Newton's Wake

The cup rattled, the coffee splashed into the saucer over the back of her thumb. She sucked her hand and walked carefully to a table by the window and sat down. For a while she brushed the slight scald against the raindrops caught on the cagoule, and let the coffee cool. On the wall, Shlaim rattled on about how civilised, comparatively speaking, the Knights were, and how keen they would be to protect the planet and the relic from the dangerous depredations of the Carlyles.

The coffee had gone cold. She drank it and stood up. Everyone was looking at her.

‘It’s all true,’ she said.

She walked out. The rain rattled on her cagoule. She didn’t see anything until she got back to the hotel. The minder for the day was waiting in the breakfast room. Carlyle dismissed him and went straight to her room, where she used the screen to call the Government building. It didn’t take her long to get through to Shlaim.

‘Good morning,’ he said. It was still weird, seeing him and hearing his voice.

‘What the fuck are you playing at?’ she demanded. ‘You know what the Knights are like. Have you at least warned off the Carlyles?’

‘Of course. And received the predictable response.’ He slouched his accent into a parody of English. ‘ “Youse want tae mess wi us, we’re ready tae rumble. Keep the fuck aff oor patch.” ’

‘They know the Knights are going to be here, and they’re still coming?’

‘ “The ships are on their way awready, jimmie. We’ll see who’s got the fastest ships and the maist bottle.” ’

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

Shlaim looked back at her, amused. ‘What did you expect? They have to defend their credibility, not to mention their monopoly over the skein. They can’t let the Knights take control of the gate without at least putting up a fight, even if they know they might lose.’

‘Shit.’ She rocked back, trying to think of an angle, a wedge… . ‘What about those alien war-machines that everybody’s so worried about? Having space battles in Eurydice’s skies isn’t exactly the best way to prepare for their arrival, if they’re really out there.’

‘Oh, bugger that,’ said Shlaim. ‘Look, even the Joint Chiefs are coming round to the possibility that the relic is posthuman rather than alien. And the Knights can deal with posthuman war-machines.’

‘Aye, and so can we. But what if they are alien?’

Shlaim shrugged. ‘They’re not. But suppose they are. If anyone can handle alien war machines, it’s the Knights. And rather more elegantly than the Carlyles, I should imagine. No nasty fission by-products polluting the atmosphere, for a start.’

‘I guess you’re right. If that weapon they used on our search engine is anything to go by, the Eurydiceans could probably do it themselves.’ She frowned, diverted by a puzzle. ‘How the hell did you persuade them the relic might not have been made by the extinct local aliens?’

He grinned. ‘From its ability to hack your suit and set me free. That was a big clue, but not definitive. So we took a core dump. It was obvious at a glance that the intrusion was a descendant of something of human origin.’

Carlyle knew something of diagnostics. It was big part of combat archaeology. Come to think of it, her own diagnostics would have been where Shlaim had derived his. Damn. But still, it would have been a long and laborious job.

‘At a glance?’

‘That was all it took to identify the Microsoft patches.’

‘Oh.’

‘Indeed. They’re as definitive as index fossils.’

That reminded her of another objection. ‘What about the fossils on Eurydice? Including fossil war- machines?’

‘Convergent evolution, I’m afraid. Looks like the indigenes went through the same shit as we did. A military- driven Singularity. It’s no more surprising that their war-machines looked like ours than that their tanks and aeroplanes did.’

‘I suppose not.’ Still, it bothered her. It all seemed too big a coincidence. She dismissed the thought to her subconscious, from where it might come back bearing clues or brilliant insights, or not. ‘And the Eurydiceans are not bothered at all that you have set us up for a fight?’

Shlaim leaned forward, glaring at her. ‘You have no idea how much they detest what your family did to me, and does to others. I had no need to exaggerate or embroider—the truth was enough. The only reason—’ He stopped. ‘You definitely have no credibility around here. You condemn yourself every time you open your mouth on these questions. I’ve seen polls taken after last night’s little contretemps, and they are personally quite gratifying— for me. I would advise you to keep your head down and your mouth shut, and negotiate your departure with whatever’s left of the Carlyle ships after the Knights are through with them.’

‘The Carlyles might win the round.’

‘They might at that,’ said Shlaim. ‘If they get here first. However, I wouldn’t count on it, and in the meantime my previous advice stands. Goodbye.’

The screen returned to its mirror setting. Carlyle sat and looked at herself for a while. What was it that Shlaim had been about to say, and had stopped himself from saying? ‘The only reason—’ What? The only reason you are still walking around is that you have some value as a negotiating chip. The only reason we’re still being nice to you is that we’re afraid the Carlyles might win. Something along those lines. She had to get out and get home, and there was only one way home now.

She called up the search pages and found the code for Armand’s company, Blue Water Landings.

‘That’s funny,’ Armand told her, when she’d gotten through to him. ‘I was just about to call you.’

‘I’ll be right over,’ she said.

L

ucinda Carlyle toyed with a plastic skull on the desk in Jacques Armand’s office, somewhere at the back of Lesser Light Lane. Armand stared into an optic tank, studying material balances, ignoring her. Outside, on the field that here took the place of a park in the prevalent pattern, aircars lifted and landed more or less continuously. She was patient, aware that Armand was busy, but felt a need to do something with her hands. The skull, used as a paperweight, was a reconstruction of that of the type specimen of Eurydice’s indigenous intelligent species, extinct ten million years. Large empty orbits and a braincase low-slung down the back, protected by a dorsal ridge as thick as your thumb. It looked like something between a tarsier and an australopithecene. Only the ocherous remains of a rifle clutched in the creature’s claw, some traces of a buckle at the pelvis, and spots of rust marking the nails of a shoe around one of the feet, had identified it as intelligent, and a builder of the Artificial Strata. Prior to this discovery, the purported fossils of the sapient autochthon had been of what later investigation confirmed to be a two-metre-long freshwater amphibian, whose misleadingly large cranial domes had housed the oil-filled cavities of its hunting sonar.

Armand looked up and pushed the optic tank to one side.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ he said. He passed a hand across his brow. ‘We’ve been busy, as you can imagine. How are you getting on? Everyone treating you right?’

‘More than all right,’ she said. ‘People are very generous. I can’t get over not paying for things.’

‘Oh, you are paying,’ said Armand. ‘Your credit and interest are high. Don’t worry about that.’

‘And people have stopped recommending cosmetic resculpting, ever since I gave someone a bloody cheek for his, so tae speak.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Armand. He looked suitably embarrassed. ‘Tact in these matters is not, ah, a well-cultivated virtue on Eurydice. There’s nothing wrong with your face, you know,’ he added fiercely.

‘Oh, I know. It’s them that don’t.’

‘I myself am considered ill-favoured,’ Armand said. ‘I have kept my original genome. Fortunately, so has my wife.’

He rotated a mounted photograph to show himself, and a quite ordinary-looking but by no means unattractive woman of the same apparent age, smiling at the camera.

‘That’s us, straight out of the revival tank.’

‘And very nice you both look too,’ said Carlyle. ‘I understand you go back a long way.’