by Paul McAuley
‘You have to wonder, if it really did commit suicide, why it did it,’ the freebooter said. ‘Maybe mad ships have some kind of ethical code, and it killed itself because it had been misused, and death was a way of making that good. Or maybe it’s just that mad ships are crazy. What’s your interest, kid?’
‘Some wizards I know got themselves involved with the Red Brigade.’
‘You probably don’t want my advice, being young and immortal and all, but here it is anyway. You should fly on by. Wizards are clever, but they lack caution and common sense. They have moths, where you come from?’
Tony shook his head.
‘They’re from Earth. Winged bugs, a lot smaller and much prettier than those monsters,’ the freebooter said, indicating the silvery husks overhead. ‘They mostly fly at night, navigating by the light of the moon. Earth’s moon, that is. Nothing else like her in all the known worlds. Nothing so big or so bright. I don’t miss most things about Earth, but I miss that big old moon. But we were talking about moths. The point is, any light at night, they’re attracted to it. They’ll circle a candle until they burn up in the flame. Wizards are like that. And they’ll take you with them. If you don’t want to get burned, you should fly your own course, not theirs.’
‘I hear that,’ Tony said, thinking of Cho Wing-James and the others lying dead in the stinking aquarium water. I only want your head.
The freebooter said that she’d got the story about the stolen mad ship from a trader who had a contact in the military division that supplied stations that controlled sargassos. So maybe there was a grain of truth in it, just enough to make Tony a little paranoid, to make him wonder why Colonel X hadn’t told him about it, and what other information the colonel might have withheld.
The bridle had at first been blithely optimistic about their quest; now she began to echo Tony’s unease.
‘You should trust your instincts,’ she said.
And: ‘When you feel it’s time to cut and run I’ll be ready.’
And: ‘Whatever you choose to do, I’ll always be there for you.’
Using her newly acquired abilities, she had delved into the records of Dry Salvages’s traffic control, but the only G-class frigate to have visited the planet in the past year had been owned by the Commons police, and the three K-class freighters which had recently touched down had all had been registered to governments or legitimate companies, and none were in port right now. So if the Red Brigade had paid a visit to Raqle Thornhilde, they hadn’t travelled to Dry Salvages on the frigate which had jumped the claim on the slime planet, and they hadn’t used the hijacked freighter to deliver the stromatolites and Aunty Jael to the broker directly after the raid. The bridle had also checked the records of Raqle Thornhilde’s previous contracts and trades, but could find no evidence that she had any involvement with the Red Brigade or their known proxies, or any previous interest in stromatolites, the Old Old Ones, Ghajar narrative code, or mad ships.
Tony paid a bribe to a minor official in the city’s police who claimed that she would be able to dig up some dirt on Raqle Thornhilde, check for clandestine deals that didn’t appear in the records, so forth. But every time he contacted the woman she said that she needed to do a little more work. It looked like the only way he could find out if Raqle Thornhilde was in league with the Red Brigade would be to ask her directly, after she came to him.
She seemed to be in no hurry to do that. Five days passed, six, and there was no sign that she was checking out Tony or probing his ship. He nursed his dwindling funds – his bodyguards’ per diem was substantial. He worried that Colonel X hadn’t sent him to Freedonia as an independent investigator but to bait some kind of trap. He worried about the eidolon that had infiltrated Abalunam’s Pride’s systems, the conversation it was having with the actual ship that the bridle still couldn’t understand.
He remembered his first trip off Skadi, accompanying his parents on some kind of diplomatic business in Great Elizabeth, on Ràn. Just turned six (the trip was a birthday treat), excited and intimidated by the strangeness of it all, he had asked his nanny to leave the door of his bedroom ajar, to let in a little light from the sitting room. For a long time he had lain awake, listening to the low murmur of his parents’ voices, familiar and soothing but indistinct. He told the bridle about this, but she didn’t understand the comparison. She wasn’t good with analogies because their slippery meanings overflowed the boundaries of logic.
