Forbidden Planets

by Peter Crowther (Ed)

  “Its function?” Seeing her hesitation, he added: “I have the necessary clearance, Doctor. It’s safe to tell me.”

  “Absolute control,” she said. “Utter dominance of matter and energy, not just in this brane but across the entire stack of realities. With this instrumentality, the KR-L could influence events in any brane they selected, in an instant. This machinery makes our graviton pulse equipment—the means by which you arrived here—look like the ham-fisted workings of a brain-damaged caveman.”

  Fernando was silent for a moment, as the pod sped on through the mind-wrenching scenery.

  “Yet the KR-L only ever occupied this one brane,” he said. “What use did they have for machinery capable of influencing events in another one?”

  “Only the KR-L can tell us that,” Austvro said. “Yet it seems likely to me that the machinery was constructed to deal with a threat to their peaceful occupation of this one brane.”

  “What could threaten such a culture, apart from their own bloody minded hubris?”

  “One must presume another culture of comparable sophistication. Their science must have detected the emergence of another civilization, in some remote brane, hundreds of thousands or even millions of realities away, that the KR-L considered hostile. They created this great machinery so that they might nip that threat in the bud, before it spilled across the stack toward them.”

  “Genocide?”

  “Not necessarily. Is it evil to spay a cat?”

  “Depends on the cat.”

  “My point is that the KR-L were not butchers. They sought their own self-preservation, but not at the ultimate expense of that other culture, whoever they might have been. Surgical intervention was all that was required.”

  Fernando looked around again. Some part of his mind was finally adjusting to the humbling dimensions of the machinery, for his nausea was abating. “Yet they’re all gone now. What happened?”

  “Again, one must presume. Perhaps some fatal hesitancy. They created this machinery but, at what should have been their moment of greatest triumph, flinched from using it.”

  “Or they did use it, and it came back and bit them.”

  “I hardly think so, Inspector.”

  “How many realities have we explored? Eighty, ninety thousand layers in either direction?”

  “Something like that,” she said, tolerantly.

  “How do we know what happens when you get much farther out? For that matter, what could the KR-L have known?”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “I’m just wondering . . . when I was a child I remember someone—I think it was my uncle— explaining to me that the stack was like the pages of an infinitely thick book, a book whose pages reached away to an infinite distance in either direction: reality after reality, as far as you could imagine, with the physics changing only slightly from page to page.”

  “As good an explanation as the layman will ever grasp.”

  “But the same person told me there was another theory of the stack, taken a bit less seriously but not completely discredited.”

  “Continue,” Austvro said.

  “The theory was that physics kept changing, but after a while it flattened out again and began to converge back to ours. And that by then you were actually coming back again, approaching our reality from the other direction. The stack, in other words, was circular.”

  “You’re quite right: That theory is taken a bit less seriously.”

  “But it isn’t discredited, is it?”

  “You can’t discredit an untestable hypothesis.”

  “But what if it is testable? What if the physics does begin to change less quickly?”

  “Local gradients tell you nothing. We’d have to map millions, tens of millions, of layers before we could begin. . . .”

  “But you already said the KR-L machinery might have had that kind of range. What if they were capable of looking all the way around the stack, but they didn’t realize it? What if the hostile culture they thought they were detecting was actually themselves? What if they turned on their machinery and it reached around through the closed loop of realities and nipped them in the bud?”

  “An amusing conceit, Inspector, but no more than that.”

  “But a deadly one, should it happen to be true.” Fernando stroked his chin tufts, purring quietly to himself as he thought things through. “The Office of Exploitation wishes to make use of the KR-L machinery to deal with another emerging threat.”

  “The Metagovernment pays my wages. It’s up to it what it does with the results I send home.”

  “But as was made clear to me when I arrived, you are a busy woman. Busy because you are approaching your own moment of greatest triumph. You understand enough about the KR-L machinery to make it work, don’t you? You can talk to it through the inclusion, ask it do your bidding.”

  Her expression gave nothing away. “The Metagovernment expects results.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But I wonder if the Metagovernment has been fully apprised of the risks. When they asked you what happened to the KR-L, did you mention the possibility that they might have brought about their own extinction?”

  “I confined my speculation to the realm of the reasonably likely, Inspector. I saw no reason to digress into fancy.”

  “Nonetheless, it might have been worth mentioning.”

  “I disagree. The Metagovernment is intending to take action against dissident branes within its own realm of colonization, not some barely detected culture a million layers away. Even if the topology of the layers was closed. . . .”

  “But even if the machinery was used, it was only used once,” Fernando said. “There’s no telling what other side effects might be involved.”

  “I’ve made many local tests. There’s no reason to expect any difficulties.”

  “I’m sure the KR-L scientists were equally confident before they switched it on.”

  Her tone of voice, never exactly confiding, turned chill. “I’ll remind you once again that you are on Scrutiny business, not working for Exploitation. My recollection is that you came to investigate leaks, not to question the basis of the entire project.”

  “I know, and you’re quite right. But I can’t help wondering whether the two things aren’t in some way connected.”

