The girl stopped in front of him. She looked up at him and smiled broadly. ‘Honey, you’ll get your report,’ she told him, ‘but I’m the best there is. You’re on to the proxime accesserunt after me and if you persist with them your new toy down there might start getting annoyed and really chew one of them up.’ She tapped the man on his chest. ‘Don’t say you weren’t warned, big boy.’ She turned to the woman with the blue gloves. ‘Charming working with you. Let me know how you get on.’
She left.
The other two exchanged looks.
‘You know what I think? I think we should kill her.’
‘No one cares what you think. Contact the next one on the list.’
‘Oh, yes, ma’am.’
2
Gadfium left the traumparlour. The door clunked shut and she heard bolts snick home, locking it.
—Left.
She turned left and started walking.
—Hurry.
She walked faster.
Gadfium couldn’t stop shaking. It was so bad it was affecting her eyesight and she could not believe other people weren’t able to see her quivering from fifty or more metres away.
—You’re breathing too quickly and too shallowly. Calm down. Take longer, deeper breaths.
—Am I this bossy with other people? she asked, taking a long, deep breath.
—Yes, you are. Turn right, here; take the lift. It’ll arrive in twelve seconds.
—Where are you taking me?
—Away from here; out of the Palace.
—After that?
—Don’t ask.
—Oh, grief! I’m too old to be on the lam.
—No you’re not. You’re only too old when you’re dead, and you aren’t that either, not yet.
—Yet. Oh, thanks.
—Here’s the lift. Ignore the display; I’ve told it where to go.
—Oh, grief!
—Will you calm down? And wipe your eyes; I can hardly see when I look out of them.
She wiped her eyes while the lift zoomed. They were heading for the ceiling level.
—I know; I’m already dead, there is a hell and you’re my punishment.
—Stop gibbering. I’m your guardian angel, Gadfium.
The elevator stopped at a luxuriously appointed tube station.
—Straight ahead. And try to look arrogant, and cruel, like nobody’d better interfere with you. We’re taking a Security service carriage.
—Oh, grief!
Head up! Arrogant! Cruel!
—If I get out of this I swear I’ll never order anybody about ever again.
—Arrogant! Cruel!
She marched to the carriage with her nose in the air and a sneer on her lips, passing between potted palms standing on gleaming marble beneath a ceiling of polished hardwood. She sensed a few other people around but nobody challenged her. The carriage opened its doors, she stepped aboard and it rolled away immediately, through some points, across other tracks and into a tunnel where it accelerated quickly. She sat down on a leather couch, shaking again.
—We’re out of the Palace.
Gadfium put her head between her knees.
—I feel faint.
—Yes, you do, don’t you?
—That was awful, awful, awful.
—You did fine.
—I meant in the shop; those women. The man.
—Oh. Of course. I’m sorry. But you didn’t have to watch it in slow motion.
—I suppose it was a long time ago, for you.
—Quite. I’ve been through the process.
Gadfium straightened. She sniffed and took the gun, ammunition and knife out of her pockets, holding them in shaking hands. The gun was a long, thick black flexible tube. It was weighty; it felt like metal covered by some tough, almost sticky foam. It straightened into a cosh or curved into a comfortable hand-gun shape with a finger-sculpted grip, depending on how she held it.
—Here; allow me.
Her hands and fingers moved without her willing them to; she stopped them without difficulty, making them pause poised above the gun, then let her other self — a sighing, finger-tapping presence somewhere at the back of her mind—control her again.
—It has a homing mechanism built in but I’ve switched it off, the construct said as she used Gadfium’s fingers to click the gun open, put some of the fresh ammunition in, closed the stock again, checked the weapon’s action, briefly switched on a laser-dot sight, then gave her back control.
—I very much doubt I can use this again, Gadfium told her other self, before repocketing the gun.
—So do I.
—Perhaps I ought to throw it away.
—Don’t be silly. You only throw away weapons when they might get you into trouble.
—You don’t say.
—And you’re already in deep trouble. So deep it can’t get any deeper.
—Wow. It’s a good job you’re here to keep my spirits up.
—Keep the gun, Gadfium.
—What about this knife? she asked, taking it from her pocket. It was flat; the blade was as long and broad as two of her fingers. It was wickedly sharp; slots in the centre of the flat of the blade guided it into the hard plastic sheath, keeping the edges away from the sides.
—Keep that, too.
Gadfium shook her head as she slid the knife back into its sheath and carefully put it in her pocket.
—I don’t suppose you can tell me any more about what’s going on, can you? she asked.
—Still investigating. Though I think I may now know who betrayed you.
—Who?
—. . . I’m not yet certain. Let me check.
—Oh, check away, Gadfium thought, and sat back, sighing. She held her hands up. They had almost stopped shaking.
The carriage hurtled through the tunnels, swaying and rattling as it took turns and crossed points. Lights flashed sporadically through the shaded windows. Air whistled.
—Where are you taking me?
