gate you went through originally hasnae reopened yet, but he’s found a wormhole route tae near enough that DK planet you found that has a gate tae Eurydice. They’re building up a combat archaeology team tae hit them through that in a day or two. I’m getting a squad together myself. You should offer tae join in.’
‘That’s fine by me,’ said Lucinda.
‘Come on,’ said Duncan. ‘You had mair nor that in mind. I ken ye too well by now.’
Lucinda leaned back and made soothing motions with her hands. ‘I just wondered how Morag Higgins might feel about doing the same,’ she said, as mildly as she could. ‘Come on now, guys, the Knights have one Rapture- fucker working for them on the relic. Would it no be a good idea to have one working for
This was not going to be easy. Not the doing of it, not the preparation. Preparation first. Alone again in her flat, Lucinda eased the letter from her previous self out of its envelope. The thin paper shook in her hands. She had to look away and walk about for a few minutes. Then she sat down and read it.
Dear Lucinda,
Don’t do what I did. Death is real and believe me you don’t want it to happen to you. I don’t want it to happen to you. I already think of you as someone different from me, as of course you are. Ah hell we just go into this one by one.
Oh, cut the crap, girl! Lucinda skimmed page after page of meditative whinging before she got to the meat.
But enough about me. (You said it, Lucinda thought.) This is for you. As I hope our family have told you or will tell you, Johnstone sold us out to the Knights, stole the QTD, and the Knights hope to use it to gain an understanding of the relic on Eurydice which they believe created and can be used to control Carlyle’s Drift. I expect you will go back to Eurydice one way or another. If you do there are two things to bear in mind. One is that the stakes are very high. Johnstone is capable of anything and I don’t know if the Knights can keep him on the leash. The other is that synthetics and chip minds really are people. You remember how you felt when you learned about Winter’s mind being constructed? Well that was wrong. I don’t know how but I learned that from being with Morag Higgins. If she survives and chooses repatriation please be kind to her and remember that she can help you, and the family, get back at Johnstone. If you possibly can, please kill Johnstone for me. And again, if you possibly can, please fuck James Winter for me. He’s an opportunity I missed this time around.
Here’s tae us on the next recurrence.
The dictyping here was replaced by shaky, scrawled handwriting that she barely recognised as her own:
Yours aye,
She started quivering again. The person who had written the final paragraph was a person different from herself. The revenge on Johnstone, yes, that she could take, that she bloody well could take. But not the rest. Not the advice about Higgins and Winter. Her other self had been changed out there, by some experience other than approaching death, in some way that her present self could not understand.
She sighed and put the letter away. Some day, when she was calmer, she would read the first part of it again. It contained no useful information. It did not even contain useful advice about facing death. No recollection of anything that her other self had written would stand her in good stead if—when—she went down the dark glen herself. Perhaps that was what she was supposed to learn from this: that you really did have to walk it all alone.
Still, it made her feel better about contacting Morag Higgins. She was less in dread of the prospect than she had been. Perhaps this, too, had been what her other self had hoped.
Lucinda peeled a new phone off the flat’s comms panel and slipped it on. It still had Higgins’s code.
‘Oh,’ said Higgins. ‘You.’
‘I would like to meet.’
Higgins shrugged. ‘You know where to find me. Back where we started. In the Hairy Fairy.’
There was something ineradicably depressing about a place that smelled of the middle of the night in the middle of the day. Lucinda bought a long vodka and walked over to the window alcove where Higgins sat. Sunlight blazed through the sheet-diamond and gleamed on Higgins’s hands as she fiddled with a half- litre bottle of whisky, half-empty.
‘The stuff works, now,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’
‘And a steel liver, too,’ said Lucinda, in what she hoped was an admiring tone. Something inside her, in her belly or in her head, was churning.
Higgins laughed. ‘Thank you. The one thing I can’t stand is sympathy.’
‘I heard you were angry.’
‘Sure, I’m angry.’ Higgins bit off the top of the bottle’s neck and crunched the glass in her mouth. Swallowed. Poked out a tongue glittering with powdered particles, then washed them back with a swig from the bitten bottle. ‘Fascinating, eh? I have this marvellous body, and I still have the same pathetic mind. “My name is Morag Higgins, and I’m a Rapture-fucker.” Only more so. God, I want it.’
‘I’m kind of glad you didn’t find it, on Chernobyl.’
‘Nah, didn’t like the place. Too many ghosts.’ She looked at Lucinda appraisingly. ‘It was you who got me out of there, you know. You were tough. You were good to me.’
Lucinda tilted her hands. ‘She wasn’t me.’
‘Well, you have her
Higgins, her self-pity suddenly gone, was gazing at her in an odd way, as though looking at some admired person she’d previously met and hoped remembered her.
‘All right,’ Lucinda said. ‘I won’t. It’s good to know.’ She sipped her vodka, but it wasn’t only that that warmed her inside. It was rare, really, to be liked by a civilian. And gratifying, even though this civilian was not quite human. ‘My cousin said you don’t want to download back to the flesh. We can pay for it, you know. We owe you that.’
Higgins shook her head, the fine wires of her hair hissing. ‘You can revive my old self in a new body if you like. I’m sure she’ll be happy.’ Her lips compressed, stretched. ‘Or maybe not. I don’t know. She can always kill herself if it doesn’t work out.’
‘What about you?’ It was a rule that there could be only one instance of a person walking around at the same time in Carlyle’s Drift. One legal person, anyway. It made life difficult for identical twins. They needed certificates.
‘I don’t want to stay the same, or download, so it doesn’t matter. I want to upgrade. You can write me off, honestly. I’ll surrender all my identity rights to the clone.’
‘Where will you go? I don’t see an expedition taking you, and you can’t afford to take ship, and you can’t walk out of the Drift.’
‘I don’t have to breathe, you know.’
‘Stow away on the
‘Keep your voice down,’ said Higgins. ‘Well, it’s a dream, innit? To feel solar wind in my hair. See the stars with my own naked eyes, in vacuum. See what an FTL jump really looks like. I’d hold my mouth open and catch quantum angels like midges.’
‘Do you,’ asked Lucinda, ‘have some way of sobering up?’
‘Yeah, sure.’ Higgins blinked, sighed. Her glass eyes came into focus. ‘Hah. Fuck. Clarity again. Did I really say all that?’
‘You did.’ Lucinda leaned forward. ‘Would you like to take part in a raid on Eurydice?’
