The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (93 page)

He shouted back, said that she had thirty minutes. He sounded angry and on edge. The death of his goon had definitely spooked him, and Marilyn hoped that he was beginning to worry that a posse from Joe’s Corner might soon turn up.

“I’ll take as long as it needs,” she said, and with a penlight in her teeth like a pirate’s cutlass started to climb down the rope ladder into the hot stinking dark.

The shaft went down a long way, flaring out into a vault whose walls were ribbed with long vertical plates. Marilyn shone the penlight around and saw something jutting out of the wall a few metres below, a wooden platform little bigger than a bed, hung from a web of ropes. Ana Datlovskya sat there with her back to the wall, her face pale in the beam of the penlight and one arm raised straight up, aiming a pistol at Marilyn.

“Tell me you have arrested those fools.”

“Not yet,” Marilyn said, and explained how she had taken one man prisoner, how another had been badly bitten and a third had been killed by the hive rats after she had tricked him into wearing only the base solvent. “There are only two left. Three, if their client is hiding inside one of those Range Rovers. I managed to convince them that your suppressor only works for women. Can I come down? I feel very vulnerable, hanging here.”

Ana told her to be careful, the platform was meant for only one person. When Marilyn reached her, she saw that the old woman had cut away one leg of her jeans and tied a bandage around her thigh. Rusty vines of dry blood wrapped her skinny bare leg. She refused to let Marilyn look at her wound, saying that it was a flesh wound, nothing serious, and she refused the various painkillers Marilyn had brought, too.

“I have a first-aid kit here. I have already treated myself to a Syrette of morphine, and need no more because I must keep a clear head. I climbed down powered by adrenaline, but I don’t think I can climb back up.”

“Is there any other way out of here?”

“Unless you are very good at digging, no.”

Ana sat on a big cushion with her injured leg stretched out straight. Her face was taut with pain and beaded with sweat. There was a laptop beside her – not the notebook she kept in her shack but a cutting-edge q-bit machine that used the same technology as Marilyn’s q-phone, phenomenally fast and with a memory so capacious it could swallow the contents of the British Library in a single gulp. Ledges cut into the wall held boxes of canned food and bottled water, a bank of car batteries, a camping stove: a regular little encampment or den.

“I think you had better tell me why Tom Archibold and his client are so interested in you,” Marilyn said.

She was planning to climb back out and talk to Tom and his client, stretch things out by pretending to negotiate with them until help arrived. Although she couldn’t be sure that anyone in town would have noticed the smoke from the fire before night had fallen, or that they’d link it to the fact that she hadn’t returned from her day-trip to the desert, that she might be in trouble . . .

Ana said, “They did not tell you?”

“They told me you found a spaceship.”

“And you thought they were lying. Well, it’s true. Don’t look so surprised. We have spaceships, yes? So did the other tenants. The ones who lived here before us. And one of them crashed here, long, long ago. It was not very big, smaller than a car in fact, and all that’s left of it are scraps of hull material, worth nothing. I send a piece to be analysed. Someone has already found something identical on some lonely rock around another star, took a patent out on its composition.”

“So it’s worthless. That’s good. Or it will be, if we can convince the bad guys that you don’t have anything worth stealing.”

Ana shook her head. “I should not have trusted Zui Lin.”

“This is your mathematician friend.”

“I needed help to construct the logic of the interface, and the AI programme, but I confided too much to him. You see the goggles, on the shelf? Put them on and take a look below us. They do not like ordinary light, it disrupts their behaviour. But they show up very well in infra-red.”

Marilyn fitted the goggles over her eyes. The platform creaked as she leaned over the side, holding onto the rope ladder for support. Directly below, grainy white clouds were flowing past each other. Hive rats. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Moving over the floor and lower parts of the wall of the chamber in clusters that merged and broke apart and turned as one like flocks of birds on the wing . . .

Behind her, Ana said, “There was a war. A thousand years ago, ten thousand . . . My friend does not think of time as we do, in days or in seasons, as something with a linear flow. So it is not clear how long ago. But there was a war, and during the war a spaceship crashed here.”

“The hive rats were on it? Is that where they came from?”

