The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (35 page)

“We have followed Dr Sarkka’s career with great interest,” it said. “And this is a very interesting turn of events.”

“A potentially serious turn of events,” the Inspector General said. “Sarkka is a dangerous man, and he may be about to lay his hands on dangerous code.”

“We have examined the damaged code,” the avatar said. “What was deleted presents a clear danger to you. We are here to help.”

“And we’re grateful, of course,” the Inspector General said.

The avatar responded with a lengthy speech, telling us that the Jackaroo were grateful for the UN’s cooperation and for my role in helping to heal a potentially difficult rift; how this was a fine example of the harmonic convergence of the Jackaroo and the human race; how the present small difficulty would be quickly overcome by application of that same cooperation in general, and my talents in particular, and so on and so forth – I won’t bore you. It was the usual mash-up of cliches, mixed metaphors, and orotund sentiment, like a mission statement for some multinational company written by committee and run through a computer which had scrupulously removed any trace of originality, human feeling, and passion. The experts are still arguing, and will probably argue forever, about whether the Jackaroos’ communications and conversations are classic examples of Chinese Room AI simulations of human thought patterns, or cleverly misleading simulations of Chinese Room AI simulations of human thought patterns. As someone who has been on the receiving end of one of their perorations, I can tell you that the distinction doesn’t matter. As far as I was concerned, all that mattered was that it was so relentlessly dull that it was almost impossible to keep track of what was being said. It would have sent anyone not wired to the eyeballs on caffeine and amphetamine to sleep had it not been for one thing: it was delivered by a genuine alien through a machine of unknown powers.

And so, despite the soporific blanket of the avatar’s bland and lengthy blandishments, I was gripped by an electric, barely suppressed terror, and I’m certain that Marc and the Inspector General felt the same way. For despite their best intentions – or because of them – you can’t help but be paranoid about the Jackaroo. They are alien and therefore completely opaque. Neither angels nor devils, but distorting mirrors that reflect our best hopes and worst fears.

“May I ask a question?” I said, when it had finished, or at least run out of words. “If you’re offering to help us, what kind of help are we talking about?”

“We are here to advise, nothing more,” the avatar said. “After all, we do not want to reveal that we are helping you. It would violate the terms of our agreement. However, we may be able to locate Dr Sarkka’s ship, should it use a wormhole again, and we do not see a problem with passing on that information.”

The Inspector General chipped in again, said that the Jackaroo usually refrained from direct interference, but because this was an unusual and highly alarming case, they would utilize a little-known property of the wormhole throats to identify any used by Sarkka’s ship. They had already confirmed that Sarkka had visited Terminus, and because he had not returned through that system’s only wormhole, he must still be there. Our first priority was to find, identify, and destroy the code. Our second was to track down Hughes and Sarkka, and if it came to it, we would try to purchase the mirror of the code from them.

The Inspector General mentioned a ceiling limit that exceeded the GDPs of several countries back on Earth. “We have no intention of paying Sarkka of course. He will be arrested for murder as soon as he tries to collect. Hopefully, he will have become infected before then, and will have aimed his ship at some damned star or other.”

“It is possible,” the avatar said. “But we cannot count on it because the incubation period is variable.”

I saw a big flaw in the plan at once: Niles Sarkka wasn’t stupid, and would guess that my offer was bogus. And in any case, if the code promised to validate his theory he wouldn’t part with it for any amount of money. But I didn’t raise any objections – as I’ve already explained, I believed that summary justice was better than letting Niles Sarkka gain power over dangerous code. When the Inspector General asked me if I needed time to think about this, I said that I already had thought about it, and would gladly accept.

It was almost not untrue.

“They have been manipulating us from the very beginning, Emma. Playing with us as a child plays with white mice in a cage. And they have been watching us a very long time. They know things about us that we do not know. They sit in judgement beyond ordinary human plight or perception. But they do not know everything. Their survey of our comings and goings on Earth and everywhere else is not omniscient. That is why we will escape their chains. And that is why we are here, you and I.”

