“Alois,” he said.
“Tell it to me later,” said interlocutor-Alois.
Macro sighed, and climbed into the chair. He hoped this was the right thing to do. While he was in this device, the people he loved could die. Or they could win. There was always that possibility.
He’d hate to miss that.
“I’ll see you in ten years,” said Totoro. “Whatever happens, this machine will take care of you.”
“What can possibly go wrong?” He tried to imagine the winged Eunuchs defending the Citadel.
“If I’m not the next face you see, something has happened.”
20 ∞ Singularity
2065
The tell-tales in the Water Bear’s gamespace lit up like a firmament. Hard radiation. Alpha particles and gamma rays. Too hard for human flesh to survive. In the medibay, Pax and Jaasper’s bodies slid into hardened tubes. They’d been in hot pursuit of the Horu ship for several days, though it was a cold kind of hot, falling through the dusty abstraction of the Manifold, always at a distance, invisible behind the scattering field of a Xap cloaking device.
Now they were falling towards a maelstrom of hard gamma rays.
[Ideas?] asked Pax.
[A galactic core,] said the ship.
[Ours?]
[Hard to say from here.]
They tried to make sense of what they could see. Framed by the exit portal was a disc, blazing with reflected light; beyond it a flatness: a singularity’s event horizon. Most galaxies have at their core a supermassive black hole. Inside each one is a singularity: a one-dimensional point, where density and gravity become infinite, and space-time curves infinitely. Surrounding it is an event horizon: the sphere of points of no return, beyond which no information can escape.
Floating above this event horizon - far enough for it not to be destroyed by tidal forces - was the disc.
[What is it?] asked Jaasper.
[A stellar heat shield,] said the ship. [We’re looking on it from above.]
[On what scale?]
[I make it thirteen thousand kilometers across.]
[We’ve seen this before,] said Pax.
[Yes, from the other side.]
[The Möbius machine.]
[A part of it. Its radiation umbrella.]
[I want to see what’s behind it,] said Jaasper.
[Me too,] said Pax.
[The question is how,] said the ship.
Jaasper had always thought of the Po as showponies. Elegant technicians, but peacekeepers, not soldiers. He was pleased to be proved wrong. Pax Lo was a pugnacious commander. He intended to jump across the umbrella, through the radiant cauldron, at warp speed, like diving blind through fire into a hornet’s nest. Time dilation was their enemy. Stray too close to the black hole’s event horizon, and the war would be over while they were making observations.
[Do it,] said Pax.
The Water Bear had spent the past few microseconds wargaming strategies.
She knew what to do now.
She jumped.
In her gamespace, instants of time stretched into moments. Her clockspeed was near enough Planck time, the innermost heartbeat of the universe. She fell into realspace, just meters below the umbrella. It was a perfect jump. Only the nearest possible defenders would get a shot at her. Anyone else would risk destroying the umbrella.
The Horu were an advanced civilization. She anticipated solid-state beam weapons, with no time needed to fire, and hyperluminal communications. If that was the case, her ally was time: first the time taken by information to travel through the artificial brains of the weapons, then the time taken by whatever particles to reach her. Then she’d jump, just as the killing wavefront approached her.
That was the best case. The worst case was weapons she didn’t understand, and her instant destruction. What she didn’t expect was the size of the reception fleet. In the moments before their beam weapons fired, she counted upwards of a million warships.
Only a handful were Horu necropolises. They were the same totemic arks as she’d seen over Fluxor, during the 2068 atrocity. The rest were a design she didn’t recognize. Only a few were in a safe position to fire on her.
They took between one and five milliseconds to react to her presence.
An eternity.
[What do we see?] asked Pax.
It was a rhetorical question. Given a nanosecond, she could’ve taken the equivalent of a grainy photograph. In a whole millisecond, she saw everything.
