by John Meaney
The ranger does not look up as the observer trots past.
Piotr, a senior researcher, stopped outside her open office door, mumbling into his full beard.
‘Hey,’ said Ro. ‘You got a real coherence problem, da?’
He flashed a grin.
‘No kidding, queral-girl.’ Piotr knew her research’s direction. ‘I’m in two minds about everything, myself.’
‘Ha. I mean, da.’ Her Russki was a long way from Piotr’s command of English.
He nodded and carried on, tugging at his beard, sinking back into his own thoughts.
Decoherence. To queral-net designers, it was merely an engineering problem: keeping a true quantum system, unitary-processing components (working through reversible algorithms: to a quantum bit, qubit, time is a two-way street) occupying many states simultaneously, isolated from the macroscopic world, until it was ready to collapse quantum weirdness and provide the computation’s result to its human users.
‘But queral computers,’ muttered Ro to herself, ‘were designed, not evolved.’
It meant that Zajinets’ decentralized nervous systems were messy. It also meant that, as far as she could ascertain, every Zajinet possessed a minimum of sixteen simultaneous consciousnesses: emergent properties of smaller daemon personalities—all thinking and emoting at the same time -whose numbers ran into thousands, maybe even tens of thousands.
Ten thousand semi-personalities in the same mind.
Yet they were complex, overlapping: a Zajinet neuron-analogue (strictly, one of the parallel states of that one microscopic component) could be part of many semi-personalities at the same instant.
Ro shook her head.
‘I’ve got to work this out.’
When I talk to myself, who the hell am I talking to? Unsmiling, she kicked back her chair, stood, and headed for Zoë’s office.
Trying not to think of Luís.
<
~ * ~
40
NULAPEIRON AD 3420-3421
Half a Standard Year passed very quickly, with Tom’s own re-training as well as teaching, as he delved deeply into the logosophical disciplines, relating them to the theory and practice of warfare—something which caused him many sleepless nights—in ways he had never done before.
There were times when he could pretend he was no more than an academic, for he was a scholar-dozent without military rank, and this was an educational establishment of far higher standards than he had expected: equivalent to the highest streams of the Sorites School which had set his mind alight.
But sometimes, when the talk turned to a weapon’s blast-penetration characteristics or a cipher-logotrope’s self-erasure command, he would look at his students’ young, earnest faces and realize that he was asking them to blow apart human beings, or to wipe their own memory under interrogation by an enemy who would show no mercy.
Yet the more he learned of the Dark Fire’s spreading, the Blight which dotted the world of Nulapeiron like some dread disease, the more he feared that he was witnessing the end of human culture, and the beginning of an age in which homo sapiens submitted to a power far more evil than any they had served before. Perhaps humankind’s Destiny was to carry out the Blight’s implacable, indecipherable will; perhaps there was no other choice.
In the meantime, Tom sent his young students off to war.
To die.
But there was another campaign, in parallel with the more obvious military actions, and that was a covert world: of penetration agents and clandestine support lines; of entanglement codes and suicide thanatotropes; of long-term sleepers-in-place, gathering intelligence in occupied realms, feeding back snippets whose overall import they would never comprehend; of paramilitary snatch-and-interrogate missions, of sabotage, of strategic assassination.
It was a shadow war which played by its own rules, or lack of them.
And in that war, the most heroic actions would go forever unrecorded and unrecognized: the heart-pounding run through dank shadow-wrapped tunnels with military installation schematics encrypted in a semi-crystalline tooth, while the Blight’s dark dragnet inexorably closed in; the delicate conversation steering and eavesdropping, smiling and nodding at the occupying forces’ stone-faced officers, in polite dinner parties and soirees where a misplaced word could spell disaster.
Or the lonely death: face down upon broken flagstones, or shuddering beneath the suicide implant’s pain before the interrogators could get to work.
It was a war within a war, of which Tom caught only glimpses; but those snatches of detail drew him with a terrible fascination.
During his second half-year at the Academy, he steered the course of his work in a different direction, making it known that he could help in the briefing and training of agents. He had been a LudusVitae senior executive, after all.
At the same time, he trained when he could with the special instructors—those who taught penetration agents disciplines where physical arts and covert tactics merged: tailing techniques, situational gymnastics (with particular application to escape-route vectors), stealth climbing, silent killing.
He even learned to swim.
Even to himself, Tom pretended his reasons were something like Jay A’Khelikov’s, that time when Jay wrote a surprisingly lyrical and emotional poem: to understand what the operatives were going through.
But there was a part of him that knew that self-serving rationalization rarely tells the whole story: that teaching frustrated him; that he was no closer to finding Elva.
And it was Jay, for reasons which had nothing to do with military advantage or tactical gain, who finally enveloped Tom in that shadow war.
