Into Everywhere (3 page)

Tony ignored him, looked at Junot. ‘Why aren’t these people packing up, as I ordered?’

He was fizzing with anger. Anger at his uncle’s intervention; anger at his failure to assert himself; anger at the wizards’ insubordination.

‘We need more time,’ Fred Firat said, before Junot could answer. ‘We’ve made a good start, but a start is all it is. And now you’ve set us back by bringing the ship here. I realise you are upset by these so-called claim jumpers, Mister Okoye, but you should have known better. You should have thought things through.’

Tony met Fred Firat’s bright bold gaze. ‘You have isolated some specimens in the Faraday cages, haven’t you?’

‘Of course, but that isn’t the point.’

‘Didn’t you tell me once that their memory is holographic? Which means, I think, that a small portion will contain everything in the whole.’

‘We hadn’t done enough work to prove that it was. And anyway, that’s not really how holograms work,’ Fred Firat said. He was an old man, eighty or ninety, with the squat build of someone born and raised on a heavy planet. He stood foursquare in front of Tony, arms crossed over the chestplate of his pressure suit, the faceted oval of his ancillary eye, socketed in the middle of his forehead, glinting behind his visor like a gunsight.

‘Nevertheless, you are done here,’ Tony said. ‘Load those specimens and whatever else you have as quickly as possible. The window for escape is closing fast.’

‘You aren’t listening,’ Fred Firat said. ‘I have a plan.’

‘It’s you who are not listening,’ Tony said, thrusting his face so close to the wizard’s that their helmets almost kissed. ‘Another ship is coming here. A big ship, well armed, ready to take us prisoner and steal what is rightly ours. We have to boot as quickly as possible. You and your people should be packing up your equipment and your specimens, not quibbling about my orders.’

‘I have a better idea,’ Fred Firat said. ‘You can take the specimens and most of my crew. I’ll stay behind with a couple of volunteers. We can hide in the Ghajar ruins – we have mapped a network of voids beneath them. We’ll wait out the claim jumpers, and after they leave we’ll start work again, and you can bring back the rest of my crew.’

Tony couldn’t believe it. No, he could. Wizards were clever but naive, put their faith in friction-free models of messy reality, and lacked any kind of common sense.

He said, ‘That isn’t going to happen.’

‘If you force me aboard at gunpoint, I’ll sue you and your family for breach of contract,’ Fred Firat said. ‘But if you leave me here to finish my work, I promise that I’ll make all of us rich.’

‘It isn’t going to happen because there won’t be any stromatolites left for you or the claim jumpers to exploit,’ Tony said, and ordered the ship’s bridle to implement Plan B.

A hatch opened amongst the jags and points of the ship’s base and a black cylinder tumbled out, splashing into the shallow water.

‘That is a pop-up high-impulse thermobaric bomb packed with powdered aluminium and nanoparticles of isopropyl nitrate and RDX,’ Tony said. ‘Powerful enough to sterilise this bay and the surrounding area.’

Fred Firat and the other wizards cried out in shock and fury; a tall skinny young man broke away from the group and ran head down and howling at Tony, who stood his ground and took a half-step sideways at the last moment, blocking his attacker with his hip and using the man’s momentum to pivot him off his feet and smash him onto his back. The man stared up through the curve of his faceplate, wide-eyed with shock, as Lancelot Askia stepped forward and aimed his pistol at him.

‘Don’t,’ Tony said, and felt a wash of relief when the enforcer shrugged and lowered his weapon and turned back to the other wizards.

‘There are other colonies,’ Fred Firat said. ‘We will work on them.’

‘No, you won’t,’ Tony said. ‘Because I have planted bombs in every colony along this shore. They will be triggered when we boot. The only stromatolites left will be those we take with us.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Too bad. Get your crew moving. We boot in two hours. Anything that isn’t on the ship by then will be left behind.’

‘And if I refuse? What will you do? Kill me?’

‘Why not?’ Lancelot Askia said and raised his pistol and shot Fred Firat through his helmet visor.

The wizard collapsed. Blood splashed the inner surface of the crazed visor: the round had nailed him through his ancillary eye.

In the moment of shocked silence, Tony told Lancelot Askia, ‘I needed that man. You had no
right
.’

