The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  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 grey 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 which 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 83,000th layer of reality’. This from at least 6,000 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 360 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 towards 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 enquiry 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 signalling: 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 M
etagovernment 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?”

  “That still doesn’t explain why the keywords would crop up in . . . a play, of all things.”

  “Perhaps it does, though. Especially if the acausal signalling involves the transmission of patterns directly into the human mind, across time, in a scattergun fashion. The playwright . . .”

  “What about him?” she asked, with a knowingness that reminded him she had listened in on his conversation with Cook.

  “The man lived and died before the discovery of quantum mechanics, let alone braneworlds. Even if the warning arrived fully-formed and coherent in his mind, he could only have interpreted it according to his existing mental framework. It’s no wonder things got mixed up, confused. His conceptual vocabulary didn’t extend to vanished alien cultures in adjacent reality stacks. It did extend to islands, dead witches, ghosts.”

  “Ridiculous. Next you’ll be telling me that the other clusters . . .”

  “Exactly so. The dramatized recording – the ‘film’ – was made a few centuries later. The creators did the best they could with their limited understanding of the universe. They knew of space travel, other worlds. Closer to the truth than the playwright, but still limited by the mental prison of their contemporary world-view. The same goes for all the other clusters, I’m willing to bet.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Austvro said. “The future Metagovernment resurrects ancient KR-L time-signalling machinery, technology that it barely understands. It attempts to send a message back in time, but it ends up spraying it through history, back to the time of a man who probably thought the Sun ran on coal.”

  “Maybe even earlier,” Fernando said. “There’s nothing to say there aren’t other clusters, lurking in the statistical noise . . .”

  Austvro cut him off. “And yet despite this limited understanding of the machinery, the – as you said – scattershot approach – they still managed to score direct hits into the heads of playwrights, dramatists, sculptors . . .” She shook her head pityingly.

  “Not necessarily,” Fernando said. “We only know that these people became what they were in our timeline. It might have been the warning itself that set these individuals on their artistic courses . . . planting a seed, a vaguely-felt anxiety, that they had no choice but to exorcise through creative expression, be it a play, a film, or an ice-opera on Pluto Prime.”

  “I’ll give you credit, Inspector: you really know how to take an argument beyond its logical limit. You’re actually suggesting that if the signalling hadn’t taken place, none of these works of art would ever have existed?”

  He shrugged. “If you admit the possibility of time messages . . .”

  “I don’t. Not at all.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’d hoped to convince you – I thought it might make your arrest an easier matter for both of us – but it’s really not necessary. You understand now, though, why I must put an end to your research. Scrutiny and Exploitation can decide for themselves whether there’s any truth in my theory.”

  “And if they don’t think there is – then I’ll be allowed to resume my studies?”

  “There’s still the small matter of your murder charge, Meranda.”

  She looked sad. “I’d hoped you might have forgotten.”

  “It’s not my job to forget.”

  “How did you guess?”

  “I didn’t guess,” he said. “You led me to it. More than that: I think some part of you – some hidden, subconscious part – actually wanted me to learn the truth. If not, that was a very unfortunate choice of card game, Meranda.”

  “You’re saying I wanted you to arrest me?”

  “I can’t believe that you ever hated your husband enough to kill him. You just hated the way he opposed your research. For that reason he had to go, but I doubt that there’s been a moment since when what you did hasn’t been eating you from inside.”

  “You’re right,” she said, as if arriving at a firm decision. “I didn’t hate him. But he still had to go. And so do you.”

  In a flash her hand had emerged from the silvery folds of her dress, clutching the sleek black form of a weapon. Fernando recognized it as a simple blaster: not the most sophisticated weapon in existence, but more than capable of inflicting mortal harm.

  “Please, Doctor. Put that thing away, before you do one of us an injury.”

  She stood, the weapon wavering in her hand, but never losing its lock on him.

  “Caliph,” she said. “Escort the Inspector to the dissolution chamber. He’s leaving us.”

  “You’re making a mistake, Meranda.”

  “The mistake would be in allowing the Metagovernment to close me down, when I’m so close to success. Caliph!”

  “I cannot escort the Inspector, unless the Inspector wishes to be escorted,” the aerial informed her.

  “I gave you an order!”

  “He is an agent of the Office of Scrutiny. My programming does not permit . . .”

  “Walk with me, please,” Fernando said. “Put the gun away and we’ll say no more about it. You’re in enough trouble as it is.”

  “I’m not going with you.”

  “You’ll receive a fair trial. With the right argument, you may even be able to claim your husband’s death as manslaughter. Perhaps you didn’t mean to kill him, just to strand him . . .”

  “It’s not the trial,” she snarled. “It’s the thought of stepping into that thing . . . when I came here I never intended to leave. I won’t go with you.”

  “You must.”

  He took a step towards her, knowing even as he did it that the move was unwise. He watched her finger tense on the blaster’s trigger, and for an instant he thought he might cross the space to her before the weapon discharged. Few people had the nerve to hold a gun against an agent of Scrutiny; even fewer had the nerve to fire.

  But Meranda Austvro was one of those few. The muzzle spat rapid bolts of self-confined plasma, and he watched in slow-motion horror as three of the bolts slammed into his right arm, below the elbow, and took his hand and forearm away in an agonizing orange fire, like a chalk drawing smeared in the rain. The pain hit him like a hammer, and despite his training he felt the full force of it before mental barriers slammed down in rapid succession, blocking the worst. He could smell his own charred fur.

  “An error, Doctor Austvro,” he grunted, forcing the words out.

  “Don’t take another step, Inspector.”

  “I’m afraid I must.”

  “I’ll kill you.” The weapon was now aimed directly at his chest. If her earlier shot had been wide, there would be no error now. />
  He took another step. He watched her finger tense again, and readied himself for the annihilating fire.

  But the weapon dropped from her hand. One of Caliph’s smaller spheres had dashed it from her grip. Austvro clutched her hand with the other, massaging the fingers. Her face showed stunned incomprehension. “You betrayed me,” she said to the aerial.

  “You injured an agent of Scrutiny. You were about to inflict further harm. I could not allow that to happen.” Then one of the larger spheres swerved into Fernando’s line of sight. “Do you require medical assistance?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m about done with this body anyway.”

  “Very well.”

  “Will you help me to escort Doctor Austvro to the dissolution chamber?”

  “If you order it.”

  “Help me, in that case.”

  Doctor Austvro tried to resist, but between them Fernando and Caliph quickly had the better of her. Fernando kicked the weapon out of harm’s way, then pulled Austvro against his chest with his left arm, pinning her there. She struggled to escape, but her strength was nothing against his, even allowing for the shock of losing his right arm.

  Caliph propelled them to the dissolution chamber. Austvro fought all the way, but with steadily draining will. Only at the last moment, when she saw the grey hood of the memory recorder, next to the recessed alcove of the dissolution field, did she summon some last reserve of resistance. But her efforts counted for nothing. Fernando and the robot placed her into the recorder, closing the heavy metal restraining buckles across her body. The hood lowered itself, ready to capture a final neural image; a snapshot of her mind that would be encoded into a graviton pulse and relayed back to the homebrane.