Memory Seed

by Stephen Palmer

  ‘Yes, we’ve both got the same aim. To find out more. Come on.’

  Zinina sprang to her feet and pulled up the cover. A metal ladder allowed them to descend.

  Immediately the atmosphere of the tunnel attacked them. It was hot, with a strong chemical smell that seemed to make the place as dead as an oven. All around them cables were strung, some as thick as tree trunks snaking across the floor, others thin or just bare wires. And everywhere there lay glittering junction boxes, hastily screwed repairs, and piles of rubble. A glinting monoline ran along the bottom. Pin-point lights added to the illumination provided by the bacteria torch and the lamp. It was a claustrophobic place, chaotic and unpleasant. They began to walk, but soon the heat made Zinina’s jump-suit unbearable. Graaff-lin was sweating, and her face was flushed dark in the blue light, as though she was bruised.

  ‘Gotta take this off,’ Zinina gasped. She flung aside her protectives and struggled out of the one-piece, folding both and stowing them on a power converter, then pulling her boots back on. Graaff-lin did likewise, and Zinina was surprised to see that her underwear was rather more colourful than her personality. In fact, it seemed of jannitta origin. Zinina, by contrast, wore a single vest garment, grey and sweaty. Graaff-lin was very thin, her hip-bones clearly defined, her thighs thin, ribs showing, and Zinina found it hard to mask the revulsion she felt at the sight. Graaff-lin showed no womanly belly, and Zinina wondered if the aamlon was sterile. Most probably she was. They walked on. In underwear and high boots they both looked silly, and they laughed at one another.

  After an hour Zinina was disconcerted to see a black hatch that signified the entrance to the Citadel. She had never walked this tunnel – and now Graaff-lin had spotted the confusion that plagued her.

  ‘Zinina, I thought you remarked that we would climb up underneath the Citadel?’

  ‘I did… we should have. We must be at the same level as the ordinary city, unless there’s been a tiny slope up all the way.’

  Graaff-lin pointed. ‘That is the correct hatch?’

  ‘Sure. I know it. I’ve seen plans, pictures. See that number? Hatch DDG/54. That’ll take us into the Citadel pyuter zone.’

  Graaff-lin seemed unconvinced.

  ‘Look,’ Zinina said, adopting a wheedling voice, ‘I’ve seen this hatch lots of times. There’s a little tunnel, then we drop down into a chamber. I’ve never been inside, but it’s there. We’ve come this far, we gotta go on.’

  ‘All right,” said Graaff-lin, ‘but you go first.’

  Zinina pulled off the hatch, reached inside for the security bud, and squeezed to disable the alarm. She jumped inside, trying to impress Graaff-lin with her physicality in order to reassure her, and turned to help her friend up.

  ‘That’s it. Just follow me,’ she said.

  Zinina crawled to the end of the tunnel. There was a hatch at the end, which she pushed off.

  ‘Rien Zir! The whole place is gold.’

  She jumped out of the tunnel into a chamber like the inside of a honeycomb. The floor was pitted, and the chamber’s three exits seemed to lead off at odd angles. It was as if the place had been moulded by the work of some giant insect burrowing at random. The walls, which on one side were thin enough to be translucent, were covered with cryptic bas-relief designs in such a way that the surfaces were all mellow ochre, but the raised edges were crimson. Looking close by a wall gave the strange impression of the structure curving in the opposite direction to that of reality.

  The chamber was empty. Zinina took out a purse of miniature catseyes and placed one at an exit. ‘This is so we don’t get lost,’ she explained.

  Graaff-lin produced a map pyuter from her kit and clipped it to her bra strap. ‘This will map us automatically. I thought we agreed to use it?’

  Zinina, who distrusted much technology, particularly the older things that nobody knew how to work any more, glanced at the pyuter. Sceptically she replied, ‘If you don’t mind we’ll use both methods.’

  Graaff-lin agreed, but was clearly irritated.

  They walked into the next chamber. There was a sweet odour in both chambers – not honey, rather something more herbal, that reminded Zinina of her days patrolling the Citadel. She wondered if it was a drug. ‘I wonder if we’re far under the Citadel,’ she mused. ‘Nobody except them in the Red Brigade is supposed to know how many floors there are underneath the streets. I reckon we’re right in the heart of the place. I reckon this whole tumulus is bubbly inside, don’t you?’

