Forbidden Planets

by Peter Crowther (Ed)

  “Perhaps if I ask nicely.”

  “Ask whatever you like. It will make no difference.”

  While they sped on—in silence now, for Fernando had decided he preferred it that way—he chewed over what he knew of the inclusion and its significance to the Metagovernment.

  Hundreds of thousands of years ago, humanity had achieved the means to colonize nearby branes: squeezing biological data across the hyperspatial gap into adjacent realities, then growing living organisms from those patterns. Now the Metagovernment sprawled across thirty thousand densely packed braneworlds. Yet in all that time it had encountered evidence of only one other intelligent civilization: the vanished KR-L culture.

  Further expansion was unlikely. Physics changed subtly from brane to brane, limiting the possibilities for human colonization. Beyond fifteen thousand realities in either direction, people could survive only inside bubbles of tampered spacetime, in which the local physics had been tweaked to simulate homebrane conditions. These “inclusions” became increasingly difficult to maintain as the local physics grew more exotic. At five kilometers across, Meranda Austvro’s inclusion was the smallest in existence, and it still required gigantic support machinery to hold it open. The Metagovernment was happy to shoulder the expense because it hoped to reap riches from Austvro’s investigations into the vanished KR-L culture.

  But that investigation was supposed to be above-top-secret, the mere existence of the KR-L culture officially deniable at all levels of the Metagovernment. By all accounts Austvro was close to a shattering discovery.

  And yet there were leaks. Someone close to the operation—maybe even Austvro herself—was blabbing.

  Scrutiny had sent Fernando in to seal the leak. If that meant shutting down Austvro’s whole show until the cat could be put back into the bag (Fernando could not help but smile at the metaphor), then he had the necessary authorization.

  How Austvro would take it was another thing.

  The rush of corridors and doors slowed abruptly, and a moment later Fernando was deposited back on his feet, teetering slightly until he regained his balance. He had arrived in a much larger room than the one where he had been quickened, one that felt a good deal more welcoming. There was plush white carpet on the floor, comfortable furniture, soothing pastel décor, various homely knickknacks and tasteful objets d’art. The rock-effect walls were interrupted by lavish picture windows overlooking an unlikely garden, complete with winding paths, rock pools, and all manner of imported vegetation, laid out under a soothing green sky. It was a convincing simulacrum of one of the more popular holiday destinations in the low-thousand branes.

  Meranda Austvro was reclining in a silver dress on a long black settee. Playing cards were arranged in a circular formation on the coffee table before her. She put down the one card that had been in her hand and beckoned Fernando to join her.

  “Welcome to Pegasus Station, Inspector,” she said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to greet you sooner, but I’ve been rather on the busy side.”

  Fernando sat himself down on a chair, facing her across the table. “So I see.”

  “A simple game of Clock Patience, Inspector, to occupy myself while I was waiting for your arrival. Don’t imagine this is how I’d rather be spending my afternoon.”

  He decided to soften his approach. “Your aerial did tell me you’d been preoccupied with your work.”

  “That’s part of it. But I must admit we botched your first quickening, and I didn’t have time to wait around to see the results a second time.”

  “When you say ‘botched’ . . .”

  “I neglected to check your header tag more carefully. When all that cat fur started appearing . . .” She waved her hand dismissively. “I assumed there’d been a mistake in the profile, so I aborted the quickening before you reached legal sentience.”

  The news unnerved him. Failed quickenings weren’t unknown, though, and she’d acted legally enough. “I hope you recycled my remains.”

  “On the contrary, Inspector: I made good use of them.” Austvro patted a striped orange rug, spread across the length of the settee. “You don’t mind, do you? I found the pattern quite appealing.”

  “Make the most of me,” Fernando said, trying not to sound as if she had touched any particular nerve. “You can have another skin when I leave, if it means so much to you.”

  She clicked her fingers over his shoulder at the aerial. “You may go now, Caliph.”

