by Paul McAuley
‘Would you have believed a humble and obscure scholar such as me? I knew you were working out of Dry Salvages, so I contacted one of the brokers there, told her about the slime planet, and pointed her towards you. But I see now that she is dissatisfied with the arrangement.’
‘She thinks you cheated her when the Red Brigade raided my home and took the wizards and the stromatolites.’
‘Not to mention Ada Morange,’ Adam Apostu said.
‘She belongs to my family,’ Tony said. ‘I want her back, and I believe that you may know where she is.’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Is she with the Red Brigade?’
‘I suppose you could say that she mostly is.’
‘Is she a prisoner?’
‘No.’
‘She made a deal with them, didn’t she? Her freedom in exchange for the Ghajar eidolon and the archival genetics in the stromatolites.’
‘You seem to know everything,’ Adam Apostu said.
‘I don’t know why the Red Brigade wants the eidolon and the archival genetics. Why are they so important?’
‘The Red Brigade stole them from my mother,’ Bob said. He held up the knife in front of his face and smiled around it. ‘We’ve come to get them back.’
‘What you want isn’t here,’ Adam Apostu said.
‘You know where they are,’ Bob said. ‘And I’m going to tickle it out of you.’
But when he stepped towards the old scholar a storm of eidolons blew up around him, pouring like smoke from gaps in the floorboards. Bob roared with anger and slashed at them with his knife. It was as futile as trying to cut air or shadows. In moments, he was completely obscured in a whirling column of black shapes: somewhere in this old dark house Adam Apostu was running a huge cache of Elder Culture algorithms. Wisps whipped out at Tony, but recoiled before touching him.
‘They know your friend, Master Tony,’ Adam Apostu said, speaking quickly and precisely. ‘If I were you, I’d take this chance to escape. Once Raqle Thornhilde realises you’re no longer of any use, she’ll have her bully-boys dispose of you. That would be unfortunate, because the guest aboard your ship has caught my interest. It has made some very interesting changes.’
‘How do you know about my ship?’
Bob, blinded by the eidolons, lunged wildly with his knife; Adam Apostu deftly parried it with his pole, saying, ‘I talked to it, of course. You should leave now, before Bane comes.’
‘There you are, you old fucker,’ Bob sang, and struck again.
The old man leaned backwards, the knife point missing his face by a scant centimetre, and Bob howled inside his whirlwind of eidolons and slammed into him. They crashed into the curtains; eidolons flared away into every corner of the room. Adam Apostu’s hood had fallen back, revealing a plastic shell that had replaced his scalp. Bob caught his pole in one hand and swung his knife, hacking deep into the scholar’s neck, wrenching it free, hacking again.
Adam Apostu’s head tumbled to the floor. There was no blood. The scholar’s dark glasses were askew, revealing silvery eyes with cruciform pupils that swivelled towards Tony. His black lips parted and he croaked, ‘Run, you fool.’
The headless body had broken free from Bob and was belabouring him with the pole. Swift ruthless blows that drove the clone from one side of the room to the other. Tony understood what Adam Apostu was, then. Not a man at all, but a hand controlled by someone else, from some other location. It swung the pole, hit Bob’s head with a tremendous clang. The clone went down on one knee, tried to push up, and the headless hand swung its pole again and a gout of blood splashed across the wall.
Tony ran for the stairs and in the darkness missed the bottom step and fell full length, smacking the breath from his lungs. The thorny thickets of tables and chairs, legs interlocked in a mad sculpture, were lit only by the faint light that outlined the open doorway. Tony saw a shadow moving there and scrambled sideways on elbows and knees, curling up inside his rain cape under a tangle of chairs a moment before Bane charged through the doorway and ran straight at the stairs, slippers pounding a hand’s breadth from Tony’s hiding place.
As soon as the clone had disappeared up the staircase, Tony pushed to his feet and looked all around. He could have made a run through the doorway, across the courtyard, out into the city, but he knew that Bane and Bob would track him down if he took to the streets, and Adam Apostu had pointed him towards a better hiding place.
