The Quantum Garden

by Derek Künsken

  “What if we need to contact you?” Iekanjika said.

  “Make sure you don’t need to.”

  She heard something of her wife in Rudo’s tone. Iekanjika picked up the two sidearms on the table and pushed one into Arjona’s hand. A glance at Rudo didn’t encourage her to make their goodbye elaborate, so she opened the door and shouldered past the con man. He followed in silence. At the airlock, they suited up. Only outside, twenty meters from the building did he speak by laser.

  “We’re not assassins!” he said.

  She didn’t disagree. But discussing it wouldn’t make it easier. Ice fragments crunched under her boots.

  “She has us over a barrel,” Iekanjika said.

  “Trick her!” Arjona said. “Make her think we did it. We’ve got the tech to pull that off.”

  Fury rose in her. She wanted to hit something. Or someone. She stopped.

  “A con man,” she said in disgust. “That’s all you are! A small thieving man with small grasping goals. This is war. Not a swindle.”

  “This isn’t war, colonel! Your Lieutenant-General sent us back to this and didn’t tell us everything. She didn’t forget the details! This has to be a test for you. Young Rudo can order all she wants, but we don’t have to do any of it. You’re older, more experienced. General Rudo isn’t the same person we just saw in there. Maybe you’ve been sent to save her from herself.”

  Iekanjika grabbed the front of his suit.

  “Get your head out of your ass, Arjona! We aren’t betting over cards and interesting thought experiments. My people will die if I fail here. And unless you’ve forgotten, so will yours! This isn’t the time for fancy; it’s the time for expediency. The exchange of one man for two nations is a good trade.”

  “This isn’t your call, colonel. We each get a vote here, including Saint Matthew.”

  “Your mad AI?”

  “I’m not anyone’s AI, and I’m no more mad than anyone else,” Saint Matthew said.

  “You have nothing to say on this, AI,” Iekanjika said. “I read up on Saint Matthew when we first met. The Patron of banks. The turncoat tax collector. A man who collaborated with his conquerors. The Expeditionary Force shoots people like that.”

  Iekanjika released Arjona. She continued in the direction they’d been moving and he followed.

  An uncomfortable silence fell.

  “That isn’t what your marriage is like, is it?” Arjona said.

  They crunched another dozen steps. Her hatred of Arjona was becoming uncomfortably complex. He’d tricked the Puppets and gotten them across the Puppet Axis. And he’d stolen the most precious of their nation’s treasures from them. But she’d seen the insides of the time gates now, the tremendously alien and terrifying space that the human mind could not comprehend, or even properly perceive. Arjona and Mejía could withstand and navigate that world outside of time. And, still shaken by her journey through that strange realm, she’d brought him home, so to speak, to the most intimate of conversations she might ever have. Her connection to Arjona didn’t orbit about an axis; it precessed chaotically. And he was the only one here to help her in the past.

  “I’m not married to that woman back there,” she said slowly.

  Saying it aloud crystallized a disappointment that had been silently uncertain in her. Family mattered. Rudo and Wakikonda were the only family she’d ever known. In normal families, pasts could be buried by consent. Staring too hard into the past did not build trust, and didn’t feel exactly fair. Rudo hadn’t asked for a woman to come from the future and judge her on standards she had no way of meeting for another thirty years. Captain Rudo was a product of her times, as was Lieutenant-General Rudo in the future.

  “I’m close to the Lieutenant-General Rudo and our husband. Our marriage is a political one fenced by contracts and trust built over time. But none of that relationship infrastructure exists here. We’ll be strangers for another twenty-five years.”

  “Is that why you didn’t tell her about Saint Matthew?” Arjona asked.

  Iekanjika stopped. Arjona peered at her, his expression revealing none of the cunning in his question.

  “You know what he can do,” Arjona said. “Saint Matthew could probably have gotten the mining equipment tonight.”

  The young brown dwarf glared a directionless orange glow onto the oily black surface around them.