  The spheres bustled around each other. “As you wish, Doctor Austvro.”

  When Fernando had heard the whisk of the closing door, he leaned an elbow on the table, careful not to disturb the cards. He brought his huge whiskered head close to Austvro’s. She was an attractive woman despite a certain steely hauteur. He wondered if she could smell his breath, how uniquely, distastefully feline it was. “I hope this won’t take too much time, for both our sakes. Scrutiny wants early closure on this whole mess.”

  “I’m sure it does. Unfortunately, I don’t know the first thing about your investigation.” She picked up a card from one part of the pattern, examined it with pursed lips, then placed it down on top of another one. “Therefore, I’m not sure how I can help you.”

  “You were informed that we were investigating a security hole.”

  “I was informed, and I found the suggestion absurd. Unless I am the perpetrator.” She turned her cool, civil eyes upon him. “Is that what you think, Inspector? That I am the one leaking information back to the homebrane, risking the suspension of my own project?”

  “I know only that there are leaks.”

  “They could be originating from someone in Scrutiny, or Exploitation. Have you considered that?”

  “We have to start somewhere. The operation itself seems as good a place as any.”

  “Then you’re wasting your time. Return down-stack and knock on someone else’s door. I’ve work to do.”

  “Why are you so certain the leaks couldn’t be originating here?”

  “Because—first—I do not accept that there are leaks. There are merely statistical patterns, coincidences, that Scrutiny has latched onto because it has nothing better to do with its time. Second, I run this show on my own. There is no room for anyone else to be the source of these nonexistent leaks.”

  “Your husband?”

  She smiled briefly and extended a hand over the coffee table, palm down. A figure—a grave, clerical-looking man in black—appeared above the table’s surface, no larger than a statuette. The man made a gesture with his hands, as if shaping an invisible ball, then said something barely audible—Fernando caught the phrase “three hundred”—then vanished again, leaving only the arrangement of playing cards.

  Austvro selected another, examined it once more and returned it to the table.

  “My husband died years ago, Inspector. Edvardo and I were deep inside the KR-L machinery, protected by an extension of the inclusion. My husband’s speciality was acausal mechanics. . . .” For a moment, a flicker of humanity interrupted the composure of her face. “The extension collapsed. Edvardo was on the other side of the failure point. I watched him fall into KR-L spacetime. I watched what it did to him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Fernando said, wishing he had paid more attention to the biographical briefing.

  “Since then I have conducted operations alone, with only the machines to help me. Caliph is the most special of them. I place great value on his companionship. You can question the machines if you like, but it won’t get you anywhere.”

  “Yet the leaks are real.”

  “We could argue about that.”

  “Scrutiny wouldn’t have sent me otherwise.”

  “There must be false alarms. Given the amount of data Scrutiny keeps tabs on—the entire informational content of metahumanity, spread across thirty thousand reality layers—isn’t any pattern almost guaranteed to show up eventually?”

  “It is,” Fernando conceded, stroking his chin tufts. “But that’s why Scrutiny pays
attention to context and to clustering. Not simply to exact matches for sensitive keywords, either, but for suspicious similarities: near-misses designed to throw us off the scent. Miranda for Meranda; Ostrow for Austvro, that kind of thing.”

  “And you’ve found these clusters?”

  “Nearly a dozen at the last count. Someone with intimate knowledge of this research project is talking, and we can’t have that.”

  This amused her. “So the Metagovernment does have its enemies after all.”

  “It’s no secret that there are political difficulties in the high branes. Talk of secession. Exploitation feels that the KR-L technology may give the Metagovernment just the tools it needs to hold the stack together if the dissidents try to gain the upper hand.”

  Austvro sneered. “Tools of political control.”

  “An edge, that’s all. And obviously matters won’t be helped if the breakaway branes learn about the KR-L discoveries and what we intend to do with them. That’s why we need to keep a lid on things.”

