Into Everywhere (31 page)

‘Goodbye, Ms Dawes. And good luck.’

The shadows of the organ trees turned and shortened across the dry stones, began to lengthen again. Ant-sized biochines scuttled from shadow to shadow on wiry multi-jointed legs. At last, Isabelle slid off the hood and called out that their passenger had arrived. Lisa climbed to her feet, dusting off her pants, and saw that a truck had stopped out on the distant highway. After a minute it moved off, the faint whine of its gear train passing over the salt pan as it picked up speed, heading east towards civilisation. A little later, a jiggling shape appeared at the far edge of the salt pan, broken and distorted by layers of hot air. Vanishing, reappearing upside down, vanishing again.

And suddenly it was close: a black, blunt cylinder prinking towards them on three slender legs like a miniature Martian fighting machine. Its flat top was at about the level of Lisa’s chest. There were no cameras, no windows, no eyes, but she was acutely aware of the attention of the alien intelligence inside.

‘Mademoiselle Linder,’ an engaging baritone voice said. ‘How good to see you again. And here’s Ms Dawes and her guest! How marvellous! What fun we’re going to have!’

They made a strange little procession, following a red-dirt path slashed across a meadow of black, close-woven, strap-like plants. Tony and the broker, Raqle Thornhilde, immense in a white kaftan and a wide-brimmed straw hat, the aquarium cylinder of the !Cha raised on its three legs, and three identical bodyguards in white shirts and black kilts. Raqle Thornhilde’s weircat ran in swift loops and circles across the meadow, once jumping onto a prow of rock and raising itself on its long legs, silhouetted against the slow apocalypse of sunset.

‘She can hear her prey hiding in their burrows,’ Raqle said. ‘She triangulates the heartbeat, then leaps high into the air and augers down into the dirt. So fierce. So precise.’

Tony didn’t know what to say to that. He supposed that it was some kind of warning.

Now the biochine flung itself from the prow rock and sped out across the meadow again.

‘I love to see her run,’ Raqle said. ‘I take her out of the city when I can, but never for long enough. I have too much to do, and many of the people with whom I do business find my sweetheart intimidating.’

‘I find
you
intimidating, madam,’ Tony said.

‘Good. Perhaps you’re not as stupid as you seem.’

Raqle had made it clear that his fate was subject to her whim. ‘You didn’t put up much of a struggle,’ she had said, back in the little prison shack. ‘I think you wanted to be caught.’

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Tony said.

‘It was almost clever, luring me to approach you by advertising yourself about town, but it attracted the wrong kind of attention. That’s why I had you brought here. It was for your own good.’

‘People keep telling me that,’ Tony said, thinking of Ayo and Opeyemi.

Raqle said that she had not questioned him until now because she had been waiting for the !Cha to arrive. The alien would be able to detect the slightest deviation from complete truthfulness and sincerity, she told Tony, and warned him that any hint of duplicity would be severely punished.

Tony said that there was no need to threaten him because he would be happy to talk about why he had come back to Dry Salvages. He told the broker and the !Cha about his adventure on the slime planet, and how the wizards had discovered the Ghajar algorithm in the stromatolites and accidentally freed the eidolon. He described the raid on his family’s home and its aftermath, explained that he had escaped and set out to find Aunty Jael.

He did not mention Colonel X, hoping that Raqle Thornhilde and her !Cha would not be able to sniff out the lie of omission. The broker was a formidable person, sly and dangerous, and he was at her mercy. But he needed Colonel X as a hole card. He wasn’t hoping for rescue, but it was always useful to have something in reserve.

She did not tell him whether she believed his story; nor did she tell him whether or not she had been involved with Aunty Jael’s escape. Now, as they walked towards the compound where the children were kept, he was waiting on her judgement.

‘Look at her run!’ she said. She was still watching the weircat. ‘I love her purity. She is a killing machine. Fast and sleek and unforgiving. She feels no remorse when she brings down her prey. And you cannot plead with her, if she targets you. She is what she is. She does not care that she was designed by unknown minds and hands. She is what she is. She does not meddle in things she doesn’t understand, or dream that she can become other than she already is. If we were a little more like her and all the other biochines, if we weren’t so restless, so stupidly inquisitive, then perhaps we might not be afflicted by meme plagues or possessed by eidolons. We might not have scattered ourselves so widely and thinly, or warred against each other over stupid little differences. We might not be trembling on the edge of extinction.’

