“It’s not easy!”
“It is for you,” she says. “You work directly for Ellery Quinn at what, twenty-three years old?”
“Hmm.”
“Then you go to meetings with Keris Veitch who personally whips my beloved on your behalf…”
“That was satisfying.”
“You’re being groomed for big things my girl.”
“I’ll call Harlan tomorrow,” I say.
“Call him now.”
“All right.”
“Go out with him now.”
“All right!”
She looks at me with one eyebrow raised.
“It will probably be outside Centria,” I say.
“And?” Ursula says.
“I’m still shaky from the other night.”
“So is he most like. You both need a nice cuddle.”
“I feel a bit unwell.”
“Call him or I will,” Ursula says.
She’s got that hungry look.
“Okay,” I say hurriedly.
I scan the Aer.
“That’s odd.”
“What?” Ursula says.
“There’s nothing about him, only his name.”
“Get on with it.”
I smooth my hair nervously and call Harlan. As the ifarm links the call to his Aerac my heart beats louder and harder, louder and harder. I get up dizzily and pace the small area left by the diamond security shroud.
When Harlan doesn’t reply I look at Ursula and shrug tightly. There’s no left-message box on so after a couple of minutes I end the call and sit on the bed, relieved and disappointed.
“Aha!” Ursula says.
I stare at her blankly.
“Coordinates for somewhere called New Runcton just popped up next to his name,” she says. “And a time.”
“What time?”
“7.15pm.”
“That’s in forty minutes,” I say.
“You’d better take the train.”
I look down at my blue suit.
“Should I gif another outfit-?”
“No!”
I glance at the door.
“Run Charity!”
“Right,” I say.
Ursula gets up and puts her arms around me.
“Not as good as an autopony,” I mumble into her shoulder.
“That autopony was a bastard,” she says and kisses my forehead.
She lets go and shoves me gently. I turn and run from the room before I change my mind.
**
As I walk through Centria’s great doorway I get the familiar prickly sense of being followed. It will be for my protection and I should be used to it but today the Security presence makes me feel like I’m doing something stupid, something wrong. My own desires seem trivial against a backdrop of conspiracy and fear.
I feel myself stop walking. I can’t forget Mum just lying there or the unanswered call to Dad. My parents blend in memory and imagination to form a single entity whose features are indistinct but who radiates love like warmth. I remember the Harvest Days and the bubbles and toys and stars and rows and food and hugs and… and…
People and vehicles whirl brightly around me as they would whether I was there or not. I breathe once, twice, think of Ursula and think of Keris. Unexpectedly, it’s the thought of Gethen Karkarridan that gets me moving; his quiet determination, his ruthlessness.
I buy a ticket to New Runcton and start to walk again. My steps increase in speed. They take me along the road from Centria and through a broad, high arch in the wall of the surrounding chamber.
I emerge in the train terminal, which is another hollow sphere whose underside is a few hundred meters or so from the exterior of Centria. The terminal’s fifty-six train tubes are spread equidistantly over its surface to reach every part of Diamond City. Each tube has a platform like a shelf beside it and I head for the nearest, where the train seems to wait for me alone. It’s a series of spherical carriages, each with its own opening into the carrier tube and two decks connected by small elevators. An indicator flickers over my vision to indicate which carriage is mine; I get on and feel strangely elated.
The lower deck is empty, with four quadrants of seats that face inwards. I choose one on the outside edge and settle into it. A chime sounds; the portals in the carrier tube close themselves with walls that grow automatically out of the floor and the door seals retract. For a moment the train hangs in the vacuum tube and then it starts to move, quickly reaching terrific speed. The opaque carriage walls allow sufficient light through to let me know I’m moving but not enough to make me motion sick.
New Runcton is on a different floor to Centria so after a while the train enters a tube that angles up, although the carriage remains level. My carriage then fires off from the rest of the train into the gentle curve of a circular route.
Now I am underway I feel calm. Is it the fixed nature of the journey that gives me this curious sense of inevitability?
Soon the carriage slows under a vertical connection, through which it immediately rises like an elevator. Light streaks down around me until eventually the train eases to a stop. The doors connect with the carrier tube and I walk through the resulting short corridor out into New Runcton.
The place has got nothing going for it. In an insignificant part of MidZone, it’s a crossroads formed by a series of units that are part commerce and part residential. A sign swings on a post even though there is not, never has been and never will be a breeze here. The sign says NEW RUNCTON with misguided civic pride.
The architecture barely qualifies as such and is not so much poor as mean. The determination of the residents to avoid every interesting building patent suggests an utter hatred of beauty.
Cubic or rectangular buildings have been grown along either side of the crossroads. Others overhang or are squeezed in behind them regardless of how absurd the result looks. Instead of utilising space in a sensible or creative way, everyone here has done their own thing to maximise their allocated area. The mess feels oppressive, as if this is where ambition comes to die.
A couple of children play quietly on a patio and an old man stares at me with open hostility from a narrow porch. He wears the remains of a uniform and his left arm is withered. After a moment, he goes inside a dwelling not much broader than he is. Soon the children run into their house too. Although the settlement now looks deserted I know I’m being watched. In Centria the surveillance is functional; here I feel judged.
