Divergence

by Tony Ballantyne

  “Are you saying you would keep my children from me?”

  Stephanie said nothing.

  Suddenly he relaxed. He gave a laugh that made Maurice shiver with its wildness.

  “This is all a bluff, isn’t it?” He walked back to the café entrance, where the silver bars had now grown to floor level. He took two in his hands and bent them apart easily. “Social Care doesn’t imprison us with bars and locks. You use words and gestures, wall us up behind our manners and upbringing, and then you beat us with our conscience when we stray from your path. You’re not going to stop us boarding this ship. You’re counting on us returning to you in a few weeks’ time, when you’ll be waiting for us with sympathy and kind words and then you’ll take us back into your stifling grasp.”

  The Borderlands was sliding over the beach, dwarfing the cafés and bars of the seafront, the humming of its engines mixing with the splash of the waves. An exit ramp was dropping open halfway down its enormous length, a tongue of light shining out from the inward curve of the teardrop.

  “Where are you going?” There was a note in Saskia’s voice that none of them had heard before. It almost sounded like terror. Armstrong, who was marching towards the ship with a determined look on his face, mistakenly thought she was speaking to him. He called his reply over his shoulder as he went.

  “I’m getting on board. You heard what Donny said. He’s right. I’m fed up with Social Care always telling me what to do.”

  But Saskia ignored him. She was following Craig down onto the sand.

  “Craig, wait! Are you sure that really want to do this? You won’t be welcome in the Enemy Domain when you come back. They’ll send you back to Earth.”

  Craig turned and thrust his face close to hers.

  “And what are you going to do when I’ve gone, Saskia? Whose life are you going to organize when Donny and the rest of us are off flying through the stars? What if we even make a go of it out there?”

  Maurice pushed past them, eager to be on the ship. Michel walked on thoughtfully, Stephanie’s wheel rolling alongside him.

  “There will be a flier here in five minutes. Why not wait for its arrival? Talk things over with the atomic Stephanie. You can still go with this ship tomorrow.”

  Michel paused. Saskia suddenly appeared at his shoulder. She made a little noise that sounded something like a sob.

  “Don’t listen to her, Michel. Come on, we’re going to need you to tell us what to do.”

  She took him by the arm and led him up the ramp.

  “And that’s it?” asked Judy.

  “And that’s it,” said Maurice. “It was just like a game of dare. We all thought that we were going to give up at any moment, but somehow we just went on playing. Claude and his crew took us up into space, where they triggered the self-replication routine on the Borderlands, and the Eva Rye was born.”

  Judy frowned. “I thought that you weren’t allowed to use self-replication. I thought that wasn’t in the rules of the game.”

  Maurice shrugged. “We’re still learning the rules of the game, Judy. I think that you’re allowed to use VNMs when you bring in new players. The Borderlands got an upgrade, I guess. The original Eva Rye was very basic. A complete hodge-podge of styles, most of which didn’t work.” He cast a thoughtful eye around the black-and-white interior of the room. “So now we just go around trading, though we don’t do very well. I suppose if we had an AI, then we wouldn’t keep making mistakes. But I suppose if everyone had AIs, then we’d be right back to where we started.”

  “No,” Edward said suddenly, “that’s not it. We don’t need AIs when FE keeps everything fair. Listen to what Judy said about that person Chris, about him trying to get her to go to Earth. It’s the AIs that mess everything up. They bend the rules and tell you what to think, and you’re left with nothing to do. AIs aren’t fair to humans like us.”

  Maurice was more than a little shocked at the way Edward had suddenly spoken up. It wasn’t like Edward to express himself so surely.

  “But the deals aren’t fair…” Maurice began, but at that point Judy let out a moan.

  “Are you okay?” asked Saskia.

  Judy was rubbing the back of her neck. “Yes. Yes, just a twinge.”

  For a moment, her face had been lit up with expression; it had made her seem much more human. Now she returned to her habitual calmness.

  She looked down the table, and paused. The rest of the crew held their breath, waiting to hear what she would say. Nobody was expecting her next words.

