The Quantum Magician

by Derek Künsken

  “This is a quarantine area, Mister Kaltwasser,” he said. “We have doctors here ready to make sure you and Lister-10 aren’t carrying contagions into the Free City.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of spending much time in the Free City,” William said. “I know I’m sick. I know I don’t have a lot of time. Before I die, I want to get to Port Stubbs, where my family came from. I’ve never been there, but it meant a lot to my grandparents.”

  “The quarantine shouldn’t last long.”

  “I’m a little nervous,” William said. “I’d never met a Puppet before I contacted Warren. I’d spent most of my life avoiding the chance of ever meeting one. Stories go around.”

  “Stories do go around, Mister Kaltwasser, detached from facts, circulated by people who have never been here. I appreciate that you understood that these stories made no sense. Come.”

  A female Puppet stood in the doorway, in robes more surgical than sacramental. She smiled and motioned William to enter with a fine, pale hand. They were all pale, as if they’d descended from Old Earth European stock. Like Marie. Like him. Grassie-6 touched William’s elbow and gently encouraged him in. He closed the door so that it was just the three of them.

  “You won’t be surprised at the effect you have on Puppets,” Grassie-6 said, “but Doctor Teller-5 is among the most self-disciplined. We’ll get you out of your suit to begin the decontamination process and also to assess your health information so we can begin treating you.”

  William had never seen a female Puppet. Doctor Teller-5 was taller than Grassie-6, perhaps a few centimeters over a meter, with long brown hair, old-fashioned patterns of makeup and an absence of any visible body art. She had clear, lovely features. The Numen had carried many atavistic traits through the centuries, among them a classical sense of beauty, and had designed their slaves accordingly. The Puppets would, by force of biological imperatives, still be cultivating that flavor of beauty, as long as Numen existed to be worshipped.

  With some resignation, William began to unstrap and unzip the suit he had travelled in. A shyness touched him as he peeled it off. He’d expected a decontamination shower with no one but himself to suffer the unavoidable smell of his unwashed body. From his unfeigned social discomfort, he watched them react. Their eyes traced the lines of his body with hungry attention and their own self-awareness, listening to their bodies for their reactions.

  This was the test of Del Casal’s work. Either the con would continue, or he and Gates-15 would end their working relationship with an execution. The doctor approached him, staring in wonder. Instead of touching him with the sampling swabs in her fingers, she slowly stroked the skin of his arm, not caressing, not grabbing, but just feeling at the texture of him. A slow, heavy inhalation accompanied the touch. William jerked his arm away.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded. “I thought you were a doctor.”

  His reaction didn’t seem to matter to her. She wasn’t bashful or embarrassed at his tone. She looked at his neck and chest, not his eyes, as if his outburst were mildly interesting, but bereft of meaning. She touched him again, palm-first, unmoving. With a bit of heat, William seized her wrist. She smiled directionlessly, and then looked at Bishop Grassie-6 in wonder. Grassie-6 smiled back at her. William pushed her away, and she stumbled back and down, knocking her head loudly against the cupboard. She looked up at him. As did the bishop. In eerie synchrony, they sighed. William’s stomach lurched. They were so disturbing. And he been violent. They were rattling him. He had to control himself.

  “This isn’t a medical exam,” William said. His voice tightened an octave.

  The doctor rose.

  “He’s remarkable,” she breathed, rising.

  “Samples,” the bishop said. “I’m very interested in results. I wonder what family he’s from.”

  “Yes, Your Grace,” she said.

  William forced himself to be still as she came close again, the crown of her head rising only to his abdomen. She reached to his chest, wiped a swab and put that in a tube. She swabbed his leg, his back, and his buttocks. She took her time behind him. He turned to see what she was doing back there. He found her staring up at his back with her lips parted in some undefined, but overpowering feeling. Her cheeks flushed, not in embarrassment, but in reaction to him. He stepped away from her and looked to the bishop.

  But Grassie-6 knelt by William’s discarded suit, crouched over it, sniffing at the inside and giving it a furtive lick.

