Into Everywhere (15 page)

‘Actually, I’m beginning to believe that there may be something of value,’ Opeyemi said. ‘Because someone else does.’

‘Yes. The Red Brigade. From whom I escaped by the skin of my teeth.’

‘Whoever the claim jumpers were, the traitor Fred Firat called them down on your head,’ Opeyemi said. ‘And now it seems that there is another traitor. Someone in that mad little crew you are supposed to be supervising has been sending reports of their work to someone on Dry Salvages.’

The mist was creeping through the streets. The buildings nearest the harbour were almost entirely drowned; only their red-tile roofs and the upper storey of a stone tower showed above a white sea.

Tony said, ‘That is a serious accusation, uncle. I hope you have serious proof.’

‘Deadly serious,’ Opeyemi said. ‘My people have discovered encrypted packets steganographically inserted into communications traffic in the common exchange.’

Commoners did not have access to q-phones, which transmitted messages instantaneously across any distance. Instead, their off-world communications were sent via an exchange linked to a q-phone network. Messages could hop through a dozen or more exchanges and q-phone pairs, zigzagging across the Milky Way until they reached their destination.

‘It was cleverly done,’ Opeyemi said, ‘using a variation of the classic chaffing-and-winnowing technique. Fortunately, our security protocols detected and pieced together two messages, including headers that addressed them to Dry Salvages. As to their content and who they were sent to, we have not yet broken the encryption. But it is only a matter of time before we do.’

‘If you have not read the messages, uncle, how do you know that they came from one of the wizards?’

‘Because they began to be sent after you returned home. And they were traced back to Aunty Jael’s laboratory.’

‘I need to see them.’

Tony was afraid and angry. He half-hoped that this was some trick of his uncle’s. A bluff with nothing behind it, an attempt to shut down the work on the stromatolites before the deadline expired.

Opeyemi said, ‘My word should be enough, but I’ll arrange it.’

‘Who knows about this?’

‘Don’t worry, nephew. I came to you first. If you follow my advice and act quickly, you will be able to come out of this with some kind of honour. First, you should shut down the research. Suppose your wizards actually found something? The traitor could send the information to their friends. Second, you should put the wizards to the question. I will be happy to help you with that. My people have considerable expertise.’

Two years ago Tony would have surrendered to the canon law of Opeyemi’s counsel. But he’d been tempered by hard lessons in the freebooting business since then, and knew a thing or two about countering threats and intimidation. He met his uncle’s blinkless stare and said, ‘I’ll find this traitor, but I will do it my way. For now, everything will continue as normal. I will do nothing that could alert the traitor and give them the chance to destroy all evidence of their actions before they are brought to justice.’

‘And exactly how do you propose to do that?’

Tony flatly lied. ‘Oh, don’t worry, uncle. I have a few ideas.’

‘Then you had better get to work,’ Opeyemi said. ‘If you don’t identify the traitor soon, I will be forced to act for the good of the family, and you will lose what little reputation you have left.’

‘Oh, I rather think this enhances my reputation,’ Tony said. ‘After all, other people believe that the research is important. And sending the wizards to Dry Salvages is no longer an option, because the recipient of those messages might well be Raqle Thornhilde. Once I have got to the bottom of this, I will ask the council to reconsider its deadline.’

On her way out of the city, Lisa stopped at Skate Planet, the only skateboard store in Port of Plenty, on the whole damn world, and bought a twelve-pack of Club-Mate. The soda, juiced with caffeine-laden yerba mate, had powered the Crazy 88’s exploits back in the day: Lisa had a lot to do and sleep didn’t figure in her plans.

When she got home, she dug up a plastic box buried in the pounded earth floor of the pen of the big male hurklin. Inside, wrapped in layers of polyester soft-shell material, was the exabyte drive that contained a mirror of the files in her confiscated massively parallel computer. She placed Willie’s tessera in the box and reburied it and stamped the earth flat, cracked open the first bottle of golden rocket fuel, and fired up Sorabji’s
Opus clavicembalisticum
on the sound system (Pete gave her a soulful look and padded out of the room). She liked to work to music, mostly solo piano pieces, some ambient stuff, Pink Floyd’s
Wish You Were Here
, her father’s favourite album. Silence was a big empty room in which every distraction echoed; music was a train that took her somewhere useful, sharpened her focus, inspired connections and little leaps of logic, shut down extraneous thoughts. And for deciphering this mad strange code, what better inspiration than Sorabji’s enormous, wild, incantatory masterpiece? As its opening bars rang out, she plugged the mirror drive into the powerful tablet she’d borrowed from Bria, and got down to it.

