by John Meaney
Twisted…
And then Robert’s fighting to recalibrate nav, and the geodesic, pulled to tatters by a strange attractor, rearranges itself as a steady curve in a phase-space display, and we’re back to normal, I guess. The small video volume shows a green world, an Earth-type world, and space-time is back to rights.
“Things got a little… out of balance,” I say, for the log’s benefit, “But we’re fine.”
“There’s our balance,” says Mai-Li, gesturing at the display, and inadvertently names our home, the resplendent green world where we shall dwell forever.
The half-forgotten ant is crawling across my armrest. I encourage him to climb onto my finger, then gently let him down onto the console.
“I guess,” I say, “We’re all in this together.”
The ant stops, antennae waving, below the green globe’s image hanging in the air, a vast new world. Home.
Children screaming as they fell, no, that wasn’t right, they fell silently, grim and pale-faced towards the flowing, glowing lava and burned up without a sound…
I wrenched myself back to wakefulness, breathing hard. In the skimmer, yes, that’s where I was, and the crick in my neck was the result of sleeping in this damned seat.
I depolarised the cockpit. Clear, it held the night sky, deepest black, and a profusion of stars sprinkled across those infinite reaches. Childhood nights, sneaking out to watch the stars, grinning with delight when an asteroid shower sprayed briefly across the night…
I wasn’t going to sleep any more this night. I pulled my seat into an upright position, gunned the skimmer’s engine — startling thunder in the desert night — and lifted off, tuning the cockpit to IR as I did so: a film of smartatom scintillators now in an enabled state. The desert was painted in ghostly blues and pinks.
I let the skimmer resume its original course, the one I had laid in yesterday, while I accessed info and requested a terrain map and her address. The two intelligent facets interfaced, and the holoprojector drew me a floating miniature desert in the bright Martian reds of daylight, and amber trace lines marked sensible routes to the flashing terminus point atop a low mesa: her house, new from my day. I wondered what it looked like, how she had furnished it.
If I had a home on Earth to call my own, I suppose I’d fill it with infocrystals, a hi-res proj, and exercise equipment. But what do I know?
I killed the display and altered course for Kayenta.
Pure impulse. The image of Cly, the policeman, arose in mind’s eye, and my heart beat a little faster. Was he the reason for my change in course? I didn’t know. But I took a long sweeping curve across the featureless desert and powered on towards the town.
It was just before dawn when I landed on the outskirts. From the long-range viewer, it hadn’t changed much: the long sweeping dome and arches of the hotel, the small string of stores, the small prefab domes of the locals. Not hovels, but smaller and meaner homes than the Anglos in the cities.
But they had hozro, some of them — the ones who weren’t drunks or addicts, and that was most of them— and that sense of walking in harmony, of following the Navajo way, was part of what I’d lost.
And no damned corp-war was likely to spread out this far, either.
An unmanned freight skimmer passed by a metre above the ground, following the line of the old Highway 160, like a giant blind trilobite gliding almost silently through the air. Soon, it was out of sight.
I climbed out of the skimmer and limbered up. Then I began to run along the old cracked highway, heading into the dawn. As the potholes became worse, I moved out onto the sand, running steadily, veering off to one side whenever I neared a straggly mesquite bush which might shelter a rattlesnake at its base. I ran for half an hour, revelling in the ease with which I breathed, since SWSA medics cured my smoke-damaged lungs on my return with miraculous femtotech, and turned around, and ran back towards the flyer with the warmth of the rising sun soaking into my back. Back at the flyer I stretched — easy when the ground is radiating warmth into your muscles, something I had missed in our region of Balance, though you didn’t have to keep an eye out for scorpions there — and I worked my abs with two hundred sit-ups below a disconcerting sapphire sky, and finished with lunges and biceps and triceps curls with two small handy rocks I picked up.
