by Neil Clarke
“When I wasn’t shovelling shit in Smolensk, I used to think of myself as something of an amateur philosopher. I’d read all the popular articles, sometimes even kidded myself that I understood the math. The point is, all quantum systems—atoms, crystals, cats, dogs—exist in a superposition of possible states, like photographs stacked on top of each other. Provided you don’t actually look at them, that is. But as soon as a measurement’s made on the system, as soon as any part of it is observed, the system collapses—chooses one possible outcome out of all the options available to it and discards all the others.” Ivan relaxed his grip. “Would you pour me some water? My throat is rather dry. That clanfolk stuff’s real firewater.”
While he attended to this, Sergio said, “There was never time, was there? To ask the Kiwidinok everything we might have wanted.”
Ivan quenched his thirst. “When they announced that they were leaving, that was when the big panic began, because it seemed as if we hadn’t learned enough from them; not supped sufficiently from the fount of their wisdom.”
“That was when they made the offer.”
“Yes. They’d already dropped hints here and there along the line that our—how shall I say it? That our existence wasn’t quite as we imagined it to be; that there was some fundamental aspect of our nature that we just weren’t aware of.” Ivan held his hand up to the candlelight, as if appalled at some new translucence in his flesh. “You humans, they’d say, you just don’t get it, do you? That was what it was like. They said that we could spend our remaining time asking them little questions, and not even chipping at this one fundamental misapprehension—or we could arrange for one person to be, shall I say, enlightened?” “And you were selected,” Sergio said.
“Put my name forward, didn’t I? Ivan Pashenkov: effluent disposal technician from Smolensk. Didn’t think I had a chance in hell—or Perdition, huh? Don’t laugh so much, son.”
“How did you feel when they selected you, out of all the millions who applied?”
“Very drunk. Or was that the day afterwards? Hell, I don’t know. How was I meant to feel? Privileged? It wasn’t as if they picked me on my merit. It was sheer luck.”
After his selection, the Kiwidinok had taken him aboard their ship, along with a handful of permitted recording devices small enough to be worn about his person. Preparing to depart, the ship had encased itself in a field of polarised inertia, defining a preferred axis along which resistance to acceleration was essentially zero, essentially infinite in all directions perpendicular to that axis. For interstellar travel, this was hardly an inconvenience.
“They immobilised me,” Ivan said. “Locked me in a pod, and pumped me full of drugs.”
“How was it?”
He reached up with one hand and traced a line along the occipital crown of his skull, fingertips skating through the veil-like hair that still haloed his scalp. “The brain’s divided into two hemispheres; certain mental tasks assigned to one or the other half, like language, or appreciating a good wine, or making love to a woman.” The remark hung in the air, like an accusing finger. Then he resumed: “There’s a tangle of nerves bridging the hemispheres: the commissure or corpus callosum. They’re the means by which we synthesise the different models of the world constructed in either hemisphere; the analytic and the emotional, for instance. But the Kiwidinok drive did something to my head. Nerve impulses found it difficult to cross the commissure, because it required movement against the preferred axis of the polarisation field. I found my thoughts—my conscious experience—stagnating in one or the other hemisphere. I’d think of things, but I couldn’t assign names to any of the mental symbols I was imagining, because the requisite neural paths were obstructed.” “But it didn’t last long.”
He waved his hand. “Longer than you think. We got there, eventually. They showed me the sun and it was faint, but not nearly as faint as the brightest stars, which meant they couldn’t have carried me very far beyond the system.”
“Just beyond the cometary halo.”
“Mm. To within a few light-minutes of Perdition, except of course we didn’t even know it existed.”
“Everything that you’ve told me,” Sergio said, “accords exactly with what we were told in the seminary. If you now reveal that the object in question was a neutron star, I don’t see how your account can differ in any significant way from the standard teachings. I mean, the mere existence of—”
“It exists,” Ivan said. “And it’s everything I ever said it was. But where it differs . . . “ Then he paused, and allowed Sergio to bring another beaker of water to his lips, from which he drank sparingly, as if the fluid was rationed. Sergio recalled his own thirst much earlier, in the Juggernaut of the clanfolk caravan, after the ornithopter crash, then purged the thought. “Listen,” the old man said. “Before we continue, there’s something I have to ask you. Do you mind?”
“If I can help.”
“Tell me about Indrani, if you’d be so kind.”
Her name was like a penance. “I’m sorry?” And then, before he could even hear Ivan’s answer, he felt the fear uncoil inside him, like a python waking. He dashed from the room, cupping a hand to his mouth. Retracing his steps, he reached the bridge, leaned over the railinged side and was sick. For a moment, it was a thing of fascination to watch his vomit paint the pristine lower levels of the alabaster spire. Then, when the retching was over, he wiped the tears from his eyes and drew calming breaths, accessing soothing mandalas from his catechist. One of the gargoyles loomed above, large as a naval cannon, the faint curve of its jaw seeming to mock him.
