by Paul McAuley
‘Maybe the Billion Blossoms killed him and the data miner,’ the Horse said.
We were moving towards the eastern end of Glitter Gulch, taking a long and complicated route through narrow streets and courtyards off the main drag. Past gambling joints, past tattoo parlours and chophouses, past saloons and bars where soldiers knocked back shots of ethyl alcohol chilled with drops of liquid nitrogen and enlivened with benzene, liquid camphor, formaldehyde, and a variety of esters and psychotropics, past sex parlours and free-fall emporiums, the blooming, buzzing confusion of their virtual frontages jostling together without plan or pattern, filling the air with vivid hallucinations that offered vices catering to every conceivable human appetite. Reward and encouragement for the part of the brain where primitive emotions and appetites writhe like alligators in a pit, the part that is the seat of every destructive impulse.
We Trues are proud that our brains are as unmodified as every other part of us. The war was a direct result of that aboriginal wiring. And Glitter Gulch was a naked expression of its basest impulses.
There was a saying that had a quarter of the energy and aggression expended in Glitter Gulch and other places like it been harnessed for the war effort, we would have been celebrating victory six hundred megaseconds ago. I could see now that there was some truth to this commonplace observation, although it was hard to know how things could be arranged otherwise. We Trues prize individualism and independence above all things, and so Glitter Gulch was a necessary vent for those qualities in those who would soon be regimented and dragooned into fighting in disciplined order.
Officially, its raw licentiousness was sanctioned because it boosted camaraderie and reduced attempts to mutiny, desert, commit suicide, or go rogue – to turn your weapons on your officers and fellow soldiers. Unofficially, it was a loose collective run by gangs of scions who fought amongst themselves to extract every credit from the accounts of soldiers and sailors, and the men and women who designed and made the ships, machines, weapons, or maintained supply lines. It was a place rife with crime and violence. The habitat of pimps and whores, gamblers and grifters, thieves and trimmers and knockout artists found nowhere else. Throwbacks to a more primitive era.
The Billion Blossoms was one of those gangs, a loose alliance of several minor clans that in the real world had even less power than mine, but down in Glitter Gulch was as powerful as any of the senior clans. Tisin Nemo had given me an introduction to someone in the gang who was willing to help me. The help would not be given freely, of course. I would have to do something in return – I hoped it would be no more than exorcising some minor hell that had fallen into their hands, or verifying that booty liberated from some Ghost rathole wasn’t contaminated.
The Horse and I hurried to our rendezvous still cloaked in our anonymity, but took random turns in the maze until I was as certain as I could be that we were not being followed by the Office of Public Safety, one of Tisin Nemo’s people, or anyone else. All around us civilians and soldiers and sailors bounded along in groups, or ambled arm in arm or stumbled in solo trajectories towards oblivion. Feral tribes of children in uniform roared along one block where smokehouses and bars sold milk laced with psychotropics. I saw a trio of rangers, women permanently arrested in the middle of pregnancy. I saw men and women tweaked in trivial and serious ways. I saw a man riding a Quick modified as a beast of burden, with stout legs and a humped and crooked back fitted with a saddle.
Most people ignored us, but as we crossed a crowded plaza one soldier who was too stupid or too stoned to get out of our way challenged me. I was tall but the man overtopped me by a head or more and his bare arms were as thick as my waist and he had tusks in the corners of his mouth that he exposed in a snarl, asking me what my problem was.
My security threw a nightmare at him, lodging it in the implanted interfaces that allowed him to control his weapons and vacuum suit. He screamed and thrashed, wrestling with horrors only he could see and feel, and bumped into a woman almost as large as he was, with a shaven head and black plastic pegs sticking from her forehead. She laid him out with a blow to his jaw. His companions roared and charged at her, her companions charged at them, the entire plaza dissolved into a battleground, and the Horse and I took to our heels.
