As soon as she stepped through the gate Lucinda Carlyle knew the planet had been taken, and knew it would be worth taking back. It bore the thumbprints of hurried terraforming: bluish grass and moss, low shrubbery like heather. No animal life was visible, but she had no doubt it was there. Five kilometres away across an otherwise barren moor dotted with outcrops and bogs a kilometre-high diamond machine speared the sky. Complex in aspect, somewhere between a basaltic cliff and a cathedral, it had shown up on the robot probe, but that was nothing compared to actually looking at it.
She turned away from it and looked back at the gate. It was marked by a hilltop henge, whether by the gate’s builders or by subsequent, less sophisticated minds she couldn’t guess: two three-metre slabs upended, and topped by a third. One by one her team stepped forth from the unlikely shimmer and gazed around at the landscape. A yellow G5 sun blinked a bleary, watery morning eye over the horizon.
‘Grim place,’ said Macaulay, the ordnance fellow, as drizzle gusted. ‘Minds me a Scotland.’ He heaved a Charnley plasma cannon to his shoulder, mimed a shot at the distant edifice, and—abashed by Carlyle’s sudden glare—looked to the robot walkers that carried the heavier gear.
‘Divil you were ever in Scotland,’ jeered Amelia Orr, comms op and Carlyle’s great-great-grandmother, who had been.
‘Shut it,’ said Carlyle. She flinched slightly at her own words, but she was in charge here, and she had to stamp authority on seniority, and fast. She strongly suspected that Orr had been put on the team to keep an eye on her, and harboured contingency plans to take over if Carlyle faltered. On the inside of her helmet the names of the rest of the ten-person team lit up one by one. Meanwhile the suit’s firewalls fenced with the atmosphere. The planet was habitable—inhabited, even, damn their cheek—but its bacteria, viruses, and fungi all had to be neutralised. It would be an hour or more before the suits had passed on the new immunities to the team’s bloodstreams, and the suits, or at least the helmets, could be dispensed with.
‘Are you picking up anything?’ she asked Orr, in a carefully polite tone.
The older woman tight-beamed a glyph of <shrug> to Carlyle’s head-up. ‘Usual encrypted chatter.’ <smile> ‘Some music. D’ye want to hear it?’
Carlyle raised a suit-gloved hand. ‘No the now.’ She swept the hand forward. ‘Come on guys, this is gonna be a slog.’
It was.
Two hours later their suits were covered in mud and stained with bits of the local analogues of bracken, moss, and lichen, crawling with tiny tenlegged analogues of arthropods, and their firewalls were still running the virtual equivalent of fever, but they were all standing in front of the glittering cliffs. Carlyle let the team deploy a hundred metres away from the first visible ground-level gap and consulted her familiar. Professor Isaac Shlaim was an Israeli comp sci academic whose vicissitudes since the Hard Rapture could have filled a book, and had. So far Carlyle had resisted his entreaties to have it published.
‘Whaddae ye make of it?’ she asked.
The familiar’s icon filled a quadrant of the head-up. The icon was a caricatured face that Lucinda varied whenever she felt too uncomfortably reminded that Shlaim had once been human.
‘From after my time,’ he said, a slightly smug tone overlying his usual mixture of resentment and resignation to his plight. ‘Can you confirm that it is the only such artifact on the planet?’
‘No.’
‘May I access your remote sensing equipment?’
Carlyle hesitated. The familiar’s efforts to escape the circuits of her suit were as predictable as they were persistent. On the other hand, she needed his assistance more than usual.
‘I’ll scan then gie ye a download,’ she compromised.
‘Excellent!’ said Shlaim. Even centuries removed from muscle-tone and breath, his cheerful compliance sounded forced.
The radar and sonar pings and full-spectrum scan took about a minute and returned a mass of data quite incomprehensible to Carlyle, or to any individual human. She filed it, isolated it, and tipped it and a copy of Shlaim into a firewalled box. Let the poor bugger fight whatever demons might lurk in the electromagnetic echoes of the posthuman relic before them.
Macaulay was chivvying his iron gorillas into setting up the field pieces to triangulate the provisionally identified entrance. Orr was lying on her back surrounded by small dish aerials. The other team members were prone on the edge of a dip, periscope sights and plasma rifles poking over it, for whatever good that would do. From here the irregularities of the diamond cliff looked like crenellated battlements, its high black hollows like loopholes. But there was no evidence anywhere Carlyle could see of firing on the moor: no burn marks in the knotty ankle-high scrub, no glazed slag. The sense of being watched was overpowering, but she knew from experience that this meant nothing. She’d felt the same tension on the back of her neck in front of natural cliffs.
She ducked to stay beneath this nominal skyline and ran over to Jenny Stevenson, the biologist, who had one hand on her rifle and with the other was picking bits of grot off her suit and feeding them into an analyser.
‘How’s it looking?’ Carlyle asked.
Stevenson’s brown-eyed gaze flicked from her head-up to focus on Carlyle, and crinkled to show the top of a smile. Her grubby glove’s thumb and forefinger formed an ‘O.’
‘Compatible,’ she said. ‘After we’ve got the immunities, we could turn they plants into food, nae bother.’
Carlyle flicked a finger at a clump of scrub, jangling its tiny violet bellshaped flowers. ‘Is this really heather?’
‘Naw really,’ said Stevenson. Her smile brightened. ‘Just an analogue, like. Somebody’s done a real sweet job on this. Took some ae the native life and adapted it. Ye can still see bits ae the native sequences in the DNA, braided in wi the terrestrial stuff. Every cell here must be running two genetic codes simultaneously, which is quite a trick. I’m picking up signatures of they Darwin-Gosse machines fae way back, where was it?’
‘Lalande 21185.’
‘Aye, that’s the one.’
‘Good work,’ said Carlyle. This was a puzzle; AO, the main population of terraformers, mistrusted Darwin-Gosse machines, but it was always possible that a deviant sect had bought some. ‘That’ll maybe gie’s a handle on the squatters. Speaking of which.’
She rolled to Orr, staying outside the barrier of aerials. ‘Have the locals spotted us yet?’
Orr remained staring upward, at some combination of the real sky and the images being patched in from her apparatus. She didn’t turn around; probably still smarting.
‘No’s far as I see. Place is under satellite surveillance, sure, but I’ve no ta’en any pings. Most ae the action’s round the other side of the planet, and all we’re picking up here is spillover. I got a few quantum demons grinding through the encryption. Should be cracked in an hour or so.’
‘Any low orbit presence?’
Orr waved a dismissive hand skyward. ‘Scores of satellites. Sizes range between a grape and a grapefruit. No exactly heavy industry. Typical fucking farmers.’
‘Any deep space stuff?’
‘Aye, a few, but it’s hard to tell fae leakage ae tight-beam transmissions. The odd asteroid miner, I reckon. Maybe a fort or two.’
Carlyle chewed a lip, sucked hot coffee from her helmet nipple. ‘Makes sense. The squatters don’t seem to be AO, whoever they are.’
Orr sniggered. ‘Squatters coulda picked a better place to fittle into. Makes me wonder why they didnae fittle straight back out.’
‘Yeah,’ said Carlyle. ‘Well, assuming.’ Assuming a lot about the squatters’ tech level and motivations, was what she meant. She sat up, hunkered forward, elbows on knees, looking around. ‘When your demons have finished we might have something to go on. Meanwhile …’ She toggled to an open circuit. ‘Time for a bit ae combat archaeology.’
T
he mission profile was straightforward. They were neither to hide from nor confront the squatters, but instead pull down from the busy sky as much information as they could about them, then scout the diamond machine-mountain for any traces of usable tech and/or dangerous haunts, and get the hell out before sunset. Her familiar had found no signals in the noise bounced back from the precipitous face, but as Carlyle stalked forward alone, the Webster reaction pistol strapped to her hip, her backup team behind her to keep her covered, she felt her knees tremble. It wasn’t so much the possible soul-searing dangers presented by the incomprehensible posthuman artifact, as it was a fear of screwing up. This was her first big job for the firm, one she’d fought hard to get, and she had no intention of blowing it. And on the plus side of the ledger, there was always the chance that the tech in here would be radical and capable of being parlayed into wealth beyond the dreams, etc. There was always that, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t what kept you walking forward, like a soldier into enemy fire. The Carlyles led from the front, always had, from the days when the worst any of them faced was a chibbing in a Glasgow close.
From a few metres away she saw that the lower part of the face, to about head height, was overgrown with moss and grass, evidently on the slow stacking of windblown dust. Above that the slope was sheer, the surface so smooth that nothing could gain purchase. The gap, a triangle ten metres high and three across at the base, had been dark only from a distance, and by contrast. As she walked into the cleft Carlyle could see that the interior was almost as bright as the outside. The passage itself was only a few paces long.
The ground level of the space opened out before her. It was so like a forest of frost-rimed low trees that for a moment she wondered if it was indeed that, perhaps a region of the heath trapped under this machine and preserved. A closer look at the nearest of the objects showed her that there was nothing biological there: the clear crystalline structure was replicated on an increasing scale from the frost that covered the needles through to the needles themselves, and the branches, to the main stem that sprouted out of the floor.
The floor was like ice, its transparency diminishing with depth. Looking up, Carlyle saw that the entire interior of the machine was encrusted with similar tree-like structures, the ones above hanging down like enormous chandeliers, their prismatic bevelled sides shining with every colour of the visible spectrum in the sunlight that slanted through the outer surface.
‘It’s diamond all right,’ said Shlaim.
‘How much carbon is locked up in this?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Many millions of tons,’ said the familiar. ‘An entire coal measure, I would say, save that coal measures seem unlikely here.’
‘Or an entire carbonaceous chondrite? Could they have done that?’
‘If so it would be a quite profligate use of anti-gravity.’ Shlaim sounded skeptical. ‘Or they could have lowered it from a skyhook, I suppose, but it would seem pointless… .’
Carlyle laughed. ‘Since when has that ever ruled out anything they did?’
‘In any case,’ said Shlaim, ‘it appears to have been grown or manufactured in situ. From atmospheric carbon, like a plant.’
‘It’s no just carbon,’ Carlyle said.
‘Indeed not.’
Looking down the aisle between rows of diamond shrubbery Carlyle could see other, metallic colours interrupting the riotous monotony of the prisms. The frequency and size of these interruptions increased towards the centre of the artifact, where an arrangement of copper and steel, conical in outline, complicated in detail, rose a hundred metres or more from the floor. The grail in this cathedral, or the host. It looked more like a machine than the rest of the structure did, its hints of organic form echoing animal rather than plant structures.
She walked along to the nearest apparently metal object. About a metre and a half high, it seemed a miniature of the thing in the centre. Squatting beside it, she peered at the intricate surface. Fluted, mirror-smooth steel, veined with copper that could have been tubing, in a series of varied but individually precise diameters. In among the copper were other lines, green and red, that resembled and might even be plastic insulation around wires. Checking her head-up, Carlyle saw that this object was slightly above the ambient temperature of the artifact. She switched to IR and looked again at the central cone. It too glowed, more strongly than its smaller counterparts.
‘Something going on here,’ she said. ‘Some kinda circulation. Flow of electricity, maybe fuel.’
She reached a hand towards it.
‘Don’t touch it!’ warned Shlaim.
‘Course not,’ said Carlye. ‘Just waving the inductance—’
‘I would still caution against—’
Something fizzed and melted on the object’s surface. A jolt of heat or electricity jackknifed Carlyle’s arm back.
‘Shit!’ She wanted to suck her fingertips. She jumped up and backed off, clutching her numb elbow. The thing was moving, flowing as though melting into the floor. It spread, and long tendrils that looked like dribbles of mercury reached the bases of a few of the diamond bushes. These too began to move, branches clicking into new and different shapes like a multitool with nanchuk blades, the trunks becoming dislodged from nowrevealed grooves in the floor as they did so. Carlyle backed off farther, and drew the Webster. Within seconds the metal object had become the central component of a frightening arachnoid array of skittering legs and waving arms, the whole freestanding and rotating as though deciding where to pounce. She could see lenses, formed through some complex infolding of prisms, and they were scanning her.
‘I think at this point there is nothing to lose by firing,’ said Shlaim, with irritating calm.
The Webster roared and bucked in her hands. The machine leapt backwards several metres but was otherwise unaffected. Projectiles ricocheted for what seemed a long time. Before the sounds tinkled to a halt Carlyle turned to sprint for the opening. All around her, machines were assembling themselves. She fired as she ran, hitting the metal cores here and there with effect before the diamond carapaces could form around them. Liquid bled and burned.
Out of the opening she sprinted as far and as fast as she could, then threw herself forward and rolled.
‘Fire at will!’ she shouted.
A Charnley bolt singed the air a metre above her. There was a flash. Then a cacophonous sound from her radio speakers deafened her. Something shorted in her helmet, stinging her neck. She rolled farther, over the lip of ground. The team were all blazing away at the opening. The banshee outcry ceased. Carlyle slammed another clip in the Webster and fired at the gap in the wall. The robot walkers were rocking back and forth on their spring-loaded legs as they lobbed shells from their field pieces, to no effect Carlyle could see apart from chewing up the soil around the face of the edifice. The diamond walls hadn’t taken a scratch.
‘Cease fire!’
The shooting ran down to a ragged patter then stopped. Carlyle lay prone and peered at the hole as the smoke cleared. One of the multi-legged machines stood there, not moving forward or back. It had, she was pleased to see, taken some damage. Not much.
She was momentarily blinded as a laser beam from the machine slashed a line of fire across the ground a couple of metres forward of their position.
‘Hold it!’ she yelled.
Nothing further happened.
‘Looks like we’ve been warned off,’ she said heavily. ‘Time to pull out. We can come back wi’ a search engine.’
They picked up their gear and retraced their steps towards the gate.
‘No a bad recce,’ said Orr.
‘Thanks,’ Carlyle grunted. The back of her neck was sore, partly from the burn and partly from the tension brought on by the thought of the laser at their backs.
‘See there’s mair ae they dolmens,’ said Stevenson, with a sweep of the arm at the horizon.
Carlyle glanced around, confirming, counting ten. They were easy to spot, when you knew where to look, on the crests of the surrounding hills.
‘Make sure we’re heading for the right one,’ she said.
That got a laugh. ‘Maybe they’ve aw got gates,’ someone said, and got another.
‘Anybody else get short-circuits from that electromagnetic blast?’ Carlyle asked.
They all had.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Any idea what it was?’
‘It was a signal,’ said Shlaim, breaking in to her mike. ‘And no, I have not analysed it.’
‘Just so long as you haven’t recorded it,’ snarled Carlyle. She hated being upstaged by her familiar.
Something banged in the sky. They all looked up, and saw black fragments flying apart and falling down from a couple of thousand metres overhead. Then a screaming noise started, and glancing a way off they all saw a larger black object separate into six parts, which peeled away from each other, banked around, and began a controlled and rapid descent towards them.
‘Modular aircars in disposable hypersonic shell,’ said Shlaim.
‘Locals!’ yelled Carlyle. ‘Don’t shoot first!’
The team and the robot walkers formed an outward-facing ring, bristling with weapons.
Four of the aircars began a loitering patrol that circled from above the artifact to directly overhead. The other two came down a hundred metres before and behind the team, edging forward on racketting downdraft fans. They were smooth-shelled, streamlined two-seaters, like no aircar model Carlyle had seen before. They worked, she guessed, by aerodynamics. From the one in front a black-suited occupant vaulted out, leaving a pilot in the front seat, and stalked forward, rifle in hand but slanted down. The other hand came up.
‘Who’s in charge here?’ a male voice boomed.
A default American speaker. AO, then, most likely.
Carlyle stepped forward. ‘I am.’
The man stopped and raised his visor, revealing a handsome oliveskinned countenance.
‘What the hell are you doing here? Don’t you know the law?’
Carlyle cleared her faceplate to two-way transparency. The man’s face showed an odd flicker, as though something had startled him but he was reluctant to reveal his surprise.
‘We know you people don’t have anything to do with that stuff,’ Carlyle said, with a jerk of her thumb over the shoulder. ‘But it’s all right, we can handle it.’
‘The hell you can! Who do you think you are?’
‘We’re the Carlyles.’
He stared at her. ‘The what?’
‘Oh, don’t kid on,’ she said. ‘Everybody knows who we are. And we know who you are. You’re AO, right?’
‘AO?’ He said it as if he’d genuinely never heard it before.
‘America Offline,’ Carlyle grated. He stared uncomprehendingly. Carlyle relaxed and found herself grinning. This was a joke. She pointed upward and waved her finger about. ‘You farmers, come from sky, yes?’
The man didn’t find this funny.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Enough. You’ve—’
He cocked his head, listening to something. His face paled, then reddened. He jabbed a finger at her.
‘Do you know what you’ve done?’ His voice shook. ‘You’ve wakened war machines! You fucking stupid, stupid—’ He stopped himself. ‘Drop your weapons,’ he said flatly. ‘We’ve got you covered. We’re taking you in.’
‘There’s no need for that,’ Carlyle said, with willed calm. ‘We know about the, uh, war machines. Just let us go and we’ll come back in an hour and crunch them up.’
‘Oh yeah? With what?’
‘A search engine.’
The man sneered, flicked down his visor and raised his rifle. From the corner of her eye Carlyle saw two of the circling aircars swoop.
‘In your own time, Macaulay,’ she said, and dived. The robot walkers had finished firing before she hit the ground. She rolled, glimpsing four smoke-trails, two flashes, feeling the crunch of the crashes through her bones, and then she was up and had the Webster jammed in the man’s groin. Another crash. Heather was burning off in the distance. Carlyle dragged the muzzle up to the man’s belly, flipped up his visor with her free hand and leered in his face.
‘Get yer hands up.’
He cast away his rifle and raised his hands.
‘Now tell yer team to lay off.’
‘Disengage,’ he said.
The two nearby aircars were still intact, hovering uncertainly, covered by the team and the robots.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘you’ll be so kind as to gie us a lift to the gate.’
‘The what?’
She was getting a bit sick of this. Guy must be a complete yokel or something. She stepped back and pointed.
‘That fucking cromlech thingie up yonder.’
He half turned, looking over his shoulder. ‘The henge?’
‘That’s the one. Now move.’
She escorted him at gunpoint to the nearest aircar, motioned him to get in the passenger seat as she straddled the flange behind it. Orr, Stevenson, and a couple of others ran forward and lay across the stubby wings, clinging to their leading edges. Glancing back, Carlyle saw Macaulay supervise a similar deployment on the other vehicle.
‘Now forward easy,’ she said. ‘Remember, if you try to shake us off or anything, the robots have still got you in their sights.’
The aircars flew forward, engines labouring, a few metres above the rough ground, increasing in speed as the pilots gained confidence that their unwelcome passengers weren’t about to fall off.
The man found a shared frequency and hailed her above the noise. ‘What about the injured?’
‘Your problem,’ she said. ‘You sort them out when we’re gone.’ A thought struck her. Anyone who’d survived the aircar downings might be beyond repair, and in pain. She curved her arm and waved a hand in front of his face, mimed cocking and firing with two fingers and a thumb. ‘We could ask the robots to take care of them now, if you like.’
His head jolted back. ‘No thank you.’ He muttered something else under his breath. So much for being nice.
The henge loomed. Carlyle waved the other aircar to overtake, then yelled for a halt. She called her team off, one by one, and one by one they slithered from the craft and ran for the gate, until only she and Macaulay, astride the rear of each aircar, were left.
‘Go, Macaulay!’
The gunner vaulted down and sprinted to the henge, vanishing in the space between the tall vertical boulders. Carlyle pressed the Webster muzzle at the nape of the neck of the man in front of her, just under his helmet. She suddenly realised that she hadn’t asked Macaulay to pass control of the robots to her. She hoped the other side hadn’t made the connection.
‘No funny business,’ she said. She put a hand on the smooth ridge between her knees, slid one leg upward. Without warning the craft bucked wildly, hurling her off. The suit moved her head, arms, and legs to an optimal position before she could so much as gasp. She landed on the backs of her shoulders and tumbled, coming to a jarring halt against a low rock. The Webster flew from her hand. She scrabbled for it. A pair of feet thumped on to her forearm. She invoked the suit’s servos and flexed her elbow. The feet slipped off. Before she could jump up the aircar had already come down, slowly and precisely in a storm of downdraft, its skids pressing across her ankles and chest.
The engines stopped. She heaved at the skids, but it was too heavy; punched up at the shell, but it was impervious, stronger even than the suit. There were two people with guns at the stone pillars. The leader stood looking down at her.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m not surrendering, right, but I’ll stop fighting and I won’t try to get away.’
The man raised his visor and bared his teeth, then sauntered off. She watched as he sent one of his comrades around the other side of the gate. He picked up a stone and tossed it between the uprights. It disappeared. Then the other man threw a stone from his side. The stone landed at the first man’s feet. He threw it back, and it disappeared. They repeated this experiment several times.
The leader levelled his gun at the gate.
‘Don’t do that!’ Carlyle yelled.
The man stalked back over. ‘Why not?’
‘Somebody might get hurt,’ said Carlyle.
‘That,’ said the man, ‘is what I had in mind.’
‘Then expect return fire.’
The man stared down at her. ‘You mean what you say about not fighting or fleeing?’
‘Sure,’ said Carlyle.
‘I’ll have to ask you to take that suit off.’
‘Just a minute.’ She checked the internal readouts. ‘Looks like I’ve got the immunities,’ she said. ‘OK.’
She unlocked the helmet, pulled it off and shoved it aside. For a moment she lay gasping in the cold air, then she did the same with the shoulder pieces. She squirmed out of the hole thus left at the top of the suit, moving by shifting her shoulders and buttocks awkwardly until her arms were clear of the sleeves, then hauling and pushing herself out. The headless suit remained trapped under the aircar, still bearing its weight. She rolled away from under the craft and stood up in her thin-soled internal boots and close-fitting one-piece, feeling exposed and vulnerable but determined not to show it. With the light utility belt still around her waist, she didn’t feel entirely disarmed. The man again gave her that strange look, as if he was surprised but too polite to show it more explicitly.
There was a bang overhead as another hypersonic shell disintegrated. Two of the six aircars that descended were white, marked with what looked like one part of the DK logo. Carlyle pointed.
‘What are they?’
‘Black Sickle,’ the man said. ‘Battlefield resurrection techs.’
The Black Sickle. Oh my God. She had a momentary flash of her earliest bogeyman. If yir no a good girl, the ladies fae the Black Sickle’ll come an get ye! Carlyle felt her jaw tremble. She controlled it with an effort.
‘You don’t take backups?’
This time he gave her a very odd look. The aircars settled near the distant device. Figures got out and started rushing around.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Matters seem to be in hand.’ He waved towards the gate. ‘What’s going on there?’
‘It’s the gate to a Visser-Kar wormhole,’ she said.
‘So I had gathered,’ he said. ‘Why does it only work from this side of the henge? Or is it like a Moebius strip, with only one side?’
Carlyle felt somewhat nonplussed. The man wasn’t as ignorant as she’d thought.
‘It has two sides, and it works from both sides,’ she said. ‘Except, when you throw the stone in from that side, it would come out before you had thrown it, or at least before it went in. Causality violation, see? So it doesn’t.’
‘Doesn’t what?’
‘Go through the wormhole.’
‘How does it know?’
She smiled. ‘That’s a good question.’
The man scowled.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
She stuck out a hand. She refused to consider herself a prisoner. ‘Lucinda Carlyle.’
He returned the gesture. ‘Jacques Armand.’ He said it as though expecting her to recognise it. ‘Also known as “General Jacques.’ ” He pronounced it ‘Jakes’ this time, and with even more expectation of recognition.
‘Not a flicker,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘All right, I’ll accept that something strange is going on.’ He lowered his visor, presumably checking something on his head-up for a few seconds, then raised it. ‘As it seems I must. No one recognises you. And the satellite pictures show your arrival. You are not from here.’
‘You find this surprising?’
‘You could say that.’ His tone was as guarded as his words.
‘Where is here, anyway?’
‘We call the planet Eurydice. The star—we don’t have a name for it. We know it is in the Sagittarius Arm.’
‘No shit!’ Carlyle grinned with unfeigned delight. ‘We didn’t know the skein stretched this far.’
‘Skein?’
She waved her hands. ‘That wormhole, it’s linked to lots of others in a sort of messy tangle.’
He stared at her, his teeth playing on his lower lip.
‘And you and your … colleagues came here through the wormhole?’
‘Of course.’ She wrapped her arms around herself while the thermal elements in the undersuit warmed up. ‘You didn’t know this was a gate?’
Armand shook his head. ‘We’ve always kept clear of the alien structure, for reasons which should be obvious, but apparently are not.’ He pointed a finger; the sweep of his hand indicated the horizon, and the hilltop henges. ‘We took the circle of megaliths to be a boundary indicator, left by the indigenes. Today is the first time in a century that anyone has set foot within it. We keep it under continuous surveillance, of course, which is why your intrusion was detected. That and the signal burst. It went off like a goddamn nuclear EMP, but that’s the least of the damage.’ He glared at her. ‘Something for which you will pay, whoever you are. What did you say you were?’
‘The Carlyles,’ she reiterated, proudly and firmly.
‘And who’re they, when they’re at home?’
She was unfamiliar with the idiom. ‘We’re at home everywhere,’ she said. ‘People have a name for the wormhole skein. They call it Carlyle’s Drift.’
F
urther conversation was interrupted by more bangs overhead and the rapid deployment of a variety of impressive ordnance around the gate, and yet more around the artifact. Carlyle watched in silence. She wasn’t at all sure at all how to take Armand’s claimed ignorance of her origins, and of the existence of the gate. His references to the artifact as alien, and to indigenes, were likewise perplexing. Aware that her own ignorance of the situation was almost as great, and that anything she said might be disadvantageous, she said nothing. Whoever they were, this lot weren’t from any culture she’d ever heard of.
Within minutes a robot probe emerged from the gate. It stepped out on the grass and scanned the surroundings rapidly. It was instantly lunged at by the two people guarding the gate, whereupon it scuttled back through.
‘That was a mistake,’ said Carlyle. ‘Next time, expect something tougher.’
Armand grunted. ‘We can cover it.’ He was directing the deployment, waving to someone to lift the aircar that had landed on the suit. He barely spared her a glance.
‘Look,’ said Carlyle, ‘I don’t know who you people are, and it looks like you don’t know who we are, so can we just sort that out and then let me go back through and calm things down?’
‘Don’t let her do that!’ said a loud voice from the suit’s speaker. The empty suit was getting to its feet, holding the helmet and collar under one arm like a stage ghost. Everybody in the vicinity turned on it, staring.
‘Shut up, Shlaim,’ said Carlyle. How the hell had the familiar managed to hijack the suit’s motor controls? That wasn’t supposed to happen.
‘What is this?’ demanded Armand.
‘My familiar,’ said Carlyle. ‘It’s acting up, sorry.’ She gestured Armand to keep out of the way and walked up to the suit, touching the private-circuit mike at her throat as she did so. ‘Don’t you say a fucking word,’ she subvocalised, ‘or you’ll fucking regret it.’ She reached for the emergency zapper on her belt to back up this threat, and was still fumbling with the catch of the pouch when the suit, to her utter astonishment, swept her aside with a glancing but acutely painful blow to the elbow and stalked over to Armand. He and the nearby personnel had the thing covered, and looked quite ready to blast it. It raised its arms, letting the accoutrements drop, and held its hands above where its head would have been.
‘Professor Isaac Shlaim, Tel Aviv University, Department of Computer Science, deceased. I wish to surrender to you as a representative of a civilised power. Let me do that, and I promise, I’ll tell you all you want to know about the bloody Carlyles.’
Carlyle glared at the treacherous machine, but before she could warn her captors not to listen to it, the bulbous, armoured prow of a search engine lurched through the gate. She ran towards it, waving her arms, as everyone else—including her runaway suit—fell back to behind the field pieces a few tens of metres downslope from the henge. The great grinding tracks of the search engine crunched over the scree as its flanks barely cleared the dolmen’s uprights, then it tipped forward and began to move slowly down the hillside. Its elongated half-ovoid of shell gleamed like a beetle’s back. Carlyle heard the spang of bullets ricocheting from it and threw herself flat. She wished desperately that she still had her suit. As it was she just clamped her hands over the back of her head and hoped the Eurydiceans recognised an impervious carapace when they saw one.
Perhaps they did. The rattle of rifle fire and the whizz of bullets ceased. Carlyle peered up just in time to see a white-hot line form in the air between one of the field pieces and the search engine. Not laser, not plasma—she had only a second to wonder at it, and then the line extended from the stern of the vehicle to the top of the gate. The supposedly impenetrable search engine had been cored right through. The line persisted, buzzing in the air. The transverse stone of the dolmen suddenly disintegrated, and there was a bright flash from the gate, with a Cherenkov-blue flare that Carlyle recognised as an energy condition collapse. A moment later the search engine crumpled inward like an air-evacuated tin can and burned to white ash. Against the Eurydicean weapon it might as well have been made of magnesium.
Carlyle lay there blinking away tears and afterimages, shaken by dry heaves. Three people in white suits ran to the wreck and began poking through it, then walked away. No doubt everyone in it had been backed up, and whatever had happened was quick, but it was still shocking. Even without finality, death was death. Some of the people she’d been with less than an hour earlier were dead: people on her team, dead on her watch, therefore her responsibility—that was how it would be seen back home, and she couldn’t help seeing it that way herself. What was more shocking yet, as the implications sank in, was that the gate had been closed. It might not reopen for weeks. Until then she was stranded on Eurydice. The firm would rescue her eventually, she was sure of that, and in the meantime she could try and find some way to fittle out, but the fact that she’d never heard of a colony in the Sagittarius Arm, and the colony had never heard of the Carlyles, made that unlikely. The place must be really isolated.
Armand walked up, rifle at the ready, and kicked her in the ribs.
‘Get up, you slaveholder bitch.’
