The Yawning Angel watched the other GSV race away into the everlasting night between the stars, a sense of hopelessness, of defeat, settling over it.
Now it knew it had shaken off its pursuers the Sleeper Service ’s course was starting to curve gently, no doubt the first of many ducks and weaves it would carry out, if it was trying to conceal its eventual goal, and assuming that it had a goal other than simply giving the slip to its minders . . . Somehow, the Yawning Angel suspected its Eccentric charge - or ex-charge - did have a definite goal; a place, a location it was headed for.
Two hundred and thirty-three thousand times the speed of light. Dear holy fucking shit. The Yawning Angel thought there was something almost vulgar about such a velocity. Where the hell was it heading for? Andromeda?
The Yawning Angel drew a course-probability cone through the galactic model it kept in its mind.
It supposed it all depended how devious the Sleeper Service was being, but it looked like it might be headed for the Upper Leaf Swirl. If it was, it would be there within three weeks.
The Yawning Angel signalled ahead. Look on the bright side; at least the problem was out of its fields now.
The avatar Amorphia stood - arms crossed, thin, black-gloved hands grasping at bony elbows - gaze fastened intently upon the screen on the far side of the lounge. It showed a compensated view of hyperspace, vastly magnified.
Looking into the screen was like peering into some vast planetary airscape. Far below was a layer of glowing mist representing the energy grid; above was an identical layer of bright cloud. The skein of real space lay in between both of these; a two-dimensional layer, a simple transparent plane which the GSV went flickering through like a weaving shuttle across an infinite loom. Far, far behind it, the tiny dot that was the superlifter shrank still further. It too had been bobbing up and down through the skein on a sine wave whose length was measured in light minutes, but now it had stopped oscillating, settling into the lower level of hyperspace.
The magnification jumped; the superlifter was a larger dot now, but still dropping back all the time. A light-point tracing its own once wavy now straight course even further behind was the pursuing GSV. The star of the Dreve system was a bright spot back beyond that, stationary in the skein.
The Sleeper Service reached its maximum velocity and also ceased to oscillate between the two regions of hyperspace, settling into the larger of the two infinities that was ultraspace. The two following ships did the same, increasing their speed fractionally but briefly. A purist would call the place where they now existed ultraspace one positive, though as nobody had ever had access to ultraspace one negative - or infraspace one positive, for that matter - it was a redundant, even pedantic distinction. Or it had been until now. That might be about to change, if the Excession could deliver what it appeared to promise . . .
Amorphia took a deep breath and then let it go.
The view clicked off and the screen disappeared.
The avatar turned to look at the woman Dajeil Gelian and the black bird Gravious. They were in a recreation area on the Ridge class GCU Jaundiced Outlook, housed in a bay in one of the Sleeper Service’s mid-top strakes. The lounge was pretty well standard Contact issue; deceptively spacious, stylishly comfortable, punctuated by plants and subdued lighting.
This ship was to be the woman’s home for the rest of the journey; a life boat ready to quit the larger craft at a moment’s notice and take her to safety if anything went wrong. She sat on a white recliner chair, dressed in a long red dress, calm but wide-eyed, one hand cupped upon her swollen belly, the black bird perched on one arm of the seat near her hand.
The avatar smiled down at the woman. ‘There,’ it said. It made a show of looking around. ‘Alone at last.’ It laughed lightly, then looked down at the black bird, its smile disappearing. ‘Whereas you,’ it said, ‘will not be again.’
Gravious jerked upright, neck stretching. ‘What?’ it asked. Gelian looked surprised, then concerned.
Amorphia glanced to one side. A small device like a stubby pen floated out of the shadows cast by a small tree. It coasted up to the bird, which shrank back and back from the small, silent missile until it almost fell off the arm of the chair, its blue-black beak centimetres from the nose cone of the tiny, intricate machine.
