by John Meaney
“Sir.”
“Think old Wally’s a nice chap?” Bruan asked.
The dorm was low-ceilinged: four rows, eight beds in each. Very clean. Cubbyholes lined one wall.
“Seems OK.”
“Really?” The lightness left Bruan’s voice. “Watch your step and you may be all right. The opportunities are here, if you appreciate them. Know what I mean?”
“Uh, sure,” Tom lied.
“Good.” Bruan paused at the short flight of steps which led out of the dorm. “One thing more ...”
“Yes?”
“Try to lose that accent.”
Silence.
The dorm was empty. Tom sat on the bed which was to be his own, and pulled out his infotablet from the small bundle.
Reaching inside his tunic—He stopped, looked around. Nothing. No-one looking. Heart beating fast, he drew out his stallion talisman.
Father. . .
The Pilot, the strange witchlike woman—jet-black eye staring as she died—had marked it somehow, making it more than a symbol of lost childhood. But it was Father’s hands that had wielded the graser tool, creating beauty from a metal block.
The stallion fell apart into two halves: Tom had correctly memorized the control gesture.
Without any command, his infotablet’s holodisplay blossomed into life: a metre-wide representation of an Aqua Hall, blank-faced people queuing up with empty containers in their hands. Beside one figure, a descriptive tricon, hanging:
THIS IS TOM.
“What the—?” Tom was confused.
The figures moving, shuffling forwards.
TOM FETCHES WATER FOR ALL IN THE MARKET WHO DO NOT FETCH THEIR OWN.
He swallowed. This fragment was not downloaded from the crystal: that was still wrapped in its black nul-gel coating. Either it had transferred itself just now, by induction from the needle which lay alongside the gel-coated crystal, or the Pilot had directly transferred it into the infotablet just before she—
“You’re the new boy?” A strange voice, from the dorm’s narrow entrance arch.
Tom just had time to see the final tricon, shaded an interrogative pink—QUESTION: WHO FETCHES WATER FOR TOM?—before he shut down the display.
“That’s me.” He powered off the infotablet completely. “I’m Tom. Tom Corcorigan.”
The oriental boy grinned. His black hair was a spiky brush. “Not your fault, I suppose.”
“Er . . . Who are you?”
“Zhao-ji. Pleased to meet ya.” Another impudent grin. “Really.”
Massive vibration. Blast of air, screech of noise.
The cargo engine was huge, greenish bronze and grime-streaked, and its roar filled the tunnel. Even from up here, the pulse of its brake jets was enormous.
“What are we doing here?” Tom raised his voice above the din.
“Following them.” Zhao-ji pointed downwards. “Algrin and his gang.”
Tom and Zhao-ji were high up near the cavern’s ceiling, hiding behind an embrasure. Down below, on a cargo platform, six boys from the school were dodging behind dumb-crates, keeping out of the stevedore crew’s sight.
Black studded spheres rolled down an unloading-ramp from an opened cargo car. As a crewleader waved her control baton, the spheres stopped, shuffled into position on their short, stubby protrusions, and split open to disgorge their goods.
“Don’t we have to get back?” What would happen if Tom missed his first lesson? “Come on, Zhao-ji.”
“Wait a minute.”
Down below, a group of brown-garbed men had disembarked, and Zhao-ji laughed shortly. “Professionals. Brown Panthers. No-one would steal from them, except maybe—Well, not Algrin.”
Tom shook his head. He had allowed this boy to lead him outside the school during the midday break—when leaving the school bounds was allowed—and he realized that he was going to miss lunch, if nothing else.
“Aw, no!”
“What’s wrong?” Tom was concerned.
“Follow me.”
Dead.
“Those bastards,” Zhao-ji said, meaning Algrin and his cronies.
“An accident?” Tom looked at the poor thing. “Or the cargo men?”
Zhao-ji glanced back—they were in an alcove just off the main unloading-chamber—and shook his head. “I saw them.”
The pool of blood was thick maroon. The feline’s head lay in the pool, amber eyes focused on infinity, its long body arched in one last leap for freedom which would never end.
“Just because they couldn’t steal anything. Damn it,” said Zhao-ji, as a soft mew sounded. “Fate—”
A tiny white neko-kitten, up on a ledge. Thin enough for ribs to be outlined through fur.
“We can’t keep pets.” As though Zhao-ji had read Tom’s mind.
Tom held out a finger. The kitten swiped at it, purring loudly. “We can’t let him starve, either.”
Zhao-ji sighed.
“Evening break. We’ll come back with food.”
“Good.”
Tom smiled; it had been a while since anything had amused him.
“What the little fella needs,” said Zhao-ji, “is a name.”
“How about”—Tom thought for a moment—”Paradox?”