—I suppose it can’t do any harm to tell you now, her other self said crisply. The carriage started to slow down. - You’ll be getting on one of Security’s secret intramural microclifters very soon and descending four levels. You’re going to the castle core, Gadfium; the deep dark inner rooms.
- Oh, grief! Where the outlaws are?
- That’s right. The carriage drew to a halt and the nearest door hissed open to darkness; a wave of cold, damp-smelling air flowed in over Gadnum. — Where the outlaws are.
3
Sessine wandered the face of the world beyond Serehfa, journeying through its version of Xtremadur to the distant Uitland, travelling across its prairies and plains and deserts and lakes of salt, through its rolling hills, broad valleys and narrow ravines, between its tall mountains and its rolling rivers and its dark seas, amongst its scrub, grassland, forests and jungles.
He soon grew used to the perverse negativity of this world, where the empty aridity of the semi-desert indicated the greatest richness and intensity of transmitted knowledge, which yet remained untappable, and where the seeming fecundity of the jungle’s congested greenery betokened impassible lifelessness, and yet radiated a kind of barren beauty.
Cliffs and mountains indicated buried fastnesses of storage and computation, rivers and seas embodied unsorted masses of chaotic but relatively harmless information, while volcanoes represented mortal danger welling from the explosively corrosive depths of the virus-infested corpus.
The wind was the half-random machine-code shiftings symbolic of the movement of languages and programs within the geographical image of the operating system, while the rain was raw data, filtering through, slowed, from base-reality, and as meaningless as static. The grid of lights available in the sky was simply another representation of the Cryptosphere, like the landscape visible around him, but mapped on a smaller scale.
The optionally visible highways, roads, trails and paths which criss-crossed the countryside were the information channels for the wh
ole of the uncorrupted crypt. Data within them moved at close to the speed of light, which meant that viewed within the context of crypt-time their traffic appeared to move at supersonic speeds. Sometimes he stood near the great coiling highways, listening, rapt, to their eerie, hypnotic songs and staring intently at their gargantuan writhings as though trying through concentration alone to divine the meaning of their cargoes, and always failing.
The first time he saw somebody else he felt a mixture of emotions; fear, joy, expectation and a kind of disappointment that this wilderness was not his alone. He saw a light in the distance across the rocky plain he was crossing, and went, cautiously, to investigate.
An old woman sat alone, staring into a small fire. He had found no need for or way of making fire. She sensed him watching her and called out to him.
He kept his rucksack open and held in front of him and went to join her at the fire. He gave a small bow from a few metres away, uncertain what protocols might apply. She nodded; he sat a quarter-way around the fire from her.
She wore her white hair in a bun and was dressed in loose, dark clothes. Her face was deeply lined. She was sitting back against a small pack.
‘You’re new here?’ she asked. Her voice was deep but soft.
‘Forty days or so,’ he told her. ‘And you?’
She smiled at the fire. ‘A little longer.’ She looked quizzically at him. ‘So, am I your Friday?’
He frowned. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Robinson Crusoe; a story. He believes he is alone on his desert island until he sees another’s footprint, on the day called Friday. When he meets the other man he calls him Friday. We call the first person a new arrival meets their Friday.’ She shrugged. ‘Just a tradition. Silly, really.’
‘Then you are, yes,’ he told her.
She nodded as though to herself and said, ‘Another tradition - and I think it a good one - has it that a Friday answers any questions a newcomer may have.’
He looked into her old, dark eyes.
‘I have many questions,’ he said. ‘Probably more than I know.’
‘That is not uncommon. First, though, may I ask what brings you here?’
He turned his hands palm up. ‘Oh, just the passing of events.’
She nodded and looked understanding, but he felt he might have been rude. He added; ‘I made enemies in the other world, and was brought near to extinction. A friend - a Virgil to my Dante, if you will — led me away from that to whatever sanctuary this represents.’
‘Dante, not Orpheus, then?’ she asked, smiling.
He gave a modest laugh. ‘Ma’am, I am neither poet nor musician, and I don’t believe I ever quite found my Eurydice, so was unable to lose her.’
She chuckled, suddenly childlike. ‘Well then,’ she said, ‘what can I tell you?’
‘Oh, let’s just talk, shall we? Perhaps I’ll find out anything I need to know in the course of our conversation.’
‘Why not?’ she nodded. She sat up a little. ‘I shan’t ask your name, sir; our old names can be dangerous and I doubt you have settled on a new one yet. My name here is Procopia. You are not tired?’
‘I am not,’ he said.
‘Then I shall tell you my story. I am here because of a lost love, as are not a few of us here . . .’
She told him a little of her life before she came to be incrypted, much of the particular circumstances which led to her being in this level of the crypt, and all she thought relevant of what she had learnt since she had been here.
He talked a little in return, and she seemed content.
Mostly, though, he listened, and as he did so, learnt. He decided he liked the woman; it was very late when they bade each other goodnight and fell asleep.
He dreamt of a far castle, sweet music and a long-lost love.
In the morning when he awoke she was packed and about to depart.
