The Quantum Garden

by Derek Künsken

  CHAPTER TEN

  BELISARIUS FELT AN unreasoning relief four days later when they rendezvoused with Saint Matthew in the empty fastness of space almost a light-hour above the ecliptic. This oughtn’t have been in doubt, but the reality of leaving the Garret and the misery of the Homo quantus had amplified risks in his mind. The Garret was gone. They’d pointed passive telescopes towards solar south and watched their home vanish in a slow-motion replay of their original observations. Hundreds of Homo quantus were now dead.

  Belisarius and Cassie transferred to The Calculated Risk. Cassie’s models would only prove their worth once they’d collected more data. They had to know if the time gates were really maps to other mouths of the Axis Mundi.

  “You did it,” Saint Matthew said in wonder.

  “Barely,” Cassie said.

  “This might be the closest thing I’ve seen to a miracle.”

  “We’ve performed nothing but since Bel convinced me to leave the Garret.”

  Belisarius didn’t feel that they’d done anything miraculous. He couldn’t even fit the word into his thinking now that he’d really been inside the hyperspacial interior of the time gates. Every moment since Major Iekanjika walked into his life felt like frantic improvising. And the Garret had paid for his risks. He didn’t know how to get things to safe and right.

  As he and Cassie entered the cramped hold, Saint Matthew’s automata skittered on the walls, lighting the way. Soft brackets held the time gates in a gentle curve, and they drifted towards them, feeling the awe of being before the gates of their temple again. They ached to enter.

  Cassie slaved her suit’s thrusters to his, and took his hand. He loved the pressure, even through their layered gloves. But as quickly as the squeeze came, it went. Cassie had already ceased to be a person. She’d leapt into the quantum fugue and once again he was alone. Of course she’d be rushed to begin. The quantum world flooded into the Homo quantus through their magnetosomes. In the first moments of the fugue, the quantum intellect would begin to receive overlapping inputs, waves and particles, whole spreads of probability. At first, these were just from nearby sources. But because the Homo quantus felt electromagnetic fields, the scale of Cassie’s perceptions would expand one light-second per second, and the scale of her senses would enlarge through entanglement much faster than that. Reluctantly, Belisarius released her hand.

  He activated the suit jets, nudging them past the horizon and into the space-time hyper-volume of the time gates. Sight expanded in strange directions. Sounds and ghostly touches from nowhere pattered on his perceptions. Magnetism and electrical charge felt mushy and distant; his quantum intellect was hoarding most of the measurements it was making. It reported some observations to him, although not many. If it shared more, Belisarius would collapse many of the overlapping probabilities he saw. But the two quantum intellects, Belisarius’ and Cassie’s, could share indeterminate quantum data with each other without collapsing the overlapping probabilities.

  “What do you see?” Belisarius asked the two quantum intellects.

  The intellects were probably speaking to each other via electromagnetic signals, in a language of equations, partial observations, mathematics and new hypotheses. His own quantum intellect began feeding him minor data points, not direct observations. Belisarius couldn’t have access to those without collapsing the probabilities. He felt left out, moreso because despite everything, he still lived to discover and understand.

  The data points appeared; hundreds of stars, bereft of hints of spectroscopy or luminosity. Belisarius tried to match the pattern to the geometries of star fields. None of this data mapped to any of the star maps he knew. He was seeing only a fraction of what the quantum intellects were perceiving, but it was enough. As the pattern thickened, his brain toggled through possibilities of orientation, geometric system and scale. Abruptly, his brain started matching these to the structures of large quasar groups, those collections of galaxies named for the super-massive black holes that held them together.

  He didn’t reach any conclusions. Genetic engineers had dialed pattern-recognition in the Homo quantus so high that they suffered many false positives, finding things that, heart-breakingly, weren’t there. But if these initial patterns held, what did it mean? Why would quantum entanglement at the time gates lead to the centers of distant galaxies?

  The intellect gave him more data, even as he ached to actually see it unfiltered. The new data points increased the resolution of his modeling. Each individual point soon resolved into a haze of fine points, and the new data allowed a kind of magnification into that haze. There was a lot of data now, but if he was receiving a thousandth of what the quantum intellects perceived, what were they seeing? Each point in those vast mists possessed the kinds of quantum features they’d seen in the Puppet Axis.

  Every point seemed to be another mouth of the Axis Mundi network.

  And there were so many points that they formed a hazy cloud that, from a distance looked like a single pinprick of lights, and of those, there were millions, across great chains of galaxies. The scale beggared his Homo quantus sanguine calm. Theoretical modeling took on the weight of a near-religious experience. What he was glimpsing might mean that millions of wormholes were knit together by quantum entanglement into the super-galactic structure of the large quasar groups.

  Civilization knew of fifty or sixty wormholes. Here were millions, only visible through the lens of quantum entanglement, something he and Cassie had practiced to pull a confidence scheme.

  More data rolled in.

  The large quasar groups themselves, despite containing quadrillions of stars, were only the building blocks of the walls, filaments and sheets of galaxies in the observable universe. The pattern of accumulating points began assuming a shape Belisarius recognized: the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. This vast collection of galaxies strung across twenty billion light years of sky was the largest known structure in the universe. Lines of entanglement seemed to lead to billions of points all across this vast structure.

