chance of upgrade. Hell. And even if you can avoid that, you still don’t want to be taken up, even to heaven. You might lose yourself entirely.’
‘So why do you people risk that by lightning-chasing?’
Higgins sighed. ‘It’s the getting close to … the sublime and the beautiful, yeah? You can look over the top of a cliff or look up at it and be, like, ravished, but you wouldn’t want to fall off it.’
‘I don’t understand the attraction at all,’ Carlyle said. She waved a hand. ‘I’ve been in places like this. Weirder and more beautiful places, like crystal jungles, like iron coral. And I’ve crunched a search engine right over them and through them tae get what I want. I mean, fuck, it isnae like it’s nature or anything. It’s just artificial.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Higgins. ‘What the posthumans created was—when you can see it up close, inside, in virtuality, not this’—she waved dismissively—‘
‘Mair wonderful than the real world? Greater than God or Nature?’
‘Yes!’ said Higgins explosively. Then, perhaps sensing the stiffening in Carlyle’s muscles, she retracted: ‘A greater insight into the reality than we have, anyway.’
‘Hah!’ said Carlyle. ‘Tossers. I mean that. That’s whit the Raptured were when ye get right down tae it. Nerds. Wankers. This is aw’—it was her turn to wave dismissively—‘pornography. Because if it wisnae, how come they burned out so fast? How come they arenae around any mair? Wanked theirsels tae death if you ask me.’
‘You couldn’t be more wrong,’ said Higgins. ‘They loved the universe far more than we ever can. There are infinitely many modes of existence of which we can’t conceive: not space-time, not thought, not mind, or matter. They began to conceive them before they left. They went below the Planck length, and away. Into the fine grain of the world. And there they still are, and far beyond it. The whole of space-time is now riddled with their minds. Or rather, with minds far less than theirs but far greater than ours. It is these minds that enforce the CPC and make FTL travel possible and time-travel paradoxes impossible.’
Carlyle had heard such conjectures before. ‘You know all this?’
Higgins laboriously stood up. ‘I know. I’ve seen it. Seen them. The quantum angels. Come on, let’s find the gate.’
T
he gate was in the direction Higgins had taken. Higgins’s face looked twisted and strained, warped away from human semblance, as if resisting the deterioration of the rest of her body was becoming a major preoccupation for her metal head. You expected to see beads of mercury running down it. Her glass eyes had cracks in them.
Carlyle gazed at the gate incuriously. Its absent shape was outlined by a gold filigree frame beaded with crystals that flickered in elusive patterns. She had walked past greater and stranger things in the past hour. Her mind was jaded with wonders.
‘Brilliant,’ she said. ‘You got us here.’
Higgins attempted a smile. Reflective surfaces moved. ‘Just get me out.’
Carlyle grasped her hand. ‘OK.’
Together they stepped through the gate. As soon as they did so their knees buckled, their arms went instinctively in front of and above their faces, and again at the same moment, they both laughed and looked embarrassed at each other. They lowered their shielding arms. With an effort Carlyle straightened up, Higgins a moment later. 1.2 g: it was no worse than carrying a pack. Before them stretched a plain of cratered ice, sharply lit by a distant yellow-white F7 at what looked like 10 AU and blue-shaded by reflected light from the plain-featured sub-Jovian ice giant that filled a third of the sky and that had, for a moment, looked as though it was hurtling down upon them. Another moon, sulphur-yellow to its jet-black terminator, hung in the sky, its disc plain among a prickle of stars. Carlyle took a few steps forward and turned to look back at the gate. It was marked by a perfect parabola of smooth, sculpted-seeming ice.
‘Where are we?’ Higgins asked, feebly and querulously.
Carlyle gave her a smile she hoped was encouraging.
‘In the skein, if we’re lucky,’ she said. ‘Race you through the catalogue.’
Higgins flapped a hand, and squatted, elbows on thighs. ‘You do it.’
Carlyle blinked up the Messier 102.02 on her head-up and systematically scanned the sky. Her suit’s sensors fed every available scrap of incoming information to the catalogue: the positions of the visible stars, the spectrum of the sun and of the light from the planet, the temperature of the ground, the motion of the other moon… . It took about a minute to match them and come up with the anonymous string of numbers that identified the system. She cross-referenced the result with the skein map.
‘We’re lucky,’ she told Higgins. ‘We’re in the skein all right. If not exactly in the Drift. None of the firm’s outposts is anywhere nearby.’ She licked her cracked lips, winced. ‘That gate we came through isn’t marked. There’s another one, but it’s about twenty kilometres away. North-northwest.’ She looked around, letting the suit take a bearing from the now charted sky. The moon they were on had no magnetic field. ‘We should make it.’
Higgins looked sceptical. ‘Where does it take us?’
Carlyle hesitated, then gave her the bad news. ‘A KE homeworld.’
Higgins rose to her feet. She even smiled. ‘The
‘Good on you,’ said Carlyle, dubious though she felt at the prospect. She had never heard of any outsider going to a KE homeworld, let alone coming back from one. This had, she hoped, more to do with the protectiveness of the Knights towards their homes than with anything more sinister.
They set off across the ice, following the bearing on her head-up. That gave them a direction, and it changed by dead reckoning as they detoured around craters large and small. It didn’t so much as suggest an optimal route.
‘Footprints behind us again,’ said Higgins, as they walked down a small valley that looked as if it had been carved by flowing water, but surely couldn’t have been.
‘That’s our
‘Why are they in front of us?’
‘Because we’ve had to retrace our steps.’
‘I can’t see properly,’ said Higgins, sounding relieved and resigned.
She laid her hand on Carlyle’s shoulder, and before long, a fair bit of her weight too. Carlyle vomited suddenly, and almost blacked out as she held her breath while the suit’s cleaning mechanisms cleared the airways and the spew went into the recylers. They couldn’t do anything about the stink, but after a while it had so saturated her nostrils that she couldn’t smell it.
They stumbled on. The other moon moved in its orbit to a place where its shadow cast a spot, a solid ellipse of perfect black, on the ice giant. The shadow moved, it sometimes seemed, as they watched, and at other times, dismayingly, moved back.
‘Relative motion of the moons,’ said Higgins, surprising Carlyle with that sensible reassurance.
The other gate appeared as a tiny regularity on the horizon a long time before they reached it; this world was bigger than most of the terrestrial planets, let alone moons, that either of them were used to walking on, and their intuitions played them false. The gate was marked with a square of ice, bevelled like a picture frame. It advanced and receded in Carlyle’s sight as they approached, hour after hour. The moon-shadow vanished from the top of the giant planet’s placid blue atmosphere.
‘Are we there yet?’ said Higgins, when they were a hundred or so metres from the ten-metre high gate marker, then laughed at herself. She swayed and began to topple forward. Carlyle ducked, letting her fall over her shoulder, and struggled upright. Higgins was surprisingly light. Carlyle staggered towards the gate and almost fell through it. A sudden wash of light made her shut her eyes until the faceplate had adapted. Her feet were in something soft. Higgins felt suddenly lighter. Carlyle staggered a few paces away from the gate and then fell face- first into sand. After a moment she crawled forward, out from under Higgins, and looked around.
