Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  De Ramaira’s fork dipped in balked elegance as he chewed and swallowed. “Constat says that if the city falls we should assume the worst.”

  “And everyone believes Constat, I suppose?”

  “It’s a very clever computer. Rick. You think it could be wrong?”

  Rick said into de Ramaira’s ear, “‘To every omega-consistent recursive class kappa there correspond recursive class-signs r, such that neither v Gen r nor Neg (V Gen r)’”—he drew the brackets in the air—“‘belongs to Fig (kappa).’ Where v is the free variable of r, of course.”

  “This means that Constat is wrong, does it?”

  “Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. It means that in any number-theory system there are undecidable propositions, statements which can’t be proven true or false except by stepping outside the system. It means there are more things in Heaven and Earth than we, or Constat, can dream of. Constat codes its worldview in an iterative number-theory system, so some of its statements about that worldview are bound to be wrong. Only it can’t tell which ones.”

  “You mean, it can make mistakes. Now, I never knew that about AIs. Do you think the people on the City Board know this?”

  “Some of their advisors must. Maybe things aren’t as bad as it makes out.”

  “A comforting thought. On the other hand, please don’t spread it around, or I might be out of a job and shovelling mud with the rest of the VDF.”

  “Of course, Constat could just as easily be right in predicting that we’re all headed for the Stone Age if the insurgents win.” White wine burned in Rick’s empty stomach. “What I saw today makes me wonder whether it might be better if they did win.”

  De Ramaira put down his fork. It was his turn to lean closer. “That kind of talk could get you put away, Rick. Whatever happened to your loyalty—give me my experiments or give me death, that’s your slogan, right?”

  “I was at Lake Fonda,” Rick said. “Savory took me out there.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to.”

  But Rick had to tell someone. The burning trees. The sheep milling back and forth as the cop methodically slaughtered them. The children and old women and old men of the settlement, set free only because they would be a burden to the insurgents. Savory’s strutting pride. He told de Ramaira all of it, shouting above the roar of the crowd and the pachedu even though their heads were almost touching, and still not sure that de Ramaira understood everything he said. But merely saying it helped. “It was clear to me before the war started,” he said at the end. “I owed the city for my career, I thought, so I stayed when I could have gone.”

  “Do you know why Savory took you out there?”

  “To show me what would happen if the city lost, I think. At least, he said something like that. Or maybe he way testing my loyalty, I don’t know. And I don’t know why he takes an interest in me, if that’s what it is. He keeps turning up in my life, ever since I went out to check the radio telescope—and even that was probably Savory’s idea. He seems to feed on this war. He was in a rotten little basement office before, now look at him. Actually, I suppose he isn’t really interested in me. A few minutes of his time, all that implies, has a far greater effect on me than it does on him. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to lay all this on you.”

  De Ramaira touched Rick’s hand. “This is a rotten little war. Back on Earth, I’ve lived in buildings with more people in them than on all of Elysium. No wonder everyone is caught up in it.” Then, unexpectedly, he smiled at a point somewhere behind Rick and yelled, “Good to see you again!”

  It was Lena.

  “Hi,” she said casually. “And Dr Florey. I didn’t know you came down here.”

  “Rick was just telling me he was at Lake Fonda today.” De Ramaira stood. “I gotta go piss. Take my seat, Lena.”

  As she settled herself, Rick asked, “Web isn’t with you?”

  “Oh, I think you frightened him off. I’m supposed to be meeting someone here, but he hasn’t shown yet.”

  “Oh.”

  “Were you really there? At Lake Fonda?”

  They were so close that he could smell the scent, like musk and oranges, that rose between the lapels of her black leather jacket, warmed in the deep cleft between her breasts.

  “I was there all right, but not by choice.”

  “I guess maybe I shouldn’t be talking with you,” Lena said. Her sudden sunburst smile. “Do you forgive me for coming to see you that time, with Web?”

  “I’m glad you were there. Otherwise what happened might have been more serious.”

  “Web carries a knife, you know.”

  “I didn’t. Jesus. The vicious little—you ought to stay away from him. His plan will get him into trouble.”

