by Paul McAuley
‘Use this, kid,’ she told Hari, and threw a package at him.
His bios caught it, ran it through a sandbox to check for hidden djinns, implemented the simple trait it contained. Layers of information settled through him. Map and phone functions, a ticker that showed the slow, steady unravelling of his store of credit. The hours left before he had to go to work for the city, or find a way of leaving it.
He thanked the woman (her tag was a wireframe cube that contained a clear blue flame and no readable information, not even her name); she shrugged inside her jacket.
This was in a dark little shop where thick, heavy True lifebooks, bound in metal or manskin or shimmering polymers, were chained to wooden presses. A single volume was spreadeagled on a lectern, its broad pages spread wider than the span of Hari’s arms and printed with double columns of elegant handwritten script as black as the outer dark. Intricate and colourful illustrations framed the tall initial letters of the first words of every paragraph, and at the top of the right-hand page a woman with a burning gaze and bright yellow hair looked out of a window, talking about something that no doubt had been important in the long ago, when she had been alive.
The teashop was next door, an open-air terrace two storeys up, overlooking a hutong crowded with stalls selling flotsam and jetsam from the long ago. Rav and Hari settled on cushions at the edge of the terrace, Hari with a cup of smoky gunpowder tea, Rav with a glass of hot water into which he crushed acid yellow berries, releasing a sharp pungent odour and giving the water a urinous tint. Hari’s tweaked bios revealed schools of tags glittering above the stalls, explicating the function and provenance of every item. Machines, machine parts. Antique costumes. The glass catafalque of an ancient surgical bot. Frayed battle colours. Cases of trait rings. A flock of dead microsats. A p-suit helmet with a slit visor and a pinlight crest, reputed to have been owned by the Champion of the Tharsis Protectorate . . .
‘I wouldn’t be surprised to find trinkets excavated by your family down there,’ Rav said.
Hari blushed: it was exactly what he’d been thinking. ‘You tailor algorithms to revive old machines,’ he said, reading the information off Rav’s tag. ‘Is that what we have in common – salvage?’
‘That’s what I do for a living, but that isn’t why I came here to find you. Dig deeper. Begin at the beginning. Where was I quickened?’
‘That I already knew,’ Hari said. ‘The Republic of Arden. My family had some business there, years ago.’
‘Before the Bright Moment, no doubt. Before my people took a wrong turn.’
‘You had a civil war . . .’
‘Now we’re getting to it,’ Rav said. ‘We were philosophers once upon a time, mostly interested in the fine structure of universes. Theoretical work, mostly. And then the elders became infected with bad ideas about the nature of the Bright Moment, and joined up with an end-time cult, the Saints. That’s when we had ourselves that civil war. I was on the losing side.’
‘And you think that these Saints have something to do with the hijack of my family’s ship,’ Hari said.
‘Their leader, Levi, took his name from the leader of another, much older cult. He took many of his ideas from it, too. A mixture of philosophy and frank mysticism. He plans to vasten himself and his followers, just as Sri Hong-Owen vastened herself. He wants to become a god. He believes that the Bright Moment contains instructions on how that can be done. The elders of my people think that, too. The Saints have recruited a number of philosophers to their cause, and are reputed to have kidnapped others. And Dr Gagarian and his associates were working on the nature of the Bright Moment . . .’
‘It’s an interesting theory,’ Hari said. ‘But do you have any hard evidence that these Saints had anything to do with the hijack?’
‘Even if they didn’t, I’d still like to find out what your late tick-tock philosopher discovered. Most of my friends were killed in the civil war. The rest of us fled into exile, where we’ve been plotting to overthrow the elders and pitch out the Saints ever since. The problem is, we are each of us individualists,’ Rav said. ‘It’s our nature. When we hunt, we like to hunt alone. We need a strong idea to unite us. Preferably something that will disprove the nonsense championed by the elders and the Saints.’
‘Can you open Dr Gagarian’s files?’
Rav inhaled the steam rising from his infusion, then gulped it down with a sudden swift motion. Hari wouldn’t have been surprised if the Ardenist had crushed the glass in his fist and chewed down the fragments; like Nabhomani, he had the restless, barely contained energies of someone easily bored, who’d do something shocking for the instant reaction, to challenge himself or other people.
