The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (28 page)

Yes, it hurt. Of course it did. But not as badly as seeing poor Jules twitching with pseudo-Parkinson’s and gibbering about demons. It hurt, but it was also a kind of relief, knowing that he wasn’t suffering anymore. Really it was. And besides, it was a long time ago, long before I joined the Technology Control Unit. It really doesn’t have anything to do with anything I’m telling you about here, despite what some people claim. I wasn’t avenging my husband or trying to assuage my guilt or anything like that. I was working the case, just like I worked every other case.

But after my confrontation with Pak Young-Min, the case appeared to have reached a dead end. I continued to try to tease out new leads, coordinating the team who were interviewing everyone who worked in the code factory and trying to discover a direct connection between the dead ex-soldier, Abuelo Baez, and Pak Young-Min. I wrote day reports, filed evidence dockets, and minuted case conferences. I arranged to meet Detective August Zacarias, ostensibly to brief him about the ongoing investigation into the double homicide at the motel, in reality to pump him for information about his fellow member of the Fortunate Five Hundred. That, too, yielded nothing useful. He claimed that he’d only met Niles Sarkka once or twice, and knew little about him.

“You want to know if he’s one of the bad guys. All I can tell you is that back in the early days he argued very passionately and convincingly about the importance of finding out everything we could about our new worlds. He said that we should take nothing for granted. That we should take charge of our own destiny by forging a complete understanding of the history and nature of the Jackaroos’ gift. He wasn’t dangerous, then, merely impassioned. It seems to me that he hasn’t changed.”

I suppose I should have known better. I should have known that the so-called elite would stick together. Ten days passed with little to show for my efforts, beyond filling in the biographies of Everett Hughes and Jason Singleton. And then I received an email that opened up a fresh angle.

It was from a man who claimed to be a friend of Meyer Lansky’s mistress. He said that she had gone into hiding because she was afraid of the Paks, and that she had something that I would like to see: two sets of books for the code farm. This so-called friend had used an anonymous forwarding service to cove his traks, but Prem Gurung managed to trak him down while I negotiated with him online, and within the hour he was sitting in our interview room.

He was a small-time hustler by the name of Randy Twigger, a former boyfriend of Lansky’s mistress. He put up a feeble show of defiance that quickly collapsed when I called his bluff and told him that he could be arraigned for accessory to murder and kidnap of the Lanskys. Later that day, with a pair of armed marshals at my back, I was knocking on the door of a motel room in the fishing resort of Marina Vista, 400 km east of Port of Plenty.

Meyer Lansky’s mistress, Natasha Wu, was a tough and level-headed young woman who was ready and willing to be taken into protective custody, and wasn’t surprised that Randy Twigger had screwed up by trying to make some money for himself.

“He was supposed to make an arrangement so that I could meet with you. But he always was greedy,” she said, and dismissed him with a flick of her manicured fingers.

She said that she’d heard about the disappearance of Meyer Lansky and his family on the news, said that she’d known at once that they were dead. “Meyer was ultra-paranoid the last time I saw him. There’d been a break-in at the farm, and those two kids were killed, and you threatened him. I was about the only person he could trust. That’s why he gave me the books. He was going to contact me when things settled down. Instead, this man I don’t know calls me on the phone Meyer gave me, and threatens me.”

Lansky had given her a q-phone, but after the threatening call she had ditched it and gone to ground, moving from place to place. Randy Twigger had checked her apartment a couple of days ago and found that it had been trashed, so she knew that the people who had killed Lansky and his family knew about her. That’s why she had reached out to me.

I liked Natasha Wu, even though I disapproved of the choices she had made in her life. She was a survivor with no trace of self-pity and had probably given as good as she got in her relationship with Meyer Lansky. I told her that the UN was willing to give her a new identity and relocate her in exchange for the accounts and records that Lansky had entrusted to her, and she said why not, the man was dead, and it wasn’t like she had a choice anyway.

