by Nancy Kress
The Institute for Brain Research was a building of stone, not foamcast, with simple arches forming a colonnade on all four sides. People sat on railings or stone benches, talking earnestly. He found Dr. Hampden’s office on the ground floor and knocked. The door said, “Just a moment, please.” When it opened, Philip was looking at a woman only a few years older than himself. “Yes?” she said.
Brown eyes, rather dull brown hair tied back, dressed in dark pants and a green tunic, she was in no way remarkable. Neither pretty nor plain, short nor tall, skinny nor fat. Yet Philip felt he would have noticed her anywhere: her confident carriage, alert expression, intelligent eyes. This was someone who knew who she was and what she wanted to do, but was not going to trample others to get it. She was the antithesis of the man on the train. She was the un-Tara. Nothing in her manner suggested either impatience or the kind of female reaction Philip usually got to his spectacular genemod looks.
“Yes?” she repeated.
He’d been standing there like a fool. “I’m looking for Dr. Hampden. Rachel Landry sent me.”
If that impressed her, she didn’t show it. “I’m Dr. Hampden.”
Philip had regained poise. “My name is Philip Anderson. I have a message for you from Ms. Landry.”
He handed her the chip and she listened to it. Someone within called, “Julie?”
“Just a moment, Cy.” She turned her gaze on Philip. “You’ve volunteered to be a deep-brain implant subject? Why?”
“That’s not an easy question to answer.”
“We’re most certainly not going forward without an answer. Which will be followed by a battery of physical, mental and psychological tests. This lab is not a whimsical hobby of Rachel Landry’s, nor of university president Caitlin Landry. Neither one makes scientific decisions for me, and I need to protect the validity of my research and its methods.”
“I understand,” Philip said. He’d touched a nerve. But if a favorable decision rested with Julie Hampden, then he would convince her that he was healthy, sane, and possessed of a convincing reason to undergo an experimental messing with his one and only brain.
Yeah, right.
“Dr. Hampden,” he began, “may I ask how familiar you are with—”
“Julie,” a man said, crowding into the doorway, “this can’t wait. Post-op called. Subject Six had an epileptic seizure.”
“All right. Yes. Mr. Anderson, sit down over there and wait. It might be a long wait, unless you’d rather come back tomorrow.”
“I’ll wait,” Philip said. Silently, he completed his own question: —with Varennes’s theory of the intersection of quantum entanglement and the collective unconscious?
She would never accept him as a research subject. And if she did, would he too end up in a post-op epileptic seizure? On this Libertarian planet, where each person was allowed to make decisions about his or her life and there existed no governmental controls, just how experimental was experimental science allowed to be with human subjects?
Who was crazier, him or her?
• • •
Two weeks later, Philip lay on a gurneybot, waiting to be taken into the operating room. His shaved head was covered by a thin helmet he couldn’t see and his hands were strapped down to prevent him from touching the helmet. The room was too cold. The gurney was too hard. He felt like a trussed, decorated, chilled chicken readied for sacrifice to some mechanical god. There was no other place on the Eight Worlds that he would rather be.
Julie Hampden, swathed in sterile garb, suddenly loomed over him. All he could see of her were two brown eyes, but his heart leapt. He said, “I didn’t think you’d be here.”
“Me neither. Your surgeon gave way only because I got permission from Caitlin Landry herself.”
Philip smiled. He wanted to kiss her eyelids. He wanted to rip off her scrubs and then everything else. He wanted to ignore the careful protocol that had kept them from so much as touching hands during all his pre-op tests. He wanted more of whatever drug they’d already given him, because this recklessness was a drug reaction—wasn’t it?
He didn’t need more drugs to tell her how he felt, how he’d been feeling since the moment they met. “Julie—”
She cut him off. “No. Don’t.”
“But—”
“You’re drugged, Philip. Don’t talk.” She smiled. “Unless it’s about physics.”
“It’s not. I—”
“Look at this.” She held up a tablet, which held an image of green and red worms.
Her rejection should have made him feel bruised, but it didn’t. They both knew what lay between them. It would happen, when he was no longer her research subject. Everything would happen at exactly the right time!
Only, what if, afterwards, he—
“Philip, don’t get amorous. It’s a side effect of the drug. Look at this. Do you know what it is?”
“No.” Sulky now. He didn’t seem in control of his emotions. He was as bad as Tara. Tara—where was she? Had he remembered to tell Rachel Landry—
“Focus, Philip. Be you. This is an electron microscopy image of neural connections. This is what the implants are going to boost.”
Of course it was. Did she think he didn’t know that? Why was she telling him what they’d spent so much time discussing already?
He realized the answer: Because she’d wanted to be with him during the operation, but she didn’t want to discuss anything personal. The green-and-red worms were a distraction. She wanted him to be detached, cerebral. He wanted desperately to please her. Only all at once it was hard to think, hard to talk.
Fucking drugs.
He said, “Gamma rays,” and she smiled.
“Yes. Gamma rays.”
That was what the operation was for, yes. The brain produced them naturally. They aided memory, the immune system, concentration. Deep-brain stimulation from implants had been used even on old Earth to combat a growing list of ailments and memory problems. Serious meditation dramatically increased cerebral production of gamma rays—but not, for Philip’s purposes, enough of an increase. The implants would boost that production.
