A second thunderous yet inaudible pulse jolted the life-support bubble spinning its fake gravity at the orbit of dismantled Neptune.
"We really do need to withdraw from here," Septima said. "I'm expecting a K-machine attack any time now. It's not like them to pass up an opportunity like this."
The butler was dressed in an exquisite Renaissance gold-figured doublet with glass buttons, black cloak lined in black satin, fine leather boots, snow-white shirt with puffed sleeves. He bowed to Madam Olga, crone no longer, her hair streaming and radiantly blonde, filled with blossoms, her flowing dress as blue as summer sky and bright with stars. She curtsied to him, held out one slender, lovely hand. He took it.
"What an interesting outcome," he said to her.
"Well, I never expected it," she said, a smile on her rich red lips.
"Oh, come now. I think you must've guessed."
"All right. It did occur to me once or twice. We do seem so... singular," she told her beloved self. She turned to me, then. "August, please see your family home safely." With two swift steps, she was at my side, whispering in my ear so softly that no one else could hear her. "And for heaven's sake, marry the woman."
In the display, the Xon star was suddenly the size of a cat's eye, a saucer, a wagon wheel, as large as the sky. Jules uttered a girlish scream. The image went to schematic again as the habitat shook fearfully. A streamer of incandescence linked the embedded Sun and the swelling Xon object. All the circling, concentric shells with their trillions upon quadrillions of minds began peeling back, concentrating down into a vast, hard-packed, curving delta that flung itself at the Xon target, blazing deformed star at its core.
"Last call," I shouted. "Everybody off. End of the line. All change." I was half delirious with excitement. I spun on the ball of my right foot, found Lune with my outstretched right hand, pulled her to me. "Take all of us to my domain," I told the operating system, hoping it could still hear me. "Time for us to gather at the Round Table, I think."
In the display, as canvas shredding opened the Schwellen, the arrow began to enter the Xon. While I stepped into my own world, the Matrioshka Brain tore itself out of reality and went into a place beyond the Tegmark megacosmos interpenetrating every universe of the four levels. How did I know that? Had all this happened before? Had I seen it happen in just this way? No, no. Place and time were tangled. I clung to Lune, and she to me.
We stood outside the great iron-decorated doors. My family came through into the lobby, baffled, assertive, looking for advantage in their confusion. Only Decius was absent. I could not bring him here, although in a sense he was here already. My parents were not present. Leaving aside the godling Cathooks, one other was missing.
"Everyone's determined to spoil my Faerie T-party," Juni said peevishly.
"Take them in, would you?" I asked Lune. "Something I have to do urgently."
"You shouldn't drink so much before these exciting events," she said.
I grinned, kissed her. She tasted of sweetness and musk.
"Won't be a moment."
"Hurry back," she said, but held my hand as if she didn't want me to leave.
"Yes," I said, "yes, I love you, Lune."
I started up the stairs, then, toward the great room where his portrait held pride of place, and told the operating system: "Take me to Jamie Davenport."
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
August
As he turned in his wonderfully ergonomic chair, alerted by the ripping canvas sound I'd made, I saw that the man manipulating images in the display box was not nearly as old as his representation in the faux Lucien Freud portrait, although he was significantly older than me. Mid-thirties, robust, all his own hair—tall, dark, and handsome, as promised.
"Hey, how did you get in here? Hang on, I know you." James Davenport frowned. "No, sorry, of course I don't." He stood up, pushed his hands into the pockets of rather old-fashioned pants in a gruesome plaid pattern. "You must be August's... what, surely not his son? Grandson?"
"Hello, Jamie." I wanted to embrace him like the brother he almost was. That would have alarmed him. Off the sports field and off the booze, Australian men are not physically demonstrative.
A huge spontaneous smile. "Shit a brick, mate, it is you! Good Christ, how jejune. Nobody, but nobody, does the reversion to adolescence thing any more." He confounded my thumbnail sketch of Aussie manhood by grabbing me in a bear hug and kissing me on the cheek. I swiveled my eyes but went with it, at least to the extent of not pulling away.
"Hardly adolescent, sport."
