Into Everywhere (10 page)

‘Yeah?’

‘That stone Willie found? The one that started off this whole thing? I still have it.’

‘That’s him,’ Òrélolu told Tony.

‘The one with the cornrows?’

‘Danilo Evangalista. A real heartbreaker. He can sing, too. Wait until you hear him sing, cousin. If I wasn’t married . . .’

‘Oh, he’s luscious, no doubt,’ Tony said. He was a little drunk. Brandy at the Great House when he had met up with Òrélolu, and now gin flavoured with pine resin. ‘Is this why you brought me here? To see a little songbird who has turned your head?’

They were in a basement café in the Old Town quarter. Rough stone walls, wooden benches and tables, a toilet where you put used tissues in a bin instead of flushing them. Tony and Òrélolu sat in a booth whose original occupants had been evicted by the café’s owner; the man couldn’t stop telling them what an honour it was to have two such distinguished guests. The booth was to one side of the low stage, where a poet was machine-gunning staccato verses under a blue spotlight. The young singer sat with two men on the other side, tall and slender in a simple white shirt and black trousers.

‘I’ll introduce you,’ Òrélolu said. ‘We can have a drink together after his set.’

‘Whose idea was this, Òrélolu?’

Tony’s cousin shrugged. ‘You wanted to talk. Here is as good a place as any.’

‘Oh, Òrélolu, you were always such a bad liar,’ Tony said. ‘You know why? Because when you tell an untruth you always break eye contact. Also, pandering really isn’t your thing. So who put you up to it? Actually, I know. It was Ayo. Ah, and there we have it. Because now you are trying so very hard not to look away that you are staring at me without blinking. Ayo will not talk to me, but she feels sorry for me, and here we are. Well, you can tell her that I’m not looking for a boyfriend.’

Òrélolu smiled. ‘He really is a good singer.’

‘I would rather talk about Opeyemi.’

‘To what point? The decision has been made. Nothing can undo it.’

Tony ignored that. ‘He has been waiting for an excuse to shut me down. And when he finally finds one, he uses it to wreck what could have been a great chance for our family to turn its fortune around.’

‘The thing is, T, it isn’t all about you,’ Òrélolu said.

‘It isn’t? Then why am I the one who has lost his fucking ship?’

‘I don’t know how to put this delicately,’ Òrélolu said. ‘So I will speak plainly, and you will have to forgive my bluntness. There is a majority in the family who believe that Ayo has been taking us in the wrong direction. That she has been taking too many risks. That she has been gambling with our fortune and reputation. You know how badly she was affected by the death of Ngoze. Some say that she has not been thinking straight ever since.’

‘I know that she threw herself into her work. And that she resolved that it was time the family took back its rightful place in Commons affairs.’

‘You’ve been away a long time, cousin. She has become somewhat erratic. Careless, even. She has made some bad decisions. People are rightly worried.’

‘Are you one of these people?’

‘You know very well that I keep out of that kind of thing,’ Òrélolu said. ‘I care about patients, not politics.’

He was almost exactly Tony’s age, a calm plump man dressed in the local fashion – homespun wool trousers dyed purple by a lichen extract, an embroidered cotton shirt, a goatskin waistcoat with horn buttons. They had grown up together, and after two years away Tony was surprised and grateful that they were still good friends, despite the different paths their lives had taken. Òrélolu had married three years ago, he and his husband had a son, conceived using the sperm-fusion technique and carried to term by a surrogate mother, and he had devoted himself to his work at the clinic where scions of honourable families and the rich suffering from sleepy sickness lived out the last of their days. The place where Ayo’s eldest son, Ngoze, had died.

Tony said, ‘For someone who claims to have nothing to do with our business, you seem to know an awful lot about it.’

‘Even if you have no influence over the weather, you cannot ignore it,’ Òrélolu said. ‘Ayo has lost crucial support in the past two years. Your adventure brought things to a head. Even those who still support her felt it was a step too far. Running contraband and cutting deals in the shade is one thing. Meddling in dangerous Elder Culture stuff is quite another.’

‘I heard all that from the doubters, and I am sorry to hear it from you,’ Tony said. His glass was unaccountably empty; he clicked his fingers to summon a waiter.

‘I am merely reporting how things are,’ Òrélolu said blandly. ‘I am sorry you will not accept it.’

