The Star Fraction

11

Down Time

Wilde stood looking dubiously at the pack and the two sets of weapons that Tamara had laid out on the table. He lifted the pack and put it back down again.

‘What have you got in there?’ he said. ‘Nukes?’

Tamara looked up from a scanner, which she was using to download the latest maps of the Fifth Quarter to her contacts, and shook her head. ‘No nukes,’ she said firmly. ‘Discharging nuclear explosives within city limits is a serious offence.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Wilde. ‘So that’s us ready to go, then.’

‘More or less.’ Tamara folded away the scanner. ‘We need to be ready to go at any time, but that doesn’t mean we have to go now. Reid will book the hearing, and we’ll get at least thirteen hours’ notice.’

‘What about preparing our case?’ Wilde asked. ‘I don’t know anything about your laws here, let alone the specific code Talgarth operates.’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Tamara said. ‘Invisible Hand will take care of it. You can get someone to stand counsel if you want, but if you ask me you’re just as well letting Invisible Hand patch you a MacKenzie remote.’

‘A what?’

‘A software agent to advise you on points of law, when you’re representing yourself.’

‘Ah,’ said Wilde. ‘Progress.’

Tamara wandered over to the kitchen-range and began brewing up a large canteen of coffee.

‘Expecting company?’

‘Allies,’ Tamara said. ‘Invisible Hand is calling some in for me.’ She smiled mischievously at him. ‘None for you.’

‘Consider me one of yours,’ Wilde said. He looked about the room, searching. ‘Do you have any way of keeping up on the news?’

Tamara looked at him oddly. ‘Yeah, sure.’

She went over to a shelf and picked up a television screen and unrolled it and stuck it to the wall behind the table. The tall kettle was boiling. She turned to attend to it. Wilde looked at the screen, caught Tamara’s eye. He waved at the screen’s blank pewter surface.

‘Oh!’ Tamara tapped her temples with her hand. ‘Sorry. You don’t have contacts?’

‘Something the robot evidently neglected to tell me about,’ Wilde said.

Tamara told him about a good local stall where he could buy contacts, and how to get there. He wrote down her instructions, drew a sketch-map, checked it with her, and left. He returned about half an hour later, blinking and wide-eyed. ‘Wow,’ he kept saying. ‘Wow, fuck!’

Tamara’s allies turned up in ones and twos over the next hour; eventually, a dozen of them were filling the room, sitting on the table, checking weapons and drinking Tamara’s coffee. Most of them smoked and all of them had strongly held opinions on aspects of the case, as well an embarrassed, and embarrassing, interest in Wilde. The man from the dead! Wilde rapidly lost track of their names or interest in their obsessions, as he found himself backed into corners by a crowd of mostly skinny, mostly young, all heavily armed strangers telling him things he didn’t know about himself.

‘I’ve always thought your later works denouncing the conspiracy theory were forged by the conspiracy –’

‘No.’

‘– and Norlonto, right, that was an ideal community –’

‘No.’

‘– the basic idea of abolitionism, that machine intelligence has artificial rights, was based on the same premises as your space movement manifestos –’

‘No.’

‘They say this is all because Reid is screwing your woman –’

‘No.’

And so on.

And then everyone started and fell silent at the same moment, even Wilde who had by now got the hang of tuning his contacts to the television screen. The news, like most news on Ship City’s channels, was delivered by an excited child. (Wilde had already expressed his opinion that this was one of the most enlightened and appropriate uses of child labour he’d ever come across.)

‘News just in!’ said the blonde-curled bimbette on the Legal Affairs Channel. ‘Three sensational developments! David Reid sues abolitionist for return of his gynoid, Dee Model! And – he sues the long-dead anarchist and nuclear terrorist, Jonathan Wilde, on a related charge! Finally, Dee Model and another abolitionist call witness that they’ve killed the renowned artist, Anderson Parris! Hue-and-cry raised – bounties posted shortly!’

Pictures of those mentioned zoomed giddily onto the screen as she spoke, and the channel then split into sub-threads exploring the implications of each aspect, the biographies of the alleged participants and the eschatological significance of the return of Jonathan Wilde.

‘Nuclear terrorist?’ The man who spoke was called Ethan Miller. His appearance was older than most of those present, with lank black hair, skin the colour of the vile tobacco he smoked, and a face like a well-used hatchet. He wore nothing but leather trousers and a ragged TOE-shirt which he claimed was an original, though the Malley equations now had even more holes in their fabric than they’d ever made in reality. ‘You should sue them for that, man!’