  “It’s a small city, smaller now, with the war. It was my idea to go with him, I just wanted you to know. I was afraid he’d get mad at you. But you got mad at him.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. If it’s any consolation, I don’t know if what he said—implying that I couldn’t be trusted because I’m from a settlement—would make me mad now.”

  “He’s gotten some technical wizard involved, a shy little boy of about fourteen. Web says he’s building him some kind of filter.”

  “A bypass filter? Well, he can try, but it would be like putting a telescope to one of those antique photographs. But he really is serious? How is he going to get out of the city, steal an overlander?”

  “Oh,” Lena said, shrugging inside her leather jacket, “there are easier ways than that.”

  De Ramaira pushed through the crowd and said something to Lena, about seeing a friend of hers.

  “Thanks,” Lena said, and told Rick, “We’re playing a concert in the park tomorrow evening. I’d like it if you came; you can meet my father afterward.”

  “Sure,” Rick said, surprise blooming through the muzzy warmth of the cheap wine. “Sure, I’ll be there.”

  “I hope so.” Lena smiled at Rick, at de Ramaira. Then she had vanished into the crowd’s hot dark uproar.

  “Now if you think I’m strange,” de Ramaira said as he sat down, “just you wait until you meet her father.”

  16. Prospero’s Island

  Lena’s father was not only strange, but dauntingly formidable, a tall, stern, craggy-faced man more than eighty years old—an age that to Rick, born in a settlement where the average lifespan was little more than fifty, was as fantastic as Methuselah’s. His home was equally fantastic. Although outwardly just another dome in the bubble-suburbs, it did not contain the usual prelapsarian fantasy of greenery and pools and cunningly hidden rooms. Instead, nestled in tall, gloomy shrubbery, was a replica of a nineteenth-century Carpenter Gothic house, with walls of painted wooden planking, a raised front porch and a steep gabled roof, even a turret—the superfluous lightning conductor that topped its spire almost touching the apex of the dome. It was as if an island of the Wombworld’s past had dropped on to Elysium through some wormhole in space, a wizard’s domain.

  And inside, as befitted a wizard’s house, the air was full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs, a thousand twanging instruments, and voices. There was music such as Rick had never dreamed of—that first evening, it was Messiaen’s inexhaustible catalogue of birdsong—and always the voices of Lena’s ancestors. They were stored in matrix files right there in the house, and permanently accessed, commenting on the conversations of the living or conducting impenetrable conversations of their own, whispering and cackling through all the dusty rooms like a convocation of ghosts.

  Like Prospero, Lena’s father ruled over it all with calm, undeniable authority. Rick’s first evening there, after the concert to which Lena had invited him, the old man bid him sit at a keyboard and play a Chopin prelude. As Rick stumbled through the piece, Lena’s father listened with fierce attention, pulling all the while on his hooked nose, his faded blue eyes fixed on some unguessable distance. His long hair, yellow-white and fine as cornsilk, was brushed back from his craggy
face. “Fair,” he allowed, when Rick had finished. “Fair, if a little mechanical. You’re natural pitch, young man. You should practise, practise! Talent shouldn’t be wasted.”

  “I guess not,” Rick said, feeling both relief (at having passed this test) and irritation (at having been treated like a schoolkid).

  “Oh, you mustn’t mind Father,” Lena said afterward. “All he thinks of is music.”

  “All anyone should think of in this house,” an old woman’s voice said, out of the middle air of the plushly furnished parlour.

  “If I was allowed, that’s what I’d do, Grandmother,” Lena said boldly. “But you won’t let me work on my own pieces, so what do you expect.” She winked at Rick.

  The disembodied old woman said tartly, “You’re as bad as your father was when he was your age, thinking of yourself and not your heritage. You’ll come round, young Lena.”

