Belisarius erased the word Alone.
He would help them, somehow.
Tribe, he wrote where Alone had been. Regrow he wrote next, although it sat ambiguously in the lexiconwith other end-of-life meanings that the Union researchers had never puzzled out.
His chest-plate chirped softly as different receptors received new smells. He waited for the message, but Regrow began to fade. And new words appeared, orbiting the word Tribe.
Wrong-parentage/wrong pollen, which was the Hortus quantus conception of falsehood, pictured as inappropriate genes being sent to the past, not truly preparing this generation of Hortus quantus for the future.
But the elder continued modifying it before his eyes, using combinations of smells as qualifiers, something the Union had never before observed.
Wrong-parentage/wrong pollen faded, and became No parentage.
Belisarius didn’t know what to make of this. It was beyond the borrowed lexicon. Pollen and genes and truth and perception were conceptually synonymous to the Hortus quantus, encompassing a general meaning of rightness and visionary hope. This was the opposite: a feeling of wrongness and despairing blindness.
Help, Belisarius offered. Regrow, he insisted.
But the Hortus quantus did not even bother to erase these. What was Belisarius to them but a bright angel of destruction? He’d lobotomized them, extinguished their communal soul. They didn’t owe him an answer.
The other elders weren’t moving. No melting of joints with anti-freeze proteins. No slow lumbering in the faint gravity. The black photosynthetic skins clung to statues of ice, performing mindless metabolic functions. Their thoughtful essence had bled away, leaving this vast archipelago of lonely islands.
He couldn’t do anything. He could make entangled particles, but he couldn’t entangle the Hortus quantus to each other, much less to the tribes of the future and the past.
He couldn’t look at them. Seeing the results of his crime was too much to accept. But turning away couldn’t help him. His perfect memory preserved them in his mind’s eye, like a slideshow of the moments of horror as he realized what he’d done. His memory was a curse in this moment, as it had been when he’d seen the Garret destroyed. He staggered away from the living graveyard he’d made.
“They were thinking and talking,” Saint Matthew said softly in his helmet.
“I destroyed their soul,” Belisarius said, his voice cracking.
The saint was silent.
“They were unique,” Belisarius said. “Transcendent. They really existed beyond the material. I destroyed the part of them that was eternal.”
“Mister Arjona,” the AI said, “Belisarius. You couldn’t have known. You didn’t mean to.”
“It’s not about knowing. I did it. But so did the Homo quantus project. The Hortus quantus would still be alive if I’d been less curious, more cautious. The Homo quantus would still have a home if I could control my instincts. Our instincts, requisitioned by Banks, were made too strong to be safe. I wasn’t strong enough to stop mine. The Homo quantus as a species have to share in this guilt, but most of it is mine.”
Saint Matthew spoke in his ear, but Belisarius wasn’t listening. Oddly, his brain had stopped recording. Parts of him were shutting down. He walked without counting the steps, measuring the distances in millimeters. Then, Saint Matthew appeared in the heads-up display in his helmet.
Belisarius closed his eyes and kept walking, following the mental image of the surface he’d recorded in his mind. He wouldn’t listen to the AI. He walked, acidic grief blocking everything out until he was wrenched by someone grabbing the chest straps of his harness.
Iekanjika’s fist was bunching his harness and a drawn sidearm was in the other hand.
“What are you doing over here?” she demanded by tight suit-to-suit laser. “I left you with the drill.”
His crime was too big to repeat, a lump too wide to fit past his throat.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“There was an accident,” Belisarius heard Saint Matthew answer. “He was examining the Hortus quantus from within the fugue. Something went wrong with them.”
Iekanjika didn’t lower the sidearm. She squinted at the field of Hortus quantus.
“Did they react to him?” she asked. “Something the Union will notice?”
“I killed them all,” Belisarius said.
“They don’t look dead to me,” Iekanjika said.
“They really were quantum lifeforms,” Belisarius said. “They possessed a true Cartesian dualism of mind and body. Their essence wasn’t here. It was in the interacting entanglement across space and time. I observed it. I collapsed all of it, all the miracle that couldn’t be seen.”
Iekanjika holstered the pistol and gripped the sides of his helmet and forced him to look up, her helmet light shining through his faceplate.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
He nodded awkwardly in his helmet, closing his eyes against the light and her look.
“That’s... terrible, Arjona,” she said, “but this herd of vegetable intelligences wouldn’t have survived more than a few months anyway.”
“They would have survived. Their entangled consciousness would have survived the flare. It would even have survived the theft of the time gates.”
“Let us hope the same can be said of the Union.”
“Everything I’ve touched has come out wrong. They engineered me to be the exemplar of my generation, and instead I became a con man. As a con man I betrayed my clients and used my friends, which endangered my people. My meeting of the Hortus quantus, one of the only untarnished moments of my life, was poisoned by my engineered curiosity and obsession.”
“You need to bring the core samples back,” Saint Matthew said firmly. “You can save the Homo quantus. And one day, you might do something for the Hortus quantus.”
“Do something?” he demanded. “I collapsed the quantum entanglement! That can’t be uncollapsed.”
