The Quantum Garden

by Derek Künsken

  No MPs were in sight. They drove the truck right up to the edge of the pastward wormhole where no pollen emerged. Iekanjika programmed the truck to drive back on its own to the tool shed and then gripped the straps around the ton of ice cores, and hefted them high with a combination of weak gravity and military-grade muscular augments. She maneuvered the ice cores across the horizon. Belisarius grabbed the chest plate.

  Holding onto each other, they hopped into the eerie vastness within the time gates. Most light vanished, but the haunted blue Cherenkov radiation made hyperspace itself luminesce in dimensions that were hard to see. The Calculated Risk hung in the gloomy emptiness, about fifty meters ahead of them. Its running lights winked red.

  They each grabbed the straps around the ice cores and used their cold jets. The mass of the samples made this slow work. The Calculated Risk neared. Long bright scars marked the hull in some places. In others, what looked like burn splashes blackened the cowling.

  “Antimatter weapons leave marks like that,” Iekanjika lasered to him.

  Belisarius’ brain had already analyzed the spray patterns and come to the same conclusion. But there were no weapons in this hyperspace, nor had he seen any natural sources of antimatter.

  The doors to the lower cargo area, where Stills’ pressure chamber was kept, opened. Belisarius clamped down the ice cores while Iekanjika shut the bay doors. In a small way, he was home, a cramped box of a ship in which he could flee faster than anyone could catch him. They cycled through the bay airlock and into the cramped cockpit.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CASSANDRA HUGGED BEL as he emerged from the airlock, not even giving him a chance to take off his helmet. He hugged her back, uncertainly at first, then with a kind of desperation.

  “You fuckers better have had a good vacation,” Vincent called back, “’cause we been eating shit out here.”

  Iekanjika and Bel got their helmets free. They were both sweaty. Bel had started to lose some of the extra pigment they’d used for his disguise.

  “What happened?” Bel asked.

  “Fuckin’ Scarecrow!” Vincent said.

  Bel stared at Cassandra questioningly.

  “Fuckin’ Scarecrow,” she said, and laughed.

  “Don’t shit your pants,” Vincent said. “We nuked the electronic felcher.”

  “With what?” Iekanjika asked.

  Vincent explained, fouling and rendering crude what had been a relatively straightforward geometric set of events. Bel looked at Cassandra wonderingly. Iekanjika shook her head and took a seat. Something in Bel’s expression was dark, mourning. Iekanjika was also in a mood. She strapped herself in and turned immediately to look out the cockpit window, into a geometric immensity unhealthy for baseline humans to ponder too long.

  “I’ll navigate us to the other mouth,” Cassandra said. “Come on. Strap in.”

  Bel nodded and she brushed his face once with her fingers, before she took the pilot’s seat and started issuing instructions to Vincent to carry them to the other side of the hyperspace. No one else spoke.

  Cassandra had Vincent park them about five hundred meters from the futureward horizon, about twenty minutes after they had entered so they would not encounter their past selves, or the Scarecrow. To keep them in place, she’d had Vincent bring the racer to a step in a set of dimensions that included a time axis perpendicular to the one they’d followed in. Here they could look for the other wormholes of the Axis Mundi. She unstrapped and floated back to Bel.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “How long, Mejía?” Iekanjika asked.

  Cassandra shrugged. “A few hours, I hope.”

  The colonel didn’t look impressed and turned back to the window. Cassandra and Bel moved through the galley, then to the airlock to the cargo hold. They were out of earshot.

  “What’s wrong, Bel?”

  He pursed his lips and looked away. She pulled his face gently around. He was crying.

  “What is it?”

  He slipped his arms around her and held her tight. She whispered in his ear, the way she had when they were children, frightened and dislocated by their first steps into savant and the fugue, soothing, stroking his face. Then, slowly, in hoarse fragments, he told her everything, of who he had found and what they were, and what he had done. Each word seemed to expand the cosmos and all its possibilities, until they all collapsed.

  Humanity had found microbial life exploiting other environments. Some patron nations were rumored to have even found other intelligent life forms, but there was no proof and no hint that other life forms might be more like the Homo quantus than baseline humans. Other quantum beings were such an unexpected discovery that it was difficult for even her engineered brain to contextualize it.

  And Bel had destroyed them.

  “It’s not your fault, Bel,” she whispered.

  “It’s either my fault or the fault of the whole Homo quantus project,” he said bitterly.

  “You didn’t choose for this to happen, Bel. You weren’t reckless. If you had known, you would have done anything to prevent this.”

  “Those are just words, Cassie.”

  “They’re more than words, Bel! The region of space-time occupied by the Hortus quantus is bounded in time, just like everything else, including us. They have a beginning and an end. The presence of any human, and especially a Homo quantus, was destructive to them. But your specific presence there also had a remarkable outcome. You saw what they were. You saw what kind of an intellect could be formed with quantum processes. And before they ended, you took away gamete samples. They were going to be set back to zero by the flare and the loss of the time gates. Now you have the gametes and the time gates. The Hortus quantus may be important to the cosmos and you might be the mechanism by which their seeds are carried to new environments.”

  “The cosmos has no purpose, Cassie.”

