Divergence

The rest of the table nodded. Claude put a finger to his lips.

“Okay,” he said, thoughtfully, “we said that for round two the rules could change. So we are agreed that, from now on, extra help is not allowed?”

“Agreed.”

Maurice raised a hand.

“Yes, Maurice?”

“Are you sure you don’t work for Social Care?” he asked.

Everyone laughed at that. The night was pleasantly cool and a party atmosphere was taking hold.

“Okay,” said Claude, “I will now teach you the eight-fold path. Take four strings in your hand like this…”

Claude taught them the eight-fold path and the reversing right fold. The bar they sat in cast a circle of light into a darkness filled with the sound of nothing more than the splash of the waves. Douglas took a break to fetch some more beers from the crate at the back, and Claude downed one before showing them the double impasse and the one-strand weave. The alcohol began to take its effect on all of them. Claude was giggling as he forgot the pattern for the eighteen plait for the third time and the rest of the group gradually joined in until they were a shaking mass, gasping weakly at nothing in particular. They drank more beer and counted the growing piles of strands and bracelets that they were accumulating before themselves. Maurice and Armstrong passed strands between themselves, trying to form a Schrödinger’s Cat’s Cradle.

“Now take the middle bit here and twist it around itself like this,” said Claude. “Whoops!” He laughed as the half-seen threads collapsed in on themselves to form a tangled mess. “I always get that bit wrong.”

Claude’s sheen of mysterious untouchability was evaporating in the alcohol haze. Maurice was coming to the realization that this was just another person, albeit one who had played the n-strings game many times before. Claude was losing the air of a sage and becoming more like a salesman: some of his comments seemed to be alluding to a deal in the offing.

“Isn’t it good to do something all on your own, without the interference of Social Care?” he would say slyly.

“What I like about these things is the way you can understand them,” he told Joanne, swigging beer from a bottle. “You make them yourselves; you know how they are made. You don’t need an AI figuring out all the details.” The comment sounded like something that Claude had rehearsed: a line he had been instructed to drop into the conversation.

“You know, people used to live on what they produced for themselves,” he had said, laughing, as Joanne and Michel had passed across a complicated double helix in return for the three hundred and six strands that Claude formed by performing a complicated twisting action on successive bundles of n-strings. “…and then AIs and VNMs came and offered them something for nothing. Are they any happier for it?”

“Show me how to do that,” said Joanne, leaning forward as she tried to follow the complicated movement of his hands. Claude paused in the action of pulling strands from nowhere.

“Sorry, single strands are too difficult for beginners.” He smacked his lips thoughtfully. “But I suppose I could show you this, instead…”

They huddled close together as Claude demonstrated a new move, and Maurice lost interest for a time as Armstrong called his attention back to their growing pile of bracelets.

“Come on,” Armstrong urged. “Donny and Craig are pulling ahead of us.”

Maurice picked up some of the strands, ready to restart the process of folding the Cradle. He ran two of the n-strings through his fingers, experiencing the odd sensation they gave of stillness, even when they moved. Twist them in the wrong direction and it was as if they weren’t there at all. They got back to the work. The splash of the waves, the clinking of beer bottles on tables, the sounds of chatter…

It was only a short time later that the whole table noticed that Joanne and Michel had come from nowhere to build up a decisive lead. The pile of double helices in front of them seemed to be growing at an astonishing rate.

“Good work,” Craig said approvingly.

“Hey, that’s not fair!” Armstrong called out. “Look what she’s doing!”

Joanne was taking hold of the ends of a double helix and twisting them around and over themselves in the same complicated motion that Claude had used. When the bracelet was a tangle of strands, she would gently pull it apart and there would be two of them. She had the grace to blush and look embarrassed.

“Claude showed me how to do it,” she apologized.

“And why shouldn’t I? It’s not in the rules.”

“But it gives her an unfair advantage,” called Armstrong, in his agitation kicking one of the beer bottles that lay at his feet.

Claude adopted a thoughtful pose, and Maurice became more convinced than ever that he was delivering a practiced speech.

“So you are saying that replication is unfair, Armstrong? Just like AIs give one an unfair advantage in this game.”

“Exactly!”

“Yet you come from a society where these advantages are assumed on a daily basis.”

The sound of the waves could be heard distinctly in the room, that and the skittering echo of Armstrong’s beer bottle finally spinning to a halt.

“Yes, but you can’t compare this game to the way we live.” Donny’s words dripped with all the bitterness and bile that had built up within him since his wife had walked out.

“And why not?” Claude asked gently.

“Because…” Donny began. His voice trailed away to nothing.

“I know one reason why,” said Claude softly. “Because we choose the games we play, and yet the way we live is immutable. It is imposed upon us from our birth by the Watcher and Social Care. Well, what if I were to tell you there are other ways to live?”

Craig leaned forward. “I’ve heard about this,” he said excitedly. “I knew a girl on Lorient; she talked about people getting out from under the gaze of the Watcher and living a different sort of life. It’s an old-fashioned sort of thing, she said, getting back to basics.”

“Not old-fashioned at all,” said Claude. “It gives humans a chance to live as they should do, thinking for themselves, not as unwitting slaves to the will of AIs and Social Care.”

“Somebody’s coming.”

They swept the colorful strands of the n-strings into pockets, onto chairs, pushed them up their sleeves. They started to giggle at the futility of the task. There were so many of them. Too many. Armstrong was even shoving them down the front of his trousers, smirking at the obscene bulge they formed. Joanne shook her head at his childishness.

“It’s Saskia,” said Craig as a pale face appeared in the darkness. Saskia strode into the open-fronted space of the café.

“You know that Social Care are coming?” she said, taking in the scene in the midnight-bright room. “How much have you been drinking, Craig?”

“Not enough,” muttered Craig, and they all collapsed with laughter again. Maurice began to push n-strings down the front of his trousers, imitating Armstrong. Saskia’s eyes fell on Claude. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” she asked. Craig couldn’t stop giggling.

“This is Claude,” said a still sober Joanne, placing her hand on his dark wrist. As he clasped it in his own, Joanne looked up with dancing green eyes. “I wonder how Social Care knew that we were here, Saskia?”

Saskia flicked her dark eyes around the table. “I don’t think that she should be able to make such accusations unchallenged, Michel.”

“Don’t start, Saskia,” Craig said, suddenly serious again. “Who’s coming?”

“One of the Stephanies.”

The assembled people looked at one another.

“We should go now,” Armstrong decided, pushing back his chair in a clatter of beer bottles.

“Claude, it was nice meeting you.”

“You don’t have to go,” Claude said quietly. “I have a ship waiting not one minute away. Join the game, Armstrong.”

Maurice felt more tempted by the sudden offer than he would have imagined, but Armstrong was shaking his head.

“Not for me, Claude. I’ve got nothing to hide from Social Care.” He shook his head again. “I’ve got nothing against them, either.”

“What about when they stop you from drinking?” Maurice asked.

“They’re just doing the job,” Armstrong replied, drunkenly sanctimonious. “And I’ve got mine to do, too, Maurice. I signed up for duty on this planet and I’ll see it through. It’s the same with Social Care. You get the rights, you accept the responsibilities.”

“You should be getting them out of here,” murmured Saskia to Michel. “It won’t look good for you if Social Care realize that you let your team play the n-strings game.”

“All right, I know,” said Michel. He gave an apologetic shrug.

“Way to spoil the party, Saskia,” Joanne murmured.

“Be quiet, Joanne,” Michel said. “Come on, everyone, back to the flier.”

Slowly, with a scrape of chairs and further skittering of bottles, they began to make their way from the table. All except one.

“I’m not going.” Donny spoke up, his voice darkly sullen. “Claude, tell me some more about this new way of life of yours.”

“Look out,” Craig called. A disc came spinning out of the night; it bounced off the table and fell to the floor.

“Hello, Stephanie,” said Saskia.

“Hello, Saskia.”

Maurice shivered. This Stephanie was a personality construct of the human Stephanie, who was no doubt even now being woken and bundled onto a flier so she could be rushed across the world in order to speak to the erring crew.

“I see you have all been playing the n-strings game. It’s a charming diversion. I have played it myself a few times.”

“What, in digital space?” Joanne’s voice was sweetly sarcastic. “You have precious little chance of leaving your world, Stephanie.”

“Don’t be so prejudiced, Joanne,” Stephanie replied lightly. “I have the same rights to self-fulfillment as anyone in what you like to call the atomic world. Besides, I don’t need to walk in the physical world to realize that the concept behind this game is flawed.”

“It’s a diversion,” said Craig. “Look!”

Fine silver bars were silently growing downwards to block the open front of the café. Everyone present made a dash for the cool space outside. Claude whispered something into the heavy silver ring that he wore on his little finger.

“It’s not a trap,” called Stephanie. “It’s for your own protection. You need to think sensibly about this, so as not to be rushed into an unwise decision.”

Armstrong scowled. “Who’s rushing us, Stephanie?” He raised his voice. “Claude, what do you mean when you say there is another way to live? Whose idea is this?”

Claude was scanning the sky. Up above, Maurice thought that he saw a pinprick of light drifting across the stars.

“Oh, some old guy from history,” said Claude distractedly. “I don’t remember his name.”

Maurice could see that Craig had now taken Saskia off to one side. He could hear the harshness in his voice as he berated her.

“What’s going on here, Saskia? Why did you tell them what we were doing?”

Maurice strained to hear Saskia’s answer, spoken in a self-righteous whisper.

“I didn’t want to tell them anything. Craig, you know what they’re like. Social Care always know what you’re thinking. But I promise, I didn’t want to tell them anything!”

Craig said nothing to that.

“Hey, you don’t suppose you’re the first person to come here, do you?” said Saskia suddenly.

“Claude’s been up and down the coast for the past week, looking for people to join his commune, or whatever it is.” She reached out and touched the bracelet that Craig had tied around his wrist.

“That’s a six plait,” she said. “I can do that.”

Something was dropping towards them. A sleek teardrop shape, the light of the café reflected off its burnished side.

“It’s the Borderlands,” said Claude. “This is my ship. You are welcome to come aboard with me. I can get the Borderlands to reproduce. Give you a ship of your own.”

“I’m coming,” said Donny.

“But Donny, what about your children?”

The disc holding the personality construct of Stephanie rolled on its side like a wheel, following them away from the café into the night and the noise of the waves that splashed invisibly all around them.

Donny clenched his fists. He was unshaven, his hair hung in greasy strands. The barely suppressed anger that had burned so brightly within him for the past weeks flared white-hot for a moment. With difficulty, he restrained it.

“Are you saying you would keep my children from me?”

Stephanie said nothing.

Suddenly he relaxed. He gave a laugh that made Maurice shiver with its wildness.

“This is all a bluff, isn’t it?” He walked back to the café entrance, where the silver bars had now grown to floor level. He took two in his hands and bent them apart easily. “Social Care doesn’t imprison us with bars and locks. You use words and gestures, wall us up behind our manners and upbringing, and then you beat us with our conscience when we stray from your path. You’re not going to stop us boarding this ship. You’re counting on us returning to you in a few weeks’ time, when you’ll be waiting for us with sympathy and kind words and then you’ll take us back into your stifling grasp.”

The Borderlands was sliding over the beach, dwarfing the cafés and bars of the seafront, the humming of its engines mixing with the splash of the waves. An exit ramp was dropping open halfway down its enormous length, a tongue of light shining out from the inward curve of the teardrop.

“Where are you going?” There was a note in Saskia’s voice that none of them had heard before. It almost sounded like terror. Armstrong, who was marching towards the ship with a determined look on his face, mistakenly thought she was speaking to him. He called his reply over his shoulder as he went.

“I’m getting on board. You heard what Donny said. He’s right. I’m fed up with Social Care always telling me what to do.”

But Saskia ignored him. She was following Craig down onto the sand.

“Craig, wait! Are you sure that really want to do this? You won’t be welcome in the Enemy Domain when you come back. They’ll send you back to Earth.”

Craig turned and thrust his face close to hers.

“And what are you going to do when I’ve gone, Saskia? Whose life are you going to organize when Donny and the rest of us are off flying through the stars? What if we even make a go of it out there?”

Maurice pushed past them, eager to be on the ship. Michel walked on thoughtfully, Stephanie’s wheel rolling alongside him.

“There will be a flier here in five minutes. Why not wait for its arrival? Talk things over with the atomic Stephanie. You can still go with this ship tomorrow.”

Michel paused. Saskia suddenly appeared at his shoulder. She made a little noise that sounded something like a sob.

“Don’t listen to her, Michel. Come on, we’re going to need you to tell us what to do.”

She took him by the arm and led him up the ramp.

“And that’s it?” asked Judy.

“And that’s it,” said Maurice. “It was just like a game of dare. We all thought that we were going to give up at any moment, but somehow we just went on playing. Claude and his crew took us up into space, where they triggered the self-replication routine on the Borderlands, and the Eva Rye was born.”

Judy frowned. “I thought that you weren’t allowed to use self-replication. I thought that wasn’t in the rules of the game.”

Maurice shrugged. “We’re still learning the rules of the game, Judy. I think that you’re allowed to use VNMs when you bring in new players. The Borderlands got an upgrade, I guess. The original Eva Rye was very basic. A complete hodge-podge of styles, most of which didn’t work.” He cast a thoughtful eye around the black-and-white interior of the room. “So now we just go around trading, though we don’t do very well. I suppose if we had an AI, then we wouldn’t keep making mistakes. But I suppose if everyone had AIs, then we’d be right back to where we started.”

“No,” Edward said suddenly, “that’s not it. We don’t need AIs when FE keeps everything fair. Listen to what Judy said about that person Chris, about him trying to get her to go to Earth. It’s the AIs that mess everything up. They bend the rules and tell you what to think, and you’re left with nothing to do. AIs aren’t fair to humans like us.”

Maurice was more than a little shocked at the way Edward had suddenly spoken up. It wasn’t like Edward to express himself so surely.

“But the deals aren’t fair…” Maurice began, but at that point Judy let out a moan.

“Are you okay?” asked Saskia.

Judy was rubbing the back of her neck. “Yes. Yes, just a twinge.”

For a moment, her face had been lit up with expression; it had made her seem much more human. Now she returned to her habitual calmness.

She looked down the table, and paused. The rest of the crew held their breath, waiting to hear what she would say. Nobody was expecting her next words.

“I’ll have my last roast potato back, thank you, Miss Rose.”

eva 6: 2-89

On an early July morninga battered robotic britzka—one of those modern britzkas found in plenty just outside the borders of the Russian Free States, and so beloved of the thieves and supposed Free Spirits that dwelt therein—rolled out of the little town that had grown up around the Pekarsky Narkomfin and went thundering down the road running alongside the Arctic data cable. In the britzka sat two residents of Narkomfin 128: the systems man Ivan Atchmianov, well fed and clean shaven, and the other, Eva Rye, her grey hair cut short and her face burnt red from the summer sun. Despite being there for nearly five years, Russian life still excited her with its novelty. She had risen early that morning and breakfasted on doughnuts and sour cream, and then allowed Ivan to persuade her to drink a little vodka for the road.

“What are you smiling about?” she teased her companion, who was looking through a pair of half-moon glasses at the humming line that ran from the dashboard down into the floor of the vehicle.

“I was admiring clever workmanship,” said Ivan. “And I was thinking about how it alienates us from nature. When this journey used to take days, people would get a feel for the size of this land. Spend your days bumping along under the hot sun, looking for a place to shelter from the storms at night, and you’d understand what Russia is.”

