'Why not?' asked the Doctor.
'No logic gates for a start.'
'Logic gates,' said the Doctor, 'are vastly overrated. Are you still using yes-no logic gates in this period?'
'Silicon components use them,' said Blondie. 'Mainframes use neural networks.'
'There you are,' said the Doctor.
'It doesn't look like a neural network either.'
'You mean it doesn't look designed, right?'
'Right,' said Kadiatu.
'How about evolved?'
Kadiatu's fork paused halfway to her mouth.
'What about software?' she asked. 'If it's a computer it must have an operating system. Right?'
'Timetables,' said the Doctor. 'The train on platform five is the 12:15 to Sidcup. That's an ordered sequence of logical instructions.'
'Where's Sidcup?' asked Blondie.
'It's a small town in Borneo,' Kadiatu told him. 'Assuming you're right ...'
'It has been known," said the Doctor.
'Assuming you're right and the system is analogous to a computer, then I'm willing to concede that in some respects what's happening now could be seen as the result of an intrusion by a hostile virus program.'
'Have some more pasta,' said the Doctor.
'But it's huge,' said Kadiatu.
The Doctor turned to Blondie. 'You work in maintenance,' he said. 'What do you think?'
'It came from the Stunnel and it had real physical power,' said Blondie. 'Demolished everything in its path from one end of the Central Line to the other.'
'I know,' said Kadiatu. 'I was standing in front of it.'
'Anything else unusual?' asked the Doctor.
'You mean apart from the Surf Mutants from Hell?'
'Failures in control systems,' said the Doctor. 'Mysterious power drains, odd messages on the indicator boards?'
'There were some power outages in the peripheral sectors.'
'Peripheral? Like Pluto?'
'Yeah, Pluto, but we thought it was a calibration problem.'
'I knew it,' said the Doctor. 'Penetration, concealment and infiltration, typical virus programming.'
'Except that was before all this happened,' said Blondie.
The Doctor stared at him and Blondie started in his seat. For a second he thought the Doctor's irises turned solid black, the pupils snapping open and shut like tiny mechanical cameras.
'Come on,' he said getting up, 'I've overlooked something.'
'I haven't finished eating,' said Kadiatu.
'The basement extended under the whole house and was lit with more of the illegal low-efficiency bulbs. Foundation walls divided the space into discrete sections and the ceiling was low enough to make Kadiatu stoop. Blondie could smell dust and slow decay. One of the sections was lined with a wooden framework of diamond-shaped slots. Glass snouts poked out from one or two of the slots. One of them had a cardboard label attached to its neck with string. Blondie stopped and brushed away some cobwebs to read it. 'SOMEBODY PLEASE DRINK ME'. He pulled the dusty bottle out of its slot; a beige adhesive patch on the side was labelled 'Stinging nettle wine June 1976' in crabbed handwriting.
Blondie heard his name called from deeper into the basement. He carefully put the bottle back in its place. For Blondie wine came in two-litre cartons.
The next section of the basement was filled with stacks of rotting cardboard boxes, Kadiatu and the Doctor were trying to prise out a box that was so old the cardboard kept on coming apart in their hands. With Blondie's help they managed to pull it free. The Doctor ripped the rest of the cardboard away to reveal a one-metre satellite dish wrapped in polythene. To Blondie's eyes it was an absurdly expensive form of packaging. The dish had the word 'AMSTRAD' written across the inside.
'Does this mean we get to watch some television?' asked Kadiatu.
'No,' said the Doctor.
'Just a thought,' said Kadiatu.
Under the Doctor's direction they carried the dish into the garden and over to the ruined greenhouse. The Doctor had picked up a hundred metres of laminated fibre optics from somewhere and carried it out draped over his shoulder. A three-quarter moon gave off enough light to allow them to fix the dish on to one of the remaining cast iron struts.
'You two go to bed,' said the Doctor. 'You're going to need the rest.'
Blondie and Kadiatu walked back to the house leaving the Doctor uncoiling his cable in the moonlight.
