by John Meaney
Later, as they filed out of the refectory chamber, Tom felt a light touch on his forearm.
‘Hey, one-arm. I’m Grax, and I ain’ t never had no cripple.’
And the wide square hand was trying to grab him but Tom moved faster, an inner wrist block with perfect torque, power from the tension in fist and abdomen, and the large man had spun in a half-circle before he realized what was happening.
Tom whipped forwards, palm-heel to forehead, and Grax’s large head bounced off the white stone wall with a dull thud, and the angry light faded from his eyes as he slumped slowly to the floor.
‘Sorry,’ said Tom.
Zel and Fashoma were watching open-mouthed, with mingled fear and sorrow, but when Tom thought about what had just happened he felt no true regret.
Basic logosophy included a neurocognitive model of human behaviour, which lay at the heart of logotropical design: those tailored molecules built from pseudatoms designed to educate anyone who had been through the disciplines. Because consciousness is a thin layer upon the thousand-personality community which resides in every human brain: a strange illusion which seems to initiate action, but results from electrical changes which take place a third of a second before volition.
Tom had experienced Zen Neuronal Coding before he had ever dreamed of attending the Sorites School.
It was the hand which blocked.
The fighting technique had been automatic, astounding in its remembered clarity purely because conscious thought had no involvement in the action.
Paradox, duality—because sometimes it is the mind which defines the body.
Even in archaic cultures, there were individuals with fully developed multiple personalities. Depending on which daemon was momentarily in charge, the individual’s body could change dramatically: shifting eye colour, banishing or resurrecting serious diseases.
And, as he stepped over Grax’s slumbering body—the big man now emitting stentorian snores, as though gentle sleep instead of sudden knockout had fallen upon him—Tom wondered just how much of his own life was illusion.
Elva.
‘Nemo.’ It was Fashoma’s voice, but he ignored it.
You still live, inside the Seer’s vision...
Somehow, this was a defining moment.
As Tom walked away, blinking, he knew that there was only one chance of retaining sanity and meaning in his life, and that was to focus purely on a single goal amid the whirling possibilities and complexities woven through the world, yet with no hint or inkling as to how he could possibly find her.
~ * ~
17
NULAPEIRON AD 3418
Fashoma had been quiet all morning, and was nowhere to be seen now. Zel clasped Tom’s wrist in farewell, before handing over a small satchel of supplies.
‘Someday, perhaps,’ said Tom, ‘I’ll be able to help someone else, the way you’ve helped me.’
He was echoing a promise he’d once made to Vosie: another woman who had saved him. It was a debt he had not yet repaid.
‘That’s the only kind of recompense I’d consider.’ Zel smiled. ‘You’d be a natural, should you ever decide to join the Church.’
Multi-threaded mantras sounded intriguing—one of their core practices—but Tom knew that was not enough.
‘Take care of yourselves.’
He hitched the satchel over his right shoulder, and set off along a plain-walled tunnel.
For twenty-three days he walked, making better progress as the last of his injuries healed, until he was trekking thirty kilometres daily between dawnshift and darkfall. Through crystal caverns with spilling waterfalls, foaming white into bottomless black pools; along ghostly, empty boulevards and gallerias where his footsteps sounded hollow, in long-deserted realms—though Nulapeiron held ten billion souls (and even that was not common knowledge among the plebeian classes), in previous centuries there had been many more—and among the crowded thoroughfares and busy markets of three different demesnes, Tom made his solitary way.
But there were not always public water pools or Aqua Halls to drink from, and his dwindling supply of low-denomination cred-needles meant he could not continue travelling this way. Too many residential tunnels required loyal-subject earstud IDs before allowing people entrance to eateries and hostels.
He could sleep wrapped up in his plain travelling cloak, but there was no avoiding the need for food and water.
He found himself standing one day in a darkened rocky place where reality shifted, a tunnel exit before him suddenly plunging out of existence, while two narrow clefts sprang into being. Tom stumbled, falling painfully onto one knee, wondering whether he had finally lost his mind.
Then everything around him flickered into a third, new configuration.
Holo illusion?
But he snapped his fingers, and although his hearing was not astute enough for echo location, the rocks before him seemed solid. He picked up a tiny pebble, threw it, and it bounced from hard, gnarled rockface and clattered to the ground.
Then light and shadow flickered again, and when Tom had re-oriented his perceptions he was surrounded by tall, bulky housecarls: muscular warriors helmed in polished bronze, allegiance cords knotted round short tunic sleeves.
Their morphospears seemed to gleam with an inner creamy light, sharp cutting blades positioned centimetres from Tom’s unguarded throat.
‘Do you have business’—gravelly voice, invisible helm-wrapped expression—‘within the Bronlah Hong?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tom.