  ‘It certainly might be.’

  They explored further, Zinina dropping catseyes at the borders between chambers. As they penetrated further, the rooms began to contain things, pyuters mostly, or so Graaff-lin said. There were clusters of giant mushrooms with perspex tops, spirals of ultramarine weed hanging from the ceiling and pulsing with light – optical processing units, Graaff-lin said, grown from the seeds of mutated banana trees – and there were many screens, each individual, each flickering with multiple layers of information, like the turbid depths of a river. Zinina pressed her eyes against these screens to see the deepest layers possible, but she always received the impression that much more knowledge dwelt inside the velvety disks.

  Graaff-lin settled in a chamber that contained a pool surrounded by mushroom-pyuters. ‘I think it is time to tap into their sources,’ she said.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Zinina encouraged, sitting cross-legged to keep watch, a thrumming needle rifle in her lap.

  Silence fell. Graaff-lin spoke to the pyuter networks, pressing portions of the perspex occasionally, but mostly communicating in aamlon. Zinina recognised many words because of their similarity to Kray tongue. She kept one eye on a small screen nearby, mounted on a pole.

  Graaff-lin didn’t speak for a minute, then said, ‘This is becoming very complex. I’m not sure what I’ve discovered... What time is it? Is it time to go?’

  ‘An hour or so left,’ Zinina replied.

  The minutes passed. Zinina estimated that the night had three hours to run. She looked around. The nearest wall was eggshell thin, light from behind making it glow and sparkle like jaundiced opal. She turned her gaze to the screen. A sentence flashed by.

  ‘Graaff-lin?’

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘I thought it said “dwan” just then.’

  Graaff-lin paused. She seemed tired. There were black circles under her eyes, and those eyes seemed to have lost their shine. ‘It may have. Wait, there may be a lexicon. I suppose I could ask.’

  ‘Yes, ask.’

  ‘A dwan, apparently, is a garden for noophytes.’

  ‘And what’s a noophyte?’

  ‘I don’t know. It is not listed. But look at this map.’

  Zinina moved closer to the screen. ‘This is the Citadel, this circle here. What do you suppose all these lines are, radiating out from it?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘I think they’re pyuter mainlines. I’m going to take a copy of this.’

  Graaff-lin rummaged through her kit once more and produced a sheet of plastic, which she shook the dust from. ‘This will copy the screen. It’s the old saliva type. Would you, er, mind?’

  Zinina did not follow. ‘Mind what?’

  ‘Just spit on it. I’ve got a touch of ‘flu, you see.’

  Zinina spat on the plastic, and was disconcerted to see a faint green trail as the saliva fell. Graaff-lin shook the sheet and the fluid spread like a drop of oil on water. Then she pressed the plastic to the screen, waited, and pulled it off. There was a crackle of static.

  ‘There.’ Graaff-lin held it up to the light. A colour copy of the pyuter image had been made.

  ‘What else have you discovered?’ asked Zinina.

  ‘These noophytes seem to be repositories of knowledge. But information is limited. It is almost as if the noophytes navigate the shafts and lodes of data in this place, and have a say in how it exists.’

  Zinina shivered. She felt cold. ‘You mean they’re alive?’

 
‘I think probably not, although one seems to have been given the name Laspetosyne... Laspetosyne, the name means nothing to me. Most likely they are gargantuan memories that have some sort of defence system. This makes a sort of sense. She who controls knowledge controls people. Knowledge is domination, Zinina.’

  ‘Look some more,’ Zinina urged.

  Graaff-lin did so. As the hour came to a close, however, she gasped, and sat back from the mushroom she was talking with.

  ‘What?’ Zinina said, clutching Graaff-lin’s shoulder.

  ‘My temple. The Dodspaat temple is part of this system.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  Graaff-lin moved away from the pool. ‘I must have been mistaken. I was trying to find out if the Portreeve’s plan controlled individual people. I ignored the Portreeve and the Red Brigade and there seemed to be a connection with my temple. No, it cannot be. Anyhow, I have lost the link. It’s like trying to build a house with the aerial seeds of dandelions–’

  ‘Sssh!’ Zinina hissed, grabbing Graaff-lin’s arm. She had heard a clunk from the next chamber. In seconds she was standing alert, rifle ready. ‘Stay here.’

