Omega point

CHAPTER 9

They went by rail; the roads were not safe. The trains, run in partnership by the corporate Muscovite clans and the Chinese, were huge and armoured, a thin line of civilisation cutting across the lawless Russian east.

"Things have been bad here since the purchase," said Lehmann, watching Novosibirsk roll by. The train went slow here, negotiating damaged points to a frost-buckled side line. To one side of the train great machines laid new track, on a massive embankment broad enough to carry the newer locomotives. To the other, the dirty and dishevelled shell of what had once been Russia's third largest city. Windowless apartment blocks of grey concrete surrounded the place, the population having shrunk into its historic centre. Even there, the roads were cracked, the buildings long unpainted. Whole streets, those abandoned early when the government still had money to put them up, sported steel shutters. There were few modern machines in evidence, no AI and less wealth. Only the train, gleaming with money from Russian plutoprinces and Chinese development funds, seemed fit for the twenty-second century.

"They were bad before," said Otto. "Pollution, crime, alcoholism. The population has been nose-diving since the Soviet Union fell apart a hundred and fifty years ago."

Lehmann shook his head. "This is the product of slow decline. But it is nothing. It gets worse as we go further east. They say the purchase was a peaceful transaction, but we were not far off full-scale war. I was there, I fought in the Secret War."

Otto snorted.

"I didn't invent the name, Leutnant," said Lehmann irritably.

Novosibirsk's shiny station welcomed them in like a weary old brothel madame, decrepitude painted over with fresh make-up and a knowing smile. They stayed on the train as passengers came and went, the smart minions of the resource barons and oligarchs pouring from first-class carriages, rough-clothed people pouring in a long flood from the cheaper cars down the platform. Many, both rich and poor, wore biofilter masks, protection against the flu, yet another variant of which had ripped across Eurasia last winter.

The station was like the train, clean and hi-tech. A high wall ran around it. Money was finally coming back into the region, Chinese money. Valdaire reflected ruefully. Industrialisation wasn't a new dawn as the economists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had thought, but a passing phase, jobs moving from region to region like ripples as the industrial revolution washed round the world, bringing prosperity, population expansion and finally collapse into poverty. The money went wherever the cheap labour was, and to think they once thought shopping could fill in once the factories had gone. Its only lasting legacy in places like this was overpopulation and environmental damage. Just like now, she thought, only we're more honest about it. They were idiots back then to think whatever benefits it brought would last.

The train filled up again. Armed men in the uniform dress of the Don Cossack Great Host made their way down the train and scanned their identities and travel documentation for the hundredth time since they'd boarded. Valdaire's 'ware was good, and their fake sigs held.

The train pulled away with a sigh, the thrum from its induction motors vibrating the carriages. Valdaire found the effect soporific, but did not sleep. She watched Novosibirsk slide by. Outside the city evidence of past environmental despoliation was everywhere, crumbling industrial complexes, weed-choked pits gouged out of the earth, the hulks of giant drag cranes rusting to pieces in their hearts. Some of these mines were active, giant automata worrying the soil with great steel teeth. Mountains stood with their tops lopped off, forests of trees black and dead around them. They rushed past trains loaded with lumber, ore and grain, all, like them, heading east; and everywhere the ideograms of the Orient. They were still hours away from the Sinosiberian demilitarised zone, but even this far west the influence of the People's Republic was apparent, the resources they took from the mountains and forests fuelling the ravenous economy of this second Chinese century.

Between ran mile upon mile of unbroken forest. Sometimes the remains of buildings could be seen poking out from among the trees, villages and towns cleared out by economic failure and flu. Russia was a broken empire, its hinterland abandoned to poverty while the plutoprinces of Moscow drowned in luxury. Elsewhere they travelled for hours through prairie fields, steppe land tilled by machine, not a human in sight.

As they travelled further east, the influence of the Chinese became more pronounced. Self-contained factories took the place of the abandoned relics, pod-like barracks of Han migrant workers incongruous in the forests and farmlands round them.

Lehmann had urged Otto to sleep, an activity he was reluctant to undertake, as Valdaire had discovered for herself. Chures stared out of the window. Lehmann pulled his seat into a reclining position and closed his eyes.

"Both of you are going to sleep?" said Valdaire.

"Yes," said Lehmann. "Kaplinski might well be on this train with us, but he'll not act. He would not find what we know, and if he managed to escape with his own skin intact, he'd be hunted. The Cossacks hate him. You not sleeping?"

Valdaire shook her head, and slipped Chloe's tablet out of its case.

"Suit yourself," said Lehmann. He was soon fast asleep. He snored.

