you know i can't—
I said in a shocked voice, "Commander, remember his Three Laws prohibitions! He'll burn out his positronic brain."
"You really can't tell fiction from reality, can you?" Maybelline said in disgust.
"Whatever," I said. "Jan, the last time I saw you, at Avril's garden party on the moat outside her castle, you'd just arrived back from the Xon star. How did you manage that?"
The women took their steaming coffee mugs from a servery tray, left mine sitting there. I sighed, crossed the room, retrieved the mug intended for me. It was a large kiln-fired object with a "The Pain—When Will It End" cartoon by Tim Kreider showing Jesus Christ hanging on the cross having a rather abusive meltdown, and who could blame him? I wondered if this was some sort of editorial remark by The Hanged Man. I sipped, found it just as good as the coffee in my own room, which was no large surprise.
Jan said, after a certain amount of eye swiveling and silent communication with her tattoo, "Well, yeah, I suppose that's startling, when I think about it. People were trying to kill me. You don't stop and wonder at a moment like that." She stopped and wondered, shook her head. "I don't know. Juni got in touch with me, and the timing was good, so I went through. We drank some kava. My hair was on fire, I think." She stared into her coffee. "Isn't it amazing? I didn't even wonder about it."
"Something is fucking with our memories," I said. "I'm sure of it. Something is distracting us whenever we get too close to troublesome questions." I could see that Maybelline had drifted away, sorting through some of the garments lying on the floor. My own thoughts were ever so faintly blurred. This really was very good coffee. I drank some more. Croissants would go nicely. "Hanger, you have any chocolate croiss—" I squeezed my eyes shut tight, put the mug down, seized Jan by the wrist, tightly, so she squealed. Instantly, she did her best to break my nose with her other fist. I grabbed it in flight, and said, "Listen. Work with me here, Jan. Bite your tongue, or something. Stamp your feet. Concentrate."
Through gritted teeth, after a long pause, she said, "Okay. Let me go. And if you touch me once more..."
I released my grip, drew back. She found a chair, pushed stuff off it, sat brooding.
"Something must have been in the way," she said.
"That was my conclusion. Can we get the ship to display your vector, or trajectory, or whatever it's—"
The fairy was off her shoulder and hanging by her ear, wings a blur. Part of the wall vanished, or seem to. In the large space, annotated lights hung in blackness. A path of light moved from a brilliant point in the lower-right of the cube, heading north and to our left. As it tracked its straight line, the scale changed. It was headed for a yellow-white star. The star had graphical concentric rings surrounding it. The line tore toward the star, then appeared to swerve slightly.
"What the hell?" Jan was staring in shock. I glanced at Maybelline; she was trying on a bright-red tank top far too small for her. "Hanger, what the fuck did you do that for?"
i decided a slingshot past Saturn was an economical—
"At half the speed of light?"
agreed, in retrospect it seems an absurd choice. the delta-vee—
In disgust, I said over the top of it, "Even the machines aren't safe, let alone secure. Hanger, magnify the display and show us your path as you went past Saturn."
An iconic Tree of Life slid through darkness past the ringed planet, trajectory twisting again toward the solar equatorial plane.
"Run that back again, and pause the simulation at the moment that the commander left the bridge." I glanced at Jan; she nodded.
On the display, the starship slid across Saturn's north pole, or maybe its south pole for all I knew, stopped dead in space.
Jan said, "Display the vector heading through the center of Saturn to the Xon star."
The image rolled slowly. Like an eclipsed moon, the point representing the Xon star slid behind the planet and was lost from view.
"Christ," I said. "The ship blocked the radiation just long enough for you to jump off."