  Graaff-lin nodded, fear in her face. Zinina ran silently to the archway and peered around the wall, but saw nothing. It was another pyuter room. She scanned the nooks and crannies. Was that a movement? She caught a glimpse of something the size of a rat. Something metal.

  She relaxed. ‘Just some pyuter vermin,’ she whispered to Graaff-lin.

  ‘Let’s at least–’

  ‘Don’t raise your voice. Shush!’

  Graaff-lin paused. ‘I said, let us at least – oh! What’s that?’ She pointed behind Zinina.

  Zinina turned to see shadows on the wall – the grotesque shapes of creeping units with spider legs, and chunkier things on wheels. ‘Run,’ she said. ‘I’ll follow you and pick up the catseyes. Quick!’

  They ran. In ten minutes they were back at the hatch, faces and bodies flushed, Zinina frightened, Graaff-lin gasping for breath. The creeping machines had not managed to follow them. Too late, Zinina realised that they had left the plastic map behind.

  ‘Quick, into the tunnel.’ They would have to trust to luck that no pyutons or survey teams were working.

  They crawled along the connecting passage and into the service tunnel, dropping down into what seemed an even more chemical-laden atmosphere. Judging from the smell of sparks and steel something had trundled along the monorail. Sweat flying, they ran back along the tunnel, Zinina looking over her shoulder every minute to check for further automata, until fifteen minutes had passed and she began to relax.

  Halfway back she caught sight of a body up ahead. In the gloom, with cables everywhere and shadows confusing her vision, it seemed immobile. She gripped Graaff-lin’s shoulder and pointed. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I cannot see,’ Graaff-lin replied, squinting. ‘We had better be careful.’

  Closer, Zinina was able to see that the body of a young woman, dressed in an emerald coloured one-piece and low boots, lay close to the monorail, but how she came to be there and why she was unconscious, or dead, was impossible to determine. The costume was not that of any defender Zinina knew. With utmost caution, she approached.

  She bent over the figure. The woman was breathing.

  ‘I can hear rumbling,’ Graaff-lin whispered.

  Zinina placed her ear to the rail. ‘Carts,’ she said. ‘About forty seconds away. Big loaders by the sound of it, but only two or three of them.’

  ‘Will they see us?’

  Zinina scanned the tunnel. No time to lose. ‘It’ll be pyuter-run, but them carts have owl eyes. Quick, behind that power thing. Help me carry the woman.’

  Twenty yards away a large converter stood, cables sprouting from it like the leaves of a palm. They hauled the woman across, hid her under cable-nets and a fragment of tarpaulin, then crouched behind the converter. The carts, three of them, rumbled by, a large black disk on the front that Zinina knew to be the pyuter eye. Once the gusting air had died down she stood up.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘who’s this woman?’

  ‘It is surely too dark to see,’ Graaff-lin complained, ‘and dawn will soon come. Let’s just climb out of this awful tunnel.’

  ‘We’ll have to carry her.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The final half-hour was difficult, with the heat, the acrid atmosphere, and the fear of further carts or pyutons combining to cause plenty of curses and grunts of exertion. Zinina would have liked to have left the woman to her fate, but it was far more important to know why she was in such a tunnel, a place Zinina thought only she, barring defenders, knew about.

  At the place where their Kray clothes were hidden they dressed. It was all Zinina could do to stop herself ripping the constricting, uncomfortable things off her body, which itched with sweat and grime, but in minutes they would be in city alleys and she would have no choice. At least it would be cool outside. They struggled through the concrete rooms and tunnels, then at the final room Zinina took a wooden pallet to stand on and pushed out the metal cover. Rain swept in, and with it the familiar city smells of rotting vegetation, sewage and methane. For a few seconds she stood still to revel in it.

  Once they were out, they decided to take the woman to the Infirmary. Zinina wanted her conscious, so she could be questioned.

  ‘How about that wheelbarrow?’ Graaff-lin suggested. So they pushed the woman to the Infirmary in a wheelbarrow.