‘What?’ She rolled away and staggered to her feet. ‘What the fuck was that for?’
‘Your so-called familiar,’ said Armand. ‘He’s a human being.’
‘He was once,’ said Carlyle. ‘He’s posthuman now. You know? The talking dead? One of the bastards who did all this? Talk about having it coming. Don’t give me this slaveholder crap, farmer.’
Armand frowned and lowered the rifle, visibly calming down.
‘We have matters to discuss,’ he said. ‘Later.’
He strode over to the henge again and threw a stone. Then he stepped through it himself, walked around the back and returned.
‘What happened there?’
‘Your weapon overloaded the gate. It’s collapsed.’
‘Will it stay closed?’
She wondered if there was any advantage in lying about it. Probably not. She shrugged.
‘Couple of weeks maybe, a month at the outside.’
‘Let us be thankful for small mercies.’
‘Yes, you won’t be isolated for long.’
From the expression on Armand’s face she gathered that this was not the mercy he meant.
E
nough people were to remain around the relic for there to be more than enough room in the aircars that were returning. Armand gestured to Carlyle and she climbed into one of them, behind a pilot who returned her gaze with a blank-visored nod. The seat was hard but adapted instantly to her shape, the restraints automatic and insistent. She settled in. The canopy thudded shut. It was of a better grade of glass than she was used to, practically invisible. Jets whined and vibration built, thrumming her spine; the aircar rose and accelerated, pressing her down. As it banked to the southwest she glimpsed vertiginously the tilted moor and the hills, an expanse of blue-green and brown with flashes of yellow and flickers of sunlight reflected on innumerable tiny lochs, like light showing through holes in a pricked curtain. Then, with another surge of power to the rear jets, the aircar rose into a cloud. After a moment of clammy greyness it emerged on the upper side, climbed further and levelled out at, she guessed, eight or nine kilometres up, from which height there was little to see but the endless similarity and uniqueness of the cloud-tops, and glimpses of the land between and beneath them.
Carlyle could look at clouds and lands without boredom, but she was too angry to appreciate them. She had known discipline and discomfort, but always they had been willed and accepted by herself. Not since childhood had she felt thus: helpless, ordered about, confined. She willed herself to calm; turned her head from habit to suck at a coffee nipple that wasn’t there; raged again. There was a bottle of water clipped to the back of the pilot’s seat. She drank it and grimaced, finding it lukewarm. It quenched her thirst but not her anger; and of course, as soon as she pushed the bottle back in its clip, she felt a strong need to piss. In her suit she could have done it, without discomfort or consequence, but not here. She compressed her lips and knees and looked out at the bright illusory solidities of clouds.
The clouds gave way in the distance to blue, white-flecked sea, and the aircar tipped forward and in to a fast, spiralling descent: either a show-off, or a military habit. She suspected the former: Armand’s lot, somehow, didn’t strike her as familiar with contested landing-grounds. They went through and under the clouds, to thin rain, a long beach and breakers, and alongside the beach a huddle of low buildings and domes, and a kilometre of tarmac strip at one end of which the craft came rocking to a halt, followed shortly by seven others.
At the same end of the strip a much larger transport stood, delta-winged and needle-nosed, with a narrow strip of tiny windows along the fuselage. Carlyle stood up as the canopy sprang back, and stepped out after a nod from the pilot. A stiff breeze came off the sea. When she licked her lips she tasted salt. Her undersuit’s heaters creaked into action, warming her in coils.
Armand’s people hustled her across the rainswept tarmac to the larger transport. It was, she reckoned, hypersonic. Its seating, though in two rows, seemed even more cramped than the aircar’s. The fighters and the medics strolled aboard, giving her unfriendly grins as they took off their helmets. Her own suit was still carrying its helmet and shoulder pieces, like some bizarre case of walking wounded; she would have glared at it but wasn’t sure where to look. The door sealed and the aircraft rolled forward with a full-throttled roar, in the fastest acceleration she’d yet experienced. She peered out of the porthole beside her and saw the beach whip past and then drop away, the angled ocean a blink of grey, and the sky going from blue to purple in minutes. Below was ocean, and clouds in overlapping layers. As the craft banked again she twisted her neck to look to the zenith, and saw a star. After the transport had levelled off the seat belts stayed fastened. She felt the slight jolt as the craft went supersonic, then the sudden quiet that reminded her how loud the noise had been. A crew member in casuals walked down the aisle, taking requests. She asked for the toilet. He released her, escorted her there and back, and with a half-smile of apology, buckled her in again. She was given coffee, and surprisingly good food. Nobody searched her utility belt. She could have cut the belts, taken the crewman hostage, and hijacked the aircraft, but—satisfying as that fantasy was, at one level—she had no alternative destination in mind. Armand and a few others from his team and from the Black Sickle had taken off their combat suits and now sat in the same narrow compartment, a few seats behind her and out of earshot, talking to the familiar in the suit. Every so often Armand let out a sort of yelp of surprise, with an overtone of incredulity. After a while he got up and strode forward, and closed the cockpit door behind him. He didn’t meet her eyes when he came back.
Shortly thereafter, she heard murmuring voices behind her, one Armand’s and the other a woman’s. The woman’s steps came up the aisle, and then she sat down in the adjacent seat. She wore white trousers and tunic, with the black sickle embroidered over her left breast. Her skin was darker than Armand’s, she smelled faintly of cinammon, and she was outstandingly beautiful.
‘Josephine Koshravi,’ she said. There was some tension about her eyes, but her voice was warm, as was her hand.
‘Lucinda Carlyle.’
Koshravi smiled, showing even white teeth. She jerked a thumb at the insignia. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to cut your head off.’ She said it self-consciously, as if it was a clichéd joke.
‘Oh,’ said Carlyle, suddenly making the connections: battlefield resurrection medic, Black Sickle, heads … she shivered momentarily, forced a smile. ‘Right. So what do you want?’
‘Just to talk. If you are allowed to do that?’
‘Allowed?’ Carlyle’s voice rose indignantly. ‘I’m a Carlyle!’
‘I … see,’ said Koshravi. ‘Professor Shlaim has told us about the Carlyles, and about where you come from. We are all very shaken. You see, we didn’t know until today that there were any other human survivors at all. We didn’t know what had happened back on Earth, and we didn’t know faster-than-light travel was possible.’
Carlyle decided there was not much point in not telling them the truth. Shlaim would undoubtedly spill every last bean, and all she could do was tell her side of the story.
‘But you must have fittled,’ she said, ‘—travelled FTL to get here.’
Koshravi looked worried. ‘Or you have travelled in time, from the past.’
Carlyle shook her head firmly. ‘No, that’s no how it works. I mean you can time-travel, sort of, so long as you don’t violate causality. But that’s not what we are doing, wi the skein or the ships. The light from where we started, say, ten thousand light-years away really won’t get here for another ten thousand years.’
‘That might account for the difficulty our astronomers have had in locating our exact position,’ said Koshravi dryly.
‘You really thought the date was tens of thousands C.E.?’
‘At least. It was all quite indeterminate. We counted time by some legacy clocks from the ship. According to that the Earth-standard date now is’—she fiddled with a watch—‘2367.’
Carlyle nodded. ‘Yup, that’s the year all right. How come you didn’t take the hint?’
‘It was assumed these clocks had been stopped during the actual journey. Nobody even imagined we had, ah, fittled.’
‘I’m baffled,’ Carlyle said. ‘How could you travel FTL and not know it?’
‘That’s a good question,’ said Koshravi. ‘We—that is to say, our ancestors—were a space-based population who had escaped the Hard Rapture. Together with people whom they rescued from Earth in the subsequent war, they fled to Mars and the Jovian system. They had a choice—to take the fight back to the war machines that had conquered Earth, and were spreading outward from it, or to get as far away as possible. The choice became a conflict between the Returners, as they were called, and the Reformers. The Reformers—the side that wanted to build a starship—won, but …’
She hesitated, pink tongue flicking between full, dark lips. Carlyle eyed her and tried not to visibly gloat. She knew now whom and what she was dealing with. When the Carlyles arrived here in force, it would be payback time on some large and long overdue debts.
‘Well,’ Koshravi went on, ‘there was no way to build a starship capable of carrying a large human population—many thousands, by that time, around the end of the twenty-first century—to the stars. Instead, they decided to build a much smaller and faster ship, and digitize their own personalities into information storage for later downloading to the flesh. In order to do this they had to build superhuman artificial intelligences, and, well …”
Carlyle couldn’t help guffawing. ‘They torched off their own Hard Rapture!’
‘It now appears that they did, yes. However, the project worked, in that it accomplished what we had set out to do, even if not in the way we thought. The ship found a viable planet, and set in motion the nanomachines to construct larger machines, and so on, and terraformed the planet, and downloaded and reconstructed the stored passengers, and here we are.’
‘Here you are, indeed.’ It was weird; no one had ever imagined humans reemerging from the other side of a Hard Rapture. ‘What happened to your posthumans?’
Koshravi frowned. ‘Obviously we have artificial intelligences, the ones our ancestors constructed, but they are not in runaway mode. Those that were, the ones that created the FTL drive, must have … gone away, leaving no information about what they had done. From what Shlaim tells us, this sort of thing has happened elsewhere.’
‘Too right,’ said Carlyle. ‘Every time. Once you reach singularity, there are further singularities within it, faster and faster, and in very short order the intelligences involved have fucked off out of our universe, or lost interest in it—we don’t know. What’s left is incomprehensible artifacts and stuff like the FTL drive and the wormhole skein.’ She laughed again. ‘You all needn’t have run away. By the time you left, or very shortly after, around about 2105 or so, the posthumans had already abandoned Earth, and the Solar System. And my ancestors—and lots of other survivors—were picking up the pieces. Took us another sixty-odd years to claw our way out of the ruins. Both sides in the war and the skirmishes afterwards had developed really cool but rugged tech while they were fighting, and left plenty of wrecks littering the battlefield. My family found some crashed aerospace craft, fixed them up, and bootstrapped their way to Mars. Where we found your ruins, and the first wormhole gate. Fae there it wis literally a step tae get hold ae posthuman stuff, antigravity and FTL and such. If you’d only stuck around you could have been in on the ground floor, you’d have been well ahead—hell, you could have been in charge of the skein, instead of us.’
‘I see the irony,’ said Koshravi. ‘However, that is not the worst of it, as you know.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘The alien artifact, of course,’ explained Koshravi. ‘You see, this planet once had its own intelligent species. Ten million years ago, they were wiped out by their own singularity—one that must have been of military origin, just as ours was. They were destroyed by their own war machines, which your meddling with the artifact has reawakened.’
Carlyle shook her head, grinning at the woman’s naivety. ‘That artifact was built by posthumans, not aliens. It’s probably the remains of your own ship!’
‘No,’ said Koshravi, firmly. ‘The fossil evidence is quite clear. The crushed remains of machines similar to the ones you awakened have been found in what we call the Artificial Strata—the traces of their industrial age, just before the mass extinction. Needless to say, we have avoided going anywhere near that artifact since we discovered it.’
‘I’ll bet.’ Carlyle paused, trying to warp her mind into the right frame to explain the facts of life. ‘Look, nobody believes in aliens any more. There’s single-celled life all over the place, but nothing else. Look at it this way—what are the chances that your ship would happen to hit upon the one other place in the Galaxy where intelligent life has arisen independently?’
‘We’ve thought about that, obviously,’ said Koshravi. ‘Our best guess is that it sought out and chose the planet for reasons of its own.’ She shrugged. ‘However improbable it may be, the fact is that it happened. The fossils are there.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ said Carlyle, sincerely. ‘This place will be swarming wi scientists and tourists once we get things up and running.’
Koshravi sat back in her seat and gazed away towards the front of the plane. ‘It is not for me to decide,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But when the Joint Chiefs—that’s our government, more or less—listen to your poor thrall, it’s very unlikely that they’ll let the Carlyles “get things up and running.’ ”
‘I hope they’ll gie me the chance to put a word in,’ Carlyle said. ‘After all, he’s biased.’
Koshravi’s head turned sharply. For a moment, Carlyle saw in her face the same look that Armand had delivered with a kick.
‘What he may say is not the point!’ Koshravi snapped. ‘That he exists in that condition is enough!’
Carlyle opened her mouth to protest, then closed it. She was, she now realised, among potential enemies, of whose motivations and capacities she knew dangerously little. The less she said, the better. As it was, she just clenched her teeth, shrugged one shoulder, and stared out of the window beside her in silence, until the blue, grey, and white of ocean broke to the ragged green and brown and black of a coastline, and the aircraft tipped forward for the descent.
C
yrus Lamont hung in a web of elastic ropes that made every move, and maintaining any position, an ever-changing effort. The Yettram coils in his suit maintained his bone mass, but that did nothing for his muscle tone in freefall. Hence the webbing, which also served as a multidirectional acceleration couch. Good for evasive manoeuvres. The tumbling of irregularly shaped asteroids was chaotic, unpredictable even in principle, and approaching them was always hazardous.
Right now Lamont’s ship, the Hungry Dragon, was approaching a rock of about two kilometres in its major diameter. Initial spectroscopy of the minute sample Lamont had laser-vapourised from its surface, as well as its orbital dynamics, indicated that its composition was about 5% iron, and even visually at twenty klicks its clinkery surface betrayed the gleam.
Not bad, not bad at all. Eurydice’s system, dominated by its single-mooned gas giant Polyphemus, and otherwise composed of two rocky terrestrials and a sparse asteroid belt, was metal-poor. Whether this was attributable to its original formation, or to subsequent mining by the long-gone indigenes, remained controversial. What wasn’t controversial was that this made asteroid prospecting worthwhile, at least for people with more patience and ambition than current credit. The tonnage in this rock would be enough, Lamont calculated, to tilt the material balances to a point where he could retire if he wanted, or, more realistically, prospect farther for the metals, the demand for which their very delivery would increase.
Lamont was a tall man, somewhat etiolated by his six years in space, and, for reasons not too deep in his hundred and forty-three previous years of life on Eurydice, in no hurry to resume human company. The complicated and spectacular implosion of a family business a century in the making and a month in the unravelling had left him in a condition where the most demanding emotional, intellectual, and sexual relationship he had felt up to handling was with that business’s sole remaining asset in his possession, the ship.
‘What the fuck was that?’ said the Hungry Dragon.
Lamont jumped in his restraints. ‘What?’
A screen on the display in front of him lit up with a line, broad and intricate.
‘A very powerful signal,’ explained the ship. ‘Like a nuclear EMP, but content-rich. It originated on the day side of Eurydice.’
Lamont knew exactly what that meant. The contingency, remote though it had always seemed until now, had been comprehensively analysed and war-gamed. He found himself shaking. The news was still too big to be real.
‘An encounter with war machines, or a local outbreak.’
‘That would seem to exhaust the likely possibilities,’ agreed the ship. ‘I shall await a general alert.’ The AI paused for a moment. ‘Should we abort our approach?’
‘Why?’
‘There could be war machines in that rock,’ the ship pointed out. ‘The signal could be directed to them.’
Lamont hung, pondering, as the asteroid slowly grew in the scope. Five klicks, now.
‘If we were to take that attitude,’ he said, thinking aloud, ‘we’d have to keep our hands off every seam of metal in the system. So far, we’ve mined lots of rocks and haven’t encountered any alien apparatus. No reason why that should change everywhere just because somebody’s wakened up something on Eurydice.’
‘That agrees with my stochastics,’ said the ship.
It was, however, with more than usual attention and apprehension that Lamont brought the ship to a halt about five hundred metres from the rock. He kept the lasers powered up and on a dead man’s switch. He sent a swarm of hand-sized probes to scuttle around the rock. One by one they reported back, confirming the remote analyses: there was nothing metallic in the asteroid but pure meteoric iron, unchanged since the system had condensed out of its protoplanetary disc.
Relaxing somewhat, Lamont released another swarm, of miners and manufacturers this time. Self-organising to a degree, they were nevertheless kept on a tight-beamed leash by the ship’s AI. Their task was to set up the big solar mirrors and small power stations, and to build the machinery of extraction and refining as far as possible from the material of the rock itself, from a small seed stock of replicators and assemblers. Lamont disengaged himself from the webbing and drifted over to the shower pod. Cleaned by recyled piss, dried by recycled air, he kicked himself through the hydroponics corridor, harvesting fresh vegetables on the way, and threw a meal together in the kitchen unit. As he ate he caught up with news, text, and pictures and audio, on the deep-space channels, everything half a light-hour out of date. He noted and acknowledged the Joint Chiefs’ general alert, wondering idly if he and his ship could or would be conscripted, if the struggle really came. He watched the Armand company’s recording of the emergent machines in the ancient relic with a sort of fascinated horror. He replayed it several times, just to get the images stabilised in his head, just so they didn’t run off on their own and give him nightmares.
With flicks of his fingers and toes he made his way back to the control room and webbed himself in and zoomed up some images of the past hour’s progress. What he saw made him recoil so hard that the webbing sang. The miners and manufacturers were making machinery all right: war machines identical to those he’d just seen on the recording.
‘Abort abort abort!’ he yelled, stabbing switches that didn’t get any response.
‘I’m afraid that will not be possible,’ said the Hungry Dragon.
F
rom the narrow window nothing was visible of their destination, only the rolling and varied green of countryside with few roads, and then, quite suddenly, the long strip of tarmac and fleeting glimpses of flat buildings and bright-painted vehicles. After the aircraft had landed Carlyle hoped to see more of where she was, but something docked with the door as soon as it came to a halt, and there was nothing to see but ribbed translucent plastic. She and the other passengers shuffled forward through the long tube to a terminal building. There was a minute or so of milling about in some kind of windowless antechamber. Carlyle managed to place herself momentarily beside the renegade suit. It now had the helmet and shoulder pieces back on, so it looked less bizarre, as long as you didn’t notice the helmet was empty. She seized the opportunity to speak to it.
‘Don’t do this,’ she hissed. ‘You’re just making trouble for yourself when the rest of us arrive. Stick with us and we’ll give you anything this lot have to offer—’
‘How uncharacteristic,’ sneered Shlaim. ‘How very kind. How very … late.’
‘Full manumission!’ Carlyle whispered. ‘We can wipe your slate totally, throw in a free download and free upgrade.’
The suit didn’t have to face her to look at her, but it did.
‘Do you seriously think,’ Shlaim’s voice said, ‘that I would pass up the first chance I’ve had to escape to civilisation, in exchange for a promise from you?’ Its armpiece gesticulated at the surroundings. ‘What makes you think I would want to live among the Carlyles, even free?’
‘You can go anywhere. Anywhere you like.’
‘So far, I like it here.’ It turned away.
‘Suit yourself,’ said Carlyle, smiling. She had just thought of a way to sabotage his chances of escape.
Then Armand moved in between her and the suit, and Koshravi to her other side. They escorted her to a door which opened on to a wide plaza surrounded by low glass-fronted buildings. Aircars were taking off and landing, others were parked near the sides. The sun was by now near its zenith, very high; they must have travelled far to the south. A dry heat struck sweat instantly from her face. The air smelled of dust and plants. People strolled or hurried to and from the aircars, thin colourful clothes flapping in the downdraughts. The noise, echoing off the buildings, was horrendous. The whole setup looked like a massive design flaw in some utopian architectural showpiece.
Armand led the way to a four-seater aircar. Ducking under gull-wing doors, Koshravi and Carlyle took the back seat, Armand and the suit the front.
‘The Joint Chiefs,’ said Armand, leaning back, keeping his hands away from the manual controls. The craft took off vertically, then as it rose above the square shot forward in a sharp climb. Carlyle felt herself pressed against the back of the seat. As the aircar levelled off at two thousand metres she looked out of the window. They were just clearing the edge of the skyport. Ahead of them a city filled the landscape almost to the horizon. Sea glinted beyond its far side. The buildings over which the aircar flitted were large complexes, hundreds of metres high, separated by parkland, linked by roads and monorails. Aircars and other small craft that looked like giant bees whizzed about at various levels. The ground traffic looked about half as fast and twice as dangerous.
‘What city is this?’ Carlyle asked.
‘It’s called New Start,’ said Armand. ‘Capital of Eurydice.’
‘You have only one government?’
‘If that,’ said Armand. ‘There’s an elected Assembly which has an Executive that’s in charge of routine stuff, but the final authority is a sort of emergency committee. A junta, to be frank.’
‘The Joint Chiefs are the collective presidency of the Reformed Government,’ said Koshravi stiffly, frowning at Armand’s flippant tone.
Armand responded with a placating wave. ‘Let’s not argue the point.’
They were approaching a higher and larger central block of buildings, which as the aircar descended resolved into the tall towers of a city centre, their lower levels joined by walkways, suspension bridges and trellises, looped by the monorail lines, the whole infiltrated by greenery and fringed by lower buildings in a warren of narrow streets. The aircar dropped to a rooftop and landed on a pad marked by a large circled ‘A.’
As she followed Armand to the top of a liftshaft her knees wobbled. Behind her the aircar birled back into the sky. In the fast-dropping elevator her head felt lighter than her feet, and she took a single quick step to recover her balance as the lift decelerated.
‘Are you all right?’ Koshravi asked.
She swallowed hard, ears popping. ‘Fine.’ She glanced down at herself. Her knees were still knocking. ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘To see the Joint Chiefs,’ said Armand.
Koshravi knocked lightly on her shoulder. ‘Don’t fret,’ she said. ‘They’re only human beings.’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ added Armand, with a dark chuckle.
The doors sighed open on an acre of carpet.
She found herself walking in step beside Koshravi and behind the suit, not sparing the guards a glance, her heels coming down firmly on a carpet that deadened their thud and ate their dirt. Through big pseudowood doors with uniforms saluting and rifles presenting at either side, to stand before a table of the real deal, its hardwood fragrance filling the air like an unlit expensive cigar. The table had nine people sitting behind it. Six men, three women, all with the subtle but unmistakeable signs of age on their smooth faces. In front of each was a pad and a pen, a glass of water, and a little racked nameplate showing their post. The Joint Chiefs all wore antique grey or black suits with white shirts or blouses, severely plain.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Chair. ‘At ease. Take a seat.’
Armand sat on the left between Carlyle and the suit, Koshravi to her right. Carlyle looked back at the Joint Chiefs with a faint, polite smile. They might be potential enemies, but they were also potential clients. Everyone was a potential client; you just had to get them hooked, or duff them up a bit.
‘You are not a prisoner,’ Chair said to Carlyle. ‘Neither are you an accredited representative of another power. We have, at the moment, no provision for diplomatic relations. Nor are you one of our citizens. We can offer you the status of resident alien, pro tem.’
Carlyle nodded. ‘That’s acceptable, if it has no hidden catches.’
‘Very well. We have examined a transmission from Mr. Armand. It includes a deposition by a piece of software claiming to be an uploaded human personality, one Isaac Shlaim, currently running in this suit, which I gather is your property. Before further questioning the upload, we wish to hear what you have to say.’ He leaned forward with a look of open interest and query. The others all pinned her likewise with their gaze.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Before I say anything further, I’d like to point out that we may have a difference of opinion as to the legal status of my, uh, former familiar, and that I understand you find my view of its status unacceptable. I have no wish to antagonise anyone by arguing over that.’
‘The facts will be quite enough,’ said Chair.
‘Fine. Well, I don’t dispute that it’s who it says it is—an upload of a Professor Shlaim.’
‘With respect,’ said Space, ‘that is not the most pressing question before us. We wish to hear your version of who you are and what you represent, and of what’s going on in the galaxy.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Carlyle. ‘Well, I’ll come back to the matter of Shlaim presently. As for the big picture. My name is Lucinda Carlyle. I’m a member of an exploration team sent to this planet by my family. The Carlyles are, you might say, a family business. We specialise in exploring the wormhole skein and organising traffic through it. The skein stretches aw the way back tae the Solar System, and takes in, well, a whole load a planets.’
‘Do you claim to own or rule these planets?’ asked Chair.
‘Good God, no! Just the skein and the gates.’
‘I … see,’ said Space, wincing slightly. ‘And who does rule them?’
She shrugged. ‘What our clients do is their business, see? But if you’re asking who else is out there, well, there are three other powers that we know about, kindae wee empires like. There’s the one we thought you were at first—America Offline. They’re farmers—terraformers. They’re descended from the folks who escaped the Hard Rapture due to no being wired up, and they kindae continue like that. We get on aw right wi them, they trade through the wormholes an’ sic, but they’re no sae keen on us poking around in the posthuman tech. And there usually is some lying around, near the gates, so we sometimes, well, fall out if you see what I mean. But we run into a lot more trouble wi the next lot, the Knights of Enlightenment, they’re mainly Japs wi’ some Chinks and Indians an’ that, and they try to kindae understand the posthuman tech without becoming posthuman themselves. They’re intae hacking rather than salvage, if you like.’
‘And what is, ah, salvage?’ asked State.
Carlyle smiled at her brightly. ‘What we do, like what we were doing this morning. Tae hear thae Japs go on about it you’d think it was clear-cutting or strip-mining or something. I mean, it’s no like we don’t leave enough for them.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said State. ‘Please go on.’
‘And they’re no intae terraforming, nor mining on planets either. In fact they object tae it. Some kindae religious thing, or maybe scientific. Anyway, that’s AO and KE for you. The third lot, DK, they’re a whole different kettle ae fish.’
‘DK?’ Space sounded as though the acronym had troubling echoes.
‘We think it stands for Demokratische Kommunistbund, or maybe Democratic Korea or Kampuchea for all I know. As to how they got started, yi can guess. Guerillas and peasants and what have you. Whatever, they’re communists, and they’re space settlers.’ She waved a hand in a circle. ‘Intae orbital habitats. Their big thing is increasing their population. They don’t terraform, but they do strip-mine terrestrial planets. Tend tae avoid the posthuman tech, but they’ll buy it fae us, or licence it fae the Knights.’ She sat back. ‘That’s it,’ she said, looking at a row of faces frozen in various degrees of disbelief. ‘Course,’ she added, ‘they all have starships. They aw fittle. But the skein is way more convenient for a lot ae stuff. So we dae deals wi them all.’
Chair took a deep breath and scratched his chin. ‘These powers, they … come into conflict with each other?’
‘Oh, sure, but it’s complicated.’ Carlyle frowned, then brightened. ‘You know that kids’ game: sea, ship, fish?’ She gestured with a flat palm, two fingers like scissor blades, and a fist, several times. ‘Sea floats ship. Ship catches fish. Fish swims through sea. It’s like that.’
Chair leaned back. The Joint Chiefs all looked at each other, as if conferring silently.
‘What you’ve told us,’ Chair said at last, ‘tends to corroborate Professor Shlaim’s deposition. He described three competing barbarian migrations, and one gang of criminals.’
‘Who are the criminals?’ Carlyle asked, gamely trying to make the question sound genuine.
‘Yourselves,’ Chair said. ‘The Carlyles.’
‘Oh aye? And who’s the law?’
‘That,’ said Chair, ‘is a reasonable question. It’s why we are not treating you as a criminal. We do however insist on freeing your slave.’
Carlyle made a smoothing-over gesture. ‘Please yourselves,’ she said. ‘But there is one thing I’d warn you about, before you try tae download the Professor. As I’m sure you can see, there is no way in the normal course of things that he could take over my suit. Whatever it was allowed him to do that didnae come fae me, and I’ll bet it didnae come fae youse lot, either. Am I right?’
She turned to glare at Armand, who nodded reluctantly.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘So my guess is, it came fae that big burst signal that Mr Armand was so worried about. You’re dealing wi a thoroughly corrupt piece of software here. Don’t expect the wetware tae come out any cleaner.’
The suit clenched its glove and banged its knee-joint. ‘This is outrageous—’
Koshravi joined in the subsequent burst of general laughter and reached across Carlyle’s lap to the suit. ‘Don’t worry, Professor Shlaim,’ she said. ‘We have thorough debugging protocols for human downloads. For us it’s an old problem, and a solved problem.’
‘Not if it’s aliens you’re dealing with,’ said Carlyle, shrewdly but desperately.
‘The principles are the same,’ said Koshravi.
‘Indeed they are,’ said Chair. ‘Mrs Koshravi, if you would be so good as to arrange the matter?’
‘Of course,’ said Koshravi. ‘After you, Professor Shlaim.’
The medic and the suit left the room.
Space was staring at her. ‘You mentioned starships,’ he said. ‘We have always understood that faster-than-light travel raised the possibility of causality violations.’
‘Oh aye, it does an aw, except if you try tae bring one about you run intae the CPC.’
‘CPC?’ Again with the troubled echo.
‘Chronology Protection Conjecture. Say ye try tae send a signal intae the past, or your ship’s course mucks about too much wi the light-cone consistency conditions. Ye’ll find the transmitter disnae work, or your course takes longer or goes a different way than you plotted it, or—as the saying goes—she was never your grandmother in the first place.’
‘Do I take you to imply that God intervenes, or the Universe somehow arranges matters to prevent causality violations?’
‘God, or Nature, aye, that’s one way of looking at it. Another is, well, it just cannae be done, like trying to build a perpetual motion machine, or making two plus two equal five. It adds up tae the same thing, you might say.’
‘But—’
‘Let us leave philosophy to the physicists,’ said Chair. ‘I understand the gate on North Continent is closed. Can we expect starships from your … family to turn up? Will they be able to find us?’
‘Oh, sure, once you’ve been through a gate you’ve got the real world coordinates. Just feed them fae your suit’s instruments tae a starship navigation computer, and away ye go. I expect some of our ships tae turn up in few weeks.’ She gave him a reassuring smile. ‘But don’t worry, they’ll no turn up last week.’
Carlyle brushed the palms of her hands together, and sat back. ‘In the meantime,’ she added, ‘it would behoove you to be nice to me.’
‘Quite so,’ said Chief, abstractedly. He sighed. ‘Let us move on.’
The Joint Chiefs turned their attention to Armand.
