Newton's Wake

‘I’ve been set up,’ she said. ‘Just so you all know I know. All right, Shlaim. Go ahead. Say what you have to say.’

Hoffman glanced at her, made a frantic wiping gesture with both hands, and stepped back. She could believe he had nothing to do with this.

Shlaim reached out sideways without looking and kept his hand there until somebody put a glass of beer in it. He sipped the beer, put it down on the bar counter and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

‘Ah, that’s good,’ he said. ‘My first in two hundred and eighty years. How old are you, Lucinda?’

‘Twenty-four,’ she said.

‘You’ve had me in your suit for eight years. You got me when you were sixteen. Sweet sixteen. You got me for your fucking birthday.’

‘You were treated right,’ she said. ‘You had a decent virtuality package to run in. And in ten more years you’d have worked off your debt.’

Shlaim gulped beer again. ‘I can assure you that a decent virtuality package is not a substitute for real life. It’s not even a substitute for real beer. Only my intellectual interests kept me sane. What would have happened to someone without them?’

‘We don’t keep non-intellectual people in virtuality,’ Carlyle said. ‘As you bloody well know. What would be the point? And if you’d gone mad or shown severe distress we’d have rebooted you. Spare us your sob stories.’

‘Mistreatment is not the issue,’ said Shlaim. ‘Slavery is.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ said Carlyle. She shifted her gaze slightly to look directly at the nearest hovering camera. ‘You know where he developed his intellectual interests? The Computer Science Department of the University of Tel Aviv! He helped to engineer the Hard Rapture. He’s a goddamn war criminal. He’s lucky we didn’t throw him in a hell-file.’ She faced Shlaim again, stabbing towards him with her finger. ‘You owe us, Shlaim. I said I’d manumit you, and I won’t go back on that. As far as I’m concerned you’re free and clear. But if it wasn’t for us you’d still be a bunch of electrons doing the exercise-yard shuffle in a dreg processor on a decaying balloon sonde on Rho Coronae Borealis b. And who put you there? Who could it have been but your own posthuman exaltant, who saw its human original for the ruthless, selfish, unpleasant little nerd that he was. I had hoped you’d had a chance to think and reform your character while you were doing time, but maybe not. I never did buy rehab anyway. Restitution, aye, I’ll take that out of your hide, and I have, and I’m not ashamed of it.’

‘Lies,’ said Shlaim, quite unperturbed. ‘I was caught up in the Hard Rapture quite innocently and inadvertently, like millions of others. You can’t hold computer scientists collectively responsible for the disaster anyway. For generations your criminal family has been using this spiel as a spurious justification for enslaving any upload or conscious AI you could get your grubby hands on. And you’ll use it against Eurydice, too.’ At this point he took his turn to speak to camera. ‘Ask her what compensation the Carlyles intend to exact from you for damage done in the final war. They carry a load of resentment about that, but they’ve always thought the forces of the fightback were dead or beyond their reach. Now they’ve found you. Be afraid. Or prepare to fight.’

With that he leaned on the bar and resumed his drink. Answer that if you can, his face told her.

‘This is ridiculous,’ Carlyle said, to him and to the camera floating behind his shoulder. ‘The Carlyle company has no claim against Eurydice. I’m certain that all we’ll do is to open the wormhole for traffic and trade. We’ll charge for that, of course, but most clients find our rates reasonable. Those that don’t are free to fittle. I think you’ll find the benefits of reestablishing contact with the rest of the human race are so vast that anything we’ll charge is a pittance.’

This was true, as far as it went, which was just enough for her to be able to say it with a clear conscience and a sincere sounding voice. Shlaim drained his glass, laughed in her face, and stalked away.

‘I think,’ said Hoffman, stepping forward and turning her smoothly around, ‘that now would be a good time for us to flounce out.’

He was having me on.

