The Quantum Magician

by Derek Künsken

  An MP came and brought him to a room with vacuum suits webbed to the walls. Major Iekanjika was already suited up. “You want to see the performance of the Expeditionary Force,” she said. “I’ve gotten authorization to show you.”

  Belisarius flailed his way in zero g to the rack and took a suit that looked about his size. Without gravity, it took some time to put on, and the MP finished suiting up before Belisarius even had the pants on. When he needed two hands to detach one of the buttons on his shirt, he began spinning. This seemed to wear down Iekanjika’s patience and she finally clapped a hand on his arm to steady him. He sheepishly put the button in an outside pocket of the vacuum suit and resumed dressing.

  “I’ll be okay,” he said as the suit sucked tight its seals.

  The three of them cycled through the airlock into hard vacuum. Inwardly, he slumped. He loved the stars, but he hated space, and the deep black of the universe opened with stomach-churning vastness. The Stubbs Pulsar a tenth of a light year away touched Belisarius’s muscles with faint magnetic fingers. With baseline human sight, he could see four thousand stars. Between those, emptiness yawned wide and endless. If he telescoped his ocular implants, he might see five times that number, but the space between them would also multiply, bringing new, trackless voids into being. The view tasted like the fugue: seeing all the cosmos and not only knowing it to be a void, but being part of that void.

  He took the button from his pocket with gloved fingers and let it drift free beside the Mutapa in perfect stillness.

  Spotlights from the Mutapa shone on them, sharp whites bleaching discolorations from the arm and hands of his suit. Another warship stood abeam of the Mutapa across several kilometers of space. The major on one side and the MP on the other grabbed his upper arms and leapt from the Mutapa. His stomach lurched and he swallowed a yelp as they careened into the void.

  No shuttle. No guide wire. No nothing.

  Iekanjika and the MP had jumped true. He’d been too startled to move as they jumped, and he hadn’t spoiled their aim. He stayed rigid. Little pressures nudged him where the pair used cold gas jets to correct their course. It would be minutes before they reached the other warship. He flew through space, only the scrunch of fabric on fabric where they held him making any noise beyond his own shallow, quick breathing.

  What kind of people jumped between ships? He didn’t know of any service that required this maneuver. He doubted they were out to impress him. They didn’t respect him enough for that. Maybe it was a new military maneuver or a tactic born of austerity. Or maybe it was a tactic developed purely for its unconventionality. The Sixth Expeditionary Force carried new weapons and propulsion; why not bring new tactics to battle?

  Play the player, not the cards.

  They closed on the other warship. Spotlights focused on them, tracking them toward a small bay ringed with pale lights. More forces, more pressures, and then he was spinning, pointing his feet at their destination. A strong magnetic field bloomed below them.

  “Bend your knees, Arjona, or you’ll break an ankle,” Iekanjika said in his helmet radio.

  He did. The ship grew at an alarming speed. He knew they only carried the energy they’d used to jump, but instinct made fear tickle at his insides. And then the ship swallowed the infinity of his vision and their feet crashed against the hull and stuck. His breathing rasped loud in his ears and his knees wobbled.

  “Hell, Arjona!” Iekanjika said, shoving him into the airlock. “It’s like you’ve never been in space before.”

  Belisarius’s face heated. They cycled through the airlock.

  “This is the Jonglei,” she said to Belisarius as he removed his helmet. “It’s a good warship, representative of the ships of the Expeditionary Force.”

  They moved by hand to the bridge. Belisarius was slow, but had no mishaps. They met Colonel Ruhindi, the commanding officer of the Jonglei, a woman in her late thirties with very dark skin and six horizontal scars on her forehead. The bridge loomed with weight, incongruously so in zero g. Six coffin-sized acceleration chambers stood at angles to the walls, with small thick-glassed windows in front of where the crew’s faces would be. Ruhindi summoned a holographic display in the middle of the bridge. Belisarius stepped clumsily in his magnetic boots and peered into it.

  “Can I see an external view?” he asked.

