The Quantum Magician

by Derek Künsken

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  WILLIAM HAD BEEN bound to a surgical table in zero g and left under the inscrutable regards of the hermetically sealed episcopal troops. He shivered, despite the heat. Trenholm periodically caused eruptions of agonizing, rib-seizing coughs that threatened to choke him.

  He cursed his ex-wife. He cursed Gates-15 and Grassie-6. He cursed Trenholm. He cursed Belisarius. And he cursed himself. He ought to have just walked past the undergrown kid twelve years ago. Whatever that kid had been, he hadn’t been William’s problem, and Belisarius would have landed on his feet just fine. William had dealt himself into a game he hadn’t understood. More coughs. The stinging ache behind his sternum throbbed tirelessly, like a little heart made of pain, each contraction displacing a tiny bit of air so that his lungs slowly suffocated him.

  The handle on the door spun and Grassie-6’s mitered head peeked in. Teller-5 swung in next, with a closed tray of surgical equipment. A sallow Puppet followed, pale, with sweat pasting stringy hair to her scalp. She was so weak that she didn’t even react to the smell of William. Teller-5 floated her to a surgical table beside him. He stared in so much horror at Teller-5 that at first he didn’t notice who followed. Then all his terror yawned wide in his stomach, as the dizzying realization of how bad things were sank in.

  Del Casal and Gates-15 entered.

  “Hello, Mister Gander,” Del Casal said.

  Nothing came from William’s mouth.

  “They are treating you well, I hope?” the geneticist said.

  The dizziness worsened. “You’re... not a prisoner?”

  “I saw the direction the winds were blowing, Gander,” Del Casal said. “Arjona’s plan could not work. It is long past the deadline, and it looks like Port Stubbs has survived the Union assault. They mauled some of the defenses a few hours ago, but the Puppets watched the Union ships retreat already. Arjona failed.”

  Del Casal’s words hit like hammer strokes on fingers. The suicide pill had failed. Belisarius’s con had failed.

  “But I found an employer willing to pay even more,” Del Casal said. “It turns out that the procedure I performed on you is worth a lot to the Puppets.”

  “You’re going to make more Numen?”

  “They know as well as I that they are going to die out without other divine humans,” Del Casal said. “To not help the Puppets would be to stand aside for an extinction.”

  “Let them go extinct! What about this?” William demanded, shaking against his bonds. “You want this for people? For me? Talk to them! Get me out of here!” William started coughing, but not so much that he didn’t hear the sharp intake of breath from Grassie-6.

  “It’s like living in the times of The Book of Pleas,” the bishop said serenely.

  “Who are you going to turn into a Numen next, Del Casal?” he demanded. “Who gets to be tortured to death because of you?”

  “Not my concern,” Del Casal said. “Enemies of the Puppets? The world is red in tooth and claw, Gander.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “They want me to observe their surgical procedures. I told them that would not be necessary, but I get the sense they want to impress me.”

  “They’re going to operate on me?”

  “Transubstantiation,” Grassie-6 said, “to keep you with us longer.”

  William laid his head back, moaning, when suddenly something clicked in his chest. It took him a moment to realize that it had come from right where Saint Matthew’s robot had surgically implanted the medication device; Bel’s insurance. A dreamy numbness spread through his chest, chasing pain. The coughing stopped. It would never start again.

  He felt a smile creep onto his face. It had been a long time since he’d smiled.

  “He did it,” he said. “Bel did it.”

  “Arjona got you killed, is what he did,” Del Casal said.

  William shook his head, dizzy with relief.

  “He outsmarted you and the Puppets,” William said. “The ships are through. Enjoy hell, Del Casal. You can have my spot.”

  Grassie-6 appeared in his vision, green and white mitre blocking out most of the ceiling. His expression was frantic. “What’s happening?” he demanded.

  Teller-5 was on his other side. “He’s going into shock.”

  “Is it Trenholm?”

  William laughed. It had been a long time since he’d laughed. It felt good.