“Paradox. That’s perfect.”
After lessons and the evening meal, they sneaked out, bearing protoblock. They left Paradox hungrily lapping at the food, and hurried back, barely making curfew.
It was the middle of the night when Tom jerked awake and stared into darkness, the puzzle looping over and over in his mind. Then, moving quietly, he took his infotablet to the corridor outside the dorm—he could not leave the school’s confines at night, when alarm fields were enabled—and powered it on.
QUESTION: WHO FETCHES TOM’S WATER?
“No-one,” whispered Tom. “He only drinks daistral.”
BREAKING CONTEXT, read the answering tricon, RESOLVES ANTINOMY. LATER, MORE SOPHISTICATED SOLUTIONS WILL BE REQUIRED.
“I don’t—”
NOW, USE THE NEEDLE TO DOWNLOAD MODULE ONE
“Module one?” But he remembered the Pilot’s words: Download just one module at a time.
He took out his talisman, split it, and dug the needle through the nul-gel coating, making contact with the embedded crystal.
COMPLETE.
Hurrying, he resealed the thing, remembering her warning about emissions.
ACTIVATE MODULE?
“Go,” said Tom.
~ * ~
9
TERRA AD 2122
<
[1]
Fear and elation gripped her simultaneously.
UTech from the air: verdant parkland, copper-bright Virginia forest. Octagonal central plaza, tiled in orange and green, among golden walkways and silver domes, gleaming beneath a clear sapphire sky.
Face pressed against the plexiglass, Karyn watched the campus rushing up to meet her—
{{Tom swallowed, sick with vertigo, pressing back against solid stone, grateful for reality’s anchor.}}
—as the air-taxi swooped down.
Hovering at the plaza’s edge, it raised its gull-door as Karyn thumbed her bracelet’s cred-transfer. Grabbing her holdall, she slid out. Within seconds, the taxi was airborne; she stepped back to watch its soaring ascent.
“Watch out!” The shout coincided with a bark behind her, and Karyn jumped.
Wolf.
Huge and glowering, the timber wolf growled, silver highlights playing across its ceramic cowl. Behind the beast, a visored man roundly cursed Karyn.
“Stupid cow!”
Karyn stepped to one side, holding her bag in front of her. Two heads, human and lupine, turned in perfect synchrony, following her motion.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t see you there.”
“No kidding.”
The wolf’s growl deepened, threatening.
“An accident.” Karyn swallowed. “Really. My first time here.”
The man removed his visor.
“I can see that.” A smile twisted across his face and was gone. “In a manner of speaking.” Ripples of frozen scar tissue filled his eye sockets. Temple-mounted i/o ports clicked as he refastened the visor. “Spacer’s outfit?”
“Er, yes.” Karyn had removed her jumpsuit’s UNSA insignia. “I’m Pilot Candidate Karyn McNamara. Very pleased to—”
“Bitch!” Real venom in the blind man’s voice. “Damn you to hell!”
She could only watch as the symbiotic pair stalked away across the plaza, muscles bunched with fury.
“Jesus Christ!” Her own shoulders were knotted with tension. “This’ll be even harder than I thought.”
<
~ * ~
10
NULAPEIRON AD 3404
It was five tendays—half a hectoday—before Tom received any contact with the world he had left behind. Fifty days in which he learned the Ragged School’s immediate lessons: which of the bigger boys to avoid, how to insinuate himself into the crush for meals, when it was safe to bathe in the gel-bloc.
During breaktimes, the cavern fronting the school became a light-ball court and tagfight pit all in one, while Tom would sit quietly to one side, infotablet hidden, working on poetry or strategy algorithms in his head. He had replayed the first module many times (though never without a sickening sense of vertigo at the sight of Terra’s open sky); yet he could not download the next module without solving its initial problem.
A ring of men, seated at a circular table. An empty bowl before each. In every gap between the grey-robed diners, a single chop stick lay.
One morning, when Zhao-ji was playing solo smartball nearby, a large praefectus snagged the ball from the air. Tom was only half paying attention, still thinking about the problem which would lead him to the second module.
At the table’s centre, a full bowl of noodles. Each man would need two chopsticks to retrieve food. QUESTION: HOW DO THEY EQUALLY SHARE THE MEAL?
“Hey, little slit-eyes.”
Two more praefecti came up. Each of them was twice Zhao-ji’s size.
“On your knees.” They laughed as Zhao-ji sank, obeying their command. “And beg, you little yellow—”
Tom thought his first answer had been efficient: THE LEADER COMMANDS THEM TO EAT IN TURN. But the algorithm had been rejected because . . .
Zhao-ji sprang up, arms flailing at the three youths, and pummelled away—
Tom, frozen, could only stare at them.
