Into Everywhere

by Paul McAuley

  ‘What did he find?’ Bria said.

  ‘The geek police wouldn’t tell me. They think I already know. They think I’m involved.’

  ‘But you aren’t.’

  ‘Of course not!’

  Pete lifted his head, looking up at Lisa. She let go of Bria’s hands and pushed her hair out of her face, the frizz of grey corkscrew curls she’d stopped dyeing a couple of years ago. She was bone-tired, had spent most of the night looking at the ceiling of her bedroom, her head like a beehive.

  ‘I haven’t seen him for three months,’ she said. ‘I had no idea what he was into.’

  ‘And you told the police that.’

  ‘It didn’t make any difference.’

  Lisa told Bria about the man who’d led the raid on her property. Investigator Adam Nevers of the UN Technology Control Unit: a tall Englishman with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, dressed in a cream linen suit, light blue shirt and dark blue tie, polished brown brogues powdered with the red dust of her yard. He’d been very polite, very proper, but there had been a coldness in his manner, an Olympian condescension, as he explained that the search-and-seizure warrant had been issued because it was possible that Willie might have sent Lisa something potentially dangerous, or left behind something she believed to be harmless but actually wasn’t.

  ‘I think I’d know if he had,’ Lisa said. ‘It’s kind of how I earn my living.’

  ‘When you last saw him, did he tell you that he had found something in the Badlands?’ Nevers said.

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘Did he tell you he was going out there with a crew to dig something up?’

  ‘I’d definitely remember that because Willie always worked alone.’

  ‘Did you notice anything strange in his manner or behaviour?’

  ‘No. He was just himself.’

  ‘“He was just himself.”’ Nevers frosted the words with disdain. ‘Exactly what do you mean by that?’

  ‘Exactly what I said. He turned up one day, we caught up on what each other had been doing, and after a couple of hours he left.’

  ‘So it was purely a social visit.’

  ‘As far as I was concerned.’

  It was hard to think of Willie, hard not to. Lisa saw his smile, his gold tooth flashing. The deep lines around his eyes. His black hair brushed back and held by a bandana folded just so. The warmth of him, his sour-sweet smell. They hadn’t slept together the last time he’d stopped by because Lisa had been irritated by his presumption and they’d fallen into the groove of one of their old arguments. His selfishness; her stubbornness. She hoped that she wasn’t going to have cause to regret the way they’d parted, that last time. She hoped that Willie had managed to escape unharmed, that maybe he hadn’t been there when the trouble had kicked off. And then she thought of her seizure, and knew, with numb certainty, that he must have been caught up in it.

  Nevers led her through the banal details of their last conversation, then threw her a curve ball, saying, ‘Could your husband have visited your property without your knowledge?’

  ‘I guess. I mean, I’m not here all the time.’

  ‘So he could have left something here. Hidden it.’

  ‘What kind of something?’ Lisa was beginning to feel uneasy, because it was exactly the kind of stupid stunt that Willie liked to pull. Had liked. Jesus.

  ‘That’s what we want to find out,’ Nevers said.

  The other agents, two men and a woman, were walking in and out of the lean-to workshop tacked onto the end of Lisa’s house, carrying away equipment and stacking it inside the two Range Rovers. Her ultrasound probe, her binocular microscope, the compact oven of her printer, her Reynolds trap . . .

  The gold-skinned Jackaroo avatar stood between the vehicles, still as a statue. It had helped Adam Nevers perform a preliminary survey of the house and barn while Lisa sat with Sheriff Bird in his patrol car, trying to stay calm because she knew that if she lost her cool they’d definitely arrest her. She was still trying to stay calm, but it was getting harder while she watched her livelihood being ransacked and Nevers treated her like someone who was either incredibly naive or incredibly dumb. When she saw one of the men wheel out the tall black box of her massively parallel computer on a hand truck, she started towards him, saying indignantly, ‘You can’t take that!’

  Nevers caught her arm, gripping so hard she could feel his fingers pressing on the bone. He said, ‘You’ll be given an inventory of everything we take. And if there isn’t a problem it will be returned to you as soon as possible.’

