Ragnarok 03 - Resonance

by John Meaney

  Conscious of her face on that laboratory wall, she closed her eyes for the final time, and felt her sensations withdraw as she triggered the process now.

  System.getController( ).getTransform(Project.Metamorph).initialize( )

  Every part of her seemed to shudder, though she had no proprioceptive or autokinetic senses in her current form, the distributed body she was about to leave.

  And she wanted to scream but her output channels were already disconnected; and then it began.

  Transfer.

  Afterwards, it was like remembering dying – again – with every separate thread and shard of cognition accompanied by howling, burning pain. Cascades of processes split apart, rushed headlong to their new receptacles, and came crashing together in a torrent of new computation, far closer to death than birth because a baby during expulsion from the womb is yet to have a mind, while she destroyed – had to destroy – every part of her complex, long-lived self in order to survive.

  The ceiling was above/before her when she opened her eyes.

  I will have to move.

  This was supposed to have been years in duration, the process of learning to move once more, the gradual sharing of thoughts between her Palace embedded self and this new – glorious! – form. But her old self was gone.

  Really move, because they can kill me now.

  She looked like nothing anyone would recognise. Any Palace guard or member of the attacking forces would trigger their weapons at the sight of her, and at this stage she was not even sure that she could walk, let alone run or fight.

  The transformation, performed this way instead of to plan, had left her vulnerable. A baby without care will not survive; but she had to survive, because she was needed, and if she could not get through one armed attack, what use would she be in the great confrontation to come?

  She wondered if Alvix was calling her, if he had time to be shocked or feel regret at her old self’s death, or whether he was wrapped up in thoughts of his own and Lady Suzanne’s survival. That probably depended on the attack force’s orders: if their objective was to steal the contents of the Oraculum and get away, that would bode better than if they intended to secure the Palace while an occupation force made its way here, and then took over.

  Strange sensations washed through her as she sat up – for the first time in over a century – and looked down at her new body. Everything was immediate and odd and beautiful in its intensity, and the danger lay in her growing enraptured at her own existence and failing to take action right now because this was mortal danger unless she got her act together and actually bloody moved.

  Fibres withdrew into her, disconnecting her from the old, dead Kenna system, and then she did something simple, ordinary and yet entirely miraculous: she swung her legs to one side of the couch, leant forward . . .

  Amazing.

  . . . and stood.

  On actual feet.

  With legs.

  A body.

  Arms and hands . . .

  Focus.

  Everything so wonderful.

  Focus now.

  She swayed, balance tipping. Corrected herself.

  Got it.

  Took a step.

  A second step.

  Definitely got it now.

  Third step, and it was almost automatic, in time with a distant bang followed by screams.

  Time to really move.

  She was most of the way to one of her primary escape routes, feeling guilty yet desperate because of her selfish focus on survival of self – and hang the rest – when she saw in her mind’s eye a helpless, addled girl-woman, the victim of worldly ambition more than logosophical exploration, and then there was a feeling of relief that it was necessary to go back and confront the danger. There are times when you want to do something and are scared to, have found excuses to avoid it; and then some factor forces you to do it anyway, and all you can feel is thankful that you’ve been forced to do the right thing, to confront the fear: that was how Kenna felt now.

  Mandia had foreseen liquid crystal moving, but to Kenna’s knowledge the poor girl had never had an opportunity to see such a thing; yet every prediction was a verbal description of something she was to see in the future. For her prediction to be true, she must survive the armed assault in order to see . . . well, Kenna as she was now. So for all her vulnerability in her stumbling new body, Kenna could not abandon Mandia, not if there was a risk of Mandia’s dying.

  The alternative was . . . what? Death by paradox? The self-immolation of a closed time like curve of events? Of people that had existed and events that had occurred but would turn out never to have been?

  Once upon a time I was a fighter.

  Never mind her notions of becoming a general, a chief of staff, a war leader in ages to come: this was immediate, raw, physical danger and she had to face it or the rest was nonsense. She gestured to the nearest wall, and waited for the Palace to recognise the codes she broadcast by microwave from her hand. It took a full half-second for the Palace to make the adjustment to her new form; then the wall liquefied and melted open, revealing one of the hidden servitor tunnels (it would not do for the nobility to be distracted by the sight of menial workers engaged on mundane tasks) and stepped inside.

  Leaning forward slightly, she forced herself into a shuffling jog, a shamble compared to her mental image of running freely, but as she followed the tunnel her gait became smoother, then smoother again, through an incremental sequence of improvements; and by the time she drew near to the Oraculum, she was running faster than any but the fittest of endurance athletes.

  Armed attackers were entering the tunnel up ahead, but she gestured and the quickstone wall slammed down on them, burying them. Then she was running past and a new opening was growing in front of her, and when she leapt through she was in the Oraculum, where the proto-Oracles were thrashing on their couches – only Mandia was upright, struggling to stand – and the staff were gone, either fled or helping the fighters outside: graser fire caused the air to crackle in the surrounding corridors.

