The mayor’s mouth gaped open. Some councilors made sounds that weren’t words. Most remained silent, mentally digging up their knowledge of space-time geometries. They were all brilliant mathematicians and capable astrophysicists, but none were wormhole experts. Wormhole physics was too applied a discipline for most Homo quantus.
“I directed the induced wormhole from within the fugue,” Cassie said, “guiding my perceptions, following lines of entanglement as navigational guides through hyperspace. While I did this, Bel stole the time travel device from the Union.”
Eyes turned on him, at once horrified and approving.
A time travel device.
Every one of them hungered for knowledge the way he did.
“That can’t be possible,” the mayor said. “Nothing can travel back in time.”
“I transited the... device myself,” Belisarius said, feeling guilty at referring to something so spiritually sublime with the banal word device. “I went back fifteen minutes.”
They looked at him like he’d grown another head.
“I navigated through it from within the fugue,” he said. “The interior is naked hyperspace, two eleven-dimensional regions of space-time that together make a twisted mess of twenty-two dimensions.”
“Bel and his quantum intellect changed inside the time gates,” Cassie said. “He and the intellect coexist in his brain all the time by some kind of partitioning. He may be the next step in the evolution of the Homo quantus.”
The mayor rose slightly in her chair. “You haven’t been hooking him up to monitoring equipment to study this? We’ve been wasting time talking? What if this effect is temporary?”
Cassie looked stricken. A tear traced a curve down one cheek.
“There’s been no time, Lina,” she said. “Yes, we took the time travel device... the time gates. Yes, Bel has some strange partitioning in his brain hinting at the future of the Homo quantus. But this pulled Bel and I into the conflict between the Congregate, the Union and the Puppet Theocracies. The Union wants their wormholes back.”
“You led them here?” Uribe said with an expression of dawning understanding.
Cassie shook her head.
“Everyone knew where the Garret was.”
Cassie waited. She’d changed in the last three months. She’d become harder. More confident. Like him. He didn’t really want that anymore. He’d rather become more like her; in control of his instincts, just a researcher, not a con man.
“The Union will come here?” the mayor asked. “They’ll use us as bargaining chips to get the time gates back?”
“It’s worse than that,” Cassie said. “Congregate spies know that two Homo quantus, Bel and I, helped the Union.”
“The Congregate is looking for you?” the mayor asked quietly.
“Everyone who has business to know these things has realized that the Homo quantus have become a military asset,” Cassie said. “All the Homo quantus.”
Lina’s expression melted.
“The Congregate...” the mayor said finally. “You’ve destroyed us.”
Cassie nodded. “We really have. In twelve days, the Congregate will arrive at the Garret. They’ll destroy it.”
The mayor deflated.
“You know this because you somehow broke into their plans?” she asked guardedly.
Cassie said nothing. The mayor looked at Belisarius. He shook his head. Lina looked away with a dreamy, stunned expression.
“You’ve both come from the future,” the mayor concluded.
“Yes,” Belisarius said.
“Why?” the mayor asked in a low voice. Her face and hands had cooled. She wilted as he watched. They’d brought her the best and worst news of her life. New evolution. New knowledge. And extinction. “We can’t change anything.”
“We observed the destruction of the Garret,” Belisarius said. “We were too far away to see any Homo quantus die. We can run away with all of you before that happens, and still be consistent with the observations in the future.”
“Paradoxes,” Samper said. She looked queasy at the word.
“This is mierda!” Uribe said, rising and flinging his chair away. He stomped out of the office. His footsteps faltered four meters down the hall, but he didn’t come back. He just couldn’t be in the same room as them with this news.
Cassie touched Lina’s arm. “We haven’t given you any information that will change the observations we made twelve days in the future. If we move quickly, we can save the Homo quantus without violating causality.”
“Where would we go?” Samper asked angrily. “The Banks will protect us. They’ll keep funding the Homo quantus project.”
The whole room existed within a held breath.
“If we run to the Banks, the Homo quantus will become a military project,” Belisarius said. “The Homo quantus have become militarily relevant. No one will ever believe otherwise again.”
The mayor put her forehead in her hands.
“This is the end of us,” she whispered.
She was right. No more quietly retiring to contemplate and engineer themselves. Events were thrusting the Homo quantus onto the stage. No, not events—his actions. He’d gone into the wide world with the gifts and curses of the Homo quantus and shown civilization that they were not children anymore.
But neither had the Homo quantus grown into adulthood. They were fragile, in-between, lacking most of the abilities needed to truly protect themselves. He and Cassie were their only guides in this terrifying new world.
“We brought three freighters,” Belisarius said. “They won’t be comfortable, but there’s just about room for us all. We can jump away by induced wormhole, far enough that the Congregate won’t find us.”
“Freighters?” the mayor asked.
“Like refugees,” Arciniegas said.
“Where will we go?” the mayor asked. “How will we live?”
“We don’t have all the answers,” Belisarius said, “but we can make sure no Homo quantus are here in twelve days.”
