by Paul McAuley
Lisa also had a meeting with the chief of the local TCU office, a gruff Turkish man with impressive side-whiskers who advised her that it was in her best interests to surrender to him. Lisa was accompanied by her lawyers, who reminded the TCU chief that the meeting was merely a courtesy, and the UN had no authority in the Commonwealth of Terminus.
‘Yes, because your Commonwealth wants to grow rich by exploiting artefacts and those who discover them, taking bribes from the likes of Ada Morange, and ignoring all the risks. Don’t make that mistake, Miss Dawes,’ the chief told Lisa. ‘I can promise you that if you surrender voluntarily, all charges pertaining to your recent adventures on First Foot will be dropped. You will be taken into custody, of course, but only for your own protection, so that your condition can be assessed and stabilised.’
‘As far as I can see I have the choice of being your lab rat or Ada Morange’s,’ Lisa said. ‘So I think I’ll go with the person who’ll pay me. If she can’t find a cure, maybe I’ll be able to afford one of my own.’
And so, after she and her lawyers finally cut a deal and she had signed about thirty copies of a fat contract, Lisa became a research associate employed by Karyotech Pharma on a freelance basis. By this time the !Cha, Unlikely Worlds, had disappeared. According to Isabelle Linder, he had gone across to Ada Morange’s timeship. ‘I am sure we will visit the Professor soon,’ she said. ‘I know she has the greatest interest in you.’
Meanwhile, Lisa endured a battery of tests, from straightforward brain scans to psychological assessments, and gave a detailed account of everything that had happened since she’d been struck down in her yard. And then she got to work on the code with the expert from Peking University, Professor Lu Jeu Enge.
He was younger than Lisa had pictured him, a cheerful confident man in his early thirties who worked off his excess energy in pick-up games of free-fall basketball, and planned to spend a couple of weeks hiking the lake country of Niflheimr’s north pole once what he called his fieldwork was finished. They bonded over their interest in the narrative code, and a shared incredulity about the daily group-think meetings before the start of work, when Isabelle Linder and the research team gathered to discuss that day’s goals and yesterday’s successes and failures, and to reaffirm their loyalty to their company and to each other.
‘I am not completely sure why I am here,’ Enge told Lisa. ‘I do not subscribe to their personality cult, and they don’t want me to unravel the code, but to discover instead what you see in it. Hardly a precise match to my area of expertise. However, Karyotech pays extraordinarily well for services they do not really need, I have never before left Earth, and I must admit that I am very curious about your discovery. So here I am.’
‘I think it’s partly because Ada Morange doesn’t want the geek police to hire you,’ Lisa confessed.
‘All I can say is that it is nice to be wanted, for whatever reason,’ Enge said. ‘And their facilities are first-rate. Even if I fail to contribute anything useful, I believe that I will learn much. What about you, Lisa? You obviously have reservations, yet here you are. What made you choose to throw in with them?’
‘It wasn’t so much a conscious choice,’ Lisa said, remembering some favourite books from her childhood, ‘as a series of unfortunate events.’
She and Lu Jeu Enge ran and reran the Ghajar narrative code that Karyotech’s coders had extracted from the tesserae that Lisa had brought with her. Code that Willie’s eidolon had injected into the Ghostkeeper matrices at the moment of his death, code which Lisa believed might contain some trace of his essence, although she saw in its silvery flow only the same knots and nodes that she’d seen in the code she and Bria had pulled from the tessera Willie had entrusted to his girlfriend.
Enge used a tool developed by his research team to refine the location of the nodes, and to capture and calibrate the changes they imposed on the code’s flow. According to him, they appeared to be emergent properties, a typical feature of Ghajar narrative code.
‘It is more like a symphony than a written language,’ he said. ‘The analogy is imperfect, of course, but it makes a useful working model. So far, we have had no success in translating it, but your ghost may provide an interesting baseline. Something that until now we have lacked.’
