Into Everywhere by Paul McAuley Page A

at Lisa’s attention – perhaps her ghost was interested in it for some reason. The damn thing had woken up again, a spooky presence at her back, always just out of sight.
    Bria was saying, ‘The girlfriend sounds like a bill of goods.’
    ‘I liked her. And she loved Willie, in her way. That was one thing he was good at. Getting inside your heart.’
    There was a pause, and then Bria said, ‘Have you been drinking?’
    ‘Not really,’ Lisa said, and knew it sounded evasive. ‘Just this one beer. To be sociable while I had my heart to heart with Brittany. Right now I’m sipping some damn fine coffee made by an Ethiopian woman who was in Ethiopia just three months ago.’
    ‘Because you sound a trifle manic.’
    ‘Maybe that’s because I’m absolutely, one hundred per cent certain that Willie found the place where we were struck down. Not that stupid hole in the ground, but the real deal. Wherever it is, whatever it is, he couldn’t afford to excavate it on his own, so he partnered up with this outfit his girlfriend told me about. Outland Archaeological Services. I just now paid a visit to their offices. Police tape across the door, no one home. This guy in the insurance brokers next door told me they’d been closed for several days, and the police had been around first thing yesterday. He said they carried out everything in the place. And he also said, get this, that there was a Jackaroo avatar poking around. Adam Nevers’s sidekick. First they raid Outland’s offices. Then, when they couldn’t find anything, they go after Brittany and me.’
    ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them,’ Bria said.
    ‘I googled them,’ Lisa said. ‘Turns out they’re funded by this nonprofit outfit, the Omega Point Foundation.’
    ‘The one owned by Ada Morange?’
    ‘She doesn’t exactly own it. But her company, Karyotech Pharma, is its major benefactor.’
    Ada Morange was famous in the way that Albert Einstein and Abe Lincoln were famous. The kind of fame that was in the air, in the water. She had been involved in the discovery of the first Ghajar ships, the ones that a kid infected with some kind of eidolon had called down to a ruined spaceport on Mangala – people called it a spaceport, although no one could say exactly what it was. A place those two ships knew, at any rate. And a couple of years later Ada Morange’s company had located the first orbital sargasso. She was one of the richest people in human history, and most of her wealth was channelled into the Omega Point Foundation, which subsidised big astronomy projects, exploration of the new worlds of the New Frontier and research into Elder Culture technology, artificial intelligence and life extension, and promoted the idea that humanity could bootstrap its way to transcendence without the help of the Jackaroo.
    Lisa told Bria that Outland had bought out the site in the City of the Dead where a Ghajar shipwreck had infected a hive-rat colony. ‘And they were involved in digs looking for other traces of the wreck.’
    ‘So is that what Willie found?’ Bria said. ‘Something to do with the wreck?’
    ‘It’s possible. According to Carol Schleifer, this tessera contains Ghajar narrative code. Which until now has only been found in Ghajar ships. I need your help, Bria. I need to take a look at this code.’
    ‘Right now what you need to do is go home and get some rest.’
    ‘And meanwhile the cops are digging up whatever it was that Willie found out there,’ Lisa said. She was walking up and down at the shoulder of the road. She couldn’t keep still. ‘I need to look at this code, and I need you to go check recent excavation licences again. Willie didn’t register his find, either because he couldn’t afford the fee or because he knew it was something big, was worried that it would attract the wrong kind of attention. So he took a risk and kept it secret. But maybe Outland took out a licence after he hooked up with them.’
    ‘We’ll have