A Quantum Murder

by Peter F. Hamilton

  She waved him down irritably, concentrating on Cormac.

  "Yes, the classic question," Cormac said politely. "Travelling back to kill your grandfather before your father was born, thus creating a paradox. If your grandfather was killed how could you have been born to travel back to kill him? This is a null question, because quantum cosmology allows for multiple parallel universes, an infinite stack of space-times with identical physical parameters except each one has a different history—Hitler triumphant, J. F. Kennedy never killed, the PSP remaining in power. If CTCs do exist, the multiple histories will interconnect, effectively integrating the parallel universes into a unified family and facilitating travel between them. In this instance quantum mechanics permits the establishment of as many connected universes as there are variant outcomes of the time traveller's actions. So you can travel back in time to kill your grandfather, because in another universe, the one you travelled from, your grandfather will remain alive to conceive your father."

  "Yes." Gabriel sucked her cheeks in. "Whenever I looked into the future, I saw multiple probabilities; the further into the future the more probabilities there were, and the wilder they became."

  "Wilder?" Julia asked, fascinated.

  "Improbable. Mammoths roaming round in Siberia, the Greenhouse effect suddenly reversing, obscure politicians becoming statesmen, weird religions taking hold. I never looked too far," she added contritely.

  Because death haunted those extremes, Julia completed privately.

  "Had you looked back in time, you would have seen that same multiplication of alternatives," Cormac said. "That is what Edward hoped to see."

  "What?" Gabriel asked sharply.

  "To look in the past."

  "You said Kitchener was developing a neurohormone to perceive CTCs, not look into the past," Greg said.

  Cormac's smile was wintry. "But don't you see, that's the same thing. Edward theorized that CTCs are the basis of psychic ability."

  Greg and Gabriel exchanged a glance bordering on pained anxiety. What made him think that?" Greg asked.

  "These microscopic holes through space-time are too small for physical objects to pass through, so he suggested that they facilitate the exchange of pure data. Your mind, Mr Mandel, is quite literally connected with billions, trillions, of other minds; a vast repository of visual images, smells, tastes, and memories. This so-called psychic trait in certain humans is no more than a superior interpretation ability, you can make sense of our cosmological heritage, filter out the scream of the white noise jumble, pick over the bones."

  "If that's true, then how could I reach as far as I can? You said these CTCs are microscopic."

  "Indeed, but there are so many of them. If you go down one of these wormholes, back in time for that fraction of a second, move an infinitesimal distance, you will be able to find another CTC at its terminus, perhaps several, and that connection will allow you to extend another increment further outward. You understand? It is like a chain, appallingly convoluted, which accounts for the limits in range you experience, but a clear link none the less, stretching across infinity, and up and down eternity."

  "But I could see into the future," Gabriel said. "How could these CTCs produce that effect? You said they go back in time."

  "They do. But the now we are in is the past of the futures you perceived."

  "Yes," said Gabriel, though she sounded unconvinced.

  "However, by itself looking into the future isn't sufficient to prove the existence of CTCs. Psychic is such a prejudicial term, you see, people have always laid claim to the power of foresight. But if CTCs exist, then the past should be available on an equal basis. Edward hoped that by producing a neurohormone capable of opening up the past in the way that precognition opens up the future he would make a case for microscopic CTCs which would be irrefutable. There could be very few alternative explanations."

  "Julia?" Greg's voice was dead, devoid of all inflection. Everyone looked at him. "What was the result of the analysis on those ampoules Eleanor gave you?"

  She had some trouble forming the words, her throat had dried up as soon as she started thinking about the implications. "The laboratory said it was a themed neurohormone, sharing some characteristics with the standard precognition formula. But it's not a type they were familiar with."

  "Edward succeeded in formulating a retrospection neurohormone?" Cormac asked with a feverish note of hope.

  "Looks that way, doesn't it." Greg was staring at Gabriel. Julia saw she had gone quite white, her hands were trembling slightly.

  "No," Morgan said. He didn't use a loud voice, but the authority he conveyed was final. He took hold of Gabriel's hand. "You're not infusing it."

