Newtons wake, p.6
Newton's Wake, page 6
‘I strongly recommend against that,’ said the ship. ‘The more intelligence is applied to the problem, the more likely it is that the program can be itself corrupted.’
Lamont writhed in his webbing as he thought about this. The AI, well used to human processing times, waited patiently through another stretch of protracted torment.
‘Have you had any thoughts,’ asked Lamont at last, ‘as to how the alien program managed to grab control?’
‘Unfortunately the details of this are part of what is no longer accessible to me,’ said the Hungry Dragon, ‘but I can speculate. Clearly the establishment of platform and hardware compatibility was accomplished before the transmission. Otherwise, merely receiving it would not have had any adverse consequences.’
‘I had figured that out for myself,’ said Lamont, and retreated into gloom.
L
amont was careful not to betray anything of his intention to the ship, but he was actively considering more drastic measures. He wasn’t sure whether the ship’s speculation—that the source of the war-machine-generation program was already familiar with human-built software—was more alarming than the possibility he’d at first contemplated: that it cracked the computer from scratch, using some kind of universal translation, which he was vaguely aware was supposed to be impossible. But then, neural parsers had been supposed to be impossible, until they were invented. Perhaps some similar latching on to universal basics—worming out the encoding of the natural numbers, and search-space branching outward from there—was involved here.
Or perhaps not. In that case the horror that Armand had unearthed had been listening, and not passively, to human electronic traffic for a long time. Another possibility, of course, was that the thing wasn’t alien at all—that it was, despite appearances, of human origin itself. This speculation had been comprehensively thrashed out on the discussions back home, to which Lamont had listened in an agony of frustration, missing as they were a crucial bit of evidence. His was, as far as he knew, the only spacecraft with which contact had been lost, and that was so common and unalarming an occurrence—he’d been out of contact seven times in the past ten years—that only the most excitable commentators were attributing to it any sinister significance. All the attention—practical as well as speculative—was turned to the possibility of further buried alien war machines in nearby asteroids or on Eurydice’s moon, Orpheus. Cue newscasts of nervy, armed patrols slogging through craters and searching in caves. These war machines, Lamont thought, might very well exist, though the swift elegance with which his ship—and how many other machines?—had been fucked over made him doubt it.
He disengaged from the webbing and prowled the vessel, ostensibly checking for subtle damage wreaked by the intrusion, and privately brainstorming himself for ways to destroy the ship’s mind.
R
esurrections had to be sponsored. It was a big responsibility, bringing people back from the dead. This was one reason why it wasn’t done very much. Another was that many of those who remained dead had been on the Returner side, and had few sympathisers. They were not much missed. A minority of the Returners remained proscribed.
To get Winter and Calder off the list, Ben-Ami had to organise a small campaign. He circulated a petition among the fans, he put up a considerable amount of his own credit, and accepted responsibility for the consequences of the resurrection. Letters of application had to be sent off to the Department of Culture and the Department of Defence, followed up after a day or two by the petitions, which now had several hundred signatures. Before doing any of this he had to clear it with the copyright holders, the Entertainment and Education Corporation, popularly known as the Mouse. Fortunately for him, the rights were handled by a low-level droid who—blindly cross-referencing the musicians’ names as still on the proscribed list—sold them to Ben-Ami for a pittance. Something similar happened with the Departments, whose philistinism Ben-Ami had not underestimated. Defence saw the musicians as artists (and thus irrelevant). Culture saw them as propagandist hacks (and thus irrelevant). The clearance came through.
‘Careful with that AK,’ said Andrea Al-Khayed, as they moved stuff out of the way of the resurrection tanks.
‘It isn’t loaded. It’s just a prop.’
She gave him a look. ‘It’s always real. It’s always loaded.’
‘Oh, all right.’ Ben-Ami removed the magazine clip from the rifle (it was the one that Leonid, in the tragedy, had used to shoot himself as Gorbachev’s troops stormed the Kremlin), saw that it was indeed loaded, remembered just in time to take the round out of the chamber, and stashed the weapon on top of a wardrobe. He and Andrea wheeled the tanks to near the desk, cabled them up and plumbed them in, and then dragged up a couple of beds from the hospital scene in the same production that the resurrection tanks had featured in.
