Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (28 page)

Jed was not sure that an incipient Anomaly was one of them.

It's more likely a renegade.

An Anomalous component might have tried to initiate absorption, the process obvious because it was accompanied, as
far as anyone had ever observed, by a characteristic spillover glow that was a precise shade of blue. This might be one of Schenck's renegades, but even at this range Jed should have been able to detect the induction neurons and other characteristics of a fellow Pilot. Everything indicated that this was an ordinary man he was chasing.

A man capable of moving faster than Jed, and perhaps heading for a weapons cache or transport, even a submersible flying shuttle, because that was what the researchers used for—

He had stopped, the man, amid falling snow but with an ellipsoidal volume of clear air surrounding him, and it took Jed several stumbling moments to realise what he was looking at: a smartmiasma, no doubt weapon-primed and ready to strike.

I'm dead.

Jed's tu-ring had weapon capabilities and he even had an old-fashioned knuckleduster with embedded grasers tucked inside a pocket, but they needed human action to initiate a strike while the whole point about smartmiasmas and similar technology was that they operated at a trillion times the speed of thought, because organic brains are slow.

The man smiled and raised his arms.

I'm sorry, my—

Something huge and bronze crashed into existence.

What for, lover?

It was a ship, gleaming and beautiful.

Where did you—? I love you.

And I love you.

Which was why she had taken the risk, not descending through air but transiting via mu-space, such a dangerous transition, perfectly executed, and smashing any matter in the way, say a human body, to misty oblivion.

It was not the icy wind that brought tears to Jed's eyes.

Before he left Coolth for good, there was one last event to finish off a very odd day. After the all-clear had been sounded,
and the research station modules crawled back together and reformed while Jed's ship hovered overhead, all weapons powered up just in case, Jed had a final meeting with Shireen Singh. Her team had analysed both Corplane's body and the evaporated remains of the unknown man – a man redolent with the scent of darkness, according to the Haxigoji witnesses – along with Corplane's business systems.

‘We think Corplane was acting under some kind of compulsion,' Shireen said. ‘Which is worrying, but not the most interesting thing. I want you to know this as added back-up to my own report, because the Admiralty need to find out.'

Jed looked into her steady faux-brown eyes.

‘Find out what? That I've killed again?'

‘It wasn't exactly you this time. Plus' – with a smile – ‘the person your ship wiped out was one Petra Helsen, responsible for the Anomaly coming into existence.'

‘That bitch.'

‘Exactly.'

‘But it was a man I—'

‘Autodoc,' said Shireen, and shrugged. ‘Identity change.'

‘Of course. She did it before, on Molsin. Not to that extent.'

He should have thought of it earlier.

Clara was a boy until she was seventeen. You know that.

I know, I know. I'm glad one of us could think clearly in the moment.

Any time, my love.

Shireen raised an eyebrow, as if aware that he was in thought conjunction with his ship, although of course she could not eavesdrop: no one could.

‘You did good, Pilot Goran.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Give my love to your wife. And belated congratulations to both of you.'

‘Cheers. I'll do that.'

His ship, who had been hovering high overhead once more,
took her time descending, and after taking him on board rose slowly. The team of agents, with Shireen at their centre, watched from the ground. There was no hurry now.

Jed-and-ship could fly home in quiet triumph.

FORTY-ONE

EARTH, 1972 AD

It happened on the morning that, over breakfast, Rupert asked Gavriela where cosmic rays came from, and she told him they came from the cosmos – where did he expect? – then after some badinage she talked about radiation from nebulae where stars were born, and the magnetic bow wave thrown up by the galaxy as it hurtled towards Virgo, at which Rupert raised an ironic eyebrow.

She went in to Imperial late, as was fitting for a retired scientist, but young Geoffrey was equally late, and they entered his office together. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and featured a six-foot vertical strip of computer printout on the back of the door: Ursula Andress, bikini-clad, the shading rendered in alphanumeric characters. Or perhaps it was Raquel Welch, from
One Million Years BC
. Embarrassed, Geoffrey hung his overcoat from the door hook, obscuring Ursula or Raquel, whichever.

‘Sorry. I, er—'

A tap on the door was followed by Hannah, one of the administrators, poking her head inside and saying, ‘Alex really needs you, Geoffrey, to sort out that budget thing.'