Managona Depot (P-87)
Mariko was stuck with both forearms jammed into a pair of artificers. She could feel the tools inside their enveloping stomachs working as they reassembled her arms from the elbow down. She was glad she was being upgraded: it maintained her status as number one kreweboss and plugged a gap in the razvedka capabilities. The two artificers maintained a non-stop conversation while they worked, most of it incomprehensible, some of it possibly in machine code. They only stopped talking to swallow little bags of raw materials.
Naran lounged halfway up the opposite wall, his tongue snuffling around in the bottom of a cake box. Occasionally he would look at Mariko and roll his eyes. He was still upset at being left out of the last two operations. Since both had resulted in 100 per cent casualties on their side Mariko couldn't see the attraction herself. Perhaps he felt that he could have done better.
'Finished,' chorused the artificers.
Her arms came out of their bellies with a sucking sound, covered in rapidly drying mutagenic gel. One of the artificers politely vomited a stream of clean water so she could wash off.
'The weapon fires a four-millimetre explosive cartridge,' said the left-hand artificer. 'The barrel emerges through the palm."
Mariko flexed her right arm; there was a click followed by a loud bang. The right-hand artificer fell backwards with a half-metre hole in its chest.
'Whoops,' said Mariko.
'The flex impulse acts as the trigger,' said the remaining artificer. 'There are four rounds in each arm, reloads go in through the flap just under the elbow.'
'Snap shot,' said Mariko. 'Can he be fixed?'
The artificer peered down at his dead companion and said no.
'Well, at least we know it works.'
'He would have liked that,' said the artificer.
'All right, fit it on all the razvedka krewes, starting with mine. Can you do a concealed version for reps?'
'The load would have to be cut.'
'Fine, fit the reps as well,' said Mariko.
Naran was waving his tongue at her.
'Oh yeah,' said Mariko. 'While you're fitting Naran, change the colour scheme on his carapace.'
'Sure,' said the artificer. 'What does he want?'
'Would you believe go-faster stripes?'
Mariko stood up. It was time to integrate the new material. Busy, busy, busy, she thought. There had been a number of teething troubles in the last batch. One of the new artificers had managed to turn herself inside out and had to be scraped off the walls. One of the conversion jobs had gone wrong and left Mariko with a razvedka with a four-foot mouth. Every time his teeth started spinning he fell over; 3krewe had him lying on his back in a side tunnel and were using him for waste disposal.
The new material was herded on to the eastbound platform ready for Mariko's inspection. With the losses that the razvedka had been taking lately they'd begun to make regular trawls through the more populated sections of the system. That was acceptable and within the parameters of Mariko's mission profile.
Mariko walked down the line, making her selections.
The first three were obvious ravedka; the next was an artificer. As Mariko picked them out they were ordered to stand in separate lines. There was no resistance or outcry; those that had put up a fight were long dead.
Mariko paused in front of her fourth victim, a woman of the correct physical parameters for the special operation that was being planned.
'Specialized rep,' Mariko told the artificer, 'and make sure that she's fitted with weapons.'
The
woman was led away and Mariko continued down the line.
'Razvedka, razvedka, rep, razvedka ...'
The House
He got the keyboard from an old Olivetti typewriter that he found hidden in the bottom drawer of the kitchen cabinet under a loose pile of yellowing Dandys. He allowed himself to be diverted for a couple of minutes by the adventures of Desperate Dan before continuing. The CPU was salvaged from two pocket calculators and the disposable personal organizer that came free with the June 2005 edition of Der Speigel. He generated the hex code by pretending that he had sixteen fingers,
The VDU posed a problem until he uncovered the front end of an oscilloscope under the living-room sofa and mated it with the guts of a Betamax VCR. Since he wanted two-wa) communication he incorporated a minicassette recorder, the type that was popular with journalists in the 1970s. Vision wa& tricky so he compromised by building up a compound eye fron, leftover optical fibre.
