The Quantum Garden

by Derek Künsken

  It didn’t matter. The Port-Cartier would secure one side of these bizarre wormholes. Then the Congregate would have decades and centuries to peel the layers away from their secrets, perhaps with the help of the Homo quantus the Scarecrow had captured. And perhaps with the help of the Union colonel. The Scarecrow couldn’t navigate the interior of this place, but it could repeat all the rotations and accelerations it saw in the inflaton ship. Once it found the other side of the wormhole, it could get a star fix and signal the Congregate.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  IEKANJIKA SNAPPED CLOSED the seals on her helmet, ignoring the puppy love between the two Homo quantus. She’d never experienced that kind of innocent affection. She’d had lovers from time to time, trysts, but nothing like the needy insecurity Arjona and Mejía displayed. When she was relatively young she had been joined into a powerful triple marriage to Lieutenant-General Rudo and Brigadier Wakikonda, both significantly older. She’d always respected Wakikonda, and she revered Lieutenant-General Rudo’s military cunning, her commanding leadership, and her unflagging belief that they would return home. Despite Iekanjika’s own failure in losing the time gates, she’d been so proud when Rudo had been promoted and given command of the Navy.

  Iekanjika’s loyalty had been unshakable since childhood, but the last three days had dislocated her life, tilting everything askew. Lieutenant-General Rudo wasn’t Rudo, not really, but a name didn’t matter. The woman they’d called Rudo all these years was the same person, and had been since before Iekanjika had been born.

  Yet names did matter, as much as actions.

  The Union named its warships after places and people that meant something to them: Mutapa, Limpopo, Kampala, Gbudue, Batembuzi; names bound to their history and identity. The Venusian Congregate did the same, honoring names from a colonial Québec inflated by time and steeped in legend. Zimbabwe, the central power of the Union, had itself taken its name from an Iron Age kingdom precisely because names had power.

  So the young woman, Vimbiso Tangwerai, had taken the name Kudzanai Rudo, a name with the totemic power to enter the academy. And she’d transformed that name into a charm spoken with reverence by her fleet, with respect by Union politicians, and with frustration by the Congregate.

  So maybe the Lieutenant-General had been right to take Rudo’s place in history. What were the chances that the original Rudo would have accomplished as much as the woman who had stolen her life? If the murdered Rudo was anything like the Union’s social elite Iekanjika had met since their return to Bachwezi, those chances were tiny.

  Iekanjika moved to the airlock. The dislocation of her life had not run its course; it was worsening. She was dislocated in history now too, stepping into a legendary time, when her slightest error could abort their rebellion four decades in the past.

  Arjona joined her in the cramped airlock; Iekanjika cycled it and the door swung into the surreal space outside the racer: a slate-gray shot through with elusive, oily moments of sourceless color; flashes of sweet tastes and painfully loud bursts of white noise. All points around them touched her eyes as if they were at three different distances at once.

  The racer, while solid enough, shifted in this eerie space, moving in and out of focus, with sourceless green and blue glints shooting under its opaque surface. Her own gloved hands shimmered and when she moved them to dispel the effect, they seemed to foreshorten. Arjona seemed not to have the same trouble and focusing on him seemed to reduce the field of strangeness. His darkened face looked at her from within the halo of his faceplate.

  “Ready, colonel?” he asked.

  She could deal with this if he could. She wasn’t Homo quantus, but she was proud of her officer status; that didn’t change in a strange hyperspace, nor in the past.

  Arjona activated the cold jets on his suit and moved without trouble, like he’d been born here. That was a dangerous notion. For months she’d considered him a brilliant, underhanded criminal. That assessment, perhaps wrong, might have come by measuring him outside of his proper setting. Aboard the Mutapa and the Jonglei, and in the Puppet Free City, Arjona never seemed quite to belong. But he and Mejía possessed the ease of the children born to this chaos.

  She followed hesitantly, slowing as he stopped just above the red-shot surface of the wormhole mouth. Disconcertingly, he pressed his face through that horizon, as if pushing his faceplate into a liquid. He pulled back and looked at her.

