Into Everywhere (7 page)

‘You have a guest with deep roots. How did it find you?’

She found herself explaining about the Bad Trip. The young man listened attentively. He did not seem to judge her. When she finished talking there was a short silence; then he told her that understanding what possessed her was the first step on the road to self-knowledge.

‘That’s why I’m here.’

Lisa paid a hundred and forty dollars for an initial consultation. They sat either side of the table and the psychic took out a small parcel of silvery mylar cloth and unfolded it to reveal a pale, thumbnail-sized tessera. He centred it between them, told Lisa that he was going to evoke his familiar and that she should not be frightened.

‘I’ve seen eidolons before,’ she said.

‘The Butcher can be intimidating to some people.’

‘The Butcher?’

‘It is what I call him,’ the psychic said. ‘His actual name has no real human equivalent, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Lisa said, beginning to feel that she’d made a mistake.

The psychic told the lights to dim, touched the tessera. And his eidolon was suddenly there, filling the room like a faint fog of cigarette smoke. The psychic closed his eyes. His hands rested palms up on the table, thumb and forefinger pinched together. Lisa expected him to speak in a sonorous voice, channelling his spirit guide, offering nuggets of wisdom, asking leading questions. Instead, the fog began to thicken and coalesce behind him, and she had the brief impression of something larger than the room leaning in, looking down at her. Then the smoky fog blew away, vanishing beyond the walls of the dim little room, and the young man stood with an abrupt motion that knocked over his chair.

‘Go,’ he said. He looked as if he had been punched hard in the stomach.

‘What about my reading? What did you see?’

There was a stinging metallic taste in Lisa’s mouth, a headache pulsing behind her eyes.

‘Just leave. Please. I can’t help you. I can’t . . .’

For a moment the young man stared at her, a look that was half longing, half revulsion, then turned on his heel and shouldered through the glass-bead curtain.

Lisa started to take a longer route to work so that she could avoid the psychic’s parlour. One morning, three or four weeks later, she found a small parcel of mylar cloth on the doorstep of her office. She didn’t unwrap it: she knew what it contained. And when she finally nerved herself up to visit the psychic’s parlour she discovered that it was boarded up; according to one of his neighbours the owner had fallen ill and given up the lease.

Lisa didn’t ever scan the tessera he’d left. She knew that it would be empty, wiped clean by her ghost. Call it an exorcism in reverse. Shortly after that, she was starting her mornings with a shot or two to numb herself, and then she got into shine and lost her business and quit the Alien Market.

Now she was searching for clues about the identity and nature of her ghost again. She was certain that the geek police weren’t going to tell her anything; a brief phone conference with Bria’s lawyer had confirmed that as far as that went she was pretty much screwed.

‘At this point I recommend patience,’ he’d said. ‘If your equipment has not been returned in, let’s say, four weeks, it might be possible to lodge an appeal based on the distress caused to your business.’

‘What about the distress caused by their harassment?’ Lisa had said, but the lawyer had told her that it would be hard to argue that the police had been doing anything other than implementing the usual procedures in their investigation.

She planned to make the rounds of friends and business acquaintances, asking about Willie’s find and who he’d crewed up with, asking if he’d brought in anything for analysis, and she lucked out on her first stop. Her old boss Valerie Tortorella, who’d heard about the breakout on the tomb-raider gossip board.

Valerie was in her late sixties, a shrewd, laid-back Canadian who’d come up to First Foot on the seventh shuttle cycle, back when Port of Plenty had been no more than a tent town pitched on the shore of an alien sea. Lisa had worked for her before she’d met Bria and joined the Crazy 88 Collective, and Valerie had been part of the intervention that had rescued her from her low point after the Bad Trip.

They sat in Valerie’s workshop, sipping mint tea. Pete sprawled beside Lisa; her ghost leaned at her shoulder. Perhaps it was interested in the fossil that sat on the workbench, under an articulated magnifier lamp: a hand-sized sandstone slab printed with a glistening spiral, the burrow made by some worm-like animal or biochine in the mud of a lake that had dried up half a million years ago, lined with an organic polymer salted with copper and iron. Valerie had shown Lisa how a pair of gold-tipped needle probes attached to an oscillator elicited high pure tones from different parts of the fossil. ‘Maybe the worm-things sang to each other with magnetic pulses. Or maybe it’s an accidental feature of some deeper property. Who knows?’