  The Infirmary was a rambling building, parts of it so rotten there were plastic stays and scaffolding holding it together, its frontage a jumble of doors, shuttered windows and miscellaneous lamps. This frontage stretched for three hundred yards. Opposite it lay a plaza, the main feature of which was one of Kray’s few remaining brass-men, a supine toy heated internally by warm water with a large penis jutting out perpendicular to the verdigris-sheened body. In earlier days such brass-men were a public service provided by the authorities for those citizens who wished to disport themselves, and many had indeed ridden and enjoyed, but now, with Kray ravaged by green and turning in upon itself, few people dared risk infection. Zinina noticed ivy growing out of the brass-man’s eyes and nostrils. She wheeled her charge into the Infirmary’s reception room and called for help.

  ‘May I see your kit?’ an orderly asked, approaching them. She was small, and seemed tired. Her black clothes were damp.

  Zinina showed her the kit number, then explained. ‘This is a friend of ours, we found her unconscious. Can you help please?’

  The orderly asked that the woman be taken to a medical room. There, lying on a bed under a bright anjiq, they were able to see her properly.

  Immediately Zinina was struck by some odd facts. She glanced at Graaff-lin, but the aamlon seemed very tired; not concentrating. Zinina comforted her, rubbing her back and saying, ‘Go sit down. I’ll deal with this.’

  With Graaff-lin out of the way and the orderly preparing to loosen the woman’s clothes, Zinina examined her. Although she was bald, Zinina noticed that her scalp had very recently been shaved, and not well, for there were cut marks. Most unusual. In addition her ear lobes were pierced, though this had been hidden by make-up, now crumbling away. And Zinina, studying the fingers, noticed that although there were no rings, there were small indentations at the base of every finger. The evidence was circumstantial, but here, it seemed, was a priestess of Rien Zir trying to appear a normal Krayan.

  The orderly removed the woman’s jacket. Zinina saw blood on an arm. Instinctively she jumped back and shouted, ‘Wrap it up! Wrap it! Wash it off quickly.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said the orderly. Zinina stared. She could not look at the wound. The thought that it had been so close to her, and she had not known it was there, made her retch.

  ‘Zinina,’ said Graaff-lin, her face and voice full of worry.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Zinina said, pushing Graaff-lin back into her seat.

  ‘It’s dried blood,’ the orderly said.
‘This is only a long scratch that’s bled a lot some hours back, and has closed. I’ll disinfect it and administer some antibiotics. Your friend is unconscious from gas inhalation, by the way. Propane by the smell of her clothes. I’ll have her come round in a while.’

  ‘We’ll stay,’ Zinina said. ‘We have to take her home.’

  ‘Home?’ queried Graaff-lin.

  ‘To the temple,’ Zinina said firmly.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the orderly, ‘but you do have a connection with this woman?’

  Zinina grinned, moving away. ‘A close friend. Very close. We’ll wait outside ’til she’s come round.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘C’mon, Graaff-lin,’ Zinina said, gesturing at the door.

  They waited. The blackness of the night had been replaced by dawn’s dull grey, and there were crimson-clad defenders walking the streets, alongside other Krayans.

  After an hour, they saw the orderly bring out the woman, conscious but dizzy. ‘We’ll take you home,’ Zinina said to their charge, silently rejoicing that the woman was not rational. Using her most soothing voice she guided the wobbling priestess into the street.

  ‘The wheelbarrow,’ she said to Graaff-lin once they were out of earshot.

  ‘To my house?’ Graaff-lin asked.

  The priestess pulled herself away and said, ‘Thank you... but no. I must go.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Zinina demanded, standing hands on hips in front of the woman.

  ‘Arvendyn.'

  Zinina sneered, as if disbelieving. ‘So, Arvendyn, what were you doing in that tunnel?’

  ‘You’ll be hurt to know,’ Arvendyn replied in her thin, breathy voice, ‘that I can’t tell you.’

  Zinina controlled the anger she felt.

  ‘We rescued you,’ Graaff-lin said. ‘You’re lucky to be alive.’

  ‘I know, but I can’t tell you.’

  Zinina stood close. ‘Don’t think you’ll just walk away from this, lady. I know you’re a priestess. I know you’re on a job for Taziqi. Now speak up, else mix with trouble.’

  ‘I am a vector of the Goddess,’ came the calm reply. ‘Nothing you can say or do can change my mind. I can’t thank you enough for rescuing me, and I’m in your debt–'