Space Opera

Cracklegrackle



Justina Robson

Many times Mark Bishop read the assignment, but it never made more sense to him. He was to interview the Greenjack Hyperion, make an assessment of the claims made for it, and return his report. That part was simple. But after it, the evidence supplied by the Forged and human witnesses . . . this he couldn't manage more than a line or two of. Panic rose and the black and white print became an unknown language. He could see it hadn't changed, but simply by moving his eyes across it his mind redshifted and all meaning sped away from him.

He poured the one-too-many scotch from the concession bottle by his elbow just as the hostess was about to whisk it away, and drank it down. The burn was impersonal and direct. It did exactly what it always promised, and shot the pain where it hurt. He rubbed his eyes and tried again.

He disliked the sight of the document on his screen. It struck him suddenly that the paragraphs were too long. The white spaces between them loomed in violent stripes. Missing things were there. All of the unknown inlets holding the truth that the print struggled to express. The punctuation was a taunt, an assault that declared in black and white that the subject's defeat of his reason was absolute. Even the title was loathsome: Making A Case For The Intuitive Interpretation Of Full Spectrum Data In Unique Generative Posthuman Experience. Usually he had no bother with jargon, or any scientific melee, but what the hell did that mean? What did it mean to the person it referred to? Had they titled it or was it just the bureaucrat's pedantic label for something they could read but not comprehend?

A final slug of scotch ended his attempt. He only understood that there was no escape from meeting the Greenjack, as he had promised, as his job demanded: meet, interview, assess, report. That was all. It was easy. He'd done it a hundred times. More. He was an expert. That's why the government had hired him and kept him on the top payroll all these years. They trusted him to judge rightly, to know truth, to detect mistakes and delusions, to be sure.

Bishop tried to read the document once more. His eyes hurt and finally, after a forced march across the first few paragraphs, he felt a cluster headache come on and halt them with a fierce spasm of pain as if something had decided to drill invisible holes into his head via the back of his eyeballs. He lay back in the recline seat of the lift launcher and closed his eyes. The attendants circled and took away his cup, secured his harness and spoke pleasantly about the safety of the orbital lift system and the experience of several gs of force during acceleration—a song and dance routine he already knew so well he could have done it himself. He briefly remembered being offered a ride up on one of the Heavy Angels, explaining he didn't want it to the secretary. She couldn't understand his reluctance. Then in the background she heard some colleague whisper, "Mars." She'd gone red, then white.

But it wasn't just the difficulty of talking to the Forged now, he'd never liked the idea of being inside a body. It was too much like being eaten, or some form of unwilling sex. So he'd made his economy-excuse, a polite no, a don'twant-to-be-a-bother smile and now he was waiting for take off, no time left, unprepared for the big meeting, his mouth dry with all the things he'd taken to avoid doing anything repulsively human, like being sick.

The lift was moved into position by its waldos, attached to the cable, tested. The slight technicalities passed him in a blur of nauseating detail and then there was the stomach-leaving, spine shrinking hurl of acceleration in the back of his legs. The headache peaked. Weightlessness came as they soared above the clouds into the blue and then the black. He felt like lead. When the time came to unclip and get out, he half expected that he'd be set in position, a statue, and surprised himself by seeing his hands reach out and competently move him along the guiderails. He didn't hit anyone. The other passengers were all busy talking to each other or into their mikes. Then the smell filled his nostrils.

It was a mysterious animal tang that reminded him of the hot hides of horses, a drooling, dozing camel he had once attempted to ride, and, on top of that, the ocean. Bishop gripped on tight, knowing that all his juvenile, ancient spine-root superstitions had caught up with him. His interviewee had come to meet him in an act of unwanted courtesy. He would have to greet and speak to it . . . why had he forgotten its name suddenly? Why did it have to smell like that? But he was now holding up the queue. The stewardess mistook his hesitation for ignorance and started talking about freefall walking. All that remained was to turn himself towards the smooth, white-lit exit chute that led to the Offworld Destinations Lounge, and follow that telltale scent of primeval beast.

The other passengers sniffed curiously as they passed him, "so-sorrying" their way around his stalled self. He fiddled with his recorder, checking his microphone and switching everything on. It made him feel secure in the same way he imagined old world spies had once felt secure by their illicit link to someone somewhere who would at least hear their final moments. It wasn't exactly like being accompanied, but it was enough of a shield to let the prickling under his arms stop and for his headache to recede.

The thought came to him that he hadn't been himself lately. It was only natural after the conclusion of the enquiry and its open verdict. Too much stress. He ought to stop, cry off, take a holiday. Nobody would be surprised. But the thought of not having his job, the idea of having nothing to do but walk the familiar coast near Pismo Beach or under the tall silence of the redwoods—that made him pull himself along all the faster to escape the hum, the static darkness, the horror that was waiting there for him, that was already here in the notion of that place. He gritted his teeth and pushed that aside. The scotch made it easy. Why the hell hadn't he thought to bring some more?

He pulled himself forward into the glide that felt graceful even when it wasn't, and swallowed with difficulty. That smell! It was so curious here, where all the smells were ground out of existence quickly in the filtration of the dry air so that humans and their descendants, the Forged, could meet without the animal startle reflexes scent caused the humans. But the grace would only last a minute or two here, in the neutral zone of the Lift Centre. And why could he smell this one so clearly? It must reek—and as he thought this, he saw it/him, a tall, gangling, ugly creature that resembled a gargoyle from some mighty gothic cathedral whose creator had been keen on all the Old Testamentary virtues. It could easily have featured in his nightmares. He wouldn't have been surprised to discover that it had been modelled with an artistic eye to that effect. The Pangenesis Tupac, brooder, sculptor, creator in flesh and metal, enjoyed her humour at all levels of creation. The word anathema sat in his head, alone, as he bravely put on a smile of greeting.

"Mark Bishop?" said the gargoyle in an old English gentleman's voice, as fitting and unexpected as rain in Death Valley.

"I am." He found conviction, was so glad the other didn't offer his hand, and glanced down and saw it was a fistful of claws.

"My name is Hyperion. I am pleased to meet you. I have read many of your articles in the more popular academic journals and the ordinary press. Your reputation is well founded." It made a slight bow and the harsh interior lights shone off its bony eyelids.

It was shamefully difficult not to marvel at the sight and sound of a talking gryphon-thing, or want to see if those yellow eyes were real. Hyperion's voice seemed to indicate enjoyment, but who knew, with the Forged? Mark, ashamed of his hatred, gushed, "Forgive me, I'm having a lot of trouble with this assignment. I don't believe in the supernatural and . . . "


" . . . and you are nervous around the Forged. Most humans are, and pretend not to be. You have always been clear about your limitations in your previous work. I am not deterred. You have come this far. Let us complete the journey." Feathers rustled on it. Its face was scaled, beaked. How it managed speech was beyond him, and yet it spoke remarkably well. But parrots did too, Bishop reasoned, so why not this?

It took him almost a minute to understand what it'd said, not because it was unclear, but because he was so confused by the storm of feeling inside himself. Repulsion, aggression, fear. The stink, he realised at last with a shock of guilt, was himself.

Hyperion took hold of the guide rails delicately and spun itself away, tail trailing like a kite's. It's comfort with weightlessness spoke of many years spent there, in the cramped airlocks and crabbed tunnels of the old stations. In its wake, Bishop followed, slipping, and after a too brief eternity found himself at the entrance hatch that looked entirely machine, though there was no disguising the chitinous interior into which he was able to peer and see seats of the strange kind made for space travel—ball like concoctions of soft stuff that moved against tethers and into which one had to crawl like a mouse into a nest. He made himself concentrate only on mechanics, move a hand, a foot, that's all—it was the only thing that kept his control of himself intact.

Of course it was Forged. The only machines that travelled the length of the system were robotically controlled cargo carriers whose glacial pace was utterly unsuitable for this trip or most any other if you didn't have half a lifetime to spare. For local traffic to the moon and the various towed-in asteroids that had been clustered nearby to form the awkward mineral suburb of Rolling Rock, all travel was undertaken in the purpose built, ur-human creatures of the Flight. Every last one of them was a speed freak.