‘No.’

Invisible Hand’s more sober declaration over-rode the news channel, instructing all parties in the case to appear at the Court of the Fifth Quarter by ten the following day.

‘Right!’ yelled Tamara above the hubbub. ‘You heard! Go go go!’

The deployment that followed was less frantic than Tamara’s efforts to organise it. Evidently the deadline for their appearance wasn’t expected to be hard to meet. People tooled up and strolled out, with Tamara, Wilde and Ethan Miller bringing up the rear. Tamara locked and armed the house – just to prevent any warrantless searches, she explained – and they all moved off towards the quay.

The sun was low in the sky, turning the city-centre towers into a tall tiara of gold and gems. On Circle Square’s central island, stall-holders were packing up, while the first roadies for the evening’s bands were rigging up sound-systems. The early-evening air was thick with the smells of cooking-oil and engine-oil and the sweet reek of cannabis. Around tables and outdoor bars, late departures or early arrivals watched the quiet-speaking, marching group with shadowed apprehension and hand-hidden comments among which the occasional encouraging smile gleamed like a flashed weapon.

‘What’ll happen to Dee and Ax,’ Wilde asked, ‘if they’re caught?’

Tamara grunted. ‘Depends how outraged whoever catches them is,’ she said. ‘Likely they’ll just be pulled in and charged, by whoever is claiming the damage. I guess this Anderson Parris would’ve had a pretty price on his head.’

‘Yeah, well…’ Wilde said. ‘I can relate to all that. But what gets done to them, like punishment?’

‘Punishment?’ Tamara sounded puzzled. ‘Oh, you mean penalties. Depends, again. Killing somebody can be quite serious, you know.’

‘Yes,’ said Wilde dryly. ‘So what does the penalty depend on?’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Tamara. ‘Shit, at least they’ve called witness to it. That counts for a lot, not trying to hide it…apart from that, it depends on the victim’s losses, right? Emotional distress, loss of life-experience, earnings, loss of society for those close to them – add all that up and multiply it by the down time.’

‘Ah,’ said Wilde. ‘Down time. I think I might understand what you’re saying a lot better if you explain to me exactly what down time is.’

They had reached the quay where Tamara’s dinghy bobbed. The others had piled into their own boats, a flotilla of skiffs and outboards and inflatables. Tamara descended to her boat, Ethan Miller passed down her kit, and she helped Wilde on board. He sat down where she told him, by the side.

‘Down time,’ Tamara explained, as she cast off and eased the engine into a gentle start, ‘is the time between gettin’ killed and coming back. Backups cost, see, and growing clones can take fucking months, ’specially if you want a good one, no cancers or shit. So like, if you’re just ordinary, like me say, you’ll have back-ups every year or so, and you’ll have a fast-clone policy. If you’re real rich, like this Parris bloke, you’ll take ’em weekly. But then, you have a slow clone, and your losses mount up faster ’cause of your earnings being higher. So it sort of balances out, but it’s still cheaper to kill poor folks.’

She smiled at him and gunned the engine. ‘Ain’t class society a bitch.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Wilde, noncommittally. ‘And what if somebody doesn’t have a back-up? What if they stay dead?’

‘Everybody has back-ups,’ Tamara said, amazed at his ignorance. ‘Nobody stays dead. Jesus.’

She concentrated on steering the boat in the reckless wake of their companions’, and missed Wilde’s look of sudden pain. Only the boat’s ’bot saw it, and it could only record, and not understand.

The low sun, reddened by desert dust, is in Dee’s eyes. She shades them with her hood, tugs the cloak closer about her. As her sight adjusts, a millimetre out of the direct glare, she can see the jagged black edge of the Madreporite Mountains far to the west, at the end of the Stone Canal’s shining slash. She’s sitting, hugging her knees, the skirt’s bunched lace prickly on the skin of her arms. Ax is also sitting, leaning against her back. They’re in a sort of eyrie, a functionless hollow in the side of a tower pitted by many such. The holes are connected by likewise inexplicable tunnels, which at least provide ventilation for the longer and much wider corridors within. The great spongy spike has been colonised over decades by businesses and settlers. What, if anything, it was originally designed for was almost certainly not human occupation, but humans are nothing if not ingenious and adaptable animals. Dee knows about this trait. She finds it admirable, though – she now realises – she can’t quite take pride in it. They’re not her species.

