The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (46 page)

“Something’s going on,”
Riba told him, stuffing his hands into his pockets and leaning against the wall
so that he could look out across the city towards Downing Street. “I can tell
by the way everything’s flying.”

Slattery snorted. “Mmn,
yes, maybe in some uncharted corner of the universe there still exists some
angle on the day’s big story that’s not entirely shredded and bedded. The small
pets of the world may be bursting to give you their reactions to the reactions
on the reactions so far. I can see it now Impossible Space Journey — a hamster
speaks.
I was in my wheel, you know, just doing a few laps, when suddenly .
. .”

But Riba was already out
of the door and moving out of the paper’s network footprint. In a café a half a
mile distant he sat down and opened his Abacand — a handheld device of infinite
practical use. Using the money from his last major investigative assignment he
pump-primed his account with DarkNet, the non-governmental AI communications
service.

He drank his way through
four espressos and oiled, smoothed and bribed his way through all but a handful
of dollars in the next few hours. Finally, as lights began to come on across
the city, he felt that lifting of the hairs on the back of his neck as an old
contact from the Forged Uluru network came on line. Using the café’s integral
holographic units they projected their avatar into the empty chair opposite
Riba’s.

Forged people, whose
bodies might be far distant or in a form not suitable for talking, in order to
manifest themselves in the form of Original, or Unevolved human beings, used
Avatars as a matter of course in order to communicate more effectively. Their
appearance conventionally revealed much about the personality behind their
design. This one took the form of an ancient Chinese man with a pot belly. He
wore orange robes, had a shaved head, and smoked a meerschaum pipe that gave
off a fierce blast of smoke every so often, like the funnel of a tug-boat. Riba
knew this avatar, even though he knew nothing about who it really was, and he
was used to the fact that it never spoke. Instead it gave him an amused smile
and sent his Abacand the time and departure point of a trans-Atlantic flight.
Then, with an extra-large puff of smoke, it did the genie-thing and vanished.

The notes included a
brief description of a person. Riba had used this contact before, when it
gained him access to a file that revealed the identities of a half a dozen
businessmen involved in financing interplanetary piracy. Upon receiving this
new instruction he immediately called in a couple of favours from other
journalists to borrow enough money to buy a ticket and by the time Slattery was
ploughing his way through the volleyball scores Riba was stepping aboard the
helium airship
Byzantium,
bound for New York.

The
Byzantium
was
a passenger craft ideally suited to extending journey time beyond the practical
and into the realms of affluence. No vehicle appealed less to Riba personally
but, if it led him to definite information on the peculiar circumstances of
Voyager Lonestar Isol’s return to Earth space, then it was the best transport
in the world. That this return was a matter that required serious investigation
was beyond question.

The Voyager was an early
type of Forged human being, an engineered mind in an engineered body which was
suited for the long years, great speeds and incredible tedium of interstellar
exploration. Her Manifest Photograph was currently showing on every newscast in
the system. Riba flinched instinctively every time he saw it. Isol looked like
fifty different kinds of assassin bug wedded to the toughest machinery money
could buy. She was as inhuman as he could imagine, on the outside at least. On
the way to catch his flight he did his best to forget it although it was the
kind of thing that had a way of stamping itself on the mind.

Isol had returned only
yesterday from a journey of over thirty years’ duration. According to the
official story she had followed a single, accurate trajectory out of the Sol
system towards its near neighbour, Barnard’s Star. All had been well. There
were some nice photographs of nebulae, some pertinent observations on planets,
black holes, the galactic hub and other such matters of importance to science.
There were also many transmissions to and from the Forged Independence Party
Headquarters.

Riba re-read these and
their latest updates with the feeling that at last here was something he could
get his teeth into. Isol was a political agitator and a radical of the
out-there order. She wrote vehemently about the obsolescence of Old Monkey —
the humans like Riba who were as nature had made them. It was Isol’s view that
the Forged should create an independent state beyond the legislative and
economic grip of the present Solar Government so that they could pursue their
own reproduction and evolution unhindered by “historical and unsympathetic”
views of their destiny.

