Into Everywhere (33 page)

During the short voyage, as the ship passed through three mirror pairs in quick succession and powered in towards Veles, Unlikely Worlds questioned Tony about his adventures on the slime planet and afterwards, digging up details that Tony had more or less forgotten. The !Cha was also interested in Tony’s memories of Aunty Jael. How the Okoye family had acquired her and the advice she had given them over the years; her lessons in biology and Elder Culture artefacts; the variant of Go they had sometimes played together; the bugs and plants he had collected for her.

Tony found himself talking about his resentment and anger at the way she had fooled and betrayed his family.

‘All this time she was living a lie,’ he said. ‘She told us that the slime-planet job would be worthwhile. She told us that we would share a good profit. Instead, she played us. She betrayed us to the Red Brigade.’

He would make sure that she paid for that betrayal. For the deaths of Junot Johnson and everyone else killed in the raid. For his disgrace. And Raqle Thornhilde would pay too, for kidnapping him and dispatching him on this quest like a servant instead of an equal.

Unlikely Worlds said, ‘If, as you claim, she is a chattel, how then can she pay?’

‘Anything she has found is ours, to begin with. I will make sure that she will not profit from it.’

‘Yet she has already profited from it, by using it to arrange her escape.’

The !Cha always had an answer for everything, and always tried to have the last word. Now, he mused about Ada Morange and the laminated brain she had become.

‘It was not that she feared death,’ he said. ‘She was dying when I first knew her. But she did not want to miss what came next. She believed that her story was not yet done. And so it has proved.’

‘Aunty Jael is not really Ada Morange,’ Tony said. ‘At best she is a copy. And not a very good one. She does not have free will. She cannot think new thoughts. She is a bundle of habits and memories masquerading as a person.’

‘Oh, being laminated will have crimped Ada Morange’s style, no doubt, but it is clear that she is still formidable. Look at how long she managed to fool you and your family,’ Unlikely Worlds said.

Aside from his smug air of superiority, of being above petty human dramas, the !Cha was not bad company. He told Tony stories about the early days of the settling of the fifteen gift worlds. Encounters with eidolons; hauntings; tragedies and comedies resulting from the refusal by settlers to adapt to their new homes. He described the discovery of the first Ghajar ships, called down by a haunted young man who had been helped by Ada Morange – that story was true, according to Unlikely Worlds.

‘I should know. I was there.’

There was that smugness again. Tony had to remind himself that there was real substance behind the !Cha’s boasts. He had lived through a hundred and fifty years of human history, saw humans as humans could not see themselves, and knew how to make use of their vulnerabilities and appetites.

Unlikely Worlds was certainly better company than Raqle Thornhilde’s cloned sons. Like the weircat, they had been designed as predators. They were not exactly stupid, but were bluntly uninterested in anything but the task at hand, lacked any sense of humour, and had an obscene love for their weapons. One or the other was always dismantling and reassembling a handgun, or sharpening a knife, or flicking little razor-edged wedges at a target. Their tasks were to snatch Adam Apostu and put him to some hard questioning, and to make sure that Tony didn’t try to escape, screw up, or try to finesse the confrontation to his own advantage. Tony was worried that they had also been told to dispose of him once he had outlasted his usefulness to their mother.

The clone who accompanied him into Tanrog was called Bob. (The other was Bane; apparently, the clones’ names all began with the letter B.) Like his sibling, Bob was tall, muscular and cat-footed, dressed in a grey many-pocketed field jacket, black knee-length shorts and split-toe slippers. His only distinguishing mark was a white scar that lifted one corner of his upper lip, giving him a slightly quizzical expression. He followed Tony without question or comment through the rainy streets to the house of Adam Apostu, down by the sea docks. Tucked away in a small courtyard accessed by an arch in a gatehouse, it was typical of the sailors’ quarter: narrow-fronted and four storeys tall, with two slit windows to each floor and a steep roof that shed a silvery curtain of rainwater.

‘Tricky,’ Bob said, after studying it from the shelter of the archway. ‘The door is faced with steel, the windows are too narrow for a man to climb through, and getting across that roof won’t be easy. And there’s no telling how it’s connected to its neighbours, or the tunnels under the city. He could have any number of boltholes.’