Reeling with laughter, we dodged through an archway into a small square courtyard with a dead tree standing in the centre, bare trunk and branches stripped of bark and the smooth wood glowing white as a ghost. Circles of light dropped from floating sparklights overlapped on a floor of scuffed plastic with luminous green spirals sunk in its translucent depths. The walls were tiled with mirrors and chromos of pornography and battle scenes. On one side of the dead tree was a scattering of tables where a few Quick sat; on the other a stage where a Quick guitarist sat on a stool, bent over his woman-shaped instrument and playing trilling riffs to a beat set by his stamping foot, and a Quick singer stepped up beside him and pressed his fists to his throat and began to sing a song of heartbreaking beauty and sorrow.
It was the place that Tisin Nemo had aimed us at. My security had guided me there during our headlong flight.
A man in a quilted ankle-length surcoat ambled over and spoke my name and said that he had been sent to bring us to the meeting place. He smiled when I said that this courtyard was surely the meeting place.
‘You have met me, so in one sense it is,’ he said. ‘But it is not the kind of place where confidences can be exchanged. And in any case, the man you want to talk to never leaves his room these days, and we don’t care to trust people like your friend Tisin Nemo with his whereabouts. In fact, no one outside of his circle knows it. Hence this halfway house. Hence me. I’m nothing in the order of things. Less than even your servant. I’m to guide you if you want the meeting, or to take your regrets to my master if you don’t. It’s all the same to me.’
He wasn’t much taller than the Horse, and had a small head with blond hair sleeked back, the ends curling on the collar of his surcoat. His manner was at once servile and arrogant, as if he was discharging a duty he didn’t much care about. He was also completely transparent to my security. I do not mean that I could see everything he carried. I mean that my security was unable to register more than a sketchy presence; it couldn’t even detect the gross activity of his brain or the clockwork of his heart and lungs. It was as if he was an eidolon, and yet he stood four-square and solid before me.
I told him that Tisin Nemo would alert the Office of Public Safety if we did not return within the next ten thousand seconds. It was a lie, of course, but I felt I needed some kind of safety net.
‘I heard the Office of Public Safety is already looking for you. They aren’t having any luck, as you’ve cloaked yourself, but it is another reason why I was sent. In case you were the bait for some kind of trap. As I said, I’m of no consequence. If I got snapped up,’ he said, with a fine bitterness, ‘no one would care.’
The Horse was sending me tremors of agitation through his security, making it plain that he wasn’t happy. I ignored him.
‘We’re working outside the jurisdiction and without the permission of the Office of Public Safety,’ I said. ‘But when we are done, we’ll have to return to the marshal who interviewed me when I arrived here. We have no other way of leaving T. And if we aren’t finished by the deadline, my friend will tell them where we went.’
‘Ten thousand seconds – that’s three hours? You’ll have much less time than that to make your deal. The man you want to talk to is very busy, and this is a small matter to him. An inconvenience, really, but he is fond of your friend and is willing to grant her this small favour.’
I laughed at this disingenuous attempt to make it seem that I was the supplicant to some important scion. ‘He needs something from me, or he would not have agreed to see me. And I need something from him. I’m sure we can come to a mutual arrangement.’
‘Then why are we still talking when we could be walking?’ the man said, and led us across the courtyard to a passage on the fa
r side that plunged between two high walls and was so narrow that we had to go single file. The Horse pinged me again, telling me that it might be better to return to the marshal and seek his help in winkling out the criminal who had the information we needed.
Our guide said, ‘I can’t stop you talking amongst yourselves, but I hope we trust each other enough that we can all speak openly.’
‘You are cloaked,’ I said. ‘That’s hardly open.’
‘We are all cloaked, my friend. You make surveillance avert its gaze, which works as long as no one notices the hole you make in the world. I, on the other hand, make it believe I’m someone else. If you’re wondering why my security is so much better than yours, the answer is simple. T is the centre of the war, everything passes through it at some point, and we fish its waters and sometimes make a useful catch. The once proud and mighty race of which your servant is a downgraded descendant forgot more than we’ll ever know.’
