by Wil McCarthy
“Out of where?” someone asked.
“Out of Artya, for a start. “ He speared Malye with an accusing stare. “How could you let them bring us here? We need to go someplace safer, more isolated. Back to Pinega, maybe. Better yet, we need passage out of Sirius altogether. What's closest, Sol system?”
“Another hundred years in cryostasis?” said Nik. “No thank you, not me.”
“And where are we supposed to get a ship?”
“We can start by asking!” Fuming, Konstant jerked an elbow in Malye's direction, pointing, making an insult of it somehow. “This woman isn't asking for anything. `Yes, Plate. No, Plate. Of course we'll see your Queen, Plate.' We all saw it. Ialah's names, she was groveling on the floor.”
Malye sighed. “Citizens, be realistic. As we speak, Gate system is being invaded. Even assuming we survive, what kind of help can we expect from the Gateans? Just how important do you think we are?”
“Perhaps more than you think.”
Everyone looked to the dayroom's outer entrance, in which stood their old friend, Plate. Slim and supple as ever, Malye thought, a collection of elastic cords in the shape of a man. And yet, he seemed flush with some exertion that had left him feeling weary but empowered, as if he had run a race. As if he had won a race.
“May I come in?” he asked, the air around him pink with tension.
“Why so polite?” Malye inquired, setting her daughter down. “Why not simply barge in, as you always do?”
“I apologize for that,” he said, nodding liquidly. “I try to be sensitive to your ways, but I have little experience. The, ah, the Dog told me what happened. Who is hurt?”
“So your Dogs speak Standard after all,” Malye said.
His large, copper eyes met her gaze. “No. But they recognize a problem when they see one. Who is hurt, please?”
“It's Viktor,” she said. “He spent the whole night in the Congress of Advisors.”
“Ah.” Plate nodded again, his neck bending, almost folding double before it straightened once more. “Yes, we have that problem with our own people, sometimes. It's... less serious than it may appear.”
“Will he recover?” Sasha asked.
“His body should be fine,” Plate replied, turning now to look through the doorway toward the sleeping rooms, craning for a glimpse at the victim. “The physiological stress is not in any way unusual. Like any sort of prolonged labor, I suppose, like walking, or perhaps sitting at a comp station all day. Mentally... well, an eight hour session is quite a lot to absorb. Much information, much subjective time crammed into that space. There will certainly be... personality changes.”
That phrase rang a cold, clear note in Malye's core. Personality changes. “Serious?” she asked quietly.
Plate shrugged. “Possibly. He's been out of connection with reality for many thousands of hours. His personality will likely reassert itself in short order, but the residual effects may well last the remainder of his life. Attention inertia, we call it; he will be slow to react, slow to change the course of his thoughts. Or to put it another way, his attention span has been increased. And of course, he'll know a lot more than he did when he began.”
“You make it sound like a good thing,” Sasha said disapprovingly.
Plate shrugged. “The process carries no moral objectivity.”
Malye tasted gray ambivalence, like dust on her tongue. A single moment of trauma, she knew, could haunt a person forever, coloring every thought and action from that time forward. And yet, she had once known a violent offender who'd been sentenced to ten years in prison with nothing but a library flatscreen to keep him company in his cell. In the end he'd emerged a quiet, contemplative man, ready to take his place among civilized people. Changed, yes, and yet also the same, his hard corners smoothed and polished. And he himself agreed that he was smarter.
That Viktor had no crimes to atone for, at least so far as she knew, mattered less than the fact that he'd chosen his prison willingly. And if there was no lasting harm, per se.... Well, so be it.
“So he will recover,” she said, feeling better. But she eyed Plate cynically. “What of the rest of us? What will you do with us, now that we've...performed the function for which we were revived?”
“You have been assigned a new function,” Plate replied gravely. “You're to begin in thirty-six hours.”
“And what would this function be?”
