Into Everywhere (12 page)

‘The Jackaroo gave us wormholes and shuttles,’ he said, ‘and we understand those because, hey, shuttles are basically big old spaceships, and we already had crude spaceships when the Jackaroo made contact. And although we didn’t know how to open wormholes, we had theories about them, so the idea that they allow near-instantaneous travel to every part of the Milky Way wasn’t new or startling. It’s the same with most Elder Culture tech. It’s the kind of stuff we might have come up with, in time. But there are a few artefacts that are so weird we barely recognise them as artefacts, and can’t begin to understand their function, and it’s not much of a leap to believe that there’s stuff we don’t even recognise as technology. Stuff so advanced that it makes us look like insects walking through the interface of a qube. At best we might glimpse a bare flicker of light, but we’d have no way of knowing what it means.’

He could happily elaborate his ideas about hyper-evolved Elder Cultures for hours, said that it was quite possible that there were aliens far more advanced than the Jackaroo – civilisations that could harness the entire energy output of stars, construct megastructures like Dyson spheres and stellar engines, manipulate space-time, and organise information flow across the galaxy or even the entire universe. These beings, Cho said, would be like gods. Incomprehensible, unknowable, unseeable.

‘I don’t mean that they look and behave so differently we think they’re animals, or biochines, or like the trees you have here,’ he said. ‘If they are trees.’

‘We call them trees,’ Tony said. ‘Because that’s what they are.’

‘Well, they look more like giant kelp to me, or big mops stuck in the ground and spray-painted unnatural shades of yellow and orange. This world, it’s like it’s always autumn. You know? The chill in the air, the colours of the vegetation. Or what passes for vegetation. But the angle of light, the verticality of it, is tropical. It’s a weird combination. Anyway, the kelp-mop-tree-things, they could be an Elder Culture species, communing through what passes for their root systems, through chemicals they release into the air. Thinking really slow thoughts that take decades to complete. But mistaking them for trees when really they’re sentient beings is only a category error. Trying to detect and understand a truly advanced civilisation would be a completely different order of difficulty. And that’s what makes it so exciting,’ Cho said.

He was not interested in the uses of knowledge; he was interested only in how it confirmed or changed his theories of how the world worked. A common failing in wizards, who dosed themselves with drugs that accentuated obsessive-compulsive traits, and infected themselves with memes and partial eidolons to help them intuit the workings of Elder Culture algorithms. Unlike Fred Firat, who’d struck Tony as a sturdily practical sort, Cho Wing-James treated the stromatolites’ archival genetics as an intricate and fascinating puzzle rather than a library of ancient and potentially valuable secrets. He and his crew had squandered days studying some kind of Ghajar algorithm lodged in the magnetite arrays of the stromatolites; Cho had claimed that it might have been some kind of translation tool left over from an attempt by the Elder Culture to crack the archival genetics, but nothing had come of it.

At last, frustrated by his inability to persuade Cho to focus on finding something, anything, that could persuade the family council to extend its deadline, Tony took the wizard up to the clinic to show him what was at stake. It was Danilo Evangalista’s idea, actually. After listening to Tony vent one day, the young singer had asked if Cho had ever seen the effects of sleepy sickness. It turned out that the wizard hadn’t. It wasn’t something that had ever interested him, he said.

Tony was astonished. ‘Even though I hauled you and your friends out to the slime planet because Fred Firat claimed that the stromatolites would help us understand meme plagues?’

‘Oh, I know that Fred believed that,’ Cho said airily. ‘But I was only ever interested in the actual science.’

‘Sleepy sickness is an actual thing, too,’ Tony said. ‘It’s time you realised that.’

Tony, Danilo and Cho Wing-James travelled out to the clinic the next day, flying north in a spinner helmed by Lancelot Askia – a condition imposed by Opeyemi in return for permission to take the wizard on the little trip. Danilo pressed close to the transparent aluminium of the spinner’s bubble, pointing out sights to Cho as the spinner rose above the close-packed roofs of the city and flew out over patchwork farms and pine plantations, and the orange and yellow native forest climbing the slopes of the foothills. Snowy mountain peaks were chalkily sketched against the blue horizon, the boundary between the northern edge of Skadi’s habitable strip of land and the vast ice cap that stretched away towards the north pole.

