“The Puppets are always a bit disorganized,” he said.
“I wish Saint Matthew were here,” Cassandra whispered. “He could have told us what kind of ships are getting in ahead of us.”
“We can’t do everything at once.”
“How many of the ships going ahead of us do you suppose are military?”
“Some,” Iekanjika said.
“What’s wrong?” Cassandra asked him. “William?”
Belisarius shook his head. “I should have had a signal from Del Casal by now,” he said. “He’s not the kind to deviate from a plan.”
“Could the Puppets be blocking signals?” Iekanjika asked.
“I have some automated messages set up as test pings. They’re all getting through.”
“Captured?” Cassandra asked.
“I don’t know. I’m worried.”
“How worried?” Marie asked.
“William’s part is going well,” Belisarius said. “Everything else is going according to plan. So even if Del Casal was captured, there’s no reason the Puppets or anyone else would be putting together our plan.”
“He probably got spooked and is laying low,” Marie said.
The news screens changed, and a Puppet announcer appeared, a tiny woman with straight blond hair. They couldn’t hear her words over the noise of the lounge, but the view shifted to a view of stars, ineptly out of focus and drifting until it focused on a gray shape in the distance.
“Tabarnak,” Marie swore softly.
“What is it?” Cassandra asked.
“A dreadnought,” Iekanjika said quietly. “Laurentide-class.” She squinted at the blurred image, but Belisarius’s brain had already matched its movement against the background stars.
“Olero-stationary orbit,” Belisarius said. “About thirteen thousand kilometers above the Free City.”
“Is its appearance related to us?” Cassandra whispered.
“An assault on the Free City would need more ships, and they would have saturation-bombed for a day or two before moving this close,” Iekanjika said. “But from that orbit, the Congregate can survey all traffic entering or leaving the Free City and stop anything it wants.”
The sweating newscaster spoke quickly, words they couldn’t hear, before the view cut to stock footage of Puppet fortifications and scrambling troops in armor.
“The Puppets are going to stop moving their forces to Port Stubbs and they’ll concentrate them over the Free City?” Marie asked. “And a dreadnought can stop any ship coming out of the Axis. Should we call it off?”
Iekanjika continued squinting at the screen.
“If we call it off,” Belisarius said, “we lose what we’ve already put on the table, including William. Maybe all of us. I don’t know that we’ll ever have another chance.”
“That’s a dreadnought, Bel,” Marie said. “Whatever you’ve heard about the Congregate’s capital warships, multiply it by ten.”
“It isn’t Arjona’s choice,” Iekanjika said. “Whatever you’ve bet, we’ve bet more. Major-General Rudo will make the final decision.”
They watched the news somewhat morosely, as the image sharpened a bit, showing what looked like dozens of warships welded together into a rectangular wedge. This image never got better than that, but it didn’t need to. All of them could do their own math. An hour later, their transport was ready. It had no windows, but Cassandra and Belisarius sat near the walls anyway. They moved to their seats shyly, not touching, but never so far that they couldn’t reach a hand.
Something changed when Cassandra had touched his face, and touched her lips to his. Years had dug a gulf between them, dug deeper by whatever motives Cassandra had attributed to him, and the suspicions Belisarius carried about what kind of person she had become. But in that long moment, they’d found a halfway point over that space. He’d gone into Cassandra’s world to offer her a view of a wormhole, and she’d come into his world to see it, and there between the two was a fragile bridge.
As soon as they strapped in, Cassandra relaxed, laying her hands on the armrests. Without asking, Belisarius put his fingers on the pulse under her warm wrist and slipped into savant. Cassandra had beaten him there. Her heartbeat was already metronomic, and her temperature normal. So graphable. He graphed it in his mind and derived an equation, and then graphed his own for comparison.
The synchronization of periodic biological processes during savant and the fugue had been observed as early as the sixth generation of the Homo quantus project, and had guided early experiments in fugue spotting. Even now, Homo quantus children practiced coupling heartbeat, respiration and body temperature to seek resonances.
