=There is a bright seed in your brain.=
It was Kenna who deduced the implant’s nature: a spinpoint entangled with one other, an identical counterpart. And that partner was in Tom Corcorigan’s brain.
How else could Corcorigan’s journey along the hyperdimensions have deposited him precisely in the location where Kian was being held? Unexpected events had crowded upon everyone, and the Seer-mediated teleportation was known to have been directed to Siganth along the hyperdimensional channel used by the Anomaly, joining Siganth to Nulapeiron. Bizarre as the events might be, there was no mystery in Corcorigan’s destination being the hellworld; but no one had questioned the deeper coincidence, that he had ended up near the one hive-cell containing Kian.
The hidden entangled spinpoints had played a role in the fine details of hyperdimensional navigation, drawing one towards the other.
Now, a realtime holo showed the interior of Kian’s brain. As he and Kenna watched, smartbeams projected from the walls – like the ones generated by Alexa’s tu-ring – caused the shining white point inside his head, the other half of the entangled pair, to wink out of existence.
It was gone.
Except of course it was not extinction – it was the moment of the spinpoint’s birth, beginning its life backwards in time, all the way to Kian’s conception, when it would collapse. Dirk had grown from the same initial cell in the womb, but when the growing cells divided into two separate clumps, the spinpoint would have had to go along with the proto-Kian, not Dirk.
Was this a form of gross mechanical motion induced by future goals, teleology instead of cause-and-effect? Was it a veridical paradox, one that would be resolved by looking at it from a different perspective, with new knowledge? Or was it the real thing, an antinomy?
Even with the old aristocratic system on its knees if not extinct, such logosophical questions were a natural thing to ask here on Nulapeiron. Kenna and Kian smiled at each other, aware of how odd their friendship was, and the weirdness of the events that indirectly linked them.
‘What do you think happens eventually?’ asked Kian. ‘Do we win?’
In so many ways, they were both outsiders, with very different viewpoints. Though he was not trapped in hypnotic awe of Kenna, the way most people were, he thought she might be wisest being alive right now.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I hope so.’
There was nothing more to say then, as they watched the realtime holo showing a former Warlord’s grieving grandchildren, Alexa with the neko-kitten in her arms, and the flyers arriving at the quickglass tower, where soon enough the funeral would be held.
A good death, then.
If there could ever be such a thing.
FIFTY-SEVEN
MU-SPACE, 2608 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
Autohypnosis is part of every Pilot’s education, but this is a key moment, important, so Corinne is glad to have medics around her for every minute, with Clara nearby – a close friend since peace came to Labyrinth and Corinne got to celebrate Roger’s memory with those who knew him, Jed Goran included. For over twenty tendays they have been close, and particularly supportive recently, not just because of the weight inside her and the aching back and all the rest.
And when it happens, it is just as everyone said: using trance and hypnotic time-distortion and breath control to hold back the tremendous impulse to push; and then in the second phase to do exactly that when the medic says: ‘Now, push now!’
Soon enough, it comes: the final yelling shove, and the sound she was dying to hear: a thin crying, the most beautiful sound in any universe, and those frequent yet never-to-be-forgotten words:
‘It’s a boy.’
FIFTY-EIGHT
LUNA, 703017 AD
Kenna remembered her era of involvement with human affairs, at the beginning of her existence in this form, seven hundred centuries earlier, and the Anomaly’s defeat on Nulapeiron, a defeat never replicated elsewhere, except for a handful of absorption attempts interrupted at an early stage. The twisty complexity of humans plotting and engaging in treachery were not the only things that came to mind, when it came to multitudinous lives intertwined and conflicting, but they became foremost during the dream awakenings, when she induced past-mind resonances in this particular crystalline body.
It was the same recruitment process she had employed for the other members of the Council, but this individual was different, though he might be their salvation. In admitting the Trickster, the risk was awful.
Knowing this, she awoke him in private, away from the others, on every occasion. In his earlier organic life as he dreamt, he was in his later years. Those who fully belonged to the darkness never heard her call across the aeons; those who were strongly affected yet also fought it were paradoxically the most sensitive to the possibility of resonance. Of that number, one stood out above the others in his dark, twisted strength. His was the subconscious call that she answered, and drew him forward across time from his dreams, and talked to him.
In the vast majority of other destinies, she avoided recruiting any hint of chaos, and in doing so met eventual defeat – assuming her pseudo-memories had any basis in reality, and were not imaginary workings-out, in her vast computational subconscious, of different paths through the events she perceived.
The slumbering crystalline form was thin in appearance, and the first symptom of resonance engaging was the twisted smile, even before the transparent eyelids opened and he sat up.
—Kenna. Nice to see you again. Particularly since I was already dreaming, before I fell into this dream. It was very strange.
This was the Trickster, with whom no conversation could be taken at face value. Nevertheless, she asked him to elucidate.
—Tell me more about that, since it is on your mind.
Her name meant one-who-knows, but she did not know everything, though others often acted as if she did.
—I tore my own eye out, and then I crucified myself. It was not pleasant.
—Punishing yourself for the things you have done?
She knew much about the atrocities that were part of his original life.
—That is a pretty thought, Queen Kenna, but the dream is one I have encountered before, and it is not fantasy but memory.
—I understand.
—Truly? Then enlighten me, please.
He was always polite to her.
—You understand music. She knew this about him. Call it a subharmonic in the standing wave that is your mind. Or consider two wires alongside each other, one slightly longer than the other, vibrating together when plucked.
—I am not just me, is that what you mean?
Kenna regarded him with stillness, as only a living-crystal being could.
—In this place, we are all more than we once were, Dmitri Ivanovitch Shtemenko.
—But not necessarily better, is that it?
—To what are you alluding?
—You wake me away from the others, every time. Until I wake permanently and the transformation is complete, you do not wish them to— Oh!
The Trickster’s eyes widened, and his body shuddered. Kenna knew him to be capable of practical jokes, but this was not one of them.
—What is happening to me, Kenna?
Their previous sessions had on occasion been filled with rage, or calm, chilling descriptions of the darkest needs that drove him in his younger years, and any number of devious debates, games that he played because he was yet to make a final resolution, the commitment to join the Council for real. This was the first time his thoughts had sounded small with fear.