by Nigel Foster
* * *
Her adoptive parents will love her.”
Anson knew the beginning of a trade when he heard it. “Lay it all out.”
“You will join the United West Coast Army. You will become a special operations general. Then join Earth Central’s Galactic Division as Director. And then the plan will become more straightforward. You will be reunited with your daughter.
“In exchange we guarantee that her life will be as I’ve said.”
Anson shook his head. “I’ll want to keep tabs on her throughout.”
“Not twenty-four seven,” Tse said. “Maybe a monthly sit-rep. The danger is you becoming so involved in her life that your own role changes.”
Anson stood up and moved to face both people, one open-faced, the other inscrutable. “Yes. About that. About the career you’ve mapped for me. I might almost think...”
“And you’d be right,” Tse said. “You will enable victory. If you follow this career path.”
“What else are you offering?”
“You already killed the man who murdered your wife...”
“That fucker at the station!”
“The Seattle kid was a decoy. The real killer was skilled at concealing himself. We can give you the men who hired him.”
“Deal,” Anson said. What the hell, he could always renege. But a small voice in his mind said that he never would.
* * *
It took two days. On the first the owner of a freight business renowned for its meticulous operations was found in an alley with his throat cut. He had taken several minutes to die, unable to call for help because the vocal cords were also severed.
On the second day the eldest son of a wealthy family known for its inspired investments was killed in a hit-and-run.
On the third day Anson Greenaway became a soldier.
And if his resolve ever wavered – name a soldier whose resolve never did – he would remind himself that his wife had died so that he and his daughter could live.
5
It took just under an hour for Greenaway to finish his story. He did so as they flew past Shrewsbury, a client town of Birmingham City State. The jitney kept under thirty kph, as if this was a casual, local flight. Greenaway said the jitney was invisible to all radar. Kara’s AI hadn’t registered any electronic surveillance, so maybe it was. If not there’d be little time for recriminations. She kept silent as he’d talked, not wanting to interrupt the flow.
“Thanks,” Kara said. “That can’t have been easy. But again, you took one hell of a lot on trust.”
“It was Cleo,” he said. “I’d known her all my life. The Exchange is the Wild.” He paused. “Afterwards Cleo was always there to advise me. Like a second mother. Or maybe aunt. She’s not exactly warm. None of the Exchange are.”
“What about your own parents?”
“They got religion when I was twelve. Extreme Buddhism. You know, contemplating the pointlessness of contemplation...”
“Er...”
“Okay, a tad unfair. But not for me. They live in a desert commune with other fanatics. We speak maybe twice a year.”
And for you the alien pre-cogs are another form of fanaticism, Kara thought. She touched his hand. “So we’re both orphans.” Yet something niggled at her mind.
“Thanks for listening.” He tried a smile. “It helped.”
He didn’t say what it helped with and Kara wasn’t too fussed. She had the anomaly now. “The timeline, though. It doesn’t make sense. Or I’m stupid.”
“You’re not.”
She took that as encouragement. “If I heard right, Tatia should be in her early thirties. But she’s at least ten years younger, from the time she was adopted.” She noticed his hands tighten on the controls – he’d switched off the vehicle’s AI, saying it could be traced – and knew she’d found the flaw.
“Thirty-two, in fact,” he all but whispered. “It’s her birthday in a week.”
“I must remember to send a card. Anson, what the fuck?”
“Not my idea,” he said, slowly. “But I agreed...”
A matter of keeping the baby Tatia alive. She was that important... or would be in the future. The alien pre-cog empire plus their human allies were centred on destroying her. Short of keeping Tatia locked away in a castle surrounded by an army, there was little chance she’d survive. Even that wasn’t a guarantee.
Unless the enemy thought she was dead.
“You told me she’d be adopted, be safe!” Greenaway had protested.
“She will be. Very safe.”
“It seems so... so weird. Wrong.”
“You led a sheltered life.” Tse wanted to shock Greenaway into accepting reality. “Until two weeks ago.”
Greenaway decided not to hit Tse. Which presumably Tse would have known? Or maybe not. Pre-cognition could be so complicated. “I get the necessity. But this?”
* * *
Stasis-field preservation wouldn’t become public knowledge for another thirty-five years. One of the human pre-cog families – in which the third son was always destined for castration, instead of the army or the church – had known about it for a very long time. Their version came from a three-hundred-year-old trade with an alien that resembled a large, tight bunch of brightly coloured feathers. It was superior to the stasis tech that would eventually be traded by the Cancri. That last could only preserve small amounts of food.
The earlier version could preserve humans until the power ran out. As far as the Wild scientists figured it, the stasis machine might last for several thousand years. How did it work? Easier to ask what it did than how. And forget the why. It was a cube one metre square that expanded by pressing the sides into a cube three metres square. One side was open. You went inside and into a different time frame.
Do not confuse time with change. The one can be measured by the other but only in a relative way. Time is as much a matter of where (in the cosmos) as when. Some say it is the cosmos and is linked with gravity. Well, they would, wouldn’t they.
