‘I’ll admit it crossed my mind. Maybe we should move out of here, if your daughter can travel. If you can, without your belly falling apart.’
‘I’m sore, but I’m healing.’
‘When are you gonna find a name for her, huh?’
‘I wanted to call her Hiroko, but my precocious daughter doesn’t like the name.’ Poor Hiroko, surely dead, now. Or an old, old woman. And her daughter’s father still on the Vingança, which if it had survived its transfer orbit around the singularity and reached relativistic velocity was even now leaving behind the close-packed stars of the Galactic Core, twenty-eight thousand light years from home. Time dilation would mean that Valdez would age no more than a handful of years, but Dorthy and their daughter would be dead almost three hundred centuries before he returned.
The baby released her nipple and said, ‘Stupid name, ’roko. Stupid. I choose.’
Dorthy wiped milk and drool from the baby’s chin. ‘Then you had better hurry and choose one before one chooses you.’
Robot said, ‘Know what? The guy asked me, just as he was leaving, if the Witnesses were right. If there really are gods in the centre of the Galaxy.’
‘Not yet,’ Dorthy’s daughter said, and returned to suck.
They left late that night, riding slowly through the crowds that milled up and down the wide dockside, beneath balconies where whores, men and women and creatures that could have been either or both, leaned on scrolled iron railings and called down to prospective clients. When they had paid off their room, Dorthy had glimpsed a half-formed plan to betray them to the Witnesses uncoiling in the innkeeper’s mind. She had drawn aside his wife, Maria, and asked her bluntly to try and make sure that they’d at least have time to get away from the town. Maria, who appreciated plain speaking, had told her not to worry; her husband couldn’t leave the inn until the bar closed early in the morning, and she’d make sure that he didn’t send any of the pot boys off with a message.
‘But you must know word will get to the Witnesses soon enough,’ she’d said. ‘They don’t take much notice of what goes on in the Strip, but a baby that can talk from birth is something different. Poor mite. I wish you could stay a little longer. It’s hard on you as well as on her.’
‘I’ve been in worse places,’ Dorthy had said, and Maria had embraced her and given her a paper parcel of pressed dried fruit, and led them out around the back lane.
But for all of Maria’s assurances, Dorthy felt happier as she and Robot climbed the wooded slope away from Evangelina, and felt Robot’s relief, too. The baby slept inside the sling Dorthy had made, cradled up to her breasts: she was dreaming about the shadow dancers, their graceful weaving dance amongst the scoop-shell encrusted pillars of their lagoon.
They made camp inside a grove of squat old cypresses, well away from the unpaved road. Insects made noise all around them. Far down the slope they could see the dim fires of Evangelina’s shanty town, the ribbon of light that was the Strip. Running lights of ships on the river were like small constellations. Just south of the town the two airships of the Witnesses were lit up, each brighter than Luna’s tipped fingernail-paring crescent. Like certain deep-sea fish, their skins were transparent, revealing shadowy skeletal structures, gas bags like luminous organs. The bowl of the radio telescope was rimmed in white light: an unsleeping eye.
Dorthy’s daughter woke, cranky and hungry, and Dorthy fed her while munching handfuls of sharply sweet dried fruit; they didn’t dare start a campfire. After a while Robot stood up and casually announced that he was going to ride back into town, see if he could find the freetrader.
‘Be careful, now.’
Robot said, ‘It’s not really me they’re looking for.’ And there was that touch of black mood again.
Dorthy said, ‘Hurry back,’ meaning, come back, don’t run away. Because that was what she was frightened of, Robot vanishing into the hinterlands of his childhood, leaving her and her baby daughter stranded on anarchic Earth.
After Robot had gone, Dorthy lay on fragrant cedar needles in the warm humid darkness, with her daughter lying between her breasts. Her belly slack and aching, like the shell of a scooped-out fruit. Well, that would pass. She had her daughter, warm, smelling of sour milk and pee and something undefinable that stirred her heart. How often she had cursed her fate for being born a woman—echoing her father’s despair at having no sons: she hadn’t realized that before—and yet men could never have this.