In most cases, the fugue induced its own negative feedback with fever-inducing interferons. A few degrees could disrupt the fragile quantum coherences sustaining the fugue. Resonance with a spotter could dampen fever for a time, allowing longer fugues. Cassandra’s breathing absorbed the rhythm of his and vice versa. Her heartbeat throbbed in her wrist against his fingertips, warm and close.
Belisarius in savant knew he was not Belisarius, not really. The tiny direct current from his electroplaques suppressed activity in parts of the frontal lobe, mimicking a very specific kind of brain damage that made perception of language and socialization difficult. Whole pieces of personality gone. The image that haunted him was of cracking open his head, exposing his wet brain to the crackle of emotions.
Savant was a state of being in those diminished emotions, sometimes making it a place in which to hide. But sometimes feelings were so strong, that even diminished, they hurt. And the emotional ineptitude that came with savant made things worse. This was a bad time for Belisarius to be in savant. The image of William crammed naked into a cage and carried over the streets of the Free City clung like a nightmare. Kissing Cassandra was a disruptive dream, a summoner of might-have-beens and might-still-bes. The hope of happiness was more nerve-racking than none at all. In savant, his insides were invisible to introspection or management. Feelings were a raw storm of biting acid and fiery exhilaration.
He wanted to be quiet, to watch the raw world from a hidey-hole. He wanted to huddle with Cassandra. He wanted to hug and hold her. He wanted her safe and he wanted her to keep him safe from the world, as if they were little animals hiding from the night. Cassandra had needed to hold him when they’d been teenagers damaging their minds. Maybe she felt it again now.
No. She felt nothing at all. Cassandra was gone, in the slowed breathing and calmed pulse of early fugue. Beside him was a quantum perceptional and computational array, nested knots of processing algorithms without the subjectivity to collapse a wave function, a thing capable of seeing overlapping quantum possibilities and probabilities in their beautiful simultaneity, but not a creature that, like him, could feel lonely or helpless.
The seats trembled as the transport moved over the mouth of the Axis.
Cassandra twitched. Trouble staying in the fugue? Or difficulty perceiving the quantum world beyond the transport? Cassandra the person desperately wanted to see the wormhole. So did the quantum intellect inhabiting the body. But objectivity was not a natural place to be, any more than savant. It was no place at all. Living things belonged in a place, needed to sense belonging.
But the Puppet transport, all hulking metal and electrified systems, was a wall of electrical and quantum interference as impenetrable as a Faraday cage. To see the wormhole properly, he and Cassandra needed to be out there in dumb vacuum suits. Being in the transport was like looking at the stars through a dirty telescope from the middle of a city. At the sensitivities Cassandra and Belisarius cared about, the noise of the transport made most observations unproductive. Yet still she tried.
The transport accelerated gently, toward the Axis.
Belisarius ticked the seconds by. Being a chronometer was calming.
The stillness of freefall soaked the cabin and its passengers. Voices lowered to whispers. Cassandra’s pulse increased. Her temperature rose by point t
wo degrees. Belisarius’s spotting dampened the effect. His own pulse increased and his temperature rose a half degree in sympathy.
Taste was evolution’s first sense, a way for bacteria to touch one molecule to another to decide in a binary way if something was food or poison. Taste was the scaffolding for the development of smell, which gave life chemical information from distant places. Sensitivity to vibrations developed into touch and hearing, to give fragile organisms more information about the world beyond their own membranes, and rudimentary understandings of direction and distance. Electromagnetic sensitivity, from infrared to ultraviolet to variants of electrical and magnetic sensitivity, gave organisms senses to locate food or avoid predation by perceiving distant movement and color at the speed of light.
