Into Everywhere (36 page)

There was a coolness, a certain wary distance, between her and Lisa. They hadn’t talked about what had happened out on the playa, and Lisa was ashamed at her complicity. It seemed like a kind of cowardice, and tinted her hope that Ada Morange’s people could help her to discover everything she needed to know about her ghost.

‘Does your expert work at Peking University?’ she said to Isabelle, earning a brief look of surprise.

‘I forget you have done your own research,’ Isabelle said. ‘Yes. He was approached by the TCU, but we tempted him away with a better offer.’

‘So Nevers wants to find out what the Ghajar code contains too,’ Lisa said. ‘Given his past history, he won’t let it go.’

‘Perhaps not. But we have one advantage.’

‘What’s that?’

Unlikely Worlds spoke up before Isabelle could reply. ‘Why, you, of course. I am beginning to believe that your story may be as interesting as Professor Morange’s.’

A vast machinery seemed to be settling into place around Lisa. She told herself that she’d done the right thing, that Ada Morange could protect her from Adam Nevers and the TCU, and find some way of exorcising her ghost, but Isabelle and Doris were vague about what would happen when they reached Terminus, and they shared an unsettling gestalt with the ship’s crew. A kind of calm certainty; an unquestioning belief in the righteousness of their cause. They were a lot like Adam Nevers, Lisa realised. They saw the world in stark binary divisions. Black hats v. white hats, like in the old cowboy movies. Us v. them.

A couple of hours before transit through the wormhole, Isabelle and Doris Bauer and her assistants met in the lounge for what they called a visualisation meeting, a cross between a pep talk and one of the mindfulness sessions Lisa had volunteered for in the aftermath of the Bad Trip, hoping that it would help her come to terms with her ghost. They didn’t actually sit in a circle holding hands while ambient music played in the background and candles scented the air, but that was the vibe. Afterwards, Isabelle told Lisa that they had been making sure that they knew what their goals were and how to achieve them, but to Lisa it seemed a lot like the way cult members suppressed doubts and reaffirmed their commitment to their leader and their cause. What would they do, she wondered, if she tried to back out now? Love-bomb her into submission? Shackle her in a luxuriously appointed cell?

‘I find much of your behaviour strange,’ Unlikely Worlds said, when Lisa asked him what he thought of the visualisation meeting. ‘It wouldn’t be any fun if I didn’t.’

‘And there’s the way they refer to Ada Morange as “The Professor”,’ Lisa said. ‘The reverent tone they have. The way they’ve let her get inside their heads.’

‘She depends on the love of others. As far as she is concerned, encouraging that love is a survival trait.’

‘Because of her illness, you mean? Just how bad is it?’

‘Because of the way she has chosen to prolong her story. The path she wants to take.’

At last the wormhole throat resolved out of the big black. A faint granular star quickly gaining shape and definition, rushing towards the ship at startling speed. Watching in the lounge, Lisa glimpsed a dark mirror set in the flat polished face of a cone-shaped rock and framed by the architecture of the strange matter that held it open, and then it was gone and with no sense of transition the ship emerged from the far end of the wormhole, one of fifteen that orbited the L5 point where the gravity of Earth and the gravity of the Moon cancelled each other out.

The view on the HD screen panned across black space to Earth’s crescent, small and sharp and blue and lovely, and Lisa was cleaved by an intense pang of homesickness. Before the Jackaroo came with their offer to help that small blue planet had been the only home humanity had known, the place where every person ever born had lived and died. Most of human history was down there, along with everything from Lisa’s life before she had won the lottery and gone up and out. Her family, her childhood home, her high school and the college where she’d studied maths, the places where she’d worked, the people she’d known, the things she’d seen . . .

Two servants in white jackets and trousers padded through the lounge, collecting coffee cups and other loose objects. A few minutes later, there was a soft chime, Lisa’s chair folded around her, and she was gripped by the floating sensation of weightlessness as the ship swung on its axis towards its new course. A second chime, and the pull of acceleration came back. Less than an hour later, the ship shot through another wormhole and emerged in orbit around the red dwarf star 2CR 5938, otherwise known as Terminus, the lesser partner in a binary system with a G0 star a little brighter and hotter than Earth’s Sun.

