by Paul McAuley
‘Was it Bob Smith?’ Chloe said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘That’s what the avatar Nevers was working with back then called itself.’
‘We weren’t introduced,’ Lisa said. ‘It was mostly tagging along as an observer.’
‘Nevers was carrying a kind of wire that generated a copy of that avatar,’ Chloe said. ‘It got into a fight with the Ghajar eidolon that called down the ships, and it lost. One of the !Cha once told me that the Jackaroo make a thing of preventing us finding and using certain kinds of Elder Culture technology because they know it will make it seem all the more desirable to us. Forbidden fruit, the apple in the Garden of Eden and so on. I don’t think Nevers understands that. That he may be helping the Jackaroo to manipulate us.’
‘You make him sound like some kind of fanatic,’ Lisa said.
‘He’s deadly serious about the dangers of Elder Culture technology. And he more or less lacks a sense of humour. Goes with his vanity, the way he presents himself. My advice is to take him as seriously as he takes himself. Because if he believes that you are dangerous, or if he thinks that you have found something that could be dangerous, he won’t let it go.’
‘That’s kind of why I called you.’
‘Because you aren’t going to let it go, either. Whatever it is that we aren’t going to talk about.’
‘I won’t go into any detail, like you asked,’ Lisa said. ‘But Ada Morange has an interest in this thing I’m caught up in. And I’ve reached a point where I may have to decide whether to throw in with her.’
A silence on the line. At the table next to Lisa’s a woman said loudly, ‘He told me he was so over it. But he so wasn’t.’
Chloe Millar said, ‘I can’t advise you about that. I haven’t met her or heard from her in years.’
‘But you chose to work with her, once upon a time.’
‘I was working for her from the beginning. For a little company, Disruption Theory, she’d bought a controlling share in. And then I got involved with the two kids infected with that Ghajar eidolon, and she gave us a great deal of help. She can be a good friend when your interests coincide with hers, but like all successful business people she can also be pretty ruthless. Using people to get what she wants.’
‘Nevers warned me about her followers. He made it sound like she’s running some kind of cult.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ Chloe said. ‘She wanted me to stay on, afterwards. I said no thanks, and we parted I guess you could say amicably. But Fahad Chauhan, one of the kids infected with that Ghajar eidolon? He stayed on. And at first it worked out pretty well. He helped her company work out how other people could control Ghajar ships; she paid him a good salary, protected him and his little sister from a shitload of legal trouble. But she also encouraged him to take off on solo voyages, go anywhere he wanted to, because she believed that his eidolon might lead him to something super-interesting. The Ghajar home world, some place with a living remnant of an Elder Culture species . . . He was one of the first pilots to explore the New Frontier, and one day, about five years ago, he went out into that wormhole network and he didn’t come back. You could say that it wasn’t Ada’s fault. That he would have gone out there anyway. But she encouraged him. She enabled him. She used him for her own ends.’
‘So if I throw in with her, I should watch my back.’
‘Like with any business deal.’ Chloe paused, then said, ‘If you do throw in with her, you’ll probably meet a !Cha who calls himself Unlikely Worlds. He’s following her story, the way the !Cha do, and she lets him. Partly out of vanity – that’s one of the things she and Adam Nevers have in common. Partly because she thinks he can be useful to her. If you do meet him, be careful.’
‘Is this the one who told you about the Jackaroo?’
‘I think that the !Cha manipulate people too,’ Chloe said. Most people didn’t bother with it, but she had the pronunciation of the click consonant, halfway between a sneeze and the sound of a cork pulled from a bottle, down to a T. ‘The Jackaroo do it because they want to help, whatever that means. The !Cha do it to jazz up the stories they’re following. At the end of the thing with the Ghajar eidolon, Unlikely Worlds gave me something I thought I wanted. As a reward, you know, for making Ada Morange’s story more tasty. I’d been looking for it for the longest time. I guess you could say it was my heart’s desire. It turned out that it wasn’t what I wanted at all, but that wasn’t his fault . . .’
