Грег Иган - Distress

He unfurled the ladder and came down, alone. I stared up at the strip of pale dawn sky behind him; I could see a fading satellite, but I had no way to reach it. Three picked up two pieces of discarded rope and tossed them at us. "Sit down and tie your feet together. Do it properly and you might get breakfast." He yawned widely, then turned and yelled, "Giorgio! Anna! Give me a hand!"

Kuwale rushed him, faster than I’d seen anyone move in my life. Three raised the gun and shot ver in the thigh. Kuwale staggered, pirouetting, still moving forward. Three kept the gun aimed squarely on ver, as vis knees buckled and vis head sagged. As the shot’s reverb faded from my skull, I could hear ver gasping for breath.

I stood and shouted abuse at him, barely conscious of what I was saying. I’d lost it: I wanted to take the hold, the ship, the ocean, and wipe them all away like cobwebs. I stepped forward, waving my arms wildly, screaming obscenities. Three glanced at me, perplexed, as if he couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was about. I took another step, and he aimed the gun at me.

Kuwale sprang forward and knocked him off his feet. Before he could rise, ve leapt on him and pinned his arms, slamming his right hand against the floor. I was paralyzed for a second, convinced that the struggle was futile, but then I ran to help.

Three must have looked like an indulgent father playing with two belligerent five-year-olds. I tugged at the gun barrel protruding from his huge fist; the weapon might as well have been set in stone. He seemed ready to climb to his feet as soon as he caught his breath, with or without Kuwale’s slender frame attached.

I kicked him in the head. He protested, outraged. I attacked the same spot repeatedly, fighting down my revulsion. The skin above his eye split open; I ground my heel hard into the wound, crouching down and pulling on the gun. He cried out in pain and let it slip free—and then half sat up, throwing Kuwale to one side. I fired the gun into the floor behind me, hoping to discourage him from making me use it. Another shot rang out, above. I looked up. Nineteen—Anna?—was lying on her stomach at the edge of the hold.

I aimed the gun at Three, stepping back a few paces. He stared at me, bloodied and angry—but still curious, trying to fathom my senseless actions.

"You want it, don’t you? The unraveling. You want Mosala to take the world apart." He laughed and shook his head. "You’re too late."

Anna called out, "There’s no need for any of this. Please. Put the gun down, and you’ll be back on Stateless in an hour. No one wants to harm you."

I shouted back, "Bring me a working notepad. Fast. You have two minutes before I blow his brains out." I meant it—if only for as long as it took to get the words out.

Anna crawled back from the edge; I heard a murmur of angry low voices as she consulted with the others.

Kuwale limped over to me. Vis wound was bleeding steadily; the bullet had clearly missed the femoral artery, but vis breathing was ragged, ve needed help. Ve said, "They’re not going to do it. They’ll just keep stalling. Put yourself in their place—"

Three said calmly, "Ve’s right. Whatever value anyone puts on my life… if Mosala becomes the Keystone, we all die anyway. If you’re trying to save her, you’ve got nothing to trade—because whatever you threaten, it’s forfeit either way."

I glanced up toward the deck; I could still hear them arguing. But if they had enough faith in their cosmology to kill Mosala—and to trash their own lives and become self-righteous fugitives, hiding out in rural Mongolia or Turkistan without so much as a share of the media rights… the threat of one more death was not going to dent their conviction. I said, "I think your work is in urgent need of peer review." I handed Kuwale the gun, then took off my shirt and tied it around the top of vis leg. I’d stopped bleeding, myself; the ruptured sealant tissue was oozing a colorless balm of antibiotics and coagulants.

I returned to the utilities panel and plugged myself in again. Independent of the main computer, the emergency system couldn’t be shut down; I repeated the mayday, then fired the flares. I heard three loud hisses of expanding gas—and then a merciless actinic glare began to spread down the far wall, displacing the soft dawn light. The brown patina of algal stains had never been clearer—but it lost its camouflage value completely: the edges of another recessed compartment appeared, the gap around the protective cover starkly etched in black. I looked inside; there were two large buttons, just as I’d suspected, and an emergency air supply as well. On close inspection, the faintest hint of a cryptic logo—incomprehensible across all languages and cultures—showed through the stains on the compartment’s door.

The conversation above had fallen silent. I was just hoping they wouldn’t panic, and rush us.

Three seemed tempted to say something disparaging, but he kept his mouth shut. He eyed Kuwale nervously; maybe he’d decided that ve was the real fanatic who wanted the unraveling, and I’d merely been duped into helping ver.

The flare rose toward the zenith, its light filling the hold. I said, "I don’t understand. How do you get to the point where you’re ready to kill an innocent woman—just because some computer tells you she can bring on Armageddon?" Three mimed indifference in the presence of fools. I said, "So you found a theory that could swallow any TOE. A system that could out-explain any kind of physics. But don’t kid yourself: it’s not science. You might as well have stumbled on some way to add up the gematria numbers of Mosala to get 666."

Three said mildly, "Ask Kuwale if it’s all cabalistic gibberish. Ask ver about Kinshasa in '43."

"What?"

"That’s just… apocryphal bullshit." Kuwale was drenched in sweat, and showing signs of going into shock. I took the gun, and ve went to sit against the wall.

Three persisted, "Ask ver how Muteba Kazadi died."

I said, "He was seventy-eight years old." I struggled to recall what his biographers had said about his death; given his age, I hadn’t paid much attention. "I think the words you’re looking for are cerebral hemorrhage. "

Three laughed, disbelieving, and a chill ran through me. Of course they had more than pure information theory behind their beliefs: they also had at least one mythical death by forbidden knowledge— to validate everything, to convince them that the abstractions had teeth.

I said, "Okay. But if Muteba didn’t bring down the universe when he went… why should Mosala?"

"Muteba wasn’t a TOE theorist; he couldn’t have become the Keystone. No one knows exactly what he was doing; all his notes have been lost. But some of us think he found a way to mix with information—and when it happened, the shock was too much for him."

Kuwale snorted derisively.

I said, "What’s mix with information supposed to mean?"

Three said, "Every physical structure encodes information—but normally it’s the laws of physics alone which control how the structure behaves." He grinned. "Drop a Bible and a copy of the Principia together, and they’ll fall side-by-side all the way. The fact that the laws of physics are themselves information is invisible, irrelevant. They’re as absolute as Newtonian space-time—a fixed backdrop, not a player.

"But nothing’s pure, nothing’s independent. Time and space mix at high velocities. Macroscopic possibilities mix at the quantum level. The four forces mix at high temperatures. And physics and information mix… by an unknown process. The symmetry group isn’t clear, let alone the detailed dynamics. But it could just as easily be triggered by pure knowledge—knowledge of information cosmology itself, encoded in a human brain—as by any physical extreme."