Gemsigns
Page 1
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Quercus
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW
Copyright © 2013 Stephanie Saulter
The moral right of Stephanie Saulter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78087 865 2 (TPB)
ISBN 978 1 78087 866 9 (eBOOK)
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk and
www.jofletcherbooks.com
To the memory of my mother,
who started it all with a hobbit
Greer-Ann Saulter
1948 – 2006
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
0
1
DAY ONE 2
3
4
5
DAY TWO 6
7
8
9
DAY THREE 10
11
12
13
14
15
DAY FOUR 16
17
18
19
DAY FIVE 20
21
22
23
24
DAY SIX 25
26
27
28
29
DAY SEVEN 30
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
0
When describing a circle one begins anywhere. Each point precedes and succeeds with no greater or less meaning; the tale they tell remains unvaried. There is neither cause nor consequence, for every moment is both. It is curious the resignation with which we declare this pattern in human affairs, and the virtue with which we credit it in nature.
But beware illusions born of too still and centred a perspective. A mere tilt of the head, a sideways step – and history unspools. The triumphs and tragedies, victories and defeats, dark and golden ages come and go and come again, each shaped by the revolution of which it is the final coordinate, shaping that for which it is the first. No two moments are exactly the same, for travelling the circuit conveys a momentum that displaces the point of return from the point of departure. Life proceeds in a spiral, pushing outward and forward, expanding and accelerating as the players whirl through their evolutions, building a vortex.
Be careful. Stand in the middle and the maelstrom will pull you in.
But you must pick the right moment to join the dance. There are events which ripple down the helix, maiming and moulding all the moments that follow. These are worth understanding.
Beginnings are important.
*
So our story begins, perhaps, with Dr Eli Walker, tasked with the mapping of divisions, accosted, accused and propositioned. Insulted, as he would have it, but then Dr Walker is a principled man. To himself he is a player in a morality tale, unravelling dissimulations. He knows, or thinks he knows, what the choices are. His own righteousness is in no doubt. He has the conviction of a man who fights on the side of angels.
*
But Dr Walker is a reactor to a reality, the effect of a cause. We might better begin with Gaela Provis Bel’Natur, struggling with corollaries as she makes her way across the city. They will lead her to a treasure beyond imagining, the discarded relic of a dismayed hegemony. Does our story flow from what she finds, or from the manner of her finding it? She could not tell you. Gaela is the very embodiment of unintended consequences. It is her boon and her doom, her grace and her gall. It exhausts her. Gaela could tell Eli a thing or two about the hard grind of duality. She would give a lot for a middle ground, some quiet grey in which to rest, and she may find it, for a while. But not for long. She has convictions of her own.
*
So Gaela, maybe Gaela is the starting point. Or maybe not. All beginnings are endings, after all, so perhaps we should commence with a departure. A long time ago, in a forest, a deep dark wood as befits a fairytale. A young girl, not much beyond childhood, flees between towering trunks, bearing an impossible burden, running for her life. She has emerged from earth and the great silent spaces beneath the cathedral of trees frighten her. She pauses for breath, rests her hand against rough bark. She has never felt anything like it.
A moth flutters away from her fingers, brown-grey and mottled and invisible until it moves, finding a safer vantage higher up. The girl is transfixed. She is reaching up towards it, hoping to see it fly again, when a whisper of sound reaches her, sighing on a breeze through the forest. For a moment she has almost forgotten the pursuit. She wishes she shared the moth’s gift of camouflage, or the possibility of escape in the trees. But even if she were to ascend into the canopy she knows they would find her, track her, burn the forest to retrieve or destroy her. There are men and dogs on her trail, and darker things as well. So she turns, slips away up the slope, running as fast as she can, making for the open ground she knows is there.
Knows? She does not know. She has seen a map. They did not think she would understand it and so did not trouble to hide it from her. She understands only too well that it may be old. The place she is making for may have changed. The trees may stop too soon, or not at all. There may be people, and not the ones she hopes to find. She had very little time, and has judged this her best chance. There is nothing to do now except struggle uphill, hearing more distinctly the whir of a helicopter in the distance, feeling the stitch burning fierce in her side, the low branches and brambles catching at her as the trees become smaller, newer, and the forest turns to scrub on the flat land of the plateau.
This is unexpected. The trees have been cleared, a hazard she had anticipated; but some time ago, and the new growth has not been managed. So she is not exposed as she had feared, but she is slowed down, reduced to walking pace as she pushes through the dense brush. Her pursuers are still moving at speed, and she can hear the dogs now, and the shouts of the men.
