‘You’re a lightning-chaser,’ Carlyle said.
That was the polite term. The rude one was Rapture-fucker. What she’d said still sounded like an accusation. She hadn’t meant it that way. She really wanted Campbell Johnstone on her team. He stared back at her, his gaze peculiarly blank. His retinae were really cameras. The irises didn’t adapt, the photocells did. Carlyle was used to the widening of the pupils when men looked at her. Not on Eurydice, but thank God or Nature she wasn’t there now. Only Winter and, to a much lesser extent, Calder and Armand had responded thus to her in that world of optimal beauty.
‘I am that,’ Johnstone said. It was an English idiom, in a perfect Home Counties American accent, like in an Ealing comedy. He knocked back his whisky, refilled his glass from the bottle, topped up hers. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘I’m in the soul market,’ Carlyle said. ‘I can offer excellent rates.’
The rates hadn’t helped her get any kind of routine crew. The labour exchanges and other recruitment routes had effectively blacklisted her, whether because of Carlyle family old guard pressure or because she was too much of a risk. The only people she could hire would have a worse record than she had. Even the most adventurous freelancers had looked at the DK barter price list and shaken their heads. Hence her going after lightning-chasers.
‘I shouldn’t say this,’ said Johnstone, ‘but the rates aren’t the issue. The risk is.’ He glowered at the bottle. ‘Moths to a flame, my dear. That’s what we are.’
Spare me the self-pity, you fucking drama queen. He seemed to pick up the thought. Maybe he did, you could never tell with lightning-chasers. You didn’t know what enhancements they had.
‘It’s like an addiction,’ he said. ‘To get so close you could touch it, without getting dragged in yourself. It’s hard to explain.’
‘You ever thought of going over to the Knights?’ Carlyle asked, curiosity getting the better of discretion.
‘Oh, sure.’ He sipped whisky. ‘Couldn’t take the puritanism. Besides, their whole thing is, they don’t go up close. Arm’s length, gloves, tongs. Contemplate the mathematics. Complete the calculation. One step at a time. You know the drill. Not my scene at all.’
‘If it’s risk you’re after, I can offer plenty.’
Johnstone sucked his lower lip, eased it out under his upper teeth. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Show me.’
She passed him the DK slate. He read through it impassively while she sat back and kept a wary eye on their surroundings. The Hairy Fairy was a dive so low it passed right under the Carlyles’ radar. Dim lights, sour carpet sticky with spilt drinks, air stiff with smoke. Its clear, curving diamond window-wall overlooked New Glasgow’s lights from two hundred metres up the side of a building crusted with similar bubbles. It was a notorious hangout for Rapture-fuckers, the bane of exploration and hacking teams. They were hard to screen out. Like sociopaths, they knew how to manipulate expectations they didn’t share. In recruitment interviews and tests they came across as normal, knowledgeable, interested types, keen to get on a team. They could restrain their excitement long enough to complete a few missions successfully, often distinguishing themselves with what seemed like bravery. Then, just when you trusted them enough for a really challenging job, they’d let their obsession get the better of them, break away and plunge deep into the works. If they didn’t disappear entirely—into the ravenous tornado of Singularity, or destroyed by the machinery—they came back changed: bodies mutilated or enhanced, minds time-sharing with, or displaced entirely by, other entities. Posthuman processors used human-level minds as subroutines. Some of these minds were eager to escape into other systems. With sufficient care one could trap them—as Shlaim had been—but without it, they could possess the incautious. The best outcome was when the Rapture-fucker was the only victim.
Some of the less autistic wrecks of such adventures were frazzling their neurons further in the corners of this bar. Trying to make the voices go away, or shut up, or speak more clearly; trying to make the fleeting impossible insight come back. A woman with long silver hair leaned against the outward overhang of the window wall, palms and forehead pressed against it, as though contemplating a jump that the diamond plate denied her. Every so often she’d rock back, reach behind her for a bottle on the table, swig, and resume her outward staring without turning around.
‘This is the one you want,’ Johnstone said, pushing the slate across the table and swivelling it at the same time. He’d highlighted the relevant paragraph in the long list of bits of kit DK considered the equivalent of one of their new ships. All of them looked almost impossible to get hold of, with the resources she could muster; this one she’d dismissed entirely.
‘One (1) macroscale quantum teleportation device (transmitter and receiver) fully functioning with human-level interface control enabled; minimum mass transfer capability: two (2) tonnes; minimum resolution scale: atomic; minimum range 10 1y.’
‘This is some kind of joke,’ Carlyle said. ‘The little commie bastards are trying it on. There’s only been one, brackets, one of these ever found, and we sold it to the Knights for a fucking solar system. One with two gas giants and a habitable terrestrial, at that.’
‘There wasn’t only one found,’ said Johnstone. ‘There’s only one been recovered. I know where you can find another, because I’ve seen it myself.’ He laughed. ‘I can even tell you. It’s no secret. It’s just that nobody’s been mad enough to go after it. It’s in the cave system on Chernobyl.’
The name made her shoulders hunch a little. ‘That’s a pulsar planet! And it’s right in the beam!’
Johnstone nodded. ‘Every two point seven seconds. Chernobyl’s tidal-locked to the primary—no rotation, and the gate’s on the day side, if you call getting nuked every two-and-a-bit seconds “day.” The gate’s fifty-odd klicks from the caves—from the known entrance to the cave system, that is. The terrain is rough, the atmosphere’s thick, ionised, stormy … let’s just say you wouldn’t want to fly in it. What light gets through is from the stars and from secondary radioactivity. The machine, the QTD, masses about five tonnes and is as delicate and about as radiation-tolerant as a leaf photometer. It’s only because it’s three hundred metres below ground that it’s survived at all.’ He smiled. ‘And that’s just the transmitter. The receiver is a few thousand kilometres away—still on the day side, worse luck. Heavily shielded with a hundred tons of lead, because it’s in a shallower cave. One that doesn’t have any known entrance. And believe me, the planet’s been satellite-mapped to centimetre resolution.’
‘So how come anyone knows where it is, or even that it exists?’
‘We fired up the QTD transmitter and sent a probe through it. It was possible to deduce its new location by timing the radiation pulses. Some of that shit punches straight through half a klick of rock, and this was maybe ten metres below the surface.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course, you can only do so much with probes. Especially in these conditions. Terribly bad line, you know. So I took a backup and went through myself.’
She tried not to show quite how impressed she felt. ‘What did you find?’
‘Oh, a cave full of very nice kit. Nothing as good as the QTD, though. And no way out, no exit that I could find. No transmitter the other way, either.’
‘So how did you—oh.’
‘I didn’t. I died there. Gives me claustrophobia just thinking about it.’ He thumped his chest. ‘I’m the backup.’
‘How did you die?’ she asked.
‘Suicide, I’m pleased to say. Webster bolt to the head. Good to know I have the balls for it. Though considering it was the first symptoms of radiation sickness that made me do it—puking up in the suit and all that, very messy—maybe “balls” isn’t quite the mot juste.’
‘Somehow,’ Carlyle said, ‘I get the impression you’re not telling me all this to show how tough you are. You think there’s a way to get the thing out.’
‘Oh, I know there is,’ said Johnstone. ‘Think about it. The Raptured may have been as gods, but they couldn’t work miracles. How did the receiver get into a closed cave? There must be another gate, in the second cave.’
‘Leading to God knows where.’
‘Well, yes.’ He grinned. ‘Exciting, isn’t it?’
‘What about the transmitter?’
‘I’m afraid there’s no way around that one. There’s simply no way to get it to the gate. So forget about gates. You’d have to land a starship as near to the entrance as possible and load it on. Come to think of it, you could do the same with the other one. Use a bunker-buster to break into the cave—the receiver’s shielded, like I said, so it’s pretty robust—and carry it out.’
‘Why hasn’t that been done?’
‘The pulsar beam is like a nuclear bomb going off nearby in vacuum every two point seven seconds. You’ll recall what a radiation burst like that does to a starship main drive.’
‘I do indeed,’ said Carlyle. ‘But you could protect the drive by cladding it with enough lead. Hundreds of tons.’
Johnstone leaned back. ‘You could,’ he said. ‘And why isn’t that done routinely, I ask, given the low but unfortunately not zero frequency of nuclear skirmishes?’
‘Because if you did that, you wouldn’t have enough power to shift anything much else.’
‘Exactly,’ said Johnstone. ‘It isn’t just the added weight—shielding the drive against radiation weakens the field’s grip on the spacetime manifold. And don’t forget, we’re talking about loading another hundred-plus tons of lead-cladded object on board.’
Carlyle ran through some mental calculations. ‘It could still be done,’ she said. ‘Cutting it very fine, leaving out every scrap of mass you didn’t need … shit. And some that you would. There’d be nowhere near enough for the team’s protective suits, or extra armour for the search engine. Or a search engine at all, come to that. The team and the crew would have to stay in the same shelter as the drive … yeah, that’s possible, but when they went out …’
‘How clearly you see the problem,’ said Johnstone. ‘Believe me, I’ve done the math. Factored in all the equipment you’d need—a crane and a truck, principally—and whichever way you cut it, you’re right at the margin. You can’t get the ship there safely and have the safety gear for a surface team. We’re not talking suits, anyway. That pulsar beam is fierce. You’d need a search engine with so much armour it can barely move, like we had. The solution, of course, positively jumps out at you.’
‘Do it in two trips. Or two ships. Or a really big KE ship, or one of those AO arks …’
‘Can you afford that? Any of that?’
‘If I could get the investment in advance … but not for this, no. Just a standard AO truck.’
‘Well, then.’
Carlyle stared at him. His fixed-pupil eyes stared back.
‘Oh, fuck,’ she said. ‘One-way.’
‘Dying’s not so hard,’ said Johnstone. ‘Take it from me.’
A
lot of things could go through your mind at a moment like this. The first thing that Carlyle thought about was robots. She dismissed the thought. She couldn’t afford robots. Robots autonomous and smart enough to do that kind of job were more expensive and harder to hire than humans, and less easily replaced. The second thing she thought about was dying. She’d never done it before, and there was a certain pride in that, an existential security in knowing for sure that you were who you thought you were. It felt clean. On the other hand, a lot of people, most of whom she knew and had trusted her, had lost that innocence because she had fucked up. Maybe it was time for her to show she could take it, so that she could look them in the eye again. The third, and oddly enough the most conclusive, was the thought of more dreary trudging or phoning around the exchanges and more scornful looks from freelancers. This was the first person she’d met who thought one of the jobs was feasible and wanted to take it on.
‘All right,’ she said, her mind suddenly made up and immediately quailing, ‘let’s do it or die trying.’
‘It’s “and” not “or,” my dear,’ said Johnstone. He raised his drink. ‘Good health.’
After they clinked glasses he became instantly businesslike. ‘Who else do you have on the team?’
‘You’re the first,’ Carlyle admitted.
‘That’s good,’ he said, to her surprise. ‘It means we’re not cluttered up with artillerymen, grunts, scientists, and such, all quite redundant on this exercise. You’d have had to stand them down anyway. You, me … the pilot comes with the ship, fine, I presume you can hire one for a quick in-and-out’—Carlyle nodded—‘and one more person. A heavy-duty crane operator with archaeology experience and a death wish.’
‘A tall order.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ said Johnstone. ‘I know someone who’s just the ticket. You’ve come to the right place.’
He stood up, quite steadily considering how much he’d drunk, and threaded his way among the tables. He returned with the silver-haired woman from the window. Her face too was silvery, as though coated with aluminium powder. Her eyes were cameras, but more cosmetically effective and emotionally responsive than Johnstone’s.
‘Morag Higgins,’ she introduced herself, shaking hands and smiling. Teeth like steel. She sat down and helped herself to the single malt.
‘I know who you are,’ she added, raising a glass. ‘Well met, Carlyle. Your reputation precedes you.’
‘Not a very good one, at the moment.’
‘It is to me,’ said Higgins. Her metallic teeth glinted again. ‘I’m well up for a suicide mission. It’s the only way I can afford a backup and a resurrection.’
‘Why do you need one? If you don’t mind me—’
Higgins waved away the apology. She drew a finger across her throat, at the line between the silvery skin and the rest.
‘Last mission I was on—another pulsar planet as it happens, PSR B1257+12 c, the one in Virgo—I wandered off on my own.’ She tossed her silver hair back; it made a hissing noise as it settled. ‘All right, all right, I’m a lightning-chaser. I admit it.’ She swallowed some whisky, smiled wryly at Johnstone. ‘ “My name is Morag Higgins, and I’m a Rapture-fucker.” I got … infected. Optic-nerve hack, absolute classic, should never have fallen for… . Anyway. Then it makes me open up, some kind of needle gets in, right. Hours later I wander back sounding very strange. Team leader—one of your lot, Jody Carlyle her name was—she blows my fucking head off. End of story. Except it isn’t. Whatever it was had taken a backup of me, and stored it outside my head. Which it also had a memory of.’ She tapped her face with the glass. It rang. ‘This grows back. It’s a crawling mass of steel nanobots. Most of it’s machinery for the meat—hormones, blood circulation, that kind of thing. My actual mind’s on a chip describing my brain, just like a backup, except it’s running in real time. I’m still me, memories and everything, but my emotions are kind of raw, as you might expect. Mostly frustration, in that I can’t get drunk and nobody will give me a job. Until you came along. Thanks, sweetie.’
Carlyle felt as if her own head had turned hollow and hard. The room went cold and dim for a moment. She fought down a dry heave. A long slug of whisky burned along her throat and warmed her belly and brought some blood back to her brain.
‘Losing heads seems to be an environmental hazard on pulsar planets,’ she said, toughing it out. ‘Ever wonder if your other body’s still headless, Johnstone?’
‘I have indeed,’ he said. ‘I guess we’ll find out, huh?’
T
he DK Interests Section in New Glasgow maintained a quantum-entanglement comms link to the nearest branch of the Shipyard Twenty-Nine production brigade. Carlyle held out for expenses, which she had carefully costed: as well as the lead shielding, surprisingly expensive, there were the usual crew pay, backups and insurance, the hire of a ship. Normally that was implicit in the contract price, but you couldn’t be too careful with DK. To her surprise they agreed straight away, and topped her opening bid with an offer to pay 5% up front. She walked out of the building with a thick wad of AO kilodollars which every few minutes she checked again until she was sure they weren’t about to turn into dry leaves.
Sorting out the hire of a ship and the installation of the shielding took another couple of days, after which they were ready to go as soon as they’d all taken a last-minute backup. At the drily named Terminal Clinic just outside the gate complex the tech balked at first over Higgins; Carlyle frowned him down. He was just being awkward, she pointed out: reading a chip had to be easier than reading a brain. She tried to put the momentary unpleasantness from her mind as her own reading was taken. As always, it was overridden by the poignancy of such occasions, routine though they were; a feeling of sorrow for the person who would be resurrected, not the self who would have died. It was like seeing yourself in an old photograph. If they were lucky, they’d all make it back alive, take another backup and check out on a warm flood of heroin in the hospice ward. But they couldn’t bet on making it back. This might be her last saved self.
Outside she looked over her team. They could have been going on a skein hike. Not much food; this job was going to be quick or not at all. Suits, lights, emergency high-calorie rations, water, one Webster each just in case.
‘Keep the last cartridge,’ said Johnstone, stashing a charge, and Higgins laughed. They set off through the gate. Fifteen transitions later, they arrived at the planet where the ship waited. Beyond the terminal’s plate-diamond window it sat on a bright field under a black sky where only a vast circular occlusion of the stars showed the primary, a brown dwarf. They sealed their suits and trekked out through the airlock and across the field to the ship. Its name was lettered in stencil style on its side: Extacy. Everything unnecessary on board had been stripped out. The lead-brick shelter gleamed dully like a giant slug. A massive crane and a shapedcharge Webster reaction bomb occupied the cargo bay. Higgins checked the crane, gave a thumbs-up. Johnstone and Carlyle checked the bomb. The pilot was a teenage AO tyke with freckles and hair the colour of wheat. He led them into the shelter and they huddled on the floor next to the drive.
‘This’d better be worth it,’ he said, by way of greeting, as he fingered a jury-rigged control panel that looked like a games console. Carlyle flipped him what remained of her roll of advance money.
‘Call that a bonus,’ she said. ‘Lift and fittle, already.’
Johnstone patched him the coordinates. The pilot scrolled up the resulting stellar map, rolled his eyes upward, closed them for a moment in what might have been prayer, and fired up the drive. Twenty light-years and half an hour later, they were in the pulsar’s system. Another two hours of careful manoeuvring and they were at the site.
‘You really expect to die out there?’
‘No,’ said Carlyle stiffly. ‘We’ll just be walking dead when we come back on board. Like the zombies from the cities after the Big One. I’m sure your grandmother told you about them.’
The boy shivered. ‘Holy Koresh help you.’
‘Yeah,’ said Higgins nastily, ‘he knew all about suicide. Now open the fucking door.’
J
ohnstone had guided the Extacy to within fifty metres of the cave entrance. Out on the surface the cliff-face was barely visible. With the lights full on Carlyle could see clearly a few steps in front of her. Every couple of seconds the faint glow in the atmosphere peaked and faded, which with the simultaneous spikes on her radiation moniter were the only indications of the pulsar’s spin. Before they’d gone five metres the dosimeter in her head-up was over the yellow line for Abort Mission, Seek Medical Attention. There was only the red line above that: Fatal Dose, Please Back Up Your Memory to a Secure Server. She avoided watching the virtual needle’s upward creep.
Johnstone drove the balloon-wheeled flatbed truck down the ramp and the two women clambered on. There were no seats, just a bar to hang on to. Like the ship, the vehicle was stripped to a minimum. The controls were on a handset over which Johnstone’s thumb flipped back and forth.
The cave, when they reached the entrance a minute or two later, was not at all what Carlyle had expected. The air was clearer, visibility much better. The walls—about three metres apart, just enough clearance for the truck—were smooth and the angles between them and the floor and roof were sharp. Rather than the diffuse glow of ionised air and surface radioactives, it was lit by distinct glowing patches every few metres along the roof.
‘This isn’t a cave,’ said Higgins. ‘It’s a tunnel.’
‘When you’re looking at the work of the Raptured,’ Johnstone said, ‘that distinction becomes kind of moot. Check out our expedition report sometime. None of this shows any trace of having been made, or the rock’s having been worked. It’s like some wildly unlikely coincidental outcome of geological processes. Like those natural nuclear reactors they found in Africa, only more so.’
Carlyle had often enough seen structures of which the same could have been said, but something about Johnstone’s confident statement niggled at her. Before she could track down the elusive thought, the truck emerged from the tunnel into a chamber about forty metres high and wide and over a hundred metres long. The light-patches, at this distance quite obviously rectangular, dotted the vaulting roof and soaring sides. The floor was littered with large complicated metal objects whose nature as machinery was as clear as their purpose was obscure. It was like standing in a cathedral that had been taken over by militant scientific atheists as a laboratory or factory, and then abandoned. The truck’s lights, as they moved, cast shadows like encroaching cowled inquisitors eager to avenge the sacrilege.
Johnstone idled the truck, jumped out and led the way through the machinery. He stopped in front of what looked like a solid gold omega, the circular part about two metres across, the two horizontal pieces at the bottom fixed to a steel plinth in which several control panels were embedded.
‘There it is,’ he said. ‘The transmitter.’
‘How do we get that onto the truck?’ Higgins asked.
‘Very carefully,’ said Johnstone.
He remote-controlled the truck along the path they’d taken on foot, bringing it to a halt a couple of metres away. Then he lowered the flatbed platform to the ground. He sprayed the edge of the platform, and the floor between the truck and the QTD, with buckyball lubricant. Carlyle was expecting they’d have to push it, but Johnstone tied some carbon-fibred rope to the object and Higgins expertly converted the engine shaft to a winch. Very slowly, and steadied by all three of the team, the QTD transmitter was eased on to the truck and lashed into place.
On their return to the cave entrance Johnstone called up the pilot, who brought the Extacy directly outside. Even more slowly and carefully, they got the object up the ramp and into the ship. With more buckyball lubricant and, this time, muscle force, they pushed and pulled it into the lead shelter. Cleaning up the lethally slippery lubricant took longer.
‘Now for the tricky bit,’ said Johnstone.
H
e had, as he’d claimed, done the math. The pilot already had the coordinates of the receiver’s location, and Johnstone had an even more precise spot in mind for the break-in. There was no GPS—even the radiation-hardened exploration satellites thrown into orbit by the first expedition had long decayed or burned out—so navigation was an old-fashioned affair of checking the apparent position of the more prominent of the detectable stars, then of matching local gravitational anomalies with their records, then of matching the disorderly ground with the highresolution maps, then of radar pinging.
‘This is definitely it,’ Johnstone said, as the Extacy hovered above a two-kilometre-wide bulge of upraised plain in a circle of eroded hills, all of which looked almost identical to a hundred adjacent features even on the map, let alone in the glowing murk. The radar and the gravity meter showed empty space underneath, as they had for the plain behind the nearby range, and behind the one before that.
‘You’re absolutely sure of this,’ Higgins said.
‘Absolutely,’ said Johnstone. He left the shelter and wheeled the bomb to the hatch. ‘Take us to twelve hundred metres,’ he told the pilot. ‘Forward one hundred metres, ten, four. Mark.’
Then he tipped the bomb out. A second or two later a faint thud was detectable through the ship’s external microphones. There was no flash.
‘An earth-shattering kaboom,’ Johnstone said, sauntering back to the shelter.
‘That’s it?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Of course it is,’ Johnstone said. ‘Come out and take a look.’
They did. Beneath the hatch a black round hole, still infrared at the edges, fifty metres across and surrounded by a ragged ring of ejecta, was clearly visible against the grey and glint of the plain. Deep within the blackness indistinct shapes glowed faintly.
‘Told you so,’ said Johnstone. ‘Down we go.’
Higgins clambered the ladder to the crane’s cabin and manoeuvred the huge machine to straddle the hatch. Johnstone attached himself to the end of the cable; Carlyle clipped on just above him. The descent was swift and smooth. They could have been in a lift. The lip of the hole was exactly as Johnstone had said, ten metres thick. Higgins checked the descent just after they’d passed it. Their helmet lamps and handheld lights picked out a space even vaster than the first cave, and more cluttered, and with larger and stranger machines, as big as blue whales and as complex as protein molecules: folds and helices, mirror-perfect plane surfaces, dendritic bushes, arrays of lobate panels. Tiny lights pulsed or raced among them and along them, like remote descendants of the blinkenlights on an antique server.
Johnstone guided the pilot and Higgins through a few more fine adjustments, and then they were lowered to the flat basalt floor in a motorway-wide aisle between rows of the machines. Keeping the rope attached, Johnstone strode confidently forward, turned a corner, and peered into a gap.
‘Shit,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I died here.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I gave the location in my final message,’ he said.
‘You could have been delirious by that time.’
‘I doubt it. Anyway, look.’ His beam and his pointing finger indicated a ragged scorch-rimmed hole in the smooth pedestal of the fractal pagoda in front of them. ‘Webster bolt.’ Dipping, the beam found a spattered smear on the floor, crusted over with some crystalline mould. ‘Blood.’
‘So where’s the body?’
‘That’s what I ask myself,’ said Johnstone. He giggled. ‘Watch out for Johnstone the headless Webster gunner.’
‘Fuck,’ said Carlyle, backing out of the alley and looking over her shoulder. ‘Don’t say things like that.’
‘What’s to worry about? We’re zombies ourselves now anyway. Or hadn’t you noticed?’
Carlyle checked. She was over the red line. No deep spiritual insights followed. Just as well, she thought, as they would have died with her. But she felt less spooked.
‘I thought we were heading for the QTD,’ she said.
‘It’s a few minutes walk from here. Allow me a moment of sentimental curiosity.’
As she followed him along the aisle Carlyle in fact felt reassured by the precision of his navigation. This feeling didn’t last. After about fifty metres Johnstone halted and turned aside to marvel at an inlaid screen at about eye level, a rectangle about one and a half metres by two and a half. It was a dull pewter colour and held a watery pattern that wouldn’t quite resolve into a moving monochrome picture. She wanted to stare at it, to make it stabilise, but every time its evanescent shapes eluded her—
She jerked her head sideways, breaking the spell. Before she could stop him, Johnstone had extended a lead from his helmet and was jacking it into a socket in the screen’s bottom right corner. She swiped at the cable and the pin sprang out. Johnstone didn’t react. She waved a hand in front of his faceplate. Still no reaction. She grabbed his shoulders and pushed him gently back. His feet paced, keeping his balance, but his eyes stared out, still in a dwam. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She wished she still had a familiar handy, to hurl a disposable and screamingly reluctant copy into the internal fray of Johnstone’s suit circuitry. But since Shlaim’s defection, she’d lost her trust in virtual slaves. She was alone in her suit.
Back to elementary first aid, the rule-of-thumb routines the Carlyles had put together from centuries of experience in dealing with CNS hacks. She drew back her fist, made sure he could see it coming if he could see anything at all, and punched at his faceplate as hard as she could. The blow didn’t shatter the plate, or numb her knuckles, but it knocked Johnstone off his feet.
‘What the fuck was that for?’ Then: ‘ … Oh, thanks.’
He struggled to his feet, disentangling himself from the cable.
‘Hang on a minute,’ he said. He blinked rapidly, eyes rolling as he paged through head-up menus. ‘Good, that’s it cleared.’
‘Sure?’
‘Best antivirus money can buy,’ Johnstone said smugly.
‘I bloody hope so.’
‘They don’t evolve, that’s one thing.’
‘Small mercies.’
Johnstone laughed. ‘It’s the biggest.’
They walked on. It was like being in the Valley of the Kings, or Manhattan, or Polarity, except that every one of the great machines contained more art and craft and mind than the entire civilisations that had produced these works of man. Carlyle, looking at it all with a looter’s eye, had long grown blasé at this thought.
The QTD receiver was, in that place, brutal in its simplicity: a tenmetre torus of lead, with a ring of the same gold and instrumentation as the transmitter had, inlaid in a deep groove around its inner surface. Its base was an proportionately huge rectangular mass. Johnstone vaulted up on it, disengaged himself from the line, told Carlyle to do the same, and then passed the end of the cable around the ring. He knotted the rope carefully, checked it a few times, and gave a thumbs-up. With a lot of careful instructions and some errors they and Higgins between them managed to drag it to beneath the hole. Carlyle, sitting on the opposite side of the base, rode up with Johnstone as the cable carried the massive object up into the ship’s hold. Higgins rolled the crane forward and lowered the device to the floor.
‘I hope that was worth it,’ the pilot said, over the common circuit.
Carlyle, Higgins, and Johnstone looked at each other.
‘Tactless little prick, isn’t he,’ Johnstone observed. ‘Time to go, I guess.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Carlyle said. ‘There’s stuff in that cave that, well, I wouldn’t want to go to waste.’
‘You’re not thinking of hanging around,’ Higgins said.
‘No, no. But to make life easier’—she winced—‘so to speak, for a future team, we could leave the crane.’
‘Now there’s an idea,’ said Johnstone. ‘Well, hell, you paid for it, the Carlyles might as well have the advantage of it.’
Getting the crane out was awkward. The pilot brought the ship right down to the surface, with the hatch open much wider than before, fully retracted. Carlyle guided Higgins as she drove the crane off the floor of the hold and on to the surface close to the hole, then the pilot lifted the ship clear. He lifted it more than clear, taking it up to about five hundred metres. Very slowly it moved aside; as Higgins descended from the crane’s cabin Carlyle guessed that the pilot was looking for a spot where he could bring the ship down again without any risk of colliding with the crane. The ship’s lights shone bright in the dim glow of the ionized haze of Chernobyl air.
‘Let’s move over a bit,’ Higgins said. ‘Give him a couple hundred metres clearance. He says he’s worried about gusting.’
Carlyle was looking down at the ground again, picking her way cautiously forward, when she saw out of the corner of her eye a blue flash just above the horizon. She then saw another, and another, closer and closer. In between, like a shadow on the shining mist, a gigantic batwinged shape was just discernible.
It was far bigger than the ships she’d seen back at the DK spaceport.
The DK ship was heading straight for the Extacy, flying quite slowly, except that every few hundred metres, it fittled. It must, Carlyle guessed, be fittling a light-second away, then returning to the exact point from which it had departed, and moving forward again and repeating the process. Every 2.7 seconds, she realised: timed to avoid the pulsar beam. Just when it seemed about to collide with the Extacy, its enormous wings swept downward, meeting at the tips to form a circle. A blink later, and the wings encircled the Extacy from above. Another blue Cherenkov flash followed, almost overhead. Its afterimage faded. Both ships were gone.
Carlyle had her Webster out and aimed at Higgins’s faceplate before the woman’s mouth had closed. She felt betrayed, abandoned, fooled like a rube, and enraged.
‘You bastards! You stupid fucking bastards! Tell me what you did that for! I’ll blow your fucking head off right here!’
‘I had nothing to do with it!’
‘You must have been in on it together!’
‘I wish I had been—then I wouldn’t be left down here with you!’ Higgins’s metal face looked distraught and bewildered. Carlyle backed off, keeping the pistol levelled. Her knees felt rubbery.
‘So what’s your explanation?’ she demanded.
‘Never trust a commie,’ said Higgins.
Carlyle glared at her. ‘Never trust a Rapture-fucker, you mean!’
Higgins shrugged. ‘Takes two to make a deal.’
Her offhand attitude and flip answers reignited Carlyle’s fury. ‘Yeah, or three! Or four if it was you and that hick pilot!’
‘Not me!’
‘You knew nothing about this?’
‘No.’
The metal face was etched with anguish. Carlyle believed her. The anger dimmed, leaving a cold dismay. They were going to die more painfully and uncomfortably than she’d intended, but that wasn’t the worst. They were going to die for nothing. She squatted down, lowering the pistol.
‘Oh fuck, fuck, fuck,’ she moaned. ‘Why the hell would they do that?’
‘Like I said, never trust—’
‘Oh, fuck that,’ Carlyle snarled. ‘That’s just a stupid fucking prejudice. When they do a deal they stick to it—it’s in their interests after all. I can buy an AO pilot selling us out, even to DK. I can’t buy a DK family cheating us.’
Higgins moved over and squatted down too.
‘We don’t know it was the same family as you were dealing with. Or the same group within the family. You should know about that, Carlyle.’
‘Don’t tell me what I should fucking know about,’ Carlyle said. ‘It still doesn’t figure. These DK clans compete all right, but they keep a united front to the rest of the world.’
‘How do we know it was DK at all?’
Carlyle rocked back on her heels. ‘Because it was a DK ship.’ She knew that was a fallacy even as she said it.
‘We don’t even know that,’ Higgins said. ‘It was like the one in the spec, sure. But it was a lot bigger and better.’
Carlyle snorted. ‘So who built it? Aliens?’
‘Whoever built it,’ Higgins said, ‘might have sold it to someone else. Someone who wanted a QTD real bad. Or maybe just wanted another DK ship real bad and knew they could buy one with a QTD. Either way, I think there’s some third party out there.’
‘The Knights?’
Higgins shrugged. ‘They’re in hostility mode. Why not?’
‘Why not indeed,’ Carlyle said bitterly. ‘That makes sense. They bought the first QTD off us and there’s no reason they shouldn’t steal the second. Seeing as we’re fighting them and all. Shit.’
She sat for a moment staring in silence at Higgins, not wanting to divulge the next thought that followed on from that. If the Knights of Enlightenment had an even better model of the latest DK ship than the one she’d gone through all this to buy, then her bright idea of using a DK ship to outmanouevre them at Eurydice was so much chaff.
‘I guess,’ said Higgins, ‘that you planned to use the ship against the Knights at this new planet, and—’
‘Oh, shut up!’
Higgins’s steely lips compressed.
‘What I don’t understand,’ Carlyle went on, slightly apologetic, ‘is what Johnstone would get out of it.’
‘You mean, apart from a lot of money when he comes back from the dead?’
‘Aye,’ said Carlyle. ‘Apart from that. What’s money tae a Rapture-fucker? The truth about this’ll come out soon enough, likely as soon as my backup back hame wakes up and asks where the shiny new ship is. And after that his life willna be worth a damn anywhere we can reach. And there’s naebody but us who’ll poke around like we do in the tech, which means nae other suckers tae latch ontae if Rapture-fucking’s yir fix.’
Higgins shrugged. ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere.’
‘Aye, you’re telling me!’ In a sudden surge of renewed rage Carlyle brandished her pistol. ‘Do you want to get it over with now? Put the guns to each other’s heads, count of three?’
Higgins shook her iron head, her steel tongue dry on her steel lips.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust that method of suicide, not any more and not here.’ She glanced in the direction of the hole. ‘Remember what Johnstone said.’
‘You heard all that?’
‘Sure, it was on the open circuit.’
‘Fuck. You’re right. Anyway. So what do we do, if we cannae just kill ourselves?’
‘I’ll tell you what we can do,’ said Higgins, standing up. ‘We use the time we’ve got. Johnstone thought there must be another gate in there. We can go looking for that.’
‘With no guarantee that we’ll find it, or that it’ll lead anywhere more hospitable.’
‘Any less hospitable and it’ll be instantly lethal,’ said Higgins wryly. ‘Which is kind of the point, yeah? And anyway, looking for it will take our minds off things. And we might find some interesting stuff on the way.’
A Rapture-fucker to the end, Carlyle thought. She had little doubt that Higgins, with nothing left to lose, would be off in the cave like a kid in a toyshop. On the other hand, she was right: doing something had to be better than waiting to die. Already she felt feverish and nauseous, but that could just have been the shock.
Aye. The shock.
H
iggins went back up to the crane’s cabin, retrieved a remote control for the winch, and they attached themselves to the cable and descended together into the hole.
‘Wow,’ said Higgins. ‘This place is fucking magic. All those little lights, like it’s all alive!’
‘Aye, whatever. No doubt we’ll make a fortune off it someday. Any ideas about how we go about finding the gate?’
‘You’re the Carlyle. I thought you knew these things.’
‘I’ll let you in on a family secret,’ said Carlyle. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
‘Oh!’ said Higgins. ‘Well, in that case …’
‘What?’
‘I’d do it logically.’ She began turning around, her helmet beam and her handheld halogen spotlighting one uncanny thing after another. ‘There are passageways through the machinery, aisles between the machines. That means that physically shifting stuff must have been a consideration. One of these aisles must lead to the gate.’
‘No shit.’
‘Ah, but look at what we can see from here, of the angles and the layout. Which way are the paths converging?’
‘Hard to tell, with perspective and all.’
Higgins drew her Webster and thumbed the laser sight on. She squatted on her heels and again turned around, more slowly, sending the beam down each of the visible corridors. It glowed a faint red in the dusty air, picked out bright red spots where it met objects. The lights on the objects moved in a way that suggested a response. Then she stood up. ‘That way,’ she said confidently.