Someone started the gurneybot moving. Julie walked alongside. Philip wanted to say something, but he couldn’t find words. Finally he mumbled, “Physics…of nothingness.” She didn’t hear him, or she chose not to respond.
But Philip knew what he meant. The physics of nothingness was why he was here. Julie was interested in his brain. Philip, who’d spent every spare minute reading as much physics as he could understand, was here for the void.
Which didn’t exist. Even “empty space” roiled with gravitational waves. With particles that popped in and out of existence, brief excitations in fields of energy. With non-locality and unseen dark matter. With energy that became particles and particles that became energy. Everything in the universe was entangled with everything else; particles existed in all states at once until observed, and observation changed the whole system, even the dimension of time, so that effects could happen before their causes. It was a seething jungle out there, and he was a blind man trying to stumble through it encased in a cage of meat.
But the number of potential neural connections in a human brain, which also operated partly at a quantum level, exceeded the total number of…something. Stars in the Milky Way, maybe? Julie had told him that—hadn’t she?
There was something he wanted to say to Julie, to himself, something written by someone…Eddington? Yes, Arthur Eddington…but what?
Then there were people moving around him, and very bright lights, and someone saying, “Breathe,” and then a genuine nothingness.
• • •
He woke, slept, woke again. The third time, he lay in a hospital bed, in a small room with dimmed lights that were nonetheless still too bright. Monitors hummed softly around him, and footsteps went by in a corridor. A man laughed, low and pleasant, and said something Philip didn’t hear clearly. The footsteps receded.
He was alone.
He touched his head: bandages under some sort of thin film. A nurse appeared, somehow looking both compassionate and stern. “Mr. Anderson? You’re awake. I’m going to ask you some questions, all right?”
As if Philip had a choice. But he said, “Sure.” He wanted to get this over and again be alone.
When the simple questions were over, sternness took over from compassion. The nurse said, “One more thing, and it’s very important. Dr. Hampden left word that when you awoke, you are not to try to meditate yet. Wait until after both the doctor and she have seen you. All right?”
“Yes.”
“Repeat back to me what I just said.”
Philip did, word for word. The nurse fussed with machinery for a few minutes and then left.
Philip began to meditate.
Clear his mind, concentrate on his breathing, let the emptiness-that-was-not come as everything else faded away. It was surprisingly easy, easier than it had ever been before, but then he had to push away the elation he felt. Elation wasn’t emptiness. Push away everything, let his mind just be.…
Time passed. He touched something.
A second later, it was gone.
With a deep shudder, Philip returned to himself. Daylight flooded the room. Julie, two of her researchers, and a doctor stood by his bed. The researchers were absorbed in the screen displaying his brain waves. The doctor looked grave. Julie looked quietly furious.
Disappointment tsunamied through Philip.
Julie said tightly, “You were told not to do that.”
The doctor said, “There doesn’t seem to be any harm done.”
Philip said nothing. Whatever had just happened had been brief, partial, unsatisfactory. Nothing like the transforming experience of five years ago. Yes, he had touched something, but he couldn’t sustain it, couldn’t understand it, had gained nothing from it.
A researcher said, “Increased production of gamma rays, yes, but fitfully—look at this graph. He wasn’t—”
Philip stopped listening. He closed his eyes. For this he had machinery in his brain—for a graph that didn’t even excite researchers all that much?
Then the researcher said, “I wonder if there’s a learning curve. If he can control the gamma wave production with practice. We need to set up a schedule that controls for variables.”
Practice. Like a concert pianist, an athlete, a dancer. Practice and discipline. And then maybe…
Philip opened his eyes. “Yes,” he said.
8
* * *
PROMETHEUS
DiCaria said, “There they are, sir.”
The Landry warship showed as a blip on a datascreen of the Skyhawk. Technically, of course, it was not a warship since it belonged to a corporation fleet and, until now, there had never been a war. But call it what you will, Martinez had no doubt that it was just as heavily weaponized as his own vessel.
Martinez said, “Arm weapons.”
“Armed.”
“Countdown at twenty units from firing range.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Skyhawk hovered on the Prometheus side of the Polyglot-Prometheus gate. Martinez’s three-ship fleet had raced from New California through the gate to neutral Polyglot, spent a week reaching the Polyglot-Prometheus gate, and passed through. The most remote gate and—until now—the farthest away from any planet, it had been the last one discovered, barely fifty years ago. It led only to the dwarf planet Prometheus, or so everyone had assumed.
Prometheus orbited the same star as New Utah, although so far away that the planet was frozen, a small ball of rock and ice. It shone with thin layers of carbon monoxide, methane, and nitrogen over water ice. Tholins, darker areas caused by charged particles falling on mixtures of methane and nitrogen, dotted the surface, as did craters and shallow mountains. It made for a bleak environment, totally unlike anything else near a gate. The only thing on Prometheus was an underground Peregoy research station on a hundred-year lease from Polyglot, which owned Prometheus. Neither Polyglot nor Peregoy Corporation had stationed defense ships at the gate, since the barren planet below held nothing of real value.
