Context

by John Meaney

  Seventeen years later, he could recite it almost word for word.

  They were the Luculenti élite, small in relative numbers, but the controlling force on the rich, half-terraformed world of Fulgor. Their brains—using archaic pre-logotropic femtotech—were enhanced via plexcores: processors implanted in their bodies, initially as tabulae rasae, into which their minds extended.

  They knew the dangers of too-large plexcore-arrays, even though emergenics had not yet developed into a mature discipline. The number of plexcores per individual was strictly regulated by law.

  But every epic needs a villain, and the deadly Rafael fulfilled that role.

  Vampire-like, he preyed upon living minds, and the plexcores of the dead: sucking out their private thoughts and memories, their deepest feelings; deepscanning into his own array, heisenberging the originals to Chaos.

  His plexcore array was vast—secreted processors scattered across Fulgor—and his abilities grew accordingly. And yet, he was killed, by an unknown Terran whose name did not survive.

  But dead Rafael’s plexcore array—networked by mu-space comms—was not destroyed. Some—or all, depending on the account—remained undetected.

  My talisman...

  Tom touched his chest, feeling the stallion beneath his tunic. In some ways, it formed a link to that ancient tale, in ways he had not considered before.

  ‘After the disembodied Rafael’s two centuries of slumber’—the speaker cleared his throat—‘it was, as Xiao Wang says, time for the Dark God finally to awaken

  At the time of Rafael’s birth, Fulgor was a bright and shining republic, an intellectual Utopia, where commercial empires flourished and died in seconds—inside Fulgor’s rich, consensual alternate reality: the virtual Skein.

  And the Luculenti reached levels of intellectual ability which would never be seen again—or at least, not until Nulapeiron’s nobility refined their logotropic techniques in a distant place and time.

  But, although it took two hundred Standard Years, the strange, dark fragments of the former Rafael’s distributed consciousness slowly resurfaced in Skein. Slowly, slowly, they began a process of malevolent rebirth: the central theme of Xiao Wang’s epic work.

  From strange, fractured, dislocated beginnings, those shards of evil linked together, spreading and growing in Skein, eventually to coalesce into something infinitely blacker, more mysterious, and totally implacable.

  Small numbers at first, then large groups of Luculenti fell under its sway, were absorbed into darkness, as the days of the eponymous Skein Wars began.

  There was heroism, among the élite and ordinary people both, as they fought back against the spread of evil. Many sacrificed everything for the sake of the greater good, so that Utopian days might be seen again by others.

  Xiao Wang chronicled their valour, the outstanding intellectual effort of their campaigns: the days of the counter-Skein, brilliant twin to the corrupted virtual world; of the de-programming viruses they unleashed in Skein and in reality.

  His work, as a commentator’s foreword said, speaks to the warrior spirit in us all.

  But, ultimately, it was about the tragic fall of a once-bright society, a doomed struggle, as decades-long campaigns failed one by one, and whole populations died or melded into a vast something that was not remotely human, a planetwide blackness Destined to remain forever.

  It was the Fulgor Anomaly.

  Then a strange alteration came over the speaker’s manner. He stood taller, his fidgeting ceased, and when he spoke his voice was softer but more commanding.

  ‘My real name is Strostiv.’ He looked around the chamber. ‘And I have a particular reason for inviting you today. Everyone here has been carefully chosen, according to criteria I will not discuss at this time.’

  Tom sat up straighter, and looked at Anrila who winked, before returning her attention to Strostiv.

  ‘You will already have noticed’—a smile flitted across Strostiv’s face, was gone—‘broad similarities, as well as important differences, between the Anomaly’s genesis and our own situation. Of course, we have long abandoned the dangerous and ultimately corrupting practice of immersion in artificial realities.’

  Strostiv’s gaze tracked across his audience.

  Tom could have mentioned zentropes—on the subject of corrupt technologies—but held his silence.

  ‘That closes off one potential weakness. But the Blight has many more techniques at its disposal.’

  Everyone was paying rigid attention, now that myth was explicitly linked to contemporary menace.

  ‘My Lord Corcorigan, some years back, you delivered an interesting exposition on the nature of timeflow. Would you care to repeat that now?’

  Tom grew very still.

  He had been almost too frightened to see straight at the time, but this Strostiv could be one of them: the trio of Lords Academic who had recommended his promotion to Lordship.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, rising. ‘It would be my pleasure.’

  There were people with stronger logosophical backgrounds than Tom Corcorigan in this chamber, for sure ...But none that would have meddled in the forbidden areas, or brought a clumsy energy to inquiries unhindered by the complex, careful scholarship which had gone before.

  This time, he would make his exposition shorter and to the point.