‘Keep listening,’ Tony told her. ‘Keep watching the skies.’
By now she was all up inside traffic control, watching ships in transit between the mirrors in the wilderness, but she saw nothing of interest, and still Raqle Thornhilde hadn’t reached out to Tony. And then, one day at breakfast in the courtyard of the motel, the bodyguard sitting nearby (the father, a craggy man with deep-set eyes and a spade-shaped beard) suddenly became alert. Tony looked up and saw someone coming towards him, and knew at once that it was Raqle Thornhilde’s emissary.
31. The Invitation
Isabelle Linder told Lisa that a ship had been dispatched from Terminus more than a week ago, after ground-radar images had revealed a chamber at the excavation site. The original plan had been to transport finds from the dig directly to Terminus, bypassing UN controls; now the ship was going to take Willie there for treatment. According to Isabelle it was due to arrive in three days.
Lisa said, ‘Then what? Can they cure him?’
‘I will be honest,’ Isabelle said. ‘The experts listened to his story and studied the photographs I took, but it was not enough for them to be able to make a prognosis. When they can examine him properly we will know more.’
‘By examine, I guess you mean experiment,’ Lisa said.
‘He has agreed to it,’ Isabelle said.
‘I bet. He thinks it’s his only chance of surviving this.’
They were walking slowly between boulders and patches of catchclaw. Late-afternoon sunlight glowed on the cliffs that stood above them.
‘We really are his best chance,’ Isabelle said. ‘The Professor has many good people working for her, and I am told she has taken a personal interest. That means everything that can be done for him will be done.’
She was a pretty young woman with a fetching French accent, dressed in a pink T-shirt, hiking shorts with big side pockets, sneakers stained with red dust. She told Lisa that she was Outland’s office manager, and had stayed behind in Port of Plenty during the excavation of Willie’s jackpot. About a week into the dig one of her colleagues had made a panicky call that had cut off mid-sentence. No one had picked up when she’d rung back, so she had used the company q-phone to call the head office for advice, and had been ordered to go straight to the site.
‘I had no idea what to expect, or how I could be of help,’ she said. ‘So, first I stop at Joe’s Corner. We have an understanding with the mayor there, because of our purchase of the crash site of the spaceship. He told me that the police had arrived, that already they have sealed off the excavation and set up a quarantine area. So I was cautious. I hired a tomb raider as a guide, a woman recommended by the mayor. We could not get so close to the site, but we found a spot where we could see it clearly enough. It is at the base of a big rock formation. The kind in cowboy films?’
‘A butte,’ Lisa said.
‘Yes, I think so. A column of rock rising out of the desert floor,’ Isabelle said, shaping the air with her hands to demonstrate what she meant. ‘Everything bare, like the Sahara. Sand and rocks. And strange plants, some black, some orange. I could see the site very clearly. There were police working there, and also avatars.’
Lisa felt a cold clutch in her heart. ‘Jackaroo avatars.’
‘Of course.’
‘How many?’
‘At least three. It was a long way away and they were coming and going around the shaft. And even face to face it is hard to tell them apart. At least three.’
‘One visited me,’ Lisa said. ‘Whatever your people found out
there, the Jackaroo don’t like it.’
‘Yes, that is very clear. We thought we had taken precautions, but alas, they were not sufficient.’
‘No kidding. So how did you find Willie? Did he call you?’
‘Not exactly. I must tell you that there was a certain amount of distrust between us. He has a certain . . . reputation, shall we say. And although the contract specified that we share all finds, we knew he had held back some items from his initial excavation.’
‘Willie always likes to have an edge,’ Lisa said, thinking of the tessera he’d given to Brittany Odenkirk.
‘Yes. So that is why we placed a tracker in his phone. Simply as a precaution. When I was close enough to check, it showed that he was some distance from the dig site. I followed its signal, and found him here, with his friends. And then you found us, and here we all are.’
‘You were lucky to find him. There are plenty of dead spots in these hills.’
