Burning Bright

by Melissa Scott

  He lay back against the shifting cushions, studying the image, set it slowly rotating in front of him. The shape derived from those twining numbers would be the main focus of one of his story eggs, a commission for a Syndic of the Merchant Investors, a woman who lived and died by the movements of the trade that created the numbers coiling in the air in front of him. He reached for the face that hung in the air beside it, brought it down, until the strands of numbers slowly writhed behind the mask, like DNA beneath the skin. It was interesting, but not, he thought, what was needed now; it detracted from the bizarre beauty of the shifting numbers. He banished the face with a wave of his hand, leaving only the intertwining numbers, bronze and green and all the shades of metal, floating in unreal space. He smiled, contemplating it, and reached into the control space to preserve the image in one of the dataspheres waiting linked to the main consoles. The sphere would store both the algorithm that transformed the numbers to this graphic and the formulae for the connections to the financial nets–even the private ones, one of which had been donated by the client–that provided the raw data. All that remained was to set the image into a proper casing, and that was already waiting, ready on the shelf: a smooth, pale green egg the color of old, well‑weathered copper, with streaks and spills of stronger green, and the ghost of the metal showing through. He smiled, savoring the satisfaction of a job well done, and closed the particular volume.

  A voice that had been speaking from one of the floor‑mounted receivers for some time now, he realized belatedly, was calling his name.

  “–Ransome, I know you’re there. I can see your taps.” There was a brief pause, and then, reluctantly, “It’s important, I‑Jay.”

  Ransome sighed, suddenly aware that it was morning and that he had been awake most of the night, and that it was Chauvelin himself who was making this connection, not one of the apparently numberless ambassadorial servants. He muted the remaining images with a wave of his hand, and reached into control space to connect himself with the communications channel. “I’m here.”

  “About time.”

  The familiar face, elegant and worn and lined beneath the brown hair just going cloudy with grey, bloomed in the air above him. Ransome winced, and moved it to a less dominating position. “I was working,” he said, and winced again at the defensive note in his voice. “What is it?”

  Chauvelin smiled slightly, sourly, a faint quirk of one corner of his long mouth. “I need to talk to you–not on the nets. The Visiting Speaker has come up with some interesting information you and I need to discuss.”

  “Fuck the Visiting Speaker,” Ransome said, and Chauvelin’s smile widened into something approaching humor.

  “A privilege not likely to be granted.” Chauvelin’s smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Tell me something, why would Cella Minter want you back in the Game?”

  Ransome blinked, wondering where this question had come from, and what it really meant. Cella he knew, both as Damian Chrestil’s mistress and as an accomplished Gamer, but only from a distance. “I’ve no idea,” he said, and then, because it was usually best to tell Chauvelin the truth, “I didn’t know she wanted me back Gaming.”

  “So ji‑Imbaoa says,” Chauvelin said, and held up a hand, forestalling any answer from the other. Ransome grinned, and let him continue. “And so it looks to me, too, looking at the nets. I tied in to some of the club gossip boards. There’s a lot of talk about Ambidexter, and usually Cella hinting in the background that he ought to come back to show people how his templates are supposed to be played.”

  Ransome shrugged, felt his face go wooden. “Ambidexter’s dead–”

  In spite of himself, the words came out bitter, and it was the bitterness that Chauvelin answered. “You’re not dead yet. I don’t have time for self‑pity, I‑Jay, I need your help.”

  Ransome lifted both eyebrows, a deliberate imitation of Chauvelin’s gesture. “You must be desperate.” He paused then, shook his head, shaking away the bad temper that was becoming a habit with him. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why Cella would want me on the Game,” he said again. “Unless it’s something Damian Chrestil wants?”

  “I’d say that was highly likely,” Chauvelin murmured. “Which raises the question of why he would want it. And that is something I don’t want to discuss on the nets.”

  Ransome made another face, though he had to admit the wisdom of it. He himself was not the only netwalker on Burning Bright, or the only imagist who tapped unlikely lines looking for good sources. “I suppose you’ll want me to come to you.”