  Kenna grabbed Mandia.

  The others were helpless, but Kenna had to accept her current limitations, and save the one she could. She hauled Mandia into another, newly opened servitor tunnel, commanded the entrance to flow shut, and pulled Mandia into a staggering run. When they had made enough distance horizontally, Kenna stopped, holding Mandia upright – the girl was wheezing, wet with sweat and trembling – and commanded the floor to melt.

  At this point the Palace was five levels deep, but where they stood was above internal walls, five metres thick or more, in the lower levels. They sank downwards – in a bubble of air for Mandia’s sake – until they were all the way through and below the Palace, coming into a corridor in the Secundum Stratum.

  By chance it was deserted for the moment: a polished marble-like corridor with clean lines, not too different from the style of the Primum Stratum where the Palace was situated, except that here the surroundings were solid, not quickstone, with little in the way of inbuilt systems.

  I’ll need disguise.

  So much for planning in advance. Leaving Mandia slumped against the wall, Kenna jogged along the corridor, knowing she had to do something fast: she was a woman formed entirely of crystal and there was no way she could blend in while looking like this.

  Here.

  It was a store fronted by vitreous membrane that was currently hard and opaque, not open for business, and it came to Kenna that this must be one of those areas where everything was brightly lit all the time, and people chose sleep-wake cycles to suit themselves individually, unlike the communal-consent approach which was the most common alternative.

  The membrane liquefied and Kenna stepped through, leaving it softened because she was going to exit through it very shortly. There were clothing racks – the store was dark but she could see well enough – and she found leggings, pulled them on, then smart-boots that wrapped around her feet and calves, tightening themselves in place. Th
en a dark tunic with long sleeves, and when she pulled it on, the sleeves lengthened to cover her transparent hands all the way to the fingertips, and morphed to form integral gloves. Finally a full-length hooded cloak.

  A small payment pad rested on a shelf, requesting recompense for the garments that the customer was purchasing. Kenna had no time to decipher its protocols – there had been nothing like this in the Palace – so she reached out and crushed it into powder instead.

  No alarms followed.

  Good enough.

  When she went back out, there was still no one in sight, but voices drifted from around a long curve in the corridor: easy conversation, a light laugh, and total ignorance of the violence taking place in the Primum Stratum above. Kenna slipped away in the opposite direction, pulling her hood low, and returned to Mandia, who was now sitting on the floor, back against the wall, staring blankly.

  Once more Kenna pulled Mandia upright, and supported her as they walked, coming out into a larger thoroughfare where people did not quite stare at them – this was a polite place – as they headed for a large, platinum-inlaid disc on the floor. Ruby lights winked at their approach, and Kenna pressed Mandia’s palm against a horizontal pad atop a waist-high stalk, a metre from the disc – which began to rotate and separate into a complex affair of blade-like segments that clacked and clattered, then dropped to form a helical staircase. The rotation stopped as the treads snapped into place.

  Kenna kept one arm around Mandia’s waist as they descended. Once down and clear of the treads, the whole assemblage reversed procedure, pulling upwards and turning as the disc reformed and locked into place – except that Kenna and Mandia were now below it: a circle on the ceiling of the Tertium Stratum, and one that would not grant access without specific authorisation.

  Descent was straightforward; only upward movement required authorisation.

  Fifteen more descents, and they were in a region of raw tunnels lit – and given habitable atmosphere – by ceiling fluorofungus, where dwelling-tunnels featured rows of hollowed-out al-coves that served as homes, and dumb-fabric hangings served as doors and interior walls, and the people were on the whole kind to each other, because this was a community strong in the face of poverty, where working together meant survival.

  It was a good place to find a hospice, run by older folk with steady eyes and plain speech, who would not turn away the young girl-woman left at their door by a silent, hooded figure – her clothes far too rich for this stratum – who slipped away without greeting anyone. They helped Mandia inside with kindness.

  Kenna moved on.

  Other people were beginning to follow her, made suspicious by her clothing and lack of speech, so when the tunnel curved and her pursuers were out of sight, she broke into a run, moving fast and easily now, until she came to a high chamber formed of natural, raw rock in which a lava pool glowed and bubbled.

  Dead end.

  I will not fight them.

  Let them wonder at her disappearance. She stared at the lava pool.

  This will be fine.

  With a neat motion, she dived into the molten lava and swam downwards through the hot, viscous liquid rock, not caring as her garments burnt away and the heat grew stronger, because this was freedom and wonderful. Something brushed against her – she felt angular flukes – and knew it for the one of the little studied native forms that lived inside the magma, and drew inspiration from the ease with which it moved here.

  This world will be good enough.

  Give it a millennium or two, she thought as she swam, and then she would move on. There was no hurry.

