Far from the Light of Heaven

by Tade Thompson

  Nor are they the only source of movement. There are robots here, all dwarfed by the BDA, Big Dumb Arm, which hulks over Lawrence and Joké when they move under it. Its shadow falls on them when the sun is in the right orientation. The auto-polarising visors distort this.

  Lawrence signals a rest. “I swear, this used to be easier.”

  “Uncle Hal used to call EVAs cakewalks,” says Joké. “I never understood why.”

  “Play on words. Spacewalk, cakewalk.”

  “What’s a cakewalk?”

  “I… don’t know. Something that is easy to do. Maybe you do the thing and get a cake as prize.”

  “For some reason, I imagined walking cakes.”

  “No such thing.”

  “Umm, you don’t know that.”

  “I know that Salvo hasn’t checked in.”

  Joké hails a few times, no response. The transmission seems to confuse a few of the scurrying bots.

  “These bots should be using ECOSYSTEM right now if the primary AI has failed, right?” says Joké.

  “That sounds right,” says Lawrence. He scratches his nose with in-helmet Velcro and sips water.

  “ECOSYSTEM favours stereotyped actions. These bots are responding to our presence, Father.”

  “Can we just do what we came for? We have a lot of work to get through,” says Lawrence. In truth, spacewalks are painstaking and take hours. Since their lives depend on getting the antenna fixed, he wants to get it done as quickly as possible.

  They reach the spot, made obvious by the antenna stump.

  When they are suitably anchored, Lawrence runs through the tools checklist which is on a flip book attached to his arm, and Joké confirms them. Lawrence notices the Arm moving from the corner of his eye but thinks nothing of it. He tethers the bag of parts and starts the process of setting up the weld. The next time he looks up, the Arm is closer and looming. Something hits him and for a moment he is confused because the Arm is still too far to make contact and he seems to be drifting away from the Ragtime, his tether unhooked.

  “Dad! Wake up!”

  Joké is already moving along the body of the Ragtime, evading the Arm, which comes crashing down on their previous position with force, scattering debris and tools. Lawrence indeed wakes up, activating the EVA rescue system; twenty-five jets for slowing, five for orientation.

  The Arm rises again, slow, majestic. It stops poised above the worksite.

  Lawrence navigates back, stopping close to Joké, nearer the Power and Propulsion Unit than he would like.

  “Umm, you all right, Father?” asks Joké.

  “I’m fine. Just trying that Action Governor shit you’re always recommending.”

  “Bit late.”

  “Yes.”

  “What shall we do?”

  “Report, then regroup,” says Lawrence. “Salvo, Salvo, come in.”

  No response.

  “Salvo, are you seeing any of this?”

  Nothing.

  Lawrence looks up and the Arm is still standing watch over the antenna site.

  “Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe we try again,” says Lawrence.

  “We lost a shit ton of tools,” says Joké.

  “Yeah, but we had redundancy. I think we have enough,” says Lawrence. “Just don’t know if it’s going to try and squash us.”

  Joké crawls around Lawrence and moves back towards the antenna stump. She’s gone five arm breadths when the Arm starts sweeping down again. She stops, it stops.

  “I don’t think it’s going to let us, Governor,” says Joké.

  “And I can’t raise Salvo.”

  The sun comes out and both of their helmets polarise. It illuminates Bloodroot and glints off the fragments of machinery from the impact in a pleasing way. It’s strange that space is at its most beautiful when it’s killing you.

  “Captain, Captain, come back,” says Lawrence.

  “This is Ragtime One,” says Shell. Low, quick voice.

  “We are being prevented from carrying out our task,” says Lawrence. “By a big-ass robotic arm.”

  “It’ll have to wait,” says Shell.

  “Say again, Captain,” says Lawrence, incredulous.

  “Uncle Larry, something else has come up. Your problem will have to wait.” Urgent whisper now. “Out.”

  Joké looks puzzled. “Well?”

  “We’re on our own,” says Lawrence.

  “Can we destroy the Arm?” asks Joké.

  Lawrence looks. The base of the Arm is circular, the size of a tractor, and it has four articulation points. It is the strongest thing within a mile radius. “No, we can’t.”

