Context

by John Meaney

  ‘It’s a new being!’ Oron was struggling to get up. ‘You don’t know—’

  A rebirth? A metamorphosis? Many beings change radically, make transitions from one life-stage to another...

  Should that remove the guilt?

  Closer.

  Then the external forms came apart, and she was in a blizzard of whirling stones, every one flying with deadly momentum, and she squinted against the blazing inner forms as she moved, blending and avoiding, working by instinct—irimi: seeking the hurricane’s centre, the eye of the storm—and then she was in the midst of blazing waveforms, spiking and burning and glowing with reinforced energies.

  Patterns.

  Needing to make sense of...

  She recognized the second Zajinet now. It was the renegade’s accuser, the one which had gone up against it in the trial. But why—?

  There. The pattern flicked into view, a visual paradox resolved—now—then she took her chance and struck.

  Light flowed like liquid flames.

  For Luís.

  Her hands burned and she cried out, dropping the copper shaft, but a blackness was already rippling across the Zajinet’s blue/red fire.

  Done it.

  Then they were two distinct forms again, stones snapping back into protective body-form, and they dropped to the floor and remained still, two elephantine sculpture-piles built of charred pebbles and boulders.

  ‘Oh, Ro. What have you done?’

  <>

  ~ * ~

  56

  NULAPEIRON AD 3422—

  Four more tendays he spent in a coma, floating in an autodoc’s womb, flooded with nutrients and tranquillizers, muscles contracting against viscous fluid—stimulated involuntarily—in an effort to rebuild them.

  Slowly, slowly, mind and body knitted together.

  Healed...

  In the early days of his waking convalescence, therapists and counsellors tried to work with the deeper wounds, until he raged at them and they were made—under Corduven’s direct orders, Tom later learned—to leave him in uneasy peace.

  Whatever Tom was becoming, or had become—he knew the darkness in his own spirit—it was nourished on hatred. And he wanted nothing more than to be a weapon, directed by Corduven to wherever it would do most damage to the hated Enemy’s cause.

  But it would be nearly year’s end before they sent him out again.

  The day after his final debriefing, he had dinner with Sylvana. The conversation was of intelligence matters: she was part of Corduven’s strategy team, most of whom considered Tom’s mission a striking success, despite the human cost.

  He wondered how Velsivith’s widow was coping.

  Sylvana seemed easy in Tom’s company. But at the meal’s end, when he leaned forward to chastely kiss her cheek in farewell, she flinched.

  That told him everything he needed to know about their relationship.

  ‘Take care, my Lady.’

  He watched her walk away, along a rose-pink marble gallery, followed by a small retinue of servitors clad in ivory and black. They were colours he himself had worn for too many years.

  At the new, relocated Academy, he trained decryption teams, helped design idiom-level eavesdropping AIs (Turing-capable and therefore illegal, but this was wartime), brainstormed organizational cell structures and messaging paths for penetration agents sent in to liaise with partisan resistance fighters.

  And he trained hard, waiting for the day they would send him back into the field.

  But his debriefing had been very thorough, and not all of it had been conducted while he was conscious. There were forces at work on his behalf, which he was not aware of until the night a clap sounded from outside his modest quarters, and when he waved open the membrane-door it was Adam Gervicort, his former servitor now in military uniform, who was standing in the corridor outside.

  ‘Adam? What are you doing here? It’s good to—’

  But Adam sketched a bow, then quickly handed over a crystal.

  ‘It’s from High Command, sir. Tom. From Brigadier-General d’Ovraison himself.’

  Tom had scarcely seen Corduven since his return.

  ‘Wants to see me now, does he?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Looking back at his crystal-strewn desk: ‘Well, I could—’

  ‘I was told to say, it concerns a certain security chief. She’s been located, alive and well.’

  Elva!

  The world whirled all around him, and he had to grab at the doorjamb for support.

  Elva’s alive, and they’ve found her.

  ~ * ~

  43

  BETA DRACONIS III AD 2143

  <>

  [19]

  Gritty-eyed, unable to sleep, they gathered in the main conference room: a bellied-out section of bluish tubular corridor. There was a ragged energy in the air, the unspoken communal thought keeping them awake: We‘re going home.

  Lila was perched on a crate, holding the comms pad. Not long now.

  Ro pushed her way through. ‘Lila, you’re missing two people.’

  ‘I know.’ Anger darkened Lila’s eyes, and she flicked back her hair—now lustrous green, and long—from her face. ‘Anita and Oron.’

  “They’re staying in the city, they said. For good.’

  ‘They’ll need—’

  But just then the comms pad squawked into life.

