• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘And Meg,’ said Dee’s voice. ‘It’s not even crowded.’

Reid sighed and turned to Ax and Tamara.

‘What makes you people go along with this?’ he asked. ‘What did this machine, or that –’ he indicated Wilde, who was very slowly and carefully pulling his pack of fags from his pocket ‘– tell you? That information wants to be free?’ He laughed. ‘If that’s what you want, go back to Ship City right now – the whole place is in an uproar, with arguments turning into fist-fights, if not yet firefights. Just what you’ve always wanted – anarchy in the streets! Or did it tell you it could raise the dead? What could be worth the risk of replacing humanity with…flatlines?’

‘So what’re flatlines?’ Wilde asked. He’d managed to get his cigarettes out, under the guards’ watchful eyes, and he lit one and absently offered the pack around. Reid watched this performance with an air of being quite unimpressed.

‘You should know,’ he said. ‘Automata that mimic conscious action, but have none themselves. No subjectivity. No…souls.’

Dee’s mouth opened, but Wilde spoke first.

‘Ach, come off it Dave,’ he said. ‘We can argue about that sort of thing till the whisky runs out, like we used to. What you should worry about now is non-human minds, all right, but it’s not any you see standing around here. It’s the ones that’ll come for us all any time now, when they reach the other side of the Malley Mile. That’s when you’ll see what a flatline universe looks like. From the inside.’

The suspicion on Reid’s face was like a relenting of his earlier contempt.

Dee spoke again. ‘That’s why we need to run the fast folk,’ her voice said. ‘To find the way back.’

‘But you do know the way back,’ said Reid, facing Dee but speaking to someone else. ‘That’s what I sent you into the macro to find out, so we could set it all up.’

‘What I know, what I found out back there, is the way here.’ Her voice was uncharacteristically harsh, straining the deeper registers of her vocal chords. Then it shifted up again. ‘But the way here and the way back are not the same thing, and we have to go back. Through the daughter wormhole.’

20

The Stone Canal

Daughter wormholes. You know about daughter wormholes. I didn’t.

‘That’s what we’ve come out of,’ Meg explained. ‘Reid set it up.’

I and all the other robots were clinging to the side of the starship, like third-class passengers to a Third World train. The ship had irrupted into a completely different part of space and neatly inserted itself into orbit above a planet. Behind us the daughter wormhole, whatever that was, dwindled to a trashy bangle. The Solar System, presumably, was on the other side of it. On this side –

‘Goddess fucking wept,’ I said. ‘We left Earth for this?’ I’d been kind of hoping for the big planet, the planet of my dreams.

‘It’s habitable,’ Meg said. She was manifesting in my sight as an external entity. She capered about on the hull, her diaphanous shift fluttering in an imaginary slipstream. Real-world physics was never a strong point with succubi.

‘Habitable?’ I had found a line-feed. Data was coming in, pasting labels on the forward view Meg had patched us into. ‘It’s like a warmed-over Mars. It’s actually losing atmosphere as we speak.’

‘Don’t exaggerate,’ Meg said. ‘It’ll be all right once we’ve terraformed it some more.’

Terraformed it? Holy shit.

‘With what?’ I asked. I switched off the external view and stared at a simulation of this new sun’s family. ‘There’s just this planet, two small ones further in, and a few million goddam rocks! Not one gas giant! What are we going to do – suck Saturn through the wormhole?’

‘If you up the res a bit,’ Meg said patiently, ‘you’ll see that what this system lost out in gas giants, it gained in ice and a real thick and tasty comet-cloud.’

Centuries of being bombarded with milkshake; by the time it got through the atmosphere, baked Alaska.

‘Fucking great,’ I said.

‘You can’t come inside,’ Reid said. He was addressing the robots, on the television, from the