Now, Plate's tiny mouth split into a grin that revealed small, flat teeth, evenly spaced. “It's a surprise,” he said.
She sensed no menace from him, only a sort of weary smugness, and an almost reflexive impulse to withhold information. From her? From humanity in general?
“And if we refuse?” she asked.
“You will not,” he replied simply, his grin never wavering.
Well, at least it was something.
~~~
When Konstant was through quarreling with Malye he quarreled with Svetlane Antoneve, and then fell into bed with her and, to Malye's relief, remained there for the rest of the day and night. Vere and Nik, the two construction workers, had also taken up together, though more discreetly. Perhaps the age difference made them shy, though what scandal it could generate in a population of ten was not at all clear.
The children quarreled as well, with the adults and with each other, saving the day from what would otherwise be a mournful and apprehensive silence.
Time passed, in short, as time had always done: heedless of anything.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
217::08
HOLDERS FASTNESS, GATE SYSTEM:
CONTINUITY 5218, YEAR OF THE DRAGON
“So, how are you?” Malye asked Viktor. After two hours in the washroom following nearly two full days of sleep, he'd emerged scrubbed and fresh, his amber skin almost glowing, his hair and beard neatly brushed, though they could use a trim. Soon, they would all have to start worrying about things like that. Haircuts. Did Gatean hair even need to be cut?
“I'm...fine,” Viktor replied, with slow sincerity. “It's all a little unfamiliar, but... it's coming back to me.”
“Are you fit to travel?” she asked him, nodding sideways toward their escort: Plate, Crow, and a pair of hulking Drones. Not Wende's drones, but rather spares from two other Finders Queens, here to—assist them? guard them?—on the way to their new assignment.
“Travel where?” Viktor asked, eyeing the escort thoughtfully.
Malye shrugged, not bothering to conceal her apprehension. “They won't say. But they want all of us, at least for now. Our 'new assignment.' Are you well enough?”
Viktor blinked, formed and released a frown. “I suppose I am, yes.” He turned to look at the other refugees, who stood in a tight knot near the exit as if preparing to leave. But they were apprehensive as well, the air around them pink, and a gulf of several meters separated them from the knot of calm but clearly impatient Gateans. “I remember all of you.”
Little Vadim spoke up: “Viktor, do you remember how to play two-ten?”
“Yes, I do,” Viktor said, slowly and after a lengthy pause. He made symbols of his hands and held them up to show.
“I think he'll be okay,” Vadim said to Malye, in what he probably thought was a voice too quiet for Viktor to hear. But in fact, all the Sirians overheard him, and laughed, releasing their tension for a moment.
“Are we ready to go now?” Crow asked them all. A slight edge to his voice—of anger? No, of something else. Resentment, perhaps, but of what? They had nothing worth coveting.
But Malye nodded. “Yes. Lead the way.”
They cycled through the membrane door, quite accustomed by now to being led like children, with the heavy Drones trailing behind them like a threat. Out in the corridor, a wide red stripe had been painted along the floor, with black chevrons crossing it every few meters as if to point the way. It stood out sharply against the whiteness of everything else, buzzing in Malye's brain like a too-close look at the fractal-moiré surface of a fingerpri
nt lifter.
“This indicator,” Plate said, pointing to the line, “will lead you from the interface station to your chambers. Should you become lost or disoriented, simply look for the indicator to find your way. Do not seek assistance from passersby.”
“Or what?” Malye inquired.
Plate did not deign to reply, which told Malye even more than his words had done, even more than his deferential behavior, even more than the presence of the painted line itself. Somehow, something had happened to increase the refugees' importance, to make a tangible asset of them. They mustn't be lost or even inconvenienced. They mustn't be allowed to fall into unfriendly hands.
And yet, their escort was not so fearsome. There was no direct threat against Finders ring, nor against the refugees themselves. It must be more a matter of leverage, of social maneuvering. Sometimes a local greenbar commander would attempt to seize a prisoner from Central for similar reasons, or, more rarely, to force an unwanted prisoner upon them. But the refugees were not prisoners here, not precisely. That much had been made clear, in both word and deed.
