Paradox (36 page)

Zhao-ji inclined his head, saying nothing.

“And the others?” Arlanna.

“We use,” said Tom carefully, “the method I employed against Oracle d'Ovraison.”

Everyone in the room grew still.

He could see the realization on their faces, sinking truly home for the first time:
This man has killed an Oracle.

“A fictitious future, lasting many years…” It was a round-faced black man who spoke. “And consistent with previous reality. How can this be?”

There were nods around the table.

“They have a point, Tom.” Zhao-ji leaned forwards. “Not even femtotech can give you that kind of processing power.”

Is that why you want to help? To find out the secret?

But this was the moment to reveal all, or turn away from the whole enterprise.

Very well.

“The equipment I used was damaged,” Tom began. “We'll need a lot of resource to repair and duplicate it.”

“That doesn't explain—”

Talisman.

Slowly he reached inside his tunic, and drew forth the stallion his father had crafted. All around, the air seemed to crystallize into solidity.

Gesture, and it fell neatly into two halves.

“The coating”—he picked up the comms relay between thumb and forefinger—“is nul-gel. The crystal was given to me by…by a Pilot.”

They stared at him.

Chaos. After all this time—

Inside, he shivered: revealing the secret he had kept close, always.

“In mu-space,” he added, “we can run any simulation we like.”

Commitment—Fate! Am I doing the right thing?

Arlanna was the first to speak.

“How long before, ah, before we can use this stuff?”

At least one person believes me.

The others looked stunned, even Zhao-ji.

“Two years,” said Tom, “and we'll be ready.”

Ten days.

Ten long days, from the news of Dart's micro-buoy to the final interface. Seven days for the viral rewire to perform its transformations; during the first five, Karyn continued to work on the visually based simulator, but by the end her vision grew wild and hazy. When training became impossible, she shut herself away to meditate, waiting for the process to end. Trying not to think of the innocent embryo growing inside her.

On the seventh night they removed her eyes.

They inserted silver sockets as replacements, but these would be nonfunctional outside her mu-space vessel. In the meantime, she had to wait for them to heal.

Even with nanocytic healing agents, it was not until the eighth night—while Karyn exerted all of her self-discipline not to explore the metal implants with her fingertips—that the sockets were ready for interface.

They led her in darkness—only the cool air, with a hinted scent of distant mesquite, told her that this was true night, not just the endless night of blindness—to a waiting TDV. Then the short drive, breeze tugging at her hair, across the runway to her waiting vessel.

Sure hands guided her to the lift-chair; there was no vertigo as she
was swung high up into the air, then slowly lowered through the opening on the ship's upper hull.

In the eyes of her imagination, the ship existed: a silver, delta-winged bird, poised upon the runway, ready to lift.

Hands and robot arms fitted her into the command couch. A soft hum sounded, then a click as high-bandwidth bus-fibres were plugged in, where her eyes used to be.

Faint mist of mathematical spaces, of shadowy geometries beyond sight.

“I'm ready,” she said.

But it took two more days.

Two more days of lying there, without privacy when she had to use the attached waste-tubes, waiting while the diagnostics ran and technicians jostled her and monitored her reactions when she slipped into the migraine-inducing hallucinations of billowing phase-spaces.

Finally, someone leaned in and touched her shoulder.

“Ready to fly, ma'am.”

As dawn rose, Sensei was standing at the runway's edge, praying harder than he ever had before in a long life of self-discipline and worship.

Burnished fire dripped along the silver hull. Beside him, Anne-Marie held his arm for support, her head still and rapt as her dog's, staring at the same thing:
Karyn's ship.

“Systems check OK,” said a lieutenant, as transparent blast shields rose up before them. “She's going now.”

Reaction burners banged into life, the silver ship shuddered, released brakes and hurtled down the runway, lifted its nose, then arced upwards into the air, high, and sped into the clear sapphire sky.

They watched the holos as satellites tracked Karyn's trajectory. Unbelievably soon, the ship rose through purple darkness at the atmosphere's edge and burst into the high-contrast blackness of interplanetary space.

Then it rippled, miragelike, grew twisted and knotted through impossible shifting angles, shrank to an infinitesimal silver point, and was gone.

All the time, during simulation training, she had been pushing the insertion angles to the limit. In mu-space, a vessel became a solid projection, a volume shadow of the realspace object, protected by its event membrane from the chaotic effects of fractal time.

Now she was doing it for real.

Ignoring optimal safety parameters, Karyn pushed it to the maximum. Relative to the size of Dart's vessel, Karyn's ship became a tiny thing, a silver insect speeding through the golden void.

She was minimizing the journey's duration—from Dart's point of view. Trawling through a different context, a different level of size, her voyage, subjectively, was paradoxically longer.

Her trip lasted thirty-three weeks.

Internal robot arms manipulated her limbs, electrostimulation worked the muscles; internal manifolds and scrolling digits, in her augmented non-vision, monitored the embryo in her womb.

If there had been passengers aboard, they would have been anaesthetized: no-one, even protected by the vessel's event membrane, could survive mu-space's mind-bending perspectives. But the baby—

Scarlet-analogue flashed across her non-vision as proximity sensors blared.

Destination achieved.

His ship was bronze.

+ + COME IN, DART. COME IN. + +

No surprise: she had chosen that exact hue as one of her colour-simulation calibration points.

++ DART, PLEASE…++

But this was not how she had visualized his proud winged ship—impaled by fractally branching tendrils of scarlet and purple lightning, which coruscated endlessly across the hull's event membrane, brightest at the points where it was beginning to bore through.

## KARYN? IS THAT YOU, BABE? ##

+ + DART! + +

If she'd had eyes, she would have wept.

Subjective time passed.

