by Paul McAuley
Brandon was trying for an offhand manner, but Tony could see an eager shine creeping into his gaze.
‘Something unexpected,’ Tony said. ‘A Ghajar eidolon.’
‘Hmm. Eidolons can be tricky. Harmless or dangerous, most of them. Not much good in either case.’
‘This one is a kind of translator,’ Tony said. ‘I hope you will not take it the wrong way if I don’t go into too much detail.’
‘Not at all. You don’t want to give away too much until you’ve found someone who has a genuine interest . . . Have you found anyone?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Just the usual chancers, I suppose.’
‘More or less,’ Tony said. ‘But I am sure that I will find someone who will recognise the value of what I have to sell. Its uniqueness.’
Tony had already rejected the advances of several traders and brokers who, like Brandon, worked at the low end of the market, where it was often difficult to distinguish desperation from greed. So far the real players had kept away, either because they weren’t interested, or because they knew about his contract with Raqle Thornhilde. Who, he hoped, had sent Brandon Wiley to sound him out, as pilot fish searched out prey for krakens, hoping to find scraps in the bloodied water after the kill.
‘What about the wizards you took all the way out there?’ the trader said.
‘Oh, there is no need to worry about them,’ Tony said. ‘They are out of the picture. This is what you might call a personal project of my own.’
Brandon pretended to think about that. He said, ‘I know someone who could help. If you like, I can provide an introduction.’
There it was. The first tentative tug on the hook.
‘That would be extremely generous of you, Brandon,’ Tony said, as casually as he could.
‘We are old friends, Tony. And what are friends for, if not to help each other? Let me see what I can do about arranging a meeting. And meanwhile, don’t talk about it to anyone else. There are too many people in this city who hope to take advantage of someone who has an unexpected difficulty in moving his merchandise.’
After Brandon had gone, the older of the two bodyguards asked Tony how he could be certain that the trader was fronting for Raqle Thornhilde.
‘He asked if the wizards still had an interest in this thing, but he did not once mention Raqle’s name, or the contract,’ Tony said. ‘He will come back with an offer to meet with this person who can help me, and it will turn out to be her.’
And then Tony would find out who had told her about the slime planet and the stromatolites, and all the rest. Trade information for information. He discussed the terms of the meeting with the bodyguards, told them it was possible that Raqle Thornhilde would try to strong-arm him.
‘Brandon will suggest a meeting place. At the last moment, we will tell him we have decided to meet somewhere else. Somewhere public where we can talk without either of us worrying that the other will pull some kind of trick.’
The bodyguards said that they knew just the place. Brandon Wiley called the next day, and the negotiations about where to meet his client went down just as Tony had predicted. But after that, everything went to hell.
As the hired runabout trundled towards the rendezvous – a cocktail bar on the top floor of an apartment tower – the youngest of the two bodyguards palmed a black cylinder and screwed it into Tony’s neck. A jolt of pain paralysed him; the older bodyguard slapped a surgical patch over his eye. He felt something press between his eyeball and its socket, and then his link with the ship’s bridle fell over.
‘Nothing personal,’ the older bodyguard said, ripping off the patch. ‘We just got a better offer.’
When the pain had mostly ebbed away and he could think straight again, Tony said, ‘I’m going to make sure you never work in this city again.’
‘We already have a new job,’ the younger bodyguard said.
‘A permanent one,’ the older bodyguard said. ‘No more scuffling for temporary contracts with off-world assholes.’
Tony pulled up his comms menu: most of its icons had turned red. He couldn’t even make a simple phone call. The bodyguards would not answer any of his questions – the younger one showed him the black cylinder, told him he would get another taste if he didn’t shut the fuck up. Tony hoped that they were working for Raqle Thornhilde. He believed that he could still make a deal with her, but if one of her rivals was trying to muscle in he could be in serious trouble. Freebooters and traders caught in the middle of local disputes had a habit of disappearing.
