The Quantum Garden

by Derek Künsken

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rudo said.

  “My concern is not for my mother,” Iekanjika said.

  The younger officer didn’t squirm, but it was a close thing.

  “I never knew her,” Iekanjika said. “I’m concerned with two parts of the timeline. Firstly, I was born on February 34th. Secondly, you had nothing to do with the brigadier’s assassination. If I die, some rather large successes thirty-nine years from now will be in jeopardy. And if you’re associated with the assassination of Brigadier Iekanjika, your career will stop. And you’re far more important to the history of the Expeditionary Force than I am.”

  This seemed to deflate the young captain, as if this kindness were proof that Colonel Iekanjika really was from the future, the full weight of which was far more than the thought of murder. The captain’s lips pressed tight.

  “I don’t know what you have to do,” Iekanjika said, “but I need you to understand the stakes. Don’t do it. Or change the date so I at least have time to be born.”

  “I have to deal with this now,” Rudo said leaning forward with a fervency in her voice, “or we don’t get to have your future. The Expeditionary Force is on the verge of breaking apart.”

  “You have to keep yourself clean. You got us the drilling equipment. We need a few days of cover and then the permits to go back near the time gates,” Iekanjika said. “I don’t know if you’re the key to preserving the Force now, but your help directly affects the war effort in the future.”

  Rudo stared straight into her. “War effort?”

  “You have to excel both now and tomorrow, captain.”

  Rudo’s eyebrows rose in a familiar manner; not quirky or curious, but deadly dangerous.

  “Captain, is it?” she demanded. “Pulling rank, colonel? Fuck you! I don’t know you from shit. You might be from the future, but you might not be on my side then. For all I know, you captured me in the future and tortured my real name out of me so that you could coerce me now.”

  Iekanjika’s hands had gradually tightened on the arms of the chair. “I don’t know what you’re dealing with in the present, captain, but in the future, we’re about three months away from being overwhelmed by the Congregate. Even if I get back with the core samples instantaneously relative to my time, I don’t know if it will be in time.”

  “You have a time machine, colonel. Use it.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. We can only travel to certain places and times.”

  “There’s not enough time here either,” Rudo said. She worked at a peeling seam on a datapad and lowered her voice. “I’ve cast my lot with Major-General Takatafare’s faction. My senior wife and middle husband haven’t committed to either one. They’re trying to maintain their independence, but there are no independents.”

  “This is politics. It will wind itself out.”

  “This doesn’t look like politics at all,” Rudo said. “This looks like where I come from.”

  “Where Vimbiso Tangwerai comes from,” Iekanjika said in a low voice.

  “I spent time in the slums of Harare. This struggle in the Force has all the characteristics of a gang war, yet the factions approach it like a political fight. That will drag it out. We’ll lose ships and years, maybe forever.”

  A chill snaked up Iekanjika’s spine. Losing ships was unthinkable, not only because all twelve had survived to cross the Puppet Axis in the future, but after that they needed everything they had for the war effort.

  “You can fix this?”

  “Gang wars are never about ideology. They’re about money and control. Fighting costs money and dead men don’t get rich. They make deals or they solve things fast through other means.”

  “I’ve given you more information about the future than I should have,” Iekanjika said, standing. “You and I are critical to the timeline. Don’t do anything to take us off the board. Losing in the future is just like losing now.”

  She opened the door and left.

  In the icy stairwell leading up from the offices and cubicles, a sudden trembling overcame her. For fifteen or twenty seconds her hands felt frozen, and she fought an unnerving dizziness. She knew the signs. Officers were trained to spot it in their crews, and sometimes in themselves.

  Shock.

  She knelt on one knee and lowered her head. Somebody descended the stairs and Iekanjika made as if she were adjusting an ankle seal on her suit. They passed her without paying attention. Iekanjika rose, heading for the airlock where she’d left her helmet.

  Shock had hit her before: from injuries, from acceleration damage from failing gel chambers, but she’d never gone into shock just from mental trauma. Time travel. Meeting her youthful future wife. Discovering the plot to assassinate her own mother. What had she expected?

  Time travel wasn’t part of her profession. She soldiered. She could face danger, fight any enemy, and stick to the parameters of a mission profile. But time travel wasn’t just another battle. Meeting young Rudo and finding out over the last week that her wife carried a terrible secret had deeply shaken her faith in her future wife.

  And her mother? Her mother was alive, right now. Her brain could think the thought, process it. What had her heart expected? That she could walk on the same world as her and not feel it rip at her? Ayen Iekanjika had grown up rootless, another orphan in the Force, raised on the Mutapa, apprenticed to anyone who needed an extra pair of hands. She’d known her way around the Mutapa by the time she turned six, and could fix anything on it by her fifteenth birthday, like all the children who knew they would have to take up jobs in the fleet.

  No one visited the platoons of orphans or brought them presents or told them they loved them. None of that had bothered her, growing up. She’d known who she was and what she was. Her father had been a criminal, executed months before her birth. And everyone knew her mother had been assassinated and vilified after the fact. It wasn’t politic for Ayen to try to find out who her mother had been. So she’d grown from child to adult without context or reference to anyone.

