by Paul McAuley
‘The people who sold her to your family called her Jael,’ the bridle told Tony. ‘Your grandmother added the honorific. Much of the work she did for her previous owners involved manipulating eidolons and tweaking crop species and bioforms, an odd combination consistent with Ada Morange’s interests, but I was unable to find any other link. Colonel X must know something I do not.’
‘Or he wants me to check out a hunch,’ Tony said.
‘A hunch?’
‘An evidence-free guess. If he has been searching for this Ada Morange for a long time, he will have exhausted all of the best leads. By now he will be chasing rumours and ghosts.’
‘Will we be in trouble if it turns out that Aunty Jael is not Ada Morange?’
‘Even if she was once Ada Morange, she is not Ada Morange now. She is a laminated brain with only a residual resemblance to her original. Besides, we were not asked to find out who she was, but where she is. And I have my own reasons for tracking her down.’
Colonel X wanted to find Aunty Jael because he believed that she had once been the long-dead biotech wizard with whom he had unfinished business. But Tony wanted to find her because she had tricked him, because her escape had caused his downfall and disgrace, and because he believed that she had found something in the Ghajar algorithm that the wizards had overlooked. She had sold that knowledge to her friends in the Red Brigade, and she had also given them the two missing wizards. Not because of what the wizards knew, but because of what the Ghajar eidolon had done to their heads.
Because of what it had done to his head.
He wanted her to pay for what she had done. Her betrayal; his disgrace. But before he turned her over to Colonel X and the Commons police, he planned to find out what she had discovered. He would offer it to his family, and if they spurned it and refused to forgive him, it would provide the foundation for his own fortune, his own dynasty of freebooters.
Tony shared this and other fantasies with the bridle. She indulged him because that was how she had been made. She listened to him talk about Danilo, too, and the brutal end of their relationship. It had been a point of pride, a discipline, to conceal his emotions from Opeyemi and the rest of his family, but he could grieve openly now. Wallow in self-pity, and curse himself all over again for having failed his lover.
One day, on the way to the last mirror pair, the bridle told him that there was a problem.
Tony thought she meant the upcoming transit, but no: Abalunam’s Pride was decelerating exactly as planned through the outer edge of a small wilderness, and would make her final transit in a little under four hours. Everything was nominal.
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘There is someone else aboard,’ the bridle said.
Tony immediately thought of the eidolon. It had been quiet all this time – he had not been troubled by strange dreams, had not once absent-mindedly sketched that diagram – but he supposed that it might know that they were closing in on their destination.
He said, ‘Has it been talking to you? Asking questions? Demanding information?’
‘It has been talking to the ship.’
‘The actual ship? Its mind? What have they been talking about?’
‘The great highways. Deep time. Other things I do not understand.’
Tony said, ‘Can you talk to them? To this intruder, to the ship?’
‘I have always been able to talk to the ship’s mind,’ the bridle said. ‘But this is different.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Another part of the ship is awake. One I did not know about until now.’
She could not explain how this newly wakened part of the ship was different to the part with which she was linked, and was unable to give Tony any specific details about the snatches of conversation she had overheard. He thought of the travellers’ tales about ships which had rebelled against the smart apes who’d press-ganged them into service for trivial ape business. Ships which murdered their crews and passengers and lit out for parts unknown, or enslaved their human pilots, using them as puppets for their own fell purposes. He told the bridle to find a way to open up a line of communication and ran his own checks on the ship’s systems, but failed to find any irregularities.
By now, the mouth to the last mirror pair was dead ahead. Tony slipped into the ship’s navigational systems and gave the transit his complete attention.
It was entirely uneventful. Abalunam’s Pride emerged into the light of a M0 red dwarf star and drove on towards the desert world at the inner edge of its habitable zone. The ship might be haunted by the eidolon, but right now Tony was still in control. Riding the rails of his determination towards Dry Salvages and Raqle Thornhilde.
29. Road Dogs
‘You’re a long way from home, Bear.’
‘We ride where we want to ride, Lize. You know that.’
