Resolution (10 page)

‘Who’s aboard?’ said Tom.

‘No-one. D’you expect
people
to go up in those things?’ Zhao-ji’s grin twisted. ‘We’re not all as mad as you are.’

‘So it’s AI-controlled. Then what’s the cargo?’

Zhao-ji shook his head.

‘Why don’t we just go and take a look?’

Then he turned around and headed back towards the hillock, and the concealed drop-shaft which would take them back into the buried safety of the civilized world.

Perhaps it’s not the Strontium Dragons who have something to gain,
Tom decided, as he followed Zhao-ji.
Perhaps it’s Strostiv who has a goal here.

The grassy doorway opened.

Tom and Zhao-ji entered, then stepped side by side into the viscous metallic gel, and sank down inside the shaft together.

They walked into a large bay. The bay adjoined a huge hall shaped like a horizontal cylinder, stretching the best part of a kilometre. A thick transparent view-window separated Tom and Zhao-ji from the interior.

‘That’s hard vacuum inside,’ said Zhao-ji. ‘We can see everything from out here. Look.’

He pointed. A long balcony, offset from the hall, ran alongside. Like this bay, it was partitioned off by thick windows.

‘Look at what, exactly?’

‘Well, this ...’

The shuttle, held in place by great metallic clamps in the body of the hall, was cracking its dorsal doors open.

‘They’re collecting the harvest,’ added Zhao-ji.

‘Harvest?
What the Fate do you harvest in orbit?’

‘Something very important. We’ve been doing it for centuries.’

Tom noted the
we.
Perhaps the collaboration between Collegium and Zhongguo Ren societies went deeper than he had thought. Perhaps the Strontium Dragons’ involvement in the abortive revolution had been more equivocal and manipulative than anyone realized.

‘All right, Zhao-ji. Show me.’

Shepherded by drones, a misty cloud rose out of the shuttle and hung billowing in the vacuum. Inside it, tiny points of hard white light were shining.

Tom opened his mouth, closed it. Zhao-ji would explain in his own time.

‘This way, Tom.’

They stepped onto a dark strip that ran along the floor. Zhao-ji gestured, and the strip began to flow. It carried them to the bay’s edge, flowed around a corner, and then followed alongside the vast cylindrical hall.

Inside the hall, the misty cloud was moving along the hall’s central axis, at approximately the same pace.

They tracked the cloud’s progress to the far end, where a huge cone formed of magnets collimated the cloud into a narrow beam, pushing it along a solid horizontal shaft that was hidden from sight.

‘Now what?’ said Tom.

‘Now you see what this is all about.’ Zhao-ji looked more glum than Tom had ever seen him. ‘And I hope that you don’t hate me for it.’

The moving strip bore them onwards through a dark windowless tunnel, then brought them out into a bright-lit observation chamber where medics in orange gowns stared through view-windows, manipulating med-drones with intricate hand gestures.

What the Fate?

In the chamber below, on the other side of the glass, drones were working on a shaven-headed child who lay on a couch. Tom could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl. Whichever, the child lay quiescent, eyes open, oblivious to the robotic arms peeling back his/her scalp and lasing tiny holes into the skull.

All around, drones used magnetic fields to marshal the misty cloud and its load of shining white geometric points, funnelling the stuff downwards, into the child’s freshly exposed brain.

Oh, sweet Destiny.

Tom had forgotten where he was: the place where ‘Oracles are created, not born’. The thing was, no-one outside knew about the process itself; it was the most heavily guarded secret the Collegium possessed. There was
no
reason to reveal it to a sworn enemy.

‘Zhao-ji. What are they doing?’

‘What they’ve always done, my friend. Exactly what they’ve always done.’

~ * ~

7

NULAPEIRON AD 3423

Strostiv was waiting for Tom in his antechamber. Zhao-ji took his leave, departing amid an escort of hard-faced 49s, footsoldiers of the Strontium Dragons, trained in wu shu and weaponry and utterly ruthless in protecting their senior officers. They caught the vibrations from Tom’s repressed anger, and kept watchful gazes on him until they were out of sight.

Tom had not spoken a word since they left the medical chamber.

‘My apologies,’ said Strostiv, ‘if I have offended you.’

There was no reply that Tom could make, short of striking out with a half-fist to the larynx and ending Strostiv’s life here and now. And what good would that do? The Collegium and its work would still go on.

Finally, Tom exerted all of his self-control and said in a tight but civilized voice: ‘There was a technical meeting you wanted me to attend?’

‘That’s right.’ Strostiv looked relieved. ‘That’s exactly right, old chap.’

‘So where—?’

‘Do follow me, my Lord. Right in here. We’re all set up and waiting.’

Strostiv’s technical expert was a man called Zilwen. An obsidian skullcap clasped his head. Whether it fitted over his scalp or replaced it, Tom could not tell.

They convened in the same chamber as before, with the purple conference table over which a large abstract holodisplay was now billowing. Zilwen gestured an intricate network diagram into being as Tom took his seat.

The core equation modelled the expansion of the entire universe from the viewpoint of notional metaspace. Its relevance was obvious: the future lies (always) in the direction in which the universe is bigger.
All
the basic equations of physics are time-reversible: swap the sign of the time variable in any particle’s trajectory, and you merely get a particle moving in the opposite direction.

There is
no
preferred past or future at the tiniest scales. It is the great temporal mystery.

If the universe begins to collapse ... the ancients’ notion was of a Big Bang, expansion, then collapse to a Big Crunch. But by symmetry, Tom knew, you actually get
two
Big Bangs, both growing towards the future time when they meet and join.

These are the equations,
Tom thought,
that led to my blade in d’Ovraison‘s heart.

Would the cross-over time actually occur? Irrelevant. Provided you replicated conditions
as
if the universe were shrinking, you obtained regions of spacetime where time flowed in the opposite direction. Some of the neural groups in Oracles’ minds experienced just such negative time: it was the basis of their abilities and their damaged, fragmented personalities.

No-one knew how such a feat of spacetime engineering was possible, only that it had been done. Living Oracles were the proof.

‘Perhaps you’ve wondered,’ said Zilwen, ‘how Oracular minds can be constructed.’

‘I’m willing to learn,’ Tom muttered.