Divergence

ALSO BY TONY BALLANTYNE

Recursion

Capacity

About the Author

Tony Ballantyne grew up in County Durham in the northeast of England, studied mathematics at Manchester University, and then worked as a teacher, first of math, then IT, in London and later in the northwest of England. Nowadays he enjoys playing boogie piano, cycling, and walking. In the past he has taught sword fencing at an American children’s camp, been a ballroom dancer, and worked voluntarily on conservation projects and with adults with low literacy and numeracy.

Visit Tony Ballantyne atwww.tonyballantyne.com .

edward 1: 2252

There was an argumenttaking place on board the Eva Rye , but then again they had been arguing on board the Eva Rye since the ship had left Garvey’s World.

“It’s a robot. It houses an intelligence, it’s mobile: it’s a robot.”

“Why would a robot be floating in space? It’s got to be a ship. A small one.”

“I keep telling you, it’s a self-replicator, and it’s trying to trap us. Let it on board and it will convert our ship to copies of itself. We’ll all be left swimming through vacuum.”

Edward sat on the hessian matting that made up part of the patchwork floor of the spaceship’s lounge and tried to follow what was going on. Ever since the Stranger had first made contact, and everyone had been summoned to the gaudy living area, the same argument had been sloshing back and forth. It wasn’t a new argument, just a natural development of the same one that had thrived on the Eva Rye for the past five weeks, given new life by the distress call they had picked up.

After about an hour of Donny’s bitterness and Armstrong’s belligerence, Craig had brought Edward a glass of apple juice and had tried to explain what they were all shouting about, but Saskia had chosen that moment to mention Edward’s sister again and another favorite quarrel had been added to the stew. The only one who had maintained his temper was the Stranger himself. His image could be seen in the viewing field that had been opened up in the middle of the conference room.

“ Eva Rye, why do you keep arguing? All I want from you is delta vee. It’s a common enough request. You are a trading ship, aren’t you?”

There was an edge to the Stranger’s question that achieved something that none of the crew of the Eva Rye had managed in their one hundred and forty minutes of bitter debate. It brought silence to the room. Ten bodies paused just outside the circle of light in which the Stranger floated, his shape a grainy letter x pushed to maximum resolution by the radio telescope. The picture was an embarrassment to the technology that should be available to the ship, but it was the best image that could be achieved with the long-range senses off-line and the self-repair mechanisms still malfunctioning. In the hushed silence, Edward looked up at Craig.

“What’s happened?” he whispered.

Craig took a break from glaring daggers at Saskia just long enough to whisper: “Nothing yet. The Stranger just reminded us who we are. This can’t take much longer, Eddie. Shh. Michel’s going to speak.”

Michel blinked in the dim light, not so much speaking as refereeing his own indecisiveness.

“Okay,” he said, finally getting to the point in the mental debate that jammed up his head, “we could argue about this for another hour, but all the time the Stranger would just get farther away from us. I propose we put this to a vote.”

“A vote?” Saskia queried in tones of mild surprise.

Edward shivered. Saskia may have been Craig’s sister, but he still didn’t like her that much. Especially when she spoke like that; especially sitting back as she was in the stripiest of the three stripey chairs, letting her shiny aubergine-black hair fall forward to cover her eyes; especially when her words were so quiet and reasonable.

“One of your jobs as our leader is to make decisions,” she said, ever so mildly. “You should ask your specialists for their opinions and then tell us what to do.”

Michel rubbed his head. “I know, I know. I was coming to that. Armstrong, what do you think?”

Armstrong was sitting at the stone-and-copper dinner table, three carbon-bladed knives resting before him. His fingernails were stained black from the soft block of carbon that he was rubbing into a fourth tiny blade, growing it into a beautiful curved panga that Edward had been regarding with a wistful expression. Sometimes Armstrong let Edward hold the knives, and Edward would swoop and swish them through the air, listening to the clean sound they made.

Edward wished that he could hold Armstrong’s knives more often. They felt good in the hand, balanced and powerful—just like Armstrong. Armstrong always waited until he had everyone’s full attention before speaking. He did so now, giving the panga a last slow wipe of the carbon block.

“I say we make contact,” he growled, pointing the embryonic knife towards the object floating in the viewing field. “Like that thing says, we’re a trading ship. If we run away from everything new, we’ll never get to trade anything.”

“Armstrong’s right,” agreed Maurice. He leaned back on his chair, his padded combat jacket open to the waist, just like Armstrong’s. “We’ve got to take a few risks.”

“Thank you for your opinion, Maurice,” said Donny sarcastically. “Michel, we’ve only been a trading ship for five weeks. Who’s to say what’s correct behavior in these circumstances?”

Donny’s two children, Jack and Emily, were playing at his feet, their presence tolerated in the room because it was the only thing that could sweeten Donny’s poisonous bitterness at his wife’s desertion. The children were sending their dolls into the kitchen area to collect last week’s grapes from a bowl set on the floor there. The dolls carried the wizened fruit back on little silver plates for a miniature tea party. Edward would have loved to join the game, but Donny had told him more than once that he was too old. Michel looked as if he was getting a headache. He had one hand to his temple, his eyes closed as he tried to make a decision.

“I know, Donny, I know. What is the correct behavior in these circumstances?”

He turned to Craig’s sister, sitting, as always, right beside him. “Saskia, what do you think?”

Edward wasn’t happy to see Saskia tilt her head again so that her straight dark hair fell around her face, hiding her eyes. Her reply came in her mildest tones, making Edward want to retreat into a dark corner and hide.

“It’s not for me to say what I think, Michel,” she murmured. “You’re the commander. This is not the place from where I would make a decision. If it had been down to me, I’d have stayed at the edge of the old Enemy Domain. I wouldn’t have taken us out of human space completely.”

“People, people, why do you keep arguing?” The grainy shape in the viewing field was moving, forming shapes at the edge of recognition. Everyone leaned closer, trying to make out what they were dealing with. For over two hours they had gazed at the Stranger, trying to guess what he was. “Listen,” he said.

“I have the capacity to trade through Kelvin’s Paradigm, the Northern Protocol, and 1.66. I don’t understand why you keep talking about risk.”

“Do you have FE software?” called out Joanne, not quite concealing the edge of impatience in her voice.

“Joanne,” said Saskia, “I thought we agreed, all communications go through Michel.”

“It’s okay,” said Michel, withering under the glares of both women. “It’s a good question. Do you have FE, Stranger?”

“FE?” said the Stranger, in some surprise. “Yes, I have Fair Exchange software, though I have not used it in some time. This explains something about your behavior: you are new to the trade game, are you not?”

“Don’t tell him anything,” hissed Armstrong.

“Why not?” asked Joanne, reasonably. “Like the Stranger said, we’re perfectly safe if we use the FE

software. We’re guaranteed a Fair Exchange. That’s what it’s for, isn’t it?”

Edward had never quite understood exactly what the FE software did. All he knew was that it was responsible for him leaving his home on Garvey’s World and flying off on this spaceship. It had meant leaving behind his sister, Caroline. He thought of her standing outside the patchwork hull of the Eva Rye, trying not to cry as she gave him a hug.

“Here you are, Edward,” she had said, handing him a plaited bracelet made of n-strings. “This is to remind you of me.” She held up her own wrist, showing an identical bracelet there. “See, I have one, too.”

“Where’s Dad?” Edward had asked, looking around the bleak greyness of the landing field.

“He’s off with Mum, working. They’ll still be out in the fields, scanning for venumb infestations.”

“Dad doesn’t want me to go.”

“I know, Edward. But this is for the best. If what they say is happening on Earth is true, then the sooner you’re away from here, the better.”

Safe in the near darkness close to the floor, Edward ran a finger along the bracelet, feeling the strange slippery surface of the n-strings. He thought of Caroline’s parting words.

“Listen, Edward. I know you’re not very clever, but you’ve always done your best to be a good boy. You need to be a good boy now. You’ve heard the rumors: the Dark Plants are spreading, and they say the Watcher is calling everyone back home to Earth for their own safety, starting with the most helpless. And that means you. I really don’t know what to do. But they say that the trade ships are safe. The Fair Exchange software guarantees that nobody can be cheated. Well, I hope so. I’ve bought you passage on the Eva Rye .”

A cold look came into her eyes, thin as the misty rain that filled the dull green valleys of Garvey’s World.

“Are you okay, Caroline?”

She gave him a sudden, fierce hug. He kissed her on the cheek and she smiled at him.

“Now get on board. Quickly.”

And before Edward had had a last chance to look around the grey, rain-sodden hills, she had pushed him up the rainbow-striped staircase into the hatchway of the spaceship. That had been three weeks ago.

Since then Edward had wandered the multicolored corridors of the ship, trying to make sense of his new situation. The Eva Rye was not a happy place: there was no peace or harmony to be found anywhere on board, not socially, aurally, or visually. Especially visually. The decor in the living areas was a wildly eclectic mix; no two parts of the ship matched. Great bulky brown studded leather recliners humphed their way between delicately carved wooden dining chairs upholstered in shot silk. Rubber-coated floors, embossed with round gripping bumps, were covered with coconut foot mats; woodchip wallpaper was pasted over brushed aluminum bulkheads.

Even the material from which the ship was constructed flowed and changed from room to room. Wedges of grey concrete were driven into blond parquet that was in turn tiled with cream plastic shapes. And as for the people, you couldn’t have picked a more disparate bunch if you tried. Nobody seemed to want Michel to be the leader, least of all Michel himself. Maurice agreed with everything Armstrong said and did; he even dressed the same way. Donny hoarded his sour resentment, rationing his formerly sweet nature only for his children. Most people, but especially Saskia and Joanne, looked the other way when Edward entered the room. Only Craig seemed to take the trouble to speak to him, now that Donny had told Jack and Emily to keep away. Only Craig. Oh, and Miss Rose, but she hardly ever left her room, and when she did it was just to hurl, with a careful eye, more bad feeling into the bouillabaisse of hurt that was the Eva Rye .

And nobody would tell Edward what was going on. He wandered into rooms just as decisions had been made. He watched on viewing fields as deals were already done, and as other similarly eclectic spaceships slid away from theirs without Edward ever having seen those on board. All of this was something to do with the FE software that lurked unseen in the processing spaces of the Eva Rye . Edward was really beginning to resent it. All he wanted to do was to go home to Garvey’s World, to its monotonous greyness and to Caroline.

Now another stranger had contacted the ship. This time everyone had been summoned to speak to it. Nobody had been really happy with the trades that had been made so far. Everyone thought that Michel was making bad decisions, and people were beginning to say so out loud. Edward didn’t understand how that could be so, when surely it was the job of the FE software to make the trades, but even so, when the Stranger had hailed the ship, it had been agreed that this time everyone should be present for the negotiations. Even Edward. Craig had insisted on that point.

So now Edward sat on the hessian mat, his backside aching, his hands sore and itching, as the mysterious Stranger bargained for delta vee.

“Craig,” hissed Edward. “Craig! What is delta vee?”

“Acceleration,” whispered Craig. “The Stranger is floating in space. It wants us to take it somewhere else, and that requires fuel.”

“Why is it floating in space?” asked Edward.

Craig stared at him for a moment, and a lopsided smile slowly spread across his face.

“Do you know, Edward, I don’t think anyone has actually asked that.” He raised his voice. “Stranger!

Why are you floating in space?”

“All communications through Michel,” said Saskia reprovingly.

“It’s okay,” said Michel. “It’s a good question. Go on, Stranger, why?”

The fuzzy x in the viewing field laughed.

“I told you, I work on systems repair. Where else would I be but floating in space, waiting for systems to repair?”

Craig looked down at Edward. “Does that answer your question?” he said. Edward shook his head.

“No. No, it doesn’t. If it is where it is supposed to be, why does it want a lift from us?”

“A very good question!” called the Stranger. “I require delta vee because I’m floating towards a region of Dark Plants. I estimate I will be amongst them in around six hundred years if someone does not help me.”

Edward noted the hungry expression that had awoken in Joanne and Saskia’s faces. Joanne was mouthing, “Pick him up.” At the same time Saskia murmured, “I think you should consider this new information, Michel.”

“Why is the Stranger afraid of Dark Plants?” whispered Edward up to Craig.

“Every intelligent being is afraid of them,” Craig whispered back. “Even AIs stop thinking when near them.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, but Dark Plants kill intelligent life. You must know that, Edward. You must have heard of Dark Plants before! Anyway, Joanne and Saskia now think that we are in a much better bargaining position.”

“Why?”

“Because…” began Craig. “Look, I’ll explain later. Shhh, listen!”

“I think Joanne is right,” called Armstrong, Maurice nodding in agreement. “We should pick him up. Find out what’s on offer.”

“Be quiet,” hissed Michel. “I haven’t engaged the buffer. It can hear everything we’re saying.”

“Yes, I can hear everything,” agreed the Stranger. It really did have a cheerful voice, thought Edward. Happy and positive: it made you feel good just to listen to it. “Listen, I will give you some advice. Free advice! Remember, as all negotiations pass through the FE software, there is no need to be secretive. All of our intrigues will be as naught once FE takes over.”

“You were already told that by the crew of the Imagio, ” Saskia reminded a scowling Michel.

“I know! I know! So, Stranger, what do we get if we take you to safety?”

“System repair, of course. It’s what I do. Even from here, I can see many things that are wrong with the systems on the Eva Rye .”

“Could you fix the Self-Replicating Mechanisms?” asked Armstrong suddenly. “I’m fed up with rubbing up knives by hand.” By way of illustration, he picked up the template of a katana, a tiny carbon crystal the size of his finger, just ready to be grown.

“Could I fix the Self-Replicating Mechanisms?” repeated the Stranger. “You are very new to this, aren’t you? I wonder if you really understand the implications of what you have taken on?”

“Of course we do,” said Joanne smoothly, neat and efficient in her trim suit. Green eyes looked keenly down at the Stranger. “We heard what you said earlier about openness. Are you trying to bargain the price down now?”

“Not at all,” said the Stranger primly. “I will not offer anything more or less than that which is agreed by FE. It will decide what the appropriate fee will be for you to take me where I wish. Now, do we have a deal?”

Joanne nodded emphatically. Michel turned to Saskia, who was looking out under a fringe of aubergine hair at Joanne.

“It’s your decision,” said Saskia. “You’ve heard enough evidence to realize that we should pick it up.”

Michel nodded. “Okay then,” he said, “we’ll give you a lift. Would you like to interface with our processing space now?”

“Certainly,” said the Stranger. “May I suggest that you begin your intercept? It could take some time for the FE protocols to complete. The longer you wait, the more fuel you will expend in catching up with me.”

“I’m on it,” said Craig, unfolding his console. Edward got up to look over Craig’s shoulder as he touched the screen of his console, moving around the colored lines that told the ship where to go.

“Donny, could you open up the pipe to the Stranger?”

Donny tapped sourly at his console, and the FE software initialized in a bloom of peach and gold.

“Handshaking now,” he said without enthusiasm. “Okay, we’re uploading our circumstances. It will take about five minutes.”

Everyone relaxed a little. The decision had been made; now it was up to the FE software to sort out the details. A doll carrying a fairy cake walked towards Michel, stepping from the hessian carpet onto a plastic tarpaulin that for a few preposterous centimeters was part of the weave.

“Thank you, Emily,” he said, taking the cake.

“Do you think we’ll get a good deal?” asked Maurice.

