Ken MacLeod: Newton's Wake

At the same end of the strip a much larger transport stood, delta-winged and needle-nosed, with a narrow strip of tiny windows along the fuselage. Carlyle stood up as the canopy sprang back, and stepped out after a nod from the pilot. A stiff breeze came off the sea. When she licked her lips she tasted salt. Her undersuit’s heaters creaked into action, warming her in coils.

Armand’s people hustled her across the rainswept tarmac to the larger transport. It was, she reckoned, hypersonic. Its seating, though in two rows, seemed even more cramped than the aircar’s. The fighters and the medics strolled aboard, giving her unfriendly grins as they took off their helmets. Her own suit was still carrying its helmet and shoulder pieces, like some bizarre case of walking wounded; she would have glared at it but wasn’t sure where to look. The door sealed and the aircraft rolled forward with a full-throttled roar, in the fastest acceleration she’d yet experienced. She peered out of the porthole beside her and saw the beach whip past and then drop away, the angled ocean a blink of grey, and the sky going from blue to purple in minutes. Below was ocean, and clouds in overlapping layers. As the craft banked again she twisted her neck to look to the zenith, and saw a star. After the transport had levelled off the seat belts stayed fastened. She felt the slight jolt as the craft went supersonic, then the sudden quiet that reminded her how loud the noise had been. A crew member in casuals walked down the aisle, taking requests. She asked for the toilet. He released her, escorted her there and back, and with a half-smile of apology, buckled her in again. She was given coffee, and surprisingly good food. Nobody searched her utility belt. She could have cut the belts, taken the crewman hostage, and hijacked the aircraft, but—satisfying as that fantasy was, at one level—she had no alternative destination in mind. Armand and a few others from his team and from the Black Sickle had taken off their combat suits and now sat in the same narrow compartment, a few seats behind her and out of earshot, talking to the familiar in the suit. Every so often Armand let out a sort of yelp of surprise, with an overtone of incredulity. After a while he got up and strode forward, and closed the cockpit door behind him. He didn’t meet her eyes when he came back.

Shortly thereafter, she heard murmuring voices behind her, one Armand’s and the other a woman’s. The woman’s steps came up the aisle, and then she sat down in the adjacent seat. She wore white trousers and tunic, with the black sickle embroidered over her left breast. Her skin was darker than Armand’s, she smelled faintly of cinammon, and she was outstandingly beautiful.

‘Josephine Koshravi,’ she said. There was some tension about her eyes, but her voice was warm, as was her hand.

‘Lucinda Carlyle.’

Koshravi smiled, showing even white teeth. She jerked a thumb at the insignia. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to cut your head off.’ She said it self-consciously, as if it was a clichéd joke.

‘Oh,’ said Carlyle, suddenly making the connections: battlefield resurrection medic, Black Sickle, heads … she shivered momentarily, forced a smile. ‘Right. So what do you want?’

‘Just to talk. If you are allowed to do that?’

‘Allowed?’ Carlyle’s voice rose indignantly. ‘I’m a Carlyle!’

‘I … see,’ said Koshravi. ‘Professor Shlaim has told us about the Carlyles, and about where you come from. We are all very shaken. You see, we didn’t know until today that there were any other human survivors at all. We didn’t know what had happened back on Earth, and we didn’t know faster-than-light travel was possible.’

Carlyle decided there was not much point in not telling them the truth. Shlaim would undoubtedly spill every last bean, and all she could do was tell her side of the story.

‘But you must have fittled,’ she said, ‘—travelled FTL to get here.’

Koshravi looked worried. ‘Or you have travelled in time, from the past.’

Carlyle shook her head firmly. ‘No, that’s no how it works. I mean you can time-travel, sort of, so long as you don’t violate causality. But that’s not what we are doing, wi the skein or the ships. The light from where we started, say, ten thousand light-years away really won’t get here for another ten thousand years.’

‘That might account for the difficulty our astronomers have had in locating our exact position,’ said Koshravi dryly.

‘You really thought the date was tens of thousands C.E.?’

‘At least. It was all quite indeterminate. We counted time by some legacy clocks from the ship. According to that the Earth-standard date now is’—she fiddled with a watch—‘2367.’

Carlyle nodded. ‘Yup, that’s the year all right. How come you didn’t take the hint?’

‘It was assumed these clocks had been stopped during the actual journey. Nobody even imagined we had, ah, fittled.’

‘I’m baffled,’ Carlyle said. ‘How could you travel FTL and not know it?’

‘That’s a good question,’ said Koshravi. ‘We—that is to say, our ancestors—were a space-based population who had escaped the Hard Rapture. Together with people whom they rescued from Earth in the subsequent war, they fled to Mars and the Jovian system. They had a choice—to take the fight back to the war machines that had conquered Earth, and were spreading outward from it, or to get as far away as possible. The choice became a conflict between the Returners, as they were called, and the Reformers. The Reformers—the side that wanted to build a starship—won, but …’

She hesitated, pink tongue flicking between full, dark lips. Carlyle eyed her and tried not to visibly gloat. She knew now whom and what she was dealing with. When the Carlyles arrived here in force, it would be payback time on some large and long overdue debts.

‘Well,’ Koshravi went on, ‘there was no way to build a starship capable of carrying a large human population—many thousands, by that time, around the end of the twenty-first century—to the stars. Instead, they decided to build a much smaller and faster ship, and digitize their own personalities into information storage for later downloading to the flesh. In order to do this they had to build superhuman artificial intelligences, and, well …”

Carlyle couldn’t help guffawing. ‘They torched off their own Hard Rapture!’

‘It now appears that they did, yes. However, the project worked, in that it accomplished what we had set out to do, even if not in the way we thought. The ship found a viable planet, and set in motion the nanomachines to construct larger machines, and so on, and terraformed the planet, and downloaded and reconstructed the stored passengers, and here we are.’

‘Here you are, indeed.’ It was weird; no one had ever imagined humans reemerging from the other side of a Hard Rapture. ‘What happened to your posthumans?’

Koshravi frowned. ‘Obviously we have artificial intelligences, the ones our ancestors constructed, but they are not in runaway mode. Those that were, the ones that created the FTL drive, must have … gone away, leaving no information about what they had done. From what Shlaim tells us, this sort of thing has happened elsewhere.’

‘Too right,’ said Carlyle. ‘Every time. Once you reach singularity, there are further singularities within it, faster and faster, and in very short order the intelligences involved have fucked off out of our universe, or lost interest in it—we don’t know. What’s left is incomprehensible artifacts and stuff like the FTL drive and the wormhole skein.’ She laughed again. ‘You all needn’t have run away. By the time you left, or very shortly after, around about 2105 or so, the posthumans had already abandoned Earth, and the Solar System. And my ancestors—and lots of other survivors—were picking up the pieces. Took us another sixty-odd years to claw our way out of the ruins. Both sides in the war and the skirmishes afterwards had developed really cool but rugged tech while they were fighting, and left plenty of wrecks littering the battlefield. My family found some crashed aerospace craft, fixed them up, and bootstrapped their way to Mars. Where we found your ruins, and the first wormhole gate. Fae there it wis literally a step tae get hold ae posthuman stuff, antigravity and FTL and such. If you’d only stuck around you could have been in on the ground floor, you’d have been well ahead—hell, you could have been in charge of the skein, instead of us.’