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  BELISARIUS AND CASSANDRA reluctantly pulled away from watching the time gates when Saint Matthew called them. Cassandra’s fever was abating, but his own held. It might always hold, if the quantum intellect in his brain stayed on forever. Perhaps he’d traded one new way of dying for another. Or maybe he’d shaken the curse of the Homo quantus. It would take time to understand what he’d become.

  Saint Matthew was approaching the chaos of Port Stubbs in a wide loop, merging into the cloud of hundreds of civilian ships, cargo vessels, tugs and equipment ferries that had raced out of the line of fire. The port artillery erupted in nervous twitches, spitting chaff and particle fire stochastically, even though no enemy seemed to be showing itself behind Hinkley. Far beyond weapons range, the Limpopo and the Omukama retreated. Radio channels carried confused news of a Puppet victory.

  The clot of civilian traffic was building, and Saint Matthew flew the tug into a line-up of industrial freighters waiting for a spot through the Puppet Axis. They flew closer and closer to a particular freighter, until they contacted it, hull to hull.

  “You still want to risk bringing the time gates to the other side?” Cassandra said.

  “The Union will soon know that we’ve stolen the time gates and gone missing,” Belisarius said. “They’re going to be looking for them on this side of the Axis for a while.”

  “The Puppets are going to be inspecting everything crossing the Axis,” she said.

  Belisarius shook his head. “The Puppets never knew about the time gates. They wanted the Union warships. Now they’re going to be rushing freight across in a hurry.”

  “Why?” Saint Matthew asked.

  “The only way the Union could have made it through with all ten ships would be to make a mess of the fortifications of the Free City. It’s going to take the Puppets months to rebuild. And because of the embargo, all the materials they need are on this side of the Axis. The freighter underneath us happens to be filled with steel.”

  Cassandra smiled and kissed him. “You are a magician.”

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  THE SCARECROW ENTERED the high-security intelligence section of Les Rapides de Lachine, a heavy Congregate warship where he was headquartering now that the Parizeau had been lost. As he moved hand over hand, various sensors probed at him, queried his identity repeatedly, and closed secure doors behind him. Finally, the last secure door opened and he set magnetic soles to plating and walked to one of the nerve centers of Congregate intelligence analysis for the Epsilon Indi system.

  Powerful sub-AIs lined the walls, monstrosities capable of processing, filing, analyzing, and pattern-interrogating a solar system’s worth of information. Baseline human operators, as well as mentally augmented operators and analysts tended the platoon of thinking machines. Majeur Bareilles waited for him in her office. He shut the secure door behind himself, but did not try to strap himself into one of the chairs.

  “Bad?” she said.

  “Oui.”

  She had much of the information, but not all he’d just received.

  “After much looking, they found no survivors of the Parizeau,” he said.

  Cruisers and warships might have anywhere from a hundred to a thousand hands. A dreadnought was an order of magnitude beyond that and it would be weeks before they would be certain which officers and crew were lost. If the Parizeau were the end of it, it would still be a military disaster.

  “The Freyja Axis is definitely lost for now,” the Scarecrow continued. “We don’t understand the weaponry or the propulsion o
n the Union ships. The Saint-Émile is so extensively damaged that they are not sure she will be salvageable.”

  “And no contact with the units at Bachwezi?” Bareilles asked. “They might be holding.”

  “The Union ships seem to be moving freely from one side of the Freyja Axis to the other. The Admiralty sent a heavy reconnaissance squadron to Bachwezi by induced wormhole,” the Scarecrow said.

  Bareilles made another dissatisfied face. She could do the math as well as he. The best Congregate warships could induce and re-induce wormholes and leap across a light year at a jump, but Bachwezi was not close. Three days at best to get a squadron there. And if they were seen, the Union could disrupt wormhole induction with lasers to prevent them from leaving. Sending a squadron under those conditions meant that information was more valuable at this point than warships.

  “Open rebellion,” Bareilles said.

  “Yes, and they had help.”