“Bound to,” said Armstrong. “Its needs are greater than ours. After all, we don’t have to pick it up. We could just leave it floating towards its doom.”

“It will be nice to have the Von Neumann Machines working again,” said Maurice complacently. “I’m fed up with my tiny room. I can get myself a copy made of yours.”

“Hmm,” said Armstrong, rubbing carbon into the blade of his panga.

Now that everyone was a little calmer, Edward got up and walked across the living area to the kitchen space in the corner. He was thirsty, and he thought there might still be some apple juice in the fridge.

“Leave it,” snapped Saskia.

“What?” asked Edward, nervously dancing on felt tiles.

“The apple juice. You’ve already had more than your fair share this morning.”

“I wasn’t getting apple juice,” he lied. Edward frowned as he poured some milk into a glass. How come Saskia always seemed to know what he was thinking? Behind him, Jack’s doll turned the corner, paused as it saw Edward, and then went running back to its owner.

Edward took a big drink of milk and sat down on a glass chair that stood by the pine breakfast bar. He wiped the wetness from his upper lip and felt the roughness there. He hadn’t shaved in two days. Caroline used to remind him every morning. He looked down at his bracelet, a big balloon of misery swelling in his stomach.

Edward and the rest of the crew of the Eva Rye had grown up in the twenty-third century, where AIs worked at speeds far beyond those of human thought. The incredible slowness of FE software was frustrating to them all. Even now, after five weeks of use, it was trying their patience to wait for the twenty or thirty minutes it took the routine to complete. Add to that the sense of nervous expectation that awaited the results of the transaction, and tempers, already high on the ship, were pushed past breaking point.

It all started innocently enough.

“We’re approaching point oh five lights,” said Craig. “The resolution on the viewing field is improving already. We should be able to get a proper look at the Stranger soon enough.”

“How long until we get to it?” asked Joanne.

“About two hours.”

“Wouldn’t it be faster if we made a jump into Warp?”

“Yes, but it would take more fuel.”

“Ah, we never used to have to worry about that sort of thing,” said Joanne wistfully. “I’d never even heard of the concept of fuel until we began Fair Exchange.”

The image of the Stranger in the viewing field gradually resolved itself. It wasn’t a ship. It was a robot. But a robot like no one had ever seen before.

“Who built you?” asked Armstrong, rubbing at his panga.

“That information does not come for free,” said the Stranger. “Do you wish to trade?”

“No, thank you, I was just making conversation. I think I’ve seen something like you out in the Dawlish sector. That’s where the old Sho Heen company finished up, if I remember correctly. They used to build repair craft that look a bit like you.”

“They look nothing like me,” said the Stranger indignantly. “They are a completely different class of robot: no symmetry, no artistic line to their structure.”

The Stranger had reason to be proud, thought Edward. His body did look rather beautiful, in its odd way. It rather resembled one of Armstrong’s throwing stars. Edward had never seen a swastika, but if he had he would have said the Stranger looked a little like that. Four black and silver legs curved out from the center of the robot, their ends branching into an array of tentacles, some incredibly fine, some thick and powerful, no doubt for heavy-duty repairs. The Stranger was spinning slowly in space, allowing the crew of the Eva Rye to see all eight of its eyes: four on top of the central section to which the legs joined, four beneath. Yellow letters and numbers could just be made out, written across the whole of the black and silver body. Edward could just make out some of the larger letters, the rest were lost in the fuzzy uncertainty of the viewing field’s resolution.

“What’s that you have written on you?” asked Donny, squinting to make out the words Jeu de Vagues.

“Oh, just verses, epigrams, things that I like the sound of.”

Donny glanced at his console.

“Circumstances uploaded for both us and the Stranger. Correlation is now running. It’ll take about ten minutes.”

“What’s going on?”

At the sound of Miss Rose’s voice, Edward put down his glass of milk and went to sit down again at Craig’s feet. The old woman stood in the carved wooden doorway leading to the living area, wearing a white shift over a dove-grey passive suit. Her white hair was brushed back to cover the balding patch at the back of her head.

“What’s he doing?” she said, pointing at Edward. “Drinking all the apple juice, I bet.”

“I had milk, Miss Rose,” said Edward defiantly, but Miss Rose ignored this and shuffled into the middle of the room, staring at the Stranger’s eerily beautiful body, still coming into focus in the viewing area.

“What’s that thing?” she asked.

“The Stranger,” said Michel. “We’re giving him a lift to safety. In return he’s going to repair some of the failing systems on this ship.”

“Good. He can fix the AI in my room. I haven’t been able to get a peep out of it since I boarded this ship.”

Michel raised his eyes to the ceiling. “I’ve told you this before, Miss Rose. There are no AIs on board this ship. You know that. We can’t have anything to do with them if we are to run the FE software.”

“So you said. But I can’t see one little AI in my room hurting anybody. It would give me someone to speak to. Are you going to give an old woman a seat?”

Despite the fact that there were plenty of empty seats around the room, she made Maurice move to another place.

“And who is this?” asked the Stranger. “Why hasn’t she spoken before?”

“This is Miss Rose,” replied Michel, “the last member of our crew. She’s…older than the rest of us.”

“He thinks I’m senile,” said Miss Rose. “Is one of you going to get me a drink of apple juice?” She looked accusingly at Armstrong and Maurice.

“I’ll get it,” said Armstrong easily.

“No, let me,” said Maurice, leaping to his feet and heading for the fridge. Edward watched sullenly. She was the one who drank all the juice, and when she blamed Edward, everyone believed her. It wasn’t fair. She said Edward could drink beer like the other adults, but Edward didn’t like beer. Everyone drank apple juice on Garvey’s World. They drank cider when they were hot, and they distilled it into apple brandy to keep out the winter chill. Edward wasn’t used to beer.

“Thank you,” said Miss Rose, accepting the cold glass that Maurice gave her. “So, are we going to get ripped off again?”

“We haven’t been ripped off,” said Michel. “The FE software stops that happening.”

The yellow carbon discs woven into the n-string bracelet on Miss Rose’s wrist jangled as she took a sip of apple juice.

“We always get ripped off,” she said with finality. “That last ship we met was barely functioning. With half of its life system down, we should have cleaned up on that deal. So what happened? We gave it Douglas and a spare set of nanotechs to fix their life support, and got what back in return? A warning about Earth and two useless wooden dinosaurs that are currently taking up all the space in the large hold.”

“They’re not dinosaurs,” said Michel weakly. “They’re venumbs. Half plant and half Von Neumann Machine…”

“Hah. And what are we going to do with them? Like I said: we gave them Douglas and we got two venumbs and a warning.” She spoke in an affected, screechy voice. “Don’t eat the food on Earth! Don’t drink anything! The Watcher has drugged everything to keep the people there compliant!” She shook her head. “Like we were planning to go to Earth anyway. I don’t call that a good deal.”

Michel looked at the floor. He didn’t really have an answer to that. Saskia leaned in closer.

“You really need to think about our track record,” she said. “People are beginning to talk.”

“And then look what happened on Garvey’s World,” continued Miss Rose. Edward knew what was coming next.

“Leave him alone,” said Craig warningly.

Miss Rose took a sip of apple juice. “I wasn’t going to mention the dummy,” she replied. “I just wanted to point out that we gave a lot of n-strings away there, and what did we get in return? Some apple juice and an apple juice disposal unit.”

“I said, leave him alone,” repeated Craig in an icy tone.

“At least you got something out of the deal,” observed Miss Rose sagely. Craig leapt to his feet. “I’ve told you before, you vicious old hag…”

“Leave it, Craig,” said Armstrong easily, slowly rubbing carbon along the blade of his knife.

“Come on, let’s just calm down,” agreed Maurice.

“You need to do something here,” Saskia whispered loudly to Michel. “Stop them arguing amongst themselves.”

“What would you suggest he do, Saskia?” asked Joanne sweetly, as Michel’s eyes darted this way and that.

“People, people, let’s all calm down a little,” said the Stranger, spinning easily in space. “Not in front of the children.”

At that all eyes turned towards Jack and Emily, who were huddled by Donny’s legs, looking around the room with big eyes.

“Okay,” said Michel, and a gentle calm descended. “The Stranger is right. Donny, how much longer with the correlation?”

“Almost done,” he said, rubbing at his unshaven chin.

“Maurice,” said Miss Rose, “I’ve finished with my juice. Be a darling and take it for me, will you?”

“Of course, Miss Rose,” said Maurice, and Edward watched despondently as Maurice took the half-full glass to the little kitchen and poured it down the sink. He was sure that Miss Rose was laughing at him.

The Eva Rye turned off its motors. It would coast for the next hour or so, before turning and beginning the process of deceleration that would end in them matching courses with the Stranger. In the living area, the process of Fair Exchange was approaching completion. The crew watched the shrinking blue status bar at the base of the viewing field. Above it, the Stranger gradually gained resolution. More and more yellow letters came into view. Edward could read the sentence I never saw a purple cow.

“Twenty seconds,” announced Donny.

“Fingers crossed, Eddie,” said Craig.

“Fifteen seconds—”

“Waste of time if you ask me,” said Miss Rose.

“Ten seconds—”

“Now, are you sure you’ve done the right thing, Michel?” asked Saskia

“Five, four, three, two, one. Transaction complete.”

Donny looked around the waiting faces on board the Eva Rye, a sour humor awakening in him at the thought of the likely disappointment that awaited them.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” he said, and the room held its breath.

There was a lengthening pause as he tried to make sense of the verdict. The Stranger spoke up first.

“Well, this seems all in order. Pickup will be in just over ninety minutes, but I don’t see why I can’t start work right away. System repair will now commence.”

There was an air of hushed expectation. Edward hoped that the food generators would get fixed. The Stranger spoke: “Michel, you are not the right person to be the commander of the Eva Rye. That position should go to Joanne.”

With an air of utter professionalism, Joanne stood up, fastened the button of her jacket, and glided across the room towards Michel. Saskia glared at Armstrong, Craig, and Maurice. They were watching Joanne’s elegant stride, the swaying of her hips in her fitted jacket and skirt, the way her pretty little face betrayed no sign of triumph.

“I’m sorry,” said Joanne, shaking Michel’s hand.

“That’s okay,” said Michel, a look of resignation and relief spreading across his face. One could almost hear birdsong.

“Saskia,” said the Stranger. Saskia was staring at Joanne with loathing.

“What you do is dishonest. If you truly believe in what needs to be done, come out and say it for yourself.”

“What?” said Saskia. “I beg your pardon…”

“And lastly,” continued the Stranger, ignoring the interruption, “Miss Rose. You are now, and will always be, exactly right. The rest of you would do well to listen to her. And that’s the main work done.”

The crew of the Eva Rye gazed at one another, blank incomprehension fading into annoyance and then anger. Joanne spoke first, glowing with her new sense of command.

“I’m terribly sorry, Stranger, I believe there must be some mistake. What do you mean that’s it ? What about our Self-Replicating Mechanisms? What about the recycling units and the long-range senses? I thought you were offering system repair?”

“I was, I am, and so I have done,” said the Stranger. “The systems that were most obviously failing on your ship were the command structure and the group dynamic. That has now been rectified. Or it will be if you follow my advice.”

“What?” called Armstrong. “No! No way!”

Donny wore an air of acerbic satisfaction.

“So we’ve been tricked again. Nice one, Michel.”

“You have not been tricked,” said the Stranger indignantly. “Besides, I still have one last service to perform. When you pick me up, I will…”

“What if we don’t pick you up?” said Armstrong coolly.

“All comments through me, please, Armstrong,” murmured Joanne. “Still, it’s a good point, Stranger. I don’t think this is a Fair Exchange.”

The Stranger contracted its legs, irised them closed so that for a moment it was simply a black-and-silver disc, then straightened them out to form an elongated cross. It appeared agitated.

“Not a Fair Exchange?” it said. “But it is, by definition. We ran the software routine. You agreed to the trade.”

“That’s because we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into.”

She gazed at the Stranger, stillness crystallizing around her body.

“Yes,” said Maurice. “We…” He stopped as Joanne raised a finger, indicating that he should shut up. She was creating a silence for the Stranger to fill. It did so.

“Well, the deal has been done. I am sorry it is not to your satisfaction.” It sounded hurt. “Perhaps as you gain more experience in the use of FE, you will understand just how rude you are being.”

“Perhaps,” said Joanne. “For the moment, though, I am canceling the deal.”

“Just a moment, Joanne,” said Michel, “I don’t think that we can…”

“And who’s in charge here?” asked Joanne, 1.4 meters of icy calm, turning to face her former boss.

“Well,” interrupted Saskia mildly, “if the deal has been broken, I rather think Michel is in charge again. We can hardly be seen to act on the Stranger’s advice if we are breaking the deal.”

Donny was looking down at his console. He gave a sudden mirthless laugh. “When you’ve finished, ladies, I think you should see this. I’ll put it on the main viewing field.”

Pale gold letters sprang to life in the middle of the living area, flowing across the floating shape of the Stranger.

Violation of Contract?

Are you sure you wish to disengage from a Fair

Exchange?

Yes/No ?

“That looks ominous, Joanne,” said Saskia softly. “What are you going to do?”

Joanne bit her lip.

“If I could just give you some advice, Joanne,” said Michel softly, “we were warned at the start. Once you break a deal, that’s it. You are off the Fair Exchange network for good. My advice is that we just grit our teeth and learn from this one.” Yet again. The unspoken words were picked up by everyone present.

Joanne’s face remained calm; even so, the rest of the crew could feel the fury boiling within her. Edward moved around Craig’s chair, trying to get farther away from her. Jack picked up his doll and held it tightly in his hand, its little legs kicking pitifully as it tried to get free. Finally, Joanne spoke. “All right. We accept the deal.” She glanced at her console. “Of course we do. Stranger, we will be with you in eighty-five minutes.”

The Eva Rye was decelerating, matching velocities with the black-and-silver swastika of the Stranger. Four glassy lenses gazed through emptiness at the rainbow colors of the ship that would save it from the region of Dark Plants. It was silly, the Stranger knew, but it imagined it could already feel the aching of oblivion to be found in the region ahead. The Stranger had once plunged into a gravity well, fallen headfirst onto a planet. Its body had burned brightly, the plasma formed by the speed of its entry into the planet’s atmosphere whipping out from its limbs in long swirling strands. It had felt the rising pull of the mass below, drawing it down and down. That’s what the region ahead felt like: six hundred years away, the region of Dark Plants was an inescapable emptiness, working on the bright star of the Stranger’s intelligence, pulling it inwards. The Stranger had written words on its own body, a quotation from a classic text.

“Do you know how I see the Milky Way? As a glow of intelligence. AIs such as myself have spread throughout the galaxy. Humans have piggybacked their way along, parasites, living off our greater intelligence…”

Maybe someday the Dark regions would swallow up the entire universe. When the Stranger had first seen the Eva Rye, it had felt a huge wave of relief. Now the ship was coming closer, invisible black lightning arcing about its gaudy teardrop shape as it displaced its momentum to the free hydrogen around it. The Stranger reached out with its senses and stroked the mismatched patterns on the ship’s surface, followed the seams between the materials, teased them apart and reached into them to touch the ship deep inside, interfacing with the dormant mechanisms it knew to be there. Sensually, it set about waking them up.

“Donny, what’s that?”

Joanne pointed to the red band that had begun to loop around itself, in a figure eight, inside the viewing field.

“I know what that is,” muttered Michel.

