Paradox (17 page)

I love you, Sylvana.

Grey shadows—
attackers!
—and he hurled the black sheet off his body, kicked out, stabbed with his fingertips—

No-one there.

Sylvana
…Fate, had he spoken aloud?

In one corner, a glowing tricon slowly revolved. Shaded apologetic green, it nevertheless required his presence in kitchens-admin right now.

Groaning, he slid from the bed, fought down a curse as his toes knocked against one of his packed bags. The room's illumination grew bright.

Chaos!
Three hours before dawn-light.

Gritty-eyed, he dressed and made his way to the office suite: fluted columns of dark blue glass, a basalt freeform sculpture; Chef-Steward Malkoril blearily sitting in his obsidian chair.

“Sorry, Tom. But the others were working very late.”

“Sir.”

“It's only a food order. But I want you to take a drone, and one of Milran's Dragoons as escort.”

“OK.” Tom was puzzled.

The red-tinged membrane slid across his skin as he stepped inside, followed by a small, gleaming drone. He stopped, drone hovering at shoulder height, and surveyed the guest suite. The young Dragoon trooper remained outside.

“Sir?”

Blue shadows lay across the chamber, and it took a moment for Tom's vision to adjust. Then he could see in the dark, sunken pit at the chamber's centre a bare, emaciated man—lev-bracelets around every joint in his body—floating in the lev-field, ringed by holovolumes cycling through newscasts, political analyses, financial reports.

“Your meal.”

Spittle dripped from the man's slack mouth. The half-lidded eyes seemed to stir, blinking away some of the stupor as he turned in Tom's direction.

“N-nice.” The man's tongue wetly licked his lips.

An Oracle.

“If that's all, sir—Thank you.”

Tom turned and chopped his hand through the air in command to the drone:
remain here.
Then he strode quickly through the membrane.

“Everything all right?” The trooper's expression was open, unconcerned.

“Come on,” said Tom. “Let's get out of here.”

Two hours before dawn-light, but Tom had been out before at this time, in darkness. Every three or four tendays, when insomnia struck, he would rise quietly and do what he did now: get changed, stretch, and make his way to the deserted gallery for an extra run.

Dark grey shadows shrouded the diminishing perspective; the archways were black semicircles receding to infinity.

Tom crouched—

A cough.

—and froze.

“Who's there?”

A scrabbling sound, then: “Sorry, your honour. Meaning no harm.”

“Who are you?”

Tom heard the fear in his own voice, but felt also the buried eagerness that wanted to prove his phi2dao training for real.

In the nearest archway, a dozen lumpen shadows moved, shuffling towards the dismal light. One drew back her hood, revealing a scarred, wizened face.

“Beg your pardon, yer honour. We was ordered to find a quiet place.”

“Ordered?” Tom relaxed: these wretches were no danger to him.

“We're Oracle Palrazin's retinue.” A measure of pride in her voice as she gestured back with a fingerless hand.

“We're not allowed”—it was a hunchbacked, heavily scarred man who spoke—“to stay in official quarters, like.”

“We won't be no trouble,” started another, but then someone at the rear spoke up: “He's one of us. Look.”

There was a strained stillness until Tom understood and straightened up, turning so that the stump of his left arm was visible in the pale grey light.

“He tortures you,” Tom said simply.

The woman looked at him. “Sometimes it takes…extra stimulation…to drag His Wisdom's consciousness into normal timeflow.”

Sweet Destiny!

“Wait here.” Tom forced his voice to remain calm. “I'll come back to you.”

In the kitchen, Tom ordered a macrodrone to stock itself with leftovers from the wedding feast. Then it followed him to Tom's dorm and hovered in the corridor outside as Tom went in.

He quickly transferred all his essentials to one small holdall. There were formal outfits which he could not get rid of, but he packed the heaviest, warmest old capes and tunics, and took them out to the drone.

Then he led the drone back to the shadowed gallery.

“Thanks!” “Bless you, sir…”

As they gathered round the drone, unloading it, Tom gave the
control gestures that would cause it to return to its docking-bay when empty.

I wish I could do more.

Eyes stinging from more than lack of sleep, he walked quietly back to his room to wait for the wake-up signal.

A huge arachnargos with shining thorax—blue/grey, shading to black underneath—bobbed in place, suspended by long tendrils fastened to ceiling, floor, walls.

