The Quantum Garden

by Derek Künsken

  “Go on,” he said, facing her.

  “This is a Homo quantus behavior, colonel,” Saint Matthew said to both of them. “They have great difficulty in letting go of puzzles.”

  “I’m asking because I think it’s important,” Belisarius said with a bit of heat. “How many neurons?”

  “Colonel...” Saint Matthew said.

  “Don’t patronize me, Saint Matthew!”

  “A few hundred million,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “A billion in some.”

  Iekanjika led them to the next possible site with their rudimentary equipment, and Belisarius mentally fretted at his models. The vegetable intelligences had one percent of the neurons he had, although that wasn’t a strong measure of intellect. But it focused his mathematical modeling. Brains a hundred times smaller than his running at the temperature of dry ice certainly needed less energy, but still wouldn’t have enough processing power for abstraction and speech.

  In classical computation.

  Quantum computation was a kind of quantum coherence that used less energy and processed its operations in parallel, meaning it could need fewer components.

  Iekanjika stopped them in a small depression somewhat sheltered by the high-growing plants from the view of cameras and other crews. They drew at the nutrient tubes in their helmets.

  “The Union never named them?” Belisarius said.

  “Why would we?”

  “I’m going to call them the Hortus quantus,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “You’re Homo sapiens. I’m Homo quantus. We should call them something.”

  “Does it mean anything?”

  “It translates into français 8.1 as le jardin quantique, or into Anglo-Spanish as the quantum garden,” he said.

  They ate in silence. She was patronizing him. So was Saint Matthew.

  “It’s been thirty-six hours,” he ventured.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think Rudo has had a change of heart?”

  “If Captain Rudo wasn’t going to help us, Lieutenant-General Rudo wouldn’t have sent us.”

  “That doesn’t follow,” Belisarius said. “Captain Rudo has been obstructive and even dangerous. I don’t know if she’ll play ball. It might be that we have to figure out everything on our own. That wouldn’t be something that General Rudo would need to tell us about. In fact, the less we know about our personal futures, the more General Rudo is shielded from paradoxes.”

  “We can make ourselves dizzy with second-guessing, Arjona,” she said.

  “We can also discreetly check if we should take over.”

  “What are you proposing?”

  “You have powerful pass-codes,” he said. “Saint Matthew is faster than any processor this era is carrying. He could look into Rudo’s communications, see if she’s ratting us out, or if she’s working on getting authorization for us to drill.”

  The rhythm of her breathing didn’t tell him much of her thinking. Nor did the long pause.

  “This is a suspicious time, Arjona,” she said finally. “The Expeditionary Force had factions. One proposed taking the time gates and going home. Another said we should study them here and make weapons. A very small faction said we should run away with the gates and make our own nation, never to meet up with civilization again. The general officers and even some warship captains were vying for power. Political tension almost broke the fleet apart after the death of its first commander. Some factions watched every query and keystroke. Any queries we make could draw attention.”

  “What if Saint Matthew could move behind all those precautions?”

  She didn’t answer for a long time. The bruised eye of the brown dwarf glowered at them. Belisarius’ engineered brain and ocular implants puzzled out spectra and temperatures. High clouds of chromium and vanadium oxide streamed over hazy molten iron mist that traced the lines of deep magnetic storms. Beautiful, but pregnant with destruction.

  “It must be hard not to trust Rudo,” he said.

  “I don’t trust you.”

  She picked at a latch on the surveyor laser mounting.

  “I trust the woman she becomes,” Iekanjika said.

  Her dark skin in the shadow of the helmet made her expression hard to read. He dialed up the gain on his ocular implants, giving false illumination with patches of gray pixilation. But he saw.

  “No, you don’t,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “People get over some lies,” he said, “but not others. Rudo lied to everyone for decades. I don’t think you’ve decided if you can accept that.”

  “You know all about trust, I suppose?”

  “Trust is at the heart of all confidence schemes.”

  “Yes, you pulled one on me,” she said bitterly.

  “You never trusted me. You obeyed orders.”

