by John Meaney
‘In Moscow? But I’m just an intern.’
‘Nevertheless, that’s the offer.’
After a moment, Ro said, ‘It sounds very interesting.’
‘There are high-g Veraliks, who are interesting beings. Ephemerae from Limbo. And Zajinets—at least one at all times.’
‘What do I have to do?’
‘Call Dr Schwenger tomorrow afternoon, when you’ve had time to think it over. Is that fair?’
‘Yes ... Yes, it is. Thank you, Professor.’
With a beneficent smile: ‘You’re perfectly welcome.’
At sunrise the next morning, she was in the Painted Desert, admiring the candy-like mineral strata—sugary-looking white, green, black—which streaked the low sandstone ridges.
At 9 a.m. she sat down—having checked for scorpions and rattlesnakes—by a fallen pink/red tree trunk long turned to stone: part of the Petrified Wood. Her rented TDV was parked back by the automated tourist stop, a low white building with a curved solar-panel roof.
I wonder what it’s like in Moscow right now?
Certainly cold. Moskva, Moscow, was almost as chilly as London. And since the last century’s North Sea convection-cell reversal, and the loss of the Gulf Stream, London was bitterly freezing: ice-locked for half the year.
Just when I was starting to love the desert.
Red sand, a twisted mesquite tree. And, above all, the sky: a startling blue, deeper than sapphire. Even when occasional clouds appeared, they were twisted into wispy configurations such as Ro had never seen.
Over the horizon, almost invisible against the royal blue, two tiny dots.
At last.
She thought Sergeant Arrowsmith and Hannah must have missed their own rendezvous. Although it had only been the sergeant’s name tagged on the h-mail.
It’s not them.
Ro could not have said exactly how she knew: minutiae in the handling of the craft. And, somehow, she could foretell a deadly intent from the flyers’ attitudes, as they hurtled in her direction.
She pushed herself to her feet.
Time to run.
Reddish shards flying in all directions, clattering, slippery beneath her boots.
Run.
Dodged behind a horizontal stone trunk, knowing its shelter was not enough, pushing onwards ...
Run faster.
<
~ * ~
27
NULAPEIRON AD 3420
It was the thirteenth day.
Tom and his brother-in-enlightenment ran easily, side by side.
‘The tunnel flows’—the elder monk, Barjo, spoke without effort as they increased speed, pounding over a footbridge -’the stream does not.’
‘No.’ Tom denied the koan, laughing.
‘Just so.’ Accepting the response.
Water gurgling beneath them.
They ran.
Brother Barjo’s prayers were set at twenty klicks a day—a moderate phase in his current seven-year cycle: this was the fifth such cycle—but for Tom’s sake, he altered his devotions. Praying at a reduced sequence of shrines, so that he could run three seven-klick laps, offering up the tiny distance increase as a prayer for Tom’s perseverance.
One lap was enough for Tom.
Until I perceive the Way more deeply...
For those with deeper devotion could run for longer than anyone Tom had ever known.
At his single lap’s end, he would stand at the round bronze temple door, and watch Brother Barjo’s diminishing slender figure, until he had run from sight. Then it would be time to join the other novitiates in the Outer Court, where they would walk, meditating, in approximate ellipses—each assigned his own path: a strange attractor whose image he would hold in his mind—without ever colliding.
An instructor-monk would stand at the Court’s centre, his voice a soft, washing presence, as he spoke of the mundane (such as which scarlet fungi might be safely eaten) and the cosmic (the interconnected karma matrices).
The language was Lefanjin. Though Tom was not yet fluent, in these sessions it seemed that he understood every word with a clarity beyond normal speech.
And every other day he stood inside the Great Prism, its kaleidoscopic facets presenting infinite recursions, like geometric koans: translucent shards forming impossible triangles, or tangled non-Euclidean mazes which shifted parallax in unsettling ways.
Aeolian music, eerie and haunting, created by the Prism itself from the hot and cold breezes which flowed within, talked deeply to Tom’s spirit, paradoxically unsettling yet reassuring.
Yet time itself seemed increasingly abstract, an artefact created by convention and the limited perceptions of too-busy human beings.
When the glamour became too much, he would drift away ...Later, he would awaken in the Outer Court, while the watcher-priests who had carried him out would laugh as the focus returned to his gaze.
And Tom would smile back.
At peace.
At some point, it was his turn to accompany an elder—big Brother Fazner, strongly built for a monk—into the commercial tunnels of Verinadshi Demesne. Tom waited patiently outside each establishment where his brother-in-enlightenment visited.
Where families were shopping—this was rest-day—children would stop and point at Tom, standing there in his bright orange garb. When he nodded back, they would squeal with delight, tugging at their parents’ tunics, begging to be allowed to talk with Tom.