‘We are posing as honest freebooters,’ Tony said. ‘We do not need to kick in the front door. All we have to do is knock.’

‘Maybe you can talk your way in. But can you talk your way back out?’

‘First, let’s ask the locals about Mr Apostu. Perhaps they can tell us something useful.’

The docks were dwarfed by the flank of the great sea wall, cut in several places by elevators that raised and lowered ships to sea level, a hundred metres below. Fullerene-hulled trawlers and seiners loomed amongst cranes and warehouses; a fish market bustled under a transparent dome; a long street of hostels, flophouses, pawnbrokers shared by fisherfolk and off-worlders, and cafés and bars with steamy windows, some kind of sport playing in a common window and tiny shrines tucked in a corner – flowers and candles in front of a tarnished mirror, a photograph of a local saint or an effigy of the white kraken – where sailors could wish for good fortune before a voyage.

Tony made the rounds, exchanging gossip, spinning a yarn about fragments of stromatolite code that happened to have come into his possession, saying that he had heard of a scholar, Adam Apostu, who might be interested in that kind of thing. Most of the traders and brokers either didn’t know the man, or pretended they didn’t. One said that yes, Adam Apostu’s interest in code was well known, but it was mostly Ghajar ship code that he sought. Another claimed that the scholar was a dangerous man to do business with.

‘He came here ten years ago,’ the broker said. He was a lean man with a hooked nose and an extravagant moustache waxed into spirals at its ends. ‘He has no friends or allies I know of, but people who try to cheat him have a habit of disappearing. And at least two freebooters with Ghajar code to sell likewise disappeared. I have heard that he has a feral biochine that can make itself invisible. A killing thing from the jungles of some hell-world. I also heard that he murdered a rival scholar on Bahamut before he came here. Best to stay away from him. Do business with honest people such as myself.’

Another broker, a cheerful young woman in a red niqab that showed only her eyes, said that, sure, she had met the old fraud, but she could not recommend doing business with him. ‘He never goes out. You have to go to him. He presents as this mad-scientist kind of guy, and frankly it’s hard to tell whether or not it’s an act. But he definitely works with weird algorithms. His house, it’s haunted. Eidolons coming up through the floorboards, hanging out under the ceiling . . . I had some Ghajar narrative code for sale. Rare, premium stuff. He wasn’t interested. Said he already had it. I thought it was a bargaining position. But no, he genuinely didn’t care. A couple of business pals of mine, they’ve had the same experience. You want to try to sell something to him? Good luck, because I don’t know that he has ever bought anything.’

Tony returned to the ship and gave Raqle Thornhilde an account of his day’s work. ‘Adam Apostu is definitely interested in Ghajar code, but no one seems to have done any business with him. No one offered to act as a go-between, or to introduce me to him. And no one has ever seen him out and about in the quarter, either. He does not leave his house, or buy anything in the local shops. And he does not seem to have any friends, or to be connected with any of the local politicians.’

‘That you know of,’ Raqle said.

‘You cannot do any real business here without paying off one or more of the local pols. Especially if you are an off-worlder. If someone has an interest in him, they would have sent someone to talk to me by now,’ Tony said. ‘There are stories that he’s mad and bad, but they are the kind of stories you hear about eccentric scholars and wizards everywhere.’

‘Perhaps he isn’t the one we’re looking for,’ Raqle said. ‘Perhaps someone else stole his identity and used it as cover when they contacted me.’

She was nervous, outside her comfort zone. Brokers did not usually chase leads. They waited for leads to come to them.

Tony said, ‘We will soon know. I made an appointment to see him.’

‘You did what?’

The broker’s anger spat at Tony across eight thousand light years.

‘You sent me to check him out. I checked him out. And now I have arranged an appointment with him.’

‘My boys let you do that? Without my permission?’

‘Bob realised that it was the only way in.’

It had not been hard to convince the clone. Tony had pointed out that in a place where everyone knew everyone else’s business it would be strange if he did not contact the man he had been asking about.

‘What did he say?’

‘Bob?’ Tony was having fun after a hard day in the rain.

‘Don’t try to be smart, Mr Okoye. My boys have ways of making smart people realise that they aren’t so smart after all.’

