Now We Are Ten: Celebrating the First Ten Years of NewCon Press

by Peter F. Hamilton

  At which point fame and money will be his, like loyal dogs.

  *

  After Rob has gone, the little girl crawls into the emergency washdown and rinses the blood off with her chubby, competent young hands. Emergents generated by her own plants have rooted in her and sprout from the backs of her knuckles and behind her ears.

  “They are protecting me,” she tells Abdul, who hovers with a towel and a cup of tea.

  “Why are you so small?” he asks. “I feel I should call your mother.”

  “Never mind that,” she says in her high voice. “I need you to help me make something. Please.”

  Abdul works on Injala’s project for several nights running. He wants to get it just right. When he is done, they carry her most important plants downstairs and put them in a stolen shopping trolley whose immobilisers have been snapped off. Injala hugs Abdul goodbye and pushes the loaded trolley little by little all the way to the Dartford Crossing. She gets older rapidly as she walks. By the time she encounters other castaways and riffraff in the dead zone between Dartford and Erith, she is a woman again, and the foetus in her belly is well-established. There are supple, shining leaves in her hair.

  *

  I find a butcher shop under the A206 bridge. The Butcher will cut out your cogs for you, no questions asked. It’s necessary because the waves are unregulated out here in whackjob land. No price plans, no premium content. All you get is noise and ubiquitous advertising, and occasional illegal science experiments being carried out on the inhabitants without their knowledge. Waves bombard you mercilessly. People come here when they’ve fallen out the bottom of the economic shopping bag. If they stay, they invariably cut out their cogs.

  There is plenty of empty ground. I move in beside the Butcher but politely decline his offer of a neighbour’s discount. I set up my plants on nearby land, using the dead air under the bridge as protection from the waves when the demons start to get to me. I watch the Butcher remove people’s cogs to be sold on or recycled. I watch people stumble away from this procedure damaged, bereft.

  Back in the real world, the procedure we endure is written off as an information-age variant of self-harm. Many people aren’t susceptible to the dangers on the waves; consequently, accepted logic says people like me must be imagining things. We are inherently off-kilter. The bombs that go off inside our heads aren’t planted by anything malevolent; they’re just self-destruct devices that originate within us.

  The things that live in the walls attack you in the middle of the night, and in the morning when your injuries become visible people say, “What have you done to yourself?”

  It’s like when a little kid makes another little kid punch himself with his own hand and then says, “Why are you hitting yourself?”

  It’s like that.

  “You think the world rejects you but that’s not so,” my mother said to me, when my work using plants as receivers first started making me paranoid. She said this as if it were some great insight, like she’d been up all night thinking about it and if she didn’t say it, the whole idea would evaporate. “Really you’re the one who rejects the world. You’re like a transplant patient. You want to live, but when you get this foreign body inside you, you can’t cope and you start to attack yourself. It’s probably a new disease, something they’ll find a name for and twenty years from now it will be a syndrome with a Latin name, and everybody will understand when I say you have it. But right now I don’t know what to tell people.”

  She said this while putting lettuce in her salad-spinner, pulling the cord, inspecting the results. I sat on a stool at her kitchen counter and examined the scars on my knees. I’d gone over the handlebars of my bike so many times as a child. Never cried at that, but with the plants showing me what’s really in the air I was weeping helplessly every other day. On the days I wasn’t crying I was breaking up pieces of pavement with a sledgehammer in the empty lot behind the community lab.

  “Madame Curie died because she was investigating a phenomenon no one could see,” I told my mother. “She was killed by invisible things. Her notebooks are still too radioactive to touch.”

  My mother said, “But don’t you be. Don’t be too radioactive to touch.”

  *

  Speaking of mothers. Mir is born seeing and hearing and sensing all I can sense and more. I am terrified for her. As best we can, Abdul and I have equipped her to fight off the things that live in the waves, but I want to do better than that.

