Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

She called up the search pages and found the code for Armand’s company, Blue Water Landings.

‘That’s funny,’ Armand told her, when she’d gotten through to him. ‘I was just about to call you.’

‘I’ll be right over,’ she said.

L

ucinda Carlyle toyed with a plastic skull on the desk in Jacques Armand’s office, somewhere at the back of Lesser Light Lane. Armand stared into an optic tank, studying material balances, ignoring her. Outside, on the field that here took the place of a park in the prevalent pattern, aircars lifted and landed more or less continuously. She was patient, aware that Armand was busy, but felt a need to do something with her hands. The skull, used as a paperweight, was a reconstruction of that of the type specimen of Eurydice’s indigenous intelligent species, extinct ten million years. Large empty orbits and a braincase low-slung down the back, protected by a dorsal ridge as thick as your thumb. It looked like something between a tarsier and an australopithecene. Only the ocherous remains of a rifle clutched in the creature’s claw, some traces of a buckle at the pelvis, and spots of rust marking the nails of a shoe around one of the feet, had identified it as intelligent, and a builder of the Artificial Strata. Prior to this discovery, the purported fossils of the sapient autochthon had been of what later investigation confirmed to be a two-metre-long freshwater amphibian, whose misleadingly large cranial domes had housed the oil-filled cavities of its hunting sonar.

Armand looked up and pushed the optic tank to one side.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ he said. He passed a hand across his brow. ‘We’ve been busy, as you can imagine. How are you getting on? Everyone treating you right?’

‘More than all right,’ she said. ‘People are very generous. I can’t get over not paying for things.’

‘Oh, you are paying,’ said Armand. ‘Your credit and interest are high. Don’t worry about that.’

‘And people have stopped recommending cosmetic resculpting, ever since I gave someone a bloody cheek for his, so tae speak.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Armand. He looked suitably embarrassed. ‘Tact in these matters is not, ah, a well-cultivated virtue on Eurydice. There’s nothing wrong with your face, you know,’ he added fiercely.

‘Oh, I know. It’s them that don’t.’

‘I myself am considered ill-favoured,’ Armand said. ‘I have kept my original genome. Fortunately, so has my wife.’

He rotated a mounted photograph to show himself, and a quite ordinary-looking but by no means unattractive woman of the same apparent age, smiling at the camera.

‘That’s us, straight out of the revival tank.’

‘And very nice you both look too,’ said Carlyle. ‘I understand you go back a long way.’

‘So you’ve been told of my dubious history.’

‘Aye.’ She had not exactly been told of it. She had researched it from her hotel room’s screen. ‘Why did the Runners resurrect you?’

‘The Runners?’ Armand smiled, thin-lipped. ‘Don’t let them hear you call them that. The Reformers can be a bit touchy about it at the best of times. Anyway, to answer your question. I never took part in the Returner rebellion of 2098. Many of my best friends did, and died in it, thinking I had betrayed them. I did not. I was a loyal officer, that’s all. I went along with the Reform, and the flight, but I threatened to blow my brains out if the recordings of the dead Returners were not taken along too. Their souls are still sealed in the vaults. They include some of the best military minds of their generation, the last people alive—so to speak—who fought in the final war. We could use them now, but as you see, the Joint Chiefs remain implacable on the question. Over the years they’ve cleared and revived a few minor figures, civilians mostly, that’s all. Humanitarian reasons—reuniting families that were divided in the conflict, that kind of thing.’ He laughed. ‘They’ve just cleared a couple of really crass folksingers, I notice. Winter and Calder.’

‘I’ve heard of them,’ Carlyle said, startled. ‘My great-great-grandmother has some of their songs. Crass is the word.’

Armand chuckled. ‘They were big in the asteroid belt.’

‘Aye, you said it. Anyway, that’s no what I’m here to talk about. Well, it is in a way. You saw the show, right? Last night and this morning?’

‘I’ve seen it,’ said Armand, ‘I was struck by your passing remark about where Shlaim was recovered from, and how he’d got there. Was it true?’

‘Yes, as far as I know. It’s no big deal.’

‘It’s a big deal to me, as I’m sure you know.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Carlyle cautiously. ‘I wouldn’t want to claim that we can bring them all back , but … ’

She waited for his response. She had just alluded to the oldest slogan and boldest aim of the Returners: to rescue and resurrect the billions of dead whose minds—it was an article of faith, backed by scraps of evidence—were still recorded somewhere in the war machines that had overwhelmed them.

Armand tilted his hand up. ‘Careful where you throw that phrase around … but, ah, putting that aside for the moment.’ He scratched the back of his head. ‘I’m still a loyal officer, albeit in a private capacity. And before, ah, going any deeper … hmm, this is difficult. I also noticed what Shlaim had to say, and it doesn’t bode well for relations with the Carlyles, as the Joint Chiefs seem to have picked up on very fast. Can you tell me more about that?’

‘Well, there is some truth in what Shlaim was saying. You see, we have an implacable older generation too. Several of them, in fact, but the hardest are the folks who were born back on Earth, who lived through the Hard Rapture and the final war. They remember you.’

Armand raised his eyebrows. ‘Me?’

‘No you personally, at least I never heard your name. But if they have a low opinion ae the Raptured, a wee bit instrumental as you’ll have noticed, they positively hate the forces who fought against the Raptured in the final war.’

‘Why on Earth—?’ Armand asked. ‘We fought on your side!’

‘On Earth, aye, that’s why!’ Carlyle clasped her knees with her hands, and took a few deep breaths. ‘Please remember,’ she said, ‘I’m telling you how I’ve been told it looked fae the point of view of the folks in the rubble you fought over. And tae them, it was aw war-machines, nae matter if some ae them had men inside them. Tanks and jets and bombs, huge installations, the weather going crazy, and weird terrifying valkyries ca’ed the Black Sickle harvesting heids ae the dead. And after aw that, they lost, they retreated, and they fucked off intae space. With scant regard for whatever or whoever was under their rockets at the time, I may add.’

‘Those were desperate times,’ said Armand.

‘Oh, I agree. I’m no condemning you myself. I’m just telling you how the older family members felt about it. Of course, it’s aw been moot, syne there was neither hide nor hair ae ye left in the Solar System after we aw climbed back intae space. But now—’

‘Now, you’ve found us.’ Armand frowned. ‘Is this view common among the other powers? Should we have the same concern about the Knights of Enlightenment, or anyone else who may turn up?’

‘No really. They were aw in a different situation. The Yanks were behind posthuman lines, so tae speak, the Japs were on a quieter front, and the commie guerillas were off in their jungles and mountains. None of them were fucking churned over like our part ae the world.’

‘Well, that’s a relief. All we have to worry about is your criminal family, as Shlaim puts it. If they get here first I take it a shakedown is likely, and perhaps a little rougher than your usual run of them.’