‘This is a scout missile, bird,’ Amorphia told it. ‘Do not be deceived by its innocent title. If you so much as think of committing another act of treachery, it will happily reduce you to hot gas. It is going to follow you everywhere. Don’t do as I have done; do as I say and don’t try to shake it off; there is a tracer nanotech on you - in you - which will make it a simple matter to follow you. It should be correctly embedded by now, replacing the original tissue.’
‘What?’ the bird screeched again, head jerking up and back.
‘If you want to remove it,’ Amorphia continued smoothly, ‘you may, of course. You’ll find it in your heart; primary aortic valve.’
The bird made a screaming noise and thrashed vertically into the air. Dajeil flinched, covering her face with her hands. Gravious wheeled in the air and beat hard for the nearest corridor. Amorphia watched it go from beneath cold, lid-hooded eyes. Dajeil put both her hands on her abdomen. She swallowed. Something black drifted down past her face and she picked it out of the air. A feather.
‘Sorry about that,’ Amorphia said.
‘What . . . what was all that about?’ Gelian asked.
Amorphia shrugged. ‘The bird is a spy,’ it said flatly. ‘Has been from the first. It got its reports to the outside by encoding them on a bacterium and depositing them on the bodies of people about to be returned for re-awakening. I knew about it twenty years ago but let it pass after checking each signal; it was never allowed to know anything the disclosure of which could pose a threat. Its last message was the only one I ever altered. It helped facilitate our escape from the attentions of the Yawning Angel.’ Amorphia grinned, almost childishly. ‘There’s nothing further it can do; I set the scout missile on it to punish it, really. If it distresses you, I’ll call it off.’
Dajeil Gelian looked up into the steady grey eyes of the cadaverous, dark-clad creature for some time, quite as if she hadn’t even heard the question.
‘Amorphia,’ she said. ‘Please; what is going on? What is really going on?’
The ship’s avatar looked pained for a moment. It looked away, towards the plant the scout missile had been hiding underneath. ‘Whatever else,’ it said awkwardly, formally, ‘always remember that you are free to leave me at any time; this GCU is entirely at your disposal and no order or request of mine will affect its actions.’ It looked back at her. It shook its head, but its voice sounded kinder when it spoke again; ‘I’m sorry, Gelian; I still can’t tell you very much. We are going to a place near a star called Esperi.’ The creature hesitated, as though unsure, gaze roaming the floor and the nearby seats. ‘Because I want to,’ it said eventually, as though only realising this itself for the first time. ‘Because there may be something I can do there.’ It raised its arms out from its body, let them fall again. ‘And in the meantime, we await a guest. Or at any rate, I await a guest. You may not care to.’
‘Who?’ the woman asked.
‘Haven’t you guessed?’ the avatar said softly. ‘Byr Genar-Hofoen. ’
The woman looked down then, and her brows slowly creased, and the dark feather she had caught fell from her fingers.
III
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.867.4406]
xLSV Serious Callers Only
oEccentric Shoot Them Later
Have you heard? Was I not right about Genar-Hofoen? Do the times not now start to tally?
∞
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.868.4886]
xEccentric Shoot Them Later
oLSV Serious Callers Only
Yes. Two three three. What’s it doing - going for some kind of record? Yes yes yes all right you were correct about the human. But why didn’t yo
u have any warning of this?
∞
I don’t know. Two decades of reliable but totally boring reports and then just when it might have been handy to know what the big bugger was really up to, the intelligence conduit caves in. All I can think of is that our mutual friend . . . oh, hell, might as well call it by its real name now I suppose . . . is that the Sleeper Service discovered the link - we don’t know when - and waited until it had something to hide before it started messing with our intelligence.
∞
Yes, but what’s it doing? We thought it was just being invited to join the Group out of politeness, didn’t we? Suddenly it’s acting like a fucking missile. What is it up to?
∞
This may seem rather obvious, but we could always just ask it.
∞
Tried that. Still waiting.
∞
Well you could have said . . .
∞
I beg your pardon. So now what?
∞ Now I get a load of bullshit from the Steely Glint. Excuse me. ∞
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28.868.8243]
xLSV Serious Callers Only
oGCV Steely Glint
Our mutual friend with the velocity obsession. This wouldn’t be what we really expected, would it? Some private deal, by any chance?