The bread board was used to mount the silicon. Since he seemed to have mislaid his soldering iron, he stoked up the Aga and used a couple of wooden-handled screwdrivers in rotation. The whole misshapen contraption used up two roll'. of gaffer tape and completely covered the kitchen table. It plugged into the light socket in the larder at one end and the cable to the dish at the other.
He was astonished when it worked.
And he still had the two tin lids that he had pocketed while preparing supper. So much for foresight.
There was a pair of secateur's in the sink drawer, and he used them to cut the tin lids into shuriken while he waited for the program to run.
The first contact arrived while he was filing down the edges of the throwing star. The oscilloscope had a scanning phosphor CRT so the image built up as a series of slow amber-coloured frame updates.
The first image was an extreme close-up of a pair of lips. Tinny incoherent noises emerged from the speaker as the lips jerked open and closed.
'Nearly,' said the Doctor. 'Try again.'
The lips dwindled down to a single orange point at the centre of the screen.
The Doctor waited for a while and then returned to his work. It was crucial to get the shuriken's balance correct or it wouldn't fly straight.
'Do not adjust your set,' said a voice from the speaker, 'we are controlling the transmission.'
This time the image was sharp and clear. The signal feed pushing the capabilities of antique cathode ray tube to the limits. The screen showed the top half of a young man in a bold suit.
'Gosh,' said the man, 'there's a lot of you.'
'I'm using a compound eye,' said the Doctor.
The rate of frame updating was still inadequate, making the young man look badly animated when he spoke or moved.
'I knew that,' said the young man.
'Who are you?' asked the Doctor,
'What you're looking at is an infotainment construct called Yak Harris that we bootlegged from the mainframe at English 37. We're using it as a template to talk to you.'
'I'll call you Yak,' said the Doctor.
'Fine by us,' said Yak. 'Once we got your signal it took us simply ages to work out a method of communication.
'How long?'
'At least thirty seconds.'
'That long?'
'We had to start from scratch.'
'I take it that you're not the whole entity.'
'We're a subset. Actually we're son of subset, the revenge of the subset, subset two, subset the sequel. There are probably other subsets that can communicate better than us but we're the subset that was on the logical pathway that led to you.'
'That doesn't seem very efficient.'
'You're the one with the junk transmitter.'
'Why were you looking for me?'
'We're sick, we need a doctor, you are the Doctor.'
'You want a consultation?'
'Yes.'
'Right then,' said the Doctor leaning forward. 'What seems to be the problem?'
Achebe Gorge
The ramp leading from the transit station to the surface had a gravity gradient from normal to one-third G. The ramp's actual physical gradient steepened as you climbed higher; it was designed to facilitate a seamless adjustment to Martian weight Even so Zamina stumbled when she got to the top. Like everybody else she immediately looked for the canyon walls. The thin air made everything clear and bright Zamina had expected the floor of the gorge to be smooth and featureless, but instead she found herself looking out over a broker-landscape of rust-coloured ridges and dark green pastures.
She realized that what she'd thought was a line of dark cloud across the horizon was the far canyon wall, four kilometres high. Zamina turned around and looked up. The scarp went up for ever until it was lost in the atmospheric haze. A huge bas-relief of President Achebe's face had been blasted into the rock six hundred metres up. The sheer weight of his profile seemed to bear down and overwhelm her inner ear. She felt herself losing her balance and toppling backwards.
Strong hands caught her and kept her upright,
'Easy there,' said a voice by her ear. 'Everybody does thai the first time.' The hands let go and Zamina turned. 'All right now?'
Zamina thought he looked like something out of a commercial, with his red curly hair and easy lopsided grin. He was wearing a white linen blouse with an OXFAM tag stuck on the breast. She half expected him to sell her life insurance.
He nodded over her shoulder at Benny. 'Is that your friend?'
'Who are you?'
'My name's Colin,' he said. 'I'm your resettlement officer.'
