You find innocence in the strangest places.
At the base of the ramp he caught one of the gull corpses with his foot and stumbled slightly. He kicked the clump of feathers away from him in a spray of turquoise sand.
‘Hansen,’ he snapped tightly. ‘Jiang. Get all of this shit off the beach. I want it cleared back two hundred metres from the ship on all sides.’
Ole Hansen raised an eyebrow and slotted an ironic salute in beside it. Sutjiadi wasn’t looking - he’d already stalked away towards the water’s edge.
Something wasn’t right.
Hansen and Jiang used the drives from two of the expedition’s grav bikes to blow the gull corpses back in a skirling knee-high storm front of feathers and sand. In the space they cleared around the Nagini, the encampment took rapid shape, speeded up by the return of Deprez, Vongsavath and Cruickshank from the trawler. By the time it was fully dark, five bubblefabs had sprouted from the sand in a rough circle around the assault ship. They were uniform in size, chameleochrome-coated and featureless apart from small illuminum numerals above each door. Each ’fab was equipped to sleep four in twin bunk rooms, separated by a central living space but two of the units had been assembled in a non-standard configuration with half the bedspace, one to serve as a general meeting room and the other as Tanya Wardani’s lab.
I found the archaeologue there, still sketching.
The hatch was open, freshly lasered out and hinged back on epoxy welding that still smelled faintly of resin. I touched the chime pad and leaned in.
‘What do you want?’ she asked, not looking up from what she was doing.
‘It’s me.’
‘I know who it is, Kovacs. What do you want?’
‘An invitation over the threshold?’
She stopped sketching and sighed, still not looking up.
‘We’re not in virtual any more, Kovacs. I—’
‘I wasn’t looking for a fuck.’
She hesitated, then met my gaze levelly. ‘That’s just as well.’
‘So do I get to come in?’
‘Suit yourself.’
I ducked through the entrance and crossed to where she was sitting, picking my way among the litter of hardcopy sheets the memoryboard had churned out. They were all variations on a theme - sequences of technoglyphs with scrawled annotation. As I watched, she put a line through the current sketch.
‘Getting anywhere?’
‘Slowly.’ She yawned. ‘I don’t remember as much as I thought. Going to have to redo some of the secondary configs from scratch again.’
I propped myself against a table edge.
‘So how long do you reckon?’
She shrugged. ‘A couple of days. Then there’s testing.’
‘How long for that?’
‘The whole thing, primaries and secondaries? I don’t know. Why? Your bone marrow starting to itch already?’
I glanced through the open door to where the fires in Sauberville cast a dull red glow on the night sky. This soon after the blast, and this close in, the elemental exotics would be out in force. Strontium 90, iodine 131 and all their numerous friends, like a ’methed-up party of Harlan family heirs crashing wharfside Millsport with their chittering bright enthusiasm. Wearing their unstable subatomic jackets like swamp panther skin, and wanting into everywhere, every cell they could fuck up with their heavily jewelled presence.
I twitched despite myself.
‘I’m just curious.’
‘An admirable quality. Must make soldiering difficult for you.’
I snapped open one of the camp chairs stacked beside the table and lowered myself into it. ‘I think you’re confusing curiosity with empathy.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. Curiosity’s a basic monkey trait. Torturers are full of it. Doesn’t make you a better human being.’
‘Well, I suppose you’d know.’
It was an admirable riposte. I didn’t know if she’d been tortured in the camp - in the momentary flare of anger I hadn’t cared - but she never flinched as the words came out.
‘Why are you behaving like this, Wardani?’
‘I told you we’re not in virtual any more.’
‘No.’
I waited. Eventually she got up and went across to the back wall of the compartment, where a bank of monitors for the remote gear showed the gate from a dozen slightly different angles.
