by Paul McAuley
‘I knew her as Aunty Jael,’ Tony said. ‘And it turns out that was not who she was at all. And besides, it is not possible to argue with a laminated brain. Her mind was fixed long ago, and cannot be changed.’
Like yours, he had the sense not to say.
He was back in his room when gravity came back. A brief jolt, then another. The scow was on the move. Probably leaving the mad ship’s hold and preparing for combat.
Free fall returned. A little later two guards came for Tony. Colonel Nevers needed to talk to him again, they said, as they escorted him towards the elevator.
‘What kind of trouble is he in?’
‘He’ll tell you,’ one of the guards said, and the elevator door slid open and a hand was inside, a man-sized thing with a cartoon face floating in its white mask and a plastic gun in one hand.
‘Hi there,’ it said in a familiar voice, shot the guards with fat darts that instantly knocked them out, and grabbed Tony and pulled him into the elevator.
Tony said, perfectly shocked, ‘The police shut you down.’
‘I managed to find a way to wake up,’ the bridle said breezily. The hand it was riding was a skinless stickman with plastic musculature, bundles of fibre-optic cabling clipped to its spine, and a power pack in the cage of its chest. ‘You had locked up the hands, so I made this one, and made this neat little dart gun too, and came aboard when the police were distracted by a bunch of attack drones. The Red Brigade boosted them ahead of their incoming ships, and they swung around the far side of the planet and used its atmosphere and gravity well to slow down and aim themselves at the mad ship. Sneaky! And convenient! Why are you looking at me like that? Aren’t you pleased that I was able to come to your rescue?’
‘I’m astonished,’ Tony said. He was also seriously spooked by this new display of the bridle’s autonomy.
‘I think we should get back to the ship,’ the bridle said, ‘before someone realises that you have escaped.’
The elevator door opened; they swam out into a passageway.
Tony said, ‘Is Abalunam’s Pride still in the mad ship’s hold?’
‘We can reach it with a rocket stick,’ the bridle said with airy assurance. ‘Down here. There’s an airlock.’
Tony and the hand shot down the passageway like salmon down a chute, out into a transparent tube that linked the fat cylinder of the lifesystem with one of the airlocks, which was wedged between two fretted struts of the scow’s actual interior. The architecture of the ship, a Gothic proliferation of flanges and buttresses and spikes, stretched above and below; the steel box of the airlock gleamed in actinic blue light.
The hand preceded Tony through the airlock hatch. Someone shouted in surprise: a sharp impact shattered the hand’s mask. ‘Something happened,’ the bridle said plaintively, as the hand tumbled into the brightly lit space, and a second impact folded up the stickman machine and knocked it sideways.
‘Don’t even think of trying to run away,’ a man said.
He was a runty little guy with black hair and a pale hard-set face, wearing a pressure suit without helmet and gloves, aiming some kind of gun at Tony. Behind him, also dressed in a pressure suit, arms pinned to her sides by cables, her head shaven and patched with black dots, her face pale and haggard, was the time traveller Lisa Dawes.
61. Shanghaied Again
Dave Clegg intercepted the robot as it rebounded from the far wall, jerked a fat yellow gun from its lax grip, and told Tony Okoye that he hadn’t meant to shoot it, the fucking thing had startled him. The freebooter shrugged and said that it didn’t matter, his ship could easily make a replacement. He seemed calm and wryly amused. Floating at the entrance to the airlock’s antechamber, one hand against the hatch’s rim, he smiled at Lisa and said, ‘We all want to get to the same place, I think.’
Lisa was exhausted beyond measure by the aftermath of the wizards’ tests and experiments, broken down and busted, her head buzzing with psychic static, but an echo of the powerful thrill of recognition she’d felt the first time they’d met pulsed through her. Although they barely knew each other, they were conspirators bound by alien ghosts.
She said, ‘Do you know what we’re supposed to find?’
‘Not yet,’ Tony Okoye said.
‘It isn’t coincidence, is it? That we’re both here.’
‘I think it’s a good omen.’
