by John Meaney
Simon turned to a holodisplay on one of the controllers’ consoles. It showed Rekka checking Sharp was on his couch, then pressing the tailored delta-band across his forehead and activating it. She watched the status displays for a while - they were reproduced on the console, and Simon could see they were normal for Sharp - then she climbed onto her own couch, put delta-band to forehead, and pressed it.
Her hand dropped to the couch. She was deep in sleep.
Neither Mary nor Simon said anything as the remaining minutes elapsed. At exactly ten o’clock, one of the controllers said, ‘It’s a go,’ and blue flame brightened at the ship’s rear. Then it began to roll.
‘And . . . now,’ said the controller.
The craft blasted along the runway, pulled impossibly fast up into the sky, and disappeared in a blaze of whiteness.
‘Godspeed,’ said Mary.
‘Come back safe,’ said Simon.
Above Desert One, the sapphire sky was empty.
TWENTY-SEVEN
FULGOR, 2603 AD
So how was he supposed to pretend everything was normal? Roger commanded his bedroom window to swell outwards and open down, forming a balcony; then he stepped out on to the quickglass. He stared across campus, remembering golden space and the endless elegance of Labyrinth. Not to mention strange, dark dreams that kept popping into his head.
Gavriela. You’re only in my mind.
From above, a voice called: ‘You okay down there?’
‘Huh? Sure.’
‘So, do I need to open Skein comms?’ It was Stef, leaning from her own balcony. ‘Or shall I come down in person?’
It wasn’t like her to be friendly.
‘If you want to,’ he said. ‘Would you like a cup of daistral?’
‘You bet. See you in a second.’
He half-expected her to morph her balcony into a ramp, leading down to his own. Instead she disappeared inside, presumably to descend indoors like a civilized person. He requested drinks from the house system, and he had a cup in each hand by the time the door melted open and Stef came in.
‘Here you are.’
‘Thank you, Mr Blackstone. So, did I catch you staring into space, thinking of your girlfriend?’
For a moment he thought she meant Gavriela, which was insane.
‘Are you talking about Alisha? Because she’s not—’
‘That’s who I’m talking about, and I’ve been pretty snotty with her, haven’t I?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Can we sit down?’ Stef gestured for chairs to sprout from the floor. ‘Maybe I’ve been a bit short with everyone.’
They both sat.
‘Everyone has their own mannerisms,’ said Roger.
‘You’re very polite. Truth is, I’ve been a bit mixed up. I had an older boyfriend, you see. Long-term, and we split up as part of my coming here.’
‘Oh.’
‘The bust-up was . . . I don’t know. He told me I was only something because of him. Without him, I was useless.’
‘He was wrong.’
‘Thank you. I think I know that. But without him, I’d never have dragged myself out of the mess I—Look, I was mixed up since I was ten, starting when—’
What she related was the story of a childhood formed by self-involved parents who never noticed their daughter sampling amphetamist and booze left over from their frequent parties. At school, she had become a bully, a nasty piece of work - in her own words - and the kind of subversive pupil every teacher hated: intelligent and nuts.
Accidental pregnancy was so primitive and stupid a mistake that it wasn’t even a cliché. There was some legal trouble that she skated over, a succession of boyfriends, then the one stable relationship that pulled her out of chaos.
‘Not that anyone else approved, you understand.’
‘But you came out if it,’ said Roger. ‘You’ve been through the mill, and come out a stronger person.’
‘Maybe.’ Her smile was sad. ‘You’re sweet.’
‘Not really.’
‘You are.’ She leaned over, and pressed her palm against his cheek. ‘You understand why I can’t be with you, don’t you?’
‘Er—’
‘So, look.’ She stood up. ‘I want to see you going out on a date with Alisha Spalding, or you’re in big trouble. Understand me?’
‘I guess.’
‘Good. Then I’m off.’ She walked to the opening door, blew him a kiss, and left. ‘Ciao.’
The quickglass flowed back into place.
What was that all about?
He remembered a conversation with Dad, perhaps a year ago.
‘Son, no matter how much cognosemantics and neurocoding you learn, women are a mystery. And some of them are strange attractors.’
‘Isn’t that some kind of archaic gender stereotyping?’
‘It certainly is.’
Obviously Dad hadn’t told him half of it.
In the sports hall, he stared down at the wrestling area, watching people roll on the mats, wishing he could join them. His solo exercises might have combat applications, but without practising live, he was never going to feel confident. The problem was the additional deepscanning that athletes went through - both for health and to prevent cheating - and the danger of revealing his true nature.
