The Quantum Magician

by Derek Künsken

  “Fuck off!” William said, shoving him. The Puppet’s hands snapped closed on his forearms, snake-quick, and his neck stretched, trying to bite at him. William yanked away the hand gripping the whip and punched him in the head. The Puppet gasped as he tumbled backwards in the air, crashing into another Puppet. Three more alighted on the wall around William, catching hold of the railing with their feet. Every eye stared dreamily.

  William’s panicked hand struck with the whip. It landed across a Puppet’s leg, the snap curling ineffectively. William laid the length of the whip coil on the next Puppet’s stomach. She gasped, doubling over.

  The first approached again deliriously. William aimed for the chest, but the lash wrote itself up the Puppet’s neck and cheek, snapping into his eye. The poor Puppet shrieked and William froze in horror. The Puppet screamed endlessly, holding his face in his hands as blood painted the fingers.

  “Make them stop!” William shrieked.

  Grassie-6 smiled serenely on the railing at the other side of the room.

  “Stop!” William said to the Puppets. “I won’t hit you! I’ll get in the cage! Stop.”

  A Puppet landed on the wall under William’s feet, hooking her feet into a lower railing. She sucked air into her throat, inhaling him. She hugged his leg like it was the only real thing in the world. She bit him with miniature teeth, tearing through his pants. He screamed, kicking at her.

  He raised the whip over and over, lashing them, snapping at arms and hands and chests and faces, yelling wordlessly, whipping his own legs when he missed the Puppets clinging there. He did not finish his own shrieking or the whipping until his voice became hoarse and his arm exhausted and a haze of blood droplets floated in the room, separating him from the cowering Puppets moaning in agonized ecstasy near the bishop.

  William’s arm trembled. His gorge rose.

  “I said to make them stop,” William said. He began to cry.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  THE RENTED TUG had been shut down and fastened to the skeleton of the Puppet cargo ship, along with dozens of smaller ships, shipping containers, and bulk construction material. The tug’s fission engine had cooled and configured for long-term inactivity. Buried within a thick sphere of lead, newly attached to the cladding around the fissionables, was Saint Matthew, in a space no larger than a fist.

  He was designing electric instrumental arrangements to accompany tenth century Gregorian chants. People came to religions for many reasons, and the beauty and richness of a ministry’s culture, art, music and philosophy could be as potent a gateway to the salvation of souls as proselytizing in public squares. He’d arranged different chants with tones and tempos ranging from Anglo-Spanish ranchero to Indonesian romantic to Venusian technodance to Ummah acid rock.

  Unlike everything else strapped to the outside of the Puppet cargo ship, Saint Mathew couldn’t be turned off without destroying his consciousness. As a security measure, the Puppets sterilized every piece of cargo with ionizing radiation and knocked out electronics with focused EM pulses prior to moving them through the Axis. Their crude methods ensured that nothing recorded the inner workings of their wormhole or damaged it. Thick radiation shielding and a hull design that acted like a Faraday cage blocked most EM signals, keeping the passengers as safe as Saint Matthew.

  Saint Matthew had modified their rented tug with a few special features. Outside the AI’s tiny lead safe room, a clock ticked, dumb, mechanical, wound by hand, and completely invulnerable to the scouring radiation the Puppets used on their cargo. The faint vibrations wound down.

  The clock ticked its last as the Puppet freighter moved into the Axis. And a mechanical arm closed a circuit, connecting Saint Matthew by cable to passive external sensors and his waking battery-powered automata. The weak sensors peered at the world outside the tug in the visual, IR and X-ray. The interior of the Puppet Axis lacked visible light, but the automata detected faint, weirdly rippled X-ray patterns, and an IR signal corresponding to a temperature only a few hundredths of a degree above absolute zero. Saint Matthew used these observations to measure the speed of the transport.

  Continuing to hum the chant to the electric arrangement he’d designed, he ran diagnostics on the automata. Each one had clung to a different part of the hull, in the corners and edges and hollows of the old shipyard workhorse. The largest automaton was eight centimeters long, with spidery legs, while the smallest was under two centimeters. Saint Matthew had evolved different designs in the hopes that of the dozen on the hull, two or three would be certain to escape detection and survive.

