Memory Seed

by Stephen Palmer

  ‘Sometimes, yes. I do it with drink.’

  The man smiled, placed a plastic bookmark between the pages of his book, then snapped it shut. ‘Drink, yes. How merry.’

  ‘Are you a reveller?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s that you’re reading?

  ‘Oh, only an old diary. As a matter of fact it was written by a reveller, one from the Archaic Quarter.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Zinina demanded.

  He did not answer but instead gazed at her, looking her up and down. A thoughtful expression came to his face.

  ‘You’re a man,’ Zinina said bluntly. But there was something else he could be. She fumbled in her kit for a sterile needle and, quick as a cobra, lunged at his arm. He shrank back, taken by surprise.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘That was dangerous.’

  Zinina threw an alcohol swab in his direction, but she did not apologise. ‘There’s blood on your wrist. I reckoned you might be a pyuton.’

  Frowning, the man said, ‘Well I am human. Are there further diagnostic checks to be undertaken?’

  ‘No. I’m satisfied. But I still want to know what you’re doing here.’

  ‘Perusing a diary, as I said,’ he replied, opening the book again.

  ‘Aren’t you scared of revellers?’

  ‘Yes. But they will hardly bother me so close to the Cemetery wall. Their prime encampments lie southwards.’

  Zinina laughed. ‘You don’t know much about revellers, then. They can be anywhere hereabouts.’

  The man smiled as though he was humouring a small child. He rummaged inside his coat and pulled out two battered packets and an old tin. From these he took a piece of paper, a match and some chopped-up weed, items from which he proceeded to roll a cigarette. Zinina, used to seeing some of her friends smoking, watched, fascinated. She had never seen a man smoke in her life. And now she noticed the odour of the weed...

  ‘I know you,’ she said, with thumping heart. ‘You rescued me from the pit off Blank Street.’

  He nodded. ‘Indeed I did. And now we meet again.’

  ‘You took me to Graaff-lin’s house?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is deKray. Might I know the jannitta whom I have the privilege of looking up to?’

  ‘Zinina. Why did you take me there?’

  ‘The aamlon is an acquaintance of mine.’

  Zinina frowned. ‘She’s never mentioned you.’

  ‘Why should she?’

  ‘But you rescued me. And my kit.’

  ‘At the time you were a Krayan in distress, Zinina. I noticed you were wearing the garments of a member of the Citadel Guard, though you had tried to alter your clothes by ripping off the lapels and flashes. I deduced that you were a deserter. When the woman attacked you, I beat her off, then pulled you out. Realising that your position was somewhat precarious, I carried you down to Graaff-lin’s house, hoping that she would offer you sanctuary. I thought it wise not to reveal my identity... you had a better chance simply appearing out of the green. Had Graaff-lin known it was I who foisted you upon her, she might have acted differently.’

  Zinina nodded. ‘And what is that stuff you smell of?’

  ‘Menthol,’ he replied, relighting the cigarette when it went out. ‘Do you imbibe at all, Zinina?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘It can be ghastly stuff,’ he said, puffing at the crooked cigarette, ‘but it has the same effect as your alcohol. You know, I once read that if I tried to imagine what sort of person my cigarette would be, I should learn much about myself. The same applies to your glass of dooch, I imagine.’

  ‘Really? And who would your cigarette be?’

  ‘I imagined my cigarette as an Infirmary doctor. Now is that not curious?’

  Zinina laughed. She found herself tantalised by the mind that might lie behind this polished exterior. DeKray possessed the air of an aesthete. He radiated calmness. When he spoke it was as if tomes had come alive. ‘What did you make of that thought?’ she asked.

  ‘I do not know. Only rarely do I ponder the matter. Mayhap it means that I wish to operate upon myself.’

  ‘Hoy,’ Zinina said, ‘why not come back with me to Graaff-lin’s? She should meet more people.’

  He paused, clearly not sure, took a puff and then gazed speculatively at her. ‘Very well. I must confess, I have not seen her for a while.’

  DeKray packed up his things, then followed Zinina out of the Cemetery. In Sphagnum Street he remarked, ‘I used to reside two alleys away, you know, at a domicile in Cochineal Mews.’ Sporadic talk about the rain and the sound of gunfire enlivened the walk home, but, crossing the Peppermint Bridge into Eastcity, Zinina began to feel nervous. What would Graaff-lin say?

