A Game of Universe (10 page)

More memories surfaced: a dozen bejeweled offspring of amazing grace and beauty, a world full of warm fluid, crystalline caves, thermal plumes to play in, and a joy I would never know. It was little wonder he fought so hard to keep it.

Regret filled my heart, guilt over his death, over the annihilation of his race. I tried to ignore it and concentrated on the air attraction, concentrated on saving my own skin.

“You ready?” I whispered.

“Whenever you are,” Virginia said.

Quilp was too high to say anything, his mind polarized to solve the equations before him.

I released the mnemonic lore. Aaron screamed as the energies coursed through me, through the blank void of space, directed into the warship. He screamed as his soul unraveled, along with the air attraction, from my mind.

First heartbeat: the air within Omar’s ship condensed into liquid, making a vacuum on board. This wouldn’t damage the hull. It was designed to withstand such changes in pressure (although the crew might not fare as well). The sensors would detect the change in pressure and report a hull breach to the computer.

Second heartbeat: the computer automatically sealed the corridors and rooms, compartments and passages (a sensible procedure), then re-pressurized them. With any luck the liquefied air was trapped in a single sealed section.

“Now,” I said to Virginia. “Go!”

The generators throbbed with power, straining against one another, one wrinkling our mass, the other smoothing it out. Quilp moved his hands through a virtual matrix, adjusting the glowing field values, making us hover on the edge of existence.

Third heartbeat: the liquid atmosphere flash-vaporized. In a compartment never designed to withstand such pressure, a hundred thousand cubic meters of air were suddenly present, pushing against the hull, tearing it apart like an overinflated balloon. Even Aaron’s mental construct couldn’t fool thermodynamics for long.

Omar’s ship bulged, seemed to pause mid-flight, then exploded. Tentacled weapons spun in space, wriggling as if they had a life of their own, and armored plates like confetti were thrown into the night sky in celebration.

“Maximal probability of wave function in upper atmosphere now at point oh three,” Virginia informed Quilp.

He grunted an acknowledgment, and his equations flashed a violet warning. He compensated with a flick of his hands, fine-tuning our mass.

The displays were a jumble of simultaneous images: warship fragments shooting through space, clouds of hydrogen sulfide, wind-carved red rocks, and all spaces in between. Our existence was reduced to its pure quantum mechanical components, and we were no longer in any one place at any one time. Position had no meaning. We were only an envelope of probability smeared across space.

“Maximum probability entering planetary crust,” Setebos announced.

Quilp and Virginia were too engrossed in keeping our mass adjusted to respond. Quilp wasn’t even breathing. His tetraoxide reserves would keep him healthy for the few minutes, so I didn’t worry about him.

The displays revealed the interior of the planet. Liquid stone surrounded the
Grail Angel,
and I felt strangely comfortable among the heat and pressure, despite the burn on my back. The air turned thick and stale.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Neither of them answered.

“Setebos? Why is it so hot?”

“Atmospheric systems off line and power rerouted to compensate for a divergent secondary field,” he told me.

The psychologist remarked,
The heat you feel is primarily based on the perception that we are inside the planet. There exist several examples of such an induced …

His voice faded away. It was just as well; I wasn’t listening. Instead, I sat and watched the displays, watched as our probability shifted through the molten core. There were currents and eddies out there, and I knew exactly what it would feel like to ride them, to swim through the convection rolls, to explore the caves of liquid crystals deeper than any surface dweller could imagine. My sexmate and offspring were here, too. Their names, so long since I have heard them, echoed for kilometers in the dense hot sea.

“Warning,” Setebos said in a formal tone. “Path integral not bounded in nondiagonalized matrix. Please reconfigure.”

Quilp cursed and raced through the tangle of symbols to find his error.

In my haze of Aaron’s reminiscence, I heard Virginia say, “Exponential decay of wave function approaching critical level. Boosting power to the second mass-folding field.” Her voice was a squeaky thing to me, not the slow melodies of my sexmate.

Quilp hissed, “It’s not working, we’re gonna have to bring the third mass-folding generator online.”

This was all wrong. I was cold and too solid. I should be out there, surrounded by warm fluidity, my body melding with my world’s minerals, not confined within this bubble of air and frozen metal. I went to the hatch, and my hand fumbled with the control pad.

“Master?” asked Setebos, “may I inquire what you are doing?”

“Going home,” I answered. “My family waits for me. Cannot you hear their songs? Cannot you see my offspring sheathed in liquid gold, their lovely flames? They are waiting for me. They have been waiting too long.”