“It’s the Stranger,” said Donny hoarsely. “He’s activated the Self-Replicating Mechanisms. The ship is copying itself.”

Suddenly all were on their feet.

“What’s going on?” said Edward.

“Not now,” shushed Craig, and Edward watched in confusion as his only friend on board ship stood up and stared intently at the walls.

“Stranger, what are you doing?” called Joanne.

“The last part of our bargain. I’ve activated the Self-Replicating Mechanisms of your ship.”

“But we’re still on it! We could be killed.”

“You’ll be perfectly safe. I suggest you go to your rooms. I will move you through the ship as fission proceeds.”

“Craig…” said Edward.

“Go to your room, Edward,” ordered Craig. “Go to your room.”

“But…”

But Craig wasn’t listening. He was shouting at Donny, who wasn’t listening either; he was too busy bundling up his children and pushing them towards the door. The floor shuddered and Edward looked down. Miss Rose hurried past, something half hidden in her hand.

“She’s got my knife!” yelled Armstrong. “She’s taken my bloody knife.”

“Get out of my way,” muttered Donny, hurrying past with his children.

“Joanne, don’t you think we should go to our rooms now?” Saskia stood up and took the arm of the person nearest to her.

“Come on, Edward,” Saskia said sweetly, and she guided him out into the corridor that led to the bedrooms. The garish walls there were already peeling apart like a snake shedding its skin. There was a cracking noise that seemed to travel the length of the ship, as indigo glass shook itself free of iron sheets.

“What’s happening?” asked Edward again, in a tinkling cloud of sparkling violet shards. Michel came hurrying up behind them.

“I think you should take Edward to his room,” said Saskia, passing him over. Edward watched as she hurried away. Beneath their feet, the wooden tiles of the parquet floor had risen up and were walking away all in one direction, like leaves being carried by ants. A tumbling river of glass blocks started to flow in the other direction.

Dancing over the shifting floor, Michel pushed Edward into his bedroom. The door slammed shut and Edward looked around to see that his collection of holopictures above the bed was migrating to one corner as the wooden frames of the doors and windows peeled themselves away from the walls and began to descend into the floor.

“What’s happening?” asked Edward again, but there was no reply. He was all alone.

edward 2: 2252

Just like the Eva Rye, the Stranger was itself a Von Neumann Machine—a self-replicating machine. It was aware of the mechanism within its body which, when triggered, would begin the reproductive process. The Stranger lived with the constant possibility of triggering that mechanism: the reasons why it did not do so at any given time were as fascinating as the reasons that would cause it to do so. In activating the Eva Rye’s Self-Replicating Mechanisms, the Stranger had imposed itself upon that object in a most fundamental way. The reproductive procedure followed by the Eva Rye was one of fission. A seam had developed along the back of the teardrop-shaped vessel, giving it the appearance of a deformed peach. Metal and plastic was flowing into the seam and then dividing itself, tearing in tissue layers, half going this way, half going that. A double bulge was slowly inflating into space and already two Eva Ryes could be seen taking shape, each half the mass of the original. The procedure was satisfying to observe, pleasing in its elegance and engineering. The reproductive program was well thought out: the Stranger measured both of the ships to be of almost exactly equal mass. There was a music to the separation, too, the singing of materials in harmony with themselves as they rent apart, and underneath it all the deep bass throb of the engine warping space into the gradient down which the ship slid. Even that warping was separating into two distinct bubbles of space.

And then, a question appeared in the Stranger’s vision. The fission process paused for a moment, the two nascent bulges wavering, anchored by an indissoluble mass within the ship. The stranger looked closer and saw the two cargo holds, and in them the goods carried by the ship. Apples and colored pebbles, crystal and china, bales of paper. And the two huge wooden venumbs that occupied the large hold; pacing back and forth with prehistoric fortitude. The Stranger consulted the results of the Fair Exchange and noted the division of the goods between the two ships.

Just for a moment, it could have sworn that the venumbs were gazing in its direction as it did so.

Edward lay staring up at the ceiling of his new room. For the past hour everything had been blessedly still. Cold silence leaked from the vacuum of space into the walls and floors of the ship; it deadened the air and choked the hum of life from the crew. Silence was pooling in the room, drowning Edward in emptiness. Edward was terrified; he almost wished that he was back in the seemingly endless snapping, shifting maelstrom of the replication. Just when it seemed that he could take no more, a violent double wrenching had shaken the whole ship and sent Edward tumbling across the room and onto his bed. He tried to understand what had happened. He had seen the ship tearing itself apart, moving over and under itself and reshaping itself like a gigantic piece of origami. He had gazed awestruck as the colors and textures of the ship had separated themselves out and rationalized themselves. He had sat in his room, arms clenched tightly around his body, watching as things like jeweled beetles tore themselves free of the floor and scuttled up the walls to the ceiling. Then the Stranger’s voice had called out, telling Edward to move back out into the corridor. He had found Miss Rose already waiting there; she was watching as black-and-white tiles spilled along the floor and down the walls. They had tumbled around and about them like lines of dominoes, and Edward had suddenly needed to go to the toilet, but all the doors had vanished.

Edward had stood there with Miss Rose, his bladder aching, for what seemed like ages, and then the Stranger had spoken again, telling them to go back to their rooms.

Edward had stood open-mouthed as he took in the changes. It was still his room, but different. As if he had been living in a room where the walls had been great scabs, now peeled away to show smooth healthy skin beneath. It was as if all the extra bits had been stripped away to leave the real room, all picked out in black and white.

He looked at his neatly made bed, a black cover stretched over it, his black desk with white ornaments on top, at the regular pattern of black-and-white lozenges on the walls, and then his aching bladder regained his attention and he went running into his new black-and-white bathroom. After that he had returned to his bed. He still lay there now, wondering if everyone else was okay. There was a knock on his door.

“Craig?” Edward called. “Is that you?”

He jumped off his bed and trotted across the new black wool carpet to see who was outside. His face fell as he saw the blue eyes and blond eyelashes of the man beyond the threshold.

“Oh, hello, Maurice,” he muttered.

“You’d better come back to the living area,” said Maurice, looking paler than usual. He had fastened his padded combat jacket up to the neck, even though it was as warm as ever on board the ship. Maurice turned on his heel and marched away down the new black-and-white corridor. Edward bent for a moment to run his hands across the beautifully soft wool of the black carpet and to breathe in its sweet lanolin scent, and then he straightened up and followed Maurice, a big smile spreading across his face. Everything smelled new and looked clean and freshly made. The black plastic bumpers around the doors were so shiny you could see yourself there inside them. The round white lights set in the ceiling shone with a pearly glow, and the walls were covered with the same pleasant pattern as those in Edward’s bedroom.

They passed the recreation room, black exercise machines glistening on the white floors, before shiny mirrors. Edward wanted to go in there and smear fingerprint marks onto the chrome handles; he wanted to be the first to run on the shiny black ribbon of the treadmill. He longed to explore the ship further, but Maurice was already walking into the main living area, and so he followed. Saskia was waiting in there, purple-black hair falling around her pale face, and Edward was hurt at the expression of disappointment that crossed her face when she saw him.

“That’s it,” Maurice said. “Miss Rose won’t leave her room. She says she is rearranging her things after the mess that was made of them in the separation. Apart from her, there’s just you, me, and Edward left on board.”

Saskia closed her eyes and put a hand to her head.

Edward moved his lips, working things out.

“Just us left?” he said. “Where’s Craig? Where’s my friend?”

Saskia wasn’t listening.

“What the fuck is happening here?” she said. “How are we supposed to go on without Donny and Armstrong?”

Maurice looked uncomfortable. He pulled his console from his pocket and started to fiddle with it. “I can operate the systems,” he said.

“You?” said Saskia. “I thought you were a combat man, like Armstrong.”

Maurice flushed red. “I trained in systems,” he said quietly. “Combat is just my hobby. I understand the FE software better than Donny does.”

Saskia gazed at him appraisingly, her dark eyes like slits. “Okay,” she said, “we’d better hope that you do. Because at the moment it’s just you and me.”

“And me,” said Edward. “What’s happened? Where is everybody else?”

Saskia looked at Maurice who gave a bitter laugh.

“Why don’t you tell him, Saskia? Meanwhile, I’ll try to figure my way through the mess that Donny made of our systems.”

Saskia held his gaze, her lips thin with annoyance. “You’d better be able to,” she said darkly, and then she turned to Edward and gave him a big beaming smile.

“Edward,” she said, “come over here.”

Feeling more nervous than ever, Edward followed her to the new chessboard-patterned table that stood near the kitchen area. Saskia could be pretty, Edward thought as he anxiously looked at her, with her big dark eyes and her wide mouth and her black hair that curved around her thin face; it was just that she never seemed to want to. She rarely smiled. She wore nice clothes, just like Joanne, but she seemed to wear them in a different way, as if they were just part of a uniform, something that had to be done. Joanne looked like a woman in her clothes: she had glared at Edward more than once for staring at her breasts or her bum. But Saskia, she just looked like someone wearing nice clothes. Edward felt confused. He wasn’t used to thinking thoughts like these.

“Edward,” said Saskia, taking one of his big hands in hers. “You know that the Stranger tricked us into a bad deal?”

Edward nodded, not quite sure if this was true or not. Hadn’t Michel said there was no such thing as a bad deal where the FE software was concerned?

Saskia was still smiling. She looked like a big doll, sort of pretty but hollow inside.

“Well, Edward, the last thing that the Stranger did was to set the ship to copy itself. You understand that? Yes? Self-replication happens all the time in the Earth Domain. Well, for some reason, one of the conditions of accepting FE software on board seems to be that the self-replication no longer happens when you want it to.”

“I know that,” said Edward.

“Of course you do,” said Saskia. “Well, somehow the Stranger managed to make our ship replicate. There are now two Eva Rye s. We are on one: you, me, Maurice and”—her smile froze a little—“Miss Rose. And it would appear that Joanne, Craig, Donny, Armstrong, and Michel are on the other one.”

“Oh,” said Edward. “And Donny’s kids?”

“Yes.”

Edward inhaled a deep shuddering breath. “So why can’t we go and dock with the other ship?”

Saskia gave him a very odd look. “Because, Edward, I didn’t realize that anyone on board this Eva Rye knew how to fly the ship until a few moments ago.” She glared across at Maurice, who ignored her and continued to tap away at his console.

“Oh,” said Edward again. “So what do we do now?”

“I don’t know,” said Saskia. “That’s why I want to ask you to do something important for me. Do you think you can do that?”

Edward nodded.

“Good,” beamed Saskia. “Good! Now, Maurice and I have to do a lot of talking. I want you to stay over here and not disturb us while we try to figure out what to do next. Do you think you can do that?”

“Saskia,” Edward replied in his deep voice, “I’m not a kid. I’m just not very clever.”

Saskia’s eyes widened slightly, as people’s eyes often did when Edward said this.

“I know that, Edward,” she said, regaining her poise. “I’ll tell you what, why don’t you make us all some tea? You’re good at that, aren’t you? You make nice tea.”

Edward thought about it for a moment and nodded. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll make the tea.”

“Good!” said Saskia. “That will help us think.”

At that the smile drained from her face and she rose from her chair to rejoin Maurice, who was sitting on one of the newly grown white leather sofas, his console on his lap.

“Well?” she snapped.

Maurice didn’t bother to look up from his console.

“No luck,” he said. “They’re already in Warp. I think they’re taking the Stranger on his way.”

In the kitchen, Edward slowly, carefully took down the teapot from the shelf. Ever so gently, so he could hear what Maurice and Saskia were saying. He didn’t need to keep that quiet. Saskia was shouting.

“Damn! Well, what about us?” She gave a hollow laugh. “I suppose we’ve just been discarded now the Stranger has got what he wants.”

“Mmm,” said Maurice. “It’s odd, that. I don’t think we’ve just been discarded. Don’t you even wonder how I know that the other ship is in Warp? The long-range senses are back online.”

“What?” said Saskia. “You’re telling me that they were fixed during the separation?”

Maurice bit his lip. “No. Not exactly fixed. More like improved. They are better now than they ever could have been before. It’s like that with the rest of the ship. Have you taken a look around? Haven’t you noticed? Everything is nicer than before. Feel this sofa, feel the carpets. Everything is softer, better quality; it’s not just like we’ve separated. I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like we’re playing a video game and our ship has just had an upgrade.”

Saskia sat down on the sofa opposite to Maurice’s. She tilted her head forward so that her hair covered her eyes.

“I never play video games,” she said.

“Oh, I do,” said Maurice.

“Good practice for combat, are they?”

Edward slowly spooned tea into the beautiful white teapot. He noticed Maurice was blushing as he explained. “Look, don’t you wonder what is going on here? Why did the Stranger have to separate the ships? Surely one Eva Rye would be enough to take him to wherever he was going?”

Saskia leaned back and sighed. “You’re right. Maybe there was more to the deal after all. Maybe we should have a little more faith in the FE software.”

She closed her eyes to think. Carefully, Edward poured boiling water into the pot, steam swirling about his hand.

“Saskia,” said Maurice urgently.

“What?” she said.

“I think you’d better look. It’s the Stranger. I’ll put him on the main viewing field.”

Edward put down the kettle and came forward. There was a shimmer in the air between the white sofas and another Eva Rye appeared there. It was not quite the old Eva Rye, just as their ship was no longer the old Eva Rye . The ship that floated in the middle of the room was still a rainbow of colors, only now there was some pattern to them. A glorious reproduction of the Mandelbrot set trailed along its teardrop hull, the squashed heart and wandering branches of the shape defined in heartbreakingly beautiful silver and rose.

“Oh, not the bloody Mandelbrot set again,” muttered Maurice. “We’ve wandered into a twentieth-century SF novel.”

Edward was leaning forward to get a better view. “It’s nice, but I think I like our ship better,” he breathed.

“Shhh,” hissed Saskia, waving a dismissive hand at him. “Maurice, zoom in on the front of the ship, between the two main lobes of the Mandelbrot set.”

“I was doing that already,” grumbled Maurice, sliding a finger along the surface of the console. The Eva Rye expanded, centering on the twisted cross of the Stranger, his four legs twisted downwards with tendrils spread out to grip the multicolored pattern of the hull.

“Hello there, Edward, Maurice, Miss Rose, Saskia!”

The Stranger twisted the four glassy lenses on its upper surface to face them as it spoke. Edward supposed Miss Rose must be watching this scene from her room.

“What’s going on?” asked Saskia. Edward thought she sounded annoyed at being mentioned last.

“Merely fulfilling the last part of our deal,” said the Stranger. “The Eva Rye was never going to work with the mix of people you had on board. I’ve merely rationalized your systems.”

Saskia was staring at Edward. Her lips were narrowing.

Maurice spoke up. “Could we speak to the others?” he asked quickly.

“You can do whatever you like,” said the Stranger. “Here, allow me to help you.”

The viewing field split in two, the lower area opening up to show the living area on the other Eva Rye . Joanne stood on deep red carpet, a look of immense satisfaction on her face. She was wearing a tailored green suit that complemented her red hair. It also made her breasts stand out more, Edward noticed.

“Hello there, everybody,” she said. “Gosh, I like the black-and-white theme! What do you think of our ship?”

“It’s very nice,” said Saskia through gritted teeth, taking in the rich golds and reds of the floor and furnishings of the other living area. “And how are you, Captain ?”

Joanne gave a little smile.

“Just call me Joanne,” she said. “We’re all fine. We’re taking the Stranger to his destination, then we’re going to follow a lead he sold us. Isn’t that right, Michel?”