Unlike the other gift worlds, there was no rocky, Earth-like planet here. Instead an Elder Culture, the Spiders, had engineered fourteen planetoids that orbited at the inner edge of a broad asteroid belt, shepherded into a loose archipelago by interaction with the gravity of a hot super-Jupiter orbiting much closer in. Exotic dark matter denser than neutronium had been injected into the planetoids’ centres of mass, increasing their surface gravity to about one-third of Earth’s, they had been wrapped in bubbles of quasi-living polymer that conserved scanty oxygen/nitrogen atmospheres, and had been landscaped and seeded with life, and space elevators had been spun between their surfaces and counterweight asteroids parked in stationary orbits. The engineers of these little garden worlds were long gone, as were the other Elder Cultures who had lived on them for a century or ten thousand years. People lived there now. Farmers, mostly. An agrarian commonwealth. A storybook utopia.

At first, only one of the planetoids, Niflheimr, had been colonised. An ice world about the size of Ceres, served by a Jackaroo shuttle that looped between its space-elevator terminal and Earth, it had been settled by a handful of hardy pioneers, and visited by science crews studying the weird physics of the dark-matter stuff in its core or the space-elevator technology. There had been vague plans to explore the other planetoids, but the Jackaroo shuttles were locked in fixed cycles between Earth and the gift worlds, and the only functional spacecraft that humanity possessed at the time had been Soyuz and Orion capsules, and the various unmanned cargo modules that serviced the International Space Station. Then the first sargassos of Ghajar ships had been discovered, independent space travel had become possible, and all the worldlets of Terminus were suddenly within reach. Soon afterwards, code recovered from a crashed Ghajar spacecraft had been cracked, revealing details of its last voyage. A rogue explorer, chased by TCU agents, had retraced that voyage to a rosette of wormholes orbiting the only planet of Terminus’s companion star: the access point to a vast wormhole network, the New Frontier. The archipelago of Terminus was a way station now, a link between Earth and the worlds of the New Frontier.

The spark of the elevator terminal, hung beyond the pale half disc of Niflheimr, slowly grew larger on the lounge’s HD screen, resolving into an oval rock a kilometre across, its ashen surface pitted with the dark mouths of docking shafts. Lisa saw an I-class schooner rise smoothly and slowly from one of those shafts and accelerate away. According to Unlikely Worlds, it was heading out to the G0 star and the gateway to the New Frontier. A journey of more than four hundred and fifty astronomical units, fifteen times the distance between the Sun and Neptune, that even with the Ghajar bias drive would take at least ninety days. And that was only the beginning of a voyage to some new world, some new settlement, far across the Milky Way.

‘The things you people can do now!’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘The stories you make!’

They were in free fall again. The ship was idling towards the elevator terminal, preparing to dock. A scatter of other ships hung in the black sky beyond the terminal’s lumpy crescent. Lisa, doped by an anti-nausea patch, thought it looked like a scene from one of the space-opera video games her first boyfriend had loved to play.

Isabelle pointed to a fat dark cylinder much bigger than the rest of the ships, or maybe much closer. ‘There!’ she said. ‘You see?’

‘Sure. What am I seeing?’

‘That,’ Isabelle said, a lilt in her voice reminding Lisa of how a stump preacher she had seen one time in Joe’s Corner had pronounced the name of the Son of God, ‘is the Professor’s timeship.’

‘We don’t discuss our affairs with people up on the skin,’ the speaker for the dead told Tony, ‘and they don’t trouble us. So if you stick with me and stay out of the common ways, no one will know where you are.’

His name was Victor Ursu. ‘A good name for a speaker, Ursu,’ he said. ‘Back where we all came from, it means “bear”. And bears have a long association with the underground, seeing as how they sleep out the winter in caves. Down here, of course, it’s mostly the dead who sleep. And we do our best to make sure their sleep is undisturbed.’

Victor was a compact muscular man with milky skin and a bristly crest of black hair. He carried an iron staff that reminded Tony of Adam Apostu’s pole, was dressed in a yellow skinsuit and heavy boots, and his belt was hung with climbing gear, flares, blast dots, several knives, and a fullerene rock hammer. He and his fellow speakers maintained the paths of the dead, policed the miners and tomb raiders who searched the labyrinths that honeycombed the raft’s construction coral for Elder Culture artefacts, and hunted down feral animals and biochines that found their way in from the surface or from the sea and might infiltrate the city if the speakers didn’t keep them under control.

