Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (36 page)

‘Roger Blackstone is promoted to brevet-Admiral.'

Corinne received that signal as, cursing, she-and-ship flew clear of Labyrinth into a rain of weapons fire that took all their concentration to dodge. Only when they were clear of immediate danger could a part of her mind ask two very obvious questions.

First, what the hell was Whitwell playing at, with such a battlefield promotion for someone so young, even if it was her Roger?

And second, where the bloody hell
was
Roger?

Up ahead, a makeshift squadron, one of many, was forming: some two dozen ships coming together as directed by Dirk McNamara – now there was a real admiral! – so Corinne-and-ship flew to join them. The backdrop was a vast wall of approaching renegade ships, a hundred thousand in the first plane, four times as many crowding behind, eager and menacing and simply overwhelming in their numbers.

Three ships in the nascent squadron of defenders blew up.

Shit.

Ship-and-Corinne hurtled through to take command, leading the survivors along a helical escape trajectory, an avoidance manoeuvre designed to give them time, but doing nothing to immediately hurt the enemy.

This is bad.

Two more ships exploded, either side of her.

We're going to lose.

Corinne sent a determined signal to the survivors.

**
With me, everyone.
**

Her squadron turned to face the enemy.

FORTY-NINE

EARTH, 1989 AD

Gavriela used the joystick to position her wheelchair under her rosewood desk, then opened up the terminal emulation session on her Hewlett Packard while the modem blinked furiously.

She had written code back when most people thought that a ‘computer' was a woman with a calculating machine. To her, ‘data transmission' still evoked images of tape reels and motorcycle couriers; but here she was, at home in Chelsea and talking to a mainframe in Kensington, itself allowing passthrough to CERN.

Using her Imperial login, she accessed the astrophysics server that she needed, typing with her frail, blotched hands. Despite her eighty-two years, she had felt herself to be an old woman only since the stroke.

But she still had her mind, and the richness of memory.

       
$ cd /astro/geoff/heimdall

       
$ grep ‘meson' *

A wealth of occurrences of the word ‘meson' appeared. Using the cat command, she examined the contents of the archived research files.

The surprise was that some of the dates were recent, and she realised that her no-longer-young friend Geoff – some of his former PhD students were now supervisors in their own right – had resurrected the old project, or at least the name, while consolidating new cosmic-ray data with the old. She checked, but there were no new readings from the direction of the galactic anti-centre. No one besides her, then, had seen significance in the old data.

Message in a bottle
.

Edmund Stafford had brought her up to date, and helped her obtain the necessary permissions on the necessary machines. In the world of computing, everything seemed to change so fast; but it was Stafford's musing over the new edition of
The Selfish Gene
that verified her thinking on the best way to send a message into the future.

‘Dawkins is absolutely right in the new foreword,' Edmund told her. ‘The book became the replacement orthodoxy
without
controversy among scientists. It was the theme's
reputation
that later aroused irate discussion, mostly among the clueless. But I heard a visiting biochemist in the Bird and Baby' – he meant the pub where Gavriela first met Rupert – ‘call Dawkins a genetic determinist, which is nonsense.'

Ingrid had kept them supplied with coffee and Bourbon creams, not joining in the conversation, but giving approving looks at the increasingly feminist tone of Edmund's diatribe, as his thoughts leapt from Dawkins to Sagan, then the groundbreaking work of Sagan's ex-wife Lynn Margulis, who first described the origins of mitochondria, the in-cell power-house organelles common to all animal life, and likewise the chloroplasts occurring in plants.

Those organelles, Margulis argued, were the remnants of archaic symbionts, separate bacterial species absorbed but not digested, instead continuing in mutual cooperation.

‘Species can work together instead of fighting,' Edmund said. ‘Maybe if a man had said it, people would have taken the idea more seriously right from the beginning. Like Beatrix Potter proposing that lichen is a symbiotic pairing of two species.'

‘I didn't know that,' Gavriela told him. ‘Is it?'

‘It absolutely is, but the Royal Society didn't think so at the time, which was why she ended up writing children's books instead of becoming a scientist.'