His missing arm was the mark of a thief, but there were other ways to lose a limb and these were warriors. The carls made no attempt to insult or brutalize Tom as they led him through a series of confusing tunnels—‘Maze of Light and Dark,’ someone muttered—as the source of reality shifting became clear.
It was simple but effective: strong light sources which flicked off and on at random. Contrast produced black shadows, hiding all detail; immediate change created the illusion of total reconfiguration.
The housecarls marched steadily, surrounding Tom, unaffected by the dizziness which threatened to pitch him forward every time the illumination changed.
In an interview chamber, they left him with a wizened man called Shihol Grenshin, whose skullcap incorporated woven aphorisms in a dozen languages. The Bronlah Hong, he explained, was a trading house with long-distance commercial relationships stretching across three sectors, and they were always—when Tom asked about recruitment—looking for experienced merchanalysts with good linguistic skills.
‘Sukhazhitne na’Noighlín?’ he asked casually, in a thick buzz of Noileenski consonants, and seemed satisfied with Tom’s reply: ‘Nique parovihm.’ Just a little.
There was an aptitude test, which consisted of holomapping cargo distribution and transport requests into complex labyrinths of tesseract-labelled arcs and nodes. To someone of Tom’s background it was too easy, and he deliberately introduced errors into his model.
It would not do to advertise his logosophical training.
‘Hmm.’ Master Grenshin walked around the model, fingering his chin, sunk deep in thought. ‘Interesting perspective here’—he pointed—‘and that minimax could save us money right now. Real credit, I mean.’
Then he turned and shuffled away, long robe scuffing the dusty floor, and it took Tom a moment to realize that he had got the job.
That evening he accepted a towel and a blanket from a square-faced woman, who pushed them across her pale blue counter top, then directed him towards the male workers’ tunnel.
‘Third sleeping alcove on the left,’ she said. ‘Meals are paid for directly from your tendaily credit, in case they didn’t tell you. And what’—turning to her small holopad and gesturing for dictation mode—‘is your name, young man?’
‘Gazhe, er ...’ Tom coughed, throat dry and head pounding with dehydration. ‘Gazhe Fernah, ma’am.’
Something in his tone softened her expression.
‘There’
s an aqua chamber to your right.’ She pointed. ‘Use as much as you like.’
That first night, alone in his alcove behind heavy drapes, he opened up the stallion talisman, revealing the mu-space crystal secreted inside, but did not dare to operate it. He had no idea what emissions it might produce in its damaged state, or what kind of surveillance the Bronlah Hong’s internal security teams had in place.
But he fell asleep with the talisman clutched in his fist, and dreamed he walked beneath Terra’s wide blue open skies, on Alpine slopes with sweet green grass brushing against his ankles, and woke tense with disappointment in the real world next morning.
His new colleagues were pleasant enough: self-effacing Mivkin, who spoke with a slight lisp and showed Tom around; Jasirah, small and dark-skinned, her smile bright but infrequent, who told Tom after a few days that he should not chat with the carls who were on security duty.
‘Not the done thing.’ She half-whispered, as if she were sharing a valuable confidence. ‘A matter of status, you know.’
Then she nodded as though accepting grateful thanks he had not in fact offered.
Later that afternoon, having strung together a sequence of shipment plans in a profit-optimizing fashion which owed nothing to the Hong’s usual algorithms, Tom walked out into the unsettling tunnels which formed the Maze of Light and Dark, and watched the shifting colours and sliding darkness.
‘Makes me sick just looking at it.’ The amused voice came from behind him.
‘Hi, Horush.’ Tom nodded at the young housecarl. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘Old Lafti’—Horush was referring to the carls’ master-at-arms—‘said you’ve requested permission to go running here.’
So much for secrecy.
‘I know it sounds crazy—’
‘He reckons you might be a mad bastard.’ Horush removed his helmet, revealing creamy brown features, and rubbed his hand through his black cropped hair. ‘Which is a bit rich, coming from him.’
Horush was gangly, hard-working, twenty SY old but with the appearance of someone younger, with a strangely vulnerable, almost girlish smile. If there was anyone less likely to develop the berserker rage which carls held in such reverential esteem, Tom had yet to meet them.
‘I’ll take Lafti’s remark,’ he said, ‘as a compliment.’
It was five tendays later, of uninspiring work days but increasing vitality in his physical training, that Tom was finally invited to lunch: formal luncheon with Master Trader Bronlah. As Tom left the work chamber in Master Grenshin’s company, Jasirah’s gaze followed him, swollen with jealousy. For three Standard Years she had been indentured here, her contract annually renewed, yet this honour had never come her way.
It was a privilege Tom could have done without.
The merchant was pot-bellied, a white goatee framing his small red mouth, and he sat cross-legged on a floating lev-cushion at the head of the low table, while his employee vassals, Tom among them, knelt in twin rows facing each other, sitting back on their heels on the rough matting which covered the greystone floor.
