by Paul McAuley
‘And why aren’t they here?’
‘They are on Terminus. But they have been advising me via q-phone. And help is coming.’
Willie squeezed Lisa’s hand with surprising strength. He said, ‘Ada Morange is sending a ship. All I have to do is hang on until it arrives.’
‘I can go get help right now.’
‘Stay a while,’ Willie said. ‘Let me tell you how I fucked up.’
He told the story with something of the jaunty self-deprecation of old. Explaining that for the past two years he’d been spending a lot of the time in the hills at the edge of the City of the Dead, where tombs were scattered and hard to find, and there were many dead spots where GPS and phone signals vanished. He’d become obsessed with the place, he said, and at last he’d found somewhere that sang out to him. Ground radar showed the faint trace of a shaft; his instincts told him that there was something useful down there.
‘Your instincts, or the ghost?’ Lisa said.
‘Maybe fifty-fifty. It had become hard to tell where it ended and I began.’
He had spent two weeks excavating rubble. Digging through compacted layers of sand and stone. Dragging out big rocks with a winch. Eventually he uncovered the beginning of a Ghostkeeper shaft, blocked a couple of metres inside by a rockfall.
‘But I found something there. A handful of tesserae. They shone like shards of moonlight. Earth’s Moon, not our crappy little lopsided flying pebble,’ Willie said, and went off at a tangent about different kinds of lunar light and then briefly fell asleep. Mouse bathed his head with a wet cloth and he woke again, slowly focusing on Mouse and Lisa and the others like an astronomer scrying distant worlds. ‘What was I talking about?’
‘Tesserae that looked like moonlight,’ Lisa said. ‘They contained Ghajar narrative code, didn’t they?’
‘You know about that.’
‘Your girlfriend gave me the one you asked her to look after.’
‘Is she here?’
‘Brittany? No.’
‘Good. Don’t let her know how I ended up, Lize. Tell a few lies. I know some good ones if you come up short.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Lisa said, speaking around a hard ache in her throat.
Willie explained that his old friend Calvin Quinlan hadn’t been able to make head or tail of the tesserae, so he’d had one of them analysed in the Alien Market. And that had attracted the attention of Ada Morange. Her people were on the lookout for Ghajar code; he was pretty sure that Carol Schleifer had told them about his find after he’d paid her to mirror the stuff. The deal had been clinched when they’d seen the drawings he’d been making. Turned out they were identical to a diagram that a Ghajar eidolon had put into the head of the little sister of the guy who had found the first operational spaceships. A map of pulsars that Ada Morange believed might lead to the Ghajar home world or some other equally momentous discovery.
‘I made a deal with her people,’ Willie said, sounding briefly like his old self. ‘A pretty good deal, if I say so myself. They were so excited they didn’t care what it cost. It was like taking candy from a baby who happens to own a candy factory. And frankly they got me cheap, considering . . . I should have asked for more, for all the good it would have done me. So anyway, we went out and started digging. We found a chamber tomb, and that’s when things sort of went sideways.’
He’d glimpsed some kind of skeleton on the floor, and then eidolons had exploded around him and the Outland crew. The crew had started attacking each other; he’d fled. When he woke, he was in his truck, his nose crusted with blood, bruises on his chest, the windshield cracked. He’d crashed into a stand of iron trees half a dozen kilometres from the site, but had no memory of it. He believed that he’d suffered the same kind of fugue that had seized him and Lisa during the Bad Trip.
He drove back to the excavation site, saw several bodies lying all bloody outside the shaft and realised there’d been a breakout, and freaked out again.
‘I thought that the police would think I murdered those people. So I unloaded the trail bike, put together some supplies, and set fire to the truck to cover up my disappearance. Crazy, I know, but I was sort of delirious by then.’
He had ridden until he had stumbled on this tomb, drawn there, he said, by some instinct not his. He slept outside on bare ground under the stars and woke up at first light, feverish and hurting. Needles were beginning to grow through his skin. Trying to cut one out had caused terrible pain. He couldn’t go any further, knew he was in a bad way, and had used his satellite phone to ask the road dogs for help.
