Into Everywhere (39 page)

The next day they crossed a bridge over a chasm where faint lights floated in unplumbed darkness. Not even Victor knew if they were machines or eidolons, or some kind of unknown animal or biochine. On the far side, a long stair of broad shallow steps descended to a cave system like a series of chapels carved out of glistening lime deposits. Stalactites hung in clusters from irregular ceilings or fringed folds and ledges; stalagmites stood like fat candles amongst pellucid pools cupped in basins of mother-of-pearl and onyx.

As they picked their way through these marvels, Tony thought with a melancholy pang that Danilo would have loved this place. He remembered how Danilo had run down the beach, arms outstretched as if he was trying to fly; how he had wheeled around and run back, his face alight with bliss. Remembered him standing at the foot of the spire of a native tree, one hand pressed to its pale rind as he watched orange banners lifting and falling high above in the cold wind. Remembered his lover’s innocent delight in the world outside the city, and how it had made him see everything afresh.

At last they reached a chamber several kilometres long, where a ceramic road wound between cones of debris that leaned against the walls on either side, slanting towards the uneven roof. Pale pillows of some kind of fungus grew on the steep slopes; Tony saw three or four people moving up there. Pickers, according to Victor, who searched for the rare, intensely fragrant fruiting bodies of a parasitic plant that grew on the fungus.

An hour later, beyond the far side of the chamber, they emerged in a long narrow defile lined with rickety buildings: a settlement of tomb raiders and artefact dealers. In a chopshop, a technician immobilised Tony’s head in a scaffold frame, dabbed local anaesthetic around his right eye and introduced a long thin needle into the socket and injected nanotech that would dismantle the block on his comms. The process would take several hours, the technician said; she would need to keep him under observation in case there were side effects.

‘What kind of side effects?’

‘Fits, partial loss of vision, auditory hallucinations . . . Nothing I can’t fix,’ the technician said breezily.

She patched him with a soporific and he dozed in a cot at the back of the chopshop, woke to find the ship’s telemetry crowding his vision. He closed the windows, opened the q-phone link.

‘There you are!’ the bridle said. ‘I was beginning to think I’d come to the wrong place.’

‘What do you mean? Where are you?’

‘I’m here! I’m here!’

One of the windows opened, dense with navigation code. Tony checked it and laughed with shock and happiness.
Abalunam’s Pride
was in orbit around Veles.

Lisa hated every moment of the trip to Ada Morange’s timeship, a terrifying jaunt in an Orion capsule piloted by a cheerful Nigerian astronaut. The noisy kick-in-the pants launch and the long free-fall arc across naked vacuum. The cramped interior, with its rigid padded seats like dentists’ chairs and quaint computer interfaces and joysticks, laughably primitive compared with the lifesystems built into Ghajar ships. Eye-burning splinters of sunlight sweeping across the glass portholes because the capsule was rotating to even out temperature differences.

The astronaut told her that the capsule had been slated for a mission to a near-Earth asteroid when the arrival of the Jackaroo had put an end to the dream of manned exploration of the solar system. ‘Developing this baby cost around fifty billion dollars. And now we use it as a space taxi. Such a shame. That’s why this thing is so important. Why we need to understand everything about the tech we use now. Because if we can’t control it, it will control us. The Professor was one of the first people to see that. And she’s the only person, now, who can do something about it. It’s a great thing to be part of.’

There was an alarming popping sound like distant gunfire – ‘Attitude thrusters killing our rotation, perfectly normal,’ the astronaut said – and the timeship drifted into view. Its fat cylinder, a kilometre long and swollen at either end, somewhat resembled a human thigh bone. Almost all of its bulk, according to the astronaut, was shielding built up from fullerene foam, titanium honeycomb, ceramic tiles and layers of tough elastomers, designed to absorb and dissipate the terrific energies of collisions at near light-speed with any stray hydrogen atoms or microscopic grains of interstellar dust that managed to penetrate its protective magnetic fields.

‘The things we can do now,’ he said, and manoeuvred his frail craft towards the midpoint of this forbiddingly Gothic object, sliding into the circular mouth of a pit cut deep in the shielding, and docking with an airlock that led to the J-class Ghajar ship buried inside.