  The transport moved sixty-two kilometers per hour. Saint Matthew gave his automata launch commands. One by one, the tiny machines braced themselves against the hull and with prodigious jumps, launched themselves into the channel of normal space-time within the worm hole. Tiny cold flares of gas freezing into snow clouded beneath them, slowing them to full stops relative to the inside of the Axis. Through the limited sensors, Saint Matthew watched them recede in the distance. And then, they were too tiny to see.

  Saint Matthew turned back to the task of composition, humming as he worked, looking for resonances between the modes of the Gregorian chants and the rhythms of twenty-second century Mexican bubblegum pop.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  THE PUPPETS LEFT William alone. His last experience with them had shaken him more deeply than he could grasp. The Puppets were utterly alien. The Numen had been idiots. Absolute idiots. It must have looked like a good idea at the time: the creation an entire species ecstatically happy to be around and serve the Numen. Endless disposable willing labor. And when taught properly, the Puppets had probably been obedient, knowing nothing other than joyful service. But none of the Puppets of today had been born to be obedient. They struggled with faith, seeking a way to satisfy their religious needs, and the wishes of the Numen had no value. William had never been depersonalized, commoditized. It was breath-taking in its horror. He needed to finish his job and get away from the Puppets the only way he could.

  After his lights were out, he snuck to check the door in the zero g of Port Stubbs. A trooper was strapped to the wall at the end of the corridor. William’s stomach cramped with his indecision. The Puppets had bought into his disguise. He’d gotten into the Free City and Port Stubbs. Gates-15 had uploaded his virus on Oler, and as backup, William had done the same. Maybe Gates-15 had already uploaded his virus into Port Stubbs’ network. But if he hadn’t, it risked the con.

  William had to get to some kind of terminal to upload his own copy of the virus. But if he was caught, that might give up the game too. Maybe Gates-15 had gotten the job done. But the Gates-15 they’d first met and the Gates-15 they had now were different. Did he want to bet Kate’s future on the exile holding his shit together?

  What was insurance worth? That was the question. William was the fall guy. His game was winding down. He was a small payment. He took a deep breath, trying not to cough and very slowly, listening for the most minor squeak, opened the door, letting in the dim light from the corridor. He peeked around the doorframe, down the long hallway to where the armored Puppet hung. Still no movement. Was he sleeping? Were alarms ringing in his helmet? Or was he watching television in his visor?

  William slipped from his room, braced himself on the doorframe, and leapt down the corridor, away from the Puppet. He alighted at the end of the hallway and shot a glance back as he readied to jump down the next hallway. Still no movement. William pushed himself away.

  The next corridor widened, with a number of darkened doorways, all sized for humans. A faint bluish light spilled from a window in one door. Inside, a UV light kept a fume hood sterile in a medical bay. A small workstation with a computer terminal reflected blue light in an upper corner of the ceiling. A trap. Or another test. Maybe a hundred drooling Puppets waited behind those doors. He looked back. Still no captor. He touched the pad beside the door. It slid open. A trap then.

  But they didn’t know about his virus.


  William couldn’t take the cage again. He couldn’t take the Puppets touching him again. He’d lived his life. No need to suffer during the last of it. He tongued at the tooth containing the suicide pill. Biting on it would whisk him from here in under a minute, into a peace the Puppets could not reach. He swung into the lab and shut the door behind him.

  He leapt to the work station. He didn’t fit into straps made for Puppet-sized bodies, but he wrapped one around an arm so he wouldn’t drift away. The screen lit haunted yellow at his touch. It asked for a thumb-print. He ignored it. Ports for different hardware interfaces formed a thin array on the left side.

  He pressed at the pad of flesh behind the second knuckle of his index finger, and nearly invisible hairs emerged from his finger tip. He steadied his shaking hands against the side of the screen before touching the hairs to the ports. He didn’t know which port would be easiest to crack with Saint Matthew’s virus, so he tried them all.

