Paradox (30 page)

Gérard d'Ovraison.

The other voice—a younger man?—abruptly turned to silence.

Oracle.

“I'm here,” Tom whispered, in a voice which was hardly his own.

The big, broad-shouldered man walked into the hall in which Tom stood. He stopped, regarded Tom, and smiled; his teeth were very white.

Scarlet pinpoints of lights seemed to spring out across the square-jawed, bearded, handsome face; the muscular neck; and across the fine turquoise and white garments. Attack points, delineated in virtual light, while kinaesthetic tugging sensations mapped all the strike-vectors which Tom might follow.

His hand itched to drive into the carotid sinus, to whip edge-on against the laryngeal cartilage and watch the Oracle inexorably choke to death.

The pulse pounded in Tom's ears as d'Ovraison finally spoke.

“Greetings, Tom.” Again, the easy smile. “Would you believe…I've been expecting you.”

“Of course you have,” said Tom after a moment. Every sense was keening: even the hairs on his skin seemed to pick up vibrations, searching for danger.

“I have been, and often will be, aware of this discussion we're having now.” The big man pushed his cape back over one shoulder.

Tom circled.

The Oracle turned easily, keeping him in sight.

“Must be a tired dance for you, Oracle.”

An unreadable expression clouded d'Ovraison's eyes for a moment. Then: “How I've looked forward to your saying that.”

Tom smiled appreciatively, but answered: “Your lies lack conviction, Your Wisdom.”

“Shall I tell you how this conversation ends?”

Icy fear gripped Tom, remembering how the last prediction had fulfilled itself.

Father
…

“It should have started”—Tom slid the poignard from its sheath—“with your calling the guards, or activating smartmists. But it's too late now.”

“I don't think so.”

The Oracle retreated before Tom's advance, but there was no fear in his eyes. Only a strained resignation—just for a moment—and a hint of ancient weariness. Then his urbane charm returned.

“There's no need”—smoothly—“for physical action. I've always known, you see, that you'll not be able to resist seeing her.”

Tom stopped, crouched in cat stance: defensive, but ready.

“She's this way.” A brief smile in the broad beard. “Follow me.”

Cape swirling, the Oracle turned and stalked away down gleaming flagstones, turning into a spiralling ramp, descending farther into the terraformer.

Initiative lost, Tom could only follow.

Ovoid, sapphire-blue crystal shell, cradled in a sweeping frame of gold which curved up into a canopy and was everywhere encrusted with baroque carvings, inlaid with strange minerals in which glimmering fires danced and moved. The great sculpture was the chamber's focus: all around, sweeping buttresses and the stellate ceiling and concentric white-and-blue flagstones centred upon its structure.

As Tom drew near, the air became chill. Beads of moisture dotted the ovoid crystal, blurring the shadowy form inside.

Cryosarcophagus.

“You dare—” Tom leaped forwards, poignard raised high for a sweeping cut, but the Oracle's motion was a subtle avoidance, as though he had known
exactly
how Tom was going to move, and then blue sparks in one of the Oracle's ornate finger rings were answered by a blossoming of holovolumes all around the majestic crypt.

Focus.

But his peripheral vision was already on the status displays, the slowly moving and static manifolds, the lattices of digits in which changes dripped only slowly, here and there.

Only angiological data flowed, represented at branching levels from arteries/veins down to capillaries and sinusoids: differential gradients cycling through changes.

So much of the rest was flat-planed: in the cortex, superolateral/medial/basal surfaces were devoid of signal; in each half of the midbrain, shallow electrical tides swept crus cerebri and tegmentum; only deep in the rhombencephalon was there true activity.

“You said she was alive.”

“Did I?” said the Oracle, and the sadness in his voice washed through the room, lingered when silence fell again.

I don't know.
Uncertainties mixed in Tom's mind.
I thought you did.

“The machines,” added the Oracle, “keep her body running. Only the higher functions are long gone.”

“I can see that.”

Mother!

“She's been dead for seven years.”

Wiping away condensation, he saw: high cheekbones, flawless skin, full rose-pink lips hinting of overbite. Eyes closed. Vibrant cupric hair.

So young.

