Ragnarok 03 - Resonance

by John Meaney

  Fenrisulfr shook his head, for it seemed to him that such vessels were unnecessary, though he had no idea how he could know such a thing. Kenna forestalled his question by adding:

  —For the armies we raise there. For the billions who will fight against the darkness.

  Such numbers could not be imagined.

  —Then you do not need me, War Queen.

  —Every individual can help, and you are a leader.

  Even without air, it was possible to laugh, or something like it. Fenrisulfr shook his head and spread his crystal arms.

  —Some leader. Is there room for butchers in this realm of yours?

  Again Kenna surprised him.

  —I think perhaps there might be. I wish it were not so.

  Fenrisulfr expanded his chest, then compressed it, though there was nothing to exhale in this strange place.

  —I name the nine realms on the three levels, War Queen. They are first, Ásgarth, Alfheim and Vanaheim. Then Mithgarth hangs there in front of us, level with Utgarth, Jötunheim, Svartalfheim and Nithavellir. And finally, below or beyond, lies cold Niflheim, where Hel rules over the dead who will wage war on us, come Ragnarökkr.

  Kenna answered him this way.

  —All is as you say, brave Ulfr. Our fellow Council members use different words, and think of realms differently, as you suggest. Mithgarth, the Middle World, stands for more than just that disc where men and women first lived. The five middle realms are those formed of ‘baryonic matter’, but these are just words.

  She seemed so implacably sure of herself.

  —You see the same realms, then, War Queen? The same as poets and sorcerers and volvas from my time, just with different names?

  —Indeed so.

  —Then I pass onto you the words of a dead poet. People drop Múspellheim from their schemes.

  Kenna’s transparent eyes widened, at the mention of a realm which was known and yet did not fit into the cosmic scheme.

  —I don’t . . . know how to think about that.

  —And it needs a bridge that is not Bifröst.

  She shook her head, no longer looking certain.

  —That I understand. The darkness needs its own Trembling Way, along which it will advance, and destroy us if we do not fight.

  —Then I have helped you, as you asked.

  Kenna reached out, starlight twinkling through her.

  —Stay with . . .

  But the dream was over, the spirit world fading into nothingness as profound and empty as Ginnungagap, the Great Void, the Abyss of Emptiness.

  Nothing.

  THIRTY-TWO

  NULAPEIRON, 2657-2713 AD

  From her distributed surveillance motes throughout Palace Avernon, Kenna watched most of the preparations, while her own hidden programme continued slowly: that work was not to be rushed. The Pilot, Caleb deVries, used a lev-platform several times to return to his ship on the surface, via a giant vertical shaft on the edge of the demesne. The first time, he had taken the crystal spearhead stolen from Avernon’s collection. Had Kenna wanted to blackmail deVries, the opportunity was gone, at least without betraying the undercover Pilot, Linda Gunnarsson, living the life of an epsilon-class servitrix in the lowest level of the Palace.

  From a balcony protected by membrane, as well as the sharpest members of his personal guard, Lord Avernon watched a sequence of nine master-drones, each ten metres long, float one by one into the centre of the shaft, and then begin a slow vertical ascent to the surface a hundred metres above, there to gently glide into the cargo hold of deVries’s ship.

  Kenna noted that Avernon had not proposed going into space himself. He was content for deVries, or rather the drones that deVries was due to deploy, to carry out the experiments, while he, Avernon, would wait to collect, collate and analyse the subsequent results. Realtime images and readings would be tightbeamed down to a receiver near the shaft opening on the planet’s surface. The chances of a neighbouring Lord eavesdropping on the signals were minimal; to involve oneself in tasks up above, even when others did the hard work, was scarcely thinkable, a blindspot in thinking that in the lower strata was taken to the extreme. Many were inhibited against – not to mention prohibited from – ascending to the next stratum. Such concepts as ground and sky were as little thought of as, say, a mythical hell, and exactly as frightening to someone who seriously imagined it.