They headed out of the city on the beetling freeway, turned off onto a service road that cut between huge fields where combines were harvesting catch crops ahead of the long night. Beyond the last of the fields, the service road gave out to a rutted dusty track. The runabout jacked up on its suspension and fattened its wheels and without slackening its speed drove straight on into the desert. They drove for more than an hour, at last rolling to a halt in a broad sinuous valley that might once have been the course of a river, vanished aeons ago.
The bodyguards helped Tony out into dry furnace heat and immense silence. Sculpted saddles of sand dunes; rocks thinly layered like old books. Long shadows lay everywhere. Red rocks and red sand glowed in level sunlight. The spires reared up at the horizon, clawing the sky.
A spark flared overhead: the bubble of a spinner floating down, dust blowing away in every direction as it kissed the ground. One of the bodyguards bound Tony’s wrists with a cord that cinched itself tight; the other produced a black hood and pulled it over Tony’s head. He was hustled forward, lifted up, dumped on soft padding. A moment later, the world fell away.
33. Death Mask
After sunset, Little Mike built up the campfire against the chill of the desert night and the men sat around it, grilling hot dogs and passing a couple of blunts and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to and fro. Isabelle, sitting in the shadows outside the pulsing light of the fire, politely refused their offers to share; Lisa did her best to ignore the whisky, but took a couple of cautious tokes that levitated her, just a little, above her anxiety and grief.
Little Mike took a couple of hot dogs into the tomb for Mouse, who was keeping watch over Willie, and came back out and said that Willie was still asleep.
‘That’s a good sign,’ Bear said. Firelight glinted on his glasses at he looked around at the others. ‘I mean, isn’t it?’
‘If it helps the man conserve his strength,’ Sonny said.
‘We did everything we could,’ Wolfman Dave said, staring at Isabelle. ‘Fuck anyone who says different.’
‘Willie and his dogs, man,’ Sonny said, and raised the bottle of Jack Daniel’s in salute and took a long drink and spat into the fire. Blue flames briefly flared.
Little Mike told Lisa, ‘I got a blanket if you need one. Looks like the night air’s getting to you.’
This rough kindness pierced Lisa’s heart. She excused herself and walked off a ways and wept a little. For Willie. For Pete. For herself, because she believed that she saw in Willie a premonition of her own fate.
She returned to her seat by the fire, nodded off, and was jolted awake by the sound of angry voices. She knew, somehow, that Willie was awake, too. In the leaping firelight, the road dogs were crowding around Isabelle. She looked frightened but defiant, saying, ‘My people need to know. If they are to save him, they need to know everything!’
‘We should fuck up her ride,’ Wolfman Jack said. ‘Leave her stranded here.’
‘Take her way the hell out into the Badlands, leave her there,’ Mouse said.
The men were mostly drunk by now. There was a meanness in the air. They ignored Lisa the first time she asked what was going on, so she stepped between them and Isabelle and asked again.
Mouse was holding up a smartphone, saying that he’d woken to find that Willie was in a bad way, and ‘this fucking French bitch’ was filming him.
Lisa said, ‘What kind of bad way?’
‘He may have reache
d a crisis point,’ Isabelle said.
‘Like you fucking care,’ Sonny said.
‘I know how you feel—’
‘I don’t believe you do,’ Sonny said, with a hard stare and a nasty smile. ‘But I’ll be happy to enlighten you.’
‘Give me that phone,’ Lisa told Mouse, and he handed it over. She held it up, saying, ‘Willie’s sick, and you’re all out here, arguing about this? What kind of friends are you?’
The men looking at her as she tossed the smartphone, underhand, into the fire. Isabelle had the good sense not to say anything.
Mouse said, ‘She’s right. We need to go see to him.’
‘Don’t think we aren’t done with you,’ Sonny told Isabelle, trying to assert his authority.
‘We need her help,’ Lisa said, thinking of how strange it was, an actual fucking spaceship coming to save Willie.
Mouse said, ‘I think it could be too late for that. I think you’d better come see.’
