PAUL MCAULEY
Here’s another story by Paul McAuley, whose “Incomers” appears elsewhere in this anthology. In this one he takes us to a distant world that’s littered with the ruins of vanished civilizations to unravel an enigmatic—and deadly—biological mystery.
How Marilyn Carter first met Ana Datlovskaya, the Queen of the Hive Rats: late one afternoon she was driving through the endless tracts of alien tombs in the City of the Dead, to the west of the little desert town of Joe’s Corner, when she saw a pickup canted on the shoulder of the rough track, its hood up. She pulled over and asked the woman working elbow-deep in the engine of the pickup if she needed any help; the woman said that she believed that she needed a tow truck, this bloody excuse for a pickup she should have sold for scrap long ago had thrown a rod.
‘I am Ana Datlovskaya,’ she added, and stuck out an oily hand.
‘Marilyn Carter,’ Marilyn said, and shook Ana Datlovskaya’s hand.
‘Our new town constable. That incorrigible gossip Joel Jumonville told me about you,’ the woman said. She was somewhere in her sixties, short and broadhipped, dressed in a khaki shirt and blue jeans and hiking boots. Her white hair, roughly cropped, stuck up like ruffled feathers; her shrewd gaze didn’t seem to miss much. ‘Although he didn’t mention that you have a dog. He is a police dog? I met one once, in Port of Plenty. At the train station. It told me to stand still while its handler searched me for I don’t know what.’
The black Labrador, Jet, was standing in the loadbed of Marilyn’s Bronco, watching them with keen interest.
‘He’s just a dog,’ Marilyn said. ‘He doesn’t talk or anything. We can give you a lift into town, if you need one.’
‘No doubt Joel told you that I am the crazy old woman who lives with hive rats,’ Ana Datlovskaya said to Marilyn, as they drove off towards Joe’s Corner. ‘It is true I am old, as you can plainly see. And it’s true also that I study hive rats. But I am not crazy. In fact, I am the only sane person in this desert. Everyone else hopes to make fortune by finding treasure, or by swindling people looking for treasure. That is craziness, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘I don’t mind in the least, because that’s not why I’m here,’ Marilyn said.
She’d become town constable by accident. She’d stopped for the night in Joe’s Corner and had been sitting in its roadhouse, minding her own business, nursing a beer and half-listening to the house band blast out some twentieth-century industrial blues, when a big man a few stools down took exception to something the bartender said and tried to haul him over the counter by his beard. Marilyn intervened and put the big guy on the floor, and the owner of the roadhouse, Joel Jumonville, had given her a steak dinner on the house. Joel was an ex-astronaut who like Marilyn had fought in World War Three. He also owned two of the little town’s motels, ran its radio station and its web site, and was, more by default than democracy, its mayor. He and Marilyn got drunk together and told war stories, and by the end of the evening she’d shaken hands on a contract to serve as town constable for one year, replacing a guy who’d quit when a scrap of plastic he’d dug up in one of the tombs had turned out to be a room temperature superconductor.
It wasn’t exactly how she’d imagined her life would turn out when she’d won a lottery place on one of the arks.
This was in the heady years immediately after the Jackaroo had arrived in the aftermath of World War Three, and had given the survivors a basic fusion drive and access to a wormhole network linking fifteen M-class red dwarf stars in exchange for rights to the rest of the Solar System; a brief, anarchic age of temporary kingdoms, squabbling emirates, and gloriously foolish attempts at building every kind of Utopia; an age of exploration, heroic ambition, and low farce. Like every other lottery winner, Marilyn had imagined a fresh start, every kind of exotic adventure, but after she’d arrived in Port of Plenty, on the planet of First Foot, short of cash and knowing no one, she’d ended up working for a security firm, which is what she’d been doing before she left Earth. She guarded the mansions and compounds of the city’s rich, rode as bodyguard for their wives and children. Some had earned vast fortunes founded on novel principles of physics or mathematics wrested from discarded alien machineries; others were gangsters feeding on the underbelly of Port of Plenty’s fast and loose economy. Marilyn’s last job had been with an Albanian involved in all kinds of dubious property deals; after he’d been killed by a car bomb, she’d had to get out of Port of Plenty in a hurry because his family suspected that the assassination had been an inside job. She’d drifted west along the coast of First Foot’s single continent and ended up in Joe’s Corner, but, as she told Ana Datlovskaya, she didn’t plan to stay.
‘When the year’s up I’m moving on. I have a whole new world to explore. And plenty more besides.’
‘Ha. If I had a euro for every time I’d heard that from people who thought they were passing through but couldn’t find a reason to leave,’ Ana Datlovskaya said, ‘I’d be riding around the desert in style, instead of nursing that broken-down donkey of a pickup.’
Ana was a biologist who’d moved out to the western desert to study hive rats, supporting her research with her savings and the sale of odd little figurines. Like Marilyn, she was originally from London, England, but their sex and nationality were about all they had in common—Marilyn had been born and raised in Streatham, her mother a nurse and her father a driver on the Underground, while Ana’s parents had been Russian exiles, poets who’d escaped Stalin’s postwar purges and had set up residence in Hampstead. Still, the two women quickly became friends. Ana was a prominent member of Joe’s Corner’s extensive cast of eccentrics, but she was also an exemplar of the legion of stout-hearted, sensible, and completely fearless women who before World War Three had explored and done every kind of good work in every corner of the globe. Marilyn had met several of these doughty heroines during her service in the army and had admired them all. The evening she gave Ana a lift into town they had a fine time in the roadhouse, swapping war stories and reminiscing about London and how they’d survived World War Three, and on her next free day Marilyn was more than happy to make a fifty kilometre trip beyond the northern edge of the City of the Dead to visit Ana’s desert camp.
By then, Joel Jumonville had told Marilyn a fair number of tall tales about the Queen of the Hive Rats. According to him, the old woman had once shot a bandit who’d tried to rob her, and cut up his body and fed it to her hive rats. Also, that the little figurines she sold to support herself, found nowhere else in the City of the Dead, were rumoured to come from the hold of an ancient spaceship she’d uncovered, she kept a tame tigon she’d raised from a kitten, and she’d learned how to enter hive rat gardens without being immediately attacked and killed. Joel was an inveterate gossip and an accomplished fabulist, so Marilyn also took his stories with large pinches of salt, but when she pulled up by Ana’s shack, on a bench terrace cut into a stony ridge that overlooked a broad arroyo, she was amazed to see the old woman pottering about the edge of a hive rat garden. The garden stretched away down the arroyo, crowded with the tall yellow blades of century plants. Columns of hardened mud that Marilyn later learned were ventilation chambers stood here and there, hive rat sentries perched on their hind legs at intervals along the perimeter, and there was a big mound with a hole in its flat top that no doubt led to the heart of the nest.
Jet went crazy over the scent of the hive rats. By the time Marilyn had calmed him down, Ana was climbing the path to her shack, cheerfully helloing them. ‘How nice to see you, my dear. And your lovely dog. Did you by any chance bring any tea? I ran out two days ago.’