‘You’ll have to forgive me, Kovacs,’ she said heavily. ‘Today I saw a hundred thousand people murdered to clear the way for our little venture, and I know, I know, we didn’t do it, but it’s a little too convenient for me not to feel responsible. If I go for a walk, I know there are little bits of them blowing around in the wind out there. And that’s without those heroes of the revolution you killed so efficiently this morning. I’m sorry, Kovacs. I have no training at this sort of thing.’
‘You won’t want to talk about the two bodies we fished out of the trawl nets, then.’
‘Is there something to talk about?’ She didn’t look round.
‘Deprez and Jiang just got through with the autosurgeon. Still no idea what killed them. No trace of trauma in any of the bone structure, and there’s not a great deal else left to work from.’ I moved up beside her, closer to the monitors. ‘I’m told there are tests we can do with bone at cellular level, but I have a feeling they aren’t going to tell us anything either.’
That got her looking at me.
‘Why?’
‘Because whatever killed them has something to do with this.’ I tapped the glass of a monitor where the gate loomed close up. ‘And this is like nothing any of us have seen before.’
‘You think something came through the gate at the witching hour?’ she asked scornfully. ‘The vampires got them?’
‘Something got them,’ I said mildly. ‘They didn’t die of old age. Their stacks are gone.’
‘Doesn’t that rule out the vampire option? Stack excision is a peculiarly human atrocity, isn’t it?’
‘Not necessarily. Any civilisation that could build a hyperportal must have been able to digitise consciousness.’
‘There’s no actual evidence for that.’
‘Not even common sense?’
‘Common sense?’ The scorn was back in her voice. ‘The same common sense that said a thousand years ago that obviously the sun goes round the earth, just look at it? The common sense that Bogdanovich appealed to when he set up hub theory? Common sense is anthropocentric, Kovacs. It assumes that because this is the way human beings turned out, it has to be the way any intelligent technological species would turn out.’
‘I’ve heard some pretty convincing arguments along those lines.’
‘Yeah, haven’t we all,’ she said shortly. ‘Common sense for the common herd, and why bother to feed them anything else. What if Martian ethics didn’t permit re-sleeving, Kovacs? Ever think of that? What if death means you’ve proved yourself unworthy of life? That even if you could be brought back, you have no right to it.’
‘In a technologically advanced culture? A starfaring culture? This is bullshit, Wardani.’
‘No, it’s a theory. Function-related raptor ethics. Ferrer and Yoshimoto at Bradbury. And at the moment, there’s very little hard evidence around to disprove it.’
‘Do you believe it?’
She sighed and went back to her seat. ‘Of course I don’t believe it. I’m just trying to demonstrate that there’s more to eat at this party than the cosy little certainties human science is handing round. We know almost nothing about the Martians, and that’s after hundreds of years of study. What we think we know could be proved completely wrong at any moment, easily. Half of the things we dig up, we have no idea what they are, and we still sell them as fucking coffee-table trinkets. Right now, someone back on Latimer has probably got the encoded secret of a faster-than-light drive mounted on their fucking living-room wall.’ She paused. ‘And it’s probably upside down.’
I laughed out loud.
It shattered the tension in the ’fab. Wardani’s face twitched in an unwilling smile.
‘No, I mean it,’ she muttered. ‘You think, just because I can open this gate, that we’ve got some kind of handle on it. Well, we haven’t. You can’t assume anything here. You can’t think in human terms.’
‘OK, fine.’ I followed her back to the centre of the room and reclaimed my own seat. In fact, the thought of a human stack being retrieved by some kind of Martian gate commando, the thought of that personality being downloaded into a Martian virtuality and what that might do to a human mind, was making my spine crawl. It was an idea I would have been just as happy never to have come up with. ‘But you’re the one who’s beginning to sound like a vampire story now.’
‘I’m just warning you.’
‘OK, I’m warned. Now tell me something else. How many other archaeologues knew about this site?’
‘Outside of my own team?’ She considered. ‘We filed with central processing in Landfall, but that was before we knew what it was. It was just listed as an obelisk. Artefact of Unknown Function, but like I said, AUFs are practically every second thing we dig up.’