  The idea that she had a chance to know her mother kicked her hard now. Know her for real. Not through the dry administrative recordings the fleet carried on file. She knew where her mother was. The unexpected ache to meet this long-dead person strengthened. But realistically, she couldn’t get within a dozen meters of the brigadier. A corporal in the Union navy trying to approach a general officer with no reasonable business would be shot or jailed. Her fake identity would survive casual inspection, but even forty years ago, the cross-referencing in the secure areas would spot her in a second. And what could she even say?

  I’m Ayen, your daughter from the future?

  Would her mother think her mad? Maybe not. Doubt her, yes, but the Union had the time gates, even if they didn’t yet understand how to use them. The idea that in the future their descendants would have figured it out couldn’t be outside the realm of possibility.

  I’m Ayen. Your daughter.

  I don’t know you.

  Iekanjika didn’t like these thoughts. She didn’t feel like herself while she thought them. She hadn’t been trained for this. She screwed on her helmet, hopefully sealing out the dark thoughts that kept trying to infect her. She cycled through the airlock.

  On the surface, under the spongy red light. The black surface crunched under her boots and flakes of the all-covering plants came away, revealing the bright surface beneath. The layers fell away to show the true world. Bright truth was important, but there was something artful and vibrant about the layers that obscured the truth here. She missed her innocence and the honest trust she’d offered.

  The drill towered above the horizon, hammering downward in a faint booming that was louder in her boots than in her ears. Arjona stood nearby, watching the robots load the next section of tubing. He saw her and approached. He wasn’t responding to radio or laser. She got ready to draw her sidearm or fight him down. Instead, he pulled a fine wire from his suit and offered it to her. Direct
cable. Used to transfer software or data between suits. Also useful for private communication. What did he have to say he couldn’t tell her by laser?

  “I wasn’t sure you’d gotten out,” Arjona said. “I didn’t dare signal you or leave the work site.”

  “What is it?”

  “Saint Matthew left some one-time electronic alarms in the network to let us know if Rudo’s group continued its plotting.”

  Her heart thumped faster. “They were detected?”

  Focus on the mission.

  Assess risk.

  “No,” the AI said. “The Expeditionary Force doesn’t have anything in this era to detect my programs.”

  “What happened?” Iekanjika said.

  “Captain Rudo was arrested,” the AI said, “for treason.”

  “I was just there!”

  “It just happened,” Saint Matthew said. “If you’d stayed a few minutes more, you might have been arrested yourself.”

  Worry made her stomach clench. Not just for the mission, but for Rudo the woman, no matter how infuriating she was at this age, no matter who she really was.

  “She was arrested by Takatafare’s MPs for treason?” Iekanjika said. “But she’s working with Takatafare’s faction against Brigadier Iekanjika.”

  “The use of the code Lieutenant-General Rudo gave us was detected,” Arjona said. “From when Captain Rudo went into the network to create our identities.”

  “We did this?” Iekanjika demanded.

  The implications for the future swam in her mind, dizzying.

  “We don’t know,” Arjona said.

  “Are we compromised?”

  “Not yet,” the AI said. “Security detected an authentic code coming from a remote location. It will take them a while to figure out which actions were Rudo’s and which ones were ours.”

  “They caught her based on just that?”

  “No,” Arjona said. “They found the same code had been used again.”

  “When we looked to see if she was moving on the drilling requisition,” Iekanjika said as a finger of horror slid along her spine.

  She’d done this. It had been Arjona’s idea, but this was her mission. She’d authorized it. She’d stopped trusting Rudo and now the future commander of the Expeditionary Force was in the brig, with enough evidence to bust her to private or to get her executed.

  “Is this a change in history or was this episode in the books?” Arjona asked.

  “Of course it wasn’t in the books!” Iekanjika said. “An officer doesn’t get arrested and then fast-tracked for promotion.”

  “We’ve changed the timeline,” the AI said.

  “Smaller bits of the timeline may be flexible,” Arjona said, “and not recorded. This may be what really happened in the past and no one knows.”

  “We changed the past, Arjona!” Iekanjika said.

  “We don’t know that! Our arrival may have delayed the assassination attempt on your mother, long enough for you to be born.”

  “Causality doesn’t work that way. Trust me. The Expeditionary Force has spent a lot of time thinking about avoiding paradoxes.”

  “And the Homo quantus couldn’t have done better. But the Homo quantus examine the nature of reality. Causality isn’t just linear. It can branch in lines, forward and backwards in time. It can take other geometric forms: two-dimensional sheets, solids, and in cases involving time travel, it could exist in closed loops like eddies and open loops like spirals.”

  “I’m not looking for a lecture in graphs, Arjona!” she said. “Do you think this arrest caused the delay in the assassination to allow my own birth?”

  “If Rudo gets out of jail with no charge, or a minor one, then it’s self-consistent, constructive interference,” Arjona said. “Imagine it like the interference patterns you’d see in electromagnetic waves. Going a step further, the fact that you’re still here to ask the question means that Captain Rudo’s initial plan didn’t work.”

