Winter Song (40 page)

    Karl indicated the console. "Downloaded. He's gone hunting the datarealm. Even if they just keep each other occupied, it'll give us a chance to get on with dumping the reactor." Karl clutched at her for support. "Still a bit unsteady," he said. "The world keeps moving around."

    The viewscreen showed the comet ahead of them, vapour boiling from it in the glare of Gama and Deltasol, rising in wraiths of steam.

    Come on, stop daydreaming, he thought, rubbing his head. He had once placed an antique reality patch on his head, to see how the thing worked. It had been a memory of a visit to a tooth repairist – a dentist, that was the word – back when teeth either wore or fell out. The subject had actually had a tooth knocked out, and kept probing the gap where it had been, feeling the roughness of the surrounding molars. It was that feeling of emptiness that Loki's absence reminded Karl of. The feeling that something, no matter how reluctantly accepted it had been, was no longer there, leaving only a phantom of memory. Karl shook his head, and releasing his harness, drifted around the cabin with a small sack in hand, stuffing items of debris into it. All Bera's patient gathering of materials for their eventual return to the surface had been undone in a matter of seconds. For some reason that made Karl angrier than anything else.

    Leaning on the console, Karl began to flick switches; slowly, then a flurry as he understood a sequence, then slowing again. He swore. "That thruster firing wasn't supposed to happen. Oh, I think it's Loki and the Idiot, fighting."

    The lights suddenly dimmed, then returned to full intensity. "That wasn't me," Karl said.

    "Karl!" Bera said.

    "Not right now, unless it's really urgent, Bera," Karl murmured.

    "It depends if you consider Ragnar's having some sort of seizure is urgent!" she snapped.

You emerged from the tunnel not inside the cityscape as you had expected, but on the wrong side of a meshfence several metres high. As a deterrent, it was pretty feeble, you decided, visualising a rabbit hole at the base of the fence, and when it appeared, rolling under the fence through the gap it created.

    The skyscrapers were a little blurred around the edges, like a picture magnified so that the pixels show. Huge flying ziggurats that you suspected were data objects floated serenely across a lemon and grey sky that you recognised as Isheimur; it was, after all, even though you had only witnessed it through Karl's eyes, the only sky you had ever seen. Shuttle-type shapes comprised of pockets of data flitted like little fishes from ziggurat to ziggurat. And vast columns of numbers rose high into the sky, all the way up to orbit.

    Of people, of course, there was no sign. You weren't surprised. There would, after all, be only one inhabitant of this city.

The others gathered around Ragnar's prone body, Arnbjorn kneeling, clutching a box. The container was open, showing bottles and phials scattered. Arnbjorn's face was ashen, and a solitary tear track glistened on one cheek. "I can't read any of these things!" he said and, leaning back on his haunches, shot Karl an imploring look.

    "Let me," Karl said, although he had little hope of understanding the labels. He ran his finger over each in turn and listened to the instructions that each label recited. Smart labels, he thought, these bottles must date from when people were just starting to lose archaic skills like reading. But although drug names and ingredients were similar across languages, he didn't know enough to know what the drugs did. Some labels recited what sounded like instructions, but his Kazakh wasn't adequate to translate more than simple phrases.

    Karl gazed at the torn-open shirt and the network of scars criss-crossing Ragnar's exposed chest. Ragnar's face drooped on one side, and drool trickled down his face.

    Arnbjorn wiped the spittle away. "Help us," he begged.

    "I don't know what to do," Karl admitted. "Without access to the medical programme, I don't even know what it is."

    "It's a stroke," Bera said. "My grandmother had one. There are drugs that can thin the blood, and–" Her eyes widened. "Would your nanophytes fix him?"

    Karl thought, You idiot! Panic in the face of an archaic medical condition with no access to proper intel had frozen his brain. "They might," he admitted, and rummaging in the box, pulled out a knife sheathed in sterile wrapping. He willed clusters of nanophytes to his hand, felt the slight tingling in his arms that spoke of their movement, and after a few seconds, made an incision. "There won't be enough to completely fix him, but they may alleviate the worst effects."