  “Yes.” Chauvelin’s tone blended forbearance and the resignation of an adult dealing with a child. “I think that would be best.”

  Ransome laughed, gestured apology, miming the hsai gesture that linked wrist spurs. The scars where his implanted spurs had been removed touched briefly, an odd, unpleasant feeling; he jerked his hands apart without finishing the movement. Chauvelin said nothing, did not move at all, as though nothing had happened, and Ransome said, “I’ll be there in an hour.” He knew he sounded curt, made himself add, by way of further apology, “It’ll take me a while to pull myself together. I was up all night working on a commission.”

  Chauvelin nodded. “May I see?”

  “It’s a private commission,” Ransome said, with genuine regret–Chauvelin was one of the very few whose opinions mattered to him–then grinned suddenly. “But I’ve done something for you, I’ll show you when I get there.”

  “That will be the first good thing that’s happened all day,” Chauvelin said. He gave a twisted smile, as though he regretted the admission, and said, in an entirely different voice, “In an hour, then.” He cut the connection before Ransome could respond.

  Ransome sighed, staring at the still‑busy images without really seeing them, then brought his chair upright. The net taps whirled around him, readjusting themselves to his position, but he waved them away, then closed both fists to shut down the system. Glyphs and codestrings flickered past, too fast to be understood at more than the subliminal level, and then the pictures vanished. Ransome sighed again, stretching, feeling the long night’s work claw at his back, the old familiar ache in the bones and tendons of his hands. He peeled off the tight gloves, wincing a little, and set them aside. His chest was tight, catching in his ribs; he could hear the fluids at the base of his lungs, a harsh rasp that cut each breath too short for comfort. He reached instinctively for the cylinder of Mist, flipping it backwards to unfold the facemask, but stopped abruptly. The red light glowed under the trigger button, warning him that he had taken a dose within the last two hours. He stared at it for a second, his mind forming a curse to override the fear, then made himself set it aside.

  “Input,” he said aloud. “Housekeeper systems.” The words caught in his chest, the lack of air catching him by surprise. He coughed, hard, the spasm driving painfully deep. His mouth filled with phlegm that tasted like bitter copper; he spat it into a sheet of tissue, and saw the familiar thick white laced with a froth of red. That was answer enough. “Cancel,” he whispered, voice harsh and strange to his own ears, but the room responded calmly.

  “Input canceled.”

  Ransome scowled, hating the sickness, hating the fact that his systems remembered that choked voice as his own, and pushed himself up out of the chair. The injector lay on the shelf where he kept the story eggs’ shells. He went to get it, feeling the too‑familiar giddiness, laid the cold tip against the veins of his neck as he had been taught, where the skin was more or less permanently reddened from the injections, and pressed the trigger. The machine stung once, painfully, and he imagined he could feel the drug spreading like cold fire under his skin. The doctors swore it was a hallucination, a common side effect. It felt real enough, and he stood for a long moment, waiting, eyes fixed on nothing, as the chill spread through his chest and down his right arm, and the pain eased and his breath came easier, the rattling in his lungs fading slightly. It had been three years since the mainte
nance drugs, the ones that had kept the white‑sickness at bay, had failed him, as he had known they would: five to seven years, he could expect the injections to work, and then he was dead.

  Ransome stuffed the injector into his pocket, made himself shower and shave and find a clean shirt and jerkin, going through the motions until the fear and anger had retreated again. White‑sickness was common in hsai space, a common killer of jericho‑humans; it was also incurable, though onset and death could be delayed for decades with the right drugs. It was just his bad luck to have shared a cell with a carrier, back on Jericho. My mistake to have been on Jericho at all, to have worked for the Chrestil‑Brisch in the first place… He shook the thought away, and glanced for a final time in his mirror. He was looking haggard– too little sleep; nothing new–but the hectic flush from the injection still burned on his cheeks, two ugly, fake‑looking spots of red. The black jerkin and trousers and the loose white shirt had been meant to complement his usual bone‑white pallor. He suppressed the instinct to rub his face, to scrub the red away, and reached instead for the handful of carved stones waiting on his workbench. He slipped those into his pocket, and left the loft, double‑sealing the palmprint lock behind him out of habit.