Gavriela might never have applied that thinking to computers, but Edmund made the analogy explicit. ‘In a few years,
people won't remember languages like Algol or RPG,' he said. ‘But bits will still be ones and zeros, and characters will be encoded in EBCDIC or ASCII, or a superset thereof, with TCP/IP at the root of comms. And don't be too surprised if C continues to run, for decades, if not centuries.'

‘To be fair, some things deservedly die out,' Gavriela had said. ‘Remember those one-hand card punches? They used to give me cramps.'

‘I hated the blighters,' Edmund had said, and laughed. ‘And when you only had one chance a day, most likely overnight, for your program to compile . . . These youngsters with their interactive debuggers and the like are just so
spoilt
.'

And there the conversation took a new direction, but his provocative advice remained; and when she later needed practical hints, Edmund helped in that regard as well. Because new technology would retain its primitive ancestors deep inside, like the chemical powerhouses in every human cell, and if mi tochondria could survive for six hundred million years, surely a few words in plain English could last for decades.

Four days later, Gavriela's handwritten note was now a .JPEG file, cocooned in self-replicating code that would someday send a POP message to a recipient not yet born.

As always, she had dozed off from time to time during her work. It seemed inevitable that late in the third evening, she came awake to find that she had typed while asleep, hard-coding the message destination in the source code (based on a nonexistent URL, with a
device
name-value pair that made no sense with current technology), along with the trigger timestamp.

If this code survived, the
send
routine would activate on the ninth of September, 2033, at 07:30 Universal Standard Time, meaning half past eight if they still put the clocks forward in summer, thirty-four years from now.

Or else the stroke made me insane, if I wasn't already.

She opened the image one last time to check.

Dearest Lucas,

How wonderful to have a grandson! My words will seem very strange, since we do not know each other and I speak from your past. Still, I must ask you a favour, and be assured it must be this way. Even banks can fail over time, although it is to be hoped that some familiar names survive, so I am forced to contact you in this indirect way, with the hope that you will feel curious enough to investigate as I tell you
.

Please, my grandson, look under the parquet flooring, in the right-hand outer corner as you look out the window at the park
.

 

Then she closed down everything apart from a monochrome console window, and fired off a shell file that would send out the first generation of her code package. Like organisms, some would survive to propagate while most would die; but it took only one copy to persist in order to count as victory.

Madness, of course.

The Christmas holidays rolled around, and with them came Brody. Her grandson had put on a little more muscle in addition to the massive increase over the summer, extra mass that suited him, and he had grown a first patchy attempt at a beard, which didn't suit at all.

It gave Gavriela and Ingrid something other than the fall of the Berlin Wall to talk about. ‘
Es ist nicht möglich
,' Ingrid would mutter, ‘
dass die Mauer zerstört ist
,' while Gavriela would declare it the death of Communism: ‘
Das Kommunismus ist ja kaput
.' Brody's first term of A-level physics had been too easy, he said, which worried Gavriela a little, because everyone needs a challenge.

He and Amy had joined an astronomy club, which was perhaps an excuse for being together late at night, but seemed also to have sparked a genuine interest in cosmology.

‘I'll give Geoffrey a ring,' she told Brody, wanting to encourage him. ‘Perhaps he can get one of his students to show you the particle accelerators.'

It was a well-established principle of labour and autocracy: pharaohs had slaves, academics had grad students. But when she rang him, Geoffrey surprised her. ‘I'll show you around myself,' he said, taking it for granted that she intended to accompany Brody.

‘Um, I'll need to use the goods ramp,' she told him. ‘Because of the wheelchair.'

‘For you, anything. You can have a dozen chaps bearing you aloft on their shoulders, if you prefer.'

‘Grad students, of course.'

‘Well, yes. Nice to get some use out of the buggers.'

His touch of East London coarseness had the same effect as Ingrid's formality when speaking German: both caused Gavriela to smile, both made her feel at home.

‘I'll spare them the effort,' she said. ‘But I'll see you tomorrow.'

Next morning, they disembarked carefully from the taxi – Ingrid and Brody helping Gavriela in the wheelchair – and went inside with the college porter's assistance. They rode up in a lift with Geoffrey, and as a group of four they poked around inside one of the labs, chatting to a researcher who seemed glad to share his enthusiasm for the work. Brody looked fascinated.

