Into Everywhere

by Paul McAuley

  ‘That’s where we are,’ he said. ‘One star amongst four hundred billion. You could spend a lifetime travelling between the known worlds, and not exhaust them.’

  Danilo laughed, saying that you could spend all your life in one place and still find something new every day.

  ‘Aren’t you curious about the other worlds?’ Tony said.

  ‘I’m curious about other people.’

  ‘There are other people on those worlds. Strange and new and wonderful people. People unlike any here.’

  ‘You miss your ship,’ Danilo said.

  ‘I miss my freedom,’ Tony admitted.

  ‘One day you’ll get her back, and then you’ll be gone. Out there somewhere, in all those bright stars . . .’

  ‘I could take you with me. I could get permission, and if I didn’t I could take you anyway. Show you things you wouldn’t believe—’

  Danilo placed two fingers on his lips.

  ‘But it isn’t about the other worlds, is it?’ the singer said. ‘It isn’t about where you go. It’s about the going. The flight. You’re like a kite who can’t settle on a roost. Always in motion, never at rest. Always between one world and another.’

  Tony had tried to turn it into a joke, saying, ‘Am I not part of your world?’ But he knew now that Danilo had been right. He had only ever been a casual visitor in his lover’s life. That was the worst of it. The root of his guilt. He could visit Danilo’s world, but Danilo could never visit his. Could never, ever be a part of it.

  Two days passed. Three. The conflagration in the sky intensified as the sun laboriously set; the patch of windowlight that fell on the far wall dimmed as it inched towards the ceiling. And then, on the morning of the fourth day of Tony’s imprisonment, the door slid back and Raqle Thornhilde ducked under the low lintel. Behind her, stepping daintily over the threshold on three articulated legs, was the aquarium tank of a !Cha.

  35. The Pyre

  In cold dawn light the road dogs used their Harleys to rope stumpy greasewood trees out of the stony ground and haul them, bumping and jerking, long leathery leaves trailing like the tentacles of dead squid, to the spot where they were building Willie’s funeral pyre. They stacked the trees in lengthwise and crosswise layers, taking care not to get the caustic white sap on their skin, and capped the pile with a platform of brushwood and coral-tree branches. And then Willie’s body, wrapped in a blanket, was carried out of the Ghostkeeper tomb and tenderly laid on top. Each road dog said his goodbye, gripping Willie’s limp hand, telling him you’re in a better place now, bro, and ride safe, and fuck an angel for me. Lisa brushed back black spikes and kissed his cold lips. Then Sonny sprinkled a litre of precious gasoline on the blanket and took a burning brand from Mouse and touched it to the congealed puddles of sap at the base of the pyre.

  They all stepped back from the heat and flare. White smoke rolled up, stinking like molten road tar. Lisa wondered about contagion. What if the Ghajar nanotech had multiplied in Willie’s body, and had been freed by the fire and was rising and spreading on the air?

  Something had definitely escaped from him at the moment of his death. She supposed that it was his ghost, or what his ghost had become after the breakout, passing through her as it flew into the tesserae scattered across the walls of the tomb. She hoped that it had taken something of Willie with it. In ten or a hundred thousand years other clients of the Jackaroo might read in those tesserae something of the essence of his life.

  Whatever it was, it had left its mark in her. She could see now dim phantoms in the landscape. Faint X-rays of the dead. She could sense the interiors of Ghostkeeper tombs in the cliffs across the valley. Indistinct gestures inhabited the Boxbuilder ruins up on the ridge. Something severe and forbidding stood in the chip of the moon as it fell towards the paling eastern horizon, and she could sense another presence in the sky – an orbiting ship, maybe . . .

  There was a sudden jerky movement inside the caul of flame. Willie’s body sitting up in the fire, horrible to see.

  ‘It’s just muscles contracting,’ Mouse told her. ‘It don’t signify.’

  The body fell back into the flames, and a little later the platform on which it lay collapsed into the burning shells of the greasewood logs. Wild galaxies of sparks swirled up into the vivid blue morning sky. A great banner of smoke streamed down the valley.

