Hard Questions

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Meet Qua, the quantum computer with the immense power capabilities that tunes into pathways in parallel universes to operate at lightning speed. But with such power comes the threat of catastrophe, and as government agents, cult disciples, and computer criminals learn what this computer is capable of, Cambridge researcher Clare Conway makes every attempt to safeguard herself and society from the realities she discovers about Qua. For all of the power this computer offers, it threatens to spark a civil war in America, a danger unlike any other that history has ever known.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 323

Sample

Built on earlier cemeteries and sand dunes, the Richmond district of San Francisco between the Golden Gate Park and the Golden Gate Bridge became home after the Russian Revolution to thousands of refugees. Forty years on, the golden onion-domed cathedral of Saint Mary the Virgin in Exile arose. Beneath its floor was laid the body of the priest-become-bishop known as John the Barefoot, who had campaigned for a new home for those exiles.

But émigrés grew old or drifted away to suburbs. Instead, many Asians moved in to the Richmond district. Chinese, Cambodians, Koreans. And then the collapse of Soviet Communism caused a new influx of Russians, escaping from hard times and from the new gangsterism, or simply to do business.

When three men who called one another Night and Dawn and Noon met in a small apartment in an unassuming townhouse on an avenue in the mid thirties off Geary Boulevard, no one would have paid much attention.

White Venetian blinds obscured the half-open window through which a slightly salty breeze blew from the ocean a mile away. A computer was scrolling as its program trawled. Key words were being highlighted and tagged. Quantum. Chip. Encryption.

Maps were thumb-tacked to walls. Files and journals and directories were stacked around the floor, along with some unopened packages from Gump’s and FAO Schwartz, gifts to take home to Russia. A bottle of Stolichnaya and glasses and an ashtray of Marlboro butts weighed down news clippings on a low table.

Both Night and Dawn had the high cheek-bones, dark wiry hair and lack of fold to the eyelids denoting the Mongol blood which flows in so many Russian veins. These two might easily be mistaken for native Americans. Fair-haired Noon was Caucasian. Noon and Dawn were burly; Night was rangy and lean. All three were entering middle age, bitterly.

They spoke softly in Russian. Even when arguing, they would do so quietly.

The agency must be stupid sending us something like this,’ said Dawn. The news clipping was illustrated by a photograph of a young woman standing nude on a beach. Her groin was blurred. ‘National Investigator is full of bourgeois shit. I was raped by an alien from Venus. Elvis Presley is on Mars.’

Think again,’ said Night, whose real name was Andrei. ‘Look at the Matsushima connection. Quantum computers. She’s due to attend a conference shortly in Tucson. Tim woman knows things.’

‘Cambridge … in England, not in Massachusetts … However did those journalists come by this story? And the pin-up photograph too!’

Night shrugged.

On the computer screen a message flashed: Invitation only. Immediately to be overlaid by: Please wait. Without much delay the software invaded a private bulletin board.

‘I have a hunch about this,’ said Night.

Noon nodded. ‘It’s a wild card. But maybe you’re right.’

They talked about the recent boating accident which had put Tony Racine in hospital. Strong rumours were that Racine’s QX Corporation in San Jose were edging very close to a prototype quantum computer. Supposedly so were Motorola’s corporate research laboratories in Phoenix. Matsushima likewise, at their labs in Japan and in England.

‘If we agree,’ said Night, ‘I’ll fly to Phoenix—’

‘But we already tried to penetrate Motorola—’

‘—and I’ll drive down to Tucson to check out this conference and this young lady. I do have a feeling.’

Dawn nodded. Night’s hunches had sometimes paid off handsomely. Noon filled three glasses.

Since Night would fly much of the way, he wouldn’t be taking a gun which could show up on airport scanners. The young woman should be a soft touch.

Seen from the air the desert had resembled pale cracked cardboard. Driving down the interstate from Phoenix in a rented Pontiac, under a sky too bright to be quite blue, the widespread ugliness of raped landscape offended Andrei’s eyes.