  She decided it would be better if deKray remained outside the house while she fetched Graaff-lin. Nervously, she told Graaff-lin that a friend awaited her at the front door. When Graaff-lin saw who it was she halted, face set into a grimace. But her eyes conveyed her feelings. ‘Not a friend, rather an acquaintance,’ she said.

  ‘That is how I described myself,’ said deKray.

  Zinina reassured Graaff-lin, saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’ve checked him. He’s the one that rescued me.’ DeKray took out a menthol sweet and dropped it on to his tongue. ‘He reads a lot,’ she added.

  ‘I know.’

  Suddenly inspired, Zinina asked him, ‘Hoy, you don’t happen to know what a noophyte is?’

  Graaff-lin scowled at her. ‘Don’t be ridicu–’

  ‘Assuredly yes,’ deKray interrupted. ‘A noophyte is what Graaff-lin here would term a conscoositie.’

  ‘A conscoositie,’ Graaff-lin said, recognising the aamlon word. ‘A conscoositie?’

  ‘Why, yes.’

  Graaff-lin’s face seemed lit up. ‘A conscoositie! Of course. That would explain the strange partial inhabitation of the networks...’

  Graaff-lin walked back into the house. Shrugging, Zinina gestured for deKray to follow. Divested of his boots and greatcoat Zinina offered him a seat.

  ‘We know of some noophytes,’ she said. ‘We wondered what they were.’

  ‘Don’t tell him anything,’ Graaff-lin said, sharply.

  Zinina studied deKray’s face. ‘Can you prove you’re an indep?’ she asked.

  ‘Utilise my kit number,’ he replied. ‘The Citadel pyuters will confirm my status.’

  Graaff-lin checked deKray’s identity. He was genuine.

  ‘We can trust an independent,’ Zinina said. ‘He’d be a defender, wouldn’t he, if he was a spy or something?’

  Graaff-lin seemed hesitant, but Zinina, impatient, had no time for procrastination. DeKray was happy to illuminate her darkness. ‘A conscoositie is a partial or fractured model of reality – an abstract model. Thus, we human beings are noophytes, except that most philosophers would judge human beings to be almost complete models of reality, and so would class them apart.’

  Zinina glanced across at Graaff-lin. It was clear that she was uncomfortable, being so close to a loose man – and maybe this loose man in particular. ‘Where do you live?’ Zinina asked him.

  ‘At a maisonette in the south of the Citadel Quarter.’

  Zinina opened an internal shutter and peered out into the evening gloom. ‘Better walk you home,’ she said. ‘It’s dangerous out there.’

  ‘That is most gracious,’ deKray replied.

  Suited up, Zinina led him out and along to Pine Street, but before they entered it she took him by the arm and stopped him. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘it’s getting fraught out here.’ She handed him a rusty needle pistol.

  He smiled. ‘But men are not permitted to bear arms.’

  ‘If you hide it nobody’ll know.’

  'I shall risk the enormous risk.’

  Zinina smiled back. As he hid the pistol within some recess of the huge greatcoat, she noticed on one lapel a large copper hat-pin with a bulbous head. She watched his face. It w
as not that his features showed no emotions, rather that his emotions flickered through his expression, like sunny patches in a cloudy sky. DeKray was a cultured man. He had the driest, yet most delicate, sense of humour, even though he was acutely aware of his position in Kray. Zinina liked him for that.

  ‘How did you get to know Graaff-lin?’ she asked him.

  ‘We both studied pyuter metaphysics at the Waterlily Institute, near the Cemetery.’

  ‘I’m sorry I spoke rough at you up the tombgardens,’ she said, as they walked along Pine Street.

  ‘In truth I expected you to,’ he replied.

  ‘Well, sorry. You must admit it’s better to be safe than sorry.’

  ‘I suppose that is true.’

  Silence fell between them. But the city was not silent. As they walked south they heard automatic gunfire, and once a large explosion. People ran by, as if being chased.

  Then deKray halted. ‘I hear carousing revellers,’ he said. ‘We had better secrete ourselves.’

  Zinina heard the singing, but around them stood only locked doors and alleys filled with poison vines, death-roses and stinking puddles. ‘We better hide in a doorway,’ she said.

