Into Everywhere (51 page)

She was startled back into herself when something – Tony Okoye’s gloved hand – clutched her hand. He leaned in until their helmets were touching; she heard his voice, muffled and distant, telling her to switch off her comms.

‘Just look at the speaker icon until it blinks and turns red.’

It took her a moment to work out how to do it. The icon was the usual cup emitting three nested curves of increasing size. Some things hadn’t changed. She wondered if people still saved stuff by clicking on an icon that looked like a floppy disc.

‘Now we can speak privately,’ Tony said.

‘This isn’t an ordinary storm,’ Lisa said.

They were kneeling head to head in the howling blast, holding hands, glove in glove. Tony’s face, a handspan from Lisa’s, behind the faceplate of his helmet, wore a cool serious expression. There were little scars, precisely spaced, in the skin over the sharp ridges of his cheekbones.

‘I think that you and I have woken something,’ he said.

‘What about Dave?’ Lisa said. The man was haunted by a weak copy of her eidolon; she was wondering if he saw what she saw, felt what she felt.

‘What about him?’ Tony said. ‘The eidolon in his head is not like the eidolons in ours. He does not have the connection we share. Perhaps it gave him the idea to escape, to come here, but it is clear that he is out of his depth. He needs us but we do not need him.’

‘All hat and no cattle,’ Lisa said, and winced as a chain of sparks snapped close to her helmet and blew away.

‘We know our eidolons wanted us to come here, but we don’t know why,’ Tony said. ‘But it feels right to me. It feels that we are in the right place. And it is a good feeling.’

‘I think the Jackaroo wanted us to come here, too,’ Lisa said, and told him about the avatars on Nevers’s ship, told him how they had vanished after the expedition had come through the wormhole that orbited the neutron star.

‘Unlikely Worlds knows something too,’ Tony said.

They told each other how they had met the !Cha.

‘He did his best to nudge me towards this place,’ Tony said. ‘You had the Jackaroo, I had a !Cha.’

Lisa said, ‘We were aimed here, no doubt. But we shouldn’t blame the Jackaroo or Unlikely Worlds, or even our eidolons. In the end, it was our choice to start down this road. We could have said no to it at the beginning, but we didn’t. And now we have to face up to the consequences. It’s like Elder Culture tech. People pull it out of ancient artefacts and use it without really understanding it, and when there’s some kind of blowback they blame the artefacts, or the Elder Culture that made them. They blame the Jackaroo. They blame everything and everybody but themselves. That kind of thinking is why Nevers wants to control exploration and research. He claims that Elder Culture tech is inherently dangerous, says he wants to protect people from it, but really it’s all about taking away the freedom to explore and experiment and create. The freedom to make mistakes. Elder Culture tech can be dangerous, I know that better than most, but every new thing can be dangerous and disruptive if it is misused. There’s nothing wrong with exploration and research as long as you take responsibility for what you find, and how you use it. Too many people didn’t, in my time. Just as the Red Brigade don’t, here and now. As far as I can tell, they aren’t interested in Elder Culture tech for what it is. Only in what it can do. How they can use it to gain power over others.’

‘As was I,’ Tony said. ‘As was my family. We fell on hard times. We searched for something that would restore our fortune, and our honour. Ada Morange, as Aunty Jael, encouraged us, and we went along with it.
I
went along with it. I ended up here because I was chasing a cure for sleepy sickness. I believed that it was lying in some ruin, cached in some eidolon or algorithm, waiting to be found. My family and I, we did not think to find out what sleepy sickness was. What caused it. How it affected people. We just thought that it was bad code, and there had to be good code that would cancel it out.’

‘When I won the lottery and went up and out,’ Lisa said, ‘I thought the same thing. I believed that I would discover something that would make me rich and famous. A lot of people thought like that. They thought that a new world would give them a new life. My husband was one of the few people who actually did make a new life for himself, but most didn’t.’

Willie was more than a hundred years dead, but the memory of his last hours was still horribly raw.