“Amazing,” murmured Tom.

Beyond, the clean-curved dark-nacre lev-car hovered: the new Lord and Lady d'Ovraison would travel in that.

“What I do to those lazy buggers will be amazing”—the stevedore captain gestured with his chin towards the loading-crews—“if they don't get everything on board before his Lordship gets here.”

“Plenty of time yet.”

Tom felt curiously displaced, exhausted. He had to crane his neck back to stare up at the arachnargos: its shiny underbelly seemed almost to glow with reflected eldritch light as it puckered open, extruded a slender thread down to the stevedores on the ground, and sucked up a bound cluster of penrose cases.

I'm going on a foreign trip.

The excitement mingled with his lack of sleep and his tangled feelings towards Corduven and Sylvana, so that, in a weird state of mind, he took every step carefully, watched everything minutely—

He stiffened.

“What are those?” In the main Talefryn Tunnel, and in some of the smaller cross-corridors, they hung: like arachnargoi, but totally black, with small, teardrop-shaped bodies and narrow, formidable-looking tendrils.

“Arachnabug escort.” The stevedore captain picked his nose, examined his finger, then wiped it across his work tunic, oblivious to Tom's disgust. “One-man bugs. Military.”

“There's a sick-bag, back of the seat.”

The tunnel lurched and twisted, and the bottom dropped out of Tom's stomach as they left the ornate, marbled Talefryn Tunnel and plunged into raw cavern.

“Leaving Darinia Demesne.” The driver's voice, muffled by his helmet, remained even, though the arachnargos control cabin tipped, then levelled. Their velocity increased. “Interdemesne territory for the next fifty klicks.”

“You don't like travelling by arachnargos, do you?”

It was the co-driver who spoke, turning in the bench-seat towards Tom, who was webbed into the small jumpseat on the rear bulkhead. Taking off her helmet, she ran her fingers through her close-cropped hair.

Inside her discarded helmet, virtual holos pulsed with impossible depths: tracking vectors, monitoring the lev-car—with Corduven and Lady Sylvana on board—and the arachnabugs.

“It's my first time in one of these things.”

Tom glanced through the wide horizontal slit of the forward screen. Amid the hurtling craggy buttresses and splotchy fluorofungal patches, the tiny black arachnabugs sped back and forth, criss-crossing the bigger arachnargos's trajectory.

“They're real mad buggers.”

Tom swallowed, holding down bile. “Sounds as if you admire them.”

“They're OK, for soldierboys.” She flashed a grin. “I'm Limava. That's Lanctus.”

“Tom.”

“Nice to meet y—Oops! That was a good one.”

They span to the right, tipped downwards forty-five degrees, pouring on the speed.

Bastard!

“Sure you don't need that sick-bag?”

Tom, teeth clamped together, shook his head.

They stopped overnight in the Burnished Caves: ornate and polished, complex-hued and elegant; gargoyles clustered along its baroque, intricate walls.

Relieved of duties, Tom went for a run.

After a late dinner, the lev-car crew camped out on the crystalline floor, leaving their vehicle discreetly to Lord and Lady d'Ovraison.

The arachnabugs were gone—“Patrolling,” Limava said—and the arachnargos control cabin was quiet, peaceful at the day's end. Lanctus was asleep, softly snoring in his chair.

“Pretty, isn't it?” Limava spoke softly, pointing out at the cavern.

“Beautiful,” Tom whispered.

They watched in companionable silence for a while, then Tom—with an involuntary glance out at the lev-car—excused himself, and left via the cabin's rear membrane.

His quarters were a catwalk overlooking the cargo hold. Wearily, he stripped off and slid inside his sleeping-bag: aching with exhaustion, but knowing he would not sleep.

“Hey, there.”

It was Limava, barefoot and wearing a simple robe—with nothing beneath it.

“Uh, hi…”

She slid the robe down. Smooth, pale skin; strong shoulders; wide, flat breasts; a slight curve to her muscular stomach—

Tom gulped. “I thought, er, you and Lanctus…”

“Don't be disgusting.” She crouched down and pulled back the sleeping-bag. “He's my brother.”

“I didn't—”

“Budge over.”

She slid in beside him.

