Context

by John Meaney

  ‘You’ve no idea,’ she murmured, stroking Tom’s stump with her fingertips, ‘how hard it is for me to see this.’

  ‘Remove an arm.’ Lady Darinia’s words. ‘Either arm will do.’

  Tom exhaled, letting the memory go.

  ‘You saved my life, Sylvana.’

  She smiled, and Tom closed his eyes, fixing this instant forever in his mind.

  ‘Darling Tom ...You’ll join the Academy officially, won’t you?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The Academy. I know Cord would really like you to.’

  ‘I haven’t seen Corduven.’ Then, deliberately softening his tone: ‘Sorry. I didn’t realize this was a recruitment operation.’

  ‘Perhaps a little more than that?’ Sylvana laughed, but pink spots grew on her cheeks. ‘Ah, Tom, I’ve missed you.’

  ‘And I can’t believe you’re real, my love.’

  He kissed her.

  But that was not the end of the subject.

  ‘It seems a low-key position,’ she said. ‘Trainer and adviser. But they’ll expand the role as you gain—’

  ‘Sylvana. I’ll place my expertise at the Academy’s disposal, all right? It’s what I’ve been doing since I got here.’

  ‘Tom, don’t be ... I’m glad, anyway.’

  ‘OK.’ He reached out and touched her long golden hair. ‘What is it you’re really trying to say, Sylvana? I’m out of practice with multi-layered conversation.’

  ‘Been slumming it, my darling? Ah, it’s just...’

  ‘Just what?’

  ‘You know they ship combat casualties back here, some of the worst ones.’

  There had been no reason for Tom to visit the med complex, but he had heard something of its renown.

  Nothing like a war to improve medical techniques.

  ‘I know,’ was all he said.

  ‘As an attached officer, you could ...You see, their regrow-vats are second to n—’

  Tom was off the bed and standing.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But—’

  An unwanted vision flashed across his mind:

  A one-armed black-clad figure leaps through an archway, kicks low, hits a second trooper with a rapid combination, throws a high spinning kick ...

  ‘Elva. Didn’t you know I’d come back for you?’

  He turned away.

  ‘Don’t ask, Sylvana. Just do not ask.’

  ‘Ask what?’ Petulance insinuated itself into her silver voice for the first time. ‘Ask you to heal yourself?’

  Tom took a shuddering breath, trying to calm himself.

  ‘What is it, Tom, that won’t let you take the chance to finally look normal, for Chaos’ sake? Don’t you think th— ?’

  Her words slammed into him like a sickening blow.

  ‘Normal? Me?’

  Tom’s harsh laugh bounced back from the chamber’s elegant walls, and she shrank away, staring at his face.

  ‘Do you know half the things I’ve done, Sylvana?’

  But that wasn’t it.

  It was not the little-girl twist to Sylvana’s normally flawless mouth, the frustration in not getting her own way, nor the arrogance with which she had assumed he would automatically fall in with her plans. Nor was it the way she had ignored the servitrix’s presence, treating the woman like some inanimate tool, no more worthy of consideration than a chair or a lev-tray.

  It was not even the way she acknowledged Tom now as a peer because of his title, where formerly he had been chattel, purchased and utilized for his owners’ benefit.

  No, it was his own stupidity which galled him: that, and the harsh realization that nothing—nothing at all—had changed.

  Elva ... I’ve betrayed you, again.

  There was no fever to blame this time, apart from his old fiery obsession with a noble beauty forever beyond his reach.

  Not forever.

  But had he not already identified the one constant factor in his life?

  ‘I know what you’ve done, Tom.’ Quietly: ‘And so does Cord.’

  Redmetal poignard, sinking in to the hilt...

  ‘How he deals with that’—Tom hardened his voice, remembering everything the Oracle had done—‘is up to him.’

  He bent to retrieve his tunic.

  ‘Sylvana, I’m sorry. This was perhaps not a good idea.’

  She watched silently as he fastened the seal, then shook her head.

  ‘I should have known better,’ she said, ‘than to show you pity.’

  And that was the barb which finally got through.

  ‘Pity? What was this? An exercise in charity? Noblesse oblige, my Lady?’

  He looked for his cape, found it.

  ‘I didn’t mean today, Tom. I meant—’

  ‘What? Come across for the cripple, and he’ll be so grateful he’ll—’

  ‘Damn you to Chaos, Tom Corcorigan!’

  And then it was too late to clarify misunderstanding, to look for justification.

  ‘I’ll see you around, Sylvana.’

  He stormed out of her bedchamber, out of her apartment, stalked down corridors with rage and self-disgust pounding in waves. Nobles and servitors alike stepped aside at his approach, reflexively sensing the volcanic madness swelling inside him, huge and uncontrolled, threatening to burst forth in torrents of hot, sticky blood.

