“No,” he said.
“I was wrong,” she said, after she had left him a pause which he didn’t fill. “It was wrong of me.”
She had to be content with a shrug.
“So. What then? What should I do? You tell me, you with your emotional intelligence you’re clearly so proud of.”
“Take this ship deep,” he said. “Take it to the Tract.”
“I don’t know why I’m talking to you, Billy Anker.”
He laughed.
“I had to try,” he said. He said, “OK, so this is how I found the package. First, you got to know a little about K-tech.”
She laughed.
“Billy Anker, what can you tell me about that?” He went on anyway.
Two hundred years before, humanity stumbled over the remains of the oldest halo culture of all. It was thinly represented compared to some, scattered across fifty cubic lights and half a dozen planets, with outstations huddled so close to the Tract it soon became known as the Kefahuchi Culture or K-culture. There was no clue what these people looked like, though from their architecture you could tell they were short. The ruins were alive with code, which turned out to be some kind of intelligent machine interface.
Working technological remains, sixty-five million years old.
No one knew what to do with it. The research arm of Earth Military Contracts arrived. They threw a cordon round what they called the “affected area” and, working out of hastily thrown-up colonies of pressurised sheds, modified tools from various strains of shadow operator, which they ran on nano- and biotech substrates. With these they tried to manipulate the code direct. It was a disaster. Conditions in the sheds were brutal. Researchers and experimental subjects alike lived on top of the containment facilities. “Containment” was another meaningless EMC word. There were no firewalls, no masks, nothing above a Class IV cabinet. Evolution ran at virus speeds. There were escapes, unplanned hybrids. Men, women and children, shipped in down the Carling Line from the branded prison hulks orbiting Cor Caroli, accidentally ingested the substrates, then screamed all night and in the morning spoke in tongues. It was like having a wave of luminous insects spill out of the machine, run up your arm and into your mouth before you could stop them. There were outbreaks of behaviour so incomprehensible it had to be an imitation of the religious rituals of the K-culture itself. Dancing. Sex and drugs cults. Anthemic chanting.
After the Tampling-Praine Outbreak of 2293, which escaped the halo and infected parts of the galaxy itself, attempts to deal directly with the code, or the machinery it controlled, were abandoned. The big idea after that was to contain it and connect the human operator via a system of buffers and compressors, cybernetic and biological, which mimicked the way human consciousness dealt with its own raw eleven-million-bit-a-second sensory input. The dream of a one-to-one realtime link with the mathematics faded, and, a generation after the original discoveries, EMC installed what they had into hybridised ships, drives, weapons and—especially—navigational systems which had last run sixty-five million years before.
The pressure-sheds were demolished, and the lives of the people in them quietly forgotten.
K-tech was born.
“So?” said Seria Mau. “This is not news.”
She knew all this, but was embarrassed to hear it spoken out loud. She felt some guilt for all those dead people. She laughed. “None of this is news to my life,” she said. “You know?”
“I know,” said Billy Anker. He went on:
“EMC was born in those pressure-sheds, too. Before that you had a loose cartel of security corporations, designed so the neo-liberal democracies could blame subcontractors for any police action that got out of hand. So all those boyish decent-looking presidents could make eye contact with you out of the hologram display and claim in those holy voices of theirs, ’We don’t make the wars,’ and then have ‘ terrorists’ killed in numbers. After K-tech, well, EMC became the democracies: look at that little shit we just talked to.” He grinned. “But here’s the good news. K-tech has run out. For a while, it was a gold rush. There was always something new. The early prospectors were picking stuff up with their bare hands. But by the time Uncle Zip’s generation came along, there was nothing left. Now they’re adding refinements to refinements, but only at the human interface. They can’t build new code, or back-engineer those original machines.
“Do you understand? We don’t have a technology here. We have alien artefacts: a resource mined until it ran out.” He looked around him, gestured to indicate the White Cat. “This may have been one of the last of them,” he said. “And we don’t even know what it was for.”
“Hey, Billy Anker,” she said. “I know what it’s for.”
He looked her fetch in the eye and she felt less sure.
“K-tech has run out,” he repeated.
“If that’s a good thing, why are you so pissed off?”
Billy Anker got up and walked about to stretch his legs. He had another look at the Dr. Haends package. Then he came back to her and knelt down again.
“Because I found a whole planet of it,” he said.
Silence strung itself out like packets in a wire in the human quarters of the ship. Under the dim fluorescent lights the shadow operators whispered to one another, turning their faces to the wall. Billy Anker sat on the floor scratching the calf of one leg. His shoulders were hunched, his stubbled face set in creases as habitual as the creases in his leather coats. Seria Mau watched him intently. Every tiny camera drifting in the room gave her a different view.
“Ten years ago,” he said, “I was obsessed with the Sigma End wormhole. I wanted to know who put it there, how they did it. More than that, I wanted whatever was at the other end of it. I wasn’t alone. For a year or two, every hot guy with a theory was hanging off the edge of the accretion disc, doing what he called ‘science’ from some piece of junk he’d salvaged further down the Beach. A lot of them ended up as plasma.” He laughed softly. “A thousand sky-pilots, entradistas, madmen. Amazing guys like Liv Hula and Ed Chianese. At that time we all thought Sigma End was the gateway to the Tract. I was the one found out it wasn’t.”
“How?”
Billy Anker chuckled. His whole face changed.
“I went down it,” he said.
She stared at him. “But . . .” she said. She thought of everyone who had died trying that.
She said: “Didn’t you care?”
He shrugged. “I wanted to know,” he said.
“Billy Anker—”
“Oh, it’s no way to travel,” he said. “It broke me. It broke the ship. That weird twist of light just hangs like a crack in nowhere. You can barely see it against the stars: but shoot through and it’s like—” He examined his damaged hand. “Who knows what it’s like? Everything changes. Things happened in there I can’t describe. It was like being a kid again, some bad dream of running down an endless hallway in the dark. I heard things I still can’t give a meaning to, filtering through the hull. But, hey, I was out there! You know?” The memory of it made him rock to and fro with excitement where he sat. He looked twenty years younger than when she woke him up. The lines had vanished from round his mouth. His greeny-grey eyes, harder to bear than usual, were lighted from inside by his joke, his hidden narrative, his fierce construction of himself; at the same time they made him seem vulnerable and human. “I was somewhere no entradista had ever been before. I was in front, for the first time. Can you imagine that?”