I twitched despite myself.
‘I’m just curious.’
‘An admirable quality. Must make soldiering difficult for you.’
I snapped open one of the camp chairs stacked beside the table and lowered myself into it. ‘I think you’re confusing curiosity with empathy.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. Curiosity’s a basic monkey trait. Torturers are full of it. Doesn’t make you a better human being.’
‘Well, I suppose you’d know.’
It was an admirable riposte. I didn’t know if she’d been tortured in the camp – in the momentary flare of anger I hadn’t cared – but she never flinched as the words came out.
‘Why are you behaving like this, Wardani?’
‘I told you we’re not in virtual any more.’
‘No.’
I waited. Eventually she got up and went across to the back wall of the compartment, where a bank of monitors for the remote gear showed the gate from a dozen slightly different angles.
‘You’ll have to forgive me, Kovacs,’ she said heavily. ‘Today I saw a hundred thousand people murdered to clear the way for our little venture, and I know, I know, we didn’t do it, but it’s a little too convenient for me not to feel responsible. If I go for a walk, I know there are little bits of them blowing around in the wind out there. And that’s without those heroes of the revolution you killed so efficiently this morning. I’m sorry, Kovacs. I have no training at this sort of thing.’
‘You won’t want to talk about the two bodies we fished out of the trawl nets, then.’
‘Is there something to talk about?’ She didn’t look round.
‘Deprez and Jiang just got through with the autosurgeon. Still no idea what killed them. No trace of trauma in any of the bone structure, and there’s not a great deal else left to work from.’ I moved up beside her, closer to the monitors. ‘I’m told there are tests we can do with bone at cellular level, but I have a feeling they aren’t going to tell us anything either.’
That got her looking at me.
‘Why?’
‘Because whatever killed them has something to do with this.’ I tapped the glass of a monitor where the gate loomed close up. ‘And this is like nothing any of us have seen before.’
‘You think something came through the gate at the witching hour?’ she asked scornfully. ‘The vampires got them?’
‘Something got them,’ I said mildly. ‘They didn’t die of old age. Their stacks are gone.’
‘Doesn’t that rule out the vampire option? Stack excision is a peculiarly human atrocity, isn’t it?’
‘Not necessarily. Any civilisation that could build a hyperportal must have been able to digitise consciousness.’
‘There’s no actual evidence for that.’
‘Not even common sense?’
‘Common sense?’ The scorn was back in her voice. ‘The same common sense that said a thousand years ago that obviously the sun goes round the earth, just look at it? The common sense that Bogdanovich appealed to when he set up hub theory? Common sense is anthropocentric, Kovacs. It assumes that because this is the way human beings turned out, it has to be the way any intelligent technological species would turn out.’
‘I’ve heard some pretty convincing arguments along those lines.’
‘Yeah, haven’t we all,’ she said shortly. ‘Common sense for the common herd, and why bother to feed them anything else. What if Martian ethics didn’t permit re-sleeving, Kovacs? Ever think of that? What if death means you’ve proved yourself unworthy of life? That even if you could be brought back, you have no right to it.’
‘In a technologically advanced culture? A starfaring culture? This is bullshit, Wardani.’
‘No, it’s a theory. Function-related raptor ethics. Ferrer and Yoshimoto at Bradbury. And at the moment, there’s very little hard evidence around to disprove it.’
‘Do you believe it?’
She sighed and went back to her seat. ‘Of course I don’t believe it. I’m just trying to demonstrate that there’s more to eat at this party than the cosy little certainties human science is handing round. We know almost nothing about the Martians, and that’s after hundreds of years of study. What we think we know could be proved completely wrong at any moment, easily. Half of the things we dig up, we have no idea what they are, and we still sell them as fucking coffee-table trinkets. Right now, someone back on Latimer has probably got the encoded secret of a faster-than-light drive mounted on their fucking living-room wall.’ She paused. ‘And it’s probably upside down.’
I laughed out loud. It shattered the tension in the ’fab. Wardani’s face twitched in an unwilling smile.
‘No, I mean it,’ she muttered. ‘You think, just because I can open this gate, that we’ve got some kind of handle on it. Well, we haven’t. You can’t assume anything here. You can’t think in human terms.’
‘OK, fine.’ I followed her back to the centre of the room and reclaimed my own seat. In fact, the thought of a human stack being retrieved by some kind of Martian gate commando, the thought of that personality being downloaded into a Martian virtuality and what that might do to a human mind, was making my spine crawl. It was an idea I would have been just as happy never to have come up with. ‘But you’re the one who’s beginning to sound like a vampire story now.’
‘I’m just warning you.’
‘OK, I’m warned. Now tell me something else. How many other archaeologues knew about this site?’
‘Outside of my own team?’ She considered. ‘We filed with central processing in Landfall, but that was before we knew what it was. It was just listed as an obelisk. Artefact of Unknown Function, but like I said, AUFs are practically every second thing we dig up.’
‘You know Hand says there’s no record of an object like this in the Landfall registry.’
‘Yeah, I read the report. Files get lost, I guess.’
‘Seems a little too convenient to me. And files may get lost, but not files on the biggest find since Bradbury.’
‘I told you, we filed it as an AUF. An obelisk. Another obelisk. We’d already turned up a dozen structural pieces along this coast by the time we found this one.’
‘And you never updated? Not even when you knew what it was?’
‘No.’ She gave me a crooked smile. ‘The Guild has always given me a pretty hard time about my Wycinski-esque tendencies, and a lot of the Scratchers I took on got tarred by association. Cold-shouldered by colleagues, slagged off in academic journals. The usual conformist stuff. When we realised what we’d found, I think we all felt the Guild could wait until we were ready to make them eat their words in style.’
‘And when the war started, you buried it for the same reasons?’
‘Got it in one.’ She shrugged. ‘It might sound childish now, but at the time we were all pretty angry. I don’t know if you’d understand that. How it feels to have every piece of research you do, every theory you come up with, rubbished because you once took the wrong side in a political dispute.’
I thought briefly back to the Innenin hearings.
‘It sounds familiar enough.’
‘I think.’ She hesitated. ‘I think there was something else as well. You know the night we opened the gate for the first time, we went crazy. Big party, lots of chemicals, lots of talk. Everyone was talking about full professorships back on Latimer; they said I’d be made an honorary Earth scholar in recognition of my work.’ She smiled. ‘I think I even made an acceptance speech. I don’t remember that stage of the evening too well, never did, even the next morning.’