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Ra Page 20

by Sam Hughes


  "What the fuck does any of that even mean?"

  "Space magic, Ed. Kardashev one."

  Their tail is gaining faster than should be possible. No flashing red and blue lights. A civilian. Hatt would dearly like to know what he's driving.

  Garrett still doesn't let go of the wheel. "Outrun him," he says.

  Hatt looks Garrett in the eye. "Why?"

  About three-quarters of a second elapses. This is enough time for Hatt to see that Martin Garrett has no good answer prepared to give to him. Garrett, Hatt realises, is a crazy. Garrett's mind has been occupied by Hatt's enemy: paranoid schizophrenic pseudoscience.

  Hatt decides that he no longer wants this man in control of his vehicle.

  Garrett sees the decision flash up in Hatt's eyes. Garrett reacts faster. He pulls his side of the steering wheel down, hard.

  The 911 swerves left, but there's no chance of it changing direction. The front right tyre skids for an instant, then it and its rear counterpart bite the concrete, and the left half of the car leaves the ground. The car rolls in fresh air, in high-gee centrifugal freefall. "Oh my God—" are Edward Hatt's expiring words.

  It lands on its front left wheel and left headlight, tearing Garrett's door in half and driving shattered pieces of wheel well and brake disc into the passenger compartment. Garrett is crushed into his seat by crumpled bodywork. Ed Hatt is lacerated in the eyes and throat by windscreen shards, but the shock of the first impact has already broken his neck. Still rolling, the Porsche sheds a trail of broken glass, body panels and vital automotive organs. It barely takes a few seconds to come to a halt, but it seems longer. The car finishes the right way up, facing the central reservation, drooling the last of its vital fluids onto the lane markings.

  There's a little while of silence.

  Ed Hatt is dead. His seat's fabric is saturated scarlet. Martin Garrett sees this very clearly. He can't look away. The passenger door is almost folded double over him, crushing his head back.

  Garrett spits a few words out. A narrow, powerful laser ignites, down near his right hip. With care, he slices through his seatbelt and then through strategic joints in the metalwork pinning him, leaving red-hot edges which cool rapidly. Disregarding the heat, he pushes superhumanly hard, forcing the metal tangle to bend upwards and forwards, sprinkling more window glass over his lap and the bonnet.

  He slithers out onto the cold, sodium-lit asphalt and takes up a defensive position behind the battered ex-car, breathing hard. By now his privileges have been revoked, something which wouldn't happen until the engagement formally began, for fear of tipping him off. He's down to base magic, the same rules by which everybody else in the world is forced to play.

  Where is he?

  Over the remains of the Porsche's bonnet he spies the pursuer's car, a midnight-black Testarossa parked a long way back in the middle lane, hazard lights flashing as a warning to approaching traffic. Garrett squints, then aims a finger at the driver's seat, spot-lighting it. The car is empty.

  No fully-formed word of reaction has enough time to pass through Garrett's mind. He knows what's next. He instantly spins a hundred and eighty degrees, bringing the laser back up, tightened to as narrow and intense a point as it'll go.

  "Oh, you think?"

  Exa blocks Garrett's arm with his own. The laser wouldn't scratch him, but he doesn't want to give Garrett even the symbolic victory of landing a single attack. Instead, a long scorch mark ignites in the asphalt beside them, throwing up carcinogenic smoke. Exa takes Garrett's laser arm and uses it as leverage to throw him over one shoulder and down on the road, face down. There's a crack: Garrett's fingers.

  "Thanks for your service, Martin," Exa says, "you're fired."

  "For what?"

  "Oh, you want to do this the tedious way? For the record? That's fine." Exa is the sharp end of his organisation, and is expected to maintain some cool while deployed. But, just this once, he lets some personal anger show: "Going rogue. Revealing deep, dark secrets of the universe to people not in the Wheel Group. Exploiting a flaw in the fabric of magic. Failing to report said flaw through the proper channels. Trying to wake Ra!"

  Garrett rolls over. There's nothing in his other hand: the charm is invisible, needing no supporting hardware. Nevertheless, Exa clearly sees Garrett's mana aura supplying power to it, and the metadata pouring out of the charm itself. If this one goes off, it could actually hurt Exa. It doesn't matter. The conversation is over.

