Grazing The Long Acre (30 page)

She listened until she was sure she could hear footsteps inside the ziggurat. No, it’s okay, she’s still there, still haunting. Unhurried, peaceful, timeless, the Tomb Wife was going about her quiet routines.

 Rate had agonised nightmares in which the Lar’sz’ ghûl crept around his brain and scratched at his bunk closure: seeking live human flesh. Seriously repentant, Sigurt dredged up (or fabricated) some potent ancient Lar’sz’ian prayers: which he translated into English phonemes, and taught Rafe to recite. Elen had said nothing about the footsteps in the tomb, but she felt equally responsible. She might have leaked it into the shared reality, telepathy artefacts were the bane of starfaring. You learned that you
had
to think no evil of your companions in the matrix; or there would be hell to pay. And don’t imagine spooks, or somebody will get spooked.

She did not confess. It would only have made Rafe worse.

 At the end of a long shift she unplugged herself from the mainframe, meeting as always the adrenalin of panic as she returned to ship-time: clutching at her stomach, icy down her spine. Carter was the captain on this trip, thank God. But Elen was the one who crunched the numbers. She was finally responsible for all the lives on board (not to mention those huge ancient gewgaws in the hold). And the worst was knowing that if—
if
!—, she’d let a transcription error get by, it would not manifest itself until the closing phase. Not until too late. That’s quantum computing, no way around it.

The terror of the blizzard engulfed her. No radio, no GPS for this ocean. No ground control for this spaceship, not the slightest possibility of rescue. She saved-off their position meticulously, although off-frame storage was nonsense, no such thing as a Black Box; and let the solidity of the banks of instruments and winking screens reassure her. The freighter’s official name was
Pirate Jenny
(not that Actives themselves bothered much with names of starships); reflecting the Brechtian, Utopian leanings of the parent company, and its financial partner, the World State of Earth. Other ships were the
Clement Atlee
, the
Eleanor Roosevelt
. Their sisters were the
White Visitation,
the
Sacred Wicca
, the
Caer Siddi
. Elen decided she preferred the occult strand. No Black Box but this is Black Art. We don’t know what we are doing, we conjure with monstrous forces, far beyond our control.

Footsteps behind her, a breath on the back of her neck, a mocking sigh.

“So you got out,” she whispered, and turned slowly: hoping to catch a glimpse of the Tomb Wife’s ghost. Nobody there. She never lets herself be seen—

They got used to the extra presence. “I blame myself,” said Sigurt, but in fact it was a common symptom, technically harmless in terms of neurophysics: believed to be benign by superstitious Actives. Only Rafe was troubled, and he had his prayers. Sigurt told stories. Nadeem the Commissar and the Chief Engineer flirted. The Assistant Navigator, Chief Engineer’s former squeeze, took up with Passenger Liasion. Elen visited the hold again, alone. She’d decided against the guided tour.

In the low light, looking up at that black, balanced teardrop, she fell into a reverie in which the “Tomb Wife” tradition was not oppression but a shimmering resolve. Not to move on, not to let go of the past: to decide, so far and no further. The princess had chosen to stick, as they say in cards, at the grief of loss. To stay with the absence, never to let it fritter away into vague anniversaries, faded rose leaves of memory. Was refusing to let go a feminine trait? Or was it a Blue trait, which she was cutting and pasting onto the customs of another planet? It was an Elen trait. She told people (family, boyfriends, outsiders), that she was an interstellar navigator for the adventure of it. The most exotic of exotic travel. But we do not travel, she thought. Not a step. When the transcription is done—what does
when
mean, where there is no time?—we will make the crossing in almost zero extension.

What we do is stay, in the paradoxical moment.

Without deliberation she stood up, used her sleeve controls to open the tomb’s forcefield and set her gloved palms on the doorsill. Her suit was limber, designed for active wear. A push downwards, a bounce up, she had her knee on stone. As she stood up diffuse lighting welled around her. The tomb had been prepared for visitors. She realised, disappointed, that she couldn’t possibly be the first to enter since the Tomb Wife’s time: probably not even the first Blue! A short passage led into a stone room, where a table like an altar stood against an inner wall. Above it a life-size mural, in brilliant colour, showed two people, same height, same build, sitting opposite each other, informally; knees up. They both looked like Sigurt, in a generic way. They were gazing at each other, their diamond-shaped eyes over-bright, their smiling lips full of sadness. Both had the short cape of black velvet fur. One of them seemed to be wearing a black half-mask. It was this figure who reached to the other, one slender hand outstretched, as if in an unfinished caress. Below them on the altar stood an array of diamond shaped bowls: a curved platter, a heap of dry rags.