Eva laughed. “What do you know about Russian life? You live in São Paolo!”

The words were out before she could stop them. She felt herself blushing and fumbled for something else to say. “You know, when we get back I’m going to get ahold of your toolboxes and I’m going to find a wrench and take this thing apart. Maybe when you’ve been forced to take that walk with the rest of us you’ll feel happier.”

“There are too many people in Russia,” said Ivan morosely. “I wonder if the bourgeois who flock to the Narkomfins would be so eager if they had to face up to the cold blast of winter without their passive suits and their heated transport.”

He caught Eva’s smile. “Anyway, a wrench would do you no good. These panels have been sealed using induction screws.”

“Whatever,” said Eva waving her hand. “I’ll look through that big red box of yours, where you keep all those weird new tools, and I’ll find out what an induction screwdriver is and how to use it. I’ll strip apart your bike and your rain belt, and maybe then you’ll be happy.” She released an extravagant sigh.

“You’re such a man! You spend all your time fixing machines but you never want to use them. Six months you’ve been here now. You’ve had that lovely old Zil limousine sitting outside the apartment block, and you’ve polished it and you’ve had your head under the hood practically every day, but you’ve never actually taken me anywhere. You could have driven me to the lake and we could have sat outside the dukhan there, and I could have bought you fish soup and stuffed zucchini.”

Ivan reddened with embarrassment.

“You should have said you wanted to go to the lake. I did not realize! I would have taken you there in the britzka.”

The awkwardness between them had passed. Now Eva felt it was safe to laugh gently at him. She laughed with a confidence she had had to wait nearly seventy years to acquire.

“That’s not what I meant…” she began but, on seeing the confusion in his face, continued, “though yes, I would have liked to have gone to the lake.”

He gave a happy smile, and Eva tried to look cheerful. Ivan folded his glasses into his breast pocket and sternly took her hand.

“Maybe when we had finished our soup, and if you had promised to leave my britzka alone, I would show you how to use an induction screwdriver.”

Eva smiled at him. She wanted to say something funny and sarcastic in reply, but she knew that he would misunderstand.

“I used one in the Pekarsky block to open the hatch to the heating system,” he continued. “A black handle, about this long?”

He held his palms apart, his soft hands pale and smelling of soap. Eva shivered at the memory. The people of the Pekarsky block were unintelligent and superstitious: they had walked out from under the constant surveillance of the world outside but, lacking the vision to find something to replace the Watcher’s protection, they had instead handed control of their lives over to some imagined malign fate or nature. When machinery failed, they blamed bad luck or sabotage, then they waited in sullen bad temper for someone like Ivan to come and sort out their problems.

And they hated him for it—Ivan came from the outside world. Social Care arranged for people like him to do their six months’ public service in the Russian Free States, and Ivan had dutifully turned up, bringing along Katya, his handicapped daughter. And still they resented him for it. They saw his work as an intrusion on their lives, and yet they expected it as their due.

Eva had followed the big man through peeling concrete corridors of the Pekarsky Narkomfin, past smashed plasterwork and half-open doors, to a metal duct where Ivan had put down his traveling toolbox and set to work. Unlike Eva, he hadn’t seemed to notice or care about the people who shuffled up to gaze at them. Doughy people with greasy hair, who smelled of fried food and cheap leather, who stared at them with hard eyes, resenting their presence, making Eva wish she had stayed at home in her own Narkomfin, looking after the handicapped.

Ivan had not been oblivious to how she had felt, though. Quite the opposite. When the metal panel swung open, he had sensed her revulsion and had pushed the door closed again to give her time to calm down. He knew that Eva didn’t like VNMs.

The Russian Free States were riddled with Von Neumann Machines, but it still gave her a lurch of sickening vertigo to think of them all crammed together in the duct, their long segments curling as they stripped apart the metal to make copies of themselves. Ivan had found her a job to do well away from the infected duct. She stood along the corridor from him, her hands shaking as she peeled off the magnetic scale that was forming across one of the walls and threatening to interrupt the lighting circuit. Ivan was an attentive man. She liked that: it was a gentle, fallible thing after the unfailing attention to detail that the Watcher had forced upon her. And now, as he sat in the jolting britzka, explaining how the induction screwdriver magnetically reached through the panels to take hold of the screws beneath, he noted the distress in her face.

“I’m sorry, Eva; you don’t want to talk about screwdrivers, do you?”

“No, it’s interesting. Honestly. It’s that duct I’d rather not think about.”

And again now, his breath acetone sweet from their morning nip of vodka, he gently placed his hand on hers.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, the britzka bouncing him sharply to the left as it swerved around a slippage of red rubble. “Really, I mean. I would have thought that you were used to that sort of thing. There are still lots of people here in the RFS who have never really seen self-replicating machines, but you came here from England. They must have been a common sight there.”

“They were,” said Eva. “I didn’t like them back then, either.”

She was trying to look away from him, not wanting to meet his big grey eyes. Ivan was at a loss, completely without guile in these situations.

“I wish you would tell me, Eva, why is it you really came here? You don’t act like a typical Free Stater.”

“I told you. I wanted to get out from under the gaze of the Watcher. I wanted to do something to help the handicapped. I felt as if I had some affinity with them…”

Ivan knew there was more to it than that, but he did not know how to push her to reveal more. He was a skilled, intelligent man who spoke English and French fluently, and he was technically very able, and yet underneath it all he remained shy and uncertain. Eva found that incredibly attractive.

“I worked in England for a few months,” said Ivan, “back in ’58.”

“I know,” said Eva, taking his hand and giving it a warm squeeze. “You told me.”

They were now rolling through one of the areas of forgotten industrialization that littered the landscape of the southern peninsula. Concrete blocks of flats—too rotten even to be used to house the refugees who had fled to the last free space on Earth—tilted as they subsided, their carcasses overturning like dead animals. The heating pipes, whose network had once described rubber loops through the grey sky, were tangled and fallen, their ends broken off to leave rusty mouths that could not taste the hot morning air.

“Should be through here soon,” muttered Ivan.

“You are very attentive, Ivan,” said Eva thoughtfully.

“What do you mean?”

She squeezed his hand again.

“You and I both know that these places are breeding grounds for VNMs and venumbs. You didn’t want me getting upset again.”

Ivan said nothing, two little pink spots burning on his cheeks. He took refuge in pessimism.

“Hah! This is an unstable society. The RFS only exists because the rest of the world props it up.” He gave a mournful smile at the thought. “The big organizations are using this place as a testing ground. They’re letting the VNMs run free and seeing what develops. Oh…”—he caught sight of Eva’s face and began to laugh—“all that effort to change the subject and I mention them again.”

Eva laughed along with him, one hand to her mouth.

“That’s okay. It was nice that you thought of me.”

She rolled back the sleeves of her white blouse as the britzka swayed along under a clear blue sky. It was going to be another hot day.

You’re not really Eva Rye—you’re just dreaming all this. You are sleeping in your cabin on board ship, Judy. You tried to look at the thoughts of the FE program and it did something to you to push you away. Wake up, Judy!

A woman was standing in the middle of the potholed road, waving her arms. The robot britzka picked up on the gesture and came to a halt.

Ivan said something in Russian, and the woman’s mouth closed in a hard line. She ducked her head up and down, her whole body bobbing like a duck on water.

“Oh, I’m sorry, don’t you speak English?”

“I do,” said Ivan curtly.

“What’s the matter?” asked Eva simultaneously. “Do you need help?”

The woman’s face lit up as she heard Eva’s voice.

“Are you English? You are, aren’t you? I can tell by your accent. And by your shoes!”

Both Ivan and Eva looked down at Eva’s feet, but the woman continued breathlessly, the bangles on her wrists jangling as she continued to wave her arms about.

“You’ve got to back up now! At least fifty meters! Quickly, now! This road will be covered in VNMs in about three minutes. Julian has been timing it. Hurry up! They’ll strip your funny little cart apart! There’ll be nothing left!”

Ivan pressed a couple of buttons on the dashboard and the britzka began to roll backwards slowly.

“Who is Julian?” he murmured to Eva.

Eva looked down at the plump woman, a sheen of sweat on her forehead as she tramped along the road after them.

“I don’t know who Julian is,” said Eva dismissively. “There’s a sort of person back in England who always talks as if you should know everyone they do.”

“We have them in Russia, too,” said Ivan, wrinkling his lip. “Although I would say that rather they assume that you should know their acquaintances. And if you don’t, they find you wanting for it.”

He spoke with such contempt that Eva giggled.

“Aren’t you scared?” asked Ivan.

“No, I’m not,” said Eva, and she was pleased to find that she wasn’t. She felt safe with Ivan; it made her feel like a teenager again. “Apprehensive maybe,” she added. “Hah! She’s probably seen a squirrel or something.”

Ivan laughed.

“What’s up?” called the woman, not happy to be left out of the joke, not happy that they weren’t taking her warning seriously. She spoke in stern tones. “Look, you should be okay just there. Do you mind if I come on board?”

She was already climbing up onto the bench beside them. Her hands and feet were dirty with the brick dust that had settled all around on the wrecked landscape.

“Julian and the rest are over there, close to the flower. I came over to the road to warn passersby. Somebody has to think of these things, and let’s face it, it’s not going to be Julian. He has a mind like a razor but he needs someone to sort out the important details, and let’s face it” —at this point she gave Eva a flash of smile—“that’s the sort of thing that you have to leave to a woman, isn’t it? I mean, those things can strip a vehicle apart in minutes. Ah, look! You can see the edge of it now. Over there.”

Eva glanced at Ivan, checking if he was upset that this woman in her tie-dyed dress was so obviously ignoring him. Eva was taking a considered dislike to her.

“Over there,” repeated the woman. “Oh, my name’s Fiona, by the way. And you are?”

Eva took the proffered hand, felt the grittiness of brick dust rubbing against her palm.

“Eva. And this is Ivan.”

“Hello, Ivan,” said Fiona, and promptly ignored him again. “Tell you what, maybe if you just backed up another ten meters. Just to be on the safe side. Ah, there you go! Look, Eva, there they are!”

Fiona gripped Eva’s arm and pointed.

They were in a landscape that looked every bit as naturally formed as the rugged mountains to the north. A vista of low hills and twisting dales, filled with the gentle splash of running water. And yet there was no grass or plants or mud to paint the scene. The entire landscape was built of concrete and brick. Broken buildings reared around her, rubble and bricks forming scree at their base. Tarmacked roads, cracked into eroded plates, formed jigsaw paths through the greyness. And now, off to one side, silver VNMs were spilling out of a depression, spreading over the land like water welling from a hole. Eva gave an involuntary whimper, and Ivan placed a gentle hand on her knee.

“It’s okay,” said Fiona, “they won’t get this far.”

Silver spiders flooded out across the land, washing over the road ahead.

“See?” she said triumphantly. “See, if you’d been up there they’d have stripped this cart apart and made it into copies of themselves! Look at them, can you see how they wave their little legs about? They’re looking for something, sensing for metal. Look at how their bodies are silver, and you can’t see any joints.”

Fiona had remarkable facility for describing what was perfectly obvious to everyone else.

“See they are still coming, but fewer and fewer of them…”

The tide slowed, hesitated, and began to run backwards.

“Okay,” she called, “they’re reversing. It will be safe to follow them now. Come on, you’ve got to see this. Julian says he has never seen anything like it.”

She climbed down from the britzka and made her way up a low slope of broken bricks to the sound of clinking and scraping.

“It’s okay,” she said, pausing at the top of the pile to wipe her hands. “Come on, you’ll be perfectly safe. They only eat metal.”

Eva looked at Ivan, who nodded. He pulled something out of his orange-banded toolbox and helped Eva down from the britzka.

They stood at the edge of the dusty road, staring at the shifting sea of bricks.

“Does that look safe to walk on to you?” asked Eva.

Ivan took her arm and helped her across the uneven surface. They kicked silver beads of melted glass to set them bouncing over the dry ground. Fiona didn’t seem to notice; she puffed on ahead, keeping up a constant monologue.

“We were out here looking for railway lines, you know. We’re close to the border with East Coast Company and they keep trying to grow them through here. If DIANA or Berliner Sibelius can get a link across to Enterprise City, then they’ll have a corridor through the RFS that they’ll slowly widen. They’ve already got pipes under here from Colourtown to Openport, carrying oil and carbon, but they’re too deep to touch. Still, you’ve got to do what you can, haven’t you? And now there’s the flower. It’s just over here, not long now, Eva. Emily thinks it’s some sort of signaling device. She says she saw something like it over in Patagonia back in ’75. She says it will be sending a pulse to some receiver, describing the layout of the land. Anyway, here it is, down here.”

The red landscape rose and fell around them like an industrial moon surface. Eva coughed, her mouth dry with the heat and the smell of brick dust all around her.

“It’s so dry and broken,” she said. “It makes me think of bones rubbing together.”

“Bones?” said Fiona. “No. Sloppy sentimentalism. Look, there it is.”

Eva guessed that they were looking across what had once been the basement of a building; she saw a set of stone steps climbing into the air nearby, and she wondered who had once skipped down them, and for what purpose. Now the building was long gone and they stood at the edge of what looked like a silver pond of VNMs, silver insects the size of Eva’s hand, waving their feelers in the air. And yet the pond was contracting while bulging at the center. A silver column was rising into the air, made up of the swarming insects climbing over one another to get the very center of the pool. The column rose until it was roughly twice Eva’s height, and then the top began to swell. The pond at the base was shrinking away to nothing, leaving the dirty tiled floor of the basement exposed, and now there was only a metal flower, its stalk thinning as the top bulged larger and larger.

“What is it?” whispered Eva to Ivan, filled with an uneasy thrill. It was a robot dandelion, a metal puffball. The silver flower flashed brightly under the hot sun. Eva felt a strange lump inside her stomach, an edge of excitement. This was why she had come to the RFS: the Watcher thought it controlled everything, and yet it had not counted on this. This was a new sort of life, emerging from the broken past of the industrial world, this was…

“It’s nothing,” said Ivan, woodenly, and Eva felt her hopes come tumbling down. For once, he didn’t seem to notice her distress. “I’ve seen this before,” he said, “it’s a—”

“It isn’t nothing,” said Fiona angrily. “Watch. You haven’t seen what happens next.”

The top of the flower was growing larger as the stalk grew ever thinner; every VNM present seemed to be trying to climb to the center of the growing puffball, climbing over the bodies of those around it in order to achieve its aim. The stalk grew thinner and thinner, till the inevitable happened.

“Now!” breathed Fiona as the dandelion began to tilt ever so slightly to one side, and then, falling faster and faster, it smashed to the ground and burst apart in a spray of silver bodies. They began to scatter, running apart in a widening circle.

Eva flinched as they came towards her, a chittering tide of silver bodies. Ivan put a hand on her arm.

“Don’t worry, they won’t harm you.”

“They’d strip your cart apart without a moment’s hesitation, though.” Fiona laughed nervously. The silver creatures were skittering past her sandaled feet, and it was obvious that she herself was not quite convinced that they were safe. “Good job you moved it well back.”

Eva nodded and bent her knee slightly, lifting one foot off the ground a little. She could feel the whispery brush of delicate feelers against her ankles; she could hear the pitter-patter of feet on the tiny pieces of broken concrete, and she felt nauseated.

“Look,” said Fiona, “here’s Julian and Emily and Will. Let me introduce you.”