Until now.
Control the Prometheus gate and you controlled the most direct access to the newly discovered eleventh gate. The eleventh gate could also be reached from New Utah, but that was a three-month voyage through deep space. Martinez sent his other two ships, the Zeus and the Green Hills of Earth, to the new gate, as per Sloan’s orders. The Skyhawk lingered here, gambling that this critical access point was where the Landrys would attack in the first battle of the war. He would, if he were a Landry captain. In addition to the weapons on the Skyhawk, Martinez had backup from the planetary defense weapons. They weren’t much, but the Landry captain might not expect them to exist at all.
And here came a Landry cruiser, newly emerged from the Polyglot-Prometheus gate.
“Twenty from firing range,” the lieutenant said.
Martinez felt in his own skin the muscle-tightening of everyone else on the bridge. This was what they had trained for and had never yet had a chance to exercise. On New California, more ships were being hastily constructed; in war you always lost some battles. Martinez did not intend to lose this one.
“Eighteen,” the lieutenant said.
Mounted on the bulkhead was a permascreen with Sloan Peregoy’s portrait. Martinez had never liked that; it reeked too much of veneration, with overtones of Lenin and Mao and other dictators. Sloan Peregoy, that intelligent but limited man, did not read enough history. But Martinez had never had the portrait removed. Standard fleet equipment.
“Sixteen.”
Sloan stared out, level-eyed and unsmiling, at Martinez.
“Four—aaahhhh!”
A blast of light on all viewscreens, soundless except for the sickening SLAM! against the ship.
“We’re…hit,” said the gunnery officer. She’d been thrown to the floor, tried to raise herself, and collapsed.
“Retreat!” Martinez said. “Straight-line retreat!”
The Skyhawk had not lost power. Wherever they’d been hit, it hadn’t been in the drive. Martinez, who’d kept his seat, watched the moving blips on the data screen. If this new weapon had an even greater range, or the Landry ship a greater speed…
Because it had to be a new weapon. Nothing in the Peregoy arsenal had that long a firing range, nothing. This was what Martinez had been afraid of and had argued about with Sloan, arguments that Martinez had lost.
The Landry ship didn’t pursue the Skyhawk, nor fire again. The brief battle was over—the first of the war, and Martinez had lost. He watched another Landry ship emerge from the gate into Prometheus space. Both went into orbit around the gate, out of range of the pitiful planetary defense weapons. The two warships weren’t interested in Prometheus, or its scientists. They wanted only to control the Polyglot-Prometheus gate.
There wouldn’t be Landry ships on the Polyglot side, which was neutral space, but there didn’t need to be. The Landry Libertarian Alliance now controlled the most direct access to the eleventh gate and whatever lay behind it. What the hell was this new weapon, and what else could it do?
“Damage report,” he said. “All sections, damage report. Gardwell, the drive?”
“Undamaged, sir.” Gardwell’s face appeared on a viewscreen.
“Available speed?”
“Maximum, sir.”
“Good. Helmsman, set a course for target destination.” Sloan Peregoy’s intel said one month from Prometheus to the eleventh gate.
A medical team arrived on the bridge for the gunnery officer, who’d broken an arm in her fall and was irritable about it. “I’ll be back as soon as it’s set, sir.”
The damage reports came in. Not as bad as he feared; perhaps the Landry ship had fired too soon. Perhaps the new weapon, whatever it was, was too new to them as well. Perhaps—with any luck—this was a prototype, and they didn’t possess more.
But the Skyhawk had lost three crew member
s and a part of a cargo bay.
As Martinez made the dozens of necessary decisions, a part of his mind would not let go of his thoughts about Sloan Peregoy. Martinez had told him, in the respectful terms that were the only ones Sloan would listen to, that the tight corporate control on the Peregoy worlds might have unintended consequences. Communications were controlled. The environment was cared for and protected. Jobs were provided for all. Indoctrination of children was heavy. Capitalism was tightly regulated. Order and respect were emphasized. None of that, although it forced planetary peace and eliminated want, created the atmosphere needed for creative innovation.
The Landrys, whose Libertarian worlds and unregulated capitalism allowed for virtually anything to be created, tested, and revised no matter what it did to people or planets, were shortsighted but better at innovation. They had innovated themselves a new weapon, and the Skyhawk had lost its first and only battle.
Prometheus and its shimmering gate dwindled on the viewscreen until they disappeared.
Martinez brought up the data on his three dead crewmen. Dean Chimenti, Warrant Officer, wife and two children, file request for burial in space.
Janice Flewellen, Spacer First Class, parents on New Yosemite, file request for body to be returned there.
Daniel Chapman, brother on New California, file request for burial in space.
Martinez would write to each of the relatives and send the letters with his official report. “Mr. DiCaria,” he said to his exec, “take charge of funeral arrangements.”
Unintended consequences.
9
* * *
GALT
News of the victory at the Prometheus gate reached Rachel on Galt eight days after the battle. Interplanetary communication was, she thought and not for the first time, a throwback to pre-industrial humanity on old Earth, when news must travel by horse or runner or raven. The gates had their drawbacks.