  The road dogs began to pack, getting ready to move out in case the geek cops spotted the tell-tale smoke and came to investigate. Lisa hugged and thanked them one by one.

  ‘We only did what was right,’ Sonny said, his usual belligerence slightly softened. ‘You sure you want to go off with that woman?’

  ‘You need protecting from the cops, let us do it,’ Little Mike said.

  ‘You don’t want any part of the trouble I’m in,’ Lisa said.

  ‘Seems to me you’re asking for more trouble, going with her,’ Sonny said.

  ‘I think she can help,’ Lisa said. ‘Or at least, I think her boss can.’

  When the fire had at last burned down, the road dogs picked through the hot ashes. They found a few shards of bone and buried them near the entrance to the tomb, then swung onto their hogs and saluted Lisa and rode off towards the City of the Dead. After she had prised a couple of tesserae from the wall of the tomb, Lisa walked to where Isabelle Linder was waiting by her Land Cruiser, which had been hidden under a camo drop cloth that imitated the red rocks and grey brush with such fidelity that Lisa hadn’t spotted it when she’d walked past it the previous evening.

  Two hours later they were parked at the edge of the Badlands, in the shade of a cluster of organ trees, waiting to pick up someone who, Isabelle said, needed a lift. She wouldn’t tell Lisa who it was because ‘it would spoil the surprise’.

  While Isabelle perched on the hood of the Land Cruiser, looking out across a glaring salt pan towards the highway that ran west across the Badlands to the copper mine at Mount Why Not, Lisa sat with her back against an organ tree’s scaly column, sipping from a bottle of spring water. Brittle husks were scattered over the gravelly sand, dropped from the chocolate-brown froths of sporangia that sprouted under the notched swords of the tree’s fronds. It was fiercely hot, timelessly quiet and still.

  There was no sense of the history of Elder Cultures out there. No tombs, no ruins, no ghosts. The desert was empty of any meaning but its own. Lisa found the inhuman silence calming after riding through the far edge of the hills, with distracting glimpses of tombs and their inhabitants and inscrutable fragments of Boxbuilders long dead. She was trying to understand Willie’s death. The fact of his death. The manner of his death. She was still kind of numb, the weight of what had happened poised above her head like a landslide. It could bury her if she didn’t come to terms with it. If she didn’t find some way of understanding it. Or if not understanding, because maybe it was impossible to understand, then at least some way of accepting it. Accepting that she had been changed. Accepting that the ghost tattooed in her brain had been changed too.

  She kept touching her face. Half-expecting, half-dreading that she would discover hard points pushing through her skin. She had studied herself in the Land Cruiser’s rear-view mirror, and although she had failed to find any trace of the silvery flow of information she’d seen under Willie’s skin she supposed that it was only a matter of time before it appeared.

  It was the fear of that, of how her ghost might have been changed, of how she herself might have been changed, rather than the possibility of arrest and indefinite quarantine, that had convinced her that she should throw in her lot with Isabelle Linder and Ada Morange. She wanted to talk one-on-one with the Professor, but Isabelle had told her that it was impossible – the Professor had nothing to do with the operations of the Omega Point Foundation or the companies and research initiatives that it funded. Instead, Lisa had used the q-phone Isabelle kept in the glovebox of the Land Cruiser to discuss terms with someone called Malcolm D’Ath, one of the non-executive directors of the foundation. The
man had sounded like one of those plummy actors in the British TV soap about old-time aristocrats and their servants that Lisa’s mother had liked to watch way back when, but seemed pretty hands-on and straight-talking.

  He was in London, England. It was two in the morning there, apparently.

  ‘But not to worry, Ms Dawes. I’m used to keeping strange hours. And I am very pleased that you have decided to get in touch. I think you will be a great help to our programme. And, in turn, we can definitely help you.’

  She would be handsomely rewarded if she allowed the Professor’s researchers to investigate her eidolon and the tesserae she had taken from the tomb, he said, and assured her that they would do their very best to find a way to cure her.

  ‘But the first thing we need to do is extract you, and get you to a place of safety. Did you know that you are on the TCU’s watch list, and that a warrant has been issued for your arrest?’

  ‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’ Lisa said, thinking of Adam Nevers.

  ‘Our legal people can file an appeal against the warrant straight away. But it would not be wise to remain on First Foot.’

  ‘Where would I be extracted to? London? Paris?’

  ‘That would be a jump from the proverbial frying pan into the proverbial fire. No, our ship will return to its point of origin, Terminus. I am given to understand that the facilities there will be more than adequate to investigate your discovery. And also, of course, to try to rid you of your passenger.’

  ‘Terminus.’

  ‘Yes. A great opportunity, if I may say so.’

  ‘I guess I have no alternative,’ Lisa said, with a feeling of weightlessness.

  ‘A simple “yes” will seal the deal.’

  ‘Yes, then. Yes.’

  ‘Very good. Our ship is already on its way, of course. Our agent on the ground will arrange the rendezvous. If I could speak to Mademoiselle Linder?’

  ‘Wait a moment.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is it raining there?’

  ‘In London? Not at present. Contrary to myth it doesn’t always rain here.’

  ‘Are you near a window?’

  ‘Standing in front of one, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Could you open it?’

  ‘One moment. There.’

  ‘And hold the phone out.’

  ‘Ah. I see. Of course.’

  Lisa clamped the shell of the q-phone to her ear. Heard across tens of thousands of light years the faint rustle of a night wind in trees, a siren twisting above the surf of a great city.

  Malcolm D’Ath said, ‘Was that satisfactory, Ms Dawes?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, thank you.’

  ‘Goodbye, Ms Dawes. And good luck.’

  The shadows of the organ trees turned and shortened across the dry stones, began to lengthen again. Ant-sized biochines scuttled from shadow to shadow on wiry multi-jointed legs. At last, Isabelle slid off the hood and called out that their passenger had arrived. Lisa climbed to her feet, dusting off her pants, and saw that a truck had stopped out on the distant highway. After a minute it moved off, the faint whine of its gear train passing over the salt pan as it picked up speed, heading east towards civilisation. A little later, a jiggling shape appeared at the far edge of the salt pan, broken and distorted by layers of hot air. Vanishing, reappearing upside down, vanishing again.

  And suddenly it was close: a black, blunt cylinder prinking towards them on three slender legs like a miniature Martian fighting machine. Its flat top was at about the level of Lisa’s chest. There were no cameras, no windows, no eyes, but she was acutely aware of the attention of the alien intelligence inside.

  ‘Mademoiselle Linder,’ an engaging baritone voice said. ‘How good to see you again. And here’s Ms Dawes and her guest! How marvellous! What fun we’re going to have!’

  36. The Children

  They made a strange little procession, following a red-dirt path slashed across a meadow of black, close-woven, strap-like plants. Tony and the broker, Raqle Thornhilde, immense in a white kaftan and a wide-brimmed straw hat, the aquarium cylinder of the !Cha raised on its three legs, and three identical bodyguards in white shirts and black kilts. Raqle Thornhilde’s weircat ran in swift loops and circles across the meadow, once jumping onto a prow of rock and raising itself on its long legs, silhouetted against the slow apocalypse of sunset.

  ‘She can hear her prey hiding in their burrows,’ Raqle said. ‘She triangulates the heartbeat, then leaps high into the air and augers down into the dirt. So fierce. So precise.’

  Tony didn’t know what to say to that. He supposed that it was some kind of warning.

  Now the biochine flung itself from the prow rock and sped out across the meadow again.

  ‘I love to see her run,’ Raqle said. ‘I take her out of the city when I can, but never for long enough. I have too much to do, and many of the people with whom I do business find my sweetheart intimidating.’

  ‘I find you intimidating, madam,’ Tony said.

  ‘Good. Perhaps you’re not as stupid as you seem.’

  Raqle had made it clear that his fate was subject to her whim. ‘You didn’t put up much of a struggle,’ she had said, back in the little prison shack. ‘I think you wanted to be caught.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Tony said.