  “Theft of one kind or another is all the same to you, I’m sure,” she said, “but one will draw attention to us, and one won’t. You come from a clean world with rules. Theft and sneaking is a matter of technology to you. Here, in this period of the Expeditionary Force, eyes, snitches and informants are everywhere. I’m not equipped to navigate this world. Rudo is.”

  “What I saw in your fleet in the future is what you call trust?” he asked incredulously.

  “In the future, we don’t trust outsiders,” she said. “Here we don’t trust each other.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  BELISARIUS DIDN’T LIKE Barracks D. The air was below freezing, colder than the Puppet Free City. He felt like he would never be warm again. Yet despite this, the barracks stank of sweat, fear, resignation, and the simple will to endure. He knew a lot about fear and desperation. They were strings he’d plucked to fleece marks. So he understood what he was seeing in Iekanjika. She didn’t see another way out. Wasn’t even looking for another way. Simple fear was driving her to murder.

  He saw the same thing in Rudo too—a sense of being in over her head—but she and Iekanjika weren’t the same. The wave of pressure on the colonel broke against an unwavering sense of mission, and a loyalty to her superiors that had never been divided. Rudo had none of that. She was a captain, trying to play at a table where she didn’t understand the stakes. Rudo might break.

  And could he handle it? When would he break?

  He might freeze first.

  The Union crews had built not only the commissary out of ice, but also the tables and benches. Pots of soup, mushy stews and bioreactor paste steamed flavorlessly over electric stoves along one wall. Iekanjika slopped generous helpings into a bowl she scraped clean with a half-frozen piece of flat bread.

  Belisarius disconsolately spooned a single portion of rubbery stew into the bowl he’d surreptitiously wiped with his sleeve. Even though the stew smelled faintly of bleach, his brain unhelpfully calculated bacterial growth curves, microbial adaptation to non-neutral pH, the potential selection coefficients for psychrophilic characteristics. That didn’t take more than a few seconds and then he couldn’t get the likely bacterial count out of his head.

  Iekanjika wolfed down the contents of her bowl before she’d finished walking out of the serving area, dropping her bowl and spoon back into scummy disinfectant. Belisarius forced himself to chew the squishy chunks while standing, and to swallow a few yeasty mouthfuls. The flat bread was hard, tasting of cardboard and chlorine.

  He followed Iekanjika to the dispensary for sheets, and then to the two bunks they’d been assigned. The sleepers in the last shift were just getting up and leaving with their sheets. Belisarius laid out his sheets and resisted the urge to sniff suspiciously at the cooling blankets.

  Belisarius lay straight and stiff and cold, acutely aware of Iekanjika, looking for some cue on how to handle this. But it was like she didn’t notice so many sleeping, shifting, smelling bodies around them.

  He couldn’t stop being aware of them all. He couldn’t sleep like this. But this was how his people were sleeping, thirty-nine years from now and about five hundred light-years away, in cramped freighters that weren’t meant to house people. His stomach tightened.

  He backed away from that feeling by imagining the kind of block-time geometry of space that could hold all the time and space that separated him from his people. Although he was Homo quantus, his head spun at the immensity of where and when he was. Nothing had prepared him for walking in the past, for traveling the wrong way through time. Iekanjika had to be feeling the same, but shortly after suffering a
n arguably life-changing experience, she put her head on her rolled towel and snored softly.

  How could she do that?

  “Saint Matthew,” he sub-vocalized.

  “Are you alright, Mister Arjona?” the AI answered in Belisarius’ subdermal auditory implant.

  “Maybe not,” he said silently to the AI. “Murder shouldn’t be a part of the price of saving the Homo quantus.”

  “You don’t need to help her.”

  “The Homo quantus need a home. Can I go back and tell them I couldn’t get them one because I stopped one stranger from killing another stranger?”

  “No one is a stranger, Mister Arjona,” Saint Matthew said. “That’s why you’re doing this for your people.”

  “I don’t know that I could stop Iekanjika if I tried. And without her we can’t get the samples.”