  “It has whatever purpose we give it, Bel. You might be less a destroyer than the bird who carries seed to new lands.”

  “I would love that to be true.”

  “We’ll make it true.”

  He nodded and she held him again.

  “Let’s cut up the ice cores,” she said, “so we can find ourselves some axes to help the Union and our own people.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  AYEN STEWED IN the straps of her seat, waiting one hour, three, six in the unwholesome space within the time gates. The pair of Homo quantus had been busy for hours. Stills was silent and inscrutable in his steel chamber in the lower hold.

  She’d written and rewritten her mission report, boiled it down to just notes, but finally erased everything and shock-wiped the pad’s drive. Nothing she’d seen or done could genuinely be adequately expressed in words, and who would read it? Rudo, the once—and perhaps future—sleeper agent? The questionably competent Minister for the Navy? The Union Cabinet, wracked by infighting and lack of resolve?

  Two weeks ago, everything had seemed clear, at least for her. She’d lived safely within a rational, loyal chain of command with a very specific mission. But since then, she’d been dislocated in space and time and authority, and neither space nor time was that difficult to come to terms with. She’d struggled with having nothing but gray moral positions to stand upon, no higher authority to whom to cede decisions beyond her rank.

  She’d been solely and entirely responsible for handling risks that faced not only the Expeditionary Force, but the entire Sub-Saharan Union. She’d been thrust into a surreal adulthood where she parented the parents, punished them, and made choices that would create or end her nation, and the kind of people they were. She didn’t want this responsibility. It was hard to understand what set of looping causal factors had led her to this existence, and she didn’t know the way back to normalcy. Or if she even had a life to go back to.

  Lieutenant-General Rudo was cunning. She’d had thirty-nine years to think about the last time she’d seen Ayen, thirty-nine years to plan fo
r their reunion, and had all the power of the Union to execute her plans. Rudo knew that Colonel Iekanjika had gone from being the most loyal of her supporters to being someone who now had to consider assassinating her. All her life, Ayen had been prepared and groomed for this formative moment in Rudo’s past, and now her purpose had been fulfilled. The plant that had thrown seed to the wind could now be plowed under.

  Her life and loyalty might mean nothing. Through no fault of her own, the best thing for the fleet and the Union after she gave over the coordinates of the ten Axes Mundi might be her own death. She’d always been ready to die at the hands of an enemy. She’d been ready to die for strategic advantage in a battle. She’d even resigned herself to the fact that her life might end in friendly fire. It was harder to swallow the idea that a death might be needed for political and organizational, rather than strategic or tactical, reasons.

  But she wasn’t ready to lie down yet. She had no idea if the Union was in safe hands. Maybe Lieutenant-General Rudo was no longer to be trusted, and maybe the Union Cabinet was uncertain ground upon which to lay a foundation. Of her own loyalty she had no question. If she belonged to no authority structure, and those at the top of her nation were unreliable, what would she do to save her people?

  That wasn’t a question she would have asked even a week ago.

  She would seek allies, powerful allies.

  The Union Government had been tentative in their diplomatic overtures. Ayen could imagine what they’d do with the coordinates to ten mouths to the Axis Mundi. They would imitate the patron nations and keep them secret.

  But the Expeditionary Force had, of necessity, created new ways of thinking about risk and advantage. They’d had to think of new ways of fighting, sometimes even changing tactics and remodeling strategies on no other merit than that they differed from what had come before. The Union was too small, floating on a sea of giant patron nations; it could never afford to be predictable. Secrecy would not turn the new Axes Mundi into strategic advantage.

  “Stills,” she said finally.

  “What?”

  “What is the goal of the mongrels? What do your people want?”

  “I’d like people to stop trying to slip their cocks into my ass.”

  “I’m serious, Stills,” she snapped. “What are your people doing? Do you want to work for the Congregate forever?”

  “I ain’t workin’ for the Congregate now. Although I ain’t rightly workin’ now. This is another one of those shut-up-and-wait missions that’s borin’ the shit out of me, hyperspace or no.”

  Stills’ obtuse attitude would make him a fine negotiator.

  “How many mongrels could we peel out of Congregate service if we had enough inflaton fighters?” she said. “You brought thirty. We’re still outgunned.”

  “I don’t know. Lotta the dogs like a good fight, but yours doesn’t look so winnable right now.”

  “Numbers,” she pressed.

  She imagined thousands. That would be terrifying, if they could build enough inflaton fighters. They’d built all their kit with multiple self-destruct systems, but with that many fighters in play, their systems would eventually fail, and the Congregate would capture and eventually reverse engineer the inflaton drives, and the inflaton cannons. Still, that was almost a problem for another year. They needed to survive this year.

  “You pay right, you might get two, three hundred.”

  “How many does that leave in Congregate service?”

  “All over? Shit. Maybe fifteen hundred?”

  Not thousands. She’d hoped for squadrons of mongrel fighters swarming Congregate positions like wasps.

  “How do we get them?”

  “You have to fuckin’ win.”

  She took a steadying breath. Speaking with the mongrels was always difficult.

