Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (7 page)

THIRTEEN

EARTH, 2034 AD

Lucas and Jacqui trailed Gus and her friend Ives into the Mexican restaurant. At a table just inside the door, a stocky, grizzled, bearded man was telling his grey-haired female companion: ‘A galaxy is like an M&M. The sugary coating is a dark matter halo.'

‘And the central black hole,' the woman asked, ‘is the chocolate centre?'

Jacqui looked at Lucas and winked.

‘No, see, there's a hundred billion stars, order-of-magnitude approximation' – the man might look like a lumberjack, but he answered much as Lucas might have – ‘making up the whole of the visible galaxy. All of that is your chocolate centre.'

‘But I thought there was a—'

‘You've then got ten per cent of the stars comprising the bright bit in the middle, your actual galactic core. That would be like a tiny lump inside the M&M, at the centre of the chocolate. And the black hole would be microscopic. Smaller, in fact.'

Only in Pasadena.

Actually, come to think of it, any university town.

As the four of them were shown to their table, Jacqui said, ‘Seems like your kind of place, Lucas,' and Ives smiled at them both. He was very tall, elegant in a tweed jacket with an honest-to-goodness bow tie whose spots were tiny spiral galaxies. He was also Gus's oldest, closest friend.

Once they were seated, the waiter came over for their drinks order. Ives stared up into the young man's eyes while
discussing his choice in soft Spanish. After the waiter had left, Gus said: ‘He's too young for you, darling,' prompting Ives to answer that he knew as much, darling Augusta, but the truth was that she was jealous.

‘I hate it when you're right,' she told him.

Ives was a mathematician, a topologist with a sideline in topoi logics, a very different field, whose work on knots had once threatened to revolutionise both string theory and M-theory, by taking a traditional approach to analysing knots – focusing on their context, known as not-knots, and who says mathematicians have no sense of humour? – and applying it to the hyperdimensional twists known as Calabi-Yau manifolds. As a visiting lecturer in Oxford, during a sabbatical from MIT, he had befriended a precocious young student called Augusta ‘Gus' Calzonni, and their collaboration produced both the computer game that kick-started Gus's fortune – Fractal of the Beast – and her mu-space theory which, if mu-space turned out to be physically real instead of purely mathematical, might some day revolutionise humanity's place in the universe.

Waving fingers, before his eyes, jolted Lucas back to Earth.

‘—images in your head,' Gus was saying.

Holy crap
.

His stomach rocked as his eyes refocused.

‘Eyeballs triangulate on a point in space,' explained Ives, ‘when you're strongly visualising. It's a shock when some bad person' – he patted Gus's hand – ‘breaks up the virtual image like that.'

Gus smiled. ‘Sorry, Lucas. You were miles away, and I couldn't resist.'

‘It's because of the entorhinal cortex,' said Ives, ‘And the neurons forming the spatiotemporal array inside it, which are geometrically quite fascinating.'

‘Feynman visualised colour-coded equations floating in front of a fuzzy picture of the phenomenon,' said Lucas, referring to his science hero. ‘Like, I asked one of my PhD students
to imagine electrons in a wire, and she saw a glowing white necklace moving along it. They wouldn't really form an exact loop, but it highlights the mutual repulsion, right?'

‘Right, but no one teaches physics' – Gus pointed an emphatic finger – ‘by teaching students to make visual hallucinations.'

‘Exactly,' said Lucas.

‘Exactly,' said Gus.

Ives looked at Jacqui.

‘Hobby horses,' he told her.

‘And soap boxes.'

‘They really can't help it.'

And that would have been that, a friendly meal spiced up with badinage and banter, a touch pretentious but balanced by self-mockery, had not a stranger approached their table: the grey-haired woman who had been sitting near the door. The stocky bearded man, still seated, looked furious.

‘Dr Woods?' She addressed Lucas directly. ‘My name's Amy, and I'm a medical researcher, and I'd really like to talk to you. Just for a moment.'

If her lumberjack friend caused trouble, Lucas hoped that Gus would deal with it – of everyone at the table, she was the one who knew how to fight. The lumberjack looked to be in his late fifties, one of those guys who got tougher as they aged.

‘This thing' – the woman, Amy, held up a small silver device – ‘is a DNA sampler, online to a wide-array sequencer in the Cloud. It only takes seconds.' She looked at the others, then back at Lucas. ‘I guarantee to destroy the results afterwards. Delete the data.'