Whole zones were wired off. Former farmland, perhaps, to judge by sporadic decaying buildings. Abandoned now to bales of tumbleweed. A sign proclaimed something about a water authority. It came to Andrei that this land had been bought and forsaken for the sake of whatever water was underground. He had heard that the cities and their sun-dwellers were draining the desert even drier than it was already. And over in the west, wasn’t the Colorado river a pygmy compared to its former self?

A few bullet holes had pocked that sign. Other signs along the route had been shot into illegibility. No drivers of cars or rigs currently cruising the route were acting as if they were on a firing range, but obviously some people did, presumably at night.

In the midst of nowhere, a vast half-completed housing development loomed. It looked like a colony under construction on one of the dead seas of the Moon, or on Mars.

Once during the drive Andrei stopped and got out to stretch his legs and smoke. As soon as he left the artificial chill of the car, he was smitten by heat and light which seemed quite interchangeable. The light was sheer heat; the heat was luminous. Air trembled, faintly tainted. Since the air was so dry, the haze must be pollution drifting from dozens of miles away.

The droning of crickets seemed like tinnitus within one’s own ear. Shrubs were razor-wire. Bushes were bundles of dried rubbish. Mountains in the distance were two-dimensional. The mountains might have been merely cutout backdrops, a studio set for an amateur cowboy movie, or the scenery of a hostile alien planet.

A huge bronzed rig powered past, hooting mournfully. Following it was a long silver fuel-tanker. The tanker could have been a ballistic missile condemned to roam the interstates of America horizontally forever. Along came a truckload of volcanic cinders, destined perhaps for landscaping.

Andrei felt sick at heart, then angry.

Much of Russia’s wilderness had also been ravaged – in the service of society. Yet to no ultimate profit. Futilely! And then the servants of the state had been betrayed, impoverished, while only gangsters thrived.

Coming closer to Tucson, Andrei passed a great oasis of a golf course. A few miles further on was yet another golf course. Aquifers were being drained so that people could knock balls across greens.

The Convention Center was simultaneously hosting a motorbike fair and a convention of tax consultants. In fact the upcoming conference about consciousness wasn’t slated for the main building with its vast exhibition hall and galleria and ballroom and its arena which could seat nearly ten thousand people, but for a theatre adjoining the complex which would comfortably house the expected five hundred attendees.

Registrations and accommodation for the conference were being handled by the University a mile to the east. Before heading there, Andrei took Polaroid pictures of the Leo Rich Theater and its surrounds. Each picture which emerged was paled by the drenching light.

The immediate vicinity included a score of parked Harleys and their owners. Almost all of the tanned young men were dressed in baggy jeans and leather bomber jackets. Shades hid their eyes. Blue bandanas soaked up sweat from their brows. Baseball caps were turned backwards. Chubby-cheeked and hard-jawed, those fellows. Even though Andrei hadn’t pointed his camera at any of them, someone assumed so. While Andrei waited for a final picture to appear, four bikers spread out at a trot to bracket him.

‘Why you taking our photos without permission?’

‘What you up to, man?’

‘I’m interested in architecture, that’s all, guys.’

Dozens of other people were around. Surely enough bystanders were present for him to be safe from assault. However, a biker snatched the picture from his hand and glowered at it. Only men, when some of the other men in bomber jackets moved, did Andrei spy an item of graffiti upon the theatre wall. In bold black zig-zag letters: Inzane Nation.

A biker eyed Andrei’s part-Mongol face. He raised his shades, revealing slanted eyes.

‘What nation are you, man?’

Had they figured Andrei for a foreigner? Oh no, these were Indians, native Americans. They thought that he was one of them, but of an unfamiliar tribe – working as a plain clothes security employee for the Convention Center, capturing evidence of vandalism with his camera.

‘I’m a tourist,’ Andrei protested. The biker tore the photo in half.

‘Hey—’

A young white patrolman, in jackboots and short-sleeved blue shirt and vizored helmet, was approaching.

‘What’s going on?’

His hand hovered by the side-arm in its holster. Such a mood of menace, in the glaring sunshine.

‘It’s nothing,’ Andrei replied. ‘A slight misunderstanding, officer. They thought I was taking their photograph.’

The patrolman grinned.

‘Oh, you mustn’t do that – not unless you pay them a dollar each.’