She was certain that the narrative code was connected with the mystery artefact that had zapped her on the Bad Trip: that was why she could see the distortion in the silvery flow, the sparks in its wake. Something that had reached out to her. She needed to find out what it was. What it did and how it did it.

She brought up a sandbox, froze the playback when the distortion appeared, and used the zoom tool. She was hoping to glimpse some kind of fractal activity, but the edges of the distortion were smooth all the way down to the limits of resolution. She ran the looped playback over and again, watched the distortion appear and disappear until she couldn’t really see it any more, closed the sandbox with an angry gesture and shut off the sound system. She felt threadbare, shaky, sick with frustration. Silvery eels swimming everywhere she looked. The ghost leaning at her back.

She needed to run the real thing again. She needed the data from Bria’s decompiling, pattern matching and reverse lookup. She needed to sleep, but knew that she couldn’t. She needed a fucking drink and swore that she wouldn’t. Instead, she opened another bottle of Club-Mate and began to read up on Ghajar algorithms.

The Ghajar had been a gypsy species that had left almost no trace of its civilisation or culture apart from its ships and a few so-called landing towers. Most of their ships had been abandoned in orbital sargassos, but several crash sites had been identified on First Foot and other Jackaroo gift worlds. Some archaeologists believed that the Ghajar had beached their ships much as whales and smaller cetaceans, because of disease or panic or suicidal ennui, had stranded themselves on beaches on Earth. Others said that the crashed ships were casualties in a war between factions of the Ghajar, and suggested that so-called mad ships recently discovered in a remote sargasso, which killed or drove crazy anyone who approached too closely, were weapons which had been used in that war.

One thing was certain: all Ghajar ships were infested with algorithms, quantum stuff embedded in the spin properties of fundamental particles in the molecular matrices of their hulls, riddled with errors and necrotic patches that had accumulated during millennia of disuse. Coders analysed and catalogued the algorithms, stitched viable fragments together, and spent hours and days trying to get them to run in sandboxed virtual spaces.

Ghajar ship code had played a pivotal role in the development of various kinds of quantum technology and had helped to solve four of the so-called hard mathematical problems; one of Ada Morange’s companies had used it to develop the AIs that acted as interfaces between the ships and their human pilots. But Ghajar narrative code was another country. Unmapped, untranslated, incomprehensible. Lisa googled some scholarly articles, most of them by a professor at Peking University, no doubt the researcher Carol Schleifer had mentioned. Lisa had trouble following his deep theoretical analyses, but the conclusions were plain: no one knew what narrative code did, what it contained, or how to read it. And no one ever seemed to have observed the distortion she’d seen, either.

It was four in the morning. She was wired but bone-tired, and was still seeing little flashes in the air. She crashed for a couple of hours, woke around dawn and fed Pete, brewed a pot of coffee and whizzed two chopped bananas with almond milk in a blender and drank her breakfast while watching the looped playback just one more time. Okay, another.

It was too early to phone Bria. Lisa called anyway. It went straight to voicemail.

She was in the barn, checking on the hurklins, when a car horn sounded out in the yard. Sheriff Bird was standing at the gate, and a black SUV and a powder-blue Range Rover were parked behind his tan patrol car. The geek police were back.

Tony went straight from church to the laboratory . Junot Johnson intercepted him outside the workshop, saying that there had been a development.

‘The wizards have been working all through the night,’ he said. ‘They believe they have made what they call a conceptual breakthrough.’

‘Is this something real, or some kind of theoretical business no one else would ever be interested in?’