Tony was charmed by Danilo’s innocent delight in these vistas. The singer wore the white fur jacket that Tony had given him for this trip, his long legs encased in tight red jeans. When he looked around and asked if that was the clinic ahead, his smile turned Tony’s heart.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘It’s bigger than I thought it would be,’ Danilo said.

The spinner was flying above a lake towards rugged cliffs divided by the white ribbon of a waterfall. The heaped geodesic domes of the clinic straddled the swift river that fed the waterfall, glinting in cold sunlight and caught between steep slopes of yellow forest.

‘When I had a work placement here, eight years ago,’ Tony said, catching Cho’s gaze, ‘there were just over three hundred patients. That was bad enough. Now there are more than two thousand. All of them children, sent here from every world in the Commons. And all of them will die here, for want of a cure.’

Òrélolu greeted them at the landing stage and took them up to his office, where he and several staff members explained that the clinic had been founded by Ayo after the death of her eldest son, and gave a short description of its work and research programme. Cho sat through this quietly, but said at the end that he was pleased to see that they were using randomised trials. ‘A lot of what you people call science is indistinguishable from magic. Claims of secret knowledge and special talents, all kinds of weird rites and ceremonies, and so forth. It’s so rare and refreshing to find this kind of old-school methodology out here. Hopeful, even.’

‘Aunty Jael must take most of the credit for that,’ Òrélolu said. ‘She devised the experimental programmes. But despite all our work, we still have no idea what causes sleepy sickness, or how it is transmitted. And although we have prolonged the lives of some of our patients, we have yet to cure a single one.’

‘That is why your work is so important,’ Tony told Cho. ‘We hope that it will give Òrélolu and his crew a new direction.’

As they set out across a covered walkway that swooped above the river, linking the stark cube of the administration block with the accommodation domes, Òrélolu took Tony’s arm and said, ‘I hear that you have moved out of the Great House and moved in with Danilo. Is it love, or just a silly stunt to piss off Opeyemi?’

‘I can assure you that there is nothing silly about it.’

‘You shouldn’t use the boy to score petty points, Tony.’

‘You set us up, cousin. And I am glad, now, that you did. And grateful. But frankly? Our relationship is none of your business.’

‘Then why did you bring him here to rub my nose in it?’

‘This visit was Danilo’s idea, actually. And it was also his idea to come along. I told him that he would see things that might break his heart; he said that if he shed a tear or two it would help my pet wizard to understand the reality of this. He is tougher than he looks.’

‘Even so, he is just an ordinary kid,’ Òrélolu said. ‘Suppose Opeyemi decides to get at you by hurting him?’

‘I will make sure he won’t,’ Tony said. ‘Oh, and by the way? The sex is amazing.’

They entered an observation cubicle raised high in the side of one of the domes. Below, fifty or so children shambled about the black-sand floor. Some dressed in pyjamas or cotton gowns, some naked. Some moving in little groups, some following solitary paths, some standing still, staring off at something beyond the walls of the dome.

All were pre-adolescents between ten and fourteen, and all were in the second stage of sleepy sickness. To begin with, sufferers began to sleep for longer and longer, eventually passing into a state of unconsciousness that lasted for as long as forty days. Most woke and showed no other symptoms, but one in a hundred developed aberrant behaviour similar to sleepwalking, becoming increasingly withdrawn until at last lapsing into a catatonic state and shortly afterwards dying.

Òrélolu told Cho Wing-James that the patients in this dome were local children whose parents had volunteered them for tests and experimental drugs and other treatments. Therapies developed here, he said, were used to treat children of parents who could afford to send them to Skadi.

‘So basically, the rich kids benefit from their suffering,’ Cho said, seeming more amused than angry.

‘And the local children benefit from care they could not otherwise afford,’ Òrélolu said.

‘I guess I have a hard time understanding it because we don’t have your kind of social hierarchy on Earth,’ Cho said. ‘The honourable families thing, and so on. But you’d have a much bigger sample group, and a better chance of finding an effective treatment, if all of your patients were treated in the same way.’

‘We hope that your work will give us a much better chance of finding a treatment that would benefit everyone,’ Tony said.

‘Including your family,’ Cho said. ‘A cure for sleepy sickness would be worth a tidy sum.’