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  SIX DAYS LATER, a smaller crew reassembled on Tahuando, a big, carbonaceous asteroid whose mining facilities had been inactive for decades. This was not their first RV point. Belisarius took the absence of Del Casal to mean that everything to which the geneticist had been privy was now compromised.

  Marie had arrived first. She’d taken an evasive path from the shrapnel-blasted orbital zone above the Free City. The odd computer that might have detected a small, cold signature moving away from the battle at high speed would have mistaken it for a dead fighter. She stowed the racer deep in a mine shaft.

  A day later, Stills arrived. The shattered windows, radioactivity in the cabin and a deep particle burn along one flank were a bit shocking. But every system on the tough little ship worked just fine.

  On the sixth day, Belisarius, Cassandra and Saint Matthew docked the old freighter Boyacá within the mine. Taking up part of its hold was a Puppet tug. None of the three told Marie or Stills about the time gates.

  News of the Union capture of the Freyja Axis filled the feeds, as did the Congregate declaration of war. Pundits chattered over the movement of significant military tonnage into the Epsilon Indi system through the Congregate’s remaining Axis. Real hostilities hadn’t begun yet. The Sub-Saharan Union was too small to mount an offense, and the Congregate had no idea what had hit it.

  Military history had been made. No nation had ever taken an Axis from another. Calcified and impenetrable defensive systems had been shown to be vulnerable to new tactics and weaponry. Military observers flooded into Epsilon Indi.

  Diplomatically, every nation danced while it tried to figure out where its interests lay. The Puppets tried to maintain their neutrality. And although the Union had just killed a few hundred Puppets and ripped the lid off the Axis at the Free City, news feeds buzzed when the Puppets allowed the passage of the last two Union warships into Epsilon Indi.

  Bookies were in chaos as to whether the Congregate would declare war on the Puppets as well. Pundits on news networks pointed to the key problem with this: What could the Puppets have done? Thousands of witnesses, including foreign diplomats, could attest that the Union had emerged from the Free City mouth of the Puppet Axis without having entered the Port Stubbs mouth. The Congregate already had lost the dreadnought Parizeau and the Freyja Axis; what would declaring war on the Puppets do? If the Congregate did declare war on the Federation of Puppet Theocracies, it would be seen as a naked grab for the Puppet Axis, an act certain to draw the Anglo-Spanish Banks into the conflict.

  Only hours after the Union breakout into Epsilon Indi, secret bidding had begun for a working sample of whatever propulsion system had been used. And as soon as the full scale of what was happening at the Freyja Axis broke in the news, the bidding became ferocious.

  Five days later, the ownership of a series of corporate accounts in the First Bank of the Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy changed hands—first to the discreet broker and then to the crew, while the automated and utterly nondescript Boyacá, carrying ore and the damaged but functional inflaton racer, joined the shipping orbits of the Epsilon Indi system to rendezvous with its new owner.

  The final haul was twelve million Congregate francs each, four times what they’d expected, enough to live many lifetimes. Belisarius set up the trust account for William’s daughter with an Anglo-Spanish law firm, with additional instructions to move Kate and her mother out of system with new identities.

  “To William,” Belisarius said, toasting gently with a bulb of wine in the micro-gravity. Cassandra, beside him, hugged him with one arm and toasted with the other. He put his arm over her shoulders.

  “What are you going to do with your money, quantum man?” Stills’ speakers asked. “Buy yourself some more mountaintops to shit on?”

  “I haven’t decided,” Belisarius said. “Isn’t that what money is about? Having the chance to do whatever you want?”

  “You got yourself another racer, too,” Stills pressed. “What are you going to do with that?”

  “Travel in style.”

  “With a target on your back.”

  “Maybe,” Belisarius said. “Depends where I go.”

  “Pity is, you can’t even fly it like it’s supposed to be flown.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t pull the G’s it can take,” Stills said. “It’s a beautiful piece of hardware.”

  “Are you going to miss flying it?” Marie asked.

