by Paul McAuley
This one is for Pat Cadigan, and (of course) for Georgina.
INTO EVERYWHERE
PAUL McAULEY
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
Contents
Dedication
Title Page
1. Ghost In The Head
2. Wizards Of The Slime Planet
3. The Geek Police
4. Rogue Moon
5. Breakout
6. Serious Throw-Weight
7. The Alien Market
8. Risk Management
9. Love And Marriage
10. The Singer Not The Song
11. The Bad Trip
12. Wizard Work
13. Code Farm
14. Traitors
15. Crashing And Burning
16. Conceptual Breakthrough
17. Under Caution
18. The Slint
19. Control
20. Sky Fall
21. Ashes
22. ‘I just need your head.’
23. Chloe Millar
24. On The Farm
25. The City Of The Dead
26. Colonel X
27. Joe’s Corner
28. Rumours And Ghosts
29. Road Dogs
30. Dry Salvages
31. The Invitation
32. The Switch
33. Death Mask
34. Real Free People
35. The Pyre
36. The Children
37. ‘I can see ghosts.’
38. Rain City
39. Perspective
40. Old Dark House
41. Timeship
42. Speaker For The Dead
43. Different Maps
44. The Paths Of The Dead
45. Lodestar
46. The Message
47. ‘Don’t worry.’
48. Committed
49. Shanghaied
50. The Desires Of A Ghost
51. Mad Ship
52. Somewhat Resembling Venus
53. ‘We are here to help.’
54. Aerostats
55. Into Everywhere
56. Mirror Dive
57. Dead Planet
58. Final Destination
59. Synchronicity
60. Deeper Than Sex
61. Shanghaied Again
62. Sandstorm
63. City Of Sand
64. Ruins And Mad Ghosts
65. City Of Gold
66. Pyramid Of The Ancients
67. Unlikely Worlds
Acknowledgements
Also by Paul McAuley
Copyright
1. Ghost In The Head
There were some days now when she didn’t think about the ghost in her head. Or there might be a moment when she’d wonder if it was asleep or awake, if it was looking out through her eyes, and then the moment would pass and she’d get on with whatever it was she happened to be doing. It hadn’t shown itself for eight years. It had receded into the background hum of her life. But then there was the day when it returned in all its terror and glory. Black lightning snapping in the cave of her skull. A thunderous swell obliterating all thought.
Lisa’s dog was nuzzling her neck when she came back to herself. She flapped a hand, trying to push him away or gather him close, she wasn’t sure. Pete sat back on his haunches and wordlessly barked, once, twice. She was sprawled in the yard, halfway between the house and the barn, looking up at the cloudless dark blue sky. Someone had hammered a nail into her skull, right between her eyes.
She pushed onto her elbows, managed to sit all the way up. A greasy swell of nausea washed through her and she rested her head between her knees for a minute or so. Her mouth tingled with a metallic taste like a battery’s kiss. The sharp pain in her head began to diffuse into a general skull-cramp; she noticed that her pipe wrench lay next to her. She’d been fixing something, a leak in the water supply to the hurklin pens. She’d gone to fetch the wrench from the toolbox in her pickup truck . . .
Pete told her that she had fallen over.
‘I’m okay now,’ Lisa said, although she was very fucking far from okay. She was frightened and confused and angry. After all this time it had happened again. After all this time her ghost had woken in thunder and lightning and had knocked her on her ass.
Later, she told her friend Bria that she didn’t know what had triggered it.
‘I haven’t been handling any especially weird shit. Just the usual tesserae, sympathy stones, so forth. And anyway, I haven’t had a client for two weeks now. More like three. I haven’t eaten anything I haven’t eaten a hundred times before, I’m clean and sober . . . I can’t figure out what I did to set it off.’
‘You sound like you’re trying to find some way of blaming yourself,’ Bria said.
They were sitting in Lisa’s kitchen, drinking coffee. Lisa dressed in her usual blue jeans and denim shirt, Bria in a pale green pants suit, caramel-coloured hair done up in a high curly ponytail. She’d been in a business meeting when Lisa had called, had insisted on driving over.
The two of them went way back. They had both come up and out to First Foot on the same shuttle trip, had both started out working as coders in the Crazy 88 Collective. Lisa’s freelance career had run onto the rocks, leaving her with a reputation as a brilliant eccentric whose best years were long behind her; Bria, ten years younger, with a relentless work ethic and good people skills, had founded one of the first code farms in Port of Plenty, was happily married with two kids. A rambling red-tiled house in the burbs, school runs, dinner parties, a subscription to the city’s theatre, weekends at the country club where she was attempting to reduce her golfing handicap with the focused zeal that characterised her work. The whole aspirational middle-class-professional bit. Lisa had once asked her friend if this was how she had imagined things turning out when she had won her emigration ticket; Bria had said that back in the day the so-called Wild West had opera houses and gas lighting, and wasn’t she dealing with weird alien shit every day, down on the code farm?