She looked into the bowls. Dead leaves, granular dust—

Are the conventions of mourning a universal constant? Elen thought of Etruscan tombs, Chinese ancestor worship. Her files contained no data, only the vaguest notions, but she was pretty sure that mural was a masterpiece. Her gauntleted hand must have brushed one of the artefacts. A label sprang into existence in the air, explaining—in Sigurt’s planet’s dominant script, in English, and in a third writing she didn’t recognise—, that the actual bowls and platters had been taken away, with their ancient contents. These were replicas. The dry rags were a replica of the decayed set of clothes that had been found.

The past as theme-park is a universal constant.

She explored the stone corridors of the ground floor, paying no further attention to the artwork: ghoulish and hopeful as a child, looking for the bones that had never been discovered. She found only dust, and very little of that. There were no stairways to the upper floors, and nothing she could identify as living quarters. The artful lighting started to make her feel like a tourist. She took refuge in the gloomiest of the courtyards and sat there looking at another black teardrop, halfway up a wall: quietly visiting the shade of a long-dead “princess”.

Immense peace, engulfing spiritual quiet.

She listened for footsteps, suddenly terrified.

Abruptly she got up and returned to the entrance, dropped to the floor.

As she closed the field behind her, embarrassed by her moment of panic in there, a black manta-ray swooped across the ocean trench darkness. Elen yelped, and stared around wildly. The shadow cruised again. Her heart was thumping, my God, what is that thing? What’s in here with me?

“Who’s there—?”

No answer but the hiss of disturbed air. “
Hey
! Who’s there?”

Sigurt landed beside her with a soft thump, wrapping slippery folds of bat-wings around him. “Ah,” he said, with smiling interest. “So it’s you, Elen.”

She stared, appalled: open-mouthed. “MY GOD! SIGURT! What d’you think you’re doing!
You can’t fly
! This is NOT a game!”

“On the contrary,” said the alien cheerfully. “The whole universe is a game, is it not? A puzzle-mass of tiny units of information, the pattern of which can be changed at will—given the torus, and the fabulous software implanted in a trained, numinous consciousness. Such as yours, Elen. I’m not the expert, but isn’t that the whole basis of interstellar ‘navigation’?”

Elen was shaking with horror. “You can’t do this! You can’t piss around doing impossible things in the transition! Our lives depend, every f-fucking moment—“

“On our conviction that all this is real,” he finished, unrepentant. He showed her the fx controller on his sleeve; and switched it off. The bat-wings vanished.

“I can access a toy from the ship’s library without damaging the equation, can’t I? I was just playing. I’m much lighter than a Blue, and there’s not a great deal of gravity in here. I’ve been jumping off the monuments.”

She dropped her head in her hands as relief thundered through her, leaving her spent and hollow. Starfarers live in constant terror, like sailors on the ancient oceans. You don’t realise, until you hit a peak, how high the ambient stress is getting.

“Just for the record, Sigurt, there’s no software, not the way you mean.”

“I know that we maintain all this,” he waved a slender hand, shadow-pale in the dark. “Between us…I’ve never been quite sure how it’s done. You Blues have all the secrets. Is it true that Starflight Actives have had brain surgery?”

Sigurt’s people had stunning cellular regeneration. They treated almost any trauma as a purely medical problem. The sciences of surgery and (worse!) gene manipulation had come as a horrible shock to them. Barbarism.

“No surgery. No implants. It’s more like a tissue culture. You have to have the right kind of brain to start with. The reason you can be awake is because you’re like us, Sigurt: but you’re a straight, a virgin. We’ve had the training that makes us grow the extra neuronal architecture, which doesn’t, er, exist in normal space—”

“Or you would be hydrocephalic Eloi, with heads the size of pumpkins.”

She nodded, though she had no idea what an Eloi was.