She said, ‘I helped to create something useful once upon a time, and I gave it away. Because it was got up from found stuff that I didn’t own. That no one should own. Because I was young, and still had ideals, and the world seemed full of endless wonders, and there was more than enough time to explore them . . . But I couldn’t repeat the trick and I lost sight of why I was doing what I was doing. I became like everyone else, grubbing for trinkets in the dirt. Eyes on the ground, never looking up at the stars. And when we stumbled over something wild and strange, Willie and me, the first thing we did was run away from it. I tried to blot it out with drink and drugs. The usual anaesthetics. The usual attempt to numb yourself against a world that seems too much to handle. The usual refusal. But Willie went on being Willie, more or less. He never gave up the idea that he’d find a way back to that wildness, that strangeness. And he did, but the finding of it killed him. I wanted to know why he died. Because I thought that the world should answer for his death. Because I was scared that it would happen to me. And that’s how I ended up here. But the world doesn’t owe us any answers. It just is.’

Tony said, ‘When Adam Nevers posed as Colonel X, when he offered to help me escape if I would help him, I told myself that I would find something that would redeem myself and restore my family’s reputation. But I was really running away. From my duty to my family, from taking responsibility for what happened after I brought back the stromatolites. I blamed my family for driving me away, Adam Nevers for tempting me, my eidolon for leading me on. But it was always my choice. And here I am, at the heart of this great mystery, and I have to ask: do I deserve to be here? What have I done to deserve it?’

‘We like to think that we win something from the world because of some innate quality,’ Lisa said. ‘Because we have been chosen. Because we are anointed. But it’s magical thinking. It’s observer bias. We see only what we find. We don’t see what we miss. We reach a place, a prize, and make up stories to explain why we deserved to get there first, but it’s all bullshit. Because if someone else found that prize, what difference would it make?’

‘But here we are anyway, making stories,’ Tony said.

They were smiling at each other through the faceplates of their helmets, closer in that moment than any lovers. Lisa knew that it might be nothing to do with them and everything to do with their ghosts, but she didn’t care.

She said, ‘Maybe we’re trying to get past the bullshit so we can work out why we’re really here, what we hope to find.’

‘Whatever it is, Ada Morange and the Red Brigade will try to use it for their own selfish purposes.’

‘Yeah, and Nevers will try to stop anyone and everyone from using it.’

‘So we must find it before they do.’

‘And take control of it.’

‘And set it free.’

‘Yes,’ Lisa said.

‘Yes,’ Tony said, and lifted his helmet away for a moment before setting it back against hers. ‘I think it is getting a little lighter. And wind speed is dropping. I think I see something . . .’

Lisa saw something too. Vague shapes looming through streamers and curtains of blowing sand. The force of the wind against her back was failing, the low disc of the sun was burning through the murk, and then the last of the storm blew past and she saw what it had made.

A city of sand stood all around.

She and Tony pushed to their feet. They were still holding hands, as unselfconscious as children lost in a fairytale wood. Dave Clegg stood a little way off, hands on hips, looking up at a basket-weave tower built of sand. Billions of grains cemented together by some mad architect.

The comms icon inside Lisa’s helmet was blinking. She stared at it and Dave’s voice was suddenly inside her helmet, saying, ‘Are you seeing this?’

‘That’s Ghajar,’ Tony said. ‘A Ghajar mooring tower. At least, that’s what it looks like . . .’

Dave laughed. ‘My ship found the right place after all.’

‘Maybe the right place found us,’ Lisa said. She was thinking of Willie’s last words.
A city hidden in a sea of red sand.
Thinking that his eidolon – and hers – had known all along where they were supposed to go. Thinking of the storm front marching towards them across the desert. What had sent it? What kind of intelligence could raise up a city in a few minutes?

Beyond the Ghajar tower, the timeship hung like the gnomon of a gigantic sundial at the centre of a level stretch of sand woven with intricate patterns in shades of red. Avenues radiated away, lined with large and small structures in no discernible pattern. Lisa recognised replicas of Boxbuilder ruins and tombs like the tombs in the City of the Dead, saw in the distance a cluster of huge spires a little like those at Mammoth Lakes, saw untidy piles of spheres, a big cube with a fractal pattern of smaller cubes along its edges . . . Everything the same colour, the colour of blood, everything shining with an inner light, everything tugging at her. Her ghost was leaning in, so close that it seemed to be inside her pressure suit, close as her skin, and she felt an absurd bubbling joy, wanted to fly away down those strange avenues, between those strange buildings . . .

Someone was speaking, asking her was she all right? She had fallen to her knees. Her heart was going like anything. When Tony helped her to her feet she felt the entire world spin around her and everything went dark for a moment. Her body felt brittle and insubstantial, a ghost trapped in the shell of her pressure suit. She had the mad idea that if she stripped it off she could dissolve in the city’s lovely light.

