Mortal Remains

by Christopher Evans

  “Are you alone?” was the first thing Morgen said to Adele.

  “Alone?”

  “Isn’t Fowote with you?”

  Adele turned towards him, making a show of searching the chambers. Tunde shook his head vigorously.

  “No,” she said to the optic. “He’s around somewhere. Probably watching your little beastlings perform. Is something wrong?”

  “No, nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. I’d like you to come over. Bring our three.”

  Adele was surprised. “Why?”

  “I want to see you, that’s all. It’s been a month or more, hasn’t it?”

  “More.”

  “Make it about noon. We’ll eat in the office arbour. I know you like it there.”

  “Just the five of us?”

  “There’s a family matter I want to discuss. Don’t be late.”

  He blanked the optic without further comment.

  Adele turned to Tunde. “Why didn’t you want him to know you were here?”

  Tunde shrugged. “Call it instinct. I thought he wanted to talk to you alone.”

  “Don’t give me that.”

  “Where’s Cori?”

  “Out in the garden having her lessons with my three. Don’t change the subject. What’s going on, Fo?”

  Every mention of the name was a reminder of what a fraud he was. He had bought fake identities for himself and Cori through a contact at Ishtar Transit who owed him a favour, along with passage to Titan. Adele was a fellow Venusian from a similar background to his whom he had met on the flight out: she had been visiting relatives in the Swamplands. They had struck up an immediate rapport, Tunde posing as a mediator on a year’s sabbatical. Though still married, Adele and Morgen had been living apart for some years, and when Tunde proposed a one-year live-in contract, she had immediately accepted. Their marriage had proved surprisingly successful, physically satisfying to them both and free of suspicion. Until now.

  “Maybe you ought to ask Morgen,” he said to her. “He’s the one who sounded cagey.”

  “He hasn’t seen me or the children in the flesh for a while. What’s so suspicious about a family gathering?”

  “Nothing. Forget it.”

  But she obviously wouldn’t; she was a direct woman, emphatic in all she did. Today she was wearing sapphire cosmetics and an indigo thrall whose tight folds emphasized her ampleness. Her uncomplicated attitude towards sex had done much to restore his self-esteem; but though straightforward, she was not lacking in shrewdness.

  “Is it because he didn’t invite you and Cori?”

  “We’ve never met. Why should he?”

  “You’ve never met because you never wanted to.” Her eyes appraised him, and eventually she said, “Are you planning on leaving, Fo?”

  She had him. He decided there was no point in trying to lie.

  “It may be time. We’re coming to the end of the year.”

  “And you don’t want to extend the contract?”

  “It’s not that. I have to get back. To my duties.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “You’re not a mediator. I’ve never believed that. Not from the start.”

  “No?” He checked that the aural was off on the console; it was. “Then what am I?”

  “It doesn’t matter to me. Perhaps that added to the fascination. Your deceit.”

  She really was a desirable woman, and at that moment it pained him to think that she had known him to be a fraud from the start. He sighed. “What can I say? I had good reasons. And I didn’t lie to you about anything else.”

  “We’ve been good together. Good for one another. Can you deny it?”

  “No. I won’t deny it.”

  “But you’re in some sort of trouble.”

  “I may be. If I stay here any longer.”

  “Isn’t it time you told me about it?”

  “That’s one thing I daren’t do. It dates back to before I met you. In the best possible way, it’s none of your business.”

  She considered. “There must be something I can do to help.”

  “You’re better off out of it. You and the children.”

  He knew where to hit her; she immediately became guarded. Ultimately she was a pragmatist who would do anything to protect her offspring.

  “Are we in danger?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Not if you carry on exactly as you intended to today. It may be nothing anyway. But when you get back from Morgen’s we’ll probably be gone.”

  “Cori, too?”

  “I wouldn’t go anywhere without her.”

  Adele rose, approached him. “This is so abrupt, Fo. You gave me no warning.”

  He had to swallow. “I wouldn’t leave if there was any other alternative, I promise you.”

  “Can’t you tell me anything about it?”

  His only response was silence.

  Her eyes were moist, but he knew she wouldn’t make an emotional issue out of it. That wasn’t her way.

  He put his arms around her waist. “I’m really sorry. Apart from anything else, I’m almost out of money.”

  “I’d subsidize you for another year or two. I’ve got enough for us both.”

  “I know you would. But it isn’t a question of whether I want to stay. There’s no alternative.”

  She looked rueful. “It’s been fun.”

  “Sure has.”

  He drew her to him, kissed her lips. She was always responsive, her appetite matching his.

  “You want to extend this farewell?” she suggested mischievously.

  He had to force his desire down. “There’s nothing I’d like better, but any delay increases the risk.”

  She drew back. “Will I hear from you?”

  “I don’t even know where I’m going to be.”

  She put a turquoise fingernail to his chin. “I’m going to miss you.”

  “It works both ways. I’ll never forget you, Adele.”

  “You’d better not!”

  She gave him a huge kiss, and then, suddenly businesslike, announced that she was going to take a long dip in the pulsator before she left.

