Revelation

by Nigel Foster

  * * *

  One last action: to persuade Kara to go back Up, find Marc who’d been seduced by Netherspace and whatever lived there. Find Tatia who’d gone wandering with the Originators, driven by a compulsion she didn’t understand. Three people with unique, individual talents they barely understood.

  Very soon now he’d brief Kara on her last mission.

  Still blocked from writing.

  Greenaway thought about the humanity he was dedicated to save.

  They’d gone to the stars as if born to it. Humans loved to discover new places where they could be themselves. Be as outrageous, dull, creative, boring, evil or good as they could get away with. Humans were driven by curiosity as much as survival. He’d once said so to Tse, who’d laughed.

  “You want to look up Club 18-30,” he’d replied. “Back in the nineteen eighties.” Tse was well over a hundred. “Someone once described the British Empire as like the Club, but with pay.”

  Greenaway did so, and found the comparison strained, but even so...

  * * *

  There are thirty known, official, colony planets and at least as many unofficial ones. Space flight is that easy. Fraught, often dangerous, but essentially a “point-and-go” process. All colonies trade with each other and with Earth, Mars and an Asteroid Belt that has Dominion status. The Belt is rich in minerals and rare earths. It wants independence. Earth Central says no.

  Greenaway and GalDiv disagree. How can you stop them? Or any other colony/dominion wanting to go its own way? People had died making the Belt habitable, and it wasn’t for the glory of Earth Central.

  There are pukka human colonies where aliens can be nervous and friendly like cows; or nervous and dangerous like sharks. Then the colonies GalDiv doesn’t want to know about, where humans and aliens have developed strange types of alliances that even – shock-horror – include sexual contact. No breeding but lots of wild nights. Humans are so adaptable. Aliens are as good a fetish as anything else.

  And then there are colonies that scare the hell out of Greenaway, with aliens that make the Gliese seem like the family next door. Greenaway has long known that horror isn’t fangs and tentacles. It isn’t the carnage of a battlefield, nor the malevolence of a twisted human mind. True horror is beyond understanding. Like the alien artefact that had propelled a Swiss village into an adjacent dimension. They could be heard screaming but couldn’t be seen. Eventually the artefact was sent into the sun and the screaming stopped.

  Humans learned to live alongside alien horror. And so became part of it and human no more.

  * * *

  Yet, the greatest horror would be revealed as the price humanity paid for the Gliese-supplied star drives. Human beings, any age, sex or condition, as long as they’re alive at the moment of exchange. Criminals, the terminally ill and dying, bold explorers or hopeless romantics. GalDiv still had no idea what happened to them. Greenaway was desperate to find out.

  “You have to know,” he’d once accused Tse.

  “I don’t. And will not try to see.” Tse spoke of seeing the future. In fact it was a combination of logical thought that only a pre-cog could understand; and mental visions difficult to describe. “It could affect the outcome.”

  * * *

  There’s a standard currency throughout human space: virtscrip, developed by the big corporations. But from the outset planets and their businesses had problems with financing, credit and insurance, until GalDiv gave responsibility to new generation AIs.

  No one worries that alien tech is at the heart of AI. No one throws stones at shops selling personal AIs that meld with your own mind. People trust alien tech more than they do human. Without it, humanity might just as well start looking for a decent cave. Civilisation would leave without bang or whimper.

  People have learned not to think about the price they’ve paid.

  Mummy knows best.

  Wrong.

  * * *

  It was no good. The letter would have to wait. Greenaway put away the paper and pencil and drained his glass. There was maybe a centimetre left in the bottle, enough for an angel’s kiss. He drank it in one.

  “I’ll be gone for the rest of the day,” he told his PA, the lie coming easily.

  She nodded. “City state AIs are acting rogue all over the world.”

  “Twist will keep me informed.”

  “Is it going to be okay?” She meant the world.

  “It’ll change,” he said. “But that may be no bad thing.” He took the paper and pencil with him.