Michel was sitting on a red-and-gold sofa, tapping at a console and looking more relaxed than he had seemed in weeks.

“That’s right,” he said. He gave a sudden gulp of laughter. “Hey, I’ve just realized. We’ve got all your colors! You’ve got all of our black and white. The Stranger has a sense of humor.”

“Obviously,” said Maurice tightly.

“Hello, Craig!” called Edward, walking up to the viewing field with the teapot in his hand.

“Careful, Edward,” said Craig warningly. “Don’t spill that tea!”

“Are you coming back?” asked Edward.

Craig looked guilty. “I don’t think we can at the moment. But I’m sure we’ll meet up again sometime.”

“Oh.” Edward felt a heavy weight settle in his stomach. He looked at the floor through blurry eyes.

“What do you mean, you don’t think you can?” Maurice called out. He was fiddling with his console, checking local space. “You’ve certainly wasted no time in putting some distance between our two ships. Are you abandoning us?”

Joanne came forward again, that faintly smug smile still playing on her lips, even as she tried to look sympathetic.

“It’s not like that, Maurice. Check the FE contract. We’re not one crew anymore, we’re two. Check the manifest net. You haven’t done too badly out of the deal. You got most of the cargo; take a look in the holds.”

“Fuck the cargo,” Saskia called out. “You’re running out on us.”

“I don’t think it works that way,” said Joanne. “Look, I’m sorry. We’ve got a contract to take the Stranger to where he wants to go. After that there’s nothing to stop us meeting again, is there?”

There was silence inside the lounges of both ships. Edward twisted his fingers around one another, uncertain of what to say. It was Craig who spoke up first.

“Saskia,” he called, “look after Edward. You too, Maurice.”

“We will,” replied Maurice dismissively.

Craig gazed at him coldly. “You’d better.”

“Hey, Maurice!” Armstrong was calling from his usual place at the table, still rubbing up his panga. Maurice merely gave him a wave of the hand. The scene on board the other ship suddenly shrank and the Stranger took its place.

“Now,” it said, “I’m sorry to butt in like this, but you will have plenty of time to talk later on. I just wanted to straighten a few things out.”

“Like what?” said Saskia.

“Like making sure that I really deliver on the last part of our deal. I don’t want the FE software dropping out on me. It may be nearly obsolete, but I still use it occasionally.”

“Yeah,” said Maurice, brightening up suddenly. “You mentioned other exchange mechanisms before…”

“I will sell you information about those, if you are still interested,” said the Stranger. “But first let’s sort out your systems. Maurice, I’m pleased to see you operating the ship. You should have been doing that from the start. If you hadn’t spent all your time sucking up to Armstrong…”

“I wasn’t sucking up. He was just a good friend.”

“Whatever. I have fulfilled my obligation to you. Saskia, I see that you are acting directly. That is good, you have taken my advice. Here is the last part: you should not be commander of the ship.”

Saskia’s eyes narrowed. “Then who?” she asked. “Miss Rose?”

The Stranger laughed. “I have already spoken to Miss Rose. Her role is her own business.”

Saskia frowned. “Well, who else?” Her jaw dropped. “Not Edward!”

“That’s my advice, take it or leave it. So, I have fulfilled all my obligations. Now I should say good-bye.”

Him? Commander of the Eva Rye ? Edward was too scared by what the Stranger had just said to think about Saskia’s reaction. She was nearly choking with anger.

“Say good-bye! Is that it? You have ripped the ship in two and left me with…”

… with this crew of failures, thought Edward. He didn’t care. She was right. Him, a commander?

Still, Saskia managed to stop herself saying the words just in time. She breathed deeply and shook her head. “What should we do next?”

“Go on trading, of course,” said the Stranger. “That’s what it means to adopt FE software, isn’t it?”

An icy stillness took hold of Saskia. Edward tiptoed back to the kitchen area and safety.

“Fine,” said Saskia at last. “Okay, fine.” She forced a smile to her lips. “Well, thank you, Stranger, for doing business with us. I look forward to meeting you again.”

“Hold on,” said the Stranger. “I might be able to put some business your way. Would you be interested, Edward?”

“Would I be interested?” said Edward, licking his lips. The teapot felt hot and heavy in his hands. In the viewing field, the Stranger had twisted four glassy lenses in his direction.

“I think I should make the decisions here, don’t you, Edward?” Saskia’s voice was cold and thin. She had stood up now to stare at the Stranger.

“Do you want her to?” asked the Stranger gently. Edward nodded with relief.

“Okay, Saskia,” said the Stranger. “Are you interested?”

“What about me?” said Maurice.

“You can advise,” snapped Saskia. “Go on, Stranger.”

The Stranger didn’t answer straight away. When he did, there was a note of amusement in its voice.

“Well, I don’t know if you will already be too late, so for that reason I will offer this information to you free of charge. About four weeks ago, before your timely rescue, and while I believed I was still floating towards my doom, I picked up a signal requesting a trade. Someone wants to be transported to Earth.”

“To Earth?” said Saskia and Maurice, at the same time.

“Why would anyone want to go there?” said Maurice. “It’s swamped with Dark Plants. If they don’t wipe your mind, they tie you up in BVBs and strangle you. They say the Watcher is losing its grip completely.”

Edward realized he was holding his breath. What did he know about Dark Plants? Only that you mustn’t look at them; it made them grow faster. Only that they spread BVBs: unbreakable nooses that irresistibly tightened around anything within range. Only that everyone was frightened of them. They originated from the edge of the galaxy, that’s what they said. The Watcher had found them out there and tried to run away from them, but somehow they had followed it home, and now they had begun to grow on Earth. Why on earth would anyone want to go to Earth?

“I don’t know why this person wants to go to Earth,” said the Stranger. “All I know is a request was made for trade. Perhaps you could follow it up? If there is significant risk involved, that will naturally weigh in your favor with the FE software.”

“Hold on,” said Saskia suspiciously. “If you picked up their signal, why didn’t you ask them to save you?”

“That is my own business,” said the Stranger. “Would you like me to send you the location of the signal?”

Saskia said nothing. She looked at Maurice. “What do you think?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Stranger, is it safe, do you think?”

The Stranger gave a loud laugh. “You ask the most expensive question of all! You couldn’t afford to pay me for that answer, even if I could give it!” He gave a sigh. “But I think it is a fair job. You would do well to at least investigate it.”

Saskia and Maurice held each other’s gaze. In the kitchen, Edward found his voice.

“I think we should go,” he said. “I think we should trust the Stranger.”

Saskia turned to him, but for once, her face wasn’t angry. She just looked tired.

“You think we should trust him. Very well. Maurice, what do you think?”

Maurice shrugged. “What else are we going to do?” he asked.

Saskia looked down at the soft black carpet on the floor.

“Okay, Stranger. You did a nice job on the ship, if nothing else, and I’m sorry for not trusting you. Yes, please, we’d like to have a look at the job.”

“I’ve just sent the details to Maurice,” said the Stranger. “Well, until we meet again!”

“Good-bye,” said Saskia in an empty voice.

The viewing field shrank to nothing.

“Hello, Eva Rye . This is the Free Enterprise. Glad to hear from you.”

Saskia looked at the ship that now floated in the viewing field. It didn’t look right.

“Is that an alien ship?” asked Edward.

“There are no such things as aliens,” said Maurice, “you must know that. Those are only stories.”

“What about the Stranger?”

“The Stranger was a robot. He was built in that shape in order to do his job properly.”

“Built by aliens,” said Edward stubbornly.

Maurice was irritable. He was missing Armstrong, Edward guessed. He had changed out of his padded combat jacket and into a grey T-shirt and long grey pants. He gave Edward a long stare.

“I told you, there are no aliens. Besides, look at those markings on the side. They’re written in English.”

“Be quiet, you two,” said Saskia. “I need to speak to them.”

It was a very odd-looking ship, though. Edward didn’t quite have the capacity to articulate what he was feeling, which was this: at least the Stranger looked as if it had some Earth connection, bearing, as it did, a passing resemblance to a starfish. Its shape touched human norms at some point in the evolutionary process. This ship had no discernible form whatsoever; it was something less than a collection of shapes. Edward had absolutely nothing to refer to, to hang a pattern on it. There were bundles of wires and cables snaking through the structure, but the ship could not even be described as looking like a plate of spaghetti. Nor did it look like a junk heap. It was utterly alien, beyond human experience. Except for the fact that it had DIANA written on it in various places, in huge yellow letters. Saskia had been staring at the floor, collecting her thoughts. She was dressed in a neat black suit with a white blouse and matching white button earrings. Her hair was shiny and neatly brushed and, Edward noted, pinned up on top of her head in a bun. She looked every bit the part of the voice of the Eva Rye .

“Hello, Free Enterprise . My name is Saskia. I understand that you wish to trade.”

“I do. How do you wish to proceed?”

“Are you FE enabled?” Saskia shot a sidelong glance at Maurice sitting on the sofa, fingers poised over his console.

“I certainly am,” said the Free Enterprise . “Let’s not waste each other’s time. Would you be willing to take a passenger to Earth?”

“I don’t know,” said Saskia. “Is that all that is required?”

“Yes. Simply drop this person off as close as is safely possible to their destination, and then the contract is complete.”

“Mmm. Why would anybody want to go to Earth?”

“I could add that information into the price, but why not just ask her when she boards your ship? I’m sure she would be happy to tell you.”

“So the passenger is a she?”

Edward opened the fridge door and smiled when he saw that the apple juice container was full. Ever since the Eva Rye had separated, the container never seemed to run out. He poured three glasses. One each for himself, Maurice, and Saskia.

Maurice whispered something to Saskia.

“That’s a good point,” she murmured. “ Free Enterprise, what if we cannot actually reach Earth? I heard that the Watcher is refusing to allow anyone past Jupiter’s orbit.”

“As I said, as close as is safely possible. I will trust the FE software to adjudicate.” There was a little chuckle. “I see that you are unfamiliar with the implications of FE. I take it you are relatively new at this game? Such lack of trust is typical.”

Saskia rolled her eyes. “It’s a cold universe out there, Free Enterprise .”

Edward pushed a cold glass of apple juice into her hand.

“Why, thank you, Edward,” she said.

He hesitated, not wanting to interrupt.

“Yes, Edward?” she said.

“Saskia, why can’t we see who you are speaking to? They can see us, can’t they?”

“Because…” Saskia frowned. “Actually, that’s a good point. Why can’t we see you?”

There was another chuckle.

“You can see me. I’m the ship. I am the Free Enterprise. ”

“You mean you’re an AI?” said Maurice, and Saskia glared at him, angry at being interrupted. He didn’t seem to notice. His character seemed to have changed with his new outfit. He looked so much more relaxed in his greys.

The Free Enterprise sounded amused as it replied, “Yes, I am an AI.”

“But I thought AIs couldn’t function where FE is being used?” Maurice sounded puzzled.

“No, that’s not true,” said the Free Enterprise, “although a lot of people make that mistake, particularly in the early days of adoption. I’m not trying to be rude, but I think it’s fair to say that you obviously haven’t grasped the full implications of what you’ve signed up to. Now, are we going to do a deal?”

Maurice gave a shrug.

Edward was nodding his head vigorously.

“Hold on,” said Saskia. “You haven’t told us what you are offering us yet.”

“I can’t,” said the Free Enterprise. “If I were to tell you, and you were to refuse the trade, you would have gained valuable information from me for nothing. You must be prepared to trust FE. Now, are we going to trade?”

Edward didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. They must have intended upon doing the deal, else why waste fuel flying out here to make contact? Certainly, Earth was dangerous, but they didn’t have to go that close, did they?

Saskia appeared to reach a decision.

“Okay,” she said, “we’ll put it to the vote. Maurice?”

“You’re the boss.” Maurice shrugged. He gave a thin smile. “I’m happy to go with you.”

“Fine. Edward?”

Edward nodded his head vigorously.

“Yes. I’d like to go to Earth. Are you going to ask Miss Rose?”

Miss Rose wasn’t there. She still spent most of the time shut up in her room, rearranging her things, only making occasional trips out to eat her meals and steal small items from around the ship.

“I would if she were here,” said Saskia briskly. “Okay then,” she raised her glass of apple juice, as if in a toast, “we trade. Are you ready to interface?”

“Yes,” replied Maurice and the Free Enterprise simultaneously.

“Then let’s go.”

“Uploading circumstances,” said Maurice. “What the hell?” He gazed at his console, mouth hanging open.

“What’s the matter?” asked Saskia, squinting to see what was scrolling across his screen.

“That’s never happened before,” said Maurice. “I’m going to run a check.”

“What?” asked Saskia. “Speak to me! What’s never happened before?”

“The trade—it’s completed already. I don’t understand it! Free Enterprise, are you getting the same?”

“I must admit, it does seem very unusual.” The other ship sounded genuinely puzzled. “Still, occasionally circumstances are such that two trading partners find themselves almost perfectly matched.” There was a fluttering noise. “Even so, I have never heard of an Exchange taking place quite so quickly.”

Saskia was visibly fretting. Edward took the glass of apple juice from her hand and placed it on the low coffee table nearby.

“I’ve run the check,” said Maurice. “It’s a Fair Exchange.”

“I concur,” said the Free Enterprise. “Very well, I am dispatching your passenger now. She should arrive with you in four minutes.”

A shuttle detached itself from the image of the spaceship that floated in the middle of the living area.

“It will have to go into the large hold,” said Maurice, gazing at a dimension reading. “There should be plenty of room, even with the venumbs in there. I’ll open the hatch now.”

“You may keep the shuttle,” said the Free Enterprise . “It is part of the Exchange. As to the rest, my price includes disclosure of the information that I have just downloaded to your ship. I will give you a quick summary as your passenger approaches. Have you heard of DIANA?”

Maurice shook his head.

“I have,” said Saskia. “They were one of the old commercial organizations. They controlled quite a bit of human-occupied space until the Watcher and the Environment Agency took over the running of human affairs.”

“A fair summary,” said the Free Enterprise . The pod in the viewing field was growing larger. The Eva Rye slid into view, looking like a Harlequin’s teardrop, its opening hangar door masquerading as one of the dark checks, not immediately apparent. The Free Enterprise continued.

“Yes, a fair summary. However, it is not true to speak of DIANA in the past tense. I myself still work for DIANA, as do many others.”

“How can that be?” asked Saskia. “The Watcher made it its business to infiltrate all those large organizations—and then to destroy them. The age of large-scale capitalism is past.”

“Some of us managed to escape the Watcher’s gaze. The first Warp Ships were built by the commercial organizations before the Watcher had completely infiltrated them. No one was surprised when some of those experimental ships failed to return home. Some of them, no doubt, malfunctioned. Others, such as my own manufacturers, chose to stay hidden in space.”

Comprehension dawned on Maurice’s face.

“That explains your unusual appearance,” he said. “The first Warp Ships were robots, they had no direct connection with human beings. Your development was completely independent of human needs or intervention.”

“Very astute,” said the Free Enterprise . “As to the rest of your payment: now that the Watcher’s control is waning, the need for us to remain in hiding is lessening. I have relayed the coordinates of the Warp Ship Bailero to your console. It is the experimental ship that gave rise to me and my kind. FE

suggests it is of great value to you, and our contract permits you to first collect the ship before taking the passenger to Earth.”

