by John Meaney
EARTH, 2147 AD
Singapore felt like the sauna of the gods. After years in Arizona, Rekka was acclimatized to air-conditioning more than the dry outdoors, and certainly not this sweltering humidity where hot moistness seemed to drip in the air itself. She walked along Orchard Road, where single-storey buildings with curled-up Chinese rooftops nestled amid bioluminescent towers. Everything was bright, while she felt dislocated, alien and out of synch.
It’s only another part of Earth.
One far from Simon, who had not been talkative during their last days and nights together. She had stuck her neck out to get him transferred here or to mainland China during the coming UNSA re-org. He had avoided saying anything about it until the final night.
‘Damn it, Rekka. Couldn’t you have fucking asked?’
Simon never swore. Nearly never.
A question in what sounded like Urdu pulled her back to reality. The woman wore a sari, her head moving in a lateral nod.
‘I’m sorry?’ said Rekka.
‘Oh, I am speaking English. I thought—’ She pointed at Rekka’s skin, then her own, their colouring identical; then she frowned. ‘But you were touched by vritra and dasu.’
‘So were a lot of people, if you mean the Changeling Plague.’
‘I am so sorry.’
The woman walked on, shaking her head. Rekka watched until she disappeared among a crowd of shoppers, many of them women with headscarves, Chinese Muslims rather than Indian.
A great start.
She wanted to sleep, but tomorrow she would have to be in synch with local time. Past the tall glass UNSA tower she walked, as far as Doby Ghaut. At the station she turned back, taking smaller roads parallel to Orchard, finally to reach Stanley Hill, where she entered the park.
For a while, she sat on a low stone wall in the old fort, a preserved relic of British imperialism from a nearly forgotten time. Finally, with no one to see her, she performed repetitions of Salute to the Sun, the heat working out her muscle kinks, then went through her asanas, holding each pose to a mental countdown, shallow breaths sucking in humidity.
Afterwards, feeling weak-limbed, she went back to her hotel, a hollow cylinder of a building with an open court where tropical trees grew. A tiny gekko, perched on the outside wall, scuttled away from her.
Sharp, my friend. I wish I could have shown you this city.
She went in to the icy air-conditioned reception, took a glass-walled lift up to her floor, entered her room, lay down on the soft bed, and dropped into deep, exhausted sleep.
Breakfast was hot spicy noodles and jasmine tea. Afterwards, with time to spare, she bought a light silk scarf in a mall on Orchard Road. Her gestures had been no different than if she had been in Arizona; but then she watched a local woman paying for a new blouse, noted the way goods were passed from seller to buyer using two hands, their bodies facing each other squarely.
Rekka had been rude through carelessness.
In a different shop, she bought some eau de parfum, this time with the correct body language and a small bow; and the cashier’s smile was clearly genuine as well as polite. It made Rekka feel good, and at least halfway competent to interact with an alien species whose anthropological history bore no relation to anything seen on Earth, except for occasional chance parallels. Later, in a coffee house across the road from the UNSA tower, she drank an espresso, fastened the new scarf around her neck, took controlled breaths, and deliberately relaxed her shoulder muscles, raised her chin, and smiled at nothing whatsoever.
I can face this.
She crossed the street, entered the glass-dominated reception lounge, and announced herself to the AI, which told her to take a seat and wait. Instead, she stood looking out at the city until someone approached.
‘Ms Chandri?’ The young woman looked Chinese. ‘I’m Google Li.’
It was an old-fashioned forename, the kind that ought to belong to someone’s grandmother.
‘Call me Rekka.’
As they shook hands, Google asked, ‘Would you like to meet the team straight away?’
‘I’d love to.’
They rode a lift to the seventeenth floor, while Google enumerated the available facilities.
‘We’ve category C and F xenoatmospheric facilities on this level, and category B on the next floor up.’
‘I needed minimal meds on their world,’ said Rekka. ‘And … Sharp got around on Earth just fine.’