Strangely it is the helicopter she fears most, and she scans the sky. Its endless unbordered space should panic her, but instead the blue immensity overhead fills her with a strange, wild joy. She marshals it. There is no time yet to explore this feeling, and if she is captured the time will never come again. No sight of the helicopter, and its sound has become distant: it must be at its apogee as it circles the forest. For a moment she marvels at her luck, and wonders that it is not tracking the movements of her pursuers, as they are tracking her. The others must not all have been rounded up yet, she thinks, and hope surges in her. Again, she damps the emotion down. She is the only one who has any real chance, and that will be dashed in minutes if the helicopter is called in before she reaches her destination.
Which it will be the moment they realise where she has led them. She can clearly hear the other sound she had been straining for. It was a distant murmur as she came out of the trees, then a growing grumble as she pushed and strained through the dense growth, and now a rushing, tumbling roar as the bracken releases her and she stumbles out onto a narrow, grassy ledge.
No one is there to meet her. A mountain climber with ropes and anchors might hope to abseil down the side of the cliff; she has neither the skill nor the equipment. White water boils at the base of the drop, and she feels panic rising up into her throat. She takes a deep breath, then another and another, and casts a last look up at the deepening blue of the evening sky. Then she fixes her eyes down the long plunge into the gorge.
A moment later the tracking team bursts out of the forest and into the sticky embrace of the scrubland. The leader hears the faint thunder of the waterfall, checks her map and swears. She screams into her earset.
Within seconds the roar of the helicopter rivals that of the river as it heaves into view. By the time the trackers and dogs force their way through the undergrowth and onto the ledge, it is hovering above the gorge, swaying a bit in the updraughts, staying high to avoid the steep walls and buffeting currents. Its rotors almost span the width of the crevice. Retrieval specialists in orange safety suits hang out of the door, sweeping the gap with binoculars. Even from a distance their body language signals disappointment.
The air team leader spots his counterpart standing on the edge of the abyss and pulls himself back inside. She knows what he will say before her comlink crackles with the news.
The girl is gone.
1
The headache bloomed before Gaela’s eyes, a violence of reds and violets. Her knees jellied as turbulent, aggressive colours pulsed in time to the pounding in her skull. She’d felt it coming on as she left the museum, had gulped some painkillers and hoped she’d caught it early enough to at least stave off the florid accompaniment. No such luck. The meds should kick in soon, but for now she felt buried under waves of pain and almostpurple.
She often wondered what norms – or even other gems – would call her colours, and knew she would never have the answer. Hyperspectral vision coupled to an unimpaired intellect was a rarity, and hyperspectral synaesthesia was, as far as she knew, unique. She could have done without the distinction. She struggled endlessly to describe hues no one else could see.
Today they were intense enough to interfere with her carefully modulated perception of her surroundings, and she stumbled and stopped, eyes half closed. The street was lined with old, faceless buildings hard up against the pavement and she leaned against one of them gratefully. The migraine was not exactly a surprise. She’d known the likely outcome of the day’s task, a hurried evaluation of a massive private collection. The paintings were rumoured to include old masters, even some Renaissance work, but the museum had had its doubts. It was only at the last moment that someone had thought to request Gaela’s services.
Now they had a treasure trove of lost masterpieces, awaiting painstaking analysis of the ancient underdrawings, corrections and layers of paint by highly trained specialists wielding delicate instruments that could reveal to norm eyes what Gaela had seen in an instant. After hours spent checking dozens of canvases, trying to describe her findings in terms the others could understand, she had a headache. And, she reminded herself, payment and the prospect of more work. It was still far better than other things she’d had to do for a living.
But it had been an exhausting day and the early winter evening had long since deepened into night. At least there was no one around; she always chose her route carefully, preferring quiet streets where there was less passive surveillance to avoid, she was less likely to be accosted, and the visual bombardment would be less severe. She should be able to wait, unmolested, for the doublebarrelled barrage to recede.
She tipped her head back to rest against the cool masonry and gazed up at the sky. Even to her it was largely blank, washed out by the city’s glow. Peaceful. She picked out gentle rays of ultraviolet, followed them up until she could make out a few stars. She stood in the shadow of the wall and watched them wheel slowly overhead, letting her eyes rest in the invisible light, until the pain diminished to a spatter of lavender. Her earset buzzed.
‘Where are you?’ Bal, worried. She’d told him about the paintings and that she’d be late, and messaged him as she was leaving. Still, she should have been home long since. She could picture him resisting the urge to call, wanting to trust that the Declaration would keep her safe, finding things to do around the flat to distract himself, and finally grabbing his tablet in an excess of anxiety. It gave her a warm feeling.