‘Maybe one, maybe the other,’ Junot said. He had a grainy, bloodshot look: he must have been up all night too. ‘They’re working on that Ghajar stuff again—’

‘After I told them to give it up? Has time started running backwards here?’

‘I know, Mr Tony. They’re a stubborn lot. But this time they may be on to something. That last experiment? The blue light you told me about? They think it was some kind of eidolon. They think it’s done something to their heads, lets them see stuff they couldn’t see before. They think that it could help them to read the stromatolite data.’

‘What kind of eidolon? Is it harmful?’

‘I don’t know. They’re more interested in what it does than what it is.’

‘I could be infected, too. So could you.’

‘It’s possible, Mr Tony. Although if you remember, I was in the city at the time, buying elements for their maker.’

‘You should have told me what they were doing from the very first,’ Tony said. He was angry and scared. First Opeyemi, and now this. It was as if everything was spinning away from him. ‘I have just had a very difficult conversation with Opeyemi – I am certain Lancelot Askia told him all about this. But you waited until now . . . It’s unacceptable, Junot. Completely unacceptable.’

‘I realise that, Mr Tony. And I’m sorry,’ Junot said, with a hangdog look of contrition.

‘“Sorry” will not fix this mess. But there is something you can do. Opeyemi told me that someone is sending clandestine messages off-world. He believes it is one of the wizards. If he is right, we must deal with the traitor straight away. Are they working on this so-called breakthrough right now?’

‘They’re all in the work space, yes.’

‘Good. I want you to search their accommodations. Look for anything that could be used to connect to the city net. It might be a phone, it might be some sort of homebrew device. Turn everything upside down and inside out. If you don’t find anything, I want to be certain that it is because there is nothing there, not because you fucked up again.’

‘I will do my best. Although the man Askia searches their stuff regularly, and he hasn’t found anything I know of.’

‘Yes, because he could have planted something. Because this traitor may not exist outside of Opeyemi’s scheming.’

‘I don’t follow, Mr Tony.’

‘My uncle knows about this breakthrough, and will have guessed that I would want to use it to argue for an extension of the council’s deadline. So he may have had his man plant damning evidence that one of the wizards is a traitor, and when I fail to find it he will accuse me of incompetence. You see it now?’

‘Clear as ice, Mr Tony.’

‘Then get to work. Search every square centimetre of the wizards’ accommodations. Meanwhile, I will get up to speed on this discovery of theirs.’

The wizards were clustered around a big window in the work space. One of Aunty Jael’s hands stood behind them – this one tall and very thin, clad in polished black plastic that reflected a stream of silvery light waterfalling through the window. Lancelot Askia sat in his usual place in the kitchen area, watching everything with sleepy insolence.

The hand did not turn as Tony approached. Instead, an image of the face that Aunty Jael chose to present to the world floated around the screen that ringed the flat-topped cylinder of its head, saying, ‘Something wonderfully interesting has happened.’

‘So I heard,’ Tony said, and asked Cho Wing-James if he had cracked the archival genetics.

‘Not exactly,’ the wizard said, running his fingers through his disordered mass of hair. ‘But I think that we have cracked something that can.’

His explanation came in an eager rush of technical terms. Tony held up a hand to silence him, asked Aunty Jael for a summary. It seemed that the storm of virtual light had contained densely packed sequences of information that had interacted with the wizards’ visual cortices and printed copies of an eidolon in their brains.

‘The eidolon is a kind of translation tool,’ Aunty Jael said. ‘The Ghajar appear to have used it to hack into the archival genetics via the stromatolites’ transmission system, extract data, and render it into so-called narrative code.’

‘That is what we are studying now,’ Cho Wing-James said.

‘And can you translate this narrative code into something I can understand?’ Tony said.

‘That’s a very interesting question,’ Cho said, and opened a small window that displayed a kind of starburst with lines of unequal length radiating from a central point. The wizard set it rotating, asked Tony if he had ever drawn something like it, or if it had featured in any of his dreams.

Tony felt a clammy twinge of unease and said, ‘You had better tell me exactly what this eidolon has done to you.’

‘To begin with, it helps you see patterns in the narrative code,’ Cho said. ‘Eli and Rael saw them first.’