Another pause. Then Chloe said, ‘My mother died in the Spasm. The suitcase nuke that took out Trafalgar Square, in London? She was there.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Lisa said.
‘I tried to find out how she died,’ Chloe said. ‘What she was doing, whether it was slow or mercifully quick. It was sort of how I got involved with Disruption Theory, so I suppose you could say it was how I got caught up in the Ghajar eidolon thing, too . . . Anyway, Unlikely Worlds showed me her last moments, and it was quick. Thank God. She died quickly. But that isn’t the point. The point is that he knew. I don’t mean that the Jackaroo and the !Cha had anything to do with the Spasm, or any of that truther nonsense, but they definitely knew about it. They knew what was going to happen. Where it was going to happen. And they let it. They let it happen, and then they came to help.’
‘They’d been watching us for a long time before First Contact,’ Lisa said.
‘Yes. And they know more about us than we can imagine. They know us better than we know ourselves. So watch out, if you meet Unlikely Worlds. Because he might try to fuck around with you. To spice up the story he’s following, or because it’s his idea of fun.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t been much help.’
‘I think I have a better idea about what I’m up against.’
‘As far as I’m concerned? I still don’t know the half of it, and I probably never will. But whatever you choose to do, I hope it works out. I really do,’ Chloe said, and terminated the call.
A couple of moments later, a robot voice told Lisa how much it had cost. It was a healthy bite from her bank account, but she thought that it had been worth it.
She went into the rest room, pulled out the smartphone’s SIM card and snapped it in half and flushed it. An hour later she was out on Highway One, heading for the desert and the City of the Dead.
24. On The Farm
Tony was exiled to a tank farm some forty kilometres north-west of the city. He was supposed to be learning how to run the place – starting afresh from the bottom and working his way back up, as Ayo put it – but it was really just one step away from house arrest. He had been stowed there because the family had chosen to reserve their decision about how best to punish him until after the Commons police had completed their investigation of the assault on Skadi. Out of sight, out of mind.
He had not been allowed to attend the funeral of Junot Johnson, the quiet, wry man who had served with him for two years of freebooting. Running errands, giving him unobtrusive advice during negotiations, checking out markets and rivals and potential clients . . . A dutiful, loyal sidesman, and also, Tony realised, too late, a good friend.
His phone privileges had been revoked. He could not access the family or the public nets, could not communicate with anyone outside the boundary of the farm. And Ayo refused his request to arrange a meeting with Danilo. That little fling was over, she said.
‘I know that isn’t your idea,’ Tony said. ‘It reeks of Opeyemi’s petty spite.’
‘It was going to end sooner or later, brother. That kind of affair always does.’
‘Danilo was an innocent party in all this,’ Tony said. ‘Promise me that he will not be hurt. Give me that, at least.’
‘He has been interrogated and released. And he will be of no further interest to us as long as you keep away from him.’
‘What do you mean, interrogated? Was he put to the question?’
‘He gave a statement about your little affair,’ Ayo said.
‘Nothing more than that. We are not monsters, Tony.’
She looked exhausted. Worn down and overburdened. She had agreed to the freebooting venture that had culminated in the work on the stromatolites, and now she had to deal with the fallout of the raid, and with Opeyemi’s self-righteous crusade to defend the family’s honour. Her authority had been weakened. She could no longer protect Tony because she could no longer protect herself.
While the city’s emergency services had been dealing with the attack on the refinery, raiders had infiltrated the city and headed for Danilo’s apartment building. Security forces had spotted them entering; there had been a firefight; the raiders had triggered explosives they had been carrying. Three city blocks had been obliterated and more than five hundred people had been killed or badly injured. Danilo had survived only because his bodyguard had ignored Tony’s orders and had taken him to one of the deep shelters instead of his apartment.