The logical response was refusal, but the bearded man was approaching, looking about to intervene, and some devilry made Lucas hold out his hand and say, ‘What the hell. Why not?'

‘Lucas—' began Jacqui.

There was a pinprick, and Amy nodded. ‘Thank you.'

‘Oh, for fuck's sake,' said the lumberjack.

He had been talking about dark matter and galaxies, hadn't he?

‘If I left it up to you, Brody, we'd never find out.' Amy held up the analyser. ‘Five more seconds, and we'll know for sure.'

As if they had agreed to a countdown, everyone waited until Amy nodded, told this Brody that it was true, and turned the device so Lucas could see its small display. Two strips, labelled
alleles #1
and
alleles #2
, contained clusters of dots. ‘The lower one is yours,' she told him. ‘And look how similar they are.'

‘Very nice,' said Lucas. ‘What the hell are you showing me?'

But Ives had slipped a qPad out of his jacket, and finger-gestured to transfer data from the analyser to his own device. He tapped away, and touched his collar to enable a throat mike, allowing subvocal commands.

‘Amy, grow up.' The lumberjack was practically growling. ‘This is unnecessary. We gotta go.'

‘Maybe,' said Amy, ‘you should introduce yourself.'

‘Sod off.'

You could hear it now: the man was English, underneath the Americanised accent.

‘Perhaps' – Ives pushed his chair back, allowing him space to cross his legs – ‘I might be allowed to summarise the results. I'd like to introduce,' he went on, gesturing toward the lumberjack, ‘Dr Brody Gould. And over here, Dr Lucas Woods.'

This Brody was frowning, and Lucas felt himself do likewise.

‘Bloody hell,' said Gus, craning to see the qPad. ‘Lucas, you won't—'

‘What is this?' asked Brody. ‘A sodding soap opera?'

‘Your brother,' Ives told Lucas.

My—?

He felt Jacqui take his hand, heard her telling him to breathe.

‘Half brother, to be precise.' Ives directed his attention to Amy. ‘You've livened up everyone's day, as I'm sure you've noticed.'

Then Gus took command, as was her privilege and habit.

‘Waiter? Two more chairs, please. Brody and Amy, you'll join us.'

And so they did.

An hour later, Brody and Lucas had yet to shake hands. A big mitt like that could crush Lucas's fingers. But it seemed Brody would never use his strength against Amy, which was how she had been able to go against his wishes. ‘High school sweethearts, is what we are,' she told everyone at the table. ‘Met in London, when my Dad was working there. Brody got stuck with me then.'

Lucas rubbed his face.

‘Tell me again,' he said to Brody. ‘How come you knew, and I didn't.'

‘My dad – our dad – never married my mum. Sort of childhood sweethearts that
didn't
work out, eventually. He was well out of the picture, as far as Mum was concerned,
my
mother, when he hitched up with yours.'

Brody was in his late fifties, older than Lucas by over two decades, old enough to be an uncle rather than a brother. Half-brother.
But Dad was in his forties
, thought Lucas,
when he met Mum
. She was a grad student at the time.

‘Plus there was Granny Woods's war work,' Brody went on. ‘All that sneaky-beaky stuff, as Mum used to call it. And
her
mother, Granny Gould, worked there too. They were best friends, but our father didn't know anything about it, because of the secrecy regs.'

Lucas was going to need diagrams and notes. He ordered a second cappuccino – they were still at the same table, meal and coffee over, while most of the other tables had emptied.

‘What secrecy regulations are we talking about?'

‘The thirty-year rule and all that. Bletchley Park. Until the 1970s, no one knew what went on there. Our father, Carl, was totally ignorant about it. Granny Woods told
me
back in, what, 1989?'

‘Yes, because that was the year we met,' said Amy.
‘Forty-four years ago. And I remember your Granny Woods. She was wonderful.'

Yet again, Lucas felt Jacqui squeeze his hand. So much was changing: his father was not his alone, while even Brody's partner knew the grandmother who – presumably, if none of this was a hoax – had sent a message from the past. If it
was
her.

‘She was Gabrielle Woods,' said Amy. ‘Lovely place in Chelsea. Previously known as Gabby. Your gran, I mean. Not the house.'

How had the mysterious letter been signed? Oh, yes.

So here was the first inconsistency in—

‘Except,' said Brody, ‘she was really Fräulein Doktor Gavriela Wolf, and I think she escaped from Germany, but I never quite got that part of the story.'

