Hamilton, Peter F – Quantum Murder, A

N icholas Beswick looked out of his mullioned window, watching a near solid front of thick woolly clouds slide over the secluded Chater valley. It was mid-afternoon, and the storm was arriving more or less on time. The warm rain began to fall, a heavy grey nebula constricting oppressively around the ancient Abbey. His room faced west, giving him a good view out over the long gentle slope of grassy parkland which made up that side of the valley. But the brow was no longer visible, in fact he was hard pressed to see the road slicing through the park outside the front of the building, beyond the deep U-shaped loop of the drive. Mist was struggling to rise up from the grass, only to be torn apart by the deluge of hoary water. There would be no swimming in the fish lakes this evening, he realized ruefully, no opportunity of seeing Isabel in her swimsuit. The daily swim had become an iron-cast habit for the six students; Launde Abbey didn’t have any outdoor sport pitches or indoor games courts, so they clung to whatever activity they could make for themselves with a grim tenacity. The lack of facilities had never bothered him. He had been at the Abbey since October, and he still found it hard to believe he had been admitted. Launde Abbey was looked upon as a kind of semi-mythical grail by every university physics student in England: the chance to study under Dr Edward Kitchener. Kitchener was regarded by most of his peers as the Newton of the age, a double Nobel Laureate for his work in cosmology and solid-state physics; his now-classic molecular interaction equations had defijied a whole range of new crystals and semiconductors which could be produced in orbiting microgee factories. The royalty payments from the latter work had made him independently wealthy before hc reached forty, which also kicked up the embers of envy among his colleagues 18 whose work tended more to the intellectual. Nor did it help that he was slightly unconventional in the way he approached his subject matter; at his level of theorizing, physics verged on philosophy. He .considered he had a perfect right to intrude on the country of the mind, to develop new aspects of thought processes. It had led to some fierce disagreements with the psychology establishment, and he didn’t always confine his arguments to the pages of respected journals – critics were often subjected to an open tirade of abuse and scorn at scientific conferences. Then twenty-two years ago, after nearly twenty years of ill-tempered confrontation with his fellow theorists, he had, with characteristic abruptness, resigned from his position at Cambridge and retreated to Launde Abbey to pursue his theories without carping interference from lesser minds, his brilliance and loud vocal intolerance of the dry, crusty world endemic to academia creating a media legend of Bohemian eccentricity in the process. When psi-stimulant neurohormones were developed, seventeen years ago, he awarded them an unqualified welcome, saying they gave the human mind direct access to the cosmos at large, presenting physicists with the opportunity to perceive first-hand the particles and waveforms they had only ever seen on peer and in projection cubes. Even after it became clear that neurohormones couldn’t produce anything like the initial over-optimistic results predicted, he never lost his conviction. Psi, he contended, was the greatest event in physics since relativity, exposing hitherto unquantifiable phenomena. Simply defining the mechanism of psi in conventional terms was enough to fascinate him, a rationale which would tie up nature and supernature, something beyond even the elusive Grand Unification theory. This tenuous goal was one to which more and more of his time was devoted. But every year he invited three degree students into his home for an intensive two-year session of lectures, research and intellectual meditation. And childish tantrums, Nicholas had discovered, at first to his embarrassed surprise, and then with secret amusement. Even the most brilliant of men had character flaws. PETER F. HAMILTON A QUANTUM MURDER 19 Launde Abbey wasn’t just about profound reasoning and scaling new heights of metaphysics. The human dynamics of six young people cooped up with an increasingly crotchety sixty-seven-year-old was weird. Fun, but weird. Nicholas could now see a tributary network of steely rivulets coalescing on the grassland, trickling across the road and running down the slope into the first of the three little lakes to the north. The rain was incredibly heavy, and Globecast’s news channel said it would last for six or seven hours. The River Chater at the bottom of the valley would flood again; it was probably up to the rickety little bridge already. There was some sort of vehicle crawling along the road, heading down towards the river. He frowned and peered forward, nose touching the chilly glass. It was a rugged four-wheel-drive Suzuki jeep. Probably the farmer who leased the park’s grazing rights checking to make sure he’d rounded up all the sheep and llamas. Lightning burst across the valley, ragged sheets of plasma ripping the gloom apart. It revealed the small powder-blue composite geodesic dome sitting like some baroque technological sentry on the brow of the valley. Nicholas could see a couple of the hexagonal panels were missing. The gravity wave detector which it housed was now long abandoned. In the height of summer sheep used the dome for shade. Another