“Master, if you release the hatch, our wave function will become asymmetric. The core temperature is twenty-two thousand degrees Kelvin, and while the
Grail Angel
is designed to withstand these extremes, your flesh is not. I beg you to reconsider.”

“But my family, they need me, my protection.”

So faint I barely heard him, the psychologist whispered,
They are dead, long dead. You are not King Aaron. You are Germain of Umbra Incorporated. These are not your memories.

Germain; his name I knew. He was the surface dweller who called us to speak of peace, the man who wished to speak to me alone in the meeting cave, the man who had trapped me, froze me solid, immobile, then he—

I was he.

I removed my hand from the control pad. I was not the noble Aaron, but the cold killer, the professional assassin.

This had never happened before. When one of my personas took over, I knew what was happening, I sensed in a limited fashion what they did from the background of my mind. I always retained my identity. This time was different. For a moment, I was Aaron. My ego had been washed completely away.

I warned you this would eventually happen,
the psychologist said.

“Energy spike!” cried Virginia. “They’ve fired on our initial position. It’s disrupting the tail end of our wave function and propagating through our extended field. Intersecting our maximal probability in six seconds.”

“I’m bringing the third mass-folding generator online,” Quilp said. “It’ll boost our resolution, and—what in blazes?”

My vision blurred. The ship seemed to be drifting apart in all directions at once.

“Confirm that I have thirty-three distinct wave functions,” Quilp asked Virginia.

Virginia’s insignia flashed continuously, a single unbroken stream of data, then she said, “Confirmed. Thirty-three identical overlapping wave functions. Increase power to the number two generator. Give us some mass before we scatter apart.”

Images of clouds poured from the displays, a swirl of green mist, then the dark coolness of space. The blurring sensation vanished.

“Exiting probability increasing to point eight nine,” Virginia said. “Field arrays powering down, resolution of wave function imminent.”

“Look!” Quilp cried.

Ahead of us, another
Grail Angel
popped into reality, then another, then a dozen more, all identical to our ship. The displays aft showed more
Grail Angels.
An explosion bloomed there, engulfed one of them, white fire, then red, then only a dot of black smoke that was swept away by the raging winds of the planet.

The other
Grail Angels
veered away, and one by one, faded from our displays.

Quilp released the equations he so tightly controlled, then slumped over in his chair, and started breathing again. There were no pupils in his eyes that I could discern, and all his muscles twitched from overstimulation. It was a wonder his heart hadn’t burst.

“Did you see that?” he wheezed. “Our wave function split when I brought the last generator online. They resolved, too. Weird. I’m gonna have to run a few simulations to figure out how it happened.”

“What course?” Virginia asked. “I’d like to put some distance between us and your friends on the other side of the planet.”

Since Setebos hadn’t found the location of the Grail, there was no choice but to pay a visit to the master-psychologist, Necatane.

“Set course for the Delphid system,” I said.

Virginia turned her attention to the navigation display. Setebos balanced our mass-folding fields, and we left what remained of the cloned Omar far behind. Did a clone even have a soul?

“Estimated arrival in eleven days twenty hours sixteen minutes, non-relative time,” Setebos said. “Six hours fourteen minutes, relative time.”

I took another look back and pondered the sea of liquid metal we had sailed through, and thought of Aaron and his people, and considered my role in their extinction.

Would you care to discuss your feelings?
the psychologist inquired.

There’s no time to dig through the past,
Fifty-five said.
What happened back there with those other ships?

I asked Quilp, “Those other
Grail Angels,
what were they? An optical distortion?”

“There were no distortions,” he replied. “They were us.”

“How can that be?”

“You know the uncertainty principle?” he asked.

“You can’t measure a quantum object’s position and momentum simultaneously.”

“Yeah, but there’s another version of the principle that applies to energy and time. When we tried to smooth out that energy spike, and keep our wave function resonating at the light neutrino mass limit, we forced our energy into an extremely narrow range.”

“Correspondingly,” Virginia said, “our wave function was scattered through time. For a brief instance there were thirty-three
Grail Angels.”

“But they vanished,” I said.

“That’s because only one of us can exist in the same temporal frame,” Quilp explained, seeming slightly annoyed that I didn’t know. “The exclusion principle? Only one set of quantum numbers per customer? Those other wave functions had to collapse.”

“It was curious they lasted so long though,” Virginia added, then she got up. “If you two don’t mind, I’m going aft to make sure the ship is intact.”

