Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two (43 page)

It was nine years since a young, British-born researcher called Gus Calzonni – her legal name being Augusta – made her controversial discovery in Caltech. A laser beam that appeared broken, non-existent along part of its length, was significant in itself; but Calzonni’s claim was that the beam in fact remained continuous, with a segment inside another spacetime continuum that she named mu-space. What gave the claim some credibility was that she had calculated the transition requirements in advance, based on the fractal geometry of a hypothetical ur-continuum, and designed the experiment afterwards. However, it remained an open question: just because the beam behaved
as if
it had entered mu-space did not guarantee it actually had.

The webAnts and webAgents that Lucas set loose returned an interesting picture, more high-tech entrepeneur (or
entrepeneuse
as several journal sites had it) than researcher. There was a small tradition of Oxford, where she had taken her first degree and DPhil both, producing academics who grew rich from spin-off companies; but Calzonni appeared to have a greater, un-English (or un-English-academic) drive for wealth. A mathematical prodigy, she had also studied a near-forgotten non-academic system called neurolinguistic programming, which she claimed produced useful psychological techniques and skills for business people, even as she denounced the system’s community as New Age schizoid delusional, with minimal knowledge of neurology, linguistics or software engineering, unable to see past their dogmatic constraints or test themselves with scientific rigour. Lucas removed the latter set of findings from his workspace – they seemed strident about an irrelevance – so he could concentrate on the physics.

What he had set the ants and agents to search for had been the triplet of variables and values in the postscript of the note he had dug up from his floor, ruining the parquet: the note that appeared to have been secreted by his grandmother decades ago.

You will see three. You will be wrong
.

G

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

The values had no specified units and returned no significant matches from the web, but the triplet of variable names was distinctive: kappa, lambda and mu, each with an infinity sign as subscript. The webAgents found a match in Calzonni’s published papers, being three of the nine key parameters that she had set for the beam’s insertion into mu-space … if that was what she had achieved.

Interestingly, despite the insertion parameter μ (as in mew like a pussycat), Calzonni intended mu-space to be named after the Japanese concept of
mu
(like a cow, not a cat). Physicists still failed to agree whether ‘quark’ rhymed with dark or dork, Lucas following the latter. But regarding mu-space, he decided he had been using the wrong pronunciation.

As a child, during the evenings while her mother worked as an office cleaner, Gus Calzonni had taught herself logic by coding in Java. She wrote:
Storing data in value objects, such as Strings and Booleans, was immensely valuable. It meant that if I declared a variable
b
of type Boolean, evaluating
b.booleanValue( )
gave me three possible outcomes:
true, false
or
NullPointerException.
This made it natural for me to recast discrete mathematics as trinary logic when I began to …

The Japanese
mu
, it seemed, could mean boundless or nothingness or neither/nor: concepts not normally synonymous in Western minds, but apparently in Calzonni’s.

She was also an expert in something called jeet kune do. Rich, brilliant, masterful, and no one to argue with. The thought of meeting someone like that, especially a woman, was appalling.

But then there was that note from Grandma – apparently – and the triple gamma-ray burster event, observed by separate astronomical set-ups, but deleted from them all via simultaneous worm attacks. That had been three days ago, and still he had not told anyone about the data he had copied to his memory flake, an offline replica of the destroyed Cloud data.

Nor had he returned home, or seen Maria, because whenever he thought of her attitude as the mysterious message arrived on his holoterminal, the more he became afraid.

Why would a musically talented, nympho beauty hang around with a geek scientist like me?

Perhaps his low self-esteem was illusion; but he thought it was more likely realistic. And perhaps Maria’s calculating manner was just part of her personality – but what if she was only with him for a deliberate reason?

The qPad had few of the facilities available to Imperial’s holoterminals, so before looking at the data again, Lucas used low-level reflection and introspection hacks, pulling open the component structures, before running data-projection extracts, retrieving subsets suitable for 2-D rendering. That initial dissection turned out to be fortuitous, for hidden inside the nested object aggregates were worm vectors, lying in wait and ready to go wild.

‘You little bastards,’ Lucas told them.

As he popped up a flat still image containing the three shining dots among the stars, he remembered something from seeing the real time data as it arrived: in a subsidiary panel showing numeric data, two values were in familiar territory: the right ascension close to 6 hours, the declination close to +40°.

A second image, with lower resolution – showing the triplet as a single unresolved dot, but with a greater visible area of sky – confirmed that the gamma ray bursters shone from a little to the left of β Aurigae, at the bottom of the distorted hexagon that was the Auriga constellation.

From the direction of the galactic anti-centre.

‘So it has to be a hoax,’ he said aloud. ‘Has to be.’

While the scared voice inside his head told him it was real.

In the morning he travelled to Heathrow via a roundabout route: Victoria to Hounslow by coach, on to Slough by bus, then a second bus to the airport, paying via the touristToken he had bought for cash. Only at Terminal 7 did he revert to his legal identity, waiting as long as he dared before buying a seat on the next flight to Los Angeles.

She won’t even see me
.

Perhaps it was better if he did not try. From all accounts, a copy of her original apparatus – or an early generation among variations – remained in the Caltech laboratory where she had constructed it, guaranteed a safe place due to her financial endowments. If he had to break into someplace, a university would surely be less challenging than some corporate headquarters.

Grandma, I’m scared shitless
.

Had she ever been afraid like this?