Lisa told her old boss about the raid on her homestead by the geek police and admitted that she still didn’t know how she felt about Willie, said it hadn’t really sunk in yet. Valerie said, ‘I heard the police haven’t found his body. Is there still a chance . . .?’

‘If anyone could turn up after a catastrophic breakout, it would be Willie. But the guy in charge of the case said that it was really bad, it looked like everyone had turned on everyone else . . .’ Lisa paused, then said, ‘You know that corny old thing about twins feeling each other’s pain? How if one twin dies the other knows about it, even if they’re half a world apart?’

Valerie looked at her over the top of her bifocals. Her grey hair was pulled in a tight bun skewered with a steel needle. She was dressed in a work apron over jeans and a thin cotton sweater. ‘It was like that with you and Willie?’

‘I think it was like that with our ghosts,’ Lisa said, and told Valerie about her seizure, said that she thought that Willie had been digging up something related to the Bad Trip.

‘So I suppose you want to know about that weird tessera he brought in for analysis a few weeks back,’ Valerie said.

Lisa rode out the moment of freezing shock and said, ‘This was from the place he was digging up?’

‘He didn’t say. You know Willie. One day he would be bragging about some jackpot that turned out to exist only his imagination, the next he was Mr Mystery.’

‘That’s why he was such a terrible poker player. He’d clown around until he got some good cards, and then he was deadly serious. He’d say, “Are we playing or are we playing?” and everyone knew to throw in their high cards and low pairs.’

‘The same when he was trying to get a price on something, for sure,’ Valerie said.

She told Lisa that Willie had asked her for a second opinion on the tessera. ‘It was active, but didn’t express the usual eidolon. Instead, it contained some kind of Ghajar code. Not my kind of thing, so I sent him over to Carol Schleifer. She has handled a couple of fragments of ship code from that crash site in the City of the Dead.’

‘This was definitely a tessera.’

‘And not a piece of ship wreckage that looked like a tessera? That’s what I wondered,’ Valerie said. ‘So I zapped it with my chemcam. I also did a CT scan. Chemical composition and fine-grain structure were identical with late-period Ghostkeeper tesserae. Composition, isotopic ratios and tracks left by cosmic rays dated it at between forty and fifty thousand years old. Again, consistent with late-period tesserae.’

‘So how did Ghajar code get inside it?’

‘You’d have to ask Carol. It’s outside my area of expertise. Do you think it could have something to do with what happened to you?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe. Did Willie happen to tell you where he found it?’

Valerie shook her head. ‘He was holding that card close to his chest.’

‘He partnered up with a crew,’ Lisa said. ‘I was wondering if you heard anything about that, know anyone who went with him.’

Valerie studied her for a moment. ‘Are you sure you’re all right? Because if you don’t mind me saying so, you look like you’re running on empty.’

Pete agreed, saying that Lisa was bad tired.

‘Say again?’ Valerie said.

‘He said I’ve had a couple of rough days,’ Lisa said. ‘I should go talk to Carol. If you hear anything about this breakout, what the geek police are doing, maybe you could pass it on.’

Carol Schleifer’s office was in Prometheus Row, a narrow street of mud-brick buildings that stepped down towards Elysian Creek. It was cluttered with little restaurants and shops selling trinkets and printed replicas, but some of the original businesses lingered at the far end, down by the old cast-iron bridge where day trippers posed for selfies and love-sick teenagers fastened padlocks scratched with their initials to the railings. Carol Schleifer shared a storefront with a business that advertised energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. She made a fuss of Pete, as if he was a pet instead of a working dog, and told Lisa she was sorry to hear about Willie. ‘Sometimes you hit the jackpot and sometimes the jackpot hits you, I guess.’

Lisa ignored that, asked about Willie’s tessera. Carol told her that it had contained Ghajar code all right, but it wasn’t ship code.

‘It was narrative code, so-called. Rare stuff, usually found in scraps of grapheme laminate recovered from Ghajar ships. I asked him if he’d been poking around the City of the Dead. You know, the site of that crashed spaceship. He just winked. He was acting
muy misteriosamente
,’ Carol said. ‘Said he’d found something big but wouldn’t tell me what.’