Riba viewed the looming
prospect of a civil war with mixed feelings. For the last few years the Forged
Independence movement had grown. Together with an increasing lawlessness out in
the wider system it had built an ominous momentum with incident after incident
of piracy and assault out on the frontiers of Solar space. The Unevolved fear
of their stronger and faster gengineered cousins had grown and on Earth there
were daily incidents of violence and misunderstanding between the two. The
Forged resented their slavery. The Unevolved envied the Forged their power. But
the Forged supplied the Unevolved settlements with essential resources from the
wider system, and the Unevolved . . . well, sometimes it was difficult to see
exactly how the Unevolved fit into the macroeconomics of it all, but you could
safely say they still had the dollars to buy in. They were a big market and the
Forged had a lot to sell.

That was the big story
as it was being broadcast, but Riba was more interested in what the little
newsnets and the independents had to say. Their reporters had rounded on the
fact that, for anyone with an Abacand and a half decent recollection of
secondary education, you could see that it was clearly impossible to return to
Earth within three years when you’d been travelling away from it as fast as
possible for thirty. Besides, General Machen, the commander-in-chief of all
Solar military and police forces, had issued a statement that morning in Riba’s
very paper, warning against action until a thorough and full account of Isol’s
journey could be published. And that level of explanation meant there was
something very bad going on.

By the time Riba took
his seat upon the
Byzantium’s
viewing deck and observed the tedious rituals of Buck’s Fizz
before cast-off and salutes to the captain, he was already planning an in-depth
exposé. He would write carefully of what facts he might find and he would argue
with meticulous daring for the case of allowing the Forged complete freedom to
self-govern — an angle his editor and the paper’s owner were also not averse to
because they hoped it would mean that most of the Forged would disappear from
Earth.

They were an hour into
their flight and had just begun the low-altitude portion of the journey to
allow a spot of whale-watching when Riba decided to take himself on a tour of
the ship. But after a few minutes he was sure that he was being followed. He
thought it might be his contact. He took a few turns that led him into the
relative privacy of the luxurious upper deck accommodation corridor and waited.
Thirty seconds later a man approached him and Riba’s neck hair stood on end for
a second time that day. Not a woman in a green coat holding a leather bag but a
man with long blond hair bound back into a queue and dark glasses, his powerful
form almost entirely covered by a grey trenchcoat with its collar turned up
high.

“Regrettably your
investigation must end for the time being,” this young man said without
preamble. He took Riba’s hand and arm in the semblance of a casual
conversational hold though it effectively prisoned Riba in a vicelike grip. “I
have been sent to send you to your contact.” He began to tow Riba along the
corridor at a swift pace.

Riba struggled, at first
without trying to appear in trouble, but then more violently. He didn’t like
changes and he really didn’t care for the strength that so easily overpowered
his own.

“Don’t make this
difficult,” the man warned him in a low tone and Riba realized that he wasn’t
the only one who was nervous.

“You are interfering
with the lawful free press!” Riba asserted loudly in the textbook style. He was
ignored in the same vein and found himself hauled along the ramp towards the
aft gliding decks where wind-hangers and the elegant lines of individual
air-yachts were moored by rope to the smooth flanks of the
Byzantium.

“Yes, yes,” said the
agent. “That’s my job.”

“Help! This man is
robbing me!” Riba shouted, but the
Byzantium’s
crew were busy at distant
posts and the few passengers who were within earshot were of the kind who sank
deeper in their seats or hurried away, afraid and embarrassed. Within moments
both he and his captor were standing on the air deck, nothing in front of them
except ten metres of beautifully finished hardwood landing strip and the
blustery air over the ocean.