‘Oh,' said Lucas.

There had been intermittent periods of silence, and another descended now. Finally, Gus announced that she had a break-fast meeting at her Seattle plant in the morning, and preferred to travel today in good time. As disappointed blinks appeared around the table, she added: ‘So I'd take it as an honour if you could all travel with me, and keep the family atmosphere going. The Lear's at the airfield, and the limo's big enough for all of us.'

‘Bloody hell,' said Brody.

Lucas knew the feeling. He too thought of Gus as a scientist, rather than a businessperson with astounding wealth.

‘One grows used to it,' drawled Ives. ‘All this tedious luxury.'

Everyone laughed. As they stood up to leave, Ives looked from Lucas to Brody and back.

‘You know,' he began, ‘I always like to judge a man by his eyes . . .'

‘Er,' said Lucas.

‘Um,' said Brody.

‘ . . . And
your
eyes are identical, the two of you. Or am I the only to notice?'

‘He's right,' said Jacqui, and Amy nodded.

‘He's always right.' Gus slipped her arm inside Ives's. ‘But I forgive him anyway.'

They ambled out to her limousine.

FOURTEEN

LABYRINTH, 2604 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

Rhianna moved with the ferocity of a fighter, not the elegance of the dancer her mother once wanted her to be (as daily recreation, at best an avocation – Rhianna's future as a ‘proper' working Pilot was always the main goal). There was a difference: in most aggressive moves the power starts from the big toe and whips wave-like through the body, raw and violent.

Today she punished the flowmetal mannequins with elbow strikes and knees, with whirling kicks and punches both long and close-in, smashing the figures into the ground with fast-flowing throws: beating them over and over again until the rage came under control; and then she stopped, commanded the mannequins into immobility, and walked back and forth inside the shining hall currently configured as her dojo.

Within fifty seconds her breathing and heart-rate had slowed almost to normal.

I should've killed that fucking Gunnarsson
.

Following up the reports, she had finally interviewed the idiot in person, working alongside Clayton who
was
professional – no wonder Max had come to trust him – and all they had learnt from Gunnarsson was that civilisation would be safer if some people were killed at birth. Not only had he allowed Schenck's ship to fly to Fulgor and leave unchallenged – and what the hell was Schenck doing there? – but Gunnarsson had subsequently fired on and killed the Zajinets who rescued Tannier from Molsin.

Shit shit shit
.

Helsen free, Schenck free, renegade Pilots en masse, Fulgor
a hellworld and new data coming in from Molsin that had Uncle Max worried. Everything she had learned from Roger Blackstone's subconscious mind, all the far-future dreams he had no conscious memory of, was coming dangerously true. One dead world at least, and probably a second, formed compelling evidence.

After the Gunnarsson interview, having relocated to an officers' mess within the Admiralty's Orange Zone – where classified matters could be discussed, up to a point – she listened as Clayton told her about the white-and-red memory flake sent through from the past, from half a millennium ago, identifying the galactic anti-centre as the direction from which the darkness was advancing. Strange evidence, but consistent again with Roger Blackstone's dreams.

‘And Max is happy with you telling me this?'

‘If he weren't, I wouldn't be telling you.'

‘Fair enough.'

At the back of her mind was a humbling thought: the galaxy was vast, as was its (literally infinite) corresponding volume in mu-space; yet both were lost in the greater immensity of their respective continua. Even in realspace, galactic clusters and superclusters were separated by cosmic voids, and the timescales on which the darkness operated went far beyond the limits of human intuition: hundreds of millions of years at the barest minimum. If it operated according to some hyper intelligent purpose, how much further could that intellect – or myriad intellects – develop over the aeons?

She wished she could dismiss these notions as delusion.

‘And the Zajinets.' While Clayton was here, it was worth picking his brains. ‘You think they'll retaliate?'

‘What, you think they won't?' he said. ‘If they'd hit us sooner, I'd have been less worried. If they're massing for an all-out strike, I hope Max knows about it, because the rest of us don't.'

From the open area of the mess, a murmuring grew. Rhianna and Clayton looked at each other, then popped up
urgent bulletin holos and saw what was causing a stir: the reappearance of a big name from the past, Admiral Dirk McNamara, back into mean geodesic timeflow after another relativistic flight. He had been missing for decades, had aged perhaps minutes.