Al-Khayed downloaded the released and transferred data from the desk while Ben-Ami tore open in succession two heavy paper sacks labelled ‘Human (dry)—Sterile if Sealed,’ tipped one into each tank and turned on the water supply. He closed the lids carefully and watched a display of lights and gauges that meant more to Andrea than it did to him. She checked them carefully.
‘All is well,’ she said.
‘That’s it?’ said Ben-Ami. He had a sense of anticlimax. The equivalent scene as he’d scripted it long ago for Herbert West had been a lot more spectacular, shrouded with carbon dioxide smoke and lit by Van Der Graaf sparks.
‘Seven days,’ she said. ‘See you then.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
She paused at the door. ‘Don’t peek.’
He sat down at the desk, sighed, and returned to working on the script.
CHAPTER 4
I Don’t Know Your Face, But Your Name Is Familiar
Lucinda Carlyle tried not to scowl into the mirror as the makeup artist sweated over her face. The artist of the features had a yellowing bruise on his own, the ten-minute-old legacy of his hint that eugenic nanosurgery was what she really wanted. Beyond the edge of her reflection, her face appeared again, larger than life on the news wall. The channel was recycling her first words from the Government steps, with the sound turned off. She had heard and seen it a dozen times. She pouted, bored, for the lipstick, and read her lips.
‘People of Eurydice,’ she’d said, ‘welcome back! It’s great to see you! You’re looking well! The rest of the human race is out there, it’s doing fine, and we’re coming to see you soon!’
She was quite proud of it. No Neil Armstrong, but come to think of it, he’d had only one line and he’d fluffed that.
Over the past week, since her arrival, Carlyle had talked to a lot of people: journalists, scientists, venture planners, military company directors. Every night she had returned exhausted to her room high in a hotel near the city centre, and slept until dawn. In the mornings she went out and explored the streets around the hotel, before returning for breakfast with her handler of the day. She had learned a lot about Eurydice’s peculiar history and purported prehistory, and in return had passed on as much as she knew and was politic to reveal about her family’s, and that of the rest of the human race. That she was, by her very presence, turning upside down the assumptions that had ruled the colony since its founding troubled her not at all. She’d seen the firm do bigger jobs, and her sole concern was to do this one right. All the time she was aware that Shlaim, in one form or another, was probably undergoing—or would soon undergo—a like debriefing, and that it was best not to say anything he could plausibly refute. Still, she had a head start on him in the business of a charm offensive, and she tried to make the most of it. Time enough to bring them fully up to speed when the Carlyle ships fittled in.
The makeup artist patted her face with a tissue. A spray hissed briefly at her carotids.
‘That’s it,’ he said, stepping back.
She smiled politely at him in the mirror. The result of his work she could admire, in an abstract way, as though it was on somebody else. She felt masked.
‘It’s lovely,’ she said, and stood up. A cape slithered to her feet. ‘Sorry about the bruise.’
His lips thinned, then stretched to a reluctant smile. ‘It’s nothing. My fault.’
‘If you’re sure.’
‘Of course.’ The tip of his tongue visited his lips. He was a little afraid of her, she thought. They all were. He stepped aside for a moment and returned with a green dress on a hanger dangled from his forefinger. Stiff, sculptured, off-shoulder, big at the hips and bust, its skirt supported by concentric, nested, truncated cones of stiff fine mesh, it looked as if it could stand up and waltz off by itself. She got into it as into a space suit, from the back. The fit was perfect.
‘I look like the wife of some geezer picking up a Nobel Prize,’ Carlyle said. ‘For chemistry.’
‘It’s very this evening.’
She met his mirrored gaze with a warmer smile than before. ‘How do you keep up?’
‘ “Keeping up,” ’ he said, with some froideur, ‘is not what I do.’
She stepped into shoes that lifted her heels ten centimetres off the floor. The cosmetician handed her a clutch purse and a wrap.
‘That’s you all set to party,’ he said.
