“Doran,” Kiera said, with forced patience, “this is all very interesting, and there was a time when it would have meant the world to me to hear it, but just now there’s at least one man trying to kill you and possibly me as well, that device of yours is doing whatever it’s doing and . . .”
“Really?” he asked, unable to keep the astonishment from his voice.
“What?”
“You really wanted to know about my work? I thought you hated it.”
“Oh, Doran,” Kiera said. “Are you such an idiot? I married you because I loved you. I stayed because I loved you. Did you think I didn’t care about your work? I cared about it and I cared about you. It was you who chose not to see that, day after day. Blame me for leaving if you like, but don’t you dare pretend it was because I didn’t care.”
And to that Floranov had no answer. He found in fact that all the words, all the thoughts, had been sucked out of him; the mental equivalent of a kick to the stomach. He had always known he should have fought harder to keep his wife’s affection, known that he’d been wrong about many things. Now though, the sheer, sudden scale of that error was like the view from a frozen mountainside: chilling and vast and terrible.
Floranov struggled to hang onto something, to find a point to centre himself around. The question, he thought. Just answer the damned question and everything else can wait. Or else it can’t, because it’s already too late, but close your mouth, damn you, stop gawping.
“I already knew,” he said, and the words sounded too thick, so he gulped and started once more. “I knew that, in transdimensional terms at least, the realities were close to each other. I knew there was a degree of permeability. However different realities might be, the fundamental building blocks, the fundamental rules were the same, and they all obeyed the metarules of the reality stack itself. What it meant was, bring a patch of one reality into the vicinity of another in just such a way and the latter would emulate the properties of the former exactly. One reality would soak through into the other. Do it correctly and the changes would be permanent, irreversible.”
“So . . .” He could see she was struggling to think the idea through, feeling out its edges in her mind—just as he had done all those many months and years ago. “So say I have an empty room and I’d like a chair. I can just tell your Palimpsest to find me one?”
“Absolutely,” Floranov agreed. “Palimpsest would hunt out a reality with basic spatial compatibility that contains something it can recognise as intended for a bipedal mammal of about your height to sit on, and it will link our reality to that in such a way that the chair bleeds through and is duplicated. Only since I’ve had no way to test and perfect it, it’s not quite at that stage yet. Right now, with the limitations of the interface I have, it’s more of a blunt instrument. If you wanted a chair it might bring a whole house along with it. Or, given how divergent the realities can be, something much stranger. It’s programmed to automatically avoid emulating anything it identifies as harmful, but it’s still a long way from safe.”
Kiera was very still now. When she spoke again, only her lips moved; her eyes, unblinking, stayed fixed on his. “And say I wanted a bomb? Or a flesh-eating bacteria? Or a supernova?”
She had always had a remarkable ability to see to the heart of a problem: to perceive its dangers with all-too-perfect clarity. Floranov realised that cold sweat was prickling his brow, running in a rivulet along his spine. He tried to keep his voice steady. “If someone found a way to remove the safety checks, which are both integral and extensive . . . then yes, of course. Anything. Anywhere. Perhaps even an entire reality, pasted over ours.”
Much of the blood had drained from Kiera’s face. In the gloom of the compartment, she looked almost ghostlike. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If I’d realised . . . I’d never had gone along with Heleon. I wouldn’t have made you explain all this to me now. I’m sorry. You have to go, this minute, and try and stop it.” Then her expression changed; colour rushed back into her cheeks. “But why would you build it? What were you thinking, Doran?”
There was such horror and disgust in those last words that he could hardly bring himself to answer. “I thought it could do some good,” Floranov said, in barely a whisper. “Replacing poisoned seas with clean, fresh water, wouldn’t that be a good thing? I thought . . .”
Tup. Tup. Tup.
Someone was knocking on the compartment door. In the sudden silence it sounded like the pop of fireworks.
There were many people who might be outside. It could be perfectly innocent: a ticket inspector or some other routine check. But it wasn’t. Because, in stupidly imagining Dorivic’s thug smashing his way into one apartment after another, Floranov had failed to credit the man with any subtlety at all.
