by John Meaney
I pushed too hard.
Too late to undo that now.
Finally, someone had removed the bed on which Anne-Louise had died, leaving empty floor space with the stains cleaned away. Whether they had taken the bed to spare her feelings or for more forensic tests, Ro had no idea.
As evening fell, she sat down cross-legged on the fibrous carpeting—forcing herself to occupy the same space as that poor bloodied corpse—then closed her eyes, bringing her focus inside herself, acknowledging her conflicting Luís-centred emotions but trying to let go.
Mu-space. . .
And there was the glory of her vision: the infinite fractal-dimensioned wonder of that other continuum which she had dreamed of, or seen for real, deep inside the dream-quest she had not known she was going to make.
But there was an intrusion, inside her mystic vision. A chesspiece upon a board. A king, standing one row removed from the edge. She tried to banish it, dispel the sight, return her mental focus to fractal infinity ...
Then her eyes snapped open, and she knew what the vision meant.
‘Not the second row. The seventh, counting from the other side.’
Floating, above poor Anne-Louise’s strangled corpse.
A message.
Perhaps Anne-Louise had been playing chess when the intruder was suddenly there, and the ligature was tightening round her throat before she even realized that her world was about to end, decades before her time. Maybe it was from a story scene she had been working on, the kind of clue a storyfact might leave for someone else to decipher, thinking that others might perceive the world the same way as she did.
Or perhaps it was just a final act of desperation by some small random-firing neural shard of a once-rational brain, already fragmenting as the end drew near. A message which could be formed with a tiny movement of the fingertips, the last gesture she would ever make.
A twitch before dying.
‘Position K7. Why didn’t I see it?’
Because Anne-Louise was Quebecoise, and in extremis everybody, no matter how linguistically talented, counts and prays in their first—their parents’—tongue.
Not kay-seven, the piece’s position, but ka-sept. Pronounced: cassette.
Like the old-fashioned crystal-cassette on which Anne-Louise had kept all her primary work.
‘Hey, purty lady. Howya doin’?’
Subtle overlay: Clint Shade, Arizona Ranger, seemed to be sitting back on Ro’s easy chair and crossing his ankles. Highlights made the cushion appear to depress beneath the holo’s nonexistent weight.
He was an illusion, Anne-Louise’s fictional creation, and he had appeared as soon as Ro inserted the cassette into the holoscribe’s waiting socket. But he looked so real, Ro felt she could almost reach out and touch him.
Which she did, slowly, and her fingertips passed through the spectral illusion of his sleeve, as she had expected. But he still looked solid.
‘What,’ she asked softly, ‘are you doing out of context?’
The Ranger tipped up his hat, and his eyes were steel-grey, and gleaming.
‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘I was thinkin’ you’d never ask.’
For a long moment, there was nothing Ro could say.
Then, ‘Explain that, please.’
‘I have come across’—ah have come acrawst—‘from the other side. The real world. Can’t say’—with a glance around the room—‘as I like this one too much.’
Ro shook her head, not knowing what to say.
If she took the conversation along a route the programming could not deal with, the holo would vanish and she would almost certainly lose whatever information was hidden here.
‘What,’ she said slowly, ‘can you tell—’
‘The answer’—he tipped his stetson back down to hide his eyes—‘is in Shadowville, fer sure. But there ain’t no shortcuts, darlin’. Ya gotta see for yourself.’
‘I don’t—’
But Ro was talking to an empty room.
Dusty street…
[[Partial immersion: all senses engaged, but not to full extent.]]
Dusty street, and the round movement of Querelle—a virtual Quarrel—between her thighs.
[[Trickle-stimulus only, by cerebellar induction: she wanted to feel the v-cological world; but reality remained her anchor.]]
There are swing doors, a dark saloon.
And the sound of honky-tonk, a badly tuned piano.
Ro smiles and [[shifting awkwardly on the floor, in reality]] swings her leg back, and dismounts.
Then she stands in the dusty main street, hands upon her hips, regarding the frontier town around her.
Lounging cowboys, forearms resting on hitching rails to which their horses are tethered. One of them, his eyes pale and expressionless, spits liquid brown tobacco into the dirt; his gaze never leaves Ro.
Respectable women, parasols held high, pass quickly by. Overhead, from two half-open windows, saloon girls make conversation; occasionally, cold interest flickers as they recognize a man walking on the boards below.
[[Ro gestured for the ongoing scenario to pause. For a moment, she considered ending it totally.
There was only one drama on the crystal cassette, but it was immense, branching through an incredible number of possible logic-paths depending on the viewer’s responses. If there was some clue to Anne-Louise’s killer buried in here, it was going to take a huge effort to find it.
