‘There is always a last time for everything.’
Lucinda turned, startled by the familiar voice. Shlaim sauntered over, his sandals flip-flopping on the dusty marble of the museum floor. He was wearing khaki shorts and a black T-shirt printed with a picture of Earth and the words AOL That! As if, she thought. She had become as passionate a Returner—or, as was now said, a Stayer—as Winter. There had only ever been one planet worth taking, she had belatedly realised now that it was being taken away. In a googol of light-years she would not see its like.
‘Hello,’ she said, ungraciously, though hardly surprised; he’d expressed an intention of ‘doing Earth,’ as the current phrase went, shortly before she and Winter had set off with the more limited intention of doing Europe. In the two years that had passed since then it was not surprising that at some point their paths would cross.
‘What brings you here?’ Winter asked.
‘Like I said,’ Shlaim grinned. ‘Same as you, yeah? Last chance to see.’
He stood beside them and peered into the glass case. Inside it was a brown ceramic disc about ten centimetres across, stamped in a spiral pattern with dozens of tiny pictographs: a profile face that looked like a Mohawk, stick figures, a boxy spiked shape that reminded Lucinda irresistibly of a Lunar Excursion Module . . . the Phaistos Disc was as enigmatic an artifact as it had always been, like some playful, planted evidence of alien contact, or the jest of a god who could fake a planet’s entire past with a sense of style.
‘Bronze-Age CD-ROM,’ said Shlaim. Winter laughed.
‘Have you done Knossos?’ Lucinda asked.
‘Yeah, in the morning. You too?’
‘Uh-huh. While it was cool, supposedly.’ She recalled momentarily the long queues in the unforgiving heat, waiting to stoop and peer into small or large rooms with their fragments of tile and fresco, from which could be derived scenes of dolphins and dancers and bull-leaping boys and girls; the concrete and red-painted reconstructions of ancient wooden pillars, and the overwhelming sense of gigantic scale and a grandeur not lost but present in the very shape of the shaped ground, the long stone ramps and artificial hills. ‘Must have missed you in the crowd.’
‘Easily done,’ said Shlaim.
They wandered on, past cases of coins and weights and drinking-vessels, of minute copper double-headed axes and elaborately worked, minuscule golden bees; of figurines of bare-breasted, snake-handling dancers in long frilly skirts. Every so often Lucinda saw an item familiar from encyclopaedia screens, and could hardly believe she was looking at the original, the thing itself. If the chronology given in the explanatory cards was right it seemed all wrong: the fine pieces of black stone and bronze, of gold and ivory were early, the cruder versions in terra-cotta late. The museum’s rooms, big and airy and lit by tall windows, smelled of paper and old dust. Not many visitors were here; the rush had passed; in a few days the curators would be packing everything up, ready to be shipped off Earth. So far, no people, and few even of plants and animals, had been absorbed into the growing fastnesses, and their expansion was slow and erratic, but the once-burned inhabitants of Earth were in no mood to take chances. Most of them were getting out while, as they saw it, they still could. Here in Crete, the fastness that had once been the central telephone exchange of Heraklion had, a couple of months earlier, begun its transformation, and had now spread a hundred metres beyond its previous perimeter. Winter and Lucinda had been able to see its wavering topmost extensions, sparkling like stiff tinsel, above the town’s rooftops when they’d had a quick beer in one of the few refreshment stalls that remained, under the multiple tilted flagpoles of Commonwealth Square.
All the time Shlaim kept up an informed commentary on the artifacts, surprising her.
‘I didn’t know you knew all that,’ she said.
‘You didn’t know me very well,’ he said mildly. ‘Just a comp-sci geek who had it coming, that was it, huh?’
Her cheeks burned. ‘Yes,’ she said. She glanced sideways at him. ‘I haven’t used a thrall since, you know.’
‘Well, good for you,’ he said, grudgingly, but sounding somewhat pleased. ‘Anyway. Archaeology was a big thing, for us. In Israel, you know, as was? Back in the day.’ He sounded sad; his dark eyes blinked as he looked at her. ‘Last place I’ve visited,’ he went on, ‘was Krakow. The old Jewish Quarter. You know, back in the 2030s there were a hundred thousand people living there? And that there still were, again, just a few months ago? And now the streets are deserted, the synagogues are empty shells again, and the rabbis are stashing Torah scrolls for the ships.’ His fists clenched at his sides. ‘Another fucking exodus.’