  “Maybe Rudo didn’t trust you either,” Iekanjika said, rising. The threat of physical violence was barely contained in her tense stance. “She hired you in the future because I came to the past with you. Our presence in the past forces her hand in the future. Maybe no one in the Union ever wanted you or trusted you, and we’re only working with you to avoid a grandfather paradox. Maybe this is one of those cyclic causal structures. And maybe this trip to the past isn’t even about the core sample and you’re still playing us. If that’s the case, maybe that’s something I can fix.”

  “I thought you and Rudo were suicidal patriots!” he said. “I didn’t know you were going to win! Can you blame me for thinking the Congregate would make short work of you? If you had failed, I was ready to try to hide for a while, while everyone’s questions led to dead ends. But because you succeeded, I’m now the most hunted fugitive in civilization and the Homo quantus have been sucked into that with me. I’m trying to save my people, and you need those other Axis Mundi.”

  “I don’t know where your people are,” Iekanjika said. “I don’t know that they really got away from the Congregate. I don’t know that you care about them or anyone else. All I have is your word, and I know that isn’t worth the air you’re breathing.”

  “We need each other. I don’t trust you not to shoot me, but I trust you to act in the interests of the Union. And if Saint Matthew can look into Rudo’s work during sleep shift changes, we reduce the risk of being noticed.”

  “Give her more time,” Iekanjika said finally. “If we haven’t heard from her by the morning shift change, I’ll green-light a quick, low-risk reconnaissance.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  IEKANJIKA ROSE TO the sound of the early showers, twenty minutes before lights on. She always rolled out of her sleep sack completely awake, a useful quality for a soldier. Nothing was overtly different in what she saw or heard, just soldiers rubbing scratchy eyes and taking their morning pisses, but the air whispered tension. The crews said nothing overt and she wasn’t plugged into the confidences. If she’d belonged to this era, she could have asked another corporal or her sergeant. Hell, in a lot of squads, the privates got the best gossip. But she didn’t belong to this world.

  She checked her service band. No message from Captain Rudo. She’d hoped. She’d hoped by now to have come back to a place of trust in herself at least. But she wasn’t there and she was the one who had to make this mission work. Instructing the AI to look in on Captain Rudo’s work would crystallize her doubts.

  She didn’t normally vacillate over tactical decisions. She had a lot of practice pushing aside fear, anxiety, pride and elation; those got in the way. But wondering if her commander was committed to the mission was new. The emotional muscles required to push those anxieties aside felt soft.

  And reason was hard to apply. Everything told her that Rudo wanted the same thing: the independence of the Union. Rudo had lied to her, to everyone, for a long time. Iekanjika responded to lies reflexively and she didn’t know how to turn that response off. She didn’t doubt her mission. She never doubted her mission.

  Push feelings aside.
<
br />   Focus on reason.

  Assess risk.

  Her mission here might tip the success or failure of the entire rebellion. How would she be behaving if her contact wasn’t her wife? Wasn’t her hero? How would she deal with a flawed officer, a tool of unknown reliability?

  She had three choices: use the officer, replace the officer, go around the officer.

  Focus on reason.

  Assess risk.

  Push feelings aside. Deal with this like a mission commander.

  Arjona looked groggy and unrested again. That didn’t matter. She kicked him lightly and he groaned. “Get up,” she said in a low voice. “Even the saints have to work today.”

  Arjona shivered and sat up. The AI had surely heard her and was even now breaking into whatever systems he needed to access.

  She and Arjona dressed warmly, grabbed food packs for now and for insertion into the food slots in their suits. Shortly afterwards, they were on the surface of Nyanga, heading to the tool tables and sheds under the inflamed stare of the motionless brown dwarf. She connected their suits by private laser communication.

  “You didn’t get anything from Rudo?” Arjona asked.

  “What did your AI find out?”

  “I’m not anyone’s AI,” Saint Matthew said indignantly.

