Norton shook his head. ‘You say Merrin’s not damaged? You weren’t there when they cracked the hull on Horkan’s Pride. You didn’t see the mess he left.’
‘I know he fed off the passengers.’
‘No. He didn’t just feed off them, Marsalis. He ripped them apart, gouged out their eyes and scattered the fucking pieces from one end of the crew section to the other. That’s what he did.’ Norton took a steadying breath. ‘You want to call that a plan of action, go right ahead. To me, it sounds like good old-fashioned insanity.’
It was a fractional pause, but Sevgi saw how the news stopped Marsalis dead.
‘Well, you’ll need to show me footage of that,’ he said finally. ‘But my guess is there was a reason for whatever he did.’
Norton grinned mirthlessly. ‘Sure there was a reason. Seven months alone in deep space, and a diet of human flesh. I’d be feeling pretty edgy myself under the circumstances.’
‘It’s not enough.’
‘So you say. Ever consider you might be wrong about this? Maybe Merrin did crack. Maybe variant thirteen just isn’t as beyond human as everybody thinks.’
That got a sour smile out of Marsalis. ‘Thanks for the solidarity, Tom. It’s a nice thought, but I’m in no hurry to be assimilated. Variant thirteen is not human the way you are, and this guy Merrin isn’t going to be an exception. You judge what he does by normal human yardsticks, you’ll be making a big mistake. Meanwhile, you hired me to echo-profile the guy, so how about we get on and do that, starting with the last living thing to see him alive. You going to let me talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn, or not?’
CHAPTER TWENTY
The night sky lay at his feet.
Not a night sky you could see from Earth or Mars, or anywhere else this far out on a galactic arm. Instead, the black floor was densely splattered with incandescence. Stars crowded each other’s brilliance or studded the multi-coloured marble veins of nebulae. It might have been an accurately generated view from some hypothetical world at the core of the Milky Way, it might just have been a thousand different local night skies, overlaid one on top of the other and amped up to blazing. He took a couple of steps and stars crunched into white powder underfoot, smeared across the inky black. Over his head, the sky was a claustrophobic steel grey, daubed with ugly blob riveting in wide spiral runs.
Fucking ghosts in the machine.
No one knew why the shipboard djinns ran their virtual environments like this. Queries on the subject from human interface engineers met with vague responses which made no linguistic sense. Flown from it-will, cannot the heavy, there-at, through-at, slopeless and ripe was one of the famous ones. Carl had known an IF engineer on Mars who had it typed out and pasted above his bunk as a koan. The accompanying mathematics apparently made even less sense, though the guy insisted they had a certain insane elegance, whatever that was supposed to mean. He was planning a book, a collection of n-djinn haiku printed very small on expensive paper, with illustrations of the virtual formats on the facing pages.
Itwas Carl’s opinion, admittedly unfounded on any actual evidence, that the n-djinns were making elaborate jokes at humanity’s dull-witted expense. He supposed that the book, if it ever saw print, could be seen as a punchline delivered.
In his darker moments, he wondered what might come after that. The joke over, the gloves off.
‘Marsalis.’
The voice came first, then the ’face, almost as if the n-djinn had forgotten it should manifest a focus the human could address. Like someone asking for a contact number, and then groping about for a pen to write it down. The ’face shaded in. A blued, confetti-shredded androgynous body that stood as if being continually blown away in a wind tunnel. Long ragged hair, streaming back. Flesh like a million tiny fluttering wings, stirring on the bone. It was impossible to make out male or female features. Under the voice, there was a tiny rustling, crackling sound, like paper burning up.
It was a little like talking to an angel. Carl grimaced.
‘That’s me. Been looking me up?’
‘You feature in the flow.’ The ’face lifted one arm and a curtain of images cascaded from it to the star-strewn floor. He spotted induction photos from Osprey, media footage following the Felipe Souza rescue, other stuff that lit odd corners of memory in him and made them newly familiar. Somewhere in amongst it all he thought he saw Marisol’s face, but it was hard to tell. A defensive twinge went through him.
