“You’re a dangerous man, Arjona,” she said. He wasn’t sure if she meant it in the way that suggested she was about to draw her pistol and smear his brains on the wall. “How many other Homo quantus would make similar guesses?”
“Most Homo quantus have split personalities and are highly unstable,” Belisarius lied. “They can function in quiet, low-stimulus environments. One in a hundred can get along in the world like me.”
“But most of your people could make these logical leaps?”
He shook his head. “Most Homo quantus are so impractical that they consider cosmology too applied for serious debate. My interests have always been more immediate than theirs.”
“It’s dangerous to have too many interests, Arjona.”
“We may as well get all the danger out of the way at once, then. Why is the drive on your ship open at the front? It’s not a ram scoop. It’s not feeding on the interstellar medium.”
She arched her brow this time and crossed her arms. “You tell me, magician.”
He stared at the hologram of the Mutapa, thinking about it as if it was the hand Iekanjika was playing across a poker table from the Congregate. If he was to play the player, and not the cards, his first data point was that Iekanjika felt pretty good about her hand. Bluffs didn’t work against the hegemonic power of the Congregate, so she thought she held winning cards. Why?
The Sixth Expeditionary Force was forty years old, carrying equipment that had been outdated before the fleet had ever been lost. Numerically and ship for ship, forty years ago, they wouldn’t have lasted an hour in a battle against a patron nation. Now, in refurbished warships, their eagerness to get back into civilized space tingled in the air. They weren’t homesick. They dreamed of a war of independence, and no one spoiled for a war they didn’t think they could win.
“Turn the display a hundred and eighty degrees,” he said.
The movement of her fingers on the patch rotated the image until the tube stared him in the face, like the barrel of a cannon. His Homo quantus brain, always snuffling for patterns and symmetries, tasted at a new parallel: a drive with no fuel, a cannon with no ammunition.
An inflaton cannon. Their drive propelled them on the picosecond-brief existence of inflaton/anti-inflaton pairs in the drive tube. What would such particle pairs do outside of the containment of the drive system?
“How destructive is your inflaton cannon?” he asked finally.
“Not your concern,” she said, but there was a smugness in her voice.
How had the Expeditionary Force developed so much? Had they stumbled across some kind of forerunner artifact and figured out its secrets? Forty years was a long time, but not long enough for all they’d invented. The inflaton drive alone was many decades ahead of anything in civilization, perhaps more than that. The size of this job, the scale of the political and military implications, boggled the mind. This was far, far beyond conning businessmen and gangsters. Frankly, it was probably beyond his skills. And he didn’t doubt that if he tried and failed, Major Iekanjika would consider it an efficient use of her time to put a bullet in his brain.
“The job is to move twelve ships across the Puppet Axis,” he mused. When he said it like that, with none of the political context, it didn’t sound so immense. “What’s the pay?”
She changed the holographic display and a small ship appeared in yellow.
“What’s the scale?” he asked, leaning forward in the straps.
“Fifty-three meters from bow to stern,” she said.
The ship was sleek. A narrow structure of cockpit, engines, cargo and life support wrapped around a tube. It was a small craft with its own inflaton drive. Any of the patron nations would pay anything for it.
Chapter Five
BELISARIUS HAD NO idea if he should take the job, but he didn’t need to answer yet. Iekanjika led him into the corridor where the MP still waited. Belisarius gripped for the rungs, but his movements were clumsy. Then he grasped with futile, panicked reaching and somehow began slowly rotating in the middle of the hallway, just far enough not to be able to reach any wall. He sighed.
“It’s been a while since zero g,” he said. “I could use a hand.”
The MP made a disgusted face and held out his hand. Belisarius clapped his hands around the MP’s as if holding onto a lifeline and then caught the rungs on the wall. He followed them more deliberately down corridors whose walls of discolored carbon polymer felt unwelcoming and oppressive. Small colored lights would have made the ship feel warmer. Iekanjika stopped, placed her palm against a sensor and a door ground open. A gloomy room, the size of a few coffins, lay revealed.
