Paradox

by John Meaney

  I don’t think so. Did they not realize how hard he worked? Lord Velond knew the difference: otherwise Tom would have been transferred to the Veritas Institute, servitor though he was.

  Jak left the Palace. He was relocated to a major bonded hong at the edge of Darinia Demesne, with pan-sector responsibilities.

  No-one gave Tom extra responsibilities or promoted him.

  His private tutorials with Mistress eh’Nalephi continued, and his respect for her increased: she was alpha-class, but had more ability, Tom suspected, than many Ladies. She pushed him to the limit, offering neither congratulations nor encouragement. But on his twenty-third birthday (a servitor’s celebration: a noble would have celebrated his OctiMilDay), she presented him with a crystal shard.

  It contained Playing the Paradox—collected verses by Thomas Corcorigan. His first official publication; payment received as academic merit points.

  Nine Standard Years had passed since the mysterious Pilot had stumbled over Thomas Corcorigan, huddled in a lonely corridor, writing verse.

  In the Sorites School, the atmosphere seemed changed: not just because of the respect Tom had earned, but because there was a sense of fruition, of training coming to an end.

  Auntie Antinomy Dances the Fractal Fantastic was Tom’s second publication, light-hearted but complex. The strangest moment occurred when he saw Lord Velond chuckling over a holodisplay, reading about Auntie’s paradoxical exploits.

  Then, early one morning, Tat, who was on the dawn-light kitchen shift, came into Tom’s room and told him to report to the Sorites School immediately.

  “I’m due there in an hour, anyway.”

  “I know. Thing is, Tom, while you’re there, I’m supposed to pack your gear for a long trip.”

  A sinking feeling in Tom’s stomach. “You don’t know—?”

  “Sorry, old mate.” Tat shook his head. “I’ve asked the others. None of us has a clue.”

  Lord Velond’s private study had a sweeping curved window overlooking the outer cavern, and plain eggshell walls. Crystals, as usual, were scattered everywhere: abstract mosaics of violets, blacks, oranges, reds—a schema Tom had never deciphered, but Lord Velond could unerringly pick up any required crystal. Dozens of abstruse holodisplays cycled through skeletal six-dimensional proof-dendrimers.

  “Good morning, Tom.”

  There were three people waiting for him: Lord Velond, long, snowy hair brushed back, stern and regal; Mistress eh’Nalephi, aloof and self-composed; and a stranger.

  It was the pale youth, the alleged genius from the Veritas Institute.

  “Lord Avernon.” Tom bowed, dragging the name up from memory. “Lord Velond, Mistress eh’Nalephi.”

  “Ahem.” Lord Velond cleared his throat. “Very nice, but Avernon stands on ceremony even less than I do.”

  In Mistress eh’Nalephi’s eyes Tom caught a flicker of disapproval of the Lords’ informality. Her tone was businesslike: “You have a journey to make, Tom.”

  He smiled. “I promise to record everything. And to study hard.”

  A brusque nod. “This time, I have only one assignment for you.” She held his gaze. “Plan your own logosophical research. And”—she held up a hand as Tom started to speak—”don’t tell me. This is for you to do.”

  Solemnly, Lord Velond handed Tom a crystal. “Your itinerary. This year’s Convocation is hosted by Count Shernafil’s demesne. You’ll both be attending.” He nodded in Lord Avernon’s direction.

  “My Lord.”

  Then something surprising happened.

  “I want to thank you.” The pale Lord Avernon held out his hand as though Tom were his peer. “Though I don’t know what to say.”

  Mistress eh’Nalephi gasped audibly.

  “I—” Swallowing, Tom held out his hand.

  They clasped wrists, in the noble fashion.

  “I could have tracked you down at the time,” Lord Avernon said, “but I didn’t know what ...”

  Then Tom remembered: his first time in Maestro da Silva’s salle d’armes, following the ill-looking boy out into the corridor.

  “My Fate, it’s you! The one who collapsed.”

  “I nearly died.”

  “Thank Destiny you didn’t.” Lord Velond smiled. “Or the Veritas Institute would have missed its brightest star for decades.”

  Lord Avernon looked embarrassed.

  “Anyway”—Mistress eh’Nalephi cleared her throat—”I wish you luck, Tom. And you, Lord Avernon. May you both receive what you deserve.”

  “Er, very nice.” Tom peered at the display as Lord Avernon minimized it and waved it to one side. “What’s that theta-function supposed to represent?”

  “Total bidirectional temporal energy. Here.” Lord Avernon tossed a crystal in Tom’s direction, and Tom snagged it from the air. “Read up about it, and we’ll talk.”

  They were in a modest passenger cabin; only occasional arcing acceleration reminded them that they were in a small arachnargos. There were no external views.

  “So, what’s a Convocation?”

