Into Everywhere
Authors: Paul McAuley
This one is for Pat Cadigan, and (of course) for Georgina.
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
2. Wizards Of The Slime Planet
There were some days now when she didn’t think about the ghost in her head. Or there might be a moment when she’d wonder if it was asleep or awake, if it was looking out through her eyes, and then the moment would pass and she’d get on with whatever it was she happened to be doing. It hadn’t shown itself for eight years. It had receded into the background hum of her life. But then there was the day when it returned in all its terror and glory. Black lightning snapping in the cave of her skull. A thunderous swell obliterating all thought.
Lisa’s dog was nuzzling her neck when she came back to herself. She flapped a hand, trying to push him away or gather him close, she wasn’t sure. Pete sat back on his haunches and wordlessly barked, once, twice. She was sprawled in the yard, halfway between the house and the barn, looking up at the cloudless dark blue sky. Someone had hammered a nail into her skull, right between her eyes.
She pushed onto her elbows, managed to sit all the way up. A greasy swell of nausea washed through her and she rested her head between her knees for a minute or so. Her mouth tingled with a metallic taste like a battery’s kiss. The sharp pain in her head began to diffuse into a general skull-cramp; she noticed that her pipe wrench lay next to her. She’d been fixing something, a leak in the water supply to the hurklin pens. She’d gone to fetch the wrench from the toolbox in her pickup truck . . .
Pete told her that she had fallen over.
‘I’m okay now,’ Lisa said, although she was very fucking far from okay. She was frightened and confused and angry. After all this time it had happened again. After all this time her ghost had woken in thunder and lightning and had knocked her on her ass.
Later, she told her friend Bria that she didn’t know what had triggered it.
‘I haven’t been handling any especially weird shit. Just the usual tesserae, sympathy stones, so forth. And anyway, I haven’t had a client for two weeks now. More like three. I haven’t eaten anything I haven’t eaten a hundred times before, I’m clean and sober . . . I can’t figure out what I did to set it off.’
‘You sound like you’re trying to find some way of blaming yourself,’ Bria said.
They were sitting in Lisa’s kitchen, drinking coffee. Lisa dressed in her usual blue jeans and denim shirt, Bria in a pale green pants suit, caramel-coloured hair done up in a high curly ponytail. She’d been in a business meeting when Lisa had called, had insisted on driving over.
The two of them went way back. They had both come up and out to First Foot on the same shuttle trip, had both started out working as coders in the Crazy 88 Collective. Lisa’s freelance career had run onto the rocks, leaving her with a reputation as a brilliant eccentric whose best years were long behind her; Bria, ten years younger, with a relentless work ethic and good people skills, had founded one of the first code farms in Port of Plenty, was happily married with two kids. A rambling red-tiled house in the burbs, school runs, dinner parties, a subscription to the city’s theatre, weekends at the country club where she was attempting to reduce her golfing handicap with the focused zeal that characterised her work. The whole aspirational middle-class-professional bit. Lisa had once asked her friend if this was how she had imagined things turning out when she had won her emigration ticket; Bria had said that back in the day the so-called Wild West had opera houses and gas lighting, and wasn’t she dealing with weird alien shit every day, down on the code farm?
‘It’s been eight years since the last time. Eight years, three months, nine days. What I’m wondering,’ Lisa said, ‘is did Willie’s ghost give him a kick in the head too? I gave him a call, but it went straight to voicemail. So then I phoned around the hospitals and clinics. You know, just in case. No sign of him anywhere, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t zapped. Maybe he shrugged it off. Or he’s lying hurt somewhere . . .’
‘Have the two of you ever been affected at the same time?’
‘Sure. During the Bad Trip.’
‘Apart from that.’
‘Not that I know of. But Willie and I aren’t exactly close any more.’
Bria raised an eyebrow.
‘So he stops by now and then,’ Lisa said. ‘But he doesn’t tell me everything. I can’t help thinking he had some kind of accident. That maybe something happened to him and woke up his ghost, and that’s what woke up mine.’
‘He’s probably scratching around in the City of the Dead, out of phone range,’ Bria said. ‘Or he’s in the drunk tank after one of his parties.’
She didn’t have much sympathy for Lisa’s ex.
‘If Willie had been arrested I would probably know,’ Lisa said. ‘Because he would have asked me to bail him out.’
