by John Meaney
‘You, dear Rekka, are the talk of Desert One right now.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Simon. ‘On account of the confidential mission she’s just completed.’
‘It’s not confidential, it’s just not been made public yet.’ Gwillem gestured at a table. ‘Come and sit with us, both of you.’
Mary Stelanko was there, but no sign of her partner Amber.
‘I’ll get you some food.’ Simon held out a chair for Rekka. ‘The usual preferences?’
‘Sure.’ Rekka settled on the chair.
‘You okay?’ Mary asked.
‘The debrief went as well as expected. Unfortunately.’
‘So are you grounded?’ Gwillem raised his fork. ‘Excuse me while I carry on stuffing my face. Got to make sure my food’s digested by sixteen hundred.’
‘Probably, and what’s at sixteen hundred?’
‘Aiki demo.’ Gwillem nodded to Mary. ‘Kinda thing your sweetheart does, right?’
‘Did. A long time ago.’
‘Well, I kinda gather it’s out of fashion.’
Both aikido and Feldenkrais movement had been part of Pilot training since the first voyages into mu-space; but in the early days, things had been different, the sacrifices awful. Some seventeen per cent of Pilots now were natural born, their eyes black-on-black, requiring no surgery to survive in that other continuum; and that percentage kept increasing. Pilots like Mary’s partner would eventually retire - three or four decades hence, in Amber’s case.
The current training curriculum was under critical review.
‘So,’ said Mary. ‘You’re probably grounded?’
‘McStuart was ambiguous about the future.’
‘But clear about his present mood?’
‘You got it, exactly. How was your debriefing, anyway? They can’t blame you for my actions.’
‘They can try, but it’ll backfire on them if they do.’
‘Son of a bitch,’ said Gwillem.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Top table. Look who’s here.’
Rekka and Mary looked past Simon, who was approaching with a tray, to the far table where men and women in business suits were sat. And one white-haired man in particular.
‘Professor Jiang-Shen,’ said Mary. ‘That bastard.’
Rekka shook her head.
‘What?’ asked Gwillem.
‘You know about my biological parents.’
‘Er, yes. I remember the story, not that you can remember that far back, since you were a baby.’
‘It was the Changeling Plague that got my father. That’s why my mother tried to kill me in the Suttee Pavilion. Along with herself.’
‘I forgot that part. Sorry.’
‘What part?’ Simon put a veggie biryani in front of Rekka, the same in his own place, and sat. ‘Am I missing something good?’
‘Something bad.’ Gwillem nodded to the top table.
‘Ah. No one ever proved it was his biotech that got loose.’
‘Nor will they, while he’s so useful to us.’
‘Good point.’
Mary had been eating with her eyes closed, slowly.
‘The food’s so good,’ she said. ‘So where’s Professor-? Ah, I see him. And the two special guests.’
‘You’re up to date on the gossip already?’ Rekka looked at her infostrand-bracelet, considered going online, then shrugged. ‘So who are the special guests?’
‘Those two.’ Simon pointed. ‘With the near-identical features. ’
A man and a woman, aged somewhere between twenty and forty, with flawless skin and black hair, the man wearing a goatee. They smiled with charisma, the centre of everyone’s focus.
‘Brother and sister?’
‘Cousins, in fact. The Higashionnas, Japanese-Brazilian, from Rio. UN senators, and real superstars.’
‘Hence my dramatic and exciting aiki demo for the VIPs,’ said Gwillem. ‘Which you’ll all be attending?’
‘Haven’t you got a lab to work in?’ asked Simon.
‘And haven’t you got a management cubicle to do no work in at all?’
‘Huh. Sixteen hundred hours?’
‘Right.’
‘I’ll be there. Rekka?’
‘If I can’t get in to see my special friend,’ said Rekka, ‘then I might come along.’
‘Special?’ said Gwillem.
‘Handsomely endowed.’ Mary spread her arms wide. ‘I mean like this big.’
Simon held his fork underhand, and waved it back and forth between Mary and Rekka.
‘You better be talking about antlers.’
‘What else is there?’ asked Rekka.
‘You don’t remember?’
‘Certainly not.’
At four p.m., Rekka was sitting on a bleacher seat with Sharp on her right, Simon to her left. Poliakov sat the other side of Sharp. On blue mats in the sports hall centre, some thirty people in white pyjama-like jackets and what looked like black ankle-length skirts were rolling and rehearsing footwork, warming up. Some carried blunt wooden daggers.
‘Where’s Gwillem?’ said Rekka.