  “I don’t even accept that there are leaks, Inspector. You have some way to go before you can convince me they have anything to do with the KR-L machinery.”

  “I’m working on it,” Fernando said.

  They watched the great structures shift angle and perspective as the pod reached the apex of its journey and began to race back toward the inclusion. Fernando was glad when the shaft walls turned opaque and they were again speeding down a dark-walled tunnel, back into what he now thought of as the comparative safety and sanity of Pegasus Station. Until he had recorded and transmitted his memories down the stack, self-preservation still had a strong allure.

  “I hope that satisfied your curiosity,” Austvro said, when they had disembarked and returned to her lounge. “But as I warned you, the journey was of no value to your investigation.”

  “On the contrary,” he told her. “I’m certain it clarified a number of things. Might I have access to a communications console? I’d like to see if Scrutiny has come up with anything new since I arrived.”

  “I’ll have Caliph provide you with whatever you need. In the meantime, I must attend to work. Have Caliph summon me if there is anything of particular urgency.”

  “I’ll be sure to.”

  She left him alone in the lounge. He fingered the tigerskin rug, repulsed and fascinated in equal measure at the exact match with his own fur. While he waited for the aerial to arrive, he swept a paw over the coffee table, trying to conjure up the image of Austvro’s dead husband. But the little figure never appeared.

  It hardly mattered. His forensic memory was perfectly capable of replaying a recent observation, especially one that had seemed noteworthy at the time
. He called to mind the dead man, dwelling on the way he shaped an invisible form: not, Fernando now realized, a ball, but the ring-shaped stack of adjacent branes in the closed-loop of realities. “Three hundred and sixty degrees,” he’d been saying. Meranda Austvro’s dead husband had been describing the same theoretical metareality of which Fernando’s uncle had once spoken. Did that mean that the dead man believed that the KR-L had been scared by their own shadow, glimpsed at some immense distance into the reality stack? And had they forged this soul-crushingly huge machinery simply to strike at that perceived enemy, not realizing that the blow was doomed to fall on their own heads?

  Perhaps.

  He looked anew at the pattern of cards, untouched since Austvro had taken him from this room to view the KR-L machinery. The ring of cards, arranged for Clock Patience, echoed the closed-loop of realities in her husband’s imagination.

  Almost, he supposed, as if Austvro had been dropping him a hint.

  Fernando was just thinking that through when Caliph appeared, assigning one of his larger spheres into a communications console. Symbols and keypads brightened across the matte gray surface. Fernando tapped commands, claws clicking as he worked, and soon accessed his private data channel.

  There was, as he had half expected, a new message from Scrutiny. It concerned the more detailed analysis of the leaks that had been in motion when he left on his investigation.

  Fernando placed a direct call through.

  “Hello,” said Fernando’s down-brane counterpart, a man named Cook. “Good news, bad news, I’m afraid.”

  “Continue,” Fernando purred.

  “We’ve run a thorough analysis on the keyword clusters, as promised. The good news is that the clusters haven’t gone away. Their statistical significance is now even more certain. There’s clearly been a leak. That means your journey hasn’t been for nothing.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “The bad news is that the context is still giving us some serious headaches. Frankly, it’s disturbing. Whoever’s responsible for these leaks has gone to immense trouble to make them look as if they’ve always been part of our data heritage.”

  “I don’t understand. I mean, I understand, but I don’t get it. There must be a problem with your methods, your data auditing.”

  Cook looked pained. “That’s what we thought, but we’ve been over this time and again. There’s no mistake. Whoever planted these leaks has tampered with the data at a very deep level, sufficient to make it seem as if the clusters have been with us long before the KR-L brane was ever discovered.”

  Fernando lowered his voice. “Give me an example. Austvro mentioned a play, for instance.”

  “That would be one of the oldest clusters. The Shipwreck , by a paper-age playwright, around 001611. No overt references to the KR-L, but it does deal with a scholar on a haunted island, an island where a powerful witch used to live . . . which could be considered a metaphorical substitute for Austvro and Pegasus Station. Contains a Miranda, too, and . . .”

  “Was the playwright a real historical figure?”

  “Unlikely, unless he was almost absurdly prolific. There are several dozen other plays in the records, all of which we can presume were the work of the mole.”

  “Mm,” Fernando said, thoughtfully.

  “The mole screwed up in other ways too,” Cook added. “The plays are riddled with anachronisms—words and phrases that don’t appear earlier in the records.”

  “Sloppy,” Fernando commented, while wondering if there was something more to it than mere sloppiness. “Tell me about another cluster.”

  “Skip to 001956 and we have another piece of faked drama, something called a ‘film,’ some kind of recorded performance. Again, lots of giveaways: Ostrow for Austvro, Bellerophon—he’s the hero who rode the winged horse Pegasus—the KR-L themselves . . . real aliens, this time, even if they’re confined to a single planet, rather than an entire brane. There’s even—get this—a tiger.”

  “Really,” Fernando said dryly.