‘But you would be a great deal less interesting,’ the !Cha said.

It was still startling to hear his rich baritone, to remember that his tank was not a drone but a kind of spacesuit for a little colony of smart shrimp.

Tony had never met a !Cha before, although he had once glimpsed one on a city street on a world thirty thousand light years away. Their relationship with the Jackaroo was unclear, but they freely admitted that they were connoisseurs and collectors of human stories, and many believed that they manipulated people and events to make those stories more interesting. This one’s name was Unlikely Worlds. Tony supposed that he was following Raqle’s story, her life; supposed he would become a small part of that tale. It was not a comforting thought.

‘You are biased,’ Raqle told the !Cha. ‘You like us to burn brightly and briefly because that creates interesting stories, and interesting stories turn on your females.’

‘You would create stories anyway,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘It is in your nature to elaborate worlds that do not exist.’

‘The point is,’ Raqle said, ‘we’d live a lot longer if we didn’t meddle in things we don’t understand. We wouldn’t be divided as we are. Our children wouldn’t be dying of sleepy sickness.’

‘And you would not aspire to glory and godhood,’ the !Cha said. ‘I do envy you that. And not just because it makes such good stories.’

‘No doubt you said that to all the Elder Cultures. And look at them. Like Ozymandias, one and all.’

‘I am old, certainly. But not that old.’

‘So you’d like me to think. Oh, just look at her!’ Raqle said, turning from Unlikely Worlds to look across the meadow again. ‘Such speed. Such fierce joy. Now there’s something to envy!’

‘I’m not so sure,’ the !Cha said. ‘Weircats are found only on Dry Salvages and two other worlds. And on all three they are scarcely numerous. Each needs a territory of several hundred square kilometres, in the right kind of desert. Made or evolved, they have specialised themselves almost out of existence.’

‘Three worlds that we know of,’ Raqle said. ‘There are thousands we haven’t yet touched. And besides, because of us, because we have taken them with us, they live on more than three of the known worlds now. After we die out, the Jackaroo will find new clients, and perhaps they will wonder why certain species are always associated with the ruins of our cities. Perhaps that will be our only legacy.’

‘We will remember you,’ the !Cha said.

‘You collect our stories and turn them into love feasts for your females. What about Mr Okoye? How does his story taste to you?’

‘It tastes of truth,’ Unlikely Worlds said.

Tony felt a wash of relief, and realised at that moment exactly how anxious he had been.

‘That’s what I thought,’ Raqle said. ‘He didn’t tell me much that I didn’t already know, but it’s clear now that I’ve been played for a fool. And by a laminated brain, of all things.’

‘If it’s any consolation, she has been playing the game a lot longer than you,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘This is a new chapter in a long and enthralling tale.’

‘His story isn’t worth much by itself,’ Raqle Thornhilde said. ‘But I think you’ll agree that it definitely adds something to hers.’

‘Oh, I think it’s safe to say that I haven’t been disappointed,’ Unlikely Worlds said, and Tony realised with a little thrill of hope that the !Cha was not interested in his story, or Raqle Thornhilde’s, but in Ada Morange’s. That there was a chance he could turn that interest to his own advantage.

‘Then you’ll give me your help,’ Raqle said.

‘We will help each other,’ Unlikely Worlds said.

‘Yes, we will,’ Raqle said, and took out a small golden cylinder and put it to her lips and blew. Tony did not hear anything, but out in the meadow the weircat turned sharply and ran headlong towards them.

They walked on to the place where the children infected with sleepy sickness were kept. A plastic mesh fence strung on concrete posts with three strands of barbed wire stretched along its top; a dusty compound; a long windowless barracks built of the same sandstone blocks as the huts of the real free people.

‘It isn’t much compared with the clinic run by your family,’ Raqle Thornhilde told Tony. ‘Pyotr’s people do what they can, but there are no trained medical personnel, no hands or drones, no attempts at remedial treatment, no wizards trying to find a cure. But the children have food and water and shelter. They are free to do what they need to do. What their disease needs them to do.’