‘Didn’t know they were letting you hook up so soon.’
It was a lie. Ertekin had shown him the release documentation from MIT - he knew to the hour when the n-djinn had been recalibrated and allowed back into the flow.
‘It is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data,’ the blue figure said gravely. ‘Re-enabling a nano-level artificial consciousness engine necessitates reconnection to local dataflows.’
Unhumanly, the djinn had left the upheld arm where it was and the downpour of images ran on. Carl gestured towards the display.
‘Right. So what does the local dataflow have to say about me lately?’
‘Many things. UNGLA currently defines you as a genetic licensing agent. The Miami Herald calls you a murderer. Reverend Jessie Marshall of the Church of Human Purity calls you an abomination, but this is a generalised reference. News feeds abstracted from the Mars dataflow and currently held locally refer to you as this year’s luckiest man on Mars, though the year in question is of course 2099. The Frankfurter Allgemein called y-’
‘Yeah, fine. You can stop there.’ Shipboard n-djinns were famously literal-minded. It was in the nature of the job they did. Minimal requirement for interface. Humans were deep-frozen freight. The djinns sat alone, sunk in black silence laced with star static, talked occasionally with other machines on Mars and Earth when docking or other logistics required it. ‘I came to ask you a couple of questions.’
The ’face waited.
‘Do you recall Allen Merrin?’
‘Yes.’ Merrin’s gaunt Christ-like features evolved in the air at the ’face’s shoulder. Standard ID likeness. ‘Occupant of crew section beta capsule, redesignated for human freight under COLIN interplanetary traffic directive c93-ep4652-21. Cryo-certified Bradbury November 5th 2106, protocol code 55528187.’
‘Yeah, except he didn’t really occupy the beta capsule much, did he?’
‘No. The system revived him at four hundred and fourteen hours of trajectory time.’
‘You’ve told the debriefing crew that you shut down voluntarily at three hundred and seventy-nine hours, on suspicion of corruptive material in a navigational module.’
‘Yes. I was concerned to prevent a possible viral agent from passing into the secondary navigational core. Quarantine measures were appropriate.’
‘And Merrin wakes up thirty-six hours later. Is that a coincidence?’
The blue shredded figure hesitated, face expressionless, eyes fixed on him. Carl guessed it was trying to calibrate his perceptions of relatedness and event, gleaning it from a million tiny shreds of evidence laid down in the details the dataflow held about him. Was he superstitious, was he religious? What feelings did he have about the role of chance in human affairs? The n-djinn was running his specifications, the way a machine would check the interface topography on a new piece of software.
It took about twenty seconds.
‘There is no systems evidence to indicate a relation between the two events. The revival appears to have been a capsule malfunction.’
‘Were you aware of Merrin once he was awake?’
‘To a limited extent, yes. As I said, it is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data. In a quarantine lockdown, the ship’s secondary systems continue to feed into my cores, though it is impossible for me to actively respond to them in any way. The traffic is one-way, an interrupt protocol prevents feedback. You might consider this similar to the data processed by a human mind during REM sleep.’
&
nbsp; ‘So you dreamed Merrin.’
‘That is one way of describing it, yes.’
‘And in these dreams, did Merrin talk?’
The confetti streaming figure shifted slightly in the grip of its invisible gale. There was an expression on its face that might have been curiosity. Might equally well have been mild pain, or restrained sexual ecstasy. It hadn’t really got the hang of human features.
‘Talk to whom?’
Carl shrugged, but it felt anything but casual. He was too freighted with the cold memories. ‘To the machines. To the people in the cryocaps. Did he talk to himself? To the stars, maybe? He was out there a long time.’
‘If you consider this talking, then yes. He talked.’
‘Often?’
‘I am not calibrated to judge what would be considered often in human terms. Merrin was silent for eighty-seven point twenty-two per cent of the trajectory, including time spent in sleep. Forty-three point nine per cent of his speech was apparently directed-’
‘All right, never mind. Are you equipped for Yaroshanko intuitive function?’