  “What can your AI really do?” Iekanjika asked. “How deep can he get into our networks without passwords, without getting detected?”

  “I can break through some layers of security,” the AI said, “but lots of important things aren’t visible on your network. It’s like your network security was designed by paranoids.”

  “With reason,” she said.

  “What do you want Saint Matthew to do?” Arjona asked.

  “Can he fabricate evidence to show that Rudo was framed?”

  “Maybe,” the AI said. “Who would I point your investigators at? Whoever I do, they’d likely be executed, no?”

  “The Expeditionary Force has few innocents,” she said.

  “It’s not my job to see that anyone is punished,” the AI said.

  “The alternative is messing up the timeline and the future,” Arjona said.

  “But hacking will only get us so far,” Saint Matthew said. “A determined investigator will look for physical evidence too. We can’t fake that, so even if, in the short term, we get Captain Rudo free, she might just end up back where she is now when our fabricated evidence meets real evidence.”

  Iekanjika inhaled slowly and deeply, but her head swam, like she was underwater and no matter how much she clawed for the black surface, it remained just out of reach. She walked back towards the base.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  BELISARIUS’ MOOD WAS not much better than Iekanjika’s. While listening to Saint Matthew’s news about Rudo, he’d started to rethink his views of predestination and free will. With their knowledge of the future, Rudo and Iekanjika were as constrained as Belisarius by his genetics, but he didn’t want to be as trapped as them. He was moving away from the idea that he couldn’t control his curiosity. He had to believe that he was more than an automaton, wound at birth through genetics and development, going through the motions of a clockwork life until his spring wound down.

  But the price of believing he was free was responsibility. He really was responsible for every choice he’d made, from fleeing the Garret all the way until the present moment. That stuck him with all the consequences of his mistakes, in a place his talents meant nothing. A con man in a culture he didn’t know was close to useless. A contemplative among hard-bitten soldiers was no better.

  He switched off his transmitter as the drill rumbled on.

  “Are you shutting down?” the AI asked.

  “What?”

  “A response to prolonged stress in humans is apathy and depression. You can’t care anymore.”

  “Are you counseling me, or worried about my soul?”

  “I’ve always been worried about your soul,” the AI said, “but you need to be functional for a while longer, at least until we get out of the past. Even then, the Homo quantus need you for months, maybe forever. That kind of pressure is hard to bear.”

  “I survived the con and travelling through time.”

  “It’s different when you’re alone,” Saint Matthew said. “Your mind has a pressure release valve. When the pressure goes on too long, your brain can start to accept that death or some other outcome is possible and make peace with it. But you can’t make peace with the uncertain fate of all the Homo quantus, which is now tied to the future of the Union rebellion.”

  “We’re getting the core sample,” Belisarius said. “We’ll save the Homo quantus. Right now, I need to go into the fugue.”

  “That’s a different Belisarius Arjona than I’ve known for years.”

  “I want to see if there’s some way to help the Hortus quantus.”

  “The Homo quantus don’t run into savant and the fugue to hide from the world,” Saint Matthew said. Belisarius had never known the AI to be openly sarcastic, but there’s a first time for everything. After four point four seconds, an eternity for both of them, Saint Matthew said, “What can you do?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  The ember shine of the brown dwarf cast only faint shadows, creating a dreamy aura around him. Only the harsh spotlights in t
he distance gave any feeling of solidity, and it wasn’t solidity he was looking for.

  “I do need to understand what I’ve become, what it means for the subjective me to coexist in one brain with an objective intellect,” Belisarius said. “Although I don’t like it, Cassie is right. I might be a new stage of Homo quantus evolution, if I can make it work. If I go back and I bring the Homo quantus data on how my brain works, they’ll be happier.”

  “How much of this is real and how much of it is just your curiosity? Could you hurt yourself by entering the fugue? You did before.”

  “I should be okay, and the risk ought to be worth it, if I can do something to preserve the Hortus quantus. I’m just one man, but I need data.”

  “One man who has to carry back coordinates that will help his people escape.”

  “You’re fussing like a mother hen again,” Belisarius said.

  The brown dwarf’s magnetic field trembled. This gas giant equivalent of a minor earthquake was small in astronomical terms, but heralded a much larger readjustment only months away, and perhaps extinction for the Hortus quantus.

  Not extinction exactly. The oily black plants slicking the frozen surface could be considered a variant form of the Hortus quantus, or a segment of their life cycle. But that sessile form wasn’t intelligent or conscious. The consciousness of the Hortus quantus seemed centered on the time gates, which the Expeditionary Force were taking away.

  In a way, it was an act of genocide, perhaps not intentional, but not entirely innocent either. It was too facile of the Union to claim that they were saving the time gates from an ecological disaster; the time gates must have experienced dozens or hundreds of flares while the Hortus quantus were evolving.

  What could he do? He had the time gates now. When he was done, might he figure out a path back to save them? If not all of them, the part of them that was intelligent? Many creatures and species lived and died in the cosmos, but these beings were the only others he’d ever known who lived with some part of themselves in the quantum world. They might hint at the future of the Homo quantus, something that, despite all his differences with his people, carried the echoes of a kind of inner peace for him.