‘How things are, I have been given a hundred days to prove that this “meddling” could increase our fortune and standing,’ Tony said. ‘And I will. Don’t doubt that I will. Despite the murder of their leader, my wizards are pressing on with their work. And Aunty Jael is doing all she can to help.’

But digging out the information from the stromatolites had turned out to be extraordinarily complicated. According to the wizards and Aunty Jael, sequences packed into the archival genetics were organised in overlapping frames, which meant that they could be read in hundreds of different ways, producing hundreds of different code strings. And they were also badly corrupted. The stromatolites were millions of years old, and although the microorganisms that had built them were highly modified and possessed a variety of proof-reading and post-replication mechanisms to ensure accurate copying of the data stored in their archival genetics, as well as the data transmission system that cross-checked and corrected copy families in different colonies, serious errors had accumulated. Information had been erased, or had been imperfectly copied, or had been compromised by insertion of multiple copies of nonsense sequences. Two weeks after they had started work, the wizards were still separating signal from noise. Only then, Aunty Jael said, could they begin to attempt a full translation of the archival genetics, and try to understand what it contained.

‘At least she sees the importance of what we found,’ Tony told Òrélolu. ‘She knows what is at stake. But no one listens to her. They treat her as if she is just another hand.’

‘I know that she is so much more than that,’ Òrélolu said. ‘I owe her my career. She encouraged my interest in biomedicine. She gave me a space for my studies. Without her I would not be where I am now.’

‘Oh, I did not mean you, Òrélolu. You are one of the good guys.’ Tony drank half his new drink and said, ‘So how are things with you? With your work? There was a D-class barge on the field when I touched down. Lowloaders were trundling hibernaculae out of the hold, and there were a dozen coffins stacked on the whitetop. New patients for the clinic arriving, I suppose, and the dead returning to their families. How many are you treating now? How many could be saved, if the doubters would allow my wizards to work as they should?’

‘I admire your ambition, cousin,’ Òrélolu said. ‘But it is not as simple as you seem to think. Even if there is a clue to the origin of sleepy sickness in those stromatolites of yours, it will take years to develop a cure.’

‘Yes, and thanks to Opeyemi we have only a hundred days. And he didn’t order the so-called execution of Fred Firat because he believed the man was a traitor. He did it to sabotage the work. He wanted us to fail.’

‘Do you know how many wizards claim that they are close to finding a cure?’ Òrélolu said, with a spark of exasperation.

‘Too many, I suppose. But the information that the stromatolites contain is old. Old enough to be the common link to all other Elder Culture code. That has to count for something.’

‘Your sudden faith in science is touching,’ Òrélolu said. ‘And I wish I had the power to help you. I really do. But I chose to take a different path.’

‘Yes, you chose to help others rather than our family.’

The words tasted bitter, and Tony regretted them at once.

‘I always hope that by helping others I am also helping our family regain its honour,’ Òrélolu said mildly. ‘Now, hush. Let’s not argue. He’s about to sing.’

The young man, Danilo Evangalista, had taken his place behind a small upright harmonium. Glass beads woven into the cornrows that criss-crossed his shapely skull sparkled in blue light as he bent over the keyboard and picked out a brief melody before he began to sing: an old choro standard about songs so good and true they outshone the faults of their singers.

‘So simple, and so lovely,’ Òrélolu said, when the young man had finished.

‘I told you. And you can tell Ayo. Thanks but no thanks.’

‘You feel wounded. It’s only natural. But try not to see everyone as your enemy.’

‘It is hard not to see those who would take away my ship and my work as friends. Opeyemi has no imagination, Òrélolu. He does not understand what Ayo and I are trying to do.’

‘Is that ship really more important than your home and your family?’ Òrélolu said. And then: ‘Wait. What’s wrong?’

Tony was pushing to his feet. He had recognised the introduction to the young man’s next song. ‘The Sky Has Closed Over Us.’ A bright breezy tune with lyrics lamenting the cruel separation of two lovers after Skadi had been cut off from interworld trade because of the so-called treachery of his family. After his father had been killed during negotiations with the Red Brigade. After his mother’s so-called suicide.

The singer fell silent when Tony stepped onto the stage. Someone in the audience laughed nervously. Tony mashed the harmonium’s keyboard with his fist. The squealing discord echoed in the silence at his back.