Being here was like picking at a scab. What he ought to do was call Alisha, as Stef had pretty much commanded, or else put her out of his mind. He felt about as decisive as Hamlet, the protagonist of the most boring holodrama he had seen. According to Alisha, it was all in the poor translation; but English was about as accessible as Sanskrit. To be fair, among old Earth languages it had some nice characteristics - more verb tenses than some, more subtly different verbs, so reducing the need for qualifying adverbs - but it lacked the tonality or symbolic resonance that made allusions and multiple meanings so easy. Other ancestral usage, from Old Norse kennings to Mandarin numerology, allowed subtle simultaneous messages to be delivered in a single—
He forced the tip of his tongue against the roof of his mouth, shutting himself up.
Then his tu-ring chimed. It was Alisha.
‘Got a moment?’
‘Sure.’
‘You know Lupus Festival starts tomorrow, right?’
‘I guess so.’
‘So we’re building a mannequin for the parade. Our gang, plus some friends of Stef ’s.’
‘Did she ask you to call me?’
‘Not directly. Why-? Never mind. We’ve all got studies today, so we’re pulling an all-nighter in the labs to do the construction.’
‘You mean, no sleep?’
‘Sure, unless you can sleepwalk. It’s Rick’s design, and he’s done a good job.’
‘That’s nuts.’
‘Part of the fun. Oh, and . . . the parade’s tomorrow afternoon, so it’ll be a long haul.’
‘Also, totally insane.’
‘Hope you make it. Endit.’
The holo shrank to a point, was gone.
Mannequins. Carnival parades. First day of Lupus.
What am I doing here?
This was supposed to be the centre of learning, of leading intellectual activity. Instead, Alisha wanted him to hang around with a bunch of giggling people, working through the night to achieve nothing serious, just for the hell of it.
It’s stupid.
Or maybe he was the stupid one, brooding by himself about things that mattered only to him, while the world continued to flow around him, and people could enjoy or be miserable as they wished, none of it making a difference to anyone but themselves.
They worked in a bay designed to receive large transport vehicles. Roger turned up when the project was well underway, his friends hanging off a half-constructed silver skeleton, or dangling from the scaffolding around it. The mannequin’s joints were complex cogs. Once finished, it would be four times taller than a person.
‘Where does the engine go?’ asked Roger.
‘Hey, Rog,’ Stef
called down from a precarious position five metres up. ‘Couldn’t stay away, then?’
Rick tapped Roger’s shoulder.
‘Glad you made it, my friend. And there’s no engine.’
‘With those joints and cable-inserts . . . isn’t it meant to walk?’
‘It certainly is.’
‘But—’
‘We’re using no artificial power. That’s the fun of it.’
‘So it is going to walk in the parade.’
‘Sure.’
‘And it doesn’t have an engine.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘So you dangle it from a hovering flyer and work it like a puppet?’
‘That would be cheating.’
‘I give up. I can’t imagine—’
‘Sure you can.’ Rick turned him. ‘There’s your clue.’
Alisha and two people he didn’t know were assembling some hardware involving narrow chains and gears. Roger stared at them, then shook his head.
‘You have to be kidding. Pedals?’
‘There, you’ve got it.’
Roger tilted his head back, examining the shining skeleton, estimating its mass.
‘Sorry, Rick. It can’t be done. Are you sure you’ve done the calculations right?’
‘Feel those metal bones, my friend. They’re only half as dense as you think - rather like myself, ha, ha - and just because there’s no artificial power, that doesn’t stop us using superfluid bearings and a bit of smartmaterial.’
‘If you say so. Just don’t ask me to get inside that contraption. ’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ Rick looked up into the scaffolding. ‘Stef, would you order this boy to get inside the mannequin and get to work?’
‘Hoy,’ shouted Stef. ‘Blackstone, get your arse up here and make yourself useful.’
‘You tell him, Stef,’ called Alisha.
Roger laughed. He wanted to talk to Alisha, but she had already turned back to the others. They were loosening a chain loop, trying to slip it off a cog; and one of them was swearing, a streak of blood on his finger.
‘We’re all nuts,’ Roger said.
‘Finally, the boy understands.’
‘Totally insane.’
He grabbed the scaffolding and swung himself up.
By lunchtime, a headless giant clothed mannequin with hands was ready to go. Cables and chains were its ligaments and muscles, counterbalanced tension holding it upright. When they took the scaffolding away, it swayed - Stef and Rick were inside the thing - but stayed upright. Then several others, Roger included, pulled back the diaphanous ‘skin’ and clambered into the skeleton, finding their saddles.
‘Mad, mad, mad.’
‘We know that, Roger.’
