Galactic North (29 page)

“I’m . . . fine. The op’s proceeding well.” Katia paused, then stiffened her voice with iron resolve, businesslike detachment. “The next implant is the deepest. It lies between the occipital lobe and the cerebellum. We must take care to avoid lesion of the visual centre. This is the primary entoptic infeed node.”

“In we go, then.”

The machinery snicked obediently into place. Our ciliated microprobes slid into the tissue, like flexible syringes slipping into jelly. Despite the cold I found myself hot around the collar, iced sweat prickling my skin. Another hour passed, though time had ceased to have very much meaning.

And I froze, conscious of a presence behind me, in the same room.

Compelled, I turned. The watcher was with me.

I saw now that it could not be a man. Yet it did have a humanoid form, a humanoid of my build and posture.

A sculptor had selected ten thousand raven-black cubes, so dark that they were pure silhouettes, and arranged them as a blocky statue. That was the entirety of the watcher: a mass of black cubes.

As I turned, it swung towards me. None of the cubes from which it was formed actually moved; they simply blipped out and reappeared in an orchestrated wave, whole new strata of cubes forming in thin air. They popped in and out of reality to mould its altering posture. To my eyes the motion had a beguiling, digital beauty. I thought of the coloured patterns that would sweep across a stadium of schoolchildren holding painted mosaic cards to image some great slogan or emblem.

I raised my left arm, and observed the shadow repeat the action from its point of view. We were not mirrors of one another. We were ghosts.

My terror had reached some peak and evaporated. I grasped that the watcher was essentially motiveless, that it had been drawn to me as inevitably as a shrinking noon shadow.

“Continue with the operation,” insisted Katia. I noticed hesitancy in her voice, true to her personality to the end. She liked games, my Katia, but she was never a convincing liar.

“Lesion of the visual centre, you say?”

“That is what we must be careful to avoid.”

I grimaced. I had to know for sure.

I scooped up one of the detached nanoprobes. In reality, the drones mimicked my intentions with their own manipulators, picking up the nanoprobe’s platonic twin . . . Then I jammed it recklessly into Janos’s head, into his occipital lobe.

This reality melted and shattered, as if a stone had fallen into and disturbed the reflections on a crystal-mooth lake.

I knew, then.

My vision slowly unpeeled itself, returning to normality in strips. Katia was doing this, attempting to cancel the damage in my visual centre by sending distorted signals along the optic infeeds. I realised that I no longer had control of the surgical tools.

“I am the patient,” I said. “Not Janos. The surgeon is the one who needs surgery. How ironic.”

“It was best that you not know,” Katia said. And then, very rapidly, she herself flickered and warped, her voice momentarily growing cavernous and slurred. “I’m failing . . . there isn’t much time.”

“And the watcher?”

“A symptom,” she said ruefully. “A symptom of my own illness. A false mapping of your own body image within the simulation.”

“You’re a simulation!” I roared. “I can understand your image being affected . . . but you—yourself—you don’t exist in my head! You’re a program running in the mainbrain! ”

“Yes, darling. But the Melding Plague has also reached the mainbrain.” She paused, and then, withut warning, her voice became robotically flat and autistic. “Much of the computer is damaged. To keep this simulation intact has necessitated sacrifices in tertiary function levels. However, the primary goal is to guarantee that you do not die. The operation-in-progress must be completed. In order to maintain the integrity of the simulation, the tuple-ensemble coded KATIA must be removed from main memory. This operation has now been executed.”

She froze, her last moment locked within my implant, trapped in my eyes like a spot of sun-blindness. It was just me and the computer then, not forgetting the ever-present watcher.

What could I do but continue with the surgery? I had a reason now. I wanted to excise the frozen ghost of Katia from my mind. She was the real lesion.

So I survived.

