“War becomes a wild animal as soon as it’s born. You can guide it, fence it, tame it, but it has no master until it’s done.”
“It sounds like mathematical chaos.”
“Or quantum reality.”
“Thank you.”
“We’re awake past our shift,” she said. “You need rack time, but I don’t know if I can trust you inside by yourself.”
“I won’t get in trouble.”
“When I left you before, you wandered out to see the vegetable intelligences.”
“No danger of a repeat,” he said bitterly.
She gave him back the service band containing Saint Matthew.
“You can get a half shift of sleep. Shower. Eat up. Get back here. Don’t talk to anyone.”
Her orders were brisk and persuasive. He started obeying before he realized it. The world was foggy, but she spoke with stony certainty. Belisarius trudged back along the black-slicked ice towards Barracks D. But no matter his condition or exhaustion, he couldn’t turn off his brain.
It switched to quantum logical pathways, superimposing possibilities in his thinking, blurring and broadening his sense of the present, to better consider the question of whether the Hortus quantus might ever live again. The Hortus quantus had been created by miraculous accident, much like the time gates. Might the nature of the universe allow an observation to be unmade? Or could miracles be reproduced?
“Do you want to talk, Mister Arjona?” Saint Matthew said, breaking into his thoughts.
“I don’t know,” Belisarius said, slowing his progress. “I wonder if you could be right, that there might be some way to bring the Hortus quantus back.”
“Do you have any ideas?”
“I may need a miracle.”
“Are you and I talking about God?”
“Collapsing a superposition of quantum states is irreversible, at least to the observer who collapsed them. You can’t open the box on Schrödinger’s Cat, see the cat dead, and then go back to the superposition of quantum states that existed earlier. Observations can’t be unmade.”
“And the Hortus quantus can’t exist without the unobserved superposition of quantum states.”
“Yes.”
“You can’t break physical laws, Mister Arjona.”
“Everything outside of what we’re capable of understanding is where a god could exist,” Belisarius said.
“The Final Observer philosophy offered by some Homo quantus?” the AI asked.
“I observed the quantum entangled nature of the Hortus quantus, and forced the system to choose one state. But from Cassandra’s point of view, nothing has been chosen. I’m part of the quantum system that is the Hortus quantus and I’ve collapsed the probabilities. I’m the cat in the unopened box.”
“Miss Mejía can’t undo this observation,” Saint Matthew said.
“The principle of expanding concentric circles of consciousness collapsing ever more complex quantum phenomena and determining reality may still stand. The universe may be a patchwork of determined and undetermined reality. The only truly real things might be those tiny patches illuminated by the observation of a subjective consciousness. But that’s the problem with the quantum anti-realist philosophy; there’s nothing to connect those patches causally, or even to make the far past and far future of the universe real. A Final Observer, some consciousness so vast that it could collapse all the superimposed possibilities of the cosmos, might really be needed to make the universe itself real.”
“Do you believe in the Homo quantus god?” Saint Matthew said quietly.
Saint Matthew’s question was profoundly simple, yet as insightfully rigorous as any posed by the most studied Puppet theologian. The answer could transform a life, a philosophy, all belief, and yet was also binary and mutually exclusive in the most classic quantum sense. The question was all the more profound when directed at a Homo quantus. Belisarius’ brain partitioned conflicting logical positions and probabilities to sustain quantum logic. One part of his brain could be the hard-nosed realist who thought that a vast universe-creating consciousness was too much to accept. Another could embrace the hope of a Final Observer who might bring back the innocent beauty and peace of the Hortus quantus. Both beliefs existing at once had the same implications as a cat both dead and alive.
“Only a god could fix what I’ve done.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
IEKANJIKA VERIFIED THE programming in the drilling equipment. It ran smoothly. The loader of the truck contained ten thousand years of clean, stacked sample. Within six hours, their core would extend back fifty thousand years. In the distance, the time gates loomed dimly under rings of lights.
She’d done the right thing, if bitterly. The time gates were too powerful. She didn’t trust much, but compared to the Union and the Congregate, the Homo quantus might be the least destructive owners for the gates.
Her service band chirped. A message from Colonel Okonkwo waited: a summons. A chill tickled up her spine, and wondering dread about who she could and couldn’t trust. But twenty minutes later, she was knocking at the door to Colonel Okonkwo’s suite. A tall major opened the door and Iekanjika saluted. He eyed her carefully, looked back at Colonel Okonkwo who was occupied at her desk, and then stepped out of the suite. Iekanjika stepped in. He closed the door and she was alone with the colonel.
“Major Tinashe Zivai, I presume?” Iekanjika asked. The middle husband to Okonkwo and Rudo.
“I told him he couldn’t stay,” Okonkwo said without looking up. “He didn’t like it, but I’m the colonel.”
Iekanjika sat in an empty chair without moving it closer. Okonkwo shut off her display and turned.
“I have news for you. My sources informed me that MilSec cracked Rudo’s office. They found the information on the plot. Her three co-conspirators have also been arrested,” Okonkwo said. “I have no indication that your temporary identities have been compromised yet, but you never know what Rudo might reveal under interrogation.”