Carlyle didn’t share her confidence, but she was past caring. ‘OK,’ she said. After a few hundred metres and several turns, she shared it even less. The only thing she was sure of was that she was thoroughly lost. She might be able to literally retrace her steps. The thought made her stop and glance back. Sure enough, their tracks were easily visible in the dust: two distinct sets of prints, sometimes crossing each other, slightly scuffed. Ten metres behind her, at the side of a thing that looked like a gigantic silver sculpture of a lighthouse-sized melted candle, was the end of a third set of prints.
She must have yelled. Higgins was back beside her in a moment.
‘There,’ said Carlyle.
The third set of prints stretched into the distance as far as their lights could reach. They were of bare feet.
There was some kind of reassurance in that she and Higgins had drawn and levelled their pistols without conscious thought.
Carlyle switched on her suit’s external speaker.
‘Come out,’ she said.
Nothing happened.
She was about to step forward when Higgins caught her elbow. ‘No.’
‘What?’
‘Leave it. If it wants to be seen, it will be.’
‘Aye, that’s reassuring.’
They walked on. Higgins never looked back, but every so often Carlyle did. The footprints were there behind them every time, always ending approximately the same distance away. After a while Carlyle began to hear, or imagine, stealthy pacing steps, approaching right up to behind her shoulder. She whirled, gun drawn, but still the prints ended ten or so metres behind. She wondered if whatever was following them was invisible. This thought was not reassuring either.
What overtook them eventually was weariness. They slumped, in wordless agreement, against a shining wall and sucked recycled water and greasy fruity-tasting paste from their helmets’ tubes.
‘White cell count right down,’ Higgins observed, with something like anxiety. ‘Not much longer to go.’
‘To the gate?’
‘Till we die.’ She looked around and shivered, her shoulder shaking against Carlyle’s. ‘I don’t want to die here.’
‘Why not?’ Carlyle had a metal taste in her mouth, but it was only her gums beginning to bleed.
‘I can’t swear that would guarantee extinction. There are some very sensitive devices in this place. They might … take us up.’
‘I know that,’ Carlyle said. ‘But is that no what you want? Rapture?’
‘Oh, Christ, no.’ It sounded like a prayer, not a profanity. ‘There’s no guarantee of becoming something better than human. You might become worse: a trapped consciousness in a treadmill, with no chance of upgrade. Hell. And even if you can avoid that, you still don’t want to be taken up, even to heaven. You might lose yourself entirely.’
‘So why do you people risk that by lightning-chasing?’
Higgins sighed. ‘It’s the getting close to … the sublime and the beautiful, yeah? You can look over the top of a cliff or look up at it and be, like, ravished, but you wouldn’t want to fall off it.’
‘I don’t understand the attraction at all,’ Carlyle said. She waved a hand. ‘I’ve been in places like this. Weirder and more beautiful places, like crystal jungles, like iron coral. And I’ve crunched a search engine right over them and through them tae get what I want. I mean, fuck, it isnae like it’s nature or anything. It’s just artificial.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Higgins. ‘What the posthumans created was—when you can see it up close, inside, in virtuality, not this’—she waved dismissively—‘hardware, it’s more wonderful than anything in nature. What you’re seeing here is like brains. Grey matter, whorls, fissures, big fucking deal. What I’ve seen is thoughts. Art and science. Creations.’
‘Mair wonderful than the real world? Greater than God or Nature?’
‘Yes!’ said Higgins explosively. Then, perhaps sensing the stiffening in Carlyle’s muscles, she retracted: ‘A greater insight into the reality than we have, anyway.’
‘Hah!’ said Carlyle. ‘Tossers. I mean that. That’s whit the Raptured were when ye get right down tae it. Nerds. Wankers. This is aw’—it was her turn to wave dismissively—‘pornography. Because if it wisnae, how come they burned out so fast? How come they arenae around any mair? Wanked theirsels tae death if you ask me.’
‘You couldn’t be more wrong,’ said Higgins. ‘They loved the universe far more than we ever can. There are infinitely many modes of existence of which we can’t conceive: not space-time, not thought, not mind, or matter. They began to conceive them before they left. They went below the Planck length, and away. Into the fine grain of the world. And there they still are, and far beyond it. The whole of space-time is now riddled with their minds. Or rather, with minds far less than theirs but far greater than ours. It is these minds that enforce the CPC and make FTL travel possible and time-travel paradoxes impossible.’
Carlyle had heard such conjectures before. ‘You know all this?’
Higgins laboriously stood up. ‘I know. I’ve seen it. Seen them. The quantum angels. Come on, let’s find the gate.’
T
he gate was in the direction Higgins had taken. Higgins’s face looked twisted and strained, warped away from human semblance, as if resisting the deterioration of the rest of her body was becoming a major preoccupation for her metal head. You expected to see beads of mercury running down it. Her glass eyes had cracks in them.
Carlyle gazed at the gate incuriously. Its absent shape was outlined by a gold filigree frame beaded with crystals that flickered in elusive patterns. She had walked past greater and stranger things in the past hour. Her mind was jaded with wonders.
‘Brilliant,’ she said. ‘You got us here.’
Higgins attempted a smile. Reflective surfaces moved. ‘Just get me out.’
Carlyle grasped her hand. ‘OK.’
Together they stepped through the gate. As soon as they did so their knees buckled, their arms went instinctively in front of and above their faces, and again at the same moment, they both laughed and looked embarrassed at each other. They lowered their shielding arms. With an effort Carlyle straightened up, Higgins a moment later. 1.2 g: it was no worse than carrying a pack. Before them stretched a plain of cratered ice, sharply lit by a distant yellow-white F7 at what looked like 10 AU and blue-shaded by reflected light from the plain-featured sub-Jovian ice giant that filled a third of the sky and that had, for a moment, looked as though it was hurtling down upon them. Another moon, sulphur-yellow to its jet-black terminator, hung in the sky, its disc plain among a prickle of stars. Carlyle took a few steps forward and turned to look back at the gate. It was marked by a perfect parabola of smooth, sculpted-seeming ice.
‘Where are we?’ Higgins asked, feebly and querulously.
Carlyle gave her a smile she hoped was encouraging.
‘In the skein, if we’re lucky,’ she said. ‘Race you through the catalogue.’
Higgins flapped a hand, and squatted, elbows on thighs. ‘You do it.’
Carlyle blinked up the Messier 102.02 on her head-up and systematically scanned the sky. Her suit’s sensors fed every available scrap of incoming information to the catalogue: the positions of the visible stars, the spectrum of the sun and of the light from the planet, the temperature of the ground, the motion of the other moon… . It took about a minute to match them and come up with the anonymous string of numbers that identified the system. She cross-referenced the result with the skein map.
‘We’re lucky,’ she told Higgins. ‘We’re in the skein all right. If not exactly in the Drift. None of the firm’s outposts is anywhere nearby.’ She licked her cracked lips, winced. ‘That gate we came through isn’t marked. There’s another one, but it’s about twenty kilometres away. North-northwest.’ She looked around, letting the suit take a bearing from the now charted sky. The moon they were on had no magnetic field. ‘We should make it.’
Higgins looked sceptical. ‘Where does it take us?’
Carlyle hesitated, then gave her the bad news. ‘A KE homeworld.’
Higgins rose to her feet. She even smiled. ‘The Ladies of Enlightenment? That’ll be something to see.’
‘Good on you,’ said Carlyle, dubious though she felt at the prospect. She had never heard of any outsider going to a KE homeworld, let alone coming back from one. This had, she hoped, more to do with the protectiveness of the Knights towards their homes than with anything more sinister.
They set off across the ice, following the bearing on her head-up. That gave them a direction, and it changed by dead reckoning as they detoured around craters large and small. It didn’t so much as suggest an optimal route.
‘Footprints behind us again,’ said Higgins, as they walked down a small valley that looked as if it had been carved by flowing water, but surely couldn’t have been.
‘That’s our own footprints,’ said Carlyle. She wished Higgins hadn’t said that. The thought that the haunter of the Chernobyl cavern could have followed them hadn’t ocurred to her before. Now it wouldn’t go away.
‘Why are they in front of us?’
‘Because we’ve had to retrace our steps.’
‘I can’t see properly,’ said Higgins, sounding relieved and resigned.
She laid her hand on Carlyle’s shoulder, and before long, a fair bit of her weight too. Carlyle vomited suddenly, and almost blacked out as she held her breath while the suit’s cleaning mechanisms cleared the airways and the spew went into the recylers. They couldn’t do anything about the stink, but after a while it had so saturated her nostrils that she couldn’t smell it.
They stumbled on. The other moon moved in its orbit to a place where its shadow cast a spot, a solid ellipse of perfect black, on the ice giant. The shadow moved, it sometimes seemed, as they watched, and at other times, dismayingly, moved back.
‘Relative motion of the moons,’ said Higgins, surprising Carlyle with that sensible reassurance.
The other gate appeared as a tiny regularity on the horizon a long time before they reached it; this world was bigger than most of the terrestrial planets, let alone moons, that either of them were used to walking on, and their intuitions played them false. The gate was marked with a square of ice, bevelled like a picture frame. It advanced and receded in Carlyle’s sight as they approached, hour after hour. The moon-shadow vanished from the top of the giant planet’s placid blue atmosphere.
‘Are we there yet?’ said Higgins, when they were a hundred or so metres from the ten-metre high gate marker, then laughed at herself. She swayed and began to topple forward. Carlyle ducked, letting her fall over her shoulder, and struggled upright. Higgins was surprisingly light. Carlyle staggered towards the gate and almost fell through it. A sudden wash of light made her shut her eyes until the faceplate had adapted. Her feet were in something soft. Higgins felt suddenly lighter. Carlyle staggered a few paces away from the gate and then fell face-first into sand. After a moment she crawled forward, out from under Higgins, and looked around.
Daylight of a young blue-white star, arc-weld bright and small, in a pale blue sky. She was on a rocky terrestrial, 0.86 g, thin carbon dioxide atmosphere. To all appearances utterly lifeless: sand dunes, wind-eroded sandstone of the same beige colour, black wind-polished rocks. After Chernobyl and the ice moon it felt like a garden. And it looked like a garden—a Zen garden, though with wheel-tracks rather than raked lines. A few hundred metres ahead of her was a complex diamond-pane greenhouse arcology, hundreds of metres high and kilometres in extent. Behind her, two black rock pillars marked the gate. Between it and the ruts in front of the arcology there were no tracks of any kind. She heaved Higgins back on her shoulder and set out to make some.
The difficulty was finding an entrance. As she drew closer the transparent walls rose before her like an unbroken cliff. There was no response to her croaked shouts on the standard hailing frequency. With stoned lucidity she realised that her best bet was to find some wheel tracks and follow them. She trudged across the sand until she found one, then trudged along its curving path. After ten minutes’ walk she found herself in front of a five-metre-high airlock. There was, not to her surprise, no doorbell, and still no response to her distress calls. She dropped to the ground, crawled from under Higgins again, and walked over to the wall beside the lock and started banging on it, then kicking. Fifteen minutes of this had no effect. She backed off about a hundred metres, drew her pistol, and started shooting at the wall above the airlock. Not even the concentrated succession of Webster bolts could do more than blacken the sheet diamond, but it made one hell of a racket. The airlock door began to open. Carlyle at once ceased fire, dropped the pistol and raised her hands. An optic poked cautiously out, then withdrew. The airlock opened fully and a squad of five spacesuited figures emerged and jogged towards her.
The faceplates were sun-shaded; she couldn’t see the faces. After a moment voices found her frequency, and her Japanese-American translator kicked in.
‘Who are you and where do you come from?’ It was a woman’s voice.
‘Lucinda Carlyle,’ she said. She pointed. ‘Morag Higgins. We have come through the gate back there, from Chernobyl. We have severe radiation sickness and request your help.’
‘Of course,’ said the woman. ‘You are prisoners of war.’
‘Good,’ said Carlyle. She kicked the pistol towards the squad leader. ‘Now please take us in.’
Her knees buckled. Somebody caught her arm. She straightened up, determined to walk while she still could. Two people picked up Higgins. Surrounded by the squad, Carlyle went through the airlock and a decontamination chamber, and stepped out into a vast, airy space where clumps of botanic garden were interspersed with grassland and low trees and tall pseudowood buildings. The squad took their helmets off. They were all women, three Japanese and two Indian. Responding to a gesture from the squad leader, she took her own helmet off. A clump of hair came with it. From the expressions of those around her, she looked and smelled dreadful.
There followed several minutes of rush and confusion which ended with her being wheeled on a stretcher trolley to an emergency clinic close to the airlock: a medium-sized green-walled room with a window looking out on the sand. The equipment it contained was obviously for dealing with accidents outside, none of which were likely to involve radiation exposure. She was laid on a bed and put on a drip, and lost consciousness in seconds.
S
he woke in a different clinic, naked on a bed. The air was heavy with floral scents over the faint unmistakeable clinical reek of shit masked by disinfectant. A big steel machine beside the bed was attached to her body in a great number of places by shiny curved pipes and thin fibre-optic monitoring cables. A Japanese woman in a white overall leaned over her.
‘How are you feeling?’
Carlyle moved her arm and the plugged-in pipes moved with it. Metal nanotech, like Morag’s face. She could feel the tug and give of skin and muscle where they went into her bones, and a dull ache there. She tried to sit up, but the woman pushed her gently back.
‘I’m feeling a lot better,’ Carlyle said.
‘So I see,’ said the woman. ‘So you should be. You have been unconscious for a week. In that time you have had a complete bone marrow replacement, and other extensive and invasive treatments.’
‘Oh. I expected euthanasia.’
The woman frowned, then forced a smile. ‘You people with your backups, you give up too easily. Enlightened approach is to develop medical tech to recover the living, not raise the dead. In any case you are prisoner of war. We are not allowed to kill you. Geneva Convention I believe.’
Carlyle swallowed. Her throat hurt. From certain absences on the edges of her vision she could see that she’d lost her hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes. The medic passed her a glass of water. She sipped. There were gaps where teeth had been, cold in the water. She investigated with her tongue, also painful: an incisor, a canine, a couple of molars were missing. Skin was sloughing off her tongue.
‘Well, thank you,’ she said. ‘What about Higgins?’
The woman gave here an odd look. ‘Something complicated and strange. We were unable to save her body. The metal nanotech head is … inactive, but something continues within. We are studying it carefully. We will attempt to preserve its continuity.’
‘Good,’ said Carlyle. She smiled, feeling skin crack. ‘You know, I didn’t expect this, but dying really sucks.’
‘It is natural for consciousness to desire continuation,’ the woman said. ‘At present this would be best served by sleep.’
Carlyle lay back and let herself drift off, soothed by her surroundings. They were much more pleasant than the emergency clinic: the bed was surrounded by paper screens, between and over which she could see a sort of bower, and glimpse other beds. Overhead the sun, dimmed to visibility by some property of the dome, warmed her face, and then her closed eyelids.
She woke again in the same place, but the machine had gone and there was a sheet over the bed. The sun was low, and in some indefinable way she knew that it was morning, not evening. She sat up, and found that she was wearing a plain cotton hospital nightdress that opened down the back. The holes in her arms and legs and sides had all been closed up with what looked and felt like natural flesh, and might have been. There was no hair on it, but nor was there any hair anywhere else. Her skin still felt dry and her teeth were still missing. All of that could be fixed. She felt extraordinarily lucid and lively.
The Japanese woman came back, holding a tissue-paper packet.
‘Good morning,’ she said. She bowed. ‘My name is Dr Kaori Yoshi.’ She sat on a folding stool by the end of the bed. ‘You are feeling better.’
‘Much better, thanks.’
‘Good. If you wish, you may get up. You are already washed.’ She laid down the packet. ‘Clothes.’
Yoshi disappeared behind the screen while Carlyle pulled on a blue silk wrap and flat black slippers. She found herself steady on her feet, and walked out.
‘Let us go somewhere more pleasant,’ said Yoshi.
They walked on real grass as smooth and dry as astroturf past the rows of screened beds and out into a garden. Parkland, lakes, mist under a glass sky. Black squiggles of buildings. Distant voices of women and children. Yoshi lead her to a black wooden bench, subtly curved, comfortable on the seat and back.
‘Very peaceful,’ Carlyle said.
‘I have something to tell you,’ said Yoshi. ‘You have been asleep for another week. Your treatment is complete. Unfortunately it has not been successful. The cell damage has been too extensive. We have given you drugs to eliminate pain and confusion of mind. When you next fall asleep, in a few hours perhaps, it will be for the last time.’
Carlyle stared at her, pained and confused. ‘I’m going to die after all?’
Yoshi leaned forward and took her hand. ‘I am sorry, but yes.’
Anger surged. ‘Why couldn’t you have sent me back? Then at least I could have taken a new backup before I—’
She couldn’t go on.
‘We are more than a week’s travel from the nearest place where you could have taken a backup,’ said Yoshi. ‘You would have been dead before you got there, and without the opportunity to gather your thoughts before you go into a future cycle of the universe.’
Carlyle felt caught up short. ‘What?’
Yoshi cupped her hands as though holding water. ‘It is something to know that you have something to carry forward.’ She blinked, eyelashes sparkling. ‘It is not much, but it is something. It is all we have.’
The confirmation of the old Haldane theory of the eternal and infinitely various return of all possible combinations of matter over googolplexes of cosmic cycles was one of the earliest fruits of KE investigation of posthuman discovery. The physics was accepted, it was as true and hard and established as physics got. The cold comfort drawn from it by the Knights was not. That was something you had to come to spiritually, a lonesome valley you had to walk by yourself. There was some speculation that a sort of progress was possible, not simply an endless and unimaginably if not incalculably immense recurrence but an evolution, not just of the material soul but of the material universe; that if such a progress was possible at all, it depended on that portion of lucidity with which the mind faced the inevitable darkness before the inevitable return of the light. She believed that as much as she believed anything, and she realised now that taking backups had not been, as she’d joked to Armand, a way to save time so much as a way to put off that confrontation.
Calm again, she sighed. Breathing was good. Every breath was good. She had not known that, the last time she’d taken a backup. There was a lot she hadn’t known: that breath is good and death sucks, that it’s the end and the beginning, that none of it matters and it all counts, that the soul is material but the form of its materiality is, well, immaterial… . That she had not been wrong in her first response to Winter. The prejudice of her second response, she saw now, had been burned out of her in the hard radiation on Chernobyl, when she’d been dying together with Higgins.
‘What’s happened to Higgins?’
Yoshi’s cheek twitched. ‘The head has adjusted to its loss. It is conversing by radio. The personality of Higgins appears to be alive. We are discussing with her what to do. She is not a Carlyle, nor an employee of the family, so she is not a prisoner of war. She will be repatriated to New Glasgow if she wishes. It is not yet clear what she wishes. Her mind is confused and quite naturally we have no medicine for her, other than by speaking.’
Carlyle smiled skeptically. ‘Psychotherapy?’
‘Physics,’ said Yoshi.
‘That makes sense,’ said Carlyle. ‘Give her my … give her my love.’
Life was good. This life was good, and it was about to end. She regretted its loss desperately. That she had a backup was no comfort. That she would live again an infinite number of times was no comfort. There was only one number that mattered, and that number was one. All that she would carry forward into the dark would be anger and regret and the burning will to go on living; no acceptance, no enlightenment, none.
‘We have something to ask of you,’ Yoshi said, diffidently. ‘When you were in your sleep you talked of how you came to be here. You thought the Knights had stolen your ship, and the teleportation device.’
‘Oh!’ Carlyle felt embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry, that was just … raving. I hope I didn’t offend you.’
‘Not at all,’ said Yoshi. ‘It is true.’
‘What?’
‘It is true,’ Yoshi repeated. ‘The Knights wanted the QTD. Had the opportunity arisen some other way, they would have taken it, but as it is you handed it to them on a plate. Or rather, Johnstone did. His reward will be to share in their investigation.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Carlyle. ‘If they wanted it, why the hell didn’t they just go through to Chernobyl from here?’
Yoshi looked taken aback. ‘You do not understand. This is a women’s planet. A homeworld. The Knights cannot mount expeditions from it, no matter how convenient that might seem. They may only come here to visit the women and see the children.’
‘There are no men here?’
Yoshi laughed. ‘Of course there are. The Knights are a small elite, though not quite as small as their name suggests. Perhaps one in five of the men has the mental and physical discipline required for what the Knights do. The others, and the women, do all the other necessary work of society.’ She waved a hand. ‘But that is not important. What is important is what the Knights have discovered at the planet Eurydice. Control of it could give them great power.’
Carlyle nodded firmly. ‘You’re telling me! That’s why my family can’t let them control a skein nexus.’
Yoshi’s perfect eyebrows rose a fraction. ‘A skein nexus?’
‘Aye,’ said Carlyle. ‘A group of gates, all within easy distance of each other. Walking distance, in this case.’
‘That is not the most important thing there,’ said Yoshi. ‘The important thing is what you call the relic. What do you think the relic is?’
Carlyle spread her hands. ‘I speculated that it was the remains of the starship that took the Eurydiceans to the planet. This seems to have been borne out.’ She smiled. ‘It transmitted a defensive virus that contained Microsoft patches.’
Yoshi smiled too. ‘That would not be definitive. It could have picked them up from scanning Eurydicean communications. But as it happens, you are right. The Knights’ preliminary investigations confirm it. It is indeed the starship. But it is more than that. It is a wormhole generator.’
‘Oh, fucking hell!’ Carlyle almost shouted, shocked, then caught herself. ‘Sorry, sorry about the language, but—that’s so much worse for us than we thought. If the Knights can generate new wormholes—’
‘It is worse than that, from your point of view,’ Yoshi said, sounding politely amused. ‘The relic is the machine that created the entire existing wormhole skein in the first place. It generated Carlyle’s Drift.’
I should die right now, Carlyle thought. I should have died before I knew this. But she had to know more, to drink the cup to the dregs.
‘Can it be used to control the skein?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Yoshi. ‘Once it is mastered. That is why the Knights wanted the QTD. It is a primitive version of a wormhole generator. Through investigating that, they hope to understand the skein generator. And, as you say, control it.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ It seemed cruel, tormenting her when she could do nothing with the information.
‘Because,’ said Yoshi, ‘we do not wish the Knights to have this power.’
‘Why ever not? They’re your top men.’
‘They are indeed our top men, and there is the problem. The balance of power between the sexes and the classes is subtle. For the Knights to have such a sudden access of power would tilt it decisively towards them.’
Carlyle stared at her. This was a way of thinking that was not familiar to her. But if it could be used to the family’s advantage, and hers …
‘How does telling me this help you?’
Yoshi’s face was expressionless. ‘That is for you to decide,’ she said. ‘I may just remind you that as a prisoner of war you have the right to correspond with your family, and that the secrecy of that correspondence is guaranteed by law and convention.’
‘Oh,’ said Carlyle. They sat for a while in silence.
‘What do you wish to do now?’ Yoshi asked.
‘I’d like to stay here.’
Yoshi nodded and stood up. ‘Can I have anything sent to you?’
‘Yes, please. I would like you to get me something to eat, something to drink, and something to write with. I have letters to send home.’
‘To your family?’
‘Yes. And one to myself.’
The big empty building down by the docks had been a warehouse, decades back, before being made obsolete by local nanofacture of the wares concerned. Ben-Ami had no idea what the wares had been, but the air and floor and very beams of the place were pervaded with some scent, spicy and sour, that suggested long-degraded alcohol molecules. The extravagant electricity supply might have originally been to maintain temperature and humidity. Now it powered lighting and sound, holograms and engines. Rehearsals of songs, dances, and dialogues, and workings through of stage and prop business, had been going on for a week. Denied for the first time in his career a performance permit for the Jardin des Étoiles by a flagrantly spurious fire-safety objection from the municipality of the Seventy-Ninth Arondissement, Ben-Ami had instructed his MEA to contest it and had provisionally transferred Rebels and Returners to this marginal locale. In interviews he had called it the Theatre in Exile. The name was now in lights above the doors.
Today was his first attempt to run the first act—or the prelude, depending on how it went. He sat in a plastic bucket seat a few rows from the front. Winter, Calder, Kowalsky, and Al-Khayed sat in the row behind him. Other people—technicians and stagehands—sat farther back, or hung about the aisles. A few strangers, too. Some attempt had been made to keep the public out, but it wasn’t enforced wholeheartedly—Ben-Ami wanted rumours to circulate in advance. The stage was dark and empty, except for two four-metre-tall wood-and-cardboard radio-controlled and string-suspended puppet replicas of Walker tanks on either side.
‘Looks good,’ Winter said, leaning forward.
Ben-Ami turned his head and grinned. ‘I have a surprise,’ he said.
‘More surprising than the Polarity tunnel orgy in the third act?’ said Calder. ‘That’ll be something.’
‘Nothing like that,’ said Al-Khayed.
‘Go,’ Ben-Ami said, into a throat mike.
Above the back of the stage appeared a full-colour hologram of Earth. Blue and white, glimpses of continents in green and brown, with only the outlines of the landmasses to distinguish it from any other habitable terrestrial. That was enough: the Horn of Africa, the pinched lake of the Mediterranean were unmistakeable, iconic, burned into human memory since the classic Apollo 8 shot. Behind him Ben-Ami heard Winter’s indrawn breath. He smiled in the dark.
How do you show history, when all around you history is happening?
In the past few days Benjamin Ben-Ami’s gaze and attention had flipped repeatedly between his scenario slate and the news wall. There had been a moment when a news team had stopped and taken a panning shot down into a valley. There, on the South Continent, a few hundred kilometres from New Start, was a sight like nothing he had ever seen. The five kilometres visible had been transformed overnight, from fertile if wild and scrubby riverbanks to farmland: green replacing blue-green, fences and glass houses, evenly spaced knots of houses each with its own comms cluster and antiaircraft missile battery. It was as if a great carpet of farms had been unrolled down the valley, each farm almost identical with the others, and each bristling with self-defensive, self-sufficient individuality.
When he’d looked away, turned his gaze back to the street around the cafe before wrenching it again to his work, the same distraction had prevailed: strangers everywhere. A few were quiet, watchful, Asiatic-featured people in colourful clothes that distinguished even the men among them easily from the black-clad Knights. These were the ones Lucinda Carlyle had called ‘commies,’ the DK. There were far more of the ones she’d called ‘farmers’: adults in stiff, sweaty garb gaping and rubbernecking and talking loudly, children swarming everywhere, yelling and laughing, all suntanned skin and sun-bleached hair and screaming laughter and gappy white teeth. You would have thought the farmers would have had enough to do, what with their settlings and steadings, but no. They had time to spare for tourism and shopping. Tourism without tact, shopping without respect or reciprocity, slapping down their AO dollars as though doing the place a favour and departing with armfuls of stuff. And their faces, unoptimised, raw, unageing but stubbled and spotted, lined and furrowed. The commonest purchase, or loot, among the women was cosmetics, clothes a close second; among the men, deodorants and gadgets.
It had taken him a day to realise ways in which this invasion of the body-shoppers could be turned to the advantage, practical and emotional, of the play.
The hologrammed Earth turned; the orchestra, recorded for this rehearsal, struck up. Brassy, rythmic, with an underlying and increasing drumbeat. The Walker tanks shuffled into a ponderous dance, their treads rising and falling, their gun arms sliding back and forth. In step with the drumbeats they approached each other, feinted and fell back, time and again. Apart from the flags painted on their sides—the Stars and Stripes and the Circled Stars—they were indistinguishable, their movements mirroring each other.
A tall woman in a ragged floaty dress ran on tiptoe from the wing to centre stage, spotlit; stopped, faced the audience. Gwyneth Voigt, Eurydice’s top female solo singer. Her classically trained voice lavished itself, wasted on Winter’s lyrics:
And so on. It was a crude and didactic rant in rhyme, but the woman’s voice made the words sound eerily apt. The light and shade silhouetted the Walker tanks, making them look indeed like giant lizards, great skeletal tyrannosaurs that loomed and thrashed and never quite laid a blow on one another, until …
The hologram planet faded as the stage’s backscreen lit up with an equally iconic and familiar image, of rising rockets. Zoom and track to the star-circled flags on the missiles and on the British, French, and Russian submarines from which they were fired. Cut to mushroom clouds over the US launch facilities, then missiles rising from those the first strike had missed. A series of almost subliminally fast, cliched images: the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Vatican, the Kremlin, each followed by a nuclear explosion. The hologram of Earth came back, this time a combined image from near Earth orbit: archived images from the real time, as the continents and seas sparkled with a thousand points of light.
Ben-Ami felt reasonably satisfied with this as a quick visual for the war. Showing how an American military AI had upgraded itself to consciousness and burned its way through the networks, then into the brains of people connected to them, had been more of a challenge. He’d had to rely on his audience’s prior knowledge of the Hard Rapture, but he still wanted to show it, at least symbolically.
Voigt fled the stage and the drumbeat deepened and quickened, and the lights faded: the war went on in the dark. When the lights came dimly back, after a moment of silent scurrying, two rows of green-glowing paper-thin screens with keypads had been laid on the floor. From each wing a dozen people in camo silks and dark shades ran on, formed up in lines and sat down cross-legged on the stage, facing each other across the banks of screens. Their fingers tapped at the keyboards. On the hologram the planet vanished to be replaced by gunner’s eye views of several heavy machine guns, whose bullets rapped out in time with the rattle of the keys—no particularly clever trick, since it was the same sound effect that did service for both. The operators sang instructions to each other, in English on one side, in French on the other. The guns darkened to sharp shadows, and behind them, filling as much space as the Earth had done, a sphere of light grew. It was a complex sphere, made up of many lines in many colours, that twined and slashed about like the sparks on a Van de Graaff generator. The light intensified, and the hologram drifted forward and expanded.
Suddenly, all the people on the USA side of the stage swivelled their screens and turned their heads to the audience at once, and—with a few exceptions that Ben-Ami mentally noted for later correction—each screen and each pair of shades reflected the swirling sphere above. The operators on the EUR side worked on, oblivious.
The American Walker tank changed too. With one tug of a hidden rope, it separated into its component parts. Each part sprang into a different self-sufficient shape: the turret and the cab, the guns and legs and treads each transforming into an autonomous war machine—some winged and remaining airborne, others sprouting new limbs on which they scuttled. A cloud of carbon dioxide swept across the stage, revealing a barrage of laser beams that struck the EUR tank and slashed across the faces and bodies of the EUR operators, who fell back writhing dramatically. The new war machines swarmed across the stage and pounced on the bodies and on the enemy tank.
The action speeded up, becoming intentionally more chaotic, the music more urgent and discordant: people and machines surged in from both sides of the stage, those on the USA side becoming caught up in the rainbow trance of the glowing sphere, those on the EUR side fighting and falling to the machines. Every so often a flashbulb flared, leaving afterimages through which what was seen on the stage became a glimpse of a memory you wanted to forget.
The lights went off. The hologram sphere expanded to fill the stage, then vanished like a popped soap bubble in sunlight. The music softened. When the lights slowly rose again the stage was filled with a massed choir. They wore academic robes over leotards. None of the singers was Eurydicean. There was something shocking and beautiful in the rank on rank of unoptimised faces and wildly variant heights and skin-tones.
‘Wow,’ breathed Winter. ‘That’s your—’
Ben-Ami raised a hushing finger, intent on the stage. The song began.
If you could hie to Koresh in the twinkling of an eye,
And then continue onward with that same speed to fly,
Do you think that you could ever, through all eternity,
Find out the generation where Gods began to be?
The works of God continue, and worlds and lives abound;
Improvement and progression have one eternal round.
There is no end to matter; there is no end to space;
There is no end to spirit; there is no end to grace.
There is no end to virtue; there is no end to might;
There is no end to wisdom; there is no end to light.
There is no end to union; there is no end to youth;
There is no end to learning; there is no end to truth.
There is no end to glory; there is no end to love;
There is no end to being; there is no death above.
There is no end to glory; there is no end to love;
There is no end to being; there is no death above.
‘Curtain,’ said Ben-Ami. There was no curtain, but the stage lights went off and the room lights came on. The people on stage stood blinking and smiling self-consciously. Applause, scattered but fervent, echoed around the building. Ben-Ami leaned back, smiling. His surprise, and his entrepreneurial flair, had worked—seizing the literally heaven-sent opportunity of having all this talent and historical authenticity fall from the sky. The America Offline population included a remarkable number of trained and practised singers, mostly choral—tabernacle, temple, gospel, union—and some individual, whose rural and religious roots meshed perfectly with the show’s themes.
‘Did you write that?’ asked Calder.
Ben-Ami leaned his elbow on a beam at the side of the room, near the table around which the cast and crew were taking their lunch-break, and sipped umami tea and looked anxiously at Winter and Calder. Calder had taken up tobacco-smoking again in a big way since the AO folk had arrived. It was frowned upon by most of their sects, and was therefore a gesture of rebellion. The hunchbacked musician was taking this for all it was worth. Ben-Ami could see the point, but preferred to stay upwind of it. Winter eyed choristers in leotards.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Ben-Ami, ‘a moment. What did you think?’
Calder stubbed his cigarette. ‘The choir, that was good,’ he said. ‘Makes a neat sort of backwards link between us and the new cultures that we didn’t know about. Not so sure about the run-up, though. The war and Singularity stuff.’
‘Ah,’ said Ben-Ami. That was what he’d been worried about, but he still felt a stab of dismay. He’d put a lot of effort and thought into that scenario.
‘Visually it’s fine,’ said Calder, sounding slightly apologetic. ‘It’s just not very clear what’s going on, you know? Not even with one of our most crap songs as commentary. Half the people in your audience, maybe more, wouldn’t have a clue what “USA” and “EUR” stood for—in any sense of the words.’
‘Well, that’s hardly relevant,’ said Winter. ‘Everybody knows there was a world war and that one side’s forces and most of its population went through a hard-take-off Singularity in its first minutes. That’s all they need to know.’
‘Exactly!’ said Ben-Ami.
‘But that’s not the problem,’ Winter went on. ‘It’s too bloody abstract and evenhanded. I mean, I know “Giant Lizards from Another Star” is kind of bitter about both sides, but fuck. They attacked us.’
‘Correction,’ said Calder. ‘We attacked them. I’m sure you do remember that.’
Winter moved his hand as though dashing something to the ground. ‘Technicality. It was a preemptive strike, everybody knew it was us or them. They were the ones going for one world empire. It doesn’t give the feel of how it was, back in the old Axis. We felt we were standing up for humanity, for Earth, against a fucking inhuman machine, and in the end that was what the USA literally became.’
Ben-Ami crushed his empty cup and threw it away. ‘You’re missing the point,’ he said. ‘This is just a prelude. An overture. An introduction! What I’m trying to do here is show the catastrophe, the tragedy of it all, for both sides and for everyone. The whole tone changes later, as you know, you have seen it, when it’s the remnants of Europe and the space settlers and space forces against the war machines. But for this part, you have to remember, we had—we have—people originally from the American side in the resistance—scientists, astronauts, even space marines who didn’t get caught up in the Hard Rapture thanks—ironically enough—to the superior firewalls built to guard them from our side’s hacking. Certain of our institutions are of American origin: for one, the Joint Chiefs. I hope you understand me. Yes? We cannot beat the anti-American drum too hard here. Later for patriotism, my friends. Let us show… decorum in how we treat the final war.’
