His face brightened. ‘Yeah! That’s it! Something about them bothered me. Couldn’t put me finger on it. But one of them had a funny way of hanging on to the edge of the table, like what you’re doing now—’ I let go and straightened up, self-consciously ‘—and they both had a way of dropping things. Books they’d picked up.’ He took a pencil from behind his ear and demonstrated, mimicking someone absently putting the pencil down a foot above the table, then turning back and looking for it where it wasn’t. We all laughed.
‘I think I know who they are,’ I smiled. ‘When exactly did you say they were here?’
‘Must’ve been Sunday,’ the man said. ‘Weekend market. Today’s midweek. ’
Today was—I had to think for a moment—Wednesday. I nodded and smiled. ‘Thanks very much.’
‘Be seeing you,’ the stall-holder said.
‘Cheers, Tommy,’ Suze said, and we left, Suze intent on the old book she’d bought, pointing out to me its appallingly accurate instructions for building nanotech replicators using only a primitive computer, a scanning tunnelling electron microscope made out of television parts, and a few chemicals likely to be found under the kitchen sink in which the results could be ‘safely isolated’ according to the book’s demonically irresponsible author, one Dr Frank N. Stein (probably a pseudonym, Suze told me solemnly).
‘“Sold for informational purposes only”,’ she said, incredulously quoting the publisher’s disclaimer. ‘You know, the stuff in this book is
still
dangerous! You could start your very own outbreak with it!’
‘Just as well you’ve got it out of the non-cos’ hot little hands,’ I said.
She glanced at me. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘That’s a point. Never thought of that.’
We had reached the end of one of the aisles of stalls. I walked on, until we’d reached the edge of the clearing. Suze followed me into the shade of one of the tall trees. We sat down on springy beech mast and gazed back at the ever-busier market.
‘Well,’ I said, letting out a long sigh, ‘I had no idea they still made ’em like you, Suze. That was brilliant. You could be like one of those guys from the old days, a spy or a detective or whatever.’
‘Ah, thanks.’ Suze picked up a dried kernel and began picking at it with her fingernails. ‘I suppose I am in a way. An investigator.’ She shot me an awkward, almost embarrassed look, and I wondered, not for the first time, what social pressures—as undetectable to her, perhaps, as the pressure of the air she breathed—bore down on her from the society she wasn’t investigating: her own. ‘So there are other people looking for Malley.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And none that I know, I’ll tell you that.’
‘Perhaps they really are just students, keen on talking to a great physicist, ’ Suze said in a flat tone. ‘What was that about the way they moved?’
‘Spacers,’ I said. ‘Classic low-gee reflexes. Lagrangers or Loonies, if you ask me. Not from the Division, as far as I know.’
‘But would you know?’
‘I reckon so.’
Suze cocked an eyebrow at me. ‘I know about need-to-know,’ she said. She looked down again, then up. ‘From books.’
I took this as a reproof, and had a momentary impulse to tell her everything. But I resisted it.
‘That book dealer,’ I said. ‘You called him Tommy. You know him?’
‘Chatted to him a couple of times,’ she said. ‘He’s—he’s ex-Union.’
‘Really? Well, that explains the way he talks.’
Suze laughed. ‘We’re all so conscious of our superiority, aren’t we?’
‘I suppose so.’ Well, we were superior. I’d never considered the matter. ‘Why should anyone leave the Union?’
‘I’ve asked him that,’ Suze said. ‘Couldn’t get any answer out of him that made sense.’ It sounded like an admission of personal failure. ‘He didn’t get on with neighbours, that’s how he put it.’
‘With thirty billion to choose from? I’m surprised he can get on with anybody.’
‘I don’t think he meant any particular neighbours.’
I grimaced. ‘Weird. Anyway, it’s his business.’
‘That’s
exactly
how he put it!’
I stared up at the sun-dappled leaves. A squirrel bounded along a low branch, looked at me and began scolding, just like my conscience.
‘It’s almost noon,’ I said. ‘I think I’d best be on my way.’
Suze’s face fell. ‘You don’t want me to come along?’
I leaned over and squeezed her hand. ‘You’ve helped me a lot, Suze. But … I really think it wouldn’t be fair to get you further into this. It could be more dangerous than you expect.’
She expostulated further, to no avail; but with outward cheerfulness led me to the canal-boat dock, and said goodbye to me with an unexpected and more than neighbourly embrace.
I borrowed a small inflatable with an electric outboard. It could make five kilometres an hour, and even with the inevitable delays in locks, would only take a couple of hours to get me to the Union station at the intersection of the Grand Union Canal and the trail known as the North Circular.