He believed that the crash site in the City of the Dead, the Bad Trip and his jackpot were all linked. ‘The ship was damaged. It fell out of orbit and crashed. One of the crew escaped. Or maybe it was the only crew . . . Anyway, it got away, in some kind of lifeboat. It was hurt. It hid in that Ghostkeeper tomb, and repurposed the tesserae it found there. I think it put some kind of log or diary in them. Some kind of information.’
‘What kind of information?’
Willie touched the scribbles on the rock beside him. ‘It’s out there. I can feel it tugging at me.’
‘Where they came from?’
‘That would be something, wouldn’t it?’
Lisa started to tell Willie about the flow of Ghajar narrative code, the nodes she’d seen that Bria hadn’t. He nodded out for a minute or so, woke and focused on her.
Saying, ‘We had some good times, didn’t we?’
‘The best,’ Lisa said.
They talked about the old times. Willie said that when he was fixed up he wanted to see some of the other worlds. Said that Ada Morange owed him that.
‘You can come with me, Lize. You deserve it.’
‘That’s a fine idea,’ she said, and held his hand until he passed into sleep again.
30. Dry Salvages
Tony touched down outside Dry Salvages’s only city, Freedonia, in the middle of the long afternoon of the planet’s two-thousand-hour day, and rode a taxi into town. They had ceramic-shell ground vehicles here, propelled by engines that burned alcohol refined from sugar cane, and piloted by actual human beings. This one was red with a chequerboard stripe around its waist, owned by a garrulous middle-aged woman with a lot of curly black hair who drove with casual authority along the buzzing six-lane highway, trying to find out where Tony had been, why he was here and where he was going, offering to introduce him to the kind of good honest trader who was impossible to find in Freedonia without local knowledge. She laughed at Tony’s dismay when she swerved around a truck that cut in front of them. ‘You space jockeys are all the same. You ride in alien space-cans, zip through wormholes from star to star, but a little light freeway traffic makes you shit your underwear.’
It was actually the prospect of confronting Raqle Thornhilde that was making Tony nervous. Fantasies of revenge were one thing; the reality was something else. He had spent a fair amount of his freebooter career on Dry Salvages, in Freedonia, but everything familiar seemed strange; the gigantic spires reared up ahead like the fangs of some planet-eating beast.
They were between one and a half and two kilometres high, the spires. Crooked and tapering and glossy black, woven from billions of strands of fullerene, a carbon allotrope harder than diamond. Their adamantine foundations went down half a kilometre and the land around them had eroded over the tens of thousands of years since they had been built, leaving them standing on a mesa elevated above the desert plain. Like all such spires, every square centimetre of their surfaces was covered in intricate carvings whose meaning and purpose were as yet unknown. Some believed that they were algorithms encoding the essence of the Elder Culture that had constructed them; others that they were vast libraries containing secret knowledge about the relationship between the Spirebuilders and the Jackaroo, or the entire history of intelligent life in the universe, or instructions that when deciphered would allow humanity to uplift itself into some higher state of being.
The spires that stood
in the centre of the vast desert of Dry Salvages’s southern continent were the largest known, surrounded by the detritus of Elder Cultures that had come to study, worship or rewrite their texts. This, and the small wilderness of mirrors that orbited Dry Salvages’s star and gave access to a mostly unexplored portion of the wormhole network, had attracted freebooters, tomb raiders, scholars, wizards, pirates and hopeful dreamers from every part of the Commons and the fringe worlds. Artefacts and clandestine goods were traded in Freedonia’s libertarian economy; brokers bought and sold information about new worlds and unexplored Elder Culture ruins. This was where Raqle Thornhilde had forged a contract with Tony and a crew of wizards, sending them out to track down the rumour of ancient stromatolites left by the Old Old Ones on a remote slime planet. And now he had returned to confront the wily old broker, to ask her who had told her about the slime planet, and to find out what she knew about the Red Brigade, Aunty Jael, and Ada Morange.
