Newton's Wake

in bright silks, but it wasn’t that, and it wasn’t his odd attire that drew their attention. Whenever anyone passed they seemed to clock him, in a searching glance without a smile or nod. He saw Ben-Ami notice his frown. Calder was beginning to glare around as if he expected an attack or suspected a trick. The traffic all stopped at once and the four people threaded their way through and headed into the park.

‘There is one thing,’ said Ben-Ami, striding along. He looked uncomfortable. ‘You know that your bodies are not quite the same as the bodies you last died in.’ He waved a hand. ‘Some subtle adjustments to the native biochemistry, some immunities and so forth. It is not that. We, ah, took one liberty with your brains.’

Oh. Here it comes.

‘Without it you would be as dead socially as you would be physically without the biochemical adaptations. We maintain, as you did in your time, the cultural squick about internal interfaces with networked machinery, and about data capture, for obvious reasons. At the same time we depend, very much, on individual recognition and repute. So we have enhanced one well-mapped part of the brain—the facial recognition system. You will never again forget a face you have seen, or forget the name that goes with it, once you have heard it.’

‘Slow down,’ said Calder, hirpling to keep up. They slowed. ‘That’ll be good. Christ, the embarrassments I had back in Polarity. They were all so pretty it was hard to tell them apart. That was what was bugging me, back there. Everybody looked unique.’

‘Everybody is,’ said Andrea. She walked between Winter and Calder with unhurried quickness, boot-heels thudding, black hem snapping about her ankles. Her lab-coat had been replaced by a dun matt satin bolero.

Winter smiled sideways at her, taking a moment to refresh his appreciation of the minute particulars of her face. People had been beautiful since his first resurrection, back in the Solar system. It was a side-effect. They weren’t genetically engineered for beauty but for health. Beauty was only bone-deep. The health was permanent, the wired-in repair strategies that kept them physically young, though with experience you learned to notice the subtler effects of age in the carriage and expression; not, as in his original day, a deterioration, but a sort of honing. The openness, that almost childlike readability of the gaze he had noticed in Ben-Ami and Al-Khayed, was something new.

‘Oh, Christ,’ said Calder, halting suddenly.

‘I wanted you to see this,’ said Ben-Ami.

The first thing Winter noticed was his own name, and Calder’s, on the plinth in front of them. Then he looked up, at the statue’s mutually clutching nude bodies, balanced on one foot of the taller, whose face was his own. He moved around, and saw the look on the representation of Calder’s, then turned back and saw the same look on the real man’s face. Calder could have been about to scream.

Winter laughed.

‘The statue is popularly known as “The Lovers,” ’ said Ben-Ami.

At that Calder laughed too.

‘I had noticed that you found this reference amusing,’ said Al-Khayed.

‘Do you know what that shows?’ said Winter. ‘It’s us falling into a peat bog. The one our bodies were recovered from. We were in a car. The reason my leg is stretched out like that is that I had my foot on the fucking brake!’

‘And the reason I’m holding on to him,’ said Calder, aggrieved, ‘is that I had nothing else to grab.’

‘You remember all this?’ asked Ben-Ami.

Winter looked at Calder, seeing his own bleak gaze reflected back. Calder was shaking his head almost imperceptibly.

‘It’s what happened,’ Winter said. Memory was not a subject he wished to discuss.

‘How did you come to be recovered?’ Al-Khayed asked.

‘Black Sickle scooped us off the Rannoch battlefield,’ said Winter. ‘Thought we were combat casualties. Course, the peat bog was permafrost by that time. Nuclear winter and all that.’

‘This is wonderful,’ said Ben-Ami, taking notes.

CHAPTER 6 Big in the Asteroid Belt

‘Perfect,’ said Hoffman.

Not for the first time, Carlyle suspected him of having a practical joke at her expense. Full-length, off-white cotton raschel lace over ivory polyester, frills at the collar and cuffs and a deep flounce around the hem.

‘Looks like a bloody wedding dress.’

‘It is not a bridal,’ he said. ‘Nor a bridesmaid’s,’ he added, forestalling her next objection. ‘It’s period, and ironic, and—’

‘Very this evening,’ she singsonged. ‘All right, I’ll take your word for it. Coming?’

Headshake, extended to a shudder. ‘Folkies? Spare me. I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful time. Men will be falling over you.’

‘I’ll be the one falling over. Tripping on this.’

She tugged up a fistful of skirt to clear a way for her high-booted, high-heeled step, slung a leather satchel —the appurtenance of the evening, she’d been assured—on her shoulder, crammed on a floppy beribboned straw hat and made her way out.

‘The hat,’ Hoffman called after her despairingly, ‘is carried ’

She felt less self-conscious the closer the shuttles took her to the concert park. Rustic retro quaintness was definitely the look of the hour. She’d seen the same style affected by the Atomic Amish, one of the more conservative AO sects: fission freaks. The park entrance was a hundred metres from the stop. A big marquee with a stage glowed in the twilight a few hundred metres from the gate. Inside, the crowd already smelled of sweat and beer. Some people were even smoking. All part of the atmosphere. She grabbed a can of beer off a stall, fanned herself with the hat (aha!) and made her way to the front. With universal recognition, there was no ticketing. She wouldn’t even need a pass to go backstage for the after-show party. If it hadn’t been part of her conspiracy with Armand, the party would have held no attraction for her. As it was, she felt a fannish flutter in her chest at the thought. Meeting the Returner bards was important. Even her—and now Shlaim’s—abrupt drop from public attention played into her hands, galling though it was in a way. At least she still had enough cachet to be on the guest-list. The fickle folk of Eurydice had en masse turned their flash-flood attention on the musicians, enough to swamp the steadfast folkies who had turned out to actually hear them.

Armand wasn’t one of them, but he too had been invited, and had a seat in the front row, beside hers. He stood up, very formal in a facsimile of his old ESA uniform, and bowed and introduced his wife. Jeanette had overshot the temporal mark—metallic minidress and space-helmet coiff—but was elegantly insouciant about it. ‘It was a very plastic genre,’ she said, settling.

Carlyle sat down in her very plastic seat and looked around. There were plenty of rows of seats, not all occupied, but a lot of people were standing. Some of them had an intense, focused gaze. She tagged them for longtime enthusiasts of the band. The rest of the audience were a cross section of New Start, from (she guessed) a lower level of society than had been represented at her own big reception. As she scanned the rows towards the back she recognised a few faces: a news analyst, the actor Kowalsky, and a few seats away from him, Shlaim. Her former familiar hadn’t noticed her. She turned sharply away.

What the hell was he doing here? For a moment her imagination went into paranoid overdrive. Then, more calmly, she reflected that Shlaim came, after all, from the same era as Winter and Calder. Of course he’d want to see and hear people from the 2040s. The little geek might even have been a fan himself. Deep sky country—he was sad enough for it.

A man in a three-piece suit and shirt made entirely from blue denim strode on to the stage, brandished a prop mike and requested a welcome for Winter and Calder, Deceased. Everyone stood—or, if they were already standing, jumped up and down—and applauded. The two musicians walked on, carrying guitars. They waved their arms and flourished the instruments above their heads and grinned. The lighting contrast was already such that they probably couldn’t make out much of the crowd.