by Paul McAuley
‘They don’t realise they are outnumbered,’ the pilot said.
‘They dealt with your drones easily enough,’ Tony said.
He had been nursing the faint hope that Bane and Colonel X had been lying about the police ships, was dismayed by their appearance. It was a dangerous and unpredictable complication.
‘Let ’em think they have the advantage,’ the pilot said cheerfully. ‘That little engagement was just a taster. Pretty soon you’re going to see some real fun.’
A sentiment echoed by Mina Saba when she called an hour later, wanting to know if the police ships had been sent by Colonel X.
‘Ada Morange tricked a broker into hiring me to help investigate the slime planet. Her hand killed one of the broker’s sons on Veles. The broker told the police everything, and here we are,’ Tony said.
‘You have been less than honest with me, Mr Okoye. I’m disappointed,’ Mina Saba said.
‘I was hoping that the broker was bluffing,’ Tony said. ‘I’m sorry to see that she was not. Where is Ada Morange, by the way? Is she with you?’
‘Don’t expect any help from the police,’ Mina Saba said. ‘They have badly underestimated my resources. We will talk again when you reach my ship. We will talk face to face. And if you are less than candid with me, if there is any more trickery, I can promise you that things will go badly.’
‘Ask Ada Morange what happened in her house in Tanrog,’ Tony said. ‘Ask her how she tricked Raqle Thornhilde. Ask her how she tricked my family. Ask yourself how she might be tricking you.’
But Mina Saba had cut the connection.
Abalunam’s Pride and the picket ship flew on, separated by just ten kilometres, decelerating on a course that intersected with the planet. One of the police ships aimed a maser at them, transmitting a declaration that this was a designated forbidden zone, a command to prepare to surrender, and a message from Opeyemi, ordering Tony to give up his futile plans for the good of the family. Tony told the bridle to block anything else that the police sent.
‘Do you want to reply to Opeyemi?’ the bridle said.
‘It probably wasn’t even him,’ Tony said. ‘Just some avatar got up by the police.’
But it had woken the itches of old doubts. Colonel X had abandoned him. He had run from his family. And now he was running from the police into the arms of the Red Brigade, with no idea of what would happen when he got there.
His destination, presently showing as a crescent off to one side of the star’s incandescent coin, was a cloud-wrapped hothouse planet somewhat resembling Venus. Like Venus, a runaway greenhouse effect had baked carbon dioxide from its crust, muffling it in a thick atmosphere several hundred kilometres deep; unlike Venus, it was protected from solar winds by a strong magnetic field, and had retained most of its water. Venus’s clouds were mostly concentrated sulphuric acid; here, they were composed of tiny droplets of carbonic acid that constantly rained out towards the hot surface, turning into carbon dioxide and superheated steam that was recirculated high into the atmosphere to begin the cycle again.
The bridle reported that she had detected the signature of photosynthetic pigments in the calm upper layers of the clouds: aerial plankton whose rate of reproduction exceeded the rate of removal by rain falling towards the surface. A little later she said that she had detected a small fleet of ships in orbit around the planet’s equator: a U-class hauler and twelve smaller ships in a higher, separate orbit.
Tony said, ‘The hauler will be remotely controlled. And it contains a mad ship. That’s why the other ships are keeping their distance.’
‘I have found something else,’ the bridle said. ‘Several hundred small radar-reflective bodies in the planet’s atmosphere.’
Tony wanted to know if they were ships. He imagined a fleet of them, each hung under giant balloons in the thick cloud cover. A floating sargasso drifting on the wind . . .
‘We are too far away to resolve them,’ the bridle said. ‘But it is possible that at least one of them could be a mirror. The planet is emitting a small excess of tau neutrinos consistent with the operation of mirror machinery. And the eidolon . . .’
‘What about the eidolon?’ Tony said, after a few seconds’ silence.
‘It is very interested in the planet. I think it is searching for something down there. Or maybe it has found it, and is talking to it,’ the bridle said. ‘It isn’t clear. I wish I knew more, but there it is.’