Sitting on plastic chairs under a canvas awning that cracked and boomed in the hot breeze, they made do with stale instant coffee and flat biscuits, tasting exactly like burnt toast, that Ana had baked using flour ground from cactus tree bark. There wasn’t any trick to walking amongst the hive rats, the old woman told Marilyn. She had worked out the system of pheromonal signals that governed much of their cooperative behaviour, and wore a dab of scent that suppressed secretion of alarm and aggression pheromones by sentries and soldiers, so that the hive rats accepted her as one of their own.
Ana talked a long streak about hive rat biology, explaining how their nests were organised in different castes like ants or bees, how they made their gardens. This garden was the largest known, Ana said, and it was unique not only because it was a monoculture of century plants, but because there was an elaborate system of irrigation ditches and dykes scratched across the arroyo floor. She showed Marilyn views from camera feeds she’d installed in the kilometres of tunnels and shafts and chambers of the nest beneath the garden: workers gnawing at the car-sized tuber of a century plant; endless processions of workers toiling up from the deep aquifer, their bellies swollen with water; one of the fungal gardens that processed the hive rats’ waste; a chamber in which a hive rat queen, fed and groomed by workers one-tenth her size, extruded blind, squirming pups with machine-like regularity. Unlike other nests, this one housed many queens, Ana said; it had never split into daughter colonies.
‘When I know you better, perhaps I’ll tell you why. But enough of my work. Tell me about the world.’
Marilyn gave Ana the latest local gossip, and ended up promising to do a supply run for the old woman, who said that she would be grateful not to have to bother with dealing with other people: she was far too busy with her research, which was at a very interesting stage. So Marilyn took a dozen little figurines back to Joe’s Corner, smoothly knotted shapes fashioned from some kind of resin that when handled induced a pleasant, dreamy sensation that reminded her of her habit, when she’d been eleven or twelve, of standing at the bathroom sink with her hands up to the wrists in warm water, staring into the fogged mirror, wondering what she would become when she grew up. She sold them to the Nigerian assayer in Joe’s Corner, bought supplies and picked up several packages from an electronics supplier along with the rest of Ana’s mail, and on her next free day took everything out to the old woman’s camp.
After a couple of supply runs, Ana gave Marilyn a tiny brown bottle containing a couple of millilitres of oily suppressor scent, telling her that she could use it to check out tombs that happened to be in the middle of hive rat gardens. ‘Foolish people try to poison or smoke them out. And they usually get bitten badly because the rats are smarter than most people think. They know how to avoid poison, and their nests are extremely well-ventilated. But if you wear just a dab of suppressor, my dear, you can walk right into those tombs, all of them untouched by looters, and pick up any treasures you might find.’
Marilyn promised she’d give it a try, but the bottle ended up unopened in the junk-filled glove compartment of her Bronco. For one thing, she wasn’t convinced that it would work, and she knew that you could die from infection with flesh-eating bacteria after a single hive rat bite. For another, she didn’t really need to supplement her income from sale of scraps looted from tombs. Her salary as town constable was about a quarter of what she’d received for guarding the late unlamented Albanian businessman, but she had a rent-free room in the Westward Ho! motel and ate for free in Joel’s roadhouse most nights, and for the first time in her life she was able to put a little money by for a rainy day.
It occurred to her around this time that she was happy. She had a job she liked, and she liked most of the people in Joe’s Corner and could tolerate the rest, and she liked the desert, too. When she wasn’t visiting Ana Datlovskaya, she spent most of her free time pottering around the tombs of the City of the Dead, exploring the salt-flats and arroyos and low, gullied hills, learning about the patchwork desert ecology, plants and animals native to First Foot and alien species imported from other worlds by previous tenant races. Camping out in the desert at night, she’d lie in her sleeping bag and look up at the rigid pattens of alien constellations, the two swift moons, the luminous milk of the Phoenix nebula sprawled across the eastern horizon. Earth was about two thousand light years beyond the nebula: the wormhole network linked only fifteen stars, but it spanned the Sagittarius arm of the Galaxy. How strange and wonderful that she should be here, so far from Earth. On an alien world twice the size of Earth, where things weighed half as much again, and the day was a shade over twenty hours long. In a desert full of the tombs of a long-vanished alien race . . .
One day, Marilyn was out at the northern edge of the City of the Dead, sitting on a flat boulder on a low ridge and eating her lunch, when Jet raised up and trotted smartly to the edge of the ridge and began to bark. A few moments later, Marilyn heard the noise of a vehicle off in the distance. She finished what was left of her banana in two quick bites, walked over to where her dog stood, and looked out across the dry playa towards distant hills hazed by dusty air and shimmering heat. The hummocks of ancient tombs in ragged lines amongst drifts of sand and rocks; silvery clouds of saltbush and tall clumps of cactus trees; the green oases of hive rat gardens. The nearest garden was only a kilometre away; Marilyn could see the cat-sized, pinkly naked sentries perched upright amongst its piecework plantings. Beyond it, a thin line of dust boiled up, dragged by a black Range Rover. As it drew nearer, the hive rat sentries started drumming with their feet, a faint pattering that started Jet barking. Soldiers popped up from the mound in the centre of the garden, two or three times the size of the sentries, armoured with scales and armed with recurved claws and strong jaws that could bite through a man’s wrist, running towards the Range Rover as it drove straight across the garden. It ploughed through them, leaving some dead and dying and the rest chasing its dusty wake all the way to the garden’s boundary, where they tumbled to a halt and stared after it as it headed up a bare apron of rock towards the ridge.
Marilyn walked over to her Bronco and took her pistol from her day bag and stuck it in the waistband of her shorts and walked back to Jet, who was bristling and barking. The Range Rover had stopped at the bottom of the short steep slope. A blond, burly man stood in the angle of the open door on the far side, staring up at Marilyn as a second man climbed out. He had a deep tan and black hair shaved close to his skull, was dressed in black jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt. Black tattoos on his forearms, black sunglasses that heliographed twin discs of sunlight at Marilyn as he said, ‘How are you doing, Marilyn? It’s been a while.’
It was one of the men who’d worked for the security firm back in Port of Plenty. Frank something. Frank Parker.
‘I’m wondering why you came all the way out here to find me, Frank. I’m also wondering how you found me.’
Marilyn was pretty sure that this wasn’t anything do with the Albanians, who liked to do their own dirty work, but she was also pretty sure that Frank Parker and his blond bodybuilder friend were some kind of trouble, and a smooth coolness was filling her up inside, something she hadn’t felt for a long time.
‘I guess you don’t feel like coming down here, so I’ll come up,’ Frank Parker said, and began to pick his way up the stony slope, ignoring Marilyn’s sharp request to stay where he was, going down on one knee when his black town shoes slipped on the frangible dirt and pushing up and coming on, stopping only when Jet started to bark at him, knuckling sweat from his forehead and saying, ‘Feisty fellow, ain’t he?’
‘He’s a pretty good judge of people.’ Marilyn told Jet to sit, said to Frank Parker, ‘I’m waiting to hear what you want. Maybe you can start by telling me what you’re doing out here. It’s a long way from Port of Plenty.’
‘I wouldn’t mind a drink of water,’ Frank Parker said, and took a couple of steps forward. Jet rose up and started barking again and the man held up his hands, palms out, in a gesture of surrender.
