The Quantum Magician

by Derek Künsken

  His restless brain counted the stones of the arcade, measured the angular errors in the joints of walls and buildings and roofs, and tracked the gradual deteriorations that no one fixed. The magnetic organelles in his cells felt the unevenness of the electrical currents in the neighborhood, and his brain assigned notional probabilities to different service failures. His brain wouldn’t have done all this if small scams on off-worlders were enough to hold its bioengineered curiosity. The jobs were lucrative, but they were getting too easy, too small to hide behind.

  His gallery AI spoke in his implant as he neared. “Someone is looking for you.”

  Chapter Two

  BELISARIUS STOPPED. HE hadn’t done enough jobs to warrant an assassin, but he’d started fleecing higher-level crime figures lately. And even with assassination off the table, a few people would probably pay to have him beat up.

  “Show me,” he sub-vocalized.

  The gallery AI projected a picture into his ocular implants. His art gallery appeared as a cylindrical schematic of glazed brick with a winding staircase spearing the hollow in the middle. Late night patrons moved up and down the staircase, whispering, pausing in pools of light at the landings to examine paintings, sculptures and even silent films set into alcoves. The image zoomed onto a figure just inside the lobby on the top floor.

  Her skin was darker than his by many shades, and an uncomfortable-looking knot held her black hair tight. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her body. Her hands rested awkwardly behind her. She stood with feet apart, poised, suggesting a readiness to move. She wore an off-the-rack tunic and loose pants, neither daringly nor conservatively cut.

  “Sub-Saharan Union?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” the gallery AI said. “Checking her financial links. Would you like a genetic analysis?”

  “Armed?” Belisarius asked. He resumed his stroll.

  “No. She has some quiescent augments, though,” the AI responded. “I can’t tell what they are.”

  Belisarius magnified the image, considering the woman’s expression. “How much is she worth?”

  He reached a squat brick building of sintered regolith growing into the ice-enclosed tunnels of Bob Town, a suburban lobe of the Puppet Free City. Within that building, plunging deep into the ice, was his art gallery.

  “No credit limit I can find,” the gallery reported, “but she has one link to an account held by the Consulate of the Sub-Saharan Union.”

  The Sub-Saharan Union was a small client nation with two worlds and some industrial habitats on the other side of the Freyja wormhole. Their patron nation gave them second-hand weapons and warships. In return, the Union undertook military expeditions or stood garrison duty. Not wealthy. They’d never been his clients or his marks, and they didn’t have a reputation as the kind of muscle he might worry about.

  He opened the door and stepped into the lobby at the top of the helical stairs. Belisarius sold legal and illegal Puppet art and was curating the first exposition permitted by the Theocracy. Smell, lighting and sound influenced the aesthetic of Puppet religious experience, and for the exposition, Belisarius had laced the lobby with the faint citrus odor of Puppet sweat. From the gloom below, a whip snap echoed. The woman seemed aware of all this, but untouched by her environment.

  She stood taller than Belisarius by a good ten centimeters and had intense eyes. Her waiting stance shifted, shoulders back, hands at her side, but nothing close to the body language of resting. She was an unfired bow.

  “Monsieur Arjona?” she asked.

  “I’m Belisarius,” he said in français 8.1.

  “I’m Ayen,” she said. “Can we speak somewhere more private?” An odd accent laced her French.

  “I built an apartment into the gallery,” he said, leading her down a hallway.

  Brick made of cooked asteroidal dust surfaced the ice of the walls, giving the illusion of warmth. His apartment was opulent by the standards of Oler, with several bedrooms, a wide dining area and a sunken living room. The walls and ceilings were white and devoid of decorations. The dining room was spotless, and the living room barely furnished. All low stimulus.

  The gallery AI had soft colored lights glowing in sconces and the heaters running. A bottle of rice soju stood on the table between two small glasses. Belisarius stepped down into the living room, slumped onto the couch, and motioned for Ayen to select a seat. She sat.