Carlyle crammed the frock into the drexler and stood naked in front of the window of her fortieth-floor hotel room, and watched midnight rain fall on the towers of New Start. The lights were grouped like clusters in a busy spiral arm, the parks dark between them like dust, the blue-green grass soaking up the rain, the same rain that blurred the window. She had left the light off, so there was no reflection to peer through, nothing for someone looking in—not that anyone was, at this height—to see. Unless they were using infrared, in which case what they would pick out most strongly would be the glow of her face, hot with embarrassment.

Of course he had been having her on. Hoffman had taken her for a rube, a country girl, a daft naive lassie, and she had confirmed it for him. Imagine believing that there was some kind of wetware switch that could flip your sexuality from gay to straight for an evening! It had started as a joke, then a pose, then something he couldn’t believe she’d fallen for, and had strung her along to. He was probably laughing about it right this minute. That his sexuality was mutable she could well believe; here, most folks’ was. In a closed cornucopian economy everything was camp, performance, role-play. People got off on heterosexuality, on marriages and divorces and families as soap opera. Everything was in inverted commas and ironic drag. Like the economy itself: a charade of capitalism played out as if to keep the Joint Chiefs and other ancients happy, in the full unacknowledged knowledge that they were in on the joke.

She went into the bathroom and carefully wiped off the makeup he’d applied, seeing her own face reemerge, its own light and shade. The eyes looked smaller, the brows thicker, the nose bigger, the lips less full, the cheekbones less defined. But that was all. There was nothing wrong with it in the first place. It was a normal, healthy face at the pretty end of plain, just ordinary, attractive in its own way. Good teeth, bright eyes, a nice open smile. She knew that. It was only in the context of Eurydice’s relentless genetic optimisation that it seemed anything less. Everyone here was like an athlete, an actor, a movie megastar, a top-of-the-range supermodel. Maybe that was what they could sell to the rest of the inhabited galaxy. Image could be their substance. In the cornucopian economy this was not such a daft idea. She smiled vengefully at the thought of the planet as a vast agency, pimping its population’s pretty faces to the media and advertising conglomerates.

Maybe that would generate enough revenue to settle whatever had to be settled between the Carlyles and the last known successor to the states of Earth. When the ships came… The thought of the ships sent her from the bathroom to the bed, where she threw herself face down and bit the pillow. She missed home, family, familiarity. She even missed her familiar.

In the morning, things got worse.

A fine drizzle sifted down through the city’s skyways and bridges, which were in this quarter a mesh almost dense enough to occlude the sky, and quite dense enough to concentrate the falling rain into local cascades of drips that hammered the street and drummed on canopies and soaked the unwary. Carlyle dodged down First Left Street and turned right into Halliday Alley, a covered narrow street where the shops sold scientific apparatus, climbing equipment, hunting weapons, and weather-protective clothing. She ducked into Rivka’s Rainwear and came out wearing an olive-green cagoule over the rouched top and knee-length trousers in blue synthetic kid that the drexler had brought forth as her outfit for the day. She put the hood up and emerged from the alley on to Feynmann Place, the square on the edge of the science quarter. That was what the people who lived there called it. Others called it the geek ghetto. Past the statue of Feynmann with the jagged lines of the Diagram clutched like a god’s lightning- bolts in his upraised fist. The soles of her boots squeaked on wet paving as she walked across to the Java Script, which had become her favourite cafe. Low comfortable chairs jammed around tiny round tables; you had to wade through the crush of people’s back-to-back backs. Muddy coffee, cloudy drinks, steamy air, airy talk. It was a place where she could sit and listen to the conversations around her, and sip coffee and watch the wall or the window, rather than answer questions.

This morning nobody even wanted to look at her. It was as if they were embarrassed by her presence. They were all watching the wall. She went to the counter and helped herself, then turned to watch too. Shlaim was standing on the Government building’s steps, just as she had a few days ago. Behind him stood the Joint Chiefs.

‘—schematic for constructing an FTL communicator has been retrieved from the suit,’ he was saying. ‘Its construction and testing have been successful. Earlier this morning, it was used to send an appeal to the most civilised of the other powers, the Knights of Enlightenment, for security against the pending arrival of starships from the Carlyle gang. This appeal, I am happy to say, has been answered.’