“We moved an officer into the main barracks so that during your stay you would feel like an honored guest,” Iekanjika said, without any irony he could detect. His shower stall in the Puppet Free City was bigger than this room.
He floated in and turned to face her. Her brown eyes stared back at him challengingly. “You can’t beat the Congregate,” he said finally. “When they sneeze, even the other patron nations get nervous.”
“Do your magic and we’ll do the rest.”
Her hard eyes bored into his, and then she softened slightly.
“I have nothing against you, Arjona,” she said. “You don’t live with someone else’s boot on your neck. You bumble into arguments that have played themselves out over decades. On n’est pas maîtres dans nos maisons...” she said, leaving the old expression unfinished. We are not masters in our houses...
The machinery in the wall ground the door closed again. A dim panel on the ceiling lit age-discolored gray-brown carbon fiber walls. A zero-g sleep bag was strapped onto one wall. Handles on another wall opened up a tiny sink and the head. Sweat laced the air. Of course some camera must be watching him. The paranoia of the Union was as palpable as their passion. He gingerly opened the sleep bag and strapped himself in. He shut the light and closed his eyes, his thoughts still spinning.
The Sub-Saharan Union wanted a war of independence against the biggest power in civilization. And they needed a con man to get their secret weapon to where it could get chewed to pieces. Not an appetizing problem on its surface.
More than that, Iekanjika had lied poorly about something. The probability that a lone Union scientist had suddenly come up with an idea for a new type of propulsion system was vanishingly small. Where had they gotten their new inflaton drive and their new weapons? He needed to think.
The Homo quantus brain had been engineered over eleven generations for mathematical and geometric talents, coupled with an eidetic memory. This alone produced children capable of remarkable mental feats, but to wrestle with the deepest conceptual problems of the cosmos, the Homo quantus needed more.
Engineered from electric fish DNA, every Homo quantus had electroplaques, stacks of muscles under their ribs that acted like batteries. Belisarius sent a sustained, polarized micro-current from his electroplaques into the left temporal area of his brain, an area associated with sensory input and language. After a few moments, his capacity to conceptualize linguistic and social nuance dwindled, as did smell, taste and touch. At the same time, activity in the right anterior lobe increased, augmenting mathematically creative connections and increasing geometric thinking beyond prodigy levels. The Homo quantus called this state of being ‘savant.’
Belisarius sent a different current from his electroplaques to electrify his magnetosomes, those organelles in his muscle cells containing microscopic coils of iron. A weak magnetic field blossomed around him, letting him feel the electrical and magnetic fields of the Mutapa pressing at his arms and legs. The metal hinges on the panels to the sink distorted his magnetic field. The metal wiring behind the powered-down computer display did the same. And so did a camera embedded in a corner of the tiny cabin. He varied his magnetic field, feeling for the distortions produced by the camera. It was unresponsive, dumb tech, monitoring the visual band only.
Belisarius turned his back to the camera and huddled his head
in the bag as if in sleep. In the dark of the bag, he pulled out the plastic patch that he’d taken from the back of the MP’s hand. It had been some time since he’d lifted a wallet or coin or chip from anyone. He’d worried he might have lost his touch.
The patch was semi-conductor nano-circuitry over a breathable carbon filament web. Flexible. Vaguely shiny. Powered by the movement of the body. He pressed it to the back of his left hand. Small displays lit faintly. Belisarius had asked Iekanjika to rotate the holographic displays often today so he could see how she manipulated her patch. Her movements had been confident, practiced. His were tentative. A simple, stylistically backward holographic display floated in French above the back of his hand. The patch wasn’t password-locked, which meant everything else would be.