There were about twenty children beyond the fence. A small group huddled around something Tony couldn’t see, but most stood or sat by themselves. Several were staring at the sunset. A tall blonde girl, hands knotted at her chest, sang over and over: ‘La! La-la-la. La!’

Raqle Thornhilde stepped closer to the fence, hooking her fingers in its diamond mesh, gazing at the children with fierce tenderness. ‘My son died here,’ she said. ‘He began to show symptoms just after his eleventh birthday. I brought him here, and he died two years later. The kind of medical intervention your family provides can keep them alive for longer, but what’s the point? During the first stage of infection, the meme eats their minds while they sleep. When they wake, they are no longer what they once were. They are not even children.’

She spoke flatly, without affect. Tony supposed that it was the only way she could bear to talk about it.

‘I cloned my son,’ she said, ‘but of course it isn’t the same. I knew that, even at the nadir of my grief. His siblings may look like him, they share his genome, but I had them tweaked to be stupid and loyal. I wanted him to live, but I couldn’t stand the thought of another person wearing his body. Of living the life he had lost. Of living a life different to the life he would have had. He was one of the first, twenty years ago. How it’s spread since then! I have not been able to change the quarantine law. I have not been able to stop people turning them out of the city. So I pay the real free people to round up as many as they can, and look after them here.

‘That was why I was interested in the stromatolites. I believed the story that there might be a cure hidden in their archival genetics. And you and your family wanted to believe it too.’ Raqle Thornhilde turned to look at Tony. She was dry-eyed, quite calm. ‘I had nothing to do with what happened afterwards. I thought that your Aunty Jael could help to find a cure. I didn’t know who she really was.’

‘My family and I were fooled too,’ Tony said.

‘A pleasing symmetry,’ Unlikely Worlds said.

Raqle Thornhilde ignored the !Cha, telling Tony, ‘You came to me because you thought I’d helped her to escape. I didn’t. But I want to find her, as do you. And we’re going to help each other. I’m not doing this to get some sort of revenge, or so this fucking school of shrimp can get his rocks off. I want to find out if there’s any truth to the idea that there’s a cure for sleepy sickness out there. I’m doing it for the children. As far as I’m concerned, it has always been about the children.’

Unlikely Worlds was the!Cha Chloe Millar had warned Lisa about, the one who was making a story out of Ada Morange’s life. He said that he had come to First Foot because he believed that what he called Lisa’s accident was about to become an important part of that story. A story that was, according to him, a great work of time.

‘And it is not yet even halfway done. She changed human history with the discovery of the Ghajar ships, and now she may change it again. This time with your help, Ms Dawes, and the help of the eidolon in your head, so recently embiggened.’

Lisa said, ‘How do you know it’s been . . . What was it you said?’

‘Embiggened. A cultural reference. A small joke. Perhaps too obscure? Oh well. We try to please and sometimes we try too hard. As for your eidolon, I can see ghosts. Although perhaps not in quite the same way that you see them. How did it happen, may I ask?’

‘Isabelle didn’t tell you?’

‘I prefer to hear these things first-hand,’ Unlikely Worlds said.

His mellifluous baritone sounded like the dead guy who did the voice-overs for the kind of movie trailers that were full of explosions and military hardware and collapsing megastructures, and who was now a kind of ghost himself, an AI that perfectly imitated him. Lisa and Isabelle were sitting on a flat slab of rock in the shade of the organ trees; Unlikely Worlds had folded his three skinny multi-jointed legs to squat in front of them. The flat-topped cylinder of his tank was about a metre tall, matt black and textured with a fine grain, like expensive hand-made paper. He wasn’t the first !Cha that Lisa had met. There had been another, Useless Beauty, sniffing around her and Willie after the Bad Trip. Lisa, unsure of the !Cha’s authority, had told him what she remembered of the incident; Willie claimed to have strung him along with the promise of some grand tall tales. Hoping for payment that had never come. Useless Beauty had listened to them and had not returned; they had never learned if he had been satisfied with their stories or if he had found them wanting, or why. And now here was this one, wanting more of the same. Even without Chloe’s warning, Lisa wouldn’t have trusted him, but Isabelle Linder didn’t seem to be fazed by his presence, telling her, ‘He’ll get it out of you one way or another. So you might as well tell him now.’