‘Like a key?’
‘Perhaps. But we may never know if anything we read in the code has equivalence with the way the Ghajar read it.’
‘My ghost sees things differently. So perhaps I see things differently too.’
‘Even so, you may not see what it sees. It is a matter of compatibility and interpretation, of neurological hard-wiring.’
One day, details Lisa hadn’t seen before began to pop out of the flow. She lost track of time, watching them, didn’t realise Enge had left her alone until he returned with a pad of paper and a Sharpie.
‘You were making movements with your right hand,’ he said. ‘As if writing or drawing. Perhaps you could watch again, pen in hand. Try not to think about it.’
Two minutes later, they were studying the pattern she’d scribbled. A starburst of lines radiating out from a common point, each line a different length, each of them hatched with three or four short crossbars. It was a duplicate of the diagrams that Willie had made on his dying bed; Enge said that it resembled drawings made by the sister of the first person to pilot a Ghajar ship. Like Lisa, the little girl had been haunted by an eidolon, although hers had been encoded in a bead of crystalline material similar to cat’s-eye apatite.
‘The Ghajar used a variety of media for information storage, just as we do,’ Enge said. ‘But in both cases, the embedded eidolons extract information in the narrative code and render it in the same kind of shorthand visual representation. It is very interesting!’
He told Lisa that Ada Morange had been attempting to unriddle that diagram for twenty years. Back in the twentieth century, two robot spacecraft flying past the planets of the outer solar system into interstellar space had carried plates engraved with similar patterns: maps of the Sun’s location relative to several pulsars, neutron stars that emitted powerful beams of electromagnetic radiation. Because the beams could only be detected when they were directly pointed at an observer, and because the neutron stars rotated very rapidly, spinning many times a second, they appeared to pulse. And because every pulsar spun at a different rate and could be detected over vast distances, they were useful cosmic lighthouses.
Ada Morange believed that the Ghajar diagram was a similar map. The length of each line represented the distance between the pulsars and the target star; the spacing of the crossbars represented the clock time of their pulsing beams. But unriddling the map had proven to be very difficult. It had taken more than a decade to translate the distances into light years and the pulsar clock times into milliseconds, and locating the pulsars was an even harder problem. Their clocks had slowed in the thousands of years since the Ghajar had made their maps, and many were not visible from Earth. Ada Morange was presently engaged in a vast and vastly expensive project to map the positions of every star and pulsar in the galaxy, using flocks of cheap telescopes put into orbit around the gift worlds and the worlds of the New Frontier.
Lisa’s map was not identical to the little girl’s. Perhaps it used different pulsars to point to the same target; perhaps it pointed elsewhere. Lu Jeu Enge turned the results over to Karyotech’s research team and rode down to Niflheimr for his hiking vacation; Lisa and the research team moved on, developing a way to pin down the location of her lodestar. And now she was heading back to Terminus and a face-to-face meeting with Ada Morange. She believed that she had redeemed something useful from Willie’s death and wanted to ask Ada Morange to make good her promise to find a way to exorcise her ghost. But the billionaire, it turned out, had very different plans.
44. The Paths Of The Dead
Victor Ursu led Tony and Unlikely Worlds along branching paths that descended ever deeper underground. A kilometre of construction coral massing overhead like
compressed time. Darkness profounder than night lying everywhere beyond the sparklight that Victor floated for the convenience of his guests – he usually navigated lightless stretches of the paths of the dead by echoes returned from clicks of his tongue. They edged along a rift that plunged to unguessable depths. They passed through a long low cavern where Ghostkeepers had carved rows of tombs in the construction-coral walls. Eidolons crouched like twists of frozen smoke in several of the tomb mouths, chittering and snapping as they went past. They saw no other sign of life on the long hike, although sometimes Tony felt that there was a fourth member of their little party. An unglimpsable presence haunting the shadows at the outer edge of his field of view, unremarked by his companions.
