‘Grandmother!’
‘On one condition,’ Vala said, facing Sand. ‘Let him go. The boy. Spare him your “processing”.’
Coton cried, ‘No!’
Marshal Sand said evenly, ‘How can I bargain with you, woman? If I make an exception for him it’s going to be rather visible, isn’t it? I do have a duty to maintain order.’
Vala sounded desperate. ‘It’s not just that he’s family. It’s more than that. I think he could turn out to be important – very important.’
Coton was frightened and bewildered. ‘What are you saying?’
Vala turned to him. ‘I hoped it wouldn’t come to this. We haven’t even had time to discuss it ourselves . . . It can’t be helped, and here we are. Coton – tell the Marshal about your dreams.’
‘Dreams?’ The Marshal glanced at her Virtual displays again. ‘You mean visions? Your kind of Weaponised are precognitive, aren’t you? Or were. Has that somehow switched itself back on in this boy’s head?’ She eyed Coton, interested. ‘Are you seeing the future, child?’
‘The future?’ He looked at his grandmother, still more bewildered.
Vala took his hand in hers. ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘They bred it out of us. Coton, you were born hamstrung but the modifications are still in your head, the technological relic. They feared us, child, and hate us still. Because we could see what is to come . . .’
The Adepts’ precognitive ability had always been limited. They could see only a few minutes, or less, into the future, and only aspects of it that concerned their own surroundings – their own destiny. Beyond that, quantum uncertainty led to a blurring of competing possibilities.
‘But that few minutes’ edge made our ancestors formidable soldiers,’ Vala said. ‘Just enough to let us get out of the way of the next bullet.’
‘The Adepts were among the more effective of the Integrality’s Weaponised types, in fact,’ Sand said, checking her archives as they spoke. ‘But they were more useful in policing activities than against the Xeelee.’
‘We were used against humans,’ Vala said. ‘No wonder we were feared, and hated. When the Integrality fell we were rounded up, though we were as hard to catch as we were to kill. And those who survived were genetically modified.’
Sand regarded Coton analytically. ‘You never knew this, did you, boy? Never knew what your Weaponisation entailed.’
‘He would have been told, if his parents had lived. It’s our way to keep it from the children, for if they blurt it out to normals the fear starts up again. Coton, I would have told you,’ Vala insisted.
Sand watched them, judgemental. ‘I’ve always found truth the best policy myself. So is this stunted precog now seeing the future after all?’
‘Not that,’ Vala said. ‘I think he’s seeing another universe entirely.’
The Marshal just stared. Then she rubbed her eyes. ‘Is that supposed to make sense, Academician?’
‘It’s the way our talent was engineered into us,’ Vala said. ‘May I use your display facilities?’
Access to the future depended on paths in spacetime called closed timelike curves – faster-than-light transitions. Humanity’s hyperdrive warships had routinely travelled faster than light, and, at the height of the Exultant war, had just as routinely shown up scarred by battles that hadn’t yet been fought. The First Coalition’s Commissaries had learned to harvest such information, and, in suites like Vala’s own Map Room, they had charted the outlines of the war’s future progress.
‘But there are other sorts of closed timelike curves,’ Vala said. ‘Marshal, our universe of three space dimensions floats in a greater space, which the physicists call the Bulk, of many extra dimensions. There are many universes’ – and she held her palms together – ‘floating parallel to each other in the Bulk, like pages in a book. You can reach these other universes through engineering, like wormholes—’
‘Like Bolder’s Ring.’ The most titanic Xeelee construct of all, at the heart of the galactic supercluster.
‘Yes – and I’ll come back to the Ring. But there are also certain sorts of leakages between the universes. Most particles are bound to spacetime, but some wash out into the Bulk – especially gravitons, which mediate gravity. Now, if our universe is folded in the Bulk – or if the Bulk itself is distorted – these particles can take shortcuts through the Bulk from one point in our spacetime to another.’
‘Thus creating closed timelike curves.’
‘Exactly.’ Vala turned to her grandson. ‘Coton, in your head there is a sort of transmitter-receiver of gravitons. You can sense gravitons coming via the Bulk from events a few seconds or minutes ahead of us in time, and your brain processes them into sound or vision.’
‘But,’ Sand said, ‘you said this facility has been bred out.’
‘No,’ Vala said with strange patience. ‘The mechanism is still there, growing in each child’s head; it’s the faculty to process the data that’s been turned off. As if Coton had healthy eyes but lacked the cortical equipment for his brain to process the information from those eyes.
‘But you’re dealing with biology, Marshal, and a very ancient modification. Things drift with the generations. Many of our young have always had gravity dreams, as we call them, dreams of other places and times – even of the future. Residual perception. They usually grow out of it. And we don’t announce it to the world. Would you? In Coton’s case it may be something to do with the proximity of the neutron star – spacetime is grossly distorted hereabouts, and the graviton flux—’
‘Get to the point, Academician.’
‘Marshal, I believe my grandson is receiving a graviton signal, not from any future event in our own universe, but from another universe entirely – a universe where the descendants of the crew of a warship, which sailed there through Bolder’s Ring, have been stranded for several hundred thousand years. Coton, you’re picking up a distress call! And the first thing you must do is respond . . .’
6
The man with the sharpened teeth anchored his feet in the tree’s foliage and stood straight. His short hair was shaved into elaborate patterns, Lura saw, and a crude zigzag tattoo had been carved into his belly. He leered in triumph. ‘Take the girl,’ he said, his language coarse and heavily accented but recognisable. ‘She looks worth a hump.’
‘You’ll have to kill me first,’ Lura spat.
The rider kneeling on her back, a woman, laughed. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t give old Otho ideas like that, little girl. It only makes him hornier.’
Otho laughed in turn, showing those gruesome teeth. ‘She’ll keep. Just sit on her, Anka. Kill the old man, he’s no use.’
Pesten roared his defiance, and struggled with his captors, but he couldn’t get a fist free. A rider held his spear over his chest.
‘No!’ Lura yelled. ‘Don’t kill him.’
The leader, Otho, bent down so his face was close to hers. His breath stank of blood. ‘And why not? Will you be nice to me if we let him live, little girl?’
‘He’s a Brother,’ she snapped. ‘Look at his robe. The Brotherhood of the Infrastructure will pay you ransom to get him back.’
‘She’s right,’ said the woman Anka, still on Lura’s back. ‘Might save a bit of fighting, Otho.’
‘But I like fighting . . . Oh, very well, bring him. Tie him first.’
They got Pesten up on his knees and stripped him of his robe, leaving him naked, and tore lengths off the robe to truss him up. Pesten kept struggling throughout. ‘You’ll get no ransom for me!’ He was silenced by a punch in the mouth by Otho, a sickening impact that cracked teeth. They got Lura up too, and tied some of the strips from Pesten’s robe around her body. She still had hold of the Mole, which Anka, a red-haired woman with a body like a whip, eyed curiously. But the riders were rushing too much to do anything about it for now.