Recursion (42 page)

Why? It didn’t sound much like the behavior of an agent of the EA.

So maybe Robert wasn’t an agent of the EA. But who else would have access to such resources? And what would their motive be?

It was at that point that Herb remembered something Robert had said, something he had mentioned just before they jumped.

Something about other young men he had captured.

He had named one: Sean Simons. Missing. No one knew where he was except Robert, and Robert wasn’t telling. Had Sean been abandoned, just as Herb had been? Did his corpse now lie on a lost planet somewhere? Were his bones currently bleaching under an alien sun at the edge of the galaxy? Despite the heat, Herb shivered to think of it. What reason would Robert have to do that? Why do that to
anyone
?

The object in the distance was growing larger. It appeared to be moving toward him, flickering in the heat haze like a dark candle flame.

Maybe it was Robert coming to save him.

But Robert had been eaten by the VNMs. Herb had watched it happen.

But what about the other ship? Robert had caused Herb’s ship to reproduce before they had made the jump to this planet. Maybe that other ship had come back to rescue him. He hoped so.

Night came, and with it the cold. Herb was shivering violently, unknowingly suffering from the effects of heatstroke. His mouth and lips were so dry he was having trouble thinking straight. He crouched on the flat rock surface, arms wrapped around himself for warmth, drifting into half sleep and then jerking awake. The cold stars shone down on him. Somewhere out on the plain, something was still moving toward him.

Halfway through the night, Herb drifted from a half sleep into half awakening, following the course of a dream that had spilled over into reality. High above in the sky, there was a sudden glittering. A silver thread stretched and expanded itself to reveal a crescent of moon that slowly widened from new moon to full moon in a matter of minutes, as if someone was peeling away a piece of black paper from the lunar surface. He shook his head and wondered if he was hallucinating. What could cause that? he wondered. Dizzy with the effects of heatstroke, it was nearly an hour before the answer occurred to him.

VNMs, he thought. They were up there too, eating away at whatever dark material covered the surface of that moon.

Morning came, and with it the chance to spend just a few hours sleeping untroubled on the bare rock.

Again, he was woken by the pain in his joints. He sat up and looked toward the approaching object. It was much closer now, and it had resolved itself into a human figure. Herb could make out the bobbing movement of someone walking. Someone grey, or wearing grey, picking its way carefully around all the great holes in the surface as it moved toward him.

Herb thought about going to meet the figure, but he felt too tired, too dizzy, and too thirsty. He crouched down and watched as it came closer. Herb had no perception of any distances greater than a hundred meters or so; modern ranging devices had robbed him of the skill or the need. He had no idea how far away the figure was, or how long it would take it to walk to him. He sat and watched it. He had nothing else to do.

The figure appeared to wave to him. Herb waved back.

As the figure came closer, Herb could see it wasn’t human. It was a robot, but there was something strange about its shape. It was fuzzy, hard to see properly, like the half-tuned pictures on Robert’s television set. The robot looked like a half-tuned picture that had just stepped into his world.

It wore a black bag slung carelessly over its shoulder.

Herb rose to his feet, but the robot waved to him to sit down. Now it was only a hundred meters away. Now fifty.

Step by step it approached Herb, closer and closer until finally it reached him. It stopped right in front of Herb and looked him up and down, then turned and scanned the horizon. Finally, it sat down opposite him. Close to, it didn’t seem so much a shape as a smudge in the air. The robot wasn’t quite there.

Herb swallowed with some difficulty. Speaking was going to be difficult with his dry mouth, but he forced himself to anyway.

“Who are you?” he croaked.

“My name is Constantine Storey,” said the robot. “You must be Herb Kirkham. Your great-great-grandmother says ‘hi.’”

Two days ago

This far from the sun, the coma of Comet 2305 FQOO was so insubstantial as to barely register on the ship’s senses. The enhanced visual feed had filtered the coma completely from its picture and then painted the nucleus as a dirty-white ball of frozen gasses cementing together silvery chunks of rock. The mirrored silver lozenge of the stealth ship was a tiny speck slowly closing on the irregular lump of matter.

Constantine Storey came back to life at the flick of a switch. From his perspective, one moment the world of Stonebreak was fading into nothingness, the next he was gazing at the steadily approaching dirty mass of Comet 2305 FQOO.

For a moment he had thought he was dead, but no, not yet. He was in a small room. He was watching a viewing field. On the viewing field there was a picture of a comet. It looked familiar.

Then a woman moved in front of him. She looked familiar, too: a face from his past. Someone famous. Someone from the newscasts and the viewing screens. A legend.

“Katie Kirkham,” he said, “I thought you were dead.”

“Look who’s talking.”

Constantine was sitting down. He shifted a little; his body felt strange. Something moved in front of his vision. His arm? It looked odd. Blurred. His whole body looked blurred.

“What’s going on?”

“You’ll see. Personality Construct Constantine Storey, the year is now 2210; it’s ninety-one years since you were terminated. The Environmental Agency has resurrected you in order that you might complete your life’s work. You are now resident in a robot body clothed in a fractal skin. Stand up, please.”

Ninety-one years? It felt like a couple of seconds. Constantine felt numb from the suddenness of the transition. Slowly, he moved his new body, trying it out.

“Nice interface,” he said. “This feels just like my old body, except it looks so blurry. I take it that’s the effect of the fractal skin?”

He was standing in a small room, bare of everything but a chair and a black shoulder bag lying on the floor.

“See if you can pick up the bag,” said Katie.

“Okay.”

Constantine tried to do so, but the bag slipped through his fingers.

