Into Everywhere (47 page)

‘The side of the Jackaroo, at any rate,’ Lisa said, looking down the dim busy gallery at the avatars. Impossible to tell if they were looking back at her. ‘That’s why your three friends have come along for the ride, isn’t it? To help your crazy attempt to censor the universe.’

‘They are merely interested observers. It’s up to us to save ourselves.’ Nevers pointed to the crescent of the dead planet. ‘That’s one possible future. Some are of the opinion that we are too far down the path towards it to be able to turn back. Others think that we can do better than the Ghajar and the rest of the Elder Cultures. That’s what I think. That’s what my boss thinks. And that is why we are here.’

The withered old son-of-a-bitch looked happy. He was exactly where he wanted to be. He was fighting the good fight. Lisa thought, with a pang of grief that opened a hole in her heart, of how Willie would have loved this, too. Weird wormholes leading to planets no human being had ever seen before. Deep history. Untold plunder.

Nevers said, ‘We’re at the L5 point between that planet and its moon. It’s bigger than the Moon, Earth’s moon. About the size of Mars, with a thin atmosphere and ice caps. The wizards say that it would have strongly motivated the Ghajar to develop space-going technology. But it’s a lifeless garden of craters now, wrecked by the same cosmic bombardment that ruined the planet. So much for the moon. So much for the planet. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, they aren’t our final destination. There are several hundred wormholes around us. Most of them are dead, but you pointed us towards one of the active ones. Mr Clegg opened it yesterday, and we sent a drone through. And found a star clad in iron, orbited by a planet made of diamond.’

He paused, clearly expecting Lisa to ask him what he meant. When she didn’t take the bait, he said, ‘Keep watching this window. You’ll see soon enough.’

He left her there with the two guards and hauled himself back to Dave Clegg’s couch, talking to the pilot while the technicians manipulated symbols in dozens of small windows. At last, Nevers and the technicians sculled back from the couch, and it slid into the wall. Chatter and activity up and down the gallery sharpened; muted chimes pulsed in the air. The guards conjured stalked chairs and sat Lisa in one; it clamped around her like a soft fist.

Gravity came back. The ship was under way again. The view in the window changed, showing now the silvery ring of a wormhole throat embedded in an irregular black sheet, steadily growing larger.

Lisa leaned forward. She was afraid, vastly and mortally afraid, but she was also amazed and excited, watching as the wormhole throat expanded with a sudden rush, filling the window. She felt it coming at her, felt it engulf her and pull at her soul. And then the ship was through, spat out the other side whole and unaltered, and the window was full of fat bright stars that hung before washes and threads of glowing gas in which yet more stars burned. Lisa saw a star cluster like a swarm of burning bees, saw flowing arcs and filaments. People were applauding all around her, and then someone cried out, a loud human shout of surprise and shock.

Lisa turned, saw that the three Jackaroo avatars were dissolving into the air. Their heads and hands thinning, fading away, their sunglasses floating free as their tracksuits collapsed. Gone.

‘Look. Look! Isn’t it wonderful?’ the bridle said.

‘It’s too early to tell. Where are we?’

Tony was flipping through the images she had thrown at him. It was difficult to focus. He was still gripped by the adrenalin rush of the crazy dive, shaky and elated and buzzing with skittish energy. He had never before felt so alive. He had escaped the Red Brigade. He was flying a ship with crazy unknown powers. Everything seemed possible.

‘In a wilderness of mirrors,’ the bridle said. ‘It appears to be orbiting at the L5 point of that rocky planet and its moon.’

Tony saw that the other side of the mirror pair they had just used was dwindling behind them, centred on a thinning cloud of carbon dioxide and water vapour that had bled through when the wormhole mouth had opened. Many more mirrors, a couple of hundred of them, were scattered across a spherical volume roughly ten thousand kilometres across. And far beyond this compact wilderness were the tiny crescents of a planet and a big moon. It reminded Tony at once of images of Earth and its moon, but when he zoomed in he saw that the planet was wrapped in cloud from pole to pole, a dirty grey shroud punctuated by the swirl of a gigantic hurricane close to the equator.

He asked the bridle if this was where the eidolon wanted to go, or was it just a way point to somewhere else?

‘I think it’s a way point.’

‘You think or you know?’

‘I have a feeling,’ the bridle said. ‘A good one.’