  Sweat slicked his face and would not drip away in the zero g. He needed to cough. Something sounded in the hallway outside the door. William turned in the straps and leapt to the opposite wall. He wouldn’t be seen from the window in the door, but once someone opened the door, they would discover him.

  The wall beside him had another door. He pressed its control pad. The door ground open loudly. Warm air wafted through the opening. He swung in and closed the door behind him. He cringed as the sliding mechanism made even more noise.

  The eerie red light of heat lamps cast indistinct shadows. Condensation sheened the walls. A voice cried out and he froze. It was a cry of pain in restless sleep. He squinted into the gloom, but couldn’t make anything out. Had he entered a nest of Puppets? He held himself against a railing on the wall and breathed the hot air, resisting the urge to cough.

  If he could just get back to his room.

  He didn’t want to die. He thought of snapping down on the poison capsule in his tooth, of ceasing to be. No more William Gander. No more tasting food. No laughing. No reading. No gambling or drinking. He didn’t want to die.

  He coughed, long hacks gurgling under his sternum. The lights brightened, enough to reveal a row of small beds affixed to the far wall. Each held a sweating Puppet in straps—gasping, feverish, with swollen, red-rimmed eyes. They didn’t wake or notice him.

  Cages, too small for human beings, stood in front of each bed, trapping painfully contorted humans, flesh pressed tight at the bars; the sweat on their bodies slick and shiny in the dim light. Some parts of their bodies were lumpy and bore bright red scars. His stomach turned.

  The door ground open behind him.

  No place to go.

  He leapt to the cages, and clung beside one in the dimness.

  One of the hermetically sealed Puppet troopers swung in, agile, sure-handed, holding a rubber nightstick in one hand. Two more entered, and arraying themselves along the railings. Then Bishop Grassie-6 came through, slowly, in full episcopal vestments—mitre, white and gold robes, shackles at wrist and ankle.

  The lights brightened to full strength and the creatures in the cages groaned.

  “So,” Grassie-6 said. “You did make your attempt.”

  “What?” William said.

  Grassie-6 smiled. “You attempted to access the network.”

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  “What are you talking about?” William asked.

  “Gates-15 told us everything, Mister Gander. Gates-15 is in our employ, not yours.”

  William coughed until he gagged. He was going to throw up.

  “He’s thrown away his chance then,” William said with a bit of satisfaction. “He’s going to be an exile forever, or are you going to kill him?”

  “There’s no such thing as a Puppet exile,” Grassie-6 said. “No Puppet born without sensitivity to the Numen would ever be allowed to live. Gates-15 is an ascetic, someone who can survive for indefinite periods in the absence of divinity. Few Puppets can stand that amount of suffering. For ascetics, it is an act of spiritual endurance. We send Puppets like Gates-15 out as holy spies, to seek out hidden Numen, so that they can be brought home.”

  William’s insides shrivelled.

  “We knew about your role and the plan of this Arjona, the failed Homo quantus. We know you’ve been hired by the Union fleet. We’ll round up any survivors when they try to force the port. The Union officers will be worth quite a bit to the Congregate.”

  William groaned. Belisarius and Cassandra and Marie and the others were as good as dead.

  And no payoff for Kate.

  “Things will go worse for the Union, of course,” Grassie-6 said. “They would not come to peaceful and profitable terms with us. We’ve strengthened the fortifications around Port Stubbs and deployed additional squadrons of naval forces as reinforcements. We survived two major attacks with less. We’ll be able to handle a dozen warships.”

  “So just kill me,” William said.

  “Of course I won’t kill you. I’ve just spent the last few days trying to puzzle out what you are. You’re close to the Numen, so close that if Numen were being created today, they might smell and feel like you. But you’re an abomination, a false divinity, perhaps the first of many.

  “Many in the Conclave of Bishops believe that you are a Satan figure, an anti-Numen. Many religions have anti-divinities. We didn’t think we would have one, but we’re still early in our journey.”

  “I’m not an anti-anything, unless it’s anti-Puppet. I’m a spy. Just execute me.”

  “That view has broad support in the Conclave,” Grassie-6 said. “But I’m not starting from the same point at my fellow bishops. I don’t believe you are a Satan figure any more than you do. I think that you signal a second creation event. You point the way to a second Edenic Age.”