Matter fell asleep within the cube. Natural biological processes, including ageing, slowed by a factor of 1,023.367. Which annoyed a few scientists, who’d much have preferred an interesting number, perhaps even the cosmological constant times a thousand. 1,023.357 was just so blah, even meh. Until someone commented that the aliens who built the damn thing probably used a different type of numbering system, even a different mathematics, so no reason to feel superior.
That’s what the cube did. No one understood how. There were no apparent moving parts except for sliding walls – not telescopic, you pressed and pushed upwards and they simply got larger without thinning out. The same in reverse: push, pull down and they diminished without getting thicker. And you only had to push, or pull down one side for all the other five sides to also shrink or expand. It was metal – a dull coppery sort, impervious to anything but behaved like fast ice. It made theoretical physicists – despite the boring number – laugh and engineers even more convinced the universe had a cruel sense of humour. As for why? What it was meant for? The theory behind the technology? That’s when theoretical physicists stopped laughing and went out for a beer, to find engineers already propped against the bar.
Here’s the kicker: apparently anyone within the stasis field ceased to exist on any possibility/probability matrix accessed by pre-cogs. The universe no longer recognised them. Possibly also all the other universes, but that would only be conjecture. That part was understandable. Also an out-of-sight, out-of-mind phenomenon that posed a question some found troubling: just as we observe the universe, does the universe also observe us? And if yes, does it do so in a state of self-awareness, or as a simple, automatic information collection/exchange? And if so, could it be rebooted, and what about the threat from a virus?
* * *
“She became the Sleeping Beauty,” Kara said, a note of anger in her voice
“What?” Greenaway sounded surprised by her reaction. “Oh, that was centuries ago. So
meone’s wife with a fatal disease, put into stasis until a cure was ready. Word leaked out and a legend was born.”
“Who was the wicked stepmother?”
“I’ve no idea...” a sudden perception, more often used to dominate. “It wouldn’t have helped with your sister.”
Kara had been thinking how ugly was the life support system used for Call-Out Fees, a human melded with plastic tubing and metal probes. Referencing a fairy tale had been a distraction from sadness and anger.
“More dignity,” she said. “So what else?”
* * *
There was a fire that left few human remains. DNA analysis showed that they were once Tatia. In reality it was cloned DNA. Tatia would spend the next ten years neither dead nor properly alive. She emerged still a three-year-old orphan, to be adopted as Tse had promised. Kara mentally kicked herself: she, Tatia and Marc were all effectively orphans. Not a coincidence. “Orphans show up on this possibility matrix?”
“They’re easier to hide. Less of a trail, I think. There’s no real past, present or future as you and I understand it.” Said with the resignation of a man who’s accepted he’ll never understand the “how” of the universe, let alone the “why”. “Here’s a fun fact. Apparently the pyramids, Stonehenge and other great stone structures were built to anchor reality. All that effort, all that physical matter to make the outcome more probable. But still cheaper than war.”
He was avoiding a truth. “So, did you ever visit Tatia? When she was in stasis.”
“Three times,” he said quietly. “More would have been too risky.” There was far more than a decade of longing in his voice.
“You didn’t tell her the last time you met?” Unlikely, Tatia would have said.
“She wasn’t in a mood to listen.”
“You bottled it.”
He turned to look at her. “Yes,” he said bleakly. “I did.” He paused, shrugged briefly. “Something else you need to know. The Wild don’t use call-out fees.”
The world stopped for Kara. “Never?”
“It was one reason we split from the city states and Earth Central.”
“You fucking are Earth Central!” Because GalDiv was the real power.
“You think? Several city states have their own colonies, GalDiv not welcome. So they have their own SUTs.” He was into senior-officer-explains-all mode. “All of them trying to do their own deals with the Gliese. GalDiv keeps an edge by playing them off against each other. By controlling virtscrip and most off-world trade. Being the nastiest kid on the block...”
“Nothing to do with fees!”
“Wild pre-cogs figured out how to trade for a new engine. Something, anything with a human connection. Like an old sweater, a book, whatever...”
“And the Gliese go along because they get all the humans they need!”
“Aliens, who knows.” He sounded immeasurably sad. “Something else. We have better space-drives, too. Much smaller. Each Wild ship carries two spares.”
“Why are you telling me this!” She was close to blind fury.
“You’d find out anyway. Best from me. We promised total honesty.”
“My sister could... could...” Tears prickled her eyes. How can I kill the bastard if I can’t focus?
“Alien pre-cogs want humans. We can’t stop them. If not GalDiv, individual city states will supply.”
She heard his own anger and pain.
“We are a space-faring civilisation,” he said. “We’re colonising the galaxy, like I said last night. Maybe other galaxies. No more star drives and it all collapses. Wars break out. I don’t know why the Gliese accept trades from the Wild. I don’t know what happens to the humans they take. Small comfort, but the Gliese once asked far more for each type of drive. We managed to reduce the cost. Would your sister be alive? I don’t know. The trade would still exist.”
