“Vincent! Focus! Can you fly now?” she demanded.
“Merde, princess, don’t tie your panties in a knot! Never said I couldn’t fly. I’m hearing weird-ass interference patterns in cock-eyed dimensions when we’re standing still, and EM signals coming straight through the walls and floor from angles they shouldn’t when I move. Yeah, it’s like I’m flying after dropping a tab of acid. But no one can fly better’n me on acid.”
“Have you tried?” she demanded, hearing a note of panic in her voice.
Nevermind.
Nevermind.
She and Bel would have to handle hyperspace. Their brains could think hyperspacially. They’d hoped Stills could handle it.
“Why didn’t you say anything sooner?” she demanded.
“Do you have another pilot?”
She rubbed the heels of her palms into her eyes. All they had to do was sit here. In a pinch, she could program in navigational corrections if she needed to. It was slower, but she could do it. And once Bel was back, they could slowly pilot back to the futureward mouth. This was their fault. They should have tested this more first, but there’d been no time.
“You don’t get your freak on much, do you?” Stills said.
“What?”
“Party,” he said. “Cut loose. Dance on tables. Smoke weed in a wriggly group grope.”
“No!”
“Coño! What do you do for fun?”
“I think,” she said in a tone she hoped conveyed the obviousness of her answer.
“Really? Sounds like a waste. But I mean you must be hot, right, with your two legs?”
“What?”
“Mongrels got no legs, sweetie. Makes a world of difference for getting it on. There ain’t a lot of make-out songs with ‘hey baby, sit your cloaca down right here’.”
She wasn’t sure if he was genuinely making conversation or just trying to revolt her.
“Lemme get this straight,” Stills said. “Prancy-pants is the funnest you quantum people got?”
“No,” she said indecisively.
“I seen him gambling and breaking laws. I’m sure he was up to no good while he was shacked up with the Puppets, if you know what I mean.”
Her stomach turned over.
“If you don’t know what I mean, I’m talking Prancy-Pants Puppet-poki—”
“Vincent, why do your people stay on Indi’s Tear?” she interrupted.
“There’s only so many shit holes the mongrels can survive, sweet cakes.”
“It sounds confined.”
“Sort of. If you don’t mind being squashed into paste, you should come visit,” he said. “It’s dark. And smelly. Like sulfur and ammonia and old dead things. Imagine hell burst a big urinal pipe. That’s the ocean on Indi’s Tear.”
“Why don’t you colonize a gas giant?” she asked.
“Did you drop some acid too?”
“If you need eight hundred atmospheres of pressure to live, any gas giant will have that at some altitude. That pressure band would be much larger than where you live now, and if you find a giant close to its primary, you’d get plenty of light.”
“We don’t breathe air, stupid,” he said.
“So wear wing suits with water respiration systems. In a gas giant, you could easily pressurize water habitats to eight hundred atmospheres and those could move around in the clouds. You don’t need to live in the stink and the dark.”
The silence lengthened and she mentally rechecked her pressure and luminosity calculations in case she’d made a mistake. In principle, what she’d just described was no different than what the Congregate did with their habitats in the clouds of Venus.
“Shit,” he said flatly.
She wasn’t sure how to take that.
“Shit!” Stills said, now angrily. “We got a hail!”
“We’ve got a what?”
“Incoming comms.”
“Is it Bel?” Cassandra asked.
“Fuck,” Stills said. “Câlisse! Puta! Zarba!”
“What is it?” Cassandra demanded.
The cockpit speakers activated. A sepulchral voice spoke in last century’s French. “Union ship carrying Belisarius Arjona, this is the Epsilon Indi Scarecrow. Power down and slave your controls to my ship. Any other course of action will result in you being fired upon.”
“How did a Scarecrow get in here?” Cassandra demanded.
“Get into your acceleration couch!” Stills said.
Cassandra fumbled with the straps and then leapt from the pilot seat to the line of coffin-sized chambers. In the first, she sealed her suit and struggled the tight hood onto her head.
“Where did it come from?” she demanded with shaking hands.
“Skip the plumbing!” Stills said. “Just flood your chamber.”
Cassandra slammed the door of her chamber, attached the neural jack and punched the button to fill the chamber with gel.
“Our sensors are all fucked up in this space,” Stills said. “I can make out a low-profile shape about a kilometer away. Can’t tell the design with this resolution. Can you use your quantum magic to see what the fuck we’re dealing with?”
“That’s not the way my senses work,” she said through the jack as she fought instinct and inhaled thick, choking gel as fast as she could cough around it.
“Of course it isn’t,” Stills said. “You quantum people are all deadweight when the chips are down. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. A Scarecrow.”
“How bad is it, Vincent?”
“When I flew for the Congregate, my job was to fuck up their enemies. The Congregate sends in Scarecrows when they want to fuck up their friends.”
The low, dead voice spoke again. “You have ten seconds to power down and turn over your ship’s control. I am fully armed.”
Cassandra tuned the telemetry resolution to maximum input and slipped into savant. The world became pattern-rich and logical, built of linear, geometric and exponential relations, accented with fractal patterns and edged with chaos.