    Taking a syringe from its sterile wrapper, Bera drew back the plunger and slowly filled it with blood from the cut. "Inject this into his carotid artery," Bera said, passing the syringe to Arnbjorn, who took it as if it were a poisonous snake.

    Arnbjorn fumbled it, so Orn snatched it, and plunged it into Ragnar's neck. "Don't worry," Orn said. "Some of us react better to these situations than others." Arnbjorn didn't answer, preoccupied with his own private hell.

    Bera sniffed at a jar and wrinkled her nose. "I think these have gone off." Instead she simply wrapped bandages around the wounded hand.

    Ragnar's eyelids fixed on Karl, and he tried to speak, but it came out as a drunken-sounding mumble that Karl couldn't make out.

    "If Loki can take control of the ship," Karl said to Bera, "then we should be able to access the medical records."

    "You should concentrate on the ship," Bera said. "Leave me to tend to Ragnar." She added, "The first twenty-four hours are key to any recovery, but until the nanophytes have had time to work, we can't do too much apart from keep him comfortable. Go on, leave us to it."

    Stamping on any guilt that seeped into his thoughts, Karl returned to the console, and cursed as the W
inter
Song
lurched.

    Not now, Loki! he sub-vocalised – then remembered that the construct wasn't there to hear him. Sort that Idiot out.

For the longest time you thought that you were alone, as you wandered the city streets looking for the One.

    When you saw him on the skyline, you thought at first that he was astride a horse. As you drew closer, step by step down the avenue lined with trees whose leaves were lined with crystalline veins, you realised that the mounted horseman was actually a centaur, his face bearing the cruel look of a Kazakh warrior. "What are you, interloper?" the centaur said, the Kazakh words turning into Standard a micro-second after his lips moved; the faintest of lags, but still visible.

    "A construct, the same as you." You made yourself grow bigger, so that you were the same two-and-a-half metres tall as him; no medieval program was going to psych you out.

    From nowhere, it seemed, the W
inter Song
's datarealm drew a bow and turned and fired an arrow at your heart in one smooth motion.

    But you stepped to the left so that it sailed harmlessly past you. You pointed the gun at him left-handed but as his lips curled in a sneer, instead took a phial righthanded from the little canvas sack. "Tailored virus," you said, and threw the phial, whose contents were suspended in a solution, at the centaur. "No cure for this," you said. "It's pure germ warfare, as a billion people on New Ithaca learned."

    Moments later, the centaur screamed.

    "It's the viral equivalent of an old, prehistoric neutron bomb," you said to the twitching, dissolving mess. "Kills the enemy but leaves the buildings intact."

    It seemed to take forever, but even in cyber-time it was probably only a minute or so, in outside time perhaps a half-second, and nothing remained of the datarealm but a bubbling pool.

    In the moments when you were sure that it was dead, but before entropy could send the systems crashing to the ground, you reached out with arms quickly grown infinitely long. You caught the first struggling ziggurat as it wobbled in its path, and pushed it on its way as before.

    More and more, as a juggler will catch balls tossed to him, you manipulated the data structures, wherever possible keeping them going as before, at least until you could work what each one of them did. It took hours of subjective time, but then you realised what bothered you about this faux-world – there were no suns in here, so it was impossible to sense the passage of time.

    Then you saw that one of the vast columns of numbers was changing. It was a clock, a mission clock counting off the gigaseconds since the start of the mission.

    For a long time, you concentrated on keeping the myriad systems going, learning how things worked one object at a time. Only when you were sure of what you were doing, did you start to actually change arrangements, gradually taking control of the W
inter Song.

    Soon, you forgot all about the passage of time. The data was just so fascinating. This was what you were made for, you belatedly realised.

    It took a voice to interrupt your reverie. A familiar voice.

Too many of the protocols needed to complete the operation were either activated by parts of the instrumentation that had been cannibalised on the ground, or worse by the datarealm, Karl finally realised.

    Dreading what he might find, he re-inserted the jack.