‘Where are the rest of the dogs? Or are you riding alone?’
‘Come to that, you’re a long way from home too.’
‘I think you know why I’m here, Bear.’
They were talking by the dumpsters in back of the bar. Bear – his birth name was Joshua Davis, but after he’d come up and out no one but the police had ever called him that – was a big guy dressed in a denim vest, filthy jeans, motorcycle boots. Hair greased back and matted with road dust; glasses with black plastic frames; a necklace of hive-rat soldier teeth hung on his bare chest; arms wrapped in full-sleeve tats.
He said, with an unconvincing shrug, ‘There are a bunch of tomb raiders out here chasing this jackpot. Thought I’d check it out.’
He’d never been a good liar.
Lisa said, ‘You found Willie, didn’t you?’
Bear’s mild blue eyes widened behind the thick lenses of his glasses. ‘Where did you get that idea?’
‘I saw his truck,’ Lisa said. ‘In the parking lot of the sheriff’s office, where it was towed. His trail bike wasn’t in the load bed. How I see it, he escaped the breakout somehow, and took off on that bike. And then he called on his friends for help. So where is he?’
Bear met her gaze, looked away.
Lisa said, ‘It’s okay, Bear. It’s me. His old lady.’
‘Not exactly his old lady any more.’
‘Not exactly not, either. We split up, yeah, but we never divorced. Remember the last time we were all together, out at my place? Willie’s fortieth? Did it look like I didn’t care for him?’
Bear shrugged again.
‘I want to help him, Bear. Any way I can.’ She really did. She could feel the weight of it settling on her. She said, ‘At least tell me that’s he’s alive.’
After a moment, Bear nodded.
Lisa could have hugged the sweet dumb old road dog. ‘Is he okay? Is he hurt?’
Bear’s Adam’s apple bobbed. ‘It’s fucked, Lize.’
A chill gripped Lisa’s heart. ‘Oh, Bear. How bad is it?’
‘Why I came into town, it was for supplies from the pharmacy. But honestly? I don’t think they’ll do much good.’
‘You have to let me see him.’
She watched Bear think about that. At last he said, ‘I gotta make a phone call first.’
They headed into the City of the Dead on Bear’s hog. Lisa rode pillion, feet on the pegs, the small of her back against the chrome rest. The familiar throaty burble and rush of hot wind, the tang of burned gasoline – the road dogs brewed their own in anaerobic stills, from wood chips and tweaked algae. It was like the old times when Willie and his dogs would stop by the homestead and hang out for a day or two.
After the Bad Trip, Willie had spent a couple of years riding the roads with them. To get his head straight, he’d said, but it had seemed to Lisa that his exploits with the road dogs had been howls against the void. They were lost boys, riding out into the alien wilderness and the ruins of millennia of alien colonisation in search of something they probably couldn’t even begin to define. Outriders of a Mad Max future in which civilisation had been destroyed by imperfectl
y assimilated alien wonders, and deracinated tribes haunted by powerful eidolons wandered the Earth and the fifteen gift worlds. She’d been pleased when Willie had sold his Harley to settle that gambling debt, and had gone back to full-time tomb raiding. She had thought that it was a kind of progress. But he had never quite cut his connection with the road dogs, and she was grateful for that now, riding behind Bear as his low-slung hog jolted down sandy tracks that twisted through a maze of mounds and half-buried tombs.
They rode a long way. Heading west and north through the City of the Dead, as far as Lisa could estimate, towards the range of hills that was the gateway to the Badlands. She entertained all kinds of scenarios about the breakout, and how Willie had escaped. She wanted to believe that he was basically okay, wanted to believe that she could do something to save him, but she kept coming back to the way Bear had looked when he’d told her that no one could help Willie now. The soft sadness of his gaze. The knowledge of finality that it contained.
Bare rounded hills slashed by arroyos and draws resolved out of the heat haze. Their slopes glowed in the afternoon light and the shadows between them were dark and deep. A trackless maze where Ghostkeepers had cut tombs into sandstone laid down by an ancient sea, built them into the overhangs of eroded ledges.