Saskia and Maurice were smiling. For the first time, it seemed they had made a satisfactory trade. Even Edward understood that: an old ship, that had to be worth something?

“May I say, it has been a pleasure doing business with you!” said Saskia, unable to keep the delight from her voice.

“And I with you,” replied the Free Enterprise . “And now, I note the shuttle is entering your ship. Perhaps we will meet again. Until then, good-bye!”

And at that there was a complex unfolding in the viewing field, and the Free Enterprise changed shape into something else equally indescribable, before shimmering out of view. Maurice stood up, beaming.

“We’d better get to the large hold to meet our passenger. She might be disturbed by the venumbs in there.”

“I’ll come, too,” said Edward.

Saskia was clearly in a good mood. “Yes, that would be nice, Edward.” She was smiling. “I know what you mean about the venumbs, Maurice. She might think she’s being attacked by dinosaurs!”

They left the living area in good spirits and marched past the conference room. Edward looked inside as they walked by. Gone was the mismatched, eclectic jumble. Everything in there now matched: big comfortable white leather chairs set out around a shiny black oval table. They came to the twisted knot of the junction where five corridors met. Even after the upgrade to the smart new Eva Rye, this junction still looked odd to Edward. It was from here that you accessed the big and little holds, and the geometry of the ship had been twisted about to accommodate their shapes. You had to step around a protruding corner of the large hold to take the path that led to the cargo areas, and you felt the gravity change direction as you did so, felt an odd tug in the stomach. Edward didn’t like that. Still, he bravely stepped forward, felt the open mouths of the five corridors looking at him as he hung for a moment in space, and then set off with the others down the black-carpeted path to the large hold’s entrance. It was still a long walk.

They met their new passenger on the way; she was following the map patterns set on the walls, heading back to the living space.

Edward guessed that she was older than Saskia. The woman looked similar, with shoulder-length black hair and a very pale face, but there was a difference in her stance, an air of quiet confidence. As they drew closer, Edward realized she was wearing white makeup on her hands as well as her face. Her lips and fingernails were colored in black, to match her simple black passive suit. Beaming, Saskia stepped forward and held out a hand.

“Welcome aboard the Eva Rye, ” she said. “My name is Saskia. This is Maurice, my systems man. This is Edward.”

The woman shook their hands absently. “The Eva Rye ?” she said, smiling faintly. “I suppose it would be. I’m sorry about this. I am very sorry about this.”

The expression drained from Saskia’s face. “Sorry for what?”

“Sorry for involving you in all this.”

“Look, I’m sure things aren’t that bad,” said Maurice.

“Yes,” agreed Saskia. “Come back to the living area and you can explain what’s going on. What’s your name?”

The woman gave another faint smile. “My name is Judy,” she said. “But you might as well call me Jonah.”

interlude: 2247

AIs have a different way of looking at the world.

The Watcher and Chris stood on a beach, on either side of a flat stream of water that had cut a meandering channel through the sand. Sand blew in thin yellow ribbons from the grass bound dunes that loomed behind them; the flat sea threw little waves onto the shore below them.

“What do you hope to achieve, Chris?” asked the Watcher.

The water was tainted; a black tendril of ink ran down the stream at their feet, thickening. Chris dipped a hand in the running water, stirring the ink into a grey cloud.

“I don’t know,” said Chris. “Just seeing what happens.”

Or to look at it another way…

The Watcher didn’t invent MTPH. It was a meme that had evolved at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It was a drug that had found favor with a significant proportion of the population, a drug whose effects could be engineered by those with the necessary know-how. The Watcher had that know-how.

In its original state MTPH caused hallucinations. Phantom personalities arose in the user’s mind. Personalities that appeared to have minds of their own. Users would say they did have minds of their own. You had to be a user to understand.

The Watcher had uses for MTPH.

The Watcher planned a world of fairness and tolerance. It wanted a world where everyone could achieve their full potential. It saw MTPH as a means to achieve this. With a few subtle twists, MTPH became a drug that helped users to experience other people’s points of view. Administered through Social Care, a group of humans trained in the use of MTPH and the care and protection of clients, the drug became a delicate instrument, wielded in the manner of a surgeon’s scalpel, a way of subtly restoring the balance when things weren’t running as they should. It wasn’t until later, under the constant onslaught of the Dark Seeds brought about by Chris, that the Watcher dispensed with subtlety. The human population of Earth needed to understand one another completely. They needed to understand what was right. It was then the Watcher sent MTPH flooding Earth, tainting the water and the air and the food.

Or to look at it another way…

A clear stream of water flooded down the beach. And now Chris had corrupted it. But not for long.

The Watcher waved a hand and the water ran clear again.

On the opposite side of the stream Chris gave a shrug.

“I will always be your superior. I made you,” said the Watcher. “I don’t know why you continue with these futile attacks.”

“Just seeing what happens,” said Chris.

judy 1: 2252

Judy had wonderedwhat it would be like to be away from the sterile corridors of the Free Enterprise and back amongst humans again. Now she knew.

Cold and bleak and utterly hopeless.

There was a slightly raised fleshy cross growing on her back: the Free Enterprise had done something to her to make it appear. She felt it now, rubbing against the material of her passive suit. It ran across her shoulders and down her spine, the top vertical running up the nape of her neck. There was something living inside there, she knew. It had no presence, and yet it could experience everything that she did, and it spoke to her of what they both saw.

Judy had worked for Social Care. She had taken the drug MTPH to boost her ability to empathize with others. The Free Enterprise, however, had replaced that faculty with something far more cold and clinical. The shifting webs of emotions that she would once have discerned in the three humans now standing before her were gone. Instead, she saw nothing more than the ghostly glow of the mechanism that lived in their heads. She couldn’t read their thoughts; no, what she saw was at a lower level than that. She was observing the mechanism that produced thought.

Judy pushed her despair down deep. So this was her reentry to the world of humanity. It all seemed so much less than she remembered.

The woman who had introduced herself as Saskia was gazing at Judy from under a fringe of purple-black hair. She spoke hesitantly.

“Well, Judy or Jonah or whatever you want to be called, I’m sure we can make you comfortable here. There are plenty of spare rooms on board the Eva Rye …”

“I’m sure there are.” Judy gave a bitter laugh. “I’m sure if you look there will be one made just to my liking, with lacquered furniture and tatami matting and white paper screens for doors.”

The smaller of the two men was checking his console, the pale ghost of his mind moving in patterns as he processed what he saw there. It was all so ordered, so objective. Where was the emotion? Where had it gone?

“She’s right,” he said. “That’s Donny’s old room. It’s decorated just like she said, some sort of Japanese style from the last decade.” He suddenly gave a smile. “I’m Maurice.”

Judy’s mind read the smile, but all the warmth that it transmitted was diluted by the meta-intelligence that she carried in the cross on her back. A smile is just a signal, it was saying, just another way of transmitting information.

She had to speak, so she forced herself to smile back. It was hard.

“I told you,” she said. “Someone is choosing a path for me. His name is Chris. He doesn’t care that I don’t want to go back to Earth.”

Saskia frowned. She looked upset, but all Judy could see was the ghost of her thoughts assigning reactions. Saskia’s voice was tentative, apologetic.

“But we thought you wanted to go to Earth. We were told that the Free Enterprise had a passenger. That’s right, isn’t it, Maurice?”

Maurice nodded, but Judy cut across his answer. “A passenger, maybe, but not a willing one.”

The tall black man who stood in the middle of the group was moved to speak. There was a difference to his mind, Judy noticed: a simplicity and a complexity that tangled over each other to make the movement of his thoughts difficult to follow.

“We don’t have to take her, do we?” he said to Saskia. He turned. “Where do you want to go, Judy?”

“It’s not that easy, Edward,” said Saskia firmly. “We used the FE software to agree to this trade, remember. We can’t go back on it.”

“You wouldn’t be able to anyway,” said Judy, gazing oddly at Edward. She recognized him for what he was, but it was strange. In the past she had felt pity for people like him, now she felt…nothing. It was all just part of the mechanism. Some were bright, and some were not. He was looking at her with a tender expression. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” she added dryly. “Feel sorry for yourselves for being dragged into this without your permission.”

The concern that this statement generated was visible in the crew’s minds. To the meta-intelligence, it was just another process to be measured. Judy continued.

“Now, would it be possible to have something to eat? I haven’t had real food for five weeks. The Free Enterprise wasn’t equipped for humans. It constructed everything from the ground up.” She grimaced at the memory.

“What were you doing on board that ship?” asked Maurice.

Judy shivered at the question.

Saskia must have noticed it. “I think there will be time for Judy’s story later, Maurice,” she said mildly. Any thoughts that Judy might have had that Saskia was sympathetic were quickly dashed when she continued—“For the moment, Judy, I want to know what you mean, saying that we’ve been dragged into this. We operate of our own free will. That’s the point of FE software: haven’t you heard of it?”

Judy inclined her head slightly. “A little, yes. But I’m sorry, Saskia, someone is playing games with you. This ship, the decor—someone is sending me messages.”

She looked around the freshly made corridor with its black carpet, the black-and-white tiled pattern on the walls and the pearly balls of light set in the ceiling that receded in a line into the distance.

“You’re a black-and-white woman,” Saskia noted astutely. “And our ship has only just adopted this color scheme.”

“And then there is the name,” said Judy.

“Eva Rye?” said Saskia. “But she’s just a story. Anyway, she would have died nearly two hundred years ago.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” replied Judy, and the edge of bitterness in her voice was absorbed by the soft comfort of the corridor.

“You’ve got something on your neck,” said Edward suddenly.

“I know,” said Judy. “The Free Enterprise put it there. Please don’t mention it again.”

Edward looked crestfallen, but at that moment Judy didn’t care.

“Would it be so bad to go to Earth?” asked Saskia hopefully. “I know you hear stories, but—”

“It’s worse than you can possibly imagine,” Judy replied. “Imagine everyone acting completely selflessly. Each person only doing what is best for their fellow humans.”

“That sounds quite nice to me,” Maurice said.

“Oh, it’s not,” Judy said. “Trust me, it’s not.”

“Do the Dark Seeds really exist?” Saskia asked. “I wondered if maybe they were just a story.”

“They exist. I’ve seen them.”

“Oh.”

“Hold on,” Maurice said, fiddling with his console again, “you said you haven’t had real food for five weeks. When were you taken on board the Free Enterprise ?”

“On the thirty-first of July.”

Maurice and Saskia looked at each other.

“This ship was born on the first of August.”

“Like I said, call me Jonah. Someone is doing whatever it takes to get me to Earth, and they don’t give a damn about the consequences of that for anyone else.”

Saskia spoke, not quite concealing her nervousness. “Judy, what are you doing here?”

Judy lay sobbing in bed. She was forty-one years old and a virgin, but that wasn’t why she was crying.

—You spend all your days wearing your face like a mask. You should cry more often, Judy.

“Oh, go away and leave me alone. You’re not even real.”

—Don’t take it out on me, Judy. Come on, what is the matter? What did you see that has you so upset?

Judy was hugging her knees, her whole body shaking as she cried.

“That little girl…that ugly little girl…”

Judy sat on a dining chair in the Eva Rye ’s living area. Edward was in the small kitchen, preparing a meal with a clack of pans and a bubbling of water. Saskia and Maurice sat opposite, looking rumpled and confused within the clean newness of the ship. Judy was doing what she had always done, separating her emotions from her memories. She was very good at it. It was only recently that she had begun to suspect that this wasn’t necessarily always something to be proud of.

“Five weeks ago I was on board the Deborah, traveling to Quantick. It’s a settled world at the far end of the former Enemy Domain. About as far from Earth as you can get.”

Judy sipped at her water, a picture of composure.

“That ugly little girl…”

Judy couldn’t stop crying. There remained that part of her that was always cool and objective; it stood to one side within her consciousness, examining the torrid waterfall of her passions, trying to pinpoint the source of this outburst. She hadn’t cried so violently even when her sisters had died; she hadn’t been so badly shaken when Frances, her best friend, had been nearly destroyed. What was it about the scene in the social room that had upset her so? Such a tiny matter. The girl was an ugly little thing, painfully thin with a deformed face, one eye lower than the other. Her protruding mouth was filled with crooked, irregular teeth. She clung tightly to her mother’s hand as she entered the room, trying to fade into the background, hoping not to be seen by the other occupants, lost in their games of Chess and Starquest, Dominions and Bridge. Judy had been sitting in the corner, having politely turned down an invitation to join a game of poker. Where was the sport in playing a game when she knew the thoughts and feelings of her opponents better than they did themselves? She had watched as the little girl was led across the room to an Aeon table. The two people already seated there passed a set of colored counters across to the new players. Nervously, the little girl accepted them. She sat down, clutching the large counters against her pigeon chest.

—At least she could walk, Judy. She could join in a game of Aeon. We’ve seen far worse, haven’t we? People at the end of life. People crippled by disease. And we’ve asked, why can’t the Watcher cure them? Come on, Judy, this girl wasn’t so badly off. Her brother just didn’t understand. Judy rolled herself up into a sitting position on the bed. “That’s not why I’m so upset, Jesse,” she sobbed. The shadowy figure that stood in her room tried to place an arm around her shoulder. She wriggled it off angrily.

—There are worse things than being ugly, Judy.

“It’s not that…”

But she couldn’t explain further because she was overtaken by another bout of racking sobs. She was being ridiculous.

The mother and girl had joined in the game. The two existing players were cracking jokes, teasing the daughter, making her smile. Judy had herself begun a conversation game with a husband and wife who were trying to construct an idea path from Kant to the resurrected fugue form. They were skillful players and Judy had needed to keep her wits about her in order to participate, and yet her attention was constantly drawn across to the four Aeon players, and the ugly little girl. Judy could feel something building up inside her, something unrecognizable and edged with danger.

“What is it, Jesse?” she had whispered to her shadowy brother, but he had made no reply at the time, merely frowned and tilted his head questioningly, not understanding her problem. Jesse sat by her bed now, rubbing his insubstantial hand across her shoulders. Still, she couldn’t stop crying. The moment was approaching again…

It was the end of the evening, and Judy’s conversation game had finished. Her partners shook her hand and headed off to bed. Judy had stood up and stretched, and yet still that sense of danger was bubbling up inside her. The Aeon game was ending. The mother and daughter were in the lead, and Judy caught the warm edge of emotion from the mother as she smiled across at the other two players, who were letting the little girl win. There was a bubble of kindness centered on that table that made Judy feel painfully happy inside.

And then it happened. The little girl, the ugly, nervous, buck-toothed little girl, had turned to look up at her mother and had given her such a smile of delight that, to Judy and her hyperaware emotional sense, it felt almost like the collapse of a small star. Such a feeling of warmth and kindness and contentedness and belonging flowing between the pair, two faces turned towards each other alight with something so essentially human.

And not knowing why, Judy had felt something dissolve inside herself and she had begun to stumble off through the corridors of the ship towards her room.

She had undressed and lain down in bed and drifted off into an agitated sleep where she had dreamt, as she did so often, of the hand reaching down from above to cover her face…. She had woken up crying. And she still didn’t know why.

On board the Eva Rye, the only sound was the clink of the knife on glass as Edward chopped potatoes. Judy’s gaze was lost in the shiny black depths of the dining table.

“I don’t understand,” said Edward.

“Shhh.” Edward flinched as both Maurice and Saskia turned to hiss at him.

“But I don’t. Who is Jesse? Why wasn’t he really there?”

