The day crawled by for Zinina. She felt nauseous when food appeared, and had to decline it. Even her hearing had been affected, for she kept hearing a creaking, groaning sound that seemed to come from inside her own skull. But then Arrahaquen pointed out that it was the house making the noise, shifting on its foundations.
Zinina felt the urge for fresh air, and she hauled deKray out to examine the house. The north end had sunk six inches at least, and five cracks, one big enough for Zinina to put fingers into, leaped from ground to roof. All around the house slates lay. Window frames and shutters were warping. In the wall nearest the street were countless bullet holes.
‘We must do something about Graaff-lin’s garden,’ deKray said. ‘She is too busy to tend it.’
It was dangerous. Packed vegetation had hidden all trace of path and border. Saplings were shooting up everywhere, and roots were beginning to make one wall crumble at the base. Poisonous ferns, landwracks and ivy had appeared. Zinina pointed out that they did not have enough verticide to deal with the whole plot.
‘Then we must make a path through to the alley,’ deKray replied.
‘You do it now,’ Zinina said. ‘I’m just popping out.’
‘Where to?’
Zinina pulled on protectives. ‘Oh,’ she said as nonchalantly as possible, ‘just to call a friend. If there’s any screens working, that is.’
DeKray handed over her boots. ‘This would be Qmoet.’
Zinina stopped dressing. ‘How do you know about her?’
‘You mentioned her name once in your sleep. And someone by the name of Gishaad-lin.’
Zinina hid her reaction to this reply. Her final secret she wanted kept. ‘Well,’ she managed, ‘that’s who got me into the Citadel in the first place. I owe my guard career to her. We sort of grew up together.’
DeKray seemed unimpressed. ‘I see. Well, go make your communication if you must, and I shall prepare a safe path through the jungle outside. But do not be long.’
‘I won’t be.’
She kissed him on the lips, then ran out into the rain, sped down the alley – first ensuring there were no revellers or gunslingers visible – then walked into Pine Street, where one screen still worked. Poking needles into a digital port to bypass any network spies, she called the secret number.
Qmoet answered. ‘Hoy, it’s me,’ Zinina said in jannitta.
‘Zin, how are you?’
‘Amazing news. You won’t believe it’s true. Arrahaquen, last night, she threw a party and then gave us an envelope with everything we’d done predicted on it. She’s a pythoness!’
‘A pythoness?’
‘It’s true,’ Zinina insisted. ‘I saw it with my own eyes. Qmoet, this changes everything–’
‘Wait, wait, Zinina, explain yourself fully.’
Zinina did so. Qmoet, however, remained unimpressed by the news. ‘Eskhatos will think that Graaff-lin is more important, not Arrahaquen, since Graaff-lin has some kind of contact with the noophytes. Carry on reporting her progress to us.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I will, but Qmoet, I saw it with my own eyes.’
‘Well... keep an eye on Arrahaquen then, and collect as much data as you can. But I warn you, at this stage in our operation Eskhatos will reject talk of prophecies in favour of solid pyuter work.’
Dejectedly, Zinina agreed, and signed off. She returned to the house. DeKray had widened the existing path with a razor on a pole. He had doused the whole area with verticide and sodden planks lay across the treated land. Zinina made to enter the house, then noticed that the chimney had fallen off. To cap it all, the door was sticking, and she had to lift it and slam it shut.
‘Is Graaff-lin working off batteries?’ Zinina asked deKray.
‘She is,’ he replied. ‘There has been a lack of power all day. By the way, I informed Graaff-lin that Arrahaquen had acquired prophetic skills, and she did not believe me. She is suffering from influenza yet again. I fear she is in a truculent mood. Perhaps it would be best if we left her alone.’
Zinina nodded. ‘Tonight I’s going to convince Arrahaquen to fetch her replica from the Citadel.’
DeKray seemed in thoughtful mood. ‘I too must go somewhere tonight, I trust not for long.’
Zinina’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where?’
‘I must obtain verticide to spray the outer walls of my abode.’
‘Well, be careful.’
That evening, making the journey to the Carmine Quarter, Zinina realised that travelling would soon be too difficult to countenance. Wading through endless alleys, across no-go streets filled with mines and barbed wire, along passages squelching with fungi and rotting refuse; all this would become impossible. The question of where to live would soon demand an answer. The freedom of the city was no longer theirs.
