Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  —You will be my arm, Miguel, the voice said, my arm in the troubles that are to come. The one which carried this extension of myself failed me, but I think you will serve me better than he. There was already a small part of me in you, put there by the compsim to make sure you did not throw it away. As signals can impose patterns on your visual area, so they can impose patterns elsewhere in your brain. This part of me will watch over you now, and to begin with it will make sure you go back the way you came. You will be needed in the Outback, in the times of trouble which are to come.

  Miguel began to push through the bushes—or rather, his body did. He was like a passenger trapped within the cavern of his skull, scared almost to death. For he knew what had happened to the previous servant of this voice, this machine, had seen his brains blown all over the side of the overlander on that distant beach. That was the price of failure.

  —I will be with you, the voice said. Even if you stray out of range of any transmitter. A part of me is in your head now, Miguel. Take it east, back across the path. I will need an arm there soon enough.

  “What do you want of me?”

  —You are more…susceptible. Empathic. Do you understand? Yes. You know why you understand the aborigines. That knowledge was what you were running from.

  It was true, Miguel had never liked being around people, they pressed in on him, like a cloud obscuring his own thoughts. Sensitive, his father said it so often. His father had drunk to keep out the pressure, alone in his shack at the edge of the vast empty forest, and Miguel hadn’t minded the way they lived, knew no better then. He’d populated the nearby cemetery with imaginary playmates; so many of the graves were those of children or babies, killed by the world before they were properly alive. Lying on the close-trimmed grass by the white cross which marked the grave of his mother and twin brother, Miguel imagined that he could hear his brother whispering the secrets of the world underground, somewhere in the darkness behind Miguel’s eyes, a darkness like a curtain that could be pushed aside, if only Miguel knew how.

  “Estaban?”

  The iron control withdrew so suddenly that Miguel almost fell. He was at the edge of a quiet clearing in the forest, blue with evening. Through the trees he could see a blinking red light, the tip of the relay tower he had passed days before.

  “Estaban?”

  There was no reply, but Miguel could feel the thing in the darkness behind his eyes, a cold, dead mind like the dead minds which the people of the city worshipped, cold as a steel snake nested in his skull. Blue brother, waiting for its will to be done.

  10. Something Wild

  The cops began to spread out as they pushed through scrub toward the river, following coordinates fed through their compsims. Rick stayed close to Catlan. Savory bulled his way through the thickets a few paces ahead of them, cursing now and then as a branch whipped back into his face or a thorn snagged his expensive suit. The police lieutenant had activated the chameleon circuit of her coveralls and pulled up the hood, turning herself into a half-glimpsed montage of patterned green just slightly out of synch with her surroundings.

  When they reached the river, Savory turned to Rick and Catlan and said, “At last it seems that a heat trace of our man has been picked up again. I’ll be asking some hard questions when we get back as to why they lost it in the first place. How are you managing, Dr Florey?”

  “Okay,” Rick said. In fact, he was in better shape than Savory, whose face, turned a patchy red, was slick with sweat. Rick hadn’t quite forgotten the skill of picking a way through the tangles with minimum effort, learned during his childhood rambles through the forests around Mount Airy.

  The lieutenant’s coveralls flickered, green patterns fading to white. The woman said, “He’s up near the ridge line across the water, got outside our circle somehow.”

  “Christ,” Savory said with venomous disgust, “can’t your people handle this? Let me know and I’ll pull them off it.”

  The lieutenant shrugged. “We’re doing our best, sir. Do you want to be in on the end?”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Savory said. He blotted sweat from his face with the back of his wrist. “Across the fucking river? Can’t you call the copter down?”

  “Not without losing the trace, sir.” Rick saw that the lieutenant was trying not to smile.

  Catlan murmured to Rick, “This guy has been living in-country most of his life. He appreciates this kind of terrain, right?”

  “How about you?”

  “I was born in New Haven.”

  “I’m from Mount Airy, myself.”