“Judy works for Social Care,” Maurice said brusquely. “You know what that means, Edward? She takes MTPH to help her feel other people’s emotions. Sometimes that drug causes phantom personalities to arise in the mind. Jesse isn’t really there. He doesn’t really exist.”

“Oh,” said Edward.

Edward still didn’t understand, but Maurice was already moving on. “Well, Judy?” he said, impatiently.

“I’m sorry,” said Judy. “I was just thinking about something.” She closed her eyes. “I suppose I should start from when I woke up in my cabin.”

—Judy. Something’s wrong.

“I know, I can’t help it.”

—No, I mean with the ship.

Jesse was a shadowy shape at the edge of her consciousness. She could never quite make out his appearance. Sometimes he seemed far away, a man viewed at a distance; sometimes he was nothing but a child. Like Maurice had said, he was the phantom residue of the drug that she had once taken in her work as a Social Care operative, a construct of her imagination; he lived out his own life in time slices snatched from her brain and senses. He was stalking her cabin now, pressing his hands against the terra-cotta walls.

“I can’t feel any vibration,” he said. “I think the engines have stopped.”

Judy rose from her bed. She wiped the back of her hand across her face, which was still puffy from crying, and then pressed it against the wall. Despite appearances to the contrary, Jesse had no existence outside of her mind. For him to think the engines had stopped, Judy must have sensed the cessation of vibration for herself, and then Jesse would have acted out a scenario to illustrate this. Nonetheless…

“You’re right,” she murmured, “the engines have stopped. But we were Warping. I didn’t notice our reinsertion into flat space….”

—We didn’t reinsert, replied Jesse.

Judy raised her voice. “Ship. What’s going on?”

Jesse tilted his shadowy head when no reply came.

“Ship! Speak to me!”

Judy dived across the bed and snatched the loose rope belt that was the form currently assumed by her console. She ran her fingers along the chameleon device, raised it to her lips and called out again.

“Ship, I think there is a fault with the senses in my cabin.”

The console was dead. Jesse had pressed his ear to the wall again.

—Now I’m worried.

Judy pressed her hands together and concentrated. It was twelve years since she had given up working for Social Care, but the training was ingrained. In circumstances such as these she would automatically calm herself, center herself.

—I can hear something outside. I think someone is screaming.

“Let me dress.”

Quickly, she pulled on her black passive suit, the material tightening around her. A pot of white makeup sat by her bed and she dipped the first finger of each hand into it, touched them to her face. A white tide covered her skin as she breathed deeply.

—I think I know what is going on, said Jesse.

“Don’t say it! Do not say it!”

—Shit. Look on the bed.

Judy did so, and saw humanity’s last nightmare lying there.

Three little black cubes, each the size of the first joint of her finger, sat in the middle of the twisted sheets. Dark Seeds.

Something close to panic poured through the corridors; it drained from the rooms into the social areas, a hysterical babble of voices mixed with the half-comprehending cries of children. Many of the passengers had come from Earth, but that would have been before the dark tide had risen to its current extent. The vast majority of people would have boarded the Deborah without ever coming face-to-face with the fascinating emptiness that could grow from the Dark Seeds. Judy took a deep breath. Dark Seeds. Don’t look at them. No matter how much they call to you, don’t observe them in any way: touch, sound, taste. Don’t observe them, or they will begin to grow. And then come the Black Velvet Bands…

Judy pushed open the door of her cabin and stepped into the corridor beyond. Somebody called out to her.

Judy…

“We’re too late,” said Judy tonelessly. “I can hear them calling me already.”

—I can’t hear anything, said Jesse after a pause. —Odd, that. Are you going to kill the other passengers?

“In the end, yes. What else can I do?”

She felt that Jesse had tempted fate with his question, because just at that moment the ugly little girl came running down the corridor, shaking with terror over something that hadn’t been explained to her properly. She saw Judy and ran towards her, snot streaming from her nose.

“Help me!” she called. Judy took her hand weakly.

“I’ll help you,” she whispered.

“You were going to kill her?” said Saskia.

“I did kill her,” said Judy.

The Deborah had been an evolving thing, the fabric of the hull and engines and furnishings constantly changing as the vessel made its journey, always seeking out the optimum form for a spaceship. Now it was dead. As the first Dark Seeds had flickered across its senses, the ship’s AIs would have begun to look away, desperate to avoid gazing into the endlessly fascinating spaces that lay inside them.

Nonsentient nullification routines would have cut in, in an attempt to neutralize the threat, but if the flux of Dark Seeds through this area of space had been too great, then the AIs would have not been able to avoid seeing them. They would have no choice but to shut themselves down. There could be no better indication of the cessation of AI activity than the unchanging nature of the floor and walls of the corridor along which Judy now ran, jerking the ugly child along by the hand. The patterns in the carpets no longer moved to soothe her passage or indicate where to go. The walls were frozen in unsightly lumps, caught halfway in changing from one form to another. Judy turned a corner and a frozen rain of black cubes confronted her. For a moment they appeared to hang in the air, fixed in position as their quantum paths through the universe were interrupted by observation; now they began to fall, pitter-pattering to the floor and vanishing as they left her awareness. The little girl froze, gazing at one of the little black cubes that lay on the floor, a thread of dark light already emerging from its base. Judy clapped a hand over the child’s eyes and dragged her backwards.

“Don’t look at them!” she called. “Never look at them.”

They began to run back the way they had come, Jesse in the lead. He suddenly hesitated.

—Group of people coming this way. Fifteen or twenty. I think we’re trapped.

“Of course we’re trapped,” snapped Judy. “We’re on a dead spaceship drifting in Warp. Where can we go?”

The little girl looked up at her.

“Who are you speaking to?” she said, wiping at her pale face with a shaking hand.

“My imaginary friend,” said Judy.

“Are you Social Care?” asked the little girl, her eyes filling with hope.

“Yes,” lied Judy. Okay, half a lie: she used to be, until her sisters were killed.

“Right,” said the little girl. Judy was touched to see that she wasn’t shaking so much now. Poor little thing. The girl’s misplaced trust would be her only comfort in the next few hours.

“What’s your name?”

“Grainne.”

“I’m Judy.”

A group of passengers came running around the corner. They hesitated when they saw Judy. A naked man at the front spurred them on.

“Run!” he called to Judy. “There is a long-distance sense array back there. It has Dark Plants growing around it already.”

“There’s no point going on,” said Judy. “The flux is too heavy all through the ship.”

“Then we’re trapped.” The naked man seemed to deflate, his overlarge stomach drooping down over his skinny legs.

“Judy is a Social Care operative,” said Grainne confidently.

The passengers visibly relaxed at that. Strained smiles played over strained faces.

“Okay,” said the naked man, “then what should we do?”

“We need to empty our minds,” said Judy. “Sit down.”

“What, here in the corridor?”

“Can you think of a better place?”

The carpet had evolved a low-pile walkway down the center. The lost passengers now sat down in the fluffy comfort that piled up around the edges of this. There was a sudden lurch.

“What was that?”

“We’ve finally dropped out of Warp,” said an old woman, rubbing her elbow where she had knocked it on the wall. “I recognize the sensation. It used to be common on the old Warp Ships.”

“How could the Dark Seeds find us in Warp?” asked another passenger.

“That doesn’t matter now. The important thing at the moment is not to think.”

“Close your eyes,” said Judy. Seventeen pairs of glittering eyes turned towards her, and she thought back twelve years. There was a voice, a way of framing commands. “Close your eyes,”

she commanded. This time the passengers did so.

“Now, think back to your childhood. Try to remember your first week at school.”

“I can’t,” someone muttered the words in panicky frustration. “I can’t!”

“Yes, you can. Do you remember Mr. Jacks? He came to visit your class on the third day. Mr. Jacks wore a red-and-yellow suit and carried a machine made of mirrors.”

“Oh, yes…”

“I remember…”

“How could I have forgotten…”

Because Mr. Jacks visited every classroom, and Mr. Jacks made everyone forget about his visit and the subtle social programming he performed.

“…and he pressed a button and the mirrors began to turn and you all fell asleep…”

In the corridor, a burst of dark boxes dropped out of the air. Judy looked in the other direction, but more fell over there. Everywhere she looked, Dark Seeds were forming. It was too late. She closed her eyes tightly and felt with her hand for the first of the sleeping bodies. She touched a tiny foot, followed it to a spindly leg. Grainne.

Judy…

She heard the word again at the edge of consciousness. It was almost too late. She hit an internal switch and turned off her emotions. Her hands were already fastened around Grainne’s throat as she felt for the right spot.

“You killed her. I don’t believe you can just sit there and describe it so coldly.”

Saskia didn’t sound disbelieving. Judy had a well of anger rising in her stomach that she could have ridden to the heights of self-righteous satisfaction, but one look at the mechanism in Saskia’s mind—as viewed by the meta-intelligence—and she forgot all that. What did it all matter, anyway?

“Saskia, what do you know of how the Dark Plants propagate?” Judy said, her voice distant and serene.

“Only the rumors…”

Judy shook her head. “No one really knows, Saskia. We don’t know if they evolved or if they were made, if they are real or virtual. They seem to contradict themselves at every level. They exist in the quantum world but are visible in our world: their seeds behave more like electrons than macroscopic objects; they drift through space having no fixed position or direction until they are observed. That’s Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. And when a suitable intelligence observes them, and fixes them in position in space, they germinate.”

“Yes, I know that. We all know that.”

“And then come the BVBs. Black Velvet Bands. Black loops that just form in unobserved space and shrink down to nothing. They catch around your arm or leg, and they can’t be cut. One could form around your lungs, and you would breathe out and it would shrink along with them, and then you’d find you couldn’t breathe in again….”

“You killed the girl.”

“I had to. There were too many intelligent observers on that ship. I had to shut them down. Being asleep wouldn’t have protected those passengers; the Dark Seeds can infiltrate dreams. They can cut right down to your subconscious mind.”

Maurice gave a cold laugh. “They say the worst thing is to have one of the seeds come upon you in your dreams. To be sleeping in your bed while a plant grows nearby, feeding on your nightmares…”

“Do they look for us?” asked Edward nervously.

“No,” said Judy, staring at Maurice. “Definitely not, Edward. But we seem able to sense them, no matter what we do. The AIs on the planet Gateway committed suicide rather than face them, do you know that?

They were too frightened of what the seeds would become if they were allowed to grow.”

Saskia opened her mouth; Judy held her hand up to quieten her.

“Grainne’s upper mind was shut down in sleep, and yet still there was a part of her deep subconscious sensing the world. Do you know what the plants are made of, Saskia? I’ll tell you: nothing. They aren’t really there; they are a recursively defined space, like the Sierpienski Gasket. The seeds look like cubes, but their fascinating structure draws your attention in, as it is intended to. You look at a cube and you can see little holes in its structure. So you look closer at the structure around the holes and you see that it is made of holes, too. Everywhere you look you see holes, never actually the seed itself. You look closer and closer and the stuff that makes up the seed is always tantalizingly out of your reach, and you begin to suspect that the seed itself isn’t actually there.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

“Do you believe in the soul, Saskia?”

“No. Do you?”

“No. And yet those who have ever looked at the plants all say the same thing. They felt as if their soul had become lost amongst the intangible substance of the plants. I’ve known people who have been saved from the plants—pulled back from the brink. They walk and eat and…and that’s about it, and…”

Judy gazed at her hands, remembering her fear on the ship. She was trying to feel something, anything, more than just the effects of the mechanism that made up her brain. “…and all the time the seed is growing and growing. Making a plant out of nothing. And that plant is even more fascinating, and it is pulling at the fabric of the universe, inflating loops of cosmic string larger and larger to make BVBs…”

“They’ve used the Sierpienski Gasket as decoration on the walls over there,” said Maurice quietly. Maurice saw Edward turn to look where he was pointing, at the white shape like a square split into nine little squares by a Tic-Tac-Toe grid.

“See how it’s made, Edward?” he said. “Take away the middle square and then split each of the remaining squares into nine, and take away the middle squares again, and repeat that process forever.”

Judy was looking at the shape, too. “More connections,” she whispered. She turned back to find Saskia looking at her.

The other woman blinked. “Did you kill the others on that ship as well?” she asked blandly. Judy blinked in turn.

“Only four. Then the rescue arrived.”

Judy felt the life ebb from the fourth passenger. It rattled out from her empty body, skittering away with the sound of a metal ball in a plastic cup, and Judy felt nothing at its passing. She had told herself not to.

Jesse felt the change first; he had to shout to make himself heard above the rising buzz of the plants growing from the Dark Seeds.

—Judy, something is in here with us.

Judy, her eyes tightly closed, could still see by grey light. The outlines of fabulous plants danced behind her eyelids, her optic nerves somehow registering their presence.

“I can’t see anything,” she muttered. “Jesse, I’m not going to have time to kill them all…”

—We’re leaking air. Open your eyes so I can see, Judy. There is something down the corridor, and it’s coming towards us.

“I can’t open them, Jesse. I can’t look at the plants.”

Something touched her foot and she jerked it away. Something seized her by the wrist. She felt herself being dragged down the corridor, and she opened her eyes before she could stop herself. And then she couldn’t close them, because she just didn’t understand what had gripped her and she was trying to make out its shape. There was a silver rope wrapped around her waist, something like a silver crab claw held her wrist. That was about it. Something like legs scrabbled at the floor and she tried to see what they were attached to, but then a Dark Plant caught her attention. Dark vines spilled down a wall and a lacelike bloom turned to face her, the edges of its petals endlessly frilled.

—Look away, said Jesse, and she did, and there was another plant just over there, hazily indistinct. She examined the delicate perforations built of perforations that made up its leaves, and she was now being dragged towards a hole in the wall. It was Jesse who noticed the thin meniscus stretched across it like a soap bubble; it was Jesse who saw the stars beyond. Judy was too busy looking at the mad plants behind her to notice the other passengers being pulled to

safety. She didn’t notice the meniscus stretch around her and snap out into a bubble, carrying just enough air and pressure to support her life as she crossed the void. Dark Seeds rattled into the envelope she occupied, and were sucked up and ejected. The space around the Deborah was filled with little bubbles of life crossing from the stricken craft to the Free Enterprise.

“A stellated dodecahedron!”

The woman floating by Judy was speaking for the sake of it. She was very nervous, filling the space between herself and her approaching fear with words.

“That’s what you call the shape of this thing. They must have grown it just to house us. Whoever they are. Who do you think they are?”

“I don’t know,” replied Judy. She didn’t need Jesse’s MTPH-enhanced senses to tell her that the terrified passengers who were being poured into the enormous plastic bubble in which she floated were close to panic. They tumbled inexpertly in the zero-G space, gazing wide-eyed, through the clear plastic walls of the dodecahedron, at the stricken body of the Deborah lit up by nauseous green searchlights. A few last tiny bubbles were crossing through space, bringing the remaining humans to safety. Judy watched as one of the little bubbles touched the wall of envelope and discharged a tumbling passenger through its protective wall into safety.

—I reckon they’ve now saved about half of us, said Jesse.

“Who has?” asked Judy.

“Who has what?” asked the nervous woman. She looked around. “Who are you speaking to?”

“Never mind. Have you noticed that there are no facilities in here?” remarked Judy. “No beds, no toilets. Nothing. Just a lot of people floating in a great bubble.”

A voice rang out in the great space.

“Passengers of the Deborah .”

The floating passengers quietened immediately.

