Context (75 page)

Her weekly messages to Mother and
Gramps were always about work, never about her feelings.

Though Ro had turned away from
other people, she was not blind to those around her. While they could be
arrogant, the researchers were generally pleasant enough among themselves; but
they had a tendency to treat the other staff—the security officers, the
low-grade clerks, the cleaners—as though they did not exist. The nearest thing
to friendship Ro was capable of right now was chatting in the early mornings
with Andreiev (a white-haired military veteran, her favourite among the older
security men) or Lucinda (the big Jamaican overseer of all the cleaning staff,
who had taught herself to program maint-bots) before the researchers came into
their offices and labs.

In the academic brainstorming
sessions she kept strictly to business.

Two evenings a week, thanks to
Andreiev’s intercession, she trained at a hard, no-nonsense gym in
rokupashniboi,
a branch of the brilliant, evolving combat
sambo
practised for two
centuries by Spetsnaz and airborne special forces. The warm-up routines (as in
all Russia athletics) drew from gymnastics and ballet; the fighting techniques
flowed effortlessly from striking to grappling; the sparring was heavy-contact.
Every session resulted in at least one new cut or bruise on Ro’s ever-healing
body.

She had never known there were so
many ways to break an attacker’s neck.

In
the dusty street, silence.

Lean and rangy, with lank, greasy
hair, the gunslinger stands straight. His long coat, a travel-stained duster,
stirs slightly in the breeze. Beneath his stetson, his eyes are narrowed
against the glare.

‘Hey!’ The shout is from an alley
on one side of the street, designed to distract. An accomplice.

[[In reality, Ro jumped with
surprise.]]

But Ranger Shade’s Colt leaps
from his holster almost by itself, and he drills a scarlet hole through his
opponent’s heart before the gunslinger’s pistol is half drawn.

The man spins and drops.

In the alleyway, his accomplice
freezes for a moment, then turns and flees.

‘Stone cold dead,’ murmurs Shade.
‘Another one for you, my love.’

Beside him, a swirling coalescence
of light. Juanita’s ghost slowly forms.

Solemnly: “Thank you, my fine
man.’

Blood, leaking from the
gunslinger s splayed corpse, soaks into the dust.

The observer
[[Ro, her actual hand movements
matching the moment]]
unhitches reins from a rail, grabs the pommel as she
inserts her pointed boot in one stirrup, swings herself up and mounts Querelle.

The ranger does not look up as
the observer trots past.

Piotr,
a senior researcher, stopped outside her open office door, mumbling into his full
beard.

‘Hey,’ said Ro. ‘You got a real
coherence problem,
da?’

He flashed a grin.

‘No kidding, queral-girl.’ Piotr
knew her research’s direction. ‘I’m in two minds about everything, myself.’

‘Ha. I mean,
da.’
Her
Russki was a long way from Piotr’s command of English.

He nodded and carried on, tugging
at his beard, sinking back into his own thoughts.

Decoherence.
To queral-net designers, it was
merely an engineering problem: keeping a true quantum system,
unitary-processing components (working through reversible algorithms: to a
quantum bit, qubit, time is a two-way street) occupying many states
simultaneously, isolated from the macroscopic world, until it was ready to
collapse quantum weirdness and provide the computation’s result to its human
users.

‘But queral computers,’ muttered
Ro to herself, ‘were designed, not evolved.’

It meant that Zajinets’
decentralized nervous systems were messy. It also meant that, as far as she
could ascertain, every Zajinet possessed a minimum of sixteen simultaneous
consciousnesses: emergent properties of smaller daemon personalities—all
thinking and emoting at the same time -whose numbers ran into thousands, maybe
even tens of thousands.

Ten thousand semi-personalities
in the same mind.

Yet they were complex,
overlapping: a Zajinet neuron-analogue (strictly, one of the parallel states of
that one microscopic component) could be part of many semi-personalities at the
same instant.

Ro shook her head.

‘I’ve got to work this out.’

When I talk to myself, who the
hell am I talking to?
Unsmiling,
she kicked back her chair, stood, and headed for Zoë’s office.

Trying not to think of Luís.

<>

~ * ~

40

NULAPEIRON
AD 3420-3421

Half
a Standard Year passed very quickly, with Tom’s own re-training as well as
teaching, as he delved deeply into the logosophical disciplines, relating them
to the theory and practice of warfare—something which caused him many sleepless
nights—in ways he had never done before.

There were times when he could
pretend he was no more than an academic, for he was a scholar-dozent without
military rank, and this was an educational establishment of far higher
standards than he had expected: equivalent to the highest streams of the
Sorites School which had set his mind alight.

But sometimes, when the talk
turned to a weapon’s blast-penetration characteristics or a cipher-logotrope’s
self-erasure command, he would look at his students’ young, earnest faces and
realize that he was asking them to blow apart human beings, or to wipe their
own memory under interrogation by an enemy who would show no mercy.

Yet the more he learned of the
Dark Fire’s spreading, the Blight which dotted the world of Nulapeiron like
some dread disease, the more he feared that he was witnessing the end of human
culture, and the beginning of an age in which homo sapiens submitted to a power
far more evil than any they had served before. Perhaps humankind’s Destiny was
to carry out the Blight’s implacable, indecipherable will; perhaps there was no
other choice.

In the meantime, Tom sent his
young students off to war.

To die.

But
there was another campaign, in parallel with the more obvious military actions,
and that was a covert world: of penetration agents and clandestine support
lines; of entanglement codes and suicide thanatotropes; of long-term
sleepers-in-place, gathering intelligence in occupied realms, feeding back
snippets whose overall import they would never comprehend; of paramilitary
snatch-and-interrogate missions, of sabotage, of strategic assassination.

It was a shadow war which played
by its own rules, or lack of them.

And in that war, the most heroic
actions would go forever unrecorded and unrecognized: the heart-pounding run
through dank shadow-wrapped tunnels with military installation schematics
encrypted in a semi-crystalline tooth, while the Blight’s dark dragnet inexorably
closed in; the delicate conversation steering and eavesdropping, smiling and
nodding at the occupying forces’ stone-faced officers, in polite dinner parties
and soirees where a misplaced word could spell disaster.