The British government had also issued an Interpol Red Notice for the arrest of Chloe, Fahad and Henry but, because the French government had yet to forgive the ‘English perfidy’ that had almost caused the collapse of the EU, its police were reluctant to cooperate. ‘For once, the intransigence of French bureaucracy will work in our favour,’ Henry said. ‘And our own lawyers are throwing tons of sand into the gears of justice too. By the time Adam Nevers turns up with a warrant, we’ll have been to Mangala and back.’
There were briefings given by Michel Charpentier, a raffish archaeologist who had worked on Mangala eight years ago. He was coming with them, travelling in what he called cattle class rather than their clandestine accommodation. He told them about his work on Mangala, about its Elder Culture sites and its capital city, Petra, and gave them a brief lesson about walking surveys and shovel test pits. ‘If we are fortunate, we should not have to sift a gram of dirt,’ he said. ‘We are only looking for one thing at this time: whether or not the site interests the eidolon.’
Ada Morange’s agent on Mangala had discovered that a company formerly owned by Cal McBride had taken out licences to excavate several Elder Culture sites. According to Michel, one of them, Site 326, was especially promising. The company hadn’t yet filed a detailed report of its finds, but Michel had worked up a 3D topographical model from the contour map of the initial landscape survey. A cluster of mounds each about thirty metres across, low truncated cones with flat tops and sloping sides. He rotated the model, tipped it up and down, then brought up an overlay of spires rising from the footprints of the mounds and asked Fahad if it looked familiar.
‘Of course it looks familiar. You used my pictures.’
‘What about the relationship of the spires to each other? Take your time.’
Fahad bent over the tablet, used his forefinger to spin the image around. He said, ‘Is that a river?’
‘Along the eastern edge? Yes, a big one.’
‘There shouldn’t be a river.’
‘The mounds are many thousands of years old. The river probably changed its course several times. And your spires collapsed, left these mounds of rubble. We tried to match them with your drawings, but you drew different numbers of spires, sometimes standing close to each other, sometimes not. We’d like to know if you think that seems to be the right number of spires, in the right pattern.’
Michel was languidly patient, but Fahad refused to commit to a definite answer. He didn’t know the exact number of spires, or their size. He drew whatever was in his head at the time. It flowed down his arm onto the paper. The reconstruction looked familiar, but he wasn’t sure if it was where Ugly Chicken had come from.
‘I’ll know when I get there,’ he said at last. ‘Ugly Chicken will lead me to the right place.’
Later, Henry said to Chloe, ‘I can’t figure out if he’s hiding something because he doesn’t trust us, or he really doesn’t know.’
‘If he didn’t trust you, he wouldn’t be here,’ Chloe said. ‘Where is that site?’
‘A big valley about a thousand kilometres south and west of Petra. There are more than four hundred known Elder Culture sites on Mangala, but I have a good feeling about this one. Those mounds look right, and the licence was issued three years ago, which fits with the time frame.’
‘His father stole artefacts from the site, his boss found out…’
‘Our person on the ground gave us some info on the boss. Cal McBride. Soon after the excavation licence was issued, he went to prison over some smuggling scam. He lost control of his company while he was inside, came out about six months ago, maybe looking for people to blame. Or maybe the new boss of the company found out about Sahar Chauhan’s little sideline in purloined artefacts. Like the kid said, we’ll know when we get there.’
Ada Morange was absent during the days of lab tests and briefing sessions. She returned on the last afternoon, the afternoon when Chloe said her farewells to Neil and Gail Ann, bringing with her the!Cha, Unlikely Worlds, and Daniel Rosenblaum, freshly sprung from detention along with the rest of Disruption Theory’s crew. They dined together that evening on the terrace of the farmhouse, under the grape arbour. The old woman sat at the head of the long table; Chloe on her left, Daniel on her right, the tank of Unlikely Worlds standing next to her wheelchair, its black cylinder balanced on a tripod of three skeletal legs like a miniature Martian fighting machine. A shot glass of apple brandy sat on its flat top. Unlikely Worlds explained that a demon ‘smaller than one of your bacteria’ was inflating the vanishingly small chance that certain molecules would be somewhere other than inside the glass. Not molecules of alcohol, but the congeners that gave the apple brandy its unique flavour.
‘It’s my only vice.’
According to the!Cha, their tanks each contained a school of tiny shrimp-like creatures that housed various aspects of their personalities. In the oceans of their home world, they said, males of their ancestral species had constructed elaborate nests decorated with weed and shells to attract a mate. The strongest, those most likely to produce the fittest offspring, made the biggest and most elaborate nests, and attracted the strongest, most fertile females. Although they had left their home world a long time ago, male!Cha still advertised their sexual prowess by collecting Elder Culture artefacts, ghosts and eidolons, and stories. Stories most of all. That was why they followed the Jackaroo, they said. The Jackaroo’s interactions with other species created all kinds of deep, rich tales.
Some people believed that the!Cha were the power behind the Jackaroo. Others that the!Cha were another kind of Jackaroo avatar. Their tanks were sealed, impervious to X-rays, microwaves, radar, and ultrasound. Anything might be inside, or nothing at all. Schools of shrimp, monstrous nightmares, machine intelligences, magic crystals inhabited by ghosts or eidolons, like Rana’s cat’s-eye bead.
The Jackaroo, of course, had only ever made vague, enigmatic comments about their fellow travellers.
‘We are friends with all we find,’ they said.
Unlikely Worlds told Chloe that human stories were especially fine — their effect on female!Cha was rather like the buzz he got from the congeners in his glass of apple brandy.
‘Your own story is not without interest,’ he said. His voice, a mellow baritone, was modelled on an old movie star who’d several times played God. Richly paternal and reassuring, it hummed in the air somewhere above the table. ‘I took the liberty of studying your entries on the Last Five Minutes wiki. A tragedy rooted in the foolishness of your species.’
Chloe, unsettled and provoked, said, ‘I would have thought you would be more interested in Fahad and Rana. Their story is way weirder than mine.’
‘I prefer to work in miniature,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘And besides, yours is more purely human.’
This was after dessert and coffee. Rana had been excused from the table, and she and her brother were chasing fireflies on the lawn. She ran through the little constellations of green and red and blue flashes, laughing with innocent delight. Before dinner, she had given her bracelet to her brother in a touchingly simple ceremony. She didn’t seem at all upset to part with the bead and her imaginary friend. She was happy that Ugly Chicken was going home. Happy because Ugly Chicken was happy.
Now Unlikely Worlds said that the LFM wiki was an interesting attempt to overcome the shortcomings of human memory.