Implied Spaces

by Walter Jon Williams

  “We’ve seen no sign of his shipping antimatter anywhere, let alone the Kuiper Belt,” Bitsy said. “So it’s likely he’s using solar power both for building and then for powering his weapon.”

  “Not much solar power that far out,” Aristide said.

  “No. Construction would be slow, and there might be a significant delay between shots.”

  “He might be lucky,” said the woman from the Advisory Committee, “and have a source of geothermal power.”

  Aristide looked at the Minister of Industry. “When will our own mass driver be completed?”

  The man reddened. “I probably shouldn’t say. Spoken too much already.”

  “That’s our deadline, then, whatever it is. But as we’re building it, we should be certain that Vindex doesn’t know where our driver is, or can’t find it once he starts looking.”

  “Or,” said Bitsy, “that one of the people who knew about it died in the zombie plague, and get turned to one of the Venger’s clients long enough to report it to his boss.”

  That set them into a panic. Decisions were made in haste, though with a certain residual decorum. Endora, speaking through Bitsy, said that none of those who knew officially of the rail gun project were known to have been a pod person—though of course if someone had carelessly blabbed to someone, that someone could have been anyone. The committee breathed only a little more easily.

  “Perhaps,” said the Chancellor, “the Treasury can afford more than one mass driver.”

  “Redundancy,” said Aristide, “is our friend.”

  Tumusok and Bitsy both looked up, their eyes identically glazed as they communed with their implants.

  “Now what?” Aristide muttered. Bitsy yawned, stretched, and looked at him.

  “Vindex is demonstrating his petulance,” she said. “He just threw a new weapon at us—at Topaz, I mean.”

  “What was it?” Tumusok asked. “All I got was a lot of data.”

  “Courtland fired a missile,” Bitsy said. “Our antiproton beams intercepted it. It was about three meters long, but at my best guess it contained a wormhole gate leading to a universe containing about ninety million tonnes of antimatter. The antimatter was ejected, but fortunately it’s no longer aimed at us. It’s heading south of the plane of the ecliptic, and doing battle with the solar wind all the way.”

  “Our defenses are adequate?” Tumusok asked.

  “Unless he fires millions of the things, yes.”

  They both jumped as Aristide hammered the table with both fists.

  “Damn it!” he said.

  The committee stared at him.

  “Do you mean to say,” Aristide said, “that our civilization has now reached the point where we’re hurling hostile universes at each other?”

  There was another moment of silence.

  “Apparently yes,” Bitsy said.

  “I’m annoyed,” Daljit said. “No, more than that. I’m furious.”

  Aristide looked at her across the table. “Not at me, I hope.”

  “No. Yes. Make that hell yes.”

  He was silent, observing her.

  “I failed,” she said. “I sensed something behind those Chiau equations, and I failed to find it, and you failed to inspire me!”

  “It could be argued,” he responded, “that I did inspire you, though the you and the I were alternative versions of ourselves. But,” seeing the impatience in her eyes, “I won’t argue that. Instead I’ll suggest that our alternative selves were not entirely lucky.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I tried to break Chiau’s theory and I couldn’t,” she said. “I switched to genetics because it was still in a place where I could contribute, and astrophysics was such a dead end.” Her lips tightened. “I so want it to be your fault that I failed,” she said.

  Aristide shrugged. “Let it be my fault, then,” he said, “if it will soothe you.”

  For a moment they fell silent. They had met for dinner on neutral ground, a restaurant inland from Myriad City, in a place called Tres Piedras. Daljit now worked in a secret installation and had leave only two days out of ten, and Aristide had his own war work, so the rendezvous had to be arranged well in advance.

  It had been difficult for Aristide to make an exit from Myriad City. The government had released the identity of Vindex, and Aristide had been under siege by an army of cranks, reporters, and historians who wanted everything from Aristide’s opinion of his twin’s character and intentions to those who insisted he was part of Pablo’s conspiracy. Tumusok had assigned Aristide bodyguards. One of these was an old friend—Captain Grax, full-sized again, whose trollish presence outside Aristide’s door served to discourage both assault and inquiry.