Many years passed for us. Our ship’s computer was so damaged by the Melding Plague that we could not decelerate in time to reach the Earth system. Our choice was to steer for 61 Cygni-A, around which lay the colony Sky’s Edge. Our dilation sleepers consequently found themselves further from home both in time and space than they had expected. Secretly we cherished the justice in this, we who had sacrificed parts of our lives to crew their dream-voyage. Yet they had not lost so very much, and I suppose I would have been one of their number had I had their power. Concerning Katia . . .

The simulation was never properly reanimated.

The shipboard memory in which it lay fell prey to the Melding Plague, and much of its data was badly corrupted. When I did attempt to recreate her, I found only a crude caricature, all spontaneity sapped away, as lifeless and cruelly predictable as a Babbage engine. In a fit of remorse I destroyed the imago. It helped that I was blind, for even this façade had been programmed to exhibit fear, programmed to plead once it guessed my intentions.

That was years ago. I tell myself that she never lived. And that at least is what the cybertechs would have us believe.

The last information pulse from Yellowstone told me that the real Katia is still alive, of course much older than when I knew her. She has been married twice. To her the days of our union must seem as ancient and fragile as an heirloom. But she does not yet know that I survived. I transmitted to her, but the signal will not reach Epsilon Eridani for a decade. And then I will have to await her reply, more years still.

Perhaps she will reply in person. This is our only hope of meeting, because I . . .

I will not fly again. Nor will I sleep out the decades.

Grafenwalder’s attention is torn between the Ultra captain standing before him and the real-time video feed playing on his monocle. The feed shows the creature being unloaded from the Ultras’ shuttle into the special holding pen Grafenwalder has already prepared. The beetle-like forms of armoured keepers poke and prod the recalcitrant animal with ten-metre stun-rods. The huge serpentine form writhes and bellows, flashing its attack eyes each time it exposes the roof of its mouth.

“Must have been a difficult catch, Captain. Locating one is supposed to be difficult enough, let alone trapping and transporting—”

“The capture was handled by a third party,” Shallice informs him, with dry indifference. “I have no knowledge of the procedures involved, or of the particular difficulties encountered. ”

While the keepers pacify the animal, technicians snip tissue samples and hasten them into miniature bio-analysers. So far they’ve seen nothing that suggests it isn’t the real thing.

“I take it there were no problems with the freezing?”

“Freezing always carries a risk, especially when the underlying biology is nonterrestrial. We only guarantee that the animal appears to behave the same way now as when it was captured.”

Shallice is a typical Ultra: a cyborg human adapted for the extreme rigours of prolonged interstellar flight. His sleek red servo-powered exoskeleton is decorated with writhing green neon dragons. Cagelike metal ribs emerge from the Ultra’s waxy white sternum, smeared with vivid blue disinfectant where they puncture the skin. The Ultra’s limbs are blade-thin; his skull a squeezed hatchet capable of only a limited range of expression. He smells faintly of ammonia, breathes like a broken bellows and his voice is a buzzing, waspish approximation of human speech.

“Whoever that third party was, they must have been damned good.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Last I heard, no one has ever captured a live hamadryad. Not for very long, anyway.”

Shallice can’t hide his scorn. “Your news is old. There had been at least three successful captures before we left Sky’s Edge.” He pauses, fearing perhaps that he may have soured the deal. “Of course,” he continues, “this is a far larger hamadryad . . . an adult, almost ready for tree-fusion. The others were juveniles, and they did not continue to grow once they were in captivity.”

“You’re right: I need to keep better informed.” At that moment the news scrolls onto his monocle: his specialists have cross-matched samples from the animal against archived hamadryad genetic material, finding no significant points of deviation. “Well, Captain,” he says agreeably, “it looks as if we have closure on this one. You must be in quite a hurry to get back into safe space, away from the Rust Belt.”

“We’ve other business to attend to before we have that luxury,” Shallice tells him. “You’re not our only client around Yellowstone.” The Ultra’s eyes narrow to calculating slits. “As a matter of fact, we have another hamadryad to deliver.” Before Grafenwalder responds, the Ultra raises a servo-assisted hand. “Not a fully grown sample like your own. A much less mature animal. Yours will still be unique in that sense.”

