by Paul McAuley
The two women exchanged a look.
‘You always had a sense of entitlement, Tony,’ Ada Morange said. ‘It isn’t your fault. You have been raised to believe that ruling over others is your right, your destiny. But don’t think that you are the only key to this particular lock.’
‘Yet here I am, because you invited me. Because, I guess, the two wizards you kidnapped were unable to help you.’
‘I will admit that there have been certain difficulties,’ Mina Saba said.
‘We have a mad ship,’ Ada Morange said. ‘That’s what will open the mirror, not your eidolon. But we need your eidolon to take control of the mad ship.’
‘You said that there have been difficulties,’ Tony said. ‘What kind of difficulties?’
‘That is none of your business,’ Mina Saba said. ‘What matters now is how we will move forward.’
‘If something happened to the wizards, I think it very much is,’ Tony said.
‘Oh, what’s the harm in telling him?’ Ada Morange said. ‘He came to us willingly, and besides, he’s already guessed most of it.’
‘Then tell him, why not?’ Mina Saba said, with an impatient flick of her hand.
‘The stromatolites were badly damaged, and we have been unable to make more copies of the eidolon,’ Ada Morange said to Tony. ‘As for the wizards, one died of brain-stem failure, and the other killed himself and ten of Mina’s people.’
‘This was when they tried to take control of the mad ship,’ Tony said.
‘The wizards were not pilots,’ Ada Morange said. ‘You are. Your ship has been infected with a copy of the stromatolite eidolon, which has made some interesting changes to its mind. And because you are in intimate contact with it, I believe you have been changed too. I have every confidence that you will be able to do what the wizards could not.’
‘Where does it go, this mirror?’ Tony said.
‘Somewhere only mad ships can go,’ Ada Morange said.
‘The Ghajar were divided into at least two factions,’ Mina Saba said. ‘One built the mad ships and the new mirrors. Either as an alternative to the network gifted to them by the Jackaroo, or as entrances to secret or sacred places. The other faction opposed the first. There was a war. It consumed both sides.’
‘There are many stories,’ Unlikely Worlds said, ‘but most follow similar patterns.’
‘We are not like the Ghajar,’ Mina Saba said sharply.
‘I was not thinking of the Ghajar,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘I was thinking of Ada, and an old friend of hers, Adam Nevers.’
‘Otherwise known as Colonel X,’ Ada Morange said. ‘I see that you did not know his true name, Master Tony.’
‘I know about Adam Nevers,’ Tony said. ‘I thought him long dead.’
‘He found someone willing to sponsor his stupid quest,’ Ada Morange said, ‘and he rode a timeship in a circular course to his future. Our present. He was taken in by one of the honourable families, and joined Special Services. Once a policeman, always a policeman. He wants to stop us reaching the other side of the mirror, but you will give us the edge.’
‘He and his employer fear new discoveries because they threaten established hierarchies of power and privilege,’ Mina Saba said. ‘He is the dead hand of the past. And we are the way forward.’
The conversation turned to Tony’s rendezvous with the Red Brigade’s fleet. He would undergo tests, Ada Morange said, and then the work of preparing the mad ship for transition through the new mirror would begin. Together, Mina Saba said, they would find all kinds of wonders, and remake history.
‘It’s interesting,’ Unlikely Worlds said afterwards. ‘You don’t trust them, and they don’t trust you. Yet you need each other.’
‘Who said I need them?’ Tony said.
‘Oho. Now that is interesting. May I ask what you plan to do?’
‘They claim that only a mad ship can open this mirror of theirs,’ Tony said. ‘I think that I can prove them wrong.’