Tony was certain that the eidolons in those tombs had sensed it, knew that Ada Morange had some idea of its abilities and intentions – it was why she had helped him to escape – and suspected that Unlikely Worlds knew something about it too. But so far it had made no attempt to communicate with him, not even in dreams. It was as if he was carrying a stowaway who evaded his every attempt to find her, and left no clues about her identity or purpose.
He told himself that it did not matter what the eidolon wanted, if it wanted anything at all, as long as it helped him to find Ada Morange and the Red Brigade. Nor did it matter if Unlikely Worlds was slyly manipulating him, and might be planning to sacrifice or betray him when he was no longer useful. At the moment it was enough to be moving. There was a kind of reckless freedom in being caught up in the plots of powerful, enigmatic creatures, and defying them to do their worst.
As they walked, Victor told stories about the wonders and mysteries of the paths of the dead. On the far side of the raft, he said, the remains of a city once inhabited by an aquatic Elder Culture were submerged in an underground lake that was connected to the sea by several long flumes. Some claimed that unlike other Elder Cultures this species had not died out or evolved into something else, but had retreated into the deeps of the world-girdling ocean. Others said that it was not an Elder Culture at all, but was native to Veles. There were tales of a lost fleet of spaceships crushed in matrices of construction coral and haunted still by the eidolons of their control systems; of caves containing stepped pyramids built by humans kidnapped from Earth long before the Jackaroo had made contact; of a race of small, secretive creatures, degenerate descendants of an Elder Culture, that inhabited chambers where they farmed fungi and kept herds of scrabs that they tapped for their haemolymph, and sometimes emerged at night to steal food and trinkets from houses in the city. There was a story about tomb raiders who, after being trapped in a labyrinth by malicious eidolons, had resorted to cannibalism. The last survivor had been discovered wearing a cloak made from the skins of his companions. Another told of a cult that had tweaked themselves to digest blood and lured the unwary to dungeons where their victims were bound and hung from hooks and drained over days and weeks.
Some of Victor’s stories were new to Tony; others were variations of travellers’ tales he had heard in bars and cafés on other worlds. When Tony pointed this out, the speaker shrugged and said why not? Stories ended up in the paths of the dead along with everything else.
‘This is the place where things long forgotten on the skin are still remembered,’ he said. ‘Although time moves at the same rate below as above, decay does not. After all, that’s why people keep their dead down here. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the oldest stories can also be found here, long after they have been forgotten on the skin.’
Tony asked Unlikely Worlds if he had ever collected any of Victor’s stories.
‘Some of them are undeniably pretty,’ Unlikely Worlds said, which Tony took to mean yes.
‘If you know so many stories,’ he said to Victor, ‘why is it you owe a favour to Unlikely Worlds, and not the other way around?’
‘Why do you think I owe him any kind of favour?’ Victor said.
‘Isn’t that why you’re helping us?’ Tony said.
‘To discharge a debt?’ Victor laughed. ‘That’s skinwalker thinking, lad. I’m helping you because that’s what we do, down here.’
‘Would you help Raqle’s boys, if they asked you to find me?’
‘But they haven’t asked,’ Victor said, as if it was the most reasonable thing in all the worlds.
After a little while, walking down what seemed an endless stone gullet that rose and fell in long undulations (a solution tube carved, Victor said, by water that dissolved the rock rather than eroding it), Tony said that he didn’t think there was as much difference between the surface and the paths of the dead as Victor claimed.
‘We rely on the dead too. Not our own dead, but the dead of the Elder Cultures. Most of our technologies are derived from Elder Culture artefacts. Even our ships were built by long-dead aliens. We don’t make anything new any more. We don’t search for new knowledge. We dig up old knowledge in tombs. And every world is a tomb world.’
‘And yet you make new stories,’ Unlikely Worlds said.
‘Are they really new? Or are they like Victor’s stories? Variations on old tales. New flesh on old bones.’