  “Figured you were from someplace, those moves you were making. How did you get called on this anyway?”

  “I saw the guy when I was out checking the relay station,” Rick told Catlan, colouring at memory of the struggle, the theft of the pistol he’d been entrusted with. He added, “You’ll have to ask Savory why I’m here now.”

  Savory had been holding an internal conference with his compsim. Now he looked around, his eyes refocusing, and said, “It seems he’s holed up now, or at least not moving. Lead on, lieutenant.”

  The brown river water swirled higher than Rick’s knees, ruining his expensive pleated trousers. But it was almost worth it to see the expression of deep distaste on Savory’s face as he tiptoed through the flood. Beyond, reed beds gave out to a steep slope. Tall, spaced trees. Limestone outcrops patched with palm-sized cups of stonewort, lichens bright as splashed paint. The huge soft disc of the sun hung just above the top of the ridge, silhouetting the cops who were climbing there. The helicopter droned somewhere above; when Rick reached the top, he glimpsed it turning away above the tree-tops.

  Rick followed Catlan over a jumble of roots splayed everywhere to grip the broken slabs of limestone. Some were as thick through as his thigh. Deep dark crevices, weathered pinnacles. The cops were gathering around a long, narrow fissure that zagged into darkness under collapsed boulders. One was sighting into the fissure with an infrared scope. Others were scrambling around the trees which leaned over it, looking for possible exits.

  Savory beat at his muddy trousers while the lieutenant explained that the helicopter had tracked the dingo into the fissure with thermal imaging. Even as she spoke, the cop with the infrared scope turned and shouted. “He’s down in there all right!”

  The lieutenant said to Savory, “Permission to continue, sir?”

  “Could be anything down there,” Catlan said.

  “Thank you for your opinion,” Savory said. “Go ahead, Lieutenant. We’re wasting time.”

  The cops deployed themselves either side of the fissure. One raised a short-barrelled shotgun. The flat crack of the weapon’s discharge was followed by a muffled thump down in the dark recesses. Yellow-grey smoke drifted up. It smelled of mustard and rotten geraniums, an acrid scent that seared Rick’s nostrils. Like Catlan, he covered his mouth with his sleeve. His eyes watered and stung.

  For a long moment nothing else happened. One of the cops coughed loudly and repeatedly. No one, it seemed, had thought to bring gas masks. The man with the shotgun looked around, waiting for the order to fire again. Then there was a rattling scraping commotion inside the fissure.

  “That’s no fuckin’ man—” Catlan said, and brought up his rifle as something long and sinuous burst out of the heavy smoke. Curved claws drew great splinters from the limestone as they grappled the edge of the fissure. Muscles of the heavy forelimbs bunched under glittering scales. Catlan’s rifle went off beside Rick’s ear but the sabretooth had already pulled itself up, and the shot ricocheted harmlessly into the fissure. The sabretooth lashed at the nearest cop, and although its casual sideways swipe hardly seemed to have touched him, the man flew backward, a line of torn cloth and flesh down his chest suddenly flooded with red.

  The others scattered in uncoordinated panic as the sabretooth looked around, tiny eyes red as flame beneath the ridged carapace that hooded its head, fangs sliding half out their black sheathes. Then Catlan fired ag
ain and the sabretooth took off, pouring effortlessly over a canted tree trunk, twisting away downslope, gone.

  Catlan ejected the spent cartridges from his rifle. “Now that,” he said, “was really wild.”

  “Maybe the dingo was dragged in there by the sabretooth,” Rick said.

  “Maybe. This just isn’t our friend Savory’s day.”

  Savory had begun to rage at the lieutenant, but she turned from him and hurried to where her wounded man lay, just beginning to make sharp cries of shocked pain, his head cradled by one of his comrades. “Someone call in the chopper,” she said, emptying her aid kit on to the rock. Overhead the drone of the helicopter changed pitch and then Rick saw the machine swoop downward, its canopy burning with the light of the setting sun as it sought a clear path through the trees.