The parents would duck their heads in mute apology, smiling.
But there were other tunnels, where garish holos in cobalt blue and vermilion red pushed back shadows, and customers hunched furtively as they passed by. Music whined, and scents of amphetamist and ganja grew strong.
But there is no dragon.
So even here, Tom was at peace: the dark yearning for alcoholic forgetfulness was driven into submission.
Somewhere on the border between sleazy quarters and bright market corridors lay the House Of The Golden Moth. It was classier than other taverns: well-dressed freemen entered without hesitation, accompanied by their well-washed, happy-looking children.
Perhaps they drew some security from the huge, dark-skinned figure guarding the door, copper helm upon his head, morphospear in hand. Around the carl’s upper arm, the indenture armlet gleamed as brightly as his helm.
‘Hello, Kraiv,’ said Tom.
The big warrior looked down at him.
Inside, while Kraiv remained on duty, Tom and Brother Fazner were led by a waitress to a small nook, where she motioned them to sit.
‘Master Lochlen will be here shortly.’
‘Thank you.’ Brother Fazner bowed to her as she withdrew.
‘Should I not wait outside, brother?’
‘Perhaps not. Why don’t you stand there?’
Was Kraiv that bad an influence? Tom felt saddened that he should cause Brother Fazner such concern.
He went to where his brother-in-enlightenment had pointed, and stood against the wall beneath a flickering orange holoflame which cast no heat.
‘Hello? I’m Lochlen.’ A lean man, with tattooed cheeks and a dark goatee, came up to Tom. ‘Owner of this sorry joint. Are you my new—’
‘Here I am, Master Lochlen,’ called out Brother Fazner from the nook.
‘Ah, right.’ With a wry smile, Lochlen pulled a small purse from his belt. ‘Guess I nearly made a mistake, right?’
‘If you would, please.’ Brother Fazner gestured for Lochlen to join him, which he did: sliding onto the seat opposite, placing the purse on the black tabletop between them.
‘Tom? My Fate, is that you?’
‘Oh.’ He turned round. ‘How are you, Draquelle?’
‘I—’ For a moment, it looked as though she was going to slap him. Then she made a visible effort to calm down, and shook her head. ‘I’m the last person to accuse you of being irresponsible. My apologies, Tom.’
‘Not required,’ he answered, puzzled by her words.
Irresponsible? In what way?
But to ask her outright would be impolite.
‘So, should I call you Brother Tom? Is that what this’ -gesturing at his orange garments—‘is all about?’
‘I don’t yet have that honour.’
‘Destiny.’ Draquelle shivered, and hugged herself. ‘If you say so, my friend.’
It was the form of address which Kraiv so often used.
‘You and Kraiv are getting along well,’ Tom said.
‘Oh, yes.’ With a small smile: ‘He’s the reason my life’s under control. Finally.’
‘I know what you mean.’
Draquelle stared at him. ‘I thought you had other— Wasn’t a woman involved, somehow?’
Elva?
A ghost ran cold, insubstantial fingers down Tom’s spine ... but then the moment was past.
‘We must be going now,’ said Brother Fazner.
Though it was strictly too soon, Tom tried to keep up with Brother Barjo for all three laps, but his devotion-endurance failed, and he dropped back, gasping. Then the long, slow walk to the monastery, with the knowledge of failure hurting as much as the cramps which racked his legs.
When he entered the dorm that night, one of the other novitiates, young Yerwo, made Tom lie face down on his sleeping mat, while all fifteen fellow novitiates who slept here used strong fingers to massage painful healing into Tom’s feet and calves and hamstrings.
‘You tried until the body gave way,’ Yerwo told him.
‘There is honour in that,’ said another.
“Thank you, my brothers.’
Though the treatment was agony, when it finished the cessation was wonderful.
Tom slid into sleep.
Next morning, after the usual cold rice breakfast, two physiologist-monks inserted needle probes in Tom’s limbs, and checked their holodisplays, nodding and smiling.
‘Drink this.’ One of them handed Tom a bowl of orth-orange juice.
‘Today,’ said the other, ‘you run with Thrumik.’
It was an advancement, despite yesterday’s failure. But he should be humble, not consider his progress as meritorious in its own right, burdening his ego.
But the two monks, now testing Yerwo’s physiometrics, were frowning.
I am no better, Tom told himself firmly, than my brother.
He drained his bowl of juice, then crossed to the limbering-up chapel, to prepare for the day’s devotions.
It was the AdrenaGitha, the sprint-interval devotion, and it was agony. Its coda was a long-distance run—slow-paced, but a full twenty-three klicks.
