Context

by John Meaney

  ‘Sweetheart?’ Tom called out.

  His black cloak was still draped over his forearm, but he was able to give a half-wave in the woman’s direction.

  She paused.

  Tom moved quickly, taking long paces to hide the urgency.

  ‘It is you, darling. Fancy seeing you here.’

  Doubt reached her eyes, and she began to turn away, but Tom was close enough now to murmur: ‘You’re in danger. I can help.’

  ‘Danger?’ Her voice was quiet.

  He took her arm, redirecting her—‘Don’t turn your head, but can you glance to your left?’—until he was sure she had seen the watchers.

  ‘Who are you? A friend of Yano’s?’

  ‘Talk later.’ Tom was already leading her towards a different exit: rounded, black with gloom. ‘Right now, you’ve attracted some unwelcome attention.’

  She gave a small, silent nod.

  Either she was less drunk than he had thought, or fear had sobered her, for she matched his pace with no further argument. Accompanying him into shadows.

  And stopped with him, when they were hidden in the exit tunnel. Like Tom, she held her breath, and listened.

  Footsteps.

  The militiamen were following.

  Tom felt the entire mission, his secret world, collapsing in around him because of the impulse to help a weak embittered stranger, who might turn out to be detestable.

  ‘Take this.’ He shoved his folded cloak into her hands. ‘And give me your cape.’

  At the next intersection, half-lit in sombre blue, Tom stood briefly where the following men might see him from a distance—clad in the woman’s long cape—then stepped into the shadows and slapped his own face.

  ‘Swear at me now,’ he said in a low voice.

  And the dark-haired woman delivered a loud blistering curse—the sound would surely carry back to the militiamen—using a wealth of vocabulary which surprised him even in the circumstances.

  ‘Now go,’ he said when she had finished. ‘Meet me in Skandril Market at dawnshift.’

  She started to move.

  ‘And don’t return home.’

  A hesitation, then: ‘I was with friends at the club.’

  Bitter undertone. Friends who would likely have betrayed her, by now.

  You betrayed yourself.

  ‘Go on,’ said Tom. ‘Get out of here.’

  Into a side tunnel’s shadows —

  Go with freedom.

  — and was gone.

  Militiamen, making more noise as they drew near, no longer bothering to conceal themselves.

  Tom made his move.

  Swimming was the least of the new skills drilled into him at the Academy. But he was going to have to count on it to save his life.

  Deep breath, silent dive—it was a mental rehearsal—and push like Chaos.

  Tom was walking fast, but not too fast, with the cape billowing slightly, and three militiamen following. But in his mind, he was already in the cold, black canal, taking the only way to freedom.

  Focus now.

  The teachings of fine, honest warrior-instructors—from Dervlin and Maestro da Silva, to Sergeant M’Kalnikav and his Academy comrades—lived on in Tom. Defining the nature of reality: that it bends to human will, to the power of imagination.

  Hold the objective in mind, consider it achieved, keep that image despite all pain and all confusion, hang on to it with frenzied energy, and it becomes—finally—real.

  More footsteps, ahead as well as behind him.

  Another patrol.

  Tom turned left, into a grey stone corridor, but there were voices at the far end.

  They’re closing in.

  But the soldiers’ mental objective was to capture a lone, somewhat drunken woman, who might curse and scratch but offered no serious threat to uniformed males at the height of their power, with the strength of their comradeship and teamed desire, their polished weapons in their hands, and the knowledge that a prisoner was in no position to complain about anything that might occur between here and the cells, after they had finished with her.

  There was an alcove, too small to hide a person, but sufficient to conceal a bundled cape of lustrous blue, in the shadows where its sprinkled silver flecks would not spark with reflected light.

  Then Tom climbed up and hung motionless, like some three-limbed silent arachnabug, splayed against the tunnel ceiling.

  After they had passed, he descended easily, retrieved the cape, and broke into a loping, soundless run.

  He had spent little time here on the Quintum Stratum, but the design was replicated through several levels and he had memorized the topological differences. The canal was where it would be near his current home, two strata down, and he ran harder than he ever had, heel to toe, in utter silence.

  Black water, glistening.

  He cast the cape, and it fluttered to the waves then floated, where it began a slow rotating drift, like a discarded blossom whose purpose was to spread genes by the power of its beauty. Silver flecks scintillated, grew dark.

  Distant shouts, as the militiamen, angry now, retraced their steps.

  Tom crouched down at the stone bank’s straight edge, controlled his breathing as he extended his arm, and rolled forwards softly into darkness.

  Cold black water enveloped him.

  ~ * ~

  48

  BETA DRACONIS III AD 2142

  <>

  [16]

  It was a world where nothing made sense.