Her daughter slept again, and woke and complained about her dirty diapers. Dorthy changed her in the dark and held her again, trying out names for the baby, none of which she liked, then asking her how much she remembered, curiosity and airy fear mingling. Just what was this changeling she’d carried, full-bellied with the wanton wind of lust, hers and Valdez’s? How human was she? How human would she be?
But her daughter didn’t understand, or confused her vivid dreams with the smothering reality of the womb, beat her tiny hands in frustration because she couldn’t explain this to her mother, and then abruptly relaxed into sleep.
Dorthy dozed, too, and woke with the sense of people growing nearer. She called out, sleepily thinking it was Robot, returned with the freetrader. Then she knew it wasn’t, but before she could get up light hit her from four directions at once, and a man said, ‘Stay right where you are, citizen.’
5
* * *
The Witnesses were as polite as could be; it was as if there was a space around Dorthy and her daughter they dared enter only after careful ritual appeasement, saying ‘Careful now, Dr Yoshida,’ or ‘Let me just take your hand a minute,’ as they helped her out of the groundcar, guided her along white gravel paths that wound between huts and quonset domes. Beyond, the two luminous airships and the scaffolding and huge light-ringed bowl of the radio telescope rose against a sky so black it appeared to be solid.
There were half a dozen Witnesses, dressed in loose tunics and trousers of various primary colours, each with a representation of the Galaxy’s triple spiral, a synthetic ruby sparkling in its centre, hung from a fine chain around their necks. All men and all very young, handsome in a cleancut, gangling, vacuous way. Accustomed to obeying orders unquestioningly. Just the sort of cannon fodder a jihad requires.
They had tried to take her daughter away from her, but Dorthy had grown fierce despite their pistols, and they’d given up, shrugging, It didn’t matter to them. They had all the time they wanted.
They put her in a little room furnished with a table and a couple of straight-backed chairs, the iron frame of a bed with a wire mattress. There were old, dark stains on the white floor tiles around the bed-frame. An odd-looking apparatus, a black box with a handle and long wires hanging from it, was bolted to its head.
The Witnesses left her in the room awhile, two standing impassively either side of the door. The baby woke and demanded food and Dorthy fed her. ‘Bad men,’ the baby remarked, when she had finished, then fell asleep again. Little bubbles of milky saliva rose and ebbed at one corner of her mouth, in time to her damp breathing.
Time passed. After a while, one of the Witnesses brought Dorthy a stainless steel jigger of coffee. She was still sipping it when two more Witnesses marched in, honour guard for a compact man who looked hardly human, dressed all in white.
His name was Paul Marquira. He was the demiurge in charge of the Evangelina station of petition. ‘We have all the time we need,’ he told Dorthy. Both of his eyes were artificial, and there were inserts in his shaven skull, transparent windows that showed blue blood vessels snaking over smooth cerebral folds. He belonged to one of the more extreme Witness sects, one which believed that immortality could be attained by this kind of mutilation. Marquira basked in Dorthy’s curious gaze, told her boastfully that half his organs were implants; his blood was an artificial plasma in which silicon-bonded haem carried oxygen; his metabolism had been radically rejigged so that for nourishment he needed only a simple nutrient solution. All that was really required was the bra
in, he said, and even that wasn’t necessary, as the ancients had shown. Full transference of both mind and anima to machine intelligence was the next stage in human evolution, long delayed but inevitable.
Dorthy played along with Marquira. She didn’t need inserts to glimpse his thoughts. She was a prize, a trophy. Possession of someone who had visited the Galaxy’s core and heard the voices of the gods would hugely increase the standing of Marquira’s sect. Strictly speaking she should have been sent directly to Galveston, but instead they were waiting on an airship crossing the Gulf, bringing the leader of Marquira’s schismatic sect. She would be debriefed, as Marquira put it, by friendly hands.
Dorthy said that she would tell him anything he wanted to know, right here. ‘I have no secrets, Seyour. I saw what I saw, and I want people to know about it. It is why I came back to Earth.’