“You seem perturbed,” Bellarmine said, appearing at the bridge’s end. “I read it in the salinity of your skin. It modifies your bioelectric aura.”
“What do you want?”
The cloaked figure moved to his side, the rust-coloured, softly undulating landscape reflected in Bellarmine’s mirror-like ovoid face. For an instant, Sergio thought he saw something: a scurry of silver or chrome, something darting between dunetops. But if it was real, it was gone now, and he saw no reason to trouble Bellarmine with his observation. “Was there another presence, Menendez?”
“Another what?”
“In the room. Another such as I.”
Sergio stared deeply into the mirror before answering. “I think I would have noticed. Why? Ought there to have been another?”
The Apparent leaned closer to him, as if to whisper some confidence. After a moment Bellarmine said: “Put the question from your mind and answer this instead. What has he told you?” The armed gargoyle was reflected in the mirror now, its ugliness magnified by distortion. “What has he told you? It is a matter of security for the Order. Silence could be considered perfidy.”
“If the Founder wished you to know, he would not have called me from the Diocese.”
“You are in a position of some vulnerability, Menendez.”
“I assure you, I’ll hear what he has to say,” Sergio said. “And whatever message he has for us, I’ll ensure that it returns to Vikingville.”
He navigated to the bedside, between the monitors, and resumed his station next to Ivan. “When you first mentioned her,” he said quietly, with more calm than he believed himself capable of, “I dared to imagine I’d misheard you.”
“Tell me what happened,” Ivan said, the recorder still conspicuously running. “I’ll then reciprocate by telling you what I really experienced around Perdition.”
“Bellarmine knows about her, doesn’t he?”
“I guarantee his knowledge of events arrived via a different route than mine. I suggest you start where I did—at the beginning. You’d only recently been consecrated, hadn’t you?”
“A few days after the catechist was installed.” Sergio touched the weal on his scalp. “It was my first mission for the Diocese—a trip north of Vikingville, to visit clanfolk. They were using consecrated servitors supplied by the Order, so there was a pretext for me to arrive with little or no notice.”
Although it was decades since the last iceteroid had crashed onto the Martian surface, spilling atmosphere across the world, the climate was still roiling in search of an equilibrium it hadn’t known for four billion years. Occasionally, squalls would slam into the flight path of an ornithopter, unleashing twisting vortices of separated laminar flow, too sudden and vicious to be smoothed out by the thopter’s adaptive flight surfaces.
He hadn’t seen it, of course—and when it did hit, it seemed as if the adaptive flight surfaces accommodated the squall even more sluggishly than usual. One of the thopter’s wings daggered into the dunes. Sergio saw the other wing buckling like crushed origami. Then—blood sucked from his head by the whiplash—he began to black out, retaining consciousness just long enough to observe the monstrous wheels of the Juggernaut rolling towards him.
And then he woke inside the machine.
“She was like an angel to me,” Sergio said, grateful now that he could unburden himself. “I wasn’t badly injured, really—I felt a lot worse than I had any right to. Indrani fetched me water, which tasted dusty, but was at least drinkable, and then I started to feel a little better. Naturally, I had questions.”
“You wondered why she was alone, a girl like that, in charge of a whole foraging caravan. Was there anyone else?”
“Oh, a brother—Haidar, eight or nine years old. I remember him because I gave him toys.”
“Other than Haidar, though . . . ”
“She was alone, yes. I asked her, of course. She told me her parents were both dead; that they’d been killed by the Taoist Militia.” Now that he was doing most of the talking, Sergio found his mouth quickly parched, helping himself to the Founder’s water. “I could have called up the catechist’s demographics database to check on her story, but I hadn’t been ordained long enough to think of that. Anyway, the squall wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was my ornithopter—we were stuck in the Juggernaut for a few days at the least. I was—”
“You’re about to say that you were weak, traumatised, not fully in control—not really yourself?”
“Except it wouldn’t be true, would it? I knew what I was doing. I was weak in my adherence to the Order. But strong enough to make love to Indrani. I had some toys in the ornithopter; trinkets we always carried, to pacify children and make them think favourably of the Order when they grow up. Indrani fetched them for Haidar, to keep him occupied. Then we made love.”
“Your first time, right?”
“There hasn’t been another, either.”
“Was it worth it?”
“There’s never been a day when I haven’t thought of her, if that answers your question. I occasionally delude myself that she might have felt similarly.”
“I’m glad. You’re going to sin, at least have some fun.”
But when the storm had died, and all that remained of his ornithopter was a pair of glistening wingtips protruding from a moraine of red dust, two lightweight surface vehicles scudded from the south. They were tricycles, bouncing on obese tyres, their riders cocooned in filigreed cockpits, enfoliated by fuel cells and comms modules.
Indrani’s parents.
“I never understood why she’d lied to me, manufactured the whole story about running the caravan on her own; about her parents being murdered by the Taoists. Perhaps she initiated everything that happened, with that lie.”
“That would be convenient.”
