Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  In another moment the helicopter was skimming over the dunes, circling twice before finally settling near the overlander. The helicopter had an egg-shaped cabin, much clear plastic webbed by black steel, and a long narrow tail with flared air vents to stabilise it. The wash of its rotors sent tidewrack fluttering out to sea, enveloped Miguel in torn petals and a gritty sandstorm. He was still cleaning sand from his face and whiskery beard when the two cops ducked out of the helicopter and sprinted down the beach to the overlander.

  Miguel crouched lower, leaves trembling around him.

  The cops walked around the big white vehicle, ducking to look under its tracks, peering up at its curved windscreen.

  Then they went up the ladder onto its roof and one pulled up the hatch while the other clambered inside, reappearing a minute later to say something that was lost in the roar of the surf. Both cops scrambled down and quickly quartered the beach, their white coveralls ghostly in the last light. At last, one returned to the helicopter, leaning into the plastic bubble of the cabin to talk to the radio.

  Miguel watched the other cop poke around at the foot of the dunes. They knew he was hiding from them, he thought. The goddamn cops, you didn’t stand a chance against them when they got on your tail. He should have run when he had had the chance. He could have been a kilometre away by now.

  The cop by the dunes bent, began to scoop away sand with both hands. A boot appeared, then part of a bloated leg. The cop turned away, pinching the wings of his nostrils with finger and thumb. A dozen metres away, Miguel caught a whiff of corruption over the dusty scent of the quaking vine. He was shivering with anticipatory fear now, nerving himself to make a run for it. So much for charity. He should have left the body where he had found it, propped up against the overlander with the back of its head spattered all over the tracks. Now the cops wouldn’t rest until they found out who had buried the body; and because the body’s head was spoiled they might take Miguel’s instead, if they caught him, turn him into a machine the way they did to all their dead people.

  As both cops bent to the unpleasant task of exhuming the corpse from its shallow sandy grave, Miguel slowly wriggled backward, tendrils clutching at his clothing, catching in his matted hair. When he was out of sight of the beach he stood, dusting sand from his red trousers. Then he shouldered his pack and broke into a run, feet flying over close-cropped turf, the scooped mouths of rabbit burrows, dancing around loops of briar and vine. He ran through the maze of the dunes until he was winded and then he walked on, holding his aching side, shadows gathering around him. Some time later he heard the angry buzz of the helicopter. It circled above the dunes for half an hour, searchlight blazing, before giving up and turning away, heading west.

  Miguel had taken cover in a hollow clump of thornbush. Even after the helicopter had gone he sat still, fearing some trick, so still that, first one, then two, then a dozen more, rabbits emerged from their burrows and began to nibble at the turf. When Miguel finally stood, they dived for safety in frantic crisscross trajectories of white scuts.

  Miguel walked back the way he had come.

  The overlander was still there, but the hatch in its roof had been locked. Miguel pried at it in a halfhearted way, then sat on his heels. He thought, I should have taken as much as I could at the beginning and gone on. He’d spent too much time here, bumping his head on a mystery not for him. And now the goddamned cops would be after him, really, specifically after him…

  Miguel pulled a heavy foil envelope from inside his overjacket, scraped off a sliver of the gummy stuff inside with a fingernail, put it under his tongue. Numbness spread from the cavern of his mouth, weighting his tongue, his jaw, suffusing his face. His fear did not go away, but it no longer seemed important.

  There was little light now. Only the small inner moon was up, a chipped fleck of light not much brighter than the first stars. But as the drug took hold, things seemed to gain their own luminescence, as if every object shadowed a spectral inner light. The unravelling lines of foam far down the beach continually renewed lacy patterns of phosphorescence; and the curved beach itself held a heavy glow flecked with small furtive flickers of life. Each leaf of the quaking vine, every recurved blade of grass, glistened as if coated with frost. Only the overlander was unchanged, a dead shadow in the landscape of living light.

