Norton shook his head. ‘You say Merrin’s not damaged? You weren’t there when they cracked the hull on Horkan’s Pride. You didn’t see the mess he left.’
‘I know he fed off the passengers.’
‘No. He didn’t just feed off them, Marsalis. He ripped them apart, gouged out their eyes and scattered the fucking pieces from one end of the crew section to the other. That’s what he did.’ Norton took a steadying breath. ‘You want to call that a plan of action, go right ahead. To me, it sounds like good old-fashioned insanity.’
It was a fractional pause, but Sevgi saw how the news stopped Marsalis dead.
‘Well, you’ll need to show me footage of that,’ he said finally. ‘But my guess is there was a reason for whatever he did.’
Norton grinned mirthlessly. ‘Sure there was a reason. Seven months alone in deep space, and a diet of human flesh. I’d be feeling pretty edgy myself under the circumstances.’
‘It’s not enough.’
‘So you say. Ever consider you might be wrong about this? Maybe Merrin did crack. Maybe variant thirteen just isn’t as beyond human as everybody thinks.’
That got a sour smile out of Marsalis. ‘Thanks for the solidarity, Tom. It’s a nice thought, but I’m in no hurry to be assimilated. Variant thirteen is not human the way you are, and this guy Merrin isn’t going to be an exception. You judge what he does by normal human yardsticks, you’ll be making a big mistake. Meanwhile, you hired me to echo-profile the guy, so how about we get on and do that, starting with the last living thing to see him alive. You going to let me talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn, or not?’
CHAPTER TWENTY
The night sky lay at his feet.
Not a night sky you could see from Earth or Mars, or anywhere else this far out on a galactic arm. Instead, the black floor was densely splattered with incandescence. Stars crowded each other’s brilliance or studded the multi-coloured marble veins of nebulae. It might have been an accurately generated view from some hypothetical world at the core of the Milky Way, it might just have been a thousand different local night skies, overlaid one on top of the other and amped up to blazing. He took a couple of steps and stars crunched into white powder underfoot, smeared across the inky black. Over his head, the sky was a claustrophobic steel grey, daubed with ugly blob riveting in wide spiral runs.
Fucking ghosts in the machine.
No one knew why the shipboard djinns ran their virtual environments like this. Queries on the subject from human interface engineers met with vague responses which made no linguistic sense. Flown from it-will, cannot the heavy, there-at, through-at, slopeless and ripe was one of the famous ones. Carl had known an IF engineer on Mars who had it typed out and pasted above his bunk as a koan. The accompanying mathematics apparently made even less sense, though the guy insisted they had a certain insane elegance, whatever that was supposed to mean. He was planning a book, a collection of n-djinn haiku printed very small on expensive paper, with illustrations of the virtual formats on the facing pages.
Itwas Carl’s opinion, admittedly unfounded on any actual evidence, that the n-djinns were making elaborate jokes at humanity’s dull-witted expense. He supposed that the book, if it ever saw print, could be seen as a punchline delivered.
In his darker moments, he wondered what might come after that. The joke over, the gloves off.
‘Marsalis.’
The voice came first, then the ’face, almost as if the n-djinn had forgotten it should manifest a focus the human could address. Like someone asking for a contact number, and then groping about for a pen to write it down. The ’face shaded in. A blued, confetti-shredded androgynous body that stood as if being continually blown away in a wind tunnel. Long ragged hair, streaming back. Flesh like a million tiny fluttering wings, stirring on the bone. It was impossible to make out male or female features. Under the voice, there was a tiny rustling, crackling sound, like paper burning up.
It was a little like talking to an angel. Carl grimaced.
‘That’s me. Been looking me up?’
‘You feature in the flow.’ The ’face lifted one arm and a curtain of images cascaded from it to the star-strewn floor. He spotted induction photos from Osprey, media footage following the Felipe Souza rescue, other stuff that lit odd corners of memory in him and made them newly familiar. Somewhere in amongst it all he thought he saw Marisol’s face, but it was hard to tell. A defensive twinge went through him.
‘Didn’t know they were letting you hook up so soon.’
It was a lie. Ertekin had shown him the release documentation from MIT – he knew to the hour when the n-djinn had been recalibrated and allowed back into the flow.
‘It is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data,’ the blue figure said gravely. ‘Re-enabling a nano-level artificial consciousness engine necessitates reconnection to local dataflows.’
Unhumanly, the djinn had left the upheld arm where it was and the downpour of images ran on. Carl gestured towards the display.
‘Right. So what does the local dataflow have to say about me lately?’
