by Paul McAuley
As usual, when she wasn’t on patrol, she’d shucked her camo gear and was dressed in shorts and a vest with pockets and pouches that left her arms bare. She flexed her right arm, showing the definition of her muscles, making the snake tattoo that coiled from shoulder to wrist jump.
‘Most of the time it’s the same old same old. The men pretend to think we’re equal, the ones who aren’t assholes, but in their heart of hearts, deep down? They know we’re not. Because everything around them feeds that unconscious assumption, and they’re blind to their own faults. The only time it doesn’t matter what equipment you’re packing between your legs is when you’re in the shit. All that matters then is that you can do what needs to be done, and that your buddies are watching your back, just like you’re watching theirs.’ Sara paused, then said, ‘Your mother mind, you hanging with us rough tough soldiers? Listening to us talk dirty like this?’
‘She doesn’t care what I do,’ the Child said, and felt a sudden pang of sorrow because she realised that she believed it.
On the nights that her mother visited Vidal Francisca straight after finishing her work at the hospital, the Child stayed behind with Ama Paulinho. Her ama went to bed early and slept soundly, and the Child often climbed on to the roof of the bungalow and looked up at the stars or watched the lights of the town flicker amongst the trees. Dreaming of escape. One night, a week or so after her talk with her mother, she was sitting cross-legged in the warm dark when she felt a presence behind her and turned. A figure stood on the edge of the roof. He was slight and bare-chested, dressed in ragged trousers tied at his waist with a rope, and he had the head of a jaguar.
The Child felt her heart catch. Felt a cool electric tide rise inside her. Felt the hairs on the back of her neck and the soft down on her forearms stand up. She got to her feet, moving slowly and carefully, as if he was an animal that might take fright. Tried to speak and found her mouth was dry. Swallowed, tried again.
‘Who are you? What do you want?’
The boy raised his hands to the height of his chest, held them out on either side, palms up. As if cupping invisible weights.
The Child said, ‘Can you understand what I’m saying?’
The boy moved his strange sleek head up and down.
The Child glanced at the little screen on her wrist. She had by then hacked into the hospital’s security. She could see herself in infrared but could see no trace of the boy at all. But there he was.
‘Are you a wildsider?’
The boy moved his head from side to side.
‘Did they make you? Did you escape from them? Where did you come from?’
The boy shook his head again, and stepped up on to something unseen and climbed into the sky on invisible corkscrew steps, turning faster and faster until he was a tiny pale blur shooting away into the zenith of the starry sky to a place where we could not follow him.
The next morning, waking in her bed, the Child wondered if she’d dreamed the encounter, but she had the distinct memory of sitting up on the roof for a long time afterwards, watching the rigid span of stars that glittered and twinkled overhead, and the swift points of satellites and ships moving from west to east. She’d stayed there until she heard the noise of a vehicle outside the hospital compound wall, realised that her mother had returned from Vidal Francisca’s house, and quickly climbed down into her bedroom. And then, yes, fell asleep: but only then.
She used the back door she’d inserted into the hospital’s security and reviewed the footage. Saw herself, sitting on the roof, standing, talking. Played the segment again, zooming in on her face. She was awake. Her eyes were open. Blinking. She looked scared, more scared than she remembered feeling. Looking up, as if following something as it rose. Yes. Exactly as she remembered, except there was no trace of the boy.
We could find no trace of him, either. He had appeared before the Child, and then he had vanished through a back door – and that had vanished, too. We had conjured up a small action against wildsiders to make sure that the Child could not leave the town, and thrown up strong defences around her, and he had bypassed everything.