‘It means I’m going to save both your arses,’ Dave Clegg said. He was pale and jittery, had actually screamed when the robot, the hand, had swum into the antechamber, shooting it with the bolt gun he had found in a tool locker, nearly shooting Tony Okoye too.
‘You will need my help, I think,’ Tony said. ‘To begin with, I have a ship.’
‘So do I,’ Dave said. ‘I’m going to help the Professor find whatever it is Nevers doesn’t want her to find. And you two are going to help me.’
‘What kind of assets does your ship have?’
‘What do you mean? Weapons?’
‘I mean something more substantial than a bolt or dart gun. An X-ray laser, for instance, or a pinch-fusion bomb. Also, my ship has acquired certain talents that should prove to be very useful if Adam Nevers comes after us.’
‘And I suppose that if I come aboard your fucking ship it would use those talents against me. No fucking way,’ Dave said.
‘I think you should seriously think about Mr Okoye’s offer,’ Lisa said. ‘If we head out to the red planet without protection, any encounter with Nevers or Ada Morange will be very one-sided.’
She badly wanted to get off the ship, get away from Nevers and his wizards, but she didn’t trust Dave Clegg to keep her safe. One minute the man was telling her that he was rescuing her; the next he was trussing her up. ‘For your own safety, given how you are.’ As if. Even in her befuddled state, she knew that she was his hostage. Knew she’d been shanghaied again.
‘I don’t plan to get into any kind of encounter,’ Dave said. Telling Tony Okoye, ‘Now, how about getting into a pressure suit before the fucking police realise what’s going on?’
The trader assembled a pressure suit around himself, moving quickly and gracefully in free fall, and allowed Dave Clegg to bind him with the same kind of cables that bound Lisa, smart things that coiled around his legs and lashed his arms to his sides. Tony smiled at Lisa behind his helmet faceplate while Dave checked his bonds, mouthed something that might have been don’t worry. And the thing was, she felt a weird calm. It was as if her ghost hung behind her with a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
Dave Clegg manoeuvred them one after the other through the airlock hatch. Four rocket sticks were racked inside, blunt torpedoes with saddles and steering bridles at their midpoints and two rings of thrusters fore and aft. He unshipped one, clipped Lisa and Tony to its cargo net. ‘Lie back and enjoy the ride,’ he said, and swung into the saddle. There was a deep vibration of pumps, the lights dimmed and a door slid back, and then they were moving outside, into fathomless vacuum.
The mad ship hung close by, silhouetted against the curve of the red planet, and a handful of smaller ships were scattered beyond it. Lisa, lying on her back, saw a brilliant point of white light flare close to one ship, saw sparks shoot away from another, and realised that she was in the middle of an actual fucking space battle. Then the rocket stick was moving, aimed straight at the mad ship.
Lisa imagined the tie clips that fastened her arms and legs to the cargo net popping open, saw herself falling away into the void, tumbling in an endless orbit until the air in her pressure suit gave out. She imagined a swarm of drones smoking out of one of Nevers’s ships, flying at the rocket stick and blowing it into hot plasma, like those old movies about adventures in space before adventures in space became an actual thing. And even if they managed to reach the timeship, she would have to work out how to survive Dave Clegg and his crazy plans.
After her brief, astonishing first meeting with Tony Okoye, after Adam Nevers had told her that the man was a freebooter, some kind of inter
stellar trader whose family had once owned Ada Morange’s laminated brain, that he was infected with an eidolon similar to hers, Lisa had been turned over to the tender mercies of the wizards. Nevers had his prize, he had Dave Clegg piloting the mad ship and he had that young freebooter with his eidolon . . . He didn’t need her any more.
More tests, more brutal than any before, as the wizards tried to isolate and define the activity of the eidolon. Audio-visual tests that gave her skull-splitting migraines. Drugs that left her disorientated and delusional. Sometimes she was patched with something that knocked her out, and woke with the feeling that something terrible had been done to her, some filthy violation of her core self. The wizards zapped her with old-fashioned electroshock treatment. They induced epileptic fits. They shaved off her hair and drilled tiny holes in her skull and inserted optical fibres that grew fine threads through the tissues of her brain and stimulated specific tangles of neurons with blue light. They calibrated her suffering, recorded everything, refused to discuss their work with her.