  This they did, taking muslin masks from their kits and tying them across their faces. Three revellers emerged from an alley. Pledgets were pressed by elastic bands to their noses, and all were filthy and bloodied. Zinina shivered when she saw the blood. Each carried a toad in one hand, and as they staggered by Zinina saw one reveller lick the eye secretions of the noxious beast.

  ‘I have witnessed such things before,’ deKray said as they hurried on. ‘Such toads expectorate a dense humour from their eye ducts, which in humans produces a psychedelic response. No doubt those revellers were deep in some other, druggy reality.’

  Zinina looked up the street. ‘Do you feel sorry for them?’

  He considered this for some minutes. When he answered they were well into Gur-Lossom Street. ‘We live in a hierarchical society because of the extremity of our condition. It was not always so, I should have you know.’

  Zinina nodded. ‘I feel sorry for them. The Portreeve should help them, instead of eating cakes and drinking wine up the damn tumulus.’

  ‘Indeed. A most valid point.’

  Walking on, into areas she had never explored, Zinina noticed that pale grass shoots were pushing up between the flagstones. From the shattered windows of ruined houses – and there were many in this sparsely populated quarter – she saw hanging vines, lianas, and the globular flowers of the poison chrysanthemum, which here, by the sea, was a common cause of death. A few bodies lay in gutters. Most were greened and partially decomposed, but one was not, and Zinina stopped to see if the clothes contained anything useful. Seeing what she was doing, deKray took hold of her arm and pointed to the streaks of vomit, the empty syringe, and the red stain of uz, all signs indicating that revellers had already stripped the corpse of useful oddments. They walked on.

  At last, with the cliffs in sight and the sound of waves audible, deKray indicated a white house. He said he lived alone in the upper floor, the ground floor being empty.

  As he pointed to it a reveller staggered into the street; an aggressive one, armed with a circular saw on a bamboo pole. They decided not to fight, so deKray hurried Zinina into his house. The reveller hammered on the locked door, but, weakened by the effort, departed, screaming curses. Watching deKray, Zinina loosened her knife in its scabbard, wary, though curious.

  His house was remarkable. Its ceilings were very high, indicating that it was old, and from each hung long wires dangling photoplankton spheres on their ends. In every room there were shelves and shelves of books. Zinina had never seen so many. Even in the shower room and the kitchen books stood on shelves. Thousands of them.

  ‘This is the third largest library in all of the city,’ deKray said with joy in his voice. His eyes, which he had wiped with a medicated tissue, were shining.

  ‘Third?’

  ‘I refer to paper, not electronic, books. The second largest belongs to a woman residing northwards, adjacent to the Gardens.’

  ‘Who?’

  He did not want to answer. Zinina frowned at him, distrust uppermost in her thoughts. ‘One Oquayan,’ he eventually admitted. ‘Her works cover botany, mostly. And of course the largest library in Kray belongs to whoever happens to be Portreeve.’

  Zinina nodded.

  ‘What beverage would you prefer, Zinina?’

  ‘I better go,’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘Doesn’t do to be alone in a man’s house. But I’ll be seeing you. Yeah?’

  It was half an offer. Zinina felt attracted, yet nervous. He was an unchained man, after all.

  DeKray said, ‘I should appreciate that.’

  In the hall’s green zone Zinina checked her suit and hood, then repositioned the elastics around her boot tops. ‘Don’t want nothing falling in,’ she said. ‘Um...’

  ‘Yes?’ He seemed anxious to prolong the farewell.

  But Zinina said nothing, and departed.

  She had never felt like this. Anticipation: that was what it was. Happy, she hurried back to the Old Quarter.

  CHAPTER 13

  It was often said that a sunny morning in Kray was as common as a Portreeve with a smile on her face – an aphorism that became increasingly true as years went by. But two mornings after Beltayn, Zinina awoke to see blue sky and the sun behind streamers of red cloud. Unaccustomed to the brightness, she shaded her eyes behind one hand as she looked over the city. It seemed stark and green, everything clear instead of hazy, although she noticed that already great clouds of flies and greater clouds of midges were swarming over stagnant water. Spring and especially summer were the seasons of plague, when whole species could be wiped out by sudden immune system failures, or by total male infertility. Soon, every Krayan would be troubled by sweat, insects, insomnia, and the suffocating, damp heat that could send people mad.

