Into Everywhere (11 page)

Lisa told Bria that Outland had bought out the site in the City of the Dead where a Ghajar shipwreck had infected a hive-rat colony. ‘And they were involved in digs looking for other traces of the wreck.’

‘So is that what Willie found?’ Bria said. ‘Something to do with the wreck?’

‘It’s possible. According to Carol Schleifer, this tessera contains Ghajar narrative code. Which until now has only been found in Ghajar ships. I need your help, Bria. I need to take a look at this code.’

‘Right now what you need to do is go home and get some rest.’

‘And meanwhile the cops are digging up whatever it was that Willie found out there,’ Lisa said. She was walking up and down at the shoulder of the road. She couldn’t keep still. ‘I need to look at this code, and I need you to go check recent excavation licences again. Willie didn’t register his find, either because he couldn’t afford the fee or because he knew it was something big, was worried that it would attract the wrong kind of attention. So he took a risk and kept it secret. But maybe Outland took out a licence after he hooked up with them.’

‘We’ll have to do that tomorrow,’ Bria said. ‘The licence office will be closed now.’

‘Okay. But first thing. First thing tomorrow. The licence and the code.’

‘Are you sure,’ Bria said, ‘that this isn’t something to do with the ghost? That it isn’t driving you towards this place? The place it came from, where Willie and everyone else was killed.’

Lisa realised that she was staring at the big ship hanging out there across acres of concrete. Had the Ghajar built those ships before their version of first contact with the Jackaroo, or had they found them afterwards, cast off by some previous client race? She deliberately turned her back on it and said, ‘This isn’t about helping it. It’s about understanding it. Finding out what it is so I can get rid of it.’

‘You just had a seizure,’ Bria said. ‘And then there was the bad news about Willie. Either one of those would have definitely put me in a spin.’

‘I’m chasing it
because
I had a seizure,’ Lisa said. ‘Because Willie found something that woke the ghost in my head.’

‘But first, maybe you should to take a step back and think this through. Think about what you really want. Think about the consequences of going up against the geek police. Not to mention the Jackaroo.’

‘I don’t want to get into a fight with anyone,’ Lisa said. ‘I just want to find out what it was Willie found. Find out exactly what it was that fucked us up.’

After all these years she still didn’t have a coherent picture of what had happened to her and Willie during the Bad Trip. They had set out from Port of Plenty on one of their expeditions into the back country, and next thing she knew she woke up in the clinic in Joe’s Corner, battered and bruised and sick, no memory of how she got there. Apparently she and Willie had ditched their truck in the City of the Dead and had been found by a tomb raider, badly dehydrated and suffering from heatstroke and retrograde amnesia. She’d lost almost three weeks of her life. Wiped clean. Gone. Later, she was visited by little flashes of disconnected memory fragments – a sense of deep panic, as if she was struggling for her last breath deep underwater, dust whirling up around her, fighting with Willie over control of the truck as they fled helter-skelter from some vast black flapping doom – but neither she nor Willie could ever recall where they’d been, how they’d got there, what they had found.

A couple of local tomb raiders had tried to follow their trail back into the Badlands, but the Badlands were big and empty, and the sandstorm season had arrived early and put an end to the search. A year later, Willie found that small excavation pit in what he claimed to be the right place, but although he dug all around it he hadn’t turned up anything.

But something had happened. Something that had stimulated a flight reaction, forcing them to run mindlessly until they could run no more. Something that had wiped out their memories and left atypical neurological activity in the temporal lobes of their brains. An infection with some kind of algorithm. An eidolon. A ghost.

Although actively malign artefacts were rare, all Elder Culture algorithms possessed some degree of toxicity. Despite using virtual sandboxes, Reynolds traps and other precautions, most coders and analysts suffered from headaches and transient visual or auditory hallucinations, while prospectors and tomb raiders, exposed to unshielded artefacts, risked all kinds of neurological damage, from hysterical blindness to pseudo-Parkinson’s and the zombie delusion. There was always some old-timer in the corner of a tomb raiders’ bar with the staggers and the jags, or an imaginary friend, or a demon on their back, or missing fingers or ears they’d cut off to prove that they were actually one of the walking dead. Lisa and Willie were haunted, but according to their neurology consultant their ghosts were mostly benign. They had been lucky to escape without suffering more serious damage.