It’s two in the morning. Everyone on the ship is asleep except for the maintenance robots puttering about their inscrutable business beyond our encampment, the three men and women of the night watch, and me. I’m trying to make a cup of green tea with one hand while holding the q-phone’s handset in the other, listening to for the tenth or twelfth time a variant of Niles Sarkka’s standard lecture on the Jackaroo and their fiendish plans and plots.

I said, “They knew about Hughes and Singleton. They knew about the code.”

“No, Emma. They intercepted q-phone messages between me and a friend in Port of Plenty who was acting as go-between. They did not know what the code was, or where it came from because poor Everett and Jason did not know what it was, and they wouldn’t tell me where the original was located until we had concluded our dealings face to face and quit First Foot.”

“Even so, they tracked you to Terminus.”

“Did they? They lied about the nature of the code. Perhaps they lied about that, too. They do not know everything, and they lie. If they are gods, they are petty and spiteful gods. I don’t know about you, but even at its lowest, I don’t think that humanity deserves gods as low and base as them. No, we aspire to greater things. Why else would we have come all this way, you and I?”

“I’m here to bring you to justice, Niles. You know that.”

“You’re here because of your nature, Emma. You’re here because you want to be here. You see, you aren’t very different from me after all.”

I was brought up short by his assertion, but shrugged it off with a quip about this not being in any way the destination I’d anticipated when I’d left First Foot, and he didn’t make any more of it, went back to his interminable dissection of conspiracies and secret histories. I mention it here because I think he’s wrong. Oh, there’s no doubt that we have some things in common. Particularly our obsession with seeing things through to the end no matter what the cost. But this is overshadowed by a fundamental difference.

I stand on the right side, and he does not.

We left, the strike team and I, in a Q-class scout, a small ship that resembled a cartoon toadstool: a fat cone containing the lifesystem, with the teardrop-shaped stalk of the fusion motor pod depending from its centre. The lifesystem’s interior was a roughly oval chamber partitioned by mesh platforms and furnished with bunk beds, a pair of porta-potty toilets and a shower pod like a dingy plastic egg, picnic tables and an industrial microwave, commercial chest freezers and rows of steel storage lockers. All in all, it was about as glamorous as a low-rent bomb shelter or the accommodation module of an oil platform, except that the scalloped nooks and crannies of its walls were a perfect hollow cast of the whale-sized agglomeration that had once filled it – the Ghajar had been colonial creatures that exchanged biological modular parts amongst themselves as easily as we changed clothes, each one a different shape and size from all the rest.

Like all ships, ours was a strictly point-and-click operation. Apart from a package of solid-fuel motors for fine manoeuvres strapped around the lifesystem’s circumference, most of the ship’s systems, especially the fusion motor, were sealed, enigmatic, inaccessible. Our pilot, a slender, athletic New Zealander, Sally McKenzie, typed a command string into the laptop that interfaced with the ship’s navigation package, and the ship boosted itself out of orbit and aimed itself at the pair of wormhole throats that orbited the trailing Lagrangian point of the system’s methane gas giant.

All wormhole throats look the same, a round black mirror a little over a kilometre across, framed by the ring that houses the braid of strange matter that keeps it open and embedded in a rock sheared flat on one side and shaped and polished to a smooth cone behind, shaped and set in place millions of years ago by the nameless and forgotten Elder Culture that created the network. There were two in First Foot’s system, one leading to the Solar System, the other to a red dwarf star some twenty thousand light years away, at the outer edge of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm of the Galaxy. That’s the one we dropped through.

I sat with Sally McKenzie during the transit, watching on the HD screen as with startling speed Wormhole #2 grew from a glint to a speck to a three-dimensional object, the round black mirror of its throat flying at the screen, filling it. And then, without any sense of transition, we were out on the far side, falling around the nightside of a hot super-Jupiter. The red dwarf sun rose above the vast curve of the planet like a moon set afire, and the ship drove on towards the next wormhole throat, 60 degrees around the orbit it shared with the wormhole we’d just exited.