A ripple of automatic fire burst out from some neighbouring street. She stood still: listened. Another gunshot, far off. How many people left in Kray now? Ten thousand? One thousand? Five thousand at most, Zinina guessed. She stood, taking in distant city sounds, wondering what these last few were doing.
Listening in silence, in a strange quarter, doom all around her, she understood how people could turn to religions, or cults, or believe against all hope that the Portreeve would come onto the Citadel networks and announce her great plan. Just listening to the mad city made all this clear to Zinina.
Breathing deep, Zinina hurried on. Arrahaquen received her, already guessing what they were to discuss.
‘I have considered your idea,’ she told Zinina, ‘but I can’t see how it could be done. Flying another balloon would be too dangerous for us, even if the priestess of Balloon Love could be persuaded to pilot it. Going underground has the same problems.’
‘A gate?’ Zinina asked, without much hope.
‘We’d have to get the replica disguised coming out. It would be noticed by the Citadel Guard. You know that – you used to work for them.’
Zinina sighed. ‘S’pose you’re right. Rien Zir, but we need a pyuton. Without one, Graaff-lin’s work might be for nothing.’
Arrahaquen sat upright. ‘A pyuton,’ she repeated.
‘Yeah. Graaff-lin’s got to have one.’
‘A pyuton,’ Arrahaquen said once more. ‘That gives us one extra option. Maybe we need not enter the Citadel. The Wall...’
‘No one’s going to get over that Wall.’
Arrahaquen smiled, and Zinina saw a sudden light of triumph in her face. ‘Maybe no human could get over,’ she said, ‘but who’s to say a remotely piloted replica couldn’t do it?’
Zinina considered this. She had no views to offer, but she did not want to cramp Arrahaquen’s ideas. ‘Sure, maybe it could be done,’ she said, as positively as she could.
‘We’d need Graaff-lin’s assistance,’ Arrahaquen said. ‘Our position in the network as we guided the replica would need to remain hidden, in case we were spotted by Citadel network patrols.’ She stood and took a deep breath. ‘We could do it, you know.’
As midnight approached they crept down the alley leading to Graaff-lin’s house. Nearby, guns were blazing. Torrential rain concealed them.
DeKray had not yet returned, but Zinina’s mind was on other things. She put forward their idea to Graaff-lin.
‘This was your idea?’ Graaff-lin asked, looking at Arrahaquen. This was not the response Zinina had expected.
‘It was,’ Arrahaquen confirmed.
‘The Wall grabs anything that moves. I’ve seen people die there – we all have. And now you come to me asking for help to pilot a replica out?’
Zinina spoke in her most persuasive tones. ‘It’s for your sake, Graaff-lin. We need pyuton help. You know that. This is the only one we’ve got access to. Besides, just because the Wall grabs humans, that’s no reason to assume that it’ll grab pyutons as well.’
Graaff-lin closed her eyes and seemed to withdraw into herself. The pose worried Zinina. Graaff-lin had potential for good and ill. She could work pyuter miracles or she could des
troy. ‘It’s late,’ she said, but her voice held no fight.
‘So you’ll do it,’ Zinina said. ‘Great. Let’s go to the rig room, eh?’
It was easy to locate the system operating Arrahaquen’s private rooms, but less easy to alert the pyuton replica, which sat, as it had for some weeks, by the window. When she saw it on a monitor, Arrahaquen said, ‘I didn’t think it would be there. They probably didn’t even bother to check my things after I vanished.’
‘Your mother must have.’
Mutely Arrahaquen shook her head.
Zinina returned her attention to the screens. Graaff-lin, by some electronic sleight of hand, had convinced the security system that she was its co-ordinator. ‘Project my voice to the pyuton replica,’ she demanded.
‘Null job,’ came the reply. Zinina muttered a curse.
Graaff-lin was now immersed in the challenge, eyes flickering, fingers twitching, mouth compressed. She restructured the system so that it recognised no signals from the Citadel, isolating it, but restricting her own manoeuvrability. ‘Project my voice to the pyuton replica,’ she said again.
‘Ready.’