  William’s hands trembled. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he yelled. He had no control.

  Then he kicked the bishop hard in the ribs. The air groaned out of Grassie-6 and he curled around his stomach.

  “Oh, yes,” the bishop whispered.

  A hot palm pressed against William’s buttock, not stroking, not moving, just pressing, as if communing with the consistency of skin and fat and muscle. She did not even look up at him. His skin held her enraptured.

  No thought. He swung a fist backwards. His knuckles hit her forehead hard and two snaps sounded in his hand. She fell limp to the floor.

  Then, William’s nerves exploded in pain, and his muscles seized so tightly that he could not cry out. His head struck the floor and his eyes could only look straight ahead. Grassie-6’s rapt face stared down at him in fascination over a hand that held a trembling shocker.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  MARIE WATCHED HER monitor as Stills melted a crater into the center of the window, occasionally pausing to scoop out molten glass with the end of a rod. He moved slower and slower.

  “Stills! Move faster. Chop, chop!”

  “Blow me,” he said. “Not enough water pressure in here. My blood can’t get the oxygen I need. I’m fightin’ not to pass out.”

  “Think less. Conserve oxygen.”

  His artificial voice grunted. “And it’s stinkin’ hot in here. Your refrigeration isn’t worth shit. Feels like I’m close to a smoker.”

  “I wanted you to feel at home.”

  “I think I hate your guts, Phocas.”

  “Less think. Cut more.”

  Then her monitor filled with static as the room shook. The barometer reading inside the lock had jumped to nine hundred and eighty atmospheres. A tiny spray of water fanned from the corner of the airlock.

  “Stills!” she called. “Stills!”

  No response. She didn’t even know if her voice was getting through.

  Then the monitor came on after a reboot. A hard white light, the kind Stills didn’t like, shone. The emergency light. The water inside was blackened and tinged with red. Shards of glass lay on the floor of the airlock and over Stills’ hyperbaric chamber. Stills held the light in his fatty arms. His body and tail swayed and his great black eyes examined the chamber.

  “Never thought I’d be so happy to smell an ammonia ocean,” he said. His artificial voice had no inflection. She couldn’t tell if he was weakened, or in pain.

  “I see blood, Stills. How bad you hurt?”

  “Don’t know. I feel shitty. It’s not the cuts. My body was at a lower pressure when the glass broke. I’m hopin’ I’m just shocky and that I’m not dealing with organ damage.”

  “You need a rest?”

  “Yeah, but we don’t got the time, do we?”

  “Not really.”

  “Let’s kick it.”

  “Okay. Clear my airlock.”

  Stills closed his side of the airlock and then turned to the task of widening the edges of the hole in the window with the torch. Marie drained the lock and opened the door. The smell of dilute ammonia wafted out.

  She jerked at Stills’ chamber, sliding it a few centimeters with every tug. It massed close to a ton, but weighed less than half of that in Oler’s weaker gravity. Even at that, she strained with myofibril-enhanced muscles until it was out of the way. This was faster than rigging straps and a winch, and she was working off nervous energy. She rolled forward a pallet of explosives on a dolly, and maneuvered it into the dripping ai
rlock. She shut the door and flooded it.

  They’d not reached the dangerous part yet. She began increasing the pressure in the airlock, getting it closer and closer to the pressure outside. The explosives didn’t mind being wet, but the pressure was so high that gasses complexed to the explosives might react with the solids, changing their properties. She’d tested her design on Ptolemy up to eight hundred atmospheres and they’d been pretty stable. But this was higher than that.

  “All right, cross your fingers,” she said. “Wait. Have you even got fingers?”

  “Fuck off, Phocas.”

  She squinted into the monitor. Yup. He had at least one finger on each hand.

  “Should I be outside?” Stills added.

  “Depends on your philosophy of life.”

  “I follow the Way of the Mongrel.”

  “In that case, stay close. If this goes south, you’ll want to stab me with a shard of glass or something, right?”