The Child’s story was beginning to deviate significantly from what was known, and we knew now that the jaguar boy was no glitch but an intruder whose origin and powers and purpose were unknown, but we were in too deep to turn back. The outer edge of the dust belt spanned the sky from horizon to horizon, with Fomalhaut’s bright spark caught in its centre. There was not enough time to start over. We had to press on. And so, early one evening in the garden of Vidal Francisca’s house, the Child was coming back from her light trap, carrying several choice specimens in cages she’d woven out of dry grass (a skill her ama had taught her), when she heard her mother and Vidal Francisca talking on the terrace. The Child had been walking straight towards the soft glow of the terrace along a path edged with a luminous rope; now she slipped sideways into darkness and moved stealthily across the dark lawn.
She was still buzzing from a dose of her home-brewed stimulant, which had helped her to vanish inside the flickering school of her thoughts for most of the long and boring dinner and the two adults’ conversation about things and people the Child had no interest in. Everything around her seemed sharp and slightly separate. The flow of warm air on her skin, blades of grass yielding under her sandals, the heavy flutter of a hand-sized lunar moth in one of the cages at her hip, the scratching of a beetle in another, the whisper of a drone somewhere above the house. A chain of suspended moments like stepping stones across a stream, one yielding to the next as she wove between the trimmed shapes of the bushes planted below the terrace. She pressed the length of her body against warm stone and listened to her mother and Vidal Francisca talking about their plans to visit Manaus, and what to tell the Child, who knew that it was coming, the worst thing, unstoppable.
Soon, everything would change. We would reach our refuge, everything wrong would be made right, and our mother would be made safe until she could rise, renewed. It was our last best contrivance, and we had to engineer it carefully and make sure that every part of it was consistent with the story we had spun round the Child. Meanwhile, we could only hope that the jaguar boy would not come again until we were ready to deal with him.
5
T was the main arsenal for the war effort, the centre of the Archipelago’s defences, and a singular body besides: a rocky asteroid that, after it had been ejected from the wreckage of Fomalhaut’s inner system, had been captured by the 2:3 orbital resonance with Cthuga shared by the planetoids and worldlets of the Archipelago. It had been smashed apart at least once, and most of the fragments had fallen back together under their own gravity into the shape of a lumpy peanut. The larger of its two lobes was slashed with a long and irregular rift that meandered from pole to equator, its surface was heavily cratered, and the edges of the craters were still raw and sharp.
The Quicks and their machines hadn’t touched T, but we had settled on it at the beginning of the first war with the Ghosts, and our mining machines had cut an intricate network of tunnels through its regolith, searching out seams of silicates and traces of metals, and these tunnels were now threaded with adamantine fullerene cables that reinforced the asteroid’s structural integrity. Its minor lobe was covered in a sprawling carpet of barracks and manufactories, refineries and graving yards and docks; its major lobe was patched with training grounds of every description, where troops practised infiltration and combat methods in mocked-up habitats and farms. And its deep rift had been roofed over and pressurised and landscaped, creating a habitat where the cadres in charge of T and their families made their homes, and officers and veteran troops, specialists and philosophers, could enjoy their leaves in a variety of sanctioned playgrounds.
All of this had been built by True machines, using True technology. It was the very symbol of our strength, and we were stupidly proud that it had never been attacked.
Our ship made its final approach to T through layers of drones, smart rocks, one-shot ga
mma and X-ray lasers, kinetic cannon, particle-beam throwers, plasma mines, and strange attractors. As soon as it achieved a parking orbit at the edge of a small cloud of ships large and small, old and new, Prem Singleton and her cousins departed in a small flock of flitters for a barracks and processing centre under the bulging dome that capped T’s minor lobe; the Horse and I dropped to the deep rift in the major lobe, where we were met by a crew of troopers and prefects. As was customary, I had informed the authorities that I was coming to T, but when I told the official in command of our reception committee that I would like to get to work as soon as possible, she said that her boss wanted to talk to me, and escorted the Horse and me to a flitter that dropped into the rift. We fell beside a sheer wall of pyroclastic basalts clad in gossamer sheaths of construction diamond, and docked at a skinny building of some twenty storeys that clung to the wall some way above a broad, forested terrace. The Horse was led off by the troopers; I was taken to the office of Marshal Panchaanan, the chief of T’s internal security service.