They sat with their knees folded up, like the figures in the mural.

“I’m sorry I fooled around, Elen. I scared you. I think I’m going stir crazy.”

“Or else you’re reacting poorly to racist abuse, Batman.”

Sigurt laughed, and scratched his ear. ‘
Batman
! Half-domino, cute little shoulder cape. Sounds too girly for my taste. If you like comparisons, we are more akin to frilled lizards than bats.”

“Nadeem must really annoy you.”

“He is
something I would scrape off my shoe
,” pronounced the alien, with relish. He tipped back his head. “Do you hear that, Commissar? Shoe-Scrapings!”

They started to laugh. The Active Complement lived in each other’s heads, accommodating each other as if they’d been workmates for a lifetime. They were a group mind: inhibited, licensed; in constant negotiation. Elen replayed the first remark Sigurt had made. Sigurt had known that someone was visiting the artefacts, but because he was only supercargo, not A/C, he hadn’t known who it was.

“I’ve been visiting the Tomb Wife,” she said. “I’m fascinated by the idea of a ghost on an instantaneous transit. Do you know anything more about her?”

The alien shrugged. “Like what?”

The tomb crouched like a massive, patient animal. Ancient artefacts peered at them from the gloom, carving and shaping blurred into a vague sense of
life.

“Was she old? Was she young…? Did she have a lover?”

“Widows are a danger to social cohesion,’ said the alien. “The relict of a partnership has to be neutralised, or there’ll be misalliances, inheritance disputes. Therefore the widow must marry again, harmlessly. She must wed the tomb—”

“That sounds very human. Nadeem would be horrified.”

Sigurt seemed to think it over. “The ancient Lar’sz’ kept state records,” he said at last. “And accounts. Not much else was written down. I’m afraid we don’t know much. There are the bas-reliefs, but they’re high art, highly ambiguous. And not of her choosing, of course. They are the memorial her husband ordered.”

Elen wanted to ask
what was her name
, but she was afraid that might be a lapse in taste, a cultural taboo. Another question came to her. “Is it right to call her a ghost? Or did a haunting mean something different to the ancient Lar’sz?”

“It’s different and it’s the same, of course.”

The constant cry of one numinously intelligent sentient biped to another.

Sigurt grinned, acknowledging the problem. “Let me try to bridge the gap. In my world we believe that people can, how can I put it,
leave themselves behind
at certain junctures, life events. Someone else goes on. When we speak of a haunting, that’s our derivation. Not the, er, spirit of someone physically dead. D’you see?”

“Yes,” said Elen, startled and moved. “Yes, I think I do.”

She felt that she knew Sigurt better, after this conversation. There was a bond between them, the celebrated archaeologist and the navigator: unexpected but real.

The country of no duration can’t be seen from the outside. You can never look back and say
there
, I was. That’s what happened. Everything that “happened” in a transit was doomed to vanish like a dream when they fell back into normal space. As the
Pirate Jenny
moved, without motion, to the end, without ending, of the paradoxical moment, everyone had a terrible psychic headache. The Active Complement suffered fretful agonies that swamped the ghost, Rafe’s nightmares; all their shipboard entanglements. They regarded Sigurt, whose wakefulness was part of their burden, not so much as an exciting famous person, more as a demanding pet. Batman’s favourite expression (of course!) set everybody’s teeth on edge.

The captain had been interstellar crew for as long as there’d been commercial interstellar traffic, and he could see the writing on the wall. “
The Pirate Jenny
is a horseless carriage,” he moaned, in mourning for the sunlit green walls, the mossy ground; the polished birchwood. “Soon it will all be gone, all this. Nobody will bother. Passengers will transport themselves, we’ll be obsolete.”

“Shut up,” muttered Elen, “shut up, shut up, I’m trying to concentrate—”

She was mortally afraid that she’d made a mistake. She scoured the code for a single trace of the ghost (there must be a trace!) found none, and knew she must have missed something. Mistake, mistake. The insensate, visceral memory that she
always
felt like this in the closing phase was no comfort at all.

“What about freight?” Gorgeous Simone, Chief Engineer, looked up from a game of solitaire. “Who’s going to carry the freight, doctor? Hump it through the indefinite void, if not people like us? Fuck, look at the size of
that
problem.”