  “You get me for once.”

  “Cycling open,” she said, crossing her fingers. The pressure inside the airlock shot from six hundred atmospheres to over a thousand. The seams squeaked. She waited a few seconds, watching the displays.

  “All right, slacker!” Marie said. “Get out of there! Move it!”

  “I already said fuck you, Phocas.”

  “You’re going to be sorry you said that when you find the cupcakes I sealed in there.”

  “I couldn’t eat that shit,” he said, pulling out the pallet and shutting the lock.

  “That’s probably best,” she said, pumping out the lock. “You don’t want to see what a thousand atmospheres of pressure does to a cupcake.”

  Stills broke the first crate of explosives free. He and Marie fell into a rhythm of communicating through action across the airlock, separated by pressure differences that would kill either one of them. The lock was made to be fast, but they couldn’t get to less than four minutes to a cycle. Four crates of explosives took them another eighteen minutes.

  The room rumbled slightly.

  “What the hell was that, Phocas?” Stills said. “Is the hotel coming apart?”

  “I don’t think so. Also, I hope not, ’cause I’m still in it. If our break made any fractures farther away, they might be equalizing.” The room rumbled again. “Get moving, Stills. We’ve got to get you moving. They’ll have heard that!”

  “Too late. I’ve got company.”

  She looked into the monitor. Stills was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  THE BRIDGE OF the Boyacá still carried the modification they’d made to enable the two Homo quantus to work in holographic workspaces. In magnetic boots, Belisarius crouched in the middle of a small village of graphs, network flow diagrams, and communication traffic dashboards. The holographic light shone on his hands and the service band on his wrist.

  “I think things just got more complicated,” Belisarius said.

  Iekanjika turned in one of the two pilot seats. Cassandra, in savant, approached from a different cluster of holographic charts.

  “What is it?” Iekanjika asked.

  “Someone is paying a lot of attention to what’s going on in the Free City,” Belisarius said. “Look at the patterns of money and communication.” He reworked the holograms to displays graphs and charts.

  “There’s no pattern there,” Saint Matthew said. “It’s indistinguishable from the normal chaotic dynamic flow of money and talking.”

  “False signals,” Belisarius said. “Someone is very good at camouflaging their actions, to make it look like nothing’s going on.” He pointed to small but clear spikes. “If all information and money were flowing into normal market patterns, there would be no directional preference. This shows money flowing in, in specific spots, in small enough quantities that it ought not to be noticed above background. Same with communications.”

  The AI was silent, puzzling over this.

  Iekanjika stroked her chin, frowning. “What do you think this is?” she asked.

  “Unfortunately, I think that the Free City has attracted the attention of the Congregate security apparatus. Maybe the Puppets weren’t as close-lipped as they ought to have been about the Expeditionary Force, or maybe they went extra quiet, which makes everyone suspicious.”

  “How much attention?” Iekanjika asked.

  “Any attention is bad,” Belisarius said, “but if they can camouflage their attention with false signals, maybe we can throw in some false signals of our own.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  WILLIAM PULLED OUT of sticky thoughts. He pushed at cloying, tugging things. He ached. A bit of light creaked into his brain through slitted eyes. He lay in a narrow bed low enough to be a stretcher. A sheet and thin blanket covered him, except for his leg.

  Teller-5, the Puppet doctor, knelt at his leg, her hands flat upon it. She flushed deep pink under a bandage wound about her forehead. A bruise darkened from forehead to cheek. She met his eyes. Her expression was alien.

  She licked his leg. He scrambled back in his sheets, sitting up.

  It had not been a playful tongue to skin. It had not been a sexual advance.

  She had been tasting him.

  He was divine to her, incarnated.

  Holy spirit in textured flesh.

  From the corner came the bishop, who pulled the doctor back with hands on shoulders and quiet words. William locked eyes with him. Grassie-6 had calm, sated eyes. He met William’s as he guided Doctor Teller-5 to a small chair.

  “This is no medical test,” William said.