  “The coast is as clear as I think it’s going to get,” he said. “I lasered the nearest watchtower with our identification.”

  He took her upper arm and she matched his trajectory with her cold jets, bracing herself for the transition, but she felt nothing as they crossed the horizon. Hard spotlights cast harsh shadows. Gravity pulled her onto concrete-hard water ice overrun with drifts of melt-welded pollen, powdered with carbon dioxide snow and wreathed in faint mists of methane and nitrogen.

  She’d never walked this ice, but a strange sense of ownership shivered in her. Somewhere among the Union forces were the mother and father she’d never met. Overhead loomed the fat brown dwarf she’d been born under, squatting across fifteen degrees of the sky like a great glowing ember. Once, stars determined lives and fates. Dusty threads of metallic oxides—of vanadium, iron and aluminum—striated her star’s windy upper atmosphere, while deeper clouds of titanium oxide were slow-moving bruises over the inflamed red beneath.

  Behind her, the lower edge of the wormhole was frozen into the surface of the ice. In a wide circle centered on the portal stood rudely-built pillars of ice, topped with bright spotlights. They shone on an oily black scum covering much of the ground, a vacuum-living slick that photosynthesized the infrared from the young brown dwarf. Farther from the time gates, other photosynthesizers sprouted from the ground, assuming fractal shapes reminiscent of trees and bushes, oily black films webbing the branches to one another. But strangest of all was the herd of motile creatures, the ones called the vegetable intelligences in all the reports.

  At first glance, they appeared utterly still, but after only a few moments her combat-trained senses noticed slow, inching shifts of weight. They were four-legged, with barrel-like body structures. Icy black fronds splayed above them, catching the dim infrared of the brown dwarf and the fine pollen that emerged from the time gates; except that no pollen emerged from the time gates anymore.

  “You named the planet Nyanga,” Belisarius said.

  The Lieutenant-General had only said the name twice, but Arjona never forgot anything. The name was sacred, and neither she nor anyone in the rest of the Expeditionary Force ever spoke it lightly. It sounded strange coming from his lips, like an intrusive familiarity.

  “The name is a dark joke,” she said. “Nyanga is a national park in Zimbabwe. Does this look like a national park to you?”

  Arjona looked around with the same awe as she did.

  “It does feel like a garden,” he said slowly, “a garden grown under the ember of a failed star.”

  She didn’t know how to take the tone of reverence in his voice. She didn’t know the Homo quantus and what they might honor. And until he’d said it that way, it had never occurred to her that she’d been born under a failed star.

  “About one minute until the cameras wake up from the override Rudo gave us,” the AI said.

  They walked from the time gates briskly, skirting the individual vegetable intelligences; if any had noticed their passage, they made no sign. In the distance, the outlines of crude buildings masked the stars and spilled their own illumination onto the ice. There some fifty people were widely scattered on the surface of the ice, bustling with activity.

  Iekanjika’s and Belisarius’ helmets picked up radio traffic—uncoded orders, security detail check-ins, assignment changes. She listened to each message, feeling the press of history. If the Union survived breaking away from the Congregate, this would be their founding myth and she was standing at its inception, listening to its pedestrian humanity.

  They
passed the occasional worker. Most paid them no attention, or eyed them sidewise with masked suspicion. This was the Force’s first of forty years on the run, using the time gates to accelerate the design of new propulsion and weapons technologies. But it was also the end of an ugly period of rooting out spies, sleeper agents, and traitors with loyalties to the Congregate. It had taken five years to outgrow that distrust, five years in which Rudo grew into prominence in the Expeditionary Force, helping forge a single, loyal unit focused on freeing the Sub-Saharan Union from the hegemony of the Congregate. Iekanjika had been raised in that unified fleet and knew nothing of crossed loyalties, until they had come home and seen the politics of the Union, the squabbles in the Cabinet, the jockeying for position and blame. Did she even have the skills to navigate this time?

  Perhaps not, but Captain Rudo did.

  Sets of orders from security volleyed back and forth. She absorbed as much as she could, but lacked many of the referents. Then she heard, “Iekanjika said to clear them out. Kill them.”

