Ra

by Sam Hughes

  *

  "Alright, here's the thing," says the sergeant who first interviewed Natalie. "Your offer of expertise in the magical field has been percolating upwards, and it seems to have found someone in charge who's keen to get a magical opinion or two."

  "Here?" Devi asks.

  "This is a bomb site," says the sergeant, whose last name is Henders and whose first name might as well be Sergeant. "We can do bomb sites, and it'll still be here in the morning. Over at Chedbury, though, is a big pile of magical machinery which nobody on site is entirely sure what to make of."

  "Forensic thaumaturgy," Devi suggests.

  "Limited, unofficial scientific consultation," is how Henders puts it. "Cooperating with our inquiries."

  "Like you can afford my consulting rate," says Devi. "I'm kidding."

  Natalie asks, "What actually happened at Chedbury? What did they find? Did they raid the place? Did they find my sister?"

  "Didn't say, ma'am," Henders says.

  "If they'd found my sister, they've have said so, right?"

  "I couldn't say."

  "And they wouldn't need us there. Right?"

  "I couldn't say."

  You guys are good at this. "All right. We need a minute to grab equipment."

  Devi's car, formerly parked not-quite-outside the Ferno residence, has been lightly torched and is missing a window. Still, its contents are pristine: an eclectic assortment of light-to-heavy aerospace engineering equipment. "Enough to do most jobs," he explains to Natalie, handing her a fistful of Kaprekar driver/linkers. "It'd be better if we could swing past work, but it's in the wrong direction. What are you bringing?"

  Natalie indicates that all of her equipment amounts to a single earring. Empty fingers, bare wrists, nothing up her sleeves. "Theoretical physicist, remember? I can spell, but I don't practice."

  "But you just cast that force field. 'Only one spell' my arse."

  "Two spells. That and eset. Honest. In any case, I'm completely out of mana right now."

  Devi raises one eyebrow, and once again draws his own conclusion. He hands her a plastic box containing the unscrewed pieces of his magic staff.

  Natalie asks, "How long would it take you to put together a basic chi scanner? Something that can find my sister in a haystack."

  Devi snorts. "Like, a hundred and fifty seconds."

  "Good. Then I need something that can read people's True Names remotely."

  Devi opens his mouth to respond to this, then closes it, and smiles. He has no idea how to do this. It is an old sensation, and a familiar one, and an exciting one.

  "I can give you some pointers," Natalie suggests.

  "I don't take dictation," Devi says. "I'm an engineer. You're the client. You give me requirements. I actualise."

  *

  They're in the back of the police car, headed west. The passenger compartment is roomy. Natalie shuffles uncomfortably in her seat, becoming a little carsick from facing the wrong way. Devi's on the other side, distracted by his engineering task, trying syllable sequences. There's a constant clattering of equipment. He looks like he's assembling a rifle.

  "I don't believe in demons," he says.

  Natalie looks at him, waiting for something else.

  "I specifically don't believe in a demon called Ra," he continues. "...Which means I have a problem, because who blew the house up?"

  "You heard the spell segment," Natalie says. "You heard the fellow's Name."

  "Sure, but who was he? Who blows a house up? What is actually going on here? I feel like I'm coming in late. Like I missed acts one and two."

  "You've got a monster in your basement," Natalie explains. "You've seen that physical things can come back from T-world. Would you believe that a mind can come back? Call it what you want. 'Hijacking'."

  "But that wasn't Nick Laughon."

  "Ra isn't one person," says Natalie.

  "You mean, like... an organisation?"

  Natalie doesn't say anything.

  *

  Chedbury Bridge Institute is its own private world, lurking behind tall electrified fences off an inaccessible road in the Chedbury forest. From the outside, none of its buildings are visible through the fence and trees, even in daylight. The track up to the entrance is not signposted. The Institute doesn't want to be found. There's work going on inside, and it would rather not be disturbed.

  Devi and Natalie are driven straight in, indirectly revealing that any excitement occurring at this location, any kind of armed police raid, happened offscreen and is long since over. The Institute is four or five two-storey buildings made of stylishly modern sand-coloured bricks, almost new. It's close to midnight now, but all the exterior and interior lights are on. There are police all over, specialist vans and dogs, garbled radio chatter. An unusual number of men carry black rifles.

  There's a weird cold atmosphere, an aftermath atmosphere.

  Henders lets Devi and Natalie out. Devi's completed magic machine is quite heavy, six rings all on one wrist, some up to half a metre in diameter. They are kept from falling off by his staff, a conventional steel model, effective without being flashy. Devi turns the machine on using a long and slightly confused spell which clearly needs refactoring.

  The first readings come in. Having lacked the time to build any kind of modulator, they come in through Devi's hand as inscrutable flux changes. He has to perform most of the decoding in his head. "Zui for you," he reports. "And thelet for me, we already knew that. No bindings for any of the cops. Just fuzz. Hah!"

  Henders comes around and joins them after a brief conversation with the officer in charge of the site.

