He didn’t enter the fugue, not exactly. The existence of the quantum objectivity in his brain no longer required the extinguishing of his subjective self. The quantum intellect ran all the time and it was partitioned from the parts of his brain running his subjective consciousness. Otherwise he would collapse the superimposed probability waves the quantum intellect perceived.
Belisarius diminished and the quantum intellect expanded, consuming his processing resources, even his senses. The two of them, subjectivity and objectivity, could not coexist, so the wall between them was high. A soft numbness seeped into him as the quantum intellect rerouted more than ninety-nine percent of the electromagnetic sensations to itself. The richness of sensation from the hundreds of millions of magnetosomes in his muscle cells faded. And although he couldn’t see it, the interacting, overlapping waves became quantum data, superimposed, with multiple states existing at once.
Perceptual sensitivity has dropped, the quantum intellect said in Belisarius’ thoughts. The voice was his, though toneless and eerie. Recommend de-partitioning the brain of the Belisarius physicality to increase sensitivity.
The drop in perceptual sensitivity the quantum intellect referred to was the leakiness of the partition, allowing him to feel the faintest breeze of the magnetic sensation against his arms and legs. The quantum intellect couldn’t be distressed; it wasn’t conscious. Nor could it be described as self-interested. The term had no meaning to an intellect with no sense of self. But it had the same priorities and objectives as him: to learn as much as possible of the world and the cosmos, at almost any cost. The intellect was looking to increase the efficiency of its senses.
But the leak through the partition gave Belisarius a pinhole view of the quantum world, like it had in the hyperspace of the interior of the time gates. Every brief glimpse, only a tiny fraction of all the overlapping probability waves, caused a minor collapse in the superposition of states as his attention forced the cosmos to decide on one set of choices instead of others. But his engineered brain was fast enough to make sense of those strobing glimpses of the quantum world.
A vast cosmos, a thousand cosmoses written over one another, frothed as quantum states indecisively looked through all possibilities inscrutably, selecting between reality and discarded might-have-beens. In the past, the quantum intellect had viewed the quantum world, and Belisarius saw only its memories. Even those feeble memories had been awe-inspiring, frenetic, second-hand peeks into what really made up the cosmos.
But those memories paled in comparison to this glimpse through whatever separated subjective selfhood from the objective, unconscious world. That tiny fraction of superposition he saw collapsed, but the vastness out there felt incalculable, the superposition seeming constantly to be replenishing itself. He was looking at divinity through a pin hole. All pain and worry receded, collapsing behind him; discarded possibilities. Belisarius stepped forward in wonder, one slow step after another.
“Mister Arjona, you’re moving away from the drilling equipment,” Saint Matthew said. “I’m no con man, but I don’t think this will help our cover.”
“Inverse-square law,” Belisarius whispered. “I need to observe from closer.”
The vast herd of the Hortus quantus was only two hundred meters ahead, slowly-moving black shapes trampling fine bushes and grasses of oil-covered ice. But it wasn’t what he saw with his eyes that gripped him. Webs of tangled probability, fractally layered, described orbits around the herd. The vanishing glimpses started adding to a nearly hypnotic eleven-dimensional picture. His brain, engineered for curiosity and discovery, looked for patterns and relationships feverishly. Something was building around the Hortus quantus, a sense of their connectedness.
And more moving yet, he was glimpsing the quantum world directly, not filtered and abstracted. He saw frames of a jerky, interrupted film of the wonder of the cosmos undecided and debating, waiting for some consciousness to announce that the debate was finished so that reality could come into being. And as soon as he saw it, the debate collapsed.
Belisarius stepped closer. His fever and breathing were rising, starting to fog his faceplate. But that didn’t get in the way of him seeing. He wasn’t looking with his eyes. The fragments of the quantum world he saw before he collapsed the crashing probabilities were electromagnetic. His brain constructed images from the millions of magnetosomes in his muscle cells, but he could see snapshots just as his attention dissolved them.