‘Has anyone ever found a mirror floating in a planetary atmosphere?’
‘I know! Isn’t it amazing?’
‘Can you locate it? If it is a mirror.’
‘Not yet. It may be possible when we are closer. Also, I could build more detectors. Do you want me to do that?’
‘If it will help you find this mirror,’ Tony said carefully. He was still wary of the bridle’s new abilities. He was worried that she might decide that her interests – or the interests of the eidolon – were more important than his.
‘I think it will. Yes. It’s exciting, isn’t it?’ the bridle said happily.
‘Keep looking,’ Tony said. ‘Keep looking everywhere. And open a line to that picket.’
He was going to tell its pilot that he wanted to talk to Mina Saba again. He believed that he finally had some leverage in this game.
53. ‘We are here to help.’
After Lisa had been extracted from the tug and stripped of her sensor patches, a guard clipped a short cable to her waist and towed her down the length of the hold. Gliding in free fall through deep shadow and splashes of brilliant light, past two A-class jaunt ships, actual alien spaceships like giant whiskery catfish carved from obsidian, to a curtain of plastic webbing on the far bulkhead, where Adam Nevers and three Jackaroo avatars were waiting.
‘We wanted to congratulate you in person,’ Nevers said.
He was gripping the webbing with both hands, as if afraid that he would fall if he let go. The three avatars hung quiet and still in the air beside him. It was a shock to see them, but not a surprise. Their translucent gold skin. Their black tracksuits, which here in the future must look like antiques. The dark glasses that masked the white stones of their eyes.
‘So who’s really in charge?’ Lisa said, hooking a couple of fingers in the webbing and turning to the avatars. It was a little like floating in water, except that there was no sense of up or down. ‘You or Mr Nevers?’
‘We are here to help,’ the middle one said.
‘Yeah, I know all about your help.’
Lisa was shaky and exhausted after the jaunt in the tug, her spine and hips ached from hours of being immobilised in the rigid shell of her pressure garment, and for the first time since she had woken in the future she badly needed a drink. It parched her tongue and throat, burned in her belly.
‘One of you was with Mr Nevers when he raided my place,’ she said. ‘And a couple of your buddies turned up at Terminus, scaring Ada Morange into kidnapping me and booting me into the future.’
Nevers said, ‘If you must blame anyone for your plight, Lisa, blame Ada Morange.’
That even, faintly sarcastic tone of his, as if speaking to a child.
‘Did you ever ask yourself how you got here, Mr Nevers? The way I see it, we’ve both been manipulated by those showroom dummies from the get-go.’
Lisa didn’t believe for a moment that the avatars were disinterested observers of the antics of their clever, curious monkey clients. The Jackaroo had helped dozens of client races. Hundreds. All of them had spread through the wormhole network and all of them had vanished, destroying themselves in catastrophic wars, evolving into something beyond human comprehension, or simply dying out, stretched too thin by the effort of embracing the Jackaroo’s gifts. No one knew. All the Jackaroo would say was that every client found its own path. But one thing was clear: none of their clients had survived contact unchanged.
She looked again at the avatars, floating there like a too-cool-for-school trio of pop stars, and said, ‘I have a
question.’
‘Of course.’
It was the left-hand one who spoke this time. Lisa looked straight at it, her face dimly reflected in its dark glasses.
‘The eidolon inside my head. Can you speak to it?’
‘We know it was once like you.’
‘Is it one of your clients?’
‘Those clients have moved on.’
‘The eidolon didn’t. What does it want?’
‘It should speak for itself,’ the middle Jackaroo said.
‘It’s interesting. You say you want to help. It’s your tag line. Your USP. But whenever you’re asked anything you put on this act, all aloof and fucking mysterious. You tell us that we have to choose our own path, and then you push us in the direction you want us to go. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To make sure Mr Nevers does the right thing.’