‘It's all right,' Gavriela said. ‘If that's the meson data over there, why I don't I just poke through it by myself?'

‘Oh. Yes, why not?'

She was supposed to be good at this, making sense of columnar figures, allowing patterns to emerge in her mind's eye as easily as a collection of printed characters might be perceived as a movie actress wearing a bikini. But the office was warm and perhaps she was feeling her age, because she jerked her
eyes open and realised she had been dozing. At least Geoffrey had not discovered her that way: luckily, his bureaucratic task seemed to be dragging on.

On an A4 pad she wrote, in pencil, some fragments of Fortran code that might group the data in more useful ways, so that the patterns she was unable to see might grow apparent. Why she thought there were patterns, she could not say. Geoffrey could piece the subroutines into a program on the PDP11, and if he spotted nothing in the output, perhaps she might wander in again next week and have another try.

‘Er . . .'

‘Hello, Geoffrey. I thought you'd been sucked into a bureaucratic hell for ever.'

Geoffrey's expression was the same as when he spotted Gavriela looking at the printout on the back of the door. ‘I, um, sort of was. The thing is, some people think we're falling behind King's College – London, I mean – because they're working on new stuff, on black holes.'

‘Seriously?' said Gavriela. ‘You can't mean that.'

The phenomenon might be allowed by general relativity, yet that did not mean such objects existed, any more than quarks, which to her mind were mathematical figments reflecting the choice of equations in the model, having little to do with what was really there. A meson
might
be a paired quark-plus-anti-quark, but it seemed unlikely.

‘Anyway,' said Geoffrey, ‘I kind of volunteered to investigate the field. But that means . . .'

‘Abandoning this line of research. I understand.' She looked at the stack of printed numbers, and her scribbled lines of Fortran. ‘Archive this where I can find it, Geoffrey, and I'll come pootling along to browse when I'm able. No doubt I'm verging on senility, but when I pick up my Nobel Prize, I'll mention you in my speech.'

‘You think I'll be working on a flawed theory?'

‘I do.'

‘And didn't Bohr win the Nobel for his pre-quantum atomic model?'

It predicted the energy spectrum of helium, hence the prize, but his theory was wholly inadequate to a proper understanding of the atom, and in a real sense was incorrect.

‘Good point,' said Gavriela. ‘When
you
make the speech, maybe you can mention
me
.'

Geoffrey grinned at her.

‘More importantly,' he said, ‘I hear they've got fresh doughnuts in the tea-room.'

‘You mean we're wasting time talking about the nature of the universe when we could be doing something useful. Was that plain doughnuts or jam?'

‘Jam, of course. We're not barbarians.'

There were little pings of arthritis when she stood.

‘I'll race you,' she lied.

Outside the college, she stood looking at the redbrick grandeur of the Royal Albert Hall, while music drifted from the Royal College of Music behind her, next to Imperial. She smiled and listened: it was the whimsical Bach piece that they used on the telly –
dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum; da-da-da, da-dum, da-da-da, da-dum
– as the countdown to educational programmes.

But some forty seconds in, the pleasantness was disturbed by a discordant intrusion –
da, da-dum, da-da-da-dum, da-da
– far off to her right. When she looked, a thin man might have just disappeared around the corner, or she might have imagined it. Her sense of being in the presence of darkness faded.

‘Are you all right, Dr Woods?' It was Hannah from Admin, her hair freshly permed, with a silk headscarf to protect it. ‘You seem a little pale.'

‘Too many doughnuts,' said Gavriela. ‘But I'm fine now, thank you.'

Nothing untoward happened on the journey home, and in the end she said nothing to Rupert about her possible brush
with the darkness, because what could he have done about it?

That night, in her comfortable bedroom that felt so right, she knew as she was falling asleep that she was going to dream, vividly and in strong colours. Yet she encountered neither crystalline beings nor wolves and swords as she expected; instead, the world in which she found herself was constructed of mathematical metaphor, and in the middle of the dream she had the thought that Lewis Carroll would be proud.

Wonderfuler and wonderfuler
, she decided.

