Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘Don’t!’ he said, suddenly alarmed.

She turned her steel smile on him. ‘You still think I have anything to be afraid of?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘But I have.’

She pushed her fingers into his beard.

‘Some time … ’ she said. ‘Some time, the curiosity will get too much. And even putting in a copy won’t be enough. I’ll have to know .’

He nodded sombrely. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But not this time.’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Not this time.’

They turned around and walked the two kilometres back along the moor to the empty streets of Inverness.

T

he habitat hung in space, a great turning wheel of lands and lakes under diamond glass and solar mirrors. Its defences were many, its vulnerabilities few. One of the latter was that it had no expectation of, or defence against, a small starship fittling right in under its roof, scorching along between its floor and roof for several kilometres before coming to a dead halt immediately above the central committee offices. Hatches opened in the ship and space-armoured soldiers swarmed out, riding down on rocket packs, carrying cosmic-string weapons and plasma rifles.

One of the soldiers kicked open the door of the office and marched in to see the chairman. He stared from behind his console at the visored, armoured and armed figure before him. Another soldier came into the office, while the rest ran thunderously through the corridors and up the stairs of the building.

‘You are the responsible elected leader of Man Conquers Space Collective?’ the first soldier asked.

‘Yes,’ said the chairman, raising his hands slowly above his head.

‘Good,’ said the soldier. The visor flipped up and a woman’s face grinned out at him. ‘I am Number One Destruction Brigade San Ok.’ She indicated the other soldier. ‘And this is my comrade Number One Destruction Brigade Ree. Both formerly of Eighty-Seven Production Brigade, Transformation of Nature Collective. We’re here to collect on a debt.’

Benjamin Ben-Ami put down his coffee and sighed.

Problems?’ Andrea Al-Khayed asked, from the other side of the verandah breakfast table.

‘Not at all.’ Ben-Ami waved a hand to encompass the green and crowded farms of the valley and the sky above it, where that morning’s third shipload of Earth evacuees was drifting past. ‘These people have problems . They’ve seen the planet they were born on turning inexorably into a machinery of thought. All I have is a hankering for good New Start coffee.’

Andrea nodded. ‘Me too. It’s funny the things you miss.’

They were two years into Ben-Ami’s five-year exile from the city, the penalty for his part in what were now referred to as ‘the recent events.’ AlKhayed had, with unexpected loyalty, chosen to share it. The thought still made him feel almost guilty.

‘You can leave at any time,’ he said. ‘Honestly.’

Under the table, her toes attempted to tickle his thigh. ‘Not really,’ she said.

He smiled back.

‘It’s not just the coffee, though,’ she said. ‘It’s the cafe, and the comms, and the city. That’s what you’re missing, Ben, and you shouldn’t. They would just distract you from what you’re doing now, and this is the best possible place for doing it.’

‘I know, I know.’ He thumbed his slate, looking at the draft for the new libretto: Jesus Koresh: Martyred Messiah . It looked like it might be the best thing he’d ever done, better even than last year’s Osama: Warrior Prince : the most conscientiously researched: every character, from its mild-mannered and modest but strong-willed hero to its gloating psychopathic villains, the Emperor Reno and the Empress Hillary, meticulously authenticated from the documents of the Latter Day Adventists. But still.

He looked down the valley balefully to the nearest of its several small whitewashed churches.

‘If I have to listen to another bloody hymn,’ he said, ‘I’ll burn down a church myself.’

They walked out of the resurrection lab together, laughing and talking. As soon as they were out in the open Calder lit a cigarette. Arlene nudged him.

‘These things will kill you one of these days,’ she said.

Winter looked around. The sky was dark blue, webbed with the hairline hexagons of a high dome. The resurrection lab was a small low building with a wooden ramp down to a broad plaza, set among green parks with paths that linked a cluster of white buildings of four or five storeys. There were a lot of people on the paths, and they all looked young. That didn’t mean much, but he suspected them of being students.

‘Where are we, anyway?’ he said.

Calder made a thing of squinting up at the sky. ‘Still the Sagittarius Arm, by the looks of it,’ he announced.

‘Another campus gig,’ said Irene. ‘Let’s hope this time the little bastards haven’t cracked our copy-headers and napstered us to virtualities all over the planet.’

Winter looked at her, alarmed. ‘Has that ever happened?’

She shook her head, smiling. ‘I shouldn’t tease you,’ she said. ‘You fall for it every time.’

‘This is definitely real?’

‘Definitely. Come on, let’s find the bar.’ She slipped her hand under his arm and set off with him and the others, down the ramp. ‘Don’t look back.’

THE FALL REVOLUTION

The Star Fraction

The Stone Canal

The Cassini Division

The Sky Road

THE ENGINES OF LIGHT

Cosmonaut Keep

Dark Light

Engine City

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

NEWTON’S WAKE: A SPACE OPERA

Copyright © 2004 by Ken MacLeod

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Book design by Milenda Nan Ok Lee

Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor ®is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

MacLeod, Ken.

Newton’s wake: a space opera / by Ken MacLeod.—1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

ISBN 0-765-30503-8

EAN 978-0765-30503-9

1. Life on other planets—Fiction. 2. Space flight—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6063.A2515N49 2004

823’.914—dc22

2003026584

First Edition: June 2004

Printed in the United States of America

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