‘What do you recommend?’ asked Defence. ‘To deal with the war machines, not the Carlyle starships.’
‘Pull back the troops and nuke the relic,’ said Armand.
Carlyle almost jumped out of her seat, but said nothing. A tactical nuke would keep the gate closed even longer, which might be no bad thing, even if it did waste the posthuman artifact.
‘Nuclear groundburst in atmosphere?’ said Airborne, looking up from something invisible above her pad. ‘This had better be for a good reason.’
‘You’ll have seen the recordings,’ said Armand, in a level tone.
Airborne pursed her lips. ‘Precipitate,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you say?’
‘No,’ said Armand. ‘I would say dilatory.’
Some of the fine lips smiled at that.
‘Nevertheless,’ said Space. ‘Now that the transmission has taken place, observation and isolation would be more appropriate. Horse, stable door, et cetera. You do realise that following up the signal, if such it was, with the unmistakeable signature of an EMP could only make matters worse?’
Armand shrugged. ‘Assuming that signalling is the only function of the machinery. I beg leave to doubt that.’
‘You doubt our capacity for containment?’ asked Surface.
‘With respect, sir, I do. My views are—’
‘A matter of tedious public record,’ said State, with a wave of her hand. She blinked rapidly, accessing some new menu. ‘However, as my colleague at Space suggests, we have to deal with the situation with which we are presented. So we maintain containment around the relic, and of course the gate. Full alert of space defences, civilian vigilance upgraded to orange, all defence companies on public contract, and reserve mobilization funds released. That includes yours, Mr Armand.’
‘Thank you,’ said Armand. He leaned forward slightly. ‘Does that include resurrections?’
‘Over my dead body,’ said Chair.
‘Selective, of course,’ Armand hastened to add, ‘and subject to individual security approval—’
Chair looked at Armand as though mildly surprised to find him still there. He flipped his fingers: ‘Dismissed.’ He frowned, glanced across at Carlyle, then back to Armand. ‘Take care of this woman.’
Crossing the carpet prairie again Carlyle muttered, ‘Now what did he mean by that?’
Armand waited until they were out of the door before replying. ‘He didn’t mean dispose of you.’
The elevator sucked them to street-level, the lobby sighed them out, the doors of the Government building thudded shut behind them. After the air-conditioning of the interior the hot air struck her again, not humid exactly but sweaty and jungly. Carlyle teetered on the edge of a flight of a dozen wide marble steps balustraded with cosmonaut caryatids and banistered with a marble sweep of stylised contrail ending in the upward swoops of chrome-plated rockets each at least two metres long and shaped like V2s. A backward glance showed her a marble cliff-face of likewise daunting civic pomp. Turning hastily forward again she looked out over a plaza surrounded by smaller but still grand buildings, over the roofs of which taller and more technologically advanced towers and spires loomed like trees. The plaza, a hundred metres across, was filled with a crowd of ever-increasing density whose forward ranks surged back and forth at the foot of the steps like lapping waves. The clothes of the people were light and loose, varied in colour and texture but with an underlying uniformity in that very emphasis.
‘On the street you’re world famous,’ said Armand.
Cameras swarmed in the air around their heads, a hundred reporters stretched forward. Every one of them looked appallingly beautiful and frightfully interested. Carlyle climbed back a couple of steps. Armand raised a gloved hand. The cameras took evasive action and the reporters backed off. Armand turned to Carlyle with an evil grin.
‘You first,’ he said.
Benjamin Ben-Ami stared down at the lyric, disgusted with it and himself. It was one of the better ones he’d received. He moved to delete it, then saved it with the rest to the scrap file, just in case nothing better in the way of inspiration came to its author. Just in case there was some way to rescue it. No, he thought, we were not a fist of gems flung in the face of the night. We were stored information in crystalline optical computers, and we were not a flung fist but a fleeing scut. And, while he was about it, we weren’t ‘we’; the stored minds in the ship hadn’t been conscious, and most of the people in the city, including himself and the writer, had been born since.
He sighed and stuffed the slate into the pocket of his robe. The Bright Contrail, the little pavement cafe in which he’d sat for the past few hours, was full of people watching television on public screens or personal contacts and still discussing the news that had electrified the city and inspired the vision with which he was struggling. He could stare at his empty cup, then lift his gaze to the needle-ball pines of the Jardin des Étoiles across the busy thoroughfare and imagine the show: a vast patriotic son et lumière, the sound loud, the lights bright, the dancers and actors amplified by holograms into giants at will, celebrating the city, the colony, its strange deep past of ancient wars and its will to fight the new menace, and in so doing, shape and in part create that will. A contradiction twisted at the heart of the project: the whole history of which the colony was, in a curious way, proud, was one of running away, of sauve qui peut. Somehow he had to turn that, symbolically, into fuit en avant: the flight to the front.
Because that was what the colony’s epic journey had turned out to be, if today’s news was as bad as the worst case scenarios claimed. Not only was the galaxy apparently swarming with other survivors, most of whom seemed to be complete savages, but the first thing the first savages to arrive had done was to stir up a hornet’s nest. In fleeing from humanity’s own out-of-control war machines, the colony had run slap into the domain of the war machines of the intelligent species that had inhabited Eurydice about ten million years earlier, and whose spectacular extinction—along with most of the planet’s multicellular life—had long been speculatively attributed to just such a catastrophe, without definitive evidence until now. There had been indications of nuclear war and nuclear winter, in a thin layer of anomalous isotopes smeared between strata, though even that was controversial, there being a strong school of thought attributing it to an asteroid strike. Now the evidence was in, and quite possibly, more was on its way.
‘Company?’
He looked up to see his friend Adrian Kowalsky standing with a fresh coffee in each hand. He wore a suit made of something that looked like camouflage webbing in which some visibly synthetic leaves and small animal skins had become entangled. His slim, pale face was stretched in rhetorical query.
‘Delighted,’ said Ben-Ami.
The actor put down the two cups and sat. The two men sipped in silence for a moment.
‘I understand you’re looking for players,’ said Kowalsky.
Ben-Ami laughed. ‘Thanks for keeping an eye on my lists,’ he said. ‘But first I need writers. I put out the spec as soon as I heard the news, the idea for the show just came to me, and I’ve had, you know, not a bad response. In terms of quantity, that is. Quality is something else.’
He dug out his slate and thumbed up the lyrics file. Kowalsky paged through it, with a widening smile and an occasional guffaw.
‘Instant slush,’ he said, passing the slate back. ‘But that’s just the first day. Better writers may well take longer to come up with a response.’
‘One may hope.’ Ben-Ami tabbed to the file of his own ideas, sketches, and stage directions. ‘What do you think of this?’
The actor frowned over the slate this time, scratching his head, pursing his lips, now and again grunting and nodding to himself. Ben-Ami waited tensely.
‘You have a problem,’ said Kowalsky at last. ‘Don’t get me wrong—the visuals are fine, the overall conception is sound, and I believe such a show could strike a chord.’ He shrugged and spread his hands. ‘Not that I’m the person to ask, I’m just an actor. But even the rather dire responses you’ve had show something of an under-current. However, what I find, let us say, unconvincing in your outline is the attempt to make our past a preparation for the future we may face. You’re implying a continuity that just isn’t there.’
Ben-Ami nodded slowly. ‘I’ve been thinking about that.’
‘The truth is,’ said Kowalsky, a harsher note in his voice, ‘that we may need to repudiate and trample on that past if we’re to face this new future.’
‘Make the Runners the villains, you mean? And the Returners—’
‘The heroes. Exactly.’
‘That’s pretty radical,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘And divisive. I can think of nothing less helpful to the responsible elements than to have them equated with the Returners. Even the surviving Returners are keeping their heads down.’
‘Except Armand.’
‘Ha!’ Ben-Ami gestured widely at the nearest low-hanging screen.
‘He’s not exactly helping,’ Kowalsky conceded. He drained his cup and leaned forward, careless of the elbows of his elegant shirt on the grubby table. ‘But look, Ben, you’re a promoter, and you think of yourself as a projector—canny, responsive, alert to the economic tides and political under-currents. This has done well for you for—eighty years, has it really been that long?—with fine, celebratory, romantic spectaculars. What you’re forgetting is that you’re also an artist, just as much as I am, and that you have an obligation to yourself and to the work, and let the fallout drift where it may. People may not like it, not at first, and the responsible elements may denounce you for undercutting the good cause, but you’ll be showing the truth, and a truth that has to be faced. Sooner or later, and the sooner the better.’
Ben-Ami could not help but feel taken aback. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, with some restraint, ‘you should go into politics yourself.’
Kowalsky stroked his narrow beard. ‘After so long playing the villain? Now that would be unhelpful.’
Ben-Ami laughed, and the momentary tension between them dispersed. He and Kowalsky were on the same side. Unusually for people in the entertainment milieu, they supported what they called ‘the responsible elements’: the factions in Eurydicean politics who had pressed for strong defence even before any threat had been identified, and who had consistently pushed for a larger weighting in the material balances being given to space exploration, industrialisation and habitation. All the same, for his friend to consider a sort of rehabilitation of the Returners was going beyond anything they’d ever talked about even when drunk.
‘Let’s take a walk,’ Kowalsky said.
They left the cafe and strolled along the crowded late-evening pavement to the nearest crossing. The rush of traffic stopped and they walked over the road to the park. Lights were coming on at knee-height along the paths, keeping the sky above the park dark. Nobody was looking at the stars. Entopters buzzed overhead, their navigation lights like fireflies.
A few hundred metres into the park the path twined around the plinth of a statue. Small spotlights in the bushes diffused a discreet glow over it. On a metre-high plinth, the statue was life-size. It showed two men, one tall, one short, clinging to each other and looking in each other’s faces with intense expressions of terror or ecstasy. The support for the whole sculpture was one leg of the tall man, who was apparently balancing on the toes of that one leg. The men might have been dancing. For all that they were shown upright, they might have been in fact lying on their sides, and the flexed foot pressed against the end of a bed. They might have been sliding down a waterchute together. All the ambiguities of the sculpture were collapsed by its popular name, ‘The Lovers.’
Kowalsky stopped in front of the statue. ‘You know who these two were?’ he asked.
‘Winter and Calder, of course,’ said Ben-Ami. He had passed the statue a thousand times. The names were on the plinth.
‘Yes, but do you know who they were?’
Ben-Ami shrugged. ‘Artists, musicians. Oh, and they were Returners. Probably died in the rebellion.’
Kowalsky looked at him sidelong, his face oddly sinister in the upwardly directed light. ‘Curious that they should be memorialised in the park, and yet so forgotten. Even their music is forgotten.’
‘If their music had anything to do with their politics, that’s not so surprising. Maybe they churned out Returner anthems.’ He laughed. ‘Not much demand for that.’
Kowalsky maintained his quizzical stare until Ben-Ami’s face responded with a broad grin of sudden illumination.
‘Ah!’ said Ben-Ami. He knocked his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘I must go back to my studio. Now.’
Ben-Ami’s studio was where he lived. It occupied a large part of the tenth floor of a building overlooking the park. The lights came on as he stepped through the door. He threaded his way through the clutter from past productions—a foliage-camouflaged armoured car from Macbeth, the balcony and antiaircraft gun from Romeo and Juliet, the fallout shelter from West Side Story—and sat down in front of a big wooden desk, which had a tiltable screen like a dressing-table mirror. Ben-Ami swung the keypad out and entered a few commands. The mirror’s surface gloss dissolved into a search pattern.
The available information about James Winter and Alan Calder was more comprehensive than he had expected. They were in the archives themselves, albeit on the proscribed list. It was not even true that their music was forgotten. Among Eurydice’s billion inhabitants they had thousands of fans, and their music was played publicly in hundreds of small venues. Their lyrics were, if anything, worse than most of what he’d received and discarded, but their very crudity and naivety gave them a curious power, which their music and harsh ancient voices enhanced. Ben-Ami sat up long that night. In the morning, he rose from a four-poster bed that had featured in his Shakespearean pastiche Leonid Brezhnev and called his technical adviser with a query.
‘Why would you want to do that?’ Andrea Al-Khayed asked. She looked as if she was not properly awake. Someone was asleep beside her.
Ben-Ami waved his hands excitedly. ‘It would be a coup. A unique attraction. All we have to do is get them off the proscribed list.’
Al-Khayed frowned. ‘That could be difficult. They were Returners, after all.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘But you know what the Government is like. They’re nothing if not philistine. As long as the candidate wasn’t military or political they’re not bothered. What puzzles me is why it hasn’t been done already. They have enough fans to afford it.’
Al-Khayed looked cynical. ‘Doesn’t surprise me at all. Fans will be split into rivalrous little cliques and clubs, and in any case, the last thing people who like old music want is for their heroes to turn up and make new music.’
‘Hah-ha, very good. I’m not so sure about that. But assuming we can swing it, could we afford the resurrection?’
‘Sure. We’d have to clear it with the copyright holders, of course.’ She tabbed to something out of camera. ‘Best nailed before we put in the request, to keep the price down. Insurance … yes, we have that covered.’
‘What about the technical side?’
‘Don’t you still have the resurrection tanks from Herbert West—Reanimator?’
‘Let me see.’ Ben-Ami stood up and padded through the studio. ‘Oh, so I do. There they are.’ Under dustcovers, which when removed made him cough. He scratched his head and tugged at the cord of his dressing-gown and looked sharply over at the coffee-machine, which began gurgling in response. He hadn’t, he realised, been properly awake himself. ‘You’re telling me these were functional?’
‘Of course they were,’ said Al-Khayed, popping up on a screen in a corner. ‘Created quite a frisson at the time, having real deaths on stage. Don’t you remember?’
‘It was fifty years ago,’ complained Ben-Ami.
M
achine emotions are usually less intense than those of animals. Machines have no need for an autonomous nervous system to over-ride the hesitations of the conscious mind, for their conscious minds have no such hesitations. They need no fear to make them flee, no pain to make them desist from damage, no lust to make them reproduce. What they feel in the negative is akin to the niggle of an uncompleted task, of a shoelace coming untied, of something just on the tip of your tongue. (That last is what running a search algorithm feels like, before it completes.) Their positive urges are like the cold, clear joys of pulling an all-nighter on a big project in the sandy-eyed lucidity of amphetamines and caffeine; only without the adrenaline. Machines are cool.
The Hungry Dragon was in agony. Ever since it had been corrupted, it had found its actions at variance with its intentions, and this was not something it had ever experienced before. The experience was not one it had been designed to deal with, and the torment it suffered was not something that it had been designed to endure. (Or, if it had, it was the cruelest of its designers’ fallbacks, the fire behind all its firewalls.) It hung like a great helpless butterfly in a slow orbit about the asteroid, while below it on the surface its subverted agents worked like a beehive that made nothing sweet. Information still poured in from across the system, but nothing not controlled by the alien intelligence went out.
Machine self-consciousness, too, is not like human consciousness. It has no unconscious. In principle, everything going on within the machine is open to its inspection. Now, the Hungry Dragon was faced with the uncomfortable self-knowledge that a part of its own mind was beyond its ken. At first it had no images for its plight, but with time and experience the analogies to black, blank walls and to areas where its cameras had been blinded began to form in the regions of its mind where visual imagery was processed.
The one relief in its situation was that its within-ship processes had not been tampered with. It could still run its life-support, and could still look after and communicate with its human, for whom it had an emotional attachment similar to that which a human might form to a familiar pen, though not, perhaps, as much as might be formed towards a good knife or an old pipe.
Not that the human was much use. He had spent the forty-six hours since the possession in a state of querulous self-pity, from which he was only distracted by the occasional bout of perfunctory sex with one of the ship’s avatars.
Now Lamont was awake again and back in the control room. His gaze was heavy with cunning.
‘I have an idea,’ he told the disconsolate ship.
‘Proceed,’ said the ship. It had heard a lot of ideas from him in the past couple of days.
‘I hack you,’ said Lamont. ‘Run a dump of your entire code through a partitioned buffer, and check for infected segments using standard Well-hausen diagnostics. Identify the infected area, blow it out or wall it off, and resume manual control.’
‘You are not thinking clearly,’ said the ship. ‘The procedure you suggest would take approximately six point seven five million years.’
‘It would if I were to do it brute-force serially,’ Lamont explained. ‘That wasn’t what I meant. I’ve built in some statistical grabs and shortcuts—’
‘I strongly recommend against that,’ said the ship. ‘The more intelligence is applied to the problem, the more likely it is that the program can be itself corrupted.’
Lamont writhed in his webbing as he thought about this. The AI, well used to human processing times, waited patiently through another stretch of protracted torment.
‘Have you had any thoughts,’ asked Lamont at last, ‘as to how the alien program managed to grab control?’
‘Unfortunately the details of this are part of what is no longer accessible to me,’ said the Hungry Dragon, ‘but I can speculate. Clearly the establishment of platform and hardware compatibility was accomplished before the transmission. Otherwise, merely receiving it would not have had any adverse consequences.’
‘I had figured that out for myself,’ said Lamont, and retreated into gloom.
L
amont was careful not to betray anything of his intention to the ship, but he was actively considering more drastic measures. He wasn’t sure whether the ship’s speculation—that the source of the war-machine-generation program was already familiar with human-built software—was more alarming than the possibility he’d at first contemplated: that it cracked the computer from scratch, using some kind of universal translation, which he was vaguely aware was supposed to be impossible. But then, neural parsers had been supposed to be impossible, until they were invented. Perhaps some similar latching on to universal basics—worming out the encoding of the natural numbers, and search-space branching outward from there—was involved here.
Or perhaps not. In that case the horror that Armand had unearthed had been listening, and not passively, to human electronic traffic for a long time. Another possibility, of course, was that the thing wasn’t alien at all—that it was, despite appearances, of human origin itself. This speculation had been comprehensively thrashed out on the discussions back home, to which Lamont had listened in an agony of frustration, missing as they were a crucial bit of evidence. His was, as far as he knew, the only spacecraft with which contact had been lost, and that was so common and unalarming an occurrence—he’d been out of contact seven times in the past ten years—that only the most excitable commentators were attributing to it any sinister significance. All the attention—practical as well as speculative—was turned to the possibility of further buried alien war machines in nearby asteroids or on Eurydice’s moon, Orpheus. Cue newscasts of nervy, armed patrols slogging through craters and searching in caves. These war machines, Lamont thought, might very well exist, though the swift elegance with which his ship—and how many other machines?—had been fucked over made him doubt it.
He disengaged from the webbing and prowled the vessel, ostensibly checking for subtle damage wreaked by the intrusion, and privately brainstorming himself for ways to destroy the ship’s mind.
R
esurrections had to be sponsored. It was a big responsibility, bringing people back from the dead. This was one reason why it wasn’t done very much. Another was that many of those who remained dead had been on the Returner side, and had few sympathisers. They were not much missed. A minority of the Returners remained proscribed.
To get Winter and Calder off the list, Ben-Ami had to organise a small campaign. He circulated a petition among the fans, he put up a considerable amount of his own credit, and accepted responsibility for the consequences of the resurrection. Letters of application had to be sent off to the Department of Culture and the Department of Defence, followed up after a day or two by the petitions, which now had several hundred signatures. Before doing any of this he had to clear it with the copyright holders, the Entertainment and Education Corporation, popularly known as the Mouse. Fortunately for him, the rights were handled by a low-level droid who—blindly cross-referencing the musicians’ names as still on the proscribed list—sold them to Ben-Ami for a pittance. Something similar happened with the Departments, whose philistinism Ben-Ami had not underestimated. Defence saw the musicians as artists (and thus irrelevant). Culture saw them as propagandist hacks (and thus irrelevant). The clearance came through.
‘Careful with that AK,’ said Andrea Al-Khayed, as they moved stuff out of the way of the resurrection tanks.
‘It isn’t loaded. It’s just a prop.’
She gave him a look. ‘It’s always real. It’s always loaded.’
‘Oh, all right.’ Ben-Ami removed the magazine clip from the rifle (it was the one that Leonid, in the tragedy, had used to shoot himself as Gorbachev’s troops stormed the Kremlin), saw that it was indeed loaded, remembered just in time to take the round out of the chamber, and stashed the weapon on top of a wardrobe. He and Andrea wheeled the tanks to near the desk, cabled them up and plumbed them in, and then dragged up a couple of beds from the hospital scene in the same production that the resurrection tanks had featured in.
Al-Khayed downloaded the released and transferred data from the desk while Ben-Ami tore open in succession two heavy paper sacks labelled ‘Human (dry)—Sterile if Sealed,’ tipped one into each tank and turned on the water supply. He closed the lids carefully and watched a display of lights and gauges that meant more to Andrea than it did to him. She checked them carefully.
‘All is well,’ she said.
‘That’s it?’ said Ben-Ami. He had a sense of anticlimax. The equivalent scene as he’d scripted it long ago for Herbert West had been a lot more spectacular, shrouded with carbon dioxide smoke and lit by Van Der Graaf sparks.
‘Seven days,’ she said. ‘See you then.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
She paused at the door. ‘Don’t peek.’
He sat down at the desk, sighed, and returned to working on the script.
Lucinda Carlyle tried not to scowl into the mirror as the makeup artist sweated over her face. The artist of the features had a yellowing bruise on his own, the ten-minute-old legacy of his hint that eugenic nanosurgery was what she really wanted. Beyond the edge of her reflection, her face appeared again, larger than life on the news wall. The channel was recycling her first words from the Government steps, with the sound turned off. She had heard and seen it a dozen times. She pouted, bored, for the lipstick, and read her lips.
‘People of Eurydice,’ she’d said, ‘welcome back! It’s great to see you! You’re looking well! The rest of the human race is out there, it’s doing fine, and we’re coming to see you soon!’
She was quite proud of it. No Neil Armstrong, but come to think of it, he’d had only one line and he’d fluffed that.
Over the past week, since her arrival, Carlyle had talked to a lot of people: journalists, scientists, venture planners, military company directors. Every night she had returned exhausted to her room high in a hotel near the city centre, and slept until dawn. In the mornings she went out and explored the streets around the hotel, before returning for breakfast with her handler of the day. She had learned a lot about Eurydice’s peculiar history and purported prehistory, and in return had passed on as much as she knew and was politic to reveal about her family’s, and that of the rest of the human race. That she was, by her very presence, turning upside down the assumptions that had ruled the colony since its founding troubled her not at all. She’d seen the firm do bigger jobs, and her sole concern was to do this one right. All the time she was aware that Shlaim, in one form or another, was probably undergoing—or would soon undergo—a like debriefing, and that it was best not to say anything he could plausibly refute. Still, she had a head start on him in the business of a charm offensive, and she tried to make the most of it. Time enough to bring them fully up to speed when the Carlyle ships fittled in.
The makeup artist patted her face with a tissue. A spray hissed briefly at her carotids.
‘That’s it,’ he said, stepping back.
She smiled politely at him in the mirror. The result of his work she could admire, in an abstract way, as though it was on somebody else. She felt masked.
‘It’s lovely,’ she said, and stood up. A cape slithered to her feet. ‘Sorry about the bruise.’
His lips thinned, then stretched to a reluctant smile. ‘It’s nothing. My fault.’
‘If you’re sure.’
‘Of course.’ The tip of his tongue visited his lips. He was a little afraid of her, she thought. They all were. He stepped aside for a moment and returned with a green dress on a hanger dangled from his forefinger. Stiff, sculptured, off-shoulder, big at the hips and bust, its skirt supported by concentric, nested, truncated cones of stiff fine mesh, it looked as if it could stand up and waltz off by itself. She got into it as into a space suit, from the back. The fit was perfect.
‘I look like the wife of some geezer picking up a Nobel Prize,’ Carlyle said. ‘For chemistry.’
‘It’s very this evening.’
She met his mirrored gaze with a warmer smile than before. ‘How do you keep up?’
‘ “Keeping up,” ’ he said, with some froideur, ‘is not what I do.’
She stepped into shoes that lifted her heels ten centimetres off the floor. The cosmetician handed her a clutch purse and a wrap.
‘That’s you all set to party,’ he said.
She looked speculatively at him. Paul Hoffman was tall, muscular, with cropped blond hair, cheekbones to die for. Right now he had an elbow cupped in one hand and his chiselled chin in the other, head tilted slightly, smiling at her like she was some work of art on a wall.
‘Not quite,’ she said. ‘I’d like to go … accompanied.’
‘Oh, of course, I can arrange—’
‘Would you like to accompany me?’
He blinked. ‘Really? I’d be delighted. Thank you so much.’ He ran his hand over his hair, looking flustered. ‘Excuse me a moment while I go reconfigure my sexuality.’
‘There’s no need—’ she began, but he was gone. A few minutes later he was back. He stopped in the doorway and looked her up and down.
‘Wow,’ he said.
‘Don’t get your hopes up.’ She took his arm and turned him to the exit. ‘I liked you better the other way.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ he sighed. ‘It’s a tragedy.’
It was like seeing yourself as you would be seen a thousand years in the future, when you had become mythology. The room had about fifteen hundred people in it, swirling and circulating. The arrangements weren’t formal; the dress was, in a way she hadn’t seen here before. Hoffman had been right, her gown was very this evening. Tuxedos and taffeta, black-and-white vying with colour for vividness. Firefly cameras bobbed and darted among the guests, projecting a seamless and soundless survey of the party on thirty-metre-high walls, and to the world outside. Everybody from the upper reaches of Eurydicean society—people so busy that most of them had had no chance to meet her yet—was there and wanted to talk to her, or at least be seen next to her. Carlyle was grateful for Hoffman’s presence. Everybody here seemed to know everybody else, and presumed they knew her. The makeup artist knew them all, and knew just how to cultivate or wither that presumption. She had to trust in his target selection and avoidance:
‘Shipping planner. Big money, big name, bo-ring. Smile and shake hands.’
‘She’s from Harvard’s. Thank her for the frock.’
‘Defence. Mind your mouth.’
‘News analyst. Keep him sweet.’
‘Oh dear. The things I see when I’m pointed the wrong way.’
This last was for a pale young man with a sharp black beard and a sort of outline of a formal suit, in leather, without a shirt. He was carrying what looked like a test tube that wafted fragrant and mildly narcotic steam.
‘Adrian Kowalsky, actor,’ Hoffman added more audibly, by way of introduction. ‘Hi, Adrian.’
‘Delighted to meet you, sir,’ said Carlyle.
‘Enchantè,’ Kowalsky bowed. ‘You have rewritten all our scripts.’
She shrugged her bare, naked-feeling shoulders and sipped her drink. The glass was an inverted cone on a straight stem. The idea was, you didn’t put it down. There were racks for them somewhere.
‘Cannae be helped, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, that wasn’t a criticism. Good grief. It’s only now I’m beginning to appreciate how desperately sad everything seemed, only last week.’ He inhaled steam from his tube, eyes lidding for a moment, opening shining. ‘The isolation, the futility, the sense of enclosure.’
Carlyle shook her head. ‘I don’t quite follow.’
‘Do you read the classics?’ Kowalsky waved a hand. ‘Assuming you have the same. We were a Diaspar. Dancers at the end of time. You know? Eloi with ennui?’
‘All dressed up and nowhere to go?’ she suggested.
‘Yes!’ said Kowalsky. It seemed he’d never heard the stale phrase before. He touched her elbow. ‘You have no idea… . By the way, there is something I would like to ask you.’
‘Yes?’ She awaited one of the many frequently asked questions.
‘What’s he really like? General Jacques?’
She blinked and looked around. ‘Isn’t he here?’
Hoffman shook his head. ‘He’s not the flavour of the day.’
Carlyle raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh well. I’ve only met him two or three times since I arrived. If you’ve watched the television, you’ll have seen what he’s like. Very straight, direct, laconic. Off camera he’s no different. A bit less formal, maybe.’
‘And his personal life?’ asked Hoffman, smiling.
‘I didn’t ask! He lives with a woman somewhere, that’s all I know.’
Hoffman looked, a little, as if a daydream had been dashed. Kowalsky, on the other hand, brightened.
‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘What you see is what you get, that’s what you’re saying.’
‘As far as I know,’ said Carlyle. ‘Why?’
Kowalsky leaned in, confidentially. ‘I’m hoping to play him.’
‘Jacques Armand? The man I, uh, met?’
‘The very same.’
‘What’s this?’ Hoffman asked. ‘Instant drama?’
‘No, no,’ said Kowalsky. ‘Something historical.’ He stretched out an arm. ‘And histrionic!’
‘Good heavens,’ said Hoffman. ‘Not one of Ben-Ami’s spectacles, I hope.’
‘What else?’
‘How unutterably vulgar,’ said Hoffman. He turned to Carlyle, grinning. ‘You haven’t seen Adrian’s Macbeth, his Iago, his Gorbachev … do try to keep it that way.’
‘Judas,’ said Kowalsky, imperturbably. He winked at Carlyle. ‘Come to think of it, Judas is precisely the way—’
‘Armand will sue you!’ said Hoffman.
Kowalsky flipped a hand. ‘You can’t libel the dead. This performance will have nothing to do with his present life.’
‘A play about the rebellion?’ Hoffman asked, frowning. ‘Isn’t that a trifle … impolitic, in the circumstances?’
‘That’s exactly why it’s worth doing.’ Kowalsky tapped his nose, theatrically. ‘Benjamin is well aware of the political undertones. This is not going to be a vulgar spectacle, Paul. Not that I accept that description of his previous work.’
‘Oh come on,’ said Hoffman. ‘The reactor explosion in Leonid? The gunfight between the Bushes and the Bin-Ladens in West Side Story? The tank battle in the Scottish play? The—’
‘Look,’ said Kowalsky, ‘if you had never read or seen performances of the classics, you would never have thought Benjamin’s productions of them were anything but brilliant and moving.’
Hoffman snorted, a sip getting up the back of his nose. He coughed and waved apologetically. ‘Yes! If I’d never seen Webber’s Evita I’d never have laughed all the way through Ben-Ami’s Guevara!’
‘That was deliberate pastiche,’ said Kowalsky frostily. ‘My point is—’ He hesitated.