That humans are not her species is a conclusion she has come to only this afternoon. It’s a little disappointing, since she’s only felt like a human being for a couple of days, and she has every intention of keeping it to herself, especially if the question of her human status becomes a matter of learned dispute. But it’s the only way she can explain to herself how little she minds killing them.

Even given that they’ll come back – minds out of slow-running computer storage, bodies out of vats – being killed must cause them a lot of distress and inconvenience. (This is different from the dead, Scientist pedantically reminds her – different storage, different retrieval, different problem. Yeah, yeah, she tells it, and as that self is off-lined again Dee has a fleeting thought about Annette, the woman whose genotype she now knows she shares. She thinks of her among the dead, she thinks about codes and stores, and for another moment Sys flashes up some tenuous connection, but it’s gone…She’s just got too much on her mind right now.)

The distress and inconvenience caused is, for Ax, the whole point. He’s taking great delight in knocking off anyone who ever ripped him off, exploited him financially or spiritually or sexually. He chortles as they fall, to Dee’s bullets or his. Three so far, and more to go. Dee just doesn’t give a shit, basically. She knows she’s capable of emotion, of empathy, even of ethics – they’re right there, burned into the circuits of most of her selves – but they don’t seem to apply to people like Parris, or that woman Ax skewered in a cellar two hours ago, or the man she shot in a doorway. Perhaps they’re only meant to apply to one’s own species, in which case they’re not her species.

It now occurs to her, as she squints into the sun and watches out for bounty-hunters, for signs of hue-and-cry, that there is another explanation. Perhaps she’s human, all right, and her victims are not. Perhaps what they all have in common is a parasitic mimicry of humanity, which she can see through. One of her Story threads, which she plays on nights when she wants to give herself stronger fare than her usual historical romance, is about vampires. She wonders if the ostensibly human species – or hominid genera – are divided between real people and some hollow mockery of people, beings like vampires, who live on the lives of others. Killing them might be quite different from killing real people, who only live on the lives of plants and animals and machines.

An interesting thought.

She hears Ax’s long, lung-emptying sigh. She braces her back for the expected thud of the pistol and thump of the recoil. They shake her body a second later.

‘Got him!’ says Ax.

Dee doesn’t need to look around. The exit-ramp their eyrie overlooks is five metres down and about twenty metres away, and she can picture the sprawled body of the banker lying there. She can also picture the faces and lenses turning in their direction in the next couple of seconds…

But they’ve already rolled, Ax and Dee, down the slope of the hollow and out of immediate sight. A metre-wide hole in the synthetic rock leads to a curving chute, which they patiently climbed up about half an hour ago. The glassy smoothness which made the ascent difficult makes the descent easy. Dee goes first, feet-first, wrapped in her cloak. The drop at the end is awkward; her lumbar ligaments strain, her heels jar – another task for the Surgeon sub-routines. She turns and holds up her hands and catches Ax as he hurtles out.

The corridor they’re standing in has the usual quasi-organic rounded-off corners in its rectangular cross-section, and curves smoothly around to the left and right. The glowing mother-of-pearl surfaces are pocked with holes, studded with chitinous lenses and membranes – and, hacked crudely in, mikes and cameras, office windows and doors. Already alarms are echoing along the corridor, and rippling along the wires. Soldier and Spy, time-sharing Dee’s senses and transmitters, hack and ping. Some of the alarm-signals are disrupted.

But not all. With a silent conference of glances, Dee and Ax turn and race to the left. They head for the lift which they used to ascend from street-level. Doors open down the corridor in front of them, alarms shrill again. A security guard in a black uniform steps out and raises a hand. He’s just in sight around the curve of the corridor. Dee skids to a stop and catches Ax’s arm.

‘Back!’ she gasps.

They turn and run back. The guard’s footsteps echo behind them. Dee notices, out of the corner of her eye, a movement behind a thin area of the wall – not a window, but internal to the building. She runs on for a few metres and then stops and turns. The guard is just coming into view. She aims carefully at the thin patch and shoots at it. It shatters like glass and a blue, bubbling liquid floods out, slicking the floor. The guard slips on it and tumbles, then jumps up and begins tearing off his uniform and yelling for help. Dee can sense a barrier up ahead, thick and resilient – perhaps a cordon of guards; she can’t be sure at this distance.

Close by there’s an elliptical hole in the wall. Somebody has scrawled above it ‘FIRE EXIT?!’ Dee looks at it, looks at Ax, raises her eyebrows. Ax nods.

