Stephen Baxter - Starfall

Stillich approached his superior, rubbing his ankles. "Sir. How long?"

Kale snapped his fingers; a small Virtual data display appeared in the air. "That fucking relativistic ship is crossing Saturn's orbit."

Stillich thought. "Seventy-eight minutes from Earth."

"About that. And we're still waiting on this bastard Flood."

After the Navy's scattering at Jupiter, there had been nothing left to stand in the way of the Freestar's advance on Earth. At last the rebel ship had entered orbit around Earth itself, and Flood was descending to discuss surrender terms.

"Do you think we've a choice but to do what he says?"

Kale grimaced. "The choice is playing itself out on the Empress's lap."

The consequence of the Fist striking the Earth had been modelled for the Empress. The physics was simple, a function of the fist's immense kinetic energy. The impact, marked by a tunnel of air shocked to superheated plasma, would be the source of a pulse of electromagnetic energy itself strong enough to sear anything alive across half a hemisphere—bright enough to pierce walls. The shock waves of air and water that would follow, and a hard rain of melted bedrock falling from the sky, would do the rest. Shira watched this over and over, obsessive.

At the seventy-minute mark, the chamber door opened. Flood walked in. He was a bulky, strong-looking man, wearing a simple tunic and leggings. He carried a package, a sleek black box. Two others accompanied him, a man and a woman similarly dressed. These companions looked nervous, even over-awed, to be in this bunker under New York City itself, to be in the presence of an Empress. Flood, however, showed no fear.

Flood glanced at the Empress. She showed no reaction, watching her model go through its sequence, over and over.

Kale sneered. "So you are Flood, the great rebel leader. And you dress like a farmer. How ostentatious. How predictable."

Flood smiled at him, and looked him up and down. "Nice jacket. Here. Hold this." He handed him the box he was carrying.

Kale took it reflexively. Then, irritated, he passed it to Stillich. "What is it?"

"Our final weapon. A nanotech modification of the smart plague—hardware, not software. Released, it would chew up the robust networks you were prudent enough to install—your optical-fibre links and all the rest. Necessarily delivered after landfall."

Stillich put this on the floor, gingerly. "Your final weapon save for the fist."

"Save for that, yes."

"Why have you brought it here?" the Admiral asked. "You have won. You have no need to do more damage."

Flood walked to the rim of the logic pool. "To put an end to that."

Now the Empress spoke. "You are Flood."

He bowed. "Empress—"

"Shira will do."

"Yes. Shira is your name. It always was, wasn't it? I am here to discuss terms."

Stillich said tensely, "Keep it brief, farmer. We don't have much time."

"Brief I can manage. Your Empress must stand down. This logic pool must be shut down—here, now, immediately, before my eyes. And we begin the establishment of a constitutional convention. A new relationship between the free worlds of all mankind."

"How civilised," Kale said. "A constitutional convention, or global obliteration."

"Admiral," Stillich snapped. "We don't have the time. Flood—why the logic pool? This is at the centre of everything, isn't it?"

Flood faced Shira. "The centre of all she is doing. Isn't that true, ma'am?"

"How little you understand," Shira said.

"Oh, I think I understand well enough." Flood faced the Navy men. "You know her story by now. She is a refugee from the future—from a time that, even nine hundred years later, is so far remote it remains the future. And she is going home the long way, year by year, heartbeat by heartbeat. But it isn't the future she longs for - is it, Shira? You don't want to be in this universe at all ... "

Kale had tried to explain Shira's extraordinary ideas to Stillich, and Stillich thought he understood. "Ma'am? Is he right?"

"None of this is real," Shira said, her voice a husk. "It is all transitory. We are simply forced to endure the motion of our consciousness along one of the chains of quantum functions, a sequence of potentiality to be collapsed, discarded, by the Ultimate Observer at timelike infinity ... "

Stillich tried to control his impatience. "This is just anachronistic philosophy. I don't see what it is that she's doing here that disturbs you, Flood."

"She longs for her Ultimate Observer. And she thought she could find her quantum messiah in mathematics ... "

The logic pool, he said, was a meta mathematical universe. While not infinite it comprised more mathematical understanding, far more, than had yet been explored by mankind—and in principle, somewhere within the meta mathematical branching of the pool, any algorithm possible might exist.

Shira said softly, "All our science is based on the search for simple rules underlying complex phenomena. Simple algorithms can be shown to generate complexities, from the turbulent flow in a glass of water to the spiral structure of the Galaxy itself."

"You see the idea," Flood said. "There's a lot of nonsense in there, but also a lot of treasure to be dug out. It's as if you have a tank full of every possible combination of words in Earthish. Most of it is dross. But in there to be discovered are the finest works of human literature—even those not written yet."

"And similarly, I suppose," Stillich said, "scientific understanding not yet acquired."

"Well, yes. But Shira has always been more ambitious than that, haven't you, Empress?"

Shira said, "Human consciousness is likewise the product of simple algorithms with particularly complicated outcomes. And similarly, any mind imaginable—human, post-human or alien—must be there to be discovered, in the pool, in metamathematical stasis."

Flood grimaced. "The Friends of Wigner were prepared to destroy Jupiter to send a message to the Ultimate Observer. Now this lunatic believes she can find the Observer in a tank of light."

"Show some respect," Stillich said sharply.

"But whether or not she ever achieved her goal, she is in danger of unleashing much greater threats on humanity. For some of the minds in there are not content with stasis, with waiting to be discovered. Look at this." He summoned up a Virtual of his own. "We've been tracking this for years. Decades. We have our spies, in Sol system. Look at this. It's a neutrino scan we made from the Freestar just hours ago."

It took Stillich a moment to work out that he was looking at a cross-section of the Earth, deep below the granite raft of Manhattan, and the imperial bunker. And down there, swimming in the mantle, was a shape, perhaps organic, perhaps artificial, a winged shape like a stingray, like a sycamore seed.

"It isn't fully formed," Flood said grimly. "Not fully operational. But it soon will be."

Kale asked, "What is it?"

"In the Friends' accounts of their dark future, there are hints of a race even more threatening to mankind than the occupiers of Earth from whom they fled. A race called—" His pronunciation was uncertain: “Chee-lee, Zee-lee. They, or their potentialities, are lurking in the logic pool. And they are trying to break out."

"How?" Kale snapped. "By constructing this ship, deep in the Earth? How are they doing that?."

"We have no idea," Flood said. "Our only concern was to stop it, before this ship bursts from the Earth like a bird from its egg. I mean, this is a threat so potent it is trying to strike at us out of nothing more than a statement of the logical possibility of its own existence! If this thing had got out of the mantle, I don't imagine our four light years' separation would have saved Alpha system. Now do you see why it was necessary to wage this war? It wasn't just for our freedom from Shira's political domination. It was to free all mankind of this terrible threat—for Shira, your Empress from the future, was endangering all of us."