‘You have no right,’ he said. ‘You have no right to sing that song.’

‘What would you have me sing instead?’

The young man’s gaze was level and calm. There were flecks of gold in his warm brown eyes.

‘Sing something happy, goddamn you,’ Tony said. His sight swam with stupid tears. ‘Stop trying to break my heart.’

‘It looks like an ordinary tessera,’ Lisa told Bria. ‘But I’m pretty certain that it’ll yield Ghajar narrative code when I tickle it. Brittany kept it in the safe of the bar where she works – she’d had some jewellery stolen from her motel room. When Nevers and his Jackaroo pal came knocking, they didn’t think to look there.’

‘And then she sold it to you,’ Bria said.

‘She loaned it to me. And in return, when this is over, I’ll sell it for her on a zero-commission basis. We co-signed an agreement. One of her customers, he used to be a lawyer, drew it up. I’m not certain it’ll hold up in court, but I intend to stick to it.’

‘Drew it up on what, a napkin?’

‘Her tablet. Brittany printed out two copies, had a couple of customers witness them, gave me one. She’s smarter than she lets on.’

Lisa was at a roadside food truck near the shuttle terminal, talking to Bria on her new phone and sipping strong earthy Ethiopian coffee from a paper cup. Pete was sitting in the loadbed of the pickup truck, watching traffic scooting along the dusty two-lane blacktop. A flat-roofed factory building sprawled on the other side; beyond it, the level plain of the shuttle field stretched towards foothills shimmering in the deep orange light of the setting sun. A single ship hung above the field – a bulbous, spiny S-class scow forty storeys tall. Ghajar ships, revived and repurposed, weren’t an uncommon sight these days. Governments and private companies used them to transport people and goods between Earth and the Jackaroo gift worlds, and the worlds of the New Frontier. Anyone with a couple of thousand dollars could afford a ticket. But this one nagged at Lisa’s attention – perhaps her ghost was interested in it for some reason. The damn thing had woken up again, a spooky presence at her back, always just out of sight.

Bria was saying, ‘The girlfriend sounds like a bill of goods.’

‘I liked her. And she loved Willie, in her way. That was one thing he was good at. Getting inside your heart.’

There was a pause, and then Bria said, ‘Have you been drinking?’

‘Not really,’ Lisa said, and knew it sounded evasive. ‘Just this one beer. To be sociable while I had my heart to heart with Brittany. Right now I’m sipping some damn fine coffee made by an Ethiopian woman who was in Ethiopia just three months ago.’

‘Because you sound a trifle manic.’

‘Maybe that’s because I’m absolutely, one hundred per cent certain that Willie found the place where we were struck down. Not that stupid hole in the ground, but the real deal. Wherever it is, whatever it is, he couldn’t afford to excavate it on his own, so he partnered up with this outfit his girlfriend told me about. Outland Archaeological Services. I just now paid a visit to their offices. Police tape across the door, no one home. This guy in the insurance brokers next door told me they’d been closed for several days, and the police had been around first thing yesterday. He said they carried out everything in the place. And he also said, get this, that there was a Jackaroo avatar poking around. Adam Nevers’s sidekick. First they raid Outland’s offices. Then, when they couldn’t find anything, they go after Brittany and me.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them,’ Bria said.

‘I googled them,’ Lisa said. ‘Turns out they’re funded by this nonprofit outfit, the Omega Point Foundation.’

‘The one owned by Ada Morange?’

‘She doesn’t exactly own it. But her company, Karyotech Pharma, is its major benefactor.’

Ada Morange was famous in the way that Albert Einstein and Abe Lincoln were famous. The kind of fame that was in the air, in the water. She had been involved in the discovery of the first Ghajar ships, the ones that a kid infected with some kind of eidolon had called down to a ruined spaceport on Mangala – people called it a spaceport, although no one could say exactly what it was. A place those two ships knew, at any rate. And a couple of years later Ada Morange’s company had located the first orbital sargasso. She was one of the richest people in human history, and most of her wealth was channelled into the Omega Point Foundation, which subsidised big astronomy projects, exploration of the new worlds of the New Frontier and research into Elder Culture technology, artificial intelligence and life extension, and promoted the idea that humanity could bootstrap its way to transcendence without the help of the Jackaroo.