“You left the Garret!” the mayor said. “You rejected us! And now you’ve come back, dragging this... destruction to our door!”
Lina’s words resonated with his imaginings of the dead Puppets in the Free City, with the silence of the crew on the Parizeau and all the others who would have been alive but for his actions.
“You asked me to convince Bel to come home, Lina,” Cassie said. “I went with him for the data, and the chance at more. We brought back much, much more, but Bel didn’t know this would happen.”
The mayor was crying, shaking her head. Thin tears met under Cassie’s chin. Belisarius found his cheeks wet too.
“Lina,” Cassie said, “this is awful news, but right now we need to keep people alive. We need to evacuate now.”
“Where could we possibly go where the Congregate wouldn’t find us?” the mayor said in a daze.
CHAPTER SIX
THE WORST WERE not the crying children. It made sense that children, frightened and disoriented at the idea of leaving their homes, would be reduced to tears. The tears of the adults bit Belisarius more deeply. The Garret had always been a dangerous place for Belisarius’ engineered instincts. His nature had forced him away, and he’d had years in the Puppet Free City to grieve his leaving. Nothing in the Garret could have prepared any of the Homo quantus for this. And so everyone mourned the Garret right now.
Belisarius might have dealt better with them yelling at him, throwing things, but they’d gone numb, overwhelmed and disbelieving the message Belisarius and Cassandra brought from the future. Between fits of grieving for the home they would be leaving, the Homo quantus became automata, unable to process the world beyond their fingertips, free of self-consciousness for moments, as if they’d hidden in a fugue of fear. A people designed to one day see the future suddenly couldn’t see an hour ahead.
He and Cassie shared the small bed in her suite, huddling each night like two little animals frightened of the world
outside their nest. Their moods swung wildly. At times, they could take the despondency no more and they fled into savant and mathematics.
Within that numbing state, they had a rich theoretical world to model. They still didn’t understand all of what Cassie had seen in the interior of the time gates. Instead of sleeping, she sometimes went into savant, raking through the memories left by her quantum intellect, turning the puzzle pieces over and over. Belisarius couldn’t help, even though he wanted more than anything to stop thinking about the evacuation.
“I need to be able to enter the quantum fugue in some way,” he said, “otherwise I’m no more useful to us than any of the bioengineers and geneticists. We need to understand what you observed more quickly than we are.”
Cassandra had been laying back, complex holographic geometries above her constructed from datasets in her brain that he couldn’t access. His own quantum intellect had taken different measurements, had navigated. His data was valuable, but she was looking at things he didn’t understand, true basic exploratory science, and he was jealous, left out. Cassandra’s holograms stilled and she slowly rolled to face him. The distant expression in her eyes cleared as she emerged from savant.
“Let go of all your resentment, Bel. The Homo quantus project isn’t your enemy. We were built for a reason, with a purpose, and you might be the next evolutionary step, but none of our steps come easy. You have to explore what you are now, to yourself and to the quantum intellect. There’s a whole village of scientists here who will want to help you, once we’re out of here.”
He nodded.
“Do you have any hope for the Homo quantus project?” she asked.
“Before the time gates, before someone tried to kill them all, I would have said no. Blood runs deeper than I thought.”
Cassandra smiled and lay back on the narrow bed, and resumed the manipulation of models he didn’t understand. And their rhythm of evacuation work during the day and theorizing at night continued, although he turned more and more to the question of what he was and what it meant for he and the quantum intellect to coexist.
After three days, Cassie had scraped enough data from her memories to make a model. He felt anxious to see what she’d made. They sat in their old shared office in the Museum. Holographic projectors represented eleven dimensional space-time using angles, color gradients, holographic perspective and electromagnetic fields to depict them all. Visualizing six or seven dimensions was routine for Homo quantus, but eleven was challenging.
Cassandra had modeled the time gates as a single quantum object, a lumpy, uneven central blob of probability, with hundreds of thousands of lines of quantum entanglement streaming outwards, some bright and clear, others faint and blurry. Other lines of entanglement looped from one face of the time gates and back into the other, quantum events stitching and restitching themselves through time. The mathematical beauty and ambition of Cassie’s thinking was awe-inspiring and humbling. She’d grown past him many times over in the years he’d been a con man, and he regretted part of his flight from the Garret.
“I think the lines of entanglement lead to other wormhole mouths of the Axis Mundi,” Cassie said. “In healthy wormholes, we might never notice because the entanglement is so smooth. But the time gates are damaged, so the entanglement structure is easier to detect for our quantum intellects.”
Belisarius’ heart expanded with a kind of elation. Her theory was so vast, maybe the first thinking in all of humanity to understand the Axis Mundi network left by the forerunners. And flashes of possible patterns winked from the geometric tangle of dimensions in the hologram.
“There,” she said at the same time as he traced a finger along one of the bright lines of entangled probability in their model. Another node, its own lines of entanglement radiating outward like the invisible solar wind from a star. “I think that’s another wormhole of the Axis Mundi network.”