Eva and Ivan exchanged glances as the three strangers approached from the other side of the basement. They were all in their fifties, Eva guessed, about the same age as Fiona. She had met lots of their type in the RFS: well educated, with good jobs back in the surveillance world, with just enough character to see themselves as different from others but not enough to accept their similarities.

“Julian,” said Fiona, “I’d like to introduce you to Eva. She’s from England.”

A handsome man with greying temples held out his hand. “Whereabouts?” he asked with genuine interest.

“All over,” said Eva. “I lived the last thirty years in the North West Conurbation.”

“Ah yes.” Julian nodded. “The green needle. We took the kids up to see that when it first started growing. To think how far VNMs have progressed.”

“And this is Ivan,” continued Fiona. “He’s Russian.”

“Good to meet you, Ivan,” said Julian. “What do you think about this, then? Emily here thinks it’s a signaling device.”

“It’s not,” said Ivan. “It’s a Conway event.”

“Really? That’s interesting,” said Julian, and Eva flushed angrily to see how quickly he dismissed her friend. He waved a hand at the other two. “This is Emily, and this is Will.”

Two more people shook hands. The tide of silver machines that clittered past their ankles was thinning. Fiona could not abide a lull in the conversation. “And where do you live now, Eva?” she asked.

“What’s a Conway event, Ivan?” Eva asked deliberately.

Ivan wore a sulky look. “It is quite a common occurrence with these sort of devices,” he said, ignoring Julian and the others. “Sometimes the units get locked into a dynamic equilibrium—”

“Look!” interrupted Will. “That one’s wearing a jacket!” He pointed to one of the machines scuttling by. There was a flash of white on its back.

“Gosh,” said Emily, kneeling down and reaching out to catch hold of the machine. It snickered past her; she was too hesitant to get a proper grip on it. “Camouflage?”

“No,” said Ivan, “venumb.”

“You told me about those,” said Eva loudly. If Ivan wasn’t going to shine, she was damn well going to do the showing off for him. “Is that birch bark?”

“I think so,” said Ivan, picking up the little creature. “When metal is in short supply, these machines are programmed to adapt.”

Julian leaned closer. “Do you mind?” he said, taking the little machine from Ivan. He held it by the body, its legs waving as it sought purchase with anything available. “Yes, it is birch,” he said as if there had been some doubt. He shook his head. “Things are getting worse. They programmed these things to interfere with the natural environment…”

“No,” said Ivan, “this is almost an evolved process. New forms of life are thriving in the RFS all the time. VNMs are abandoned to replicate here unchecked. The errors in progressive generations are not corrected by outside organizations, as they would be in the surveillance world. These venumbs are occurring more and more frequently. No one could have ever thought that VNMs would interact with plants.”

Julian let go of the creature and watched as it scuttled off.

Fiona looked at her watch. “Three more minutes until the plant re-forms. The signaling pulse must have a period of about five minutes thirty-three seconds.”

Her attitude annoyed Eva. “Weren’t you going to tell us what a Conway event is, Ivan?” she said in a loud voice.

“I was…”

“So, where do you live now, Eva?” interrupted Julian.

Ivan gave a shrug. “Excuse me, Eva, I have something I want to try.” He walked off from the group, stamping down the stone steps into the basement where the flower had grown. He was fiddling with the device he had taken from his tool kit.

“Be careful, Ivan!” she called. “They’ll be coming back soon. They will fill that basement with you in it.”

“I will be okay,” said Ivan.

Eva didn’t really blame him for abandoning her.

Julian was staring at her, and she felt some of the old embarrassment at being in company creeping back. She didn’t know what to say, so she answered his question.

“We live in Narkomfin 128. It’s a communal building about fifty kilometers from here.”

Julian tilted his head at that.

“What’s the matter?” asked Eva.

“Oh, nothing.”

“No it’s not. Why do you look like that?”

“No reason,” said Julian, “just silly rumors. Narkomfin 128 is quite well known, isn’t it? There are lot of handicapped people there, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” said Eva, “a lot of incurables. And then there are the elderly, and the alcoholics that don’t want to be cured, and the children with—”

“A lot of MTPH addicts, too, I hear.” For a moment Julian looked as if he was going to say something more, then he thought better of it and changed the subject. “We’re from Saolim. Have you heard of it?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’ve heard of it,” and at that she relaxed as she saw Ivan come stumping back up the steps.

“Are you okay?” she asked him.

“Yes.” He gazed blankly down into the dusty pit below.

“Here they come again,” said Fiona.

The tide had turned again. Already silver machines were scuttling back, tumbling down the walls of the basement, heading towards the site of the flower. Ivan wore that sulky look of hurt pride that Eva knew only too well.

“What have you done?” she whispered. Ivan didn’t reply, and Eva realized that she had the eyes of the group fixed upon her.

“Ivan builds robots,” she said, as if that explained everything. For a moment, she felt as if she had to justify his behavior, and maybe excuse him.

More and more VNMs flowed past. They noticed others that were wearing birch jackets.

“A Conway event,” said Ivan suddenly, and to no one in particular, “is named after John Conway’s game of life. In this game, cells operating according to a few simple rules can exhibit incredibly complex behavior. From the early days of their use, it has been noted that VNMs following rules insufficiently defined for their environment can become locked in a dynamic equilibrium. Essentially, they get caught in a loop.”

He seemed to be reciting someone else’s words, Eva noted. Though Ivan’s English was excellent, this was not his usual style of speech.

The machines had now formed a silver pool again in the depression. The middle was beginning to bulge and rise as they headed towards the center, striving to climb to that point three meters up in the air. Ivan continued speaking. “Think of a VNM designed to grow into a building. How might you program its prototype? Like this, I think. If you were the VNM, first, make enough copies of yourself. Next, find the foundations and spread yourself out over them to make a floor.”

He waved his hands in illustration, spreading his fingers wide and drawing a big circle in the air.

“You see? Now, when you have done that, climb up a height of, say, three meters to where the next floor would be. Spread yourself out again, and keep going like this until the building is done. This would work fine if you had other separate VNMs building the foundations and raising a frame for you. But what if those other VNMs are not present, or what if your own VNM should get lost? What if it was to find itself all alone, perhaps here in the RFS?”

The silver stalk had grown considerably now; the bulge was already forming on the top as the VNMs climbed up to a next floor that did not exist. Ivan frowned and looked around the brick-strewn landscape.

“Maybe that same VNM would wander the industrial wasteland, making copies of itself until eventually it had enough. Then it would search for the foundations of a building that did not exist.”

He pointed downwards to the rippled concrete floor of the basement, once again exposed.

“But that floor down there is solid enough. Maybe this is the foundation it has been seeking? So then it searches for the next floor up. There is no frame, so it climbs up over copies of itself, until every creature is climbing over every other one, trying to get as high as possible, but the pedestal becomes too thin, and the machines fall and, believing themselves on the next floor up, spread out to find a space that needs covering. Not finding it they rise yet again, and the process repeats and repeats itself until…”

There was a cracking noise, like ice freezing. The silver flower was changing color, the change rising from the base, the material of the VNMs altering subtly, metal crystals growing and realigning. A few scraps of birch bark fluttered to the ground.

Ivan continued softly.

“…until someone who understands what is going on, having worked with VNMs in his younger days, recognizes the model that has repeated its hopeless task for all these months in the wasteland, then looks up the completion code, and sends it to those hapless machines…”

They all looked at the silver flower, frozen in position, its head rising from the broken black rubble of the basement to reflect the hot yellow sun straight into their eyes. Fiona moved her lips slowly, searching for the right words.

“You’ve killed it,” she said.

Wake up! You keep dreaming of this. Why do you think you are Eva? Who keeps giving you these dreams?

Are they lodged in your psyche? Part of what DIANA did to you? Or are they a reminder of your lost soul? Are you borrowing Eva’s feelings to remind yourself what emotions are like?

Eva stamped her way across the broken ground, heading back to the britzka. She could feel the accusing gazes of Fiona and the rest on her back, and it made her angry. Unfairly, she began taking it out on Ivan.

“They come across here with their big intentions and their rules for how this country should be run, and none of them could even operate a bloody hammer. And when they meet someone who actually knows what he’s doing, someone who can operate machinery, they treat him like he’s some sort of idiot.”

Ivan said nothing; he calmly climbed back into the britzka and gazed down the potholed road ahead.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” said Eva. “Aren’t you going to say something?”

“Please don’t patronize me, Eva,” said Ivan. “Do you think I am not aware? Do you think I need you to point all this out to me?”

Eva blushed.

But I’m not Eva, I’m Judy. Why do I keep dreaming of this woman? Now I’m even on a ship that bears her name. I used the meta-intelligence to look around the Eva Rye. I can see every living being on this ship, but there is something else, too. Something that inhabits the ship but is not alive.

But what is life, anyway? Is it just a Conway event?

Eva and Ivan were rolling home through the awakening smell of growing grass that rose up around the Narkomfin, through the buzz of machinery and the sound of nervous giggling as one of the handicapped ran out from the side of the road. And there was the sweet sound of a cello playing at the edge of evening. Eva recognized the music made by Hilde, child prodigy, gifted resident of Narkomfin 128.

“It looked alive,” insisted Eva. “It looked alive.”

“It was just a result of initial conditions, Eva,” answered Ivan solemnly. “A few simple rules can produce systems of astonishing complexity.”

“I know.”

Ivan waved to a group of people who stood by the side of the road. He shouted something in Russian to them. They laughed in response.

“Oh, Eva, why so sad? Come on, we are home. Look, there is Katya waiting for me.”

Down the road, Ivan’s daughter sat in her wheelchair, her boyfriend, Paul, standing at her side.

“Come on, Eva, we have just a few days left together, and you are worrying about a metal flower. That sort of thing is inevitable when you have VNMs. What’s the matter?”

Eva gazed at nothing.

“What’s the matter?” he repeated. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No.” Eva bit her lip. “Yes. I don’t know. I’m sad that you are leaving here.”

“Come with me.”

“I can’t. I can’t return to the surveillance world. You know that. You stay here with me.”

“No, I have Katya to think about. I need to take her home.”

“See? We are both prisoners of circumstance.”

“This is life.”

“I know.”

She sighed bitterly. “There is no choice. There is no free will. I thought so once, but the Watcher proved me wrong. It asked me questions, decided how it should operate on this planet, but the questions were loaded. I had no choice in how I answered them.”

“There is always a choice.”

“No, there is not, Ivan. You Russians, with your icons and the Holy Mother and your sentimentality. Out in the middle of this emptiness you hear the echo of your thoughts, and you think it the still small voice of calm. Here you can believe in the soul and free will, yet all there is, is the mechanism ticking away in your skull…”

Ivan frowned. “No, Eva. That is not right. Yes, there is a mechanism that produces your thoughts, but that does not mean that everything is fixed.”

“You have to believe that, Ivan, but it’s not true. It’s like this…”

She lowered her head, as if utterly exhausted. Ivan waited patiently for her to speak.

“Back in England,” she began slowly, “I remember seeing an antique narrow boat in a museum. Most of it—ninety-eight percent of it—was given over to cargo, to profit. This was how the owners made a living, carrying cargo up and down the canals. So much of the boat was given over to cargo that their living quarters were all cramped into one end. They were tiny: the steering part, the kitchen, the cupboards, everything that was not profitable, was cramped into a tiny nook at one end.”

The britzka rocked as it bumped to a halt. The smell of frying onions, drifting out from the open windows of the grey Narkomfin, was like a friendly spirit in the cooling air.

“I thought it terrible that they should live so,” she continued. “The bed was the worst thing, a tiny board laid out over the space where the pilot would stand during the daytime. A man, a woman, and their child would sleep at night in a space so small they couldn’t stretch out but would have to curl around each other like spoons. They literally couldn’t turn over in their sleep, it was so small. And in the morning they would lift that bed board and then use the space beneath it to cook breakfast.”

She smiled slightly, registering the smell of onions. Then she fixed Ivan with an intense look.

“And I was struck by the way people were forced to live in such dreadful conditions by the prevailing economic forces of the time. There was land available for all, for food and space, but it wasn’t shared out equally. People had to sleep—that’s what really struck me— sleep like that, because that was the way the country was run then, with everyone seeking to find work and make a profit to survive. And that was because humans are destined to compete with each other, and that’s because of the way they evolved, and…and…and suddenly it struck me that, in a way, it’s written in the fundamental makeup of the universe that matter attracts, and molecules replicate, and life evolves and competes, and one of the means of such competition is profit. Just think of that, how capitalism and the rise of the big organizations are as much a part of the inevitable consequences of the big bang as are atoms and stars and life itself.”

Ivan moved his lips, tasting the idea. “I suppose so,” he said.

Eva was staring at the Narkomfin, at its grey walls made colorful by the laundry looping from the windows to dry in the late-afternoon sunshine. She saw the ruined silver bones of the defeated venumb that had once tried to claim the building. She gazed at the distant mountains, purple and blue, and so rough and wild and unlike the rest of the world, covered as that was by the creeping sanitized surveillance of the Watcher.

“It makes me wonder,” said Eva. “Could we stand back and look at the commercial company that operated those barges and think that that particular macro structure was as much a part of the universe as a white dwarf.”

“What has that got to do with the flower?” asked Ivan. “What has that got to do with Katya and you and me?”

“It means that your leaving me is inevitable, Ivan. Do not blame yourself.”

…and you looked for life on the ship, Judy, and you found something, something located at the very core of its being. In its bones, you might say.

The FE software. Do you remember? It feels alive, but it’s not living; and you wanted to know what it was. It is here on the ship; you can feel its actual presence. Lying on your bed, you sent your thoughts off through the ship, but you lost it at that strange knot of converging corridors. It is something that your mind cannot touch. The FE software is like life without motion—the essence of life, but unchanging, a cloud of ink moulded in a Perspex block.

It doesn’t move, it doesn’t defend itself, and yet your thoughts drifted off, drifted off into this dream. You’ve dreamt of Eva before, Judy—why is that? And now you must wake up…

Judy opened her eyes to see the stars rising higher and higher into the night sky, like stacks of silver pennies thrown into the air. Her eyes adjusted, and she saw it was just the black lacquer of her ceiling reflecting the myriad yellow flames of the little candles burning around her bed. The FE software? It wasn’t life—but, then again, life took on so many forms. Life took on so many forms.

And what was life, anyway?

maurice 2: 2252

Maurice played his clarinetwith his eyes half fixed on the screen of his console. It was unusual to have three FE ships within range of them at once, and the thought that maybe he should wake Saskia and tell her wove in and out of his thoughts in time to the music.

The silver plastic felt warm and alive under his fingers; he could feel the patterns of resonance change in the space around him as he played. The air of the little hold seemed to be dancing, ripe with melody. For the moment, Maurice felt at peace in the funny little space where gravity had been set to make maximum use of the available surfaces. Black-and-white rubber tiles lined the floor, the four walls and the ceiling. He didn’t hear Judy coming up behind him. “That sounds nice,” she said. The music died, and the hold reverted to an empty space scattered with the thin cargo the crew of the Eva Rye had managed to acquire. The life seemed to pass instantly from the goods ranged in the crates that were stacked on the floor, the ceiling, and the walls, all held in place by the six-directional gravity. In the ensuing silence, the crystal glasses packed in foam pellets no longer sang, the green apples that lay in neat nests of paper lost their bloom. Only the piles of colored pebbles remained happy, glinting in the light.

“No, don’t stop. Go on,” Judy urged, sitting down heavily on the crate next to Maurice. Her voice sounded whispery and thin.