‘I did not talk to Apostu,’ Tony said. ‘I talked to an AI. I told it I had some interesting code. It had already heard about me. Apostu may be a recluse, but he is plugged into the local rumour net. The AI told me to show up at the house tomorrow.’

‘If you’re trying to trick me you’ll regret it.’

‘I am trying to find out what we both want to find out.’

Tony sweated out the short silence. He knew that the broker was thinking about telling her boys to hurt him, either to make sure he was telling the truth or as a lesson.

At last she said, ‘All right.’

‘As in, “All right, let’s do it?”’

‘I told you: don’t try to be smart. Now let me talk to my boys. You can have your meeting with Apostu, but you’ll do it my way.’

They overnighted in the little valley below the outlook. Its dead spot meant that they were safe from drone overflights, and the Land Cruiser was almost invisible under its camo drop sheet, a distortion as slight as a heat shimmer or a minor glitch in some virtual-reality game. Like the blind-spot warp of Lisa’s ghost.

‘You could make a fortune in the tomb-raider trade,’ Isabelle told her. ‘Finding everything that everyone else has not yet found.’

‘I was a tomb raider until everything went wrong,’ Lisa said. ‘I can’t see myself going back to it.’

‘You could fly over the City of the Dead in a helicopter. Make a map. Sell locations to others.’

Lisa thought of her brief out-of-body experience. ‘What I’d like is the nice quiet life I had before all this blew it up.’

She and Isabelle ate US Army MRE rations from self-heating pouches, Isabelle grumbling that she hadn’t been able to source the French equivalent; Lisa pushed away the thought that French rations might contain a bottle of wine or two. Those cute little ones you used to get on airplanes, back in the day. Her ghost was a ringing presence, as impossible to ignore as tinnitus.

Isabelle slept in the Land Cruiser; Lisa scraped a hollow in drift sand and wrapped herself in a mylar blanket, thinking of trips with Willie, sleeping with him under the stars. Trying to remember his face and panicking because she couldn’t, and there it was. Oh, Willie.

She woke in grey predawn light, wiped a film of dew from her face. Unlikely Worlds stood nearby, his tank balanced on the column of its three legs like a piece of abandoned street furniture. She asked him if he ever slept.

‘My rest periods are not as yours,’ he said. ‘A different form of consciousness, rather than the oblivion and involuntary hallucinations that you embrace.’

Isabelle was still asleep, curled up in a sleeping bag on the back seat of the Land Cruiser. Lisa snagged the field glasses and a bottle of water and hiked to the outlook. She wanted to shake the stiffness from her bones and to check out the activity around the tomb, but when she got up there she couldn’t spot any movement around the vehicles or the big tent. It was six-twenty in the morning. Maybe the police slept late. Maybe the Jackaroo did, too. Or maybe they’d turned off their avatars while whatever it was that animated them turned its attention elsewhere. Keeping the human race in check must require a lot of multitasking.

The star was still burning at the top of the distant mesa. Lisa glanced at it, quickly looked away. Safer to study the ghostly smoke inside the roofless cube at one end of the Boxbuilder ruins. It hung about a metre above the bare rock floor, composed of myriad tiny elements like 3-D pixels, twirling around and around in tireless trajectories. Lisa was reminded of a snake she’d seen once on a country road, looping endlessly over itself because its back had been broken when some car had run it over, and wondered where the algorithm that generated the smoke twist was cached. Boxbuilder ruins were found on every one of the gift worlds, constructed from self-repairing polymer that synthesised new material from rock and air and rain. No one knew what the creatures who had built them had looked like, how they lived and loved, whether they’d even been sentient. So much was unknown. So much would never be known. The algorithm could be part of the structure’s homeostatic mechanism, or perhaps it was something its former inhabitants had left behind, a forgotten keepsake . . .

She jumped when Unlikely Worlds said, close behind her, ‘I wonder if I see what you see. And if either of us sees what its makers saw.’

‘What do you see?’

‘Something old and broken. Like much on this world.’

‘Older than you?’

‘We do not privilege any particular moment in time because of its antiquity. It is more of a . . . continuum.’

‘But the stories you collect have a beginning and an end. That’s the point of stories.’