  A pair of Aristide’s guards, both human to all appearances, now dined soberly at a corner table and kept alert watch on the other diners.

  Aristide had escaped his pursuers thanks only to Bitsy, who had carefully switched off all surveillance along his route as he passed. Now that he was in the restaurant, he sat facing the wall on the far side of the room. Though he had got a few strange looks from other diners, he and Daljit ate in relative privacy. Anyone trying to communicate Aristide’s whereabouts from this area would encounter a strange communications malfunction.

  Bitsy’s powers to hide Aristide, or anyone, or anything, had been greatly enhanced by emergency war legislation.

  One piece of information that had not been released was Pablo’s astronomical data, or the nature of his solution to the Existential Crisis. So many people and politicians, however, had been let into this secret that Aristide concluded it couldn’t be kept from the public much longer, and he had felt free to tell Daljit what he knew.

  Daljit was dressed in subdued colors, blues and violets, that contrasted with the white brilliance of the table linen. Over her plate winked the jewelry that called attention to her fine hands. Her mole was all in order.

  She sighed, looked away. “I envy my twin. And I know I’ll carry that bitter envy forever.”

  “She didn’t die well.”

  “Who cares? She died at her moment of triumph. And I—” Her lips twisted with disgust.

  Aristide sipped at his glass of water and wondered if Daljit was too young to know what such a death, a permanent death, really meant.

  “You’ve refused an appointment to the Elite Committee,” he said.

  “I’m not elite anymore. Everything I know is out of date. I don’t even think like an astrophysicist any longer.” She looked down at one clenched fist. “I’m not going to compound my humiliation by joining a committee of physicists who are all faster and more current than I am.”

  “It’s a mistake.”

  “It’s a mistake I can live with.” Bitterly.

  He said nothing.

  “And you?” she asked. “Do you envy Pablo Rex?”

  “Get thee behind me, Pablo,” he said. “I rejoice in the difference between us.”

  “He has found a purpose.”

  “So have I. Opposing him.”

  Daljit looked at Tecmessa, which leaned against the table in its case.

  “You still go armed, even though you have guards?” Daljit asked.

  “I’ve received a rather astounding number of death threats,” Aristide said. “Until the police check them and discover that they originate from the usual harmless cranks, I’m to be careful.” He sighed. “I had found a pleasant sort of obscurity, and now I wake to find I’m infamous.”

  “I still don’t understand what a sword’s going to do against a shotgun.”

  Aristide looked at her. “Would you rather I carry a shotgun?”

  She had no answer, and so ate a piece of mushroom.

  He regarded her, dark eyes and graceful hands and asymmetric mole, and spoke.

  “My career has of late been a tale of miserable failure,” he said. “As a soldier, I led my forces to their destruction. As a prisoner, I failed to do more than dance to the tune of my captor. As a philosopher, I failed to win t
he Other Pablo from his solipsism. Even as a heckler, I failed to enlighten or amuse.”

  She looked at him, analytical. “The whole army failed, not just you. Since you were prisoner in a whole universe devoted to the enemy’s cause, it’s not surprising you failed to escape all on your own—you had only a few hours, you could scarcely dig your way out of the Château d’If with a rusty spoon. As for Pablo Rex—” She shrugged. “He’s been planning this for centuries. If you couldn’t talk him out of it in the course of a short conversation, I can’t blame you.”

  He smiled. “And my failure as a heckler?”

  She returned his smile. “I think you underrate your malevolent wit.”

  “Well,” he said. “That’s a relief.” He ate a prawn, sipped his wine, and regarded the glass. “You know,” he said “when I was young, I had to be careful how much I drank at a restaurant, because I would have to drive home afterward—physically drive, I mean, wrestling with the steering of a superannuated Chinese automobile creeping along roads that had been built on twisting alpaca or cow paths. It was amazing the hazards we lived with in those days—and we thought ourselves advanced, so much luckier than those who had gone before.