“In any case, I never had a chance to find out. Her parents still had to dock their tricycles in the Juggernaut’s vehicle bay, which gave us time to fall into our old roles. If her parents suspected anything, I never saw it. No; they shamed me with their humility and hospitality. It was another three days before we could meet with a transporter that was returning to Vikingville. And when I arrived at the seminary, they treated me as a hero. Except for some of the other priests, who seemed to guess what had happened.”
“Yet it didn’t destroy you.”
“No,” Sergio said. “But I always feared I’d hear her name again. I was right to fear, wasn’t I?”
“You probably imagine that she lodged a complaint with the Diocese, or that her family somehow learned the truth and did it themselves. But that’s not how it happened. Not at all.”
“How did Bellarmine find out?”
“I’ll tell you, but first I have to reciprocate my side of the bargain.” Sergio took a deep breath, oddly aware now that the room seemed more claustrophobic than earlier; darker and more oppressive, as if it was physically trying to squeeze the life out of the man dying within it.
“All right,” he said. “I’m not sure why you wanted to know about Indrani, but you’re right. I should hear about Perdition. Although I don’t see how anything you can say can really—”
“Menendez, shut up. What you saw on the cards in the seminary, on the day you were ordained, all that was true. Perdition exists; it’s a neutron star, just like I always said it was.” And then Ivan talked about the nature of the star, things Sergio had learned in the seminary but then forgotten, because they were not absolutely central to his faith. That a neutron star was a sphere of nuclear matter forged in the heart of a dying star, containing as much mass as the sun, but compressed into a size no larger than Vikingville. A sugar lump from its heart would have weighed half a billion tons. Perdition was still cooling rapidly, like a cherry-red ingot removed from the furnace, implying that it had been born no more than a few hundred thousand years earlier, very close to its present position. A hot, blue star must have died, outshining the entire galaxy in its expiration. The nebula that star had shed was gone now, but there was no doubting what had happened.
Perdition had been born in a supernova.
“It shouldn’t have existed,” Ivan said. “No evidence for a supernova was ever found; no mini-extinction or enhancement in the local mutation rate; no dieback or brief flourish of speciation. Nothing.” The man looked around at the few candles still burning, their incense no longer the dominant smell in the room. “Something like a supernova doesn’t just happen without anyone noticing. Matter of fact, if you’re as close to it as we would have been, you’re not going to have the luxury of noticing much else, ever again. You’re going to be a pile of ashes. And yet it must have happened, or else there’d be no Perdition.”
“God must have intervened.”
“Yeah. Must have poked his big, old finger into the heart of that collapsing star, causing it to happen in just such a way that we didn’t get crisped. That’s the point, isn’t it? Our little miracle. And I suppose if you’re going to have a miracle, it’s not a bad one.”
The essence of it was simple enough: it had been known, on purely theoretical grounds, that supernova explosions might not be completely symmetric; that the blast might not emerge in a perfectly spherical fashion. Tiny initial imperfections in the dynamics of the pre-explosion core collapse might be magnified chaotically, building and building, until the star blew apart in a hugely asymmetric manner, lopsidedly spilling half its guts in one direction.
“They showed me how delicate it was,” Ivan said. “How precise the initial conditions must have been. If they’d differed by one part in a billion—”
“We wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“And what does that tell you—us—Menendez?”
Sergio looked guardedly at the recorder. An ill-chosen word at this point could ruin his position in the Diocese, yet what seemed more important now was to give the Founder the answer he wanted to he
ar. “An event of staggering improbability happened, an event that had to happen for humankind to survive at all. A miracle, if you like. An act of intervention by God, who arranged for the initial conditions to be just as they had to be.”
“You must have been teacher’s pet at the seminary, son.”
For the first time, Sergio felt angry, though he fought to keep it from his voice. “What they taught me, Founder, is only what they learned from you, on your return from Perdition. Are you saying you were misinterpreted?”
“No, not at all. Is that damned thing still running?”
“Would you like me to turn it off?”
“No, but move it closer because I want what I’m about to say to be beyond any possible doubt. Because when you take this back to the Diocese, they’ll find every possible way to twist my words—even what I’m saying now.” He waited while Sergio adjusted the position of the recorder, a futile gesture but one that seemed to satisfy Ivan. Then he said: “No one misinterpreted a word of what I said. I lied. Maybe it had something to do with the way the Kiwidinok drive interfered with brain function.”
“That would be convenient, wouldn’t it?”
“Touché. Do you know about temporal-lobe epilepsy, Menendez? Almost no one suffers from it now, but those that do often report feelings of intense religious ecstasy.”
After long moments, Sergio said: “The kinds of drugs that have been administered to you could cause hallucinations, I think. With all respect.”
Ivan pivoted his body across to the other side of the bed, rummaging in the dark pile of effects placed on the nightstand next to it. He held up a syringe, needle glistening in candlelight. “I told them I was more frightened than in pain. It’s hard to die a prophet when you don’t believe, Menendez. They gave me this drug; said it purged fear. Well, maybe it did—but not enough.”
Words formed in Sergio’s mouth and seemed to emerge of their own volition.