Valdaire scanned the phone's screen. Through her she could see all the systems on the train; the interiors of all the cars, poor, rich and private, the long sweep of the roof, the front and rear major engines, the subsidiary drive units under each carriage. Nothing unusual.

Valdaire was tired. She looked at the sleeping faces of the two cyborgs. Lehmann was better-looking than Otto, and his English was less inflected, but there was something in his eyes that chilled her. You looked into Otto's eyes and behind the impassive glare there was a great deal of pain. In Lehmann it was something else: there was a lack, a hollowness that threatened to pull her in. So many killers in one place. Lehmann was all charm on the surface, but while Chures was penetrating and deliberately guarded, he had fire within him, he was human. Lehmann, she could not see what motivated him. Probably all he knew how to do was fight, and did so now from habit.

So where did that leave her? She was no cyborg, but she'd been a soldier too.

She decided she had better try and rest too. As her seat reclined and she closed her eyes, she wondered what the Ky-tech dreamt of, with all that tech crammed into their skulls. The thought kept her own sleep at bay for long minutes, until her mind surrendered to the swaying click of the train.

Otto's mentaug dreamed.

Clear notes rang out, silver trumpets in the dark.

The cave was cold, broad mouth open to the night; they weren't deep enough in to benefit from the warmth of the Earth, but the audience's eyes were bright with the rapture Christmas nights bring. There were a hundred of them or so, ranged up in three tiers above the brass band, their temporary stand erected where in summer tour guides stood.

The scene was from shortly after his initial implantation. His twin recollections struggled with the recreation. Human memory alters over time; that held in the storage crystals was absolute. There was a jagged line between them. The audience flickered, faces and clothing changed. Further irregularity was introduced by the mixing of his and Honour's memories. Shared e-membering in a full virtual environment was always an odd experience, but the melding of organic perceptions revealed just how subjective the world was. This shared environment led to a sensation of bilocation as his and Honour's individual memories ran into one another; Otto's twinned set — machine and meat — to Honour's native memory. They ran ever closer together, his brain checking its own recollections against those of Honour and his mentaug, green OK lights flickering through his iHUD.

"Oh Little Town of Bethlehem" finished with a fanfare. Honour's face was glowing in the candlelight. Otto felt his chest tighten. This moment was something no one else had, and that is why they had come back. No additional data was available to fill out the memory; soulcap and mentaug tech wasn't in wide usage then, and certainly no one beyond Otto in the cave had had any data capture device more sophisticated than a phone.

They needed a raw situation like this to know if it were the machine in Honour's head or Honour herself that ailed. Together their mentaugs rebuilt the scene totally; the present was out of reach. At the back of his head, Otto felt the machines checking over each other and their human hosts in concert, using their shared experience as a point of calibration.

A further factor in choosing this time was the emotional resonance the event had for both. They remembered it equally strongly, in their own way. As the music had swelled, Otto had known with all his heart that he loved this woman. A few weeks later they were engaged; months after that, married. Otto waited for the moment of realisation to arrive. Expected, it remained a shocking feeling, no less so for being a repetition.

She looked at him, cheeks and nose tip red, so young, twenty-six. He had thought himself much older at the time, but nine years was nothing. Her smile mirrored his, a combination of the smile she had smiled then and the one she wore now, two decades later. Their minds were intertwined by their mentaugs. Her deepest self lay open to Otto. He wondered how she had known how he had felt back then, when she was as she had been born, unchanged, but she had known. For a moment, he was happy.

A buzzing noise chased the music away; the scene disintegrated, photographs blistering in a fire.

"Honour, are you OK?"

"I…" Her face split. The pain hit him. A set of icons in his iHUD warned of the imminent dissolution of the shared fantasy. Their minds came apart.

Honour sat on the stone floor, her head in her hands. The sun glared outside the cave mouth. It was hot and humid, and sweat stuck Otto's shirt to his back. The cave chilled it to the clamminess of sickbed sheets.

"It happened again," he said flatly.

"Yes," she said.

"I hoped…" he began, but he didn't know what he hoped. It was too late for hope.

"I know, Otto. I'm sorry. I hoped too. I'm sick. This confirms it. It's better than not knowing, at least."

Otto stood, tense but immobile. He didn't know what to do, he didn't know what to say. After all they had been through, after all he had been through; it wasn't fair.

It was his fault.

"I'm sorry," she said again, as if it weren't her that was dying, but him. Otto tried to smile, but his face felt weirdly stretched, as if it were numbed or belonged to someone else. He helped Honour to her feet. She put her hands on his shoulders. "How are you?" he said.

"My head really hurts."