They were deep inside the Labyrinth, an extended cubic multi-level volume within the Academy’s core, where corridors were uniformly grey, square in cross-section and carpeted in the same dull blue.
It was a place for hushed voices, for drawn-out planning sessions behind sealed doors: a hive in which code-makers and -breakers worked in solitude or quiet teams; a warren where plans could be hatched—the assassination of a once-friendly ruler, the kidnapping and interrogation of a noble Blight sympathizer—which would never stand up to public scrutiny.
Bleak tactics: but they were all that stood between civilization and the darkness, in a world where everything was sliding into Chaos, and even the Academy’s own Oracles -under heavy guard at the Labyrinth’s core—were unreliable.
In Jay’s depressing cuboid office, Tom sat down to have a chat, sensing that Jay had a favour to ask, not dreaming where it might lead.
Jay leaned back in his soft lev-chair, hands behind his head.
‘Have you seen my Lady Sylvana recently, Tom?’ His tone was a shade too offhand.
‘No.’
‘Right. Forget I said anything.’
It was not the first hint that she might like to talk to him, merely the least subtle.
‘How’re your spacetime hackers doing?’
‘You wouldn’t believe the budget for coupling resonators, but otherwise, great.’
‘Glad I could help.’
‘My codebreakers think you’re a genius, Tom.’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve only ever met one true genius. There were some big brains at the Sorites School.’
‘Fat minds?’ Jay sketched the tricon for ‘phospholipid’ in the air.
‘I’ll say.’
It was a biochemical pun, for minute changes in fat chemistry—the brain being largely structured fat—separate human sentience from Terran chimpanzees.
‘But Avernon’s the real thing, Jay. I mean it.’
‘Subject closed. Although I hear’—with a wink—‘you gave the general a hard time on the matter.’
‘That I did.’
Tom had met with Corduven on three occasions during the past year—each time in crowded meetings with little opportunity for private discussion, where matters of strategy, and the creeping Blight, hung too heavily for badinage.
&nbs
p; But Tom had taken the opportunity to remind Corduven of Lord Avernon’s coup in developing metavector theory: such a mind was the most valuable resource they could gain.
‘I’ll think about it,’ was all Corduven had said.
Perhaps Tom’s latest work would make him reconsider.
When Tom—still a servitor—had been facing the Review Committee who held his future in their hands, his presentation had at first been stumbling, halting. But Avernon, in excited private discussion—needing someone to talk to—had given Tom a preview of his new approach; and Tom used that to dazzle the three Lords Academic with his own extrapolations, spun off from the basic theory, and helped gain his ascension to noble status.
Tom applied metavectors to cosmic timeflow, in a rush of enthusiasm which barely registered the Lords’ Academic lack of surprise. For they already knew his findings—and more—despite the new techniques in his derivation. It was Tom’s first hint that whole areas of logosophical endeavour were forbidden, even to most Lords.
For history and cosmology were always restricted: kept hidden from a populace who ought not to dwell on thoughts of other worlds, nor on the dramas of Nulapeiron’ s founding, lest they wonder how things might have been different, or could become so.
So, yes, Tom knew the difference between ability and obsessive drive on the one hand, and genius on the other. For he had glimpsed the magical workings of Avernon’s mind, and remained in awe at the flashes of poetic insight such an intellect delivered.
I’m no Avernon.
And yet, and yet...
Something about the Academy’s atmosphere, despite its warlike purpose, had reawakened in Tom the fire of logosophical exploration. Perhaps the clandestine nature of the Labyrinth’s operations lent extra plausibility to Avernon’s vector-on-vector approach, which invoked yet another layer of indirection between qualia—perceived reality—and the underlying stuff of the universe-as-is.
It allowed Tom to treat entangled particle-pairs as twin pointers—hidden variables of a very particular kind—to the same underlying state in ur-space: a concept which had nothing to do with other spacetime continua and everything to do with reality’s deepest nature.
At any other time, such musings would be purely intellectual games. But in the world of espionage and quantum cryptography, the ability to hack reality, using metavector iterators to tease apart entangled states, was a useful technique indeed.
In the arcane subculture of the codebreakers, Tom was something of a hero.
But, on this particular day, it soon became clear that Jay’s reasons for talking to him had little to do with logosophical expertise. It was his newly upgraded security rating that interested Jay.
‘You’re cleared for code-gamma ops now, aren’t you, Tom?’
‘But this is code-alpha’—Tom delivered the old joke with a straight face—‘so now you have to kill me.’
‘Right…’
Tom had already taken more than one pensive agent through tactical scenarios, using intricate holo models of distant locations with observation points (or in one case a sniper’s kill-zone) clearly marked and annotated.
