Context

by John Meaney

  <<... saved softly in confusing dark...>>

  <<... their only hope...>>

  Lila, her hair a shining violet today, examined a small disk embedded in the palm of her glove.

  ‘One of them’—Lila pointed—‘we’ve dealt with before. The other Zajinet’s a stranger.’

  I know him.

  It was the one who had broken into XenoMir, had somehow brought her to this world. Ro was—almost—sure of it. But she kept her mouth shut as Lila tapped her palm disk, downloading the defendant’s (as Ro mentally labelled the Zajinet stranger) energy signature for later reference.

  Some kind of resonance? Ro was sure she could steal a palm disk, now she knew of their existence. A way of detecting particular individuals?

  Or of tracking them down.

  Already Ro was thinking in terms of tactics and weaponry. And revenge.

  Between the two Zajinets, a complex wave pattern built: a form of communication so beyond humans there was nothing to do but analyse the ebb and flow of brightness. It was like trying to decipher a person’s speech by looking at the blaze of neurons firing within the brain: devoid of semantic content. But it surely was an argument, between two minds.

  Then the pattern slowly faded.

  An expectant air hung over the hall, and for a moment the walls seemed solid, devoid of the flickering overlays which normally characterized this place.

  Find him guilty!

  Nothing.

  If it was a trial, the defendant was not being punished.

  And then the conclusion, which no-one among the humans fully understood.

  The individual that had kidnapped Ro blazed brightly—in triumph, she thought. Then both of the opposing Zajinets seemed to slip sideways into the liquid air, somehow folding the atmosphere and themselves into narrow lines, then collapsed to points, then nothing at all.

  Is that what it did to me?

  Was it teleportation?

  Whatever the mechanism, it was the disappearance into thin—if unusual—air of two alien beings which captured people’s imaginations. Not the workings of the Zajinet legal system, if such a thing even existed.

  The others were muttering excitedly to each other—‘Did you see that?’—but Ro tapped her glove’s wrist controls to silence her helmet’s audio input.

  Can they teleport across the light-years?

  But a strange memory came to her then, a flickering glimpse of a hollow ovoid chamber, glimmering with eerie light, with the Zajinet, her shining captor, hovering above a white glowing brightness at the chamber’s centre. Then a twisting, a blaze of amber.

  And somehow she knows the Zajinet’s attention is upon her, though it is no more than a jumbled tracery of scarlet light. Then a tendril of lightning reaches out—

  Blackness.

  Ro drew a deep, shuddering breath.

  It’s short-range, the teleportation, if that’s what it truly is. But it’s not how they travel among the stars.

  Because she knew what the shining chamber must have been. And that glimpse of amber...

  They have mu-space ships!

  She knew, but she was going to keep that knowledge to herself. At least for now.

  All around the humans on the dais, the remaining Zajinets, clothed in a variety of abstract-sculpture conglomerate forms, began to depart, drifting outwards from the hall’s centre. Each timed its egress with a wall’s flickering out of existence, so that no actual openings were necessary.

  There was an air of anticlimax.

  Behind the dais, the humans’ large personnel carrier, a blank-windowed converted TDV, opened its opaque doors. Quickly, they began to move inside with a shivering eagerness, desperate to return to the settlement they normally despised.

  You should‘ve killed me, Zajinet.

  It brought her here, but let her live. To avoid a murder charge, instead of kidnapping, in the strange trial they had just witnessed? The trial from which it had gone free.

  But it was responsible for Anne-Louise’s murder.

  And for the death of Luís, the man she loved.

  You really should have killed me.

  A woman called Anita—normally to be found in the company of Oron, a skimpy-bearded sociologist—pushed her way through the noisy gathering to Ro’s side.

  ‘Did you feel it?’ Her dark brows, which almost met in the middle, were raised in amazement. “Their prayer energy. It was seventh level, at least.’

  ‘Amazing,’ said Ro.

  ‘Would you like to talk it over?’ Anita’s face had grown flushed, as though the invitation were sexually illicit. ‘Oron’s waiting in my room. We could—’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘But you’re simpatico, Dorothy. I can sense it.’

  Only Mother calls me that.

  ‘I need to meditate on it,’ said Ro. ‘I’m going to pray alone.’

  ‘Ah, ah. I see.’ Anita withdrew, confused. ‘Talk to me later.’

  Much later.

  Ro stood at the periphery, until the excitement began to die down, and the group broke up slowly of its own accord, as people began to drift back towards their work.

  But there were some diehards for whom the distraction had been too much. There was boisterous laughter, and a booming voice called along the silver corridor’s curved length:

  ‘Hey, Fluffy! You up for a game of ping-darts?’