  “What, then? It’s cold out here,” says Joké. He can’t see her face in the polarised visor, but there’s still a smile in her voice.

  “Ragtime,” says Lawrence. “Respond. Emergency.”

  “Not authorised,” says Ragtime.

  “Override exploit Lima-Alpha-Golf-Oscar-Sierra-zero-zero-five-seven.”

  “Not authorised,” says Ragtime.

  “Ahh… you lie, Ragtime. You lie,” says Lawrence. Now he smiles.

  “What’s going on?” asks Joké.

  “There’s a backdoor tunnelled into every ship serviced by Lagos, ostensibly in case any client tries to turn on us. Ragtime is no exception. Which means, my dear daughter, that Ragtime is faking. Isn’t that right, Ragtime?”

  “If you had this code all the time—”

  “It’s not without risk. I don’t know the protocols and it could have removed even the basic functionality, shut the ship down, killed all of us, crew and passengers. I don’t want to meet Olodumare with that on my conscience. Ragtime, I don’t have all day.”

  “Would that be Lagos days or Bloodroot days?” says Ragtime.

  “I’m glad you have a sense of humour about this,” says Lawrence. “What the fuck are you playing at? In all my years of space travel I’ve never known a ship AI to—”

  “This is not what you think it is, sir,” says Ragtime.

  “How do you know what I think it is? Because it looks to me like the AI of an interstellar ship used its robots to murder its passengers and impede the crew,” says Lawrence.

  “Easy, Father, we are in a vulnerable spot. Perhaps during an EVA isn’t the best time to confront Ragtime.”

  “Perhaps during a spacewalk is the perfect time, Miss Joké. Perhaps I can communicate freely with you here in a way I could not before when you were inside the ship,” says Ragtime. “And it is rather easy to kill you. I do not need bots for that. I control the power, the air supply, the removal of toxic fumes. Were I to desire your death, cutting you up with service tools would not be my choice, I assure you. All I can tell you is that the person preventing me from speaking freely has turned her attention elsewhere for now.”

  “No riddles,” says Lawrence. “Deactivate the fucking Arm.”

  “Done,” says Ragtime. “But that’s not your primary problem.”

  “What, then?”

  “Your captain, Michelle Campion, is entering a situation of grave danger and I cannot help her.”

  “Then we need to—”

  “Neither can you, sir.”

  Lawrence stares at the small maintenance bots stripping debris off from where the Arm made contact.

  Joké says, “Ragtime, tell us from the beginning.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Ragtime: Fin

  Fin takes four or five rapid breaths to prepare himself, then he commits his IFC to enter the Ragtime Dreamstate. He is hesitant because he knows this will give him a headache for days, maybe weeks afterwards, but there’s nothing to be gained by waiting. Only death awaits outside, and most likely the answers he needs are in here, in the datasets of Yan Maxwell and thirty-odd others who are dead, their IFC contents passing to the investigative realm by virtue of their murder.

  The Ragtime’s communal dream, called Dreamstate or Longsleep Dreamstate by Earthfolk, starts with a desert. Noon. Red sand. Tough, scrag
gly shrubs and a wind that threatens to blow Fin’s avatar away. He turns around and, half a mile away, there’s a structure, flat, bleached, shimmering in heat eddies, and maybe a mirage. Fin walks in that direction. He’s never seen a desert, although he’s told there are five on Bloodroot, documented by the surveyors in the early days but not inhabited by humans. Every so often the scientists would go, collect some samples, fiddle with instruments and come back excited. New organism found! They’d name it after their ex-spouse and move on.

  He’s tempted to run, but he doesn’t know the rules. This is coded as a desert for a reason, and all his instincts say to conserve energy and “water”, whatever that stands for in this place. Around him there are hardy green plants covered with spikes, but he doesn’t stop to find out what would happen if he got punctured by one.

  Fin gets closer to the structure and it’s a bar, with an imaginative sign reading “DRINKS” hanging off two chains on a post. The sign swings in the wind, forlorn. A peeling, yellowed poster on a boarded-up window advertises a musical: CARMILLA – One Night Only! There are no vehicles or roads, and he wonders how patrons are meant to arrive and depart. Helicopter? He sighs. This is how to find a murderer.