“I can’t get a grip.”

“That’s the fractal skin. It blurs the boundary between you and the rest of the universe. You can relax the effect around your hands and feet in order to interact with the world. I’ll show you how.”

It was as if Katie Kirkham was sharing his body: she reached down inside his hand and did something,
so,
and there was a change. Now he could grip the bag.

“How did you do that? Are you in this robot along with me?”

“For the moment. Both of us are Personality Constructs of long-dead people. We go where we please. Well, I do, anyway. Now, in a moment, I will open the airlock door. This body is vacuum proof. We’re going to head out to the comet to retrieve something.”

“I thought as much,” said Constantine. He was right to think the comet looked familiar. He had been here before. Sort of.

Constantine floated away from the silver needle of the stealth ship using some mysterious form of propulsion.

“I’ll guide us,” said Katie. “You won’t need to know how the motion poppers work where you’re going.”

“Motion poppers? I can see things have changed in ninety-one years,” Constantine muttered. “Nice ship, by the way. It looks very stealthy.”

“Thank you. No one else will have a ship like this for another fifty years.”

“How do you know?”

“We won’t release the technology until then.”

“And who is we?”

“The Environmental Agency.”

“You mentioned it before. What is the Environmental Agency?”

“In your day you called it the Watcher.”

At that point Constantine noticed something was missing.

“Hey, where are Red, White, and Blue? Where’s Grey?”

“We removed them. You’re working for us now.” She made a little moue. “Mind you, you always were.”

When he was younger, Constantine had gone fell-walking during a winter thaw. Walking above the tree line, he found himself in a land of snow and stone. Like the surface of the moon, someone had remarked, but Constantine didn’t think much of the analogy. The moon’s surface didn’t bend and crack like this one did, its gulleys and ridges weren’t choked with half-melted ice that had refrozen into smooth mounds that softened the world while not quite concealing the harshness that lay beneath.

What that land had really resembled was the surface of this comet. As Constantine descended to the dirty grey ball, he shivered at the bleak loneliness of the scene. This cold, fell-like comet had traveled a long way in the ninety-two years since he had last visited it.

Katie guided them toward a chunk of splintered rock that lay embedded in the dirty ice of the nucleus. Larger than the stealth ship, it rose from the ground like a dirty grey fist; the upper end of the rock bulged and cracked in the shape of a clenched hand. It was just as Constantine remembered it.

“How did you know about this?” he whispered to Katie in awe.

“We’ve always known about it,” answered Katie. “The Watcher had a handle on DIANA almost from the beginning. It was the Watcher who declared the Mars site a World Heritage Center, insisted that it remained untouched. Didn’t that ever strike you as being a bit too convenient? The Watcher appreciates the importance of the Mars project more than anyone. When 113 Berliner Sibelius captured your personality in order to discover more about the Mars project, the Watcher had to take over their corporation just to help suppress the information you carried. Just imagine that: a whole corporation bought out, all because of you.”

They touched down on the surface of the dirty ice. Katie did something to the feet of the robot, increased their traction. The comet’s gravity was weak; Constantine could feel the robot’s mysterious propulsion system holding them down against the icy surface. Constantine felt dizzy. His whole world was changing again.

“But we were
fighting
the Watcher.”

“You only thought you were. I told you, the Watcher thinks it’s essential that the Mars project succeeds. And now we’re going to do it. Everything is in place. All we need to do now is to pick up the final piece and then we can go.”

Constantine made his way to the base of the huge rocky fist. It looked exactly as he remembered it from all those years ago, viewed through the remote cameras of a stealth pod. He saw the deep crack that split the rock from top to bottom, made out the triangular space at its base. His feet held tight onto the slippery surface as he marched toward the hiding place. There was nothing to be seen but dark shadow ahead. Brilliant stars shone above the rock-littered surface.

Constantine reached into the triangular hole and felt for the smooth surface of the stealth pod, now set to matte black for maximum concealment.

“Let me,” said Katie. Somewhere in the robot’s mind she pushed the buttons that sent the unlocking signal. Constantine felt the stealth pod split apart; felt the leaking of impact gel. He reached inside the pod, took hold of the loose plastic of the C Case and pulled it clear of the pod; held it up and allowed the impact gel to drain from it and then peered through the transparent coating at what lay inside.

A two-hundred-year-old machine. A laptop computer. The seed of the Mars project.

“I hope it still works,” said Constantine.

“It will,” said Katie. “If worse comes to worst, I’m sure we can map enough of the data across to the new Martian factories for them to make a go of it.”

Katie guided them back to the stealth ship. Constantine watched carefully as they approached the seamless silver skin of the craft. They were moving closer and closer without any sign of an opening appearing. Just as Constantine thought they were going to hit, he gripped the precious C Case closer to himself…and they slid effortlessly through the silver wall. He found himself inside the airlock.

“Sorry about that,” said Katie. “We can’t risk any breaches in the ship’s integument making us visible, even for an instant. We can’t afford to be seen.”

“But by who? If we’re working for the Watcher, who else is there to hide from?”

“That’s the big question. Come on through to the living area. We’re about to insert ourselves into warp.”

Constantine was delighted. “Warp drive? They got that sorted in the end, did they?”

“Oh, yes.”

Constantine headed from the airlock into the ship’s living area. A bare room lit by blue light. It contained a chair for him to sit on. The black shoulder bag lay where he had left it, on the floor near the chair. There was nothing else in the room.

“There’s no one on the ship but us, and we don’t need anything,” Katie explained. “Most of the other space on board is taken up with equipment.”