The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  “I’ll need some way to get in touch with you,” Gil tells him.

  Blacker puts his dice back in his pocket and pulls out a cheap clamshell phone. “Here. Turn it on some time after four and listen to the voice mail: it has instructions for you. Keep it turned off except when you’re actively using it.”

  He holds it out. Gil takes it cautiously. “Why?”

  “Basic SIGSEC—use it too often, traffic analysis can tell an adversary that it’s hostile and they can home in on it.” Gil stares at the phone as if it’s a poisonous snake while Blacker continues. “I’ll call it once, with rendezvous details. You get to use it to call me back—just once—to say go or no go or amend the rendezvous. After that, you get rid of it. Understood?”

  Gil nods. “Like a drugs drop.”

  “Exactly, I think.” Then the British agent looks puzzled.

  “What is it?” Gil asks.

  “Can you point me towards the exit? I’m lost.”

  * * *

  Agents Smith and Jones have taken up positions between the broadcasting studio and the lobby, so there’d be no easy way out past them even if Gaby figured it would do any good. They’re Feds; they know where she lives, they know where her dog goes to school.1 Glenn harrumphs indignantly and Danni protests shrilly but it’s not making any difference. “Why?” demands Gaby. “We haven’t done anything!”

  “But one of your callers did,” Agent Jones tells her. “You will come with us now. Maybe you can tell us why they called.”

  “Stand up slowly,” says Agent Smith. “Keep your hands where I can see them.” A pistol materializes in his hand like a malignant card trick. “Move!”

  Gaby stands, shaking. It feels unreal, more so than the sasquatch and dragon reports that are the meat and drink of her show, the reports of UFO abductions and cultists that cluster in this corner of Colorado. Perhaps they’re just the creative outlets of bored locals: it hardly matters to her mind, as long as it keeps her listeners going through the night. But Men in Black holding her at gunpoint in the workplace are emphatically something else.

  “Out front! You first!” Smith waves Glenn over to the door. “Kneel!”

  “I can’t—” Glenn wheezes. He’s middle-aged and is always complaining about his joints. Jones grabs him by the arm and pushes him down and forward, twisting the arm behind him to force compliance, but instead of kneeling Glenn gives an agonized wail and falls badly. “My knee! My knee!”

  “On your front! Hands behind your head!” shouts Smith, but Glenn is in too much pain to comply. Gaby watches, appalled, as Smith kicks him. “Shut the fuck up, motherfucker! Stop resisting, stop resisting, you are resisting arrest!” Another breathless wail, and Smith kicks him in the side of the head. “Next!” he screams at Gaby, quivering with rage. Jones, standing behind him, shrugs uncomfortably, as if to say, What can you do.

  “He’s got arthritis,” Gaby tells them, as if reason will work on fists and boots: “He’s due to have his knees replaced next month.” Was due. Glenn lies horribly motionless and slack.

  “Hands behind your backs! On your knees!” Gaby, at least, is flexible enough to kneel while Jones steps round his partner. He’s zip-tying her wrists when the alarm siren goes off.

  “What the fuck!” Smith casts about wildly, then raises his gun and fires two shots through the open fire-escape door. In the confines of the studio the gunshots feel like fists pounding the sides of her head. Danni has escaped into the nighttime darkness, and the siren wail of the door alarm is deafeningly loud—but not loud enough to stir Glenn. “Come on.” Jones grabs Gaby under one arm and hauls her towards the front door. “You search the parking lot,” he shouts at Smith, who is already halfway out onto the fire escape. “She won’t have gone far.”

  Jones drags Gaby out into the reception area, then goes back into the studio briefly. He re-emerges shaking his head. “Come on.” He shoves Gaby, pushing her off balance, then drags her through the front door.

  “Wh-what—Glenn?”

  “He’s not going anywhere. Come on, we’re leaving.” There’s a gigantic SUV in the car park—a Navigator or a Suburban or something—and Jones pushes Gaby over to it, then pops the rear door. “Get in.” Gaby is shaking. She eyes the running board. She’s not a tall woman, and after a moment Jones seems to realize that with her wrists bound she can’t pull herself up. “Fuck.” He grabs under her armpit, and boosts her onto the seat.

