The Labyrinth Key Read online

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  PRAISE FOR HOWARD V. HENDRIX AND THE LABYRINTH KEY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PRELUDE:

  INCANDESCENT BLISS

  ONE

  DOUBTING THOMAS JEFFERSYNTH

  TWO

  CHIMERICULTURE

  THREE

  MUTUAL ASSURANCES

  FOUR

  GÖDELIAN LOVE KNOT

  FIVE

  UNDULATIONS

  SIX

  CONFESSIONS AND CONUNDRUMS

  SEVEN

  PENETRANCE

  EIGHT

  SYMMETRY…

  NINE

  GETAWAYS

  TEN

  THE FLOUR OF HIS BONES

  ELEVEN

  SEMPERIUM

  TWELVE

  INFINITE REGRESS OF GODS AND MACHINES

  THIRTEEN

  DIAMOND-SILK COCOON

  FOURTEEN

  SCARED SACRED

  FIFTEEN

  ANOTHER PATH, IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE

  ONE LAST WORLD MORE, ONE MORE WORLD LAST

  A KEY TO THE LABYRINTH

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  DON’T MISS HOWARD V. HENDRIX’S NEXT SCIENCE FICTION THRILLER SPEARS OF GOD

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  PRAISE FOR HOWARD V. HENDRIX AND THE LABYRINTH KEY

  “HOWARD V. HENDRIX CAN BE CLAIMED AS ONE OF OUR VERY BEST.”

  —Locus

  “Hendrix’s sentences have punch, his plots have points, and he knows his science—what more can one ask of cutting-edge science fiction?”

  —GREGORY BENFORD, Nebula Award–winning

  author of Timescape

  “Stephen Hawking meets Tom Clancy! Quantum physics and international intrigue combine in the best novel yet by the finest new SF writer of the last decade.”

  —ROBERT J. SAWYER, Hugo Award–winning

  author of Hominids

  “If Robert Ludlum or Eric Ambler had written a science fiction novel, then it might have resembled The Labyrinth Key. An intriguing thriller, it’s also first-rate speculation: a masterful blend of genres. If you are searching for a thought-provoking novel, this shouldn’t be missed.”

  —ALAN STEELE, Hugo Award–winning

  author of Chronospace

  “With the hip fecundity of Neal Stephenson, the speculative acuity of John Brunner, and the suspense-building audacity of John LeCarré, Howard Hendrix fashions a science fiction thriller that’s truly twenty-first century in its tone, subject matter, and style. Hopping from exotic real-world locales to even more outré virtualities, this tale will keep readers guessing till its climax.”

  —PAUL DI FILIPPO, author of Fuzzy Dice

  and A Mouthful of Tongues

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks go to my agent, Chris Lotts, of the Ralph Vicinanza Agency, for his guidance in keeping the business side of my writing life going. To Steve Saffel at Del Rey, for his extensive editorial comments, questions, and suggestions on the manuscript of The Labyrinth Key—and his valiant attempts to help me wear my research and learning more lightly. To David Brin and Jack McDevitt, for instructive feedback from gentlemen wise in the ways of storytelling.

  To Joe Miller, Brad Lyau, and Takayuki Tatsumi, for Fermi Paradox solutions and bwana intellectuals and hypercultural chimeras. To George Slusser, Colin Greenland, Gary Westfahl, and K. Y. Wong, for Eaton Conferences in Riverside, London, and Hong Kong over the years. To Stephen Kearney, for the Fahrney devices. To FBI Special Agents Thomas Anzelmo and Timothy Lester of the Sacramento field office, for clarifying my understanding of the FBI’s Legal Attaché (legat) program.

  To Richard Bagley of Southern California Edison, for the private tour of the powerhouse inside the mountain. To Chris Garcia of the Computer History Museum in Moffett Field, for Pierce codes and tonal keys. To Eugene Zumwalt for fly-fishing lessons. To Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, for pointing me to the work of Edward Felten at Princeton regarding the flaws in digital watermarking and the complexities of digital rights management.

  And to the readers of my previous novels, who might like to know that Mei-ling Magnus in my second novel, Standing Wave, is the mispronounced namesake and niece of Lu Mei-lin here (ah, the things that end up on the cutting-room floor….).