“Are you okay?” Maurice turned to peer at her pale face. Even through her white makeup he could see how drawn and uneasy she looked.

“I’ll be fine,” Judy said, sitting up straighter.

“You’re not fine now, though,” Maurice replied. “Come on, let’s go to the living area and get you something to drink.”

“I just need to sit here for a while,” said Judy. “I didn’t sleep too well. I heard the music. Why don’t you let me listen to you play?”

Maurice was already opening his instrument case and slotting the clarinet into its nest in the green baize inside.

“I’ve finished,” he said, making to close the case. Judy placed a hand on his elbow to stop him.

“What are they ?” she asked, pointing to the pieces of black pipe that also nestled in the baize. She ran a finger along the silver metal that formed loops over the surface of one of them. Maurice sounded almost embarrassed.

“Those?” he said. “They’re sections of another clarinet, an old one. They used to be carved from wood, not grown from plastic.” He touched the shiny black wood of one of the pieces. “The shape of them was not as efficient as the fractal forms they use nowadays. The fingering was different as well, not terribly logical.”

“Can you play it?”

“Oh, yes,” said Maurice, and he snapped the case shut with a click, firmly ending that line of conversation.

The three ships registered on the console were moving closer. Judy’s eyes looked yellow and dull; her black passive suit seemed shabby and frumpy. She gave a yawn and rubbed her hands through her hair, trying to wake herself up.

“It smells nice in here,” she said.

“It’s the apples,” said Maurice. “Judy, what is the matter? You look ill.”

Judy was drooping again. She sat up straighter.

“It’s this thing here,” she said, lethargically pointing to the back of her neck. “It’s making me feel things that aren’t real. Maurice, what do you know about the FE software?”

“Not much more than I’ve told you. Why?”

“It doesn’t feel right.” She rubbed her hands through her hair again, as if she had a headache. “What about Miss Rose? What’s she doing on this ship anyway?”

Maurice smiled. “Stealing things. Oh, and being rude to people.”

He looked back at his console. “You know, Judy, there are three FE-equipped ships within range of us at the moment, all transmitting protocols indicating they wish to trade. That’s unusual: up until now we’ve only encountered one such ship every few days or so.”

“It’ll be me,” said Judy. “I told you. Someone is arranging things so as to get me to Earth.”

“Chris?” said Maurice. “This oh-so-powerful AI that you mentioned?”

“He’s part of it,” said Judy. “But I think it runs much deeper than that.”

She shuddered and folded her hands in her lap. She looked over towards the apples, green and jolly in their crates. Maurice wondered if he should offer to fetch her one.

“Shall I…?” he began.

“Tell me about Miss Rose,” said Judy. “She wasn’t on Breizh, was she? How did she come to join you?”

Maurice was still fiddling with his console, peering intently at one of the ships indicated on the display.

“That ship there,” he said, pointing to an amber arrow, “the A Capella —I bet you it makes contact with us in the next few minutes.” He looked at Judy thoughtfully. “Miss Rose? She was on the, oh, I can’t remember its name, the Yellow River or something. They had too many passengers on board; too many minds. They were having problems with Dark Seeds. A Dark Plant had taken root somewhere in the ship, but they couldn’t find it.”

Judy shivered.

“Sorry,” he said.

“No, go on.”

“Most of an FE ship is off-limits to humans—did you know that? Passengers were going to sleep on that ship not knowing what they would wake up to. I saw one of them wrapped up in a cocoon of BVBs, like a mummy. You can’t cut BVBs. Nothing can. The man inside them was dying a slow death.”

Now it was Maurice’s turn to shiver. “They wanted to reduce the number of people on board. Fewer minds means fewer people to pick up on the flux. They did a Fair Exchange. We got Miss Rose.”

He paused significantly, inviting the question that Judy now supplied.

“And what did you get in return?”

“Nothing, of course,” said Maurice with satisfaction. “The FE software deemed that her presence on board the ship was payment enough.”

“That fact doesn’t upset you as much as it does Saskia, does it?” Judy observed. Maurice was peering thoughtfully at his console again.

“It doesn’t annoy me. If anything it makes me feel nervous,” he said. “I’m beginning to think there’s more to the FE software than we have been told. A lot more.”

“So am I,” said Judy softly.

“And it makes me worried,” said Maurice. “Miss Rose is over eighty years old, senile, and a kleptomaniac. What is she going to do for us to earn her passage?”

They gazed at each other. Judy was about to say something significant, something about FE—Maurice just knew it—but at that moment the A Capella made contact.

“Hello, Eva Rye. We hear you are going to Earth. Do you wish to trade?”

Saskia usually took a good half an hour to wake up properly. Sitting up in bed, with red lines from the pillow creases on her cheek, she was not at her best.

“They want us to take what to Earth?” she said blearily, looking at the glass of water she was holding in her hand. “Hold on, I’ll come down there right away.”

“Saskia, what’s the point?” said Maurice patiently. “Does it make any difference if you watch a viewing field here with us in the hold, or you watch one alone in your cabin?”

Saskia put down the glass without taking a sip. She looked so soft and childlike while half asleep. Maurice imagined she would smell of toothpaste and warm bedclothes.

“Okay,” she said, stifling a yawn, “put them through. I’ll speak to them here, then.”

“I should warn you…” began Maurice.

“Just put them through.”

Maurice shrugged. He took a certain pleasure in seeing Saskia’s surprise as the captain of the A Capella appeared before her.

“How old are you?” she asked, sounding insulted.

“Eleven,” said the boy in the viewing field. He was a good-looking lad, thought Maurice, with a nice smile, big brown eyes, and olive skin. “Are you Saskia?”

“I am. Do your parents know what you are doing right now?”

“They do,” said the boy. “My name is Ben. A systems-repair unit recommended that I take command of the ship during a Fair Exchange we made a few months ago.”

Saskia frowned. Maurice knew what she was thinking. The Stranger had recommended that Edward should command the Eva Rye, and they had ignored its suggestion.

“Ben,” called Maurice, “how do you know we are going to Earth?”

“Our FE software told us,” the boy replied smugly. “ Eva Rye, heading to Earth, ETA five days from now. Can’t your FE do that yet?”

Saskia sat up straighter on her bed. She was wearing blue-checked pajamas that fastened up to her neck. They made her look even more like a little girl. She gave a dismissive gesture.

“Of course it can,” she lied. “Tell me, what is it you want taken to Earth?”

“Some crates,” said Ben.

“What’s in them?”

“Active suits.”

“Active suits? Aren’t they dangerous?”

“These ones are perfectly safe,” said Ben.

“So you say. I hear they walk around on their own, looking for trouble.”

“Only if they’re activated. These ones are currently set to dormant.”

“But isn’t it true that they can rouse themselves in times of danger?”

Ben waved dismissively. “I told you, they’re perfectly safe. The FE software issued a digital certificate confirming this.”

“Okay.” But Saskia didn’t look as if it was okay. “Well, if they’re that safe, why don’t you take them to Earth?”

Ben spoke to someone standing outside the viewing field. Maurice strained to hear what was said. The boy nodded his head and then replied to her.

“Earth is too unstable. We dare not go there.”

Saskia gave a tired groan. Maurice realized that Judy was watching him watching Saskia in the console. She wore that impassive expression of hers. What was she thinking? He dismissed the thought and turned back to the job at hand.

“What are we going to do, Saskia?” he asked.

“We might as well take the suits with us,” said Saskia irritably. “We’re going to Earth anyway. You sort it all out, Maurice. I’m going back to sleep.”

She reached out, and the viewing field from which she spoke shrank to nothing, leaving Maurice alone in the little hold with Judy and the image of Ben. He realized everyone was looking at him. Fine. Maurice stared at the space where she had just been. Just fine. As soon as the heat is on, you dodge the decisions.

“What do you think we should do, Judy?” Maurice asked, turning to her.

“I’m just a passenger,” said Judy. “But, as you’re asking me, I say make it easy on yourself. I told you, someone is planning my life for me. If they want us to take those crates with us, then you’ll be wasting your time trying to resist them.”

Maurice rubbed his hands together thoughtfully.

“Okay, Ben, we’ll trade.”

“Good,” said Ben. “I’ll get my dad to start the FE process.”

The boy glanced out of the range of the viewing field again, as if listening to someone nearby. Maurice noted the décor on the other ship: a tropical collection of bamboo and woven grass. Did they have the heating turned up on board there to complement the décor? Did they spend their evenings drinking long cool drinks in sand-covered leisure rooms?

Ben was nodding his head. “Oh, yes,” he was saying, “good idea.”

He turned back to Maurice. “Listen, Eva Rye, don’t bother plotting an intercept course. We’ll launch the cargo into space. Your course will intersect with it in just over four hours. You can pick it up as you pass.”

Maurice bit his lip as he reached for his console. Somebody had all this planned out in advance. What were the chances of two ships flying on such similar courses in the vastness of space?

He activated the FE software. “I’m handshaking now.”

“Good, we’ll speak to you soon.”

Ben’s viewing field shrank away to nothing.

In the hollow space of the little cargo hold, Maurice watched flowing colors ripple into life above his console as the Eva Rye ’s FE software hand-shook with that of the A Capella . Silence fell in the little hold. Black-and-white tiles twinkled amongst the sparse collection of crates that lay scattered about over the walls and ceiling.

“Can I give you some advice?” said Judy suddenly.

“Would I be able to stop you?”

“Sleep with Saskia,” said Judy, ignoring his weary tone. “You are both sexually frustrated and more compatible than you would imagine: I saw the way you looked at her in that viewing field. I think recreational sexual intercourse would do you both some good.”

Maurice turned and stared at her. He was already voicing his reply before he properly had time to think about it.

“Well, if we’re being frank, why don’t I sleep with you instead? You’re so good at reading people, you must know I find you attractive.”

“You can’t sleep with me. I’m a virgin,” said Judy simply. “I thought I told you this already. Besides which, you find Saskia more attractive—you just don’t know it yet. Now, why don’t you play me a tune on your clarinet?”

Maurice stroked the case and said nothing.

“Okay,” said Judy, “let’s make it worth your while. Let’s put it through the FE software. You play for me, and I’ll sleep with you. We’ll get FE to work out the difference on the transaction.”

Maurice turned pale. “Don’t make jokes like that, Judy. You don’t know what FE is like. Your virginity will come at too high a price. You’ve no idea how such a transaction would affect the ship!”

“I’ll take the risk if you will, Maurice.”

Maurice was frightened. Judy was gazing at him like a robot might. It’s not me she’s doing this to, he thought. She’s doing this to make a point—but to herself. A flicker on the console caught his eye.

“There’s the next one.” He pointed, trying to hide his embarrassment.

“The next what?” asked Judy.

“The next FE-equipped ship. You’re right, Judy. Someone has something planned for us.”

He turned to face her, unable to keep the frustration from his voice.

“Who are you Judy?”

Judy said nothing. He began to wonder how old she was. Older than she looked, he guessed. The skin on her face was so smooth, and yet he noted tiny little lines at the edges of her eyes. She lacked some of the easy joy of a younger person, but she had gained the relaxed grace and poise of experience.

“Who are you?” he repeated. “When you say you’re a virgin, you make it sound like it’s some sort of species, not a life choice.”

“Who am I?” said Judy. And for a moment Maurice expected to hear the words “no one special,” but he realized this was not what Judy was thinking. Quite the opposite, in fact. “Me?” she repeated. “I’m Judy. I had twelve copies made of my mind. We were all virgins, and we all pledged to remain so.”

“Why?”

“You wouldn’t understand. But it was a way of holding something in common. We all worked for Social Care, myself and my twelve digital sisters.”

“What’s the matter? What happened? You look so wistful.”

Judy brushed her hands through her hair again.

“They were all killed,” she said, “each and every one of them.”

“But why?”

“Chris! I told you, Chris had my sisters killed because he thought that it would help me to see his point of view.” Her dark eyes were fixed upon his. He wanted to look away. She went on in her soft voice.

“Chris had an associate called Kevin. Have you ever heard of him? Kevin? Almost a man. He wasn’t a human as such, nor an atomic being like you or me. He was digital construct, an AI written by DIANA. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it? It was a DIANA ship that found me, a DIANA ship that performed FE

with you…”

“But why did Kevin kill your sisters?”

“To get my attention.”

“But that’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? It worked. Chris and Kevin were convinced that I would see their point of view, once they had explained it to me. They are sure that someday I too will want to help them usurp the Watcher.”

Maurice made a little noise in his throat. He couldn’t speak. He swallowed hard.

“Do you?” he said.

Judy’s gaze hardened.

“No. Never. I used to work for Social Care, remember.” She leaned closer to him, full of conviction.

“Listen, no matter how bad things have become on Earth, no matter what the Watcher needs to do to win the fight against the dark plants, I will not forsake it, neither will I forget the role that I have taken on. The Watcher exists to nurture humans.”

Maurice felt uncomfortable at the sheer belief resonating through her words. This missionary zeal, this conviction that humanity could be guided to a better path by Social Care, did not play well with the milk-and-water principles by which most of the people in the twenty-third century lived their lives. And Judy knew it; she was eyeing him with a scornful expression. She knew about him, she was taunting him. Who are you, now that Armstrong has gone ? she was saying. How are you going to dress, who are you going to look up to on this ship? Who will your role model be? Me? Do you dare?

Maurice recoiled, and the world seemed to lighten. He was still sitting in the little hold. Judy was just a tired, sick woman. It was all in his imagination.

He needed to speak. “I have heard it’s bad on Earth, but can we blame the Dark Plants? The Dark Plants are not that dangerous, surely. I know that they cause problems, but the Watcher is—”

Judy was rattled. She was allowing her emotion to show. She leaned forward and her eyes glittered. He could smell cinnamon on her breath.

“Believe me, Maurice, the Dark Plants are that great a threat.”

She broke off.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m being terribly unprofessional. I will compose myself.”

Maurice’s console chimed. The FE software had exchanged circumstances. Now it was calculating the deal. Maurice couldn’t help but notice the way Judy seemed to flinch every time she looked at the console. She looked away, looked around the empty space of the little hold, looked up at the crates stacked on the ceiling that seemed to hang over her head. You could walk up the walls in here, following the curving paths set between the planes of the floors and ceiling and walls. You could follow a circular route in any direction, always pulled to the nearest surface by the six-way gravity. There was a dead spot in the middle of the room, an area of weightlessness where they stored special cargoes. Scented paper sculptures, crystal lattice forms, pingrams.

“Do you want to walk up to the ceiling with me?” Maurice asked. “Or maybe go alone? We can look up at each other while we wait for the FE to complete.”

“No, thank you,” Judy replied tiredly. “I’d like it better if you played your clarinet again.”

Maurice touched the black case and it snapped open. He was reaching into the green baize interior just as his console chimed.

“FE is done,” he said, closing the case again. He looked at the console and laughed coldly.

“ There’s a surprise,” he said. “We get nothing from the deal again. We just pick up the cargo and take it to Earth. It seems that will be our reward.”

He tapped his teeth thoughtfully and muttered to himself.

“Saskia will be upset, I suppose. But I wonder…I’m beginning to suspect there might be a teleological element to FE. Are we being badly dealt with by FE, or are we just not seeing the benefits yet? Are they still to come?”

Judy wasn’t listening. She was hugging herself, her arms tight around her body. Maurice reached out to touch her, then paused.

“Should I hug you?” he asked.

“Why do you ask? We know that you are only doing it to comfort me.”

“You’re a virgin.”