  “He killed Glenn,” she whimpers, struggling upright. “Who are you?”

  Jones smiles horribly from the open door. “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.”

  “Help? You’re not helping us!”

  “Indeed.” He reaches up and pulls off his Ray-Bans, folds them, and stows them in a pocket. A febrile green glow that owes nothing to the street lighting writhes within his eyes. Gaby recoils, whimpering.

  A minute later, Agent Smith lurches into view with Danni’s body slung over his shoulder. The opposite door opens and Smith and Jones push her onto the bench seat so that her head flops in Gaby’s lap. They’ve zip-tied her, hand and foot, and she’s out cold, a bruise already forming on her forehead. A minute later the trunk opens and they roll something heavy inside. “Let us depart, Brother.” The two agents wrap seat belts around their passengers, close the doors, and climb in. Jones puts the SUV in gear and drives slowly out of the parking lot, not turning on his lights. As they turn onto Whiterock they pass a police cruiser heading the other way with light bar flashing.

  Are they really Feds? she wonders, panicky, as she stares at the back of Agent Jones’s head. Glenn seemed to think they were, and he read their papers, but Glenn is—she shies away from the thought—dead. Or at least very deeply unconscious. Is this an abduction? Smith and Jones drive in silence. After a minute Danni begins to stir, moaning incoherently. There’s a compass display in the rearview, and Gaby realizes they’re turning west, heading towards the trail up to Peanut Lake. Brother. Brother Drake, she realizes. Friends of Sleep. But the agents arrived at the studio before the broadcast. What the hell?

  “Are—are you with the Friends of Sleep?” she asks hoarsely.

  “I told you, we’re from the govern—” Agent Jones begins, just as Agent Smith says, “Yes.”

  Agent Jones clears his throat. “We are the Friends of the Lord of Sleep, and we’re from the government, and we’re here to help,” he explains.

  “To help our Lord,” Agent Smith clarifies, “not you.”

  Outside the side windows, the road has run out of houses and street lights. They’re driving between trees now, and the street has narrowed and is winding uphill. I could call 911, if I had my phone, Gaby thinks helplessly. But her phone is in her bag, back in the studio. “Why are you taking us?” she asks, desperate for anything that could shed light on her abductors’ intentions.

  “A ward is weakest in the center of its working,” Jones says, as if by way of explanation. “And here we are furthest from the coast, the border with our Lord’s demesne. Breakthroughs happen. Wild apprehensions of the starry wisdom. Weakenings of the gates of memory that let old loyalties bleed through.”

  “I don’t understand any of this!” Gaby wails, close to spilling tears of frustration.

  “It’s good that you don’t,” Smith says, his tone warm and reassuring. “If you understood, you’d either be one of them or one of us—”

  “—One of us,” Jones echoes. “Initiates.”

  “Mad, now!” Smith sounds abominably cheerful.

  “Instead of which you’re one of the flock.”

  “Please let us go? We haven’t done anything to you! We don’t know anything!”

  Jones hisses quietly, like an amused snake. “Ignorant sacrifices are the best kind.”

  “Sacri—”

  “You were safe until your colleague bleeped out the warning, but he spoiled everything for us. Now we’ll have to use you, instead.”

  “Use—me?”

  The road steepens and
the SUV jolts, rocking from side to side as it descends towards the lakeside. “One of our High Priests—an initiate of the inner temple—wrote, ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots.’ What do you think Brother Jefferson meant by that? Are you a patriot, Miss Carson?”

  Danni moans quietly, and stiffens, straining at the zip ties around her wrists. She’s coming round.

  These people are mad, Gaby realizes, and they mean to kill us. An icy calm grips her. She doesn’t know what she can do to stop them, but the idea of being slaughtered like Thanksgiving turkeys is repugnant.

