The Quantum Garden

by Derek Künsken

  And now, for the first time in her life, she was free to choose?

  She didn’t know for certain that Rudo was loyal to the Union. And if she toppled Rudo, if that was even possible, what then? They were in the middle of a war. Precipitating a leadership crisis in the general ranks was no way to win it.

  And what was more galling, what ate at her insides, was that none of what Rudo had done was reproachable. She’d gotten them here. She’d destroyed the Parizeau, and taken the Freyja Axis. What were soldiers in that context, but acceptable losses? Or a mother? Would Ayen have chosen any differently? She would like to think so. She would have said before that no murder was ever acceptable, but she’d murdered six people to save the timeline. She’d gotten results. Like Rudo.

  The only thing that mattered was whether Rudo belonged to the Union or to the Congregate. And Ayen had no information. This could only be settled by trust. There was no evidence. Just instinct. And yet Rudo had built Ayen’s instincts too. She was in a decisive battle for the future of the Union, and the only tool she had at her disposal was talking.

  “And so began the rise of Rudo,” Ayen said bitterly.

  Rudo shook her head helplessly.

  “You saw it,” Rudo said. “The Expeditionary Force was coming apart thirty-nine years ago. We had the greatest military asset ever discovered by humanity, and it was about to be lost because everyone wanted the crown.”

  “So you made the fighting go away?” Ayen said derisively.

  Rudo had the grace to look ashamed, regretful.

  “Takatafare was trained to the kind of military politicking which, even after the death of your mother, gave her no advantage on Nyanga,” Rudo said defiantly. “I grew up watching gangland positioning.”

  “From gangster to traitor back to gangster.”

  “I consolidated the Expeditionary Force under Takatafare. I’m not proud of everything I did, but I kept the Expeditionary Force together.”

  “I’m sure the Old Lady was very pleased with your loyalty.”

  “She didn’t trust me, but she needed me. And she eventually brought me into her political marriage as her junior wife.”

  The silence between them stretched. Ayen fidgeted. What did Rudo want from her? Was this a gangland tactic too? Putting Ayen off-balance before having her eliminated? Or was she hunting forgiveness, as much as Arjona, or Ayen herself?

  “Takatafare wanted to refit the fleet with better weapons and propulsion systems, but she didn’t know what to do with a new fleet,” Rudo said softly. “I did. I made the plans. I invented all the strategies. I trained the Expeditionary Force. I moved new people into the right commands.”

  “Including me,” Ayen said bitterly. “I thought you invited me into your marriage because you saw something in me. And then, not even weeks ago, I realized you’d only married me to avoid a causal violation. That was a step down from pedestal to floor. But the last few days have pulled that out from under me too. It wasn’t just a causal violation you were avoiding. You couldn’t trust me knowing what I know. I’m dangerous to you and yet I couldn’t be eliminated. So you made me your junior wife. It’s all a lie.”

  “Your last words as you shot me were we’ll speak again. I would have been negligent not to have taken a hand in making you.”

  “You didn’t pick me to find Arjona and work with him because I was good,” Ayen pressed. “I was the only person you knew for certain would survive.”

  “You’re an excellent officer. Look what you’ve done with Arjona for the Union. Time travel makes a mess of orders and choices, but it doesn’t take away what you chose to do in each moment.”

  “None of that makes me less dangerous to you though, does it? Our time debts are quits aren’t they? You can finally eliminate me without endangering the timeline.”

  “I don’t want to,” Rudo said. “We have a common dream, you and I, and I have no more secrets. You know everything about me, ugly and good. No one knows me better than you do and I’ve had four decades to think about who I was when I met you, and who you were. You were the first honorable person I’d ever met, the first who showed me a dream I should carry.

  “I’d been like everyone else, looking out for myself, trying to pick sides and hedge my bets, and you made me ashamed of that. You showed me a larger dream and you showed me the kind of people who would reach it. I didn’t want to be left behind. When I became a major, I knew I didn’t want to be like Takatafare; I wanted to be like you. If I haven’t ruined everything between us, I still want you leading my staff. I still want you as my junior wife.”