There was a fluttering agitation in the tomb’s dark cool air: eidolons had been loosed from the tesserae scattered across the walls. Lisa felt their attention turn towards her as she hurried towards Willie’s makeshift bed. He had pushed his blanket away and his fists were clenched by his sides and his chest heaved with each breath. It was as if he was trying to breathe through a narrowing straw. He turned to look at Lisa when she knelt beside him, and she saw that the blood vessels in his eyes had burst. His pupils were black pools floating on eight-ball haemorrhages.
‘The bones in there,’ he said. ‘If they were bones. Woven, like wicker baskets. Chains of them. That Ghajar. Much bigger than a man, Lize. Much bigger. Wounded I think. In a bad way. Trying to help himself. Used some kind of nanotech. That’s what got me. It’s trying to fix me only way it knows how . . .’
Lisa took one of his fists in both her hands. It was fever-hot. She told him to hush, said, ‘We’ll get you fixed up soon. Isabelle’s friends are on their way.’
‘I won’t be dissected, Lize. I won’t be cut up. Analysed. Bits of me sold off. Promise me that.’
‘Oh, Willie.’
‘The things we meddle in. Not knowing what they are. Wonder any of us survive.’
His breath stank like a chemical lab. There was a faint silvery glow under his skin, a flow of unreadable information. She was only dimly aware of the road dogs behind her, and of the faint flutter of eidolons, now near, now far.
‘I see it all,’ Willie said, ‘but I understand hardly any of it. Maybe you’ll do better.’
‘What do you mean, Willie? Tell me what you see.’
‘A planet bigger than its sun. I think it’s a planet. A city hidden in a sea of red sand . . .’
Willie started to laugh and it turned into a racking cough. Flecks of blood on his lips. Bubbles of blood in his nostrils. Blood welling from the corners of his eyes, pooling against his nose, slanting down his cheek in a quick red slick. Lisa was gripped by a freezing mix of horror and pity.
He was looking straight at her, saying, ‘We don’t know anything, Lize. We’re like ants. Ants trying to understand algebra. But it’s so beautiful, you know?’
Then he was looking past her. Looking past everything.
‘Hush now, Willie. Save your strength. Hush.’
He breathed for a minute. Maybe two. It felt like all the time they’d ever had was compressed into that tall dark chamber. The eidolons were gathering close, eager witnesses to this all too human drama.
Willie suddenly started, tried to sit up. For a moment his reddened gaze fixed on Lisa.
‘The Jackaroo aren’t gods, Lize. That’s the funny thing. They aren’t even close . . .’
He fell back. The faint silvery flow, the death mask beneath his skin, was fading. His fist relaxed in Lisa’s grip and something slammed through her. She felt the eidolons fly back into their tesserae, and then black lightning clawed across the inside of her skull and everything went away.
34. Real Free People
Tony was imprisoned in a shed or shack with a beaten-earth floor and walls of roughly mortared blocks of sandstone. An unglazed slit window above his pipe-frame bed, a low doorway he couldn’t quite reach because of the plastic cord that tethered his ankle to the bed. Peering through the window, he could see a cluster of stone shacks and a patchwork of small stone-walled fields. In the distance was the long low barracks where the children were kept.
The sky was on fire with the mad light of the long sunset.
When the wind blew in a certain direction it carried a stench like rot and charred plastic – the smell of decomposing windrows of the self-reproducing photosynthetic monomers that an unknown Elder Culture had introduced into Dry Salvages’s shallow seas. So he was somewhere on the coast, but had no idea where he was in relation to Freedonia. Pyotr, the old man who brought Tony’s food, would not tell him who had kidnapped him or how long he was going to be kept there, and shrugged off threats of retribution and promises that Tony’s family would pay a generous reward for his release.
‘We are a long way away from the city and its laws,’ Pyotr said. ‘We are the real free people. Free to think as we will, free to live our lives. We answer only to God.’
The food was simple but good. Pyotr brought a pail of hot water every morning, and there was an ancient tablet containing a small library – mostly theological texts and tracts, but some fiction, too, all of it predating the arrival of the Jackaroo – and a chess program that even on its simplest setting beat Tony two times out of three. But Tony was not allowed to leave the shack, and whenever Pyotr visited there were always two strong lads stationed outside the door.
