“We have data… theory. But you’re not ready.”
“When will we be ready?”
“In time. At the moment you are still absorbing the lessons of your own lost history. New knowledge — the kind you’re asking for — could be catastrophically destabilising.”
“How much time are we talking about, McKinley?” Thale enquired.
“Several decades. Fifty years. Perhaps longer.”
“And if the Musk Dogs come sooner than that, how would that change things?” Bella asked.,
McKinley shivered: a powerful ripple of his tractor fronds that exposed the ruby-streaked shimmer of the sensor fronds within. It was the only innately alien gesture Bella had learned to recognise: all the others, she felt certain, were a conscious mimicry of human action and revealed nothing about the aliens’ true emotional states. But the shiver indicated a profound agitation.
“They will offer you the world,” McKinley said. “If you take it, you will lose everything.”
* * *
They made her young again. Or at least younger: she had not requested a full rejuvenation, simply the resetting of her clock to the approximate physiological age she had been when Rockhopper first encountered Janus. Her decision might have been considered eccentric by some, given that the complete restoration of youth was also on offer. But Bella had enjoyed being middle-aged a lot more than she had enjoyed being young. She had felt good at fifty-five, and it felt good to be fifty-five again, even though she still carried the burden of a further thirty-three years of memory, pressing against the limits of her skull like a migraine.
She remembered little of the experience itself. Nobody ever did. She had said goodbye to Nick Thale and Jim Chisholm, and the Fountainheads had escorted her into the base of one of the spikes that lowered itself from the ceiling. The spike retracted, transporting her deeper into the embassy.
Presently the aliens brought her to a kind of garden, enclosed by glass: a place of running water, rock pools, wind chimes and simple plants with a delicate blue-green lustre. The Fountainheads remained behind the glass, pressing their ever-moving fronds delicately against it. Unaccountably, she was reminded of something she hadn’t seen for forty or fifty years: the whirling brushes of a car wash sliding against a windshield.
The cocoon opened, allowing her to step out. The air was breathable and pleasantly scented, somehow encouraging deep inhalations. The burble of water and the tinkling of the chimes induced an overwhelming sense of ease and well-being — she supposed that the aliens had dredged the human psyche and extracted the parameters for a maximally relaxing environment. Knowing that it was engineered, the product of conscious and quite possibly ruthlessly pragmatic design principles, did not lessen its soothing effects.
Some chemical influence in the surroundings eased her into a state of serene acceptance, blasting away the last residues of trepidation. The aliens instructed her to disrobe and lie down in one of the larger rock pools. The rock was soap-smooth beneath her skin and the water lapped and burbled gently against her shoulders. It was cool enough to feel invigorating, drawing the blood to her skin, but not so cool that she could not have imagined spending all day in the pool. But she soon felt a pleasant, seductive drowsiness. She had no will to move, no desire to think. She was aware, without any sense of alarm, as the water rose to cover her completely, and when they brought her back she retained some murky recollection of drowning. But there was nothing in that memory that felt like fear or anxiety, only a serene acceptance, a childlike sense that she was in wise hands.
She did, however, remember a dream.
It was a dream of an all-surrounding darkness, and of a child lost in that darkness. A girl lost in the snow, in the thin air and cruel cold of a night somewhere in the Hindu Kush, hoping and praying for the lights of rescue to pierce the darkness. Eventually a light swelled to the brightness of day, and Bella was back, lying in the shallow burbling water. She held a hand up towards the false sky and saw that the aliens had done all that she had asked of them. But she had smuggled something of that cold back from the dream, and when they asked her to stand she could still feel the chill in her strong new bones.
“It’s time to go home now, Bella,” McKinley said, and for a moment she thought the alien meant Earth, rather than Crabtree.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Sooner or later, Bella thought, she was going to have to move to a bigger office: it was either that or scale back her plans for the fish. The old glass tank was still there — she had brought it back to Crabtree when she returned to power — but now it formed only one part of a much larger series of linked environments. The huge tanks swallowed three walls and most of the ceiling of her office, throwing a constant trembling light across her paper-strewn desk. There was a window somewhere behind one of the tanks, but it was twenty years since anyone had looked through it. Even at night, when she darkened their tanks, Bella preferred the shadow-world of the fish to any view on Janus.
Genetic manipulation had taken her original stocks and radiated them into a hundred brilliant forms. When her paperwork grew distracting, Bella could easily lose herself in the chrome-yellow flash of a foxface, or the azure dazzle of a blue devil or damselfish. The Fountainheads did not have the genetic templates for many fish, but they knew how to sculpt convincing simulacra that produced accurate copies of themselves.
It was late, the tanks were dimmed and she was paging distractedly through paragraphs of pre-Cutoff history. She made handwritten notes on creamy sheets of vat-grown paper, annotating those historical passages that could be safely released to the populace, highlighting those that would need to be withheld or doctored.