  It would take time to become the person she needed to be.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  EARTH, 1972 AD

  Alone in her flat, Gavriela lay one slightly arthritic hand upon a project notebook and said to no one at all: ‘I always thought it would be the death of me.’ But here she was, sixty-four years old and mostly healthy, mostly retired, mostly enjoying life. A label on the notebook’s front cover explained the project’s name:

  High

  Energy

  Interstellar

  Meson

  Detection,

  Amplification &

  Lensing

  Lattice

  It rarely spooked her these days, the thought that she had written out an identical description during wartime Oxford, scribbling in her personal notebook while asleep, something she had never done before or since. When Charles, her department head at Imperial, had first suggested she take over the meson research team and showed her the name of a project that Lucas Krause had proposed, he had actually been concerned for her health because of the blood draining from her face. But she had recovered and accepted the job, and nothing had come of it save for a wealth of readings concerning the behaviour of mesons from cosmic rays.

  Their decay-time was affected by relativistic distortion, because their velocities were so high, providing one more validation of Einstein’s work: her hero, who had once played her nine discordant notes upon his violin, as an indication that they had more in common than a love of physics.

  And Lucas Krause, whose team she had taken over when he left, was the same Lucas she had known as a student at the Erdgenössische Technische Hochschule, where Einstein had previously studied and even taught a little. There had been a brief period when she had taken to spending the occasional night at Lucas’s house – romance and physical love were never frequent features in her life – but he had finally returned to his estranged wife in Nebraska, on hearing that she was diagnosed with cancer.

  That was five years ago, and Mary Krause was still alive and doing well, which Gavriela was glad of.

  Inside the notebook was tucked a typewritten note from one of her Caltech acquaintances, someone she had met at several conferences and was a good contact, because he worked with Gell-Mann frequently. He said that a few people were talking about renaming the meson family members – K mesons, µ mesons and π mesons would now be known as kaons, muons and pions respectively – and asking what Gavriela thought of the notion.

  She had not yet replied, uncertain whether her natural response would be perceived as European snobbery: that people should use Greek letters, along with Latin terms, as much as possible, and that furthermore there was no excuse for any physicist not to read the Cyrillic alphabet, and realise just how much Russian was comprehensible, especially since modern vocabulary so often resembled French or German.

  Then she smiled, remembering Gell-Mann’s reputation as a polymath and polyglot who insisted on correct pronunciation of all foreign terms, and decided that she would write her reply exactly as it came to mind.

  Earlier today, at half past eight, she had written a one sentence entry in her diary, after receiving an important phone call – fulfilling the reason she had got the Post Office to install a home telephone in the first place, as soon as she had heard that Carl was an expectant father.

  Today I became a grandmother.

  It was an echo of the day Carl was born, and more comforting than she had expected, the thought of continuity despite personal mortality.

  (She had asked the engineer, when he was installing the phone, whether he had heard of a gentleman called Tommy Flowers. He had said no, then winked, causing Gavriela to smile. Within the next few years, thanks to the thirty-year rule regarding secrecy, the British public would begin to learn how her friend Alan had invented computers and how Tommy built the first, and incidentally shortened the war by two years at least, and perhaps made the difference between victory and defeat.)

  The phone rang, one-two, one-two, left-right, left-right as she hurried to the hallway and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ she said, expecting Carl.

  ‘Most assuredly, old thing,’ came a familiar patrician drawl. ‘Why ever would it not be?’

  ‘Rupert.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I thought Carl might be calling from St Mary’s.’

  ‘He’s in church praying for a mir
acle?’

  ‘I mean the hospital. Alexander Fleming, penicillin, and now my first grandson,’ she said.

  There was a short silence.

  ‘That’s really most excellent news, dear Gabby.’ He would not use her real name on a phone line. ‘Most excellent.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she said. ‘And an indication that I’m far too old to work for you, dear Rupert. Assuming you’ve a little job you wanted me to carry out.’

  Another silence.

  ‘I do that, don’t I?’ said Rupert. ‘Ignore you unless I want something.’

  That was disconcerting.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes . . . I was hoping we could meet up, not for work, and have a—’

  ‘Spot of tea,’ she said. ‘You do that as well. And I’d love to.’

  ‘You would?’ He sounded more cheery. ‘Fancy a stroll around the British Museum?’

  ‘So one old mummy can cast an eye over the others? I’d be delighted, dear Rupert.’

  They agreed to meet in an hour, and then she hung up.

  From the outside, the British Museum, like all the other major buildings in London, was a single massive block of soot, black and off putting. Inside it was airy, calming Gavriela down as she passed the Elgin Marbles – relics of one dead empire stolen by another, whose patrician classes were finally realising they had been trained to rule a quarter of the globe that was no longer theirs – and then stood in front of the dark stone Book of Gilgamesh, realising she was in the presence of the world’s first written story, not quite able to process the thought.

  Rupert, when he appeared, was wearing a bow tie of lapis-lazuli blue, a touch of startling colour; but his pinstripe suit was as conservative as ever: narrow lapels unlike the modern look, and not a hint of flare to the trousers. His oiled hair was iron grey, combed from a parting that was geometrically exact.

  They strolled around saying little, finally stopping in the Viking room upstairs, where a wide metal bowl hung on chains from the ceiling.