  “Unless I go fly for the Union.”

  “What?” Belisarius said. Marie choked red wine out her nose.

  “The Congregate is still the biggest navy there is,” Stills said, “but they haven’t got the biggest cock anymore. If I want to fly the best fighters in civilization, I gotta fly for the Union.”

  “You’re a client of the Congregate,” Marie said.

  “Like hell,” Stills said. “The tribe never signed a patronage accord. We’re contractors of the Congregate, but our contracts have all the right clauses.”

  “You can’t join the Union, you moron!” Marie said. “You’re not African.”

  “I’m not an acid-sucking Venusian either, but I’ve been flying tonnères since I was a teenager. What are you, a patriot?”

  “No,” Marie said. “Go. I don’t care. The Congregate’s going to win in the end.”

  “Probably,” Stills said, “but I bet you the Union has some beautiful fighters, and those fuckers have cojones the size of grapefruits.”

  “Are you going to do something stupid with your money, Marie?” Saint Matthew asked.

  “I’m going to buy myself a nice, safe annuity,” she said flatly. Then she laughed, unable to carry her own joke. “I didn’t think that far. I thought we were all going to get shot. I don’t know. I could buy a moon somewhere, or maybe a whole town on Venus. Ah... who am I kidding? I’ll probably blow it on explosives and lottery tickets.”

  People did not drift out even by the early hours of the morning, so after a time Belisarius took Cassandra’s hand and led her away, to his room. It did not have the star-view of his room on Ptolemy, nor the Spartan comforts of his suites in the Free City, but he’d strung small colored lights on the ceiling. He held her hands. She smiled in the soft glow.

  He’d come so far. He’d left the Garret angry and frightened and bitter. He’d learned a new world and hid from his old one, and yet, in the end, his two worlds had interacted, like overlapping waves of possibilities. And somehow, in the interference of his two worlds, his anger and bitterness were lost, his fear was lost, and he’d been able to embrace his old curiosity. It was the nature of quantum logic that sometimes mutually exclusive states could coexist. He’d been right. Cassandra had been right. The truth, the final observation, was in the complexity of their interference.

  “Do you think you’ll be happy with me, Cassie?”

  “Maybe,” she said coyly. She held his hands tight, and he found himself holding hers back as tightly. “Bel, can you believe what we’ve done?”

  They were still like children
on their birthday, unable to believe their happiness. Her perceptions of the whole field while in the fugue, from Port Stubbs all the way to the Free City, would feed months, perhaps years, of analysis and theories. And neither had dared get too close to the time gates yet. They wanted, needed, to explore them together. Nor had they plumbed the depths of the new structure of Belisarius’s brain, and the tentative peace he’d found with the quantum objectivity running there.

  “You came back to me,” she said.

  “And you came into the wide world with me.”

  She nodded happily, seven point two centimeters from his face. Her fingers were cool in his.

  “Now that we’re criminals on the run, what do you suppose we’ll do all day, Bel?”

  “We could figure out the time gates.”

  “You’re certainly not like other men,” she teased, nearing. Three point seven centimeters. “You never thought to just bring flowers?”

  “I thought we’d like this better,” he said.

  He neared, until her lips were four millimeters from his.

  “Let’s make theories together,” she whispered.

  He nodded, and then there was no distance left to count.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  BECAUSE IT’S MORE dramatic to do things in threes, I would like to make three sets of thank yous.

  Thank you to the East Block Irregulars, the critiquing group who over the years have done so much to make me a better writer: Matt Moore, Peter Atwood, Hayden Trenholm, Liz Westbrook-Trenholm, Marie Bilodeau, Geoff Gander, Agnes Cadieux, Kate Heartfield.

  Thank you to readers Matthew Johnson, Kate Heartfield, Geoff Gander, Desirina Boskovich, Ranylt Richildis, Marie Bilodeau, Kate Heartfield, Nicole Lavigne, Matt Moore, Agnes Cadieux for incisive comments on initial drafts of The Quantum Magician.