Context

by John Meaney

  ‘What’—with teeth chattering—‘is BD3?’

  ‘My God. She really doesn’t…’

  A pause, then Lila softly spoke:

  ‘Beta Draconis III, my young friend. You’re on the Zajinet homeworld.’

  The strange, metallic blue surroundings seemed to spin around her.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  46

  NULAPEIRON AD 3421

  The long shapes hung like stripped carcasses amid the gloom, eerie and threatening. Odd echoes of sound—plashing waves, from the canal outside—dissipated among the shadows.

  There was a soft footstep.

  Holoflash ... A virtual tricon was beamed into Tom’s eyes. Silently, he clenched his fist, and the steel ring on his middle finger sparked back the countersign.

  ‘We can use lights.’ A square-chinned man, older than Tom, stepped into an area of lesser gloom amid the hanging shapes. ‘I’ve watchers posted.’

  Glowglimmers drifted up from his hands, casting eerie, demonic highlights across his face.

  ‘You’re Tyentro. I’m—’

  ‘Honoured, sir.’

  Canoes...

  Now that he could make out the shapes, hanging vertically in the glowglimmers’ friendly illumination, they were no longer threatening.

  ‘How many watchers?’

  ‘Five. My main team, Stilvan in charge.’

  From the dossiers, Tom had thought this Stilvan too gung-ho, likely to jeopardize too much for too little gain; but Tyentro’s tone was approving.

  He’s survived here.

  All of them had developed instincts to live amid the occupying regime without detection. Tom could learn from them.

  ‘We can sit down at the rear.’ Tyentro pointed.

  ‘Lead on.’

  They walked among the canoes, careful not to touch one and set it rocking into motion: if they had to depart in a hurry, they should leave no obvious traces.

  Earlier, at midday, Tom had been outside: walking by the long straight canal, where the arched ceiling bounced back the musical wave sounds, the reflected ripples of light. There had been a family, taking a picnic on the flat stone bank; a matronly fruit vendor; some young revellers canoeing for pleasure on the placid, gentle waters.

  But at some point a patrol had walked by, scarlet flashes on their grey uniforms, and at that moment the laughter faded. Even afterwards, when the Tunnel Guard militiamen were gone, a subtle sober change remained in the atmosphere.

  Another sound, and Tom dropped into a crouch.

  ‘That’s Rilka.’ Tyentro seemed to be inspecting the back of his hand: lasing-gel, a his-eyes-only display. ‘And all’s clear. We can debrief now, sir, if you’re ready.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Rilka was Academy-trained, working in the local constabulary as a trusted cleaner. Somewhere, she kept a concealed lab kit, and was adept at reconstructing flash-burned or reinitialized crystals.

  ‘And then,’ said Tyentro, as Rilka’s voice trailed off and it was clear she had nothing more to report, ‘there’s Ralkin Velsivith

  He held out a crystal.

  ‘I’d better leave.’ Rilka nodded to Tom and Tyentro. ‘Take care.’

  She rose and slipped away, into the shadows beyond the hanging canoes.

  Was gone.

  ‘It was my wife they threatened.’ In the holo, Velsivith stopped. ‘You know my Vhiyalla’s blind, don’t you?’

  Rustle of cloth. Out of view-field, Tyentro must have nodded.

  ‘A morale officer’—a humourless smile, the amber ovoid inset beneath his cheekbone suddenly catching the light -’had a little chat with me. About the importance of rooting out the realm’s enemies. And, just as I was leaving, she asked whether Vhiyalla was being treated right by the Service’s benefits scheme. “Given her circumstances,” he said.’

  And that was a threat?’ Tyentro’s voice.

  ‘Yes, and none too subtle.’

  Tyentro paused the playback.

  ‘He’s edgy, at this point. I don’t think there’s real friction between us.’

  Tom wondered if that was a veiled hint. Did Tyentro know of his past encounters with Velsivith?

  ‘Carry on.’

  ‘At first... we really arrested criminals, made the corridors safer. People we ‘d suspected but didn‘t...Well. We were told they were conspiring against the realm.’

  He sank back, shadows darkening the amber ovoid and his eyes.

  ‘But then ...Complaining about food rations, during a residents’ meeting—that became a crime. One that carries a five-SY sentence. We’ve shipped out hundreds, thousands, of prisoners for such “treasonous” activities.’

  A pause, then:

  And who knows whether any of them will ever be sent back?’

  This time it was Tom who halted the re-play.

  ‘Stress analysis?’

  ‘Seems genuine.’ Tyentro waved open a secondary holo-volume: phase spaces gently rippling, colour-coded sheets of lights a gentle green, within normal parameters. ‘But I wasn’t using sophisticated equipment.’

  ‘Takes some training, all the same, to lie without detection.’

  ‘I’ve been fooled before.’

  Tom looked at him, then nodded.

