Context

by John Meaney

  But their numbers—

  Transcend.

  Fight faster.

  He was a blur, he was violence incarnate, and he danced among them like a demon, dispensing death and pain, and he was flooded with a joy such as he had never known, that no civilized being should experience.

  Elva!

  Father’s blocky hands, graser tool, molten metal spitting as he drew the stallion’s form out of a featureless metal brick. Mother’s cupric tresses, her dreamy smiles. Golden hair and creamy skin, and Sylvana’s blue eyes regarding him in Lord Velond’s classroom, as the joys of logosophy blossomed at last. The simple shore and the tranquil cavern sea, and the Pavilion School where for a while he taught and knew some peace.

  And Elva.

  Fluid on his hand, hot blood and worse, and the bodies were one Chaotic group-mass of limbs and torsos, a vast target, and he smashed and impaled and twisted in his death-dance and then the bodies close to him were fallen and there was no time left to reach the soldiers who knelt at the rear and the mirror transmission-faces of their graser rifles shone like rainbows, shimmering spectra of diffracted colours, blue the colour of the homeworld’ s skies and red as of the dark blood which runs through us all, a vast extended river passed on and ever on which flows along the mainstreams and into the tiniest tributaries of human history, billions and eventually trillions of actual physical existing feeling thinking individual people—real warm smelly wonderful healthy dirty loving hating depressed and disappointed with joy-moments and the high transcendence and the thousand hidden fears and petty details, the colour and the texture of those curtains and the taste of today’s breakfast and floating dust which catches the light and another’s touch and the countless sensations too easy to overlook which form a universe for every human and every being alone along that tiny capillary flow of history until suddenly one day with unforeseen abruptness ends.

  And nothing.

  Running.

  Nothing in his mind but a prayer of hate, an oath which spreading virus-like was imprinting itself within his molecular structure, rewriting every cell, as the animal-organism simply ran for life.

  Empty tunnel after empty tunnel, as though none would dare oppose him.

  I will kill them.

  Running.

  My brother...

  Running harder.

  For you —

  Harder.

  — I will kill them all.

  ~ * ~

  54

  NULAPEIRON AD 3422

  It took forty-two days to reach the wild zones.

  At the second tenday’s start, he finally left Grand’aume territory, carefully picking his way through jumbled broken tunnels—a battleground of two SY before, still shattered but without the stink—to avoid the border patrols.

  In Khitaliaq, the atmosphere was different; though the Blight’s forces were still everywhere, the occupation rested more easily upon the local inhabitants.

  Because, he realized after a while, they offered no resistance to the takeover.

  If there were deportations, he did not spot any, and he did not dare to ask. Though he had an emergency cover-ID, his description alone might throw up an alert in even a routine security check.

  There was a store, on the realm’s outskirts, where he tried to buy some food.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ An expressive shrug of the shopkeeper’s shoulders. ‘No cred-spindles accepted. Not since the ... you know. Only scrip.’

  Which, as a non-citizen, Tom did not possess.

  ‘I see.’

  But, as Tom was leaving, the shopkeeper stopped him, and handed over a small bundle: baked rolls and a small bottle, wrapped in cloth. Tom bowed, expressing thanks beyond words.

  Avoiding patrols, he slept in deserted corridors, wrapped in a thin cloak taken from a storage bin—at an almshouse, intended for the needy—and curled up on cold stone. Sometimes, older folk took him in, fed him, let him sleep on a mat or a spare cot; always, he left silently before dawnshift, sans farewell.

  If there was an organized resistance here to the Blight’s occupation, Tom had no way of contacting it.

  A large woman, smiling at his accent, gave him freshly made broth. But she left him, saying she had a neighbour to visit, and something about her expression—a hint of determined scowl, quickly hidden—alerted him.

  He slipped away as soon as she was gone, regretting the loss of warmth and comfort, but afraid that soldiers would soon be descending upon her spotlessly clean chambers.

  There were patrols, but the border into interstitial territory was extended—with thousands of tunnels and caverns to cover—and the place Tom chose had been another battleground.

  Quiet now, air redolent of old slaughter, the cries of dying men and women embedded in the shattered stone, the blackened ceilings and the riven floors, though their bodies had long since been hauled away by grieving civilians: family members reclaiming their dead.

  He moved through the caverns, silent and grim, as though he were a ghost himself.

  It was the monks who saved him.

  Am I forgiven?

  There were times, as he ran, that it seemed he was not alone: that orange-robed spirits ran alongside in soundless encouragement. It was their zentropic drugs, not designed for someone like Tom, which had caused his psychotic breakdown.

  Tom ran on, disbelieving.