She didn’t think it odd to find Ghajar code in a Ghostkeeper tessera.

‘Ship code got into hive rats that dug a colony in the site of that crashed ship. And it got inside a couple of coders working on it, too. It’s labile. So I wouldn’t be surprised if narrative code is labile too. Do you think it got inside Willie’s head? It would find it pretty crowded in there, I should think,’ Carol said, reminding Lisa exactly why she’d never really liked the woman.

‘Did Willie say anything at all about where he’d found it?’

‘He said he’d made a lucky strike, wouldn’t say where. Did anything ever come of it? Why I ask, he still owes me,’ Carol said. She was a brisk, brittle New Yorker, her sharp blue eyes lasering Lisa over the top of spex with thin gold frames. ‘I told him that I could get him a good price for that tessera. Enough to pay off his debt, and then some. I know most of the collectors, and there’s someone at Peking University trying to decode the language. If it is a language. But Willie blew me off, said he had other plans.’

‘He went back out with a crew. I’m trying to find out who they were.’

‘I wouldn’t know anything about that. You could ask his girlfriend, I guess.’ Carol smiled. ‘You did know he has a new girlfriend?’

‘I’d be surprised if he didn’t,’ Lisa said.

According to Carol, this one was a pretty newbie who’d come up a few months ago. ‘Say, how about this? You pay what he owes me, I’ll knock twenty per cent off, you get the girlfriend to pay you the full amount and keep the difference. That way we both make a little something.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I help people, this is what I get,’ Carol said. ‘You guys were still married, weren’t you?’

‘Only technically,’ Lisa said. ‘Don’t think that it makes me liable for his debts. But listen, maybe his girlfriend is holding on to something that might raise a little cash. Do you happen to know if he was still living in that motel over in Felony Flats?’

Tony Okoye was in the middle of offloading his passengers and their strange cargo when three police cruisers came scurrying across the landing field. He was required to attend an extraordinary council meeting; no use protesting that he had far better things to do. He told Junot to oversee the transfer of the crew of wizards to Aunty Jael’s laboratories, climbed into the lead cruiser, and in a whirl of lights and blare of sirens was driven at speed along the coast highway and through the crooked and winding streets of Victory Landing to the Great House.

Tony had been away for more than two years, but nothing seemed to have changed. His rooms were as clean and anonymous as a hotel suite. Hands had set up artful arrangements of pine boughs and the blood-red feathers of some kind of native foliage here and there, laid out a selection of fresh clothes, and drawn a sudsy bath. As soon as he was alone, he called Ayo on her hard line. He was certain that Opeyemi was behind the security theatre and the meeting, wanted to find out if his sister was on his side, wanted to discuss how they could neutralise this charade, but her secretary told him that Madam Ayo was at present unavailable.

‘Tell her it’s her young brother, back from a grand adventure with a great prize.’

‘She knows all about your arrival, sir. And she asked me to tell you that she is looking forward to hearing your report.’

‘I have to talk to her before the meeting.’

‘The meeting is already under way, sir. You will be sent for shortly.’

Tony was pacing in a tight circle to work off his frustration. ‘Sent for? What am I, a package?’

‘I believe that you will appear as a witness, sir,’ the secretary said drily.

Perfumed from the bath, dressed in a red brocade jacket with gold frogs, matching trousers with a gold stripe, and a felt cap denoting his status, Tony was escorted by a coronet and two troopers to his sister’s offices. Lancelot Askia was in the anteroom, dressed in a plain black suit and talking to a pair of senior executive officers. He glanced at Tony across the big room, smiled, and looked away. According to the handsome young aide who greeted Tony, the man had just given evidence to the council.

‘My version of events should be all they need,’ Tony said, feeling that he had walked into an ambush.

‘They must consider all the facts, sir,’ the aide said. ‘This way, please.’

As he followed the aide to the council chamber, Tony opened a window, called up the ship’s external feeds, and checked its perimeter. The wizards and the shielded aquarium containing the stromatolites were gone; there was no unusual activity on the whitetop of the landing field; the bridle confirmed that everything was quiet.