‘And why then are you trying to leave it?’ Marquira sat across the table from her, his hands folded over the bulge his belly made in his lavender tunic. His restructured metabolism had swollen his liver four-fold.
Robot, Dorthy thought. Robot had sold her out. Him, or the freetrader, or both of them.
Marquira’s implanted eyes were silver, with smeared black pupils that dilated independently. They glittered spectrally in the harsh light of the little room. ‘We’ve been keeping watch on you ever since you arrived in Evangelina. We keep watch on anyone interesting who arrives here. We are not as disingenuous as the people believe, although we like to keep a low profile. Those who give us trouble we make disappear. Without fuss, without trace. It is not our main task, but we are thorough.’
‘You don’t have to justify yourself to me,’ Dorthy said. The coffee had nerved her up. ‘I’ve seen what you’ve done here.’
Marquira shrugged. He’d heard it all before. ‘We need Earth for the moment, as a platform for our petitions. After the Revelation, only we had the organization, the willpower, to resist the wave of anarchy that swept the Earth. Our present position is a simple historical inevitability.’
‘Not one of the people you pretend to rule asked for your rule. You’re all just a bunch of opportunistic vigilantes.’
‘Billions of people died after the Revelation, Dr Yoshida. Literally billions. But billions more survived, because of us. Because we were prepared to make a stand.’
‘What are you going to do with us? Are we going to be part of this historical inevitability of yours?’
‘You have been to the core of the Galaxy. You have seen the glory that people on Earth only glimpsed.’
Dorthy thought that she knew what was coming. She told Marquira that his Revelation was no more than the dying babblings of a psychotic Golden with nothing left to live for but revenge, told him that if there ever had been things like gods they had gone away an aeon ago, that the human race was just a pawn brought into play in history’s end-game.
Marquira heard her out impassively, silver eyes glittering. When she had finished, he nodded slightly, and Dorthy barely had time to flinch before the two Witnesses behind her jerked her upright, one snatching her daughter as the other rabbit-punched her.
Raw white pain wiped everything away. She was on her hands and knees, feeling bits and pieces of herself float back together as the pain ebbed. Her spine was a rod of fire.
Marquira stood up and came around the desk. ‘You’re tired, Dr Yoshida,’ he said, ‘tired and confused and upset. You think that you hate us, so you think that you can hurt us by repeating the kind of baseless rumour that’s lately been floating through the population here. In fact, you cannot hurt us at all, but we can hurt you. And we will, until we get at the truth. It may be a hard, dark road, but we will get there in the end. You will recant your heresy. And then you’ll be in a position to tell everyone about what you learned, at the core. Only then: not now.’
They left Dorthy alone with her daughter after that. The pain did not go away, although after a while she was able to get off the floor and sit on one of the chairs. She desperately wanted to lie down, but the floor was too hard and she couldn’t lie on the wire mattress, knowing all too well what it had been used for.
The baby fretted in Dorthy’s embrace, aware of her mother’s pain but unable to do anything about it. Her eyes kept trying to focus on Dorthy’s face, and her little hands twisted and fumbled and patted. ‘All right,’ she kept insisting. ‘All all right. Sleep.’
‘There may be comfort in dreams, child, but you always have to wake from them, and find the world unchanged. Dreams are only a reflection of the world; they don’t work on it.’
‘Mine do,’ the baby said.
‘The shadow dancers are asleep inside you. That’s why you see them in your dreams. We can’t wake them here.’
‘We’ll see,’ her daughter said, and fell asleep, after a while waking long enough to say, ‘They know.’ And then she was sleeping again, a queer deep REM sleep that would draw Dorthy down into it if she let it.
Dawn came, quick and vivid. It began to grow warm in the little room. There was no environmental conditioning. It was just a concrete box with a white tile floor and a high ceiling Dorthy couldn’t reach even when standing on the chair she’d placed on top of the desk. There’d been a writing screen set in the desk once, but it had been taken out and the hole neatly patched. There was nothing but little rolls of dust in the sliding drawer, nothing else in the little room she could use except perhaps the whip-like wires of the machine bolted to the head of the bed-frame; but she couldn’t bear to touch those.