  “It most certainly is,” Grassie-6 said. “It has been thirteen hours. You needed sleep. We kept you sedated to wait out your distress.”

  “Don’t sedate me anymore!”

  The bishop smiled. “We’ve assessed your health readings, so that our doctors can treat you.”

  “You’re going to give yourself the Trenholm virus if you’re not careful.”

  “It’s a good and necessary test,” the bishop said. “Our creators gave us immune systems very similar to their own. None of us should catch it, but if we do, we’ll know that we can’t bring you into the Forbidden City or Port Stubbs.”

  William flexed his hand, the one he’d used to strike the doctor. It hurt a lot.

  “The bones of the hand are fragile,” Grassie-6 said. “The next time you wish to strike a Puppet, ask for a whip or a boot or a rubber hose.”

  Snakes curled in William’s stomach. “Would you give me one?”

  “We don’t want your hand hurt. Or your feet, for that matter. You have some bruising on the arch of your foot.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” he croaked.

  “Nothing,” the Puppet said, looking back at Teller-5, who eyed William dreamily. “We’re exactly as we’re supposed to be.”

  Chapter Forty

  THE OCEAN WAS frigid, and the ammonia tasted like bile. Stills shot upward along the Puppet Free City, keeping close to the spine of the hotel, where no windows looked out. So many different kinds of light vomited into the murkiness, from romantic candle-light to hard-assed spotlights to puke-inducing decorations to bioluminescent fishing lures; all disorienting oases of useless light.

  The scents were no fucking help either. The dissolved ammonia smelled stronger in open sea and made weird chemical scents against the solid surface of the Free City, but the currents shuffled the associations every hundred meters he swam higher, so he couldn’t trust smell.

  And judging distance and direction by sound would have been a pissing shot. He’d been raised in eight hundred atmospheres of pressure, and despite dragging around a lot of base-human instincts, he could locate things by sound under those conditions. But an extra two hundred atmospheres of pressure changed the speed of sound a shitload faster than his brain could adapt.

  So Stills felt his way through the ocean with his electroplaques and magnetosomes. A propeller churned, transmitting in the EM maybe four hundred meters above him; certainly a Puppet sub.
Maybe manned, maybe unmanned. Arjona hadn’t planned on attracting deep-ocean attention. If the Puppets found Stills, they would swarm the inside of the hotel like ants.

  The sub sonar pinged and Stills spun, blocking his ringing ears.

  Ass-lickers! That fucking hurt.

  Stills shot away from the hotel, on an intercept course with the descending sub. At worst, he would appear as a big, fishy contact in sonar, and at best, wouldn’t reflect much back at all.

  He was ready when it pinged again. It was probably listening to the sonar reflection of the hotel. The sub wasn’t close enough to pick up the window damage in the penthouse, but it was heading straight that way. This was a cock-up in the job. And even if he managed to destroy this sub, that might bring five more of the fuckers.

  Stills darted up until he came fifty meters abeam of it. It was cheap cast-off mining tech, unmanned. No indication if it was remotely controlled or programmed. The main sonar and EM sensing equipment were nose-loaded, for prospecting in the ice and the ocean’s subsurface. He got behind the nose so the ping wouldn’t deafen him.

  The sub navigated like him, using a combination of magnetic and sonic sensitivity. He drove his flukes hard, closing with the hull ahead of the sub’s rudder and stern planes. The creaking of the machinery inside fucked with his hearing. He moved farther up the hull, holding onto a forward fin with his hands.

  This would be tricky.

  His electroplaques were not the fine-tuned, uptown organs the Homo quantus pranced around with. The Homo quantus genetic engineers had engineered far more sensitivity and control into the electroplaques for their precious snowflakes. As always, the tribe got the dog deal.

  Stills flexed a charge from his electroplaques through conducting carbon nanotubules, into magnetosomes in his arms, generating a magnetic field of a dozen microtesla, not enough to overwhelm Oler’s field of twenty microtesla, but enough to make some nice fucking pretend for the remote sub.