“It could be heaven. You don’t know for sure.”
“See!” She wagged a finger in his direction, barely able to focus. “You do it every time. Smart-ass words. Not stupid enough to agree with me, oh, no, but enough to make me preach at you. Setting it up so I can save you.”
“You’re wrong. This is all about the money.”
“Ha!” She held up the empty bottle of port and scowled at it.
Aaron hesitated. He could never tell how much control she had. He took a risk and pushed. “Anyway, if the Void is salvation, why did he leave?”
The result wasn’t quite what he had expected. Corrie-Lyn started sobbing.
“I don’t know!” she wailed. “He left us. Left all of us. Oh, where are you, Inigo? Where did you go? I loved you so much.”
Aaron groaned in dismay. Their quiet meal was now a full-blown public spectacle. Her sobs were increasing in volume. He hurriedly called the waiter and shuffled the seats to sit next to Corrie-Lyn, putting himself between her and the curious patrons. “Come on,” he murmured. “Let’s go.”
There was a landing platform on the thirtieth floor, but he wanted her to get some fresh air, so they took an elevator straight down to the skyscraper’s lobby. The boulevard outside was almost deserted. A slim road running down the middle was partially hidden behind a long row of tall, bushy evergreen trees. The footpath alongside it was illuminated by slender glowing arches.
“Do you think I’m attractive?” Corrie-Lyn slurred as he encouraged her to walk. Past the skyscraper there were a couple of apartment blocks, all surrounded by raised gardens. Local night birds swooped and flittered silently through the arches. It was a warm air, with the smell of sea ozone accompanying the humid gusts coming in from the coast.
“Very attractive,” Aaron assured her. He wondered if he should insist that she take the detox aerosol he had brought along for this eventuality. The trouble with drinkers of this stature was that they didn’t want to sober up that quickly, especially when they were burdened with as much grief as Corrie-Lyn was.
“Then how come you don’t want me? Is it the drink? Do you not like me drinking?” She broke away to look at him, swaying slightly, her eyes blurred from tears, hauntingly miserable. With her light coat undone to show off the exclusive cocktail dress, she presented a profoundly unappealing sight.
“Business before pleasure,” Aaron said, hoping she would accept that and shut the hell up. He should have caught a taxi from the skyscraper’s platform. As if she finally were picking up on his exasperation, she turned fast and started walking.
Someone appeared on the path barely five meters in front of them, a man in a one-piece suit that still had the remnants of its black stealth envelope swirling like water in low gravity. Aaron scanned around with his full field functions. Two more people were shedding their envelopes as they walked up behind him. His combat routines moved smoothly to active status, accessing the situation. They designated the first of the group to confront them: One. Eighty percent probability he was the commander. The subordinates were tagged Two and Three. His close-range situation exoimage showed all three of them glowing with enrichments. He actually relaxed: By confronting him, they had taken away all choice; with that accepted, there could only be one outcome now. He simply waited for them to present him with the maximum target opportunity.
Corrie-Lyn blinked in mild bewilderment, peering forward at the first man as she clutched her small scarlet bag to her belly. “I didn’t see you. Where were you?”
“You don’t look too good, Your Honor,” One replied. “Why don’t you come along with us.”
Corrie-Lyn pressed back into Aaron’s side, degrading his strike ability by a third. “No,” she moaned. “No, I don’t want to.”
“You’re bringing the Living Dream into disrepute, Your Honor,” One said. “Is that what Inigo would have wanted?”
“I know you,” she said wretchedly. “I’m not going with you. Aaron, don’t leave me. Please.”
“Nobody is going anywhere they don’t want to.”
One did not even look at him. “You. Fuck off. If you ever want a sales meeting with a Councillor, be smart now.”
