Paradox

by John Meaney

  Sure hands guided her to the lift-chair; there was no vertigo as she was swung high up into the air, then slowly lowered through the opening on the ship’s upper hull.

  In the eyes of her imagination, the ship existed: a silver, deltawinged bird, poised upon the runway, ready to lift.

  Hands and robot arms fitted her into the command couch. A soft hum sounded, then a click as high-bandwidth bus-fibres were plugged in, where her eyes used to be.

  Faint mist of mathematical spaces, of shadowy geometries beyond sight.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  But it took two more days.

  Two more days of lying there, without privacy when she had to use the attached waste-tubes, waiting while the diagnostics ran and technicians jostled her and monitored her reactions when she slipped into the migraine-inducing hallucinations of billowing phase-spaces.

  Finally, someone leaned in and touched her shoulder.

  “Ready to fly, ma’am.”

  As dawn rose, Sensei was standing at the runway’s edge, praying harder than he ever had before in a long life of self-discipline and worship.

  Burnished fire dripped along the silver hull. Beside him, Anne-Marie held his arm for support, her head still and rapt as her dog’s, staring at the same thing: Karyn’s ship.

  “Systems check OK,” said a lieutenant, as transparent blast shields rose up before them. “She’s going now.”

  Reaction burners banged into life, the silver ship shuddered, released brakes and hurtled down the runway, lifted its nose, then arced upwards into the air, high, and sped into the clear sapphire sky.

  They watched the holos as satellites tracked Karyn’s trajectory. Unbelievably soon, the ship rose through purple darkness at the atmosphere’s edge and burst into the high-contrast blackness of interplanetary space.

  Then it rippled, miragelike, grew twisted and knotted through impossible shifting angles, shrank to an infinitesimal silver point, and was gone.

  All the time, during simulation training, she had been pushing the insertion angles to the limit. In mu-space, a vessel became a solid projection, a volume shadow of the realspace object, protected by its event membrane from the chaotic effects of fractal time.

  Now she was doing it for real.

  Ignoring optimal safety parameters, Karyn pushed it to the maximum. Relative to the size of Dart’s vessel, Karyn’s ship became a tiny thing, a silver insect speeding through the golden void.

  She was minimizing the journey’s duration—from Dart’s point of view. Trawling through a different context, a different level of size, her voyage, subjectively, was paradoxically longer.

  Her trip lasted thirty-three weeks.

  Internal robot arms manipulated her limbs, electrostimulation worked the muscles; internal manifolds and scrolling digits, in her augmented non-vision, monitored the embryo in her womb.

  If there had been passengers aboard, they would have been anaesthetized: no-one, even protected by the vessel’s event membrane, could survive mu-space’s mind-bending perspectives. But the baby—

  Scarlet-analogue flashed across her non-vision as proximity sensors blared.

  Destination achieved.

  His ship was bronze.

  + + COME IN, DART. COME IN. + +

  No surprise: she had chosen that exact hue as one of her colour-simulation calibration points.

  + + DART, PLEASE . . . + +

  But this was not how she had visualized his proud winged ship— impaled by fractally branching tendrils of scarlet and purple lightning, which coruscated endlessly across the hull’s event membrane, brightest at the points where it was beginning to bore through.

  ## KARYN? IS THAT YOU, BABE? ##

  + + DART! + +

  If she’d had eyes, she would have wept.

  Subjective time passed.

  ## I DON’T WANT YOU HERE. ##

  As she drew closer, the bronze ship grew huge, hundreds of times her size. Manoeuvring was tricky, as she avoided questing tendrils of lightning.

  + + TOUGH. I’VE COME A LONG WAY. + +

  Just to get you, she meant, but her concentration was divided now, and communication was hard.

  Her ship juddered as the enhanced field generators came online. The event membrane shivered across her hull, and her senses spun as resonance effects perturbed her sensors.

  ## OK, TELL ME WHAT YOU’RE DOING. ##

  + + ENHANCED EVENT MEMBRANE. + +

  She dipped and twisted her vessel, evading the scarlet lightning.

  + + GET READY. WE’RE GOING TO MERGE MEMBRANES. + +

  ## SOUNDS GREAT, DARLING. ##

  Drawing close.

  + + INITIATING. . . + +

  Contact.

  Black light pulsed and waved across their conjoined vessels: the tiny silver form of Karyn’s ship, the massive bronze of Dart’s.

  ## GIVE ME AN INTERFACE. ##

  Karyn checked progress before replying: + + OPENING INFOFLOW. MAKE IT TWO-WAY, BABY. + +

  She needed to know the exact figures if they were going to throw off the energy pattern by their parallel efforts.