‘Almost home.’ She swung away from the wall. ‘I had to stop for a while. Headache.’
‘You all right? Want me to come and get you?’
‘No, it’s okay. I’m feeling a bit better. Should be there in fifteen minutes or so.’
‘Dinner’s ready.’ The warm feeling spread. She could feel herself smiling, a huge happy grin that pushed the headache all the way back.
‘Great. I’m starving.’
She flicked off and picked up the pace, still smiling. Bal: what a treasure. A gem in the literal sense, a godsend if you believed in god. She remembered how they’d met, when she was still a runaway staying barely a step ahead of the Bel’Natur retrieval squads and he a newly arrived refugee from the Himalayan mines. He’d used the chaos of the transit camp to keep her safe, and she’d kept the cash coming in. Once the danger of forced repatriation and indenture had passed, they had ventured out into the city and found a new home in the Squats. For a long time their nascent community had been barely noticeable, a tiny tract of alien territory carved out of the heart of London. Now it was exploding, as gems flooded in on the back of the Declaration.
She crossed the broad, brightly lit avenue that separated the back streets of the financial district from buzzier clubs and cafés, barely noticing herself twisting and angling to slip unregistered between infrared camera beams and traffic monitors. The Declaration might have brought with it a new sense of security, but with scarcely a week gone by it still felt too tenuous for her to give up the old habit. The strange, dancing gait drew a few puzzled looks, which Gaela ignored. Gems were expected to be weird. In an open, populated place like this, with her hair uncovered and no companion, a touch of harmlessly off-putting eccentricity was useful. She sidestepped between a couple waiting for a table – who politely, pointedly looked away – and the perimeter of the sweeper field in front of the neighbouring jewellery shop, and plunged into the network of alleys that ran down towards the river.
The boutiques and bistros ended abruptly. There was less surveillance now, and she walked more or less normally. Little light penetrated these narrow streets, but she was using night vision, seeing as a cat sees, navigating easily around obstacles, on the lookout for lurkers in the shadows. From a hundred yards away she spotted a couple grappling with each other, hands pulling at belts and britches as they crammed themselves into the angle of a doorway. Gaela blinked at the telltale glow, not unlike her own, as one of them fell to his knees. She looked for a similar glimmer from his partner, couldn’t find it. She hesitated a moment, then turned off into an adjacent lane.
So one was a gem and the other not, unless his gemsign was well hidden. None of her business. Such liaisons – relationships even – weren’t unheard of. Now that the Declaration had confirmed a universal humanity, there would inevitably be more. And if it was a business transaction, well, most gems had few choices. Still, it made her uncomfortable. This was not yet a safe place for a gem to linger, still less to leave himself so vulnerable.
The lane she was in ran directly towards the Squats, but she changed cours
e again to avoid a motion sensor, the infrared beam as clear to her as a red rope stretched across her path. The authorities were evidently trying to monitor the numbers moving into the inner-city colony of the radically altered.
Worry sparked in her, coupled with a deep-seated resentment of the endless, obsessive data-gathering. There were a lot of very good reasons for newly liberated, often baffled and disorientated gems to band together; but they were in effect corralling themselves, the more easily to be counted and catalogued. Social services had been at pains to reassure them that the information would only ever be used for their benefit. The department liaison was committed, kind and clearly believed what she said to be true. Gaela wished she shared her confidence.
She came out onto another main road, as broad as the avenue she’d crossed earlier but dim and deserted, its surface pitted with age. A damp, stickily cold mist rolled up from the quayside, diffusing the glow from a few ancient streetlamps. Blocky, rectilinear buildings rose in front of her, lights twinkling from very few windows. Still, more than there had been even last night.
She glanced further up the road to where the old leisure centre squatted, dark at this late hour. Bal would have been in there today, working with the others to welcome and settle the newcomers while around them the building was slowly brought back to life. It had been the hub of a desirable area once, a development of modern apartments and communal gardens running down to the river and a short walk from offices, shops and entertainment. People had flocked to live one atop the other, competing to claim a place in the heart of the city.
Then the Syndrome rolled through like a decades-long tsunami and the survivors, disheartened by the echoing solitude of so many empty homes, dispersed into the more spacious suburbs that ringed the centre. Plans had occasionally been floated to demolish the old apartment buildings, reclaim the riverside, but for so long there had been so little money, so few people and so much else to salvage that it had become an endlessly deferred project.