Memory Seed

by Stephen Palmer

  Zinina considered all this. It was common knowledge, at least to revellers, that the Earth was trying to remove all traces of humanity from its crust. Now it had breached the walls of the final city. Once, it was rumoured, people and land were one. When the land altered in such a way as to change the life upon it, that life became unbalanced. Zinina had been taught that the original problem was people existing in the first place, and for some time she had believed that. But later, thinking about it for herself, she realised that it should be possible for people and land to relate harmoniously, if only the right attitude could be cultivated. Now it was too late. They moved on.

  ‘How about lunch?’ Graaff-lin said. ‘I’m hungry.’

  Zinina looked around the chamber in which they stood. It was dry in the centre, and there was a large purple root on which they could sit. ‘Here do?’

  They ate their food, drank a bottle of water each, then carried on exploring. Now they were finding less complete rooms, although many of these contained superior friezes, some retaining original colours. Graaff-lin paused at a group of landscapes and, when she did not move for some minutes, Zinina joined her. Graaff-lin pointed, saying, ‘What’s that white disk?’

  Zinina approached until her nose was inches away from the picture. ‘That’s the moon. Didn’t you know there used to be a moon?’

  Graaff-lin nodded, but seemed uncertain.

  ‘Hoy, you have led a sheltered life,’ Zinina remarked. ‘Long ago there used to be a moon as well as a sun. Don’t you know the legend of the Goddess and the Fungus?’

  ‘Such stuff is not learnt by priestesses of the Dodspaat.’

  ‘According to the legend, Rien Zir was strolling across the firmament, just out for a walk or something, and she happened to notice a fungus spore shooting away from her towards her sister Seylene.’

  ‘That is the moon?’

  ‘That’s the moon. Anyhow, this spore came from her own belly-button–’

  ‘Omphalos,’ Graaff-lin interrupted.

  Zinina smiled a frigid smile. ‘Navel. Whatever. So, Rien Zir tried to stop this spore from flying away with her hand, but she couldn’t, and it hit her sister. Then the spore began to grow, and nothing Rien Zir did could stop it from eating away at her sister, like a sort of silicon leprosy. So eventually Seylene, from all the agony I suppose, was completely transformed, and became a flower shape. The Spaceflower, in fact. So that’s the origin of the Spaceflower.’

  Graaff-lin nodded. ‘You have to look at these legends with a metaphorical eye, Zinina, an eye you do not possess, I think. Obviously Seylene is this ancient moon and Rien Zir personifies the Earth. No doubt this lone spore symbolises some event.’ She paused. ‘I suppose it’s not impossible that the spore was the Silver Seed itself.’

  Zinina was stunned by this simple statement, so casually uttered.

  ‘It is possible,’ Graaff-lin went on. ‘Remember, Arrahaquen said that Arvendyn was implicated by Citadel spies in the search for the Silver Seed. Your legend concerns a real object, the Spaceflower. Reality and fantasy intertwine.’

  Zinina had never thought to read any deeper meaning into the old stories. ‘How could we find out? We ain’t found no trace of Arvendyn here.’

  ‘Look at these friezes with open eye and mind.’

  ‘But could you do that? I mean, with all your Hu Junuq training and that?’

  ‘Zinina, I shall do my best, if you are trying to imply that my faith leaves me with a closed mind. As for the Silver Seed, I think it is a legend, nothing more. Probably the priestesses of the Gedeese Veert have been convinced by Arvendyn that it still exists, so they are looking for it. They will fail, since the Dodspaat alone promulgate truth.’

  They departed the room and entered an open area. The rain pattered down upon the grass and the date leaves, and left sparkling traces as rivulets ran down the bark, for every surface around them was imbued with a fungal luminescence, giving them the feeling that they were inside a faery grotto. A gusty wind had picked up, and Zinina knew that heavy rain would follow. As they walked on, through a statue-lined boulevard and towards a series of free-standing metal walls, Zinina asked, ‘How would you interpret these statues, then?’

  Graaff-lin studied them, shielding her eyes from the rain. She drew breath to speak, but a tremor shook the ground. When it died she said, ‘Well, they seem to depict a group of people, though they don’t seem to have proper faces. I expect that means they have no identity. Perhaps they were pyuton heroes or something.’

