by Paul McAuley
She couldn’t ask the Trues what they had done, but she would have done anything to experience that feeling again. She would even have given up the chance to fly for it.
That was the good part. The flying. It was only in virtuality to begin with, and the drones were stubby and slow, nothing like the swift sleek raptors that Ori had coveted for so long, but it was flying all the same, and she was determined to master every aspect of it as quickly as possible.
The supervisor of Ori’s group, Teo, was a tough, practical, hard-headed old bird who’d been working for the commissar ever since he’d arrived on Cthuga.
‘You have to forget everything,’ Teo told her charges. ‘Everything about your former life. It no longer exists. What you once were no longer matters. All that matters now is the change you’re undergoing, and what you’re going to become when it’s finished. There was no before. There’s only this. This is the world. Our world, sole and entire. And the commissar is our god, like in the old, old stories. He made the world and he made us too. Yes, he did. Everything you think you remember, about a life before this? He made those memories too. And he made the Mind, to give us a purpose. And that purpose is to fly straight and well, and to attract as many sprites as we can. Either you learn how to do that, or you’ll take the long drop. Not for wasting my time, but for wasting the commissar’s.’
To begin with, Ori had to unlearn everything she knew about riding bots. She’d been in daily and intimate contact with her bot for more than three hundred days, a symbiotic relationship that had left deep imprints in her body and the motor centres of her brain. Now she had only a short time to shake off every reflex and habit, and learn how to ride a new and very different body, one that locked her legs together and turned her belly into the maw of a ramjet, and her arms into vanes, binding them to her sides and locking her wrists to her hips; the only freedom of movement that she had was in her hugely enlarged thumbs and fingers. She learned how to think in three dimensions at all times, how to use the drone’s visual, acoustic and radar sensorium to continually sweep out a spherical volume kilometres across. She learned how to tilt and feather the vanes to adjust attitude, how to avoid stalling, and how to surrender to the drone’s autopilot if she did stall, how to activate hover mode.
Truthfully, it wasn’t much more than a point-and-click operation. She could choose the flight path and make gross manoeuvres, but the drone’s autopilot made most of the fine adjustments, gave warnings about rough or choppy air and other dangers, and would take over from her if she ignored those warnings. She was bait – Hira had been right about that, at least. She was riding the machine because her presence in the downlink might attract the attention of sprites, and the drone gave off all kinds of complex, pulsing electromagnetic signals and visual displays designed to attract them, too. But she was also doing what she’d always dreamed of doing. She was flying.
At the end of every session in the immersion chair, Ori had to endure more medical tests, or do hours of housekeeping work before she could climb into her sleeping niche. She had little time to reflect on her new situation, or to miss the familiar, comfortable commons of jockey crew #87, or to wonder what Inas was doing. Her dreams were always about flying, and always ended in the same way: a long tumbling fall, fighting battering winds as she tried and failed to restart her motor, falling and falling into hot crushing darkness from which she woke in a panic, chest heaving as she tried to grab air, heart thumping so loudly that it seemed to echo off the sides of the cramped sleeping niche. She’d reach for Inas’ hot, muscular body and find only air. She’d open her eyes and see light burning at the margins of the niche’s curtain, hear the hum of pumps and the small noises of someone tinkering with a rig, one of the philosopher-soldiers talking, and someone else laughing. She’d remember where she was, and calm down and fall asleep again, and wake when her supervisor ripped back the curtain and told her to move her sorry ass, it was the start of a brand new shift and it was time to get to work.
Teo bullied and cajoled Ori and everyone else in the group; Ori’s own pride and stubbornness made her repeat every action until she got it right, and then repeat it again, over and over, until it was a reflex.
At last, everyone was assembled before Commissar Doctor Pentangel, who told them that their testing was almost over. They would rest tonight, and tomorrow they would complete a final test before they received their assignments.
Ori stood in the last rank this time and was able to count those standing in front of her and to either side. There were at least fifty people missing. Two had failed in her group; many more in others. The official line was that those who’d failed had been returned to their ordinary duties, but everyone knew that they had been given the long drop. Disappeared like a piece of malfunctioning machinery that wasn’t worth repairing, like toxic trash. It could still happen to her.
There were no housekeeping duties afterwards and the recruits were allowed to associate freely as they cooked and served and ate their evening meal. They speculated about where they would go, whether to the train or to one of the pelagic stations. Hira, at the centre of a small group of acolytes, seemed as usual to know more than most. She said that the train was for the best recruits because it faced the most dangers.
‘The further down you go, the more sprites you find,’ she said. ‘Sprites, and other things. Things that can eat you whole, from the inside out.’
‘We used to frighten each other with stories like that when we were little,’ Ori said. ‘Ghouls and ghosts and other horrors.’
‘Just because they were stories told by children doesn’t mean that they aren’t true. Every story must grow from something, after all.’
Hira seemed unreasonably cheerful about the prospect of meeting monsters. She claimed that she had aced her tests, and said that it didn’t matter how well they flew, fast or slow. They only flew to attract sprites. They were all bait.