  “Why are you doing this? I mean, what purpose does it serve?” Gaby asks, speaking to cover up the click as she pops her seatbelt latch. The metal buckle is blunt-edged so she can’t saw at the zip ties with it, and her wrists are pinioned behind her, but if this is a hire car the door latches may still work—

  Smith tries to explain again. “The genius of the republic is maintained by constant sacrifices and the blood-soaked rituals of the initiates. Sacred geometry and dark secrets under DC, this much you and your listeners already know of. But in these trying times, as the stars come right and the walls between the worlds thin, it takes more than ritual and intent to compel a nation to serve the will to power. By the sacred cabling of AT&T and Comcast we bind the routers and ties of a continent together and broadcast the sacred timing codes that underpin the great working, the geas of forgetting. Using them, we, the servants of the Black Chamber—be we Friends of the Lord of Sleep or officiants in the Mysteries of Central Intelligence—act to buttress our nation’s magical boundaries against intrusions from outside. But the center cannot hold without reinforcement. Your program is a weakness, febrile leakage from the realm of chaos and the void beyond the world. We were sent to monitor and report, if necessary to close you down—but thanks to your producer’s bungling malice, it will take a broadcast anchored in your blood to rewind the damage you have inflicted on our nation’s defenses.”

  The SUV slows as the dirt track between the trees levels out. Is this slow enough? Gaby nerves herself as she realizes she’s out of time. She twists and scrabbles behind her back for the door latch, then feels it click open. Night and darkness breathe down her neck as she kicks hard against the transmission hump and pushes herself out of the moving vehicle. It’s a bad fall, and her momentary fear of going under a wheel is driven out of her mind by the force of impact. Stunned, she rolls over twice and lies prone, gasping for breath as her head spins. The SUV rolls onwards and she collects herself enough to realize that if she stays here she will certainly be killed. She rolls over on her front and pushes herself up—a hot needle of pain stabs through the joint of her left knee—then with a shuddering gasp she rises to her feet and staggers between the trees.

  The darkness is near-total, despite the crescent moon riding low overhead. It’s a bitterly cold night. Gaby’s nostrils flare. She can smell lake water standing, not far away. Dead leaf mass and pine needles underfoot, a whiff of snow hanging in the air. The crunch of tires on dirt ceases. Doors open, shouting ensues.

  Gaby stands up, a couple of feet back from the road. And she’s still standing, nerving herself to step back into the road and walk away from the lakeshore when—with barely any warning—another car, its lights out, ghosts by dangerously fast with a buffet of wind and a crunch of tires on gravel.

  She ducks back further as the new arrival brakes to avoid the SUV pulled up on the shoreline ahead: then she drops and rolls for shelter as shots ring out.

  * * *

  The Greyhound station in Colorado Springs is a single-story brick-and-concrete structure the size of a gas station. During the day, floor-to-ceiling slit windows admit pale winter light that spills across the ranks of plastic bucket seats bolted to the floor. The amenities consist of toilets, a row of coin-operated luggage lockers, and a vending machine. It’s as bleak as the visitor room at Camp Tolkien, Yarisol realizes, although there is a comforting sameness to its bland walls and floor tiles, and as it’s past sunset she is happy enough to sit and wait for her ride. The handful of other passengers she shares the waiting room with ignore her.

  Yarisol flew in to Albuquerque around lunchtime, wearing Jonquil’s face and holding a passport in her name. After a brief misunderstanding, one of the limos from the taxi rank proved willing to drive her to Colorado Springs. It was a journey of some six hours, broken only by gas and toilet stops and the quiet weeping of the driver. Yarisol is not needlessly cruel, but she has little understanding of urük ways, and once she’s settled on a course of action she sticks to it, and the last bus of the day for Colorado Springs had left half an hour before she reached the airport concourse.

  She spent the flight over assimilating her memories of Jonquil. She is an alien to Yarisol, who doesn’t quite grasp how other alfär souls work, let alone the lumpen round-eared kind. Jonquil is dazzling and sharp enough to draw blood with the cut direct, a social animal who takes what she will and serves the All-Highest as a god. So along with the disguise, Yarisol chooses to use Jonquil’s awareness as a kind of prosthetic theory of mind, to help her understand the complexities of social interaction. She is determined to make full use of it, and to hold tight as many of Jonquil’s memories as she can once the imprinting begins to fade (as it inevitably will, after a few days). So she practices by engaging in cunning wordplay and jest with her driver, and when he balks she motivates him with the razor-sharp edges of nightmare, stopping just short of inflicting so much distress that he loses control on the highway.