Malye sighed. For all that had changed in the past two millennia, politics nonetheless seemed alive and well.
Vadim, who had edged his way forward until he walked alongside Crow, his little legs pumping almost twice as fast with the effort of keeping up, now spoke again. “Crow,” he said, “I noticed that all the Workers are named after things, except for you. Why are you named after an animal? Are you special?”
The question impressed and intrigued Malye, and she made no move to intervene. Indeed, she wanted to hear the answer.
The Worker looked down as if astonished to learn that Vadim could speak. “A crow is an instrument used for prying,” he said without reflection, as if explaining the obvious. “A plate is an instrument which physically separates objects that have been pried apart.”
“I told you!” Vadim said, turning partway around to address his sister, half a pace in front of Malye.
“No oh!” Elle replied. “You said it was for opening doors.”
“That's the same thing.”
Crow's head turned backward to face Elle. “Your sibling is correct; a crow may be used in that manner.” The head snapped around toward Vadim again. “Our names were chosen by Wende when her six was formed, and are appropriate to us. There is nothing special about me.”
“Oh,” Vadim said. “How old were you then?”
“What? I had lived four standard years. That is a strange question.”
“Four?” Vadim said, sounding impressed for some reason. “Ialah, that's young. Are there other children around here?”
“No.”
Crow's tone was final, dismissive; the conversation had interested him briefly, but no longer. To his credit, Vadim seemed to recognize this, and dropped back to speak more quietly with his sister. He knew better than to force his luck.
“Your children are very bright,” Viktor remarked. “I've been dealing with stubborn simulacra for five years. The change is welcome.” His voice was a little slow, a little strange, but he hovered at Malye's elbow and appeared to have no trouble keeping up as they moved through the twisting corridors. They were going uphill, at least—gravity was getting lighter.
“Yes,” she said, appreciating the compliment. She reached forward to ruffle Elle's hair. “They do surprise me at times. Vadim once put a pressure regulator back together without instructions. And Elle can name the hundred largest worlds in alphabetical order.”
“They will barely remember the interstitial period at all,” Viktor went on distantly. “They will be children of this era. I wonder what they will call it, when all is over and done?”
“Depends on what happens in the next few days,” Sasha said from behind them.
After a pause, Viktor grunted and nodded. “Yes, that's so.”
Disparate feelings flickered through Malye. Had Viktor's mind been damaged? Had his soul? She still felt that pull toward him, that alarming, uncontrolled attraction, but now it was tempered with sympathy, and guilt, and perhaps a tinge of fear as well. What had this man become? What was he feeling behind that slow, distracted exterior?
“What did you learn,” she asked him, “in all that time with the Congress? What questions did you ask them?”
“Oh,” he said, and the word was rich and deep and textured, conveying a sense of burden, of sacrifice, of accomplishment. “Oh, I asked them so many things. About history, at first, but the more you look at history, the more it comes apart, the more it seems to be the history of a million different things. You can't see history from the outside; you have to pick something caught in the flow, watch the way it changes and is changed by the events around it. History of language, history of economics, history of warfare... I once followed the development of lighting and illumination technology through fifty centuries of human endeavor, and I became convinced, convinced, that lighting was the key to everything. And it is; I can make a very good case for it. But the processing and recycling of waste is also the key to everything, and so is transportation, and religion, and the social status accorded to adolescents. Everything is the key to everything else.”
“That sounds a little abstract,” Malye said, despairing quietly, within herself. Had Viktor simply become a mystic, doomed to see everything as some useless holistic jumble?