Riba scrabbled with his
free hand in his pocket and signalled out with his Abacand, cuing emergency
messages he’d had in place for just this awful moment. To his dismay a flat
beep informed him that they were all blocked.

“It’s nothing personal,”
said the agent, dragging him towards the edge of the launch pad. “And nothing
permanent,” he added as he anchored his own feet with miraculous traction and
pushed Riba over the side. Riba thought he saw bare feet not boots in that
instant, and that the soles of the feet were covered in suckers.

This impression was
wiped from his mind by complete terror as Riba understood that he was falling
more than a hundred metres towards the unbroken waters of the Atlantic. He
heard screaming and felt a searing pain in his throat as the gigantic hull of
the
Byzantium
passed over him. His limbs flailed. He thought of helpless
mice he’d held by the tail at pet shows, of Slattery’s high-pitched hamster
saying
I bet you didn’t ask the mice . . .

Riba turned gently in
the airstream and saw the sea rushing to meet him. As he marked the likely spot
of his demise he saw something that almost made his heart stop prematurely.

Something was rising up
through the water.

A great beast, pale and
vast, more massive even than the largest whale — he couldn’t make out its exact
shape. There was a centre, solid and near-white, but then there were great
reefs and rafts of less tangible matter, tentacles and sheets of flesh that
ballooned and snaked about in the surface water. For miles they seemed to reach
out, a billion arms . . . He thought he saw a single enormous eye staring up at
him and at that instant tried hard to die.

He fell and beneath him
the creature suddenly thrashed and convulsed, stirring up a mass of bubbles
into a frothing whirlpool where the simple sea waves had been. There was then
no more time for thought. Riba met the ocean — not the hard, unyielding density
of solid water, but the soft foam of the creature’s ferocious wake.

He felt himself falling
still. To his astonishment the water accepted him in a gentle way. It drew him
down unharmed into the cold of itself. Thoughts of the creature instantly made
him kick and thrash. Riba stared wildly about him, seeing only dim greyness and
the leisurely upward race of a trillion bubbles, feeling the pressure of endless
water in his ears and against his lungs, just like the man’s hand on his arm —
hard and merciless. He was deafened to everything but the sound of his own
panic.

Riba made the surface
choking and coughing and saw the awful pale hulk of the creature again as the
shield of bubbles dissipated around him. Huge arms and fingers of translucent
jelly, pocked with pink-edged suckers the size of saucers, reached towards him
through the water. He turned and began to swim, hopelessly, but the tentacles
were everywhere, some breaking the surface and turning their tips towards him
where he saw, with horror, the distinct shapes of primitive pigment patches —
yet more eyes.

Something cold and
powerful snaked around his legs and bound them tight. He opened his mouth but
was pulled under. His last sensations were of cold water, cold strength in
flesh that wasn’t remotely like any flesh he knew. His last impression was of
stealthy and nimble fingers making a thorough attempt to pick his pockets.

When he woke Riba found
himself lying on solid ground. It was so unexpected that he gave a start and
discovered that, all things considered, he didn’t feel that bad. His skin was
sore from salt water abrasion and he felt battered but he was able to move to
hands and knees and then climb to his feet with almost ordinary ease. His solid
ground turned out to be a long white sanded beach, fringed by tall palm trees
which stretched up to the sky and out over the baby blue shallows of a small
lagoon. Not four metres away from him he could see the rivulet of a fresh water
stream cutting a shallow groove through wet sand to the sea. He moved towards
this and bent down for a cautious handful. In moments he was on his hands and
knees, drinking and splashing.

He impressed himself
with his resourceful skills as he remembered to take off his clothing and rinse
it out, spread it to dry on the sand, clean off the salt on his skin and then
move quickly into some shade. The day was hot and the sand even hotter. A few
flies came and gathered around his
wet skin and then left
him alone. It was only as he took a rest and began to notice more of his
surroundings that it occurred to him to wonder where he was and how he had got
there.