‘It’s been eight years since the last time. Eight years, three months, nine days. What I’m wondering,’ Lisa said, ‘is did Willie’s ghost give him a kick in the head too? I gave him a call, but it went straight to voicemail. So then I phoned around the hospitals and clinics. You know, just in case. No sign of him anywhere, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t zapped. Maybe he shrugged it off. Or he’s lying hurt somewhere . . .’
‘Have the two of you ever been affected at the same time?’
‘Sure. During the Bad Trip.’
‘Apart from that.’
‘Not that I know of. But Willie and I aren’t exactly close any more.’
Bria raised an eyebrow.
‘So he stops by now and then,’ Lisa said. ‘But he doesn’t tell me everything. I can’t help thinking he had some kind of accident. That maybe something happened to him and woke up his ghost, and that’s what woke up mine.’
‘He’s probably scratching around in the City of the Dead, out of phone range,’ Bria said. ‘Or he’s in the drunk tank after one of his parties.’
She didn’t have much sympathy for Lisa’s ex.
‘If Willie had been arrested I would probably know,’ Lisa said. ‘Because he would have asked me to bail him out.’
Willie had once bought a serious muscle car after making a good find, and a week later had totalled it during a street race in Felony Flats. He’d walked away with a broken collarbone, but the cops had busted him for dangerous driving and he’d served two months, six suspended. Willie was smart and funny and sweet, but he had poor impulse control and was about as dependable as the long-range weather forecast.
‘He’s like one of those cartoon characters,’ Bria said. ‘You smack h
im down with a hammer, he springs right back up. Forget about him, honey, and for once think about yourself. You had a shock. You need to rest. And you need to get yourself checked out. Seriously.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘If you’re worried about paying for it, don’t be. I’ll cover it.’
‘No need. I already had Doc Hendricks look me over.’
‘The old guy with the chicken farm?’
‘It’s also a clinic. And Doc Hendricks knows his stuff. He told me that it wasn’t a stroke or an epileptic fit. Nothing organic. As if I didn’t already know that. My ghost gave me a little kick, that’s all. The way it used to, the first few months after the Bad Trip. I don’t need to go to hospital. I don’t need any tests. I’m fine.’
Bria gave her a steady, serious look. ‘You’re very far from fine, honey. Otherwise you wouldn’t have called me.’
They pushed it back and forth. After Lisa refused to make an appointment with the consultant who’d tested her after the Bad Trip, no way was she going back to being a lab rat or to being zombified with anti-epileptic drugs, Bria changed tack, said that she was worried about Lisa being out here on her own.
‘I have Pete.’
‘I mean if it should happen again.’
‘This is the first time in more than eight years,’ Lisa said. ‘I really don’t think it’s going to happen again any time soon.’
But the flat fact was that she had no idea why the ghost in her head had woken up after so long. She didn’t know what it wanted; she didn’t even know exactly what it was. Despite the batteries of tests that she and Willie had put themselves through after the Bad Trip, hoping for a fix that had never materialised, no one could tell them whether they had been infected with an eidolon that had full agency, or some fragmented algorithm which threw random glitches. All she knew was that it was old and alien, like all the revenants and ruins on this old, haunted world, that it manifested as unusual activity in the temporal lobe of her brain, and that after eight years of inactivity, after she had begun to allow herself to hope that it might have faded away, it was back. It was awake again, fully present. It was as if something she couldn’t see was standing at her back. A visual stutter. A blind spot that jumped past something unimaginable.
Lisa didn’t tell Bria about that. She hadn’t talked about that aspect of her haunting with anyone except Willie. Maybe that was why she had felt the urge to get in touch with him: he was the only person who understood how it was to have something old and alien living inside your head, amongst your thoughts.
But Willie still wasn’t answering her texts and messages.
She told herself that her feeling that something awful had happened was just a hangover from the seizure, and tried to get back into her routine. Watering and feeding the hurklins. Mulching her vegetable beds and planting out eggplant and winter squash. Picking and canning tomatoes. For the first time in a couple of months she went to an AA meeting and testified and drank bad coffee and put some money in the hat. Keeping busy helped to cover up the hole in the world the seizure had made.
But then the geek police came, and everything changed again.
2. Wizards Of The Slime Planet
When the perimeter alert slammed down the pipe Tony Okoye was lying on his command couch and one of the hands was braiding his hair. He raised a finger to still the clever fingers of the man-shaped machine and said, ‘I hope this isn’t another cosmic-ray impact.’
‘Not this time,’ the ship’s bridle said.
‘Because if it is, I swear I will modify your detection filters with an axe.’
‘Then I’m almost glad I’m looking at an actual intruder,’ the bridle said, and opened an arc of windows in the dim warm air.
Tony sat up, bare-chested in lime-green ‘second skin’ shorts, pushing a fall of loose hair from his face as he studied multi-spectrum images, vectors, estimates of the intruder’s capability. She was real. She was big. A G-class frigate ten times the size of his C-class clipper, bristling with weapon pods and patches. She had come through the mirror less than two minutes ago, she was already driving straight for the slime planet, and she was displaying a police flag. CPF Dauntless.
‘What are the police doing here? Have they said what they want?’
