by Paul McAuley
As the mirror of the wormhole throat dwindled into the starry scape he dropped a couple of drones that would keep watch for the claim jumpers’ frigate, and reprogrammed and deployed a drone that clamped itself to the ship’s prow. It was a poor replacement for the arrays which had been burned away when he had taken out the disrupter needles, but at least he could see where he was headed.
The mirror orbited a brown dwarf, a small sub-stellar object whose dim disc rapidly expanded ahead as Abalunam’s Pride swung past on a gravity-assist manoeuvre. Ragged shadows of silicate vapour clouds stretched across the faint violet glow of the brown dwarf’s inner layers like dirt streaked across a failing neon globe, suddenly filling the sky and then whipping past and falling away as the ship flew on. Its velocity had increased by the small amount of orbital energy it had stolen; it was now aimed at the brown dwarf’s sun, a K0 main-sequence star over six billion kilometres away, with a swarm of more than five hundred mirrors orbiting at the inner edge of its habitable zone.
Powered by zero-point energy, warping the gravitational constant to create a local propulsive gradient, Abalunam’s Pride drove towards the mirror-swarm and safety at an acceleration equivalent to 2.3 g, the maximum acceleration permitted by her bias drive, the maximum acceleration of the bias drive of every Ghajar ship, from A-class jaunt ships to U-class haulers. After more than a hundred years no one knew if this was an inherent property dictated by fundamental physics, or a limit built into the drive for some inscrutable reason – some argued that it was the maximum acceleration force the Ghajar, which appeared to have been fragile gasbag colonies of specialised individuals, had been able to survive. But it meant that, after using the wormhole to traverse thousands of light years in a blink of an eye, Abalunam’s Pride would take eleven days to cross the void between the brown dwarf and the mirrors orbiting the K0 star.
Tony moved around as little as possible in the heavy pull of constant acceleration, spent most of his time on his bed’s silicon-gel mattress. One of the ship’s hands gave him full-body massages and spread soothing salves on his aching back and limbs. He sent a text message via the q-phone. All well. Homeward bound as instructed. He wanted to talk to Ayo about the close encounter with the claim jumpers, Opeyemi’s interference and the execution of Fred Firat, but because his uncle had taken control of the q-phone link it would have to wait. He made regular checks on the drones stationed at the mirror orbiting the brown dwarf, and Junot Johnson kept him informed about the wizards. After arguing about whether they should continue to work after the execution of their boss, they’d turned to intense discussions about the data they’d obtained during their stay on the slime planet. It seemed like a hopeful sign to Tony. He was also monitoring Lancelot Askia. The man spent most of his time sleeping or grimly exercising, and as far as Tony could tell had not used his clandestine q-phone to talk to Opeyemi.
The claim jumpers’ frigate came through the mirror two days after Abalunam’s Pride. An hour later, the bridle told Tony that someone had hacked the carrier signal from the watch drones and was attempting to infiltrate the ship’s comms.
‘Shut them down,’ Tony said.
‘The drones or the comms?’
‘Both.’
Four days later, he turned Abalunam’s Pride through one hundred and eighty degrees and began to decelerate, the first stage in preparing to rendezvous with the mirror-swarm. If the claim jumpers intended to destroy his ship, they would continue to accelerate, overtaking Abalunam’s Pride and knocking her out with shrapnel or smart gravel. But the frigate made its own turnover manoeuvre two days later, and was still lagging behind when Tony aimed his ship at one of the mirrors and passed through into orbit around a young yellow star surrounded by a belt of churning rocks and ice and gas a billion kilometres across. A giant structure orbited the far edge of this protoplanetary disc, a flat, fractal snowflake several thousand kilometres in diameter and of unknown provenance and purpose, as yet undisturbed by the monkey curiosity of humans.
The mirror from which Abalunam’s Pride exited was one of eight in close orbit about each other. Tony aimed his ship at the nearest, emerging in orbit around a ringed gas giant that orbited a blue-white B0 star. And felt a little better: the claim jumpers would have seen which mirror he had used in the wilderness, but they couldn’t know which of the seven possible exits he’d just now used.