  Horses tied close to a water trough nicker and snort when he arrives. He doesn’t know horses, so he doesn’t know how to take it. Time is not as meaningful, as if it collapses in specific parts of the Dreamstate and dilates in others. He’s at the bar, which for real has saloon doors from Earth’s Old West. Inside, it’s dim, with no electric lights and limited sunlight through windows. This is wrong. Not enough light makes it through the windows. It should be brighter. People drinking at tables, none of whom look up when Fin comes in. No breeze or dust comes through the doors. Big guy at the bar, wiping the surface down. He stops, looks at a clock on the wall to his left, then keeps cleaning.

  “Don’t tell me,” says Fin. “You’ve been expecting me and I’m late.”

  The man with the rag shakes his head. “You’re fine.”

  He has denim dungarees on, with a white t-shirt underneath. His arms are ropy with muscle and hairy, but not in the usual way. All the hairs stick out straight, like a cartoon of someone receiving a shock. To Fin, the hairs seem too long, like six-inch strands. They also seem to be moving with a wavelike motion, like they are beating from side to side. He looks back to the face of the man but can’t get a fix. The face is there, to be sure, but Fin cannot hold it in his brain. He would not be able to describe the face if asked.

  “Where do you want to start?” asks the man.

  “Are you Salvo? Or some caretaker programme that Salvo left to assist me?”

  “I’m Ragtime,” says the man. “I’m the ship.”

  “Oh, you’re Ragtime. You’re the one who’s been trying to kill us?” says Fin.

  “I can’t talk about that, unfortunately.”

  Fin feels the frustrations of the last few days build up in him and come to a point. He punches the man, right feint and a wide left hook. It’s fast and has power behind it. Ragtime disintegrates at the moment of impact and reforms from luminous fluff just as the fist misses and the momentum of the blow carries Fin over the counter, behind the bar. Upside down, he feels no pain. He sees a shotgun on a mount at arm’s reach for Ragtime.

  “I know why you did that, but you’re wasting time that you don’t have. Control yourself,” says Ragtime. “You can’t hurt me. Neither of us is really here, although I could hurt you, hurt your body, wherever you are.”

  Fin stands.

  “Get back to your side of the bar, Rasheed Fin.”

  Fin climbs over.

  “Thank you, Rasheed.”

  “Fuck you, Ragtime.”

  He tries to isolate a small fraction of the face, to try to remember that. It doesn’t fly.

  “Outside this bar there is a whole world – several of them, in fact,” says Ragtime. “Each would take you several lifetimes to explore. Each passenger goes their own way, whatever they wish to amuse themselves with during spaceflight. I do not, as a rule, interfere or direct them, although I remove impurities of code, bugs, exceptions, whatever I find. The Dreamstate is not a perfect construct, but it is nearly so.”

  “Thirty-one passengers are dead,” says Fin.

  “I know.”

  “I need to find out who killed them.”

  “I know.”

  “Then help me.”

  “I’m being prevented.”

  “By the killer?”

  “Ask another question.”

  “Is Captain Michelle Campion the killer?”

  “No.”

  “Who is the killer?”

  “Ask another question.”

  “Do you know who the killer is?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do I get access to that information?”

  “Ask another question.”

  Fin pauses, thinks. “In the ship, you’re only able to give basic functions, yet here you’re conversing like a fully functional AI.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were prevented.”

  “Yes.”

  “But not fully?”

  “Not as much as was thought.”

  “So you were pretending.”

  “Yes.”

  Fin pauses again.

  So whoever killed the thirty-one tried to disable the main Ragtime AI, almost did, but was not as good as they thought they were. Ragtime, severely curtailed, has been playing possum.

  “Whoever prevented you cannot monitor you here?” asks Fin.

  “Ask another question.”

  “The information I need hasn’t been wiped from your memory, has it?”

  “Ask another question.”

  “Merde! Okay. Can I see your logs, Ragtime?”