  “What did you find out?” she said. Carrying picks and sonar equipment, they’d reached the uneven tailings of one of the sites where cores had been drilled out of the ice. Compared to the smooth waves of the slowly sublimating plain, the sharp fragments of bright ice stood out like a wound.

  “I couldn’t break into Rudo’s comms records with the pass-codes you gave me,” the AI said.

  “Didn’t the Lieutenant-General give you an all-access pass-code?” Arjona asked.

  “She did,” Iekanjika said.

  “Captain Rudo had additional layers of encryption around her comms, something I’ve seen in other parts of the larger network.”

  “Everyone has veto over access to their accounts?” Arjona asked.

  “It was a suspicious time, Arjona,” Iekanjika said. She crouched, looking down the narrow channel in the ice with its perfectly-cored walls. The shine of her wrist lamp disappeared into that claustrophobic gloom.

  “A time of fortified camps might be a more accurate description of the architecture,” the AI said. “There must be a lot of non-networked systems. The network I can see doesn’t account for all the computer functions for a base this size.”

  “So you didn’t get in,” Arjona said.

  “Of course I got in,” the AI said, “just not with the codes you gave me. Even the quantum encryption technology of this era is crackable with the tools from forty years in the future.”

  Iekanjika’s anger briefly flared with the realization that their systems would be so easily passed by this AI. Maybe Arjona had outmaneuvered her and stolen their time gates, her birthright, but maybe she ought to take his mad AI. But she couldn’t pay back all the debts owed. Not yet. Patience.

  “Is she getting us the drilling equipment?” Iekanjika asked.

  “She’s in the process of setting up the order structure,” the AI said. “She looks to be almost done. She’s creating layers of signatures to authorize it, but from what I can tell, she’s not letting her superiors know. Which is good, correct?”

  “How long?” Iekanjika asked.

  “It looks like it should be today.”

  “You weren’t noticed?” Iekanjika asked.

  “Not by these systems,” the AI said with a hint of pique.

  A tiny glow of relief began to bloom in her chest; for the mission, for her wife.

  “There are two other problems,” the AI said.

  “What?” Iekanjika demanded.

  “Last night, MilSec found an illicit transmitter on the northern comms trunk,” the AI said, producing an electric anxiety in her stomach. “It’s MilSec equipment and it’s set to intercept signals from Bioweapons to the fleet.”

  “Major-General Takatafare is spying on Brigadier Iekanjika’s communications,” she said. She could have stopped this. “This will raise tensions.”

  “It’s worse,” the AI said. “The tech crews have been arrested, among them Lieutenant Nabwire.”

  “Takatafare is trying to cover it up, trying to look like she’s not involved,” Iekanjika said.

  “No,” the AI said. “The codes and equipment used don’t match the ones used by MilSec, Major-General Takatafare’s units. Someone tried to frame Takatafare and they got caught.”

  “Is there anyone other than your mother who would stand to gain by Takatafare being caught spying?” Arjona asked.

  Iekanjika pursed her lips. She’d had a chance to kill Lieutenant Nabwire last night. The assassination of a junior officer would have been less disruptive than this. Under interrogation, Nabwire would admit to have been working for months in MilSec, but on behalf of Brigadier Iekanjika’s faction. All fingers would point to her mother.

  “Rudo wanted me to kill Nabwire after his shift,” she mused, “possibly to draw attention to what he’d planted on the comms trunk. MilSec was better than she thought. They found the transmitter anyway.”

  “It’s a double-cross,” Arjona said. “Takatafare engineered this, or someone did on her behalf.”

  “Why?” the AI said.

  Iekanjika recognized in that moment that, despite how gruff and occasionally tedious Saint Matthew was, he possessed a remarkable naïveté. Arjona had understood her right away. Iekanjika had understood as soon as she’d thought like the politicians on Bachwezi.

  “To destabilize the Expeditionary Force,” Iekanjika said, “to force even loyal, uninvolved crews and officers into camps, especially if it looks like Brigadier Iekanjika was trying to frame Takatafare.”

  Neither Arjona nor the AI commented on that grim note.

  “What’s the second problem?” she asked.

