It was humbling.
This was war. Belisarius hadn’t caused it, but he’d opened the door to let through the people who had. It was like living with the fugue; things happened out of his control, but he was necessary, a midwife for events too immense to take in. The Puppets had wanted to extort the Union. The Congregate had wanted to keep the Union as a client nation. The Union had wanted to be free. And Belisarius had given them terrain on which to meet.
How many Puppets and humans had died as the Union force had blasted its way out of the Axis? The Congregate had paid too. One of their giant warships, the dreadnought Parizeau,had been destroyed with all hands. Belisarius had ceased to be a bystander belonging to no side. He’d become the enemy of all parties.
Puppets worked in crews, operating big construction machinery with dangerous and inefficient abandon, and in big-wheeled vacuum trucks. Puppets in battle armor also patrolled, watching the skies, but also unloading cargo.
Belisarius and Cassie hopped from the hatch. They shouldered twisted pieces of metal and began walking towards what looked like airlocks. A couple of full-sized humans working in the port might be uncommon, but in this chaos, probably large sections of the human population of the Puppet Free City were doing uncommon things.
In a large crater of shiny new ice, they reached an airlock that looked like it had barely survived a strike on what might have once been an artillery emplacement. White clouds blew out of the sides of the chamber beyond the airlock. Over the leaks, Puppet workers in space suits sprayed water that froze into new ice to hold the breathable air in the city.
A Puppet stepped towards him, trying different frequencies to speak to Belisarius. Belisarius mimed that he wasn’t receiving and dropped his piece of metal. The other Puppets, who in Puppet fashion, stopped working as soon as anything happened around them, watched his fiction. Belisarius continued towards the airlock, but the Puppet grabbed his arm.
Belisarius eyed him for three point one seconds before pressing a money card into the Puppet’s gloved hand. The Puppet regarded it suspiciously and pocketed it with a conspiratorial look at his companions. Belisarius cycled the airlock. The Puppet with the new money card watched them indecisively and then turned back to the work crew.
Inside, Belisarius and Cassie found a corridor that ought to have been lit. Their helmet lamps revealed exposed wires in the ceiling that they could feel with their magnetosomes. Lots of live wires, just centimeters from shorting. The wiring looked like it had been cannibalized to skip the nearby junction box, but not in a safe way. A couple of empty old tool boxes lay dusty in the corner. He handed one to Cassie and took the other. They moved deeper into the Free City.
They made their way into better lit and ventilated parts of the Puppet Free City. A café without coffee or tea or food, but with network access, seemed as good a place as any to stop. They removed their helmets at the table, but not their insulated cowls.
The pressure had definitely dropped below one atmosphere, and the smell of burnt plastic laced odd air currents. Cassie’s fugue fever glowed hot from her cheeks in the infrared. She popped two anti-pyretics. Belisarius did the same.
He accessed the public network. The display greened as he made contact with one of his sub-AIs. He instructed it to find three big freighters capable of inducing their own temporary wormholes. The Puppet Theocracy had an anemic economy, partly because of the embargo they lived under. Usually, freighters idled and were cheap, but most of them would now be leased for years as the Free City rebuilt. He authorized the sub-AI to outbid other potential customers, or even buy the freighters outright, and then left it to work.
“Are you okay?” he asked. She was sweating even in the cold, and she shivered slightly.
She nodded with fever-laced enthusiasm. “The interior was...” her voice trailed off.
He nodded, but he envied her and maybe she saw that. There weren’t many things he could hide from her. She put a hand on his, clammy hot flesh on clammy hot flesh.
“What was it for you?” she said. “How did you interact with your quantum intellect?”
“I don’t know. I don’t understand it. It feels really partitioned, but it meant I couldn’t see anything, not the real quantum world. I may not be your next step in Homo quantus evolution.”
“You didn’t get any sensory input?”
She was referring to his magnetic sense. To the Homo quantus the other senses were mostly irrelevant. He shook his head.