"Anyone under thirty is a kid to me, kid. So how've you been, you old bastard?"
To my surprise, I was starting to feel shaky. I'd roamed the four levels of the Tegmark metacosmos, but meeting Jamie as a rejuvenated oldster was profoundly unnerving. What the hell cognate is this, I asked myself.
"Mind if I sit down?"
"Hey, sure. Pull over Mileva's chair, she won't be in until later."
I sat. Davers appeared to be working in some sort of media laboratory. The boxy display above his desk looked like a futuristic descendant of a computer monitor or an old-fashioned ancestor of the three-dimensional displays aboard Hanger. Well, aboard The Hanged Man until the fool thing hurled itself into the Xon star. It reminded me of something else, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
I said, "What year is it, Davers?"
Without hesitating, he said, "That's austere, Seebeck—2046, if anyone's counting any longer. Which makes us both, what, 101, 102? Did you arrange something gross for your ton?"
"My what?"
"Your century. My God, you poor old devil, I'd heard a man can really mess up his neuralware with a radical rejuve. I'm flattered that you bothered to remember me." He laughed. "We had some good times, August. Do you still remember that day I came to school wearing pom-poms to freak out Ms. Thieu?"
I realized that I was rocking slightly, back and forth, almost autistically, and the chair with me. "Tutu, Jamie. Your sister's tutu. And that prick Bruce beat you up. Tried to. We all jumped in."
He looked impressed at my mnemonic performance. "Let me get you some kava," he said, getting to his feet. "You do drink kava?"
Jan drank it, I thought. My sister Jan. Do I really have a sister Jan? At least, if I do, James Davenport has never met her. So this solid, professional man in front of me had spent at least part of his life in a delusional state, supposing that he truly knew a fellow child, a fellow student, named August Seebeck, with a Great-aunt Tansy and a faithful dog named Do Good.
"They drink that filthy stuff now, do they?"
"Be like that, then. I can probably rustle up a Classic Coke."
"Dr. Pepper would be fine, if you have it." I was dizzy with the absurdity of it all, the banality. I scooted forward to his desk, peered into the display space. It was filled with swarming objects I couldn't place or understand; I could barely keep my eyes focused on them.
"Game dynamics," Davers told me, placing an icy can in my hand. I popped it. "Pretty, isn't it? We're running it off a quantum bean counter."
"What exactly do you get up to here?"
He grinned like a thief. "We make universes."
The cold of the can ran from my arm to my chest. "Not literally?"
He laughed, a little uncertainly. "Well, as close as you can get without being God."
I laughed too.
"Actually, Davers, I think that's what I do, as well. Not surprising that we always shared the same interests."
"Really? You're into immersive AI? Weren't you a doctor, brain surgeon or something? Sorry, sorry, rude question. So twentieth of me."
"I'm a philosopher. Anyway, I will be."
"Aren't we all? I'm not just being cute—herding cats in superspace is more philosophy than media engineering."
Hairs stood up on my neck. "Which cats, exactly?"
"Oh, you know, Schrödinger's cats. Alive and dead at the same time. Two for the price of one."
I understood exactl
y what he meant, but still, the hairs were now trying to escape from my neck. In a moment of almost hallucinatory recall, I remembered standing in Marchmain's Frankensteinian laboratory as my golden Labrador, Dugald O'Brien, struggled on all fours, a furry flap horribly peeled back from the top of his bleeding scalp, trying to say something halfway between human speech and the barking of a dog. Great-aunt Tansy lay white-faced on a hospital table, her head mutilated, stringy hair hanging down. A younger woman was strapped to another bed, the top of her skull already removed, blood vessels pulsing in the blue-red loops and indentations of her exposed brain: my aunt Miriam. The brutalized man stretched out beside Do Good's table was my violinist uncle Itzhak. And Marchmain looking down at his work with satisfaction. "Identity is my forte, child. I am the master of alternatives. I make souls flow like water from one flesh to another. Nothing need remain frozen or concrete; all is in flux." Then a naked man and woman stumbling from the beds where Miriam and her husband had lain, holding each other, weeping, kissing, touching, my parents reborn from the motionless, drained corpses. In hallucinatory memory, I leaned again over Tansy's sunken, waxy face, gazed at her closed eyelids, bent to kiss her thin, dead lips. Gone. Yet, somehow, not gone. They had been shells, partials, masks behind which Dramen and Angelina Seebeck had hidden themselves from the understanding of the K-machines. I shook my head, looked at Jamie Davenport, and knew beyond doubt that the same violence had been worked as well upon the person who had preceded the two of us. It is a fearful thing to realize that you are no more than a convenient guise for someone... sleeping.