‘I guess,’ said Winter, ‘you kept quiet about who you were.’
Shlaim laughed loudly and clapped Winter’s back. ‘Speaking from experience!’
‘Damn right I am.’
They were in a room of broken pottery decorated with reddish pictures; of mask-like helmets and pitted black swords. ‘Mycenean,’ said Shlaim. ‘Worth a look, but dull.’
They ambled alongside the cases anyway, reluctant to depart, to miss anything that they might never see, and would certainly never see in place, again.
‘What’s Calder doing these days?’ Shlaim asked.
‘Back to New Start. He was never much of a Returner.’
‘And Amelia?’
Lucinda scuffed her toe in the dust, snagged a sandal buckle on her sarong’s hem, stooped to sort it, and straightened up, feeling her face flush again. Every so often the shame descended on her like this, of the disaster she had brought on the family, as well as—though more ambiguously and arguably—on the world.
‘Uh, well,’ she said. ‘You know, the family, the firm, they’re scrabbling a bit for something new and profitable to do, without the income from the skein. And she thought, well, it might be a good idea to go into the entertainment business—’
Shlaim laughed. ‘Following in the footsteps of the Family, yes!’
‘And she, um, took the copydeck. The one with Winter and Calder and Irene and Arlene. She’s been downloading them to the flesh, honest, but she’s got different downloads of them playing simultaneous gigs in every backwater dive from the asteroid belt to the Sagittarius Arm. . . .’
‘We’ve set the Mouse on her case,’ said Winter, a little defensively. ‘Calder and me. But the downloads aren’t cooperating.’
For the first time Shlaim looked at a loss for words. After a minute he shrugged and said, ‘Information wants to be free.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lucinda bitterly. ‘That’s how we got into this whole fucking mess.’
‘It’s not such a bad mess, as such things go,’ said Shlaim. ‘Take it from me.’
He looked around. The exit and the souvenir shop were just outside. ‘That’s about the end of the line.’
Lucinda didn’t want to leave without walking, however quickly, past the brighter and older remains again, so she insisted on going all the way back around to the entrance. As they did so she remarked:
‘It’s a funny thing, compared to the Myceneans . . . the Minoans didn’t leave many weapons.’
‘They didn’t need many,’ said Shlaim. ‘They were a thassalocracy.’
‘A what?’ she asked.
‘An empire of the merchant marine,’ Shlaim explained. ‘They got their wealth from trade.’
‘All this?’ said Lucinda, waving her hand around. ‘Just from . . . carrying things from place to place in ships?’
‘That and growing vines and olives, yes,’ said Shlaim.
‘The palaces and jewels and theatres and everything? From trade?’
‘Yes,’ said Shlaim. He sounded a little impatient with her incredulity, or as it might seem to him, her obtuseness.
Lucinda put an arm around the shoulders of each of the men and swung her feet up off the ground between them like a child. Shlaim and Winter staggered, taking the weight, and gave her, or each other, a puzzled look. Lucinda felt weightless herself, lightened by a load off her mind, but she relented in a moment, swinging back to the ground. She skipped ahead of them, turned around, and laughed.
‘That,’ she said, ‘is the most amazing idea I’ve ever heard. Or ever had.’
Lamont stood on a hot red moor with the smell of rust in his nostrils, with Morag Higgins beside him and the lip of the fastness, moving slowly like a glacier, a few metres in front of him. The great inorganic botanic garden of the thing swept up and over the nearest hilltops. In the sky above and far away to the west, shimmering aurorae rose like pillars kilometres tall, within which insubstantial masses moved like thunderheads.
‘Wimps,’ said Morag, looking up.
‘What?’
‘Weakly interacting massive particles.’
‘It’s a possibility,’ Lamont allowed.
She squatted and reached out with a finger towards the interface, where particles of rust were being picked up magnetically like crumbs carried by invisible ants, and in a hot flicker forged into further small, bright steel components buzzing and ticking like the inside of a fob watch around the fringe of the great sprawling machine that now extended far beyond the environs of Tully Carn.
‘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.
The 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.’