‘Yaroshanko’s underlying constants are present in my operating systems, yes.’
‘Good, then I’d like to run a Tjaden/Wasson honorific for links between myself and Merrin, making inference along a Yaroshanko curve. No more than two degrees of separation.’
‘What referents do you wish employed for the curve?’
‘Initially, both our footprints in the total dataflow. Or as much of it as they’re letting you have access to. You’re going to get a lot of standard Bacon links; they’re not what I’m after.’ Carl wished suddenly that Matthew was here to handle this for him, to reach quick-silver swift and cool down the wires and engage the machine at something like its own levels of consciousness. Matthew would have been at ease in here - Carl felt clumsy by contrast, the terminology of complexity math tasted awkward on his tongue. ‘Cross reference to everything Merrin said or did while he was aboard Horkan’s Pride. Bring me anything that shows up there.’
The blue shredded figure shifted slightly, rippling in the gale that Carl could not feel.
‘This will take time,’ it said.
Carl looked around at the unending sky-floored desolation of the construct. He shrugged.
‘Better get me a chair then.’
He could, he supposed, have left the virtuality and killed the time somehow in the vaulted neoNordic halls of COLIN’s Jefferson Park complex. He could have talked to Sevgi Ertekin some more, maybe even tried to massage Tom Norton back into a more compliant attitude with some male-on-male platitudes. He could have eaten something - his stomach was a blotched ache from lack of anything but coffee since Florida the previous night; he ignored it with trained stoicism - or just gone for a walk among the jutting riverside terraces of the complex. He had the run of the place, Sevgi said.
Instead, he sat under the rivet-scarred metal sky and watched Merrin walk through the n-djinn’s dreams.
The ’face had left him to his chair - a colliding geometry of comet trail lines and nebula gas upholstery, spun up out of the night sky as if flung at him - and disappeared into the dwindling perspectives of the wind that blew continually through its body. Something else blew back in its place - at first a tiny rectangular panel like an antique holographic postage stamp Carl had once seen in a London museum, fluttering stiff-cornered and growing in size as it approached until it slammed to a silent halt, three metres tall, two broad and angled slightly backward at the base, a handful of paces in front of where he sat. It was a cascade of images like the curtain where he’d seen his own face fall from the djinn’s upheld arm. Silent and discoherent with the n-djinn’s unhuman associative processes.
He saw Merrin wake from the beta capsule in the crew section, groggy from the revival but already moving with a recognisable focused economy. Saw him pacing the dorsal corridor of Horkan’s Pride, face unreadable.
Saw him clean Helena Larsen’s meat from between his teeth with a micro-gauge manual screwdriver from the maintenance lockers.
Saw him request a lateral viewport unshuttered, the ships’ interior lighting killed. Saw him brace his arms either side of the glass and stare out like a sick man into a mirror.
Saw him scream, jaw yawning wide, but silent, silent.
Saw him cut the throat of a limbless body as it revived, splayed palm held to block the arterial spray. Saw him gouge out the eyes, carefully, thoughtfully, one at a time, and smear them off his fingers against the matt-textured metal of a bulkhead.
Saw him talking to someone who wasn’t there.
Saw him turn, once, in the corridor and look up at the camera, as if he knew Carl was watching him. He smiled, then, and Carl felt how it chilled him as his own facial muscles responded.
There was more, a lot more, even in the scant time it took the n-djinn to run the Tjaden/Wasson. The images juddered and flashed and were eaten over by other screen effects. He wasn’t sure why the machine was showing it to him or what criteria it was using to select. It was the same sensation he knew from his time aboard Felipe Souza, the irritable feeling of trying to second-guess a capricious god he’d been assured - no really, it’s true, it’s in the programming - was watching over him. The feeling of sense just out of reach.
Maybe the djinn read something in him he wasn’t aware of letting show, a need he didn’t know he had. Maybe it thought this was what he wanted.
