Paradox (28 page)

It took a full Standard Year.

The five sigmas are: speed, strength, stamina, suppleness and skill.
Maestro da Silva's dictum.
But speed, Tom, will serve you above all else.

Tom wondered, though, whether the maestro would approve, even in the smallest way, of Tom's using his flow/focus skills, his phi2dao tactics, to plan assassination.

Father. Mother
…

He allowed himself to think of his mother more often now. At any time in his investigations, he might come across mention of her.

But it did not happen. She had meant nothing to the Oracle. The destruction of Tom's family had been an irrelevance, not worth recording in official data.

Even I can affect others' lives now, without meaning to.

Not just collaterally: there were the seven injured troopers who had mistaken him for an intruder.

The demesne's capital funds covered their medical care. In the end, thank Fate, none of them died: two had inhaled blood and undergone cardiac arrest, but were successfully revived. All seven received post-trauma counselling. Tom offered to transfer their allegiance back to Lady Darinia, or to any Lord needing subjects with their (highly desirable) skill-set. They all refused.

The troopers were reassigned; two of them became team leaders under the new structure put into place by Tom's security chief, Captain Elva Strelsthorm.

“I know you,” she had said to Tom, entering the conference chamber where the injured men lay.

It had taken little prompting—Elva's visual memory being apparently near-eidetic—to recall the frightened boy hiding in a dark storage alcove, between the dripping mop and broken-down cleaning-drone.

“Your eyes haven't changed, my Lord,” she told him, after the medics had departed.

Elva had gained maturity, too. The twenty-something proctor who had come to Tom's family dwelling was now almost ten years older: easy with command, well organized and disciplined. She cared about her troopers' well-being—as Tom observed over the coming tendays—and it showed in the automatic respect they accorded her.

Between her and Jak, Tom was able to delegate most of the day-to-day running of his realm. Felgrinar was theoretically at the same level—part of a triumvirate subordinate only to Tom—but in practice was guided almost entirely by Jak's (and sometimes Elva's) suggestions. Felgrinar's disposition improved, and it began to look as though the demesne's budget, at least in the Primum Stratum, was going to show a positive balance within three SY: earlier than estimated.

A truecast—if there were any available to cover fiscal analyses of a minor realm such as Tom's—could have delivered a guaranteed-accurate prediction. But Tom steered clear of Oracular output.

Call it superstition; call it fear of entrapment by paradox. But he
had
to work in ignorance of his own eventual success or failure.

More than that: if he truly succeeded—or even failed, in a spectacular fashion—in killing Gérard d'Ovraison, then there were still about five thousand Oracles in the world. Others who could form truecasts, possibly
had
formed truecasts years ago, depicting the event.

If they had, it was a secret from Tom, even with his noble-house access. Because there were other levels to which he had no authority?

Or because the Oracles censored themselves?

In a sense, it freed him. Ignoring paradox, except when it served his tactical approach, he worked as though only security forces,
without Oracular assistance, existed: in secret, with great care, drawing up his lonely plans.

At first, it seemed as though it would take forever. Then, when he had the basic concepts straight, he estimated a few tendays at most.

After heartbreaking effort spent on his proof-of-concept project, based on truecasts and newscasts about Duke Boltrivar's demesne (to choose a topic not entirely at random), Tom realized he had to throw away all his work and start again.

Though the simulations worked, they could not create an entire fictitious world. His design paradigm was wrong. The only solution was to conceive every single facet
from the start
in terms of infinite-dendrimer autoreflexive processing.

Then it became feasible…in principle.

Other preparations: the physical conditioning, the climbing, the times spent immersed in Karyn's Tale beneath blue skies and grey, desensitizing his acrophobia and agoraphobia.

And it took an entire Standard Year.

First, the triple-shielding of his study. Elva said nothing as she oversaw the threading of dumb caging and smart interference-emitters throughout the quickglass inner walls.

You don't talk much, Elva
, thought Tom, watching her at work,
about the things that matter.

Layers within layers of security. For her sake, in case he were caught, it needed to be obvious that he was working alone.

They did not talk much of the old days, but her presence sparked a reevaluation in Tom's mind: of Trude's strange manner, her trips to far places (by the market's standards), and her anxiety (and mysterious hooded companions) when he had told her of the questing Jack's proximity.

Had Elva ever known Trude? They had met—had talked, after Father's funeral: Tom had seen them—but did they actually know each other?

He did not ask.

Nor did he mention his unwillingly loaded tacware, though he asked her to investigate the strange weapons emporium.

“No trace of Kilware Associates,” reported Elva, on her return from downstratum. “Never mind this Brino feller. I could contact Lord Shinkenar's proctors—”

“Never mind,” said Tom. “Let's forget it, shall we.”

More suspicions.

It was the way Brino moved, the quiet confidence with which he held himself…Tom wondered whether he had, for the second time in his life, met a Pilot.

But I couldn't have risked revealing the comms relay.

“All finished,” Elva said in the same meeting. “Your shielding, I mean. We ran the final tests this morning. Not a peep escaped.”