“Ah, well, now, here’s the thing,” Aaron said affably. “I’m so stupid, I can’t afford an IQ boost come regeneration time. So I just stay this way forever.” Behind him, Two and Three were standing very close. They both drew small pistols. Aaron’s routines identified their hardware as jelly guns, which had been developed a century and a half earlier as a lethal short-range weapon that acted exactly as specified on human flesh. He could feel accelerants slipping through his neurons, quickening his mental reaction time. Biononic energy currents synchronized with them, upgrading his physical responses to match. The effect dragged out spoken words, so much so that he easily could predict what was going to be said long before One finished his sentence.
“Then I’m sorry for you.” One sent a fast message to his subordinates that Aaron intercepted; it was nothing more than a simple code. He did not even need to decrypt it. Both of them raised their weapons. Aaron’s combat routines already were moving him smoothly. He twisted Corrie-Lyn out of the way as he bent down. The first shot from Two’s jelly gun seared through the air where Aaron’s head had been less than a second before. The beam struck the wall, producing a squirt of concrete dust. Aaron’s foot came up fast, smashing into the knee of Three. Their force fields clashed with a screech, electrons flaring in a rosette of blue-white light. The velocity and power behind Aaron’s kick were enough to distort his opponent’s protection. Three’s leg shattered as it was punched backward, throwing his whole body sideways. Aaron’s energy currents formatted a distortion pulse that slammed into One. He was flung back six meters into the garden wall, hitting it with a dull thud. His straining force field pushed out a dangerous bruised purple nimbus as another of Aaron’s distorter pulses pummeled him, trying to shove him through the wall. His back arched at the impact, his force field close to outright failure.
Two was trying to swing his pistol around, tracking a target that was moving with inhuman speed. All his enriched senses revealed was a blurred shape as Aaron danced across the path. He never got a lock. Aaron’s hand materialized out of a dim streak to chop across his throat, overloading the force field. His neck snapped instantly, and his corpse flew through the air. Aaron snatched the jelly gun from Two’s hand at the same time, wrenching the fingers off with a liquid crunching sound. It took Aaron a fraction of a second to spin around again. His force field expanded into the ground, an anchor snatching away inertia, allowing him to stop instantly, the pistol aligned on One as the dazed man was clambering unsteadily to his feet. Blood from the severed fingers dripped down onto the path. One froze, sucking down air as he stared at the nozzle of the jelly gun. Aaron opened his grip, allowing the fingers to slither away. “Who are they?” he yelled at Corrie-Lyn, who was lying on the sodden grass where she’d landed. She was giving One a bewildered look. “Who?” Aaron demanded.
“The … the police. That’s Captain Manby, special protection division.”
“That’s right,” Manby wheezed as he flinched against the pain.
“So you just put that fucking gun down. You’re already drowning in shit so deep that you’ll never see the universe again.”
“Join me at the bottom.” Aaron pressed the trigger on the jelly gun, holding it down on continuous-fire mode. He added his own distortion pulse to the barrage. Manby’s force field held out for almost two seconds before collapsing. The jelly gun pulses struck the exposed body. Aaron turned and fired again, overloading Three’s force field.
Corrie-Lyn threw up as waves of bloody sludge from both ruined corpses cascaded across the ground. She was wailing like a wounded kitten when Aaron hauled her to her feet. “We have to go,” he shouted at her. She shrank back from his hold. “Come on, now! Move!” His u-shadow already was calling down a taxi.
“No,” she whimpered. “No, no. They didn’t … you just killed
them. You killed them.”
“Do you understand what this is?” he growled at her, his voice loud and aggressive; he was using belligerence to keep her off balance. “Do you understand what just happened? Do you? They’re an assassination squad. Ethan wants you dead. Permanently dead. You can’t stay here. They’ll keep coming after you. Corrie-Lyn! I can protect you.”
“Me?” she sobbed. “They wanted me?”
“Yes. Now come on; we’re not safe here.”
“Oh, sweet Ozzie.”
