A bubble of quiet eventually enveloped him and the major-general. She watched him over her port, unsmiling. Most of the officers in the room were of a size with Iekanjika, but this woman was diminutive even by comparison to Belisarius.
“Victory, Major-General,” he offered, toasting her. She toasted as well, triggering a wave of raised cups.
“He looks young enough to be my grandson,” Rudo said to Babedi.
“Mister Arjona broke into the vault of one of the big Plutocracy Banks and stole an experimental AI when he was still a teenager,” Babedi said.
“That wasn’t proven,” Belisarius said. “I wasn’t even charged.”
“He’s also wanted for questioning by the Congregate on suspicion of espionage,” Babedi said. “Congregate defense secrets were compromised.”
“The charges were withdrawn,” Belisarius said. “There was no evidence linking me to anything. I’m free to move through Congregate space.”
“So Mister Arjona has a habit of getting into trouble,” Rudo said.
“He has a habit of getting out of it, which is what we need, ma’am,” Babedi said.
“Just so,” she agreed.
“What will you do on the other side, Major-General?” Belisarius asked quietly. “The Congregate will want what you’ve got. Just like the Puppets.”
“They can try to take it,” she replied. The hum of conversation lowered as officers strained to hear their commanding officer. “A hundred and twenty-five years ago, the Venusian state signed an accord with the Sub-Saharan Union. In the last century, in service and in blood, the Union has paid out its debt.”
“The Congregate owns a lot of real estate in the Epsilon Indi system,” Belisarius said. “Two fortified Axis Mundi wormholes. Battleships bigger and more numerous than your cruisers. And I think they’ve got a dreadnought in system.”
“They do,” Babedi said.
They were going to die. They were all going to die if they faced the Congregate navy, and they needed him to get to a place where they could die.
“The Congregate’s political stance may make conflict inevitable,” Rudo said.
Shouts of “Hear! Hear!” accompanied the slapping of hands on the table. Belisarius was the odd man out. He drank. Rudo drank. The noise abated.
“They call you the magician,” Rudo said. “You’ve seen what we’ll pay for a bit of magic. What scheme do you have in mind?”
He wasn’t responsible for them. He wasn’t responsible for anyone but himself. If they died, that was the product of their choices. They all made choices. Belisarius set down his cup. Conversation quieted.
“With respect, Major-General, I actually cost double what you’re offering.”
Silence washed over the mess hall. Rudo raised one eyebrow.
“No one has the fast shuttle we’re offering,” she said. “One alone is invaluable.”
“If I get you to the other side of the Puppet Axis I’m a dead man,” Belisarius said. “This is no ordinary con, and you’re no ordinary client. Politics and confidence schemes don’t mix well. The cost of my own survival is factored into the price.”
Rudo’s eyes narrowed, showing lines where age had left marks. “Fine. What do you have in mind?”
Belisarius drained his port.
“The key is to distract the mark with something tempting and flashy, to make them think they’ve got you figured out. In the meantime, your real movements go unnoticed.”
“Go on.”
“The flash will take money,” he said. “I need to buy ships and real estate. I’m going to need to bribe officials, and I’m going to have to advance some hefty retainers to some of the best people in the business. We’re going to need an inside man, a demolitions expert, a navigator, an unparalleled electronics wizard, a geneticist, probably an exotic deep diver, and an experienced con man.”
“We’ll be intimately involved in the planning and execution of your con,” Rudo said. “Major Iekanjika would be delighted to help assemble your team.”
“Of course.”
“So explain,” Rudo said, smiling with frightening determination.
Chapter Ten
A MONTH LATER:
Many ships came to the Puppet Free City despite the embargo, including the Cervantes, a passenger liner. The Cervantes plodded out on fission engines until it was far enough from the Free City to induce a wormhole. As predictable as an old donkey, the Cervantes could reliably induce one wormhole per day, bridging the one hundred and seventy-five light hours to Port Barcelona, which orbited Nueva Granada.
Belisarius didn’t mingle with the other passengers. He liked looking at the stars, constructing geometries in their patterns, especially when he was restless. The scale of the heist itself wasn’t bothering him so much anymore. A series of dangerous jobs, congealed between periods of inward-seeking indecision, was a good description of his adult life. It was the idea of returning to the Homo quantus that unsettled him.
Belisarius had been ten years old when he’d had enough control of his electroplaques to trigger savant. He’d continued to be a precocious delight to the molecular biologists and psychologists, until he’d decided to leave at sixteen. He hadn’t been back to the Garret in twelve years. So he made comforting patterns of star points while waiting to arrive at Port Barcelona.
Under the orange light of Epsilon Indi, Port Barcelona was spacious, wealthy and growing, everything the Puppet Free City was not. He didn’t have time to take in the theaters or a concert, or to try the newest engineered steaks at Las Pampas. Instead, he rented a small, self-piloting torch ship to carry him to the Garret.
The Anglo-Spanish Banks had been experimenting with the genetic improvement of humanity for centuries. The Homo quantus were their crowning achievement, a magnum opus of biological engineering and neural manipulation, although Belisarius felt the achievement was built more of irony than of anything truly useful.
