Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  She squinted up at him. “That’s another thing. At the party last night, Josie was miffed when you refused a hit. It doesn’t hurt to relax every so often.”

  “Where I come from, it’s a sin to do alcohol, much less serotonin specifics. Look, if the crowd worries you so much, let’s exercise our privilege and go back in.”

  Cath drained her glass and set it in the sand, and they strolled to the gate and showed their tickets again, climbed the L-shaped stairway of the amphitheatre to their seats. The stepped rows of benches were sparsely occupied; the upper tiers, reserved for members of the City Board, were completely deserted.

  Side by side, Rick and Cath looked out at the level line of the ocean horizon. There—there was the beginning of the unknown. Two thousand kilometres away this same ocean was breaking on an unexplored shore.

  The amphitheatre filled slowly, but Rick couldn’t recognise anyone in the bronzed light. The sun had vanished behind a molten line of clouds above the delta. The crescent of the moon had sunken lower in the sky. The first stars were pricking across the huge sky. Somewhere above: the colonyboat. The thought tripped a solid clot of excitement in Rick’s stomach.

  Cath leaned to hug her knees, bare thighs clamped together as she looked left and right. The mutter of the waiting people drifted through the amphitheatre’s seashell curve.

  Rick asked, “Shall we try the bar again? Maybe we can find out what’s happening.”

  Cath stirred drowsily. “I guess one more will either kill or cure.”

  The sun had set now. Ragged lines of cloud were cooling to a purple not much lighter than the rest of the sky. As Rick and Cath went down the aisle, someone in the amphitheatre turned up a radio—

  “—AS YET NO WORD BUT AS SOON AS—”

  —and turned it down again. As echoes blatted away, Rick realised just how much noise the crowd was making at the bottom of the stairs. Cath had stopped, one hand raised to the side of her neck. Rick grinned. “It sounds like they’ve penned all the drinks in the world down there!”

  Cath said, “It sounds like a riot to me. Didn’t you hear someone scream just now?” The elbow of the stairway blocked their view. She added, “Let’s go back. Rick. It isn’t worth the trouble.”

  It was the hard voice she used in their domestic squabbles. The dreamy precision of the focus had evaporated. Rick said quickly, “I want to check out what’s happening. People don’t come here to get totally wired; maybe there’s some news. I’ll just take a look, is all.”

  He went on down. Even before the turn, the noise rose around him as if he was descending into the vitals of a huge overstrained machine. A metallic voice cut through the din, but its words were botched by echoes. In that moment Rick decided to turn around—and someone, a cop, turned the corner and grabbed him, shouted something drowned by the roar. Rick smiled, thinking he was meant to go back up, but the cop tightened his grip and marched him down.

  Light surprised him. Someone had turned on the searchlights above the entrance, where the crowd seethed against a line of cops. People were standing on the counter of the bar, shouting and clapping; others were clambering up to join them.

  Rick clamped his eyes against the glare…and was hit in the back, shoved forward! The crowd closed around him, a hot cell of arms and torsos. Dazed, he tried to turn back (a woman’s face brushed his own; someone smacked heavily into his side; a hand scraped the back of his neck) but something hit the people behind him and he went forward with everyone else. Then the press slackened so suddenly that he almost fell.

  Lights sprang on beyond the dispersing crowd, throwing long shadows across the ground. The air above became an impenetrable black ceiling. More people staggered from the entrance. Mostly, they turned toward the meadow behind the amphitheatre, stumbling over wooden stakes trampled into the sand. Rick set off in that direction too, looking for the electric blue of Cath’s dress. People wandered aimlessly between white police cruisers, clotting here and there in small groups.

  Then an amplified voice blared under the black ceiling, chanting the same sentence over and over: “WE’VE BEEN ABANDONED! WE’VE BEEN ABANDONED! ABANDONED!” De Ramaira straddled the roof of a police cruiser, his face half-obscured by the yellow cone of an amplifier. “YOU FOOLS, CAN’T YOU SEE HOW THEY’VE DECEIVED US!” There was a squeal of feedback. “LOOK UP—”

  As Rick started toward the cruiser, Cath crashed into his side. They clasped each other tightly, each seeking familiar comfort. “All right,” he kept saying. “It’s all right.”