  With reflexes as far beyond Garrett's as Garrett's were beyond Hatt's, Exa ends him. Garrett ceases to exist, his component atoms transmuted into a thick cloud of humid ozone, which dissipates immediately. The crime scene is left totally sterile.

  Exa exhales. He turns on one heel and paces smartly back towards his car, crunching glass beneath his shoes. "I think we're done," he says aloud.

  "What about the scientists?" Exa's controller asks him.

  "The loophole's closed," he replies. "They'll give up and move on. Hatt's death is regrettable. But I think we're done."

  "Do you want to resurrect Hatt?"

  He hesitates at the car door and looks back. Hatt's hunched body is still just visible in the wreckage of his car. Exa's expression is blank. In his professional opinion, it doesn't make a difference whether Hatt lives or dies. He considers tossing a coin. He reconsiders.

  "I don't want to spend any mana we don't have to," he says. "It's more plausible this way."

  As the first trailing cars are starting to pull up at the crash site, Exa turns his ignition. He navigates smoothly around the wreck and disappears into the distance, unidentified.

  *

  Hatt breathes in and out. Breathing in is worse. The act of inhaling gives him sharp crackling pains in his chest, neck and pelvis. Breathing out is more of a dull rasp as the same bones and organs settle back, broader in effect but not quite as intense. He concentrates on taking shallow breaths, to minimise the pain. He concentrates, also, on not moving any other part of his body, even experimentally. He can tell that a great deal of it is broken. He thinks he might have spinal damage, and dares not even open his eyes for fear of jostling his head out of position and making it worse. Speaking isn't going to happen, but he sure as hell thinks Help as loudly as he can. He listens out hard for sirens, but only hears the occasional vehicle pass in the other carriageway. Someone's coming, he knows. He hopes. He can't manage this level of pain for very long. Take it a minute at a time. Take it five seconds at a time. In. Out.

  I'm dying.

  Hatt can feel something metallic touching his left wrist, but he can feel metal touching his ankles (which are broken) and his ribs (some fractured) and his right forearm (severely gouged). His wrist feels fine, but he doesn't want to know. He keeps his eyes clamped shut because there's nothing in the world that he wants to see now.

  He isn't dying. Much the opposite. The metal object on his wrist is Garrett's medring, placed there as Garrett's last act before exiting the vehicle. The ring is set on minimum power, low profile, prioritising the most severe medical conditions, such as - initially - death. Its first act as Hatt's personal doctor was to reset his neck joint, a necessary prerequisite to bringing the patient back to life. Now, it has started working, very slowly, on his eyes. No human doctor in the world could heal Hatt's eyes, but by the time the ambulance arrives there'll be no evidence that they were ever damaged.

  Hatt's overall recovery will not be miraculous, but certainly impressively quick. He won't be able to shake off the things Garrett said. "Good luck charm". "Speeds up healing".

  "Limitless energy".

  Hatt is impatient. He is results-driven, with no tolerance for bull.

  Vehicular manslaughter? It hardly requires a fleet of lawyers to prove that in the absence of Martin Garrett's body, he must have either (1) walked away from the crash site alive or (2) never been in the vehicle in the first place. With suitable emphasis on mitigating circumstances (clean licence, no drugs or alcohol, serious personal injury), Hatt escap
es the legal proceedings with a dangerous driving conviction: a heavy fine and a multi-year ban. He hires a driver.

  As for the deep, dark secrets of the universe: One year to the day after the crash, Hatt officially severs his relationship with it. He decides that idea two might as well be the truth of the matter, for all the concrete results that have come out of Garrett's dreamlike comments. The lightning bolt accident cannot be duplicated. The syllable Ra has, if anything, less significance than any other. The kara that Hatt has inherited is just a solid ring of admittedly extremely valuable rhenium with no detectable magical properties. Hatt continues to wear it, anyway. Placebo effect or not, it seems to give him energy.

  He sees that there are more important things competing for this part of his life, and he lets them take his attention away. He resigns himself to never finding out what the hell really happened to Martin Garrett. He moves on to the next chapter.