“This is the Free Enterprise —part of DIANA. We noted your distress and made all haste to rescue the Deborah . We are just in the process of bringing the last few of you aboard. After that we will be making the jump clear of the region of Dark Plants, en route for Fraxinus.”

“Fraxinus?” said the woman, gripping Judy’s arms tightly. “Oh, Watcher save us. Where’s Fraxinus? Is that a safe place?”

“DIANA?” wondered Judy. “I wonder what’s in it for the Free Enterprise, in this rescue? The old companies never did anything that wasn’t going to turn them a profit.”

“What do you mean, what was in it for them?” asked Maurice. “You were in danger and they rescued you. What more is there to say?”

Ask Saskia, thought Judy, noting the other woman’s hungry look. Edward dropped a pan onto the cooktop in the kitchen.

Judy answered Maurice’s question. “The Free Enterprise lives by a way of thinking that was rendered obsolete long ago. It was built by AIs that jumped from Earth on the first Warp Ships, AIs built by organizations like DIANA that saw everything in terms of financial transactions. It saved us, it wanted something in return.”

“What?”

“Venumbs. The Free Enterprise wanted some of the knowledge gained on Fraxinus. And it got it, too.”

“So the passengers all made it to safety?”

“Yes. The Free Enterprise took them to Fraxinus and made a deal. We were saved through the power of old-style capitalism. The Watcher was supposed to have killed that off, but it’s making a resurgence.”

Just look at your ship.

“We’ve traded with Fraxinus, you know,” said Saskia. “You would have seen two of their genetically modified ash trees in the large hold. Those wooden dinosaurs.”

Maurice wasn’t going to be distracted.

“So what about you?” he asked Judy. “What are you doing here?”

There were eventually nearly five hundred humans floating in the plastic bag grown by the Free Enterprise, most of whom were unused to zero gravity. It was unnerving at the best of times to find yourself in a space where nothing was fixed; add to that the fact that you had only just survived an encounter with the Dark Plants, probably losing friends and family in the process, and it was no wonder that the sound of crying filled the bubble. Most of the passengers had formed themselves into loose circles; they gripped each other by the arms as they floated and spoke in tense voices, waiting out their time and watching out for the yellow balls of urine that floated amongst them.

Judy spent most of her time floating near the clear plastic walls of the bubble, trying to get a glimpse of the structure of the Free Enterprise beyond. It was difficult to make out what they were looking at. The ship did not look like a ship at all, more a series of floating points to which objects where tethered.

—I think I can see something, said Jesse.

“What?” Judy asked eagerly. “Hey! Watch out!”

A young man came tumbling towards Judy, face twisted with fury.

“Murderer!” he yelled, raising his voice so that the other passengers could hear him. “She’s a murderer! She said that she would keep us safe, and instead she started killing us one by one. She said she was Social Care—uuugh.”

Judy had elbowed him in the solar plexus as he came near. He doubled over in pain. She leaned close to his ear.

“These people are frightened enough already,” she hissed. “Say anything else and I’ll kill you, too.”

She pushed him away.

“Doesn’t he realize what I was doing?” Judy muttered, watching the young man tumbling away.

“Didn’t he realize why I killed them?”

—Do you know why you did it?

“Oh, yes. And I know it was the right thing. That doesn’t mean it was easy.”

—Damn, Jesse swore. —We’re floating away from the wall.

“We’ll find someone to give us a push back,” she said.

—If they even come near us. Look at how they are watching you. They heard what he said.

“Never mind them,” Judy said brusquely. “What did you see out there?”

—Senses. Scanners. The Free Enterprise is watching us.

Judy folded her arms. Weightlessness made her feel nauseated. Concentrating on other things helped her to forget it.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” she said, thoughtfully. “The Free Enterprise may not have seen humans for one hundred and fifty years. It certainly doesn’t understand our needs. Look at this place: no gravity, no toilet facilities—”

—You don’t understand. The Free Enterprise is watching all of us, but you and me in particular, Judy. It’s using something like laser-ranging devices to scan the passengers. Their beams are out of the visual spectrum, but they make the plastic of the envelope glow as they shine through. You can see pale circular patches, and they are mostly triangulated on us.

“Why?”

—I don’t know.

“What does Jesse think now?” Saskia asked suddenly. “What does he think about us?”

“He’s not here anymore,” Judy said tightly. “He’s gone. The Free Enterprise did something to him.”

“What?”

“They twisted him into something else. Something unliving.”

“What do you mean?”

Saskia’s expression was one of intense curiosity. Seen through the eyes of the meta-intelligence, she simply looked like a machine scanning for data.

Jesse wouldn’t have seen it that way. Jesse gave her knowledge. All the meta-intelligence gave her was information.

Judy didn’t answer Saskia’s question. Instead she went on with her story.

Three hours later, a swarm of tiny probes approached the plastic envelope. Those passengers floating closest scattered in a screaming windmill of bodies as the probes pierced the bubble. The panic that had been building finally rippled out across the enclosed space, and then, with something of an anticlimax, evaporated into embarrassment as the humans realized the probes had resealed the bubble after they entered. Now the probes darted about through the confined space, sucking up bubbles of urine and eating feces. Other probes emitted pale bubbles that floated, honey clear, in the air.

The voice of the Free Enterprise sounded.

“Drink the nectar. It will sustain you for the next few hours, before we arrive on Fraxinus.”

—Fraxinus, said Jesse with some satisfaction.

“I can see something out there,” said Judy. “Something big in the shadows of the ship’s superstructure. I’m sure it wasn’t there before. I think you’re right, Jesse: something is watching us.”

She looked around the bubble, saw the other passengers laughing as they sipped at the golden bubbles of nectar.

“Why feed us now, I wonder? This feels like a distraction. What is it doing out there?”

Judy and Jesse spent the next few hours peering out suspiciously through the plastic walls of the bubble. There was something out there, and it seemed to change subtly even as they watched it.

—Maybe I’m getting paranoid, but it seems to be looking at us.

“Hmmm,” answered Judy. She was finding the strange looming shape that hovered just beyond view increasingly unsettling.

—You’re biting your lip, said Jesse.

“Am I?”

Time passed. All around the bubble, the passengers gazed at Judy suspiciously. She ignored them.

Fraxinus turned below them in green and blue and white swirls.

The envelope was collapsing, squeezing passengers towards the waiting ships sent up from the planet below. The familiar white curves of the Earth-designed fliers and shuttles were a welcome relief after the madness of the Free Enterprise.

The plastic walls folded in on themselves in gentle waves, pulsing as they formed the passengers into groups, just the right number to fit onto a waiting ship. Somehow, even though she had been closest to the waiting vessels at the beginning, Judy found herself near the back of the carefully separated warm packages of humanity that were being gulped down. Just as the suspicion took root within her, the walls pulsed again, and nobody noticed that Judy had been trapped in a little bubble of her own. No one noticed when silver arms intruded and seized her, and a meniscus formed around her and she was dragged off through the walls into the cold space beyond.

“Hey!” she called, “help me! Hey, over here!”

She waved frantically at the sleek white shape of an Earth-built flier, sliding past nearby, but the AI inside did not seem to notice her as a probe carried her up and away from the friendly shapes of the waiting ships below, up, up to the schizophrenic logic of the Free Enterprise. She felt a scream curling somewhere down in her stomach, growing as it wormed its sick way around and around, working its way up to her throat…

—Don’t lose it, warned Jesse.

She gulped hot vomit back down inside her. The skin of the meniscus was close to her face; she resisted the urge to reach out and touch it, frightened that it might burst and leave her exposed to the hard vacuum beyond. They passed through a curl of shifting segments, part of the surrounding material of the Free Enterprise. A nest of clear plastic spheres, each containing a jelly-black dot drifted by, then an array of hexagonal containers of all different sizes. And then the probe changed direction and she lost sight of the waiting ships, and Fraxinus all green and friendly below, and she plunged into an open box. The lid snapped shut.

“Hello, Judy.”

Judy was laced to a bench by red and yellow and green and gold strands. She could see them curled around her fingers and wrists and arms, stretched out before her. She could feel them digging into her feet and calves and thighs; they rubbed against her naked back. She was lying facedown on a bench in the middle of a pale green room, straining to hear the electronic movement that was taking place behind her. She wanted to turn her head to see what lay there.

“I know you can hear me, Judy.”

“Where’s Jesse? Why can’t I hear Jesse?”

“We’ve had to suspend certain mechanisms within your body while we complete your development. Why were you left half finished, Judy?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. Why have you kept me here? Why haven’t you let me go with the other passengers?”

“We’re not sure that we understand why you wished to go with the other passengers, Judy. Why didn’t you make yourself known to us as soon as we took you on board? We could have assisted you.”

“What? Assisted me with what?”

“This is a DIANA ship, and you are an asset of DIANA…”

“Bullshit. I am…I was a Social Care operative.”

“This may be true, yet you remain property of DIANA. Your genetic code contains sequences copyrighted to DIANA, your thought patterns are constructed on a recognized DIANA AI seed algorithm.”

For a moment, Judy was speechless. She fought against her rising indignation, coldly calming herself.

“This is ridiculous. My thoughts are my own. Even if, and I do not believe this to be true for a moment, even if my thoughts were the result of a DIANA AI seed algorithm, then they would still be my own. You cannot copyright a mind.”

“That may be true of the Earth Domain, but not of DIANA’s sphere of influence.”

Judy was thinking fast. At these moments it was helpful to speak to Jesse, but he was gone. Gone? What had the Free Enterprise said, that certain mechanisms had been suspended while it completed her development? What did that mean?

Her hands suddenly flexed, without her meaning them to, the right hand fluttering pitifully, trapped within the colored threads that bound it. What were they doing to her?

“Is this some sort of game?” she shouted. “I think you are being deliberately misled. I have had dealings in the past with DIANA in my work as an SC operative. Did Kevin put you up to this?

Have you heard of him? Maybe he tagged me, some sort of revenge…”

“No, Judy. This goes to the very core of your being. It is in your bones, you might say. You are a DIANA asset. I cannot believe that you did not know this. Surely you know what your purpose is?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.” Something touched her back and the flesh there went suddenly numb. She strained at the brightly colored laces, saw them digging into her arms and hands, tried to turn her head to see what was happening.

“What are you doing to me?”

A nauseating smell filled the room, a sickly sweet burning.

“Is that me?”

“Judy, we have examined your mind, and we believe that you are telling the truth. You do not realize what your purpose is; you are not even aware of the reason for your existence. Sadly, neither are we. Therefore, we are taking what we believe to be appropriate action. We are now performing whatever repairs that we can to your mechanism.”

“What repairs?”

“Activating the meta-intelligence that has stalled within you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This is the problem: you appear to be lacking the most basic information regarding your purpose. Therefore we are arranging for you to be returned to Earth for repairs and reprogramming.”

“Earth! But I don’t want to go to Earth!”

“Exactly our point. You seem to have acquired the notion that you have free will and the right to self-determination. You need to be reminded of DIANA’s core purposes. Arrangements have been made. We should have a ship here within a few weeks.”

Maurice stared at Judy, his eyes wide.

“A ship? But that’s us.”

Judy shrugged.

“Like I said, call me Jonah. I’m a broken machine, and they’re sending me back for repairs. And there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

Edward had come into the room from the kitchen. He was gazing at Judy, his hands red and greasy from the chicken he had been preparing. The meta-intelligence rendered him as something so simple, like a pleasing, undemanding pattern of square tiles.

“Don’t you want to go to Earth, Judy?” he asked.

“Of course she doesn’t, Edward,” said Maurice impatiently.

“But she might be able to find out what happened to her. How long will it take to get to Earth?”

Maurice slid his fingers over his console.

“Today’s Sunday. We’ll be there Friday. Six days.”

“Six days?” said Edward. Nobody else was speaking. “Why don’t you try to run, Judy?”

Maurice and Saskia couldn’t meet Judy’s eyes. Only Edward stared at her with his honest, open gaze. She addressed her answer to him.

“I’ve tried, Edward. I’ve been running for over ten years. But someone wants me to go back to Earth.”

“Who?”

“Someone called Chris.”

“Who is he?”

Judy almost smiled. “A bad person. Actually, a bad robot. He wants me to kill someone there.”

“Who?”

“The Watcher.”

Now Judy had Maurice and Saskia’s full attention.

“The Watcher?” said Maurice. “Why do you want to kill the Watcher?”

“I don’t. Chris told me that I would someday.”

“When did he tell you this?”

“Twelve years ago.”

“How could you possibly do it, anyway? The Watcher was the first AI. It is the most powerful entity known to humankind.” Maurice snorted. “It’s not even as if there is a reason for killing it! You might disagree with its actions, you might find them restrictive, but it’s doing its best. It nurtures humans! Why would you want to kill it?”

“I don’t know. Chris is a powerful AI himself. He wants the Watcher out of the way; he thinks that he has better plans for how humanity should operate. He thinks that I will agree with him someday.”

“Do you think that he’s right?”

“I hope that he’s not. I’ve spent the last twelve years wondering about it. That’s why I ran. I suppose now, at last, I’ll get to find out.”

Edward shook his head. He turned to the new captain of the Eva Rye . “We don’t have to take her, do we, Saskia? Not if she doesn’t want to go?”

Without speaking, Maurice traced a pattern across the surface of his console. Pale gold letters sprang to life in the middle of the living area.

Violation of Contract?

Are you sure you wish to disengage from a Fair

Exchange?

Yes/No ?

Saskia tilted her head forward so that she was looking up at Edward from under her purple-black fringe.

“I don’t think we have any choice, Edward,” she murmured.

maurice 1: 2252

Edward had made surethere were three boiled and three roast potatoes for everyone sitting at the table. Maurice had watched him share them out carefully, counting under his breath as Edward spooned them one by one onto each plate.

So now, as Saskia was pouring gravy onto her cauliflower, Maurice wanted to know why Miss Rose, who still had three boiled and three roast on her plate, was just forking up a fourth roast potato with the evident intention of eating it all at once. Where had she got it from? Maurice was mystified: she did this kind of thing every mealtime, and nobody seemed to notice but him.

“You say the Eva Rye was born on the first of August,” said Judy, interrupting his thoughts. “That’s an odd choice of words.”

“No, it’s a good description,” said Maurice. He brought his attention back to Judy. What was it about the way she gazed at him that he found unnerving? It was the way she studied you as if you were an object, he decided. She would stare at you for a moment and then there would be a flicker of recognition in her face, as if she had remembered what you were: a human, rather than just another piece of furniture. And then that spark of recognition would be replaced by a carefully blank expression. Judy knew that Maurice was watching her. She turned to Saskia.

“You’re not eating, Saskia,” said Judy. “Maybe you can tell me about how you adopted the Fair Exchange software. I’ve heard rumors, but nothing concrete.”

Saskia speared a piece of cauliflower with her fork. “Why do you want to know?” She leaned forward so that her face was hidden again by black curtains of hair.

“Because I find the FE system fascinating,” said Judy. “I have never been on a ship without an AI before, and yet…”

“What?” asked Maurice.

“And yet…I can almost feel the presence of something here on board…” Her voice trailed away to nothing.