If they found him fumbling about in their networks, he’d be on a short list for a visit to a firing squad. Hopefully, the Sixth Expeditionary Force was still walking around with quantum computers fifty years old. Belisarius carried a head full of quantum processing abilities, but he was nervous. It wasn’t often he put his own skin this far into the game. But he had to know the Union to figure out if he should take the job, or if it could even be done.
A con man called Gander had once taught him that there were only three bets.
Sometimes, you play the cards.
Sometimes, you play the player.
Sometimes, you just throw the dice.
He pressed into the Union network. A grid of standard icons bloomed over his hand in yellow light: communications, common archives, research, power systems, weaponry, status dashboards, and restricted files. An authentication image grew, flashing interrogative. It would be a quantum password.
The world dizzied around him as he switched his thinking to quantum logic. It did not become less precise, but it seemed to adopt an attitude that made precision less important. Interactions and relationships became more important than identity and state. Auras throbbed around blurring objects. Sound became deeper and richer, modified by the constructive and destructive interference of barely heard sidenotes. The portion of time called the present gently widened.
His visual augments picked apart the densely textured information in the authentication image. The encryption was tough. Belisarius’s mind, in savant, and using quantum processing, struggled with the new challenge for long seconds, ten, twenty, thirty seconds, until he thought surely alarms would be going off. Then the holographic icons greened.
He toggled the insubstantial power systems icon. The directory contained eyebrow-raising acceleration and heat dissipation specifications for the inflaton drive, do-not-cross tolerances and detailed maintenance instructions, but no blueprints or theory. The information was probably in isolated systems. Dead end.
He dug into the research directory. His pattern-sniffing brain focused in on mathematical formulations attached to snippets of incomplete physical theories. Weirdly, the Expeditionary Force didn’t have an inflaton theory, but had modified something familiar, wormhole physics, to underpin their engineering. Their formulation lacked the rigor that had given his own teenage theories their predictive and analytical power. The disorganized snippets of theory looked like something invented by outsider artists. Perhaps this wasn’t surprising; few military strike forces would carry theoretical physicists with them.
His brain stalled at the dating of the research. The reports had overlapping and backwards dates. First generation tests were listed as beginning in 2499, but four different sets of fifth generation experiments had begun in 2476, only a year after the Expeditionary Force disappeared. The first generation of experiments had to be completed before the fifth generation ones were begun, right?
Had the Union been doing illicit research long before they left? If Union forces routinely accessed the Congregate Axis Mundi wormholes, and always acted under the surveillance of shipboard political commissars, how would they have kept their research secret? They couldn’t have. So they hadn’t started the research before they’d left.
He skimmed more of the references and notes. Much of their research seemed related to wormhole physics, including some observations that couldn’t have been made without access to one of the permanent wormholes of the forerunner’s Axis Mundi network. The Expeditionary Force must have found one.
If so, it was a treasure of incalculable value. Owning any of the permanent wormholes of the Axis Mundi network was the defining feature of patron nations. Client nations, by definition, didn’t own any, and under the Union’s Patron-Client Accord with the Congregate, any new Axis Mundi wormhole had to be given to their patrons. That was what had driven the Expeditionary Force to vanish.
There was something deeply personal too in this discovery. The observations they’d made, if correct, opened up whole fields of research that Belisarius had abandoned when he’d left home years ago. Old memories welled up in him, silty with imprecise longings. He pushed those feelings down, to focus on what was before him.
The jumble of time signatures remained impenetrable. Logical lines of causality did not link investigation to discovery to new waves of investigation. Many complex discoveries seemed to have been made at the beginning of the forty years.
One directory was labelled Research Coordinating Center. The coordinating center had been dormant for the last three years, but before that, it had been an enormous clearinghouse of research transactions, a centralized economy of discovery. Research questions had been issued on particular dates, and answers delivered on later dates: wormhole physics, weapon research, defensive technology, sensor technology, propulsion and computing. Decades of research at a time. It was when the results were passed to different research units that the dates became confused.