  I’ve already taught the plants to make dangerous influences visible. That was the hard part. Now that emergents are visible, I teach the plants to interfere with them, neutralise the dangerous constructs or transform them into something else.

  And so the Silence creeps out from beneath the bridge. It spreads. The plants shelter us from the waves, and as they grow they begin to form a quiet zone on the bank by the bridge, above the brackish water and beneath the flight paths of the traffic helicopters. What was waste ground is becoming something new.

  *

  The Butcher and I and one of his customers cook noodles over a campfire while Mir squirms in my lap, fascinated by the flames.

  “I’ll have to branch out into insect farming for protein,” he tells me. He complains that the Silence has lost him business, but he’s fascinated by what I’m doing. I persuade him to go in with me growing more plants, investing in boosters for the existing trees; they are capable of so much more. We take a small rent from the people who want to shelter in the Silence. I feel good about this, because I know that thanks to the Silence the susceptible can function out here without losing their cogs, and this brings in a slow trickle of income for everybody. A tent community grows up within the Silence.

  We are careful to keep it small, beneath notice.

  *

  Five-year-old Mir tells me she’s finding souls in our marshland. They are runaways, she says. They are lost and dissolute. They seek refuge in the jumble of scrub and mud, drifting on the air until their fragments are trapped by the plants’ information filters and reconstituted.

  I think about this. I don’t know if the souls are real before they come here, or if they accrue out of the processing that the plants do when they neutralise incoming waves. Lost souls roost in the treetops and among the catkins, a by-product of the Silence industry.

  Some of them belong to famous people. Mir plants them in the earth to settle them. She seems to know what to do; maybe the plants tell her.

  *

  Mir is eight when Karranga shows up in a helicopter. I haven’t seen Karranga since university. She is well-dressed and nervous. I can’t imagine how she found us. She says she is a journalist and she’s aware of my work. I’m not sure I believe this, but I fill a pot with water from a blue extension hose we’ve diverted from a housing estate. I make tea and we squat outside my yurt at sunset. In the soul garden the plants furl their leaves for darkness.

  “Explain it to me,” she says. “I want to understand.”

  I gesture at the flora around us.

  “They are intelligent. They receive information out of the air and they can interface digitally. They connect to my cogs and extend my senses. They make the invisible visible. When we link them with the right data-combing software, the plants can identify causal apparati and feedback systems that result in what I call presences. Political movements and tactics and yearnings and arguments all have lives of their own even though we think of them as abstract. I can perceive these presences directly, and in the case of hostile presences, I can teach the plants to block their influence on my mind. But to find out what’s hostile and damaging, you first have to experience it. That’s the ugly part.”

  “What about Mir? She didn’t ask for this life.”

  “Mir’s a new generation. She doesn’t need cogs. She can pick up on the waves directly just like a plant, and they protect her instinctively. She’s safe here.”

  I expect Karranga to ask me how that’s possible, and I decide I won’t mention Abdul
’s contribution to Mir’s biology; but she doesn’t seem interested in the how of Mir. Instead she says, “You remember Rob? From our Endologies class?”

  She acts like she doesn’t know I lived with him for three years. She smells of cloves and something more bitter. She stubs her ciggy out in the mud.

  “He’s large now. Offices in the Strand.”

  I say nothing.

  “He told me he analysed your work. Said he wanted to find out what kind of thing came after you. You know. When you had that breakdown.”

  I snort. “And it ate him. Right?”

  She swings her head from side to side in the way of people who deliver bad news. “He isolated it and made tweaks. Said it was highly intelligent and someone had to control it. Might as well be him, right? He’s been leasing it out as a kind of intellectual precision-guided munition.”

  Smoke in my ears and nostrils. No pain at all in the lost eye, but my gorge rises. Wish I could breathe fire. My skeleton clatters inside my flesh.

  “Leasing it to whom?”

  “Does it matter? It’s got some kind of corporate applications. How to fuck with the head of your enemy type of thing.”

