Context

by John Meaney

  He—it—took the control ring from the mewling woman’s finger, squinted, saw something else—metal, pretty: horse—and tugged it off the bad man’s corpse. Slipped the bauble over his, its, own neck.

  Good...

  Ten burning paces.

  Move.

  Held up the ring, and the flesh wall folded back.

  Then, hunched over with cramps and pain, naked body coated with shck warm blood, the half-conscious primate stumbled through the acid-coated opening, into the cold stone corridor beyond.

  Move now.

  ~ * ~

  15

  NULAPEIRON AD 3418

  Naked, trembling, the wounded unthinking being called Tom Corcorigan moved, hid shivering in an alcove at the sound of voices, stumbled out when they had gone. The conscious rational being could not have moved with such desperate, effective awareness; but the Corcorigan-thing sensed knots of humanity ahead—from subtle cues only the deep reptilian senses could work with—and avoided them.

  Jade corridors, marble halls.

  Move.

  Uniforms, voices and ...

  Go ... vibration.

  Spiral staircase all of stone: cold relief beneath his bare acid-burned feet as he ran downwards.

  And then a roar which filled the air.

  It was huge and bronze: a vast cargo train which, stationary, stretched the length of the great loading platform and still reached invisibly into the dark tunnel fore and aft.

  Wordless fear. An unreasoning desire to escape—deeper than emotion: a primitive drive at the organism’s cellular level. Crouched naked behind a pillar, shuddering now.

  Pain.

  Ignore.

  Rolling spheres of raw, stinging flesh.

  See them now.

  Hundreds of stevedores were at work, marshalling the things with wicked stun staves, keeping their distance. A dozen, two dozen great flesh-spheres -red and glistening wet with exuded toxins—rolled down brass-coloured ramps, lined up in formation upon the platform.

  Brought here by bronze cargo train, destined to line more torture chambers. Inserted in place, they would expand to cover any chamber’s walls, pulsing in hunger for the prisoner-morsels which would be fed to them.

  Perhaps some rational fragment in the escaped creature’s mind wondered what was happening here, deep in the prosperous Aurineate Grand’aume; but non-rational awareness was filled with a more immediate knowledge so deep it defined reality: time to leave or die.

  A flesh-sphere rolled past, with a soft, liquid sucking motion, followed by white-faced stevedores who looked as though they would rather be anywhere else but here.

  Shining. Silver.

  He frowned, grasping after the thought.

  Then it came—ring—and the near-mindless thing which had been Tom Corcorigan held up the captured control ring, clenched in his hand. And the flesh-sphere veered in its path, away from the hidden ring-holder, and the stevedores jumped but too late.

  One of them screamed, but it was his mate who fell back, face already half-digested by pungent acid.

  Escape vector: clear.

  Time to run.

  He crossed the platform, sprinting fast, then threw himself forward, tucking into a ball at the last moment and rolling clear. He dropped into darkness, fell, rolled once more.

  Sharp stones, darkness. Distant shouts—cries for medics, not for soldiers.

  Ignore.

  He was underneath the platform’s edge, and he moved quickly now, towards the front of the train, moving by instinct. Into the black tunnel, where the long leading cars had already been unloaded.

  Membrane...

  He clawed his way through, hoisting himself inside the cold empty car where the air lay flat and dead. Hard, the floor. Chilling to the bone.

  Relief, after acid burns.

  Then a howling, a lurch forwards, and inertia tipped his naked form across the lightless car’s interior, then nothing.

  The comatose organism whimpered once as the train picked up speed, a rocking motion as the long cars rode their massive sound wave through passageways in solid rock. The naked, frail, injured being hunched itself into a foetal curve, sliding ever deeper into shock, bringing the life process shutdown which can save the body or destroy, and remained that way until the silence came.

  ~ * ~

  16

  NULAPEIRON AD 3418

  Rasping wounded-animal sounds. Pitiful, crawling ...

  The noise came from Tom’s own throat; he was the wounded creature, crawling in darkness. Trembling, unsure where he might be.

  Get out.

  Something in his grip, a stanchion, and he hauled himself upright. Taking cautious steps forward—his acid-stripped soles, raw and weeping fluid, adhered to the freezing metallic floor; gritting his broken teeth, he tugged them free—then stumbled forward, door-membrane sliding across his naked skin. Cool liquid draughts swirled around him, and an involuntary sneeze convulsed him, pain clawing his stomach and fresh blood-flow starting.

  The stone platform was grey and dingy, and quite deserted. Areas of blue-tinged light slid at random, from cracked glow-globes slowly moving through the air.

  He fell.