‘I’ve a favour to ask.’
‘All right, Jay. Whatever you need.’
Behind his desk, Jay doodled in the air, creating abstract holos, while Tom waited. But it was not until Jay had caused the garish, morphing shapes to float around the chamber -appearing to bounce off the stark walls—that he sighed and came to the point.
“There’s a woman...’ Jay began. ‘Chaos. You’ve no idea how hard this is.’
Tom managed not to laugh.
‘If it’s advice you want, old chap, I’m not sure—’
‘I’m talking about a mission briefing, if that’s all right with you.’
Tom looked at him carefully. ‘Go on.’
‘Her name is Lihru. Her target zone is Jephrin, and she’s due to go in within the tenday.’
‘I’m sorry? Jephrin?’
‘In Realm Ruvandi, about twenty klicks inside the border.’
‘But that’s—’
‘Deep in Blight-occupied territory, yes. It makes the access routes complicated, but they’re all worked out, and there’s a network in place ...’ Jay’s voice trailed off.
‘You’re involved with this woman,’ said Tom.
‘Yes, I—’
‘And you don’t want to be her briefing officer.’
‘I don’t think it’s appropr— Damn it, Tom. I can’t send her in, knowing ... I just can’t, that’s all.’
Tom wondered what Elva was doing now. Was she, too, in some occupied realm, in constant danger of discovery by forces of the Blight?
‘Of course I’ll do it’
‘Thank Fate.’
Later, Tom found himself brooding on the notion of hyperego formation, as mentioned by Sylvana’s cousin, Brekana, when he had just arrived at the Academy. Surely it was no conceit to consider modern people superior, better integrated than their ancestors. Yet perhaps they retained their capacity for self-delusion. For some part of Tom was surely aware there was more to Jay’s request than a prematurely ended love affair, or a natural concern over a comrade’s safety.
Back in the more open parts of the Academy, an unusual melancholy settled on Tom. There was a seminar he was supposed to prepare for, but instead he sat in a deep lev-chair at the edge of the instructors’ common chamber, where gentle holoflames flickered with simulated warmth in illusory braziers, soft music played, and a solitary glass bird circled slowly below the ceiling.
Tom brooded over the first, tentative stanzas of a new poem:
ENTANGLED LOVE
Where deep beneath the strongest crests
Of wave-equation Fate creates —
The startled glance, the love that binds —
Two souls in matching eigenstates.
‘... with us, Tom?’
‘I’m sorry? What was that?’
When Fate without remittance splits
The tangled pair a world apart;
Yet links them true with bonds so great
That each one beats the other’s heart.
‘We’re going to a conversazione. More like a historical lecture, really.’
It was Anrila, a young Lady who was a fast-track instructor in psychomanipulative strategies, and her perennial companion, Zebdinov Krimlar. He was bearded, with wild red hair—and a commoner by birth.
In any other milieu, their open association would have been unthinkable.
‘Forbidden knowledge,’ said Krimlar. ‘History and stuff.’
‘Like what us commoners’—Tom pretended to snort in a disgusting way—‘ain’t supposed to know, like?’
‘That kind of thing, yeah.’ Anrila let out an exaggerated sigh, then giggled.
Tom forced himself to smile. ‘It sounds irresistible.’
Historical Society though this might be, the speaker’s sources seemed to draw more from fanciful ancient literature than any objective account.
Seated near the back of the small lecture hall, among an audience of some two dozen people—mostly young, but with a handful of older, watchful men—Tom allowed the words and holos to drift through his awareness, ignoring minutiae.
This Lihru — I wonder what she’s like.
It was foolish of Jay to have become involved with an operative, but what recrimination could Tom give? He himself was staking everything on a remembered vision granted by a dead Seer whose true nature remained enigmatic.
Elva... What are you doing right now?
She could be in any realm of Nulapeiron; any realm at all.
What can you see? What do you feel?
He shook his head.
‘Xiao Wang’s commentary’—the speaker, a smallish grey-bearded man with an excitable manner, moved around the low stage—‘is an exciting mix of factual account and dramatic narrative. This marriage of forms, while both intriguing and compelling, makes it difficult for the serious scholar to ...’
Tom tuned out the words.
Among the audience, only Zebdinov Krimlar, his red hair prominent, seemed to be of common origin, like Tom himself. Tom would bet that the rest were noble-born.
‘For those not familiar with the text…’
To himself, Tom smiled.
Aged fourteen, within the parochial, inward-looking Salis Core, in a humble stratum of Darinia Demesne, he had read a bootleg copy of Xiao Wang’s Skein Wars: a riveting account of distant events one thousand Standard Years before. He had worked his way through that massive work in a single rest-day.