∞
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28.868.8499]
xGCV Steely Glint
oLSV Serious Callers Only
No it isn’t! I’m getting fed up repeating this; I should have posted a general notice. No; we wanted the damn thing’s views, some sort of entirely outside viewpoint, not it tearing off to anywhere near the Excession itself.
It was part of the Gang before, you know. We owed it that, no matter that it is now Eccentric.
Would that we had known how much . . .
Now we’ve got another horrendous variable screwing up our plans.
If you have any helpful suggestions I’d be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.
∞
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.868.8978]
xLSV Serious Callers Only
oEccentric Shoot Them Later
(signal file attached) What did I tell you? I don’t know about this. Looks suspicious to me.
∞
Hmm. And I don’t know, either. I hate to say it, but it sounds genuine. Of course, if I prove to be wrong you will never confront me with this, ever, all right?
∞
If, after all this is over, we are both still in a position for me to confer and you to benefit from such leniency, I shall be infinitely glad to extend such forbearance.
∞
Well, it could have been expressed more graciously, but I accept this moral blank cheque with all the deference it merits.
∞
I’m going to call the Sleeper Service. It won’t take any notice of me but I’m going to call the meatworm anyway.
IV
Genar-Hofoen didn’t take his pen terminal with him when he went out that evening, and the first place he visited in Night City was a Tier-Sintricate/Ishlorsinami Tech. store.
The woman was small for an Ishy, thought Genar-Hofoen. Still, she towered over him. She wore the usual long black robes and she smelled . . . musty. They sat on plain, narrow seats in a bubble of blackness. The woman was bent over a tiny fold-away screen balanced on her knees. She nodded and craned her body over towards him. Her hand extended, close to his left ear. A sequence of shining, telescoping rods extended from her fingers. She closed her eyes. In the dimness, Genar-Hofoen could see tiny lights flickering on the inside of her eyelids.
Her hand touched his ear, tickling slightly. He felt his face twitch. ‘Don’t move,’ she said.
He tried to stay still. The woman withdrew her hand. She opened her eyes and peered at the point where the tips of three of the delicate rods met. She nodded and said, ‘Hmm.’
Genar-Hofoen bent forward and looked too. He couldn’t see anything. The woman closed her eyes again; her lid screens glowed again.
‘Very sophisticated,’ she said. ‘Could have missed it.’
Genar-Hofoen looked at his right palm. ‘Sure there’s nothing on this hand?’ he asked, recalling Verlioef Schung’s firm handshake.
‘As sure as I can be,’ the woman said, withdrawing a small transparent container from her robe and dropping whatever she had taken out of his ear into it. He still couldn’t see anything there.
‘And the suit?’ he asked, fingering one lapel of his jacket.
‘Clean,’ the woman said.
‘So that’s it?’ he asked.
‘That is all,’ she told him. The black bubble disappeared and they were sitting in a small room whose walls were lined with shelves overflowing with impenetrably technical-looking gear.
‘Well, thanks.’
‘That will be eight hundred Tier-sintricate-hour equivalents.’
‘Oh, call it a round thousand.’
He walked along Street Six, in the heart of Night City Tier. There were Night Cities throughout the developed galaxy; it was a kind of condominium franchise, though nobody seemed to know to whom the franchise belonged. Night Cities varied a lot from place to place. The only certain things about them was that it would always be night when you got there, and you’d have no excuse for not having fun.
Night City Tier was situated on the middle level of the world, on a small island in a shallow sea. The island was entirely covered by a shallow dome ten kilometres across and two in height. Internally, the City tended to take its cue from each year’s Festival. The last time Genar-Hofoen had been here the place had taken on the appearance of a magnified oceanscape, all its buildings turned into waves between one and two hundred metres tall. The theme that year had been the Sea; Street Six had existed in the long trough between two exponentially swept surges. Ripples on the towering curves of the waves’ surfaces had been balconies, burning with lights. Luminous foam at each wave’s looming, overhanging crest had cast a pallid, sepulchral light over the winding street beneath. At either end of the Street the broadway had risen to meet crisscrossing wave fronts and connect - through oceanically inauthentic tunnels - with other highways.
