S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

I wish I hadn't thought about that, Harvey thought. Man-eating Ettins. Christ. The stories are all about them, when you get right down to it.

"Better be a bit more explicit about that there progress, Professor," Harvey said.

Peter smiled-he looked much better than he had the last time Harvey saw him, which said a good deal for his basic resilience and toughness.

Gotta remember that the opposite of badass is not weenie, Harvey reminded himself. That's a risky way to think, could lead to underestimating people, which can lead to a bad case of the deads.

"This isn't like any research project I've ever worked on," Boase said. "No bureaucracy, no nonphysical constraints on equipment, only the security considerations are anything like what I'm used to."

"Glad you're happy," Harvey said. "The Brotherhood hasn't done much scientific research before; we didn't think in those terms."

"I suppose you don't, when you're a magician," Boase said.

"It ain't magic. We've known that for generations now."

"But you've been using it as if it were magic."

Harvey could feel a combination of fear and resentment and fascination in the other man's mind; he suspected that the existence of the Power just plain offended the physicist. That it had been in the hands of black-arts secret societies and their esoteric opposite numbers probably offended him even worse. It was a good thing he'd never seen a meeting of the Brotherhood's leadership, with the white robes and doves and meditation and chanting. The meditation actually served a useful purpose; the rest was pure theater, a relic of their origins as witchfinders. Though you could eat the doves, in a pinch.

Harvey shrugged. "For that matter, this operation is really sorta off the reservation, Adrian bulldozin' his own priorities through. Since he controls the financing, no reason for the leadership not to go along. Now, about the results?"

Boase smiled. "I actually got nearly all the theory done while I was at Rancho Sangre," he said.

For a moment his handsome, good-natured face turned savage. "And she'd really be going to regret that if she were still alive."

"If she were still alive, you'd still be there. Now, the results."

"The essential thing was realizing that the Shadowspawn brain doesn't create the oomph that you guys call the Power. It just modulates it, like a transistor does electric currents; the basic force comes from the substrate of the universe. Saying that someone is 'strong in the Power' just means they can tap more without frying their neural circuitry, the centers that step it up and direct it. But a brain is a physical object, and what one object does another can do."

"Wait a minute, you've got some sort of computer that can use the Power?"

Boase shook his head. "Oh, no. Not for a long time, like two or three paradigm shifts in our ability to process information. Generations, even if the whole world were trying really hard. A computer as we know it, a Turing machine, is far too, ah, too coarse a mechanism. The brain has a subatomic, a quantum element that's essential to consciousness, and it's that part that interacts with the substrate of the universe, the holographic-"

The words stopped making sense; Harvey shook his head impatiently.

"Cut to the chase."

"Okay, we'd need a quantum computer as sophisticated as a brain to really handle the Power. With that we could fry any protoplasmic adept. We'd be the next thing to God, which worries me a little, but we don't have it and we aren't going to in our lifetimes anyway. But. The way silver screws up the Power, and the transuranics, was a clue. There's one simple thing that we thought we could do with the electromagnetic spectrum, provided we-"

Boase lapsed into Old High Technicalese again; Harvey spoke with dangerous patience:

"Don't tell me about the dilithium crystals, boy, just tell me what they can do?"

Peter smiled beatifically, glanced at his phone's time display, and waved a hand behind him.

"Look," he said. "I was stalling for this."

Harvey turned and did. "Well, fuck me blind," he said mildly, blinking in astonishment.

That was a particularly appropriate oath. The entrance to the complex was disguised as a farmhouse, red painted, with barns and outbuildings of the same, all looking considerably run-down; it had been mothballed most of a generation ago, and the new occupants had left as much of the patina of neglect as they could. The dirt road was more like two ruts through weeds, and only a careful observer would have noticed the wear of a great many trucks last year.

The actual entrance to the tunnels was through the "barn," which had doors big enough for heavy vehicles; the whole thing was splendidly camouflaged, and the power source was an underground water turbine powered by a mountain stream, so there wasn't even much of a heat signature.

None of that meant anything to the Power, of course. Even Harvey's modest talent could sense the minds there, the flow of energies, and feel the bunching of world-lines. It was like a smell. The ability had evolved to track down humans doing their very best to hide-in caves, among other things-and to foil competitors equipped with the same brain centers.

Everything had an effect on the world, casting its shadow back from the infinite spray of possible futures into the present. A grain of sand on the other side of the galaxy did, though of course that was far too faint even for the greatest adept to detect. People most of all, because their minds touched the foaming substrate of reality even if they couldn't mold it the way a Power wielder did.

Only now it isn't there and I can't smell a thing, he thought. It's like the Power doesn't apply there. But not in a way that would be obvious if I didn't already know otherwise. It's just about the most dramatic undramatic thing conceivable, when you think about it.

"It's like it's vanished," he said, wondering. "Not like a silver barrier. You can feel that even if you can't get through it. Silver's like a hole in the universe, or like having a tooth drilled if you try to probe. This isn't an absence, it's as if there's nothing there to sense."

Boase was grinning from ear to ear. "How's that for accelerated R and D-"

Pop.

Harvey blinked. Everything was back, and now he could hardly believe that he hadn't noticed anything before.

"Whoa, that is one odd effect," Harvey said. "Sorta tampering with reality, if you know what I mean. Now you don't see it, now you do, and the whole universe switched over from one to t'other without making no fuss I could detect."

Boase was scowling and punching at his phone. He looked up as he did.

"Says the walking quantum effects manipulator!" he said. " You people have been screwing with my nice rationalistic if indeterminate worldview for years now."

Harvey was grinning too, happy enough that not even being classed with the Shadowspawn annoyed him. He supposed that from the point of view of someone who couldn't Wreak at all, it was fair enough.

"Hey, wait a minute," Boase said thoughtfully, pausing in midprod at the smartscreen. "I think I've just had a thought."

"Happens to most people with functioning brain stems every now and then. What sort of thought?"

"The Fermi Paradox."

"What…Oh, why we haven't had little green men droppin' in on us in flying saucers?"

"Yes. We know there are planets around most stars and a lot of them are Earth-like, we know that for sure now. Why hasn't anyone shown up or at least sent a message? But it just occurred to me that it's quite likely any species with a conscious brain would eventually evolve the Power-or some subset of every species would. And that means no science."

"How so?"

"Well, to invent the scientific method, you've got to believe in an orderly, rational, deterministic universe. The sort of billiard-ball world Newton and Laplace thought they were discovering."