Into Everywhere (26 page)

Sonny Singer had always intimidated her. He’d been a dentist before he’d come up and out, was the most intelligent and least predictable of the road dogs, his laid-back Southern charm masking an indelible meanness. He never forgot a slight, talked down to everyone, especially people he suspected might be brighter than he was, and knew exactly when and how to twist the knife of his scorn.

He looked at Lisa and said, ‘You know who Willie called when he was in trouble? Here’s a clue: it wasn’t you.’

‘But here I am.’ The itch was stronger now, and it had a direction. ‘I know you’ve been trying to do right by him, and I want to help any way I can.’

‘Exactly what did you tell her, Bear?’ Sonny said.

‘She’s his old lady,’ Bear said again.

‘Maybe she was once,’ Sonny said.

‘We still have something in common. That’s why I know he’s in there,’ Lisa said, pointing to one end of the overhang.

It wasn’t exactly as if she’d suddenly acquired X-ray vision, could see through dirt and rock to where Willie lay, but like a compass needle quivering north she knew with absolute conviction his position relative to hers.

‘He’s hurt bad,’ Sonny said. ‘And he’s sleeping. Maybe you can see him when he wakes. If he wants to see you.’

‘He’s awake now. And he knows I’m here,’ Lisa said, because she could feel that too. Or maybe her ghost could: it was standing at her shoulder, so close that if it had been human she would have felt its breath on the back of her neck. She had to resist the urge to turn around, try to glimpse the unglimpsable.

She said, ‘If you men don’t believe me, maybe one of you could go check.’

Staring at her, Sonny said, ‘Someone take a look,’ and Mouse, a white scar Lisa didn’t remember dinting his unshaven chin, more chains than ever looped across the front and back of his leather jacket, jangled off.

The men around Lisa relaxed, as if something had been resolved. They started asking questions, how was she, was she still living on the homestead with those critters, so forth. As if this was no more than a social call. She asked them if this was where they’d found Willie.

‘More or less,’ Sonny said.

‘How badly is he hurt? What happened to him?’

‘You can’t tell?’

Lisa knocked that one right back at Sonny, saying, ‘You didn’t think to take him to hospital?’

‘There isn’t anything a hospital can do.’

‘Maybe that’s something a hospital should decide.’

‘We took medical advice,’ Sonny said.

‘And there’s help on the way,’ Wolfman Dave said.

‘What kind of help?’ Lisa said.

‘Stick around and you’ll see,’ Sonny said.

‘This is where he wants to be, Lize,’ Little Mike said. ‘We’ve made him as comfortable as we can, in the circumstances.’

He took a swig from a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s and held it out to her. She refused as nicely as she could. ‘How about giving a lady a long drink of cold water? I feel like I’ve swallowed a couple of pounds of dust riding here.’

Wolfman Dave fetched a bottle of spring water. Lisa was chugging it down when Mouse came jangling back, with the disconcerted, distracted look of a man trying to puzzle out a magic trick.

‘Willie knew she was here before I told him,’ he told Sonny. ‘Says she shouldn’t have come, but now she’s here he needs to talk to her.’

The road dogs exchanged glances.

‘Why don’t you take me in to see him?’ Lisa said.

The overhang narrowed to a descending slot, the entrance to a chamber lit by a blade of sunlight slanting through a slit in the high ceiling. A scattering of tesserae glimmered on the far wall; Lisa could feel the presence of eidolons, like a flitter of bats in the corner of her eye.

‘Over here,’ Mouse said, and led her across the sandy floor to an alcove on the far side. A woman rose from a canvas chair as they approached.

‘Ms Dawes? I am Isabelle Linder. I am so pleased to meet you,’ she said, and held out a hand.

Lisa hardly noticed. She was staring at the thin figure lying on a kind of shelf or fold of rock. It was Willie. It wasn’t.

He was bare-chested, a mylar blanket folded to his waist, his head pillowed on a sweat-stained kitbag. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes sunken in bruised sockets. His ribs articulated under his skin with each breath. And there were needles studded in his grey crew cut and his forehead, needles of black glass, different lengths, forming a kind of crown. They rattled when he turned his head to look at Lisa.

‘I knew you were coming,’ he said. ‘I could feel it.’

‘Our ghosts,’ Lisa said.

‘Yeah. Our ghosts.’