  PRELUDE:

  INCANDESCENT BLISS

  SHA TIN

  Dr. Jaron L. Kwok stood in his favorite red silk robe, glancing out the rain-streaked window of his tenth-story room in the Royal Park Hotel. A lit cigarette smoldered between his fingers, its ash lengthening, forgotten.

  In the distance, green tree-covered mountains hung in the mist, behind high-rise New Territory apartment blocks, white-painted concrete eroding to gray. On the nearer side of the Shing Mun River stood the Sha Tin town park, where he had strolled thoughtlessly the day he arrived in Hong Kong, too jet-lagged to do any work.

  Turning away from the tall, narrow gap in the thick curtains, Kwok paused while his eyes adjusted slowly to the watery half-light of the room. His gaze lingered on the mess of papers, reports, and scribbled notecard arcana scattered about the bed, then turned to the laptop, virtuality visor, and bottle of Scotch on the nightstand. He cleared a space for himself on the bed. Lying down, he pawed through the masses of hardcopy until he was half buried in paper, a caddisworm cocooning and encasing itself in the detritus of its underwater environment. Disappearing back into his “obsessions,” his “infojunkie tendencies,” as Cherise once called them.

  Glancing at the bottle of Scotch and the plughead paraphernalia that sat on the night table, then at the cigarette in his hand, Kwok sighed. All the old, bad bachelor habits. All the things he had been, before he met Cherise—before she loved him, and he cleaned up his act, thinking that was what she wanted.

  Was that the way love was supposed to work?

  He flicked the ash from his cigarette.

  Never been much good at being what other people expect me to be, he thought, drawing deeply on the cigarette, his stare fixing on the ashen orange glow of its tip. No good at all at becoming what other people expect me to become. Not even for Cherise.

  He hadn’t expected Cherise to be so thoroughly repelled by his decision to take an assignment with the National Security Agency.

  He hadn’t seen their breakup coming, as much as he should have.

  Theirs was still a virtual divorce: not yet final by the letter of the law, though the marriage had long since ended in spirit.

  He slugged back a mouthful of the Scotch, felt it burn—peat and asphalt at the back of his throat—then slide numbingly away. He recapped the bottle loosely, dropped it on the bed beside him, and took a drag on his cigarette. Chewing smoke before exhaling, he sat up—dislodging papers—and absently opened the matte black laptop. The screen saver showed a sixteenth-century painting of a grim-faced nobleman, pointing with his left hand at an image of a labyrinth cut into the surface of a parapet, yet looking away from the very thing at which he was pointing.

  Kwok brought up the icon for his virtual environment and clicked on it. Propping the virtuality ’trodeshades up onto his temples, he lay back on the bed. Shifting the shades down over his eyes and clicking them into place, he said a silent prayer of thanks to his masters at the Puzzle Palace. His gear was a plughead’s dream-machine: a complete DIVE mask—an electrode-ensemble virtuality visor, with prototype binotech implants—wirelessly connected to the net via a microkernel in the laptop. Top-line tools of the trade, made available to him for use in service to the NSA.

  As his latest virtuality began to cycle up, Jaron couldn’t help wondering if what he was doing was in their service anymore. Glancing through the piles of research mounded on and around him, h
e mused that the obsessions that had led him here had changed. Once upon a time, the quantum crypto race between China and America—that great and secret struggle of cybertage and infowar—had powerfully fueled his fascinations.

  Yet even that wasn’t feeding the fires anymore. It had been replaced by…what? Something much bigger, something more important? Or more narrowly focused, more obsessive?

  Undecidable propositions, even now. He’d been given a treasure trove of cryptologic information long hidden in the dark—some of it for nearly fifty years, some of it for well over four hundred. He should be thrilled, he knew, yet he felt more anxious than excited. He was standing on the brink of great things…though perhaps not the great things his employers expected.

