The two Drift ships had bellied up to each other, cargo door to cargo door, in order to form a vast bay the size of both their largest holds. She realized as soon as she saw it that of course ships had to be able to do this—and of course the Christina actually had done it at least once since she’d been aboard. Because how else had they shifted the massive stolen loads of oxygen and hydrogen that fueled the ravenous air and water cycle of the life support systems?
This time, however, the purpose was twofold. Shifting cargo—because naturally “gifts” would be exchanged, mostly in the favor of Jenny, who had them dead to rights here even if she had decided to play nice. But also socializing—or, more accurately if Li’s read of the body language on both sides was any gauge of events to come, fraternizing.
Llewellyn’s crew arrived first. And then various minions and flunkies straggled in from Jenny’s side of the line. And then came Jenny’s bridge crew.
And then came Jenny.
Li had heard a lot of stories about Jenny Wheelan since her resurrection, but none of them prepared her for the woman behind the legend.
Most people in UN space wore their wire jobs and genetic tweaks as discreetly as possible. It might take more than merely human strength, speed, and processing capacity to survive in the UN’s dog-eat-dog free-market economy. But the people who ruled UN space had stuck close to their native soil, genetically as well as geographically. It had been the poor huddled masses who had rocketed the length and breadth of the local arm in search of new worlds and new lives. They had gone out on UN-built generation ships or on corporate arks financed by the sale of their own genetic wealth. They had braved the mutational assault of space and unterraformed atmospheres. And they had changed. But the people who launched them into space had not changed. And they were still the people who ran the IMF and sat in the General Assembly and decided the fate of planets in corporate boardrooms. So the name of the game was to do what it took to survive the Interstellar Free Trade Regime still looking deniably human.
Pirate Jenny, however, had her own model of free trade. And she didn’t seem any more interested in looking like the average UN citizen than she was in pulling a paycheck or paying taxes.
She was an old Navy captain, like Llewellyn and almost every other really able pirate in the Drift, but she had modified and extended her Navy wire job until its origins were barely recognizable. Its internal components ran beneath her skin in tightly woven patterns that reminded Li of old circuit diagrams but that she suspected had more to do with the need to dissipate the heat of her implanted intelligent systems far faster than even a profoundly modified human phenotype could do without additional subdermal circulation. She had virally modified the color of the wires, too, inserting genetic code evolved from a rare species of deep-sea fish that turned them a glowing, pulsing, phosphorescent blue. Instead of ordinary clothes she wore what appeared at first glance to be full body armor—but Li suspected was a cleverly engineered modular system of external RAM linked to her wire job. And the silicon shimmer of the chain mail reflected in the irising camera aperture of her artificial eye—which had replaced a biological original shot out in a long-ago battle, but which rumor held was linked directly and permanently to her ship’s conformal sensor array.
Jenny strode to the middle of the cargo bay in a dazzle of blue and silver and stood there impassively while Llewellyn and his bridge crew paid their respects to her. “I hear things about you,” she told Llewellyn as their hands clasped across the sealed kissing lips of the cargo airlocks. “Bad, sad, desperate things. I hear you’re running for your life and some of my Uploader friends gave you a NavComp that might just be a little too juiced for its own good.”
“Space is boring,” Llewellyn told her. “People gossip. And when they run out of gossip, they start lying their asses off.”
Jenny shrugged, sparking off an electric blue cascade that shimmered down her bare arms to her fingertips. “No skin off my nose. As far as I’m concerned it’s whatever way you say it is. Where’s the beer? That’s all I give a shit about.”
To her surprise, Li was invited to the officers’ table at the dinner that followed. She filed into the officers’ mess—hastily reclaimed from its everyday use as spare parts storage for the engine master—and soon found herself seated next to the ship’s chaplain—who she really shouldn’t have been surprised to discover was an Uploader.