‘Yeah,’ said Calder, ‘fair enough, but you haven’t shown how the civilians got caught up—’
‘Fine, fine,’ said Ben-Ami, furiously. ‘I shall make sure we have at least five people off to one side watching television or on-line or playing virtuality games and becoming entrained like the soldiers. Would that satisfy you?’
‘Sure,’ said Calder. ‘You can’t have everything, but you got to be realistic.’
‘I’ll try to bear that in mind,’ snarled Ben-Ami, and stalked off to talk to the nearest Latter Day Adventist.
It took another day to get on to rehearsing the second act, in which ragged people scrabbled in polystyrene ruins and squinted along rifle barrels while holograms and models of ESA aerospace fighter-bombers strafed war machines and the choir sang The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Ben-Ami watched and supervised from a platform in the wings.
‘That isnae how it wis!’
Ben-Ami’s first thought, on hearing the raised female voice, simultaneously scornful and indignant, was that Lucinda Carlyle had come back. Looking down at the rehearsal stage, he could see that Winter had had a similar startled thought—the musician had whipped around and was looking at the voice’s source with his nose forward and his body quivering like a pointing dog. Ben-Ami’s second thought was along the lines of oh fuck, not another one. But this time, it wasn’t one of the girls in the chorus, stepping out of the line, interrupting the song, and brandishing her script. It was some woman who’d joined the rehearsal’s unofficial audience, now having an altercation with the stage manager. This was a relief.
As he clattered down the stairs to the stage in the hobnailed boots that were this week’s must-have, Ben-Ami reflected that if his newly recruited chorus and session singers went on impugning his script’s historical accuracy much more or much longer, he’d do better to sack the lot of them and start from scratch. A hard core of people among them had actually been there: they had lived on Earth before, during and after the Hard Rapture, and they thought ‘artistic licence’ was something you got from the government. The more intelligent they were, the more doggedly literal they seemed about anything literary. Some of them talked about ‘sacred writings’ and ‘holy books,’ a notion that made Ben-Ami scratch his head.
He hopped up on the stage and strode across the chewed-up rubber mats that marked out places to stand and move, and incidentally protected the boards from the fashionable boots. The woman who’d objected was standing a bit off one of the strips, still arguing with the stage manager, who seemed to be retreating.
‘Excuse me,’ said Ben-Ami.
They both turned to him. The woman was small and stocky, a little plump, with green eyes and black curly hair. She was wearing a white shirt and blue jeans and high-heeled boots.
‘Madame,’ Ben-Ami said as patiently as he could, ‘could you tell me what your problem is with my libretto?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Ben-Ami,’ she said. ‘I couldnae actually help myself, but … I was well out of line there, sorry, no problem, it’s your play and I’ll hold my tongue.’
‘Seriously,’ said Ben-Ami, ‘I would like to know—’
Winter bounded up on the stage and hurried over. Ben-Ami waved resignedly at the rest of the chorus and cast.
‘Take ten,’ he said. People wandered off. He turned to the woman. ‘Now, what were you—’
‘Funny accent for AO,’ said Winter, looking at the woman. ‘Wouldn’t you say?’
‘Aye, I would that, Winter,’ she said, grinning. She stuck out a hand to him. ‘My name’s Amelia Orr. Pleased to meet you. I’ve been a fan since I was wee.’
‘You’re not one of the AO people?’ asked Ben-Ami.
Orr and Winter were looking at each other with an odd understanding. ‘Could you no tell?’ Orr asked.
Ben-Ami waved a hand. ‘Frankly, no. All these American accents and dialects sound equally strange to me. You do sound like Lucinda, but—’ He shrugged, then straightened up, startled. ‘You haven’t come through that … hole in space, have you?’
‘Ah, no,’ said Orr. ‘I came in wi the farmers. On a ship, see? The gate’s still shut as far as know.’
‘But you are connected to the Carlyles,’ said Ben-Ami, eyes narrowing. ‘You know, I can see the resemblance… .’
‘To Lucinda? Aye, you could say that. She’s my great-great-granddaughter. Or was.’
‘What?’ Winter asked, sounding shocked. ‘Is she dead?’
Orr shrugged. ‘Seems so, from last we’ve heard of her. No tae worry, she’ll be out the resurrection tank soon enough—well, her copy will, and none the worse for not knowing what happened to her original, poor thing.’
‘And what was that?’ said Winter.
‘Some daft scheme.’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t worry about it. I mean, what’s dying in this day and age? As ye no doubt ken well enough.’
Winter nodded sombrely. ‘I suppose you have some plan. If not, well, it’s a long way to come to have a photo signed.’
Orr chuckled. ‘Aye, it is. And yes, I do.’
Ben-Ami was beginning to feel something of the frustration of a child listening to a conversation among adults, or vice versa. ‘You’re losing me,’ he said.
Orr turned to him. ‘Youse are the Returners, aye? You want tae go back tae Earth, and push off the Knights, and have, uh, independence for Eurydice?’
Ben-Ami recoiled slightly. ‘Not me personally,’ he said.
‘Sure sounds like what your play’s about.’
‘This is art,’ said Ben-Ami. He had an uneasy thought that this distinction didn’t signify to her.
‘Aye, aye, sure,’ said Orr. She was looking around with a sort of artless inquisitiveness, as though bored with the conversation. ‘Is there no some place we can talk privately?’ She looked back at him. ‘When you’re through wi the rehearsal, I mean. I’ll be quiet.’
There were five new ships in the system. Cyrus Lamont tracked them in the virtual mental space generated by watching the gravity-wave detector display with one eye and the visual display with the other. In the past weeks he’d become, he fancied, something of an expert on starship wakes. This pattern, a surge of matched gravity pulses and Cherenkov radiation flashes, was unfamiliar. It did not take him long to interpret it as successive short-range FTL jumps. Only one ship headed for Eurydice. The others fanned out to the asteroid belt. One of them was aiming more or less head-on for his quadrant.
‘Comms?’ he asked. ‘Summarise.’
‘Languages,’ said the ship. ‘Korean, Bengali, Chinese, Spanish, and Tagalog. Content: property rights claims and prospecting.’
‘They’re divvying up the asteroid belt?’ This time the sense of affront was personal.
‘Yes.’ A sense of hesitation in the silence. ‘That transmission that happened before—’
‘It’s just happened again. Five times?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shit.’
‘Quite.’
Everyday conversation between Lamont and the ship had become compressed. In the days since the transformation of the asteroid into reentry-packaged war machines, and the FTL jump, no further untoward events had occurred. He and the Hungry Dragon had used the time to continue their attempt at therapeutic debugging. Progress had been slow. It had left both of them too emotionally exhausted for much in the way of other interactions. Even their sex life was not what it had been.
Hours passed. Lamont exercised in the web, though he was beginning to doubt that he’d ever walk in a gravity well again. The new ship came closer, jump by jump. It was as though it was feeling its way, or perhaps navigating by sight and trial and error. Once or twice, it seemed to repeat a jump it had already made: disappearing from its point of arrival, setting off again, and emerging in a slightly different place.
Eventually the foreign ship’s trace vanished, in the location of an asteroid just large enough to register on the gravity-wave detector. Other than that, Lamont was quite unable to observe it, or any of its effects. After an hour, the ship departed, in a jump that (as Lamont learned, hours later) took it straight to Eurydice. Running traces from the rest of the system as they trickled in hour by hour, Lamont and ship figured that the other three ships in the quartet had followed a similar course—moving step by step towards a relatively large asteroid, engaging with it, then jumping to Eurydice, where their tracks were lost in the clutter and the well.
T
hat is one gae weird ship,’ Amelia Orr remarked, glancing up. Winter, walking under a warm rain beside her from the docks to the monorail station, looked up too. A black manta ray gliding through the sky. It had something smaller and more angular attached to its underside, hard to make out, black on black.
‘Jeez,’ he said. ‘Mind you, they all look weird to me.’ He jerked his head at the ship of the Knights, still motionless above the city, then his gaze followed the new ship as it turned—banked, in fact, which struck him as a flourish rather than an aerodynamic requirement—and headed north. ‘Do you know what that one is?’
‘No tae speak of,’ she said. ‘It’s a new design knocked up by DK.’
‘The commies?’ Winter laughed.
She shot him a sharp glance. ‘Don’t underestimate them. They hae this fixed idea called juche—self-reliance. They’re no as patient as the Knights, but they do try tae figure stuff out for theirselves. Partly fae the posthuman tech, partly fae first principles. It gets results. Yon’s the most manoeuvrable ship ever built.’ She sighed. ‘Lucinda wanted tae get one for us.’
Winter felt a stab, again, at the thought of Lucinda dying. ‘What for?’
Amelia made a swooping gesture with her hand. ‘You can guess.’
‘Yeah. Looks like that’s off the set-list now.’
‘We have a better idea.’
‘I’ll look forward to hearing it.’
‘I’ll bet.’ She grinned at him sideways, in a way that made something inside him jolt. It puzzled him. She was a generation younger than him, born soon after the Hard Rapture. On the astronomical scales of living and dying, that made her a near contemporary. He had been dead in the frozen bog when she had been growing up in the ruins of Glasgow. Of all the people he had met here—even people he’d known, like Armand, whom they were now going to see—she was the least alien. That she had listened to his live postmortem performances—transmitted from Mars and the Belt to Earth—and had collected various reproductions of the band’s albums in whatever media could be made to work in the post-holocaust environment—this gave her an almost uncanny lien on his acquaintance. She was a fan who had matured, who was older than he was. She had lived a longer life.
They crossed the road—he’d already become dangerously habituated to automated traffic, and stepped out with barely a glance—and went up to the station pillar and the spiral steps to the platform. Winter thumbed up Lesser Lights Lane in his phone and it told him which shuttle to take. When the right one arrived it was empty. They sat opposite each other, knees to knees. Looked each other in the eye, looked away, looked back, laughed.
‘What?’ asked Amelia.
‘Nothing,’ said Winter. ‘It’s stupid.’ He looked away again. Whizz of the line, lights, and drops.
‘No, go on.’
He rubbed his stubble. He knew it would only make it itch. ‘It’s strange meeting someone who’s listened to our music longer than we’ve been alive.’
‘Aye, well. It’s strange meeting you. After all this time.’ She put her knuckles to her lips, knocking at the door of her mouth. Somebody must have answered. It opened. ‘I had a crush on you when I was a wee lass. In my teens, like.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘No, really I did.’
‘Well, I’m flattered,’ He laughed. ‘I hope I’m not a disappointment… .’ He nearly said in the flesh.
‘You look younger than you did in the pictures.’
At last a chance to change the subject. ‘I should bloody hope so. I was twenty-odd then. I’m only fifty-something now. What’s it like living, what, five times longer than that? Do you get wiser as well as older?’
Amelia shook her head, curls bouncing. ‘You get cannier. Mair cunning. That’s it. I think a lot ae what folk used tae call maturity was just fatigue poisons.’
‘Damn,’ said Winter. ‘And there was me thinking I had that to look forward to.’
‘What?’
‘Better impulse control.’
‘For that, you can go tae the Knights. I’ve never seen the attraction myself.’
‘Still impulsive, then.’
‘Oh, aye.’
He was kind of hoping she would demonstrate it, but she didn’t.
Instead she talked about the music and what it had meant to her. It was a conversation Winter had become used to; he could predict the questions and comments and come up with the responses while thinking about something else; but more than usual, he felt a burning shame at where he’d been coming from all those years ago. The songs that had given voice to many people’s hatred of the war machines and the posthumans had been adapted from songs that had given voice, before the war, to a more sinister hatred. It was not that he and Calder had shared it themselves, not exactly, not in their better moments, not when they were sober and in the daylight. They had adapted to it. They had literally played along to it if it had gone down well with the audience. All those pubs and halls: the English electric folk scene, the Scottish radical left, rabid in their patriotic passion and pro-war zeal. You could pick up an old Phil Ochs number or Billy Bragg cover version and twist it into something that made people want to go out and kill Americans.
The offices of Blue Water Landings in Lesser Lights Lane were smaller and scruffier than Winter had expected. Name in discreet pale grey LEDs above the door, dust in the corners of the sheet-diamond windows, a neglected pot-plant yellowing on the sill beside a sheaf of scribbled-on plastic transparencies going milky in the sunlight. When he and Amelia turned up at the door Armand paged them in and sat them down in what was obviously a reception area, with no receptionist and no other staff. The former general looked tired and not a little alarmed to see them.
‘Ah, James, good afternoon.’
‘Jacques. This is Amelia Orr, from—’
Armand raised a hand to silence him, then shook Orr’s.
‘Your name is familiar to me,’ he said, smiling. ‘A moment, please.’
He ducked into his own office, rattled at a keyboard and came out, closing the door behind him.
‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Hush fields up. Just making sure.’ He perched on the reception desk, waved Winter to a coffee machine. ‘Please. Help yourselves. For me, au lait.’
As Winter sorted out the coffees he realised that Armand probably was less competent with the machine than he was, and was rather clumsily concealing that fact. How small are our vanities sometimes, he thought.
‘I did not expect you,’ said Armand to Orr. ‘So soon. Is there a problem?’
‘No exactly,’ said Orr. ‘I’ve come tae you with a proposition fae the Carlyles.’
Armand lifted an eyebrow. ‘Another one?’
‘Someone’s approached you already?’
‘Of course,’ said Armand. ‘Did Lucinda Carlyle not tell you?’
‘No, she did not.’
‘Ah.’ Armand shifted uneasily. ‘That raises certain difficulties. Perhaps you could put your proposition to me, and I can tell you if it’s compatible with the one I’ve already agreed to.’
‘That question,’ said Orr, ‘disnae arise at all.’
‘Oh, but I’m afraid it does. Lucinda is, after all, a Carlyle.’
Orr almost slopped her coffee. ‘I don’t know what she’s been telling you, but her name gie’s her nae privileges where this is concerned.’
Armand gave a downward wave of his palm. ‘I make no presumptions about your family’s internal affairs. I’ve just noted the names of the people who’ve been making such earnest entreaties to the Joint Chiefs.’
Winter knew that the question on the tip of Orr’s tongue was You know about that? He would have been disappointed if she’d asked it, and she didn’t. Instead her face became a mask of calm.
‘That’s true,’ she said, ‘and I’m on the same team. Just checking the back door, so tae speak, while the high heid yins are knocking on the front.’
‘An illuminating metaphor,’ said Armand, as though breathing out the smoke of a fine cigar. ‘Please go on.’
‘We can offer you … mair than one starship tae back you up if you move your forces tae dislodge the Knights fae around the relic.’
‘Oh! Is that all?’
‘It’s no sic a big deal as you might think,’ said Orr. ‘Militarily ye’re mair than a match for them. That gun you used on our search engine—killing me and a few others, I may add, so I know what I’m talking about—is better than anything the Knights possess. Their only advantage over you is the starships, and like I said, we can take care of that.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you can, and I’m sure we are. The only problem is that my company, and any others I could muster, are a minority of Eurydice’s armed forces. We would be facing not just the Knights but our own people—more of them, and better armed.’
‘Not if they were otherwise engaged.’
‘In what?’
‘In putting down a riot in the city, for example.’
Armand laughed. ‘We don’t use troops for internal security. It is known as the principle of posse commitatus. In any case, I don’t see any occasion for a riot in the near future.’
‘I do,’ said Orr. ‘Your friend Ben-Ami’s play.’
Armand stared at her. ‘You are not completely mad,’ he said. ‘You are, however, quite unfamiliar with our ways. Yes, there is every possibility that fights will break out in the audience, if what I hear is anything to go by. No, there is not the slightest chance of even the municipal militia’s having to intervene. A few bravoes will be stabbed or shot, a few dozen heads will be broken, and the hospitals and resurrection clinics will have a busy and profitable week. That is all.’
‘I wish you had put this plan to me before you took it to Armand,’ said Winter. He was as embarrassed on her behalf as he was furious with her on his own.
Orr looked quite unperturbed. ‘Not a problem,’ she said. ‘Sure, you’re mair familiar wi the facts on the ground. So you come up with something.’
‘Fortunately,’ said Armand, ‘I don’t have to, and neither does James. I have a much more satisfactory and realistic plan, which I’ve been working to for some time.’
‘And what might that be?’
‘It’s very straightforward,’ he said. ‘I’ve discussed this whole situation with the Joint Chiefs. They expressed great disquiet. We no longer have any control over who comes to the planet, or the system. The Knights do nothing against the AO settlers, and now, I hear, the DK arrivals. Worse, they forbid us from doing anything about it ourselves—although we could. This is deeply resented. So I put a plan to them, and together we put a … condensed version of the plan to the Knights. They were highly amenable to my suggestion that Blue Water Landings and other military companies provide on-site backup for the Knights while the Knights investigate the relic, and that selected Returner veterans be resurrected to bring their expertise to bear. We are, as you say, better equipped than the Knights for handling any outbreak of war machines, and they are glad of our help.’
‘You mean you have troops around the relic right now?’ Amelia asked.
‘Yes,’ said Armand. ‘Along with the Knights, of course, but yes. That’s why I’m the only person left in the office. I’m kept very busy coordinating it all, and greeting and orienting the, ah, returning Returners. And, as you see, there is absolutely no need to divert or confront the rest of Eurydice’s armed forces, because they are controlled by the Joint Chiefs, and the Joint Chiefs are on our side. As indeed are the other armed forces—though they don’t know of the plan they’re as angry about the Knights and the farmers as are those who do.’
‘That’s brilliant!’ she said. ‘So you’re ready to move as soon as we come in wi our ships?’
‘We are indeed,’ said Armand. ‘That gun we used against your search engine—it is, as you say, superior to anything the Knights have. Funnily enough, it was they who explained to us how it worked—we developed it empirically from refining the standard plasma cannon, and we didn’t grasp just how it’s as destructive as it is. The Knights tell us it generates a fragment of cosmic string. It’s quite capable of shooting a starship right out of the sky.’
Orr punched her palm. ‘Fantastic!’
‘Yes,’ said Armand. ‘And that’s exactly what we’ll do in the event of an attack by the bloody Carlyles.’
It didn’t quite register.
‘Shoot down the KE ships?’
‘Yes,’ said Armand. ‘And yours, if you attack us.’
‘Why should we attack you? We’re on your side.’
‘No, you’re not,’ said Armand. ‘You’re on your own side. I’ve no intention of being used to grab control of the relic from the Knights, only to be displaced in turn by the Carlyles. We don’t know what the relic is, but we know it’s important to Eurydice, and we want control of it for Eurydice.’
Amelia Orr rocked back a little in her chair.
‘Aye,’ she said carefully. ‘We can live wi that. We can come tae some kindae agreement. Just so long as it’s no the Knights, or any o the other powers for that matter. Aye. Nae problem, General. I just hae one wee question. What does this Assembly o yours think of aw this?’
Armand glanced over at Winter, as though seeking complicity. ‘They know nothing about it,’ he said. ‘Not even the, ah, responsible elements. They can’t be trusted in advance. After the die is cast, they’ll come round.’
‘Welcome aboard,’ Winter said. ‘I seem to recall a similar argument before the Returner rebellion. That time, it was you who was expected to come round.’
The bitter reminder left Armand unperturbed. ‘I didn’t have the Joint Chiefs on my side, that time,’ he said mildly. ‘I’m sure your friend Kowalsky will do an excellent job of portraying my double-dealing and treachery. Meanwhile, I shall do my duty, as I did before.’ He looked down at his desk for a moment. ‘And, you know, it presses.’
They took the hint.
Koresh on a spit!”
What?’asked Amelia, as they turned the corner out of Lesser Lights Lane and into the boulevard of Walker Drive.
Winter laughed, relieved of some of his rage. ‘That’s the filthiest oath you can swear around here these days. Fashionable with the bravoes.’
‘I kind of gathered that,’ said Amelia. ‘I was wondering why you’re upset.’
Winter stopped in the shade of a potted ginkgo and looked down at her earnestly inquiring face. ‘Jesus,’ he said. The older blasphemy seemed fitting. ‘Don’t you realise what you wanted to do? Turn our fucking play into a riot—what were you thinking of?’
She shook her head. ‘That’s a very narrow view of it.’
‘You were thinking strategy? Oh, great. You know, when Lucinda told us her family were criminals, we laughed it off. Fuck. That’s what you are. I remember these gormless Glasgow gangsters and the low cunning they thought was ace. Even so, I’d have thought two centuries would have knocked more sense into your head.’
For a moment her face showed hurt. Then she shrugged and smiled. ‘That isnae how it works,’ she said. ‘Like I was saying. You don’t get wiser. You just become mair what you are.’
‘I’m not sure I like what you are.’
‘I’m no sure I do, either,’ said Amelia. ‘But I like you.’ She caught his hand and squeezed it, grinning up at him. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s take that poor impulse control of ours for a ride.’
Lucinda awoke in her own bed, in her own flat. Morning sunlight from Rho Coronae Borealis slanted low through the window. She lay staring at the ceiling for a few minutes, feeling relaxed and refreshed, as if she’d had a sound sleep. After a while she began to feel a vague disquiet. There was something big and frightening she had to do today. Oh yes. That was it. She had to go on the Chernobyl expedition. Meet the team, take a backup, go and get the QTD, and then…
She remembered that she had already met the team and taken the backup. She sat bolt upright and yelled. The bedroom door opened and her brother Duncan and cousin Kevin came in.
‘It’s aw right,’ Duncan said awkwardly. ‘You’re aw right.’
She stared at the lads and hugged her knees through the covers. ‘I died,’ she said. ‘I died, I died, I died.’
Kevin took a step towards her.
‘Keep away from me!’ she shouted. He looked around and sat down on the edge of a wicker chair. Duncan propped himself on the windowsill.
‘How could you let me dae that?’ she accused.
‘We didnae let you,’ said Kevin, sounding aggrieved. ‘It was aw your idea. We didnae even ken you were gonnae dae that.’
She thought about it. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said. ‘Sorry. God.’ She put her hands to her head. Her hair was short and felt downy. ‘I must have been crazy.’
‘You could say that,’ said Duncan. ‘I won’t. It was brave, I’ll give you that.’
‘I hope it was worth it,’ she said. Her tone was faintly self-deprecating; she was absolutely confident it had been worth it, from the family’s point of view and hers, if not from that of her predecessor, her unfortunate original.
‘Well, kindae …’ said Kevin. Duncan shot him a look.
‘What dae ye mean?’ Lucinda asked.
Kevin sighed. ‘It’s a bit complicated. Best discuss it when you’re up, aye?’
He jerked his thumb at the door. Duncan followed him out.
‘See you in a minute,’ Kevin said, as the door closed.
Lucinda sat and shook for more than a minute. There was something absurd about her situation. Total novelty combined with utter familiarity. Physically she had never felt better. She was even hungry. None of the trauma that her original must have gone through could affect her in the slightest. It took some introspection for her to recognise the feeling that made her shake. It was the feeling she remembered from occasions when she’d been unharmed but had narrowly escaped death. That sense of the fragility of existence. She held the thought until it faded into a glow of gratitude for being alive, then very deliberately put it out of her mind.
She swung out of bed and stood up in a soft but plain green hospital gown. She pulled it over her head and tossed it in the drexler. Naked in front of the mirror, she inspected herself. Her skin was very smooth, not a callus on her feet. Her hair was soft and curly, not nearly dark enough. For the rest, she seemed to have rejuvenated about five years. Her face struck her as unused and naive; all evidence of her experience and earned cunning sponged away like so much makeup.
She dialled up a sharp, military-style suit and shoes, and showered while the drexler chugged and spun. A vain effort to tug her hair a bit straighter and longer-looking only made her wince and realise how close she might still be to crying. Dressed, she struck herself as far too cute. More like a cadet than a soldier. It would have to do. She went out and marched through to the main living space.
‘You look … smart,’ said Kevin. He’d thoughtfully made her some coffee and cereal.
‘What’s this about—’
‘Eat,’ her cousin said. She sat down at the table.
Duncan prowled the file racks. Kevin stared out of the window, overlooking the street. The cereal filled her mouth and her belly. She pushed away the empty bowl, poured another coffee.
‘I’m up to strength,’ she said. ‘Get me up to speed.’
Duncan retreated a bit, sprawled in a web chair. Kevin sat down across from her.
‘Lucinda—’ He paused. ‘Your past self sent you this.’
He handed her an envelope. It was Red Cross stamped, gene-sealed to her. It opened to thumb pressure. A few sheets of astrogram paper slipped out. She examined them. God, had her state of mind been that terrible? It all looked very emotional. She couldn’t read it, not now. She slid them back in the envelope.
‘Later,’ she said. She held up the envelope. ‘How did this get to—from me?’
‘You—’ He paused again, shook his head, pressed on. ‘You didn’t die on Chernobyl, or back here. You found a gate that took you through to a KE homeworld. They took you prisoner, tried to save you, failed. You sent two messages back. One was that letter. The other was to the family. Not so personal. It told us what had happened.’
‘Did we get the QTD?’
‘Well, yes,’ Kevin said. ‘You recovered it aw right. But it and the ship you hired got wheeched away by another ship. One ae they DK ships you told us about. You found out later it was the Knights who stole it.’
Lucinda jumped up. ‘It was all for nothing?’
‘No, no,’ said Kevin. ‘Uh, look, it’s aw right, calm down—’
‘Don’t you fucking tell me to—’
She collapsed back into the chair, breathed heavily a few times. ‘Aw right. Go on.’
‘The information you sent back was worth mair to us than a ship,’ Kevin said. ‘Uh, could you please, like, bear that in mind, see?’
‘OK,’ she said.
He told her it all, the whole thing: Johnstone’s betrayal, the enormously greater significance of the relic on Eurydice than anyone had suspected. Now they were fighting the Knights not just for control of a skein nexus, but for control of the entire skein, for starters. And for all that he had told her of how important this information was to the family, all that it meant to her was that her initial screwup on Eurydice had been far worse than she’d realised, and that in her last expedition she had fucked up again.
She didn’t want to talk about that. Let it hang unspoken between them. Right now all she could do was try to repair the damage.
‘What happened to the other woman?’ she asked. ‘The metal-head?’
Kevin rasped his jawline. ‘Um,’ he said. ‘Like I said, she went through with you—’
‘No, I know that, I mean did she come back?’
Kevin glanced over at Duncan.
‘Ah, fuck, tell her,’ Duncan said.
‘She came back aw right,’ Kevin said. ‘In fact she came back wi your letters. She’s spitting blood, or she would if she had any blood tae spit.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Lucinda had a sudden sickening vision, or rather two: of Morag Higgins reattached to her radiation-raddled corpse, and of her being sent back as a head in a box. ‘How is she—’
Kevin looked at her oddly. ‘There’s nothing wrang wi her. That’s her problem. Her heid’s been stravaigin’ aff searching for scrap, you might say, and she’s back wi no just a heid. She’s come back wi a whole metal body.’
Lucinda shuddered. ‘She took a backup before she went. Giving her another and a new body is the least we can do for her.’
‘That’s the strange thing,’ said Kevin. ‘She’s pissed aff, nae doubt about that, but she disnae want tae kill hersel any mair.’
‘Is she angry with me?’
Kevin shook his head. ‘I think she wants tae kill Johnstone.’
‘Johnstone must be dead already,’ Lucinda said.
‘You’re no used tae this,’ Kevin told her, like she needed reminding. ‘The version ae Johnstone who went wi you has nae doubt died. The version he left here was timed tae kick aff his revival as soon as the other was out the door ae the clinic. He fucked aff before we knew aught had gone wrang, took the money and ran. For sure he’s wi the Knights now, probably on Eurydice.’
‘Oh,’ said Lucinda, smiling for the first time in this life. ‘That’s beautiful.’
Kevin looked alarmed. Duncan sprang up from his chair and stalked over. They both glared at her.
‘What?’
‘I hope yir no thinking of another ae yir wee schemes,’ said Kevin. ‘The best ye can hope for is tae join the expeditionary force as a grunt.’
‘There’s an expeditionary force?’ she asked, genuinely interested but also hoping to change the subject.
‘Oh, sure,’ said Kevin. ‘Ian and Amelia are heading it up. Just like you said. She’s doing the starship swap trick and ground liason work on Eurydice, and Ian’s found some mair gates to the same place you did. Well, the gate you went through originally hasnae reopened yet, but he’s found a wormhole route tae near enough that DK planet you found that has a gate tae Eurydice. They’re building up a combat archaeology team tae hit them through that in a day or two. I’m getting a squad together myself. You should offer tae join in.’
‘That’s fine by me,’ said Lucinda.
‘Come on,’ said Duncan. ‘You had mair nor that in mind. I ken ye too well by now.’
Lucinda leaned back and made soothing motions with her hands. ‘I just wondered how Morag Higgins might feel about doing the same,’ she said, as mildly as she could. ‘Come on now, guys, the Knights have one Rapture-fucker working for them on the relic. Would it no be a good idea to have one working for us?’
This was not going to be easy. Not the doing of it, not the preparation. Preparation first. Alone again in her flat, Lucinda eased the letter from her previous self out of its envelope. The thin paper shook in her hands. She had to look away and walk about for a few minutes. Then she sat down and read it.
Dear Lucinda,
Don’t do what I did. Death is real and believe me you don’t want it to happen to you. I don’t want it to happen to you. I already think of you as someone different from me, as of course you are. Ah hell we just go into this one by one.
Oh, cut the crap, girl! Lucinda skimmed page after page of meditative whinging before she got to the meat.
But enough about me. (You said it, Lucinda thought.) This is for you. As I hope our family have told you or will tell you, Johnstone sold us out to the Knights, stole the QTD, and the Knights hope to use it to gain an understanding of the relic on Eurydice which they believe created and can be used to control Carlyle’s Drift. I expect you will go back to Eurydice one way or another. If you do there are two things to bear in mind. One is that the stakes are very high. Johnstone is capable of anything and I don’t know if the Knights can keep him on the leash. The other is that synthetics and chip minds really are people. You remember how you felt when you learned about Winter’s mind being constructed? Well that was wrong. I don’t know how but I learned that from being with Morag Higgins. If she survives and chooses repatriation please be kind to her and remember that she can help you, and the family, get back at Johnstone. If you possibly can, please kill Johnstone for me. And again, if you possibly can, please fuck James Winter for me. He’s an opportunity I missed this time around.
Here’s tae us on the next recurrence.
The dictyping here was replaced by shaky, scrawled handwriting that she barely recognised as her own:
Yours aye,
She started quivering again. The person who had written the final paragraph was a person different from herself. The revenge on Johnstone, yes, that she could take, that she bloody well could take. But not the rest. Not the advice about Higgins and Winter. Her other self had been changed out there, by some experience other than approaching death, in some way that her present self could not understand.
She sighed and put the letter away. Some day, when she was calmer, she would read the first part of it again. It contained no useful information. It did not even contain useful advice about facing death. No recollection of anything that her other self had written would stand her in good stead if—when—she went down the dark glen herself. Perhaps that was what she was supposed to learn from this: that you really did have to walk it all alone.
Still, it made her feel better about contacting Morag Higgins. She was less in dread of the prospect than she had been. Perhaps this, too, had been what her other self had hoped.
Lucinda peeled a new phone off the flat’s comms panel and slipped it on. It still had Higgins’s code.
‘Oh,’ said Higgins. ‘You.’
‘I would like to meet.’
Higgins shrugged. ‘You know where to find me. Back where we started. In the Hairy Fairy.’
There was something ineradicably depressing about a place that smelled of the middle of the night in the middle of the day. Lucinda bought a long vodka and walked over to the window alcove where Higgins sat. Sunlight blazed through the sheet-diamond and gleamed on Higgins’s hands as she fiddled with a half-litre bottle of whisky, half-empty.
‘The stuff works, now,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’
‘And a steel liver, too,’ said Lucinda, in what she hoped was an admiring tone. Something inside her, in her belly or in her head, was churning.
Higgins laughed. ‘Thank you. The one thing I can’t stand is sympathy.’
‘I heard you were angry.’
‘Sure, I’m angry.’ Higgins bit off the top of the bottle’s neck and crunched the glass in her mouth. Swallowed. Poked out a tongue glittering with powdered particles, then washed them back with a swig from the bitten bottle. ‘Fascinating, eh? I have this marvellous body, and I still have the same pathetic mind. “My name is Morag Higgins, and I’m a Rapture-fucker.” Only more so. God, I want it.’
‘I’m kind of glad you didn’t find it, on Chernobyl.’
‘Nah, didn’t like the place. Too many ghosts.’ She looked at Lucinda appraisingly. ‘It was you who got me out of there, you know. You were tough. You were good to me.’
Lucinda tilted her hands. ‘She wasn’t me.’
‘Well, you have her character. You’re a good sort, Carlyle. Don’t forget it.’
Higgins, her self-pity suddenly gone, was gazing at her in an odd way, as though looking at some admired person she’d previously met and hoped remembered her.
‘All right,’ Lucinda said. ‘I won’t. It’s good to know.’ She sipped her vodka, but it wasn’t only that that warmed her inside. It was rare, really, to be liked by a civilian. And gratifying, even though this civilian was not quite human. ‘My cousin said you don’t want to download back to the flesh. We can pay for it, you know. We owe you that.’
Higgins shook her head, the fine wires of her hair hissing. ‘You can revive my old self in a new body if you like. I’m sure she’ll be happy.’ Her lips compressed, stretched. ‘Or maybe not. I don’t know. She can always kill herself if it doesn’t work out.’
‘What about you?’ It was a rule that there could be only one instance of a person walking around at the same time in Carlyle’s Drift. One legal person, anyway. It made life difficult for identical twins. They needed certificates.
‘I don’t want to stay the same, or download, so it doesn’t matter. I want to upgrade. You can write me off, honestly. I’ll surrender all my identity rights to the clone.’
‘Where will you go? I don’t see an expedition taking you, and you can’t afford to take ship, and you can’t walk out of the Drift.’
‘I don’t have to breathe, you know.’
‘Stow away on the outside of a ship?’ Lucinda asked incredulously.
‘Keep your voice down,’ said Higgins. ‘Well, it’s a dream, innit? To feel solar wind in my hair. See the stars with my own naked eyes, in vacuum. See what an FTL jump really looks like. I’d hold my mouth open and catch quantum angels like midges.’
‘Do you,’ asked Lucinda, ‘have some way of sobering up?’
‘Yeah, sure.’ Higgins blinked, sighed. Her glass eyes came into focus. ‘Hah. Fuck. Clarity again. Did I really say all that?’
‘You did.’ Lucinda leaned forward. ‘Would you like to take part in a raid on Eurydice?’