Setebos said, “Madam captain, I have performed three checks of the hull integrity, and tested all the—”

“I’d feel better, Setebos, if I took a look for myself.” She left us.

Quilp seemed certain those other
Grail Angels
had disappeared. I wasn’t so sure. I definitely saw another
Grail Angel
in the hanger on Needles. Could it have been one of the shadows we cast in time? And the déjà vu I felt since this mission started, that remained unexplained. Maybe there were other Germains out there now. Would we all be saved if one of us found the Grail, or could there be only one winner? It might explain how Omar found me. Another Germain, projected back in time, might tip him off to eliminate the competition from his other selves. Yet, if Omar had killed me on Needles, wouldn’t that wipe out my other selves? I’d never have left Needles, never have tunneled through the planet, and never have split myself through time. Paradox.

I could go crazy working out all the implications.

Quilp interrupted my thoughts. “Why are we headed to the Delphid system? There’s nothing there but a brewery. Kinda off the beaten path.”

“Not a brewery,” I corrected him, “a winery. But that’s not why we are going there. We’re going there to see a man.”

“You gonna ask him where this thing is you’re looking for?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to kill him.”

8

H
alf of Quilp’s money was mine. The rest was Virginia’s. Six stacks of ivory chips were neatly piled in front of her. For the last five hours, I hadn’t been able to consistently beat her, even with the gambler’s advice. She wore a nonchalant mask, which made it impossible to tell when she bluffed.

It was Quilp’s deal. His shaking hands threw me two blank vacuums, a pair of planets, a gas giant, and a binary star, which gave me the beginnings of a system.

“You’re both cheating,” he hissed after scrutinizing his cards.

“There’s no need,” I said. “You’re doing a fine job of losing without our help. Maybe if you gave your mind a rest from those stimulants, you’d win a hand or two.”

The corner of his eye twitched. “They don’t affect my game.”

Virginia sipped her shot of boiling quantum ice, ignored our debate, and opened with a cautious bet of twelve.

“Both of you will see,” he mumbled. “I’ve gotta surefire method. The cards just need to catch up to the statistics. I’ll win everything back.”

I laughed. Poor Quilp sounded like he believed himself.

Discarding my pair of vacuums, I hoped for another planet, a comet, or even an asteroid to complete my system. Instead, I got a black hole and a section of the celestial dragon for my wishful thinking. That left a single pair of planets—a lousy hand—but that wouldn’t stop me from bluffing. Another round of betting and cards remained. I felt lucky.

The gambler said,
Your pilot is a good guesser. She’ll know a bluff.

Care to play this hand out?
I asked.

Sorry, I couldn’t sit in for less than ten thousand. I am a professional, after all.

I tossed forty into the pot. “Your twelve and twenty-eight more.” I let a fake smile crack my poker face, then turned to Quilp.“That’s forty to you. And how’s our little project coming along? Shouldn’t you be tinkering with that rather than losing your shirt?”

“It’ll be ready,” he said and tugged thoughtfully at one of the few hairs on his head. “Setebos is compiling the code for me and etching it into crystal. Some fine-tuning after that, and we’ll be in business.” He stared at his cards, then, “Forty, huh? You wouldn’t want to extend me a line of credit, would you?”

“Not a chance.”

“I can cover you,” Virginia volunteered. She pushed a stack of chips (that were recently his) toward him.

“Who are you,” he sneered, “my mother?” He pocketed his remaining seven chips, and threw his cards across the crew’s quarters. “I’m gonna go see what’s taking that AI so long. We’ll finish this later.” He sulked back into the cargo bay where he had set up his equipment.

Virginia picked up his cards, inspected them, then placed them on the discard pile.

Now that you two are secluded,
Celeste whispered,
steal another delectable kiss.

You said a pilot cannot get involved with her employer.

So discharge her.

I just might do that. My thoughts wandered from the game, and my eyes became more concerned with the shades of gold, platinum, and copper in her hair than with how many planets I held. Virginia was better at Universe than me, which indicated intelligence, intuition, and luck—all traits I admired. Yet, there was still that feeling that we had met before, not as strong as when we kissed at Golden City, but there nonetheless. It bothered me.

“Cards?” she asked.

I dropped the black hole (which was heavier than the other cards) and the freezing vacuum. “Please, two.”

She flicked a pair of card plates to me.

I’ll tell you what’s bothering you,
said Fifty-five.
She’s a traitor. Who else could have tipped Omar and E’kerta off? She was the only one who knew we were going to Needles.

