Divergence (7 page)

“It’s not that easy, Edward,” said Saskia firmly. “We used the FE software to agree to this trade, remember. We can’t go back on it.”

“You wouldn’t be able to anyway,” said Judy, gazing oddly at Edward. She recognized him for what he was, but it was strange. In the past she had felt pity for people like him, now she felt…nothing. It was all just part of the mechanism. Some were bright, and some were not. He was looking at her with a tender expression. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” she added dryly. “Feel sorry for yourselves for being dragged into this without your permission.”

The concern that this statement generated was visible in the crew’s minds. To the meta-intelligence, it was just another process to be measured. Judy continued.

“Now, would it be possible to have something to eat? I haven’t had real food for five weeks. The
Free Enterprise
wasn’t equipped for humans. It constructed everything from the ground up.” She grimaced at the memory.

“What were you doing on board that ship?” asked Maurice.

Judy shivered at the question.

Saskia must have noticed it. “I think there will be time for Judy’s story later, Maurice,” she said mildly. Any thoughts that Judy might have had that Saskia was sympathetic were quickly dashed when she continued—“For the moment, Judy, I want to know what you mean, saying that we’ve been dragged into this. We operate of our own free will. That’s the point of FE software: haven’t you heard of it?”

Judy inclined her head slightly. “A little, yes. But I’m sorry, Saskia, someone is playing games with you. This ship, the decor—someone is sending me messages.”

She looked around the freshly made corridor with its black carpet, the black-and-white tiled pattern on the walls and the pearly balls of light set in the ceiling that receded in a line into the distance.

“You’re a black-and-white woman,” Saskia noted astutely. “And our ship has only just adopted this color scheme.”

“And then there is the name,” said Judy.

“Eva Rye?” said Saskia. “But she’s just a story. Anyway, she would have died nearly two hundred years ago.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” replied Judy, and the edge of bitterness in her voice was absorbed by the soft comfort of the corridor.

“You’ve got something on your neck,” said Edward suddenly.

“I know,” said Judy. “The
Free Enterprise
put it there. Please don’t mention it again.”

Edward looked crestfallen, but at that moment Judy didn’t care.

“Would it be so bad to go to Earth?” asked Saskia hopefully. “I know you hear stories, but—”

“It’s worse than you can possibly imagine,” Judy replied. “Imagine everyone acting completely selflessly. Each person only doing what is best for their fellow humans.”

“That sounds quite nice to me,” Maurice said.

“Oh, it’s not,” Judy said. “Trust me, it’s not.”

“Do the Dark Seeds really exist?” Saskia asked. “I wondered if maybe they were just a story.”

“They exist. I’ve seen them.”

“Oh.”

“Hold on,” Maurice said, fiddling with his console again, “you said you haven’t had real food for five weeks. When were you taken on board the
Free Enterprise
?”

“On the thirty-first of July.”

Maurice and Saskia looked at each other.

“This ship was born on the first of August.”

“Like I said, call me Jonah. Someone is doing whatever it takes to get me to Earth, and they don’t give a damn about the consequences of that for anyone else.”

Saskia spoke, not quite concealing her nervousness. “Judy, what are you doing here?”

Judy lay sobbing in bed. She was forty-one years old and a virgin, but that wasn’t why she was crying.

—You spend all your days wearing your face like a mask. You should cry more often, Judy.

“Oh, go away and leave me alone. You’re not even real.”

—Don’t take it out on me, Judy. Come on, what is the matter? What did you see that has you so upset?

Judy was hugging her knees, her whole body shaking as she cried.

“That little girl…that ugly little girl…”

Judy sat on a dining chair in the
Eva Rye
’s living area. Edward was in the small kitchen, preparing a meal with a clack of pans and a bubbling of water. Saskia and Maurice sat opposite, looking rumpled and confused within the clean newness of the ship. Judy was doing what she had always done, separating her emotions from her memories. She was very good at it. It was only recently that she had begun to suspect that this wasn’t necessarily always something to be proud of.

“Five weeks ago I was on board the
Deborah,
traveling to Quantick. It’s a settled world at the far end of the former Enemy Domain. About as far from Earth as you can get.”

Judy sipped at her water, a picture of composure.

“That ugly little girl…”

Judy couldn’t stop crying. There remained that part of her that was always cool and objective; it stood to one side within her consciousness, examining the torrid waterfall of her passions, trying to pinpoint the source of this outburst. She hadn’t cried so violently even when her sisters had died; she hadn’t been so badly shaken when Frances, her best friend, had been nearly destroyed. What was it about the scene in the social room that had upset her so? Such a tiny matter. The girl was an ugly little thing, painfully thin with a deformed face, one eye lower than the other. Her protruding mouth was filled with crooked, irregular teeth. She clung tightly to her mother’s hand as she entered the room, trying to fade into the background, hoping not to be seen by the other occupants, lost in their games of Chess and Starquest, Dominions and Bridge.

Judy had been sitting in the corner, having politely turned down an invitation to join a game of poker. Where was the sport in playing a game when she knew the thoughts and feelings of her opponents better than they did themselves? She had watched as the little girl was led across the room to an Aeon table. The two people already seated there passed a set of colored counters across to the new players. Nervously, the little girl accepted them. She sat down, clutching the large counters against her pigeon chest.

—At least she could walk, Judy. She could join in a game of Aeon. We’ve seen far worse, haven’t we? People at the end of life. People crippled by disease. And we’ve asked, why can’t the Watcher cure them? Come on, Judy, this girl wasn’t so badly off. Her brother just didn’t understand.