  "Who else can?" she answered. "My temporal ability is a proven one."

  "You are proposing to use it?" Cormac asked, he blinked owlishly at Gabriel. "Why? We don't even know if it works, all Edward's records were erased."

  Julia cursed under her breath. It was a perpetual mystery to her how someone as smart as Cormac could be so oblivious to the problems of life itself. "If it enables us to look into the past, we can use it to see who killed Kitchener," she told him, using the strained tone reserved for making company divisional managers wish they'd never been born.

  Cormac opened his mouth to speak, then glanced at Gabriel, blushing furiously. "I ... I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking. This whole series of events has been extremely stressful ..."

  He trailed off.

  "I'll infuse it," Eleanor said.

  "No bloody chance!" Greg snapped.

  "Why not? These themed neurohormones are designed to amplify single psi traits. Anyone with even a faintly psionic ability should be able to infuse one. And you always say I'm sensitive."

  Greg's face darkened. "That's hardly a qualified objective opinion."

  "What have we got to lose? If it doesn't work, there's no disaster, we simply carry on the investigation as before. If it does work, we find out who the murderer is."

  It was quite peculiar; Julia was watching Greg gather himself for a tirade, desperately trying to think of some way she could defuse the situation before it degenerated into a vicious personal row. She knew from past experience just how forceful Greg could get when he was really upset. And Eleanor was just as bad. Both of them complete stubborn-heads. But something happened, because Greg suddenly gave Eleanor a perplexed, almost awestruck, stare, and sat back limply in his seat, his anger visibly draining away.

  "What is it?" Eleanor asked. She was frowning at his behaviour.

  "Nothing."

  Which Julia didn't believe for a second.

  "You mean you don't object?" Eleanor said, suspicion charging her voice.

  He gave her a lame grin. "No."

  "Oh."

  Julia looked at Morgan for guidance, but all he could manage was a confused grimace. She couldn't think what had made Greg change his mind so abruptly. The mood swing had struck him so swiftly she was tempted to call it a revelation.

  "If Gabriel's precognition is any example, we'll need to do this at Launde Abbey itself," Greg said. "You'll have a job trying to focus on the temporal displacement of a location outside your immediate area. Right, Gabriel?"

  "Right."

  "OK, two points. Well, three, actually. I'll use my empathic ability to monitor your attempt, or at least try to. I want you fitted with a somnolence inducer; that way if anything does go wrong I'll sense it and simply send you off to sleep until the neurohormone wears off."

  "Good idea," Eleanor said. She seemed relieved Greg was taking it seriously.

  "Gabriel, I'd like you there as an adviser. You too, Doctor, if it's no trouble."

  "I will be happy to attend," Cormac Ranasfari said stiffly.

  "Finally, we can't really exclude Vernon Langley or his team, I suggest we don't try. But I want him to bring Nicholas Beswick with him."

  "Why?" Julia asked.

  "You'll see tomorrow. Or at least, I think you will."

  Chapter F
ifteen

  An agitated fleece of cloud was stretched over the Chater valley the next morning, an easterly wind scattering meagre curtains of drizzle across the slopes of Launde Park. The water flowing over the bridge was down to a couple of centimetres when the EMC Ranger splashed over it. Greg drove up past the series of lakes, hopeful that this time he might remember. Disappointed once more.

  Maybe Vernon would have pulled something out of the police records by now.

  Eleanor sat in the passenger seat, gazing out at the desultory stone-grey drizzle. She had been silent for most of the journey, his espersense revealing the pensive timbre of her thoughts, although she was careful to keep a neutral expression on her face.

  He turned off down the loop of drive towards the Abbey.

  "You know exactly what I'm thinking," he said. "Which means there's no point in my saying it. So I'll say it anyway. I didn't really want you to do this, and if you want to pull out I won't stop you."

  She leant over and gave him the briefest of kisses. "So why the dramatic about-face yesterday?"

  "Because ... Well, you'll see in a minute."

  "Sounds intriguing. Is it going to make me change my mind?"