The business of censoring history gave her no pleasure, but it was as necessary as it was gruelling. The truth would come out eventually, she was sure of that, but it had to be administered in controlled doses, like a potent drug. She had background files on every surviving member of the original Rockhopper crew manifest: names, nationalities, birthplaces, teasing hints of biographical data. Take Gabriela Ramos, for instance. She was still alive — a recent grandmother, as it happened. She was happy, well balanced, a solid member of the community. Though she had sided with Svetlana in the mutiny, Bella had never found cause to dislike her. But Gabriela Ramos was from Old Buenos Aires, and that was where she had left most of her family when the ship went out to Janus.
Ramos had adapted, as they had all been forced to adapt, to the fact that she would never see her family again. That had been wrenching and cruel, but to one degree or another most of the crew had found a way through it. Part of the healing process involved accepting that life would inevitably go on back home, and that friends and loved ones would also find a way to continue with the business of existence. If one could achieve a state of mind whereby one believed that the people back home were happy, or at least not living their lives in a state of permanent sadness, then it was possible to feel a little happier on Janus as well. It didn’t mean that anyone had been forgotten, or that the pain of separation was any less acute, just that — as if by a kind of unspoken consent between the sundered pasties — life had to go on.
But in Old Buenos Aires, life had not gone on.
In 2063, only six years after Rockhopper’s departure, hackers had gained control of a satellite power station and steered its space-to-ground beam onto Old Buenos Aires. Two point eight million people had died in the flash fires that consumed the city, mostly in the wooden slums of the boca shanty towns.
Gabriela Ramos’s family would almost certainly have been amongst the dead.
Bella could not stand to see Ramos tortured by this news. She knew it would destroy her and cause terrible harm to those close to her. The waves of grief would touch everyone on Janus. No one needed that, most especially not Gabriela Ramos.
So Bella sat up late, evening after evening, scanning the latest batches of data released by the Fountainheads, making sure that the automated editing systems hadn’t missed anything. Now and then something
did slip through: an oblique reference to the event that might not even mention Old Buenos Aires, but which could be enough to set the curious on a dangerous hunt for further data. She blue-pencilled anything that had the slightest connection with the atrocity.
That wasn’t enough, though.
After she was done, there was a glaring hole in the world where Old Buenos Aires used to be. Ramos was curious, naturally, about the future history of the city where she had been born. So Bella had to concoct just enough of an invented history to be convincing: seeding the real news with little white lies just to keep Ramos from guessing the truth. Nothing about her family, of course, but enough information to allow her the comforting fantasy that they had all gone on to lead normal, happy lives, instead of dying in raging hellfire.
It didn’t stop with Gabriela Ramos, though.
Hers was the most extreme case, requiring the most brutal historical intervention, but there were other people who deserved to be spared the truth about those they had left behind. When Mike Pasqualucci — one of Parry’s miners — rotated onto Rockhopper, he had left a son behind on Earth. Losing his boy had nearly destroyed him, but somehow he had found a way to keep on living, throwing himself into the numbing routine of duty. He was out of that darkness now, with a new wife and a new son, but Bella knew he had never stopped thinking of the boy he had left behind.
The trouble was, the boy back home had grown up bad: a string of serial murders and rapes across three continents, followed by arrest in Stockholm and — as was the custom of the European Union in the twenty-seventies — sentencing for ‘accelerated neural reprofiling’. Mike Pasqualucci didn’t need to know all that, Bella thought. He deserved to keep the precious memory of the little boy he had left behind, untainted by the grown-up monster the boy had become.
So she had doctored that strand of history as well, removing all references to the crime spree and fabricating a happy-ever-after story where Pasqualucci’s son ended up running a profitable lobster-boat business off New Bedford. She made nothing overt of that, but it was buried in the data if Pasqualucci cared to look: a fabricated write-up in the gourmet section of the New Yorker. And via search-history traceback, Bella knew he had done just that on many occasions, as if he needed to keep reassuring himself that things really had worked out well for his son.
Such tinkering had been deceptively easy at first, but as the trickle of news became a torrent, so the complexity of her task rapidly became overwhelming. Sooner or later, she knew, she was bound to make a mistake — even with the aid of the Borderline Intelligences guiding her hand. A lie that exposed another lie, a paradox that would cleave open her doctored history like a crack in an iceberg. All she hoped was that she could keep postponing that moment of exposure, so that when it came — years or decades down the line — those it hurt would be psychologically buffered against feeling too much pain by the years they had already lived on Janus. They would hate her for it, she knew, but she also hoped that they would understand why she had done it: out of love, and a sense of dutiful obligation to her children.
Her flexy chimed. Bella pushed aside the latest set of edits and took the call from Liz Shen.
“I knew you’d still be up,” the young woman said reprovingly.
“Did you call me just to check whether I was still awake?”
“Actually, no. I thought you’d like to hear about the Underhole investigation.” Tactfully, she reminded Bella, “The cube, the thing Svetlana left behind.”
Reminding Bella of things was a habit Shen would take some time to lose. Before the rejuvenation, Bella’s memory had been increasingly slow and unreliable. Now it growled like a supercharged engine.
Oddly, Bella realised that she had hardly thought about the cube since returning from the Fountainheads. She remembered Avery Fox showing it to her, and she remembered tasking Liz Shen to track down the individuals who might have been at Underhole when Svetlana had evacuated. But since then the matter had barely merited a second thought.
