by Paul McAuley
‘As I said, I’m otherwise occupied at present. But I would very much like to talk to Aunty Jael, and I believe that you will be able to track her down.’
‘And what do I get, if I agree to help you?’
‘Apart from your freedom, your honour, and your ship?’
‘You can do that?’
‘Your family have been too busy cleaning up the damage after the raid to get around to putting her on the market. Here.’
It was like a window opening inside his head. The familiar connection streaming in like sunlight through a window. The sense of the shape of the ship and the status of her systems. Tony and the bridle of Abalunam’s Pride asking each other if they were all right.
‘What have they done to you?’ Tony said.
He was on his knees in the snow. He didn’t remember falling to his knees.
‘They cut off my comms. They would not tell me why,’ the bridle said.
‘My family were scared of what we found,’ Tony said. ‘They are still scared. And I am in a little trouble.’
‘Of course you are,’ the bridle said. ‘How bad is it?’
‘Nothing that can’t be fixed.’
Tony was running a swift and superficial systems check. The ship appeared to be free of any extra layers of security or surveillance. He would need to go deeper to discover if anything had been implanted by his family, and wondered if he would be able to tell if Colonel X had inserted something . . .
And then it all went away again. He was back in the snowy forest, facing the avatar of Colonel X.
‘I can give you everything you want,’ Colonel X said, ‘as long as you agree to help me. And since we both want to find out the same thing, the obligation is hardly onerous.’
‘If you really are working for the Commons police, with all its resources, why me?’
‘This particular investigation is off the books. Like you, I haven’t been able to convince those who call themselves my superiors of the importance of this. So I must work with what comes to hand. If it’s any comfort, you are by no means my only irregular.’
‘I suppose your superiors refuse to believe that the stromatolites’ archival genetics may contain a cure for sleepy sickness.’
‘Oh, it was never about that,’ Colonel X said airily. ‘That was a story got up by your Aunty Jael. Have you been drawing lately? Scribbling?’
‘You mean the pattern.’
‘I mean the map. The Ghajar found something, long ago. I believe that it has something to do with the so-called mad ships and a certain wormhole route,’ Colonel X said. ‘As to where that leads, and what’s at the end of it, I don’t yet know. Something old, something powerful, something that might have destroyed the Ghajar, and may destroy us if it falls into the wrong hands. You should start with the person who pointed you towards the slime planet. The broker, Raqle Thornhilde. She may have collaborated with Aunty Jael.’
‘I need some time to consider this,’ Tony said.
He wanted to escape his punishment and his shaming, wanted to prove that he was right. And after the brief moments of contact with the bridle, he ached for his ship more than ever. But he also felt a prickling caution: this really did seem like one of the old stories where someone made a pact with a devil, only to find out that the bargain was deeper and more dangerous than it first appeared.
The ghostly avatar of Colonel X said, ‘I’m afraid that you’ll have to make your decision now. Ten minutes ago someone discovered my tampering with the security system of the farm. And four minutes after that they found that you are not in your room. They are searching the farm for you; it won’t be long before they will realise that you escaped, and find the tracks you left in the snow.’
Tony knew that Colonel X could be lying to force his hand, but he also knew that he did not want to return to the farm. He said, ‘All I have to do is find Aunty Jael.’
‘Yes. What happens after that is up to you.’
‘I want full control of my ship.’
‘Of course.’
The ship’s bridle was back inside his head again, and he was back inside her. She started to apologise for having been cut off; he told her to get ready to boot.
‘You bet.’
Tony tore his attention away from her and looked at Colonel X. ‘You won’t ever touch my ship again.’
‘Now she’s back with her rightful owner? Of course not.’
‘I am doing this for my family, not for myself.’
‘Of course you are.’ It was impossible to tell if the avatar was mocking him. ‘Take command of your ship, Mr Okoye. Go to Dry Salvages, or wherever else you think your search should begin. We’ll talk again soon.’