    The cyberscape seemed much as it had before, insofar as one databerg looked just like another, and infostreams were as indistinguishable to him as faces to a blind man.

    "Loki!" Karl called, the name a symbol hurtling into the void, shrinking with distance, smoke streaming from them. "Loki!" He cast another copy of the symbol, and then new ones: "Where are you?"

    "Here!" came an answering shout, and a sigil loomed out of the void, hurtling at Karl so quickly that he had to duck, but luckily it flashed past him. He breathed a sigh of relief. "I need to be able to communicate with you without jacking in. Any suggestions?"

    "There's a speaker on the console for radio messages," Loki said. "Have Orn re-wire it so that it hacks into the jack connection, and it'll pass as a voicecomm."

    Karl put Orn to work, removing the jack first.

    After a few minutes Orn pronounced the work done. A flat, metallic voice echoed from the speaker: "Finally."

    Karl said, "Do you have control of this bloody thing, or is there another ambush waiting just around the corner?"

    "I've got control," Loki said, voice echoing through the cabin, metallic and harsh and nothing like the voice that had been in Karl's head these last months. Still, the implications were such that Karl exhaled with sheer relief, and silently clenched his fist.

    "Then let's make up for lost time, and push this rock to Isheimur," Karl said. The ship rotated through ninety degrees and nudged forward on thrusters. Then the engines kicked in, gradually growing in volume.

    Karl felt the tiniest push of acceleration against his back, and closed his eyes, trying to achieve some mental equilibrium. The acceleration wasn't anywhere near strong enough to require him to sit, but he needed to gather his wits; he seemed to have been in perpetual motion for hours without a break, but he realised that it had actually only been minutes, and he was suffering from a weird sense of temporal displacement. Now he needed to be absolutely focused upon the task, if they were to have any chance of survival.

    "Ice weighs slightly less than one kilogram per cubic metre at standard gravity," Loki said. "So a cubic kilometre masses one megatonne. This comet's diameter at twelve point five eight kilometres means that it masses almost two thousand megatonnes…"

    "How much does the W
inter Song
mass?"

    "Just under a megatonne," Loki said.

    Orn, still loitering nearby, whistled. "It'll be like an ant pushing an elephant!"

    "Not quite so bad," Karl said. "We're not pushing it from a standing start, just nudging it to alter its course. Even at a fiftieth of a gee, which is about all we can manage for more than a few minutes, we'd have a lateral velocity of sixty metres a second after five minutes. In the time we have to planetfall, we should have enough time to correct the course divergence."

    He wasn't as sure as he was making out. There was a margin of error of only a few hundred metres for the launch co-ordinates. More than that, and by the time it had travelled several million kilometres, the comet would fly harmlessly by Isheimur. Even more important was that the trajectory was accurate to within a fraction of a degree or they were doomed.

    "How long until we need to fire the engines?""Fortyeight minutes," Loki said, raven's caw voice still grating. "I assume that we don't need the odd few seconds, which have in any event almost elapsed now."

    It took Karl a moment to realise that the construct was joking. "Humour from a machine," he murmured.

    "Actually, I was serious," Loki said. "You don't call up every result of a search, do you?"

    "Hmmph."

    "I am concerned about one of the lateral thrusters," Loki said. "It's working, but only intermittently, and when it does it's only at barely forty per cent efficiency."

    "It'll have to do," Karl said.

    "It sounds odd actually hearing his voice." Bera stood beside Karl, resting her hand on his shoulder.

    "Did you think he was a figment of my imagination?" Karl said, laughing.

    "Only in the very, very small hours, when sleep didn't come easy. Then you start to doubt everything, even yourself." For the first time Karl realised what a colossal investment of faith Bera had made in him. He must have looked upset, for she squeezed his shoulder and said, "Do you think I could tell just anyone something like that? Take it as a very indirect measure of how much I think of you."

    Karl patted her hand. "I will."

    The view of the comet in the monitor, though impressive – steam boiled from it – had quickly become stale. On an impulse, Karl said, "Loki, open the shutter covering the side window – the one leeward from the suns."