by Paul McAuley
His name was Victor Ursu. ‘A good name for a speaker, Ursu,’ he said. ‘Back where we all came from, it means “bear”. And bears have a long association with the underground, seeing as how they sleep out the winter in caves. Down here, of course, it’s mostly the dead who sleep. And we do our best to make sure their sleep is undisturbed.’
Victor was a compact muscular man with milky skin and a bristly crest of black hair. He carried an iron staff that reminded Tony of Adam Apostu’s pole, was dressed in a yellow skinsuit and heavy boots, and his belt was hung with climbing gear, flares, blast dots, several knives, and a fullerene rock hammer. He and his fellow speakers maintained the paths of the dead, policed the miners and tomb raiders who searched the labyrinths that honeycombed the raft’s construction coral for Elder Culture artefacts, and hunted down feral animals and biochines that found their way in from the surface or from the sea and might infiltrate the city if the speakers didn’t keep them under control.
‘We know the paths of the dead better than anyone,’ Victor said. ‘But there are many mysteries in the deeps, many places we haven’t yet reached, and some places even we don’t dare disturb.’
That first night, he led Tony and Unlikely Worlds through passageways carved out of construction coral to a long low cavern where plastic igloos were laid out in a grid: one of the refuges where the speakers camped out during their long patrols. Tony dozed fitfully for a few hours, woke early the next morning and lay on the foam pallet inside the little bubble of the igloo, thinking things through, before clambering out into the changeless glow of the lights floating under the ribbed rock ceiling. Victor Ursu was seated at one end of a long table, eating a breakfast of black bread, cheese and salami, and talking with Unlikely Worlds. A pair of speakers at the other end of the table, a man and a woman in white skinsuits, were trying hard to ignore them.
‘Take a seat, lad,’ Victor said. ‘We are talking about where you need to go and how to get there.’
‘I want a private word,’ Tony told Unlikely Worlds.
‘You can trust Victor,’ the !Cha said. ‘I have known him a long time. And like all speakers he respects the privacy of everyone down here, dead or alive.’
‘I’m not worried about Victor,’ Tony said. ‘I’m worried about you.’
They sat in a chapel-like niche at the far end of the cave, Tony on a smooth bruise-coloured stump of stone, Unlikely Worlds on his folded legs.
‘If you are afraid that I will lead you back to the sons of Raqle Thornhilde,’ the !Cha said, ‘I can assure you that my association with her is over. She was never more than a minor character in this story.’
‘And what about your association with Ada Morange?’
‘Like you, I hope to find her.’
‘When did you know about her hand?’ Tony said. ‘That’s what Adam Apostu was, wasn’t he?’
Last night, as Victor had led them to the refuge, Tony had given the !Cha a brief sketch of the confrontation with Adam Apostu, and his escape. He had not realised that Ada Morange had been controlling the hand until now, waking with the absolute certainty of the revelation clicking into place, and he needed to ask the !Cha some hard questions.
‘How did you guess?’ Unlikely Worlds said, with a perfect simulation of mild curiosity.
‘I think she wanted me to know. She called me Master Tony, as she did at home, when she was Aunty Jael. And then there was the name she gave her hand. Adam. Ada M.’
‘Yes. And Adam is the forename of one of her oldest and most persistent antagonists. She has always liked her little jokes.’
‘You knew, didn’t you? You knew that Adam Apostu was her hand long before I walked into his house.’
‘I suspected it after Raqle Thornhilde explained how she had found out about the slime planet. But I could not be certain until you told me that Adam Apostu had helped you to escape the terrible twins.’
‘But you didn’t tell me that you knew who he was. What he was.’
‘I was hoping that you would be clever enough to work that out. She has been using him for a long time, I think.’
‘At least ten years,’ Tony said. ‘That is how long he has been living in Tanrog. If living is the right word.’
Via Adam Apostu, Ada Morange had been using the paths of the dead to send eidolons everywhere in the city, eavesdropping on the private conversations of brokers and traders and selling the information she stole. And it was possible that she had used other hands for the same purpose. A small army of them linked to her by q-phone circuits, working on different worlds and in different ways towards an unknown goal. Speculating about this while lying sleeplessly in the little igloo, Tony had thought of a spider squid squatting in its casing of mucus and seaweed, tentacles extended across the dark void, groping for tasty morsels of information, manipulating people . . .
