by Guy Haley
The train filled up again. Armed men in the uniform dress of the Don Cossack Great Host made their way down the train and scanned their identities and travel documentation for the hundredth time since they'd boarded. Valdaire's 'ware was good, and their fake sigs held.
The train pulled away with a sigh, the thrum from its induction motors vibrating the carriages. Valdaire found the effect soporific, but did not sleep. She watched Novosibirsk slide by. Outside the city evidence of past environmental despoliation was everywhere, crumbling industrial complexes, weed-choked pits gouged out of the earth, the hulks of giant drag cranes rusting to pieces in their hearts. Some of these mines were active, giant automata worrying the soil with great steel teeth. Mountains stood with their tops lopped off, forests of trees black and dead around them. They rushed past trains loaded with lumber, ore and grain, all, like them, heading east; and everywhere the ideograms of the Orient. They were still hours away from the Sinosiberian demilitarised zone, but even this far west the influence of the People's Republic was apparent, the resources they took from the mountains and forests fuelling the ravenous economy of this second Chinese century.
Between ran mile upon mile of unbroken forest. Sometimes the remains of buildings could be seen poking out from among the trees, villages and towns cleared out by economic failure and flu. Russia was a broken empire, its hinterland abandoned to poverty while the plutoprinces of Moscow drowned in luxury. Elsewhere they travelled for hours through prairie fields, steppe land tilled by machine, not a human in sight.
As they travelled further east, the influence of the Chinese became more pronounced. Self-contained factories took the place of the abandoned relics, pod-like barracks of Han migrant workers incongruous in the forests and farmlands round them.
Lehmann had urged Otto to sleep, an activity he was reluctant to undertake, as Valdaire had discovered for herself. Chures stared out of the window. Lehmann pulled his seat into a reclining position and closed his eyes.
"Both of you are going to sleep?" said Valdaire.
"Yes," said Lehmann. "Kaplinski might well be on this train with us, but he'll not act. He would not find what we know, and if he managed to escape with his own skin intact, he'd be hunted. The Cossacks hate him. You not sleeping?"
Valdaire shook her head, and slipped Chloe's tablet out of its case.
"Suit yourself," said Lehmann. He was soon fast asleep. He snored.
Valdaire scanned the phone's screen. Through her she could see all the systems on the train; the interiors of all the cars, poor, rich and private, the long sweep of the roof, the front and rear major engines, the subsidiary drive units under each carriage. Nothing unusual.
Valdaire was tired. She looked at the sleeping faces of the two cyborgs. Lehmann was better-looking than Otto, and his English was less inflected, but there was something in his eyes that chilled her. You looked into Otto's eyes and behind the impassive glare there was a great deal of pain. In Lehmann it was something else: there was a lack, a hollowness that threatened to pull her in. So many killers in one place. Lehmann was all charm on the surface, but while Chures was penetrating and deliberately guarded, he had fire within him, he was human. Lehmann, she could not see what motivated him. Probably all he knew how to do was fight, and did so now from habit.
So where did that leave her? She was no cyborg, but she'd been a soldier too.
She decided she had better try and rest too. As her seat reclined and she closed her eyes, she wondered what the Ky-tech dreamt of, with all that tech crammed into their skulls. The thought kept her own sleep at bay for long minutes, until her mind surrendered to the swaying click of the train.
Otto's mentaug dreamed.
Clear notes rang out, silver trumpets in the dark.
The cave was cold, broad mouth open to the night; they weren't deep enough in to benefit from the warmth of the Earth, but the audience's eyes were bright with the rapture Christmas nights bring. There were a hundred of them or so, ranged up in three tiers above the brass band, their temporary stand erected where in summer tour guides stood.
The scene was from shortly after his initial implantation. His twin recollections struggled with the recreation. Human memory alters over time; that held in the storage crystals was absolute. There was a jagged line between them. The audience flickered, faces and clothing changed. Further irregularity was introduced by the mixing of his and Honour's memories. Shared e-membering in a full virtual environment was always an odd experience, but the melding of organic perceptions revealed just how subjective the world was. This shared environment led to a sensation of bilocation as his and Honour's individual memories ran into one another; Otto's twinned set — machine and meat — to Honour's native memory. They ran ever closer together, his brain checking its own recollections against those of Honour and his mentaug, green OK lights flickering through his iHUD.