  ‘It’s a memetic virus. People informing on their neighbours, on their friends. Even family:

  ‘So we take them from their homes in the middle of the night, hold them for a while, ship them out. Some of them... Their sentences should be up soon, and then we’ll see.’

  Tyentro: ‘See what?’

  ‘Whether they come back.’

  Pause.

  ‘There are more stressors here.’ Tyentro pointed. ‘I think he’s seen people he knows—maybe even friends—being loaded onto deportation trains.’

  ‘Fate.’

  Tyentro glanced up. ‘You sound sympathetic’

  ‘That only goes so far.’

  ‘When you take them from their homes... there’s no fuss, you see. No disturbance. It’s in their eyes: terrified, but convinced it’s a mistake. The world has tipped upside down but they’re sure that someone in authority will see it’s a cruel misunderstanding, and set everything to rights.’

  Another pause.

  ‘It’s why,’ Velsivith added, ‘they never fight.’

  ‘Never?’ Tyentro.

  ‘Not... until the torture cells.’ Blinking. ‘Sometimes then, too late.’

  Stress indicators flared orange, then scarlet.

  ‘Are there visitors?’ asked Tyentro.

  ‘Family members.’ Looking up, towards the out-of-view Tyentro: ‘They’ll do anything for news, never mind the hope of leniency.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Velsivith’s face looked raw. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Are they ever successful? The family members.’

  Turning away: ‘It’s always too late for that. For any of them.’

  Halting the display once more, Tyentro said: ‘Visiting family don’t always reappear either. Pleading on a prisoner’s behalf can be construed as treason, if the interviewing officer decides.’

  Tom let out a breath.

  ‘Where are the camps? Do we know anything about them?’

  ‘Far away.’ Tyentro shook his head. ‘A thousand klicks or more. If anyone’s infiltrated them, it’s not our network.’

  They played it a second time through, in silence.

  ‘The problem’—Tyentro shut down the holo, concealed the crystal in his surcoat’s flash-pocket: ready to wipe the crystal at a tapped command—‘is that Velsivith is a pro.’

  Even the questions which Tyentro asked could be used to gauge his knowledge.

  ‘We’ll work him gently,’ said Tom. ‘And slowly.’

  ‘Sir? I don’t want to expose your cover, but a safe-chamber, with you sitting in darkness, perhaps—’

  ‘Velsivith and I have a personal history.’

  A pause. ‘I see.’
/>   ‘Slowly, then?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  There were parts of the following tendays which were pleasant, almost intoxicating: strolling through the market chamber in the early morning, buying fruit from the Belkranitsan mother and daughter who ran a modest stall, strolling past the canal when the canoeists were at practice, getting deep into the language so he could eavesdrop on serving girls’ gossip, bright with the promise of youth when love’s promise was everything, even now, under the occupation. In the evenings, there might be picnics by the fresh-smelling canal, where the families’ laughter was softened, yet made more piquant, by the gentle wavelets which trapped the ceiling’s light, rippling with blue and golden reflections, lapping gently at the clean stone banks.

  Or perhaps it was the constant awareness that informants and the Blight’s Tunnel Guard militia were everywhere, and that life’s quotidian pleasures could be snatched away instantly and without warning by the human representatives of a vast distributed power which cared nothing for individuals, which saw no pleasure or purpose in the smiles of a teenage couple walking hand in hand through a world of bright awakening, or in the simple warmth of a communal meal spiced by light-hearted gossip.

  Almost half a Standard Year passed, faster than seemed possible: gathering snippets of information, gently wooing Velsivith—he handed over confidential crystals of increasing significance—and every courier got through without mishap.

  And Tom, in his role as merchant-trader Quilvan Nyassen, slowly settled into the local community, on the outskirts of the Seventh Stratum in the Aurineate Grand’aume.

  Then one morning, buying his usual breakfast from the fruit stall, Tom noticed that young Rosa’s face was stiff with the onset of a bruise. There was a difference, too, in the way she had tied her pale green shoulder scarf, but Tom had not yet deciphered the full significance of the various knots which local women wore.

  ‘Where’s your mother, Rosa?’

  ‘At home.’ Her inflection was flat.

  ‘Is anything wrong?’

  After a moment, ‘My father’s back.’

  ‘I see.’

  But he saw nothing.

  It was later, when he watched Rosa’s mother walking by the canal, stone-faced, arm in arm with a tall narrow-shouldered man whose pot belly hung over his tunic’s belt, that Tom understood. There were few other folk by the water’s edge at this time, but they moved back unnecessarily, without a word or sign of recognition, giving the couple more than adequate room to pass.

  For the returned husband’s tunic was grey, as were his trousers, tucked into combat boots. And the cravat inside his collar was scarlet: the only insignia necessary to identify him as a member of the Dark Fire’s armed forces, home on leave with his human family.

