Paradox (6 page)

Fear and elation gripped her simultaneously.

UTech from the air: verdant parkland, copper-bright Virginia forest. Octagonal central plaza, tiled in orange and green, among golden walkways and silver domes, gleaming beneath a clear sapphire sky.

Face pressed against the plexiglass, Karyn watched the campus rushing up to meet her—

{{
Tom swallowed, sick with vertigo, pressing back against solid stone, grateful for reality's anchor.
}}

—as the air-taxi swooped down.

Hovering at the plaza's edge, it raised its gull-door as Karyn thumbed her bracelet's cred-transfer. Grabbing her holdall, she slid out. Within seconds, the taxi was airborne; she stepped back to watch its soaring ascent.

“Watch out!” The shout coincided with a bark behind her, and Karyn jumped.

Wolf.

Huge and glowering, the timber wolf growled, silver highlights playing across its ceramic cowl. Behind the beast, a visored man roundly cursed Karyn.

“Stupid cow!”

Karyn stepped to one side, holding her bag in front of her. Two heads, human and lupine, turned in perfect synchrony, following her motion.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn't see you there.”

“No kidding.”

The wolf's growl deepened, threatening.

“An accident.” Karyn swallowed. “Really. My first time here.”

The man removed his visor.

“I can see that.” A smile twisted across his face and was gone. “In a manner of speaking.” Ripples of frozen scar tissue filled his eye sockets. Temple-mounted i/o ports clicked as he refastened the visor. “Spacer's outfit?”

“Er, yes.” Karyn had removed her jumpsuit's UNSA insignia. “I'm Pilot Candidate Karyn McNamara. Very pleased to—”

“Bitch!” Real venom in the blind man's voice. “Damn you to hell!”

She could only watch as the symbiotic pair stalked away across the plaza, muscles bunched with fury.

“Jesus Christ!” Her own shoulders were knotted with tension. “This'll be even harder than I thought.”

It was five tendays—half a hectoday—before Tom received any contact with the world he had left behind. Fifty days in which he learned the Ragged School's immediate lessons: which of the bigger boys to avoid, how to insinuate himself into the crush for meals, when it was safe to bathe in the gel-bloc.

During breaktimes, the cavern fronting the school became a lightball court and tagfight pit all in one, while Tom would sit quietly to one side, infotablet hidden, working on poetry or strategy algorithms in his head. He had replayed the first module many times (though never without a sickening sense of vertigo at the sight of Terra's open sky); yet he could not download the next module without solving its initial problem.

A ring of men, seated at a circular table. An empty bowl before each. In every gap between the grey-robed diners, a single chopstick lay.

One morning, when Zhao-ji was playing solo smartball nearby, a large praefectus snagged the ball from the air. Tom was only half paying attention, still thinking about the problem which would lead him to the second module.

At the table's centre, a full bowl of noodles. Each man would need two chopsticks to retrieve food.
QUESTION: HOW DO THEY EQUALLY SHARE THE MEAL?

“Hey, little slit-eyes.”

Two more praefecti came up. Each of them was twice Zhao-ji's size.

“On your knees.” They laughed as Zhao-ji sank, obeying their command. “And beg, you little yellow—”

Tom thought his first answer had been efficient:
THE LEADER COMMANDS THEM TO EAT IN TURN
. But the algorithm had been rejected because…

Zhao-ji sprang up, arms flailing at the three youths, and pummelled away—

Tom, frozen, could only stare at them.

—until the biggest of them stepped back—“Destiny!”—and squarely kicked Zhao-ji in the groin.

Zhao-ji dropped.

They let the ball fall to the ground and walked away, shaking their heads. Tom, shaking, walked over to Zhao-ji.

“Leave me alone.” Hunched foetally, hands between his legs. “Just go.”

Tom went inside, ignored by the on-duty praefectus who should have stopped him: he had earned respect by proxy, from Zhao-ji's mad bravery.

But I was too scared to help.

Always the same. Always the bigger ones, the strong ones, abused their strength.

But in the puzzle world of his downloaded code, such concepts did not apply.
THERE IS NO LEADER
, it had told him, rejecting his first solution.
THE DINERS ARE EXACTLY EQUAL.

Scared.

TRY ANOTHER STRATEGY
.

That evening, Tom went alone to feed Paradox, while Zhao-ji lay alone in the dorm, silent in his pain.

TRY ANOTHER STRATEGY
.

Magister Kolgash Alverom—known as “Captain Kolgash” or merely “the Captain” to the boys—was hook-nosed and possibly one-eyed: a black inverted-triangle patch was permanently fastened where his left eye should have been.

“Again, boy.”

