Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  The sun was in the last quarter of the sky, rouging the roostertail of dust which the overlander raised as it ploughed the dry grassland. In the cool, humming cave of its cabin, behind the two cops, Rick was plugged into his compsim, concentrating on some setting-up exercises for optimising the payload of his experiments, when the overlander made a sudden turn. He unplugged and looked up. They had turned off the arrow-straight track, toward the uneven green line which marked some canyon’s course.

  Rick asked what was happening, and the blonde sergeant who was driving told him that she’d seen some smoke. “Don’t worry about it, Dr Florey. We just have to take a look is all.”

  “Probably just some abos,” her companion said, rubbing his face and yawning.

  “The aborigines don’t light fires,” Rick said.

  The sergeant said sharply, “You let us worry about that. You’re just the passenger here, remember?”

  The overlander brushed through the last bunches of grass and bumped across bare ground to the canyon’s edge. The sergeant parked it at a prudent distance from the drop and cracked the hatch. Orange light struck into the cabin like a lance. When Rick followed the cops out, hot air enveloped him, dry as baked dust. Sweat ribboned his back and chest even before he had clambered from the ribbed roof.

  Sandstone cliffs dropped to green masses of feathery foliage. The smoke trickled up from somewhere in the centre of this sunken line of trees, a thick white rope that rose a long way in the hot still air.

  “You wait here for us,” the sergeant told him. Sweat shone on her round, pockmarked face. She shaded her eyes to stare at the smoke, and Rick asked her who she thought was down there.

  “I don’t think anything.”

  “Standard procedure,” her companion said smoothly. “You look after the overlander, okay?”

  Rick stood at the edge and watched as the two cops scrambled down unhandily. Their flip dismissal rankled. He’d grown up in-country—he probably knew more about it than any cop. The cliffs slumped into talus slopes about half a kilometre away, and Rick walked until the drop didn’t look so bad, lowered himself over the edge and let go. Something snagged his coveralls and he landed sprawling on loose scree, breath knocked out of him. He stood and dusted his tingling hands, looking up at deeply grooved sandstone, the indigo sky. Rock shards clattered under his boots. Already he was worried about getting back.

  Somewhere in the middle of the canyon, cutting between the trees that lifted from the slopes, there was a river. Rick listened to the distant chuckling rush and suddenly realised how hot and sticky he was. Well, it wouldn’t do any harm, he thought, and went on down through the trees. Delicate foliage pressed closely overhead; rich mould cushioned his steps. Whenever he brushed one of the slim green boles, clouds of gnats dropped from quivering branches and got into his hair and eyes. Some distant bird or animal was making a repetitive, knocking sound, muffled pulse of the wood’s secret heart.

  The cops out there were chasing down some poor fellow who only wanted to be left alone. Tension was centred between Rick’s shoulderblades, the expectation of hearing shouts of pursuit, or a shot as final as a full stop.

  The trees gave way to shingle sloping down to the river. An irregular curb of boulders rimmed the water’s edge, so overgrown with moss and tongue-fern that they resembled unkempt green pillows. Rick knelt on a mossy shelf of rock and drank, scooping cold water to his mouth with a cupped hand. It had a gritty mineral taste the filtered city water lacked, the taste of the earth, its bed, something he hadn’t tasted since he’d gone to the city for good.

  Growing up in the circumscribed world of Mount Airy, the Californian Substantivist settlement three hundred kilometres east of Port of Plenty, his mother and father most often working in their smithy, his sister and two brothers a dozen or more years older, Rick had often run off with the half-dozen children of his age through the forest which surrounded the clutter of concrete buildings and stony fields. There was freedom in the forest, freedom from the strict rules of the grown-ups, a chance to run and shout. But the children’s noise was soon swallowed by the steadfast silence of the trees through which they ran. At last, intimidated, they walked home in a close group, whispering warily. There were strange things in the forest, wild animals, maybe even abos—though the nearest abo village was a good day’s walk away. Certainly, there were piles of stones here and there which some people said were the remains of structures built by the abos an age ago, long before humankind had come to Elysium. Rickey and the other children always gave these revenants a wide berth, scaring each other with stories of what might still live deep underground.

