Paradox (23 page)

“That's kind.” Tom's voice was carefully neutral.

“Maybe, maybe not.” Lady V'Delikona looked serious. She grabbed his forearm. “Promise me something, Tom.”

“Anything.”

“Remember that you deserve everything you've achieved.” Her voice grew fierce. “What others have handed to them on a plate, you've earned by your own efforts. Believe in your strength.”

“I…thank you.”

“Don't forget. And keep your guard up. A'Dekal's a brilliant logosopher, but a rotten human being.”

“Funny,” said Tom, “how the two don't always go together.”

“That's right.” She tightened her arm in his again. “Except for you and me, babe.”

Her sudden smile was heartbreaking, despite their difference in years, and Tom laughed. Inside, he was deeply moved.

Then she took him out to a small balcony, and left him alone with Lord A'Dekal.

“I looked over the logs, Tom, of your Review presentation.” Lord A'Dekal smiled frostily. “Most intriguing, though not in my area of expertise.”

“Nor up to your standards, sir.” Tom's reply was diplomatic more than truthful. “Your stochastic-certainty cytomatrices are required studies at Lady Darinia's Sorites School.”

“Just so.”

The balcony clung outside a marble-encrusted drawing-room. Below, in a low courtyard, an impromptu lightball game was in progress. Laughing white-shirted Lords, tunics and capes discarded, chased the whining, fluorescing ball.

“Builds backbone,” added Lord A'Dekal. “The noble pursuit. I was in the first seventeen at l'Academia Ultima. Do you play?”

“Er, no.” Tom realized belatedly that he was talking about lightball.

“Pity. Sound mind, sound body.”

“I guess so.” Tom thought of the thousands of hours he had spent running, stretching, practising phi2dao.

“You're welcome to visit my demesne.” Lord A'Dekal's clipped tone made it sound like an order. “Come in two tendays. You can join in the bat hunt.”

“Thank you.”

“I don't suppose you've handled a graser rifle before.”

“No, sir. But hunting doesn't sound like the kind of thing I'd be good at.”

White eyebrows exaggerated A'Dekal's frown. “I suppose not. But you can stay for a while. You'll be welcome to use
all
the facilities.”

Tom stared at the stony-faced old Lord, trying to understand his meaning.

“Any handicap in the sporting arena”—Lord A'Dekal's stern gaze was fixed determinedly on Tom's face—“can be overcome. My medical facilities are superlative; you know of my research.”

He's trying not to look at my stump.
Tom twisted slightly, moving his left shoulder forwards, and the tiniest of twitches plucked at Lord A'Dekal's right eye.

“My femtovats,” Lord A'Dekal continued, “have clone and fastgrow facilities.”

“Ah,” said Tom. “I see. Thank you.”

And he did see.

He can regrow my missing arm.

Cursing his lack of control, Tom glanced down at his abbreviated left sleeve. And when he looked up, there was the subtle, superior light of victory in Lord A'Dekal's eyes.

Of course.
Bitterness flooded through Tom.
We can't have the newest Lord looking like a thief, can we?

The regrowth could be achieved. There would be the long, painful physiotherapy afterwards…but in a few tendays, Tom could be whole once more.

White, glinting. A small teardrop-shape on Lord A'Dekal's palm: an offering.

Tom took the object.

“My Lord?” It pulsed with light: pure white rings, intricately revolving. Tom recognized the emblem now. “You're chairman of the Circulus Fidus, of course.”

“An impartial think-tank,” said Lord A'Dekal smoothly. “Though not without influence in matters politic.”

Tom closed his fist around the holopin.

The Circulus's political philosophy was reactionary. Tom doubted that they favoured elevation of commoners to the noble ranks.

“I'm too new to this level, my Lord, to consider political allegiances. I'd be a hindrance more than a help to anyone.”

“You misunderstand me, Tom. There is no price attached to my friendship. Just visit me.”

Tom regarded those glacial eyes.

You don't have friends
, he thought.
You have allies.

His skin crawled. Had he expected a life of gracious ease and no worries?

Allies. And enemies.

He made his choice.

“I…don't think so, my Lord.”

The expression behind Lord A'Dekal's cold eyes shut down. “I see.”

I could have my arm back
.

But he remembered Lady V'Delikona's words: that he deserved what he had won, that he should believe in his own strength.

My arm.

Lord A'Dekal turned away.

“My Lord…” Tom let his voice trail off, knowing that A'Dekal would think he had weakened. “Thank you, sincerely, for your offer. You've been very gracious to this new Lord.”

A curt nod, then A'Dekal headed back in towards the drawing-room, leaving Tom alone.

Believe in my strength, Lady V'Delikona?

Fist clenched, A'Dekal's holopin digging into his palm, Tom faced out across the courtyard. Raucous laughter from the lightball game below echoed back from the carved ceiling. But he was blind to the sport.

Hatred.

A hard lesson to learn. A bitter one. And he had never realized it, not before this moment.

It's hatred that feeds my strength. It always has been.