Zinina cheered. Graaff-lin turned to Arrahaquen and said, ‘Quickly, instruct the pyuton where to go. Any second now a network patrol will spot me and crash into the system.’
‘This is Arrahaquen. Walk down through the jannitta sector to the Wall. Climb over. Then make north to the Pyramid Bridge. I will meet you there–’
With a smack of her control pad Graaff-lin cut the link. ‘That was close,’ she said.
‘Can we see through the pyuton’s eyes?’ Arrahaquen asked.
‘What’s the frequency?’
‘Eleven eighty-one point eighty-one gigahertz.’
Graaff-lin tuned her main rig to the frequency. On a wall screen static flickered, and then, with a judder, an image appeared: dark and motion-blurred, the spectral streets of the Citadel unfocused, overlaid with glittering after-images. The replica was walking quickly, head nodding a little. Then there was sound too, an eerie rustle of clothes, the thunking of plastic heels on perspex, the ticking of droplets against aluminium eardrums.
Soon the Wall appeared. Zinina found that she was gripping Arrahaquen’s arm. The replica approached. Cannibalised limbs grasped... eyeballs on stalks rotated. Still the pyuton strode on. Then they saw darkness.
‘It’s fallen!’ Zinina cried.
‘There’s the sea,’ Graaff-lin said.
The pyuton had leaped to the top of the Wall then jumped down. Already it was striding up Violin Street. Zinina rushed into the hall, shouting, ‘Come on, we’ve got to meet it!’
They arrived at the Pyramid Bridge seconds before the replica. Arrahaquen ordered it to follow them back, which it did without complaint.
~
For deKray, the attentions of a young, athletic, attractive woman from a culture that was to him an exotic unknown came as the most pleasant shock of his life, and despite his fervent atheism and scorn of all concepts of fate and destiny – the twin peaks of selfishness – he was hard put to think of Zinina’s arrival in any more sensible way. The most plausible idea he could come up with was that a most amazing coincidence had occurred. In this final year, a young woman had found herself interested in him.
But it was not as simple as that. Relating discussions held after Arrahaquen’s meal, Zinina had indicated the stresses she was under, making deKray feel that he must make an effort to prove to the three women that he was a useful ally – an indispensable ally. Above all, he did not want to return to being an outsider.
That was why he now stood in evening gloom at a north-westerly Cemetery gate.
Rain poured from heavy cloud. DeKray pulled tight his waterproof hood and tied the drawstrings, checked the elastics on his boots, took a final sniff at a handkerchief impregnated with oylbas oil, then took from his greatcoat pocket a night-monocular. The Felis device had been tied around the neck of the cat which had killed his guardian, and rated as one of the most useful items in his possession. Through this gold-rimmed glass he studied the Cemetery. Nobody about.
He walked south along the wall, feeling its sinister boulders with a gloved hand. He wished the weather would allow him to light up a cigarette. Soon he would be desperate for one. Still, he could always suck a cough sweet.
At the line of yew trees he struck off to the left. Many graves here had been opened by revellers, and he was careful to avoid them. In some, fragments of rusting machinery lay, in others there were fungi twinkling like stars, or hairy roots from nearby trees. Noise was deadened by the sound of pattering rain, though he could hear pounding bazooka fire from somewhere to the east of the Gardens.
A sudden mental flash allowed him a glimpse of the bizarre figure he must cut – hunched over, glass held to one eye, Zinina’s pistol in the other hand. A real sleuther.
He stopped for a cough sweet then returned to striding along the green glass and rust-fragment path, until he saw the grove near which the mausoleum ruins stood. This grove he made towards.
‘I say.’
The voice made him jump. He raised the pistol, crouched down and waved it around until he saw the woman who had spoken standing under a tree.
‘Do not move,’ he said.
‘Well I shan’t then. I say, your face is familiar.’
DeKray confronted an old woman, who, oddly enough, seemed familiar to him. She must be at least sixty, and that made him suspicious. This was probably a reveller grandmother. She was tall, dressed in formal black jacket and long skirt, the latter highly unusual Kray wear, with green plastic boots, a black top hat, and a walking stick made of silver. A fob watch hung upside down from one lapel.