“Arjona,” Iekanjika said, “I’m the last person who ought to be comforting you, but put this in perspective. This is not normal causality. We’re moving around events in space and time. The vegetable intelligences died long before you knew they existed. If what you say is true, you’ve come back to a time before they went extinct, and maybe you discovered that you caused their extinction. That doesn’t change anything. Whether it was an asteroid, a solar flare or a single Homo quantus visitor, in our present, they were dead before we came, and they’re dead when we leave.”
Belisarius hesitated. She didn’t understand. No one but a Homo quantus could.
“You can’t do anything for the Hortus quantus now,” Saint Matthew said. “You’ll know more in the future. And you’ll have people to help you. You and Miss Mejía have to lead your people now. This trip into the past has shown you other ways of being. Hundreds of hyper-intelligent Homo quantus working on reversing this event will be very different from you thinking about it alone right now. And you’ll be bringing home pollen samples from across thousands of years.”
“Dreams don’t all come true, Arjona,” Iekanjika said. “What you eventually make might not be what you dreamed, but if you care, it might be better than nothing.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
IEKANJIKA DIDN’T KNOW what to do with Arjona. He shouldn’t have been her problem, and yet somehow he was. She knew little about his stability, how quickly he might bounce back from this, whether it might break him, or whether that had already happened. She set him to focusing on the core samples. It was boring work. She didn’t know if that would help, but right now she just needed to keep him out of trouble.
“Arjona,” she said. “I need your AI.”
“What?” Arjona said, touching his wrist self-consciously.
“I need to find some way to get Rudo cleared of these charges. History has to be put back on track.”
The augments in Iekanjika’s eyes dialed up the light sensitivity. In grain-washed detail, Arjon
a looked uncertain.
“I can’t do it without him,” she said.
Arjona unwrapped the service band from his wrist. She gave him hers.
“Stay here,” she said. “Keep the drill working. Don’t do anything else, no matter how you feel.”
Iekanjika left Arjona and marched back to HQ maintenance.
“Where are we going?” the AI asked in her helmet.
“Will he crack?”
“Imagine you just accidentally annihilated a habitat with thousands of innocent people inside.”
“If he cracks, can you take over for him?”
“The drilling and getting the right sample? I don’t know. If he shuts down, we have to do our best and then get back to Cassandra and the flier. She’ll know what to do.”
“If we get back,” Iekanjika said.
“What do you mean?” the AI said.
“I don’t know how to fix the timeline. I don’t know where or how to create evidence without getting caught doing it. I contacted someone who could help, but they won’t help either.”
“What are you hoping I can do?”
“The high-level codes that Lieutenant-General Rudo gave us are limited. I need more. Arjona said that you’re one of the most advanced AIs in all of civilization. The security around the Expeditionary Force shouldn’t stop you.”
“Maybe so for electronic security, but I can’t reach stand-alone systems in the high security areas.”
They arrived at the maintenance HQ. Iekanjika cycled the airlock.
“You should be able to reach Captain Rudo’s virtual office from here,” she said.
A collection of worn-looking privates and corporals were cooling their heels inside. Some diced. Some smoked. Three napped. She knew this kind of crowd. As a young teen, she’d been a private-in-training, working hard on getting at least a technical rating, making her way into the officer corps. She’d spent time in crew bays just like this, with moderately or completely unmotivated crews, not working for anything, not themselves, not even the dream. Just people who’d signed up for a three-year hitch in a bad job, suddenly finding themselves trapped in it forever. And they knew people like her too, people on the way up, driving themselves.
Iekanjika found a hard stool by an empty terminal, close enough for the AI to establish a tight data beam. She lit one of the cigarettes Okonkwo had given her. The user access screen brightened, querying for authorization.
“Turn her office upside down, without anyone noticing you,” she whispered.
“One of these day,” the AI said in her implant, “I’m going to do something good for someone’s soul.”
Iekanjika puffed quietly, assuming the cautious ease of NCOs and crew anywhere officers might walk in unannounced. While her cigarette burned down, she plotted escape routes in case MilSec somehow traced back the AI’s access. After some minutes, the AI started speaking painfully loud in her audio implant. She gritted her teeth and dialed down the volume as she tensed to run.
“What is it?” she whispered. “Were you found out?”
“I don’t think so. Captain Rudo has some strange things in her virtual office, things no one has seen yet, not even the MPs.”
“What things?”
“I snuck around the hidden directories she used to meet electronically with co-plotters. Hidden under those were whole processors that aren’t accounted for anywhere in the network. Not only that, but the power draw and connectivity of the system is very efficient, efficient enough that a routine scan wouldn’t notice that other systems were running.”
“What does that mean?” Iekanjika asked with a sinking feeling. “Is this an auditor thing?”
“The system architecture isn’t typical of Union design. It matches Congregate system architecture. Worse yet, it doesn’t look forty years old. I saw designs like this ten years ago in Congregate military systems. There must be another set of time travelers here, from the Congregate.”
She took a long draw on her cigarette as the full implications sank in.