  It was no longer logosophy, but military strategy, which was important now.

  Quickly:

  ‘Assume that space is flat — just pretend it’s a disk, all right?’

  A holo almost-sphere, elongated towards the ends, appeared at his gestured command.

  “This is the lifetime of the universe: starting at a point’ -Tom indicated one end—‘then growing to a maximum’—the middle—‘and shrinking to the Big Crunch.’

  He looked at Strostiv, who gave a small ironic smile.

  I’m working from incomplete knowledge. I didn’t know that eight years ago, but I do now.

  Tom continued:

  ‘The Sakharov-Gold Principle, from ancient times, links the direction of time with cosmic expansion. Therefore, by symmetry, there are two Big Bangs, and time flows towards the Centre Time, the phase transition. And there’s no way to distinguish which half of the cosmic history we’re in.’

  The audience were giving him their full attention. These were areas that bright minds must have speculated on, for all that discussions were discouraged.

  “The interesting thing’—he looked to Strostiv: no reaction—‘is that Centre Time. In fact, even if the cosmos continued to expand forever’—Strostiv shook his head: that could not happen—‘the principle remains.’

  Tom caused a vertical plane, through the centre of his holo model, to sparkle with pinpricks of scarlet light.

  ‘Does time flip over in one instant of contextual metatime? Or are there seedpoints of time-reversal, spreading out to engulf the cosmos?’

  This was more than the young Tom Corcorigan had talked about. But it was something he wanted people to know.

  ‘If you could emulate the Centre Time conditions, then you would produce regions, perhaps micro-regions, of negative timeflow, such as ...’

  Tom paused here—some speculations were most definitely forbidden—but Strostiv made no comment, so he pressed on to make his final point.

  ‘... such as obtains inside Oracular minds.’

  He sat down amid a heavy silence.

  ‘I’m not going to comment,’ said Strostiv, ‘on the processes which produce an Oracle.’

  It sounded as though he could, if he chose to. That made Tom wonder what Strostiv did when he was not interviewing nervous young would-be Lords.

  ‘But the Blight is most certainly interested in those procedures.’

  Then the lecture hall grew dark, and the true point of this gathering became apparent.

  Black space, and a roughly cylindrical richness of stars: a section of one galactic spiral arm. One star glowed amber: Nulapeiron’s own system.

  It reminded
Tom of the ancient joke. A bystander, during a scene in Ro’s Story, wore a holo-emblazoned sweatshirt depicting the galaxy. At the edge, a tiny insignificant point was labelled You Are Here.

  Strostiv’s words came from the darkness.

  ‘Nulapeiron, yes. And this’—as a distant star flared baleful red—‘is Fulgor’s sun. And over there’—green—‘the home-world of Terra.’

  More systems were highlighted, all in blue.

  ‘Other so-called first-wave worlds: Coolth, Vijaya, Sivlix III...’

  But then two more stars flared red, like Fulgor.

  ‘And these are the hell-worlds of Siganth and Molsin — you’ll recall the children’s stories.’

  Even Skein Wars probably survived because it was a cautionary tale.

  ‘Extrapolating...’

  A spiky flat polyhedron grew, solidified to three dimensions, metamorphosed to projected 4-D—using the faux-perspective of hypergeometric trompe l’oeil—then flickered again ... and each of the highlighted stars now lay on a pointed projection from that single, impossibly faceted shape.

  ‘You’ll see how the so-called Anomalous Worlds’—more stars shone scarlet—‘can be topologically linked through this one geometric construct.’

  In Tom’s flat-space, had he touched the disk-shaped universe with his thumb and fingertips, there would be five spots of intrusion in 2-D space. But in 3-D, it would be obvious that there is only one hand.

  Could these spreading intrusions, these Anomalous Worlds, really be linked through some analogous process? A mathematical fiction, with the extra dimension representing the richness of communications links? Or something more...

  That they are all one?

  But finally, the stars were replaced by a single globe — Nulapeiron itself—with scarlet spots springing up throughout, highlighting the Blight’s incursion. But, in the rotating globe, three locations were marked in blue.

  ‘The Collegium Perpetuum Delphinorum,’ said Strostiv, ‘is normally referred to in the singular. But there are three Collegiate locations in the world, and each one, as you can see, is the focus of concentrated Dark Fire expansion.

  ‘It is imperative that none of them fall beneath the Blight’s dominion.’

  Another detail: Tom had not realized how close the Blight was to this sector. And Strostiv’s next words made that chillingly explicit; it seemed obvious, too, that he foresaw no halt to the Blight’s annexing of territory.

