Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘The skein.’ The thought of it filled his mind like lust. ‘But the skein was made by—’

‘Oh,’ she said, as he showed her. How had he known? He had seen the relic on Eurydice, he had talked to Lucinda, and now it all seemed so obvious that it was taking shape from the way he waved his hands.

‘And the starships!’ Arlene cried. ‘Oh, the way they are prevented from violating causality! The dedication, the attention, the work!’

‘Work we can’t do here,’ said Shlaim, his voice like tectonic plates.

‘But look—’ said Irene, showing him the shape of the skein, the forming gate.

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘I see.’ He grinned icecaps at Winter. ‘That’s, you know, clever. Let’s—’

‘Wait—’ said Arlene.

This time, Shlaim attended to her. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said, grudgingly like glaciers. ‘I suppose we owe it to ourselves, in a manner of speaking.’

Libraries of condescension laughed with them all.

I

’m waiting.’ Shlaim’s words hung on the air for a moment.

Winter and Calder ran up to the command console, crowding Shlaim and Lucinda and the driver at the screen.

‘Waiting for what?’ Winter asked.

‘Waiting for you two. I’m there to stop you, and I think I know who will have the best of it,’ said Shlaim, turning.

‘Indeed you do,’ said an amused voice from the screen. It was Shlaim’s voice.

But it was Irene’s face that at first took Winter’s whole attention. She was exactly as he remembered her, but she had changed. Beyond beauty and brighter than intelligence, she smiled on him like Eve. He was certain that she could see him even though the screen had—designedly—no camera. Then he saw the others: Arlene, Calder, Shlaim, and himself, all the same and all changed, and a crowd that seemed infinite at their backs. They were all going somewhere, and it wasn’t into the search engine’s storage.

‘There is something you should know,’ said Irene. ‘Your memories of us were false. As you see, they have now become true.’

Winter felt his world turn inside out for the second time in minutes. ‘Shlaim lied?’

‘Shlaim didn’t lie to you,’ said Irene, ‘but he was mistaken. He and the Knights took your memories of us and used them to search for us. But in this environment, the parameters of that kind of search become ever more explicit, so explicit that they eventually define the object of the search precisely. And when that object is as simple as the specifications for a human body and mind and remembered life, the definition and the object become indistinguishable. The search for us called us into being.’

‘You must leave,’ said Arlene’s voice. ‘There’s no time to talk. But as you see, there’s no need.’

Their transfigured, exaltant selves vanished. The screen became all forward view again. The glass-like walls had begun to move and flow, in every colour but their original black. The small squad of Knights looked around in frantic alarm, swinging the cosmic-string gun.

‘Get them on board,’ Lucinda said.

Shlaim leapt to comply. As soon as the men were in and the hatch was shut Shlaim called out: ‘Go down the way we came in! It’s quicker, there’s an entrance at two hundred metres.’

‘Let’s hope it’s still an exit,’ said Lucinda.

The driver manoeuvred the search engine around the corner and into the long tube. By now there was no need for the lights. The walls themselves were shining. It was like driving through the end of a rainbow. It was so bright that the driver almost did not notice the sunlight. They emerged from the gap out on to the bare hillside, already cleared of casualties but still littered with weapons and burnt-out vehicles, to see in the distance search engines and the Knights’ gravity sleds fleeing in all directions.

They were about half a kilometre down the track up which they’d come when Shlaim said: ‘It isn’t a fucking pillar of salt, you know. We can look back.’

‘All right,’ Lucinda said. ‘Stop for a moment, OK?’

The driver complied reluctantly. Lucinda flicked the view from before to behind. The fastness at Tully Carn was no longer a black and glassy root-system spread over a rusty slope. Complex and colourful, floral and coralline, exuberant and expanding, it was a junkyard of jewelled clockwork orreries giving off little spinning wheels that soared into the air like toy helicopters and drifted away like dandelion seeds.

‘Oh. My. God,’ said Lucinda. ‘What have we done?’

‘I’ll tell you what you’ve done,’ snarled Shlaim. ‘You’ve—’

‘No,’ said Winter. ‘I’ll tell you . I don’t know whether the minds in that thing were just data files or if they or anything else in it were actually running, and I doubt you know either. But your copy was the first to go in there, and that was what set it off. Maybe they didn’t know about the big wide galaxy and what the other minds have done. They could certainly learn about it from your copy. That thing is spreading, it’ll spread to all the fastnesses of the Earth, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. Any minds that got caught up in the Hard Rapture aren’t going to need or want a Return. What they want is a departure , and you’ve given it to them.’ He clapped Shlaim’s shoulder. ‘You’ve given it to us . You should be proud.’

‘What,’ Calder asked, pointing at a place on the screen just above the fast-transforming fastness, ‘do you think that is?’

‘It’s a gate,’ Lucinda said. She flicked to a forward view. ‘Let’s go.’

‘What a fuckup,’ said Calder. Lucinda flinched.

‘At least you’ve got the copies,’ Shlaim said.

Winter saw in Calder’s face, as they both turned on the scientist, the same rage and fury and disappointment that burned in his own throat.

‘They’re not copies,’ he said. ‘They never lived. They’re not fucking real .’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Shlaim.

‘It’s you who doesn’t understand,’ said Calder.

The search engine moved on down the hill to the road.

‘There is always a last time for everything.’

Lucinda turned, startled by the familiar voice. Shlaim sauntered over, his sandals flip-flopping on the dusty marble of the museum floor. He was wearing khaki shorts and a black T-shirt printed with a picture of Earth and the words AOL That! As if, she thought. She had become as passionate a Returner—or, as was now said, a Stayer—as Winter. There had only ever been one planet worth taking, she had belatedly realised now that it was being taken away. In a googol of light-years she would not see its like.

‘Hello,’ she said, ungraciously, though hardly surprised; he’d expressed an intention of ‘doing Earth,’ as the current phrase went, shortly before she and Winter had set off with the more limited intention of doing Europe. In the two years that had passed since then it was not surprising that at some point their paths would cross.

‘What brings you here?’ Winter asked.

‘Like I said,’ Shlaim grinned. ‘Same as you, yeah? Last chance to see.’

He stood beside them and peered into the glass case. Inside it was a brown ceramic disc about ten centimetres across, stamped in a spiral pattern with dozens of tiny pictographs: a profile face that looked like a Mohawk, stick figures, a boxy spiked shape that reminded Lucinda irresistibly of a Lunar Excursion Module … the Phaistos Disc was as enigmatic an artifact as it had always been, like some playful, planted evidence of alien contact, or the jest of a god who could fake a planet’s entire past with a sense of style.