“Besides, I want off this fucking world. I’ve been here a year, and already I hate it. I want to go back to Earth. To Singapore. It’s fucked up there, but I know my way around, and the gangsters aren’t as crazy bad as they are here. Poor Meyer. And his kids.” She teared up just a little, and said, “Will you get the filth that killed them?”

I thought of Detective August Zacarias and said, “I’m going to do my best.”

At the UN building, I sat with Marc Godin and one of the city attorneys while they made a deal with Natasha Wu and took her initial deposition. Then I escorted Natasha to one of our safe houses, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to Marc about searching the records for the location of the original of the code, or chasing after Sarkka and Hughes.

I stayed at the safe house overnight, and was eating breakfast with Natasha and the two UN special agents detailed to protect her when Marc called.

“There have been developments,” he said. “Something I think you will like.”

“Has Prem found where the code came from? Are we going after Sarkka?”

“Meet me at the UN Building,” he said, and rang off.

We bought coffee at the roach coach in the parking lot in front of the UN Building, and walked two blocks to the seafront. I told him that Natasha was holding up; he told me that the records were all that we hoped they would be.

“The late Monsieur Lansky was a meticulous man,” Marc said. “We have details of all his black market transactions, and that is a great prize. As for the code that has caused so much trouble, you will be pleased to hear that we know now where it came from. A planoformed but uninhabited worldlet in the outer belt of the system of Terminus. It was located and mirrored by a prospector named Suresh Shrivastav, registered in Libertaria.”

“And what are you going to do about it?”

“That’s what we must talk about now. Let’s find a seat.”

It was a fine warm spring morning. Far around the great curve of the beach, two bulldozers looking small as toys were levelling sand where a kraken had beached a few days ago. A raft of bladders and pulpy limbs the size of two football fields, it had drawn huge crowds, and dismembering and removing it had been an industrial process. People were strolling along the front or walking their dogs on the wide beach, and a few early-bird surfers were riding the waves.

Marc and I found a bench, and Marc told me that the UN representative in Libertaria had contacted Suresh Shrivastav’s agent. The prospector had just departed for the star 2M 4962, and according to his agent he had nothing to say to the UN.

“It may be an attempt to force us to negotiate, but as long as we find the code it does not matter,” Marc said. “As for that, I have also contacted our representative in the Terminus system. I regret there is no positive news there, either. There are two belts of rocks around Terminus. The people who live there, farmers all of them, live on the inner belt. And their traffic control system is pretty rudimentary. Regrettably, it doesn’t extend to the outer belt, and there is no evidence that Sarkka’s ship has visited the system.”

“It doesn’t mean that he didn’t go there.”

“That’s true.”

“Or that he might not be there right now.”

“That is also possible.”

“In any case, the original of the code will still be there. If Sarkka or that prospector hasn’t already destroyed it.”

“Now we come to the heart of the matter,” Marc said. “It is not Niles Sarkka, of course, but the code. There have been political developments. The Inspector General has been informed. And it appears that the Jackaroo have become interested.”

I felt a beat of foolish excitement. “It’s really that serious?”

“They think so. They studied the code and said it was very bad stuff. Do you remember Thor V?”

“That farming family who took off into the big black,” I said.

They had stumbled onto code that had infected them with a meme. Seized by its ancient imperative, they’d climbed aboard their ships and headed out into interstellar space. They are still falling through space, a light year from their star now, out of reach, out of fuel and power, their ships and everyone on board them dead.

Marc said, “The Jackaroo claim that Hughes’s code may have a similar effect on anyone who interacts with it, and there is a nasty twist: it is slowburning, so those infected have time to infect others. And those who become infected but are unable to reach a ship will become insane. The Inspector General has authorized a strike team to travel to Terminus. I have argued successfully that our department should remain involved. So, let me ask you formally. Are you willing to volunteer to accompany the strike team?”

“I’ve already thought about this, boss. There’s nothing I’d like better.”

“Of course. Now, I want you to go home and change your clothes, pack for a long voyage, and make any necessary personal arrangements. Find me in my office in four hours. That is when we are to meet with the Inspector General.”