What he did instead was curl his long, pointed red tongue inside the glass and lick the slurry of berry pulp from the bottom. ‘Although I have many talents,’ he said, ‘the ability to break tick-tock encryption isn’t one of them. But I know someone who can.’
‘Here, in Fei Shen?’
‘That would be convenient, wouldn’t it? No, she doesn’t live here, but I have a ship, I can take you to her . . . Ah, now I really do have your interest. More than anything else, I think, you want to get off this rock. I don’t blame you. Fei Shen is a good place to do business, but the Free People extract a high price for their hospitality. You want a ticket out; I have a ship. You have the tick-tock philosopher’s head, we both want to find out what’s inside it, and I know someone who can help us with that . . . It all works out very neatly, don’t you think?’
‘I think I need to think about it,’ Hari said.
‘I understand. We’re both exiles. And when you’re an exile, well, not to put your trust in anyone; that is the Law. I’ve already helped you tweak your bios – it was nothing, no need to thank me for it, and I’ll give you something else for free, too. To show my good intentions. To prove that I can help you. Meet me this evening at the caravanserai, and we’ll visit a friend of mine.’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘Because you’re curious. Because you have enough sense to realise I can help you.’ Rav stood, quick and fluid, smiled down at Hari. ‘Oh, and because my friend has some information about the location of your family’s ship.’
6
As he crossed Fei Shen, navigating the starburst of its avenues and the ladders of narrow hutongs that linked them, Hari used his new trait to access the city’s commons. He tried and failed to contact the p-suit’s eidolon, and after a little thought set up a room in the freespace quarter and equipped it with a model of Pabuji’s Gift and a message point: if the eidolon was searching for him, she’d find that sooner or later. Then he checked the records of the city’s docks, and discovered that a ship registered to Rav, of the True Sons of the Republic of Arden, had put in fifteen days ago. So that much was true: Rav could help him escape from Fei Shen. And then there was his claim that one of his friends knew the current location of Pabuji’s Gift . . .
Hari didn’t trust the Ardenist, but he knew that he couldn’t walk away from his offer of help. It was possible – it seemed to be the best possibility – that Rav was honest but crazy. Posthumans were prone to extremes of pareidolia. They heard whispering voices in the radio pulses of Jupiter or Saturn. They saw patterns in sunspot activity that predicted the future, connections between past and present that hinted at vast and malign secret histories. Rav blamed his exile on an end-time cult, the Saints, so it wouldn’t be surprising if he saw traces of their conspiracies everywhere, including the hijack of Pabuji’s Gift. But it was more likely, Hari thought, that Rav’s interest in him was purely mercenary: that he saw the chance to make a profit from exploiting the secrets locked inside Dr Gagarian’s head. It was even possible that the Ardenist was working for the hijackers, or was hoping to make some kind of deal with them.
Nabhomani had taught Hari that if someone makes an offer that seems too good to be true, nine times out of ten it is too good to be true. A lure, bait for some kind of scam or deception. Trash talk masquerading as
the truth. But you don’t dismiss it out of hand, Nabhomani had said. You examine it from every angle and investigate the person who made the offer, and if it turns out that it might be of value, you use what you’ve learned to make a counter-offer.
Hari definitely needed to learn more about Rav: to find out whether he was mad or bad. Or mad and bad. And he needed to learn all he could about the files in Dr Gagarian’s head, too. Even if Rav was right, even if an ordinary head doctor couldn’t crack the tick-tock’s encryption, he could at least find out if anyone else had tried.
The Avenue of the Elevation of the Mind was quiet and shabby. It reminded Hari of the unused sections of the ship, of abandoned settlements and installations. The poignant dilapidation of things that had lost meaning and purpose, their slow decay unwatched, unmarked. More than half the buildings on either side of its broad strip of half-life grass were shuttered; most of the rest housed workshops that repaired and refurbished bots. Hari found the Almond Pit at one end of a short arcade of head shops, but walked past it because he didn’t quite trust Gabriel Daza, and didn’t want to incur a debt by accepting his recommendation.