  Now, sitting beside the rushing river in the green shadows of the canyon, Rick felt a touch of that old unease, and began to wish that he had stayed beside the overlander after all. Only a crazy person or a criminal would build a fire out here. He stood, ready to go back, and saw a flicker of colour in the distance, a patch of red among feathery sunlit green. His heart gave a little leap, pure anticipation, as he crouched beside one of the boulders.

  Dressed in bright red trousers and a dirty overjacket, the man came along the shingle bank with a kind of hunched lope. When Rick stood, the man stopped, a hand at the wide belt which bunched the waist of his trousers. He said, “Man, what are you doing here?”

  “I might ask you the same question,” Rick said. “I just came down to the river to cool off, is all. I’ve been checking out the relay station. The one which receives laser pulses from the colonyboats.”

  “Oh yeah?” The man looked to be about fifty, twice Rick’s age, thickening into an ungraceful end to middle-age. Broken capillaries speckled his cheeks above an unkempt beard; his throat sagged in three folds. Yet he had an air of authority, of power. “Look here,” he said, “I never meant any harm. I was just doing the decent thing.” What he had his hand on was a sheathed knife.

  “I’m no cop, if that’s what you think.” Sweat rolled down Rick’s chest, rib by rib. He could feel the weight of the pistol holstered at his side, but didn’t dare move his hand toward it.

  The man spat black phlegm toward the river. There was something wadded in his cheek, Rick saw; and there was something funny about his eyes too, the irises no more than thin rims around wide black pupils. The man said, “I don’t aim to hurt anyone out here. I just want to be left alone.”

  “If that’s all you want,” Rick said, “I guess there isn’t any harm to it. I won’t tell the cops, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He wanted to run, but didn’t dare. He said, “I mean, is that okay with you?”

  The man shrugged.

  “Okay, if that’s how you want it,” Rick said, and turned to start up the steep shingle bank. Then a heavy blow sent him sprawling: shock, titanic galvanism, struck down his spine. The man’s body pressed his in an obscene embrace, legs mixed clumsily together, weight pivoting on his back, hot breath hissing by his ear. Rick remembered the knife and managed to jerk up an elbow, felt it connect with something solid. The weight rolled away and Rick kicked out, catching the man just below his knee so he went over backward, sprawling among glossy loops of fern.

  Rick scrambled to his feet, clumsy and slow, breath digging a raw pit in his throat, backed away as the man got up on one knee, glaring up through his tangled fringe. For an instant, Rick saw into those eyes. Then the spell snapped, and he could run.

  Panting hard, Rick gripped the hot metal ladder and pulled himself onto the overlander’s ribbed roof. Beyond the canyon, far out across the plain, the sun was an amorphous blur within a bank of haze on the horizon. The bare sandstone at the edge of the canyon glowed like red-hot iron: the sunken slopes of vegetation ribboned away beneath the darkening sky. There was no sign of the cops.

  Rick’s muscles thawed to a spasmodic trembling. There was no smoke now, nothing to show that anything had happened down there. He reached to finger the power holster, reflecting wryly that he had had nothing to fear…and discovered only the edge of the clip that had held it to
his belt: shattered, empty. He looked around as fresh panic unfolded, the world seeming to slip askew. And saw the two cops coming toward the overlander, luminous as angels in their white coveralls.

  3. In the System

  Teep. Tip-tip. Teep. The timer’s plaintive cry dragged Rick from the clamorous depths of REM sleep to the edge of consciousness. Beside him, Cath rolled onto her stomach, clutching a pillow to her face. He reached out to touch the cut-off, focused on the glowing green figures: 0716. Shit. What kind of time was that?