  “I’ll have my last roast potato back, thank you, Miss Rose.”

  eva 6: 2-89

  On an early July morning a battered robotic britzka—one of those modern britzkas found in plenty just outside the borders of the Russian Free States, and so beloved of the thieves and supposed Free Spirits that dwelt therein—rolled out of the little town that had grown up around the Pekarsky Narkomfin and went thundering down the road running alongside the Arctic data cable.

  In the britzka sat two residents of Narkomfin 128: the systems man Ivan Atchmianov, well fed and clean shaven, and the other, Eva Rye, her grey hair cut short and her face burnt red from the summer sun. Despite being there for nearly five years, Russian life still excited her with its novelty. She had risen early that morning and breakfasted on doughnuts and sour cream, and then allowed Ivan to persuade her to drink a little vodka for the road.

  “What are you smiling about?” she teased her companion, who was looking through a pair of half-moon glasses at the humming line that ran from the dashboard down into the floor of the vehicle.

  “I was admiring clever workmanship,” said Ivan. “And I was thinking about how it alienates us from nature. When this journey used to take days, people would get a feel for the size of this land. Spend your days bumping along under the hot sun, looking for a place to shelter from the storms at night, and you’d understand what Russia is.”

  Eva laughed. “What do you know about Russian life? You live in São Paolo!”

  The words were out before she could stop them. She felt herself blushing and fumbled for something else to say. “You know, when we get back I’m going to get ahold of your toolboxes and I’m going to find a wrench and take this thing apart. Maybe when you’ve been forced to take that walk with the rest of us you’ll feel happier.”

  “There are too many people in Russia,” said Ivan morosely. “I wonder if the bourgeois who flock to the Narkomfins would be so eager if they had to face up to the cold blast of winter without their passive suits and their heated transport.”

  He caught Eva’s smile. “Anyway, a wrench would do you no good. These panels have been sealed using induction screws.”

  “Whatever,” said Eva waving her hand. “I’ll look through that big red box of yours, where you keep all those weird new tools, and I’ll find out what an induction screwdriver is and how to use it. I’ll strip apart your bike and your rain belt, and maybe then you’ll be happy.” She released an extravagant sigh. “You’re such a man! You spend all your time fixing machines but you never want to use them. Six months you’ve been here now. You’ve had that lovely old Zil limousine sitting outside the apartment block, and you’ve polished it and you’ve had your head under the hood practically every day, but you’ve never actually taken me anywhere. You could have driven me to the lake and we could have sat outside the dukhan there, and I could have bought you fish soup and stuffed zucchini.”

  Ivan reddened with embarrassment.

  “You should have said you wanted to go to the lake. I did not realize! I would have taken you there in the britzka.”

  The awkwardness between them had passed. Now Eva felt it was safe to laugh gently at him. She laughed with a confidence she had had to wait nearly seventy years to acquire.

  “That’s not what I meant…” she began but, on seeing the confusion in his face, continued, “though yes, I would have liked to have gone to the lake.”

  He gave a happy smile, and Eva tried t
o look cheerful. Ivan folded his glasses into his breast pocket and sternly took her hand.

  “Maybe when we had finished our soup, and if you had promised to leave my britzka alone, I would show you how to use an induction screwdriver.”

  Eva smiled at him. She wanted to say something funny and sarcastic in reply, but she knew that he would misunderstand.

  “I used one in the Pekarsky block to open the hatch to the heating system,” he continued. “A black handle, about this long?”

  He held his palms apart, his soft hands pale and smelling of soap. Eva shivered at the memory. The people of the Pekarsky block were unintelligent and superstitious: they had walked out from under the constant surveillance of the world outside but, lacking the vision to find something to replace the Watcher’s protection, they had instead handed control of their lives over to some imagined malign fate or nature. When machinery failed, they blamed bad luck or sabotage, then they waited in sullen bad temper for someone like Ivan to come and sort out their problems.

  And they hated him for it—Ivan came from the outside world. Social Care arranged for people like him to do their six months’ public service in the Russian Free States, and Ivan had dutifully turned up, bringing along Katya, his handicapped daughter. And still they resented him for it. They saw his work as an intrusion on their lives, and yet they expected it as their due.