“No, there aren’t,” Iekanjika whispered. Her heart started breaking. “Forty years ago, the Congregate were using their cutting-edge tech to spy on their client nations. That equipment and those designs wouldn’t be phased into regular units for twenty or thirty years. Are you sure it’s hers?”
“It’s bio-coded to her DNA and thought-locked.”
“The Union doesn’t have thought-lock tech,” she said slowly. “Even now.”
“What does this mean?”
Iekanjika tapped out her cigarette and crushed it under her thumb until the paper fragmented and the dried leaf powdered. It wasn’t hitting her yet. She was reacting in a kind of combat consciousness that filed facts and prioritized information. Emotional reactions were crowded back until the adrenaline dropped. Right now, her adrenaline was surging.
“It means that Rudo is a Congregate sleeper agent,” Iekanjika said woodenly.
“The Commander of your Navy? The one who destroyed the Parizeau and stole the Freyja Axis from the Congregate?”
Iekanjika slumped. This revelation was enormous, bigger than the impossibility of traveling back in time, bigger than breaking through the Puppet Axis. Forty years ago, the woman who called herself Rudo had been a Congregate sleeper agent.
“Who is Garai Munyaradzi?” the AI asked.
“I don’t know,” Iekanjika whispered. “Why?”
“His bio-ID is over many of the secret files. I can access the Force’ original manifests from here. He appears in the manifests, but his personnel record isn’t stored with the other personnel files.”
She didn’t answer. Pieces were falling into place too quickly. Rudo’s original story, that she’d hacked the military academy’s systems at Harare was hard to swallow. A civilian shouldn’t be able to do that. But Congregate agents within the Union bureaucracy could. Easily. Maybe they’d even helped kill the original Rudo.
It was overwhelming. Forty years from now, Kudzanai Rudo was arguably the most powerful person in the Sub-Saharan Union. She commanded the navy, and de facto the armed forces. The officers and crews gave their loyalty to the hero general who’d brought home a fleet lost in history and who had led it in its first battle against the most powerful navy in civilization. And she’d won. She wasn’t just the inspiration and the cult worship figure of the fleet; she was a national icon.
And she’d been a Congregate informer and spy.
More dangerously, maybe she still was.
It seemed absurd to think that a sleeper agent could choose to be activated after forty years, but the Union was losing the battle. Without any change in the strategic terrain, they had eighty to a hundred days. It would be very tempting for Rudo to switch sides, or even lead the navy into a disaster. She could defect with the inflaton drive tech straight to the Congregate. As a reward, she would live in a palace in the clouds of Venus. Or if she wanted, the Congregate could give her governorship of the Union, backed by Congregate marines and navies. Even after all this time, Rudo had everything to gain by betraying her people to the Congregate.
Only Iekanjika knew all this, and she was conveniently trapped in the past, with no latitude to do anything. She couldn’t shoot Rudo here. In fact, to protect the timeline, she had to do everything in her power to get Rudo cleared of charges and properly launched in her career. To do any less could trigger a grandfather paradox of catastrophic scale, stretching across four decades of time and three hundred and eighty light-years of space.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
THE BROWN DWARF glowered accusing red down as Belisarius watched meter after meter of drill grind its way into concrete-hard ice. The grinding vibrated through his boots. Thousands of years of pollen impregnated the ice, every grain of it disconnected and disentangled from every other, like sand, instead of being part of a great quantum consciousness.
His mind drifted numbly, floating on slow-moving misery of a kind that had never seized him before. He stayed in his baseline mental state.
His feelings were too raw to go into savant, where emotions, while distanced, could abrade more harshly. Nor did he want to go into the fugue. After what had happened with the Hortus quantus, he couldn’t really be sure what that might do to the world around him. His thinking stalled, repeating, unable to break the knot of algorithms, like a computer program.
The unmodified human brain had instincts and protocols for withstanding situations too large or too painful to process. It shut itself down when it needed to, like an injured leg or spine. It dulled the emotions, disassociated and disconnected from horrific experiences. His mind could easily fracture. It came in pieces already. He would welcome the disintegration of self if it took away the anguish in a soul he hadn’t known existed before now. But he couldn’t. If he gave in, if he let himself crumble, his people would be carried away into captivity or death, just like the Hortus quantus.
The slow tide of misery washed around him, resonating with the cadence of the thrumming ground. He didn’t notice Iekanjika return until she touched his shoulder. They looked at each other for long seconds. Even in its numb state, his brain assembled patterns, analyzed, honed with a decade of experience as a con man. Something disturbed her, and not the normal anxiety of a military op going south.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, in a fair attempt at a lie. Her face, pixilated by his ocular augments dialing up their sensitivity, hardened and softened by turns. “We’re quits, Arjona.”
“What?”
“You owe me nothing anymore. Maybe you wanted the time gates for yourself. Maybe you wanted to keep them out of the hands of the Congregate when we inevitably lose our war with them. Whatever our differences before, keep them. Take them as far away from humanity as you can and keep on running.”
A tiny sense of relief blossomed in his chest, bobbing on the guilt; the edge of loneliness a little less hard.
“Is the war going to get worse?” he asked.
The Quantum Garden Page 24