‘It isn’t Ghost technology, then.’
‘We have a little of everything,’ the guide said, and led us out of the passage and across a wide boulevard, threading through the crowd with a deftness that made it hard to keep up with him, dodging into another passage, telling us that it wasn’t far now, deflecting my questions about his master with skilful vagueness.
‘He’s a unique man, as you’ll see soon enough,’ he said. ‘I’m not surprised you’re eager to meet him, but you’ll have to contain your curiosity. It doesn’t do to speak of him here.’
‘Then he can’t be as powerful as I thought.’
‘We’re on his turf now. That’s why we don’t speak of him. Any more than we speak of the air we breathe.’
We crossed a string of small courtyards, emerged at the upper level of a fighting arena, and followed a broad ramp that spiralled down, past levels where small, lightly tweaked animals – rats and cats, bantams and dinopterids – scuffled in little combat pits, to darker levels where heavily armed animals fought each other, animals fought Quicks, and Quicks tweaked in various disgusting ways fought each other. The place had once been tricked out with all kinds of lux, but it was shabby and faded now. Stretches of the ramp’s illuminated floor were dim or flickering, or even dead; the rails around the combat pits were greasy and scratched; the walls of the pits were scabbed with old blood, and the patter of the pitmen was tired and jaded.
We paused at the rail of a pit where a man-sized dinopterid was kicking at the belly of another, its hooked spurs slashing and slashing, harrying its hapless opponent backwards until it reeled into the wall and collapsed. The languid applause of the sparse audience distracted the victorious dinopterid for a moment. It looked all around, panting, beak agape and its scarlet throat pulsing, then it shook itself from crest to tail, and stooped over its dying opponent and pecked out its eyes.
Our guide licked his lips and told me that I could have plenty of fun here after my meeting, and I could have no better guide than him.
‘I am here on business,’ I said.
‘And this is my business. Officers and armigers like to think they know all about form and bet accordingly, but I have inside information. I can give you infallible tips, and only take a small cut of your winnings.’
‘Some other time,’ I said, shooting a glance at the Horse when he started to speak.
We went down and down, passing other pits, passing cabanas and platform bars, emerging above a pair of big pits at the bottom of the spiral, their rims ringed with platforms and walkways. Both were lighted but only one was in use, and people crowded around it. Crossing spotlights shone on the two mechas that stood at either end. They were roughly man-shaped, standing about ten metres tall and possessing two pairs of arms equipped with buzzsaws and all kinds of cutting-edge weapons, and on the right-hand shoulder of each a Quick jockey sat in a crash cage. A woman strolled around the base of the pit, extolling the combat virtues of the two machines while they brandished their weaponry and shot sizzling lightning at their feet. Then white vapour billowed up and the two mechas, controlled by their jockeys, stamped towards each other and engaged five-metre-long chainsaws like swords, clashing in ponderous close-quarter strike and counterstrike that sent gouts of sparks fountaining to either side. The first bot stepped back and swept its chainsaw in a low arc and slashed chunks from one of its rival’s legs, and then we descended past the rim of the pit and saw no more.
Our guide touched a blank wall and a camouflaged door shimmered into existence and we entered a warm and humid service sub-basement. A maze of corridors and chambers where food and drink and drugs were synthesised in compact manufactories, sewage was processed, and all kinds of machines were repaired and maintained. We saw only a little of this; our guide ushered us into a compartment of a low, jointed vehicle equipped with a dozen pairs of stumpy legs, its canopy closed over us, opaque to visible light and the additional senses of my security, and it set off in a kind of lurching run that buffeted us from side to side in the padded compartment, turning right and left at what seemed like random intervals, skittering down long slopes and climbing steep grades.
The Horse touched my security with his, told me that he was memorising every twist and turn of this silly diversionary tactic, in case we needed to track down our guide’s master at a later date.
‘I have no intention of coming here again,’ I said.
‘You might have to, if he turns out to be untrustworthy. And I’d say the chance of that is about even.’
