Into Everywhere (22 page)

She looked exhausted. Worn down and overburdened. She had agreed to the freebooting venture that had culminated in the work on the stromatolites, and now she had to deal with the fallout of the raid, and with Opeyemi’s self-righteous crusade to defend the family’s honour. Her authority had been weakened. She could no longer protect Tony because she could no longer protect herself.

While the city’s emergency services had been dealing with the attack on the refinery, raiders had infiltrated the city and headed for Danilo’s apartment building. Security forces had spotted them entering; there had been a firefight; the raiders had triggered explosives they had been carrying. Three city blocks had been obliterated and more than five hundred people had been killed or badly injured. Danilo had survived only because his bodyguard had ignored Tony’s orders and had taken him to one of the deep shelters instead of his apartment.

It was the only bright spot in what was otherwise a comprehensive fiasco. Tony had been interrogated by Opeyemi, and then interrogated all over again by the family council. There was general agreement that the raiders had wanted to snatch the stromatolites and the results of the wizards’ research, but no one apart from Tony believed that they were part of the Red Brigade – the dead they had left behind had lacked any kind of identification – and Opeyemi had more or less accused him of collaboration. Although they had been carried out in private and Tony had sworn her to secrecy, Opeyemi knew all about Aunty Jael’s tests. He said that the eidolon which had infected Tony had affected his behaviour and judgement, said that Tony’s failure to inform the family council about it was an irresponsible and wholly selfish decision that proved he was unfit to serve in any capacity.

Tony’s offer to chase after the raiders had been refused; Ayo had told him to admit his guilt and take his punishment. If he kept a low profile and showed suitable contrition, she said, it was quite possible that he would be forgiven.

‘Opeyemi has other ideas,’ Tony said. ‘He wants me to stand before a police tribunal and be prosecuted for sedition. He wants to sacrifice me to save the family’s reputation. You would think, sister, that I had stolen the fucking freighter.’

It was clear now that the K-class freighter which had landed the day before the attack had been hijacked by the raiders. They had launched the escape pods as the freighter had approached Skadi, and the pods had followed long spiral orbits that had intersected with the planet’s atmosphere eighteen hours later. The police were still trying to find out why traffic control had failed to spot this manoeuvre. And at the end of the raid, several hands acting as suicide bombers had damaged the only police ship and killed eight and wounded twenty more in the barracks and the control tower, and the raiders had sneaked back aboard the freighter and booted.

Tony’s suggestion that Aunty Jael had infiltrated traffic control and prevented it spotting the incoming pods, that she had used the hands to kill Junot and the police guards and attack the space field, and had told the raiders that he was living in Danilo’s apartment, was comprehensively ridiculed. She was a laminated person, unable to show any kind of initiative. She had not escaped; she had been stolen. The family’s official story, given to the police and distributed across news feeds, was that Eli Tanjung and the two missing wizards had been traitors, communicating with the raiders and feeding them inside information, and that Tony was entirely responsible for this catastrophic failure in security.

So he was exiled to the farm, accompanied by Lancelot Askia. In case, Tony supposed, he tried to poison the fish or lace the banana crop with hallucinogens. It was a relief to get away from the Great House and his family, the looks and pointed silences, the whispers at his back, but he had little to do but brood in the office he had appropriated from the farm’s supervisor, or wander the catwalks above the tanks and hydroponic platforms, where tomato vines, yams and banana plants, queen’s pineapple, efo tete and ugo grew in the sharp light of grow-lamps. The secret flicker of carp in the green depths of the tanks; a hundred hungry mouths kissing the skin of the water when they were fed. The taste of a freshly picked apple banana. The calm odour of growing plants in the damp warmth. Moments of pleasure in the desolation of his misery.

He went for long walks in the snowy plantation. Rows of tall pines stretching away in cathedral quiet. The sun pale and heatless in the white sky. Tracks of animals and biochines printed here and there in the snow. The crackle of ice crystals breaking under his boots. The smoke of his breath.

Lancelot Askia followed a dozen or so metres behind, a rifle slung on his shoulder and a pistol at his hip. Tony was unarmed. He was not even allowed to carry a knife.

Sometimes he fantasised that Opeyemi had given the order for his execution. A merciful bullet in the back of his head as he plodded through the snow. The crack of the shot echoing off through the trees, vanishing into the rapt chill silence.

