The Restoration Game (37 page)

“Yes,” the man said. “Lucy Stone, daughter of Amanda Stone, great-grand-daughter of Eugenie Finn, née Montford. We know. Don't try to wave your family's old Agency connections at us. We don't work for that Agency.”

I nodded. “Yes, I'm Amanda's daughter, and all the rest.”

I waved a dismissive hand and took a deep gulp of cooled coffee.

“Let me tell you what you don't know,” I went on. “I'm the natural daughter of Ilya Klebov, the richest man in Krassnia—”

The guy snickered. “That's like saying, ‘the richest man in the South Bronx.’”

“—who is,” I went on, “the man who back in the eighties turned a CIA op into a KGB op, then turned them both into his own op—in order to become, yes, the richest man in Krassnia. The man who destroyed the thing that I recorded—you can check that, I'm sure you have the satellite pics—and do you know
why
he destroyed it? This unique, irreplaceable, amazing thing? Because he wants to go
on
being the richest man in Krassnia. The man who—I have no doubt—called in the Russian troops last week, for the same reason. But there's more to him than that. He's a man who knows more about this thing than anyone else alive, because he's been observing it for years. He's also a man who knows exactly how capitalism got restored, going all the way back to the fifties—hell, the thirties—because his father was there, and told him, and he was there himself at the end, and helped to bring it about. He's a man who knows, literally, where all the bodies are buried.”

“And you know what else? He's a man who cares about me. He took a great risk to save me, personally, when I was a little kid. You can ask Amanda about that. She'll confirm it. He took another risk to save me, just last week. You can check that on your fucking satellite pics, too.

“So my advice to you is, don't mess with Ilya Klebov. Don't harm a hair on the head of Ilya Klebov's little girl—or her boyfriend's. Let me tell you how it's going to be. You're going to release Alec, unharmed. You're going to tell my goddamn mother that she can settle this dispute over the copper mine by coming to an amicable arrangement with Klebov: he'll bequeath his shares in the mine to me, so it comes back into our family when he dies, and at the same time there's no acceptance of the old Ural Caspian Mineral Company's claims against Russia. On her side, if he does that, she stops trying to stir colour revolutions against him.”

I was, of course, winging it. I was guessing that there were long and murky conspiracies in play, that they had at least an uneasy awareness of as matters best kept in the dark. Fundamentally, I was lying like a rug.

“And if we don't do all this?” the woman said.

At that point I knew I'd won.

“Klebov will blow the whole thing wide open,” I said. “And if he doesn't hear from me, before this day is out, or if anything happens to me after that, he'll come after you, personally, to say nothing of what he'll do politically.” I shrugged. “We've just stepped back from the brink of war over Georgia. Think what a mess it would make if it came out that the US had used kinetic-energy weapons on a territory claimed by Russia.”

“Take a walk,” said the man.

“What?” I said. “You're not—”

“I meant literally,” he said. “To the end of the pier, and back.” I left my case—theft was the least of my worries, at that point—and in as casual and confident a manner as I could manage, took a stroll. The Remarkables really are remarkable. I returned about five minutes later.

“One condition,” the man said. “You must say nothing of this to anyone, not a hint, for the rest of your life. If you do—”

He drew his finger across his throat. I thought this was being a little too dramatic, but I nodded.

“OK. There's nothing I want more than to forget it.”

They stood up.

“Your friend will be here in half an hour,” the woman said.

“And you will call Klebov today, yes?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering how. I'd find a way.

“One thing,” she said, folding the map. “How did you know we were not, as you might have thought, Russian gangsters or such?”

“The Russians don't make threats with one eye on the possibility, however remote, that they might one day have to answer for them,” I said.

“That's still the difference between us and them, you know,” the woman said.

I decided this was a good time to say nothing.

Half an hour later, Alec walked around the corner of a building, onto the pier, and ran to me, and stayed with me, and I with him, and that was that.

I kept my promised silence for a long time. I'm only breaking it now, all these years later, because it no longer matters. I knew that someday I would, because in the half hour that I waited for Alec, another person came to see me.

You position your avatar precisely, calibrate the sensorium input jacks, give a thumbs-up to your teammates, and hit the switch.

And
wham
, you're there. You stagger for a moment in the higher gravity—you've got used to Mars—and then your muscle feedback adjusts. A chemical and fecal stench assails your sinuses. Dim light, a narrow stall with partial walls. You're in some kind of human waste recycling facility.

You tug the unlocked swing door open, and step out, past mirrors and washstands. Another woman, washing her hands under running water, doesn't give you a glance.

Outside, you take a few steps to get away from the waste facility and stand still for a full minute or so to breathe deeply and to absorb the sights and sounds of the mountains and the lake and the people. You can feel the air expand your chest, the fresh smells hit your nose, but this air isn't filling your real lungs. This sunlight, UV-rich (overrich, as it happens) isn't warming your real skin. But the illusion that it is is gratifying, and induces an intense homesickness for Earth.

Enough self-indulgence. You don't have long. You stride across the wooden decking and approach the red-haired girl who sits alone working with her thumbs on her handheld comms device. She hears your footsteps and looks up, startled, wary.

You rest your hand lightly on the back of a wooden chair opposite her.

“May I join you, Lucy?” you say.

The translation software is working: she seems to understand.

“Go ahead,” she says. Still wary.

You pick up the chair, swing it behind you, and sit down on it in one smooth, fluid motion. Lucy looks surprised.

“That was neat,” she says.

You realise that isn't how they do things, here. They aren't very athletic.

