“With what justification?”
“They’re afraid that if they release your family, you all will build a new psiberweb and restart the war.” She drank her Blazer’s, but she didn’t down it all at once this time. “I believe their comment was, ‘The Skolian Imperialate and Trader Empire will destroy human civilization just as they did five thousand years ago.’” She grunted. “Damn Allieds.”
Unfortunately, they had a point. But they had missed one “slight” flaw in their argument. “If the Traders build a psiberweb and we can’t, we’ll all be fodder for their war machine. Including the Allieds.”
“Actually, Earth’s leaders made that charming comment about us destroying civilization before the Traders broadcast that holo with your husband in slave restraints.”
I tried not to think of the holo, but my heart lurched. “And now? Earth can’t ignore the danger.”
“They hope to negotiate with the Traders.”
I stared at her. “Aristos don’t negotiate with non-Aristos. They think we’re dirt.”
Her face took on a pensive cast. “Xir looked exhausted on that broadcast And did you hear all the mistakes he made? He even referred to Lady Roca as your brother. Maybe they’re as worn out as we are with this damnable war.”
“Maybe.” I held little hope for negotiations, but anything was worth a try. “If Earth won’t let my family go, Naaj might take it as a hostile act.” I could imagine how the hard-line, aristocratic general had taken their refusal. “It could start a war with the Allieds.”
Vazar spoke flatly. “Another war will destroy us.”
I crossed my arms and rubbed my palms up and down my bare arms. But nothing could warm my chill apprehension. Our future might depend on those four children on Earth. I could reveal my suspicion that they had a link to the Ruby and Qox Dynasties. As farfetched as it sounded, I could probably produce enough evidence to spur an investigation, not only using the lists of their potential parents, but also to ask why ISC’s own computer system had covertly blocked my search. It would be interesting to hear ISC’s take on that. I wasn’t sure I wanted to play that hand, though, at least not yet.
I could just say my models kept converging on the children. ISC also ran models to predict the future, but theirs rarely agreed with mine. They hadn’t been able to duplicate my thought processes even before I had neural enhancements. A general had once referred to my brain as an “invaluable interstellar resource.” It made me feel strange, as if I were a stockpile rather than a person.
But I hesitated to mention the children. They might have no link to this—or they could be triggers that sent the precarious balance of interstellar power spiraling out of control. As long as a good chance existed that someone else could reach them first, I couldn’t risk drawing attention to their existence. Gods only knew what could happen if the wrong people found them. The Traders had reached Jaibriol II first—and it had started the Radiance War, nearly destroying two empires.
Pain stabbed my temples. Wincing, I massaged my head. My mind had jumped into an accelerated mode. Normal brain cells worked much slower than computers. Our minds plodded while our machines whizzed. The nodes we put in our brains worked faster than unaided thought; in a sense, the human mind became a user on the implanted system. It could be unsettling, and difficult to learn, which was one reason not everyone chose to enhance their brains.
I had dealt with the problem in a unique manner, judged from the shock of the neurosurgeons who monitored my brain. I wasn’t sure why they became so excited. All I did was have nanomeds in my body redesign my brain so my neurons became part of the implanted system. It accelerated my neural impulses. I thought faster. I didn’t use that mode often, though; fiddling with my own brain chemistry gave me a headache. I had discovered the hard way that if I ignored the warning signs, I went into a coma.
According to my chronometer, only three seconds had passed since Vazar made her last comment. I considered her. “Do you know anything about Admiral Rockworth?”
She blinked at me. “What?”
“Seth Rockworth.”
“When did we start talking about your ex?”
“I just wondered if you knew anything.”
She took on the distant look she got when she accessed her mental files. “He’s still on Earth, enjoying his retirement.”
“Has he had any contact with the Ruby Dynasty recently?”
“None that I know of.” Her focus returned to me. “Why the blazes do you care? He made his position clear when he walked out on you.”