  “You write music too?” Rick asked. He was sitting gingerly at the edge of a huge couch that, with its heavy hand-carved frame and cracked covering of Muir ox hide, surely dated from the first years of Port of Plenty. He pinched the delicate handle of a china coffee cup between two fingers. Lena’s stepmother (her father’s fifth wife, almost as wonderfully strange as his age), a plump, self-effacing woman not much older than Rick, had brought them a tray of coffee and handmade cookies and, of all things, a sweating pitcher of lemonade.

  Lena shook her head. “Not as seriously as I’d like. I don’t have time, what with the Quartet and my studies. And when I start full-time at the hydroponic farms, I’ll have even less. Someone in the family has to have a credit line, you see. Our music has never paid its way, although at the moment we’re not doing badly, playing concerts for the troops. To boost their morale, supposedly. To give them something to do, my father says. You’d love it,” she said, wrinkling her nose, “Bach and Mozart.”

  “I shall look out for you. I’m working at the perimeter camp, now.” And although it had never completely left his mind. Rick saw again the smoke rising into the sky, the burning trees, the prisoners. He said, “I suppose I should tell you that I’m working for Savory.”

  “Colonel Savory? The head of—”

  “The same. He seems to be very insistent on involving me in his nefarious plans, but the weird thing is that he doesn’t seem to know what to do with me.”

  That morning, Rick had felt a certain amount of trepidation as he entered the hut in the main perimeter camp, where the day before Savory had once again intersected his life. As if it had all been a trick played on him and he was about to receive the punchline. But he had found that he had been assigned a desk, and lying on it was a scrap of paper bearing the handwritten request that he compile a report comparing the rate of work in newly cleared sectors with those where part of the defensive wall had already been completed. He asked Ernest Bergen, one of the cops who shared the office, “How am I suppose to deliver a report?”

  “Through channels,” Bergen said, shrugging. “You don’t know about channels?”

  “Of course he doesn’t.” This was the other cop who had a desk in the hut, a thin impatient woman named Ana Yep. “Look, whatever-you’re-called, Florey, get over to admin and get yourself a code for access to Constat, and a compsim.”

  “Oh, I already have a compsim.”

  “An academic.” She made it sound disreputable. “Go on, get your access code. And while you’re there, ask them just what you are supposed to be doing here. Because I surely don’t know.”

  “I guess I’m working for Colonel Savory.”

  Bergen, more reasonable than his partner, said, “Savory isn’t one for details, he leaves those to the likes of us. But admin will sort you out.”

  The clerk in the administration hut told Rick, “I’ll do my best, but it’ll take a couple of hours. I have to clear it higher up.” She pulled out a yellow flimsy, ran a blackpainted fingernail down it. “Richard Damon Florey, that’s you. Says here you are due for a checkup.”

  “Checkup? Where would—”

  “Over in the hospital, of course,” the clerk said testily, plugging back into her compsim. “You special cases, you take up more time…”

  The hospital was a white-painted flat-roofed shack on the other side of the muddy compound. In a curtained-off cubicle beyond the double row of empty beds, a bored police surgeon gave Rick the most thorough going over he had had since gaining tenure at the University and the first rung of full medical. Nothing wrong with him but a little anemia, the surgeon pronounced, and shot about a hundred millilitres of assorted vitamins into Rick’s arm without so much as a by-your-leave.

  Back at his new desk, he found that a VDF runner had delivered two envelopes. One contained his access code; the other a pass identifying him with the authority of the City Board, signed by Savory and with a holo of one of his younger selves affixed to it. Armed with the access code, Rick plugged into his compsim and wasted an hour sifting through depressingly familiar supply requisition forms before he remembered that Rydell had been surveying the defences since they had been started. After he had found Rydell’s reports it was simply a matter of integration. It could have been done in ten seconds, he thought as he scanned his notes when he had finished, simply by asking Constat. But perhaps that was the point. Perhaps this was just a test to see if he was fit for better things, God help him. But he plotted out his findings—efficiency fell off in direct proportion to the length of wall completed—and drafted a brief summary. He could not resist adding the not-altogether facetious remark that in virgin sites the workers were perhaps spurred by the fear of being caught out in the open by the insurgents.