“I didn't mean to show off,” you say.

“Who are you?” Lucy says. “Do I know you?”

You lean across the table and hold out a hand.

“My name is Daphne Pontifex,” you say.

Lucy clutches your hand feebly, lets go, and flinches away a little.

“Who are you?” she repeats. She glances around, and over her shoulder. “Are you from the Agency, or…?”

Her voice trails off on an unvoiced phrase of the question.

You decide to cut to the chase. She understands, she must understand, she can take it.

“No,” you tell her. “I'm from the real world.”

Her face pales. Her mouth works.

“No,” she says. “No. This can't be happening.”

“It's what you tried to make happen,” you say. “Yesterday, in Auckland.”

She smiles as if she suddenly understands.

“You
are
from the Agency, or from…” Again the trail-off, as if there's a name she doesn't dare pronounce, of some power that watches and listens and must not be carelessly invoked. “You're here to warn me off.”

She waves her hands crosswise in front of her face. “OK, OK,” she goes on. “I won't do it again. I
said
I wouldn't, to the other two. You don't need to do this.
They
didn't need to do this. They could just have asked nicely.”

She looks as if she is about to cry.

“We could do with some coffee,” you say.

She blinks. Her mouth begins to form a word—

You back out, jarringly, scan the local environment, and do a quick double copy-and-paste of some coffee and pastry. You drop back, into the machine world.

Lucy looks at the steaming, fragrant cup and tasty snack in front of her as if they were snakes. Her face, when it eventually tilts up, is even paler than before.

“How did you do that?” she says.

“You know how I did it,” you say. “We
know
you understand.”

She lays the fingers of one hand across her mouth.

“All right,” she says. “All right.”

Shakily, she picks up the cup, inhales through her nose, blows on the coffee, and sips.

“Tastes real,” she says, with an experimental smile.

“It's all real,” you say, after sipping and nibbling from your own copy-and-pasted coffee-and-pastry, and for a moment, as you enjoy the taste and heat and smell, it is all real to you, even though the caffeine won't stimulate your neurons and the carbohydrate and sugar won't go into your blood.

“Why are you here?” Lucy asks.

“Because you made contact. You let us know you knew. No one else has ever done that, at least none that we know of. We want to warn you not to do that again.”

“Why not?”

“It's destabilising. If people become prematurely aware of what's going on, the feedback becomes chaotic.”

“What
is
going on?” Lucy asks. “Do you people…intervene?”

“Not intentionally,” you say, smiling. “The code you saw was what you would call a patch, to help us to observe without having to track millions of individuals. It was placed in an obscure location. Not obscure enough, as it turned out. The effects of its discovery by the Vrai weren't intentional on our part, but as it turned out—again—they were benign, in the long run. But with deliberate interventions, we have to be very, very cautious.”

“But you're the programmers!” she says. “You can do anything!”

You recoil slightly.

“No!” you say. “We're not the programmers! We wouldn't do something as horrible as this!”

She gazes around at the milieu. “This isn't horrible.”

“Not here, no, for a postcatastrophe civilisation in recovery. The catastrophe itself, and all the other places and times that you know about—these were and are horrible.”

“Then who did set it up?”

You tell her.

“Oh, God,” she says, almost groaning. “So we're a history experiment set up by amoral AIs.”

“Synthetic Psyches, we call them. Yes.”

“There must be a reason,” she says, “why I thought of the Krassnia game just after I'd heard about another game about Romans on Mars and Spartacus winning and all that.”

“Spartacus?” you say. “Never heard of him.”

“He led a slave uprising.”

You shrug. “In our history, there were a lot of slave uprisings.”

“But still,” she insists. “It wasn't a coincidence.”

Oh, poor Lucy. She must never know. Never have the spell of her life broken. Never know of the fine-grained tweaks and fixes that have been made to the code that runs her mind. Else she will never trust her mind again.

Just as she must never know that Colin Byrne, aka Cairds, is an avatar of your comrade Hector O'Donnell, and that he has been on the case since before he opened the door of Ross's flat to Amanda, back in 1979 AD. Because if she knew that, she would have an even lower opinion of destiny.

And that would never do, because she still has a destiny.

You give her your most persuasive smile.

“In this world,” you tell her, earnestly, “there are connections that are not quite causal within the physics of the world. There are what we call affinities. We don't fully understand them, but we suspect they are a result of efficiency savings and data compression. The same code is run in different contexts. There was an affinity between the legend and the real—so to speak—effect of the code running in Krassnia, and there may have been a like affinity between it and our level of reality. Hence, a game that echoed our reality, however distantly.”

Lucy is still suspicious, unconvinced.

“You mean, like Sheldrake's morphic resonance?”

You have no idea what she's talking about.

“Something like that,” you agree, confidently.

“I might buy that,” she says.

(It's a strange usage they have. It means something to do with their equivalent of points.)

“It's the best explanation I can give,” you say, truthfully enough.

“I'm going to look for explanations,” she says. “You can't stop me doing that.”

You restrain yourself from sighing with relief.

“We don't want you to stop, Lucy,” you tell her. “We want your world to find out the truth for itself, in its own time. People alive at that time could even, we hope, come out of this world and into the real world. There are certain areas of physics where a concentration on anomalies would be a fertile line of investigation.”

“But I don't know anything about physics.”

“You don't have to,” you tell her. “Someday, you'll be rich. When you are, you can put money into these lines of research.”

“Which lines?”

You tell her.

She shakes her head with a sad smile, as if you are the one who is naive.