An access shaft at the midpoint of the ship’s central corridor led to the carousel ring that, spinning between the exterior of the ship’s lifesystem and the inner surface of its hull to generate a centrifugal imitation of gravity, housed Ada Morange’s medical suite. Lisa had to wait for half an hour in a cubicle, with a cheerful steward looking in every five minutes to tell her that it would not be long before she was at last admitted to the inner sanctum.

Unlikely Worlds stood by Ada Morange’s elevated hospital bed, his baritone booming across the curved, dimly lit room when Lisa entered. ‘I hear that you have been travelling far and wide in search of your lodestar. It’s all so very exciting!’

‘You pretend that everything excites you, you old fraud,’ Ada Morange said. ‘Please, Ms Dawes, come and sit with me.’

Her head was cushioned by soft white pillows. Her body barely disturbed the starched sheet that covered it. Tubing ran to machines that oxygenated, cleansed and pumped artificial blood. An IV bag was feeding, drop by drop, a clear liquid to a cannula in the crook of her emaciated arm. She thumbed a button on the remote control she gripped in her right hand, all knuckles and ropy veins under crepe skin. The bed responded by elevating her pillowed head as Lisa sat beside her on a hard plastic chair.

‘You have met my old friend Adam Nevers,’ she said. ‘What did you think of him?’

‘That he’s a scrupulously polite asshole who uses his position to pursue his own agenda.’

‘I see that he got under your skin. You should not take it personally. It’s a talent he has.’

‘He killed my dog,’ Lisa confessed, and told Ada Morange about the interrogation and the raids on her homestead.

‘He has not much changed,’ Ada Morange said, when Lisa had finished. ‘Does he still believe that he is my nemesis?’

‘He warned me about you.’

‘I expect he did.’ Ada Morange’s eyes were sharp blue. The shifting colours of the screens that kept her in contact with the happening world played across her gaunt face. Her hair was brushed out on either side, white wings on the white pillow. ‘As you can see, I contend with something more serious than Investigator Nevers. I survived an immunodeficiency-associated lymphoma, and now I am slowly dying of an autoimmune disease. At the moment, I am being treated with tailored prions. Like all the other treatments, it has only a transient effect. Soon I will have to make a choice. To die, or to set out into a voyage into the future. Do you know why this is called a timeship?’

‘It’s something to do with travelling close to the speed of light, so that time passes more slowly on board than elsewhere.’

Isabelle had told Lisa all about it, with the kind of reverence with which an art historian might describe an obscure masterpiece.

‘There is a star some two hundred light years from Terminus,’ Ada Morange said. ‘It is orbited by several wormholes, so that when I reach it I can quickly return home. But to get there, I will travel across interstellar space. My crew will place me in a hypothermal coma and we will accelerate at one gravity until we reach, as you have said, a cruising speed a little under the speed of light. The journey will take two centuries, but by the clocks aboard the timeship, slowed by Einsteinian time dilation, just ten years will have passed. So when I arrive at the star I will have also travelled into the future, where perhaps a cure for my illness will have been discovered. Or a way to upload my mind into another substrate or transfer it to another body. I am presently sponsoring research into those areas, and others that may be of use, but as far as I am concerned progress is frustratingly slow. The timeship will enable me to jump to a point where those projects have come to fruition. No doubt you think that it is a crazy plan.’

‘It’s definitely ambitious.’

‘You are being polite. Even I think it is more than a little crazy. And I hope very much that I will not need it. I hope every day for a breakthrough in the search for a cure, or for another solution. Not because of the risks of an interstellar voyage that no one has ever before attempted, or because it will mean leaving behind my company and my fortune, and everything familiar. But because I am worried about what I may find, two hundred years in the future. We once supposed that there would be a steady advance in science, but that is no longer the case. In two hundred years, we may be as gods. But it is also possible that misuse of Elder Culture technology and reckless expansion into the New Frontier will destroy us. I may arrive in a future where most settlements have died out, and the survivors have devolved to hunter-gatherers who tell each other campfire stories of gods who fell from the sky.’ Ada Morange turned her head to look at Unlikely Worlds, on the other side of the bed. ‘Perhaps it has happened before. To previous clients of the Jackaroo.’

‘It’s an interesting idea,’ Unlikely Worlds said.