  Had it not been for the theoretical work performed by Avernon’s grandfather, the current Lord would scarcely have thought of this. But the earlier results were intriguing, with the kaon-antikaon decay rates indicating the potential for reversing time’s arrow.

  Finally, deVries flew.

  Kenna’s airborne surveillance motes showed her: from barely a metre above the surface, deVries’s bronze ship disappeared in a white flash that Kenna knew to be as risky as it was flamboyant. There was no realtime signal relaying the ship’s reappearance in distant orbit; neither the deployment of the first master-drone, nor the subsequent hops as it deployed the other eight, were tightcast to the ground. It was only when the master-drones themselves completed initialisation procedures that the signals began.

  First, readings established that each drone was in clear space, with no hindrances to letting loose the cargo, comprising thousands of fist-sized mini-drones.

  The last of the master-drones also sent holovideo footage of deVries’s vessel, until it transited out of realspace, leaving nothing to see. If the experimental programme worked, any or all of the master-drones would commence a slow descent back to the shaft on Nulapeiron’s surface that led down to Demesne Avernon, where the ruling Lord and his logosophical research team would commence work on whatever came back.

  Soon clouds of mini-drones were spraying out into space.

  I wonder what they’ll find.

  Kenna already possessed dangerous knowledge of the future, assuming that everything she had learned as Rhianna Chiang from placing Roger Blackstone into deepest trance so long ago was true, and not a delusion formed during her reconstruction and resurrection as a static cyborg formed of distributed components.

  A few mini-drones performed initial checks on kaon-antikaon decay rates, finding them skewed further from previous readings by 0.06 per cent. There were no other unusual phenomena. This was a research programme whose payoff might come in days (as the current Lord Avernon hoped) or decades or never.

  While deep inside the Palace walls, where no surveillance system beyond Kenna’s own could see, her own programme of experiments was well under way, although she had to be careful because of one severely limited resource.

  The splinter of crystal, removed from the spearhead now in mu-space, was so very, very small. She had to plan hard and ration carefully at every stage: that was obvious from the start.

  But the energy spectrum . . .

  Whatever Kenna was, she was no longer a Pilot, no longer able to perceive mu-space or to work directly with Labyrinthine technologies; but she remembered things, and the results of her every analysis implied a strange construction pathway – transitions to impossible minima – to produce that splinter of crystal taken originally from the spearhead. It did not match any physical process in mu-space that she could remember or imagine.

  Which was strange, because the crystal sure as hell did not originate in realspace either.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Practicality overrode theory every time.

  I only have to work the stuff.

  In the event, it took fifty-one more years to achieve a breakthrough.

  To the continuing sequence of Lords Avernon, Kenna made herself indispensable, because she could not count on them all ignoring her like Lord Dalgen Avernon. Ironically, he, short-sighted and machiavellian, had commissioned one of the most far-sighted experiments to be carried out by Nulapeiron’s logosophers. But he lost interest during the years that followed, as the tiny anomalous results produced zero payoff.

  People got on with the march of their lives, and in due course d
ied, while Kenna remained immobile, her pseudo-face embedded in the wall of a laboratory chamber deep inside Palace Avernon. Her larger components were splayed across that same wall, while many more components, far smaller, were distributed throughout the Palace.

  Lord Alvix, who had dropped the Avernon suffix though it remained the legal name of his line, was the fifth Lord chronologically, and the nearest so far to recreating the intellectual daring and humour of the old Duke.

  But the demesne he had inherited was not financially stable, and so he was forced consciously to use his brilliance and expertise in areas he would rather have avoided – or so Kenna read the situation, on the basis of both passive observation and their personal chats, when Alvix felt there was no one he could talk to besides his immobile cyborg adviser.

  What Kenna had kept to herself for decades was the truth about Dalgen Avernon’s death, for the causes were not natural, as everyone in the demesne had believed: not unless you counted an assassin’s work paid for by Lord Vikal, a scheming Lord Minor from Realm Grisengahl, as a natural occurrence.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Lord Alvix now. ‘Kenna, will you look at this?’