55. Into Everywhere
After being debriefed and subjected to a variety of mostly mysterious tests by Adam Nevers’s mad little crew of wizards, Lisa was escorted to her cabin and more or less left alone for three days. Space travel seemed to consist mostly of moving through a series of rooms – even the tug sort of counted. This one was egg-shaped, about the size of the bathroom in the house she had built on her homestead. Floating in mid-air with her feet towards the hatch, she could reach out and touch the walls on either side. One wall (she supposed it would be the ceiling, when there was gravity) gave off a pale light that could be dialled down but never completely extinguished; a silvery sleeping bag like the cocoon of a giant bug was fastened to another. Webbing pouches contained toiletries, changes of underwear, and grey sweatshirts and loose black pants, a costume that reminded her of childhood ballet classes.
She could invoke wallpaper that turned the room into a glade in a forest, a grassy hollow in an alpine meadow, a bubble floating on a restless ocean, a sandy depression in a stony desert under two suns, so forth. But the illusions were too painful, reminding her of all she had left behind, so she left the walls of the cabin blank, like the prison cell it was.
Food was brought by one or another of her guards, who also escorted her if she needed to use the bathroom, a complicated routine in free fall, involving nozzles and suction devices and wet-wipes. She could access the ship’s library via a window that opened in the air, but couldn’t get at the stuff she needed – histories of the days of future past, documentaries, anything that would give her a handle on where she was. All she could call up were nineteenth-century novels and late twentieth-century TV programmes she vaguely remembered watching with her parents in the long-ago before the Jackaroo came. Alternating Bleak House with random episodes of Homicide: Life on the Streets induced an aching homesickness, part nostalgia, part loneliness. Here she was in the future. There was no going back. And the only person who understood how she felt, the only person who might know the difference between Inspector Bucket and Detective Munch, was her jailer.
Her ghost was a constant vague presence. Sometimes she talked to it, asking questions about the mad ship and the weird mirror, giving running commentaries on whichever programme she happened to be watching at the time. ‘I’m trying to teach you how people are,’ she said. ‘The kind of stories they like.’
She knew that the wizards might be listening in, but she didn’t care. Let them think she was going stir-crazy.
The eidolon didn’t respond, of course. No voice in her head, no visions or dreams, no lightning-strike revelation. Just the sense that it was somewhere in the tiny room, silently absorbed in its own thoughts.
One day she woke to find that she was lying in her sleeping bag on what had become the floor. The pull was slight but definite, and the spiral track of her lodestar had changed.
‘We’re on the move,’ she said to the eidolon. ‘I wonder where.’
No reply, as usual.
Gravity vanished for a few minutes, came back briefly, vanished again. It was like riding a fairground attraction. After two hours it seemed that the return to free fall was permanent. When Lisa asked to use the bathroom her guard wouldn’t tell her why the ship had been manoeuvring.
Six days later, watching a random episode of Friends, Lisa drifted down to what was once again the floor. The force of acceleration was stronger this time, and the lodestar was fixed in one place, somewhere beyond the glow of the ceiling.
‘We must be heading towards it,’ Lisa said to her ghost. ‘Is this something to do with you?’
The tug of the lodestar slowly grew stronger until, with an abrupt quantum jump, it was a physical force prying at her mind. She felt everything else fall away, felt the same out-of-body swoon she’d experienced on First Foot when she’d stared too long at the star at the edge of the Badlands. Felt as if she was expanding beyond her body the room the ship into everywhere . . . And then that vastening vanished like a popped balloon, and she was floa
ting in mid-air because gravity had vanished too.
She knew then what had happened. There could be no doubt about it. The wizards had found some way of plugging Dave Clegg into that mad ship, he’d opened the wormhole, and the ship had just gone through it. A little later, the gentle tug of the lodestar came back, roughly ninety degrees from its last position. Lisa supposed it must be the far end of the wormhole. She soon found out that she was wrong.
56. Mirror Dive
Abalunam’s Pride was just three hundred thousand kilometres out from the hothouse planet when the bridle reported that she had at last acquired hard data on the location of the mirror. It was travelling west to east at about two hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, she said, tracing a wide, irregular circle around the planet’s north pole.
‘There’s a lot of uncertainty in that track,’ Tony said, after he had studied the images she threw to him.