If she signaled them while we were en route,
I said,
they would have arrived hours after we did. Those
Sedition-
class warships couldn’t be faster than the
Grail Angel.
They had to leave for Needles before we did. Any bright ideas how that happened?

My cards: a third planet, newly formed, and its crust cracked with lines of glowing magma, and a comet. I had my system, not a great one, but it had to be better than her hand. Last round she picked up four cards. Unless she was phenomenally lucky, I had her.

“Twenty more,” she said, and slid her chips between the “P” and the “7” stenciled in the center of the table.

“Your twenty and a hundred,” I answered with a stone face, and tossed a stack of chips into the pot.

She raised an eyebrow. “One hundred … and three hundred more.”

Now we’re talking,
the gambler said.

“You’re bluffing.”

She shrugged. “We’ll see.”

Consider the possibility of her being a spy,
Fifty-five said.

I asked the psychologist,
You told me Virginia was loyal.

You want my professional opinion?
he said.
I must make note of this occasion. Yes, I did. And since you shared a near fatal experience, I sense the bond even stronger than before. I might add that your feelings toward her are also
—

Enough professional opinion,
Fifty-five interrupted.
So she’s loyal to you. She might be brainwashed and acting on a subconscious level. The Corporation does it all the time.

“Tell me,” Virginia said and leaned across the table. “At Golden City you used magic to change your last card, didn’t you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just curious,” she answered and traced the edge of the stenciled “P” on the table with her finger. “I’ve never seen real magic before. They have magicians at the casino, but they use holograms, sleight of hand, and mirrors. It’s not real. Not like what you did.”

“What I did was nothing, really.”

“Then it
was
magic.” Her brown eyes widened. “Can you teach me? Do you have to be born with the ability? Is there some dark ritual to perform?” She glanced at her pile of chips, then whispered, “I’ve heard muses sell their souls for power.”

“No selling of souls,” I told her. “And there is no magic or rituals. Just years spent with your nose in books.”

Tell her the truth,
the psychologist said.
Your so-called magic is merely a low-grade, undisciplined psychic talent cloaked in superstition.

I didn’t let him bait me into the argument we had had a thousand times before.

“So anyone could learn it?” Virginia squared her cards and set them down. “Show me exactly what you did.”

My mental constructs were precious. Using them to impress her seemed wasteful; yet, I wanted to impress her. I wanted her to like me. But I couldn’t switch the cards as I did before. That mnemonic lore was Omar’s, and it was gone … he was gone. I’d have to do something else.

After I said nothing for several seconds, she spoke: “Or maybe it’s asking too much.” She scooped up her cards, fanned them, then, “It’s three hundred to you. Are you betting or folding?”

In plain sight, so she could see, I squeezed my thumb and pinkie together, the first of the seventeen mnemonics that unlocked the
Theorem of Malleability
from my mind. Memories and power unwound together, flooding my thoughts: Einstein oscillators and blackbody radiation and energy bands.

Virginia watched as pale blue light spread across my right hand, watched as sparks dripped from my fingers and mist collected in my palm, but did not see the three stacks of chips I secreted under the table with my other hand.

“I am betting,” I whispered.

More memories uncoiled; energy took form and erupted into a lavender flame, a ghostly fire that did not consume my hand. It was hot and cold. While flames licked my palm, frost crystallized on the tips of my fingers, and water vapor condensed, beading at my wrist, and trickling down my arm. I set my burning hand flat on the table, and beneath, the metal turned soft. My fingers sank into it.

On the underside of the table, the metal there softened, too. With one smooth motion, I pushed the stacks of chips through, and removed my hands. The mnemonic construct vanished. The metal hardened.

Virginia gasped. “How did—”

“Magic,” I lied, then blew the flames dripping from my fingers out.

She carefully probed the table with one finger. It was solid. The “7-P” stenciled on the surface however, was slightly distorted. The tail end of the “7” curled around, making it look like hybrid between a “6” and a backwards “5.”

“If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.” She stared at my stack of chips, then asked, “This your bet?”

“I suppose.”

“Then I call,” she said. “What have you got?”

She wasn’t amazed. Or if she was, she had recovered quickly enough to take advantage of me. We flipped our cards. She gave an appreciative nod to my three-planet system, but that was nothing compared to her black cluster, fourth-order no less: three stars, a nebula, and a black hole.

Her winning hand sprang to life; a virtual projection radiated from each card. The nebula engulfed our table in a blood-tinged hydrogen mist. And in its center, three suns spun about a point of darkness. From those stars, tails of plasma spiraled into the center, heated to white brilliance, and vanished forever (like the money I just lost).