Most of the other head shops had eidolons posted outside. They targeted Hari as he went by, drifting after him, getting in his face, conjuring windows, trying to port fliers to his bios, bragging about the prowess of their owners and warning him about the dishonest claims of rivals, making extravagant promises about boosting intelligence, information processing and theory-of-mind skills, removing or recovering memories, enhancing sexual pleasure and aesthetic appreciation, implanting traits . . . A small comet-tail of especially persistent eidolons followed him down the avenue, and at last he ducked into a place that lacked any kind of advertisement to shake them off.
Steps led down to a small, square, dimly lit room. Its walls were hung with swags and folds of pinkish-grey fabric. More fabric bulged from the ceiling. It was blessedly quiet, and shielded from the city’s cloud; the sole piece of furniture was a kind of attenuated crash couch that hung above the floor with no visible means of support.
The proprietor, Eli Yong according to her tag, materialised from the shadows behind the floating couch. She was a small, neat woman dressed in leggings and a knee-length smock. Her shaved scalp was tattooed with spidery words or symbols in a language Hari’s bios didn’t recognise; her eyes were masked by tinted goggles.
‘You’re the boy who crashed on Vesta.’
‘I suppose I am.’
‘And I suppose you want me to fix that black-market trait,’ Eli Yong said. ‘You purchased it from some free trader who told you it would work as well as the official version, and now you’ve come to your senses.’
‘I was wondering if you could open files stored in a tick-tock’s head,’ Hari said.
‘The head you’re carrying in that flask, I assume.’
‘It’s the only head I possess.’
‘Apart from your own.’
‘I think I know what’s inside my own head. I came here because I need to find out what’s inside the tick-tock’s.’
‘If everyone knew their own head, I would be out of business,’ Eli Yong said. ‘As for the tick-tock’s, to open that you’ll need to find another tick-tock. I’m the best head doctor in Fei Shen, but even I won’t be able to get at its files. And if anyone else here promises they can, they’ll be lying. Tick-tock encryption is famously gnarly.’
‘So I’ve been told. But even if you can’t open the files, could you determine whether or not anyone else has tried to look inside?’
The head doctor was silent for a moment, staring at Hari through her tinted goggles. He was beginning to wonder if he’d insulted or upset her when she surprised him with a quick smile.
‘Why not?’ she said, and waved away his question about a fee. ‘I’ll do it for fun. I’ve never interrogated a tick-tock’s head before.’
Hari shrugged the cryoflask from his shoulder, asked if he should take out the head. He assumed that Eli Yong would plug it into some kind of arcane apparatus. Probes guided by laser-painted grids, the hum and crackle of mysterious energies . . .
‘I’ve already scanned it,’ the head doctor said.
A pict appeared in the air above the couch’s slim rectangle: a head clad in smooth black skin that slowly became transparent, revealing the articulation of the lower jaw and tombstone rows of teeth, the balls of the eyes, the cloudy jelly of the brain. There were cylindrical and rectangular modules and beaded strings embedded everywhere in the brain’s hemispheres, and the whole was wrapped in a thin shroud woven from fine, intricately tangled threads and filaments.
Eli Yong brushed the air with long white fingers; the view zoomed in. ‘Someone inserted a probe behind his eye,’ she said. ‘There.’
The pict of the head enlarged, and a single thread was suddenly painted with bright scarlet light. It curved around the ball of the right eye, entered the brain through a notched aperture at the back of the socket, and traced a path towards the rear of the brain’s left hemisphere.
‘They tried to hide it by running it parallel to the optic nerve,’ the head doctor said. ‘Very sly, but not sly enough. It terminates at this false gyrus, close to the parietal lobe. That’s where most traits and files are accessed and controlled by the subject’s consciousness, because it plays an important role in integrating sensory input and visuospatial processing. It’s where the brain deals with symbology, too. Mathematics, reading, writing. See how the thread frays into dense, short branches where it terminates? It’s a parasensory patch. It looks like they attempted to induce a memory dump by directly stimulating the connections between brain and neural net.’
Hari said, ‘Can you tell who did this?’
‘You’re wondering if the commissars tried to get at the files stored in the head while you were in prison,’ Eli Yong said.