  As she rode the stairway upwards, Tunde said, “A last favour. Can I borrow one of the strollers?”

  “Feel free. Take the Psyche. She’s got the fastest turn of speed.”

  Then the stairway carried her out of sight.

  Tunde stood there for a little while, staring around at the spacious light-filled curves of the mansion. He had been perfectly content living in her home, a secure place for himself and for Cori, with considerable luxuries. And Morgen had seemed to accept his reclusiveness—until now. As a fugitive, Tunde had learned to be suspicious of everyone and everything. It was Morgen’s insistence that Adele bring only their three children that had clinched his feeling that something was afoot.

  He went out through the mansion’s throatway into the garden.

  Cori loved it here, he knew. The garden was extensive, filled with feathertrees, spiral cacti and stretches of glaucous lawn. Cori was sitting with the other children around a tutor that was patiently explaining the fundamentals of gravity control, its optic illustrating the point with a cutaway hologram of a gravity trail. Cori wasn’t paying much attention; she was curling her bare feet together and trying to catch a jumpjack that was flipping around her on the grass.

  Tunde crouched beside her and whispered, “I might test you on this later.”

  She shrugged. “I did it at primary.” Her voice took on a stilted pedantic drone: “Concentrated nuclear matter is laid down in swathes to a density corresponding to standard gravitational pull. Such matter is produced in the lower intestinal tracts of fluxors as a byproduct of energy generation in power plantations. The process involves the biofusion of baryonic matter blah blah blah.” She squinted up at him. “See?”

  “I’m impressed with your memory,” he told her. “But do you understand it?”

  She gave him a look as if to say: Don’t insult me.

 
; “Want to go shopping?” he asked.

  “Yes, please!”

  Adele’s three children—two boys and a girl—were four years younger, but Cori had been happy in their company, had enjoyed being the older sister. She had insisted on keeping her true name, though she had readily agreed to the rest of his deception, seeing it as an adult game and playing her part to perfection. In fact, they had told no other lies, and had become a real part of Adele’s family. It had been good for Cori, good for him.

  “Listen,” he said quietly. “How would you feel if I said we’re going to have to leave?”

  She captured the jumpjack and held it up to him in her cupped hands. Its tiny triangular head poked out, forked pink tongue flashing. Though he had told Adele that both he and Cori would be going, it had occurred to him that he should take nothing for granted.

  “Would you want to stay, or come with me?”

  “Come with you, of course,” she said, as if it had been the stupidest question in the world. Then she said, “Ouch!” as the jumpjack nipped her finger and hopped away through the grass.

  He took her inside to her room and told her to pack any belongings she might want to take with her. She did not question him, but he felt obliged to make it clear that they might be fugitives again. This she also seemed to accept. Though their lives had been more settled, even carefree, in the past year he’d always continued to behave as if it was a temporary arrangement, and he suspected she had too. Cori was shrewd beyond her years.

  He waited until Adele and her children had left, then drove the stroller around to the side of the house where a thick stand of hydratia screened them from view but allowed them to see the main driveway to the entrance. Bees droned in the azure flowers, and the heat lay heavy on them, even with the vehicle fully venting. Tunde instructed it to stay on idle.

  “Why are we waiting here?” Cori wanted to know.

  “There’s something I need to check. Be patient.”

  They did not have long to wait. Presently a big ground car rolled up and several figures got out. Though they were not in uniform, Tunde was sure they were politia: they were discreetly armed with quellsticks. Quietly they surged through the garden towards the mansion, going in through different portals. Tunde drove the stroller off at speed down the secluded side road that coiled away from the house towards the main highway.

  It was an hour’s drive to Antaeus, but Tunde only went halfway, pulling over at a service umbilical where a passenger blimp had just tethered. The blimp was taking tourists on the scenic flight to the city, and Tunde bought passage for both himself and Cori. He instructed the stroller to take the long route home via the Atlas Chasms, a route that would take the best part of a day even at maximum speed; should any politia decide to track down the vehicle they would have a high time following it through tunnels, over bridges, up and down mountain roads where flocks of fledgling ships were a major hazard in addition to the precipitous bends.

  The blimp was full with a gaggle of Mercurian tourists who were expressive in their appreciation of every spectacle. They skirted the shores of the Hercules Sea, where surfers rode the breakers on pneumatic floatfish; they sailed over the Argentine Delta, where hordes of newly hatched shuttles grazed on silverleaf that shone like white fire; they circled the Great Shrine of Oldengland, reputedly built by one of the architects of the Noosphere from the skeletons and ceramic superstructures of decrepit ships who had come to die in the bone-strewn marshlands that surrounded it. The shrine was a marvel of many-tusked domes and ribbed balustrades, much of it open to the air. Despite himself, Tunde was as impressed as the other passengers; he had always meant to take Cori on a day trip there but had never got around to it.

  He bought frost fountains for the two of them, trying to make a holiday of it. Presently Antaeus hove into view, a compact metropolis of fluted towers and sinuous segmented habitats that formed whorls and spirals around leafy open spaces. After landing, he took Cori to a gastrodome overlooking the Oline Falls; they shared a bowl of fruit mélange while watching the fiery torrent cascade down to extinction in the Hercules River far below. Cori, subdued until now, began to perk up as he let her lead him around the shopping arteries and indulged her by buying her a picture book about the Seventy Wonders of Old Earth.