  I want to say I’ll crush him. I’ll kill him. I’ll unwrite him from history. But that’s all nonsense. I can’t even bring myself to say his name. I imagine myself ‘confronting’ him. How I’d slink around and hide, stalk him, wishing all the while I could bring him down with a death ray from my remaining eye. He’d finally catch me at it and I’d break down in tears and he’d take my hand, act all sympathetic and humanitarian. Maybe offer me some pity money before swinging off to lunch with a set of lawyers and a publicist. People would say how sad for her (meaning me).

  “He sent you,” I say, because it’s obvious. Karranga has the grace to squirm.

  We both look at Mir, who is squatting in the weeds, talking to them.

  “I know,” Mir whispers, nodding to her plant friends. “I saw that, too. It was so funny.”

  She places her palms over the seed-tips of the grass, tickling herself. Then she jumps up and runs off, laughing.

  “He misses you,” Kerranga tries. But you can’t lie to me out here. The Silence is my place.

  “How did you find us.” It’s not a question, it’s a complaint, and she manages to make her reply sound like an apology.

  “His DNA’s in Mir. She came up on a routine scan.”

  I look at her with the eye I don’t have anymore. Let her see the dead flesh.

  “Fuck you, Karranga,” I say. “If he picked up Mir’s signal then Mir must have left the Silence. How could that happen? She is always with me.”

  Almost always.

  “How you discipline your kid is not my problem.”

  Nearby in the mud, Mir has set about playing tug-of-war with a stray dog. I think the rope is actually one of my T-shirts.

  I don’t say anything for so long that Karranga reaches over and touches my wrist.

  “I’m not on his side,” she tells me. “I’m here for you, too.”

  “Tell him he can’t have her,” I say, dry-eyed. It feels as if Rob has shoved his boot into my teeth, even from afar. Mir and I struggle for every scrap we have. Socialise with broken people. Feels like we’re hiding all the time. He has everything he wanted. Now he wants to take Mir? A surge of inchoate feeling rises. I want to puke, want to come, want to hit out. I shake.

  “Where can I run? What will happen to my plants? They’ve started mixing with the local flora. I can’t just pick up and go. The people who come here depend on the Silence.”

  “All he has to do is go to the council and get an order against you, and you’ll have to leave,” Karranga says. “But listen, Injala. You don’t have to keep this quiet. What you’re doing, it’s rather amazing and people will want to know about it. Why not be proactive, come out of hiding? I’ll help you find support for your work.”

  “I can’t go back.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Of what.”

  Of what not? The sky, the air, the noises, the interstices of words, the unspoken, the gazes, the emptiness between saccades of my own eye. I know there are things that could slip into those empty spaces and steal my agency. The unwritten, the unsayable, the cracks in the sidewalk.

  I don’t say any of that. I shrug, but don’t say:

  The AIs in the air can dismember you pretty much anytime.

  I finally manage to say, “It’s one thing to make Silence in the middle of unintentional junk noise, because that’s all that’s out here. Filtering out deliberate attacks in the commercial airspace is another thing. You said it yourself. People like Rob are deliberately making predators and setting them against their enemies at will. I can’t expose Mir to that. Look what happened to me.”

  My teeth are chattering, just thinking about it.

  “Stop shaking, Injala,” Karranga says fiercely. “Don’t collapse. You cannot afford to flinch.”

  Is she kidding? My whole life is a series of flinches. And retreats. And not showing up. It’s who I am.

  I train my one eye on her.

  “Tell Rob I said no. Just no.”

  My words are final. Karranga recoils from their force.

  “Okay,” she relents. “I’ll tell him.”

  Then Mir says, “I want to see my dad.”

  *

  Mir takes me down by the willows and shows me where to dig up Rob’s soul. It’s misshapen and lovely and it smells of the bottom of the tide and long afternoons with nothing to do, of the things we never prized when we had them, which retroactively gleam.