  When they got back to the mines, Savory, still fuming over the debacle, ordered the police lieutenant and Catlan to join him for a postmortem. After the wounded man had been loaded into the helicopter, the cops had made a cursory search of the crevice, but there had been no trace of the dingo.

  “I want to know just how a dingo could lead us into a trap, and I want to know how we fell for it,” he said, then told Rick, “You’ll have to wait here until this is done. Half an hour or so, I expect.”

  Rick sat on the dusty planks of the porch of the commons hut, sipping from a paper cup of coffee Catlan had brought out for him. Time passed. He was still in reaction from the sabretooth’s attack, a hollow, burnt-out feeling. He watched the last sunlight burnish the pall of smoke rising from the smelters. Across the compound the ground-effect barge looked like the carcass of a beached sea monster; the raking conveyer belts above it the bones of some greater beast. Beyond the wire fence the forest was steeped in shadow. Anything could be out there, anything at all, even magicians who could turn into wild beasts…

  More than Savory’s promised half hour passed. The helicopter returned, sinking toward the compound in a storm of light and noise and dust. As Rick clambered inside it, fluoros on high poles around the compound came on. In their distilled glare. Rick saw drying bloodspots on the cleated decking of the cabin. He was careful not to step on them. Music dribbled from the radio. The burly pilot turned it down and asked, “What did you do with Savory?”

  “He’s still talking it over. How’s the guy who was hurt?”

  “He’ll live to show off his scars. Did Savory say how long he’d be?”

  “Half an hour. But that was more than half an hour ago.”

  “Shit. I hate to hang around this hole. That Savory is some guy, huh? Smooth on the surface and hard underneath. I don’t fancy being in the lieutenant’s place, although I don’t see how anyone could have anticipated that move. I was watching the thermal scans as they came in. Can’t understand how that guy we were chasing walked out the circle without showing a trace. But he must have, maybe walked down the river with only his head showing?”

  “It was too shallow for that.” Rick rubbed at his mud-stiffened trousers.

  “Well he did it somehow. And led you all on to that sabretooth. Those guys who go dingo, everyone says they’re crazy, but I don’t know.”

  The music from the speaker beside the pilot cut off suddenly, shockingly. There was only the crackle of interference. Both men looked at the radio as if a charm had been broken. Then someone said, “Stand by for an important announcement from the City Board.”

  Crackle and hiss again. The pilot turned up the volume. Another voice said, “There have been reports that a convoy of Arcadian produce trucks has been fired on. No casualties are reported. This news comes as the All Colony Council breaks up after a delegation representing twelve settlements presented an ultimatum demanding that the citizens of Port of Plenty should quote join an effort to pioneer new territory for the benefit of all on this world unquote. The delegation also stated that a trade ban would be enforced against the city, and that its member settlements would no longer regulate expansion of farming land as recommended by the City Board. The Board has warned that any aggressive acts will lead to reprisals in defence of citizens’ rights. A Volunteer Defence Force will be organised for this contingency. Please stand by for further announcements.”

  Right away, the pulsing beat of some Brazilian pop song began. Rick took his hands from the back of the pilot’s seat and clasped them between his knees. If Cath had been hurt…but then he remembered that, praise God, she had left the day before. The smoothing of that kink allowed a welling of relief.

  “Sweet fucking Jesus,” the pilot said. “We’re sitting right in the middle of a prison full of those shiteaters! I should go get Savory, do you think?”

  Rick dared reach out and touch the big man’s shoulder. He was convinced that the politician had known what was going to come down. “Savory will be safe, you can depend on it.”

  The pilot might have argued against Rick’s doubtful authority, but the music cut off again and the voice announced that the Arcadian convoy had been stopped by an explosion somewhere on the forest road. After that there was no more music. The situation was clarified by driblets of information spaced by edgy pauses, the crackling voice on the radio underscored by the asynchronous pounding of crushing engines as it recounted the first act of war.

