run its life-support, and could still look after and communicate with its human, for whom it had an emotional attachment similar to that which a human might form to a familiar pen, though not, perhaps, as much as might be formed towards a good knife or an old pipe.
Not that the human was much use. He had spent the forty-six hours since the possession in a state of querulous self-pity, from which he was only distracted by the occasional bout of perfunctory sex with one of the ship’s avatars.
Now Lamont was awake again and back in the control room. His gaze was heavy with cunning.
‘I have an idea,’ he told the disconsolate ship.
‘Proceed,’ said the ship. It had heard a lot of ideas from him in the past couple of days.
‘I hack you,’ said Lamont. ‘Run a dump of your entire code through a partitioned buffer, and check for infected segments using standard Well-hausen diagnostics. Identify the infected area, blow it out or wall it off, and resume manual control.’
‘You are not thinking clearly,’ said the ship. ‘The procedure you suggest would take approximately six point seven five million years.’
‘It would if I were to do it brute-force serially,’ Lamont explained. ‘That wasn’t what I meant. I’ve built in some statistical grabs and shortcuts—’
‘I strongly recommend against that,’ said the ship. ‘The more intelligence is applied to the problem, the more likely it is that the program can be itself corrupted.’
Lamont writhed in his webbing as he thought about this. The AI, well used to human processing times, waited patiently through another stretch of protracted torment.
‘Have you had any thoughts,’ asked Lamont at last, ‘as to how the alien program managed to grab control?’
‘Unfortunately the details of this are part of what is no longer accessible to me,’ said the
‘I had figured that out for myself,’ said Lamont, and retreated into gloom.
L
amont was careful not to betray anything of his intention to the ship, but he was actively considering more drastic measures. He wasn’t sure whether the ship’s speculation—that the source of the war-machine-generation program was already familiar with human-built software—was more alarming than the possibility he’d at first contemplated: that it cracked the computer from scratch, using some kind of universal translation, which he was vaguely aware was supposed to be impossible. But then, neural parsers had been supposed to be impossible, until they were invented. Perhaps some similar latching on to universal basics—worming out the encoding of the natural numbers, and search-space branching outward from there—was involved here.
Or perhaps not. In that case the horror that Armand had unearthed had been listening, and not passively, to human electronic traffic for a long time. Another possibility, of course, was that the thing wasn’t alien at all—that it was, despite appearances, of human origin itself. This speculation had been comprehensively thrashed out on the discussions back home, to which Lamont had listened in an agony of frustration, missing as they were a crucial bit of evidence. His was, as far as he knew, the only spacecraft with which contact had been lost, and that was so common and unalarming an occurrence—he’d been out of contact seven times in the past ten years—that only the most excitable commentators were attributing to it any sinister significance. All the attention—practical as well as speculative—was turned to the possibility of further buried alien war machines in nearby asteroids or on Eurydice’s moon, Orpheus. Cue newscasts of nervy, armed patrols slogging through craters and searching in caves. These war machines, Lamont thought, might very well exist, though the swift elegance with which his ship—and how many other machines?—had been fucked over made him doubt it.
He disengaged from the webbing and prowled the vessel, ostensibly checking for subtle damage wreaked by the intrusion, and privately brainstorming himself for ways to destroy the ship’s mind.
R
esurrections had to be sponsored. It was a big responsibility, bringing people back from the dead. This was one reason why it wasn’t done very much. Another was that many of those who remained dead had been on the Returner side, and had few sympathisers. They were not much missed. A minority of the Returners remained proscribed.
To get Winter and Calder off the list, Ben-Ami had to organise a small campaign. He circulated a petition among the fans, he put up a considerable amount of his own credit, and accepted responsibility for the consequences of the resurrection. Letters of application had to be sent off to the Department of Culture and the Department of Defence, followed up after a day or two by the petitions, which now had several hundred signatures. Before doing any of this he had to clear it with the copyright holders, the Entertainment and Education Corporation, popularly known as the Mouse. Fortunately for him, the rights were handled by a low-level droid who—blindly cross-referencing the musicians’ names as still on the proscribed list—sold them to Ben-Ami for a pittance. Something similar happened with the Departments, whose philistinism Ben-Ami had not underestimated. Defence saw the musicians as artists (and thus irrelevant). Culture saw them as propagandist hacks (and thus irrelevant). The clearance came through.
‘Careful with that AK,’ said Andrea Al-Khayed, as they moved stuff out of the way of the resurrection tanks.
‘It isn’t loaded. It’s just a prop.’
She gave him a look. ‘It’s
‘Oh, all right.’ Ben-Ami removed the magazine clip from the rifle (it was the one that Leonid, in the tragedy, had used to shoot himself as Gorbachev’s troops stormed the Kremlin), saw that it was indeed loaded, remembered just in time to take the round out of the chamber, and stashed the weapon on top of a wardrobe. He and Andrea wheeled the tanks to near the desk, cabled them up and plumbed them in, and then dragged up a couple of beds from the hospital scene in the same production that the resurrection tanks had featured in.
Al-Khayed downloaded the released and transferred data from the desk while Ben-Ami tore open in succession two heavy paper sacks labelled ‘Human (dry)—Sterile if Sealed,’ tipped one into each tank and turned on the water supply. He closed the lids carefully and watched a display of lights and gauges that meant more to Andrea than it did to him. She checked them carefully.
‘All is well,’ she said.
‘That’s it?’ said Ben-Ami. He had a sense of anticlimax. The equivalent scene as he’d scripted it long ago for
‘Seven days,’ she said. ‘See you then.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
She paused at the door. ‘Don’t peek.’
He sat down at the desk, sighed, and returned to working on the script.
CHAPTER 4
I Don’t Know Your Face, But Your Name Is Familiar
Lucinda Carlyle tried not to scowl into the mirror as the makeup artist sweated over her face. The artist of the features had a yellowing bruise on his own, the ten-minute-old legacy of his hint that eugenic nanosurgery was what she really wanted. Beyond the edge of her reflection, her face appeared again, larger than life on the news wall. The channel was recycling her first words from the Government steps, with the sound turned off. She had heard and seen it a dozen times. She pouted, bored, for the lipstick, and read her lips.
‘People of Eurydice,’ she’d said, ‘welcome back! It’s great to see you! You’re looking well! The rest of the