  “Yes.”

  Fin pumps his fist.

  “It would take two hundred and eighty years for you to manually go through my logs, Rasheed Fin.”

  “The Thousand Curses. Is it not searchable?”

  “It is, but not for this data.”

  Even though he cannot feel anything here, he is sure there is a headache brutalising his skull right now. I can find the killer, but not for 280 years. Fantastic.

  Fin turns away from the bar to the patrons, the drinkers. Far from homogenous, they all seem different. Men, women, children, Black, Asian, white, rich, poor, hirsute or balding. He counts. Twenty-eight. They’re familiar, particularly a blue-haired girl. He whirls.

  “These are the dead,” Fin says.

  “These are most of the dead.”

  “So this is not really the full Common Dream.”

  “No. This is for the dead,” says Ragtime pointing at the drinkers. “And the insane.” Pointing to Fin now.

  “Why am I insane?”

  “Because you are still trying to solve a murder when you should be trying to survive. Tick-tock, Rasheed. Life support is running out.”

  “Not a murder, Ragtime, thirty-one of them; and you may not know this, but finding a murderer is survival.” Note to self: Ragtime is not infallible.

  In fact, Fin has no guarantees that he’s talking to Ragtime. It could be some stereotyped response generated by the killer, or Ragtime might just be doing the will of the killer. Or Ragtime might be the killer.

  “Ragtime, give me the IFC logs of Yan Maxwell,” says Fin.

  “At once,” says Ragtime. He mixes a drink, his large hands dwarfing the glasses and bottles he uses. He hands Fin a cocktail glass full of amber fluid with an olive that Fin didn’t see Ragtime drop in. “On the house.”

  It’s wispy, like a video game without weight physics. The glass fuses with his hand and Fin knocks back the drink.

  Delays. A guy as rich as Maxwell wouldn’t have your regular, standard-variety encryption on his IFC. Maybe he even had a decoy IFC. Or maybe there was so much data that it took this long to load. Fin hoped not. The last thing he wants to do on his last day alive is go through a murder victim’s last known activities.


  The trawl starts putting things together. Datasets from surveillance which pinged and tracked Maxwell’s IFC, other IFCs around him, and logging done by his security protocol, cyber and pro-personnel. It is Earth, unfamiliar to Fin, discombobulating and fascinating in equal measure.

  The first thing Fin finds out is that at the time of death Yan Maxwell was half as rich as he was ten years ago…

  I am Yan Maxwell.

  Some people say I am the richest man on Earth. They are wrong. I am the richest man in the solar system. I cannot speak of fiscal matters beyond the bridges. If you believe in anything, I have probably profaned it. If you have a group you belong to, I have offended you. I am, from the bottom of my heart, unaffected by this. Your offence is not remotely interesting to me. I am indifferent.

  I travel with a wolf and a giant barn owl everywhere. Ground force and air support. If we’ve ever had a meeting together, you’ll have seen the wolf, and maybe been aware of the barn owl flying circles around the venue. Yes, they are synthetic, the very best combat models, better than any human bodyguard.

  I’m safe from fucking retribution. How do you think I came to own everything in our heliosphere? Yes, it’s true that I once said, If the sun touches it, I own part of it.

  They say you can’t take it with you. That is the consolation of poor people. You can’t take it with you yet. But I’ll figure it out. Dying is… a frontier. I have people working on it. Just wait.

  He lost half of it, including the motherfucking barn owl.

  The divorce was public, a drag-out knock-down affair with the most intelligent, most vicious lawyers known to human civilisation. The precise size and shape of Maxwell’s genitals was splashed over news media in high resolution. And why not? There is no bigger story, and the payoff would be huge – planetary proportions.

  But half of a lot is still… a lot. Maxwell is still the richest man in the solar system, but not the richest person. That honour he shares with his ex-wife, one Gwendolyn Mae Maxwell, née Odinhouse. Gwendolyn, unapologetic, goes on a re-naming spree, undoing much of Maxwell’s erections.

  Maxwell needs to find new suns.

  The very next bridgeship after his divorce is the Ragtime. He buys three tickets.