"Ironhorse Alacrity Valhalla has agreed to take us to our location." Hyperion made the introduction as he waited for Bishop to precede him into the dimly lit interior chitoblast and become a helpless parasite inside a being he couldn't even see or identify,but which had a mind, apparently rather like his own, only connected by the telepathy of contemporary electronic signalling to every other Forged mind—whereas he was quite alone. He checked his mike and gave Hyperion a sickly smile that he had intended to be professional and cheering. The creature blinked at him slowly, quite relaxed, and he saw that it had extraordinary eyes. They were large, as large as his fist in its big head, but beyond the clear, wet sclera lay an iris so complex and dazzling . . . another blink brought him to his senses. Yellow eyes. It was demonic. What idiot had made them that colour?

He was able to manage quite well, and put himself into the seatsack without any foolish struggling or tangles, even though now he was feeling slightly drunk. Cocooned next to each other, they were able to see one another's heads easily. Stuck to the side of each sack, a refreshment package waited. Within the slings, toilet apparatus was easy to find. There was a screen in the ceiling, if it was the ceiling—without gravity it hardly mattered—showing some pleasant views of pastoral Earth scenes, like a holiday brochure. Bishop figure it was for his benefit and tried to be comforted as a Hawaiian beach glowed azure at him, surrounded by thick, fleshy webbing that pulsed slightly in erratic measure.

Common lore said it was all right for old humans not to attempt talking to their host carrier at this point. The gargoyle could have been rabbitting on to the ship all the time of course, there was no knowing. His mind fussed around what they might say. It blurred hopelessly as he attempted to drag up anything about the task at hand. He couldn't bring any thought into focus long enough to articulate it.

The door sealed up behind them and was immediately lost in the strange texture of the wall. There were no ports. He wouldn't be seeing the stars unless the Alacrity wanted to show him images from outside on the holiday channel.

"Where are we going?" he asked, though it had been in the damn notes.

"To the spot you requested," Hyperion said with some puzzlement. "Don't you recall?" Bishop flushed hot with embarrassment, started sweating all over again. He didn't remember. Then there was a vague hint that he might have made a call, no, written a request, a secret note . . . had he? He checked the screen inventory of his mail. Nothing. Inside the cocoon of the webbing, he experienced a stab of shocking acuteness in the region of his guts and heart. He felt that he was losing his mind and that it was paying him back with this lance, this polearm of pure fear. What had he requested?

"No." He wanted to lie but his mouth wouldn't do it.

The Greenjack was quiet for a moment. "I think that we should talk a little on the way there, Mr. Bishop, if you don't mind." Its voice was gentle now, and had a rounded, richness that reminded Bishop of leather chairs, wood panelling, pipe tobacco, twilight, and cognac. Above the line of the cocoon, he could see its feet twitching gently, flexing their strangely padded digits. Dark claws, blunted from walking, were just visible. "I am well aware of the way my claims must appear to scientists such as yourself. Energies beyond human perception existing within our own spacetime perhaps is not too outlandish in itself. But my observations of their behaviour, and what it seems to mean for their interactions with us, that is the stuff of late night stories. Believe me, Mr. Bishop, I have studied them for many years before making these statements. And I would welcome any remarks."

Charlatan, Bishop thought. Must be. He'd thought it from the get go, when he first read about it.

Bishop had been in doubt on other assignments, though none of them like this one. Mostly, he wrote for journals about science or current affairs based on Earth. He was one of the more popular and able writers who could turn complicated and difficult notions into the kind of thing that most well educated people could digest with breakfast. Normally, he avoided all discussions about the Forged and their politics, but, of course, it had caught up with him as it must with everyone in the end, he reasoned. And his expertise had led to him being selected by the government to come and make a judgement out here about this odd person and its extraordinary claims, its illegal and incomprehensible existence. The Greenjack Cylenchar Hyperion was a member of a class created by the Forged themselves, by the Motherfather, Tupac, whose vast body had bred all the spacefarers and most of the Gravity Bound. It was a class she claimed was scientifically essential, though he had serious doubts. The Greenjacks were there to confront the boundaries of the perceivable universe, and to try and apprehend what, to ordinary human eyes, was beyond sight. Hyperion, in particular, was said to be able to perceive every frequency there was, and had been given adaptations to allow his mind to be able to cope with the information. Hyperion didn't just see, he watched. Recently, he'd been making dramatic claims about his visions that had been in all the papers.

Bishop struggled, but the panic was choking, he wasn't able to say the sensible thing he had in mind—namely, "Yes, but just because you can detect these things, why aren't they verified by machines?"

The Greenjack paused, just the length of time it would have taken him to make this reply, and added, "Machine verification has confirmed erratic frequency fluctuations in localised areas, but, obviously, they can't put an interpretation on these anomalies. We have successfully managed to get some mappings of areas and frequency variations that confirm my own sensory perceptions are accurate."


This was news. Bishop jerked as his screen recovered the files being zapped across to it and vibrated to alert him—all the data was there, already witnessed and verified by independent bodies . . . He felt himself breathing steadily. The scotch seemed to have made it out of his stomach. The pills he'd taken still worked hard on fooling his head that it knew which way was up. Better, that was better. Statistics. Facts. Good.

"But if you are too distressed we can delay this," the Cylenchar said suddenly. "Mr. Bishop?"

"No, we have to go," he didn't know where they had to go, though apparently he was determined. His panic returned.

"May I speak frankly?"

Into Bishop's agonised silence, Hyperion said clearly, "I think you have asked me to go to Mars because of your daughter. You are hoping that I will be able to find her where the inquest has failed. Is that right?"

A cold drench of sweat covered him from head to foot, as memory returned, cold, clear. He couldn't breathe. He was drowning. Mars. Tabitha. The unsolved mystery of the routine survey expedition vanishing without trace. Oh a sandstorm, a dust ocean, a flood of sand, a mighty sirocco that blew them away . . . what had it been and where was she? Nobody could answer. Not even the equipment returned a ping. But how? And when the months dragged on and the company pulled out and sent its condolences and added their names to the long list of people who'd gone missing on Mars during the fierce years of its terraforming, and then this assignment came, what else to do? Bring the creature who, above all, had been made to see. No frequency, no signal, no energy that the Greenjacks can't decipher, right? Of course, if she's there . . . and if she's dead, then this one will say so. It claims that some of the things it can sense aren't people but are what people leave or make somehow in the unseen fields they move in; trails and marks. It says some are like the wizards of story, able to make things with shape, with form, with intent that is almost conscious. Some can leave memories like prints on the empty air. Oh. But a man of strict science does not believe in that.

"Yes." Bishop said. He was small then, in his mouse nest, hanging, damp and suddenly getting the chills. He was afraid that the 'Jack would say no.

"I will be glad to look," it said instead, and Mark Bishop fell into a deep sleep on the spot.

Sleep was one of the many skills the 'Jack had learned in its long years of waiting for things that might not appear. It closed its eyes and shared a warm goodnight with Valhalla, who was more than curious to know the outcome now, and sang towards the red world with fire and all the winds of the sun.

They joined one another in a shared interior space, a private dreamtime. It was cosy. Valhalla whispered, "Sometimes I am flying in the sunlight, and there is nothing there, but I feel a cold, a call, a kind of falling. Is that real? Are the monsters from under the bed out at sea too?"

"Wake me if it happens," Hyperion said. "And we'll see."

He co-created a kind romance with Valhalla, in which they saw huge floating algal swarms of deep colour and shadow populate the fathoms beyond the stars. They named them in whispers, and with childish fingers measured their shapes in the sky, and then pinched them out of existence, snuff, snuff, snuff.

"There," Hyperion said, "they may be here, but they have no power. They can only hurt you if you let them. They live in the holes of the mind, and eat the spirit. Cracklegrackle. Just pinch them out." They got back into bed and closed the window, drew the shades. The Valhalla was happy again and drove on all the faster in his sleep.