“Not bad.” Tom was impressed with her rapid progress. “Not bad at all.”

Coincidence, too, that Dervlin's fighting style held something of the fast, flowing multiple-strikes-per-second method of the Pilots?

And wasn't Dervlin an old friend of Trude's?

Forget it.
Tom opened up the stallion talisman and removed the capsule.
Let's focus on the objective.

With the shielding in place, it was the first time Tom, ignoring the download needle, had openly prised apart the nul-gel coating, revealing the crystalline comms relay which had lain hidden for nearly a decade.

“Logon,” he said. “Ident: pi sigma three cee-cedilla nine eight nine slash Petra deVries. I'm her proxy.”

Strangeness.

Gripping the arm of his chair, he plunges into vertigo.

Golden light, burning.

Snowflake?

For a moment, he sees the small, scarlet, stellated shape slowly revolve—then the labyrinth crashes into being.

Cubes of blood.

But each cube is also—somehow—an endlessly branching snowflake in three—no, in many—dimensions. He leans close to one, and it explodes into detail: an entire infinitude, an apparent universe of complexity.

Sweet Fate…

He had hoped for a mere comms interface, but this is so much more: it is everything.

Blood-snow in the golden sea.

Multifractal cellular automata.

Shimmer and coalesce: patterns form as they learn from him and he adapts; the system's matrix-factorization maps eigen-functions from Tom's brain to mu-space processor-architecture; gestalten-integration solitons pulse between continua.

Limited-diffusion aggregation patterns coalesce, like lightning around seedpoints, forming complex structures.

Low-level tools at first: simple Turing-machine complexes, gently introducing him to their operations.

Then the hints of gleaming vistas beyond, of the logic-beyond-logic that is possible in this universe.

He can work with voice and image; touch and motion; thought and dream: can simulate an atom or a human being…

Did you want me to use this
—he addresses the dead Pilot rhetorically in his memory, careful not to let the tools pick it up: he does not want her replicated virtually here—
just to ask off-worlders for help?

Slatting into place all around: blood-flakes representing ever more powerful mind-tools, in a phase-space based on hardware he can never directly experience—an infinite-capacity processor somewhere in mu-space.

If he had the intellectual capacity, he could create his own virtual universe…

But there is no need for that: just one Oracle's future to model.

Golden light.

Strange patterns sweeping through the tessellated automata, the multifractal blood-maze, the impossible-perspective tool-shapes revolving close by…

For a second, for eternity, he regards a system beyond limit: a processing-space where even the laws of logic may be transcended.

“Enough.”

Shuddering, withdrawing, until the interface is the lightest of touches, and the tool-infinicons respond only to concentrated, directed, conscious control.

He started work.

In the guise of helping Elva—and of interest in the tech for its own sake—he learned as much of security protocols as he could. For all the strange self-referential, infinitely recursive functions he was designing and running, it was low-tech physical logistics and tactics that could trip him up.

One piece of luck: overhearing a conversation between Jak and Elva set Tom to tracking supply routes. Lord Shinkenar, in the neighbouring demesne, shipped supplies for Oracle d'Ovraison's use. He was a middleman.

The goods went via cargo train, passing through the sixth stratum of Tom's demesne without stopping, and passing through sealed tunnels—inaccessible from any form of side corridor or access shaft—through seven demesnes and into the next sector.

And somewhere in the unmarked volumes between sectors, the train made a stop which was not recorded on any manifest, nor reproduced on any order which Tom could access.

He stepped up his training.

Free-climbing around his practice chamber; sparring with surplus mannequins bought from Lord Takegawa's military academy; running endless lengths of his deserted gallery.

The translation algorithms took three times longer than he had estimated, but then he was able to feed real newscasts and truecasts into his multifractal simulated world.

Then changing, extrapolating…

Imperfections twisted the models, so that occasionally they became weird rides through nightmarish dreams: impossible events played out against collage landscapes.

But the models ran, and that was a beginning.

He ignored Sylvana's invitations to visit, and—guiltily—a query from Avernon, wondering why Tom had published no work.

Tom composed a reply—
Because I've ignored orthogonal-component matrices in favour of a multifractal-function approach which reifies algorithms in mu-space in no time at all
—and deleted it without sending.

On occasion he sparred with some of Elva's troopers, but they were nervous of him. He was their Lord, after all.

The mindless sparring-mannequins had no such inhibitions.

One of his small side excursions into the Pilots' structured knowledge domain scared him.
Many Terra-sized planets
, he read,
exist in “interstellar” space. Six were found in the Sol system, only in the twenty-fourth century.
A chill spread through him.
Thrown far away from the accretion centre at formation, averaging only 30K in temperature, nevertheless radioactivity (and resultant vulcanism and storm meteorology) provides surface conditions allowing water oceans
…

It took several days of research to determine—to Tom's relief—that Nulapeiron, like Terra, orbited normally around a star.

Finished.

Memories.

Immensely old, the white-haired Oracle lies dying. Sunken flesh: wide-boned shoulders are the only hint of former power.