Context

by John Meaney

  And quiet.

  It struck Ro that this was a Navajo thing, not needing to fill a void with words. With Anglos it would be an effective interrogation method.

  ‘She was very sweet,’ Ro said. ‘Even though I’d just met her...’

  Arrowsmith nodded. ‘In your statement, you said it wasn’t just a random intruder.’

  ‘There’s a sensor array just inside the mistfield. Teardrop sniff-cameras floating at random . . .’ She saw the intense concentration growing in his dark eyes. ‘My home is a UNS A training school in Switzerland, ran by my mother. I know about security protocols.’

  ‘And the logs show... ?’

  ‘I don’t have security officer access.’ Ro shrugged. ‘Not in DistribOne.’

  She wondered if the question had been deliberate, a trick.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to wait outside, Ms McNamara.’

  ‘Something to eat?’ asked a chunky uniformed woman, pausing in the cool, glassy atrium.

  ‘You bet,’ said her colleague, a lean, tanned deputy.

  Not talking to me.

  Ro’s stomach growled.

  She had not eaten, had not even thought about it, since discovering Anne-Louise’s body. An entire day without food.

  There were Tribal Police and Rangers, and many people in civilian clothes, wandering around Police HQ. But the smells of food came from beyond a glass door decorated with a virtual-image holo:

  *** STAFF AND AUTHORIZED VISITORS ONLY ***

  Ro was sitting on a bench in the foyer, and beginning to feel faint. It seemed shameful, almost blasphemous, but she had to eat. Anne-Louise would not have wanted her to starve.

  The two officers stared into red wall lenses for ID-scan, then the door slid open—aromas of hot food escaping—and they stepped inside. Ro watched the door seal shut.

  A simple recognition: I’m hungry.

  She cast a glance around the busy foyer: no-one was looking at her.

  ‘OK,’ she murmured. ‘Let’s try it.’

  She got up, walked unobtrusively to the nearest lens, and stared into it. Beyond normal perception, buried circuitry felt like a distant stream in which tiny fish darted, the flows obvious to one who was familiar with their ways, like a woodsman who can see and feel what city folk cannot. It was nothing she could have explained to another human being.

  If I am human.

  In the depths of Ro’s black-on-black eyes, a tiny golden spark of fire glimmered ...

  It worked.

  ... and was gone.

  The door slid open.

  ‘... the stiffest stiff I’ve ever seen’—the speaker was a white-haired woman wearing a lab coat—‘and the deceased’s name was Woody!’

  Laughter from the others at her table.

  Anne-Louise’s dead protruding eyes...

  Ro forced the image away.

  ‘... ergot victim,’ a big-bellied man was saying, ‘when I was in Tunisia. Kept seeing spirits, like chindhí’—he glanced around: no Navajo officers were nearby—‘and did himself in, inside the very granary the fungus started from.’

  The other forensic staff continued eating, not bothered by the imagery.

  ‘Yeah, so what?’ asked one of them, munching an open sandwich.

  ‘So first he placed his head between the grinding wheel and the stone ...’

  The white-haired woman looked over at Ro, who was sitting by herself next to the window.

  ‘I’m Hannah,’ the woman said. ‘You can join us if you like.’

  It was a tentative invitation: there was a noticeable gap between their table and the others. Even hardened police officers had other things to talk about over lunch besides the ironic and often undignified ways in which ordinary human beings meet their end.

  ‘Sure.’ Ro carried her tray over, and took a vacant chair between Hannah and the large man who’d been describing his Tunisian trip. ‘Is that fried manta you’re eating?’ Determined to put her grief aside.

  ‘Yep.’ The man patted his belly. ‘Lots of locals won’t eat seafood, but I love it.’

  ‘You know that rays, if they don’t feel too good,’ said Ro, ‘regurgitate their own stomachs.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sure. Their stomachs, turned inside out, dangle from their mouths, and they rinse them off. Then they suck ‘em back in.’

  ‘Gross.’ One of the other techs nodded in approval. ‘I like it’

  ‘And more efficient than simply vom—’

  Sergeant Arrowsmith was standing by the table: a looming, bulky figure. He stared down, with neither comment nor judgement in his gaze.

  ‘I see that you’ve made some friends.’

  <>

  ~ * ~

  13

  NULAPEIRON AD 3418

  It burned: the missing left arm. Fire traced the nonexistent nerves, delivered sensations of cramp-knotted muscles. An acidic itching of skin which could never be scratched.

  Elva.

  Wrapped in a heavy cape and leaning on a cane, he stood at the black lake’s edge. Stared into its night-dark depths. Fragments of her corpse would have settled on the bottom: the parts which had escaped digestion by teloworms. Microscopic life would already have gone to work on those tiny remains; one way or another, she was wholly absorbed into the local ecosystem.