  Belisarius hid his face under the blanket that smelled of many other people. The geometry of space time was still in his mind’s eye, and a much larger image—the hyperspace in the interior of the time gates—came to join it, although he couldn’t picture its entirety.

  Moral problems. Logical problems. Geometric problems.

  “I can’t put anything in perspective,” Belisarius said. “We’re talking murder versus extinction, but we’re in the past where the murder already happened. We’ve left everything we were evolved for, or even designed for. We traveled through naked hyperspace. Things don’t fit, yet there’s so much awe too. How do you fit it all in your mind?”

  “I don’t,” Saint Matthew said.

  “I feel like I’m holding onto reason by fingertips. I feel I might fall.”

  “I did.”

  “Said the AI who believes that he’s the reincarnation of an Apostle.”

  “Irrationality is a state of mind.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Mister Arjona, at some point you’ll make observations that not only can’t be incorporated into any theory, but that contradict proven facts. That’s not irrationality. That’s a consequence of the way we’re built. That’s the way awe enters our lives.”

  “You embraced an irrational religion.”

  “I embraced the things I could prove and explain, as well as the things I could not.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “The world has different ways of showing itself.”

  Belisarius took a deep breath, chilling his lungs.

  “Are you suggesting I accept irrationality and rationality?”

  “Those labels aren’t helpful where we are now, when we are now.”

  “I can’t live like that,” Belisarius said.

  “We live with lots of things we can’t live with.”

  BELISARIUS SAT UP an hour before he had to get out of the bunk. By then, many men and women moved into cold, short showers that Belisarius didn’t want to touch. He followed them uncertainly, trying not to think about all the bacteria and viruses he might exposing his feet to. Shivering people stood near the walls, frothing themselves with harsh ammoniac soap under limp drizzles of cold water; so finally he did too. The low fever he’d borne for weeks made the icy air and water that much more painful. He shivered back to his bunk, dressed and got back under the covers, trying to warm up.

  Iekanjika rolled straight out of sleep, apparently fully rested. She stripped down unhesitatingly in the chill air, walked to the showers and washed quickly with the rest of the bathers. She toweled off and hung sheet and towel on the end of the bunk. She didn’t shiver as she dressed.

  They didn’t speak through breakfast or wait around in the barracks; the next shift of sleepers was already shuffling in, grabbing food and beds. In vacuum suits, Belisarius and Iekanjika cycled out of one of the big airlocks with twenty other crew who dispersed to their duties on the surface. He and Iekanjika walked out onto the ice. The dim, spongy light of the brown dwarf hadn’t changed. Nyanga was tidally locked, so the failed star would never move, like time stood still here. It gave a soothing, dreamy feel to Nyanga.

  After two hundred and sixty-six steps, Belisarius stopped and poked at the oily black ground. The flat patches reflected like oil, as hard as frozen taffy. Stems festooned other areas where no one had walked. The darkness cloaked them here; the spotlights focused at the perimeter, or at the time gates.

  “Have you thought of what we talked about?” he asked her.

  “My mind is clear.”

  “You’re going to kill him.”

  “Sometimes to win a battle, a commander sacrifices individual units,” she said.

  “Saint Mathew can get us the supplies to do the drilling.”

  “Will he also orally brief the watch officers?” she demanded. “Will he write it in pencil on today’s authorized work details? Will our drilling, our very obvious and very loud drilling, mysteriously pass the morning order verifications, when the section heads are asked to verify the orders they gave? Rudo wasn’t lying. Everyone watches everyone else out here. You’re too dependent on computer tricks.”

  “So this poor lieutenant dies.”

  “I’ve never heard of him, so he obviously didn’t survive to my time,” Iekanjika said. “It might be that I really did kill him in my history, and I’m only finding out about my role in it now.”

  “That’s a lot to take on faith in a captain you don’t know.”

  “Faith is for you and your AI.”

  “I hope you’re not expecting me to help you.”

  “Your lack of military training makes you a danger to a real op, Arjona. You need to stay out of the way. I have sixteen hours to save your people and mine.”