We managed to reduce the cost. The words echoed in her mind. There’d always be people who wanted to be a fee, or had no choice. Yet such a cold way to explain tragedy. “You make it sound like a business,” she said. “Profit and loss in human lives.”
“It’s the only way I can live with it.”
They both fell quiet. There wasn’t much else to say.
* * *
They were passing over a forested area when Kara came to life.
“What’s down there?”
“Forest of Bowland. Wild enclave. Has a lot of wild boar.”
“Find a clearing. I need to pee.”
The SUT was equipped with urine and faecal disposal tubes. A one-size-fits-all design, meaning everyone found it uncomfortable. For an unlucky few – too fat or too thin – it leaked.
“Me too,” he said and took the jitney down.
It was more glade than clearing, grass and bushes surrounded by mature trees.
“Watch out for wild boars,” he called as she walked towards the trees.
There was a faint rustling from within a thicket. Kara chose a tree several metres away. She finished, used a wet-wipe then walked back to the jitney where Greenaway was waiting.
“I can’t be professional about the call-out fees,” she said calmly.
He nodded, face neutral.
“I don’t blame you. But you were part of it.”
He nodded again.
“Part of me would like to kill you.” She was clear in her mind what had to be done. “That wouldn’t get Marc and Tatia back. Wouldn’t destroy the alien pre-cogs.”
Curiosity in his eyes.
“Tension is not good.” She undid her trousers for the second time. “I think we better fuck.” It was the only way to preserve a bond between them. More, it was what she needed, physically and emotionally. Was it betraying her sister? Not if it meant either finding or avenging her.
It wasn’t about her sister. Or saving the world.
It was what Kara needed. Reasons or consequences didn’t matter.
Yet that rut against the side of the jitney – any watching wild boar would have been impressed by the ferocity – morphed into something altogether richer. At the end they clung to each other. What had begun as a fuck ended as making love.
“It’s so bloody stupid,” Kara said as the jitney rose in the air. She leaned across and kissed him behind the ear. “We fight to prevent a super-ordered world. Where everything is pre-ordained. Yet we never had any choice, you and I. Now we follow the plan to defeat the plan. Maybe this is all part of some game that far more intelligent aliens play. Do you ever think that our alien pre-cogs could be as much victim as us?”
Greenaway laughed. “Only at least every day. That way leads to god.”
“You’re religious?” She’d never have thought so.
“I accept there are things I’ll never know, wouldn’t understand if I did. I’d never worship them.”
“Not even on the battlefield?”
He laughed again. “Soldiers make pacts with anything to keep safe. No difference between god and a lucky charm.”
“I feel safe with you.” She closed her eyes and dozed on and off for the rest of the journey. Not from tiredness, but to avoid thinking about what she, what they had done. Anson Greenaway was not her commanding officer (no jokes about being commanded, girl. This is too important). If anything he was more client (makes me a whore? Not charging enough). Not good enough to say there’d been sex because she needed it. She’d also wanted him, Anson Greenaway. Just as he’d wanted her, Kara Jones. The link was there and it shouldn’t be.
They reached Jeff’s house just before noon.
Or what was left of it.
* * *
They landed next to the lake. The area had once been idyllic. Now it looked like a battleground. Tyre marks scarred the soft grass. An old tree had been used as target practice, the ground next to the scorched trunk littered with smashed branches. Rockets had been fired at the mill house, making holes like open mouths with broken teeth. A curtain drooped from a smashed window.
Closer to the water’s edge a
Wild SUT, fifty metres long and twenty wide, shaped like a fat tube pointed at both ends, stood parked and waiting for them.
“Efficient,” Kara commented as she stood stretching her legs. “And by the way: what the hell happened here?”
Greenaway looked at the half-wrecked mill house a hundred metres away. “Last night. Jeff was killed.” He saw the question in her eyes. “My AI just told me. No one knew until they brought the SUT here. The area’s safe now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t know him that well. Why is this place so important to you?”
“It’s about Marc,” she said. “I took him climbing on Dartmoor, around when you got kidnapped. We saw... an entity on Haytor... weird and wonderful colours, sense of power. Similar to the one you and I saw last night. And Marc saw... the way he told it, was possessed by something similar here, as arranged by the Wild. But you knew that, right?”
“That last part,” he admitted. “Last night, of course. But not Dartmoor.”
“Is it to do with boojums?”
“UPINs.”
“What?”
“Unexplained Phenomena In Netherspace. Pronounced yew-pin. We think Marc has an affinity with the infinite.”
She shook her head sadly. “The man is a walking cliché.”
“Won’t happen again.” I was trying to forget that sigh you make after orgasm, such a deep, happy satisfaction, but it’ll be with me forever.
“You okay?” she said with the innocence of a woman who intuits what a man is thinking. Who’d a thought he’d be so good in bed? And she let it show in her eyes.
“Thinking I prefer boojum.” It sounded like buj’m. He coughed and looked away.
“Mmmm. Anyway, I’m assuming they’re linked to these entities?”
Greenaway took a deep breath. “Probably. No idea how, though. So we’re here because it’s linked to Marc?” Saw her nod and asked the obvious. “Now what?”