‘They haven’t said anything. And they aren’t the police,’ the bridle said. ‘The Dauntless is a G-class frigate, but that G-class frigate is not the Dauntless. The configuration of her assets is wrong, and her flag’s certificate is a clever fake. Clever enough to fool the average freebooter, but not quite clever enough to fool me.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘I can show you my workings.’
Tony flicked through images of the intruder. It looked a little like a weaponised jellyfish got up from shards of charred plastic: a convex shield or hood three hundred metres across, trailing three stout tentacles ornamented with random clusters of spines. No one knew what the original function of G-class Ghajar ships had been, but plating their shields with foamed fullerene and attaching weapon pods and patches around their rims turned them into formidable combat vessels.
‘If they aren’t police,’ he said, ‘they must be pirates. Claim jumpers.’
‘The possibility is not insignificant,’ the bridle said.
‘A ship that size, running under a fake flag? It is the only possibility. The Red Brigade has frigates, doesn’t it?’
‘So do a number of other fringe-world outfits. We should challenge it,’ the bridle said. ‘You can use your notorious charm to get its crew to reveal who they really are and what they want.’
Her personality package, presenting as a bright eager capable young woman, was the front end of the AI that interfaced with the mind and nervous system of the actual ship, which like the frigate, like all ships everywhere, had been built by the Ghajar thousands of years ago. Tony’s C-class clipper was called Abalunam’s Pride, but no one knew its real name. The name its maker had given it long before it had been extracted from a sargasso orbit, refurbished and modified, and purchased by his grandmother. The secret name it might still call itself.
Tony said, ‘I already have a pretty good idea about what they want. And it is possible that they do not know we are here. So we will maintain radio silence and continue to monitor them. And if they contact us, we will tell them that we are just a freebooter with an exploration licence and nothing to hide.’
‘Which we are.’
‘Which we are. But my family has a history with the Red Brigade. And if that really is one of their frigates . . .’
Tony grazed the cicatrices on his cheek with his thumb as he thought things through. He was scared, yes, shocked and sort of numb, but he also felt alert and focused. Babysitting Fred Firat and his crew of wizards while they probed the ancient secrets of the slime planet had proven to be astoundingly tedious. There were no beasties to hunt, and the scattered Elder Culture ruins weren’t anything special. Junot Johnson was supervising the wizards’ work; Lancelot Askia was keeping them in line; after completing the survey of stromatolite sites and setting his little surprises, Tony had mostly stayed aboard the ship. Now, for the first time in four weeks, he was fully awake. At last he had something to do. And if that frigate really was one of the Red Brigade’s ships he would have a chance to test his skill and cunning against his family’s old nemesis.
He said, ‘How long before it gets here?’
‘Nineteen point three eight hours, if it maintains its current delta vee,’ the bridle said.
‘We will have a lot less than that if it fires off scouting drones. What about our assets at the mirror? Has our unwelcome guest pinged them, tried to spoof them, knocked any of them out?’
‘Not yet.’
‘It could have left behind assets of its own when it came through. Have one of the drones scan the mirror and the volume around it out to five thousand kilometres, but keep the rest dark. And shoot a message to Junot, brief him on the situation and tell him that the wizards should start
packing up their stuff straight away.’
‘Then we’re going to make a run for it,’ the bridle said.
‘I am not going to sit on the ground and wait to see what that frigate does next,’ Tony said. ‘Check the mirror, message Junot, and raise the ship and aim it at the wizards’ camp.’
‘Shall I have the hand finish braiding your hair, too?’
The bridle had a nice line in sarcasm, but Tony took the offer at face value.
‘Why not?’ he said, settling back on the couch. ‘If those claim jumpers do want to talk to me face to face, I should look my best.’
Five minutes later, Abalunam’s Pride was sliding sideways and low above eroded sheets of ancient basaltic lava. The lifeless black plain stretched away in every direction, studded with puddles and ponds gleaming orange in the level light of the soft sun, which at this high latitude was fixed just above the southern horizon. The slime planet, in close orbit around a cool, quiescent red dwarf star, was tidally locked, one face permanently turned to its star, the other to the outer dark. It had no name, only a number assigned by a rip-and-run survey team before the rise and fall of the two empires, and it was old, about twice the age of Earth. The tectonic plates of its lithosphere had set in place after its outer core had cooled and solidified; any mountains it might once have possessed had long ago weathered to dust; after its magnetosphere had decayed most of its original atmosphere had been blown away by the solar wind of its star. It had been cold and virtually airless when the so-called Old Old Ones, said by some to have been the first of the Jackaroo’s clients, said by others to have been the Jackaroo’s precursors, had arrived, thickening its atmosphere and rebooting its hydrological cycle by bombarding the vast ice cap on the dark side with comets diverted from the red dwarf’s threadbare Oort cloud. Now the slime planet was cloaked in a reducing atmosphere of nitrogen, methane and ammonia, and a shallow sea turbid with ferrous iron spread across its sub-stellar hemisphere, broken by a single sodden land mass near the terminator between light and darkness. Enormous rafts of sticky foam generated by blooms of photosynthetic bacteria floated everywhere on the sea, and colonies of stromatolites grew in a few muddy bays on the sunward edge of the lone continent.