‘I think she found out about the slime world and the stromatolites through Adam Apostu’s little spies,’ he said. ‘She definitely used him to sell the information to Raqle Thornhilde, and to hint that they might contain a cure for sleepy sickness. She knew how Raqle’s son had died, knew of Raqle’s involvement with Fred Firat and his work on meme plagues, and knew that I was in Freedonia, looking for work. She had sent me there, chasing a lead that I now realise probably never existed. Through Adam Apostu, she told Raqle about my family’s work with the disease, and the deal was as good as done.’
‘It helped that you are a scion of one of the honourable families,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘After her son’s death Raqle spent most of her money on the search for a cure, and on caring for the afflicted. She needed a sponsor. Your sister, who had also lost a child to sleepy sickness, was an obvious candidate.’
‘There was nothing wrong with the contract,’ Tony said. Even though Ayo had given him up to Opeyemi after the raid, he still felt sorry for her. ‘There really were stromatolites on the slime planet. And the stromatolites really did contain archival genetics. Not to mention the Ghajar eidolon. It was a sweet deal. Everyone could have made a profit. Fred Firat might even have found something that could be used to combat the meme plagues. But Ada Morange had other plans. She betrayed us all by making a deal with the Red Brigade. They were supposed to jump the claim and capture me and Fred Firat and his wizards; I would be ransomed in exchange for her freedom. But I escaped, and she had to change her plans. She told the Red Brigade about the Ghajar eidolon, helped them plan and execute the raid, and here we are, chasing after her.’
‘It’s a nice story, isn’t it?’ Unlikely Worlds said.
‘Although there is one thing that puzzles me,’ Tony said.
‘Oh, I’m sure there’s more than one thing.’
Tony ignored that. ‘My ship did some research into Ada Morange’s background. In her previous life, she was interested in Ghajar mad ships. What they are, how to get inside their defences, all the hard questions that still have not been answered. I think that’s why she and the Red Brigade were so interested in the Ghajar eidolon. I think that’s why, after the raid, the Red Brigade stole a mad ship and the means to transport it.’
‘I believe that Raqle Thornhilde has agreed with you on that point,’ Unlikely Worlds said.
‘There is something else. Something I did not tell Raqle. Long before she was laminated and became Aunty Jael, Ada Morange dispatched a ship to a star more than a hundred light years from the nearest mirror. Although the ship accelerated to close to the speed of light, it would have taken over a century to reach its destination. A huge commitment. She must have believed that there was something of great value there.’
‘She has always seen further than most,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘That’s one of the things that makes her so special. That, and her belief that the trick to living for ever is to never die.’
‘That ship is due to arrive at its destination around about now,’ Tony said. ‘It is quite the coincidence, isn’t it? That the end of that old ship’s long voyage should coincide with the discovery of stromatolites contain
ing a Ghajar eidolon, and with Ada Morange’s escape from my family.’
He wanted to say more, wanted to ask Unlikely Worlds if he had pointed Ada Morange towards the stromatolites, but he knew that the !Cha would almost certainly deny it, and there was no way of forcing the truth out of him. There were stories that people had made !Cha give up their secrets by threatening to boil their tanks, or stamp them flat in industrial hydraulic presses, or cut them open with industrial lasers, but no one knew anyone who had actually done it. The !Cha were clever enough to avoid most dangerous situations, and when cornered had been known to rocket skywards or sideways at tremendous speed.
‘It is very interesting,’ Unlikely Worlds said, as if considering it for the first time. ‘Perhaps Ada found out about the slime planet some time ago. And kept it to herself until this mysterious ship was due to arrive at this mysterious star. Tell me, do you know its location?’
‘The records were not clear on that point,’ Tony said. ‘I was wondering if you knew anything about it.’
He had to imagine the !Cha’s shrug, but it was definitely there.