The Möbius planetoid was as she remembered: a knot of circuitry, curling in on itself with oily precision, except that some of it was missing. In the umbrella, a portal was in the act of unfolding, preparing to disgorge their original quarry. Below, the event horizon. Between those extremes, the mysterious warships. They were unlike any design she knew.
Primitively constructed, essentially boxes, bristling with weapons.
Not designed for survivability. An offensive armada.
What use is a million attack ships? Either to overwhelm a well-defended target, like Praxis or Waterfall, or to cleanse a large volume of space.
Large, like a galaxy.
In orbit around the planetoid, she could see the factory that made them. It was of a more primitive design than the Horu equipment. Much like the ships it built, it was barely post-industrial. Between them flowed a stream of parts. The planetoid was being mined for raw materials. A new ship was emerging from the factory.
Around the factory was a fleet of freighters. They were of many types. One was in the act of unloading weapons and systems, destined for the new ship.
Most surprising of all was the event horizon. Physics says the information falling into a black hole is imprinted in its event horizon. If this were Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, then the information contained in a hundred million solar masses would be stored in its featureless sphere. Except it wasn’t featureless. It had a texture.
That was impossible.
Or new physics.
From distances of between a hundred and a thousand kilometers, beam weapons began firing. She’d be gone by the time they reached her location. She hoped for the sake of the umbrella that they’d taken this into account. The last thing she wanted was the Möbius universe endangered.
She jumped.
[Where now?] asked Jaasper Huw.
[Hopefully we’re still in our galaxy,] said Pax.
21 ∞ Dangerous Ideas
314
With Kitou gone, and Ito quarantined, the ship began to die. She spent her last hours monitoring the progress of Ito’s disease.
[Maybe he’ll keep me company,] she said.
[That’s maudlin,] said Box, and wished she hadn’t.
[Who knows?] said the ship. [Maybe we’ll both end up in the data, like all the other lost souls.]
Between the firewall that’d snapped automatically in place when Ito first became infectious, and the one the ship had already installed, was a sacrificial AI. Like a canary in a coalmine, a time would come when it became infected. Then it would wire both firewalls shut. A curtain would be drawn over Ito’s mind, that could never be opened.
Box regarded that prospect with horror.
[The disease is structured like me,] said the ship.
[How?] she asked.
[It’s a distributed, parasitic personality. Not that I’m a parasite. I like to think I help the minds I share.]
[You don’t have to worry about that.]
[I don’t. I’m not susceptible to dangerous ideas.]
[What do you mean?]
[The pathway of the cryptographic disease is seductive ideas. Things you can’t get out of your head.]
[You mean paranoid thoughts?]
[In a sense. If the eventual psychosis is the rape of the mind, the disease is its seduction.]
[That’s a horrible metaphor.]
[But apt. The disease targets a certain type of mind. People with high-functioning binary brains. Creative e
nough to allow the seduction; sufficiently mathematical to host the algorithm.]
[Polymaths?]
[Close. Consider you, for example. I’d place you in the top one percent of creative thinkers. Fortunately, you have no aptitude for mathematics. You can count, but numbers don’t sing to you.]
[Fortunately?]
[Otherwise, you’d have the disease.]
[I always knew that’d come in handy,] she said.
[Ito scores in the top one percent for both.]
[What about the others?]
[Most humans aren’t high functioning either way. That includes most here in Flipside. The disease has no interest in them. Nim looks on it like a specimen. It has no appetite for her. Brin is insufficiently creative. Respit is endangered. He survives by the skin of his codebase. Pax is infected.]
[What?]
[I was there when it happened. He’ll be fine.]
[What about Kitou?]
[That’s where it gets interesting. Like the Blue people, Kitou’s immune. She appears incapable of delusion. She rejects the infection.]
[Is that a pointer to a cure?]
[Could be. The people of Fluxor could save us.]
[Then we’d better save them.]
[Exactly.]
[Can you get infected?]
[Me? No. I’m conscious in a way your biological minds aren’t. I can quarantine the malware.]