Belisarius customized the display to suit his brain better. He wanted a geometric display, preferably with four or more dimensions and vectors of causality drawn from experiments to their results, to trace where those results were incorporated into the design of the next set of experiments. The holographic display complied, showing a hyper-dimensional knot that human eyes and brains would have had difficulty disentangling.
The shape of a fountain appeared, a fountain of light with six streams; time ran vertically into the future with the streams. The beginnings of experiments and questions were at the bottom. Experimental results rose, propelled by the researchers of the Expeditionary Force, staying in their discrete streams, not interacting with the other research lines. Further experiments shot upward from those first results, begetting new results, and then new experiments, until, near 2487, slightly more than a decade after the beginning of the experiments, the results disappeared and next showed up at the base of the neighbouring streams.
At the base.
In 2476.
Eleven years back in time.
Belisarius refused to make the connection. He double-checked the date markings. The patterns were too organized to be the result of inconsistent dating or database errors. His brain was built to find patterns in the world, but the genetic engineers had built his abilities so well that often he found patterns that didn’t really exist. Constant second-guessing of his perceptions was all that kept the world rational.
And yet this.
The alternative to second-guessing himself all night was to accept that the Expeditionary Force had found a way to send information back in time. If that was true, the segregated flows of information in the research were designed to compartmentalize knowledge in order to avoid causal violations. The researchers in Stream A in the year 2487 would never receive the results of their own experiments from 2498. Those results went to Stream B. And likewise, the results of Stream B went to the past of Stream C, and so it went with each of the research streams. And every eleven years, the cycle restarted.
It was ingenious. It was overwhelming. The Union had a time travel device.
And in forty years, they’d completed not four decades of research, but perhaps four centuries’ worth. The Union had started from far behind and might have succeede
d in leaping past all other nations. And if news of the time travel device’s existence got out, all the patron nations would march to war for it. If he took the job, it might trigger a civilization-wide war. It was too much to absorb all at once.
Belisarius found a set of files containing the mathematical formulations of the time travel device. The work was frustratingly inelegant, but after some minutes, he worked out that it described a pair of wormholes, only dozens of meters across, imperfectly bound to one another, forming a one-way bridge across eleven years of time. They’d found not one of the forerunners’ wormholes, but two, stuck together by some accident of orbital mechanics. A pair of wormholes bound together would give off all sorts of quantum-level interference, probably the odd electromagnetic fields he’d felt when approaching the fleet. The wormholes could be nearby. Then it hit him: they were only a dozen meters in diameter. The Expeditionary Force was carrying the pair of wormholes in one of their ships.
He remembered the signals he’d felt approaching the fleet with Iekanjika and Babedi. He worked backwards, calculating where the source would have been, and then accessed the fleet formation records to cross-match. At the time of his approach, there had been only one ship near the source of the strangely-textured magnetic field. The Limpopo. It was over two hundred kilometers away, too far to make even a single observation. So close, yet so far.
Belisarius retreated from the ship’s files and came out of savant.
He peeled the incriminating patch from the back of his hand and closed it in his cupped fingers. Current from his electroplaques surged through a set of insulated carbon nanotubule wires that ran to his fingertips. The patch shrivelled into a tiny pellet of ash. He slipped the pellet into a weakness in the seam of the sleep bag and then crushed it to fragments for good measure.
Chapter Six
IN THE MORNING, Belisarius was no closer to taking or refusing the job. Whether he failed or succeeded, somebody, maybe a lot of somebodies, was going to get killed. Probably everyone in the Sixth Expeditionary Force, but maybe more. But the Union had obviously already committed; they were going to try this with or without him. Real war was coming, not just the cold war they’d been living. He did know the Puppets, as well as anyone not a Puppet could. And he knew something of wormholes. He couldn’t think of anyone who could help them better than he could, even if he didn’t yet know how he would do it.
The Quantum Magician Page 3