Something about that neglect troubled her now.
“The cube, of course,” she said hastily. “What have you got for me?”
“Names,” Shen said. “It wasn’t easy, digging back twenty years. I had to call in favours and twist arms. But I’ve found out who was on the team.”
“Tell me,” Bella said.
“Denise Nadis, Josef Protsenko and Christine Ofria-Gomberg.”
“Staunch Barseghian loyalists,” she said, disappointed. “They’ll be tough nuts to crack.”
“Can’t have been accidental,” Shen agreed. “Svetlana knew she was dealing with something sensitive. She wouldn’t have wanted to bring Thale or Regis into the loop if she could help it.”
“I need to talk to them.” Suddenly she was unsure of herself. “They are all still alive, aren’t they?”
“Yes, but Nadis and Protsenko will be difficult to bring in without causing a fuss: they’re in small eddytowns where word travels fast.”
“Do you think Christine might be less problematic?”
“She’s in Crabtree right now. Of the three, she’s the one you’re most likely to get sense out of.”
Bella watched her fish absent-mindedly: dark shapes cruising the twilight gloom of the dimmed tanks. “She’s still on good terms with Nick Thale, isn’t she?”
“As far as I know.”
“Then talk to Nick, see if he can get anything out of her without making this official.”
“I’ll do my best, but don’t expect anything to happen before tomorrow.”
“I won’t.”
“One other thing,” Shen said. “You really should get some sleep. If you’re not careful you’ll work yourself into an early grave. Again.”
* * *
Days passed. Bella busied herself with the routine chores of Crabtree administration: Tier-Two review committees, presentations of the latest data from the deep-shaft probes, grumbles and complaints from the outlying communities, mass-energy budgets that needed balancing. She settled her mind by wandering the arboreta, recalling how she had always found solace in the aeroponics lab aboard the old ship. The latest saplings were growing with the eagerness of self-assembling skyscrapers, flinging themselves towards the sky.
Word returned that Nick Thale had spoken to Christine Ofria-Gomberg. At first, she had been reluctant to discuss anything that had happened during the last few days of the Barseghian regime, but Bella knew she would be open to persuasion with the right manipulation. Christine and her husband Jake were still deeply involved in their studies of the Spican language. The arrival of the Fountainheads hadn’t dented that particular enthusiasm at all, especially since the essential mystery remained intact. The Fountainheads might well have cracked the language themselves, but they were sharing none of that wisdom with the humans.
For twenty years, the Ofria-Gombergs had continued their private study, subjecting their data to increasingly sophisticated statistical tests in the hope of teasing out at least the existence of meaning. When a heavy nugget of lexical data was being subjected to a complex piece of analysis, the drag on the distributed system was visible. People’s clothes stalled and crashed under the processing load, and the normally seamless environment flickered with eye-wrenching patterns. There had been at least one instance of someone suffering an epileptic fit during a particularly protracted piece of number-crunching, and there was a nasty whiff of lawsuit in the wangwood-lined halls of the High Hab Court.
They could call it blackmail if they wanted, but all Bella was saying was that the Ofria-Gombergs’ continued utilisation of the system might be contingent upon their cooperation with the cube inquiry.
“I don’t know what you expect me to tell you,” Christine said, as they followed a meandering gravel path through the arboreta. It was twilight — the topside lights had been dimmed — and they had the place to themselves. Bella’s security had made sure of that.
“We found the cube,” Bella said. “It was buried beneath Underhole. It
was only a matter of time, what with all the digging they’ve been doing there.”
Christine had never visited the Fountainheads, yet she seemed young beyond her years. Her hair was grey now, but she carried herself with the poised elegance of a much younger woman. A good spine, Bella thought idly.
Christine’s expressive face shifted from playful amusement to lofty disdain. “Where is it now?”
“Here in Crabtree,” Bella said. “I’ve got a team working on it. So far they haven’t come up with anything we didn’t know a month ago, but it’s still early days, I suppose.”
“What have they tried?”
“It’s you I want answers from, Christine.”
“I’m sure I won’t remember anything useful.”
“Tell me what you do remember, and I’ll be the judge of what’s useful.”
“It was just a cube.”
“Where did it come from? How did it end up in Underhole?” Bella waited a while, as they walked around half the perimeter of a little rock pool. She was prepared to be patient, but only up to a point. “Start giving me something, Christine, or I’ll have to seriously reconsider your allocation of algorithmic cycles in the next assessment round.”
“That’s your problem,” she said. “You only ever offer the stick.”
Bella’s shoes crunched pleasantly on the gravel. It was nice to walk under half a gee, the loading painless on her bones and joints. “All right, then,” she said slowly, as if it had only just occurred to her. “I’ll hold up a big orange carrot: tell me about the cube and I’ll offer you a place on the analysis team. I’m sure you have something to contribute.”
They had walked to the end of another line of caged and bound saplings by the time Christine spoke again. “It came from space. After the hole opened in the Sky, we sent probes out to examine our surroundings.”
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