  His flat was one of a dozen in a converted warehouse, purchased cheap by one of the artists’ cooperatives now that most cargoes moved through the new Junction Pool cargo lifts rather than the long way around, from the ramps at Dry Cut along the Old Coast Road that skimmed the cliff edge. The old warehouse districts were no longer convenient, or profitable; the buildings that had not been converted to other uses–ght manufacture, particularly, and in this district the embroiderers’ shops that made the embellished fabrics that were Burning Bright’s primary export product–stood empty, their windows cracked, frames emptied by last year’s Storm. The lift was occupied, as usual–there were enough heavy‑materials workers in the building to ensure that the single lift was always in use or out of order–and Ransome made his way down the side stairs. It had been a fire access once, running along the outside of the building, and the outer wall was pierced at intervals by narrow panels of wire mesh. The air that flowed in was soft and heavy with the salt smell of the canals, and warm with the promise of Storm. There were more signs of approaching Storm in the corners of the stair, or at least of the Carnival that took up most of the two‑week period: a raki bottle stood empty on each landing, and the lowest level, where the walls were solid to prevent unauthorized access, stank of urine. Ransome made a face, and stepped carefully over the puddles to unlock the gate.

  The alleyway was crowded with denki‑bikes and two‑and three‑wheeled velocks, the latter chained to anything substantial enough to defeat a standard wirecutter, the denki‑bikes clustered around the charging bollards, a blue haze showing where the security fields intersected. Ransome reached cautiously into the tangle of cables and locks to free his own machine, and winced as the fizzing security stung his fingers. Then he backed the bike out of the tangle–for once without setting off someone else’s security system–checked the power reserve, and climbed aboard. The machine was woefully underpowered, for his taste, but it was serviceable, and better than the tourist‑trolleys. He edged the throttle forward–the bike whined and shivered–and let it carry him sedately into the traffic stream.

  He took the short road to the Ghetto where Chauvelin lived with most of the rest of Burning Bright’s noncitizen residents, skirting the cliff edge above the delivery basins of Junction Pool, then cutting straight through the industrial zone past the spaceport at Newfields. A column of smoke and steam hung in the distance, the winds slowly bending and fraying it to nothing: someone was saving money on launch costs, flying chemical rockets. The pilots who ran the orbital shuttle would be cursing, Ransome thought, and smiled.

  The ambassadorial residence stood on one of the highest points in the Ghetto–on all of the Landing Isle, the largest piece of the original landmass: the hsai liked heights, and most of Burning Bright’s inhabitants didn’t care. The household staff had been told to expect him. Ransome paused at the gate only long enough to identify himself–most of Chauvelin’s household knew him by sight, after nearly fifteen years in the ambassador’s service–and then a pair of hsai servants came out of the main house to meet him. The male took the denki‑bike, and the hsaii–Chauvelin’s steward Iameis je‑Sou’tsian, Ransome realized with some surprise–bowed politely.

  “Sia Chauvelin has asked me to bring you directly to the garden,” she said, in tradetalk, and Ransome answered in low mian‑hsai.

  “I’m honored by the courtesy.” And very surprised by it, he added silently. What the hells is going on, to make me rate this treatment? He followed without question, however–he knew better than to ask that question–and je‑Sou’tsian brought him through the sudden cool of a service passageway, bypassing the main house, and led him out as suddenly onto a path that ran between tall walls of flowering hedge. Ransome blinked, momentarily confused, then oriented himself. This was the maze, a part of the garden derived from hsai tradition, and one that Chauvelin rarely used. Je‑Sou’tsian followed the turns without hesitation, however– maybe it is true, Ransome thought, that there really is only one pattern in use on all the worlds of HsaioiAn–and let them out through a red‑lacquered gate onto the carefully landscaped lawn of the upper terrace. Chauvelin was waiting a few meters away, seated comfortably in the shade of a bellflower tree, a luncheon tray beside him and a data manager resting in his lap.