  And yet he had seen a future in which he rescued her. In which a one-armed Tom Corcorigan saved the woman he loved; and he believed in that vision strongly enough to have shorn off his regrowing left arm.

  Giggling, high voices.

  Tom looked up. A small group of adults and children, maybe two families on an outing, settled further along by the lake, placed unopened picnic parcels on the broken grey stones.

  So what do I do now?

  Black-clad figure, leaping into the chamber, where soldiers threaten Elva...

  In the vision which the Seer had granted him, there were tiny differences in Elva’s appearance, but she looked like the woman he had grown to love. If that body had belonged to a twin or to a clone, then life experiences would account for the changes; and the physical duplication would mean that her personality would be less altered by the transfer.

  Though what effect the experience of deliberate suicide might have upon a person, before awakening in a sister’s body, knowing that you had caused the sudden and permanent erasure of that body’s original personality ...Tom blinked, aware of his ignorance, his only certainty an absolute determination to find her.

  But the vision’s remembered sequence gave no hint as to her location in space, or the time when those events occurred.

  He turned away from the lake, a strange sound catching in his throat, and the playing children froze, then looked to their parents for support, knowing that their mothers and fathers were omniscient and strong, ensuring their security, defining their entire childhood worlds forever.

  A vassal, barefoot and carrying a small bundle, entered the cavern. She descended the scree slope, stopped at the water’s edge and genuflected.

  ‘What do you want?’ Tom gestured for her to stand.

  ‘My Lord.’

  She placed the fabric-wrapped bundle on the stones.

  ‘What—?’

  But she was already leaving. Stones scrunched beneath her bare feet as she made her way upslope.

  Tom used his cane’s tip carefully to pull back the fabric. Inside lay a bluemetal poignard.

  Fate...

  Awkwardly, he picked it up between thumb and forefinger while keeping hold of the cane. At the hilt’s end, an archaic flatscript insignia which he recognized: kappa and alpha entwined, sign of the strange vanished weapons suppliers known as Kilware Associates.

  Its balance was perfect. Save for the colour, and the hallmark, the poignard was twin to one Tom had once owned.

  Scarlet blood across a blue/white floor...

  The one he had used to kill the Oracle Gérard d’Ovraison.

  His fitness increased by geometric progression.

>   There was a long gallery with angular, intricately carved pillars set every ten metres, and he used them as markers. Early in the morning, with the gallery almost deserted, eerily lit by floating half-power glowclusters, he jogged slowly along the central blue-carpeted aisle, from the beginning to the second set of pillars, and retraced his steps, ignoring the pain.

  He was puffing, totally winded.

  But the next day he jogged faster, and pushed himself all the way to the fourth pillar. On the third day, he made it to the eighth and back.

  He spent most of his time studying—across a range of subjects whose choice seemed random—inside his expensive apartment. Soon, he would have to move out, or start earning credit.

  But Elva had dealt with the finances, and he wanted to put off that particular pain as long as possible.

  Outside, though, when he walked the boulevards, he noticed a new tension in the air. Occasionally, random brittle laughter rang out from a daistral house, before dying abruptly, cut off too soon. While here and there, among the crowds, Tom saw teams of scarlet-caped men and women in unfamiliar grey uniforms, all with an odd intensity of gaze.

  And their capes’ hue was familiar: the same shade as the cravats of the unnaturally synchronized team who had caught the thief, and the clothing of the mysterious children by the black lake in which Elva had been buried.

  Once, a passing age-bent woman muttered something about ‘Chaos-damned Blight’, but she broke off when she noticed Tom’s regard, tugging her shawl up around her straggling white locks, and shuffled away into a side runnel. By the time he had decided to follow and question her, she was gone.

  There were news pillars, whose intricate embellished tricons were on display at major intersections, and according to them the Aurineate Grand’aume’s prosperity was at an all-time high, while social events were flourishing and the normally low crime rate had dropped to zero.

  During one of those walks, he thought he saw a black-cowled figure watching him. But when he approached, Nirilya turned away, and left.

  He could have run after her, or made his way to her home, but instead he returned to his own apartment, and resumed his logosophical studies. Looking for any hint or clue which might lead him to the location of that vision which he hoped was not a dream.

  On the eighth morning he jogged—slowly, wheezing—a little over five klicks. His gait was awkward, almost stumbling, and his diaphragm was tight with pain.

  Ninth day. Keeping the same distance, Tom tried for a smoother motion, with controlled breathing. Over short stretches, it almost came together.

  It was very early, before dawnshift, and the gallery was empty. The day before, there had been stares from the few passers-by, and he wanted to remain anonymous. Whatever the reasons for the realm’s change in atmosphere, Tom took a new accessory with him on his workout: the bluemetal poignard, tagged to his waist.