He could guess at others, in the far distance of her projection. The model was limited by the data, and the data was just what Cassandra had grabbed on her first experience through the time gates. Quantum entanglement illuminated the architecture of the Axis Mundi network. She rotated the projection and three other bright nodes became clear in the cloudy image. Something looked strange.
“Do you recognize anything?” she asked.
Fevered excitement had crept into her voice. His brain tested model after model of the nodes. No correlation. No correlation. No correlation. Then something greened in his mind. He gasped.
“See?” she said.
Five bright nodes. Out of all that entanglement noise, he could match the geometric relationship of four nodes with the locations of the four mouths of the Axis Mundi in the Epsilon Indi system. The Puppet Axis. The Freyja Axis. The Delta Pavonis Axis. And the Congregate’s Axis to Polaris.
And one bright node hovered in her model, unassigned. They neared the projection, tracing the filmy details with their eyes. A gentle magnetic pressure touched his arms and hands; Cassandra examining the last node in the electromagnetic. He hardened the magnetic field projected by his magnetosomes, and felt at the brightness, the spongy hardness, and Cassandra’s magnetic field.
“The fifth Axis,” she said, smiling.
The mouths of the Axis Mundi seemed to almost always come in sets of five. That wasn’t to say that orbital dynamics over astronomical time hadn’t ejected some Axes forever into interplanetary space, or into their sun, or that some still hadn’t yet been found. The patron nations expected Epsilon Indi to have five Axes, but no one had ever found the fifth. But Cassandra may have. And if no one else knew of it, they may be able to flee through it with the Homo quantus.
Hope.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, “but one passage, through a single wormhole, is only a temporary solution. Sooner or later, someone will find this Axis. We need to go farther.”
They looked for a long time at the projection, seeking, searching for more information, but like equations with too many unknowns, they’d reached the limit of what this data set could tell them. They needed more data, and not just because they were Homo quantus. This could save their people. And so those bright moments in the Museum stifled them under the full weight of their predicament as time wore down. Eight days to flee, and ten days until the Congregate arrived, and the Homo quantus were not mobilizing quickly.
Cassie cried in the mornings before going out to shepherd their people. She occupied a weird interstitial space of being the only one who could really get through to their people and being the only one truly capable of being angry with him. She’d seen the wide world, and that gave her the strength to be sullen and lash out.
What had he been thinking in getting involved with the Union? Only an idiot wouldn’t have seen the dangers in helping the Union rebel. What gave him the right? It didn’t matter that she’d played a part. He agreed with her. He’d come to this because he’d wanted to live. And then he’d become greedy for the time gates.
But part of Cassie’s anger turned selfward. He’d been a con man long enough to know that her instincts were at war. She loved her people. This was her home. And unlike the rest of the Homo quantus, she hadn’t the luxury of denial. The destruction of the Garret had burned itself into her perfect memory. But she was Homo quantus, with all the engineered instinct for pattern-recognition and curiosity. She couldn’t set aside the value of the time gates, or the things she’d seen and discovered within the fugue, even for a moment, something that would have let her regret the exchange. That told her something of the kind of person she was, and her instincts trapped her in an ambivalence surely as bitter as his.
Cassie was washing her face on the fourth morning, and tying her hair back.
“Lina can’t do it,” Cassie said abruptly, like she’d been puzzling over something for a long time. “She’s coming apart.”
Belisarius sat in a chair, feeling like he was filled with heavy, viscous tar. Of course Lina was coming apart. The mayor had been elected to admini
ster a stable research outpost, not oversee its destruction.
“The Homo quantus need to hear that if we move quickly, they’ll be safe, that we’ll find them a home,” she said.
He said nothing.
“They listen to me,” she said, “but they won’t believe me on this.”
“You’re one of them,” he said.
“I don’t know the world. They need to hear it from you, Bel.”
“I don’t know how to find them a home,” he said. “I couldn’t find myself a home.”
“You’ve survived the wide world.”
“I had Saint Matthew.”
“William said that when he found you, you didn’t know anything, that everything scared you,” Cassie said. Her banked anger was dry for now, like her tears. “Every Homo quantus is there right now, Bel. Even me.”
“I’m not responsible enough for this, Cassie. I never was.”
“You took responsibility for everyone in the Expeditionary Force when you moved them across the Puppet Axis,” she said.
He shook his head. Picked at his fingernails. He felt like he was curdling. He couldn’t look at Cassie anymore.
“Everyone who worked the con accepted the dangers,” he said. “You did. Even Will. General Rudo was responsible for the Expeditionary Force. She brought them home. I was just the ferryman.”
“Like it or not Bel, whether the Homo quantus hate you or not for what’s happened, you have to be the one to tell them it’ll be okay. You have to tell them you’ll lead them somewhere safe.”
“It’s not true,” he said. He met her eyes. She’d not given up, but she was handing this to him.
“You’re a con man,” she said, without irony or judgment. “Your profession is lying. Exercise your profession now, or the Homo quantus will never leave the Garret. Pretend to be a leader.”
He stood, and moved to take her hands. She didn’t let him.
The Quantum Garden Page 4