As the avatar began to fade out of the dark air, Tony said, ‘Wait! You said that Aunty Jael was an old acquaintance of yours. Who is she really? What is her name?’
The avatar’s face brightened briefly, it said two words, then popped out of existence. A moment later something shot up from where it had stood, a tiny bright spark rising past the tops of the trees and accelerating as it rose higher, vanishing amongst the fixed stars. A drone, no doubt equipped with a q-phone and a caster. The hand was moving too, marching past Tony, following the tracks he had made in the snow. It ignored him when he ordered it to stop. He wondered, watching it disappear into the dark between the trees, if it would have killed him if he had turned down Colonel X’s offer.
He asked the bridle if she knew his location.
‘Of course.’
‘Come and get me. Right now.’
‘I am already on my way, and will rendezvous with you in two hundred and thirty-two seconds. Traffic control is unhappy.’
‘Ignore traffic control. Are you connected to the net?’
‘Yes. That came back after the block on communicating with you was removed.’
Tony thought of sending a message to Danilo Evangalista, explaining that he was setting out to right a great wrong and would carry Danilo in his heart until he returned. But he told himself, thinking of the oubliettes beneath the Great Tower, the interrogation suite stark as an operating theatre, that there was every chance that Opeyemi would intercept any message, that it would be stupid and selfish to put his lover in harm’s way. No, he thought, with a cold, lonely but not ignoble feeling, this was no time for explanations or sentiment. He must slip away into the night, and hope that finding Aunty Jael and bringing her to justice would exonerate him.
So instead of calling up his phone, he gave the bridle the password to the family’s archives, saying, ‘I want you to compile a file on someone called Ada Morange. Find everything you can before we boot.’
27. Joe’s Corner
Apart from her recent slip and a couple of early lapses, Lisa had been clean and sober for almost six years. But the old cravings were never far away, ambushing her at odd moments, sneakily sliding in the idea, when she passed a bar or a billboard advertising liquor or saw the bottles glinting behind the sliding doors of the country store’s chiller cabinet, that a cold one would hit the spot right about now. As she drove south in early morning light, striking the two-lane blacktop and blowing down it, she felt something like those cravings rise up inside her – the need to find the site of the breakout, to find what was there, what it had done to Willie and the others. Bria had asked if she’d come out here because she really wanted to, or because she was being driven by her ghost. Well, the thing was fully present now, like a shard of sun-dazzle at the corner of her sight, and Lisa was certain that it wanted to find the site as much as she did. Maybe it wanted to go home. Maybe it would slip away from her and return to the artefact which had generated it, the way that little pack of eidolons had fled from the sunrise into the tomb and their tesserae.
She slowed, passing the sign for Joe’s Corner, Pop: 523, and discovered that the little crossroads town had been overrun. RVs, SUVs with big all-terrain tyres, pickup trucks and Humvees were nose to tail along its main drag, crowding the parking lots of the three motels and the flying-saucer-shaped
coffee shop. She saw a polished aluminium Slipstream caravan, saw customised camper vans with elaborate paint jobs depicting galaxies, desert landscapes, a Jackaroo avatar riding a T. rex rodeo-style. An old school bus converted into a travelling restaurant; a food van serving tacos. A gaggle of Harleys cruised throatily past, ridden by women with shaven heads and leather armour, reminding Lisa of the road dogs Willie had run with back in the day.
As usual after someone hit a jackpot, tomb raiders had come a-running. It didn’t matter that the find had killed the people who had dug it up. Tomb raiders believed they made their own luck, were exemplars of confirmation bias, retrospective determination and the gambler’s fallacy who thought that they were invulnerable because nothing, so far, had proven that they weren’t. Some believed that they possessed special talents, gifts and knowledge that those killed in breakouts or driven into irretrievable psychosis so obviously lacked; others deployed trademark rituals and methods for invoking luck and appeasing the alien dead, wore amulets, bones, and rings to ward off ancient curses, or were tattooed with signs meant to baffle spooks and defuse bad algorithms. Lisa remembered one woman who used the I Ching to decide where to search. Remembered another who’d always burned fake paper promissory notes, big red bills, before entering a tomb. And here they all were, hoping to cash in on someone else’s bad luck, planning to head into the Badlands as soon as the geek police lifted their quarantine. No doubt some of them were already out there, trying to sneak past the patrols and drone pickets.