  ~ * ~

  39

  TERRA AD 2142

  <>

  [12]

  Saarbrücken Fliegerhorst—the words were blurred by tears—war heute mit einer Micronuke teilweise zerstört. Die tödliche Explosion hat am wenigsten zwölf Offiziere und Studenten niedergemetzelt, und vielleicht mehr als ein hundert anderen verletzt...

  She halted the display.

  Why?

  The conference room was empty, unsettling; she sat at an unchanging desk beneath a slow-morph green-tinted window. Outside lay Moscow’s ancient grandeur.

  But Luís—

  Hot tears as she confronted the thought: Luís would never see anything again. He did not exist.

  It was implacable reality; it was the great terrible truth which could not be denied.

  Details: lime-tinged sunlight falling on the desk; a tiny greenfly (escaping the building’s nanocleaners), legs splayed, upon the desktop terminal-pad; from somewhere, a soft white-noise macromachine hum; the faint traces (to Ro’s preternatural hearing) of distant conversation.

  The physical world, surrounding her.

  Reality.

  Luís was dead.

  There was a knock and her heart leaped—Luís!—while the small rational part of her knew it could never be.

  When the door concertinaed open, it was Zoë who was standing there. Her normally youthful face was solemn, revealing hard lines Ro had never noticed before.

  A black armband circled her left sleeve.

  ‘Ro? Are you OK with this? If you’re not up to—’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘We’re using an official vehicle, but unmarked. Leaving from the basement garage.’

  ‘Security?’ Ro glanced at the news feature again, at its dry description of the airbase’s devastation. Its content, its enormity had not changed. ‘All right. I’m ready.’

  She waved the holo out of existence.

  ‘There are new security protocols.’ Zoë led the way along a winding corridor. ‘We’ll talk about them later.’

  They came out into an atrium; grey evening lay upon the slowly deforming skylights high above.

  Something flickered.

  It rolled then: elephant-sized, it walked/flowed into the atrium. Like a collection of stony blobs hastily thrown together into an organic sculpture, the ungainly mass lumbered past a group of workers in civilian jumpsuits. It might have slowed as it neared Ro.

  She focused her unusual vision; at small scale, the Zajinet still seemed to be formed of many components: pebbles and (squinting into the microscopic region) grains, all shifting and vibrating within the
overall matrix.

  <<... node is reinforcement: interference joy ... >>

  <<... deadly, like the other sweetened death ...>>

  <<... visual field prey/predator fascination ...>>

  <<... swift ambivalence in roiling calm ...>>

  Ro snapped her senses back to normal as the big thing lumbered past, turned left into the lab area, was gone.

  ‘Are you all right, Ro?’

  ‘Did you— Never mind.’

  Because she knew, suddenly, that what she had just seen was for her eyes only. For a fraction of a second, as it had rounded the corner, the Zajinet’s gross form had grown insubstantial, and its true core had flared with brilliance.

  A tracery of burning crimson, touched with fiery sapphire.

  Demonic fire.

  It was not the only memorial service.

  Dislocated impressions. Hymns echoing back from the old stones, fading. The bearded, dark-robed priest intoning his prayer to the standing congregation. Incense upon the heavy air.

  No, this was not the only service. There would be mourners at UNSA centres across the world, wherever there were people who had known Luís, or any of the others who had died in Saarbrücken.

  Stained brass candelabras hung on soot-blackened chains from the shadow-wrapped vaulted ceiling. It was an ancient church. There were no pews; in this chill climate, no-one sat or knelt.

  ‘Mi spaminaem Luís Starhome’—the priest’s words, in any language, were meaningless: symbols devoid of referent; maps of a nonexistent territory—‘maladoy muzhchina, talantliviy y energichniy ...’

  Zoë, wrapped in heavy coat and scarf, looked frozen. Her skin, always pale, seemed brittle and bloodless.

  Death is waiting for us all.

  Zoë joined in with the congregation’s prayer responses. Her command of Russki, to Ro’s untutored ear, seemed perfect.

  It seemed to drone on forever ...And then it was over, and Ro did not know what to do. The local babushkas and younger folk had gone, save for one old woman standing in prayer, her wrinkled face screwed up with concentration: a tense and private communication with her God.

  The remaining UNSA staff filed out.

  ‘Come on.’ Zoë’ touched Ro’s arm. ‘We’d better go.’

  Darkness was gathering. Patches of snow looked blue-grey, surrounding the basilica.

  Everything was cold as death.

  There was a cemetery: iron-black trees stark against the fading sky; square dark mausoleums; narrow pathways. Before one grave, shocking against the monochrome world, a bright red bloom.

