The Killing of Worlds (33 page)

“Were you and Zai lovers?”

“No.”

“Did Laurent Zai choose to live for you, Katherie?”

“No, Adept. It was someone else.”

Their faces showed no surprise, but Hobbes’s words won her a moment of respite. She felt triumphant to have silenced the dead woman.

“Who, Katherie?” the adept finally asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Another crew member?”

“No. Captain Zai would never—” She swallowed. “I have no idea who.”

“So it could be a crewmate of yours.”

“No! It’s someone on Home, I think.”

The adept leaned closer, peering at her like some troubling specimen under glass.

“He just wanted to live, Honored Mother. For some lover, for some imagined future. Why is that so hard to believe?”

The dead woman blinked, then nodded again, as smoothly as a machine. Hobbes felt she could detect an expression on her face: a ghost of satisfaction.

“I believe you, Executive Officer,” the dead woman said.

They left Hobbes, and she curled back into bed. The worm silk didn’t comfort her. The privacy of the cabin had been utterly violated, her mind stripped of its deepest secret. They had seen what she had wanted, what she had allowed herself to hope for. That old humiliation had returned, amplified by a dead woman’s smirk.

And as she calmed herself, curling into a ball and gesturing for the susurrant music of her childhood, Katherie realized that she might have made a terrible mistake. The politicals still wanted Captain Zai’s blood, still sought revenge for his rejection of tradition. They would try to turn anything they knew about him to their advantage. And she had told him of his secret lover on Home. Had she betrayed her captain?

Bassiritz watched the transformation.

The prisoner had lain with her head pressed against the cell wall, just as she had for a few minutes of every hour for the last two weeks.

He had checked the interval against his time stamp many times, and it was always just over an hour. In his shifts guarding the Rix-woman, Bassiritz had never seen the ritual disrupted. Her actions were absolutely regular, as if her mind were empty of everything but numbers, counting ten thousand seconds again and again. She seemed more machine than human.

Bassiritz’s fascination with her had led to still more reading, and he knew that Rix bodies were half artificial. Brain, muscles, cellular systems—no aspect of their physiology remained untouched, even in the womb. Of course, Imperial knowledge had for centuries been limited to corpses recovered after battle; live specimens had only been observed in firefights, where the Rixwomen seemed more demonic than mechanical.

The woman before him was the Empire’s first captive Rixwoman.

For the last two weeks, Bassiritz had keenly observed this event, this moment when the prisoner looked fully human. As she listened, head pressed to the hypercarbon wall, the fierce cast of her features softened, as if she were adrift in some innocent daydream years distant from her empty cell.

So he saw when it happened.

Her eyes popped open, and filled with predatory pleasure.

The marine jumped at the Rixwoman’s sudden motion, a measure of cold fear trickling into his belly. The hypercarbon between them suddenly seemed no more substantial than glass.

Bassiritz remembered his childhood, when he used to dare himself to face his father’s tarantula, trapped in a terrarium above the old man’s desk. The arachnid glowered down from the transparent globe, guarding its tiny domain of twigs and sand. The glass sphere never seemed sufficient to ensure its captivity. When, subjective years ago, Bassiritz had returned home to discover that the Time Thief had taken his father, the globe above the desk was empty. The tarantula had died long ago, his aging sisters assured Bassiritz. But in his mind, it had escaped, free to roam now that it was no longer held in check by his father’s iron will. Since that disappearance, the marine had never slept comfortably in his family home.

The Rixwoman now seemed to embody the spirit of that missing spider, as if it had come for him at last.

She stared directly at Bassiritz, even though the imaging was oneway.

“Bring your captain to me,” she said.

He nodded dumbly, unable to resist her command.

Laurent Zai looked at the command bridge airscreen and sighed.

The colors of the image were false, the terminology metaphorical, the clean-looking shapes wholly a mathematical invention. The illustration was purely hypothetical; merely a representation of a theory about an enigma. Nothing was ever straightforward when one tried to plumb the quantum.

“We think that the pseudoatoms are physically disjunct from the silicon substrate,” Tyre continued.