  Miguel rubbed his bristly chin, chuckling to himself, then dropped to the sand and crossed to the empty grave. The long, shallow hole held a deep, dusty green radiance, as if lined with moldering velvet. Miguel urinated into it, his water gouging crusty shadows in the green glow. Piss on it all, on everything that came out of the city. He climbed the steep dune face and stood at the rim for a moment, a stocky, ragged figure silhouetted against the starry sky.

  And stepped down, was gone.

  2. The Dingo

  On a desk-sized platform of mesh high above the baking Outback, in the shade of the reaching dish of the relay station’s ten-metre antenna, Richard Damon Florey looked out across dry red grassland at the shimmering horizon while the machines talked to each other. He held a compsim in his right hand, one input jacked into the guidance computer, the other into the cuff, wrapped loosely around his left wrist, which interfaced with her nervous system via a subdermal implant. It turned him into the active link, the mediator, between the relay station and Constat, the one point eight megacee computer in Port of Plenty (he imagined microlaser impulses jittering back and forth along the buried cable like quantum fireflies). But unless Constat found something wrong, there would be nothing else for him to do.

  Bored with the scenery, Florey took another peek at the operation: an endless array of figures scrolling across his vision, the manifestation of Constat’s interrogation of the billion or so elements and innumerable shifting pathways of the guidance computer. Briefly, Florey shifted deeper, but encountered only Constat’s calmly floating colophon, a skeletal sketch in vivid electric blue of four interlocking pyramids hanging before the unsettling sense of dark seething vastness, as if an information-dense yet insubstantial mountain had somehow rooted in his mind. This intimation of Constat’s power gave him a chill despite the sweltering heat. So different from the idiot savant mind of his compsim, icon-accessed subroutines worn smooth with familiarity. Thinking about accessing Constat was like contemplating a dive into a sea of churning razors.

  He uncoupled and found himself staring into the sun, his glasses darkened to an opaque black. Afraid of losing his balance and falling from his precarious perch, he looked away and, one hand holding the compsim, the other the platform’s flimsy railing, stood quite still while the sensitive molecules in the lenses depolarised.

  Although tricked out in the coveralls of the Port Authority cops, even to the recoilless pistol in the power holster at his hip, Rick Florey looked bemused and defenceless: a sparely built technician marooned with his machinery in anarchic nature. As his sunglasses cleared, the shimmering plain became visible once more, but there was little to interest him out there. Open tracts of red grass, a few clumps of twisted leafless trees, perhaps the dark slash of a river canyon. Directly below were the remnants of the research post, bleached shells of a half a dozen abandoned shacks scattered on a weedy apron of concrete and ringed round with a sagging wire fence, and the white overlander where the two cops who had escorted Rick out to the relay station sat in air-conditioned comfort. Orange sunlight flared on the curved windscreen; Rick couldn’t see if the cops were watching him or not.

  He peeked again. The compsim was still parading numbers.

  With his wrist, Rick wiped sweat from his forehead, yawned. This routine inspection was horrible tedious, despite the importance of the relay station. A century ago it had received an unending stream of news and advice from a laser transmitter beyond Neptune’s orbit, but the government which had built and funded the transmitter had long ago fallen from power in the United States. Now that only colonyboats linked Earth and Elysium, the relay station served to pick up their femtowatt signals as they
decelerated at the edge of Tau Ceti’s gravity well. Not that warning of another arrival was needed—after a century, the rhythm of arrival, once every three point six three terrestrial years, was a tradition as invariable as celestial mechanics—but the signals contained information about the type of cargo and supercargo to expect. Revivification of the cargo of new settlers was one of Port of Plenty’s major industries, while the supercargo of technological wizardly, automat tapes, and cultural ideology insured that the city retained its necessary edge over the settlements.