Tony lingered only for the handful of hours it took to traverse to the next mirror, and then he was somewhere else, out in another wilderness of mirrors fifteen thousand light years away, this one at the L5 point in the orbit of an Earth-sized planet tidally locked to its red dwarf star, with a narrow habitable ring between the ice cap of the dark side and the howling desert of dust seas and volcanoes of the sub-stellar hemisphere. There were hundreds of worlds like it, most of them littered with the usual Elder Culture ruins, the usual secrets waiting to be unlocked. This one had been colonised by an atechnic cult sixty years ago. Maybe they were living the life of pastoral utopianism they’d planned; maybe they had descended into savagery and were roasting and eating prisoners of war captured in tribal wars fought with stone-tipped spears. No one knew nor cared.
Abalunam’s Pride transited three more times, and after twenty-eight hours emerged into the familiar light of a M0 red dwarf star and aimed herself at a rocky world with an equatorial belt of ocean pinched between ice caps that covered most of its northern and southern hemispheres. Skadi. After two years of banging around the galaxy as a freebooter, Tony had come home.
7. The Alien Market
When Lisa arrived on First Foot, the Alien Market had been on the very edge of Port of Plenty: a maze of converted shipping containers, Quonset huts and flat-roofed mud-brick buildings crammed into a narrow triangle between Elysian Creek and the meatpacking district. Tomb raiders and prospectors who came in from the back country to do business had camped out on the far side of the creek, and every Sunday there had been an unofficial flea fair along the main drag where dealers, collectors and scouts haggled over unlicensed artefacts and other finds.
Now the city’s low-rise sprawl spread far beyond the creek. A Holiday Inn stood where the tomb raiders had once camped, the slaughterhouses and cold stores of the meatpacking district had moved out to Felony Flats, the flea fair was no more, and most of the assayers, analysts, traders, chandlers, coders and pawn shops had been displaced by bars, coffee shops, bubble-tea houses and restaurants, shops that sold gimcrack souvenirs and replicas of famous finds, stuffed animals and the shells of biochines, and expensive field kit and utility clothing that no prospector would ever use. It was a popular weekend destination. You could eat brunch, buy a pair of hurklin-hide shoes, a snow globe containing a replica of the spires of Mammoth Lakes, jewellery made from spent tesserae, or a phial of blue sand from the so-called Arena of Kings, and round off your day in one of the quaint themed bars.
But some of the old businesses still clung on, and Lisa could map moments from her past as she led Pete through the passages, alleyways and courtyards. Here were the shallow steps down to the cellar bar where she and Willie had spent way too much time back when; here was her favourite sushi counter; here was the ground-floor room in the three-storey stack of shipping containers where she’d first set up business on her own, although the containers had recently been painted in bright primary colours, and what had been her workshop was now a store front advertising ‘genuine gemstones and geodes’.
And here was the place where she’d once tried to make contact with her ghost. She’d been desperate back then, in the first year of her possession. She’d broken up with Willie, had begun to numb herself with booze because she was scared of the thing in her head, of what it might do, of what it might already have done. There had been anxiety attacks, lurid nightmares, the whole nine yards. She pestered her friends, asking them if they thought she’d changed, looking for confirmation of her fears in their gaze, in casual conversations. Her obsession had driven many of them away, confirming her belief that she wa
s turning into something else. That she was carrying in her head a monstrous entity whose loathsome aura horrified and repulsed other people.
Back then, a dozen mediums and psychics had been operating in the Alien Market, claiming to be able to channel the spirits of ancient intelligences from Elder Cultures, tap into deep wells of weird wisdom, exorcise unwelcome eidolons and talk to the human and alien dead. Coders and assayers made fun of their mystic woo, but there was an undercurrent of self-recognition in the jokes: both psychics and coders were attempting to quantify the unquantifiable, and their jargon and methodologies echoed each other. Eidolons v. ghosts. Avatars v. spirits. Reynolds traps v. crystal balls. Code stripping v. cold reading.