He shook her. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she whispered. By the way she was shaking, Aaron thought she was going into mild shock. “Good.” He started to walk toward the descending taxi, hauling her along, heedless of the way she stumbled to keep up. It was hard not to smile. He could not have delivered a better result to the evening if he had planned it.
Inigo’s First Dream
When Edeard woke, his dream was already a confused fading memory. The same thing happened every morning. No matter how hard he tried, he never could hold on to the images and sounds afflicting him every night. Akeem said not to worry; his dreams were made from the gentle spillage of other sleeping minds around him. Edeard did not believe that the things he dreamed of came from anywhere like their village; the fragments he occasionally managed to cling to were too strange and fascinating for that.
Cool predawn light was showing up the cracks in the window’s wooden shutters. Edeard lay still for a while, cozy under the pile of blankets that covered his cot. It was a big room with whitewashed plaster walls and bare floorboards. The rafters of the hammer-beam roof above were ancient martoz wood that had blackened and hardened over the decades until they resembled iron. There was not much by way of furniture; two-thirds of the floor space was completely empty. Edeard had shoved what was left down to the end that had a broad window. At the foot of the cot was a crude chest where he kept his meager collection of clothes; there was a long table covered in his enthusiastic sketches of possible genistar animals, several chairs, and a dresser with a plain white bowl and a pitcher of water. Over in the corner opposite the cot, the fire had burned out sometime in the night, with a few embers left glimmering in the grate. It was difficult to heat such a large volume, especially in winter, and Edeard could see his breath as a fine white mist.
Technically, he lived in the apprentice dormitory of Ashwell village’s Eggshaper Guild, but he was the only occupant. He had lived there for the last six years, ever since his parents had died when he was eight years old. Master Akeem, the village’s sole remaining shaper, had taken him in after the caravan they had joined to travel through the hills to the east had been attacked by bandits.
Edeard wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and hurried over the cold floor to the small brick-arch fireplace. The embers still were giving off a little heat, warming the clothes he had left on the back of a chair. He dressed hurriedly, pulling up badly worn leather trousers and tucking an equally worn shirt into the waist before struggling into a thick green sweater. As always, the fabric smelled of the stables and their varied occupants, a melange of fur and food and cages, but after six years at the guild he was so used to it that he hardly noticed. He sat back on the cot to pull his boots on; they really were too small for him now. With the last eighteen months seeing more genistars in the stables and Edeard taking on official commission duties, their little branch of the Eggshaper Guild had seen a lot more money coming in. Hardly a fortune, but sufficient to pay for new clothes and boots; it was just that he never had time to visit the cobbler. He winced slightly as he stood up, trying to wriggle his toes, which were squashed together. It was no good; he definitely was going to take an hour out of his busy day to visit the cobbler. He grinned. But not today.
Today was when the village’s new well would be finished. It was a project in which the Eggshaper Guild was playing an unusually large part. Better than that: For him it was an innovative part. Edeard knew how many doubters there were in the village: basically everybody. But Master Akeem had quietly persuaded the elder council to give his young apprentice a chance. They had said yes only because they had nothing to lose.
He made his way downstairs, then hurried across the narrow rear yard to the warmth of the guild dining hall. Like the dormitory, it was a sharp reminder that the Eggshaper Guild had known better times, a lot better. There were still two rows of long bench tables in the big hall, enough to seat fifty shapers and their guests on feast nights. At the far end the huge fireplace had iron baking ovens built into the stonework on either side, and the roasting spit was large enough to handle a whole pig. This morning, the fire was just a small blaze tended by a couple of ge-monkeys. Normally, people did not let the genistars get anywhere near naked flames—they were as skittish as any terrestrial animal—but Edeard’s orders were lucid and embedded deeply enough that the ge-monkeys could manage the routine without panicking.