“Seth has been around Allied politics longer than anyone else alive. He might have ideas about how we could handle this situation without it blowing up.” I could always send a proposal to Earth suggesting Seth and I negotiate. But that might still draw attention to the children.
Don’t reveal them. That thought jumped out of the models evolving in my mind. The equations suddenly morphed into pictures, beautiful quantum orbitals. They spun lazily, globes circled by diffuse rings, pale blue, soft gold, the blush of a newly opened rose, the lavender of a desert sky at dawn, all as graceful as delicate ornaments bobbing in a breeze. Math functions. Spherical harmonics.
“Orbitals?” I said. “What the hell?”
Vazar quirked an eyebrow at me. “Orbitals? That makes perfect sense.”
“No it doesn’t.” Why would thinking about Seth make me see mathematical functions? My mind drifted with the images. Spherical harmonics…
“—medical team now!” The man’s voice cut the air in staccato bursts.
“What good will that do?” Vazar demanded. “She’s not sick, she’s translucent.”
I squinted, trying to clear my blurred vision. Medics in gray jumpsuits surrounded the divan, all smelling of the antiseptic nanomeds doctors used to keep their offices sterile. Two were bending over me and several others were working on palmtops, monitoring me apparently, judged from the ho-los of my body that rotated above their units. They flicked their fingers through the holos, working with sharp, fast motions. One fellow’s hand was the palmtop; his entire arm was cybernetic. Lights glinted in a circle around his wrist
Vazar was no longer sitting next to me. She now stood a few steps away, glaring at a man in a green jumpsuit. His uniform identified him as a member of the medical corps in the Pharaoh’s Army.
“What are you doing?” I asked the cluster of agitated medics. My words came out like leaves blowing over a distant plain. It didn’t even sound as if I were in the room.
A tall man sat on the edge of the divan, leaving enough space so that he was in no danger of touching my body. “Pharaoh Dyhianna? Can you hear me?”
“Yes.” My voice drifted, star dust on an interstellar wind…
“Hey.” Vazar stepped closer, nudging aside a medic. “Dehya? Are you solid again?”
Her vigorous presence pulled me back into reality, but it was like trying to find purchase on an oiled surface. Without my tenuous connection to her, I might completely disperse into psiberspace.
“Vaz. &hellips; I’m going …,” I whispered.
“Dehya!” She tried to grab my shoulders.
Her hands went through me.
“Don’t touch her!” The medic’s warning echoed in my ears. The scene smeared as if it were a reflection in a sheen of oil. Vazar’s hands swirled, blending with my shoulder.
Dismayed, I tried to inhale. Air sifted through my body. I was a ghost, diaphanous, evaporating. If I became solid, Vazar’s hands would be inside my body.
“Gods,” someone whispered.
The blood drained from Vazar’s face. My mind spread throughout the room; I felt her thoughts, knew the blood thundering in her veins, saw what she saw. My body had become almost transparent.
With infinite care, she withdrew her hands from my shoulders. My body rippled like the rings that spread on a lake after a leaf dropped onto its still surface—
Suddenly I snapped back. The room solidified with jarring speed. I slumped on th
e divan, gulping in air. “Ah …”
“Saints al-frigging-mighty.” Vazar stared at me. “Dehya, are you all right?”
“I’m… fine.” I felt as if I had been wrung through a star-ship drive nozzle.
“Pharaoh Dyhianna?” The medic at my side spoke. “We’ve never dealt with anything like this. Can you tell us what you’re doing?”
Good question. “I’m not sure. I don’t think medicine can help, though.” I looked up at Vazar. “Your hands disrupted whatever was happening to me.”
She paled. “I’m a jackabat on jigs.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “What does that mean?”
“I can’t say. You told me to clean up my language.”
“Vaz, when you grabbed me, it pulled me back.”
“It did?” She looked nonplussed.
Some of the medics made entries on palmtops, while others monitored my condition. The one with the cyber-arm was running a calculation that produced holos of my body rippling in the air. The sight made me queasy.