  ‘The Academy’s sphere of interest is threatened here’ -Strostiv pointed—‘and here. Accordingly’—everyone blinked as holo diagrams snapped out of existence and the lighting grew bright—‘an evacuation order from General d’Ovraison will be circulated within the next few days. That fact is not to leave this chamber.’

  Consternation erupted, then faded as Strostiv held up one hand.

  ‘If the Academy regrouping is successful, then fine. If the evacuation fails, then make your way to another Sector Command, and divulge what you’ve learned today to the highest-ranking officer you can reach.’

  And, with a grim smile:

  ‘This briefing is concluded. Thank you for your time.’

  Tom slept little that night. But early the next morning he was in his assigned briefing chamber, taking a dark-haired young woman called Lihru through final checks: entangled-crypto protocols and keys; passwords and paroles for every contact along the complicated access route; secondaries and fallbacks.

  She reminded him a little of Jasirah, but more composed, and he could see why Jay would have fallen for her: anybody would.

  Tom kept things strictly business—it was her life on the line—and made no mention of Jay, or the fact that Jay was originally assigned to be her briefing officer. But at the briefing’s end, Lihru thanked Tom quietly for taking the time to instruct her.

  ‘And you can tell Jay ... I understand. Tell him to take care.’

  ‘I’ll... pass it on.’

  After she had gone, Tom stared for a long time at the blank stone wall, seeing nothing except the fading afterimage of a beautiful young woman whom—he was suddenly sure—he had just sent to her death.

  The next morning, a new general order was posted in every corridor, wrapped up in one tiny tricon whose minimal size belied the heavy import of its meaning:

  BY ORDER OF THE C-IN-C: STRATEGIC COMMAND

  All personnel are hereby advised that Evacuation Plan

  Gamma is to be implemented immediately. Fully

  urgent: invoke immediate save-or-destroy procedures

  for all repeat all material classified level 7 or above.

  Section heads cf. standing orders: deadline schedule

  2 alpha.

  Final evacuation date: Chameleon 173

  May Fate preserve us all.

  Authorized today 27th Quintembral Chameleon Year

  [Chameleon 145]

  GENERAL LORD CORDUVEN D’ORAISON

  Command-in-Chief

  ~ * ~

  41

  TERRA AD 2142

  <>

  [13]

  December. Bathed in white, Moscow stretched wide.

  Below Ro’s feet, concave snow-covered slopes—of the Yeltsin Hills—dropped to the flooded grey river. On the opposite bank stood the rebuilt stadium, formed of dull granite. Beyond, the great old buildings, like powerful square-shouldered prole workers, stood hard and strong amid the wide, clean geometric boulevards.

  Patterns within patterns.

  Behind her reared the university campus, with its broad, grand central building. Among its turrets, the central spire rose; its apex cupped, as it had for centuries, a bright golden star.

  Ro’s mathematical analysis sense, always active, mapped the conic sections and fractal details of the frozen snow’s gradient, the trajectories of homemade sleds as bright-clad students, shrieking with laughter, belted downwards at hazardous speed towards the churning waters.

  White within white ...variations even in the texture of soft snow.

  Patterns —

  To Ro’s left, Zoë shifted her feet.

  ‘Cold.’ Her breath steamed as though in evidence. ‘Damned cold.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

  — within patterns —

  ’Ro...’

  — and this one with meaning.

  ‘Look, Zoë, I’m sorry I screwed up, OK?’

  Mortal danger.

  There had been no flash of inspiration, after all the pressure she had put on Zoë to grant direct xeno access.

  In a penrose-tiled observation room, its glass roof revealing the dull grey sky above, Ro had sat on a cushion, watching the elephantine moving sculpture which was the Zajinet’s external form.

  ‘First test.’ She thumbed a holopad into life. ‘What do you make of this?’

  There was a secondary psych team—sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?—keeping watch on her. Or rather, on the human—Zajinet interaction considered (in traditional psych fashion) as a third entity, separate from the individuals involved.

  Ro’s second holo—an intricate geometry puzzle -provoked the xeno’s interest:

  <<... multi-flange: the transform ...>>

  <<... rotate, translate before inverts ...>>

  <<... fond beginning, reinforce potentiation ...>>

  ‘You mean’—Ro smiled at her own intuition—‘it’s like a toy, from your childhood.’

  The Zajinet’s body-granules whirled and spun.

  <<... is-is-is...>>

  <<... transaction double emit/receive ...>>

  <<... standing wave for true ...>>

  Ro looked at the psych team.

  ‘Lucky guess,’ she said.

  On the skylight above, a sudden rattle of hailstones.

  ‘Christ. What about this weather?’

  No! Damn it—

  Too late, she realized what she had done.

  The Zajinet was frozen.

  ‘Merde.’ She dragged herself upright. ‘Scheiss!’

 
It was totally immobile.