In fact, Belisarius doubted the Banks had ever gotten a single economic or military benefit from the Homo quantus project. Instead of humans who could predict economic outcomes or see novel military strategies, the very nature of quantum perceptions created a species inclined to contemplating abstract interacting probabilities. The Homo quantus plumbed the nature of reality, but became mired in arcane ideas rather than concluding anything of immediate benefit to humanity.
The Bank Generals and CEOs kept funding the project, but the Homo quantus had become a fringe R&D investment, and eventually sought a home isolated from the bustle of politics, economics and military theory. The project relocated to a big asteroid around Epsilon Indi, carving crystal gardens beneath its skin and calling it the Garret.
He adjusted the views from his pilot couch, watching the asteroid grow into a great, shadowed body. But instead of looming in the darkness, it became increasingly airy. Belisarius’s people had webbed the surface of the Garret with small, colored lights. Too small to see from afar, they resolved on approach into gentle lines of greens and reds and blues, warming the icy view, inviting with the beauty of mathematical designs and probability distributions. They’d not lit the surface because the patterns communicated anything useful, or because the Garret had many visitors, but for the simple reason that it was beautiful. His people, designed to be the leading edge of corporate or military strategy, instead laid lights over the surface of their world that even they could not see.
Homesickness bit unexpectedly. The patterns were beautiful.
Belisarius left the ship, feeling nervous and feather-light. Automated customs and health inspectors admitted him to the town of about three thousand scientists in a bright nanotubule-reinforced cavern. Overhead lights glowed soft yellow, speckled with points and clusters of blues, greens and reds. The Homo quantus, even at a very young age, liked puzzling at the interference patterns hidden in the mix of wavelengths.
Quiet hugged the town. The Homo quantus had not brought songbirds to the Garret, but instead small, shy things that made few sounds, nesting
among bioluminescent trees and vines. People and small robots moved about their business on slow steps in the faint gravity. The footpaths of the Garret ran over hills that rolled in gentle symmetries, their grasses barely bruised by light feet. An unexpected loneliness bit at him, a homesickness like he hadn’t felt in twelve years.
Belisarius attracted shy, curious stares. The people he saw were not the ones living at the edge of quantum perception, gnawing at the secrets of the cosmos. Those who could not enter the quantum fugue became the managers, the doctors, the geneticists and bacteriologists working to bring the next generation of the project into the world. Depending on the viewpoint, these were either the winners or the losers of the genetic engineering lottery.
The schools would be full of children right now, perhaps done with physics and quantum logic for the day, but still drilling on precise control of their electroplaques. The more advanced students, having reached seven or eight years old, would be having their first induced savant experiences with special magnetic helmets. Children learned early to toggle between birth-type self and savant self, so that later they would be less resistant to temporarily extinguishing their identities in the fugue. Belisarius had been good at these tasks and had been proud as a child. Now this all seemed cruel.
The Museum was a cluster of low buildings skirted by verandas overlooking glassy ponds of slow koi fish. It was a refuge in which to cool brains too long exposed to the froth of incandescently collapsing probabilities. People in lounge chairs on the veranda draped exhausted stares onto the hills. They had sought the muses.
Cassandra Mejía did not work in the main building of the Museum, nor even in the nearest of the out-buildings. The main building was devoted to those seeking hints at where consciousness ended. The out-buildings housed the researchers sharpening the range of Homo quantus perception and manipulation. Beyond those, at the very edges of the Museum campus, less important studies peered into the fabric of the universe. At this fringe, Belisarius and Cassandra had worked together as children and adolescents.
He didn’t recognize Cassandra right away. He carried memories of a face close to his in the dark, stealing kisses, laughing with delight. Now she slumped in a chaise on the patio, staring vacantly onto the grassy waves. Curls of black hair matted around a face grown adult. Wrinkled, baggy clothes hid many of the curves he remembered in the teenager.
Even so, she was beautiful. Sexual beauty was not an ongoing concern for the Homo quantus, but no one who was genetically engineered came out with anything less than smooth symmetries. Dark eyes peered out, unmoving. Clear brown skin was firm over rounded cheekbones. Lips parted in the gentle breath of almost-sleep. His stomach tickled. He stepped onto the veranda in the soundless habits of the Homo quantus and sat to face her in a lounge chair.
“They pulled me out of a long fugue early,” she said tonelessly, without taking her eyes from the gentle green. She might not yet have come down from the loss of self in the quantum fugue, and might still even be in savant. Maybe she didn’t ever intend to come totally back to her base personality. If she was like him, she ached to try to get back into the fugue.
“How long were you in?” he asked.
“Almost a week,” she said.
He’d never heard of fugues so long. Cassandra was one of the best, the flower of the Homo quantus project. She was the opposite of him in some ways; she had to fight to stay in the fugue while he had to fight to leave it. A week would have expanded her perceptions to a radius of seven light days, enough to encompass the four Axis Mundi wormholes in the inner system, and almost enough to perceive the Puppet Axis. How far had she been intending to go? How would she have sorted out the endless wash of superimposed quantum waves?