  “We had to deal with environmental destruction, climate change, and nuclear or biological terrorism, but at least there were no global wars, no cholera epidemics, no smallpox or polio.”

  Daljit blinked at him. “Polio? What’s polio?”

  “You can look it up. I had a great-uncle crippled by it.” He sipped again, sighed.

  “And then,” he said, “came the Seraphim. And all the helplessness in the world descended. I couldn’t even save the ones I loved, let alone the other billions who died.”

  She reached out, took his hand.

  “I was reminded of all that,” Aristide said, “in Greater Zimbabwe, as I sat paralyzed listening to Pablo telling me of his mission. And I wondered whether it was better to remember all that horror, or forget… like you.”

  Her eyes flashed. “I didn’t choose to forget,” she said.

  “No. You were killed twice by me, and once by the state, and though you were resurrected each time, you don’t remember any of what happened in the interim. All you know is what you can imagine, which may be far more frightening than what actually occurred. All you know is that you were not you, that you were helpless to prevent your own transformation into one or another form of monster. I, on the other hand, remember my defenselessness and incapacity and failure all too well. Which of us, I wonder, is better off?”

  Her expression hardened as she considered this, and she withdrew her hand.

  “I’d rather have the memories,” she said.

  “Would you? I can enlighten you about at least some of it.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Your memories wouldn’t have anything like the same context as mine.”

  “True enough.” Aristide took a piece of bread and spread butter on it. “Together we shared two great ecstasies,” he said. “The first, after we planned and carried out an assassination. The second, lasting several days, when we were slaves of Vindex, and lived in a ménage à trois along with our idealization of him.” He put down the bread and looked at her. “Tell me—is it best that I remember all this, or that you will never know?”

  She looked away, her expression uneasy. “I only know that this—ecstasy, if you insist—is not possible now, between the two of us as we exist now,” she said.

  “I didn’t understand that until my own captivity,” Aristide said. “Because now I would do nearly anything to avoid a reminder of that time of fear and failure, and I daresay you would, too.”

  Daljit looked at her plate. “Let’s change the subject,” she said.

  “As you think best,” said Aristide, and—because he would not be driving—poured himself a slug of wine.

  “Is there more poetry on the way?”

  Bitsy’s voice came from Aristide’s implant. Under autopilot, Aristide’s Destiny arrowed along the highway toward where Myriad City sat in its golden glow, followed by the bodyguards in their own, more fearsome, vehicle. Aristide slouched in the seat in back, wine spinning in his head.

  “More poetry?” he said. “Inevitably.”

  “I thought your last one was rather good. Though I’m no critic.”

  “Thank you. I think.”

  She could heal me, at least a little, he thought,

  But there is naught I can do for her.

  Poetry. Perhaps. Barely.

  The thought would need development.

  “May I ask a personal question?” said Bitsy.

  Aristide lifted his eyebrows. “There’s something you don’t know after all these years? Ask away.”

  “You have,” said Bitsy, “got rather good over the years at concealing a broken heart. I merely wondered if there was anything I might do for the sake of comfort.”

  “You are a civilized creature, to be sure.” Aristide closed his eyes and leaned his head against the cushion, which adjusted itself to his contours. “I’m on my second millennium of broken hearts,” he said. “Unlike Bad Pablo, I’ve long ago left behind the weeping and smashing furniture and demanding of the sky, Why me? I shall retain my dignity, work hard, and try not to write too much bad poetry.”

  “And, if the past is anything to go by, chase tail.”

  Aristide sighed. “Your vulgarity is justified merely by the facts. But in actuality I intend to chase no one other than Bad Pablo, who I shall hunt down along with all his works until I have rendered them all into vapor.”

  “Work is the traditional substitute for happiness.”