  Matheson shook his head. ‘Sorry, old thing.’ He started to clap a hand on Ro’s shoulder, stopped himself. ‘I’m going to buy this girl a drink.’

  In the otherwise deserted bar, he fixed two drinks in plastic cups, and he and Ro sat down on opposite sides of a small round table.

  Both drinks were juice-mixes.

  ‘On the wagon?’ asked Ro.

  ‘After this morning, no chance. But it’s a bit early, still.’

  ‘You’ve been out in the city before.’

  ‘I didn’t like it then, either.’ He blew out a long breath. ‘And they weren’t discussing the welfare of one of my friends, that time.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You, old girl’—he raised his cup: a mocking toast—‘were the focus of today’s proceedings. Couldn’t you tell?’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  Not from the energy flows. But their implied regard -inasmuch as they had focused attention: their entire minds were also their sense organs—had indeed been directed at her from time to time.

  ‘Bit of a blistering argument, among those two fiery Zajinets. I’d love to know what was really going on.’

  Has he worked it out?

  Ro set her cup down, and spoke very quietly.

  ‘It was a trial.’ And, with bitterness: ‘But the guilty party went free.’

  She was sure of it.

  That night, Ro prowled the empty corridors of Watcher’s Bones, until she came to the area known as Sparks. There was a lock system, but Ro spent only seconds examining it. She stood before the sensor panel.

  Golden scintillations.

  It was more complex than the locking plates she had subverted in Arizona, but she could feel the ebb and flow of energy, the tiny flux-knots of power—

  A blaze of golden light.

  Yes.

  Fading ...

  Then her eyes were shining jet once more, a glistening black, and the security door was folding open.

  In a long cupboard, six empty env-suits hung like shadowed spectres. None of the gauntlets bore a processor disk, though each palm held an empty socket.

  Damn, damn.

  But she analysed the layout, saw in her mind the quiet movements of the senior researchers, Lila among them.

  If I were a disk, where would I be?

  She waved open a lab-bench drawer, and found the disk. She pocketed it.

  Then a strange sound/not-sound pulsed through the air.

  There was a folding/unfolding in the shining wall before her, as her surroundings began to reconfigure -

  It’s not supposed to happen when someon
e’s watching.

  — and, galvanized, she took the opportunity and pushed with all her might, impossible strength in her narrow frame, and the spacetime disturbance caught hold of the lab bench and sucked it into presumed oblivion, while Ro leaped back to safety.

  She laughed quietly, surprising herself, as the wall shivered into its new configuration and solidified.

  Now no-one would know she had stolen a palm disk.

  Off to one side lay evidence of an experiment in construction: a jumble of processor blocks, a pile of narrow copper tubing. It seemed an omen, for Ro had been thinking that a metallic conductor would make the best weapon.

  There was a length of copper which was the right size for a bo, the fighting staff of aikido with which Ro had trained since childhood, and that was the one she picked.

  Forgive me, Father.

  She did it occasionally: talked to Dart, to the dead father she had never known, who had sacrificed himself in mu-space—subsumed within the quasi-sentient energy pattern which had held his ship and threatened Mother’s—to save his lover and his unborn child.

  It was the only form of prayer of which Ro was capable.

  You would not approve of this.

  No answer rang back from the empty metal corridors as she broke into a silent jog, the copper pipe held horizontally in her hand, like a spear-carrying warrior who was used to moving long distances, fast, while conserving her true strength for the waiting battlefield.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  52

  NULAPEIRON AD 3422

  Scarlet banners. Armbands on the civilians who marched in rows through the boulevards and gallerias, their febrile manic excitement washing through the air, bouncing back from stone walls which had seen everything over the passing centuries.

  Soldiers were everywhere.

  In the quieter residential tunnels, there were people who turned away from Tom as he passed by, not wanting to lock gazes. They were the rationalists, the scared ones who could not openly share their fear.

  It was the first day of Phoenix Year, and the community was giving birth to itself in a new guise, with new loyalties. The occupation had continued for long enough. Something in the cultural psyche had given way with the passing of the old year, and acceptance of the new order (with the over-enthusiasm of new converts) pushed its insistent way through every corridor, inserted its self-serving images into every family and social group.

  And blocked out memories of deportation: the disappearance of former neighbours and friends enveloped now by an overarching wave of desperate optimism.

  At the first checkpoint, an officer had insisted on chatting in Lintran, and Tom had made it through the interrogation-by-gossip, careful not to over-use his memorized trivia of that region. But he had been sweating heavily by the conversation’s end.