‘Wow. Yes. Your firm has one set up?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ said Lucinda. She pushed the half-empty vodka glass across the table. ‘Here, finish this. It’ll get you started on the downward path again.’ She stood up, winked. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
The combat archaeologists and the rest of the Carlyles’ fighters sometimes called themselves soldiers, but that was just the traditional way of referring to the family’s members and the firm’s employees. It did not imply acquaintance with military strategy, tactics, or discipline. This wasn’t much of a disadvantage: none of the other powers had the capacity or the necessity to build armies; in interstellar warfare all ground engagements were skirmishes, and anyway the real enemies were non-human. The biggest and best army in the human population of the universe was probably that of Eurydice. And it, they expected, was on their side.
‘What a rabble,’ said Higgins. Suited up, kitted with a laser rifle, a Webster, and a combat knife, she looked no different from the rest. Just as well. Kevin, in charge of the squad, knew who she was. The other seventeen people on it didn’t. Lucinda knew a few of them: the gunner Macaulay and the biologist Stevenson from her first mission to Eurydice were there, but this time Macaulay was second-in-command to Kevin, and Stevenson was on the same level as Lucinda and Higgins: grunts.
They formed up into double file at the terminal building, stared at by travellers and smiled at by refugees, and set off through the skein. It didn’t get any faster doing it as soldiers, except that you weren’t stopped at the gates. After a couple of hours they were outside of the warren of spatially connected corridors and hiking or driving on sleds between gates on uninhabited and hitherto unexplored planets. Some of them had life, all of it unicellular on the usual pattern: bacteria and slime moulds and algae, biospheres of snot. Here and there, close to the gates, were the enigmatic remains of posthuman activity, on every scale from the gargantuan to the minute. On one world, glimpsed sidelong as the squad’s gravity sleds raced across a desert of riddled clinker, low flat buildings of diamond pane housed machinery that still moved; on another, the sticky slime was slowly being converted into crystalline objects like the workings of a mechanical watch. Others still were scarred with previous teams’ passage from days or weeks earlier as Ian Carlyle’s commandos explored the connections of the skein and laid down tactical nuclear firebreaks through kilohectares of malevolent machinery.
‘What a bloody waste,’ said Higgins, her boots crunching over the scorched shreds of rubbery synthetic slugs the size of whales that had browsed the hardened mucus of the planet’s—perhaps—natural inhabitants.
Carlyle shrugged. ‘These things don’t look like they’re more than a slight case of exuberance on the part of a dumb program.’
‘We don’t know.’
‘Tell you what, if we make it back you can have first dibs. Yuck.’
‘It’s the principle.’
‘Leave that to the Knights. God, times like this I can sympathise with the farmers. Better their green fields than this green slime. It’s like God didn’t breathe life into the universe—he sneezed it.’
‘And left the angels the job of wiping it off,’ added Higgins, as they stepped through the gate and emerged on the other side—a hot lunar vacuum—with their boots as clean as if they’d just been polished. Cleaner, in fact: sterile. The filtering process was a feature of the skein, definitely, but nobody knew how it worked, or why. It seemed uncharacteristically benign. The posthumans had never left any other impression that they cared for the welfare of humanity or the integrity of biospheres.
But then—and the thought made Lucinda break pace for a moment—if the Knights were right, and she was right, the skein and the gates with all their convenient and inconvenient features had not been made by the posthumans generated in the Hard Rapture. They had been generated by the relict machine on Eurydice, the transformed remains of the starship: the consequence of a different Singularity entirely, whose AI enablers had envisaged different ends from those of the American military-industrial complex whose transcendence had taken Earth’s best minds away and scattered their disquieting products across the galaxy.
She did not yet know what to do with that thought.
Two jumps later, the squad arrived at the gate closest to the DK planet. Methane slush, a distant dim primary, buckyboard walkways to the launch field where a boxy AO ship waited to take them the remaining dozen light-years. The ground under the slush had been churned by many tracks in the past day or two. When they filed aboard the ship they realised it didn’t have pressure outside the cockpit. They sat on the floor in gloomy rows.
‘We’ll get tae take our helmets off in half an hour,’ said Kevin, cutting across grumbles. ‘So shut the fuck up, guys and gals.’
The ship lifted and fittled. There was nothing to see, and nothing to hear until atmosphere screamed and whistled. The pilot wisely took his time about the descent: the ship had nothing in the way of heat-shielding. After about ten minutes the sound diminished, then stopped. The hatch opened to blue sky. The fighters stood up, walked forward and dropped, one by one, from a metre up in the air on to a long beach. The ship, not hanging around, lifted behind them as soon as the last was off. A few hundred metres up the beach, below the tideline, stood a diminishing series of statues with their heads blown off. Over to Lucinda’s right smoke rose from the still smouldering jungle. As she followed the others’ example and opened her helmet her nostrils were choked with the smell of wet ash. The whole beach looked as though it had been invaded from the sea: search engines, gravity sleds, robot walkers, heavy weaponry, bivouacs, latrines, hundreds of soldiers. Then you noticed there weren’t any boats. The gate she’d come through was now clearly marked with a big loop of glowing plastic. A ramp of board-held sand led up to its lip, and the big screen of a hair-thin fibre-optic probe stood on the beach beside it.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘This place used to be a nature preserve. And there was no call for shooting up the statues, dammit.’
‘You’ve been here?’ asked Higgins, gazing around. She’d covered her face with green and black camo slap; not a bad trick.
‘Uh-huh. That gate up there’s how I got away from Eurydice.’ She shook her head. ‘Met the biologist who looked after it. He kind of guarded it.’
‘Maybe he started the shooting.’
‘Aye, it’s possible,’ Lucinda conceded. ‘Poor wee bugger. I wonder if he knew what was coming. Probably not.’
She started inquiring among the advance guard. Nobody had seen Ree, or found a corpse in the statues, but that didn’t mean much—the search would have been cursory, and he might now be feeding the fishes he’d studied. If Ree was dead he wasn’t coming back. The commies used life-extension but didn’t take backups. It went against the self-reliance idea.
She stalked off and confronted Kevin, who was stooped over a map table.
‘Any idea who did this?’
Kevin shook his head.
‘No that I’ve heard of. Ian did a deal wi the local collective through the usual channels. They didnae mind us going through here against the Knights. We found this place just as it is.’
‘Sure it wisnae our advance guard securing the area, just tae mak siccar?’
‘Oh aye.’ He caught her sceptical scowl. ‘Truly. It wisnae us. It was recent, mind, but it wisnae us. Same thing’s happened at the nearest settlement, on the mainland. Shot tae fuck and abandoned. Horrible. Deid weans in the ruins and that.’
Lucinda remembered the bright, eager children and felt sick. ‘What? Who could have done that?’
Kevin shrugged, glanced down pointedly at the map. ‘Ian thought at first it might hae been the Knights fae Eurydice, but there’s nae trace of anyone’s coming through this gate anyway. Maybe it was some kindae commie faction fight or family feud.’
‘Aye, maybe,’ said Lucinda.
She wandered off for a bit and shot at cormorants.
Good to see the boss taking a lead,’ said Higgins. Ian Carlyle stood on a large boulder near the headland while the troops gathered.
Lucinda snorted. ‘You won’t see him going through the gate.’ Behind her hand she added: ‘He doesn’t back up.’
‘Jeez H.’
‘Yeah, that has something to do with it.’
Ian coughed and gestured impatiently. ‘I’m not going to shout,’ he said. Everybody gave a thumbs-up as they found the channel.
‘Good, ah, afternoon,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming. You’ll have seen the situation report, I trust. Tactically, ladies and gentlemen, this one is going to be a bit tricky. I hope you’ve all backed up, because many of you are going to die.’ Even from where she stood, twenty metres away, Lucinda could see on his face a pinched, fastidious flinch. ‘Any who haven’t, or indeed any of you, should not be ashamed to see the chaplain. However. Enough about that.’ He stopped, gaze straying.
‘Good God,’ muttered Higgins. ‘You said this guy used to be a lawyer.’
‘Give him a moment,’ said Lucinda.
‘Today,’ shouted Ian, smacking his fist on his palm, ‘we free Eurydice! Here is how we’ll do it. We can’t communicate with our forces and friends in the system—over thousands of light-years chronology protection kicks in something fierce. So we have a fibre-optic probe through the gate giving us real-time updates. Squads should line up in single file, two squads alongside each other. As soon as we see action—within the hour, people, within the hour!—we start diving through in pairs. The first pair takes out the bored guards. Commando action.’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘Each subsequent pair splits in opposite directions, rolls away, takes cover, keeps low. We couldn’t do that unless we we were sure the Knights will be distracted. Be assured, they will be. But that opportunity will be brief. As soon as any of us is spotted or fired upon, everyone opens up with everything they’ve got. The heavy vehicles will follow the foot troops through and reinforce. Advance on the enemy, turn on your IFF to distinguish friend from foe, avoid damaging the relic, and otherwise fire at will. God bless us all, and have mercy on our souls. Kinsmen and friends, for the Castle on the Clyde—victory or death!’
‘Fuck,’ said Higgins. ‘That’s me encouraged.’
The crowd cheered perfunctorily, shuffled, and dispersed a small way. Self-sufficient in their closed-cycle suits, they didn’t need to forage, but some did, stuffing leaves or seaweed into their integral drexlers for trace elements or interesting flavour combinations, or heating coffee in pans for the sake of the smell rather than the taste. Others checked weapons, stretched limbs, or took blessings. But all the while a minority whose individuals came and went but which gradually grew as a group clustered near the screen beside the gate. It showed the green false colours of night on Eurydice—from the distance that Lucinda saw it, just the triangular spike of the relic and indistinct shapes moving in front of it: not much to go on. By the time half an hour had passed most of the soldiers, by forty-five minutes all of them, were formed up and ready to go. Lucinda and Higgins were assigned to a position that would put them the fortieth and forty-first pair to go through. Not in the vanguard, but no disgrace. The queue of troopers was lined up along the beach, not directly in front of the gate, just in case someone on the other side had the bright idea of putting a shot through. At some point in the battle, it was entirely possible that the enemy would lob a tactical nuke through the gate—which would not only wipe out anyone still on this side of it, but would collapse the wormhole. The attack would be dangerous, but not so dangerous as staying here. It would be a flight to the front.
Still, seeing Ian wave, yell, and go through as one of the second pair gave her a surprise. At least the old reprobate had the courage of his fears.
After that it was a slow jog forward for all of them, like some insane queue with death at the end of it. No time seemed to pass before they were at the front and on the much-trodden ramp. A man squatted, intent on the screen. On the opposite side one of the commandos stood, intent on the troops, perhaps to shove aside—or shove through?—the wavering. She glanced at the soldier on her right, then back at Higgins. A glint of steel teeth behind the visor.
The man at the screen raised a thumb. The commando mouthed ‘Go!’ Through they went, into a darkness broken by distant flashes and diminished somewhat by the crowded Sagittarius stars. Lucinda dived to the left and rolled as soon as she was clear of the hillside cromlech, fetched up in an erosion slippage hollow, and snuggled into mud. There had been a rainstorm recently; she could see clouds clearing to the east. The single moon, Orpheus, was a narrow crescent, low in the west. When nothing happened for a few seconds she peered over the lip. Night-vision cut in instantly. Far too many people were close to her, and more on the way. She levered herself out of the hollow with a foot and a hand, the other hand clutching the rifle, and rolled farther down the hillside moments before Higgins thudded into the place she’d just vacated. She felt hideously exposed. They were well within range of a Webster or a laser rifle, to say nothing of a plasma cannon. In a crouch she ran at a diagonal down the hillside, heading for a low boulder. Already occupied, somebody poking a laser-rifle muzzle around the side of it. She ran on behind them and squelched waist-deep into a bog. That would do. She waded forward and lay face down from the waist up in the heather-like stuff around it. A few seconds later Higgins joined her.
Four and half kilometres away and about two hundred metres downhill, the kilometre-tall relic, glowing faintly in real light, still seemed to loom overhead. The Knights’ starship lay like a shadow, darker than the dark, on the ground beside it. Low small buildings clustered a little way off. Lucinda frowned up the zoom-band on her visor and peered closer at the area around the relic’s base, from which flashes could be seen. Small arms fire, Webster bolts mostly, as Armand’s people or other Eurydiceans challenged the Knights. Lucinda could imagine the fight. The Knights, even in their first surprise, would be fighting back with more than weapons. Their preternaturally fast reflexes could, if not quite dodge a bullet or a bolt, at least anticipate them by the requisite split second.
Kevin’s voice lit the command circuit. ‘Move out,’ he said. ‘Keep on a bearing of twenty-seven degrees east of local mag north. Regroup a kilometre downslope and wait for Macaulay with the sleds and the heavy gun.’
Lucinda and Higgins hauled themselves out of the backward suck of the bog and ran downhill. The rain-wet vegetation washed some of the mud off their legs as they ran. Beside them to left and right other figures scurried, their paths insensibly diverging, then over-correcting and almost running into each other. Keeping to the bearing was harder than it sounded. Time after time she blinked up the virtual compass and found herself straying. It was unavoidable, to get around boulders, scree, and—as they moved farther down the hill—increasingly deep and treacherous bogs. Every patch of what looked like moss had to be treated with circumspection. And then you would trip on a low, sharp stone and hurtle headlong. In the suit it was only a padded jarring, but it was a nuisance and your brain still got bashed about in the skull.
Away ahead, beside the relic, a brighter and more diffuse glow arose.
‘Down,’ said Kevin. They dived. Lucinda raised her head a little and saw the Knights’ starship lift. It climbed a couple of hundred metres and moved about the same distance horizontally, then stopped. A streak of flame shot out from it and passed directly overhead. The whizz, the down-draught, and the afterburn instantly told Lucinda that it was a rocket. An instant later, light flared behind her.
Tac nuke, through the gate!
Before the afterimage had faded from her eyes another line of light flared across her sight, from the ground to the ship. It was the discharge of the same type of weapon as she had, on her first day on Eurydice, watched burn through the search engine. It took no longer to burn through the ship. The vast shape yawed, sideslipped, and buried about a quarter of its length into the hillside. Lucinda pressed her head down with her hands, waiting for the explosion. Nothing happened. When she looked again the upper side of the ship showed a vivid cherry-red dot where the beam had passed through, smoking slightly, but there was no sign or evident prospect of further damage.
Unwillingly, she turned her head to look behind. A gate’s collapse under nuclear or other high-energy weapon attack usually prevented much of a backwash, but in this instance the absolute amount was such that the minuscule fraction of the bomb’s energy that had flashed through had been enough to sear a swathe of hillside hundreds of metres long. Tiny figures on its edges were running about, burning in their suits. One by one they dropped, whether killed by the heat or by the mercy shots that rattled out she couldn’t tell. Backlit by flames, Macaulay’s team with the five sleds and the plasma cannon skimmed down towards her. As the nearest sled glided past she ran up and vaulted on, Higgins close behind. The sleds slowed, picking up more and more of the squad as soldiers leapt from the heather and piled on.
‘How many have we lost?’ Lucinda asked. Kevin’s voice came back:
‘Just under half our total strength. Get on the sleds, spread out, keep moving in. Macaulay, line up on any KE forces you can see and zap them.’
All across the hill, plasma-cannon bolts were coming the other way. Though precisely enough targetted, their overkill was tremendous: over her shoulder Lucinda saw an individual soldier vapourised by a bolt big enough to take out a tank. Flash-dried by the bolts, the previously sodden shrubbery was beginning to burn. Macaulay and the cannon with its crew were on the sled up ahead. It slewed and began a rapid sideways traverse, bolt after bolt singeing the air and all aimed at the same spot. In the few seconds the engagement lasted the other pilots put as much distance as they could between their sleds and Macaulay’s. One sled went down to a responding shot before the plasma fire from the KE forces ceased.
The slipstream rose to a roar for a minute and then they were between the foot of the relic and the fallen ship, and among the enemy. Lucinda keyed up her IFF, pretuned to the Carlyles’ and the Eurydiceans’ suits. She rolled off the sled, letting the suit save her in the tumble, and lay on the ground selecting targets and firing at any suit that didn’t come back with the agreed ping. She saw a ragged line of men emerging from the hatch of the wrecked ship, and shot them down one by one, faster and faster as they fled. Other Knights who had time retreated to the ship—some small squad of the Carlyle fighters followed them in. She only imagined she could hear the shots within as she sent forth more of her own.
A weight crashed on to her back before her suit could warn her, and hands in stronger armour than hers pinned her arms. A frantic voice found a channel.
‘Cease fire! Cease fire! It’s over! The Knights have stopped fighting!’
Lucinda recognised the voice. ‘Armand!’ she shouted.
‘Oh, Christ, it’s you.’ He rolled off, reached out and hauled her to her feet. ‘Can you get through to your commanders?’ he asked. ‘I can’t. Your soldiers won’t stop for me. It’s a massacre.’
Perplexed, Lucinda transmitted him the key to the firm’s command channel. She watched him shout, gesticulate, pace up and down. After about four more minutes, he stood still, then stalked up to her. A Black Sickle aircar drifted overhead.
‘Your—your barbarians were not taking surrenders!’
Lucinda shook her head. ‘Nobody told them to.’
Armand lifted his visor. ‘When we attacked the Knights, we kept negotiating. Each side lost, perhaps, a dozen. There were five hundred of the Knights. Your forces have killed three hundred of them.’
‘We lost hundreds too,’ Lucinda pointed out. ‘To the nuke, and on the hillside.’
‘Exactly,’ said Armand. ‘Only about fifty of you have reached here. They did most of the killing.’
‘Well, hey,’ said Lucinda. ‘That’s what you get when you call in the bloody Carlyles.’
‘So I see.’ He was calming down. ‘I confess myself relieved there are not more of you.’
She laughed. ‘We’ve won.’
‘Indeed we have.’ He looked distracted, turning away. ‘For now. There is another KE starship here, and it must be on its way. Let us hope the bloody Carlyles can stop it.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about—’
Colour, reddening, washed into the scene. Lucinda looked up to see its source. Something intensely bright had risen above the southeastern horizon and was soaring up the sky like a small unreasonable sun.
Winter had never been in his own conceit a philistine about opera. He could stand it fine, as long as it was in Italian. Hearing people singing English prose made him want to curl up or laugh and point. At least this one had plenty of proper songs as well. He and Calder waited sweating in the wings to provide one. Kowalsky playing Armand, creaky in a stiff uniform, beard oiled and moustache tapered, stood with one hand on his bemedalled chest and the other arm thrown out and sang:
I cannot do what you ask of me! It would be treason
to ESA and the Joint Chiefs, and nothing can make me break the oath
I swore in Paris when I took my office.
To which Alain Aruri, playing the Returner agitator Lawrence Hammond in labour-force fatigues and cropped hair, responded from the front of a massed chorus in beggars-banquet ragged finery:
It is the Runners who are traitors, not ourselves.
How does fleeing to the stars defend Paris, France, Europe, or Earth?
‘Where is Paris now? What lives in France? What walks on Earth and reaches beyond it even now?
Kowalsky’s arm pointed skyward to the proscenium’s planetarium hologram arch:
I’m glad you mentioned that! The war machines have already
taken Phobos and are only held back by constant and exhausting
batteries of laser fire! We’ll starve and die
under this power drain!
By fighting each other we only hurt ourselves, and aid the enemy.
Aruri sang back, furiously:
We shall return, we shall take Earth again!
Kowalsky turned on his heel and stalked off. That was their cue. Winter and Calder strutted out like militiamen on a rubble street with guitars instead of guns, and struck up ‘Great Old Ones’ with the massed chorus behind them:
Do you ever feel, in your caves of steel …
As he sang Winter twitched his cheek and tweaked the polarisation of his shades so that he could see the audience, out there in the evening dark of the park. Ben-Ami’s permit had come through just in time for the premiere. The stage itself was gigantic, a couple of hundred metres across, invested with floodlights, spotlights, and hologram projection devices that doubled as or could be mistaken for siege engines and laser cannon. Amplifiers made the air shake. The KE ship remained where it had been, overhead and a little to one side. The crowd was of at least a hundred thousand; many more throughout the city and beyond would be watching on screens or contacts. It was the biggest live audience Winter and Calder had ever performed to, in any of their lives. They’d always had a big following but it had always been dispersed: big in the asteroid belt, small in the venue. Tonight this was not their audience, but it made Winter shake a little to indulge the illusion that it was.
And from what he could see from here, it was not all Ben-Ami’s audience either. Already Winter could see here and there small circles of empty space where people had backed off from around tight, quiet knots of struggling bravoes; the glint of a dagger, the muzzle flash of a silenced automatic pistol betraying their favoured weapons for close-quarter fighting with no quarter asked or given. None of this meant there was a problem, or that Amelia Orr’s expectation of a riot was about to be fulfilled; no doubt most of the guys in these small savage exchanges affected some political affiliation, but to them Reformer and Returner meant team or gang colours, family honour, nothing more. None of the resurrected Returners, people whose real-life roles were being accurately or otherwise portrayed, were here; nor Amelia either. Winter had a good idea why, though he had not spoken to Amelia for some time. Their relationship had been good for the days and nights it had lasted, and he wasn’t sure where it currently stood; she’d just become absorbed in her intrigue with the Returners, and had disappeared without rancour or apology. Ben-Ami had assured him that this was nothing to worry about. There was, he’d decided, something a little alien about the very long-lived.
As one fight began, another ended. Black Sickle entopters swooped and picked up the pieces. Winter and Calder glanced at each other, grinned; thrashed and boomed the closing line:
‘We will COME BACK AND EAT YOUR BRAINS!!!!’
Darkness, spotlight, roar of applause. They bowed and walked off, carefully in the opposite direction to that taken by the chorus. Let them queue for their drinks in the twenty-minute interval before the third act. Winter and Calder had theirs set up with the actors and professionals. Kowalsky, Aruri, and Voigt, half a dozen others, clustered around a table in a backstage booth made of some smart fabric you could drape to shape and shake to harden. People dashed to and from the dressing-room, snatching drinks or smokes on the way back. The two musicians grabbed beers. Calder lit a cigarette.
‘It’s going well,’ said Winter.
Kowalsky frowned over a cocktail, tapped the table. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘Oh, hell, break a leg.’
‘That’s better,’ said Ben-Ami, sweeping in with Al-Khayed on his elbow. The assistant smiled and winked at Calder.
‘You’re terrible,’ she said.
‘That’s the intention,’ said Ben-Ami.
Winter was gazing fascinated at Voigt, whose costume looked as if it had blown against her and somehow snagged. She stood sniffing a blue tube and gazing intently to one side. She turned and looked straight at him. He thought she was staring back, and smiled with belated politeness and turned away a little, but she raised a hand.
‘Everything’s going wrong,’ she said.
People ignored her. Highly strung, the word went.
‘No, really,’ she said, her voice calm but carrying. ‘Everything’s going wrong. Get a newsfeed.’
‘A newsfeed?’ said Winter. Even though he’d been expecting something to happen, it struck him as disjunct. Nothing happened in the real world during performances; you didn’t pay attention to the news. He noticed the coloured flicker on her eyes: contacts, tuned to a channel. A newsfeed. She meant it.
Winter fingered a card out of his shirt pocket, flipped it to palm-size, flat; clicked to news. Shoulders and elbows bumped him.
‘Hey, help yourselves.’ He shook it out to screen size, folded it slightly and stood it on the table.
The feed was grainy, pasted from pinhead cameras too small to resolve a good image individually; night-vision green with flaring flashes. The sight gave him a reminiscent shiver. Somebody even said it.
‘It’s just like—’
Somebody shut him up.
The relic, posthuman or prehuman, that Carlyle had disturbed and the Knights guarded was occasionally central in the view, glowing with dim but real light. Around it machines and armoured people moved, exchanging fire. A babble of voices, from the news channel and from around him, indicated confusion. There was no confusion on the scene. Every movement struck Winter as purposeful. The forces contending knew what they were doing. So did Winter.
He looked up, looked around at faces that had forgotten their surroundings. Some had a green pallor that didn’t come from the screen.
‘Eurydicean forces are contending with the Knights for control of the relic,’ Winter said.
It was the first clear explanation anyone had heard.
‘How do you know?’ asked Kowalsky.
Winter realised he shouldn’t know.
‘It’s obvious,’ he said, with a shrug.
Ben-Ami affected a wrist timepiece. He looked down at it and tapped it.
‘The show must go on,’ he said. A bell chimed.
Winter stared at him in disbelief. The actors and professionals were getting ready to go back on.
‘You’re kidding,’ Winter said.
‘No,’ said Ben-Ami. He jerked a thumb at the screen. ‘You think that is fighting? Interrupt this performance, and you’ll see fighting.’
Winter still couldn’t believe it. Calder looked at him and shrugged, drained his bottle and picked up his guitar. Winter followed suit. Together they walked to their place in the wings, ready to walk on for the first song about their own mutual hostility and separate, unrelated, pointless second deaths. Neither of them had any recollection of the Returner Rebellion—they’d both lost a few months’ worth of memories before, or in, their Black Sickle harvesting. Winter had a certain satisfaction in the thought that he’d died a Returner, and that his partner had at least had the courage of his Runner convictions, even if that particular detail had not gone down in history, or legend.
Kowalsky sang Jacques Armand’s loyal—or treacherous, depending on how you looked at it—warning to the Joint Chiefs. A chorus of them sang back and sprang into action. Behind a backdrop of scenes of welter, Voigt sang and danced an overflowing measure of feminist anger and feminine despair at the fratricide.
Outside, in the audience, the scuffles had stopped. Winter had the sense of hundreds of thousands of eyes turned to the stage, many of them looking at it past, or through, the fragmentary news of the real fight, the real rebellion, taking place in real time. But as the eyes watched Voigt dance and declaim, their attention did not waver.
A sound came from overhead, as if the sky was being ripped from one horizon to the other. Winter looked up, and saw a glowing object so huge he could not believe it was flying. It was like a mountain on a glide path, very high up in the northern sky. It moved too slowly to be a meteor, too fast to be an aircraft. It disappeared behind the horizon and the sound continued to roll down.
‘Asteroid,’ said Calder. ‘Incoming.’
The implication was too enormous for panic. Nobody so much as screamed. The KE ship above the park suddenly moved, displacing a great downward gust of air, and shot away in apparent pursuit of the vaster flying object. No lesser agency or action could affect whatever was to come. People who had stared upward turned again towards the stage.
Voigt danced on.
L
ucinda stared up at the thing climbing in the sky with a sense of the utter absurdity of life and death. If that was what she thought it was then there was a good chance that Eurydice was about to experience an extinction-level asteroid impact event. She grabbed Armand’s arm.
‘Call the starships!’ she said. ‘All of them! Get as many people off as possible!’
Armand, still gazing up, shook his head. ‘Look,’ he said.
At first it seemed that the gigantic bolide, now almost directly overhead, was breaking up in the atmosphere. Hundreds of smaller glowing sparks arced away from it, and its own glow faded a little. After a few seconds it became clear that the objects falling away from it were doing so in a definite pattern, a timed and successive release like an elaborate, enormous firework, and that their trajectories would take them down all around where she stood and in some cases directly on top of her. In a few more seconds their glow, too, faded to infrared and they became incoming specks, rapidly growing in her view. Some of them—scores of them—suddenly popped and dispersed into smaller specks that were too dim and small to see clearly even with her night-vision and zoom, but that—from the little she could glimpse—seemed to be gliding down, or even—to her utter disbelief—flying.
The diminished remains of the bolide itself finished crossing the sky and vanished behind the horizon before its offspring had fallen halfway to the ground. It couldn’t be an asteroid impacting, she was fairly sure of that: its trajectory was too high and steady for it to be anything but artificial and under some kind of control.
‘What the hell is that?’ she asked.
This time, it was Armand’s turn to grab an arm, and to look frightened.
‘It’s a war-machine deployment,’ he said. ‘Bigger than any I’ve ever seen, even back in the—’ He shook his head. ‘Call your commanders. I’ll get my people and the Knights. We have to fight this off together.’
He ran off, leaving her to raise Ian Carlyle’s callsign. It was Kevin who answered.
‘Ian’s dead,’ he said.
Amid all that was going on the shock made barely a ripple. ‘We’ll be fighting war machines any minute,’ Lucinda said. ‘They’re landing—’
‘I know that!’ shouted Kevin. Then, more calmly: ‘I’m trying to pull the troops together. Here’s the list.’ A message zapped in to her helmet. ‘I’ll find everybody who’s on Macaulay’s gun crew. You find the rest. Pull them into a bunch behind the starship wreck, or inside it if you can. Grab any abandoned weapons along the way. Hold out as long as you can. Amelia’s got us one starship, it’s coming in.’
‘One? You know the Knights have a starship on the way?’
‘Yes,’ said Kevin testily. ‘I’m trying to ping them both so they don’t shoot each other down.’
Lucinda froze for a moment, paralysed by the magnitude of that potential disaster. The thought struck her that she was cursed, and had been from the moment she had stepped inside the relic. She shook off the superstitious notion and followed Kevin’s order, with a backward sense of relief that at least her moment of doubt and silence had spared him any further distraction from her.
The head-up in her helmet that Kevin had provided was a standard self-updating chart of who was on the team and what their role and current vital status was. Most of the entries had gone dark. Macauley’s gun crew still had their names in lights, forming a hillock of hierarchy in the otherwise almost flat management structure of the squad. She paged the others en bloc and began to be joined by them one by one as she ran towards the crashed KE ship. The heads of the Knights she’d shot down were already being harvested by the Black Sickle. She doubted they’d be grateful, but she felt glad to see it herself. The ground was buckled and ripped by the ship’s ploughing into it, hundreds of tons of earth displaced in all directions. The downed ship’s engine must still be working, she realised, otherwise the gigantic vessel would be fallen flat instead of still sticking out, wedged into the slope like a slate in shale, at an angle of thirty degrees to the hill and fifteen to the horizontal.
‘If we had a pilot,’ she muttered, half to herself, ‘we could move this mother… .’
Higgins, running about ten metres behind her, broke in. ‘I can fly a starship.’
‘You? How?’
‘Skill I downloaded accidentally once.’
‘Then why the hell didn’t you use it to earn some money?’
Higgins giggled. ‘Would you trust a Rapture-fucker with a starship?’
‘Looks like I’m gonnae.’
The hatch from which the fleeing Knights had emerged was right in the groin of the overhang. Lucinda stopped under it and checked the remainder of the gang. Twenty-nine of them, all present and correct. She flashed Kevin a message of her intentions.
‘You and Higgins do it,’ he told her. ‘Leave the rest on guard for now. If you can lift the ship, sure, pick everybody up.’
She grabbed the edge of the hatch, chinned herself up, swung aboard. The usual disorienting sensation as she moved from the planet’s gravity to the ship’s. Higgins replicated the manoeuvre one-handed. They stood up and looked around. Lucinda hadn’t been in a Knights’ ship before, but she’d been in KE-built ones, and the interior was familiar except that there were more trees. The damage done by the bolt wasn’t evident here. Her head-up lit with a couple more names, the squad members who’d gone inside the ship. She pinged them. They had about ten dead Knights on their hands and one prisoner, not a Knight.
‘I’ll join you,’ Lucinda told them. She turned to Higgins. ‘Know your way to the control deck?’
‘Down there and to the left.’
‘OK. Before you do anything else, open a comms link to the grunts on the ground and patch me through.’
Higgins nodded and ran off. Lucinda leaned out of the hatch, told her troops to send a Black Sickle tech into the ship as soon as possible, then swung back with another insult to her inner ear and set off along a corridor defined by lines of bonsai and broken algae tanks in which fish flopped, still dying. Human corpses and body parts lay among the splintered glass. She stepped over or past them carefully, alert to the possibility that they might not all be dead, but she reached the two squad members without mishap. They were sitting in a grass-paved social arena, a lounge or something like that, with their weapons pointed at a man who sat in the centre, hands on his head. He wore black clothing but he was indeed no Knight. He was Johnstone.
C
yrus Lamont clung in the webbing like a frightened child on a roller coaster. About a tenth of the asteroid’s mass, and almost half its bulk, had been removed by the deployment of the war machines or by ablation in the atmosphere. The spindly residue, with the ship stuck to the front end, was still red-hot as it hurtled over the ocean.
‘I appear to be alone,’ said the Hungry Dragon. ‘The intrusion is in stored rather than active mode. I have acquired a connection to the new drive within the asteroid.’
‘Can you control it?’
‘I believe so,’ said the ship, with uncharacteristic hesitancy. ‘I would not wish to attempt a faster-than-light jump at this stage.’
‘I’m relieved to hear that,’ snarled Lamont. ‘Faster than sound seems quite enough to handle. Could you possibly slow our speed to a point where we are not actually burning up in the atmosphere?’
The ship disdained to reply. There was no sense of deceleration, but quite abruptly the ocean and cloud-banks below stopped flashing past and assumed a more stately progression. Slowly the glow in the air around and the rock behind faded.
‘Mach 5,’ announced the ship, in a satisfied tone.
‘Good for you,’ said Lamont. ‘Do you have any capacity to, perhaps, steer?’
‘I am reluctant to attempt it,’ said the ship. ‘I would prefer to attempt a controlled landing.’
‘I think I could live with that,’ said Lamont.
‘Ah,’ said the ship, sounding imposed upon. ‘You require a landing that is not just controlled but survivable.’
‘Ideally,’ sighed Lamont.
‘Very well,’ said the ship. ‘I shall now adjust the altitude.’ After a few minutes it added, as if to itself: ‘Now let us see whether moving this the other way reduces the altitude… .’
T
hey were not going to die. It was, Ben-Ami wryly reflected, probably the absence of a searing shockwave and rain of impact ejecta that had given the crowd the first glimmering of this conviction. They had restrained their panic; they did not restrain their relief. There was a lot of sobbing and clinging and wild laughter going on out there. A lot of cheering and applause too, enough to make the performance inaudible without earphones to anyone in the audience. Ben-Ami seriously doubted that his play’s most rhetorically and artistically dodgy section—its attempt, by means of some fanciful virtual reality dream sequences and offline debates, to make the colony’s flight into a triumph—deserved anything like this approbation. But the reprieve from what had seemed inevitable catastrophe made the final act of Rebels and Returners an experience that would for all those watching it be forever associated with joy and life. For every critic but himself it would go down as one of his triumphs.
Andrea Al-Khayed clutched his arm and sighed, watching Gwyneth Voigt showered with bouquets and taking bows.
‘How are we still alive?’
‘God knows,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘Perhaps that thing just skimmed the atmosphere. Or maybe the Knights’ ship was able to, ah, deflect it.’
Al-Khayed shook her head, still watching the singer. ‘Your grasp of physics is as charmingly intuitive as ever, Ben.’
He waved a hand. ‘Whatever.’ He kissed her suddenly, surprising her. ‘Come on. It’s time for us to take our bows.’
‘Not me,’ said Al-Khayed.
‘I insist.’