  “Ah, right. Annual gathering. Ours covers four sectors: that’s about eighty demesnes.”

  “That many?”

  “Hm? Oh, yes. Held in interstitial territory, at the boundary intersection of all four sectors. Each year, one demesne provides the host services: the obligation rotates.”

  “And?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What do they do, my Lord?”

  “Just Avernon, please.” He looked distracted. “Policy reviews, dispute arbitration, that sort of thing. Ratify limited military action, if it comes to that. And then there are appointments to office.”

  “Oh, I see. You’re hoping to become a full academician?”

  Avernon shrugged. “I can’t imagine anything else, really. Who’d want to run a demesne?”

  “Mm.”

  Five days later, they arrived.

  Congressio-Interstata Beth-Gamma was opulent: a shining red-and-cream palace nestling in a giant cavern, supported by silver buttresses. The guest wing had black, shining floors, high ivory ceilings.

  Servitors carried Avernon’s baggage; Tom carried his own. But their guest suites were identical.

  “Can we review some sorites before dinner, Tom? I wanted to look over cathartic transform strategies.”

  “In an hour and a half?” asked Tom. He wanted to go for a run.

  “Perfect, old chap.”

  “Er—” Tom spoke up just as Avernon started to walk through his liquefied door membrane. “I would have thought there was nothing in drama theory you didn’t know.”

  “There are always weak areas to be strengthened, don’t you think?”

  “Frankly?” Tom looked at him. “Not in your case, no.”

  “Damn it, Tom.” Avernon stepped back from the membrane; it quivered, then vitrified. “Maybe it’s your weaknesses I’m concerned with.”

  “Tom?”

  “Huh!” Kicking the light sheets from him, Tom rolled to his feet beside the bed, crouched, his arm held in front of him, fingers extended, as though feeling the darkness.

  “Can I come in?” Avernon.

  “Uh, yeah.” Tom pulled a cape around his shoulders as Avernon came inside. “Room: raise lights.”

  Diffuse illumination made the peach-coloured room warm. A brocaded chair slid up as Avernon dropped to a sitting position, raising a crystal.

  “Display.”

  He was pale, eyes feverish.

  “Authorized.” Tom, the designated guest, gave the go-ahead. Then, “What’s wrong?” he asked, as spectral manifolds unfurled.

  “Look at this.” Triconic lattices slid into place. “See here . . .”

  And then he began to explain.

  It took several hours for Tom just to learn Avernon’s peculiar abbreviated metavector notation, but by then the excitement had taken him over, galvanizing his nerves so that sleep was forgotten. Layer by layer, drilling in through holotesseracts, Avernon l
aid out his theory’s skeleton, fleshing in the details when Tom could not understand the principles.

  “Destiny,” Tom murmured at one point. “Just that corollary over there”—he pointed—”is what the ancients called a Theory of Everything, and never found.”

  Simplicity theory lasted a century; connectivity theory lasted a further three hundred years. Then, in the twenty-fifth century, the old paradigms had been overturned by the Amber Maze model: combining bidirectional time loops with contextual emergenics.

  Sub-quantum twistors, vertebrate consciousness, stock-market dynamics and stellar evolution were linked by a web of step-functions which correctly predicted a plethora of phenomena, including the emergence of one-way timeflow at the thermodynamic level.

  It was a view of the cosmos that had reigned four and a half times longer than Newton’s once had, and now Avernon was challenging it.

  And Tom Corcorigan was there to see it happen.

  After Avernon closeted himself away—even he felt the need for some preparation before his summons—Tom continued to work through auxiliary problems by himself. Awe, like a subsonic chord, thrummed constantly inside him. How could these bright marvels have appeared in Avernon’s mind?

  He ploughed on, not noticing the time, distractedly eating snacks which other servitors brought in, then finally collapsed on the bed and slept.

  And dreamed.

  On black velvet, a string of white pearls lay glistening.

  A necklace . . .

  When he awoke again, it was fifteen hours after he had gone to bed.

  Fading dream-tag: ghostly pearls dissolved as reality crowded in.

  A waiting note from Avernon invited him to lunch. Tom said yes, and waved the tricon out of existence. Naked, he walked through the glimmering clean-film, dressed, and was in the dining-chamber within five minutes.

  “They’ll make you an Academician-Premier at least,” said Tom, sitting down.

  “I suppose. That would be all right, so long as I could do real work.” Avernon looked morose, picking at his food with a tine-spoon. Suddenly he laughed. “Bet you a thousand coronae they never make me an administrator.”

  “Er ...”

  “Negative occurrence, right? Twenty SY, then. If I’m still doing research, you owe me a thousand.”

  Tom shook his head. “I hate to point this out—

  “No, no.” Avernon interrupted. “You’ll be able to afford it. But we’ll make it one corona, if that makes you happier.”