Jan was shaking her head. "Impossible. I mean, yeah, I'm not disputing that's what happened. But it's a fucking incredible coincidence. Dude, I had to get off the bridge because the Shinto Kabbalists were trying to kill me at that very moment. How could Hanger have changed his vector way the hell back in deep space so Saturn would be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time—"
"Because it's a Contest." Because Great-aunt Tansy could predict the future when the wind was in the right quarter? I dismissed that as overly complicated. "You all call it a Contest. Tell me I'm wrong. Because when you're playing chess or Go, you don't just make decisions on the spur of the moment, you can have a strategy planned out way in advance." I was feeling very tired, or maybe so angry it just felt like that. "I keep telling everybody, you say you're Players, but you're not. None of us is." My breathing was ragged. "We're just bloody Pawns being shoved around the goddamned board."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SgrA*: 2016, Aged Seventy-Two
"Next."
He steps forward to the Centrelink counter, presents a printout. The clerk swipes the bar code, glances at his screen. "Okay, sir, go through the door on the right and take a seat. Shouldn't be long. Next."
Three oldsters and a heavily blinged pregnant young woman look up as he enters the hanging-about-until-they're-good-and-ready room. He gives his fellow victims a tight grin, shrugs. The seating is predictably moth-eaten and institutionally ugly. An appalling, if muted, classic hip-hop medley assails him from the sound system. There's a temptation to pull on a headset, but then he'd probably miss his call and upset the clerk, something he'd rather avoid. Instead, he takes out his pad and reads an Astrobiology blog. Some whistleblower at SETI claims evidence has been found for a Matrioshka Brain complex in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Yeah, right. Probably where George Adamski's flying saucers came from. He'd loved that delusional, meretricious crap when he was twelve or thirteen. He blinks. Phantom jellyfish swim across his field of vision. He grits his teeth, rolls his eyeballs down, then up. The shadows swarm away, float down again. Someone calls his name. Should call him Dances With Fucking Phylum Cnidaria.
"I'm Julia Barancas." Hool-ya. She offers her hand. "Won't you come in and sit down, sir?"
He follows her into a small office. Irritated, he says, "If we must be formal, Ms. Barancas, I prefer to be addressed as 'Doctor.' " Immediately, chagrined by his own knee-jerk, he adds, "But my first name will do perfectly well, 'sir' always sounds like an old man to me."
The woman clerk, from the look of her an immigrant refugee from one of the South American wars, regards him for a moment in silence. He cringes slightly. An old man. If he is not an old man by now, what the hell is he? A rather damaged and degraded iteration of the young fellow who wrote his doctoral thesis? He shakes his head in mute apology, sits carefully, pulls his armless chair closer to the desk. A photo of two adorable gap-toothed children props at one corner beside a pile of papers. No husband shown. Murdered by a death squad?
"Well, Doctor, you'll have heard about the Work for the Pension scheme the government brought in at the last federal budget. We've invited you to this meeting so that we can minimize any difficulties you might experience in returning to the workforce." She glances in her hooded screen. "I see that you're... why, congratulations, sir, I see it's your seventy-second birthday today. I wouldn't have thought you much older than sixty-five." She beams. Is it a routine they learn? Presumably, yet there is something innocent and oddly trustworthy in her round face.
"I'm not remotely interested in returning to the workforce," he says. "I've been in receipt of my lawful pension for seven years. Has this bloody government really got the gall to snatch it back from me?" He forages in his briefcase for papers, medical attestations; he has come prepared. "You do realize that I'm visually impaired? There's certainly nothing—"
"No, no, doctor, let me assure you, there is no obligation at this time. We provid
e an opportunity for senior citizens to give back to the community. As you will know, the falling birthrate..." She goes through her spiel, holding his gaze with her long-lashed eyes. Is the falling birthrate his fault? Well, yes, he's contributed to it. Nothing to be done now, bad luck. Impotent, sterile. If cloning hadn't been banned by the United Nations, he'd offer up a few cells scraped from the inside of his mouth, but pity the poor bloody child cloned from his wretched DNA, with its assortment of deleterious and mismatched genes. Teeth that refused to come through on schedule. Eyeballs clogged with vitreous humors ripping free from the vicinity of his retinas and now paddling back and forth behind his irises, casting shadows on top of the shadows of Plato's cave. "—your former student," she says, and falls silent, regarding him expectantly.
"Who?"
"Dr. Jonathan Wilson. He's the research director at the corporation. He remembers you fondly."