“It’s about angular momentum wavefunction expansions,” I told them.
“Oh. Well. In that case.” Now Vazar sounded more like her usual self. “What the holy hack does ‘angular momentum wavefunction expansions’ mean?”
Farther back in the room, the medic in the green jumpsuit spoke in a low voice to a man who was studying his palmtop. “Is she going to live?”
The other man glanced up uneasily. “According to this, she was never dying. She just started to—thin out. Like ink diluting in water.”
An odd comparison, but apt. “I was going into another reality,” I called to them.
They looked around with a start. It seemed odd they wouldn’t know I had augmented hearing. Any doctor assigned to my case should have seen my records. Then again, my hearing seemed even more heightened now than usual.
They came closer, joining the medics. The officer in green had a bar on his chest that gave his name as Bayliron. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.
“Spherical harmonics.” I rubbed my eyes. “Before Opalite, I was in a Hubert space spanned by an infinite set of orthonormal angular momentum wavefunctíons that used thought as coordinates rather than spatial rotations.”
Bayliron rubbed the back of his neck. “Ah… spatial rotations.”
I could tell he didn’t know if I was serious or cracked. Security had cleared my medical team to know what happened, so I tried again. “When the Traders came after us, my husband pushed my son and me into the First Lock. The Lock is—basically it’s a pole associated with different Riemann sheets. A branch cut joins the sheets. When Taquinil and I slid through the cut, it took us from this universe into psiber-space. I’ve only come out part way.”
He still had that look. “Uh—part way?”
I searched for better words. “Not all the terms in my partial wave expansion have transformed. They’re higher order, so they only contribute to fine details, which is why I look solid. But they’re still part of my overall state. Right now, if I don’t concentrate, I start to slip back into the Kyle universe. I need a psiberweb to stabilize my transformation so it can finish properly.”
I stopped then, mainly because they were all staring as if I had said, “Floobergab miggledy bleck.”
“Is it safe for us to examine you?” Bayliron asked.
The thought of being examined made me feel trapped. The concern of all these worried people gathered in one place thickened the air like invisible smoke, gritty against my skin. I needed air. “I will come to sick bay tomorrow.”
He didn’t look pleased. “Pharaoh Dyhianna—”
“Tomorrow,” I said softly. Like most cruisers, this one kept a thirty hour “day.”
He started to protest, but when I shook my head, he stopped. After bowing from the waist, he said, “May you have a pleasant evening, Your Highness.” Then he motioned to his people, and they all took their leave.
When we were alone, Vazar shook her head. “You should have let them stay. Admiral Casestar will give them grief.”
I sank back into the sofa. The feel of the cushions scratching my skin came as a relief. I was solid. I could feel. “No doctor can cure what’s wrong with me.”
She sat next on the divan, making the cushions sink. “If you were in Kyle space, why didn’t you die when it imploded?”
I wished I knew. Orbitals. They shimmered in my mind. What made me think of them? It had to be important, if it had almost pulled me out of this reality. We had been talking about the Lock. Seth Rockworth. The Allieds. My sister Roca. Her husband Eldrinson.
Orbitals.
I suddenly sat up straight. “Delos.”
She blinked. “You survived the implosion of another universe because of a little island on Earth?”
I smiled. “No. We have to go there.”
“We can’t go to Earth. They’ll put you in ‘protective custody’ too.”
“Not that Delos. The planet named after it.” Earth had declared Delos a neutral world. Sanctuary. They hoped that Skolians, Traders, and Allieds could meet there in harmony and build bridges among their peoples. It was an inspiring dream, but naïve.
She leaned back, her body turned toward me, one arm on the top of the sofa. “Why Delos? I would have thought you would want to go to a Lock.”
“The Locks aren’t secure.” I rubbed my arms for warmth. “If I hook into one, the Traders might attack me through the one they stole.”