‘If it is a way point, we need to find the next mirror right away,’ Tony said. ‘We need to keep moving.’

The mirror pair between the hothouse planet and this wilderness was still active. The ship had woken it a bare second before they transited, and the bridle had no idea how to shut it down. Pretty soon, the Red Brigade would regroup and send those drones through, controlled by q-phone links over who knew how many light years. And then they would come through themselves . . .

Tony tasked the bridle with scanning the mirrors, fretted as an hour ticked past. Unlikely Worlds, down in the hold, was as usual no help at all.

‘There was a war here,’ he said, after Tony showed him images of the planet and its battered moon.

‘Was it fought between two factions of the Ghajar?’ Tony said, thinking of Mina Saba’s theory.

‘It’s possible.’

‘And is that the Ghajar home world?’

‘I very much doubt that anyone is living there now.’

‘That isn’t what I asked.’

‘What happened here happened before my time,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘Thousands and thousands of years ago. Perhaps you should ask your eidolon. Or the copy lodged in the ship’s mind. Are they interested in it?’

But although Tony was jittery with nervous energy, his eidolon was quiet, unmoved by the transition through the wormhole and the mirrors or the planet. The bridle reported that most of the mirrors were the ordinary kind, set in the flat faces of cone-shaped rocks, and most of the rest appeared to be dead.

‘Keep looking,’ Tony told her.

About ten minutes later, the mirror that led to the hothouse planet blinked open and the two drones sharked out, lighting up the neighbourhood with radar and microwave scans. ‘Uh-oh,’ the bridle said, and a moment later the drive kicked in. The ship was heading towards one of the mirrors. And its controls had locked up.

‘Give me direct-law flight,’ Tony said, angry and frightened. ‘At once.’

‘Trust me,’ the bridle sang out.

The overrides were locked up too. Tony was a helpless passenger in his own ship.

Unlikely Worlds said, ‘I think your question about whether this is the final destination or just a way point has been answered.’

‘Where are we going?’ Tony said.

‘Somewhere wonderful,’ Unlikely Worlds said, and Tony realised that the fucking thing had known all along where they were supposed to go.

‘Home,’ the bridle said, and Tony wondered whether the eidolon had spoken.

They flashed past a mirror, past two more rotating around each other, homing in on a black rectangle only faintly visible against the black of space.

‘It’s awake,’ the bridle said. ‘I think someone has been here before us.’

Tony’s comms pinged: the drones, a couple of thousand kilometres astern, had spotted him. He saw the blink of their reaction motors as they began to manouevre, and then
Abalunam’s Pride
slammed through the mirror.

Bright stars spread across the sky. Great washes of luminous gas.

Control of the ship came back. Tony began to kill its momentum, told the bridle to find out where they were. Dazed by the transition, he was wondering if they weren’t somehow back in orbit around the blue ice giant.

‘We have a more immediate problem,’ the bridle said, and opened two windows.

One showed a gigantic mad ship hanging about a thousand kilometres from the mirror; the other a pair of E-class raptors, both of them displaying police flags as they closed on
Abalunam’s Pride
.

In the immediate aftermath of the avatars’ disappearance, Lisa was dispatched to the wizards’ lair for another round of tests. Her ghost was quiet, its presence as faint as music leaking from a neighbouring room, and all sense of the lodestar was gone. The wizards wouldn’t tell her if this meant they had arrived at their final destination; they were their usual non-communicative selves, giving her instructions in English –
Hold still
,
Look at this
,
Tell me what you see
– but talking amongst themselves in machine-gun Spanish. As far as they were concerned, Lisa wasn’t a person but a puzzle they had as yet only partly unlocked.

They were still a long way from replicating the ghost in her head, and translating the information it encoded. At the beginning of the long series of tests she had offered to help to analyse the data, but the wizards’ boss, a skinny man with a shock of black hair, told her that she wouldn’t understand their methods. ‘We have developed many new tools since your time,’ he’d said, but Lisa wasn’t so sure. They didn’t appear to use any kind of analytical reasoning to confirm their conjectures, employing instead a crude form of experimental Darwinism, seeding a matrix with algorithms modelling variations of their initial assumptions and letting them run to a halting state, selecting those that most resembled the observed conditions, and running and re-running everything over and again until they had derived an algorithm that reproduced reality to an agreed level of statistical confidence. The wizards didn’t care that this method gave no insights into the problems it attacked, or that they didn’t understand how the solutions it yielded were related to the vast edifice of Euclidean mathematical theory. They weren’t interested in theory. As far as they were concerned, if an algorithm gave the right answer, then plug it in: it was good to go.