‘They’re not contained. Strangers are always safe here.’
‘Um, of course.’
The Haxigoji were standing in a group, waiting for her. At the front was a female, strong-looking but lacking antlers, her tabard and skirt of white and gold; while behind her ranged half a dozen huge males, deep amber eyes unreadable, dressed in dark, mossy colours. Only the female wore a translator unit, fastened at her throat.
‘We honour you, Rekka, good friend.’ It was a feminine voice, with subtleties of modulation matching the received scent. ‘My name is Bittersweet.’
Then Bittersweet clasped her double-thumbed hands together and bowed.
‘I know you to be brave and honourable people.’ Rekka bowed back. ‘I’m glad to be working with you here.’
Off to one side, Google Li and other staff were staring, eyes wide, as if this behaviour was unexpected.
‘As are we, knowing that all humans’ – Bittersweet performed a swiping gesture – ‘are our friends.’
They had not noticed, the other UNSA personnel.
Shit?
It was a faint smell but unmistakable, gone in a second. She remembered her and Sharp’s amusement when they realized the one word that translated directly between their languages. But in his scent-speech, that odour when compounded with others denoted degrees of negation, all the way up to outright falsehood.
‘I understand,’ said Rekka.
Tiredness split off from her, like a shearing iceberg falling away.
Not all humans are friends. That’s what she meant.
Bittersweet had covered the sensor for less than a second, just long enough to prevent it from catching that momentary scent. The message was therefore secret, for Rekka’s … nostrils … only.
‘I hope,’ Rekka added, ‘we grow closer in mutual understanding.’
‘Yes.’
Bittersweet bowed again. Then she turned as the males drew apart, allowing her to walk through. They fell in behind her, and the group continued in to their private quarters. Doors slid shut.
‘That was promising,’ said one of the researchers.
‘I hope so,’ said Rekka.
As she went forward to introduce herself to her new colleagues, what replayed in her mind’s eye was the subtle swiping gesture that Bittersweet had made. It was a surprise, yet Sharp would have known to do that, wouldn’t he?
Oh, my brave, brave friend.
He had sacrificed himself so others could taste and absorb his knowledge. Rekka did not want to think how Bittersweet knew such details from the past.
‘I’m Rekka.’ She held out her hand to the nearest researcher. ‘Good to meet you.’
‘Randolf. And this is …’
But it was the memory of Sharp that dominated her attention, while her co-workers seemed insubstantial, figments that scarcely existed in her world.
Google absented herself from the technical discussions – she was management, not research – so Rekka was able to lose herself in details of xenolinguistics for the rest of the day. The others seemed awed by her rapport with Bittersweet. By the end of the afternoon, however, Rekka had made sure to introduce the researchers individually to the Haxigoji, allowing them each to have a short conversation with Bittersweet. It went down well. At the end of the working day, she was afraid that they would ask her to socialize; but either that was not the custom or they remained awed by her, or they could see that she felt wrecked, in need of food and sleep.
Travelling down in the lift, she was joined by Google, who got on at the sixte
enth floor.
‘Good first day?’ asked Google.
‘Yes, for sure.’
It was just the two of them. Was it psychological, or was the lift really descending more slowly than expected?
‘Your mission to the Haxigoji world was very successful,’ said Google. ‘Everyone recognizes that.’
‘Thank you.’
‘The team leader was Mary Stelanko, is that right?’
‘You know Mary?’ said Rekka.
‘Not as such. I heard her partner’s on sabbatical. Amber, isn’t it?’
The lift was definitely going slow.
‘I’ve not been in touch with either of them.’ Rekka did not like this. ‘Not for a while.’
Google’s shrug looked almost unrehearsed.
‘It’s just that I heard about the new utilization criteria. Ships that have been idle for too long are being decommissioned or reconfigured for another Pilot. Getting with the programme is the best thing Amber could do.’