  Hatt's People

  Rajesh Vidyasagar has begun to decelerate.

  He takes the lift to Hatt's floor, which is normal for visitors to Hatt's floor given what floor Hatt's is, but then when he reaches the ante-room where Sally works he leans on the chair for support as he lowers himself into it. He politely refuses Sally's offer of tea. When it's time for the meeting, he leans on the chair again to get up. He politely refuses Sally's offer of assistance.

  He's losing weight. He leans for support on the door handle to Hatt's office.

  "Hi. Have a seat."

  Ed Hatt knows Vidyasagar far better. He stays behind his desk, and lets Vidyasagar seat himself.

  "I don't come up here very often," Vidyasagar smiles.

  "I should have come to you," Hatt says apologetically. He knows the walk from Vidyasagar's office to this one is long and lengthening. "How are you? How's the family?"

  "How's the view?" Vidyasagar asks, nodding at the window behind Hatt.

  Hatt keeps the blinds permanently closed. "It's crap," he says.

  Down in reception and in the rest of the customer-facing half of the Group, the walls are covered with pictures of historic aircraft and spaceships, some in flight, some on pads, classic aerospace photography. Mixed with the photographs are huge murals of spaceports and experimental jets and ships: concept art; Hatt's concepts of what he wants to build. But it's the third quarter of 1988 and that vision's not built yet, and he won't open the blinds until he's going to see something worth seeing.

  Also, the Sun glares on his computer screen, but that's less poetic.

  "Rajesh, I'm moving you to a new role. It's a role we've created for you. Director of Special Projects. It's more money, and less responsibility. Actually, it would be essentially ceremonial."

  Vidyasagar does not visibly react to this. "Why?"

  "Because we think you've done everything we can ask you to do for this company. No," Hatt corrects himself. "Not 'we'. 'We' is the board. Let me say this personally. I think you've done everything I can ask you to do for my company. I thank you personally for your years of service and your immeasurable contributions to the magical sciences. I thank you and I want you to stop."

  "Why not fire me? It's the same thing."

  Hatt laughs. "Sure. Fire the father of the first age of magic. Just from a P.R. standpoint—"

  "Why do you want me to retire from science?"

  "...Because you're seventy-five, Rajesh. It's time."

  "I know how old I am, Edward. It's as obvious to me as it is to anybody. My brain isn't going yet. I still have my eyes. I can still type."

  There's a long, deep pause.

  Hatt gives up. "Your current line of research is not valuable to us. To me."

  "My current line of research—"

  "I don't care."

  Vidyasagar works on a long rein. He has a lab and a small staff on the site, a separate block with good equipment, but without much real need for equipment. His work is way out on the theoretical edge of magic. The gap in focus between his work and Hatt Group's work at large has constantly increased as years have gone by. From Hatt's perspective, the day has long passed when Vidyasagar's little business unit might as well be a totally unrelated spinoff organisation. There's no harmonious link from there to here, no synergy, no connection to modern practical aerospace, barely any concrete experiments, no viable results. Meanwhile, there's a kilometre-tall stack of advanced practical work that Hatt wants demolishing, and Vidyasagar is holding on to valuable brains and skills.

  Creative differences.

  Hatt says, "I've been tolerant. I've been indulgent to the tune of serious money. I've shown due respect. But Hatt Group is not a scientific research institution. The groundwork is down now. Pure theory is of no value to me. I have shit to do."

  And he studies Vidyasagar's reaction and, like always, gets nothing.

  Vidyasagar has an iceberg cool about him. He's always had it. It's not that he's an emotionless automaton; he has feelings and opinions as strong as anybody else's. It's more as if his emotions happen at some heavily shielded core, where the worst effects are never allowed to reach the surface. His sons have both inherited the trait. Vidyasagars, by design, can never melt down.

  Vidyasagar says this: "What is magic?"

  "...I'm not sure what you're asking."

  "What is magic?" Vidyasagar asks simply.

  "What is gravity?" Hatt asks rhetorically. "What is electromagnetism? It's the way the world works."

  "Why?"

  "I don't care!" Hatt replies, exasperated. Vidyasagar has evidently jumped off the metaphysical deep end.

  "On the day we first met and spoke," says Vidyasagar, "what did I say to you?"