She had a recurring dream that she was stretched naked on a steel autopsy table, watching as she was unseamed and her organs were removed one by one, and her brain was unseated from her skull and laid on a steel tray. And it was crawling with ants, her brain, fat black things with tiny malevolent human faces, and she’d wake up in her cabin on the gel mattress she’d been given, with the relentless force of gravity pressing down on her and a scream strangled in her throat.
Dazed and doped, she got into the habit of leaving television streaming in the cabin’s window, running random selections of late twentieth-century sitcoms and soaps, serials and cheesy old films. Every so often the playback would freeze, or flick to another programme. She quickly realised that the same kinds of images were recurring over and again. Deserts. Sunsets. The lighted grids of cities at night. A clip from some black and white movie about ghosts or maybe angels watching over people in a library. Brief clips of cartoon animals talking to cartoon people.
‘I get it,’ Lisa told her ghost. ‘We’re different species, and you’re trying to figure out a way of communicating.’
As usual, it didn’t reply.
She wondered if she was imposing meaning on a random glitch, but the images, especially those of desert landscapes, were weirdly compelling. Glimpses of a place richer and more real than her bare little cell. Sometimes she would feel herself falling inside them, waking with a start a few minutes or an hour later to the thinness of the real world. The wizards still wouldn’t tell her anything. ‘It’s too early to draw conclusions,’ they said, but she knew that her ghost was changing and growing, getting stronger while she was getting weaker. Right now it was only playing with the window, but suppose it started to play with her mind, started to take control of her thoughts? How would she be able to tell?
Even if she somehow, impossibly, escaped Adam Nevers, she could not escape the passenger in her skull. And where could she run to? Everything and everyone she knew was gone. She had lost the thread of her life. All she had was the small hope that Nevers would make good his promise, that she would meet the young freebooter again. She was certain that he understood her plight. That he was an ally, an accomplice, a secret sharer. ‘It’s best to keep you apart for now,’ Adam Nevers had said. Lisa believed that meant the two of them, together, might be able to do something that Nevers was afraid he could not control. Something astonishing. It wasn’t much more than a silly fantasy, but it was all she had.
One day her bone-breaking weight suddenly vanished. A few hours later, gravity briefly come back, much weaker, coming and going in quick erratic cycles. The scow was manoeuvring. Lisa imagined it slipping out of the hold of the mad ship, heading towards the surface of the red planet . . . Free fall returned, and she was wondering how she could try to find out what was happening when the door of her cabin wrinkled back and Dave Clegg flew in, colliding with her, clamping one hand over her mouth as they rebounded from the wall, grabbing hold of the door frame with the other, telling her that he was going to save her life. According to him, Nevers’s little fleet had quit the mad ship after it had come under attack by Red Brigade drones. Because his piloting skills were no longer needed, he had been ordered back to his cabin, but he’d overpowered his guard and come looking for her. The Professor would be here soon, he said. It was time to make things right with her.
‘You’re going over to Ada Morange?’ Lisa said stupidly, when he took his hand away from her mouth.
‘Going over? I never left. I was just playing along because I didn’t have any choice. Until now,’ Dave Clegg said.
Probably best not to ask him if he’d had any choice when he’d killed the timeship crew. Lisa said, ‘And I’m what? Your prisoner? A hostage?’
Dave Clegg held up a short plastic shiv. It looked like it had been whittled from a table knife. There was blood on it. Lisa knew then what had happened to his guard.
He said, ‘We’re both of us Nevers’s prisoners. What I’m doing, I’m rescuing you.’
Now, the rocket stick plunged through a gap in the basket-weave funnel of the mad ship’s hold and spun around in a dizzy manoeuvre that killed its momentum. Orange sunlight lanced through the mesh on the far side; light and shadows tiger-striped the bulky bone-shape of the timeship, dead ahead.