  Another metallic squeal echoed from the rising wall of the amphitheatre. Rick turned (Cath’s head butted against his chest) and saw that de Ramaira had gone from the cruiser’s roof.

  In the circle of his arms, Cath said, “It was crazy, Rick! The police were pushing everyone out of their seats, shoving them down those stairs…”The tremor in her voice was an overflow of anger. “It’s those goddamn fucking separatists, I just know it. They must be behind it!”

  In the circle of her arms, Rick said, “I ought to see about de Ramaira.”

  Rick found no relief in Cath’s embrace as they walked between the cruisers, through the milling crowd, forgetting how often he had sought it. He felt the onset of a queerly detached sense of precision, nothing to do with the ferocity of the cops or the shattered expectation of the splashdown, or the fat woman in the yellow smock who walked across their path with tears streaming down her face.

  “He sounded out of his head,” Cath said. “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  De Ramaira stood in the glare of the cruiser’s headlights, passive in the casual grip of a cop, head hanging so that his wiry hair flopped over his face. His glittering shirt was torn, and he was panting hard.

  Rick pushed through the loose semicircle of spectators. A cop with sergeants’ chevrons on the breast of his white coveralls was unplugging from his compsim. As Rick went up to him the sergeant jerked a thumb toward de Ramaira. “You know him?”

  Rick nodded. “Dr de Ramaira, from the University. I guess he’s drunken a little too much—”

  One of those watching said loudly, “He’s wired out of his head!”

  “So is it okay to take him home and sober him up?”

  The sergeant scratched behind one ear. “You can do what you want, long as you keep this wasting fucker out of trouble. I just want this place cleared. Those are my orders.”

  Something settled, something final. “The Landing?”

  “Look,” the sergeant told Rick, “there isn’t going to be any Landing.”

  De Ramaira raised his head. He didn’t look drunk at all. A black trickle of blood gleamed below one nostril.

  “Don’t you see, Rick? Don’t you understand? Earth has finished with us. There won’t be any more ships. For ever and ever.”

  6. Scorpio Rising

  The heatwave mounted in the week after the debacle of Landing Day, a breath from the Outback now. The discharge of thousands of air-conditioning circuits rose like the updraft of a furnace over the close-packed roofs of the Port of Plenty’s old quarter, drawing a hot, headachy wind off the estuary. Harsh sunlight turned the thousand domes of the bubble-suburbs into incandescent gems, scorched their settings of trees and evergreen shrubs. People ventured out only when they had to. Sweltering beneath the empty indigo sky, Port of Plenty seemed half-abandoned, as if its population had incontinently taken flight from the sudden, universal disaster.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day, the hottest yet, Governor O’Hara broadcast a belated explanation of the City Board’s position. Even though contact had never been established with the colonyboat, he said, the Landing Day celebrations had not been cancelled because of a mistaken faith in tradition. The board had expected until the last possible moment to detect the colonyboat as it entered orbit.

  A burly man with a sweating jowly face, thinning hair combed sideways across a freckled pate, O’Hara was not convincing. An athlete gone to seed, a compromiser elev
ated too high. The next day, Max Rydell, who was a loyal Constitutionalist, confided to Rick, “Well, yesterday’s little fiasco won’t help matters, will it?”

  “What do you think will happen now?”

  They were leaning on the rail of the balcony overlooking the jai alai court, waiting for the current game to end. Shouts. Hard-edged slams of the ball against the walls. Skittering squeals of sneakers as players chased rebounds.

  Rydell watched the game pensively. He said at last, “I guess the only way to save face is to have the fellow resign. He gambled it would come good is the best way of looking at it. But it didn’t. He’ll have to step down now, or we might be forced into an election.”

  Rick lifted the mesh singlet away from his sweat-sticky chest. The air conditioning wasn’t coping very well with the sunlight which glared through the court’s glass roof. “So all that will happen is we get a new governor.”

  “What do you want, a revolution?”

