Redemption Ark

‘More than that, Mr Clavain. It made him cease to have existed.’ H watched Clavain and nodded with tutorly patience. ‘It was as if his entire life story, his entire world-line, had been unstitched from our reality, right back to the point when he was killed during the Melding Plague. That, I suppose, was the most logical point at which he could have died in our mutual world-line, the one you and I share.’

‘But not for Sukhoi,’ Clavain said.

‘No, not for her. She remembered how things had been before. I suppose she was close enough to the focus that her memories were entangled, knotted-up with the prior version of events. When Merrier was erased, she nonetheless ’ retained her memories of him. So she was not mad at all, not remotely delusional. She was merely the witness to an event so horrific that it transcends all understanding. Does it chill you, Mr Clavain, to think that an experiment could have this outcome?‘

‘You already told me it was dangerous.’

‘More than we ever realised at the time. I wonder how many world-lines were wrenched out of existence before there was ever a witness close enough to feel the change?’

Clavain said, ‘What exactly was it that these experiments were related to, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘That’s the interesting part. State transitions, as I have said — exploring the more exotic quantum-vacuum manifolds. We can suck some of the inertia out of matter, and depending on the field state we can keep sucking it out until the matter’s inertial mass becomes asymptotic with zero. According to Einstein, matter with no mass has no choice but to travel at the speed of light. It will have become photonic, light-like.’

‘Is that what happened to Merrier?’

‘No — not quite. In so far as I understood Sukhoi’s work, it appeared that the zero-mass state would be very difficult to realise physically. As it neared the zero-mass state, the vacuum would be inclined to flip to the other side. Sukhoi called it a tunnelling phenomenon.’

Clavain raised an eyebrow. ‘The other side?’

‘The quantum-vacuum state in which matter has imaginary inertial mass. By imaginary I mean in the purely mathematical sense, in the sense that the square root of minus one is an imaginary number. Of course, you immediately see what that would imply.’

‘You’re talking about tachyonic matter,’ Clavain said. ‘Matter travelling faster than light.’

‘Yes.’ Clavain’s host seemed pleased. ‘It appears that Merrier and Sukhoi’s final experiment concerned the transition between tardyonic — the matter we are familiar with — and tachyonic matter states. They were exploring the vacuum states that would allow the construction of a faster-than-light propulsion system.’

‘That’s simply not possible,’ Clavain said.

H put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Actually, I don’t think that is quite the right way to think about it. The grubs knew, of course. This technology had been theirs, and yet they chose to crawl between the stars. That should have told us all we needed to know. It is not that it is impossible, merely that it is very, very inadvisable.’

For a long time they stood in silence, on the threshold of the bleak room where Merrier had been unthreaded from existence.

‘Has anyone attempted those experiments again?’ Clavain asked.

‘No, not after what happened to Merrier. Quite frankly, no one was very keen to do any further work on the grub machinery. We’d learned enough as it was. The basement was evacuated. Almost no one ever comes down here these days. Those who do sometimes say they see ghosts; perhaps they’re the residual shadows of all those who suffered the same fate as Merrier. I’ve never seen the ghosts myself, I have to say, and people’s minds do play tricks on them.’ He forced false cheer into his voice, an effort that had the opposite effect to that intended. ‘One mustn’t credit such things. You don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Mr Clavain?’

‘I never used to,’ he said, wishing devoutly to be somewhere other than in the basement of the Chateau.

‘These are strange times,’ H said, with no little sympathy. ‘I sense that we live at the end of history, that great scores are soon to be settled. Difficult choices must soon be made. Now, shall we go and see the people I mentioned earlier on?’

Clavain nodded. ‘I can’t wait.’

Antoinette left the rim train at the closest station to the rented repair shop. Something about Xavier’s attitude had struck her as unusual, but it was nothing she could quite put her finger on. With some trepidation she checked out the repair shop’s waiting area and business desk. Nothing doing there, just a ‘closed for business’ sign on the door. She double-checked that the repair bay was pressurised and then pushed through to the interior of the bay itself. She took the nearest connecting catwalk, never looking down. The air in the bay was heady with aerosols. She was sneezing by the time she reached the ship’s own airlock, and her eyes were itching.

‘Xavier…’ she called.