The theme this year was the Primitive and the City had chosen to interpret this as a gigantic early electronic circuit board; the network of silvery streets formed an almost perfectly flat cityscape studded with enormous resistors, dense-looking, centipedally legged flat-topped chips, spindly diodes and huge semi-transparent valves with complicated internal structures, each standing on groups of shining metal legs embedded in the network of the printed circuit. Those were the bits that Genar-Hofoen sort of half recognised from his History of Technical Stuff course or whatever it had been called when he’d been a student; there were lots of other jagged, knobbly, smooth, brightly coloured, matt black, shiny, vaned, crinkled bits he didn’t know the purpose or the name of.
Street Six this year was a fifteen-metre wide stream of quickly flowing mercury covered with etched diamond sheeting; every now and again large coherent blobs of sparkling blue-gold went speeding along the mercury stream underfoot. Apparently these were symbolised electrons or something. The original idea had been to incorporate the mercury channels into the City transport system, but this had proved impractical and so they were there just for effect; the City tube system ran deep underground as usual. Genar-Hofoen had jumped on and off a few of the underground cars on his way to the City and on and off a couple more once he’d arrived, hoping to give the slip to anybody following. Having done this and had the tracer in his ear removed, he was happy he’d done the best he could to ensure that his evening’s fun would take place unobserved by SC, though he wasn’t particularly bothered if they were still watching him; it was more the principle of the thing. No point getting obsessive
about it.
Street Six itself was packed with people, walking, talking, staggering, strolling, rolling along within bubblespheres, riding on exotically accoutred animals, riding in small carriages drawn by ysner-mistretl pairs and floating along under small vacuum balloons or in force field harnesses. Above, in the eternal night sky beneath the City’s vast dome, this part of the evening’s entertainment was being provided by a city-wide hologram of an ancient bomber raid.
The sky was filled with hundreds and hundreds of winged aircraft with four or six piston engines each, many of them picked out by searchlights. Spasms of light leaving black-on-black clouds and blossoming spheres of dimming red sparks were supposed to be anti-aircraft fire, while in amongst the bombers smaller single and twin-engined aircraft whizzed; the two sorts of aircraft were shooting at each other, the large planes from turrets and the smaller ones from their wings and noses. Gently curving lines of white, yellow and red tracer moved slowly across the sky and every now and again an aircraft seemed to catch fire and start to fall out of the sky; occasionally one would explode in mid air. All the time, the dark shapes of bombs could be glimpsed, falling to explode with bright flashes and vivid gouts of flame on parts of the City seemingly always just a little way off. Genar-Hofoen thought it all looked a little contrived, and he doubted there’d ever been such a concentrated air battle, or one in which the ground fire kept up while interceptor planes did their intercepting, but as a show it was undeniably impressive.
Explosions, gunfire and sirens sounded above the chatter of people filling the street and was sporadically submerged by the music spilling from the hundreds of bars and multifarious entertainment venues lining the Street. The air was full of half-strange, half-familiar, entirely enticing smells and wild pheremonic effects understandably banned everywhere else on Tier.
Genar-Hofoen strolled down the middle of the Street, a large glass of Tier 9050 in one hand, a cloud cane in the other and a small puff-creant nestling on one shoulder of his immaculately presented ownskin jacket. The 9050 was a cocktail which notoriously involved about three hundred separate processes to make, many of them involving unlikely and even unpleasant combinations of plants, animals and substances. The end result was an acceptable if strong-tasting drink composed largely of alcohol, no more, but you didn’t really drink it for the internal effect, you drank it to show you could afford to; they put it in a special crystal field-goblet so you could show that you could. The name was meant to imply that after sinking a few you were ninety per cent certain to get laid and fifty per cent assured of ending up in legal trouble (or it may have been the other way round - Genar-Hofoen could never remember).
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