‘Orders,’ the enforcer said calmly. ‘I was told that anyone who suggested staying behind could be the one who betrayed us.’

‘And now we will never know if he did.’

‘Of course he did. That’s why I shot him,’ Lancelot Askia said, and turned away and ordered the wizards to shape up and get moving. ‘You can pack your shit and get on board the ship or you can join your dead boss. Your choice.’

After the Bad Trip, after she’d been discharged from hospital, after she’d broken up with Willie because he wanted to go right back out there and find the thing that had fucked up their heads, Lisa tried to forget everything by self-medicating with booze and shine. She lost her apartment and let her business slide away, was living in a rented room in Felony Flats, doing zero-hours piecework for corporate code farms, when an intervention by Bria and several other friends made her realise that she needed to make some changes in her life. So she sobered up and scraped together enough money to buy a trailer home and a pioneer licence for a patch of scrub in the tableland north of Port of Plenty, where she hired a local guy with a bulldozer to cut a track to the nearest paved road, sank a well and capped it with a wind pump and a filter to remove the gypsum from the groundwater, and fenced off a hectare of caliche and grew catch crops of tweaked clover and soybean and ploughed them in with kelp hauled from the coast until the soil was rich enough to support a vegetable garden.

Looking back, Lisa couldn’t believe her energy, her single-minded focus. A cold determination to prove that, by taming this little patch of First Foot’s strangeness, she could reclaim her life from the accident that had derailed it.

She built a little house with the help of friends and her new neighbours. Rammed-earth and tyre walls faced with lime render, solar paint on the corrugated-iron roof. Bria gave her a tweaked Labrador puppy as a housewarming present, and Lisa soon learned to understand Pete’s rough speech. Amazing what you could convey with just a couple of hundred words. Supposedly a guard dog, he was better company than protection, although he was pretty good at running down the rabbits that were multiplying everywhere in the tableland after some misguided settler had released half a dozen into the wild.

Lisa tried to raise goats at first, but when her little herd was cut down by a wildfire pulmonary infection she turned to hurklin ranching instead. She and Pete survived sandstorms, lightning storms, biblical hailstorms, a plague of hoppers that stripped crops, scrub and the insulation from power cables, two years of drought, and a hundred smaller difficulties and hardships. And after five years, by the terms of her pioneer licence, she owned the place free and clear.

By then, she had made a slight return to the Elder Culture biz. Rebuilding her client list, testing and evaluating their finds, advising an academic who was trying to map the taxonomic relationships between different kinds of Elder Culture code. She and Willie were still married, technically. He stopped by now and then, and sometimes they’d sort of accidentally fall into bed. There’d been a few casual relationships too, and one semi-serious – a biologist surveying the flora and fauna of the high desert who turned out to have a wife and three kids in the city – but she mostly lived on her own now, a cantankerous forty-something desert broad scraping by like her neighbours, watching the city creep over the hills and edge into the tableland. Strip malls and motels and big box stores along Highway One; tracts on the western edge of the tableland pegged out for future suburban subdivisions; settlements and developers entangled in lawsuits over water rights. Every thirty-three days the shuttle returned from Earth and disgorged five thousand new settlers; many more were arriving on Ghajar ships reclaimed from orbital sargassos. Human civilisation spreading out in a grand and futile project to ‘normalise’ First Foot and the other worlds gifted by the Jackaroo more than thirty years ago.

Willie liked to quote a kōan he claimed to have learned from a Buddhist monk he’d met just before he’d come up and out: a man climbing a remote mountain finds a pocket of smooth unmarked summer snow in a shaded hollow, and jumps into it with his big boots. Later, Lisa discovered that the bit about the Buddhist monk was more of Willie’s bullshit, and his so-called kōan had actually been written by this canny old Scottish guy years before the Jackaroo came with their gifts and their offer to help. And although it was a neat image of humanity’s irrepressible urge to despoil pristine nature, it didn’t quite fit the brave new age of expansion. The fifteen gift worlds and the worlds of the new frontier weren’t like unmarked snow, or blank pages waiting to be inscribed with human history. Everywhere people went, they found the footprints of previous clients of the Jackaroo. Elder Culture ruins, scraps of Elder Culture technology, Elder Culture eidolons, fetches and ghosts. Remnants of unknown, unknowable alien histories bleeding into human culture and human history.

