Phase Space (8 page)

But now even old Rigel had been turned emerald green, by a titanic Dyson cloud twice the diameter of Pluto’s orbit.

Not only that, the people up there were starting to adjust the evolution of their giant star. Rigel only had a few million years of stable life – compared to Sol’s billions – before it would slide off the Main Sequence and rip itself apart as a supernova.

But the people up there were
managing
Rigel, managing a goddamn supergiant, deflecting its evolution into realms of light and energy never before seen in the history of the universe. And that emerald colour, visible even to a naked archaic human eye, was the symbol of that achievement.

It was a hell of a thing, a Promethean triumph, monkey paws digging into the collapsing heart of a supergiant.

Nobody knew how far humans had got from Earth, or what technical and other advances they had achieved, out there on the rim. But if we don’t have to fear supernovas, he thought, we need fear
nothing.
We’ve come a long way since the last time I climbed into the belly of a VentureStar, down there at Canaveral, and breathed in my last lungful of sea air …

… an assignment,
the Weissmans were saying to him.

Earth swam close, and was growing closer.

We want to right the ancient necrosis as far as we can. We want you to help us.

‘Me? Why me?’

It is appropriate. You are an ambassador from exponent zero. This is a way of closing the loop, in a sense. The causal loop. Do you accept
?

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I accept. I don’t know what you mean …’

… The walls of the hab module dissolved around him. Suddenly he didn’t have hold of anything, and he was
falling.

Oh, shit, he thought.

But there were shadows around him, struts and blocks. And a heavy, liquid mass at his lower body he hadn’t felt for a long time.

Legs.
He had legs.

His breathing was loud in his ears. Oxygen hissed over his face.

He was back in his Shuttle-era pressure suit, and he was encased in his PMU once more, the original model, its spidery frame occluding the dusting of stars around him.

He grasped his right-hand controller. It worked. There was a soft tone in his helmet; he saw a faint sparkle of exhaust crystals, to his left.

Still, Earth swam before him.

It is time.

‘Wait – what –’

Earth was gone.

Ra-Shalom sailed through the space where the Earth had been, its meniscus shimmering with slow, complex waves as it rolled, the life at its heart a dim green knot against the blue.

My God, he thought.
They pushed Earth aside.
I didn’t know they got so powerful –

‘What did you do? Is it destroyed?’

No. Earth is in a stable orbit around Jupiter. The ice will return, for now. But later, when the sun starts to die, Earth will be preserved, as it would not have been –

‘Later?’

We must plan for exponent seven, eight, nine. Even beyond. The future is in our hands. It always has been.

‘But how –’

Goodbye,
the Weissmans said, a tinny voice in the headphones in his Snoopy hat.
Goodbye.

And now there was another hulking mass swimming into view, just visible at the edge of his faceplate.

He worked his attitude thrusters, and began a slow yaw. Strange, he didn’t seem to have forgotten any of the old skills he had practised in the sims at Houston, and in LEO, all those years ago.

He faced the new object.

It was an asteroid. It looked like Ra-Shalom – at any rate, how that rock had looked when he first approached it – but it was a lot bigger, a neat sphere. The sun’s light slanted across craters and ravines, littered with coal-dust regolith. And there was a structure there, he saw: tracings of wire and panelling, bust up and abandoned, and a big affair that stuck out from the rock, a spider-web of wires and threads. Maybe it was an antenna. Or a solar sail.

Artefacts.

It looked like the remains of a ship, in fact. But not human.

Not human.
My God, he thought.

And now the light changed: to the stark planes of the sun’s eternal glow was added a new, softer glow.

Water blue.

He turned, clumsily, blipping his attitude thrusters.

Earth was
back,
a fat crescent, directly ahead of him. This is a hell of a light show, he thought.

But Earth looked different. It had spun around on his axis. Before he’d been over the Pacific; now he could make out, in a faint dawn glow, the familiar shapes of the continents – North and South America, painted over the ocean under bubbling wisps of cloud.

There were no lights, anywhere. And the arrangement of continents didn’t look right. Earth didn’t match his memories of schoolroom globes, under the Stars and Stripes, back in Iowa.

The Atlantic looked too skinny, for instance.

This new rock was heading for Earth, just like Ra-Shalom had been. It couldn’t be more than a few minutes from reaching the atmosphere. And it looked to him as if it was going to hit somewhere in Mexico …

Oh, he thought. I get it.

This was the dinosaur killer,
the original, destined to gouge out a two-hundred-kilometre crater at Chicxulub, and to have its substance rained around the planet.

He shielded his eyes with a gloved hand, and studied the stars.

They were different. The stars were bone white: no
green,
anywhere.

He was displaced in time, a long way. But this was not the far future, but the deep past.

He turned again to face the plummeting rock, with its fragile cargo of artefacts.

One last time the kerosene thrusters fired, fat and full. The asteroid started to approach him, filling his sky. The suit was quiet, warm, safe.

He just let himself drift in, at a metre or so a second. The close horizon receded, and the cliff face turned into a wall that cut off half the universe.