  The colonel’s fingers twitched, and the display compressed, reducing the Jonglei to an icon. Only one other ship showed in the display: the Mutapa.

  “Larger display, please,” he said. “The whole Expeditionary Force.”

  The colonel’s fingers moved and the center icons shrank, allowing new ones to appear at the margins. On the left wing floated the command cruiser Nhialic, with the Juba, the Gbudue, and the Batembuzi in formation, lit in orange. On the right wing in pale yellow, the armored cruiser Limpopo, commanding the Omukama, the Fashoda, and the Kampala. In the center, the battleship Mutapa, attended by the Jonglei, the Ngundeng, and the Pibor.

  A microcurrent from his electroplaques to his brain induced savantism. Subtleties of language and emotional nuance melted in a hard rain of geometric and mathematical understanding. Quantifying was easy, inviting. The feel of other people nearby prickled. They didn’t like him. Maybe they didn’t like him. The blizzard of geometric and numerical insights buried qualitative, social cues.

  The Expeditionary Force in the hologram became a web of momentum, distance, mass, and speed-of-light signals. The locations of the Limpopo, the Mutapa and the button he’d left floating in the vacuum formed a long, narrow triangle. Numbers darted between his thoughts. Two hundred and fifty kilometers from the Limpopo to the Mutapa.

  Hesitantly, he said, “I need to understand what your ships can do with wormholes: how fast they can induce one, how far they can go, how fast they can transit, and how fast systems come online after emergence.”

  Belisarius didn’t meet their eyes. In savant, meeting people’s eyes was like looking into a box of puzzle pieces, making the pattern recognition tendencies in his brain hyperactive, facial expressions swirling into cycles of false positives. The colonel’s fingers twitched, and a thrumming resonated through the ship. Gravity lurched on under their feet.

  Belisarius’s brain, thirsty for logic and abstractions, began chopping up the name Mutapa. Encyclopedic implants fed him information as fast as he could drink it. Mutapa, a medieval kingdom founded by a prince of greater Zimbabwe. The Kingdom of Mutapa had soon outstripped its neighbors and even its parent nation. Powerful imagery. Powerful symbolism. He wished he could quantify it.

  The Union picked good names. Like Omukama, a dynasty that had ruled Uganda until the nineteenth century. Not swept aside by modernity so much as carried along with it, the dynasty possessed powerful cultural weight even into the era of the formation of the Sub-Saharan Union. Naming a warship after a cultural capital made for powerful symbolism. Powerful enough to die for? He didn’t want them to die.

  How could he quantify the effect? There ought to be an algebra for societies. He should make one. Cultural capital propelled the Expeditionary Force, imprinting personal identity on its nationals. They wrapped themselves in their identity with a confidence Belisarius could only envy.

  Ngundeng, the nineteenth century Dinka prophet. The Dinka had a creator god, Nhialic. Batembuzi was a medieval empire circling the Great Lakes region. Gbudue was a famous Azande king of South Sudan whose name meant to tear out a man’s intestines.

  Powerful imagery. Powerful symbolism. How had the Congregate missed it? The Union ships had been carrying these names for decades. It was mathematical. This was the physics of people. The multiplication of emotional and patriotic energy produced psychological momentum.

  Iekanjika pushed him and he froze.

  “Take it or don’t take it, Arjona,” she repeated.

  A timer. A digital timer. She held a digital timer. In her hand. Her hand was before him. He was in savant. Remember to be polite.

  “Thank you,” he said.
“I have a very sharp sense of time. I won’t need it. Thank you.”

  He didn’t meet her eyes. She was already moving away, shaking her head. Weight increased.

  “We’re running on your inflaton drive?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Iekanjika said.

  He felt no change in the magnetic field. That meant the drive didn’t interact with the electromagnetic force.

  “We’re below half a gravity,” Belisarius said. “What can the drive do? Ten g? Twenty g?”

  Military-grade fission-propelled missiles could sustain forty gravities of acceleration and still hit evasive targets.

  “Much more,” she said.