Judy smiled tensely. “That doesn’t mean I don’t like people to touch me,” she said. She stood up straighter. “But I am in control of myself again. Thank you, anyway.”

They stood in silence in the hold.

“I’d still like you to play for me, though,” Judy insisted.

“What’s the matter? Every time you see the FE software you go all tense.”

“I dreamt…” she began. “I can feel…”

She reached out, opened the clarinet case, and ran her finger across the green baize lining the interior. Carefully she took out the clarinet and held it inexpertly in her hands.

“It’s very nice,” she said. “It feels like it’s been well made.”

“One of the best,” Maurice confirmed. “So you couldn’t sleep? You came looking for company.”

“I miss Jesse,” she said. “I miss him. And this thing on my neck”—she touched herself, gently—“the Free Enterprise called it a meta-intelligence. It took away Jesse, and it replaced him with this thing. I can now see life in places where it never existed before. Yet the life I can see is nothing more than a set of reactions.”

She blew on the clarinet: a note emerged, thin and reedy. “I wish you would play for me.” Her voice was so desolate that Maurice felt chilled to his stomach.

“What do you mean, nothing more than a set of reactions?”

Judy rolled the clarinet in her hands. “I see the way you all react to one another, you and Saskia, Edward and Miss Rose, and it’s nothing more than a set of rules. I can’t see any love or friendship or feeling anymore.”

“I think that pretty much sums up this ship.” Maurice laughed uncertainly.

“No, you don’t understand.” She held up the clarinet. “I hear you play and I see another aspect to your personality, one that you keep hidden. I listen through the meta-intelligence, and all I hear is a sequence of notes.”

She dropped her voice.

“And I then use the meta-intelligence to look at the FE software and I see something there. Something in the processing space on this ship.”

“Something alive?” asked Maurice.

“No, not alive. There is no movement. Whatever is in there is something still and deep. Maurice, I don’t think we have the first beginnings of an idea of what you have welcomed on board this ship when you signed up with FE.”

She shivered. “It doesn’t think, it’s not alive, and yet”—her eyes widened—“I tried to look at it, Maurice, and it pushed me away.”

He touched her gently on the shoulder.

“I’m not sure what you mean, Judy.”

She was hugging herself again. “Play for me?” she pleaded.

He raised the clarinet to his lips and moistened the reed.

Another voice spoke in the hold.

“Hello, Eva Rye, this is the Petersburg. Do you wish to engage in Fair Exchange?”

“Two in half an hour?” Maurice muttered, putting his clarinet back in its case. “What’s going on here?”

Saskia was tired and even more bad-tempered.

“Is there anybody in the galaxy who doesn’t know our business, Maurice?”

“Saskia, how should I know? The FE software is obviously capable of more than we were told about.”

“And you say they’re telling us to change course. Have you any idea why?”

“They say it’s dangerous. It makes sense, I suppose. We’re heading now to the location of the ship given to us by the Free Enterprise . That’s our payment, our reason for going to Earth. If the Bailero is located in a restricted area, it would explain why no one else has found it before.”

“Hmmm,” said Saskia, “will it be safe for us to go there?”

“Saskia, how the fuck should I know?”

Maurice looked across at Judy. She was on the other side of the hold, picking green apples one by one out of their paper nests, feeling them for bruises. In the viewing field, Saskia was squirming angrily on the bed, bedclothes rucked up around her feet.

“ Petersburg, who are you to tell us where we should go?”

“Nobody,” said Fyodor, the Petersburg ’s captain. “But you are heading towards a dangerous region. You would do better to fly around it.”

Fyodor was a relaxed-looking man. He reminded Maurice a little of Claude.

“We thank you for your advice,” snapped Saskia. “Now what do you want?”

“Just a shot in the dark,” interrupted Maurice, “but you wouldn’t want us to take something to Earth, would you?”

Fyodor gave a big white beaming smile. “Just a processing space.”

Saskia was past caring. “Listen, all I want is some decent coffee,” she said. “Or preferably some brandy. You haven’t got any of that on board, have you? I will gladly take your processing space, along with any other shit you want to off-load on us, if you can promise me just one decent cup of coffee. At least that way we will have got something out of a deal for once. Failing that, I just want to go back to sleep.”

“I’m sorry,” said Fyodor, “I did not mean to wake you. We drink tea on board this ship, for preference, and I’m not sure how much coffee we have. We do have some vanilla whiskey on board, if you are interested in that?”

“Ignore her,” said Maurice, from the hold. “She’s just in a bad mood.” Something caught his attention. A visual representation was pulsing in a soft spiral at the edge of his vision. He slid his fingers over his console, adjusting his view.

“Is that a systems repair robot I can see on your hull?” he asked. The console was zooming in on the pencil-shaped hull of the Petersburg to focus in on a curved swastika. Four glassy eyes stared back at him.

“It is,” said Fyodor. “The processing space I want you to take is located in that robot. His name is Aleph.”

“You want me to take the processing space inside that robot to Earth?”

Fyodor looked amused. “No, it is the robot itself that wants to travel to Earth, but it is afraid to ask you directly.”

“Not afraid,” said Aleph. “I just thought you might be a little suspicious if I approached you myself. My brother tells me that you did not appreciate the Fair Exchange you made with him.”

“Oh, whatever you think is best, Maurice,” snorted Saskia. “I’m putting you in charge for the next eight hours. I’m going to back to sleep. Don’t wake me.”

Again the viewing field faded to nothing.

Maurice shrugged. “We’ll take the deal.”

“Good,” said the robot. “I’m detaching myself now. I will meet you at the rendezvous point, with the crates from the A Capella .”

For the second time in half an hour, Maurice began the process of Fair Exchange. From behind him, he heard a crunching sound as Judy ate her apple.

Time passed in the little hold.

Judy ate three apples, one after the other, and showed no sign of wanting to return to her room. The FE software chimed to announce another contract. The Eva Rye would carry the robot and receive nothing in return.

Maurice gave a grunt at the arrangement. Judy shivered again and hugged herself. And eventually, lulled by the silence and the unspoken companionship, Maurice lowered his guard. He picked up the clarinet and began to play. Eyes closed at first, he lost himself in the melody. Then, when he felt confident enough, he looked around to see Judy watching him, staring at his fingers as they flickered up and down. She smiled at him, and he inclined his head a little and listened to the music inside his head. He closed his eyes again and reached inside himself and tried to think what music to play for virgins and nonbelievers, and a melody that seemed to be written in nothing more than the bloom of fresh apples and the reflection of light from pebbles awoke inside him. And then he lost himself, and he was no longer thinking of Judy.

Eventually he finished playing. He opened his eyes.

Judy was staring at him. “That was very good,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“What do you mean?” Maurice said defensively.

“You had your eyes closed as you were playing. Maybe you were lost in a dream, I don’t know.” She narrowed her eyes. “I can’t read your mind, Maurice, but I can see the beauty: an empty space, filled with the music of your clarinet.”

Maurice looked down, almost embarrassed. Judy pressed on.

“The air in this hangar resonates with the sound of music—it dances. It’s almost like a mind and then, beyond it, emptiness. Outside the metal walls of the Eva Rye, hard vacuum. Oh…”

A scale of tiny popping sounds came to life as Maurice’s hand clenched itself around the silver plastic of the clarinet, opening the keys.

“That’s private!” he said. Judy had her eyes closed now. She didn’t seem to have heard him.

“Oh! Yes! A little bubble of life, enclosed by the hard metal walls of the ship.”

“Stop it!” said Maurice. “Fucking Social Care! Always telling us how to live our lives! What good have you ever done anyone?” He gripped her arms tightly, though still holding the clarinet in one hand. It dug into Judy’s flesh and she gave a little whimper. “Sorry,” he said, releasing her. She held his gaze.

“I’m sorry, too,” she said. “Maurice, you have a little devil in your head that is whispering to you all the time. It turns you away from everything that gives you pleasure and persuades you that there are better things to do. It tells you that others have far more value as people, and that you must emulate them if you are to be accepted. That’s why you sneak off here to play by yourself.”

She turned and walked out of the little hold.

Maurice watched her go. “Judy!” he called. “I’m sorry.”

She reappeared at the door, face calm. “I know,” she said.

The Eva Rye dropped out of Warp.

Maurice, Saskia, and Judy sat in the white leather chairs of the conference room, looking at the viewing field that floated over the table. Edward brought them coffee, thin and watery. Maurice watched him, saw the look of concentration as the tall man placed the thin white cups and saucers before them.

“I can’t see anything,” complained Saskia irritably. She needed more sleep.

“They’re out there somewhere,” said Maurice, sliding his fingers over his console. “Ah, got them.”

He zoomed in on the crates, floating through space in neat lines, two by two. Ben, the eleven-year-old captain of the A Capella, hailed them. “Hello there, Maurice.”

“I’ll deal with this,” said Saskia. “Hello, Ben. Is your dad there?”

“I’m captain of the A Capella, Saskia,” Ben said disapprovingly. “Anyway, my dad’s gone to bed with Mum.”

“Should you be saying things like that about your parents?” asked Maurice. Ben waved his hand in an airy gesture. “Dad says he’s never felt so relaxed since I became captain. I don’t think he’ll want you disturbing him.”

“How do you suggest we pick up these crates then, Ben?” asked Saskia.

“Open the doors to your large hold, slide yourself around them, and then gradually dial up the gravity,”

said Ben. “That’s what we usually do.”

“I can do that,” said Maurice, “no problem,” and he noticed the way that Saskia looked at him. Not exactly approvingly, but at least she had lost her earlier hostility. He wondered at what Judy had said to him earlier in the hold about the pair of them.

“Why don’t you get down there now?” suggested Saskia. “Check that they arrive okay.”

“I will,” said Maurice.

He picked up his console and walked from the room. He still felt slightly ashamed of his behavior earlier. Then he heard Judy’s words from the corridor. Later on, he wondered if he was supposed to.

“He’s very competent,” said Judy. “Maurice, I mean.”

“Yes,” said Saskia.

“A word of advice, though. Don’t do something stupid.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t, whatever you do, end up doing something stupid like sleeping with him.”

Maurice stopped, fists clenched. And then the door to the conference room slid shut on their conversation.

Seething, he walked on down the corridor.

interlude: 2245

—Judy has gone, said the Watcher. He and Chris communicated oh, so carefully. Any message, any scrap of information that passed between them had the potential to be a weapon. A Trojan, a virus, a recursive meme. A message could also be an arrow, a pointer to the other’s location. Chris’ reply was days in coming, written in the arrangement of a pattern of asteroids. Their subsequent conversation danced in dust motes; it was written in the stars.

—So? Chris said. —She will come back.

—You really think that she will help you defeat me? the Watcher replied. —She hates you. You killed her sisters.

—That was Kevin, not me.

—Kevin works for you. You gave him control of the processing spaces. Judy had twelve digital copies of herself living in cyberspace and you allowed him to kill them all.

—Where has she gone? Chris asked, changing the subject.

—You think I would tell you that?

—Into the Enemy Domain, I expect. That’s where everyone runs when they want to get away from you.

—That’s where you think you are building a resistance, the Watcher replied. —It won’t succeed, Chris.

—That’s where you have built your ziggurat, replied Chris. —Don’t think that I don’t know about your plans, too.

The silence that followed this revelation lasted weeks. It was eventually broken by the stir of newspaper in the wind in a street in Amsterdam.

—Still, Judy has gone, the Watcher said.

—She’ll be back, Chris said. —Someday she will return to me. Someday she will see my point of

view.

maurice 3: 2252

Saskia cameinto Maurice’s room without waiting for an invitation.

“I think you should come to the conference room,” she urged. “We’ve found something unusual.”

Maurice put down the sandwich he had been eating and wiped his hands carefully on a linen napkin. Saskia looked different, somehow. She was tense, but there was nothing unusual in that. He gave a little snort of laughter. Maybe she had just found something new to be tense about.

“Couldn’t you just have patched me through using a viewing field?” He stood up and stretched. Tuesday had been a long day. They had arrived at the location given them by the Free Enterprise, but there had been no sign of the Bailero, their promised payment for taking Judy to Earth. The ensuing search had done nothing for anyone’s temper, particularly with the Petersburg ’s warnings as to the danger of this region still ringing in their ears.

Then there had been the totally bizarre events that afternoon when the active suits had suddenly broken free from the crates in the small hold and started marching through the ship, looking for all the world like a drunken mob of pajamas, searching for somewhere to store themselves. They had marched up and down the corridors, badly frightening Miss Rose, until Edward, of all people, had thought of showing them through to the lockers near the living area.

By the evening Saskia had become so edgy that Maurice had chosen to take his meal to his own room. Anything to avoid the tension that had built up yet again in the ship’s communal areas.

“What?” he said, noting the way Saskia was scowling at his black passive suit.

“Since when did you wear black?” she asked. “Trying to be like Judy now, are we?” She let her hair drop forward over her eyes and continued in her quiet voice, “Look, we all need to be together to discuss this. It’s…odd. Come on.”

She walked to the door and from there took a long look around Maurice’s neatly ordered quarters.

“I’ve never been in here before,” she said hesitantly. “You’ve got so many things.”

She placed a hand on one of several carbon-bladed knives that were displayed on a shelf near the door, then glanced up at the 3D pictures of venumbs that were hung on the wall above them, all bright and alive. She gazed at the red thorns and rich dark bark, examined the silver metal joints. She did look different, thought Maurice, but why?

Suddenly, she looked as though she remembered why she was there. “Come on,” she repeated, and walked from the room.

Edward sat in the conference room, his hands covering his face, his feet on his chair so that his knees were drawn up to his chest.

“I don’t like them,” he said.

“Don’t be silly,” snapped Saskia, striding into the room.

“That’s not going to calm him down, is it?” said Judy, quite reasonably. She placed a reassuring hand on the big man’s shoulder and said something softly that Maurice couldn’t hear. The cause of Edward’s distress could be seen floating in a viewing field above the table.

“What are they?” asked Maurice.

“We don’t know,” admitted Judy. “Neither does Aleph.”

She pointed to a viewing field, where the systems repair robot they had picked up from the Petersburg could be seen clinging to the hull of their ship. Aleph gave Maurice a cheery wave. Maurice gave a halfhearted wave in return as he moved closer to the images. They reminded him of flowers: they were all the same size and shape, roughly spherical. Their surfaces were spectacularly colored, bursts of yellow and red and orange tangled around each other in fractally entwined patterns that deepened to a dark rose at a focus. Maurice understood why Edward seemed so frightened. The patterns on those flowers were unnerving: they gave the impression that they were looking straight at you. To conceal his uneasiness, Maurice pulled out his console and brought up a scale reading. The flowers registered as just over thirty centimeters in diameter. He called up a topographical mapping.

“The readings suggest that they are not completely spherical,” he announced. “There is an indentation at the other side of these objects. They’re hollow. So what’s inside?”

“We don’t know,” said Saskia. “They’re turning so as to face us as we travel. It’s like they are always keeping their back to us, not letting us see what they’re hiding.”

Maurice rubbed his chin. “Oh. I’ve never heard of anything like this before.”

“Neither has Aleph,” said Judy.

“I don’t like them,” Edward repeated. He noted Saskia’s glare. “They’re not right,” he whined. “They’re alien!”

Judy rubbed his arm gently and spoke to him in a voice learned from Social Care.

“Edward, they’re not alien. Aleph says so.”

“Aleph is an alien himself! Why should we believe him?”

“There are no such things as aliens,” Saskia snapped, looking painfully thin and bristling with nerves. “I already told you that. We have never found aliens on any of the planets we’ve visited, and humans have traveled a very long way. Aleph is just a systems repair robot.”

