Context (15 page)

‘Please, noble sir. A small
donation fends off starv—’

The urchin’s voice trailed off.

One of the mummers, blunt ceramic
dagger upraised, had his other arm behind his back, hidden beneath a half-cape,
and Tom shivered in recognition, hoping that no-one would make the connection
between the allegorical performance in front of them and the one-armed man who
stood behind the audience.

‘I’m neither cold’—the urchin—‘nor
very old. My time’s not yet, pale Dr Death.’

Making a ward sign, he slipped
away, was lost among the onlookers.

Tom turned.

‘My Lord.’ It was Xyenquil,
smiling with chagrin. ‘I’m the district coroner, among other duties. Hence the
young lad’s—’

‘I understand.’ Tom spoke
quickly, to distract him from the mummers’ performance. ‘You’re here on
business, Doctor?’

Xyenquil ran a hand through his
curly red hair.

‘Not, ah ... No. I was hoping to
talk to you.’

But not, Tom realized, on
official premises.

‘Talk about what?’ Then he
remembered the interrogation he had undergone, and everything they had said
about Elva. ‘The neurosurgery. Elva’s implants. What exactly was done to her?’

Xyenquil’s blue eyes held an
unreadable expression, and he replied with a question of his own which at first
seemed neither interesting nor relevant.

‘Is it true that Lords study
all
the logosophical disciplines?’

Quietly: ‘Yes. It’s true.’

‘Ah. If only ... Well, you’ll
know then, sir, of quantum entanglement. Pairs of particles prepared so that
one will always be in some way the duplicate or the exact inverse of the other:
paired spins, polarity, whatever.’

‘Ancient observations, Doctor. A
thousand SY old. More.’

‘But it’s ancient knowledge,’
said Xyenquil, ‘which has never lost its mystery. Not to me, at least.’

It
is one of the key indicators that the universe is stranger than it looks: some
outcomes are determined by the nature of the experiment—a particle’s properties
are partially determined by the way a human observer chooses to measure it.
When particles are paired, then separated by vast distances ...whenever one
particle is observed, the partner
instantaneously
changes, to remain its
partner’s duplicate or inverse.

It was fundamental to the Oracles’
existence: since information cannot travel faster than light, the
entanglement-relationship travels
backwards
through time.

‘So why exactly,’ asked Xyenquil,
‘would an extended femtarray, an
entangled
femtarray, be threaded
throughout Elva Strelsthorm’s nervous system?’

Tom stared at him.

‘I’m risking a great deal to tell
you this, my Lord.’ Xyenquil swallowed. ‘But there are things happening in
government departments right now which make me feel, well, uncomfortable. I
just thought you should know.’

It was the first indication Tom
had received that the medical centre was more than just a private concern. And
a hint of strange occurrences among official organizations ...

Was that the source of the fear
he had sensed, among those who were questioning him? A burgeoning coup d’état,
or some other great internal change about to come over this realm’s
administration?

But whatever was going on, it was
obvious that there were individuals with a sense of decency and honour which
overrode considerations of protocol and regulations, even in a dangerous
political climate.

‘Thank you, Doctor.’

Tom’s interrogators had mentioned
tanglethreads. But he had thought it was to do with encrypted comms, not the
entire basis of Elva’s identity ...

And then the enormous implication
of what Xyenquil was saying hit him like a sledgehammer, and he dropped to his
knees on the flagstones, and vomited profusely even as the medic took hold of
him.

‘The
duplicate ...’ Tom spoke thickly, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.

‘Can’t possibly be a machine,’
said Xyenquil. ‘I’m sure it can’t be.’

‘A person?’

‘I’d say so.’ Xyenquil’s grasp,
supporting Tom, was stronger than Tom would have expected. ‘I can’t see how
else it could be done.’

‘You’re saying she ...’ Tom
forced himself to stand upright, and take a step away from Xyenquil. ‘That
there’s someone else, somewhere in this world, whose mind is a duplicate of
Elva’s.’

‘I’m not sure that
duplicate
is
the correct term.’

Chaos
...

‘Tell me. Please.’

‘I’m not—’ Xyenquil stopped,
continued. ‘I believe that Captain Strelsthorm’s nervous system was intimately
interwoven with sensors, quantum-entangled to a similar array in some other
person’s body. At the moment of death -’

Tom swallowed, but could not look
away from him.

‘—the entangled pairs collapsed,
and a one-off information transfer—a
total
information transfer—pulsed
through the link as it was destroyed.’

‘I daren’t believe it.’

‘But, my Lord ...’ Xyenquil
blinked. ‘I’m sure of it. Her mind effectively over-wrote the other body’s
personality in that instant. The link was designed that way.’

A two-way link: had the other
person died first, it would have been Elva who ...

Elva lives?

Tom closed his eyes, shuddering
beneath the impact of an idea whose implications were too big to comprehend.

For if Xyenquil was right,
somewhere in this world of ten billion souls there walked a person of unknown
appearance and even gender whose thoughts and emotions and memories were those
of Elva Strelsthorm, the embodiment of everything that was good and decent and
joyful in his life: Elva, whose body had been buried and dissolved within an
icy lake, but whose essential beautiful being, whose
soul
might yet
survive, close at hand or forever beyond his reach.

~ * ~

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