Bishop was woken by the Valhalla's cheerful cry, "Mars!" The Ironhorse made orbit and scanned the surface to find the small outpost where the Gaiaform Nikkal Raven, chief developer of Mars, had built a human-scale shelter with its Hands in the lee of a high cliff. "Nobody's there now. If it's a graveyard or a ghost town, it's empty for sure, but with a bit of effort there's probably power and some basics that you could get going." For politeness, they contacted the Gaiaform.

"That's funny," Valhalla said, as Bishop struggled to change his clothes. "She sounds annoyed, or at least, she doesn't want to discuss the place."

The Nikkal's voice was grumpy on the intercom. She grated on Bishop's exposed nerves and wore out his fragile strip of patience almost at once. "My Hands got lost there too. Given up sending more. Thought I'd get to it later, after the planting on the south faces was finished. Just a minor space really, full of gullies."

They all recognised the feeling this rationale covered. "We don't need your help," Bishop grated. "Just want to get there and look around. That's all."

"But if anything happens it's on my watch," the Nikkal countered.

"Tupac knows we're here," Hyperion suggested. "We won't stay long. A day at the most."

" . . . as long as it takes . . . " Bishop said. He was in clean clothes. His panics were gone. He felt old and thin and shelterless, and looked around for something he could hold. He found only his small bag and his recorder, and filled his hands with them. A panic would have been welcome. Their fury was better than this deadly flat feeling that had taken their place. It was clear now. He was here, Thorson's Gullies, the last known location. Every step was a puppet step his body took at the behest of some will named Mark that wouldn't let it rest, but there was no more struggle between them. He felt that he did not inhabit these arms, these legs. They were his waldos, his servos, they were his method. Only his guts were still his own, a liquid concentration waiting for a mould.

"Come on, Mark," Hyperion called from the drop capsule.

Since when had they become friends? Bishop didn't know how, but he climbed inside the small fruit shape of the vehicle. Mars had lift cable, but no system in place. Cargo was simply clipped on and set going under whatever power it was able to muster. They were attached to the line and given a good shove by Valhalla. The new atmosphere buffeted them, warmed them, cooked them almost, and then they were down, Bishop still surprised, still too frozen to even be sick with either motion nausea or relief at their arrival. The capsule detached, put out its six wheeled legs like a bored insect and began to trundle the prescribed steady course towards the gullies. Hyperion opened the ventilation system and they sniffed the Martian air. It was thin, and even though it had been filtered a million ways, somehow gritty.

" . . . it's the names that are part of the trouble," Bishop said, staring out at the peculiar sight of Mars's tundra, red ochre studded with the teal green puffs of growing things in regular patterns. "Good and Evil. Why did you call them that?"

"There are more," Hyperion said. "There is Eater and Biter and Poison and Power and Luck and Fortune and Benificence, and the Cracklegrackle. I expect there are many more. But these are the commonest major sorts."

"But why? Couldn't you name them Energy Number One and so forth?"

"I could, but that wouldn't be accurate. Their names is what they are."

"How they seem to you. The one person who can see them."

"That's not exactly right. I think we can all perceive them, but only I can see them as easily as I can see you."

"And you say they are everywhere."

"Scattered, but everywhere in known space, I think."

"And some are spontaneous, but others are man made?"

"Yes. Few of the major arcana are manmade, like those. It takes a very powerful person to create one. Or a large group of people. There are many manmade minor arcana and many naturally occurring ones like that, but they are very shortlived, a day or two at most."


"You see my problem is that I can believe in this kind of thing at a symbolic level, within the human world, acting at large and small scales. We're creatures of symbolic meaning. But you're saying there's physical stuff, and that it has a real, external, distinct existence."

"Yes. I am saying it exists as patterns within the same energy fields that give rise to matter."

"Consciousness is material?"

"No. It has a material interaction that is more than simply the building of a house from a plan or the singing of a song, is what I am saying."

"And these things . . . patterns . . . can influence people?"

"Influence them, infect them, live inside them, alter them perhaps. Yes, I think so." The creature stared at him for the longest time, unblinking. "Yes."

"And just like that, we are expected to accept this—theory of material mind?"

Hyperion shrugged, as if he didn't much care either way. "I report what I see, but I say what it is for me. Otherwise, I would report nothing more than machines can report. When you look at a landscape, you don't list a bunch of coordinates and say they are mid green, then another list grey, another list white, and so on. You say, I see a hill with some trees, a river, a house in the distance."

"But you're making claims about the nature of this stuff, linking it to subjective values. Hills aren't subjective."

"They are. True, there is some rock that exists independently of you, some sand, some dust, but without you, it is no hill, and however the hill seems is how all hills seem to you, large or small—not mountains, not flat, perhaps even with traits that are more personal. If your home is among the hills, then they seem well known; if not, then they provoke suspicion."

They were trundling at high speed, balanced in their gyrobody between the capsule's six legs, seeming to float like thistledown between the rocks of this region of Mars; Thorson's Plot. Plot was something of a misnomer, as the area, already claimed by an Earth corporate, was some fifteen thousand square miles. The gullies, which made it a cheaper piece of real estate, and complicated to sow—hence the surveying team—were near the western edge and ran in a broad scar north-south along the lines of the mapping system. Thorsons had hoped to find watery deposits deep in the gullies, or perhaps some useful mineral, or who knows what down in the cracked gulches where twisting runnels of rock hid large areas from the sun and most of the wind which had scoured the planet for millennia. All around them were hills of varying sizes, some no more than dunes, others rising with rugged defiance in scarps and screes. Occasionally, small pieces of metal flashed the sunlight back at them as they moved between light and the shade of the thin high cloud that now streaked the sky white.

"The remains of Hands," the Greenjack said with interest, of course able to tell what everything was at any distance. "How interesting. And there is some debris from attempts to seed here, some markers, some water catchers. All wrecked. And . . . "

"And?" Bishop leapt on the hesitation.

"What I would call distress residue. A taint in the energy, very slight."

"What energy?'

"The subtle fields. You will find them referenced a great deal in my submitted thesis. Vibrationary levels where human perception is only infrequently able, or not able at all. When trauma occurs, bursts of energy are thrown off the distressed person into these fields, and although they decay quite rapidly, they leave a trace pattern behind which is very slow to fade."

"A disturbance in the Force," Bishop said bitterly. He felt nothing except the dread which had clutched at him in place of his panic.

"It might be only the natural upset of someone experiencing an unlucky accident," Hyperion said, unruffled. "It's hard to say without extreme observation and immersion on the site. You ought to be glad, Mr. Bishop, rather than contemptuous. Why else are you here?"

Mark gripped the arms of his seat. He was furious and full of nervous agitation. He ought to be civil, but he felt the need to destroy this creature's claims even as he wanted them to be right for his own sake. He didn't want to know about some spiritual plane, not after all the time it had taken to rid the human race of its destructive superstitions. Even if it existed, what difference did it make to those who were, in the shaman's own words, unable to interact with it. He could see no good coming of it. But he longed for it to be true. Somewhere in his fevered mind, where fragments of the shaman's testimony had lodged in spite of his allergic reaction to reading them, he recalled there being quite specific traces of people and moments stuck in this peculiar aether like flies in amber. Not always, not everywhere, but sometime and somewhere it acted as a recorder for incidents and individuals. It could. It might have.

The capsule lurched to a halt. They had arrived at the last known point of the survey team's wellbeing. A couple of waymarkers and a discarded, empty water canister pegged down beside them were the only visible remnants now. Without further talk, Hyperion and Bishop disembarked.

They fitted their facemasks—the air was still too thin for comfort—and Bishop put on his thin wind jacket and new desert boots. Hyperion sank a little in the fine grit on his four limbs, but otherwise he went as always, naked save for his fur, feathers, scales, and quills.