  2

  Kara Jones prowled barefoot in the morning sunshine on flood-adapted soft grass bordering the Upper Severn Estuary. She wore loose black jeans and a matching T-shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, face bare of makeup, no combat lenses so her eyes their natural jet black. Her face twisted into a scowl when her AI announced that Anson Greenaway was on his way.

  > Tell him I’m busy.

  < I did. His AI said “so what”. Also, have you seen the news? She had, and for that reason expected Greenaway to show up. Maybe the pre-cogs had given up trying to subvert creative, chaotic humanity in favour of destroying it. Or possibly that was always the plan. Get humans dependent on alien artificial intelligence and then send the AI mad.

  She heard the distant whine of an aerial jitney. Greenaway was near. She might still be angry with him but two weeks spent on her own had been too long. The neighbours were welcoming, once Marc’s house AI had confirmed that Kara and Marc were friends. Although how it knew was a mystery to her... until the house AI explained that it and Marc’s personal AI had been in constant contact when he was on Earth. She’d asked Ishmael, her self-named AI, about it.

  < Of course we chat. It’s good to have a sympathetic ear.

  > Chat?

  < Exchange pleasantries. Gossip. Talk about stuff.

  > I thought you were kind of exclusive.

  < You got a fascinating mind, Kara. But sometimes I need a break, okay? Access to new ideas and opinions is as healthy for AIs as for humans.

  Kara frowned. Not the centre of her AI’s universe?

  > Surely if you give two AIs access to the same facts and sensory inputs, they’ll come to the same conclusions?

  Her AI’s mental voice was condescending.

  < I’m constantly amazed by how little you know about us.

  > “You” meaning me, or “you” meaning humans in general?

  < Indeed.

  Oddly inconclusive but the best she could expect. So while personal AIs would never act against their human, they did have their secrets. She wondered how much information was exchanged, then mentally shrugged. Too late to do anything now. That problem had been posed before she’d been born, with Facebook, Twitter and the social media explosion, and solved by just ignoring it.

  Kara had a problem with the neighbours. They had nothing in common. She couldn’t tell them about going Up, about the boojums that live in netherspace or the species-crossing civilisation of pre-cogs that wanted to turn Earth into a do-nothing paradise. Even if they believed her, in the few moments before screaming panic set in they’d bitterly resent the messenger of doom.

  Kara had known a similar isolation after leaving the Army. How do you explain the satisfaction of being a sniper/assassin to a civilian who’d never killed under orders? It was why she’d joined the Bureau, the organisation that settled – with surgical force – disputes between businesses. Legal assassination could and did prevent mini-wars. Or so the general public, and Kara herself, had believed. Only later had she discovered the Bureau was secretly run by GalDiv and used to kill business executives who put profit above everything.

  Inevitably this had only made her more isolated, which was when she’d bought the Mercedes SUV and become like thousands of others who liked the wandering life. She could park up and stay for a day, a week or a year. Personal relationships could be intense but never lasted long enough to become awkward. Her first great love had sacrificed himself for her on the b
attlefield, unaware that she was also screwing someone else. Kara did not like guilt. It was easier to be unattached.

  * * *

  She and Marc were extremely close but still not lovers. Kara and Tatia had been lovers, briefly, on the trip back from the Cancri homeworld. Much more to the point, they had both become her family. More than comrades in the military sense, they gave her the emotional home lost first when her parents died... and again when her older sister was taken by the Gliese as the standard fee to replace a broken star drive. Now Marc was gone to netherspace, his choice, and while she felt him still alive – connected somehow by a strip of wood from her childhood home – Kara couldn’t know where he was or when he’d return. The strip came from a doorframe where her sister had once measured Kara’s height. Kara had taken it the last time she visited the long-abandoned house, cut on a whim and later thrust on impulse into Marc’s hand just before he stepped naked into netherspace. The type of emotional, pointless gesture that Kara would once have dismissed. What possible use would a small piece of notched pine be in a dimension that no human understood? At the time it had been desperately important for Marc to take with him something of her, something of home. He had no idea what the strip of wood was, of course, and had most likely dropped it early on, to be puzzled over and probably eaten by a boojum. Yet she felt linked to him – not wishful thinking, no – and knew that he was still alive. Weren’t all psychic phenomena merely unexplained quantum effects? Why shouldn’t a physical memory of childhood link two people? Or if nothing else, be a mundane, silly good luck charm. Kara decided that all the same, it wasn’t something she’d discuss with Greenaway, who would, should, be more concerned about his daughter.