  The police patrol sent to investigate was not responding to radio calls. A helicopter was over the scene. It was reporting a covering of smoke. A police overlander was burning and several trucks were burning too. All the trucks were on fire and the second overlander could not be seen. There were bodies on the road.

  PART TWO

  11. In Limbo

  The concierge was watching the valet clean the foyer when the new tenant came down the stairs. Normally, she wasn’t given to worrying about the occupants of the rooming house—mostly settlers working on short-term contracts, they came and went so quickly. But this young man was different.

  For one thing he dressed too well. Today, he was wearing a black and white overjacket vee’d over a baggy mesh jumper, grey pleated slacks, soft leather boots. The casual clothes of a citizen, a professional. Those, and his always clean hands, his neatly trimmed hair (blond, already thinning, it enhanced his scholarly appearance) were out of place there. For another, he rarely went out much before noonbreak. As if there wasn’t a war.

  Anyway, the concierge thought, he surely couldn’t be any sort of subversive, or the police already would have taken him away. She remembered the way they’d arrested an automat worker who’d arrived in the city only a week before the troubles had begun—a big man with long black hair, the front part of it wet with blood as he had tried to wrestle away from the two cops, right there in the foyer. They had knocked him to the floor and set a pacifier on him, a little crablike machine which had fastened many thin legs around his neck and instantly paralysed him. After that they had carried him out, just like something you saw on the trivia. She could no longer remember the automat worker’s name, could remember nothing commonplace about him except that he had always been courteous toward her—and that was true of most of the settlement people really. No, the police knew their job all right.

  She left the valet patiently cleaning the wooden blocks of the floor centimetre by centimetre and went over to the door, where the new tenant looked through the glass at the rain-swept street. Terrible weather, though really they had been lucky all summer. Making up for it now.

  She remarked, “Not very nice to be going out in. Not unless you need to.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Of course,” she said, “there’s some that have to be out in it. My husband’s working out there, catching pneumonia and who knows what.” Her voice was lifted by her indignation. “Do you know, since he was called up he’s had to work in all weathers, even like this, building those defences. When he comes home he’s too tired to do anything but sit around in front of the trivee all evening, or sleep. He used to help with the bigger jobs around here, but that’s all gone to ruination now. It’s so ridiculous, he was a
supervisor in Number Three Element Refinery and you’d think that was more important than helping build the wall. I think the way they choose people is all wrong, don’t you?”

  Yes, he did agree, watching the rainy street as if impatient to be gone. His face was in profile. His eyes were his best feature, the concierge thought. Overly large, a ghostly colour, a child’s eyes.

  She could see that the rain wasn’t about to let up, so she plunged on. “Maybe we can be thankful they haven’t started shooting yet. Harry, my husband, says everyone on the line—that’s what they’re calling the defences, like something out of the historical wars on the Wombworld isn’t it? Everyone says it won’t be too long before something happens. Soon as the weather settles, they say, there’ll be trouble. I don’t know what to think about that. After what the settlers did to those poor people who tried to escape from Arcadia it makes you wonder what they’ll do next.”

  He made the slightest of shrugs.

  She could see that it was no use, but she went on anyway. Without intending to, she had made herself angry. “I can’t understand what possesses them to do such things. I’ve known as many settlers as anyone in the city, of course we get quite a few living here—” she paused, but he wasn’t going to be drawn easily—“and they’re decent enough people, it seems to me. They always used to say to me that they didn’t much like the ways of the city, but that’s only to be expected, isn’t it? It can’t be like anything they’re used to. I suppose it’s quieter in-country. But I can’t see why they should want to make us like them. Live and let live I say. Still, I suppose you’re glad to be out of it.” The last sentence, the thing she should have left unsaid, slipped out before she realised. She stiffened in anticipation of his answer.

  But just then the valet started its nagging distress tone; the little machine had trapped itself in a corner. The new tenant said, “I’d better be off.” And then he had escaped into the rain.