  "You said a lot of things."

  "You asked me what magic is," Vidyasagar says. "Do you remember what I said in response?"

  "You said to me..." Hatt descends into his records. He actually remembers the conversation extremely clearly, although a minute passes as the old data drags itself out of storage. "You said, 'One says the correct words, and thinks the correct thoughts at the same time. Then, a physical effect occurs.' And then I said to you, 'That's it?' And you said to me, 'As far as we can tell, that's it.'"

  "And you bought that?"

  Hatt blinks. "...'Bought'? It happened right in front of me. It's consistent, it's reproducible. I've done it myself, I've done magic. I— we have made a huge amount of money out of its reproducibility. It bought me."

  "The real universe in which we live is an examination," Vidyasagar explains. "And then time runs out and you leave the room and— how many marks did you get? You don't get to find out. Let me ask you another question. What is the biological component of magic?"

  Now Hatt sees where this is going.

  Both he and Vidyasagar know full well that there are unsolved problems in all areas of science. In magic, the unsolved problems are so famous and obvious and intractable as to be named and numbered. The Biology Problem, the Conservation Problem, the Listener Problem. One, Two, Three.

  Hatt says, "I don't know—" but Vidyasagar appears determined to speak his piece:

  "What process in the human body produces it? What part of the human brain channels and distributes it? How is it that humans have this capability, but no other known species has it? How is it that we have this capability, fully evolved, yet have never demonstrated it before 1972?"

  "I don't know," Hatt says. "Nobody knows. I admit it. Nobody in the world knows."

  "We generate mana. Mana: magical energy. It evaporates up from our skin in clouds. We have auras, clearly visible with appropriate oracles. This is a distinct form of energy from chemical energy or kinetic energy. We can track the movements of all five classes of mana particle. We are living generators and the amount of mana we generate is more, far more, than any of us ingest as food. Where does the energy come from?"

  Hatt's struggling for the vocabulary. "Magic is on the flip side of quantum mechanics. It exists in this dark zone, it's not subject to the conservation laws that we understand."

  "That
's not an answer," Vidyasagar says. "That's the absence of an answer. That's a confession of defeat. You are not a scientist."

  "I don't take that as an insult," Hatt says.

  "And I don't mean it as one."

  "Maybe it's geological," says Hatt. "The geothermal mana exchange doesn't violate the conservation laws as far as we can tell. Maybe there's a connection there that nobody can detect yet."

  "'Maybe.' 'Maybe.' 'Maybe.' Answers. Who is listening? Magic words must be spoken aloud. Why?" Vidyasagar gestures around the room. "Why? To whom?"

  "And that's basically the biological question again," says Hatt. "It's part of the mental model of magic. It's a mantra, it triggers a process in the mind—"

  "A guess," Vidyasagar says. "That was always a guess. There's no evidence."

  There's a pause.

  Vidyasagar says this: "Why can't we answer these questions?

  "We've attacked them and attacked them. I have, and so have many others. For decades. They are basic questions. We should be past them. But we aren't."

  Hatt tries to read Vidyasagar. "And this... frightens you?"

  "This doesn't frighten me," says Vidyasagar. "Not knowing things doesn't frighten me. As long as I've been alive, the number of things I don't know has only ever grown. And you're the same, in your way. What frightens me is the very notion of giving up on knowing. Because this is important."

  "I'm not... I'm not giving up on knowing," Hatt says. "Really. I really think we'll work it all out one day."

  "So do I," says Vidyasagar, sitting up straight. "And I'm not giving up on knowing either. Thank you for the offer of the role of Director of Special Projects, but I'm afraid I can't accept it. I shall resign instead."

  "You'll retire?" Hatt shows significant relief. This works even better for him - it's equally face-saving and it'll save him a big chunk of money.

  "No," says Vidyasagar. "I won't retire. I'll resign."

  Hatt works this out. "And... keep working? You're going to go and find another job?"

  "Certainly." Vidyasagar smiles. "I doubt it would be difficult, as 'father of the first age of magic'. I believe I have at least another ten years of work ahead of me and I intend to use all of my allotted time. What is it you said just now? After pure theory being of no value to you?"

 

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