  Tatia had gone with the Originators, the alien precog civilisation who spread shiny tech throughout the galaxy. Tatia had believed it was her fate... propelled by a compulsion, a geas that Kara couldn’t understand, only that it was necessary. It probably was, according to the plan Tse had once developed. And how long ago was that? Ten, twenty years? So many people still dancing to a dead man’s tune.

  * * *

  There’d been two isolated weeks to think over the past. Was she in love with Marc? They shared a bond that went beyond the simulity – the alien tech that enabled people to learn complex procedures in tandem or in groups while also bonding them together. My mind is your mind, yours is mine. The bond usually wore off, but the conditioning had been reinforced to last longer than normal. And perhaps for another reason? She had no evidence, only intuition. It would do.

  I will come home, Marc had said. And later, You have to trust people sometime. Trust me. Not bad from a man who’d been a self-obsessed artist and borderline psychopath when they first met. Netherspace had changed him, as had the nature entity that possessed him in Scotland. The science of it defeated Kara. She suspected it always would. A couple of days ago she’d asked Ishmael to explain. The result was a series of mathematical formulae, an algebra she’d never seen before, a sense of "something" she wasn’t equipped to understand. If it’s any consolation, Ishmael had told her, I’ve also got problems with it. Actually, no consolation at all.

  Decide, Kara, she told herself. Marc and me, a future? Probably not. If there was they’d have slept together at least once. The excuse that commanders don’t have sex with the commanded made stupid by her sleeping with Tatia... something else not to be mentioned to Greenaway.

  Kara had a plan. Not much of one but you had to start somewhere.

  This one would start with Jeff’s house. She didn’t know why, only that it involved Marc. Intuition, she decided. So much better than compulsion.

  * * *

  The jitney whine grew louder as it landed next to Marc’s house. Greenaway got out and walked towards Kara. She stood waiting for him, hands in her pockets. Greenaway stopped two metres away, next to the grey bones of a boat whose name and use had been mislaid a hundred years ago. He was still the commanding officer, tall and straight, severely good-looking, double-collared business suit barely creased by the journey.

  “Great view,” he finally said.

  The Severn was high, placid and as always brown with sediment. But there was menace in its very size, while sinewy eddies suggested hidden violence. On the far side the Black Mountains rose up in a soft purple haze that mocked their name. Yet every year three or four walkers died because the weather changed. Or they fell from a rock face they should never have tried to climb. Last year a man had died in a mini avalanche caused by a sheep higher up the mountainside. A single rock had spun through the air to crash against his left temple. An accident in a million but all in a day’s work for the Black Mountains and their killer sheep.

  “Yes,” Kara agreed. “And now you’ve seen it, you can leave.” Her right hand gripped the compact vibra-knife in her pocket. She could pull it out, extended and slicing, in just under a second. Probably not, but the thought was reassuring.

  Did she trust Greenaway? Of course not. He’d planned for Marc to go walkabout in netherspace; and Tatia, his own long-lost daughter, to go off with the Originators. He would sacrifice Kara in a moment if he thought Earth’s survival depended on it.

  “Keep up with the big world?”

  Kara shrugged. “More fucked than usual. Which should be impossible.”

  “If it all goes tits-up,” he said calmly, “you’ll never get your people back.”

  “To tell the truth,” she said, “I’m not sure I can.” It wouldn’t stop her trying.

  “But you want to.”

  “Always.”

  “You had your vehicle charged up yesterday.”