Dee peers in. It’s a dark chute, sloping sharply down and turning out of sight. She steps in, lies down on her cloak, and lets go of the top edge of the hole.

She instantly finds herself plunged downwards and whirled around what feels like an almost vertical spiral drop. ‘AAAAAHHHHH!’ she observes. Her scream is quite involuntary, but it comes too late to discourage Ax, who’s followed her a scant second later. His heels are perilously close to her hooded head. She hunches forward, only to see the drop as even more terrifying. Her ankles are crossed, her hands are clasping the cloak in front of her thighs. It’s all she can do not to curl up into a ball. The walls of the tube are in places transparent – at some moments she sees, or thinks she sees, over the city’s roofs, at others she glimpses the interiors of rooms, with the startled faces of their occupants looking straight back at her for fractions of a second. She can smell the fabric of the cloak beginning to scorch.

Her other senses are utterly confused. She retreats to the detached perspective of Sys, which is already running the first steps of the bale-out routine, getting ready for somatic systems failure. Dee has a brief, chilling image of her computer detaching itself from the remains of her animal brain and crawling out of the bloody wreckage of her skull.

Then she’s sliding along more slowly, in an open space. Light shines on her closed eyelids. She opens them and finds herself still whizzing along, but decelerating…she braces her shoulders and, right on Newtonian cue, Ax’s heels cannon into them. Daylight and open air, and people yelling.

Dee sprawls and stops. Everything is still spinning. She sits up and looks around. Ax is a few metres away, eyes still shut, mouth open. They’re at the bottom of a gentle slope of black, vitrified material at the foot of the tower, in a plaza. Among benches and fountains and the entrances to other buildings, people are staring at her.

Just to the right of her right hand, a centimetre-wide hole appears in the black glass. Cracks radiate out from it. At the same time, she hears a soft pock.

Another hole, closer.

‘She-it!’

Dee leaps up, staggers forward and grabs Ax by the ankle and drags him across the lip of the slope. He falls half a metre with a bump. He cries out and opens his eyes. Dee looks up the face of the tower, sees dark figures darting on balconies high above. She fires a couple of shots upwards, on general principle, then hauls Ax to his feet.

‘Run!’

They’re both still so dizzy that dodging and weaving, and falling and rolling, come quite naturally. Within a second or two they’re among the now screaming pedestrians in the plaza, though not yet out of the cone of fire from the tower-top.

Things are still going around and around. Ax is slamming into people, but continuing a pinball progress across the plaza. Dee fights her spinning senses into stability and sprints straight for an entrance-way that has an overhang. She reaches its welcome shadow and looks back. Ax, to her utter horror, has got into a fight. Three girls in secretarial gear are swiping at his head and kicking at his shins, while he butts at their midriffs and stamps at their feet and pummels their thighs.

Dee dives out of cover with a banshee howl and grabs a fistful of long blonde hair. She yanks the girl’s head back, reaches into the melée with her other hand and drags Ax by the collar until he’s behind her. Then with a sweep of both arms she shoves the girls together into a heap and catches up with Ax, who has very wisely chosen to run for the same overhang.

She stares down at Ax’s flushed dark face.

‘Run!’ she says.

‘Where?’

‘After me!’

Maps are dancing in front of her eyes. Soldier pages through the head-up and marks a route, hallucinating signposts in front of her. She runs along the steps of the building, around a corner, through a car-park, and over a railing into a noisome alleyway. Puddles splash underfoot. Ax pants along behind her.

The virtual arrowheads are pointing at a door in the wall. Dee rattles its knob. Locked. She fumbles her pistol out but Ax stays her hand. He grins at her and spins on the ball of one foot, kicking hard at the door with the other. It bangs open, showing a flight of steps. The map’s arrows glow on the steps like the footprints left by some gigantic radioactive bird coming the other way. Dee glances to left and right. At the car-park end, a head dodges swiftly back.

Dee fires a shot at the corner the head has gone behind, hopeful that a flying splinter or two might discourage further peeping, and goes down the steps. Ax treads on her trailing cloak a couple of times. She tugs it up indignantly.

At the foot of twenty-five concrete steps they emerge into a huge basement area with just enough clearance for Dee’s head. Dim-lit by organic noctilucence, it resembles an underground car-park, although there aren’t enough vehicles in this area to justify such a use. Instead it’s heaped with old machinery, coils of piping, and – to Dee’s amazement – obvious modular components of spacecraft. She knows that the city’s towers were partly grown from parts of the original Ship, but this confirmation is almost shocking. It’s like she’s arrived at the very pit of her world. From here, there’s no way down.