  “Na Ransome is here,” je‑Sou’tsian said, and the ambassador looked up with an abstracted smile.

  “Ransome. Join me, why don’t you?” To je‑Sou’tsian, he added, “Thank you. That’ll be all.”

  “Yes, sia,” the steward answered, bowing, and backed away.

  Ransome made his way down the terraced slope, stepping carefully around the elaborately casual plantings. He was very aware of the ambassador’s residence looming behind him, the sunlight polishing the white‑stone walls and glinting off the long windows. It felt unpleasantly as though someone were watching him, and he seated himself deliberately on the wall that overlooked the lower terrace. Chauvelin glanced up at him, gave a quick smile, and Ransome smiled rather wryly in return. If it had been the cliff wall, overlooking the hundred‑meter drop to the Old City, he would never in a thousand years have settled himself there, especially with Chauvelin sitting less than two meters from him, and they both knew it.

  “So good of you to come,” Chauvelin said, with only the lightest note of irony.

  Ransome let his smile widen. “I was working,” he said. “What is this about Cella, and the Game?”

  “That’s the very question I’d like you to answer,” Chauvelin said.

  Ransome spread his hands–a human gesture, not hsai, and deliberately so. “I don’t know. I’ve been out of the Game for three years, I barely pay attention to the Game nets except when I’m trolling for images. I don’t know what Cella wants–except that if she wants it, Damian Chrestil probably wants it, too.”

  Chauvelin nodded slightly, though Ransome could not be sure if the movement was a response to his words or to something on his screen. “I need to know why. Ji‑Imbaoa came in this morning–”

  “Sober?” Ransome murmured, with just the right note of shock, and allowed himself a brief smile when the word surprised a laugh from Chauvelin.

  “Mostly so. At any rate, he came to me complaining that Damian Chrestil is interested in you, via Cella–he knows you as my agent, so don’t ask–and demanding to know why. When I checked him out, I found the same thing: lots of agitation to get you back into the Game, and usually Cella’s at the back of it. I want to know what’s going on.”

  “I told you,” Ransome began, and Chauvelin nodded.

  “I know you’ve been working. A commission for Syndic Leonerdes, and that big installation for the governor. But I need to know what’s going on, I‑Jay. Ji‑Imbaoa–well, I won’t bore you with hsai politics.”

 
“Bore me,” Ransome said.

  Chauvelin grinned, sobered instantly. “Suffice it to say that ji‑Imbaoa has more influence than he should, and he wants this done. And that’s the other thing I want to find out: why the hell should he be so worried about Damian Chrestil?”

  Ransome shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe they had a bar fight, their tastes seem similar enough. Though I don’t think Damian Chrestil drinks quite so much.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Chauvelin said, and his voice was suddenly devoid of all expression. “Ji‑Imbaoa is worried enough to remind me that, since I made you min‑hao, you could still face charges in HsaioiAn, for lese majesty.”

  “Lesser treason,” Ransome murmured, through lips grown suddenly stiff and unresponsive, “but still treason.”

  “Just so.”

  They sat in silence for a long moment, the only sounds the faint whistle of the seabirds and the whine of a denki‑bike passing in the street. Ransome slipped his hand into his pocket, found the handful of carved stones he had collected, turned them over one by one. He had been glad to be tried as houtaback on Jericho; insults up the social scale, from person to person or from min‑haoto a person, could be construed as a kind of treason, and the sentences for that were more severe than they were for theft. Insults by houta, on the other hand, were “no more than the barking of dogs,” or so the hsaii judge had said through the human translator, and therefore didn’t count against him. Unfortunately, the hsai had a very long memory for insults.