‘I’m sure you have a bottle or two in that expensive car of yours,’ Marilyn said. She was watching him and trying to watch his friend down by the Range Rover at the same time. Her Glock was a hard flat weight against the small of her back and she stepped hard on the impulse to show it to Frank Parker. If she did, it would take things up to the next level and there’d be no going back.
‘I bring greetings from another old friend,’ Frank Parker said. ‘Tom Archibold. He’d like to invite you over for a chat.’
‘What’s Tom doing out here?’
Like Frank Parker, Tom Archibold had been working for the same security firm that had been employing Marilyn when her client had been blown to bloody confetti. She was trying her best to keep the surprise she felt from her face, but Frank Parker must have seen something of it because his smile broadened into a grin. ‘Tom told me to tell you that he has a little job for you.’
‘You can thank Tom for me, and tell him that I already have a job.’
‘He needs your advice on something is all.’
‘If he wants my advice, he’s welcome to visit me when I get back to town tomorrow. My office is right in the middle of our little commercial strip. You can’t miss it. It has a sign with “Town Constable” printed on it hung right above the door.’
‘He kind of needs you on site,’ Frank Parker said.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘We really would like for you to come right away. It’s about your friend Ana Datlovskaya,’ Frank Parker said, and took a step towards Marilyn.
Jet barked and lunged forward, and Frank Parker reached behind himself and jerked a pistol from his belt, Marilyn shouting no!, and shot Jet in the chest. Jet dropped flat and slid down the slope, and Frank Parker turned to Marilyn, his eyes widening behind his sunglasses when she put her Glock on him and told him to put his weapon down.
‘Do it right now!’ she said, and shot him in the leg when he didn’t.
He fell on his ass and dropped his pistol. Marilyn stepped forwards and kicked it away, saw movement at the bottom of the slope, the man behind the Range Rover raising a machine pistol, and threw herself flat as a short burst walked along the edge of the ridge, whining off stones, smacking into dirt, kicking up dust. Marilyn raised up and took aim, and the man ducked out of sight as the round spanged off the window post beside him. She got off two more shots, aiming for the tyres, but the damned things must have been puncture-proof. The Range Rover started with a roar and reversed at speed, its open door flapping. Marilyn braced and took aim and put a shot through the tinted windshield, and the Range Rover spun in a handbrake turn and took off into the playa, leaving only dust in the air.
Frank Parker was holding his thigh with both hands, blood seeping through laced fingers, face pale and tight with pain. ‘You fucking shot me, you bitch.’
‘You shot my dog. But don’t think that makes us even.’
Marilyn picked up his pistol and told him to roll over on his stomach, patted him down and found a gravity knife in an ankle scabbard. She told him to stay absolutely still if he didn’t want to get shot again, and crabbed down the slope to where Jet lay, dusty and limp and dead. She carried him up the slope to her Bronco, set him in the well under the shotgun seat. Frank Parker had sat up again and was clutching his thigh and making threats. She told him to shut up and pulled the q-phone from its holster under the dashboard, but although she tried three times she could raise only a faint conversation between two people who seemed to be shouting at each other in a howling gale in a language she didn’t recognise. She tried the shortwave radio, too, but every channel was full of static; that wasn’t unexpected, as radio reception ran from patchy to non-existent in the City of the Dead, but she’d never before had a problem with the q-phone. A little miracle that fused alien and human technology, it was worth more than the Bronco and shared a bound pair of electrons with the hub station in Joe’s Corner, and should have given her an instant connection even if she was standing on other side of the universe.
Well, she didn’t know why the damn thing had decided to throw a glitch, but she was a long way from town, and Ana was in trouble. She found her handcuffs in the glove compartment and walked over to Frank Parker and tossed them into his lap and told him to put them on. As he fumbled with them, she asked him why Tom wanted to talk with her, and what it had to do with Ana Datlovskaya.
Frank Parker told her to go fuck herself, closed his eyes when Marilyn cocked her pistol.
‘I can knock off plenty of pieces of you before you die,’ she said. She was angry and out of patience, and anxious too. ‘Or maybe give you to the hive rats down there. I bet they’re still pissed off after you drove straight through their garden.’
After a moment, Frank Parker said, ‘We’ve taken over Ana Datlovskaya’s claim.’
‘Taken it over? What does that mean? Have you bastards killed her?’
‘No. No, no. It’s not like that.’
‘She’s alive.’
‘We think so.’
‘She is or she isn’t.’
‘We think she’s alive,’ Frank Parker said. ‘She got out into the damn garden and ducked into a hole. We haven’t been able to get near it.’
‘Because of the hive rats. Did anyone get eaten?’
‘One of us got bitten.’
‘Tom wants me to persuade her to come out.’
The man nodded sullenly. ‘Word is, you’re her good friend. Tom thought you could talk some sense into her.’
Marilyn thought about this. ‘How did you know where to find me? This is my day off, I driving around the desert, no one in town knows where I am. Yet you drive straight towards me. Were you following me?’
‘You have a q-phone. We have a magic gizmo that tracks them.’
‘Does this magic gizmo also stop q-phones working?’
‘I don’t know. Really, I don’t,’ Frank Parker said. ‘I was told where to find you, and there you were. Look, the old woman is sitting on something valuable. You can have a share of it. All you have to do is talk to her, persuade her to give herself up. Is that so hard?’
‘We walk away afterwards, me and Ana.’
‘Sure. We’ll even cut you in for a share. Why not? Help me up, we can drive straight there—’
‘What is it you want from her? Those figurines?’
‘It’s something to do with those rats. Don’t ask me what. I wasn’t privy to the deal Tom made.’
‘I bet. Think you can walk over to my pickup?’
‘You shot me in the fucking leg. You’re going to have to give me a hand.’
‘Wrong answer,’ Marilyn said.
Frank Parker flinched and started to raise his cuffed hands, but she was quicker, and rapped him smartly above his ear with the grip of her pistol and laid him flat.
He started to come round when she dumped him in the loadbed of the Bronco, feebly trying to resist as she tied off the nylon cord she’d wrapped around his calves. ‘You’re fucked,’ he said. ‘Well and truly fucked.’
Marilyn ignored him and went around to the cab and took out the q-phone and tried it again—still no signal—then put it in the plastic box in which she’d packed her lunch, and piled a little cairn of stones over the box. She didn’t really believe that Frank Parker had tracked her with some kind of magic gizmo, but better safe than sorry.
Marilyn drove west along the gravel flats of the playa and then north, into a low range of hills. She parked in the shade of a stand of cactus trees and at gunpoint forced her prisoner to climb down and limp inside one of the tombs that stood like a row of bad teeth along the crest of the hill. She told him to stay right where he was, and pulled a shovel from the space behind the Bronco’s seats and dug a grave and lined the grave with flat stones and wrapped Jet in plastic sheeting and laid him at the bottom.
She’d found him six months ago, chained to a wrecked car behind a service station on the coast highway, half-starved, sores everywhere under his matted and filthy coat. When the service station owner had tried to stop her taking him, she’d knocked the man on his ass and dragged him back to the wreck and chained him up and left him there. She’d spent two weeks in a motel farther on down the road, nursing Jet back to health. He’d been a good companion ever since, loyal and affectionate and alert, foolishly brave when it came to standing up to dire cats, hydras, and hive rat soldiers. He’d died defending her, and she wasn’t ever going to forget that.
