Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

Carlyle nodded. ‘They’ll want to take more out of your hides than they do for most of our clients, that’s for sure. And that’s where your Returner-Runner squabble comes in.’

‘How so? It seems a bit irrelevant in this context.’

‘Let me tell you how my family works,’ Carlyle said. ‘They started off as scrap merchants, drug dealers, and loan sharks. We haven’t changed much. We give the customer what they want, in return for what we want. There’s something I want from you, a wee favour.’

‘And what might that be?’

Carlyle glanced around. ‘Is this place secure?’

‘Of course,’ said Armand, sounding indignant.

‘All right. What I want you to do for me is let me get back through the gate when it reopens. That could mean, you know, kind of hiding me if anyone else—say the Government, or the Knights—tries to pull me in.’

‘I could consider that,’ said Armand. ‘What’s in it for me?’

‘Our goodwill if we ever come to get a wee bit of compensation—’

Armand shook his head. ‘Too intangible, and not enough.’

‘I know. That’s not all. We have something to offer that the Returners really, really want, and that the Knights cannae and willnae give.’

‘FTL flight? Your backup technology?’ Armand sounded puzzled.

‘No,’ said Carlyle. ‘Return.’

I was Winter. He was Calder.

Every time it was the same.

Winter had come back from the dead before. The experience was over-rated. You woke, and didn’t remember dying: death is not lived through. In both cases, he woke to find the most beautiful woman he had yet seen looking at him with an expression of disdain and dread. She didn’t scream, but Winter had put it in the song just the same, after his first time.

The lab tech screamed: the sight appalled her.

I was ugly. He was lame.

That had always gotten a laugh.

‘Don’t try to sit up,’ she said. He knew she wasn’t a nurse. And her white coat didn’t have the Black Sickle on it. The only question in his mind was whether she was the mad scientist, or his (or her) beautiful assistant. So here we are, he thought, back in the land of the living again. The country of the young: Tir nan Og . Where everybody is beautiful, except us. And there he had been not even knowing he was dead.

‘How’s Calder?’ he asked. His mouth was dry.

She glanced sideways. ‘Recovering.’ Her gaze returned to Winter, and softened somewhat. ‘You loved him very much?’

Winter laughed, and then it wasn’t funny. They must have lost the fight, and lost centuries. ‘How long have we been dead?’

She turned away, and turned back holding out a steaming plastic cup.

‘Drink this,’ she said.

He raised himself on his elbow and took the cup, sipped cautiously. It was just short of being too hot to drink, and smelled and tasted meaty, but clean of any trace of grease, and with a slight bitter edge.

‘We call it umami tea,’ she said. ‘A local herb. It’s a mild stimulant.’

It was more than mild. Every sip was like a shot of vodka. His stomach glowed and his limbs tingled, and his mind felt clearer by the second. He took advantage of the moment to look around and check out his surroundings. He was lying naked on a sheet spread on a high table. Another such table stood a couple of metres away. He could see the curved back of a man lying curled on his side, presumably Calder. Winter’s own body fitted his body-image. Even his beard was the length he remembered, a rough fiveday stubble. The ceiling was about five metres above him, and the room seemed proportionately large. Cluttered with unfamiliar but antique machines and pieces of dusty furniture, hung with paintings and costumes, lit by five tall windows through which he could see masses of green, it struck him as more like a studio than a laboratory, let alone a clinic. Two of the machines, close by, he recognised as resurrection tanks.

‘So the terraforming worked,’ he said.

She looked at him oddly. ‘You’re taking this very calmly.’

Winter sat up and shrugged. ‘It’s only a shock the first time.’

Gallows humour, from the men they couldn’t hang.

Calder stirred and rolled over. His hand moved, utterly predictably, to his crotch. As though satisfied with the systems check, he opened his eyes and blinked. The woman was already leaning over him. He leered up at her, revealing that his teeth, if nothing else, had been improved by the process.

‘Don’t try to sit up,’ the woman said.

‘I’m in no hurry,’ he said. The leer brightened.

She passed him a cup of umami tea. As he propped himself up to drink it he caught sight of Winter and almost dropped it.

‘Should have known,’ Calder said to Andrea. He set down the cup beside him and reached behind his neck to feel the curvature of his spine. ‘Ankylosing fucking spondylitis, too,’ he added, aggrieved. ‘You could have got rid of that, you know.’ He sipped the tea. ‘And him, while you were at it.’

Winter swung his legs over the edge of the table. ‘Glad to see you, too.’

Calder cracked a grin and raised his cup. ‘Good health.’ He glanced around. ‘I suppose this means the fight’s over, one way or the other.’ He looked at the woman. ‘So who won?’

She looked from Calder to Winter, and back. She really was extraordinarily beautiful. Her face showed her bafflement and disappointment with such transparency that her lip trembled. It made Winter want to comfort her.

‘This is not what we expected,’ she said. ‘You are Winter and Calder, yes? The musicians?’

‘That’s us,’ Winter said.

‘ The Winter and Calder? The Returner heroes? The famous lovers?’

Winter could see Calder arriving at the same awful realisation as he had.

‘Fuck,’ Calder said. ‘We’re history.’

‘Legend,’ said Winter.

Calder smirked. ‘What I said.’ He sat up on the bed and swung his legs over, and continued to drink his tea.

‘What’s your name?’ Winter asked the woman, to give her something else to look at.

‘Andrea Al-Khayed,’ she replied. She moistened her lips. ‘I think I should call the promoter.’

Winter didn’t see her use any comms, but a moment later a door at the far end of the room opened and a man walked in. He was tall, with long dark hair, and wearing a sort of academical gown in green silk over what looked like dungarees—denim, brass clips, and all. Not to Winter’s surprise, he was remarkably good-looking—dark eyes and skin, prominent nose. He stopped a little way off and looked at the two men, smiling.

‘My name is Benjamin Ben-Ami,’ he said. He nodded at the woman. ‘Thank you, Andrea. They seem to be fit.’

‘They’re fine,’ she said, standing aside with an over-to-you gesture. Ben-Ami stepped to the ends of the tables and beamed at the men on them with an expression of proprietorial pride. It was a look Winter had seen before, and it didn’t bode well.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Ben-Ami, ‘allow me to welcome you.’

‘Thanks,’ said Calder. ‘Now cut the crap and tell us where we are and what you want.’

Ben-Ami showed no sign of taking offence. Like Andrea’s, his expressions were easily readable, and at that moment showed a certain awe, as though it was only by hearing Calder’s voice that he had become convinced of their presence. And, also like her, he evaded the question.

‘I have had your clothes reconstructed,’ he said. ‘You may feel more comfortable dressed.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Calder, favouring Andrea with another leer. Ignoring this, the man and the woman swung a wheeled gurney between the tables. On top of it were two neat stacks of clothes. Winter slid off the table and began to climb into the ones he recognised as his own. They were almost too authentic. Every stain on his jeans, rip in his T-shirt and crack in his leather jacket and boots was exactly as it had been on the cover screen of their last album. Calder finished pulling his clothes on, and struggled into and stood up in his cowboy boots. They made him look taller, but that was not to say much.