The ceiling is very high and the dimming day lights reveal New Runcton’s only redeeming feature: the sense above me of an actual open night sky. The train’s carrier tube glows softly as it rises out of the ground and disappears into the darkness. The doors close and the carriage shoots up silently to leave the area eerily still.
Another carriage arrives in the tube. Two Centrian Security officers, a man and a woman, emerge self-consciously and try to look like they haven’t followed me. I know them both vaguely and there isn’t anywhere they can hide. The man shrugs. I laugh and give them a little wave.
There is no way Harlan lives here. I start to walk and reach the centre of the crossroads, where I look up at the sign and then at a star. Wait, a star? A moving star? It swoops down low behind the two officers so they don’t see it until it’s almost on top of us.
It isn’t a star, it’s Harlan on a flybike. I’m used to seeing vast floating assemblies but that flybike is so huge it shouldn’t be airborne. The thing is a brutal commingling of black and chrome with an exostructure of dazzling white lights. They pulse over its surface like an energy field holding the entire unlikely mass together.
Harlan approaches too fast to land, like he’s going to attack. He is already between me and the guards and blocks them with the flybike’s broad underside as he leans over. He flies a metre above the floor and comes straight at me, his left arm outstretched to encircle my waist. I feel his muscles lock and suddenly the soles of my shoes are skimming over the diamond road. I glimpse the
two guards, who have produced their guns but can’t shoot in case they hit me. The male guard waves his arms frantically while the female speaks, apparently to herself but more likely to Security Control.
The bike rolls back into an upright position and all its lights go off. I look down at my legs as they hang over the rushing dark and sense rather than see movement as the bike rolls to the right. I seize a warm surface that rises and falls and realise I’ve been swung up behind Harlan. My thighs brush either side of the saddle as if I’m drifting in the air and I clamp them together. The saddle is absurdly wide and my legs don’t seem long enough. There are no protective restraints.
Putting both arms around Harlan I press my cheek against his back and breathe him in. His aroma is a fixed point in this wildness and I tighten my grip. The wedge of his upper body tapers down to a narrow waist, where ridges of muscle make it a beautiful landscape of its own.
We have left New Runcton far behind, the way I suspect most people do, and another part of MidZone shines ahead. We could be in outer space as we fly towards a distant galaxy, boiling with the power to change everything.
“Charity!”
Anton Jelka has called me.
“I’m all right Anton,” I say without moving my cheek from Harlan’s back. “I’m following a lead.”
“Charity, we follow leads. You just tell us about them.”
“I’ll let you know if anything goes wrong,” I say. “But… nothing will go wrong. Goodbye now.”
I break the connection and look up.
Multi-coloured light silhouettes Harlan and streams off him in all directions. We descend and fly through diamond canyons whose bases vanish into hazy fluorescence kilometres below. The buildings are crude compared to Centria, but what they lack in sophistication they make up for in sheer size. One even has a train tube through it.
Harlan flies down at a steep angle towards a spindle that glows acid green in the distance. I feel our height for the first time and clutch him tighter.
Unlike Centria, all the light here is advertising. Unused to the constant war of blinding images I squeeze my eyes shut but that only enhances the sound, which is like the amplified scream of a million lunatics who each thinks he knows what I want. Just as it reaches a crescendo it stops but the silence feels even more aggressive and penetrating.
The bike tilts beneath me and I open my eyes. The spindle has resolved into a circular platform below and Harlan drops us straight down towards it. The great buildings rise on every side, disappearing into the garish dark above. Their brightness is muted now and I realise a damper has blocked out the advert noise.
The bike lands with a bump that goes from my underneath to the top of my head. Reluctantly I let go of Harlan, who swings his long legs off the flybike to land in a single motion. I jump off too and stand beside him.
“Good club this,” he says.
I look up at him and smile. We both start to walk at the same time.
The roof of the building is a circular platform thrust up into the bright chaos of the MidZone night. Shorn of their gruelling racket, the adverts streak and pulse. Some of them literally fight each other, like huge characters made of light. Assemblies and ships, also adverts, crash through them and the whole relentless process begins again. Endlessly evolving illumination floods the platform and the fifty or so vehicles parked there throw odd shadows that stretch and turn like dark fingers pointing at a moving target.
A lot of the adverts feature my sister. Over there she soars on the latest flybike, different from the last one only in the runner design although I must admit the change is an improvement. There’s also one for a product called Vingo that cooks itself while you eat it, which holo-Ursula is in the process of doing. The sexuality in her movements and expression is magnified by scale and Harlan’s overwhelming presence. I seem to need more and more oxygen, breathing deep, then deeper…
I focus on the most striking advert, which is for Centria itself. Hanging over the others, it is a huge hologram of Ursula’s head. Her eyes gaze steadily down, the iris and pupil altered to show Centria’s logo: a filled circle surrounded by a thick-bodied C, both elements glowing a soft otherworldly blue. The limbs of the C nearly meet, perhaps to resemble Centria’s great door open, perhaps to show the ring road that brings everyone close or perhaps to suggest Centria’s grip on Diamond City.
