Context

by John Meaney

  ‘Non, merci.’

  To her other side, the window overlooked blue skies, with grey cloud cover nestling below, hiding the winter-bound countryside.

  ... fodder for gulags, when the secret police would knock upon the doors at night, arresting innocents for sedition. In the one country which suffered most in the TwenCen war against the Nazis, where every family was touched by bereavement, a national paranoia ironically replicated the worst of—

  She minimized the holo, maximized the other: the message she had read no more than two dozen times since boarding the flight and checking her h-mail.

  Bronze warrior face, the too-long black hair.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, in re-play. ‘I think you’re expecting too much of our, ah, friendship. Forgive me if I’m out of line, but I’m not comfortable with this.’

  Her stomach contracted once more.

  ‘Tomorrow, I leave for Saarbrücken, for two weeks’ initial training.’ He mispronounced the narrow ‘ü’. ‘If I’ve misunderstood, you can contact me there, before I go on to Tehran.’

  Sick inside, skin tightening, Ro touched the miniature Luís Starhome: just an insubstantial holo, pure light and quite intangible.

  Can I lose what I never had?

  Was this the way poor Albrecht suffered, when she rid her life of him?

  ‘Otherwise, I think it best’—his warrior’s face was grave, rather than contrite—‘that we not talk again. Endit’

  The holo stilled, winked out of existence.

  Endit. Yes, he had ended what he had never started.

  Ro blinked rapidly, re-started the other holovolume.

  ... wide imperial streets, cupolas and minarets still prominent, stolid kremlins rubbing shoulders with the latest in leading-edge bioarchitecture—

  Ro checked the aisle, tempted to summon the smartcart back. Something to dull the pain ... No.

  There were few other passengers. Up front, the big payers in luxury class were partying or working: too blasé actually to enjoy the flight. Under other circumstances, Ro would have been thrilled; now she felt dislocated in space, unnerved by despair.

  — though Sakharov ‘s statue has been removed, and the site has reverted to its former name of Dzerzhinski Square, the dark ghosts of Beria and Dzerzhinski himself have thankfully not returned. The iron fist in the iron glove no longer haunts Muscovites. Where a grim dark cube once stood, headquarters of the feared Komityet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti—KGB—now grows the magnificent flowering bioarchitecture of XenoMir, home to alien ambassadors and UNSA’s finest research scientists. It is situated opposite the well-known—

  The hypershuttle banked, arced down into the cloud layer.

  Sheremetyevo spaceport, and the whole of Moscow’s grandeur, were laid out beneath her.

  UN troops, armoured with flak jackets and bearing sonar-scoped lineac rifles, escorted her to a waiting TDV. Their boots crunched through the heavy snow.

  ‘S’il vous plaît.’ A sergeant gestured her inside.

  ‘Merci.’ She slid onto the cold bench seat as the heavy gull door swung down, clicked shut.

  ‘Welcome to Moscow.’ The onboard AI spoke in English. ‘We will shortly be—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  A smartcart slid her luggage—two carryalls—into the TDV’s stowage compartment. The soldiers nodded, stepped away: apparently, their duty was fulfilled.

  The vehicle slid into motion.

  She had a glimpse of her fellow shuttle passengers, all queuing for taxis like normal civilians, and wished she was among them. Not important enough to be escorted all the way, but not allowed to remain anonymous.

  ... of the recent outrages, UNSA personnel are required to follow code-orange safety protocols at all times. She tapped on her golden-wire infostrand, cranking up the audio. Please keep EveryWare-Assist in permanent pre-load whenever you are travelling out of...

  There had been anti-xeno demonstrations in Tehran, Dublin, Saigon and Reykjavik. Ro shook her head, and silenced her infostrand. She hoped that Sergeant Arrowsmith and the forensic scientist, Hannah, were safe: both had taken indefinite leave, and gone to stay with distant relatives.

  As for her, if there was some conspiracy which threatened her, she was safer surrounded by UNSA security, in a city where paranoia had once been a way of life, than wandering around the desert, exposed.

  Outside, Moscow’s wide snow-bordered boulevards slipped past.

  Among the grand old granite buildings—bigger and more imposing than Ro had expected—was something new: a glistening black corporate pyramid, large enough to contain maybe two thousand employees, visibly reconfiguring itself. Ro pressed her face against the TDV’s blue-tinted armour-glass, watching the biobuilding slowly recede into the distance behind her.

  Then she flopped back into her seat, let out a long breath, and smiled despite her dark mood. Perhaps this was going to be interesting, after all.

  Outside, a cold grey rain began to fall, mashing at the snow.

  Over glistening wet cobbles, the TDV hissed into Red Square. Crimson reflections—from the giant floating holo: —dripped across the ground, and the soaking membrane which coated St Basil’s Cathedral. The largest of its cupolas was striped with the exact shade of mint-green that the scarp slopes showed in the Painted Desert—

  Ro shook her head.

