“Fuck you too,” Kearney told him. “Sony could swallow Gordon with a glass of water.” He looked round at the equipment. “They must be desperate. Have we achieved anything this week?”
Tate shrugged.
“It’s always the same problem,” he said.
He was a tallish man with mild eyes who spent his free time, to the extent he had any, devising a complexity-based architectural system, full of shapes and curves he described as “natural.” He lived in Croydon, and his wife, who was older than him by a decade, had two children from her previous marriage. Perhaps as a reminder of his Los Alamos past, Tate favoured bowling shirts, horn-rimmed glasses and a careful haircut which made him look like Buddy Holly.
“We can slow down the rate at which the q-bits pick up phase. We’re actually doing better than Kielpinski there—I’ve had factors of four and up this week.”
He shrugged.
“After that, noise wins. No q-bit. No quantum computer.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it.” Tate took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Oh. There was one thing.”
“What?”
“Come and look at this.”
Tate had installed a thirty-inch superflat display on a credenza at the back of the room. He did something to a keyboard and it lit up an icy blue colour. Somewhere off in its parallel mazes, the Beowulf system began modelling the decoherence-free subspace—the Kielpinski space—of an ion-pair. Its filmy, energetic extensions reminded Kearney of the aurora borealis. “We’ve seen this before,” he said.
“Watch, though,” Tate warned him. “Just before it decays. I’ve slowed it down about a million times, but it’s still hard to catch—there!”
A cascade of fractals like a bird’s wing, so tiny Kearney barely noticed it. But the female oriental, whose sensory-motor uptake times had been engineered by different biological considerations, was off his shoulder in an instant. She approached the screen, which was now blank, and batted it repeatedly with her front paws, stopping every so often to look into them as though she expected to have caught something. After a moment the male cat came out from wherever it had been hiding and tried to join in. She looked down at it, chattering angrily.
Tate laughed and switched the display off.
“She does that every time,” he said.
“She can see something we can’t. Whatever it is goes on after the part we can see.”
“There’s not really anything there at all.”
“Run it again.”
“It’s just some artefact,” Tate insisted. “It’s not in the actual data. I wouldn’t have shown you if I thought it was.”
Kearney laughed.
“That’s encouraging,” he said. “Will it slow down any further?”
“I could try, I suppose. But why bother? It’s a bug.”
“Try,” said Kearney. “Just for fun.” He stroked the cat. She jumped back onto his shoulder. “You’re a good girl,” he said absently. He pulled some things out of a desk-drawer. Among them was a little discoloured leather bag which contained the dice he had stolen from the Shrander twenty-three years before. He put his hand inside. The dice felt warm against his fingers. Kearney shivered over a sudden clear image of the woman in the Midlands, kneeling on a bed and whispering “I want so much to come” to herself in the middle of the night. To Tate, he said: “I might have to go away for a while.”
“You’ve only just come back,” Tate reminded him. “We’d get on quicker if you were here more often. The cold-gas people are on our heels. They can get robust states where we can’t: if they make any more progress it’s us who’ll become the backwater. You know?”
“I know.”
Kearney, at the door, offered him the white cat. She twisted about in his hands. Her brother was still looking at the empty display.
“Have you got names for them yet?”
Tate looked embarrassed.
“Only the female,” he said. “I thought we could call her Justine.”
“Very apt,” Kearney admitted. That evening, rather than face an empty house, he called his first wife, Anna.
2
Gold Diggers of 2400 AD
K-captain Seria Mau Genlicher was up in the halo with her ship, the White Cat, trolling for customers.
Up there, a thousand lights out of the galactic Core, the Kefahuchi Tract streams across half the sky, trailing its vast invisible plumes of dark matter. Seria Mau liked it there. She liked the halo. She liked the ragged margins of the Tract itself, which everyone called “the Beach,” where the corroded old pre-human observatories wove their chaotic orbits, tool-platforms and laboratories abandoned millions of years previously by entities who had no idea where they were—or perhaps anymore what they were. They had all wanted a closer look at the Tract. Some of them had steered whole planets into position, then wandered off or died out. Some of them had steered whole solar systems into position, then lost them.
Even without all that stuff, the halo would have been a hard place to navigate. That made it a good hunting ground for Seria Mau, who now lay at a kind of non-Newtonian standstill inside a classic orbital tangle of white dwarf stars, waiting to pounce. She liked this time the best. Engines were shut down. Coms were shut down. Everything was shut down so she could listen.
Some hours ago she had lured a little convoy—three dynaflow freighters, civilian ships carrying “archeological” artefacts out of a mining belt twenty lights along the Beach, hurried along anxiously by a fast armed yawl called La Vie Féerique—into this benighted spot and left them there while she went and did something else. Her ship’s mathematics knew exactly how to find them again: they, however, tied to standard Tate-Kearney transformations, barely knew what day it was. By the time she returned, the yawl, overburdened by its duty of care, had got the freighters into the shadow of an old gas giant while it tried to calculate a way out of the trap. She watched them curiously. She was calm, they were not. She could hear their communications. They were beginning to suspect she was there. La Vie Féerique had sent out drones. Tiny actinic spangles of light showed where these had begun to encounter the minefields she had sown into the gravitational subcurrents of the cluster days before the freighters arrived.
“Ah,” said Seria Mau Genlicher, as if they could hear her. “You should be more careful, out here in empty space.”
As she spoke, the White Cat slipped into a cloud of non-baryonic junk, which, reacting weakly to her passage through it, stroked the hull like a ghost. A few dials woke up in the manual back-up systems in the empty human quarters of the ship, flickered, dropped back to zero. As matter, it was barely there, but the shadow operators were drawn to it. They gathered by the portholes, arranging the light that fell around them so that they could make the most tragic picture, looking at themselves in mirrors, whispering and running thin fingers across their mouths or through their hair, rustling their dry wings.
“If only you had grown like this, Cinderella,” they mourned, in the old language.
“Such a blessing,” they said.
Don’t let me have to deal with this now, she thought.
“Go back to your posts,” she ordered them, “or I’ll have the portholes taken out.”
“We’re always at our posts—”
“I’m sure we never meant to upset you, dear.”
“—always at our posts, dear.”
As if this had been a signal, La Vie Féerique, running fast upside the local sun, blundered into a minefield.
The mines, two micrograms of antimatter steered on to station by hydrazine engines etched into silicon wafers a centimetre square, weren’t much more intelligent than a mouse; but once they knew you were there, you were dead. It was the old dilemma. You daren’t move and you daren’t stop moving. The crew of La Vie Féerique understood what was happening to them, even though it was very quick. Seria Mau could hear them screaming at one another as the yawl split lengthwise and levered itself apart. Not long after that, two of the freighters ran into one another as, dynaflow drivers clawing at the spatial fabric, they broke cover on desperate, half-calculated E&E trajectories. The third slunk quietly away into the debris around the gas giant, where it turned everything off and prepared to wait her out.