  "No. Quite the opposite, actually."

  She gave him another of her penetrating stares, then turned back to the window.

  One thing, he was going to be bloody glad when this was over, and no messing. When the snap of intuition had hit him in Julia's study yesterday it was tough not to simply say it out loud. Then this morning he had lain on the bed with belly muscles cold and hard in anticipation as he watched her getting dressed.

  She had gone through the big chest of drawers taking out a couple of blouses along with her underwear; then she'd started rummaging around the racks in the wardrobe. Three skirts were removed, and she went through the usual procedure of comparing them in the thin light coming through the window. He'd never noticed before how long it all seemed to take. In the end she had slipped into a lime-green blouse and a full-length cotton flower-print skirt, with a walnut-coloured fleece-lined sweat jacket that came down over her hips.

  "Good enough for you?" she had asked tartly when she zipped the front of the jacket up.

  "Sure." He hadn't realized how obvious his stare had been.

  The two white vans belonging to the forensic team were parked in their usual places outside the Abbey, three police cars from Oakham and a blue Ford which had brought Gabriel and Ranasfari, were drawn up alongside. They were the last to arrive, as he'd intended.

  Eleanor pulled her jacket hood up and allowed him to take her arm as they walked to the front door. The roses along the Abbey's façade looked very scraggly now, sodden and beginning to rot. A uniformed bobby standing in the porch gave a quick salute as they hurried in out of the damp.

  There were a lot of people milling around in the hall, the familiar figures of the CID team; Gabriel and Ranasfari standing together along with Ranasfari's bodyguard. The physicist was in earnest conversation with Denzil Osborne. A couple of uniformed bobbies made up the complement.

  Greg spotted Nicholas Beswick standing at the foot of the stairs, hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, his elbows sticking out at awkward angles, avoiding eye contact, trying to go unnoticed amid the hubbub of small-talk. The affection he felt at the sight of the boy was spontaneous; he wanted to go over and put a hand on his shoulder, reassure him everything was going to be all right: there was something oddly appealing about someone so timid.

  He watched Nicholas very closely as Eleanor greeted the others in the hall. The boy turned round to see what was going on, full of reluctance. Then he caught sight of Eleanor. His brooding expression twisted into shock then outright fright. Both hands lurched upwards, almost as though he was warding off a punch. "You!" It came out as a mangled yell. He took an instinctive pace backwards, and tripped on the bottom step, sitting down jarringly.

  Everyone in the hall froze, staring at him. Colour began to rush into his cheeks.

  Greg went over and offered him a sympathetic arm. "She was your ghost wasn't she?" he asked gently.

  Nicholas struggled to his feet, still staring thunderstruck at Eleanor. "Yes, but look, she's real now. She's alive."

  "No messing. Allow me to introduce you; this is Eleanor, my wife."

  Nicholas gave him a wild trapped look. "Wife?"

  "Let me explain," he said kindly.

  "About time," Eleanor grumbled in his ear.

  * * * *

  "You knew all along," Eleanor said, she was hovering between anger and bemusement. Undecided.

  "I guessed all along," Greg temporized. And Lord preserve us if she decides on anger.

  They were sitting on the circular bed in Nicholas's room. All the furniture was still in place, but swathed in plastic sheeting, embargoed by the forensic team, although there had been no need for the wholesale dismantling exercise which had occurred in Kitchener's room.

  Nicholas had claimed the chair behind the desk, the translucent plastic rustling at each tiny movement. He had shrugged off his reticence as Greg explained his hunch about the ghost and the retrospection neurohormone. Asking questions, making observations. Almost behaving like a regular person.

  Ranasfari was sitting on the window-seat in a virtual trance state. One hand stroked the stonework absently. Greg wondered what ghosts Launde had conjured up for him.

  Gabriel had listened to him explain with a smile blinking on and off. She had assumed that knowing air of elder sister tolerance he remembered so well.

  Vernon, Amanda, and Denzil were grouped together in mutual confusion, attentive but saying little, swapping moody, baffled glances.