“You and the intellect set up the partition. There must be a way to partition it differently.”
The touch of her hand on his irritated in the body ache of the fever. He pulled his hand away from beneath hers.
“When we have time, we can explore the partition together. Find out what it means,” he said. “Now, I’m getting some ships.”
“Can you be traced?” Cassie asked.
“The Free City is nothing but clandestine channels,” he said. “The three hundred Puppet micro-states don’t trust each other. They don’t police their networks. They just live out the normal kind of Puppet chaos. Over the years, I’ve hidden anonymous pockets of money and dormant sub-AIs throughout the city.”
The display began running long lists of information.
“We have three big ships,” Belisarius said, as the money for several years of leases transferred out of his accounts.
“How much money do you have?” Cassie said.
“This is most of it,” he admitted. “But in a week we’ll have plenty.”
“A week in our past,” she said, “and a week in the future. We need new grammar.”
An incoming message from another of his sub-AIs winked on in his helmet. A hologram displayed his face and Cassie’s, as well as those of Marie Phocas and the Homo eridanus Vincent Stills. Arrest warrants accompanied the holograms. Nothing on William Gander or Antonio Del Casal. William was dead, and Del Casal was missing.
“The Congregate has warrants and rewards for our arrest,” he said. “Let’s not spend a lot of time here.”
THE FREIGHTERS BELISARIUS had leased were neither habitable nor in good repair. He and Cassie lost a day slaving the navigational controls of all three together before setting out. They set robotic systems to refitting the cargo holds, sealing leaks in the hulls, and building cubicle-sized rooms in the huge space; rows stacked upon rows—uncomfortable, poorly-lit, and indifferently ventilated. It was exhausting work, and sometimes intellectually tasking, even for Homo quantus.
Partway through that first day, in an exhausted moment, Belisarius drifted to the cockpit and floated before the tiny window, staring at stars that didn’t move, letting his frenetic brain cool. The starscape was quiet. His brain matched patterns and constructed orbital curves of the stars, the satellites and ship traffic.
He couldn’t see it, but he looked toward the exact location of their secret hideout. Their present selves, with Saint Matthew, were making their way to the hideout. From here though, their present selves were invisible, and to one accustomed to quantum logic, perhaps not entirely real.
The ships of the Sub-Saharan Union and of the Congregate were also too invisibly distant to feel real, even if he stepped up his vision. Those two mismatched fleets were finishing their battle over the Freyja Axis Mundi right now. Theoretical, academic, probable, like the destruction of the Garret, and unlike the certainty of the debris field of the Parizeau shining above Oler.
Dirty ice regolith and churned surface roads gave way to great blast craters of shining white. New flash-frozen ice melt lay like silvery-pink rivers of molten rock, forming sudden five meter high obstacles to the surviving surface cars hauling steel and finished parts from the gaping hollow of the port just at the edge of Belisarius’ view. He didn’t step up his vision to get a better view.
How many Puppets had died? How many humans? Belisarius hadn’t wanted this. He’d known what would play out; he wasn’t naïve. But prior to seeing the destruction, he’d justified, putting the moral responsibil
ity on others.
The Puppets were responsible for extorting the Union. The Congregate was responsible for refusing to surrender political hegemony. The Union was responsible for their willingness to kill for independence. All of them owned their sins. What did he own?
Nothing?
The Union chose to rebel. And he wasn’t the Congregate; Belisarius didn’t rule over other nations. And most importantly, Belisarius couldn’t find any guilt for stealing the time gates, no matter how he tried. The engineers who’d made the Homo quantus hadn’t added a moral element into the engineered instincts. They simply made a species of people whose curiosity and pattern-seeking instincts were unnaturally strong, disproportionate to evolutionary advantage. Competing perspectives withered around the pattern-seeking instincts. Belisarius was a monster engineered to not regret having stolen the time gates, even if it resulted in the Garret being blasted to atoms.