  As a message, its meaning was one he could not decipher: he did not know who had sent it, and had no idea of its significance unless its near duplication of a weapon he had lost was some comment upon his current quest for the new, living Elva.

  And if someone knew that much, they ought to show themselves and help him. But it seemed that was not going to happen.

  In the evening, slowly, for the first time in many days, he worked through a phi2dao fighting set, a beginner’s form.

  There was an old woman who sold minrastic cakes and broth from a stall. Tom got into the habit of buying a cake, mid-morning, as he strolled the busy length of Arkinol Boulevard. One day, as Tom walked away munching, a man sidled up to him, crystal in hand, and whispered: ‘Want to see the news?’

  But there was something about his expression which Tom did not like.

  He moved away, close to a female astymonia trooper who was standing beside a pillar. When he saw her uniform, the furtive man started, then turned and slipped away into the crowd, leaving Tom puzzled and uncertain.

  Is the news a black-market commodity now?

  At the minrasta stall, the old woman was determinedly staring the other way. It told Tom all that he needed to know. The Aurineate Grand’aume was changing, undergoing one of those societal phase transitions which happen seldom, but he was here to see it happen. He could investigate ... Yet soon he would be moving on, and the political affairs of one small though prosperous realm within the whole of Nulapeiron were hardly his concern.

  Day forty.

  ‘Sir, can you ...’ A freedman, asking for directions.

  But Tom was hurtling past, legs pumping, thrill-adrenaline coursing through his veins.

  Sorry.

  He hit the arched footbridge at top acceleration, sprinted over the top, turned left and pushed down hard. He raced along the redbrick footpath, black canal to his left, dark rounded ceiling overhead.

  Digging deep, he ran.

  Laughter inside, the pure joy of free athletic movement, once lost but now regained.

  Bright silvery cargo bubbles drifted past on the canal, a chain of them heading back the way Tom had come, and he wondered what might be inside. Then he was past them, entering a three-dimensional maze of deserted but clean ramps and stairways, arches and spirals, and he took the obstacles as fast as he could, vaulting a banister—to his own surprise—and dropping onto another pathway.

  The path was tiled in ochre and green. On a whim, he followed it, running easily, as it led into a side tunnel, a tributary of the main canal. His footsteps echoed strangely, almost musically, as he ran, enjoying the physicality, deep into kinaesthetic Zen.

  And then he heard a scream.

  The gunman was a large square-faced man, shining graser pistol in hand, trained upon the small elfin woman. She stared at him defiantly.

  ‘Bitch! I’m going—’

  Tom kicked the back of his right knee, smashing it downwards into stone, hooked the sleeve and stamped on the man’s exposed ankle, splitting the achilles tendon. Smiling as he wrist-locked the arm, straightened it, and broke the elbow across his knee.

  The graser pistol clattered on the tiles.

  ‘Nasty,’ said the woman he had rescued.

  The disarmed gunman lay in silent frightened shock, staring up at Tom.

  ‘Thanks. Really,’ she added. Her voice was high, almost fluting, but it was the rainbow shimmer which held Tom’s attention. ‘I’m very grateful.’

  Pretty diffraction patterns played across the transmission end of the graser. He had not seen her pick it up.

  ‘And you gave me back my pistol, too.’

  Chaos. I’m a bifurcating fool. . .

  She backed slowly away. Reaching a narrow exit, she slipped inside, was gone.

  ‘My ... Lord. You have to leave this realm.’ The injured gunman was panting now. ‘She stole ... crystal. Thief.’

  ‘Who are you? A courier?’

  For a moment, the man could not speak.

  Then, ‘Sentinel

  He passed out.

  The journey back was nightmare and farce combined.

  A dead weight across Tom’s shoulders, the near comatose man—a courier, despatched by Sentinel to deliver information to Tom, not get half-killed by him—stirred and muttered from time to time, throwing Tom off balance. Then came the convoluted conjunction of ramps and stairs, where Tom had to climb, thighs burning, pain clawing his lower back, struggling to keep upright.

  ‘Bifurcatin’... Chaos.’

  Downwards. He looked for a ramp, found none, used the steps. But it was hard, descending but unable to look down at his feet. Towards the bottom the open staircase spiralled and the wide steps themselves were curved and that was where he lost it.

  Black waters coming towards his face.

  There was a heavy splash—the injured courier falling in—and then cold water enveloped Tom, before his conscious mind had even noticed that his foot had slipped.

  Fate damn it!

  He had never learned to swim.

  Struggling at first, but thirteen Standard Years of physical tr
aining told him to relax, and he did. Floating to the surface, striking out, but the courier was drowning—

  Cargo bubbles.

  It was another string of the big floating bubbles and Tom jerked his head out of the way just in time, as the leading bubble slid past. There was a protruding rim around each one, just above the surface; Tom grabbed the nearest, jack-knifed upwards, kicked through the membranous top, and was in.