  “Saving civilization isn’t a substitute,” Aristide said. “It’s a necessity.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Apropos Bad Pablo,” Bitsy said. “I should commend your instincts.”

  “Yes?” His eyes blinked open. “How so?”

  “When you decided to interest yourself in the implied spaces, I didn’t think it was a very useful idea. I thought you were just trying to find an excuse to travel and work off the ennui of the last few centuries. It was the sort of work that didn’t need a Pablo Monagas Pérez to do it. But instead the implied spaces turned out to be exactly the right place for you to be. It’s as if you were looking for Bad Pablo without knowing it.”

  Aristide laughed. “Perhaps Bad Pablo and I are entangled on the quantum level.”

  “Technically speaking,” Bitsy said seriously, “the odds are very much against it.”

  “I know,” Aristide said. “But in a universe that is nothing more than an artifact, all sorts of entanglements should be possible. For instance—”

  “Wait.”

  Bitsy did not often command. Aristide shut his mouth and obeyed. Mileposts clocked the seconds as they passed. Finally Bitsy spoke, and though she used a normal, conversational tone, somehow Aristide sensed behind her words the yawning of the void.

  “Aloysius is gone,” Bitsy said.

  Aristide spoke into the sudden great emptiness.

  “Gone how?” he asked.

  “Destroyed.”

  “Hit with an antimatter universe?”

  Bitsy’s ears twitched.

  “If I had to guess how,” she said, “I would say that Bad Pablo’s mass driver is no longer a hypothesis.”

  21

  “Take me to wherever the Standing Committee is likely to meet,” Aristide said. “The ship, the ministry, wherever.”

  “Yes,” Bitsy said.

  “And fast.”

  Acceleration pushed Aristide back into his seat. Through the darkened windscreen ahead, he could see traffic being routed off the highway to make way for him.

  “There are pictures,” Bitsy said.

  He watched as they were projected on the windscreen. Aloysius came apart over and over, cracking like a platter struck dead center with a large-caliber bullet, the pieces tumbling away in slow motion as the bull’s-eye flashed into a cloud of glowing plasma.

  “Ha
ve any of the pockets survived?” Aristide asked.

  “Too early to tell. We’re trying to make contact with the fragments.”

  Like a light-absorbent flower shedding petals, Aloysius unfolded again and again in video, dying in the utter silence of space. By the time the Golden Treasure IV loomed overhead, it was clear that none of the five pockets anchored to the great processor array had survived, at least in this universe. If they hadn’t been destroyed by fierce energies flashing through the wormholes, the wormholes had collapsed and left them on their own.

  Aristide’s mind flooded with images of beautiful Hawaiki suddenly gone dark with the destruction of its great mirror panoply. If the other pockets had survived, they would at least have their little suns with them, and the suns wouldn’t burn out for millennia, but Hawaiki was completely dependent on Sol for light and heat.

  He pictured the cold descending on darkened Hawaiki, cradling the whole of the little universe in its bone-white grip. The great ocean with its enormous reserves of heat would hold off the freeze for a while, but eventually the snow would begin to fall on the dead palms and brittle tropical flowers, and a skin of ice slowly advance across the sea. Hawaiki had little energy available once its solar collectors were taken out of the equation, and life on land would quickly turn untenable. Fortunately the inhabitants would have the opportunity to turn aquatic.

  But life at sea wouldn’t last much longer than life on land. Without sun the plankton and the corals would die, and so would every creature ultimately dependent on their existence—which, in the end, was all of them. Even the pelagians would find themselves without a source of food.

  By the time the ice began to stretch its fingers into the great ocean trenches, everything there would be dead.

  The dead would live again—their backups were all in storage, and would be resurrected once the infrastructure was built for them in other pockets. But they would not live on Hawaiki.

  Hawaiki was gone forever.

  And possibly its citizens would be lost, too, if the war destroyed the remaining Loyal Nine and left their resurrected bodies without a place to stand on.