  ‘But pyutons are characters.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Graaff-lin became interested in the statues, counting them – there were eighteen – and studying their costume and their arrangement. ‘Each has a flower for a face, and each is covered in miniature hieroglyphics. Look, it is as if they have been written by spiders.’

  Zinina walked up to the nearest statue, which was a trifle taller than she, and saw the truth of Graaff-lin’s observation. This one had a primrose-like face.

  ‘Yet they seem to have emotional expressions,’ Graaff-lin continued. ‘These are beautiful, rare objects.’

  ‘They were carved by laser, you can see the glassy sheen.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I can... and look Zinina, we have stumbled across something here. Praise the Dodspaat! Look, each one carries a small seed with a piece of wool for a wriggly tail.’

  ‘Seed?’ Zinina said. ‘You mean the silver one?’

  ‘They can’t all be the Silver Seed.’ Graaff-lin let her gaze range over every statue. ‘I don’t know. I shall have to consider it.’

  Disappointed, Zinina nodded. As dusk approached they ate a final meal, drank all but one bottle of water, then began the trek west.

  CHAPTER 9

  The winds strengthened through the night that Zinina and Graaff-lin spent sleeping off the fatigue of trekking through the Andromeda Quarter, and the rain became torrential. Much damage was done, particularly to the northerly quarters of Kray, the Green and the Archaic, and also to some of the older buildings in the Harbour Quarter, where few people now lived. By morning there were gales shrieking off the ocean. Zinina looked out into the street, to see that most Krayans felt too intimidated by the weather to leave their hovels and garrets. The streets were empty of people but full of slates and rubble.

  And storms meant more power cuts. The Power Station, which was located high up in the Green Quarter, operated on a schedule composed of chance and poor management. Already today there had been two short cuts, and bulletins on the Citadel networks hinted at longer ones to come. It was clear that now Kray had been breached the Power Station had only a short life remaining in which to splutter out electricity.

  Graaff-lin possessed rechargeable batteries for her pyuter rigs, thin cylinders that smelled of grease and acid, but not everyone was so fortunate. Soon, Krayans would have something else to complain about. But not those who lived in the Citadel, of course. They had their own power supply.

  Graaff-lin went to her temple next morning – she worked on alternate days – but returned unhappy. For a second time Katoh-lin had requested that she deliver a parcel to the Citadel, and she was beginning to feel suspicious, for there was no reason why some junior clerk could not perform the task. She held a crimson pass in her hand. ‘It was warm,’ she said, puzzled, ‘most definitely warm.’

  Zinina shrugged. ‘I expect she took it out her back pocket.’

  ‘No, it lay in a drawer.’

  ‘Maybe it was over a heater.’

  Graaff-lin would not accept any of this. ‘Something is going to happen. I can feel it. The Dodspaat are going to manifest something for me.’

  ‘You’re just worried,’ Zinina replied, trying to remain calm.

  ‘Then how do you explain a weapon appearing in my locker?’

  Zinina perked up at this. ‘Do you think you’ve been set up?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd. Who would wish to set me up? Katoh-lin?’

  Zinina turned on the music channel of a pyuter rig
, but despite the fact that she turned the volume up, the sound of an aamlon string and hound quintet did not mask what followed. Both women jumped out of their seats as the thunderous rumble of an explosion made the shutters rattle and the floor tremble. A pair of wall-mounted azure photoplankton tubes flickered, and the nutrition sticks inside them crumbled and dissolved.

  ‘Uqallavaz tq! What in all Kray was that?’ Zinina shouted.

  Both women ran to the nearest window and peered out. Dusk had arrived, and because of that they were able to see a bloated mushroom of orange flame and black smoke billowing out of the side of the Citadel.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ Zinina suggested, ‘get a better view.’

  They hurried through the trapdoor and from the roof window saw what was now a seething mass of smoke drifting north across the Citadel. Soon it would cross the river and begin to smother the Mercantile Quarter.

  ‘That’ll come here,’ Zinina breathed. ‘We better secure every window. Could be poison. Come on, it’ll be here in minutes, sea wind’s blowing it.’