The lift stopped and the doors opened. They had only descended as far as the thirteenth floor.
‘Have a good evening.’ Google stepped out. ‘See you in the morning.’
‘And you.’
As the descent resumed, Rekka reflected that it was not only Bittersweet sending private messages; but in Google’s case it was neither friendly nor subtle. Needing comfort, Rekka tapped her infostrand, trying to call Simon; but a red icon indicated he was offline: whether to the world or to her specifically, there was no way to tell.
Sharp. No one knows how much I miss you.
The world outside was bright, hot and alien.
Shoulders drooping, chest concave with fatigue, she headed for her hotel.
THIRTY-FOUR
LABYRINTH, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
Dr Imelda Sapherson was working in a slowtime bubble, sealed off from the rest of the room. Her experimental data was promising: a neural deepscan showing activity of the spatiotemporal grid in the subject’s entorhinal cortex, correlated with eye-muscle motor signals, precuneus activation and other distributed neural resonance. In realspace humans, mental images appear to have a real location in space, sometimes with a geometric representation of time – as in the front-to-back timeline denoting verb tenses in sign languages: formerly for the deaf, more latterly for kineme-based system-control gestures – while giving rise to spoken linguistic idioms like ‘putting the past behind me’, meaningful even to the extent that people act more charitably when standing higher than the surrounding ground level, as they take the literal moral high ground.
In Pilots, the entorhinal cortex was connected differently. What interested Sapherson was the extent to which that was driven by neural growth in mu-space, and how much was due to immersion in Aeternum. The language’s effect on brain architecture extended far beyond the neural centres called Bernicke’s and Broca’s areas. Recently, she had been reading a paper written by a Luculentus noting the correlation between alphabets and neurology – in particular, the way that old-fashioned 2-dimensional alphabets without written vowels were read right-to-left, allowing for greater right-hemisphere processing to distinguish context, while ideographic scripts ran vertically – and wished she could have talked to the man, before his world was destroyed.
It’s why I do what I do.
She pushed the words away – behind her, if she deconstructed her subjective experience deeply enough to tell – because the truth was, doubts had been with her for a long time. But the appearance of the Anomaly in realspace told her she had been right to work with the intelligence service and the Admiralty in the way she did. Civilization was clearly fragile, therefore extraordinary measures were sometimes necessary to safeguard the common good.
Sapherson was aware that outsiders, not understanding the hard necessities of her discipline, would consider her a psychopath. At least history provided her with a centuries-long chain of antecedents, all of them as cruel as she had to be.
Perhaps training Fleming and his small corps of torturers was the most questionable thing she had done. Or maybe it was the increasingly vicious – because deep – mindwipe procedures carried out on innocent witnesses and on officers of the intelligence service itself.
What would they ask her to do next?
And why do I always agree?
But her subjective analysis could not be so deeply rigorous without self-honesty to a degree few people were capable of. Lying to others was an art; lying to herself was impossible. That was why she knew about the hidden reason, the one she would never admit to.
Twisting other minds was a rush, a power trip.
When she came out of slowtime, her chief assistant, Alfredo, was waiting to talk.
‘Hey, boss,’ he said. ‘I did the check-up you asked for on Darius Boyle.’
‘Using Med-Centre cover?’
‘Well, yeah. I wouldn’t want him to associate me with his condition. He’s a bit too … physical for me to handle.’
‘And what is his condition?’ said Sapherson. ‘The same as before?’
‘The aphasia’s stopped increasing for sure, and the remedial therapy is probably pushing it back. Visits from his sister – from his viewpoint, a stranger claiming to be his sister, and with what appears to be fake evidence to prove it – remain upsetting. I observed that firsthand.’
It proved the strength of her technique for following associative potentiation. Say that much for it.
‘I saw Colonel Garber on the way in,’ Alfredo added. ‘He said he has another assignment for us. Same kind of thing as Boyle, in fact.’
