by Paul McAuley
She was eleven, that summer. We had at last passed through Fomalhaut’s Oort Cloud and were approaching the bow shock of its heliosphere. After almost one and a half thousand years, we were poised to enter the rarified climate of our destination. And the weather that summer in the little town of São Gabriel da Cachoeira and in the vast Amazonia region all around was unusually hot and dry. The wet season ended a month early, and after that no rain fell for day after day after day. The sun burned in a cloudless sky bleached white as paper. The lawn in the hospital compound withered. The streets were silted with silky dust and dust blew into houses and apartments. The R&R Corps stopped planting out new areas of forest. The artesian well that watered Vidal Francisca’s sugar-cane plantation dried up; he had to run a pump line two kilometres long from the river. And the level of the river dropped steadily, exposing rocks and an old shipwreck unseen for decades.
It was a return of the bad days, Ama Paulinho said, and told the Child tall tales about great droughts in the long-ago. People prayed to Gaia at every Mass, but no rain came. During the day they stayed indoors as much as possible, sheltering from brassy hammerfalls of heat and light; in the evening they gathered along the beach below the Praia Grande, to enjoy the breezes that blew over the cool waters of the river. Families brought food or cooked there, men drank and talked at a couple of bars set up on the sand, and children ran everywhere.
Maria Hong-Owen was too often busy with her duties at the hospital to visit the beach, but the Child went there almost every evening with Ama Paulinho, where they ate with the old woman’s extended family, everyone sitting around a blanket spread with bowls and dishes of salad, rice and beans, fried fish, farofa, hard-boiled eggs, and fruit. Afterwards, the Child liked to walk by herself, watching fat tropical stars bloom in the humid nightblue sky, watching bats dip and skim across the river, watching people moving about. Children chased up and down the beach in little packs, or played the game that was the rage in the town that summer, involving throwing little shells into the air and catching them on the back of the hand while chanting nonsense rhymes, but the Child believed that she had grown beyond those childish things. She was no longer a child nor yet an adult, but something else. A changeling, perhaps, like one of the lonely creatures in her ama’s stories. Living amongst people, disguised as one of them, but watchful and apart.
One night, she was walking along the water’s edge when she noticed a flurry of activity a little way ahead. A small group of children shouting and pointing at something in the river; two men running towards them, splashing into the shallows. The Child walked towards them over sugary sand still warm from the day’s sun. More adults were coming down the beach. Then a woman screamed and ran towards the two men, stooping between them and lifting up the wet and naked body of a little boy. She staggered out of the water and sat down hard, pressing the body to herself, shaking it, kissing its face, looking around at people who would not meet her gaze, asking the dear Lord Jesus Christ the same question over and again. Why? Why had this happened? Why why why?
The Child knew the boy from the market, where he helped his father sell watermelons, but she did not know his name until the woman began to say it, calling to him over and again in a cracked and sobbing incantation, rocking his body, stroking wet hair back from his face. Two small girls were crying, hugging each other, convulsed by huge shivers. One man said that the boy had got out of his depth in the river. Other people talked in low voices. No one dared disturb the terrible eloquence of the woman’s grief. The Child stood amongst the crowd, watching everything.
At last, one of the priests, Father Caetano, came along the twilight beach in his black soutane. Two paramedics from the hospital followed him, hauling their gear. They prised the drowned boy from his mother and worked on him for some time; at last they looked at each other across his body and one of them shook his head. The boy’s mother shrieked, pushed away a woman who tried to comfort her, was caught and held tight by another. Father Caetano knelt, recited the Prayer for the Dead, and took out a small vial of oil and with his thumb drew a cross on the boy’s forehead. Then the paramedics lifted the body on to their stretcher and covered it with a blanket and put their equipment on its chest and carried it up the beach, followed by Father Caetano and the boy’s mother and a ragged tail of onlookers.
The Child lingered at the river’s edge after everyone else had gone. Watching the dark water slide past, head cocked as if listening for something.