Master Thrumik, aged sixty-two SY, running with an ethereal fluid motion, seemed to drift along the ground as though borne by unfelt breezes. After prostrated praying at each shrine, Thrumik would rise, face suffused with devotion’s joy, and begin to run again.
Awestruck, Tom could only follow, carried along by the master’s spiritual strength.
And so it continued.
Prayer-runs and walking meditation were the extended high points of every day, along with solitary sessions in the Great Prism.
Every morning, Tom awoke, strangely disconnected as though his spirit was elevated beyond his body. And he would greet his brothers-in-enlightenment with joyful bows, unable to comprehend the wonderful Fate which had brought him here.
Sometimes at night, though he was filled with calm, Tom felt beyond the need for sleep.
Then, he might walk around the Outer Court, performing his strange-attractor meditation again while the guardian-monks on night duty watched approvingly. Or he would go outside, for a second run among the shrine-dotted prayer-routes.
But sometimes another spirit would move him, and he would run silently along deserted, shadow-shrouded commercial runnels, where the few passers-by ignored him.
And once, taking a shortcut through the Couloir d’Amori, beyond the membrane-curtained chambers where reclining half-clad women waited, he saw two elder monks, conversing cheerfully, exiting an establishment.
Moderation, Tom told himself. Another approach to the Way.
It did not matter that he, like every novitiate, was denied contact with the opposite sex. That was part of the austere discipline, the shugyo.
His life was as frugal as the diet which was so carefully prepared in the monastery’s kitchen-lab.
But that night he dreamed of his first days in Palace Darinia, after the great crackling vibroblade had shorn off his arm, yet he performed his duties in a strange euphoria.
‘That’ll be the implant,’ his new friend Jak had told him.
The implant which numbed the pain, until Tom himself cut it out.
They gathered in the Outer Court for Brother Alvam’s triumph. The atmosphere was a strangely expectant mix of calm and tension: monks of all ranks waited in serried rows, murmuring to each other, waiting for the great bronze door to swing open.
‘Soon,’ whispered Yerwo.
And then indeed it opened, and guardian-monks bowed as Brother Alvam, glistening with sweat, half-ran, half-stumbled inside, finally reaching his goal. For the ninety-ninth successive day, he had completed a ninety-nine klick ultra-endurance novadecenovena devotion, and now he was spent.
Then every monk present, including the Abbot, bowed in unison, while Brother Alvam could only stand in acceptance, unable to return the gesture.
Senior monks began the Chant of Stepwise Triumph, ancient verses filling the air like incense smoke, while novitiates smiled in wonder.
Then medic-priests took gentle hold of Brother Alvam’s stick-like arms—for he was emaciated, fat and muscle burned away to sinew and bone by the ongoing strength of his spiritual will—and guided him towards the recovery chapel.
‘Did you see?’ Yerwo continued to stare after Alvam was no longer in sight. ‘Did you?’
‘Yes, my brother.’
If only I could...
For the monk’s exhausted frame had glowed with an inner light, eyes on fire, enlightenment shining like a nova in his soul.
Someday...
It was another night run, solo, and he passed through a grey-lit tunnel which seemed oddly familiar. Before one establishment a golden-winged holoimage fluttered virtual wings, and Tom slowed down to walking pace.
‘Tom?’ A big bulky figure, wrapped in a cape, stood below the holo. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes, my brother.’
‘I’m not your... You remember me, right? Kraiv.’
‘Of course.’
‘We...’ The big man paused as a slender woman, prematurely silver hair visible around the edges of her cape’s hood, came through the archway behind him. ‘Draquelle and I are leaving soon. My indenture ended two tendays ago.’
‘We waited, Tom,’ said Draquelle. ‘The monks wouldn’t let—’
But Tom was walking past.
‘Tom? It’s half a Standard Year since we’ve seen you. Aren’t you even going to—?’
Time to move.
Half a Standard Year?
He broke into a run.
But I’m so far from enlightenment.
Ran faster.
But then Tom’s brother novitiate was expelled from the monastery.
It was with a genuine sorrow that two guardian-monks led Yerwo from the dorm into an isolation cell. Yerwo, shocked and bewildered, began to shake with resentment, but one of the monks applied a subtle wrist-lock and led him out.
Tom could only watch.
He was not the only one. In the cloister’s shadows, Brother Thrumik stood silently, his expression invisible in the gloom.
‘Sir?’ Tom addressed him quietly. ‘Is there not some mistake?’
Thrumik shook his head.
‘Poor Yerwo,’ he said, ‘is not up to the rigours of advanced devotion.’
Tom remembered the physiologist-monks’ frowns.
‘Sadness.’
‘Indeed, my young brother-in-enlightenment.’
It was a rare compliment, that form of address from an e
lder monk, and Tom bowed deeply. When he straightened, he had little memory of why he was standing here.