It was the only bright spot in what was otherwise a comprehensive fiasco. Tony had been interrogated by Opeyemi, and then interrogated all over again by the family council. There was general agreement that the raiders had wanted to snatch the stromatolites and the results of the wizards’ research, but no one apart from Tony believed that they were part of the Red Brigade – the dead they had left behind had lacked any kind of identification – and Opeyemi had more or less accused him of collaboration. Although they had been carried out in private and Tony had sworn her to secrecy, Opeyemi knew all about Aunty Jael’s tests. He said that the eidolon which had infected Tony had affected his behaviour and judgement, said that Tony’s failure to inform the family council about it was an irresponsible and wholly selfish decision that proved he was unfit to serve in any capacity.
Tony’s offer to chase after the raiders had been refused; Ayo had told him to admit his guilt and take his punishment. If he kept a low profile and showed suitable contrition, she said, it was quite possible that he would be forgiven.
‘Opeyemi has other ideas,’ Tony said. ‘He wants me to stand before a police tribunal and be prosecuted for sedition. He wants to sacrifice me to save the family’s reputation. You would think, sister, that I had stolen the fucking freighter.’
It was clear now that the K-class freighter which had landed the day before the attack had been hijacked by the raiders. They had launched the escape pods as the freighter had approached Skadi, and the pods had followed long spiral orbits that had intersected with the planet’s atmosphere eighteen hours later. The police were still trying to find out why traffic control had failed to spot this manoeuvre. And at the end of the raid, several hands acting as suicide bombers had damaged the only police ship and killed eight and wounded twenty more in the barracks and the control tower, and the raiders had sneaked back aboard the freighter and booted.
Tony’s suggestion that Aunty Jael had infiltrated traffic control and prevented it spotting the incoming pods, that she had used the hands to kill Junot and the police guards and attack the space field, and had told the raiders that he was living in Danilo’s apartment, was comprehensively ridiculed. She was a laminated person, unable to show any kind of initiative. She had not escaped; she had been stolen. The family’s official story, given to the police and distributed across news feeds, was that Eli Tanjung and the two missing wizards had been traitors, communicating with the raiders and feeding them inside information, and that Tony was entirely responsible for this catastrophic failure in security.
So he was exiled to the farm, accompanied by Lancelot Askia. In case, Tony supposed, he tried to poison the fish or lace the banana crop with hallucinogens. It was a relief to get away from the Great House and his family, the looks and pointed silences, the whispers at his back, but he had little to do but brood in the office he had appropriated from the farm’s supervisor, or wander the catwalks above the tanks and hydroponic platforms, where tomato vines, yams and banana plants, queen’s pineapple, efo tete and ugo grew in the sharp light of grow-lamps. The secret flicker of carp in the green depths of the tanks; a hundred hungry mouths kissing the skin of the water when they were fed. The taste of a freshly picked apple banana. The calm odour of growing plants in the damp warmth. Moments of pleasure in the desolation of his misery.
He went for long walks in the snowy plantation. Rows of tall pines stretching away in cathedral quiet. The sun pale and heatless in the white sky. Tracks of animals and biochines printed here and there in the snow. The crackle of ice crystals breaking under his boots. The smoke of his breath.
Lancelot Askia followed a dozen or so metres behind, a rifle slung on his shoulder and a pistol at his hip. Tony was unarmed. He was not even allowed to carry a knife.
Sometimes he fantasised that Opeyemi had given the order for his execution. A merciful bullet in the back of his head as he plodded through the snow. The crack of the shot echoing off through the trees, vanishing into the rapt chill silence.
Sometimes he fantasised about overpowering the man and escaping. But where would he escape to?
Sometimes it felt as if there was a third person walking with them. The feeling was so strong that Tony could not help looking around, seeing only his guard and the sentinel ranks of pine trees.
Once he came across a patch of trees that had been colonised by a congregation of kites. Clusters of the black diamond-shaped creatures clung to the treetops, overlapping each other like badly laid flagstones. Tony stepped towards the nearest tree and walked all the way around it, studying the kites. They were mostly motionless, but now and then an edge of a wing would ruffle, or a whip-like clasper would coil a little tighter, or an eye or three would extrude, blink, and withdraw.