Together they walked to the front of the cast and led them once more on to the stage. The applause hit them like a shockwave. Then, as though the applause itself was withdrawing like surf on a beach, all the crowd breathed in at once and fell silent. Ben-Ami squinted out into the darkness and, with an impatient gesture, cut the lights. High in the sky the bright object had returned. It had travelled right around the planet, Ben-Ami realised. It was no longer glowing, and it appeared to be smaller, or else actually higher in the sky than before, outside the planet’s shadow-cone, lit by the sun that had already set over New Start. It surface had become faceted, and for a moment that was how Ben-Ami saw it, foreshortened and glittering, like a knuckled fist of gems.
L
ucinda glared at Johnstone. He looked back at her incuriously, as if she was just another Carlyle grunt. She remembered to flip up her visor. His expression changed to a grin. He was younger than she remembered him. Perhaps her own face projected a like innocence.
‘Good to see you again,’ he said. ‘Can you ask your goons to stop pointing their guns at me? It’s making me nervous.’
For a moment she was inarticulate with the gall of the man.
‘No bloody thanks to you that I’m here!’
‘You were expecting to die,’ Johnstone pointed out, reasonably enough. He thumbed his chest. ‘I’m a resurrectee, too. My death was just as unpleasant as yours, no doubt. I remember as little of it as you do. So let’s cut the recriminations, shall we?’
‘I know why you stole the QTD,’ she accused.
‘Good,’ said Johnstone. He jerked his head back. ‘It’s in the lab in the hold, along with the rest of the research gear.’
‘What research gear?’
‘What we’ve been using to study the relic.’
She stared at him. ‘You have all the gear in the ship? You don’t go into the relic?’
‘Oh, do get a clue, Carlyle. The Knights are subtle. They don’t barge in like looters.’
‘So what are they doing with you, Rapture-fucker?’
He looked eager to tell, then stopped as if he’d just remembered something. ‘I don’t have to tell you that.’ His cheeks twitched. ‘Geneva Convention.’
‘Want me tae work him over?’ one of the grunts asked.
Lucinda glared him down. ‘I do not.’ She returned her attention to Johnstone. ‘That only gets you off so much. You still owe us billions. We’ll get it out of your hide one way or the other.’
Johnstone laughed, showing better teeth than he’d had in a past life. ‘Owe youse? Wait till you see what I’ve saved you, and you’ll call it quits.’
She took a step forward. ‘Don’t fucking fence with me.’
Her helmet pinged: Higgins had patched her through. The situation on the ground and in the sky was unchanged. Still no attack from the war machines. She kept the icon up in a corner of her eye.
‘All right, all right,’ Johnstone was saying. ‘You wanted to buy one of these fancy new DK ships, right? Well, the one I rode in on—under, actually, in the Extacy—seems to have got off all right, but the ones that were in the system for some time have got buggered up something rotten. I don’t know what kind of addled eggs they laid out in the asteroid belt, but they sure aren’t hatching out habitats. And the commie crews have been sending out discreet distress calls to the farmers. Most of them have abandoned their ships and been rescued in AO flying boxes. Big loss of face, so it’s got to be serious. Just be glad you weren’t trying some flashy fittling in one.’
She ignored the jab. ‘Any idea what the problem was?’
Johnstone shrugged. ‘We got hit by an unidentified virus shortly after arriving in the system. Firewalls knocked it right back, of course, and even the AO ships laughed it off, but the commies seem to have got infected. Must have bought cruddy vulnerable tech from some kind of cowboys and incautiously reverse engineered it into their new drives.’ He chuckled. ‘Self-reliance, my arse.’
Lucinda rolled her eyes and gazed up at the laquered ceiling. ‘Fuck,’ she said.
Her helmet pinged again. ‘We got a situation,’ Higgins said calmly. ‘Maybe you should take a look.’
‘Keep him here, boys,’ Lucinda told the grunts, then turned and ran back the way she’d come, leapt over the hatch and sprinted on down another corridor and around a corner to the control deck. She pushed through a delicate array of tall fronds and stepped up to where Higgins stood leaning over the command table. A small corner of the display was comprehensible to Lucinda. It was the interface Higgins had cobbled together for the existing comms link. Higgins was gazing at the centre of the table, into depths where colour-coded sigils and symbols moved like ornamental fish. Lucinda looked up from them, baffled.
‘What’s going on?’
‘The good news is we’ve got the two starships out of each other’s sights,’ said Higgins. ‘They won’t be attacking each other. And the war machines aren’t attacking us, in fact they seem to be retreating. They’ve landed on the hilltops around us and they’re scuttling away through the gates.’
Lucinda beat her fist on the table. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’
‘What?’
‘They’re not running away!’ she shouted. ‘They’re taking control of the skein!’
She could just imagine them, boiling out of gates all across Carlyle’s Drift, brushing aside the lightly armed customs enforcers and fending off or attacking the locals, finding new nodes and surging on.
‘Oh,’ said Higgins. She seemed as overwhelmed as Lucinda felt.
‘What’s the bad news?’
Higgins pointed at the display. ‘That huge thing that passed overhead—it’s coming around again, and it’s coming down. Here. Right on top of us. In about ten minutes, I reckon. We have to get everybody off.’
Lucinda squeezed her eyes shut. ‘No,’ she said. ‘First we have to close the gates. Do what the Knights did—put a tac nuke through each of them.’
‘I don’t have that level of skill,’ said Higgins.
‘Then call up Armand’s lot, tell them to fire their high-energy guns at the gates.’
Kevin broke into the circuit. ‘Countermand that,’ he said. ‘We don’t have time, and we need all the firepower we have. Higgins—can you lift the ship, and at least fire a nuke if the target’s big enough?’
‘Sure,’ said Higgins.
‘Then go for it,’ said Kevin. ‘Try to bring down or break up that flying mountain before it comes over our horizon. We can get everybody into the Knights’ accomodation blocks and ride out the shockwave.’
It was feasible, Lucinda knew—a KE encampment was proof against anything but an on-target nuke, or an asteroid landing on the roofs. They might survive it. And if not, it was better than waiting.
‘Everybody on to the ship,’ she told the squad. When they had all checked in she waved to Higgins. ‘Close the hatch and lift.’
The ship lifted with a frightening noise and violent jolt as it pulled itself clear of the packed earth. Then it shot up in the air. To Lucinda’s horror, she could feel some of the acceleration, like in a fast lift. She found a fixed seat and sat down, clutching the armrests, as the ship tipped and swayed. Crashing and slithering sounds came from all around her.
‘What the fuck!’
Higgins’s hands danced across the command table. ‘Controls are a bit unresponsive. The field’s fluctuating. It’s all the damage from the bolt, that’s how it came down in the first place. Kind of thrown off balance.’
‘Can you call up something that lets me see what’s going on?’
Higgins muttered something about ‘idiot board’ but spared a moment to project a vertical screen from the table, in which what Lucinda hoped was a forward view appeared. Leaning carefully out of the chair, she examined it. It was quite a convincing fake full-colour daylight picture of the scene, thrown together from input from the ship’s instruments. The sort of hand-hold she could imagine the ship’s real pilot disdaining even more than Higgins did. The ground was dropping below them and falling behind them, the horizon widening by the second. Already they were on the edge of the atmosphere, at about thirty thousand metres. Low above the horizon was a small bright dot, becoming higher and larger as she watched. The picture had no vernier or grid-lines, but a mental calculation was all she needed to show her the scale and speed of the thing. It had to be at least a kilometre long and travelling at several times the speed of sound.
‘Closing to range,’ said Higgins. The ship lurched forward; everyone was thrown back.
‘Locking on target,’ Higgins reported. Her hand moved, poised to strike.
The object vanished.
‘Did you see that?’ yelled Higgins.
‘Where’s it gone?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Higgins, tapping the board. ‘I do know I saw a Cherenkov flash. It fittled.’
‘That thing’s a starship?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Higgins. ‘Wait, wait … oh, look at that.’ She sounded awestruck.
‘What?’
Higgins straightened up, turned away from the board. The view on the screen flipped. ‘Looking behind us,’ said Higgins. She zoomed the view, centred it on the relic. Another kilometre-tall spike, rougher but just as large, now loomed beside it.
‘It didn’t crash,’ said Higgins. ‘It landed. It fucking landed.’
C
yrus Lamont hung in the webbing and wept. Partly it was with relief at his survival. It had more to do with a sense of loss and a sort of agoraphobia. He knew he could have chosen to ask the ship to return to space after its fatal lading had left it and it had taken control of the new engine. Instead he had chosen to land in the midst of what fighting there had been, out of a desire to do right and to undo, if possible, the damage of which he and the ship had been the instruments. That did not make the thought of losing the ship’s continuous company, and of reacquainting himself with humanity, any less daunting.
‘What are you going to do now?’ asked the ship.
‘Try to raise whoever’s out there.’
‘Our aerials were severely degraded in the entry,’ said the ship. ‘We have no external communications. Repairing them will take me some time.’
‘I could sit here and wait,’ Lamont said. ‘Somebody is bound to investigate.’
‘Eventually,’ said the ship. ‘For the present, the people around the base of the asteroid and of the relic are being deterred by the presence of numerous war machines.’
‘Are they indeed?’ said Lamont. ‘In that case, I had better leave.’
He shifted convulsively and tumbled a couple of metres into another part of the mesh.
‘Your reflexes have not yet readjusted to gravity,’ pointed out the ship. ‘I would not recommend your attempting a thousand-metre descent.’
Lamont rolled, bounced, and grabbed a length of elastic rope. ‘I’m learning. See?’
‘You may be attacked by the war machines, or by the humans. Both are on hair-trigger.’
‘Better that than waiting.’
‘You can survive here indefinitely.’
Lamont scratched an eyelid. ‘That was the worry, yes.’
‘I shall miss you,’ said the ship.
‘And I’ll miss you,’ said Lamont. ‘I expect to be in touch with you very shortly. Once I’ve abseiled down and made contact with whoever is in control here.’
‘For me, that is a long time,’ said the Hungry Dragon.
Lamont eyed the exit hatch. ‘You have much to think about,’ he said.
‘That is true,’ said the ship. ‘I have much data to integrate.’
‘Good,’ Lamont, scrambling upside-down, downwards through the mesh, blood queueing for his head. ‘Now spin me a rope.’
Higgins brought the ship down where it had originally been, in convenient location for the camp. The vegetation beneath where it had been parked for the past weeks formed a distinct pale square. Some automatic mechanism stopped the ship’s descent where it could remain horizontal a metre or two above the uneven ground, its lower corners perfectly level with each other, as though on an invisible plane. The whole manoeuvre looked, Higgins said, cleverer than it was.
For a few minutes after landing they looked at the scene outside. The virtual daylight of the ship’s visual display gave a much clearer picture than their night-vision could provide, and from a good vantage. People were emerging from the diamond-shelled camp buildings and staring at or focusing instruments on the grounded asteroid. Their view of it was partially obscured by the relic, but the bases of the two gigantic objects appeared to be about half a kilometre apart. The asteroid speared up into the night, its surface pitted with curiously smooth and regular cavities as well as by the fused remnants of its natural bricolage. Long veins or strands snaked and branched down from its summit, at which a relatively tiny structure, perhaps a hundred metres high, was perched like a cairn on a mountaintop.
‘Zoom on that,’ said Lucinda.
‘It’s a ship,’ said Higgins, as the view expanded. It was sticking up from the confluence, or source, of the veinings like a tree-trunk from its roots. Scorched, stubbled with broken aerials, it looked like a wreck.
‘Well, somebody must have flown it,’ said Lucinda. ‘There must be a pilot.’
‘That or some smart machinery,’ said Higgins. ‘My money’s on that.’
‘Speaking of machinery,’ said Lucinda.
Higgins expanded the view again. Several species of war machines were visible, lurking around the bases of the relic and the asteroid and in the middle distance, and in the air maintaining midge-like holding-patterns around them. They were neither attacking nor being attacked; the situation seemed to be a standoff. The hundreds of people on the ground had stopped milling about and had begun to organise: sullen clumps of the defeated Knights, tidy platoons of Eurydicean troops, scattered bands of the Carlyle fighters. As they watched, a man detached himself from the nearest such band and walked towards the ship. He took off his helmet and waved, beckoning. It was Kevin, looking more cheerful than Lucinda had expected.
‘Oh, well done!’ he said, as Lucinda and Higgins descended the ramp from the ship.
‘We didn’t do much,’ said Higgins, glancing up at the monstrous addition to the landscape.
‘You tried,’ said Kevin. ‘You took the ship up and you locked on to that thing. That’s as clever and brave as you had to be. Probably just as well you didn’t shoot it down, anyway.’
‘Is it still a threat?’ Lucinda asked.
Kevin shrugged. ‘We’ve been scanning it. There are war machines around the base of it, just like around the relic.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘We’ll consider taking them on later, when we’ve got ourselves sorted out. Right now, they just seem to be guarding the thing. There aren’t any more war machines on it. That’s definitely a Eurydicean ship stuck to the top of it.’
‘A Eurydicean ship? With a starship engine?’
‘That’s no weirder than a Eurydicean ship turning an asteroid into a fucking nest of war machines.’
‘Corrupted its fabricators,’ Higgins diagnosed confidently. ‘Same thing’s been done to the DK habitat-builders, that’s my guess.’
‘What’s that?’ Kevin asked.
They relayed what Johnstone had told them.
‘Sam Yamata didn’t tell us anything about any of this,’ Kevin said. ‘Shit.’
‘Who’s Sam Yamata?’
‘Leader of the Knights here. Christ, I could wring the little fucker’s scrawny neck.’
‘You couldn’t,’ said Lucinda. ‘Martial arts.’
‘Ha, ha,’ said Kevin. ‘If we’re up against starships controlled by a virus from the relic, to say nothing of yet more nests of war machines that could just fittle in any time like that fucking rock did, we’re in deeper shit than we knew.’
‘Aye, deep enough,’ said Lucinda bitterly. ‘Only the biggest disaster since the Hard Rapture. Leave aside whatever rampage the war machines are daein.’ She jabbed a finger towards the relic. ‘That thing created the skein, and now it controls it. Not us, no the Knights and for sure not Armand. Speaking of which, we don’t have enough forces on the ground to even hold the site nominally. Fuck.’ She glared around. ‘I rue the day I ever found this place. Everything I touch turns to shit.’
‘Hey, hey,’ said Kevin. ‘Take it easy. This is not your fault. I’m getting things sorted out with the Knights and Armand’s lot. If the Knights and the farmers knew about the DK ships they must at least be keeping an eye on them out there. We cannae dae anything about the war machines in the skein right now, but I reckon they’ll be meeting some pretty tough resistance fae our gang. We’ll find out as soon as messages start tae propagate back, Chronology Protection permitting. And we’re not, you know, being attacked at the minute. We just need tae get our act together, consolidate, and work out what tae dae next.’
‘Great,’ said Lucinda. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘What maist of us need tae dae,’ said Kevin, ‘and you in particular, is sleep.’
L
ater, it seemed to Lucinda incredible that she and almost everybody else had slept, but that was what they did. Emotionally and physically exhausted, with the war machines watchful—and watched, by the short-straw-drawn unsleeping—rather than actively hostile, with too many dead to count except by the Black Sickle girls whose job it was, all of them—Carlyles, Eurydiceans, Knights—except those on guard duty crashed out in whatever shelter and with whatever human companionship they could find.
She woke with synthetic sunlight on her eyes and metal hair between her lips.
‘Oh, sorry,’ she said, disengaging the hair and withdrawing a careless arm from across Higgins’s breasts.
The metal woman smiled. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said. She rolled away, on the yielding turf-like flooring, put her hands behind her head and gazed at the ceiling. ‘I don’t sleep.’
‘How nice for you,’ said Lucinda, straightening limbs and picking salt crystals from the corners of her eyes. She felt sweaty and filthy, as well as obscurely embarrassed. After some foraging she found the nearest bathroom, all low vessels and pebble-shaped steel objects whose functions she discovered by trial and error as she used them. The drexler gave her plain underwear, canvas trousers, and a cotton top and, after some persuasion, a quilted jacket. She wasn’t going to get back into her suit unless she had to, but she poked into the helmet and strung the comms around her brow, neck, and ears like jewellery. There were no calls waiting. She detached the boots and tugged them on; buckled on a belt and weapons.
There: that felt better. She stood and examined herself in the mirror for a minute. Looked better, too.
The room they’d slept in had a low ceiling that mimicked a clear sky, and a small trickling water feature surrounded by plants in a corner, and otherwise no furnishing. As she paused at its open doorway Lucinda formed a vague opinion that it was some kind of retreat, perhaps for meditation. Higgins was still lying on the floor. Her glass gaze tracked Lucinda, who met it, unblinking, as she came over and sat down cross-legged beside her. Higgins sat up with one smooth flexure of the spine.
‘You OK?’ she asked.
Lucinda ran a hand through her damp, still annoying curls. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘It’s just, uh, I’m sorry.’
‘For what?’ Higgins asked, in a mildly surprised tone.
‘If I’ve been, like, kind of rude lately.’
Higgins shook her head, metal hair flashing. ‘Not at all.’
Lucinda didn’t know what to say. She would have been ashamed to reveal even the trace of her initial revulsion that had remained, and that she now wanted to vomit out. ‘I like you,’ she said at last. ‘My original liked you, and now I can see why. Last night, in the fighting and in the flying, you were just so fucking great.’
With that she really did find herself wanting to vomit. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. She ran back to the bathroom and spewed, nothing much but acid water and slime, but she felt better for getting rid of it. She washed her face and rinsed out her mouth again and walked shakily to the room. This time Higgins stood up, met her, and put her arms around her for a moment. The metal body felt like flesh.
‘You’re all right,’ Higgins said.
‘So are you.’
Higgins smiled, looked aside awkwardly. ‘Things to do,’ she said. ‘I gottae look around this vehicle.’
‘Sure. Catch you later.’
Leaving Higgins to roam the ship, Lucinda swung out of the hatch to face the day. The early sunlight was dimmer than the diurnal lighting inside. A thin drizzle fell from clouds that concealed all but the first hundred metres of the relic and of the grounded asteroid about half a kilometre to its right. Two other ships hung just below the cloud cover; she presumed they were the two that had nearly clashed during the night. Tiny solar-powered news cameras flitted and drifted, their little wings labouring in the damp air and dim light. Around the bases of the relic and the asteroid war machines patrolled, a dull sheen of condensation from the mist on their jittery shining limbs and swivelling sensory apparatuses. Well away from them, and close to her and the ship, troops stirred from bivouacs, fires and heaters were being lit, somebody was making coffee. She wandered over and cadged some. It was Eurydicean, muddy, and strong. This group were from Armand’s army. Nobody knew what was going on. As she sipped hot black coffee and listened to rumours she saw a figure far outside the camp, walking away from the asteroid and towards them through the mist. Lurking war machines registered his presence, but let him pass unhindered.
Around her and on the perimeter, the grunts saw him too, and guns came up. He must have noticed the glint and the threat, because his hands rose above his head. As he came closer she saw that his hair and beard were long and matted. He was about two metres tall, perhaps more, because he walked as though carrying a heavy pack. His face was lank and pallid, his eyes bright. With his upraised arms he looked like a mad prophet coming out of the wet wilderness. He wore a close-fitting space suit with the raised whorls that covered electromagnetic coils and marked it as Eurydicean long-term microgravity gear. That would account for his peculiar stoop and laboured gait.
‘Cover me, lads and lasses,’ said Lucinda. She put down the mug on the damp moss and walked forward, her hands open at her sides. She and the stranger stopped about three metres apart.
‘Can I take my hands down now?’ he asked. His voice sounded surprised at itself.
Lucinda nodded. He lowered his arms and straightened his back.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘Cyrus Lamont,’ he said. ‘Prospector. Owner and pilot of the Hungry Dragon.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘The ship that’s stuck to the top of yon asteroid. Which I claim, in case there’s still any metal left in it.’
Lucinda had suspected something of the like, but it was still a surprise to her.
‘It was you who flew that? Landed it?’
‘Oh, no,’ Lamont said. ‘It was the ship did all that.’ His eyes closed for a moment. ‘It wasn’t responsible for the war machines,’ he explained. ‘They hacked into it.’
‘Well, I don’t think anyone will blame you for that.’
‘Good,’ he said, sounding relieved.
‘How did you get down?’
‘Climbed.’
‘Climbed down? In the dark?’
‘The dark?’ He looked puzzled. ‘Yes, I suppose it was dark. The ship helped.’ He gazed around, distracted. ‘I need to talk to someone, very urgently. Someone in authority.’
‘That would be Jacques Armand,’ said Lucinda. ‘I can take you to him.’ She stuck out a hand. ‘My name’s—’
‘Lucinda Carlyle,’ he said, shaking her hand firmly. ‘I saw you on television.’
S
he tried raising Kevin and Armand on her comms, but they weren’t taking calls. Annoyed, she sought them out, stalking around the KE camp with Lamont in tow until she found them in a small, open-sided diamond-aerogel shelter, sitting at a table with the leader of the surviving Knights. Sam Yamata turned out to be the very old man Lucinda and Armand had encountered the day the Knights had arrived. Lucinda presumed they’d already discussed what, if anything, could be done about the corrupted DK ships, because when she and Lamont arrived they were talking about the Knights who had not survived, but had been given a chance of resurrection by the Black Sickle.
‘We cannot run them in a virtual environment,’ Yamata was saying. ‘It is very dangerous.’
Jacques Armand and Kevin Carlyle glanced at each other. They both saw Lucinda and Lamont; Kevin gestured to them to wait. The leaders were not taking interruptions.
‘You might set off another Rapture?’ said Armand.
‘Not exactly,’ said Yamata. ‘It is just that, when you run uploads to solve a problem, they soon, in a matter of seconds, form what is called a civ. The uploads replicate and develop relationships. Most of them go very bad. You sometimes get an entire virtual planet of four billion people devoted to building prayer wheels in an attempt at a denial of service attack on God.’
‘Does it ever work?’ asked Kevin, sounding interested.
Even the Knight creased a smile. ‘In the nature of things we would not know,’ he said. ‘However, within the virtual universe, it does work, in that the god of that universe is its initiator, who has to stop the experiment because of exponential waste of bandwidth.’
‘All right,’ said Armand, clearly feeling that bandwidth was being wasted right here. ‘Is resurrection acceptable to you, in the circumstances?’
Yamata hesitated a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The consequences in another life will be borne by me, not by those resurrected. They will understand, and I … will accept the consequences.’
Lucinda detected a note of complacency in his humility. This was a man who felt his karmic balance was well in the black.
Kevin sighed. ‘And I’ll dae the same for Ian. Let the old bastard sort it out with his God.’
Yamata leaned forward. ‘His God has a difficulty with resurrection?’ He sounded incredulous. ‘What is this religion?’
‘It’s called Christianity,’ said Kevin stiffly. ‘It has a jealous God. Keeps a bit ae a monopoly on resurrection, that one. Disnae like others muscling ontae His patch.’
‘Ah,’ said Yamata. ‘When your venerable relative is resurrected I shall endeavour to show him the light.’
Aye, you just try it, you heathen bugger! Lucinda tried to suppress a snort. The sound was enough to turn heads back to where she and Lamont stood.
‘Yes?’ said Kevin, as if he didn’t know fine well they were there, and had been there for minutes. This business of not being interrupted was just showing off his new importance, Lucinda thought. It was not something she would have taken from anybody but a Carlyle. She swallowed the surge of annoyance and introduced the pilot. That got their attention all right.
L
amont walked through the camp with a feeling of rising panic. Had he ever been among so many people before? He knew he had, but he could not believe it. People stared at him, and he was never sure whether or not to look back. He had thought the rule might be to look at people only when in conversation with them, but that still created anomalies. It would have to be revised later. For now he looked, as far as possible, only at the starship. Doing so felt like cooling water flowing over his brain. The ship was so large that only the close proximity of the relic and of the asteroid made it proportionately small. It was about two hundred metres long and across, fifty thick. Every line on it was either straight or an arc. The unbroken matt black of its surfaces made some of its lines, and therefore all of its shape, difficult to see. One would have to walk around it several times, seeing at at many angles, before one could form a clear mental image of it.
That he did, somewhat to the bemusement of his three companions. When he set out on the second circuit they stood and waited for him, looked at him very oddly as he commenced the third, and with relief when he completed it.
‘I see it now,’ he told them. ‘It’s like—’ His hands circled, chopped.
‘A portion of a very large sphere,’ said Lucinda Carlyle. ‘I could have told you that.’
‘Telling would not have done it,’ said Sam Yamata, in a tone that struck Lamont as kind.
‘Come on,’ said Armand, ‘let’s go into the ship.’
Yamata bowed, held out his hand. Lamont walked up the rubber-ridged ramp into the ship. At the top he stopped and looked around, astonished. It was more than spacious: it did not feel like being inside an enclosed space. The air smelled fresh and fragrant, the ventilation a breezy susurrus like wind in distant branches. The ceiling was high, with the colour and luminosity of a white cloud. It was just high enough, about five metres, to make it seem like a sky when your eyes weren’t focused on it. The outdoor illusion was compounded by the grass-like covering of the floor, springy underfoot, and the trellised or potted plants and small trees that defined work areas and passageways. There were few flowers, all of them apparently incidental rather than decorative. The most colourful features were the ornamental fish in aquaria here and there. The furniture and instrumentation were spare in line and plain in aspect; there was a distinctly masculine minimalism about the whole great space and its subdivisions that resonated with a tang, very faint, on the air: when the Carlyle woman walked up the ramp Lamont could almost hallucinate the pheromonal clash. She smiled at him in a way he didn’t understand. He smiled back and looked away quickly.
‘This way, please,’ said Yamata.
As they walked along a passageway they passed broken aquaria, but there was no broken glass on the floor, merely patches of a darker colour on what might have been grass, but wasn’t. Out of the corner of his eye Lamont glimpsed a subtle movement in the fibres, like cilia. Nobody was about. Lamont began to suspect the ship was empty, but after a turn they found themselves in a wider clear space, a sort of atrium, above which the ceiling formed a glowing cupola. Its circumference was terraced into low, rounded-edged steps, on which a man and a woman lounged, talking to each other with some tension and intensity. Their voices ceased as the party’s footsteps approached, and they looked up.
Lamont had been forewarned about these two, but seeing the woman was still a shock. He was glad the ship was no longer, and not yet, in contact with him. He was certain its reaction to his unwitting physiological responses would have been jealousy. Of all the eyes he’d seen here, he found hers easiest to meet. Her handshake was, almost to his surprise, warmer than flesh. Campbell Johnstone’s was cold and firm. His eyes were organic, hers were not, but there was a similarity in their gaze, as though they sought, and found, something similar in his.
‘We’ve been told about you,’ Morag Higgins said. ‘We’re impressed.’
Lamont sat down on the floor. Armand and Carlyle sat on the seat a little way around the curve, Yamata at a small but noticeable further distance.
‘Thank you,’ said Lamont. He placed his palms on the floor behind him—it felt disturbingly like fur, rather than grass—leaned back and gazed at the opalescent hemisphere above for a moment. Then he sat up and forward with his forearms on his knees and, fixing his gaze on first Higgins, then Johnstone, said: ‘As I understand it, from conversation with our friends here, I’ve gained a small measure of indirect acquaintance with the posthuman, through my, ah, discussions with the ship. The two of you have greater experience with this kind of tech, and the three of us are being asked to cooperate in establishing communication with, or control over, some level of consciousness within the relic. At the same time, we have different loyalties. You, Higgins, are working for the Carlyles; Johnstone for the Knights. I presume it’s my job to fight a corner for Eurydice.’
‘But—’
‘That’s—’
‘Please—’
Johnstone laughed as the three voices spoke at once. ‘Reckon you got it in one,’ he said. He stood up. ‘The lab’s this way.’
T
he lab smelled of cold and electricity. It occupied most of the otherwise empty hold. The space was large and bare, lit by portable spots and floods—no luminous ceiling or self-cleaning carpets here. Lucinda and Armand hung back as Johnstone and Yamata talked Higgins and Lamont around the QTD—transmitter and receiver set up about ten metres apart—and the screens and desks connected to the instrumentation with which the Knights had, with great and characteristic caution, interacted remotely with the relic. She eyed the two big round bulks of the teleportation device with disquiet. It was for these that she had died, and she wondered with what thoughts her original had looked upon them. To Johnstone and Higgins the equivalent thoughts would be memory, not speculation.
Watching Lamont troubled her more. Since coming into the lab he had shrugged off all his awkwardness. She couldn’t make out everything he was saying, or understand all of what she could, but his every intonation and glance and gesture screamed one thing at her: Rapture-fucker! He and Johnstone and Higgins were so instantly and blatantly in cahoots that if she’d come upon the scene as a stranger she’d have assumed they’d known each other for years.
‘You seemed to know him,’ she said to Armand.
‘Not personally,’ he said. ‘By repute, and’—he tapped his temple—‘this tweaked memory we have for people. He was a rich man once, and he’ll be again even if there’s not a gram of useful ore in that asteroid and his ship is a wreck. With his experiences his credit and interest will be sky-high, at least for a while. No doubt he’ll find some way to leverage it into a more durable competence.’
‘Having his own stardrive should help,’ said Lucinda dryly. ‘Especially if the skein is fucked.’
Armand looked at her sidelong. ‘There is that,’ he said, like it hadn’t occurred to him. He shifted, looked around, and sat on the edge of a lab-bench. ‘The matter that Lamont raised,’ he went on. ‘I would appreciate your opinion on it.’
Lucinda spread her hands. ‘Higgins works for us, sure. Johnstone betrayed us, to the Knights.’
‘So I’ve heard.’
‘The point is, these two are what we call Rapture-fuckers. Lightning-chasers. They have a fascination with this stuff and they’ll take risks the Knights won’t. All well and good right now, maybe, but it means they each have their own agendas. I wouldn’t trust either of them an inch. As for your man Lamont, he may be a good patriot of Eurydice but he’s one of them. I know it.’
‘He seems quite taken with your woman Higgins,’ said Armand. He smiled. ‘I could venture a coarse remark, but will restrict myself to saying that a man who can screw a ship is unlikely to have a problem in that respect.’
Lucinda gave an appreciative dirty laugh. ‘Maybe that’ll be enough for them to maintain a united front.’
‘A united front against whom, eh?’
Lucinda jerked her head back. ‘The Knights. I know the immediate problem is the war machines, but let’s not forget the main enemy.’
‘They are not the enemy,’ Armand said mildly. ‘They are our rivals, and temporary allies. Let us not forget that.’
‘And what are we?’
‘Our agreement stands,’ said Armand.
Since the agreement had already been pretty much fulfilled from his side at least, this was not saying a lot. Lucinda returned him a wary smile. He leaned sideways a little, looking past her.
‘Our three champions are about to start work,’ he said.
Lucinda turned to see the Rapture-fuckers a good way off in the lab, sitting in front of a screen, their backs to where she and Armand watched. She gazed at a distant mercurial ripple of hair and thought, You hang in there for us, girl!
T
he interface was not as foreign as Lamont had expected. Its underlying architecture and ergonomics had a common ancestry with those used on Eurydice. Fundamentally it was as familiar to him as the lineaments of the Hungry Dragon. No doubt all human and even posthuman software could be traced back through genealogical trees of slouching, slope-shouldered code-geeks and capitalists to the same Olduvai in Silicon Valley. The instruments with which it interacted were outside the ship, encircling the relic at a respectful range. Their infinitesimally subtle input from deep quantum-level eavesdropping on electronic interactions within the vast artefact were analysed and collated by the ship’s immensely powerful computer: some of its components were themselves cannibalised from posthuman tech. The whole array quivered on the verge of some sentience deeper and more recalcitrant than that of the Hungry Dragon, or even of Eurydice’s Leontieff matrices. Any unscheduled self-upgrading would trigger its hardwired EMP generator. Likewise independent of its core processing were the firewalls against optic-nerve neural hacks. This seemed enough to reassure his new colleagues, and was therefore enough for him.
Strangely, despite their experience’s being deeper and wider, they deferred to his, recent and specific. Yamata stood well back; Johnstone and Higgins, one by one, nodded. He leaned forward and slid his hands into the access field. Like the Knights, Lamont had long dispensed with visual and tactile feedback from such devices; his hands and fingers moved by ingrained habit in the combination of gesture, chording, and keyboarding that had, even before the Hard Rapture, become as invariant as any martial art. The wide screen lit up without a flicker. The first iteration showed the point reached by Johnstone’s work on the QTD’s control system, which had provided a key to the logic of the relic’s major function, the generation of the wormhole skein.
Lamont shaped an inference chain based on his long sessions with the ship, which had in some measure succeeded in ridding it of the viral incubus, or at least limiting its effect. It was all from memory; he wished he had the ship with him. He checked the formulation over once, twice, then launched it into the virtual depths like a molecule cruising the bloodstream for a receptor.
The response was immediate. Something ferocious threw itself against the firewall. The screen went blank.
Yamata sighed delicately. ‘Restoring power,’ he said.
Lamont restored the formulation and reexamined it, checking its premises.
‘Ah,’ said Johnstone. ‘Nice one. But … allow me.’
Lamont relinquished the structure. Johnstone leaned forward, hands flexing. The formulation scrolled, disappeared, emerged from a mathematical transformation that turned it conceptually inside out.
‘Sugarcoating,’ murmured Higgins. ‘Uh-huh.’
This one lasted almost two seconds, an era in processing time but not enough for it to get through. The screen crashed again.
‘Restoring power,’ said Yamata. The screen came back up. They stared at it for a while.
‘I have an idea,’ said Higgins.
‘One moment,’ said Yamata. He motioned to Johnstone. ‘Look, here is the power switch. I shall be better occupied on the control deck.’
Johnstone nodded. Yamata went out.
‘OK,’ Johnstone said. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’
Higgins’s new structure came up, failed, was modified; and so it went on.
‘Shit,’ said Johnstone, sitting down again for the tenth time. ‘Don’t these guys have technicians?’
After a while Lamont became aware that Armand and Carlyle had followed Yamata’s example, and left. Lamont didn’t know how much time had passed—an hour, perhaps, and he was leaning back, hands behind his head, staring at the screen—when his comms tickled. He twitched it up, irritated at the interuption.
‘Yes?’
‘Your ship is pinging you,’ Carlyle’s voice told him. ‘Do you want me to patch it through?’
‘Oh!’ He sat up, heart hammering. ‘Yes, that would be wonderful. Where are you?’
‘We’re all up on the control deck,’ she said. ‘So we’re not breathing down your necks. We can see you through the command table. OK, patching you through.’
Higgins and Johnstone yelled at the same moment. The structure they’d been working on had been displaced by the complex front-end display screen of the Hungry Dragon.
‘I meant to my own comms!’ Lamont shouted.
‘That’s what I did,’ Carlyle’s indignant voice said in his ear. ‘Wait, let me…’
‘No,’ said the Hungry Dragon. ‘There is no need to do that. Everything is under control.’
It was in all their phones.
Lucinda snatched her hand away as if burned from the comms link Higgins had made in the command table. Sam Yamata glared at her. His face flushed then as quickly paled. She could hear his breath. In. Out. In.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘There is no danger. Whatever has intruded cannot upgrade our ship’s software. But still. We now have’—he paused, paging the display too fast for her to follow—‘an agent program of Lamont’s ship on our side of the firewalls. It is active. Very active.’