  After he had sent off the report, he had nothing to do but sit around and drink coffee and chat with Bergen, who sat with his chair tipped back and his booted feet crossed on top of his desk. Rick told about his involvement with Savory, although he was careful to play down his reaction to the razing of Lake Fonda. Bergen had his affable good-old-boy act down pat, but he had the shrewd knowing eyes of a cop all the same. In turn, he learned that Bergen and Ana Yep (who pointedly sat with her back to the two men, plugged into her compsim) were investigating an involuted fraud which was diverting construction materials intended for the defensive all to some unknown destination. Bergen told Rick that he thought it involved someone on the City Board, someone that Savory wanted out of the way. “Savory is on his way up by any means possible, just be glad you aren’t in his way.”

  Ana Yep turned around and said, “For Christ’s sake, Bergen, there you go shooting your mouth off again. Don’t you know Florey here is from a settlement?”

  “Is that a fact?” Bergen winked at Rick. “So what are you doing here, my friend? Subverting us, hey?”

  “There’s an idea,” Rick said, smiling, because of course he had not yet taken that step. But that evening, as he recounted all this to Lena in her father’s doubly haunted house, it occurred to him that perhaps he had, after all.

  And so, in the lull of the phoney war, the pattern of Rick’s days was set.

  Each morning Rick arrived at his desk to find his orders for the day scribbled on a scrap of paper—Savory never visited the office or used a compsim. He was asked to find out whether concrete was being wasted during transfer from the city’s stocks to the chain of construction sites around the perimeter, about the time it took to sow a minefield, to discover how many VDF labourers were absent each day, and why. Perhaps some of this was to do with Yep and Bergen’s investigations (the misappropriations were getting weirder and weirder, Bergen told Rick: some of the cryogenic equipment missing from the reception centre where new settlers had been brought out of their decades-long slumber); or perhaps Savory believed that a drive for greater efficiency would help his slow but certain accumulation of power. Rick didn’t much care. The work did not precisely engage his intellect, but it was better than filling in the endless requisition forms at the site office of sector twenty, and there seemed to be little harm to it.

  And in the meantime, t
here was Lena. Whenever he could, Rick attended the concerts given by the Chronus String Quartet, at noonbreak at various sites around the perimeter (and he could catch most of them now that his time was unsupervised), at night in the little theatre in the city. After the evening concert, at her father’s house, Rick would talk with Lena, or sit in on the conversation of the musicians. Her father said little, but the other two men more than made up for that. The first violinist was a cheerful balding man named Hal Graves who could beat Rick at chess two times out of three; the viola player, Shelly Glassner, an intense, unkempt beanpole of a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of the last thousand years of western music, given to unexpected stuttering solo perorations, or fierce arguments with one or another of the ancestors, on anything from atonality to plain song. Rick never got used to the interruptions which at any time could come out of the air, the narrow-minded fanaticism of the stored dead concerning preservation and promulgation of music. Much as Rick enjoyed kibitzing, despite the sometimes basilisk regard of Lena’s father, and as much as the strange house intrigued him, he felt more relaxed on the occasions when he and Lena went elsewhere, mostly the circuit of cafes and bars of the old quarter. Dating, Rick would have called it once upon a time, back in Mount Airy.

  It was good to talk over his work with someone. Although while he often wanted to defuse his worries by turning it all into a joke, Lena took it seriously, worrying over every implication of the obscure tasks to which Rick was put to satisfy. She saw him being drawn deeper and deeper into Savory’s plots. She said once, quite seriously, that he was changing.

  “Really?” Rick scraped up the last of his bouillabaisse: the real thing, grown in the hydroponic tanks. By now he was almost reconciled to authentic food. They were eating in a small cafe on the wrong side of the old quarter. “The Other World”: rickety, handmade tables and chairs, the ceiling covered by a bellying sweep of net, a holographic view of a sunlit sea playing along one wall, blue swells capped with white foam that sparkled like diamond dust in the light of Earth’s sun. It was an old hologram, blurred in places. Workpeople from the nearby automats sat at the copper-topped counter near the door, watching a huge trivee where a serial drama was playing.