The Ninth Circle (52 page)

Read The Ninth Circle Online

Authors: R. M. Meluch

 
The Marines advanced toward the expedition camp. This leg of the trek was all uphill.
The foxes kept up. Sometimes they ran ahead, which was good. It motivated the squad to keep up the pace. But this was a long march, and sooner or later the foxes had to turn around and go home. But then again, what else had a fox to do?
The gray-brown she-fox whom Rhino dubbed Fur For Brains pawed at Rhino’s navel as if her belly button could open up.
Rhino yelled to no one in particular, “What the fecund is this furball doing?”
Kerry Blue cackled. Carly Delgado and Twitch Fuentes snorted. Asante said, “She’s trying to look in your pouch to see if you’re carrying a baby.”
Rhino gave the fox’s face an annoyed shove away from her. “Sister, you have the wrong address.”
 
“
Merrimack
,” said Leo, like a man suddenly making a mental connection.
“What of her?” said Nox.
It was after dinner. Most of the xenos had abandoned their usual seats around the fire pit. That left only the brothers, Jose Maria, Aaron Rose, and Glenn and Patrick.
“Is
Merrimack
still upstairs? Is Adamas aboard?” Leo had the bright-eyed look of a fan. Adamas had been mad emperor Romulus’ gladiator. Adamas had been known to serve on
Merrimack
. His real name was TR Steele.
Nox lifted both hands. “How would I know?”
Glenn clammed shut.
Patrick blurted the answer without thinking, “Usually.”
Glenn shot him a glare. Patrick was nominally an officer, but he was as discreet as a civilian. You never offer information to an enemy. Not even seemingly harmless stuff.
Galeo spoke up, another fan. “I would like to see Adamas.”
“You don’t,” Glenn said quietly.
Adamas will take your head off.
“You really don’t.”
TR Steele was a confirmed Roman hater.
Nox told his brothers, “I’ve heard Steele hates all things Roman.”
“We’re not Roman,” Orissus reminded him. “We’re pirates.”
“That’s probably worse,” said Nox. “Everyone hates pirates.”
 
The leader of any pack got all the finest hembras. A snow-white she-fox in the furry band of camp followers took to twitching her tail at TR Steele. The white vixen ran past him, brushing herself against him, then stopped and looked back, tilted her foxy head to say,
Ain’tcha gonna chase me?
“I can translate that,” said Kerry Blue sourly and yelled to her com-padres, “Hey! Can someone tell Fluffy here the Old Man’s not interested?”
A twitch too far, and Kerry Blue was on her. Kerry dropped her field pack and lunged. Big claws and sharp teeth be damned.
Gyrene green and snowy white rolled over and over on the ground.
“Girl fight!” Dak cried.
Before Steele could bark his Marine back into line, Kerry Blue had already wrestled the she-fox over onto her back and roared into her huge rounded eyes, “Hey, perv! I AM THE ALPHA BITCH!”
Then Kerry was on her feet, collecting her field pack.
The white vixen shook herself off and gamboled away to flirt with a knot of young fox males.
“Good thing foxes are not aggressive,” Asante told Kerry. “Fluff could’ve torn your guts out.”
“
Muy estupido
,” Carly said. “
Chica linda
, you gotta know the furball wasn’t never no competition.”
 