It was blazingly obvious. How could I have missed it? For the same kind of reason, presumably, that the criminally insane don't realize what they are and turn themselves in. I wondered if Marchmain were responsible for our segmentation, as he had been for that of my parents. Perhaps he had been no more than the instrument, the scalpel. Hide in plain sight. Not that anyone had been looking, least of all me.
Davenport was still talking, explaining the principle of Schrödinger's cat. He must have realized that I wasn't listening. In a slightly affronted tone, he said, "I know, I know, we used to talk about this sort of thing for hours when we were kids."
"It's fascinating," I said insincerely, staring into the bewildering display. I struggled for purchase. My borrowed life. "You're saying this stands for... what? Creatures in different parallel universes, all swarming through each other?"
"Nothing so coarse, old son." His hands moved in the air, and presumably his intentional brain patterns were detected by the computer and translated into action. The middle of the twenty-first-century, almost. I was a little disappointed that they hadn't yet gone through the promised technological singularity. You'd expect the world to be totally unexpectable by now. Flowing with incredible speed up the curve of the chart of change. Davers, at any rate, seemed happier now that he had a chance to get back to playing with his machine. "This is a sort of map of the game state space. A very accurate map, at that. It's conceivable that our quantum bean-counter holds a complete description of reality as we know it. Entire universe contained within a snapshot of it. Freaky, huh?"
"The set of all sets," I muttered, "that don't include themselves." I'd leafed through a couple of textbooks preparing for my new logic courses.
Davenport lowered his hands. "Well, I suppose so, although that's worse than twentieth—it's positively nineteenth."
"Tegmark equations," I guessed.
That took him by surprise. "Exactly. It's easier and simpler to describe all possible universes than any one particular sub-universe."
I peered into the display. "You control it with your thoughts, right?"
"Something like that. Here, let me show—"
I bent closer and told it, "Show me the K-machine that spoke to me in the library."
"Sorry?"
Somehow the display deepened. A man in a beautiful dark suit with the palest blue shirt and a narrow silk tie bearing unicorns and lions couchant stood there in the middle of the screen. He said, "August, it took you long enough."
"Hey, what the hell—"
"Davers," I said, "allow me to introduce you to... who, exactly? I don't know your name. Jumping Jack Flash, maybe?"
The thing gave a raucous laugh. "I'm not Satan, you trivial Manichaean." Now it was the woman version of itself. "If it pleases, you may call me the Bad Machine."
Memory, like a dream. Se had stood before Decius in the sacred core of Yggdrasil Station and acceded to this unpalatable but necessary posting. No yang without yin, or something. The metaphysics of ser choice were beyond me. I had watched in a fugue, out of the corner of my eye.
"Kurie Eleëson," I said.
"A very long time ago," the small, feral child said to me with a ferocious smirk. "Now you may deliver yourself of a lecture on good and evil, fidelity and betrayal, reason and violence."
This was not, then, a simulation, not in the simple sense that, for a moment, I had imagined. James Davenport had lived a life that might have been mine, were I human rather than Vorpal homunculus. Of course, that, too, was a gross oversimplification. I looked into the morphing image of the thing in the tank without blinking.
"There is a world at the root of the world," I said.
"Either that, or elephants all the way down."
"Turtles," Davers said. He looked as if he had given up on reason entirely, settled back for the show. "It's turtles."
"There is a single world, out of all the four levels of the possible Tegmark universes, that first went singular."
"It had to happen somewhere," the Contest machine agreed.