  “But these clusters . . .” Austvro leaned back into the settee, studying Fernando levelly. “I was shown some of the evidence—some of the documents—before you arrived, and, frankly, none of it made much sense to me.”

  “It didn’t?”

  “If someone—some mole—was trying to get a message through to the breakaway branes, why insist on being so cryptic? Why not just come out and say whatever needs to be said instead of creating jumbled riddles? Names mixed up . . . names altered . . . the context changed out of all recognition . . . some of these keywords even looked like they were embedded in some kind of play.”

  “All I can say is that Scrutiny considered the evidence sufficiently compelling to require immediate action. It’s still investigating the provenance of these documents, but I should have word on that soon enough.”

  Austvro narrowed her flint-gray eyes. “Provenance?”

  “As I said, the documents are faked: made to appear historical, as if they’ve always been present in the data.”

  “Which is even more absurd than there being leaks in the first place.”

  He smiled at her. “I’m glad we agree on something.”

  “It’s a start.”

  He tapped his extended claws against the coffee table. “I appreciate your skepticism, Doctor. But the fact is, I can’t leave here until I have an explanation. If Scrutiny isn’t satisfied with my findings—if the source of the leaks can’t be traced—they’ll have no option but to shut down Pegasus, or at least replace the current setup with something under much tighter government control. So it’s really in your interests to work with me, to help me find the solution.”

  “I see,” she said coldly.

  “I’d like to see more of this operation. Not just Pegasus Station but the KR-L culture itself.”

  “Unthinkable. Didn’t Caliph clarify where your jurisdiction ends, Inspector?”

  “It’s not a question of jurisdiction. Give me a reason to think you haven’t anything to hide, and I’ll focus my inquiries somewhere else.”

  She looked down, fingering the striped orange rug she had made of his skin.

  “It will serve no purpose, Inspector, except to disturb you.”

  “I’ll edit the memories before I pass them back down the stack. How does that sound?”

  She rose from the settee, abandoning her card game. “Your call. But don’t blame me when you start gibbering.”

  Austvro led him from the lounge, back into a more austere part of the station. The hem of her silver dress swished on the iron-gray flooring. Now and then an aerial flashed past on some errand, but in all other respects the station was deserted. Fernando knew that Exploitation had offered to send more expertise, but Austvro had always declined assistance. By all accounts she worked efficiently, feeding a steady stream of tidbits and breakthroughs back to the Metagovernment specialists. According to Fernando’s dossier, Austvro didn’t trust the stability of anyone who would actually volunteer to be copied this far up-stack, knowing the protocols. It was no surprise that she treated him with suspicion, for he was also a volunteer, and only his memories would be going back home again.

  Presently they arrived at an oval aperture cut into one wall. On the other side of the aperture, ready to dart down a tunnel, was a two-seater travel pod.

  “Are you sure about this, Inspector?”

  “I’m perfectly sure.”

  She shrugged—letting him know it was his mistake, not hers—and then ushered him into one of the seats. Austvro took the other one, facing him at right angles to the direction of travel. She applied her hand to a tiller and the pod sped into motion. Tunnel walls zipped by in an accelerating blur.

  “We’re about to leave the main body of the inclusion,” Austvro informed him.

  “Into KR-L spacetime?”

  “Not unless the support machines fail. The inclusion’s more or less spherical—insofar as one can talk about ‘spherical’ intrusions of one form of spacetime into another—but it sprouts tentacles and loops into interesting portions of the surrounding KR-L structure. Maintaining these tentacles and loops is much harder than keeping the sphere up, and I’m sure you’ve heard how expensive and difficult that is.”

  Fernando felt his hairs bristling. The pod was moving terrifically fast now; so swiftly that there could be no doubt that they had left the main sphere behind already. He visualized a narrow, delicate stalk of spacetime jutting out from the sphere and himself as a tiny moving mote within that stalk.

  “Was this where your husband died, Doctor?”