Standing on the chair, she could look through the room’s high narrow window, but all she could see were the ragged crowns of a clump of palms framed against blue sky.
Most of the time she sat zazen on the desk. Time was marked by the patch of light projected from the window against the far wall, slowly travelling upwards as Dorthy tried to order her thoughts and ignore the sweat that ran all over her body, the dull pain in her kidneys (she’d had to relieve herself twice, furtively, in a corner of the room; both times, her piss had been tinged with blood). What it came down to was that she could not let herself be used. Not this time. She could not fool herself that she could resist torture. That one blow had already left its mark on her psyche. And blows were the least of it. There were ways out; there were always ways out. She had tried them once or twice after particularly harrowing sessions at the Kamali—Silver Institute (once with bleach; once with a knife; and once she had tried to drown herself in the teardrop swimming pool at the Institute’s weightless heart). Tried and failed, but she’d only been a child, then.
But there was her daughter. Dorthy couldn’t leave her behind, but to take her as well (if she could) would be to betray the hopes of an entire race. The Witnesses knew that. Perhaps not overtly, but they knew it all the same, with the kind of instinct that lets a wild dog pick out the weakest member of a herd, the one that can be brought down with least effort.
That’s what the Witnesses were, Dorthy thought, or less than that. They were carrion creatures picking over the bones of history, possessed of enough snarl and swagger to chase off lesser creatures, but without the necessary gram of courage to make a kill of their own. Even if they did brainwash her into confirming their beliefs, they were still wrong, still superseded. Lies would not make their faith any more real. They’d continue to inflict misery on Earth, but because their religion forbade the desecration of space by anything other than their prayers they would not spread elsewhere.
The shadow dancers, frozen potentials inside the tender curve of her sleeping daughter’s skull, could not be allowed to die stillborn in this universe, for all that they still swam in the ocean of the interzone. She would save them if she could, her daughter and the shadow dancers. She had to stay alive, alert to whatever chance there might be. All she had was all she had ever had: a slender ravelling thread of hope.
The glossy patch of sunlight reached the angle between wall and ceiling and began to decline, losing its sharpness as it fell. When it was no brighter th
an the gridded glotube that had never been turned off, a Witness brought a steel tray into the room, pale squares of vat-grown slop, a glass pitcher brimful with tepid cloudy water. Dorthy took the pitcher and said she didn’t want the food, but could she please have a change of diapers for her daughter.
The Witness took the food away without a word, amazingly returned with a stack of starched and pressed towels. Dorthy changed her sleeping daughter, who slept on, still dreaming of swimmers of dark seas under pink skies. There was only darkness beyond the window slit when Paul Marquira returned, and told her it was time to go.
A new airship was tethered beyond the radio telescope, caught in the glare of crossing searchlights. It was small and black, its cruciform vanes silvered along their edges. Red and green running lights winked either side of the cabin tucked beneath the phallic swell of its envelope. Dorthy and Marquira were the head of a wedge of Witnesses moving across scrub grass towards it.
‘There is a place we have on the far side of the Gulf,’ Marquira told Dorthy. ‘You’ll go there; it’ll be safer.’
‘For me, or for you?’
‘For all of us,’ the Witness said. The inserts in his skull flashed in the lights ringing the edge of the radio telescope as he looked from side to side. Dorthy didn’t need her Talent to sense his fear. He said, ‘You have brought much trouble with you, Dr Yoshida. If I had—’
And then all the lights went out: the searchlights playing on the airships; the lights of the radio telescope; the lights of the buildings and the perimeter of the compound.
Dorthy stopped and someone stumbled into her, nearly knocking her daughter to the ground. A kind of stir went through the clumps of palmetto grass all around, although there was no wind. The baby started to fret and Dorthy lifted her onto her shoulder. She was the centre of a circle of panicky Witnesses. There were only the running lights of the airships, brilliant constellations swaying against the scatter of fixed stars in the sky.
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