Trillions of lines of quantum entanglement surrounded the entire Hortus quantus herd. Infinitesimally fine lines of entangled probability threaded through the time gates trillions of times and back through individual Hortus quantus, making loops with no beginning and no end. The Hortus quantus were entangled, through the time gates.
The entanglement of the Homo quantus wasn’t just through space. The two faces of the time gates reached forward and back in time. Their lowest energy orbit through the hyperspace was eleven years, but there were other pathways through the time gates.
So, the entanglement might link to Hortus quantus far into the future and far into the past. The waves of entangled probability interacted with each other, and even with less than a hundredth of the perception, he saw new lines of entanglement diving into the time gates every moment, dragged along like kite strings by frozen grains of pollen. Entanglement was knitting all the eras of the Hortus quantus together, perhaps even across periods where flares had melted the entire species, preserving their information through time.
It was so beautiful that tears blurred his vision.
No wonder the Union scientists had had such trouble sending information back in time. The odds of any unpowered object navigating the hostile interior of the time gates were vanishing. But entanglement guided the pollen from the Hortus quantus in a process almost like quantum tunneling, past destructive regions and back out. The Hortus quantus existed like a giant superposition of uncollapsed quantum states. And the nature of their consciousness was quantum. They existed in a kind of natural quantum fugue, without collapsing quantum fields.
But humans did. The scientists of the Sixth Expeditionary Force had observed the pollen. They had collapsed the superimposed quantum probabilities, interrupting the flow of pollen. Each observation the Union made on the Hortus quantus reduced the quantum superposition. Humanity and its subjectivity was caustic and destructive to these sublime aliens. The Union wasn’t really to blame. How could they have known?
The Hortus quantus were slowly recovering. Pollen was finding its way through the interior of the time gates, on feeble lines of unobserved entanglement. If the Union were not taking the time gates, eventually, the pollen stream would be reestablished. Genetic information from the future would arrive again.
But with the gates gone what would happen to the Hortus quantus? Was this really genocide like Belisarius thought? Quantum entanglement was independent of distance and time. Maybe as long as the time gates existed, the weave of entanglement through them would serve to hold the Hortus quantus together through all eras. It was comforting to think that there might be a kind of eternal consciousness in the universe, eschewing limits of time and distance; a consciousness woven into the fabric of space-time. He stepped forward another uncertain step. The strobing feel of the lines of quantum entanglement began to falter.
Destroying, destroying, the quantum intellect insisted in a toneless, terse voice.
Belisarius closed his eyes.
“What is it?” Saint Matthew asked.
The Hortus quantus had stopped moving. He knew it even without waiting to measure their slow procession in glacial time. The cataracts and surging ocean of entanglement were gone. All the superimposed quantum probabilities in the icy vacuum under the baleful stare of the red dwarf had evaporated. The weave of countless infinitely thin waves had dispersed.
“What is it, Mister Arjona?”
“I...” Belisarius began.
The ache in his chest overwhelmed him. He tasted his own tears on his l
ips.
“I just killed them all.”
“I detect movement,” Saint Matthew said.
“No,” Belisarius whispered, dropping to his knees. “No, no, no, no.”
Destroyed, his own voice said tonelessly in his head. The quantum intellect, without sense of self or guilt, could make assertions of fact. Destroyed.
“They’re alive, Mister Arjona.”
Belisarius’ stomach lurched. He breathed unevenly. Hyperventilated. He was too hot. Far far too hot. Or he was just feeling the cold of the world against his ever-fevered skin? Belisarius forced the words out. “Walking is the least important part of them. I collapsed their quantum environment. I destroyed them more thoroughly than flares or the Union ever could have.”
“You didn’t stop the pollen,” Saint Matthew said softly. “It stopped almost a year ago.”