  Eva had followed the big man through peeling concrete corridors of the Pekarsky Narkomfin, past smashed plasterwork and half-open doors, to a metal duct where Ivan had put down his traveling toolbox and set to work. Unlike Eva, he hadn’t seemed to notice or care about the people who shuffled up to gaze at them. Doughy people with greasy hair, who smelled of fried food and cheap leather, who stared at them with hard eyes, resenting their presence, making Eva wish she had stayed at home in her own Narkomfin, looking after the handicapped.

  Ivan had not been oblivious to how she had felt, though. Quite the opposite. When the metal panel swung open, he had sensed her revulsion and had pushed the door closed again to give her time to calm down. He knew that Eva didn’t like VNMs.

  The Russian Free States were riddled with Von Neumann Machines, but it still gave her a lurch of sickening vertigo to think of them all crammed together in the duct, their long segments curling as they stripped apart the metal to make copies of themselves. Ivan had found her a job to do well away from the infected duct. She stood along the corridor from him, her hands shaking as she peeled off the magnetic scale that was forming across one of the walls and threatening to interrupt the lighting circuit.

  Ivan was an attentive man. She liked that: it was a gentle, fallible thing after the unfailing attention to detail that the Watcher had forced upon her. And now, as he sat in the jolting britzka, explaining how the induction screwdriver magnetically reached through the panels to take hold of the screws beneath, he noted the distress in her face.

  “I’m sorry, Eva; you don’t want to talk about screwdrivers, do you?”

  “No, it’s interesting. Honestly. It’s that duct I’d rather not think about.”

  And again now, his breath acetone sweet from their morning nip of vodka, he gently placed his hand on hers.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, the britzka bouncing him sharply to the left as it swerved around a slippage of red rubble. “Really, I mean. I would have thought that you were used to that sort of thing. There are still lots of people here in the RFS who have never really seen self-replicating machines, but you came here from England. They must have been a common sight there.”

  “They were,” said Eva. “I didn’t like them back then, either.”

  She was trying to look away from him, not wanting to meet his big grey eyes. Ivan was at a loss, completely without guile in these situations.

  “I wish you would tell me, Eva, why is it you really came here? You don’t act like a typical Free Stater.”

  “I told you. I wanted to get out from under the gaze of the Watcher. I wanted to do something to help the handicapped. I felt as if I had some affinity with them…”

  Ivan knew there was more to it than that, but he did not know how to push her to reveal more. He was a skilled, intelligent man who spoke English and French fluently, and he was technically very able, and yet underneath it all he remained shy and uncertain. Eva found that incredibly attractive.

  “I worked in England for a few months,” said Ivan, “back in ’58.”

  “I know,” said Eva, taking his hand and giving it a warm squeeze. “You told me.”

  They were now rolling through one of the areas of forgotten industrialization that littered the landscape of the southern peninsula. Concrete blocks of flats—too rotten even to be used to house the refugees who had fled to the last free space on Earth—tilted as they subsided, their carcasses overturning like dead animals. The heating pipes, whose network had once described rubber loops through the grey sky, were tangled and fallen, their ends broken off to leave rusty mouths that could not taste the hot morning air.

  “Should be through here soon,” muttered Ivan.

  “You are very attentive, Ivan,” said Eva thoughtfully.

  “What do you mean?”

  She squeezed his hand again.

  “You and I both know that these places are breeding grounds for VNMs and venumbs. You didn’t want me getting upset again.”

  Ivan said nothing, two little pink spots burning on his cheeks. He took refuge in pessimism.

  “Hah! This is an unstable society. The RFS only exists because the rest of the world props it up.” He gave a mournful smile at the thought. “The big organizations are using this place as a testing ground. They’re letting the VNMs run free and seeing what develops. Oh…”—he caught sight of Eva’s face and began to laugh—“all that effort to change the subject and I mention them again.”

  Eva laughed along with him, one hand to her mouth.