Late that night, Maria returned from the hospital and looked in on her daughter and found the bed empty. She checked the other rooms in the bungalow and went outside and woke Ama Paulinho. The two women went to the shed where the Child kept her menagerie, and then they searched the rest of the compound. The private gate was locked; the watchman at the public gate at the front of the hospital apologised and said that he had not seen the doctor’s daughter. With the help of two night nurses, Maria and Ama Paulinho searched the wards and surgical rooms, the kitchens and storerooms, the offices and the pathology lab, the pharmacy and the out-patient clinic. They found the Child at last in the mortuary, asleep on a chair near the rack of refrigerated drawers where those who had died in the hospital or in accidental or suspicious circumstances were stored before being autopsied.
The Child said that she’d wanted to keep the dead boy company, and despite close questioning by her mother would say nothing else. She never told anyone the real reason why she’d kept watch over the body: that she had believed the boy might have been seduced by the River Folk, that his death by drowning had been the first stage in his transformation. In her mind’s eye, she’d seen him waking in the cold dark of the mortuary drawer, had seen herself freeing him, helping him back to the river, earning the gratitude of the River Folk. A fantasy that seemed foolish the next morning, but left her with one unassailable conviction. Green saints and gene wizards could extend their lives by a century or more, and people cheated death time and again in her ama’s stories. She was certain that she would find a way to cheat it too.
2
I was on my way to harrow a hell when everything changed. This was on Maui, a no-account worldlet at the trailing edge of the Archipelago. The Trehajo clan had turned it into a resettlement centre for refugees who had fled the last big push by the Ghosts, some hundred megaseconds ago. A family of ice refiners had stumbled upon an active fragment of the old Library, and before informing the resettlement authority they’d taken a peek inside, no doubt hoping to uncover a tasty chunk of data that they could sell on the grey market. They’d woken a minor demon instead, and it had turned them. Luckily, the resettlement authority had realised what was happening, and had moved on the family’s tent habitat before things got out of hand. I’d been tasked with the final clean-up.
Maui wasn’t much different from the farm rock where I’d spent my early childhood. A dwarf planet about three hundred kilometres across, just large enough to have been pulled into a sphere by its own gravity: a rough ball of water ice accreted around a core of silicate rocks, contaminated with pockets of methane and nitrogen ices, coated in layers of primordial carbonaceous material and spattered with craters, one so big that material excavated by the impact covered half Maui’s surface with a lightly cratered debris shield. Two fragments lofted by that impact still circled Maui’s equator, a pair of moonlets kindled into sullen slow-burning miniature suns by Quick construction machines during the short-lived world-building era immediately after their seedship had arrived at Fomalhaut.
The Quick machines had extensively gardened the worldlet too, planting vacuum organisms in seemingly random and wildly beautiful patterns utterly unlike the square fields of my foster-family’s farm. Huge tangles of ropes, crustose pavements, clusters of tall spires, fluted columns and smooth domes, forests of wire. Mostly in shades of black but enlivened here and there with splashes and flecks of vivid reds or yellows, sprawled across crater floors, climbing walls and spilling their rims, spreading across intercrater plains, sending pseudohypha
e into the icy regolith to mine carbonaceous tars, growing slowly but steadily in the faint light of Fomalhaut and Maui’s two swift-moving mini-suns.
Once, when the Quick had been the sole inhabitants of the Fomalhaut system, these gardens had covered the entire surface of the worldlet, inhabited by only a few contemplative eremites. Now, they were scarred by tents built to house refugees, the monolithic cubes of fusion generators, landing stages, materiel dumps, missile emplacements, strip mines, refineries, and maker blocks. My transit pod was flying above a region scraped down to clean bright water ice when my security delivered a message. Report to the Redactor Svern when you are finished.
‘Report?’ the Horse said. ‘As in talk? As in face to face?’
The Horse was my kholop. We were crammed thigh to thigh in the pod, dressed in pressure suits, our securities overlapping.