  He was still not properly awake, did not remember that he had an appointment at the police headquarters. He relaxed back into the softness of the bedplate and a fugitive dream fragment overtook him instantly. Someone was whispering urgently and he strained to catch the meaning, knowing that it was desperately important…but the whisper faded to a dribbling susurrus, dismal universal hiss, and he was falling, failing over a darkling land, nothing into nothing—

  The timer went off again. Rick shut it off and sat up. Exhaustion was a gritty veil in his eyes; memory of the madman and of his own panic smouldered behind it. No. Remember instead the amnesty he and Cath had achieved late last night. She was still asleep, or pretending to be, black hair tangled over the raised planes of her shoulderblades.

  Rick left her to sleep on—after all, she had waited for him until his return just before midnight, and through the debacle that had followed—and padded into the bathroom. Its bright light, slickly reflected from glass and plastic surfaces, gave him a sudden sense of urgency. He urinated and perfunctorily scrubbed at his face and hands, then went back into the suspended half-light of the bedroom and quickly dressed, choosing sombre clothes for the interview which lay ahead. Grey pants with only narrow pleating, a white half-sleeved shirt, sandals.

  In the kitchen, the treacher delivered his customary breakfast of milk-drenched oatcakes and milky tea. One of Bach’s violin concertos murmured in the air. A summer morning beyond the picture window, gold light pricking through levels of wide cedar branches, beginnings of heat.

  He pulled on his asymmetric linen jacket and stepped outside, the door rolling shut at his back. In the kitchen, the treacher shut its hatch on the soiled dishes and retracted into the wall with a smug click. Elsewhere, a small homeostatic mechanism uttered a brief staccato of clicks and was silent. The canopy over the fanlight of the sunken bedroom tilted half a degree to admit a little more light. Below, on the cool bedplate, Cath murmured and reached out.

  The houses of the University staff were strung around a sculptured hill above the sprawling campus, half-sunken into the earth and hidden by landscaping and clumps of trees. Cedar and pine, oak and elm, chestnut and sycamore: all raised from cell templates carried by the two arks which had originally colonised Elysium. Aisles of green calm, artfully contrived clearings and banks of shrubbery. You had to look carefully to make out the line of a pastel wall or the jut of a roof, the flash of light on a window.

  Absorbed, Rick walked down a gravel path scattered with spiked fruit fallen from the chestnut trees into the awakening campus. Lawns and long low buildings, their flat roofs cluttered with antennae masts, windmill generators, and solar collectors. The flow tubes and racked mirrors of the experimental hydroponics farm glittering in the early morning sunlight. Rick could have taken a bicycle from one of the public racks, but he wanted to walk. He had been sent for, and resented it, knowing that at best his time would be wasted in a reshuffling of the facts he had recited the previous night, at worst…but he didn’t want to think about that.

  He passed the Neo-Bauhaus Architecture building, with its rust-stained concrete panels, polyhedral decking and steel-framed windows, and climbed the grassy ridge at the boundary of the campus. A road ran beyond the downslope, its far side bounded by the high stone walls of the estates of the rich, the quaintly peaked roofs of their sprawling houses islanded in the trees which stepped away down the hillside. Beyond were the domes of the bubble-suburbs, embraced on either side by the enigmatic native forest, crowding toward the packed roofs of the old quarter at the edge of the silty waters of the estuary. A hundred thousand people down there, and most would never be affected by anything he did. Suburban culture was deep into the gifts of Earth: body augmentation, reality structuring, wholetime art, cultism, trash aesthetique. Science was not relevant. The citizens of Port of Plenty looked inward, took advice from the stored personality matrices of their dead relations rather than make their own decisions, turned their backs on the vast unknown continent.

  Yet still the city sang a seductive siren song to Rick. There was no other place in the world where he could pursue his research, no other place where he could live long enough to pursue it properly—only a year into his lectureship, he had had his blood purged of toxins twice already, and with citizenship came full medical and the chance to live on after death in the cool matrix files. So long as he kept to the path Professor Collins had mapped out for him it would all be his…but how easy it was to stray from that path! If he had not gone down into the river canyon he would not have lost the pistol, would not have been called to account for it now.