‘We know the paths of the dead better than anyone,’ Victor said. ‘But there are many mysteries in the deeps, many places we haven’t yet reached, and some places even we don’t dare disturb.’

That first night, he led Tony and Unlikely Worlds through passageways carved out of construction coral to a long low cavern where plastic igloos were laid out in a grid: one of the refuges where the speakers camped out during their long patrols. Tony dozed fitfully for a few hours, woke early the next morning and lay on the foam pallet inside the little bubble of the igloo, thinking things through, before clambering out into the changeless glow of the lights floating under the ribbed rock ceiling. Victor Ursu was seated at one end of a long table, eating a breakfast of black bread, cheese and salami, and talking with Unlikely Worlds. A pair of speakers at the other end of the table, a man and a woman in white skinsuits, were trying hard to ignore them.

‘Take a seat, lad,’ Victor said. ‘We are talking about where you need to go and how to get there.’

‘I want a private word,’ Tony told Unlikely Worlds.

‘You can trust Victor,’ the !Cha said. ‘I have known him a long time. And like all speakers he respects the privacy of everyone down here, dead or alive.’

‘I’m not worried about Victor,’ Tony said. ‘I’m worried about you.’

They sat in a chapel-like niche at the far end of the cave, Tony on a smooth bruise-coloured stump of stone, Unlikely Worlds on his folded legs.

‘If you are afraid that I will lead you back to the sons of Raqle Thornhilde,’ the !Cha said, ‘I can assure you that my association with her is over. She was never more than a minor character in this story.’

‘And what about your association with Ada Morange?’

‘Like you, I hope to find her.’

‘When did you know about her hand?’ Tony said. ‘That’s what Adam Apostu was, wasn’t he?’

Last night, as Victor had led them to the refuge, Tony had given the !Cha a brief sketch of the confrontation with Adam Apostu, and his escape. He had not realised that Ada Morange had been controlling the hand until now, waking with the absolute certainty of the revelation clicking into place, and he needed to ask the !Cha some hard questions.

‘How did you guess?’ Unlikely Worlds said, with a perfect simulation of mild curiosity.

‘I think she wanted me to know. She called me Master Tony, as she did at home, when she was Aunty Jael. And then there was the name she gave her hand. Adam. Ada M.’

‘Yes. And Adam is the forename of one of her oldest and most persistent antagonists. She has always liked her little jokes.’

‘You knew, didn’t you? You knew that Adam Apostu was her hand long before I walked into his house.’

‘I suspected it after Raqle Thornhilde explained how she had found out about the slime planet. But I could not be certain until you told me that Adam Apostu had helped you to escape the terrible twins.’

‘But you didn’t tell me that you knew who he was. What he was.’

‘I was hoping that you would be clever enough to work that out. She has been using him for a long time, I think.’

‘At least ten years,’ Tony said. ‘That is how long he has been living in Tanrog. If living is the right word.’

Via Adam Apostu, Ada Morange had been using the paths of the dead to send eidolons everywhere in the city, eavesdropping on the private conversations of brokers and traders and selling the information she stole. And it was possible that she had used other hands for the same purpose. A small army of them linked to her by q-phone circuits, working on different worlds and in different ways towards an unknown goal. Speculating about this while lying sleeplessly in the little igloo, Tony had thought of a spider squid squatting in its casing of mucus and seaweed, tentacles extended across the dark void, groping for tasty morsels of information, manipulating people . . .

‘I think she found out about the slime world and the stromatolites through Adam Apostu’s little spies,’ he said. ‘She definitely used him to sell the information to Raqle Thornhilde, and to hint that they might contain a cure for sleepy sickness. She knew how Raqle’s son had died, knew of Raqle’s involvement with Fred Firat and his work on meme plagues, and knew that I was in Freedonia, looking for work. She had sent me there, chasing a lead that I now realise probably never existed. Through Adam Apostu, she told Raqle about my family’s work with the disease, and the deal was as good as done.’

‘It helped that you are a scion of one of the honourable families,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘After her son’s death Raqle spent most of her money on the search for a cure, and on caring for the afflicted. She needed a sponsor. Your sister, who had also lost a child to sleepy sickness, was an obvious candidate.’