by John Meaney
Rupert thrust himself up from the chair.
‘Time to prove yourself, Dr Wolf.’
A blindfolded man sat in a chair in shirtsleeves, his upper arms bound to the chair’s back, his wrists tied to the rear legs. In each corner of the blank room a soldier stood, rifle at port arms.
Gavriela stopped in the doorway, Rupert and Brian behind her. Then the prisoner turned to face her, and smiled a sightless smile.
No!
Four rifle barrels swivelled towards the doorway, aiming at her and Rupert and Brian—
‘Ulfr!’
—but Gavriela flung herself low and spinning, hands on the nearest rifle, twisting, leverage and rage her weapons as she hugged the rifle close—
‘Ver nær mér, berserkrinn!’
—with maximum torque continuing the spin, whipping out through the target, hardwood and steel against nothing much, a distant crunch as rotation carried her past—
He’s down.
—and the chair had toppled, while bound to it was a thing with a smashed egg attached to a crooked neck: an egg spilling copious yolk, pure red.
‘My God,’ said Rupert: whether appalled at her violence, or because he realized how close he had come to dying, there was no way to tell.
Three soldiers lowered their weapons; the fourth stared at his empty hands. Did he even remember the dream that had caused him to aim a rifle at his own superior officers? Did any of them?
‘Go to your darkness,’ Gavriela told the corpse.
She was holding the rifle like a hockey-stick. Slick fluid glistened on the butt.
TWENTY-TWO
FULGOR, 2603 AD
Piet Gunnarsson did not deserve realspace sentry duty, not because it was beneath him, but because he was unworthy. Nine subjective day-cycles earlier, he-and-ship had been gliding in the direction of distant Labyrinth, just as the tail end of a massive fleet passed out of sight behind a blood-coloured nebula. He had flown on, ignoring the fleet because of his own travails – including wounds sustained on Sivlix III when a flash riot started around a group of Zajinet traders, during what should have been a simple commercial mission. Allegedly the Zajinets had flared up with strange energies in what someone had thought presaged an attack; in retrospect, the Zajinets fired on no one, evincing panic if anything.
With comms off, Piet had taken a long-duration geodesic, giving himself time to heal from injuries he now considered trivial, in light of the Fulgor Catastrophe. Had he been more alert, more of a true Pilot, he would have flung his ship into a hard curve, thrown all sensors open on maximum gain, and hailed the departing fleet to find out what was going on.
Saving one Fulgidus life would have been worth it. But he might have been able to evacuate hundreds, and he could not forgive himself for missing that.
If there’s war, I’ll be here.
Fulgor floated before him, no different to the archive holos in her memory – his beautiful ship, surrounding him and holding him, trying to comfort him now.
We are here, doing our part.
Yes.
Her sensors were fully trained on that hellworld, because however unchanged the planetary chemistry might appear from this distance, the global Anomaly would surely be continuing to grow in strength. Theorists, working from sparse data, speculated on the gestalt mind linking to the nervous systems of other species, perhaps even those native to Fulgor: though ZNA-based, there had been ZNA-DNA hybrids created by human scientists in attempts to blend ecosystems. Subverting the hybrids would enable a transition to full absorption, combining the global web of life into some dark, perverted distortion of what others might call Gaia, but which Piet thought of as Jorth, both planetary goddess and mother of Thórr, himself a duality: war-god yet protector of freemen.
Forget the old myths. Concentrate on the science.
At some point, the new global organism would begin altering the atmospheric composition, so that even archaic spectroscopy might reveal the transformed nature of this once-beautiful world.
**You awake, Piet, sweetheart?**
That would be Alice, her own ship some three hundred kilometres further out than he was. He smiled as he sent his reply:
**All OK. Pass it on.**
**Will do. Kiss, kiss. Keep alert.**
**You too, gorgeous.**
So there was another reason to forget about boredom and just keep watch, however unchanging the planet before him might appear. If it reached out and got him, then Alice was next in line, and she deserved to live. So he would observe with all his senses – like Heimdall, Watcher of the Gods, from the legends of his ancestors – and report the slightest activity. Even if he-and-ship did not manage to escape, the others might live.