She looked speculatively at him. Paul Hoffman was tall, muscular, with cropped blond hair, cheekbones to die for. Right now he had an elbow cupped in one hand and his chiselled chin in the other, head tilted slightly, smiling at her like she was some work of art on a wall.
‘Not quite,’ she said. ‘I’d like to go … accompanied.’
‘Oh, of course, I can arrange—’
‘Would you like to accompany me?’
He blinked. ‘Really? I’d be delighted. Thank you so much.’ He ran his hand over his hair, looking flustered. ‘Excuse me a moment while I go reconfigure my sexuality.’
‘There’s no need—’ she began, but he was gone. A few minutes later he was back. He stopped in the doorway and looked her up and down.
‘Wow,’ he said.
‘Don’t get your hopes up.’ She took his arm and turned him to the exit. ‘I liked you better the other way.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ he sighed. ‘It’s a tragedy.’
It was like seeing yourself as you would be seen a thousand years in the future, when you had become mythology. The room had about fifteen hundred people in it, swirling and circulating. The arrangements weren’t formal; the dress was, in a way she hadn’t seen here before. Hoffman had been right, her gown was very this evening. Tuxedos and taffeta, black-and-white vying with colour for vividness. Firefly cameras bobbed and darted among the guests, projecting a seamless and soundless survey of the party on thirty-metre-high walls, and to the world outside. Everybody from the upper reaches of Eurydicean society—people so busy that most of them had had no chance to meet her yet—was there and wanted to talk to her, or at least be seen next to her. Carlyle was grateful for Hoffman’s presence. Everybody here seemed to know everybody else, and presumed they knew her. The makeup artist knew them all, and knew just how to cultivate or wither that presumption. She had to trust in his target selection and avoidance:
‘Shipping planner. Big money, big name, bo-ring. Smile and shake hands.’
‘She’s from Harvard’s. Thank her for the frock.’
‘Defence. Mind your mouth.’
‘News analyst. Keep him sweet.’
‘Oh dear. The things I see when I’m pointed the wrong way.’
This last was for a pale young man with a sharp black beard and a sort of outline of a formal suit, in leather, without a shirt. He was carrying what looked like a test tube that wafted fragrant and mildly narcotic steam.
‘Adrian Kowalsky, actor,’ Hoffman added more audibly, by way of introduction. ‘Hi, Adrian.’
‘Delighted to meet you, sir,’ said Carlyle.
‘Enchantè,’ Kowalsky bowed. ‘You have rewritten all our scripts.’
She shrugged her bare, naked-feeling shoulders and sipped her drink. The glass was an inverted cone on a straight stem. The idea was, you didn’t put it down. There were racks for them somewhere.
‘Cannae be helped, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, that wasn’t a criticism. Good grief. It’s only now I’m beginning to appreciate how desperately sad everything seemed, only last week.’ He inhaled steam from his tube, eyes lidding for a moment, opening shining. ‘The isolation, the futility, the sense of enclosure.’
Carlyle shook her head. ‘I don’t quite follow.’
‘Do you read the classics?’ Kowalsky waved a hand. ‘Assuming you have the same. We were a Diaspar. Dancers at the end of time. You know? Eloi with ennui?’
‘All dressed up and nowhere to go?’ she suggested.
‘Yes!’ said Kowalsky. It seemed he’d never heard the stale phrase before. He touched her elbow. ‘You have no idea… . By the way, there is something I would like to ask you.’
‘Yes?’ She awaited one of the many frequently asked questions.
‘What’s he really like? General Jacques?’
She blinked and looked around. ‘Isn’t he here?’
Hoffman shook his head. ‘He’s not the flavour of the day.’
Carlyle raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh well. I’ve only met him two or three times since I arrived. If you’ve watched the television, you’ll have seen what he’s like. Very straight, direct, laconic. Off camera he’s no different. A bit less formal, maybe.’
‘And his personal life?’ asked Hoffman, smiling.
‘I didn’t ask! He lives with a woman somewhere, that’s all I know.’
Hoffman looked, a little, as if a daydream had been dashed. Kowalsky, on the other hand, brightened.
‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘What you see is what you get, that’s what you’re saying.’
‘As far as I know,’ said Carlyle. ‘Why?’