Was the patrolman in collusion with this gang of bikers against the foolish foreigner? Maybe he was trying to appease the bikers to ease the tension. Their attitude was sullen. The patrolman continued to grin.

‘Dollar’s the going rate on the reservation, right?’

Should Andrei take the hint, and hand over money as if paying a fine?

The bikers’ spokesman scowled at the patrolman:

‘Navajo Nation, man, not reservation!’

Was the patrolman a racist? Andrei had seen so many swarthy faces on the streets. It was as if he had actually crossed the nearby border into Mexico.

‘You boys are a long way south.’

‘Come to see the bike fair, what else?’

The officer scanned the assembled Harleys. If he noticed the phrase upon the theatre wall, he chose to ignore it.

‘Thinking of changing your wheels, then, boys?’ Was he being ironic or appreciative? The incident seemed to be subsiding. Onlookers were losing interest. The officer advised Andrei: ‘Move along, mister.’

Towards evening, a sudden storm briefly freshened the city, and Andrei too. The heat had begun to sicken him. Clouds boiled forth from the mountain range to the north like sulphurous smoke gushing from a volcano in eruption. A ten-minute rain shower lowered the temperature a bit and settled some of the smog trapped in the valley. In the aftermath the sunset was gory – and fleeting. Within what seemed a few minutes the sky was a gloomy lavender; then indigo. Streetlights were a myriad hovering fireflies. Headlamps hurried by, the eyes of prowling beasts. A coyote began to yip somewhere in the city, its voice, carrying eerily through the evening. From elsewhere, another wild urban animal answered.

The rapid disappearance of daylight had surprised Andrei. Still, an almost-full moon was up, so he took numerous Polaroids around the Desert Hacienda, where a certain young Englishwoman was scheduled to stay the following week.

The Hacienda was much more up-market than the cheap hotel which Andrei had chosen for himself. Twenty minutes’ leisurely walk, at most, from the Convention Center, the Hacienda’s spread boasted luxury adobe cottages set around semi-private garden patios. Palm trees shaded walkways, illuminated discreetly after sundown by occasional low mushroom-lamps. With its lawns and bushes and low walls of sun-baked brick, the Hacienda was easily accessible to a prowler – who might, after all, merely be using its cocktail lounge or its gourmet restaurant.

When Andrei had visited the University earlier, to register for the conference, he had pretended to be a psychologist from a clinic in Zurich. He was on vacation, he’d said. He’d come to Tucson because of his hobby. His private passion in life, so he claimed, was cacti. He had intended to spend a whole week exploring the Saguaro and Organ Pipe national monuments. Only by chance did he learn about the conference.

Glancing through the list of delegates in a secretary’s office, he was surprised, delighted to come upon the names of three or four old acquaintances. Oh, and here’s another one: Dr Clare Conway from England. Where’s she staying during the conference?

Oddly, he was the second person to have asked that same question today, though the previous enquiry had been by phone. Another old friend. An American.

A subsequent phone call by Andrei to the Hacienda had confirmed Dr Conway’s reservation. No, sir, not a double. The Visitors’ Bureau definitely told us a single. Yes, sir, Cottage 12’s a single all right …

Cottages 11 and 12 shared a veranda fronting on a little lawn. A white plastic table and chairs stood under a graceful paloverde tree. The camera whirred as it produced another Polaroid of the adjoining moonlit chalets.

A stiff metallic finger pressed against Andrei’s neck.

‘Don’t move.’

His first thought was that a security guard had crept up on him. When a second person in jeans and thin leather jacket relieved him of the camera, he briefly imagined that a couple of members of the Navajo Nation had trailed him. The thin-faced individual was no Indian, though. The gun muzzle stayed against the base of Andrei’s skull while his wallet slid free, and then the keys to the Pontiac. Were the two men muggers?

‘Where are you parked?’ a voice whispered.

Andrei told them, hoping that the men would run off and steal his car.

‘We’ll take a walk to your car. We’ll have a conversation.’

It was a conversation about his interest in the chalet. And about the conference literature which was in the glove compartment. And about a photocopy of the clipping from the National Investigator.

While unheeding traffic drove past the parked Pontiac, Andrei nerved himself to ask, ‘Who are you?’