  “You’re so messed up... It’s just bioengineering. That’s all.”

  The serene bishop shook his head, smiling.

  “Everything that happens to the Puppets has cosmic meaning. We live in a world of divinities. It’s up to us to decipher the clues the cosmos leaves us. Right now, we understand the Puppets to live in a Fallen Age of accelerating decline. We face hopeless suffering and deprivation. This view changes quite a bit if other creation events are possible. In a world where William Gander is possible, the Puppets are also possible.”

  “I’m not possible,” William said. “I don’t mean anything.” William tongued at the tooth that contained the poison. He needed to loosen it to bite down on it.

  “The Puppets are necessary to the cosmos, Mister Gander. Fate happens to us. Not even you can consider the simultaneous arrival of an advanced military fleet and a second Numen creation event as coincidence. You may mean everything. You may presage the salvation of the Puppets.”

  “I’m a fake! And I’m not helping you do anything.”

  “I don’t need your help, Mister Gander. I lead the division of the Puppet Church that breaks Numen. Physically. Psychologically. By any means.”

  The tooth finally loosened in William’s mouth and he winced as he snapped it between his molars. He sucked back his spit, waiting for the taste and the pain.

  One minute left with these lunatics.

  There was no taste. No liquid.

  His stomach clenched.

  “Doctor Teller-5 already removed the toxin in your tooth, Mister Gander. You are going to spend some time with us.”

  “Not long,” William said, spitting out the tooth shards and coughing again, painfully. “Trenholm has seen to that.”

  “There you go again, speaking as if fate didn’t direct each and every Puppet. What do you see here, Mister Gander?”

  William looked through the bars at the broken human figures cramped painfully into cages so tightly that they could barely breathe, and at the Puppets in the beds. The Puppets and the Numen had lumps beneath their skin, under angry red lines of infection and swelling.

  “Oler has always been a world of miners,” Grassie-6 said, “made up of refugees, and social and
religious outcasts living under crushing poverty, bereft of alliances. The effort of surviving was back-breaking, dangerous, and often futile. So they made the Puppets. To do the work. To break our backs joyfully for them. But they also designed the immune systems of the Puppets to be weak and compatible with their own. The luckiest of Puppets might be asked to donate organs to injured or aging Numen. There is no greater spiritual ecstasy than transubstantiation, becoming the body and blood of a divinity.”

  William’s gorge rose.

  “The Numen are no longer in danger of accidents,” Grassie-6 said, “but we continue to take the flesh of the faithful and graft it into the Numen. And our experimental theologians have explored new boundaries of the sacral. Surgeons like Doctor Teller-5 have taken pieces of flesh and even organs from the Numen and exchanged them with flesh from Puppet donors. We live in the Fallen Age, but we have discovered new ways of touching divinity.”

  William’s hands shook. “You’re sick.”

  “You’re using standards that don’t apply, Mister Gander. For that matter, you ceased to be human about three weeks ago when you entered the world of the divine, didn’t you?”

  “You’re monsters.”

  “Ask them,” Grassie-6 said, waving his hands at the Puppets strapped to the beds, trembling with fever.

  William turned away, shutting his eyes. Grassie-6’s voice continued with silky passion.

  “The Puppets in this room are among the holiest of a deeply spiritual people,” he said.

  “You’re just doing surgery!” William said, jabbing a finger at the bishop. A strident tone was edging into his words. He was close to panic. “There’s nothing divine here! It’s just surgery!”

  He couldn’t panic. Keep their eyes on me. I am the distraction for this con. No. There’s no more con. It’s all gone. Tears welled, blurring his vision.

  “Biochemistry carried you into a spiritual world,” Bishop Grassie-6 said. “And the hand of fate is obvious. The Trenholm virus has knocked out your T-cells, so you have the same immune profile as some of the Puppets lineages we created by knocking out the RAG genes. Any knockout Puppet can donate flesh and organs to you and vice versa. Because of Trenholm, we can keep you alive for decades through transubstantiation.”