The odour of them was like burned vinegar in the cold still air.
He clapped his hands. Softly and tentatively at first; then, after nothing happened, as hard as he could. Cupping his palms and smashing them together, the impact stinging under his gloves. Above him, several kites shuffled and stirred. One raised a ventral clasper to reveal its secondary sensory cluster: white stones randomly set in creased black leather.
Tony laughed, clapped some more. He was seized by a careless exhilaration. Maybe the kites would attack him, maybe they wouldn’t, but in the moment it felt as if he had regained control of his fate. He was so keyed up that he actually jumped when Lancelot Askia’s hand fell on his shoulder. It was the first time the man had touched him.
‘We must leave,’ Lancelot Askia said. ‘They could kill us if they startle.’
‘They don’t care,’ Tony said, and raised his voice. ‘They. Don’t. Care.’
‘Please,’ the man said firmly, and tried to pull Tony away.
Tony lashed out and smacked him in the face, a hard blow that sent him reeling back. He wiped a bright bubble of blood from his nose and stared at Tony with a hard loathing. His eyes were small and dark, set close together under a heavy brow.
‘I didn’t ask to look after you,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who infected me with a fucking alien ghost. I should kill you for that. But unlike you, I respect the chain of command. I have been given my orders, and I will carry them out as best as I can.’
Tony realised that the man had not been sent here to spy on him or kill him. No, Opeyemi wanted to make sure he did not try to commit suicide before the police tribunal arrived.
He said, ‘Why are you even alive? Why weren’t you in the laboratory? Why weren’t you killed like the others?’
Lancelot Askia glanced up as a couple of kites stirred high overhead, looked back at Tony. ‘If I have to knock you out and carry you, I will.’
‘If you lay a hand on me again, I will have you skinned for your insolence.’
Lancelot Askia stepped forward. Their faces were a handspan apart, the clouds of their breath mingling. ‘No, you won’t,’ he said. ‘Because you don’t have any power any more. Now let’s take this pity party home.’
25. The City Of The Dead
Lisa perched on the hood of her pickup truck, peeling an orange with her clasp knif
e, watching the first sliver of the sun simmer at the horizon, silhouetting the mounds and arthritic coral trees of the City of the Dead. She was bone-tired and stiffly aching after the long drive and a few hours of snatched sleep on stony ground, was trying to ignore the feeling that something was in the cab, sitting behind the steering wheel, staring at her through the windshield. Light sparked off a distant string of Boxbuilder ruins that crested a low ridge. A flock of harmless little eidolons that had crept out to watch her in the night suddenly swirled into the air and fled into a nearby crevice like flakes of burned paper sucked down a flue. Something whoop-whoop-whooped close by; in the middle distance something else cleared its throat with a brisk pneumatic rattle.
The alien desert waking around her, ancient and vast and full of mystery.
First Foot huddled so close to its cool red dwarf star that it should have been tidally locked like Earth’s Moon, its orbital period matching its rotation so that one face was always turned towards the star. Sunrise was a daily miracle courtesy of the unknown Elder Culture which had spun up the planet’s rotational speed around the time a long drought had been driving the ancestors of hominins into the plains of Africa.
Lisa remembered trips with Willie in the first flush of their marriage. Banging across stony flats in the old Holden Colorado, soundtracked by the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and the Grateful Dead. Willie grokked the music from three or four generations ago. He said that he had an old soul, claimed to be the reincarnation of the singer Gram Parsons. He’d had a chart drawn up by a Tibetan monk, or so he said, that tracked his soul back to when it had previously entered the bardo: 19 September 1973, when Parsons had died in the Hi-Desert Memorial Hospital in Joshua Tree National Monument, California. Parsons’s friends had hijacked his body and attempted to cremate it out in the desert, and that was what he wanted when the time came, Willie said. Forget some sterile crematorium oven. He wanted a pyre out in the desert. Wanted to mingle his molecules with earth and sky.
