Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘He was aiming for three weeks, Dr Barrie, but the time key didn’t cooperate.’

  ‘He wasn’t supposed to use it at all. Without the proper precautions it can be . . . dangerous. You said that he was aiming for three weeks. Did he tell you why?’

  ‘He said he was going to put a stop to everything before it began. He didn’t explain how.’

  ‘Unless the device is used in exactly the right way, Mr Stone, it tends to go its own way. We know that it’s highly intelligent, and we have good evidence that it is self-aware. We believe that it has free will. It makes choices that can affect the direction of history. So when it is necessary to make use of it, it must be forced to make the correct choice.’

  ‘You have “good evidence”? You “believe”? I thought you built this thing.’

  ‘It’s very flattering that you should think so, Mr Stone, but I’m afraid that I didn’t.’

  ‘If you didn’t build it, who did?’

  ‘Time travellers.’

  Stone laughed. He couldn’t help himself.

  ‘If you found a spaceship sitting in the desert, Mr Stone, you’d think at once that it had been built by space travellers. You have had a practical demonstration of what the device can do, so why is it so hard for you to believe that what is in effect a time machine was built by time travellers - by people who travelled back in time into their past, our present?’

  Stone thought about this for a moment, then said, ‘Where did these time travellers come from? What were they doing?’

  ‘From somewhere in the future - we’re not sure how long. There were three of them. They were shadowing some field officers in the Nixon sheaf. When our people realised that they were being watched, they set a trap. Perhaps the time travellers were no more than observers, perhaps they were engaged in their own version of a covert operation; unfortunately, we have no way of knowing, because they died in custody. Not under so-called hot questioning, nor from injuries received when they were caught. They simply died.’

  ‘They killed themselves?’

  ‘Their hearts stopped. We believe that they willed themselves to die.’

  ‘They were carrying this thing, the time key.’

  ‘The device.’

  ‘You were given the task of finding out how to make it work. That’s what GYPSY is all about.’

  Eileen Barrie nodded.

  ‘And it did a number on your head while you were examining it, which is why you don’t even want to look at it.’

  ‘We had to devise a way of interrogating it. Like any self-aware entity, it tried to defend itself.’

  ‘But you found a way around its defences. You know how to make it do its little trick with time and the Turing gates.’

  ‘I found out how to operate it. Or at least, how to make it cooperate. And I was part of the team that discovered the principles of its operation. ’

  ‘If you’ve duplicated it, why is the original so valuable to GYPSY? Why would they pay you and Tom to get it back?’

  ‘We have some understanding of what the device can do, Mr Stone, but we do not yet completely understand how it works. Our best guess is that it is the physical manifestation of a highly complex emergent phenomenon distributed within the General Quantum Field of the universe.’

  ‘The thing that makes the universe intelligent.’

  ‘We’re what makes the universe self-aware, Mr Stone. Our brains are physical constructs that are sufficiently complex to be able to interact with the General Quantum Field, and that interaction generates consciousness. That’s why the choices we make can affect the quantum state of the entire universe and cause one sheaf to split into two. The device is at least as complicated as the human brain, but it is merely the interface for operations that take place within the General Quantum Field itself.’

  Eileen Barrie was growing animated, getting into her explanation.

  ‘The multiverse contains a vast number of alternate histories. We can travel between some of them using Turing gates. What’s not so well known is that for each alternate history, each sheaf, there is a very large number of different states. Our minds read these states in a sequence that establishes time’s arrow, like the pages of a book, or the sentences on a page. In one state, I’m saying this sentence. In the next, I’m saying this sentence, and we both have an extra moment of memory about the first sentence. We experience the so-called passage of time because we move from one state to the next in an unbroken sequence, but in fact, all possible states exist at every moment. The time key not only allows movement between different sheaves, but also between different moments in those sheaves.’

  ‘Turing gates link different sheaves. But the time key does something to a Turing gate that enables it to link different states - different times - within a single sheaf.’

