Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  “I did what I was asked to do, even to the little charade on the trivia.”

  “Charade?”

  “Well,” Rick said, beginning to sweat, “I mean I was asked to give certain replies to the questions asked of me. I don’t know the truth of what I was asked to say.” Careful, he thought, careful.

  “You were asked to say that the colonyboat was approaching on schedule,” Savory said briskly. “Surely that follows from your successful mission at the relay station. Now, after that, on your way back to the city, smoke was seen over a river canyon. Your police escort investigated, and you took it into your head to follow them, and got yourself in trouble with a dingo.”

  “He just…jumped me.” The memory was painfully vivid. “We didn’t fight, exactly.”

  Savory’s gaze was intent.

  Compelled, Rick said, “Surely you’ve read the report. I put all that I could remember into it. Look, Mr Savory, that isn’t why you had me come here, is it?”

  “It has everything to do with it, Dr Florey. Constat has a flag routine to call in anyone who reports a contact such as yours. I’m sorry your call came so early in the morning, but the priority rating is high.”

  “You mean that he was some sort of criminal?”

  Savory nodded gravely. “Something like that.”

  “Has there been an escape from the mines?” Rick remembered the man’s knife, and felt a cold wave travel over his entire skin.

  Savory said, “Not as of yesterday. Actually, simply by being out there, without a permit, he is violating enough laws to be sent to the mines, just as we send those families who think that they can make their own little kingdoms in the wilderness. However, Dr Florey, a man may intend to commit a crime and if that intention is discovered, why he is then a criminal. There are certain factions, I’m sure you know, who think to gain by harming the city.”

  Remembering the defaced statue in the parking lot, Rick said flatly, “You think he’s a separatist.”

  “Perhaps. Now, Dr Florey, I’m going to show you a picture of someone. I want you to tell me if he looks anything like your dingo. But remember that the man in the picture is probably better groomed.”

  Rick leaned forward as Savory turned the compsim.

  “Well, Doctor?”

  After the thrill of recognition, Rick laughed. “How could he be!”

  “The question, Dr Florey.”

  “Of course he isn’t. What is this, Mr Savory? A ghost hunt?”

  “As I told you, Dr Florey, there’s nothing to worry about. I’m simply checking something out. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

  Behind Rick, the door swung open.

  The interview with Savory coloured the rest of Rick’s day. He muddled through his auditing of a couple of lectures and then settled in his office to read a paper pertinent to his project. But the pattern of sense underlying the words refused to come together. Burning more brightly was the puzzle of just what Savory had wanted of him. Also, his application to send up a high altitude balloon was still neither approved nor refused.

  Suppose the University Senate had realised that he was embarked on a programme of pure research? He was beginning to doubt whether he could continue to evade that central issue, although of course no one could ever predict what would turn out to be of practical value. He had skewed the present project, for instance, to emphasise its potential for developing better weather prediction systems, just as his thesis work on the nonlinear dynamics of atmospheric scintillation and interference levels touched on the problem of radio reception. Well enough, but Rick was interested in global systems not local problems. He wanted to understand the deep mechanisms of the world’s climate, not just the weather of the little part which humans had colonised.

  The thing to do was to keep his head down. He resisted the temptation to put out an inquiry and turned to grading problem sheets instead. At least that required no real thought. But it seemed that the world would not leave him be.

  His first visitor was Max Rydell, a material engineer who played jai alai with Rick. The stocky, gruffly self-important man came into Rick’s little office without knocking and said with his usual briskness, “I suppose I can confirm for two tickets, right?”

  “Tickets?”

  “For Landing Day.” Rydell tapped his compsim. “I’m organising seating in the amphitheatre this year; you’re almost the last fish I need to net. You’ll want two, I guess.”

  “Oh. Yes, of course.”

  Rydell plugged into his compsim. “I saw your interview last night. Not bad. Except you sounded a little impatient.”

  “Well, I’d had a long day.”

  Rydell’s eyes unfocused for a moment. Then he pulled the interface band from his hairy wrist and shut the compsim’s case with a flourish. “I heard that you should always pause for a second or two before answering. That way you seem to be giving each question proper consideration,” he said. And then he was gone, the door banging shut behind him.

  Rick returned to his grading, but toward the end of the afternoon Professor Collins, the head of the Department of Communications Engineering, knocked on his door. “I’ve come to see if all is well with you,” Collins said, after they had exchanged pleasantries.

  “You think something’s wrong?”

  “Not exactly.” Sitting upright in the office’s worn armchair, Professor Collins smoothed first one, then the other, of his grey sideburns. As always, he was impeccably dressed, in an up-to-the-minute asymmetric suit of an iridescent lightweight synthetic; but then nothing looked ridiculous on his slim, straight-backed figure. He said in mild rebuke, “You didn’t come to tell me, but I understand that your mission was successful.”