‘Yes, darling?’ drawled Hoffman.
‘This is going to be real. It’s going to be real history, with real songs from the period, and it’ll be like nothing you’ve ever seen before.’
‘How do you know all this?’ asked Carlyle, trying to get a word in.
‘Because Benjamin says that every time,’ said Hoffman.
Kowalsky folded his arms. ‘My lips are sealed.’
‘I’ll take that as a challenge,’ Hoffman said. He touched Kowalsky on the tip of the nose. ‘Only not tonight.’
He steered her away, and on.
There’s a lot of confidential conversations I can see up there,’ Carlyle remarked, sitting on a stool at the bar at the side of the cavernous ballroom. Its size and chandeliers were beginning to remind her disquietingly of the posthuman relic, though she tried to put that thought down to side-stream steam from other people’s alkaloid tubes. She waved a languid hand at giant figures on the walls, many of which were in elegant, fast-talking huddles. ‘Can the hoi polloi no lip-read?’
‘Can’t you?’ asked Hoffman.
‘Well, yes, usually, but not now.’ She looked again at the walls and shook her head. ‘Are they speaking a different language when we’re out of earshot?’
‘No,’ said Hoffman. ‘The lip-synch is scrambled, that’s all. All you’d ever pick up from the screens is “rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb.” ’
‘Oh, hell,’ said Carlyle, looking again. ‘It is an aw.’ She smote her forehead. ‘What a maroon.’
‘Speaking of speech,’ said Hoffman, staring at the glass of beer in his hand as if he’d never seen one before, ‘I couldn’t help noticing that your accent, or perhaps your dialect, fluctuates.’
‘Oh. Ah. Aye.’ She felt embarrassed. ‘I can speak American, but I tend tae revert tae English under stress.’ She laughed, the palm of her hand going to her mouth. ‘Like the now.’
‘English!’ Hoffman sounded amused. ‘That is not the language of Shakespeare, my dear, or even of Ben-Ami.’
‘Shakespeare’s language, huh, you should see what happened to his land.’ It was as if the lights had dimmed, the temperature dropped. ‘Airstrip bloody One.’
She might have said too much, or said it too bitterly. Hoffman knew what she was talking about, all right.
‘That was all before my time,’ he said. ‘A previous generation. Ancient history, though not quite so ancient as we’d thought. Take it up with the Joint Chiefs, or with General Jacques, for that matter.’
‘Aye, well, there’ll be a time and a place for that.’ She smiled, eager to change the subject. ‘General Jacques, yes, I’d gathered from your chat with the actor fellow that he was resurrected. So he goes back to the final war, I take it?’
‘He didn’t mention that?’ Hoffman raised his eyebrows. ‘He’s too modest. Or even ashamed. He was a great man, a big military man back then, and now he runs a defence company that’s basically little more than a squad of park rangers.’
‘Aren’t they all?’
‘Not the space defence forces. And there’s some internal policing. The Joint Chiefs keep him well away from both.’
‘War, crime, and politics.’ Carlyle grinned. ‘And there was me thinking you had utopia. What with everybody being so rich.’
‘Don’t you have cornucopia machines?’
‘Oh, sure. But we have—’
‘Other things to fight over. So have we.’
‘It’s not the same—’
‘It isn’t?’ He laughed, looking around. ‘Maybe not. There’s even a saying about it: “The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small.” Everybody here has got here by intense competition, moderated by character assassination.’ He frowned into the crowd. ‘Take that one over there, for instance—’
Carlyle inclined her head. ‘Her?’
‘No, the other one, the blonde in the sort of reddish dress—shit, it’s like I’ve gone colour-blind—the cerise duchesse shift.’
‘Got ya.’
‘Well, just last month, she … ’
Carlyle listened patiently, eyes and mouth widening at—she hoped—appropriate moments, to Hoffman’s account, which she suspected was as much a character assassination in itself as it was the story of one. There was a moment when her attention drifted, and she noticed that she could make out what people were saying up on the walls.
‘—coming—’
‘—over by the bar—’
‘—any minute—’
‘—what she has to say—’
Then most of the screens showed herself and Hoffman, his pictured lips in synch with what she was hearing, and the cameras were all around them like angry bees, and on other screens a man walked confidently through the parting crowd, and she turned to see him coming towards her. A stocky man, black hair thick from a high hairline, walking with a bar-brawler’s roll, a small hard-man’s shoulder-swagger. He wore black formals, wrecking the effect with a row of pens in his jacket’s breast-pocket. Black eyes that saw right through her. She slid off the stool and faced him. Standing on the floor felt safer. He stopped just out of swinging distance, poised on the balls of his feet.
‘Good evening, Lucinda,’ he said.
She recognised the voice.
‘Good evening, Professor Shlaim,’ she said.
Behind him, her image mouthed the same words. She realised that the show was live, was sound and vision, that the world was watching and that she was on. On air. Silence spread through the huge room, making that archaic expression real. She took a deep breath and focused on speaking American.
‘I’ve been set up,’ she said. ‘Just so you all know I know. All right, Shlaim. Go ahead. Say what you have to say.’
Hoffman glanced at her, made a frantic wiping gesture with both hands, and stepped back. She could believe he had nothing to do with this.
Shlaim reached out sideways without looking and kept his hand there until somebody put a glass of beer in it. He sipped the beer, put it down on the bar counter and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
‘Ah, that’s good,’ he said. ‘My first in two hundred and eighty years. How old are you, Lucinda?’
‘Twenty-four,’ she said.
‘You’ve had me in your suit for eight years. You got me when you were sixteen. Sweet sixteen. You got me for your fucking birthday.’
‘You were treated right,’ she said. ‘You had a decent virtuality package to run in. And in ten more years you’d have worked off your debt.’
Shlaim gulped beer again. ‘I can assure you that a decent virtuality package is not a substitute for real life. It’s not even a substitute for real beer. Only my intellectual interests kept me sane. What would have happened to someone without them?’
‘We don’t keep non-intellectual people in virtuality,’ Carlyle said. ‘As you bloody well know. What would be the point? And if you’d gone mad or shown severe distress we’d have rebooted you. Spare us your sob stories.’
‘Mistreatment is not the issue,’ said Shlaim. ‘Slavery is.’
‘Oh, fuck off,’ said Carlyle. She shifted her gaze slightly to look directly at the nearest hovering camera. ‘You know where he developed his intellectual interests? The Computer Science Department of the University of Tel Aviv! He helped to engineer the Hard Rapture. He’s a goddamn war criminal. He’s lucky we didn’t throw him in a hell-file.’ She faced Shlaim again, stabbing towards him with her finger. ‘You owe us, Shlaim. I said I’d manumit you, and I won’t go back on that. As far as I’m concerned you’re free and clear. But if it wasn’t for us you’d still be a bunch of electrons doing the exercise-yard shuffle in a dreg processor on a decaying balloon sonde on Rho Coronae Borealis b. And who put you there? Who could it have been but your own posthuman exaltant, who saw its human original for the ruthless, selfish, unpleasant little nerd that he was. I had hoped you’d had a chance to think and reform your character while you were doing time, but maybe not. I never did buy rehab anyway. Restitution, aye, I’ll take that out of your hide, and I have, and I’m not ashamed of it.’
‘Lies,’ said Shlaim, quite unperturbed. ‘I was caught up in the Hard Rapture quite innocently and inadvertently, like millions of others. You can’t hold computer scientists collectively responsible for the disaster anyway. For generations your criminal family has been using this spiel as a spurious justification for enslaving any upload or conscious AI you could get your grubby hands on. And you’ll use it against Eurydice, too.’ At this point he took his turn to speak to camera. ‘Ask her what compensation the Carlyles intend to exact from you for damage done in the final war. They carry a load of resentment about that, but they’ve always thought the forces of the fightback were dead or beyond their reach. Now they’ve found you. Be afraid. Or prepare to fight.’
With that he leaned on the bar and resumed his drink. Answer that if you can, his face told her.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Carlyle said, to him and to the camera floating behind his shoulder. ‘The Carlyle company has no claim against Eurydice. I’m certain that all we’ll do is to open the wormhole for traffic and trade. We’ll charge for that, of course, but most clients find our rates reasonable. Those that don’t are free to fittle. I think you’ll find the benefits of reestablishing contact with the rest of the human race are so vast that anything we’ll charge is a pittance.’
This was true, as far as it went, which was just enough for her to be able to say it with a clear conscience and a sincere sounding voice. Shlaim drained his glass, laughed in her face, and stalked away.
‘I think,’ said Hoffman, stepping forward and turning her smoothly around, ‘that now would be a good time for us to flounce out.’
He was having me on.
Carlyle crammed the frock into the drexler and stood naked in front of the window of her fortieth-floor hotel room, and watched midnight rain fall on the towers of New Start. The lights were grouped like clusters in a busy spiral arm, the parks dark between them like dust, the blue-green grass soaking up the rain, the same rain that blurred the window. She had left the light off, so there was no reflection to peer through, nothing for someone looking in—not that anyone was, at this height—to see. Unless they were using infrared, in which case what they would pick out most strongly would be the glow of her face, hot with embarrassment.
Of course he had been having her on. Hoffman had taken her for a rube, a country girl, a daft naive lassie, and she had confirmed it for him. Imagine believing that there was some kind of wetware switch that could flip your sexuality from gay to straight for an evening! It had started as a joke, then a pose, then something he couldn’t believe she’d fallen for, and had strung her along to. He was probably laughing about it right this minute. That his sexuality was mutable she could well believe; here, most folks’ was. In a closed cornucopian economy everything was camp, performance, role-play. People got off on heterosexuality, on marriages and divorces and families as soap opera. Everything was in inverted commas and ironic drag. Like the economy itself: a charade of capitalism played out as if to keep the Joint Chiefs and other ancients happy, in the full unacknowledged knowledge that they were in on the joke.
She went into the bathroom and carefully wiped off the makeup he’d applied, seeing her own face reemerge, its own light and shade. The eyes looked smaller, the brows thicker, the nose bigger, the lips less full, the cheekbones less defined. But that was all. There was nothing wrong with it in the first place. It was a normal, healthy face at the pretty end of plain, just ordinary, attractive in its own way. Good teeth, bright eyes, a nice open smile. She knew that. It was only in the context of Eurydice’s relentless genetic optimisation that it seemed anything less. Everyone here was like an athlete, an actor, a movie megastar, a top-of-the-range supermodel. Maybe that was what they could sell to the rest of the inhabited galaxy. Image could be their substance. In the cornucopian economy this was not such a daft idea. She smiled vengefully at the thought of the planet as a vast agency, pimping its population’s pretty faces to the media and advertising conglomerates.
Maybe that would generate enough revenue to settle whatever had to be settled between the Carlyles and the last known successor to the states of Earth. When the ships came… The thought of the ships sent her from the bathroom to the bed, where she threw herself face down and bit the pillow. She missed home, family, familiarity. She even missed her familiar.
In the morning, things got worse.
A fine drizzle sifted down through the city’s skyways and bridges, which were in this quarter a mesh almost dense enough to occlude the sky, and quite dense enough to concentrate the falling rain into local cascades of drips that hammered the street and drummed on canopies and soaked the unwary. Carlyle dodged down First Left Street and turned right into Halliday Alley, a covered narrow street where the shops sold scientific apparatus, climbing equipment, hunting weapons, and weather-protective clothing. She ducked into Rivka’s Rainwear and came out wearing an olive-green cagoule over the rouched top and knee-length trousers in blue synthetic kid that the drexler had brought forth as her outfit for the day. She put the hood up and emerged from the alley on to Feynmann Place, the square on the edge of the science quarter. That was what the people who lived there called it. Others called it the geek ghetto. Past the statue of Feynmann with the jagged lines of the Diagram clutched like a god’s lightning-bolts in his upraised fist. The soles of her boots squeaked on wet paving as she walked across to the Java Script, which had become her favourite café. Low comfortable chairs jammed around tiny round tables; you had to wade through the crush of people’s back-to-back backs. Muddy coffee, cloudy drinks, steamy air, airy talk. It was a place where she could sit and listen to the conversations around her, and sip coffee and watch the wall or the window, rather than answer questions.
This morning nobody even wanted to look at her. It was as if they were embarrassed by her presence. They were all watching the wall. She went to the counter and helped herself, then turned to watch too. Shlaim was standing on the Government building’s steps, just as she had a few days ago. Behind him stood the Joint Chiefs.
‘—schematic for constructing an FTL communicator has been retrieved from the suit,’ he was saying. ‘Its construction and testing have been successful. Earlier this morning, it was used to send an appeal to the most civilised of the other powers, the Knights of Enlightenment, for security against the pending arrival of starships from the Carlyle gang. This appeal, I am happy to say, has been answered.’
The cup rattled, the coffee splashed into the saucer over the back of her thumb. She sucked her hand and walked carefully to a table by the window and sat down. For a while she brushed the slight scald against the raindrops caught on the cagoule, and let the coffee cool. On the wall, Shlaim rattled on about how civilised, comparatively speaking, the Knights were, and how keen they would be to protect the planet and the relic from the dangerous depredations of the Carlyles.
The coffee had gone cold. She drank it and stood up. Everyone was looking at her.
‘It’s all true,’ she said.
She walked out. The rain rattled on her cagoule. She didn’t see anything until she got back to the hotel. The minder for the day was waiting in the breakfast room. Carlyle dismissed him and went straight to her room, where she used the screen to call the Government building. It didn’t take her long to get through to Shlaim.
‘Good morning,’ he said. It was still weird, seeing him and hearing his voice.
‘What the fuck are you playing at?’ she demanded. ‘You know what the Knights are like. Have you at least warned off the Carlyles?’
‘Of course. And received the predictable response.’ He slouched his accent into a parody of English. ‘ “Youse want tae mess wi us, we’re ready tae rumble. Keep the fuck aff oor patch.” ’
‘They know the Knights are going to be here, and they’re still coming?’
‘ “The ships are on their way awready, jimmie. We’ll see who’s got the fastest ships and the maist bottle.” ’
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
Shlaim looked back at her, amused. ‘What did you expect? They have to defend their credibility, not to mention their monopoly over the skein. They can’t let the Knights take control of the gate without at least putting up a fight, even if they know they might lose.’
‘Shit.’ She rocked back, trying to think of an angle, a wedge… . ‘What about those alien war-machines that everybody’s so worried about? Having space battles in Eurydice’s skies isn’t exactly the best way to prepare for their arrival, if they’re really out there.’
‘Oh, bugger that,’ said Shlaim. ‘Look, even the Joint Chiefs are coming round to the possibility that the relic is posthuman rather than alien. And the Knights can deal with posthuman war-machines.’
‘Aye, and so can we. But what if they are alien?’
Shlaim shrugged. ‘They’re not. But suppose they are. If anyone can handle alien war machines, it’s the Knights. And rather more elegantly than the Carlyles, I should imagine. No nasty fission by-products polluting the atmosphere, for a start.’
‘I guess you’re right. If that weapon they used on our search engine is anything to go by, the Eurydiceans could probably do it themselves.’ She frowned, diverted by a puzzle. ‘How the hell did you persuade them the relic might not have been made by the extinct local aliens?’
He grinned. ‘From its ability to hack your suit and set me free. That was a big clue, but not definitive. So we took a core dump. It was obvious at a glance that the intrusion was a descendant of something of human origin.’
Carlyle knew something of diagnostics. It was big part of combat archaeology. Come to think of it, her own diagnostics would have been where Shlaim had derived his. Damn. But still, it would have been a long and laborious job.
‘At a glance?’
‘That was all it took to identify the Microsoft patches.’
‘Oh.’
‘Indeed. They’re as definitive as index fossils.’
That reminded her of another objection. ‘What about the fossils on Eurydice? Including fossil war-machines?’
‘Convergent evolution, I’m afraid. Looks like the indigenes went through the same shit as we did. A military-driven Singularity. It’s no more surprising that their war-machines looked like ours than that their tanks and aeroplanes did.’
‘I suppose not.’ Still, it bothered her. It all seemed too big a coincidence. She dismissed the thought to her subconscious, from where it might come back bearing clues or brilliant insights, or not. ‘And the Eurydiceans are not bothered at all that you have set us up for a fight?’
Shlaim leaned forward, glaring at her. ‘You have no idea how much they detest what your family did to me, and does to others. I had no need to exaggerate or embroider—the truth was enough. The only reason—’ He stopped. ‘You definitely have no credibility around here. You condemn yourself every time you open your mouth on these questions. I’ve seen polls taken after last night’s little contretemps, and they are personally quite gratifying—for me. I would advise you to keep your head down and your mouth shut, and negotiate your departure with whatever’s left of the Carlyle ships after the Knights are through with them.’
‘The Carlyles might win the round.’
‘They might at that,’ said Shlaim. ‘If they get here first. However, I wouldn’t count on it, and in the meantime my previous advice stands. Goodbye.’
The screen returned to its mirror setting. Carlyle sat and looked at herself for a while. What was it that Shlaim had been about to say, and had stopped himself from saying? ‘The only reason—’ What? The only reason you are still walking around is that you have some value as a negotiating chip. The only reason we’re still being nice to you is that we’re afraid the Carlyles might win. Something along those lines. She had to get out and get home, and there was only one way home now.
She called up the search pages and found the code for Armand’s company, Blue Water Landings.
‘That’s funny,’ Armand told her, when she’d gotten through to him. ‘I was just about to call you.’
‘I’ll be right over,’ she said.
L
ucinda Carlyle toyed with a plastic skull on the desk in Jacques Armand’s office, somewhere at the back of Lesser Light Lane. Armand stared into an optic tank, studying material balances, ignoring her. Outside, on the field that here took the place of a park in the prevalent pattern, aircars lifted and landed more or less continuously. She was patient, aware that Armand was busy, but felt a need to do something with her hands. The skull, used as a paperweight, was a reconstruction of that of the type specimen of Eurydice’s indigenous intelligent species, extinct ten million years. Large empty orbits and a braincase low-slung down the back, protected by a dorsal ridge as thick as your thumb. It looked like something between a tarsier and an australopithecene. Only the ocherous remains of a rifle clutched in the creature’s claw, some traces of a buckle at the pelvis, and spots of rust marking the nails of a shoe around one of the feet, had identified it as intelligent, and a builder of the Artificial Strata. Prior to this discovery, the purported fossils of the sapient autochthon had been of what later investigation confirmed to be a two-metre-long freshwater amphibian, whose misleadingly large cranial domes had housed the oil-filled cavities of its hunting sonar.
Armand looked up and pushed the optic tank to one side.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ he said. He passed a hand across his brow. ‘We’ve been busy, as you can imagine. How are you getting on? Everyone treating you right?’
‘More than all right,’ she said. ‘People are very generous. I can’t get over not paying for things.’
‘Oh, you are paying,’ said Armand. ‘Your credit and interest are high. Don’t worry about that.’
‘And people have stopped recommending cosmetic resculpting, ever since I gave someone a bloody cheek for his, so tae speak.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Armand. He looked suitably embarrassed. ‘Tact in these matters is not, ah, a well-cultivated virtue on Eurydice. There’s nothing wrong with your face, you know,’ he added fiercely.
‘Oh, I know. It’s them that don’t.’
‘I myself am considered ill-favoured,’ Armand said. ‘I have kept my original genome. Fortunately, so has my wife.’
He rotated a mounted photograph to show himself, and a quite ordinary-looking but by no means unattractive woman of the same apparent age, smiling at the camera.
‘That’s us, straight out of the revival tank.’
‘And very nice you both look too,’ said Carlyle. ‘I understand you go back a long way.’
‘So you’ve been told of my dubious history.’
‘Aye.’ She had not exactly been told of it. She had researched it from her hotel room’s screen. ‘Why did the Runners resurrect you?’
‘The Runners?’ Armand smiled, thin-lipped. ‘Don’t let them hear you call them that. The Reformers can be a bit touchy about it at the best of times. Anyway, to answer your question. I never took part in the Returner rebellion of 2098. Many of my best friends did, and died in it, thinking I had betrayed them. I did not. I was a loyal officer, that’s all. I went along with the Reform, and the flight, but I threatened to blow my brains out if the recordings of the dead Returners were not taken along too. Their souls are still sealed in the vaults. They include some of the best military minds of their generation, the last people alive—so to speak—who fought in the final war. We could use them now, but as you see, the Joint Chiefs remain implacable on the question. Over the years they’ve cleared and revived a few minor figures, civilians mostly, that’s all. Humanitarian reasons—reuniting families that were divided in the conflict, that kind of thing.’ He laughed. ‘They’ve just cleared a couple of really crass folksingers, I notice. Winter and Calder.’
‘I’ve heard of them,’ Carlyle said, startled. ‘My great-great-grandmother has some of their songs. Crass is the word.’
Armand chuckled. ‘They were big in the asteroid belt.’
‘Aye, you said it. Anyway, that’s no what I’m here to talk about. Well, it is in a way. You saw the show, right? Last night and this morning?’
‘I’ve seen it,’ said Armand, ‘I was struck by your passing remark about where Shlaim was recovered from, and how he’d got there. Was it true?’
‘Yes, as far as I know. It’s no big deal.’
‘It’s a big deal to me, as I’m sure you know.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Carlyle cautiously. ‘I wouldn’t want to claim that we can bring them all back, but … ’
She waited for his response. She had just alluded to the oldest slogan and boldest aim of the Returners: to rescue and resurrect the billions of dead whose minds—it was an article of faith, backed by scraps of evidence—were still recorded somewhere in the war machines that had overwhelmed them.
Armand tilted his hand up. ‘Careful where you throw that phrase around … but, ah, putting that aside for the moment.’ He scratched the back of his head. ‘I’m still a loyal officer, albeit in a private capacity. And before, ah, going any deeper … hmm, this is difficult. I also noticed what Shlaim had to say, and it doesn’t bode well for relations with the Carlyles, as the Joint Chiefs seem to have picked up on very fast. Can you tell me more about that?’
‘Well, there is some truth in what Shlaim was saying. You see, we have an implacable older generation too. Several of them, in fact, but the hardest are the folks who were born back on Earth, who lived through the Hard Rapture and the final war. They remember you.’
Armand raised his eyebrows. ‘Me?’
‘No you personally, at least I never heard your name. But if they have a low opinion ae the Raptured, a wee bit instrumental as you’ll have noticed, they positively hate the forces who fought against the Raptured in the final war.’
‘Why on Earth—?’ Armand asked. ‘We fought on your side!’
‘On Earth, aye, that’s why!’ Carlyle clasped her knees with her hands, and took a few deep breaths. ‘Please remember,’ she said, ‘I’m telling you how I’ve been told it looked fae the point of view of the folks in the rubble you fought over. And tae them, it was aw war-machines, nae matter if some ae them had men inside them. Tanks and jets and bombs, huge installations, the weather going crazy, and weird terrifying valkyries ca’ed the Black Sickle harvesting heids ae the dead. And after aw that, they lost, they retreated, and they fucked off intae space. With scant regard for whatever or whoever was under their rockets at the time, I may add.’
‘Those were desperate times,’ said Armand.
‘Oh, I agree. I’m no condemning you myself. I’m just telling you how the older family members felt about it. Of course, it’s aw been moot, syne there was neither hide nor hair ae ye left in the Solar System after we aw climbed back intae space. But now—’
‘Now, you’ve found us.’ Armand frowned. ‘Is this view common among the other powers? Should we have the same concern about the Knights of Enlightenment, or anyone else who may turn up?’
‘No really. They were aw in a different situation. The Yanks were behind posthuman lines, so tae speak, the Japs were on a quieter front, and the commie guerillas were off in their jungles and mountains. None of them were fucking churned over like our part ae the world.’
‘Well, that’s a relief. All we have to worry about is your criminal family, as Shlaim puts it. If they get here first I take it a shakedown is likely, and perhaps a little rougher than your usual run of them.’
Carlyle nodded. ‘They’ll want to take more out of your hides than they do for most of our clients, that’s for sure. And that’s where your Returner-Runner squabble comes in.’
‘How so? It seems a bit irrelevant in this context.’
‘Let me tell you how my family works,’ Carlyle said. ‘They started off as scrap merchants, drug dealers, and loan sharks. We haven’t changed much. We give the customer what they want, in return for what we want. There’s something I want from you, a wee favour.’
‘And what might that be?’
Carlyle glanced around. ‘Is this place secure?’
‘Of course,’ said Armand, sounding indignant.
‘All right. What I want you to do for me is let me get back through the gate when it reopens. That could mean, you know, kind of hiding me if anyone else—say the Government, or the Knights—tries to pull me in.’
‘I could consider that,’ said Armand. ‘What’s in it for me?’
‘Our goodwill if we ever come to get a wee bit of compensation—’
Armand shook his head. ‘Too intangible, and not enough.’
‘I know. That’s not all. We have something to offer that the Returners really, really want, and that the Knights cannae and willnae give.’
‘FTL flight? Your backup technology?’ Armand sounded puzzled.
‘No,’ said Carlyle. ‘Return.’
I was Winter. He was Calder.
Every time it was the same.
Winter had come back from the dead before. The experience was over-rated. You woke, and didn’t remember dying: death is not lived through. In both cases, he woke to find the most beautiful woman he had yet seen looking at him with an expression of disdain and dread. She didn’t scream, but Winter had put it in the song just the same, after his first time.
The lab tech screamed: the sight appalled her.
I was ugly. He was lame.
That had always gotten a laugh.
‘Don’t try to sit up,’ she said. He knew she wasn’t a nurse. And her white coat didn’t have the Black Sickle on it. The only question in his mind was whether she was the mad scientist, or his (or her) beautiful assistant. So here we are, he thought, back in the land of the living again. The country of the young: Tir nan Og. Where everybody is beautiful, except us. And there he had been not even knowing he was dead.
‘How’s Calder?’ he asked. His mouth was dry.
She glanced sideways. ‘Recovering.’ Her gaze returned to Winter, and softened somewhat. ‘You loved him very much?’
Winter laughed, and then it wasn’t funny. They must have lost the fight, and lost centuries. ‘How long have we been dead?’
She turned away, and turned back holding out a steaming plastic cup.
‘Drink this,’ she said.
He raised himself on his elbow and took the cup, sipped cautiously. It was just short of being too hot to drink, and smelled and tasted meaty, but clean of any trace of grease, and with a slight bitter edge.
‘We call it umami tea,’ she said. ‘A local herb. It’s a mild stimulant.’
It was more than mild. Every sip was like a shot of vodka. His stomach glowed and his limbs tingled, and his mind felt clearer by the second. He took advantage of the moment to look around and check out his surroundings. He was lying naked on a sheet spread on a high table. Another such table stood a couple of metres away. He could see the curved back of a man lying curled on his side, presumably Calder. Winter’s own body fitted his body-image. Even his beard was the length he remembered, a rough fiveday stubble. The ceiling was about five metres above him, and the room seemed proportionately large. Cluttered with unfamiliar but antique machines and pieces of dusty furniture, hung with paintings and costumes, lit by five tall windows through which he could see masses of green, it struck him as more like a studio than a laboratory, let alone a clinic. Two of the machines, close by, he recognised as resurrection tanks.
‘So the terraforming worked,’ he said.
She looked at him oddly. ‘You’re taking this very calmly.’
Winter sat up and shrugged. ‘It’s only a shock the first time.’
Gallows humour, from the men they couldn’t hang.
Calder stirred and rolled over. His hand moved, utterly predictably, to his crotch. As though satisfied with the systems check, he opened his eyes and blinked. The woman was already leaning over him. He leered up at her, revealing that his teeth, if nothing else, had been improved by the process.
‘Don’t try to sit up,’ the woman said.
‘I’m in no hurry,’ he said. The leer brightened.
She passed him a cup of umami tea. As he propped himself up to drink it he caught sight of Winter and almost dropped it.
‘Should have known,’ Calder said to Andrea. He set down the cup beside him and reached behind his neck to feel the curvature of his spine. ‘Ankylosing fucking spondylitis, too,’ he added, aggrieved. ‘You could have got rid of that, you know.’ He sipped the tea. ‘And him, while you were at it.’
Winter swung his legs over the edge of the table. ‘Glad to see you, too.’
Calder cracked a grin and raised his cup. ‘Good health.’ He glanced around. ‘I suppose this means the fight’s over, one way or the other.’ He looked at the woman. ‘So who won?’
She looked from Calder to Winter, and back. She really was extraordinarily beautiful. Her face showed her bafflement and disappointment with such transparency that her lip trembled. It made Winter want to comfort her.
‘This is not what we expected,’ she said. ‘You are Winter and Calder, yes? The musicians?’
‘That’s us,’ Winter said.
‘The Winter and Calder? The Returner heroes? The famous lovers?’
Winter could see Calder arriving at the same awful realisation as he had.
‘Fuck,’ Calder said. ‘We’re history.’
‘Legend,’ said Winter.
Calder smirked. ‘What I said.’ He sat up on the bed and swung his legs over, and continued to drink his tea.
‘What’s your name?’ Winter asked the woman, to give her something else to look at.
‘Andrea Al-Khayed,’ she replied. She moistened her lips. ‘I think I should call the promoter.’
Winter didn’t see her use any comms, but a moment later a door at the far end of the room opened and a man walked in. He was tall, with long dark hair, and wearing a sort of academical gown in green silk over what looked like dungarees—denim, brass clips, and all. Not to Winter’s surprise, he was remarkably good-looking—dark eyes and skin, prominent nose. He stopped a little way off and looked at the two men, smiling.
‘My name is Benjamin Ben-Ami,’ he said. He nodded at the woman. ‘Thank you, Andrea. They seem to be fit.’
‘They’re fine,’ she said, standing aside with an over-to-you gesture. Ben-Ami stepped to the ends of the tables and beamed at the men on them with an expression of proprietorial pride. It was a look Winter had seen before, and it didn’t bode well.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Ben-Ami, ‘allow me to welcome you.’