The construction coral foundations of the city were honeycombed with kilometres of tunnels and voids. People buried their dead down there, in catacombs that they visited on high days and saints’ days. There were hundreds of entrances, in churches and houses, in cafés and shops: Tony believed that there must be one hidden somewhere under the thickets of furniture, and as he looked all around a wisp of faint luminescence curdled in a far corner.
He had to crawl under and over a pile of chairs to reach it. It stood like a faint, frozen candle flame above a flagstone. As thumping footsteps and oaths sounded overhead, Tony ran his fingers around the edges of the stone, found a depression that slid backwards with a click. The stone hinged up and Tony grabbed the free edge and pulled it upright, revealing a ladder dropping down a square shaft.
The wisp of light darted past and plummeted straight down the shaft. Tony shrugged off his rain cape and followed, using the iron ring set in the underside of the hinged flagstone to pull it shut, climbing down the ladder to a narrow passage lit by small lamps set in the rough construction-coral ceiling.
The light circled him twice and fluttered forward. The passage slanted down, always down, joined or crossed here and there by other passages. The paths of the dead. Here was a skull in a niche carved into the stony wall, mirror fragments jammed in its sockets reflecting the tiny flame that burned in front of it. Here was the body of a woman propped upright in an alcove, wrapped in tattered winding cloth, her face an eyeless leathery mask. Here was a window showing a loop of a child running into sunlit water on a beach of some other world, turning in knee-deep waves and smiling.
Not all of the dead were human. As Tony followed the wisp of light down a passage whose walls were lined with polished construction coral, he saw a tall figure seemingly constructed from sticks totter away from him, vanishing into a crevice in the wall.
The route slanted deeper into the city’s foundations, leaving behind human burials. The walls began to sweat; there was a scent of salt and rot in the air. A handful of scrabs skittered around his feet, hard shells glistening. And then the way ended in a cavern or cistern flooded with still black water. Stairs led down to a walkway. The wisp of light shot out across it and halted above a platform on the far side, where a pale-skinned man stood beside the aquarium tank of the !Cha, Unlikely Worlds.
41. Timeship
The trip to First Foot’s wormhole took a little over a day. The ship accelerated continuously until it reached midpoint, and then, after a disorientating fifteen minutes in free fall while it swung around, began to decelerate. There would be heavy traffic on the far side of the wormhole, so it wasn’t a good idea to slam out of it at high velocity. The ship lacked windows and portholes, but Lisa could watch First Foot’s ochre and blue globe dwindle on the big HD screen in the guest lounge, an airy space at the centre of an accommodation module constructed by a Dutch shipbuilding firm that usually designed the interiors of superyachts and inserted into the Ghajar ship’s open-plan interior like a bullet into the chamber of a gun. White carpets, white leather furniture, walls panelled in fine-grained maple, brass handrails. The guest cabins and en-suite bathrooms little marvels of economy.
Lisa, Isabelle and Unlikely Worlds shared this space with the pilot, the half-dozen servants who unobtrusively catered to their needs, and the specialists who been sent from Terminus to deal with artefacts retrieved from Willie’s dig site – Doris Bauer, a formidably brisk Austrian woman about Lisa’s age, and her two handsome young assistants. They documented the tesserae from the wall of the tomb an
d performed a preliminary assessment of Lisa and her ghost that wasn’t much different from the yearly check-ups in the hospital in Port of Plenty. The same tests, the same meaningless reassurances. The eidolon was active, but there was no indication that it was malign. It wasn’t clear how it had been changed, why Lisa could now see the activity of Elder Culture artefacts, or why some unknown object or location in the sky tugged at her attention (she knew now that it wasn’t the ship because that little tug was still there, somewhere off to port), but according to Doris Bauer everything would be clarified by further tests when they reached Terminus. ‘We have the best people there. The best facilities. You are in good hands.’
Lisa thought that the luxury was amusingly over the top, but Isabelle was in her element. She’d had a manicure and a haircut while Lisa was being tested, and had changed into a white silk trouser suit, and spent most of her time on her q-phone, giving crisp accounts of her adventure in the back country to a management team and a variety of experts, and briefing a crew who were riding towards First Foot on the shuttle. They’d been tasked with exploring and documenting the site after the police quit it, and would also hire local tomb raiders to search the area, concentrating on the places Lisa had spotted from the outlook.