  ~ * ~

  47

  NULAPEIRON AD 3421

  Once every tenday, Tom ascended two strata—the highest his cover-ID would allow him to go—and dined in the Club d’Anderquin. Sometimes with business contacts, where conversation would proceed in the strangled jargon of commerce (which Tom had perfected in the Bronlah Hong) unless it turned to personal matters; most often, Tom would take dinner alone, and watch the local bourgeoisie relaxing.

  While burghers and military officers dined in restaurants, alongside bright, airy promenades where polished glow-clusters floated, most ordinary folk would still be working; the luckier ones would be trudging home through service tunnels to their tiny alcoves.

  On the evening after he had seen Rosa’s returned father, Tom sat by himself at his usual table by the wall, picking at a light salad, listening to the soft Kaznin folksongs. The musician was a traveller—these days, a dangerous occupation—and he was surprisingly skilled, perched on the tiny stage at the chamber’s rear, picking at his aerolute, his soft melodious voice somehow reaching throughout the club.

  Among the rich gowns, the formal uniforms—the officers’ braid prominent in the bright light—marked the occupying forces’ highest representatives. But they sometimes behaved in unexpected ways.

  Kaznia was a distant realm currently besieged by the Blight. Famously (as though the authorities knew they had no hope of suppressing the news), the inhabitants of one small outlying community had committed suicide—parents taking their children’s lives before their own—rather than surrender. That was only six tendays ago, but the blockaded realm’s core was on the brink of falling, as Duke Broyse and his subjects starved.

  It was the officers who surprised Tom.

  As soon as the musician had begun, his first sweet ballad threaded with the unmistakable harmonies of the Kaznin ten-point scale, the uniformed men had laid down their tine-spoons, ignoring both food and the brittle conversation of their female paid companions, and turned their attention towards the music.

  They did not applaud when the song ended—a few scattered claps sounded, then fell away to silence, as other diners followed the officers’ lead—but they watched and listened attentively throughout the next song, and the next.

  One of the officers, lean and grey-haired with a rigid back, was sitting in profile; Tom saw the bright glitter of unashamed tears upon the man’s cheek as the musician’s ballad drew to its soft, sweet, haunting close.

  Have I misjudged these people ?

  Tom’s impulse was to leave, and think over what he had seen.

  But then a waiter-servitor stumbled slightly, spilling some water from the carafe he was carrying, and brushed against the grey-haired officer’s sleeve. Without taking his gaze away from the stage, the officer whipped his tine-spoon across the apologetic waiter’s cheek, ripping three parallel welts just below the eye.

  Blood was already welling as the waiter-servitor backed away, hurrying towards the service membrane-door, while the other waiters stood and watched, not daring to help.

  Tom picked a slice of gripplefruit from his plate, and slowly chewed, tasting nothing.

  After the musician finished, glowglimmers brightened and the ambient noise grew to a hubbub, over a low background of recorded zeitdeco chorales. The grey-haired officer resumed eating, using the same tine-spoon which had raised blood in the servitor’s cheek.

  Then, as the music softened, in one of those sudden unpredictable lulls, a woman’s voice carried clearly: ‘... Chaos-damned occupation ends, and we’ll all be free.’

  The music rose, in counterpoint to murmured conversations’ fading away to silence.

  She was dark-haired, the woman who had spoken. Slowly she replaced her goblet upon the table where she sat, as her companions unconsciously shifted in their seats, distancing themselves from her remark.

  Then another woman’s laughter—too brittle: bright and intoxicated—cut through the silence, and an officer made a coarse remark, and gradually diners began to converse once more.

  But there were watchful gazes trained upon the dark-haired woman.

  Excusing herself, she left her table and walked, a little unsteadily, to the exit, where a servitor fetched her cloak and draped it around her shoulders: royal blue and lustrous, with a spray of silver flecks fanning out across the shoulders, and a brocaded hem which brushed along the marble flagstones as she passed through the glistening membrane and was gone, the membrane vitrifying to milky hardness.

  Tom, still seated, used his cred-ring to pay the bill, touching it to the tabletop sensor.

  His black cloak was folded on an unused chair beside him, and he picked it up, carrying it across his forearm as he stood. Near him, on the wall, an area of liquid texture was subtly different from the polished stone surrounding it: a servitors’ doorway. No-one—he verified with a casual scan across the restaurant—was looking in his direction.

  Tom crouched down so that the covered table hid him, rolled sideways through the membrane, and came to his feet in a dank service tunnel.

  His heart beat faster.

  In a dank, cobbled piazza shrouded with black shadows, Tom finally caught sight of her spectral shape, wide cape sweeping the dark glisteni
ng cobblestones. She was heading for a square archway—but, in the tunnel beyond, he saw silhouettes move. Outlines of three militiamen standing out of the light, on purpose.

  Alerted by someone from the Club d’Anderquin?