by Paul McAuley
And that wasn’t all, Adam Nevers said. Another star, an M3 red dwarf, orbited the neutron star at a distance of a little under nineteen astronomical units. And the M3 dwarf possessed a tide-locked Mars-sized rocky planet. He opened windows, showed Lisa images of the M3 dwarf and its planet, images of the diamond planet’s dim half-disc illuminated by a sharp blue point source. With a quick deep chill she remembered something Willie had said on his dying bed. A planet bigger than its sun . . .
Nevers was explaining that the M3 dwarf and its planet seemed to have been moved into orbit around the neutron star relatively recently, said that the diamond planet could be some kind of supercomputer or vast quantum memory store, encoding information in nitrogen vacancies in isotopically pure carbon-12. A survey drone had discovered the remnants of a Ghajar tower at the planet’s south pole, near what appeared to be a deep drill site. Another drone, spiralling on a suicide trajectory into the neutron star’s steep gravity well, had captured in its last moments evidence of structures on the star’s surface: intricate patterns etched in lines five millimetres high across several hundred square kilometres of the otherwise mirror-smooth crust.
‘I’m told that in the neutron star’s extreme gravity those patterns are equivalent to mountains on Earth,’ Nevers said. ‘We have no idea how they were made or how to access them, but there they are. And there are odd patterns in the belt of dark matter around the black hole at galactic centre, too. Nodes at regular intervals, like beads on a string. The wizards say it’s evidence of some kind of cosmic engineering, but as the nearest node is more than three hundred light years away I think we can safely ignore that for now.’
He was going to secure this side of the wormhole, he told Lisa. If the Red Brigade managed to find a way through before the Commons police caught up with them, they were going to get a warm welcome.
‘Meanwhile, we’ll finish our survey of the diamond planet, and then we’ll head for the M3 dwarf and its planet. Perhaps we’ll find something we can understand there.’
‘Wise old aliens dressed in togas and inhabiting a styrofoam replica of a Greek temple, that kind of thing?’ Lisa said.
Nevers smiled. ‘Something that piques the interest of your eidolon, hopefully.’
Lisa hadn’t felt anything when he had shown her images of his prize, and was too proud to ask if the wizards had detected some kind of activity.
‘I don’t think you should hope for any help from that quarter,’ she said. ‘Look where it got me.’
‘It put you where you are supposed to be, Ms Dawes. And soon we’ll find out why,’ Nevers said, and offered her one of the pouches of vodka martini again. ‘Are you sure you won’t join me in a little celebration?’
‘I think you need it more than me,’ Lisa said. ‘Maybe it’ll help you get over the loss of your friends in black.’
She was confined to the bland egg of her cabin again. Gravity came and went several times. The ship was manoeuvring. As usual, her guards wouldn’t tell her anything.
She was asleep when gravity came back again. She woke with a jolt, found herself pinned to the floor by her own weight. Sitting up was an effort; standing a heroic labour that made her heart pound and invoked fresh pain in her spine and joints. Her weight had more than doubled; she guessed that the mad ship was moving at the bias drive’s maximum acceleration.
Her ghost was back, too. A vivid eager presence in the tiny space.
‘You aren’t going to tell me why you are so goddamned happy, are you?’ she said.
Presently, two guards came for her and fastened her wrists together with plastic strip. No use pointing out that she would probably break an ankle if she tried to run, or that there was no place she could run to. They didn’t take her to the wizards’ lair or the control gallery. Instead, the elevator dropped three levels and she was marched around the curve of a narrow corridor to a bare brightly lit room where Adam Nevers sprawled in a kind of wheeled sling chair, his head propped in a cushioned brace. Two wizards sat behind him, watching windows tiled in the air.
‘Their activity just went into synchronicity,’ one of them said.
‘So they’re definitely in contact,’ Nevers said.
‘They are definitely mirroring each other,’ the other wizard said.
‘It is not yet clear if they are actually exchanging information,’ the first wizard said. ‘It could be a form of entanglement.’