  He was in the centre of the lab chamber, surrounded by a plethora of holovolumes: sheaves of numbers; intricate, shifting phase spaces rendered in a thousand hues where every nuance of colour held meaning; and many-dimensioned emergenic maps, which tracked the generation of properties emergent from complex substrates, always checking and attempting to predict the emergence of order from chaos.

  Alvix’s self-mending tunic had failed to do so: his faded once-black-now-grey garment looked as if a rat had been chewing at the sleeves. In public he knew how to dress with propriety, but when he withdrew himself from matters political, he became the distracted scholar he was meant to be.

  ‘Not that old thing,’ said Kenna.

  Lord Alvix laughed.

  ‘My grandfather’s great disappointment,’ he said. ‘But look at these gamma-rays.’

  ‘Holy shit.’ Kenna absorbed the readings, allowing herself to feel surprised. ‘You’ve found a second temporal phenomenon.’

  Was this the beginning of a successful logosophical attempt to read the future? It was over a century ago that Max Gould, dear Uncle Max, director of Labyrinth’s intelligence service, had despatched her here – or rather, despatched Rhianna Chiang – to investigate the rumour.

  ‘I always thought,’ Kenna added, ‘that only the kaon-antikaon thing was sensitive to the direction of time. But this one was always there, waiting to be seen.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alvix. ‘Except that I never thought I would see it.’

  He dimmed the holovolumes, except for one that he shifted to the centre, and caused to magnify and brighten. Inside, successive layers of spherical waves, with a common centre, shrank inwards to that central point and were absorbed.

  Over and over, wavefronts diminished to nothing.

  In terms of subatomic process, the kaon reaction stands alone; but there is one other phenomenon not seen in nature, because it would be the equivalent of a smashed egg reforming. Emissions of radiation outwards from a point are common; what is rarely seen is the reverse: spherical wave-forms shrinking inwards – except that was what the data was showing Alvix now.

  ‘I’m going to call them spinpoints,’ he said. ‘Singularities being born. They’re appearing in the regions around Nulapeiron where the kaon-antikaon decay was most strongly affected before. Just look how they behave.’ He could not stop smiling. ‘Time to contact l’Academia. This is going to cause such a stir.’

  ‘Or you could call on your friends’ – Kenna meant his allies – ‘to fund a private research effort.’

  Alvix paused, then: ‘Practicalities. That’s why I like you hanging around, Kenna. Unless you’ve reconsidered my offer.’

  ‘Of a drone body? I thank you again, my Lord,’ she answered. ‘And decline once more, with gratitude.’

  ‘We’re alone. You don’t need the polite rigmarole.’ He grinned. ‘And point taken. You’ll help me work through the details?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ she said.

  But either because of coincidence or the subtle psychological effects of Alvix’s breakthrough – the realisation that decades-long effort could provide sudden insight – Kenna’s attention would become distracted in a matter of days, as she broke through her own private research barrier. In her case, there was no one at all with whom to share the news.

  A microscopic fragment of crystal suddenly wriggled under gamma-ray bombardment.

  The manner in which that tiny sample had become not just liquid – though highly viscous – but actually motile . . . that might not have seemed like much, any more than spherical absorption rather than emission of radiation might be radically significant.

  It might take decades more, even a century, to grow enough of the crystal to work with, and then to learn the ins and outs of engineering with the stuff; but it was a start.

  Roger Blackstone’s dreams might come true.

  Such a strange reason for the feeling of triumph that spread throughout Kenna’s dispersed, distributed self.

  Five years later, the prototype Oraculum was ready, and a more hardened-looking Lord Alvix was getting ready to receive his noble visitors, the Lords and Ladies who had sunk finances into his project and were intrigued at the notion they might get a return sooner than expected.