Breathing heavily, I got back into the cockpit and retrieved a tube of smartgel from my pack., and slapped a handful of it onto my face. It left a cool minty tang where it slithered across my skin, and by the time I picked up the used puddle from the floor into my filter bowl, my skin felt clean and scrubbed all over, and my clothes smelled fresh as new. At least they’d let me in the hotel restaurant now.
I ignored my thirst — no good wasting the flyer’s limited supply — until I got to the hotel. The restaurant was at the back, low and long and cool and dark. Ignoring the self-serve system, I slipped into a booth and waited for the waitress, a plump young Navajo girl, to take my order.
I reeled off the list of things I wanted to eat. “The works,” I said. “And a pitcher of water, please. No, make that iced tea. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” she said politely.
She checked on the other booths on her way through to the kitchen. Three tables were occupied, a couple of burly local guys complaining about the boss who worked them so hard, and —
My skin crawled. Those IB agents were good, very good. I’d been sure that no-one was tagging me, but one of them was here, slim and cold-looking, carefully not meeting my gaze while his pale eyes watched everything in sight. His movements, as he cut his breakfast steak, were controlled and precise.
I was light-headed, but that was partly low blood glucose, so I stayed and waited for breakfast to arrive, and pretended I hadn’t noticed him.
How had they known I was coming? Extrapolated from my last course change, and sped here? But there hadn’t been any high performance flyers out in the parking lot and besides, in Navajo territory you need a Navajo licence to fly anywhere but over the old highway routes. The parking lot had held one battered old pickup and a small black dart of a skimmer. Not professionally unobtrusive…
Something very wrong here, but I loaded eggs and pancakes into my system, replenishing lost electrolytes and sugar. Not overeating: I’d been scrawny for years, and planned to stay that way.
Someone turned on the hv, and images sprang up at half a dozen points in the room. I’d forgotten how hooked on media input some people could be.
I listened absently to the news while I finished off breakfast and ran my cred-ring over the table’s sensor pad, thumbing the ring twice for a generous tip.
A muffled crump from each display, and I realised they were showing the explosions at Flagstaff, and I saw the man’s eyes shift, then, and it came to me that he was not what I had thought, not an IB agent after all.
I left the restaurant slowly, then, out into the white sunlight, squinting my eyes almost shut. Damn, my eye-drops were back in Aunt Josephine’s skimmer. Along with my blaster.
I jogged slowly across the old cross-roads to a low one-storied building that housed the local emergency services. Inside, the entire complement of the Tribal Police comprised Cly, leaning back in a chair, dusty boots up on his desk, with a phase-space holo pulsing in the air before him, and, from my viewpoint, mirror-image text which he waved away into oblivion as he dropped his feet to the floor.
“Yá’át’ééh,”; he said.
“One of the Flagstaff bombers is over in the hotel,” I said. “Pale skin, dead grey eyes. You’ll spot him. If you move quick, you’ll get him before he finishes breakfast.”
“What?” he asked, but he was already on his feet and moving. “How do you know it’s one of them?”
That floored me. A strange tingling on my skin, a sick feeling in my stomach.
“I just know it.”
“Like a witch, you mean?” he asked, cynicism and belief evenly balanced in his voice. “Is this a habit, with you?”
&nb
sp; I let out a long shaky breath. “On Balance,” I said, “These things happened all the time. That’s the way things were.”
But I’ve brought it here, the sickness. Oh, ye gods. And had I, somehow, subconsciously, known how to arrange the microwards so that a surveilling IB agent would get second degree burns?
“I can’t arrest him because of your… feelings,” he said, but there was a half-questioning look in his dark eyes.
“As he gets in the vehicle,” I said, “You might spot… the other device. The second one, the one that’s with him. I’m not sure…”
He picked up his hat and jammed it on his head, checked his blaster’s status light with a glance, and looked at me, hard.
“Stay — No, wait in there.” He pointed to an office with an opaque door. “I don’t want him to see you. Don’t go anywhere.”