  “But here’s an oddity: Our enquiries turned up peripheral matter that seems to argue that the later piece was in some way based upon the earlier one.”

  “Almost as if the mole wished to lead our attention from one cluster to another.” Fernando scratched at his ear. “What’s the next cluster?”

  “Jump to 002713: an ice opera performed on Pluto Prime for one night only, before it closed due to exceptionally bad notices. Mentions ‘entities in the eighty-three-thousandth layer of reality.’ This from at least six thousand years before the existence of adjoining braneworlds was proven beyond doubt.”

  “Could be coincidence, but . . . well, go on.”

  “Jump to 009655, the premier of a Tauri-phase astrosculpture in the Wenlock star-forming region. Supplementary text refers to ‘the aesthetic of the doomed Crail’ and ‘Mirandine and Kalebin.’ ”

  “There are other clusters, right up to the near present?”

  “All the way up the line. Random time-spacing: We’ve looked for patterns there, and haven’t found any. It must mean something to the mole, of course. . . .”

  “If there is a mole,” Fernando said.

  “Of course there’s a mole. What other explanation could there be?”

  “That’s what I’m wondering.”

  Fernando closed the connection, then sat in silent contemplation, shuffling mental permutations. When he felt that he had examined the matter from every conceivable angle—and yet still arrived at the same unsettling conclusion—he had Caliph summon Doctor Austvro once more.

  “Really, Inspector,” she said, as she came back into the lounge. “I’ve barely had time . . .”

  “Sit down, Doctor.”

  Something in the force of his words must have reached her. Doctor Austvro sank into the settee, her hands tucked into the silvery folds of her dress.

  “Is there a problem? I specifically asked . . .”

  “You’re under arrest for the murder of your husband, Edvardo Austvro.”

  Her face turned furious. “Don’t be absurd. My husband’s death was an accident: a horrid, gruesome mistake, but no more than that.”

  “That’s what you wished us all to think. But you killed him, didn’t you? You arranged for the collapse of the inclusion, knowing that he would be caught in KR-L spacetime.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “Your husband understood what had happened to the KR-L: how their machinery had reached around the stack, through three hundred and sixty degrees, and wiped them out of existence, leaving only their remains. He knew exactly how dangerous it would be to reactivate the machinery; how it could never become a tool for the Metagovernment. You said it yourself, Meranda: He feared the machinery. That’s because he knew what it had done, what it was still capable of doing.”

  “I would never have killed him,” she said, her tone flatly insistent.

  “Not until he opposed you directly, not until he became the only obstacle between you and your greatest triumph. Then he had to go.”

  “I’ve heard enough.” She turned her angry face toward the aerial. “Caliph, escort the Inspector to the dissolution chamber. He’s in clear violation of the terms under which I agreed to this investigation.”

  “On the contrary,” Fernando said. “My inquiry is still of central importance.”

  She sneered. “Your ridiculous obsession with leaks? I monitored your recent conversation with the homebrane, Inspector. The leaks are what I’ve always maintained: statistical noise, meaningless coincidences. The mere fact that they appear in sources that are incontrovertibly old . . . what further evidence do you need, that the leaks are nothing of the sort?”

  “You’re right,” Fernando said, allowing himself a heavy sigh. “They aren’t leaks. In that sense I was mistaken.”

  “In which case admit that your mission here was no more than a wild goose chase and that your accusations concerning my husband amount to no more than a desperate attempt to salvage some . .
.”

  “They aren’t leaks,” Fernando continued, as if Austvro had not spoken. “They’re warnings, sent from our own future.”

  She blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s the only explanation. The leaks appear in context sources that appear totally authentic . . . because they are.”

  “Madness.”

  “I don’t think so. It all fits together quite nicely. Your husband was investigating acausal signaling: the means to send messages back in time. You dismissed his work, but what if there was something in it after all? What if a proper understanding of the KR-L technology allowed a future version of the Metagovernment to send a warning to itself in the past?”

  “What kind of warning, Inspector?” she asked, still sounding appalled.

  “I’m guessing here, but it might have something to do with the machinery itself. You’re about to reactivate the very tools that destroyed the KR-L. Perhaps the point of the warning is to stop that ever happening. Some dreadful, unforeseen consequence of turning the machinery against the dissident branes . . . not the extinction of humanity, obviously, or there wouldn’t be anyone left alive to send the warning. But something nearly as bad. Something so awful that it must be edited out of history, at all costs.”

  “You should listen to yourself, Inspector. Then ask yourself whether you came out of the quickening room with all your faculties intact.”

  He smiled. “Then you have doubts.”

  “Concerning your sanity, yes. This idea of a message being sent back in time . . . it might have some microscopic degree of credibility if your precious leaks weren’t so hopelessly cryptic. Who sends a message and then scrambles the facts?”

  “Someone in a hurry, I suppose. Or someone with an imperfect technique.”

  “I’m sure that means something to you.”

  “I’m just wondering: What if there wasn’t time to get it right? What if the sending of the message was a one-shot attempt, something that had to be attempted even though the method was still not fully understood?”