“It looks like a missile, Stills.”
“Fuck.”
“One missile doesn’t make sense.”
A searing line leapt the kilometer of hyperspace from the Scarecrow’s vessel. An explosion on the surface of the racer shook them.
“Holy shit!” Stills said. “He’s shooting anti-matter! That was a warning shot. He could have destroyed us right there.”
Cassandra’s brain churned out calculations, the energy required to produce the observed acceleration and vibrations, factoring in dispersion on the hull of the racer. “That was a few micrograms!” she said.
“This is your cue, big brain.”
“My what?”
“I’m just the fuckin’ hired help, princess, an’ I got no fuckin’ weapons. I can evade, but tell me how you want to deal with this and do it quick.”
The racer moved dizzily, so hard that even in the acceleration gel, her chest crushed tight, taking the air from her. At least thirty gravities, in-mixed with angular accelerations. Even with telemetry fed into her jack, position and velocity in multiple dimensions jumbled. The racer couldn’t keep track of all the dimensions in here. Only she could.
“Stop moving!” Cassandra said. “Stop moving! You’ll get us lost!”
“Lost ain’t our problem, big brain!” Stills said, turning again, making the other ship vanish, but forcing her to desperately track their movements with her brain. “One real hit from the AM this malparido’s throwing and we’re dog food.”
“This is a twenty-two dimensional region of space-time with no landmarks!” Cassandra said. “We’re navigating by dead reckoning!”
“Then you better reckon, ostie, ‘cause I’m supposed to die in an ocean!”
“Come to a full stop!” she said. “Full stop right away! Then rotate forty-five degrees across the p-axis, then forty-five degrees across the v-axis!”
The crushing pressure on her ribs and joints mounted, vanished, then shot up again.
“He’s following,” Stills said.
Cassandra’s brain raced, calculating their position and velocity at the same time as she constructed a better pattern of the Scarecrow vessel based on the slim sensor readings. She diagrammed it and projected it in Stills’ display.
“Does this make sense to you?” she asked.
She’d drawn a missile, nineteen meters long, plus or minus sixty-three centimeters, by one hundred and sixty centimeters in diameter plus or minus nine, studded with protruding straight edges.
“That’s a casse à face missile,” Stills said with distaste. “Fast bugger.”
“Someone is riding it?”
“A Scarecrow is an AI mounted in a robot, baby, not a somebody. He doesn’t need life support. And if you take the warhead out of a casse à face, you get a shitload of space for weapons.”
“He’s following, making the same rotations,” she said.
“That’s probably how he got here,” Stills said. “It wouldn’t have taken much for a low-profile missile to be sensor-absorbent. He must have matched all our maneuvers all the way through. Come up with either run or fight, big-brain. I can’t do this all day.”
She’d never been in combat. She’d navigated the movement of the Sixth Expeditionary Force across the Puppet Axis. She’d escaped from the Limpopo. But most of that had been Bel’s plans. She’d never fought anyone or anything.
But this Scarecrow thing wanted to hurt her.
“Let’s see if he can follow this,” she said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
BELISARIUS FOLLOWED IEKANJIKA as she drove the remote control surface truck about a kilometer from the ground HQ, on the other side of the Hortus quantus herd. While she programmed the different robotic drill components, Belisarius’ brain snuffled at something to keep it occupied. Predictably, he gravitated to the Hortus quantus again, testing patterns, relationships and analogies. The more he thought about their perception of time, the more alien they seemed.
To the Hortus quantus, eleven years in the past and eleven years in the future might feel adjacent, maybe even simultaneous. They signaled one and received signals from the other. But the years in between, say 5 years pastward and futureward, must not be invisible to them. That would make little evolutionary sense.
They knew what happened in the intervening spaces, but that knowledge wasn’t observational. They probably worked like a radio telescope. The most cost-effective way to build a radio telescope was not to build a single large one, but to integrate one image out of many small images from an array of smaller telescopes. That was also the way the hundreds of millions of magnetosomes in his muscle cells worked. Each one was a microscopic magnet. Each measured only the tiny magnetic environment around them, but all their inputs came together in Belisarius’ brain as electromagnetic maps of exquisite resolution. It was also the way Cassandra had used entangled particles to see the space-time environment across the distance of hyperspace when she had guided the Expeditionary Force across the Puppet Axis. Except that the Hortus quantus were not summing observations across space. They were integrating information across a twenty-two year wide simultaneity.
But what did the Hortus quantus see? They weren’t sending electrical patterns or pictures across their array. Gene combinations that were mal-adapted for the future were selected out and not sent back in time. They saw their environment in the abstraction of gene frequencies. They saw their environment in terms of how they themselves evolved to it. They might not discern the unevenness of the ground before them, but the immensity of the picture they saw through their genetic telescope shivered a chill up his spine.
They were tremendously alien, peering at abstractions rather than the world itself. He and Cassandra might have more in common with the Hortus quantus than he did with Iekanjika or any other human. It was a dizzying, frightening thought. The Hortus quantus were far more valuable to him and the cosmos. He had to talk to them again.
He set his comms to link only to himself and AI.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” Belisarius asked Saint Matthew.