He collided softly with the rock. Dust sprays were thrown up from around the PMU’s penetrator legs. Greenberg was stuck there, clinging to the surface like a mountaineer to a rock face.

He turned on his helmet lamp. Impact glass glimmered a few centimetres from his face. He reached out and pushed his gloved hand into the compacted-snow surface, a monkey paw probing.

… There was something here. Something alive, something sentient, inside the rock. He could feel it, though he couldn’t tell how.

Maybe the Weissmans were using him as some kind of conduit, he thought. Maybe they wanted to save some of whatever was here from the destruction of the rock, take it with them to whatever future awaited mankind.

Or maybe it was just him.

He smiled. He was a million years old after all; maybe a little of the Weissman had rubbed off on him.

He took a handful of dust and pulled out his hand. A cloud of dust came with it that gushed into his face like a hail of meteorites, glittering particles following dead-straight lines.

He sensed acceptance. Forgiveness. He wondered how far they’d come, how long they’d travelled. What they were fleeing.

Anyhow, it was over now.

‘You weren’t alone,’ he said. ‘And neither were we.’ He pushed his hand back into the pit he’d dug, ignoring the fresh dust clouds he raised.

The light of Earth billowed around him.

‘You lied to me.’

I don’t understand.

‘You lied about the murder. Have you lied to me all my life? Is it just me, or do other Angels do this too?’

Rob, I don’t mean you any harm. My sole purpose is to serve you.

‘Because of you I don’t know what’s real any more …’

It is the year 2045. Don’t be afraid.

For Rob Morhaim, it started as just another assignment.

Morhaim checked his reflection in the Cinderella mirror on the softwall. Not that he expected to meet anybody in person today – that hardly ever happened – but it made him feel better. The mirror showed him Cary Grant circa 1935 – incongruously dressed in Metropolitan Police light armour, circa 2045 – but it was honest enough to show him any smuts on his nose, and that he needed a shave.

But the mirror was infested; Cary Grant started to sprout a ridiculous Groucho Marx moustache and cigar.

‘Goddamn viruses. Off.’

The mirror metamorphosed to a neutral view of a Thames riverscape, under a parched June sky. The view was overlaid by a tampon ad: irrelevant to Morhaim since his divorce, of course, but still counting to his ad quota.

Nothing much we can do about the viruses,
murmured the Angel.
Since the passing of the sentience laws –

Morhaim fixed himself a coffee and a Coca-Dopa marijuana cigarette. ‘I know, I know. But where the hell are the Goodfellows when you need them? …’

He settled in his chair.

The Room, his home, was just a softwall box, with a single office chair, and a caffeine/Dopa vending machine. Its bio equipment – a bed, a kitchen, a bathroom – folded away when he didn’t need it. He was a cop in a box, one of thousands in New New Scotland Yard: a Virtual warren of Rooms, of cops in boxes, physically separated, their softwalls linking one to another.

Nobody travelled any more …

You want to take your ads
?

‘Do it.’

Morhaim stared straight ahead as a melange of graphics, letters and smiling faces blizzarded over the wall in front of him.

Most of the ads that, for statutory reasons, survived the Angel’s filtering were dominated by the big companies – Microsoft-Disney, Coke-Boeing, IG Farben. Morhaim could never see why they couldn’t do a little pooling, thus reducing the quota for everyone. Some of the images were crudely three-dimensional, popping out of the softwall in front of him, though they still hadn’t got that stuff right and the images tended to break up into pixels, light-filled boxes, around the edges. More insidious were the you-ads, ads that were tailored to him – shouting his name, for instance, or Bobby, the name of his kid.

He let his eye follow the action – the in-wall retinal scanners could tell if you closed your eyes, or even if you let yourself glaze over – and, unless your attention was caught, you wouldn’t be allowed to tally to your quota.

At last the battering of light and noise died.

When he checked the time he found he’d got through the best part of his legal duty as a consumer in a half-hour, a good performance by any standard, even if it did leave his eyes feeling like poached eggs.

And all the time, somewhere in his head, he was thinking about The Case.

With relish, he said: ‘Time to go to work, Angel.’

The softwalls dissolved, even the Cinderella mirror, and Morhaim was suspended over Tower Bridge.

When they were proven to be alive, by legal definition anyhow, you granted viruses amnesty.

Manufacturers of virus killers were shut down; even virus check software is illegal. In fact it is part of the remit of Rob Morhaim’s unit of the CID to track down breaches of those laws.

But there are supposed to be two sides to the bargain: the Robin Goodfellows, the most human-like products of virus evolution, have committed to keep their more mischievous junior companions under control. Mostly they do just that …

Possibly.

But things seem to be sliding a little right now, as most of you realize. A lot of commentators blame the approach of the Digital Millennium – 2048, the year 100000000000 in binary, requiring a whole extra digit from
2047,
which was 11111111111 – when, street scuttlebutt has it, the storage problems required by that extra digit will deliver the catastrophe we managed to avoid at the 2000 date change.