  ## JESUS CHRIST! ##

  Inside her Pilot’s cocoon, she might have laughed.

  + + HEY, DART. YOUR DAD’LL REPLAY THESE LOGS SOME TIME. + +

  A silence, during which Karyn nervously noted the lack of progress in the membrane-strengthening procedure.

  Then Dart’s reply came: ## you’re pregnant, sweetheart. ##

  Cursing herself for not realizing that he was going to see all of her internal dataflow, she sent a brief acknowledgement code.

  No time for anything more. A tiny scarlet tendril was playing about her own ship’s hull.

  ## YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME. ##

  A pause, then: + + DART, I LOVE YOU. BUT i’m BUSY RIGHT NOW. + +

  ## I KNOW. ##

  Her attention was on the turbulent stream of rushing data. Dart would be doing the same thing.

  ## IT’S NOT GOING TO LET ME GO. ##

  Another tendril on her hull, joining the first. Then another.

  Questing: not blindly, but algorithmically driven. Shifting frequencies, searching for pseudo-quantum tunnelling across the event-membrane barrier, to drill into her vessel and tear it apart.

  + + THE HELL IT ISN’T. + +

  A fourth tendril.

  More. Homing in, like an immune response against an invading pathogen.

  And, across the body of Dart’s ship, the lightning’s insertion points were growing brighter, not weaker, as the field generators red-planed into max output.

  Sickened, she checked: it was the only interpretation.

  Her arrival had stimulated it, if anything. Given the energy pattern more data to work with.

  + + IS IT ALIVE? + +

  Status flags tripping everywhere: it was almost through. Ready to tear both ships apart into total dissolution.

  ## I DON’T THINK SO. MAYBE. ##

  Then, after a pause: ## KARYN. YOU HAVE TO LET GO. ##

  + + NO CHANCE. + +

  Glowing figures, highlighted as Dart pinpointed the intensity manifolds and sent the data back to her.

  ## IF YOU STAY, IT’S GOING TO GET ALL OF US. ALL THREE OF US. ##

  The data hung in her awareness. Desperate, she searched for counter-strategies.

  ## LET ME GO, KARYN! ##

  Breakthrough threshold. As the shared membrane around both vessels began to split, a peripheral-data phase-space, at the edge of Karyn’s internal awareness, flared with authority-adoption commands.

  + + DAMN YOU, DART. NO. WE’RE GETTING OUT OF—+ +

  But she had not reckoned on his expertise. While she had been reconfiguring the output characteristics to suit the lightning’s interference mode, Dart had been picking control codes from her comms protocols and forming his own instructions.

  Sudden pain tugged through Karyn, and for a moment she thought the lightning had drilled through, but then she realized.

  Contraction.


  ## KARYN. ARE YOU ALL RIGHT? ##

  She nearly laughed, but another contraction rippled through her womb.

  + + TOO EARLY, DAMN IT. IT’S TOO EARLY! + +

  Op-codes streamed through her input buffers, unidentified until it was too late. Dart had control.

  ## I LOVE YOU, KARYN. ##

  Waves oscillated across the black field as he triggered the power-down sequence.

  + + DART, NO. I—I LOVE YOU, TOO. + +

  Datastreams froze. Ships, membranes, pulling apart.

  ## LOOK AFTER OUR DAUGHTER. I—##

  Separation.

  For a moment, tiny tendrils still played about her own ship, but then the explosion came.

  Dart’s vessel blew apart into a million fragments.

  Her last sight, as she triggered reinsertion, was a cloud of sparkling bronze motes, twinkling in a sea of golden light.

  A strange feeling of euphoric warmth, of loving benediction—

  Then the scarlet lightning released her, and the vision was lost.

  Realspace.

  It was dark outside but her attention was turned inwards. The baby should not have been ready to be born.

  Position warning.

  The internal systems were not designed to help a pregnant woman give birth; that was as helpful as the scan routine could be. Redirecting the resonance imagers from device-monitoring to herself, she could see the problem: the baby was twisted around, sideways on to the opening cervix.

  Breach birth.

  No problem under normal circumstances, but there was no way to stop the birth process once it had reached this stage. With her mind torn apart in confusion, Karyn could not have re-entered mu-space, much less navigated her way homewards.

  Happening now.

  There was only one thing she could think of, and she did it. The internal robot arms pulled the cocooning material back from her abdomen.

  Careful. . .

  She screamed as the arm’s laser bit through her belly, peeling skin and striated muscle apart.

  Pain!

  Then two more arms dived into her womb and gently, gently pulled the struggling baby free. But the robots were already under their co-processors’ control.