  "You are saying this looking-back notion has already worked?" Amanda asked.

  "No," Greg said. "Just that the retrospection neurohormone will work. I had some reservations at first, you see."

  Eleanor's hand squeezed his leg playfully. "You wait till I get you home, Gregory."

  "But ... Oh, I don't know." Amanda's arms flapped in expressive dismay. "You really think this drug is going to let you look back and see who murdered Kitchener?"

  "She has pervaded the correct tau co-ordinates," Nicholas said. "I saw her. Dressed exactly as she is now."

  Amanda's eyebrows shot up.

  Probably never heard him speak unless he's been spoken to before, Greg thought.

  "So what would happen if Eleanor doesn't take the neurohormone?" Gabriel asked. Her whole attitude was pure wickedness. "We know it works, so why don't we give it to someone else? Vernon here, he's a likely lad, and it is his investigation."

  "Behave," Greg said. The others wouldn't be able to tell how serious she was. Gabriel took some getting used to. He'd known her for close on sixteen years, through the good times and the bad, and he wasn't sure he really understood her. Made for interesting company, though.

  "Perfectly legitimate question." She affected injured innocence. "Nicholas says he saw her, so what would happen if she doesn't go?"

  "You and your paradoxes," Eleanor muttered.

  "Nothing would happen," Ranasfari said. "As I explained yesterday, quantum mechanics eradicates any inconsistency. The ghost which Nicholas witnessed originates from a universe in which Eleanor will infuse the neurohormone. There are others in which she does not."

  "Another me," Eleanor said wonderingly.

  "This version does me fine," Greg said. But there was an image in his mind he couldn't shake free; a million Eleanors saying yes and infusing the neurohormone, another million pandering to Gabriel's whim, and refusing. Universes torn asunder. And never the twain shall meet.

  Eleanor smiled at him, hand gripping tighter.

  "Well what's it going to be, then?" he asked.

  "Oh, I'll infuse it, of course." She looked at Nicholas, her smile turning impish. "I'm sorry I'm going to startle you last Thursday night."

  "That's all right." His eyes shone adoringly.

  Greg had the uncomfortable thought that Eleanor and Nicholas were
actually both the same age. Only chronologically though, an evil voice said inside his mind.

  * * * *

  Eleanor lay down on the bed and let Denzil fit the somnolence induction loop round her head. A pearl-white tiara with a coil of cable connecting it to a slim oblong box of blue plastic. It reminded Greg of the neural-jammer collars at Stocken. The technology was the same.

  "You should be able to reach down the landing into Kitchener's bedroom without any trouble," Gabriel said. "I could tell what was going to happen to a general area about a kilometre across. Or if I fixated on a person, I could track him three or four days into the future even if he went to Australia."

  "She used to fixate on a lot of men," Greg told the room at large. Nicholas started to giggle.

  "Bugger you, Mandel."

  "I'll be happy if I can just manage to find the Abbey last Thursday," Eleanor said.

  "You did," Nicholas said. "Or you do, I don't know which."

  "Shall we just get on with it," Eleanor said.

  Greg could feel the nerves building in her belly. "OK." He sat beside her, plumping up a pillow, then took her hand. Her grip was strong, in search of reassurance, of a rock of stability.

  Denzil handed him the somnolence induction box. There were three buttons and a small liquid-crystal display on the front. A column of black numbers changed occasionally below a row of symbols he didn't recognize.

  "I've preset it," Denzil said. "Press this button and she should be under in five seconds."

  "Right." He rested his forefinger lightly over the button. Hoping to God he wouldn't have to use it.

  Gabriel held up an infuser tube. "You want me to do this?"

  "Please," said Eleanor.

  Gabriel bent over her, face sober and professional, and pressed the tube to her neck, just over the carotid.

  "Keep your eyes dosed," Gabriel instructed. "You'll be seeing enough visions without trying to untangle optical images as well."

  Eleanor's eyes closed and she clamped her jaw shut, facial muscles hard as stone. Greg ordered a secretion—gland thudding away like a second heartbeat—and joined her in the country of the mind.