  Enough to outrun a missile? Psychological momentum and fast ships didn’t matter; they were just twelve ships. The Congregate had that many ships in a single squadron. The Congregate had hundreds of squadrons. Math was comfortingly inescapable. And so much of the Expeditionary Force’s other technology was half a century old. Sad. So sad for the Union. But it was what they wanted. Cultural momentum propelled them.

  The Jonglei stopped accelerating and spun one hundred and eighty degrees. Then the gravity became crushing and Belisarius’s knees trembled. He staggered against the wall. He tried not to black out. His savantism wavered as he lost focus. Iekanjika and Ruhindi stood, laughing at him. His insides heated with anger. Not at them. At himself.

  “This is just one and a half gravities, Arjona,” Iekanjika said.

  He didn’t want to lose the numbers. Mutapa to Limpopo. Coordinates. Time in seconds. Acceleration in gravities. Hold onto the coordinates. He sank to a sitting position against the wall and held his head between his knees. He didn’t care what they thought of him.

  After another thirty-four point seven seconds, the crush stopped. The thrumming stopped. Weight evaporated. The Jonglei had moved away from the Mutapa, far enough to safely induce a wormhole. In response to Colonel Ruhindi’s twitching fingers, the watch officers in the acceleration chambers shut down ship systems.

  “Where do you want to jump?” Ruhindi said in very accented French.

  “How far can you go in the direction of galactic south?” he asked. The transit would answer him on both the distance and precision of the Expeditionary Force’s induced wormholes.

  Ruhindi issued more silent orders. Belisarius stepped forward in the awkward magnetic boots. The external holographic displaysshrank and internal systems graphs appeared. The Jonglei had extended its magnetic coils off the bow and Belisarius could feel magnetism tugging, even deep within the ship. The magnetic field rose to nine thousand Gauss. Ten thousand. Fourteen thousand. Twenty-one thousand.

  Belisarius’s arms and chest tingled.

  Sixty thousand. One hundred thousand. Two hundred and eighty thousand Gauss.

  They had passed industrial and medical magnetic field strengths.

  At four hundred thousand Gauss, electromagnetism and gravity interacted in interesting ways, and a properly targeted magnetic field would cause space-time itself to creak. The readings levelled at five hundred and fifty thousand Gauss.

  In front of the ship, a pocket of space-time bulged at right angles to the three dimensions of space. Semi-melted space-time distended like a questing pseudopod. The shape and focus of the magnetic field pushed the tube of space-time across dimensions accustomed to being curled. The questing finger reached down, around the intervening space, until a narrow, unstable bridge reached a point far to galactic south. Then the display greened. They had induced a wormhole.

  Now came the dangerous part. The six hundred meters of the Jonglei was packed with fusion and fission power systems, as well as the inflaton drive. Those moving parts had to still, because there was nothing natural about an induced wormhole. It was the proverbial pencil balancing on its tip. Its difference in temperature from absolute zero was within the range of the uncertainty principle. Most interactions with the environment would caused it to collapse. This was very different from the permanent wormholes of the Axis Mundi, which were never in danger of swallowing the transiting ships if there was a mistake.

  The Jonglei’s main and secondary systems were off, but the dashboard showed that the outside temperature of the warship was one hundred and five Kelvins. Small projectors all over the ship activated to radiate infrared in this range, designed to interfere with the black body radiation of the Jonglei, rendering it so ghostly cool that it would not disturb the wormhole. A tenth of a gravity pressed his feet for two point three one seconds, propelling the Jonglei into the throat.

  Then, weightlessness and held breaths. The wormhole would be closing behind them, shepherding them through. Displays turned green. A chime sounded. The warship trembled as different systems came online. The holographic tactical display winked back into existence, showing no ships anywhere. Numbers colonized the edges of the display.

  “A third of a light year,” Colonel Ruhindi said.

  Precise numbers lay on the bottom of the holographic display.

  “Is this the limit of what the Jonglei can do?” Belisarius asked.