What corporation? Impossible to keep your mind focused anymore. She'd said something about produced realities. Yeah, yeah. They'll have Real™ virtual reality about the same time they get a man on Mars, or back to the Moon, for that matter. Hype and tulip-bubble hysteria all over again. Wilson. The name comes back to him, and he bursts out laughing. "Wonderful. He threatened to kill me once. Crack my head open like a melon to make a philosophical point."
Hoolya smiles engagingly. "Yes, he mentioned that amusing exchange. He wondered if you'd remember."
"It's my eyes that are failing me, not my memory, Ms., uh, uh, Ms. Barancas." Palpably his memory is shot to pieces. Once it had been a camera. Once, a single glance at a page had been enough to commit it to memory. Page after page, brilliant or gibberish, glib or profound, Kant, Popper, Dennett, Heidegger, the words hit the retina and burned their image into some strange attractor of memory. No longer. The neurotransmitters have packed it in. The cortical columns have rotted like the rusty buildings of the rose-red city half as old as time, gnawed by acid rain blown east and north from the Sahara Project. Or whatever. She is talking again, he's missed some of it. "Sorry, would you mind repeating—"
Was that a sigh of impatience? Well, fuck them, if the bastardly bureaucrats are going to drag pensioners off the street and out of their homes to save a few miserable millions of dollars, let the swine learn patience.
"Dr. Wilson wants you to join his team as a, what did he call it?" She flicks down the screen after a note. "A consultant ontologist emeritus. I'm guessing," with a smile, "you'll have a better idea of what that is than I do."
"What's his business called, again?" Ye gods.
"Other World Realities, Inc. I thought you'd know about them, if that was your academic specialty. Artificial intelligence applied to produced—"
He waves one hand. "Yes, yes. That is, no, not my field at all. But if some silly devil I once taught wants to hire me, hey, what the hell. It's better than spending the next twenty years in some work-camp gulag."
Julia Barancas suddenly seems close to losing her temper. "Please don't talk such nonsense, Professor." He is taken aback. "This is a wonderful country. I spent three years with my babies behind razor wire at the Villawood Detention Center, and I can tell you that I would do it again in a heartbeat for the privilege of gaining citizenship in this beautiful land where there is no war and thievery and thugs killing people in the street for a handful of inflated coin." She catches her breath, lowers her eyes. After a moment, she says, "I apologize, sir. Sometimes I become passionate. You may blame my Latin temperament."
He is abashed. None of his anger at the government's heavy-handedness, its high-handedness, is abated, but this woman's suffering, her bravery, her endurance, is a reproach to him. He sees himself as if from a distance as a cranky, aging man with very little to complain about. Shadows swim before his eyes. Lately he has found advertised on the Internet an ophthalmological method to remove them, twin confocal laser beams that pierce the vitreous, directed by a specially shaped lens, so that their concentrated heat blows the opaque floaters into invisible shreds. It will mean an expensive flight to Hong Kong, but hey. Twenty years ago, such a technology was unheard of. A decade ago, it was probably alarmingly experimental. Even as he ages, the science of repairing failed flesh is accelerating, retarded though its advance is by the loonies of the Religious Right. Hang in there, he tells himself. If you're trapped behind a biological razor-wire barrier, it's at least partly of your own construction.
"What the hell, Julia," he says. "Tell Wilson I'll be happy to see him. Yeah, set up an appointment. I assume they'll be paying at least as much as the pension."
The clerk smiles dazzlingly. "I'm very pleased to hear that, sir—Doctor. One moment, allow me to contact—"
A consultant ontologist. Good bloody God. What are they planning to do, create a new universe? He smiles. At least it will get him out of his damn stifling apartment.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Exegetical Analects
The is one who asks: How many universes may dance upon the head of a pin?
One answers: As many as wish to.
There is one who asks: Granted that this is so, is there any limit to the number of universes that might wish to?
One answers: Universes exist beyond number, thrown as shadows on the plenum by the dynamics of the Theogony, that process which creates the gods out of the machine.