‘That’s what this last test is about, I bet. Not just about flying, but about what we attract. And if you don’t attract anything . . .’ She held out her hand palm down, thumb up, then slowly turned it down.
10
Vidal Francisca sat in the stern of the skiff with the Child’s mother and Father Caetano, chatting casually, utterly at ease. As if he was the master and commander of the little vessel as it powered upriver. Dressed in a camo blouson and trousers and polished boots laced up to his knees, a pistol holstered at his hip, an aluminium case at his feet.
The Child watched him from the shade of the awning, reviewing her plan. She was surprised at how calm she felt and thought it a good sign. Vidal Francisca wanted to show that he could protect her and her mother. Wanted to prove that they needed him. That they couldn’t do without him. All right, then: she would call him on it. Challenge his arrogant assumption and show him up for the fool that he was. She looked off at the trees crowded above crazed and cracked humpback mudbanks along the edge of the river, hugging her knees, doing her best to hide her glee.
After helping Father Caetano at Mass, the Child went straight to her mother, who was already seeing the first of her patients in the tent of the field clinic while a queue of women with babies cradled in their arms and small children clinging to their skirts waited outside in the hot sunlight. The Child said that Vidal Francisca wanted to explore the ruins, asked if she could go with him.
‘I want to show him the mural we discovered.’
‘As long as you don’t go any further. And wear your hat,’ her mother said – but the Child was already running off to find Vidal.
He was at the edge of the old dock where the skiff was tied up, watching one of the drones he’d unpacked from his aluminium case skim out across channels of water that ran between sandbars. He’d bought the drones to supplement his house’s security, and had once allowed the Child to fly one. It was shaped like a flying saucer, light and quick as a hummingbird, driven by a pair of bladeless fans. She’d quickly mastered the simple controls, sending it swooping noiselessly over
the darkening lawn, now high, now low, now looping around the big pepper tree, darting in and out of the branches, until Vidal had grown nervous, and told her she had done very well but it wasn’t a toy, she should please bring it back. And she had, flying it straight at him, watching his face grow bigger on the little screen of the control tablet, laughing as he swore and ducked when the drone flashed past, a fast curve that ended in a crash stop above the illuminated amoeba of the swimming pool. He’d snatched the tablet from her, a moment of anger getting the better of his self-control, and had sworn again when he’d mishandled the controls and nearly dropped the drone in the water.
Now the Child was on her best behaviour, telling Vidal that her mother had given her permission to botanise along the edge of the ruins: would he like to come with her? Saying, when he expressed doubt, that she and her mother had walked there last time, she was sure it was perfectly safe.
‘My mother said that I should ask one of the soldiers to go with me,’ she said. ‘But I would rather you did.’
It was as easy as that.
See the man and the Child walking through the long grass beyond the square. A little drone drifting along about a dozen metres overhead, almost invisible against the hot white sky. Vidal Francisca cupping the control tablet in one hand, flicking back and forth between views from the drone above his head and the drones stationed above the square and the field clinic, at the jetty down by the river. His eyes masked with mirrored sunglasses, a bush hat shading his face, his stupid little ponytail sticking out behind.
The Child walked beside him, keeping up a stream of chatter. When they reached the margin of the ruins, Vidal stopped and looked all around; the drone rose up, turning on its axis, surveying the overgrown apartment blocks and the mounds of rubble beyond. It was very hot, very quiet. The air glassy with heat, rippling above solitary stretches of wall standing here and there, scrub wasteland humped with overgrown heaps of rubble settling into earth. The Child pointed to a vivid slash of green in the middle distance, told Vidal that was where she and her mother had gone last time.
The man took off his sunglasses and mopped sweat from his face with one end of the red handkerchief knotted around his neck, and put his sunglasses on again. ‘It looks a long way,’ he said.
‘It’s really not far. And it’s shady there. Full of flowers and butterflies.’
The Child, after studying satellite images of the ruins of Santo João do Rio Negro and comparing them with old maps, had determined that the green line was a deep channel that had once been part of the town’s flood-control system. When they reached the edge of its steep slope, Vidal made a show of surveying the trees and bushes that grew along its floor amongst tangles of broken concrete and splintered tree trunks, and declared that it would be too dangerous to explore further.
‘We’ll take a break before we head back. You can look around up here, but keep in sight.’
He sat down and took off his hat and fanned himself, unbuckled his water bottle and offered it to the Child, who refused with a shake of her head. The drone’s white disc hung above the trees, glinting as it turned this way and that. Nothing else moved around them. In the mid-distance, a tree growing in the channel was in flower, a blaze of ardent red amongst variegated greens.
Vidal said, ‘You are like one of the Indians. You walk like them, quick and quiet. And you see everything around you.’
The Child shrugged off this compliment. She’d become interested in intelligence-boosting drugs recently, and after extensive research and experimentation had managed to manufacture small amounts of a neural booster by methylation of a proprietary pain killer. She’d taken fifty milligrams of this home-brewed stimulant before they’d set off, and it was kicking in nicely now. Everything around her stood out with pin-sharp particularity. She could feel every drop of sweat that crawled down the back of her neck as she showed Vidal the little collecting bottles in her satchel and said that she was going to look for beetles – she was certain she would find some new and interesting species of beetle under the stones.