Over the next fifteen days, Lord and Lady d'Ovraison swam in the swirling, multicoloured mineral pools of Lord Yelthiwar's demesne; saw the bat caverns of Upper Milthenos; watched Countess Relviko's Fire-lancers' combat display; flew lev-gliders along the Rivulet Borehole.

In Ralgakhtan, they listened to the sweetly complex baroque chants of the surgically altered Floating Singers of Kalgathoria; then joined in the MistDance at Ronivere Lake, among pale holowraiths and the Veritas Sprites.

Without wander-access to these foreign demesnes, Tom spent his time in meetings with the host servitors, or confined in the arachnargos, working on the crystal's latest set of problems: he was on the point of solving them, allowing download of the next module.

During working-hours, Limava discouraged intimacy. But every night she came to Tom, though she would slip quietly out of the sleeping-bag later, leaving him to sleep alone.

His dreams were haunted by drowning children.

She killed Sal unintentionally: by her choice of keywords; by her illegal upgrades to his heuristic query-probes, bought while on leave in SingaporeCube.

“Priority A: get all reports on life in mu-space,” she muttered on her way to the shower. By the time she came out, drying herself with a rough white towel, it was over.

The image's voice was flat and uninflected; its expression held a generic polygon-transform blandness:
“I'm sorry.
”

Sal O'Mander's features, but no doffing of the hat, no sardonic smile.

“
I regret to say…
”

“What did you—?”

“…
that this is a non-interactive recording. All instantiations of Sal O'Mander underwent omnithread deletion two point three minutes ago.
”

The use of the third person chilled Karyn: her NetAgent had a sense of self…but this was no longer Sal O'Mander.

“
All template-classes and local snapshots were zapped from EveryWare within ten seconds.
”

Every copy of Sal O'Mander, even the basic template from which he had grown…Lost.

“Who could—?”

Sal's face was gone. In its place, the one/mu/zero prompt of the EveryWare logon display.

“Aw, shit!” Karyn threw her towel across the room.

Why the hell had she never dumped Sal to crystal? But then, who bothered with backups when EveryWare lived up to its name?

“I'm a total idiot.”

It would take months to train up a template to even approximate Sal's versatility…but by then, she—and Dart—would be inhabitants of mu-space, leaving that strange, fractal continuum only to pick up or drop off their cargo: trade goods or passengers deep in delta-coma.

“Power off,” she said, and the logon display winked out.

Poor Sal: killer-flamed by a firewall. That must be what happened
.

Her own damned fault for using a highest-priority command with fuzzy wording. Sal had looked everywhere, following hints and links even to unauthorized black nodes.

She pulled on her UNSA-issue jumpsuit, kicked her chair viciously across the study-bedroom, and headed off to deliver yet another lecture to the too young students who were waiting for her.

Fractal sex.

Like a coastline whose length increased the more closely you examined it: her explorations of Dart's rugged, muscular body grew slower and more powerful, more fundamentally moving, as time drew on and the end of their affair drew near.

Then they took him away for the final stages, while Karyn, in grey despair, received her first nanocytic infusion.

And launch.

She walked out in the pre-dawn, footsteps receding into the endless desert air as she crossed the runway. Its huge shape brooded in shadow above her, and she shivered from more than the cold.

You're taking Dart away from me
.

And in truth, vessel and Pilot would be wired in more intimately than lovers.

Look after him
.

She waited until brilliant sun peeped across the distant purple mesa, dripping molten gold across the vessel's shining cupric hull, lacing fire across Phoenix LaunchCentral. From one of the crystal domes, a white TDV slid onto the tarmac.

Dart was somewhere inside its ceramic carapace.

The TDV, its thermoacoustic drive whispering into stillness, settled down beside the shining mu-space vessel. Mirror-masked ground crew stepped out.

Then the TDV's scorpion tail arced into its body, rose with Dart's white-shrouded cocoon, and deposited him through the dorsal opening, inside his new ship.

Ground crew swarmed over the vessel: they were on a countdown, and the bio-interface procedures were time-critical.

During the process, there was no way to talk to Dart, but they had already said—no, sang mutely with their bodies—their farewells.

She waited in the gathering heat, sickened by nerves or in reaction to the nanocytes, until the ground crew signalled, thumbs up, that the hookups were complete. They waved her on board the TDV and took her back to LaunchCentral.