Lisa hadn’t given psychics much thought before the Bad Trip, but after her neurology consultant had told her that it was impossible to remove the eidolon without causing serious brain damage, she began, like a cancer patient who’d been given a terminal diagnosis, to search for cures outside mainstream medicine. Meditation and mindfulness. A sleep machine that was supposed to modify her alpha waves. And then she finally nerved herself to walk into the psychic parlour she passed every day on the way to work.
She waited until the place was about to close. Feeling, as she slipped inside, like a kid trespassing on a grouchy neighbour’s lawn. There was none of the paraphernalia – velvet drapes, antique furniture, wax-encrusted candelabra, batteries of crystals – she’d expected. Just two plastic stacking chairs either side of a small glass-topped table, recessed lights in the ceiling, a doorway screened with a waterfall of plain glass beads that clicked as a young man pushed through them.
He wore a white shirt, black pants and wire-framed glasses, looking more like an architect or a college lecturer than someone who communed with alien spirits. Holding up a hand when Lisa began to explain why she was there, giving her a lingering look, saying that he could see that she was troubled, that she wanted help. It was her aura, he said. It was an unhealthy colour and had a swollen, lopsided look.
‘You have a guest with deep roots. How did it find you?’
She found herself explaining about the Bad Trip. The young man listened attentively. He did not seem to judge her. When she finished talking there was a short silence; then he told her that understanding what possessed her was the first step on the road to self-knowledge.
‘That’s why I’m here.’
Lisa paid a hundred and forty dollars for an initial consultation. They sat either side of the table and the psychic took out a small parcel of silvery mylar cloth and unfolded it to reveal a pale, thumbnail-sized tessera. He centred it between them, told Lisa that he was going to evoke his familiar and that she should not be frightened.
‘I’ve seen eidolons before,’ she said.
‘The Butcher can be intimidating to some people.’
‘The Butcher?’
‘It is what I call him,’ the psychic said. ‘His actual name has no real human equivalent, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Lisa said, beginning to feel that she’d made a mistake.
The psychic told the lights to dim, touched the tessera. And his eidolon was suddenly there, filling the room like a faint fog of cigarette smoke. The psychic closed his eyes. His hands rested palms up on the table, thumb and forefinger pinched together. Lisa expected him to speak in a sonorous voice, channelling his spirit guide, offering nuggets of wisdom, asking leading questions. Instead, the fog began to thicken and coalesce behind him, and she had the brief impression of something larger than the room leaning in, looking down at her. Then the smoky fog blew away, vanishing beyond the walls of the dim little room, and the young man stood with an abrupt motion that knocked over his chair.
‘Go,’ he said. He looked as if he had been punched hard in the stomach.
‘What about my reading? What did you see?’
There was a stinging metallic taste in Lisa’s mouth, a headache pulsing behind her eyes.
‘Just leave. Please. I can’t help you. I can’t . . .’
For a moment the young man stared at her, a look that was half longing, half revulsion, then turned on his heel and shouldered through the glass-bead curtain.
Lisa started to take a longer route to work so that she could avoid the psychic’s parlour. One morning, three or four weeks later, she found a small parcel of mylar cloth on the doorstep of her office. She didn’t unwrap it: she knew what it contained. And when she finally nerved herself up to visit the psychic’s parlour she discovered that it was boarded up; according to one of his neighbours the owner had fallen ill and given up the lease.
Lisa didn’t ever scan the tessera he’d left. She knew that it would be empty, wiped clean by her ghost. Call it an exorcism in reverse. Shortly after that, she was starting her mornings with a shot or two to numb herself, and then she got into shine and lost her business and quit the Alien Market.
Now she was searching for clues about the identity and nature of her ghost again. She was certain that the geek police weren’t going to tell her anything; a brief phone conference with Bria’s lawyer had confirmed that as far as that went she was pretty much screwed.
‘At this point I recommend patience,’ he’d said. ‘If your equipment has not been returned in, let’s say, four weeks, it might be possible to lodge an appeal based on the distress caused to your business.’
