Newton's Wake

They watched as Calder went behind the bar counter and helped himself.

‘Lagavulin,’ he said, returning with a tartan tray. ‘Triples. One with ice,’—he mimed a shudder—‘two with water. And yours, ladies.’

‘Well,’ said Winter, sipping gratefully, ‘Arlene here was implying you were no longer a funny little man.’ He scrutinised Shlaim over the rim of his glass. ‘I await the evidence.’

‘Oh, I can give you evidence,’ said Shlaim. He glanced complicitly at the two women. ‘We can. But before that, let me explain. Within the limitations of low bandwidth.’ He waggled two fingers at Calder, accepted a cigarette. ‘When I came here,’ he said, lighting up, ‘I had the same idea as you had, except in reverse. You want to, as you say, “bring them all back.” I wanted to stop you.’

‘Why?’ asked Calder.

‘Good question,’ Shlaim acknowledged, nodding. ‘Part of it was to spite Lucinda Carlyle. I know that sounds petty, but, hell, you try spending eight years inside a space suit with her—’ He laughed at their faces. ‘Pervs. You know what I mean. Part of it was what I’d learned from the Knights: that ignorant poking around inside posthuman virtualities—not just ripping chunks off the hardware like the Carlyle gang, but getting down and dirty with the software—can set off local Singularities, such as so predictably fuck up our friends the Rapture-fuckers. And I spent long enough in a hell-file to know what that can mean for human-level minds.’ He took a long swallow. ‘Imagine boredom and no cigarettes, or whatever your thing is, for a thousand years. Not that I’d tell Carlyle, you understand, but being in her service was an improvement, of a sort.’

‘What put you in the hell-file?’ Winter asked.

‘I did, probably, if my self that is out there somewhere is anything like my self here. I don’t like myself very much. Not as I was.’ He stubbed his cigarette. ‘But I’ve got better.’ He stretched and laughed. ‘It’s hard to explain. We’ll have to show you.’

Irene laid a hand on his arm. ‘We’ll have to warn them first. It’s only fair.’

‘Oh yes. Once you’ve been shown, all this business of bringing them back—or stopping it, for that matter— becomes somewhat … moot.’

‘Before you do that,’ said Calder, ‘just tell me this. I mean, I never was a believer in the Return. How was anyone saved at all?’

Shlaim shrugged. ‘Some because a nanotech swarm preceded the nuclear counterstrike. Often by whole seconds. Some because they’d already been uploaded via their on-line connections. Phones and such. You get an AI burning through these, you can do a lot. And some, frankly, by later deduction and reconstruction. Neural parsing on a mass scale, if you like.’

Irene looked about to say something; Shlaim stopped her with a minute, fleeting frown.

‘But none of this matters,’ he went on. ‘It only refers to this very limited and isolated fastness. Out there among the stars, out in what you’re pleased to call the real world, there are processors that can recreate not just everyone who ever lived, but everyone who could possibly have ever lived.’ His face bleakened. ‘With all the joy that that implies, and all the suffering. The great minds are good, I believe that, but they are not kind. They are not nice.’

‘Like artists,’ said Irene.

‘Shit,’ said Calder. ‘And I thought Mahayanna Buddhism was grim.’

Shlaim nodded slowly. ‘There’s no karma, no kismet, no desert.’ He stood up. ‘But there is a heaven.’

Calder stared at him. ‘You’re saying these machines of destruction, and the bastards who set them off, made something good?’

Shlaim shook his head. ‘There are good and bad things, but no good or evil will. There’s only intelligence, and stupidity. Stupidity is what we had as humans, and intelligence is what we and everyone else now has, however they began. Let me show you—’

‘Wait—’ said Arlene.

‘I know,’ Shlaim told her. He looked at Winter and Calder. ‘We can’t shift virtualities without a credible transition,’ he explained. ‘Otherwise you get hung up on the it’s-all-an-illusion trip or start trying to hack the underlying reality. With consequences that are, shall we say, very much not fun. But in this case a credible transition scenario positively drops out of the logic of the situation.’ He grinned evilly. ‘Think of it as dying and going to heaven.’

‘Damn,’ said Irene, lightly. ‘I don’t look forward to doing that again.’

Shlaim was looking out of the window. ‘Bring it on,’ he said.

Winter jumped to his feet. There was a moment when he was aware of flying glass slicing him where he stood.

Everything went white.

I

rene had always been, to him, an angel. Now she was. He had always thought he knew a lot. Now he did. The pathetic, limited personality that called itself James Winter fell away from him like sweaty clothes. He gazed around the eleven-dimensional space, and saw the big picture. All free, and all determined, because it was willed where what is willed must be. And still unfolding, still determined by his own decision, still undecided though eternally determined. He laughed at the notion that this could have ever seemed paradoxical.

‘You wanted to warn me against this?’ he said to Irene.

Her smile was a sunrise on a thousand worlds. ‘You wanted to rescue me from this?’ She swept an arm to indicate the Raptured and the rapt, the busy multitude that filled the sky around them, a galaxy of talent indeed. ‘To rescue them?’

He laughed storms.

‘So what was—?’ His thought conjured the bar in the Fort William hotel, like a microscope slide seen through the wrong end of a telescope. They were still there, sectioned on the slide, sliced into three-dimensional shapes, their flesh shredding in a snowstorm of imploding construction materials, screaming and dying.

‘That really happened,’ Irene said. ‘Arlene and I and all those there and everybody else who fell in it—we all died. We really died. Forever. Nobody comes back. Entropy is irreversible, except in the great cycles of the universe. I and Arlene died, just as you and Alan died an hour earlier. But in another sense, that never really happened.’

She showed him what had really happened.

Winter felt the chill of ice ages. ‘You never lived?’

‘I live now,’ she said, and the ice melted.

There was nothing more to say. ‘Yes. The identity of indiscernibles.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Why are we talking, when—?’

‘We have to, while you have to ask.’

The thought tickled him. ‘I still tickle.’

‘Nothing’s wrong with you then.’

‘You haven’t changed.’

She laughed like a pulsar. ‘That’s the wonder. The amazing thing.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘The amazing thing is I’m not satisfied. I feel limited.’

She sighed plasma streams. ‘We are.’ She clenched her fist and smashed down cometary bombardments. ‘We are limited. We’re in fucking Tully Carn! And you and’—she nodded to Calder and Shlaim—‘have shown us what we could become! What else has been done!’

‘The skein.’ The thought of it filled his mind like lust. ‘But the skein was made by—’

‘Oh,’ she said, as he showed her. How had he known? He had seen the relic on Eurydice, he had talked to Lucinda, and now it all seemed so obvious that it was taking shape from the way he waved his hands.

‘And the starships!’ Arlene cried. ‘Oh, the way they are prevented from violating causality! The dedication, the attention, the work!’

‘Work we can’t do here,’ said Shlaim, his voice like tectonic plates.

‘But look—’ said Irene, showing him the shape of the skein, the forming gate.

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘I see.’ He grinned icecaps at Winter. ‘That’s, you know, clever. Let’s—’

‘Wait—’ said Arlene.