The freeway switchbacked through a steep fell field of tumbled rocks to the top of the mesa and the entrance of the great cavern that, carved into one of the spires, housed the city of Freedonia and sheltered it from the extremes of temperature during the long days and nights. The city’s low-rise grid spread across the cavern’s flat floor. One- and two-storey flat-roofed buildings, open-air shopping malls and food markets, a golf course with swards of artificial grass. Bubble cars and trikes and shoals of cyclists swarming along wide boulevards under illuminated hoardings advertising perfume and clothes, drink and drugs. All this encompassed by black walls, scaffolded at their bases with the platforms where scholars and tourists inspected the spire-builder carvings, that curved up to the dome of the cavern’s roof and its fixed constellations of chandelier blimps and fierce stars of piped sunlight. It was like inhabiting the belly of a giant ship.
Tony spent most of his first day in the city recruiting a pair of bodyguards, a taciturn father-and-son team, renting two adjoining rooms in a motel they recommended, and hiring a little runabout. He dearly missed Junot Johnson, and his unflustered ability to sort out mundane matters. The next day he began the rounds of the bars, tearooms and cafés where freebooters and traders hung out. The routine was much the same in every place he visited. With one of the bodyguards stationed outside and the other keeping watch inside he would nurse a glass of tea or cup of coffee and fall into idle conversation with the other customers, working around to the prize that had been hijacked by the Red Brigade. They had murdered a bunch of wizards, he said, not needing to fake his outrage, and stolen valuable stromatolites recovered from a slime planet. Right now he was trying recoup his losses by selling some algorithms, unusual Ghajar stuff, that had been ripped from those stromatolites. Anyone who was interested in that kind of thing should come and see him.
He did not want to approach Raqle Thornhilde directly. It would imply weakness on his part. An admission that, despite the raid on his family’s home and the hit to their reputation, it was their fault that they had defaulted on the contract. And besides, although he would have loved to storm her home and put her directly to the question, the broker had powerful connections in the city and was protected by layers of robust security.
The first time Tony had met her, he had been summoned to her house, a rambling sugar-white confection in the exclusive district at the inner end of Freedonia, and had been subjected to intrusive security scans and an actual body search before being escorted by two burly men, alike as identical twins, to a tiled inner courtyard where water pulsed in a little fountain and birds chirped in gilded cages set amongst hanging ferns. He had sat there for more than half an hour before Raqle Thornhilde finally appeared, accompanied by a weircat and two men identical to Tony’s escorts: the same burly build, the same scowl, the same beady gaze under a thick monobrow, the same cropped black hair. They were rumoured to be clones of Raqle Thornhilde’s dead son. Why not? Many things forbidden elsewhere were legal in Freedonia.
The broker gave no excuse or explanation for the delay, which was clearly meant to underscore the point that this meeting was entirely on her terms. One of her escorts helped her lower herself onto a day bed; the other poured tea into silver-rimmed glasses while she studied Tony with a direct gaze that seemed to X-ray his soul.
‘You’ll like this,’ she told Tony, as she took one of the glasses. ‘A single-estate blend I import from Wellington for my own use.’
Her peremptory manner was not so much arrogance as indifference to any opinion that contradicted her tastes and decisions. Her bulk was draped in a scarlet and gold kaftan; her jowly face was powdered white, lips painted red. The weircat sprawled at her feet, long legs folded under its wasp-waisted body, its tiny head aimed at Tony, its red eyes glittering. When its mouth dilated in a kind of yawn, it displayed a rim of crooked black thorns.
After a brief exchange of pleasantries the broker explained that she had a lead on a pre-empire survey report about ancient stromatolites, was looking for someone who could take a crew of wizards to check it out, and believed that he was the person for the job.
‘To be frank, I didn’t invite you here because I was impressed by your experience, or your ship. It’s because your family owns a laminated brain that could be of great help if the wizards actually find some algorithms. Are you still interested?’