  ‘Pilot Vaachs to Diplomatic Settlement BD3. Confirming rendezvous as scheduled.’

  There were cheers as Lila answered, ‘That’s terrific, Pilot. Our thanks. There will be twenty people boarding, with this cargo.’ She appended the manifest, sent it with a gesture. ‘We’re leaving two people behind. Gone native.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like a good idea, BD3. Though I’m not sure about your arithmetic. Doesn‘t that leave nineteen personnel?’

  ‘You know where they are?’ Lila whispered. ‘Oron and Anita?’

  Ro nodded.

  ‘Well, then.’ She spoke into the comms pad. ‘Our replacements will have to dig them out. And there are twenty departing: this is not a mistake.’

  ‘Negative on the stay-behinds, BD3. There are no replacements. This is a full evacuation, as per your regulation X-nineteen. Orders file appended.’

  ‘Shit.’ Lila put down the pad, and looked around the room. ‘Any volunteers for an arrest party? We have two assholes to collect.’

  Ro led the way, with a sense of fatalistic acceptance: she would pay the price for her revenge. The others in the party, experienced though they were, had to concentrate, connected to Ro by smartrope and hanging on whenever the flickering overlays—white sky replaced by corn-yellow and blue stippling, smeared blood-red, then white once more—grew too surreal.

  Anita and Oron, env-suited, came surprisingly easily. It was not just the news that all humans were being evacuated; they were subdued, and Ro sensed that the Zajinets blamed them in some way for what had happened. But the gazes they turned on Ro were liquid with dark malevolence.

  ‘She damaged him irreparably,’ Anita said. ‘The new union, the remake of a being, and she spoiled everything.’

  ‘Your Zajinets’ — Ro’s voice was taut with bitterness — ‘are responsible for dozens of deaths on Terra. Why do you think we’re being evacuated?’

  ‘You—’

  ‘No.’ Lila brandished a wrist-graser Ro had not seen before. ‘Shut up, everyone. Recriminations later.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Let’s just get out of here alive.’

  So I didn’t kill it.

  She had aimed, with her mathematical intuition, to destroy only one pattern-within-patterns: one group personality, among the many, the supergroup, which comprised each Zajinet But at a time when it was—mating? reproducing? reincarnating?—somehow re-forming itself, in conjunction with the other, its former accuser.

  It made no sense.

  But she had effectively lobotomized the one responsible for Luís’s death. For An
ne-Louise.

  They hurried through the shifting streets, observed by hovering Zajinets who offered no greeting, but made no move to stop them.

  Departure.

  A wide space had been cleared before the twisted silver-blue tubes of the settlement, of Watcher’s Bones, and the cargo was piled up ready to go. The gathered humans watched as autoshuttles drifted down in triangular formation from the dark rippling sky.

  Cargocrabs loaded crates, while the people—one group led by Lila, the other by Bruce’s imposing bulk—lined up for the two shuttles whose holds were made over as passenger cabins: lined with grey carpeting, filled with sleep-couches for the mu-space voyage.

  ‘OK, everyone. Let’s go home.’

  They were silent as they climbed aboard, casting glances back towards the shifting, changing cityscape, noting the absence of any formal deputation. No farewells; no replacements to be greeted.

  Terrans were no longer welcome here.

  She watched the others lie back. Fluffy Matheson winked at her, then placed his delta-band on his forehead and slid into immediate sleep. All around her, people were closing their eyes, relaxing.

  But Lila and the slightly built but hard-looking Jared were watching Ro, and both of them were armed.

  ‘See you on Terra,’ said Ro.

  She lay back, thinking: Twenty minutes. Remember.

  And slept.

  And dreamed.

  Of liquid golden space, of black spongiform stars embedded in infinite amber, with crimson nebulae, like streamers of blood, here and there amid the vastness.

  Then, after twenty minutes (as humans reckon the passage of linear time) she awoke, and found what she had deeply known all along.

  The dream was real.

  There was something trance-like in the way she drifted through the shuttle, past Matheson’s and Lila’s and Jared’s sleeping forms. Golden space seemed to overlay everything, as though she swam in a fractal sea, while the shuttle’s rectilinear outlines seemed faded, a little transparent, and softer to the touch.

  But the door mechanism worked, and it rose up, revealing the great cargo hold beyond.

  Amber warmth pouring out to the infinite beyond.

  It was a siren-song and she ignored it, concentrating on her purpose so that she did not lose herself in beauty.

  Her hand, as she waved it before her face, seemed to replicate itself in series, until she held it still and there was only one hand, and she was herself once more. A small private joke: her stay among the Zajinets, her enemies, had helped to prepare her for this.

  But why were they her enemies?

  Golden space.

  I’m home.