At last Bear swung the Harley into a slot canyon pinched between cliffs banded by pink and yellow layers of sandstone and mudstone. The beat of the exhaust echoed off the high close walls and then they leaned into a sharp turn and the canyon suddenly opened out into a narrow valley. Grey scrub and a scattering of mounds, a row of Boxbuilder ruins on a high shoulder of stone, glittering against the cloudless sky, and off to the right a thin thread of smoke rising against a red cliff.
Lisa suddenly had a funny itch in her head, like a scratch in the cornea of her eye or an aching tooth that the tongue keeps returning to.
The camp fire was burning just outside an overhang at the base of the cliff. As she and Bear puttered in, threading between big boulders, Lisa saw bikes parked in the overhang’s shade and her heart overturned when she spotted Willie’s stud-tyred trail bike amongst the Harleys. And now men were standing up, big and muscled in leather and denim. Shaved heads, beards, tats. Wolfman Dave. Little Mike. Mouse. And Sonny Singer, unfolding from the shelf of stone where he’d been sitting, strutting over as Lisa swung off Bear’s bike.
Sonny addressed Bear first, punching him hard on the shoulder, asking him if he remembered what he’d been told.
‘Come on,’ Bear said uneasily. ‘When I phoned you said I should bring her in.’
‘I also said you shouldn’t have let yourself get compromised.’
‘This is Willie’s old lady, dude. I don’t see how she compromises anything.’
Sonny ignored that. A black and white doo-rag was knotted around his shaven skull; his eyes were masked by mirrorshades. ‘I trusted you to do the right thing, Bear. Before you left, what did I tell you?’
‘You said don’t talk to no one. Get the painkillers and shit and come straight back. But this—’
Sonny punched him again. ‘Goddamn, Bear. You had just the one job.’
Lisa stepped up. ‘I came to see my husband, Sonny. Where are you keeping him?’
Sonny Singer had always intimidated her. He’d been a dentist before he’d come up and out, was the most intelligent and least predictable of the road dogs, his laid-back Southern charm masking an indelible meanness. He never forgot a slight, talked down to everyone, especially people he suspected might be brighter than he was, and knew exactly when and how to twist the knife of his scorn.
He looked at Lisa and said, ‘You know who Willie called when he was in trouble? Here’s a clue: it wasn’t you.’
‘But here I am.’ The itch was stronger now, and it had a direction. ‘I know you’ve been trying to do right by him, and I want to help any way I can.’
‘Exactly what did you tell her, Bear?’ Sonny said.
‘She’s his old lady,’ Bear said again.
‘Maybe she was once,’ Sonny said.
‘We still have something in common. That’s why I know he’s in there,’ Lisa said, pointing to one end of the overhang.
It wasn’t exactly as if she’d suddenly acquired X-ray vision, could see through dirt and rock to where Willie lay, but like a compass needle quivering north she knew with absolute conviction his position relative to hers.
‘He’s hurt bad,’ Sonny said. ‘And he’s sleeping. Maybe you can see him when he wakes. If he wants to see you.’
‘He’s awake now. And he knows I’m here,’ Lisa said, because she could feel that too. Or maybe her ghost could: it was standing at her shoulder, so close that if it had been human she would have felt its breath on the back of her neck. She had to resist the urge to turn around, try to glimpse the unglimpsable.
She said, ‘If you men don’t believe me, maybe one of you could go check.’
Staring at her, Sonny said, ‘Someone take a look,’ and Mouse, a white scar Lisa didn’t remember dinting his unshaven chin, more chains than ever looped across the front and back of his leather jacket, jangled off.
The men around Lisa relaxed, as if something had been resolved. They started asking questions, how was she, was she still living on the homestead with those critters, so forth. As if this was no more than a social call. She asked them if this was where they’d found Willie.
‘More or less,’ Sonny said.
‘How badly is he hurt? What happened to him?’
‘You can’t tell?’