‘There.’ Simon’s arm encircled her. ‘See?’
‘Oh, yeah. How come you never took up this kind of stuff?’
‘I wasn’t the one who got bullied in school.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘His growth spurt came late, and there was something about his middle name that got people taunting him, once they learned it.’
‘Guillaume?’
‘Which you can pronounce two ways, one of which the kids found funny.’
‘Strange thing to latch on to.’
‘Yeah . . . He turned out all right though, didn’t he?’
Rekka leaned her weight into him, feeling the slender muscles beneath, so different from the massive fur-covered alien on her right. Then she noticed two things: Sharp was very still, nostrils wide; and Poliakov was leaning backwards, avoiding Sharp’s bulk, so he could talk to her across Sharp’s back.
‘You are a bad person, Rekka Chandri.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You spent considerable time with our friend, and he does not make you whimper with desire at his will, does he? Unlike poor Claudia and Justine in the lab.’
Now it was Simon who said: ‘Excuse me?’
A giggle rose inside her.
‘You might want to check my biofact logs.’
‘I did. You made nose filters.’
‘Of course.’
‘But you forgot to mention that.’
‘Oh, McStuart was so kind to me in debriefing that the joy overwhelmed me.’
‘Rekka, Rekka.’ Simon’s hug tightened. ‘Bad girl.’
Sharp’s attention was not on the aikido people down on the mats, but on the VIP seating, where the Japanese-Brazilian cousins, the UN senators, were taking their places. Rekka stared, about to ask what was wrong, then realized she was too used to being alone with him. Any reply he made would come straight out of his chest speaker, loud and clear to everyone.
I never thought about private conversation.
Later she would have to ask Poliakov’s advice.
‘You’re not annoyed too much, are you?’ she said to him.
‘Our friend’s ability to fine-tune his synthesized emissions is incredible. He exactly matched the energy resonance of an alien species, meaning us. And in so little time.’
‘He emits human pheromones?’ asked Simon. ‘How is that possible?’
‘Sharp fine-tunes his output molecules, but they’re not human pheromones. Unless you think that humans smell molecules according to their shape, you’ll realize it’s very possible.’
‘Er—’
‘Simon’s expertise lies outside bio sciences,’ said Rekka.
‘Scent receptors respond to patterned electrical resonance - to put it simply, the receptor resonates with the molecule - which is related to molecular shape but is not the same thing. In particular, two different configurations
can smell identical, so long as the energy levels are correct.’
‘Oh,’ said Simon.
Rekka snuggled back against him. Down below, a thin Japanese man, also in white jacket and long black skirt - actually it was a split skirt, she realized - walked to the centre of the mats, knelt down and sat back on his heels. The others, Gwillem included, followed suit. The Japanese man clapped his hands several times, in a careful way that denoted ritual, and everybody bowed, forehead to mat.
Someone announced the man as Akazawa-sensei, and then the demonstration began, with fifteen pairs of aggressors and defenders. Attackers threw graceful punches or knife-thrusts, then cartwheeled to the ground as defenders became an axis of rotation, using angular momentum to put their attacker down.
Rekka remembered Sharp’s people, huge bannermen rushing toward her campsite, and thought that perhaps real violence was something messier and more brutal than the nice display below.
On the other hand, Akazawa-sensei had enormous presence, and a centred composure that perhaps he could maintain under any pressure. Sharp looked at him, then at Rekka, then gave a nod: a learned human gesture.
He smells the charisma.
Part of what the Chinese called chi, the part relating to aura or charisma, must be simply pheromonal emissions. Rekka had never thought of it before. The rest was balanced muscular tensegrity - her years of yoga taught her that. Aiki discipline for Pilots was to enhance their spatial awareness, to open up their proprioreceptive senses.
Gwillem attacked Akazawa-sensei with a wooden knife, but there was a blur of motion, and Gwillem lay on the mat, while Akazawa-sensei raised the knife in the air. Rekka had not seen the weapon changing hands.
The demo concluded with what looked like a free-for-all, Akazawa-sensei the calm, moving centre of the storm while attackers flew in all directions. Afterwards, Rekka clapped as hard as anyone, calling out approval, though she could not match the volume of Simon’s cheers.
Afterwards, as they walked outdoors - Poliakov sure that Sharp would be fine in the bright Arizona sunshine, monitoring his blood chemistry nonetheless - they saw the Higashionna cousins, the UN senators, climbing into a TAV on the tarmac.
Sharp slowed, and so did Rekka, while Poliakov and Simon walked on.