I said, ‘I don’t know of any other way of talking to him.’
‘Then you’re going home. We’re going home.’
‘It may not mean anything.’ ‘It may mean your exile is over. That you’ve worked out your penance. That we’re done with minor demons and their petty little hells. We’re done with cleaning up other people’s mistakes—’
‘I doubt it.’
‘It has to mean something.’
‘It probably means that he’s found an assignment so crufty it will make fighting a horde of demons seem like a picnic in paradise. We’ll find out soon enough. Show me the dispersal pattern of those walkers.’
‘It’s the same as all the others,’ the Horse said. ‘Generated by a pseudo-random drunkard’s walk algorithm. If demons ever started learning from the mistakes of their brothers we’d be in real trouble.’
‘Show me,’ I said.
The close horizon tilted up as we worked the data, growing into a ridge that cut off half the sky. It was the rim wall of the big crater that put a serious dent in the worldlet’s northern hemisphere. We flew straight towards it, skimming the smooth contours of its crest and flying out above chiselled cliffs twenty kilometres tall. The pod spun on its axis and shuddered, firing up its motor, braking, falling in a long arc towards a shattered plain spattered with secondary craters and patchworked with vacuum-organism thickets, landing close to a military pinnace on a rise two klicks north of the ice refiners’ tent.
‘For once, I’m eager to see what fresh hell this is,’ the Horse said as the restraints of our crash couches snapped open. ‘I know you think me a fool, but I have a good feeling about that message.’
We crossed to the pinnace for a brief conference with the shavetail lieutenant in charge of perimeter security. She was young and scared, and very unhappy about the Horse’s presence; the Trehajo clan, old and highly conservative, had no time for Our Thing’s new-fangled idea that the Quick might be something more than property. I assured her that he’d been raised as a demon-killer and hated them as much as any right-thinking True, checked the sitrep that her security blurted to mine, and explained what we were going to do.
No harrowing was ever routine, but this one seemed straightforward. My clan had been restoring and curating the Library of the Homesun for more than six gigaseconds. All of the major segments had been discovered and integrated long ago. Most of what was left out in the wild was badly borked and heavily infected, and the fragment discovered by the ice refiners was no different. It had been cached in the dead mind of an ancient gardening machine that the refiners had dug out and dragged back to their tent. The machine was still in the tractor garage; I told the lieutenant she could safely destroy it.
‘When you’re finished, we’re going to level the tent and everything inside it,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Zap it from orbit with a gamma-ray laser. Make sure every trace of that thing is obliterated.’
‘We’ll deal with the demon and trace and seal any back doors and relays. That’s the only way to be really sure,’ I said.
The tent had been badly damaged by the firefight between the turned refugees and the resettlement authority’s troops, and lay open to the freezing vacuum. Sealed in our pressure suits, the Horse and I loped across dead, brittle meadows in the stark light of lamps floating beneath the tent’s high ridge. Shards fallen from the broken roof lay everywhere amongst scorched craters and the carbonised skeletons of trees ignited by energy weapons. Houses like random piles of cubes, all scorched and broken, were strung along the shore of a lake that had boiled dry when the tent had been ruptured.
The locus of the infection was inside the largest house, guarded by a phalanx of drones primed to blast anything that looked or behaved strangely (including us). The demon had infected the local comms, as usual, and when it couldn’t get past the security it had turned the ice refiners. They’d torn out most of the infrastructure of the tent, scavenged metals and rare earths, and fed them into a modified maker that had painted a skin of computronium across the internal walls of the house. Then they’d scooped out their eyes and installed transceivers that jacked into their optic nerves, turning them into a hyperlinked hive-mind controlled by the demon, which had migrated into the computronium skin. When the authority realised what was going on, the hive-mind had been making and releasing walkers intended to sneak demon-seed into other settlements. Slamhounds were still tracking down the last of them.