  His mind was elsewhere: he was thinking of Marea. She had been increasingly in his thoughts over the past month, and a few days ago he had taken the risk and put a transplanetary call through to her abode, only to be informed when he returned for the reply that the number was no longer operational, her house no longer extant, and could he please identify himself? He had cut the connection immediately, grateful that he was using a public booth. But that was probably how the authorities had traced him to Titan; either that, or Morgen had suspected something and got in touch with them.

  Later, by dint of the most delicate investigation in one of the library files Adele kept on the prematurely deceased, he discovered that both her husbands were dead; but her own fate was unrecorded. It was ominous. And now they were after him, had been probably ever since he’d taken the womb from her.

  A pager in the atrium was reminding everyone not to forget the public vote. This was another thing that had been denied him ever since he fled Venus. If he used a console in any way that required retina scans, they would track him down immediately.

  What was he to do now? He still had the urge to find Marea and, if she was still alive, to make amends to her in whatever way he could.

  Cori was showing him a picture of the last of the Seventy Wonders, the Leaning Tower of Babylos. A huge screw-ridged stone needle, it swayed in the wind as an electric storm raged around it, its tiers crammed with humans who were crying out in a multitude of discordant tongues.

  “Do you think it was anything really like that, Father?” she asked.

  “Do you?”

  She sighed. “I hate it when adults turn your questions around.”

  The tower launched itself towards the heavens on a column of flame, the people aboard it wailing in misery and fear.

  “Something like that could never fly,” Cori said dismissively, “let alone take our ancestors to new worlds.”

  “It’s symbolic. Mythical. The essence of the truth is probably in there somewhere.”

  Across the atrium there was a small shrine, little more than a brief stopping-off point for weary shoppers.

  “Did your mother ever let you go inside the garden shrine?” he asked Cori.

  Cori snapped her book shut. “She always said I was too young.”

  In most societies, children did not commune with the Noosphere at least until puberty; but it was only tradition.

  “Would you like to come inside with me now?”

  “Yes, please!”

  She loved anything new. He took her hand and led her into the place.

  It was as small inside as out, holding no more than thirty cubicles arranged on two levels. There was only one intercessor, a rather tired looking woman in a crumpled plaid body-wrap who eyed Cori suspiciously.

  “Will you need a booth for two?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Tunde said.

  “Is this her first time?”

  “No,” said Cori.

  The woman seemed unconvinced but she did not demur, leading them to a cubicle in a shadowy corner that had two seats. As soon as they were alone, Tunde said, “You told a fib!”

  “I didn’t.” She nibbled her lip: guilty secret time. “Me, Es and Maxim sneaked into Mother’s shrine last year. We spoke to Grandma Karin and Great-Uncle Orvalle.”

  He put a finger under her chin. “Is this the truth?”

  She nodded seriously.

  “What happened?”

  “I think they were both annoyed with us for using the shrine without permission. They were grumpy, scolding.”

  This sounded like Orvalle, at least, a gruff customer who would brook no nonsense. Karin was, he assumed, one of Yolande’s ancestors; she had never spoken to him about the deceas
ed in her family.

  The cubicle held two hoods and a joint input glove for their clasped hands. Tunde fitted the hoods over their heads, checked that they were on-line, then directed Cori to focus on the icon of a constantly blossoming sapphire rose.

  “Try to think of nothing,” he told her, “or concentrate on yourself and your family. Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not!” she said eagerly.

  They put their free hands into the prayer terminals, and immediately he could feel the tingle radiating up his brainstem.

  It was well over a year since he had last communed with the Noosphere. Most of his ancestors were fisherfolk of limited intellect and interests with whom he had little in common; it was snobbish, perhaps, but he always felt that they resented him. Yet he needed them now, needed some contact, some sense that he was not alone.

  There was always a sensation, when you first entered the Noosphere, of a vast populated darkness, huge in size and teeming with mentalities, only the tiniest fraction of whom were accessible. He felt like a blind man in an immense dark hall filled with strangers, his senses pricked for the presence of someone he knew. This time it was a little different because Cori was with him, her smaller, untutored mind drawn next to his, a little fearful yet avid for experience.

  He fully anticipated that his first contact would be with Orvalle, a boisterous spirit who had known him as a small child before he entered the Noosphere. But what he encountered instead was a profound sense of strangeness and dislocation, a single mentality which he did not recognize, a presence quite distinct and unfamiliar. His own surprise was echoed by that of Cori, who was undergoing a similar experience.

  Both mind and emotion formed the question: “Who are you?”, but he was shocked when after a brief silence the reply came in an actual word, as if someone had spoken inside his head:

  “Nathan.”

  • • •

  I surfaced as if catapulted out of a fever dream. My whole body was drenched with sweat, the memory of the cubicle, the infinite swarming darkness, still vivid. It was my own voice, speaking back to me. I had told him the name they had given me. I had spoken, and he had heard me.