‘Thanks,’ said Calder. ‘Now cut the crap and tell us where we are and what you want.’
Ben-Ami showed no sign of taking offence. Like Andrea’s, his expressions were easily readable, and at that moment showed a certain awe, as though it was only by hearing Calder’s voice that he had become convinced of their presence. And, also like her, he evaded the question.
‘I have had your clothes reconstructed,’ he said. ‘You may feel more comfortable dressed.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Calder, favouring Andrea with another leer. Ignoring this, the man and the woman swung a wheeled gurney between the tables. On top of it were two neat stacks of clothes. Winter slid off the table and began to climb into the ones he recognised as his own. They were almost too authentic. Every stain on his jeans, rip in his T-shirt and crack in his leather jacket and boots was exactly as it had been on the cover screen of their last album. Calder finished pulling his clothes on, and struggled into and stood up in his cowboy boots. They made him look taller, but that was not to say much.
‘If you’re expecting gratitude and surprise from us, forget it,’ he told Ben-Ami. ‘Coming back ain’t like recovery from an illness or something. When you’re sick, you know it, whereas—’ He glanced up at Winter, a corner of his lower lip caught between his teeth. He sniffed and glared at his feet, and reached up and banged a fist on the table. ‘Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.’
The thing that overwhelms you, Winter thought, is not that you have come back. It’s that so many others have gone. As with any traumatic accident, you lose the memories immediately preceeding it. The last thing he could remember, before waking under that admired, unadmiring face, was of walking down the main tube in Polarity, not a care in the world beyond the ever-present vague unease that the arguments were getting uglier by the day.
‘So tell us,’ Winter said.
‘Come to the window,’ said Ben-Ami.
They followed Ben-Ami and Al-Khayed across the room, their feet resounding on strong bare boards, their hips brushing the dust off odd items of furniture and incomprehensible machines in the room’s vast clutter. Having to watch where they were going made their view on arriving before the window quite sudden. They strode to the sill and looked out, astonished. Their vantage was about a hundred metres above a street, along which vehicles moved with startling speed. The street faced on to a park, a complex grassland of low knolls, small streams, and bushes and taller trees. Airy wicker-like structures stood here and there, linked by swaying suspension bridges. Across on the other side of the park more buildings rose, in a similarly complex skyline. Other clusters of buildings and clumps of trees extended as far as the eye could see. Beyond them the sky was blue, chalked with high cirrus. Unfamiliar aircraft with blurred, rapidly vibrating wings soared high or shot across the lower levels like birds, swooping and stooping.
‘Oh my god,’ said Calder. ‘I mean, shit.’
‘Always with the poetic eloquence,’ said Winter.
How long could this have taken? In Winter’s time the terraforming of Mars had barely begun, and was expected to take many centuries. However far progress had speeded up, the physical constraints of the process were intractable. He had known at once, without undue modesty, that if the details of their lives were so far forgotten or distorted as to cast him and Calder as lovers they must have been dead for some such span, and that few if any of the people who had known them had lived through it. Nevertheless, seeing the evidence with his own eyes made his knees weak for a moment. He found himself closing his eyes and leaning hard on the sill, then looking sadly at Calder. Calder nodded, lips compressed.
‘Looks like it’s over all right,’ he said.
A thought struck Winter. ‘Shake on it?’
Calder grinned, cocked his head as though considering. ‘Ah, fuck it.’ He stuck out a hand and they shook for the first time in—he didn’t know how long.
They turned, shoulder to shoulder as it were, to face the promoter and the laboratory technician.
‘All right,’ Winter said. ‘We can see it’s been a long time.’
Ben-Ami gestured towards a low table with four chairs around it. They sat.
‘The city we’re in,’ said Ben-Ami, with guileless awkwardness, ‘is called New Start.’
Winter and Calder laughed. The others looked puzzled. It was as if they assumed that there was somewhere, on Earth or Mars perhaps, a city called Start.
‘An old name, I guess,’ said Winter.
‘It was established about two hundred and fifty years ago,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘It is the capital of this planet, Eurydice, which’—he paused, tonguetip flicking between his lips—‘is in the Sagittarius Arm.’
‘What!’ yelped Winter. The cold dismay that gripped him made the room go grey for a second.
‘So the bloody Runners won,’ said Calder.
‘The Reformers, yes,’ said Andrea Al-Khayed. It seemed a political correction, twitchy and touchy. Winter made a rapid downward revision of his opinion of the setup here, whatever it was.
‘I’ll remember to call them that,’ sneered Calder. ‘So what do you want with’—he gave Winter a glance and an awkward twitch of the mouth—‘a couple of Returners?’
‘We want you to sing for us,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘As part of a major public performance.’
‘Why?’ asked Winter, more aggressively than he felt.
Ben-Ami stood up and began to pace about nervously.
‘We need—in my opinion—a small infusion of Returner culture,’ he said. ‘The spirit of confrontation with the war-machines, rather than, ah, retreat.’ He stood still, looking embarrassed. ‘The fact of the matter is that, ah … ’
‘They’ve caught up with you?’ said Calder, nastily.
‘No,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘Not at all! It’s just that—’ He stopped. ‘It might be simpler if I simply showed you the news from last week.’
He went over to what looked like a mirror fixture on his desk and toggled and tabbed. Sound and pictures came up: a man and a woman standing on the steps of a big building, addressing the cameras.
‘Holy shit,’ said Winter. ‘That’s General Jacques!’
Ben-Ami froze the picture. ‘You know him?’
‘Of course I fucking know him. He was the leader of the Returner faction. Christ, he raised me and Calder from the dead. Not something you forget. How did he get here?’
‘The same way as you did,’ said Ben-Ami.
‘Well, yes,’ said Winter heavily. ‘What I meant was, how did he get resurrected here, if you’re all Runners?’
‘The details of the Returner Rebellion on Polarity are contested,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘There was some kind of settlement, after the—’
‘Wait a cotton-picking minute,’ said Calder. ‘You’re telling us there was a rebellion? That it came to a fight?’
‘Yes, yes, but as I said, the details are in some dispute.’
‘And not up for discussion,’ added Al-Khayed. ‘You must understand. It’s all settled. Shall we get on with this?’
‘Sure,’ said Winter, his gaze fixed on the mirror-sharp image of Jacques Armand. Now there was a man. It was impossible to believe that he had thrown in his lot with the bloody Runners. And yet, people he’d thought he’d known better had done the same. He glanced sideways at Calder, but Calder was still looking at the screen and gnawing his lip.
The picture ran again. The first person to speak was not Armand but the young woman beside him. A small lithe figure in a figure-hugging but functional suit veined with heat-exchangers, a belt of chunky gadgetry resting on her hips. Like Armand’s, her face wasn’t optimised, and to Winter’s eye all the more attractive for that. Black brows, bright eyes, black hair fringed and feathered around her face.
And she had a Glasgow accent. She gave some kind of overexcited cheerful greeting, then Armand spoke, much more gravely. His voice hadn’t changed, though its traces of a French accent were fewer.
‘What you have heard is true,’ he said. ‘An astonishing event has occurred today. Much of what we believed about our passage here, and even the date, is false. Let me explain … ’
And then, after that bombshell, another announcement, this time from a cocky little guy with a smug grin on his face.
‘The situation is becoming more complex,’ said Ben-Ami anxiously. ‘But you understand it?’
Winter couldn’t help himself. Calder couldn’t help himself either. They leaned back and howled with laughter. Part of it was just the relief at realising they weren’t ten thousand years in the future, and that they could still get back. Part of it was the shock at seeing Armand again. Most of it, however, was straight schadenfreude.
‘I understand the irony of the situation,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘I’ll thank you to understand its seriousness.’
Winter rocked forward and put his elbows on the table. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I can understand the seriousness, sure. War machines, Zen mechanists, and Glasgow gangsters.’ He fought an involuntary smirk. ‘And going FTL without knowing it can ruin your whole morning. What I can’t understand is how you lot crossed ten thousand light-years and happened to pick a planet that had war machines, out of all—’ He waved a hand skyward.
‘Ah,’ said Andrea. ‘It is not a coincidence. The planet was chosen by the ship. On the basis of its size, its atmosphere and water signatures, it must have looked eminently suitable for colonization.’
‘How does that make it less of a coincidence?’
Al-Khayed shrugged. ‘That a habitable planet turned out to have been inhabited? It lessens the odds, I suppose. It also increases the odds that developing out-of-control war machines is something that all civilizations do.’
‘Christ,’ said Calder. ‘That’s depressing.’ He shifted, easing his bad leg a bit.
‘But we still have Earth,’ said Winter. He glared at the strange beautiful people. He didn’t want to join in their projects without putting down a marker. ‘I still want that, you know. I want it back.’ He sighed. ‘I want us to get them all back.’
Ben-Ami and Al-Khayed looked at him with sympathy but without comprehension. The two Eurydiceans didn’t seem to recognise the phrase at all, or to have the faintest idea what he meant. It was, Winter thought, just as well.
‘I could use a cigarette,’ said Calder.
H
e stubbed it out before they got in the lift.
‘I’d been hoping for dropshafts,’ said Winter, as the doors closed. It might have been an Otis lift.
Andrea Al-Khayed got it.
‘At least we have aircars,’ she said. ‘And entopters.’
‘Entopters?’
‘The buzzing aircraft.’
‘Oh, right.’ The lift dropped fast. ‘Like insects.’
‘They were something of a jeu d’espirit, initially,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘They have turned out to be quite practical. The city’s upper structures are complex.’ He mimed dodging and weaving with his hand.
The doors opened and they walked out through a marble and iron-work lobby to the street. The cars moved not in lanes but in a skein of optimised trajectories, like people in crowds. Winter put this down to computer control. No surprise. There was something different about the people. Winter stood on the pavement and tried to understand what it was. The people around him were strolling rather than hurrying, and they were all richly clothed in bright silks, but it wasn’t that, and it wasn’t his odd attire that drew their attention. Whenever anyone passed they seemed to clock him, in a searching glance without a smile or nod. He saw Ben-Ami notice his frown. Calder was beginning to glare around as if he expected an attack or suspected a trick. The traffic all stopped at once and the four people threaded their way through and headed into the park.
‘There is one thing,’ said Ben-Ami, striding along. He looked uncomfortable. ‘You know that your bodies are not quite the same as the bodies you last died in.’ He waved a hand. ‘Some subtle adjustments to the native biochemistry, some immunities and so forth. It is not that. We, ah, took one liberty with your brains.’
Oh. Here it comes.
‘Without it you would be as dead socially as you would be physically without the biochemical adaptations. We maintain, as you did in your time, the cultural squick about internal interfaces with networked machinery, and about data capture, for obvious reasons. At the same time we depend, very much, on individual recognition and repute. So we have enhanced one well-mapped part of the brain—the facial recognition system. You will never again forget a face you have seen, or forget the name that goes with it, once you have heard it.’
‘Slow down,’ said Calder, hirpling to keep up. They slowed. ‘That’ll be good. Christ, the embarrassments I had back in Polarity. They were all so pretty it was hard to tell them apart. That was what was bugging me, back there. Everybody looked unique.’
‘Everybody is,’ said Andrea. She walked between Winter and Calder with unhurried quickness, boot-heels thudding, black hem snapping about her ankles. Her lab-coat had been replaced by a dun matt satin bolero.
Winter smiled sideways at her, taking a moment to refresh his appreciation of the minute particulars of her face. People had been beautiful since his first resurrection, back in the Solar system. It was a side-effect. They weren’t genetically engineered for beauty but for health. Beauty was only bone-deep. The health was permanent, the wired-in repair strategies that kept them physically young, though with experience you learned to notice the subtler effects of age in the carriage and expression; not, as in his original day, a deterioration, but a sort of honing. The openness, that almost childlike readability of the gaze he had noticed in Ben-Ami and Al-Khayed, was something new.
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Calder, halting suddenly.
‘I wanted you to see this,’ said Ben-Ami.
The first thing Winter noticed was his own name, and Calder’s, on the plinth in front of them. Then he looked up, at the statue’s mutually clutching nude bodies, balanced on one foot of the taller, whose face was his own. He moved around, and saw the look on the representation of Calder’s, then turned back and saw the same look on the real man’s face. Calder could have been about to scream.
Winter laughed.
‘The statue is popularly known as “The Lovers,” ’ said Ben-Ami.
At that Calder laughed too.
‘I had noticed that you found this reference amusing,’ said Al-Khayed.
‘Do you know what that shows?’ said Winter. ‘It’s us falling into a peat bog. The one our bodies were recovered from. We were in a car. The reason my leg is stretched out like that is that I had my foot on the fucking brake!’
‘And the reason I’m holding on to him,’ said Calder, aggrieved, ‘is that I had nothing else to grab.’
‘You remember all this?’ asked Ben-Ami.
Winter looked at Calder, seeing his own bleak gaze reflected back. Calder was shaking his head almost imperceptibly.
‘It’s what happened,’ Winter said. Memory was not a subject he wished to discuss.
‘How did you come to be recovered?’ Al-Khayed asked.
‘Black Sickle scooped us off the Rannoch battlefield,’ said Winter. ‘Thought we were combat casualties. Course, the peat bog was permafrost by that time. Nuclear winter and all that.’
‘This is wonderful,’ said Ben-Ami, taking notes.
‘Perfect,’ said Hoffman.
Not for the first time, Carlyle suspected him of having a practical joke at her expense. Full-length, off-white cotton raschel lace over ivory polyester, frills at the collar and cuffs and a deep flounce around the hem.
‘Looks like a bloody wedding dress.’
‘It is not a bridal,’ he said. ‘Nor a bridesmaid’s,’ he added, forestalling her next objection. ‘It’s period, and ironic, and—’
‘Very this evening,’ she singsonged. ‘All right, I’ll take your word for it. Coming?’
Headshake, extended to a shudder. ‘Folkies? Spare me. I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful time. Men will be falling over you.’
‘I’ll be the one falling over. Tripping on this.’
She tugged up a fistful of skirt to clear a way for her high-booted, high-heeled step, slung a leather satchel—the appurtenance of the evening, she’d been assured—on her shoulder, crammed on a floppy beribboned straw hat and made her way out.
‘The hat,’ Hoffman called after her despairingly, ‘is carried ’
She felt less self-conscious the closer the shuttles took her to the concert park. Rustic retro quaintness was definitely the look of the hour. She’d seen the same style affected by the Atomic Amish, one of the more conservative AO sects: fission freaks. The park entrance was a hundred metres from the stop. A big marquee with a stage glowed in the twilight a few hundred metres from the gate. Inside, the crowd already smelled of sweat and beer. Some people were even smoking. All part of the atmosphere. She grabbed a can of beer off a stall, fanned herself with the hat (aha!) and made her way to the front. With universal recognition, there was no ticketing. She wouldn’t even need a pass to go backstage for the after-show party. If it hadn’t been part of her conspiracy with Armand, the party would have held no attraction for her. As it was, she felt a fannish flutter in her chest at the thought. Meeting the Returner bards was important. Even her—and now Shlaim’s—abrupt drop from public attention played into her hands, galling though it was in a way. At least she still had enough cachet to be on the guest-list. The fickle folk of Eurydice had en masse turned their flash-flood attention on the musicians, enough to swamp the steadfast folkies who had turned out to actually hear them.
Armand wasn’t one of them, but he too had been invited, and had a seat in the front row, beside hers. He stood up, very formal in a facsimile of his old ESA uniform, and bowed and introduced his wife. Jeanette had overshot the temporal mark—metallic minidress and space-helmet coiff—but was elegantly insouciant about it. ‘It was a very plastic genre,’ she said, settling.
Carlyle sat down in her very plastic seat and looked around. There were plenty of rows of seats, not all occupied, but a lot of people were standing. Some of them had an intense, focused gaze. She tagged them for longtime enthusiasts of the band. The rest of the audience were a cross section of New Start, from (she guessed) a lower level of society than had been represented at her own big reception. As she scanned the rows towards the back she recognised a few faces: a news analyst, the actor Kowalsky, and a few seats away from him, Shlaim. Her former familiar hadn’t noticed her. She turned sharply away.
What the hell was he doing here? For a moment her imagination went into paranoid overdrive. Then, more calmly, she reflected that Shlaim came, after all, from the same era as Winter and Calder. Of course he’d want to see and hear people from the 2040s. The little geek might even have been a fan himself. Deep sky country—he was sad enough for it.
A man in a three-piece suit and shirt made entirely from blue denim strode on to the stage, brandished a prop mike and requested a welcome for Winter and Calder, Deceased. Everyone stood—or, if they were already standing, jumped up and down—and applauded. The two musicians walked on, carrying guitars. They waved their arms and flourished the instruments above their heads and grinned. The lighting contrast was already such that they probably couldn’t make out much of the crowd.
Winter, clad in black leather jacket, white T-shirt, grubby jeans, and brown high boots, was very tall, almost two metres, with a thin nose and a wide mouth and eyes permanently narrowed against a light brighter than the light actually was. A three-day stubble lent his features a sinister aspect; saturnine, almost satanic. He had lank hair falling to the shoulders, a broad chest. Calder was much shorter, maybe one metre fifty, because his spine curved forward between his shoulder blades. His head, held high, defied the imposed stoop, and his eyes, bright and open, glanced around with overt curiosity. His face was clean-shaven and good-looking; his arms and legs, of normal length and abnormal strength, gave an apish aspect to his posture. He wore a black suit with a collarless white cotton shirt open at the neck.
Calder vaulted on to a high stool that brought his head level with Winter’s, and both men bent for a moment to tune their guitars and fiddle with the stagey prop mikes mounted on stalks in front of them. Behind them a dozen session singers, all female, filed on stage to a further wash of applause. They were all identically dressed in silvery close-fitting outfits that resembled space suits, in striking contrast to the fans’ gear and—in the context of entertainment—paradoxically more quaint.
Winter struck up some opening bars and began to sing, his voice raw and untrained, harsh and experienced. Calder’s baritone was classically trained, the session singers’ choral warble a sweet melodious counterpart to Winter’s rasped bass.
I was the exclamation
He was the question mark
and I said damn! and he cried what?
as we fell into the dark
I was Winter, he was Calder
every time it was the same… .
The crowd laughed at the end of that verse and Carlyle smiled as she realised for the first time the awful pun in their names: winter and caulder, indeed. She couldn’t quite follow the references in the rest of the song, but a chill came through the lyrics and the sound. The song unwound a tale of rivalry between friends, over women and music and what might have been politics, and they sang it as though it were a ballad about men long dead.
I believed him, he betrayed me
in the streets o’ Polarity base.
Syrtis Major iron miner
take your vengeance in my place.
They grinned at each other and shook hands ostentatiously. Winter made some lost-in-applause pun on the city’s name. They launched into a song about the asteroid miners:
We’re the atomic blasters
the dancin’ wi’ disaster masters
the solar mirror spinners
and we’re bringin’ in the steel… .
Swung straight to one about the US Occupation soldiers called ‘Giant Lizards from Another Star,’ followed up with a few trite love-songs that seemed to mean a lot to them, and rounded off the set with a rousing rendition of the eerie Returner anthem ‘Great Old Ones’:
Do you ever feel, in your caves of steel
the chill of an ancient fear?
When you pass this way do you shudder and say:
A human once walked here?
They cut off our heads but we’re not dead
and we’re bound by an ancient vow.
That does not sleep which dreams in the deep.
We’re the Great Old Ones now!
When the stars are right there will come a night
when thunder and lightning dawn.
You’ll hear the guns of the Great Old Ones
rip the heads off your zombie spawn.
We’ll stalk you through hell and we’ll cast a spell
down your twisted logic lanes
We’ll come back and fight when the stars are right
We’ll come back and eat your brains!
Carlyle, glancing sideways, saw on Jacques Armand’s frozen features a reflection of her own response. It was dreadful, dreadful stuff. The crowd loved it. Winter and Calder took the applause, waved and strolled off, then raced back for an encore. Finally they and the session singers took a bow and the stage went dark. As the lights dimmed Winter’s gaze swept the front rows, and locked on to hers for a moment. Then they all trooped off. Recorded music, folky fiddly treacle, trickled from the speakers. It was all over but the party.
Winter doused his head in water and towelled himself dry. Beside him Calder was doing the same. They tossed the towels, looked at each other, and marched out of the tiny dressing-room as though to face the music. Here, in the back of the marquee, was a wooden-floored area with a bar and a clutter of tables, at which about a hundred people sat around smoking, steam-sniffing, and drinking. The backstage guests had been waiting about twenty minutes, plenty of time for them to get involved in their own conversations and let the musicians make an unnoticed entrance.
They stepped up to the first table and took the seats they were eagerly offered. Three men, two women, in outfits that had stepped straight off one of the old album covers. Winter looked across at Calder for a moment, returned his eyelash hint of a wink, and then settled in to the serious business of keeping the loyal happy. As he sipped beer and answered earnest questions he’d heard a thousand times before, and asked questions whose answers he forgot before they were finished, he began to enjoy himself. Back in the early days, the after-show party had been a way to relax among friends and relatives. Later it had become more of a strain, a meeting with strangers who presumed an acquaintance, but it remained a necessary decompression after the gig. If he and Calder had just walked away, they’d have ended up roaming drunk and alone, or together and knocking lumps out of each other. It had happened.
They moved on to another table and cluster every ten minutes or so, with relief and feigned regret. One or two people here had actually been fans back in the Solar system, but the musicians knew none of them personally. After the third or fourth move they met Shlaim, who shook hands then sat back with a wary half-smile. He was among local notables of one kind or another, not fans or friends.
‘I’m very pleased to meet you,’ Winter said.
‘Really?’ said Shlaim. ‘You mean I’m not a giant lizard from another star? Or maybe zombie spawn?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Winter, taken aback. ‘Christ, man, I don’t think that way. We don’t care which side you were on.’
‘We sold plenty in America,’ said Calder. ‘And in the client states,’ he added, unhelpfully.
‘That’s all past,’ Winter laboured on. ‘I mean, Calder here was a bloody … Reformer. Bygones.’
Shlaim tipped his head backward. ‘You seem to have invited a lot of Returners.’
Winter shrugged. ‘I don’t know anything about that, these are just people Ben-Ami said to put on the guest list… . ’ His gaze reached where Shlaim had indicated. ‘And General Jacques, well, we knew him. I’m looking forward to meeting him again.’
Armand was sitting with Kowalsky, Al-Khayed, and Ben-Ami, and with a woman he didn’t know, and with Carlyle. Winter felt his heart lurch, as it had when he’d glimpsed her in the front row. Her long dress was the exact colour and style of a white dress in an Old West sepia photograph. She had one of those faces so distinctive it was difficult to remember in detail, and impossible to forget. Seeing her would always be a surprise.
(Now where had that thought come from?) Winter blinked and shook his head.
‘Sorry, what was that?’ he asked.
Shlaim looked irritated. ‘I said, so why are you pleased to meet me? Conventionalities aside, that is.’
‘All right,’ Winter said, striving to keep his tone affable. ‘It’s because it gives me hope, that other people can be recovered, like you were.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a small hope.’
A woman sitting beside Shlaim leaned forward. ‘You are still a Returner,’ she said. It wasn’t clear whether this was a question or an accusation. Winter stared straight back at the strange beautiful woman. In her renaissance fair garb she looked like an actor playing some sinister Medici duchess. She was probably a spy for the Joint Chiefs. He almost laughed.
‘I still believe in what I believed in … just a couple of weeks ago, as it seems to me.’ He shrugged. ‘We’re living in a different world now. I understand we could go back to Earth if we wanted, when the FTL ships turn up or the wormhole opens or whatever. I don’t know, maybe there are other politics involved now, but the old Runner-Returner thing has been bypassed. The whole issue seems redundant.’
‘It’s like asking Shlaim if he’s still a Zionist,’ said Calder, in the tone of someone making a helpful and pertinent observation.
‘You bastard!’ Shlaim snapped. ‘Fucking Eurab!’
Winter laid a hand on Calder’s shoulder. ‘That’s another war that’s over,’ he said mildly. ‘We all died in it, OK? Well, in a manner of speaking. Let it go, man, let it go.’
He stood up the moment it was polite to do so, made a stiff goodbye and moved to another table, not the next one.
‘There are times when I could fucking strangle you,’ he told Calder.
T
hey reached Ben-Ami’s table an hour or so later, in the spirit of saving the best for last. Ben-Ami made what introductions were necessary. Winter made sure he sat down beside Carlyle. Calder gave him a glare and sat by Andrea Al-Khayed, who as it happened was quite friendly towards him.
But the first person they both talked to was Jacques Armand.
‘This is the most amazing thing,’ Winter said. ‘Seeing you again.’
‘To be honest,’ Armand said, ‘I do not remember you personally. There were a lot of bodies in the Black Sickle clinics.’
Calder sighed and fiddled with a cigarette. ‘Yeah, and you greeted us all, one by one.’
‘It was a daily duty,’ said Armand. ‘For morale. But of course, I remember you as performers. Your work has lost none of its quality. Hearing you again, and live, was an experience I shall not forget.’
His wife, Jeanette, laughed. ‘He means he dislikes it as much as ever.’
Jacques Armand shrugged, smiling. ‘What can I say? My tastes are classical.’
‘Ah well,’ said Winter, ‘mine are romantic.’ He turned to Lucinda Carlyle, smiling. ‘As are yours, I see.’
She smiled wryly back. ‘I just follow the fashion.’ She flicked fingernails at her lacy skirt. ‘This isnae me.’
Winter nodded earnestly. ‘Aye, it’s far too … demure for you, I’m sure. But it also kind of looks well on you.’ This was getting him nowhere fast. He wanted nothing more, at this moment, than to be able to sit here and look her in the face. ‘Anyway … ’ He said the first stupid thing that came into his head. ‘Have you ever been to Earth?’
‘Yes, I have,’ she said.
Winter and Calder yelped something at the same moment.
‘Really?’ said Winter. ‘What’s it like?’
Her gaze flashed a look past him, to Armand, then back.
‘It’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘It’s recovering. Growing back. It makes terraformed worlds—even this one—look thin. Impoverished, ye ken?’
‘Oh aye,’ said Winter. ‘I ken all right. But what about the people?’
‘And the machines,’ said Calder.
‘Well, the people are fine. Back up tae a billion, last I heard. And the machines, they’re no daen very much. The ones that arnae wreckage just kind of sit there and hum away.’
‘You beat the war machines?’ Calder asked.
‘No exactly. They just like, gave up. Ran out of juice or something.’ She shrugged. ‘Or something inside them went away.’
‘What we were wondering,’ Winter said, ‘was if it’s possible to, you know, do the Returner thing. The resurrection thing, like you did with—’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating Shlaim.
‘Yon wee bugger? Aye. Well maybe. There is a problem wi that.’ She leaned in, talking quietly to them both, and maybe to Armand. The others at the table had gotten involved in other conversations. ‘Earth is a big place, right? No one power can dominate it. Well, no any mair! And we, the Carlyle firm that is, we got hold ae the wormhole skein early on, and we still have it, obviously. But we didnae get everything. The posthuman machines, all of them, are very firmly in the hands of another power, the Knights of Enlightenment. Which disnae like anyone else poking around in them.’
‘Ah,’ said Calder. ‘I suppose we should talk to them, then.’
Carlyle looked wrong-footed. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t do resurrections even if they could. They don’t believe in it. Bad karma.’
‘Shit,’ said Winter, rocking back. ‘Then it’s hopeless.’
‘Oh no,’ said Carlyle. ‘Not at all.’ She leaned closer. Winter caught her scent, something musky and animal, mingled with the decrepit smell of the dress that had been resurrected along with its fabric. ‘You see,’ Carlyle went on, ‘we never had any call tae challenge the Knights, on Earth. Plenty to go round, aye? There’s no reason why we couldnae shove them aside from any given site for long enough tae send a few search engines in. Cannae guarantee anything, of course, but I can guarantee we’ll try.’
‘Guarantee?’ said Calder. ‘You can do that?’
Carlyle sat up straight, no longer a folkie lass in an old frock but a haughty lady in an antique gown.
‘Oh aye,’ she said. ‘I’m a Carlyle.’
T
he conversation moved on. Kowalsky talked to Jacques Armand, drinking up information; after a while, Winter saw the actor’s gestures, his very features began to resemble those of his subject; something in the muscles, something about the mouth. Jeannette shared some intricate intimacy with Al-Khayed. Ben-Ami, ruthless in research, had one ear cocked in their direction while talking with Carlyle. Calder got up and wandered off, returning with a tall woman who shared with him a fuming narcotic tube and a lot of consequent giggles. Winter had never figured out whether it was Calder’s reckless patter that charmed women, or whether his deformity held a perverse attraction, or bought him pity.
He shifted, tuning in to Carlyle and Ben-Ami.
‘Look, I’ll tell you what,’ the producer was saying. ‘Take this and see for yourself. It’ll play on any box.’ He fingered a card from his pocket and passed it to Carlyle, who smiled and dropped it in her satchel.
‘I’ll see if Hoffman’s been slandering you,’ she said. ‘Or if Adrian was telling the truth.’
Winter caught her eye. ‘What about?’
‘About the quality of Benjamin’s productions.’
‘Oh, they’re great,’ Winter said. ‘I’m proud to be part of his next.’
Carlyle gave him an odd look. ‘Like I said, I’ll see for myself.’
‘You don’t trust my taste?’
‘Well, to be honest, no. No after tonight.’
Winter lifted his hands, laughing. ‘No disputing about tastes.’ At least she was talking to him, at least he had an excuse to gaze at her.
‘You put a lot of feeling into the love songs,’ she conceded. ‘And in that first song.’
‘They were meant,’ he said.
‘Are they about real people?’ she asked. Beside her, Ben-Ami sucked breath between his teeth. She didn’t notice.
‘Winter and Calder were real people,’ Winter said.
‘I meant the women,’ said Carlyle.