Judy rolled herself up into a sitting position on the bed. “That’s not why I’m so upset, Jesse,” she sobbed. The shadowy figure that stood in her room tried to place an arm around her shoulder. She wriggled it off angrily.

—There are worse things than being ugly, Judy.

“It’s not that…”

But she couldn’t explain further because she was overtaken by another bout of racking sobs. She was being ridiculous.

The mother and girl had joined in the game. The two existing players were cracking jokes, teasing the daughter, making her smile. Judy had herself begun a conversation game with a husband and wife who were trying to construct an idea path from Kant to the resurrected fugue form. They were skillful players and Judy had needed to keep her wits about her in order to participate, and yet her attention was constantly drawn across to the four Aeon players, and the ugly little girl. Judy could feel something building up inside her, something unrecognizable and edged with danger.

“What is it, Jesse?” she had whispered to her shadowy brother, but he had made no reply at the time, merely frowned and tilted his head questioningly, not understanding her problem.

Jesse sat by her bed now, rubbing his insubstantial hand across her shoulders. Still, she couldn’t stop crying. The moment was approaching again…

It was the end of the evening, and Judy’s conversation game had finished. Her partners shook her hand and headed off to bed. Judy had stood up and stretched, and yet still that sense of danger was bubbling up inside her. The Aeon game was ending. The mother and daughter were in the lead, and Judy caught the warm edge of emotion from the mother as she smiled across at the other two players, who were letting the little girl win. There was a bubble of kindness centered on that table that made Judy feel painfully happy inside.

And then it happened. The little girl, the ugly, nervous, buck-toothed little girl, had turned to look up at her mother and had given her such a smile of delight that, to Judy and her hyperaware emotional sense, it felt almost like the collapse of a small star. Such a feeling of warmth and kindness and contentedness and belonging flowing between the pair, two faces turned towards each other alight with something so essentially human.

And not knowing why, Judy had felt something dissolve inside herself and she had begun to stumble off through the corridors of the ship towards her room.

She had undressed and lain down in bed and drifted off into an agitated sleep where she had dreamt, as she did so often, of the hand reaching down from above to cover her face….

She had woken up crying. And she still didn’t know why.

On board the
Eva Rye,
the only sound was the clink of the knife on glass as Edward chopped potatoes. Judy’s gaze was lost in the shiny black depths of the dining table.

“I don’t understand,” said Edward.

“Shhh.” Edward flinched as both Maurice and Saskia turned to hiss at him.

“But I don’t. Who is Jesse? Why wasn’t he really there?”

“Judy works for Social Care,” Maurice said brusquely. “You know what that means, Edward? She takes MTPH to help her feel other people’s emotions. Sometimes that drug causes phantom personalities to arise in the mind. Jesse isn’t really there. He doesn’t really exist.”

“Oh,” said Edward.

Edward still didn’t understand, but Maurice was already moving on. “Well, Judy?” he said, impatiently.

“I’m sorry,” said Judy. “I was just thinking about something.” She closed her eyes. “I suppose I should start from when I woke up in my cabin.”

—Judy. Something’s wrong.

“I know, I can’t help it.”

—No, I mean with the ship.

Jesse was a shadowy shape at the edge of her consciousness. She could never quite make out his appearance. Sometimes he seemed far away, a man viewed at a distance; sometimes he was nothing but a child. Like Maurice had said, he was the phantom residue of the drug that she had once taken in her work as a Social Care operative, a construct of her imagination; he lived out his own life in time slices snatched from her brain and senses. He was stalking her cabin now, pressing his hands against the terra-cotta walls.

“I can’t feel any vibration,” he said. “I think the engines have stopped.”

Judy rose from her bed. She wiped the back of her hand across her face, which was still puffy from crying, and then pressed it against the wall. Despite appearances to the contrary, Jesse had no existence outside of her mind. For him to think the engines had stopped, Judy must have sensed the cessation of vibration for herself, and then Jesse would have acted out a scenario to illustrate this. Nonetheless…

“You’re right,” she murmured, “the engines have stopped. But we were Warping. I didn’t notice our reinsertion into flat space….”

—We didn’t reinsert, replied Jesse.

Judy raised her voice. “Ship. What’s going on?”

Jesse tilted his shadowy head when no reply came.

“Ship! Speak to me!”

Judy dived across the bed and snatched the loose rope belt that was the form currently assumed by her console. She ran her fingers along the chameleon device, raised it to her lips and called out again.

“Ship, I think there is a fault with the senses in my cabin.”

The console was dead. Jesse had pressed his ear to the wall again.

—Now I’m worried.

Judy pressed her hands together and concentrated. It was twelve years since she had given up working for Social Care, but the training was ingrained. In circumstances such as these she would automatically calm herself, center herself.

—I can hear something outside. I think someone is screaming.

“Let me dress.”

Quickly, she pulled on her black passive suit, the material tightening around her. A pot of white makeup sat by her bed and she dipped the first finger of each hand into it, touched them to her face. A white tide covered her skin as she breathed deeply.

—I think I know what is going on, said Jesse.

“Don’t say it! Do not say it!”

—Shit. Look on the bed.

Judy did so, and saw humanity’s last nightmare lying there.

Three little black cubes, each the size of the first joint of her finger, sat in the middle of the twisted sheets. Dark Seeds.

Something close to panic poured through the corridors; it drained from the rooms into the social areas, a hysterical babble of voices mixed with the half-comprehending cries of children.

Many of the passengers had come from Earth, but that would have been before the dark tide had risen to its current extent. The vast majority of people would have boarded the
Deborah
without ever coming face-to-face with the fascinating emptiness that could grow from the Dark Seeds.