Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

Here’s tae us on the next recurrence.

The dictyping here was replaced by shaky, scrawled handwriting that she barely recognised as her own:

Yours aye,

She started quivering again. The person who had written the final paragraph was a person different from herself. The revenge on Johnstone, yes, that she could take, that she bloody well could take. But not the rest. Not the advice about Higgins and Winter. Her other self had been changed out there, by some experience other than approaching death, in some way that her present self could not understand.

She sighed and put the letter away. Some day, when she was calmer, she would read the first part of it again. It contained no useful information. It did not even contain useful advice about facing death. No recollection of anything that her other self had written would stand her in good stead if—when—she went down the dark glen herself. Perhaps that was what she was supposed to learn from this: that you really did have to walk it all alone.

Still, it made her feel better about contacting Morag Higgins. She was less in dread of the prospect than she had been. Perhaps this, too, had been what her other self had hoped.

Lucinda peeled a new phone off the flat’s comms panel and slipped it on. It still had Higgins’s code.

‘Oh,’ said Higgins. ‘You.’

‘I would like to meet.’

Higgins shrugged. ‘You know where to find me. Back where we started. In the Hairy Fairy.’

There was something ineradicably depressing about a place that smelled of the middle of the night in the middle of the day. Lucinda bought a long vodka and walked over to the window alcove where Higgins sat. Sunlight blazed through the sheet-diamond and gleamed on Higgins’s hands as she fiddled with a half-litre bottle of whisky, half-empty.

‘The stuff works, now,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’

‘And a steel liver, too,’ said Lucinda, in what she hoped was an admiring tone. Something inside her, in her belly or in her head, was churning.

Higgins laughed. ‘Thank you. The one thing I can’t stand is sympathy.’

‘I heard you were angry.’

‘Sure, I’m angry.’ Higgins bit off the top of the bottle’s neck and crunched the glass in her mouth. Swallowed. Poked out a tongue glittering with powdered particles, then washed them back with a swig from the bitten bottle. ‘Fascinating, eh? I have this marvellous body, and I still have the same pathetic mind. “My name is Morag Higgins, and I’m a Rapture-fucker.” Only more so. God, I want it.’

‘I’m kind of glad you didn’t find it, on Chernobyl.’

‘Nah, didn’t like the place. Too many ghosts.’ She looked at Lucinda appraisingly. ‘It was you who got me out of there, you know. You were tough. You were good to me.’

Lucinda tilted her hands. ‘She wasn’t me.’

‘Well, you have her character . You’re a good sort, Carlyle. Don’t forget it.’

Higgins, her self-pity suddenly gone, was gazing at her in an odd way, as though looking at some admired person she’d previously met and hoped remembered her.

‘All right,’ Lucinda said. ‘I won’t. It’s good to know.’ She sipped her vodka, but it wasn’t only that that warmed her inside. It was rare, really, to be liked by a civilian. And gratifying, even though this civilian was not quite human. ‘My cousin said you don’t want to download back to the flesh. We can pay for it, you know. We owe you that.’

Higgins shook her head, the fine wires of her hair hissing. ‘You can revive my old self in a new body if you like. I’m sure she’ll be happy.’ Her lips compressed, stretched. ‘Or maybe not. I don’t know. She can always kill herself if it doesn’t work out.’

‘What about you?’ It was a rule that there could be only one instance of a person walking around at the same time in Carlyle’s Drift. One legal person, anyway. It made life difficult for identical twins. They needed certificates.

‘I don’t want to stay the same, or download, so it doesn’t matter. I want to upgrade. You can write me off, honestly. I’ll surrender all my identity rights to the clone.’

‘Where will you go? I don’t see an expedition taking you, and you can’t afford to take ship, and you can’t walk out of the Drift.’

‘I don’t have to breathe, you know.’

‘Stow away on the outside of a ship ?’ Lucinda asked incredulously.

‘Keep your voice down,’ said Higgins. ‘Well, it’s a dream, innit? To feel solar wind in my hair. See the stars with my own naked eyes, in vacuum. See what an FTL jump really looks like. I’d hold my mouth open and catch quantum angels like midges.’

‘Do you,’ asked Lucinda, ‘have some way of sobering up?’

‘Yeah, sure.’ Higgins blinked, sighed. Her glass eyes came into focus. ‘Hah. Fuck. Clarity again. Did I really say all that?’

‘You did.’ Lucinda leaned forward. ‘Would you like to take part in a raid on Eurydice?’

‘Wow. Yes. Your firm has one set up?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ said Lucinda. She pushed the half-empty vodka glass across the table. ‘Here, finish this. It’ll get you started on the downward path again.’ She stood up, winked. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

The combat archaeologists and the rest of the Carlyles’ fighters sometimes called themselves soldiers, but that was just the traditional way of referring to the family’s members and the firm’s employees. It did not imply acquaintance with military strategy, tactics, or discipline. This wasn’t much of a disadvantage: none of the other powers had the capacity or the necessity to build armies; in interstellar warfare all ground engagements were skirmishes, and anyway the real enemies were non-human. The biggest and best army in the human population of the universe was probably that of Eurydice. And it, they expected, was on their side.

‘What a rabble,’ said Higgins. Suited up, kitted with a laser rifle, a Webster, and a combat knife, she looked no different from the rest. Just as well. Kevin, in charge of the squad, knew who she was. The other seventeen people on it didn’t. Lucinda knew a few of them: the gunner Macaulay and the biologist Stevenson from her first mission to Eurydice were there, but this time Macaulay was second-in-command to Kevin, and Stevenson was on the same level as Lucinda and Higgins: grunts.

They formed up into double file at the terminal building, stared at by travellers and smiled at by refugees, and set off through the skein. It didn’t get any faster doing it as soldiers, except that you weren’t stopped at the gates. After a couple of hours they were outside of the warren of spatially connected corridors and hiking or driving on sleds between gates on uninhabited and hitherto unexplored planets. Some of them had life, all of it unicellular on the usual pattern: bacteria and slime moulds and algae, biospheres of snot. Here and there, close to the gates, were the enigmatic remains of posthuman activity, on every scale from the gargantuan to the minute. On one world, glimpsed sidelong as the squad’s gravity sleds raced across a desert of riddled clinker, low flat buildings of diamond pane housed machinery that still moved; on another, the sticky slime was slowly being converted into crystalline objects like the workings of a mechanical watch. Others still were scarred with previous teams’ passage from days or weeks earlier as Ian Carlyle’s commandos explored the connections of the skein and laid down tactical nuclear firebreaks through kilohectares of malevolent machinery.

‘What a bloody waste,’ said Higgins, her boots crunching over the scorched shreds of rubbery synthetic slugs the size of whales that had browsed the hardened mucus of the planet’s—perhaps—natural inhabitants.