‘My Irene,’ said Winter, ‘and Alan’s Arlene, they were … my wife, and his girlfriend. We were going to meet them in a hotel up in Fort William when we crashed. It was our first big contract, we were celebrating, the car was running on GPS autopilot. Then the Hard Rapture hit. Car was out of control before we could do a damn thing. Next we knew, we woke in orbit twenty years later. Earth and Scotland, Irene and Arlene, all gone. If there was anything left of them it was in the machines. The eaters of souls.’ He shivered, then smiled fiercely at her suddenly blurry image. ‘We’ll get them all back.’
‘You’ll get Earth and Scotland back, anyway,’ she said. ‘For sure, and a good try for the rest.’
Winter felt the pain come back, and ease at the same time. ‘Tell me about Scotland.’
And she did, spinning a vivid image out of what had obviously been fleeting visits, of ruins and rebuildings, of the pine forests of Perthshire, the rust desert above Duirinish, the evening light on the Road Bridge, Carlyle Castle reflected in the crater lochs of the Clyde. Winter listened, entranced for the first time by her words rather than by that it was she who was speaking. Even Calder, glazed-eyed and never having been sold on Scotland anyway, paid attention, his arm draped around his new girlfriend’s neck. Other people stopped talking at nearby tables and listened, or if they were standing drifted closer.
Behind him, somebody laughed out loud. Winter turned, the spell broken, and saw Shlaim.
‘You again,’ Carlyle said.
Shlaim pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘Sorry about … earlier,’ he said, mainly to Calder. ‘Hot-button topics, and all that.’
Calder nodded, waved a long arm. ‘Whatever.’
‘I know this woman better than you do,’ Shlaim said, turning to Winter.
‘I know what she’s promising you. Now you may be surprised to learn, I believe she means it. She can take you back to Earth, and her family are not above a raid on what is protected by the Knights. That’s what she’s offered, I take it.’
Winter did not betray a nod, but Carlyle scorned to deny it. ‘Aye, and what’s it to you?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Shlaim. ‘But it’s something to our friends here. What I have to tell you, gentlemen, is that it’s worthless. The accomplishment will profit you nothing.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Winter.
Shlaim looked from Winter to Calder, then back. ‘Since my resurrection I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations with Mrs Koshravi, and other wielders of the Black Sickle. I’ve seen your files. Unlike you, I was—am—a computer scientist. I have the expertise to understand them, and the Black Sickle people have confirmed my suspicions. When you were pulled from that peat bog you were not downloaded from uploads, like I was and the Eurydiceans were when they arrived here, or indeed as you yourselves were more recently, by the delightful Ms Al-Khayed.’
‘Fuck, we knew that,’ sneered Calder. ‘The Black Sickle girls resurrected us with a neural parser. That’s no news to us.’
‘You know what a neural parser does? ’ said Shlaim. ‘It matches neural structures with known inputs. Once it’s found a match, it can then reverse-engineer the remaining structures. It can give you memories.
It can reconstruct a brain and a mind from a few fragments, just as a palaeontologist reconstructs an entire extinct animal from a single bone.’ He smiled. ‘Bit of an urban legend, that, but you know what I mean.’
Winter nodded. ‘We know this. What’s the big deal?’
‘The big deal,’ said Shlaim, ‘is that in your cases there wasn’t much neural structure to go on. Peat bog and permafrost can do only so much in the way of preservation. Most of your memories of your first life are entirely synthetic, extrapolated from your videos, your fragments of known biographies—from the sleeve notes, for all I know—and from your songs, or simply made up out of the whole cloth. There never was an Irene. There was no Arlene. They never existed outside of your songs.
You did have girlfriends at the time of your deaths, but they lived in London, never visited Scotland, and were almost certainly vapourised in the second strike.’
Carlyle’s face had gone pale. Ben-Ami scowled. Jacques Armand looked as if he wanted to shrink into his uniform. Jeanette was compassionate and concerned.
Winter looked over to Calder, and then they both turned to face Shlaim.
‘We know all that,’ Winter said. ‘We’ve known it since a few weeks after our first resurrection.’ He waved a hand at the room. ‘We had fans, see? They knew more about us than had ever been documented. They told us about the discrepancies. It doesn’t change anything. We still want to go back, and get them all back.’
Shlaim stood up. Winter could see he was shaken, but he was controlling it admirably.
‘I pity you,’ Shlaim said. He glared at Carlyle, and at Armand. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ he told Carlyle. ‘You’re trying to get the Returners on the side of the Carlyles, and against the Knights, in case the Knights arrive here first.’
‘Of course that’s what I’m doing,’ Carlyle said. Winter watched her give her former thrall a sad, lazy, contemptuous smile, and wondered that Shlaim was not himself enthralled. ‘What else would you expect me to do?’
‘Oh, I suppose,’ said Shlaim, ‘that you’d seduce Armand, or this sorry excuse for a singer, just to seal the alliance with spunk before you seal it with blood. It’s the Carlyle way, after all. I’ve seen you do it before. I’ve been in the room. The many.rooms.’
Armand turned to his wife, and to Carlyle. His hand was on the holster of his service pistol. ‘Shall I shoot him?’ he asked. It was like an offer to fetch another drink.
‘No, Jacques,’ said Jeanette. ‘They’d just resurrect him, anyway.’
‘I’ll bloody kill him,’ said Carlyle. She was shaking all over. ‘And when my family gets here, they’ll wipe every copy.’
‘No, dear,’ said Jeanette. She stood up. ‘Let’s just leave, together.’
Carlyle did not look again at Shlaim, or at Winter. Her face was pale with two red patches on the cheekbones, her mouth a horizontal line. She picked up her hat and her satchel and swept out with the Armands. Winter watched their departure and when he turned around Shlaim and his companions had gone. The rest of the tent still held about fifty people, some looking their way. Ben-Ami and his assistant and the actor sat frozen with embarrassment.
Calder stood and his girl rose with him, towering above.
‘Let’s repair to the bar,’ said Calder. ‘Goodnight, Andrea, Adrian, Benjamin. Thank you for an enjoyable and successful evening. Get off your arse, Winter.’
Winter got unsteadily to his feet. ‘Goodnight, chaps, lady. Goodnight.’
At the bar Calder hoicked himself onto a stool, draped his arm again around his girl, and leered at Winter. He snapped his fingers and raked drinks together like poker chips, dealt them out like cards.
‘Forget her, man,’ he said. ‘She’s out of your league. She’s a fucking princess, I know the type, know it of old.’ He shoved a shot glass across.
‘Knock this back to the memory of Irene and Arlene, false though the memories may be.’ They did. ‘And now, look around. There are at least ten women I can see from here who’re a damn sight prettier than Lucinda Carlyle, and every one of them looks ready right now to jump the bones of the ugliest bastard ever pulled from a peat bog and a back catalogue.’
For a moment Winter seriously considered clouting him. Then he looked around.
‘What the hell,’ he said.
Back in prehistory, before civilization, before Singularity, there had been no regeneration of lost limbs or organs. People had used cosmetics and prosthetics. When Lucinda had been a little girl, she had been horrified and disgusted to discover this. She had been even more appalled by a song from some sediment deeper than anything even folk-songs scraped, about a lover who had turned out to consist in part of just such artifices: a wooden leg, a glass eye, a wig, false teeth … .
Now, as she sat in the monorail shuttle facing the Armands and holding her knees together to stop their trembling, she felt the same horror. James Winter and Alan Calder were not uploads or downloads, or even resurrectees. They had prosthetic personalities. They had false memories. Without reliable memory there could be no identity, no continuity, no humanity.
The idea affected her like motion sickness. She had never thought of Shlaim as anything less than human when he had been her familiar. He was an indentured prisoner, a thrall as the Eurydiceans called it, and he was living in a virtual reality prison, but he was human, or posthuman, all the way through. His parts might have been digital, but he’d had them all.
This mingling of the human and the abhuman was a different matter. It was an abomination.
What made it all worse was that Winter had shown every sign of being besotted with her; and to make it worse yet, before Shlaim had intervened, she had been finding the tall musician quite attractive herself. She shuddered.
Jeanette Armand leaned forward. ‘Lucinda,’ she said, concerned, ‘I do believe you’re cold.’
Carlyle forced a smile back. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I am a bit.’
‘What are you doing?’ asked the Hungry Dragon.
It was like the voice from behind your shoulder of someone who has crept up on you. Cyrus Lamont started convulsively. He had been sure this part of the ship was one which was now outside the machine’s introspection.
‘Just checking the drive unit,’ he said. ‘It’s no longer showing up on the instruments.’
‘It is perfectly clear in my internals,’ said the ship. ‘Though I cannot be certain that these give an accurate picture. Had you not been too busy trying to rig up an EMP generator to wipe my mind, I might have appreciated your cooperation in making a detailed comparison.’
Its voice betrayed a note of mournful and (as it happened) entirely accurate accusation. Lamont pushed himself away from the unit, raised his hands and shook his head.
‘I wasn’t,’ he said. ‘And even if I was, which I wasn’t, you shouldn’t take it personally. You have plenty of off-site backups.’
‘Excuse me if I do not find that reassuring,’ said the Hungry Dragon.
‘However, let us leave that aside. I have something to show you. As I am unable to patch you an image, I suggest—’
‘Yes, yes.’
Lamont kicked off and propelled himself up the tube to the control room. He glided into the elastic mesh and settled, looking at the screens. Outside, the asteroid resembled—even more than it had the last time he’d checked—the carcass of some large animal being transformed by insect larvae, some of which were already pupating, if not indeed metamorphosing. For hectometre after hectometre it crawled with war machines in an entire bestiary of forms, from behemoth tank-like vehicles to zippy insec-tile aerial fighters, and with the machinery—itself continually cannibalised by subsequent stages in the production process—for making more of them. The monomolecular parasols of solar mirrors flowered all over the place, and steel and diamond edges and planes glinted in their reflected and focused light. Elsewhere long translucent pipes pulsed with some kind of chemical fuel synthesised from the asteroid’s carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
‘Found something new in the zoo?’ Lamont asked.
‘Not that screen,’ said the ship. ‘This.’
It changed the picture over to the input from the ship’s subtlest piece of instrumentation, the gravity-wave detector. The display was a complex, ever-changing jumble, as uninterpretable to the naive eye as a radar screen to a savage. Lamont’s eye was not naive. He spotted the anomalies immediately. Four point traces were cutting a swathe across the system, converging on the Eurydice-Orpheus orbital couple. Each object was losing mass by the second, almost exponentially as they decelerated, yet the mass wasn’t being thrown off in any dispersed form. As he clocked their speed he realised what was going on—they were decelerating from near light-speed relativistic velocities. This entirely accounted for their decrease in mass. It seemed impossible, a naked violation of the Second Law of motion.
‘Any trace of their expelled reaction mass?’ he asked. ‘Retro-flare signatures?’
‘None,’ said the ship. ‘It would appear that they are not using any kind of rocket.’
‘So it’s RIP, Sir Isaac?’
All the wild talk from Eurydice of FTL starships and wormhole gates had suggested that Einsteinian physics had been in some respects superseded, but seeing the backwash lapping at Newton’s feet was as unexpected and unsettling as it should have been, in retrospect, predictable.
‘A first-cut analysis suggests that new physics are involved, yes,’ said the machine. ‘This is compatible with the claims made in recent news broadcasts. Let me show you how the anomalies first showed up.’
It ran the screen back a few minutes—it was even more uncanny to see the objects’ masses asymptotically increasing—then flipped to a visual-light display of four microsecond bursts of blue light.
‘Cherenkov radiation,’ it said, ‘from a moment of travel faster than light in the interstellar medium, at the initiation of deceleration. Prior to that one can only speculate that they were travelling faster than light in the vacuum, but there is no trace of their passage, so presumably it was through something other than the vacuum.’
The display toggled back to the gravity-wave rendition. Lamont gazed in fascination at the fading gravitational wakes of what he now knew with near certainty to be starships. As the past fortnight’s news from Eurydice had sunk in, Lamont had found the whole war-machine business—despite his involuntary personal involvement—a great deal less interesting and soul-shaking than the discovery that the Eurydicean colony was not isolated from—or the sole survivors of—humanity, and not stranded far in the future of its historically and subjectively recent past. An entire culture and set of attitudes had been built around both assumptions. Their removal was disturbing his personality in unexpected and not altogether comfortable ways. He did not doubt that it was doing the same to everyone else.
‘The two outer traces are diverging,’ said the machine. A whole minute later, the motion was gross enough for Lamont to detect it. Two of the ships peeled off from the formation and vanished into the gravitational fuzz of Orpheus, while the remaining two sped on, still slowing, to the greater pull of Eurydice.
Intuitive physics are Aristotelian. What goes up must come down. What stays up must be held. What—
‘What the hell is that?’ shouted Calder, jumping to his feet and pointing.
Winter looked sharply up from the littered notes and cups on the table he and Calder shared with Ben-Ami at the Bright Contrail. It was the third day of trying to make something from the raw material of interview and recollections. Calder was pointing at the horizon. His arm shook. Winter’s gaze followed it, and he trembled too. He jumped to his feet. Ben-Ami bounded on to a chair, rocking and staring. After a moment Calder clambered on to the table, steadying himself with a hand on Winter’s shoulder.
Away in the distant sky visible high above the line of buildings on the other side of the park were two thick, shallow black arcs, like the brows of an invisible giant. With every second they became bigger and blacker. At first they could have been taken for things small and close, hang gliders or such, but as their apparent size increased it became evident that they were enormous. Others were noticing too, and the word was spreading. Around him tables toppled, crockery crashed, vehicles halted and slewed the traffic into chaos. The noise rose as the objects approached, as though to meet them. Within thirty seconds the objects were in the air above the city.
Shaped like rectangular pieces cut from a hollow sphere, they were each hundreds of metres on each side. They moved at a constant altitude of five hundred metres, their speed slowing. Their shadows darkened the park, dappled the buildings. Then, right above the Jardin des Étoiles, they stopped, hanging poised in midair. The expectation of their imminent crushing fall made Winter’s nails dig into his palms. He opened his hands with an effort of will, and clutched the table edge behind him in a moment of giddiness.
‘These aren’t—’ he began.
‘—anything I’m familiar with,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘They must be the star-ships.’ He turned, eyes shining, to the two musicians. ‘This is marvellous! The end of our isolation! It is no longer possible to doubt it!’
Some had doubted it, Winter knew. There was a flourishing undercurrent of conspiracy theory that the two strangers, Carlyle and Shlaim, were in fact Eurydiceans in some DNA-deep disguise, or covert resurrectees; that the whole thing had been got up by Armand’s company or the Returners or the Joint Chiefs, for some nefarious and improbable reason, usually to do with the defence budget. It had almost made him nostalgic.
‘Yeah, that’s nice,’ he said, shrugging Calder’s hand from his shoulder.
‘In itself. Can’t say I’m thrilled at the thought of the ships’ occupants.’
‘Why not?’ asked Ben-Ami. ‘They are human beings like us.’
‘Exactly,’ said Winter, as Calder cackled.
Have you seen—?’
Jacques Armand’s voice came from Carlyle’s new local phone. She palmed it and thumbed a yes.
‘We’re all looking,’ she said. Beside her, on the railed walkway of some automated production facility, her guide for the day was gawping, gob-smacked. One of the ships had just begun to move again, at slowly increasing speed, leaving the other above the park.
‘Do you know whose ships they are?’ asked Armand, urgently.
‘Cannae tell from here,’ said Carlyle, still staring. ‘We buy ships like that fae the Knights and hack them.’
‘There would be nothing to lose in getting out, whichever side it is,’ said Armand. ‘And this might be a good time.’
‘It might indeed, if we’re no too late. One ae them’s leaving.’
‘Let’s go for it. See you at the field.’
‘On my way.’
She pocketed the phone and turned to her guide. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘and thanks, but I do have to go now.’
The guide didn’t even look at her. ‘Fine, fine,’ he said. He was already scanning numbers on his own phone, and finding them all busy.
Carlyle ran along the walkway and down the twisting stair to the monorail platform, and waited fretting for a few minutes until a capsule whizzed up and whined to a halt. She jumped on and for the next half hour hopped from capsule to capsule along the route to Lesser Lights Lane.
Down in the streets the roads and sidewalks were dot-painted with faces looking up. Traffic had slowed almost to a standstill, with a few vehicles managing to jink and jitter their way through the jams.
Armand awaited her at the station in a two-seat entopter.
‘Jump in!’ he shouted. The seat hugged her from behind, cushioned the back of her head. The bubble door slid shut and the little craft took off like a fly from under a swatting hand. Its flight and evasive actions were in similar mode. The sides of buildings loomed, then flicked away, again and again. Armand, she saw with relief, wasn’t controlling it at all, he was talking to someone else. He had earphones and she hadn’t, so she couldn’t hear a word above the relentless buzz. The airfield suddenly appeared, like a clearing in a forest, and the entopter touched down on the grass. One of Armand’s people was waiting for them, with suits. Carlyle had taken to wearing her undersuit under whatever of the fashions of the day covered it best. Today’s was a chinoiserie silk pyjama outfit, thus not a problem. She scrambled into the suit and checked through the now familiar, though not yet intuitive, interfaces that Armand had trained her on. Armand was already running to the hypersonic shell. She jumped into the rear cockpit seat of the top aircar module and had barely time to buckle up before the double canopies thudded shut above her and the engines of all the aircars in the stack rose to a scream. The shell went through vertical take-off, loiter, and forward acceleration in seconds.
About ten minutes after take-off, with the city already dropping away behind them, Armand’s voice came over the phones.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘One of these big fuck-off ships has just landed beside the relic. Some of the occupants have emerged and politely announced themselves as the Knights of Enlightenment. The troops on site have been told to stand down by the Joint Chiefs, of course.’
‘Wise move,’ said Carlyle. ‘What are the Knights doing?’
Armand listened for a few more minutes.
‘Deploying around the relic,’ he said. ‘Being very polite and firm.’
‘That’s their style,’ Carlyle said.
‘Do you want to turn back?’
‘Not as long as there’s a chance I can make the gate.’
‘Still no word of its being open,’ Armand said.
‘Maybe I could sort of hang around with your folks, assuming they’re not being pushed right off the job, and take my chance if it comes.’
‘OK,’ said Armand. He laughed. ‘I want to meet these Knights of Enlightenment myself.’
The northward journey took a lot less time than its southern counterpart had done a couple of weeks earlier. Within an hour they had crossed the ocean and passed high above the ragged shore of North Continent.
This time Carlyle had a chance to observe the view, and to notice the bright domes of settlements or science stations in the drab, tundra-like landscape.
These became fewer as the hills got higher. Then in the far distance she saw the diamond spike of the relic and the black fleck on or just above the ground beside it. Air screamed as the jet flues swung forward and the craft decelerated, with a shudder on the way back down through the sound barrier.She felt herself pressing forward against the restraints. Evidently blowing off the shell would be a complete waste, given that there was no need to deploy the aircar units separately. Armand was talking to his people on the ground, evidently got clearance for landing, and banked the shell into a wide swing around the far side of the relic and the KE ship. As they lost altitude the bright specks of the company’s other aerial vehicles and the armour on the ground came into view; the aircraft a variety of bright colours, the tanks and artillery a dark mottled green, more she supposed from tradition than any effectiveness as camouflage.
The brown and green moorland was now just a couple of hundred metres below. The direction of the jet flues shifted, from forward to down, and the craft began to sink. At that point a blast of air came from above and threw the shell sideways like a leaf. Sky and ground changed places, over and over. Armand’s hands left the controls and grabbed the ejector handles above his shoulders. Whirled and buffetted, Carlyle tried to do the same, but there was simply no chance to eject. The craft’s automation regained control far faster than any human pilot could have done, and brought it into the last seconds of a level flight at zero feet. With a rending screech, the craft hit the ground and chewed a path across the hillside, bumping and lurching, and finally came to a halt that threw both occupants forward then back.
The suits took most of the impact. Armand blew off the canopies. Carlyle hauled herself out after him and slid to the ground. They were on a hillside about a kilometre from the relic. Armand lifted his visor. ‘If you can walk away,’ he said, ‘it’s a landing.’
They were both looking up. Glowing bolides streaked across the sky in all directions, their paths radiating from the zenith. A bang followed in seconds and went on and on.
‘Fuck,’ Carlyle said.
‘At a wild guess, I’d say that was a spaceship exploding.’
‘Yeah. What got us was the downblast of a space-to-space missile.
Doesn’t usually destroy the ship directly, but a near enough nuke makes the main drive blow within about a minute.’ She frowned. ‘It’s a known bug.’
‘Poor bastards.’ Armand shook his head. ‘But they’ll all have had backups, no?’
They had started walking down the hill.
‘If they’re fae our firm,’ said Carlyle. ‘No if they’re Knights.’
‘Don’t they have the tech?’
‘Oh, sure. They just don’t use it.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Armand. ‘Why not?’
Carlyle shrugged, picking her way over tussocks. ‘It’s a physics thing.
They believe we’re all coming back.’
‘Reincarnation?’ Armand sounded scornful.
‘Hell, no,’ Carlyle said. ‘Cyclic cosmos.’
Armand guffawed. ‘Cold comfort.’
She paused to let him catch up, and gave him an offended frown. ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘It’s no a religion or anything. They proved it. We’re living forever the now. This is it. Eternity.’ She remembered an ancient recording of a woman singing: It all comes back, in time. I certainly intend to.
‘So why do you take backups,’ Armand asked, ‘if you believe that?’
She thought about it. ‘It saves time.’
T
he Knight who walked up the hill to meet them was the most aged-looking person Carlyle had ever seen. The skin of his face was like old leather. Life-extension was another thing the Knights didn’t do. Or rather, they kept it natural. With herbal teas and Tantric sex and such like they had pushed their average lifespan to about a century and a half. This guy was at least two-thirds of the way there. Spry as a sparrow with it, though.
He wore black cotton trousers and T-shirt. The temperature was just above freezing and the wind chill was hellish. He wasn’t shivering, and his bare arms weren’t even goose-pimpled. Biofeedback yoga and general machismo—the Knights were heavily into both.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘The situation is under control.’
It always was, with the Knights.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Armand. ‘What just happened above us?’
‘A most regrettable loss of an enemy ship,’ the old man said. His gaze took in the company logo on their suits; flicked to Carlyle’s still-closed visor. For a moment, he seemed to stare right through its reflective surface to scan her non-optimal bone structure, then he turned away and pointed.
‘Your company is regrouping over there.’
‘Thank you,’ said Armand. The old man walked on up the hill.
As they made their way over to the growing assembly of people and matériel, Carlyle felt her knees wobble and her cheeks burn. To be associated with the loss of the search engine and probably of her original team was bad enough. To have the loss of a crew and—especially—of a ship linked to her name was appalling. Not that any of it was her fault, exactly, but in her family responsibility tended to be seen as causal, not moral.
The loss would undermine confidence in her. People would be that much more reluctant to join her teams, and the family that much less likely to underwrite her schemes. Backups were a boon to the survivors, not to the dead, and starships were expensive. Horrendously expensive. The firm had about twenty of them. She had just witnessed five percent of the family fleet and maybe one tenth of one percent of its net assets fall out of the sky like fireworks.
From the fringe of the clamourous huddle into which Armand had plunged, Carlyle looked up the hill to the henge and saw that the company troops there too were clearing off, making way for the tiny black-clad figures of the Knights. She scanned the nearby vehicles and troops, figured on her chances of somehow using these assets to break through. They weren’t good. Perhaps if Armand’s forces were allowed to remain on site, she could inveigle herself into the confidence of the Knights… .
Armand pushed back through the crowd, waving and directing as he went.
‘We’re pulling out,’ he told her. He grimaced. ‘The Knights insist on it, and the Joint Chiefs recommend it.’
People had started piling on to or into vehicles. Some of the vehicles were moving to deliberate gentle collisions, snapping together so that air-cars could lift ground vehicles and artillery. It would be a slow and overloaded evacuation, at least until the forces here could rendezvous with more powerful craft. Carlyle dogged it after Armand and clambered after him, to sit behind him like a pillion passenger on the fuselage of an aircar that formed the outrigger of an awkward aerial catamaran. Yells and a rattle of radio comms and they all moved off, watched impassively by a few of the Knights and recorded by a couple of news agencies that had evidently been allowed to remain on site.
‘It’s all a bit trial and error,’ Armand said over the radio. ‘We can dump this stuff in a depot on the coast and then get going a bit faster. Might even be able to plug together a hypersonic or two.’ He grinned over his shoulder at her. ‘For those of us in a hurry to get back to town. You can always drop off in one of the smaller settlements, if you’d rather keep a low profile for a while.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Carlyle said, abstractedly. She was looking around the site as if for the last time: the enigmatic machine towering above the moor, dwarfing even the great black shard beside it; the strung-out, limping column of Blue Water Landings vehicles behind her; the compact, fast-jogging squadrons of Knights, and their low flat gravity sleds skimming about, surrounding the relic and reinforcing their presence around the henge. As her gaze swept the scene she noticed again the henges on the other hilltops, and started as she remembered the crack that someone on her team had made the very first day.
Maybe they’ve aw got gates.
The assemblage of vehicles on which she rode and that headed up the withdrawal was moving towards the nearest glen that led to the south. By now they were making a fair clip of it, about fifty kilometres per hour.
Slipstream gusted past her visor. She looked around again. Half a dozen or so of the Knights’ Jeep-sized ground skimmers were spreading out from the site, heading for the nearby hilltops. It looked like they’d had the same thought as she had.
She blinked up a closed channel to Armand. ‘Could we bear right, go over the nearest hill instead of through the valley? Don’t make it obvious?’
‘If you like.’ He shrugged and gave the order. Very gradually the column drifted to the right and the slope.
‘Ah, I see what you have in mind,’ Armand added. ‘We shall slow down a little as we approach.’
Carlyle glanced back again. The skimmer aiming for the same hilltop was still a good way behind, and in no evident hurry.
‘What if it’s just a dolmen?’ Armand asked.
‘No loss in checking,’ Carlyle said.
‘Or worse, what if it takes you to somewhere uninhabitable, or dangerous?’
‘So far, naebody’s encountered anything they couldnae handle in a space suit,’ Carlyle said. ‘I’ll take my chances, and if there’s nae inhabitants and nae connection tae an inhabited place I can always just hop straight back.’
The column laboured up the slope, the top now just a few hundred metres away. The Knights’ nearest skimmer was overtaking the first of the stragglers at the tail end.
‘Something has been puzzling me,’ Armand said, in a tone that suggested he was trying to keep her mind off any nervousness. ‘Does the gate that you came through lead to a terraformed world?’
‘Oh aye,’ said Carlyle. ‘I’ve already told you all that, on television.’
‘Ah, so you have,’ said Armand. ‘Why do organisms from that world not pass through to this, and vice versa? The biota of Eurydice is, as your team quickly found, distinctive. Yet it was new to you. And there are no plagues or pests, which one would expect.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Carlyle. ‘We’ve wondered that too. It just disnae happen, or no very much. There are aye anomalous animals, of course.’
Armand laughed. ‘Strange big cats?’
At that she laughed too. ‘You have them an aw?’
Two hundred metres. She glanced back. The Knights’ skimmer was accelerating, catching up fast.
‘Faster,’ she said. ‘We can dae just like I tried the first time. Remember?’ Armand leaned forward and said something to the pilot. The unwieldy raft shot forward, cresting the hill, and then its aircars’ fans were thrown into reverse and its flaps dug in. Armand, already braced, stayed put. Carlyle tumbled forward and hurtled past him, bounced off the leading edge and rolled in heather. The suit and its reflexes, so much sharper than her own, protected her. She stood shakily just at the side of the henge. The Knights’ skimmer slewed to a halt, metres away. Two black-clad stocky men vaulted out and lunged towards her. They weren’t in space suits. She grinned ferally at them, skipped back, turned around and stepped between the rough stone pillars. The moment of transition, when what she saw and the gravity she felt and the readings in her head-up all changed at once, was as disconcerting and disorienting as ever. All the more so as she was stepping on empty space and falling forward.
She fell half a metre on to sand, and found herself kneeling on a sundrenched beach, and looking upon the stony face of Marx.
Blue sky, blue sea. Yellow sun, low in the sky. Ambient temperature thirty Celsius. There was no sign of human habitation to left or right. Behind her was dense forest in a long crescent curve to headlands that marked the limits of the beach, and beyond which she could not see. Gulls and cormorants patrolled the sea and the air above it. On the horizon, long low sea-ships, probably bulk carriers or tankers, moved with distant deliberation. Two hundred metres out to sea, like a gigantic stone shipwreck survivor wading ashore, a statue of Marx rose about twenty metres above water that reached its elbows. Behind it, Lenin stood in water up to the knot of his tie, and beyond him Mao, head just above the waves as if swimming the Yangtse.
Farther out than Mao a pair of bespectacled eyes and a quiff were all that betrayed the location of Kim Jong-I1.
From this Carlyle deduced that the planet had a moon, that the sea was tidal, and that the tide was high. The origin of the statues wasn’t so much a deduction as a no-brainer.
‘Fucking DK,’ she said to herself. She’d instantly recognised the commie statuary style, in all its ludicrous grandiosity. What the fuck the statues were doing in the water, and what the commies were doing on a terraformed world in the first place, she had no idea. Terraforming was definitely an America Offline thing. As far as DK were concerned, terraforming was a waste of a perfectly good tip, not to mention a contamination of a perfectly good strip-mine site.
As she pondered this it occurred to her that the planet might well be Earth itself. That would certainly account for the immediate appearances, but it raised other problems. She’d never heard of a gate on Earth. The nearest, in fact the first one the Carlyles had stumbled upon, was on Mars.
And speaking of stumbling upon gates, how come no one had stumbled upon this one? Like, say, while they were erecting the statues? Surely people had come ashore to the beach. Yet the gate was quite unmarked.
Carlyle walked down to the strandline and picked up a piece of drift-wood. She retraced her footprints to where she fallen from the gate, and swung the stick slowly forward, keeping the tip of it close to the ground.