  But if every line of entanglement they were seeing led to a mouth of the forerunners’ Axis Mundi wormhole network, then that network was immensely more vast than anyone had ever imagined. The forerunners might have colonized a sizable fraction of the known universe. They might not even be extinct. There might be so many mouths to the Axis Mundi that the forerunners might simply have lost track of the few dozen that humanity had found.

  Belisarius’ brain raced, thinking about how the expansion of the universe might affect time and simultaneity around the wormholes. They couldn’t all be synchronized. Simple drift during the expansion of the universe would put some wormholes in the relative pasts and relative futures of the other wormholes. How might the forerunners live around this immense network? What might their society be like, at that size, encompassing a sizable portion of the entire universe?

  “Quantum intellects,” Belisarius said to the two objectivities, “we don’t know if these are mouths of the Axis Mundi or something else. We need to examine the nearer ones in more resolution, in the Epsilon Indi system, or Bachwezi or Earth, or nearby systems we already know.”

  The quantum intellects were not dumb. They would eventually have come to the same conclusion, but the pattern-recognition instincts they took from the Homo quantus made them just as likely as Belisarius to drift off into idle observation of the mathematical and physical beauty of the cosmos.

  The quantum intellect in his brain began feeding him different information. Instead of the immensity of the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, something much smaller formed: five points, without reference to anything else, without scale, with no real sense that they mapped in any linear way to the real world.

  “What is this?” Belisarius asked.

  Bachwezi, came his own voice, devoid of expression or feeling.

  Bachwezi: the system where only one Axis Mundi mouth had ever been found, a kind of dead end. The Congregate had given the system to the Sub-Sah
aran Union. In the seventy years they’d been there, despite a great deal of searching, no one had ever found another Axis Mundi. The quantum intellects were following the trail of five lines of quantum entanglement, but without reference to anything physically observable.

  The information was scale-free. The five points of entanglement in Bachwezi might be an uneven ring a single astronomical unit in diameter, or a light-year across. They might not even be simultaneous with Belisarius’ now. Quantum entanglement didn’t treat time the same way that matter, and people, did. The image of Bachwezi contained no information they could use.

  “Can you show Epsilon Indi?” Belisarius said.

  The data distribution changed after a few seconds, showing five different points of light. Only four Axes had ever been found in Epsilon Indi. The Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy had one, the Congregate had one, the Sub-Saharan Union had recently taken one from the Congregate, and the Puppets had a subsurface one. The fifth Axis was the Holy Grail or the sucker’s bet of Epsilon Indi, depending on one’s point of view. Whichever nation found the undiscovered Axis mouth would be politically, economically, and militarily strengthened.

  The quantum intellects showed five points, but there was no reason to think that entanglement might map real-world order and orientation. They needed to find the equations to transform entanglement information into astronomical positions in space-time.

  A series of equations and data points and logical statements appeared in Belisarius’ helmet display. Cassie’s quantum intellect transmitted readings on the Puppet Axis, something it had studied closely. The characteristics of the Puppet Axis matched the quantum properties of one of the five points. Her quantum intellect was suggesting that was the Puppet Axis.

  Belisarius’ brain played with the geometry, experimenting with orientations and scales. After long seconds of mentally flipping and transforming the geometry, he came up with a hypothesis that might account for the positions of the Congregate Axis, the Anglo-Spanish Axis, and the Freyja Axis. The last point, unattached to anything, lay far out in empty space, beyond the orbit of Epsilon Indi’s two stellar companions. He had a theorized location relative to the other wormholes in Epsilon Indi.

  An alarm had been sounding in Belisarius’ helmet for long seconds. Cassie’s temperature was forty degrees. He swore. He’d ignored it, and so had her own quantum intellect. The anti-pyretics had done almost no good. As much as he didn’t want to return to the real world, given the value of the data here, Cassie’s quantum intellect might not let go before her fever got dangerous.

  “Record,” Belisarius told the two quantum intellects. “We’re exiting the time gates.”

  The pace of Cassie’s breathing shifted, shallowed, as if she were waking. Belisarius activated the cold jets on their suits and they retreated. They crossed the gray, insubstantial disk of the horizon and emerged into the hold of The Calculated Risk.

  Her uneven breathing sounded labored in his earpiece and he took her hand. She gripped it and held tight. He pulled her back to the airlock. In the crew area, he cracked the seals on his suit and took hers off, before removing his. Then they lay still, strapped lightly to the two pilot chairs. Saint Matthew had learned not to make chit chat with the pair of Homo quantus after they’d been in the fugue, or even when they were in savant. Their deep obsessions responded poorly to distractions.

  Belisarius’ brain was stuffed with new data he wasn’t sure how to begin processing, all that he’d missed during the fugue. He turned on the holographic displays in their common work area, where they could draw their geometric ideas, translate equations, run iterative and chaotic processes in front of each other, with all the graphical short-hand the Homo quantus used to visualize up to seven or eight dimensions of space-time. He jacked himself in and began dumping data sets. Groaning, Cassie jacked herself in by wire and began creating images as she flooded their workspace with data points. The jack could only transfer so much per second, so some minutes passed before the image made by the points looked even closer to the structure of the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall than he’d seen. Billions of data points.