But Viktor chuckled and nodded. “Abstract! Yes, exactly! I followed that line of inquiry for a long, long time before finally concluding it was a dead end. Looking backward, at events which are fixed within the continuum, there are simply too many connections—they choke, they constrict. When everything is connected to everything else, what use is knowledge? What use is free will? There is no free will in the past, because the past can not be changed. This is the great fallacy behind the Congress. And yet, many of the simulacra understood this shortcoming in themselves, and advised me not to heed their advice. A paradox! It took me all that time to find that the Congress itself is a paradox.
“So, disheartened, I turned to the physical sciences, exploring them through the archive, through the recordings and limited simulacra of some of the best teachers in human history. I was a repairman, a mere technician, but in the leisure of timelessness I found I could apply myself fully, and I came to understand even some of the more difficult concepts. But it was the simple concepts that proved the more profound. Thirteenth law: Conservation of Angular Momentum; simple enough for a child to understand, and yet the implications of it could take a lifetime to explore.
“This, as it turns out, is the great fallacy of physical science. If Ialah is to be found in the details, as many would have it, I say at least that he is in all the details together, and not in any single place or thing. The inherent reductionism of science forced me to look always deeper and smaller and narrower, and I realized finally that I could never understand the nature of Ialah's continuum in this manner, that my mind could not contain all there was to know even about a simple thing like angular momentum. Physical science is all about the present, about now, but what is now, really? It's nothing, an infinitesimal moment in time, its duration: zero. Capture it in infinite detail, and what do you have? An infinity of nothing.
“I needed a more functional outlook, something that could help me explore the ephemeral but utterly crucial relationship between the present and the future. How do things happen? Before the connections are made, when all the possibilities are still extant, what exactly happens to weave the infinite futures into a single liquid present, and frozen past? Quantum physics claims to address this problem, but in fact it simply adds another layer of complexity to it. And so, I turned to mathematics, to statistics, to simulation. I turned to the oracle.
“Some futures are more probable than others, that much is obvious to anyone. But the future is unstable; anything at all can disrupt it. If I cough and disturb the air, I shatter the future that would have been, and exhale a new one in its place. And then that one is shattered when I cough again. But deeper down, there
are things about the future we can certainly know. The physical laws do still apply, and so too the forces of history, the terrible inertia of social change, of illumination and transportation and waste processing all rushing forward through time.
“It's possible, even trivial, to gauge the likeliest outcome of a series of events, and around it an infinitely receding cone of lesser probabilities. But where the present will actually manifest is not something we can know until it has already cemented itself in the static past. It is this process, the continual selection of the present from the possibilities of the future, that finally seemed more important to me than all the rest of it put together. What is the influence of individual thought and action over this process? I needed to know, and yet it became clear that I could not. During the collapse of the First Colonial Age, a process which all could foresee and none could avert, Pascal Giovanni claimed to have proven, conclusively, the existence of free will. But so very little was known at that time about the metachronics of observed systems. How could they know? And knowing what we do now, how can we claim, like poor Giovanni, to be captains of our fate?
“It boils down to a single unknowable question: the existence of the soul, of free will, of metachronic perturbation at the quantum level. We cannot know, and yet we must, for why else do we even exist? It took me all that time, eighteen thousand days and sleepless nights, to find that the universe itself is a paradox. And so I learned that I know nothing at all, and from the purity of that ignorance and innocence I might—”
Viktor paused, suddenly, and coughed.
“There,” he said, with a hoarse chuckle. “I've disrupted the future, and replaced it with another. Such is the proven extent of my power.”
“Names of Ialah,” Malye said, touching his arm, feeling cold, intangible fingers groping in her own hollow interior. Viktor's monologue had been offered in a slow but deliberate cadence that neither she nor anyone else had dared to interrupt, that had worn on steadily, unvaryingly through corridors, intersections, doorways. But the awfulness of it... Viktor's relentless hope had been, in the few days Malye had known him, the most central and significant feature of his character. Had the Congress worn that away, ground it down to nothing over the years, filling his head with this nonsense in its place? Had it left anything of him at all? “Oh, oh, Viktor. I had no idea. I should... I should never have let you near that thing.”