  The TDV slid past the Kremlin’s long red walls, behind which golden cupolas brightly shone. Then the vehicle hissed across a wide boulevard, circled an imposing block of grey architecture, and settled to the ground before a building such as Ro had never seen in person.

  It was approximately globular, rearing high overhead: a myriad black window facets embedded in a motile white web. The biobuilding was slowly but—as Ro slid out from the TDV—visibly deforming, morphing. Endlessly cycling through its configurations.

  There was a policeman, in green thermal suit, with wide Slavic features beneath his heavy helmet.

  ‘XenoMir?’ Ro wondered whether she should have used the older name: XenoDom.

  ‘Da.’ He looked pleased. ‘Vyi rabotayetye zdyes?’

  Ro shrugged, with an exaggerated grimace. Embarrassed at her linguistic limitations, though she did better than most.

  And we expect to understand offworld species?

  Behind her, the TDV disgorged her luggage, and whispered into motion.

  She picked up her two bags and, while the policeman benevolently watched, carried them up the broad granite steps, through the immutable stone entranceway, and into a gleaming foyer furnished with polished marble.

  That evening, in her private room in the Residence—part of the ancient university, situated north of the city proper, above the Yeltsin Hills; there was a bus to shuttle UNSA employees back and forth between campus and XenoMir -Ro tried to relax, could not. Despite the time lag, sleep would not come.

  Her bed was built into the wall fittings: everything of rich, panelled wood. Old, heavy, sliding doors separated her study-bedroom from the bathroom, and the whole suite from the corridor outside.

  The indoor warmth was comforting, if intense. Beyond the windows, grey-looking snow fell like silent ash in the gathering darkness.

  She tapped her infostrand—currently the golden wire was wrapped necklet-wise round her throat—and directed it to pass images to her desktop. Sitting at the wooden desk, she smiled as its crystalline surface inlay cleared, and presented an image which seemed to stretch downwards, inside the desk: virtual holos, rather than real.

  ‘Play the seminar.’ Her voice sounded tired. ‘Start from bookmark two.’

  It loaded at the point where she had stilled it. Professor Davenport’s image was static for a split second, then the replay began:

  ‘... like Lord Kelvin, in the nineteenth century, declaring that there was nothing remaining for physicists to do, except add the last decimal place to all that had been measured.

  ‘Similar hubris was invited two centuries later, by cosmologists who believed they ha
d deciphered the history and future of the universe. This, at a time when the Hubble “constant”—essentially what we now refer to as the Dullaghan bubble-function—had never been satisfactorily measured; when every theory assumed that at least ninety per cent of all matter was invisible quintessence (or “dark matter” as they charmingly termed it) which had never been observed, and whose nature no-one knew.’

  There was laughter from the corridor outside. For a second, Ro was tempted to investigate. But she did not feel like company.

  ‘And the lambda function was assumed to be a cosmic antigravity-repulsion constant, even though observation showed it must be smaller than its theoretical value by at least one hundred and twenty-three orders of magnitude... No other estimate in the history of science has been so badly..:

  She sat down on the bed, killing the lights with a gesture. In the desk, Prof Davenport’s image was no longer visible, but his comforting voice droned on.

  ‘...flatland, for example, by considering a polka-dot balloon. Inflate the balloon, and every dot appears to be the centre of cosmic expansion. Yet no-one considered that, though the balloon-surface inhabitants are two-dimensional beings, the balloon must exist in a three-dimensional context. For those charming fictitious characters, so too for us.

  ‘When Gus Calzonni finally made her “intuitive” leap from quintessence-matrix brane-harmonics (and inflationary cosmic evolution) to mu-space theory, wherein the realspace multiverse itself was draped across the fractal landscape of the mu-space continuum, it caused a shockwave through the scientific community.

  ‘It was not just that the values of every fundamental constant were derived from a single fractional coefficient. Gus herself knew from the very beginning, though it took decades and hundreds of researchers to prove it, that mu-space was more than a mathematical construct: in fact, an underlying and immeasurably greater reality through which we might travel.

  ‘Popular biographers, as she became an immensely rich and influential public figure (though not daring to publish until after her death), picked up on her rumoured but highly unlikely genealogy—that Gus, known more formally as Augusta Medora de Lauron (using the surname she preferred, taken from her seventh and final husband), was descended via illegitimate lines from Ada, Countess Lovelace, the world’s first programmer, and therefore from Lord Byron himself. Despite all evidence to the...’

  At some point, Ro drifted off to sleep.

  When she woke, a tiny scarlet flag seemed to be drifting above her: a newswatch netAgent, signalling an item of personal interest in EveryWare. She waved the holo away, unwound the infostrand from her neck, and dumped it on the wooden bedstand on her way to the bathroom.

  Afterwards, showered and dressed, she shoved the info-strand into her jumpsuit pocket, and went to look for breakfast.

  Perhaps I’ll see an alien today!

  Ro hurried down the broad stairs, into the ancient dining room.