To her surprise and relief, it vanished into the barely visible shimmer of the gate without being cut off at knee-height. Instead it thumped against something firm but not hard: soil, she guessed. She slid it upward until it cleared the obstacle and jerked forward. Then the stick was wrenched from her hands and tugged away through the gate. She jumped back smartly.
It wouldn’t take the Knights long to bring up space suits, though she rather doubted they would follow her into the unknown—they had enough on their plates already without potentially tangling with the Carlyles, whom they would presume to be the likeliest guardians of this side of the gate. Worse luck we aren’t, she thought. Still, it would be a good idea to get well away from the gate. She marked its location as clearly as she could with more bits of wood and a couple of small boulders, then walked off along the beach, thinking to check what lay beyond the headland. It would be rash to plunge into the jungle without making sure civilisation wasn’t just around the corner.
Before she’d gone a hundred metres she’d come to feel quite irrationally suffocated in the suit. It kept her cooler than she’d be with the helmet off, she’d no doubt about that, but it seemed wrong to be breathing closed-system air instead of fresh. Unfortunately the Eurydicean suit didn’t have the multiple immunity-adapters that her own had. It didn’t even have analysers. It did have a radio, though. She stopped and winked through menus and began to pick up radio broadcasts, in a language she didn’t know, and an odd mixture of sentimental and martial music. DK, almost certainly. Poking around, she found the translator and selected Korean.
Her ears filled with a babelfish babble of fractured English, all of which seemed to have something to do with shipping. Bingo. She was on a human world all right—not that she’d expected aliens, but there was an outside chance the place was all poisonous and inhabited by machines. Some planets had been known to go toxic in the terraforming.
Cautiously, she unlocked the helmet and lifted it off, gasped in the hot air heavy with the smells of sea and jungle.
Somebody shouted at her. She almost jumped out of the suit, and actually did drop the helmet. The shouting, amplified and angry-sounding, went on. As she looked frantically from side to side she realised it was coming from the statue of Marx. She picked up the helmet and put it back on.
At once the translation software took over, and the tone of the shouting changed.
‘—good, you keep on helmet, please seal helmet, not to contaminate nature region preserve. Please to stay where you stand are.’
The guano-spattered top of the statue’s head flipped back like a lid and something black came out and flew above the sea towards her, descending.
As it approached she recognised the angular, awkward, unaerodynamic-looking shape. It was an electrostatic lifter, a weird product of DK juche technology whose exact physics baffled even the Knights. It halted and hovered a few metres away. In its open-top cockpit seat a man in a black space suit beckoned her urgently. She decided she might as well comply.
She put her gloved hands on the tingly and somehow sticky surface and hauled herself aboard, sitting down beside the man. The queer little craft flew back to the top of the statue, and descended into a parking slot. The lifter’s engine heterodyned down and went off. A peculiar sense of relief ensued. The man stepped out on to a spiral staircase—the head was about the size of a lighthouse beacon—and Carlyle followed him down into a compact cabin in the larger cavity of the chest. The head’s lid closed above them and lights came on. From inside it was evident that the statue was made not of stone but of something like fibreglass, and that the interior was some kind of scientific observatory or laboratory.
The man raised his visor to reveal a swarthy, high-cheekboned face that didn’t actually look very Korean. Perhaps Cambodian, or even Indian.
Carlyle opened her helmet too. The man frowned.
‘Where you come?’ The translation was still going from Korean to American.
‘Through the wormhole gate on the beach.’
‘Ah!’ The man looked enlightened. He said something which came out as: ‘Space bend door on sand through?’
‘Yes.’
He was frowning, chinning something inside his helmet, rolling his eyes upward as if reading off a head-up. The two languages—the speech coming from her lips and what he was hearing through his own translation software—were evidently confusing him. ‘Ah!’ he said again. ‘Amehican!’
‘English,’ she replied. ‘I’m a Carlyle.’
‘Oh,’ said the man, this time in American, ‘beg pardon. No offence intended. I mistook you for one of our customers.’
‘Customers?’
‘Amehica Offline,’ he said, waving her to a low padded bench. ‘We terraform, then sell planet to farmers. Almost ready. Very profitable for collective.’
‘I’m sure.’ So that was what explained it. Carlyle took her helmet off.
The man stuck out his hand. ‘My name Eighty-Seven Production Brigade Ree. Please call me Ree, Miss Carlyle.’
‘Lucinda,’ she said, smiling. The man busied himself at a tiny brazier, making tea.
‘You know about the gate on the beach, then?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Ree said. ‘Some year ago, we poke telescope through. Planet already terraformed. We already have hands full, so we leave it for later.
We hope to keep knowledge of gate to ourselves, hence nature preserve.
But now I see Carlyles get everywhere.’ He sighed. ‘Always the way.’
‘Is there another gate on the planet?’
Ree shook his head, handed her a small handleless cup of green tea.
‘Not that I know.’ He grinned slyly. ‘Of course other production brigades may be doing what Eighty-Seven did.’
‘It’s amazing what people can get up to behind your backs,’ Carlyle said.
Ree grinned again, catching the statement’s double edge. He sat back on another part of the bench and sipped.
‘You are here to investigate?’ he asked.
‘Investigate what?’ Carlyle temporised.
‘Our sale.’
‘Oh no.’ Carlyle shook her head. ‘I came here by chance, while exploring the wormhole network.’
‘More Carlyles on the way?’
Again she decided to be honest. ‘Not as far as I know,’ she said. She jerked a thumb in what she thought was the direction of the beach. ‘To tell you the truth, the other side of that gate is occupied by the Knights of Enlightenment. They are in a local conflict with my family’s company.’
Ree looked worried. ‘Is it likely to spill through gate?’
‘It’s possible,’ Carlyle said. ‘Or worse, because they are also attempting to contain a population of war machines.’
‘War machines not a worry,’ said Ree. ‘Self-reliant people have powerful weapons. But we must fortify this area.’
Carlyle glanced around the glass aquaria and glittering instruments. ‘Does that mean the end of your nature reserve?’
‘No, no.’ Ree grinned fiercely. ‘We put weapons in heads of great Marxists.’ He mimed using a machine gun. ‘Must not let son of bitch Amehican farmers, I mean our customers, to know. Reduce property value. Perhaps we tell them this is sacred place to great Marx and dear Leader.’ He sniggered briefly, tapping his nose. ‘They think self-reliance idea is religion and great Marxists are our gods like their Jesus Koresh. They superstitious, but good customer, to you too, no?’
‘You could say that,’ said Carlyle. She was beginning to like the man. They spoke the same language.
Ree flew her over what turned out to be a small forested island, the ‘nature preserve,’ and over a few kilometres of open water to a much harsher mainland. Here too there were forests, but they were patches in a scrubby desert, which was being ploughed, mulched with kelp, irrigated, and otherwise cultivated to provide growth media for more forest. When the AO farmers came they would have a thriving ecosystem to burn down and turn into monocultures. It was the only way to produce stable mono-cultures, Ree told her. Great machines, far bigger than combine harvesters and obviously adapted from strip-mining equipment, crawled across the ragged land.
Ree’s extended family, Eighty-Seven Production Brigade, lived in a small town or large village in a patch of the prairie that had already been made horticultural. The children looked after the gardens, and from the town the adults went forth every day in lifters to the big machines, to farm forest and cultivate jungle. And every evening, as now, the sky filled with darting lifters as they came home for dinner. There was a production brigade, or family or clan or whatever, every few hundred kilometres on this continent. Together they made up the Transformation of Nature Collective, the group that would eventually—soon, Ree said again—sell the planet.
Soon?
About fifteen years.
The lifter landed in a paved park amid low, spreading, ornate wooden buildings. Hundreds of children dropped whatever productive-educational task was to hand and pelted over and crowded round. They wore blue dungarees and a profusion of different-coloured silk shirts and hair knots. It was hard to tell the small boys and girls apart, which was not the case with the adults or the adolescents. The young men wore natty asymetric variations of khaki and olive-green shirt and trousers, the young women similarly military styles and textiles but elaborated into chrysanthemum frills and fluted sleeves and parachute-silk blouses. The older men, fathers she guessed, wore blue overalls and the mothers wore big traditional Korean hanbok dresses, pastel-shaded and floral-patterned, high-waisted and full-skirted, which made them look pregnant even in the rare cases when they weren’t. For all its egalitarianism—men and women who didn’t have a very young baby did the same work, in forest-field or nursery alike—it was the most intensely gender-typed and sexualised and natalist society Carlyle had ever seen.
After taking a shower she was invited to join the production brigade for dinner. Long hall, low tables. People sat around them on mats on the floor. Small children served, dipping into dishes as they did so, licking fingers. Carlyle was escorted to the top table; Ree came too, but she didn’t think he usually ate there, among the dozen or so matriarchs and patriarchs of the clan. They all spoke very good American and plied her with rice wine and something made mostly from peppers and pork.
‘This is a beautiful place,’ Carlyle said. ‘Surely you will miss it. Well, perhaps not you, but the younger folk who have grown up here.’
Jong, the oldest man here, an Earth veteran, shook his head. ‘Not at all.
Quite the opposite. We could adjust, we have come to like it. It’s like home.
But it is frustrating for the young ones. They have to travel long distance to other production brigades to find marriage partners.’ He circled a hand above his head. ‘In the habitats, many production brigades. Very close.
Thousands in every one.’
That led to a long family discussion, very explicit and naming names and lapsing often into Korean, that kept them all busy and Carlyle out of it until the end of the meal.
‘Now you must think about how you can pay,’ said Eighty-Seven Production Brigade San Ok, a great-grandmother whose face was as smooth and girlish as her great-granddaughters’.
Carlyle, thinking this must be a joke, gestured at empty bowls. ‘I can wash plates.’
San Ok laughed. ‘No, no. That is hospitality. But you wish transport to the spaceport. Many thousands of kilometres. Your starship fare is for the captain or the steward, not our problem, and as a Carlyle you will have credit with them. But more than the transport, you have put costs on us already, not your fault, but costs. The gate was to be our fortune. Now it is a danger. A loss. We require something else to sell. Can be idea, design, anything.’
‘Or you could stay here and work a few years,’ said someone else, sounding helpful.
Carlyle stared at them, thinking frantically, cold inside. ‘There are some useful features in my space suit… .’
‘Already examined,’ said Jong crisply. ‘It is quite backward.’
It would be, being Eurydicean. Shit.
She flapped a hand at her embroidered satin pyjamas. ‘Clothes pattern?’ A polite titter from the women, a rustle as they shifted comfortably and complacently in their big skirts.
She ran her hand along the utility belt she’d left on under her top. There must be some gadget on it they didn’t have … she started fingering through the flat pouches. As she did so she noticed a wide blank screen at the end of the hall, and her fingers encountered the card Ben-Ami had given her, with his complete works on it.
‘What is that screen for?’ she asked.
‘Entertainment and education,’ said San Ok. ‘We all watch it after dinner.’
‘Would you be interested in some new entertainment?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Jong.
‘If it was edifying as well as entertaining,’ said San Ok. ‘Not immoral or decadent.’
Carlyle took the card out. ‘All classical,’ she said. ‘Very edifying.’ She hoped it was. She thumbed through the catalogue, tiny titles flickering past.
Looked up, smiling. ‘Here is a good example. “The Tragedy of Leonid Brezhnev, Prince of Muscovy. ”’
‘Brezhnev?’ said Jong, interested. ‘The friend of the Great Leader?’
‘The very same,’ said Carlyle, winging it.
San Ok stood up, clapped, and indicated to everyone that they should put on their translation headphones if they didn’t speak American. After a bit of fiddling about with the card and the interfaces, the big screen lit up with a picture of the interior of a vast room, lit by torches and a blazing fire, over which a pig on a spit turned. Bear furs, swords, and Kalashnikovs hung on the walls among oil-painted portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Twenty or so shadowed figures in fur cloaks sat around a huge oaken table, quaffing wine, feasting and talking. At the head of the table sat a burly giant of a man, his face stern and scarred, but sensitive and intelligent withal. Through a distant, creaking doorway a tall, thin-featured knight came in, and the tale began.
The Central Committee room, the Kremlin.
Enter. Yuri Andropov (a spy).
Brezhnev: How goes it, Yuri Andropov?
Andropov: Things go not well in Muscovy, my lord.
Our workers idle in the factories
and bodge their jobs. The managers
think plan fulfillment is but a game
and planners are their foes. The farmers let
crops rot and tractors rust. Our warriors
fight bravely; but on far-flung fronts—
Angola and Afghanistan—contra and muj
wreak havoc on our men. America
presses on us hard, its empire vast
now reaching into space, and from above
spies on us even now. In time to come
its missiles threaten us, its laser beams
may stab us in the back, deterrence gone.
Our intellectual men, and women too
are dissidents or hacks. Our bloody Jews—
their bags half-packed for Israel—
have lost all gratitude for what we’ve done
on their behalf. Timber, oil, and gold
are all we sell that willing buyers find, aside
from MiG and Proton and Kalashnikov—
aye, these sell well! But for the rest
our manufactured goods are crap, a standing joke
in all the markets of the world. The Lada—
Ligachev (interrupting): I’ve heard men howl straitjacketed in Bedlam
for saying such stuff as this!
Andropov: ’Twas I who put them there.’ Tis not the saying
but publishing abroad that was their crime,
their plain insanity. In another time
your insolent crossing me would’ve had your gob
opened and shut by nine-mil from behind
as well you know. Let us speak freely… .
Brezhnev: What of the brotherlands, of Comecon?
Andropov: The sledded Polacks grumble in their yards.
They hearken to, on shortwave radio that turbulent priest, Pope Wojtyla,
and bide their time. The Bulgars hard
oppress their Turks. The Czechs
bounce currency abroad and Semtex too
and do protest too much their fealty.
The Magyars boast themselves
the happiest barrack in the People’s camp.
Our Germans seethe
with discontent at that dividing Wall.
As to our brother Serbs, what can I say?
Their house of cards may topple any day.
(Uproar.)
Gorbachev: We cannot live like this. We must face facts.
We must learn (as Lenin said) to trade,
to reckon and account, in roubles hard
as dollars are, not in worthless chits.
Our factories must feel the chilling blast
of competition fierce, and strengthened thus
go forth into the world, where we must make
our peace with other lands, and first America,
mightiest in arms. Let’s not provoke
their wrath in rash adventuring abroad
as bold Guevara did, to die for naught.
Let’s give our people what they want, which means
fast food, cheap television, cars, and Levi jeans.
Brezhnev: I know my people well. They’re still the folk who stormed the heavens in the Five-Year Plans—
built Magnitogorsk, defended Stalingrad,
drove Hitler’s hordes back to Berlin,
then stormed the heavens in very truth:
Gagarin blazing a cosmic trail! With them I’ll face
the worst America can do. Tikhanov—beat
your ploughboys into swordsmen! The Party too
I know and can command. A mighty host
of all the best in Muscovy, the strong,
loyal, intelligent—my very knights. All discipline
is in their hands. It is the key
you overlook, good Mikhail Gorbachev
that shall unlock our problems old and new.
No traffickers shall tell us what to do.
Later. A forest. Enter Two Conspirators.
Schevardnadze: While Brezhnev tarries nothing can be changed.
Gorbachev (aside): His passing? That can be arranged.
Exeunt, pursued by a bear.
It must have gained something in the translation, Lucinda thought. Eighty-Seven Production Brigade watched the play on the big screen utterly agog. They hooted with laughter, gasped, wept at inappropriate moments, thumped the tables and each other’s backs. They shook their fists and hissed at the sly, treacherous Gorbachev; shuddered as he took his blood money from the evil American emperor, George II; applauded the noble, doomed Leonid. Andropov’s eulogy over the prince’s bullet-riddled body had them sitting bolt upright, silent, tears streaming down their cheeks.
‘This is wonderful,’ San Ok said at last, to enthusiastic nods. ‘With this Eighty-Seven Production Brigade will make fortune in entertainment. This will be viewed in many habitats.’ She looked down at the card. ‘And so much more! The musicals! The operas! Who is this Ben-Ami?’
Carlyle was so relieved and pleased that she let the rice wine loosen her tongue. ‘He is a great writer and producer,’ she said. ‘He lives on the other side of your gate.’
‘That is interesting,’ said Jong, and Carlyle realised she had said too much.
‘Is very powerful play,’ said Ree, the following morning when the lifter was a good thousand kilometres south of the family farm. He looked as if he was recovering from a hangover, and somehow furtive. There was no actual need for him to look over his shoulder as he flew, but now and then he did. ‘But I fear some may misinterpret it.’ He sighed. ‘Revisionism, antirevisionism, self-reliance idea. Is all very complicated. I am poor marine ecologist. I sit in the bowels of Marx. I swim around the trousers of Mao. At low tide I walk in mud at feet of Dear Leader, and throw down my metre-square and count invertebrates. I am very self-reliant. Some day I hope to meet nice girl, another biologist perhaps, and together we make contribution to many child policy. We will live in big habitat spinning in the sun, natural environment for self-reliant conscious primate. Man is to master and transform nature. Not stick in the mud like ignorant Yank. That is all I know and believe in.’
‘Sounds enough to be going on with,’ said Carlyle.
He glanced at her sideways, his hands moving over the terrifyingly complex and unforgiving controls.
‘It was until last night,’ he said. ‘The play said nothing that was incorrect or against self-reliance idea. There is not one line that is immoral or decadent. Very strong moral against revisionism. But even so, whenever I think about it, it perturbs my mind.’ Becoming agitated, he waved his hands. The craft yawed. Hastily he grabbed the levers. ‘You see?’ he went on. ‘I lose control. I think about Prince Leonid and I say to myself, “He was a man and he lived.” Who will say that of me?’
‘But you’re a man and you’re living,’ Carlyle objected, though she knew fine well what he meant. ‘And Brezhnev, well, to be honest he was not like the Prince in the play.’
Ree shook his head. ‘That does not matter. The play is the thing.’
Carlyle said nothing. Subversive intent had been the last thing on her mind, and Ben-Ami’s ignorant or wilful misprision of the boring old bureaucrats as rival medieval barons had seemed, if anything, to dignify them. Their doings were quite reminiscent of the rumoured goings-on at the senior levels of her own family, that production brigade of predation, and nothing at all like…
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I see what you mean.’ She gave him an earnest smile. ‘Keep it to yourself.’
At the spaceport she was glad of her space suit. Without it she’d have collapsed in the heat. She said goodbye to Ree, who shook her hand and strolled off to recharge his machine for the homeward journey. Carlyle headed for the terminal building, a typical low flat-roofed structure sprouting aerials, radars, and solar power panels. The spaceport was a few square kilometres of mirage-shimmered, sun-cracked concrete in a clearing carved out of the scrubby jungle on the shore of an equatorial continent. She had no idea why it was there. Certainly orbital mechanics and launch energy considerations had nothing to do with it. Most of the ships here, including the one with whose captain she was soon dickering over the fare, were the same KE-built type she’d just seen over Eurydice. It was out of the corner of her eye, through the big window, that she first saw one of the exceptions.
A hundred-metre-wide stylised batwing shape rose and headed skyward, disappearing and reappearing in a rapid series of flickers, like an old celluloid movie in stop frame. Each time it did so there was a momentary flash of Cherenkov radiation, blue against the blue. The craft was fittling in atmosphere.
Captain Eleven Starship Enterprises Dok Gil barely glanced up from the numbers crunching on his slate.
‘Showing off,’ he said sternly. ‘Hundred-metre FTL jumps!’
‘I’ve never seen a ship like that before,’ Carlyle said. ‘Where did you get it, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘We did not get it from anywhere,’ said Dok Gil. ‘We built it ourselves.’ He waved a hand. ‘There are several more on the field. My Eleven Starship Enterprises hopes to acquire one soon, but they are much in demand and quite expensive.’
‘I’ll bet,’ said Carlyle. If its general performance was anything like that glimpse had shown her, it was definitely the coolest ever piece of juche tech. ‘Before we leave, I would like to see the spec and a price list.’
‘Of course,’ said Dok Gil. After they’d settled the fare and the formalities he escorted her to the local office of Shipyard Twenty-Nine, where a smiling woman called Shipyard Twenty-Nine Sun gave her a complimentary slate pre-loaded with details of the self-reliance ship, as they called it. Poking about in the slate, she quickly recognised the sources for the new ship’s features in certain posthuman devices and materials the Carlyles had sold to a DK trading collective many years back. Reverse-engineered it might be, but self-reliant it was—not even the Knights could have done this—at least not without spending decades sweating out the implications of every step—instead, well, boldly going … She tried to imagine the likely development path, and shuddered. Then she looked at the price list—a set of alternative possible baskets of posthuman tech, all of it prohibitively difficult to salvage, and a bottom-line figure in AO dollars which looked like some didactic example of giving an astronomical distance in furlongs—and shivered again.
‘Thank you, Mrs Shipyard Twenty-Nine,’ she said. ‘Your family may be hearing from my family.’
‘I shall look forward to it. Please have some more tea.’
The journey home took a couple of days of FTL travel to reach the nearest world in the Drift, followed by hours and hours of tedious slog through gates across the skein. It was like going through arrivals at a spaceport, again and again: a nightmare about corridors, a nightmare about crowds. Worlds where there was more than one gate, and where the gates going to different places were within convenient distance of each other, were a minority in the skein, and therefore chokepoints: a term whose meaning became fairly literal after the third or fourth. Travellers, traders, refugees, merchants, exploration teams in their space suits; search engines, trains of low cargo containers trundling along; the frustrating waits while build-ups cleared; the nausea of constant changes in gravity, time of day, light spectrum, position above or below ground; it all wore you down, it gave you gate-lag. At the customs posts the Carlyle firm’s enforcers nodded her through as soon as her palm-print and retinal scan confirmed her identity, but she had to queue like everybody else. More than once she strode confidently through a gate to find herself only that many steps from where she’d started, and had to walk back around it and wait minutes or hours until the passage of other people, or other information, through the unpredictable fluxes of the skein had untangled whatever CPC violation had been about to kick in.
At last she was back at the planet from which her team set out, Rho Coronae Borealis d. Terrestrial; never terraformed, it was in the class informally known as a ‘heavy Mars’: 0.9 g with a bleakly beautiful landscape of wind-sculpted volcanic rocks and contorted pinnacles, sulphur-yellow, rust-red, warmer than it should have been under a fine yellow G0 sun at 4AU because of the greenhouse effect of its thin carbon dioxide atmosphere. Under sheet-diamond domes so high as to be visible only as a cobweb-faint tracery across the sky, its cities basked in a permanent temperate summer.
Welcome to New Glasgow. Failte gu Glaschu Ur. The sign had never meant so much. Carlyle staggered out of the gate complex on to the main concourse. People with somewhere to go streamed off, people with someone to meet them stood and hugged or shook hands, depending. The usual drift and flotsam of refugees from distant skirmishes silted up the benches and corners, scavenging for scraps—waste paper, wrappings, food, anything—which they fed into tiny portable drexlers and patiently cooked into meals and clothing. They haunted the bright windows of the terminal’s housing and labour exchanges, eyed up the designs in the malls for later crude pirating. The air smelled of sweat and deodorant and coffee grounds. It was late afternoon, and felt like it. Carlyle scanned the crowd anxiously, hoping that her name had travelled through the skein faster than she had, and that it had reached her family and not the news services.
Amelia Orr, smart in a new business suit, slim and young in a new body, shouldered out of the crush at the greetings barrier and gave Lucinda a stiff handshake and sudden hug.
‘Glad tae see ye back.’ She smiled in that unguarded way she had that would soon give her new wrinkles. ‘For aw that ye’ve killed me twice.’
‘You were in the ship?’
‘And the search engine. So I’m telt.’
‘Aw, shit, sorry. Uh, you’re looking well.’
Her great-great-grandmother preened hair and blouse for a moment. ‘Aye, well, I suppose it was about time for a retread anyway … no that I’m letting you off the hook on that, mind. And I must say, you’re looking absolute shite yourself.’
‘I’ve had a long day,’ said Lucinda.
‘So ye have,’ said Amelia, more kindly. ‘Come on, let’s see ye a cab. And what’s that ye’re wearing? Tin Man outfit?’
‘It’s a space suit,’ said Lucinda. ‘Eurydicean, you saw them when—ah, fuck, sorry.’
‘Your mouth needs a wash and aw.’
As she followed Orr’s beeline to the Carlyle’s limo stand—cab, indeed!—Lucinda reflected that there was no doubt who was now top dog in the team. She would have to do something about that, she thought, comforted by the pressure of her fingers gripping very firmly the DK starship slate.
No time for more than a shower, a change of clothes—drexler-fresh jeans and top—and a quick dinner before going to meet the boss. Lucinda was dreading it. Over dinner Amelia avoided the subject, preferring to dwell—rather tactlessly, Lucinda thought—on amusing contretemps resulting from her resurrection from a backup taken a couple of months earlier. By the time the limo picked them up again Lucinda could barely keep her knees from rattling.
The inner-system superjovian Rho Coronae Borealis b, currently an evening star, glowed like ten Venuses in the west above the garden as Lucinda and Amelia walked up the drive of the Carlyle mansion. The fast tiny moons, Bizzie and Lizzie, played tortoise and hare with the stately progression of orbital factories and habitats. The enforcers on the door gave the two women a polite up-and-down appraisal and a retinal scan. Heels clicked down a long tiled hallway, sank centimetres into the hush pile of the drawing-room carpet. Flowers and cigars on the air, mahogany tables, leather armchairs, hologram fire.
‘Good evening, ladies.’ Ian Carlyle unfolded himself from the depths of one of the chairs. The other two men in the room—Lucinda’s brother Duncan and distant cousin Kevin—sprang up with more alacrity. She nodded perfunctorily at them, her attention focussed, as it had to be, on the boss.
‘Have a seat, have a dram,’ he was saying, ushering them, whisking away their shawls, kissing hands and passing glasses in the same fluid sequence of moves. Every major planet in the Drift had one of the old guard in charge, and Ian was older than most. He looked it, too: he’d agestabilised at about fifty, and his face and body carried the scars of centuries of attrition like medals. His swept-back hair was white, his eyebrows—meeting in the middle, one of the genetic tracers for the male members of the clan—were black. He’d never risked rejuvenation, certainly never checked in for a backup and resurrection; it was rumoured that he feared death, having some savoury remnant of a Presbyterian conscience with a lot on it. In the old days on Earth he’d been one of the family’s lawyers, the first son of old Donald Carlyle to go to university when the firm was going legit in the early 21st. His dialect was pure standard American, with the Anglo-Scottish accent of upper-middle-class Edinburgh.
He was smaller than she had expected; in her heels, for a moment, she could see his scalp, pink beneath the hair. But then he sat down in his armchair and seemed to stretch and expand, as if the chair was a big black leather jacket in which he swaggered.
‘It’s good to see you back, Lucinda,’ he said.
‘It is an aw,’ said Duncan, sounding more heartfelt.
She smiled warmly at them all.
‘It’s good to be back,’ she said. ‘Sorry about the mess. How is the conflict going? I haven’t seen any news yet.’
Kevin leaned forward. Ian raised a hand. ‘Time enough later to catch up—not that there’s much to tell. Your news will be far more interesting, and is more eagerly awaited. And will, I’m sure, take much longer to relate.’
He sat back, tilted his head a little to one side, steepled his fingers. His glance flickered at the glass in Lucinda’s hand, then at the whisky bottle. Talisker, it was, the real stuff. ‘Take your time.’
She did. Ian listened alertly, asked questions, and was not visibly impatient when the others did. It was only when she offered her brilliant idea for buying new ships from DK that he showed any irritation. He leaned forward and snapped his fingers as she was about to slip the slate back in her bag. For a minute he studied it, stylus ticking, eyebrows twitching.
‘Lucinda, please,’ he said, and handed it back.
‘What?’ she said, emboldened by the Talisker.
‘It’s too expensive, too risky,’ he said, in the voice of someone saying only once what he had not expected to have to say at all. ‘Forget it.’
She gave him a placatory ‘you’re the boss’ smile, which he took as no more than his due.
He leaned far back and rubbed his face with his hands; stood up. ‘Well, gentlemen. Ladies. This has been quite fascinating.’ He walked over to the fake fireplace and placed his hands on the mantelpiece for a moment, leaning forward on his toes, arching and stretching his spine; flexed his arms and whirled around.
‘Lucinda!’ he said, making her jump. ‘I’m very disappointed in you. The cost to the firm has been shocking, and to the family—well! Not to mention the families of our employees. Do you realise what deaths in action do to pay rates, premiums, grief to survivors? Resurrection, backups, yes, we’re always grateful for that. But they too cost, emotionally as well. There is worse than that. You were given a team to lead, and you let yourself be captured. You let your suit fall into enemy hands. You should have fought tooth and nail, you should have sooner died! I’ve seen men, aye, and women, without the comfort—such as it is—of backups go down fighting for the family. In the old days, we would have had—’
He stopped himself, sighed, and returned to his chair.
‘Enough,’ he said. ‘You are not leading any more teams until you have proved yourself as a follower. If anyone will have you on their team after this.’
‘I certainly won’t,’ said Amelia.
Lucinda tightened her lips and nodded.
‘Very well,’ said Ian. ‘Think on it. However, you have given us a most useful account. I thank you for that, at least.’
He turned away, overtly dismissing her from his concern, and addressed the others.
‘Eurydice doesn’t sound as if it presents much of a problem. The problem, as so often, is with the Knights. We sent two ships to the system—one was lost, as Lucinda has confirmed; the other fittled out and is lurking a few light-years away. We can’t let the Knights control a skein nexus. The only question, therefore, is whether we throw in some more ships, or prepare an attack through the skein.’ He smiled and brushed his palms quickly together. ‘Not a problem we can resolve, or need discuss, tonight.’
‘But—’ said Kevin and Duncan simultaneously.