The !Cha did not reply.
Tony said, ‘Did the Elder Cultures die out because they lost themselves in the past of others? Because they could no longer think of anything new, or anything that hadn’t been thought by others long ago?’
‘The galaxy is old,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘And full of old things. You and your kind are blessed with a rare gift: you are young, and still curious, and not yet jaded. Don’t grow old before your time.’
‘Is that a warning?’
‘Think of it as a useful motto.’
They spent the second night in a Ghostkeeper catacomb. The honeycomb of small chambers was entirely free of eidolons; tomb raiders had long ago taken the stones in which their algorithms ran. There were foam pads to sleep on, and a store of food and equipment free for any to use. Tony took a brief shower in freezing water and slept deep and long, with no dreams that he could remember.
The next day, they followed passages that mostly sloped upwards. At one point they emerged into a long chamber where rain and shafts of light fell through holes in the high roof and mosses and filmy sail-sedges grew on mounds of rubble, their living reds and yellows vivid and startling after the endless stone of the underground. They were near the skin of the world now, but were still more than a day’s walk from their destination. A passage on the far side of the sunlit chamber sank into the construction coral again; a transparent plastic bridge crossed a stream that ran swiftly over bone-white flowstone and suddenly whirlpooled down a solution hole.
Down again. Down into the dark.
They made camp in a cave whose roof had partly collapsed. It was night, out on the skin: the ragged hole framed a black sky thick with stars. Victor showed Tony how to shape a comfortable hollow in the soft white sand of a dry stream bed. Lying there, his head pillowed on his folded jacket, Tony thought of Abalunam’s Pride, somewhere out there amongst all those bright stars, hoped that she would come when he found a way to call her, and hoped that Colonel X had left some kind of spyware in the bridle or the lifesystem. After the kidnapping on Dry Salvages, Tony knew that he couldn’t rely on the colonel’s help, but now, lost in the paths of the dead, he nurtured the small hope that this adventure was part of the colonel’s plan to find Ada Morange, and that at the crucial moment he would come to Tony’s aid.
The next day they crossed a bridge over a chasm where faint lights floated in unplumbed darkness. Not even Victor knew if they were machines or eidolons, or some kind of unknown animal or biochine. On the far side, a long stair of broad shallow steps descended to a cave system like a series of chapels carved out of glistening lime deposits. Stalactites hung in clusters from irregular ceilings or fringed folds and ledges; stalagmites stood like fat candles amongst pellucid pools cupped in basins of mother-of-pearl and onyx.
As they picked their way through these marvels, Tony thought with a m
elancholy pang that Danilo would have loved this place. He remembered how Danilo had run down the beach, arms outstretched as if he was trying to fly; how he had wheeled around and run back, his face alight with bliss. Remembered him standing at the foot of the spire of a native tree, one hand pressed to its pale rind as he watched orange banners lifting and falling high above in the cold wind. Remembered his lover’s innocent delight in the world outside the city, and how it had made him see everything afresh.
At last they reached a chamber several kilometres long, where a ceramic road wound between cones of debris that leaned against the walls on either side, slanting towards the uneven roof. Pale pillows of some kind of fungus grew on the steep slopes; Tony saw three or four people moving up there. Pickers, according to Victor, who searched for the rare, intensely fragrant fruiting bodies of a parasitic plant that grew on the fungus.
An hour later, beyond the far side of the chamber, they emerged in a long narrow defile lined with rickety buildings: a settlement of tomb raiders and artefact dealers. In a chopshop, a technician immobilised Tony’s head in a scaffold frame, dabbed local anaesthetic around his right eye and introduced a long thin needle into the socket and injected nanotech that would dismantle the block on his comms. The process would take several hours, the technician said; she would need to keep him under observation in case there were side effects.
‘What kind of side effects?’
‘Fits, partial loss of vision, auditory hallucinations . . . Nothing I can’t fix,’ the technician said breezily.