  “Well, there was nothing wrong with the relay station,” Rick said cautiously. He was always intimidated by Collins’s smooth, worldly style, and memory of his encounter was a fresh node of guilt that he wanted to keep hidden. He added, “It was the debriefing that caused the problems.”

  “Ah, the toils and coils of bureaucracy.” Professor Collins smiled. “I know all about that, I’m afraid. I hope that the experience has not harmed your position with the Board.”

  “Why would the Board be interested in me?”

  “It’s not always easy to earn your citizenship,” Collins said enigmatically. “Well now. The reason I came to see you is that I received a call from a Mr Savory.”

  “Jesus. What did he want?” Rick had the sudden, unsettling sensation that he was sinking into something that was nothing to do with him at all.

  “He asked my opinion of you. I told him, of course, about your impeccable work here. You’re sure that everything is all right?”

  “Savory interviewed me this morning, but I wasn’t sure what he was after.”

  Professor Collins smiled winningly. “Please, Richard, don’t be afraid to come to me for support. It’s what I’m here for, after all. And do let me know if you hear anything more from Mr Savory. He has not been very supportive of the University in the past, and I wouldn’t like to see you getting out of your depth.”

  After that, there was no question of Rick’s doing more work. He locked his office and went to see David de Ramaira.

  The biologist was in his laboratory, hunched at a binocular microscope on the central bench. The monitor was displaying a false-colour outline of the slowly rotating specimen, overlaid with columns of rapidly changing readouts. It looked like a curled-up thumb-sized fish. “Take a seat,” de Ramaira said without looking around. “I just have to finish this.”

  Rick found a stool, watched as de Ramaira delicately flensed away thin sheets of muscle to reveal the little specimen’s internal organs. The odours of preserving alcohol, formaldehyde, and dusty dried specimens began to calm Rick’s jittery nerves.

  The benches around three sides of the cluttered room and the shelves above them were crammed with samples of Elysium’s biota. Dissected packrats, bellies flayed to show pale organs, paws held out as if in entreaty, were sunken in yello
w fluid; a series of jars held the complete sequence of the ontological recapitulation through which a mire boar toiled after hatching, from necrogenetic larvae equipped with rasping suckers to a miniature of the bristle-hided, porcine adult. Trays held ranks of glittering, carefully labelled insects. There were tottering stacks of papers with plants pressed between them, varnished fossils, the mud bell of a kraalmouse’s nest sectioned to show the convoluted chambers. Tiny iridescent parabirds gathered dust next to shrunken specimens of the pitcher plants with which they were symbiotic; the metre-long peg-toothed skull of an amphibian sat behind them like a revenant. Faded holograms of the heads of aborigines glowed along one wall like a row of hollow-eyed masks; a whiteboard took up most of another, covered in double-barrelled Latin names joined one to another by arrows—half the arrows had been hastily rubbed out.

  De Ramaira’s laboratory was unique in the University, an evergrowing monument to research which had no practical applications at all. Consequently, he was regarded with the same loathing as the least idea of a physicist or pure mathematician, tolerated only because he had arrived with an interdict from the Seeding Council. There was little the other lecturers could do but snub the Wombworlder; for fifteen years de Ramaira’s only social contacts in the University had been a few of his students. But now there was Richard Florey, who in his own opinion at least was as much a scientist as de Ramaira. With de Ramaira, Rick could lose himself in discussions that soared far above the muddy buttresses of technology, forget about his prosaic duties for a while. Even so, the sidelong glances of staff who saw him with de Ramaira, loaded with unguessable appraisal, were beginning to make him uncomfortable.

  At last, de Ramaira logged the data on the screen and switched off the microscope. Despite his long-limbed, almost adolescent gawkiness, his movements had a deft economical grace. “Sorry,” he said, “but I’ve been waiting a week to look at that. Guess what it is.”

  “Well, I suppose it isn’t a fish.”

  “Indeed not. It’s the larval stage of a sabretooth, just prior to hatching. Someone shot a pregnant female over at Cooper’s Hill. The rest of the eggs are in there.” De Ramaira kicked the pail at his feet—half a dozen jelly spheres, each as big as a doubled fist, rocked in cloudy water—then looked narrowly at Rick. “You know, when you first came in you looked as if your grant application had just been kicked out of court.”

  “I guess I won’t hear about that until after Landing Day now. No, it’s just that I had a bad start to the day, and it went on from there. You know how it is.”