Ada Morange smiled at Lisa. ‘As I am sure you have by now realised, he grows evasive when the conversation turns to things one needs to know. In that regard, he is exactly like the Jackaroo.’

‘With respect, that shows how little you have learned about the Jackaroo,’ Unlikely Worlds said.

‘One thing I do know about them,’ Ada Morange told Lisa. ‘They are not really here to help. We are no more than their latest experiment. Investigator Nevers still has a close association with them, doesn’t he? Do you think he realises that they are using him?’

‘I wondered that myself,’ Lisa said.

‘We tell ourselves that we have won independence from the Jackaroo because we no longer rely on their shuttles to travel between Earth and the fifteen gift worlds,’ Ada Morange said. ‘And because we can freely explore the worlds of the New Frontier. But in truth we have exchanged one kind of dependency for another. The sargassos of Ghajar ships are one of our most important resources, but we know almost nothing about them. We do not know, for instance, why the Ghajar abandoned so many ships, or why there are some, the so-called mad ships, which we cannot even approach, let alone try to use. The popular theory is that there was a war. That the mad ships were some kind of ultimate weapon that ended it, and were abandoned by the victors, along with ships captured from their defeated enemy. It is as plausible as any other guess. But why was the war fought? And where did the victors go?

‘I have been thinking about this ever since the first two ships were called to Mangala. The young man who found them was, like you, infected with an eidolon. What was its motive? Was it a lucky accident that its needs coincided with ours, or was it something deeper? My !Cha friend, who so loves stories, dismisses such conspiracy theories. Not because they are not true, I think, but because they do not suit his purpose. But we understand so little about the aliens who have reshaped our history, so conspiracy theories are mostly all we have.’

Ada Morange paused. Flecks of coloured light moved over her face. Her machines hummed and clicked. Unlikely Worlds stood silent and still.

Lisa said, ‘That sounds like something Adam Nevers would say.’

‘You think that the two of us are similar? That we have some kind of relationship?’

Ada Morange did not smile, but she sounded amused.

‘He seems to think that you do,’ Lisa said.

‘After Mangala, after he lost his job with the Metropolitan Police in London and joined the UN Technology Control Unit, he tried to find something he could use against me. He did not succeed, of course, and that was the end of it, until your little local difficulty. So there is no relationship, except perhaps in his head. And besides, we are very different, he and I. He wants to limit use of Elder Culture technology because he fears it. I want to embrace it. To understand it. Only by understanding what we use can we truly master it, and truly control our destiny.’

‘You want to secure the future.’

‘If you are travelling somewhere, you want to make sure that you know as much about your destination as possible. Tell me, do you have any idea at all why you are drawn to what you call your lodestar?’

‘Not a one.’

‘The eidolon that inhabits you, it does not speak to you?’

‘Not that I can tell.’

‘Not even in dreams?’

‘If it does, I don’t remember them.’

Unlikely Worlds spoke up, startling Lisa. ‘There are the diagrams, of course. The diagrams you have been drawing.’

‘It would be nice to think that it is trying to be helpful,’ Ada Morange said. ‘That it is trying to point us towards something we can use. But perhaps we are too hopeful. Too trusting.’

‘Some might say too arrogant,’ Unlikely Worlds said.

‘Because, despite all evidence to the contrary, we continue to believe that the universe is shaped for our convenience? No. We believe instead that we might just be clever enough to win some advantage over those who try to manipulate us,’ Ada Morange said, and looked at Lisa again. ‘I believe that Professor Lu Jeu told you about my research into the Ghajar pulsar map. The first one.’

Lisa said, ‘All things considered, I guess you’d be surprised if we hadn’t talked about it.’

‘What he does not know, what no outsider knows, is that we decoded the map two years ago. We found where it points to.’

One of Ada Morange’s screens swivelled to face Lisa. It showed a cluster of blocky pixels on a field of black.

‘That is the star in question,’ Ada Morange said. ‘An M0 red dwarf. The map you pulled from the narrative code and your odd little talent confirm it. Why it was of such interest to the Ghajar we do not yet know. As far as we can tell, it possesses only two planets. Both are smaller than Mars, and both orbit so close to it that their surfaces are most likely oceans of molten rock. And as far as we know, it is not linked to the wormhole network.’