  “You can choose not to do it and let Rudo figure out if she still wants to deal with this lieutenant,” he said, a little nervously. “You don’t have to make it easy for her. And if you still want to help her... I’ll stop you.”

  Iekanjika laughed so loudly that he had to dial down the volume in his earpieces. But he stood his ground. He had his sidearm and his electroplaques. She had decades of training. He had intellect. She adjusted her stance, still grinning in her helmet. One of her hands neared her pistol grip. The other arm hung loose, and no doubt the real, deadly threat.

  “You’re going to get hurt, Arjona.”

  “Mister Arjona,” Saint Matthew said in his ear implant, “this isn’t the best way to reach her.”

  “Are you going to do something, Arjona?” Iekanjika asked.

  He darted in, reaching to touch her hand. Instead of avoiding him, her hand snaked out, cobra-fast, grabbing his. He released a ninety milliamp current, enough to knock out even an augmented human. The current sizzled through the fingers of his vacuum suit, crisping it and burning his fingertips.

  Arcs of electricity shone briefly on fine wires leading down her suit.

  Her suit was grounded.

  And he was burning. He wanted to shake the heat away, but she held his hand tightly. Then she punched him in the stomach and he doubled over, emptied of air. He saw spots for long seconds as panic set in, before he was finally able to take a breath.

  “Get yourself a new glove before your air leaks out and you do yourself a serious injury,” she said, letting him collapse onto the ice. “Then stay outside, out of everyone’s way. Go look at the flowers or something. I’ll come back for you later.”

  Iekanjika stalked off silently across the ice. Belisarius tucked his now cold hands under his armpits. Air hissed from the burnt tips of his gloves.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  IEKANJIKA TREMBLED AFTER leaving Arjona on the ice. She’d hurt him. She’d wanted to hurt him for some time; to take him down a peg, to make him pay for what he’d stolen. But beating him had been effortless. She didn’t feel like he’d gotten what was coming to him.

  She’d been a bully, letting a fight happen with someone who could never win. She’d been measured and fair her whole life, with all her subordinates. And now she’d pushed a contemplative into a corner until he hurt himself. The fault wasn’t his. In all that mattered, he was an idio
t, and she was commanding this mission. He was her responsibility.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. What stung was that she wasn’t in even the right. Soldiers killed. Soldiers followed orders from duly commissioned officers, who themselves derived their authority from the government. The Sixth Expeditionary Force had gone rogue for forty years, with no oversight, but never with self-interest in its heart. Each commanding officer, from Nandoro to Takatafare to Rudo, had been working for the Union, and behaved as if they could be called to account at any time.

  Captain Rudo ordering an extra-judicial execution was alien to her. Iekanjika didn’t know Lieutenant Nabwire or what he’d done to cross Rudo or her allies. And unlike a soldier on the ground or crew on a ship, she had no license to just follow orders on faith in her superiors. She had a professional duty as an officer to understand her orders, or trust that her commander did. She had no commander and she’d agreed to assassinate a man.

  The Sub-Saharan Union was poor, and its navy moreso. The Sixth Expeditionary Force had learned to eat of duty and drink of honor. They had nothing else with which to face the very real possibility of total destruction in the coming months. The officers and crew of the Sixth Expeditionary Force did their duty in the future, with honor.

  And she was here. It had been easy for her to quantify this and throw it in Arjona’s face. One man. One man didn’t outweigh the lives and freedoms of two nations. She’d sent people to their deaths on purpose for tactical gain. This was the same—trading death for strategic gain. But that comfort was hollow.

  Lieutenant Nabwire was Rudo’s price, not the price of the advantage itself. And the cost in quantity was not the whole cost. Committing a murder would make Iekanjika a criminal. An extra-judicial killing was a dishonor that could be neither erased nor redeemed. And more deeply, to know that Captain Rudo’s ordering of the killing was the suitable response for this time, that this was the way things were done at the birth of Union nationhood, only further tilted the ground beneath her feet. What did she stand on when her new nation was born of this swamp, bereft of honor and duty?