Tony, scenting the possibility of a big score, admitted that he might be. Raqle Thornhilde introduced him to Fred Firat, the leader of the crew of wizards she had already recruited; over a dinner of imported oysters and roast beef, the wizard expounded on the expertise of his crew and the potential importance of the find with a fiery passion that was only slightly less impressive when he repeated the performance for the benefit of Ayo and Aunty Jael over a q-phone link. Aunty Jael confirmed that the report was very promising and Ayo shared Tony’s enthusiasm, but there was a nerve-racking wait while she sought the approval of the family council. She called Tony early the next morning, told him that she had won the vote at the council meeting and the deal with Raqle Thornhilde and Fred Firat was on. Standing on the balcony of his motel room, still drunk from the night before, the guy he’d picked up in a bar snoring on the bed, Tony had believed that he had passed some kind of audition. That he had finally proven his worth to his family and was about to embark on the first of many fabulous adventures. He had been so stupidly happy.
He knew now that the adventure on the slime planet had been part of Aunty Jael’s escape plan, and he wanted to discover if Raqle Thornhilde had been a willing collaborator. If she was, she might know where Aunty Jael, aka Ada Morange, and the Red Brigade had gone, and how to contact them. If she wasn’t, she might help him track down the people who had cheated her out of her share of the find.
Innocent or guilty, she would know why he had returned to Freedonia, and suspect that his talk about selling Ghajar algorithms was bait for some kind of trap. But he was certain that she would not be able to resist checking it out. If she was innocent, she’d arrange a meeting and bluster at first, accuse him of cheating her and dodging his contractual obligations, but once they got past that Tony believed that she would be willing to negotiate. But if she had been collaborating with the Red Brigade and Aunty Jael, she would come at him some other way, and he would have to hope that the two bodyguards could protect him. And while she was checking him out and planning her move, he could try to find out if anyone knew why the Red Brigade wanted those stromatolites, and the copies of the Ghajar eidolon.
Mostly, he heard only the same old rumours. The Red Brigade had found the frozen body of Emperor Truman Johnson, and had laminated his brain. Their philosopher queen, Mina Saba, had cloned herself and the clones were riding a hundred ships in a hundred different directions, looking for the Jackaroo’s home world. Or she’d already found that world, and ancient secrets she’d uncovered there had enabled her to transcend the limits of the human mind. And there were the usual stories about agents from the Red Brigade spreading sleepy sickness, contaminating water supplies with alien drugs or genet
ically engineered gut bacteria, launching cube sats that broadcast mind rays . . . The same old same old.
He did hear one interesting tidbit in a small café with people playing backgammon at a couple of tables, under the husks of big silvery bugs hung from a mirrored ceiling. It seemed that a few weeks ago the Red Brigade had raided a police outpost at a small, recently discovered sargasso of Ghajar ships. According to the freebooter who told Tony the story, it contained a number of mad ships, and the police had been making arrangements to transport them to one of the collection sites in the Commons. The sole survivor of the raid claimed to have been interrogated by Mina Saba herself, said that the Red Brigade had made off with a mad ship caged in an automated U-class hauler.
Tony thought of his brother, commanding a similar lonely outpost; thought of Ada Morange’s interest in mad ships. He asked if anyone knew what the Red Brigade wanted with their prize.
‘Nothing good, you can be sure of that,’ the freebooter, a shrewd sensible grey-haired woman, said. ‘The Commons police have been rounding up mad ships ever since that terrorist gang, the ones claiming to be the true heirs of the Second Empire, tried to use one to drive an entire city crazy. I was there, one time. On Takama-ga-hara? You can still see the impact crater. Maybe you know the official story: how the mad ship parasitised the multiple-frequency bands the terrorists were using to fly it in by remote control, punched through their firewalls and drove every person and AI on board their ship insane. How it was brought down by a hero pilot who flew her raptor into the hauler carrying it before it could escape. Well, someone in Takama-ga-hara’s traffic control told me that pilot flew into the hauler, all right, but she didn’t do much damage. What really happened was that the mad ship crashed itself. It reached out to the terrorists and killed them, and then it committed suicide.’
Abass had once told Tony that story. He’d also said that the police team which had located and boarded the terrorists’ ship afterwards had discovered a charnel house: its crew had killed each other with their teeth and bare hands.