‘Good luck had nothing to do with it,’ Isabelle said.
‘I mean for Willie, not you.’
‘You might call it predestination,’ Isabelle said. ‘How paths come together at the right time. Those seeing it from the inside might call it luck. Those who know better would not.’
‘You mean the Jackaroo?’
‘I mean that the Professor sees much that we do not,’ Isabelle said.
There was a kind of shine in the young woman’s gaze. Lisa remembered with a twinge of unease that Nevers had warned her about the fanaticism of Ada Morange’s inner circle.
It turned out that this wasn’t the first of the Jackaroo gift worlds that Isabelle had visited. Two years ago she had been part of a team that had unsuccessfully attempted to raise the remains of a Ghajar ship from silt a hundred metres beneath the surface of the world ocean of Hydrot. She had been there for six months, working out of a tiny office on one of the islands at the south pole, organising resupply and the procurement of new equipment while the underwater excavation work, using remote-controlled robots, was delayed by endless difficulties.
The Ghajar ship had broken apart on impact. The wreckage was scattered across an ellipse more than twenty kilometres long, and each piece had to be dug out of several metres of silt before it could be raised to the surface. The robots were unreliable; the generator of the deep-sea trawler that acted as the expedition’s platform kept breaking down; the local workers went on strike after one was killed by a broken cable’s whiplash. At last, an approaching hurricane that drove twenty-metre waves ahead of it had brought a premature end to the attempt, but two fragments of memory laminate had been retrieved, Isabelle said, and Ada Morange’s scientists were still attempting to crack the narrative code they contained.
Ada Morange believed that the Ghajar had mapped the entirety of the vast wormhole network of the New Frontier, and she was also attempting to piece together their history. There had been a war, that much was clear. Either between opposing factions of Ghajar or against some external enemy – another Elder Culture, perhaps, or even the Jackaroo. Half a dozen crash sites had been discovered on various worlds, and a huge debris field orbited a white dwarf star in the New Frontier: billions of particles and fragments of metal, polymer and deep-frozen organic matter. And then there were the so-called mad ships, which killed or drove insane anyone who attempted to board them. Ada Morange believed that the mad ships were the key to the Ghajar’s history, and had invested a significant portion of her fortune in researching ways to neutralise and enter them.
After the expedition on Hydrot, Isabelle had been promoted to a position in the head offices of the Omega Point Foundation, in Paris, France. But her plan to work her way up the management chain had been frustrated by what she called an indiscretion with a senior colleague during a conference on Ghajar technology. The man had made things difficult for her, and eventually she had been dispatched to First Foot.
‘I hoped it would be a temporary assignment. Winding up the affairs of the investigation into the crash site in the City of the Dead. But then your husband brought in his find, and now I am caught up in the mainstream of the Professor’s interests again,’ Isabelle said. ‘I am no archaeologist. I am not interested in Elder Culture artefacts, or the “deep time” projects. I have a degree in accountancy. Yet here I am.
‘Some say that great people in history make their own luck. I think in the Professor’s case that is especially true. She saw the importance of Elder Culture technology before almost everyone else. Without her, the first Ghajar ships would not have been found. She has done much to map the New Frontier. And now this. I am part of that luck, and so are you.’
‘It didn’t work out so well for Willie, did it?’ Lisa said.
Isabelle ignored that, saying, ‘You said you were in trouble with the police?’
‘One of them, anyway.’
‘It is possible we can help you. And you, of course, may be able to help us. Think about it,’ Isabelle said, and turned and started to walk back to the little camp under the overhang.
Lisa watched her go, wondering about that unexpected invitation. Wondering what she was going to do about it.
32. The Switch
‘I had a time of it, tracking you down,’ Brandon Wiley told Tony. ‘Anyone would think you don’t care about your old friends any more.’
‘Right now, I am hoping to sell something,’ Tony said.
‘Well, maybe I can help you with that,’ Brandon said artlessly. ‘Are you going to finish those, by the way?’
‘The bean cakes? Help yourself,’ Tony said.