DeKray was too suspicious to want to stay. He waved the pistol at her. ‘This hand arm is primed,’ he said. ‘I know I am a man, but I am prepared to use it.’
‘I can’t harm you, you silly boy,’ said the woman in her cracked, warbling voice. Was she drunk? ‘I just wondered what in Kray you thought you were doing wandering around this place at this time. Don’t you know the revellers can get you?’
‘Revellers,’ said deKray, moving away, towards the mausoleum. ‘Revellers, you say. Maybe you are one yourself, my good woman? Now, if you please, I shall continue about my private business and bid you good morrow. I advise you not to follow me.’
‘Oh, all right,’ she said, tottering off to the path, ‘but I must say, dear fellow, you’ve aged terrifically well.’
Shaken, deKray watched her go. She disappeared. Quickly, so she might lose him, he ran to the ruins of a mausoleum, then waited at a tree to see if she would follow. She did not.
The mausoleum had collapsed, leaving a central clear space occupied only by rubble. But, inside, only human tombs lay. He wanted to find the grave of a pyuton.
After some hours searching he came across a marble octagon in poor repair. Something about the abstract designs on the marble made him look more closely.
All was chill and dark. Infra-red would not work here. He took a penlight from his kit, then a hook on a wire and an antidote kit, and knelt by the nearer of four sarcophagi.
He was looking for cracks. He knew one or two reveller tricks. Find a crack, find a small stone and a boulder, place the small stone on the crack and hit. It worked.
Inside lay a body, but it was an odd body. It was some seconds before he saw flashing metal at the skull and realised that here reclined the remains of an autonomous pyuter.
The disintegrated remains of plastic skin and metal bones lay before him, around them various items of stone, wood and metal, including a plaque. This deKray fished out with his hook, along with a rib and a finger-bone.
The finger was titanium; so it was an old pyuton, maybe many centuries old. The plaque was filthy. With trembling fingers he scraped off the accumulated detritus, but etchings on the plaque were still invisible under a black layer of corrosion. With the hatpin from his lapel he scraped off enough to see eighteen sigils that seemed to mix the q
ualities of flowers with mathematical symbols. As he meditated on their graceful synthesis of abstract line and botanic realism, he was reminded of something Zinina had told him of her adventures in the Andromeda Quarter... the eighteen statues. Eighteen statues and eighteen sigils.
Realisation dawned upon him. He put his pin on the sarcophagus edge and gripped the plaque as his mind fitted clues together. Eighteen statues; eighteen sigils. A connection here with pyutons. In Kray today there were twenty, or maybe twenty-one, noophytes. Could the noophytes possibly have emerged in the distant past from individual pyutons to submerge themselves in the electronic substrate of the city’s networks? Was he tonight kneeling at the grave of an entity which had leaped from the physical seat of its own mind? The skull would hold further clues.
Frantically, deKray fumbled with his right hand to pull out the skull. But it was light. DeKray had read much on the topic of pyutons and suspected that the brains of this one, if such it had been, had long since leaked away.
He was correct. Two fingers stuck into the metal sinuses, another poked up the spinal hole, and he felt no soft package of biochemical hardware.
But his probing finger did feel a small ball affixed to the forehead. It must be the innerai. All pyutons possessed one.
With the nail of one finger he managed to pop the innerai out. It pinged as it hit the inner metal of the skull, then fell out of the spinal hole. DeKray caught it, but then dropped it, and it fell into a mud puddle. He retrieved the golden sphere, wiped it with a tissue from his kit, then shone the beam of his light upon it. There was written, in tiny letters, ‘Laspetosyne.’ So this was the tomb of a pyuton called Laspetosyne. That name had been mentioned before. It was the name of a noophyte. Perhaps, at this instant, there was a noophyte in the Citadel networks named Laspetosyne, with whom the Portreeve fine-honed the details of her plan. Or then again, as Zinina would invariably point out, maybe she did not.
DeKray felt that he had made a remarkable discovery. He would go home now and check details in his books, finding facts to confirm his theory before presenting it. Yet already he felt that he was right. The precious innerai he placed between the leaves of his pocket book, next to some old vegetable plot coupons, before locking it and replacing it inside his kit satchel. Time to check the three occupants of the main tomb.
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