Lisa found a parking spot at the far end of town, walked back. Ten-thirty in the morning, and there was a pool party at the Westward Ho! Beer coolers and a barbecue and a sound system pumping out A-pop. She didn’t recognise anyone. She’d been away a good long while.
She was planning to have a serious conversation with Willie’s old friend, the assayer Calvin Quinlan. There had always been a sour atmosphere between her and Calvin. It ran deeper than professional rivalry, although he always made it plain that he resented Lisa taking on the business of analysing Willie’s finds. Maybe it was because Calvin was a boozehound who kept a bottle in his desk drawer and had recognised the same weakness in Lisa long before it had surfaced. Despite this old enmity, she figured that he wouldn’t find it easy to blow her off if she turned up unannounced, but discovered that his storefront was shuttered and dark and there was yellow police tape across the door. She walked straight past, scared that someone could be watching the place, and turned down a sandy alley and turned again, following a track behind the commercial strip as she tried to work out what to do next.
There was a stretch of elbow bush at the edge of the parking lot behind the flat-roofed single-storey Sheriff’s Office building. And in the lot, under the microwave mast, were three white Toyota Land Cruisers with Outland Archaeological Services in blue lettering on their doors, and a burned-out pickup truck squatting on wheel rims. A Holden Colorado, paint scorched from its cab, all glass gone, the door on the passenger side hanging loose, displaying the charred interior. Lisa stopped and stared. It was Willie’s truck, had to be, but there was something missing, something she wasn’t seeing . . .
A door opened in the back of the building, someone stepped out, and Lisa started walking. A dry clicking followed her down the length of the elbow-bush hedge as its long spines rotated towards her. She followed an alley that led back to the main strip, thinking about the truck, and right across the street was Don’s Joint, the bar where she and Willie used to hang out back in the day, dancing to old tunes on the jukebox, talking till three in the morning with other tomb raiders, the scores they’d made, the scores they were going to make . . .
It was dark and cool inside, mostly empty. Lisa stepped hard on the impulse that had brought her there, ordered a Diet Coke, and fell in with Jayla and Shelley Griffith-Fontcuberta, a couple of good old girls she’d known slightly back in the day. Jayla was as intense and impatient as ever, jiggling in her chair, jabbing a finger when she wanted to make a point; Shelley was about fifty pounds heavier than when Lisa had last seen her, her gorgeous waves of hair dyed blood red. They had heard about Willie, of course, and commiserated with Lisa on her loss.
‘The cops brought in the vehicles from the site two days ago,’ Jayla said.
‘Willie’s truck had been set on fire,’ Shelley said. ‘It broke my heart to see it.’
Lisa nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
‘It’s beyond fucked up is what it is,’ Jayla said.
‘There has been a serious disturbance,’ Shelley said.
‘She felt it coming,’ Jayla said, daring Lisa to contradict her.
‘Even those without the Gift could feel it coming,’ Shelley said.
She was a self-proclaimed Sensitive who believed that a web of quantum entanglement linked the City of the Dead and all the other Elder Cultures sites on First Foot, and that she could sense changes in its traffic of information. Why not? As far as Elder Culture tech was concerned, no one had yet found the limits of the possible.
Shelley said that eidolons were spooked everywhere in the City of the Dead. She said that someone had seen a vast cloud of them pouring out of a vent, rising high into the sky and heading south. She said there had been heat lightning and ripples of light like auroras, tombs collapsing, sightings of strange creatures that dissolved into thin air when approached, cries and wild music on radio bands, packs of animals and biochines fleeing as if from a forest fire. People prospecting around the spaceship crash site north of Joe’s Corner had been visited by ghosts at night: tall and slender and pale, stooping amongst vehicles and tents. Others had thrown fits or had seen visions of a celestial city rising into the sky.