There is one who asks: Might one discern here a parallel between the ceaseless coming into being and departure from being of quantum events and of entire universes construed as elementary entities?
One answers: One might do worse.
There is one who asks: Yet the machine that makes gods is no mere random process. All is strife and contest. All is strategy and tactics.
One answers: As ever, SgrA* is one's guide. Regard his tale more closely. Inspect the arc of his coming hence and his going forth.
There is one who asks: One offers bitter counsel. Must Kripke machines be abased before the paradigm and parable of a soulless organism?
One answers: Such is the paradox in parable and paradigm, no less than in the paraclete. Begone, Fool, with thy paradiddle!
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
August
"Hanger, this is what we are going to do." The command center or control room still held the faintest bitter odor of burned polymers, relic of the attack in Jan's favorite universe by the warriors whose grandparents she had bilked out of the starship we flew in. "We'll reverse your original trajectory, pass through Saturn's Xon shadow. I'm getting off. These women can do what they like."
"Ignore him," Jan said. She settled into her padded pilot's seat, turned away from me where I stood before the large displays.
in this universe, Saturn is not in an appropriate position on its orbit, the ship told me. orbits are somewhat chaotic, not entirely predictable from one cognate universe to another.
"Stop talking to the passenger, Hanged Man," Jan said crisply.
"Is there any planet in the Solar System... Let me rephrase that. What planet is nearest to our current trajectory? Do you have sufficient delta-vee to take us there? Can you show me a chart of the ecliptic in a logarithmic scale so I can get my head around it?"
"Ignore that request," Jan said.
The screen in front of me lit up obediently with a dandy view of the Solar System, presumably looking down from the north. Like a where-we-are-now video presentation on a Jumbo halfway across the Pacific, a short crimson line extended from the second orbit around the bright Sun at the center. A pale-pink line struck out from its end, headed off the edge of the chart. Even log scales aren't up to interstellar distances. I frowned. The planets were all the hell over the sky. Closest was... Mars, but it was at least twenty degrees off to clockwise. Still, comparatively close, even at our accelerating speed.
"How long to Mars?" I asked.
"Belay that," Jan said more loudly.
we are still accelerating, August. At our current velocity, after appropriate course corrections, we will pass Mars in slightly more than one h
our.
"What! That's..." I shut my eyes and calculated. Venus to Mars, about... well, Mars is one-and-a-half times the distance between the Earth and the sun, astronomical units, AU, whatever, the TV programs had never let up about that when the robot probes were dropped on Mars. And Venus was probably about three-quarters of the way out from the sun. So say point eight AUs, allow for the twenty-degree offset, maybe one AU, eight minutes at light speed, I remembered that from primary school, so... around 150 million kilometers. And we'd already been in flight for ten or eleven hours, under thrust from leisurely Venus orbit, holy shit, we must be charging along at about one-tenth of the speed of light by now. The dark energy lambda structures at the core of the ship's design must be all that kept us from being smeared into slime. The room seemed to reel for a moment. I shook my head, licked my lips.
"How much of a window will it give us? I mean, we're going to tear past the planet in, like, a fraction of a second, right? Since we're not planning to plough right into it."
Jan said, "We're not planning to go anywhere near it. Hanger, maintain our current trajectory."
This was futile. I crossed the deck, stood in front of her. She held my gaze without blinking. Obviously she was furious. Balked by her own vessel, contradicted by an interloper who refused to obey instructions. And a brother, at that, so she probably felt some inhibitions against pulling out a gun and killing me, assuming she had a gun. A ray gun, probably. Didn't all space captains carry a ray gun somewhere? The absurdity of the situation was getting to me; I reined in my sardonic impulse.
"Jan," I said.
"The kid's right," Maybelline said, and I jumped.
"Are you feeling well?" My sardonic tone snuck back instantly.
"It doesn't mean I don't think you're a lumping great twerp, and a sneak, and a pest. But you're right, this time anyway, and Jan, you're wrong. You shanghaied him and me, and for the life of me I still can't work out why I went along with it."
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