Gavriela’s war ended like so many others: in anti-climax, forbidden to discuss her work, without guarantees of the future. Only the continuing support from Rupert on Brian’s behalf – Rupert being rather better off – gave her any feeling of security in the colourless desolation that followed victorious national euphoria. How many years would it be before the ubiquitous urban bomb sites were replaced with new buildings? Ten years? Twenty? Industries were slow to regain a peacetime footing. Among ordinary people, initial talk of the end of rationing faded soon.

But then there was Carl, the miracle of having a son.

Carl started school today
, she wrote in her diary.
My boy is a schoolboy!

She left no written record of her tears, of the wrench caused by his easy acceptance of the schoolyard, the difficulty of her walking away.

Her own work was not what she had expected, and yet it provided both income and challenge: teaching physics at a 1930s-built redbrick grammar school for boys that was trying to come to terms with its changing identity. The pupils were almost entirely middle class – being so much better prepared for the Eleven Plus, the national IQ test for eleven-year-olds that was supposed to be impartial – but the working-class entrants were more numerous than before, and some of them had been
de facto
socially elevated during the evacuation years, living among rural foster families. They were often troubled by living once more with parents they had half (or wholly) forgotten; and when it came to fathers, that applied to other boys besides the returned evacuees: changed men coming home to changed wives, if they came back at all.

An older generation of teachers was struggling with this newness. The ones who accepted Gavriela were the minority, but they were enough; and she came to care for the boys as much as for the science that she taught them. So this was survival, therefore victory, if not the life she had dreamed of.

Carl was in bed, and she was reading the new C.P. Snow,
The Light and the Dark
, when a triplet of knocks sounded from the front door of the flat, peremptory and recognizable.

‘What are
you
doing here?’ she asked the empty room, putting down her book.

When she let Rupert in, he sauntered through to the small sitting-room and sat down on the burgundy two-seater, before crossing his legs and greeting her.

‘I’m really glad to see you again,’ he said. ‘Dear Gavi.’

His Oxonian drawl, to some ears, might have belied the surface meaning; but Gavriela thought, with surprise, that he meant it.

‘I’ll make some tea,’ she said.

‘No sugar, that’d be splendid.’

She came back with tea and bourbon creams; and they made a start on both before continuing their talk, preamble to whatever it was that Rupert wanted.

‘I’m known as Gabrielle these days,’ she said. ‘Gabby was a little too informal.’

‘One needs a smidgen or more of gravitas among the brats, I suppose. How
is
the world of teaching?’

‘I don’t need to use the cane more than twenty times a day.’ She looked at him. ‘That was a joke.’

‘My old school’s motto was:
So many thrashings, so little time
. At least that was how we translated the Latin.’

‘Ours is
ad astra
.’ She smiled. ‘I point out that the RAF adds
per ardua
, because if you dream of reaching the stars, you have to put in the work.’

‘Hmm.’

‘So why have you ventured out among the struggling classes, dear Rupert?’

They smiled more or less together, in a harmony that was new.

‘This and that,’ he said. ‘I’ve a couple of photographs to show you, but that’s not why I’m here. May I?’

‘If you like.’

They were in an envelope; he slid them out and handed over the first.

‘Do you recognize the older gentleman?’ he said. ‘Either of them, really.’

‘Sorry. They’re standing like father and son. Or …’

Rupert’s smile was more sad than cold.

‘Or two men with a relationship they dare not speak of? The former, in fact. The older gentleman is Max Planck, which is a name I gather you are bound to know.’

‘Of course.’ She laid a hand on the book she had put down. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

‘Neither Virgil nor Homer wrote much about quantum mechanics,’ said Rupert. ‘It’s a little outside my purview.’

‘And the younger man?’ she said. ‘Is he significant?’

‘To Planck, certainly. It’s his son Erwin, or rather was. The Nazis hanged him in ‘45.’

‘Oh.’

‘For trying to kill Hitler in fact, which makes me think rather highly of the chap. Take a look at this.’

The second photograph showed the younger Planck standing with a man in suit and overcoat. Blurred though the background was, the black hooked cross was obvious: a
Hakenkreuz
, centre of a hanging Swastika. Wartime Germany or occupied Europe was the photograph’s setting. She had no problem recognizing the other man.

‘When I met him before the war,’ she said, ‘he told me his name was Dmitri Shtemenko, though he introduced himself to everyone else as … Jürgen. Oh, what was …? Jürgen Schäffer-Braun, that was it. He was … But you know what he was, don’t you?’

‘I do.’ Rupert re-crossed his legs, elegant as always. ‘When you debriefed in Baker Street to Brian’ – he paused, just a little – ‘that night we apprehended those two darkness-driven men in Trafalgar Square … You gave those names then, Shtemenko and Schäffer-Braun, when you talked about your past.’

‘Well, then.’

It was a way of asking him to explain.

‘There was an incident in Berlin last month,’ he said. ‘During de-Nazification procedures, someone made an accusation against our man here.’ He tapped the picture of Dmitri. ‘He’d resurrected the Schäffer-Braun identity, presumably in a hurry, which is how he got flagged up. He featured in Berlin Station’s reports because of the rather unusual way he slipped out of their grasp.’

‘Using something like hypnotism,’ said Gavriela.

‘Exactly.’

She handed him back the photographs.

‘But this wasn’t why you came here?’

‘No, I just wanted confirmation of our slippery friend’s identity. In case he reappears someday.’

‘All right.’