The canal, under the oak and beech and overhanging willow that crowded its banks, was often dark. The towpath had not been maintained, so the only traffic was self-powered: the slowly chugging barges of non-co traders and travellers, the silently skimming launches, skiffs, and kayaks of Union trippers. Dredgers and other maintenance-robots went about their work, shiny metal crabs glimpsed crawling along the bottom or clambering on the banks. Shoals of minnows and sticklebacks lifted their noses to the surface, spotting the water like brief, local flurries of rain; herons and kingfishers took aim in response. Where the stone or brickwork bank was crumbled to the waterline, deer and wallabies looked up as I passed. The bridges were mostly recent, wooden; all but a few of the old stone bridges had long since collapsed, and their remains had been hauled from the water and dumped in unceremonious heaps at each side.
I settled back in the dinghy’s air-cushioning, the tiller under one elbow, and relaxed my muscles while letting my mind freewheel, gradually overcoming the lingering effect of the joint. From the collar of my shirt I allowed a tendril of the suit to creep up my neck, over my jaw and cheek and around the back of my eyeball, where it patched into my optic nerve. It would be noticed by anyone closer than a few feet away, and probably recognized, but to anyone further away would look like a strange, hair-thin scar. For the moment I left it to maintain my position on a representation of the map, which with a deliberate wink I could view in front of my eyes like an after-image. Minute by minute the tiny bead of my real-time Global Position moved along the kinked and curved wire of the scaled-down canal.
I watched it all, and worried. Two men from space were after Malley, and they had three days’ start on me. One of the more minor things I hadn’t told Suze was that there was a faction—no, that was putting it too strongly—a school of thought in the Division (and, more widely, among the space settlers outside it, and even on Earth) which wanted to negotiate with the Outwarders, if such a thing were possible. As if! The very thought of attempting to negotiate with entities who could use any communication to corrupt your brain as easily as hacking a computer made me feel cold and sick. If the men looking for Malley were part of this group—appeasers, we called them—then we could be in the worst kind of trouble.
And there was no way I could call for help, without increasing whatever danger I was in.
The boat’s engine had a bit more speed in it, for emergencies; I leaned forward, and pushed down hard on the stick. I reached the Union station a quarter of an hour earlier than I’d estimated. I deflated the boat, picked up another gas-cylinder for it, and packed it in another borrowed buggy. Then it was a matter of driving southward, picking my way carefully among upheaved concrete slabs and fallen trees.
Traffic was slow on the North Circular.
Gunnery’s going ballistic. The alarms set bulkheads drumming, periodontal ligaments resonating: my whole jaw aches as I slam into my seat. I bounce back, then it grabs me and hugs me in. Suit goes rigid for a second (
I can’t move!
), everything goes black for a second (
we’ll get that bug out of the next release or somebody DIES!
), then the optical fibres cut in and the joints articulate and my fingers are tapping the armrest pads and I’m in charge.
‘Shut that noise!’
My teeth and ears sing with relief. I’m looking straight ahead. The Gate is sixty-odd miles away, right in the sights, as always, and the number of invading ships or projectile comets or Lovecraftian unspeakables heading straight at us is, count ’em,
none
.
‘If this is another bodging drill I’ll—’
‘THIS IS NOT A DRILL,’ says the ship. Its voice drops as the magnification racks up; lenses zoom, cameras click. ‘Look.’
It’s tiny. The graticule reading shows, what? 24
inches
across. In starboard Fire Control, somebody laughs. My first thought is
welcome back, Pioneer 10!
It is, indeed, like some early space probe: body like a spider’s, brain like a gnat’s; but (second thought)
not one of ours
. It matches none of the spacecraft designs humans have ever built (I know them all, like the faces of old friends) and the apparently solid instrumentation of the thing is (
click, click
) suddenly, blatantly, nanotech stuff. Fractal depths of smart-matter come
into focus as the zoom increases and the probe continues to drift towards us: surfaces flowing, crawling—
I hit the cut-out and the view dwindles to a speck. There wasn’t enough definition to implement a Langford visual hack (
but you would think that, wouldn’t you?
) and I set the micro-scale babbages skittering across print-out and they report back in seconds that it’s clear. No nasty viruses have impacted our retinae, raced up our optic nerves and taken over our minds (
but they would say that, wouldn’t they?
) and paranoia beckons—
Enough. Ignore your feelings. Trust the computers.
(And yes, I
know
the Langford hack is just a viral meme in its own right, replicating down the centuries like an old joke, wasting resources every time we act on the insignificant off chance that if someone could think of it, somehow it could be done. What kind of twisted mind
starts
these things?)