## I DON'T WANT YOU HERE. ##

As she drew closer, the bronze ship grew huge, hundreds of times her size. Manoeuvring was tricky, as she avoided questing tendrils of lightning.

+ + TOUGH. I'VE COME A LONG WAY. + +

Just to get you
, she meant, but her concentration was divided now, and communication was hard.

Her ship juddered as the enhanced field generators came online. The event membrane shivered across her hull, and her senses spun as resonance effects perturbed her sensors.

## OK, TELL ME WHAT YOU'RE DOING. ##

+ + ENHANCED EVENT MEMBRANE. + +

She dipped and twisted her vessel, evading the scarlet lightning.

+ + GET READY. WE'RE GOING TO MERGE MEMBRANES. + +

## SOUNDS GREAT, DARLING. ##

Drawing close.

+ + INITIATING…+ +

Contact.

Black light pulsed and waved across their conjoined vessels: the tiny silver form of Karyn's ship, the massive bronze of Dart's.
## GIVE ME AN INTERFACE. ##

Karyn checked progress before replying:
++ OPENING INFOFLOW. MAKE IT TWO-WAY, BABY. ++

She needed to know the exact figures if they were going to throw off the energy pattern by their parallel efforts.

## JESUS CHRIST! ##

Inside her Pilot's cocoon, she might have laughed.

+ + HEY, DART. YOUR DAD'LL REPLAY THESE LOGS SOME TIME. + +

A silence, during which Karyn nervously noted the lack of progress in the membrane-strengthening procedure.

Then Dart's reply came:
## YOU'RE PREGNANT, SWEETHEART. ##

Cursing herself for not realizing that he was going to see
all
of her internal dataflow, she sent a brief acknowledgement code.

No time for anything more. A tiny scarlet tendril was playing about her own ship's hull.

## YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME. ##

A pause, then:
++ DART, I LOVE YOU. BUT I'M BUSY RIGHT NOW. ++

## I KNOW. ##

Her attention was on the turbulent stream of rushing data. Dart would be doing the same thing.

## IT'S NOT GOING TO LET ME GO. ##

Another tendril on her hull, joining the first. Then another.

Questing: not blindly, but algorithmically driven. Shifting frequencies, searching for pseudo-quantum tunnelling across the event-membrane barrier, to drill into her vessel and tear it apart.

++ THE HELL IT ISN'T. ++

A fourth tendril.

More. Homing in, like an immune response against an invading pathogen.

And, across the body of Dart's ship, the lightning's insertion points were growing
brighter
, not weaker, as the field generators red-planed into max output.

Sickened, she checked: it was the only interpretation.

Her arrival had
stimulated
it, if anything. Given the energy pattern more data to work with.

+ + IS IT ALIVE? + +

Status flags tripping everywhere: it was almost through. Ready to tear both ships apart into total dissolution.

## I DON'T THINK SO. MAYBE. ##

Then, after a pause:
## KARYN. YOU HAVE TO LET GO. ##

+ + NO CHANCE. + +

Glowing figures, highlighted as Dart pinpointed the intensity manifolds and sent the data back to her.

## IF YOU STAY, IT'S GOING TO GET ALL OF US. ALL THREE OF US. ##

The data hung in her awareness. Desperate, she searched for counter-strategies.

## LET ME GO, KARYN! ##

Breakthrough threshold. As the shared membrane around both vessels began to split, a peripheral-data phase-space, at the edge of Karyn's internal awareness, flared with authority-adoption commands.

+ + DAMN YOU, DART. NO. WE'RE GETTING OUT OF—+ +

But she had not reckoned on his expertise. While she had been reconfiguring the output characteristics to suit the lightning's interference mode, Dart had been picking control codes from her comms protocols and forming his own instructions.

Sudden pain tugged through Karyn, and for a moment she thought the lightning had drilled through, but then she realized.

Contraction.

## KARYN. ARE YOU ALL RIGHT? ##

She nearly laughed, but another contraction rippled through her womb.

+ + TOO EARLY, DAMN IT. IT'S TOO EARLY! + +

Op-codes streamed through her input buffers, unidentified until it was too late. Dart had control.

## I LOVE YOU, KARYN. ##

Waves oscillated across the black field as he triggered the power-down sequence.

+ + DART, NO. I—I LOVE YOU, TOO. + +

Datastreams froze. Ships, membranes, pulling apart.

## LOOK AFTER OUR DAUGHTER. I—##

Separation.

For a moment, tiny tendrils still played about her own ship, but then the explosion came.

Dart's vessel blew apart into a million fragments.

Her last sight, as she triggered reinsertion, was a cloud of sparkling bronze motes, twinkling in a sea of golden light.

A strange feeling of euphoric warmth, of loving benediction—

Then the scarlet lightning released her, and the vision was lost.

Realspace.

It was dark outside but her attention was turned inwards. The baby should not have been ready to be born.

Position warning.

The internal systems were not designed to help a pregnant woman give birth; that was as helpful as the scan routine could be. Redirecting the resonance imagers from device-monitoring to herself, she could see the problem: the baby was twisted around, sideways on to the opening cervix.

Breach birth.

No problem under normal circumstances, but there was no way to stop the birth process once it had reached this stage. With her mind torn apart in confusion, Karyn could not have re-entered mu-space, much less navigated her way homewards.

Happening now.

There was only one thing she could think of, and she did it. The internal robot arms pulled the cocooning material back from her abdomen.

Careful
…

She screamed as the arm's laser bit through her belly, peeling skin and striated muscle apart.

Pain!

Then two more arms dived into her womb and gently, gently pulled the struggling baby free. But the robots were already under their co-processors' control.

Karyn's consciousness disintegrated.