[The Horu necropolii got infected.]
[That’s because they’re digital humans.]
[What about Alois?]
[Infected.]
[Shit, will he be okay?]
[Alois is testimony.]
[What the hell does that mean?]
[I can’t say. Alois’s mission is secret.]
[Even from me?]
[Especially from you.]
That night, Box dreamed of Kitou. She was laying beneath something coarse, like an animal skin. Bodies slept closely around her. She heard Viki’s voice, murmuring.
“I’m at peace now,” Kitou was saying. “I’m not frightened any more. I know a reckoning is coming, and I’m ready.”
“Kitou, come back please,” said Box. “We agreed. We should all be together.”
“Then you come to me. It’s begun, Dr Box. The Chancery isn’t where you should be.”
The pearly grey light of a Möbius dawn was starting to rise. Or was it the half-light of a Farside day? Viki stirred, and she felt Iris shivering. A hand reached for a pot, and the hide stank of urine.
“Where are you?”
“In the high West, over the mountains.”
“What are you doing?”
“Right now, gathering intel.”
“How did you get there?”
“On the train.”
“The train goes down the centerline.”
“It goes everywhere. You just have to know how.”
“How do you know how?”
“This world told me. It’s my friend, Dr Box. It’s helping me.”
“That sounds like hocus pocus.”
“It definitely isn’t.”
“What was it like?”
“The journey?”
“Yes.”
“Perfectly comfortable. As cold as space outside. Without aerodynamic drag the train goes fast. Really fast. You can feel it in the hum of the magnets. But you see nothing, just the lights of the train, on a featureless plain.”
“That sounds spooky.”
“It would be, if I did it alone. I had Viki and Iris. Formidable corners.”
Box envisaged the three girls fighting. Yes, they’d be a good team.
“Was there gravity?”
“All the way.”
“I’m surprised it’s not done more often.”
“I think it’s because of the ghosts.”
“What?”
“The voices. Like a staticky radio. Viki calls them lost souls.”
“Like Chance?”
“No. Or yes. Maybe. More like the parts people are made of. It’s hard to describe. Snatches of conversation, lost in the passing.”
“What were they saying?”
“Facts, Dr Box. Information. It’s kicked off in the Real. Flux is destroyed, with his cargo of souls.”
Box took a few moments to absorb that. If true, it was a calamity on the scale of Fluxor.
“What about Pax?” she said.
Kitou rose, and Box realized the conversation they were having was inside Kitou’s head.
“Dr Box, I want to show you something. My mandala. Will you give me your mind?”
“How do I do that?”
“Just consent.”
“Okay.”
“I have your permission?”
“Yes.”
It was like the descent into psychedelia she’d experienced in Utah, but softer, more human. Instead of jangling geometric shapes, there was synesthesia. First, she felt the thoughts of the trees, like a warm breeze in a deep forest. Then she saw the patter and hiss of the rain on the leaves. She opened her eyes, and she was in a clearing, sitting cross-legged in front of an ironwood tree. The tree, she realized. Behind her was the void, and beyond it the massif of Lhotse. In the sky, in unbelievable detail, in wavelengths she didn’t know existed, were alien constellations.
“Kitou, this is beautiful,” she said.
“It’s the night sky over Atwusk’niges,” said Kitou.
“Is this how you see it?” she asked.
“It’s how the forest sees it.”
The heavens wheeled, and then the same stars were visible through crystalline towers. This, she knew, was the sky over Jura. Then the stars became sparse, like candles reflected in the stained glass of a cathedral. This she knew was the Smear.
She’d crossed fourteen hundred light-years of space, in a whisper.
“Avalon,” said Kitou. “There’s more...”
The skies wheeled again, and were filled by a rapacious light. She’d never imagined something so torrid. A filter slid down, and she could see a wall of stars. In places, they were packed so close there was no intervening space. A second filter slid down, and now the wall was heaped with rubies and sapphires, scattered with pinpricks of carbon and pearl.