  Yellow fluorescence burst in his eyes, disintegrating the Tom-awareness. But still he crawled ...and this time the thought pieces coalesced, re-forming, and though it was reflex which caused him to grab a rust-streaked pillar and haul himself upright, it was Tom Corcorigan again who stood there, swaying on his torn, painful feet.

  Pain.

  Narrow maintenance tunnel: round entrance at waist height, wide enough to crawl through.

  Use the pain.

  Forced himself inside.

  He moved on hand and knees, head rocking with every push forward, trying not to think of the grime infecting his sticky wounds. Just pushing—

  Stop.

  Almost toppled into space.

  Hand clawing into a gap between blackened stones, he hung on at the tunnel’s end, leaned forward. A transverse tunnel, wide but ill-lit, ran past below.

  Orange glowglobes circled over cracked plinths on which the remains of shattered statues stood. The women who waited there were resigned or sad, anger and resentment buried by fatigue and pragmatism: the need to attract business. Scant rags, barely concealing too-thin bodies. Narrow shoulders hunched against the cold.

  Three men in rough surcoats walked past, but it was nearly dawnshift and they did not even glance at the women who offered themselves.

  ‘Time’—an older woman with a scarred face—‘we gave it up for the night’

  ‘I only give it up for credit, dearie.’

  The other women were too tired to laugh. One tugged off her earrings, cheap imitation amber which for a moment brought Ralkin Velsivith to mind.

  Just how bright is he?

  They would have sealed off the interrogation levels, and there were so few ways out—could they follow him here?

  Perhaps it was that thought which cost him his balance, as he leaned too far over the edge and tried to crimp his fingers on a worn gargoyle’s head, but too late.

  Falling, surrendering at last to gravity, to Fate ...

  Flagstones rose up to smash him.

  Swaying, the ceiling, where the fluorofungus sprawled, diseased and sickly looking.

  Women. Carrying him.

  Gentle hands.

  ‘My place ...’ Her voice came from a vast distance, though she spoke right by his ear.

  Laid him down, on a rough sacking bed.

  ‘... to the Coders.’

  ‘Later.’

  He lay back, gasping, sliding in and out of consciousness, while rake-thin women with bitter faces and foul mouths and roughened skin and every reason to hate and despise the male gender tended him as carefully as they might a precious newborn child.

  ‘... with us, don’t worry.’

  ‘He was in a bad way.’

  ‘Doesn’t look too ... Is he awake?’

  Sliding away from
the world as they lifted him, gently, and laid him down onto something soft. Grey stone ceiling, drifting past above.

  ‘Here, by the autodoc.’

  ‘And lift...’

  Awoke naked on a pallet. A—thing—was sitting on his bare chest.

  ‘Ah-get off!’

  Black, fist-sized. Its two feet felt like wet rubber; its single yellow eye blinked slowly, once, then stared. Tom raised his hand to swipe it away.

  ‘Don’t harm them.’ A woman’s voice, from an archway to his right.

  Them?

  He raised himself up—the froggly on his chest hopped lower down his stomach, eye wide open—and saw four more of the little things huddled together between his feet.

  ‘You frightened them.’ The woman—white skin, grey dreadlocks—kept her voice low. ‘They were helping you.’

  A pink sheet covered the lower half of Tom’s body, preserving his modesty.

  ‘Sorry, fellows.’ Tom reached out his hand. ‘Hey ...’

  The nearest froggly jumped into reach.

  Tom stroked its round head/body, and the yellow eye squeezed shut with pleasure.

  ‘Look at your stomach.’ The woman, dressed in a pale grey tabard, pointed.

  Glistening, the skin.

  ‘What the Chaos?’ Then, as the froggly’s eye snapped open: ‘OK, little fellow. It’s all right.’

  ‘Their exudate,’ said the woman, ‘has healed your wound.’

  Tom shook his head, looking down at the other four frog-glies watching from the bottom of the pallet.

  ‘Not bad, little ones. I didn’t realize you work for a living.’

  ‘They like you. And the healing’s proceeded fast, too. Somehow’—with a brief smile—‘the two usually go together.’

  ‘Oh.’ Tom did not know how to answer that. ‘Er, thank you.’

  ‘It’s our duty.’

  Her grey tabard was more sumptuous than it first appeared: gloss and matt cells, laid grid-wise, shifting colour as Tom watched. A second later, the pattern shifted once more: an ecology of cellular automata playing out their life-cycles within the woman’s garment.

  A row of tiny ruby stars across her forehead.

  ‘You’re a—’

  ‘Holy Coder, yes.’ A wry upturned grin, and she shook her dreadlocks: tiny woven-in silver skeletons jangled. ‘That’s what they call us.’

  Church of the Incompressible Algorithm.

  Like his interrogator, Muldavika, in the Aurineate Grand’aume.