Anger rises in Grafenwalder like a hot, boiling tide. “But it won’t be the only hamadryad around Yellowstone, will it?”

“The other one will probably die. It will certainly not grow any larger.”

“You misled me, Captain. You promised exclusivity.”

“I did no such thing. I merely said that no one else would be offered an adult.”

Grafenwalder knows Ultras too well to doubt that Shallice is telling the truth. They may be unscrupulous, but they usually stay within the strict letter of a contract.

“This other collector . . . you wouldn’t mind telling me who it is, would you?”

“That would be a violation of confidentiality.”

“Come now, Captain—if someone else gets their hands on a hamadryad, they’re hardly going to keep it a secret. At least not within the Circle.”

Shallice weighs this point for several long moments, his alloy ribs flexing with each laboured breath. “The collector ’s name is Ursula Goodglass. She owns a habitat in the low belt. Doubtless you know the name.”

“Yes,” Grafenwalder says. “Vaguely. She’s been nosing around the Circle for some time, but I wouldn’t call her a full member just yet. Her collection’s nothing to speak of, by all accounts.”

“Perhaps that will change when she has her hamadryad.”

“Not when the Circle learns there’s a bigger one here. Did you let her think she’d be getting something unique as well, Captain?”

Shallice makes a sniffing sound. “The contract was watertight. ”

On the video feed, the animal is being coaxed deeper into its pen. Now and then it rears up to strike against its tormentors, moving with deceptive speed.

“Let’s not play games, Captain. How much is she paying you for her sample?”

“Ten thousand.”

“Then I’ll pay you fifteen not to hand it over, on top of what I’m already paying you.”

“Out of the question. We have an arrangement with Goodglass.”

“You’ll tell a little white lie. Say it didn’t thaw out properly, or that something went wrong afterwards.”

Shallice thinks this over, his hatchet-head cocking this way and that inside the metal chassis of the exoskeleton. “She might ask to see the corpse—”

“I absolutely insist on it. I want her to know what she nearly got her hands on.”

“A deception will place us at considerable risk. Fifteen would not be sufficient. Twenty, on the other hand—”

“Eighteen, Captain, and that’s as high as I go. If you walk out of here without accepting the deal, I’ll contact Goodglass and tell her you were at least giving it the time of day.”

“Eighteen it is, then,” Shallice says, after a suitable pause. “You drive a hard bargain, Mister Grafenwalder. You would make a good Ultra.”

Grafenwalder shrugs off the insult and reaches out a hand to Captain Shallice. When his fingers close around the Ultra’s, it’s like shaking hands with a cadaver.

“I’d love to say it’s been a pleasure doing business.”

Later, he watches their shuttle depart his habitat and thread its way through the debris-infested Rust Belt, moving furtively between the major debris-swept orbits. He wonders what the Ultras make of the old place, given the changes that have afflicted it since their last trip through the system.

Good while it lasted, as people tend to say these days.

Oddly, though, Grafenwalder prefers things the way they are now. All things told, he came out well. Neither his body nor his habitat had depended on nanomachines, so it was only the secondary effects of the plague that were of concern to him. The area in which he had invested his energies prior to the crisis—the upgrading of habitat security systems—now proves astonishingly lucrative amongst the handful of clients able to afford his services. In lawless times, people always want higher walls.

There’s something else, though. Ever since the plague hit, Grafenwalder has slept easier at night. He’s at a loss to explain why, but the catastrophe—as bad as it undoubtedly was for Yellowstone and its environs—seems to have triggered some seismic shift in his own peace of mind. He remembers being anxious before; now—most of the time, at least—he only has the memory of anxiety.

At last his radar loses track of the Ultra shuttle, and it’s only then that he realises his error. He should have asked to see the other hamadryad before paying the captain to kill it. Not because he thinks it might not ever have existed—he’s reasonably sure it did—but because he has no evidence at all that it wasn’t already dead.

He permits himself a bittersweet smile. Next time, he won’t make that kind of mistake. And at least he has his hamadryad.