She hears movement at the top of the steps, and turns and sends another bullet back. It spangs and ricochets in the stairwell, most satisfactorily. Then she runs. Her instincts, and the guidance arrows, are leading her in the same direction: across the basement, towards the smell of water.

They can’t run in a straight line. Their flight weaves in and out between crates and hunks of hardware whose space-junk-pitted sides are stencilled with warnings and instructions and markings – Dee notices ‘Space Merchants, Karaganda’ and ‘Project Jove’ and part of her mind has time to marvel at these antiquities. Behind her and Ax, among echoes of sound and the screech of electromagnetic interference, she detects pursuit. More than one person, moving with swift deliberation.

There’s a line of light ahead at floor-level. The arrows that her guidance software is patching to her sight end there, flashing. (Like she wouldn’t notice.) As she runs up she pings the control-systems of a wide, metal roll-up door. With much grinding and squeaking it begins to move up. After it’s risen thirty centimetres, it stops. Dee bounces more short-range radar off it, to no avail.

The bead of a laser-sight appears on it. Dee drops, tripping Ax so he tumbles to a landing that’s soft for him, though not for her. She rolls from under him, half-sits, and shoots back along the clearest avenue, towards some detected motion. Hastily she jams another clip in her pistol, and fires again. A flash replies and a bullet whizzes above her nose. She empties the clip with a random spray. The pursuer dodges behind a crate and Dee rolls again and crawls for the gap under the door. It’s too low for her.

‘Go ahead!’ she hisses to Ax. He needs no urging. He rolls under the door and leaps sideways.

She hears him yell: ‘No!’ and then fall silent. A pair of mechanical feet appear at the gap, striding to the middle of the door. Metal claws reach under the door and lift. The door rolls and ravels upward like a slatted blind. Whatever is lifting the door lowers its body at the same time, between its legs. A line of dust-particles flares above her head as an industrial-strength laser beam stabs into the darkness of the basement.

Hopeless now, Dee ejects the empty clip, and inserts another that she’s scrabbled out of her handbag. She’s definitely running low. She turns to face her new antagonist. It’s a squat, squatting robot. Its laser, protruding between its upper and lower shells, moves and ranges and fires again. There’s a yell from behind her, far too close.

‘I think I’ve blinded the bounty-hunters,’ the robot says. ‘But I think you should get out.’

Dee stares at it for a moment, and then recognises it as the robot that accompanied Wilde the previous night.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says ungraciously, and scrambles out. The robot lets the door fall with a rattling crash and, for good measure, fuses the locking-mechanism with a close-up blast. They are standing on a quay at the back and bottom of the building, overlooking a fifty-metre-wide canal between the backs of other buildings. The canal is empty except for a few long, automatic barges going about their oblivious business in a world little more demanding than the toy realities of the first AI experiments. There may have been light under the door, but that was just the contrast; it’s dim down here, as it probably is even at brighter times than twilight. Ax is standing hesitantly a little distance away, keeping a suspicious eye on the robot. His clothes are torn; where the robot grabbed him, Dee guesses.

‘We’re OK,’ she tells him. ‘I think.’

‘I certainly mean you no harm,’ says the robot. ‘I have no intention of turning you in, as I think my actions have shown.’ It waves a limb, indicating a streamlined boat with a powerful outboard engine and, most welcome of all, a small but concealing cabin.

‘Come with me,’ it says. ‘We have much to do.’

‘Yeah,’ says Ax. He tucks his gun away inside his now ragged shirt. ‘Will you just look at the state of her clothes.’

As the boats of the litigant alliance moved away from the main canal-system and out of the human quarter into the sandflats and marshes, Tamara’s boat shifted towards the front. By the time they were no longer in recognisable canals but in reed-banked streams and barely navigable ditches, she took the lead. Somewhere far in towards the centre of the city, a hovercraft roared across the flats, sending birds scrambling skyward for kilometres around. A vee-line of geese flew overhead, golden dots in the deep-blue sky.

‘The things I see when I don’t have a shotgun,’ Tamara sighed.

Wilde slapped at insects. ‘Why the fuck,’ he demanded, ‘did we have to bring fucking midges across interstellar space?’

