“Your minions took my sight,” I remind her.
“They're brainburned fools. Ignorant. Why do you think I'm dealing with you directly?” The lift doors close and we drop a few floors. “You should consider yourself lucky to be alive.”
The doors open and she guides me forwards. I walk forever across a causeway of rock delimited by touch; nothing exists outside of that narrow track except the steady breeze and the slap of her sandals on stone. I sense something nearby that blocks the sun, then she stops me with a touch on my shoulder that feels like a bundle of bones bound together in parchment. “We'll go aboard in a minute,” she says. “The ship is ready. You have a call sign for rendezvous? An orbital element set?”
“Yes. I came in by drop capsule, but –”
“Good. Just one last thing now, then you can go.”
I feel that itching again, at the sides of my head. “What is it?” I demand. “What are you doing?” I strain with every nerve to feel her presence, to hear the shifting of her robe in the wind, to imagine this remarkable woman in such perfect detail that my imagination becomes one with the real. I see her leaning on a cane beside the airlock of a battered shuttle, perhaps a metre away from me; her long, steel-gray hair is braided down her back. Her expression is stony and harsh. I paint the heraldic trappings of genocide in the background; barbed wire fences and watchtowers with searchlights. And then, tense as a live wire, I listen.
“I'm going to have to program you,” she says. “You've got a strong will and I don't trust you without MilSpec control – “ she pauses, alerted by her defences. “You can still see!” she says.
I feel the band of molten steel clamp down around my forehead, her built-in smart weaponry turning up the pressure on my implants, but I'm ready for it this time. I twist and listen for the faint soughing noise of her heavy braided hair sliding across her collar as she turns her head. “Yes, I can see,” I say, excited now, locking onto just where her eyes must be: “I can see!”
I lunge, and feel a moment of warm release as I ram my stiffened fingertips into her eyes and twist in the damp softness.
The band of agony lightens almost as rapidly as it descended – pain confuses her, blocks access to her built-in arsenal.
She stops screaming and whimpers quietly. “Why?” she asks, voice breaking. “Why can't you understand? Why can't you leave us alone?”
I look round blindly, across the field; I can hear boots racing towards us but they're too far away to open fire yet with me so close to their leader. She treated me with the over-confidence of the one-eyed among the blind. I run my hand along the side of the shuttle until I feel the raised edge of the airlock door. “You want to live without interference,” I say, “and maybe you're strong enough to rule this world on your own.” I turn back to her, listening to her rasping breath; and now it's simply one blind woman against another. “But there's a problem.”
She must be standing around, trying to make her systems regenerate traumatised optic nerves so she can see me; a fatal mistake because she doesn't realise how fast I can move, even blind. “What's that?” she asks, playing for time.
I pinpoint her position and reach out for her tenderly, gathering her to my shoulder; I shiver with release as I twist her neck until it crackles. “These people didn't even know there was an afterlife: and you never asked for their opinion,” I breathe in her ear. Dropping her, I fumble my way into the airlock and tell the ship to take off; it agrees readily. The door shuts behind me with a hiss of gaskets, and the drive rumbles into life and vomits me at the stars.
Meanwhile, on the war-shattered planet below me, the clock strikes one.
In the Duat
Oshi Adjani was dreaming.
She dreamed that she opened her eyes. I can see, she thought. And it was a miracle, an answered prayer.
Outside the open window the lizard-birds chittered angrily at each another. A gentle susurration drifted from the marketplace so far below. Smells of cooking food and aromatic spices tickled her nose, redolent of a dozen half-forgotten worlds. The sheets of imported cotton scratched against her skin as she rolled over, fetching up against the slightly yielding warmth of –
Ivan. She smelt his skin, a comforting musk that reminded her of other days, other sharings, a respite from fear and a gaining of sight. “Wake up,” she said, yawning. Her eyes closed, her tongue stretching for the air between her white teeth: Ivan stirred, began to roll onto his back, just as he always had.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Daytime.” The sun was rising in the west; below them, the city was bustling into life. She opened her and looked down at him, feeling a misplaced sense of loss.