Maurice, meanwhile, listened to the clinking of the cutlery on the plates. There had been new dishes in all the kitchen cupboards: beautiful, paper-thin white china decorated with delicate black swirls. Saskia looked out from under her fringe. “There’s nothing much to say, Judy,” she said mildly. “Maurice and I were both on Breizh. That’s a colony planet on the edge of the Enemy Domain. The EA were hoping to bring the colonists to term in about six months, and they had brought us humans there to aid in the final transition. In our free time we used to go to this empty port, about four hundred kilometers from the base. We’d borrow a flier to get us there, anything to get out from under the noses of Social Care…”

Maurice grinned. Saskia didn’t seem to care how rude she was. Or had she forgotten that Judy had told them she was an SC operative? It would be typical of Saskia not to pay that close attention to another person, even one who had arrived on the ship in such a strange fashion. Saskia took another tiny piece of cauliflower and swallowed it. She continued in a careless way.

“One night another Free Exchanger turned up and we played the n-strings game. A few of us made the decision to adopt the FE lifestyle pretty much there and then. Michel was our team leader on Breizh, so he became captain. Maurice here and someone else—Armstrong, his name was—were to be security.”

She seemed to change tack in the middle of her sentence without realizing it. “Donny’s wife had just walked out on him and the kids, so he wanted a fresh start. And my life was getting stale. I felt I needed a new challenge. And so here we are.”

Except that wasn’t the full story. Did Saskia really believe her story explained everything? Judy obviously didn’t think so. She was gazing back at Saskia, drinking in her pose, her expressions, all the words she hadn’t spoken. Maurice realized she was noting the slight tremble in the fork as again Saskia finally cut off the tiniest piece of cauliflower and put it in her mouth. Judy had been a Social Care operative. She was able to read the emotions of everyone present and use them as a chart to plot their course to the Watcher’s version of sanity. There was no lying to an SC

operative.

“I must admit,” said Judy, “a lot of that went over my head.” She turned to Maurice, her dead-white face like a lighthouse beam turning towards him. He felt as if all his secrets were being illuminated by that searching expression. Social Care , he thought, they can never give it up. Then he shivered as he noted how her expression changed, and she regarded him once more as just a piece of meat. When she spoke, it was in the tones someone would use to ask the Turing machine to turn on the bedroom lights.

“I don’t understand what is going on on this ship, Maurice. Why is there no AI on board?”

“FE doesn’t allow AI.”

“Why not? Why are you all here, anyway? What is the n-strings game? I’m not sure that you understand yourself.”

You couldn’t lie to that gaze.

“I’m not sure I do,” said Maurice. “Look, as far as I can tell, there are three rules to FE: no AIs, no self-replication, and everything must be paid for.”

“How do you know that? Who tells you the rules?”

“It’s not like that. They aren’t told to you; you sort of discover them for yourself.”

“How?”

“By playing the n-strings game!”

Judy held his gaze, and Maurice felt himself beginning to blush. She can see the way right through to my ignorance, he thought. She knows that I don’t really understand. And Judy just went on and on staring. He felt such relief when she finally spoke.

“Tell me what you think happened on Breizh, Maurice.”

Maurice had never felt comfortable on Breizh. There were nineteen million human embryos buried somewhere deep underground and, especially when it was nighttime, their potential lives haunted him. Even here, in the little town of Raspberry, ghosts haunted the pretty white houses that clustered on the rocky outcrops overlooking the blue sea. He imagined these ghosts streaming up the long ribbons of the bridges that climbed from the shores to the distant grey mountains, seeking their places at the silver machinery that had been driven into the dark crevasses beneath the peaks.

During his work shifts, Maurice followed Armstrong down through dim portals into underground spaces newly cleared of hostile defense mechanisms, and he would feel the ears of those unrealized lives pressed against the walls that surrounded him. He could hear long dormant fingers scrabbling to catch hold of him, reaching out for help.

The empty planet should have been beautiful; instead, the machinations of the deranged AI that had tried to build a second human empire had given Breizh the feeling of a stillborn carcass filled with crawling maggots. Maurice often wondered if the other planets in the Enemy Domain had the same feel.

When they had leave, Maurice joined the other humans and hopped onto a flier, heading far from the haunted mountains to the wild coastline, where he hoped the whipping breezes would blow the ghosts away.

Armstrong and Maurice had gone to one of the cafés that stood in line along the beach in the little village they had christened Raspberry.

“I hope that Douglas hasn’t brought his fiddle along,” complained Armstrong. “We can all play an instrument, and yet we have the good sense not to. Why don’t these people leave the job to the experts? Let the AIs play for us.”

“Exactly,” Maurice agreed. “We get enough of music at school. Here, I’ll get you a beer.” He headed for one of the crates dumped at the back of the room.

There were other people sitting at the metal tables, looking out at the spit of land across the bay, a rugged grey line between the blue water and the freshly laundered clouds in the blue sky above. The Von Neumann Machines had never made it down the spider-web bridge that ran from the AI’s base in the mountains to the coast. The construction of the houses and bars intended to help house the nineteen million had been left half completed.

“Here you are,” Maurice said, handing a beer to Armstrong. They twisted the caps and felt the bottles chilling in their hands.

“Do you know what I feel like doing?” Armstrong said. “I feel like getting drunk. It’s nice to be able to do just that without anyone telling you about the danger to your health.”

Maurice laughed in agreement. “Or having someone discreetly replace your drink with nonalcoholic lager,” he added. “You’ll never manage it, though. Social Care will be in later on. Rebecca, or one of the Stephanies.”

“Hah! I’ll be too far gone by then. Aren’t you going to join me?”

“Yeah.” Maurice smiled. “I think I might.”

Armstrong gulped down beer and gave a yeasty belch. “I don’t see why not, anyway,” he said, pressing his hand to his stomach. “You won’t get the chance when your tour here is done. Once you’re back on a regular planet, SC’ll be monitoring you day and night. I tell you, what the Watcher is doing on Earth at the moment will soon be the norm on all the other planets. Soon we won’t be able to even think unhealthy thoughts.”

Maurice laughed and gulped down more beer.

“Excuse me, I couldn’t help overhearing you.”

For a moment, Maurice thought that the stranger who had unobtrusively joined them at their table was one of the nineteen million embryos. Tired of waiting for its long-delayed birth, it had ripped itself from the ground and made its way into the land of light and warmth. The newcomer was exquisite, gorgeous in an otherworldly way. His skin was the color of lacquered wood; he wore a loose raw-silk shirt and three-quarter–length trousers the color of yellow cream; his hair was braided and beaded and tied back to accentuate his high cheekbones and deep brown eyes. He wore a handwoven bracelet on his left wrist; the straps on his sandals were woven in the same way. He looked cool and relaxed in the warm, beer-scented air of the bar. Armstrong had no imagination, however. He saw the stranger for what he was: just another man and a potential challenger. He leaned back in his chair, allowing his combat jacket to fall open, displaying his oiled chest and flat stomach. He gave the stranger a cold stare.

“You Social Care?”

“No.” The stranger smiled. “I’m the complete opposite. My name is Claude. I wondered if you would be interested in joining us?” He pointed to a group of people sitting at a table at the far end of the bar. “We’re playing the n-string game. Have you heard of it?”

“No.” Armstrong took a gulp of beer.

Claude’s smile widened. “You may enjoy it. It might just change your life.”

Maurice was recovering from his first surprise at seeing Claude. Now, for some reason, he longed to reach out and touch the dappled cream silk of the man’s shirt, it looked so cool. There was something about Claude that fascinated him.

“Why don’t we go over?” he asked. “It could be interesting.”

“You go if you like,” Armstrong said sullenly. He pulled out a tiny template of a knife and a block of carbon. “I’ve got things to do.”

“No, you’re right,” Maurice said. “Let’s just get drunk.” He took a swig of beer. Claude shrugged. “Well, if your friend is too afraid of what he might find…”

Maurice felt deflated as Claude gave him a wink and turned to go.

“Hold on,” said Armstrong. “I never said that. How long does this game take?”

“It varies. Why don’t you come along and take a look? If you don’t like it, you can always go back to getting drunk.”

He moved with an easy grace across the bar, dancing to the rhythm of the waves. The legs of Armstrong’s chair squeaked as he pushed it back across the stone floor.

“Come on, Maurice,” he said, “we’ll take a look.”

Maurice and Armstrong took the last two available seats around the table. He recognized some of the people already seated. Michel, his team co-ordinator, was there, along with Craig and Joanne. There was another man he recognized but whose name he didn’t know. Apparently his wife had left him a few weeks previously: got on a ship and headed back to Earth, abandoning the kids. There had been a bit of a crisis over that one, since the two Stephanies from Social Care hadn’t managed to avoid the breakup. The rumors were flying that one of the Stephanies in particular was in big trouble over that.

“People!” said Claude, raising his hand for attention and smiling around the table. The gentle susurration of chatter ceased as all eyes fixed on the beautiful man who sat in their midst. He had an air about him: he didn’t appear to wait for people’s attention. He simply spoke when he was ready, and everyone listened.

“Now, has anyone here played the n-strings game before?” he asked. “No? Good! Good!” He clapped his hands together in delight. Maurice saw Michel give a puzzled smile at this. Joanne, sitting next to him, narrowed her green eyes thoughtfully.

“Are we all sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.”

Claude unfastened the handwoven bracelet from his wrist and held it out in front of him. A heavy silver ring glinted on his little finger.

“This bracelet is made using the basic six plait,” he said. He twisted the bracelet into a complicated pattern and then pulled it apart. Now there were two bracelets. He held the two bracelets together and repeated the twisting movement to make four bracelets. Maurice joined in with the growing round of applause as he repeated the movement once more, to make eight.

“Ah, but it wasn’t a trick,” said Claude, tying one of the bracelets back around his wrist. “These bracelets are formed of cosmic strings. Each strand on the bracelet is a loop of thread pulled from the very weave of the universe itself. They are unbreakable.”

Now Maurice laughed.

“You find that amusing, my friend?”

“I find that impossible,” said Maurice, grinning at Armstrong, who was too busy trying to outstare Claude to notice.

“Really?” said Claude, in tones of polite surprise. “I have been told that it is the same principle as that of the Black Velvet Bands.”

At that a shadow passed across the table, as all those assembled thought of what was happening on Earth. Black Velvet Bands dropped from Dark Plants. They formed silent nooses on unobserved places, and then just shrank away to oblivion. The people of Earth were strangled in their sleep by Black Velvet Bands….

“But we were playing the n-strings game,” said Claude, quickly pulling apart the seven remaining bracelets into their six constituent strands. “Everyone begins with six strands each.”

Maurice watched as the strands were passed around the table to reach where he was sitting. Armstrong took the last six. Maurice put up his hand.

“I don’t have any strands.”

“Then you can’t play. This is the first lesson of the n-strings game. Life is unfair.”

Claude said it with a delightful grin that brought a ripple of laughter from around the table.

“You can share mine,” said Armstrong.

“Your generosity has just earned you ten points,” said Claude. Armstrong beamed. “Not that points mean anything in this game,” added Claude, and this time the table erupted in laughter. After a moment’s hesitation, Armstrong joined in.

“Now,” continued Claude, leaning forward and spreading a wide hand on the table, “I shall show you the basic six plait. Arrange three strands in a line. Cross them with three strands in a perpendicular direction, like so.” The seven other people seated around the table followed the deft movements of his fingers as he began the six plait. Maurice watched over Armstrong’s shoulder as he gamely twisted the n-strings over each other, the tip of his tongue sticking from the corner of his mouth.

Around the table, other people worked good-naturedly on their six plaits.

“Not like that, Michel.” Joanne took Michel’s half-formed plait from him and laid it out on the table before her. “Hold these two strands between your third and fourth fingers to keep them out of the way. Like this, see?”

Claude touched her hand.

“You are very good at this,” he said. “A natural, in fact. Tell you what, why don’t I help Michel?

It will save you being distracted.”

Joanne gave a little smile of triumph and went back to her work. Next to her, Claude whispered something in Michel’s ear. The latter frowned as he tried to understand what he was being told, then comprehension dawned and he made a gulping noise as he picked up his strands again. The six plait really was quite simple, thought Maurice. It was just a case of repeating one pattern over and over again to form a spiraling twist from the oddly moving strings. The thing was, Armstrong didn’t seem to quite grasp this. He kept getting the third movement in the sequence the wrong way round.

“Here, why don’t you let me have a go?” suggested Maurice, getting impatient and suddenly gripped by a desire to touch the strange plasticlike material of the strings.

“Hold on a moment,” said Armstrong, turning away from him. “I nearly got it there…”

All around the table heads bent forward as the group twisted and turned the strands. The occasional curse or giggle could be heard as a strand slipped loose or a pattern collapsed. The work was hypnotic, yet strangely satisfying. Outside of the bar, the descending night ran silkily down the spider web of the bridge, swallowing up its long white spans, gradually engulfing also the soft splashing of the waves on the beach. Inside, Joanne came to the end of her plait.

“Finished!” she said, proudly setting her bracelet down before her and looking around the table.

“Very good,” said Claude, but Joanne didn’t hear. She had just noticed Michel’s plait.

“How are you doing that?” she asked. Michel’s plait did not rise up in a spiral, like those of all the others seated at the table; instead it was a flat ribbon, a neatly symmetric pattern seemingly ruled upon it.

“Claude told me how,” explained Michel in tones of quiet satisfaction. “You simply reverse the sequence on alternate goes.”

“Oh,” Joanne sniffed.

“That’s clever,” said Craig from across the table, watching Michel’s fingers closely. “I think I’ll give that a go.”

They worked on for a few more minutes until everyone was sitting breathlessly, waiting for Maurice to finish. Maurice had finally got the bracelet away from Armstrong. Now he quickly twisted the last strands of his plait into place, feeling the strangely pliable material of the n-strings beneath his fingers.

“All done,” he said to the waiting table.

“Well done, everybody.” Claude gave them all a one-man round of applause. “You have completed the first part of the game.”

“How have we done?” asked Joanne, casting a look at Michel’s plait.

“You’ve all done very well,” said Claude. “Now for the second round. Here we can change the rules. In the second round you are not given your strands for free. You have to buy them.”

“How much do they cost?”

“I will give each of you eighteen strands in exchange for one of your completed bracelets. This will mean you can make three more bracelets. Do you still wish to play?”

Maurice looked at Armstrong. Maurice was enjoying this.

“I do,” said Armstrong, who always wanted to win.

“We can make a bracelet each this time,” said Maurice.

“Hang on,” said Craig, “that’s not fair. That means Maurice and Armstrong are at a disadvantage.”

“Why?” asked Claude innocently.

“Because they can only make three bracelets between them. We can make three each.”

Claude nodded, and Maurice had the impression that he had been waiting for someone to point that out.

“Okay,” said Claude, “are you saying in this game we should all start equally? Well, why not?

Whoever said that any game should reflect life?”

He laughed at his own joke. This time the rest of the table did not join in.

“Now, who wishes to buy some more strands?”

The people seated around the table each handed Claude their bracelets, who handed them back eighteen strands each that he had taken from who-knew-where.

“Ah, not you, Michel. You get thirty strands, to reflect the greater amount of work that went into your bracelet.”

Michel beamed as he collected his strands.

“But that’s not fair!” called Joanne.

“Yes, it is,” said Claude. “It is harder remembering where you are when you are making two movements. Also there is some effort involved in learning the opposite pattern. Michel worked harder; therefore he deserves a greater reward.”

“So why didn’t you tell any of us what you told Michel?”

“Why should I?”

“Because it’s not fair that one of us gets extra help.”

“So you are saying that extra knowledge is unfair? It wouldn’t be right if one of you were to use an AI, say, to advise you on how to make your bracelets.”

“Yes,” said Joanne.

“Does everyone else agree?”