‘You know Hand says there’s no record of an object like this in the Landfall registry.’
‘Yeah, I read the report. Files get lost, I guess.’
‘Seems a little too convenient to me. And files may get lost, but not files on the biggest find since Bradbury.’
‘I told you, we filed it as an AUF. An obelisk. Another obelisk. We’d already turned up a dozen structural pieces along this coast by the time we found this one.’
‘And you never updated? Not even when you knew what it was?’
‘No.’ She gave me a crooked smile. ‘The Guild has always given me a pretty hard time about my Wycinski-esque tendencies, and a lot of the Scratchers I took on got tarred by association. Cold-shouldered by colleagues, slagged off in academic journals. The usual conformist stuff. When we realised what we’d found, I think we all felt the Guild could wait until we were ready to make them eat their words in style.’
‘And when the war started, you buried it for the same reasons?’
‘Got it in one.’ She shrugged. ‘It might sound childish now, but at the time we were all pretty angry. I don’t know if you’d understand that. How it feels to have every piece of research you do, every theory you come up with, rubbished because you once took the wrong side in a political dispute.’
I thought briefly back to the Innenin hearings.
‘It sounds familiar enough.’
‘I think.’ She hesitated. ‘I think there was something else as well. You know the night we opened the gate for the first time, we went crazy. Big party, lots of chemicals, lots of talk. Everyone was talking about full professorships back on Latimer; they said I’d be made an honorary Earth scholar in recognition of my work.’ She smiled. ‘I think I even made an acceptance speech. I don’t remember that stage of the evening too well, never did, even the next morning.’
She sighed and rid herself of the smile.
‘Next morning, we started to think straight. Started to think about what was really going to happen. We knew that if we filed, we’d lose control. The Guild would fly in a Master with all the right political affiliations to take charge of the project, and we’d be sent home with a pat on the back. Oh, we’d be back from the academic wilderness of course, but only at a price. We’d be allowed to publish, but only after careful vetting to make sure there wasn’t too much Wycinski in the text. There’d be work, but not on an independent basis. Consultancy,’ she pronounced the word as if it tasted bad, ‘on someone else’s projects. We’d be well paid, but paid to keep quiet.’
‘Better than not getting paid at all.’
A grimace. ‘If I’d wanted to work second shovel to some smooth-faced politically-appropriate fuck with half my experience and qualifications, I could have gone to the plains like everybody else. The whole reason I was out here in the first place was because I wanted my own dig. I wanted the chance to prove that something I believed in was right.’
‘Did the others feel that strongly?’
‘In the end. In the beginning, they signed up with me because they needed the work and at the time no one else was hiring Scratchers. But a couple of years living with contempt changes you. And they were young, most of them. That gives you energy for your anger.’
I nodded.
‘Could that be who we found in the nets?’
She looked away. ‘I suppose so.’
‘How many were there on the team? People who could have come back here and opened the gate?’
‘I don’t know. About half a dozen of them were actually Guild-qualified, there were probably two or three of those who could have. Aribowo. Weng, maybe. Techakriengkrai. They were all good. But on their own? Working backwards from our notes, working together?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Kovacs. It was. A different time. A team thing. I’ve got no idea how any of those people would perform under different circumstances. Kovacs, I don’t even know how I’ll perform any more.’
A memory of her beneath the waterfall flickered, unfairly, off the comment. It coiled around itself in my guts. I groped after the thread of my thoughts.
‘Well, there’ll be DNA files for them in the Guild archives at Landfall.’
‘Yes.’
‘And we can run a DNA match from the bones—’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘—but it’s going to be hard to get through and access data in Landfall from here. And to be honest, I’m not sure what purpose it’ll serve. I don’t much care who they are. I just want to know how they ended up in that net.’
She shivered.
