Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

It wouldn’t take the Knights long to bring up space suits, though she rather doubted they would follow her into the unknown—they had enough on their plates already without potentially tangling with the Carlyles, whom they would presume to be the likeliest guardians of this side of the gate. Worse luck we aren’t, she thought. Still, it would be a good idea to get well away from the gate. She marked its location as clearly as she could with more bits of wood and a couple of small boulders, then walked off along the beach, thinking to check what lay beyond the headland. It would be rash to plunge into the jungle without making sure civilisation wasn’t just around the corner.

Before she’d gone a hundred metres she’d come to feel quite irrationally suffocated in the suit. It kept her cooler than she’d be with the helmet off, she’d no doubt about that, but it seemed wrong to be breathing closed-system air instead of fresh. Unfortunately the Eurydicean suit didn’t have the multiple immunity-adapters that her own had. It didn’t even have analysers. It did have a radio, though. She stopped and winked through menus and began to pick up radio broadcasts, in a language she didn’t know, and an odd mixture of sentimental and martial music. DK, almost certainly. Poking around, she found the translator and selected Korean.

Her ears filled with a babelfish babble of fractured English, all of which seemed to have something to do with shipping. Bingo. She was on a human world all right—not that she’d expected aliens, but there was an outside chance the place was all poisonous and inhabited by machines. Some planets had been known to go toxic in the terraforming.

Cautiously, she unlocked the helmet and lifted it off, gasped in the hot air heavy with the smells of sea and jungle.

Somebody shouted at her. She almost jumped out of the suit, and actually did drop the helmet. The shouting, amplified and angry-sounding, went on. As she looked frantically from side to side she realised it was coming from the statue of Marx. She picked up the helmet and put it back on.

At once the translation software took over, and the tone of the shouting changed.

‘—good, you keep on helmet, please seal helmet, not to contaminate nature region preserve. Please to stay where you stand are.’

The guano-spattered top of the statue’s head flipped back like a lid and something black came out and flew above the sea towards her, descending.

As it approached she recognised the angular, awkward, unaerodynamic-looking shape. It was an electrostatic lifter, a weird product of DK juche technology whose exact physics baffled even the Knights. It halted and hovered a few metres away. In its open-top cockpit seat a man in a black space suit beckoned her urgently. She decided she might as well comply.

She put her gloved hands on the tingly and somehow sticky surface and hauled herself aboard, sitting down beside the man. The queer little craft flew back to the top of the statue, and descended into a parking slot. The lifter’s engine heterodyned down and went off. A peculiar sense of relief ensued. The man stepped out on to a spiral staircase—the head was about the size of a lighthouse beacon—and Carlyle followed him down into a compact cabin in the larger cavity of the chest. The head’s lid closed above them and lights came on. From inside it was evident that the statue was made not of stone but of something like fibreglass, and that the interior was some kind of scientific observatory or laboratory.

The man raised his visor to reveal a swarthy, high-cheekboned face that didn’t actually look very Korean. Perhaps Cambodian, or even Indian.

Carlyle opened her helmet too. The man frowned.

‘Where you come?’ The translation was still going from Korean to American.

‘Through the wormhole gate on the beach.’

‘Ah!’ The man looked enlightened. He said something which came out as: ‘Space bend door on sand through?’

‘Yes.’

He was frowning, chinning something inside his helmet, rolling his eyes upward as if reading off a head-up. The two languages—the speech coming from her lips and what he was hearing through his own translation software—were evidently confusing him. ‘Ah!’ he said again. ‘Amehican!’

‘English,’ she replied. ‘I’m a Carlyle.’

‘Oh,’ said the man, this time in American, ‘beg pardon. No offence intended. I mistook you for one of our customers.’

‘Customers?’

‘Amehica Offline,’ he said, waving her to a low padded bench. ‘We terraform, then sell planet to farmers. Almost ready. Very profitable for collective.’

‘I’m sure.’ So that was what explained it. Carlyle took her helmet off.

The man stuck out his hand. ‘My name Eighty-Seven Production Brigade Ree. Please call me Ree, Miss Carlyle.’

‘Lucinda,’ she said, smiling. The man busied himself at a tiny brazier, making tea.

‘You know about the gate on the beach, then?’ Carlyle asked.

‘Oh yes,’ Ree said. ‘Some year ago, we poke telescope through. Planet already terraformed. We already have hands full, so we leave it for later.

We hope to keep knowledge of gate to ourselves, hence nature preserve.

But now I see Carlyles get everywhere.’ He sighed. ‘Always the way.’

‘Is there another gate on the planet?’

Ree shook his head, handed her a small handleless cup of green tea.

‘Not that I know.’ He grinned slyly. ‘Of course other production brigades may be doing what Eighty-Seven did.’

‘It’s amazing what people can get up to behind your backs,’ Carlyle said.

Ree grinned again, catching the statement’s double edge. He sat back on another part of the bench and sipped.

‘You are here to investigate?’ he asked.

‘Investigate what?’ Carlyle temporised.

‘Our sale.’

‘Oh no.’ Carlyle shook her head. ‘I came here by chance, while exploring the wormhole network.’

‘More Carlyles on the way?’

Again she decided to be honest. ‘Not as far as I know,’ she said. She jerked a thumb in what she thought was the direction of the beach. ‘To tell you the truth, the other side of that gate is occupied by the Knights of Enlightenment. They are in a local conflict with my family’s company.’

Ree looked worried. ‘Is it likely to spill through gate?’

‘It’s possible,’ Carlyle said. ‘Or worse, because they are also attempting to contain a population of war machines.’

‘War machines not a worry,’ said Ree. ‘Self-reliant people have powerful weapons. But we must fortify this area.’

Carlyle glanced around the glass aquaria and glittering instruments. ‘Does that mean the end of your nature reserve?’

‘No, no.’ Ree grinned fiercely. ‘We put weapons in heads of great Marxists.’ He mimed using a machine gun. ‘Must not let son of bitch Amehican farmers, I mean our customers, to know. Reduce property value. Perhaps we tell them this is sacred place to great Marx and dear Leader.’ He sniggered briefly, tapping his nose. ‘They think self-reliance idea is religion and great Marxists are our gods like their Jesus Koresh. They superstitious, but good customer, to you too, no?’

‘You could say that,’ said Carlyle. She was beginning to like the man. They spoke the same language.

Ree flew her over what turned out to be a small forested island, the ‘nature preserve,’ and over a few kilometres of open water to a much harsher mainland. Here too there were forests, but they were patches in a scrubby desert, which was being ploughed, mulched with kelp, irrigated, and otherwise cultivated to provide growth media for more forest. When the AO farmers came they would have a thriving ecosystem to burn down and turn into monocultures. It was the only way to produce stable mono-cultures, Ree told her. Great machines, far bigger than combine harvesters and obviously adapted from strip-mining equipment, crawled across the ragged land.