‘Only you can hear me?’ The voice from Sharp’s speaker was slightly muted, corresponding to subtle scent emission, but louder than a whisper. ‘Is that right?’
‘Only me, for the moment.’
It was hard for Sharp to calculate hearing distance.
‘Why do you not fear them, those two?’
‘Simon and Poliakov?’
‘No. In the device.’
It took her a moment to understand the mistranslation. She pointed towards the TAV, which was starting to move off with the Higashionnas on board.
‘Yes, Rekka. Do you not taste their evil?’
‘Evil?’
‘Can you not smell dark nothing?’
‘I don’t think so. No.’
Sharp turned and stopped. Rekka realized what he was looking at. Around the corner of one building, there was a hint of sandstone that moved, perhaps sulphurous yellow beyond.
The Zajinets.
Then they were not there.
What—?
It wasn’t fast movement; it was something else. But then the aiki demo had seemed like magic.
‘I can’t believe it.’
The Zajinets had been standing there; now they were not.
TWENTY-FIVE
LABYRINTH, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
In the language called Aeternum, the word for office still existed, but it was marked as deprecated, meaning that at some point, in some future upgrade, the word would be dropped from the core vocabulary. Language affected thought, and change was necessary - in this trivial case, because people had long been able to work anywhere - but the Logos Academy was careful with semantic evolution. Pilots occasionally followed extreme-geodesic emergency flightpaths, including hellflights, and might return centuries later than departure, relative to Labyrinthine mean-geodesic time. Catching up with the language, through prepared upgrade paths, was a key part of arrival procedures.
Still, Max considered this golden room to be his office.
‘I need to be sure,’ he said out loud. ‘I need to know what’s there.’
=You know what Carl Blackstone saw.=
‘Twenty-five years ago.’
=An insignificant duration, on these timescales.=
‘I still need corroboration.’
=And will you tell the Council?=
‘Why do you mention them?’
But now the golden walls were silent. Max ran a hand over his shaven scalp, then folded his massive forearms, revealed by his pushed-up sleeves. When people called Labyrinth a mysterious city, they had no idea how true that was.
He rubbed his face, then gestured a small holospace into being, and said: ‘Will you fetch Avril Tarquelle now, please?’
‘Sir,’ said the Pilot in the image.
The holo winked out.
He strode to the doorway, where the wall melted open, then stood with arms folded, beneath the archway, observing the outer chamber. At first it was empty. Then slabs of nothingness rotated through the air, and a young red-headed female Pilot stepped out of the disturbance.
‘How’s it going, boss?’
‘Very good, Avril. How’s your ship?’
‘Beautiful, as always.’
‘Good. Come in.’
The inner office - what word would he use when the language eventually changed? - was shielded against direct geometric shortcuts. If an enemy appeared in the outer chamber, Max could wall himself off. Not that such a thing had ever happened. This was Ascension Annexe, and well protected, inside a city-world that itself was safe.
Call it professional paranoia. In the field, such habits saved lives.
‘Relax.’ Seats morphed into place. ‘You’ve been feeling all right?’
Avril did not sit.
‘If you’re talking about Powell, sir, then I’m well over that bastard. Begging the commodore’s pardon.’
Max laughed.
‘Granted. So sit down, will you?’
‘Sir.’
He gestured a holovolume into being. Avril examined the data, checking the trajectory figures, then sucked in a breath.
‘The galactic core?’
‘You see why I need a good Pilot.’
‘I’ll say.’
Few ordinary humans appreciated the complexity and risk associated with moving between universes. Scarcely anyone understood how the presence of great mass or energy made either continuum more difficult to leave or enter accurately. It was the difference between parachuting on to a playing-field-sized mattress versus a jagged mountain peak, all razor-edged outcrops and fatal precipices, buffeted by storms.
‘All right.’ Avril finally closed the holovolume down. ‘I know where I’m going. What do I when I get there?’
‘Take a peek, and come straight back.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Full stealth. Observe, record, bug out.’
‘And no one the wiser?’
‘Right.’
‘Then I’m gone.’
Max walked her to the door. In the outer chamber, she summoned a fastpath rotation, stepped inside, and departed the way she arrived.
For a long time, Max just stared. Then he slammed a hammer-fist against the wall.
‘Fuck.’
He went back in and sat.
=She has no family, no current relationships.=
‘Avril’s a terrific Pilot, and her ship is fast.’
=Is that the only reason you chose her?=
Max lowered his chin and clasped one hand across his face, fingertips pressing hard into his own skin. Then he let go and looked up.