Rich burgundy tapestries decorated the walls, and golden glowglobes floated everywhere. The food bowls were of deep red and blue, so dark they appeared black except when direct light revealed their true lustre; the food itself was varied and multicoloured (indicating a nutritious range of bioflavins) and superb in quality.
There was no idle conversation beneath Harson Bronlah’s impassive stare. When Tom attempted to make a remark about the coming Anzhafest holiday, and the airblooms decorating the corridors, Bronlah looked at him in near-autistic silence, killing the pleasantries stone dead.
Miserable bastard.
But later, during the meal, when Tom mentioned the new reoptimization algorithm which balanced content versus context in a time-dependent fashion, working with many-dimensioned manifolds, Bronlah asked several penetrating questions. Afterwards, though, with that topic exhausted, Bronlah fell back into his emotionless, unspeaking state.
Then, as dessert was served, the man next to Tom leaned over and whispered: ‘Senior staff only, for the next part.’
Opposite Tom, a young (though silver-haired) woman called Draquelle was already rising to her feet. She nodded to Tom, causing the long white scars along her face to ripple with reflected light.
He rose and followed her.
As they were halfway down the exit passage, a slim hand beckoned from a shadowed side entrance.
‘Could you attend to that?’ asked Draquelle. ‘I really need to get back to work.’
‘All right.’
It was a vassal who had signalled, a slim Zhongguo Ren woman, and she smiled without warmth and led the way past dark alcoves, through velvet drapes into a wide low-ceilinged round chamber, artfully lit by glowclusters, where an old man was reclining nude on a couch at the chamber’s centre.
Tom was taken aback, until he noticed another woman with pale oriental features, robed in elegant gold-chased silk, constructing a holosculpture of the old man, with deft scoops and caresses of her fingertips in empty air.
‘The secret of truly mastering a thing,’ she said without looking away from her subject, ‘is to teach that thing to another.’
Long years of servitude taught Tom to hide his smile.
I’m here for an art lesson?
The vassal touched his arm, and whispered: ‘Madam Bronlah has another sensor field initialized over here.’
“Thank you.’
‘There, and there.’ She guided Tom’s wrist. ‘Oh, that’s marvellous.’
Immersed in the moment, Tom watched—it was all about seeing, he realized: focusing attention on the old man rather than his own movements—wiped a final control gesture, and stepped back from the sensor-field.
It was minimalist and ghostly, but it captured a certain feel, and Madam Bronlah was as pleased as he was.
‘You have real talent,’ she said, though her own work was exquisite, more than Tom could ever hope to achieve.
‘My thanks.’ Tom gave a courtly bow.
But her breath hissed inwards at his gesture, and he knew he had revealed a nicety of noble protocol which a lowly merchanalyst should know nothing of.
She was much younger than her husband, and very beautiful, but those dark eyes which had been so beguiling now masked her thoughts, as he backed out and took the nearest exit.
In his hurry to get out, he had taken a different passageway, but it curved in the right general direction.
When he stepped out of the passage, he was back where he had started from; but the dining chamber was now in semi-darkness, almost deserted. Two men were frozen in a tableau of unspoken tension, while a lacquered shellac box floated in the air between them.
Master Trader Bronlah still sat upon his lev-cushion. Facing him, cross-legged on the floor where the low table had stood before, was a Zhongguo Ren man wearing a heavy surcoat and a round pointed hat with long ear flaps. His hands rested upon his knees, and small carved steel plates were set into his knuckles: art and weaponry combined.
‘Pardon me.’ Tom bowed. ‘Nĭmen hăo.’
The oriental man—surely a representative of a secret society—stared at Tom without speaking.
‘Are you still here?’ The master trader scowled.
‘I was asked to assist, sir ...’
Tom backed away, but not before he had seen the Zhongguo Ren adjust his tunic, caught the sight of flashing sapphire at his throat.
I’ve seen that colour before.
The blue fluid in which his boyhood friend Kreevil had been imprisoned, with other criminals. His friend Zhao-Ji, too, in later years... And the lightning in the Seer’s chamber. It had something to do with Oracles, though in what regard he had no idea.
Tom left, knowing that he had learned nothing which should put him in jeopardy—many trading houses dealt with Zhongguo Ren secret societies, after all—but feeling an unsettled emptiness, which disturbed him on several levels.
Perhaps it was just
the reminder that there was more to life than mundane work, that true magic has always lain at reality’s heart while social convention is both as real and illusory as the chemical imperatives which rule ants in a nest—the queen’s pheromones creating commands which are absolute but only in that context—and that while he was wasting time in obscurity, there were Oracles and Seers and strange powers following their own intangible and complex purposes.
And the only woman who could bring meaning to his life was somewhere in the world, possibly in danger, waiting to be found.