‘Or a behavioural response,’ the second wizard said. ‘A reaction to the close proximity of its twin.’
‘What about you?’ Nevers said, gazing at Lisa. ‘Do you feel this close proximity?’
Her ghost leaning at her shoulder, fully present. She said, ‘You found another eidolon? How? Where?’
‘Oh, we found much more than an eidolon,’ Nevers said, and lifted a hand.
The door pinched back and a !Cha tank stepped into the room on its ungainly tripod, saying in its engaging baritone, ‘Ms Dawes. How nice to see you again.’
But Lisa barely noticed Unlikely Worlds, because now a slim handsome man with dark brown skin and a glossy cap of tightly woven braids was pushed forward by a guard. She felt as if she was part of a broken magnet, yearning towards its other half. She saw in the man’s gaze that he felt it too.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘I don’t believe you’ve met before,’ Nevers said. He was gleaming with delighted pride, like a matchmaker who had just made the perfect match. ‘But you definitely know each other.’
60. Deeper Than Sex
As he followed Unlikely Worlds into the room, propelled by an unnecessary shove from his guard, Tony felt his ghost move through him, leaning towards the woman. She was staring at him with a shock that mirrored his own. It was like that moment in serial novellas where two people meet and know at once that they share the same soul. Tony had felt something like it half a dozen years ago, back when he and Òrélolu used to trawl the cafés and bars of Victory Landing together. One night, Tony had shared a look with a tall slender man in police greens, Ramesh Rao, a marine on shore leave from the frigate that had arrived ten days ago, and that was it. They’d had sex in the bar’s bathroom, started up again in the spinner that took them to a hotel, spent the rest of the night and most of the next day together. There’d been a lot of sex, but it was deeper than sex. They completed each other, somehow. But then Ramesh’s leave ended, his ship booted, and Tony never saw him again.
He had been young enough, back then, to believe that vital spark, that sense of being completed, would happen again soon enough. But it never had. Not even with Danilo. But now, seeing this careworn middle-aged woman with her crew-cut white hair and unflattering baggy grey sweatshirt, he felt that visceral bolt of lightning again. Bam! Exactly like love at first sight.
The first thing she said to him, after Adam Nevers had made his joke about how the two of them hadn’t met but knew each other, was, ‘Where did you find yours?’
Her name was Lisa Dawes. More than a century ago, she had been infected by an eidolon that had been lurking in a scrap of wreckage from a crashed Ghajar ship. She had fallen in with Ada Morange, who had basically kidnapped her, dispatching her to her eidolon’s lodestar aboard the timeship before she could be arrested by Nevers and his crew of Jackaroo avatars. But Nevers had intercepted the timeship at the end of its voyage, and here she was now, his prisoner.
Tony was hustled out of the room before he could find out how her eidolon had changed her, whether she could communicate with it, if she knew what it wanted, so forth, and Nevers kept them apart after that – perhaps he was scared of what might happen if their eidolons fused, merging into an unimaginable whole. As far as he was concerned, it was enough to know that they were similar. He believed that it would give him an unbeatable advantage in the coming battle with Ada Morange and the Red Brigade.
It was a topic that he returned to over and again in conversations with Tony while the mad ship carrying Adam Nevers’s little fleet drove towards the neutron star’s M
3 dwarf companion and its red planet. It had set out soon after Tony told Adam Nevers, aka Colonel X, how he had escaped from the Red Brigade. A little over a day later, several Red Brigade ships, including Mina Saba’s frigate and the U-class hauler carrying the stolen mad ship, emerged from the mirror, running the gauntlet of drones and other assets Nevers had left behind, turning towards the red planet. And four days after that, three police J-class interceptors came through.
‘They’re one ship down after a hard fight with the Reds at that hothouse planet,’ Adam Nevers told Tony. ‘But they made it, and now Ada Morange and her friends are caught in a trap. All we have to do is make a stand and hold her off until help arrives. After all these years, I’ve finally got the bitch bang to rights.’