  It was a feeling which sank down to the very heart of her.

  This is where I belong.

  And was this the reason behind everything? Was she, the first human born in mu-space, the first to feel truly at home here?

  Was it me they were trying to kill?

  But there were two Zajinet factions involved. Perhaps the one which had taken her here had not been trying to murder her.

  Have I hurt the wrong one ?

  Could it be that the renegade had taken her here to save her? That the official ambassador was behind Luís’s death, and Anne-Louise’s murder?

  No...

  Amber...

  She made her way forward to a bulkhead, and sought the passageway which would lead her to the great ship’s control cabin where the Pilot would be working, interfaced with the vessel’s systems.

  The woman was slender, naked, lying on her couch, and silver cables hung in graceful catenary curves, linking her physical being to the ship’s AI core.

  ‘Pilot Vaachs?’ Ro stood uncertainly.

  The Pilot’s head turned, and reflections slid across the polished bus-cables plugged into her eye sockets.

  ‘A normal human being’—her voice drifted, oddly attenuated—‘would have been driven insane within seconds, awake in this continuum. I guess it identifies you.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  But the Pilot must have given some internal command, for the cabin grew transparent to the ship’s surroundings, and golden paralight flooded the place, became part of the ship, flowed through Pilot and vessel alike.

  Amber space, and stars of black.

  It was a realm of wonder.

  ‘You are Ro McNamara, daughter of Karyn, and some of us have waited for this day.’

  Outside, it stretched forever:

  A sea of infinite beauty.

  The place where her father had died.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  58

  NULAPEIRON AD 3422

  They were waiting for him in the briefing chamber: Corduven, standing with his hands clasped behind his back; and Sentinel, his cropped white hair making him look as ageless as ever, his thick arms folded. Tom had not seen Sentinel since his abortive recruitment attempt, in the Aurineate Grand’aume.

  ‘You sent a courier for me, didn’t you? I mean, back in the Grand’aume.’

  Sentinel nodded. His square face, impassive, gave nothing away.

  ‘I apologize,’ said Tom. ‘I disregarded his warning. More than that. I attacked him. I thought he was robbing a young woman, beside a canal.’

  ‘I’ve read the reports.’

  ‘He committed suicide ...’

  At the time, the notion of suicide to avoid torture had been an unreal abstraction; that was before Tom’s own experience in Velsivith’s acidic cells.

  Velsivith. Another death...

  There was more Tom had to say, but it evaporated from his mind.

  Behind Sentinel and Corduven a crystal desk floated; in front of them hung an intricate network diagram, a tangle of brightly coloured arcs linking explanatory tricons, depicting the Blight’s disposition of forces in some far sector.

  But that was not what caught Tom’s eye.

  Is it true ?

  It was tiny, the holoportrait suspended in mid-air, but her features were unmistakable.

  ‘That is her,’ said Corduven. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Elva!

  Tom could only nod. It was the moment which culminated five years of doubt-filled searching, but there was no way to express the yearning and frightened joy which burst like a fragrant storm through his veins and set his soul on fire.

  Elva... You really are alive.

  In the head and shoulders portrait, slowly rotating, she wore a grey uniform with scarlet flashes on the high tunic collar.

  What was she now? An officer in the Blight’s forces?

  ‘She’s infiltrated their command at a higher level’ -Sentinel coughed, then clasped his blocky hands together—‘than we’ve ever been able to.’

  ‘Where did you—’ For a moment, weakness swept over Tom.

  Corduven gestured, and a lev-stool detached itself from the wall, positioned itself behind Tom. He sat down.

  ‘Thank you. I...’

  What could he say?

  It was Sentinel who broke the silence, softly. ‘We tracked down her brother, Odom.’

  ‘I met him.’

  ‘Attended his wedding, yes.’ Sentinel smiled briefly. ‘We learned that. But what you didn’t know was, Elva had a twin sister. Natural twins, not clones.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘She never mentioned it. Of course. Because her sister Litha was already working deep undercover, for an organization called the Grey Shadows. You remember it?’

  ‘I... No.’

  ‘In LudusVitae’—Sentinel looked at Corduven, and Tom wondered for a moment whether Sentinel’s allegiance to the revolutionary movement had been all that it appeared—‘we came across them once or twice, but they were only ever loosely allied. Sometimes our objectives coincided.’

  ‘So they’ve been around for a while.’

  ‘Whatever their original purpose,’ said Sentinel, ‘the Grey Shadows have been implacably against the Blight for as long as we have. Every now and then, one of our courier
s might receive warning of a Dark Fire interception. Twice, captured agents of ours have been rescued from captivity, though always as part of some other operation against the occupying forces.’