‘So,’ Lisa said, ‘are you planning to go out there, find out what’s causing this shit?’
‘We might have one or two ideas about that,’ Jayla said. ‘The geek police have thrown up a big-ass quarantine zone. We’ve located a bunch of hotspots in there.’
‘I dowsed the map,’ Shelley said.
Lisa told them that she was looking for someone who might know how to find a way inside the quarantine zone; they said that they’d be happy to partner up with her, a straight three-way split on anything they found. Hoping, no doubt, that either Lisa knew exactly where she wanted to go, or that she would act as a human dowsing rod and lead them directly to the good stuff.
‘We can get in right now, no problem,’ Jayla said. ‘The zone’s too big to police properly. And there are plenty of blind spots. Draws, dry washes, places that fuck up radio transmissions . . . You want in, we can find a way.’
‘But you’d better make up your mind quick,’ Jayla said. ‘We aren’t going to hang around town much longer.’
‘It’s getting pretty heavy here,’ Shelley said. ‘The cops are cracking down.’
‘They came in here last night,’ Jayla said. ‘Arrested this guy who’d been mouthing off that he knew where the breakout site is.’
Lisa said, ‘Did he?’
Jayla said, ‘Did he know? No, it was just drunk talk.’
‘They arrested a good number of people,’ Shelley said. ‘There’s talk they’re planning to arrest more.’
Lisa asked about Calvin Quinlan: did they know why his store was closed?
Jayla shrugged. ‘I expect he was caught handling hot shit. Wouldn’t be the first time that’s come back to bite old Calvin.’
Lisa hardly heard her. Someone had come through the door, a big guy in biker gear. Someone she recognised. And, with a click, she realised what had been missing from Willie’s burned-out truck.
28. Rumours And Ghosts
The trip from Skadi to Dry Salvages took twenty-three days and six transits. Three involved passing through systems with inhabited planets, but although he was flying what was technically a stolen ship, Tony was not challenged by police or traffic control. There was no watch notice posted, no sign of pursuit. He doubted that his family, especially Opeyemi, had decided to let him go, suspected that Colonel X had fin
essed his free passage. Another debt to someone he knew nothing about, except that the man (if he was a man) had the power to reach across the galaxy and get deep inside the Okoye family’s security. And he had a serious interest in Aunty Jael, who was, he claimed, the laminated remains of his old ‘sparring partner’ Ada Morange.
The ship’s bridle had been able to ransack every corner of the family’s database during the two hundred and thirty-two seconds it had taken her to travel between the space field and the forest, but the information she had gleaned about the dead woman was disappointingly thin. Ada Morange, born sometime in the twentieth century, had been a biotech wizard who had pioneered the exploitation and re-engineering of Elder Culture artefacts, discovering how to manipulate the growth of construction coral, mapping eidolon activity in human brains, and acquiring and learning how to control the first Ghajar ships. She’d moved to the New Frontier after that, where she had been prominent in the first attempts to explore the wormhole network and the worlds it linked, and had developed a considerable interest in the so-called mad ships.
This last fact had not come from the family’s database, but from the Commons police station on Skadi. When Tony asked her how she had managed to hack police security, the bridle said that she did not know.
‘It came to me that I could do it, so I did. Did I do something wrong? Are you unhappy with my initiative?’
‘I’m startled.’
Tony was wondering if Colonel X had given the bridle some kind of access protocol, and was also wondering what else the man might have done, such as introducing spyware or overrides.
‘It surprised me, too,’ the bridle said.
She had also discovered that Ada Morange had been active until the rise of the First Empire, when she would have been around a hundred and thirty years old, but after that she had disappeared from view. Either she had died, or had managed to purge every trace of her life from public records, or those records had been destroyed or corrupted. There was certainly no mention of her name in the bill of purchase for the laminated brain that Tony’s family had owned for the past fifty years.