‘Ecology,’ Tamara said, with a trace of smugness. She passed him a tube of insect-repellent. Wilde rubbed it on and spent the next few minutes gloating as the tiny black devils landed on his skin and then dropped off dead, straight to whatever hell awaited their evil, two-byte souls. He expounded this unorthodox theological point to Tamara at some length, making her laugh and relax.

She told him about her occupation of hunting for biomechanisms, and her political activity in the abolitionist movement. Apart from pressing her for details of the banking system and the abolitionists’ actual forms of organisation, and their social objectives, he was not a bad listener. Then he lay back in the prow of the boat and flicked through Eon Talgarth’s notes about Jonathan Wilde. Sometimes he scowled, more often he laughed out loud. Ethan and Tamara urged him to tell them what was funny, and he now and again did. After a time he fell silent, and sat and looked at the early pages of the file, and at the end, and then the beginning again. At last he stowed it in Tamara’s pack, and sat looking away from the others, out over the damp desert, which in the sunset lay ruddy like a field of blood.

Ship City is in the tropics of New Mars. Darkness came within minutes of the sun’s disappearance behind the horizon. Wilde smiled at Tamara and Ethan, and lit a cigarette.

‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘being able to see in the dark.’ He looked around again. ‘Shit! I can’t!’

‘Shield the cigarette,’ Ethan told him. ‘It’s blinding you.’

‘Damn’ near blinding me,’ Tamara said. ‘No, no, just cup your hands around it, that’s OK.’

Wilde did as he was asked, and shortly threw the butt into the water and gazed up at the stars. With the lights of the human quarter behind them and the less ordered lighting and unpredictable random flares of the Fifth Quarter not far ahead, they were less overpowering than on his first sight of them the previous night, but impressive nonetheless. He gasped at a bolide’s whispering flight, blinked at the flash it made behind the western horizon.

‘The robot called something like that a “waterfall”,’ he said to Ethan. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Cometary ice,’ Ethan explained laconically. ‘Feeds the canals.’

‘It’s a kinda slow terraforming,’ Tamara added. ‘Planet’s habitable, sure, but we want more water and a thicker atmosphere. Take us a couple more centuries, like, but by then it’ll be as green as Earth ever was.’ She paused, as though she’d got a little carried away. ‘Least, that’s what Reid says.’

‘I wonder,’ Wilde murmured, ‘how green Earth is now. Whatever “now” means.’

‘Ah,’ said Ethan promptly. ‘I can tell you that.’ He made a show of looking at his watch. Tamara and Wilde laughed, so loudly that heads turned in the single file of boats strung out behind them in the narrow waterway.

‘Nah, nah,’ Ethan went on. ‘Serious. “Now” is two times. Absolute, if there is such a thing: fuck knows. This way: if’n you got a signal from the Solar system, it would’ve been a long time on the way. Thousands a years, millions, fuck knows. But if you went back through the Malley Mile, that’s the daughter-wormhole gate, right, you’d be right back at 2094 anno domini plus Ship-time. Six point four gigasecs, lemme see…uh, twenty-three-nineties, early twenty-four hundreds, maybe. So now is the twenty-fifth century, outside.’

‘The twenty-fifth century!’ Wilde laughed. ‘Yes, Earth might be Green all right! Or even Red!’

They didn’t get it, and he didn’t explain. He frowned at Ethan Miller.

‘Why “daughter wormhole”?’ he said.

Ethan shrugged. ‘It’s what me old man calls it. He went through, and not as a fucking robot upload, either. He was crew, not crim.’ He pounded his chest. ‘Human all the way back, that’s me.’

‘Carbon chauvinist,’ Tamara chided.

Wilde leaned forward, thoughtlessly lighting another cigarette. ‘Go on.’

‘Well,’ Ethan said, waving a hand at the sky, ‘the wormhole we came through was a spin-off.’ He planed his hand sideways. ‘The main probe, the one the fast folk built before their minds burned out, it went right on. Draggin’ its end of the wormhole to…wherever. Must’ve got there by now.’ He laughed harshly. ‘Whatever “now” means, like you said.’

Wilde sat back, drawing on his cigarette so hard that his cupped hands couldn’t hide the glare.

‘The end of time,’ he said.

He thought for a few moments longer.

‘Oh, hell,’ he said.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked Tamara. She throttled back the engine and the boat coasted towards a spit.

‘Time,’ said Wilde. ‘As in, we don’t have much.’

‘Well,’ Tamara said as the boat grounded, ‘we’re at the Fifth Quarter. Let’s get a move on.’