The motel’s maker hadn’t done a very convincing job. The fried shells were too dry, the insides half-cooked and gluey.
‘I had to skip breakfast. Too much work to do, too many people to see. These aren’t bad, whatever they are. Spicy,’ Brandon said, biting a bean cake in half. ‘You should give me the recipe – I could try them out on a few people I know in the food biz. Maybe they’ll catch on. You never know.’
He was dressed in a shabby black jacket and blue jeans, a plump middle-aged man with an untidy halo of curly black hair and the manners of an over-indulged child, half obsequious, half petulant. He had quit his university post in Port of Plenty, First Foot after some vague scandal and had drifted through the fringe worlds before washing up in Freedonia. He worked now as a low-rent trader. Although he lacked the skill and nerve to ever make it big, he was surprisingly good at networking, keeping his contacts sweet by assiduously dispensing gossip, flattery and minor favours. Tony had done a little business with him, once transporting a gaggle of code jockeys who had been stranded after their ride found herself a better deal and booted without bothering to tell them, another time shifting stock confiscated from a bankrupt trader – cheap trainers and cases of a soft drink, Vimto (the last in the universe according to Brandon), that Tony had managed to offload on Wellington for a marginal profit that had been considerably less than the trader had promised.
Brandon took a while to get to the reason for his visit. Tony listened patiently while he complained about the foibles and foolishness of other traders and freebooters, and boasted about his low-ball deals.
‘People complain that times are hard,’ Brandon said, blotting crumbs of fried beans with a wetted finger and sticking it in his mouth. ‘They say trade isn’t what it once was because worlds are becoming more self-sufficient, and too many are caught up in this so-called recession. But if you can make your own opportunities there is always a profit to be made somewhere. People like us, we roll with the lows and ride the highs for all they’re worth. For instance, here’s a nice little deal I’m putting together. An acquaintance of mine has a contract to ship seven hundred gross of prayer flags to Zungqu. You know the kind? They are set out for a year on certain places high on the spires, where they accumulate spiritual energy. Not much money in it, but – this is the sweet thing, Tony – there’s a fellow I know on Zungqu who deals in desert rose. A drug distilled from the sap of a native flower. Genuinely native, not some
Elder Culture introduction. Found only there. It gives a very fine high, a little like opium. It’s legal in Freedonia, of course, but not in the Commons, which means there’s a much better profit to be made there.
‘So what I plan to do,’ Brandon said, leaning in and lowering his voice, as if that would make any difference if anyone wanted to listen in, as if anyone else cared, ‘is bring it back in the hollow bases of a consignment of those spectacularly ugly vases they make on Zungqu. You might ask why I would go to such trouble, as all drugs are legal here. The answer is simple. I plan to sell the vases to someone I know who deals in so-called illegal drugs in the Commons. He takes the risk, I make more money than I would if I sold the shit here, on the open market. It’s an old trick, but if you know what you’re doing, it’s a profitable one.’
‘It sounds as if you are getting ready to make a big score,’ Tony said politely, thinking that it was the sort of deal that inevitably went bad in a hurry.
‘I always have the modest hope that my efforts will be properly rewarded,’ Brandon said. ‘And what about you, Tony? I hear this thing you want to sell, it may be also something big.’
‘It could be,’ Tony said. ‘If I can find the right buyer.’
‘I also hear it has something to do with that adventure of yours on the slime planet.’
Tony pretended to be surprised that Brandon knew about it.
‘Oh, I heard one bird twittering to another,’ Brandon said. ‘Something about a cure for sleepy sickness, am I right? If you don’t mind me asking, Tony, how did that all work out?’
‘We didn’t find what we were looking for, but we found something else instead,’ Tony said.
‘Not in that so-called code of the ancients, I bet. No one has ever cracked it. Probably no one ever will. So what did you really find? Some junk left by some other Elder Culture, or a new kind of slime? Or perhaps something with no practical application whatsoever, except it gives the so-called wizards a hard-on.’