Adam Nevers’s English was laced with archaic colloquialisms. He had aged just six years while travelling a century into his future, but he’d been old when he’d set out; his gaze was bright and his mind was sharp, but he was bent, bone-thin and bald. Everyone was hurting in the heavy pull of the bias drive’s maximum acceleration, but Nevers was suffering more than most. He reclined in a chair that scooted around on soft wheels, and he was permanently short of breath, his pigeon chest labouring when he spoke.
‘The Reds don’t care about me, except that I stand between them and what they want,’ he said. ‘Ada Morange, though, she wants to put an end to me. She wants me to pay for all the trouble I’ve caused her over the years. And she also wants you to pay, Tony. Because you disobeyed her. Because you came here to help me.’
Nevers wanted to convince him that, in spite of everything, he was a friend and ally, but Tony knew that the man would sacrifice him in an instant if it gave him the chance to destroy Ada Morange. The two of them were locked in a battle more than a century old. Tony and everyone else were no more than foot soldiers.
‘After I tried to stop her getting hold of those first Ghajar ships, she wouldn’t let it go,’ Nevers had said, during an earlier conversation. ‘She wanted me to suffer for the trouble I caused her. She used her wealth and her political connections to get me hounded out of the force—’
‘The force?’
‘The Met,’ Nevers said, with waspish impatience. Like many old men, he did not like to be reminded that his world was gone. ‘The Metropolitan police force. It didn’t much matter to me. I was ready to make a move. I took my police pension and I joined the UN. The United Nations. Back then, they were running the emigration lottery, distributing tickets to the gift worlds. They were getting into control of the Elder Culture artefact trade, too. That was my area of expertise, and we had several run-ins over the years, Ada Morange and me. And I usually got the better of her. She could fuck with the Met, but she couldn’t fuck with the UN. She pushed; I pushed back. She tried to dodge the regulations and restrictions; I made sure she was called to account.’
Nevers liked to expound on Ada Morange’s criminal irresponsibility. He said that he wouldn’t be surprised to discover that she had been behind some of the meme plagues, designing them, letting them loose to see what they could do. He mentioned the old idea that Elder Cultures had died out because, like Ada Morange and the Red Brigade, they had tampered with technology they did not completely understand. He talked about how humanity’s development had been stunted by contact with Elder Culture tech, said that was something Ada Morange either refused to understand or did not care about.
‘That’s why she’s so dangerous, Mr Okoye. She is blinded by her ambition. She believes that the rules and precautions meant to protect us don’t apply to her.’
‘Yet it seems that you have a lot of respect for her,’ Tony said, trying to goad the man into revealing more than he intended.
‘She is a very tricky adversary,’ Nevers said. ‘I think you know that too. The way she used your family as a hiding place all those years, while she was spinning her webs with the help of those robots. Hands, as you call them. The way she used you to escape . . .’
This was in the room where Nevers had introduced Tony to Lisa Dawes. A guard stood against the door and a clutch of little drones hung in the air, some recording the conversation from every angle, some monitoring the activity of the eidolon inside Tony’s head, others ready to zap him if he tried anything. As if he could. They had him and they had his ship, had boarded her and disabled her comms before bringing him aboard Nevers’s scow, which was garaged in the mad ship’s hold with half a dozen other ships.
‘You used me too,’ Tony told Nevers. ‘Pretending you were Colonel X. Pretending you were on my side. I had to find out from Ada Morange who you really were.’
‘And I gave you back your ship, and pointed you towards the people who did you so much wrong,’ Adam Nevers said. ‘We’re on the same side, Tony. And you’ve done some good work. You’ve exceeded my expectations, frankly. You’ve done me proud.’
One thing was clear. When they reached the red planet, things were going to get messy. And Tony would have only a little time to engineer his escape.
When he was not being prodded and probed by wizards or subjected to one of Adam Nevers’s monologues, Tony was secured in a standard cabin. That was where he was when at last, after eight days of the crippling G-force, with only a brief respite when the ship had turned around before beginning to decelerate, free fall returned abruptly. A little later, he was escorted up to the scow’s control gallery, where Nevers was waiting with Unlikely Worlds, and images of a red desert world filled most of the windows. The mad ship and its cargo had reached its destination.