What planet or orbital the padre hailed from was hard to say, since he kept the deep hood of his white wool robe pulled so far up that his face was lost in shadow. But his voice was smooth and cultured, and the hands that emerged from the snowy sleeves of the robe were not the hands of a man who had ever done hard manual labor.
For half of the meal he sat silent beside her, his head only occasionally turning to catch the pirates’ tall tales of the Deep and memories of past pirates, both the quick and the dead. Then he turned to her—only enough to throw a length of bony jawline into the light—and said, “Pirates do so love their legends. Which is a good thing, I suppose, given how much longer the legends usually last than the pirates themselves. Sometimes I think they only do it to be remembered. And they only want to be remembered because they know how very little time they have.”
“Mmm,” Li muttered noncommittally.
“But surely you’re not a pirate. Though I imagine you could tell a few tall tales if you had the mind to.”
She nodded politely. The Periphery abounded with legends of things that had happened or could and would happen. It was impossible to tell which tales were true, which ones were flat-out lies, and which ones would eventually turn out to be elaborate shaggy-dog stories. Assertions of cannibalism usually turned out to be all too accurate—though who had eaten whom and why was often fiercely debated. Likewise the endlessly circulating rumors of murder and incest. But then there were the odd, unclassifiable stories that you could never quite be sure about. Like the one about the astronaut who spent two not entirely unpleasant months as the house pet of a group of Syndicate Motai A Series constructs. Or the hapless traveler who’d been held hostage by an abandoned orbital station and forced to read aloud the entire collected works of P. G. Wodehouse. (“It’s Waugh, not Wodehouse!” Cohen had exclaimed when he heard that one. “You’ve fluffed the punch line!” But then they had actually met the AI in question at a cocktail party—debugged, very contrite, and eager to repay what he called his “debt to society.” Whereupon Cohen had changed his official position on the story, and started insisting that the space station had fluffed the punch line.)
“Nothing to offer up to the company?” the padre prompted. There was something familiar about his voice, though she couldn’t put her finger on who it reminded her of. Perhaps it was only the accent, and the slightly archaic turns of phrase that betrayed a Periphery origin despite his flawless grammar.
Li ripped off a hunk of bread and dipped it in her soup. “Like Llewellyn said, space is boring.”
“If you think that, then you must not have seen nearly as much of it as I have. I could tell you things that would set your hair on fire. Or your soul.” He laughed softly. “If you believe in souls.”
“Padre!” Pirate Jenny called down the long table. “If you’re telling her about the Datatrap, speak up so everyone can hear. I was just telling Llewellyn about it and he thinks I’m spinning him a tall one.”
“I don’t think confirmation from a man who won’t show his face in public is going to help you much on that score,” Llewellyn pointed out.
“Oh, you can see the padre’s face,” Jenny laughed. “You just have to promise to behave yourselves first, and let bygones by bygones.”
She strolled down the length of the table, grinning to bear a diamond-encrusted front tooth that shone only a little brighter than her silver clockwork eye. She came to a stop behind the padre’s chair and stood with one luminescent hand poised over the hood while he remained still and silent and passive as a puppet with its strings cut.
Then she plucked the hood back from h
is head and let it drop.
Chairs scraped back and feet clattered on decking as half the pirates around the captain’s table leaped to their feet and grabbed for weapons that had been wisely lockered for the duration of the intership festivities. A few even snatched knives off the table; they were old soldiers one and all, and reflexes die harder than memories.
And to anyone who had seen action in the War with the Syndicates, that face meant death and disaster.
Andrej Korchow sat calmly in his chair, as if having every person in the room looking murder at him was simply an ordinary part of doing business. Then he put down his fork, crossing it over his knife in the proper ten-past-two position with fussy precision. Then he turned to Li, smiled, and said, “Nice to see you again, Major. What has it been, ten years? Eleven? You’re looking a little peaked, if you don’t mind my saying so. What’s the old line? Too little butter on too much bread? I must say that’s a surprise to me. I didn’t expect to see your resurrects multiplying across the Drift any time in the next millennium. But then time goes so fast when one’s playing fun and games with scattercasting.”