“Balakrane,”
Tom recited. “
Balkerina, baelkrenitsa
…” He rattled through a hundred Laksheesh terms for cargo: nuances bespeaking dumb containers or smartbugs, small bundles or large sacks, their mode of transport and stacking-algorithms.

Tom was in the alpha group, and that meant logotropic enhancements, administered in the Captain's study. Always, it was the Captain's clawlike right hand, from which three fingers were missing, that held out the femtocyte injector for the boys to take.

“Good.”

White fingerbone, toppling into the swirling liquid—

“And the rest?”

An ancient equation:

“Concentrate, boy.”

The sound of waves, breaking against a shore.

“Talk to me, Tom.”

Sapphire sky, and a lone bird flying.

“Tom?”

A screech as it descends, falling upon its prey
…

Burst of light, pungent fumes inside his nostrils. He snapped back into reality.

“Are you all right?” The Captain's hawklike features showed concern.

“Yes, sir.”

Synaesthesia flash: he knew what it was. Caused by his sessions with the downloaded code?

“Keep visualizing, or the routines lose plasticity.”

“Sir.”

“—a disgrace.” The woman's voice, coming from the doorway, was familiar. “What are you doing to that boy?”

Tom whirled.

“Trude!”

“Tom…I can only stay for a while.”

They chatted, in fact, for hours, while the Captain served daistral but otherwise remained unobtrusive. Finally, at Trude's invitation—her expression becoming grim—he drew an old graphite chair forward and sat down to join Tom and Trude.

“You're dispensing logotropes.” She brushed back a long, white-grey lock which had escaped her mandelbrot scarf. “Do you know what you're doing?”

Tom held his breath. No-one talked to the magisters like that.

“Belageron Class-4 protocols.” The Captain's voice was matter-of-fact. “With quick-dispersal tetani matrices and bipolar potentiators.”

“What?” Trude's tone was scathing. “You'd put the fear of death into—?”

“Oh, no.” The Captain shook his head. “Not military grade: I've reduced the apoptotic inhibitors. Weakened the time gradient.”

“You tailor them yourself?”

“Quite.” A grim smile. “I learned how, under pressure…some time ago.”

Trude looked at him, expressionless, then turned away. “These boys aren't fighting for their lives.”

“No,” said the Captain. “But for their futures, even this far down. For the lucky ones.”

When her time was up, Tom escorted Trude as far as the outer court, where she embraced him.

“For this stratum—” she began. Then, “The school's better than I thought.”

“It's OK.” Tom smiled, deliberately. Trude had done her best.

“Now I've two reasons to come and visit,” she said, surprising him, then turned and walked away without a backward glance.

“How many times d'you pull the weasel, Kreevil?”

Rainbow dragon, writhing in the air above the lanky boy's bed.

“In one night, I mean.”

Tom started. For a moment, he thought he had seen his old nemesis Stavrel, standing in the arched doorway. But it was Algrin, whose reputation was known throughout the Ragged School.

Kreevil's dreamy voice—“Up to seven times”—was almost lost among the sniggers.

Only Zhao-ji was impassive, sitting cross-legged on his own bed. He had warned Kreevil not to try the psychflash—femtofeed and holostrobe—knowing that the others would take advantage of its truth-serum side-effect, but it was white-haired Petyo whose will had won the day.

From the doorway, Algrin laughed: muscular, and with just the same cruel expression Tom remembered from his market days when the disfigured Stavrel had taunted him.

More laughter. Only Petyo—the only one of Algrin's gang in the alpha group, and therefore resident in this dorm—did not join in.

I should have stood up for Kreevil.

Always the strong forcing their will upon the rest.

TRY ANOTHER STRATEGY
.

The glowclusters dimmed, and Algrin left before the night praefecti strolled past. Everyone went to their own beds. Kreevil moaned, but slid from flashtrance into sleep.

ANOTHER STRATEGY
.

Beneath the bedcovers, Tom brought up the infotablet's display, minimizing its size and disabling audio.
Round table, grey-robed diners. Single chopsticks in the gaps between them: thirteen men, thirteen chopsticks.

Opening a code volume, Tom entered design algorithms by gesture alone, working furiously. Then it was done.

The simulation executed.

Each diner modelled as a separate entity, an autonomous control process, choosing right or left at
random
—a matter of context: can randomness exist in a predetermined universe?—then waiting for the chopstick on the other side to become free.

The tiny figures moved. One helped himself to food
…

People acting in parallel. No slave, no master.

EVALUATING
…

Tom tweaked the design, avoiding deadlock whenever two reached for a chopstick at the same time.

OPTIMIZED
.

It was a very
democratic
paradox.

USE THE NEEDLE TO DOWNLOAD MODULE TWO
.

Solved it.