Iekanjika wasn’t sure how to feel. In a sense, justice was working. But the timeline was ruined. And Okonkwo hadn’t said anything about Rudo being a Congregate sleeper agent. She didn’t know. They didn’t know.
“The plot on Brigadier Iekanjika has been foiled,” Okonkwo continued, “and I should be the first to say happy birthday, colonel.”
“What?” she asked in a bit of a daze.
“Brigadier Iekanjika just had her baby. She named her Ayen.”
“I’m Ayen,” she said numbly.
“I would like to say that everything has been fixed, but things are much worse. The plot on Brigadier Iekanjika and the apparent plot by Lieutenant Nabwire to frame her has inflamed tensions in the Force. MilSec has been here twice in the last four hours. I’m being summoned to a hearing at three this afternoon. And I’ve had some discreet inquiries from warship commanders. People are picking sides. The Force is eating itself from the inside.”
“Why do you tell me this?”
“I can’t ask you what the future is supposed to look like,” Okonkwo said. “But as things stand now, Rudo will likely rot in prison or be executed. I don’t know how to get her out and, frankly, timeline or not, I know I don’t want to.”
“I know what you mean.”
“No one is essential to history. The universe can’t be so inconsistent that it would allow a time travel device to exist and yet be vulnerable when causality twists and eddies.”
“It could be.”
“Have you tested that in the future?”
She shook her head. “We didn’t dare.”
“I believe that history must be fluid, otherwise creatures like the vegetable intelligences couldn’t exist.”
“But you have no proof either.”
“The people filling history might be as replaceable as officers in a navy. Some of the details might change, but the timeline will survive.”
She didn’t know what to think. Okonkwo might be right. What needed to be done would
be done by someone. And to save Rudo would put the Expeditionary Force in her hands for decades, making her grip on the future unbreakable.
Yet the Rudo timeline had produced Ayen Iekanjika from its web of causality. Her own existence was in play, along with all the Union successes of the future. If she didn’t fix the timeline, she saw no way to fix causality. All of it would change to avoid a multi-layered grandfather paradox with no guarantee that it could actually be fixed.
If Rudo was tried and executed in the coming weeks, no one would have sent Iekanjika back in time to tell the Force that when the time came, they should seek out Arjona. But if she didn’t come back in time, Rudo would not have used the command code from her office, thereby drawing the attention of MilSec. The last forty years of history might turn into a Möbius strip of unstable causality constantly rewriting itself.
No one knew what a grandfather paradox would really do physically. If information theory was the best model, history was nothing more than all the information contained in all the particles involved in that history. Rewriting history meant erasing the information in those particles and overwriting them with new information. But a grandfather paradox was not a single rewriting event. The rewriting cycled, a toggling between the two histories forever.
But erasing and rewriting was computation, and computation took energy. They’d never been irresponsible enough to try it, but they theorized that the repeated rewrites might suck energy out of a system until it created a four-dimensional region of space-time colder than a black hole. And this was no simple desktop experiment of a grandfather paradox. The four-dimensional region influenced by Rudo and Iekanjika would be forty years in duration and almost four hundred light-years across; a swath of destruction too vast for the human mind even to picture.
“Who is Munyaradzi?” she asked.
Okonkwo couldn’t mask her surprise.
“I stumbled across suspicious files with his name in them,” she added, “but his personnel files have been pulled.”
“It’s hard to keep in mind that you’re from the future,” Okonkwo said wonderingly. “You don’t know Bantya. You don’t know Munyaradzi.”
“But you do.”
“Colonel Garai Munyaradzi was my senior husband, the man in charge of Internal Affairs before me. But he was a Congregate sleeper agent, the highest ranking one in the Force and a very successful one. He was found out. He was executed.”
A slow breath leaked from Iekanjika, one of anger and sympathy. “I’m sorry,” she said finally.
“I’m not. They saved me the trouble of confronting him myself. You can’t imagine what it’s like to live with the knowledge that your spouse is a traitor to you and your people, that the affection or love you thought you felt was all wasted.”
Surprisingly, Okonkwo wiped the back of her hand across an eye.
“You didn’t deserve that,” Iekanjika said.
“I don’t believe in deserve anymore.”
Iekanjika stared at her hands, thinking of all those who didn’t deserve. Her. The vegetable intelligences. All the crew and officers who had worked so hard their whole lives to bring the Expeditionary Force home for their war of independence. Okonkwo.
“Have you found a way for me to get the core samples near the time gates without being observed?” she asked. “Maybe in eight hours?”
“Some people aren’t going to be happy, but I can authorize a relatively large spot inspection of the security systems in the MP tower. I can time it for you.”
“Thank you,” she said, synchronizing the time on her service band to Okonkwo’s.
Iekanjika stood, but didn’t move to the door. Okonkwo looked up at her.
“You don’t know me in the future, do you?” Okonkwo said.
Iekanjika shook her head. Okonkwo looked wistful for a moment.