  Important, yes, though in Rick’s opinion this routine inspection was hardly important enough to warrant the personal attention of the University’s only lecturer in Communications Engineering, despite the imminent arrival of the latest colony-boat. But although the research station had been abandoned, the relay tower was still the property of the University, and the inspection tours were the only way of insuring continued control. And so, although the assignment was an annoying interruption of his routines, Rick had not been able to refuse it. That would have been a conspicuous act of defiance. In the city, with his ambitions, such acts were to be avoided. Besides,, the task was almost certainly some kind of test of his loyalty. So he had publicly declared that it would be an honour; and both Cath and Professor Collins had agreed that it was. Privately, though, Rick just wanted to get on with his research into the radio-reflecting properties of Elysium’s turbulent ionosphere. He had begun to miss the cubbyhole of his office even before the overlander had swung out of the city’s fenced limits toward the vast unconquered emptiness of the Outback.

  There was a kind of soundless detonation in his head, and Constat’s colophon appeared in his vision, seeming to float just beyond the tip of his nose. The computer’s quiet baritone, intimate as God’s own voice, announced, “Analysis complete. All components are functioning within acceptable limits. Thank you for assisting in this interesting problem.”

  For any other computer on Elysium, this would have been no more than a mechanical nicety ground out in obedience to some programmer’s whim. But Constat was a megacee computer, and therefore had self-direct consciousness of at least a limited sort—even philosophers were agreed on that. The fact that the overhaul of part of the interstellar communications system was of especial interest to the unimaginably abstract workings of Constat would have been at the very least suspicious, if not outright alarming, to most people. But to Richard Damon Florey, his mind on the experiments that he wanted to fit into the payload of a high altitude balloon, it meant nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  Overnight, Miguel’s snares had yielded a brace of rabbits, not bad for a river canyon in the middle of the Outback. He had skinned and gutted and spitted them, and now they were roasting over a slow, smoky fire while he sprawled atop a mossy boulder at the edge of the river, once again fiddling with the little machine he had stolen from the dead man’s overlander.

  Miguel had been in the wilderness for two-thirds of his life now, mostly alone. So long that he had to think hard to remember his own name. Miguel Lucas. Mickey. His father’s hoarse soft voice. Miguel could remember his father’s voice but not his face; in memory it was always in the shadow of the wide-brimmed hat the tall, tired, stooped man used to wear, even around the house. Miguel remembered his father as being an old man, but now he was himself older than his father had been when he had died. Alone for more than thirty years, two-thirds of his life.

  Going dingo, the settlers called it. Half of the original colonists had been from Australia, a sop to nationalist pride when that continent had finally ceded independence to become the largest of all the United States. They had named the dry grasslands after the empty heart of their birthplace, just as they had given the indigenous semi-intelligent inhabitants of Elysium the name of the long-lost original inhabitants of Australia. Going dingo was to drop out of society, to try and make it alone: usually one or two families striking off to carve a living out of the wilderness east of the Trackless Mountains; less often someone who could no longer bear to be among people. In either case it was illegal.

  Miguel Lucas had been one of identical twins, but his brother had been afflicted by some toxin or other while still in the womb, had lived less than a day after the long, hard delivery which had killed their mother. Miguel grew up a shy, solitary child. Sometimes he fancied that his dead brother was with him, swollen head bent close to his ear, eyes shut by a translucent membrane, whispering words Miguel only just failed to hear, the secrets of the hearts of others. Although he couldn’t catch the words, Miguel was often overwhelmed by the feelings behind them, especially the dizzying depths of lust and hate which even the mildest of grown-ups concealed. Miguel would be weak and feverish for days after one of these visitations, and he soon learned that it was best to stay away from other people.

  Miguel’s father was something of a loner, too. They lived at the edge of the settlement in a ramshackle cabin filled with the carcasses of junked machines from which Miguel’s father cannibalised parts to repair the broken gadgets which the settlers brought to him. “We don’t need people,” Miguel’s father would say. “You understand, Mickey. People are just a world of hurt to our family, always have been.” Sometimes he showed Miguel faded holograms of people posed stiffly in strange old-fashioned clothes, though Miguel had been more interested in the background glimpses of Earth than his ancestors. “See there,” his father would say, “that’s your great-grandfather, Mickey, you’re named after him. He made a living guessing what was in people’s minds, only one of us who ever did any good with it.”