As we continue across the roof there’s a sudden deafening clang and a beam of yellow light flashes up from a shadowy area ahead to stand in the night like a golden pillar. Discordant music tumbles out of it and rises along with my hackles. Just as I start to feel actual anger the music resolves so sweetly I can almost taste it.
A woman flies up inside the pillar of light. She laughs and waves her arms as a man follows in a slow somersault. More people rise: a fountain of people. Some move gracefully in the absence of gravity; others bump into each other and the gentle impact sends them flying apart, mouths open in delight as if propelled by laughter.
We reach the light and I look down through a large, circular hole that opens a third of the roof. People fly up at us from a bright disc far below, increasing in size the closer they get and then diminishing once they pass.
The music is beautiful now and follows the movement of everyone in the air. A man flies on the crest of a rising chord while two women, solemn and curious as children, collide with a soft, echoing boom. Even the light has a sound: a low sibilant hiss one moment and the next a thousand voices joined in a single astonishing note…
Harlan picks me up and leaps off the edge.
Weird arse clench sick and lovely-
How can I fall upward? Harlan starts to let go and I grab at him. We rise together past happy people who move in the air and smile at us. I breathe deeply and feel better. Although I register the airborne drug my overwhelming focus is Harlan. As he stares up at me my gaze traces the dark contours of his expression, the thrilling whites of his eyes and his curlicues of hair as they begin to float around his head. He gently pushes me away and this time I don’t mind.
My hair is a soft cloud as I fly up feet first. I panic as I realise I’m at the high edge of the golden light but there’s a buzz and I bounce off the side of the field to head across it in a different direction. I flex my arms and legs in a slow cartwheel, then gyrate, curl and stretch to extend my body into every conceivable position. Sweetly hot inside my clothes, my own smell is an intimate intoxication.
I am free of gravity and self-consciousness, free of guilt and fear, free of confusion and thinking. When I run my hands over myself it’s like they leave a trail of sparkles.
There is a slow drain away and the golden glow dims. When I focus on my surroundings again I see I’ve already dropped past the edge we leapt from. I continue down into a huge room with levels built around the column of light.
Harlan reaches up and pulls me out of the air; I land in his arms and he strides through the dispersing crowd. We head up a spiral ramp to the first level and a table at the back, where Harlan lowers me to the floor. He gestures to a chair and I sink into it as he sits opposite me. Two drinks grow out of the table; we pick them up and sip without breaking eye contact.
“You’re a phenomenal dancer,” Harlan says.
“Oh stop.”
“I imagine you work out a lot.”
“Everyone in Centria has to be at battle-ready fitness,” I say.
“And are you battle-ready?”
“Did you want to start something then?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Why me?”
“You just happened Charity. Do you mind?”
“No. You owe me though.”
“Hmm?”
“You messed up my party,” I say.
“The one where I saved your life?”
“No, the other one. There’s still a load of weather about who you are. You need to pretend to be my boyfriend for publicity purposes.”
“We both know I’m not going to pretend to be your boyfriend.�
��
I feel myself blush. I need to say something important, something striking.
“Harlan,” I say, “have you ever heard of something called the Guidance?”
He goes still.
“How did you hear about that?” he says.
My heart jumps.
“Someone trusted me with it,” I say.
Harlan looks at me for what seems like a very long time.
“I don’t know much,” he says. “But in my various misadventures I get to hear things.”
“What things?”
“Where the real power is. That’s always worth knowing.”
“Is that what the Guidance is? Power?”
“Yes.”
I watch him, poised. Harlan takes a deep breath.
“Everyone accepts that Diamond City is a pure capitalist utopia,” he says. “There’s no government and there’s no one in charge.”
“We stand and fall by the market,” I say.
“Or do we? Because it seems there is an authority after all and the Guidance is it.”
“You say ‘it’-?”
“Could be a group or a person or…”
“Something else? What?”
“I don’t know Charity.”
I’m dizzy; my body hums with mysterious energy and my thoughts seem barely my own. There’s a strange, deep itch between my legs and I realise I’ve been wet since Harlan picked me up and jumped into the light.
“You need to make love to me,” I tell him.
9
The room is in a MidZone hotel. There are no windows, which is fine, and low lighting, which is also fine. A round, white bed grows with infuriating slowness out of the floor.
I hurl myself at Harlan, astonished at the violence of it. I grip one of his legs with both of my own and hear myself scream. He claps a hand around the back of my head, uses the other to grip the front of my jacket and yanks me up so I’m almost on tiptoe. He kisses me and as our lips touch I lose the ability to see.
Everything comes back blurred. My eyes ache. I thrust my tongue into his mouth; he tastes of apples and wine. I dig my fingers into his wiry hair and pull it and he gasps. I whip my legs around his waist; the spreading feels so good that my skin shakes and all my muscles jump. Beautiful energy builds uncontrollably in my centre. Too amazed at it to stop, I come in a sweet storm of agony and arch back-
Sons of the Crystal Mind (Diamond Roads Book 1) Page 6