‘The resolution of the neutrino detectors will improve as we get closer. And when we get closer still, I should be able to pick it up on radar.’
‘How much closer?’
‘Oh, within three or four hundred kilometres.’
‘So not until we are on top of it.’
‘These new mirrors are smaller than the ordinary kind, and impressively transparent to radar. Also, there are many false signals,’ the bridle said. ‘Thunderstorms, rain, atmospheric turbulence. And the aerostats, of course. It’s very interesting! Perhaps someone wanted to hide it down there. Perhaps the aerostats are not cities after all. Perhaps they are camouflage. Dazzle and distraction.’
‘Try harder,’ Tony said. ‘We’ll only get one chance at this.’
‘I know! It’s going to be very extreme!’
Some hours later, the pilot of the picket ship pinged Tony, sending a string of orbital vectors and telling him to follow her. They were three thousand kilometres out from the planet now, and closing fast. The picket shed velocity, preparing to enter an equatorial orbit and rendezvous with the Red Brigade’s little fleet. Tony followed, chasing the picket through the glory of a vast sunset into the planet’s shadow. There was a huge storm below. Cannonades of sheet lightning limning contours and layers within the dark cloudscape.
‘So pretty,’ the bridle said.
‘Concentrate on nailing down the location of the mirror.’
The bridle displayed its latest estimate: an oval volume a little less than a hundred kilometres across at its widest point. She said, ‘I have every confidence that this will work. We are supposed to be here. It was meant to be.’
Tony shared her righteous conviction. It was probably spillover from the eidolon that rode him, but he didn’t care. This, he thought, was this.
The picket achieved orbital velocity and cut its drive. Abalunam’s Pride continued to decelerate, descending in a long arc towards the edge of the atmosphere. The picket’s pilot pinged Tony and told him to correct his course; he said that he was flying straight and true. After a short silence, someone else cut in, ordering him to follow his escort or suffer the consequences.
‘Come and catch me,’ Tony said, and shut off his comms.
From the hold, Unlikely Worlds asked him if he had calculated the risk of disobeying his captors.
‘They are not my captors,’ Tony said. ‘I have not surrendered to them, and I swear I never will. Tell me: what will happen to you if the ship is destroyed?’
‘That depends on how it is destroyed.’
‘I heard that !Cha can teleport to the nearest mirror.’
‘I have heard that too. Unfortunately it is not true.’
‘But you can survive in vacuum.’
‘For a while.’
‘I could eject you. I am sure the Red Brigade would pick you up from orbit.’
‘I have chosen to follow you.’
‘Either you want children really badly, or you know that I am doing the right thing,’ Tony said.
He was hoping that Unlikely Worlds was coming along for the ride because he knew that they would survive this. That this reckless gambit would pay off; that it was a chance to escape, a chance to regain some control.
Ada Morange had told him that he would be able to pilot the mad ship and use it to unlock the mirror, but he believed that the mad ship was not the only key. She had helped him to escape on Veles because he had been changed by the eidolon, but she had also been interested in how Abalunam’s Pride and her bridle had been changed: that was why she had made sure that he would be reunited with his ship. He was gambling now that those changes meant that his ship could open the mirror. That he could get ahead of the Red Brigade, find the grail they were searching for, and use it to bargain with Mina Saba. A straight exchange for Ada Morange. A simple business deal that would, after he had brought her home and she had been forced to confess her every crime and betrayal, restore his standing in his family.
The bright disc of the sun rose, shooting light around the curve of the planet. A minute later, the bridle told Tony that there were pings on the proximity radar.
‘Two drones. They’ll intersect our course in less than ninety-two seconds. My conventional armaments have been stripped out, but I can discharge waste-water ice and other material from the stern vent. Given the difference in velocity between ourselves and those drones, it would do a lot of damage when it hits them.’
‘Hold off.’
‘Are you sure about that? I can take them out. I know I can.’
‘And they’ll send more drones. Hold off.’
Tony did not like the way the bridle was questioning his orders. It had never done that before.