‘Perhaps we would give it away, increasing our reputation instead of our wealth,’ Tony said, and half-believed it. The clinic was a reliable source of off-world income, but a selfless act would do more to repair the damage to the family’s standing amongst the other honourable families than any amount of money.

Òrélolu picked up the thread of his lecture, telling Cho Wing-Jones that sleepwalkers kept in isolation soon died. They were obligately gregarious, he said, forming gangs or tribes with unclear affiliations, marking their territories with piss and daubs of excrement, stronger gangs attacking weaker ones, weaker ones attacking singletons. The aggression was mostly low-level but sometimes flared into serious fights. Sleepwalkers could be badly injured if hands controlled by the clinic’s staff failed to intervene quickly enough.

‘But at least the sleepwalkers’ behaviour has counterparts in ordinary human society,’ Òrélolu said. ‘The final stage is worse because that is where the real madness lurks. Let me show you.’

Another dome, this one cupping a bell of dim red light, its floor a maze of crooked tunnels pieced from scraps of plastic and foam sheeting. The patients who inhabited this maze were in the terminal stage of their illness. They spent their time entirely inside their tunnels, rebuilding them from within and daubing them with patterns made from their own excrement.

‘We have been able to extend the sleepwalking phase of the illness by several months, but every patient eventually enters the final catatonic stage, and its course is remorselessly swift,’ Òrélolu said, and called up images of naked and emaciated children, blank faces under tangles of filthy hair. Eventually, they fell into a permanent stupor, he said. They stopped eating and drinking; even if they were force-fed and attached to drips they quickly died.

Tony felt the same queasy mix of pity and disgust that had gripped him during the long weeks he’d spent as an intern at the clinic, part of his education in the family business. The sleepwalkers were children, but they were no longer human. They were running an alien algorithm in their brains. They were trying to express alien thoughts, alien behaviour. Whatever they had once been had been fragmented, overwritten. You never got used to that.

Danilo put his arm around Tony’s shoulders, asked him if he was all right.

‘I’m remembering how it was when I worked here. Nothing seems to have changed.’

Lancelot Askia was staring at them, his fists jammed in the slant pockets of his leather jacket, his pistol holstered at his hip. Tony stared back until the man looked away.

‘Let me try the thing we discussed,’ Danilo said, and stepped away and turned his back, standing quiet and still while Òrélolu told Cho Wing-James about the characteristic long slow waves in the brains of sleepwalkers about to enter the catatonic phase. With his back still turned, Danilo began to sing a slow, aching song about a mother who gave up her sick son to the clinic and came to visit him every day, until at last she realised that she no longer remembered what her son had been like before he had fallen ill, and wished that she had never come at all. He sang with his fists clenched and quivering under his chin, his clear voice resonant in the small space. Tony and the others – even Lancelot Askia, his arms folded sternly across his chest – listened in silence. When the song ended and Danilo turned and sketched a small bow, Cho Wing-James gave Tony a long, thoughtful look before returning to the discussion about the sleepwalkers’ neural activity.

The next day, in Aunty Jael’s laboratory, the wizard told Tony that his crew wanted to make another attempt to crack the Ghajar algorithm they had isolated from the magnetite arrays. ‘We will run copies in the ablated shells of a wide variety of eidolons, and compare their behaviour with controls containing native algorithms. The differences between Ghajar hybrids and controls will help us understand how to control the algorithm. And then, hopefully, we will be able to use it to explore the archival genetics.’

‘You are still assuming the algorithm is a translation tool,’ Tony said, with the sinking feeling that this was another frivolous diversion from the main task.

‘If it turns out to be something else, we will go back to trying to build our own translation tool,’ Cho said. ‘But this could be the kind of quick and dirty fix you have been urging us to try.’

The experiment was as strange and solemn as an ancient religious ritual. The lights in the work space were dimmed. The bubble aquarium tank that housed the stromatolites glowed like a cauldron. Flickering columns of glyphs cascaded through windows as the wizards, robed in their white coats, chanted obscure instructions and readouts, and in the centre of their rough circle the smoky shadows of ablated eidolons flickered as the Ghajar algorithm was downloaded into them. Up in the walkway with Aunty Jael’s hand, Tony held his breath, felt his blood tingle and his hair stir. But the eidolons remained stubbornly inactive: either the interface protocols were incorrect, or the algorithm the wizards had inserted into them was so badly corrupted that it was no longer functional.