Apart from the deep brainburn of knowing that they might never understand what had happened to them.

Apart from their marriage falling apart.

Apart from the bone-deep need to find out what Willie and his friends from Outland Archaeological Services had discovered out there in the Badlands. Maybe Bria was right. Maybe what Lisa thought she wanted was something the ghost wanted. Some deep alien urge to return to where it had come from, or something weirder and deeper. But at that moment she didn’t care.

Bria said, ‘One thing is certain: it’s deeply and dangerously bad. And then there’s the agent in charge of the investigation. Adam Nevers. I told you I had a contact in TCU? She says that he’s one of their most senior field agents. Smart and tough, very experienced. And he has history with Ada Morange. He was on Mangala when she brought down the first Ghajar ships.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘He’s hardcore, Lisa. Not someone you want as an enemy. A few years after the Mangala thing, he shut down one of Ada Morange’s companies in France. Something to do with importing biochines without the proper licences. After that he was part of a big investigation into her affairs, just before she moved most of her business out to the New Frontier. And now he’s here, and it looks like he’s still on her case.’

‘Which means that this is something important. That it’s not just some trivial breakout.’

‘Which means,’ Bria said, with the exaggerated patience she used on her sons when they were acting up, ‘that you don’t want to get caught up in the middle of a feud between them. My advice? Forget it. It’s Chinatown.’

‘Bria, the whole fucking planet is Chinatown. We come up and out and build shopping malls and golf courses and pretend we’ve civilised the place. But there’s a couple of million years’ worth of weird alien shit lying around everywhere. Do you really think we can just ignore that? Do you really think it ignores us?’

Bria finally agreed to a meeting at the code factory the next morning. Lisa drove home through the stop-and-go traffic of the city’s sprawl, through the hills on Highway One amongst the windy roar of big rigs and road trains, with the dazzle of oncoming high-beams on the other side of the highway nagging at her and a headache beginning to build behind her eyes. She was short of supplies and had planned to stop at the community store on the way home. Instead, she pulled into the lot of the Shop’n’Save on the commercial strip at the junction with the high desert road, one part of her mind knowing exactly what she was thinking of doing and hating herself for it, another part knowing that she needed anonymity.

She told Pete to guard the pickup truck and went inside and uncoupled a shopping cart and patrolled the towering aisles. She bought bags of dog chow and rice, cans of beans, a couple of kilos of frozen hamburger meat. Bathroom tissue. Fresh-squeezed orange juice. And here was the liquor aisle and the shelves where half a hundred brands of vodka were displayed, from generic gallon jugs to high-end Russian and Polish brands. Clear glass gleaming like a queen’s ransom.

‘Wizards work because they want to work,’ Aunty Jael told Tony. ‘There’s no need to bully them into doing it. No need for threats. It’s what they do. It’s their vocation.’

‘The problem is not their work ethic,’ Tony said. ‘It’s that they don’t seem to realise they must find something that can be used to win them more time.’

They were standing, Tony and the hand that Aunty Jael was currently using, in a glassed-in gallery overlooking the hangar-sized work space. Accommodation pods were stacked at one end; the big bubble of the aquarium stood in the centre, half-obscured by monitoring equipment. Inside, the stumps of the live stromatolites squatted in two metres of murky water; around it, the six wizards, dressed in traditional white coats emblazoned with heraldic stains, scorch marks and hand-lettered slogans in archaic fonts, scurried to and fro as they set up their latest experiment.

‘Things might go more quickly if we had access to more processing space,’ Aunty Jael said.

Today she was present in a skinny ball-jointed hand with glossy white plastic skin and a small head crowned by a circlet of stalked eyes. A number, 7, was stencilled in black ink on its chestplate. The 7 had, in the antique style that Aunty Jael favoured, a dash across its stem.