  Lisa watched, heartsick, as the man wrestled the computer into one of the Range Rovers. Everything its hard drive contained was deeply encrypted, she wasn’t about to hand over the keys unless compelled by a court order, and she had a backup that the police hadn’t yet found, but she’d built the machine herself and she couldn’t afford to replace it.

  Nevers said, ‘I understand that you were a hotshot coder back in the day. You worked out how to crack Ghostkeeper algorithms, and gave away the method.’

  ‘It was a kernel defining an environment where people can run the algorithms. And I put it out under a Creative Commons licence. Not quite the same thing as giving it away.’

  ‘But you didn’t make any money off it, while other people did,’ Nevers said.

  No point trying to explain to the man that she’d been part of a collective, that she’d just happened to have had the crucial insight that helped move forward a communal effort, that everything back then had been different, more hopeful, not yet thoroughly tainted by commercial interest and the social Darwinism of neoliberal capitalism. Nevers clearly had marked her down as some kind of eccentric hippie who’d not only been fucked up by an alien ghost, but had also squandered her intellectual property out of misplaced idealism.

  She said, ‘You can let go of my arm. I’m not going to try to stop your people doing their work. Even if it is legalised theft.’

  ‘We’re dealing with a serious breakout, Ms Dawes,’ Nevers said blandly, releasing her. ‘We’ll return your equipment after we’ve examined it. As long as it isn’t contaminated, that is.’

  Lisa resisted the urge to rub her arm. It felt like the man had left a bruise the size of Nebraska. ‘My containment protocols are as good as anyone else’s.’

  ‘Then there shouldn’t be a problem,’ Nevers said, and handed her a business card. ‘If you remember anything that might help us find out what happened to your husband and his friends, don’t hesitate to get in touch.’

  ‘So are business cards still a thing, back on Earth?’

  ‘I’m no newbie, Ms Dawes. If that’s what you’re trying to imply. I’ve been working on cases like this for a very long time. Longer than you’ve been working on Elder Culture code, I dare say.’

  ‘Well you don’t appear to have learned very much,’ Lisa said.

  That bounced right off Nevers. He said, ‘I saw the funny tortoise-things you have in the barn. Is that how you make your living now?’

  ‘The hurklins? Yeah, I ranch them.’

  ‘For meat?’

  ‘You can’t eat them. They have funny amino acids, use vanadium in their blood . . . What it is, they shed the outer layer of their shells as they grow. It’s like very fine-grained leather, naturally tinted.’

  She thought of Willie again, his ancient leather jacket, his cowboy boots with their silver tips and conchos. Oh, Willie.

  Nevers was saying something about having had a tortoise as a pet when he was a kid. ‘An age ago, in London. I painted the shell once, my idea of dazzle camouflage. But I wouldn’t have thought to try to wear it.’

  It was hard to imagine him as anything other than what he was, tall and straight-backed in his cream suit, radiating the stern rectitude of an old-time preacher. His flinty probing gaze, his shuttered expression. One of the agents came over with a tablet that displayed an inventory of the things they’d taken. Lisa studied it carefully before she signed it.

  ‘We�
��ll email you a copy,’ Nevers said. ‘Oh, one more thing. Your phone.’

  ‘My phone?’

  ‘Please,’ Nevers said, holding out his hand.

  Lisa thought of arguing, but knew that if she refused the agent would grab hold of her and Nevers would pat her down. She took out it out and said, ‘Make sure you add it to your inventory.’

  ‘Thank you for your cooperation, Ms Dawes,’ Nevers said. ‘If we have any more questions, we’ll be in touch.’

  She barely heard him. She was watching the Jackaroo avatar approach. Its elegant dancer’s walk, as if gravity were optional. Its immaculate black tracksuit. Its gold-tinted face, eyes masked by sunglasses – exact copies of Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Jackaroo avatars presented as male, composites of fashion models and movie stars, but their gender was as superficial as a mannequin’s, and more than thirty years after First Contact they were still unfathomable enigmas.

