S-Day plus 6. Imperial bunker, New York.
Admiral Kale was shocked by what he found of New York.
The great ocean wave had spared some of the mighty old buildings, which stood like menhirs, windows shattered, their flanks stained by salt water. But the human city at their feet was devastated, scoured out, millennia of history washed away. Even now the aid workers and their bots dug into the reefs of rubble the wave had left, and the refugees were only beginning to filter back to what remained of their homes.
But in her bunker, deep beneath the ruin of Central Park, the Empress sat beside her pool of logic and light, imperturbable.
‘You are angry, Admiral Kale,’ she said softly.
‘Every damn place I go on the planet I’m angry,’ he said. ‘The destruction of history – the harm done to so many people.’
‘We are not yet defeated.’
‘No, ma’am, we are not. We are massing the Navy cruisers at Jupiter—’
‘I have viewed the briefings,’ she said.
‘Ma’am.’ He stood and waited, unsure what she wanted, longing to get back to his duties.
‘I have brought you here, Admiral, to speak not of the present but of the past, and of the future. You spoke of history. What do you know of history, though? What do you know of the origin of the Empire you serve – and, deeper than that, the dynasty of the Shiras?’
He was puzzled and impatient. But she was the Empress, and he had no choice but to stand and listen. ‘Ma’am? I’m a soldier, not a scholar.’
‘I need you to understand, you see,’ she rasped. ‘I need someone to bear the truth into the future. For I fear I may not survive this war – at least I may not retain my throne. And a determination that has spanned centuries will be lost.’
‘Ma’am, we’re confident that—’
‘Tell me what you know, of the history of my throne.’
Hesitantly, dredging his memory, he spoke of the Emergency a thousand years before, when the great engineer Michael Poole had built a wormhole bridge across fifteen hundred years, a great experiment, a way to explore the future. But Poole’s bridge reached an unexpected shore. What followed was an invasion from a remote future, an age when the Solar System would be occupied by an alien power.
‘An invasion from a bleak future, yes,’ hissed the Empress. ‘An invasion from which the first Shira, founder of the dynasty, herself was a refugee.’
Kale was stunned. ‘The first Empress was from the future, the age of occupation?’
‘She saw Poole disappear into time, collapsing the wormhole links. And when the way home was lost, Shira was stranded. But she did not abandon the Project.’
‘The Project?’
‘Shira belonged to a philosophic-religious sect called the Friends of Wigner. And their purpose in coming back in time was to send a message to a further future yet . . .’
Kale, frustrated, had to endure more of this peculiar philosophising.
Life, Shira said, was essential for the very existence of the universe. Consciousness was like an immense, self-directed eye, a recursive design developed by the universe to invoke its own being – for without conscious observation there could be no actualisation of quantum potential to reality, no collapse of the wave functions. That was true moment to moment, heartbeat to heartbeat, as it was from one millennium to the next. And if this were true, the goal of consciousness, of life, said Shira, must be to gather and organise data – all data, everywhere – to observe and actualise all events. In the furthest future the confluences of mind would merge, culminating in a final state: at the last boundary to the universe, at timelike infinity.
‘And at timelike infinity resides the Ultimate Observer,’ Shira said quietly. ‘And the last Observation will be made.’ She bowed her head in an odd, almost prayerful attitude of respect. ‘It is impossible to believe that the Ultimate Observer will simply be a passive eye. A camera, for all of history. The Friends of Wigner, the sect to which Shira belonged, believed that the Observer would have the power to study all the nearly infinite potential histories of the universe, stored in regressing chains of quantum functions. And that the Observer would select, actualise a history which maximises the potential of being. Which would make the cosmos through all of time into a shining place, a garden free of waste, pain and death.’
The light from the logic pool struck shadows in her face. She was quite insane, Kale feared.
‘We must ensure that humanity is preserved in the optimal reality. What higher purpose can there be? Everything the Friends did was dedicated to the goal of communicating the plight of mankind to the Ultimate Observer. Even the eventual destruction of Jupiter. And even I, stranded here in this dismal past, stranded out of time, have always struggled to do what I could to progress the mighty project.’ She peered into the logic pool. ‘I, in my way, am searching . . .’
He stared at her, as he absorbed another huge conceptual shock. ‘Ma’am – you said “we”. You speak of yourself. Not the first Shira.’
She lifted her face, its skin papery.
‘You are Shira. The first. There was no dynasty, no thirty-two Shiras, mother and daughter – just you, the first, living on and on. You must be over a thousand years old.’
She smiled. ‘And yet I will not be born for more than four hundred years. Am I old, or young, Admiral? Once the Poole wormhole was closed down I had no way back to the future. I accepted that. But there was always another way back. The long way. I accepted AntiSenescence treatment. I began to accrue power, where I could. And then—’
‘And then,’ said Kale, barely believing, ‘having built a global empire for your protection, it was a simple matter of living through fifteen centuries, waiting for your time to come again.’
‘You have it, Admiral.’
He peered at her. ‘Were there others like you – others stranded in history?’
Her face was blank. ‘None that survive.’
He was thinking furiously. ‘And you must have used your knowledge of the future to cement your power base.’ He remembered himself. ‘Ma’am, forgive me for speaking this way.’
‘It’s all right, Admiral. Yes, you could put it like that. But it was necessary. After all, there had never been a unified government of mankind, none before me. Quite an achievement, don’t you think? Why, I had to invent a sun-worshipping religion to do it . . . It was necessary, all of it. I need the shelter of power. There are still many obstacles to be overcome in the decades ahead, if I am to survive to the year of my birth.’
‘Ma’am – I thought I knew you.’
‘None of you knows me, none of you drones.’ She withdrew. ‘I tire now. Progress your war, Admiral. But we will speak again. Even if I fall, the Project must not fail. And I will entrust in you that purpose.’
He bowed to her. ‘Ma’am.’ And with huge relief he left the chamber, leaving the lonely woman and the light of the logic pool behind him.
S-Day plus 9. Jupiter.
The earthworm fleet was assembling at last, somewhere on the far side of the giant world. The showdown was still hours away, the Alphan planners believed.
Despite the urgency of the situation, despite all Flood’s urging and imprecations, every chance they got the crew of the Freestar stared out of their lifedome at Jupiter. After all there were no Jovian planets in Alpha System.
Jupiter was a bloated monster of a world, streaked with autumn brown and salmon pink. The other ships of the rebel fleet, a minuscule armada, drifted across the face of the giant world, angular silhouettes. One other structure was visible following its own orbit, deep within the circle of the innermost moon, Io. It was an electric-blue spark, revealed under magnification to be a tangle of struts and tetrahedral frames. This was the Poole hub, where once Michael Poole had used the energies of a flux tube connecting Jupiter to Io to construct his intra-System wormhole network. One of those ancient Interfaces linked Jupiter itself to Earth – or it had, until the earthworms had cut it as the rebels approached.