There are two dozen ships in the wing this watch, and since just before the alert (all of ninety seconds ago) every ship-to-ship radio has been shut down and physically unplugged: total radio silence is the ships’ first reflex, even before they warn their crews. Decades of nothing coming through but the odd rock, decades of drills for every imaginable (and then some) contingency. Everybody in the Division has to do it, the stints come round regular as orbits, and every time it’s drilled into you that if something does happen, you’re on your own.
We’re all right behind you. But when you’re up against the superhuman, the orders run in reverse: the first is
sauve qui peut
, the second is ‘havoc’, the third is ‘no quarter’ … you get the picture. Our swords are permanently notched.
Thinking for myself is what I’m here for. At this moment the glorious possibility of First Contact is clamouring with the alarming thought that this thing originates with our long-departed—or ever-present—enemies. The little probe has closed its distance by ten miles, and seems to be decelerating: its puffs of reaction-mass volatiles another piece of evidence that it isn’t some long-lost voyager.
‘Hailing it,’ I say, and key out a standard all-bands interrogative and a single radar sweep. To my surprise there’s an immediate response. The babbages chatter for a second and then my suit’s interpreters spell out the message:
‘Cometary mining vessel NK slash eight-seven-one out of Ship City to unidentified, please respond, over.’
I don’t take it in; my mind’s still full of clutter about this craft’s being (since it’s obviously not the enemy coming back and telling us resistance is useless, etc.) a genuine alien space probe. To my lasting embarrassment, the only thing I can think of (but did I think?) is to hit the video transmission and say, my voice squeaky with astonishment:
‘Speak
Angloslav
, robot?’
More computer chatter, then a human voice:
‘English?’
‘Yes, English,’ I babble happily, still speaking falsetto, still hearing space opera, ‘you pick it up from old transmissions, yes? Language has changed—’
At that point the video input starts up, the image grainy through anti-virus snow. It’s the face of an old, old man. He’s had the telomere hack, and some fairly primitive rejuvenation, but that’s it. The significance of all the machine has said dawns on me. This is no alien emissary, but something almost as strange: the digital ghost of an escaped prisoner, one of the Outwarders’ bondsmen who, two centuries ago, had fled their orbital work camp for whatever lay beyond the Gate.
‘Much has changed,’ I tell it.
Remembering my first encounter with what turned out to be the replicated minds of Wilde and Meg could still make my ears burn, as I found when the recollection came to me while I drove down a relatively clear stretch of the trail, just north of Ealing Forest.
I knew roughly who or what he was straight away. He had no idea who we were, and was surprised when we told him. I don’t think he believed us. Partially overcoming our mutual suspicions took hours of talk, followed by almost direct physical contact before Wilde and Meg would accept that we were human. Even after we had taken the stored cells they’d brought with them (kept like a lucky charm through all their robotic adventures) and regrown bodies for the pair of them, and transferred their minds to the new brains, I could never bring myself to think of them as human. Their tale of what had happened to them did nothing to reduce my unease.
Wilde told us that the human and ex-human labourers had hacked a path through a spun-off ‘daughter wormhole’ to a just-about-habitable world they called New Mars. The uploaded ones had turned themselves back into humans, and were ‘now’ (thousands of light years away, and thousands of years in the future) turning New Mars into a new Earth, in a rather cavalier terraforming process which exploited the local system’s large complement of comets.
Society on New Mars was what Wilde called a free market anarchy. To us, it sounded more like a multiple mutual tyranny. The most powerful person in it was our oldest surviving enemy—a man called David Reid, the original owner of the forced-labour company. He had in his possession copies of the stored mind-states of the Outwarders, and was open to the argument that it would be safe to reboot them Real Soon Now.
Imagine our delight.
I brought the buggy to a halt beside a six-foot-high hawthorn hedge, a sort of natural barbed-wire entanglement, just a few paces before the gap in that hedge containing the gate of Ealing Technical College. I turned off the engine, and sat back for a moment, stretching and relaxing muscles that had tensed in the long and alert drive here, and looked around. The College was a mid-twenty-first-century building whose steel, concrete and glass had been built for blast. Its squat, three-storey bulk had survived the machinery of a more insidious destruction a lot better than the score or so of older buildings in the clearing that surrounded it. These had long since been reprocessed into low dwellings with all the usual accompaniments of non-co post-urban life, children and dogs and pigs and shit.
It was about four in the afternoon. The shadows of the forest’s hundred-foot oaks and elms covered a good quarter of the clearing. A hundred yards away, on the edge of the forest, smoke rose from behind a small shed from which the ringing of repeatedly struck metal could be heard; a low-tech version of a forge, I guessed, wondering idly what it was called. The few adults about treated me with more than usual non-cooperation, pointedly ignoring my presence and sharply tugging away any children who didn’t. I left the rucksack in the back—like a fierce dog, it could look after itself—but made sure my holstered pistol was obvious as I walked to the gate.