  The human settlement was like a tangled pile of silver bones; but, from the lip of a balcony extrusion near its apex, it seemed an island of stability amid churning chaos. The sky was a van Gogh madness, purple blood swirling in turbulent turquoise waters; the cracked ground lay still, but its hues shifted—always at the edge of Ro’s vision, whenever she looked away.

  And the buildings ...

  They changed. Sometimes, flickering, it seemed that multiple images overlaid each other. Staring at the Zajinet city for more than twenty seconds at a time caused migraines. Beside Ro, also beneath the balcony’s protective membrane, even Lila periodically closed her eyes, readjusting: a protective habit after two years’ sojourn on BD3.

  And the beings ...

  Foot traffic, and unsettling flying things, passed among the fractal avenues. Their shapes morphed, flowing as they moved; sometimes, briefly, just a fiery tracery remained, before some new external form clad the bright-glimmering inner core.

  ‘We don’t even know,’ murmured Lila, ‘whether they’re all Zajinets. One species, or a full ecology.’

  Ro squeezed her eyes shut.

  I don’t like this place.

  A Zajinet—the renegade on Terra—had somehow brought her here. After the events in Moscow, the Mexican gardener who was really an assassin, attempting to kill her—or had the target been Zoë?—her presence in this place seemed simultaneously unremarkable and a massive, cosmic joke.

  Why did the Zajinet leave me here?

  She felt as though she was going to be sick. Even Zoë had, in one sense, betrayed her. For it seemed obvious now that, though the Zajinet or one of its human servants might have stolen the crystal-cassette of Anne-Louise’s work from her room in Arizona, it was more likely that Zoë had been the thief. Working for her masters in the intelligence services.

  Protecting Ro from a threat they only half comprehended? Or using her as bait?

  She wondered if the renegade Zajinet was acting on its own, or whether it had allies—or enemies—here on BD3.

  Why did it let me live?

  Somehow it had transported her across the light-years; it seemed that not only human Pilots possessed the secret of mu-space travel. Yet the Zajinets had kept their capabilities secret all this time.

  ‘Come on, Ro.’ A gentle touch upon her arm: Lila, smiling softly. ‘Let’s get inside.’

  The corridors were blue-silver, tangled hollow tubes—occasionally widening out into rooms—which formed no
discernible pattern. Sometimes, if all the humans happened to sleep at the same time, they would awaken to find the configuration altered: old rooms disappeared (sometimes with the equipment and sparse furnishings they had contained); new rooms came into existence. Occasionally long-lost equipment made a reappearance. Most times, it was warped beyond easy recognition; sometimes—though formed of solid metal—it seemed to have been twisted inside out.

  There were forty-four people living in the settlement, and they called it Watcher’s Bones.

  Ro woke in the middle of the ‘night’, and made her way to the current designated relaxation lounge. There was a bar (complete with cocktail-mixing AI) installed by the wall, and a tall, bulky, florid-looking Englishman named Matheson -usually called Fluffy—was making practised use of it.

  ‘Delighted to see you, old girl.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Take a pew.’

  Ro fetched herself a fruit-juice mix, and took a reclining seat facing Matheson—in her own mind, she could not bring herself to use his nickname.

  ‘It’s a strange place,’ she said.

  ‘No more so’—he quaffed some of his fluorescent cocktail—‘than the manner of your arrival.’

  She sighed. ‘I couldn’t agree more.’

  Everyone in the settlement had seen the tape of her interview, with Lila and Jared asking the questions, and AI-physiometry displays indicating that everything Ro said was true. Or at least that she believed it.

  There were still stares: hers was the first new face here for two Terran years, and it was nearly six months before the next relief vessel was due to call.

  ‘ Y’know, on Earth’—Matheson, old-fashioned beyond his years, never used the word ‘Terra’—‘an alien visitor would sample grass blades, penicillin growths, mushrooms and human beings, and see that we’re all outgrowths of the same DNA chemistry. Even oxygen is a byproduct of life. It would be obvious, y’see’—with a wagging forefinger—‘that we’re all of the same world.’

  It was an old speech, Ro could tell, but with a new audience. And she was interested.

  ‘Lila said no-one knows how many species live here.’

  ‘Or even if it really is their homeworld. The eco relationships appear senseless. But my research leads me to believe—well, never mind.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘That they’ve travelled here. That the Zajinets possess the ability to travel through mu-space. And your appearance here forms my vindication, old girl.’ He held up his glass in salute, and drank to her.

  ‘I guess it does.’

  It was hard to believe that another species had the means to enter mu-space, and bring a frail human captive all this way through that strange, fractal continuum, without her being conscious of the journey.

  If that’s what really happened.