‘I must go,’ she said. ‘I had thought of offering my services as a guide, but I think you may have some point to your wanderings, and I might impose too much of my own course on yours.’
‘Then you are doubly kind, and wise,’ he said, rising and dusting himself down. She held out her hand, and he shook it.
‘I hope we meet again, sir.’
‘So do I. Travel safely.’
‘And you. Fare well.’
Gradually he started to meet more travellers. He discovered, as Procopia had told him, that these fellow wanderers of the mirror-world, human and chimeric, were either exiles like him - some through choice, some through coercion - or those who were really no more than illicit tourists; adventurers come to sample the strangeness of this anomalous paradigm of base-reality.
A kind of subsidiary ecology had arisen within the fractured human community he made occasional contact with; there were those who preyed upon other wanderers - taking on the form of animals in some cases, but not all - and those who seemed to exist only to mate with others, merging from the time of their coupling to become an individual incorporating aspects of both the former lovers, usually still imbued with whatever hunger had driven them to fuse in the first place, and so seeking further unions.
Most of the people he met wanted only to absorb his story and exchange no more than information; he declined to reveal who he had once been but was happy to share what he knew of this level of the crypt. He was neither surprised nor disappointed when he realised he appeared to have lost all interest in sex.
He discovered that his rucksack contained three things: a sword, a cape and a book. The sword had a coiled metal blade which extended up to two metres and was not particularly sharp but which produced an electric charge which could stun the largest chimeric - or, at least, the largest which had ever attacked him. He thought of the cape as his chameleon coat; it took on the appearance of whatever his environment was at the time and appeared to offer almost perfect concealment. In its own way, it was more effective than the sword.
The book was like the one he’d found in the room in Oubliette; it was every book. Opening the back cover let the book function as a journal; words appeared on the page when he spoke. He made entries in the journal every few days and kept a note of each day that passed even when he didn’t record anything more about it. He read a lot, at first.
The landscape of the crypt was littered with monuments, buildings and other structures, most of them well away from the shifting sum-paths of the great data highways and many of them of indefinable design. It was here, in these singular follies, usually in the evening after a long day’s travel, that he tended to meet and converse with others; men, women, androgynes and chimerics. He never saw anyone who even looked like a child. They were rare enough in base-reality, but quite absent here.
He found, as his time in the crypt extended, that his dreams attained a vividity that sometimes made them seem more real than his waking hours. In those oneiric passages, when he felt that he sank beneath the surface of the land and entered a deeper underworld, he played the hero, often as not, in a landscape filled with people, cities, commotion and event: he was a dashing captain thrust by circumstance to unsought glory and fame, a poet prince compelled to take up arms, a philosopher king forced to defend his realm.
He commanded a squadron of cavalry, of ships, of tanks, of aircraft, of spacecraft; he wielded clubs, swords, pistols, lasers; he climbed to surprise an enemy cave, besieged walled cities, charged across river shallows to fall upon a vulnerable flank, planned the mining of lines zig-zagging across the swell of countryside, rode the leading missile-carrier to the smoking rubble of rail-heads, threaded a corkscrew course between black bursting clouds towards enemy capitals, slid unseen through the folds of sable space to wheel against unwarned convoys lumbering between the stars.
Gradually though, as if some part of him — the realist, the cynic, the ironist — could not accept the improbable serial triumphs of his exhausting martial adventures, the furniture of each of these aspirant dreams began to include the Encroachment, and in the midst of the br
ight clamour of some clash upon a dusty plain, he would find himself looking up above the joined havoc of the contesting armies to see the moon in a cloudless sky, whole face half dimmed by some fearful agent beyond precedent; or on some night mission, below radar across the darkened enemy coast, he would look up to see the stars had disappeared from half the sky; or, sling-shotting through the well of a gas-giant, the planet’s ringed bulk would fall away to reveal no welcoming spatter of familiar constellations, but a dark void, glowing beyond sight with the inflamed exhalations of long-drowned stars.
Increasingly, he woke from such dreams with a sense of gnawing frustration and abject failure no amount of subsequent rationalisation could assuage.
‘Let me see, let me see,’ the woman said. She looked perhaps ten years younger than he, though she sported an unflatteringly tonsured scalp and had no eyebrows. Black-clad, she sat in the centre of a circle of seven travellers, on a bare floor in a bare room in a large, square-planned house which stood, stark and alone, on a dark plateau.
He sat a little way off with his back to a wall where earlier callers had left strange curlicued designs and patterns carved into the plaster. Light came from a bulb hanging above the centre of the group. He had been reading while the others had told their own stories, taking turns in the centre of the circle.
It was the seven thousand, two hundred and thirty-fifth day of his time within the crypt. He had been here for nearly twenty years. Outside, in base-reality, somewhat more than seventeen hours had passed.
‘Let me see,’ the woman in the centre of the circle said again, tapping her finger on her lips. She had completed her own tale and was supposed to choose the next story-teller. He had been half listening while he’d read, finding this group’s compended histories more absorbing than most. ‘You, sir,’ the woman said, raising her voice, and he knew she was addressing him.
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