  ‘You’re a quick study, Mr Stone.’

  ‘I guess it helps that I’ve had first-hand experience. So this thing is very complicated. It’s self-aware. How did you make it give up its secrets? Did you torture it?’

  ‘I did some reverse engineering. GYPSY needs the device, Mr Stone. With my help, you could sell it back to them. You could make a great deal of money.’

  ‘You want me to be your partner, huh?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Who would I be selling it to, Dr Barrie? Who is in charge of GYPSY? I know that Dick Knightly had something to do with it before he was sent to prison and had his stroke. He recruited Tom and at least two other people I served with in Special Ops. Who else?’

  ‘If I tell you, I won’t have anything to bargain with when you turn me over to the authorities.’

  ‘You burned your boats with GYPSY when you killed your guards and went on the run. Right now, I’m the only person who can get you out of this safely. I’m the only person you can trust. If you want me to help you, you’re going to have to help me.’ Stone let the woman think about this. When she focused on him again, he said, ‘The people in charge of GYPSY, Dr Barrie. Who are they? Give me some names.’

  ‘Mr Knightly put Victor Moore in charge of the day-to-day running of GYPSY.’

  Stone knew the name. Victor Moore hadn’t been one of the original cowboy angels, but had been recruited from the Science and Technology Directorate to take charge of a programme that assessed technology brought back from other sheaves.

  ‘Is he in charge of the cover, or the real operation?’

  ‘Mr Knightly is in overall command. Victor Moore is his deputy.’

  ‘But Knightly is stroked out, a vegetable, so I guess that makes Moore number one. He’d be the guy who’d give the order to kill someone if GYPSY was in danger of being compromised.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Mr Stone. I was in charge of the research programme. I had little to do with the operational side of things.’

  ‘Who else?’

  Eileen Barrie named names. Stone recognised a few from the good old days, not many. She said that they were loyal to the Company and wanted to restore it to its former glory. She more or less confirmed Tom’s story about travelling back in time and starting nuclear wars in pre-contact sheaves to create client states that needed the Real’s help, expanding the Real’s hegemony, making the military and the Company too powerful for any president to control.

  ‘Nuclear war has the greatest effect on the greatest number of people, the biggest resonance in the General Quantum Field. If you want to shake things up, if you really want to change history, the best thing to do is to start a nuclear war,’ she said, but claimed that she didn’t know which sheaf GYPSY’s operational team had targeted.

  They went around and around, but Stone couldn’t break her. Perhaps she was telling the truth, perhaps she was holding back information that she hoped would help her to escape prosecution after Stone turned her over to the Company. It didn’t really matter. He had a name now. Victor Moore. He had the beginning of a thread that, when pulled, would unravel GYPSY and save Susan from her fate.

  4

  While Eileen
Barrie drove, taking a route north and then west back toward Alamogordo, Stone gave her an abbreviated version of how he had become involved in Tom Waverly’s plan. He described meeting him in Pottersville, told her that Tom had been dying of radiation poisoning and had shot himself when the local cops had moved in to arrest him. Eileen Barrie listened without showing a trace of emotion. When she said that she didn’t know how Tom could have suffered a lethal dose of radiation, Stone believed her - after all, as far as she was concerned, it hadn’t happened yet. And if Stone had his way, it wouldn’t ever happen. Tom wouldn’t receive his lethal dose, he wouldn’t set off on his rampage through sheaves, murdering Eileen Barrie’s doppels and killing himself in Pottersville, and Susan wouldn’t be murdered. She would be saved, and would live out the rest of her life without ever learning what might have happened.

  He said, ‘I’m here, which as far as I’m concerned is two weeks in the past, and there’s also a version of me, two weeks younger, living in a pioneer sheaf. It seems to me that if I stop the cycle repeating itself, that earlier version of me won’t be called in to help find Tom. He’ll stay right where he is. He won’t become me.’