Ivan smiled up at her lazily. White irises, white teeth, the rest of him as deep a brown as she had ever seen. He'd taken out his contacts, the ones she liked him to wear. “And is that any reason to get up?” he asked. “Tell me, is it? Is it?”
“No.” She pouted at him: his smile widened, ringing chords of déja vu in her dream.
“Hey, did I rattle your cage? Was it –” His eyes widened further and they weren't smiling any more. What ... A gut-deep fear lit her bones up with cold fire, burning from the inside out. ( This happens every night, every time I dream.) She tried to look round, to confront whatever he saw over her shoulder, because she knew she could protect him from it if she could see it in time; but it was like staring into her blind spot. A zone that shimmered into brightness, a white of total saturation, meaningless optical noise ... hanging in front of her face like a threat and a reminder ...
“No.” She knew what came next. Next the sight peeled away from the bones, the eyes reverting to fiery dust as Ivan left her again; no, this can't be happening! – it was the sense of horror that was worst, the helplessness of knowing that this nightmare had already happened and that nothing could ever restore him to her –
Then a hand of stone descended on her shoulder and shook her until she woke up.
“No!” She said it aloud, awake now, aware that her eyes were shut: yet still she tried to sleep, blindly trying to thrust herself back into the dream in which he was still alive and warm – “go 'way.”
“Oshi. You've got to wake up. Now.”
Shivers raced along her spine: she bolted upright in bed and opened her eyes, floating combat-ready in the low gravity of a space station far from home. “What are you doing in here?” she demanded. “Don't do that!”
Helmut, a damp, glum presence, blinked at her from across the room. He was part of the backup crew who had scraped Oshi in after her last mission, gathering up the pieces with infinite care: medical support. An engineer to combat-tune the reflexes of front-line staff like Oshi. “I have remote override on the microdoctors in your spinal ganglia. Just kick-fired a few nerve trunks ...”
She relaxed fractionally. “Yes? You've got some more explaining to do, then. What time is it?”
“Morning, local. Look, things are happening. The Boss wants to see you. And there's some kind of alert in progress; we've been told to get ready for redeployment real soon now. Back to civilization, maybe. You want to get dressed? I could fill you in over breakfast.”
“There'll be time.” She stood up, naked, flexing muscles that were stronger than they had been even yesterday. She stared at him, unblinkingly. “Would you mind leaving?”
“Oh, sorry –” Helmut turned to the door, flushing like an exposed shoplifter.
“It's not that,” she said flatly, bending to retrieve an overall from the chair where the wardrobe had placed it: “I just want some time to think. Please.” The Boss wants to talk to me. That was one thought she could do without. She'd scrupulously avoided thinking about it, ever since she'd been rescued from the shuttle in low orbit, even though she knew it was inevitable. Well then, she would tackle it in due course. One step at a time.
Oshi's room was incredibly bare. There was nothing but a white-walled cell with a bed in it, and a blank frame that could pretend to be a window. Holograms
could hang there, illusory worldscapes for the homesick; Oshi wanted none of that. She shuddered for a moment, clenching her eyes tightly shut against the emptiness, then snapped her fingers. A sink extruded from one wall and she let it wash and clean her face with expert, impersonal hands. After it dried her with a fresh, unscented towel, it brushed and styled her hair as she liked it: short, sleek, and aggressive. Better, she thought, yawning at her reflection in its monitor: I almost look human. She tried to smile at herself then winced, remembering the pale vulnerabilities of night. It still took her breath away, her own casual acceptance of vision. She dressed in silence, equipping herself for the day ahead.
Helmut was waiting outside. He took her arm and tried to lead her: “please let go,” she said, so impersonally that he dropped it as if she'd stung him.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “You want to eat before talking to ..? I find it makes it easier ...”
“I'll dine later,” she said automatically. “You haven't filled me in on the situation.”
He seemed surprised. “I thought you'd have checked the news,” he said.