  “Jesus, of course not. It makes no difference to me who’s in power here.”

  “Rick, if we don’t get someone who will come down hard on the separatists, it will affect everyone on the planet.”

  Rick laughed at Rydell’s uncharacteristically sententious tone, and the stocky materials engineer said gruffly, “Your trouble is that you think you’re beyond it all.”

  “If the next colonyboat doesn’t arrive, then I’ll begin to worry. Port of Plenty always did take Earth too seriously.”

  “You ask your friend David de Ramaira how seriously this should be taken. I haven’t seen him around since that exhibition he made of himself at Jones Beach.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m seeing him this evening. I’ll pass on your concern.”

  The bell which indicated the end of a game period rang out, and the men and women in the court below the balcony began to sort themselves into their respective teams. Rydell said, “Man in your position might do well to keep clear of that fellow, at the moment.”

  “A lot of people have been telling me that, lately.” Rick picked up his curved scoop. “Come on, let’s knock Agriculture for a loop.”

  The paralysing grip of the heat gradually ebbed in the evenings, and the people of the city were able to reclaim the streets. Rick found that he was almost the only person walking by himself (Cath was taking part in a family conclave, but she would have made her excuses anyway) as he made his way through the old quarter to de Ramaira’s house. People sat in their doorways or leaned at their windows, gossiping with neighbours. The open-air restaurants and cafes in the quarter’s tree-lined squares were crowded, and groups of people promenaded in their finery along the warm streets.

  The old quarter was centred on the largest hill in the city, the place where the first colonists had begun to clear the alien forest eighty years ago. De Ramaira’s house was at the top of one of the narrow streets which snaked to the hill’s summit, a solid foursquare building overlooking a park of threadbare grass and huge chestnut trees.

  Rick touched the signal tab set in the heavy wooden door. A bell clanged somewhere inside, but minutes passed without anything else happening. The narrow windows were shuttered and dark behind their fancy iron balustrades, but from somewhere overhead came the sound of many people talking at once, mingling with the drone of the automats which lay on the seaward side of the hill. Rick was about to press the tab again when the door creaked open and de Ramaira said, “Rick! Good to see you.” His smile was a momentary flicker. “Your young lady, Ms Krausemann, she isn’t with you?”

  “She’s talking with her family.” Rick looked de Ramaira up and down. He was wearing an uncharacteristically formal suit, black high-cut jacket and pleated pants, but his white shirt was open down his bony chest, and he was barefoot. “You look well,” Rick said. “I was worried, you not turning up at work.”

  “I’m okay. Come in.”

  They went down the hall, through a room cluttered with massive pieces of early colonial furniture, and into a small courtyard lit by a single dim lamp. The neighbouring houses loomed over it, blocking out most of the sky.

  “Everyone else is on the roof,” de Ramaira said.

  “Everyone else?”

  “Oh, I invited some students over,” de Ramaira said casually, and started up the helical staircase. His footsteps clacked above Rick’s head as they climbed out of the close air of the courtyard.

  There were at least two dozen people crowded on the roof terrace. More than half the women wore the two-day-old fashion of mock-mourning, full-length dresses of layered and torn black silk, black net adorned with silver stars and moons wound through piled-up hair, draped over a face powdered chalk white. At first glance, the party looked like a reception for an obscure sect of nuns.

  De Ramaira guided Rick through noisy knots of people. As they reached the far corner, two young men turned from the angle in the railing. A woman just as young, seated at the square wooden table there, looked up with a brief but dazzling smile. Rick smiled back, and de Ramaira said to the woman, “Lena, this is Dr Florey. Rick, this young lady is one of my students, Lena Vallee.”

  “Now, you wouldn’t be related to the guy in the Chronus Quarter? The cello player?”

  Lena brushed back the heavy black hair which spilled the collar of her asymmetric blouse. “My father.”

  “Really? Hey. I used to go to all their concerts, back when I was a student.”

  One of the young men, tall, blond and nervous, stuck his hand out. “I’m Jon Grech. I’m in Agriculture too.” He glanced at de Ramaira and added, “Trying to end up as a biologist, though.” He shook hands with Rick over Lena’s head.

