This time, when her mouth moved, the mist came alive with blazing flux.
**GREETINGS!**
The Seekers staggered, and Seeker-once-Harij tripped and fell backwards, thumping into the ground. Zirkana went down on one knee beside him, but he was laughing; and after a moment, she was laughing too.
Seeker-once-captive managed to keep composure and reply.
**Greetings.**
But they were all smiling, even the soft-skinned beings, even the ones standing well back. This was a strange world and they did not know each other, but there was a sense only of warmth, of the possibility of friendship; and so long as no one did anything stupid, that was how things would proceed. Seeker-once-Harij was sure of it.
The World was going to be different now.
TWENTY-FIVE
NULAPEIRON, 2604-2657 AD
For fifty-three years, the system self-identified as Kenna was immobile. It existed as a network of components embedded in a wall deep inside Palace Avernon, itself located in the Primum Stratum of Demesne Avernon, some hundred metres below ground. Then, towards the end of that fifty-third year, Kenna decided that it was female once more.
Her internal computation had upgraded with the addition of neuropeptide-analogues, so that she manifested emotional cognition, the gut-think which comprises a huge portion of human neural processing; and that meant it was time to begin reconfiguring herself into a human personality. Choosing a gender was a major step, so she searched the standard human classification that reduced the choice to only thirty-five options; from among them she picked a feminine-tough trope-complex not dissimilar to the former Rhianna Chiang.
The old Duke Avernon, the first and best of them, would have approved of her choice.
‘Fear is literally felt in the stomach,’ he had told her once, ‘and heartache in the heart. Peptide flow in organs forms the third nervous system. Descartes would have got it right,’ he had added, ‘if he’d said cogito capioque, ergo sum. From capere, meaning to feel, experience, charm and suffer. A fetching semantic spectrum, don’t you think?’
She missed the Duke, such a contrast to the grandson ruling now. Lord Dalgen Avernon (his father had relinquished duchy status, to reduce the demesne’s tax liability) of the flighty mind and political ambition, saw himself as worldly-wise, rather than simply worldly.
Or so she thought until she watched him poring over the spacedrone experiment results, the laboratory chambers filled with holo diagrams, with billowing phase-spaces and five-dimensional lattices of linked, glowing equations. Her pseudo-face was embedded in the wall of the largest chamber, but over the years, this Avernon had grown to think of her as a decorative mounted sculpture rather than a cognitively functional, though immobile, cyborg.
She encouraged that notion by remaining silent during his devious political planning sessions.
This new experimental work, however, was based on log osophical research initiated by Avernon’s forebears and continued by current members of l’Academia Ultima, which sometimes lived up to its name. The investigation harked back to the old mystery of time’s arrow, to the time symmetry of ‘fundamental’ equations describing the natural universe, and their failure to identify the three aspects of timeflow: the moving reality of past, present and future. But the work was not just theory and laboratory experiments.
Something odd was happening in the vicinity of Nulapeiron.
The initial results had come from experiments on board drones placed in orbits of different radii around Nulapeiron, orbits chosen almost at random. Some of the results matched predictions, but others showed strange yet consistent deviations. To investigate, the researchers had commissioned more spacedrones – something most people in Nulapeiron would not dream of, given their mental blindspots regarding the uninhabitable surface, never mind what laid beyond – until there were shoals of the things, orbiting at all sorts of distances from the surface, allowing a clear mapping of the phenomenon.
Producing unambiguous readings, but not understanding.
The heart of it was a set of reactions in the spacedrones’ cores, which produced the usual spray of short-lived particles and resonances – so far, so good. But in some locations, there were too many kaons extant. Unexciting to the average person, deeply troubling to the researchers.
An imbalance occurred strongly within a kilometre-wide shell some hundred thousand kilometres from the centre of Nulapeiron; outside of that shell, subatomic reality behaved as normal. But for seven hundred years, that normality had been known to possess an inexplicable feature.
‘Take an electron moving forward in time,’ Kenna remembered one of Rhianna Chiang’s childhood teachers saying, ‘and try to distinguish it from the behaviour of a positron moving backwards in time – and you’ll find there is no difference, so how can you decide which it really is? It follows logically – and is actually true – that subatomic reactions are reversible in time.’
The teacher had shown footage of a smashed egg leaping up into someone’s hand and spontaneously reforming.
‘You know I’m showing this in reverse. But only vast collections of particles, like the number of atoms required to make up an egg, show timeflow in their larger structure. At the atomic or subatomic level, footage going forwards or backwards is equally likely.’
At an early age, Pilots were expected to understand time-flow as an emergent property. But there was a twist in the tail regarding realspace, and if an equivalent was unknown in mu-space, that might be only because Labyrinth’s researchers had not found it yet.
Because of the startling exception to the rule: neutral kaons and their opposite-spin antiparticles appear to know the difference between past and future. Seven centuries of data backed up that observation.
Now the present Lord Avernon was looking at readings that appeared to show a K° imbalance in the wrong direction, as though time itself were wobbling, as if the present were threatening to flow from the future into the past.
And if he were the one to monopolise the technology accruing from this phenomenon, not only would Demesne Avernon be a duchy once more, he would become a Lord Primus and probably—
‘Father! My Lord!’
—have better servitors, ones who would know to bar his over energetic son from his private laboratory chambers, even if he had not issued instructions to that effect.
‘What is it?’ He gestured the holos into non-existence, because the boy was bright and you never knew what he might notice. ‘Tell me there’s a good reason for this outburst.’
‘More an inburst, surely,’ said young Alvin. ‘But we’ve a visitor and you’ll never guess what he is.’
‘You’re right, I won’t guess. Just tell me.’
Alvin looked disappointed for a moment; then he gushed: ‘His name is Caleb de Vries and Mother’s talking to him in the Great Hall and he’s a Pilot, Father. A Pilot!’
If people, deep in their underground strata, rarely thought about the planet’s surface, then they had almost forgotten about mu-space and the Pilots who had brought their fore-bears here. Nor was this a culture that had come about by accident; deliberate design ran through customs, politics and language. But of course the Lords and Ladies still, on occasion, dealt with Pilots as required.
So long as the others, the servitors and commonfolk, forgot about the rest of inhabited space, that was good enough. Isolationism was a tool for social engineering, not an end in itself.
Today was nevertheless doubly unusual. Kenna, observing, felt an unexpected excitement.