A faint magnetism pressed against the muscles in his arms and legs. Cassie floated in behind him. She drifted to the port hole and regarded the stars. Their brains liked the star patterns. She put her smudged hands onto the grips and followed his eyes down to the broken surface of Oler.
“What are you doing?” Cassie asked.
“Thinking about what we are,” he said.
“And?”
“The Homo quantus need to understand the universe.”
“That’s pretty innocuous,” she said.
“On our own, in the Garret, under controlled circumstances, we’re innocuous, but when our instincts are set free in the universe, we enable monstrous things. The Numenarchy thought they were making something innocuous when they made the Puppets. The Homo quantus and the Puppets are invasive species that escaped the lab.”
Cassie made a face. She despised any comparison that put the Homo quantus and the Puppets in the same breath.
“Do you think we’re dangerous, Bel?”
“I got the Garret blown up,” he said.
She touched his cheek. “We did that together, Bel. We need the time gates. Nobody else needs them like we do. And we’ll save everyone in the Garret.”
Her insistence didn’t make it better. She wasn’t giving him a line, but neither was she convincing. His throat tightened. His eyes became hot and wet. He tried to stop it, and wiped at his eyes with his own smudged hands. It didn’t help. Cassie moved to float against him, holding them together with her legs and a hand on his shoulder. She thumbed at his tears with her other hand.
“We should have been stronger,” he said. “We’re not just our instincts. We should have said no.”
“Any of the Homo quantus in our place would have made the same choice, and would have died trying. No Homo quantus could have pulled the con you did, Bel.”
“If they’d died trying to do what I did, the rest of the Homo quantus would still be alive.”
“They still are in this past, Bel.”
The hollow in his stomach, the tight knot in his throat belied her faith, and his. The Homo quantus no longer played with physics problems. He was no con man playing a mark. Even if they got to the Garret in time and managed to evacuate them all, they would be leaving all the things the Homo quantus were good at. How would they survive as refugees in the wide world? After what he and Cassie had done, every nation in civilization would be after them.
Cassie put her smudged hands on his cheeks. Her eyes teared.
“In an hour, we’ll be underway to the Garret,” she said. “There’s nothing to do until the coils get up to strength. Let’s not tie ourselves in knots. All we can do is be ourselves.”
He kissed her. Her arms slipped around his back and neck. She responded, then pulled back, smiling.
“What?” he asked.
“In the time gates, I made some weird observations,” she said. “While we reprogrammed the navigational systems, I finished triple-checking my calculations.”
If it had taken her this long to mentally check her calculations, the analysis must be complex. Against his will, the ugliness in his chest receded, displaced by the promise of discovery. And she became momentarily shy. She worshiped at the ornately bent space-time topology of the time gates as much as he. She navigated a religious awe with memories that, in her perspective, simply appeared while she vanished from consciousness.
“I found signs of strange quantum entanglements,” she said.
“Interior entanglement structure?”
“No,” she said. “When I looked at the time gates as a single quantum object, I found paths of quantum entanglement leading away from the time gates out into space. Lots of them.”
“How far?”
“I probed at one of the paths,” she said, “and I measured how it resonated. I took those measurements and calculated what would be entangled with it to explain the resonances. I think the time gates are entangled to another wormhole of the Axis Mundi network.”
A cautious elation crept into his chest, engineered endorphins released in response to the mental state associated with discovery.
“There’s more. I think I have a rough sense of where that other wormhole is,” she said.
Belisarius realized he was gaping and that time had passed. He’d been processing the astonishing thing she’d said.
“I couldn’t have done that analysis if I hadn’t guided the induced wormhole into the Puppet Axis three weeks ago,” she said. “Quantum entanglement between wormholes was very different than entanglement between particles.”
“You can find another wormhole of the Axis Mundi?” he said in astonishment.
“I’m wondering if I can find more than one.”
She grinned. Her eyes were bright. He grinned too.