‘There is always a choice,’ the left-hand avatar said. ‘Even the straightest path has two directions.’
‘Not as far as I’m concerned,’ Lisa said. ‘I travelled into the future, and I can’t go back.’
Man, she could so do with a cold tall one right now. She could see the amber liquid pouring into the glass, the rising head of foam, smell that yeasty tang . . .
‘Then find another path,’ the middle avatar said.
‘Or choose not to follow it,’ the right-hand avatar said.
The three of them in their fucking sunglasses and black tracksuits, so above it all.
Lisa said, ‘Do you believe this bullshit, Mr Nevers?’
‘I believe that I’m doing the right thing,’ Nevers said calmly.
‘You think they’re helping you, but you’re really part of their plan to stop us finding anything that might actually reveal what’s really going on.’
But she knew she’d never make him see that. He’d pared his life down to this single purpose. He’d exiled himself into the future because of it. He’d dedicated himself to it like some kind of warrior saint, and probably rededicated himself twice daily.
‘You’re angry and confused,’ he said. ‘But mostly you’re afraid. It’s entirely understandable, given the way Ada Morange tried to use you, and where you’ve ended up because of it. In your situation? I wouldn’t trust anyone either. But now you have an opportunity to put all that right.’
‘Use my powers for good, or some such bullshit?’
‘You’ve already done that, by helping to open up the mad ship,’ Nevers said. ‘And now Mr Clegg must learn how to talk to it, so that we can ask it nicely if we can ride it through that wormhole. Meanwhile, until I need your help again, I think you should take a well-earned rest.’
‘I was kind of hoping I was done here.’
‘Oh no. Not at all. We’ve only just begun.’
54. Aerostats
As before, Tony sat in the ironwood chair in the red-curtained space he had created. As before, Unlikely Worlds stood beside him. Mina Saba was late. She was calling his bluff. She was planning some baroque punishment for his presumption. And then the window opened, showing the philosopher queen lounging in her sling chair, this time wearing a silvery quilted jacket with a collar that flared behind her head. A small neat woman in her early thirties perched on a stool at her right hand, dressed all in black. Milky skin, red pigment on her lips and the nails of her hands and bare feet, a cap of glossy hair the colour of midnight.
Her smile showed small white teeth. ‘Master Tony. I’m so glad that you found your way here.’
It was an avatar of Ada Morange. A version of her younger self before she’d been laminated, or perhaps an ideal image of what she believed to be her true self. She greeted Unlikely Worlds with some warmth, told Tony that she had first met the !Cha on Earth, a century and a half ago.
‘I thought him a friend, even though I knew that had I led a life only a little less interesting he would not have troubled to spend a single minute with me. That is to say, whatever passed for friendship between us was a kind of commerce. But it was of no matter. Many of my friendships were based not on sympathy or love, but on reciprocal satisfaction of appetite. So I was neither surprised nor disappointed when, after the difficulty that made me what I am now, his visits ceased.’
‘But I never forgot you,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘As you can see.’
Tony believed that Ada Morange’s presence was a good sign. That his gamble, telling Mina Saba that he wanted to discuss the mirror floating somewhere in the hothouse planet’s clouds, would pay off. But the two women were in no hurry to talk about that; instead, Ada Morange began to tell Tony about aerostats that rode the planet’s constant winds, lecturing him about their form and function as Aunty Jael had lectured him on so many different subjects. Either pedagogy was an act she found hard to shake off, or it had been deeply baked into her true self, and preserved after she had been laminated.
She showed him images of streamlined hollow cylinders, told him that they were between a few hundred metres and three or four kilometres long, constructed from thousands of polymer bubbles spun by architectural nanomachines from atmospheric nitrogen and carbonic acid, plankton scooped from the clouds, and minerals collected when the aerostats descended into the furnace of the planet’s lower depths and dragged fullerene cables across the baking rocks of the surface. Large aerostats would sometimes break up into daughter colonies, she said, and sometimes two would gently collide, and at the point of contact blisters would swell and froth and release thousands of tiny bubbles containing packages of nutrients and nanomachines. It seemed to be a kind of sexual reproduction.