  “And here,” de Ramaira said expansively, “is Web Marshall. He’s in the Engineering Department, like yourself.”

  But Rick had not seen the thickset, shaggy-haired youngster before. Like Jon, he was wearing black jeans and a sweatshirt. His were a lot dirtier, though. He pulled a chair from the table and sat, scowling back at Rick’s quizzical gaze. “I’m in Systems, not Communications,” he said.

  “Well, why don’t we all sit down,” de Ramaira suggested.

  Rick looked around at the rest of the party, thought he recognised one of his students and looked away. He asked de Ramaira, “Shouldn’t you be playing host?” He had the uncomfortable suspicion that he was being set up for something.

  “I think it’s reached critical mass,” de Ramaira said affably and sat next to Web. Jon sat beside Lena and after a moment’s hesitation Rick sat too, sure now that something was going on.

  De Ramaira was filling glass after glass from a pitcher of red wine. “We’re glad you could come along, Rick. Jon and Web have been plying me with questions I haven’t the least idea how to begin answering. I thought it would be easier if they put them directly to you. That would be the proper feedback, wouldn’t it?”

  Jon leaned forward. “We sort of wanted you to listen to a few ideas of ours, and maybe comment on them? You know, there’s all sorts of dumb theories around the campus and it’s getting difficult to sort out any sense.”

  Web added, “He’s trying to say that we want to know what’s going on, but we can’t be bothered to programme it ourselves.”

  Jon protested, “Hey, I didn’t meant it like that!” A caged electric lamp, hung on a pole nearby, put a corona around his crewcut hair; his face was in shadow. He said to Rick, “We’ve been trying to extract some sense from all the talk of the past few days, and we were just wondering about your opinion.”

  Rick looked at de Ramaira, who smiled gently, inscrutably. Beyond the rail at his back, leaf-laden branches doffed in the breeze. Rick said, “I didn’t know that I was to chair a discussion panel when I was asked up here. But if you want to risk your opinions against mine, then go ahead.”

  De Ramaira suggested quietly, “Jon and Web have an interesting proposal, if you’ll hear them out.”

  Lena looked up at the black sky and laughed, a single clear note.

  Jon frowned at her, then began to spe
ak rapidly and nervously about what people thought could have gone wrong with the colonyboat. He was barely audible above the noise of the party, but Rick caught enough to get the gist, nothing that he hadn’t heard a dozen times already from his colleagues. That the driver of the colonyboat could have failed in transit, the fusion motor flared out or the gravithic generators flatlined, no longer warping space to funnel hydrogen atoms into the driver’s throat. That the colonyboat could have been hit by some piece of cosmic debris big enough to penetrate its ice shield; or that its driver had failed to swing around for the deceleration manoeuvre, so that it had ploughed straight through the Tau Ceti system. Rick was going to point out that these were hardly revolutionary ideas when Jon pulled out, of all things, a piece of paper covered with calculations which he claimed to show how unlikely any of these possibilities were, offering it across the table.

  “Oh, I believe you,” Rick said. “I know that a colonyboat is a very simple thing. Self-correcting multiphasic circuitry, extensive back-up systems for the few mechanical components, and so on. And the gravithic generators don’t even have any moving parts. But that doesn’t mean a failure couldn’t happen, despite your calculations.”

  Web hunched forward. “We know that. But there’s another possibility which most people are ignoring, something more likely than a glitch in the colonyboat. The possibility that something happened on Earth so that a ship never was sent.”

  “You had better ask David about that,” Rick said. “I’m just a lecturer in Communications Engineering.”

  De Ramaira said, “The problem is, Rick, that my knowledge of current Earth politics is no better than that of anyone else. When the last batch of settlers arrived there was no indication that the launch schedule was to be changed. If there was, Governor O’Hara would have made use of it in that miserable apology of a speech last night, and anyway, there’s no reason for it to change. Every time Vesta reaches the point in its orbit closest to Tau Ceti, off goes a colonyboat. What could be simpler?”