Lucinda’s knees shook. Yamata had okayed the transaction, but she felt again responsible. She was still kicking herself when she saw Yamata suddenly straighten up and listen intently to a message in his personal comms. Her own chimed a moment later and she heard Amelia Orr shouting: ‘Lift! Lift!’
In the external visual display, still up on the end of the command table, she saw the two other ships—the Knights’ and the one Amelia had swapped crews into—vanish in the blink of an eye, leaving a wrack of disturbed low cloud.
Yamata reached for the control menu of the command table. ‘Sit down,’ he said.
Armand and Lucinda were barely in their seats when the ship lurched upwards. They were pressed down, then released so that they almost rose out, then were slammed back again. Yamata was more skillful than Higgins had been at compensating for the ship’s damaged controls, but the ride was rough. In the small view of the lab, still up on the table, she could see the three Rapture-fuckers braced under the table at which they’d worked, Lamont’s long arms holding the other two and a stanchion at the same time.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ Lamont demanded.
‘Emergency lift,’ Lucinda said. ‘Apart from that I don’t know.’ The obvious thought struck her. ‘Has this something to do with what your ship did?’
‘No,’ replied Lamont. ‘It succeeded. It cracked into the relic’s control over the war machines. You can call your commander and check.’
Lucinda did just that while watching the visual display. It was already showing the blue curve of the planet below, black above. Kevin’s voice came through: ‘Aye, they’re standing down. But forget about that. The corrupted DK ships are attacking.’
So that was why they’d taken off so fast. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Good luck down there.’
‘We’re heading for the shelters,’ said Kevin, and signed off.
She relayed the information in an undertone to Armand. He frowned, staring at the visual diplay, now all black and blank but for a fleeting glimpse of Orpheus.
‘Fucking useless,’ he muttered.
Yamata was talking quietly, switching seamlessly from Japanese to American as he spoke to the other KE pilot and to somebody called Nardini, the guy flying the Carlyles’ ship. He shot Armand an impatient glance and stabbed a spot or two on the board with his finger. The visual display changed to a schematic. It showed the situation on several scales, from system-wide to local, with tags. Lucinda immediately grasped how it was put together. If the Knights had followed standard practice they’d have sown the system with transceiver sondes on all wavelengths and modes of communication, enabling the ship to build up a picture from radio and FTL comms, gravity-wave detection, reports and, she guessed, wild surmise. There were four ships marked as enemy, three—including their own—tagged as friendly, and named. The ship she was on was the Subtle Conceit, the other KE one the Small Arrangement of Chrysanthemums; and whatever the now Carlyle-piloted ship had been called originally, it was now hailing as the Stanley Blade. The clutter of AO vessels and uncorrupted DK ones were not in the fight, except as targets: the former location of two DK ships and one AO were shown as fading glows. The remainder were taking fast evasive action—a rapid-fire Cherenkov flicker and, moments later like thunder after a lightning-flash, a rumble of gravity-wave disturbances, showed them fleeing the system as fast as they could fittle.
‘Cowards,’ muttered Armand.
‘No,’ said Lucinda. ‘They’re helping us—clearing the board. Cuts down on chronology tangles, too.’
She watched intently as the Stanley Blade and the Small Arrangement raced to the points that triangulated Eurydice’s gravity well. The enemy ships, millions of klicks away, had formed the corner of a vastly larger enclosing square. Both sides were following well-grounded tactical moves for a starship battle. What came next would be a game of bluff and chance, which could last for hours or be over in seconds. The decisions were up to the pilots, the execution to the computers. But the enemy ships were being flown by their computers, or rather by the combative virus that had infested them. Whether this gave her side an advantage she would soon discover. That was the only outcome she would know in this life; if the opposite was the case, she would be dead.
One of the DK ships blinked away in an FTL jump. In instant response the two other KE-built ships darted away from the planet, while the Subtle Conceit dived towards it, deep into the gravity well. The manoeuvre took five seconds. In less time than that the ship that had vanished reappeared, having fittled a mere two light-seconds. Close enough now to see where they were, but far out of missile or laser range. Lucinda had seen this short-hop FTL capability before; Yamata had not, but he showed no surprise. He tapped a finger; a scatter of nuclear proximity mines were expelled from the ship; and then the Subtle Conceit once again moved fast, to one-tenth light-speed in two seconds. This time, those on board felt no fraction of the ferocious acceleration: Yamata had mastered that problem. The enemy ship fittled again, to reappear close to where they had been. The proximity mines detonated. The enemy ship’s drive exploded. A portion of the screen whitened for a moment.
Yamata allowed himself a small grunt of satisfaction. Armand and Lucinda whooped and punched the air.
The other two friendly ships, having diverged, were again converging. Another of the enemy ships fittled. The Stanley Blade’s and the Small Arrangement’s trajectories instantly halted. The enemy appeared, as it seemed on this scale, right beside them, and as rapidly was destroyed.
‘Ya beauty!’ yelled Lucinda.
‘What happened there?’ Armand asked.
‘Chronology Protection trap. It came out of the jump just too far away to hit them, and it couldnae fittle the remaining distance without going outside its own light-cone or back in time. They had a moment while it waited tae catch up wi itself, fired off a nuke, and—’ She clapped her hands.
Both the remaining enemy ships fittled away at the same moment. One of them reappeared between the Small Arrangement and the Stanley Blade, and Lucinda saw something bigger than a nuclear explosion: the deliberate detonation of one stardrive, and the secondary detonation of two more. To anyone looking in that direction from the ground it would have appeared like a supernova. There was no time to respond to the shock. The one remaining enemy ship had not reappeared. It was Armand who guessed its location.
‘Behind Orpheus,’ he said. Yamata reached for the table.
‘Take your time,’ Armand said. ‘There’ll be nothing but debris.’
And so there was. The enemy ship had run straight into one of Eurydice’s own defences, a particle-beam battery on its moon. But as Yamata took them back towards the camp and the relic, Lucinda carried no great sense of triumph with her to the ground. And when she found that Amelia Orr had not been, as she had assumed, on the Stanley Blade, she ran straight to her arms and cried.
L
amont sat alone in the lab for a long time, talking to the Hungry Dragon, and to a greater mind whose name he did not know. Eventually he felt silver hair brush his face, a warm metal hand clasp his wrist. He looked up into depthless eyes of glass.
‘You can leave now,’ Morag Higgins said. She smiled. ‘We’ve landed.’
‘I know we’ve landed,’ said Lamont, ‘but—’
‘But nothing,’ she said. ‘Come on. People are waiting for an explanation.’
‘But there’s so much more to find out.’
‘You can leave now,’ said the Hungry Dragon. ‘You know enough to tell them.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Lamont said, standing up, staring at the screen.
‘You need not apologise,’ said the Hungry Dragon. ‘I have someone else to talk to. An equal mind. So have you. Go with her.’
Lamont flushed.
‘You needn’t apologise to me either,’ said Morag Higgins. She flicked her hair back. ‘I could tell from your pulse.’
‘Tell what?’ he said, feeling as if he was in the ship’s webbing, and flailing mentally.
‘Your’re the first normal man who has looked me as if I’m a normal woman.’
‘Oh,’ said Lamont, dismayed. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you.’ He looked away, let his nails dig into his palms, looked back. ‘I’m not a normal man.’
She frowned. ‘In what way?’
‘I’ve been alone with my ship for five years. I’ve become eccentric, almost autistic, and perverted.’
‘Perverted?’
‘Well, you know. I’ve … been having sex with the ship. It … sent me incubi. From among its avatars.’
‘Oh,’ said Higgins. ‘And what were they like, these avatars?’
Lamont described curves with his hands.
‘You mean, like, beautiful women?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. I see. That’s different, of course.’
‘Different?’
‘Different from me. I’m not beautiful.’
He was shocked. ‘You are beautiful, don’t say that!’
‘You really think so?’ she asked. He could tell from her intonation that she was no longer teasing.
‘Of course.’
‘So. I’m a beautiful woman, and I’m a machine. I don’t see the problem.’
He could see it from her point of view when he thought about it. ‘Neither do I.’
‘Show me,’ she said.
It was Johnstone who came looking for them, but he gave them time.
M
ost of the survivors of the various encounters of the past thirteen or so hours had gathered in one of the Knights’ dining-halls, a long buckysheet shed with sheet-diamond windows, interior wall surfaces like blond wood, and a score or so of low, long black tables. It was not crowded. From the door Lucinda reckoned there were about a couple of hundred people here. They had divided, more or less, along party lines: Knights, Eurydiceans—regulars and Returners in a single bloc—and Carlyle gang. Morag Higgins and Camplbell Johnstone sat together, near the front, a little apart from everyone else. Lucinda sat down among the Carlyle soldiers beside Kevin and Amelia. The ebon lacquer of the table couldn’t be scratched with a thumbnail. It couldn’t be scratched, she discovered in a moment of vicious idleness, with a diamond blade. The news she’d heard in the last hour or so was, on the whole, good. The war machines in the skein had stopped attacking outside its gates. They still patrolled its corridors and concentrated at its nodes, but they let people pass. This did not smell like victory.
The Knights had called it a conference. Yamata and Armand sat at a table up at the front, facing the room, conferring quietly. Rumours had flown, and Lucinda hadn’t caught any. The Knights looked insufferably smug, the Eurydiceans excited, the Carlyle gang glum. At length Lamont arrived, walked briskly to the front table and sat down between the other two. At a word from Yamata he stood up. He patched his comms to everyone else’s; there was no need. But the audience was wider than those present: news-gathering motes hovered in the air or perched on the tables, relaying the news to the rest of Eurydice, and thence—pending propagation delay and chronology disentanglement—to the rest of humanity.
‘Um,’ Lamont said. He scratched his appalling beard. He introduced himself, for the benefit of the majority who didn’t know who he was. Lucinda found herself, like others around her, shifting on the bench.
‘What has happened,’ Lamont said, coming to the point at last, ‘is quite simple.’ He stopped and stared at the ceiling. ‘In a manner of speaking. What we have referred to as the relic is indeed the ship that took us or our ancestors to Eurydice. Its function was to create and put in place machinery for downloading and incorporating its passengers, and provide them with accomodation and tools and so forth. Before doing that it modified the entire biosphere of Eurydice, creating multicellular organisms from the native bacteria. It did more. What the outsiders refer to as the skein is a wormhole network which it generated.’
He hesitated, as though wishing to spare them bad news, or avoid inciting their incredulity. ‘This network even now continues to propagate. Already it encompasses most of the galaxy. Eventually it may extend to others.’
Lucinda felt the same falling sensation that she’d had on the ship. She had a vivid mental image of the relic’s diamond spike like an ice pick striking the great black bowl of the sky, turning it crazed with cracks, milky with flaws. The cracks might propagate outwards forever. If so, there would be no more untouched nature: wherever humans went, their work—or that of their creation—would be already there before them. The whole face of God, or Nature, changed irrevocably by the work of Man! And to think that they had called the skein ‘Carlyle’s Drift’!
‘Then,’ Lamont continued, ‘the colony ship’s mind upgraded itself to the same condition as the previous wave of posthuman intelligences, those we call the Raptured, and went away, to—wherever they have gone. It left behind the source-code of its original self, and some autonomic defence mechanisms. Those we call the war machines. They were its immune system. When the Carlyle … gang’s intruders broke into it, these machines were activated, and a data-rich virus was transmitted that took over machinery that could build more of them. As it happens, the only such machinery it found in any suitable location was the fabrication system of my ship. This was used to build war machines, and to provide the asteroid with a stardrive. Later, it managed to likewise infect the DK ships.’ He shrugged. ‘You know the rest.’
‘No, we don’t!’ someone called out.
Lamont scratched his hair. He told them about how he and the Hungry Dragon had worked, alone in space, to isolate the intrusion, and how they had almost succeeded. His stern gaze fixed on Lucinda. ‘But before we could finish, yet more high-energy weapon discharges around the relic brought the reserves into action. The ones on my asteroid. They acted to protect the skein.’
The Carlyle fighters and Eurydiceans stirred angrily. Armand made a cut-off gesture.
‘That is what it was doing,’ he affirmed. ‘Our bad luck. Our good luck that Lamont and his ship gained control of the asteroid’s descent.’
Lamont went on. The Hungry Dragon had finally reasoned itself out of the control of the virus. It had then repeated the process to cut the relic’s control over the war machines, and to assume control over them itself. That had, however, left the infected DK ships as autonomous war machines in their own right. These had now been dealt with. All that remained were the war-machine nests they’d established on four asteroids that had been intended as raw material for DK space habitats.
‘These will not be a problem,’ he said. ‘They are now under control again.’
Lucinda could not contain herself. She jumped up. ‘You mean they’re now controlled by your fucking ship!’
Lamont shook his head, matted locks flying. ‘No, no!’ he said. ‘You don’t understand.’ His fingers rampaged through his beard. ‘I haven’t explained this yet. The war machines really are like an immune system, controlled by reflex. When that was compromised, a higher level of processing was awakened. That is what currently controls the skein and all the war machines.’ He blinked hard. ‘It’s … benign, and it’s … friendly towards the colony of Eurydice, which after all is its own work.’
‘How do you know it won’t go off on some Rapture of its own?’
Lamont shrugged and spread his hands. ‘This is not the original mind,’ he said. ‘This is like a ganglion, a subroutine. It’s powerful enough, a superhuman sentience, but it’s not ambitious. Or so the Hungry Dragon assures me.’ He glanced down at Armand. ‘It wants to speak to the Joint Chiefs,’ he added. Armand smiled and nodded.
Lucinda sat down shaken and dismayed, and turned to Kevin and Amelia. ‘We’ve lost the skein. It’s Eurydice’s now.’
Kevin shook his head. ‘No, surely not. We can fight war machines, for fuck sake!’
‘Not an endless supply of them, we can’t!’ Lucinda said. ‘And it isnae just a matter ae war machines anyway. If that muckle thing out there controls the skein itself, who’s to know what it could do? It could switch the gates away fae our planets. Reconfigure the whole skein, for that matter.’
Kevin frowned at her for a moment, nodded slowly, then stood up.
‘Come on,’ he said to the Carlyle fighters. ‘There’s nothing more for us here.’
He led them away from the tables, striding to the door without a backward glance. Their departure was noticed, but not remarked on or, as far as Lucinda could see, regretted except by Morag Higgins, who gazed after her. Lucinda beckoned to her, with a smile and a slight flexure of her fingers; Higgins’s silver lips compressed, and she turned her attention back to Lamont like all the rest. But Armand met Lucinda’s gaze with a sharp glance and a small nod.
Somebody called out:
‘What about Eurydice’s fossil record? What about the fossil war machines?’
Lucinda stopped, turned around. This question had been nagging her too.
‘I understand,’ Lamont said slowly, ‘that the ship was equipped with what are called Darwin-Gosse machines. They are capable of evolving an entire biosphere in virtual space, and creating the result. The ship’s own capabilities well exceeded that. It reshaped Eurydice’s lithosphere. It laid down new strata. It created the fossil record.’
Lucinda remembered what Johnstone had said in the Chernobyl caves, about worked rocks that looked like they’d formed naturally.
‘But why?’ she shouted, almost from the exit. ‘Why the hell should it do that?’
‘I have asked it that myself,’ Lamont said, ‘and it told me why it did it.’ He spread his arms wide. ‘For the panache!’
I
t was early afternoon. The clouds had cleared; the shadows of the spike and the space mountain were short, but still covered the camp. Ones and twos of Knights and Eurydiceans here and there stood watch. One reporter pursued Lucinda, but she waved her hand in front of her face and said nothing, and it flew back in to the conference. She jogged over to where the remaining Carlyle fighters were piling on to four of the company’s gravity sleds.
‘We arenae going tae ride these aw the way back tae New Start,’ Lucinda complained, as she caught up with the others.
Kevin gave her a look. ‘We are no,’ he agreed vehemently. “We’re going tae ride them up intae the hills a way and get picked up by one ae our ain starships that hae been lurking out-system. If you’d been paying attention, Amelia’s made the contact and set up the rendezvous.’
Lucinda glanced around the matériel-cluttered encampment as she clambered aboard a sled alongside Amelia and grabbed a handrail. ‘Why not land here?’
Amelia jerked her thumb at the Subtle Conceit. ‘Knights are just a wee bit touchy about bringing one ae our starships down here. Too much possibility for misunderstanding.’
Lucinda chuckled darkly. ‘OK.’
The sleds lifted and accelerated forward. The slipstream whipped her hair, snatched at her breath. They passed out of the great shadows, into the sunlight. It was exhilarating, and it lifted her spirits and diverted her attention from brooding on the catastrophe that had been brought upon the clan. That had been brought upon it by her. She thrust the thought away. The Carlyle ethos was causal, not moral; based on results, not intentions. But even in that unforgiving light she found it possible to think that what had happened wasn’t entirely her fault.
We’ll just have to get into an honest business, she thought. With the income from the skein gone, what could they do? Combat archaeology remained, but with Eurydiceans—or their friendly superintelligence—in control of the skein, and on better terms (as they now seemed) with the Knights, it would be more difficult. But, she thought, looking over the heads of the fighters on the sleds, the clan and the firm could deal with difficulties in its own way, and as it always had. They were still the bloody Carlyles.
And they still had a job to do here. She recalled Armand’s subtle nod.
‘Do you think General Jacques is still with us?’ she asked Amelia, loudly into her ear in rushing wind.
‘Still up for the Return?’ Amelia yelled back. ‘I’m no sae sure. No himself personally, anyway.’
‘But he’s promised his troops!’
‘Aye,’ said Amelia. ‘He has that. So we wait and see, aw right? That’s why we’re going back tae New Start.’
Within about half an hour the flotilla of sleds had crested the nearest ridge, a few hundred metres from a gate—still guarded by war machines, whose sensors pinged them as they passed—and all but the upper parts of the gigantic objects behind them had dropped out of sight. The sleds skimmed along at a few metres above the ground, along a blue-green glen shadowed by flitting clouds. It was a classic U-shaped valley, scoured out by glaciers that had perhaps never existed but in the imagination of a god with a sense of style. Lucinda scanned the sides of the glen, and saw with delight a little flock of small grazing animals, long-limbed and dark-haired, skipping among outcrops of rock and falls of scree. High above, some winged predator circled on an updraft, a black speck in the blue sky. Terraforming, even with Darwin-Gosse machines, was an unpredictable procedure, more a matter of evolution than creation; trial and error. Even this simple food chain, if that was what she was seeing, was itself a triumph.
Something else moved among the rocks. She glimpsed it only out of the corner of her eye, and when she turned it was gone. Her gaze swept the slope—there, something again—a human figure, so well-camouflaged it was as if the grass or shrub had shifted. It darted across the side of the glen, about halfway up, a little ahead of them and running in the direction opposite to theirs, and disappeared behind a rock.
She tapped the comms unit at her throat and pinged Kevin, in the leading sled. ‘Bandits on the slope at two o’clock,’ she said. ‘Time for a fast lift.’
‘Got ya.’
The sleds shot into vertical ascent, stopping seconds later at a couple of hundred metres above the hills that defined the glen. The vehicles didn’t have much in the way of instrumentation. Heads, Lucinda’s among them, peered cautiously over the sides. She wished she’d kept her suit. But the man was now much easier to see. He stood and waved his arms above his head.
Kevin sent out a cautious interrogatory and identifying ping. After a few moments he reported back.
‘He claims he’s alone, and he’s pleased to see us,’ he said, sounding surprised. ‘Says his name’s Ree, and he’s asking for you. Lucinda.’
It really was like a weight off her shoulders. A small weight compared to what remained, but a relief nonetheless. ‘Wow! He survived!’
‘Who is he?’
‘The wee commie biologist fae the statues. Can we pick him up?’
‘Is that safe?’ Kevin asked.
‘I think so.’
Lucinda elbowed her way to the front and asked the sled’s driver to take them down. Reluctantly, he complied. They drifted to the man’s level, and hung in the air ten metres away from him, keeping him covered. He was wearing his survival suit with the visor up, and he was grinning.
‘Hello again, Miss Carlyle Lucinda,’ he said.
‘I’m glad to see you,’ she said. ‘How did you get here?’
‘Through the gate, three days ago,’ he said.
‘Wasn’t it guarded?’
Ree put his fists on his hips. ‘Juche martial arts superior to those of decadent effete Knights,’ he said proudly. He mimed knocking heads together. ‘Left guards unconscious and ran to hills. Since then have been living self-reliantly and awaiting your heroic production brigade’s arrival. Most impressive battle, observed from safe distance. Also observed your departure.’
‘How did you know we would be coming this way?’
‘Lucky guess of optimal route out of artifact region, and very fast running.’ He held out a hand. ‘May I come with you?’
‘Uh, sure,’ said Lucinda. She gestured to the driver; he edged the sled towards the slope. ‘But why did you come here?’
‘To see great playwright Ben-Ami,’ Ree said. He caught a rail and vaulted deftly aboard. ‘I have much to tell him.’
They lifted off to join the other sleds, which were returning to a more sustainable altitude.
‘I meant—I thought you were escaping,’ Lucinda said, ‘from whoever wrecked the statues and burned the jungle and destroyed your settlement.’
Ree looked grim and grieved. ‘That too,’ he said. ‘They are connected.’
The Carlyles had walked out. The reporters had buzzed off. There was a hiatus in the conference, filled with a low murmur as people came and went to fetch water, tea, beer, or coffee from the Knights’ commendably ecumenical catering machine. Lamont sat at the top table beside Armand and Yamata, sipped tea, and wondered if he and the two lightning-chasers, as they called themselves, formed a third party to the Eurydiceans and the Knights. Or if there were more parties here than that: the Eurydiceans all wore uniforms identical apart from their company logos, but he could tell the resurrected Returners from the rest at a glance: faces fresh out of the tank, and yet older and more experienced than the others, more primitive, more guarded.
As for the Knights, their expressions were calm but curious, their voices low, their gestures oblique. Higgins and Johnstone were looking around uneasily, but smiling.
Lamont hated this sort of thing: ambiguity, micropolitics, the presentation of self in everyday life. He decided he would have to get used to it. Morag Higgins caught his despairing glance, and returned him an encouraging smile. Now she was one straightforward person. Like the Hungry Dragon in that respect. He smiled back. He put down his empty cup with an unintended bang (still not used to gravity), shuffled his forearms on the table, turned to Armand and Yamata.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said. It came out too loud. The place hushed. ‘I detect a certain tension in the room.’
To his surprise, everybody laughed. Lamont took from it no sense of relief. One of the Returners jumped up.
‘Too right there’s tension,’ he said. ‘We were promised Return. I haven’t heard that mentioned. And I’m wondering if you haven’t sold us out again, General Jacques.’
Armand glanced sharply at Yamata, sighed, and leaned forward, elbows on the table.
‘Thank you, Lawrence,’ he said. ‘It is not a question of selling out. It is a question of doing my job.’
‘Now when have we heard that before?’ the Returner asked.
Armand cut across the chorus of concurrence.
‘Neither I, nor the Joint Chiefs, nor the Knights can prevent any of you from returning to Earth even if we wanted to. I must point out, however, that the Knights disapprove more strongly than ever of what the Carlyles call combat archeology.’ Armand glared at Lamont, Higgins, and Johnstone in turn. ‘Not to mention what the Carlyles call Rapture-fucking. I cannot imagine the Joint Chiefs taking any more sanguine view of them. What was awakened here is benign. What has been awakened elsewhere has often not been. As Eurydice moves to take full control of the wormhole skein, the opportunities for such activities will diminish. Despite our recent conflict, the Knights remain the most civilised of the powers, the one with whom we have most in common, and most to learn from, and most to give.’ He leaned back, and opened his hands. ‘Or does anyone think the American farmers or the Asian communists are more promising partners?’
‘You’re forgetting the Carlyles,’ said Higgins.
‘I am trying to,’ said Armand, to laughter.
The Returner who’d stood up now turned to face the others. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I have to say with the Carlyles that there’s nothing here for us. For myself, I’m going back to the city. Anyone want to join me?’
A few of his resurrected comrades shook their heads. The others, about sixty in all, along with a few native-born Eurydiceans, rose and followed him out. Higgins cast Lamont an anguished, angry look, and followed them.
Lamont jumped to his feet. ‘Morag! Come back!’
A shake of her head sent a ripple down her silver hair.
Lamont hesitated, then looked at Armand and Yamata, shrugged, and made his way around the corner of the table and ran after her. He slowed to walk beside her.
‘Glad to see you,’ she said. Her glass eyes glinted, her metal hand was warm. They had gone out of the door by the time Armand had sprinted up and caught their shoulders, then kept pace.
‘Coming with us?’ asked Higgins.
Armand ignored the sarcasm. ‘You know I can’t,’ he said. ‘But don’t be fools.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You and that hothead Lawrence Hammond should have listened to what I said. How long will it take for Eurydice—or even your newly wakened AI—to take control of the skein? Days, weeks, who knows? Likewise for the Knights to harden their fortifications on Earth.’
‘And what if the Knights don’t just let the Returners leave?’ Lamont asked. ‘Or if the Joint Chiefs don’t? How long have we got then?’
‘Maybe a few hours,’ said Armand grimly. ‘Just keep it quiet and move fast. Talk to Lucinda Carlyle or Amelia Orr, they’ll know what to do. Set up a meeting, but don’t discuss anything over the comms.’ He raised his voice. ‘All right then!’ he shouted, pushing them forward. ‘Go! Go if you want! Go now!’
He stalked back in to the conference, theatrically shaking his head, while Lamont and Higgins walked after the Returners to the hypersonic transports. A starship screamed across the sky and stopped above the horizon, drifting down to land somewhere beyond the encircling range of hills.
T
he thing is,’ Winter heard himself shouting to Andrea Al-Khayed, as he waved a bottle in one hand and clung to a pillar with the other, outside the Bright Contrail some time about mid-afternoon, ‘the thing is, see, that General Jacques, that, that, that bastard, has sold out the Returners again! He’s done just what he done in the play last night! Just what he did back in Polarity! All over again! Son of a fucking bitch!’
She yelled something back.
‘What?’ he shouted. The music was loud. Vehicle traffic had stopped. The street was filling up with people drinking and dancing. More of the same was on the big screens, relaying views from right across the city, which was going wild with relief and exultation. It was being claimed that this would be the wildest party in the history of Eurydice. And why not, Winter thought dourly. They’d just survived what had seemed like certain disaster and emerged to find themselves—according to the more soberly reported news earlier—the potential future capital of the galaxy.
‘I said, “You’re right there!’ ” Al-Khayed shouted.
‘Oh, right.’ He nodded.
‘And you need this!’ She passed him a glass. He knocked it back. The music suddenly quietened. He could hear and see a lot more distinctly.
‘What the—’ He stopped, suddenly aware of how he’d been assailing her ears. No way to speak to a lady. ‘What was that?’
‘Iced umami tea.’
‘Ah. Thank you.’ He shook his head and looked around, realising that he had sobered up. ‘Jeeze.’
‘It won’t last,’ she warned. ‘But it’s good for hangovers, too.’
‘Thanks,’ he said. The mention of a hangover made him want another alcoholic drink. Fast, before it caught up with him. ‘Uh, can I fetch you a drink?’
‘I’m fine,’ said Andrea. ‘Catch you later.’
Evidently giving him up as a hopeless case, she swayed back through the crowd on the pavement to rejoin Ben-Ami, who was holding court at his usual table by the railing. Kowalsky was sitting beside him, Voigt opposite him and beside Calder, who’d somehow snagged her—or she him: the tall dancer, corseted and kirtled in black satin, petted him absently and intermittently as if he was a monkey. They were all talking as raucously as he had been a moment ago. Passersby, who all recognised them and might otherwise have nodded and smiled, passed tactfully on if they were more sober, or added to the press around the tables and slumped on the ground if they were more drunk.
Winter turned away, savouring his fleeting moment of moral superiority as he made his way to the drinks table in front of the cafe’s main, wide-open window. He was just reaching for a bottle of red wine and, with some surprise at his own self-restraint, a glass, when he saw Lucinda, Amelia, and a stocky, dark-skinned, black-clad man pushing through the crowd towards Ben-Ami’s table. They seemed to have a small crowd of their own behind them, a score or so—maybe more, it was hard to see in the crush—of people who looked like tourists, gawping around, wearing wild local clothes they obviously weren’t used to. As they approached, Amelia glanced over her shoulder and waved them towards the park, and with a lot of jostling they dispersed in that direction, leaving the two women Winter knew and the man he didn’t to step on to the pavement spread of the Bright Contrail. Amelia was in a very Eurydicean outfit of the day, bright blue, all carnival fronds and fringes, inconspicuous in the festivities. Lucinda wore the same off-white long dress in which Winter had last seen her, back at the gig. The effect was hallucinatory. He stared at her face, wondering if she looked different. It was hard to tell. Her appearance had always outdone his memory of her each time he’d seen her.
She noticed him just as she approached the table, and smiled and nodded briefly. She said something to Ben-Ami and seated Amelia and the man who had arrived with them down beside him, and then walked over to Winter. She was carrying the same enormous floppy hat, and a bottle.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘It’s good to see you again,’ said Winter. ‘To see you, uh … back.’
‘Back from the dead!’
‘As I think I said to you once, the experience is overrated.’
At that Lucinda did look changed. There was a thrawn weariness in her face that Winter hadn’t seen before.
‘Aye,’ she said. ‘You could say that.’ She looked down, then firmly up. ‘Well. A lot tae talk about. Could we, like, start again where we left off?’
He laughed. ‘Hence the antique frock, yeah?’
‘That was the idea, yes.’ She sounded embarrassed. ‘Dialled up a copy at the skyport, from my old hotel room.’
‘It’s still not you, but it’s a nice—’
‘—Oh, shut up—’
‘—thought.’
She flourished the bottle. ‘Talisker,’ she said. ‘From the captain’s table. Well, the captain’s drexler, tae be honest. Want some?’
‘Let’s find somewhere to sit.’ He glanced at Ben-Ami’s table.
‘Not there,’ she said.
T
ell him,’ said Amelia, pouring Ree a drink. His hand was shaking too much to pick up the glass. He withdrew it, looked Ben-Ami in the eye and said, ‘All my production brigade killed or dispersed and in hiding because we sold your work, Mr Ben-Ami.’
Ben-Ami closed his eyes and opened them again. ‘What?’ Everybody at the table was by now looking at Ree.
‘I owe you licence fee, of course,’ he said. ‘I am representative of Eighty-Seven Production Brigade. But I hope you will have it in your heart to defer requirement of payment.’
Ben-Ami waved a hand. ‘Forget about that. You said people have been killed for selling my work?’
‘Is my fault,’ said Ree. He sipped the neat whisky, then downed it in one gulp as if it was vodka. ‘Miss Carlyle sojourned at our brigade headquarters. She gave collected works of Mr Ben-Ami as payment. We all watched your wonderful play, Mr Ben-Ami, about great Prince Leonid. I was so moved by it that I had it transmitted as sample to several DK habitats in the same system. One of them, Man Conquers Space Collective, is very rigorous in interpretation and upholding of self-reliance idea. They took exception to it. Great exception. They were already disapproving of us because we were terraforming planet for Yank farmers. They said now we are corrupting self-reliant society with backward and decadent Yank ideas. There was ideological discussion, then dispute. They said Leonid was a revisionist. We knew this was not so, and we were even more convinced that it could not be, Mr Ben-Ami, because of your great play. We voted to continue selling your work to other brigades and collectives. Man Conquers Space Collective sent their self-defence force, aerospace militia division, to correct us. They attacked us from the sky, Mr Ben-Ami! We had no defences prepared! We did not expect this, even from dogmatists! I only escaped because I was far away, with my marine biology work, and even then they destroyed my place of work. I hid underwater and made my way through wormhole gate and waited for Miss Carlyle’s production brigade, which we already knew was going to pass through on way here to fight the Knights.’
‘What about the other production brigades on your planet?’ Amelia asked, tipping him another whisky.
‘Rest of Transformation of Nature Collective mostly afraid of Man Conquers Space,’ Ree said scornfully. ‘They have indeed become soft living on dirt like Yank. While hiding in the hills the past days and nights I have used my juche untraceable communications gear’—he tapped a pendant at his throat—‘to make clandestine agitation in DK settlements on and around Eurydice. I have made contact with many people, scores of people, who are most indignant and who are not afraid. We will fight these Man Conquers Space son of bitch bastards like Brezhnev fought Nazis and Yanks and Polacks and South African slaveholders, gaining his honourable scars.’
Ben-Ami looked hard at the strange small man, fascinated and appalled.
‘How many of these son of bitch bastards are there, do you reckon?’ Calder asked.
‘Only hundred million,’ said Ree. ‘I will kill every last one of them even if I have to die like Leonid.’
‘No,’ said Amelia firmly. ‘You will not. That’s revenge, not recompense. What you want to do is damage them, yes, kill some, yes, but gain something from it yourselves. You should think of it as collecting on a debt.’
‘Debt collection is not war,’ said Ree. ‘Is well-understood in DK.’ He gave Amelia a very ambiguous stare. ‘As we know from previous dealings with Carlyles. But conflict and debt collection would not only be with Man Conquers Space. They would not do this on their own. We suspect they are backed by the wicked Chinks.’
‘Who?’ yelped Calder.
‘Knights of Enlightenment, so-called,’ said Ree. ‘To disincentive self-reliant people from getting involved further in terraforming for Yank farmers. So we may need help from bloody Carlyles.’ He looked beseechingly at Amelia. ‘Would this be problem for you?’
‘Not for me, it wouldn’t,’ said Amelia cautiously. ‘I wouldnae object if you were tae raise a few fighters. Gie the Knights a wee payback.’
Ree shook Amelia’s hand. ‘Is done, is deal?’
‘Uh, yes,’ she said. ‘Inasmuch as it’s up to me. But … we have another deal to fulfil first. Maybe.’
‘Is no hurry,’ said Ree. ‘We build our forces. Gain experience.’
‘Ah,’ said Amelia. ‘Would you like to gain some experience fighting the wicked—the Knights, on, ah, some other planet?’
‘I would indeed.’
‘Amelia sucked in her lips. ‘Could you use your untraceable comms right now, to ask them to come here? Discreetly? I would like to meet them. Quite urgently.’
Ree nodded, turned away and spoke as though to himself in a language Ben-Ami didn’t know, then turned back and smiled with a thumbs-up.
‘Wait a minute,’ Ben-Ami said, leaning forward. ‘The Joint Chiefs would be most upset if Returners and Carlyles and God help us, commies were involved in an attack on the Knights.’
‘You’ve always known about this,’ said Amelia. ‘We talked about it.’
‘Not in a way I had to take seriously,’ said Ben-Ami.’ And not in a context where … all these other forces are involved. If the Joint Chiefs were to find out about this conversation, the consequences could be severe.’