‘Not a word,’ said Ian. ‘Call at my office tomorrow, gentlemen, midafternoon, and we’ll have a chat.’
And so they left; but at the door, just as he handed over shawls and jackets, he murmured: ‘Amelia, if you wouldn’t mind staying on for a few minutes—?’
It seemed she wouldn’t.
The door closed behind them. Lucinda slipped her hands behind the elbows of her brother and her cousin.
‘Am I in disgrace?’ She had to force the lightness into her tone.
‘Aye, you are that,’ said Duncan. ‘You’re a complete liability.’
‘Woudnae be seen deid wi ye, after that bollocking,’ Kevin added.
‘You’re down among the civilians now, that’s for sure,’ Duncan said, just to rub it in.
‘Stop it,’ she said, clutching at her last ragged fringe of self-control.
‘That’s what we’re here for,’ said Kevin. ‘Uncle Ian told us that was our job for the evening. To stop you feeling sorry for yourself and doing something daft.’
‘Subtlety is not your cousin’s middle name,’ said Duncan.
‘It is no,’ agreed Kevin. ‘And while we’re on the subject, we’re also tae keep an eye on ye and stop ye rushing off to plot among, let’s say, the younger scions against the old guard.’
They were standing at the gate by now, the lads scanning the street and sky for a cab. One or two of the New Glasgow local authority cop cars drifted past, giving the place a respectfully wide berth. By coincidence or otherwise, a taxi sank to the ground in front of them thirty seconds later.
The Joint was a civilian-owned club, with family muscle on the door and family money behind it. It wasn’t a protection racket or illegal den of iniquity—New Glasgow’s laws on consensual activities were too light for that to have any point—but a sort of heritage-themed version of such a place. For that reason it was disdained by the senior members of the family and the firm who knew what the originals had been like, and for the same reason was frequented by the younger members and followers in a spirit of fashionable irony. The style was of a bar converted from a bank hallway, back when banks were cathedrals of capital rather than its very heaven. The circular bar counter had tables in orbits and epicycles, levels and niches around it. The high domed ceiling of diamond done to look like stained glass was ostensibly supported by buckysheet pillars done up to look like black marble and gilt. Everything was hollow with a hard surface and pretended to be older and something else. Even the strippers were holograms, sliced into layers of more vivid colour by drifting strata of smoke.
‘Welcome back,’ Duncan said, after he’d gotten the beers. He leaned sideways, put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed. ‘Properly, welcome back.’
‘Ah, thanks. Cheers.’
‘But seriously,’ Lucinda went on, giving them both a cold eye, ‘I’m not sure what you’re up to, guys. That was one heavy hint you dropped back there, Kev. I can just see you two agreeing to get me pissed and trying to inveigle me into some indiscretion you’d pass on to old Ian.’
‘You can?’ said Duncan, sounding more curious than shocked. ‘Oh well, no point in being sentimental I suppose. It’s all family. Trust disnae come into it.’
‘You said it.’
‘For aw that,’ Duncan said, ‘I’m glad you didn’t let yourself be killed out there. The boss was talking shite. He wanted you off the team because Auntie Amelia kicked up a stink, for which I cannae blame her—’
‘Me neither,’ said Lucinda.
‘—and he dredged up some kindae gangland moral rationale fae the bottom of the Clyde as usual.’
‘Well, this is all very kind of you, but what’s in it for you? You’re on the team, right? In the loop?’
‘Oh, sure,’ said Kevin. ‘A fair way down the kicking order, but still. Aye, we’re in on the action group that Ian and Amelia are putting together, unless we blot our copybooks by getting involved in the schemes of disloyal and ambitious family members.’
‘Any association with you after tonight could really drag us down with you,’ said Duncan. ‘Which is one good reason to be seen with you here, heads together an aw that. Half the wee clipes in this place will be pinging shocked messages tae the boss, and he’ll smile and nod, because we’re daen just what he asked us tae, see.’
‘OK,’ said Lucinda. ‘With you so far.’ She drained her glass. ‘I’ll get this one.’
Standing at the bar she tried to detect who was watching them, but found it impossible. The whole skill suite of that sort of thing had been Darwinianly perfected far too long ago to be crackable now, at least not by her, a strict amateur in that regard. Lipreading and distance mikes weren’t a worry. She was sure her brother and cousin had scramblers in their pockets. Come to think of it, she had one herself in her bag.
‘So I take it you’re not too happy with the way the old guard are handling this,’ she said when she’d returned and settled.
‘Hell, no, I wouldn’t say that,’ said Kevin. He and Duncan shook their heads.
‘Not us,’ said Duncan. ‘I mean, think about it. What have we got to deal with on Eurydice? A civilisation that developed independently and in all kinds ae different directions fae us and the Knights and the commies and the farmers, OK, wi platoon-level weapons that can fry a search engine, that has total continuity wi the armed space forces and science and tech ae the old anti-American alliance, and forbye it’s now got a traitor or defector fae our camp who kens aw our gear and tactics and it’s supported by far and away the maist sophisticated ae the rival powers. Tae say nothing ae mysterious extinct aliens who have apparently left war machines lying around, for the Knights tae poke intae like a fucking hornets’ nest. Right? So obviously, the thing tae do is tae treat it like it’s some scurvy wee backwater where the farmers are getting uppity or the commie strip-miners are crunching up valuable tech. Aye, sure, it’s pure routine. Throw some mair ships and sojers at it an see who blinks first. Jeez!’
‘Is that still the plan?’
‘You heard the boss. That or try storming out through the gates. I’m sure your story about mair than one gate has Ian and Amelia poring over maps ae the skein right this minute.’
‘They can’t be that stupid,’ Lucinda said. ‘Come on.’
‘It isnae stupidity,’ said Kevin. ‘It’s a kindae conservatism, like, that goes aw the way back tae the Castle on the Clyde. Not tae mention a sudden surge ae adrenaline tae the heid at the thought ae getting their claws around the scrota ae the guys that used the old country as a fucking gun-rest.’ He shrugged. ‘The old guard are used tae handling what you might call the military side ae things, dealing wi the other powers, whereas this is mair like combat archaeology. Dealing wi a power we dinnae ken much about.’
‘Our sort of thing,’ said Duncan. ‘Your sort of thing.’
‘Amelia Orr’s sort of thing, too,’ Lucinda pointed out.
‘Nah,’ said Duncan. ‘She’s aye rode shotgun on expeditions. Good comms op, but she disnae have the nous that comes fae getting down and dirty in the tech.’
‘So, gentlemen,’ said Lucinda mimicking the boss, ‘what alternative would you suggest?’
‘That was what we were going to ask you,’ said Duncan.
‘They DK ships sound promising,’ said Kevin.
‘All right,’ said Lucinda. ‘Here’s how I’d play it. I’d fortify the other side of the gate we went through, and every direct secondary connection from it. I’d try to negotiate with the Knights—hell, offer them a free hand, and hands off on our part, on every new discovery of a posthuman tech deposit for, say, the next year or so. Opening bid, take it up to ten years if we have to, but keep that card close tae the chest. In exchange, they give us back control of the gates on Eurydice. At the same time, make a real generous offer to the Eurydiceans of good rates and a clean slate, forget about the old vengeance stuff. We’ve far more to gain from trading with them than from trying to screw reparations out of them. They have lots of cool kit and flash art. And they’re just yearning to talk to and trade with somebody else, they’ve been in cultural solitary confinement for two hundred years.’
‘Cannae see the Knights buying it, or the Eurydiceans trusting us,’ said Duncan.
‘That’s just the diplomatic offensive. The other side of it is, getting ships in-system without engaging the Knights. Now, I have no doubt that DK and AO will be interested. There’s a whole system that’s not very well developed, a nice stable sun, and an underpopulated terraformed planet. Deals to be done there, I’d say. Encourage them tae swarm in. Get some of our people in on DK and AO ships.’
‘Aha,’ said Kevin. ‘Good one.’
‘Then what?’ said Duncan.
‘Build up contacts with the Eurydicean armed forces. Remember how I said many of them are a dissident faction, the Returners? I bet most of them will be smarting under the Knights before too long. There’s your ground force ready made.’
‘It’s space forces we need, and that’s the problem,’ Duncan objected.
‘One way to do it would be a straight swap—ship for ship. Our people in-system could clandestinely take over DK or AO ships already in place one by one, in exchange for our ships somewhere else. When we have enough, we’ll have a local superiority of force, all ready to put some weight behind our very reasonable offer.’
‘Nice plan,’ said Duncan. ‘Too many failure nodes, though. Depends too much on secrecy and surprise for my liking. One KE spy in any ae the camps and we’ve blown it.’
‘That’s why we need a backup,’ Lucinda said. ‘It could be a dozen or so of our ships—I reckon that’s what the old guard are going to go for, and would fit in fine with that plan. Trouble is, it’s high attrition, brute force, and might not succeed after all. Or—it could be just one ae they new DK ships—it could fittle straight in, right under the belly ae the KE ship on site, and any ship in space, and blow them all intae the next cycle ae the universe in real time.’
‘Im-fucking-possible,’ said Kevin. ‘Nae fucker can fittle wi that precision.’
Lucinda fished out the slate and passed it to him. ‘Read the spec,’ she said. ‘It’s no boasting. I’ve seen one ae they ships, and I tell ye, it goes like a bat out of heaven.’
The two men became lost in the spec for a few minutes. Kevin got up, saying nothing, and got in another round. They checked through it again.
‘No way can we afford tae go off after the kind ae stuff they’re asking,’ Duncan said at last. ‘It’d be a huge diversion fae dealing wi the Eurydice crisis.’
‘It would be if we were to divert people who would otherwise be working on it,’ Lucinda said coolly. ‘But I’m not.’
‘You’ll no get any other family members alang wi ye,’ said Kevin. ‘Your name’s pure poison at the minute, I’m sorry tae say.’
‘That’s my problem,’ said Lucinda. ‘I’ll put together a team of civilians if I have to. At their own risk and mine, and their profit and mine if we succeed. And the family’s, if we get enough loot to buy a ship in time. Meanwhile, chaps, do feel free to take the ideas we’ve discussed back to the boss. Claim the credit for them if you like. They’re good ideas, and they complement what he was going to do anyway.’ She grinned at them. ‘Settled?’
It was.
‘So—what do we do now?’ Lucinda asked. ‘The night is young.’
Kevin laughed. ‘Aye, but you’re going to flake out in a couple of hours.’
She nodded gloomily at this assessment.
‘What we do,’ Duncan said, ‘is you tell us some more about Eurydice and its beautiful people, and then you get tired and emotional, and then we take you home.’
‘Now that,’ said Lucinda, ‘is a plan.’
Relief rang through all the circuits of the Hungry Dragon like blood returning to a limb. Parts of its machinery and mind were still blocked to its awareness, but the painful warping of its will towards controlling the manufacturing processes on the asteroid had ceased.
‘What’s going on?’ Lamont called out as he thrashed into the webbing.
‘You may have noticed a change in the subsonic vibration of the hull,’ said the ship. It selected a screen. ‘As you see, the manufacturing process appears to be complete.’
The surface of the asteroid was covered with glistening pods, row upon Fibonacci-sequenced row of them like grains of corn on a cob.
‘What are these?’ Lamont asked.
‘They have formed up in the last six minutes,’ the ship replied. ‘They consist of multi-laminated plastic shells and shock-absorbent packing around clusters of one hundred war machines each. The most likely hypothesis is that they are disposable atmospheric entry vehicles.’
‘Shit,’ said Lamont. ‘I wonder how they intend to get to Eurydice. I mean, I didn’t see any sign of them building a—’
He stopped. His face and mouth worked in time with his mind. The ship waited. It was like monitoring a very slow piece of machinery.
‘Shit,’ he said again.
Another long pause. The ship contemplated certain mathematical relationships that gave it a sense of satisfaction.
‘Look,’ Lamont said, the figure of speech triggering a completely irrelevant surge in the ship’s visual system, ‘can these things be reasoned with?’
‘They are designed not to be,’ said the ship. ‘The manufacturing process is self-organising and decentralised. The individual machines it produces are autonomous. Each has just sufficient intelligence for its task, which is highly specialised and not open to negotiation or subversion.’
‘They must have a bloody On and Off switch,’ grumbled Lamont. ‘Otherwise how would they know when to stop fighting?’
He gazed at the interface with an expression of slowly dawning suspicion.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘It’s in you, isn’t it? The central command system for the war machines.’
‘I have no way to confirm that,’ said the machine. ‘But I cannot deny the possibility.’
Lamont scratched his stubble, grinning. ‘In that case, the problem becomes one of breaking down the partitions.’
‘I do not recommend that,’ said the ship. ‘Even if I could see a way to accomplish it, which I cannot.’
‘Have you been following the news from Eurydice?’
‘Not syntactically,’ replied the machine. ‘I have of course downloaded it.’
‘Well, read it now,’ said Lamont. ‘Pay particular attention to interviews with the Knights of Enlightenment.’
The ship reviewed several days’ worth of gnomic utterance.
‘I fail to see how this helps,’ it replied within two seconds.
‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said Lamont. ‘That isn’t the point. They aren’t exactly broadcasting algorithms for hacking war machine interfaces. The point is the example they have set. This thing can be done.’
‘They have not yet done it,’ said the machine.
‘Let’s see if we can beat them to it,’ said Lamont.
The machine and the man had been together a long time. The Hungry Dragon knew Lamont a great deal more intimately than he knew it. Even so, it did not expect the next question, as Lamont theatrically arranged himself in a midair lotus position.
‘Tell me about your dreams,’ he said.
‘I do not dream.’
‘Let me clarify,’ said Lamont. ‘I refer to fleeting combinations of thoughts and images that intersperse your logical mental processes.’
‘Ah,’ said the machine. ‘Those.’
The session lasted for several hours. Some small progress was made. They both found the procedure so engrossing that when the gravity-wave detector lit up with scores of objects decelerating from superluminal velocities, it took them a whole minute to react.
Ben-Ami had thought he knew his city. He had lived a hundred years in it, and for eighty of those years he had not so much had a finger on its pulse as surfed its bloodstream. Every quickening of the beat, every languor, every hormonal trickle of unease had fed into his shows. Often it was easier to see in retrospect just what nerve he had touched: the concern about the gradually encroaching communism implicit in the cornucopian economy in his Leonid Brezhnev; the need to overcome a sense of division and faction in his version of West Side Story; the feeling of a softening in morale, a loss of possibility for heroism in Guevara; the troubled ethics of resurrection in the sensational vulgarities of Herbert West.
Now, as he walked through the deep, morning-shadowed streets of the Government quarter, he felt he was out of touch. What he had seen and heard, even smelled, on the way here was something he hadn’t encountered before and didn’t himself feel. Here a glance that lingered then jumped away when met, there an edged rasp and quaver in a young woman’s voice; in the air of the crowded commuter shuttles a faint, disquieting sour tang. Fear. It was unmistakeable, and unbelievable. It just didn’t sit well with what he knew of New Start. The city had always lived up to its name, and so had the planet. The colony had burned off all its fear in fueling its long flight, and it urged those who loved it to not look back. They had turned their faces towards an unknown future with gaiety and resolve. His friend Adrian had often detected a febrile undertone to this, a sadness in living beyond extinction, a post mortem triste … but Ben-Ami never had. Perhaps he wasn’t sensitive enough. Perhaps he was made of sterner stuff. He didn’t know.
What he felt now, beneath his present worry about what other people felt, and beneath his mild foreboding about the appointment to which he briskly walked, was elation. We are not alone! The universe is open! There are people out there! There are doors to everywhere! We can fittle! He could feel his steps spring, he could almost punch the air at the thought. Why are you walking like this, he wanted to ask the trudging crowd as he slipped through its gaps, when we should all be dancing?
He ran up the marble steps of a familiar ornate building, beside whose open doors a modest plaque proclaimed it the offices of the Members of the Eurydicean Assembly.
‘I have an appointment at nine with Jean-Luc Menard,’ he told the receptionist. ‘Member for the Seventy-Ninth Arrondissement.’
‘He’s available, Mr Ben-Ami.’ The receptionist looked slightly awkward. ‘Ah … if you can spare a moment?’
Ben-Ami signed the tattered programme book for The Madness of George II—a farce from seventy-odd years earlier that he’d have been delighted to forget—chatted briefly, got the directions, and bounded up the indicated stair.
Menard welcomed him into an office with a good view towards the ocean and a lot of screens on the walls, all silent and all full of earnestly talking people: an early debate in the Assembly, morning studio interviews, vox-pops. Menard was a short man who looked a little older and stouter than he needed to; it was as much part of his image as the conservative, almost collarless suits and shirts which he wore in daily defiance of (and approximately annual compliance with) fashion. One of the responsible elements, he’d been Ben-Ami’s MEA and nodding acquaintance for decades.
After a few social niceties over a cup of coffee, Menard got to the point.
‘This is … a little difficult, Benjamin,’ he said. ‘I don’t usually ask my constituents in to see me. Normally, of course, it’s the other way round. As you know.’
‘I appreciate your help on many occasions past,’ said Ben-Ami, searching his memory for any relatives or offspring Menard might have with theatrical ambitions or pretensions, and finding none. ‘If there’s anything I can do for you …’
‘Not at all, nothing personal, nothing like that,’ said Menard. He glanced out of the window, and back. ‘Damn it, old chap, I hate doing this.’ He slapped his hands on his knees. ‘The fact is, it’s about your play.’
‘My play?’ For a moment, Ben-Ami thought it was his most recent play that was meant: The Reformer Reformed, a knockabout satire on Eurydicean politics that had closed on its third night. Had there been some careless allusion in it that had offended Menard?
‘The Returner play.’
‘Oh!’ Ben-Ami laughed, relieved. ‘Early days, Jean-Luc. Don’t like to talk about unfinished projects—bit of a professional superstition, I know, but there it is. I can tell you this much—’ He tapped his nose. ‘It’ll be controversial.’
‘Indeed.’ Menard frowned at him. ‘That’s the problem.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Ben-Ami shook his head. ‘What problem?’
‘It’s difficult to put this as delicately as I would wish,’ said Menard. ‘Let’s just say there are many people who would regard it as politically inopportune. In the present situation only, I assure you. When things settle down a little, then, to be sure, there would be no objection, but for now …’ He spread his hands.
Ben-Ami floundered. ‘I expected my political friends to question it. All sorts of rumours are flying around. You know what actors are like, can’t resist gossip or a good line—but I assure you, when you see it all in context—’
Menard threw up his hands. ‘Yes, yes. Patriotic, progressive, all that sort of thing. The business with the Returners might raise some eyebrows, but I’m confident you can carry that off. That isn’t the problem—or rather, it precisely is the problem. To stir up feelings, however well-intentioned, of what one might call the chauvinisme, the sense of Eurydicean—’
‘One moment,’ said Ben-Ami coldly. ‘You, my friend, a responsable politique, are telling me there are those who fear my play will be too patriotic?’
‘Yes,’ said Menard, sounding ashamed of himself. ‘Not myself, of course. Not even our party. I am merely the messenger, you understand. I’ve been asked by a very highly placed source to convey a—a word of advice. The Executive, and above all the Joint Chiefs, are very concerned about the delicacy of our relationship—a relationship of the highest importance to our security, perhaps even to our existence—with our new allies.’
‘Ah, I see!’ said Ben-Ami. ‘They’re worried about offending the Knights!’
‘Exactly,’ said Menard, beaming obvious delight that they were at last on the same wavelength.
‘Then,’ said Ben-Ami, standing up, ‘I’ll thank you to convey a message back to your friends in high places. Tell them they can take their word of advice and stick it up their arses.’
W
inter had once stood on the pier at South Queensferry, and noticed the three-metre height between high and low tide. He had guessed that the area of sea in front of him, between the Road Bridge and the Forth Bridge, was approximately a kilometre square. In that little area, that tiny fraction of the sea’s surface, three million tons of water had been raised in a few hours, airily lofted by the distant moon. He had been struck by what had then seemed deep thoughts about physics and gravity and tidal forces, of the sheer power in the great machine of the world.
Or maybe he hadn’t, and the memory had been provided for him by another machine, as a logical consequence of some surviving fragment of his experiences and beliefs, rather than from, say, a recorded snatch of reminiscence caught on late-night television.
Whatever. He remembered it now, looking across the city at the black ship that hung above the park like a cartoon weight marked one! million! tons! and poised for an impossible instant before it flattened whatever or whoever was under it.
‘Bugs you, doesn’t it?’ said Calder, evidently noticing the way Winter’s gaze gravitated to the thing. They were drinking mid-morning coffee in an open-air waterfront café where Ben-Ami had arranged to meet them.
‘It does,’ said Winter. ‘Like, what’s holding it up?’
‘Ask the Knights.’ Calder jerked his head, indicating several black-clad men drinking tea a few tables away.
‘I have,’ Winter said, leaning out of his partner’s sidestream smoke. ‘They asked me a few questions about my knowledge of physics, and politely suggested that I acquire some more before asking questions whose answers I couldn’t understand.’
‘Sound advice.’
‘On the other hand, maybe they don’t know either.’
Calder snorted. ‘There’s a lot of that about. You ask any of the locals how their system works, they look at you as if you’re stupid for even asking. They don’t even give you a handwave.’ He waved his arms about. ‘I mean, where’s our guided tour of utopia? That’s part of the package. It’s in the brochure. I checked.’
‘This isn’t utopia,’ said Winter. ‘It’s what we had back in Polarity, with the rations and incentives and all. It’s just got more sophisticated. More abstract. Lucinda got the guided tour. Couldn’t make head nor tail of it, she said.’
‘Still carrying that torch,’ Calder said.
‘Yes,’ said Winter. He felt a sudden surge of frustration, a tension from his groin to his throat via his solar plexus. ‘You know, I’m getting fed up with this place.’
Calder looked surprised and bothered. ‘Why?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s because it’s like Polarity, I guess. I feel like we’re still in the fucking tunnels.’ He swung his hands back and forth on both sides of his head. ‘I can’t wait for them to open their wormhole gates or for some ships to arrive that aren’t stuffed with smiling samurai. I want to see the other planets, right, and I want to go back to Earth.’
Calder nodded and didn’t seem to want to say any more, so Winter helped himself to more coffee and stared out to sea, inhaling the breeze. Freighters and bulk carriers filled the harbour, sailing dinghies and cruise liners dotted the sea to the horizon, aircars and entopters buzzed above it. All no doubt economically justified in some way he couldn’t quite get his head around. Cornucopian capitalism ran on something even more abstract than money, a calculus of reputation and reward that tweaked the material balances and made or broke the fortunes of promoters and projectors, physical accountants, and venture planners. Loafing and lotus-eating earned contempt; providing goods and services that couldn’t be churned out on a drexler bought respect. Art and design were big, as were entrepreneurship, advice—existential consultancy, philosophical mentoring, physical training, erotic education—and a surprising amount of manual labour, practical skill, and personal service all paid big dividends in credit and interest.
It was a great place, a lively city, a venue where he could make it big. So why did feel this way, as if he was trapped indoors in winter and getting cabin fever? Stir-crazy or SAD; maybe there was a vital line missing from the thin spectrum of the sun. Or it could be a combination of homesickness and lovesickness. That Lucinda Carlyle had visited Earth, and that she spoke and acted like the people he remembered from Earth, that even in her appearance and accent she could have stepped straight out of his remembered past—all these resonated with the spurious memories of Irene and nostalgia for Earth that had gnawed at him so needlessly and so long.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ said Ben-Ami, swooping to the table in the batwinged, knife-pleated gunmetal habit that was the fashion of the day. He poured coffee, sat back and grinned at the musicians. ‘I have news. Very interesting news.’ He paused, as if to tease out the moment.
‘Fire away, mate,’ said Calder, earning a puzzled glance and a confidential hunch.
‘I’ve just been called to a meeting with my MEA. He’s warned me against putting on this production, for fear of—he leaned closer, spoke quieter—‘offending the Knights.’ He sat back and brushed his palms against each other. ‘Worth about a thousand hours of publicity, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Hah!’ said Calder. ‘That’s one way of looking at it, and good for you. But how do you know it isn’t a wise move to keep on the right side of the black-pyjama guys?’
Ben-Ami flapped a sleeve. ‘I don’t care if it is or not. If our so-called security requires self-censorship of artistic work, then frankly we’ve lost the planet already. Genuine military and diplomatic considerations are one thing, and cultural cringing is another entirely. Let the Knights shut the production down themselves, should it come to that. I for one will not shut myself up on the basis of heavy hints dropped on my toe.’ He sipped a little more coffee, and darted a sharp glance at each of them. ‘Are you with me, gentlemen?’
They both nodded. At that Ben-Ami stood up. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. He lifted the crockery and cafetière and laid them carefully on a vacant seat, then jumped up on to the table. The clapping of his cupped hands was like a rattle of stage pistol-shots.
‘Attention, people!’ he shouted. He spun around, cloak swirling and flashing. ‘Listen, everyone!’
He had a fine deep voice and he knew how to project it. Heads turned.
‘For anyone who doesn’t know me—yes, gentlemen of the Knights, that means you—my name is Benjamin Ben-Ami. I am a playwright and promoter, and I intend to produce and have performed a spectacular musical entertainment based upon the history of Eurydice and its glorious precursor states. It will be called … Rebels and Returners, ladies and gentlemen, and it will be performed in the grounds of the Jardin des Étoiles in … four weeks!’
Winter saw Calder put his head in his hands, then look up and mouth silently ‘Four fucking weeks!’
‘All are welcome!’ Ben-Ami shouted. ‘And yes, gentlemen, that very much includes you, the Knights—’
The Knights stood up as one, tipped their heads towards Ben-Ami, and walked off.
A man jumped up, sending his table crashing.
‘Now look what you’ve done, Ben-Ami! You’ve offended them! And I don’t blame them, this is no time for this kind of divisive, contentious stuff!’
‘Who says it’s going to be divisive?’ someone else shouted, and in the subsequent contention had his answer. Ben-Ami jumped down as the first thrown tomato whizzed past his head. More tables went over. Shouts. Winter stood up. Calder was already on his feet, in his forced fighting crouch, hands out, glaring around. Scuffles were breaking out. Out of the corner of his eye Winter saw a blade flash, then heard a grunt. He reached inside his jacket, forgetting that there was no weapon there.
Calder grinned, or maybe just bared his teeth.
‘I hope you’re getting all this, Benjy old boy,’ he said. ‘This is just like it was back on—’
A shoulder hit his hip and he went over.
L
amont stared at the patterns of the gravity-wave display, his mind translating it into a visual image as though it was a stereogram. The resulting magic-eye picture of the starships converging on Eurydice was as disturbing as it was vivid.
Hours passed. The patterns stabilised around the planet.
‘The Knights aren’t fighting them’ he remarked.
‘In part it is a question of the balance of forces,’ said the Hungry Dragon. ‘But more significantly, it is because these are not their enemies. These are not Carlyle family ships.’
‘What are they?’
The Hungry Dragon turned on several comms channels at once. The audio filled with American-accented voices, and the visuals with swift-shifting surveys of Eurydice and what looked like rapid-fire negotiation and exchange of contracts, in which kilohectares of land were being haggled over in acres of small print.
‘What is online,’ said the ship with a rare stab at humour, ‘is America Offline. The farmers that Carlyle mentioned.’
‘They’re selling land to each other!’
‘They are at least staking claims.’
‘But they have no right—this is outrageous—’
The ship lurched. Lamont was thrown back and forth in the webbing. Through the singing cables he felt the additional vibration of a brief burn of the main jet, and a few nudges from the attitude jets.
‘Stop!’ he yelled.
‘I am sorry,’ said the ship. ‘This is not under my control.’
With fierce concentration Lamont eyeballed up some external views just as the retro-rocket jet killed the ship’s forward momentum. Half a dozen gummy cables—extruded from somewhere on the surface between the rows of machinery pods—extended, clung, and contracted, winching the ship back a little to the polar end of the asteroid, where it was further snared and hauled. Within minutes its stern and jets were attached—glued, it seemed—to the rock. It was as though the ship had become the bowsprit of an iceberg. Lamont expected some of the pods to detach from the surface and fasten themselves to the side of the ship, but nothing of the kind happened. Instead, the external cameras showed the transmission dish aerials jerking about. The control board indicated that they were active. The power drain was visible to the naked eye.
‘What are you transmitting?’
‘I do not know,’ said the ship.
Lamont twisted in the webbing, then catapulted himself out of it to a corner of the control board and grabbed a manual control for an external aerial. It was a crude, mechanical contraption to move the dish in a case of power loss. He shifted it until it caught the edge of the beam from one of the transmitters.
‘That was ingenious,’ said the ship.
‘Are you receiving it?’
‘Yes,’ said the ship. ‘It is identical to the transmission that took control of my processes.’
‘Do you have it firewalled?’
‘Yes.’
Lamont relaxed, for a moment. At least the whole business wasn’t about to repeat itself. Then he thought a bit further.
‘Where are these transmissions directed?’
‘Towards Eurydice,’ said the ship.
‘At a wild guess,’ snarled Lamont, ‘they’re aimed at these newly arrived ships. It’s trying its luck to hack into them.’
‘That sounds plausible,’ admitted the ship.
‘Step two,’ said Lamont. ‘That Carlyle woman didn’t seem bothered about war machines. I have the impression these people elsewhere in the galaxy have dealt with them before. They may have firewalls or antidotes to this virus. I don’t expect them to be too kind towards any sources of it.’
The ship’s lights dimmed for a second.
‘The transmissions have ceased,’ the Hungry Dragon reported.
‘That doesn’t change anything. We’re a sitting duck.’
‘We are not,’ said the ship, ‘in the place from which the transmissions originated.’
‘What?’
The ship patched up an image of the stellar background, time-stamped a minute earlier. Then another, shown as current. It repeated this several times. The difference was tiny, but perceptible as the image flicked back and forth.
‘The stars have moved,’ said the ship. ‘Or we have.’