I nodded weakly.
“I won’t,” I said.
“Good.”
He left the office with a loping, easy stride, like a wolf. I wouldn’t want him for an enemy, I was sure of that.
I waited till I heard thumping and cursing from the cell next door, till I was certain that Cly had caught the man — a racist imprecation was cut off by the wet smacking sound of a fist, and I winced — then I slipped out of the office door, quietly, boot soles tuned to maximum softness, walking past an Anglo slumped in his chair, so busy reading the tiny floating holo pages before him — the Bible, I think — he never even saw me leave.
There were ways of leaving false trails on TrafficNet scans, and when I got back to the skimmer I set about swapping codes with another vehicle. Compared to jinxing the Phoenix’s logs, this was a piece of cake. I was the one who had, after all, rewritten the history of an entire world.
I worked furiously, hacking code, until it was done. Then I waited till a vehicle passed the Kayenta town sign with its sensor loop, and tight-beamed the transponder codes with my little switch program. It would only last a few minutes, ten at most, till the system polled all vehicles again and corrected its error, but in the meantime I could leave town and Cly’s display would show I was I heading east.
I powered up the skimmer and headed west over the old highway, constrained to that route for a while since TrafficNet temporarily thought I was someone else from out of state. Finally, no longer busy in the moment, I had time to think.
About doing things and not knowing the reason why, the way we learned to do things on Balance…
Beneath a grey and lavender cloudy sky, air filled with the electric scents of Hope, our little settlement on the face of Balance, on a dark tilled field, the settlement domes a kilometre away and beyond, like a sculpture of an eagle, the proud white dart-shaped Phoenix Seven standing in the lee of a smoky blue ridge, trim now, for the huge bulky tanks that had comprised ninety percent of the starship’s bulk were now the three big domes, the Terran-ecology biodomes, which form the triune centrepiece of the settlement. I shiver as the cold wind brings tears to my eyes, and return my attention to what I’m supposed to be doing.
I’m crouching in the rich loamy soil, and Claire, our best gaiologist, is a few metres away doing the same as me: pushing the spike end of the dull grey containers deep into the soil, then activating the feed. Pulsing blue surfaces and twisting red lines grow in the air above the small grey canisters: holo-displays mapping our success, with luck.
“You think this is going to work?” I ask.
“Don’t know,” says Claire dryly. “You’re in charge. Aren’t you supposed to encourage me?”
“Ha. Ha.”
Claire grins. After Robert, Mai-Li and I landed the Phoenix and let the rear pods unfold like a flower’s petals, we had some problems with the biodomes and, rather than play it safe, we decanted the entire complement of fifty colonists immediately. Everyone woke up okay, not a single sleep-tank failure, and that gave us all the expertise we needed, but fifty extra mouths to feed. The gamble paid off, and we three flight crew were voted Burghers of Hope, though there were some similar-sounding alternative designations.
Red traces tumbling, blue attractors turning strange: Claire’s fingers flickered as she adjusted flow rates.
“If they’re too tightly coupled, the species,” I say, “They’ll never evolve to a significant optimum.”
“My God!” She smacks her forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“And then you hold the egg like this, “I say, miming what I mean, “And suck just so, grandma…”
It’s fascinating, though, the way every software-evolution strategy an old coder like me can come with, some gaiologist has discovered its stratagem rules already, a decade before, just waiting to be used.
“They’re doing alright.” She points to scrolling figures, the scanned population of our little microbes, and it looks like they’re settling in to their new home.
The sky above sparkles silver as though in celebration, though it’s just some transient event in the smartatom film high above, where it surrounds the colony and reforms the atmosphere to suit us, the newcomers to this world. The barrier’s femtotech is rare and expensive enough on Earth; here on Balance, it’s both precious and irreplaceable.
Claire sits back on her heels and runs a hand through her long sweat-darkened hair.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” she says.
