Context

by John Meaney

  ‘We have a problem, Tom.’

  And then Tom saw the bronze armlet gleaming on Kraiv’s massive upper arm, and his heart sank.

  Kraiv told the story in all the detail he knew, but at heart it was a simple one. Draquelle, passing an inn by herself, had been unable to resist. Inside, lacking funds—for Kraiv had them in safekeeping—she had pawned her travel-tag to the owner, funding a massive binge.

  At some point, she had bought a round of drinks for every person in the crowded, raucous tavern, while zeitdeco music pulsed, and ganja fumes warmed the darkness.

  This morning, the owner, a man named Lochlen, had agreed to return the travel-tag to Kraiv, in exchange for something of equal value.

  And so Kraiv was indentured as a housecarl to the House Of The Golden Moth, for a period of half a Standard Year.

  ‘Where’s Draquelle now?’

  Kraiv shrugged, then gestured towards the public wash chambers along the tunnel.

  ‘Not just sick, Tom. Too embarrassed to face you.’

  Tom bit his lip.

  ‘What about your debt to Manse Hetreece?’

  ‘That remains.’

  Kraiv’s bulging shoulder muscles looked ready to burst through his tunic. Every day, he lifted massive weights—all three laden packs, one-handed, if he could find no boulders—which Tom could not imagine raising off the ground.

  His self-discipline was inspiring. And he would pay whatever price Horush’s family, in the Manse Hetreece, demanded of him: even his own death.

  And that severity grew more likely, surely, the longer his journey took.

  ‘Does Draquelle deserve it?’ Tom asked.

  But if people had given upon me...

  He raised his hand before Kraiv could speak.

  ‘Forget I said that.’

  Later, Kraiv asked: ‘What about you, Tom? Do you journey on alone, or will you stay here?’

  ‘I don’t know. I...’

  There would be difficulties, without a travel-tag, but perhaps that was not the prime consideration. For there had never been any guarantee that travelling to Corduven’s Academy would bring him closer to his goals.

  Suddenly, he smiled beatifically.

  Why not?

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said.

  In the morning, he slung his small pack over his shoulder, adjusted his cloak, and set out. Avoiding the meditation chambers, he found a public cavern, one side of which was filled by a vast, translucent emerald block, in which complex wave patterns pulsed and propagated.

  He sat down before a small open-fronted daistral house at the cavern’s far end.

  ‘It’s phonon-based,’ said the waitress who brought Tom’s breakfast. ‘Turing-capable, they say.’

  ‘Really?’

  Tom gazed at the block, wondering what computations took place inside, and whether it was aware of the world in which it existed.

  At that moment, a small tawny form leaped across Tom’s table, seized a portion of krilbar, and bounded towards its fellows who had exploded from nowhere.

  ‘Sorry.’ The waitress shooed them away. ‘Them marmies. What a nuisance.’

  The troop of tiny primates boiled across the ground, then leaped upwards, climbing the cavern walls faster than Tom could sprint, and he laughed at the joyful exuberance of their motion.

  Smiling, the waitress went back inside.

  On top of the translucent block, one chattering marmie sat. Then it began to pound the surface with a tiny, very human-looking hand. Tom could see the shivering vibrations it caused.

  Do you dream? he silently asked the computation block. Or have you got a headache now?

  It was almost in a dream-state of his own that Tom rose, placed cred-spindles on the tabletop, picked up his pack and left.

  He was at the cavern’s exit when the waitress’s voice called him back.

  ‘You’ve paid far too much! It only costs—’

  ‘That’s OK.’ Tom’s voice was gentle. ‘I don’t need credit.’

  Not where I’m going.

  There were two monks running, side by side. Tom did not try to run with them; but he noted the direction they went, and followed at an easy walk.

  Soon, beyond a long market place, he found himself standing before a circular, membrane-protected, glistening bronze door. But the membrane dissolved and the door swung inwards at his approach, revealing the courtyard within.

  Orange-clad monks and shaven-headed novitiates were practising a walking meditation.

  There were guardian monks, but they stepped aside as an elder came forward, passing through the walking group without disturbing their movements, and stopped before Tom.

  ‘Sir—’

  Shedding his pack, Tom dropped to his knees.

  It draws me …

  Forehead to the gritty stone, Tom made full obeisance, then sat back on his heels, and spoke without gazing directly at the elder monk’s impassive, stony features.

  ‘I crave permission, an it be your will’—Tom spoke softly—‘to study with the Order.’

  For a moment, he feared the guardians would strike, and turn him away.

  Please...

  But then, miraculously, the elder monk smiled.

  ~ * ~

  28

  TERRA AD 2142

  <>

  [8]

  The missile silo, after two centuries in the desert sands, remained intact. The dark green nose cone, removed from the ICBM—though it still seemed pregnant with threat—sat above ground. The original launch-tube cover was open; plexiglass protected the sunken vertical shaft from the elements.