Lisa knew all about that. She and Willie had been indelibly marked by the Bad Trip. It had changed them, changed their lives, and they still didn’t know exactly what it was, what had happened to them.

About a year afterwards, Willie found a recent excavation site out in the Badlands, claimed it was the spot where they’d been zapped, and elaborated a bunch of paranoid riffs about what had been dug up, who had taken it, and where it was now. Even though she’d been on the long slide to her nadir, Lisa knew that it was just another of Willie’s fantasies. No one could keep that kind of thing secret. The hole in the ground was just a hole in the ground, and the thing that had zapped them had probably been some kind of one-shot affair – an ancient machine, maybe, that had hoarded its energies for tens of thousands of years and discharged everything it had in one last spasm when they’d come into range. Eventually, they stopped arguing about it, and Lisa did her best to put the whole wretched affair behind her. But then the ghost in her head woke up, reminding her that she’d never be free of it. And then the geek police came knocking.

Lisa was changing the oil in the wind-pump gearbox when Pete barked a warning. She looked up, saw a little cloud of dust out in the tawny scrubland. Two, three vehicles negotiating the swales and dips of the track, headlights on, dust boiling up behind them.

By the time Lisa had clipped the chain to Pete’s collar and walked with him to the gate, the vehicles were cutting around the shelter belt of cottonwoods. The county sheriff’s patrol car leading two powder-blue Range Rovers, new models with slit-like windscreens that gave them a mean squint, badges on their doors and hoods. The UN Technology Control Unit. The geek police. Lisa had been visited by them half a dozen times since she’d moved out here: routine, random inspections of her workshop and equipment as per the terms of her licence. But they’d never before turned up mob-handed with the sheriff.

‘Don’t do anything dumb,’ she told Pete as the vehicles slowed and stopped.

Sure thing, he said, but his ears were pricked and his body was tense, the way he got when he saw a rabbit, and he barked twice when the door of the patrol car popped open. Lisa told him to hush, watched the sheriff ease out of his car, set his white straw Stetson on his head and walk up to the gate.

‘It would make things easier if you chained up your dog somewhere, ma’am,’ he said.

‘It would make things a whole lot easier if your friends turned around and headed back to the city,’ Lisa said.

‘I don’t disagree, but they have a job to do and so do I. It would be best for everyone if you allowed us to get on without any fuss.’

The sheriff, Scott Bird, was a rangy man about Lisa’s age, the brim of his Stetson angled low over his creased face. He’d been a deputy in Denton County, Texas before he’d come up and out; now he was sheriff of the Carolina Land District. A little old-fashioned, but a decent fair-minded man. Lisa liked him, had twice voted for him to stay in office.

She said, ‘I’m sorry to see they asked you to do their dirty work.’

Sheriff Bird held out a folded sheet of paper. ‘Sometimes I have to do things I don’t agree with. Comes with the badge and the territory. Which includes, I regret to say, serving this warrant on you.’

‘Are you arresting me?’

‘No, ma’am. This is a notice to search your property.’

Lisa felt Pete stir beside her as she reached out and took the warrant. She could feel the ghost at her back too, briefly wondered what it made of this little human charade.

She said, ‘You happen to know what they are looking for? Because I don’t have the faintest idea.’

Sheriff Bird hesitated, then said, ‘I also have some bad news. Maybe we could step over to your house.’

‘And let your friends trawl through my stuff while you distract me? Anything you want to tell me, you tell me here,’ Lisa said, and saw the serious look on the sheriff’s face and felt as if she’d hit an air pocket.

‘It’s your husband,’ Sheriff Bird said. ‘I’m sorry to tell you there’s been an accident.’

Lisa thought at once of the seizure.

She said, ‘Is he hurt? How bad?’

Sheriff Bird took off his hat. ‘He was working with a crew on a big dig out in the Badlands. There was some kind of accident, and everyone involved looks to have been killed.’

‘You’re kidding,’ she said, but she knew that he was not.

‘Why don’t we go sit down somewhere, ma’am, so I can tell you what I know?’

Lisa saw two figures step out of one of the Range Rovers. One a tall grey-haired man in a cream suit, the other dressed in a black tracksuit, moving with the sinuous gait of a dancer, golden highlights gleaming on a smooth skull. A Jackaroo avatar.