Eventually he managed to tear his eyes from Kiera’s to look at the door. The panel of frosted glass revealed the vaguest of silhouettes, for the lighting in the corridor was lower even than the carriage’s. What would one see from outside, looking in? Very little, surely, with the curtains drawn as they were.
There came another series of blows—these briefer, more urgent. Fine acting, Floranov thought: the exact knock of some lackey frantic to inform his betters of an emergency. Then the door handle rattled, slightly at first and then furiously, for what seemed a long time.
What next? Shoot the lock off? Shots in a luggage car where one thing, shots fired outside a fast-moving train might pass unheard—but inside a carriage? That would be a careless risk to take.
With a brutal crack, the door shook on its hinges: the sound of someone flinging their body at it with all their strength. Not as bad as firing a gun, but hardly inconspicuous. Floranov found that his heart was racing. There was something about being trapped, and the smallness of the cabin . . . the inescapability of it. He wished he had even one shot left in the miniature pistol strapped to his wrist; it wouldn’t even make a decent cosh.
The door shook once more, and groaned. The man must have the strength of a bear. Even then he could never hope to break the door. The hinges, however, and the glass, which had already begun to spiderweb, those were different matters.
Floranov reached a decision. He didn’t allow himself to question it, for he knew he’d never act if he did. He got to his feet, took two light steps to the door, turned the lock and slipped aside—just quick enough. The third time the man outside struck with even greater force, if such were possible—and this time, with no bolt to hold it in place, the door sprang open.
Floranov barely had time to get his arms up; that he did meant only that the door slammed upon his wrists instead of his face. It jarred him back and bounced him from the panelled wall behind. He should have thought this through. If nothing else he should have warned Kiera. For now, with nowhere to go, she was crawling backwards on her rump, clawing her way like a startled alley cat.
As the door swung back and out of his way, Floranov caught his first proper look at Dorivic’s thug. He had traded his suit for a steward’s uniform in austere, dark blue. Floranov didn’t want to imagine what had become of its former owner. It was a poor disguise, in any case; the man looked no less like a killer for shedding one costume for another.
Nor did he look surprised. The door springing open hardly seemed to have fazed him. He was reaching into a hip pocket now, a pocket distorted by a familiar right-angle bulge. Yet his eyes were on Kiera; he seemed not even to have noticed Floranov. Pushing from the carriage wall, Floranov put all his weight into something between a grapple and a charge. It was clumsy enough, and clumsier for the confined space. He came up against the man’s arm first, and Floranov tried his best to pin the limb, to keep that hand in the pocket along with the gun it now contained, even as the two of them half slid, half rolled onto the couch behind.
But the other man was larger—and much stronger. Had there been any room in which to manoeuvre, Floranov wouldn’t have lasted this long. Only having his left arm trapped awkwardly beneath him and one leg snared by the central tabl
e kept Dorivic’s thug from tearing himself free. Floranov jammed a foot against the still-open door and tried to brace. He hadn’t enough weight, or enough strength—and the instant the man freed his gun arm it would all be over.
Or perhaps even before then: for, shockingly loud within the carriage’s close confines, a shot roared. Dorivic’s man had fired through his own jacket pocket. Floranov felt the recoil jolt through his arm, like electricity transmitted between them; it was such an absurd gamble that he nearly let go in disbelief. But it took him only a moment to realise that the man had been intending to put a bullet in Floranov’s calf. And he’d nearly succeeded; the slug had grazed cloth, creased the table, embedded in the floor.
The shock of the gunshot had formed a caesura in their struggle. Now they set to it again, renewed. For the rules had changed: Dorivic’s man had only to wrench his arm around, angle it just so and fire again, and the next shot would gouge through Floranov’s leg. Floranov had to stop him; but for how long could he manage that? It was a losing game and he had nothing else. More, they both knew it. He could see enough of the man’s face to identify the calm there, the certainty—just as Floranov had no doubt that his own expression already admitted defeat.
