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29 Surgery

The shadow operators flew to Seria Mau from all parts of the ship. They left the dark upper corners of the human quarters where, mourning the loss of Billy Anker and his girl, they had clung in loose temporary skeins like cobwebs in the folds of an old curtain. They abandoned the portholes, next to which they had been biting their thin, bony knuckles. They emerged from the software bridges and fakebook archives, the racked hardware on the smart-plastic surfaces of which they had lain undistinguishable from two weeks’ dust in her father’s house. They had undergone a sea change. Gossip rustled between them, bursts of data flickering like silver and random colours—

They said: “Has she—?”

They said: “Dare we—?”

They said: “Is she really going out with him?”

Seria Mau watched them for a moment, feeling as remote as space. Then she ordered:

“Cut me the cultivar you have always wanted me to have.”

The shadow operators could scarcely believe their ears. They grew the cultivar in a tank much like her own, in an off-the-shelf proteome called Tailors’ Soup, customised with inorganic substrates, code neither human nor machine, pinches of alien DNA and live math. They dried it out and eyed it critically. “You’ll look very nice, dear,” they told it, “if you just wipe the sleep from your blue eyes now. Very nice indeed.” They brought it to the room in which she kept the Dr. Haends package.

“Here she is,” they said. “Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she charming?”

“I could have done without the dress,” said Seria Mau.

“Oh but dear: she had to wear something.”

It was herself, twelve years old. They had decorated her pale hands with spirals of tiny seed pearls, and turned her out in a floor-length frock of icy white satin sprigged with muslin bows and draped in cream lace. Her train was supported at each corner by hovering, perfect, baby boys. She stared shyly up at the cameras in the corners, whispering:

“What was relinquished returns.”

“I can do without that, too,” said Seria Mau.

“But you must have a voice, dear—”

She didn’t have time to argue. Suddenly she wanted it all over with. “Bridge me in,” she said.

They bridged her in. Under the impact of this, the cultivar lost psychomotor control and fell back against a bulkhead. “Oh,” it whispered. It slid down onto the deck, staring puzzledly at its own hands. “Am I me?” it asked. “Don’t you want me to be me?” It kept glancing up and then down again, wiping compulsively at its face. “I’m not sure where I am,” it said, before it shivered once and got to its feet as Seria Mau Genlicher. “Aah,” whispered the shadow operators. “It’s all too beautiful.” Deco uplighters introduced to the room a gradual pearly illumination, wavering yet triumphant; while rediscovered choral works by Janácek and Philip Glass filled the air itself. Seria Mau stared around. She felt no more “alive” than she had in the tank. What had she been so frightened of? Bodies were not new to her, and besides, this one had never been her self.

“The air smells like nothing in here,” she said. “It smells like nothing.”

The Dr. Haends package lay on the floor in front of her, locked up in Uncle Zip’s red and green beribboned box—which, she saw now, was a kind of metaphor for the actual mechanisms of confinement the gene-tailor had used. She studied the box for a moment, as if it might look different viewed from real human eyes, then knelt down and threw back its lid. Instantly, a creamy white foam began to spill out into the room. The Photographer (revisioned from five surviving notes on a corrupted optical storage disc by the twenty-second-century composer Onotodo-Ra) faded to the Muzak it so resembled. Over it, a gentle chime rang, and a woman’s voice called:

“Dr. Haends. Dr. Haends to surgery, please.”

Meanwhile, though dead by his own definitions since the collision with Uncle Zip’s K-ship, the commander of the Nastic vessel Touching the Void flickered in and out of view in one of the darkened corners of the room. He looked like a cage made of leaky insect legs, but while his ship remained, so did the burden of his responsibilities. Among these he included Seria Mau Genlicher. She had impressed him as capable of behaviour even more meaningless than most human beings. He had watched her kill her own people with a ferocity that betrayed real grief. But she was someone, he had decided early, who struggled harder with life than she needed to: this he respected, even admired. It was a Nastic quality. Because of it, he had been surprised to discover, he felt he owed her a duty of care; and he had been trying to discharge it since he died. He had done what he could to protect her from the Krishna Moire. More importantly, he had been trying to tell her what he knew.