Although she’d attended a couple of dozen funerals during her stint in the army, she could remember only a few of the words of the Service for the Dead, so recited the Lord’s Prayer instead. ‘I’ll come back and give you a proper headstone later,’ she said, and filled in the grave, tiled more stones over the mound, and went to see to her prisoner.
Frank Parker was squashed into a corner of the tomb, staring at the eidolons that drifted out of the shadows: monkey-sized semi-transparent stick figures that whispered in clicks and whistles, gesturing in abrupt jerks like overwound clockwork toys. They haunted about one in a hundred of the tombs. Perhaps they were intended to be representations of the dead, or their household gods, or perhaps they were some sort of eternal ceremony of mourning or celebration or remembrance: no one knew. And no one knew how they had been created, either; they were not affected by the removal of every bit of rotten ‘circuitry’ from the tomb they haunted, by scouring its interior clean, or even by destroying it. According to Ana Datlovskaya, they were manifestations of twists in the quantum foam that underpinned space/time, which as far as Marilyn was concerned was like saying that they’d been created by some old wizard out of dragon’s blood and dwarfs’ teeth.
Marilyn had grown used to the eidolons; they reminded her of old men at bus stops in London before the war, rubbing their hands in the cold, grumbling about the weather and the price of cat meat. Talking to themselves if no one else was about. But they definitely spooked Frank Parker, who watched them closely as they drifted through the dim air like corpses caught in an underwater current, and flinched when Marilyn’s shadow fell over him.
‘I’m going to fix up your wound,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you dying on me. Not yet, at least.’
She cut off the leg of the man’s jeans and salted the wound—a neat through-and-through in the big muscle on the outside of his thigh—with antiseptic powder and fixed a pad of gauze in place with a bandage. Then they had a little talk. Marilyn learned that Tom Archibold had been working for a street banker who’d bought out the gambling debts of a mathematician in Port of Plenty’s university. When the mathematician had come up short on his repayments, Tom had had a little talk with him, and had discovered that he’d been corresponding with Ana Datlovskaya about exotic logic systems, and had been helping her write some kind of translation programme.
‘This is the bit you’re going to have trouble believing,’ Frank Parker said. ‘But I swear it’s true.’
‘You’d better spit it out,’ Marilyn said, ‘or I’ll leave you here without any water.’
‘Tom believes that the old woman found the wreck of a spaceship,’ Frank Parker said. ‘And she’s trying to talk to the part of it that’s still alive.’
Just two hours later, Marilyn Carter was lying on her belly under a patch of the thorny scrub that grew amongst Boxbuilder ruins on top of the ridge that overlooked the arroyo and the giant hive rat garden. Ana Datlovskaya’s tarpaper shack was a couple of hundred metres to the left and somewhat below Marilyn’s position. Three Range Rovers were parked beside it. A burly man with a shaven head stood close to one of the Range Rovers and the blond bodybuilder Marilyn had chased off was scanning the hive rat garden with binoculars, a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. Seeing them together now, Marilyn realised that she’d seen them before. In town a couple of weeks ago, sitting at the counter in the diner. She’d paid them little attention then, thinking that they were just a couple of travellers passing through; now she realised that they must have been on a scouting mission.
The blond man fitted the stock of his rifle to his shoulder and took aim. Marilyn tracked his line of fire, saw a sentry standing chest-high in a hole. Then dust kicked up in front of it and it vanished as the sound of the shot whanged back from the bluffs beyond.
Well, she already knew they were mean. She hoped they were dumb, too.
The swollen sun was about an hour away from setting. Ana had once told Marilyn that because it huddled close to its cool red dwarf sun, First Foot should have been tidally locked, always showing one side to its sun, just as the moon always showed one side to Earth. The fact that there were sunrises and sunsets on First Foot was evidence of some stupendous feat of engineering that had otherwise left no trace, Ana had said: some forgotten race must have spun the planet up like a child’s top, giving it a rotational period of ten hours that over millennia had slowed to almost twice that.
The old woman loved to talk about the alien tenants—Boxbuilders, Fisher Kings, Ghostkeepers and all the rest—who had once inhabited the planets and moons and reefs of the fifteen stars linked by the wormhole network. Speculating on why they had come here and what they had done, whether they’d simply died out, or had been wiped out by war, or if they had moved on to somewhere else. To other stars, or to other universes. She’d told Marilyn that some people believed that the Jackaroo collected races as people collected pets, and disposed of them when they lost the lustre of novelty; others that the previous tenants had all been absorbed into the Jackaroo, to become part of a collective, symbiotic consciousness. Anything was possible. No one had ever been aboard one of the Jackaroo’s floppy ships, and no one knew what the Jackaroo looked like because they visited Earth only in the form of avatars shaped roughly like people. No one had much idea about the physical appearance of any of the previous tenant races of the wormhole network, either. None of them, not even the Ghostkeepers, who had built the City of the Dead and many other necropolises, had left behind any physical remains or sculptures or pictorial representations. Academics argued endlessly over the carved murals in the so-called Vaults of the Fisher Kings, but no one knew what the murals really represented, or even if the patterns and images discerned by human eyes weren’t simply optical illusions. All we really know, Ana liked to say, is that we know nothing at all. At least eight alien races lived here before we came, and each one died out or vanished or moved on, and left behind only empty ruins, odd scraps, and a few enigmatic monuments. But if we can find out the answers to those questions, we might be able to begin to understand why the Jackaroo gave us the keys to the wormhole network; we might even be able to take control of our fate.
Ana was full of strange notions, but she was also a tough desert bird who knew how to look after herself. Marilyn had had no trouble believing Frank Parker’s story that the old woman had taken off into the garden and climbed down into the nest to escape Tom Archibold and his men, and it certainly looked like they were hunkered down, waiting for her to come out and surrender. They couldn’t go after Ana because they’d be taken down by the hive rats, and as far as Marilyn knew the hole on top of the mound was the only way Ana could get in and out. It was a standoff, and Marilyn was going to have to go in and try to save Ana before things escalated. It was her job, for one thing. And then there was the small matter of doing right by poor Jet.
Marilyn crawled backwards on elbows and knees until she was certain that she wouldn’t be skylighted when she stood up. The Boxbuilder ruins ran along the top of the ridge like random strings of giant building blocks, their thin walls and roofs spun from polymer and rock dust by a species that had left hundreds of thousands of similar strings and clusters on every planet and reef and moon linked by the wormholes. Marilyn picked her way through the thorny scrub that grew everywhere amongst the ruins, and walked down the reverse side of the ridge to her Bronco, which she’d parked on a stony apron three kilometres south of the arroyo. She checked the shortwave again—still nothing but static—and lifted out her spare can of petrol and took rags from her toolbox and set off to the east.
