Context (77 page)

It allowed Tom to treat entangled
particle-pairs as twin pointers—hidden variables of a very particular kind—to
the same underlying state in ur-space: a concept which had nothing to do with other
spacetime continua and everything to do with reality’s deepest nature.

At any other time, such musings
would be purely intellectual games. But in the world of espionage and quantum
cryptography, the ability to hack reality, using metavector iterators to tease
apart entangled states, was a useful technique indeed.

In the arcane subculture of the
codebreakers, Tom was something of a hero.

But,
on this particular day, it soon became clear that Jay’s reasons for talking to
him had little to do with logosophical expertise. It was his newly upgraded
security rating that interested Jay.

‘You’re cleared for code-gamma
ops now, aren’t you, Tom?’

‘But this is code-alpha’—Tom
delivered the old joke with a straight face—‘so now you have to kill me.’

‘Right…’

Tom had already taken more than
one pensive agent through tactical scenarios, using intricate holo models of
distant locations with observation points (or in one case a sniper’s kill-zone)
clearly marked and annotated.

‘I’ve a favour to ask.’

‘All right, Jay. Whatever you
need.’

Behind his desk, Jay doodled in
the air, creating abstract holos, while Tom waited. But it was not until Jay
had caused the garish, morphing shapes to float around the chamber -appearing
to bounce off the stark walls—that he sighed and came to the point.

“There’s a woman...’ Jay began. ‘Chaos.
You’ve no idea how hard this is.’

Tom managed not to laugh.

‘If it’s advice you want, old
chap, I’m not sure—’

‘I’m talking about a mission
briefing, if that’s all right with you.’

Tom looked at him carefully. ‘Go
on.’

‘Her name is Lihru. Her target
zone is Jephrin, and she’s due to go in within the tenday.’

‘I’m sorry? Jephrin?’

‘In Realm Ruvandi, about twenty
klicks inside the border.’

‘But that’s—’

‘Deep in Blight-occupied territory,
yes. It makes the access routes complicated, but they’re all worked out, and
there’s a network in place ...’ Jay’s voice trailed off.

‘You’re involved with this woman,’
said Tom.

‘Yes, I—’

‘And you don’t want to be her
briefing officer.’

‘I don’t think it’s appropr— Damn
it, Tom. I can’t send her in, knowing ... I just can’t, that’s all.’

Tom wondered what Elva was doing
now. Was she, too, in some occupied realm, in constant danger of discovery by
forces of the Blight?

‘Of course I’ll do it’

‘Thank Fate.’

Later, Tom found himself brooding
on the notion of hyperego formation, as mentioned by Sylvana’s cousin, Brekana,
when he had just arrived at the Academy. Surely it was no conceit to consider
modern people superior, better integrated than their ancestors. Yet perhaps
they retained their capacity for self-delusion. For some part of Tom was surely
aware there was more to Jay’s request than a prematurely ended love affair, or
a natural concern over a comrade’s safety.

Back
in the more open parts of the Academy, an unusual melancholy settled on Tom.
There was a seminar he was supposed to prepare for, but instead he sat in a
deep lev-chair at the edge of the instructors’ common chamber, where gentle
holoflames flickered with simulated warmth in illusory braziers, soft music
played, and a solitary glass bird circled slowly below the ceiling.

Tom brooded over the first,
tentative stanzas of a new poem:

ENTANGLED LOVE

Where deep beneath the strongest
crests

Of wave-equation Fate creates —

The startled glance, the love
that binds
—

Two souls in matching
eigenstates.

‘... with us, Tom?’

‘I’m sorry? What was that?’

When Fate without remittance
splits

The tangled pair a world apart;

Yet links them true with bonds so
great

That each one beats the other’s
heart.

‘We’re going to a conversazione.
More like a historical lecture, really.’

It was Anrila, a young Lady who
was a fast-track instructor in psychomanipulative strategies, and her perennial
companion, Zebdinov Krimlar. He was bearded, with wild red hair—and a commoner
by birth.

In any other milieu, their open
association would have been unthinkable.

‘Forbidden knowledge,’ said
Krimlar. ‘History and stuff.’

‘Like what us commoners’—Tom
pretended to snort in a disgusting way—‘ain’t supposed to know, like?’

‘That kind of thing, yeah.’
Anrila let out an exaggerated sigh, then giggled.

Tom forced himself to smile. ‘It
sounds irresistible.’

Historical
Society though this might be, the speaker’s sources seemed to draw more from fanciful
ancient literature than any objective account.

Seated near the back of the small
lecture hall, among an audience of some two dozen people—mostly young, but with
a handful of older, watchful men—Tom allowed the words and holos to drift
through his awareness, ignoring minutiae.

This Lihru — I wonder what she’s
like.

It was foolish of Jay to have
become involved with an operative, but what recrimination could Tom give? He
himself was staking everything on a remembered vision granted by a dead Seer whose
true nature remained enigmatic.

Elva... What are you doing right
now?

She could be in any realm of
Nulapeiron; any realm at all.

What can you see? What do you
feel?

He shook his head.

‘Xiao Wang’s commentary’—the
speaker, a smallish grey-bearded man with an excitable manner, moved around the
low stage—‘is an exciting mix of factual account and dramatic narrative. This
marriage of forms, while both intriguing and compelling, makes it difficult for
the serious scholar to ...’

Tom tuned out the words.

Among the audience, only Zebdinov
Krimlar, his red hair prominent, seemed to be of common origin, like Tom
himself. Tom would bet that the rest were noble-born.

‘For those not familiar with the
text…’

To himself, Tom smiled.

Aged fourteen, within the
parochial, inward-looking Salis Core, in a humble stratum of Darinia Demesne,
he had read a bootleg copy of Xiao Wang’s
Skein Wars:
a riveting account
of distant events one thousand Standard Years before. He had worked his way
through that massive work in a single rest-day.

Seventeen years later, he could
recite it almost word for word.

They
were the Luculenti élite, small in relative numbers, but the controlling force
on the rich, half-terraformed world of Fulgor. Their brains—using archaic pre-logotropic
femtotech—were enhanced via plexcores: processors implanted in their bodies,
initially as
tabulae rasae,
into which their minds extended.

They knew the dangers of
too-large plexcore-arrays, even though emergenics had not yet developed into a
mature discipline. The number of plexcores per individual was strictly
regulated by law.

But every epic needs a villain,
and the deadly Rafael fulfilled that role.

Vampire-like, he preyed upon
living minds, and the plexcores of the dead: sucking out their private thoughts
and memories, their deepest feelings; deepscanning into his own array,
heisenberging the originals to Chaos.

His plexcore array was vast—secreted
processors scattered across Fulgor—and his abilities grew accordingly. And yet,
he was killed, by an unknown Terran whose name did not survive.