  Sometimes it seemed to Miguel that there was a cap pressing down on his skull, a pressure relieved only when he took himself away from his father, the settlement. He learned to live wild, searching out the few plants that were edible—for most were poisonous, as were all of the native animals, the same kind of poison which had crept into his mother’s womb and warped his brother’s growth into something monstrous. When his father died from cancer, Miguel continued to live in the cabin at the edge of the settlement, although he didn’t take up his father’s trade and eventually the tools and stocks of parts were confiscated. Miguel didn’t mind. Weeds tangled in the once neat vegetable garden. Dust thickened on the crude wooden furniture and the dismantled machines, muffled the hemp carpets and blinded the windows. Sometimes Miguel helped at harvest, or weeded the fields alone at night, by the light of the larger moon. The people of the settlement regarded him as touched, but still one of their own. Sometimes little parcels of food were left for Miguel to find on his doorstep the next morning. He spent more and more time away from the settlement, and at last he went out into the wilderness and didn’t return.

  He had had little time for the doings of humankind since, except to trade pelts or wild spices and herbs for small luxuries and cast-off clothing. But when he had found the dead man slumped against the overlander on the beach, his curiosity had been stirred. Who would drive all the way out into the wilderness just to kill himself? It was like a sign to Miguel, if only he could understand it.

  So while he waited for the rabbits to cook, he fiddled with the little machine, numbers and word-strings flickering in a ghostly block of light above its control pad as he ransacked its functions. Like the gun he’d also taken, he hoped to sell it to some settlement or other, but before he did he wanted to crack its memory open, extract the kernel of an explanation.

  So far he had had no luck, perhaps because he couldn’t plug into it directly. He remembered the first time he’d seen one of these things, at the hip of one of the cops who came once a year to audit the settlement, collect records of births and deaths and survey the boundaries of the fields to make sure that they were within the limits stipulated by the city. A tank on his back, Miguel had been helping his father spray rice seedlings, the wand of the sprayer fanning a rainbow film over brown water pricked by rows of vivid green shoots. The cop had driven along the embankment in his truck, dust blowing out in a great cloud when it stopped. Miguel ha
d watched as the man made sightings with a hand-held theodolite, the shaft wobbling in mysterious obedience to true vertical, its little laser light sparkling like a fragmented ruby. The white coveralls. A gun in a bulky holster riding one hip, a smooth black shape clipped to the belt at the other, connected by a looped cable to a band wrapped around the cop’s wrist. When the cop had gone, Miguel’s father had spat into the water in which they stood up to their knees, and said that Miguel should never say anything to one of those bastards unless he was asked, and to make sure that he never was asked. Miguel remembered that clearly, the stinging scent of the spray, the sun softened by mist which coiled along the wide river valley, the whistling chirrs of hopper larvae calling each to each as they writhed through the soft mud at the foot of the embankment, waiting for their legs to grow. Remembered it all but his father’s face.

  Now he pecked at function keys, calling up encrypted file headings and scrolling through them as if hoping to catch some clue that would unlock them. A word. A number. It must be there, but it continued to elude him.

  At last he set the machine aside and went to the fire, turned the rabbit joints. Dripping fat sizzled on glowing coals. Above, orange light danced through etched outlines of interlaced branches. The sun was in the last quarter of the sky.

  Miguel went to the edge of the river and splashed his face before going down on his sadly slack belly and lapping up stingingly cold water, washing away the little knot of frustration. Later, as he sat among glossy tongue-fern, tearing succulent flesh from a rabbit haunch, fingers greasy to the knuckles, it came to him that he was happy. He was on the right way, mystery or not. But there was no one to share the moment with.