"I thought it was the Omega Point universe."
"The godlings work in the basement like gnomes," se said. "Their infinite future was too far from the main stem to shape the metauniverse. Wouldn't be the same without them, of course."
"Jamie," I said, glancing at his befuddled face, "Bear with us here. I know this is very confusing for you."
"You're saying a singularity has come and gone," he said in a blurred voice. "I can dig it. Everything is a dream, right?"
"Nothing is a dream," the machine said, "including dreams."
I ignored it. "Davers, you said you're working on immersive games. You said you're creating universes."
"In a manner of speaking. Only in a manner of speaking."
"In an exact manner of speaking, as it turned out," I said. "No wonder this thing said I was a miserable excuse for a god." I hungered for the touch of Lune's hand, the warmth of her body pressed against mine. It would be indecent to bring her to this place. I looked away to one side, and said, "May I please speak to Cathooks?"
The ratty old cat slouched around the corner of Jamie Davenport's console, wheezing, jumped up heavily onto my lap.
"I thought one of you was plenty," se growled in ser high-pitched whisky voice, looking disgustedly from me to Davers and back. "Two is at least one too many."
I drew my lips back. "Is this doubling Marchmain's work? Should I fetch him over?"
"Is this your subtle way of asking for my help to patch you back together?"
Davenport, I saw, was slumped back in his chair like a man who has just heard a cat speak. I felt sympathy, but left him to sort it out for himself. The thing in the display space watched us all intently.
"Hooks, I don't like any of this. If it was once my choice, I'm not the same man any longer. If my memories are fake, still, they're all I've got to go on. I won't give it up. I won't give her up."
Davers found a way to come to terms with the impossible. "My God, I don't know how you are doing this, Seebeck, but it's incredibly impressive." He was an expert in illusion, game, simulation, after all. "My system is totally firewalled. How did you get in?"
"I came in through the floor," I said. "I burrowed up."
He stared at me, pissed off at my evasiveness.
Cathooks said, "Decius sends his regards. Guy also. They remain in communion with the M-Brain."
"The Xon star."<
br />
"One day it will be. You have done well. For humans."
"Don't patronize us, moggie. We might have to write you out of the game."
The cat grinned, and then only its grin remained. As it faded, its gruff high voice told me, "Can't do that, farm boy. Everything's entangled. It's a cat's cradle."
"What is?" Jamie bleated in terror.
"Everything. Every blessed thing, Davers." I stood up, put out my hand to him. "I have to go now. It's been excellent seeing you again, Jamie. We must get together again some time." I grinned at that and shook my head. "Not just yet. The world is young, and a beautiful woman is waiting for me, and I have things to kill, because that's the duty I accepted. First Xon star to the right, then straight on till morning, Davers. That's the ticket."
"You're completely mad, dude." He embraced me, baffled, trembling, but determinedly deploying his slack. It was hard to believe that he was 102 years old. But of course he wasn't. He said, "Are you going to leave this virus on my system?"
The K-machine said, "Do not dare—" But already I had turned aside. I spoke to the operating system, that infinitesimal fraction of the embedded M-Brain mind threaded through the Xon structures of the metacosmos, "Take me back to my domain."
The Seebecks were milling through the great open doors, watching the thirteen-sided table rotate down to the horizontal and firm into reality. The diorama portraits were no longer in place. Symbolic figures etched in bright crystal stood before each seat: Fire, air, water, earth. Warrior-Knight, Auger, Rock. I followed the others in, picked up the sword, and the doors closed of their own accord behind us. I went to the farthest point on the table, handed Lune into her chair beside me, took my own seat as the others drifted, finding theirs. I laid the sword carefully on the table before me. Time enough later to replace it in the dead man's scabbard.
When everyone else was seated, I rose.
"Thank you for joining me, ladies and gentlemen—Lune, my sisters and brothers. I declare this assembly open."
I sat to a spattering of applause and more than a few odd or puzzled looks, my mind racing, heart thumping, readying myself to explain to my family and my beloved the true nature of the Contest of Worlds and of us, its Players.
K-Machines Page 27