Wrestling the faceplate straps to get a good fit, Bishop noticed all the strange little fetishes the creature had attached to itself. Necklaces with bits of twig and bone . . . it looked like it had come off the set of a voodoo movie. He recalled now that it had labelled its profession on its passport as "shaman." He was so exhausted by his nervous disorders, however, that he didn't have the energy to muster a really negative response anymore. He was deadened to it. At last, the mask was tested and his spare oxygen packs fitted to the bodysuit that went over his clothes. Hyperion wore goggles and a kind of nosebag over his beak. He made a desultory symbol in the dust and smoothed it out again with one forepaw. The capsule, obeying commands from its uplink with Valhalla, folded up its spider legs and nestled down in a small hollow, lights dimming to a gleam as it moved into standby operation. All around, and as far as he could see in any direction, save for the shaman, Bishop was alone.

"There are very few true disappearances in human history, these days," Hyperion said after a moment when they both cast about in search of a direction. It moved closer to one of the markers and read the tags left there. "And this is not an unusual place, like those twisty spaces close to black holes for example. It is just a planet with a regular geology. The common assumption about this team's fate is that they absconded with the help of the Nikkal. From there, a number of possible avenues continue, most leading to the far system frontiers, where they were able to drop off the networks."

Bishop licked his lips, already starting to crack. The news was full of the asteroid bayous beyond the sphere of Earth's police influence and the renegade technology that festered there, unregulated. There was a lot of Unity activity. A lot of illegal, unethical, criminal work. "She had no reason to go."

"Perhaps not, but if the rest of them wanted to go they could hardly leave her behind. What would be easier for you, Mr. Bishop, to have her forcibly made into one of the Frontiersmen, or to have her dead here somewhere?"

How odd, he thought, that the 'Jack had no trouble voicing what inhabited his own awareness as a black hum beyond reckoning. Hearing the words aloud was startling, but it diminished the power of the awful feelings that gripped him inside.


"Let's start looking," Bishop said, standing still. All around them, their small dip radiated gullies that twisted and wound. The sun was beginning to go down and the high rocky outcrops cast sharp edged purple shadows.

Hyperion was exacting, his research both instantaneous and meticulous in a way that made Bishop simply envious. "The marker, as the police report indicates, says they started southwest with a view to making a loop trail back here within a six hour period, the route is marked in the statutory map." The shaman sniffed and the nosebag huffed. "All the searches have concentrated on following this route and found a scatter of personal belongings and the remains of a Finger of the Terraform, which was carrying the survey equipment. All of that was recovered intact." It held the two windbeaten Tags in its paw and rubbed them for a short time, thoughtfully. "But they did not go that way. Only the Finger took the trail."

"How do you know?"

Hyperion turned. "I can see it. I think it is time I showed you." It came across to him and held out one large, scaly arm. "Please, your screen viewer. I will adapt it to show some of the details I can see over its normal camera range. This will not be what I see, you understand, as I don't see it with my eyes. But it is the best I can do for you."

Reluctantly, Bishop handed over the precious viewer. It was his recorder too. His everything. "Don't mess up the record settings. It's on now."

The Greenjack inclined its head politely and slid one of its broad clawlike nails into one of the old style input ports. Bishop felt a chill. He'd never get used to how capable the Forged were with technology. They could interface directly with any machine.

"The signals I use to communicate with the device will cause some interference with my tracking," Hyperion said calmly. "So I will not use it all the time. If you see nothing, you may assume I am watching and listening. I will also shut the device down if its working interferes with the process, and I may ask you to move away at times." It handed the screen back, and Bishop checked it, panning it around in front of him. The camera showed whatever he pointed it at, recording diligently; it was really just like holding a picture frame up over the landscape. "I don't see anything."

"Look at the markers and the route."

He turned. From the tag line, he could now see a strange kind of coloration in the air, like points of deep shade. They were small. It was really almost like broken pixellation.

"That is the pattern left by the output of the Finger's microreactor projecting microbursts of decaying particles into the energy field. Radiation containment is generally good these days, so this is all you can find. It is also in the standard police procedurals. They mistakenly assumed it confirmed that all the travellers took the same path, since the Finger was carrying all the technical equipment and the others had only their masks and gas, their personal refreshments and devices. I would say it is certain that they intended to disappear here, as in fact all their individual communications gear has been accounted for along the Finger's trail."

Like a path cut with three-dimensional leaf shadows, the trail wound into the first gully, followed the obvious way along it, and vanished around the first turn.

"We can follow that and verify there was no other person with the Finger if you like," the shaman suggested.

"Parts of a Forged internal device unit were found," Bishop said, brain clicking in at last.

Hyperion shrugged.

"Or?" Bishop started to pan around. He soon found patches and bursts of odd colour washes everywhere, as if his screen were subject to a random painting class.

"Or we can follow the others and find out what they did, starting here."

"What is all this?"

"This is energy field debris."

As he moved around, Bishop could see that there was a huge glut of the stuff where they were, but traces of it were everywhere in fact, even in the distance. "Why so much of it?"

"There was a lot of activity here. The rest is down to regular cosmic interference, or perhaps . . . I am not actually sure what all of it is. The energy fields transect time and space, but they are linked to it, so while some of this is attached to the planet's energy sphere, some of it, as you see, is moving."

Streaks shot across the screen. A readout indicated that he was not seeing them in real time, as that would have been too fast for him to notice. The simulation and the reality overlay each other on the image, however, and the difference there was undetectable.

"I believe that the streaks are bonded to the spatial field, and that they are therefore stationary relative to absolute coordinates in space—thus as Mars traverses, so these things pass through." The creature cocked its head, a model of intellectual speculation.

Bishop relaxed his tired arms so that the screen pointed at the ground, saw the streaks shooting through his feet. "Through us?"

Hyperion nodded. "As with much cosmic ray debris. It moves too fast for me to say anything about it. I would need to move out into deep space and be on a relatively static vessel, in order to discover more about them."

'No such ship exists,' Bishop snorted. "Well, only . . . "

"Yes, only a Unity ship perhaps," the shaman said. "I shall ask for one soon."

They shared a moment of silence in which the subject of Unity, the newly discovered alien technology, rose and passed without further comment. Bishop would have loved to go into it at any other time. The surge of hysteria it had engendered had almost died down nowadays, with it being limited to offworld use, restricted use, or use far enough away from Earth and her concerns that it wasn't important to most humans, whatever strange features it possessed. FTL drives, or whatever they were, were only the half of it. It was under review. He'd seen some of the evidence. Now he let it go, and lifted the screen again. If Tabitha had gone on one of those ships, she could be anywhere. It would take years to get into Forged Space by ordinary means. Even an Ironhorse Accelerator couldn't go faster. She could have been there since the day it happened, almost a year ago. "This is just a mess."

"No," Hyperion said. He lowered his head and sniffed again, a hellish kind of hound. "There were four individuals here, all human, and one Forged, Wayfarer Jackalope McKnight."

"Bread Zee Davis, Bancroft Wan, Kialee Yang . . . " Bishop said, the names so often in his mind that they came off his tongue like an old catechism.

" . . . and Tabitha Bishop."

"I am sure which is the Forged," Hyperion said, "but the humans are harder to label. They are distinct, however."

"They'd worked together almost a year," Bishop said, wishing he'd kept his silence, but it was leaking. "No trouble. She sent me a postcard."

"May I see it?"

He hesitated, then fiddled the controls and handed over the screen. It had been shown so often during the inquest that he knew every millimetre of it better than he knew the lines in his own hand.

The object was small, almost really postcard-sized in the Greenjack's heavy paw. "Kialee is the Han girl, I am guessing."

"And Wan is the one with the black Mohawk. Davis is the wannabe soldier in all that ex military stuff." He knew every detail of that postcard. What most mystified him about it was how friendly they all seemed, how relaxed, the girls leaning on each other, the guys making silly faces, beer in hand; around them, the dull red of the tenting, and, in the background, a portable generator and a jumble of oxygen tanks. It could have been a snap of two couples on holiday, and not of students on work assignment. He wasn't sure if they'd been dating, or if dating was a concept that had gone out with dinosaurs like him.


The Greenjack was stock-still. It looked intently and then handed back the screen. "Thank you. In that case, I can now say that there was a struggle here. Bishop and Yang are surprised, but Davis and Wan are both agitated throughout. Only McKnight is calm."

"He was new. Newish. Their old Wayfarer went to another job."