“You can watch from there.” One of them pointed out a spacious lounge with black leather couches beneath a soaring, aquamarine-tinted glass wall.

The window reconfigured, magnifying.

Karyn watched.

Flicker of blue jet-flame. Rocking on its lev-field.

Then the copper ship was racing above the runway, delta-wings spread, arcing up into the blue-green sky, sparking white/gold as it caught the sun, ascending faster, diminishing, bright dot, was gone.

A SatTrack holo opened beside her.

Soaring ship, darkness of stratosphere, into the orbital reaches and then a white-light crescendo. Transition radiation spilled out into real-space, the insertion four-axis angle optimized, twistors cohered, tunnelled, disappeared.

Subsidiary holovolumes settled down.

Mu-space projection achieved
.

Gone, gone, gone.

“Sorry, Barney. I'm not much company today.”

The dog gave a short bark as though in agreement.

“What he said”—Anne-Marie, the blind woman from the campus registry, patted Barney's powerful shoulder—“goes for me, too.”

Karyn started to get up off the couch, but the room swayed.

Perspectives swung in and out of sensible geometric relationships: fractal-affine transformations crawling in her skull.

“I feel awful.” She slumped back. “Everything I see is—Hell, you must hate me, for what I'm giving up.”

“Maybe.” Anne-Marie's voice was strained. “Perhaps you're trading in one reality for another. A better one.”

“Ha.”

“I've heard tell”—wistfully—“of golden seas of light, black spiky stars…”

“How do you imagine—? I mean, er…”

“I could see a little when I was young.” Anne-Marie's sightless eyes shifted. “I can still tell the difference between a sunny day and pitch darkness,
mais c'est tout.
”

Is that better or worse than never having seen at all?

“The memory remains. And sometimes I dream…”

“Like love? Better to have loved and lost than…” Her voice trailed off.

“Oh, Karyn. It's been only three days. Some maiden voyages last a fortnight until reverse transition.”

Before returning to realspace.

“You've got all the jargon, haven't you?”

“I've worked a lot with UNSA.”

“Ah, hell—”

Anne-Marie leaned across and squeezed Karyn's knee. “It's all right. Really.”

Bloody hell, Dart. If you don't come back, to me, I'll—

She didn't know what she would do.

It had happened twice before.

She suspected it was pheromone-based, but it seemed supernatural: a skin-crawling certainty that someone was the other side of a wall, sensing their
ki
…and then they walked in through the door.

Am I kidding myself?

The first time, she had been kneeling in
seiza
, on her first visit to the Honbu Dojo in Kyoto; then the awesome sense of presence overwhelmed her, about twenty seconds
before
the legendary Harada Sensei had walked in.

Reality had seemed to centre around him, the light to grow brighter.

The second time was in a Manhattan dojo, a converted dance-loft, and she had sensed the half-Filipina, half-Anglo
rokudan
before she arrived.

Karyn herself held merely
nidan
, second-degree black belt…not advanced. But she was sensing it again—

There was a knock on the door.

“Enter.”

A burly shape, half-shadowed from the bright corridor lighting.

“Sensei.”

Mike looked at her for a long moment, then came inside. He had a straight-backed warrior's walk, big hands held loosely at his side.

“Oh, no,” said Karyn. “Not Dart.”

//insert

{commentary.provenance = πσ3ç989/Petra deVries/ personal.journal/
KMcN}

{ [[Vortex.homeostasis = established]]
[[P(phase-transition) = 1.0000]]
[[Recursion level = 10 exp 37]]

It spreads there, a fractal web of recursive patterns, hovering on the verge of self-organized criticality: not aware, not unaware. Somehow, it has been trapped by its own potential…yet something new is happening
.

The universe is a sea of golden light. In it hang black spongiform stars: stellated, fractally riddled with holes
…
and massive. Through the gold, streamers of scarlet and purple denote rivers of interstellar energy.

And the anomaly.

Its tiny copper form, born of unnaturally smooth geometry, is trapped. An event membrane surrounds it, shields it.

Tiny tendrils, offshoots of the main pattern, spread along the membrane. There are sparks, reconfigurations, as the pattern-levels evolve survival strategies in the new environment.

Slowly, slowly, the pattern's nucleus moves closer to the tiny trapped mote.

The vessel is like the tiniest of dust particles, a seed, about to give birth to the storm.

}end-insert//