  Ro, ever the mathematician, mentally plotted the equations: the straight-line geometries of the graves, the blossom’s fractal spreading. But in the vaults and cathedrals of her mind, her grief was harder to map: an absence of feeling, a black sink absorbing emotion.

  An absence with a name.

  Luís...

  A gentle touch upon her arm.

  ‘Ro?’

  Ro shook her head.

  For a moment there were two white disks in the dark sky. Blinking ... She wiped away cold tears she had not known were there. One moon, with Venus (higher, this evening) a small bright steady light.

  ‘There’s humanity out there.’ Zoë, looking up at the stars, might have been addressing herself rather than Ro. ‘Only a few of us, but a beginning.’

  But still we die.

  ‘We have an embassy of our own, you know’—Zoë’s breath steamed on the air—‘on the Zajinet homeworld. If it is their homeworld.’

  Ro turned away then—I’m not interested—and trudged alone through the snow, climbing to the top of a small ridge. Below her, the lights of Gorky village were a distant invitation.

  Finally someone, not Zoë, called Ro’s name, so she plodded back down to the UNSA bus which was waiting to take them back: to Moscow, to the mundane environment of work.

  To a world without Luís.

  Seven days a week, Ro threw herself into her routine.

  It kept her busy: rising at dawn, she would drink half a litre of water and go outside, running sprint-intervals along the Yeltsin Hills while Moscow proper lay below, to the south, as though rising inside an ancient impact crater. She used kali sticks against the proud birch trees, in her weapons drill. She alternated: fighting skills one day, strength training the next.

  Occasionally, an early riser would see this slender woman performing chin-ups from a tree branch, or deep knee bends with a small boulder clasped hard against her chest, though it was midwinter and bitterly cold. Inevitably, such an observer would stop a moment, then shake themselves—no sane person would perform zaryadka, morning exercises, in the freezing outdoors—then quickly hurry on across the campus cobblestones.

  However hard Ro tried, she was never too fatigued to think, and to remember.

  He didn‘t want me.

  A knowledge which did not help.

  We would never have been together.

  And so, her real work: banned from direct xeno access -however good she might be, she was still only an intern—she correlated all the data she could garner, talked to the researchers in the so-called coffee lounge (where the real brainstorming inevitably took place, over disposable cups of lemon tea more often than coffee), and spent long solitary hours immersed in holo phase-diagrams in the cramped, tiny office a grumpy administrator had allocated her. (In fact, she suspected that it was Zoë who had persuaded the man to grant a private office to a lowly intern.)

  Her weekly messages to Mother and Gramps were always about work, never about her feelings.

  Though Ro had turned away from other people, she was not blind to those around her. While they could be arrogant, the researchers were generally pleasant enough among themselves; but they had a tendency to treat the other staff—the security officers, the low-grade clerks, the cleaners—as though they did not exist. The nearest thing to friendship Ro was capable of right now was chatting in the early mornings with Andreiev (a white-haired military veteran, her favourite among the older security men) or Lucinda (the big Jamaican overseer of all the cleaning staff, who had taught herself to program maint-bots) before the researchers came into their offices and labs.

  In the academic brainstorming sessions she kept strictly to business.

  Two evenings a week, thanks to Andreiev’s intercession, she trained at a hard, no-nonsense gym in rokupashniboi, a branch of the brilliant, evolving combat sambo practised for two centuries by Spetsnaz and airborne special forces. The warm-up routines (as in all Russia athletics) drew from gymnastics and ballet; the fighting techniques flowed effortlessly from striking to grappling; the sparring was heavy-contact. Every session resulted in at least one new cut or bruise on Ro’s ever-healing body.

  She had never known there were so many ways to break an attacker’s neck.

  In the dusty street, silence.

  Lean and rangy, with lank, greasy hair, the gunslinger stands straight. His long coat, a travel-stained duster, stirs slightly in the breeze. Beneath his stetson, his eyes are narrowed against the glare.

  ‘Hey!’ The shout is from an alley on one side of the street, designed to distract. An accomplice.

  [[In reality, Ro jumped with surprise.]]

  But Ranger Shade’s Colt leaps from his holster almost by itself, and he drills a scarlet hole through his opponent’s heart before the gunslinger’s pistol is half drawn.

  The man spins and drops.

  In the alleyway, his accomplice freezes for a moment, then turns and flees.

  ‘Stone cold dead,’ murmurs Shade. ‘Another one for you, my love.’

  Beside him, a swirling coalescence of light. Juanita’s ghost slowly forms.

  Solemnly: “Thank you, my fine man.’

  Blood, leaking from the gunslinger s splayed corpse, soaks into the dust.

  The observer [[Ro, her actual hand movements matching the moment]] unhitches reins from a rail, grabs the pommel as she inserts her pointed boot in one stirrup, swings herself up and mounts Que
relle.