‘Another one?’ Sapherson had performed the amnesia treatment because Boyle had learned classified information beyond his authorization level. The necessity arose from the way the field officers worked, from other people’s imperatives, not her own. ‘Maybe they should manage their officers more carefully.’
‘But we’ll do the job?’
‘Of course we’ll do it,’ she said. ‘Where is this person?’
Alfredo gestured.
‘I’ve got the rotation set up.’
‘Let’s go see, then.’
She stepped inside, with Alfredo following, and allowed him to control the fastpath. They stepped into a chamber containing three people, one of them seated. He was a shaven-headed, bulky man, familiar enough.
‘You captured Gould?’ she said to the others, while staring at Gould himself.
‘Not exactly.’ He stood up, and gestured at the seat. ‘Why don’t you relax, Doctor? A little chat, and there’ll be no harm to anyone.’
Sapherson jerked back, hoping the fastpath was still in place.
No.
But Alfredo was standing off to one side, shaking his head. Her exit route had disappeared at his command, it seemed. It took a moment to process his betrayal.
‘We’ve been asked to do questionable things,’ he said. ‘Except you didn’t question them.’
‘Not in front of my subordinates, no.’
Max Gould gestured again.
‘Pretend you’re a warm, reasonable person,’ he said. ‘And sit down before we make you.’
She looked at the others standing behind him. One man, one woman; both hard-faced.
‘Very well, since I’m under coercion.’ Once on the seat, she felt flowmetal encasing her forearms and lower legs; but she stared at Gould rather than look down at her bonds. ‘Murder and treason,’ she added. ‘Now you’re bringing collaborators into your game. Bringing them down with you.’
The woman walked from behind the chair and stared at Sapherson.
‘One person in this room is working with Labyrinth’s enemies.’ Her voice was pitiless. ‘Only one.’
‘I work for the Admiralty—’
‘We all work for the Admiralty, but only one of us is erasing memories of threats to Labyrinth.’
Threats?
‘You need to be more precise.’
‘Boyle and his colleague,’ said the woman, then smiled as Sapherson fl
inched. ‘So you recognize him.’
The other man walked into full view.
‘Nice to see you again, Dr Sapherson. On behalf of Darius Boyle, I really, really want to hurt you. That’s something you might bear in mind.’ With a nasty smile: ‘Don’t go forgetting it now.’
‘The necessity for fullest depotentiation,’ she said, ‘was impressed upon me by Admiral Schenck himself. I was acting on a wholly legal order, isn’t that obvious?’
‘And Admiral Kaltberg,’ asked the woman. ‘How legal was what you did to her?’
What is this?
‘I gave her the normal treatment for someone in her position. She was looking forward to enjoying full retirement,’ said Sapherson, ‘unburdened by classified secrets from her time in—’
Gould’s fists were clenching.
He’s the danger here.
But from the corner of the room, Alfredo looked up from a pulsing holodisplay.
‘She’s telling the truth,’ he said. ‘She administered the normal amnesia regimen.’
‘In which case’ – Gould leaned close, almost spitting in her face as he spoke – ‘who induced the suicide compulsion and forced the graser pistol on her?’
‘On Admiral Kaltberg?’ Sapherson swallowed. ‘Someone conditioned her?’
Again, Alfredo backed her up.
‘Everything indicates real surprise,’ he said. ‘Someone used black psych techniques, but it wasn’t her. It’s not like there’s a shortage of people with those skills.’
‘Not exactly a glut on the market, though.’ Gould was leaning close again. ‘And the real bastards are the ones you’ve trained, aren’t they, Sapherson?’
There was only one answer possible.
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
‘In which case,’ said Gould, ‘there’s one question left that’ll determine whether you survive this little chat.’
Her limbs began to shake, despite the restraints. These were the symptoms both of hypothermia and hyperthermia in the final stages, and of simple hyperventilation, the last of which she ought to be able to control.
They’re willing to kill me.
She did not need instruments to know that Gould meant his threat.