Maybe it was what he wanted. He wasn’t sure.
He wasn’t sure why he stayed there watching. But he was glad when it was over.
The floating, blue shredded figure returned.
‘There is this,’ it told him, and raised one restless, rippling arm like a wing. On the screen beneath, Merrin walked behind the automated gurney as it took Helena Larsen on her short journey from the cryocap chamber to the autosurgeon. The second trip for her - just below the line of her leotard, her right thigh already ended in a neatly bandaged stump. She was mumbling to herself in post revival semi-wakefulness, barely audible, but the n-djinn compensated and dragged in the sound.
‘. . . not again,’ she pleaded vaguely.
Merrin leaned in to catch the murmur of her voice, but not by much. His hearing would be preternaturally sharp, Carl knew, tuned up by now in the endless smothering stillness aboard the vessel as it fell homeward, honed in the dark aural shadow of the emptiness outside, where the abruptly deepened hum of a power web upping capacity in the walls would be enough to jerk you from sleep, and the sound of a dropped kitchen utensil seemed to clang from one end of the ship to the other. Your footfalls went muffled in spacedeck slippers designed not to scratch or scrape, and after a while you found yourself trying almost superstitiously not to break the hush in other ways as well. Speaking - to yourself, for sanity’s sake, to the sentient and semi-sentient machines that kept you alive, to the dreaming visages behind the cryocap faceplates, to anyone or anything else you thought might be listening - speaking became an act of obscure defiance, a reckless violation of the silence.
‘Again, yes,’ Merrin told the woman he was feeding off. ‘The cormorant’s legacy.’
The image froze.
‘Cormorant,’ said Carl, memory flexing awake.
‘Merrin uses the same word, out of context, on several occasions,’ said the djinn. ‘An association suggests itself. According to data from Wells region work camp rotas on Mars, both you and Merrin were acquainted with Robert P. Danvers, sin 84437hp3535. Yaroshanko-form extrapolation from this connects you both through Danvers to the Martian familias andinas, and, integrating with the term cormorant used here, with high probability to the sin-disputed identity Franklin Gutierrez.’
Carl sat quietly for a while. The memories came thick and fast, the emotions he thought he’d discarded half a decade ago. He felt his fingers crook like talons at his sides
‘Well, well, well,’ he said at last. ‘Gutierrez.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘Never heard of him.’
/> Norton, preparing to be unimpressed. He was standing close enough to Carl for it to be a challenge.
‘No, you wouldn’t have,’ Carl agreed. He brushed past Norton, went to the office window and stared out at the view. Smashed autumn sunlight lay across the East River in metallic patches, like some kind of chemical slick. ‘Franklin Gutierrez used to be a datahawk in Lima back in the mid eighties. One of the best, by all accounts. In eighty-six, he cracked Serbanco for upward of half a billion soles. Immaculate execution, it took them nearly a month to even realise he’d done it.’
Norton grunted. ‘Couldn’t have been that immaculate, if he ended up on Mars.’
Carl fought down a sudden urge to remove Norton’s vocal cords with his bare hands. He summoned patience from within, Sutherland style. Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead. He focused on the details of the view below. COLIN New York, perhaps in conscious locational echo of the UN territory, stood a couple of long blocks south of Jefferson Park, vaulted and cantilevered over Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and looking out across the river. It was a fractal tumbling of structure that recalled nothing so much as a handful of abandoned segments from a huge peeled orange. Thin white nanocarb spidered over curves and angles of smoked amber glass, then swept down to brace elegantly amidst the multi-level array of carefully tended walkways, paths and gardens that linked each section into the whole site. You could stand here in the vaulted open-plan office suite Ertekin and Norton shared and look down across the whole thing, the gardens, the jutting edge of the mezzanine and the river beyond. Carl’s gaze reeled back out to the water, and he suffered a sudden resurgence of a feeling from his first days back on Earth seven years ago, a time when the sight of any large body of water came as an abrupt, visceral shock.
The Complete SF Collection Page 228