‘Be careful. There will be snakes, I’m sure. Also scorpions and centipedes. The big ones that sting.’
The Child nodded dutifully, and made a show of using a stick to tip up stones one by one. Taking her time, moving away from Vidal and the solitary star of the drone. When she was certain that he had lost interest in her, she took out the phone she’d hacked, checked once again that it had locked on to the drone’s signal, and touched the icon shimmering above its screen, a triangle with a stylised eye in it. The icon flashed from red to green, and the Child ran straight down the slope of tilted cracked concrete slabs that lined the wall of channel, into the deep shadows under the trees. Dancing and leaping and twisting over sprawling roots and stubs of broken concrete, ducking under loops of vine and coming out of the far side of the trees into the avalanche of hot sunlight, slick with sweat, her heart going like anything.
Off in the distance, a plaintive voice called her name.
The Child felt a surge of glee and excitement. Her plan had been very simple, like all the best plans, and it had worked perfectly. She’d downloaded the hack from a site on one of the darknets that Roberto had once showed her. It was an old design that cut into the feeds of security cameras and transmitted the visual equivalent of white noise. She had tested it on the security system of the hospital, used it to lock on to the feeds from Vidal Francesca’s drones during the open-air Mass.
Now they were down, and she was free. All she had to do was stay hidden for a couple of hours, then walk back to the dock and claim she’d been kidnapped by wildsiders but had managed to escape. After that, after he’d put her in danger and failed to do anything useful, Vidal Francisca would be blamed and disgraced. Her mother would never talk to him again.
The Child pressed on through the strip of forest, moving away from the sound of Vidal’s voice. She’d check out the flowering tree, she thought. See what kinds of insects it attracted, pass the time there until everyone was absolutely frantic with worry, and then she’d stroll back and tell her little story.
She was about halfway there when she saw a shadow detach from the trunk of a big thorn tree, thought for a horrible moment that Vidal had caught up with her. But the figure was too small, a boy about her age, a slim bare-chested boy in ragged cotton trousers stepping towards her, a rifle slung at his shoulder.
He was wearing a mask, the Child thought. But then he smiled at her, a smile that was so very wide it seemed to split his face in half, showing his pink tongue lolling amongst a narrow barricade of white fangs. And she realised with a thrilled shock that his mask was not a mask. He was a boy with the small sleek head of a jaguar.
For a long moment the Child and the boy stared at each other. The Child’s skin was suddenly cold all over. Her mouth was dry. She started to ask the boy what he was, who had made him, and he shook his head and put a finger to his narrow mouth. An incongruously human gesture that made him seen even stranger, even more alien and frightening.
In the distance, beyond the trees, Vidal Francisca called the Child’s name. The boy cocked his head, the shells of his mobile upright ears flicking forward; then in a swift smooth motion he raised the rifle to his shoulder and fired off two shots at a scrap of sky caught amongst leafy branches. The Child clapped her hands over her ears in shock as small green birds exploded from a nearby tree, whistling each to each as they fled. The boy stared straight at the Child for a moment. Something soft in his lambent gaze. Something like pity, or like love. And then he stepped backwards and by degrees melted away into the shadows under the trees.
Vidal Francisca called again, close now. She could hear him smashing through the undergrowth, coming towards her. And she had nowhere to run.
11
Watched narrowly by Lathi Singleton, I scanned Prem Singleton and showed her how to put on and adjust the gear. I told her that the training programme was just like a saga or any other viron, explained that the gear paralysed voluntary cont
rol of her musculature and channelled it to an avatar, that it managed the transition from one reality to another, and so on, and so forth.
Prem Singleton endured my instruction with a kind of dutiful impatience. ‘I’ve fought all kinds of monsters in my time,’ she said, when I’d finished. ‘But I never thought I’d be fighting dream demons. Bring it on, Isak. Do your worst.’
‘I’m going to show you what the Library of the Homesun looks like, Majistra, and demonstrate a few common traps. As for fighting demons, that takes a certain amount of instruction and practice. It isn’t possible to replicate that experience in the little time we have.’
I had no intention of allowing her to follow the Horse and me into the hell that Yakob Singleton had discovered, of course, and was already thinking of various strategies I could use to make sure she didn’t.
Prem laughed and said, ‘Is that a fancy way of saying that you don’t want to share your secrets, demon-slayer?’
‘Forget about heroics and do as he asks,’ Lathi Singleton said. ‘This is a serious business.’
Prem said to me, ‘Is it going to be anything like this so-called hell?’
‘If the hell is modelled on the Library, yes. But hells take many forms.’
‘Remind me how many you’ve harrowed,’ Prem said.
‘Thirteen, Majistra.’
‘Does that include the demon you ran away from?’
‘It was exorcised by others more experienced than me.’