“I observed their quantum state,” Belisarius said through a painfully tight throat, “and that broke the quantum scaffolding the Hortus quantus live on through time.”
He heard his own sobbing in his helmet. Distant.
Any human could have observed the Hortus quantus and done minor damage, as the Union had done. Any Homo quantus could have observed them safely from within the quantum fugue, doing no damage at all. Belisarius was the only being in all the cosmos who could have collapsed the entanglement that knit them into a vast group mind through time.
And he had.
CHAPTER FORTY
“FORTY-FIVE DEGREE clockwise rotations through s-axis and u-axis!” Cassandra said through the neural jack. “Ten seconds forward on twenty gravities, then a complete stop over two-point-four seconds! Then forty-five degree counter-clockwise rotations through the x-axis and the z-axes!”
“Got it,” Stills said, with what sounded like effort. Despite what he’d said earlier about the hyperspace giving him some sort of psychedelic trip, he’d completed every maneuver with breath-taking, if foul-mouthed, precision. Any AI, even Saint Matthew, would have faltered before now over piloting compensations that she couldn’t have ordered in time. No Homo quantus had the reflexes or the cool-headedness under the pressure to carry out her navigational orders.
“I’d rather this be a straight on fight,” he said. “If this pedazo de mierda had any weapons, I could fillet even a Scarecrow like a fish.”
“I know,” she said for the third time. She grunted in the shock gel at the violence of his flying, nothing he could hear.
“Why are we doing forty-five degree rotations?” Stills continued. “You had me doin’ ninety-degree turns through this maze.”
“We took the straightest orbit on the way in,” she said. “Forty-five degree rotations through hyper-dimensional space-time will involve fractal dimensionality. I want to confuse the Scarecrow.”
“I don’t understand onething you’re saying, so you may be onto something.”
Stills finished the maneuvers. A kilometer behind them, the casse à face missile casing rotated into the dimensionality the racer occupied.
“Zarba!” Stills said. “Where to, big brain? I wanna lose this afterbirth.”
“One hundred and eighty degrees clockwise across the q-axis. Accelerate at twenty gravities for five seconds. Full stop. Rotate ninety degrees clockwise across the p-axis, then ninety degrees counter-clockwise across q again.”
“You know what I want?” Stills said. The force of his rotations compressed her spine in directions evolution had not prepared her for. “I’d like to know if all this driving is doing anything useful, or if you and the Scarecrow are just doing a geometric circle jerk.”
“I’m hoping the Scarecrow can’t follow the math,” she said.
The casse à face missile casing rotated behind them, still a kilometer away.
“That artificial foreskin keeps lickin’ my ass, big brain!” Stills said. “An’ while I appreciate a good rim job, I’d like a little romance first, you get me?”
Cassandra ignored Stills’ words. Although Bel’s paranoia about his quantum objectivity had led him to say a lot of things she didn’t believe, she trusted one of them to be true. Bel said that ultimately, a subjective consciousness could discern the algorithms making up even the most advanced objective system.
As they played cat and mouse, she modeled the movements and tactics of the Scarecrow. However intelligent, no matter how much human patterning had gone into its programming, the Scarecrow was still just a big computer, hard- and soft-wired, without the creativity of subjectivity. It could follow any maneuver they made, blindly, without understanding the nature of the hyper-volume of space-time around them. She needed to beat it on the field of machine versus subjective person. Bel had talked about it in terms of cards, but she didn’t know cards. She knew space-time, though.
“Princess!” Stills said as he completed their maneuvers. “I’m lookin’ for a little advanced warning on what you need me to do. Hit me or I take over and drive the bus wherever I want.”
“Do the reverse of what you just did,” she said. “Do it exactly.”
“Will that help?”
“I just need five seconds to think through something.”
In normal space-time, she could lead the Scarecrow through a series of obstacles and hope to lose him there. In this hyper-region of space-time, she couldn’t do that. But if she was crazy enough, she could make her tracks disappear.