‘We have had some interesting chats, Mr Unlikely Worlds and I,’ Nevers told Tony. ‘About your adventures. And, of course, about Ada Morange.’
‘It has been very enlightening to meet Colonel Nevers again,’ Unlikely Worlds said.
‘Look at you,’ Tony said, mistrusting both of them. ‘Like a couple of old shipmates.’
‘We have known each other a long time,’ Unlikely Worlds said.
‘He was on the other side, way back when,’ Nevers said.
‘I was not on anyone’s side,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘I was interested in Ada Morange’s story. As I still am.’
‘I’ve been telling him that he has been following the wrong person all this time,’ Nevers said.
‘You are certainly part of the story that I have been following,’ Unlikely Worlds said.
‘As far as he is concerned, we are just spear carriers,’ Tony said to Nevers.
‘Ah, but the story isn’t over yet,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘Who can know where it will lead, what roles you will play, and who amongst you will be left at the end?’
‘That sounds like a threat,’ Nevers said cheerfully, the quick grimace of his smile revealing the plastic ridges that had replaced his teeth.
‘Merely a commonplace observation,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘I am a bystander, not a participant.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ Nevers said.
He clearly believed that he had the upper hand. Tony stepped on the temptation to tell him how the !Cha had manipulated Ada Morange and Raqle Thornhilde – and himself, for that matter. Although Unlikely Worlds could not be counted an ally, he was a wild card, and Tony believed that when it came down to it he would need all the distractions he could get.
Nevers pointed to one of the windows. ‘This is where it ends. An old world, full of old secrets. Ada Morange wants it. I’m going to stop her.’
Drones had already completed a basic survey. The planet orbited the red dwarf star once every fifty-eight days and was tidally locked, its sub-stellar hemisphere chilly and dry, a shrunken ice cap covering less than half its dark side. No seas, no lakes. Salt pans and sand dunes everywhere. Ranges of what once had been mountains weathered to low-relief plateaus. No plate tectonics. Only a feeble magnetosphere. An atmosphere too thin to be breathable, rich in carbon dioxide and low in oxygen. A long tail of nitrogen and of hydrogen and oxygen, the products of photodissociation of water, blowing away on the solar wind. No trace of life anywhere. No r
uins.
‘Although we’ve only just begun to look,’ Nevers said. ‘I think that my old friend Unlikely Worlds knows more than he’s telling.’
‘I am afraid that I am not an expert on sand,’ Unlikely Worlds said.
‘I don’t mean sand.’
‘You give me credit where I deserve none,’ the !Cha said. ‘You are the first visitors to this place in many thousands of years. I am nowhere near as old as that.’
‘But you know that the Ghajar came here,’ Nevers said.
‘As do you.’
Nevers ignored that. ‘You have been collecting stories for a long time. You may not have been here before, but I bet you know all about it.’
‘We do not share stories amongst ourselves,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘They are too valuable.’
Tony said, ‘Because it would be like sharing your women?’
‘It is an interesting analogy,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘Although it would be more accurate to say that our women share us. Also, our women are not exactly women.’
‘Even if I sit his tank on a hotplate, the stubborn son-of-a-bitch won’t tell us what’s down there,’ Nevers told Tony. ‘Not that it matters, because I’m planning to send you to take a look. My wizards tell me we can monitor the reactions of your eidolon, use you as a kind of dowsing rod. But before we do that, we have to deal with Ada and the Red Brigade. I sent her a message, told her to stand down and prepare to be arrested, but she hasn’t replied. It looks like the old witch and her pals want to fight it out. Until those police ships arrive we’ll be outnumbered and outgunned, but we will fight to the last man standing if necessary. And that includes you, Mr Okoye. She’ll arrive in just over a day. You should spend a little of that time thinking about how you might convince her that she’s chosen the wrong side in this fight.’