Edeard sat at the table closest to the fire. His mind directed a batch of instructions to the ge-monkeys by using simple telepathic longtalk. He used a pidgin version of Querencia’s mental language, visualizing the sequence of events he wanted in conjunction with simple command phrases, making sure that the emotional content was zero (so many people forgot that and then could not understand why the genistars did not obey properly). The ge-monkeys started scurrying around; they were big creatures, easily the weight of a full-gown human male, with six long legs along the lower half of the body and six even longer arms on top, the first two pairs so close together that they seemed to be sharing a shoulder joint, while the third pair was set farther back along a very flexible spine. Their bodies were covered in a wiry white fur, with patches worn away on joints and palms to reveal a leathery cinder-colored hide. The head profile was the same as in all the genistar variants: a plain globe with a snout very close to that of a terrestrial dog; the ears were situated on the lower part of the head back toward the stumpy neck, each one sprouting three petals of long creased skin thin enough to be translucent.
A big mug of tea was placed in front of Edeard, swiftly followed by thick slices of toast, a bowl of fruit, and a plate of scrambled eggs. He tucked in heartily enough, already running through the critical part of the day’s operation at the bottom of the well. His farsight picked up Akeem when the old man was still in the lodge, the residence for senior shapers annexed to the hall. Edeard already could perceive through a couple of stone walls, sensing physical structures as if they were shadows, while minds buzzed with an iridescent glow. That vision was of a caliber that eluded a lot of adults; it made Akeem inordinately proud of his apprentice’s ability, claiming his own training was the true key to developing Edeard’s potential.
The old shaper came into the hall to find the ge-monkeys ready with his breakfast. He grunted favorably as he gave Edeard’s shoulder a paternal squeeze. “Did you sense me getting up in my bedroom, boy?” he asked, gesturing at his waiting plate of sausage and tomato.
“No, sir,” Edeard said happily. “Can’t manage to get through four walls yet.”
“Won’t be long,” Akeem said as he lifted his tea. “The way you’re developing, I’ll be sleeping outside the village walls by midsummer. Everyone’s entitled to some privacy.”
“I would never intrude,” Edeard protested. He mellowed and grinned sheepishly as he caught the amusement in the old shaper’s mind. Master Akeem had passed his hundred-eightieth birthday several years back, so he claimed, though he was always vague about the precise year that had happened. Life expectancy on Querencia was supposed to be around two hundred years, though Edeard did not know of anyone in Ashwell or the surrounding villages who actually had managed to live that long. However, Akeem’s undeniable age had given him a rounded face with at least three chins rolling back into a thick neck. A lacework of red and purple capillaries decorated the pale skin of his cheeks and nose, producing a terribly wan appearance. The thin stubble left behind after his perfunctory daily shave was now mostly gray, which didn’t help t
he careworn impression everyone received on seeing him for the first time. Once a week the old man used the same razor on what was left of his silver hair.
Despite his declining years, he always insisted on dressing smartly. His personal ge-monkeys were well versed in laundry work. Today his tailored leather trousers were clean, his boots polished, a pale yellow shirt washed and pressed. He wore a jacket woven from magenta and jade yarn with the egg-in-a-twisted-circle crest of the Eggshaper Guild on the lapel. The jacket might not be as impressive as the robes worn by guild members in Makkathran, but in Ashwell it was a symbol of prestige, earning him respect. None of the other village elders dressed as well.
Edeard sheepishly realized he was fingering his own junior apprentice badge, a simple metal button on his collar; the emblem was similar to Akeem’s, but with only a quarter circle. Half the time he forgot to pin it on in the morning; after all, nobody showed him any respect, ever. But if all went well today, he would be entitled to a badge with half a circle. Akeem said he could never remember anyone attempting a shaping so sophisticated for a senior apprentice assessment.
“Nervous?” the old man asked.
“No,” Edeard said immediately. Then he ducked his head. “They work in the tank, anyway.”
“Of course they do. They always do. Our true skill comes in determining what works in real life. From what I’ve seen, I don’t believe there will be a problem. That’s not a guarantee, mind. Nothing in life is certain.”
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