All the aerostats were empty: any that had once been inhabited must have long ago disintegrated or fallen out of the cloud layer and burned up. Or perhaps it was a mistake to believe that they were floating cities. Perhaps they were factories, or some kind of art, or had been used for sexual or territorial display.
‘We know very little about the Ghajar,’ Ada Morange said. ‘But we do know that they did not much like planetary surfaces. There are thousands of their ships in parking orbits, but they left little trace of their presence on any of the known worlds. Some structures which may have been mooring points, the wreckage of a few crashed ships. But it turns out that we were looking in the wrong place. The Ghajar were creatures of the air. They wrote their signatures on the winds of worlds like this, and left no footprints behind.’
‘It’s a pretty story,’ Mina Saba said. ‘But like everything we think we know about the Elder Cultures, that’s all it is. A story we tell ourselves to fill the void of our ignorance.’
Tony, unable to contain his impatience any longer, said, ‘And what kind of stories do you tell yourselves about the floating mirror?’
‘Did you discover that for yourself, or did the !Cha tell you?’ Mina Saba said.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t presume to spoil your surprise,’ Unlikely Worlds said.
‘Oh, but of course you would,’ Ada Morange said. ‘You pretend to be helpful, but you are really manipulating us to make our stories prettier. You tried to manipulate me all those years ago, and I have no doubt that you are up to your old tricks again.’
‘The !Cha claim to be sympathetic to our ideas, but we have long ago learned not to trust them,’ Mina Saba said.
‘Tony does not trust me either,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘But like you and Ada, he finds me useful. You have that much in common.’
‘Master Tony and I share much more than that,’ Ada Morange said. ‘I have known him from birth. I trained him. I helped him to become what he is.’
‘And all the time you were someone else, and only pretending to be the person I thought I knew,’ Tony said. He meant it as a joke, but it was tainted with rancour.
‘I was a faithful servant to your family for many years,’ Ada Morange said. ‘And I still am, after a fashion. Didn’t I help you to find your way here?’
‘What happened before, it was only business,’ Mina Saba said briskly. ‘As is this. If you came looking for revenge, you will find only trouble. But if
you agree to work with us, we can agree to share what we find.’
‘He knows that,’ Ada Morange said, smiling at Tony. ‘He always was a practical boy.’
Tony wanted to tell her that he knew that she had planned to ransom him in exchange for her freedom, that she had helped the Red Brigade to stage the raid on Skadi. He wanted to ask her why she had told the raiders where to look for him, if she knew that they had been planning to kill him and take his head. If that had been her idea. He wanted to ask her why she had killed Junot Johnson and the police guards, when she could have easily knocked them out instead. Was it because they had defied her by refusing to surrender, by destroying the stromatolites? He wanted to ask her if she felt sorry for the deaths of innocent civilians in Victory Landing, and the damage she had done to his family’s reputation. He wanted to confront her with her vile crimes and contemptible betrayals. He wanted to strike her down with great vengeance and furious wrath. But that would have to wait until he could persuade Mina Saba to hand her over. He had an idea about how he was going to do that, but meanwhile he had to pretend that this was just an ordinary business negotiation.
He said, trying to bring the conversation back to the point, ‘I saw a little wilderness of mirrors when I came through into this system. Strange mirrors, mounted on flat sheets rather than on the sheer faces of sculpted asteroids. And all of them were dead. Something killed them long ago, and pinched their wormholes shut. But there is at least one live mirror floating in the clouds of that planet, amongst the aerostats. You have not been able to use it, because otherwise you would already be on the other side, and that is why you invited me here, isn’t it? You need my help to open it. You need the eidolon I am carrying, the one generated by Ghajar code, the one that has been changed in interesting ways. But before we go any further, I want to know what you hope to find on the other side, and what I will get if I can take you there.’