By now, Alice would have passed the still-OK message back along the chain of observing ships. Piet, as the closest, was outside the theoretical range of Calabi-Yau resonance transmitted by the Anomaly; but he had learned early on that the difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference; and everyone knew how that went.
An hour later, nothing had happened, except that Piet had thought of something.
No one’s talking about attacking the thing.
All efforts were focused on watching the enemy whose intentions and thoughts – if such concepts were even valid – could not be foretold, arising as emergent properties of a massively complex system unlike any other in existence, at least among the worlds known to humanity.
We’re afraid of it.
He had known it all along, but codifying the thought made a difference.
It’s the unknown.
Except that there was one aspect everyone knew exactly: from the Anomaly’s point of view, humans were less than food, simply microscopic components; while from humanity’s position, it was effectively mindless – paradoxically, since its nature was unbelievably transcendent compared to any individual – and therefore a dangerous force of nature, with one added feature.
Total malevolence.
TWENTY-THREE
MOLSIN, 2603 AD
In the midst of the street party, there was Tannier. If Roger had been a spy, then Tannier would have been his handler; at least that was how it seemed to be playing out. Barbour’s police force numbered a thousand personnel, according to the public info services: a small number considering the size of the city; but this was a peaceful place with educated citizens. So if Tannier kept cropping up, it was because someone had assigned him to the role.
A group of older men and women, dressed in primary-coloured tunics, were dancing in a sprightly, coordinated way, the choreography intricate, the music too low-pitched for Roger to enjoy. The clothing hurt his eyes. Tannier circled them, a tankard in his hand, heading this way.
‘Leeja.’ Roger squeezed her hand with care. ‘Here’s the policeman I told you about.’
‘Where?’ Streamers flickered past overhead, distracting her. ‘Oh. The hard-faced man with the smokebeer?’
‘I guess.’ There was a pale cloud rising from Tannier’s tankard. ‘Scar below his left eye.’
‘Mm.’ Leeja squeezed his wrist. ‘I don’t like him.’
‘Er …’ Dad had always insisted on trusting intuition. ‘I do, actually.’
‘No, I mean … He looks at home with danger. I don’t want you hanging around with him.’
Who are you, my mother? But that was the one thing Roger could never say, not with the age difference. Then Tannier was in front of them, smiling, fumes rising from his tankard.
‘Smells pretty bad,’ said Roger. ‘The drink, I mean. This is Leeja. And this is … I don’t know your first name.’
‘I’m just Tannier. Ma’am. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Likewise, Officer. I admire the work you people do.’
‘Thank you.’ Tannier raised the tankard as though her words had been warm. ‘It’s always good to hear someone say that and mean it.’
Leeja leaned into Roger’s side.
‘Honestly? I’m scared of wha
t you do,’ she said. ‘You’re brave to do it, but please leave Roger out of your world.’
Tannier pointed to a deserted balcony, high up, close to the concave, over-decorated ceiling. ‘Private talk? The three of us?’
‘All right,’ said Roger.
Leeja’s two arms encircled his right, like twin serpents wrapped in a helix.
What am I doing to her?
The floor cupped beneath them, twisted, and carried them up on a curving stalk. The balcony folded back to receive its three new occupants. When they alighted, the long stalk sucked back down to the main thoroughfare and disappeared. Soon the street party had spread to cover that area of floor.
‘Not long till the birth.’ Tannier looked down at the crowd. ‘The party will really kick into life then.’
How many of Fulgor’s refugees were going to feel like celebrating anything?
‘That’s nice.’ Roger looked at the lines in Leeja’s face. ‘We mostly wanted to spend time by ourselves. Quietly.’