  It had been nearly half a century since anyone had dug so deeply into the data that now occupied his every waking thought—materials Jaron thought of simply as The Documents. That previous investigator had been the old China hand and Cold War spymaster, Felix C. Forrest. Upon his death—of a “heart attack,” according to the records—Forrest’s former employers at the CIA had taken possession of The Documents and their bizarre mix of ciphers and explications in Hebrew, Chinese, Latin, Italian, and English. Jaron suspected the blood of history was there on the pages, and that the roster of victims stretched back centuries, if he could only read the invisible ink in which the names were written.

  Until the very end, Forrest claimed he had never mastered the “algorithm complex” so key to understanding the documents. Neither had the CIA, Jaron supposed. Presumably, their failures had caused the puzzle to be dropped into his lap. In his hands it had proven a sordid boon, a fractured, enchanted mirror of words, numbers, and symbols, into which he had looked too long and too intently.

  Stare into the abyss long enough, and eventually the abyss stares back into you. He rubbed his forehead. In college he’d had a friend who claimed, “I’ve stopped doing psychedelics—now the psychedelics are doing me.” Jaron’s own “addiction” couldn’t go that far, could it? He wondered.

  He didn’t like to acknowledge the nearness of genius to madness. Had Georg Cantor and Kurt Gödel really gone mad from pondering the infinities of alephs and the continuum hypothesis? Was John Nash driven insane as a result of his own games-theory work? Jaron didn’t want to believe in a touch-it-and-die Third Rail of the mind.

  Still, he couldn’t ignore what had happened the last time he had interfaced with the world of The Documents. Virtual reality wasn’t supposed to leak over into your head like that.

  He shook himself, remembering. It had been like having someone else’s hallucinations break into your dreams. And it took him far too long to recover. So he was taking precautions this time—just in case.

  The virtuality was still cycling, so his ’trodeshades remained clear and empty. Jaron peered through them at the printed and scribbled notes of his arcana, pondering again the doubtful legacy now in his possession. During the Second World War Forrest was a US Army intelligence officer who had helped create the Psychological Warfare Unit. During the early 1950s, he worked for the CIA in Korea, where his greatest, or at least most ironic accomplishment involved crafting a way for thousands of Communist Chinese soldiers to surrender by saying the Chinese equivalents of “love, virtue, humanity.” Strung together, they sounded like the English phrase “I surrender.”

  Maybe that was some sort of karmic payback. After all, Felix Forrest had been the Western godson of Sun Yat-sen, whose calligrapher had given the Occidental child the Chinese name of Lin Bah-loh, “Forest of Incandescent Bliss.”

  Historian’s trivia, Jaron mused. All his own research, and Forrest’s, too, was built on the still-earlier work of Shimon Ginsburg in the 1930s, even on the work of Ai Hao and Matteo Ricci, and Giordano Bruno in the sixteenth century. Yet all that had only been preparation. The climax, one way or another, would come today.

  This time, when Jaron jumped into his virtual environment, he would achieve an unprecedented hookup with the worldwide computershare. Today he would return with the answers he sought, if he survived the encounter. Maybe he would return with the answers his masters sought, too, but that would be incidental.

  Jaron Kwok knew things now that he had never expected to know. Not just about Felix Forrest’s work with The Documents. Not just about Shimon Ginsburg’s Kabbalistic mathematics, or how, hidden and rehidden, they had inadvertently provided Jaron with the final, critical element he needed for mastering the algorithm complex. Not even about Ricci’s “memory palace” system, which turned ideographic Chinese into an extraordinarily powerful virtual machine. And not even about the fact that all of those were ultimately built on the cipher-cosmology and proto-virtuality of a defrocked Dominican priest and heretic—Giordano Bruno, who had been burned at the stake in 1600.

  At first he resisted the idea that cryptic mysteries of the past could ever exceed present knowledge. No longer. The knowledge Jaron already possessed was the result of his previous experiences in the eccentric self-made virtuality he now waited upon. Equal parts myth and computer game, number-crunching and scenario-building, his open-architectured virtual realm had taken on a strange life of its own. It was supposed to be an elaborate heuristic, a way of making sense of things. An idiosyncratic tool with which he tried to hammer his work into some kind of coherence.

  But when he had last used that “tool,” unexpected universes had spun out of his head. His own sense of self had proved an illusion, dissociating into multiple persons, male and female, bestial and machinic, all of them him, yet not him. The memory alone made his head ache.