  While Zinina sealed every window with its zipper-curtain, and sprayed foam into the cracks around the front door, Graaff-lin tried to worm her way into the official networks in an attempt to catch snatches of defender conversation. However, the best she could do was pick up pyuters talking to one another. Eventually an official message appeared, explaining that everyone was to remain indoors for an hour. A transformer had overloaded and ignited its own mountings.

  Zinina scoffed at this. ‘No way is a transformer going to cause that much smoke. They’re lying. I’m going to watch from upstairs. You keep an eye on the networks. Try to ease yourself into the emergency chit-chat.’

  After an hour, all that remained of the incident were a few stray wisps of heavy smoke. No flames licked the tumulus. Zinina knew that the emergency services up there were superb, and it was likely that the fire had been smothered by foam in minutes. But she remained suspicious of the official explanation, and tried to remember what exactly had stood on that part of the tumulus.

  ~

  Two days after the great explosion Graaff-lin fell ill. Always thin, she seemed as gaunt as a dying reveller as she lay in bed with a temperature and pain in her chest and stomach. Graaff-lin, through gritted teeth, said she only needed rest and the painkillers that Zinina would find in her valise. Rummaging through the bag, Zinina was disconcerted to find twenty hundred-packs of ampoules, each containing a thick yellow liquid. This was a considerable supply, implying Graaff-lin had laid in stocks for a serious illness.

  Zinina returned and questioned Graaff-lin, but she refused to answer, so Zinina departed. Occasionally, she would hear muttered aamlon curses. At least, she presumed they were curses. It might almost be worth putting a translation pyuter in her room to see what she was saying…

  But Zinina’s troubles were far from over. As she pottered around the terracotta pitcher room, polishing the two globes with a duster and stroking them like puppies, there came the twin beep of Arrahaquen’s ‘ficus’ line, and she rushed through the house to take the message at Graaff-lin’s main rig. ‘Yes?’

  Arrahaquen was distraught. ‘Zinina, I’m in trouble. Had to leave the Citadel! Being chased.’ She was gasping for breath, as though she had been running.

  ‘Chased?’ repeated Zinina, shaken. ‘Chased? Who by?’

  ‘I had to escape the Citadel Guard. For the Goddess’s sake, Zinina, I need help! I’m by Westcity Water Station. Get down here, else I’m dead.’

  The line was cut. For a few seconds Zinina just looked at the dull metal of the rig communicator. Her brain seemed to be out of gear. Then she sprinted to the hall where, limbs pumping and whirling, she struggled into her boots and protectives, swearing in jannitta as she did so.

  Zinina was fit. In the Citadel Guard she had been known to sprint the Om Street Circle in under three minutes. It was evening and only a few people walked the streets. Like an amphetamine dervish Zinina raced down Sphagnum Street, then took the gentle slope of Feverfew Street even faster, as her breath came strong and the adrenaline of fear coursed through her limbs. She sped by the Temple of Balloon Love, the Food Station, then careered into Onion Street. There was Arrahaquen, obviously exhausted, struggling towards the street junction. She could hear the ominous sound of Citadel motorbikes.

  ‘What happened?’ she said, splashing up to Arrahaquen and gripping her by the shoulders.

  Arrahaquen could hardly speak for breathlessness. ‘Quick. Bikes after me. Guards. Hide me.’

  Zinina looked around. Seconds to go. She pulled Arrahaquen into a doorway and, bracing her back, pulled at a plank of wood hanging down from the jamb. It snapped off. Pushing Arrahaquen down, she pulled the pathetic cover over them both and peered out into the chill night rain.

  Two motorbikes sped along the street like the night’s squalls blowing off the sea. As the first passed, Zinina saw its scarlet hide by the lamps of adjacent houses, saw too the muscles bunching underneath, and the cords of ligament at the wheel suspensors and the handlebars. A visored Citadel Guard woman rode it. The second approached. Its two halogen headlamps searched the pot-holed street independently, like the hooded eyes of the chameleon, and its engine gave a throaty roar. But it too darted by, and Zinina was left with an after-image of red lines and an image of blue rear lights, flashing as the bikes braked, skidded, and paused at the junction.

  The riders revved their engines. Zinina heard the staccato static of radio talk. Then they turned left and made down Ficus Street, towards the river.