  But this one was armed with no more than a medical delta-inducer, and she was pointing it at him.

  ‘Sleep,’ she said, and the world went away.

  ‘Looks fit enough, beneath the injuries.’

  ‘There’s only one muscle’—a man’s voice, somewhat high-pitched; educated but not patrician—‘you need to worry about keeping active.’

  ‘That’s not muscle, that’s blood-flow. Oh ...you mean the heart.’

  ‘I’ll say.’

  ‘Ha! As though you were interested.’

  In his sleep, Tom smiled.

  How bright is Velsivith?

  Would he have connected the flesh-sphere incident on the loading platform with Tom’s escape?

  Tom jerked awake. He was on the pallet, but clothed in grey: trews and jerkin, the empty left sleeve tucked in. And his stallion talisman formed a small comforting lump on his chest. He touched it through the cloth.

  But it was not Father’s memory which sprang to mind.

  Velsivith.

  Would Grand’aume Security track him to this place? He was surely out of their realm.

  Tom looked around the bare chamber, the autodoc folded up by the wall. A narrow-shouldered, shaven-headed man was by the doorway, watching him.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  Tom clenched his teeth, fighting down a wave of sickness.

  ‘Never better,’ he said finally.

  ‘That will be a white lie, I hope.’

  ‘Maybe. But I have felt worse.’

  The thin man, whose name was Zel, led Tom into the next chamber. It was a simple hall with plain bench seats facing a low altar, where the woman with grey dreadlocks was polishing a brass thurible which reeked of burnt incense.

  ‘I’m Fashoma.’

  Tom hesitated, then: ‘Call me Nemo.’

  Beside Tom, Zel made a low noise which might have been concealed laughter, and Tom was impressed: a man who knew at least a smattering of archaic tongues.

  ‘Why don’t I’—Zel took hold of Tom’s arm—‘show our new friend around.’

  There was an alms residence, the Hostel Réfacto naBrethren, in which indigent men temporarily lived. Attendance at evening service meant one could receive free dinner afterwards; to sleep in the residence, one had to work during the day.

  The sporegardens were an intricate network of miniature tunnels branching out like capillaries from a central chamber, splashed with yellow and purple dendritic growths. Tiny airplants floated along the channels, their fragile roots dangling, their low-pressure sacs swollen and glistening, trailing exotic scents along the gentle air currents.

  Tom spent the morning in the company of a thin youth called Prax, helping him to load small harvested sporefruits into a basket. After a couple of hours, though, an extended wave of dizziness washed through him, and drops of sweat sprang out across his clammy skin.

  ‘You don’t look so good,’ said Prax.

  ‘I think I agree with you.’

  So he went back, nodded to Zel at the hostel entrance, and made his way to the autodoc chamber. There he lowered himself stiffly onto a bier, then slid swiftly into sleep, not awakening until the evening.

  Then he walked through the clean, plain corridors, pausing before a tiny holo which told him for the first time exactly where he was—Drelario District, Kuig na’Balizhakh, Shichi no Planum: in the Seventh Stratum of Count Yvyel-ir-Balizhakh’s demesne.

  There were two other realms between here and the Aurineate Grand’aume, but they were all part of the same sector, and Tom could not help wondering whether he had placed enough distance between himself and the strange malignant forces that had reached out and demonstrated how tiny individual lives can be washed away by the tidal forces of violence and self-serving legality.

  Perhaps these were strange thoughts for a former member of LudusVitae’s revolutionary movement to be having. Tom rubbed his face hard with the heel of his palm, and walked deeper into the hostel.

  At the rear, Zel and Fashoma were working in the kitchen, making occasional smart remarks—maybe not all religious types had their senses of humour excised at birth, after all -and at ease in each other’s presence. A matter of longstanding camaraderie, nothing more.

  Tom realized then that the peace and harmony which visitors and residents seemed to breathe in with the air were created by these two people, from a spirit of love and charity which transcended rage and jealousy and vengeance.

  And he felt like someone tracking dirt and muck across a newly washed floor; and knew then that he would have to leave before he dragged his violent past and future into their carefully managed lives.

  Not everyone who stayed at the Hostel Réfacto naBrethren shared that same spirit. Later that night, as they dined from plain ceramic tables in the whitewashed refectory, Tom noticed a large grimy man with bloodshot eyes stealing Prax’s dessert. Evidently Zel was on the lookout for such events, because he replaced Prax’s dessert, and spoke in calming tones to both of them.

  But afterwards, when Zel had returned to his own seat, Tom heard part of the cold promise which the large man muttered to Prax. And, as young Prax blanched in sudden realization of his own vulnerability in a hostel with communal dorms, Tom could guess at the promise’s full import.

  Then the large man caught Tom staring, and winked.