  Finally, a waiter-servitor showed him to an expensive restaurant table, on a semicircular grey balcony which overlooked a wide passageway below. Bronze glowclusters floated near the silver-decorated ceiling.

  Tom took the chair nearest to the railing, so that he could watch the expected parade pass by. The waiter complimented him on his choice, and waved a command at the table.

  Menu-tricons floated meaninglessly before Tom.

  The waiter leaned close.

  ‘Phase One complete. We’ve just had word.’

  Tom picked a dish at random.

  And, as he brought the silver carafe—‘A nice gripplewine, sir?’—another whispered update: ‘Phase Two. They’re in.’

  Tom nodded his thanks.

  Tom pushed food around on the plate with his tine-spoon, watching his fellow diners—there were occupation officers among them, and willing dining partners to share their jokes and bonhomie—and, occasionally, looking down, over the balustrade, at the crowd which swelled below the balcony. A tunnel party had expanded into the main broadway, and the laughter was both coarser and more genuine than the brittle affectations up here in the restaurant.

  Tyentro’s team had set up tight-beam comms along an old service tunnel. In places, it was scarcely wide enough for maint-drones to pass along; it seemed safe enough from eavesdropping. The control end was here, behind an access panel in the kitchen; for now, Tom preferred to maintain his merchant-trader cover and stay outside, pretending to eat alone, while two agents among the kitchen staff listened carefully.

  By now, in any case, Tyentro and Velsivith would be out of contact.

  Tyentro’s lieutenant, Stilvan, was manning the comms at the other end. He would have watched them using cling-gloves and slippers—formed of gekkomere, covered with fine, invisible fractal hairs, like arachnargoi tendril pads—to crawl along the outside of the catenary walkways, until they reached workers’ entrances (as revealed by Yano) and slipped inside the former Seer’s headquarters: the great chamber which was now the mausoleum holding his remains, suspended above a dark abyss which seemed to fall away forever.

  At the restaurant’s far end, the waiter caught Tom’s gaze and blinked slowly, three times.

  They’re inside.

  And then the waiting.

  Unpredictable, this phase, but there was that Clausewitzian principle related to the role of chance in war—which normally brought a grim smile to Tom’s face, but not this time. He would count this mission a success if all his agents, and Velsivith, returned alive.

  I’d make a poor general.

  For a former revolutionary, it was a strange thought. A fragment of half-formed poetry came to mind—and it had been a while since he had written anything—but he pushed it gently to the back of his mind, letting his subconscious daemons nurture the idea before trying to pull it forwards into the limiting constraints of language.

  Then the waiter, having brought another table’s main course, threw a white towel over his left shoulder as he headed back towards the kitchen, and Tom slowly put down his tine-spoon, swallowing hard.

  It was the signal he had been hoping not to receive.

  There were skaters below, using smooth-boots as they glided through intricate dance steps: a hundred people in approximate coordination, while a makeshift band played music, and onlookers laughed—without malice—if anyone slipped or fell. For they were amateurs all, and this was supposed to be a celebration.

  But Tom was a merchant-trader, too grand for mixing with the commoners, and his face twisted at the aftertaste of his food as he stood self-importantly, and strode with a determined glare towards the restaurant’s rear.

  ‘I’ve got a complaint to make.’

  Play-acting came naturally, but it was real fear which thickened his voice as he stepped through the membrane, and let his complaint die away.

  Inside, they ushered him straight through to a dark grimy service tunnel, where he crouched down beside a narrow-faced man who sat on an upturned box, manipulating a holopad.

  ‘I don’t know.’ The agent shook his head. ‘There was graser fire, then we lost contact.’

  ‘Chaos.’ Tom closed his eyes.

  ‘I think... Stilvan was hit.’

  ‘Hazard and perdition.’ Tom spat the curse. ‘I should’ve been with them.’

  After a moment: ‘Perhaps you should go back inside, my Lord.’

  ‘No. I’m staying here.’

  The waiting now was worse.

  The access panel opened, and light from the kitchen flooded in, along with the tail end of an argument: ‘...the sorbet this way. Then serve across the person’s right shoulder. Got it?’

  There was a mumbled reply, lost as the head waiter poked his head into the tunnel and said: ‘The intelligence forces have a guest. Not here, I mean, but at their HQ. Tortured and eventually turned, someone from another network. I can’t believe they’re discussing it openly.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Officers.’ He grimaced. ‘At table seven.’

  ‘What else?’ Tom checked the holopad: still no contact. ‘Any hint of this man’s identity?’

  ‘Not a man
. Someone called Lihru.’

  The ground seemed to shift beneath Tom’s feet.