Into Everywhere by Paul McAuley Read Free Book Online

which turned out not to be so new after all. Previous clients of the Jackaroo, the so-called Elder Cultures, had colonised the worlds and altered them in various ways before either dying out or moving elsewhere, leaving behind ancient ruins and artefacts.
    No one knew what the Jackaroo actually looked like, where they had come from, or why. They presented only as avatars, no one had ever visited their ships, and they wouldn’t ever discuss their motives, what had happened to the Elder Cultures, what might happen to the human race.
We’re here to help
was all they said.
Every client’s path is different
. Lisa, who’d been in high school back then, remembered the wave of optimism that had swept across the world after First Contact. Humanity was no longer alone in the universe. The Jackaroo were benevolent ambassadors of an advanced culture whose gifts promised the kind of utopian future, packed with miracles and marvels, that had long seemed for ever out of reach. Mining Elder Culture ruins had yielded room-temperature superconductors, construction coral, self-healing plastics and new meta-materials, entangled pairs of electrons that allowed instantaneous transmission of information across interstellar gulfs, and much else. And then there was the discovery of ships abandoned in orbital sargassos by the Ghajar, and the wormhole network of the New Frontier . . .
    Lisa had bought into that dream when she’d won a lottery ticket and come up and out, but she knew all about its dark side now. The Bad Trip, possession by an ancient alien ghost, addiction to a drug distilled from an alien plant . . . And she’d had a close encounter with a Jackaroo avatar once before, in hospital soon after the Bad Trip, when she’d told her story and had been left feeling that she’d been judged by some higher being and found wanting.
    So she clenched up as the avatar, maybe the one that had interviewed her back then, maybe a colleague, impossible to tell, walked towards her. It held out a hand, palm up. A small sharp-edged stone lay there, black against translucent golden skin. After a blank moment, Lisa realised that it was her only tangible souvenir of the Bad Trip.
    ‘Remember the stone you helped me test for activity all those years back?’ she told Bria. ‘That one. I must have picked it up before Willie and I were zapped, and found it in the pocket of my jeans a month later.’
    Lisa had hoped that it might contain some clue about what had happened to her and Willie out in the Badlands, but it had turned out to be just a rock. A little chunk of chromite, commonly found where erosion exposed the igneous rocks that underlaid the sandstone of the Badlands; an unknown Elder Culture had mined seams of chromite ore in the far south, leaving huge terraced sinkholes.
    She said, ‘I kept it in a bowl in the living room, with a bunch of pebbles and spent tesserae. Souvenirs of the places Willie and I excavated. I guess the tesserae pinged the avatar’s radar – you know how they can track down stuff like that. And when it found them it also found the little black stone, and wanted to know what I knew about it.’
    ‘What did you say?’
    ‘That it came from someplace I couldn’t recall out in the Badlands,’ Lisa said, remembering the avatar’s blank scrutiny and pleasant smile as it asked her if the stone had ever manifested any kind of activity. Although it was a shell of gold-tinted translucent polymer, remotely controlled by God-knew-what, God-knew-where, its face was mobile, disturbingly alive, disturbingly almost-but-not-quite human.
    ‘Of course not. It’s just a stone,’ Lisa told it.
    ‘Nevertheless, I must keep this for now,’ the avatar said, and closed its fingers around the stone and walked away, while Nevers reminded her to call him if she had any questions or remembered anything germane.
    ‘First time I’ve ever heard someone use the word in cold blood,’ Lisa told Bria. ‘“Germane.”’
    Bria said, ‘He