  “Housekeeping.” She saw that he’d moved to stand at an angle to her, seemingly relaxed but with his weight on the back foot, hands slightly curled. He was half expecting her to attack him. And if she did, where would the well-deserved strike go? And would he parry or try and deliver his own crippling counter blow? If one of them had been a pre-cog, they’d know. If the two of them had been pre-cogs they’d probably still be standing there tomorrow, trying to work out what was going to happen.

  “You want your people back,” he said quietly. “That’s good.”

  “You care so much.”

  Greenaway ignored the insult. “My guess, you plan on help from the Wild.”

  She didn’t deny it. “They’ve got better transport.” GalDiv SUTs were mostly cargo containers welded together then covered with an alien-produced protective foam. The Wild’s SUTs were purpose built, sleeker and far more efficient. Like all city staters, Kara had grown up believing the Wild was home to savage hippies. Her recent discovery that it was more technically advanced than the city states had made her a little resentful. And she knew who’d help: Jeff, important in the Scottish Wild and Marc’s adopted uncle.

  “If you want to talk to the Wild, talk to me. Through me.”

  She looked over at the man who controlled GalDiv. “They don’t do government.” She paused for a moment and the anger burst. “Tatia’s your daughter, for fuck’s sake! But you let her get taken. You and Tse planned it!”

  Tse, the human pre-cog who’d suicided when he had realised that the pull of the species-spanning alien pre-cog network would mean him betraying humanity for a higher cause: a calm, predictable, always ordered future for the galaxy. He’d taken a shipload of the Gliese with him, and left behind a few cryptic forecasts... including that Kara would find her sister. He hadn’t said it would end well.

  Pre-cognition, Kara thought bitterly. It can lead to an obsession with process because the unexpected, the alternative, may be experienced as a physical and mental pain. The alien pre-cogs hated creativity because it was unexpected, never respected order and reminded them of their ultimate entropic fate.

  “You bred Tatia and Marc like they were animals!”

  He recoiled. “The programme began before I was born.”

  “You fucking knew!”

  “That it was vital for humanity’s survival.”

  Kara remembered him sayin
g that his wife had died for the same cause. “So you say. Want to tell me how a man lost in netherspace and a woman off with pre-cog aliens can save the world?” Her fingers relaxed on the knife.

  “Not on their own. As a team.”

  “Come on! They can’t do shit on their...” understanding flooded into her mind, “... without me to wipe their noses...”

  “You were always part of the programme.”

  “Always?”

  “People like Marc, like my daughter, weren’t bred like you think. Pre-cognition doesn’t work that way. You are what you were always meant to be.”

  Time stopped for her. Motes of dust seemed to hang in the air. She could feel the suddenly ominous, oppressive weight of the Black Mountains away to her left. “People like me?” She saw what could be pity – impossible, maybe sympathy – in his eyes. “How old is this fucking plan, Anson?”

  “Programme, not plan,” he corrected. “It’s multi-flexible. Has to be. From what Tse said, at least five hundred years. For as long as the pre-cogs on Earth have been aware that all aliens have their own pre-cogs, and some of them formed an empire that wants a galaxy run the pre-cog way.”

  “But if you, if they knew...” She thought about how Earth had reacted when the Gliese arrived. “It was all a bit too easy, right?”

  He watched her carefully. “What was?”

  “When the Gliese first showed up. The world fell apart, but never too badly. But suddenly there’s Earth Central, the old UN, taking over. Except the old UN was crap, could never have done it unless...” She paused, words running ahead of thoughts, “and then GalDiv is there, the hard boys of world government. City states emerge and okay, some wars I remember from school, but overall it’s a peaceful transition. I mean, what the fuck!”

  “Don’t go thinking secret world rulers,” he warned. “It’s trying to ensure Earth develops the best way it can.” He smiled sourly. “Like Tse said, the landmarks on the horizon are visible, but the paths to them obscured. Often you have to sit back and let people fuck up.” He paused and looked out across the river. “Don’t think the good guys had it easy. Plenty of people happy to see the aliens take over.”