Lisa knocked that one right back at Sonny, saying, ‘You didn’t think to take him to hospital?’
‘There isn’t anything a hospital can do.’
‘Maybe that’s something a hospital should decide.’
‘We took medical advice,’ Sonny said.
‘And there’s help on the way,’ Wolfman Dave said.
‘What kind of help?’ Lisa said.
‘Stick around and you’ll see,’ Sonny said.
‘This is where he wants to be, Lize,’ Little Mike said. ‘We’ve made him as comfortable as we can, in the circumstances.’
He took a swig from a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s and held it out to her. She refused as nicely as she could. ‘How about giving a lady a long drink of cold water? I feel like I’ve swallowed a couple of pounds of dust riding here.’
Wolfman Dave fetched a bottle of spring water. Lisa was chugging it down when Mouse came jangling back, with the disconcerted, distracted look of a man trying to puzzle out a magic trick.
‘Willie knew she was here before I told him,’ he told Sonny. ‘Says she shouldn’t have come, but now she’s here he needs to talk to her.’
The road dogs exchanged glances.
‘Why don’t you take me in to see him?’ Lisa said.
The overhang narrowed to a descending slot, the entrance to a chamber lit by a blade of sunlight slanting through a slit in the high ceiling. A scattering of tesserae glimmered on the far wall; Lisa could feel the presence of eidolons, like a flitter of bats in the corner of her eye.
‘Over here,’ Mouse said, and led her across the sandy floor to an alcove on the far side. A woman rose from a canvas chair as they approached.
‘Ms Dawes? I am Isabelle Linder. I am so pleased to meet you,’ she said, and held out a hand.
Lisa hardly noticed. She was staring at the thin figure lying on a kind of shelf or fold of rock. It was Willie. It wasn’t.
He was bare-chested, a mylar blanket folded to his waist, his head pillowed on a sweat-stained kitbag. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes sunken in bruised sockets. His ribs articulated under his skin with each breath. And there were needles studded in his grey crew cut and his forehead, needles of black glass, different lengths, forming a kind of crown. They rattled when he turned his head to look at Lisa.
‘I knew you were coming,’ he said. ‘I could feel it.’
‘Our ghosts,’ Lisa said.
‘Yeah. Our ghosts.’
She could see, in the same unseeing way she’d been able to tell where he lay, a roil of activity in his body. Nodes under places where the needles stuck him, and a kind of traffic seething through the blood vessels under his skin. His face shone like a foggy mask of milky silver, like the swirl of currents around the anomaly in the Ghajar narrative code.
Lisa knelt and took his hand. She could feel the bones inside its loose hot skin.
He said, ‘I have some new ghosts now.’
His smile was all teeth.
‘Oh, Willie.’
The road dogs and the woman were standing behind her; she briefly wondered at the strange tableau they must make. Like one of those chintzily pious religious paintings. The curve of stone over Willie’s makeshift bed was marked with drawings in black Sharpie. Each the same. Lines radiating out from a central point, each marked with different patterns of cross-hatching. She supposed it was some kind of representation of the needles that pierced him. A notebook folded open and tucked between the kitbag and stone showed part of a similar sketch.
Willie said, ‘It doesn’t hurt. It did at first. But not now.’
‘What is it? What happened?’
‘I believe that he was infected with a variety of nanotechnology,’ Isabelle Linder said. ‘As far as I can tell, it is not contagious.’
‘It’s all through me like bad cancer,’ Willie said. ‘I tried to cut it out. It hurt like hell and it fucking grew back.’
Lisa turned to look at the others. ‘And you thought the best thing for him would be to stick him in this . . . cave?’ She couldn’t say tomb. ‘He needs to get to a hospital. Right now.’
‘We will do our best to help him,’ Isabelle Linder said.
‘Are you a doctor?’
‘I work for Outland Archaeological Services.’
‘I thought you were all dead.’
‘My colleagues are dead. Fortunately, I was not there when the breakout happened.’
‘Good for you. How do you know what’s best for my husband?’
‘I have consulted with experts.’