“Catheters and respirator and six doctors and everything,” she continued. “You should have seen me before they cleaned me up.”
“They didn’t need to pull you out for me,” he said. “I could have waited.”
“Make the prodigal son wait?” she asked with a little more life. “They want you back, Bel. The mayor came to ask me to convince you to stay. She told me to ask if you’d marry me.”
Belisarius’s stomach lurched. “Are you asking me to marry you?” he teased.
“You had your chance, Bel. You didn’t want it.”
“I always wanted you. I just couldn’t be... this,” he said, waving his hand to take in the Museum.
“So don’t,” she said. “Go back to wherever you live now. No one here wants to be part of your scams.”
“I’m not here with a scam, Cassie. Not exactly.”
She turned her eyes upon him. They felt like a push.
“I have a job,” he said. “A big one. I need your help.”
“Just go away, Bel.”
“You don’t even know what I’m offering.”
“How could it matter? Nothing outside the Garret is relevant to our research.”
“That’s not true.”
She frowned distantly, not all here with him. “What do you mean?”
“Come down,” he said.
“Come down?”
“Come out of savant. I want to talk to the real Cassandra.”
She frowned. Her eyes focused on him with more intent. Her expression gave a feeling of shrinking, of stepping away from a diffuse, false omniscience. He knew what it was to see so many patterns, so much geometry in the world, and then give it up.
“Why should I care what you want, Bel?” she asked with a more resonant timbre to her voice, reflecting someone newly and emotionally present.
“I’ve been hired to move something from one side of the Puppet Axis to the other,” he said.
“I don’t want your money, and I don’t see how this affects my work.”
She didn’t say our work. No one else had worked on tesseract models of wormhole physics except the two of them.
“I’m going to get access to the Puppet wormhole,” he said.
“Legally?”
“I think we can manipulate it, Cassie.”
“The Puppet Axis was built by the forerunners to be stable, Bel. If it could be manipulated, it wouldn’t be stable.”
“You and I looked at this a long time ago,” he said.
She looked at him indecisively.
“You’re Homo quantus,” she said finally. “Manipulate it yourself.”
“Do you really think I could match you?” he asked.
“Is that flattery or con job?”
“Honest flattery. I want you on the team and I’m offering something you’ll never find in the Garret.”
From his pocket, Belisarius pulled a finger-sized wafer of silicate. As he held it between them, it projected a hologram, an array with rows and rows of measurements and associated calculations.
She absorbed it, almost at a glance. Then she frowned and sat straighter. “What is this?”
“I didn’t make these measurements,” he said.
She stared at the array disbelievingly. “Whose are they? These observations mean we’re right, Bel.”
“If you’re in, I can tell you everything, Cassie. I need your help on this job. With the theory. With the math. With the engineering. But everything we do for my client also feeds you and I more experimental data.”
A breathless excitement crept into him, like he was fourteen again, creating a new theoretical framework for wormhole physics with a girl he wanted to kiss.
“Carajo,” she swore. The holographic light reflected like a tiny cosmos in her eyes, with its own patterns and infinities between the stars. “How illegal is it?”
“One government needs help doing something another government doesn’t want,” he said.
“Sounds like a way someone could get killed.”
“Getting killed is not part of my plan.”
She looked away, almost shyly.
“There are new Homo quantus, Bel, five, six years younger than us. They’re better than me. Smarter. Better mathematically. They can enter the fugue with
almost no trouble at all. If you really want someone for the job, you should talk to them.”
“You’re the one I want.”
She locked eyes with him. “Don’t joke when experiments are at stake.”
“I’m not joking.”
“You didn’t move on?”
He shook his head. “I’ve met some women. I haven’t been in love again.”
“You should have tried harder.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said.
“Why do you want to get between governments, Bel? You don’t need to be a criminal. Come home.”
He shut off the holographic array.
“I can’t come home, Cassie.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me?” He hesitated, wanting and not wanting to turn his anger on the idyllic world that made him homesick. He leaned close, whispering harshly. “They made me wrong, Cassie.”
“Who did?”
“The project. They messed up my instincts. The curiosity is as strong as my sense of self-preservation. I can drop into the fugue faster than anyone, but I can’t get out. The quantum objectivity overwrites my orders. Only fever gets me out, and each time the objectivity holds on a little longer. The next time I dive, it won’t let me go until it’s too late, Cassie. I’ll die.”
His heart was thumping. He’d never told anyone this. She sat up, reached out for his face, but hesitated, and put her hands on her lap.
“Bel, they can fix that. With the proper spotters and equipment, they can manage this.”
All the anger he had against the Homo quantus Project bubbled to the surface. He was trying to hold it back, but she wasn’t hearing him.
“I’m already managing it!” he whispered. “Every second, I’m fighting the instinct that’s telling me to do something that will hurt me.”
The Quantum Magician Page 6