  ‘Hey, Ro! How’re ya doin’?’

  It was Zoë, the teaching assistant who (slightly drunk) had told Ro about the Zajinet, on the day one of the xenos had disappeared ... For a second, Ro’s disorientation increased, as though she were back in Arizona.

  ‘Er, hi, Zoë. I didn’t realize you were going to be here as well.’

  But Ro could not remember having seen her in DistribOne recently.

  ‘Pulled some strings. I’m not living here, though.’ She gestured at the crowded dining hall. ‘Too noisy. I’ve an apartment in Strugatski Prospekt.’

  ‘Very impressive.’

  Ro looked for coffee, could not see any. People appeared to be drinking black tea. There was a samovar on the counter, along with the cooked dishes.

  ‘I need some breakfast.’ She started to head for the queue. ‘Have you already had ... ?’

  But Zoë had not moved. Gravely: ‘You haven’t checked the news, I take it?’

  ‘No.’ Ro looked at her, feeling suddenly cold. ‘Should I have?’

  ‘Saarbrücken Fliegerhorst’—Zoë’s voice dropped almost to a whisper, but Ro clearly heard every dreadful word—‘was destroyed by a micro-tak last night.’

  ‘That’s awful.’ She did not know what to say.

  ‘I’m sorry... Security-reg confirmed...’ Zoë swallowed. ‘Luís Starhome was there. He—’

  ‘No, he’s in Tehran.’

  Denying reality.

  It can’t be.

  But she remembered his h-mail, his stopover for initial training.

  No...

  ‘You’re saying he’s dead.’ Flatly. As though there were no emotion great enough to cover what she felt.

  ‘God, Ro. I’m sorry. I know you’re ...’

  Luís is dead.

  How could she lose what she never had?

  The room spun around her.

  Oh, my love. My Luís—

  But he was not hers, and never would be.

  Not now.

  Luís...

  <>

  ~ * ~

  37

  NULAPEIRON AD 3420

  It was a return to noble life. Everything was the same; everything was different.

  The physical surroundings brought back memories of Palace Darinia: vast halls and galleries on many levels (though contained within the Primum Stratum), walls and ceilings of dark lustrous mother-of-pearl or softly luminescent jade. Deep carpets of royal blue flowed through long hallways, carrying the noble-born effortlessly along, allowing them time to appreciate the precious works of art they passed, the intricate crystalline glowtrees which floated overhead. There were series within convoluted series of fountains and ponds, labyrinthine sculptures in their own right, within which fantastic artificial lifeforms swam and glowed; colonnades and quiet quadrangles, where small moss gardens provided places for silent meditation, isolated by quaint antisound hushfields from the sounds of young scholars and older folk engaged in logosophical debate; airy malls, formed of clean utilitarian lines at one moment, but whose walls would flow viscously, perhaps creating intricate spars and buttresses, extruding dainty footbridges, or sinking inwards to form niches in which noble statues stood. Gargoyles lurked playfully at odd junctures within the moving architecture.

  Even the air seemed purer, to energize with every breath.

  It was strange, and it was wonderful...

  But he felt no closer to finding Elva.

  Six soldiers escorted Tom along a gold-chased boulevard, and into a transverse hallway patterned in deep brown and crimson. At the end, they stopped before a silver membrane.

  ‘Your quarters, my Lord.’ The officer-in-charge bowed formally.

  ‘Very good.’ Tom heard the patrician tone which had resurfaced in his own voice, and hated it. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘Sir.’

  As the escort left, Tom stepped inside, and found himself in a round, marble-floored foyer where a young man in servitor’ s livery was kneeling, head bowed, soft black cap in hand.

  Oh, Fate.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Adam Gervicort, sir. Beta-plus servitor.’

  At that, six women filed in between nacreous pillars from the next chamber—bright and airy, filled with holosculptures—and lowered themselves to their knees on the silvery marble. They bowed in full forehead-to-floor obeisance.

  This, to a man born beside a humble market chamber, who had lived more recently in fearful squalor for two Standard Years, out of his mind, surviving by drunken cunning and the pity of strangers, sleeping by day in derelict tunnels where nights were dangerous…

  ‘Just get up.’

  They rose quickly, like soldiers called to attention, and stood frozen in blank-faced acceptance: awaiting punishment for an infraction whose nature they did not understand, but for which they accepted responsibility.

  Chaos ...I’ve forgotten so much.

  Softening his tone: ‘I’m not... very big on ceremony. Are you all, er, assigned to me?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ It was Adam Gervicort who spoke. ‘Yo
ur personal servitors.’

  Tom looked around at the richly appointed antechamber. A platinum-inlaid glowcluster floated near the ceiling — decorative rather than utilitarian, for the wall panels glowed with a softly pervasive, diffuse illumination—and elegant statuettes filled small niches between the panels.

  It was sumptuous, decorated with objets d’art whose price could feed entire families for lifetimes, and it was merely the entrance to his apartment.