“How do you want me to answer that?” the AI replied.
“I mean about the Hortus quantus.”
The AI was silent for a time.
“You’ve asserted some incredible things about them, without evidence, which is rare for you,” Saint Matthew finally said.
“I’m relying on how I think they work,” Belisarius said. “I haven’t tested it. I’m not even sure how I could.”
“I’m not sure you’d like any of my ideas on this.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re the quantum expert,” the AI said. “You don’t believe in fate, but you made a pretty speech about my place in the cosmos when you were trying to convince me to leave Saguenay Station and help you with your con.”
“Yes?” Belisarius said warily.
“You don’t believe in fate, but other Homo quantus believe in Einsteinian block time, that the future and past are written and that free will is an illusion. But that belief can be rephrased in terms of fate. What some call fate, I call the hand of God, and some Homo quantus call block time. And I think it’s real. The Union has been here for months, but only Belisarius Arjona could have noticed the nature of the Hortus quantus.”
“What are you getting at?”
“The hand of divinity can move in ways that even saints can’t understand.”
“You have a role in this?” Belisarius asked.
When Saint Matthew finally spoke, his voice carried a note of discomfort. “Mister Arjona, we find ourselves with the Hortus quantus at their crossroads. I don’t understand why we might have been sent just to witness an extinction. Although you don’t believe in God, I feel His hand around us.”
“Then his hand has put us somewhere between an extinction and genocide.”
Iekanjika’s voice broke into their conversation from the common channel.
“Saint Matthew. How certain are you of this plot to assassinate Brigadier Iekanjika you found in Rudo’s encrypted files?”
Belisarius and the AI switched to their common channel.
“I don’t believe it was planted there, if that’s what you’re asking,” Saint Matthew said. “I have no doubt she’s involved.”
“In my history, there’s no indication she was involved,” Iekanjika said.
“History is just a narrative that may or may not be faithful to a set of observations,” Belisarius said. “What you’ve been told may have been modified in the records, perhaps by Rudo herself. None of us has observed her pulling the trigger on the gun that killed Brigadier Iekanjika. Or it might be that your presence here persuades Captain Rudo not to join this plot or even delays it long enough for you to be born.”
The light from the brown dwarf, faint red like a heat lamp, changed subtly. His ocular implants detected a brief doubling in luminosity, too low for the human eye to notice and a spatter of x-rays. The flare event was building deep in the magnetic tangle beneath the clouds.
“Are you speaking to Captain Rudo about this?” Saint Matthew asked.
“There could be a hundred explanations for what you found,” Iekanjika said. “Conditions and opportunities change. The assassination might be delayed on its own and never involve Rudo. Maybe she’s a bit player.”
“You’re gambling more than your own life on that, colonel,” Belisarius said. “Like it or not, you’re now a central figure in Union history. If you aren’t born, our timeline is shot. You must know Rudo well enough to reach the woman she is now.”
“Drilling your core samples will take three days,” Iekanjika said. “You stay here. I’ll speak to Captain Rudo.”
Belisarius looked uncertainly at the big truck and mobile drill tower and the dozens of programmable robots.
“No problem,” Belisarius said.
Iekanjika turned and walked off towards the buildings. Belisarius switched off the transmitter so that he and Saint Matthew were alone. This might be his bes
t time. Days of mind-numbing work would be performed by machines. This was his chance to try to know himself again, and to know the Hortus quantus.
“Can you run the robots?” Belisarius asked.
“Why?”
“I’m going to try to see the Hortus quantus from the fugue,” Belisarius said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
IEKANJIKA HAD MEMORIZED the layout of the base, the standard operating procedures, the top hundred officers and NCOs on the surface, and had passing familiarity with another hundred secondary people and projects. She knew that Captain Rudo was active during Iekanjika’s two waking shifts and that she usually worked from the tiny space she’d been assigned. But she found Rudo’s office empty. So she sat to wait.
After half an hour, the short prodigy appeared, a bit breathless from wherever she’d been rushing from. Rudo didn’t bother to hide her disappointment in finding Iekanjika there waiting. A moment of dissonance washed over Iekanjika. Sometime in the next twenty years, Rudo would become the unflappable, confident officer. This young incarnation of her, with her mix of arrogance and insecurity, was a doppelganger she couldn’t match with the older woman she knew. Rudo closed the office door and sat.
“What are you doing here?” she said in a low voice. “I gave you the authorizations and equipment.”
“We’re drilling now,” Iekanjika said.
“You shouldn’t be in here.”
Iekanjika sat back and crossed her arms. “I need to talk to you about the future.”
Young Rudo shared the mannerism of narrowed eyes with her future self, but the rest of her face belied the flinty scrutiny. Rudo’s instinct was to command the situation, or at least approach it on equal footing. But she was the junior here, in experience and knowledge.
“I have tools to break files encrypted forty years in my past,” Iekanjika said.
Rudo sat straighter.
“For reasons that contribute to the mission you yourself gave me thirty-nine years in the future, I looked into some of your files here,” Iekanjika said. “I saw what you and a few others have planned for February 28th.”
The Quantum Garden Page 20