  “That’s okay. It was nice that you thought of me.”

  She rolled back the sleeves of her white blouse as the britzka swayed along under a clear blue sky. It was going to be another hot day.

  You’re not really Eva Rye—you’re just dreaming all this. You are sleeping in your cabin on board ship, Judy. You tried to look at the thoughts of the FE program and it did something to you to push you away. Wake up, Judy!

  A woman was standing in the middle of the potholed road, waving her arms. The robot britzka picked up on the gesture and came to a halt.

  Ivan said something in Russian, and the woman’s mouth closed in a hard line. She ducked her head up and down, her whole body bobbing like a duck on water.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, don’t you speak English?”

  “I do,” said Ivan curtly.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Eva simultaneously. “Do you need help?”

  The woman’s face lit up as she heard Eva’s voice.

  “Are you English? You are, aren’t you? I can tell by your accent. And by your shoes!”

  Both Ivan and Eva looked down at Eva’s feet, but the woman continued breathlessly, the bangles on her wrists jangling as she continued to wave her arms about.

  “You’ve got to back up now! At least fifty meters! Quickly, now! This road will be covered in VNMs in about three minutes. Julian has been timing it. Hurry up! They’ll strip your funny little cart apart! There’ll be nothing left!”

  Ivan pressed a couple of buttons on the dashboard and the britzka began to roll backwards slowly.

  “Who is Julian?” he murmured to Eva.

  Eva looked down at the plump woman, a sheen of sweat on her forehead as she tramped along the road after them.

  “I don’t know who Julian is,” said Eva dismissively. “There’s a sort of person back in England who always talks as if you should know everyone they do.”

  “We have them in Russia, too,” said Ivan, wrinkling his lip. “Although I would say that rather they assume that you should know their acquaintances. And if you don’t, they find you wanting for it.”

/>   He spoke with such contempt that Eva giggled.

  “Aren’t you scared?” asked Ivan.

  “No, I’m not,” said Eva, and she was pleased to find that she wasn’t. She felt safe with Ivan; it made her feel like a teenager again. “Apprehensive maybe,” she added. “Hah! She’s probably seen a squirrel or something.”

  Ivan laughed.

  “What’s up?” called the woman, not happy to be left out of the joke, not happy that they weren’t taking her warning seriously. She spoke in stern tones. “Look, you should be okay just there. Do you mind if I come on board?”

  She was already climbing up onto the bench beside them. Her hands and feet were dirty with the brick dust that had settled all around on the wrecked landscape.

  “Julian and the rest are over there, close to the flower. I came over to the road to warn passersby. Somebody has to think of these things, and let’s face it, it’s not going to be Julian. He has a mind like a razor but he needs someone to sort out the important details, and let’s face it” —at this point she gave Eva a flash of smile—“that’s the sort of thing that you have to leave to a woman, isn’t it? I mean, those things can strip a vehicle apart in minutes. Ah, look! You can see the edge of it now. Over there.”

  Eva glanced at Ivan, checking if he was upset that this woman in her tie-dyed dress was so obviously ignoring him. Eva was taking a considered dislike to her.

  “Over there,” repeated the woman. “Oh, my name’s Fiona, by the way. And you are?”

  Eva took the proffered hand, felt the grittiness of brick dust rubbing against her palm.

  “Eva. And this is Ivan.”

  “Hello, Ivan,” said Fiona, and promptly ignored him again. “Tell you what, maybe if you just backed up another ten meters. Just to be on the safe side. Ah, there you go! Look, Eva, there they are!”

  Fiona gripped Eva’s arm and pointed.

  They were in a landscape that looked every bit as naturally formed as the rugged mountains to the north. A vista of low hills and twisting dales, filled with the gentle splash of running water. And yet there was no grass or plants or mud to paint the scene. The entire landscape was built of concrete and brick. Broken buildings reared around her, rubble and bricks forming scree at their base. Tarmacked roads, cracked into eroded plates, formed jigsaw paths through the greyness. And now, off to one side, silver VNMs were spilling out of a depression, spreading over the land like water welling from a hole.