  In their hired TDV, Ro and Luís scanned the horizon through the blue-tinted windows. No sign of anyone.

  ‘He’s not here yet,’ said Luís. ‘But he will be.’

  ‘Let’s go inside.’

  The TDV’s door swung downwards, forming a ramp, and Ro walked slowly out. Hot dry air pressed upon her skin.

  Above an abandoned ancient helicopter, a blurred holo hung. Ro squinted against the sunshine to read it.

  WELCOME TO THE

  TITAN MISSILE

  AND

  TWENOEN PARANOIA

  PAVILION

  Luís headed straight for a low, white building. Doors to an empty foyer slid open at their approach.

  ‘My uncle says it’s automated. No staff.’

  Inside, conditioned air brought cool relief.

  ‘Good.’

  Ro used an anonymous cred-ribbon, instead of her info-strand, to pay their entrance fees. Once through the inner doors, they bypassed the 1950s domestic tableaux—simple androids in period dress, preparing meals, listening to the wireless news broadcasts (all cold war tension and hysteria), stocking their fallout shelters—and the Montreal 2092 display, showing the terrorists’ final minutes before they remotely took down the CommEd clean-fusion clusters (in the name of the Drowned Isles and other dirty-fuel ecotastrophes) and Detroichago disappeared forever.

  Instead, they hurried downwards, into the facilities where four-person military teams (including women: surprisingly enlightened for the times) had kept constant watch, ready to launch nuclear death with the twist of a key—two keys, in fact: at least two people had to agree on Armageddon—and the touch of a button.

  The control room was painted metal: no ceramics or smart-material in sight. Big dials, status lights and buttons decorated the control panels. There were technical manuals—the watch teams had been scientist/engineers as much as soldiers, keeping the nuclear missile’s launch systems operational—but they were hardcopy: metal-bound paper books.

  A disembodied voice asked: ‘Would anyone care to launch a missile? Please take the two indicated controls seats.’

  Holo-arrows pointed the way, but neither Ro nor Luís moved.

  ‘In that case, let us demonstrate.’

  Two simple androids walked jerkily into the control room, took their seats, and made ready to twist the launch-enabling keys.

&nb
sp; ‘I don’t like this,’ said Ro.

  Luís looked at her. ‘Don’t worry. He told me that he’ll be here, so he will. We’re related by—’

  On the other side of the room, a heavy metal hatch swung slowly open.

  Countdown lights flickered: extinguished one by one ...

  Someone’s here...

  Ro spun and crouched, hands upraised.

  Weapon—

  The square, bronze-skinned hand was visible first, and it bore a scatterspray pistol. But then the big Navajo police officer stepped inside—Sergeant Arrowsmith—and slowly lowered his weapon, and smiled.

  ‘I trust you.’ And, reholstering, he added: ‘Enough to come alone.’

  ‘Good.’ Ro relaxed, let out a shaky breath. ‘Because I’m not sure—’

  Vibration and she crouched again.

  Betrayal?

  The control room shook on its suspension springs; the recorded sounds of lift-off roared in the trembling air. Slowly, slowly the imaginary launch completed, the missile’s sound faded...

  Sergeant Arrowsmith appeared unmoved.

  ‘It seems’—his voice was deep, rhythmic—‘that paranoia still survives, in the twenty-second century.’

  After the display had ended, Luís and Ro occupied the chairs; Sergeant Arrowsmith insisted that he remain standing.

  ‘I didn’t see the crystal myself,’ said Luís. ‘Or the debug scans. But it sounds just like Anne-Louise.’

  The sergeant’s eyes were dark, unflinching. ‘But it’s just a fiction, something she made up. You said that.’

  ‘Agreed. Yet there’s more to it: information encoded, correlated with the story line. I think Ro’s correct.’

  ‘And the chess-board ...’ Ro stopped.

  ‘Position K7.’ Sergeant Arrowsmith sounded mournful.

  ‘But pronounced ka-sept. In French, it used to be an acronym.’ Ro shrugged. ‘I know it seems feeble, but...’

  ‘Like, if a dog had been involved’—Luís spoke seriously—‘and the piece had been at K9, you know? If there were such a thing as the ninth row. And if she’d been Anglophone, instead of Quebecoise.’

  My God, it sounds so stupid: a contrived whodunnit clue.

  And the crystal-cassette had disappeared, with no traces remaining in the holopad’s active memory or cache. No proof at all.

  ‘But it’s exactly,’ Luís added, ‘the way she wrote. The way she thought.’

  Sergeant Arrowsmith merely nodded.

  Ro stared at him. Did he trust Luís’s judgement that much?

  Luís... How can I make you stay?

  What could she offer him to replace the stars, the strange sights of the mu-space continuum?