Now she did smile; sour as a lemon and twice as sharp. “Bad news I prefer to hear from human lips. It's more personal that way.”
The architecture of the station was customised to fit the vasculature of a hollowed-out asteroid, a design perfected through many generations of development and experimentation. It resembled a mass of trees and diamond bubbles: big trees, gene-restricted to grow out rather than up, that filled the troglodyte caverns and ulcerous tunnels with an explosion of foliage. Butterflies flickered between blossoming orchids and creeping convolvulus, their wings moving lazily in the low-gee environment of the spinning rock. From the outside the base resembled a cinder, dark and angular in the harsh perspectives of vacuum; stealth screens concealed the subterranean eden within.
The corridor looped right round the equator of the station, curved to follow the shell of the hollowed-out asteroid as it looped back on itself. Indirect lights shed a pearly glow across a carpet of living fur. The slow thermal roll of the structure provided a semblance of gravity beneath Oshi's feet. But the tranquility of the station was broken today; she ducked to one side as a convoy of drones whined past along the emergency rail overhead. “What's happening?”
Helmut peeled himself off the opposite wall and shook imaginary dust from one sleeve. He glanced back down the corridor. “Must be busy, I imagine. Overflow from the service ducts. We'd better –” His eyes unfocused.
Oshi caught it moments later: a whispering at her inner ear as cellular network relays dumped incoming news into her wisdom receptacle. The transceivers, cheap as flies and twice as ubiquitous, scattered data like dust throughout the colony: the flipside of their duty to upload digitized mind-maps. The news chittered for attention; Oshi blinked, signaling interest to the monitors embedded within her.
A hallucination of raw text spiraled up the inside of her eyelids, coarse as sandpaper – the Boss preferred writing to speech, for some reason. Important news. Important news. Confirmation is achieved; satisfaction guaranteed. Our stock is rising, the enemy dying. It will soon be time to set sail for pastures new. Oshi Adjani, I wish to speak with you in the throne room, at your earliest convenience.
“Ack.” Working her jaws to swallow her disgust, Oshi glanced at Helmut. “Did you get that?”
“Get what?” His knowing smirk told her all she needed to know.
“Meet you later,” she said tersely. “I'm off.” Up the corridor and away. “Damn.”
Oshi didn't want to be around other people right now. It wasn't anything she could articulate: a fear of confronting what she'd done, perhaps, tainted with revulsion at the other station occupants' unfeeling voyeurism. (Everyone she met fawned over her, wanting to know: what was it like?) Since leaving New Salazar she carried a creeping sense of guilt. It was as if righteous fury could decay to uncertainty and the nasty paranoia of a middle-aged war criminal waiting for the police to knock on the door. She had been tempted to bite Helmut's head off: not a tactful move to make on one's physician. But he made her nervous. Just another nasty staring presence hanging around her, reeking of prurient curiosity. (Ask the hangman: what was it like?) She couldn't shake off the feeling that everyone know exactly what she'd done. It was everywhere in the air of the station, the stench of an original sin.
Oshi flew round the bend and into a drop tube running between levels. She clung to a vine and let it pull her along, wafting past stands of succulent cacti tended by hoverfly robots the size of gnats. Given the burden of memories she carried, she decided, she felt remarkably empty. Scooped out, as if Year Zero Man had deprived her of insight into her purpose. She shook her head, trying to clear the fog in it, edgily wondering what this could all mean. The Boss wanted to talk to her in person – through His incarnate body – and in her experience interviews with the management always boded ill.
Whoever designed the throne room had lacked all sense of humour, not to mention proportion. It was a parody of a mediaeval court: it nested deep inside the asteroid station, close by the battery of fusion reactors that powered the installation. The decor was a study in pointlessness: rectilinear walls lined with spurious flying butresses, vegetable fibre tapestries, steps leading up to the throne itself, steps in zero gee. The Boss used it as a setting when he wanted he address the troops, declare stock options, congratulate or punish loyal workers and miscreants. Oshi hated it. It reminded her of other places, long ago. The air tasted of bullshit. Worse, whenever she spoke to the Boss – which was rarely – she had a nagging sense that he knew everything she was about to say before she framed it with her lips.