Tony’s grandfather had purchased her fifty years ago, but she was much older than that – although she claimed to have forgotten her original identity and the circumstances of her death and lamination, she said that she had been born on Earth and could remember what it was like before the Jackaroo had arrived in the aftermath of the Spasm, with their offer to help. And while she was an imperfect simulation running in the laminated architecture of her original brain, got up from bundles of reflexes, habits and memories, Tony never doubted that there was an actual person behind the hands and windows she used to interact with the world: astute, absent-minded, and somewhat remote, wryly amused by what she called the eternal theatre of human folly, and unswervingly loyal. She tutored the family’s children, was involved with Òrélolu’s work on sleepy sickness, supervised research on introducing salmon into Skadi’s icy ocean, increasing the efficiency of the kraken-oil refinery and improving the cultivation of pine trees and the quality of their timber. She had advised Tony about the deals he had made during his two years of freebooting, analysed artefacts he had sent back to Skadi, and expressed enthusiasm for the slime-planet adventure, whose success now hung on the fraying hope that the wizards would find something in the stromatolites’ archival genetics that could be linked to sleepy sickness.

This was not the first time she had asked Tony to provide more processing space; like all laminated minds she tended to repeat herself, was locked in the deep grooves of old obsessions. He patiently explained that he had twice asked the council to grant the wizards access to the city net, and had twice been refused for the same reason. ‘They want the work quarantined. They are worried that an eidolon will leak out. Or some kind of meme plague even worse than sleepy sickness.’

‘Did you tell them about the firewall I devised?’

‘They were not convinced. We must manage with what we have.’

‘Unless we access the city net anyway.’

‘We cannot do that without permission from the council.’

‘I need only permission from a member of the family, Master Tony.’

Tony glanced across the work space to the kitchen area, where Lancelot Askia sprawled in a chair, watching something in a window. Hopefully one of his pornographic war fantasies, not a feed from a drone that Aunty Jael had failed to find and subvert.

He said, ‘Have you talked to anyone else about this?’

‘Of course not. They would not agree to it.’

‘Neither can I. It would be sedition.’

‘I agree that it would be a drastic measure,’ Aunty Jael said. One of the stalked eyes that crowned the hand’s stubby trunk was watching the wizards working below; the rest were aimed at Tony. ‘But shutting down this research would be a bad mistake. The archival genetics are rich in unrealised potential. Since you cannot extend the time granted for this research, I feel that it is my duty to suggest ways of making the most of what you have.’

Tony thought for a moment, then said, ‘Could you link me with my ship?’

He missed her more than he could say, was always aware of the silence in his head, of being trapped alone in his skull.

‘I’m afraid not,’ Aunty Jael said. ‘I do not have access to that system.’

‘Then think of something else. Think of a way of making our wizards do what they’re actually supposed to be doing.’

The wizards had been working in Aunty Jael’s laboratory for twenty-nine days now. Tony and Aunty Jael were supervising them; Junot Johnson sourced the materials and items of equipment they required; Lancelot Askia was a permanent reminder of Opeyemi’s disapproval, skulking around, examining the wizards’ notes and worksheets, asking awkward questions. Their new leader, Cho Wing-James, claimed that the work had already yielded some very interesting results. He and the other wizards had dissected the complex molecular machinery that replicated the archival genetic material, were developing a working model of the stromatolites’ data-transmission system, and had disproved several theories about the mathematical systems of the Old Old Ones. The problem was that Cho Wing-James’s ideas about what was interesting had very little overlap with Tony’s, and none at all with the family’s.

Cho Wing-James was the beanpole who had charged at Tony after the thermobaric bomb had been planted, an animated, untidy scarecrow with a ragged mop of hair, given to mumbling cryptic snatches of internal dialogue and smacking his forehead with the heel of his hand as if trying to dislodge a jammed gear train in the mechanism of some internal argument. He claimed that he was from Earth. From London, England. He’d come all the way out here, he said, because this was where the shit was at. The real shit, not Boxbuilder ruins or Ghostkeeper tombs, or even archival genetics containing secrets millions of years old. He believed that there were Elder Culture artefacts so wild and strange that people had not yet recognised them for what they were.