How old could she have been when Tom was born? Arrested in death, she looked no more than ten years older than he was now.

“Death is the full stop”—Gérard's smile was scarcely human—“at the end of a life sentence.”

He gestured a flat-text holosheet into being, in case Tom had not understood the reference. Then
with no gesture from the Oracle
every holovolume collapsed into oblivion.

Ancient, banned tech: Virtual Synaptic Interface. Direct neural control of the terraformer's systems.

New displays sprang up.

“Actuality, Tom.”

Newscasts and truecasts.

“One spends so much time,” added the Oracle, “just passively absorbing, watching the events of real peoples' lives.”

Displays, analyses.

Political speeches. Convocations, ceremonies. Criminal courts, servitor executions, mumbled public confessions. Rallies. Military action.

“How dreadful for you.”

A hundred shades of liquid light reflected on that blue crystal carapace.

Again, the hint of inhuman cold in those piercingly intelligent eyes. “You might dread it, my young friend. But you'll never understand it.”

Tom tore his gaze away from the crystal-and-gold sarcophagus.

“Let me try.”

“I don't think—”

“Your consciousness, poor Oracle, bounces up and down your timeline: you make a living by reporting newscasts you 'remember' seeing in the future. The same future which traps you, always.”

“If you could remember”—ice, colder than the cryosarcophagus, in his voice—“the moment of your own death, your…outlook, too, would change.”

Tom looked down at the poignard in his fist, then stared into the Oracle's eyes. “I foresee
your
death.”

“Many years from now.” Old pain; an undertone almost of wistfulness. “Long after you, Tom.”

Stepping forwards, watching the attack-point overlays spring again into his vision field, holding his weapon's hilt lightly but firmly.

“You can address me,” Tom said, “as Lord Corcorigan.”

Stepping away, stepping
through
the muted moving holodisplays—the Oracle's broad shoulders and handsome face just for a moment in the centre of swirling floodwaters, a child's outflung hand—he retreated to a buttress, leaned against its plunging arc.

“Recognize that?” Tom gestured.

“Yes, I—” A frown, then: “Duke Boltrivar's realm. A flood. Has it happened yet? Or is it yet to come?” A half-laugh. “My perspective is a little different from yours.”

Now.

“You're dead, Oracle.”

Tom lunged.

“Sorry, Tom. Procedure: execute.” Again, the Oracle subtly moved, and Tom's momentum took him sailing past but he stopped and whirled in time to hear: “Duration, two minutes.”

Melting
…

He was ready to strike again but the motion caught his attention and he froze, watching as the crystal liquefied and
flowed
, melting into the great golden sculpture which cupped the cryosarcophagus.

A wash of frigid air.

Sweet Fate! Impossible
—

Slowly but deliberately, his dead mother sat up in the sarcophagus, turned and opened wide her eyes as blue as Terran skies.

“Tom?”

She focused. Her voice, petal-soft, was as familiar as breathing.

“Is that really you?”

Abomination!

Diaphragm paralysed with shock, Tom forced himself to speak.

“How are you doing this?”

Ignoring him, the Oracle stepped up beside the sarcophagus. “Don't bother getting up, my love.” He took gentle hold of Mother's hand.

Madness. I can't be seeing this.

Blue/gold, the white/blue floor, all seemed to swirl; blood-rush filled Tom's ears.

“Would you believe”—d'Ovraison's voice was distant—“by force of will?”

Breath control.

“Not really.” Forced urbanity.

Mother's beauty was palely ethereal. Held on the point of death, reawakened for odd moments of the Oracle's life? Or was there something else?

Fist and stallion.

Tom fought to regain his focus.

“Ranvera.” The Oracle could look only at her. “Ran, my love.”

“Gérard.”

The sweet softness in her voice, directed at her husband's nemesis, washed over Tom, bathing him in icy hatred.

I'm going to kill you, Oracle.

Now he could do it. Sighting in on the targets, going from radial to common carotid in one arcing motion—

“Oh, Tom. Whatever happened to you?”

“Mother?”

He stopped, mind racing. Could this be illusion?

“All grown up, and handsome, too. Do the girls—?”