  Whether that was true, Kenna was less sure than Alvix. Lately the practicalities she had been dealing with had been those of engineering, helping develop new manipulation techniques that might some day help her directly, but for now were key to the manipulation of harvested spinpoints.

  Those spinpoints were gathered by mini-drones in far orbit, and brought down to Nulapeiron by one of the master-drones that deVries had deployed fifty-six years ago.

  Each spinpoint was a tiny seed, wrapped in magnetic fields and glowing in visible wavelengths once stabilised, and in the more energetic end of the spectrum before capture. A hall had been refashioned to hold them, with massive coils embedded in its walls, located close to the vertical shaft down which the master-drone descended, bearing its strange cargo.

  In that hall, magnetic fields guided spinpoints into new carry-drones fashioned for the purpose, the lower surface of their carapaces formed of flowskin, so that they could move snail-like along the Palace corridors, bearing their magnetically trapped spinpoints, one per carry-drone.

  Perhaps if it were not for the state in which Kenna herself existed, she would have felt more ethical concern at the treatment of the young people whom Alvix’s research team were hoping to turn into Oracles. The notion of perceiving the future, as described in primitive folklore, was ill-defined, akin to seeing distant events without technological intervention. But practical precognition was ‘simply’ one of future memory: of ‘remembering’ thoughts and perceptions from one’s own future mind.

  ‘It’s cosmology and the subatomic realm,’ Alvix had said at the start of the project, ‘going hand in hand yet again. That resonance between the cosmically large and attoscopically small has been fascinating scientists and now logosophers for hundreds of years.’

  When Alvix had first sought investors, seven of the currently visiting Lords and Ladies had come to Palace Avernon, and attended a presentation in the Great Hall. There Alvix had projected a huge holo, of a globe filled with filaments and membranes of light surrounding empty spaces that looked like biological cells.

  Each cell interior was in fact a cosmic void, and the tiniest points of light constituting those filaments and membranes represented galactic superclusters; because this was the entire realspace universe.

  And of course, he caused it to shrink back to the tiny point that was the Big Bang, before expanding it to the fill the hall once more.

  ‘When I shrank the cosmos, as it were’ – Alvix had smiled at his audience – ‘was I predicting a Big Crunch, or showing expansion from the Big Bang in reverse?’

  His poin
t was that a universe as viewed from outside might be seen to shrink, but the cosmological arrow of time seemed predicated on the future always being the direction in which the universe was bigger. It indicated that timeflow might flip into reverse, should a Crunch occur.

  And that meant you could never know whether you were in a universe that an outsider would say was expanding or collapsing.

  ‘Whether the whole of realspace will ever contract,’ he told them, ‘is irrelevant. We aim to create tiny regions of spacetime that shrink inwards to produce negentropic timeflow, and by stabilising them within normal reality, we have conduits via which to “remember” the future.’

  Those regions, naturally enough, would need to be inside a human brain: a human whose normal brain could interact with the world, while selected neural cliques and groups experienced timeflow emanating from the future, allowing memories of future perceptions to be remembered in the present.

  All you needed was a temporary abeyance of humanist ethics.

  And children on whose brains you could operate.

  *

  Now, five years later, it boiled down to this: thirteen members of the nobility standing on an internal balcony halfway up the wall of a lab chamber, twenty or so research assistants moving around, and eight drooling youngsters: the proto-Oracles.

  These were aged between seven and seventeen standard years, some with left and right eyes that moved independently, all largely confined to couches from which they observed ceaseless holo footage. Three of them could speak with some coherence.

  ‘Steam. Pudding. Good to . . .day . . .’ came from a ten-year-old girl.

  ‘Timeline is thirteen days in the future.’ An assistant checked displays. ‘Location is right here.’

  A sarcastic laugh sounded from the rear of the visiting group. At the forefront, Lord Welkin, oldest of the investors, was frowning. ‘With respect, sir,’ he told Lord Alvix, ‘this is pitiful. The paltriness of your servitors’ menu is hardly a worthy—’

  But Alvix stopped the complaint confidently.