It was a spherical room at the base of the building, with a porthole window that looked out across the gulf of the rift towards the folds and bulges of the far wall. We sat in a nest of cushions in front of that window, the marshal and I, and he served me tea himself and then explained that my services weren’t required because the hell had already been harrowed and made safe.
After I’d taken a moment to get past my surprise, I told him that the Library had no record of this. And since only my clan, by custom and contract, could harrow hells, it put both of us in a difficult position.
‘That is why your visit piqued our interest,’ the marshal said. He was quiet-spoken but his gaze was searching and seriously intelligent. Neat and straightbacked in scarlet uniform tunic and trousers, his black hair swept in a high wave. ‘We’d very much like to discuss it with you.’
‘I’d very much like to know who you employed to harrow your hell.’
‘Bree Sixsmith did the work and reported back to the Library. Don’t you wonder why your people didn’t tell you? Why they sent you here on a fool’s errand?’
‘They didn’t know the hell had been harrowed because Bree Sixsmith didn’t tell them. She couldn’t, because she’s dead.’
She had committed suicide following an encounter with a demon shelled in a doppelgänger: when she destroyed the doppelgänger, the real demon had been freed and had penetrated her defences and lodged in her mind. This was immediately after my disgrace and for some time many in the Library had believed the demon that had killed Bree was linked to the demon that had killed Arden and Van. Nothing had ever been proved, but it had deepened and darkened the cloud of infamy that clung to me.
After I had explained this, the marshal threw a packet at my security and said, ‘Is this her?’
I studied the images, and said that it certainly looked like Bree Sixsmith. There was biometric data too, but I couldn’t verify that without checking against records held in the Library, and said so.
‘She arrived after we sent the usual notification to the Library,’ the marshal said. ‘We had no reason not to believe she was other than what she seemed to be.’
‘Did you talk directly to someone in the Library, or post the request in the usual fashion? It could have been intercepted. Or it wasn’t sent at all. After she harrowed the hell, did you send anyone inside to inspect her work?’
After the slightest pause, the marshal said, ‘She provided a full record of her work. She had searched every part of the hell, found nothing of any significance, and sealed it.’
‘How do you know that it is not the record from some other harrowing, rather than the record of what she did here? My clan entered into a contract with Lathi Singleton in good faith, Marshal. It was not a task we relished, believing it would cause trouble for us, but we must see it through to completion. I suggest that you contact the Library directly, and do it quickly. Whoever this person is, she was not acting for us, and she might not have done what she claimed to have done. She might have released any demons inside the hell rather than binding them, just to begin with. Talk to the Redactor Svern. If you do not want me to enter this hell, ask him to send someone else. But do it quickly.’
Fortunately, the marshal was neither stupid nor vindictive. He told me that the Horse and I would be allowed access to the hell so long as we provided a full real-time feed, a concession I was happy to make. I would inspect it and do anything necessary to make it safe, and then the marshal would decide how to proceed from there.
‘There is one condition. Before you report to Lathi Singleton, you will report to me,’ the marshal said.
‘You’ll see everything we do.’
‘But we might not understand all of it. You’ll enlighten us afterwards with a full and frank account.’
A posse of troopers and prefects escorted the Horse and me to a busy interchange at the edge of the rift’s roof, and a capsule took us at great speed through a rapid-transit tube that cut a long chord beneath T’s surface. I told the Horse about my interview with the marshal, and we reviewed the records that one of the prefects gave us and worked up a strategy and prepared our gear. Providing the feed that the marshal had requested was simple enough, but we were still demonstrating it to the prefects when the capsule slowed and drifted into the terminus of the line where, with a thump and a jerk, the airlock at its nose mated with the airlock of the station.