Zai’s eyes drifted about the command bridge. He wondered how many of the officers present really understood this. They were all still exhausted by battle and repair work, and perhaps a bit complacent from victory. For the last fifteen minutes, only Hobbes had been questioning the DA ensign.

“The silicon simply gives it mass?” his executive officer asked.

“Gives it mass, ma’am,” said Tyre, “and serves as the semiconducting medium. Without a semiconductor, you can’t make quantum wells.”

Captain Zai winced. There was that term again. He’d always thought of quantum mechanics as safely in the realm of the minuscule—relevant to data processing and communications, but not the hard and “strongly interacting” physics of combat. Whenever the twisted rules of the quantum domain reached up into the macroworld, the results were unnerving.

“Please explain quantum wells again, Ensign.”

Tyre took a deep breath, managing to keep frustration from her face.

“In certain semiconducting environments, electrons occupy something called a quantum well. Inside a quantum well, pseudoatom electrons assume the arrangement of a normal atom, but there’s no nucleus—no protons or neutrons.”

“No real mass, Captain,” Hobbes added, “and with infinite half-life: no radiation or decay even in transuranium elements. But like an isotope, quantum-well pseudoatoms have the same physical characteristics as a real atom with the same number of electrons: hardness, reflectivity, chemical properties.”

“Imperial data processors use quantum wells, correct?” he asked.

“Some do, sir,” Tyre explained. “The
Lynx
‘s processors certainly use quantum bits—data are stored in the spin-state of electron pairs in trapped phosphorus atoms—but that’s not a quantum well. Those are real phosphorus atoms.”

Zai sighed.

“But we do know how to create quantum wells,” he stated.

“Yes, sir. That’s pre-starflight technology.”

“In that case, and please put this simply,” he said, “what can the Rix do that we can’t?”

Ensign Tyre looked pleadingly at Hobbes, and the executive officer nodded and looked upward to gather her thoughts.

“Sir, we can only create wells with fixed electron counts, and under relatively controlled circumstances. But the Rix have found a way to add and subtract electrons on the fly, to change the wells’ elemental characteristics at will. Apparently, the object can address its pseudoatoms as if they were registers in a computer’s memory. In some sense, the object is a quantum computer.”

“A computer that can change itself into whatever it wants?”

“Yes, sir. The process of the object’s thoughts is transubstantiation.”

“Mind and matter, one,” he mused.

Hobbes narrowed her eyes. “I suppose so, sir.”

Laurent Zai dared another look into the airscreen. Since his last question, Ensign Tyre had put up a representation of a quantum well. It looked like any number of three-dimensional graphs: a terrain of spiky mountains arranged with an odd symmetry, like a wedding procession of volcanoes, or the spinal ridges of some exaggerated trilobite.

Thoughts of evolutionary past turned over the soil of Zai’s growing disquiet. His staff seemed insufficiently alarmed by the object’s abilities, as if they’d captured some alien and charming children’s toy. Ensign Tyre seemed to view this as an intellectual game, as if it were one of the reverse-engineering conundra that DA officers composed and swapped like chess puzzles. For Hobbes, this new Rix technology translated into nothing more than a set of tactical advantages, like a new form of armor or an improved gravity effect.

But Zai saw a greater danger. Not only to the Empire, but to humanity itself. This was a revision of matter, for god’s sake. He had to make them grasp the enormity of this development.

“Tyre,” he said, “would this work at higher temperatures?”

“Absolutely, sir. It might improve its operation. Frankly, we have no idea how they’ve managed to get the silicon to semiconduct at deep-space temperatures.”

“And it would work in a hard-gee field?”

“It should, sir. We’ve poked at it with easy gravitons, anyway, and there seems to be no disruption. This all happens in the electromagnetic domain; gravity is a relatively trivial force.”

“So this object could exist on a planet?”

Tyre and Hobbes were silent. Other officers around the table straightened, awakening from the stupor of the physics lesson. Zai waited a few more moments as the idea sank in.

Then he asked more directly. “This object might well adapt itself to terrestrial conditions?”

“I see no reason why it couldn’t, sir,” Tyre admitted.

“Could it propagate itself, like nanotechnology?”

“Possibly, sir. If there was sufficient silicon in the environment.”