He wasn’t sure he could remember all of it. He had no clear idea, for instance, why he had been co-operating with Uncle Zip in the first place: though he guessed perhaps that Uncle Zip had promised to share Billy Anker’s discovery with him. An entire planet of unmined K-tech! On the eve of another war with human beings, this certainly would have seemed an attractive offer. It must, however, have begun to seem less attractive after the attempt to retailor the Dr. Haends package. Uncle Zip had met with little success. All he had done was wake up something which already lived inside it. What that was, neither he nor the Nastic tailors had any idea. It was something much more intelligent than any of its predecessors. It was self-aware in a way that might take years to comprehend. If it had once been what Uncle Zip claimed it to be—a package of measures powerful enough to undo safely the bridge between the operator and the code: a kind of reverse signing-up—it was no longer anything like that.

It was alive, and it was looking for other K-code to talk to.

“If it’s faulty,” Seria Mau said, “there’s one way to find out.”

Still kneeling, she leaned forward and extended her arms, palms up. The shadow operators lifted the red and green box until it lay across her arms, then streamed away from her like fish in an aquarium, flickering agitatedly this way and that.

“Don’t ask me if I know what I’m doing,” she warned them. “Because I don’t.”

She got to her feet, and with her train spilling out behind her, walked slowly towards the nearest wall.

Foam poured from the box.

“Dr. Haends—” it said.

“Take us up,” said Seria Mau to the wall.

The wall opened. White light spilled out to meet her, and Seria Mau Genlicher carried the package up into navigational space, where she intended to do what she should have done all along, and introduce it to the ship’s mathematics. The shadow operators, rendered suddenly thoughtful by this decision, went up after her as demure as lace. The wall closed behind them all.

The Nastic commander watched from his corner. He made one more attempt to attract her attention.

“Seria Mau Genlicher,” he whispered, “you really must listen—”

But—rapt, dissociated, pixilated in the way only a human being can be with the vertigo of commitment—she gave no sign of having noticed him, and all that happened was that the shadow operators chivvied him away. They were worried he would become involved with the train of her dress. That would have spoiled everything.

I hate to feel so weak and useless, he thought.

Shortly after that, events on his own bridge intervened. Uncle Zip, puzzled by what was going on and suddenly growing suspicious, had him shot. A realtime vacuum commando unit, which had been hacking its way grimly through the Nastic ship since the collision, finally broke into the command-and-control section and hosed it out with hand-held gamma ray lasers. The walls melted and dripped. The computers went down. The commander felt himself fade. It was a feeling of intolerable weariness, sudden cold. For a nanosecond he hung in the balance, beguiled by a shard of memory, the tiniest part of a dream. The papery structures of his home, a drowsy buzzing sound, some complex gesture he had once loved, gone too quickly to be pinned down. Curiously enough, his last thought was not for that but for Seria Mau Genlicher, chained to her horrible ship yet still fighting to be human. He was amused to find himself thinking this.

After all, he reminded himself. She was the enemy.

Two hours later and a thousand kilometres away, shrouded in blue light from the signature displays in the human quarters of El Rayo X, Uncle Zip the tailor sat on the three-legged wooden stool he had brought with him from Motel Splendido and tried to understand what was happening.

Touching the Void was under his control. He had nothing more to worry about in that direction. Nothing was alive down there in that rotten apple but his entradistas. Like the good team of lawyers they were they had begun to chop him out of his inadvertent contract with the Nastic vessel. It was a civil engineering project down there, with all the dull concussions and sudden flares you had to expect from that. Guys were getting a line open and saying, “Hey Unc, could you give that a little more?” “Could you give that a little less, Unc?” They were competing for his attention. And all the time now, his ship was gently trying to withdraw itself from the embrace of the cruiser. Uncle Zip thought of that embrace as a soft wet rottenness he would be glad to be out of. Trickles of particles flickered through the hull of El Rayo X, spun off from the destruction of the Nastic bridge. It was still hot down there. You had to give the guys their due, they were working in a heavily compromised environment. They had been dying for two hours now.

Touching the Void was his. But what was going on over there on the White Cat? It was total radio silence over there. K-ships had nothing you could call internal coms traffic: despite that you could usually tell if anyone was alive inside. Not in this case. Thirteen nanoseconds after the death of the Nastic commander, everything in the White Cat had switched itself off. The fusion engines were down. The dynaflow drivers were down. That ship wasn’t even talking to itself, let alone Uncle Zip. “I don’t have time for this,” he complained. “I got business elsewhere.” But he continued to watch. For another hour, nothing happened. Then, very slowly, a pale, wavering glow surrounded the White Cat. It was like a magnetic field, sketched slightly out from the ship’s hull; or a faint diagram of some kind of fluid supercavitation effect. It was violet in colour.

