Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (17 page)

The World was going to be different now.

TWENTY-FIVE

NULAPEIRON, 2604-2657 AD

For fifty-three years, the system self-identified as Kenna was immobile. It existed as a network of components embedded in a wall deep inside Palace Avernon, itself located in the Primum Stratum of Demesne Avernon, some hundred metres below ground. Then, towards the end of that fifty-third year, Kenna decided that it was female once more.

Her internal computation had upgraded with the addition of neuropeptide-analogues, so that she manifested emotional cognition, the gut-think which comprises a huge portion of human neural processing; and that meant it was time to begin reconfiguring herself into a human personality. Choosing a gender was a major step, so she searched the standard human classification that reduced the choice to only thirty-five options; from among them she picked a feminine-tough trope-complex not dissimilar to the former Rhianna Chiang.

The old Duke Avernon, the first and best of them, would have approved of her choice.

‘Fear is
literally
felt in the stomach,' he had told her once, ‘and heartache in the heart. Peptide flow in organs forms the third nervous system. Descartes would have got it right,' he had added, ‘if he'd said
cogito capioque, ergo sum
. From
capere
, meaning to feel, experience, charm and suffer. A fetching semantic spectrum, don't you think?'

She missed the Duke, such a contrast to the grandson ruling now. Lord Dalgen Avernon (his father had relinquished duchy status, to reduce the demesne's tax liability) of the flighty mind and political ambition, saw himself as worldly-wise, rather than simply worldly.

Or so she thought until she watched him poring over the spacedrone experiment results, the laboratory chambers filled with holo diagrams, with billowing phase-spaces and five-dimensional lattices of linked, glowing equations. Her pseudo-face was embedded in the wall of the largest chamber, but over the years, this Avernon had grown to think of her as a decorative mounted sculpture rather than a cognitively functional, though immobile, cyborg.

She encouraged that notion by remaining silent during his devious political planning sessions.

This new experimental work, however, was based on log osophical research initiated by Avernon's forebears and continued by current members of l'Academia Ultima, which sometimes lived up to its name. The investigation harked back to the old mystery of time's arrow, to the time symmetry of ‘fundamental' equations describing the natural universe, and their failure to identify the three aspects of timeflow: the moving reality of past, present and future. But the work was not just theory and laboratory experiments.

Something odd was happening in the vicinity of Nulapeiron.

The initial results had come from experiments on board drones placed in orbits of different radii around Nulapeiron, orbits chosen almost at random. Some of the results matched predictions, but others showed strange yet consistent deviations. To investigate, the researchers had commissioned more spacedrones – something most people in Nulapeiron would not dream of, given their mental blindspots regarding the uninhabitable surface, never mind what laid beyond – until there were shoals of the things, orbiting at all sorts of distances from the surface, allowing a clear mapping of the phenomenon.

Producing unambiguous readings, but not understanding.

The heart of it was a set of reactions in the spacedrones' cores, which produced the usual spray of short-lived particles and resonances – so far, so good. But in some locations,
there were too many kaons extant. Unexciting to the average person, deeply troubling to the researchers.

An imbalance occurred strongly within a kilometre-wide shell some hundred thousand kilometres from the centre of Nulapeiron; outside of that shell, subatomic reality behaved as normal. But for seven hundred years, that normality had been known to possess an inexplicable feature.

‘Take an electron moving forward in time,' Kenna remembered one of Rhianna Chiang's childhood teachers saying, ‘and try to distinguish it from the behaviour of a positron moving backwards in time – and you'll find there is no difference, so how can you decide which it really is? It follows logically – and is actually true – that subatomic reactions are reversible in time.'

The teacher had shown footage of a smashed egg leaping up into someone's hand and spontaneously reforming.

‘You know I'm showing this in reverse. But only vast collections of particles, like the number of atoms required to make up an egg, show timeflow in their larger structure. At the atomic or subatomic level, footage going forwards or backwards is equally likely.'

At an early age, Pilots were expected to understand time-flow as an emergent property. But there was a twist in the tail regarding realspace, and if an equivalent was unknown in mu-space, that might be only because Labyrinth's researchers had not found it yet.