—until the biggest of them stepped back—”Destiny!”—and squarely kicked Zhao-ji in the groin.
Zhao-ji dropped.
They let the ball fall to the ground and walked away, shaking their heads. Tom, shaking, walked over to Zhao-ji.
“Leave me alone.” Hunched foetally, hands between his legs. “Just go.”
Tom went inside, ignored by the on-duty praefectus who should have stopped him: he had earned respect by proxy, from Zhao-ji’s mad bravery.
But I was too scared to help.
Always the same. Always the bigger ones, the strong ones, abused their strength.
But in the puzzle world of his downloaded code, such concepts did not apply. THERE IS NO LEADER, it had told him, rejecting his first solution. THE DINERS ARE EXACTLY EQUAL.
Scared.
TRY ANOTHER STRATEGY.
That evening, Tom went alone to feed Paradox, while Zhao-ji lay alone in the dorm, silent in his pain.
TRY ANOTHER STRATEGY.
Magister Kolgash Alverom—known as “Captain Kolgash” or merely “the Captain” to the boys—was hook-nosed and possibly one-eyed: a black inverted-triangle patch was permanently fastened where his left eye should have been.
“Again, boy.”
“Balakrane,” Tom recited. “Balkerina, baelkrenitsa ...” He rattled through a hundred Laksheesh terms for cargo: nuances bespeaking dumb containers or smartbugs, small bundles or large sacks, their mode of transport and stacking-algorithms.
Tom was in the alpha group, and that meant logotropic enhancements, administered in the Captain’s study. Always, it was the Captain’s clawlike right hand, from which three fingers were missing, that held out the femtocyte injector for the boys to take.
“Good.”
White fingerbone, toppling into the swirling liquid—
“And the rest?”
An ancient equation:
“Concentrate, boy.”
The sound of waves, breaking against a shore.
“Talk to me, Tom.”
Sapphire sky, and a lone bird flying.
“Tom?”
A screech as it descends, falling upon its prey . . .
Burst of light, pungent fumes inside his nostrils. He snapped back into reality.
“Are you all right?” The Captain’s hawklike features showed concern.
“Yes, sir.”
Synaesthesia flash: he knew what it was. Caused by his sessions with the downloaded code?
“Keep visualizing, or the routines lose plasticity.”
“Sir.”
“—a disgrace.” The woman’s voice, coming from the doorway, was familiar. “What are you doing to that boy?”
Tom whirled.
“Trude!”
“Tom ... I can only stay for a while.”
They chatted, in fact, for hours, while the Captain served daistral but otherwise remained unobtrusive. Finally, at Trude’s invitation—her expression becoming grim—he drew an old graphite chair forward and sat down to join Tom and Trude.
“You’re dispensing logotropes.” She brushed back a long, white-grey lock which had escaped her mandelbrot scarf. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
Tom held his breath. No-one talked to the magisters like that.
“Belageron Class-4 protocols.” The Captain’s voice was matter-of-fact. “With quick-dispersal tetani matrices and bipolar potentiators.”
“What?” Trude’s tone was scathing. “You’d put the fear of death into—?”
“Oh, no.” The Captain shook his head. “Not military grade: I’ve reduced the apoptotic inhibitors. Weakened the time gradient.”
“You tailor them yourself?”
“Quite.” A grim smile. “I learned how, under pressure . . . some time ago.”
Trude looked at him, expressionless, then turned away. “These boys aren’t fighting for their lives.”
“No,” said the Captain. “But for their futures, even this far down. For the lucky ones.”
When her time was up, Tom escorted Trude as far as the outer court, where she embraced him.
“For this stratum—” she began. Then, “The school’s better than I thought.”
“It’s OK.” Tom smiled, deliberately. Trude had done her best.
“Now I’ve two reasons to come and visit,” she said, surprising him, then turned and walked away without a backward glance.
“How many times d’you pull the weasel, Kreevil?”
Rainbow dragon, writhing in the air above the lanky boy’s bed.
“In one night, I mean.”
Tom started. For a moment, he thought he had seen his old nemesis Stavrel, standing in the arched doorway. But it was Algrin, whose reputation was known throughout the Ragged School.
Kreevil’s dreamy voice—”Up to seven times”—was almost lost among the sniggers.
Only Zhao-ji was impassive, sitting cross-legged on his own bed. He had warned Kreevil not to try the psychflash—femtofeed and holostrobe—knowing that the others would take advantage of its truth-serum side-effect, but it was white-haired Petyo whose will had won the day.
From the doorway, Algrin laughed: muscular, and with just the same cruel expression Tom remembered from his market days when the disfigured Stavrel had taunted him.