The station was attached to a habitat that was cut into the sheer cliff of the inner face of a crater rim wall and overlooked a level dusty plain that fell away under the naked black sky. Lights raised on tall poles were strung along the roads that criss-crossed the plain, and set around ships that sat in cradles or under domes. It was a junkyard, a cemetery for ships that had been badly damaged in engagements with the enemy, retrieved, and returned to T for inspection and analysis. We passed the wreck of a big corsair, its hull riddled with holes of every size, swung around its stern and the torches of its fusion motors, twisted and warped like mutant flowers by some imaginable flux of energy, and ground on towards another dome.
An ancient Quick pinnace sat inside, an asymmetrical cluster of bubbles scarcely larger than our tractor. One of the prefects told us that it had been part of the first assault on the resurgent Ghosts, a comprehensive disaster that had grievously underestimated the enemy’s strength. Every ship had been killed; this one, like many others, had been brought back to T and had sat in the graveyard ever since, until Yakob Singleton and a data miner had boarded it and discovered the hell cached in its mind.
After the Office for Public Safety had discovered what Yakob Singleton had done, the ship had been isolated, and the hell had been harrowed – or so they thought. Because we had no idea what the person who called herself Bree Sixsmith had actually done, the Horse and I treated it like any other newly discovered hell. We set up a perimeter and sent in probes, and discovered nothing more than a small, low-bit-rate viron barely able to maintain the integrity of the simplest aspects of our avatars. It had not merely been harrowed; it had been collapsed.
‘Well, that’s that,’ the Horse said.
‘We’ll check everything,’ I said.
There was little chance that anything of any significance survived in there, but we tailored our avatars to the viron and went in anyway, emerging at the base of a rectangular block of a building sketched in wire-frame that broke up into blocky pixels when I attempted to increase resolution. All around, similar towers soared up to a sky the colour of a headache, fading away on every side into illimitable mist. Inside the building, the Horse and I climbed a long winding staircase and soon found that it contained a Mö bius warp, a twist that between one step and the next returned us to the base of the building. A simple trap of the kind I had demonstrated to Prem Singleton in the training suite, except this one didn’t contain a nasty surprise. We climbed back up the staircase and dropped through the twist and started to climb again.
‘I’m insulted,’ the Horse said.
> ‘That’s why we must remain alert. There may be other, more dangerous traps.’
‘There isn’t enough bit rate to support a child’s conjuring trick. This wasn’t much to begin with and it’s less than nothing now.’
‘Lathi Singleton said there was a back door to the Library.’
‘If there was, it isn’t here any more. We’d see the leakage. How many times are we going to climb this thing?’ the Horse said.
We had reached the point at the staircase where the metrical frame of the hell was warped.
‘Until I’m satisfied that there’s nothing hidden beyond it, and that it doesn’t go anywhere else,’ I said.
‘You won’t admit that this has been thoroughly harrowed, will you? That whoever did this was better than you.’
‘Better than you, too.’
‘All right, let’s go around again.’
Eventually, by dumb persistence, the Horse and I discovered an entry point that took us somewhere else: a seemingly limitless level stretching away under a low ceiling supported by squat pillars set at random intervals, where a trace of processing activity yet remained. It wasn’t much. A faint irregularity in the low-resolution fabric of the floor, but as significant as a bootprint in the dust of an uninhabited rock. There had been a doorway here, once. It had been sealed and reduced, there was no way of reconstructing it or finding out where it had led to, but it had been there.
We pulled our avatars out of the hell, collapsed it to the smallest amount of information required to describe it, and archived the kernel inside a secure file. I worked up my report on the return journey to the rift; there was little to it other than the fact that the hell had been made safe, and once had been linked to at least one other viron. The prefects went off to talk to the marshal; the troopers took the Horse and me to the forest that covered a setback terrace halfway down the side of the rift, about two kilometres above the thready ribbon of lights and neon of the rest-and-recreation complex.