  “To help you with more assassinations?”

  “You told me we’re losing the war. Outgunned, outnumbered, and led by a Government trained for subservience to the Congregate. Even the officer corps Bachwezi has developed is composed of people with the right political connections to get into the academy and get promoted.”

  “What are you proposing?”

  “I don’t know yet. I don’t know if some shock to the system will show them how to pursue the same dream. I don’t know.”

  Ayen didn’t know either, what to do with the larger Union culture they’d rejoined, nor what to trust in Rudo. The fire was there, the fire of the dream. Her faith wasn’t knowledge. She really believed. Ayen had made her believe. And belief was all the Ayen had.

  “Swear to me,” Ayen said, “that you aren’t a Congregate sleeper agent and that you’ll never betray us to them.”

  “I swear it.”

  “And swear to me that there will be no more lies between us.”

  “I swear it.”

  Ayen slowly nodded. The ache and grief still throbbed, but like a lanced infection, the pressure started receding.

  Ayen took a data wafer from her pocket.

  “This is from Arjona,” Ayen said, “the coordinates of twenty mouths of the Axis Mundi.”

  She plugged it into the table and unlocked it. The coordinates showed geometrically in a hologram between them. A magically expanded world, a whole new kingdom. They both regarded the projection with some wonder.

  “Thank you, Ayen,” Rudo breathed.

  “This was a long op,” Ayen said, floating away in the zero-g. “And I need to clean up and finish absorbing all this.”

  Rudo looked small sitting strapped in her chair, in some ways as beaten as Ayen herself. The scar of crinkled skin running across her scalp like an ugly, but effective weld, reflected the lights in the room that seemed sharp after the faint red glow bathing Nyanga.

  Rudo was welded together. This Kudzanai Rudo was born of the murders of the previous Kudzanai Rudo and of Brigadier Iekanjika, as well as her betrayals of the Union and Ayen. But like the vegetable intelligences, Rudo was born of more than past. Information and perspective from the future was as much part of her, and that was as heavy a secret to carry as murder. Kudzanai Rudo the patriot and leader had not existed before the imperfect welding of future and past.

  And if Rudo was created like the vegetable intelligences from past, present and future, Ayen was created from nothing at all. Ayen the honor-bound officer had been raised in Rudo’s dream, yet Ayen herself had given the dream to Captain Rudo. Ayen came from nowhere.

  “In a few hours,” Ayen said slowly, “we should discuss new alliances.”

  Rudo smiled guardedly.

  Rudo was only sixty-two years old, but her age was concentrated in the sadness in her eyes. She was still paying those costs she’d incurred early in her life. And as if Ayen really could peer straight into her heart, Ayen knew that Rudo wouldn’t kill her. It was the opposite. She really would have let Ayen kill her. Rudo was aching for a redemption she couldn’t reach. Her only hope for inner peace was the gift of absolution only Ayen could give.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  BELISARIUS AND CASSIE were on the bridge of the Red, as they emerged from the third Axis Mundi wormhole transit of their voyage. Saint Matthew was with them, as were Simón and Letícia, two younger Homo quantus learnin
g to be pilots. The cockpit windows polarized and their ocular augments stepped down their sensitivity under the sudden blaze of yellow-white light. The two other big freighters, Blue and Green, carrying the rest of the Homo quantus, emerged from the Axis behind them.

  The automated navigation and piloting systems scanned the new system telescopically across a range of wavelengths. The holographic displays began filling with data. A big G-type star shone blindingly about half an AU from them. Radiological alarms sounded. Radio emissions and x-rays forced the sensors to repeatedly rescale their displays.

  The Axis mouth they’d just emerged from was just above the plane of the spinning lighthouse beam of a pulsar. X-rays and radio waves flowed around the freighters, some of it penetrating. The three ships thrust hard, lumbering towards solar north as more information came in. Radio and x-ray emissions dropped.