  “How private is this conversation?” she asked in a low voice.

  “The apartment is secure. The Puppets aren’t very nosy outside the Forbidden City anyway,” he said. Her face remained taut. “Did you want to secure this conversation by your own means?”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she produced a small device. It looked newly made, but its design was antique, maybe thirty years old.

  “Multispectrum white noise generator?” Belisarius asked.

  She nodded. He regarded the device with some doubt. Last decade’s surveillance systems could probably have cracked the little generator, but she must have known that. She switched it on and the carrier signal from his house AI became faint in his ear, transmitting small alarms that its surveillance of the room was deeply compromised. Interesting. More questions congealed in his brain.

  “I need a con man,” she said.

  Belisarius poured two shots of soju.

  “You’re five years too late,” he said. “I’m on a spiritual journey.”

  “The right people say that you get impossible things done.”

  She leaned for her glass with wiry, contained power. She sniffed warily, then drank it down.

  He memorized her pronunciation as she spoke. Like her white noise generator, her dialect was antique, an early variant of français 8, but where had it come from? His augments carried all the accents, dialects and versions of French, but her accent didn’t match any of them.

  “That’s as flattering as it is inaccurate,” he said. “I don’t know who does cons anymore. They’re all in prison, I suppose.”

  “People call you the magician.”

  “Not to my face.”

  “My employer needs a magician.”

  She stared at him with unnerving intensity. His brain began constructing patterns, theories, abstractions of the identities of Ayen and her unknown employer. Why couldn’t he place her accent? Who was she working for? What did she think he was?

  “What kind of magic does she need?” Belisarius asked.

  “She needs something moved through the Puppet wormhole. Distal side to here.”

  “Puppet freighters ship through the Axis all the time,” he said. “They don’t care what you move, as long as you pay.”

  “We can’t afford their price.”

  “If you can’t afford them, you certainly can’t afford me.”

  Her stare hardened, the bowstring drawn tight. “We aren’t short of money,” she said, “but they don’t want money.”

  “The Puppets do like to be paid in weapons.”

  “They want half,” she said.

  “Half of what?”

  “Half of a dozen warships.”

  Chapter Three

  BELISARIUS HAD THREE days to back out. He didn’t have the first clue as to how to move a fleet of warships across the Puppet Axis. It actually sounded like a great way to get killed, but he needed something complicated. His restless brain gnawed on all sorts of problems he didn’t want it touching whenever he didn’t give it enough to do.

  So he crossed the Puppet wormhole on one of their commercial transports and stepped off at Port Stubbs, three hundred and twenty light years from the Puppet Free City. He hadn’t brought much equipment, just a dozen sets of entangled particles stored in the buttons on his suit. Anything else he needed, Iekanjika would likely be able to provide. They met him at Port Stubbs in civilian clothes: Major Ayen Iekanjika and Mothudi Babedi, a military attaché from the Consulate of the Sub-Saharan Union.

  They rented a port tugboat and took Belisarius out. They darkened the windows
and sat him at the back of the cockpit so that he couldn’t see any of the dashboard or the readouts. Maybe they didn’t know much about the Homo quantus and they were trying to keep him from knowing where they were going. The magnetic field of the Stubbs Pulsar, although weak as far as pulsars went, throbbed against the magnetosomes in Belisarius’s cells, imposing a reassuring polarity on the world and feeding his brain rough navigational data. After fifty-six point one minutes, a new magnetic field pressed on his magnetosomes, swallowing them. Something big was out there, big enough to be a warship. The clanking outside the hull signalled that the grip was more than electromagnetic.

  “We’re not getting out?” Belisarius asked after they’d floated motionless for thirty-three more seconds.

  “We’re inducing a transient wormhole to the Expeditionary Force,” Iekanjika said.

  The lights darkened and everything around them stilled. The tug shuddered once as the warship surrounding it thrust gently, then fell into stillness again for twenty-two point four minutes. Then the clamps finally released. The tug itself emerged into space, and Belisarius felt Stubbs’ magnetic field again.