  Rick crossed the road and began the long walk to the police headquarters. The stone walls of the estates gave way to faceted domes, each screened by burgeoning evergreen shrubs, that year’s horticultural fad; and these in turn yielded to rooming houses built of native limestone. No more gardens. A steady stream of cyclists flowed toward offices, automats, or the docks. Rick passed the brightly lit windows of the marts at the edge of the commerce sector, waited while a procession of cushiontrucks slid through the intersection at Market and 5th. Produce from Arcadia, the nearest and oldest settlement: soft fruit, wine, and other foodstuffs difficult to synthesise. Rick had once watched his own settlement’s trucks leave for the city, had wanted to ride with them to discover the terrible secrets that lay at the end of their journey.

  Unbelievably, he had arrived already. He checked the timetab on the cuff of his jacket—0814—and crossed the parking lot. The statue of the first governor of Port of Plenty, gesturing over ranks of bicycles and police cruisers and overlanders, had been daubed with red paint by the separatists, the third time in as many weeks. Out of warm morning sunlight into shadow. The police headquarters was, of course, the tallest building in the spreading city.

  A bored sergeant in the reception area clipped a tag to Rick’s linen jacket and gave him a direction card. Unescorted, Rick rode an elevator down one floor. The basement corridors were decorated in the natural style of a decade past. Sourceless lighting glistened on imitation grass matting, rough chalk walls. Every intersection was an excuse for an arbour of fake flowering shrubs. Vendors glittered among dusty stands of bamboo, machines submitting to Nature’s relentless growth.

  The direction card guided Rick to a door at the end of a blind corridor. There was no nameplate, not even a number. When he knocked, the door swung in and across the small room the man behind the desk looked up.

  “Come right in, Dr Florey. My name is Savory.”

  Rick turned to close the door. But it was already shut. The man was smiling now. He wasn’t wearing the uniform coveralls of a cop, but a lightweight suit and a white high-collared shirt, a luminous white echoed in his smile.

  Rick perched on the chair before the desk. His scalp prickled, charged with blood. Tentatively, he said, “I understand—”

  Savory’s smile switched off like a light. “One moment,” he said, and turned to his desk compsim.

  Rick felt another surge of embarrassment and looked away. The small room was almost bare. No decoration but a print of Dürer’s Melencolia, hung in the precise centre of one green wall; the desk and two chairs the only furniture.

  Savory angled the compsim away slightly, as if he suspected that Rick was trying to peek. The compsim was as big as a portable trivee, its manual mode display, from Rick’s point of view, a luminous blur over the gull-wing of its projector. Such machines, cannibalised from the arks, were more complex and efficient
than colonially manufactured models, and in fantastically short supply. The head of Rick’s department had one, but Rick did not.

  Rick looked at the print again. Behind the scowling angel was a four-sided magic square. Reason behind divine wrath. Is he trying to make me nervous with this waiting? At that moment, Savory’s voice startled him.

  “Sorry about that, Dr Florey.” Savory was smiling again. His bushy blond hair was thinning back from a freckled forehead; his eyes, hooded with heavy pink lids, were set close together over a snub nose. This face was somehow familiar, as if Rick had seen it in passing every day.

  “If this is about my report, I’ve already gone over that with your people. They pulled me straight back after the interview I did. See here, I was told that there would be no trouble over losing the pistol. It was hardly my fault.”

  “Now, Dr Florey, you haven’t gone over it with me. I’m not a cop, but a member of the City Board. I have my office here for the moment, that’s all.”

  Perfectly shocked. Rick said, “I don’t see why the Board should be interested.”

  Savory linked his hands at the edge of his desk. “I can assure you that it is. Not about the pistol, exactly, but about the circumstances of its loss. You aren’t a citizen, are you?”

  “Not yet. But I hope to be. My loyalty isn’t in question, is it?”

  “I don’t think so. How long have you been at the University?”

  “Three years as an undergraduate, four as a doctoral candidate. This academic year is my first as a lecturer.”

  “And are you happy with your work?”

  “Sure.” Passively, he waited to see where Savory wanted to go.

  “Now, you were asked to interface the computer at the relay station with Constat. Everything went right. Yes?”