“What percentage of the average terrestrial planet is silicon, Tyre?”

Hobbes shook her head as she interrupted. “We don’t know if propagation is even remotely possible, sir. And we do know the object has limitations. It can change itself, but it hasn’t turned into a starship and attacked us.”

Tyre spoke. “It seems to be unable to create complex objects, ma’am, as far as we’ve seen. And, of course, the object has only its own silicon substrate for reaction mass; acceleration would gradually consume it. Without nuclei, of course, it can’t make a fusion drive or nuclear weapons.”

“I hope you’re right, Tyre,” Zai said. “How many megatons of silicon do you think exist on Home?”

“We can keep it physically distant from any planets, sir,” Hobbes said.

“I wouldn’t bring it within a billion kilometers of Home, orders from the Emperor be damned,” he stated flatly.

The disloyal words brought a look of shock to the officers’ faces. Good, he had their attention. They were going to have to be very careful with this war prize.

Tyre spoke up, back with an answer to his previous questions. “Silicon is universally prevalent, sir. In terrestrial planetary crusts, only oxygen is more plentiful by mass. And in cosmic terms, only a few gases and carbon exceed silicon in abundance.”

Zai was finally satisfied by his staff’s reaction to this information.

“Listen carefully,” he said. “We seem to have a tiger by the tail. Emergent minds have existed for a long time. As the Rix Cult insists, they are the natural result of any petabyte-scale data system, just as biological life seems to be the natural result of oxygen, carbon, and a billion years of steady sunlight or geothermal. But however threatening compound minds are, so far they have always depended on humanity for their existence. We formed the substrate for their thoughts.”

Zai looked around the command bridge, catching his officers’ eyes one by one.

“But we are no longer necessary,” he said slowly.

Laurent Zai watched their faces carefully. The trip to Home would take almost two subjective years. To keep his crew alert during that long passage, he needed to illustrate the threat that this enigmatic cargo posed to the
Lynx
and the Empire, and to humanity. The space-born mind was a new species, an altogether unknown entity that would test this crew sorely.

A strange look passed over Hobbes’s face. She put a hand to one ear.

“Sir,” she said quietly. “I’m getting double-priority from the Rix prisoner’s marine guard.”

“An escape attempt?” Zai asked. He had feared that having a commando on board would cause trouble, no matter how carefully she was guarded.

“Negative, sir. A message.”

“She’s decided to speak?”

“Not her, sir. The message … it’s from the compound mind. For you personally.”

Laurent Zai glanced around at the shocked faces of his officers. He didn’t allow himself to show surprise. They would have to learn. Over the next two years, the unexpected would be the norm.

“It has already begun,” was all he said.

He left them there, signaling for Hobbes to follow.

As they walked toward the cell, Katherie Hobbes’s hand went to the flechette pistol strapped to her wrist.

She had intended to visit the prisoner once her duties permitted. The commando was a fabulous physical specimen, a captive unique in Imperial history. She was the only Rixwoman ever captured alive and conscious by Imperial forces over a century of armed clashes between Empire and Cult.

For the Rix, fighting to the end was the rule, suicide the alternative to victory. Hobbes’s researches had found only a single previous example of live Rix prisoners. At the end of the First Incursion, sixteen Rixwomen had been taken while in coldsleep, their long-range small craft intercepted by an Imperial raider deep within Cult space. One by one, they had been awakened, but each died within seconds of consciousness. Imperial doctors had attempted to discover and neutralize the mechanism by which the prisoners had ended their own lives, but no amount of medical intervention could keep them alive. Their bodies rejected sedatives, resuscitation, even—it was rumored—the holy symbiant. It seemed that the Rix had conscious control over their vital functions. For a Rixwoman, breathing was an option, the actions of the heart a voluntary choice.

Suicide, simply a decision.

Maybe, Hobbes thought, they actually believed their own propaganda. If human life was inherently meaningless, then one’s own might be ended by a whim.

Here was a Rixwoman, however, an elite commando of the Cult, who had apparently decided that life in captivity was worth living. But was it her own decision that kept her alive, Hobbes wondered, or the purposes of the compound mind?