  Eileen Barrie unravelled the paradox with ease. ‘You travelled back in time, and now you are moving toward the point where you set out, two weeks in the future. If everything happens the way it has already happened, you will complete a closed loop, your younger self will be sent off to find Tom, and he will end up here. But if you’re able to make a significant difference, you will create a new sheaf where history plays out differently.’

  ‘And the younger version of me won’t be reactivated. He’ll stay where he is.’

  Stone had to be certain that there really was a chance that he could save Susan, even if it meant that he had to ask the advice of a woman who was part of the conspiracy that had caused Susan’s death.

  ‘If you do the right thing and break the loop open, you can think of the younger version of yourself as a doppel,’ Eileen Barrie said. ‘He’ll go on to live his life, and you’ll go on to live yours.’

  ‘But I won’t be able to go home.’

  ‘No, you won’t. If you make a significant change here, you will unmake the future - the place you came from.’

  They stopped at a McDonald’s in High Rolls, a dormitory town of mini-malls, fast-food joints and cheap apartment complexes for technicians and service workers at White Sands. After an early breakfast of Egg McMuffins and sugared coffee, Stone stood guard outside the bathroom while Eileen Barrie freshened up, then escorted her across the parking lot to the gas station next door and used its pay phone to call the number he’d pulled off the Company system.

  He got through to an aide who wanted to know where Stone had obtained the number for General Ellis’s office.

  ‘From the command and control list. I’m an old friend of the general’s. I need to talk to him urgently.’

  ‘If you have a message for him, sir, I’ll pass it on.’

  ‘I need to talk to him myself. Right now wouldn’t be too soon,’ Stone said, but the aide was wedded to protocol and wouldn’t give way. At last, Stone gave his name and said that he would be visiting the general’s office shortly. ‘I want to talk about Tom Waverly and SWIFT SWORD - be sure you tell General Ellis that,’ he said, and hung up.

  ‘What now?’ Eileen Barrie said.

  ‘I’m giving you what you want, Dr Barrie. I’m taking you to a place of safety.’

  Stone opened the hood of the stolen Ford and fired up the engine. After they had climbed inside, Eileen Barrie said, ‘You like this Boy Scout stuff, don’t you?’

  For a moment, Stone thought she was actually going to smile.

  ‘Used to be what I did for a living. Turn right, Dr Barrie.’

  She turned right, neatly merging into the thin flow of traffic heading toward Alamogordo. Sunrise was still an hour away, but the sky was already turning blue above the steep bare ridge to the east. After a few minutes, she said, ‘The Company office at White Sands is compromised. If that’s where you’re taking me, you might as well shoot me dead right here.’

  ‘I know the guy in charge of perimeter security. He’ll take good care of you.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to some army officer, Mr Stone. I want to talk to the Director of Central Intelligence, no one else. And before I do that, I have to discuss my position with my lawyer.’

  ‘When my friend hears what you have to say, he’ll put you on the next plane to Washington. If you behave yourself, he might even let your lawyer ride along.’

  ‘Or he’ll put me in front of a firing squad. Or you’ll take me out into the desert and shoot me.’

  Stone didn’t blame her for getting the jitters. Officers usually spent many weeks cosying up to potential defectors, gaining their confidence, becoming their best friend, slowly and surely bringing them around to the idea of going over to the other side. But he’d taken Eileen Barrie prisoner at gunpoint and threatened to kill her if she didn’t answer his questions, and now he was forcing her to betray Operation GYPSY. He knew that he couldn’t make her trust him, but told her that she was doing the right thing, that she would feel better once she had been taken into custody.

  ‘You’ll be able to talk with your lawyer,’ he said. ‘You’ll be able to start to put your deal together. You’ll be able to move forward.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say.’

  ‘I’m in as much trouble as you, Dr Barrie. More, probably. You’ll get a sympathetic hearing from the DCI; after I’ve dealt with Victor Moore, I’ll get a hot debriefing, probably in handcuffs.’