“What’s this?” Uncle Zip asked himself.

“Ionising radiation,” said his pilot in a bored voice. “Oh, and I’m getting internal traffic.”

“Hey, who asked you?” said Uncle Zip. “What kind of traffic?”

“Come to think of it, I got no idea.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s stopped now anyway. Something was producing dark matter in there. Like the whole hull was full of it for a second.”

“That long?”

The pilot consulted his displays.

“Photinos, mostly,” he said.

After that, the ionising radiation died away and nothing happened for a further two hours. Then the White Cat jumped from blacked-out to torched-up without any intervening state. “Jesus Christ!” screamed Uncle Zip. “Get us out of here!” He thought she had exploded. His pilot went on ship-time and—ignoring the faint cries of the work teams still trapped inside—ripped the last few metres of the El Rayo X from the ruins of the Nastic vessel. He was good. He got them free and facing the right direction just in time to see the White Cat accelerate from a standstill to 98 percent the speed of light in less than fourteen seconds.

“Stay with them,” Uncle Zip told him quietly.

“France chance, honey,” the pilot said. “That’s no fusion engine.” Fierce annular shockwaves in no detectable medium were spilling back along the White Cat’s course. They were the colour of mercury. A moment or two later she reached the point where Einstein’s universe would no longer put up with her, and vanished. “They were building themselves a new drive,” the pilot said. “New navigation systems. Maybe a whole new theory of everything. I can’t deal with that. My guess: we’re stuffed.”

Uncle Zip sat on his stool for thirty long seconds, staring at the empty displays. Eventually he rubbed his face.

“They’ll go to Sigma End,” he decided. “Make the best time you can.”

“I’m on it,” the pilot said.

Sigma End, Billy Anker’s old stamping ground, was a cluster of ancient research stations and lashed-up entradista satellites sited in and around the Radio RX-1 accretion disc. Everything there was abandoned, or had the air of it. Anything new attracted the attention like a campfire seen in the distance for one night on an empty coast. This was deep Radio Bay. In places like this, Earth ran out of reach. Logistics went down. Supply lines dried up. Everything was for grabs, and the mad energy of the accretion disc lay over all of it. The black hole churned and churned, ripping material out of its companion star, V404 Stueck-Manibel, a blue supergiant at the end of its life. Those two had been locked together for a few billion years or so. This was the last of it: the wreckage of a fine old relationship. It looked like everything was going down the tubes for them.

“Which probably it is,” Uncle Zip’s pilot told him. “You know?”

“I didn’t ask you here for your religious opinions,” said Uncle Zip. He stared out across the disc, and a faint smile crossed his fat white face. “What we are looking at here is the most efficient energy transfer system in the universe.”

That disc was a roaring Einsteinian shoal. Gravitational warping from RX-1 meant you could see all of it, even the underneath, whatever angle you approached it from. Every ten minutes, transition states quaked across it, causing it to spike in the soft X-ray band, huge flares echoing backwards and forwards to illuminate the scattered experimental structures of Sigma End. Go close enough and this mad light enabled you to see clusters of barely pressurised vessels like leaky bathtubs, each hosting a failing hydroponic farm and two or three earthmen with lost eyes, bad stubble, radiation ulcers. You could see planets with ancient mass-drivers let into them, holding positions in the last stable orbit before the Schwarzchild radius. You could stumble over a group of eight perfectly spherical nickel-iron objects each the size of Motel Splendido, set into an orbital relationship which in itself seemed to be some sort of engine. But the outright prize, Uncle Zip said, went to the following effort: twenty million years before mankind arrived, some fucker had tapped off a millionth of one percent of the output of the RX-1 system and punched a wormhole straight out of there to some destination no one knew. They had left behind no archeology whatsoever. No clue of how you would do it. Just the hole itself.

“Deep guys,” he said. “Some really deep guys.”

“Hey,” the pilot interrupted him. “I got them.” Then he said: “Shit.”

“What?”

“They’re going down it. There. Look.”

It was hard to lift the wormhole out of the overall signature of the accretion disc. But El Rayo X came with the equipment to do that, and on the displays Uncle Zip could just make it out, there in the boiling gravitational rapids just outside the last stable orbit: a fragile vulva of light into which the White Cat could be seen propelling herself like a tiny sliver of ice, those curious annular shockwaves still slipping regularly back along her brilliant raw trail of fusion product.