Tony asked again if she was all right.

‘It’s full of light,’ she heard herself say.

‘The tower?’

‘Everything,’ Lisa said, but Tony had turned away from her because Dave Clegg had walked up to the base of the tower, was peering at the wall of cemented sand through the curve of his helmet faceplate. He scraped at it, kicked it, then raised the ray gun and started to walk backwards.

‘That isn’t a good idea,’ Tony said sharply.

‘I want a sample. Unless you have a crowbar or a wad of C4 in your back pocket, this will have to do.’

‘I don’t know who made this, or why,’ Tony said. ‘But I do know that it would not be a good idea to upset them.’

Lisa felt his alarm, or maybe it was her ghost’s, and said, ‘You could bring the whole thing down.’

‘I’m just going to chip it,’ Dave said, and took aim and fired.

There was a quick white flash; a hand-sized chunk of an arch turned black and crumbled, leaving an ugly pockmark. Dave scraped at the edge, retrieving a scant palmful of red grains. ‘It just looks like sand,’ he said, and dusted his gloves.

All around, the luminous silence of the city.

Lisa said, ‘Either the sand organised itself, like some kind of nanotechnology, or something organised it.’

‘Most likely it is something we do not understand,’ Tony said.

‘You’re from the future. I would have thought stuff like smart nanotech was commonplace.’

‘Unfortunately, this is not the future that the past dreamed about.’

‘Shut it, you two,’ Dave said. ‘We have a problem.’

He was pointing at the sky: at a star that had appeared in the east. A drone, according to Tony.

‘Is it the police?’ Lisa said.

‘I don’t know.’

Dave started to raise his gun as the star swooped towards them, then thought better of it. Lisa glimpsed a wasp-shaped machine about as long as her arm, and then a human figure stood there, a giantess ten or twelve metres tall. She was dressed in black, with pale skin and red lipstick and a neat cap of black hair. After a moment, Lisa remembered a picture of Ada Morange from an old profile piece, back when she’d been the thirty-year-old CEO of a hot biotech start-up.

The huge avatar looked down at them, and a voice boomed out. ‘Master Tony. What have you done now?’

Dave Clegg stepped forward. ‘It was me, Professor! I saved them!’

‘And who are you?’

‘I’m the pilot, Professor. David Clegg. The pilot of your timeship. I rescued them from Adam Nevers, and I brought them here.’

‘But first, I think, you surrendered to him. You gave him my ship, and you gave him Lisa Dawes.’

‘I left everything behind because you told me that I would find something important at the other end,’ Dave said. ‘Something wonderful and glorious. Instead, I found that Adam Nevers was waiting for me. I found that I’d wasted six years of my life travelling all the way out to a star orbited by a fucking wormhole you and your fucking company didn’t know about.’

‘No one knew of the wormhole when you set out,’ Ada Morange said. ‘But here you are, and I will see that you are rewarded appropriately.’

Dave ignored her, saying, ‘I had to kill my friends and colleagues to save myself and my passenger. I had to grovel to Nevers. But I fooled him. I got away, and I freed these two and brought them with me. I did it for you, and the first thing you say to me isn’t, “Thank you for your hard work and sacrifice.” It isn’t even, “How nice to see you again.” No, you accuse me of surrendering. Like I had some other choice. And now you’re telling me I’ll get my reward? Really? I’m not even sure who you are any more.’

‘I am your employer. And I kept my promise to you, Monsieur Clegg. Here you are, and here I am. But you have not yet rescued your companions. Nor have you escaped. Do you see why?’

The avatar gestured hugely at the sky. Another star was falling towards them.

The second drone halted about two hundred metres above the deck and was enveloped by a gigantic avatar of Adam Nevers. Tony watched, half-dismayed, half-amused, as the policeman and Ada Morange engaged in a brief competition to overtop each other and quickly ran up against the limits of their capabilities – as the avatars grew bigger, they became grainier and ever more translucent. They reached a compromise at about a hundred metres tall, looming over the Ghajar tower like ludicrously displaced blimps from Victory Landing’s Fat Tuesday parade. Ghostly in the perpetual late-afternoon sunlight. Their voices booming out across the sand city as they exchanged barbed greetings.