"Oh Little Town of Bethlehem" finished with a fanfare. Honour's face was glowing in the candlelight. Otto felt his chest tighten. This moment was something no one else had, and that is why they had come back. No additional data was available to fill out the memory; soulcap and mentaug tech wasn't in wide usage then, and certainly no one beyond Otto in the cave had had any data capture device more sophisticated than a phone.
They needed a raw situation like this to know if it were the machine in Honour's head or Honour herself that ailed. Together their mentaugs rebuilt the scene totally; the present was out of reach. At the back of his head, Otto felt the machines checking over each other and their human hosts in concert, using their shared experience as a point of calibration.
A further factor in choosing this time was the emotional resonance the event had for both. They remembered it equally strongly, in their own way. As the music had swelled, Otto had known with all his heart that he loved this woman. A few weeks later they were engaged; months after that, married. Otto waited for the moment of realisation to arrive. Expected, it remained a shocking feeling, no less so for being a repetition.
She looked at him, cheeks and nose tip red, so young, twenty-six. He had thought himself much older at the time, but nine years was nothing. Her smile mirrored his, a combination of the smile she had smiled then and the one she wore now, two decades later. Their minds were intertwined by their mentaugs. Her deepest self lay open to Otto. He wondered how she had known how he had felt back then, when she was as she had been born, unchanged, but she had known. For a moment, he was happy.
A buzzing noise chased the music away; the scene disintegrated, photographs blistering in a fire.
"Honour, are you OK?"
"I…" Her face split. The pain hit him. A set of icons in his iHUD warned of the imminent dissolution of the shared fantasy. Their minds came apart.
Honour sat on the stone floor, her head in her hands. The sun glared outside the cave mouth. It was hot and humid, and sweat stuck Otto's shirt to his back. The cave chilled it to the clamminess of sickbed sheets.
"It happened again," he said flatly.
"Yes," she said.
"I hoped…" he began, but he didn't know what he hoped. It was too late for hope.
"I know, Otto. I'm sorry. I hoped too. I'm sick. This confirms it. It's better than not knowing, at least."
Otto stood, tense but immobile. He didn't know what to do, he didn't know what to say. After all they had been through, after all he had been through; it wasn't fair.
It was his fault.
"I'm sorry," she said again, as if it weren't her that was dying, but him. Otto tried to smile, but his face felt weirdly stretched, as if it were numbed or belonged to someone else. He helped Honour to her feet. She put her hands on his shoulders. "How are you?" he said.
"My head really hurts."
"Dizzy?"
"Not so bad this time. Do you have water?"
He nodded, pulled a tube from the camelpack in his backpack and passed it to her gently. She drank gratefully. "Do you think you can walk? I can carry you." And he could, for as long as it to
ok, without tiring. Even then his body had been altered as much as his mind. They'd attended the concert near the start of the process that made him Ky-tech, the mentaug new and terrifying then. More had come. Not much of the Otto from that Christmas was left.
"No, it's OK. I'd rather walk," she said.
They walked past the pile of damp dirt that had once been the cave's tourist centre. Neither its wood nor its industry had survived the new climate. The concrete path alongside the stream that ran out of the cave had, and they picked their way along its crumbling length to the ruins of Castleton at the bottom.
The cave was in a gorge of tall limestone cliffs. When they had attended the concert this had still been typical English hill country, soft green fields with turf grazed to velvet. That had all gone. A scrub of rhododendron covered the hills, the result of a hasty attempt at ecological adaptation. The sky was a boiling mass of black and grey cloud fleeing before a hot wind. The stream had become a river, the village a ruin, windows empty, roofs sagging or gone, though one or two showed rough repair. Quirkies, trying to cling to a world that had started to die a century ago. So much had changed, so quickly.