But already she wondered whether there was a hint, in the name of the virtual horse she—as the story’s viewpoint observer—appeared to be riding in that nonexistent dusty town. For the horse was called Querelle (and Ro knew that, in reality, Anne-Louise had rented Quarrel from Alice Bridcombe’s stables more than once); while the old technology on which the cassette was based had been called queral: quantum-neural networks threaded through a semi-organic substrate.
Or perhaps it was coincidence, and this was too early in the storyline to tell what, exactly, was going on.
She gestured.
‘Resume narrative.’]]
Stagecoach.
It comes to a halt before the hotel. The horses are dust-covered and panting. The driver’s face is lined with anxiety.
Two young men come from the hotel, chatting cheerily. One climbs to the stagecoach roof, begins throwing luggage down to his waiting partner. Meanwhile, the stagecoach’s door opens—creaking, a little unsteady — and the passengers begin to dismount.
Ro assumes that this is where the main plot thread begins.
What had the Ranger said?
“The answer’s in Shadowville.’ With a laconic grin: ‘But there ain’t no shortcut, darlin’. Ya gotta see for yourself.’
But there is no sign of him here, in this part of the story.
A finely gowned woman steps down to the dusty ground. Next, a fleshy, well-groomed man with dark moustache and fine grey hat [[and <
The agent tips his hat to Ro.
‘Pleasure to make your acquaintance. I’m—’
[[‘Cut.’ Ro stopped the flow. ‘I really don’t have time for this.’]]
The dusty western town stands still.
No-one could possibly have the time to play out every variation. Life was way too short.
If Anne-Louise’s ghost expected Ro to spend days in her fictional world, like some dumb character in a drama within a melodrama, she was going to be very disappointed.
Time for a more direct approach.
‘Sorry, Ranger Shade.’ She opened up her lowest-level debugging displays. ‘I’m afraid this is going to hurt.’
And later, when she realized just how complex Anne-Louise’s story was, there was only one comment to add:
‘Shit. This writing business is harder than it looks.’
&n
bsp; The story’s framework supported evolution of the teleological kind: directed towards a specific climactic goal. The fractal-consistency milieu generators were unlike anything Ro had worked with; the allegory engine, with its quotient of real philosophical concepts to be embedded within the story, was beyond her understanding.
And as for characters: Ranger Shade was frozen, his code modules splayed open like dissected organs in Ro’s analytical holovolumes.
‘Three levels, drill in. Continue five clockpulses.’
A hundred tesseracts flared: illuminating the Shade persona’s internal state variables, tracking the operations through breakpoints.
‘Stop. Compare shadow.’
The system now showed two sets of holovolumes: two snapshots, taken five nanoseconds apart in the story’s v-cology.
There was a cliché-satire factor tree: simple weighting coefficients could flip the obviously banal into the hundred per cent subversive. No big trick either way: a simple matter of accepting or twisting each labelled stereotype as it was instantiated.
From stupid bestseller to profound literature, with a handful of numbers. Neat.
Ro checked the settings that Anne-Louise had picked, found them ranging the intermediate values with occasional wild surprises, in accordance with some convoluted fuzzy algorithm.
Throughout the core, there lurked century-old inherited code fragments, written in the evolution-oriented objectilogical language known as Chocolate. Once globally popular, now consigned to the same historical niche as assembler programming: as out-of-date as quill and parchment writing.
Some of the Chocolate daemons were buried so deeply that they were like human mitochondria: fundamental components of every cell, which at some point in bio-evolutionary prehistory had been a separate species of bacteria. The complexity was staggering; Ro could only be thankful that the story’ s v-cology was standalone, devoid of links to the greater infraclusters and ‘warenations of Every Ware.
Querelle. Was the horse emulation’s name significant?
‘The answer’s in Shadowville.’ Maybe. ‘But there ain ‘t no shortcut.’
Parallel-trace debuggers tore through Ranger Shade’s lifetime code.
Ah ...What about this?
She had found one strange, recurrent insertion. Recurring, but anomalous. It disobeyed some of the natural-law context/continuity rules which governed the story’s other scenes, as defined in the master look-up matrix. And it occurred only when there were no other characters in Shade’s virtual vicinity.
Did a clue he in the software code which represented this one character’s actions in all possible scenarios? In what would have been Ranger Shade’s thoughts and memories, had he been a real, living being?
Anomalies...
Ro picked one scene at random.
‘Let’s take a look.’
She flipped modes, became an invisible, passive observer.
Activated playback.