‘There may have been other survivors of the crash,’ Isabelle told Lisa. ‘Or other fragments of the ship scattered across the area. I have also arranged for an expert to be transported to Terminus. He will examine the code in those tesserae.’
There was a coolness, a certain wary distance, between her and Lisa. They hadn’t talked about what had happened out on the playa, and Lisa was ashamed at her complicity. It seemed like a kind of cowardice, and tinted her hope that Ada Morange’s people could help her to discover everything she needed to know about her ghost.
‘Does your expert work at Peking University?’ she said to Isabelle, earning a brief look of surprise.
‘I forget you have done your own research,’ Isabelle said. ‘Yes. He was approached by the TCU, but we tempted him away with a better offer.’
‘So Nevers wants to find out what the Ghajar code contains too,’ Lisa said. ‘Given his past history, he won’t let it go.’
‘Perhaps not. But we have one advantage.’
‘What’s that?’
Unlikely Worlds spoke up before Isabelle could reply. ‘Why, you, of course. I am beginning to believe that your story may be as interesting as Professor Morange’s.’
A vast machinery seemed to be settling into place around Lisa. She told herself that she’d done the right thing, that Ada Morange could protect her from Adam Nevers and the TCU, and find some way of exorcising her ghost, but Isabelle and Doris were vague about what would happen when they reached Terminus, and they shared an unsettling gestalt with the ship’s crew. A kind of calm certainty; an unquestioning belief in the righteousness of their cause. They were a lot like Adam Nevers, Lisa realised. They saw the world in stark binary divisions. Black hats v. white hats, like in the old cowboy movies. Us v. them.
A couple of hours before transit through the wormhole, Isabelle and Doris Bauer and her assistants met in the lounge for what they called a visualisation meeting, a cross between a pep talk and one of the mindfulness sessions Lisa had volunteered for in the aftermath of the Bad Trip, hoping that it would help her come to terms with her ghost. They didn’t actually sit in a circle holding hands while ambient music played in the background and candles scented the air, but that was the vibe. Afterwards, Isabelle told Lisa that they had been making sure that they knew what their goals were and how to achieve them, but to Lisa it seemed a lot like the way cult members suppressed doubts and reaffirmed their commitment to their leader and their cause. What would they do, she wondered, if she tried to back out now? Love-bomb her into submission? Shackle her in a luxuriously appointed cell?
‘I find much of your behaviour strange,’ Unlikely Worlds said, when Lisa asked him what he thought of the visualisation meeting. ‘It wouldn’t be any fun if I didn’t.’
‘And there’s the way they refer to Ada Morange as “The Professor”,’ Lisa said. ‘The reverent tone they have. The way they’ve let her get inside their heads.’
‘She depends on the love of others. As far as she is concerned, encouraging that love is a survival trait.’
‘Because of her illness, you mean? Just how bad is it?’
‘Because of the way she has chosen to prolong her story. The path she wants to take.’
At last the wormhole throat resolved out of the big black. A faint granular star quickly gaining shape and definition, rushing towards the ship at startling speed. Watching in the lounge, Lisa glimpsed a dark mirror set in the flat polished face of a cone-shaped rock and framed by the architecture of the strange matter that held it open, and then it was gone and with no sense of transition the ship emerged from the far end of the wormhole, one of fifteen that orbited the L5 point where the gravity of Earth and the gravity of the Moon cancelled each other out.
The view on the HD screen panned across black space to Earth’s crescent, small and sharp and blue and lovely, and Lisa was cleaved by an intense pang of homesickness. Before the Jackaroo came with their offer to help that small blue planet had been the only home humanity had known, the place where every person ever born had lived and died. Most of human history was down there, along with everything from Lisa’s life before she had won the lottery and gone up and out. Her family, her childhood home, her high school and the college where she’d studied maths, the places where she’d worked, the people she’d known, the things she’d seen . . .