The Jackaroo are supposed to keep out of human affairs. They don’t, of course. The software we now use to interface with code is a case in point. An important one, because it had established a precedent. It’s derived from code that migrated from the wreck of a spaceship into a colony of hive rats in the vast necropolis in the western desert. The biologist studying them enlisted a mathematician to help her decode the hive rats’ complex dances, and the mathematician quickly realized that they were exchanging massive amounts of information – that the colony was acting as a parallel processing computer.

All this is well known. What has been suppressed (until now – and I have good reason to break cover, as you’ll see) was the fact that the code had drawn the attention of the Jackaroo. An avatar pitched up with a bunch of hired goons and tried to kill the biologist and destroy the hive-rat colony. The Jackaroo claimed afterwards that it was the action of a rogue element, and we had to pretend to believe them. In any case, the biologist and a local law enforcement officer fought back. The goons were killed and the avatar was destroyed. I became involved a little later. The law enforcement officer had picked up a piece of kit that the avatar had been using. It not only tracked and disrupted q-phone signals, but could eavesdrop on them. We bought the technology from her, and in exchange she agreed to keep quiet about the avatar.

After that incident the UN and the Jackaroo made an informal agreement to cooperate when it came to suppressing potentially dangerous technology. That is what I had walked into, when Marc took me up to the Inspector General’s big, wood-panelled office.

The Inspector General, a small but imperious blond woman in her sixties, shook my hand and told me that from now on I was operating under Section D, but I paid scant attention to her. I was staring at the man-shaped figure that stood off to one side. A showroom dummy woven from a single giant molecule of metal-doped polymer, dressed in a black suit and white shirt and polished black shoes. A proxy for a creature no human had ever seen, linked by a version of q-phone technology to an operator who could be anywhere in the universe. Moving now, stepping towards me and greeting me in a newsreader’s rich baritone.

“We have followed Dr Sarkka’s career with great interest,” it said. “And this is a very interesting turn of events.”

“A potentially serious turn of events,” the Inspector General said. “Sarkka is a dangerous man, and he may be about to lay his hands on dangerous code.”

“We have examined the damaged code,” the avatar said. “What was deleted presents a clear danger to you. We are here to help.”

“And we’re grateful, of course,” the Inspector General said.

The avatar responded with a lengthy speech, telling us that the Jackaroo were grateful for the UN’s cooperation and for my role in helping to heal a potentially difficult rift; how this was a fine example of the harmonic convergence of the Jackaroo and the human race; how the present small difficulty would be quickly overcome by application of that same cooperation in general, and my talents in particular, and so on and so forth – I won’t bore you. It was the usual mash-up of cliches, mixed metaphors, and orotund sentiment, like a mission statement for some multinational company written by committee and run through a computer which had scrupulously removed any trace of originality, human feeling, and passion. The experts are still arguing, and will probably argue forever, about whether the Jackaroos’ communications and conversations are classic examples of Chinese Room AI simulations of human thought patterns, or cleverly misleading simulations of Chinese Room AI simulations of human thought patterns. As someone who has been on the receiving end of one of their perorations, I can tell you that the distinction doesn’t matter. As far as I was concerned, all that mattered was that it was so relentlessly dull that it was almost impossible to keep track of what was being said. It would have sent anyone not wired to the eyeballs on caffeine and amphetamine to sleep had it not been for one thing: it was delivered by a genuine alien through a machine of unknown powers.

And so, despite the soporific blanket of the avatar’s bland and lengthy blandishments, I was gripped by an electric, barely suppressed terror, and I’m certain that Marc and the Inspector General felt the same way. For despite their best intentions – or because of them – you can’t help but be paranoid about the Jackaroo. They are alien and therefore completely opaque. Neither angels nor devils, but distorting mirrors that reflect our best hopes and worst fears.

“May I ask a question?” I said, when it had finished, or at least run out of words. “If you’re offering to help us, what kind of help are we talking about?”