‘Ah, Juanita…’
Clint Shade, leaning against the hitching rail outside his simple farmhouse, looks at the sparkling yet insubstantial figure of the woman beside him. The whisky tumbler in his left hand is almost empty.
‘My dearest man.’ Outlines of distant saguaro show through her spectral figure, her wistful smile. ‘Are you troubled, love?’
‘Yeah.’ He looks away. ‘Nothing new, huh?’
‘Anything you would care to share with your wife?’
Shade laughs. A strange sound in the flat desert air.
‘My dead wife, you mean. Shouldn‘t I let you rest in peace ?’
For a moment, stillness.
Then, ‘There’s little enough peace for me here.’ Her voice is almost a sigh. ‘You know that, my love.’
‘I know.’
He glances back at his home, then turns to stare at the flat red horizon, layered with the mesa’s purple stain.
‘What’s your score so far, Clint?’
‘Two, since you ask.’
‘And the others?’
A pause.
‘I’ll find ‘em all, don’t worry.’ He looks at her beautiful dark eyes. ‘I promised you that.’
‘I know.’
Clint sips from his whisky tumbler.
‘So why are you visiting me, Juanita? It don’t happen less’n there’s trouble.’
‘Ah, my love.’ She tilts her head to one side. ‘You know, just before they pinned me down, they... One of them called me a wetback, you know?’ She blinks. ‘I told him I’d never seen the Rio Grande, much less swum across it. He just looked puzzled.’
[[Ro stopped the playback, used her infostrand to check the defunct racial epithet’s origin—from swimming across the river from Mexico: confirmed—then resumed the story.]]
‘Cruelty comes from ignorance.’ Shade’s hand rests on the hard walnut grip of his low-slung Colt .45. ‘Least I know my limitations.’ His forefinger rests briefly on the slender trigger. ‘And my strengths.’
‘So what’s really troubling you, Clint?’
Silence. Then: ‘There’s a stranger in town, darlin’.’
Overhead, a lone eagle wheels.
‘And?’
‘Pinkerton ‘s are interested. And that renegade creep, Slim Thatcher. An’ he’s part of Sacchi’s little net of raiders, I’m sure of it.’
Juanita grows strangely silent, even for a ghost.
‘Mebbe Sacchi gave the orders his own self, about what happened to you, an’ maybe not...’
As his eyes harden, dazzling sparks begin to evanesce about Juanita’s form.
‘But I’ve some questions ‘-he draws so fast the Colt seems to leap into his hand, then slowly reholsters—‘that need some answers.’
Sunset is upon the world, orange light dripping across the desert, as Juanita’s ghost swirls apart, fades into insubstantiality, is gone.
‘They killed you, my darlin’. They won’t get the stranger.’
He is still leaning against the rail as sunset slides into night.
Ro flicked off the display.
Sacchi’s net... Zajinet?
Too facile, too contrived. Wasn’t it? But: Pinkerton’s... Official agencies? The police?
Perhaps she had assumed too much, thought that there was more encrypted within the story’s fabric than Anne-Louise had in fact put there.
And as for the stranger ...Anne-Louise herself? Or someone else?
I’m the only newcomer in DistribOne.
For a long time, Ro stared at the space where Anne-Louise’s body had lain. Then she shivered, and abruptly stood up, knowing she could bear the empty accusing room no longer, and went to look for human company.
But when she returned, much later, the crystal-cassette was gone.
<
~ * ~
26
NULAPEIRON AD 3419
Orange fire, red-hot liquid.
It spat.
Crackled, burned.
A glowing blob of magma fell near Tom, but he did not flinch. He remained in lotus, seated atop his folded cloak on the dark blue ledge, while the lava pool below swirled and glowed, bubbled and flowed.
Thinking of nothing.
Dark Fire...
Thinking of everything.
‘Come back tomorrow,’ Lord Sumneriv had told him at the med centre. “They’ll let you talk to him then.’
‘And you?’
‘Oh, my good Lord Corcorigan.’ Sumneriv sniffed from a tiny pomander ring upon his little finger. ‘There is very little I have to say to you.’
‘Whatever you wish.’
Tom had walked past the chamber where Viscount Trevalkin lay submersed in healing aerogel. In the antechamber beyond, where relatives of other patients waited, a strangely self-congratulatory tricon was floating:
Thanks to our health awareness programmes, we are pleased to announce a significant drop in mortality rates throughout the stratum.
Tom suppressed a laugh, for those worried relatives’ sake. Humankind
’s mortality rate had been one hundred per cent since the species began, and he foresaw no decrease any time soon.