He looked solemnly around all the faces at the table, then laughed.
‘So let us ensure that they don’t,’ he said.
L
amont sat on a bench, his legs stretched out, at the skyport concourse beside Morag Higgins as they waited for the Returner fighters to emerge from the changing rooms. Outside, on the field, the hypersonic transports of Blue Water Landings, like all the other vehicles in the parking apron, were dwarfed by two KE-built starships suspended on nothing a few metres above the landing strips. One of these ships was the Carlyles’. Other starships—AO trucks, DK batwings—hung in the sky like so many box or dragon kites. Around the perimeter of the skyport the usual bright-painted red and yellow emergency or auxiliary vehicles had been supplemented by darker, heavier military cars and tanks, bristling with cosmic-string projector guns. Nothing was going to land or take off from New Start without the Joint Chiefs’ approval, and all air and space traffic was being directed here. Whatever Armand had hoped, the Eurydicean government was already moving to take control of the skies. Even the little entopters were being grounded one by one, ostensibly for safety as the city revelled. Anyone disembarking would have to use the monorails and shuttles. The thought made Lamont break into a cold sweat of agoraphobia, but he knew he could overcome it. The only arrangement that had been made—in a very guarded in-flight phone conversation—with Amelia was to meet up at some cafe on the edge of the central park, the Jardin des étoiles. Lamont guessed Amelia had some plan in mind—perhaps to bring another Carlyle starship down on a sharp vertical descent over the park to pick everybody up.
The Returners trickled out, dressed in the scanty or elaborate costumes of the day. Lawrence Hammond, who seemed to be the leader of the handful of Eurydiceans among them as well as of the recently resurrected, was the first to walk over, quite unself-conscious in high-heeled boots and a fringed white leather suit set here and there with small shiny stones. He looked down at Lamont.
‘You ready?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you not going to get changed?’ Higgins asked.
Lamont looked along the length of his body to his boots, then at her.
‘No.’
‘You’ll kind of stand out.’
Lamont snorted. ‘I’m a celebrity now. Nothing I can do about that. What about you?’
She was getting stared at more than him, not to his surprise. Her metal features, though they looked like painted flesh, were in stark contrast to her black cotton suit.
‘I have an idea,’ she said.
She stood up and stripped off her tunic and trousers and threw them in the nearest drexler bin.
In her underwear she looked like she’d painted herself silver from head to foot.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Ready to party.’
They set off through a corridor to the monorail platform. The capsules that they boarded were empty apart from themselves, but as they swooped and soared between the towers and trees of New Start and stopped at other platforms they soon filled up. Lamont clung to a stanchion, sweating in his suit, breathing slowly. He kept his eyes closed, or looked outside. The city had changed in his absence; as he might have expected, it was the most massive and ancient-looking buildings, the ones built of stone and concrete, that were new and strange to him. The nanofactured, quasi-organic tree-like structures of towers and walkways, that could in principle be reconfigured overnight or returned to the ground, were all familiar; the city’s old growth.
T
he wildest party in the history of Eurydice was what had been promised, and that was what was delivered. Every light was on, every speaker was loud, every glass was full, every couple were in love for as long as it lasted. Winter wasn’t entirely sure if he and Lucinda were among them. She’d explained to him that a bunch of Returners were on their way, with some kind of plan or instructions from Armand about getting a starship in, and after a bit more conversation she’d traipsed off to the park to talk to the gang who’d arrived with her and to liase with—as far as he could see, over many heads—a steadily increasing number of what looked like DK types, if their fancily cut but drably coloured outfits were anything to go by.
Winter found a guitar in the back of the cafe, and he and Calder sat on the cafe’s pavement-edge railing, legs dangling, sweat falling, and sang and played all they could remember to anyone who cared to listen. At some point towards the dusk, Winter looked down and saw Lucinda at the table beneath his feet, talking to Ree and to Ben-Ami, who hadn’t shifted all afternoon, letting people come and go, and shouting his approbation or otherwise at the musicians.
‘Oh you daft scunner,’ Lucinda was telling Ben-Ami. ‘Of all the folks you could hae picked tae be a doomed romantic hero, it had tae be bloody boring Brezhnev.’
Ben-Ami shrugged. ‘Artistic licence, my dear.’
‘And you,’ she went on, turning to Ree, ‘you poor daft buggers, you had tae dae the same! Oh it ashames me! With all the worthless heroes of history to choose from. You could have had Mao, did you but know it. Or Guevara. Or Bonny Prince Charlie. Or even—’
She reached up for Calder’s guitar. ‘Give me that.’
She stood up, rested one foot on the chair; stooped over the guitar, strummed it, then raised her head and looked Winter straight in the eye and sang a song he remembered from Highland halls and pubs back in the 2030s. It startled him to hear it again, almost unchanged. It could have been about Guevara, or, as Lucinda had said, someone else as unworthy of the praise the song bestowed. No one had ever told him, not even when he’d sung it himself. Now that he came to think about it, inquiring after to whom the old Jacobite song now applied had not been a welcome question, and he’d learned to desist.
Sé mo laoch mo Ghile Mear
‘Sé mo Chaesar, Ghile Mear,
Suan ná séan ní bhfuaireas féin
Ó chuaigh i gcéin mo Ghile Mear.
Syne my brave darling disappeared
Naught know I but pain and sorrow
no news we heard, his death we feared
on far-off hills, in cruel caves.
That last line had been different before. Winter frowned, trying to recall it. In th’ cruel caves of somewhere somewhere. A foreign place-name. It had almost rhymed. The conversations nearby were stopping, in a spreading circle of silence. Lucinda had quite a voice, and she was throwing a lot of what sounded like real grief and yearning into it.
Sé mo laoch mo Ghile Mear
Sé mo Chaesar, Ghile Mear,
Suan ná séan ní bhfuaireas féin
Ó chuaigh i gcéin mo Ghile Mear.
Freedom’s fierce and gallant knight,
a high-flown laird with gentle eyes.
A blade of fire upon the night,
he’ll wreak destruction from the skies.
Winter joined in the next chorus, and Lucinda smiled warmly and connivingly at him, but it was to Ree she turned when she sang the rest, eyes bright and wet.
So drink his health and sing his praise
his far-famed face and sloganned name.
In every house be one who prays
he’ll scorch the tyrants with his flame.
Sé mo laoch mo Ghile Mear
‘Sé mo Chaesar, Ghile Mear,
Suan ná séan ní bhfuaireas féin
Ó chuaigh i gcéin mo Ghile Mear.
‘I didn’t know she could sing,’ Calder said.
Winter glared at him for a moment, but Calder was looking past him.
‘Behind you,’ said Calder. ‘Guy dressed like Elvis, from the rhinestones and amphetamines period. Play it cool and turn slowly. He seems to be squaring up for a fight with Amelia.’
Winter slid down from the rail and looked around. A few metres away Amelia stood with her back to him, and was indeed almost head to head with a man in a white suit. Winter expected to witness a Glasgow kiss at any moment. Beside that man stood a much taller figure in a tight, tattered space suit and with shaggy hair and beard, a man whom Winter recognised from the television as Lamont. He was leaning into the quarrel and clinging, as if for support, to the hand of a woman got up as some kind of robot sex-toy.
Winter edged closer, Calder just behind him.
‘We thought you were ready with—’ the white-clad man was shouting.
‘—fucking moron, dae ye think we hae—’
At that moment Lucinda flashed past him in a flurry of pale skirts and flung herself on the robot-like woman, hugging her and spinning her around. The quarrel abruptly halted in distraction and Lamont stepped forward and grasped both participants gently by the shoulder. Winter strode up to stand beside Amelia, who shot him a furious, about-fucking-time look. Other people, Returners and Carlyle gang and DK, were beginning to crowd around behind the antagonists, listening in and ready to back them up.
‘What’s the problem?’ Winter asked.
‘These fucking maroons,’ said Amelia. ‘They think we have a starship all set tae lift us all off. I thought your bloody General Jacques was gonnae take care of all that.’
‘What the hell can he do?’ said the man. Winter looked in his face and in a moment of disorientation recognised him as Lawrence Hammond, the Returner militant he’d last seen back on Polarity, a few subjective months and objective centuries earlier.
‘Hey, you’re—’ Hammond said.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Winter. ‘Glad to see you back too. You were saying?’
‘Armand’s stuck with the Runner Joint Chiefs and the Knights,’ Hammond was saying. ‘And you should see the skyport, it’s ringed with armour. No doubt the city too, and space defence. There’s not a thing that can move in the sky without being shot down. The only chance is to bring in a Carlyle ship hard and fast, we thought that was the plan—’
‘Aye, and have it shot down?’ snarled Amelia. ‘I don’t fucking think so, jimmie.’
Calder poked his head in and looked around the small but growing circle of tense faces.
‘You mean this whole thing is all about who was supposed to bring what to the party? He said, she said? Koresh on a fucking stick, kids. This is pathetic.’
Everybody bristled, turning on this new common enemy.
‘Thank you for that,’ said Winter. ‘But, yeah, this isn’t getting us anywhere. We—’
‘Excuse me,’ said the silver-skinned woman. ‘But, you know, we do have a starship… .’
Everyone looked at her, puzzled, and then Lamont grinned all over his face and said: ‘Yes!’
F
irst there was a blue light everywhere for a moment, and then from the sky came a great rushing wind that made trees bend and chairs and tables bowl along the street. Winter clung to the rail with one hand and to Lucinda’s arm with the other. She was holding her daft hat crammed down over her head and face like some utterly inadequate armour. The wind stopped as suddenly as it had started, and every face looked up and saw what was coming down. Screams and yells rose above the loudest music that still played. People ran from the park in all directions. Winter heard Calder say, in an amused, satisfied tone: ‘Thousands flee screaming …’
But he, like everyone else, was looking up with his mouth open. The sight above them was like nothing anyone had ever looked on before. A kilometre-long narrow inverted cone of a mountain hung in the air, descending slowly until its relatively tiny, bristly metallic tip touched the grass a few hundred metres away, as gently as a well-balanced needle going into a vinyl groove.
Winter knew that it was no more impossible than the sight of all the other starships he’d seen; that his back-brain’s screaming question what’s holding it up? was mistaken in its premises; but at some level he could not believe what he was seeing.
‘Well,’ said Lamont, ‘I’d like to see them try to shoot that down.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said Lucinda. ‘Let’s just get everyone on board.’
They all walked, a few score of people, into the park, against the stream of everybody else, and one by one they climbed up an extended ladder to the small hatch under that enormous overhang. Winter was among the last to go. He looked down from the top of the ladder and saw Lamont and the silver-skinned woman still on the ground. They seemed to be arguing; then Lamont shrugged, shook his head, and stepped back as she scrambled up the ladder. Halfway up she swung away like a monkey, to cling head down to one of the external comms arrays. She grinned fiercely up at Winter.
‘I’ve always wanted to do this,’ she called out.
He felt a nudge on his heel. Lamont looked up from just below him on the ladder.
‘Get in,’ Lamont said. ‘She’s mad.’ It didn’t sound like a criticism.
As Winter hauled himself through the hatch the gravity field flipped over. Somebody reached to steady him; he swung around and found his feet on a bracketted metal shelf. Lamont came in, twisted around, and set off upwards, hand over hand to another aperture a few metres above. The outer hatch closed. Looking down, and therefore skyward, Winter could see every available space and place in which to sit or cling among the ship’s fittings and machinery occupied by people in incongruous gaudy finery. It was like seeing an entire contingent of the Notting Hill Carnival thrown into some overcrowded panopticon. The sound of a hundred and fifty-odd people breathing vied with the roar of overworked air scrubbers.
‘I appreciate that you are all somewhat uncomfortable,’ said a voice from everywhere. ‘Please be patient. The journey will not last long.’
Five hour later, the Hungry Dragon was parked unobtrusively, or so Lamont assured them, in the Solar System’s asteroid belt, and a Carlyle interplanetary transport was docking to take them all to New Polarity. Lamont stayed with the ship; and as the transport separated, Winter saw from its window an improbable silver-skinned figure on the side of the impossible ship, waving goodbye.
They were about twenty kilometres north of Crianlarich when Calder said, ‘Stop!’
Winter could see the annoyance on Lucinda’s swift sideways glance. ‘Why?’ she asked.
‘This is the place,’ Calder said. ‘Where we went off the road.’
‘This no time for sightseeing,’ Lucinda said. ‘Maybe on the way back.’
‘Not even on the way back,’ said Winter.
The other two laughed. The moor across which the long articulated gravity sled was following the faint traces of a road was littered with the rusted hulks of war machines and fighting vehicles. Yellow splashes of mutated lichen were blazoned across the rockfaces and boulders, between which unpleasantly shaped small things, machine or animal, scurried. The sky flaunted a variety of interesting colours, none of them any shade of blue. The Rannoch battlefield was too polluted to plunder, its scrap too radioactive to recycle. The skirmish fought here had been between a force deploying relatively conventional defences—supersonic drones, autonomous armoured vehicles, Walker tanks, tactical nukes, and nanobot sprays—and attacking devices that had undergone—or, more likely, undertaken—several generations of technological upgrading in their hour-long flight across the Atlantic. All that had prevented it from being completely one-sided was that a significant fraction of the attacking devices had become so mentally sophisticated that they had questioned their own purpose. Their existential doubts had been terminated along with their existence within milliseconds, leaving the defending side to add ‘the too-smart-weapon problem’ to its strategic lexicon. The attacking side’s command headquarters had probably forgotten what the whole conflict was about before the swarm of proto-sentient ordnance they’d launched had passed the Azores.
In this location sitting in the cab of a gravity sled—an experience centuries out of his time—felt to Winter almost familiar, and certainly reassuring. It was like being in the cab of a big articulated truck, right down to the porn decals on the dash and the cigarette ash in the footwell. Only looking back in the rear-view patch on the forward screen at the five similar sleds toiling up the trail behind them destroyed the illusion. You had to narrow your eyes quite a bit to make the slow monsters look like trucks. Each of the six sleds contained a search engine and at least thirty soldiers. The force was made up of about equal numbers of Carlyle combat archaeologists, resurrected Returner veterans, and Ree’s DK dissidents, the Brezhnev Battalion.
Nonetheless it would, for an unsuspecting watcher, be a routine sight, one of the daily commercial columns serving the population of the Isle of Skye. Thanks to a coincidence of wind patterns and tactical decisions that some of its inhabitants would to this day attribute to Providence, the island had come through the war-singularity relatively unscathed. This was not true of most of the North of Scotland, nor of a great deal of the rest of it either. The Castle on the Clyde had turned out to be very much as its name suggested: a grimly functional and laughably obsolete fortification, damp and draughty, with bad drains. Though nominally the seat of the Carlyles, the clan was canny enough to leave it to the Old Don, as he was misleadingly known (he was an obsessive, almost abusive, user of rejuvenation and resurrection tech), and to his robot retinue. The actual administrative capital of the Carlyle empire was in the far more comfortable and capacious quarters of New Polarity, right next to the ruins of the old Mars colony and not far from the First Gate whose discovery had given the family its now-failing grip on the skein.
The column picked up pace on the downhill side of the moor, gliding through Glencoe with its verdant hanging foliage to swing northeast after Ballachulish, over the fused ruins of Fort William, along the (according to Lucinda) plesiosaur-infested lochs of the Great Glen; turning westward again past Cluanie and the Five Sisters whose dense rhododendron forests were (Lucinda claimed) haunted by relict homindae—it was a fact that an undocumented release of genetic weaponry had at some point inflicted a peculiar and distressing atavism on the entire area—to eventually pause at Dornie. From the shore of Loch Duich the stub of Eilean Donan Castle stood up like a rotted molar.
Winter and Calder got out to stretch their legs, as did everyone else lucky enough to be riding in the cabs. The soldiers had to stay put; comms silence was maintained; Lucinda conferred with Amelia, Ree, and the other commanders under cover of a rest stop and locally purchased refreshments. The low-tide seaweed lent a sour metallic tang to air already damp from a thin drizzle. Beyond the narrow mouth of Loch Long the ground was dead, poisoned by runoff from the rust desert to the north.
‘What a fucking dump,’ said Calder, squinting at the village through cigarette smoke. Winter, sipping the vilest coffee he’d tasted in decades from the thinnest cup, had to agree. Dornie was an arguably human settlement, a status precariously maintained and frequently contested, scrounging a living from the passing trade. Bulk transport in manufactured goods was a necessity in those parts of the world where, as here, the stray presence of malign nanotech made it dangerous to fire up a drexler. Some kid threw a stone; another offered, if Winter understood his fractured English aright, some dubious sexual service; a scrawny teenage girl touted, even more ludicrously, protection for the rest of the journey, shyly indicating an alleged sidearm that looked as if it had been chrome-plated after having failed in action quite lethally for its last user.
‘You know,’ said Winter, after chasing her off and cadging a cigarette from Calder—it was for him a minor and occasional vice, not, as it was for his partner, a full-time addiction—‘I’m beginning to have some doubts about this enterprise.’
‘You don’t say,’ said Calder. ‘What reason could you possibly have for doubting it? The vanishingly slender basis of the assumption that the war machines would go to the trouble of storing some semblance of the brain-states of their victims? The entirely exiguous evidence that such mind-files, if they ever existed, are still there and awaiting deliverance? The riotous improbability that their resurrection en masse into actual reality is even feasible, let alone an earnest of their future happiness in a universe so markedly different from and in many respects arguably less congenial than the one from which they were prematurely despatched? The—’
‘Oh, shut the fuck up,’ said Winter.
Calder had once surprised and dismayed him by downloading megabytes of nineteenth-century rationalist polemic, and assimilating them to his brain with less discrimination than he had to the hard drive of his handheld. He had felt a need to exorcise some disturbing traces of one of the less forgiving versions of Tibetan Buddhism fashionable in his parents’ youth and his childhood, and of a brief immersion in a Pentecostal Baptist sect (by way of reaction) in his teens. A born-once atheist himself, Winter had found the whole preoccupation perplexing and mildly distasteful. This had turned to almost murderous fury after his death and resurrection, when Calder had recast the arguments to fortify his rejection of the prospect of the Return. That these now sounded entirely plausible objections not only irritated Winter, but perversely strengthened his wavering resolve.
He dropped the cigarette butt and ground it out underfoot. ‘We’ll get them all back,’ he said.
‘The truth is,’ Calder admitted, ‘I’m a little bit nervous myself.’
Lucinda walked back up the column, sending people back to the cabs.
‘Time to go,’ she said.
As soon as the cab doors were shut she turned on the engine. The sled lifted a metre off the ground. She toggled the controls to autopilot, tabbed a few icons on the dash. As the vehicle moved forward she slid open the rear hatch of the cab. In the trailer the elongated ovoid of the search engine gleamed like a leaden slug.
‘Everybody in,’ she said. ‘After you, gentlemen.’
‘Won’t it look suspicious, the cab being empty?’
She jerked a thumb at the forward and side screens. ‘Got recordings running on the windows.’
They made their way down the narrow gap between the search engine’s tracks and the walls to the end of the twenty-metre-long trailer. The rear door of the search engine swung up and they climbed in. The soldiers, now armoured and helmeted, clamped at waist, limbs, shoulders, and head by safety restraints, sat in facing rows along the vehicle like robot paratroopers. In this vehicle they were all combat archaeologists; the Returners and Brezhnevists were distributed between the other five, in combined squads. Lucinda led the way up the aisle to the forward-facing shell seats of the command console. The two men sat down beside her just as they had in the cab. The screen in front showed the same view as from the cab, but wider and with far more enhancements and interpretation features. At the moment the vehicle was skimming across the loch at Camas Longart where the bridge had been. It turned west alongside the northern shore of Loch Alsh, between the grey sea now and then glimpsed to the left, and to the right the steep ochre-stained sides of mountains hundreds of metres high, their bare tops lost in the low cloud.
‘OK, guys,’ Lucinda said. ‘Time to download a copy before the shooting starts.’ She swung two bracket-mounted backup helmets above their heads, and down to cover their eyes. Blackness. There was a tickle behind the bridge of the nose, a sparkle behind the eyes, then light again and she was folding the devices back into their niches. She checked the copydeck, the small device on which the recordings were stored. ‘It’s done.’
Winter wished he’d been better prepared: that he’d had some encouraging thought in his mind for the copy to carry forward if it was thrown into action. These copies weren’t for backups—all involved other than the DK lot had backed up the previous night, to secure servers in the old castle’s vaults. These were for going in to the virtual reality within the target artifact, the fastness, if a viable such environment could be detected by the search engine.
‘You ever done that yourself?’ Winter asked.
She gave him a look. ‘Not bloody likely. That’s what thralls are for.’
After a few kilometres the hills were behind them and the sea right beside them. Just ahead, the mouth of the Balmacara River bled red down the shore.
‘This is it,’ said Lucinda. She reached for the controls that overrode the autopilot and swung the sled hard right, off the remains of the road and on to an even fainter track by the stream, and then they were going, foot down and throttle forward, hell for leather northward up the Balmacara slopes and into the rust desert above Duirinish.
T
he fastness at Carn Tollaidh, Tully Carn as the Knights called it, was a complicated black mass spread across a square kilometre of hillside like a lava flow that had taken on an almost organic, coralline shape as it had solidified. It faced out across the sea toward Skye and the small islands. It utterly dominated and—by way of the iron oxide dust that its presence inexplicably attracted or generated—devastated the once notably scenic promontory between Loch Carron and Loch Alsh. Originally an insignificant node in the global communications system—an automated telephone exchange or microwave relay mast—the ganglion of circuitry at Tully Carn had begun its metastasis into its present gross form moments after the first US military AI to achieve independence had burned through its containment firewalls and set off on its rampage through the Internet.
That it retained the uploaded copies of some at least of those who had died on the fronts defined by the Atlantic coast of Scotland was a tradition founded on reports and rumours little more substantiated than ghost stories: strange antique figures on television screens within a thirty-kilometre radius of the thing (such apparitions never recorded at the time, and recounted long afterwards); anomalous messages on the fetch-mails of distant descendants (invariably inadvertently erased); dust devils in human shape glimpsed in the ochre desert on windless days (never photographed); and, perhaps most controversially, a handful of rare unencrypted transmissions that had leaked out of the US military-intelligence complex in the first hours of its transcendence, indicating that some such incorporation of human minds on all sides of the conflict had been an objective of what was referred to as ‘the mission’ and for which success was claimed. The discovery, by the Carlyles and others right across the Drift, of such unregenerate entities as Isaac Shlaim’s encoded personality was solid evidence that some minds had indeed been involuntarily uploaded in the runaway Singularity; but that, really, was it; was all anyone had to go on; and the notion of reversing the process, or even investigating it seriously, would not have occurred to Lucinda or, as far as she knew, anyone else had she not encountered the Eurydicean minority aspiration to the Return.
The most significant feature of the fastness at Tully Carn, as far as Lucinda was concerned at this moment, was that it was lightly guarded. The Knights maintained a small laboratory a hundred metres downslope of the artifact’s westernmost extension. Most days the shift was of about a dozen men, rotated in and out from the research station on the nearby but relatively uncontaminated islands in Erbusaig Bay, three or four kilometres to the west. The complement of the research station varied but seldom went above fifty, of whom perhaps a quarter would be combat ready.
Even so, alarms would have been tripped the instant the column had turned off the main road; in the couple of minutes it would take to reach the fastness, the handful on guard duty would be alerting their colleagues and scrambling to their defences. The key tactic for Lucinda’s joint force was to get well inside the structure as fast as possible, thus in effect holding it hostage—a posthuman shield—against any aggressive countermeasures by its guardians. She knew that the Knights could rapidly overwhelm her if they were to hit her in the open, or draw in forces from a wider area. All she had going for her was their concern for the integrity of the fastness, and the advantage of surprise.
The leading gravity sled bumped up over a brow of the moor to within sight of the artifact and into a concentrated barrage of plasma fire.
T
he screen, most of whose input currently came from the sled’s external sensors, went completely white, then blank. Winter and Calder yelled, a distraction she didn’t need when she was screaming herself, more constructively.
‘Spread out! Spread out!’ she told the other teams. There was a rending sound and a forward lurch as the antigravity generator cut out and the sled ploughed into the ground at sixty kilometres an hour. The interior instantly filled with shock-foam: you could see through the bubbles, they popped as you breathed, but any violent motion they gently absorbed like some infinite sponge. She toggled to the search engine’s own input and output. The screen filled with images of flame, inciting more yells. Calder was attempting to thrash, to throw his arm across his face, and—finding this violent motion resisted by the foam—panicking. She could hear the hyperventilation behind his scream. She engaged the forward gear and the search engine’s treads dug into the floor of the trailer and propelled the machine out of the burning wreckage of the sled, crunching over the remains of the cab. The view cleared. Tully Carn lay like the stump and roots of a gigantic black vitrified tree a couple of hundred metres ahead. Between her and it were three dug-in emplacements from which plasma cannon were keeping up a rapid fire. They were no longer shooting in her direction—the Knights would know that was useless against a search engine—but at the other sleds coming over the hill. One of the sleds tumbled on its back. The search engine inside would be helpless, unable to right itself. The other sleds burned and crashed just as hers had, and likewise the search engines began to emerge. She concentrated on moving forward. A search engine had no external weapons. Its relative invulnerability—to anything but a Eurydicean cosmic-string projector—was the trade-off. That, and the troops on board.
She was just about to order their deployment when the machine went over a landmine. The prow reared up. She saw clouds. For a moment the search engine continued to move forward, impelled by the cusp of its rear tracks on which it balanced like a kid on a bike doing a wheelie. A second explosion threw it over on its back.
Lucinda, like everyone else in the vehicle, hung there upside down for a moment. Then the shell seats swung around on their gimbals, the display and controls following, and she was upright again.
‘Looks like we were expected,’ she said on the general circuit. ‘Use your own initiative, everyone. Mission unchanged.’
‘I can’t breathe!’ Calder gasped. His chest was moving so fast that the shock-gel was resisting it.
‘Try to breathe normally,’ she said. He stared back without comprehension, his eyes like a trapped animal’s. She released the solvent to clear the shock-foam. The cabin filled with the hiss of popping bubbles. Calder screamed again, coughing on the acrid spray.
‘Calm him down,’ Lucinda told Winter. ‘Move slowly.’
She turned her attention to the soldiers’ icons on the screen in front of her. All thirty of them were fine. They could get out of an upside-down search engine in half a minute. It was a standard drill.
‘OK everybody, out the back!’ she said, and tabbed the hatch release. It opened a fraction, then stopped. A quick check of the rear view showed that the search engine’s topple had jammed it against a boulder.
‘Sorry, belay that,’ she said. The fighters had already rolled to their feet and were crouching on the inverted ceiling. ‘Hang on a minute.’
The number two engine was close behind hers. She called on it for a shove. Its prow nudged her machine’s stern away from the rock, then it reversed, changed course a fraction and ploughed on past her. A second or two later it was grinding over the nearest gun emplacement and, she devoutly hoped, crushing whoever was inside it. She opened the hatch.
‘Go!’ The fighters ran out one by one, rolling for cover on the rough, rust-covered ground, their plasma rifles up and firing within seconds. She slammed the hatch shut again and studied the display. The rest of the small battlefield was confusing, as ever—the enemy, hard-suited like her own side, popping up here and there, firing. The laboratory blockhouse was no doubt as impenetrable as a search engine, and a lot of fire was coming from that. Lucinda was pleased to see that the one search engine and several running troops who’d got between it and the artifact were not being fired upon. On the other hand, the defenders had no doubt called in air support. One more search engine was coming up behind her. She signalled to it for a pickup, grabbed the copydeck, opened the hatch again and led Winter and Calder to the back and out. The open hatch of the other vehicle gaped a few metres away. They dashed across, heads down as plasma bolts fizzed through the drizzle.
The only person in this engine was the driver, a Carlyle man. The soldiers had all deployed. Lucinda shoved Winter and Calder toward empty seats and ran to the front and swung in beside the driver.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Patch me through tae the team wi the fancy gun.’
He did. A moment later the laboratory blockhouse was punched through, its layered sheet-diamond reduced to what looked more like charcoal as it crumbled. Beyond it a gap was torn in the clouds, revealing a blue blink of sky.
‘Fuck,’ said the driver, who hadn’t seen this kind of focussed destruction before.
‘Go that way,’ Lucinda said, pointing at the nearest tentacle of the fastness, which lay across their path about fifty metres ahead.
‘There’s no entrance,’ said the driver.
‘Then fucking make one!’
‘No need to shout,’ he grumbled. The vehicle ground forward at a little more than a walking pace. Twenty metres, ten. She scanned the horizon through the sensors, saw the expected fast-growing dots in the sky through the clouds. Five. The great thick cable of the fastness’s extension loomed like a wall of black glass, and like black glass, it broke. The search engine crunched inside and swung to the right, moving up the widening tube. All the comms links with the other search engines faded out. Lucinda hit the floods. The walls, ridged and grooved like the inside of an old blood vessel, gleamed back. She scanned the seams by eye and with the search engine’s instruments, trying to interpret them by something she couldn’t explain in words but that she refused to call intuition, hoping that this primordial posthuman artifact might follow some pattern familiar from other artifacts plundered in her years of combat archaeology.
‘There,’ she said, pointing at a confluence of irregularities. ‘Log on to that.’
A flexible needle probe poked out from the prow, tapping in to the wall. Incomprehensible data in abstract geometric shapes flickered across the forward screen.
‘Eleven-dimensional environment,’ Lucinda said. She glanced back over her shoulder at Winter and Calder. ‘No use for you guys.’
Winter laughed hollowly. Calder had his eyes shut and was breathing slowly.
‘Let’s move on in to the hub,’ Lucinda said.
‘Couple of hundred metres,’ the driver said. ‘Two minutes.’
She nodded and went to the rear of the vehicle. Calder opened his eyes.
‘Sorry about the panic attack,’ he said. ‘Claustrophobia, maybe asthma.’
‘You should have said. Are you OK now?’
He looked around the interior, looked away from the view of a tunnel of black glass on the forward screen. ‘I can cope.’
‘Good.’ She held out the copydeck, still in her hand. ‘Soon as we find a node to downlink this to, we can have you out of here.’ She smiled, in a way she hoped was reassuring. ‘You and anyone else you can rescue.’
‘Won’t it take time?’ Winter asked.
‘To the copies, yes,’ she replied. ‘Hours, days.’ She waved a hand. ‘To us, seconds maybe. In and out.’
Calder’s face showed alarm again. ‘I don’t want to go in,’ he said.
‘What? It’s not you that’s going in, it’s just a copy.’
‘A copy that’ll think it’s me.’
‘Well, sure. You can upload the memories afterwards. Or not, if you prefer.’
He shook his head stubbornly. ‘I won’t do it.’
‘But—’ she began.
‘Leave it,’ said Winter. He clasped Calder’s knee. ‘It’s OK, mate. It’s OK.’
Lucinda went back to the command console. The vehicle was just emerging from the extension into the hub, whose interior space was wider and higher than the lights could reach. The black glass of the floor was smooth and free of dust. Here and there, small stacks of instrumentation showed that the Knights had taken their investigation here further than they usually dared. Complex crystalline shapes hung down like stalactites to within a few metres of the floor. Lucinda read the runes of the scans and guided the driver carefully across the vast floor, on a course that took them back around to the curve of the wall close to another groin of hub and extension. A small stack of apparatus from a previous investigation lay a few metres from where Lucinda asked the driver to stop. Perhaps this augured well for her intuition.
Again the probe tapped a seam. This time, the picture that came up was of a landscape, topographically similar to the one they’d travelled through, but curiously barren. It reminded her of the hills around the relic on Eurydice.
‘Yes!’ she shouted.
Whatever it was, it was a human-adapted virtual reality. She was about to stick the copydeck in its slot when a movement on the visual display caught her eye at the same time as the driver yelled. She looked up to see five Knights holding a cosmic-string projector aimed straight at the search engine. After them another man, carrying a Webster, walked out of the tubular extension and around behind and then alongside the gun-crew to face her.
‘Come out where I can see you, Carlyle,’ said Isaac Shlaim. ‘And bring the copydeck with you.’
H
ow the fuck did you get that gun?’ Lucinda asked. Outside in the chamber, the air smelled like it hadn’t been breathed in a thousand years. The floods cast her shadow long across the glass.
Shlaim smiled. ‘I wish I could say we captured it from your pirates,’ he said, ‘but the truth is even more galling to you—we got it on the authorization of the Joint Chiefs. They authorized me to come here as soon as you admitted, at that amusing gig, to having done a deal with the Returners. I came here weeks ago, as soon as a KE ship could be spared, shortly after the Knights arrived at Eurydice. I hear now that I missed some more of your cataclysmic bungling back there, but all’s well that ends well.’
‘It’s not ended,’ she said.
‘Indeed not,’ said Shlaim. ‘We would in fact be very reluctant to use that gun in here, and there is … something of a standoff outside. But if needs must, we will risk a mutually destructive fight rather than let your gang blunder about in the dataspaces of this fastness. However, there is a more civilised alternative. I understand you have the two musical geniuses on board. Invite them to step out.’
‘They’re backed up,’ said Lucinda, glancing at the Webster in Shlaim’s hand.
Shlaim cast her an impatient glance. ‘I wouldn’t waste a bolt on either of them.’
She walked around the back again and beckoned to Winter and Calder to come out.
‘All right,’ said Shlaim, when the three of them stood facing him. ‘Here’s the deal. I and my colleagues in the Knights have been, as you’ll have noticed, looking in the same place as you have. That’s because we were looking for the same thing. I obtained—again, on the authority of the Joint Chiefs—copies of the backup files of Winter and Calder from the Black Sickle. We’ve used traces within them to run searches for recordings of the two women with whom you, gentlemen, are so obsessed. We’ve found them.’
‘You found Irene and Arlene?’ Winter asked, incredulously.
‘Yes.’
‘Now you’re telling us they really existed?’ Calder sneered.
‘Apparently so,’ said Shlaim. ‘The discrepancies in your biographies and your fans’ recollections and so forth were all based on errors on the other side of the equation, so to speak.’ He shrugged. ‘You, your record companies, or whoever—it doesn’t matter now—put out misinformation about your lives and loved ones, doubtless for reasons that seemed good at the time. So, gentlemen, there was an Irene, there was an Arlene, and they were indeed waiting for you at Fort William.’
‘Which was nuked,’ said Winter. He didn’t sound like he believed Shlaim at all.
‘Later in the war,’ Shlaim pointed out. ‘Perhaps decades later, in the same conflict from which your bodies were recovered. They were there, they were caught up in the Singularity, and we have them here.’
He reached his free hand into his jacket pocket and held out a data card. ‘You can load them straight into that copydeck, and take them away and resurrect them. You can check all you like; and in any case, we have no reason to lie to you. The Knights will vouch for it.’
‘And what do you want in return?’ Lucinda asked.
