Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘If you’re expecting gratitude and surprise from us, forget it,’ he told Ben-Ami. ‘Coming back ain’t like recovery from an illness or something. When you’re sick, you know it, whereas—’ He glanced up at Winter, a corner of his lower lip caught between his teeth. He sniffed and glared at his feet, and reached up and banged a fist on the table. ‘Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.’

The thing that overwhelms you, Winter thought, is not that you have come back. It’s that so many others have gone. As with any traumatic accident, you lose the memories immediately preceeding it. The last thing he could remember, before waking under that admired, unadmiring face, was of walking down the main tube in Polarity, not a care in the world beyond the ever-present vague unease that the arguments were getting uglier by the day.

‘So tell us,’ Winter said.

‘Come to the window,’ said Ben-Ami.

They followed Ben-Ami and Al-Khayed across the room, their feet resounding on strong bare boards, their hips brushing the dust off odd items of furniture and incomprehensible machines in the room’s vast clutter. Having to watch where they were going made their view on arriving before the window quite sudden. They strode to the sill and looked out, astonished. Their vantage was about a hundred metres above a street, along which vehicles moved with startling speed. The street faced on to a park, a complex grassland of low knolls, small streams, and bushes and taller trees. Airy wicker-like structures stood here and there, linked by swaying suspension bridges. Across on the other side of the park more buildings rose, in a similarly complex skyline. Other clusters of buildings and clumps of trees extended as far as the eye could see. Beyond them the sky was blue, chalked with high cirrus. Unfamiliar aircraft with blurred, rapidly vibrating wings soared high or shot across the lower levels like birds, swooping and stooping.

‘Oh my god,’ said Calder. ‘I mean, shit.’

‘Always with the poetic eloquence,’ said Winter.

How long could this have taken? In Winter’s time the terraforming of Mars had barely begun, and was expected to take many centuries. However far progress had speeded up, the physical constraints of the process were intractable. He had known at once, without undue modesty, that if the details of their lives were so far forgotten or distorted as to cast him and Calder as lovers they must have been dead for some such span, and that few if any of the people who had known them had lived through it. Nevertheless, seeing the evidence with his own eyes made his knees weak for a moment. He found himself closing his eyes and leaning hard on the sill, then looking sadly at Calder. Calder nodded, lips compressed.

‘Looks like it’s over all right,’ he said.

A thought struck Winter. ‘Shake on it?’

Calder grinned, cocked his head as though considering. ‘Ah, fuck it.’ He stuck out a hand and they shook for the first time in—he didn’t know how long.

They turned, shoulder to shoulder as it were, to face the promoter and the laboratory technician.

‘All right,’ Winter said. ‘We can see it’s been a long time.’

Ben-Ami gestured towards a low table with four chairs around it. They sat.

‘The city we’re in,’ said Ben-Ami, with guileless awkwardness, ‘is called New Start.’

Winter and Calder laughed. The others looked puzzled. It was as if they assumed that there was somewhere, on Earth or Mars perhaps, a city called Start.

‘An old name, I guess,’ said Winter.

‘It was established about two hundred and fifty years ago,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘It is the capital of this planet, Eurydice, which’—he paused, tonguetip flicking between his lips—‘is in the Sagittarius Arm.’

‘What!’ yelped Winter. The cold dismay that gripped him made the room go grey for a second.

‘So the bloody Runners won,’ said Calder.

‘The Reformers, yes,’ said Andrea Al-Khayed. It seemed a political correction, twitchy and touchy. Winter made a rapid downward revision of his opinion of the setup here, whatever it was.

‘I’ll remember to call them that,’ sneered Calder. ‘So what do you want with’—he gave Winter a glance and an awkward twitch of the mouth—‘a couple of Returners?’

‘We want you to sing for us,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘As part of a major public performance.’

‘Why?’ asked Winter, more aggressively than he felt.

Ben-Ami stood up and began to pace about nervously.

‘We need—in my opinion—a small infusion of Returner culture,’ he said. ‘The spirit of confrontation with the war-machines, rather than, ah, retreat.’ He stood still, looking embarrassed. ‘The fact of the matter is that, ah … ’

‘They’ve caught up with you?’ said Calder, nastily.

‘No,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘Not at all! It’s just that—’ He stopped. ‘It might be simpler if I simply showed you the news from last week.’

He went over to what looked like a mirror fixture on his desk and toggled and tabbed. Sound and pictures came up: a man and a woman standing on the steps of a big building, addressing the cameras.

‘Holy shit,’ said Winter. ‘That’s General Jacques!’

Ben-Ami froze the picture. ‘You know him?’

‘Of course I fucking know him. He was the leader of the Returner faction. Christ, he raised me and Calder from the dead. Not something you forget. How did he get here?’

‘The same way as you did,’ said Ben-Ami.

‘Well, yes,’ said Winter heavily. ‘What I meant was, how did he get resurrected here, if you’re all Runners?’

‘The details of the Returner Rebellion on Polarity are contested,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘There was some kind of settlement, after the—’

‘Wait a cotton-picking minute,’ said Calder. ‘You’re telling us there was a rebellion? That it came to a fight?’

‘Yes, yes, but as I said, the details are in some dispute.’

‘And not up for discussion,’ added Al-Khayed. ‘You must understand. It’s all settled. Shall we get on with this?’

‘Sure,’ said Winter, his gaze fixed on the mirror-sharp image of Jacques Armand. Now there was a man. It was impossible to believe that he had thrown in his lot with the bloody Runners. And yet, people he’d thought he’d known better had done the same. He glanced sideways at Calder, but Calder was still looking at the screen and gnawing his lip.

The picture ran again. The first person to speak was not Armand but the young woman beside him. A small lithe figure in a figure-hugging but functional suit veined with heat-exchangers, a belt of chunky gadgetry resting on her hips. Like Armand’s, her face wasn’t optimised, and to Winter’s eye all the more attractive for that. Black brows, bright eyes, black hair fringed and feathered around her face.

And she had a Glasgow accent. She gave some kind of overexcited cheerful greeting, then Armand spoke, much more gravely. His voice hadn’t changed, though its traces of a French accent were fewer.

‘What you have heard is true,’ he said. ‘An astonishing event has occurred today. Much of what we believed about our passage here, and even the date, is false. Let me explain … ’

And then, after that bombshell, another announcement, this time from a cocky little guy with a smug grin on his face.

‘The situation is becoming more complex,’ said Ben-Ami anxiously. ‘But you understand it?’

Winter couldn’t help himself. Calder couldn’t help himself either. They leaned back and howled with laughter. Part of it was just the relief at realising they weren’t ten thousand years in the future, and that they could still get back. Part of it was the shock at seeing Armand again. Most of it, however, was straight schadenfreude .