She twisted strips torn from the rags around catchclaw and cloudbush plants, soaked them in petrol, and set them alight. Fire bloomed quick and bright and the hot wind blew flames flat amongst the dry scrub and it caught with a crackling roar. Marilyn walked along the track towards Ana’s shack with huge reefs of white smoke boiling up into the darkening sky behind her. A harsh smell of burning in the air, and flecks and curls of ash fluttering down. There was a stir of movement amongst the Range Rovers, someone shouted a challenge, a spotlight flared. Marilyn raised her hands as three men walked towards her, two circling left and right, the third, Tom Archibold, saying, ‘I was wondering when you’d turn up.’
‘Hello, Tom.’
‘You set a fire as a diversion, and then you walk right in. What are you up to?’
‘The fire isn’t a diversion, Tom. It’s a signal. In about two hours, people from Joe’s Corner will be turning up, wondering who set it.’
Tom grinned. ‘You think a bunch of hicks can make any kind of trouble for us? I’m disappointed, Marilyn. You used to be a lot sharper than that.’
‘Frank Parker said you needed my help. Here I am. Just remember that I came here voluntarily. And remember that you have about two hours. Maybe less.’
‘Where is Frank?’
‘I shot him, not seriously, after he shot my dog. He’ll be okay. I’ll tell you where to find him when this is over.’
‘He won’t make any kind of hostage, Marilyn. He fucked up, I could care less if he lives or dies, much less about exchanging the old woman for him.’
‘How about if I help you get whatever it is you came here for?’
Tom Archibold studied her for a few moments. He was a slim man dressed in a brown turtleneck sweater and blue jeans. Black hair swept back from his keen, handsome face, a Bluetooth earpiece plugged into his left ear. At last, he said, ‘What do you expect in return?’
‘To walk away from this with Ana.’
‘Why not? I might even throw in a few points from the money I’m going to make.’
He said it so quickly and casually that Marilyn knew at once he intended to kill her as soon as she was no longer useful to him. She’d guessed it anyhow, but now that she was in his power she felt a strong chill pass through her.
She said, ‘Is Ana still inside the nest?’
‘Yeah. She ran off into the garden—into the hole atop that mound,’ Tom said, pointing across the dusky arroyo. ‘We couldn’t follow her because of the damn rats. We’ve been picking off any that show themselves, but there are any number of them, we can’t get close.’
‘You want me to talk her out of there.’
‘If she’s still alive. We kind of winged her.’
‘You shot her?’
‘We shot at her, when she ran. To try to make her stop. One of the shots might have gotten a little too close.’
‘Where do you think you hit her?’
‘The right leg, it looked like. It can’t have been serious. It knocked her down, but she managed to crawl into the hole.’
‘You were supposed to take her prisoner, but she got away, you wounded her . . . It’s all gone bad, hasn’t it?’
‘We have you.’
‘Only because I wanted to come here. Don’t you forget that. I’m curious, by the way. Why involve me at all?’
Tom smiled. ‘Either you’re bluffing, pretending to be ignorant to see if I’ll let something slip, or you aren’t really the old woman’s friend. Let’s sit down and talk.’
After the blond bodybuilder had quickly and thoroughly patted Marilyn down, she and Tom sat on Ana’s plastic chairs and Tom asked her every kind of question about Ana’s research. She answered as truthfully as she could, but it quickly became clear that Tom knew a lot more about most of it than she did. He knew that Ana and the mathematician in Port of Plenty had been working up computer models of the hive rats’ behaviour, and that they had been developing some kind of artificial intelligence programme. He also knew that Ana had discovered that the behaviour of the hive rats was strongly influenced by pheromones, but he didn’t seem to know that Ana had synthesised pheromone analogs.
When he had run out of questions, Marilyn said, ‘I can help you, but I think I need to talk to your client first.’
‘What makes you think I have a client?’
‘You wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to chase a rumour about a crashed spaceship. It isn’t your style, and I doubt that you have the kind of cash to pay for an operation like this. After all, you stumbled on Ana’s research when you were working as a debt collector. So you’re working for someone. That’s the kind of people we are, Tom. We put our lives on the line for other people. I believe that he’s sitting in one of those Range Rovers,’ Marilyn said. ‘The guy guarding them hasn’t budged since I turned up, and you have a Bluetooth connection in your ear. That will only work over a very short range here, and my guess is he’d been using it to listen in to us, and feed you questions. How am I doing?’
Tom didn’t answer at once. Marilyn wondered if he was listening to his client, or if she’d pushed him too far, if he was reconsidering his options. At last, he said, ‘How can you help us?’
‘I know the trick Ana used to get inside the nest without being killed and eaten.’
Another pause. Tom said, ‘All right. If you go in there and bring her out, you can speak to my client. Deal?’
‘Deal.’
‘You’re in for a surprise,’ Tom said. ‘But right now, you had better tell me how you’re going to walk in there.’
‘I need something from Ana’s shack.’
The hot air inside the shack smelled strongly of Ana Datlovskaya and the smoking oil lamp that was the only illumination. A woman lay on Ana’s camp bed. Julie Bell, another of Marilyn’s former colleagues. She was unconscious. Her jeans had been cut off at the knees and bandages around her calves were spotted with blood and the flesh above and below the bandages was swollen red and shiny.
‘You should get her to a hospital right now,’ Marilyn told Tom. ‘Otherwise she’s going to die of blood poisoning.’
‘The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get out of here. What’s that?’
Marilyn had opened the little chemical icebox and taken out a rack of little brown bottles. She explained that they contained artificial pheromones that Ana had synthesised. She held up the largest, the only one with a screw cap, and said that a dab of this would allow her to follow Ana down into the nest.
‘I don’t think so,’ Tom said. ‘If that shit really works, we can do it ourselves.’
‘It won’t work on men. Only women. Something to do with hormones.’
‘Bullshit,’ Tom said, but Marilyn could see that he was thinking as he stared at her. Trying to figure out if she was telling the truth or making a move.
‘Why don’t you try it out?’ she said, and handed it to him.
Tom volunteered the blond bodybuilder. The man didn’t look very happy as, in the glare of the spotlights on top of two of the Range Rovers, he edged down the path towards the edge of the hive rats’ garden. The sun had set now and stars were popping out across the darkening sky, obscured in the east by smoke of the fire Marilyn had set. When the blond man reached the bottom of the path, sentries popped up from holes here and there amongst the tall century plants, and he turned and looked up at his boss and said that he didn’t think that this was a good idea.
‘Just get on with it,’ Tom said.
Standing beside him, Marilyn felt a sick eagerness. She knew what was going to happen, and she knew that it was necessary.
The man cocked his pistol and stepped forward, as if onto thin ice. Sentries near and far began to slap their feet, and the ground in front of the bodybuilder collapsed as soldiers heaved out of the gravelly sand, snapping long jaws filled with pointed teeth. The man tried to run, and one of the soldiers sprang forward and seized his ankle. He crashed down full-length and then two more soldiers were on him. He kicked and punched at them, screamed when one bit off his hand. More soldiers were running through the shadows cast by the century plants and Tom pulled his pistol and aimed and shot the bodybuilder in the head, shot at the soldiers as they tore at the body. Dust boiled up around it as it slowly sank.
The surviving goon, the one who’d been guarding the Range Rovers, invoked Jesus Christ, and Tom turned to Marilyn and hit her hard in the face with the back of his hand, knocking her down. She sat looking up at him, not moving, feeling a worm of blood run down her cheek where his signet ring had torn her skin.