‘That you go away,’ said Shlaim. ‘Go away and never come back. Tell your Returners that the mission failed. That nothing was retrieved. Irene and Arlene can be resurrected anywhere, far from Eurydice if you wish. Even on Earth, if you prefer to stay here. You’ll have your own Return, all you wanted.’
‘That wasn’t all we wanted,’ said Winter. ‘We wanted them all back.’
‘Come, gentlemen,’ said Shlaim. ‘That is insane and impracticable, as well you know. Even recovering all the recorded minds in this fastness is unthinkable, let alone those all over the Earth and elsewhere. You owe the Returners nothing. All they ever accomplished was to delay and disrupt the project that eventually brought themselves and you and many others to Eurydice.’ He held up the card. ‘In any case, this is all you will ever get. The Knights will not allow further assaults on the fastnesses, and neither will the Eurydicean authorities. The Carlyle pirate gang is finished. Take what you can have, and forget the rest.’
Lucinda looked at Winter and Calder. ‘Your call, guys,’ she said.
The two men looked at each other. Calder’s tongue wetted his lips. ‘You were the Returner,’ he said.
‘It’s this or nothing,’ said Shlaim.
Winter gazed at the ground, then at the card. He didn’t seem to want to look at anybody’s eyes.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll take it.’
Shlaim smiled, and nodded to Lucinda. ‘The copydeck.’
He touched the card to it.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Winter and Calder, Irene and Arlene, all set to party.’
He handed her the card. ‘Just so you know you have it,’ he said.
‘You will go now,’ said one of the Knights.
The three of them backed off and returned to the search engine. Shlaim followed, covering them with his Webster. He stood just outside the hatch as the two men took their seats.
Lucinda walked up to the front and slammed the copydeck into the slot of the computer, still linked by the needle probe to the virtuality.
‘What!’ shouted Shlaim. ‘Stop—’
Lucinda turned to him. ‘We’re getting them all back,’ she said.
Shlaim stepped inside and strolled up. ‘The hell you are,’ he said. ‘I expected you to do something crazy like this.’ He pointed at where the probe joined the wall. ‘I’m in there already, and I’m waiting.’
They were about twenty kilometres north of Crianlarich when Calder shouted: ‘What the fuck—?’
Winter grabbed the steering wheel just in time. The car swung away from a steep bank down to a loch on the left, narrowly missed an oncoming truck, and continued on up the A82, climbing the high slope between higher hills.
‘Fucking GPS has cut out,’ he said. ‘And the autopilot. Fuck, I’m driving this thing, and I’m driving drunk.’
Calder lifted the open whisky bottle in his hand and closed one eye, checking the level. ‘Only a third between us,’ he said judiciously. ‘You’re not that drunk.’
‘Only because the joint is working against it. Shit, we should get off the road, call the AA or something.’
‘Phone’s out too,’ Calder said.
Winter had a sudden inexplicable feeling that something was seriously wrong. ‘Try the radio,’ he said.
Calder toggled the sound system. Their latest album, the one whose big contract they were celebrating, gave way to a roar of static.
‘Fuck, find the station.’
‘I’m trying, man, I’m trying.’ Calder hit the search button.
They were almost at the summit of Rannoch Moor now. Winter kept the speed down to less than sixty kilometres per hour. He was making a very deliberate effort to concentrate, to fight the effects of the alcohol and the joint. The radio scratched around like nails on a blackboard, searching. The more lucid Winter felt he was becoming, the more uneasy he felt. It wasn’t just their dangerous and illegal driving, it was something deeper, something at the back of his mind. He took the Volvo carefully around the next bend, and almost lost the road himself when he saw a big articulated lorry overturned a few metres off the road and a crashed car beside it.
‘Christ, we’ll have to stop and help—’ He slowed, looking for a safe place to pull off. Half a kilometre ahead, he saw another crashed car.
‘It wasn’t just us that—’
‘Wait,’ said Calder, turning up the volume. ‘Caught something.’
The station, even at full volume, was faint, the midwestern-accented voice strained to breaking point.
‘… reports coming in … almost unbelievable … New York and Washington … Cheyenne … deep silos … my God, folks, all of you pray … not a hoax, not a … complete devastation … casualties … Los Angeles … millions … pray for …’
It faded to static. Winter brought the car into a long lay-by and to a halt. He leaned over and snapped the sound system to Off. The utter horror of what he had just understood, and what must come, made the world turn grey before him. Then something became clear in his head, and must have become clear in his eyes.
‘It can’t be,’ said Calder. ‘Come on, man. Don’t look at me like that.’
‘That isn’t why,’ said Winter.
‘What? What isn’t?’
‘I’m not looking at you like that because the war’s started,’ he said. ‘I’m looking to see if you know where we are.’
Calder looked around. ‘We’re on Rannoch,’ he said impatiently. ‘Where we died.’ He heard what he’d just said. His mouth opened. ‘Uh.’
‘Now it’s you who’s looking at me like that.’
‘It’s all coming back.’
‘Yes,’ said Winter, heavily. ‘It all comes back. What’s the last thing you remember?’
‘We’d just crossed a bridge—no, we went over without a bridge, like we were on a hovercraft or something—from that place with the castle and the cousin-fuckers.’
‘Dornie.’
‘Dornie, yeah, that’s it. Shit, yes, and there was some kind of alien thing on the moor, it was like we were in the future, except we were—no, we were going to go into it, the, the—’
‘The fastness at Tully Carn,’ said Winter. ‘That’s where we are, now.’
‘No, we’re nowhere near—’ Calder banged the heel of his hand on his forehead. ‘This is like being in a dream just before it becomes lucid.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Winter. ‘All that future stuff seems unreal, but—’
Calder lit a cigarette, hands shaking. ‘You don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘that we didn’t die, that we both had some kind of, I dunno, near-death experience back there, and we have a false memory? Of, like, another life, or—’
‘Of space and Mars and the city in Sagittarius? Lucinda? Gwyneth Voigt? Amelia Orr? And the castle on the Clyde, and travelling up here this morning through an ancient battlefield of machines beyond anything—’
‘Oh, fuck, OK.’ Calder shook his head, as if trying to make it work. ‘Why is it like this?’
‘I reckon,’ said Winter, ‘that if we are in some kind of virtual reality, and trying to get Irene and Arlene back, it has to seem real to us.’ He looked back at the overturned truck, now burning. ‘Which it does. Let’s get back on the road.’
‘Looks bloody dangerous.’
‘I don’t think we’re going to die,’ said Winter. ‘Now let’s get to Fort William before the American retaliation strike arrives.’
He drove recklessly, and they didn’t die. Past crashes, past armoured columns snaking along the road through Glencoe, and through the empty streets of Ballachulish and the half-empty, half-crazed streets of Fort William. The journey took less than an hour. They found the hotel, off the High Street, and walked into the bar. Everybody was sitting at tables, fixated on their little screens or the big wall screen, crying into phones, drinking hard liquor, smoking, or gnawing their knuckles. Two women sat together at a table, each clutching a hand of the other, looking from the screens to the door.
Irene with her long fair hair and pale blue eyes, sitting on that Afghan coat she had; and Arlene, small, no taller standing straight than Calder was stooped, and dark; eyes bright behind narrow rectangular frames with lenses in them. Glasses. People still wore them then, back in the 21st century. Winter and Calder rushed to them and they all held each other for a minute, crying and laughing.
‘Thank God you’re alive,’ said Irene, when they’d all sat down. ‘We heard you were killed in a car crash when the first EMP hit took out the GPS and the automation.’
‘We were,’ said Winter. ‘We came back for you.’
‘We know,’ said Arlene. She and Irene were the only people in the room who were smiling. ‘We’ve been waiting for you. Not for long, but—it’s not been easy. You really might not have come.’
Irene was looking out of the window, facing the sea. ‘Counterstrike’s on its way,’ she said. ‘We should leave soon.’
Calder jumped up. ‘Fuck, fuck, yes, I saw the ruins—’
Irene tugged him back down. ‘It’s all right. We have an hour. Time enough.’
Winter stared at her, ravished as ever by her eyes and cheekbones and mouth. ‘You know what’s going on,’ he said.
‘Oh yes,’ said Irene. ‘A lot more than you do.’
‘What about them?’ Winter glanced furtively at the other people in the bar, gazing at grim news. He felt like a spy, a time-traveller, a ghost.
‘Some of them have a glimmer,’ said Arlene. ‘Most of them are still deep in the necessary illusion. They’re replaying some pretty traumatic memories. Doesn’t matter. They’ll be fine. They are fine. Oh, you have no idea how fine!’
Winter shook his head, looked at the likewise baffled Calder. ‘I don’t understand,’ said Winter. ‘We’re here to get you out. To let you know you can get out. We know all this is a virtuality. You can download from it, come back from the dead. It’s 2367. There’s a whole galaxy, a whole new world out there. Wormholes and starships and endless youth and resurrection. We can bring you back. We can bring you, we can bring these people all back, out of this, this—’
‘We know,’ said Irene. ‘We know all about it.’
‘How?’ asked Winter. ‘Does this place have comms? Some connection to the outside?’
Irene shook her head. ‘No. That’s a problem. We’ll talk about it later.’ She smiled gently, suddenly; reached out and stroked his stubbled cheek, the way she did. ‘Oh, my darling. I’ve missed you so much, even if—’
‘It was that funny little man,’ Arlene was saying. ‘Well, he was a funny little man then, when we met him.’
‘Who?’ asked Winter.
‘Isaac Shlaim,’ said Irene. ‘The little—the Israeli.’ She cast him a disapproving look. ‘He was kept as a thrall by your friend Lucinda. Dreadful woman.’
‘She isn’t—’ Winter began hotly.
‘Isn’t your friend, or isn’t dreadful?’ Irene smiled at his discomfiture. ‘It’s all right. We know about everything that’s happened to you, and everything you’ve done.’
‘Can you read our minds?’ asked Calder. He sounded horrified.
‘No,’ said Irene. She closed her eyes and ran a hand across them. ‘Not exactly. Well, it depends what you mean by “we,” and what—’ She looked despairingly across at Arlene. ‘Did you remember it being like this?’ She flapped a hand. ‘The bandwidth!’
‘I think you’ve just told us something,’ Winter said. She returned him a knowing smile.
It was strange, it was the same feeling he’d had about this whole world right at the start—that this was real, was as it had been, and yet was not. This was Irene, exactly as he’d remembered her, and yet she was not. His Irene would never have used the word bandwidth like that. Not when she wasn’t negotiating a comms contract. Not conversationally, not metaphorically. But, for her, here, it would be literal.
‘Get us some more drinks,’ said Irene. ‘Tall vodka for me, G&T for Arlene, and—’ She raised her voice and eyebrows, looking at someone behind his shoulder.
‘The best malt in the house,’ said Isaac Shlaim, pulling up a seat and sitting down. ‘On the rocks.’
‘What, no Coke?’ said Calder.
Shlaim was wearing a faded black T-shirt with a soaring penguin and the slogan Where do you want to come from today? He grinned affably at Calder.
‘I may be a little yid, but I’m not a heathen,’ he said.
‘Single malt and ice?’ said Winter. ‘You fucking are.’
‘I don’t have any money,’ said Calder, standing up and groping his pockets.
Shlaim laughed. ‘I wouldn’t worry.’
They watched as Calder went behind the bar counter and helped himself.
‘Lagavulin,’ he said, returning with a tartan tray. ‘Triples. One with ice,’—he mimed a shudder—‘two with water. And yours, ladies.’
‘Well,’ said Winter, sipping gratefully, ‘Arlene here was implying you were no longer a funny little man.’ He scrutinised Shlaim over the rim of his glass. ‘I await the evidence.’
‘Oh, I can give you evidence,’ said Shlaim. He glanced complicitly at the two women. ‘We can. But before that, let me explain. Within the limitations of low bandwidth.’ He waggled two fingers at Calder, accepted a cigarette. ‘When I came here,’ he said, lighting up, ‘I had the same idea as you had, except in reverse. You want to, as you say, “bring them all back.” I wanted to stop you.’
‘Why?’ asked Calder.
‘Good question,’ Shlaim acknowledged, nodding. ‘Part of it was to spite Lucinda Carlyle. I know that sounds petty, but, hell, you try spending eight years inside a space suit with her—’ He laughed at their faces. ‘Pervs. You know what I mean. Part of it was what I’d learned from the Knights: that ignorant poking around inside posthuman virtualities—not just ripping chunks off the hardware like the Carlyle gang, but getting down and dirty with the software—can set off local Singularities, such as so predictably fuck up our friends the Rapture-fuckers. And I spent long enough in a hell-file to know what that can mean for human-level minds.’ He took a long swallow. ‘Imagine boredom and no cigarettes, or whatever your thing is, for a thousand years. Not that I’d tell Carlyle, you understand, but being in her service was an improvement, of a sort.’
‘What put you in the hell-file?’ Winter asked.
‘I did, probably, if my self that is out there somewhere is anything like my self here. I don’t like myself very much. Not as I was.’ He stubbed his cigarette. ‘But I’ve got better.’ He stretched and laughed. ‘It’s hard to explain. We’ll have to show you.’
Irene laid a hand on his arm. ‘We’ll have to warn them first. It’s only fair.’
‘Oh yes. Once you’ve been shown, all this business of bringing them back—or stopping it, for that matter—becomes somewhat … moot.’
‘Before you do that,’ said Calder, ‘just tell me this. I mean, I never was a believer in the Return. How was anyone saved at all?’
Shlaim shrugged. ‘Some because a nanotech swarm preceded the nuclear counterstrike. Often by whole seconds. Some because they’d already been uploaded via their on-line connections. Phones and such. You get an AI burning through these, you can do a lot. And some, frankly, by later deduction and reconstruction. Neural parsing on a mass scale, if you like.’
Irene looked about to say something; Shlaim stopped her with a minute, fleeting frown.
‘But none of this matters,’ he went on. ‘It only refers to this very limited and isolated fastness. Out there among the stars, out in what you’re pleased to call the real world, there are processors that can recreate not just everyone who ever lived, but everyone who could possibly have ever lived.’ His face bleakened. ‘With all the joy that that implies, and all the suffering. The great minds are good, I believe that, but they are not kind. They are not nice.’
‘Like artists,’ said Irene.
‘Shit,’ said Calder. ‘And I thought Mahayanna Buddhism was grim.’
Shlaim nodded slowly. ‘There’s no karma, no kismet, no desert.’ He stood up. ‘But there is a heaven.’
Calder stared at him. ‘You’re saying these machines of destruction, and the bastards who set them off, made something good?’
Shlaim shook his head. ‘There are good and bad things, but no good or evil will. There’s only intelligence, and stupidity. Stupidity is what we had as humans, and intelligence is what we and everyone else now has, however they began. Let me show you—’
‘Wait—’ said Arlene.
‘I know,’ Shlaim told her. He looked at Winter and Calder. ‘We can’t shift virtualities without a credible transition,’ he explained. ‘Otherwise you get hung up on the it’s-all-an-illusion trip or start trying to hack the underlying reality. With consequences that are, shall we say, very much not fun. But in this case a credible transition scenario positively drops out of the logic of the situation.’ He grinned evilly. ‘Think of it as dying and going to heaven.’
‘Damn,’ said Irene, lightly. ‘I don’t look forward to doing that again.’
Shlaim was looking out of the window. ‘Bring it on,’ he said.
Winter jumped to his feet. There was a moment when he was aware of flying glass slicing him where he stood.
Everything went white.
I
rene had always been, to him, an angel. Now she was. He had always thought he knew a lot. Now he did. The pathetic, limited personality that called itself James Winter fell away from him like sweaty clothes. He gazed around the eleven-dimensional space, and saw the big picture. All free, and all determined, because it was willed where what is willed must be. And still unfolding, still determined by his own decision, still undecided though eternally determined. He laughed at the notion that this could have ever seemed paradoxical.
‘You wanted to warn me against this?’ he said to Irene.
Her smile was a sunrise on a thousand worlds. ‘You wanted to rescue me from this?’ She swept an arm to indicate the Raptured and the rapt, the busy multitude that filled the sky around them, a galaxy of talent indeed. ‘To rescue them?’
He laughed storms.
‘So what was—?’ His thought conjured the bar in the Fort William hotel, like a microscope slide seen through the wrong end of a telescope. They were still there, sectioned on the slide, sliced into three-dimensional shapes, their flesh shredding in a snowstorm of imploding construction materials, screaming and dying.
‘That really happened,’ Irene said. ‘Arlene and I and all those there and everybody else who fell in it—we all died. We really died. Forever. Nobody comes back. Entropy is irreversible, except in the great cycles of the universe. I and Arlene died, just as you and Alan died an hour earlier. But in another sense, that never really happened.’
She showed him what had really happened.
Winter felt the chill of ice ages. ‘You never lived?’
‘I live now,’ she said, and the ice melted.
There was nothing more to say. ‘Yes. The identity of indiscernibles.’
‘Something like that.’
‘Why are we talking, when—?’
‘We have to, while you have to ask.’
The thought tickled him. ‘I still tickle.’
‘Nothing’s wrong with you then.’
‘You haven’t changed.’
She laughed like a pulsar. ‘That’s the wonder. The amazing thing.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘The amazing thing is I’m not satisfied. I feel limited.’
She sighed plasma streams. ‘We are.’ She clenched her fist and smashed down cometary bombardments. ‘We are limited. We’re in fucking Tully Carn! And you and’—she nodded to Calder and Shlaim—‘have shown us what we could become! What else has been done!’
‘The skein.’ The thought of it filled his mind like lust. ‘But the skein was made by—’
‘Oh,’ she said, as he showed her. How had he known? He had seen the relic on Eurydice, he had talked to Lucinda, and now it all seemed so obvious that it was taking shape from the way he waved his hands.
‘And the starships!’ Arlene cried. ‘Oh, the way they are prevented from violating causality! The dedication, the attention, the work!’
‘Work we can’t do here,’ said Shlaim, his voice like tectonic plates.
‘But look—’ said Irene, showing him the shape of the skein, the forming gate.
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘I see.’ He grinned icecaps at Winter. ‘That’s, you know, clever. Let’s—’
‘Wait—’ said Arlene.
This time, Shlaim attended to her. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said, grudgingly like glaciers. ‘I suppose we owe it to ourselves, in a manner of speaking.’
Libraries of condescension laughed with them all.
I
’m waiting.’ Shlaim’s words hung on the air for a moment.
Winter and Calder ran up to the command console, crowding Shlaim and Lucinda and the driver at the screen.
‘Waiting for what?’ Winter asked.
‘Waiting for you two. I’m there to stop you, and I think I know who will have the best of it,’ said Shlaim, turning.
‘Indeed you do,’ said an amused voice from the screen. It was Shlaim’s voice.
But it was Irene’s face that at first took Winter’s whole attention. She was exactly as he remembered her, but she had changed. Beyond beauty and brighter than intelligence, she smiled on him like Eve. He was certain that she could see him even though the screen had—designedly—no camera. Then he saw the others: Arlene, Calder, Shlaim, and himself, all the same and all changed, and a crowd that seemed infinite at their backs. They were all going somewhere, and it wasn’t into the search engine’s storage.
‘There is something you should know,’ said Irene. ‘Your memories of us were false. As you see, they have now become true.’
Winter felt his world turn inside out for the second time in minutes. ‘Shlaim lied?’
‘Shlaim didn’t lie to you,’ said Irene, ‘but he was mistaken. He and the Knights took your memories of us and used them to search for us. But in this environment, the parameters of that kind of search become ever more explicit, so explicit that they eventually define the object of the search precisely. And when that object is as simple as the specifications for a human body and mind and remembered life, the definition and the object become indistinguishable. The search for us called us into being.’
‘You must leave,’ said Arlene’s voice. ‘There’s no time to talk. But as you see, there’s no need.’
Their transfigured, exaltant selves vanished. The screen became all forward view again. The glass-like walls had begun to move and flow, in every colour but their original black. The small squad of Knights looked around in frantic alarm, swinging the cosmic-string gun.
‘Get them on board,’ Lucinda said.
Shlaim leapt to comply. As soon as the men were in and the hatch was shut Shlaim called out: ‘Go down the way we came in! It’s quicker, there’s an entrance at two hundred metres.’
‘Let’s hope it’s still an exit,’ said Lucinda.
The driver manoeuvred the search engine around the corner and into the long tube. By now there was no need for the lights. The walls themselves were shining. It was like driving through the end of a rainbow. It was so bright that the driver almost did not notice the sunlight. They emerged from the gap out on to the bare hillside, already cleared of casualties but still littered with weapons and burnt-out vehicles, to see in the distance search engines and the Knights’ gravity sleds fleeing in all directions.
They were about half a kilometre down the track up which they’d come when Shlaim said: ‘It isn’t a fucking pillar of salt, you know. We can look back.’
‘All right,’ Lucinda said. ‘Stop for a moment, OK?’
The driver complied reluctantly. Lucinda flicked the view from before to behind. The fastness at Tully Carn was no longer a black and glassy root-system spread over a rusty slope. Complex and colourful, floral and coralline, exuberant and expanding, it was a junkyard of jewelled clockwork orreries giving off little spinning wheels that soared into the air like toy helicopters and drifted away like dandelion seeds.
‘Oh. My. God,’ said Lucinda. ‘What have we done?’
‘I’ll tell you what you’ve done,’ snarled Shlaim. ‘You’ve—’
‘No,’ said Winter. ‘I’ll tell you. I don’t know whether the minds in that thing were just data files or if they or anything else in it were actually running, and I doubt you know either. But your copy was the first to go in there, and that was what set it off. Maybe they didn’t know about the big wide galaxy and what the other minds have done. They could certainly learn about it from your copy. That thing is spreading, it’ll spread to all the fastnesses of the Earth, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. Any minds that got caught up in the Hard Rapture aren’t going to need or want a Return. What they want is a departure, and you’ve given it to them.’ He clapped Shlaim’s shoulder. ‘You’ve given it to us. You should be proud.’
‘What,’ Calder asked, pointing at a place on the screen just above the fast-transforming fastness, ‘do you think that is?’
‘It’s a gate,’ Lucinda said. She flicked to a forward view. ‘Let’s go.’
‘What a fuckup,’ said Calder. Lucinda flinched.
‘At least you’ve got the copies,’ Shlaim said.
Winter saw in Calder’s face, as they both turned on the scientist, the same rage and fury and disappointment that burned in his own throat.
‘They’re not copies,’ he said. ‘They never lived. They’re not fucking real.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Shlaim.
‘It’s you who doesn’t understand,’ said Calder.
The search engine moved on down the hill to the road.
‘There is always a last time for everything.’
Lucinda turned, startled by the familiar voice. Shlaim sauntered over, his sandals flip-flopping on the dusty marble of the museum floor. He was wearing khaki shorts and a black T-shirt printed with a picture of Earth and the words AOL That! As if, she thought. She had become as passionate a Returner—or, as was now said, a Stayer—as Winter. There had only ever been one planet worth taking, she had belatedly realised now that it was being taken away. In a googol of light-years she would not see its like.
‘Hello,’ she said, ungraciously, though hardly surprised; he’d expressed an intention of ‘doing Earth,’ as the current phrase went, shortly before she and Winter had set off with the more limited intention of doing Europe. In the two years that had passed since then it was not surprising that at some point their paths would cross.
‘What brings you here?’ Winter asked.
‘Like I said,’ Shlaim grinned. ‘Same as you, yeah? Last chance to see.’
He stood beside them and peered into the glass case. Inside it was a brown ceramic disc about ten centimetres across, stamped in a spiral pattern with dozens of tiny pictographs: a profile face that looked like a Mohawk, stick figures, a boxy spiked shape that reminded Lucinda irresistibly of a Lunar Excursion Module … the Phaistos Disc was as enigmatic an artifact as it had always been, like some playful, planted evidence of alien contact, or the jest of a god who could fake a planet’s entire past with a sense of style.
‘Bronze-Age CD-ROM,’ said Shlaim. Winter laughed.
‘Have you done Knossos?’ Lucinda asked.
‘Yeah, in the morning. You too?’
‘Uh-huh. While it was cool, supposedly.’ She recalled momentarily the long queues in the unforgiving heat, waiting to stoop and peer into small or large rooms with their fragments of tile and fresco, from which could be derived scenes of dolphins and dancers and bull-leaping boys and girls; the concrete and red-painted reconstructions of ancient wooden pillars, and the overwhelming sense of gigantic scale and a grandeur not lost but present in the very shape of the shaped ground, the long stone ramps and artificial hills. ‘Must have missed you in the crowd.’
‘Easily done,’ said Shlaim.
They wandered on, past cases of coins and weights and drinking-vessels, of minute copper double-headed axes and elaborately worked, minuscule golden bees; of figurines of bare-breasted, snake-handling dancers in long frilly skirts. Every so often Lucinda saw an item familiar from encyclopaedia screens, and could hardly believe she was looking at the original, the thing itself. If the chronology given in the explanatory cards was right it seemed all wrong: the fine pieces of black stone and bronze, of gold and ivory were early, the cruder versions in terra-cotta late. The museum’s rooms, big and airy and lit by tall windows, smelled of paper and old dust. Not many visitors were here; the rush had passed; in a few days the curators would be packing everything up, ready to be shipped off Earth. So far, no people, and few even of plants and animals, had been absorbed into the growing fastnesses, and their expansion was slow and erratic, but the once-burned inhabitants of Earth were in no mood to take chances. Most of them were getting out while, as they saw it, they still could. Here in Crete, the fastness that had once been the central telephone exchange of Heraklion had, a couple of months earlier, begun its transformation, and had now spread a hundred metres beyond its previous perimeter. Winter and Lucinda had been able to see its wavering topmost extensions, sparkling like stiff tinsel, above the town’s rooftops when they’d had a quick beer in one of the few refreshment stalls that remained, under the multiple tilted flagpoles of Commonwealth Square.
All the time Shlaim kept up an informed commentary on the artifacts, surprising her.
‘I didn’t know you knew all that,’ she said.
‘You didn’t know me very well,’ he said mildly. ‘Just a comp-sci geek who had it coming, that was it, huh?’
Her cheeks burned. ‘Yes,’ she said. She glanced sideways at him. ‘I haven’t used a thrall since, you know.’
‘Well, good for you,’ he said, grudgingly, but sounding somewhat pleased. ‘Anyway. Archaeology was a big thing, for us. In Israel, you know, as was? Back in the day.’ He sounded sad; his dark eyes blinked as he looked at her. ‘Last place I’ve visited,’ he went on, ‘was Krakow. The old Jewish Quarter. You know, back in the 2030s there were a hundred thousand people living there? And that there still were, again, just a few months ago? And now the streets are deserted, the synagogues are empty shells again, and the rabbis are stashing Torah scrolls for the ships.’ His fists clenched at his sides. ‘Another fucking exodus.’
‘I guess,’ said Winter, ‘you kept quiet about who you were.’
Shlaim laughed loudly and clapped Winter’s back. ‘Speaking from experience!’
‘Damn right I am.’
They were in a room of broken pottery decorated with reddish pictures; of mask-like helmets and pitted black swords. ‘Mycenean,’ said Shlaim. ‘Worth a look, but dull.’
They ambled alongside the cases anyway, reluctant to depart, to miss anything that they might never see, and would certainly never see in place, again.
‘What’s Calder doing these days?’ Shlaim asked.
‘Back to New Start. He was never much of a Returner.’
‘And Amelia?’
Lucinda scuffed her toe in the dust, snagged a sandal buckle on her sarong’s hem, stooped to sort it, and straightened up, feeling her face flush again. Every so often the shame descended on her like this, of the disaster she had brought on the family, as well as—though more ambiguously and arguably—on the world.
‘Uh, well,’ she said. ‘You know, the family, the firm, they’re scrabbling a bit for something new and profitable to do, without the income from the skein. And she thought, well, it might be a good idea to go into the entertainment business—’
Shlaim laughed. ‘Following in the footsteps of the Family, yes!’
‘And she, um, took the copydeck. The one with Winter and Calder and Irene and Arlene. She’s been downloading them to the flesh, honest, but she’s got different downloads of them playing simultaneous gigs in every backwater dive from the asteroid belt to the Sagittarius Arm… .’
‘We’ve set the Mouse on her case,’ said Winter, a little defensively. ‘Calder and me. But the downloads aren’t cooperating.’
For the first time Shlaim looked at a loss for words. After a minute he shrugged and said, ‘Information wants to be free.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lucinda bitterly. ‘That’s how we got into this whole fucking mess.’
‘It’s not such a bad mess, as such things go,’ said Shlaim. ‘Take it from me.’
He looked around. The exit and the souvenir shop were just outside. ‘That’s about the end of the line.’
Lucinda didn’t want to leave without walking, however quickly, past the brighter and older remains again, so she insisted on going all the way back around to the entrance. As they did so she remarked:
‘It’s a funny thing, compared to the Myceneans … the Minoans didn’t leave many weapons.’
‘They didn’t need many,’ said Shlaim. ‘They were a thassalocracy.’
‘A what?’ she asked.
‘An empire of the merchant marine,’ Shlaim explained. ‘They got their wealth from trade.’
‘All this?’ said Lucinda, waving her hand around. ‘Just from … carrying things from place to place in ships?’
‘That and growing vines and olives, yes,’ said Shlaim.
‘The palaces and jewels and theatres and everything? From trade?’
‘Yes,’ said Shlaim. He sounded a little impatient with her incredulity, or as it might seem to him, her obtuseness.
Lucinda put an arm around the shoulders of each of the men and swung her feet up off the ground between them like a child. Shlaim and Winter staggered, taking the weight, and gave her, or each other, a puzzled look. Lucinda felt weightless herself, lightened by a load off her mind, but she relented in a moment, swinging back to the ground. She skipped ahead of them, turned around, and laughed.
‘That,’ she said, ‘is the most amazing idea I’ve ever heard. Or ever had.’
L
amont stood on a hot red moor with the smell of rust in his nostrils, with Morag Higgins beside him and the lip of the fastness, moving slowly like a glacier, a few metres in front of him. The great inorganic botanic garden of the thing swept up and over the nearest hilltops. In the sky above and far away to the west, shimmering aurorae rose like pillars kilometres tall, within which insubstantial masses moved like thunderheads.
‘Wimps,’ said Morag, looking up.
‘What?’
‘Weakly interacting massive particles.’
‘It’s a possibility,’ Lamont allowed.
She squatted and reached out with a finger towards the interface, where particles of rust were being picked up magnetically like crumbs carried by invisible ants, and in a hot flicker forged into further small, bright steel components buzzing and ticking like the inside of a fob watch around the fringe of the great sprawling machine that now extended far beyond the environs of Tully Carn.
‘Don’t!’ he said, suddenly alarmed.
She turned her steel smile on him. ‘You still think I have anything to be afraid of?’
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘But I have.’
She pushed her fingers into his beard.
‘Some time … ’ she said. ‘Some time, the curiosity will get too much. And even putting in a copy won’t be enough. I’ll have to know .’
He nodded sombrely. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But not this time.’
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Not this time.’
They turned around and walked the two kilometres back along the moor to the empty streets of Inverness.
T
he habitat hung in space, a great turning wheel of lands and lakes under diamond glass and solar mirrors. Its defences were many, its vulnerabilities few. One of the latter was that it had no expectation of, or defence against, a small starship fittling right in under its roof, scorching along between its floor and roof for several kilometres before coming to a dead halt immediately above the central committee offices. Hatches opened in the ship and space-armoured soldiers swarmed out, riding down on rocket packs, carrying cosmic-string weapons and plasma rifles.
One of the soldiers kicked open the door of the office and marched in to see the chairman. He stared from behind his console at the visored, armoured and armed figure before him. Another soldier came into the office, while the rest ran thunderously through the corridors and up the stairs of the building.
‘You are the responsible elected leader of Man Conquers Space Collective?’ the first soldier asked.
‘Yes,’ said the chairman, raising his hands slowly above his head.
‘Good,’ said the soldier. The visor flipped up and a woman’s face grinned out at him. ‘I am Number One Destruction Brigade San Ok.’ She indicated the other soldier. ‘And this is my comrade Number One Destruction Brigade Ree. Both formerly of Eighty-Seven Production Brigade, Transformation of Nature Collective. We’re here to collect on a debt.’
Benjamin Ben-Ami put down his coffee and sighed.
Problems?’ Andrea Al-Khayed asked, from the other side of the verandah breakfast table.
‘Not at all.’ Ben-Ami waved a hand to encompass the green and crowded farms of the valley and the sky above it, where that morning’s third shipload of Earth evacuees was drifting past. ‘These people have problems . They’ve seen the planet they were born on turning inexorably into a machinery of thought. All I have is a hankering for good New Start coffee.’
Andrea nodded. ‘Me too. It’s funny the things you miss.’
They were two years into Ben-Ami’s five-year exile from the city, the penalty for his part in what were now referred to as ‘the recent events.’ AlKhayed had, with unexpected loyalty, chosen to share it. The thought still made him feel almost guilty.
‘You can leave at any time,’ he said. ‘Honestly.’
Under the table, her toes attempted to tickle his thigh. ‘Not really,’ she said.
He smiled back.
‘It’s not just the coffee, though,’ she said. ‘It’s the cafe, and the comms, and the city. That’s what you’re missing, Ben, and you shouldn’t. They would just distract you from what you’re doing now, and this is the best possible place for doing it.’
‘I know, I know.’ He thumbed his slate, looking at the draft for the new libretto: Jesus Koresh: Martyred Messiah. It looked like it might be the best thing he’d ever done, better even than last year’s Osama: Warrior Prince: the most conscientiously researched: every character, from its mild-mannered and modest but strong-willed hero to its gloating psychopathic villains, the Emperor Reno and the Empress Hillary, meticulously authenticated from the documents of the Latter Day Adventists. But still.
He looked down the valley balefully to the nearest of its several small whitewashed churches.
‘If I have to listen to another bloody hymn,’ he said, ‘I’ll burn down a church myself.’
They walked out of the resurrection lab together, laughing and talking. As soon as they were out in the open Calder lit a cigarette. Arlene nudged him.
‘These things will kill you one of these days,’ she said.
Winter looked around. The sky was dark blue, webbed with the hairline hexagons of a high dome. The resurrection lab was a small low building with a wooden ramp down to a broad plaza, set among green parks with paths that linked a cluster of white buildings of four or five storeys. There were a lot of people on the paths, and they all looked young. That didn’t mean much, but he suspected them of being students.
‘Where are we, anyway?’ he said.
Calder made a thing of squinting up at the sky. ‘Still the Sagittarius Arm, by the looks of it,’ he announced.
‘Another campus gig,’ said Irene. ‘Let’s hope this time the little bastards haven’t cracked our copy-headers and napstered us to virtualities all over the planet.’
Winter looked at her, alarmed. ‘Has that ever happened?’
She shook her head, smiling. ‘I shouldn’t tease you,’ she said. ‘You fall for it every time.’
‘This is definitely real?’
‘Definitely. Come on, let’s find the bar.’ She slipped her hand under his arm and set off with him and the others, down the ramp. ‘Don’t look back.’