Two servants in white jackets and trousers padded through the lounge, collecting coffee cups and other loose objects. A few minutes later, there was a soft chime, Lisa’s chair folded around her, and she was gripped by the floating sensation of weightlessness as the ship swung on its axis towards its new course. A second chime, and the pull of acceleration came back. Less than an hour later, the ship shot through another wormhole and emerged in orbit around the red dwarf star 2CR 5938, otherwise known as Terminus, the lesser partner in a binary system with a G0 star a little brighter and hotter than Earth’s Sun.
Unlike the other gift worlds, there was no rocky, Earth-like planet here. Instead an Elder Culture, the Spiders, had engineered fourteen planetoids that orbited at the inner edge of a broad asteroid belt, shepherded into a loose archipelago by interaction with the gravity of a hot super-Jupiter orbiting much closer in. Exotic dark matter denser than neutronium had been injected into the planetoids’ centres of mass, increasing their surface gravity to about one-third of Earth’s, they had been wrapped in bubbles of quasi-living polymer that conserved scanty oxygen/nitrogen atmospheres, and had been landscaped and seeded with life, and space elevators had been spun between their surfaces and counterweight asteroids parked in stationary orbits. The engineers of these little garden worlds were long gone, as were the other Elder Cultures who had lived on them for a century or ten thousand years. People lived there now. Farmers, mostly. An agrarian commonwealth. A storybook utopia.
At first, only one of the planetoids, Niflheimr, had been colonised. An ice world about the size of Ceres, served by a Jackaroo shuttle that looped between its space-elevator terminal and Earth, it had been settled by a handful of hardy pioneers, and visited by science crews studying the weird physics of the dark-matter stuff in its core or the space-elevator technology. There had been vague plans to explore the other planetoids, but the Jackaroo shuttles were locked in fixed cycles between Earth and the gift worlds, and the only functional spacecraft that humanity possessed at the time had been Soyuz and Orion capsules, and the various unmanned cargo modules that serviced the International Space Station. Then the first sargassos of Ghajar ships had been discovered, independent space travel had become possible, and all the worldlets of Terminus were suddenly within reach. Soon afterwards, code recovered from a crashed Ghajar spacecraft had been cracked, revealing details of its last voyage. A rogue explorer, chased by TCU agents, h
ad retraced that voyage to a rosette of wormholes orbiting the only planet of Terminus’s companion star: the access point to a vast wormhole network, the New Frontier. The archipelago of Terminus was a way station now, a link between Earth and the worlds of the New Frontier.
The spark of the elevator terminal, hung beyond the pale half disc of Niflheimr, slowly grew larger on the lounge’s HD screen, resolving into an oval rock a kilometre across, its ashen surface pitted with the dark mouths of docking shafts. Lisa saw an I-class schooner rise smoothly and slowly from one of those shafts and accelerate away. According to Unlikely Worlds, it was heading out to the G0 star and the gateway to the New Frontier. A journey of more than four hundred and fifty astronomical units, fifteen times the distance between the Sun and Neptune, that even with the Ghajar bias drive would take at least ninety days. And that was only the beginning of a voyage to some new world, some new settlement, far across the Milky Way.
‘The things you people can do now!’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘The stories you make!’
They were in free fall again. The ship was idling towards the elevator terminal, preparing to dock. A scatter of other ships hung in the black sky beyond the terminal’s lumpy crescent. Lisa, doped by an anti-nausea patch, thought it looked like a scene from one of the space-opera video games her first boyfriend had loved to play.
Isabelle pointed to a fat dark cylinder much bigger than the rest of the ships, or maybe much closer. ‘There!’ she said. ‘You see?’
‘Sure. What am I seeing?’
‘That,’ Isabelle said, a lilt in her voice reminding Lisa of how a stump preacher she had seen one time in Joe’s Corner had pronounced the name of the Son of God, ‘is the Professor’s timeship.’
42. Speaker For The Dead
‘We don’t discuss our affairs with people up on the skin,’ the speaker for the dead told Tony, ‘and they don’t trouble us. So if you stick with me and stay out of the common ways, no one will know where you are.’