‘You’re going down there,’ Tom said.
‘I need the pheromone first,’ Marilyn said.
‘Right now,’ Tom said. ‘Let’s see how fast you can run.’
Marilyn had rubbed the suppressor scent that Ana had given her over her arms and face before she’d walked up to the shack and surrendered; the stuff she’d told Tom was a pheromone that would guarantee safe passage, but only for women, had been nothing more than the base solution of neutral oil, and gave as much protection from the hive rats’ aggression towards trespassers as a sheet of paper against a bullet. She wasn’t at all certain that it would keep her safe now that the hive rats had been stirred up, but she reckoned she had a better chance with the rats than with the two men silhouetted above her in the glare of the spotlights as she walked down the path.
The spotlights lit up a wide swathe of the garden like a theatrical set, stark and hyperreal against the darkness of the rest of the arroyo. The blades of century plants that towered above Marilyn, growing in sinuous lines and clumps between irrigation ditches, glowed banana yellow. The churned patch of dirt that had swallowed the blond bodybuilder was directly ahead. Marilyn stepped past it, feeling that her skin was about a size too small, remembering how she’d felt moving from position to position in the ruins of the outskirts of Paris, trying to pinpoint a sniper that had shot three of her squad. A hive rat sentry was watching her from its perch on a flat slab of rock, pink skin glistening, an arc of small black eyes glittering above its tiny undershot mouth. She took a wide detour around it and spotted others standing under the century plants as she made her way towards the mound.
The mound was ten metres high, shaped like a small volcano or the entrance to the lair of monster-movie ants, smooth and unmarked apart from a trail of human footprints. She trod carefully up the slope, aware of the hive rats scattered across the garden and the two men watching her from the bench terrace. At the top, a flat rim circled a hole or vent a couple of metres across. Marilyn stepped up to the lip, saw spikes hammered into the hard crust, a rope ladder dropping into darkness. Hot air blew past her face. It stank of ammonia and a rotten musk. She called Ana’s name, and when nothing came back shouted across to Tom Archibold and told him that she was going in.
He shouted back, said that she had thirty minutes. He sounded angry and on edge. The death of his goon had definitely spooked him, and Marilyn hoped that he was beginning to worry that a posse from Joe’s Corner might soon turn up.
‘I’ll take as long as it needs,’ she said, and with a penlight in her teeth like a pirate’s cutlass started to climb down the rope ladder into the hot stinking dark.
The shaft went down a long way, flaring out into a vault whose walls were ribbed with long vertical plates. Marilyn shone the penlight around and saw something jutting out of the wall a few metres below, a wooden platform little bigger than a bed,
hung from a web of ropes. Ana Datlovskya sat there with her back to the wall, her face pale in the beam of the penlight and one arm raised straight up, aiming a pistol at Marilyn.
‘Tell me you have arrested those fools.’
‘Not yet,’ Marilyn said, and explained how she had taken one man prisoner, how another had been badly bitten and a third had been killed by the hive rats after she had tricked him into wearing only the base solvent. ‘There are only two left. Three, if their client is hiding inside one of those Range Rovers. I managed to convince them that your suppressor only works for women. Can I come down? I feel very vulnerable, hanging here.’
Ana told her to be careful, the platform was meant for only one person. When Marilyn reached her, she saw that the old woman had cut away one leg of her jeans and tied a bandage around her thigh. Rusty vines of dry blood wrapped her skinny bare leg. She refused to let Marilyn look at her wound, saying that it was a flesh wound, nothing serious, and she refused the various painkillers Marilyn had brought, too.
‘I have a first-aid kit here. I have already treated myself to a Syrette of morphine, and need no more because I must keep a clear head. I climbed down powered by adrenaline, but I don’t think I can climb back up.’
‘Is there any other way out of here?’
‘Unless you are very good at digging, no.’
Ana sat on a big cushion with her injured leg stretched out straight. Her face was taut with pain and beaded with sweat. There was a laptop beside her—not the notebook she kept in her shack but a cutting-edge q-bit machine that used the same technology as Marilyn’s q-phone, phenomenally fast and with a memory so capacious it could swallow the contents of the British Library in a single gulp. Ledges cut into the wall held boxes of canned food and bottled water, a bank of car batteries, a camping stove: a regular little encampment or den.
‘I think you had better tell me why Tom Archibold and his client are so interested in you,’ Marilyn said.
She was planning to climb back out and talk to Tom and his client, stretch things out by pretending to negotiate with them until help arrived. Although she couldn’t be sure that anyone in town would have noticed the smoke from the fire before night had fallen, or that they’d link it to the fact that she hadn’t returned from her day-trip to the desert, that she might be in trouble . . .
Ana said, ‘They did not tell you?’
‘They told me you found a spaceship.’
‘And you thought they were lying. Well, it’s true. Don’t look so surprised. We have spaceships, yes? So did the other tenants. The ones who lived here before us. And one of them crashed here, long, long ago. It was not very big, smaller than a car in fact, and all that’s left of it are scraps of hull material, worth nothing. I send a piece to be analysed. Someone has already found something identical on some lonely rock around another star, took a patent out on its composition.’
‘So it’s worthless. That’s good. Or it will be, if we can convince the bad guys that you don’t have anything worth stealing.’
Ana shook her head. ‘I should not have trusted Zui Lin.’
‘This is your mathematician friend.’
‘I needed help to construct the logic of the interface, and the AI programme, but I confided too much to him. You see the goggles, on the shelf? Put them on and take a look below us. They do not like ordinary light, it disrupts their behaviour. But they show up very well in infra-red.’
Marilyn fitted the goggles over her eyes. The platform creaked as she leaned over the side, holding onto the rope ladder for support. Directly below, grainy white clouds were flowing past each other. Hive rats. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Moving over the floor and lower parts of the wall of the chamber in clusters that merged and broke apart and turned as one like flocks of birds on the wing . . .
Behind her, Ana said, ‘There was a war. A thousand years ago, ten thousand . . . My friend does not think of time as we do, in days or in seasons, as something with a linear flow. So it is not clear how long ago. But there was a war, and during the war a spaceship crashed here.’
‘The hive rats were on it? Is that where they came from?’
‘No. If there were living things on the spaceship, they died. You remember, we talked about where the former tenants of this shabby little empire went to?’
‘They died out. Or they went somewhere else.’
‘This species, they transformed. They made a very large and very rapid change. At least, some of them did. And those that changed and those that did not change fought . . . The spaceship was a casualty of that war. It was badly damaged and it crashed. What survived was its mind. It was something like a computer, but also something like a kind of bacterial colony. Or a virus culture. I have tried to understand it, but it is hard. It was in any case self-aware. It was damaged and it was dying, so it created a copy of itself and found a platform where the copy could establish itself—a hive rat colony. It infected the hive rats with a logic kernel and a compressed version of the memory files that had survived the crash, and over many years the seed of the logic kernel unpacked and grew as the colony grew. It needs to be very big because it must support many individuals that do nothing but act as hosts for the ship-mind. The dance you see down there, that is the mind at work.’
‘There must be hundreds of them,’ Marilyn said.
It was oddly hypnotic, like watching schools of fish endlessly ribboning back and forth across a reef.