  She froze, her heart beating hard. Arjona hurried her along.

  “Keep moving! They’re not talking about you.”

  She shook off his arm.

  “I know that,” she said through gritted teeth. “Who did my mother just order killed?”

  “There’s a lot of chatter,” Arjona said, “but I’m pretty sure they’re talking about the vegetable intelligences.”

  Relief washed through her. “Plants.”

  “Maybe.”

  Dirty gray ice peeked from beneath the oily black skin of the ground as they drew close to the buildings of ice and plastic. They walked past the MP tower, around the research coordinating center, behind the big supply hut, and came to the ground HQ. Everything seemed smaller and meaner than in the maps she’d studied. The buildings were built of warped and patched plastic and sprayed with ice to seal in the atmosphere. They’d been slapped together without an eye for efficiency, just a need to make-do. Iekanjika was used to living with deprivation. In the Force, they’d had very little. But even during the times of eating unflavored bioreactor produce for months on end, even after years of no chance to mine and build new parts, the crews of the Sixth Expeditionary Force had taken pride in their work. She saw no pride in any work here.

  Iekanjika showed her service band to one of door scanners, punched in a code and the airlock opened for them. Nothing had so far impeded their progress; their temporary codes were working like a dream. She hung her helmet in an open locker and then started stripping off her vacuum suit down to her inner work clothes. Arjona disrobed too. He would pass well enough for a member of the Expeditionary Force, perhaps even in conversation. He was a cunning liar.

  She adjusted her webbing and holster and began down the hall. Arjona followed, matching her attitude and pace. They passed soldiers, NCOs and officers, and saluted or nodded as appropriate, pressing deeper into the complex. The icy walls and floors chilled the air, lending everyone’s movements a cold briskness. Off an underused side corridor in the second basement, they found a cluster of cubicles carved into the ice, housing two or three crew at a time, working on 2D screens or pads. Near the end of the hallway, thin light spilled from beneath a door.

  Anxiety crept into Iekanjika, in a way she hadn’t experienced even before combat. Hesitation in soldiers and commanders could be fatal. She’d been trained from a young age to overcome hesitation with brisk, reasoned movement. But no one had ever trained her for infiltrating the past. Habit dragged her hesitant hand to knock anyway.

  A young voice bade them enter. Against a sudden nervousness that came close to nausea, Iekanjika opened the door.

  The room was tiny, a couple of meters square, roughly ground from the ice so that there wasn’t a neat corner or straight edge in sight. Behind a small table covered with data-pads and a scratched surface screen, looking up at her from an impossibly young face, was a diminutive captain.

  This woman would be her wife in the future, but thirty-nine years earlier, now, she was a marvelous stranger. Iekanjika had prepared herself for this, had studied old photos, but even so, she had to will her hand not to shake as she saluted. Arjona repeated the gesture behind her.

  “Yes, corporal?” Rudo said.

  Iekanjika hesitated so long that the young Rudo began to look suspicious. The precocious captain’s face was smooth, her short tight curls night black. The scars were gone too; the one that looked like a river delta on the side of her neck and face, and the long wrinkled burn crease on the left side of her scalp where a sleeper agent had tried to assassinate her were yet to come. Thirty-nine years in the future, Lieutenant-General Rudo wouldn’t leave the flagship for fear of assassination. Iekanjika now stood in a time before Rudo was worth killing.

  “Ma’am,” Iekanjika said softly, “I’ve been sent by a friend to ask for a favor.”

  Iekanjika stepped forward and Arjona crowded awkwardly behind her and closed the door. Rudo had to crane her neck to look Iekanjika in the eye, but she did this commandingly, leaning back in her plastic seat with a certain amount of cockiness.

  “We’re all comrades here,” Rudo said.

  Captain Rudo has yet to develop the polish of the executive and commander. Iekanjika recognized the new officer’s swaggering assumption that respect was hers by right.

  “May I sit?” Iekanjika asked.

  “Ma’am?” Rudo asked archly.

  “Ma’am,” Iekanjika said.

  “Speak your peace and go, corporal. I’m busy.”