Facing Andrei in the back of the Pontiac, the thin man had pushed up the sleeves of his jacket. On his left arm above the wrist, passing headlights revealed a tattoo of an angel in flight carrying a naked woman. Bearing a bare soul away up to heaven in his embrace. A typical motif from a medieval painting – except that this was modernized and erotic.

The other man—who had sat in the driving seat and searched for documents – was chunky, freckled and ginger-haired. He wore a military combat jacket with many pockets, open over a thin T-shirt emblazoned in psychedelic script with the phrase LOVE THY LORD. ‘Who are you?’

The ginger man grinned into the driving mirror.

‘We’re Soul Brothers, you could say.’

But they weren’t blacks.

‘Maybe we can co-operate,’ suggested Andrei. ‘Who are you representing?’

‘Oh, you’ll co-operate,’ the thin man assured him. His companion started the engine.

They drove to a cemetery on the far side of the interstate. There, his captors relocated Andrei into the trunk of the car. They wrapped parcel tape around his wrists and ankles and stuck some over his mouth.

Andrei guessed that the car returned downtown. Several times it halted, presumably at red lights. Then the engine died. Doors opened and shut. About ten minutes passed before the pair returned. Had they stopped at Andrei’s hotel to collect his belongings? The cheap hotel wasn’t hot on security.

When the car stopped again a short while later, only one door opened and closed. One of the two must be transferring to their own vehicle.

A hideous journey followed, during which Andrei lost all track of time. Despite some draughts, the air in the coffin-like trunk became stifling. By day he would surely have died. After an interminable distance the route became rough, bruisingly so. The Pontiac must be negotiating a track through wilderness.

On that hot serene Sunday morning in the first week of September, a punt glided along the Cam under the mellow seventeenth-century stonework of Dame Elizabeth’s Bridge. Decorative cannonballs on the parapet railing seemed to balance precariously. The girl with the pole ducked low. As she crouched on the platform of the punt, trailing the pole as rudder, her sandy hair cascaded and her short bleached jeans skirt rucked up her tanned freckled thighs.

Lolling against a cushion, eyeing her, Orlando Sorel quoted suavely in French, ‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tons les livres.’

Georgette translated promptly. The flesh is sad, alas, and I’ve read all the books. Mallarmé’s poem, “Sea Breeze”. You aren’t tired of me, Orly, are you?’

As she straightened, shaking her mane, the punt drifted onwards. Across the lawns the knobbly Gothic spires and pinnacles of King’s College Chapel rose high against a sapphire sky. Half a dozen other punts, several with camera-ready tourists, lazed along the next stretch of the narrow river. A large dragonfly darted and hovered by the punt, then veered away.

‘So I come up to college specially, weeks early,’ declared Georgette, ‘and suddenly the flesh is sad! Is breakfast in bed such a bummer? Croissant crumbs in the sheets!’

Orlando brushed at his blue velvet jacket as if to dislodge phantom flakes of pastry. His floppy bow tie sported purple polka dots on a mustard background. The black hair which lapped his collar gleamed, somewhat oily. From beyond King’s, the University Church clock started to sound the chimes which had been copied at Westminster and all over the world; Orlando consulted his watch.

‘Don’t be touchy.’ He wouldn’t tolerate petulance in others. ‘Actually, I feel the need to get away. Not from you, my dear, but from Cambridge. A week in Paris might be amusing.’

Georgette began to pole enthusiastically along towards the next low bridge.

‘Catching Le Shuttle tonight. I do have some things to look at in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The fact is, I’ve done something slightly naughty.’

‘Do tell!’

Orlando pouted his lips.

As their punt neared King’s Bridge, back at Dame Elizabeth’s Bridge a wrought iron gate clanged shut. Through the Scholars’ Garden a man came running alongside the river. Orlando gazed, hoisting himself higher on the cushion. The man’s tweed jacket flapped. He clutched a newspaper like some baton which he must presently pass on to another hand.

‘Oh, precious,’ drawled Orlando.

In his late forties, the runner. Neatly trimmed chestnut beard and moustache, receding curly hair. If he had been a few inches taller, he might have seemed robust. Being of less than average height, the impression was of a certain squat portliness. Still, he must possess stamina to keep up his pace—although his mouth was open, sucking in oxygen.

