Resolution (52 page)

‘You’re the expert.’ Kian looked at Dirk. ‘She’s been here at least, well, once before.’

‘Hey ... I
thought
about coming back here at Christmas.’

‘But you didn’t’

‘It was shut.’ Deirdre looked from one twin to the other. ‘Is it true that people can’t tell you apart?’

‘Well of—’

‘—course they—’

‘—can’t’

Deirdre stepped right back, staring hard. ‘Thicker neck, heavy shoulders ... Narrower features, lean ...’

The twins looked at each other.

‘You look like a wrestler,’ Deirdre told Dirk. ‘And you, Kian, are a long-distance runner. Easy.’

For once, the brothers could find nothing to say.

‘Come on, guys.’ The lift-sphere stopped, and Deirdre waved the doors open. ‘Stop worrying about your spaceships, and let’s all go eat some smelly fish.’

An hour later, they were drinking lattes, slumped back in their chairs around the detritus of lunch, happy with the buzz of their own conversation and ignoring the families surrounding them.

‘—learned more about the exercises in this weird old book,’ Dirk was saying, ‘called
Zen and the Art of Programming
by this Buchanan guy. Old website-derived thing that foresaw the merge between evolving software and formal specifications. Grainy bitmaps. Weird stuff about self-defence as a branch of physics, and Lord knows what.’

‘And your buddy Rajesh taught you these
baithaks
and
dands?
Combat conditioning?’

‘Yeah, and some takedowns you’ll really like. There’s a pickup where—’

Deirdre shook her head. ‘Am I going to enjoy this bit?’

‘Never mind. Anyway, the original site was described as “the mingled thoughts of Borges, Pirsig, and Dijkstra, as produced by the bastard intellectual love-child of Feynman and Bruce Lee.” That’s verbatim, pretty much.’

Deirdre laughed, and Dirk looked at Kian.

Not many people would have caught those old references.

‘I see what you mean,’ said Dirk.

‘Yeah. Pity,’ said Kian.

‘What?’ Deirdre looked from one to the other. ‘What?’

That was the moment a strange woman approached their table, pulled out an unused chair without asking and sat down.

Her suit was pale-grey and elegantly cut, her coiffed blonde hair was short, and though she looked eighteen at first glance, it was obvious from her calm self-possession that she was actually much older.

‘My name is Zoë, and I’m a friend of Ro’s. I need to talk to you. All three of you.’

She was also the person who had been watching them back in the shuttle port’s Arrivals lounge.

‘What,’ said Deirdre, ‘do you want to talk about?’

‘Well ... Did you know some people still hold to the idea of parallel universes? Every time an electron has a choice of two ways to travel, there are two entire universes, as if our own wasn’t unimaginably vast already.’

‘That’s nonsense.’ Deirdre’s voice was flat, unfriendly. ‘And why are you talking physics to complete strangers?’

Neither Dirk nor Kian responded. There had to be a second level to this conversation. And there was one kind of entity which seemed to exist in many superimposed states - maybe overlapping realities - at any instant in time.

The Zajinets.

‘Time is weird, too. Two centuries of looking,’ said Zoë, ‘and there’s only one low-level process that appears to know the difference between past and future: neutral kaon-antikaon decay. Otherwise, there’s no telling past from future in any fundamental equation.’

‘If they’re neutral,’ began Deirdre, ‘how can there be an
anti
—?’

‘It’s the strangeness number—’

‘—not the charge—’

‘—that’s opposite.’

‘Decoherence,’ said Zoë. ‘Definite past to fuzzy present to unknown future ... Are the concepts meaningless? It’s probably one of those unanswerable questions, like whether everything has to proceed from a first cause,
prima causa,
like that.’ Zoë stood up, pushed her chair back. ‘A thousand years from now, scientists and philosophers still won’t have a clue, y’know?’

Zoë’s attention rested on Deirdre just for a moment; then Zoë turned and walked away with a side-to-side sway that captured three intent gazes until she entered a lift-sphere and transparent doors slid shut and she dropped from sight.

‘What the bastard hell,’ said Deirdre slowly, ‘was that all about?’

Kian turned to Dirk.

‘They can’t be watching now, otherwise—’

‘—she wouldn’t have talked to us, right.’

‘What? D’you two have any idea what she was talking about?’

The twins looked at each other. The woman, Zoë, had been using oblique and surreal language because she was
almost
certain that they were not currently under surveillance, but not entirely sure. However, the twins had the advantage of nameless preternatural senses which could detect sensor devices trained upon them. Right now, they felt nothing.

‘She was talking about quantum weirdness, and how particles behave differently depending—’

‘—on how you observe them. It was a hint that we should behave differently, ourselves. Not too clear a hint, obviously.’

Deirdre leaned forward on the table. ‘Are you two trying to tell me something? Or just playing games?’

‘She’s UNSA Intelligence and we’re in danger from Zajinets and we’re under—’

‘—surveillance. You as well. That’s what she was telling us.’

With a long sigh, Deirdre closed her eyes, opened them, then gave a tiny smile.

‘You’re forgetting the most important part.’

Kian and Dirk simultaneously raised their right eyebrows, in a synchronized gesture which would have scared most people witless. Deirdre was unmoved.

‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that young, or not-so-young, Zoë just fancies the pants off me. Or didn’t you notice?’

‘Urn...’

‘Er...’

Dirk coughed. ‘Excuse me? Could we—’

‘—have the check, please?’

Particles under observation might or might not behave differently than they would otherwise, but people under surveillance are certainly constrained.

That night, they sat cross-legged in a circle on the rug in Deirdre’s candle-lit room, taking it in turns to sip from the fat bottle of Drambuie which Dirk had brought from Aberdeen. Their conversation remained subdued and morose, encouraging them to drink.

‘
Uch
...’ Deirdre shivered at the sweet/sharp taste, and passed the bottle to Kian. He drank, grimaced - ‘Likewise’ - and handed it on to Dirk.

Outside, small lights twinkled in a broad tree, unmoving in the breeze-less California night.

‘Come on,’ said Deirdre. ‘We should all get some sleep, ready for our trip to Arizona. All right?’

‘Our
trip.’ Dirk nodded, as if he had expected this all along.

‘Naturally,’ said Kian. ‘We’re hardly going to go to DistribOne—’

‘—without our best pal, are we?’

‘Come on, boys. Scat. I want sleep.’

The twins hauled themselves to their feet, Dirk snagging the bottle as he did so.

‘ ‘Night, dear.’

‘ ‘Night, dear.’

‘Goodnight, boys.’

<>

~ * ~

34

NULAPEIRON AD 3426

The vessel surfaced in a wide oval lake in the Umbral Caverns of Realm Rinsenberger. On the brass-coloured dock, green-uniformed Dragoons helped Tom from the subaquargos, while Jissie clambered out by herself and skipped ahead.