The colours illumined as the shaman talked, showing Bishop warped fields of light that were as abstract as any randomly generated image. "McKnight and the men remain close together. There is a conflict with the women. There is a struggle; I think at this point the women are forced to give up their personal devices to Terraform Raven's Finger. I believe they are tied, at least at the hands. McKnight is armed with explosive charges for the survey. But he's also more than big enough to overpower and threaten them. I guess this is what happened. Davis and Wan dislike the events a great deal but they are willing participants. That's what I see. Then there's another argument, here, the men and McKnight. It's brief. Blood and flesh scraps from McKnight are found near here."

Bishop saw the oddest nebula of greys, streaked with black and bright red. "There was some kind of struggle . . . the Wayfarer was defending . . . " But the gargoyle shaman was shaking its head.

"He cuts out his own external comms unit," Hyperion said precisely. "In the Wayfarer, this is located at the back of the skull and embedded in the surface beneath a minor chitinous plate. To remove it would be painful and messy, but it is perfectly possible and certainly not lethal. But all communication is cut before this, so there is no official account of how it was removed. The only person who can account for that is Raven, and she claims that there was a local network dropout. I would have to question her directly to be sure of her account." The implication was stark.

The air, already bitter, felt suddenly colder. "So Davis and Wan made him do it?"

"I cannot say for certain. But he does it. Any other method risks it being hijacked by signals that would give away his position. He's hidden it somewhere around here, I'd bet. Or given it to the Finger, who lost it in the gullies way before it signalled a breakdown. We should look for it. Then they leave." Hyperion pointed Northwest. "That way.' "

Bishop thought of the evidence of the Finger's call. Raven's voice said, "They've gone. Just gone." And with that phrase, she'd ushered in an entire cult of people convinced that Mars harboured ghosts, or aliens, or fiends. As if their numbers needed adding to! But Bishop couldn't keep up his anger. The pictures continued.

There was a faint coloration like a long tunnel or a tube made of the faintest streaks of yellow, grey, and ashy white. It was almost pretty against the deepening red of the Martian afternoon. The tunnel down which Tabitha had vanished. So the shaman said.

"I hardly know anything about these people," Bishop protested with distress. He didn't understand how the creature drew its conclusions.

"It is all right, Mr. Bishop," the shaman said calmly, setting off in this new direction. "I know everything about them that I need to know."

For the first time in the time that he can remember lately, Mark Bishop has enough energy to hurry in the Greenjack's wake. "But how? Just from some picture?"

"Yes."

"But you can't tell anything just from a picture!"

"You can tell everything from a single look. For instance, I know that you, Mr. Bishop, had it in mind that if you found me a fraud here, you might use your gun to shoot me dead. And then yourself. We would be a memorial in this unpleasant spot, the monument of your surrender to despair and your inability to remain rational in the face of my abominable supernatural exploitation of both your grief and reputation." It continued walking steadily.

Bishop had no answer to that. He'd never verbalised or reified that intent, but he couldn't entirely dismiss it. His gun was in his holster pocket. Everyone had them. He couldn't say that the thought hadn't been his secondary insurance. That and the recorder, of course. It would have told the sad tale to those who came to find out what happened. The notion had been discarded a long time before they even landed, though, he realised, and now, the recorder was instead preserving this vision of Hyperion's skinny ass slowly wandering along a trackless gully through soft dirt and Bishop's labored breathing.

"Anyone can see these things," Hyperion mumbled as he went. "But they don't know how to tune in, to refine and translate and know them."

"Don't start on the psychic stuff." What the hell had those boys and that monster done with his little girl? "Tell me about Wan."

"Bancroft. He is idealistic, practical, yet ordinary. Bread is determined, focused, and he has been somehow thwarted in the past, which has made him bitter, though he hides this with great charm. McKnight is an entrepreneur, comfortable with criminal ways."

"McKnight is the leader, then?"

"Wan is the leader, Mr. Bishop, whoever's foot may seem to go first. As for the women, neither of them are involved in this plan except by accident. It is simply unfortunate that they were in this team when Wan met McKnight. I am certain that McKnight was the catalyst for what occurred here. Wan is too poor, too badly connected, and too ignorant to plan this venture alone. Possibly he didn't think of it until McKnight arrived to put the idea in his head. He isn't creative."

"You're quite the detective." Bishop didn't mean it quite as bitter as it sounded.

"I would like to be. But it isn't my intuition working so much as the patterns that I see."

Bishop gave a cursory glance at his screen. A twisting tube of colours, some bleeding others sharp, was all he could see; bad art on a tiresome landscape. "If you say so." In spite of himself, he had no trouble believing the Greenjack now. "Are the girls all right?"

"They are physically unharmed at this point. They are talking here . . . " the shaman indicated their way and the stretch ahead. He moved off alone for some distance, then narrated, "I feel terror and anger. I believe they were attempting to bargain an escape or discover the real plans. McKnight is all for telling them. He is enjoying the action. Wan forbids him. McKnight doesn't mind this, but Davis is getting edgy. He has never liked the involvement of the Terraform. His fear of retaliation is keeping him quiet now."

Bishop stopped suddenly, rooted in the unmade earth. He had realised that he was walking through time, and his sudden confidence in the shaman's analysis made him fear where the future led, even though it had already happened. He attempted to rally some criticism, some countermeasure to the rigorous story unfolding, to prove at least to himself that there was a chance that most of it was simply the shaman's whimsical interpretation of some very dry facts, but he struggled to do so.

Ahead of him, the large creature stopped in its own dusty tracks and turned about. It seemed patient and concerned. Every time he looked into its peculiar yellow eyes, he expected the disturbance of an alien encounter, but instead he felt that he was understood, and the feeling made him desperately uneasy. Who knew what confidence trickery it was capable of, after all? But for the life of him, he couldn't figure out a motive.

"When we get to the end of this," Bishop said hoarsely, coughing, "what will we do?"

"That depends on the end."

"I mean, if she isn't dead, if she was taken somewhere . . . will you help me? You said you'd ask for a Unity ship. I guess that means you know someone."


"I will find your daughter, Mr. Bishop," Hyperion said. "I already promised to. If you prefer I will say no more about the events that passed this way. No doubt you must wonder how I can know, and there is no way to tell you how, any more than you can explain how you do most things you do that are your nature. I expect that some greater analysis will be able to detail the process, but I am not interested to do it myself. I see these people and I feel what they have been feeling, as if I can watch it in a moving storybook. There are other things present, besides the people now. These disruptions in such a quiet area have acted as an attractorl, and some of the energies I spoke about earlier are beginning to converge on the scene. As yet, they are only circling. You may see . . . "

"These stains? I thought they were just bad rendering or the light or something. They're so faint. Watermarks."

"They are the ones. You will see them circle and converge, then scatter and reform. They may merge. Ignore them. They are not important."

"But they . . . " But the Greenjack was already moving on. The shadows were lengthening into early evening, and a slight cooling was in the air. Bishop kept one eye on the trail and the other on the screen, but the silence was too much for him. "Talk," he said.

"They are not speaking here," the shaman replied over its shoulder. "Yang is looking for a way to escape. Bishop is locked in her thoughts. She is angry with McKnight for his betrayal of their friendship, or what she thought was their friendship. She is questioning her assessment of the others. McKnight is leading, he is content. Wan and Davis are in the rear, pushing the women on. Wan is excited. Davis is starting to lose trust in him. Davis has a weak personality. He believes that he ought to be leader and Wan is beginning to annoy him. He is starting to form a strong resentment."

"What is that cloud?"

"He is forming negative energy vortices. This kind of personality often does. Their energy scatters out from the holes in their energy bodies. It is an interesting feature of humans that they create negative energy attractors much more readily and strongly than positive ones. I am not sure why this is, but I believe it is because damaged individuals are leaky, prone to influence and loss, whereas healthy types do not shed these frequencies without some deliberate effort. They are impervious to wild influence and create almost no disturbances. I must consult with the other Greenjacks when they are done travelling."