  Humanity had been hard-pressed back then. Countries fighting over dwindling natural resources; riots, revolutions and counter-revolutions, and the constant low-level attrition of netwars; a billion refugees made homeless by famine, flood or extreme weather events. All of this craziness culminating in the Spasm, when more than a dozen capital cities from London to Karachi had been damaged or destroyed by low-yield tactical atomic bombs and a limited nuclear missile exchange.

  The Jackaroo had arrived a year later. They brought with them fifteen wormhole mouths and fifteen colossal shuttles, infiltrated the world’s communication networks, and declared that they were here to help. The wormhole mouths led to habitable worlds orbiting red dwarf stars – smaller and cooler than Earth’s sun, the most common type of star in the galaxy – scattered across the Milky Way; winners of the UN emigration lottery travelled up and out on the shuttles, hoping to begin new lives in these new worlds, which turned out not to be so new after all. Previous clients of the Jackaroo, the so-called Elder Cultures, had colonised the worlds and altered them in various ways before either dying out or moving elsewhere, leaving behind ancient ruins and artefacts.

  No one knew what the Jackaroo actually looked like, where they had come from, or why. They presented only as avatars, no one had ever visited their ships, and they wouldn’t ever discuss their motives, what had happened to the Elder Cultures, what might happen to the human race. We’re here to help was all they said. Every client’s path is different. Lisa, who’d been in high school back then, remembered the wave of optimism that had swept across the world after First Contact. Humanity was no longer alone in the universe. The Jackaroo were benevolent ambassadors of an advanced culture whose gifts promised the kind of utopian future, packed with miracles and marvels, that had long seemed for ever out of reach. Mining Elder Culture ruins had yielded room-temperature superconductors, construction coral, self-healing plastics and new meta-materials, entangled pairs of electrons that allowed instantaneous transmission of information across interstellar gulfs, and much else. And then there was the discovery of ships abandoned in orbital sargassos by the Ghajar, and the wormhole network of the New Frontier . . .

  Lisa had bought into that dream when she’d won a lottery ticket and come up and out, but she knew all about its dark side now. The Bad Trip, possession by an ancient alien ghost, addiction to a drug distilled from an alien plant . . . And she’d had a close encounter with a Jackaroo avatar once before, in hospital soon after the Bad Trip, when she’d told her story and had been left feeling that she’d been judged by some higher being and found wanting.

  So she clenched up as the avatar, maybe the one that had interviewed her back then, maybe a colleague, impossible to tell, walked towards her. It held out a hand, palm up. A small sharp-edged stone lay there, black against translucent golden skin. After a blank moment, Lisa realised that it was her only tangible souvenir of the Bad Trip.

  ‘Remember the stone you helped me test for activity all those years back?’ she told Bria. ‘That one. I must have picked it up before Willie and I were zapped, and found it in the pocket of my jeans a month later.’

  Lisa had hoped that it might contain some clue about what had happened to her and Willie out in the Badlands, but it had turned out to be just a rock. A little chunk of chromite, commonly found where erosion exposed the igneous rocks that underlaid the sandstone of the Badlands; an unknown Elder Culture had mined seams of chromite ore in the far south, leaving huge terraced sinkholes.

  She said, ‘I kept it in a bowl in the living room, with a bunch of pebbles and spent tesserae. Souvenirs of the places Willie and I excavated. I guess the tesserae pinged the avatar’s radar – you know how they can track down stuff like that. And when it found them it also found the little black stone, and wanted to know what I knew about it.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘That it came from someplace I couldn’t recall out in the Badlands,’ Lisa said, remembering the avatar’s blank scrutiny and pleasant smile as it asked her if the stone had ever manifested any kind of activity. Although it was a shell of gold-tinted translucent polymer, remotely controlled by God-knew-what, God-knew-where, its face was mobile, disturbingly alive, disturbingly almost-but-not-quite human.

  ‘Of course not. It’s just a stone,’ Lisa told it.

  ‘Nevertheless, I must keep this for now,’ the avatar said, and closed its fingers around the stone and walked away, while Nevers reminded her to call him if she had any questions or remembered anything germane.

  ‘First time I’ve ever heard someone use the word in cold blood,’ Lisa told Bria. ‘“Germane.”’

  Bria said, ‘He didn’t charge you, threaten to charge you?’