‘What about the distress caused by their harassment?’ Lisa had said, but the lawyer had told her that it would be hard to argue that the police had been doing anything other than implementing the usual procedures in their investigation.
She planned to make the rounds of friends and business acquaintances, asking about Willie’s find and who he’d crewed up with, asking if he’d brought in anything for analysis, and she lucked out on her first stop. Her old boss Valerie Tortorella, who’d heard about the breakout on the tomb-raider gossip board.
Valerie was in her late sixties, a shrewd, laid-back Canadian who’d come up to First Foot on the seventh shuttle cycle, back when Port of Plenty had been no more than a tent town pitched on the shore of an alien sea. Lisa had worked for her before she’d met Bria and joined the Crazy 88 Collective, and Valerie had been part of the intervention that had rescued her from her low point after the Bad Trip.
They sat in Valerie’s workshop, sipping mint tea. Pete sprawled beside Lisa; her ghost leaned at her shoulder. Perhaps it was interested in the fossil that sat on the workbench, under an articulated magnifier lamp: a hand-sized sandstone slab printed with a glistening spiral, the burrow made by some worm-like animal or biochine in the mud of a lake that had dried up half a million years ago, lined with an organic polymer salted with copper and iron. Valerie had shown Lisa how a pair of gold-tipped needle probes attached to an oscillator elicited high pure tones from different parts of the fossil. ‘Maybe the worm-things sang to each other with magnetic pulses. Or maybe it’s an accidental feature of some deeper property. Who knows?’
Lisa told her old boss about the raid on her homestead by the geek police and admitted that she still didn’t know how she felt about Willie, said it hadn’t really sunk in yet. Valerie said, ‘I heard the police haven’t found his body. Is there still a chance . . .?’
‘If anyone could turn up after a catastrophic breakout, it would be Willie. But the guy in charge of the case said that it was really bad, it looked like everyone had turned on everyone else . . .’ Lisa paused, then said, ‘You know that corny old thing about twins feeling each other’s pain? How if one twin dies the other knows about it, even if they’re half a world apart?’
Valerie looked at her over the top of her bifocals. Her grey hair was pulled in a tight bun skewered with a steel needle. She was dressed in a work apron over jeans and a thin cotton sweater. ‘It was like that with you and Willie?’
‘I think it was like that with our ghosts,’ Lisa said, and told Valerie about her seizure, said that she thought that Willie had been digging up something related to the Bad Trip.
‘So I suppose you want t
o know about that weird tessera he brought in for analysis a few weeks back,’ Valerie said.
Lisa rode out the moment of freezing shock and said, ‘This was from the place he was digging up?’
‘He didn’t say. You know Willie. One day he would be bragging about some jackpot that turned out to exist only his imagination, the next he was Mr Mystery.’
‘That’s why he was such a terrible poker player. He’d clown around until he got some good cards, and then he was deadly serious. He’d say, “Are we playing or are we playing?” and everyone knew to throw in their high cards and low pairs.’
‘The same when he was trying to get a price on something, for sure,’ Valerie said.
She told Lisa that Willie had asked her for a second opinion on the tessera. ‘It was active, but didn’t express the usual eidolon. Instead, it contained some kind of Ghajar code. Not my kind of thing, so I sent him over to Carol Schleifer. She has handled a couple of fragments of ship code from that crash site in the City of the Dead.’
‘This was definitely a tessera.’
‘And not a piece of ship wreckage that looked like a tessera? That’s what I wondered,’ Valerie said. ‘So I zapped it with my chemcam. I also did a CT scan. Chemical composition and fine-grain structure were identical with late-period Ghostkeeper tesserae. Composition, isotopic ratios and tracks left by cosmic rays dated it at between forty and fifty thousand years old. Again, consistent with late-period tesserae.’
‘So how did Ghajar code get inside it?’
‘You’d have to ask Carol. It’s outside my area of expertise. Do you think it could have something to do with what happened to you?’
‘I’m not sure. Maybe. Did Willie happen to tell you where he found it?’
Valerie shook her head. ‘He was holding that card close to his chest.’