Kowalsky leaned in, confidentially. ‘I’m hoping to play him.’
‘Jacques Armand? The man I, uh, met?’
‘The very same.’
‘What’s this?’ Hoffman asked. ‘Instant drama?’
‘No, no,’ said Kowalsky. ‘Something historical.’ He stretched out an arm. ‘And histrionic!’
‘Good heavens,’ said Hoffman. ‘Not one of Ben-Ami’s spectacles, I hope.’
‘What else?’
‘How unutterably vulgar,’ said Hoffman. He turned to Carlyle, grinning. ‘You haven’t seen Adrian’s Macbeth, his Iago, his Gorbachev … do try to keep it that way.’
‘Judas,’ said Kowalsky, imperturbably. He winked at Carlyle. ‘Come to think of it, Judas is precisely the way—’
‘Armand will sue you!’ said Hoffman.
Kowalsky flipped a hand. ‘You can’t libel the dead. This performance will have nothing to do with his present life.’
‘A play about the rebellion?’ Hoffman asked, frowning. ‘Isn’t that a trifle … impolitic, in the circumstances?’
‘That’s exactly why it’s worth doing.’ Kowalsky tapped his nose, theatrically. ‘Benjamin is well aware of the political undertones. This is not going to be a vulgar spectacle, Paul. Not that I accept that description of his previous work.’
‘Oh come on,’ said Hoffman. ‘The reactor explosion in Leonid? The gunfight between the Bushes and the Bin-Ladens in West Side Story? The tank battle in the Scottish play? The—’
‘Look,’ said Kowalsky, ‘if you had never read or seen performances of the classics, you would never have thought Benjamin’s productions of them were anything but brilliant and moving.’
Hoffman snorted, a sip getting up the back of his nose. He coughed and waved apologetically. ‘Yes! If I’d never seen Webber’s Evita I’d never have laughed all the way through Ben-Ami’s Guevara!’
‘That was deliberate pastiche,’ said Kowalsky frostily. ‘My point is—’ He hesitated.
‘Yes, darling?’ drawled Hoffman.
‘This is going to be real. It’s going to be real history, with real songs from the period, and it’ll be like nothing you’ve ever seen before.’
‘How do you know all this?’ asked Carlyle, trying to get a word in.
‘Because Benjamin says that every time,’ said Hoffman.
Kowalsky folded his arms. ‘My lips are sealed.’
‘I’ll take that as a challenge,’ Hoffman said. He touched Kowalsky on the tip of the nose. ‘Only not tonight.’
He steered her away, and on.
There’s a lot of confidential conversations I can see up there,’ Carlyle remarked, sitting on a stool at the bar at the side of the cavernous ballroom. Its size and chandeliers were beginning to remind her disquietingly of the posthuman relic, though she tried to put that thought down to side-stream steam from other people’s alkaloid tubes. She waved a languid hand at giant figures on the walls, many of which were in elegant, fast-talking huddles. ‘Can the hoi polloi no lip-read?’
‘Can’t you?’ asked Hoffman.
‘Well, yes, usually, but not now.’ She looked again at the walls and shook her head. ‘Are they speaking a different language when we’re out of earshot?’
‘No,’ said Hoffman. ‘The lip-synch is scrambled, that’s all. All you’d ever pick up from the screens is “rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb.” ’
‘Oh, hell,’ said Carlyle, looking again. ‘It is an aw.’ She smote her forehead. ‘What a maroon.’
‘Speaking of speech,’ said Hoffman, staring at the glass of beer in his hand as if he’d never seen one before, ‘I couldn’t help noticing that your accent, or perhaps your dialect, fluctuates.’
‘Oh. Ah. Aye.’ She felt embarrassed. ‘I can speak American, but I tend tae revert tae English under stress.’ She laughed, the palm of her hand going to her mouth. ‘Like the now.’
‘English!’ Hoffman sounded amused. ‘That is not the language of Shakespeare, my dear, or even of Ben-Ami.’
‘Shakespeare’s language, huh, you should see what happened to his land.’ It was as if the lights had dimmed, the temperature dropped. ‘Airstrip bloody One.’