bout of lightning erupted overhead, vivid blue-white forks lashing down, giving him the impression that the sky itself was fracturing. One of the flashes was bright enough to dazzle him and he jerked back from the window, fists rubbing the blotchy purple after-images from his eyes. Thunder rattled the glass. The farmer’s vehicle had gone. Humidity was steaming up the windows. Nicholas abandoned the monsoon with a reluctance rooted in a perennial child-awe of the elements. He turned on the conditioner to cope with the rampant humidity, punched up some Bil Yj Somanzer from his music deck, then retreated back to his desk. His room was on the top floor of the Abbey, a large L-shape, with old but expensive furniture. It had a small private bathroom at one end. The bed was a large 20 PETER F. HAMILTON circular affair, easily big enough for two, which often made him think of Isabel on sleepless nights. There was an array of large globular cacti in red clay pots on a copper-topped table below the window: he was mildly worried that he wasn’t watering them properly, there had been no sign of the flowers Kitchener told him to watch out for. He hadn’t brought much to the room himself, a couple of big rock band holoprints, his music deck, reproduction star-charts, some reference books (paper ones); his clothes didn’t take up half of the drawer space in the solid oak chest, and the wardrobe was almost empty. He had been too nervous back when he arrived to bring much in the way of personal possessions, unsure what liberties Kitchener would tolerate -after all, the Abbey was nothing like student digs. Of course, now he knew the old boy didn’t carewhat the students did in their rooms, or at least claimed he didn’t. Bil Yi’s Angel High thumped out of the speakers, drowning the sound of the storm in howling guitar riffs. Nicholas activated his desk-top terminal; it was a beautiful piece of gear, a top-of-the-range Hitachi model with twin studio-quality holographic projection cubes. He used the keyboard to access the CNE&mission control memory core in Toulouse and requested ~The latest batch of results from the Anromine 12 astronomy satellite platform. A map of gamma ray sources began to fill one of the cubes, and he called up his frequency analysis program. It was a marvellous sensation, being able to punch a data request into any public-access memory core on the planet without having to worry about departmental budgets. Back at the university, a request like this one would need to be referred almost back up to the dean. Kitchener’s data costs must be phenomenal, but all his students had to pay for were their own clothes and incidentals. His subroutines jumped into the second cube, and he started to integrate them. Kitchener might or might not ask how his gravity-lens research project was progressing at supper but he wanted to be ready with some kind of report. The old boy simply didn’t tolerate fools at all, let alone gladly. That fact alone did wonders for Nicholas’s self-esteem. He A QUANTUM MURDER knew he was bright, his effortless formal first at Cambridge proved that: but the downside was the trouble he had trying to fit in to the university’s social scene; he had always preferred his studies to the politics and culture-vulturing of his fellow students. Bookish eremitism was all right at university, you could get lost in the crowd and nobody would notice, but it wasn’t possible at Launde. Yet Kitchener had agreed after a mere ten-minute interview, during which Nicholas had mumbled virtually every answer to the old boy’s questions. ‘We can sort you out here,’ Kitchener had said wryly, and winked, ‘there’s more than one type of education to be had at Launde.’ Nicholas had experienced the unsettling notion that Kitchener had perceived the sense of destitute isolation which had clung to him for as long as he could remember. After he got in to Launde Abbey, money ceased to be a problem for the first time in his life. His parents had always been proud of his university scholarship, but they hadn’t been able to contribute much to his grant; they were smaliholders, barely able to feed themselves and his sister. He went to Cambridge a month after the People’s Socialism Party fell; the country was in complete turmoil, jobs and money were scarce. He scraped through the first year working as a fast-food cook grilling krillburgers in the furnace heat of a cramped McDonald’s kitchen for six nights a week. It wasn’t until halfway through his second year that the economy stabilized, and the New Conservative government began to prioritize the education department. But after he graduated and then received that golden invitation, sponsorship for the two-year sojourn had been ridiculously easy to find. Eight medium-sized companies and three giant kombinates had made him an offer. In the end he settled for accepting the money of Randon, a French-based ‘ware and energy systems manufacturer, mainly because it was coupled with the promise of a guaranteed research position afterwards. All of Launde’s graduates tended to enjoy a privileged position later in life; Kitchener did seem to have a knack for spotting genuine potential: they formed one of the most elitist 22 PETER F. HAMILTON old-boy networks in the world. It was all part of the price of spending two years isolated in the middle of nowhere. Nicholas didn’t mind that at all; after his appalling first year at Cambridge, he thought it was quite a bargain.

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