Willie had once bought a serious muscle car after making a good find, and a week later had totalled it during a street race in Felony Flats. He’d walked away with a broken collarbone, but the cops had busted him for dangerous driving and he’d served two months, six suspended. Willie was smart and funny and sweet, but he had poor impulse control and was about as dependable as the long-range weather forecast.
‘He’s like one of those cartoon characters,’ Bria said. ‘You smack him down with a hammer, he springs right back up. Forget about him, honey, and for once think about yourself. You had a shock. You need to rest. And you need to get yourself checked out. Seriously.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘If you’re worried about paying for it, don’t be. I’ll cover it.’
‘No need. I already had Doc Hendricks look me over.’
‘The old guy with the chicken farm?’
‘It’s also a clinic. And Doc Hendricks knows his stuff. He told me that it wasn’t a stroke or an epileptic fit. Nothing organic. As if I didn’t already know that. My ghost gave me a little kick, that’s all. The way it used to, the first few months after the Bad Trip. I don’t need to go to hospital. I don’t need any tests. I’m fine.’
Bria gave her a steady, serious look. ‘You’re very far from fine, honey. Otherwise you wouldn’t have called me.’
They pushed it back and forth. After Lisa refused to make an appointment with the consultant who’d tested her after the Bad Trip, no way was she going back to being a lab rat or to being zombified with anti-epileptic drugs, Bria changed tack, said that she was worried about Lisa being out here on her own.
‘I have Pete.’
‘I mean if it should happen again.’
‘This is the first time in more than eight years,’ Lisa said. ‘I really don’t think it’s going to happen again any time soon.’
But the flat fact was that she had no idea why the ghost in her head had woken up after so long. She didn’t know what it wanted; she didn’t even know exactly what it was. Despite the batteries of tests that she and Willie had put themselves through after the Bad Trip, hoping for a fix that had never materialised, no one could tell them whether they had been infected with an eidolon that had full agency, or some fragmented algorithm which threw random glitches. All she knew was that it was old and alien, like all the revenants and ruins on this old, haunted world, that it manifested as unusual activity in the temporal lobe of her brain, and that after eight years of inactivity, after she had begun to allow herself to hope that it might have faded away, it was back. It was awake again, fully present. It was as if something she couldn’t see was standing at her back. A visual stutter. A blind spot that jumped past something unimaginable.
Lisa didn’t tell Bria about that. She hadn’t talked about that aspect of her haunting with anyone except Willie. Maybe that was why she had felt the urge to get in touch with him: he was the only person who understood how it was to have something old and alien living inside your head, amongst your thoughts.
But Willie still wasn’t answering her texts and messages.
She told herself that her feeling that something awful had happened was just a hangover from the seizure, and tried to get back into her routine. Watering and feeding the hurklins. Mulching her vegetable beds and planting out eggplant and winter squash. Picking and canning tomatoes. For the first time in a couple of months she went to an AA meeting and testified and drank bad coffee and put some money in the hat. Keeping busy helped to cover up the hole in the world the seizure had made.
But then the geek police came, and everything changed again.
When the perimeter alert slammed down the pipe Tony Okoye was lying on his command couch and one of the hands was braiding his hair. He raised a finger to still the clever fingers of the man-shaped machine and said, ‘I hope this isn’t another cosmic-ray impact.’
‘Not this time,’ the ship’s bridle said.
‘Because if it is, I swear I will modify your detection filters with an axe.’
‘Then I’m almost glad I’m looking at an actual intruder,’ the bridle said, and opened an arc of windows in the dim warm air.
Tony sat up, bare-chested in lime-green ‘second skin’ shorts, pushing a fall of loose hair from his face as he studied multi-spectrum images, vectors, estimates of the intruder’s capability. She was real. She was big. A G-class frigate ten times the size of his C-class clipper, bristling with weapon pods and patches. She had come through the mirror less than two minutes ago, she was already driving straight for the slime planet, and she was displaying a police flag. CPF
Dauntless
.
‘What are the police doing here? Have they said what they want?’
‘They haven’t said anything. And they aren’t the police,’ the bridle said. ‘The
Dauntless
is a G-class frigate, but that G-class frigate is not the
Dauntless
. The configuration of her assets is wrong, and her flag’s certificate is a clever fake. Clever enough to fool the average freebooter, but not quite clever enough to fool me.’