‘If it’s them,’ she began, then stopped. ‘I don’t want to know who it is, Kovacs. I can live without that.’
I thought about reaching for her, across the small space between our chairs, but sitting there she seemed suddenly as gaunt and folded as the thing we had come here to unlock. I couldn’t see a point of contact anywhere on her body that would not make my touch seem intrusive, overtly sexual or just ridiculous.
The moment passed. Died.
‘I’m going to get some sleep,’ I said, standing up. ‘You probably better do the same. Sutjiadi’s going to want a crack-of-dawn start.’
She nodded vaguely. Most of her attention had slipped away from me. At a guess, she was staring down the barrel of her own past.
I left her alone amidst the litter of torn technoglyph sketches.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I woke up groggy with either the radiation or the chemicals I’d taken to hold it down. There was grey light filtering through the bubblefab’s dormitory window and a dream scuttling out the back of my head half seen . . .
Do you see, Wedge Wolf ? Do you see?
Semetaire?
I lost it to the sound of enthusiastic teeth-cleaning from the bathroom niche. Twisting my head, I saw Schneider towelling his hair dry with one hand while he scrubbed vigorously at his gums with a powerbrush held in the other.
‘Morning,’ he frothed.
‘Morning.’ I propped myself upright. ‘What time is it?’
‘Little after five.’ He made an apologetic shrug and turned to spit in the basin. ‘Wouldn’t be up myself, but Jiang is out there bouncing around in some martial arts frenzy, and I’m a light sleeper.’
I cocked my head and listened. From beyond the canvasynth flap, the neurachem brought me the clear sounds of hard breathing and loose clothing snapping repeatedly taut.
‘Fucking psycho,’ I grumbled.
‘Hey, he’s in good company on this beach. I thought it was a requirement. Half the people you recruited are fucking psychos.’
‘Yeah, but Jiang’s the only one with insomnia, it appears.’ I stumbled upright, frowning at the time it was taking for the combat sleeve to get itself properly online. Maybe this was what Jiang Jianping was fighting. Sleeve damage is an unpleasant wake-up call and, however subtly it m
anifests itself, a harbinger of eventual mortality. Even with the faint twinges that come with the onset of age, the message is flashing numeral clear. Limited time remaining. Blink, blink.
Rush/snap!
‘Haiii!!!’
‘Right.’ I pressed my eyeballs hard with finger and thumb. ‘I’m awake now. You finished with that brush?’
Schneider handed the powerbrush over. I stabbed a new head from the dispenser, pushed it to life and stepped into the shower niche.
Rise and shine.
Jiang had powered down somewhat by the time I stepped, dressed and relatively clear-headed, through the dormitory flap to the central living space. He stood rooted, swivelling slightly from side to side and weaving a slow pattern of defensive configurations around him. The table and chairs in the living space had been cleared to one side to make room, and the main exit from the ’fab was bound back. Light streamed into the space from outside, tinged blue from the sand.
I got a can of military-issue amphetamine cola from the dispenser, pulled the tab and sipped, watching.
‘Was there something?’ Jiang asked, as his head shifted in my direction behind a wide sweeping right-arm block. Sometime the previous night he’d razored the Maori sleeve’s thick dark hair back to an even two centimetres all over. The face the cut revealed was big-boned and hard.
‘You do this every morning?’
‘Yes.’ The syllable came out tight. Block, counterstrike, groin and sternum. He was very fast when he wanted to be.
‘Impressive.’
‘Necessary.’ Another death blow, probably to the temple, and delivered out of a combination of blocks that telegraphed retreat. Very nice. ‘Every skill must be practised. Every act rehearsed. A blade is only a blade when it cuts.’
I nodded. ‘Hayashi.’
The patterns slowed fractionally.
‘You have read him?’
‘Met him once.’
Jiang stopped and looked at me narrowly. ‘You met Toru Hayashi?’
‘I’m older than I look. We deployed together on Adoracion.’
The Complete SF Collection Page 71