Rhianna knew that young Roger Blackstone was one of the few Pilots to have talked with the famous Dirk's mother, the reclusive Ro, who used slowtime layers of reality to likewise absent herself from normal timeflow. Some people, Rhianna thought, just had to discover how the future played out: given the capability, they could not resist the urge. Or perhaps these two simply hoped someday to find out what had happened to the mysterious Kian, Dirk's disfigured twin, long lost but rumoured to appear from time to time, guiding Pilotkind to peace.

Some hope, these days.

‘The First Admiral's son,' said Clayton. ‘Back from the dead yet again.'

‘He killed the first Admiral Schenck, remember.' Rhianna clicked her fingers to dismiss the holo. ‘Be nice if he could manage the same for the grandson.'

It was of course a landmark on Borges Boulevard: the volume of spacetime asymptotically approaching eternal stasis, inside which Schenck, loser of the duel against Dirk, was torn apart in the moment of death for ever.

‘I read once,' said Clayton, ‘that the tragedy of Dirk McNamara was the continuing absence of war. Maybe he's about to come into his own.'

Pilotkind had never produced a great military leader – had never needed one. Most would say that was a good thing.

‘No realspace culture has managed to stay peaceful throughout its existence,' said Rhianna. ‘Why should we be any different?'

Away from the Admiralty, this might have been idle conversation; but in these surroundings, it carried import. The idea of Labyrinth going to war was frightening; the idea of
Labyrinth losing was pure abomination.

Fighting is bad, but when it becomes inevitable, one thing is necessary above all else.

Winning.

There was no such thing as telepathy, not as portrayed in weak-minded realspace holodramas, but Uncle Max on occasion came frighteningly close. For a time they sat on low, soft chairs at an oblique angle to each other, the cream cat on Rhianna's lap and the ginger-and-white on Max's, and it was pleasant even though it felt like play-acting, because they were not a normal family – to the extent the concept made sense in Labyrinth – and as an agent, the only extra privilege she might expect was this: if he were going to throw her to the wolves, he would tell her in advance.

But the hint of mind-reading occurred when he asked, with one hand on the tomcat's back, whether Rhianna spent much time dwelling on the nature of past, present and future, a mystery that was never resolved, merely recast as ever more intriguing questions as scientific knowledge progressed.

‘Like destiny and predestination?' she said. ‘Why ever do you ask?'

Alert for minutiae of expression that might indicate Max knew all about Roger's dreams – that there had been surveillance in place when she worked with Roger on Deltaville – she detected no particular subterfuge when Max answered: ‘Just natural thoughts, because of a new world that's opening up. A very philosophical culture, although
philosophy
is not quite the right word. They have some interesting linguistic terms for knowledge, epistemology and research.'

‘How very . . . academic, Uncle Max.'

‘All right.' He smiled, gently stroking the cat with one huge hand, his forearm muscles like load bearing cables. ‘I've a strong strategic interest in Nulapeiron, but there's something else I want to talk through first.'

Holos blossomed in a semi-circle in front of Rhianna. On
her lap, the cream-coloured cat twitched her ears. The central holo caught Rhianna's attention: Haxigoji shuffling into place, as if to protect a Pilot from human security personnel. Other holovolumes showed the event triggering the security reaction: using tu-ring weaponry to blast a young man into oblivion. But there was no mystery in that – not to Rhianna, who had spent a long time on Molsin poring over footage from Fulgor, analysing the appearance of the Anomaly.

‘The Pilot showed initiative,' she said. ‘By the time that bugger's eyes started glowing blue, it would have been too late.'

‘Very astute of you. The on-board personnel took a lot longer to convince, and there are still some legal hoops to jump through before Pilot Goran gets free.'

‘Jed Goran? Roger's friend?'

‘The very one,' said Max. ‘Which is part of how he reacted so fast: he'd seen footage of the young man before. Someone Roger knew.'

‘A coincidence, that he should happen to be there?'

‘More like causal linkages we don't know, but can guess. Perhaps there was even some buried fragment of awareness in Rick Mbuli's mind – that's the dead man – that made him volunteer to be one of the Anomalous components that travelled on Schenck's ship.'

‘That's two nasty thoughts right there,' said Rhianna. ‘That the poor bastards have some human feeling left, and that Schenck transported a bunch of them from Fulgor.'

‘We know his ship went there and left again, and if Mbuli was on board, why not others?'