  “Could this really be a map of all the mouths of the Axis Mundi?” he asked.

  Cassie’s lips parted in gentle, unselfconscious breathing, her eyes hypnotized by the image she was making. She was in savant, socially prickly, but mathematically prodigious. She frowned, processing his question.

  “It’s a map of quantum entanglement,” she said, “to the points we could perceive from the time gates. If that isn’t a proxy to all the other permanent wormholes made by the forerunners, what would the time gates be entangled with?”

  Belisarius absorbed the patterns and summoned a three-dimensional map of the universe blending infrared, radio, luminous, ultraviolet, and x-ray and gamma-ray sources. For a few minutes, neither spoke.

  “At the largest scales, the lines of entanglement lead mostly to quasars, neutron stars and pulsars,” Cassie finally said, “and with some transformations, the mapping seems almost linear. With errors of a few AU to a few light-years, the pattern matches the map of the universe.”

  She adjusted the view, zooming dizzyingly down from the entire visible universe to the local group of galaxies, to just the Milky Way, down to just the Orion Arm, and then to the apparently minuscule web of human civilization, and finally down to the Bachwezi system. Five luminous points shone in the hologram, and one shone in the actual map of the system.

  Both saw the problem. Although the map of entangled bodies they’d found by looking through the time gates was mostly linear on the large scale, at the scale of a single solar system, the errors involved meant they could make almost no predictions of the locations of individual wormholes. In Epsilon Indi, they’d already known of four and used elimination. In Bachwezi, where they knew only of one, that wouldn’t work. The five points they saw might be rotated through any of the four axes of space-time, and the scale might be anything at all, from light-seconds to light-minutes to light-hours.

  “So many Axes Mundi,” Cassie said. “Enough for the Homo quantus to study for dozens of lifetimes.”

  “Or to escape through,” Belisarius said. “The patron nations could maybe follow us through one Axis. But the chances of them finding two or three Axes only we knew about is tiny, centuries or millennia away. We need some way to calibrate.”

  They modeled different equations and graphical displays and even chaotic space-time expansion drift scenarios, looking for something that might show them how to map from quantum entanglement to physical coordinates. After an hour, they’d come up with classes of candidate relations, but nothing concrete.

  Cassie changed the view, from the Bachwezi system to Epsilon Indi, where they could compare the locations of four known mouths to the Axis Mundi to the map of entanglement. Here, they could test their models, eliminating one class of relations after another until only one remained. They stared at it for long seconds, a remarkable pattern that no one but the two of them in all of humanity knew about. The awe of discovery washed through their fevered minds.

  Their new relation depended on one important parameter. If they knew that parameter to extreme detail, they could consistently translate Cassie’s quantum entanglement map into real world coordinates in space-time. And what they needed to measure was the time difference across the two mouths of the time gates, the time difference across the futureward and pastward mouths.

  But they had no way to measure that time difference without keeping the gates relatively unmoving for several decades. The shorter the period of measurement, the larger the error, and even small errors translated into light-minutes or light-hours of differences in the prediction. And the Homo quantus didn’t have that much time to wait to get away from the Congregate and the Banks.

  To very accurately measure the natural time difference across the two mouths of the time gates, they needed to measure it across thousands of years. Only one place and time had the information they needed, and Belisarius didn�
�t want to mention it to Cassie yet. It was too much to even consider. Instead, he gave Saint Matthew the predicted coordinates of the fifth Axis Mundi of the Epsilon Indi system and asked him to fly there without being observed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BY SPY CAMERA, in a ready room, Colonel Ayen Iekanjika watched the government officials enter the Mutapa’s stateroom to meet with Lieutenant-General Rudo, recently promoted to Commander of the Navy. The first was Charles Nanyonga, the Minister of Defense. Daudi Echweru, the Minister of the Interior, accompanied him. Nanyonga wore a business suit cut in the latest Venusian fashion: dark pin-stripes with ruffles at the cuffs and neck. Echweru wore a long, flowing kandu robe, tied at the ankles against the lack of gravity. They strapped themselves into chairs around the meeting table.

  Lieutenant-General Rudo did not often leave the Mutapa. She considered the risk of assassination too high. With all the Congregate spies and agents riddling the government of Bachwezi, that was certainly justified. And it was just as well.For Cabinet ministers coming to the Mutapa it was like walking into history.They posted pictures of themselves posing against the forty-year-old flags in the meeting rooms. They gave speeches to their constituents about having spoken to the Lieutenant-General, peppering their public comments with things like “much like I saw on the Mutapa.” No doubt it played well. The crews of the Sixth Expeditionary Force were heroes.

  Low-level heroes were fine. But highly-visible heroes were a double-edged weapon to the Cabinet: the politicians gained popularity by association, but could just as easily be eclipsed. The Lieutenant-General had been offered several political positions, as had Iekanjika, but they’d both opted to stay in the navy. Far more factions moved behind the scenes than she could have imagined.