  The sounds of monks collapsing, perhaps dying.

  But they saved him, nonetheless, for the training was deep, part of his body now: a remembered discipline of ultra-distance runs with very little food. The physical organism reverted to that state, and his spirit kept him going when medically his body should have failed.

  And the need to revenge the other Tom Corcorigan’s death.

  Kill them all...

  For his brother’s sake.

  It was in the fifth tenday that he reached the wild zones. After that, he lost track: it might have been two days, it might have been twenty, thirty—he fed on wild fungi, which sometimes brought lurid dreams even as he ran—before he saw, beyond a raw, unfinished cavern, the smooth marble of a boulevard, the polished copper archway and the glistening protective membrane, and the welcome faces of startled guards.

  Help me.

  He tried to speak the words aloud but nothing came out, just gasping, then blackness crashed in as the floor rose up to meet him, hands catching him at the last moment before the world dwindled, slipped away into the distance, and left him for an extended, welcome time.

  ~ * ~

  43

  BETA DRACONIS III

  AD 2142-2143

  <>

  [18]

  She did not find revenge that first night.

  Could Luís’ s killer have escaped, travelled in its mu-space vessel back to Terra? But that would make her quest a futile one, and she could not accept that. For all she knew, Zoë had also died, her broken corpse stretched out in that ruined lab in XenoMir, while the other Zajinet, the ambassador, looked helplessly on.

  The renegade had a lot to answer for.

  In Watcher’s Bones, day and night were artificial periods of light and darkness: the irregular world outside maintained its own non-rhythms where flickering overlays failed to conceal the unsettling core reality. Though the odd-shaped planet’s centre of gravity followed an elliptical orbit, the world itself tumbled chaotically through the other degrees of freedom.

  Ro’s ‘nightly’ excursions were surreal: sometimes taking place beneath a sky of blazing white, though other realities seemed to whisper of gentler worlds, before disappearing. At other times, the night sky was a black dome in which the stars’ constellations occasionally flickered into new patterns: a phenomenon she had not reported and could not explain. She wondered if she was becoming attuned to the impossible contradictions of this place.

  Her own routine became fixed. Inspired by an account of life in Spain two centuries before, she slept twice a day, four hours at a time, using solo study-time for sleep. S
he would awaken late, take her copper shaft and her palm disk, and hunt for resonance traces of the Zajinet who was responsible for Luís’s death.

  No-one looked for the missing recognition disk; the disappearance of the lab bench accounted for everything.

  In the weeks which followed, she came to suspect, then grow certain, that she was not the only one to leave the human settlement when everyone was supposed to be asleep. One night, finally, she tracked two human figures beneath a quasi night sky banded with violet aurorae. Then she caught sight of their faces, just for a moment, as they turned beneath an archway of white light and entered the ever-shifting maze of the Zajinets’ city.

  After a while, into the third month (now February, back on Terra, had there been a way of returning there) of nocturnal explorations, her once-frequent migraines began to lessen, and finally to stop altogether. Sometimes it frightened her, that the flickering van Gogh surroundings should no longer upset her perceptions.

  And, inside Watcher’s Bones when the humans there were gathered, playing out their little social vignettes as though to shut out the vast strangeness which surrounded their insignificant enclave, she watched Anita and Oron, listened to their near-evangelical interpretations of Zajinet sociology, and wondered where they went, in an alien city, at the dead of night.

  There was an overweight biologist called Bruce, who led a group of co-workers through daily t’ai-chi, at whom Ro privately laughed till the day he slapped her lightly and sent her spinning across the room. Then she buckled down, learning the hidden complexities of the art with a rapidity which dismayed—patience being a virtue—her new teacher.

  In her room, she rigged punchbags and horizontal bars, practised kickboxing and Irish kempo, aikido footwork and pentjak silat tactics: analysing, comparing, modifying.

  Synthesizing.

  She did not know why.

  But she knew it was something she had to do.

  ‘I’m going to retire,’ said Fluffy Matheson over the usual drinks, ‘when we get back to Earth.’

  ‘Terra.’ Ro smiled.

  ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

  For once, there was a tremble in his voice, and Ro made no joke.

  ‘What is it?’

  Later, she minimized her display and said:

  ‘You made me cry, you bastard.’

  Matheson swallowed, all facades slipping away. ‘Is it good enough?’

  ‘I’m no writer.’ She killed the display. ‘But I think it’s wonderful.’ She could see, in the story, where some of the characters had come from. But his Settlements & Separations: An Embassy Tale was all his own, and it was funny as well as sad. ‘Go for it.’

  He made no reply as she left the room, quietly.

  Copper arc.