“Mother.” Harshly. “Has this one”—indicating d'Ovraison with his poignard's point—“told you what happened to Father? What they did to me after he died?”

“Died?” A dreamy frown. “Davraig died, too?”

“Don't tell me you didn't know.”

“It's not so bad…”

“
What?
”

“Dying…Just a black tunnel, and you fall in. That's it.”

Gérard, with exquisite gentleness, touched her cheek.

Breathe.

Tom struggled for self-control.

Just breathe.

Focus.

“It's only dreamtrope addiction.” He stepped back—making room, so that the Oracle could not reach him when the process began. “Her long memory lapses. Picking up the threads of a days-old conversation as though no time had elapsed. Did her insanity make her more attractive to you, poor Oracle?”

Rage flashed in d'Ovraison's eyes.

Scored a point.

Tom sensed Mother's presence, the hint of her perfume on the chilled air, but his attention now was all upon his enemy.

“Poor, trapped Oracle,” he continued. “Unable to stay in the normal flow of entropic time. Do you envy us that much? Matching your fragmented consciousness to the symptoms of her illness?”

D'Ovraison's big hands bunched into fists.

Mother spoke. “No, Gérard.” Trembling, covering the Oracle's hand with hers, she added, “You promised, my dear.”

“I did, my love. Don't worry—”

But the tiniest of frowns had appeared between the Oracle's dark eyebrows.

Mother
…

Tom pushed the thought aside.

He unfastened his jumpsuit, descending to one knee, as though genuflecting. He placed his redmetal poignard on the floor and unlooped his talisman.

“Fine workmanship, don't you think, wise Oracle?” Placing the stallion on the floor. “My father's work. Remember this, Mother?”

And I remember the Pilot. Did she know what she was giving me?

“Maybe. I'm not—”

But Tom was already forming the control gesture, causing the stallion's two halves to neatly fall apart, revealing the nul-gel capsule.

Did she think I would just communicate with other worlds?

“Watch, now.” The poignard's point neatly sliced open the gel, revealing the crystal. It sparked with blue light.

But those processors can do so much more.

Every holodisplay in the wide chamber suddenly went chaotic, rippling with wild hues, tripping kaleidoscopically through the spectrum.

“What's happening?” The Oracle's voice faltered.

“Download,” said Tom tersely. But control tesseracts told their own story.

In realspace, logic itself is incomplete
…

“I don't—” The Oracle stopped, entranced, as displays pulsed hypnotically.

…
constricted by Gödel's theorem: truth is not always provable
…

“Your life, poor Oracle, is but a dream.”

…
but in mu-space, in its infinite reflexiveness
…

Logotropic interface.

…
all may be proven
…

The crystal was already broadcasting standard strobe codes, but a parallel task searched for other means, locking on to the VSI implant and suborning that, also.

…
and anything at all may be simulated
…

Dropping Mother's hand, d'Ovraison backed away, his wide, powerful shoulders hunched with uncertainty. “Don't…understand.”

…
even
…

Direct rewiring: subverting the Oracle's own femtocytes.

….
an Oracle's
…

“Everything from this point in time is just a model, a simulation.
My
universe, Oracle. All your future memories consist of images, sensations, which I've designed.”

…
life.

The crystal broadcast the new code: rewriting molecular configurations, potientating memories of future events which would never occur.

“Impossible.”

I'm rewriting your mind—

D'Ovraison gave a frightened glance sideways. Mother was sinking back into her sarcophagus.

—
and you know it.

“It's already happened.”

“No…”

But it had.

The final newscast—a memory transmitted to his youth, as entropic time flows—flickers out.

Boundary condition.

The last moment of awareness, as the old man dies.

In an infinitesimally short period of time, d'Ovraison's
entire memories of the future beyond this moment
had been written logotropically into
his brain. All his future perceptions were the product of a multifractal-modelling simulation.

Even the memory of his distant, future death—due to old age—came from Tom's imagination.

All your predictions
…

The big man shook violently as tympani-potentiation took hold and the new memories coalesced.

…
and all your imagined future
…

The simulated future newscasts were not random predictions. They were based, as much as possible, on the truecasts of other Oracles, for consistency.

…
are just a mirage
…

Poor Oracle.

…
of my devising.

