Divergence (15 page)

There was a cracking noise, like ice freezing. The silver flower was changing color, the change rising from the base, the material of the VNMs altering subtly, metal crystals growing and realigning. A few scraps of birch bark fluttered to the ground.

Ivan continued softly.

“…until someone who understands what is going on, having worked with VNMs in his younger days, recognizes the model that has repeated its hopeless task for all these months in the wasteland, then looks up the completion code, and sends it to those hapless machines…”

They all looked at the silver flower, frozen in position, its head rising from the broken black rubble of the basement to reflect the hot yellow sun straight into their eyes. Fiona moved her lips slowly, searching for the right words.

“You’ve killed it,” she said.

Wake up! You keep dreaming of this. Why do you think you are Eva? Who keeps giving you these dreams?

Are they lodged in your psyche? Part of what DIANA did to you? Or are they a reminder of your lost soul? Are you borrowing Eva’s feelings to remind yourself what emotions are like?

Eva stamped her way across the broken ground, heading back to the britzka. She could feel the accusing gazes of Fiona and the rest on her back, and it made her angry. Unfairly, she began taking it out on Ivan.

“They come across here with their big intentions and their rules for how this country should be run, and none of them could even operate a bloody hammer. And when they meet someone who actually knows what he’s doing, someone who can operate machinery, they treat him like he’s some sort of idiot.”

Ivan said nothing; he calmly climbed back into the britzka and gazed down the potholed road ahead.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” said Eva. “Aren’t you going to say something?”

“Please don’t patronize me, Eva,” said Ivan. “Do you think I am not aware? Do you think I need you to point all this out to me?”

Eva blushed.

But I’m not Eva, I’m Judy. Why do I keep dreaming of this woman? Now I’m even on a ship that bears her name. I used the meta-intelligence to look around the
Eva Rye.
I can see every living being on this ship, but there is something else, too. Something that inhabits the ship but is not alive.

But what is life, anyway? Is it just a Conway event?

Eva and Ivan were rolling home through the awakening smell of growing grass that rose up around the Narkomfin, through the buzz of machinery and the sound of nervous giggling as one of the handicapped ran out from the side of the road. And there was the sweet sound of a cello playing at the edge of evening. Eva recognized the music made by Hilde, child prodigy, gifted resident of Narkomfin 128.

“It looked alive,” insisted Eva. “It looked alive.”

“It was just a result of initial conditions, Eva,” answered Ivan solemnly. “A few simple rules can produce systems of astonishing complexity.”

“I know.”

Ivan waved to a group of people who stood by the side of the road. He shouted something in Russian to them. They laughed in response.

“Oh, Eva, why so sad? Come on, we are home. Look, there is Katya waiting for me.”

Down the road, Ivan’s daughter sat in her wheelchair, her boyfriend, Paul, standing at her side.

“Come on, Eva, we have just a few days left together, and you are worrying about a metal flower. That sort of thing is inevitable when you have VNMs. What’s the matter?”

Eva gazed at nothing.

“What’s the matter?” he repeated. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No.” Eva bit her lip. “Yes. I don’t know. I’m sad that you are leaving here.”

“Come with me.”

“I can’t. I can’t return to the surveillance world. You know that. You stay here with me.”

“No, I have Katya to think about. I need to take her home.”

“See? We are both prisoners of circumstance.”

“This is life.”

“I know.”

She sighed bitterly. “There is no choice. There is no free will. I thought so once, but the Watcher proved me wrong. It asked me questions, decided how it should operate on this planet, but the questions were loaded. I had no choice in how I answered them.”

“There is always a choice.”

“No, there is not, Ivan. You Russians, with your icons and the Holy Mother and your sentimentality. Out in the middle of this emptiness you hear the echo of your thoughts, and you think it the still small voice of calm. Here you can believe in the soul and free will, yet all there is, is the mechanism ticking away in your skull…”

Ivan frowned. “No, Eva. That is not right. Yes, there is a mechanism that produces your thoughts, but that does not mean that everything is fixed.”

“You have to believe that, Ivan, but it’s not true. It’s like this…”

She lowered her head, as if utterly exhausted. Ivan waited patiently for her to speak.

“Back in England,” she began slowly, “I remember seeing an antique narrow boat in a museum. Most of it—ninety-eight percent of it—was given over to cargo, to profit. This was how the owners made a living, carrying cargo up and down the canals. So much of the boat was given over to cargo that their living quarters were all cramped into one end. They were tiny: the steering part, the kitchen, the cupboards, everything that was not profitable, was cramped into a tiny nook at one end.”

The britzka rocked as it bumped to a halt. The smell of frying onions, drifting out from the open windows of the grey Narkomfin, was like a friendly spirit in the cooling air.

“I thought it terrible that they should live so,” she continued. “The bed was the worst thing, a tiny board laid out over the space where the pilot would stand during the daytime. A man, a woman, and their child would sleep at night in a space so small they couldn’t stretch out but would have to curl around each other like spoons. They literally couldn’t turn over in their sleep, it was so small. And in the morning they would lift that bed board and then use the space beneath it to cook breakfast.”

She smiled slightly, registering the smell of onions. Then she fixed Ivan with an intense look.

“And I was struck by the way people were forced to live in such dreadful conditions by the prevailing economic forces of the time. There was land available for all, for food and space, but it wasn’t shared out equally. People had to sleep—that’s what really struck me—
sleep
like that, because that was the way the country was run then, with everyone seeking to find work and make a profit to survive. And that was because humans are destined to compete with each other, and that’s because of the way they evolved, and…and…and suddenly it struck me that, in a way, it’s written in the fundamental makeup of the universe that matter attracts, and molecules replicate, and life evolves and competes, and one of the means of such competition is profit. Just think of that, how capitalism and the rise of the big organizations are as much a part of the inevitable consequences of the big bang as are atoms and stars and life itself.”