At last the vehicle slowed from a mad gallop to a lurching trot. Our guide hunched around and told us to prepare ourselves to meet his master. ‘Let him ask questions. Don’t ask any yourself. And answer truthfully – he’ll know if you don’t.’
‘I seek only the truth,’ I said.
‘Don’t we all,’ the guide said, and with a quick, complicated gesture dismissed the canopy of the vehicle.
And yelped as a burly figure seemingly made out of shimmering glass plucked him from his seat and dumped him on the floor of the low and dark chamber where we had stopped. Another figure shimmered through the near dark, and stepped close and revealed her face. It was Prem Singleton, peeking out of her camo shell as if leaning through a window hung in the air.
‘You’re late,’ she said.
9
As soon as Ori and the rest of the recruits had boarded the freshly spawned pelagic station The Eye of the Righteous, they were assembled on the hangar deck and addressed by the station’s commander, Barba Tenkiller, who told them that from this moment forward they would dedicate their lives to the one true task: hunting for every kind of enemy intrusion.
‘Every day, the world’s orbit carries it a little closer to enemy territory. Every day, the enemy gets bolder. They’ve been testing the security net and dropping probes into the atmosphere for more than twenty years now. The probes keep falling, they won’t stop falling, and they’re going to be falling faster and faster. It’s our job to deal with them, and anything else the enemy sends against us. There aren’t many stations and the world is very large, so we have our work cut out. But we will do our very best. I will make sure of it. If you show any sign of slacking or doubt, you will be swiftly and surely punished. If you fail a second time, you’ll get the long drop.’
Commander Tenkiller was the oldest True that Ori had ever seen. She wasn’t much taller than a Quick, with broad shoulders and wide hips and a plain, frank, deeply lined face. Her white hair was thready and sparse, showing a scalp freckled with the scars of carcinomas killed by viral treatment. She wore a starburst on the breast of her black tunic and unlike the other Trues she was neither armed nor caged in an exoskeleton. Later, Ori would learn that she’d served ten years on picket duty in Cthuga’s oceans of air, working her way up from trooper to commander. Her heart had given out while slogging against the pull of the gas giant’s gravity, and had been replaced with a synthetic one. Most of her arteries had been replaced too, and her bones had been reinforced with fullerene scaffolding spun in situ by tweaked bacteria.
But despite the toll on her health she had re-upped for three straight tours of duty, and at last she had been rewarded with her own command.
She said now that she was a member of a cult who believed in the one true God, Who had created the universe and quickened human beings and given them the ability to choose between good and evil.
‘I know you Quicks don’t believe in anything much, except perhaps that the so-called Mind that hides away in the heart of the world will one day rise up and save you from your well-deserved servitude. Let me tell you that my God is far stronger. He created the universe and everything in it, including your petty little Mind. He is everywhere at once, and sees everything, and He’s on the side of the righteous. Get right with Him, and you won’t have to fear that you won’t defeat the enemy. They think they’ve made themselves into a god, and maybe they have, but my God shits on them just like He shits on the Mind. We’re going to pray to Him now. We’ll pray together twice a day. It will strengthen your gestalt and it will give a few moments of quiet reflection. Use it to build your belief that you are on the side of everything that’s right.’
Commander Tenkiller clasped her hands against her breast and closed her eyes and intoned a prayer to her God, invoking His swift and merciless justice, asking Him to smite his enemies and strengthen his soldiers. The True troopers, officers and pilots and the Quick flight technicians and Ori and the other recruits imitated her. Hands clasped, eyes closed, Ori felt her passenger move forward, felt it recoil when she opened her eyes at the end of the prayer.
The commander told the recruits to strip down, it was time they were inducted. The troopers stood by while pilots and technicians shaved off the recruits’ hair and dusted their naked scalps with white powder. Then Commander Tenkiller moved amongst them, using a pigment stick to mark the forehead of each of them with a red circle with a dot in its centre.