Bishop was silent for a while and they plodded on some quarter kilometre more as he checked his recordings. It was an ecology he was seeing, if it were true. A psychic kind of ecology. He couldn't help but notice it, even as it wasn't part of his concern. Just a peripheral. If the Greenjack had tried to convince him about all this any other way, he could probably have thought of a good hole or two to poke in things, but as it was . . . he shook his head and struggled on. He wasn't fit, and although gravity was lighter and walking easier, it was a long time since he'd hiked further than his back yard. He found himself stopped suddenly, almost walking onto Hyperion's tail. The Forged was still as a statue.

Bishop looked at the screen quickly. A darkening storm of purples and reds like a miniature cyclone was all around him. He waited, then Hyperion said, "They stop here. McKnight signals offworld. Wan and Davis start arguing again. Yang tries to escape. She just runs. Bishop tried to stop her. McKnight notices. Davis starts to run after her, but Wan says no. He was willing to leave her. He wants to. Davis catches Yang. Wan says to McKnight they should leave them both. He knows Davis is trouble, Yang he doesn't want anyway; they have some history . . . it's minor . . . he'd rather leave her for some reason I don't . . . Anyway. Bishop protests. Yang becomes hysterical. McKnight knocks her unconscious. Now Wan gets angry with McKnight. Davis's antagonism towards Wan crystallises. He threatens to turn them all in. McKnight doesn't like that. McKnight threatens Wan and Davis. Wan tries to calm things down. Bishop is raging. Wan ties up both women, hands and feet. Yang is injured, there is blood here. They wait. Quite a long time. I think an hour must pass or so. Davis is now focused entirely on Wan. Hates him. McKnight is the only calm one. Wan is furious but he's too smart to let it out. A ship comes. It lands over there . . . "

Mark Bishop got up and followed the Greenjack over to the place across the long shadows that had nearly covered the whole ground.

There was no sign of a landing, but then, given the weather, there wouldn't be. He recorded dutifully. The colored waterworld had gone. He watched the Greenjack circle and look, and pause. It returned from a small exploration and said, "This is the end of the trail here. The ship has come. It's a Forged craft. I don't know its name, but if I ever meet it, I'll know it by its energy signatures. It is one of three types of Ironhorse currently operating between the Far System and Earth. Can't say more. They all embark, except Yang. She's dead."

Bishop half wanted to ask for more, certain it was hiding things, but then he decided that it was enough, he didn't want to know. Everything inside him had stopped, waiting. What the shaman had just said was a testable claim, unless it meant some kind of spiritual residue. Beneath his coat, he felt the hairs on his neck stand on end. His heart gave an extra beat. "Are you sure?"

"Yes." Hyperion paused and then made a brief gesture with its head. Bishop followed the line, recorder in hand first. He saw nothing, just the usual Mars stuff, but then the shaman walked him out another hundred metres to a small mound that Bishop or anyone else would just have taken for one of the billion shifting dunes. "She is here."

Bishop took measurements, readings. They were still technically well within Thorson's Gullies. Nobody would have come here for a long, long time. Perhaps never. The land was bad, useless. This zone had already been mapped. There were no deposits of use. Then, with the shaman's help, he set up his recorder and began the process of moving the sand aside. He used his shoe as a spade. It didn't take long before he bumped something. Without ceremony, they uncovered a part of a desiccated human body, just enough to see the identifying badges on the suit, and then they covered it up again.

Bishop moved away a short distance and sat for a while, drinking water and watching the sun go down. It got very cold. His feet and hands ached. He wished for the scotch again, fervently, avidly, relentlessly. Hyperion sat beside him like a giant dog.

Bishop's hand strayed to the machine but he left it alone. He stumbled over the words, "Do you see her?" He was braced for any fool answer. He wanted there to be one, a good one.

"She was here," it said. "But now she has gone."

Bishop nodded. He wasn't going to ask for the details. He wasn't ready yet. Leave it at the cryptic stage until . . . "We should go."

"I suggest we walk back to the capsule rather than make any transmissions the Terraform might interpret. Also we must now consider this a murder investigation. What would you like to do? We could report it to the police and let them . . . "

"No. They got it all wrong the first time." Bishop was surprised by the force of his own hatred, but the shaman didn't skip a beat.

"Then we should not discuss this with Valhalla. We need help from sources that don't mind being accomplice to criminal acts."

Belatedly, Mark realised that by this it meant their failure to inform. Anything that wasted time now didn't matter to him. "Can you track them from here?"


"Not directly, but their intentions are reasonably clear. McKnight is at least guilty of manslaughter and kidnap. Wan and Davis of kidnap, misuse of corporate properties, perversion of the course of justice. The Terraform is on their side. They have every chance to make a good escape, but they couldn't head sunward—there's nothing there except Earth and the high population satellite systems, full of officials and the law. They have gone to the Belt—no Forged ship could take them further without at least stopping there for supplies. We will find something out that way." It seemed completely confident, almost resigned to its own cold certainty.

Bishop ignored the bleakness in its tone and waded forwards grimly in its wake, a squire to a weird and uncomforting King Wenceslas of the sands.

It was a long, hard, cold, and lonely passage. Bishop struggled all the way not to ask all the questions that were hunting him, but he didn't ask them, and at last they retraced all the path, and the Valhalla's Hand opened its thousand eyes and let them in. He couldn't afford to indulge his fears.

"Where to?" the Valhalla asked as it left orbit, swinging away in an arc that would return it to the sunward side so that it could pick up extra heat.

"Just to the lift station again," Hyperion said with a sigh, as though the journey had been tiring and a disappointment.

It made some small talk with Valhalla as Bishop settled himself in. He intended to check his recordings and prepare some method for transmitting them safely in case something happened to him, but before he was able to do any of that, exhaustion took over and he fell asleep. He slept all the way to the port, and woke feeling drained and thin. Hyperion led him through their formalities, and then they were sitting in the cafeteria, Bishop facing a reconstituted dinner with a dry mouth.

"An ordinary journey to the Belt is a three year stretch," the shaman said. He was lying like a giant dog on the smooth tiled floor next to Bishop's table, resting his head on a plastic plant pot beneath the convincing fake fronds of a plastic grass. "The fastest available transport can make it in one year. But Unity ships can make it instantly."

"Interference," Bishop croaked. He had managed a mouthful. It wasn't bad but he was so hungry even cardboard would have seemed delicious. Hungry or not, he was loath to think about Unity travel. They said it interfered with you at a fundamental level. They were not sure what the long-term implications would be.

"I will search here, perhaps they came this way." It was unconvincing. Nobody in their right mind would come this way if they wanted to get the hell out of Earth's influence.

Bishop surrendered to his curiosity and need. "You said you could get a Unity ship." He said it quietly. They weren't illegal, but they also weren't allowed this close to Earth space.

"I can ask a favor," Hyperion agreed. "I feel convinced that they have taken that route. I do not see how any legally operating taxi would be involved, and the illegal ones all come from midspace, and most have Unity drives. The most likely destination is Turbulence, the port on Hygeia. The majority of transfers take place there and there's only lipservice paid to the law at any level. It is Forged space and mostly rebel Forged at that."

"You think Wan wanted to remake himself?" Some humans wanted to experience addons that were better than just a comms set. It seemed ludicrous to Bishop, insane, an extreme form of self mutilation beyond tattoos and piercings, some kind of primal denial of one's self. It frightened him.

"I think there are lots of opportunities for all kinds of profit out there. Especially for those already on the run."

Bishop crumpled the wrapper his cutlery had come in. Unity technology was infectious. Even passengers aboard craft operating the technology were at risk. So far, in the years it had been around, its effects had proved relatively benign, but theorists guessed that this might be a product of a much more significant infiltration process. To use it was to risk something that could be a living death. Fanatics spoke of puppetry and zombies, aliens operating behind the scenes. He'd heard . . . "Perhaps they'd just abandon her."

"She was a witness," the shaman said. "A Terraform is complicit in crimes bringing severe penalties. Murder and human trafficking. The foundation of Mars, no less, is at stake. If they went with Raven's blessing, then they didn't go alone."

"Get your ship."