‘Many things. UNGLA currently defines you as a genetic licensing agent. The Miami Herald calls you a murderer. Reverend Jessie Marshall of the Church of Human Purity calls you an abomination, but this is a generalised reference. News feeds abstracted from the Mars dataflow and currently held locally refer to you as this year’s luckiest man on Mars, though the year in question is of course 2099. The Frankfurter Allgemein called y—’
‘Yeah, fine. You can stop there.’ Shipboard n-djinns were famously literal-minded. It was in the nature of the job they did. Minimal requirement for interface. Humans were deep-frozen freight. The djinns sat alone, sunk in black silence laced with star static, talked occasionally with other machines on Mars and Earth when docking or other logistics required it. ‘I came to ask you a couple of questions.’
The ’face waited.
‘Do you recall Allen Merrin?’
‘Yes.’ Merrin’s gaunt Christ-like features evolved in the air at the ’face’s shoulder. Standard ID likeness. ‘Occupant of crew section beta capsule, redesignated for human freight under COLIN interplanetary traffic directive c93-ep4652-21. Cryo-certified Bradbury November 5th 2106, protocol code 55528187.’
‘Yeah, except he didn’t really occupy the beta capsule much, did he?’
‘No. The system revived him at four hundred and fourteen hours of trajectory time.’
‘You’ve told the debriefing crew that you shut down voluntarily at three hundred and seventy-nine hours, on suspicion of corruptive material in a navigational module.’
‘Yes. I was concerned to prevent a possible viral agent from passing into the secondary navigational core. Quarantine measures were appropriate.’
‘And Merrin wakes up thirty-six hours later. Is that a coincidence?’
The blue shredded figure hesitated, face expressionless, eyes fixed on him. Carl guessed it was trying to calibrate his perceptions of relatedness and event, gleaning it from a million tiny shreds of evidence laid down in the details the dataflow held about him. Was he superstitious, was he religious? What feelings did he have about the role of chance in human affairs? The n-djinn was running his specifications, the way a machine would check the interface topography on a new piece of software.
It took about twenty seconds.
‘There is no systems evidence to indicate a relation between the two events. The revival appears to have been a capsule malfunction.’
‘Were you aware of Merrin once he was awake?’
‘To a limited extent, yes. As I said, it is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data. In a quarantine lockdown, the ship’s secondary systems continue to feed into my cores, though it is impossible for me to actively respond to them in any way. The traffic is one-way, an interrupt protocol prevents feedback. You might consider this similar to the data processed by a human mind during REM sleep.’
‘So you dreamed Merrin.’
‘That is one way of describing it, yes.’
‘And in these dreams, did Merrin talk?’
The confetti streaming figure shifted slightly in the grip of its invisible gale. There was an expression on its face that might have been curiosity. Might equally well have been mild pain, or restrained sexual ecstasy. It hadn’t really got the hang of human features.
‘Talk to whom?’
Carl shrugged, but it felt anything but casual. He was too freighted with the cold memories. ‘To the machines. To the people in the cryocaps. Did he talk to himself? To the stars, maybe? He was out there a long time.’
‘If you consider this talking, then yes. He talked.’
‘Often?’
‘I am not calibrated to judge what would be considered often in human terms. Merrin was silent for eighty-seven point twenty-two per cent of the trajectory, including time spent in sleep. Forty-three point nine per cent of his speech was apparently directed—’
‘All right, never mind. Are you equipped for Yaroshanko intuitive function?’
‘Yaroshanko’s underlying constants are present in my operating systems, yes.’
‘Good, then I’d like to run a Tjaden/Wasson honorific for links between myself and Merrin, making inference along a Yaroshanko curve. No more than two degrees of separation.’
‘What referents do you wish employed for the curve?’
‘Initially, both our footprints in the total dataflow. Or as much of it as they’re letting you have access to. You’re going to get a lot of standard Bacon links; they’re not what I’m after.’ Carl wished suddenly that Matthew was here to handle this for him, to reach quick-silver swift and cool down the wires and engage the machine at something like its own levels of consciousness. Matthew would have been at ease in here – Carl felt clumsy by contrast, the terminology of complexity math tasted awkward on his tongue. ‘Cross reference to everything Merrin said or did while he was aboard Horkan’s Pride. Bring me anything that shows up there.’
The blue shredded figure shifted slightly, rippling in the gale that Carl could not feel.
‘This will take time,’ it said.
Carl looked around at the unending sky-floored desolation of the construct. He shrugged.
‘Better get me a chair then.’