  It was much fainter, meaning they were farther from the Stubbs Pulsar, by about a tenth of a light year. That would put them within the comets and planetessimals of the Stubbs Oort cloud. The cockpit windows cleared and Belisarius craned his neck to see into the dizzying dark with his telescoping ocular implants. A dozen warships swung into view, speckling a two-hundred-kilometer volume of space beyond the cockpit. His ocular implants zoomed in on the images, lit by starshine and running lights.

  They were old Congregate designs; this class of military vessel had been a second-line ship sixty to seventy years ago. Belisarius counted two frigates, nine cruisers, and a battleship so small it barely qualified in the navies of today as a capital vessel.

  He squinted and zoomed the images. Not everything was old. Time-scarred plating contrasted with shinier spots, and strange, raised blisters were rowed on the hulls. And the drive sections were oddly shaped. Distended tubes pierced the hull superstructures from bow to stern. Those weren’t normal drives.

  A strange warbling signal pressed against his magnetosomes, ephemeral patterns that weren’t coming from the tug. It was hard to feel precisely through the hull, but the pressure wasn’t uniform, like he’d feel from a strong magnetic field. Rich texture saturated it, the kind of patterned granularity made by multiple layers of fields interacting with themselves in quantum superposition, too fine for most instrumentation to detect. What was it?

  The microscopic universe always boiled with quantum indistinctness. For each particle and wave in the subatomic structure of the universe, mutually exclusive possibilities existed in parallel, racing over one another, interacting, creating in every instant webs of potential causal chains, histories of particle and field interactions, bubbling in unobserved chaos. But macroscopically, that chaos always evened out. This didn’t. He’d never seen quantum interference this sustained and complex. His heart thumped with excitement.

  Babedi docked the tug in one of the dorsal bays of the flagship. In the zero g, Belisarius followed Iekanjika awkwardly through an umbilical into the hallways of a battleship that smelled of people and plastics. Its electromagnetic field pressed against his magnetosomes, hiding the mystery outside.

  Chapter Four

  CONTROLLING HIS ENGINEERED curiosity had never been a sure thing, and Belisarius forced himself not to fidget. Iekanjika returned in uniform. The poised watchfulness that had ill-fit her in civilian clothes now suited, as if a hard gem had been returned to its setting. She led him to a briefing room. Belisarius’s hands found the rungs awkwardly in zero g. At times he overcompensated and almost kicked a soft-faced MP sergeant who followed them. At the briefing room, Iekanjika swung in and strapped herself into a seat. Belisarius took considerably longer. Her eyes narrowed in impatience until he clumsily snapped the harness closed. A series of warship schematics projected in hologram between them, as well as detailed tactical analyses and diagrams of Port Stubbs. In the moments she took to consider her words, Belisarius memorized the displays.

  “What do you need to know to propose a plan for getting the fleet across the Axis?” Iekanjika asked.

  “A history lesson,” Belisarius said. “Maybe one in politics too. Your little fleet looks out of date. What are they doing here, so far from home?”

  Iekanjika seemed to work through some inner debate. “It’s been a long time,” she said finally. “Forty years.”

  Belisarius felt himself staring.

  “Forty years ago,” she said, “Congregate political commissars instructed the Union to send an armed reconnaissance mission deep into Middle Kingdom territory. It was meant to be provocative. I doubt anyone expected the Sixth Expeditionary Force to survive.”

  “Your squadron ran the other way?”

  “The Expeditionary Force did its job,” she said with heat, “heedless of danger. But during the mission, some observations suggested to one of our officers a new type of drive. A very advanced drive. Under the terms of our Patron-Client Accord, something like that has to be turned over to our patrons.”

  “And the political commissars already knew of this new idea,” Belisarius said.

  “So we arrested all the political commissars,” she said, “and ferreted out all the sleeper agents the Congregate had hidden among our crew and officers. Then we headed out of Middle Kingdom territory.”