That fiction included algorithmically incompressible processes: impossible, in realspace, to simulate—quicker to let them actually occur. But Tom had broken free of the universe's constrictions, penetrated the ur-logic of infinite mu-space.

“The memory of this event,” he told d'Ovraison, “will not spread back to other parts of your timeline. For a few short seconds, you're going to be almost human.”

The Oracle was in a new future, one he had never seen.

Interface.

The real future.

“This can't be.”

Maybe.

Tom clasped both crystal and poignard in one hand, and slowly stood.

But I'm changing your Fate, Oracle.

Blue fire rose up around him as he stepped forwards, and he halted.

What's happening?

It was as though the air resisted him.

He forced one pace. Then another.

“Just another…paradox…”

I don't understand.

Another.

But I won't let it stop me.

Tom pushed himself through rising blue sparks. Unexpected: in one sense he had altered the Oracle's future by a mere programming trick, rewriting his perceptions.

But this resistance, as though
realspace itself
was pushing against his alterations…

He pushed on.

This moment, planned in advance, had been a stopping-point when Tom had first devised the strategy. How could the Oracle not “remember” the future alteration of his own mind?

But the memory would indeed be wiped out—by trauma—since
the Oracle himself
had not expected to die, not for many years.

As Tom pushed through another barrier of intensity, a grimace-like smile tugged at his lips: a new paradox.

Poor Oracle.

Doomed by his own perceptions.

Another step.

Infinite instantiations, now over.

No simulation: this was reality.

“A gift, Oracle.”

Crackling energy, spitting through the air.

Don't stop now.

“Your first—”

A
new
reality.

D'Ovraison's eyes were wide, frozen.

“—ever—”

A cobra's prey.

“—surprise!”

And the final barrier of blue flames and sparks gave way as Tom
rushed forwards and thrust under the Oracle's left arm—his own nonexistent left arm burning white hot with hatred—stabbing through the armpit, twisting downwards, burying the poignard to its hilt.

Done it!

The Oracle fell.

Tom watched him writhing, struggling: like a stranded fish gasping at the air, smearing scarlet on the white/blue floor, reaching ineffectually for the embedded weapon, eyes popping, drowning in his own blood. He
mewled
, a strange eldritch cry.

But the Oracle Gérard d'Ovraison was a big man…

Vengeance.

…strong and powerful…

Fist and stallion.

…and took a long time to die.

The crystal seemed fused and lifeless, but he reinserted it inside the stallion anyway, and looped the whole thing in place inside his jumpsuit. Then he tugged the poignard free. It came out with a wet, sucking sound; he forced it into its sheath.

Tom gestured, and a small control display flickered into existence. At his summoning, a swarm of microdrones floated into the chamber.

Gesturing rapidly, he forced them to begin execution of their housekeeping routines. He was careful to use only some of them on d'Ovraison's body, disabling safety med-alerts, working on surface decontamination only. The others went to work on the chamber itself.

With luck, they would destroy all forensic traces before anyone realized what had happened.

Then there was nothing more he could do to avoid the thing he was putting off.

Mother
…

It was as though another barrier prevented fast movement; but this one was purely imaginary.

Have I killed you, too?

But even as he leaned over her, Mother's lifeless form gave a low gasp—holovolumes flickering all around—and, almost creaking, her head turned. Eyelids half opened, but the eyeballs were upturned and milky.

“You…think…” Rasping. “Did not…know.”

Hardly a human voice.

“Corduven…will kill…”

Oracle.

“Love you…Tom.”

“
Mother!
”

Flatplane.

*** AGONAL TRANSITION ***

Had he talked to Mother or the Oracle? Or some superposition of both?

*** PATIENT DECEASED ***

“NO!”

Fine mouth falling slack for the final time.

Not again. Not another death.

Glowing blue.

Gripping the edge of the sarcophagus, he watched azure fluid—glowing, fluorescing with inner light—spill slowly from her mouth, her ears, and pool inside the sarcophagus.

I've seen this before.

But the glow faded to a faint glimmer, and then it was gone. The fluid was matt and lifeless, and after a while something stirred inside Tom and he backed away from his mother's corpse.

Time to go.