  "When we arrived they were in the middle of tearing some machine down," he says. "Something they obviously wanted to hide. It's at the other end of the site." He nods at Devi's machine. "That thing's not going to break anything, is it? Not going to destroy any evidence?"

  "Totally passive," Devi assures him cheerfully.

  "Alright then. Stay behind me, please. No wandering off, no gawping."

  He leads them on the most direct route possible, threading between the buildings and across darkened lawns with benches. At one point a windowless police van pulls away past them, out of a secondary car park towards the exit.

  "That van has at least six passengers in it," Devi hisses, after aiming his machine at it. "Maybe seven or eight."

  "You can't tell exactly how many?"

  "I can't separate them. They're all Named ra."

  "Hmm."

  "'Hmm'? This is what you mean by Ra being more than one person?"

  "Ra was an accident," Natalie says. "Accidents happen. There's a lot of magic happening in the world, and it's only increasing. Why shouldn't an accident happen more than once? Mass-energy conservation may or may not be over. But a mind is just information, right? The integral of experience with respect to time. It's just a vector. There is no conservation law for information."

  "So the Ra whom Laura's working with and the Ra who blew up her house were different people," Devi says.

  "And the same person," Natalie says.

  She shivers.

  Around another corner, she catches sight of something. Inside another building, plainly visible through the windows, is a tall machine with a weird and serious familiarity to it.

  It's a telescope, or at least derived from telescope ancestors. The main optical tube is about three metres long and seventy-five centimetres in diameter, polished black. Its range of motion is wrong. A full range of right ascension, but twice the usual declination, a feature useless to terrestrial telescopes. It is aimed down into the Earth at a steep angle, with the eyepiece only available from a raised platform. It's a shiny and new and highly specialised piece of equipment. Natalie looks carefully, and sees two cooperating oracles fitted over the end, designed to detect passing magical particles and transmute them into visible light in the most convenient available wavelengths.

  "Chi astronomy," she breathes. Chis don't interact. You don't need to
be on a high mountain in Chile, hundreds of miles away from light pollution sources, to study them. You can look right down through the Earth. You just need a quiet room with blackout curtains, and a mathematician for the servomotor firmware.

  "No gawping," Henders calls.

  This device reduces Natalie's experiments to cheap hack jobs. The Chedburians are ahead of her. She'd kill for their data.

  *

  They're brought to a large hall, a classic magical gymnasium with a standard D/E ring stencilled on its floor and modern adapters. Planted at most of the usual loci are the usual pieces for driving a Dehlavi lightning machine. The remaining pieces appear to have been abandoned in corners.

  At the centre of the room are two empty hospital beds. They are aligned with two of the arms of the lightning Y which would be produced if the machine were active. There are medical monitoring machines— additional consulting experts will be required to identify them, since neither mage is a medic. There are drips. Nutrients?

  There are police investigators scattered around the room. Most of them look up expectantly as Devi and Natalie arrive.

  Henders explains, "This is what they were tearing down. They seemed to be in a hurry. Look but don't touch."

  "Who are 'they'?" Devi asks.

  "The site staff. They're being questioned right now."

  "Can we talk to them?" Natalie asks.

  "No."

  "How many people were here?" Devi asks. "It's the middle of the night. How many of them looked like scientists?"

  Henders looks over at the ranking investigator in the room. "I don't have the whole list yet," the second man reports, "but seven people were in this room when we got here. Two in medical scrubs, five in casuals."

  Devi says to Natalie, "To run a machine like this indefinitely, in shifts, allowing down time for a basic rate of mana recovery, and assuming fit mages—"

  "Twenty-four to twenty-eight people, depending on their combined wattage," Natalie replies. The computation is trivial.

  "This is a sleep science experiment," Devi announces. "You ever play Tetris for enough hours in one day that you end up dreaming in falling blocks? You ever study another language so hard that you end up dreaming in it? Mages have a similar thing, a specific trance state. We don't know a lot about it yet. With the right medical support, you could leave someone in that state for weeks. It looks like that's what they were doing."

  "What about the patients?" Natalie demands. "What happened to the people in these beds?"

  The second man, the investigator, shrugs. "They were empty when we got here. We're looking the rest of the site over now. You want us to bring a dog in?"

  "Scanner," Natalie says to Devi, surgeon-style.

  "Thelet eset oerin," Devi answers, throwing her a decorated black iron ring, as big as a coaster. Natalie puts it to one eye and scans the figurative horizon. She sees familiar and unfamiliar magical equipment, most of it dormant. The telescope, obviously, and other machines, built in flexible layouts for experimentation. A funfair after hours.

  If you know the conditions, you can repeat the same accident over and over, Natalie thinks. Why couldn't this whole place be staffed by Ra?

  But then, why?

  What does Laura have that Ra wants? What does she have access to that nobody else does?

  At yet another end of the complex, locked in a windowless temperature-controlled storage room, is a brighter, fuzzier signal, clustered.

  *

  This Ra hears the voices on the other side of the door. The door is an almost-solid steel slab. It would be time-consuming to crack open, at least for the baseline police. But they have mages now, and he can hear their coded chatter. A familiar pair of Names.