Because of the startling exception to the rule: neutral kaons and their opposite-spin antiparticles appear to know the difference between past and future. Seven centuries of data backed up that observation.

Now the present Lord Avernon was looking at readings that appeared to show a K° imbalance in the wrong direction, as though time itself were wobbling, as if the present were threatening to flow from the future into the past.

And if he were the one to monopolise the technology accruing from this phenomenon, not only would Demesne
Avernon be a duchy once more, he would become a Lord Primus and probably—

‘Father! My Lord!'

—have better servitors, ones who would know to bar his over energetic son from his private laboratory chambers, even if he had not issued instructions to that effect.

‘What is it?' He gestured the holos into non-existence, because the boy was bright and you never knew what he might notice. ‘Tell me there's a good reason for this outburst.'

‘More an inburst, surely,' said young Alvin. ‘But we've a visitor and you'll never guess what he is.'

‘You're right, I won't guess. Just tell me.'

Alvin looked disappointed for a moment; then he gushed: ‘His name is Caleb de Vries and Mother's talking to him in the Great Hall and he's a
Pilot
, Father. A Pilot!'

If people, deep in their underground strata, rarely thought about the planet's surface, then they had almost forgotten about mu-space and the Pilots who had brought their fore-bears here. Nor was this a culture that had come about by accident; deliberate design ran through customs, politics and language. But of course the Lords and Ladies still, on occasion, dealt with Pilots as required.

So long as the others, the servitors and commonfolk, forgot about the rest of inhabited space, that was good enough. Isolationism was a tool for social engineering, not an end in itself.

Today was nevertheless doubly unusual. Kenna, observing, felt an unexpected excitement.

It had been so
very
long since she had seen a Pilot.

Pilot deVries stood in formal jumpsuit, black edged with gold, with a knee-length black cape that was more than a simple garment: it could if necessary become shield or weapon. For an offworlder, he made a decent job of the nuances in bowing to the correct angle, with leg turned correctly, as Lord Avernon entered the Great Hall. The Lady, from her ornate chair, smiled approval.

‘My Lord,' said deVries. ‘Lady Suzanne was just pointing out your grandfather's work.' He gestured at the holoscape showing in an alcove. ‘A deliberate unbalancing of the golden ratio to produce a visual momentum, combined with a fractal dimension of 1.66 throughout.'

‘Indeed, sir,' answered Avernon. ‘My Lady is privy to more than art appreciation.'

It was an indirect way of indicating he could discuss business.

‘Pardon my intrusion,' said deVries. ‘I gather that you lodged interest in commissioning a voyage, before the Lords Major at the Regional Convocation.'

The high point of that Convocation, some fifty days past, had been the upraise of a servitrix to noble status, by virtue of her enormous self-discipline in using every educational opportunity available, and her superlative work. Now she ruled her own demesne in Penrhyl Provincia: a shining example for every commoner, except that upraise occurred maybe twice a century, no more.

But most of the actual work done during Convocation had been the usual – trade negotiations, strengthening or reshaping political alliances – during which Avernon had indeed lodged a discreet request.

‘Not exactly a mercantile voyage.' Avernon's tone lightened. ‘More along the lines of logosophical investigation.'

‘My Lord?'

‘I'm looking for a sequence of short flights in ever-wider orbits of Nulapeiron. Additional data to build on spacedrone investigations we've already carried out.'

(In Kenna's judgement, the
we
in that sentence was unjustified.)

‘The details are in here,' added Avernon, holding out an infocrystal. ‘Will you be able to carry out the work?'

Pilot deVries took the crystal and scanned it with his tu-ring. ‘Absolutely, my Lord.'

‘Then we're done here.'

‘My Lord.'

As deVries bowed out, his obsidian eyes turned to an ordinary looking patch of wall that formed one of Kenna's thousands of covert optical sensors, and then he winked. Inside herself, Kenna laughed: Pilots were as sharp as ever.

In contrast, Avernon had forgotten or never bothered to realise that Kenna's distributed presence reached this far.