  Reaching the Greyhound station at eight o’clock, she dismissed the driver from her attention and went inside to sit down. The annoying urük followed her, gesticulating and yammering something about payment until she handed him the black plastic card she had been given for expenses. That silenced him effectively. Then she settled down to wait.

  It is now five to nine, and night has fallen. The station is about to close, and Yarisol is becoming uneasy. She counts the floor tiles once again, just to be sure they haven’t been breeding between eye-blinks, then checks the clock. Urük count time in base-sixty units, which leads to some interesting if bizarre symmetries … but where are her colleagues? If the station closes, will she have to remain inside all night, or will she be required to leave? (Jonquil’s memories imply the latter, but she was not the sort to hang around bus stations after dark. The lack of a conclusive answer to this question, once it occurs to her to ask it, is a maddening itch.)

  An older urük in a drab uniform shuffles out of a windowless back room, turns to lock the door behind them, then says, very firmly, “We’re closed now.”

  At just that moment, a somewhat younger urük enters through the front door. He wears a black leather jacket and jeans, but has too little hair for the biker look, according to Jonquil’s fashion-critical eye. Laugh lines crinkle around his eyes as he looks around. He spots her and approaches, raising a hand.

  “You can’t come in here—” begins the bus station attendant.

  “Jonquil?” the new arrival asks hesitantly. “I’m Pete, Mhari told me you needed a ride.”

  Yarisol stands up, surprised to discover how she has stiffened during her hour of sitting on a throne of polymerized coal oil. “It’s no trouble,” she says.

  “You can’t come—”

  “Be silent,” she says, glancing at the old urük. His eyes bulge and he mouths something at her, then turns and staggers towards the back office, clutching his throat.

  “This way,” says the one named Pete, his laugh lines vanishing. “Will that wear off?” he asks.

  “Probably.” Yarisol reconsiders. “I see no reason why not,” she hedges.

  “Do you have any luggage?”

  “No.” This is not strictly true: a suitcase and carry-on accompanied her on the flight. But they were inconvenient to carry and she didn’t see the point, so she left them at the airport.

  “Then”—they reach the doorway—“you take the back seat.”
Pete points at a big cart, mud spattered across the shiny black paint around its wheel arches. “Don’t do that again,” he advises, “at least not for trivial offenses.”

  “It is not acceptable?” Yarisol asks him, forcing a hang-dog expression. (She is proud that she now understands this facial contortion: Jonquil’s peculiar sensitivity to human physiognomy might be rubbing off on her.)

  “No.” Pete opens the back door of the car and she climbs in. “Brains? Meet, uh … who are you really?”

  “Mhari told me I’m Jonquil now?” she says, trying to be helpful. “I borrowed Jonquil’s face, but some bits are fading? So you, like, see through her? Back in camp they called me Jar-Jar?”

  The balding man in the driver’s seat makes a choking noise.

  “Whoever gave you that name was not being nice,” Pete tells her. “Belt up, we’ve got a long way to go. What do you want us to call you?”

  Yarisol thinks for a bit. She cannot give them her full, true name, and apparently the name the urük soldiers gave her is bad, but she finds the idea of inventing her own alias pleasing. “Call me Jon,” she says, after a minute.

  “You’re alfär,” says the driver, his tone abnormally even.

  “Yarisol is alfär; Jonquil is, like, human?” Jon giggles at her humorous insight.

  “Brains—” Pete says.

  “I’m … okay. I think.” He grips the steering wheel with tension-whitened fingertips.

  “Brains’s husband was injured during the Host’s invasion,” Pete explains. “You weren’t involved were you, Jon?”

  “Invasion.” Jon hunches forward and wraps her arms around her torso, a very Yarisol gesture. With an effort of Jonquil-esque will she straightens up, relaxes, and flashes an insincere grin at the driver’s mirror. “Can we be friends?” A moment too late she remembers that she’s not supposed to show her teeth, and realizes this goes double to urük scholar-soldiers warded against glamour. The big urük-cart swerves, but stays on the road and doesn’t hit anything. “Oops,” she says, and remembers to clap a hand over her mouth only a couple of seconds too late.