The gate, of stout creosoted wood, was on a latch, evidently designed to keep out any animal less intelligent than a dog. I closed it behind me and strolled up ten yards of flagstoned path to the main entrance. To left and right of the path were vegetable gardens, with plots marked out in stretched string and lettered labels. A young man, kneeling on an old sack and poking at the soil, looked up at me incuriously.
On the concrete slab above the double doors some original name had been chiselled off, and the new one carved in, with much embellishment of leaves, hammers, sickles, and glassware to mask this necessary vandalism. The windows on the ground floor were little more than slots; on the other floors they were a more normal size. Glancing up, I saw that several of them had been cracked, in a time so distant that some green algae or moss had settled there and spread along the zigzag flaws. Tough glass. The walls themselves, of course, were covered with ivy.
I pushed at the door, which swung open to admit me to a broad foyer with stone stairs ascending to left and right, and a wide U-shaped wooden barrier in the middle, behind which a young man sat, smoking a pipe and reading a book. No one else was about, though a murmur of voices and the sounds of machinery carried from other parts of the building. There was a strong smell of non-mineral oil, presumably used for lubrication rather than
cookery. Lighting was provided by the doorway, the stairwells, and a very bright tube above where the man sat. (‘I’ve never met a non-co yet,’ Suze had told me, ‘who was too proud to generate electricity, or too poor to steal it.’)
As the door swung back behind me, the man glanced up, laid down his pipe casually and kept his hand where it was, behind the sill of the desk. He eyed me warily as I walked up. He had a thin face and narrow beard, and was wearing a homespun cotton shirt.
‘Good afternoon, lady,’ he said.
‘Good afternoon, man,’ I replied with equal formality. ‘I wonder if I could speak to Dr Malley?’
He bristled. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. The muscles of his right arm tensed.
‘If he’s busy, I’ll wait,’ I said, glancing around as though looking for a seat.
‘It ain’t that,’ he said. ‘Waiting wouldn’t do no good. Dr Malley says he don’t want to see no more of you people.’
‘Any more of what people?’
He looked away, looked back defiantly.
‘Space people.’
Ah.
‘Listen, young man,’ I said. ‘I’ve come a long way to see Dr Malley. Even longer than you think. And I’m not going to be stopped by you, or even by whatever laughable weapon you have your hand on. Using these things fast takes practice, and I have a couple hundred years’ head start.’
Sheepishly, he withdrew his hand.
‘And now,’ I said politely, ‘I’d thank you to take me to see him.’
I sauntered behind his sullen walk, all the way up two flights of stairs and along a dim-lit corridor to a room on whose brass nameplate showed (among more curlicued foliage, within which the roman capitals lurked like ruins) the name of Dr I. K. Malley.
‘Knock and enter,’ I said quietly, and he did. I followed him into a small office with a wide window whose evidently thick and old plate glass distorted the outside view. Wooden shelving along the walls bowed under the weight of books and papers, which also partly covered the floor. The room smelled of old paper, worn carpet, pipe-smoke, whisky, and sweat. It had two chairs, one of them behind the desk, which was edge-on to the window. Hunched in it, looking up at us, was a man whose apparent age must have stabilized about thirty, but who had not touched an antigeriatric for at least a hundred years. His hair and stubbly beard were white, his skin dark and lined, his eyes grey, cold as a Martian winter.
‘I thought I
told
—’ he began. Then he looked at me and waved a hand with weary resignation. ‘It’s all right,’ he said in a dull voice. ‘It wouldn’t do any good, anyway. They’ll just keep coming.’ There was a half-empty bottle of whisky on the desk, and a full glass.
The young man went reluctantly out, scowling in response to my farewell smile. Malley turned to me and motioned to the room’s other seat, a worn leather armchair by the window. I told him my name and held out my hand. He looked slightly surprised, and stood up and shook it. His grip felt like an old leather glove fitted closely over a metal hand. He was tall, but stooped, and he wore an open-necked check cotton shirt and twill trousers. All his clothes seemed too wide for his girth and too short for his limbs. He folded himself back into his seat and leaned his elbows on the desk.
‘So what do you bastards want now?’ he said without preamble or apology. He took a sip of his drink, and hooded his eyes.
I shrugged and spread my hands. ‘Dr Malley,’ I said, ‘I must tell you I have very little idea what you’re talking about. I’m here on behalf of the Cassini Division of the Solar Defence Group, and I assure you that no one else has been sent to see you.’