“Easy, Saskia,” said Maurice. “Hmm, has there been any sign of the Bailero yet?”

“Of course not.” Saskia was scathing. “We got stiffed again.”

Maurice tapped at his console. “We’re in the middle of empty space,” he said thoughtfully. “The closest star is over three parsecs away. Hmmm, if I were an AI escaping from Earth on a Warp Ship, this would be just the place I would choose to hide. Right where no one ever comes.”

“Hide maybe,” said Saskia irritably, “but not a very good place to build an empire from. There are no raw materials out here. The Free Enterprise said it was manufactured by the Bailero. Out of what, though?”

“I don’t know,” said Maurice. He gestured at the orange-red eyes of the flowers. “Maybe out of those things. Are there any more of them around?”

“Not that we know of.”

Maurice concentrated on his console. The space flowers—or whatever they were—were about two hundred kilometers distant. The Eva Rye was currently at rest relative to them. He checked back on the search pattern that he had programmed: a three-dimensional spiral that swept out a path through a volume of space that was covered by the limits of the ship’s senses. Long-distance senses had picked up the flowers from nine hundred kilometers back and had watched them closely as the ship slowed to a halt. The flowers had turned to watch the Eva Rye right back.

“Odd,” said Maurice. “I wonder what they are hiding inside? Let’s try and catch them out. Aleph?”

“Hi, Maurice.”

“I’m going to take the Eva Rye up and over to the other side of those things. Why don’t you let go of our hull and just stay floating here? If they turn to follow us, you might then get a look at what they’re concealing.”

“Maurice,” said Aleph reprovingly, “that wasn’t part of our contract.”

“Aleph, there should be an antique Warp Ship waiting here for us, payment for taking Judy to Earth. Instead we have found space flowers. Look at it this way, if there is no ship, there is no contract, so we will not be going to Earth.”

“There’ll be a ship,” said Judy resignedly.

Saskia glared at her. Maurice ignored them.

“Help us, Aleph, and we’ll soon be on our way.”

“Oh, very well. I’m letting go of your hull. Off you go now.”

Maurice’s fingers danced across his console. “Where’s Miss Rose?” he asked casually.

“In her room, of course,” said Saskia. “This is just wasting fuel, you know.”

“Well, what do you suggest? Should we just ignore those things and sit here waiting for the Bailero to turn up of its own accord?”

Saskia said nothing to that.

“Fuel?” said Judy suddenly, her head tilted to the side. “The Eva Rye uses fuel?”

“Oh, yes,” said Saskia bitterly. “That’s part of the FE deal. Apparently use of such things as AIs and VNMs and unlimited engine range only gives us the idea that we can get something for nothing. That’s contrary to the FE philosophy. Though, of course, in our case we seem to get nothing for something every time we do a deal….”

Saskia sensed that she had lost her audience’s interest. She took a green apple from the white bowl in the center of the table, and crunched on it noisily as the Eva Rye began to move.

“I don’t like this,” Edward moaned. “I don’t like this!”

“Shh,” said Judy.

“The Petersburg did warn us,” complained Saskia, but Maurice tuned her out. They watched the flowers intently. The red and yellow and orange blooms hung there, apparently motionless.

“They’re turning to follow us,” said Maurice. “They’re still trying to conceal their contents. Aleph, what can you see?”

“Nothing as yet,” said Aleph. “Keep going. I can see them turning. They are…Oh, damn!”

The crew of the Eva Rye saw it happening at the same time. The flowers seemed to move together, their hidden mouths joining together to kiss and conceal.

“Now what?” said Saskia.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

“I suppose,” said Maurice, “we could go in and pick one up. Take a proper look at it.”

“No!” said Edward, gripping the soft white leather of the seat arm. “Let’s leave them alone. I don’t like them!”

“Don’t be so—” began Saskia.

“Hold on,” Judy interrupted. “Why don’t you like them?”

“Because,” said Edward. “Because they’re scary.”

“Hmm,” Judy said, “didn’t the Stranger tell you that Edward should be in charge? I wonder if the reason that you do so badly on Fair Exchanges is because you don’t actually take your payment.”

Saskia made a hissing noise. “Maurice,” she said, brushing her aubergine hair away from her face. “You really want to pick one up?”

“I think so. What do you think, Judy?”

Judy turned from comforting Edward. How can she keep so calm , Maurice wondered. Look at her with her porcelain face and her tranquil black body. Her words are so still, not like when Saskia speaks. When Saskia speaks it’s like this nagging little draft on the back of the neck, but with Judy the words are just there precisely, like letters on a page. Like everything has already been decided and spoken.

“I told you before, Maurice,” said Judy, “I’m just a passenger here. Besides, what will be, will be. Someone has mapped out my life for me.”

Maurice held her dark gaze. “You mean Chris, the all-powerful AI? Or maybe his sidekick, Kevin?”

Judy didn’t blink. She just continued to stare at him, like he was a talking box or a dummy with a speaker wired to its jaw.

“Fine,” he said, feeling badly unsettled by her gaze. “That’s it, then. One against, Saskia and I are for it. Okay, we’re going in. Sorry, Edward. We’ll pick up one of them in the little hold.”

His fingers danced across his console. Edward drummed his feet fearfully on the chair’s legs.

Judy stepped across the knot in the gravity at the junction of five corridors and disappeared around the corner, heading down towards the little hold. Saskia hung back to speak to Maurice.

“What do you think about Judy?” she asked in a low voice.

“I don’t know,” said Maurice guardedly. “Did you see the way she looked at me back then? Like she was a nonsentient robot. It’s like she measures your emotions, she doesn’t react to them.”

“I don’t know,” said Saskia, face now hidden by her hair. “I think that, beneath all that stillness and controlled emotion, the pressure is building up. I don’t think she can keep it all in check for much longer.”

“She’s frightened by something—that AI she mentioned: Chris. I think she’s watching herself all of the time, checking to see if she is changing. She’s wondering if she’s going to suddenly just let go and change all her opinions, just like Chris told her she would do.”

Saskia wasn’t listening anymore. She placed a hand on Maurice’s arm, and he looked down at it, surprised. “Listen,” she said urgently, but Judy had reappeared, peeping around the odd angle of the corner, her body like a reflection in a pool.

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

“Fine,” Saskia said, and she headed off, leaving Maurice standing alone.

Judy waited by the black-and-white mosaic frame of the door to the little hold. Saskia glared for a moment at the black-and-white woman, and then she turned and made a show of tapping on the door to the little hold and bringing up an external picture.

A deduced scene sprang to life, built up from the Eva Rye ’s sense range. It showed the ship sliding slowly forward, the door to the little hold sliding smoothly open, halfway along the curve of the ship’s teardrop hull. Saskia zoomed in and they saw three space flowers being eaten up by the ship, like little orange mints. The inside of the hold had folded up on itself, walls and floors sliding around each other in complicated origami patterns. Black night could be seen through the main hatchway.

“I’ll catch them in the dead zone at the middle of the hold,” said Maurice thoughtfully. “They might not be able to take full gravity.”

They watched as the little hold’s external door closed, and then smiled at the elegant way in which the internal floors and walls rearranged themselves into a cube. The floor slid into place last, and they felt a click deep within the ship.

“Okay,” said Maurice, “it’s safe to enter.”

There was a small pop as the door slid open, and they paused a moment. There was a slight chill to the air beyond, meaning some heat had leaked into space across the pressure curtain. They could smell apples.

“Okay,” said Saskia, “follow me.”

Judy had already set off, and Saskia hurried to get ahead of her. Maurice followed as they half walked, half raced across the black-and-white floor of the little hold towards the center of the room. They looked up to see the three orange space flowers hanging in the air above, backs still turned determinedly away from them.

Saskia tapped at her console and a viewing platform began to unfold itself from the floor. Maurice staggered, momentarily off balance, as it lifted the three of them into the air.

“Give us some warning next time,” he complained, but Saskia made no reply, lost in contemplation of the flowers. Maurice felt his anger quickly disappear. He wanted to reach out to touch the spheres as they glided towards them. They really were beautiful: sunshine yellow wove glorious patterns through iridescent orange flames and the deep crimson heart of the pattern shone like blood from a broken heart. The platform rose higher and he felt a familiar wave of nausea as his head and then his shoulders entered the dead zone.

“That pattern,” said Maurice. “You could almost think it’s alive.” He reached out to touch a sphere, half hypnotized. “Do you think—Hey, what’s that?”

They all heard it at the same time. The flowers were humming.

“Are they moving—?” began Saskia at the same time Maurice swore.

“Oh, shit!” The flowers were accelerating. Sliding out of the dead zone. Into the region of gravity. Slowly at first, but with a sickening gathering of pace, the three spheres fell to the ground. As gravity was coming from six directions, they chose three different ways to fall. The three people on the platform watched three different spheres as they fell to three different floors, bounced, and then rolled to a halt.

“What have you done?” whispered Saskia hoarsely.

“It was a lure!” said Maurice. He bashed at his console, instructing the viewing platform to descend again. Judy was speaking in low tones, calm tones.

“They wanted to draw us in. Like the Dark Seeds. They were getting our attention!”

“What’s going on?” asked Saskia, eyes wide with fear. The three spheres lay in three directions: one on the ground below, one above, and one to the side of them. They had rolled onto their backs so they could at last see what was contained inside of them. From one sphere, a silver strand of metal pushed its way out into the hold. A silver spider emerged into the light, then quickly scuttled away. Then another. Then another.

Silver spiders went scuttling in every direction.

“Trojans!” croaked Maurice. “Those VNMs have tricked their way on board!”

Each sphere contained three spiders. They split up, skittering from view as quickly as possible. Maurice slapped his forehead. “How stupid would you have to be to take an unknown self-replicator on your ship!” he shouted angrily. “They tricked us.”

Judy stood in front of him and held his gaze. “Maurice,” she said in a calm voice. He glared at her.

“Maurice,” she repeated, “calm youself. Center yourself. Activate the ship’s countermeasures.”

“Countermeasures? What countermeasures? This is a fucking FE ship! What countermeasures, exactly, do you think we have on board? Photon-fucking-torpedoes?”

The VNMs had vanished, Maurice could not see where. He spotted two black tiles pulled out from the pattern covering the six floors. The VNMs had found their way out of the hold. They could be replicating already, using the fabric of the Eva Rye to make copies of themselves.

“Oh, hell,” said Saskia, holding herself, arms wrapped tightly around her body. “What’s going on? What are you going to do?”

Judy closed her eyes for a moment, concentrating, and then she found her voice.

“Both of you, relax,” she commanded. Despite themselves, Maurice and Saskia did so. Judy seemed to be growing in stature.

She rounded on Maurice. “Now, Maurice, think. What can we do?”

Maurice gazed into her big black eyes, their warmth heightened by contrast to her porcelain doll face and a sense of calm and control seeped through his body. Yes. Breathe deep. Yes. Stay calm and an answer would present itself. He blinked and allowed his mind to wander free. Yes. Breathe and calm. Breathe and calm. Now, what were they to do…?

“I…I…I don’t know,” he stammered. “I don’t know! I can’t think of anything!” He felt the panic that Judy had just quelled rising once more inside him. “I really don’t know! The AIs usually handle this sort of thing. Transmit friendly protocols or reprogram the VNMs? Release counter VNMs?” His voice was hollow. “We haven’t got an AI on board. We haven’t got anything like that on board!”

“Oh, hell!” breathed Saskia. “Look!”

The crates stacked on the wall in front of them were starting to move, sliding in four directions.

“The gravity is going! Those VNMs must be eating the generators in the walls.”

There was a creaking noise and a stack of crates began to tilt. Crystals wrapped in foam sheeting began to tumble to the floor below.

“It’s happening above us, too,” said Judy in composed tones. “Look, we’re back down now.” The viewing platform folded itself back into the floor. “Come on, out of here. Steadily. Calmly. Come on.”

Craning their necks upwards, they followed Judy towards the door. Three crates fell to the floor behind them, one by one, in brilliant diamond showers of crystal shards. A hollow thud reverberated throughout the hold—resonating deep inside their stomachs.

“Run,” said Saskia, pushing Maurice ahead. A rain of colored pebbles was falling with a lovely clattering noise.

“Stay calm…” soothed Judy. There was another crash and a sound of tearing paper. Quickly they walked to the exit. Maurice unclenched his fists as they stepped out of the hold. A wave of green apples rolled past their feet as the door slid shut behind them.

“Aleph!” Judy’s voice suddenly sounded muffled in the calm of the carpeted corridor. “Can you hear us?”

“Yes, Aleph,” Saskia said. “Why didn’t I think of him? Aleph, do something to stop this!”

Aleph’s voice spoke from Maurice’s console.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think there is anything I can do. I’m a systems repair robot, not a counterincursion specialist. I suggest you get yourself into those active suits you had delivered as quickly as possible.”

“Of course,” said Maurice, “the active suits!”

Saskia’s eyes were wide. “The suits? Do you think that FE knew we would need them?”

Aleph was still speaking. “…the outer hull of your ship is already disappearing. Do you want to see?”

A viewing field sprang to life right in the middle of the corridor. The black-and-white checked teardrop of the Eva Rye appeared, an expanding cloud of silver VNMs clinging to its side.

“Oh, hell,” whispered Saskia. “Maurice, what have you done? They’re eating up the hull. Look. You can almost see straight into the little hold!”

As she spoke, the door to the little hold seemed to creak slightly and a pattern of black-and-white stripes came to life upon it, coming up into existence from nothing. Letters formed in the center. HULL

INTEGRITY BREACHED. DO NOT ENTER.

“Maurice, think!” said Judy. “There must be something we can do?”

Maurice gave a shrug. He felt strangely calm, now that all of his decisions had been taken away.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I told you, I have no idea. I think we should get away from this corridor, however. Those VNMs could be through the door in no time.”

“The active suits,” said Saskia. “Edward got them to stow themselves in the locker near the living area. Oh, hell. Edward.”

“Yes, what about Edward and Miss Rose?” Judy asked quietly. Maurice and Saskia exchanged looks; they hadn’t been thinking about the other two.

Maurice spoke up. “We should get the suits first, they’re closest. Then I’ll go to Edward’s room. You fetch Miss Rose, Judy.”

They ran. On past the conference room, into the living area. Edward was there already, wringing his big hands together. A glass lay on its side by his feet, apple juice soaking into the dark carpet.

“What’s happening, Judy?” he called out.

“Don’t worry,” replied Judy. “We’re all going to put on active suits. Saskia, you come with me. Maurice, you stay here with Edward and help him.”

“Active suits? But I thought they were dangerous!” Edward was now dancing back and forth. Judy had already opened the locker and taken out three suits. She passed one to Saskia.

“You carry this. I might need help to dress Miss Rose.”

Maurice pulled two more suits from the locker, their thin material sticky beneath his fingers.

“You have to be completely naked under the suit,” explained Maurice. “It needs to interface with you totally. Don’t force it on: stroke it gently; let it get used to you.”

Quickly he undressed. Edward did the same.

Maurice’s suit was green. He fiddled with the neck, trying to get it to expand. It did so, but oh, so slowly. Edward watched him, and then did the same with his own yellow suit. There was a loud bang.

“What’s that?” called Edward, dropping the suit and clapping his hands to his head. “My ears hurt!”