  “To get all the way to Stubbs in forty years, you must have headed straight out into deep space,” Belisarius said, “away from all the known wormholes of the Axis Mundi.”

  “We had to design the drive and then build it into each of our warships.”

  “What do your drives do?” he asked.

  Iekanjika’s eyes narrowed, measuring. She didn’t trust him. Which meant that she probably didn’t agree with the decision to contact him.

  “Your people got a con man instead of a military solution,” he said. “Union intelligence operatives must have considered all the private covert operatives across Epsilon Indi. Let me guess: they couldn’t find a single one who wasn’t already attached to a rival service, or who didn’t have a bigger incentive to sell you out.”

  “Babedi told me the Homo quantus were a new human species of contemplative. You don’t sound very contemplative.”

  “I’m not so fond of being someone’s last choice, either,” Belisarius said. “What can your ships do?”

  Iekanjika touched a finger to a transparent patch on the back of her hand, tapping without looking. He hadn’t seen that kind of interface before. The room responded, darkening. The hologram of the flagship, the Mutapa, expanded.

  Clean lines in pale blue showed the classic Congregate design that had been cutting-edge eighty years ago, powerful and competitive sixty years ago, and surpassed by newer designs forty years ago. Modifications glowed in pale yellow. The axis of the warship had been rebuilt as a hollow cylinder, with the superstructure riding this immense tube like a colony of barnacles encrusting a pipe.

  “This is a new kind of drive,” Iekanjika said. “It doesn’t use reaction mass, so there’s no exhaust velocity to measure, but the drive’s thrust is equivalent to an exhaust velocity of half a million kilometers per second.”

  “What?” Belisarius blurted. She stared at him with an edge of defiant pride. “That’s more than the maximum thrust of anything in civilization...” he said. “What is it?”

  “You only need to know the specifications.”

  “Not even close. Have you used the drive in a wormhole? Something that exotic in a space-time tunnel could be real dangerous.”

  “We’ve moved the fleet through induced wormholes,” Iekanjika said, “but we’ve never activated the drive inside.”

  “What’s the exotic?”

  Her stare was uncomfortable. He turned to the blues and yellows of the schematics, more for the color than the lines, which he’d already memorized. Like bets in a card game, so
me conversations needed to be waited out.

  “It’s an inflaton drive,” she said finally.

  “What?” She’d surprised him twice in ten minutes.

  “You don’t have the knowledge to understand how it works.”

  “Probably not,” he said, squinting at the schematic. “Can you magnify?”

  He watched the motion of her fingers as the image of the Mutapa expanded, filling the room.

  “Turn the stern to me?” he asked.

  Her fingers swept a different motion on the patch on her hand and the image turned ninety degrees, until, through the hollow core of the warship, he was looking at the far wall. From this angle, the blisters on the side showed in relief, larger than they’d appeared from the side.

  An inflaton drive. He wondered if she was lying. He usually could tell, but he didn’t think she was. She was tamping down her own pride in the telling. How did they do it? Inflaton particles carried the inflationary force that caused the ongoing expansion of the universe. In some theories, a wave of inflation was self-reinforcing, a runaway effect. Their own drive could destroy them. And the energy cost must be enormous. Then it clicked.

  “Virtual inflatons,” Belisarius said. Iekanjika started.

  Virtual particles were pairs of particles and anti-particles that could jump into existence as long as they vanished back into nothingness quickly enough.

  “The Homo quantus have a particular insight into virtual particles,” he said.

  That was something of an understatement. The ocean of virtual particles frothing at every point of space-time created the tremendous noise through which the Homo quantus had to filter. Iekanjika looked sour, as if she’d said too much.

  “Don’t worry, major. None of your secrets are lost. You create a pair of virtual particles to briefly expand space-time, and in the instant before it shrinks back to normal, your warship gets thrown forward, doesn’t it?”