He watched the two drones come in, decelerating hard, separating and veering to either side of the ship, matching its course in a neat flanking manoeuvre. Abalunam’s Pride was skimming the outer edge of the planet’s mesosphere now. Usually, Tony would spiral in for a couple of orbits, killing his velocity before dropping straight down through the atmosphere on distorted gravity gradients, but he didn’t have time for that. He was going in fast and dirty.
The dim stars of the U-class hauler and the Red Brigade ships rose above the horizon. Tony could not resist taunting Mina Saba and Ada Morange with a quick message. I am going ahead. Follow me if you can.
Friction heated gas to a violet flare that wrapped around his ship. The force of deceleration slammed him into his couch for two long minutes. Then the flare blew away and Abalunam’s Pride was falling in a steep arc through a dark blue sky towards the white cloud deck. The drones were falling alongside him, falling into streaming cloud.
The bridle was screaming with delight.
Tony remembered a diver he’d once seen in Nuevo California. A woman wearing nothing but silver bodypaint, poised at the edge of the flat roof of a five-storey hotel while Tony and a small crowd watched below. He remembered how she’d raised her arms above her head, stood on her toes, and given herself to the air. Clasping her knees to her breasts and somersaulting one and a half times and smashing into the exact centre of the tiny pool of water.
‘I have radar contact!’ the bridle said.
Abalunam’s Pride slewed violently, entering a sunlit canyon between two banks of cloud. The drones slewed too, keeping pace. The radar began to return a faint signal; half a minute later Tony eyeballed a tiny black speck a long way ahead. The ship slewed again and the speck was suddenly dead ahead and growing rapidly. A rectangular sheet four kilometres tall, hanging vertically in clear air, presumably balanced within the same kind of gravity warp used by Ghajar ships, rushing towards him. The drones cut away on collision-avoidance trajectories. Tony glimpsed the ring of machinery embedded in the black sheet, wondered what it would be like to hit a wormhole that was closed, if anyone had ever before done such a thing, and then there was a black flash and the ship punched through into raw sunlight.
‘Wow,’ the bridle said. ‘Wow. We did it.’
57. Dead Planet
A couple of hours after the ship passed through the wormhole, Lisa was taken by one of h
er taciturn guards to the wizards’ lair. They strapped her into a version of the cradle that Ada Morange’s people had used to test her compass ability, stuck sensor dots on her forehead, patched her with a drug that immediately gave her a feeling of woozy detachment, and masked her with a strip of black cloth that projected sequences of geometric shapes, different colours, into her eyes, and pulses of sound into her ears. It was an intense version of the audio-visual entrainment experiments they’d tried before. The patterns changing slowly at first but gradually speeding up, smashing towards her like freeway traffic, blurring into an endless flicker that, when at last it cut off, left her dizzy and disorientated. She realised that the lodestar was somewhere beyond her feet now, and then it slowly shifted and the sequence of shapes started up again. Rinse and repeat six times, a brain cramp sharpening behind her eyes despite the cushion of the drug, spreading across the inside of her skull.
When at last the strip of cloth was removed, she was floating in a red throb of malignant pain. Looking up at the wizards, telling them that she knew what they had been doing. ‘Being used as a human compass, I’ve done that before. So what was I pointing at this time?’
‘A wormhole,’ one of them said. Her face was a mask of fractal tattoos that contained a kind of AI toolkit; it looked like she was peering at Lisa through a tangled hedge.
‘Right,’ Lisa said. ‘The one we just went through.’
The wizard shook her head. ‘One we’ll be able to go through if you pointed true,’ she said, but wouldn’t explain what she meant.
None of them would. Lisa lost it. Told them that she deserved to know what the fuck was going on. Demanded to be unstrapped from the cradle that instant and taken to Adam Nevers. Demanded to be taken to the motherfucking avatars so she could have it out with them, all her anger and frustration and fear raving out until at last one of the wizards slapped a patch on her arm and she woke up dry-mouthed and weak as a kitten back in her room.