  “A similar extension; it doesn’t matter now. We’ve made some adjustments to the support machinery, so it shouldn’t happen again.” Her expression turned playful. “Why? You’re not nervous, are you?”

  “Not at all. I just wondered where the accident had happened.”

  “A place much like here. It doesn’t matter. My husband never much cared for these little jaunts, anyway. He much preferred to restrict himself to the main inclusion.”

  Fernando recalled the image of Austvro’s husband, his hands cupping an imaginary ball, like a mime, and something of the gesture tickled his interest.

  “Your husband’s line of work—acausal signaling, wasn’t it? The theoretical possibility of communication through time, using KR-L principles?”

  “A dead end, unfortunately. Even the KR-L had never made that work. But the Metagovernment was happy with the crumbs and morsels he sent back home.”

  “He must have thought there was something in it.”

  “My husband was a dreamer,” Austvro said. “His singular failing was his inability to distinguish between a practical possibility and an outlandish fantasy.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t mean to sound harsh. I loved him, of course. But he could never love the KR-L the way I do. For him these trips were always something to be endured, not relished.”

  He watched her eyes for a glimmer of a reaction. “And after his accident—did you have misgivings?”

  “For a nanosecond. Until I realized how important this work is. How we must succeed, for the sake of the homebrane.” She leaned forward in her seat and pointed down the tunnel. “There. We’re approaching the interface. That’s where the tunnel cladding becomes transparent. The photons reaching your eyes will have originated as photon-analogs in KR-L spacetime. You’ll see their structures, their great engines. The scale will astound you. The mere geometry of these artifacts is . . . deeply troubling, for some. If it disconcerts you, close your eyes.” Her hand remained hard on the tiller. “I’m used to it, but I’m exposed to these marvels on a daily basis.”

  “I’m curious,” Fernando said. “When you speak of the aliens, you sometimes sound like you’re saying three letters. At other times . . .”

  “Krull, yes,” she said, dismissively. “It’s shorthand, Inspector, nothing more. “Long before we knew it had ever been inhabited, we called this the KR-L brane. K and R are the Boltzmann and Rydber
g constants, from nuclear physics. In KR-L spacetime, these numbers differ from their values in the homebrane. L is a parameter that denotes the degree of variation.”

  “Then Krull is . . . a word of your own coining?”

  “If you insist upon calling it a word. Why? Has it appeared in these mysterious keyword clusters of yours?”

  “Something like it.”

  The pod swooped into the transparent part of the stalk. It was difficult to judge speed now. Fernando assumed there was some glass-like cladding between him and the inclusion boundary, and somewhere beyond that (he was fuzzy on the physics) the properties of spacetime took on alien attributes, profoundly incompatible with human biochemistry. But things could still live in that spacetime, provided they’d been born there in the first place. The KR-L had evolved into an entire supercivilization, and although they were gone now, their great machines remained. He could see them now, as huge and bewildering as Austvro had warned. They were slab-sided, round-edged, ribbed with flanges and cooling grids, surmounted by arcing spheres and flickering discharge cones. The structures glowed with a lilac radiance that seemed to shade into ultraviolet. They receded in all directions—more directions, in fact, than seemed reasonable, given the usual rules of perspective. Somewhere low in his throat he already felt the first queasy constriction of nausea.

  “To give you an idea of scale . . .” Austvro said, directing his unwilling attention toward one dizzying feature “. . . that structure there, if it were mapped into our spacetime and built from our iron atoms, would be larger than a Jupiter-class gas giant. And yet it is no more than a heat dissipation element, a safety valve on a much larger mechanism. That more distant machine is almost three light-hours across, and it too is only one element in a larger whole.”

  Fernando fought to keep his eyes open. “How far do these machines extend?”

  “At least as far as our instruments can reach. Hundreds of light-hours in all directions. The inclusion penetrates a complex of KR-L machinery larger than one of our solar systems. And yet even then there is no suggestion that the machinery ends. It may extend for weeks, months, of light-travel time. It may be larger than a galaxy.”