Honour stumbled, and put her hand to her head. She was gaunt. Horrifically, she was beginning to look her age. It began to rain, a few fat drops that turned into a warm downpour, as if someone had turned on a shower. Otto pulled his wife close.
"Are you sure you are OK?"
"Yes, I'm fine."
"You don't look fine."
"Thanks."
"You don't always have to play the hero."
"You're my hero," she said darting a quick, unconvincing smile at him.
They wended their way through the village, past rusting signs. He helped Honour over heaps of rubble, took her past fields thick with plants that had once only been able to survive in greenhouses.
They reached the car. He'd parked it in the old tourists' car park, now just another collection of misplaced botanical specimens. They got in. They looked at each other, and burst out laughing at the water running in rivulets from their soaked clothes.
"Shall we go home, madchen? " he said.
"Oh, yes, Otto, please. I'm tired."
"It's more than that." He reached out to her, both with his hand and with his mentaug.
"Please, Otto." She grimaced. "Don't poke about in my head. I'm not in the mood."
Rain thundered off the car's clear roof.
"It's worse this time?"
She did not reply.
" Verdammt, Honour! You have to talk with me about this!" He slammed his hands on to the steering wheel. She remained silent. He wrestled with his feelings, appalled by his outburst and the fear that underlay it. "I'm sorry. I'm…" His voice took a pleading edge. "Let's see Ekbaum. He'll help, I am sure."
"No, Otto, no," she said firmly. "Not Ekbaum."
Otto thought about arguing, but he had been with her long enough to know that would get them nowhere. He engaged the air car's turbofans and eased it up into the rain.
He flew on for forty minutes, waited for Honour to fall into an exhausted sleep, and put in a call. Not Ekbaum then, but there were others.
"Can you get me Ms Dinez, please? Yes, neuro-engineering. Thanks."
He arranged an appointment, and hung up as the first cyclone of the wet season smashed into Britain.
Otto started awake. There was a pattering on the window, and for a second he thought he was still back in the car, hearing the rain, but the noise came from a shower of grit cast out by a largelegged machine trundling through a field of tree-stumps, arms plucking felled trees from the floor and stripping them of their branches, logs onto its back, waste ground up for fuelstock and compost going into another vehicle stumping alongside it. Its rear end extruding netted saplings, arms like a spider's spinnerets scooping holes and ramming them into the ground, a new forest for the old. Spider cannon formed a loose square with the forestry walkers at the centre, and tracked sentry guns rolled around them, guards against Beggar Barons' timber poaching and equipment theft.
The train sped past the forestry rigs, their blinking lights lost in the trees.
Otto shook his head. He was raw with emotion. The mentaug was a curse. Every time he slept he relived his life in perfect clarity. Intended to maximise the learning processes associated with sleep, instead the mentaug made Honour live, and every time he woke it was like losing her all over again.
It had been nine years.
It felt like it had happened yesterday.
He could turn it off. He should.
He swallowed hard.
He looked out of the window, forcing himself to concentrate on something else. The sky was grey with predawn light. All slept, Chloe watching over them.
Otto squeezed through the narrow gap between the seats, trying not to bump them.
"Where are you going?" said Chloe, in her sly five-year-old's voice.
"Quiet down," Otto whispered. "I'm going for a walk, stretch my legs."
It was a half-truth. He intended to go for a walk, only there'd be a bottle of whisky at the end of it.
CHAPTER 10
Pylon City
"Ding Ding!" yelled Bear. "All change for solid ground!" He hurled himself from the wood onto the moor, unmindful of the nothingness.
Richards was more cautious. "How can we be sure it's not another fragment?" he said.
Bear closed his beady eyes and breathed deep. "Sniff that air! That's the air of good solid ground, that. Them islands smell funny. Besides," said Bear, stretching his long arms, "even if it was I'd take my chances. If I have to eat another bloody squirrel in my life I'll not be a happy bear."
Richards took his time sizing up the gap before leaping. He climbed over exposed rocks up to the moorland where Bear stood. Richards now wore a lionskin cloak, crafted by Bear from the pelt of Tarquin.