  Mir squeezes it like a cantaloupe she’s testing for ripeness at the market. Her hands on the boundaries of his soul remind me so much of Rob’s hands that for a second I feel no gravity and I cannot move or think. Then I gently prise her fingers away.

  “Did you go looking for him?” I ask her. As gentle as I can.

  She shakes her head.

  “His soul just came here,” she says. “He didn’t want it any more, and it left him.”

  She swings up into an alder tree, singing.

  *

  Kerranga takes us in the helicopter with her. Mir carries the soul in a Tesco bag, and I carry one of my oldest plants in a pot on my lap. For self-protection. This is my first time north of the river since I fled Hackney, and I’m not prepared for the greening of Covent Garden and Aldwych and Charing Cross Road. Buildings are covered in grasses, and walls are thick with moss. Mir presses her face against the cockpit window, foliage standing up stiffly from her shoulders and the backs of her wrists as her plants taste the waves.

  “What are you picking up, Mir?” I ask her casually. Yellow-toothed mouths gnaw at my breasts and throat. A litany of hatred pours into my ears and nostrils like smoke, and there are winged monsters in the air around us, every glance from their multiple globular eyes an indirect attack. Already I feel faintly suicidal.

  I do not yet see my old enemies, but I’m afraid. I tell Kerranga this and she shouts, “Oh, Rob’s product is high-end. He doesn’t let his work just roam the streets like any old headbug.”

  “The plants here are simple,” Mir observes. The attacks roll off her unnoticed. “None of them can do what we can do. They could learn a lot from our plants.”

  Still I keep expecting Rob’s agents to come out of somewhere. I still remember how the invisible, negating presence came at me that night in the lab. What did Rob do with the samples he took from me? How did he contain the influence of the emergent? How could he direct it when I did nothing more than cower before it?

  Maybe he deserves to be large. It seems he did what I couldn’t do.

  *

  Mir flows through the fragrant coffee shop, dark and gracefully declarative as calligraphy. She inhabits the room with such vivid surety that the milling adults seem attenuated, incomplete. Rob is camped at a table whose data-rich surface he swipes to darkness as we approach. Pleasantries are exchanged and Kerranga
makes her excuses.

  Rob’s baritone voice carries tension like a military base on lockdown. “I have all my biological output tracked. You can’t be too careful these days. I was worried about copying, assault. I never expected this. At least, I never expected that it could happen and you wouldn’t tell me.”

  There is hostility in the tapping of his fingers on the counter; he paints me as the betrayer. His expression says, How could you do this to me? See what a nice guy I am.

  He is a nice guy, as far as that goes. So?

  He stares at Mir like she is water or starfire. What does he want from her? I try to find the answer as I always did when we were together, in his smell and the set of his movements, the between places that are only ever implied, never named.

  “What are you doing?” I say. Mir begins to play a game in the interactive surface of the table.

  “She could have so much more in this world,” he whispers. “Please don’t deprive her of what she could become.”

  I am not parsing this. There is no point in trying to pretend, and I start to twitch and laugh and roll my solitary eye and if I’m lucky I won’t wet myself but you never know these days. I haven’t had an easy life. He is uncomfortable that people are looking at us, and I let out a few barks to put the boot in.

  Then I realise he’s sincere.

  He really thinks I would give her up.

  “I know how talented you are, Inj. And I’m sure you’ve passed it on to her. I give you all credit. You found the emergents. I couldn’t even see them. The thing that attacked you? I didn’t know what it was, so it couldn’t hurt me. But I knew it had to be something, because of what it did to you.”

  “Have you learned how to stop it?” I ask suddenly. There is always that hope.

  He spreads his fingers, crunches his face. “I sort of took it in the other direction,” he says. “I found out what this species of thing could do, and then I altered it. I derived the code and tweaked it so that I could do head trips on anyone I might name.”

  “So you turned it into a weapon.”

  “More like an agent than a weapon, but I guess you could –”