  The system was a binary. A white dwarf orbited the misshapen G-type star, slowly cannibalizing it. The stellar hydrogen falling onto the white dwarf fired the blistering x-rays and radio beams from the spinning poles.

  Belisarius hadn’t expected the Axis Mundi mouth to be so close to the plane of the pulsar. That was another mistake, but not one that had proven too costly—yet. He and Cassie had to take care of them all, for a while. The politics of civilization were far far behind them now. Their future was going to be engineering more than anything else for a while, the creation of a home. All of the Homo quantus could be very capable engineers, if they stopped looking at patterns for a bit.

  The tiny convoy had passed through the secret, unguarded Axis in Epsilon Indi that Belisarius had first given to the Union. They’d emerged into Kaffaljidhma in Gamma Ceti, a triple star system with a quiescent neutron star. Around this neutron star orbited three other mouths of the Axis Mundi network, which would all belong to the Union when they took possession of that system.

  The fifth mouth of the Axis Mundi around Gamma Ceti was in a distant, chaotic orbit of the F-type star. Cassie hadn’t given its coordinates to the Union and they would likely never find it. Through that Axis that only they knew of, the Homo quantus had arrived at Alpha Ceti, a system with five mouths to the Axis Mundi whose coordinates Cassie had also not given to the Union.

  A last transit through the third of those brought them here, to J2307+2229, where five wormholes of the Axis Mundi orbited a pulsar. This was a fresh start in a solar system that didn’t even have a name. And they might not name it. The Homo quantus liked numbers better than letters and words.

  He took Cassie’s hand with a sigh of relief. J2307+2229 looked inhospitable at first. The active pulsar spraying x-rays and a close, hot G-type star created orbital chaos and prevented planetary formation. But initial telemetry also showed millions of asteroids, both chondritic and iron-nickel, which would be everything they needed to build a new home, hidden from all of civilization. Cassie squeezed his hand and pointed as telescopes in multiple frequencies showed fast-moving objects darting from one of the Axis mouths.

  The objects were small, only two to three meters long, flat and triangular. The skates were a kind of unintelligent photosynthetic life-form of ceramic and metal seen around some Axis Mundi nodes circling pulsars. They were utterly alien, but alive.

  The Homo quantus had never had access to the skates to study them; the patron nations guarded all knowledge of the Axis Mundi as state secrets, even the flora and fauna that sprouted around them. Now the Homo quantus could know them, with their own unique senses. The nature of the cosmos was not just quantized and probabilistic, but it was also fecund, ready to allow life in the eddies of moving energy.

  Cassie switched on the public address system for the three ships.

  “We’ve arrived,” Cassie said to the Homo quantus. Her voice was even, if a bit shy. “We’ve reached J2307+2229, a pulsar-G1 binary, twelve hundred and thirty light-years from Epsilon Indi.”

  Saint Matthew was helpfully feeding all the bridge telemetry and astrometrics into the comms systems of the three freighters. How many Homo quantus listened to her and how many were calculating orbital periods in their heads might be debatable.

  “It will take some time to build a new Garret, but no one will ever find us here. Not the Congregate. Not the Banks of the Plutocracy. There are five mouths to the Axis Mundi here for us to study, along with the time gates. And the pulsar itself will be a telescope to peer into our world.”

  So much of the Homo quantus project had been simply building themselves and their new senses. They hadn’t gone anywhere, nor looked at anything new before developing their tendencies for quiet and shyness. Now, they had this whole system to themselves.

  “And we also have neighbors,” she said with a tiny lifting in her voice. “Skates.”

  They had not come to a dead system, but a living one, however strange the life they’d found. Cassie was looking at him now as she spoke. “And we’ll have others someday if we can succeed in resurrecting the Hortus quantus.”

  She shut off the address system and took Belisarius’ hand. They looked out at their new home.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  THOUGHTS CRACKLED. THE error messages were supposed to blink once per second, with metronomic precision, but the flashes came too quickly, or carried the pause far too long. The Scarecrow could not immediately tell if it was damage to the missile casing or to himself.