  She sat anyway. She exhaled deeply and the words that she’d rehearsed before now seemed wooden in her mind.

  “My name is Iekanjika. Ayen Iekanjika.”

  Rudo regarded her dubiously. “We both know there’s no such person on the Force’s manifest.”

  Iekanjika balked at the insanity of what she had to say, then pressed on. “I’m from the future,” she said. “I’m the daughter of Brigadier Iekanjika.”

  Listening to herself, she could tell it sounded like a bad joke. Yet everyone in the Expeditionary Force, whether they knew it or not, had worked around the time travel device they’d found on Nyanga. Everyone who knew of its presence had carefully thought through the possibilities and perils of time travel. They’d designed an entire administrative structure to hermetically separate knowledge, so that causality would never be violated, accidentally or on purpose.

  Rudo slowly drew her sidearm and rested her hand on the table.

  “You first,” Rudo said, lifting the barrel to point directly at Iekanjika’s chest, “then him, carefully.”

  Iekanjika removed her sidearm with two fingers and laid it on the table. Arjona did the same. Without taking her eyes from them, Rudo pressed a button on the desk. One of the lights above them reddened. She’d secured the room. She regarded them, as if steeling herself.

  “You look to be in your thirties, Corporal Iekanjika,” Rudo said finally. “Given that the Brigadier is pregnant right now, you’re asking me to believe that you’ve come from more than thirty years in the future. That’s not how the gates work. They send things back eleven years.”

  “In the decades the Expeditionary Force has had them, we’ve learned to control them a bit better,” Iekanjika said. “I’m thirty-nine years old.”

  “Convenient. You didn’t come without proof, did you?”

  “You could run my DNA against my mother’s,” Iekanjika said, “but that might draw attention. You sent me from the future with something simpler.”

  “I did?” Rudo asked, eyebrow arching. “Thirty-nine years from now, I’m giving you orders?”

  Iekanjika stared back at her young wife to be, trying to see the same person in the breezy tone of the twenty-two year old compared to the stately dignity she knew from the de facto leader of the Union’s armed forces.

  “Go on,” Rudo said finally, waving her hand casually, as if she were doing Iekanjika a favor.

  “I’ve known Kudzanai Rudo my entire life. She even took me as her ju
nior wife, a deeply moving and humbling moment for me,” Iekanjika said. “Then, a few days ago, for this mission, she told me her name isn’t really Rudo.”

  Captain Rudo’s expression crumbled and the pistol rose until Iekanjika stared down the barrel.

  “I suppose she remembered that this had convinced her that I really came from the future,” Iekanjika said. Rudo looked increasingly horrified. A weird feeling of protectiveness for this young incarnation of her wife stole into Iekanjika’s heart.

  Rudo swallowed, loud in the silence.

  “If you’re not lying,” Captain Rudo croaked, “my future self must have given you a name?”

  “Vimbiso Tangwerai.”

  Rudo grimaced, but the sidearm didn’t waver.

  “I thought I’d covered my tracks,” Rudo said, “but obviously someone found out and has been holding this in reserve. That sounds like something a Congregate sleeper agent might do.”

  The barrel of Rudo’s pistol trembled and her finger tightened on the trigger.

  “This is what you told me to say!” Iekanjika said, angry panic welling up.

  “You have nothing else?”

  “I can tell you all about your future, but that won’t convince you of anything,” Iekanjika said. “You didn’t give me any more secrets.”

  “Then you’ll both tell me where you really got this information, and who else knows.”

  “Twelve years ago, you took me as your youngest wife,” Iekanjika said in Shona. “All marriages are political alliances, but you’ve been kind to me, mentored me. One of the things you like about me is my affinity with the Shona language. You’ve asked me to help you practice your own, to rid you of your accent. You’ve told me that when I speak it, it reminds you of the last bits of the language you heard growing up.” Iekanjika halted. “You have a favorite song from when you were a girl, Dai ndiri shiri.”

  Rudo grimaced. The pistol continued to tremble. If she fired now, she was as likely to blow off Iekanjika’s shoulder as her head. Iekanjika didn’t blame her; she barely believed what was going on herself.