The image faded.

She collected the cards, and her chips, then asked with a wry smile, “Another hand?”

This woman was clever. Anyone who could outfox me was worth knowing. I picked up my chair and moved next to her. I then took her hands into mine, and answered, “The only hands I desire are these.” I kissed them, her palms, the inside of her wrist, moving up along her arm, then her neck. She didn’t seem to mind.

She ran her fingers through my hair. My pulse jumped—the blood pumping hot through my body. I detected a faint fragrance from her: cinnamon and musk. Virginia drew me to her face, and kissed me like she had before in my suite, sensuous, wet, only longer, increasing in passion, not diminishing.

I sensed Celeste close, waiting for me to relax my guard so she could step in. I had to stop now or abandon myself altogether to her.

Let yourself go,
the imperial geisha whispered.
I promise you ecstasy beyond your wildest dreams.

“Hey,” Quilp said and stepped into the room, “I need you for a few—” He did an about face when he saw us intertwined. The interruption gave me time to realize what was about to happen. I pulled away from Virginia.

“Wait,” I said. “What is it?”

He poked his head back in. “Sorry to bother you,” he said unapologetically, “but this mental shield of yours needs adjusting.” He held up a baseball cap with the words
Unico Robotics
stitched along the brim.

Virginia turned away from me, her face burning, and said, “I better check the navigation systems.” She got up and left quickly, brushing past Quilp.

“Look, Germain,” he said and took a step back, “you’re not mad, are you? All I was gonna do is fine tune the shield.”

I was mad, but not at Quilp. I wanted companionship, normal physical contact. How could I have that with ghouls in my mind watching, waiting to take control when I was vulnerable?

Celeste was the worst. She had eclectic tastes when it came to intimacy. If I allowed her to have her way with Virginia she was capable of anything, sadistic torture, masochism, rape, just as easily as tenderness and submission—whatever struck her fancy. More than once I awoke in the arms of strangers, both men and women, sometimes animals, or machines, having performed acts both horrific and wonderful to satisfy her urges.

It’s only sex,
she sighed.
You don’t have to marry her. What do you care?

Let’s just say I’m partial to this one.

You’re not falling for this trollop-spy I hope,
Fifty-five said.

I didn’t answer him.

“Let’s get on with it,” I told Quilp.

He handed me the baseball cap. Inside was a sheath of flexible crystalline material, blinking with soft pastel colors. I set it atop my head.

“Not like that,” he told me and smashed it down tight enough to give me a headache. “The contact has to be snug. It would be better if you shaved your head. But maybe then our pilot wouldn’t find you so attractive?”

I cast a deadly look at him.

“I don’t blame you though, she’s a knockout.” He waved a scanner in front of me. “OK, think kinky thoughts.”

I thought about killing the little maggot.

Quilp removed the cap, swapped one of the crystals, and we tried it again, and again, and finally a third time, then he declared, “Nothing, the scanner reads zero mental emissions. You’re technically brain dead. When do I get paid?”

Fifty-five whispered,
Has it occurred to you that the creep is expendable? He’s done his job. Who would care if he disappeared?

“Approaching Delphid system,” Setebos chimed.

I grabbed my winnings, not trusting Quilp alone with them, and went forward to the bridge.

“The fifth planet,” I told Virginia.

A ruby giant burned on the ship’s displays and filled my eyes with its dreary dim light. A star in the last years of its expansion, it would soon dwindle to a tiny white dwarf, only slightly brighter than the rest of the stars in the night. This is where Necatane made his home. This is where he taught his pupils, and grew his famous silver grapes that only thrived in the light of a dying star. The wine he fermented from them was renowned for making the drinker relive forgotten memories. Some vintages brought only pleasant memories to the surface: one’s first love, long summer days, or swimming in a warm ocean.

“Coordinates?” Virginia asked me.

“Sector fourteen north, thirty-eight east,” I told her, then to Setebos I commanded, “full power to the magic circle. If there is a detection net, I want to absorb the energies, and slip in unnoticed.”

“Yes, Master,” Setebos replied. “Magic circle operating at ninety-seven percent of rated capacity.” The blue and green cube grew brighter on the console, then spoke: “Warning, magic circle drained to seventy-two percent by multiplexed radar and solid state augur forces.”

“Solid state what?” Quilp asked.

“A crystal ball,” I told him. “Virginia, take us down quick. There is a canyon at those coordinates. It should partially screen us before the magic circle fails.”