  Iekanjika stepped closer. He avoided looking at her face.

  “This is the outer limit that the crew and officers would want to try, even in an emergency,” she said. “The three flagships can go slightly farther.”

  “And how fast can the Jonglei gate, again?” Belisarius asked.

  “The main and secondary systems have to come online for star fixes, tactical assessments, last-minute telescopic surveys of the destination, before the whole thing is shut down,” the major said. “A fast crew can be ready in five to ten minutes.”

  “What about blind gates?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” Iekanjika said.

  He regarded the boots on his feet, visually and by the feel of the magnets in the soles.

  “No star fixes,” he said. “Program the destination by dead reckoning.”

  “That’s idiotic.”

  “What if you’re in a hurry?”

  He waited. Iekanjika stepped closer.

  “Look at me,” she said finally.

  He waited. The major’s left hand took a fistful of his suit. Dark skin on pale cloth. A lot of strength. She shook him and then jerked him closer. “I said look at me, Arjona.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What are you playing at?” she demanded.

  “I can’t look at you. The Homo quantus need tremendous mathematical abilities to be able to do anything useful. We can turn on prodigy-level mathematical abilities by shutting down other parts of the brain. Language. Sensory input. Socialization. It’s a trade-off. I’ve gone savant.”

  He went still, not looking at her, but adding up the digits in the columns and rows of information. A third of a light year. It wasn’t a third. They’d come zero point three two nine seven seven one four five lightyears. The number would improve with more telescopic observations.

  “What?” Iekanjika demanded.

  “I can’t look at you,” he repeated exactly. “The Homo quantus need tremendous mathematical abilities to be able to do anything useful. We can turn on prodigy-level mathematical abilities by shutting down other parts of the brain. Language. Sensory input. Socialization. It’s a trade-off. I’ve gone savant.”

  She released him in disgust. “You’re no con man,” she said. “And you’re no soldier.”

  “I’m a bad soldier,” he said, “but I’m a really good con man. And I might be able to get you through the Puppet Axis.”

  “How?” she demanded.

  “What about the blind gates?” he asked.

  “Ma’am?” Iekanjika asked, throwing up her hands. “I don’t know how to answer this question.”

  Colonel Ruhindi sidled closer on magnetized soles. “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  A heavy, impatient sigh escaped his lips. “I want to know the capacity of the Jonglei to gate somewhere without taking new star fixes. Dead reckoning.”

  Belisarius felt something impatient and angry from her, and m
aybe other feelings he couldn’t name. So much social geography became overgrown and impenetrable in savant. Ruhindi’s arms crossed. What did that mean?

  “Of course the Jonglei can create a wormhole without taking a star fix,” Ruhindi said, “but it serves no practical purpose. During a retreat, the commander would already be operating with complete star fixes. Emerging from an induced wormhole ends the situation of retreat. The odds of a pursuing enemy being able to create a wormhole mouth within weapons range of ours are miniscule.”

  The numbers on the bottom of the holographic display were hypnotic. He added and readied them. He found rounding errors that told him about the settings on the Jonglei’s navigational software.

  “I’d like the Jonglei to shut off its navigational telescopes and induce a new wormhole,” he said.

  “Why?” the colonel demanded, adding something in another language. He’d been wondering at their accents. Did they speak Shona amongst themselves? His mind puzzled at the shift in language, gnawing at it like a cryptographic problem. A theory of cultural algebra might not be so hard to develop. Iekanjika stood before him.

  “What will this get us, Arjona?” she demanded. “I feel like you’re jerking us around. Your magic is hand-waving.” He liked when she explained what she felt. It helped him understand. Her hand movements meant exasperation. “Where exactly do you want us to make a wormhole to?” she asked.

  He removed one of his buttons from his jacket. It reflected the colored holographic light.

  “I took off one of these when I put on my vacuum suit,” he said. “I left it outside the Mutapa before you brought us to the Jonglei. Inside the button, in a magnetic trap shielded from thermal vibrations, are a few dozen particles in quantum entanglement with the particles in here.”