Sometimes he fantasised about overpowering the man and escaping. But where would he escape to?

Sometimes it felt as if there was a third person walking with them. The feeling was so strong that Tony could not help looking around, seeing only his guard and the sentinel ranks of pine trees.

Once he came across a patch of trees that had been colonised by a congregation of kites. Clusters of the black diamond-shaped creatures clung to the treetops, overlapping each other like badly laid flagstones. Tony stepped towards the nearest tree and walked all the way around it, studying the kites. They were mostly motionless, but now and then an edge of a wing would ruffle, or a whip-like clasper would coil a little tighter, or an eye or three would extrude, blink, and withdraw.

The odour of them was like burned vinegar in the cold still air.

He clapped his hands. Softly and tentatively at first; then, after nothing happened, as hard as he could. Cupping his palms and smashing them together, the impact stinging under his gloves. Above him, several kites shuffled and stirred. One raised a ventral clasper to reveal its secondary sensory cluster: white stones randomly set in creased black leather.

Tony laughed, clapped some more. He was seized by a careless exhilaration. Maybe the kites would attack him, maybe they wouldn’t, but in the moment it felt as if he had regained control of his fate. He was so keyed up that he actually jumped when Lancelot Askia’s hand fell on his shoulder. It was the first time the man had touched him.

‘We must leave,’ Lancelot Askia said. ‘They could kill us if they startle.’

‘They don’t care,’ Tony said, and raised his voice. ‘They. Don’t. Care.’

‘Please,’ the man said firmly, and tried to pull Tony away.

Tony lashed out and smacked him in the face, a hard blow that sent him reeling back. He wiped a bright bubble of blood from his nose and stared at Tony with a hard loathing. His eyes were small and dark, set close together under a heavy brow.

‘I didn’t ask to look after you,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who infected me with a fucking alien ghost. I should kill you for that. But unlike you, I respect the chain of command. I have been given my orders, and I will carry them out as best as I can.’

Tony realised that the man had not been sent here to spy on him or kill him. No, Opeyemi wanted to make sure he did not try to commit suicide before the police tribunal arrived.

He said, ‘Why are you even alive? Why weren’t you in the laboratory? Why weren’t you killed like the others?’

Lancelot Askia glanced up as a couple of kites stirred high overhead, looked back at Tony. ‘If I have to knock you out and carry you, I will.’

‘If you lay a hand on me again, I will have you skinned for your insolence.’

Lancelot Askia stepped forward. Their faces were a handspan apart, the clouds of their breath mingling. ‘No, you won’t,’ he said. ‘Because you don’t have any power any more. Now let’s take this pity party home.’

Lisa perched on the hood of her pickup truck, peeling an orange with her clasp knife, watching the first sliver of the sun simmer at the horizon, silhouetting the mounds and arthritic coral trees of the City of the Dead. She was bone-tired and stiffly aching after the long drive and a few hours of snatched sleep on stony ground, was trying to ignore the feeling that something was in the cab, sitting behind the steering wheel, staring at her through the windshield. Light sparked off a distant string of Boxbuilder ruins that crested a low ridge. A flock of harmless little eidolons that had crept out to watch her in the night suddenly swirled into the air and fled into a nearby crevice like flakes of burned paper sucked down a flue. Something whoop-whoop-whooped close by; in the middle distance something else cleared its throat with a brisk pneumatic rattle.

The alien desert waking around her, ancient and vast and full of mystery.

First Foot huddled so close to its cool red dwarf star that it should have been tidally locked like Earth’s Moon, its orbital period matching its rotation so that one face was always turned towards the star. Sunrise was a daily miracle courtesy of the unknown Elder Culture which had spun up the planet’s rotational speed around the time a long drought had been driving the ancestors of hominins into the plains of Africa.

Lisa remembered trips with Willie in the first flush of their marriage. Banging across stony flats in the old Holden Colorado, soundtracked by the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and the Grateful Dead. Willie grokked the music from three or four generations ago. He said that he had an old soul, claimed to be the reincarnation of the singer Gram Parsons. He’d had a chart drawn up by a Tibetan monk, or so he said, that tracked his soul back to when it had previously entered the bardo: 19 September 1973, when Parsons had died in the Hi-Desert Memorial Hospital in Joshua Tree National Monument, California. Parsons’s friends had hijacked his body and attempted to cremate it out in the desert, and that was what he wanted when the time came, Willie said. Forget some sterile crematorium oven. He wanted a pyre out in the desert. Wanted to mingle his molecules with earth and sky.