Intelligence was the first sense to see through time instead of space. Intellect was a tool for life to foresee danger and opportunities, pushing perception into the past and future. But intellect was built on the creaky emotional and instinctual infrastructure of hunter-gatherers. Homo sapiens had existed for not much more than two hundred thousand years, and humanity’s feats of survival still needed emotional shortcuts and tribal structures. Savant deafened him to the mental infrastructure of society, and the fugue extinguished the individual, the most basic unit of tribe.
And for all that he’d given away what was natural, he really hadn’t seen the future any better than anyone else, and a sense of impending disaster yawned under his stomach. He’d doomed William. He’d doomed everyone, maybe even all the citizens of the Union, because he’d become overconfident in his intellectual solitude and the idea of the Homo quantus project, that humanity could learn to see into the future. He’d made the plan in his head, alone, playing all the players, all at once, superimposed like quantum calculations. Self-doubt tasted bitter.
Why had the Congregate dreadnought come? Had the Congregate captured Del Casal? Or had his plan to funnel false intelligence to the Puppets through Gates-15 been too clever by half? Maybe the Puppets had cut a deal with the Congregate. How many mistakes had Belisarius made that hadn’t manifested themselves yet?
Without dislodging his fingers from her wrist, he slipped the fingers of his other hand into Cassandra’s, leaning closer, clinging to the empty body, like waiting outside an apartment for its owner to come home. Her kiss in his perfect memory inflated an empty ache in his chest.
Cassandra’s wrist was one point eight degrees warmer than his. Her heartbeat became uneven, then briefly stochastic. She couldn’t sustain the fugue. The quantum intellect riding her flesh could no longer suppress the subjectivity of Cassandra. She became a person again.
Cassandra breathed, a heavy, low exhalation, the sound of someone emerging from too deep a sleep. Belisarius straightened and removed his fingers from their twining with hers, and, awkwardly, from her wrist. In savant, they could both be... unproductively intense.
Cassandra’s breathing lost its regularity. She was emerging from savant. Belisarius came up, into his baseline self. The world became quantitatively mysterious, a world depleted in geometric patterns, but overabundant in feelings and people and wants and needs. He exhaled tension.
“I couldn’t make out anything useful beyond the transport,” she whispered. “There’s so much out there, so much we could measure, if they just let us.”
“Soon,” he said.
“We’re so close to seeing something true and real about the structure of space-time,” she pressed on as if he hadn’t spoken. “I feel so much for this knowledge that it aches, Bel.”
His throat tightened. “I want to know so badly that it scares me,” he said. “It scared me away, because there’s so little holding me to me.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
The PUPPET FREE City was a poorly maintained, aesthetically unappealing nest of unevenly lit hollows in the ice, but Port Stubbs was worse. Its unimaginative lines, over-engineered spaces and burnt-out lights seemed to make up most of the port. A resource town originally built by cheap-minded Numen industrialists, and added to later by any slip-shod operation willing to break an embargo, everything in the port made William feel unwelcome.
In zero g, they went into the dirty office of a local bishop and strapped themselves to the walls. Teller-5 examined William while he looked over her, to the palanquin cage on the wall, strapped beside a coiled whip. His fever had broken for now, but he still ached all over. Bishop Grassie-6 and Gates-15 watched William anxiously.
“Should we get him to a hospital?” Gates-15 asked.
“Yes,” Teller-5 said.
“My symptoms are under control for now.”
The bishop eyed him, lips pressed tightly. The doctor stroked William’s arm unconsciously. William shook her off.
“We have to!” Gates-15 said.
“Can I have a bit of a break from him?” William said testily, indicating Gates-15.
He needed to give Gates-15 time to upload his virus.
“No!” Gates-15 said. Idiot.
“You’re here at his request,” the bishop said. “Go be the good boy.”
Gates-15 didn’t move.
“Get out for a while,” William said.
Gates-15 looked close to tears.
“He said get out!” Teller-5 shrieked. “Be the good boy!”
She smiled back at William dreamily, fixated on the skin of his arm where she’d started pressing her palm again.
“Get her out too!” William said.