“I’m glad to have met you now then, Ayen.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
TO HIS SURPRISE and bafflement, he’d passed all the tests; but whatever this new thing was, built on the scaffold of 1D446, he was not yet a Scarecrow. He’d been equipped with processors, armament, armor, sensing equipment and vast arrays of intelligence reports. But he was just a machine, a tool without function. He’d not been invested with the authorities that would make him useful to the Congregate, and would make him real. He was in between. Interstitial. Not alive, nor useful, but not dead, or lacking value.
The old, second-generation Scarecrow summoned him back to the interrogation chamber, a diamond bulb distending off the upper curve of a big defense facility floating in the hot murk forty-two kilometers above the surface of Venus. Beyond the window, misty in the distance, were sentry drones, spheres of sensors and weapons beneath glassy surfaces slick with condensing sulfuric acid. He was home.
Two armed human operatives stood behind the second-generation Scarecrow, over a bound human. Pictures shuttered past in his processing, seeking matches. The two armed human operatives were members of a Scarecrow support team, seen many times, identified almost instantly. The last human, face bloodied, hair hanging across forehead and eyes, was slower to match: almost a second.
“Adéodat,” he said, stopping, looking in confusion at the second-generation Scarecrow.
“Kill this one.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing. No ties to your past should survive the vitrification process.”
“He doesn’t need to die. He’s a citizen of the Congregate.”
The second-generation Scarecrow stamped closer on piezoelectric muscles. Camera eyes swiveled, reading him, accompanying an invasive digital search of his processors and memories, an examination of his thoughts and motivations. He had nothing to hide.
“One life is a small price to pay for a new Scarecrow,” the second-generation Scarecrow said. “You have decades of service before you, protecting the Congregate from enemies. If you pass this test.”
“What are you testing?”
“Loyalty,” came the cold digital reply, not even by sound, but inserted directly into his thoughts. “Many are relentless, but not all are loyal.”
Why me? Why did you pick me? Relentless? He didn’t know. Loyal? Surely others were more loyal. But he didn’t say these things. He wouldn’t. But it didn’t matter. The older Scarecrow was reading every one of his thoughts, every output and algorithm within his processors. Why wasn’t the older Scarecrow failing him? His hesitation was obvious; he couldn’t kill his own brother. Yet he was trapped in this digital body and mind, incapable of expressing emotion.
“The vitrification process specifically deletes markers and identities,” the second-generation Scarecrow said. “We are too powerful to possess any side loyalties. The Congregate is too important for one life to endanger it.”
“I don’t want to,” he said. “Adéodat deserves to live. He’s who I’ve been protecting. We’ve all been protecting him. I didn’t want to be a Scarecrow.”
“The Congregate is ringed on all sides by enemies,” the second-generation Scarecrow said. “You have been summoned to serve.”
Why? Why did he need to become a Scarecrow?
Adéodat looked up in fear, alone, all of the electronic conversation silent to him.
There could only be one reason he’d been summoned to serve as a Scarecrow. Not because he’d been gravely injured. Not because his analysis was irreplaceable. Not because he’d outcompeted all his nameless colleagues who’d wanted to be Scarecrows. It could only be because his mind was attuned to loyalty, above all other factors, above humanity and pity. How many Scarecrows were grown and yet never passed this point? Was he one of them or was he like the older Scarecrow? The Congregate was greater than any single person and any single life, and worth preserving at all costs.
Adéodat looked in wordless terror from one Scarecrow to the other, believing himself to be trapped in some mistake, without a friend in the world. The thing grown on the template of his brother stepped closer and lifted a mechanical hand of wire and servo-moto
rs and piezo-electrics.
A bullet fired from the hand into Adéodat’s heart.
The younger brother bled to death, gasping in disbelief.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
BELISARIUS SLEPT POORLY amid the snoring, snuffling, sleep-grumbling of a barracks full of strangers and their cold, humid smells. He felt no less a monster, but he was strangely more open to taking some comfort in this uncomfortable press of humanity. They all sheltered temporarily on this icy world, vulnerable to the elements. The very existence of humanity in this place was a hopeful statement in itself. That thought alone let him sleep in some kind of internal cease-fire with himself.
His mathematical dreams calculated death rates among the Hortus quantus, extinction curves, wobbling gene frequencies as the population dropped precipitously and was finally wiped out. His dreaming mind calculated the constellation of interacting probabilities required to make the quantum minds of the Hortus quantus, and the time required before those factors would be logically expected to appear. Then, Iekanjika was shaking him awake. It was still the middle of the sleep shift. He’d slept a broken total of seventy-one minutes.
“Suit up,” she whispered.
He groaned, dressed and met her in the commissary where she was pulling out more rations on their ration cards. They didn’t speak until they could laser in the airlock with their helmets on.
“Give me your AI,” she said. “Go to the drill site. In five hours, take the samples and walk them out to the time gates and go through.”
“What about you?” Arjona said as he handed over Saint Matthew in his service band.
“I’ll be with you,” she said as the airlock opened to the near-vacuum. “In case I’m not, go. If you have to leave me here, make sure you pay my people for what you’ve taken. Your people are not the only ones on the verge of destruction.”
“I will,” he said. “What about Saint Matthew?”
“The preservation of the timeline has become far more dangerous. I need help.”
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