‘Many thousands,’ Ana said. ‘You can see only part of it from here. Each group processes a number of sub-routines. The members of each group move endless around each other to exchange information, and the different groups merge or flow past each other to share information too. The processing is massively parallel and the mathematics underlying it is fractally compact, but even so, the clock speed is quite slow. Still, I have learnt much.’
Marilyn sat back and pulled off the goggles. ‘Ana, are you trying to say that you can talk to it?’
‘At first it tried to talk to me. It made the figurines, but they were not successful. They are supposed to convey information, but only arouse emotions, moods. But they inspired me to work hard on establishing a viable method of communication, and at last, with the help of Zui Lin, I succeeded.’
Ana explained that her laptop was connected to a light display set in the heart of the nest. When she typed a question, it was translated into a display that certain groups of rats understood, and other groups formed shapes which a programme written by Zui Lin translated back into English.
‘It takes a long time to complete the simplest conversation, but time is what I have, out here. I should have showed you this before. It would make things easier now.’
‘You didn’t trust me. It’s all right. I understand.’
‘I did not think you would believe me. But now you must.’
Ana looked about a hundred years old in the beam of the penlight.
‘I think you had better give me your gun,’ Marilyn said. ‘Maybe I can get the drop on Tom Archibold and his goon. If it comes to it, I’ll kill them.’
‘And his client, too.’
‘Yes. If it comes to it.’
‘You may find that hard,’ Ana said.
‘You know who he is, don’t you?’
‘I have a good idea . . .’ Ana took Marilyn’s hand. Her grip was feeble and feverish but her gaze was steady. ‘I also have a way of dealing with those men, and their client. I have everything you need, down here. I would have used it myself if I hadn’t been hurt.’
‘Show me.’
After Marilyn had climbed out into the glare of the spotlights, the smell of smoke, and the gentle rain of ash from the fire to the east, she held up the q-bit laptop and said loudly, ‘This is what you came for.’
‘Come straight here,’ Tom Archibold shouted back. ‘No tricks.’
‘I’ve done my part. I expect your client to stick to the agreement. I want him to tell me himself that he’ll take this laptop and let me and Ana go free. That you’ll all go back to Port of Plenty and you won’t ever come after us. Otherwise, I’ll sit out here and wait for my friends to come investigate the fire. They can’t be far away, now.’
There was a long silence. At last, Tom said, ‘My client says that he has to look at the evidence before he decides what to do.’
‘Good. He can see that it’s exactly as advertised.’
Marilyn crabbed down the side of the mound and walked out across the garden. Sentries stood everywhere, making a low drumming sound that raised the hairs on the back of her neck, and crevices were opening all around, full of squirming motion. It occurred to her that Ana’s suppressor might not protect her once the entire colony was aroused, but she steeled herself and stopped a dozen metres from the edge of the garden. On the bench terrace above, Tom told her come straight up the path, and she said that he had to be kidding.
‘I can talk to your client from here.’
‘Easier all round if you come up,’ Tom said. ‘If I wanted to shoot you, Marilyn, I would have already done it.’
‘Bullshit,’ Marilyn said. ‘You haven’t shot me because you know there’s no way you could try to retrieve this laptop without being eaten alive.’
She had to wait while Tom disappeared from view, presumably to confer directly with his client. Tom’s surviving goon stood above, watching her impassively; she stared back at him, trying not to flinch at the stealthy scrabbling noises behind her. And then two figures joined him. One was Tom Archibold; the other was a tall mannequin that moved with stiff little steps.
Tom’s client was a Jackaroo avatar.
Marilyn had seen them on TV back on Earth, but had never before faced one. It was two metres tall, dressed in a nondescript black suit, its pale face vaguely male and vaguely handsome. A showroom dummy brought to life; a shell woven from a single molecule of complex plastic doped with metals, linked by a version of q-bit tech to its Jackaroo operator, who could be in orbit around First Foot, or Earth, or a star at the far end of the universe.
In a rich baritone, it questioned Marilyn about the copy of the ship-mind lodged in the hive rat colony, and watched a slide-show of random photographs on the laptop.
‘The ship-mind has migrated to that device,’ it said, at last.
‘Ana made a copy of the kernel from which it grew, and found a way of running it in the laptop,’ Marilyn said. Her arms ached from holding it up.
‘There is a copy in the device and a copy in the hive rat colony. Are there any others?’
‘Not that I know of,’ Marilyn said, hoping that neither the Jackaroo nor Tom Archibold would spot the lie.
‘You will give us the laptop in exchange for your life.’
‘My life, and Ana’s. You don’t have much time,’ Marilyn said. ‘People will be here any minute, drawn by the fire. And they’ll be wondering why I haven’t called in, too.’
‘How do I know you won’t come after me?’ Tom said.
‘You have my word,’ Marilyn said.
‘You will let the two women live,’ the avatar told him. ‘I want only the copy of the ship-mind, and you want only your fee.’
Tom didn’t look happy about this, but told Marilyn to walk on up the path.
‘Tell your man to put up his gun,’ she said.
Tom gave a brusque order and the goon stepped back. Marilyn pressed the space bar of the laptop and closed it up and started up the path, walking slowly and deliberately, trying to ignore the scratching stir across the garden at her back. Trying to keep count in her head.
When she reached the top of the path, Tom stepped forward and snatched the laptop from her, and the goon grabbed her arms and held her.
‘There’s a lot more to it than the stuff on the laptop,’ Marilyn said. ‘I can tell you what the old woman told me. Everything she told me during our long conversations.’
‘The ship-mind is all I want,’ the avatar said.
‘They went somewhere else,’ Marilyn said. She was still counting inside her head. ‘Is that why you’re interested in them? Or are you frightened that we’ll learn something you don’t want us to know?’
The avatar swung its whole body around so that it could look at her. ‘Do not presume,’ it said.
She knew she had hit a nerve and it made her bolder. And the count was almost done. ‘I was just wondering why you broke your agreement with the UN. This world and the other places—they’re where we can make a new start. You aren’t ever supposed to come here. You’re supposed to leave us alone.’
‘In ten years or a hundred years or a thousand years it will come to you as it came to the others,’ the avatar said.
‘We’ll change,’ Marilyn said. ‘We’ll become something new.’
‘From what we have seen so far, it is likely that you will destroy yourselves. As others have done. As others will do, when you are less than a memory. It is inevitable, and it should not be hurried.’
Marilyn’s countdown reached zero. She said, ‘Is that why you’re here? Are you scared we’ll learn something we shouldn’t?’
The avatar stiffly turned and looked at the laptop Tom held. ‘Why is that making a noise?’
‘I can’t hear anything,’ Tom said.
‘It is at the frequency of twenty-four point two megahertz,’ the avatar said. ‘Beyond the range of your auditory system, but not mine.’
Tom stepped towards Marilyn, asking her what she’d done, and there was a vast stir of movement in the garden below. In the glare of the spotlights and in the shadows beyond, all around the stalks of the stiff sails of the century plants, the ground was moving.