Rhianna did not say
so you're tightening up patrols around the realspace worlds, and infiltrating their immigration agencies and the like
. Commenting on the obvious wasn't her style; nor was it Uncle Max's.

Speaking of which, what exactly was she missing?

‘Oh, bollocks.' She had never needed to watch her language
in front of him. ‘Now I remember why you're the boss. People here are frightened of you because they don't know you, Uncle Max.'

‘Really?'

‘Yeah, because if they understood how sharp you really are, they'd be too shit-scared to work for you at all. That footage is ambiguous, but this one off to the side is significant.'

Max smiled at her.

‘I guess I remember why you're my favourite niece.'

The holo footage she pointed out was of Haxigoji crowding a flexible tunnel leading to a mu-space ship's control cabin. The field of view was skewed but the Haxigoji's purpose was clear: to prevent one Pilot Guy Holland from leaving his vessel and coming on board Vachss Station. The question was, were the Haxigoji in contact with their colleagues in the lounge where the refugees had arrived?

Or were they simply able to sense that there was something wrong about Holland?

‘Send Roger,' she said. ‘He can check it out.'

Max looked surprised.

‘I genuinely hadn't thought of that. Out of sight in Tangle-knot, and quite out of mind.'

‘He's close to graduating from Phase One. I'd be surprised if he's not acing the course.'

Not guesswork: she had contacts among the staff.

‘It's early to put him in the field, even if he is your protégé.'

‘Go on, Uncle Max. You know you want to.'

They laughed hard then, enough for the cats to look up disgusted, and disappear into simultaneous fastpath rotations. But Max's mood changed again, as he pointed out another option.

‘We could let the word spread, about Haxigoji possibly being able to sense the darkness. Let Schenck get wind of it, and we'll be waiting when the renegades turn up in strength to bomb the planet.'

‘Or keep quiet, and with luck gain a huge advantage, an
entire species with Roger's ability. Instead of relying on a guess about Schenck's strategic thinking.'

It had come to this: discussing the fate of a human-equivalent-species in terms of military advantage, and no hint of ethical considerations. They talked over the implications for a while, then Max turned back to his main objective here, the new world – and experiment in deliberate social engineering – called Nulapeiron.

He came at the subject in a roundabout linguistic way, via the historic distinction between
if
and
when
– in Neudeutsch, significantly,
wenn
and
wann
– and Novanglic's semantic colouring of conditional logic in the sentence construction of
if

then
. It was not the first time Rhianna had thought that a marginally happier upbringing might have produced Max the schoolteacher, a more contented man.

‘The point,' said Max in Novanglic, ‘is the extent to which
then
is temporal. To which logic implies computation. The statement
if it rains, then put on a coat
, implies the ability to test whether it is raining, and afterwards – in chronological sequence – to put on a coat, because otherwise the logic is semantically ill formed. Or is it?'

Rhianna stayed with Aeternum when she answered. ‘Which means computation implies timeflow, and we could spin out nuances for ever in realspace languages.'

‘On Nulapeiron, that's exactly the kind of game that the aristocracy like to play. They're creating a very intellectual élite, or so the reports imply.'

‘And you want me to be an agent-in-place among people like that?' But Max's argument had been subtle, because the point had been to demonstrate to Rhianna that she was capable of following such thoughts, and so suited to the mission. ‘Haven't you got some would-be intellectual who'd feel right at home there?'

‘I don't want someone who'll kick back and enjoy themselves,' said Max. ‘There's a rumour that a certain Count
Avernon – they've already started using such titles – has an interest in some weird and speculative research, and if it were any other world I'd probably ignore it.'

‘And you want someone who can kick ass to get hold of what they need.' Deliberately, she left out reference to herself. ‘Is that the implication?'

‘I want
you
on the mission, because' – with a smile – ‘it's the kind of job you were destined to do.'

Rhianna rubbed her head. Uncle Max could play these games better than anyone. She should have conceded defeat a lot earlier; but of course, he would have been disappointed.

‘What kind of speculative research?' Her question was almost a sigh.

‘Reading the future,' said Max.

Which made it clear: this really was the job she was destined for, that had to be hers alone.

The rest of the conversation involved her trying not to appear too determined to accept the mission, because Max would wonder why, and she really could not explain her thinking, not this time. But in the end, he assigned her officially, and all that remained were the details of briefing and logistics, because she
was
going to fly to Nulapeiron.