, was sitting here, safe in the most vast cosmological experimental chamber in all the universe. The surreal flashes of light, dopplering to the blue or red even as she watched, hinted at gravitational features that had no analogues in four-dimensional space. It was fascinating and compelling, and more than enough to push aside discomforts, even as her gorge kept rising due to the lack of gravity.
Stills didn’t complain. Maybe he was used to roughing it. She was somewhat glad that he was locked in a pressurized chamber at eight hundred atmospheres. She wouldn’t have known what to talk to him about, or better yet, how to politely ask him to be quiet while she thought.
But he’d followed her navigational instructions with taciturn precision, settling them within sight of the pastward mouth of the time gates. Instead of watching it in three spacial dimensions, she’d had him rotate The Calculated Risk forty-five degrees across a temporal axis, so that the wormhole mouth was revealed in two and a half dimensions of space, and one and a half dimensions of time. Visually, the pastward mouth was partly smeared like a finger-painting, but ghostly secondary images stacked before and behind it, like the image was reflected in layers of glass. The precise combination of partial dimensionalities determined the number and spacing of the images, something she and Bel had worked out on the way, but Stills hadn’t seemed that interested in the mathematical explanations. So she’d dropped the topic and told him to monitor a set of sensors.
The geometry she’d chosen made time pass differently in The Calculated Risk. No matter when Belisarius, Iekanjika and Saint Matthew entered the mouth of the time gate over their next subjective two months, Cassandra and Stills would see them, while only a fraction of that time would pass in The Calculated Risk. If need be, she could further adjust the angle, so that their apparent time passed even more slowly relative to the time passing beyond the mouth of the wormhole, but she very much hoped that Bel, Iekanjika and Saint Matthew were only in the past for a few days subjective. Time was exposure and danger, for both Bel and Iekanjika and the Homo quantus in the freighters. She wouldn’t have traded places with any of them. She wasn’t a fighter.
To pass the time, Cassandra stayed in savant, gathering as much as she could from the racer’s sensors. All of it could be analyzed fruitfully by the Homo quantus later. She didn’t want to talk to Stills or anyone when there was data to be mined, but her internal clock ticked more and more ponderously as she realized that there might be some social obligation for her to even just check in on him. Finally, she exhaled heavily and switched on the inner comms system.
“Does the environment bother you?” she asked.
“Nothing bothers me, princess.”
Cassandra slipped out of savan
t reluctantly. She didn’t want to offend him inadvertently, so she’d need all her social skills. And she didn’t understand his tone. Most people might think he’d just taken a low-tech text-to-voice program. But the Homo quantus were very good at frequencies and there were more frequencies and even speech speed differences in what she heard than would be found in simple software. There were layers of meaning in his speech, something he’d encrypted into it, but it would take a sophisticated computer, or a very bored Homo quantus, to decipher them. This was another instance of the Homo eridanus being anti-social.
“Not even hyperspace?” she asked.
“Whatever the fuck is outside The Calculated Risk doesn’t translate well through the flier’s sensors,” he said “but it doesn’t bother me. I flown higher than this.”
All notions of analyzing and decrypting the tones hidden in his mechanical speech halted.
“What?” she said.
“What?”
“What do you mean higher than this?”
“Doped up, princess. High. Stoned. Baked. Drunk out of my gills.”
“What? You’re drunk?”
“Naw,” he said. “Not drunk. Not stoned. Not high. Tripping out... yeah maybe. Even if I turn off all the feeds to my chamber, electrical echoes bounce around here, coming from nowhere, doppling back and forth, side to side.”
“You’ve been flying like this in hyperspace?” she asked in disbelief, a cold sense of doom settling in her stomach.
“Shit, sweet-cheeks! This is nothing. Once I strafed a Second Bushido base so hammered out of my skull that I heaved up everything back to my first meal, right in my chamber. Gastric acid burns like hell in the eyes and I might have been upside down, but I still dropped a pile of ordnance right on target. The hangover was worse though.”
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