Li was still casting around for an answer when Jenny interrupted in a voice that said the tall tales portion of the evening’s entertainment had ended, and they were passing into the real heart of the talking: the exchange of the commodity that was even more a pirate ship’s lifeblood than air or water: information. “All right, Korchow. You’ve had your little joke. Now tell the nice people about the Alien Datatrap that Llewellyn here thinks is a figment of my bubbleheaded imagination.”
“Well, for one thing, I wouldn’t say it was entirely settled that the Datatrap really is alien technology.”
Jenny rolled her eyes and sighed, but Korchow just cleared his throat and patted his lips with his napkin as if he hadn’t heard her. Li suppressed a grin at the thought that if Korchow really had turned Uploader, he was probably driving the Uploaders just as crazy as he’d driven his Syndicate crechemates. There was an old saying in the Peace-keepers—at least as old as the one Korchow had just quoted—about promoting troublemakers up and out. But the Syndicates preferred to promote troublemakers into the diplomatic corps or espionage services. It put troublesome individualists far away from their non-norm-conforming fellow clones and put their “primitive” independent instincts to work infiltrating human society—a task for which even the most revolutionary sociobiologist could admit that mammalian individualism might be an adaptive behavior.
And if there was one thing Li had learned over the years about Andrej Korchow, it was that he had more idiosyncrasies, surprising opinions, and unintended aberrations from geneline norm than could comfortably be accommodated by an entire Syndicate’s worth of Series A genelines.
“Well,” Korchow began, with every appearance of settling in for the long haul, “it’s a little hard to know where to begin. I think—”
“How about close enough to the ending that I don’t strangle you?” Jenny suggested.
“Certainly. Especially since you’ve asked so charmingly. You grow in grace and beauty on a daily basis, madame. As I was saying before your scintillating contribution to the discourse, perhaps we should begin by offering a brief summary of events on Novalis, since that was, after all, what first brought my geneline to the neighborhood.”
“Sure,” Jenny said. “How’s this? The clones tried to colonize Novalis. Novalis colonized them instead. Our padre here got sent back to figure out why and found himself an honest-to-God alien artifact. Yeah, I know, it’s a fucking science fiction movie. I would have thought he was making it up, too, if I hadn’t landed a damn ship on it.”
Llewellyn was staring down the table at Korchow with an odd, absentminded, almost perplexed look on his face. “There’s a datatrap orbiting Novalis?”
“Well, that’s a bit complicated, actually. It seems to be orbiting more than one planet.”
Li thought she must have misheard or misunderstood Korchow. But Llewellyn didn’t seem to share her confusion. Instead, he squinted narrowly at Korchow and asked: “How many more?”
“At least nine … that we counted.”
“And all in the Drift?”
“As far as we could tell.”
“How can something possibly orbit nine planets?” Li finally managed to ask.
“Because,” Llewellyn said without turning his eyes away from Korchow’s. “It’s a Quant. Just like the Freetown Datatrap. It exists in multiple quantum branchings of the multiverse. And whoever built it has figured out how to turn it into a multiply connected point whose entry is located in different places in each branching. It’s Through the Looking-Glass, except every time Alice goes through the mirror she ends up orbiting a different planet around a different star. And, viewed in terms of spacetime locations in this universe, they could be arbitrarily distant from each other.”
“Well,” Korchow said, “it’s nice to see you’re not just a pretty face.”
“I don’t have a clue what that all means. I’m just repeating what Cohen says. And he also says I shouldn’t trust you because you’re the most outrageous liar he’s ever met.”
“All Corinthians are liars, said the Corinthian.”
“And misquoting Bertrand Russell isn’t going to get you anywhere.”
“If he’s so eager to cross wits with me,” Korchow suggested, “then why doesn’t he just come out and speak for himself instead of playing Chinese telephone?”