The creature got up slowly, "I will be back soon."

Bishop finished that meal, and then another as he waited, forking up food, watching the news on the cafeteria wall, not thinking now that there was no need to think any more. When he got there, when something happened, then he'd think.

They took an ordinary ship out to deep Mars orbit again, and were set adrift in a cargo pod with barely enough oxygen to survive. Something picked them up at the allotted minute and second, as displayed on Bishop's illuminated screen. Something cast them off again. There was rattling and clanking. After a few minutes of struggle, they emerged into the unloading bay of a large port. There was no trace of whoever had brought them there. There was no gravity, just the sickly spin of centrifuge. It was a struggle to keep the dinners inside him, but he did, though they felt as if they'd been in his stomach for the three year journey he'd skipped. The Greenjack helped him to get his spacelegs and then went off, sniffing.

Bishop sat in a rented cubic room at the port's only hotel and watched what Hyperion transmitted to his screen. For a few days, this was their pattern. The shaman didn't find the ship he was looking for, nor any trace of it, nor traces of the passengers. There were a lot of other things Bishop saw that disturbed him, but he was protected, by his distance, the recorder, and the fact that these troubling things were not his immediate mission. There were many shadows here, like the inkstained Mars twilight, moving splatters that now and again coagulated around a place or a person. He started to type, wrote "haunted"? He managed to read the report in bits and pieces. He struggled to wash, to shave, to function in between. He drank something called scotch that was alcohol with synthetic flavouring. It was good. It did the job. Beside "haunted," he copied the most loathsome and mysterious of the names of things that Hyperion had identified. Cracklegrackle. His nerves jangled. He tried turning the screen on himself, but only when the Jack wasn't there. He looked old. A f*cking wreck, to be honest. He was amazed.

"They only affect those who wish to be affected," the shaman insisted as they ate together on their last, fruitless night.

"But how?" Bishop pushed his food around the bag it had come in, squashing it between his fingers and thumb.

The answer was so unexpected and ridiculous that it silenced him. "Through the hands and feet, the crown or base of the spine. Never mind that. These rumours of laboratories open in the midstream; any surgery is available there. We should look into that."

Bishop agreed; what else could he do? They moved to a lesser port, and then a lesser one, the last place that pretended to commercial operations. There was no hotel, just some rented rooms in a storehouse. Bishop began to run out of money, and sanity. He couldn't bring himself to contact work and explain his absence. He thought only about Tabitha. He drank to avoid feeling. He took pills for regimented sessions of oblivion. Sometimes he watched the Mars journey again on his screen. Those strange floating films of colour absorbed his attention more and more. The more he watched them, the more he saw that their movements seemed sinister and far from random. He saw himself pass through them and tried to remember if they had changed him.


He'd felt nothing. Nothing. Hyperion's statements about the people, seemed more and more unlikely. He felt it was a goosechase. Perhaps he had been paid to lead Bishop out here where he couldn't make trouble, and strand him. Perhaps the Terraform had bought the Greenjack off. This ran through his mind hourly. Only the transmissions of the 'Jack's travels kept him going.

Then one day, months after they had set out, he got the call.

"I found her."

"Is she . . . "

"Alive."

He scrabbled to get clean clothes, to clean himself, to get sober. He was full of joy, full of terror. The hours passed like aeons. The 'Jack brought a ship—one he saw this time, an Ironhorse Jackrabbit with barely enough space to fit them aboard. It yawned and they walked into its sharklike mouth. It held them there, one bite from vacuum death, and blinked them to the cloudstreams of Jupiter. He barely noticed.

"Are those things here?"

"Everywhere, Mr. Bishop," Hyperion said.

"What things?" the Jackrabbit asked.

"Energies," the Greenjack said. "Nothing for you to worry about."

There was some bickering about the return journey. Bishop couldn't make sense of it.

"Where is she?" he gripped the Greenjack's thorny arm. Its scaly skin was like a cat's tongue, strangely abrasive. Around him, floating, the few human visitors to this place looked lost. Tabitha was none of them. They all looked through portholes into the gauzy films of the planet's outer atmosphere streaming past below their tiny station. It looked like caramel coffee. Outside, various Forged were docked and queued. People had conversations in the odd little cubicles, like airlocks, that dotted the outside of the structure. Sometimes the doors flashed and then opened. People came out, went in, on both sides of the screen wall that separated the two environments of instation and freezing space from one another.

"This way," the jack said. He reached out and laid his tough paw across the back of Bishop's gripping hand for a second, then led him with a kick and drift through the slight pull of the planet's gravity well to one of those lit doorways.

Bishop peered inside, looking for her. The shaman followed him in. The room was empty.

He turned, "She's not here!"

The shaman pointed at the panel in the reinforced floor. Some Jupiterian Forged was on the other side.

Bishop looked at Hyperion because he didn't want to look at the window, but he floated towards it, his hands and feet betraying him as they pressed suddenly against the clear portal, and, on the far other side, across six sheets of various carbonates, glass, and vacuum, the Forged pressed its own hands towards his open palms.

Jupiter was no place for a human being. They died there in droves. Even the Forged, who had been engineered before birth to thrive in its vicious atmosphere and live lives as glorified gas farmers fell prey to its merciless storms. The upper cloud layer was never more than minus one twenty Celsius. Large creatures didn't operate that well at those temperatures, even ones that were mostly made of machine and chemical technologies so far removed from the original human that they were unrecognisable components of life. But Tupac, the motherfather, was able to create children who lived here, even some who dived far down to the place where hydrogen was a metal; scientists with singleminded visions. Tupac's efforts had advanced human knowledge and experience to the limit of the material universe.

Bishop's senses didn't stretch that far. He stared into eyes behind shields of methane ice that were nothing like his own, in a face that was twice the size of his, blue, bony, and metallic and more like the faceplate of a robot fish than anything else. Narrow arms, coated in crablike exoskeletal bone reached out for him. The hands were five-digit extensions, covered in strange suckerlike skin that clung easily to the glass. Behind that, the body was willowy, ballooning, tented like clothes in the wind, patterned like a mackerel. Jellyfishes and squid were in its history somewhere, microprecise fibre engineering and ultracold processor tech its true parents.

"She has a connection to Uluru," Hyperion said quietly, naming the virtual reality which all the Forged shared. When their bodies could not meet, in mind they could get together anytime. "I can put it to your screen."

Bishop turned then. "You're not seriously suggesting this . . . thing . . . is my daughter?"

"There is a market for living bodies of any kind in the Belt. Old humans are particularly preferred for the testing of adaptive medical transformation. Technicians there have a mission to press beyond any restraint and develop their skills to make and remake any living tissues . . . "

He exploded with a kind of laugh. "But you can't make Forged. Not like that."

Hyperion was silent for a moment. "They say it is important to become self-adaptive, that they are the next step beyond Forged. They will be able to remake themselves in any fashion without experiencing discontinuity of consciousness. Any flesh or machine will be incorporated if it is willed. The Actualised . . . "

"But it can't be her!" His stare at the shaman was too wide. His eyes hurt. Against his will, he found himself turning, looking through the walls at the creature's blinkless stare. Its face had no expression. It had no mouth or nose. Gill-like extensions fluttered behind its head like ruffles of voile. Its octopid hands pressed, pressed. Its nose touched the plate. Hyperion was holding the screen out to him.

He took it in nerveless hands. They were so limp he could hardly turn it.

"Davis tried to turn Wan in, once they reached Volatility, that port on Ceres. But the Forged Police there are all sympathisers. Wan and McKnight sold him, split the money . . . "

On the screen was the standard summer garden that Uluru created for all such meetings, a place for avatars to stand in simulated sunlight amid the shelter of shrubs and trees. Running through it, watermarked, was the background that Bishop could really see, the reality he was standing in. In front of the monstrous creature attached to the window stood Tabitha, in jeans and the yellow T-shirt with the T-Rex on it that he bought her at some airport lounge some lifetime ago. Her soft brown hair moved in the nonexistent breeze. He touched the screen to feel the texture of her perfect skin.