Neither had bargained on Kiera—so that it came as a surprise to both of them when she crouched forward, balanced upon the table, and struck Dorivic’s man hard across the face. She’d been holding something clenched in her hand, a key perhaps or a pen; Floranov saw only the glint of metal. Whatever it was, it left a lurid stripe across the man’s face and dragged a grunt from between his lips.
The man began to buck again, even harder. His eyes were on Kiera, focused now on regaining her balance, readying another blow. His calm had vanished, and suddenly the man was moving like a wild animal: an animal caught in a trap. He couldn’t defend himself, and that made him desperate. It took everything Floranov had to hold him down.
Then a number of things happened, so close upon each other that Floranov could hardly separate them out. Kiera struck Dorivic’s man again, close to his left eye this time. Howling, he pushed against Floranov with impossible force, as if his body had conducted Kiera’s strength and added it to his own. Floranov finally lost his hold, rolled backward—and in that same moment, heard another shot. Even as the noise buffeted his ears, as pain flared behind his eyes, he kicked out and there came another shot, so close upon the first that they merged into one sledgehammer sound. Dorivic’s man reared once more and then Floranov lost sight of him, for he seemed to be sliding downward, even as the light in the carriage faded rapidly towards nothing.
Adwan Faizan rolled onto all fours, and only once he was certain his body would accept that position, got to his feet; hesitantly, for he wasn’t quite convinced that he hadn’t been shot. A part of his brain seemed certain he had been: like a muscle memory or the recollection of a dream. He could feel the hole in his stomach, a rupture opening him agonisingly to the air. Yet when he looked down there was nothing. No wound, no blood, no ragged hole in his charcoal-grey djellaba.
He looked to Karam. She was crouched on the far bench amidst a scattering of cushions, red and gold and duck egg blue. Her poise was calm—straight-backed, hands folded in her lap—but her eyes were wild.
“It’s all right,” Faizan said, as much for his benefit as for hers.
She looked up at him, and then down to his feet, at the body curled there. Slowly, the fever in her stare began to fade.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Faizan told her.
“I know that.”
“If anything, he shot himself.” He realised how absurd it sounded—and that, in any case, nothing in Karam’s expression suggested that she was seeking reassurance from him. Faizan noticed his own hand, saw how it was shaking. Who was he trying to convince? But he really hadn’t been responsible. He looked at the body, as Karam had, followed the stain of red spreading into the lustrous copper of the carpet. The man had fallen so that the table hid his face, and for that Faizan was grateful.
Then the body made a sound. Not a human sound, not something that might represent enduring life: a chirrup, shrill and insectile. Faizan froze, horrified. There was something too grotesque for words in hearing that odd, artificial note issuing from a corpse.
The sound came again. Again. It was issuing, he realised now, from the man’s other pocket, the one that hadn’t contained his weapon—the scarab-like thing that had released its grip on his hand and lay now on its back amidst the spreading red. At the thought, Faizan considered taking the weapon, but found that his mind resisted the prospect of plucking it from that crimson puddle, of wiping it clean and letting it clasp to his own palm. In any case, the insistent trilling was commanding all of his attention. He had realised now what it was, and its significance.
Faizan reached down. He’d never been squeamish about death, but then he had never encountered it in quite so intimate a fashion before this day. Taking care to avoid the wound in his torso, Faizan levered the man’s left side up enough to slip a hand into a wide pocket and draw forth the thing he felt there. It was a flattened dish of burnished metal, its edge indented with a simple pattern of triangles, its front a disc of dark glass.
Faizan considered for a moment, and then tapped at its centre. The pane shimmered like unsettled water and Halim Dori’s face appeared, somewhat faint and ghostly.
“Abid? Abid, damn you . . .” he said, and then—realising he was not speaking to Abid, presumably the name of the man now curled upon the floor—fell quiet.
“Hello, Dori,” Faizan said. “I’m afraid Abid is no more. I’d say it was an accident, except that he was trying to kill us at the time of his demise.”