Llewellyn laughed once, very softly. “That wouldn’t really be convenient for me.”
“I see,” Korchow said, his eyes flicking from Llewellyn to Li and back again. “You two manage to get yourselves into the most interesting situations. Is it just bad luck or do you have something against living the quiet life?”
“Fuck if I know,” Li said. “Let’s hear about the Datatrap, since I don’t have a clue what’s going on and that’s obviously what Cohen wants to talk about.”
“How can I describe the Datatrap?” Korchow said. “It’s like looking into the Mind of God. You’d have to be a lump of dead clay not to see it. No wonder the Uploaders are ready to die to stay in it.”
He leaned forward.
“Yes. That’s where to begin. With the Uploaders. When the Syndicate mission dropped into orbit around Novalis we found the Datatrap already there, and the Uploaders on it. That was eight—no, perhaps nine years ago—sorry, I always have trouble with UN-standard years. So, anyway, two or three of your years after the original Novalis mission. That mission searched the Novalis system quite thoroughly and found nothing either in the noosphere or in any of the geosynchronous or neutral orbits. Obviously no one, regardless of their level of technology, could have built such a thing from scratch in that little time. So we immediately suspected it had been moved from somewhere else. And when we talked to the Uploaders—”
“This is taking too long,” Jenny interrupted. “And I have plans that involve getting very drunk very soon. So let’s cut to the chase. Korchow here was sent on a Syndicate mission to gather data about the Novalis aliens, and when they got there they found no aliens in residence and a big honking quantum datatrap orbiting the planet where they were damn well sure there hadn’t been one the last time they visited. They play knock-knock for a while, but no one’s at home. So they land on the Datatrap. And what do they find? A bunch of Uploaders have moved in and are trying to figure out how to upload themselves into it and not getting much of anywhere. So the clones start fucking around on their own account—and then Korchow and his crechemates get into some kind of hissy fit over—”
“Technically, it was a Rostov mission and KnowlesSyndicate was only providing logistical support,” Korchow said smoothly, naming a Syndicate known for detanking researchers and theoretical scientists. “And while Rostovs consistently surpass expectations in theoretical applications, practically speaking they leave something to be—”
“Well, whatever. The bottom line is that Korchow here annoyed his little clone friends so much that when
a UN cruiser shows up in-system they decide to get the hell out of Dodge and maroon him on the Datatrap.”
Li couldn’t help laughing.
“You’re one to talk,” Korchow said.
“I know, I know. It’s just … Cohen must be enjoying this so much!”
“And I don’t begrudge him his fun. After all, next time Jenny puts into port I’ll be going my merry way. While Cohen appears to be a rather more permanent fixture, if I’ve correctly understood the lay of the land here.”
“But tell them about the alien transport field,” Jenny said.
“There’s no reason to assume it’s alien, really. First of all, the parallel universe it comes from could plausibly be a future point in our own light cone, or simply a branching in which we ourselves happen to possess technological capabilities as yet undiscovered in our branching. And even leaving that aside, it’s not like technology has a museum label hanging on it that says “alien.” Gödel was right, after all; the language of mathematics is in some very real sense universal. Lorenz attractors or Poincaré circles might not be called the same thing in other cultures, but they exist. And when you analyze the surface details and internal structures of the Datatrap—”
“Okay, we get it. We’re not going to sue you if the little green men turn out to be our evil twin overlords from the future. But the transport field.”
“It’s not really a—”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Korchow! Is quibbling your secret superpower?”
“Right, well, what Jenny would like me to mention to you—no doubt because she thinks it might help you in your ongoing efforts to elude your former Navy colleagues—is that we came to suspect that the Datatrap was cycling between a string of some dozen or so real planets that have actual locations in our universe.”
“All in the Drift?” Llewellyn asked, again seeming to grasp the direction of Korchow’s thoughts in a way that no one else did.
“Yes.”
“So it’s in some kind of massive Bose-Einstein field?” Li asked.
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