Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

Carlyle looked wrong-footed. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t do resurrections even if they could. They don’t believe in it. Bad karma.’

‘Shit,’ said Winter, rocking back. ‘Then it’s hopeless.’

‘Oh no,’ said Carlyle. ‘Not at all.’ She leaned closer. Winter caught her scent, something musky and animal, mingled with the decrepit smell of the dress that had been resurrected along with its fabric. ‘You see,’ Carlyle went on, ‘we never had any call tae challenge the Knights, on Earth. Plenty to go round, aye? There’s no reason why we couldnae shove them aside from any given site for long enough tae send a few search engines in. Cannae guarantee anything, of course, but I can guarantee we’ll try.’

‘Guarantee?’ said Calder. ‘You can do that?’

Carlyle sat up straight, no longer a folkie lass in an old frock but a haughty lady in an antique gown.

‘Oh aye,’ she said. ‘I’m a Carlyle.’

T

he conversation moved on. Kowalsky talked to Jacques Armand, drinking up information; after a while, Winter saw the actor’s gestures, his very features began to resemble those of his subject; something in the muscles, something about the mouth. Jeannette shared some intricate intimacy with Al-Khayed. Ben-Ami, ruthless in research, had one ear cocked in their direction while talking with Carlyle. Calder got up and wandered off, returning with a tall woman who shared with him a fuming narcotic tube and a lot of consequent giggles. Winter had never figured out whether it was Calder’s reckless patter that charmed women, or whether his deformity held a perverse attraction, or bought him pity.

He shifted, tuning in to Carlyle and Ben-Ami.

‘Look, I’ll tell you what,’ the producer was saying. ‘Take this and see for yourself. It’ll play on any box.’ He fingered a card from his pocket and passed it to Carlyle, who smiled and dropped it in her satchel.

‘I’ll see if Hoffman’s been slandering you,’ she said. ‘Or if Adrian was telling the truth.’

Winter caught her eye. ‘What about?’

‘About the quality of Benjamin’s productions.’

‘Oh, they’re great,’ Winter said. ‘I’m proud to be part of his next.’

Carlyle gave him an odd look. ‘Like I said, I’ll see for myself.’

‘You don’t trust my taste?’

‘Well, to be honest, no. No after tonight.’

Winter lifted his hands, laughing. ‘No disputing about tastes.’ At least she was talking to him, at least he had an excuse to gaze at her.

‘You put a lot of feeling into the love songs,’ she conceded. ‘And in that first song.’

‘They were meant,’ he said.

‘Are they about real people?’ she asked. Beside her, Ben-Ami sucked breath between his teeth. She didn’t notice.

‘Winter and Calder were real people,’ Winter said.

‘I meant the women,’ said Carlyle.

‘My Irene,’ said Winter, ‘and Alan’s Arlene, they were … my wife, and his girlfriend. We were going to meet them in a hotel up in Fort William when we crashed. It was our first big contract, we were celebrating, the car was running on GPS autopilot. Then the Hard Rapture hit. Car was out of control before we could do a damn thing. Next we knew, we woke in orbit twenty years later. Earth and Scotland, Irene and Arlene, all gone. If there was anything left of them it was in the machines. The eaters of souls.’ He shivered, then smiled fiercely at her suddenly blurry image. ‘We’ll get them all back.’

‘You’ll get Earth and Scotland back, anyway,’ she said. ‘For sure, and a good try for the rest.’

Winter felt the pain come back, and ease at the same time. ‘Tell me about Scotland.’

And she did, spinning a vivid image out of what had obviously been fleeting visits, of ruins and rebuildings, of the pine forests of Perthshire, the rust desert above Duirinish, the evening light on the Road Bridge, Carlyle Castle reflected in the crater lochs of the Clyde. Winter listened, entranced for the first time by her words rather than by that it was she who was speaking. Even Calder, glazed-eyed and never having been sold on Scotland anyway, paid attention, his arm draped around his new girlfriend’s neck. Other people stopped talking at nearby tables and listened, or if they were standing drifted closer.

Behind him, somebody laughed out loud. Winter turned, the spell broken, and saw Shlaim.

‘You again,’ Carlyle said.

Shlaim pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘Sorry about … earlier,’ he said, mainly to Calder. ‘Hot-button topics, and all that.’

Calder nodded, waved a long arm. ‘Whatever.’

‘I know this woman better than you do,’ Shlaim said, turning to Winter.

‘I know what she’s promising you. Now you may be surprised to learn, I believe she means it. She can take you back to Earth, and her family are not above a raid on what is protected by the Knights. That’s what she’s offered, I take it.’

Winter did not betray a nod, but Carlyle scorned to deny it. ‘Aye, and what’s it to you?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ said Shlaim. ‘But it’s something to our friends here. What I have to tell you, gentlemen, is that it’s worthless. The accomplishment will profit you nothing.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Winter.

Shlaim looked from Winter to Calder, then back. ‘Since my resurrection I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations with Mrs Koshravi, and other wielders of the Black Sickle. I’ve seen your files. Unlike you, I was—am—a computer scientist. I have the expertise to understand them, and the Black Sickle people have confirmed my suspicions. When you were pulled from that peat bog you were not downloaded from uploads, like I was and the Eurydiceans were when they arrived here, or indeed as you yourselves were more recently, by the delightful Ms Al-Khayed.’

‘Fuck, we knew that,’ sneered Calder. ‘The Black Sickle girls resurrected us with a neural parser. That’s no news to us.’

‘You know what a neural parser does ? ’ said Shlaim. ‘It matches neural structures with known inputs. Once it’s found a match, it can then reverse-engineer the remaining structures. It can give you memories.

It can reconstruct a brain and a mind from a few fragments, just as a palaeontologist reconstructs an entire extinct animal from a single bone.’ He smiled. ‘Bit of an urban legend, that, but you know what I mean.’

Winter nodded. ‘We know this. What’s the big deal?’

‘The big deal,’ said Shlaim, ‘is that in your cases there wasn’t much neural structure to go on. Peat bog and permafrost can do only so much in the way of preservation. Most of your memories of your first life are entirely synthetic, extrapolated from your videos, your fragments of known biographies—from the sleeve notes, for all I know—and from your songs, or simply made up out of the whole cloth. There never was an Irene. There was no Arlene. They never existed outside of your songs.

You did have girlfriends at the time of your deaths, but they lived in London, never visited Scotland, and were almost certainly vapourised in the second strike.’

Carlyle’s face had gone pale. Ben-Ami scowled. Jacques Armand looked as if he wanted to shrink into his uniform. Jeanette was compassionate and concerned.

Winter looked over to Calder, and then they both turned to face Shlaim.

‘We know all that,’ Winter said. ‘We’ve known it since a few weeks after our first resurrection.’ He waved a hand at the room. ‘We had fans, see? They knew more about us than had ever been documented. They told us about the discrepancies. It doesn’t change anything. We still want to go back, and get them all back.’