It had taken more than two days to reach the wormholes in First Foot’s system, but took just two hours to swing around the super-Jupiter to catch up with the next one, plunging through it and emerging close to a dim brown dwarf that orbited a red dwarf star a little brighter, glimmering like a dot of blood against the great dark shoulder of the Horsehead Nebula. The ship broke orbit and swung out towards a sombre ice giant and after three days at maximum acceleration plunged into the solitary wormhole that orbited it.

And so on, and so on.

Via q-phone, Marc kept me up to date with the code farm investigation. It seemed that Natasha Wu had fitted a video camera into the bedroom of her apartment (“A girl can never be too careful.”) and it had caught the two goons who had broken in and trashed the place while searching for the code farm archives. Both were in custody inside a day, and both turned out to be linked, via DNA trace evidence, to no less than seven unsolved murders. One of them quickly decided to take up Marc’s offer of immunity from prosecution and sang about everything he knew, including the kidnap and murder of Meyer Lansky and his family: more than enough to take down Pak Jung-Hin. Apparently, the dead ex-soldier, Abuelo Baez, had been a freelance who’d done several enforcement jobs for Meyer Lansky, specialising in “debt recovery.” The goon didn’t know if Baez had been sent after Jason Singleton and Everett Hughes, but Marc believed that it seemed likely. We still weren’t sure what had gone down in the motel room, but it looked as if Lansky’s man had caught up with the two coders, Everett Hughes had escaped, and Niles Sarkka had been involved in some kind of confrontation that had left both Jason Singleton and Abuelo Baez dead.

The young captain and the six soldiers of the strike team passed the time stripping and reassembling their weapons, swapping war stories, immersed in virtual simulations of various actions, watching videos, and sleeping. They slept a lot, like big predators with full bellies whiling away the time until the next meal. My presence seemed to make them uncomfortable, no doubt because I wielded authority outside their chain of command, but I found the pilot, Sally McKenzie, a congenial companion. She’d been a colonel in the New Zealand Air Force during the war, had won a ticket on the emigration lottery three years ago, shortly after she’d been retired from active service. Now she was a spaceship pilot, eager to see everything the fifteen stars had to offer. She told me stories about dogfights over the Weddell Sea and the Antarctic Peninsula; I told her sanitised versions of various investigations I’d been involved in.

And so we moved from wormhole throat to wormhole throat, a chain that passed through six star systems until we reached our destination, the star 2CR 5938, otherwise known as Terminus. So-called because there was only one wormhole throat orbiting it. One way in, one way back out. The end of the line.

It was a dim red dwarf freckled with big sunspots. The bright filamentous arc of a flare bridged one edge of its disc from equator to pole. It was partnered with a G0 star that shone a little over a tenth of a light year away, only a little less bright than the dozens of hot young stars that were beginning to burn through a tattered veil of luminous gas that slanted across half the sky.

The red dwarf was circled by two concentric belts of asteroids: rubble left from ancient collisions of protoplanets, prevented from accreting into larger bodies by the gravitational interference of the hot and dense super-Jupiter that orbited between them. Our ship fell towards the outermost belt, at the edge of Terminus’s habitable zone.

The UN representative had already reached an agreement with the reef farmers’ council, which had sensibly agreed to keep away for fear of infection with the meme that the Jackaroo had warned us about. Our destination was an undistinguished worldlet amongst ten thousand such. Unequally bi-lobed like a peanut, an agglomeration of basaltic rocks heated and partly melted by successive shock fronts that had driven the orbital migration of the super-Jupiter, afterwards lightly cratered by impacts with debris left over from the formation of thousands of others like it and mantled in a layer of dust and pebbly chondrules. It had orbited Terminus for more than seven billion years, undisturbed by anything except the occasional minor impact, until some nameless Elder Culture had planoformed it, injecting into its centre of mass a spoonful of collapsium, exotic dark matter denser than neutronium that gave it a pull averaging a little less than the Moon’s gravity, wrapping it in a bubble of quasiliving polymer that kept in a scanty atmosphere of oxygen, nitrogen, and argon, landscaping it, seeding it with life.