Gavriela drifted away, having a ‘senior moment', before realising she needed the bathroom. Remembering the way, she steered her wheelchair out into the corridor, accompanied by Ingrid.

‘When you die,' Gavriela told Ingrid for the twentieth or the hundredth time, ‘they'll make you a saint. You know that, don't you?'

‘Let's put off the moment for both of us,' Ingrid replied. ‘This door here?'

‘That's the one.'

*

Afterwards, they found Brody in a different lab, left temporarily by himself (which he seemed proud of) after a departmental secretary had dragged Geoffrey away to deal with something.

Brody grinned, showing Gavriela several large colour monitors atop a lab bench.

‘They're running pattern recognition over
your
work,' he told her. ‘And they've found a rare astronomical event of some sort. See?'

To prevent people from switching off the processors in mid-run, someone had put a felt-tip-written label beneath one of the monitors.

Property of Project HEIMDALL. Please leave running.

But this was bad. Someone
had
found her old data of interest. No one was supposed to know what Gavriela had spotted amid the cosmic-ray data. Or did it not matter at this time?

‘Tell me.' Her voice came out as a whisper.

‘Sure, Gran. See here?' He pointed at the leftmost monitor, where among scattered white dots, three scarlet points glowed brightly, forming the vertices of an equilateral triangle. ‘There's the event.'

‘Finally,' whispered Gavriela.

To see them rendered like this . . . It meant she had not deluded herself about the pattern in the data; and if that were true, then perhaps the strangest of her thoughts and actions were founded in reality also.

‘What do you mean, finally?' Brody looked puzzled.

‘Never mind,' she told him, her voice a little stronger.

Then a hard woman's voice sounded from behind her wheelchair: ‘No, I'd like to know. What did you mean by that, Dr Wolf?'

Gavriela used the joystick, rotating her chair. The woman was a stranger, with twists and shards of darkness encircling her head

And death in her eyes.

‘I've led a long life,' Gavriela told her.

But Brody must live.

‘Hey,' he said. ‘What's happened to the screen?'

The image was randomised, just electronic noise.

‘Not the device.' The stranger smiled in a way that made Gavriela shiver. ‘The data's corrupt, including the backups.'

Gavriela had wrinkled hardcopy pages of numeric data in her study at home, but this bitch could not be allowed to learn of it.

‘Too bad,' the woman continued, ‘that you didn't—'

But the door creaked as Ingrid stepped inside, and Ingrid's knuckles cracked as she formed fists, something Gavriela had thought was Hollywood invention. Then Brody was at Ingrid's side, chest swelling as he inhaled, and his newfound muscular strength was obvious.

My guardians.

The woman looked at them, then made a wide semicircle around Ingrid, avoiding her, and left through the doorway Ingrid had entered by.

‘
Scheisse
,' said Ingrid.

‘What was that about?' asked Brody.

Gavriela told him she had no idea.

When Geoffrey returned, he frowned at their description of the woman, having no idea who she might be.

‘She gave me the creeps,' said Ingrid.

‘Because you're a saint,' Gavriela told her. ‘And she was the devil.'

But the informal tour ended without disaster, and at the end, when Geoffrey asked Brody what his plans were, Brody answered: ‘To do research just like you,' and everybody smiled.

Good enough.

Whatever else spun off from today, her grandson – her
first
grandson, the only one she would ever know – was on the right path. She could wish for no more.

*

That night she woke to see a silhouetted figure standing by her bed.

‘I have your papers,' the woman whispered. ‘The meson data.'

‘It does not matter,' Gavriela said, her old-woman voice devoid of fear.

‘You know this is the end, don't you, Dr Wolf?'

The stranger raised her hand, a shadow in the darkness.

‘Everyone dies,' said Gavriela. ‘A hundred per cent. The question is, how much do you live?'

A pinprick accompanied the hand's pressing against Gavriela's neck.

Poison.

Perhaps the woman was KGB – this was their kind of technique – or perhaps she was something else. No matter.

It felt like stone inside Gavriela's heart.

No
. . .

The colour of nothingness was black . . .