‘Pilots.' Lady Suzanne continued to stare at the grand door-way after deVries had exited. ‘Are we still so dependent on them?'

‘Not so much,' said Avernon. ‘But what would it be like, my Lady, if you could perceive events that were to come? How much power would accrue from such an ability?'

‘None at all, my Lord, if what you saw was your own ruin.'

Avernon blinked several times.

(And again, Kenna was amused.)

‘I'd be interested,' Lady Suzanne added, ‘in how one might engineer such a thing.'

‘It's, um, early stages yet.'

‘And when do you
foresee
those ideas maturing?' Then she laughed and placed her palm on Avernon's arm. ‘Forgive me, love. I'm only teasing.'

‘Yes, well. Of course you are.'

Then Lady Suzanne signalled for the palace steward to attend, and summoned up holo lattices of accounting data – Palace Avernon's upkeep was a complex matter. As her steward stood before her in his white-and-platinum livery, cane of office in hand, he responded to his Lady's questions and gave occasional recommendations, which she accepted. Lord Avernon gave the occasional nod, his attention elsewhere.

(Kenna followed his example, searching the Palace systems for deVries.)

In realtime she saw this: Pilot deVries stopping in a deserted corridor, kneeling on the floor, and keeping that pose as the quickstone whirled and he sank downwards, and out of sight.

*

The person that deVries met four levels down – still within the Primum Stratum, a lower level of the Palace complex – was a thin, hard-faced woman in the clothing of a drudge: an epsilon-level servitrix at best. Except that to Kenna's perceptions, the smartlenses were obvious, and so was the conclusion: the woman was a Pilot living in deep cover.

‘I'm Linda Gunnarrson,' said the servitrix.

‘Caleb deVries.'

‘Let's get my standard report out of the way.'

There was a flash of light from deVries's tu-ring.

‘Got that,' he said. ‘You're doing a good job, clearly. Any concerns?'

‘I don't need the case officer pep-talk, deVries. All I want is—'

‘Working off the sins of the father?'

Gunnarsson flinched. ‘So you did your homework. But my father wasn't— You think I'm after redemption?'

‘I've done the time-distorting hellflight bit myself. But look . . . My sister died on Göthewelt. I don't blame your father for the Zajinet raid, and I sure as hell don't blame you.'

‘Damn you.' Smartlenses do not prevent tears. ‘All right.' She blew out a breath. ‘Perhaps I needed that.'

‘And perhaps I can't imagine the stress you live under, in this place.'

Gunnarsson reached inside her plain garments and extracted a cloth-wrapped bundle. She folded back one corner, revealing a crystalline object. It looked like a spearhead. ‘It came from an archive chamber,' she said. ‘Part of the Palace museum. The stores are filled with old stuff.'

‘Surely they check inventory.'

‘I replaced it with a quartz replica. Here.'

As he took it from her, deVries's eyes widened.

‘Right,' said Gunnarsson. ‘Hard not to feel it.'

‘But it's a forgotten relic? Where the hell could it have come from?'

‘That's going to take Labyrinth's finest to work out.
If
they manage it.'

(Kenna cursed. Whatever she might have been once, her sensors picked up nothing untoward now.)

Then deVries switched his attention back to Gunnarsson's welfare, and she unburdened herself by sharing stressful details of her life, but refusing deVries's offer, clearly genuine, to extract her from Nulapeiron. ‘There's opposition to the status quo,' she said. ‘I've gathered some of them together and the group has a name, Grey Shadows, with an elected leader. Not me.'

Recruiting assets, running networks. Kenna remembered how that went.

Meeting over, deVries ascended to the part of the Palace he was staying in for the duration of his contract. The start date was immediate. Looking exhausted, his sleep-wake cycle clearly out of synch with this place, deVries performed a light stretching routine, ate a frugal meal delivered by a servitor, and went to bed, leaving his cloth-wrapped bundle on the bedside table.

His tu-ring nicely subverted the bedchamber's inbuilt security system, so that it kept watch
over
him more than
on
him. But his espionageware remained unaware of Kenna's system intrusion, subtle and deep: she had had five decades to work on it.