with a kind of appalled impatience. Away from the media war not a shot had been fired. Except here. After a minute he said absently:
‘Leave them alone, Carlo.’
‘Hey, I didn’t start it.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Yes, OK,
‘What the fuck is going on here?’ he said.
For the boys from Earth their arrival on the Beach was a game-changer. Anything could now happen. In the tidewrack of alien refuse, new universes awaited, furled up like tiny dimensions inside each abandoned technology. Back-engineering became the order of the day. Everyone could find something to work with, from a superconductor experiment the size of a planet to a gravity wave detector assembled from an entire solar system. Everything you found, you could find something bigger. At the other end of the scale: synthesised viruses, new proteins, nanoproducts all the way down to stable neutron-rich isotopes with non-spherical nuclei.
Ten per cent of it was still functioning. Ten per cent of that, you could make a wild guess what it did. Why was it there? All of this effort suggested a five-million-year anxiety spree centred on the enigma of the Tract. Every form of intelligent life that came here had taken one look and lost its nerve. The boys from Earth didn’t care about that, not at the outset: to them, the Beach was an interregnum, a holiday from common sense, an exuberant celebration of the very large and the very small, of the very old and the very new, of the vast, extraordinary, panoramic instant they congratulated themselves on living in: the instant in which everything that went before somehow met and became confected with everything yet to be. It was the point where the known met the unknowable, the mirror of desire.
It was, in short, a chance to make some money.
2410AD: two Motel Splendido entradistas ran across an alien research tool the size of a brown dwarf, wobbling its way like a dirty balloon along some gravitational instability at the hot edge of the Tract. Their names were Galt & Cole. They made a single pass, looked things over and decided it could be done. Two days later their ride broke up in a Kelvin-Helmholtz eddy a bit further in. Cole, who couldn’t think for alarms going off, went down with the ship; Galt, temporarily stripped of ambition by a plume of gas elevated to eleven million degrees Kelvin and observable only in the extreme ultraviolet, made it back to the research tool by escape pod. Five years later, his FTL beacon drew the attention of a Macon 25 long-hauler inbound for Beta Hydrae with ten thousand tonnes of catatonic New Men stacked in the holds like the sacks of harvestable organs they were.
By then Galt was calcium under a weird light. A few shreds of fabric and a polished skull. Who knew where his partner could be said to be? Galt left an autobiography, or maybe a final statement, or maybe only the name they had decided to give the real estate, scrawled on a stone — PEARLANT. They died near their fortune, those two, like all losers: but the name stuck. Beneath the pocked and gouged surface, choked with God knew how many million years of dust, lay what came to be called the Pearlant Labyrinth.
Two generations of entradistas hacked their way in. That was a story in itself. Lost expeditions, weird fevers, death. Every side-tunnel full of ancient machinery incubating an acute sense of injustice. They contended with fungus spores, cave-ins, passages flooded by non-Abelian fluids at room temperature. They were driven mad by the feeling of being observed. Worse, the labyrinth, clearly some kind of experiment in itself, had been constructed with such exquisite fractality that the term ‘centre’ could only ever be a distraction. The experimental space, through which temporal anomalies ticked and flared in direct response to events deep inside the Tract (‘As if,’ someone said, ‘it was built to tell the time in there’), would always contain more distance than its outer surface permitted. Eventually a team of maze-runners from FUGA-Orthogen — an EMC subsidiary specialising in nuclear explosives, capitalised out of New Venusport on the sale of mining machinery somewhat older than the labyrinth itself — hacked its way into the vast, ill-defined chamber which would come to be known as The Old Control Room. Their shadows scattered, jittery and spooked, across its perfectly flat allotropic carbon deck. They gathered at a respectable distance. They cracked their helmets and let fall their thermobaric power tools. They admired the fluttering opalescence of the Aleph where it lay suspended in its cradle of magnetic fields. They knew they had struck it rich.
Fifteen years later, 3D images of this treasure trove filled Gaines’ dial-up: they were a little scratchy from distance, not to say the passage through three competing kinds of physics.
Around the time he was in the cloister with Alyssia Fignall, the Aleph had burst — boiling up from the nanoscale like a pocket nova, only to writhe, flicker, and, at the last moment, become something else. Where the containment machinery had been there was only the deck. On it lay an artefact of unknown provenance with the appearance of a woman, just over life-size and wearing a gown of grey metallic fabrics. This woman was barely human. She was neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. A white paste oozed from the corner of her mouth. There was something wrong with her cheekbones. Gaines stared at her; the woman, her limbs and torso shifting in and out of focus as if viewed through moving water, stared blankly back, her eyes drained of emotion, her face immobile. Whatever she was seeing, it wasn’t in the chamber. Whatever effort she was making, it had nothing to do with him, but went on in silence, bitter, determined, undefinable, as if she would never understand what was happening to her yet never give up.She looked, Gaines thought, like someone trying not to die.
‘I don’t think that’s a helpful assumption,’ his site controller, a man called Case, told him. ‘It assigns values where you might not want them.’ Case had started out as a serious physicist, then, after a temporal convulsion in the maze aged him sixty years in a day, switched to management. He lived for his work, had written a fictional account of Galt & Cole called ‘These Dirty Stars’, and though unimaginative did well with multidisciplinary teams. ‘To me she’s less like a person than a problem.’
‘How did this happen?’ Gaines said. ‘How can this have happened?’
No one was willing to make a guess.
‘Never mind the Aleph,’ Case said. ‘The labyrinth itself is a million years old. We never knew what it was supposed to do; we never even knew which of them we were talking to.’
Nanoscale footage presented the field-collapse as a kind of topological suicide. Picoseconds in, the Aleph resembled less a teardrop than a perished rubber ball, first folding to make a comic mouth, then rushing away towards a point beyond representation. ‘You aren’t looking at the event itself,’ Case warned Gaines. ‘Only the stuff we could pick up.’ In the aftermath of the deflation, a full nanosecond later, the containment apparatus itself could be seen softening, flowing — this was visible on cameras run realtime outside the containment facility — and then evaporating into light. Out of the light the artefact emerged,
‘She looks so alive.’
‘The people in Xenobiology are already calling her Pearl,’ Case said, to show he could understand that.
‘What does this mean for the field weapon?’
‘The field weapon?’ Case looked at Gaines as if he was mad. ‘It’s fucked. That whole line of research is fucked. I don’t think there ever was a field weapon, Rig.’ He stared around him, into the dark of the old control room. ‘I think the labyrinth had its own agenda all along.’
‘Don’t let upper management know about this.’