“Vincent!” she said after two point eight three seconds of hard thought, “how brave are you?”
“Câlice, sweet-cheeks! Ain’t no call to besmirch a dog’s honor. I never back down.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
IEKANJIKA ENTERED ONE of the tool sheds, opened a rack of drawers and found a few multipurpose data-pads. These were ubiquitous on the base and in the fleet. They interfaced with most equipment, and best of all, all keystrokes were recorded, so MilSec could always recover any misuse and even do a fair bit of intel gathering and forensics if a sleeper agent used one. For this reason, they weren’t tightly secured. Iekanjika keyed the access code Lieutenant-General Rudo had given her.
This would be its third use, the second from outside the main headquarters. Iekanjika knew enough about the systems to reroute it through a few nodes within the base. The code got her in, but MilSec would be monitoring any use of the code, laying in wait with a trap.
After her commissioning as a second lieutenant, Iekanjika had been assigned to Auditing Section. She’d been tragically disappointed at the time. She’d worked hard, outperformed every other recruit to try to escape the stigma of her heritage, and she’d been rewarded with an assignment in Internal Affairs, far from combat, command, weaponry or engineering.
Iekanjika hadn’t learned until years later that the assignment had been Rudo’s idea. She hadn’t known then that Rudo herself had also risen from Auditing, hand-picked right out of the academy by a senior auditor. Nobody liked auditors and it wasn’t a job from which most officers could hope to jump to combat or command.
But as an auditor, Iekanjika had learned to read human flaws. Everyone had done something wrong; everyone had something to hide. Few indiscretions concerned Internal Affairs, and she didn’t personally care if a corporal and a lieutenant fraternized in a storage closet. But she found out she ought not to care much if the quartermasters skimmed a percentage off supplies. The black market gave officers and crew a sense of freedom at little cost to the Expeditionary Force, and it generated small sins that could be used in coercion when real investigations were at stake: dereliction of duty, falsified records, cover-ups.
Auditing had also taught her how criminals and traitors circumvented surveillance. Iekanjika had personally rooted out a number of innovative dead drops, extra-network communication patches and exploitable system vulnerabilities, none of which would be invented in this time period for another decade or more. MilSec couldn’t be ready for them yet.
This was the first time she’d ever used the tactics she’d caught others using. She patched into Captain Rudo’s virtual off
ice to follow the electronic traces of her co-conspirators. It took a bit of doing, but she soon figured out the identities of the other three. MilSec hadn’t picked them up yet. She could try to penetrate MilSec systems to see if she could find out where Rudo was being held, but her entry would have to be much more intrusive in those hardened systems. Lieutenant-General Rudo hadn’t given her any passwords at that clearance level. But this second look into Rudo’s files with the same password could help build a case that someone was trying to frame Rudo.
The next step was to get herself some allies. She rose, put on her helmet and headed to the airlock. On a battle cruiser in a theater of war, the gulf between officer and crew was relatively deep, but bridged with hundreds of discreet relationships. In an espionage and counter-espionage environment, those relationships were a strength and a vulnerability. Deeply embedded spies, whether occupying roles of officer or crew, could use those discreet bridges to conspire, but counter-espionage could create better and larger informant networks.
A stray corporal ought not to frequent the officers’ quarters, but one never knew if this might not be an informant, reporting to their handlers. Iekanjika entered the plastic-walled hallway of the officer quarter during the evening watch. The heaters worked hard here, making the air feel thick and humid, smelling faintly of machine lubricant, ammonia and burning. Colonel Okonkwo and Major Zivai ought to be in the suites they shared with their youngest wife, Captain Rudo. Iekanjika knocked on the hard plastic of the door.
“Come in,” a woman’s voice called and the door lock clicked.
Iekanjika slid it open, came to attention and saluted. A woman in her late thirties sat at a work table set with holographic arrays—long lists of line items too small to read from the door.
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