  The force of the matter-anti-matter explosion on the skin of the missile casing had been so powerful as to bend the steel frame. The Scarecrow had only survived because the initial explosion had thrown the hot wreckage of the casse à face missile casing clear of the rest of the wave of incoming anti-matter, and because most of the annihilation products had been in the gamma spectrum. The Scarecrow’s hardened circuitry and carbon neural webs had shut down briefly. Twice. The damage to the AI was likely significant, perhaps irreparable, depending on how long before he’d rebooted. No clocks could be trusted here.

  It was difficult to think. Many things made no sense. Internal pingbacks were full of errors. The sensors could not establish the speed at which the bent missile casing was traveling, but it was spinning fast enough across several axes for the Scarecrow to feel a high apparent and varying gravity.

  Sensors finally failed. But the Scarecrow wouldn’t give up. He could not. He was built to be relentless, untiring and unfailingly committed to wiping out sedition in Congregate territories. Not only had the Homo quantus helped the Union’s rebellion, but they were bringing new and dangerous weapons.

  The Homo quantus had carried enough anti-matter in their tiny ship to be used wastefully. The anti-matter hadn’t even been loaded into a weapon and launched precisely. The Scarecrow could not fully grasp the mind of someone who had so much anti-matter that they were free to splash it. How had they not been destroyed?

  The Scarecrow was trapped in this strange hell in the interior of a wormhole, but he would get out. He would alert the navy to all that had happened, and the full weight of the Congregate would fall on her enemies.

  When Captain Kel Cheris of the hexarchate is disgraced for her unconventional tactics, Kel Command gives her a chance to redeem herself, by retaking the Fortress of Scattered Needles from the heretics. Cheris’s career isn’t the only thing at stake: if the fortress falls, the hexarchate itself might be next.

  Cheris’s best hope is to ally with the undead tactician Shuos Jedao. The good news is that Jedao has never lost a battle, and he may be the only one who can figure out how to successfully besiege the fortress. The bad news is that Jedao went mad in his first life and massacred two armies, one of them his own.

  As the siege wears on, Cheris must decide how far she can trust Jedao–because she might be his next victim.

  ‘Starship Troopers meets Apocalypse Now – and they’ve put Kurtz in charge... An unmissable debut.’

  Stephen Baxter

  ‘I love Yoon’s work! Full of battles and political intrigue, in a beautifully built far-future that manages to be human and alien at the same time
.’

  Ann Leckie

  www.solarisbooks.com

  One woman. One mission. One chance to save the world.

  It’s 1952, and the world as we know it is gone. A meteorite has destroyed Washington DC, triggering extinction-level global warming. To save humanity, the world unites to form the International Aerospace Coalition. Its mission: to colonise first the Moon, then Mars.

  Elma York, World War Two pilot and mathematician, dreams of becoming an astronaut – but prejudice has kept her grounded. Now nothing – and no man – will stop her from reaching for the stars.

  “In The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal imagines an alternate history of spaceflight that reminds me of everything I loved about Hidden Figures.” ― Cady Coleman, Astronaut

  “This is what NASA never had, a heroine with attitude.”―The Wall Street Journal

  www.solarisbooks.com

  HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM…

  Life is fragile. The difference between success and failure can come down to nothing – the thread of a screw, the flick of a switch – and when it goes wrong, you fix it. Or someone dies.

  Mission Critical takes us from our world, across the Solar System, and out into deep space to tell the stories of people who had to do the impossible.

  And do it fast.

  Featuring stories by Peter F. Hamilton, Yoon Ha Lee, Aliette de Bodard, Greg Egan, Linda Nagata, Gregory Feely, John Barnes, Tobias S. Buckell, Jason Fischer and Sean Williams, Carolyn Ives Gilman, John Meaney, Dominica Phetteplace, Allen M. Steele, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Peter Watts.