“Well,” I say, grinning, “I hope you’ve told Todd first.”
She smiles, colour rising to her cheeks. “Is it that obvious?”
I give her a hug, and kiss her warm cheek. “You’re pretty damned radiant.”
“Thanks. Am I the third, or the fourth?”
“Don’t know,” I say. “Tamarin, you mean?”
“Yeah. I think she is. But I don’t think it’s Steve’s.”
“Ah, right.” I think about that for a moment, sifting through possible candidates, then leave it aside for now. “So who’s going to pop out the first new Hoper? Place your bets puh-leez, ladies and gentlemen…”
“Don’t.” She places her hand across her still-flat abdomen. “I just know it’s going to happen the way it should.”
“Good. That’s what I think, too.”
We check the displays once more, then head back towards home. By unspoken agreement, we both take the low ridge trail that swings round the back of the settlement.
“Hi!”
A cheery wave. A small group, half a dozen of our colleagues, back from their various assignments, all happily heading back the same way at just the same time.
I nod towards Frank, tall and taciturn, and feel something tumble over inside me. God, am I getting broody?
Laughing and arguing, we walk down the grassy path past The Dumbbell, two physics-lab domes linked by a long steel and glass corridor housing a linear scullifier, just as pale blue flame flashes and there’s the thump of an explosion and the shattering of glass. Black noxious smoke pours out of the destroyed panels.
“Peter’s in there,” says someone.
Two of the guys are already standing by glass wall, to one side of the billowing black cloud, and as they link their hands to form a stirrup I take a running jump, and they boost me up onto the corridor’s glass roof, mercifully intact but burning hot.
I thump at an emergency handle and a triangular pane falls in.
Peter’s partly blackened face looks up at me from amid a tangle of wrecked lab gear, and he jumps to meet my hand and I help haul him up though it’s mostly his own effort. Then we’re standing on the roof, ready to jump, and the rest of the gang are holding out a canvas sheet and I shove Peter forward so he jumps first and the canvas breaks his fall.
They struggle to roll him off to get the canvas ready for me but the wind shifts then, and acrid fumes blow into my face and, out of breath, I suck them into my lungs with an involuntary wheeze and tears blind my eyes but I see a flash of white light, that awful twisting sight, the second time that I’ve see it now, that strange feel of things bent out of their natural geometry and a sense almost of
distant laughter and then the blackness comes and the vertiginous feeling of falling, endless falling, and no-one there to catch me…
Another memory fragment…
An unseen vision, greater far
Than optic might: yes, on a par
With dream-borne sight —
While in the chasm, deeper far
Than darkest death, black demons spar —
But we forget.
Coughing, I summon a nurse to my bedside, and point out this piece of doggerel which is in my bedside terminal’s workspace. In answer, he uses his staff access to show the bed’s previous occupant, I gather, sitting before another holo display, and someone out of view asks him to say something whenever a bird appears. The young man is pale, with blonde hair falling across his forehead. He doesn’t look stupid, but he says nothing when one bird after another appears in the lower half of his field of vision. Only when an image flies overhead does he say he can see it.
“That’s Paul,” says my nurse. “Brain damage. Visual cortex.”
The video log’s still running, though. As random blue swallows fly through the video volume, appearing from his lower left or right, Paul is asked to raise his left or right forefinger, depending on where the bird appears, and he gets it right almost every time.
“But he can’t see it,” I say.
“The conscious part of him can’t,” says my nurse. “Or couldn’t. Want to see him now?”
It’s time for my exercise anyway. The nurse escorts me down the long white corridor’s of Houston’s femto-med centre, out onto a sun-drenched lawn, and I recognise the pale man sitting in a sun-lounger, and that blonde lock of hair is still over his eyes.
“Hi,” I say. “My name’s Nat. Natalie Silverthorn.”
He nods. “I’d get up, but I’m not supposed to move about too much, till the interface is integrated. You a patient? “