Dave Clegg jockeyed the rocket stick into the mouth of a shaft cut into the timeship’s cladding, unhitched Lisa and Tony Okoye, and hauled them into the airlock. Inside, he took off their helmets but left them bound in their spacesuits and towed them out along the ship’s central companionway. It had a grubby, used look. Failed lights hadn’t been replaced, a long tear in the white padding had been patched with duct tape, and the air smelled bad, a deep musty rot like a zoo of long-dead animals. Lisa wondered if the bodies of Dave Clegg’s murdered shipmates were still aboard.
Tony Okoye was telling the man that it wasn’t too late to rejig his plan. ‘If you let me get to my ship, I can be your wing man.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t trust me. I understand. But Ada Morange is an old friend. In fact, she was my tutor—’
‘Save your breath. Nevers told me all about your relationship with her, why you both want to see her dead.’
‘She died a long time ago,’ Tony said. ‘She isn’t who you think she is.’
‘If she isn’t, why does Nevers want to kill her?’ Dave said.
‘Because he’s crazy,’ Lisa said.
‘That’s one thing we can agree on,’ Dave said.
He buckled Tony and Lisa onto couches in the cramped control gallery and began to wake up the ship’s systems. Tony watched with deep interest; Lisa supposed that everything must seem like an antique to him. The touchscreens, the banks of switches and pinlights. A fan with green plastic blades pushing stale air around.
The screens showed views of the sun-striped hold. After a couple of minutes there was a jolt, and the views began to change. They were under way. A voice spoke out of the air, said something about disabling the ship. Dave pulled on a headset, said into the bead mike, ‘You’re welcome to try, mate. But there’s a good twenty metres of fullerene foam shielding my baby, and I have Lisa Dawes and Tony Okoye on board. You want to risk killing them?’
Then gravity pressed down. The walls of the funnel flashed by and the mad ship was dwindling in the stern view and the curve of the red planet showed ahead.
Tony said, ‘You’re going to drive straight down?’
‘I’m getting into a lower orbit first,’ Dave said. ‘We’ll go around and you’ll tell me where to land.’
‘And meanwhile Nevers will target you and blow you out of the sky.’
‘No he won’t. Not with you two on board.’
‘How will we know where to land?’ Lisa said. Her thoughts were still lagging behind the actual world.
‘Wherever your eidolons tell you to go, that’s it,’ Dave said.
‘What about your eidolon?’ Tony said.
‘I have
just enough of it to be able to fly the mad ship,’ Dave said. ‘It didn’t turn me into a human compass.’
Lisa said, ‘Did it show you pictures on the TV?’
Both men looked at her like she was crazy.
She said, ‘Mine showed me images of deserts. I think it was trying to communicate.’
‘The whole fucking planet is a desert,’ Dave said. ‘I need a place to set down and I need it now. So you can stop dicking around and give up what you know.’
Lisa said, ‘The others in your crew? Were they infected by my eidolon?’
‘Like this really is the right time to get into that,’ Dave said, with bitter exasperation. ‘I had to do what I had to do. Which saved your life, by the way. The others, they were planning to kill you.’
‘I think you saved me because we both carry copies of the same eidolon,’ Lisa said. ‘But it didn’t infect your crew, did it? Because they wouldn’t have tried to kill me if it had.’
‘The eidolon in my head also infected my ship’s mind,’ Tony said. ‘So it’s likely, isn’t it, that Lisa’s eidolon first copied itself into the mind of this ship. A Ghajar eidolon in a Ghajar ship, the two of them becoming something more than the sum of their parts. And then it got inside you, because you are the pilot. Because you interact with your ship’s mind.’
Dave Clegg’s stare was as narrow as a hawk’s. ‘So what are you saying?’
‘You should trust your ship,’ Lisa said.
‘Let it choose where to land,’ Tony said. ‘Some random spot that may turn out to be not so random after all.’
62. Sandstorm
Tony had once flown a spinner under a thunderstorm on a dare, had realised as soon as the first updraught had flung his little craft into a dense squall of hail that pitting his skill against the storm’s raw power was going to be no fun at all. The ride down to the red planet was a lot worse than that.