Patrick Hamilton had figured out that Leo was the technically inclined one among the pirate band, but he had no idea what inclined Leo to amass all the data in the expedition’s computer banks, even to Patrick’s language files.
Scarred welts that extended from Leo’s shoulders to his wrists made him look like a cutter. But then again, Patrick supposed there was no “looking like” about it.
The jovial one, Faunus, fashioned a panpipe out of cloke bones he’d collected from the forest. Faunus made Patrick help him tune it. It terrified Patrick to tell the pirate when his pitch was slightly off. But Faunus, despite his brass knuckles, was one of the better-natured ones of the Circle. Faunus didn’t seem likely to break a tool that served him.
The proud one, Nicanor, was humorless. Never laughed. Which was okay, because Nicanor didn’t get angry either.
That Orissus was nasty for the fun of it.
Galeo, with his red goatee and red 666 on his forehead and his penchant for barbaric body paint, looked worse than he was. He had a mean bark, but if you obeyed the bark, he never bit.
Pallas was the one you wanted in your pocket. Pallas looked handsome and normal except for the circled IX brand on his arm. Pallas was almost kind, and he was close to Nox. You wanted Pallas between you and Nox.
And Nox. Nox was flash-tempered and unpredictable and too interested in Patrick’s wife.
Something about my wife attracts Farraguts.
After Faunus got his panpipe tuned, he made himself a crown out of local vines and broke into Aaron Rose’s wine cellar. Faunus came out waggling four bottles. “They’re holding out on us,
frateri
!”
The brothers gathered where Faunus led, to a long table under a tarp where Glenn, Patrick, Jose Maria, and Aaron Rose were sitting.
Faunus thumped down the bottles and leaned in to Aaron’s face. “Aren’t you?”
Aaron Rose, the amateur vintner, warned nervously, “Uh, that batch is an experiment. I really can’t promise that’s even drinkable.”
It looked as though Dr. Rose feared the pirates would kill him if the wine was bad. It was a reasonable fear.
“Where’s the corkscrew?” Faunus boomed.
Nox reached for one of the bottles. “I’ll open it. Let’s see what happened to Schroedinger’s cat.”
Patrick was unclear on the details of Schroedinger’s famous experiment except for the part everyone knew. Dr. Rose said it, looking ill, “That experiment sometimes ends with a dead cat.”
“Yes, it does,” said Nox, ominous.
“I believe the experiment was theoretical,” Jose Maria offered.
“I prefer the practical,” said Faunus, grinning.
“Physics are fun,” said Nox. He set the wine bottle on the table edge. He checked it for level. Then he took all the rings off his right hand.
Nox gave the rings to Glenn to hold. Then he lined up a knifehand strike on the bottle neck below the cork.
His torso moved in a slow twist through a couple practice passes. The brothers’ chuckles rumbled.
They started up a low chant: “Nox! Nox! Nox!”
Ready, Nox put up his hand for silence.
His body coiled back, his right hand cocked behind his head. Then he unleashed his massed power. His leading arm flew round first as a counterweight, his right hip thrust the momentum through the turn of his body, like a major leaguer swinging mightily for the fences. The bottle’s neck sheared clean before the edge of his right hand. The bottle mouth, with the cork still in it, bulleted out of the pavilion. Nox’s lips pulled back in a white snarling grin.
His hand was unscathed.
The brothers thumped the tables, hailing his success.
Nox put out his hand to Glenn for his rings. She spilled them into his palm.
Nox held up the opened bottle toward Dr. Rose, softly menacing. “Here, kitty.”
Apparently the life or death of the vintner hung on the quality of the contents.
Olive-skinned Aaron Rose turned ghastly pale. Couldn’t move.
Jose Maria stepped forward in Aaron’s stead. “Are you a physicist, Nox?”
Nox said, “I know enough to be dangerous.”
Jose Maria leaned his nose over the cutting edge of the bottleneck. He sniffed. “The cat lives.”
It wasn’t until Nox threw back his head, poured wine into his own mouth, and confirmed the verdict that Aaron Rose passed out with relief.
The brothers collected more bottles of the wine and took their party elsewhere.
Left behind under the tarp, Patrick, Glenn, and Jose Maria revived Dr. Rose. They had only water to offer him, which was probably a good thing.
Dr. Rose asked, “Would they have killed me if the wine was bad?”
“Don’t ever want to know,” said Patrick.
Trying to push past his terror, Aaron Rose told Jose Maria conversationally, “I never understood Shroedinger’s cat.”
“The problem is the cat,” said Jose Maria.
Glenn blinked up at him. “You’re serious?”
“The cat is too big.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I am. At issue is decoherence. A cat is a complex system, subject to interference from its surroundings and even from itself. It is not an isolated quantum object, and the premise that a cat can exist in two states at once, both living and dead, is wrong.”
“You don’t know cats,” said Glenn.
“Apparently not,” Jose Maria admitted.
Inga lifted her head from her paws, looking around for cats. Glenn hadn’t noticed her under the table.
“I suppose that is why it is not Schroedinger’s dog,” Jose Maria said. “One always knows where one stands with dogs. Ah, there’s the sun.”
The sun had come out from behind the clouds.
“What makes Schroedinger’s illustration unworkable is that the state of the cat inside the box is either alive or dead before Schroedinger lifts the lid and observes it. Even though he is leaving the fate of the animal to a subatomic event, the only uncertainty here is in Schroedinger’s mind, not in the state of the cat. This is not the case with quantum objects, which exist in two states at once. Is a photon a particle or is it a wave? The answer is yes. It is a particle. It is a wave. It is both until one observes it; and then the observation itself forces the decision. What the quantum object is depends quite literally on how you look at it.
“The observation of one aspect renders the other aspect unknown and unknowable. There is no equivalent of quantum behavior in the macroscopic world.”
Oh, yes there is
. Glenn turned her head in the direction Nox had gone. She could hear a panpipe playing.
There is
.

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