Paul McAuley - Something Coming Through

He was staring intently at her.

She said, ‘Okay.’

Daniel sat back, steepling his long fingers across his waistcoat. He bought them from a little shop in Brixton Market. He said, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you seem a little agitated. Febrile, with a touch of monomania. You might have caught a touch of meme fever from this kid, or from the breakout. Perhaps that’s why these pictures seem so important.’

‘If I start speaking in tongues you’ll be the first to know,’ Chloe said, trying to turn it into a joke.

But Daniel wasn’t listening to her. ‘Ever since first contact, our minds have been altered by alien memes and ideations. Even the simple fact of the Jackaroo’s existence has changed our ideas about what we are, and our place in the universe. Before we can understand the Jackaroo and their gifts, we must understand what they are helping us become.’

He was treating her to the full wattage of the sincerity and charm that had served him so well when he’d helmed a popular TV series that had put a contemporary spin on Charles MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds . He’d been a professor of anthropology in Middlesex University then, a consultant on what he called peripheral phenomena for several financial companies, author of a bestseller about what he called human fallibility. After the Spasm, after the Jackaroo’s presence had begun to leak out on the internet, after their avatars had appeared at the UN General Assembly, he had immediately offered his services to the British government. And when he’d been rebuffed, he’d persuaded Ada Morange to bankroll his investigations of phenomena that were, according to him, manifestations of the ways in which the Jackaroo were, by design or by accident, altering human collective consciousness.

Chloe laughed. ‘Jesus, Daniel, you don’t have to make your pitch to me.’

He had the grace and self-knowledge to look embarrassed. ‘After the last couple of weeks it’s become force of habit. You should hear the lectures I give to the bathroom mirror every morning. Listen: I don’t want you to think I’m making light of your passion. I hired you because of your expertise in chasing down apparitions and artefacts. Because of your talent. You’re good at it. You see things that others don’t. But this isn’t the time to explain it to me. Right now, everything has to be put on hold until we get past the select committee. Promise me, no more bunking off. And I promise you that I’ll give this my full attention as soon as I can. Okay?’

Chloe promised she wouldn’t bunk off again. She sat through the briefing with Helena Nichols, Ada Morange’s lawyer. She attended the strategy meeting that stretched out all through the afternoon. She was on the ferry back to Greenwich when her phone rang. It was Niome. She said that she had some news about Freddie Patel.

‘He’s only gone and done a flit.’

Mangala | 24 July

The murder scene was near the gate of the shuttle terminal’s freight yard, at the end of a track that ran past a construction site and petered out in a slope of grey heath. The shuttle’s tapering skyscraper reared into the dark blue sky like God’s own exclamation mark, its vast shadow falling across the yards and the low white terminal buildings, the construction site and the four-lane highway that ran out towards the city. Beyond the shadow’s edge, the playa burned like hot iron in the sunlight.

A cold wind blew across the heath. Clots of vegetation shivering in the dull half-light, ropes of red dust curling down the unpaved track. Vic Gayle had attended wrongful deaths in every kind of location, from luxury ‘executive’ apartments to Junktown hovels. As far as he was concerned, this one was about as bleak as they came.

The security guard who had found the body was sitting with her Alsatian in a golf buggy, parked behind the cruiser of the uniform who’d responded to her call. He leaned against his vehicle, smoking a cigarette, watching the two investigators work. A veteran who knew to keep away from the body. You can only kill someone once, but you can murder a crime scene a hundred times in a hundred different ways.

It was on its back, the body: a white male, late thirties or early forties, dressed in a thin black jacket over a grey sweater, black trousers, work boots. So freshly dead that a trace of astonishment could still be recognised in his face. Eyes half-open, not yet glazed or sunken. Blood had run from his ears and puddled under his head.

A scooter lay a little way off, a dent in the bodywork under its saddle. Skip Williams pointed out the rental sticker in the lower left-hand corner of the windshield and said it should be easy to trace.

‘My guess is our guy isn’t a local.’

‘Anyone can hire a scooter,’ Vic said.

They were wearing plastic bootees over their shoes, blue nitrile gloves.

Skip said, ‘For sure. But his clothes and boots look brand new. Could be he’s fresh off the shuttle.’

‘Let’s not jump to conclusions,’ Vic said, and winced when Skip walked directly to the body. It was Vic’s habit to circle it first, spiralling inward, checking everything around it, but hey, the kid had answered the phone. The case was his, he had to learn by trial and error how to do things the right way.

Skip Williams had been assigned to violent crimes a week ago. Vic, who’d been working alone since his long-time partner had retired, had been saddled with him. ‘Try not to break him,’ Sergeant Mikkel Madsen had said.

Investigators in the violent-crimes unit usually worked in two-person teams. The person who picked up the phone when a call came in became the principal on the case. Anyone with too many open cases got a Hail Mary pass, but it wasn’t a good idea to accumulate unsolved cases because you’d have to explain yourself to Mikkel Madsen and Captain Colombier. You were answerable to the captain, she was answerable to the chief on the sixth floor, and he was answerable to the city’s mayor and the UN commissioner. Who were currently unhappy with the homicide rate — 637 last year in a city of less than a million people — and the percentage of unsolved cases.

Skip Williams was young, a big blond handsome guy in his late twenties whose shoulders strained the seams of his suit jacket. Unusually, on a world where most of the population was from Europe, he was Australian. Winners in the UN emigration lottery were free to choose their destination, but most preferred the world where people like them lived, served by a shuttle that took off from their own country or close to it. The shuttle to Mangala took off from France; most of the settlers were from the European Union. On First Foot it was Americans, Canadians and, because of an odd geopolitical agreement, Taiwanese and a good number of people from Hong Kong. On Hydrot, mostly West Africans. On Yanos, mostly Russians. And so on. But Skip had been working in London when he’d won his ticket, and instead of returning home and taking the Timor shuttle to Syurga, he’d chosen instead to go up and out via the nearest shuttle, to Mangala.

Like all new arrivals who either couldn’t afford to buy their way out or lacked a professional qualification that would exempt them, he’d spent his first three months on Mangala in the civic labour programme, earning his right to become a citizen. He’d done his stint on a farm in Idunn’s Valley before moving to Petra and joining the city police. He’d been quickly promoted from foot patrolman to investigator, working for just a year in street crime before moving to the Mayor’s security detail, which had given him the boost to violent crimes. There was a rumour that one of the colonels had taken a shine to him, was grooming him for the prosecutor’s office.