Passive selection, Colin called it as he led them away from the station, schoolyard sociology. The selection process by resettlement officers becomes an interaction between them and their clients. Colin always referred to the refugees as clients, he was very careful about it. And about not asking about the riots.
The solid column of refugees emerging from the station was slowly breaking apart as Colin's co-workers hived off small groups and led them away.
Zamina saw the strategy at once. En masse the refugees had a kind of power, a latent power, of course, formed out of shared experiences, but a power none the less. Fragmented like this they merely became small groups of tired individuals. Even Benny seemed defeated by Colin's easy charm, meekly following him as he led them away.
Colin got them to sit in the back of his Martian trike, one of many parked in neat rows to the side of the station. It had big spindly rubber-lyred wheels and a gaily coloured rainhood over the rear seats.
'What makes it go?' asked Zamina.
'I do,' said Colin getting astride the driver's saddle. He pointed out the pedals and the gear train that drove the back wheels. 'Couldn't do this in heavier gravity,' he said.
'I thought we were going to be put in camps,' said Zamina.
'Dangerous things, refugee camps,' said Colin, 'all that negative emotion sloshing about. Often they breed more problems than the crisis that created them. Dispersion's the way to go.'
'Australia,' said Benny.
Colin grunted and stood on the pedals, steering the trike out of the bikepark. Low gravity or not, Zamina noticed that he had strong well-muscled legs. She also realised why the short trousers he was wearing were always called 'pedal pushers'. They turned on to a tarmac road that headed further into the gorge.
'Most of the people around here are descended from Australian refugees,' said Colin. 'Including me.'
'Is that why you volunteered?' asked Zamina.
'No, I'm a specialist in population trauma,' said Colin. 'This is my job.'
'But there's thousands of us,' said Zamina.
'Most of the rest are volunteers.'
Zamina felt a sudden chill.
'He's the awkward squad,' said Benny.
'Right,' said Colin. 'But don't worry, I'm not the police or anything. You are supposed to be screened before you get on the trains, we're only supposed to get what we call the PTPs, passive trauma population, here. But you always get mistakes in an oper
ation on this scale.'
'So what are we then?' asked Zamina.
'PDEs,' said Colin. 'Potentially Disruptive Elements. But like I said, don't worry. What you've done isn't my business.'
'Where are you taking us then?'
'Home,' said Colin, 'to meet my mother.'
Home was a bungalow built from blocks of cut Martian sandstone and roofed with white tiles. Colin's mother fed them grilled steak and iced tea at a table of laminated hardwood in the small kitchen. She smiled more than she talked but there were lines of pain etched into the comers of her eyes.
Colin didn't stop talking. A constant stream of anecdotes and trivia, most of it funny and all of it engaging, Zamina felt like she was being wrapped up in streamers of cotton wool. She wondered if it was natural talent or whether Colin had trained for it.
She found herself growing tired in big sudden waves. It was like the time she and Roberta had tried working right around the world, a punter in every time zone. Nearly got ripped off in Los Angeles when she fell asleep under a trick.
Transitlag, Roberta called it.
There were two single beds waiting for them, with clean sheets of yellow calico, side by side in the spare bedroom. The sheets felt cool and abrasive against her skin as she climbed between them. The pillow was soft and smelt of flowers.
She woke up with a hand across her mouth.
'Be quiet,' whispered Benny, 'I've got to tell you something and I don't have much time. Do you understand?'
Zamina nodded and the hand was removed. Benny loomed over her, a faint wash of light from the window illuminating her face. Her expression was strained, vertical lines on her forehead, the lips pinched and tight. Her eyes were in shadow.
'You remember the. man in the cavern, the one I called the Doctor?'
'Yes.'
'You have to find him and give him this.' Benny put something in Zamina's hands. It was the little book that she always carried with her. 'Tell him that "its" control is restricted outside of the transit system.'
'How?'
'Hurry,' said Benny, 'I can't fight it for long.'
Zamina rolled from the bed, casting around for her clothes.