  ‘It was almost clever, luring me to approach you by advertising yourself about town, but it attracted the wrong kind of attention. That’s why I had you brought here. It was for your own good.’

  ‘People keep telling me that,’ Tony said, thinking of Ayo and Opeyemi.

  Raqle said that she had not questioned him until now because she had been waiting for the !Cha to arrive. The alien would be able to detect the slightest deviation from complete truthfulness and sincerity, she told Tony, and warned him that any hint of duplicity would be severely punished.

  Tony said that there was no need to threaten him because he would be happy to talk about why he had come back to Dry Salvages. He told the broker and the !Cha about his adventure on the slime planet, and how the wizards had discovered the Ghajar algorithm in the stromatolites and accidentally freed the eidolon. He described the raid on his family’s home and its aftermath, explained that he had escaped and set out to find Aunty Jael.

  He did not mention Colonel X, hoping that Raqle Thornhilde and her !Cha would not be able to sniff out the lie of omission. The broker was a formidable person, sly and dangerous, and he was at her mercy. But he needed Colonel X as a hole card. He wasn’t hoping for rescue, but it was always useful to have something in reserve.

  She did not tell him whether she believed his story; nor did she tell him whether or not she had been involved with Aunty Jael’s escape. Now, as they walked towards the compound where the children were kept, he was waiting on her judgement.

  ‘Look at her run!’ she said. She was still watching the weircat. ‘I love her purity. She is a killing machine. Fast and sleek and unforgiving. She feels no remorse when she brings down her prey. And you cannot plead with her, if she targets you. She is what she is. She does not care that she was designed by unknown minds and hands. She is what she is. She does not meddle in things she doesn’t understand, or dream that she can become other than she already is. If we were a little more like her and all the other biochines, if we weren’t so restless, so stupidly inquisitive, then perhaps we might not be afflicted by meme plagues or possessed by eidolons. We might not have scattered ourselves so widely and thinly, or warred against each other over stupid little differences. We might not be trembling on the edge of extinction.’

  ‘But you would be a great deal less interesting,’ the !Cha said.

  It was still startling to hear his rich baritone, to remember that his tank was not a drone but a kind of spacesuit for a little colony of smart shrimp.

  Tony had never met a !Cha before, although he had once glimpsed one on a city street on a world thirty thousand light years away. Their relationship with the Jackaroo was unclear, but they
freely admitted that they were connoisseurs and collectors of human stories, and many believed that they manipulated people and events to make those stories more interesting. This one’s name was Unlikely Worlds. Tony supposed that he was following Raqle’s story, her life; supposed he would become a small part of that tale. It was not a comforting thought.

  ‘You are biased,’ Raqle told the !Cha. ‘You like us to burn brightly and briefly because that creates interesting stories, and interesting stories turn on your females.’

  ‘You would create stories anyway,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘It is in your nature to elaborate worlds that do not exist.’

  ‘The point is,’ Raqle said, ‘we’d live a lot longer if we didn’t meddle in things we don’t understand. We wouldn’t be divided as we are. Our children wouldn’t be dying of sleepy sickness.’

  ‘And you would not aspire to glory and godhood,’ the !Cha said. ‘I do envy you that. And not just because it makes such good stories.’

  ‘No doubt you said that to all the Elder Cultures. And look at them. Like Ozymandias, one and all.’

  ‘I am old, certainly. But not that old.’

  ‘So you’d like me to think. Oh, just look at her!’ Raqle said, turning from Unlikely Worlds to look across the meadow again. ‘Such speed. Such fierce joy. Now there’s something to envy!’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ the !Cha said. ‘Weircats are found only on Dry Salvages and two other worlds. And on all three they are scarcely numerous. Each needs a territory of several hundred square kilometres, in the right kind of desert. Made or evolved, they have specialised themselves almost out of existence.’

  ‘Three worlds that we know of,’ Raqle said. ‘There are thousands we haven’t yet touched. And besides, because of us, because we have taken them with us, they live on more than three of the known worlds now. After we die out, the Jackaroo will find new clients, and perhaps they will wonder why certain species are always associated with the ruins of our cities. Perhaps that will be our only legacy.’