‘Everyone get ready,’ called Stef. ‘And . . . Now.’
They got to work, Stef giving orders, while Rick kept himself busy on levers, switching gears and touching brakes - and the whole thing lurched into motion. The first footfall rocked Roger, then the next, but soon they had the knack of it. The mannequin was walking.
‘Time to get a head,’ said Rick.
None of them had authorization to command the roof to open. Roger would have designed a mannequin that actually fitted inside the building - but that would have been too easy, clearly. Instead, they pedalled and Rick steered, and they clomped out through the big exit, made a quick left turn - almost on the spot - and came to a halt, standing next to the wall.
Up on the roof, some more of Stef’s friends - she had obviously been socializing outside the study group - were manoeuvring a large head into position.
‘Careful.’
A magnetic bolt dropped through the hollow interior, and bounced off some part of the skeleton with a clang.
‘Sorry.’
‘Not just mad,’ muttered Roger. ‘Suicidal.’
His eyes were sore and his muscles felt detached from his body; yet he seemed to have passed beyond the need for sleep.
‘Okay, people. Pedal and step. Here we go.’
That was the beginning of an hour-long session of pedalling inside the mannequin, not seeing where they were going. From outside there was the occasional cheer, but it was not until they reached the main parade that the volume grew, indicating that they were in fact part of Lupus Festival.
Alisha was one of the team walking outside, guiding Rick by constant comms. All Roger could do was concentrate on the pedalling, far harder than he had thought it would be. High up inside the mannequin, Stef working a secondary set of pedals, her buttocks moving inside tight trousers, and it was a while before Roger pulled his attention away.
In his tired head, he seemed to hear a voice.
—Will they really leave Berlin for Amsterdam? Oh, please . . .
It took a moment to decide that he was experiencing a neural resonance of words originally uttered in another language.
—Gavi, is that you?
But Rick called down: ‘Roger, sorry pal, but can you increase power?’
‘Got it.’
The auditory hallucination was gone.
I really need to sleep.
For now, he concentrated on the physical work.
Rick projected small holos down to Roger and the others: views from external public surveillance showing their own clanking progress amid a line of morphballoons, animated dancing flames (Roger kept changing his mind about how they did that), and hundreds of students in bright costumes and masks. Among the crowds on either side of the wide avenue, many wore half-masks around eyes and nose, some like butterflies and other exotica, many like wolves.
It made the pedalling easier, feeling they were part of something. But it was hard to focus on the holos when your eyes felt like dust-filled slits, and your stomach was bubbling with acid.
Finally, they stopped somewhere on Nexus Heptagon, a wide plaza where pink snow was falling among a hundred food vendors, musicians and jugglers. Crowds milled on all sides. Some of them offered congratulations as Roger and the others limped out of the mannequin. Rick and Stef were the last to exit, after double-checking the clamps and brakes, ensuring the abandoned mannequin would remain upright.
He looked for Alisha, but she was standing with her eyes focused on some virtual image, deep in conversation.
‘Let’s party,’ said Rick. ‘Everyone, meet back here in an hour.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘What happens if we don’t pedal it back?’
‘The festival authorities will take it away to dismantle.’
‘And that’s bad because—?’
‘Look, if we’re all back and we want to pedal it home, fine. If not, that’s fine too. The main thing was to do it.’
Roger said: ‘Was that sentence semantically null, or was he just babbling?’
‘Babbling,’ said Stef. ‘Come on, everyone. Let’s find some drinks.’
She grabbed Rick and the others, pulling them into the crowd, with a wink at Roger to indicate that she was manoeuvring them deliberately, leaving Roger and Alisha behind.
But Alisha was nodding, and she moved off among the people without looking back. Not knowing whether he should, Roger followed.
Passing beneath a golden archway, he took a free glass of warm wine from a table and sipped as he walked. Real food would be better, but he did not want to lose Alisha. Nor did he want to interrupt her. He walked on, past flowsteel helical ramps leading to a temporary piazza on stilts where hundreds of revellers were dancing, the music a complex rock-baroque symphony that suddenly went discordant with an underlying da, da-dum, da-da-da-dum, da-da.
But the stamping feet of dancers continued, as if only he could hear the new theme.
He was among revellers who were dressed in beautifully expensive silk clothes, real fabric rather than smartmaterial, some with masks made from synthetic feathers, others with holomasks, rendering animal snouts and eyes with exquisite exactness. He bumped into one by accident - a man wearing a canine head and Egyptian robes: dressed as Horus
or Osiris, or whatever - and apologized. It had distracted him, and for a few seconds he had no idea where she was, but then he saw.