Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘Excuse me,’ said Ben-Ami.

They both turned to him. The woman was small and stocky, a little plump, with green eyes and black curly hair. She was wearing a white shirt and blue jeans and high-heeled boots.

‘ Madame ,’ Ben-Ami said as patiently as he could, ‘could you tell me what your problem is with my libretto?’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Ben-Ami,’ she said. ‘I couldnae actually help myself, but … I was well out of line there, sorry, no problem, it’s your play and I’ll hold my tongue.’

‘Seriously,’ said Ben-Ami, ‘I would like to know—’

Winter bounded up on the stage and hurried over. Ben-Ami waved resignedly at the rest of the chorus and cast.

‘Take ten,’ he said. People wandered off. He turned to the woman. ‘Now, what were you—’

‘Funny accent for AO,’ said Winter, looking at the woman. ‘Wouldn’t you say?’

‘Aye, I would that, Winter,’ she said, grinning. She stuck out a hand to him. ‘My name’s Amelia Orr. Pleased to meet you. I’ve been a fan since I was wee.’

‘You’re not one of the AO people?’ asked Ben-Ami.

Orr and Winter were looking at each other with an odd understanding. ‘Could you no tell?’ Orr asked.

Ben-Ami waved a hand. ‘Frankly, no. All these American accents and dialects sound equally strange to me. You do sound like Lucinda, but—’ He shrugged, then straightened up, startled. ‘You haven’t come through that … hole in space, have you?’

‘Ah, no,’ said Orr. ‘I came in wi the farmers. On a ship, see? The gate’s still shut as far as know.’

‘But you are connected to the Carlyles,’ said Ben-Ami, eyes narrowing. ‘You know, I can see the resemblance… .’

‘To Lucinda? Aye, you could say that. She’s my great-great-granddaughter. Or was.’

‘What?’ Winter asked, sounding shocked. ‘Is she dead?’

Orr shrugged. ‘Seems so, from last we’ve heard of her. No tae worry, she’ll be out the resurrection tank soon enough—well, her copy will, and none the worse for not knowing what happened to her original, poor thing.’

‘And what was that?’ said Winter.

‘Some daft scheme.’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t worry about it. I mean, what’s dying in this day and age? As ye no doubt ken well enough.’

Winter nodded sombrely. ‘I suppose you have some plan. If not, well, it’s a long way to come to have a photo signed.’

Orr chuckled. ‘Aye, it is. And yes, I do.’

Ben-Ami was beginning to feel something of the frustration of a child listening to a conversation among adults, or vice versa. ‘You’re losing me,’ he said.

Orr turned to him. ‘Youse are the Returners, aye? You want tae go back tae Earth, and push off the Knights, and have, uh, independence for Eurydice?’

Ben-Ami recoiled slightly. ‘Not me personally,’ he said.

‘Sure sounds like what your play’s about.’

‘This is art, ’ said Ben-Ami. He had an uneasy thought that this distinction didn’t signify to her.

‘Aye, aye, sure,’ said Orr. She was looking around with a sort of artless inquisitiveness, as though bored with the conversation. ‘Is there no some place we can talk privately?’ She looked back at him. ‘When you’re through wi the rehearsal, I mean. I’ll be quiet.’

There were five new ships in the system. Cyrus Lamont tracked them in the virtual mental space generated by watching the gravity-wave detector display with one eye and the visual display with the other. In the past weeks he’d become, he fancied, something of an expert on starship wakes. This pattern, a surge of matched gravity pulses and Cherenkov radiation flashes, was unfamiliar. It did not take him long to interpret it as successive short-range FTL jumps. Only one ship headed for Eurydice. The others fanned out to the asteroid belt. One of them was aiming more or less head-on for his quadrant.

‘Comms?’ he asked. ‘Summarise.’

‘Languages,’ said the ship. ‘Korean, Bengali, Chinese, Spanish, and Tagalog. Content: property rights claims and prospecting.’

‘They’re divvying up the asteroid belt ?’ This time the sense of affront was personal.

‘Yes.’ A sense of hesitation in the silence. ‘That transmission that happened before—’

‘It’s just happened again. Five times?’

‘Yes.’

‘Shit.’

‘Quite.’

Everyday conversation between Lamont and the ship had become compressed. In the days since the transformation of the asteroid into reentry-packaged war machines, and the FTL jump, no further untoward events had occurred. He and the Hungry Dragon had used the time to continue their attempt at therapeutic debugging. Progress had been slow. It had left both of them too emotionally exhausted for much in the way of other interactions. Even their sex life was not what it had been.

Hours passed. Lamont exercised in the web, though he was beginning to doubt that he’d ever walk in a gravity well again. The new ship came closer, jump by jump. It was as though it was feeling its way, or perhaps navigating by sight and trial and error. Once or twice, it seemed to repeat a jump it had already made: disappearing from its point of arrival, setting off again, and emerging in a slightly different place.

Eventually the foreign ship’s trace vanished, in the location of an asteroid just large enough to register on the gravity-wave detector. Other than that, Lamont was quite unable to observe it, or any of its effects. After an hour, the ship departed, in a jump that (as Lamont learned, hours later) took it straight to Eurydice. Running traces from the rest of the system as they trickled in hour by hour, Lamont and ship figured that the other three ships in the quartet had followed a similar course—moving step by step towards a relatively large asteroid, engaging with it, then jumping to Eurydice, where their tracks were lost in the clutter and the well.

T

hat is one gae weird ship,’ Amelia Orr remarked, glancing up. Winter, walking under a warm rain beside her from the docks to the monorail station, looked up too. A black manta ray gliding through the sky. It had something smaller and more angular attached to its underside, hard to make out, black on black.

‘Jeez,’ he said. ‘Mind you, they all look weird to me.’ He jerked his head at the ship of the Knights, still motionless above the city, then his gaze followed the new ship as it turned—banked, in fact, which struck him as a flourish rather than an aerodynamic requirement—and headed north. ‘Do you know what that one is?’

‘No tae speak of,’ she said. ‘It’s a new design knocked up by DK.’

‘The commies?’ Winter laughed.

She shot him a sharp glance. ‘Don’t underestimate them. They hae this fixed idea called juche —self-reliance. They’re no as patient as the Knights, but they do try tae figure stuff out for theirselves. Partly fae the posthuman tech, partly fae first principles. It gets results. Yon’s the most manoeuvrable ship ever built.’ She sighed. ‘Lucinda wanted tae get one for us.’

Winter felt a stab, again, at the thought of Lucinda dying. ‘What for?’

Amelia made a swooping gesture with her hand. ‘You can guess.’

‘Yeah. Looks like that’s off the set-list now.’

‘We have a better idea.’

‘I’ll look forward to hearing it.’

‘I’ll bet.’ She grinned at him sideways, in a way that made something inside him jolt. It puzzled him. She was a generation younger than him, born soon after the Hard Rapture. On the astronomical scales of living and dying, that made her a near contemporary. He had been dead in the frozen bog when she had been growing up in the ruins of Glasgow. Of all the people he had met here—even people he’d known, like Armand, whom they were now going to see—she was the least alien. That she had listened to his live postmortem performances—transmitted from Mars and the Belt to Earth—and had collected various reproductions of the band’s albums in whatever media could be made to work in the post-holocaust environment—this gave her an almost uncanny lien on his acquaintance. She was a fan who had matured, who was older than he was. She had lived a longer life.