“No. If there were living things on the spaceship, they died. You remember, we talked about where the former tenants of this shabby little empire went to?”

“They died out. Or they went somewhere else.”

“This species, they transformed. They made a very large and very rapid change. At least, some of them did. And those that changed and those that did not change fought . . . The spaceship was a casualty of that war. It was badly damaged and it crashed. What survived was its mind. It was something like a computer, but also something like a kind of bacterial colony. Or a virus culture. I have tried to understand it, but it is hard. It was in any case self-aware. It was damaged and it was dying, so it created a copy of itself and found a platform where the copy could establish itself – a hive rat colony. It infected the hive rats with a logic kernel and a compressed version of the memory files that had survived the crash, and over many years the seed of the logic kernel unpacked and grew as the colony grew. It needs to be very big because it must support many individuals that do nothing but act as hosts for the ship-mind. The dance you see down there, that is the mind at work.”

“There must be hundreds of them,” Marilyn said.

It was oddly hypnotic, like watching schools of fish endlessly ribboning back and forth across a reef.

“Many thousands,” Ana said. “You can see only part of it from here. Each group processes a number of sub-routines. The members of each group move endless around each other to exchange information, and the different groups merge or flow past each other to share information too. The processing is massively parallel and the mathematics underlying it is fractally compact, but even so, the clock speed is quite slow. Still, I have learnt much.”

Marilyn sat back and pulled off the goggles. “Ana, are you trying to say that you can talk to it?”

“At first it tried to talk to me. It made the figurines, but they were not successful. They are supposed to convey information, but only arouse emotions, moods. But they inspired me to work hard on establishing a viable method of communication, and at last, with the help of Zui Lin, I succeeded.”

Ana explained that her laptop was connected to a light display set in the heart of the nest. When she typed a question, it was translated into a display that certain groups of rats understood, and other groups formed shapes which a programme written by Zui Lin translated back into English.

“It takes a long time to complete the simplest conversation, but time is what I have, out here. I should have showed you this before. It would make things easier now.”

“You didn’t trust me. It’s all right. I understand.”

“I did not think you would believe me. But now you must.”

Ana looked about a hundred years old in the beam of the penlight.

“I think you had better give me your gun,” Marilyn said. “Maybe I can get the drop on Tom Archibold and his goon. If it comes to it, I’ll kill them.”

“And his client, too.”

“Yes. If it comes to it.”

“You may find that hard,” Ana said.

“You know who he is, don’t you?”

“I have a good idea . . .” Ana took Marilyn’s hand. Her grip was feeble and feverish but her gaze was steady. “I also have a way of dealing with those men, and their client. I have everything you need, down here. I would have used it myself if I hadn’t been hurt.”

“Show me.”

After Marilyn had climbed out into the glare of the spotlights, the smell of smoke, and the gentle rain of ash from the fire to the east, she held up the q-bit laptop and said loudly, “This is what you came for.”

“Come straight here,” Tom Archibold shouted back. “No tricks.”

“I’ve done my part. I expect your client to stick to the agreement. I want him to tell me himself that he’ll take this laptop and let me and Ana go free. That you’ll all go back to Port of Plenty and you won’t ever come after us. Otherwise, I’ll sit out here and wait for my friends to come investigate the fire. They can’t be far away, now.”

There was a long silence. At last, Tom said, “My client says that he has to look at the evidence before he decides what to do.”

“Good. He can see that it’s exactly as advertised.”

Marilyn crabbed down the side of the mound and walked out across the garden. Sentries stood everywhere, making a low drumming sound that raised the hairs on the back of her neck, and crevices were opening all around, full of squirming motion. It occurred to her that Ana’s suppressor might not protect her once the entire colony was aroused, but she steeled herself and stopped a dozen metres from the edge of the garden. On the bench terrace above, Tom told her come straight up the path, and she said that he had to be kidding.

“I can talk to your client from here.”

“Easier all round if you come up,” Tom said. “If I wanted to shoot you, Marilyn, I would have already done it.”

“Bullshit,” Marilyn said. “You haven’t shot me because you know there’s no way you could try to retrieve this laptop without being eaten alive.”