  “I found things in Captain Rudo’s virtual work area that shouldn’t have been there,” the AI said.

  “What do you mean?” Iekanjika demanded.

  “Hidden beneath Captain Rudo’s personal encryption was a secret shared work area. It looks like a space where she and at least three other people have been discussing illicit things, in code.”

  “It looks like?” Iekanjika said. “I suppose you broke this code too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “She and three others have a plot to kill Brigadier Iekanjika.”

  The wind left her. In her past, her mother had died. She’d set aside that historical fact for the duration of this mission. She hadn’t nourished the thought that her mother was alive right now, less than a kilometer away. Breathing. Thinking. That too was a fact, possessing the same kind of eerie reality that history did, but seemingly at odds with the first fact. That her mother was alive now and would be dead soon didn’t fit comfortably in her head. Now that Rudo might have somehow been involved tipped her world on its side.

  “How sure are you?”

  “It wasn’t faked in her account,” the AI said. “It’s her.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Arjona said, reaching a hand out in the cold. She smacked it aside, hurting him. She looked away and exhaled long and slow.

  “Treason,” Iekanjika said. Her voice sounded unexpectedly calm in her helmet.

  “Can we finish the job today?” the AI said. “Chaos will make our work harder. We have to get out quickly.”

  Far above them, tiny lights moved across the starry sky, parts of the Sixth Expeditionary Force. She knew the ships inside and out in her time, but four decades earlier, they were just second-hand kit given to the Union by the Congregate in exchange for service; vessels that wouldn’t have lasted fifteen minutes against even mid-sized Congregate ships.

  “How well did you know your mother, colonel?” Arjona asked softly.

  The Expeditionary Force hadn’t yet discovered the inflaton drive and the inflaton cannon in this time. They were nothing spec
ial, just a lost fleet with unreasonable ambitions. None of these people had yet passed through their chrysalis. Most alive today never would.

  “Congregate sleeper agents reached my mother not long after I was born.”

  “I’m sorry,” Arjona said.

  Iekanjika tried to shrug in her vacuum suit. “I never knew her. A lot of children grew up in the Expeditionary Force missing parents. I knew I was coming back to these events.”

  “Did Rudo know you would find out she is involved?” Arjona pressed. “She’s deep in another faction.”

  “Or she’s being framed too.”

  Arjona looked at her askance through his faceplate.

  “Even as a junior officer Rudo was the target of assassination attempts by sleeper agents,” Iekanjika said. “She was promoted to captain and brought into an influential triptych marriage in large part for her role in uncovering a highly-placed agent who had managed to signal the Congregate.”

  “Rudo aside, we may have a bigger problem,” the AI said. “When were you born, colonel?”

  “February 34th, 2476.”

  “Everything I see in Rudo’s hidden work space points to the assassination of Brigadier Iekanjika on February 28th.”

  Two days from now.

  “Was your mother killed in a way that might have allowed her to survive that long on life support?” Arjona asked.

  “Execution. Head and chest,” she said briskly.

  “We have a causality problem,” Arjona said.

  “Or there’s more going on than I know,” Iekanjika said.

  “Why didn’t Rudo tell you about this?” Arjona said with frustration.

  “I’m her youngest spouse,” Iekanjika said with contained heat. She might have dark doubts about her commanding officer, but she’d be damned if anyone criticized Rudo without proof. “I’m her chief of staff, her strategist. I know she cares about me. Before we traveled back in time, she alluded to the sins and errors of this era. Maybe she hoped I wouldn’t find out. Maybe she never knew that I found out.”

  “I’m so sorry, Ayen.”

  “I’m not interested in your sympathy, Arjona. I never knew my mother. My father was some sort of convicted criminal. I might have spent my life toiling as a deckhand with no security clearance. The Lieutenant-General selected me for officer training. The Lieutenant-General is the unifying spirit of the Expeditionary Force. She freed our people. I owe her everything. I don’t know my mother any more than these vegetable beings who are the product of pollen from fathers they’ll never know.”