  Matheson’s finding himself.

  Stab, advance, retreat.

  But what about me?

  Circle, redirect, and strike.

  Who is Ro McNamara ?

  Shining thrust.

  Who am I, really?

  ‘Three weeks left.’ Lila practically sang the words, as they stepped into the communal shower. ‘I can’t wait to see a real sky again.’

  Ro almost slipped, but caught her balance.

  ‘What do you mean?’ She raised her voice above the hissing, the clouds of steam.

  ‘Relief,’ said Lila, but she was not talking about the shower. “The ship arrives in twenty-one days and seventeen hours. Not that I’m counting.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ And Ro laughed, but not wholeheartedly.

  Three weeks to go.

  Nervous as kittens on moving day, the humans moved about their settlement, checking crates in the corridors, keeping watch (lest they disappear) on the most valuable items, and making handover preparations for their replacements.

  No-one was staying for a second tour.

  It was the final night, and Ro’s final chance, when the metallic tubular tunnels dimmed. She had thought it would be hard to slip out, but in fact the muddle of crates and unpacked belongings made it all the easier to sneak through the protective membrane.

  Easier, too, to follow the two figures moving through the glaring whiteness outside. Between them, they held a case which was not big, but too heavy for them to carry easily.

  A leaving present for your xeno friends ?

  There was bio-research, including Brace’s analysis of samples he had taken from Ro, which had been held in a case like that; Ro had seen Brace’s assistants put it at the centre of their team’s pile of crates.

  This better not be anything to do with me.

  But she was the one who had been brought here, yet not killed. Whose roommate had been murdered. And Luís -even if his death had been unintentional, if it were anti-xeno terrorists and not the Zajinet who had attacked the UNSA airbase, still it had been the renegade who sparked off the most recent wave of anti-xeno sentiment.

  Patterns, falling into place.

  Even as she followed through the blazing city, shadow buildings flicking into existence and disappearing, momentary flashes of green—solid sheets of it—decorating the sky, she saw the influence of opposing forces back on Terra. More than individuals? Two factions of Zajinets, or something more complex?

  Yes: two factions among the Zajinets.

  For every individual in this alien place was perpetually in two minds—if not two hundred minds—on any matter you could think of.

  Why me?

  The question burned through her mind, a counterpoint to the surreal slipping and sliding of artefacts and sky, of Zajinets’ bulky external forms gliding through the chaos, the half-glimpsed images of other worlds or times or dreams, whichever they might be.

  Flowers of blood, ribbons of ink.

  That was the sky which flowed overhead. Her footsteps, sounding back from the vermilion metal path running through the confusion, occasionally clanged, sometimes faded to disconcerting silence.

  Her membrane-thin env-suit served only to detoxify the atmosphere; it could not hold back the madness of this place.

  But, however much reality flickered, she kept Anita and Oron in sight. They were beginning to struggle with the case’s weight.

  Walking amid waist-high steel grass, being careful, Ro stopped suddenly. Crystal mosaics, with tessellae of a thousand hues, sang in the warm/cold pulsing air.

  What if they want to remove the proof ?

  The mu-space ship was due—but if they faked a natural disaster, killing everybody, they could remove all traces of Ro’s presence. And that would keep the Zajinets’ mu-space travel abilities a secret.

  Surely not. Surely no-one could be that insane.

  Cobalt spheres, which might have been floating liquid, coagulated in the now-darkening air like frozen raindrops.

  Ro shifted her long copper rod from her right hand to her left, and narrowed the distance to Anita and Oron. Then the disk in her glove’s palm pulsed.

  Found you.

  Luís’s killer was at hand.

  She shrank back as a Zajinet passed. It might have been muttering threats:

  <<... ephemeral segment...>>

  <<... most linear shard ...>>

  <<... blind and dark-burrowing ...>>

  <<... begone...>>

  Then, as she moved back onto the metal pavement, Anita and Oron slipped out of sight. But they no longer mattered, now that the disk was resonating with the target signature.

  Very close now.

  Following the trace, Ro slipped inside a grey moving structure, something like a Roman villa formed of lead, and at its centre two partially uncloaked Zajinets—fiery tracery blazing as their stone-like exteriors came apart, then coalesced once more—hovered, with the air between them beginning to burn.

  Like awed children, Anita and Oron sat off to one side, watching.

  ‘No, you can’t—’

  Anita’s voice, but Ro was already moving.

  For you, Luís.

  Were they mating?

  Air crackling now, as s
he moved closer. The Zajinets glowed, and there was a current of some sort in the air.

  ‘Not now! They’re re-forming.’ Anita was on her feet, hands outstretched as though to push back Ro.