“What if you had access to a Triad Command Chair?”
That gave me pause. Normally a Triad member could only use such a chair to operate a psiberweb that already existed. But my mind had been developing for more than a century and a half. I knew Kyle space like no one else. Hell, I had been Kyle space. I might be able to do more with the Triad Chair. If we could find one. A few ISC bases had them, and also several battle cruisers, though none of those I had access to now.
“It might help,” I said thoughtfully. “But we have to go to Delos first.”
She frowned. “How will going to Delos stop you from fading out?”
“It won’t.”
“Then why go?”
“I don’t know” I admitted.
“If you convince Jon Casestar to do this, he will take our entire complement of ships. We also expect to rendezvous with an ISC Fleet Talon from Onyx. It will swell our ranks to several thousand. Moving that many warships to Delos will probably give their authorities collective heart failure.” She tapped her long index finger on the top of the sofa. “We had better have a damn good reason.”
“I’ve no desire to give the Allieds collective heart failure.” That wasn’t completely true, given that they were holding my family hostage. “But we still have to go.”
Vazar frowned, somehow making it look regal. She had always been a contradictory mix of aristocrat and hard-living warrior. “Before we take such a large fleet to an Allied world, we will have to notify Naaj.”
The last person I wanted to notify was the Majda Matriarch, who had taken the title of Imperator that rightfully belonged in my family. Even worse, she might have enough support within ISC to keep the title. I wondered where Vazar came down on that issue. Majda by blood and Ruby Dynasty by marriage, she could throw her support either way.
I spoke carefully. “We have no web communications. The only way we could inform Naaj would be to send a starship to ISC headquarters. It could take days or even weeks for them to send back an answer.”
Vazar considered me. “Jon can make the decision on his own. But for something this big he’ll need to justify it. You must have some idea why you think it’s important.”
“Orbitals.”
She made an exasperated noise. “I don’t know a kiss in a quasar about your orbitals.”
“Yes, you do. You studied quantum theory in school.”
“Believe me, Dehya, it’s not the way you do it.”
“In Kyle space, Taquinil and I became spherical harmonics. How does that con
nect to Delos?” I spread my hands out, palms up. “He and I are incomplete now. Delos has an answer. I can’t define it more clearly even for myself. But we must go there. As fast as possible.”
“How can you be sure if you don’t understand why you want to go?”
“Calculations.”
“What calculations?”
I waved my hand absently. “In my head.”
She sighed. “Has anyone ever told you how strange you sound sometimes?”
My mouth quirked up. “You do, periodically.”
“The hell of it is, you’re usually right.”
“I could use your support with Jon.”
She lifted her hands in surrender. “AH right. I’ll talk to him.”
13
Primary Inversions
Délos Space Command was not happy. “We welcome vessels of all worlds.” Colonel Yamada’s voice crackled over the comm. “However, Admiral Casestar, you have more than a ‘few’ ships in orbit around Delos.”
“Two thousand four hundred and sixty-three,” Jon said. He was sitting in a control chair at the end of a robot arm in the center of the bridge. About half a kilometer across, the hemispherical bridge capped the cylinder that formed the main body of the cruiser. Layers of armaments and defensive shields protected it. Consoles studded the inner surface and crew members worked everywhere, some upside down far “above” us, some sideways to the left and right, and others right-side up “beneath” us.
I floated by his chair, holding a cable that stretched to its back. Here in the center of the bridge, we had no gravity even when the hemisphere rotated. Only Jon was visible to Yamada; I remained completely out of sight and sound.
Colonel Yamada was speaking. “What is your intent?”
“Most of my ships are survivors from the war,” Jon explained. “I was hoping to give my people a rest, but I realize we can’t send down millions at once. Would it be possible to arrange for them to visit in shifts?”
“You’re requesting shore leave?” Yamada made no attempt to hide his incredulity.
“That is correct,” Jon said. He even kept a straight face.
Spherical Harmonic Page 13