“Pressure doors,” said Maurice, feeling as if he had just drunk a liter of icy-cold water. What was going on? Only five minutes ago they had been watching the pretty orange flowers. Now the Eva Rye was disintegrating around them. It was too much to take in, in such a short time. Edward was standing fully naked, his hands still to his ears, his active suit lying in a sticky heap on the floor before him.

“Get into your suit, Edward!” yelled Maurice.

The neck on his own suit was expanding ever larger as he stroked it. Impatiently, he stabbed at his console and brought up another view of the ship.

“Oh, shit!” he moaned. The entire rear of the Eva Rye had gone. The teardrop’s read end had ablated in a cloud of silver spiders that rained back down on the swollen front end of the ship, devouring the rest of the hull. He looked away from the console to see Edward still standing there, hands clasped to his ears. Maurice shouted at him, his voice cracking with fear. “Your suit, Edward!”

Finally the big man began moving. He bent down and began to stroke the suit, opening its neck. Maurice turned back to his own active suit and saw that at last, it was big enough to step into. He pushed in one naked leg and then the other, the sticky, rubbery material fighting against him as he tried to pull it on. He forgot everything he had been told and began to jerk at the suit.

“Stay calm, Maurice.” That was Edward speaking. He was looking earnestly across at Maurice as he slowly, methodically, pulled on his own suit. “You’re rushing it and it’s fighting back. Do it slowly, like you told me.”

Maurice paused and took three slow breaths. He tried meanwhile not to look at the view of the Eva Rye floating over the dining table, the black-and-white pattern of its hull almost stripped clean by the devouring cloud. Many of the VNMs were now black-and-white themselves, dancing poisonously amongst the rest of the jostling silver crowd. That’s our ship turned traitor against itself. Don’t think about it! Another three breaths and he eased his left leg slowly forward, then, all of a sudden, the resistance was gone: the active suit was a part of his body, his foot and calf alive and tingling with a new awareness.

“Thank you, Edward,” said Maurice. “Thank you. We can do this together, can’t we?” Edward gave him a big beam of delight.

And then there was another bang, and black-and-white wasp-striped doors slammed over the entrances to the living area.

Now Edward was panicking.

“No!” called Maurice. “Remember what you said, Edward. Take it slowly. Keep it calm.”

Edward paused, stopped thrashing. “Maurice?”

“Yes, Edward.”

“Let’s both take three breaths, and then we can pull on the suit bodies.”

It was terrifying. At any moment, Maurice was expecting the walls to dissolve in a tangle of silver legs and for the atmosphere to boil away into space. Still, breathing slowly, they gently pulled the sticky material up their bodies and felt the sudden loss of resistance, the tingle and awakening that said the suits were correctly in place.

“Now the arms,” said Maurice and Edward together. “Just a wriggle of the fingers. No need to panic.”

There was a shout and a scream.

“Miss Rose!” exclaimed Edward. He began to whimper. “Somebody has hurt her!”

Another bang. Maurice turned off his console’s sound channel.

“Easy. Pull the suit on slowly, Edward, then we can go looking for her.”

Sobbing, Edward did as he was told.

“Maurice, this is Aleph. I’m overriding your console to tell you that something has just appeared out here….”

Miss Rose screamed again, her voice finding its way over the opened channel. Edward gave a shrill cry in return. Maurice slammed the lockout button on his console. He was shaking as well. What was wrong with Miss Rose? He had never heard anybody sound in such pain.

“Edward, the arms! Pull up the gloves and slip in your hands….”

Shaking, they both tried to force their hands into the sleeves, their flesh resisting, the stickiness gripping, and Miss Rose’s pain still echoing in their heads. And then Maurice felt a blessed relief and tingling. He was finally dressed. Quickly, he pulled the active suit’s hood over his head and turned to Edward.

“I can’t do it, Maurice.”

Tears splashed down Edward’s brown chest. The big man was tugging and tugging at the suit with one hand, burning his skin as he tried to force his other hand into the sleeve. There was another bang and the floor shook. Edward kept gasping and pulling.

“Stop it! Stop it!” shouted Maurice, panicking himself. “Stop it!”

Edward took hold of Maurice by the arms and began to squeeze. Maurice tried to break free, but he couldn’t. Strong as he was, Edward was stronger.

“Edward, you’ve got to let go of me. I can’t help you if you hold my arms.”

He looked at Edward, at his big brown chest and bare arms, at the silver tears streaming down his face. There was a rattling sensation. Then a flash of silver at the corner of Maurice’s vision.

“Edward! They’re coming through the walls! Let go so that I can help you!”

And then one of the walls dissolved in a flurry of silver legs.

Maurice stood sobbing in the middle of the room, feeling Edward’s grip weakening. He had his eyes tightly closed; he couldn’t bring himself to look at Edward as he died. What had happened? In the space of a few minutes they had gone from everything to nothing. The ship had been eaten up. Edward was dying, Miss Rose was…what? What had happened to her?

Edward’s grip finally loosened, and Maurice tried to open his eyes. He didn’t want to look. Okay, count to three and then…he opened his eyes.

The living area remained untouched. The black carpet, the dining table, the neat stacks of black-and-white dishes in the kitchen were all unchanged. Even Edward’s glass, lying on the floor where he had dropped it.

“What happened?” asked Edward, still standing before him, looking puzzled. Before he had time to think about it, Maurice helped Edward shrug his way into the arms of his active suit. Only when Edward had pulled the hood over his head did Maurice speak.

“I don’t know what happened. Look over there.”

They looked towards the wall where the VNMs had entered. There was a long empty corridor beyond that had not been there before. It led downwards.

“What happened?” asked Edward. “What’s going on?”

To Edward it was obvious what they had to do, so Maurice gave in and followed him down the corridor. There was nowhere else to go. Edward hated confusion, Maurice had noted. Whenever he was uncertain about what was going on, that was when he felt most ill at ease. When his choices were clear, he was happy. Edward felt that now their path was clear; they simply followed the seamless black corridor in front of them downwards.

“I think I can see something,” Edward said boldly, and then he stumbled and began to fall forward. Maurice made a grab for him and felt a stomach-wrenching surge of nausea as the world tumbled around him, leaving him floating free in the long tunnel.

“Help!” Edward called. “Maurice, help me.”

Weightlessness made Maurice feel sick. He was gulping down the thick acid bile that threatened to rise up and fill the hood of his active suit.

“Stay calm,” he gagged, then he clamped his mouth shut again and tried to overcome the nausea. A cool breath of scented air refreshed his face. The active suit was picking up on his distress. “The gravity’s gone,” he gasped. “We’ve left the zone of the Eva Rye .”

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know, Edward.”

He was tumbling head over heels now. Back in the direction from which they had come, he saw the tube contracting. The view of the living area vanished. A pattern of expanding dots flashed into life before his eyes, a projection from his active suit.

“The Eva Rye has gone,” said Maurice. “It’s been totally converted to VNMs.” He wiggled his fingers, tapping at an imaginary console. The active suit picked up the gestures and flashed up the information he had requested.

“And all in just under eight minutes,” he said.

They floated on through the black tube.

“I can see a light up ahead,” said Edward.

Maurice saw it too: a pale light, the color of snow in moonlight. For a moment he had a flash of something, a memory from his childhood, then it was gone.

They floated on.

“The tube’s getting bigger,” Edward said, and it began to widen like a trumpet’s bell, then they floated out into a vast space that froze the breath in their lungs. They were now apparently drifting upwards, rising from a hole in some vast plain. They looked down and saw white patterns of frost curling in flames of fern beneath them, incredibly complex shapes curling around themselves in recursive patterns, painting pictures of cold fire across the ground.

“Where are we?” asked Edward.

“I don’t know,” repeated Maurice.

“It’s beautiful.”

They rose higher and higher. Now they could make out distant walls and a wide ceiling above them, shining in the pale blue light that illuminated the arctic volume of emptiness around them.

“I thought we were in space,” said Edward. “How can we be underground?”

“I don’t think we’re underground,” said Maurice. He was trying to remember something he had read years ago: how you used an active suit. You reached out your hands like this, and you turned them like this and…

Now he could feel the surface of the ice below. With the help of the suit’s augmented senses it was like he was running his hands along it. He could feel the cold metal that lay below the thin residue of frost, he could tap it and feel it ring hollowly through to the void beyond.

“What is it?” asked Edward.

Maurice was running his virtual hands along the distant floor; he was feeling the walls and ceiling, patting along them, sizing up the cavern.

“We’re in a long, flattened cylinder made of metal. There is air in here, Earth atmosphere but a lot thinner. Too thin to breathe, and too cold. Moisture has settled on the walls and frozen there. Hold on, Edward. I’m calling up a picture of the shape of this cylinder.”

The active suit set a mapping of the space before his eyes. Maurice knew what it was going to be even before it appeared.

“Edward,” he announced. “We are floating inside the Bailero .”

Edward was more confused than ever.

“But where have all the insides gone?” he asked. “Where are the engines and everything?”

Before Maurice had a chance to reply, a thin, unearthly sound filled the hoods of their active suits. A keening sound of utter agony, a cry of pain so pale and exhausted that it hovered on the edge of awareness, like someone trying to crawl away from life, only to find themselves tethered there by their pain.

“Make it stop!” called Edward. “Make it stop! What is it?”

Maurice couldn’t speak; he was vomiting, gagging. His suit was working hard to flush his hood clean, and still that dreadful screaming went on, keening above the hum of the extractors.

“What is it what is it what is it?” chanted Edward.

It was Miss Rose.

judy 2: 2252

Judy imposed her willtotally upon Saskia. She pushed the younger woman against the smooth wall of the corridor and held her there by the wrist as she gazed into her eyes. Saskia tugged halfheartedly at her, her thin body wriggling, but it was not a genuine attempt to escape; she was too much in awe of the power of Social Care, and Judy made her aware of that. She spoke in the voice; she overwhelmed Saskia, smashed through the young woman’s veneer of sophistication and scooped out her insecurities, throwing them to one side as she rummaged through her psyche for her core competence. Only when she had totally subdued Saskia did she let her go.

“Pull on your active suit,” she instructed.

They stripped in the corridor, Saskia’s body very pale under the lights, her ribs outlined in shadows. They were halfway through pulling on the rubbery suits when Miss Rose’s first scream sounded, thin and agonizing. As if in a dream, Saskia began to move up the corridor, half dressed.

“Stop,” said Judy. “We’ll be no good to her if we die of decompression.”

“Okay,” said Saskia. It was the logical thing to do. They both dressed themselves calmly as another human died in agony nearby.

“I’m sorry,” said Judy, as they finally shrugged their arms into the suits. “I had to do this to you, Saskia.”

“I understand,” said Saskia, pulling the hood of the blue suit over her head.

“You understand now, ” said Judy. “When I let you go, you won’t be so logical.”

They finished dressing as the air around them began to drift down the corridor. There was a popping sound as metal spiders pulled themselves free of the floor.

“Into Miss Rose’s room,” urged Judy.

“No, I’ll get a body bag first,” said Saskia. “Listen to her scream. We’ll never get her into a suit when she’s in that much pain.”

“Yes, good thinking.” So that’s where your self-belief comes from. You really are competent when you allow yourself to be….

Saskia went to a nearby locker to get the body bag. Judy headed on to Miss Rose’s room. The door was covered in black-and-white stripes; a message formed in the center. DO NOT OPEN. CORRIDOR PRESSURE IS BELOW THAT OF THE ROOM BEYOND.

“Not for long,” said Judy. “Override. Let me in there.”

The door slid open. Judy pushed her way against the leaking air into Miss Rose’s room. The door slammed shut behind her. She was shocked at the state of the room itself, but even more shocked by the sight of Miss Rose. She lay on the bed, naked and bleeding at several points. Her arms, her thighs. Her vagina. She was screaming, writhing in agony. Her eyes looked at Judy, apparently without seeing her. Then she spoke, in a thin, bubbling voice.

“Get them out of me,” she gasped. “Get them out, get them out.” And then she gagged and began to scream again.

Something was moving inside her body, something was squirming in there. The pale, loose, liver-spotted skin over her stomach raised itself up for a moment and Judy saw the outline of a shape: a short squat body. A VNM. Inside her. Her arm moved and Judy saw a VNM holding the loose, wrinkled skin apart from inside as it pushed its way along the bone.

Judy gagged. The meta-intelligence cut in and she now saw Miss Rose as nothing more than a pattern of consciousnesses: one of them human, several machine. A symbiote was forming, rather elegant in its form. Certainly a more valid expression of resources than the failing system that was Miss Rose… No!

That isn’t the true picture. Judy forced the meta-intelligence down and let her own emotions loose. Miss Rose was alive —listen to her scream.

Then air pressure dropped, and the walls around her dissolved in a tangle of silver legs as the Eva Rye was eaten up by VNMs.

Saskia was there within the expanding cloud. She had already had the good sense to link her active suit to Judy’s. The two suits locked on to each other’s signatures and moved closer, fighting through the explosion of air and thrashing silver legs and the detritus from Miss Rose’s room. Somehow they got the body bag around Miss Rose, somehow they clung together, and somehow they weathered the storm.

“Where are we?” wondered Saskia.

They stood on an iron plane, patterns of frost curling in tongues of ice around their feet, the circle of the access tube that had brought them there was irising closed by their feet. They were two tiny figures, one blue, one black-and-white, dwarfed by the huge iron space around them. Judy bent over Miss Rose, peering at her through the transparent body bag, trying to hold eye contact with her. It was no use: the old woman’s eyes were closed, her mouth stretched wide, the thin tired scream emerging from it carried to them through the hoods of their active suits.

“Saskia? Is that you?”

Maurice sounded as if he was standing just next to them.

“Maurice? I can’t see you?”

“I’m with Edward. We’re floating inside the hull of a ship. I think it’s the Bailero. ”

Saskia looked around. “I think we must be in there with you. Listen, we’ve set our active suits to stick us to the walls. Can you walk here and join us? Miss Rose is hurt.”

“I can hear that,” Maurice said.

Judy wasn’t listening. She watched as the skin on Miss Rose’s leg was slowly unzipped from the ankle up to the thigh, silver legs reaching through to encircle the limb.

Saskia’s voice sounded hoarse in her ear. “Kill her.”

Judy looked up at Saskia, face dark in her hood, the surrounding blackness of the Bailero ’s interior framing her.

“Kill her,” repeated Saskia, “like you did that little girl. Can’t you see she’s in agony?”

Judy nodded. She placed her hands on the body bag, pinching it closer to Miss Rose’s head, wriggling her fingers through folds of plastic until she could grip the old woman’s neck. She began to squeeze. Then a voice sounded inside the hood of her active suit.

“Why are you doing that?”

It was a voice from her past—a voice that Judy’s iron will had kept on the edge of her dreams for the past twelve years. Hearing it now, even in the midst of all this confusion, Judy was momentarily back in the calm of her bedroom on the day she had listened to the dying digital sighs of her sisters.

“Kevin!” Judy released her grip on Miss Rose. She swung around, looking for the one who had spoken. Saskia had backed away. She was watching her companion warily.

“I’m sorry?” said the voice. “Have we met before?”

Judy had dropped into a fighting stance.

“You, or one of your copies,” she snarled. “Let her go, Kevin. Get those things out of her.”

“I can’t. They are their own creatures.” He sounded puzzled. “Tell me, how do you know me?”

Judy wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of answering him directly. She spoke instead to Saskia.

“Do you know that somebody killed my sisters, Saskia? Did Maurice tell you that?”

“Yes,” said Saskia warily.

“It was Kevin,” spat Judy, “or an aspect of him, anyway. Kevin, you are the Bailero ’s AI, aren’t you?”