Ana had once told Marilyn that the hive rat nest contained more than a hundred thousand individuals, a biomass of between two point five and three hundred metric tons. Most of that seemed to be flooding towards the bench terrace: a vast and implacable wave of hive rats clambering over each other, six or seven deep. A fleshcoloured tide that flowed fast and strong between the century plants and smashed into the slope and started to climb. A great hissing high-pitched scream like a vast steam engine about to explode. A wave of ammoniacal stench.
Tom Archibold raised his pistol and aimed it at Marilyn, and the avatar stepped in front of him and in its booming baritone said that it wanted the woman alive, and snatched the laptop from him and wheeled around and began to march towards the Range Rovers. The goon pushed Marilyn forward, but a living carpet of hive rats was already rippling across the ground in front of them and when they stopped and turned there were hive rats behind them too, two waves meeting and climbing over each other and merging in a great stream that chased after the avatar as it stepped stiffly along. The goon let go of Marilyn and ran, and hive rats swarmed up him and he batted at them and went down, screaming. Tom raised his pistol and got off a single round that whooped past Marilyn, and then he was down too, covered in a seething press, jerking and crawling, and then he lay still and the hive rats moved on, chasing after the laptop that the avatar carried.
Ana had released a pheromone into the nest that made the hive rats believe that they were being attacked by another nest, and painted the laptop with a scent that mimicked that of a hive rat queen. This had drawn most of the hive rats in nest to the surface, and they had begun their attack when the laptop had started to play the sound file Marilyn had activated: a recording of a hive rat queen distress call. The nest believed that one of its queens had been captured, and was rushing to her defense.
Marilyn stood still as rats scurried past on either side of her, scared that she’d be bitten if she stepped on one. The avatar wrenched open the door of the nearest Range Rover and bent inside, and a muscular stream of hive rats flowed over it. The avatar was strong and its shell was tough. It managed to start the Range Rover and the big vehicle shot forward, packed with furious movement and pursued by the army of hive rats. It ploughed through the plastic chairs and the awning, swerved snakewise past the shack, and drove straight off the edge of the bench terrace and slammed down nose first into the garden below.
The flood of hive rats washed over it and receeded, streaming away, sinking into holes and burrows. Marilyn stepped carefully amongst the hundreds of hive rats that were still moving about the bench terrace, collecting up the injured and dying. Tom Archibold and his goon were messily dead. So was Julie Bell, inside the shack. In the Range Rover, the avatar was half-crushed between the steering wheel and the broken seat. Its suit had been ripped to shreds and its shell had been torn open by the strong teeth and claws of soldier hive rats, and it did not move when Marilyn dared to lean into the Range Rover, searching for and failing to find the laptop—the hive rats must have carried it off to their nest.
The avatar wouldn’t or couldn’t answer her questions, began to leak acrid white smoke from the broken parts of its shell. Marilyn snatched up a briefcase and beat a hasty retreat when the avatar suddenly burst into flame, burning in a fierce flare that set the Range Rover on fire, too, a funeral pyre that sent hot light and dark smoke beating out across the garden as the last of the hive rats scurried home.
When the posse from Joe’s Corner arrived, late and loud and half-drunk, Marilyn was setting up a scaffold tripod over the hole in the top of the mound. She gave Joel Jumonville and the three men he’d brought with him the last of her suppressor, and they reluctantly followed her across the garden and helped her rig up a harness; then she climbed down the rope ladder and helped Ana Datlovskya into the harness and Joel and his men hauled the old woman out by main force. Ana passed out as soon as she reached the top. The men carried her across the garden and drove her off to the clinic in Joe’s Corner, and Marilyn drove Joel to the tomb where she had stashed her prisoner, Frank Parker.
Frank Parker lawyered up and parlayed a deal. Marilyn had to agree to drop most of the charges against him in exchange for a lead that pointed the UN police in Port of Plenty to a room in a hotbed motel near the city’s docks, where Tom Archibold had stashed Zui Lin. The mathematician had been interrogated by the avatar, and confirmed most of Marilyn’s story. The UN provisional authority on First Foot made a formal protest about the avatar’s presence, and in due course received apologies from the Jackaroo, who blamed a rogue element and made bland assurances that it would not happen again.
Ana Datlovskaya was in a coma for two weeks, and nearly died from blood loss and infection. Reporters set up camp outside the clinic; Marilyn arrested two who tried to sneak into her room, and deputised townspeople to set up an around-the-clock watch.
When Ana recovered consciousness, she told Marilyn her last little secret. Marilyn and Joel Jumonville drove out to the arroyo and paced off distances from Ana’s shack and dug down carefully and retrieved the plastic-wrapped box with Ana’s papers and a q-bit hard drive that contained not only a copy of all her work on the hive rats, but also a back-up of the hard drive of the laptop lost somewhere under the hive rat garden.
Marilyn and Joel drank from ice-cold bottles of beer from the cooler they’d brought along, standing side by side at the edge of the bench terrace and looking out at the simmering garden down in the arroyo. It was noon, hot and peaceful. Every blade of century plant stood above its shrunken shadow. Hive rat sentries stood guard on flat stones in front of their pop holes.
‘I can almost see why she wants to come back,’ Joel said.
Ana had told Marilyn that she still had a lot of work to do. ‘I had only just begun a proper conversation with the ship-mind before I was so rudely interrupted. Now I will have to have to start over again. Things may go more quickly if Zui Lin sticks to his promise and comes out here to help me, but it will be a long time before we know whether or not the Jackaroo avatar told you anything like the truth.’
Marilyn warned the old woman that people were already talking about her work with the hive rats and the ship-mind, showed her a fat fan of newspapers that had made it their headline story. ‘You’re famous, Ana. You’re going to have to become used to that.’
‘I will be beleaguered by fools looking for the secret of the universe,’ the old woman said. She looked frail and shrunken against the clean linen of the clinic bed, but her gaze was still as fierce as a desert owl’s.
‘The Jackaroo thought that the ship-mind knew something important,’ Marilyn said. ‘Something that might help us understand what happened to the other tenant races. What might happen to us.’
‘As if we can learn from the fate of other species, when we have learnt so little from our own history,’ Ana said. ‘Whatever the ship-mind knows, and I do not yet know it knows anything important, we must make our own future.’
Marilyn thought about that now, when Joel Jumonville asked her what she was going to do next.
‘Why I ask, you’re going to be rich,’ Joel said. ‘And the last constable, he ran out when he struck it rich with that room-temperature superconductor.’
The briefcase Marilyn had pulled out of the avatar’s Range Rover had contained a little gizmo that not only tracked and disrupted q-phones, but could also eavesdrop on them—a violation of quantum mechanics that was like catnip to physicists. Marilyn had a patent lawyer, a cousin of the town’s assayer, working full time in Port of Plenty to establish her rights to a share of profits from any new technology derived from reverse engineering the gizmo. Marilyn planned to give half of anything she earned to Ana; so far all she had was a bunch of unpaid legal bills.
She took a slug of beer and studied the shimmering hive rat garden, the sentries standing upright and alert beneath the great sails of the century plants. ‘Oh, I think I’ll stick around for a little while,’ she said. ‘Someone has to make sure that Ana will be able to get on with her work without being disturbed by tourists and charlatans. And besides, my contract has six months to run.’
‘And after that?’
‘Hell, Joel, who knows what the future holds?’