"Do I have to wear this? It makes me feel like a kid playing at Hercules," said Richards, fingering the tawny skin.
"I beg to differ," grumbled the lionskin. "Hercules, is it now? I don't think so. I've seen bigger pecs on a pigeon."
"I didn't choose this body," said Richards.
"I've told you before, pal!" said Bear. "Shut it or I'll sew your mouth up." He shook his head. "You'd think being skinned would shut it up, wouldn't you? You really would."
"Mee-owww," said Tarquin.
"Where's me needle?" said Bear, reaching for his flap. "Quiet? Good. Come on, Mr Richards. Who'd not want a lionskin cloak? And it has promised to behave."
"I told you," protested the lionskin, "I was enchanted. Enslaved! I'm not now. I'll be good."
"Yeah," said Bear doubtfully. He cupped his paws and shouted back to the island. "You sure you're not coming with us, Lucas?" called Bear to the tramp.
"Although it pains me to do so, I'm afraid I must say no. This is not my stop," said Lucas.
Richards scratched his beard, another highly annoying thing about being human. It had been a week since they'd left Circus's tower burning in the void. Little more than a small garden's worth was left.
"Are you really sure?" said Richards.
"Yes, but I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your help. I am too old to catch squirrels, and a little too cocksure to avoid being turned into a pig." He smiled. "And I have my nice new coat to keep the rain from my bones."
"Keeps the weather out nicely does dwarfskin," said Bear.
"You have been most kind," said Lucas, tipping Circus's soiled turban in salute. "And for your many kindnesses I have a gift for you." He began patting his numerous pockets. "The time has come for repayment. You are indeed right, young Richards, you should always be kind to your fellow man. For who knows what… oh, where is it? Aha! For who knows what wonders it may bring in return? It's all karma, you know. Anyway, here you are. Gifts from me unto you." He leant across from the wobbly island to present Richards with a small piece of glossy paper, grubbied by long carriage and folded many times.
"Thanks," said Richards. "I'm su
re I'll treasure it."
"I'll be buggered if it's any use. If you'd have caught me in the old days I'd have magicked up a set of epic items for you, some 'phat lewt', as I believe they say. But then, despite my cheerful manner and insightful wisdom, I am a tramp, and therefore a bit mad." He shrugged. "And for you, Bear — " he fished out a wrinkly dwarfskin pouch tied at the top with a cord "- a piece of Optimizja. This island is all that remains of it now, and that will soon be gone. Take this rock, a small part of the land. The pouch should keep it from evaporating."
"Gee, thanks," said Bear. "Nice. A stone in a dwarf's nutsack." He secreted it somewhere in his innards.
Lucas leant back into the wood and looked into its tiny patch of sky. "Night draws in. I must be away. Bear, if you would be so kind?"
"Be a pleasure, mate." Bear ripped a large limb from one of the few remaining trees. "Last chance…"
"Oh, don't worry about me!" said Lucas. "I'll be fine. There may be no squirrels left here, but there are other nourishing things for a man to eat." He eyed a chaffinch speculatively. It wisely flew off onto the moor.
"Hokey dokey! Prepare to cast off!" shouted Bear. He rammed the tree limb hard between the island and the exposed roots of the moorland and forced it free. It drifted away.
"Bye!" yelled Bear, waving. "Bye! I'll miss him, you know," he said to Richards. "Even if he was a bit hard on the old nostrils."
"How terribly touching," said Tarquin.
"Needle," stated Bear.
"My lips are sealed. Voluntarily, I might add," said the lionskin.
Bear scowled at Tarquin until the skin shut its amber eyes. "You're a bit quiet, sunshine," said Bear.
"Hmmm," said Richards.
"Hmmm? What's with the hmmm-ing?"
"This," said Richards, holding up the tattered paper. "It's a 1987 train timetable for the Thames Valley line."
Bear pulled a face. "A rock in a scrotum and an old train timetable? How very generous."
Richards shivered. A mist the consistency of custard swept across the moors. The sun must have gone down some time before; he could only tell because the dismal murk of the fog had faded to dark grey. Freezing water trickled down the neck of his mac.