  This Ra resigns himself, because the deal is done. The launch is complete and the human weapons are away; there is more than one way to get into T-world, and there is more than one way to exit from its far end.

  The storage room is cramped. Racks of shelves of chemical bottles line two walls, leaving a narrow chasm with just enough room for one of Ra and two bath-sized, thick-walled, blue PTFE tubs. Both tubs are too heavy when full for one man to move, and therefore had to be filled on the spot, one and then the other on top, hurriedly and clumsily. This Ra has spilled some of the hydrofluoric acid on himself, and will start to feel the burning and see the skin bubbling on his fingers very soon, but... The missiles are away and running, and in an ideal scenario this will be over in another day. If Laura Ferno is successful, she won't need a corporeal body to return to.

  And in any case, there will always be more of him.

  The wonderful thing about a bath of HF is that it'll take care of a mage and her tools at the same time. Precisely machined tools will stay in working condition for minutes or hours, but as time passes and acid dissolves the edges, they become less effective, and soon are damaged unrecoverably. The signal that Natalie Ferno and Anil Devi are tracking, which leads into the lower of the two baths, is clouding and smearing out, even as they brainstorm frantically on the other side of the door.

  One of them pounds desperately on the door. "What have you done?" Natalie shouts. "I know you're in there! What have you done to my sister?"

  Ra steps over to the door. "What we've done doesn't matter, Natalie," he says, peacefully.

  "You've killed her," Natalie screams. "How can that not matter?"

  "Because we're trying to end death," Ra tells her. "Don't you remember what I told you on that mountain? This is about freedom.

  "We're trying to save the world."

  Scrap Brain Zone

  Don't quip until the quarry's dead.

  It's one of the first things Exa learned. Exa isn't short for "Alexander", or at least it wasn't originally. It's "Executor", the one who carries out instructions. If a person's existence and interference need to end, Exa's job, typically, is to bring them to that end. Quips are a distraction and a delay. They're also bad manners. If somebody's going to die, their last thought might as well not be "Dear God, that was the best you could come up with?"

  It's December 1969 in the replay and he's sitting down for a meal of rare, Platonically perfect steak. There is salad involved, the most divine salad which could ever exist, but an article of jewellery on his wrist chases away extraneous sodium and replaces it with effortless muscle, so the greenery is window dressing, so why bother? Others around him have opted for more elaborate preparations of dishes generally considered theoretical, and of animals and vegetables which no longer exist, but Exa is coming out of the far end of a long and bitter struggle, and is tired, and wants food which will not challenge him.

  There's a pecking order at the table, and Exa is most of the way up it.

  "Who were those two?" somebody remarks. "What are they up to?"

  "Busy," somebody else guesses, his mouth already full. "Getting, I mean."

  The Wheel Group's members change appearance frequently enough that not everybody always recognises everybody else. This fact keeps Exa mollified for a few seconds. Then his head snaps up and he scans the table and the remaining diners.

  "Something wrong?" King asks him.

  "The table's full," Exa says. "They didn't have seats allocated."

  "That's impossible," King says. "Our whole operation is provably impregnable."

  "It isn't," says another diner, whose name is Ashburne. "And I wish you hadn't announced it as such. No operation can prove itself impregnable. That, itself, was proven about a million years ago. Do you even know who Kurt Gödel was?"

  "I'm reading no intrusion," reports the castle-in-the-cloud's security expert, Casaccia.

  "Even if they've inserted themselves into the records of this event, that's a bad sign," says Arkov. "It means the records aren't going to stay sacrosanct forever."

  Exa downs his wine. "Signal upwards," he says, standing up. He storms around the table towards the doors, turning several heads. Some of the men, who know what Exa does, get up and move to follow him. They are quietly hoping for
a show.

  "I want one of them alive," King calls.

  Exa kicks the door out, making a noise and a mess, and receiving a panicked response from the two interlopers. They have separated across the room. The man is nearby on the right, the woman far away on the left.

  Which one is going to freak out the most if I kill the other?

  The man shouts "Eject!" at the woman. This suggests that the man is leading, and the woman is subordinate. That's good enough.

  Exa shoots the man. The man drops. But then he vanishes.

  This changes Exa's plan. Akashic hackery is indeed taking place. If both of the interlopers escape, then he and his party have no data. His only hope is to kill the second interloper before she ejects too, then excavate the needed information from her dead brain. He turns the gun on her and fires. The bullet is around nine-tenths of the way to her when Exa's thought patterns flip texture and he becomes real.

  *

  In the next place he freezes absolutely solid. He catches the wall and a railing to stop himself from falling, doing so completely silently. Night vision activates so quickly that he doesn't even perceive the darkness, but the very fact that night vision has to come online at all takes him by surprise.

  This is the real world.

  This is cause for deep alarm. Cracking the akashic records open is one thing. Pulling physical objects back from them, however, speaks to a serious and dangerous breakdown of world order as it was originally implemented. Who did it? A rogue Wheel member? Unthinkable. Or was somebody new inducted? That should be impossible, the privileges aren't even hereditary. How did they get access? Is this really where they staged their attack from?