‘Wherever she has gone, isn’t it wonderful to contemplate the way she has transcended her limitations? What ingenuity! What determination!’
‘She appears to believe that I may be useful to her,’ Tony said. ‘That is why she helped me to escape from Bob and Bane.’
‘Yes, it’s all so very tasty.’
‘She told me that my eidolon had changed in interesting ways. She also told me to use the paths of the dead, and showed me the way with a little light. And that little light led me to you. You knew all along that Adam Apostu was her hand, so I cannot help wondering if you have had secret dealings with her. If you are planning to lead me to her.’
‘Don’t you want to find her?’
‘Of course. But I don’t want to be delivered to her like some package.’
‘When humans lack all the facts of the case, they spin stories to fill the gaps,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘So allow me to substitute fact for fiction. That little light was an eidolon originally controlled by Ada Morange’s hand. I reached out and took control of it, and used it to lead you to me. So you see, there was no collusion between us. Quite the opposite.’
‘You can control eidolons?’
‘You are wondering if I can control the one in your head. If I can force it to tell me what it is, and what it wants. Alas, I cannot. It is too potent and has too much self-knowledge. But I can overmaster some of the lesser ones,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘Including those that Ada employed to gather information about the dealings of brokers and traders in Tanrog. You told me what happened in Adam Apostu’s house. I admit now that I saw it all, using Ada’s little spies. You are a resourceful young man, and I knew you would be able to turn the confrontation between the hand and Raqle Thornhilde’s dullard sons to your advantage. As you did, with only a small amount of help from me. And here we are, and both of us still want the same thing and need each other’s help to find it, so I hope we can trust each other.’
‘Talking of help, perhaps you can help me to find a way to unblock my comms,’ Tony said. ‘I need my ship, and she is still stuck on Dry Salvages.’
‘Why don’t we ask Victor? He knows all kinds of people.’
The speaker for the dead listened to Tony’s explanation about how his comms had been silenced, and said that he believed that he knew someone who might be able to help.
‘He’s a fair way from here, though. Two or three days’ walk.’
‘Isn’t there anyone in the city who can help me?’ Tony said.
‘No doubt, lad,’ Victor said. ‘But that’s skinwalker business. You’d have to ask one of them.’
‘Two or three days walking, it isn’t anything,’ Unlikely Worlds said cheerfully. ‘And who knows what we’ll learn along the way?’
43. Different Maps
Lisa hung weightless in the dark, trying to focus her entire attention on the crystalline cadences of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Sometimes, her concentration faltering, she would fall back into her self, feel the tug of the straps across her body, the delicate tug of the lodestar, and she’d have to start over. Find the shape of the melody again, follow it note by note through its turns and elaborations, dissolve in its timeless sea.
Just after the emphatic flourish at the beginning of the sixteenth variation, a voice cut into her reverie, saying, ‘Thank you, Ms Dawes. I believe we have enough now.’
Light rimmed the contours of Lisa’s eye mask. She pulled it off, blinking in the glare shining off the white curves of the cargo pod, unplugged her earbuds. She was strapped into a cradle that allowed her to rotate in every direction, presently suspended slantwise to the long axis of the cylindrical volume. Two technicians hung amongst a clutter of touch screens at the far end. One of them grinned, gave her the thumbs-up.
Later, with the ship under way towards the wormhole, Isabelle Linder showed the results to Lisa. Here were the two plots previously established at Terminus and the L5 point between Earth and the Moon, lines laid across the spiral swirls of the Milky Way like a lopsided X. And here was the plot established by the latest measurements, at the L5 point in the orbit of the water world Hydrot, crossing the point where the first two intersected, turning the X into a distorted asterisk.
It was an amazingly simple experiment. Three times, around three different stars scattered across the spiral arms of the Milky Way, Lisa had been strapped into the cradle in the ship’s cargo pod, in free fall. And each time, while losing herself in music, she had slowly and unconsciously revolved, little shifts in muscle tone pushing against the cradle until her body was orientated towards the lodestar that faintly, constantly nagged at her. She’d seen video of herself, shot in infrared. Horribly fascinating to watch the muscles of her arms and legs clenching and twitching, shifting her orientation by degrees until she was aimed like an arrow in the right direction. Lisa Dawes, human compass needle.