  ‘So what does it mean?’ Arrowsmith made a slight gesture with his wide shoulders. ‘The story itself?’

  ‘A stranger, in peril.’ Ro shook her head. ‘A cliché, but somehow wrong. There was a ghost in the story, which didn’t fit the other background ... It showed me where to look.’

  For a moment, she thought Sergeant Arrowsmith might have shivered: to a Navajo, she had learned, all chindhí are to be feared, regardless of how good a person had been in life. All that is fine and true perishes; only evil lives on in spirit.

  ‘You believe us.’ Luís looked certain.

  Sergeant Arrowsmith stared at him, then touched his own lapel.

  It was a signal. Ro sensed an approaching presence, but no threat. And, as footsteps became audible, she looked out of the hatchway, along the grim metal catwalk, and recognized the slim white-haired figure walking towards her.

  ‘Hello.’ The woman was elegant, taut-featured. ‘We met at the Police HQ, over lunch. You had some interesting facts to share about vomiting sea creatures.’

  ‘Yes ... I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.’

  ‘Why should you? I’m Hannah. And you’re Ro.’

  She held out her hand, and they shook.

  ‘And I don’t believe,’ Hannah added, ‘that your roommate was killed by a psychopath either. Not in the normal sense of the term.’

  Ro felt a momentary sense of joyless vindication.

  Joyless, because the alternative was that Anne-Louise’s death was the action of a professional, disguised to look like an amateur—who had somehow slipped past DistribOne’s security—whose allies or employers must have Ro under observation. How else to explain the cassette’s disappearance?

  And, whether it was a sexual predator or a paid assassin who had erased her from existence, poor Anne-Louise was just as dead, either way.

  The next morning, Ro skipped her academic classes. In the afternoon, she was physically present in the small seminar room; but the seminar was drawing to a close and she had paid little attention to anything Professor Davenport had said during the previous hour.

  ‘I believe Anne-Louise was assassinated,’ the white-haired woman, Hannah, had told Ro and Luís. And I use that term advisedly.’

  Ro jerked from reverie: the professor was talking to her.

  ‘... afterwards, please, Miss McNamara. There’s something I’d like to discuss.’ Then, turning back to the student group as a whole: ‘In the matter of assignments, when you log on tonight you’ll find…’

  Shaking her head, Ro tried to dispel the flash images: Anne-Louise’s impossibly angled body, inhuman rictus on the white/bruised face.

  The last of the other interns filed out, and Prof Davenport smiled.

  ‘I nearly missed it in the post-mortem.’ Hannah had looked to Sergeant Arrowsmith for reassurance, before adding: ‘Microwave interference pulse. Multiple sources — too weak to leave individual traces—intersecting at the heart.’

  And Sergeant Arrowsmith had said: ‘It’s a pretty fancy way of killing someone. Everything else the killer did to her was misdirection.’

  What did it mean? That she was killed from the corridor or the ground outside the room? The distance from killing devices to the room could not be great, because the killer had then gone inside.

  Unless there were two of them. Accomplices...

  ‘Ms McNamara?’

  ‘Sorry, Professor. I’m coming.’

  But it occurred to her, as she walked, that Anne-Louise might have been murdered remotely because the assassin thought she had the means to defend herself. Then he would have forced his way into the room ... purely to disguise the manner of Anne-Louise’s death? Or because he—or she—was looking for something?

  And if the killing was performed remotely ...

  What if Anne-Louise wasn’t the real target? What if... ?

  She did not want to complete that thought.

  Oncimplant notwithstanding, Ro refused his offer of lemon nicotine-slivers. Davenport popped one in his mouth, and chewed.

  ‘Dreadful habit,’ he said.

  ‘What did you want to see me about, sir?’

  ‘None of that “sir” stuff, please. Um... I wanted to know, would you be comfortable talking to a UNSA official called Dr Schwenger? She’s officially semi-retired, but highly placed in the agency’s hierarchy, all the same.’

  He picked up another lemon sliver.

  ‘I... know who Dr Schwenger is, Professor.’

  At least, I’ve met her. I don’t know her at all.

  ‘That dreadful business with Anne-Louise.’ Davenport shook his head, then slowly replaced the lemon sliver in the bowl. His sorrow looked genuine. ‘There may be an element of corporate guilt involved, I suppose, or avoiding negative publicity. Have you seen today’s news? The anti-xeno riots in Tehran and Dublin?’

  ‘More riots? Why now? No-one’s protested about alien embassies for ages.’

  Davenport shrugged his narrow shoulders. ‘Who can tell? At any rate, you may be able to get some small advantage out of the situation.’

  From the riots?

  Ro frowned.

  Or profiting by Anne-Louise’s murder?

  ‘What kind of advantage?’

  ‘A research assistant post in one of our prime study centres,
in XenoMir. That’s what they’re offering you.’