  “We invented a lot of new tactics for our cruisers,” she said. “You’ve improvised new ones for the inflaton fighters. I’m wondering what I could learn from you if we were to apply mongrel tactics to the war cruisers.”

  “I seen some of what you guys did when you took Freyja,” Stills said, for the first time with a note of cold admiration in his false voice. “It might be interesting to see what the mongrels could do with one of your big ships if everyone onboard could pull thirty gees.”

  “Or more. How many mongrels have you got on Indi’s Tear? Can we have some of them?”

  “If you want to scrape the bottom of the barrel, you might pull another couple hundred, but inexperience may be just as likely to get some of your experienced mongrels killed.”

  “What’s the training time for a mongrel?”

  “If they’re luggin’ big ass cojones, a few months. Mongrels already come with some serious three-dimensional spacial awareness from living in the oceans, but piloting is about the hardware and the fine control of the electroplaques. Not every mongrel has it. Your recruiting plans would have some serious hard upper limits, added to the fact that you’d be laughed out of every pitch.”

  “What about if they were crewing the cruisers?”

  “Mierda,” he said. “That might be deadly. Two or three mongrels in command positions, calling the shots, navigating. Leave the numpty mongrels as gunnery crews or engineering. Interesting. But I still don’t know that you’d get that many.”

  “What if I sweetened the deal?”

  “Talk, sweet-cheeks.”

  “How would the Mongrel Government react to the idea of their own Axis and a permanent alliance with the Union?”

  “Slow down, sweetheart. What government?”

  “The Mongrel Government.”

  “Ain’t no such thing. In case you ain’t guessed it, orders give us dogs a rash.”

  “How do you get anything done?” she asked, wondering if he was lying.

  “What would we want to get done?”

  “Defense, finance, laws, health, education, everything.”

  “Shit, we don’t do that. And who would invade? We live at the bottom of an ocean in a system filled with asteroidal debris. The closest thing to a government we got is gettin’ together for fucking and birthing. We aren’t clients of the Congregate, ‘cause who the fuck would sign an accord? Every pilot has an individual contract.”

  She was baffled. How could anyone survive that anarchy?

  “So there’s no point in offering the tribe an Axis,” she said.

  She felt herself slump inside. She felt boxed in. Even if she survived the week, the Union wouldn’t survive the year.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We own some things. Fucking equipment and birthing equipment. The tribe has never had to come together to defend anything we own. Seems like a shitload of work.”

  “I’m surprised.”

  “I didn’t say fuck off. I just said it don’t feel intuitive-like, right? Where would we live?”

  “I suppose I assumed that you’d worry about that on your own if given an Axis. Bachwezi system doesn’t have any heavy water worlds like Indi’s Tear.”

  “Lemme give it a think.”

  “It may come to nothing anyway.”

  “I didn’t think you were authorized to make these kinds of big deals anyway.”

  “Big things are moving,” she said, “and I don’t know where they’ll stop.”

  “I don’t give the Union more than six months,” Stills said.

  “Three months for the Union. And I might not survive the week.”

  “Did you fuck up bad?”

  Interesting question. The dimly luminescent dark beyond the cockpit, and its sudden, dizzying shifts in perspective, stared back at her. Yawning nothingness.

  “I found two very important people in the past and shot them both in the head,” she said.

  A sound came through the speakers. After a moment, she realised it was laughter.

  “Huh,” he said. “Maybe you are somebody the mongrels could work with.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  HE AND CASSIE had done all the preparatory wor
k, had measured the lowest-energy time through the time gates with the pollen in the ice core, but it had taken far longer than they’d wanted and in the end, they needed sleep. But they were within the time gates, and he quickly found that it was no fit place to sleep. Even Belisarius’ baseline human senses tilted unnervingly in a way that had nothing to do with gravity. In this region of uncurled space-time, electrical signals in the neurons had a richness that was difficult to describe, adding a kind of echo to sensation.

  And motion mattered a great deal. They were four-dimensional constructs in a region where they could accidentally begin to rotate through any of the seven other dimensions. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, the sense of dislocated falling overwhelmed everything else. And all these effects multiplied in sleep.

  Being Homo quantus made it worse. Millions of magnetosomes made their homes in his muscle cells. Within each, a tiny coil of iron could rotate in cytoplasmic fluid in response to the ambient magnetic field or to the electrical current he could send from his electroplaques.

  Most of the time the interior of the time gates had no real magnetic field, but sometimes the effects of EM fields in other subsets of hyperspace turned some of his magnetosomes in nonsensical directions, giving the EM world a sense of false texture that woke him with magnetic hallucinations.

  And worse, he replayed with photographic clarity, waking and in nightmare, the moments he observed the Garret being destroyed, and the terrifying moment when all the superimposed probabilities knitting the Hortus quantus together collapsed. The interior of the time gates lent a tactile texture to his recurring nightmares.

  In the sleep bag beside him, Cassie moved restlessly and finally, they decided to give up on sleep. Belisarius didn’t ask how Iekanjika had slept, or worse, Stills, who also had magnetosomes, but far cruder than those Belisarius and Cassie carried. He didn’t want to know what a blurrier sight would do to the nightmares of someone trapped within the body of a Homo eridanus.