The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “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-grey 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 scepticism, 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 set-up 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 enquiries 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-grey 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 titbits 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 – in so far 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 him 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 signalling, 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-analogues 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 Rydberg 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 space-time, 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 towards 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.”

  “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 hamfisted workings of a braindamaged 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 towards 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: 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 further 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 appraised 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 th
at 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 towards 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 comparable 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 have 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 tiger skin 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 meta-reality 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?