Instead of answering, Tannier turned to stare along the broadway below. After seven seconds, by Roger’s infallible time sense, a series of giant holovolumes sprang into life above the crowd, each showing the same scene from varying angles, all centring on the long, complex shape of Deltaville. Across her dorsal surface, waves of streamers fluttered, while tiny attendant vessels floated in clouds around her, particularly towards the aft end, where even in the holos, the city’s quickglass showed waves of vibration, the ripples of impending birth.
‘The thing is’ – Tannier had turned back to face them – ‘there’s a city lottery in progress which you might have heard about. Two lucky winners get ferried across to Deltaville, to the posh celebrations. In the company of two of Barbour’s finest and richest political types.’
This meant nothing to Roger; but Leeja’s hand, holding his, began to vibrate.
‘Posh dinners, all very formal,’ Tannier went on. ‘And, like, watched by everyone. Broadcast here and Deltaville especially.’
He nodded towards the giant holos.
‘We haven’t entered a lottery,’ said Roger.
‘Well’ – Tannier’s scar twisted when he smiled – ‘that’s funny, because you and I are about to win it.’
Roger did what Dad would have wanted. He drew his somatic awareness inside, concentrating on proprioception and balance, centring himself. He exercised minute control, conscious of the curved horizontal sheet of muscle that was his diaphragm, the complex chained interplay of intercostals expanding his ribs.
Calm.
Breathing happens under conscious deliberation or while asleep, to equal effect; hence the importance of those neural pathways for mental control: the bridge from conscious to subconscious thought, to the myriad nuanced perceptions normally lost to the civilized mind.
What’s going on here?
Someone’s complex game of strategy was touching his life – except that where it impinged on him, it was really quite simple, wasn’t it?
‘A Judas goat,’ said Roger. ‘That would be me, wouldn’t it? Tied up and bleating, far too tempting for a hunter to ignore.’
‘You can’t go along with this,’ said Leeja. ‘Roger, you can’t.’
The voice in his throat felt alien. ‘Without Helsen, my parents and billions of people would be alive.’
Tannier’s eyes were hardened by whatever mental images they saw.
‘If she plans to do the same thing here, stopping her will save lives. Including yours, ma’am.’
‘Then give Roger an implant.’ Leeja gestured, and the quickglass balcony floor sprouted tiny stalks, rippling in a virtual breeze. ‘Something to make him less out of his depth.’
Was that how she saw him?
‘He’s not a citizen,’ said Tannier. ‘Naturalized or otherwise. Under the circumstances, implantation would be … irregular. Actually, illegal.’
‘Not like running a lottery whose result is fixed, then?’
Tannier’s face clenched in a muscular grin.
‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ he said. ‘Or better … Roger, I’ll meet you at Mass Centre.’
‘OK.’
The one place anyone could find was the city’s centre of mass.
‘See you.’
Tannier backed away and the balustrade melted. As he toppled, his body held straight, a quickglass tendril took hold and swung him down.
The balcony reformed.
‘It may not be for ever’ – party lights, reflected, were sparkling in her tears – ‘but we have a choice in how we say goodbye.’
‘What … do you mean?’
‘We can do it here and now, a clean break. Or back home and … gradual. Like weaning off each other, or something.’
Roger stood close, put his hands on her lower back, pulling in.
‘Home,’ he said.
‘Yes, my love.’
It was to be the longest, tenderest climb to weeping orgasm.
Mass Centre was a ten-metre hollow sphere, a complex concavity lined with baroque mathematical terracotta, while in the centre hung a three-way cruciform sculpture delineating vertical, vertebral and transverse axes. Compared to the immense bulk of the ever-morphing city, the sphere was the tiniest of bubbles, kept in position at the centre of gravity, the origin for every location reference. Outside the sphere, connecting corridors formed short arcs between linear thoroughfares: often used as meeting points, deserted today save for a few furtive couples.
