‘Of a drone body? I thank you again, my Lord,’ she answered. ‘And decline once more, with gratitude.’
‘We’re alone. You don’t need the polite rigmarole.’ He grinned. ‘And point taken. You’ll help me work through the details?’
‘Of course I will,’ she said.
But either because of coincidence or the subtle psychological effects of Alvix’s breakthrough – the realisation that decades-long effort could provide sudden insight – Kenna’s attention would become distracted in a matter of days, as she broke through her own private research barrier. In her case, there was no one at all with whom to share the news.
A microscopic fragment of crystal suddenly wriggled under gamma-ray bombardment.
The manner in which that tiny sample had become not just liquid – though highly viscous – but actually motile . . . that might not have seemed like much, any more than spherical absorption rather than emission of radiation might be radically significant.
It might take decades more, even a century, to grow enough of the crystal to work with, and then to learn the ins and outs of engineering with the stuff; but it was a start.
Roger Blackstone’s dreams might come true.
Such a strange reason for the feeling of triumph that spread throughout Kenna’s dispersed, distributed self.
Five years later, the prototype Oraculum was ready, and a more hardened-looking Lord Alvix was getting ready to receive his noble visitors, the Lords and Ladies who had sunk finances into his project and were intrigued at the notion they might get a return sooner than expected.
Whether that was true, Kenna was less sure than Alvix. Lately the practicalities she had been dealing with had been those of engineering, helping develop new manipulation techniques that might some day help her directly, but for now were key to the manipulation of harvested spinpoints.
Those spinpoints were gathered by mini-drones in far orbit, and brought down to Nulapeiron by one of the master-drones that deVries had deployed fifty-six years ago.
Each spinpoint was a tiny seed, wrapped in magnetic fields and glowing in visible wavelengths once stabilised, and in the more energetic end of the spectrum before capture. A hall had been refashioned to hold them, with massive coils embedded in its walls, located close to the vertical shaft down which the master-drone descended, bearing its strange cargo.
In that hall, magnetic fields guided spinpoints into new carry-drones fashioned for the purpose, the lower surface of their carapaces formed of flowskin, so that they could move snail-like along the Palace corridors, bearing their magnetically trapped spinpoints, one per carry-drone.
Perhaps if it were not for the state in which Kenna herself existed, she would have felt more ethical concern at the treatment of the young people whom Alvix’s research team were hoping to turn into Oracles. The notion of perceiving the future, as described in primitive folklore, was ill-defined, akin to seeing distant events without technological intervention. But practical precognition was ‘simply’ one of future memory: of ‘remembering’ thoughts and perceptions from one’s own future mind.
‘It’s cosmology and the subatomic realm,’ Alvix had said at the start of the project, ‘going hand in hand yet again. That resonance between the cosmically large and attoscopically small has been fascinating scientists and now logosophers for hundreds of years.’
When Alvix had first sought investors, seven of the currently visiting Lords and Ladies had come to Palace Avernon, and attended a presentation in the Great Hall. There Alvix had projected a huge holo, of a globe filled with filaments and membranes of light surrounding empty spaces that looked like biological cells.
Each cell interior was in fact a cosmic void, and the tiniest points of light constituting those filaments and membranes represented galactic superclusters; because this was the entire realspace universe.
And of course, he caused it to shrink back to the tiny point that was the Big Bang, before expanding it to the fill the hall once more.
‘When I shrank the cosmos, as it were’ – Alvix had smiled at his audience – ‘was I predicting a Big Crunch, or showing expansion from the Big Bang in reverse?’
His point was that a universe as viewed from outside might be seen to shrink, but the cosmological arrow of time seemed predicated on the future always being the direction in which the universe was bigger. It indicated that timeflow might flip into reverse, should a Crunch occur.
And that meant you could never know whether you were in a universe that an outsider would say was expanding or collapsing.
‘Whether the whole of realspace will ever contract,’ he told them, ‘is irrelevant. We aim to create tiny regions of spacetime that shrink inwards to produce negentropic timeflow, and by stabilising them within normal reality, we have conduits via which to “remember” the future.’
Those regions, naturally enough, would need to be inside a human brain: a human whose normal brain could interact with the world, while selected neural cliques and groups experienced timeflow emanating from the future, allowing memories of future perceptions to be remembered in the present.
All you needed was a temporary abeyance of humanist ethics.
And children on whose brains you could operate.
*
Now, five years later, it boiled down to this: thirteen members of the nobility standing on an internal balcony halfway up the wall of a lab chamber, twenty or so research assistants moving around, and eight drooling youngsters: the proto-Oracles.
These were aged between seven and seventeen standard years, some with left and right eyes that moved independently, all largely confined to couches from which they observed ceaseless holo footage. Three of them could speak with some coherence.
‘Steam. Pudding. Good to . . .day . . .’ came from a ten-year-old girl.
‘Timeline is thirteen days in the future.’ An assistant checked displays. ‘Location is right here.’
A sarcastic laugh sounded from the rear of the visiting group. At the forefront, Lord Welkin, oldest of the investors, was frowning. ‘With respect, sir,’ he told Lord Alvix, ‘this is pitiful. The paltriness of your servitors’ menu is hardly a worthy—’
But Alvix stopped the complaint confidently.
‘It would have been too much coincidence, sir,’ he said, ‘had one of them just happened to deliver useful information as you stood here.’
‘And when, my Lord, do you actually foresee gaining useful information?’
At the rear of the group, another laugh: it was Archduke Colwyn.
But Alvix had a reply ready, though it might cost him Welkin’s support.
‘We learned something a tenday ago,’ he said to Welkin. ‘Seven years and twenty-three days from now, my Lord, which is to say Dvaday the thirty-seventh of Jyu, a Convocation in Shantzu Province will rule on the dissolution of your cousin Lord Cheung’s demesne. By the end of Jyu-ni, his neighbours will have divided up his realm among themselves.’
Welkin went pale, at least in part (Kenna was almost sure, to a probability of 96.3 per cent) because he was party to the conspiracy that would in due course break up his cousin’s realm. But the other Lords and Ladies, to judge by their microexpressions and skin lividity, were rationally assessing the situation, and revealing a tentative approval.
In some metatemporal sense, the future has already happened; and that being so, they wanted to know about it, whatever details they could pick up.
But Kenna knew something else that Lord Alvix was aware of yet had not divulged. One of the more coherent proto-Oracles, the girl called Mandia, had spoken of the Collegium Delphinorum, a place that did not yet exist, and which (from interpreting Mandia’s fragments of information) seemed to be some future facility – or group of facilities – for creating and managing better Oracles in the future.
In one sense, it implied success for this venture, but those scraps of report made no mention of Demesne Avernon.
Perhaps this was knowledge that Kenna herself should be acting on.
Isn’t foreknowledge the reason I’m here?
Perhaps it was time she made plans to leave Demesne Avernon, and found a place for herself in one of the deep interstitial regions of Nulapeiron, far from other realms and their ambitious schemes.