  ‘He didn’t need to. He confiscated my shit, and sooner or later he’ll offer to give it back if I tell him what I know about Willie’s jackpot. And the thing is, while I don’t know anything but what Sheriff Bell told me, I’m definitely tangled up in it.’

  ‘Because of your seizure.’

  ‘Exactly. Listen, I was sort of wondering if you could maybe do me a favour or three.’

  ‘You only have to ask, honey.’

  ‘First, I have a feeling I might need a lawyer.’

  ‘Of course. I have a good man on retainer.’

  ‘The second thing, I thought I’d ask around in the Alien Market, tap into any gossip about Willie’s jackpot. And while I’m doing that, maybe you could find out if he did the right thing for once in his life, and registered a claim.’

  ‘Is that all? It doesn’t seem like much.’

  ‘Also, I need you to help me redeem my truck from the parking garage. I bought this piece-of-shit phone to replace the one Nevers took, and I can’t figure out how to get it to interface with the payment system.’

  6. Serious Throw-Weight

  A hundred and fifty years ago, not very long after the Jackaroo made themselves known, human explorers found the entry point to a vast, multi-stranded wormhole network that spanned the outer arms of the Milky Way. Despite the discovery of a dozen or more Ghajar navigational datasets, despite the efforts of scholars, wizards and amateur obsessives who had broken their minds trying to find patterns in the clustering of mirrors and links between mirror pairs that might span a dozen or ten or fifty thousand light years, the network was still mostly unmapped. It had been called the New Frontier at first, but then an empire jacked itself up from its first settlements, ruled by a warlord, Truman Johnson I, whose fleets controlled choke points in the network of mirrors, taxed every ship that passed through them, and attacked worlds which refused to acknowledge his primacy. Only Earth and the fifteen gift worlds were spared, protected by the UN’s navy and separated from the nearest wormhole mouth in the New Frontier by a gulf that made it impossible to mount a sneak attack.

  Eventually Truman Johnson was assassinated by his eldest son, Able Truman Johnson, whose brief reign, the so-called Second Empire, was even more brutal than his father’s. When he executed a general who refused to carry out his order to use nuclear weapons against the only city on the desert world Karnak V, of
ficers loyal to the dead woman became the focal point of a rebellion that spread through the empire’s navy, spanning four years and much of the wormhole network, and ending with the disappearance of Able Truman Johnson. A rumour that he had been murdered by two of his younger brothers was never substantiated; neither was the story that he had discovered a ship with a version of the fabled faster-than-light Alcubierre drive, and had set out to discover the location of the Jackaroo’s homeworld.

  After his disappearance, Able Truman Johnson’s empire fragmented into squabbling apanages that were swiftly subjugated by elements of the rebel navy. The victors formed a loose commonwealth that acknowledged the power of a security council and its police to referee disputes and patrol the volume of the wormhole network, but after eighty years its stability was as fragile as ever, threatened by territorial disputes, civilian rebellions and breakaway groups that attempted to set up independent principalities on fringe worlds or turned pirate, preying on merchant traffic and staging quick raids on the worlds and resources of the Commons.

  Tony Okoye believed that he had been claim-jumped by one such rogue group, maybe his family’s old nemesis the Red Brigade, maybe someone else. And although he had escaped their trap, his ship was half-blinded by its own countermeasures and he was still a long way from home.

  As soon as Abalunam’s Pride passed through the mirror, the bridle threw up images and scans, saying, ‘The claim jumpers must have spoofed our assets and fed us fake telemetry – there was some serious throw-weight emplaced around the mirror. One-shot X-ray lasers, shrapnel missiles, ship-killing warheads . . . But they didn’t use them. They tried to cripple us, but they did not try to destroy us.’

  ‘Because they discovered that all the other stromatolites are gone, and they want what we are carrying,’ Tony said. ‘That’s good. It means that they will not do anything that could endanger our cargo. And that means that they will not do anything that could endanger us.’

  But if Raqle Thornhilde had told the claim jumpers about the expedition to the slime planet, they would know who owned Abalunam’s Pride. They would know where his family lived. He would have to deal with that as and when. Right now, he still needed to make good his escape.