  Karyn’s consciousness disintegrated.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  53

  NULAPEIRON AD 3414

  Slowly at first, it began.

  Strontium Dragon trading-visits. Recruitment fairs: a natural cover, organized for the most part by Jak—who did not know of their true objective—since the economic viability of the still-young demesne was obviously of high concern. And seminars: Tom wanted publicly to encourage education among freedmen, and bringing in outside lecturers and technicians was a part of that.

  It began as a trickle, but soon there were nearly three hundred technicians and scientists working in secret teams on the Tertium Stratum. Administration and security procedures were handled by Elva; Tom himself sat in on the major technical briefings.

  Such a waste.

  Every time he left an arduous session, exhausted, he thought the same thing: here were a couple of dozen alpha servitors and freedmen—even a few low-born citizens—who could have been Lords under other circumstances.

  But the atmosphere was electric: for the first time in their lives, these young men and women were being given the chance to stretch their intellectual talents to the utmost. When he could, Tom spent time preparing eduthreads and logotropes, to help feed their frenzied, voracious appetites for learning.

  He remembered his first trip to the Sorites School, seeing the scholars and thinking: You don’t know how lucky you are.

  “Recruitment,” said Elva during a security briefing, “will make or break us.”

  It was true. The more people they took in, the greater the chances of a misplaced word or even malicious informing.

  And, at a later meeting: “I think we need to bring Jak in on this, my Lord.”

  “Are you sure, Elva?”

  “I’ve been sounding him out subtly for a long time, and doing background checks. Don’t you agree?”

  Tom looked away. “We never really discussed politics.”

  He made occasional trips to other demesnes, to various secret locations of training-camps and LudusVitae-controlled communities. Whenever he could, he joined in the close-quarter-combat training-sessions, either as a student or, increasingly, as a guest instructor.

  In the latter case, they always applauded when the session was over.

  His expertise was strategic and technical—at home, his LudusVitae role was technical project management, more than anything— not command. No action cell reported to him. Yet he visited every command group in the sector, and several outside the borders.

  “The Planning Council,” said Vilkarzyeh during one pan-sector strategy briefing, “has great plans for you, Tom.”

  “I don’t think so, Alexei.” By now, they were on first-name terms. “But thanks for trying to cheer me up.”

  Yet it was noticeable that Tom saw more of the organization than possibly any other member. For sure, it was an advantage: his detailed mental map of LudusVitae in this sector was vital to his strategic models.

  There were internal wrangles and power struggles in the Planning Council and other echelons, but Tom always held himself aloof.

  “But that’s what makes you popular, my Lord,” said Elva as she escorted him home from one meeting, with a dozen fanned-out troopers in plain clothes covering the corridor ahead and behind. “The way you don’t get involved in their stupid chest-pounding.”

  “Politics. That’s all I need!”

  And Elva laughed. “Everything we do is politics.”

  Later that night, after Tom had run his usual twelve kilometres and returned to his study for private work, she asked to talk to him.

  “What is it?” he said as she came through the membrane.

  “You know the MetaConvocation?”

  “Well, yes.” Before assuming Lordship, he had never heard of it, but he knew now: from each Convocation, annually, delegates were sent to a global MetaConvocation. Not every demesne, but certainly every sector, was represented there. “What of it?”

  “This year’s event will be in Bilkranitsa Syektor, did you know?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.” Tom frowned. “I guess I’d heard. Is that important?”

  “It’s where Vilkarzyeh’s from.” The tone in her voice indicated her dislike.

  Tom leaned against his quickglass desk; it reconfigured to accommodate his weight.

  “I don’t see—”

  “Vilkarzyeh’s going to propose you for some sort of regional-dele-gate position.”

  “Well . . .” Tom shrugged. “Alexei’s trying to do me a favour, I guess. But I’m not sure I’d have time, even if he could swing it.”

  “He’ll swing it, my Lord,” said Elva, “if it’s important enough.”

  “Probably.” Smiling, to take the sting from his words: “What are you really talking about?”

  “It’s the Planning Council who want you to take the post.”

  Tom stared at her. “But why?”

  “When the Prime Strike happens”—the provisional codename for Nulapeiron-wide action, still the best part of two years away—”they’re going to want an official ambassador.”

  “But . . . Going public. That hasn’t been discussed.”

  “Not by us, it hasn’t.” Elva crossed her arms. “And that’s my point.”

  Gold and scarlet: the tricons and network, suspended in mid-air, shifted softly. It looked intricate and static, but that was an illusion.

  “Moneylenders?” said Tom. “And cargo hongs?”

  The Zhongguo Ren, one of Zhao-ji’s lieutenants, nodded. “Not our own hongs, of course.”

  “Of course not.”