Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘Behind Orpheus,’ he said. Yamata reached for the table.

‘Take your time,’ Armand said. ‘There’ll be nothing but debris.’

And so there was. The enemy ship had run straight into one of Eurydice’s own defences, a particle-beam battery on its moon. But as Yamata took them back towards the camp and the relic, Lucinda carried no great sense of triumph with her to the ground. And when she found that Amelia Orr had not been, as she had assumed, on the Stanley Blade , she ran straight to her arms and cried.

L

amont sat alone in the lab for a long time, talking to the Hungry Dragon , and to a greater mind whose name he did not know. Eventually he felt silver hair brush his face, a warm metal hand clasp his wrist. He looked up into depthless eyes of glass.

‘You can leave now,’ Morag Higgins said. She smiled. ‘We’ve landed.’

‘I know we’ve landed,’ said Lamont, ‘but—’

‘But nothing,’ she said. ‘Come on. People are waiting for an explanation.’

‘But there’s so much more to find out.’

‘You can leave now,’ said the Hungry Dragon . ‘You know enough to tell them.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Lamont said, standing up, staring at the screen.

‘You need not apologise,’ said the Hungry Dragon . ‘I have someone else to talk to. An equal mind. So have you. Go with her.’

Lamont flushed.

‘You needn’t apologise to me either,’ said Morag Higgins. She flicked her hair back. ‘I could tell from your pulse.’

‘Tell what?’ he said, feeling as if he was in the ship’s webbing, and flailing mentally.

‘Your’re the first normal man who has looked me as if I’m a normal woman.’

‘Oh,’ said Lamont, dismayed. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you.’ He looked away, let his nails dig into his palms, looked back. ‘I’m not a normal man.’

She frowned. ‘In what way?’

‘I’ve been alone with my ship for five years. I’ve become eccentric, almost autistic, and perverted.’

‘Perverted?’

‘Well, you know. I’ve … been having sex with the ship. It … sent me incubi. From among its avatars.’

‘Oh,’ said Higgins. ‘And what were they like, these avatars?’

Lamont described curves with his hands.

‘You mean, like, beautiful women?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh. I see. That’s different, of course.’

‘Different?’

‘Different from me. I’m not beautiful.’

He was shocked. ‘You are beautiful, don’t say that!’

‘You really think so?’ she asked. He could tell from her intonation that she was no longer teasing.

‘Of course.’

‘So. I’m a beautiful woman, and I’m a machine. I don’t see the problem.’

He could see it from her point of view when he thought about it. ‘Neither do I.’

‘Show me,’ she said.

It was Johnstone who came looking for them, but he gave them time.

M

ost of the survivors of the various encounters of the past thirteen or so hours had gathered in one of the Knights’ dining-halls, a long buckysheet shed with sheet-diamond windows, interior wall surfaces like blond wood, and a score or so of low, long black tables. It was not crowded. From the door Lucinda reckoned there were about a couple of hundred people here. They had divided, more or less, along party lines: Knights, Eurydiceans—regulars and Returners in a single bloc—and Carlyle gang. Morag Higgins and Camplbell Johnstone sat together, near the front, a little apart from everyone else. Lucinda sat down among the Carlyle soldiers beside Kevin and Amelia. The ebon lacquer of the table couldn’t be scratched with a thumbnail. It couldn’t be scratched, she discovered in a moment of vicious idleness, with a diamond blade. The news she’d heard in the last hour or so was, on the whole, good. The war machines in the skein had stopped attacking outside its gates. They still patrolled its corridors and concentrated at its nodes, but they let people pass. This did not smell like victory.

The Knights had called it a conference. Yamata and Armand sat at a table up at the front, facing the room, conferring quietly. Rumours had flown, and Lucinda hadn’t caught any. The Knights looked insufferably smug, the Eurydiceans excited, the Carlyle gang glum. At length Lamont arrived, walked briskly to the front table and sat down between the other two. At a word from Yamata he stood up. He patched his comms to everyone else’s; there was no need. But the audience was wider than those present: news-gathering motes hovered in the air or perched on the tables, relaying the news to the rest of Eurydice, and thence—pending propagation delay and chronology disentanglement—to the rest of humanity.

‘Um,’ Lamont said. He scratched his appalling beard. He introduced himself, for the benefit of the majority who didn’t know who he was. Lucinda found herself, like others around her, shifting on the bench.

‘What has happened,’ Lamont said, coming to the point at last, ‘is quite simple.’ He stopped and stared at the ceiling. ‘In a manner of speaking. What we have referred to as the relic is indeed the ship that took us or our ancestors to Eurydice. Its function was to create and put in place machinery for downloading and incorporating its passengers, and provide them with accomodation and tools and so forth. Before doing that it modified the entire biosphere of Eurydice, creating multicellular organisms from the native bacteria. It did more. What the outsiders refer to as the skein is a wormhole network which it generated.’

He hesitated, as though wishing to spare them bad news, or avoid inciting their incredulity. ‘This network even now continues to propagate. Already it encompasses most of the galaxy. Eventually it may extend to others.’

Lucinda felt the same falling sensation that she’d had on the ship. She had a vivid mental image of the relic’s diamond spike like an ice pick striking the great black bowl of the sky, turning it crazed with cracks, milky with flaws. The cracks might propagate outwards forever. If so, there would be no more untouched nature: wherever humans went, their work—or that of their creation—would be already there before them. The whole face of God, or Nature, changed irrevocably by the work of Man! And to think that they had called the skein ‘Carlyle’s Drift’!

‘Then,’ Lamont continued, ‘the colony ship’s mind upgraded itself to the same condition as the previous wave of posthuman intelligences, those we call the Raptured, and went away, to—wherever they have gone. It left behind the source-code of its original self, and some autonomic defence mechanisms. Those we call the war machines. They were its immune system. When the Carlyle … gang’s intruders broke into it, these machines were activated, and a data-rich virus was transmitted that took over machinery that could build more of them. As it happens, the only such machinery it found in any suitable location was the fabrication system of my ship. This was used to build war machines, and to provide the asteroid with a stardrive. Later, it managed to likewise infect the DK ships.’ He shrugged. ‘You know the rest.’

‘No, we don’t!’ someone called out.

Lamont scratched his hair. He told them about how he and the Hungry Dragon had worked, alone in space, to isolate the intrusion, and how they had almost succeeded. His stern gaze fixed on Lucinda. ‘But before we could finish, yet more high-energy weapon discharges around the relic brought the reserves into action. The ones on my asteroid. They acted to protect the skein.’

The Carlyle fighters and Eurydiceans stirred angrily. Armand made a cut-off gesture.