Oshi did not like the Boss. And she was quite sure the feeling was mutual.
“Greetings, my dear!” He – she reminded herself: no human, this – sprawled across the tall-backed throne as if it was an armchair in some monstrous living room. He smiled and nodded in her direction, three massive chins jiggling in ponderous sympathy. Small, piggy eyes twinkled with alarming bonhomie. “And how are we feeling today?”
“You called.” She stopped short of the dais, anchoring herself to the floor by her toes. “Something the matter?”
“Not exactly.”
The Boss smiled again, in imitation of reassurance. How much of it is really in that thing? Oshi wondered: and how much exists entirely in the Dreamtime? (The body was nothing more than a biological robot.) “Why am I here?” she asked, bluntly.
“Questions, questions.” The Boss shook his great head, heavier with its fatty jowls than Oshi's entire body. “I trust you are fully recovered?”
“Fully recovered,” Oshi echoed. She blinked, not trusting herself to explore the implications of the question: “you could say that. Two weeks in the tank and a couple of days in deep interface, learning how to use my new eyes ... that's fine.” She drew a deep breath, swallowing the next sentence. I'm fully recovered. Apart from the dreams.
“How charming!” The Boss leaned forward, confidingly. “You know I consider your welfare to be important? I worry about you, my dear. If you are uncomfortable, please feel free to confide in me. You can rely on my discretion.”
I see. She stared at the Boss intently. Revulsion shuddered through her as she saw his smile. Friendly indulgence or monstrous cynicism? “Thanks. I can't tell you what it means to me to know that. Really, it means a lot. But. I'm not, too –” She stopped, uncertain. Uncertainty was a bad idea where the Boss was concerned, a tiny voice screamed in the back of her mind.
“Yes?” asked the Boss.
“I don't understand why,” she said carefully. Licking dry lips, choosing words like footsteps through a minefield: “what we're doing in this system? Rubbing out a monster, fine. A good and principled action. But isn't it ... tangential?”
“Tangential?” He raised one thunderous eyebrow.
“To our mission, as I understand it. Isn't that –”
“Yes.”
She was about to apologize and backtrack
hastily, when she felt a sudden sharp bite on one hand. Glancing down, she saw nothing there: was it psychosomatic? As she tried to work it out she stumbled into a memory of the jungle, where one of the trees had lashed her in her progress. That had bitten her, too, like the first stunning sight of Radiant Progress Number Six Factory from the air.
“I thought we were here, in this system, to stop the genocide. Isn't that right? But what I see – this isn't a low cost installation, is it? You've invested in a small scale colony, here. This station, it's far bigger than a quick rescue mission would need. Isn't it?”
“Yes.” The Boss stared at her, a greasy cowlick of hair shadowing his eyes. They glittered like rubies, digital fires flickering in their depths.
“So?” Oshi shrugged uncomfortably. “There's a hidden agenda. Not just maintenance on the Dreamtime?”
The Boss stirred on his throne, attention focussed entirely on Oshi as she stood before him. Gargoyles atop the flying butresses opened their dark eyes and stared down at her. “You never asked any questions before.”
“What is the agenda behind this mission? The truth, please.”
The Boss's body tensed, massive fists clenching on the arms of the throne. Oshi heard the sound of wood shattering. Elsewhere, deep in the core of the station, processor elements ran wild beneath a heavy load of cognition. Like all Superbrights, the Boss kept nine tenths of his personality elsewhere, scattered across the Dreamtime.
“Why do you ask this now, of all times?”
I can't go back, she realised, heart thumping. It didn't make things any easier. “Because I would like to know the truth.”
“The truth won't set you free,” warned the Boss.
“Let me be the judge of that.” Oshi stared back at him impudently, jaw clenched to stop her teeth from chattering. She had a vague idea what a Superbright could do to her. It was messy: nothing like sharp, clean shrapnel. “I don't trust you any more.”
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