It was a moment of black enlightenment, thanks to Lord A'Dekal, which Tom would have preferred to live without. Cold hatred: of the Oracle, of the system that nurtured him.

Tom went in to rejoin the party. But everything was different now.

//insert

{commentary.provenance = πσç989/Petra deVries/
personal.journal/KMcN}

{ [[Vortex.homeostasis = established]]

[[P(phase-transition) = 1.0000]]

[[Recursion level = 10 exp 38]]

Inside the trapped vessel lies a paradox, an oddness. A form of life based on a twin-spiral molecule: a molecule which is simultaneously a chemical factory and a blueprint of itself.

The mu-space pattern
…
somehow, somehow, through some unsettling resonance
…
dimly perceives the intruder's form and function.

How can this be? How can a tool, a factory, be its own design? What could produce such a strange loop? What odd processing could manifest it thus?

The pattern is a maze of scarlet lightning tumbling and twisting through the omnipresent golden sea. Its core now firmly wraps around the strange intruder, but its tendrils spread outwards. Questing, questing
…

It is self-organized criticality. Neither life nor not-life.

A new thing happens. An exploratory tendril meets another nascent pattern, another crackling turbulence. Before, they would have passed through each other without interference. But the intruding vessel has seeded a non-linearity, a growth algorithm
…

The original pattern reconfigures, adapts, plunders the new pattern for its complex inner forms, and moves on. Fragmented whorls of dissipating energy spin off into the golden void, twist apart, and are gone.

It searches for new patterns to learn from: new configurations, new configuration-changing algorithms. Perhaps some algorithm will be subtle enough, shifting and strange enough, to burrow inwards, to pierce the unsettling intrusion now firmly embedded inside the pattern's core.

Searching
…

The questing pattern is not quite alive.

end-insert//

New Year in Paris. Fireworks exploded in the dark night above the Seine, a cascade of brilliant hues, spelling out their message of good cheer:

BONNE ANNÉE!

Karyn sat, chilled, by a riverside table. The other diners sat indoors, inside the twisted labyrinth of mirrors which formed the Café Catoptrique. Carmine and silver liquid light trailed across its polished surface, reflecting the fireworks above.

No sign of Sensei. Hands wrapped around her glass of choco, grateful for its warmth, she looked up and down the embankment for the thirtieth time.

I should be badgering the project managers.
But all her attempts at shifting UNSA bureaucracy had ignominiously failed.

Pointless.

At the centre of her sculpted-mirror table lay a holoterminal core, with a zigzag slot along its side. She stared at it, trying to figure out how one powered it up.

Dart
…

Maybe Mike, Sensei, had just been delayed. If only she could check the arrivals at l'Éspace-Port Barbet—

“
Pardonnez-moi, mademoiselle
.” The young waiter who had brought
her the choco reappeared. “
Il faut acheter un jeton
”—he gestured—“
pour le terminale, vous comprenez?
”

“
Ouais
,” Karyn made her accent deliberately coarse. “I guess so.”

A crimson starburst cracked open overhead as she pulled her Cred-Master ribbon from her bracelet. By the light of the dying firework, the waiter ran the ribbon through his handheld pad and handed it back.

“
Un moment
…”

There can't be a technological reason for this
, thought Karyn, reeling the CredMaster back into her bracelet.

She watched the waiter walk inside, search behind a zinc-topped counter, then slowly return with the tiny bent token. He presented it to her with a flourish.

“
Merci
,” she said.

“
De rien.
”

She fed the token into the holoterminal core. The one/zero/mu logon display blossomed just as golden explosions of light filled the night above the city.

“Bloody hell,” she said. A trio of figures broke out of the slow-moving crowds and walked towards her. Sighing, she powered down the terminal.

“That's a fine greeting on a cold night like this.” Sensei—Mike—looked bulky in his heavy coat, plain scarf tucked beneath his grey beard, dark hat pulled down low. “And a Happy New Year to you.”

His two companions were a slender man and woman, elegantly dressed in sharp lightweight clothing, on which shimmering thermal elements formed curlicued decorative webs.

“Sorry.” Karyn held out her hand.

“Jacques Lebrun.” His handshake was dry and firm, lingering just a little too long. “Journalist, TechnoMonde Vingt-Deux.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

The woman remained watchfully in the background; neither Lebrun nor Sensei attempted to introduce her.

“It is my pleasure,” said Lebrun.

He was an attractive man, Karyn realized. But that only intensified her longing for Dart, for the touch of his calloused hands across her skin…

She focused her attention on the moment.

“Your thumbprint,” added Lebrun, holding out a transparent wafer.

Karyn looked at Mike; he nodded. “OK.”

“I don't usually sign a contract,” she said, pressing her thumb against the wafer, “without reading every clause.”

“It has a…get-out option, is that right?” Lebrun turned to the woman, who nodded. “We will conduct the interview next week. OK?”

“
D'accord.
” Karyn smiled.

“I hope you decide to go ahead.” He held out his hand, and they shook. Then he turned to Mike. “Be careful.”