Roger circumnavigated the place at several levels – you had to keep making switchbacks and cross-overs: there were no circular routes, only short linking corridors – with no sign of Tannier and no response to his tu-ring signal. Finally, he entered a corridor arc that was otherwise unoccupied, determined to make one more circular pass before giving up; then he stopped as both ends of the corridor sealed up, forming an isolated chamber.
It was the interior wall that melted open, revealing Tannier in the spherical central space, with the cruciform shape hanging behind him.
‘Come inside,’ he said. ‘Not many people get a chance to see it.’
If Roger lived here, perhaps this would be a major deal, a highpoint of his life. When he stepped into the spherical chamber, he was impressed but not stunned; or perhaps he was simply worried, wondering what would happen next.
They were standing, he and Tannier, on part of the terracotta-like pattern of the curved wall. Tannier found a convenient protrusion to sit down on, and gestured for Roger to do the same nearby.
‘All right,’ said Roger. ‘Does this mean we’re waiting for something?’
‘Your lady friend made a request, and I’m carrying it out. I like her, by the way.’
‘Request? Oh, shit. What was that about an implant?’
The block he sat on had already absorbed his legs, wrapping them in solid quickglass.
‘There’s no need to hold still,’ said Tannier. ‘Or rather, there is, but it’ – he slapped the block he sat on – ‘will handle everything.’
Quickglass encircled Roger’s torso, banded tight around upper chest and hips, but allowed him to breathe. Then it reached his neck, cupped his chin, and hardened around his jawbone, holding his head in place.
The insertion was a pinprick in the back of his neck.
Cold, the slithering quickglass.
As it reached up into his cerebellum, he closed his eyes, going deep inside himself, beyond the neurosomatic discipline open to every human being, to a mode only a Pilot could experience: the thrum of inductive neurons, resonating now with the quickglass nerve-analogues.
There was a point he would not go beyond.
Complete neural integration requires two-way flows. Visual information propagates forward in the skull, from the parietal lobes at the rear to the cerebrum at the front; yet most of the neural flow points backwards, in tight reverse loops. Adding a new control-system modality opened up Roger’s brain to potential manipulation – but only if he allowed it.
Go
t you.
He burned out portions of the major two-way bridge as it formed between the sensor-lobes (newly created in his brain) and the control circuits of his cerebellum. Only someone who was both a Pilot and a product of Fulgor’s intensive, neuroware-dominated education system – where so many had aspired to upraise, to become Luculenti – could have reconfigured such an implant as it occurred. As the quickglass restraints flowed away, he opened his eyes and nodded to Tannier.
‘Very kind of you,’ he said.
The big holoviews above the arcade showed Roger and Tannier taking in the applause, touching fists with the lottery hosts and then hugging them, before waving to the crowds and pointing to the golden starburst trophies they held as symbols of their prize: the trip to Deltaville’s official celebrations, to take place as soon as the birth happened.
None of this had occurred in reality.
Maybe they could have faked everything.
As Roger and Tannier, amid the partying crowd, watched their pseudo-selves overhead, Roger wondered whether he could have stayed with Leeja while the authorities created a virtual bait for Helsen, rather than risking him for real. But Helsen might not rely on public info feeds if she were hunting him. The more succulent the bait, the more effective the trap.
‘There they are,’ said Tannier. ‘The rest of our party.’
‘Oh, please.’
Roger had thought his own formal clothing ridiculous, but on the golden dais by the view-window, a woman was dressed in a sweeping confection of dark-blue and gold, her massive coiffure wound through with gold thread and winking holo stars. The man beside her, in his diamond-encrusted surcoat and silver-dominated trews, would have stood out anywhere else. He looked relaxed, not caring that the woman had eclipsed him.
‘She’s Rhianna Chiang,’ said Tannier. ‘Socialite and artist. Well, mostly socialite. And that’s Faubourg, no other name. Everyone knows who he is.’
‘Like Tannier, then,’ said Roger.
‘Apart from me being unknown and not a fop, yeah.’
Roger looked from Tannier’s callused knuckles to his facial scar.