The old man was barefoot in a simple shift cinched at the waist by a belt woven from a rainbow of plastic threads, a tough bird with the serene manner of someone who didn’t have anything left to prove. There were deep scars on his arms and the side of his neck, inflicted by a weircat ten years ago, when he had been on what he called a walkabout, wandering naked across the desert, living off the land. He had transfixed the biochine with a flint-tipped spear and bashed it to death with a rock.
He belonged to a sect that rejected the hypercapitalism of Freedonia and had chosen instead to live in what they called the real world. They strung kilometres of fine netting to harvest water from the fogs that rose at the beginning of each day, maintained an elaborate system of channels, water lifts and little dams to irrigate their crops of corn, squash, beans, sunflowers and melons, extracted fibrous plastic from seawater evaporated in lagoons and used it to weave mats, baskets and clothing. And they looked after children who had fallen victim to sleepy sickness.
Some were the children of rich citizens who paid for them to be cared for, but most had been rescued after being turned out of Freedonia and abandoned to live as best they could in the coastal margin lands. The real free people provided food and water and shelter, and gave them Christian burials when they died. Pyotr said that all children were God’s children, even those whose minds had been overwritten by alien memes.
‘What about the Jackaroo and the !Cha?’ Tony said.
‘Those also.’
‘And the Elder Cultures?’
‘Of course. The universe and everything in it is Her kingdom.’
‘My religion has it that the Jackaroo and the !Cha lack souls, because they were not made in God’s image.’
‘There are some who believe that the Jackaroo are angels or devils,’ Pyotr said. ‘Others that they are secular gods, empowered by technology that appears to us to be miraculous, and with a long history we can only guess at. But compared to God, they are no more than we are. Creatures of stardust with finite lifespans and limited powers. It is a matter of perspective. From that of God, all are as children.’
They talked about the differences between the real free people’s religion and the religion of Tony’s family, whose God was served by lesser deities, orishas, which also controlled the destinies of people and acted as their protectors. Tony confessed that he had fallen out o
f love with religion, but supposed that his ship – or at least, its bridle – might be a kind of orisha.
‘Is the eidolon in your head also an orisha?’ Pyotr said.
‘Who told you about that?’
Pyotr shrugged.
‘My people believe that eidolons are false orishas,’ Tony said. ‘Because they come from an Elder Culture rather than from God they are as treacherous and evil as any demon.’
‘We would say that although eidolons do not come directly from God, they are the creations of God’s children. And like God’s children, they have the potential for good as well as for evil.’ Pyotr paused, then said, ‘I was told that there is a possibility that your eidolon harbours secrets that could help us understand sleepy sickness.’
‘I was told that too. But so far it has only led me into trouble.’
Tony was not especially afraid. Mostly, he was bored. Pyotr visited twice a day but otherwise he was left to his own devices. The nanotech inserted into his head by the surgical patch prevented him from calling his ship or anyone else, but he was not completely isolated. There was always the sense that something else was with him, in the bare shack. Sometimes he looked around quickly, trying to catch it out, but it always evaded him.
Sometimes he sang. Hymns, snatches of the old, old songs that Danilo had liked to sing. He had always liked to sing in church, loved the exhilaration of raising his voice in communal music, of letting go of himself in a great joyful noise. His voice was at best vigorous, but it didn’t sound too bad in the small resonant space. He wondered what the eidolon made of it. And realised, with plangent regret, that he had never once sung with Danilo and his friends in one of their impromptu sessions in an after-hours café or someone’s apartment.
He remembered the time he had conjured a window while he and Danilo lay together one night after making love, and he had shown the singer the luminous wheel of the Milky Way, the known stars in the wormhole network marked in red, scattered across its smoky spirals like flowers in a meadow. He had highlighted the stars he had visited, zoomed in through great drifts of stars to the star of Skadi.