  Outside, human torment continued. Throughout the night there had been frenzied shooting and the crash of detonations from some nearby square. Too near for comfort. When she tuned into the Citadel networks she understood what had occurred. Three reveller gangs had attacked the Dispensary and, although two had been destroyed or scattered, the third had taken over the building and injected everyone inside with meat preservative. Now revellers from all across the city were heading for the treasure trove that lay undefended. And yet the Citadel seemed to be doing nothing about it. Zinina knew that the Portreeve had given up the Dispensary as a lost cause; and because it supplied the Infirmary, that place too had been offered only a stay of execution.

  The Citadel was withdrawing into itself, leaving Kray to die as it saw fit.

  Zinina decided to visit deKray. Graaff-lin tried to dissuade her, but she wanted to go, and so she would go. ‘You stay and keep talking to them serpents,’ she told Graaff-lin. ‘We’ve got to find out if they know the plan.’

  It was not an easy journey, since she had to avoid the now unsafe main streets – blocked by defenders at work, by rolls of barbed wire, by gangs of revellers encamped in tents made from old clothes and bedlinen – but she persevered. Back alleys, although also dangerous, were less populated by madwomen and militant drunkards. In some places pink and sodden red blossom fallen in great quantities forced Zinina to wade as if through marshes of perfumed blood.

  Zinina primed her needle gun before entering the maisonette, just in case. She felt unsure of him. They talked awhile, then Zinina suggested they return to the Cemetery, where she might show him southerly areas he was unfamiliar with. He muttered a few doubts, but for Zinina the Cemetery held little of dread, and so she had her way. Now she could test him.

  They reached the Cemetery at noon, by which time clouds had billowed in off the sea and a light drizzle was falling. Only one brief skirmish troubled them. They had approached the Cemetery by its most northerly gate, off Morte Street, which was succumbing to root damage and which in places consisted only of mud. Two re
vellers, a motley pair dressed in sackcloth and brimmed hats, stepped out of a doorway, blocking their path. They were ill, or drunk.

  ‘Hah, what we got then, huh, nice meat?’ said one, drawing a rusty knife from her belt.

  Zinina felt more anger than fear. ‘Calm it, shousters,’ she sneered. This was the only way to deal with them. ‘Down on y’luckies?’

  The revellers looked at one another. ‘Hoy, calm it y’self, sharpy,’ said one. ‘We’s only after the meats. Nice meats only.’

  ‘Y’get none here, no-blooms. Y’see two proper blooms with brains an’ hard muscle to match, so fizzle off, eh?’

  ‘Calm it, calm it,’ the revellers muttered, running off.

  ‘Yeah,’ Zinina said, anticipating deKray’s next question. ‘I was brought up a reveller.’

  But he said nothing, leaving Zinina slightly embarrassed by his apparent lack of interest.

  She led him through the Cemetery gate, now rusting, its football-eyes scratched and unfocused – the whole edifice had died some years ago – and so entered the periphery of the northern graveyards, where Kray’s poorest residents lay buried. Here, revellers rarely dug. They only exhumed the bodies of those buried with their worldly goods. The expanse of the Cemetery and the ingenuity of the revellers meant that they had not yet exhausted this supply of wealth.

  Yew and ivy traced out the remains of paths. As far as Zinina’s eye could see, crumbling gravestones at odd angles poked out from sheaves of grass and giant crocuses, except where groves of silver birch stood, or where paths made of glass and metal gravel allowed visitors access.

  Zinina followed a southward path. After half an hour or so she found herself looking down steep slopes, but ancient steps engraved with astronomical symbols allowed them to descend easily. Ahead, she saw the alabaster roofs of mausoleums, and clusters of tents in reveller encampments.

  ‘We’d better pull our hoods up and wear masks,’ she told deKray. She did not want to be recognised by anybody.

  ‘Very well,’ deKray replied, following her instruction.

  They left the path and took advantage of cover provided by the yews. These trees were ancient, many supported by iron poles or by green plastic scaffolding, others standing askew, like wounded soldiers. The ground below them emitted the smell of a deadly humus. There was no grass; only mush and mud and rotting red berries. To their right the milky quartz blocks of the Cemetery wall stood tall, washed dirty by the rain.