She could see, in the same unseeing way she’d been able to tell where he lay, a roil of activity in his body. Nodes under places where the needles stuck him, and a kind of traffic seething through the blood vessels under his skin. His face shone like a foggy mask of milky silver, like the swirl of currents around the anomaly in the Ghajar narrative code.

Lisa knelt and took his hand. She could feel the bones inside its loose hot skin.

He said, ‘I have some new ghosts now.’

His smile was all teeth.

‘Oh, Willie.’

The road dogs and the woman were standing behind her; she briefly wondered at the strange tableau they must make. Like one of those chintzily pious religious paintings. The curve of stone over Willie’s makeshift bed was marked with drawings in black Sharpie. Each the same. Lines radiating out from a central point, each marked with different patterns of cross-hatching. She supposed it was some kind of representation of the needles that pierced him. A notebook folded open and tucked between the kitbag and stone showed part of a similar sketch.

Willie said, ‘It doesn’t hurt. It did at first. But not now.’

‘What is it? What happened?’

‘I believe that he was infected with a variety of nanotechnology,’ Isabelle Linder said. ‘As far as I can tell, it is not contagious.’

‘It’s all through me like bad cancer,’ Willie said. ‘I tried to cut it out. It hurt like hell and it fucking grew back.’

Lisa turned to look at the others. ‘And you thought the best thing for him would be to stick him in this . . . cave?’ She couldn’t say
tomb
. ‘He needs to get to a hospital. Right now.’

‘We will do our best to help him,’ Isabelle Linder said.

‘Are you a doctor?’

‘I work for Outland Archaeological Services.’

‘I thought you were all dead.’

‘My colleagues are dead. Fortunately, I was not there when the breakout happened.’

‘Good for you. How do you know what’s best for my husband?’

‘I have consulted with experts.’

‘And why aren’t they here?’

‘They are on Terminus. But they have been advising me via q-phone. And help is coming.’

Willie squeezed Lisa’s hand with surprising strength. He said, ‘Ada Morange is sending a ship. All I have to do is hang on until it arrives.’

‘I can go get help right now.’

‘Stay a while,’ Willie said. ‘Let me tell you how I fucked up.’

He told the story with something of the jaunty self-deprecation of old. Explaining that for the past two years he’d been spending a lot of the time in the hills at the edge of the City of the Dead, where tombs were scattered and hard to find, and there were many dead spots where GPS and phone signals vanished. He’d become obsessed with the place, he said, and at last he’d found somewhere that sang out to him. Ground radar showed the faint trace of a shaft; his instincts told him that there was something useful down there.

‘Your instincts, or the ghost?’ Lisa said.

‘Maybe fifty-fifty. It had become hard to tell where it ended and I began.’

He had spent two weeks excavating rubble. Digging through compacted layers of sand and stone. Dragging out big rocks with a winch. Eventually he uncovered the beginning of a Ghostkeeper shaft, blocked a couple of metres inside by a rockfall.

‘But I found something there. A handful of tesserae. They shone like shards of moonlight. Earth’s Moon, not our crappy little lopsided flying pebble,’ Willie said, and went off at a tangent about different kinds of lunar light and then briefly fell asleep. Mouse bathed his head with a wet cloth and he woke again, slowly focusing on Mouse and Lisa and the others like an astronomer scrying distant worlds. ‘What was I talking about?’

‘Tesserae that looked like moonlight,’ Lisa said. ‘They contained Ghajar narrative code, didn’t they?’

‘You know about that.’

‘Your girlfriend gave me the one you asked her to look after.’

‘Is she here?’

‘Brittany? No.’

‘Good. Don’t let her know how I ended up, Lize. Tell a few lies. I know some good ones if you come up short.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ Lisa said, speaking around a hard ache in her throat.

Willie explained that his old friend Calvin Quinlan hadn’t been able to make head or tail of the tesserae, so he’d had one of them analysed in the Alien Market. And that had attracted the attention of Ada Morange. Her people were on the lookout for Ghajar code; he was pretty sure that Carol Schleifer had told them about his find after he’d paid her to mirror the stuff. The deal had been clinched when they’d seen the drawings he’d been making. Turned out they were identical to a diagram that a Ghajar eidolon had put into the head of the little sister of the guy who had found the first operational spaceships. A map of pulsars that Ada Morange believed might lead to the Ghajar home world or some other equally momentous discovery.