  But for the first time since Pottersville, Stone felt that he was in control. That he was making things right. If he could bring down GYPSY right now, Susan would be saved, and so would his other self, his doppel. They’d live out the rest of their lives on the farm in New Amsterdam and never know anything about this, he thought, and remembered with a pang the summer’s day when he and Susan had rambled through the woods, with Petey running ahead of them, running back to show them the treasures he’d found - a black pebble, a bird’s feather, an oyster shell dropped by a gull - and he had resolved to talk to her about what was happening between them when the right time came, when the raw wound of Jake’s death had healed. Maybe in six months, maybe a year: he’d been prepared to wait as long as it took. There’d been a moment when they’d been walking back from the Harvest Home dance a couple of weeks ago, and he’d thought now, speak to her now, but he’d lost his nerve. And there’d been another moment when Susan had been watching him getting ready to leave with David Welch, but before either of them could say anything Petey had burst in on them . . .

  Knowing now that he’d never be able to go back to the First Foot sheaf and tell Susan what he felt, that when this was over he would have to walk away and start afresh, a defector from his own life, was as hard and cold as anything Stone had ever faced. But there was some small comfort in knowing that it would mean his doppel, his secret sharer, would have the chance he’d lost.

  They were driving through the edge of Alamogordo’s sprawl now, past gas stations and tyre depots, generic restaurants and warehouse retail units, dingbat apartment blocks offering no-deposit rentals and cable TV. Billboards overtopped each other like rainforest trees struggling for sunlight. Amoco. Midas Mufflers. Winston Tires. A fast-food restaurant got up to look like a wooden fort was offering a super-saver deal on mammothburgers.

  Stone said, ‘Have you ever thought we’re the wrong kind of people to be spreading our influence throughout the multiverse?’

  ‘There’s no wrong or right,’ Eileen Barrie said. ‘There’s no manifest destiny. There’s only chance and probability. We just happen to be the sheaf where the probability of quantum computing coming into existence is highest. The one where Alan Turing emigrated to America, where he invented the concept of the universal quantum computer, where Richard Feynman provided the theoretical background for manipulation of single supercooled atoms, where the first
quantum calculation was performed at Bell Labs in 1962. There’s nothing special about us, Mr Stone, it’s just that in other sheaves a host of factors conspired against those key events. Take the Nixon sheaf, for instance. They had a Second World War in the 1940s, and Alan Turing was an important part of the British war effort, taking a lead in a top-secret operation to decipher German code. He stayed in Britain after the end of the war, and that’s where he killed himself, in 1954. He was hounded by the security services because of his homosexuality, and one day he injected cyanide into an apple and took a bite. Highly symbolic, don’t you think?’

  Stone, remembering the cemetery in Pottersville, remembering Willie Davis describing how Marsha Mason had died after she’d swallowed her poison pill, tried to get away from the subject of suicide. ‘It sounds like you’ve done some research on Turing and his doppels.’

  ‘When I was growing up, Alan Turing was something of a hero to me. Other girls had pop stars or movie stars. I had the man who made it possible to walk between worlds.’

  ‘You mean you had a poster of him on your wall, stuff like that?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I did have a photograph. Also a form letter his secretary signed when I wrote him once. And copies of his papers, of course, and a first edition of his autobiography. You think that I’m some kind of android, Mr Stone, but I can assure you I’m as human as anyone else.’

  ‘You risked your career for love, so I guess you must have a human side.’

  Stone had a brief image of Eileen Barrie and Tom Waverly moving over each other on some hotel bed. He couldn’t imagine any tenderness in the act. It must have been like spiders mating.

  ‘My career was effectively killed off a couple of years ago, Mr Stone. They used me, and when they had what they wanted they sidelined me. They put me in charge of the research that was covering up the real purpose of GYPSY. They made it clear that I couldn’t go anywhere else, or my life would be forfeit. I had offers to work in Livermore, in Princeton. I was offered a senior professorship at the University of Chicago - the very same position that Alan Turing held. I was forced to turn everything down.’