When the runner noticed who was upon the water, Orlando raised a limp hand in ironic salute. The man came to an abrupt halt. Puffing, he brandished the newspaper and shouted out, ‘You BASTARD! You did this, didn’t you—?’

Idly, Orlando swivelled his hand and hoisted his index finger.

Since the bearded man was unable to walk upon water to reach his taunter, he could only glare and resume his sprint. Another wrought iron gate swung open and shut. He dashed across the bridge.

‘Goodness, Orly,’ said Georgette. ‘Jack Fox seems pretty steamed. What have you been up to?’

‘Oh, it’s definitely time for a trip to la belle France for me and my favourite pupil … ‘

It was also time for Georgette to crouch again, to pass under King’s Bridge, but Orlando’s attention was scarcely upon her.

His pace telling upon him by now, Jack Fox emerged at a jog-trot from the pinnacled gateway of Kings College and turned right along King’s Parade. He dodged ambling tourists. He angled across Trumpington Street, almost colliding with a bicycle.

Presently he was passing barred mullioned windows set in a wall the hue of honey fronting directly upon the pavement, before arriving at a castellated gateway. Coats of arms surmounted the Tudor arch. The statue of a bishop in red robe and golden crown prayed up above, sheltered by a portcullis-like half-canopy of intricate stonework. The stout oak double-doors were shut, but a wicket stood open. A knot of Japanese were eyeing the notice advising that Spenser College was closed to the public until the afternoon. They peered into the deserted main court. In the centre of the lawn a fountain sprayed from a conch shell clasped by Neptune.

Jack cut across the grass to the far corner of that front quadrangle. Another archway led to cool flagstoned cloisters surrounding an inner lawn. Panting, he dodged into a stairway.

On the second-floor landing, he paused to recover himself outside a door over which the name Dr C. Conway was neatly lettered. Chest heaving, he banged with the fist that clutched the newspaper.

‘Clare,’ he called, though not too noisily. ‘It’s Jack.’

Briefly he rested his brow against the oak.

He was soon admitted.

He almost hustled a slim woman in her late twenties back into her study. Fawn slacks. Thin beige turtleneck sweater, with a saffron motif of Rodin’s Thinker cradling his chin on his fist in cogitation. Her fair hair was swept tight into a ponytail.

‘Clare, have you seen this—?’

The Sunday Scoop? Of course not – why have you bought that rubbish?’

On the third page of the newspaper loomed her photograph. She was standing upon a beach, naked, looking carefree. Her breasts were pale little compact apples. Her hair hung loose. Her groin was vague, an unfocused plastic doll’s. The story was titled: CAMBRIDGE PROFETTE SAYS YOUR COMPUTER WILL COME ALIVE.

Seizing the paper, she read falteringly, ‘If anyone can make your hard disk lively, Clare can, says the Scoop … ‘

She started shaking, and subsided into a black leather armchair over which her academic gown with scarlet hood was draped.

‘Jack, I don’t understand—’

Bewilderment in that dainty oval face. Snubby nose wrinkling like a rabbit’s. Tears of distress, or even terror, in her pale blue eyes.

‘I popped out to the newsagent for a carton of milk,’ explained Jack. ‘Heather wanted to make a sauce, and if we waited for Luke to unglue himself from his computer we’d wait forever … Mr Singh in the shop said to me, “There’s a Cambridge story in the Sunday Scoop, Dr Fox.” It’s Orlando’s doing, without a doubt! I actually saw him along the Backs – in a punt with some doting darling. He gave me the finger.’

‘South of France, last summer, that’s when. I remember! He only snapped one shot of me like that. I was an idiot to let him.’

‘You were feeling blithe.’

‘What a fool it makes me look now.’

‘The jealous petulant bastard! He’s trying to screw up our trip.’

Clare gaped blankly at the newspaper. ‘How bad is the write-up?’

On her desk a computer screen displayed the first page of the final draft of the talk Clare would be giving in Tucson. The Brain as a Computer of Light was the title. Books on anatomy, neurology and psychology populated shelves. Files had colonized half of a black leather sofa. One window stood open over a midget balcony occupied by blood-red geraniums in small terrac. . .