Ivan moved his lips, tasting the idea. “I suppose so,” he said.

Eva was staring at the Narkomfin, at its grey walls made colorful by the laundry looping from the windows to dry in the late-afternoon sunshine. She saw the ruined silver bones of the defeated venumb that had once tried to claim the building. She gazed at the distant mountains, purple and blue, and so rough and wild and unlike the rest of the world, covered as that was by the creeping sanitized surveillance of the Watcher.

“It makes me wonder,” said Eva. “Could we stand back and look at the commercial company that operated those barges and think that that particular macro structure was as much a part of the universe as a white dwarf.”

“What has that got to do with the flower?” asked Ivan. “What has that got to do with Katya and you and me?”

“It means that your leaving me is inevitable, Ivan. Do not blame yourself.”

…and you looked for life on the ship, Judy, and you found something, something located at the very core of its being. In its bones, you might say.

The FE software. Do you remember? It feels alive, but it’s not living; and you wanted to know what it was. It is here on the ship; you can feel its actual presence.

Lying on your bed, you sent your thoughts off through the ship, but you lost it at that strange knot of converging corridors. It is something that your mind cannot touch. The FE software is like life without motion—the essence of life, but unchanging, a cloud of ink moulded in a Perspex block.

It doesn’t move, it doesn’t defend itself, and yet your thoughts drifted off, drifted off into this dream. You’ve dreamt of Eva before, Judy—why is that? And now you must wake up…

Judy opened her eyes to see the stars rising higher and higher into the night sky, like stacks of silver pennies thrown into the air. Her eyes adjusted, and she saw it was just the black lacquer of her ceiling reflecting the myriad yellow flames of the little candles burning around her bed.

The FE software? It wasn’t life—but, then again, life took on so many forms.

Life took on so many forms.

And what was life, anyway?

maurice 2: 2252

Maurice played his clarinet
with his eyes half fixed on the screen of his console. It was unusual to have three FE ships within range of them at once, and the thought that maybe he should wake Saskia and tell her wove in and out of his thoughts in time to the music.

The silver plastic felt warm and alive under his fingers; he could feel the patterns of resonance change in the space around him as he played. The air of the little hold seemed to be dancing, ripe with melody. For the moment, Maurice felt at peace in the funny little space where gravity had been set to make maximum use of the available surfaces. Black-and-white rubber tiles lined the floor, the four walls and the ceiling.

He didn’t hear Judy coming up behind him. “That sounds nice,” she said.

The music died, and the hold reverted to an empty space scattered with the thin cargo the crew of the
Eva Rye
had managed to acquire. The life seemed to pass instantly from the goods ranged in the crates that were stacked on the floor, the ceiling, and the walls, all held in place by the six-directional gravity. In the ensuing silence, the crystal glasses packed in foam pellets no longer sang, the green apples that lay in neat nests of paper lost their bloom. Only the piles of colored pebbles remained happy, glinting in the light.

“No, don’t stop. Go on,” Judy urged, sitting down heavily on the crate next to Maurice. Her voice sounded whispery and thin.

“Are you okay?” Maurice turned to peer at her pale face. Even through her white makeup he could see how drawn and uneasy she looked.

“I’ll be fine,” Judy said, sitting up straighter.

“You’re not fine now, though,” Maurice replied. “Come on, let’s go to the living area and get you something to drink.”

“I just need to sit here for a while,” said Judy. “I didn’t sleep too well. I heard the music. Why don’t you let me listen to you play?”

Maurice was already opening his instrument case and slotting the clarinet into its nest in the green baize inside.

“I’ve finished,” he said, making to close the case. Judy placed a hand on his elbow to stop him.

“What are
they
?” she asked, pointing to the pieces of black pipe that also nestled in the baize. She ran a finger along the silver metal that formed loops over the surface of one of them.

Maurice sounded almost embarrassed.

“Those?” he said. “They’re sections of another clarinet, an old one. They used to be carved from wood, not grown from plastic.” He touched the shiny black wood of one of the pieces. “The shape of them was not as efficient as the fractal forms they use nowadays. The fingering was different as well, not terribly logical.”

“Can you play it?”

“Oh, yes,” said Maurice, and he snapped the case shut with a click, firmly ending that line of conversation.

The three ships registered on the console were moving closer. Judy’s eyes looked yellow and dull; her black passive suit seemed shabby and frumpy. She gave a yawn and rubbed her hands through her hair, trying to wake herself up.

“It smells nice in here,” she said.

“It’s the apples,” said Maurice. “Judy, what is the matter? You look ill.”

Judy was drooping again. She sat up straighter.

“It’s this thing here,” she said, lethargically pointing to the back of her neck. “It’s making me feel things that aren’t real. Maurice, what do
you
know about the FE software?”

“Not much more than I’ve told you. Why?”

“It doesn’t feel right.” She rubbed her hands through her hair again, as if she had a headache. “What about Miss Rose? What’s she doing on this ship anyway?”

Maurice smiled. “Stealing things. Oh, and being rude to people.”

He looked back at his console. “You know, Judy, there are three FE-equipped ships within range of us at the moment, all transmitting protocols indicating they wish to trade. That’s unusual: up until now we’ve only encountered one such ship every few days or so.”

“It’ll be me,” said Judy. “I told you. Someone is arranging things so as to get me to Earth.”