Nevers came into the wizards’ lair as the latest round of tests were being wound up, bluntly asked Lisa if she knew why the Jackaroo avatars had vanished, where they had gone. The ships docked in the funnel of the mad ship’s hold had been searched from stem to stern, but no trace of the avatars had been found. It was possible that they were somewhere aboard the mad ship itself, Nevers said, but so far no one had found a way inside.

Lisa said she was glad that they were gone but didn’t think that she could take the credit. ‘As far as I can tell, my ghost didn’t ever communicate with them. But perhaps your little gang of mad scientists knows better.’

Nevers ignored her jibe. ‘Maybe it’s a good sign. They left because we don’t need any more help from them. Because we’re exactly where we are supposed to be. We’ve beaten Ada Morange to the prize. Everything else is merely detail.’

‘Isn’t that were God lives? In the details?’

Nevers ignored that too. ‘I thought we should have a little celebration,’ he said, producing two pouches of clear liquid from the pocket of his green uniform trousers. He offered one to Lisa, holding it by its drinking tube like a popsicle. ‘Vodka martini. I had one of the wizards mix it for us.’

Lisa swallowed a little spurt of saliva, her stupid body betraying her, saw a glint of cool amusement in Nevers’s gaze and knew that he knew. The empty bottle in the trash the second time he’d searched her house. Her convictions for driving under the influence . . . Oh, he knew all right, and he was using it now to belittle her, to show her who was in charge. Maybe he’d begun his campaign against Ada Morange with the best of intentions, but it had eaten him away from the inside, turned him into the kind of pitiless monster who thought that it was funny to offer a drunk a drink.

She met his gaze and said, ‘Why don’t you just tell me what you found?’

He wiggled the pouches. ‘Are you sure you won’t join me?’

She supposed that his ghastly little smile was meant to be playful. ‘You didn’t come here to celebrate,’ she said. ‘You’re looking for validation. You don’t have the avatars any more, so you’re hoping to get a reaction from my eidolon. You want to know if this so-called prize is worth the cost of the getting.’

‘Oh, it’s worth it,’ Nevers said, and told Lisa that the wizards had determined that the mad ship and its cargo had emerged from a wormhole mouth that was just seven hundred light years from the centre of the galaxy, orbiting an old, cool neutron star and its single Earth-sized planet. Whipping around the neutron star once every two hours, at a distance of just half a million kilometres, the planet was mostly made of diamond, and strictly speaking wasn’t a planet at all, but the remnant of a massive star that had once formed a close binary with an even larger companion. That companion star had followed the usual evolutionary path, expanding into a red giant as it used up its hydrogen, fusing heavier elements until at last iron formed in its core and it could no longer produce enough energy to counter the inward pull of gravity. The resulting supernova had created a rapidly spinning neutron star – a pulsar emitting intense beams of electromagnetic radiation. When the smaller star had expanded in turn soon afterwards, the pulsar had siphoned off most of its mass and angular momentum, spinning itself up into a millisecond pulsar, reducing the smaller star to a low-mass carbon-rich white dwarf and relentlessly eroding it further, until only its dense crystalline core was left. Now, eleven or twelve billion years later, the pulsar had long ago spun down. Its radio emissions had ceased and it had become a neutron star again: a quiescent hyperdense sphere of neutrons thirteen kilometres in diameter, thinly coated with a crust of iron nuclei crushed into a solid lattice, its surface temperature just a few thousand degrees Kelvin. An ancient star armoured in iron, orbited by a planet made of diamond . . .

And that wasn’t all, Adam Nevers said. Another star, an M3 red dwarf, orbited the neutron star at a distance of a little under nineteen astronomical units. And the M3 dwarf possessed a tide-locked Mars-sized rocky planet. He opened windows, showed Lisa images of the M3 dwarf and its planet, images of the diamond planet’s dim half-disc illuminated by a sharp blue point source. With a quick deep chill she remembered something Willie had said on his dying bed.
A planet bigger than its sun . . .