“The sky above the Möbius machine,” said Kitou.
Her viewpoint zoomed, and in the turmoil was a disc. A speck appeared in front of it. The speck became the Water Bear. She felt Pax and Jaasper Huw inside.
“How?”
“They’re here, Dr Box. They’re coming for us.”
“You’re saying this is real?”
Kitou nodded.
“Look...”
Her viewpoint changed again. She saw swarms of spaceships, like boxes of weapons. They were being churned out in their thousands by a factory that was cannibalizing the workings of the Möbius machine. They reminded her of Liberty ships: ugly hulks, built for a purpose.
She zoomed in on the Water Bear. Now she was in the ship’s gamespace. Pax and Jaasper were watching systems run, arguing strategies. The ship couldn’t see her.
She felt Jaasper’s worldspirit. A winged thing, regal and stern. Fleetingly, for a moment within a moment, it reached out to her. She drew back, foolishly self-conscious, a voyeur.
“Kitou, how is this possible?”
She felt Kitou give a virtual shrug: a teenaged deus ex machina.
“I can do a lot more than this, Dr Box.”
Word filtered down to the Chancery of Kitou’s exploits in the high West, from the farseer Nim. The girl had taken a liking to Box, and had become a wellspring of information. Previously mute, she’d become almost talkative.
“The white witch. The devil’s head. Her band of Ferals,” said Nim.
“They all sound like Kitou,” said Box.
“The Ferals are the resistance,” said Nim.
“The Horu resistance?”
“Yes, the Grays.”
Nim explained to her that time runs differently on top of the Helix. That for Kitou a year had alrea
dy passed. “It has nothing to do with physics,” she said. “Time is a constant. The difference is how we experience it.”
“Like in a ship’s gamespace?” asked Box.
Nim nodded. She was fascinated by the subject of ships. The Reanimator God was Mathematics, implemented in the form of a machine. Their world had been sung into existence by gamespace constructs. In Nim’s opinion, the ship was a godlike being.
Box asked her about the Red Lady.
“We don’t share the Blue prophecy,” said the girl, “that three heroes will lead us to heaven. But we do have three heroes. One being you. We believe they will deliver us from evil.”
“Would you characterize that as a religion?”
“I don’t know what a religion is.”
Marius soon grew into his role as a leader. He called a Clave: a meeting of the people, in the Great Hall of the Chancery. He stood with a map of the world. It was more like a diagram than a map. It showed the Möbius world as two geometrically perfect figure-of-eights. The Eagle was shown as an eagle, with talons. The Spinifex Reach wasn’t shown at all.
The Enemy was shown as a black king. Box found that fascinating. What did these people know about kings?
There was to be no racism, Marius said. Everyone knew what he meant. No Horu prissiness. That didn’t go well with some of the Horu. Prejudice against the Blue people in Flipside was an old wound. There was some heckling, which was shut down instantly by a shout from Amelia Chance.
They reminded Box of the comfortable burghers of Earth, unwilling to risk anything to save everything, preferring to believe it wasn’t there.
Marius explained the war to them.
“It seems there’s been an outbreak of testosterone in Eagle,” said Box, later, after the hall had emptied. “What’s gotten into Helen’s mind? They’ll be slaughtered.”
Helen had taken her army, and was making an attack on the Enemy.
What’d happened to asymmetric warfare?
“They would, if she really meant to do it that way,” said Marius.
He unfolded a second map. This was more detailed. To the east and the west, in the high mountain ranges, the peaks were numbered and named. Kronos’s armies were shown with more numbers. She guessed those were troop deployments.
“The purpose of Helen’s raid is deception,” Marius was saying. “Ito also rides west. I believe Kronus will accept Ito’s challenge. His story allows him no choice. He must fight and win. Ito will seek to oppose him. What happens then is in the hands of the gods.”
The Water Bear Page 31