Luckily, a couple of the hive-mind’s human bodies had been preserved. The Horse had already cracked the encryption in their transceivers, and now we used them to access the hell. We sent in a standard set of probes, processed the results of their interaction with the computronium, tailored our interfaces and avatars accordingly, and opened a gate.
Like most of its kind, the demon was insanely smart, but lacked imagination and creativity. Vast heaps of doorless and windowless cubes the piss-yellow colour of old snow on an industrial worldlet stretched away under racing laceworks of black cloud. An anthill city inhabited by creatures roughly human in shape and size, crawling on spidery limbs over jagged slopes, their eyeless faces sloping straight back from the clattering beaks of their mouths. Zombie avatars, sampled from the demon’s victims and duplicated and reduplicated, their neural maps supporting most of the hell’s low-grade processing. They crawled in and out of openings that puckered in the faces of the cubes, wrapped around each other in listless parodies of lovemaking, knit loose balls around unfortunate individuals who were slowly and systematically consumed alive.
The Horse and I were invisible to the zombies because one of our probes had sampled and synthesised the hive-mind’s antpong, but we cast a prophylactic circle around ourselves just in case the demon mobilised them against us, then set loose a standard set of exorcism algorithms. They darted away in every direction, feeding on the lacework computational clouds, swiftly growing into silvery networks that spread out across the sky. The demon was dumb enough to respond with a direct attack. The cubes all around us lit up with the same image, an eye burning blood-red in the centre of churning wisps of fog, and a smoky wind got up around the perimeter of the circle in which the avatars of the Horse and I stood, a whirlwind of bits that coalesced overhead into a gigantic version of the city’s myriad eyes. I countered its feeble attempts to crack our perimeter security with a futile-cycle algorithm that ate up most of its computational power and after a little to-and-fro managed to transform it into a mouse-like creature that ran counterclockwise around our perimeter, cheeping like a bird, until the Horse snatched it up and jammed it inside a Klein trap.
Everything froze around us then, and within a few tens of seconds we were able to confirm that this was a finitely bounded hell with no external links, which meant that none of the walkers had managed to lodge a seed in any place where duplicates could grow. It took only a little longer to expose the kernel – a disappointing spew of disjointed information just a few hundred thousand terabytes in size, nothing the Library didn’t already possess or hadn’t already discarded – and dump it into a sandbox and shut everything down.
It was a routine harrowing, nothing out of the ordinary,
but the Horse was shaken and angry for some reason. As we trudged through the frozen ruin of the tent, he told me that I’d let the demon get too close before I’d neutralised it.
‘It had a few moves,’ I said. ‘But none of them were worth anything in the end, and that’s what counts.’
‘I had to intervene at one point. In case you didn’t notice.’
‘Are you looking for praise for doing your job?’
‘I was doing yours,’ the Horse said. ‘I’d like to think you’re distracted by that message. And I wouldn’t blame you if you were. But this isn’t the first time I’ve had to step in and save our souls.’
‘I’m not distracted because it won’t turn out to be anything. The Library has a long memory, and it doesn’t easily forgive.’
‘And besides, you don’t deserve forgiveness. You want to be punished.’
‘And you think it’s unfair that you have to share my punishment. But you were there too. You were part of it.’
‘You know what would be truly unfair? Having to explain why you got yourself killed because you weren’t paying enough attention to a demon’s tricks and traps.’
‘We’ve been doing this work for, what? Forty megaseconds now. We’ll be doing it a lot longer than that. Get used to it.’
‘Thirty-seven.’
‘What?’
‘It’s only been thirty-seven megaseconds.’
I said, ‘I didn’t know you were counting.’
The Horse said, ‘Someone has to keep track.’
3
It began like every other day. Ori climbed into her immersion chair and plugged into her bot, trundled it out on to the skin of the Whale, and helped her crew shepherd a pair of probes from their garage to the staging post. Fuelling and charging them, running final checks before they set off on their long journey down the cable. Important, demanding, finicky work, but nothing out of the ordinary.