He liked to speculate about whether the souls of people who died on First Foot stayed there, or if they transmigrated back to Earth. He wondered if human beings shared souls with Elder Culture species. ‘We could have been Ghostkeepers in former lives, Lize. Maybe that’s why we’re drawn to the City of the Dead.’

Lisa remembered their stoned, intense conversations under the huge desert night sky. Their lovemaking on a blanket by the camp fire. The prickle of Willie’s beard. The taste of his sweet breath. She remembered falling asleep with him under alien stars. And she remembered the long quiet days fossicking amongst the tombs.

There were millions of them in the City of the Dead, scattered across fifty thousand square kilometres. Built from small round-edged clay bricks that some believed had been excreted by the creatures that had created them, the so-called Ghostkeepers. No one knew if they really were tombs. Although they appeared to memorialise fragments of the lives of their builders, they might be temporary shelters, like Boxbuilder ruins, or works of art or religion, or the equivalent of the cells created by wasps or bees, a vast nest that had spread across the desert for five thousand years, until the Ghostkeepers had suffered the equivalent of colony collapse and vanished.

Willie had taught her tomb taxonomy. Their different sizes and shapes. How some clustered close while others were spaced in radial patterns with teasing asymmetries. Lisa had learned about the plants and animals of the desert, too: a patchwork of clades from the various worlds of the various Elder Cultures which, one after the other, had inhabited First Foot. She had studied the morphology of the desert. Alluvial fans. Bajadas. Hoodoos. Blowouts. Ventifacts. Rimrock. The difference between calcrete layers and caliche. Mesas and buttes. A mesa is wider than it is high. A butte is higher than it is wide.

Most of the tombs were small, and most had collapsed or been buried by wind-blown sand that over thousands of years had cemented into friable rock. In certain places, tombs had been built on older tombs, creating tells ten or twenty strata deep. Most were empty, but fragments of Elder Culture technology, usually sympathy stones or the mica chips that contained the entangled pairs of electrons that underpinned q-phone technology, could be found in some, and tesserae were embedded in the walls of others. No one knew if the tesserae had been created by the Ghostkeepers, or if the Ghostkeepers had excavated them from ruins left by other Elder Cultures and used them as decoration or markers for reproductive fitness. Almost all of them were inert and of only archaeological interest; those that still generated active eidolons were highly prized.

Like all tomb raiders, Lisa and Willie had eked out a living from sales of mundane finds while dreaming of discovering the kind of jackpot that would kickstart a new industry or technology and make them so rich that they would never have to work again. They sifted through the middens of abandoned hive-rat nests – the fierce little creatures dug deep and sometimes brought up artefacts. They found their way into intact chambers where eidolons might kindle from shadows and lamplight. When everything else failed, they sank shafts into the mounds of collapsed tombs. Willie disliked digging. Not just because it was hard work, although that was a consideration, but because it disturbed what he called ‘the flow’.

The City of the Dead was a sargasso of history, according to him, with strange tides and currents, backwaters and eddies. Everything flowing into everything else.

If they found no intact tombs or abandoned nests, Willie preferred to dowse rather than dig. He would wander over the parched landscape with two lengths of copper wire bent into a pair of L-rods, delicately pinching the short arms between thumbs and forefingers and narrowly watching the quiver and dip of the long arms. Circling a spot when the rods began to twitch, insisting that Lisa start digging if they violently see-sawed.

Willie’s dowsing had a surprisingly good hit rate – slightly better than chance, according to Lisa’s Chi-squared tests – but he preferred spelunking, and so did Lisa. Finding their way into spaces untouched for thousands of years, where the psychic traces of the creatures that had built them yet remained. She remembered spiral tombs augered into the earth. She remembered labyrinths of broken stone. She remembered one huge, cool, bottle-shaped chamber lit by a shaft of sunlight from a high crevice. As Willie had climbed down the swaying rope ladder, orange fronds clumped in the splash of sunlight on the floor had suddenly broken up and scurried off in every direction, seeking the safety of shadows. A kind of colonial beetle-thing, it turned out, with symbiotic plants growing on its shells. Lisa remembered another chamber, this one long and low, where eidolons had exploded around them like bats: after they’d sold the tesserae that generated them, she and Willie had lived high on the hog for two months.