Now, after averaging out the results of this latest run of tests, they knew where she was pointing to. More or less. Isabelle magnified the image, stars streaming out of the frame as she zoomed towards the intersection of the three lines. With the Sun at twelve o’clock in the Milky Way’s spiral clock face, it was roughly at five, near the outer edge of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm.
The intersection wasn’t especially precise. At ninety-five per cent probability, it encompassed a globe with a radius of approximately twenty-six light years. Even out there, where stars and dust thinned towards intergalactic space, this volume, around seventy thousand cubic light years, contained twenty-two known stars and probably an equal number of dim red dwarf stars and brown dwarfs yet to be discovered.
‘I guess we need more measurements to refine this,’ Lisa said.
‘Actually, this is good enough,’ Isabelle said.
‘I can’t see how it can be, unless you mean to check out every star.’
Isabelle smiled like a little girl whose birthdays have all come at once. ‘Ah, but we do not need to. Because, you see, this confirms something we already know.’
Lisa felt a sudden scratch of caution. These people and their fucking mysteries. She said, ‘What do you know? And how do you know it?’
‘The Professor will explain, when we return to Terminus.’
‘Can’t she tell me now?’
‘She is very pleased, Lisa,’ Isabelle said. ‘I have given her the results. And now she wants to talk to you in person.’
Lisa had been working for Karyotech Pharma for more than six weeks, but she had yet to meet its CEO, unless you counted the one time immediately after she had arrived, when the people guiding her through the free-fall corridors of the docks had suddenly swum aside to make way for an oval football-sized drone. The little machine had orientated itself towards Lisa and the screen at its blunt end had lit up, displaying Ada Morange’s witchy-wise face. They’d exchanged maybe thirty words, Ada Morange telling Lisa that she looked forward to an interesting and fruitf
ul collaboration, Lisa saying she looked forward to it too, or something equally lame. And then the screen had blanked and the drone had spun around and scooted away, and that was that.
For the first three days, Lisa had mostly talked to lawyers. Or rather, she’d sat in a conference room while her lawyers and the lawyers representing Karyotech Pharma talked to each other. She was ‘the client’. The client drank coffee and fretted while lawyers politely disagreed and rewrote sentences to make them less comprehensible to actual human beings. The client wished she could settle everything with a fucking handshake, and get on with it.
Actually, Lisa quite liked her lawyers: Zandra and Nick Papandreou, a husband-and-wife team who’d moved from Canberra to the Commonwealth of Terminus twenty years ago, and had helped draw up the framework of the new nation’s legislature. Lisa was living aboard the ship for security, but her lawyers insisted on meeting in the terminal’s mall, which was built into one of the enormous transparent bubbles that clustered around the elevator cable at the insertion point with the rock that anchored it in orbit. Like the ship and the rest of the terminal, the bubble was in free fall. Lisa was becoming accustomed to swimming through the spaces of the ship and the corridors and rooms of the Karyotech Pharma suite, but the mall was something else. The first time, she allowed Zandra and Nick to take her arms and kick her across an intimidatingly vast gulf of air to a restaurant adjacent to the wall of the bubble, with a spectacular view of the elevator cable dwindling away to the dappled globe of Niflheimr.
Lisa learned that Niflheimrs spent only a week or two at a time up in the terminal, partly to avoid problems caused by long-term exposure to free fall, partly because they didn’t want to spend too much time away from their farms, fishing boats, and plantations. The Commonwealth’s worldlets were patchworks of wilderness and farming communities. Private wealth was based on production of food, construction timber, biologics yielded by tank farms and so on. Public wealth was created by the sale and licensing of Elder Culture artefacts, and shared by using a variation of the Scandinavian model, with high and progressive tax rates, and free access to health care, social services and utilities. Infrastructure projects were determined by popular vote; investment in the economies of other worlds was controlled by an elected trust. An ideal model, according to Zandra and Nick Papandreou, for the brave new worlds of the New Frontier.