Strolling across a meadow of integers, she laughs at the sight of matrices flying in V-formation above, then picks irrational chrysanthemums with florets arranged in infinite recursion, while a row of fractions watches, nudging each other and winking.

An infinity symbol comes bounding across the integers, then stops in front of her, bouncing up and down slowly, like a Lissajous figure trapped upon an oscilloscope screen.

‘I'm boundless,' mutters the infinity.

An apparently identical infinity comes bounding into view.

‘So am I,' it says. ‘Isn't it obvious?'

She waits while they bounce in place.

‘You look bare and boundless to me,' she says. ‘Has Möbius been stripping again?'

The infinities titter.

‘What will happen if you divide us?' they say. ‘What will happen then? Can you tell, or do we need to swallow you up for all eternity?'

She clears her throat.

‘I can tell straight away,' she tells them, ‘provided you answer me two questions.'

The infinities, still bouncing, angle inwards to look at each other, then face her once more.

‘Ask us,' says the infinity on the left. ‘We'll tell you the answer.'

‘Anything at all,' says the infinity on the right. ‘Really anything.'

‘Or imaginary anything,' says Left Infinity.

‘As complex as you like,' says Right Infinity.

She lets out a breath, knowing that these two are rascals but bounded by their promise, if nothing else. All around, the meadow of integers stretches for ever, but you can tell that the infinities are different . . . though whether from each other, it is hard to tell.

‘If you were to twist yourselves into alephs,' she asks thoughtfully, ‘what would your subscripts be?'

‘I say.' That's Left Infinity.

‘That's a little personal.' Right Infinity.

‘Do you want to stay bound by a promise for ever?' she asks.

‘Oh, dear.'

‘Suppose not.'

They bounce a little more, then wriggle into knots, and re commence bouncing in their new forms.

‘Unity,' she says.

‘We beg your pardon?' they say together.

‘You're both aleph nulls,' she points out. ‘So you'll divide to produce one, and it doesn't matter which of you is on top.' Which would have been her other question, of course.

‘
Well
. . .'

‘How risqué.'

‘Little people can be so rude.'

‘Can't they just.'

She calls up: ‘I'm not little!'

But her voice is tiny because she is shrinking, with integers growing large around her. Already they are above her head, and the twin infinities are about to be obscured from sight, which seems hardly fair because she asked only one question.

‘You promised two answers!'

‘By George, she's right.'

‘By Cantor, so are you.'

The integers are so very big, taller than trees and still growing.

‘What is—?' She forces her voice to grow louder. ‘What's the
pattern
in the
numbers
?'

‘Oh, dear . . .'

‘Hmm . . .'

She spirals inwards in endless recursion.

Except that the infinite series of her transformations turns out be convergent, and so she wakes before the end of time, staring at the grey gloom and muttering to herself, ‘Too many jam doughnuts,' a second before sleep comes back, this time minus dreams.

When Gavriela woke up, her notebook, closed, was atop the candlewick bedspread, and her fountain-pen, actually borrowed from Rupert, was neatly beside it, cap screwed in place and not an ink blot anywhere. She had no memory of taking either object to bed.

Senility strikes at last.

Pushing down the covers, she forced herself up to a sitting position, sideways on the bed, wanting to pee but needing to check something first. It was decades since anything like this had happened, but perhaps the notebook contained sentences from her unconscious mind, written while she slept, as on that wartime night in Oxford.

Out in the hallway, the phone began to ring.

The notebook opened naturally at the midpoint, to a pair of facing pages that yesterday had been blank. The left-hand page now bore a blotchy ink sketch:

And the opposite page contained only a handwritten note, a first draft of a message intended to be written by her, not sent to her, although the intent was not obvious.

You will see three. You will be wrong.

G

P.S. Pass it on!
κ
_∞
= 9.42 ;
λ
_∞
= 2.703
×
10
²³
;
µ
_∞
= .02289

Rupert tapped on the door – it could not be anyone else – so she closed the notebook and pulled her dressing gown around her, hoping this would not take time because she really did have to pee.

‘I'm sorry,' he said when she opened the door, ‘but I needed to tell you . . .'

He was wearing his dressing gown with the burgundy lapels, and the new slippers she had bought him to replace the tattered monstrosities he wore when she moved in – less than four months ago, yet already the distant past.