  “OK. Done.”

  Just then, a rigid-looking servitor in the turquoise-with-violet-slashes livery of the host Lord, Count Shernafil, marched into the room and bowed to Avernon.

  “The Review Committee, my Lord, requests your presence. At your convenience.”

  Avernon’s smartchair extruded a tendril to wipe his mouth, napkin-like, as he rose. It startled Tom, whose own chair—reading his servitor ID from his ruby earstud—had remained in static form.

  “Wish me luck.”

  “Good luck.” Tom smiled at the mildly heretical form of words: Avernon’s metavectors had not replaced the concept of manifest Destiny. “But you don’t need it.”

  “Right. Um . . . You know they’re not so much looking for one piece of work as for someone who can produce results consistently, over time.”

  “OK—”

  “See you at the Grand Assembly.”

  But that’s five days away, thought Tom. What am I supposed to—?

  “In the meantime,” added Avernon, “if I were you, I’d study hard.”

  He turned to the waiting servitor. “Lead the way, then.”

  On the fourth day, they sent for him.

  Tom was exhausted, febrile, hardly able to speak: dosed to the limit with logotropes, their femtocytic networks extending his mental vision so that a thousand proof-dendrimers and phase-space manifolds coexisted in parallel.

  Information-entropic logos-flow was embedded as kinaesthetic feel, proprioceptive stimulus, even emotional strength.

  He was trembling from overstimulation. His training-runs—in his room, on his small running-pad—had been short, maybe fifteen minutes long, but he had run ten times a day, failing to burn off his adrenaline, while logosophical constructs whirled in his mind.

  When the servitor came for him, Tom could not even acknowledge the summons; he let himself be led.

  He scarcely noticed his surroundings until they reached the committee chamber’s door. It was a wide copper oval containing a white membrane, growing transparent at Tom’s approach.

  He stepped inside.

  Communication problem. He walked across the cold flagstones and stopped before the wide marble table. How do I demonstrate everything I know?

  But the three Lords Academic themselves, beneath their canopied chairs, had the flickering eyelids and “infinity stare” of logotropic trance. They were prepared for his presentation.

  “I, er.” Tom cleared his throat. “I see you, my Lords…” A grey-cowled glowcluster floated overhead, and he pointed to it. “. . . by photons emitted from this, reflected from your skin, then travelling into my retinae, where the photons are destroyed.

  “But, as a journey’s speed increases, its duration decreases, changing by a factor of (1 - v2/c2)-½ At light-speed duration becomes zero.

  “So these photons, this multitude, have lives with beginnings and endings, but no duration in time.”

  Tom gestured holomanifolds into being. “In Old Terran philosophy, this phenomenon was known, but not yet appreciated ...”

  As he plodded through the classics, he sensed the Lords’ increasing boredom, their slipping out of trance.

  They—presumably—had seen Avernon’s new approach, which showed how pure numbers and brane-tensegrity relations defined and were manifest through the universal subquantum matrix. The myriad contexts of emergence were tied together with well-behaved metavectors . . .

  Tom was expounding ancient concepts, when Avernon had just changed everything.

  By the time he came to demonstrate his own metalevel-recursion notation, he was becoming bored, and passed off the approach as caprice. His model, once instantiated in burning fire in his mind, now seemed a lacklustre trick; its time-saving proof solutions were chance results.

  “And, er, that’s it, really,” he concluded.

  There was a silence. One of the Lords coughed, then said: “And have you any notion of problems you might like to investigate?”

  “One or two, in, um, visual-loop algorithms and paradoxicon representations. And ... I write poetry.”

  “I see.”

  This time the silence lasted longer.

  “Thank you for your time.”

  Another Lord, eyes bright beneath white, bushy eyebrows, spoke up: “I’m sure I speak for us all in saying that it was a privilege to hear your discourse.”

  The other two nodded.

  “You have achieved well, given your, ah, provenance. Well done, Corcorigan.”

  It was a dismissal. Heart sinking, Tom bowed.

  “Thank you, my Lords.”

  I’ve failed.

  He turned, and walked across the cold, shining flagstones.

  Necklace.

  He remembered the pearls . . .

  A string of them, glistening against velvet blackness.

  Cosmic necklace.

  Dream image.

  Insight? Or delusion?

  He stopped. Behind him, the Review Committee’s presence felt like static electricity crawling across his back.

  Fist and stallion.

  A deep refrain, pounding: Dervlin’s determined admonition, never to give up.

  Heart thumping, Tom turned back.

  “Sirs? My Lords?” Voice quavering: ignore. “A point of detail— something I missed. Can I go over it?”

  An exchange of dour glances.

  The central Lord nodded gravely. “Approach, young man. In your own time.”