  As a way of making sense, his heuristic virtuality wasn’t quite making sense anymore.

  Yet, through it all, Jaron thought he glimpsed the fiery signs of the Tetragrammaton, waiting beyond Babel—beyond the Gate of God. Because he had lived through that strange virtual experience, he knew they were essentially right, the many-worlds physicists, with their “plenum” playing all possible universes, like channels on the ultimate TV set. If he could travel into the “past,” all he would find there would be another universe. Every past was, always and only, another universe. Same with the future.

  It was more complex even than that, though. Together, all those universes made up a labyrinthine palace of memory more vast than any Forbidden City. Each room was a universe, finite and consistent in and of itself, yet radically incomplete, as it always led on to other rooms. The palace as a whole was essentially infinite.

  With a shake of his head, Jaron shivered off such ponderings. As his virtuality finished lining up all its connections, he thought instead about all the people all over the planet who over the years had waited in cubicles for their workaday computers to boot up. Smiling wryly at the comparison, Jaron swirled another dram in his mouth.

  His virtuality finished cycling up. His implants were ready. Through the global computer grid he could access a sizable chunk of the planet’s processing power, if he had to. And his precautions were in place. The deadman-switch program was ready, should it be needed. If any of his Third Rail fears turned out to be true, that program would send a record of his entire virtual interaction across the infosphere in a holographic broadcast. Like a jetliner’s black box, that record would survive, if only to chronicle his destruction.

  The cursor flashed red.

  Jaron’s consciousness was a star falling from its sphere, a sky-diamond gone meteor. Burning, he was breaking up, over and over. Disintegrating in iterations. Becoming less integer and more fraction, tasting faintly of metal and touching faintly of sparks as he entered a vast unconscious space the material world’s machines were making. A place that was no place—virtual and real and something much more.

  In virtualspace Jaron was both less and more than he had been. The actions and words, the experiences and perceptions of his discarnately embodied self were his, yet not his own alone. Jaron was part of He, and part of She, both of whom were already present in a program always in progress. Dr. Kwok was at the controls, yet less a
nd less in control.

  Machine pistol in hand, He parachuted into the Garden. The sound of His chute’s rustling collapse roused Her from where She drowsed behind sunglasses, clad in a bikini, adrift in a chaise floating in the middle of the pool below the Tree of Life.

  “Good afternoon, dear,” She said, yawning and stretching. “You’re looking square-jawed and mightily thewed, as usual.”

  Something in Him smiled, wondering again why this simulation was so arch, or at least macho. A projection out of Him? A product of the computational matrix? A synergy of both?

  “Why thank you,” He said with a wicked grin. As He was Jaron-construct plus A Good Deal Else, so was She Cherise-construct plus A Good Deal Else, too: Ken and Barbie, Ulysses and Penelope, Adam and Eve, and many, many more.

  “What have you been up to while I was away?” He continued. “Not snakes and apples, I hope?”

  “Puh-leeze,” She said, rolling Her eyes. Leaping up from the floating chaise, She walked upon the water to the shore. “You’ll never let me live that down, will you?”

  She shrugged Herself into a white lab coat and replaced Her sunglasses with specs that made Her look forbiddingly intellectual.

  “Actually I was just taking a break from my work on the wellness plague,” She said, “if you must know.”

  Suddenly He spun around and let loose a burst of automatic weapons fire from His machine pistol. Ninja-garbed friendship terrorists fell from the surrounding trees. One of those fallen nearest died howling. “The woods are burning, boys!”

  When He removed the dead ninja’s mask, something in Him recognized the face of an actor who played Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. As the mayhem subsided for a moment, He turned back to Her and asked, “How’s the work going?”

  “Splendidly!” She said, leading Them down a perfect ramp to a pair of heavy vault doors set beneath the roots of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Retina-scanned and biometrically certified, They entered cavernous laboratories of clean-room white and chrome. “My programmable cellular machines have been very well received. Newsweek called me the Madame Curie of the Biotech Century. I would have preferred ‘Einstein’ and ‘binotech,’ but one can’t have everything, I suppose.”