CHAPTER FIVE
BELISARIUS AND CASSIE stepped into the smell of moist grass and trees in the Garret. Long hours of working the freighters, reprogramming their systems and robots, had left them dirty and sweaty, incongruous with the Garret. Gentle landscaped hills rolled from their feet all the way to where the winking blue, green, yellow and red lights on the roof of the icy cavern met the north wall of the Garret. Quiet birds flew shyly from tree to tree. For all that Belisarius disagreed with the Homo quantus who lived as isolated contemplatives, the Garret was a work of art and felt like home. Except that he was the corruption come to paradise.
No one came to meet them; that wasn’t the way of the Homo quantus. They were all researching, or planning the directed evolution of the next generations, in savant or even the quantum fugue, solitary activities at their core.
One paved footpath led to a round administrative building tucked close to the western wall of the colony. Lightly-colored glass in aluminum frames gave a soothingly simple geometry to the walls, while the roof overflowed with bright, faintly-scented flowers. The glass doors slid open, revealing maintenance and engineering offices.
The Homo quantus, while highly creative in their scientific pursuits, preferred a pedestrian touch to their architecture and decorations. They named the rooms of the municipal building after the colors of the windows: the yellow board room, the violet, blue, and orange offices. And, at the end of the small building, the mayor’s office was the green room, after its green windows. Belisarius and Cassie walked to the green room.
Mayor Lina Arjona smiled and bowed slightly to Cassie. Lina led the Homo quantus project. Like Belisarius, Afro-Colombian and mestizo blood from Earth mixed in the mayor. Despite being born into the ninth generation, with the same organs and modifications Cassie and Belisarius carried, Lina was one of the many who couldn’t enter the quantum fugue.
“Welcome home, Cassandra. We missed you.” Lina looked at him. “And you came back again, Belisarius. I hope it’s for good?”
Belisarius glanced to Cassie for help. She looked uncomfortable. Some people collected behind them.
“Let’s sit and catch up,” the mayor said.
Lina’s office had a table with six chairs. A few people brought extra chairs from other offices. He met colony Councilors Agustí
n Uribe, Beatríz Pachón, Nícola Samper, and assistants Tatiana Melendez and Marcelo Arciniegas. Brief bows accompanied each introduction. Many Homo quantus reacted poorly to physical contact, partly from their introverted natures, partly because not everyone could control their electroplaques as well as he did. Contact discharges could be painful.
They spoke. Some of it was small talk. At one level, his brain absorbed the information, made the appropriate gestures and responses, but on another, his brain panicked, trying to find a way to tell this, to make it better. All his con man skills seemed to fail him; nothing came to him.
He cared about the Homo quantus. He and Cassie had agreed that she should try to explain the danger to them. He’d left the Garret at sixteen, a decision many in the project took as a betrayal, while Cassie was one of their darlings. And yet, in the moment, she seemed not only out of place covered in dirt and smudges, but as nervous as he. And yet he couldn’t speak. They wouldn’t believe him.
“Where have you been, Cassandra?” the mayor asked. “What’s the wide world like?”
Cassie smiled awkwardly.
“Three months ago, Bel offered me data if I helped him on a job.”
The mayor leaned forward when Cassie said ‘data’. Belisarius did too.
“Bel showed me evidence that his employers, the Union, had found a time travel device,” Cassie said.
Eyebrows rose. The mayor lost her Homo quantus expression of double-processing. Someone said “What?”
“I didn’t believe him right away,” she said. “I went with him because of our previous collaborations, and because of the data he brought.”
The mayor and her councilors eyed Belisarius uncertainly.
“A time travel device?” Arciniegas said.
“The Sub-Saharan Union had a small fleet on the other side of the Puppet Axis,” Cassie said. “The Puppets wouldn’t let the Union through unless they turned over half the fleet in payment. So using the theories Bel and I had developed a decade ago, and data from the Union fleet, we connected an induced wormhole to the mid-throat of the Puppet Axis.”
The Quantum Garden Page 3