The three Puppets argued until William was alone with the bishop and a pair of hermetically sealed episcopal troops.
“We should talk about getting you to the area where your family lived,” Grassie-6 said.
“Thank you,” William said.
“You said you don’t want the cage.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m not most Puppets,” Grassie-6 said. “Nor is Teller-5. The vast majority of Puppets do not have our kind of control.”
William held back his reply.
“In this Fallen Age, there remain only a few religious modes through which most Puppets can interact with divinity,” the bishop said. “It boils down to Cage or Whip.”
“I’m not going to whip anyone,” William said.
“Then cage it is, Mister Kaltwasser.”
“No cage.”
“This is not about you. This is about the Puppet masses and what they’re capable of.”
Grassie-6 unstrapped himself, pushed off, to the other wall, and took the whip. Barely two meters long, it flexed stiffly. The bishop hooked his feet into the bars of the cage and swung the whip experimentally a few times, slowly, getting its feel. William thought Grassie-6 was inexperienced with a whip, being a Puppet and not a Numen. Then the bishop snapped it with force, its tip biting the air in the middle of the room with a loud crack.
“A blunt or side whip blow can raise painful welts,” Grassie-6 said, “but in my experience this is unpersuasive. The lashtip breaks the speed of sound. That part must kiss the target to be truly effective.”
“That’s barbaric.”
Grassie-6 floated back to William and handed him the whip handle. William didn’t take it.
“Perhaps you need to tap into your fear,” Grassie-6 said. “Let’s say a dozen Puppets joined you in this room. Who would you prefer to be in charge?”
William swallowed down nausea.
“The Numen have always been creatures who fear,” the bishop said. “They feared each other. They feared the judgement of civilization. And they feared the Puppets they’d created. In understanding that core truth, we may properly worship them.”
“You... scare them?” William asked.
“We worship them according to their natures. Are you frightened?”
William’s mouth dried. The whip handle was held out to him still. “Yes.”
Grassie-6 approached along the railing, until his citrus breath was in William’s nostrils. “We Puppets fear too. We fear the absence of divinity.”
Grass
ie-6 took William’s hand, intimately. William froze. The depth of the tenderness in the bishop’s touch made his skin crawl. The bishop closed William’s fingers around the whip handle. William pushed at the bishop’s chest, but the Puppet’s grip was surprisingly strong.
“My fear and your fear are reflections,” he said. “Those reflections carry moral weight. You have to decide what to do with your fear of us, as we must decide what to do with our fear of your absence. You have the Whip. We have the Cage.”
Grassie-6 leapt away, catching a railing a meter away. William clung to the whip. The bishop regarded him for long seconds and then leapt to the doorway.
“You want to visit places of your ancestors. You don’t want to go in a cage. You’re holding the only alternative. I’ll open the door. Beyond it are ten Puppets who have no idea you’re here.”
“Don’t!”
“It’s either this or go back to the Free City,” Grassie-6 said. “You’ve told me what you want. I’m only showing you how to get it.”
“Don’t!”
The door slid open and Grassie-6 moved aside.
A perfectly formed, half-sized face, true-stock European pale, peeked past the frame. Young. A Puppet woman, lovely, features framed in black hair. Then, a Puppet man with a brown beard appeared beside her, sniffing furtively. His mouth opened as if gasping in surprise, and then he was breathing, gulping. Then she did too. And they swung in. Others followed, perfectly-proportioned miniature people, tasting at the air like fish.
“Stay back!” William said, sounding shrill in his own ears.
His fingers fumbled at the fastenings holding him to the wall.
Three more Puppets crept in, mouths gaping.
“Call them off!” William said.
“It’s the Cage or the Whip, Mister Kaltwasser,” Grassie-6 said.
“Get back!” William yelled at them. They reacted as much as Teller-5. No reaction. Or distracted curiosity. They were in religious awe.
The first Puppet, the one with the brown beard, closed on William, fingers open.
The Quantum Magician Page 27