  ‘Time to go,’ Zinina said. ‘Can you make it?’

  ‘Just. Not far.’

  ‘We’ve got to go north. Get away from this quarter.’

  ‘Right. Just lead me.’

  Arrahaquen stumbled as Zinina led her across the street and into the maze of passages overhung with the filth-dripping upper storeys of buildings that constituted this part of the city. Her legs were tired. The toes of her boots caught in every hole and snag, and Zinina had to navigate carefully around the larger ‘legbreakers.’ Here there was no light, and every possibility of bumping into drug-addled revellers, or, worse, hormone-tripping green revellers. But Zinina had the same sense of direction as any Krayan who had been forced to live off her wits as a child, so she marched north, until she recognised the yellow cobbles of Culverkeys Street and saw crystal Infirmary lamps up ahead.

  They rested. Zinina looked back. Way south, she could see the tip of the tumulus over house roofs, but above that she noticed what looked very much like the yellow searchlights of hang-gliders making their way north. Others seemed to be searching the Harbour and Mercantile Quarters.

  ‘What have you done?’ she asked Arrahaquen as they hurried on.

  ‘I don’t know. I had to leave. It was getting too much.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The pressure. I couldn’t stand it.’

  Zinina urged Arrahaquen past the Infirmary, but stopped when they reached the Gardens. Here they sat on a log, having first checked it for vermin. ‘I can’t take you back south,’ Zinina said, ‘it’d be far too risky, what with them hang-gliders.’

  ‘But where can I go?’

  ‘Listen. I’ll hide you up at an inn I know for a few days, maybe a week. When the fuss has died down, we’ll smuggle you back, eh?’

  ‘What inn?’ Arrahaquen asked miserably.

  ‘The Spired.’

  ‘But it’s a pot-house,’ protested Arrahaquen. ‘It’s a hole.’

  ‘Hoy, don’t speak like that about it. It’s a decent hole.’

  ‘But isn’t it next to the Cemetery?’

  ‘Long as you don’t go out without me you’ll survive. It’s the only safe place. Now, what have you done?’

  ‘Left the Citadel. I can’t explain it, Zinina. It’s been building up for ages. I’m sure they’re on to me. Us, maybe.’

  Zinina stared. ‘You mean nothing’s happened and you’ve just run? Just let them know you’re guilty by runnin
g?’ Suddenly she was angry at Arrahaquen.

  ‘Yes,’ Arrahaquen sobbed, hiding her face in her hands. Then she looked up and said, ‘You’ve got to believe me. They know something. My mother’s up to something. Somebody was trying to kill me a few weeks back. I could just feel the currents, Zinina. If I stayed there I’d be as good as pitched under Gugul Street.’

  ‘So you ran.’

  ‘I couldn’t help it. When I didn’t turn up for my shift at Defender House they came after me. Thank the Goddess I met you, else I’d have had nowhere to go.’

  Zinina pulled Arrahaquen to her feet. ‘Come on. We’re going to the Spired.’

  ‘I’ve left all my stuff in my flat. But I have got some news about Arvendyn.’

  ‘Later,’ Zinina said.

  Arrahaquen seemed to deflate like a punctured balloon. She followed Zinina around the edge of the Gardens, a docile animal tripping over paving slabs, until they stopped on Crimson Street to wait for a cablecar, the fierce wind blowing torrents of rain at them. Within fifteen minutes Zinina had sat Arrahaquen on a barrel behind the Spired Inn.

  Inside, it was warm. A blaze burned in each of the three grates. Some naked jannitta dancers lay in front of one, on a shag-pile rug. Elsewhere custom seemed slow, which Zinina was glad for. She approached Dhow-lin.

  ‘Sly-girl,’ called Dhow-lin, squinting at her in surprise. ‘Here for a thimble of the weakest ale we have?’

  ‘Only the best for me,’ Zinina replied, sitting on a bar stool, ‘and I need a barrel and a half.’

  ‘Hah!’ Dhow-lin said. ‘One glass of the tough stuff and you’re–’

  ‘One sip of baqa and my mind is clear enough to banter with the likes of you!’ Zinina interrupted. ‘Now, I’ve got a favour to ask. A big one.’