  She hunched up in her chair, and shivered. All was confusion. For she could not interpret recent events’ significance, any more than her eyes could make ordered sense of the shifting, random, chaotic cityscape outside, where her kidnapper must even now be living, plotting its next indecipherable move.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured later, ‘whether Zoë’s still alive, even.’

  Matheson shifted in his chair—startling Ro: she had thought he was asleep—and spoke without opening his eyes.

  ‘Spook training, old girl. She’s bound to have got out intact.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Scholar-diplomats are we.’ He made it sound like the words of a song. ‘And we get around a bit. I’ve come across your friend before, and she was an UNtel agent-in-charge during a little, er, difficulty in Lhasa. Years ago.’

  ‘I think the renegade was trying to kill Fyodor.’ Ro had taken to using Zoë’s pet name for the Zajinet ambassador which was living in XenoMir. ‘But it might have been after Zoë.’

  Matheson opened his eyes and slowly shook his head. ‘I really don’t think so.’

  Ro stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  In answer, he slowly levered his bulk from the chair.

  ‘Either you’re being disingenuous, old thing’—he stood surprisingly steadily, after all he had drunk—‘or it’s yourself that you’re fooling. It’s time you opened those rather distinctive, unsettling eyes of yours.’

  But if it wanted me dead, why did it bring me here?

  Then Matheson steered himself towards his quarters, leaving Ro alone in the lounge to contemplate his words and the formless thoughts boiling in her mind, like a chemical spill in a troubled ocean, fermenting explosively in the shark-haunted, shadowed depths where she had not dared to look.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  49

  NULAPEIRON AD 3421

  Some things had not changed, even under the conditions of the Dark Fire’s occupation. To move between strata, it was still far easier to descend.

  The dark-haired woman, Shayella, was waiting in Skandril Market, in a dusty annexe away from the stallholders setting up. Her face was webbed with tension, pale beneath the glowclusters’ primrose morning light.

  Tom, still dripping wet, had rousted one of the local agents-in-place from his bed in the small hours. Apologizing for the intrusion, he had taken away a fake ID and one-off scan-unit.

  By a dusty pillar, he scanned in her DNA, handed over the ID.

  ‘You’re coming with me,’ he told her.

  Two strata down, in a deserted former warehouse hall where ciliates rustled unseen, she sat with Tom and Rilka and Tyentro, and told them what she knew.

  ‘A thousand artificers,’ she said, ‘constructed and upgraded the Seer’s chamber, up on the Primum Stratum. When the -enemy—came, they took it over, by all accounts. Lately, they’ve searched for anyone who worked on those projects. My...’ She looked at them. ‘My brother Yano was one of them.’

  For two hours they talked, about conditions since the Blight’s forces had arrived, the strictures on speech and social life, and about her brother. It all spilled out of her, as the tension of holding in her opinions and feelings broke open, in a cathartic relief which was helped rather than hindered by the fact that her audience consisted of three strangers. But there was no other information of immediate tactical benefit.

  Except in the negative: Yano was no dissident, had no personal enemies, yet the Tunnel Guard had arrested him. But he had worked on the Seer’s chamber, perched on one of the flexible catenary walkways which led to it, dangling over the dark chasm in which it was suspended.

  Finally, Rilka took her away to a temporary dwelling alcove, leaving Tom and Tyentro to decide what would happen next.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Tyentro, ‘while you were gone, Rilka came back with some interesting data.’

  The constabulary where Rilka worked had assisted in a raid, taking the autodoc files from a local med centre and imprisoning two of the medics. One of those medics, with travel authorization spanning eight strata, had an unusual range of patients.

  ‘His name wouldn’t be Xyenquil, would it?’

  ‘No.’ Tyentro shook his head. ‘Any reason it should be?’

  ‘Just wondering. So who was the most interesting patient?’

  Tyentro brought a holo to life in the gloom, and rotated the image of a woman’s head. Her eyes were milky, her complexion unlined, and it took a moment for Tom to realize where he had seen her.

  ‘That’s Velsivith’s wife.’

  ‘Just so.’ Tyentro smiled. ‘Lieutenant Velsivith neglected to mention—and I knew he was holding something back—that wife Vhiyalla has serious problems.’

  ‘She’s blind.’ Tom frowned. ‘He told us that.’

  ‘But he didn’t mention that she’s dying.’

  ‘Ah, Chaos.’

  ‘And now his intelligence superiors know it too. She’s the one hold they really have over him.’

  There was movement at the old warehouse’s edges, and Tom wondered how the ciliates fared with only dust to eat. It was one of those momen
ts when the small realities assume importance, before the arbitrary process of decision-making commits an entire human life to one course of action.

  ‘It’s time that Ralkin Velsivith and I had another little chat, Tyentro.’