She had to wait while Tom disappeared from view, presumably to confer directly with his client. Tom’s surviving goon stood above, watching her impassively; she stared back at him, trying not to flinch at the stealthy scrabbling noises behind her. And then two figures joined him. One was Tom Archibold; the other was a tall mannequin that moved with stiff little steps.

Tom’s client was a Jackaroo avatar.

Marilyn had seen them on TV back on Earth, but had never before faced one. It was two metres tall, dressed in a nondescript black suit, its pale face vaguely male and vaguely handsome. A showroom dummy brought to life; a shell woven from a single molecule of complex plastic doped with metals, linked by a version of q-bit tech to its Jackaroo operator, who could be in orbit around first Foot, or Earth, or a star at the far end of the universe.

In a rich baritone, it questioned Marilyn about the copy of the ship-mind lodged in the hive rat colony, and watched a slide-show of random photographs on the laptop.

“The ship-mind has migrated to that device,” it said, at last.

“Ana made a copy of the kernel from which it grew, and found a way of running it in the laptop,” Marilyn said. Her arms ached from holding it up.

“There is a copy in the device and a copy in the hive rat colony. Are there any others?”

“Not that I know of,” Marilyn said, hoping that neither the Jackaroo nor Tom Archibold would spot the lie.

“You will give us the laptop in exchange for your life.”

“My life, and Ana’s. You don’t have much time,” Marilyn said. “People will be here any minute, drawn by the fire. And they’ll be wondering why I haven’t called in, too.”

“How do I know you won’t come after me?” Tom said.

“You have my word,” Marilyn said.

“You will let the two women live,” the avatar told him. “I want only the copy of the ship-mind, and you want only your fee.”

Tom didn’t look happy about this, but told Marilyn to walk on up the path.

“Tell your man to put up his gun,” she said.

Tom gave a brusque order and the goon stepped back. Marilyn pressed the space bar of the laptop and closed it up and started up the path, walking slowly and deliberately, trying to ignore the scratching stir across the garden at her back. Trying to keep count in her head.

When she reached the top of the path, Tom stepped forward and snatched the laptop from her, and the goon grabbed her arms and held her.

“There’s a lot more to it than the stuff on the laptop,” Marilyn said. “I can tell you what the old woman told me. Everything she told me during our long conversations.”

“The ship-mind is all I want,” the avatar said.

“They went somewhere else,” Marilyn said. She was still counting inside her head. “Is that why you’re interested in them? Or are you frightened that we’ll learn something you don’t want us to know?”

The avatar swung its whole body around so that it could look at her. “Do not presume,” it said.

She knew she had hit a nerve and it made her bolder. And the count was almost done. “I was just wondering why you broke your agreement with the UN. This world and the other places – they’re where we can make a new start. You aren’t ever supposed to come here. You’re supposed to leave us alone.”

“In ten years or a hundred years or a thousand years it will come to you as it came to the others,” the avatar said.

“We’ll change,” Marilyn said. “We’ll become something new.”

“From what we have seen so far, it is likely that you will destroy yourselves. As others have done. As others will do, when you are less than a memory. It is inevitable, and it should not be hurried.”

Marilyn’s countdown reached zero. She said, “Is that why you’re here? Are you scared we’ll learn something we shouldn’t?”

The avatar stiffly turned and looked at the laptop Tom held. “Why is that making a noise?”

“I can’t hear anything,” Tom said.

“It is at the frequency of twenty-four point two megahertz,” the avatar said. “Beyond the range of your auditory system, but not mine.”

Tom stepped towards Marilyn, asking her what she’d done, and there was a vast stir of movement in the garden below. In the glare of the spotlights and in the shadows beyond, all around the stalks of the stiff sails of the century plants, the ground was moving.

Ana had once told Marilyn that the hive rat nest contained more than a hundred thousand individuals, a biomass of between two point five and three hundred metric tons. Most of that seemed to be flooding towards the bench terrace: a vast and implacable wave of hive rats clambering over each other, six or seven deep. A flesh-coloured tide that flowed fast and strong between the century plants and smashed into the slope and started to climb. A great hissing high-pitched scream like a vast steam engine about to explode. A wave of ammoniacal stench.