Then Lebrun and the anonymous woman left, footsteps clacking quickly on the stone embankment as a final flourish of rockets climaxed, then dwindled overhead.

Beethoven sounded among the Gare du Nord's high neoglassine-coated arches as Karyn and Mike descended from the high pedstrip.

“Our insurance policy,” was all Mike had said in explanation. “If we get what we want, we cancel the interview. Jacques will understand.”

“If you say so.” Karyn had no idea what he was talking about.

There were a surprising number of people milling around the old platforms. But it was New Year, and the metropolitan services were free of charge, according to the flickering festive holos, until eight a.m.

The shinkansen-maglev was a grand old silver bullet-train emblazoned with the
<>
logo.

“Here we go.” Mike grunted as he climbed aboard. “Don't worry. I've already bought the tickets.”

“Jesus Christ.” Karyn let out a long sigh as she collapsed onto her curved burgundy seat. “Oops. Sorry.”

Mike—or Sensei: but it was always hard for Karyn to think of him as Father Mulligan, Jesuit priest—merely shook his head.

“Well…” Karyn cocked an eyebrow. “Weren't we supposed to be going to Jakarta?”

“I had a lesson in subtlety and indirection.” Mike smiled. “My contact in Jakarta's BioCentre kept mentioning the two-week Zürich shutdown. Eventually it sank in: I could find what I needed
there
, not in the lab that was still open.”

“So we're blending. Going with the flow.”

“Exactly right. You have the data your friend prepared? What's his name?”

“Chojun.” Karyn stared out of the window. The station was sliding smoothly past. Inside the train, the acceleration was imperceptible. “Chojun Akazawa. Yes, I've got the data.”

“Between that and whatever we find in Zürich, we should achieve a strong bargaining position.”

“Christ, I hope so.”

Half mansion, half buckydome, outside the city: the UNSA facility was lavish, though not huge. They passed beside an arcing fountain and through a dozen security barriers of increasing thoroughness.

Two researchers were inside the lobby to meet them. Diffraction-grating strips, taped across their ID-tags, turned the two men's name-holos into anonymous sparks of random light.

A bright orange emblem,
RàFO
, was emblazoned beneath arrows of the same colour, on the walls of every corridor. There were other abbreviations, other direction indicators, but
RàFO
was the constant one. Their destination?

Underground, the facilities stretched farther than Karyn would have thought. In one corridor lay a small four-seater electric cart, but the two researchers walked past, ignoring it.

She was wrong about their destination. They passed a turning
down which
RàFO
was indicated, but the four of them hurried on. Karyn barely had time to read the sign on the doors at the side-corridor's far end:
<>
.

There were no labels on the heavy ceramic doors before which they finally stopped

Floating toroids. Glass rings through which a thread of blinding blue-white light arced. There were twenty rings, floating in mid-air, themselves arranged into a large circle.

“My God!” Karyn's whisper echoed back oddly from the big lab's shadowed walls.

“I fear,” said Mike, “that it's not His work we're witnessing.”

They were alone. In low tones, speaking guttural French, the two researchers had promised to come back in twenty minutes, when it would be safe to leave.

“It's a gateway, isn't it?”

One-dimensional, pulsing with secondary radiation, the light-thread opened onto another universe. To mu-space.

“No wonder,” Karyn added, “they need their own reactor.”

Mike was bent over a display. “I didn't know.” He looked up at her. “Really.”

“What is it?”

At first sight, it was meaningless to her. But Mike manipulated the holo, expanded and rotated it. He gestured. Text boxes and data lattices slatted into place.

“I had no idea.”

Epigenetic history. Individual cytoskeletons analysed: microtubules, filaments, transmembrane receptors. Extracellular matrix, labelled and deconstructed. At the level of the whole: a history from the small hollow sphere of the blastula, through gastrulation, then the formation of the notochord, at which point external intervention began.

Secondary displays mapped histogenetic pathways. The full neuralation sequence, in a series of time-stamped snapshots, hung like multicoloured spiderwebs above Mike's head.

“We're looking at the contents of that toroid.” He indicated the nearest glass ring, squinting against the light-thread. “It's just about visible.”

A foetus, still growing.

Human.

The big discs of its eyes extended into tendrils. They branched, forming dendrimers: fractally dividing tributaries, ever narrower, which reached
into
the blinding one-dimensional interface between continua.

What have I uncovered?
It was her use of Sal O'Mander—now deleted—that had begun this search.

“I think we have our leverage.” Mike's voice was steady.

“But we have to—”

She stopped as
the foetus moved
and Karyn bit her fist, stifling the scream.

The intent was clear. Trying to force-adapt embryos: eventually to
grow
potential Pilots…

No excuse.

“The longest-lived foetus,” said Mike, standing amid amber holosheets, “lasted ten days after interface.” He pointed. “Autopsy results. Everything we need for blackmail, if we identify our target.”

“But—” She stopped.

“I know. Dear Mother of God, I know.”

Golden reflected light glittered on his silent tears.