‘I made a deal with her people,’ Willie said, sounding briefly like his old self. ‘A pretty good deal, if I say so myself. They were so excited they didn’t care what it cost. It was like taking candy from a baby who happens to own a candy factory. And frankly they got me cheap, considering . . . I should have asked for more, for all the good it would have done me. So anyway, we went out and started digging. We found a chamber tomb, and that’s when things sort of went sideways.’

He’d glimpsed some kind of skeleton on the floor, and then eidolons had exploded around him and the Outland crew. The crew had started attacking each other; he’d fled. When he woke, he was in his truck, his nose crusted with blood, bruises on his chest, the windshield cracked. He’d crashed into a stand of iron trees half a dozen kilometres from the site, but had no memory of it. He believed that he’d suffered the same kind of fugue that had seized him and Lisa during the Bad Trip.

He drove back to the excavation site, saw several bodies lying all bloody outside the shaft and realised there’d been a breakout, and freaked out again.

‘I thought that the police would think I murdered those people. So I unloaded the trail bike, put together some supplies, and set fire to the truck to cover up my disappearance. Crazy, I know, but I was sort of delirious by then.’

He had ridden until he had stumbled on this tomb, drawn there, he said, by some instinct not his. He slept outside on bare ground under the stars and woke up at first light, feverish and hurting. Needles were beginning to grow through his skin. Trying to cut one out had caused terrible pain. He couldn’t go any further, knew he was in a bad way, and had used his satellite phone to ask the road dogs for help.

He believed that the crash site in the City of the Dead, the Bad Trip and his jackpot were all linked. ‘The ship was damaged. It fell out of orbit and crashed. One of the crew escaped. Or maybe it was the only crew . . . Anyway, it got away, in some kind of lifeboat. It was hurt. It hid in that Ghostkeeper tomb, and repurposed the tesserae it found there. I think it put some kind of log or diary in them. Some kind of information.’

‘What kind of information?’

Willie touched the scribbles on the rock beside him. ‘It’s out there. I can feel it tugging at me.’

‘Where they came from?’

‘That would be something, wouldn’t it?’

Lisa started to tell Willie about the flow of Ghajar narrative code, the nodes she’d seen that Bria hadn’t. He nodded out for a minute or so, woke and focused on her.

Saying, ‘We had some good times, didn’t we?’

‘The best,’ Lisa said.

They talked about the old times. Willie said that when he was fixed up he wanted to see some of the other worlds. Said that Ada Morange owed him that.

‘You can come with me, Lize. You deserve it.’

‘That’s a fine idea,’ she said, and held his hand until he passed into sleep again.

Tony touched down outside Dry Salvages’s only city, Freedonia, in the middle of the long afternoon of the planet’s two-thousand-hour day, and rode a taxi into town. They had ceramic-shell ground vehicles here, propelled by engines that burned alcohol refined from sugar cane, and piloted by actual human beings. This one was red with a chequerboard stripe around its waist, owned by a garrulous middle-aged woman with a lot of curly black hair who drove with casual authority along the buzzing six-lane highway, trying to find out where Tony had been, why he was here and where he was going, offering to introduce him to the kind of good honest trader who was impossible to find in Freedonia without local knowledge. She laughed at Tony’s dismay when she swerved around a truck that cut in front of them. ‘You space jockeys are all the same. You ride in alien space-cans, zip through wormholes from star to star, but a little light freeway traffic makes you shit your underwear.’

It was actually the prospect of confronting Raqle Thornhilde that was making Tony nervous. Fantasies of revenge were one thing; the reality was something else. He had spent a fair amount of his freebooter career on Dry Salvages, in Freedonia, but everything familiar seemed strange; the gigantic spires reared up ahead like the fangs of some planet-eating beast.

They were between one and a half and two kilometres high, the spires. Crooked and tapering and glossy black, woven from billions of strands of fullerene, a carbon allotrope harder than diamond. Their adamantine foundations went down half a kilometre and the land around them had eroded over the tens of thousands of years since they had been built, leaving them standing on a mesa elevated above the desert plain. Like all such spires, every square centimetre of their surfaces was covered in intricate carvings whose meaning and purpose were as yet unknown. Some believed that they were algorithms encoding the essence of the Elder Culture that had constructed them; others that they were vast libraries containing secret knowledge about the relationship between the Spirebuilders and the Jackaroo, or the entire history of intelligent life in the universe, or instructions that when deciphered would allow humanity to uplift itself into some higher state of being.