"Daddy." The lips moved to whisper. Through her hazel eyes, the great void eyes of the fish stared.

It was only an avatar. You could make these things easily. The photographs were even in his recorder. The voice was only like hers, it wasn't really hers. There must be hundreds of standard tracks of her in the archives somewhere. These things were simple to fake.

He thrust the screen back at Hyperion, though it was his, and tried to muster some shred of dignity. "Summon the ship."

The creature didn't move from its floating position at his side. "Mr. Bishop . . . "

"You've fooled me long enough with your chat and your lines and your little premade adventure complete with faked body, but I see through it now, if you can stand the irony of that, and I'm going. I find no evidence to confirm any of your ridiculous suggestions." He was so angry that he could barely speak. Bits of spit flew off him and floated, benign and silly bubbles in the slowly circulating air. "Really, this was one step too far! I bought it hook line and sinker until now. I suppose you were trying to see how far I could be drawn. Well, a long way! Perhaps you were going to get some money for bringing the Institute into disrepute and scandal when I made some case with it for your insane claims about good and evil and possession and . . . your goosechase. Yes. You took advantage of me. I was weak . . . " There was a sound in his head, that black hum. He could hear something in it. An identifiable noise. Definite. Sure.


"Bishop," the creature snapped.

" . . . daddy!" came the faint call from the screen as it tumbled down past the shaman's side and clattered against the cabin wall.

The black hum was laughing at him, a dreadful sound. It hurt his chest. It hurt everywhere. He was furious. His skin was red hot, he couldn't think of where to go. What a fool he'd been. "How dare you. How dare you . . . "

Suddenly, the hideous gargoyle hissed, a low, menacing sound. "I have done what I said I would. I have found your daughter. I have no interest in your views . . . "

Bishop was glaring around wildly. He made a shooing motion. "Get away! You won't mock me anymore! Stupid, hideous creatures!" He began to thump the glass panels where the Jupiter creature's hands were stuck. It didn't move, just stared at him with its hidden, empty eyes. "You!" he turned on Hyperion. "Make it go away!"

The Greenjack looked at him flatly, and even with its expressive handicap, he could feel its disgust. "Mr. Bishop, I urge you to look again, and listen. Your daughter . . . "

"It's not even possible!" Bishop kicked strongly for the door. Behind him, the recorder tumbled, ricocheting, out of control, the voice that came out of it growing fainter.

"Daddy!"

The door controls, they were too complicated for him. He couldn't figure them out. He turned and lashed out wildly, thinking the Greenjack was closer than it was. It caught the recorder easily from its spin and held it out to him, contempt in its every line.

Bishop took the little machine and smashed it against the wall until it stopped making any noise.

Beyond the clear wall, the Jupiterian was letting go slowly, suckers peeling off one by one. Its eyes had frosted over strangely, white cracks visible across the ice surfaces, spreading until they shrouded the whole orbit. Its head moved back from the pane and dipped. At the same moment, the door opened.

Bishop was out in a second. He couldn't breathe. Not at all. His chest was tight. There was no damn oxygen. There must have been a malfunction. He gripped the handrails, gasping, the blood pounding in his eyes. "Oxygen!" he he cried out. "There's no air!" In his ears was the black hum.

Hyperion passed him, gliding slowly. He was holding the recorder, and ignored Bishop's outburst. He started talking, and as Bishop had to listen to him, unable to go anywhere, he heard the black sound forming itself into a shape.

"I think that although you have broken the speakers and the screen, the memory is probably unharmed. It will not be possible to locate and arrest Davis as he has been scrapped for parts. Tabitha says that Wan and McKnight disposed of him first, before they went into the Belt proper. Wan wanted her to be rendered as well, but McKnight said there would be a lot more for a whole live subject. They were planning out how to create a trafficking chain and where to get more people for it from. She was taken to some facility about one twenty degrees off Earth vector. They wanted to make her as far from the original human as possible, to prove their accomplishments, but also because they thought it was fitting for humans to end up like the Forged out here have all ended, as slave workers in the materials industry. She isn't like the other Forged of course, she's just a fabrication. Her links to Uluru are very limited. She has no real contact other than voice and some vision with anyone else. And the Forged here are mostly rebel sympathisers. She tried to call you, but the networks out this way are very bad and none of the regular channels would carry her messages anyway because she is marked as a risk to the survival of the Actualist movement. It took a great deal of trouble to get her to come here. It is dangerous. She risked everything. And she didn't want to see you. It took days to persuade her that if you came there might be sufficient evidence to reopen the case and bring the Earthside Police out here to pursue it."

Bishop gulped. "You've done a very thorough job, I'll give you that."

The Greenjack made a clacking noise. It spoke in a calm, reasonable manner, as if Bishop were perfectly lucid. "I have not been able to trace the routes of Davis, Wan, or McKnight yet but I think they will be easy to find. I hope you understand, Mr. Bishop, that I do not require your permission to pursue the investigation or to make my findings known to the authorities. I also advise against your attempting to return to Earth alone. Many of the Forged here who would have you believe that they are honest taxis are pirates like Wan has aspired to become. The going rate for a live Old Monkey human in the Belt is upward of fifty thousand standard dollars. I doubt you have the finances to buy yourself out of trouble, even if they wanted you to."

The terrible pulse of the black hum wouldn't let him think. Bishop reeled against the bulkhead, the rail gripped in his slippery fingers. He was heroic. "We must rescue her. We can take her back. Find a way. I can raise the money on Earth. The Police can arrest those responsible and the government will . . . "

"The government is well aware of the situation," Hyperion said. "Returning Tabitha Earthside and attempting remodelling would be tantamount to a declaration of civil war out here. They will do no such thing. You know it as well as I do. Pull yourself together." It handed him his screen, which it had repaired somehow. Aside from a cracked screen and broken speakers, it seemed all right. "This is your evidence. It is our only hard evidence, aside from the Uluru recording I have made, but, of course, those involved are Forged, so they are suspect." This admission of bigotry in the judicial system seemed to make it tired. "If you do not act, there will be no justice of any kind."

Bishop held the screen without turning beyond the home page. He heard his own voice babbling, "We could kill them. McKnight, you can find him . . . "

Hyperion waited a few moments. "Tabitha is an extraordinary person, Mr. Bishop. Although it is a mystery how she has sprung from you. She understands your feelings. You have hurt her deeply and this makes me dislike you very much. After what she has been through, your rejection is by far the most damaging thing that has happened here. And now, you are seeking to spread misery further by your stupidity. The energy wells out here are all very dark. A few lights shine. Tabitha Bishop is one of them. You are now claiming that one of the energies is responsible for your weakness. I find that contemptible. Pull yourself together!"

"You! You could find them and kill them and you won't do it! Just this superstitious, religious babble. You bring me here to show me . . . to show me . . . Here, here!" He tried to get the screen to focus on him. "Show me now. I know it's there. That thing. Show . . . " but Bishop could not finish. The words had cannoned into each other behind his tongue and exploded there into an unpronounceable summons for hell. Cracklegrackle.

He wanted very much to be dead. The shame was unbearable. He could not carry it. On Earth, he would have been on his face, on his knees; here he was floating, curled up tight into a ball.

The shaman waited. "You are not possessed, Mark. You are simply hysterical. Your future with your daughter is your own choice. However, we must take the recording back to Earth and submit it to the Police there. Then we will have done our part. I, at least, will do so. You must hurry. She has to leave in a moment."

Behind Bishop's eyes, the blackness was shot with red. He snarled at Hyperion, silently, and then, inch by inch, he hauled himself to the cubicle door, again with that will that wasn't his, no it wasn't.


His joints hurt. His throat was so tight. He couldn't breathe. Inside. The rails. The flat expanse of glass. The slices of clear shielding. The coffee-coloured clouds miles below, as soft and gentle as thistledown. Dirt on the floor. They ought to clean this place. It was so hard to see through the handmarks, the footprints, the wear and tear on the old polycarbonate. It was so hard to see through the glass and the frozen methane that melted and ran to keep her sight clear, then froze, then melted again so that she was always half blind. It was so hard to see through his tears.