"Dizzy?"

"Not so bad this time. Do you have water?"

He nodded, pulled a tube from the camelpack in his backpack and passed it to her gently. She drank gratefully. "Do you think you can walk? I can carry you." And he could, for as long as it took, without tiring. Even then his body had been altered as much as his mind. They'd attended the concert near the start of the process that made him Ky-tech, the mentaug new and terrifying then. More had come. Not much of the Otto from that Christmas was left.

"No, it's OK. I'd rather walk," she said.

They walked past the pile of damp dirt that had once been the cave's tourist centre. Neither its wood nor its industry had survived the new climate. The concrete path alongside the stream that ran out of the cave had, and they picked their way along its crumbling length to the ruins of Castleton at the bottom.

The cave was in a gorge of tall limestone cliffs. When they had attended the concert this had still been typical English hill country, soft green fields with turf grazed to velvet. That had all gone. A scrub of rhododendron covered the hills, the result of a hasty attempt at ecological adaptation. The sky was a boiling mass of black and grey cloud fleeing before a hot wind. The stream had become a river, the village a ruin, windows empty, roofs sagging or gone, though one or two showed rough repair. Quirkies, trying to cling to a world that had started to die a century ago. So much had changed, so quickly.

Honour stumbled, and put her hand to her head. She was gaunt. Horrifically, she was beginning to look her age. It began to rain, a few fat drops that turned into a warm downpour, as if someone had turned on a shower. Otto pulled his wife close.

"Are you sure you are OK?"

"Yes, I'm fine."

"You don't look fine."

"Thanks."

"You don't always have to play the hero."

"You're my hero," she said darting a quick, unconvincing smile at him.

They wended their way through the village, past rusting signs. He helped Honour over heaps of rubble, took her past fields thick with plants that had once only been able to survive in greenhouses.

They reached the car. He'd parked it in the old tourists' car park, now just another collection of misplaced botanical specimens. They got in. They looked at each other, and burst out laughing at the water running in rivulets from their soaked clothes.

"Shall we go home, madchen? " he said.

"Oh, yes, Otto, please. I'm tired."

"It's more than that." He reached out to her, both with his hand and with his mentaug.

"Please, Otto." She grimaced. "Don't poke about in my head. I'm not in the mood."

Rain thundered off the car's clear roof.

"It's worse this time?"

She did not reply.

" Verdammt, Honour! You have to talk with me about this!" He slammed his hands on to the steering wheel. She remained silent. He wrestled with his feelings, appalled by his outburst and the fear that underlay it. "I'm sorry. I'm…" His voice took a pleading edge. "Let's see Ekbaum. He'll help, I am sure."

"No, Otto, no," she said firmly. "Not Ekbaum."

Otto thought about arguing, but he had been with her long enough to know that would get them nowhere. He engaged the air car's turbofans and eased it up into the rain.

He flew on for forty minutes, waited for Honour to fall into an exhausted sleep, and put in a call. Not Ekbaum then, but there were others.

"Can you get me Ms Dinez, please? Yes, neuro-engineering. Thanks."

He arranged an appointment, and hung up as the first cyclone of the wet season smashed into Britain.

Otto started awake. There was a pattering on the window, and for a second he thought he was still back in the car, hearing the rain, but the noise came from a shower of grit cast out by a largelegged machine trundling through a field of tree-stumps, arms plucking felled trees from the floor and stripping them of their branches, logs onto its back, waste ground up for fuelstock and compost going into another vehicle stumping alongside it. Its rear end extruding netted saplings, arms like a spider's spinnerets scooping holes and ramming them into the ground, a new forest for the old. Spider cannon formed a loose square with the forestry walkers at the centre, and tracked sentry guns rolled around them, guards against Beggar Barons' timber poaching and equipment theft.

The train sped past the forestry rigs, their blinking lights lost in the trees.

Otto shook his head. He was raw with emotion. The mentaug was a curse. Every time he slept he relived his life in perfect clarity. Intended to maximise the learning processes associated with sleep, instead the mentaug made Honour live, and every time he woke it was like losing her all over again.

It had been nine years.

It felt like it had happened yesterday.

He could turn it off. He should.

He swallowed hard.

He looked out of the window, forcing himself to concentrate on something else. The sky was grey with predawn light. All slept, Chloe watching over them.

Otto squeezed through the narrow gap between the seats, trying not to bump them.

"Where are you going?" said Chloe, in her sly five-year-old's voice.

"Quiet down," Otto whispered. "I'm going for a walk, stretch my legs."

It was a half-truth. He intended to go for a walk, only there'd be a bottle of whisky at the end of it.