Multiple roots, multiple zeroes
Where my plane intersected with the complex surface of Charles, forming shock fronts that pushed me along and ahead, tumbling like a boulder
Removing those roots, and the function collapsed in an entirely different fashion, and it seemed, in this dream, that we had both been used, that our potentials had been coerced to achieve one thing, what was happening now, and all else could be discarded, our lives the endless scribbling that leads to an answer
I saw also the trials, the judgments, the suits brought against what was left of the Republic, crowds of those who could not be reasoned with, because the shock fronts had tumbled them along, as well; and I would receive the reflection, their anger and fear.
“Ah,” Charles said, something between a sigh and a groan. “Cassie.”
He had never called me Cassie, the familiarity of a husband, and this our child coming now.
“Frame shifted,” he said.
The Solar System had vanished from our perspective. Instead, a view of the distant stars from three angles, combined, twisting my internal gaze until I understood what the interpreter was doing. We swam in a sea of nebulosity, fresh clouds of young stars, stars newly born, the corpses of over-eager suns that, dying, enriched the medium and allowed even more dynamic suns to be made. The QL laid its sight over these things, and all was twisted into uncollapsed vagueness, flickering between states, superpositions of qualities it regarded as important but which meant little even to Charles.
“I’ve found the New System,” Hergesheimer called out. “We’re four point nine trillion kilometers away.”
I broke from the projectors to look at Charles. He lay without moving on the couch. Leander kneeled beside him and looked at me with an expression caught between wonder and pain.
“Do you hear him — in the simulation?” Leander asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I went back under the projectors, bands combining to immerse me again. I did not hear Charles, but through the interpreter, I felt a guidance of the moving figures, a steady hand on the QL.
“Yes,” I said. “I feel him. He’s here.”
“Yes,” I said to the steady hand, the man on the horse.
Frame shift in…
No time at all.
A mere adjustment.
Two thirds of a light-year; having emerged ten thousand light-years from the Sun, this was just a twitch of the toe into the waters of our new ocean. Charles could do it.
Did it.
The blankness almost a familiarity now, a place of rest as well as potential, and within the repose, the steady hand on the surface of the QL.
“Not mad,” Charles said. “The QL is not mad. It’s not even eccentric.” I thought for a moment he was calling out the name of a woman, one of his lovers. Agnes Day. Who is she, Charles?
“Now listen to me closely, because there will not be time to say this again. You are my image of what a woman should be, God save me, Cassie.”
Agnus Dei he had said, lamb of god.
“You are strong, you love and care, and they will come after you.”
“Did you see them, too, Charles?”
“I don’t need to see anything. I know people almost as well as you. I won’t be there in any useful form, because this is going to”
just kill me
“Cassie. But you saved them all. History grinds very fine sometimes, and the dust is bones — or ash.”
“We’re responsible.”
“They’ll put you in a pillory, Cassie. I wish I could share it with you. Stephen will, and the others. I’m taking the easy way.”
“Charles, no.”
“Time’s up.”
I did not even feel the potential, and that may have been why he spoke to me — because that last, final twitch of the toe was the hardest, the worst.
The images projected into my eyes and into my head suddenly hurt abominably. None of it made any sense, all the messages and tags and labels scrambled, all the armillaries blown apart. I could not translate what I saw. The interpreter cut me off — leaving me in neutral, toneless darkness, and Leander pushed the bands away from my head and the projectors from my eyes.
Charles jerked on his couch, grinning horribly with clenched teeth. I rose from my couch and went to his side. Confusion and shouting from the gallery and around the lab; for the moment, everyone seemed to have forgotten us.
“We’re there!” Hergesheimer called out. “My God, we’re actually there!”
Only then did Charles relax. His head lolled, eyes shivering back and forth in their sockets. I cradled his head as Leander disconnected the optical leads. The medical arbeiters pushed forward then, through a sudden crowd, and took over, lifting Charles onto a stretcher.
I squatted on the floor beside his empty couch, dazed; we had done it. Charles had done it.
Hergesheimer walked before a vid image of the new system, pointing out stars as if this were his own triumph. Pictures of the new sun popped up around the lab.
Leander lifted me to my feet with strong hands and held me by the shoulders.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I nodded. “Charles?”
“I think he pushed it,” Leander said. “We’ll see…”
The first nine hours of the first day in the New System I slept in my quarters. I came awake when Hergesheimer, Leander, Abdi and Wachsler announced themselves at my door. Leander was solicitous.
“Are you feeling stronger?” he asked.
“Well enough,” I answered. I felt as if I could sleep another hundred years, but at least I was functional.
Wachsler’s engineers had erected a transparent dome on the surface and built a platform for us to walk on. I was pushed to the front of the first group of fifty, still expected to lead the way, and in crowded shifts we took an elevator to the central emergency exit, rose to the new airlock, and stepped out under a new sky.
Leander guided Charles in a wheelchair, attended by compact medical abeiters. I held Charles’s hand as we stood under the billowing, crystal-clear dome, but he responded only with a slight squeeze of my fingers.
The new sun seemed only slightly larger, though Mars in fact orbited eighty million kilometers closer. Twilight grew in the east. The sun’s disk slipped below the horizon, its bright, pearly, youthful corona flared and went away, and with nightfall came another glory.
Our eyes adjusted slowly. Minutes passed before we could see the depths of color, the promise of this new garden of suns. Flowers of nebula all around, rose and violet and deep lilac and faint wisps of spring green and daffodil yellow, and within them, the blurred faces of infant stars.
I kneeled beside Charles’s chair and took his hand again. He turned toward me, looked directly at me. Something lingered in his eyes, in his expression, to give me a little hope. I touched his face with my fingers and he flinched back, cheek muscles tightened. Then he relaxed.
“Do you know what’s happening, Charles?” I asked him.
“Settled down,” he whispered, eyes straying again.
“You brought us here,” I said. “For better or for worse, but it feels safe. That must be better.”
“Mm hmmm,” he murmured.
“We’re looking at the New System. It’s nighttime. We can see the stars, and they’re beautiful.”
“Good,” he said.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Too much.”
The quiet that followed our move — stunned realization, adjustment, and recovery — applied, it seemed, as much to Mars as the Martians.
No moons rose over Mars.
The threat of the locusts faded day by day as more machines wandered into our defenses and were shredded, or their energy and purpose died on the cold dry sands.