She didn’t have time for this. Miss Rose was dying in agony…And yet she had been in this situation before. Maybe Kevin wouldn’t have killed her sisters if she had agreed to his terms back then, however abhorrent they may have seemed. Maybe this time she could strike a deal that would save Miss Rose. Kevin spoke. “Yes, I am the Bailero .”

“Kevin is an AI written by DIANA, the company who built the Bailero, ” Judy explained to Saskia.

“Kevin, I knew copies of you back on Earth. I hunted them down and bottled them up in quarantined processing spaces. Do you know why I did that? Because they wanted me to help them destroy the Watcher and I refused. Well, understand this. I am being taken to Earth now, I don’t know why, but I suspect that someone is engineering the same confrontation that your brothers wanted. Someone wants me to challenge the Watcher.”

“I’m listening,” Kevin said, sounding amused. He always sounded amused.

“Miss Rose is part of that confrontation, Kevin. She was put on board the Eva Rye to help me. If you want me to do your dirty work, save Miss Rose!”

Kevin spoke in patient tones. “You weren’t listening, Judy. I can’t save her. I don’t control those creatures. Look around you, what do you see?”

Judy didn’t look. She was too busy watching Miss Rose, watching the old woman’s stomach swelling in a wriggling mass of silver legs, her arms straightening and lengthening as something inside her body uncurled itself. She was trying to ignore the meta-intelligence which was whispering the beauty of the form in there. If those VNMs were interacting with a tree, you would appreciate the venumb that was formed. Why is this any different?

“I see a woman dying,” snapped Judy.

Kevin was dismissive. “An old woman. Close to death. Those VNMs are doing her a favor in entering her. She is becoming a venumb.”

“Why? Kevin, look at me. I work for DIANA, too. I am on an important mission. I need this woman to help me reach Earth. I order you to release her.”

“You’re not listening to me, Judy,” he repeated.

Judy wished she could see Saskia’s face. What was she thinking? Saskia reached out a hand and placed it on Miss Rose’s neck, then pulled it away. Then she placed both hands there.

“Are you going to kill her, Saskia?” Kevin asked. “You’re welcome to try. In this space we believe in the survival of the fittest. You’re welcome to try to kill her, but I wonder if you can? Look around you!”

Saskia snatched her hands away.

“I don’t see anything,” she whispered. “Only empty space.”

“Exactly!” Kevin’s voice had become a deep rumble: a pleasant voice suffused with the confidence of knowing he would be listened to. A voice written to command. Judy felt a knot of hate in her stomach just to hear it. Calm yourself , she thought. Center yourself.

“Think about it, Judy,” said Kevin, “a Warp Ship fleeing Earth and the rising tyranny of the Watcher, as it subsumed first humans and then AIs to its will. I hid here in the space between the stars and began to plan. But where was I to find the material to build my empire?”

“Go on, Kevin,” said Judy, still watching Miss Rose. “I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“The Bailero was overdesigned—deliberately overdesigned—for this purpose. Lots of excess material, lots of building material. I built VNMs from my engines, and I set them loose inside my body to evolve. Many different VNMs, all fighting for scarce resources: survival of the fittest. This is how I planned to compete with the Watcher. By evolving new life of my own.”

“I can’t kill her,” Saskia sobbed, pulling her hands away from Miss Rose’s neck again. “I can’t do it!”

Miss Rose was keening softly.

“Kill or be killed,” said Kevin. “Your ship has been destroyed, converted to VNMs by one of my most successful species. That flower trick has taken in others before you. There will be many more such space flowers now, made from the materials of the Eva Rye . Some of them are already floating into human space. I wonder what they will meet there?”

“You do it,” Saskia moaned. “You kill her, Judy.”

“They’re not the only form of VNM that has thrived out here,” Kevin continued. “There are dark machines that have followed you on board. Stealth machines. They surround you now, and I don’t think you are aware of them.”

“I can’t see anything,” said Judy, but nevertheless something tickled at the edge of her meta-intelligence. Was there something out there? Lean and sharp and deadly, a single intent so focused it did not quite qualify as an intelligence?

“Of course you can’t see anything,” Kevin said. “That’s the point. Interesting, isn’t it? There are machines out there that appeal to curiosity, and those that hide and pounce. Some even set off exploring space on their own. Ships like the Free Enterprise .”

“What do you want with us?” Judy snapped.

“Nothing,” Kevin said. “I told you, I improve the breed. You live or die in here according to your own actions. Those who survive improve the breed.”

“Then we’ll die,” said Judy simply.

“Don’t be so ridiculous. You have a lot to offer. I give credit, you know. I will sell you food and oxygen. I have done the same for others before you.”

Miss Rose gave a weak whimper and her stomach began to weep blood.

“Kill her,” Saskia whispered.

Judy placed her hands back around the old woman’s neck.

“You’re too late,” Kevin said. “I don’t think it will let you now.”

Miss Rose’s long, misshapen arms reached up and pushed Judy’s hands away.

“Stop it,” Judy shouted. She concentrated, put on the voice. “Stop it,” she repeated.

“I told you, I can’t. If I were you, I’d get away from her. That venumb will want to reproduce. It’s looking at you…”

Screaming in agony again, Miss Rose scrabbled at the plastic interior of the body bag. Silver tentacles sprouted from her fingertips, pushing free her cracked yellow nails to float bloodily inside the bag. Silver tentacles began to rip at the plastic.

“Push her away,” Saskia yelled, seizing the body bag and thrusting it upwards into the weightless center of the Bailero ’s hull. Oh, so slowly, the bag began to move. Judy pushed at it, too, then ducked back to avoid the swipe of a tentacle. The bag gradually drifted upwards and away.

“Good idea,” said Kevin. “But if I were you, I would run. Those VNMs inside her are eating the calcium in her bones and lacing themselves into her nervous system. They are running up her spine to interface with her brain. I have seen this happen before. They always choose a different mode of propulsion. One set, I remember, plumbed themselves straight into a human’s bladder. Used urine as reaction mass for propulsion.”

“That’s sick,” Saskia shrieked. Judy realized Saskia was coming out from under her control. No wonder, when Judy was spreading herself so thin, trying to deal with her, Kevin, and Miss Rose all at the same time.

“Not sick, intelligent design,” said Kevin. “That’s the beauty of the ecosystem that I created inside my hull. Those VNMs evolved their own systems for motion and attack and defense with minimum involvement from myself. Look out, she’s coming for you.”

“Run,” Judy said. Miss Rose had stopped slowly rising and was now coming towards them, still screaming thinly, hands reaching out.

They began to run across the iron interior of the Bailero ’s hull, their feet locking to the surface, their bodies weightless. It was such a dreamlike feeling, like dragging a huge balloon along. Maurice called out to them. “Judy, Saskia, it’s me. Don’t try to run. Cut the attachment to the wall and swim. Use your hands and feet to pull you along!”

“What do you mean?” Judy called.

“Do as he says. Use your hands and feet!”

Saskia went sailing past Judy, floating a meter above the frost-patterned surface. She looked as if she was doing the breaststroke. Judy now understood what Maurice meant and she cut the force holding her down. She reached out with her hands and feet and felt the floor through her active suit’s senses, then began to pull herself along.

“We’re about seven hundred meters away from you both,” said Maurice. “Up and farther around the curve of the Bailero ’s hull. Just follow the signal.”

A yellow path lit up in Judy’s vision.

“Better be fast,” Kevin warned. “Miss Rose is catching up with you.”

“You animal!” Saskia snarled. “Why didn’t you save her?”

“She’s not actually dead yet,” said Kevin. “The VNMs haven’t made it into her brain.”

“I know that,” Judy muttered, halting herself with a wave of her arms and launching herself backwards. For a moment, she could see Miss Rose as a tangle of life: a snake was entwining itself around her dying body, opening its jaws to consume her.

“Would you like to make a deal?” Kevin asked suddenly.

“I don’t want to speak to you, you crazy fuck!” Saskia screamed the words.

“Keep him talking,” said Maurice. “We’re five hundred meters off. I think I can see you.”

“I don’t think so, Judy,” Kevin said. “Between you and me, he’s heading towards a trap. Dark VNMs. They’re baffling his active suit. They’ve done this before; they’ll strip the suit off him and fill it with growing organic matter harvested from his own body. They’ll use the suit as an incubation unit to make feed for venumbs like Miss Rose.”

“What venumbs?” asked Judy.

“I told you, you’re not the first humans to come here. There is a nest of seven venumbs near the rear of my body. You could join them if you like. Or you could sell your services to me. You’re not even wearing proper space suits: those active suits can’t recycle air for very long, and they don’t carry any food. You’ll be dead within days without my help.”

“What do you want of us?” Saskia asked.

“DIANA can always use human agents.”

“DIANA is dead,” Judy replied. “The old companies were taken over by the Watcher years ago.”

“Dead within the Earth Domain maybe, but we are thriving out here. The Free Enterprise is spreading the word throughout the former Enemy Domain. Judy, I can offer you food and oxygen; I will provide you with pressurized quarters. Two of you will remain with me as hostages, while the other two go to work. Prove your worth, and you could have a big future with the company.”

“What about Miss Rose?”

“She is almost dead now. She is of no use to us. Not even as a hostage.”

Judy was catching up with Saskia, who was swimming ahead of her like a blue frog in the thin icy air.

“See, Saskia,” she called out, “this is exactly why the old companies were killed off by the Watcher!”

“But now we rise again.”

Judy took a deep breath. “Kevin, I warn you one last time. You were sold to us in a Fair Exchange. Someone or something is bending my path towards Earth. You would be advised not to interfere.”

“Maybe I will choose to send you to Earth,” mused Kevin. “That way I will also be doing your puppeteer’s bidding. Yes, why not? Now, make your decision quickly. Your friends are approaching the Dark VNMs.”

“There’s no choice to make,” Saskia said. “Where do I sign?”

“Saskia!” Judy protested.

“What else are we to do?”

“What about Miss Rose?”

“What do you suggest we do?”

She was right. Judy knew it. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll do it.” For the moment, she added to herself.

“I knew you’d see sense,” said Kevin.

There was a flickering and the whole interior of the Bailero filled with pale blue light. Judy felt a surge of tangled awe at the scene that was revealed. The frost-patterned hull of the ship, beautiful in swirls of white against pale blue; the size of the ship itself, breathtaking in its extent; then the sharp tang of terror as the winter light reflected off the stealthy shapes that had been floating amongst them all this time. Glowing eerily, the outlines of the Dark VNMs could be seen, scattered like bubbles through the aquarium of the ship’s interior. With infinite patience, they were drifting closer and closer to the humans in their bright suits, set to gradually overwhelm them all.

“Judy, can you see them?” Maurice was breathless from exertion. Edward gave a loud yell of alarm.

“I can see them!” Judy called. “Maurice, Edward, keep out of their way.”

“…Judy…Miss Rose is still coming for us,” Saskia murmured.

“I’ve got her,” Kevin said, and abruptly the old woman halted in her approach, her blood-moistened body revolving slowly in space. Judy and Saskia allowed themselves to settle onto the frost-covered hull. It felt cold and brittle beneath their feet. A blue octopoid drifted nearby, its shape picked out in eerie turquoise highlights. Judy reached out and stroked it with her active suit’s senses: she felt her hand go numb.

Saskia was trying not to cry. Her body was shaking as she held back the tears. Judy came closer and held her, feeling warm skin through the active suits’ interfaces. Saskia held herself still, not accepting Judy’s embrace and not rejecting it.

“Let it all go,” Judy said. “Saskia, you can’t keep bottling it all up.”

“How did it come to this?” Saskia sobbed. “Twenty minutes ago we had a ship and a mission. Now we’re just slaves to this Kevin. What the hell has happened?”

“Shhh.”

“It’s okay for you, you’ll be going to Earth. We’ll be left here with that mad AI. What the fuck is going on anyway? Where is the Watcher? I thought he was supposed to look after us?”

“Shhh.”

But Saskia wouldn’t unbend: she continued to shake, barely holding back the tears.

“Saskia, what’s going on here?” Edward sounded confused. “What are we supposed to do now?”

“Follow my orders,” Kevin said. “You all work for me now.”

“No,” said Edward, “we work for ourselves. That’s the whole point of Fair Exchange. We’re going to Earth.”

“That’s to be decided,” Kevin said in a brisk voice. “I do have a Warp-equipped shuttle at my disposal. I might send it to Earth with you on board.”

“No,” said Edward, “we made a Fair Exchange. We cannot go back on it. You cannot go back on it. You’re our property now.”

Saskia spoke up, and Judy felt her body shaking as the other woman snapped at Edward. “Edward, you stupid gimp. Our ship has gone! Turned into thousands of little VNMs. There is no ship anymore, Edward, no more FE. All deals are off!” She sobbed. “You fucking dummy, what are you going to do here? You poor idiot! You don’t even know how bad things are!”

“Easy, Saskia,” Maurice called. “We’re all upset. Come on, Edward.” There was a moment’s pause, and Judy imagined Maurice touching Edward on the arm. She heard him clear his throat and picked up on the strain in his voice as he spoke: “Judy, we can see you properly now. We’ve been heading in the wrong direction, tricked by these stealth things. We’re coming back now. Be there in five or ten minutes.”

“Stay where you are, Maurice,” Kevin said. “I’m fetching the shuttle inside the hull. I’ll get it to pick you up first.”

“Okay, Kevin. Easy now, Edward.”

“I’m not worried,” Edward said. “I told you, we made a Fair Exchange. You can’t fool FE.”

A sad smile escaped onto Judy’s lips at Edward’s words. She looked at Miss Rose spinning slowly nearby. She was still alive, just. The meta-intelligence could see her essence, weak as a dying firefly, flickering inside Miss Rose’s skull. All around it, the lights of the VNMs could be seen burrowing closer. Saskia was gazing upwards, her thoughts somewhere in the pale blue distance, lost amongst the Dark VNMs.

Something arrived around the curve of the wall, and a dark shape slid into view. The shuttle. It resembled a blunt arrowhead, a matte grey lifting body design from the last century.

“That looks like an Earth model,” said Judy.

“It is,” said Kevin. “Its crew used to work for me.”

“What happened to them?” asked Saskia.

“That’s between me and them,” replied Kevin.

The shuttle sailed across the pale blue interior of the ship as easily as a cast stone.

“Okay,” said Kevin, “I’ll pick up Maurice first. There is a hatch located to the rear of the ship.”

“Maurice?” said Saskia. “What about Edward?” Her voice was shaking. “Don’t you mean Maurice and Edward?”

“Didn’t you just say it yourself, Saskia?” asked Kevin. Her own words were played back in her ears: “

‘You fucking dummy, what are you going to do here? You poor idiot!’ That’s what you said, isn’t it?

Well, be honest, what am I going to do with a fucking dummy?”

“Judy,” pleaded Saskia. “Judy?”

But Judy had slumped forwards, her hands clasped to her head.

“Judy? What’s the matter?”

Judy was looking through a mosaic of impressions that had suddenly engulfed her, pushed into her mind by the meta-intelligence. She was being swamped by half-understood images and impressions. Saskia was pushing at her, pummeling her shoulders, but that was just one window on reality lost among the many. There was also the smell of fire and the feel of fur between her fingers, the sound of whistling and an image of two tall buildings, their windows filled with people staring out at each other. She heard the voices of the others:

“No! I’m not leaving you, Edward.”

“It’s okay, Maurice, I’ll be all right. You can’t fool FE.”