“Ah,” said Dori. “Well, that is unfortunate.”
“Yes,” agreed Faizan. “I suppose unfortunate is the word.”
Dori’s handsome features slackened into a tentative smile. “I fear I owe you an apology, Adwan Faizan. Events have gotten out of hand. Partly your fault, of course, for making such a scene before we had a chance to talk properly, but I can’t help but feel partly responsible as well. I promise you, I didn’t tell my agents to try and kill you. On the contrary, I made it clear that I was eager to have you kept alive.”
“Then they’ve been doing a truly terrible job,” Faizan said. “I suppose that means you should feel better about the fact that they’re both dead.”
“I won’t lose sleep over it,” Dori agreed. “This is what happens when you employ men who only know how to kill. Such blunt instruments! Not good company for the likes of you and I, eh?”
“I can only speak for myself,” Faizan said. “I suspect that you fit quite well in the company of killers.”
Unexpectedly, Dori’s pleasant half smile turned to a wolfish grin. “Well, you have me there. But not such crass and small-minded men as those, that’s my point. I like grand, beautiful weapons . . . the kind that do exhilaratingly horrible things and leave your hands clean afterwards. And haven’t you just built the finest of those ever, Faizan? It’s really a thing of beauty, your Palimpsest.”
“It’s not a weapon,” Faizan said—and even as he spoke he recognised the futility of the statement.
Dori’s grin widened. “Oh, but not only is it a weapon, it is the finest, the most deadly . . . and can I say, the most singularly neat . . . that has ever been devised. You don’t believe me? Somewhere out there is a reality where China is a desert of blue sand, in which nothing larger than a scorpion lives. Somewhere Europe is a jungle, inhabited by a race of men whose greatest technical innovation is the sharpened rock. Thanks to your machine, what exists anywhere can exist here. Thanks to you, Faizan, we don’t have to fight our enemies ever again; we just patch them out of existence.”
Faizan’s first reaction was a technical one: he wanted to say, Palimpsest can’t do that. Not yet, anyway, not in this iteration. Yet straight away it occurred to him that this instinctive rejoinder was almost as terrible as the madness he was responding to. Dori was talking about
the snuffing out of millions, no, billions of lives . . . for the purpose of expediency, of politics, or not even that, for his own grotesque satisfaction. And there was nothing hypothetical about it. What Palimpsest was not yet capable of, they’d find ways to make it do.
“You’d go along with that?” Faizan asked instead, because he felt the sudden need to make it clear that he never would. “Kill so many people? So many innocents?”
“Please don’t be foolish,” Dori remonstrated, as if talking to a petulant child. “Everyone dies, sooner or later. And what could be more humane? One moment they’ll exist, the next they won’t, and there’ll be no one even to remember them. You’ve done what men have strived to do since we first left the treetops, Faizan, you realise that don’t you? You’ve made the perfect weapon. Only you have to fix it or else it’s all for nothing. From the noises it’s been making, frankly, I don’t know that it’s likely to last for much longer.”
Faizan clicked off the communicator. All he could feel was horror and a sort of deep-rooted revulsion. There had been a quality in Halim Dori’s voice, a peculiar edge to his calm and somewhat cheerful tone; it spoke so clearly of madness that the effect was like cutting into a ripe fruit to find it rotted black to the core.
“I didn’t know,” Karam said. “I should have. But I didn’t.”
She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring at a patch of floor, away from the blood now congealing over a considerable portion of the carpet. It took Faizan a moment to realise what she was referring to. It was strange how such a detail could come to seem insignificant, but Faizan had all but forgotten that she and Dori had been lovers.
“He was gentle and kind,” she said. “He never talked about his work. Not in the way you didn’t, not in a secretive way . . . he just always acted like it wasn’t important. He was intelligent. Funny. We talked about . . . my work. Small things. Not politics. Not . . . not war.” Tears were streaming down her face. It was so rare to see her cry that Faizan was quite taken aback. “Oh, Adwan. He’s a monster. I’m sorry.”
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