‘Were they successful?’
Hari’s mouth was dry. If the Free People had unlocked the secrets inside Dr Gagarian’s head, he would lose any advantage he might have had over the hijackers.
The head doctor did not reply at once. She seemed to withdraw into herself, standing silent and still. At last, she said in a faint, faraway whisper, ‘I’m almost inside.’
Hari could see his face reflected in the amber lenses of her goggles, and suddenly had a weird sense of doubling, of looking at the head doctor and looking at himself looking at her. A high note keened in his ears. An exquisite pain pierced his left eye . . .
Then, with a violent snap, he was back inside his head. His entire body ached, as if it had been gripped by an all-over cramp, and he was lying on his back, looking up at the bulges of pinkish-grey fabric that covered the ceiling. Realising, with a serene, floating detachment, that it was supposed to resemble the inside of a brain. Something had happened, but he didn’t know what it was. He pushed to his feet, dizzy and light-headed. The pict was fading out of the air and Eli Yong leaned over against the couch, fists planted on its surface, head bowed. After a few moments, she shuddered all over and looked up at Hari. Her pale face was slick with sweat. The lenses of her goggles were silvery mirrors.
‘Go,’ she said. Her voice was harsh and angry. ‘Go now!’
‘What happened? What did you do?’
‘A djinn. It sent a copy after me. Put up quite a fight before my security destroyed it.’
Hari immediately thought of the p-suit’s eidolon. He said, ‘It was protecting Dr Gagarian’s files.’
‘Dr Gagarian? Oh, you mean the head. Someone tried to open the files, as I showed you, but they couldn’t break the encryption.’ Eli Yong straightened and took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘You need to find a tick-tock. And you need to go. I need you to go. It knows about me, it’s probing my security for weak spots . . .’
The head doctor stepped backwards, dissolving into the shadows that filled the rear of the little room, and something thrust towards Hari, a feral face with parchment skin stretched over its muzzle and high cheekbones, huge burning eyes fixed o
n him.
‘Go!’ it roared. ‘Go now!’
The apparition was a ridiculous cliché, but its voice was laden with subsonic harmonics that assaulted Hari’s sympathetic nervous system with exquisite accuracy. Seized with sudden unreasoning panic, he grabbed the cryoflask and ran, blundering up the steps into shockingly bright chandelier light and scattering an ambush of eidolons.
7
A three-wheeled cargo bot hooted as it swerved to avoid Hari. He slowed and stopped, breathless, half-expecting to see the feral apparition generated by Eli Yong’s security system floating after him. Apart from the cargo bot, the broad corridor, the avenue, was empty. But as he walked on Hari had the disquieting feeling that the head doctor was somehow following him. A quiet presence at his back, immediately behind his head. It took an effort not to look around.
He walked a long way around the city, through hutongs, across avenues. Trying to process what had happened, trying to fit it into what he already knew. Dr Gagarian’s head was protected by a djinn, that much seemed clear. Eli Yong had triggered it, and no doubt the commissars had also triggered it, when they had attempted to access the tick-tock’s files. He was certain, now, that the head had been returned to him only after the commissars had tried and failed to crack its encryption, that he had been released from prison as bait for the hijackers or any friends and allies they might have in the city. He remembered how the p-suit’s eidolon had attacked the hijacker’s drone, wondered if she really had been weaponised, or if she had been ridden by the djinn. Dr Gagarian’s head had been hidden more than ten kilometres away from the spires, but perhaps the djinn had a long reach. Or perhaps it had made a copy of itself and inserted it into his p-suit . . .
Thinking about all of this, Hari ate a small meal of sprouting mung beans and steamed fermented tofu at a stall in the Avenue of the Menagerie of Worlds. Behind the triple-paned window of a neighbouring shop, transparent cryoflasks containing miniature silicon-based biomes stood amongst fuming blocks of nitrogen snow. In another, blobjects tinted with bright primary colours pulsed in bubbling aquarium tanks. A parade of equally exotic people passed by, bit-players in his story, heroes of their own mysterious lives. Hari sipped from his tumbler of grey, sticky-sweet fruit juice. One thing was clear. He needed to talk to Rav again.