  “Indeed. It varies directly with the number of my fellow lecturers I see before my first class.” De Ramaira got up and filled a beaker with water, set it on a hotplate. “So, how was your trip into the wilderness?”

  Hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence, Rick sketched his encounter with the dingo, the loss of the pistol, the subsequent interview with Savory. “Well now,” de Ramaira said, when Rick had finished. He went to the hotplate and began the ritual of filtering coffee. “I doubt that you’ve heard the last of that. They are hardly going to let what could be Lindsay’s murderer slip away. Here.”

  Rick sipped scalding coffee. “You’re kidding.”

  De Ramaira sighed. “The problem with this utterly two-dimensional teaching system is that the only people taught anything at all about the synthesis of ideas are the cops.”

  “Well I guess you’re going to have to explain it to me,” Rick said, smiling.

  There was this thing about de Ramaira: he delighted in attempting to puzzle out a logical explanation for anything, no matter how absurd, and deliver it in clear terms. As a consequence, he was addicted to conspiracy theories, the more baroque the better.

  He said, “If you remember, Lindsay was supposed to have committed suicide out in the wilderness, although why he ran from his position is anyone’s guess. His brains had been blown out days before the cops found him, no way to read anything into the matrix. And when the cops did find his body, it had been buried near the overlander—and some of his stuff was missing, too. The newscasts started to make a big play about that, until the cops clamped down. And then there was a drive against the separatists, although nothing’s come of that so far.”

  “I know he could have been murdered. You think by that guy I met out there? Jesus.” The knife. The heavy weight of the man’s body pressing his own into the dirt. Not a day ago.

  “Perhaps, perhaps not. It’s more likely the Constitutionalists are hoping to turn inquiries about whatever scandal Lindsay ran from into a murder hunt. And I bet it’s a pretty deep scandal. I mean, it’s hardly normal for the Board member in charge of colonyboat affairs to run off a couple of weeks before Landing Day, let alone commit suicide. It’s the only way they can hope to keep ahead in the next election, and your fellow provides a nicely helpless suspect. One, two, three. If you hadn’t been brainwashed by this educational establishment for dial readers, you would have seen it yourself.”

  “Maybe so. But I really don’t have that kind of morbid curiosity.”

  De Ramaira worried at his wiry hair. “But don’t you think the politics interesting?”

  “I don’t find any politics interesting—or particularly relevant to what I’m doing. Let people like Collins take care of that. I’ll get on with my own work.”

  De Ramaira chided gently, “Politics are important. Besides, I’m interested in everything.”

  For a dizzy moment Rick felt as if the bindings of his old doubts had been loosened, the doubts he’d had when, after the death of his parents, he had taken the course away from Mount Airy and wondered if he was doing the right thing or simply running away. No, that belonged in the past. It was too late now.

  De Ramaira leaned back against the bench. “Don’t take it to heart, anyhow. You’re just a very small piece in the game. You’ve done your part.”

  “You think so? I wish I could believe it.” Rick put down his half-empty cup of coffee. “Thanks for the talk, David, but I should be getting home.”

  Rick found Cath lying on her back in a shaft of sunlight at the far end of the sunken living room. She was plugged into her compsim, long black hair fanned around her white face, eyes closed. Rick gazed at her for a long moment, feeling the tumult of the day’s events fade, calmed by the familiar sight of her.

  They had met at the University, of course. Cath, working in the computer centre, had been taking an advanced programming course and, in the third year of his doctorate, Rick had shared some of her classes. Cath had introduced him—a gangling, slightly awkward, over-intelligent settler, but capable of a certain ingenious patter, possessed of a quaint intimacy with classical music—into her nebulous social crowd. Soon they had begun a casual affair, Rick’s first, dizzying him with the realisation that sex could be for something other than procreation or affirmation of a solemn vow, its own fulfilment. At the beginning of his tenure, it had seemed a natural move for them to share one of the houses especially built for the University staff, an eight-room arcology on the hill. Rick couldn’t have afforded it on his own, and the alternatives were both unpalatable, either senior residency in a student dorm or, more ignominiously, an apartment down in the old quarter of the city. But increasingly his and Cath’s lives touched only tangentially, for all that Rick was a little in love with her: a love he dared not declare, for love did not yet figure in Cath’s plans.

  As if Rick’s gaze had penetrated the flow of data behind her eyelids, Cath slowly opened her eyes, turned her head to look at him. Rick spread his arms, asked, “Am I bleeding?”

  She was slow to focus on his face. “What did the cops do?”

  “They didn’t do anything, it was more what was said. I was just about called a separatist.”

  “If that was all,” Cath said, “I think you got off lightly. You did lose their gun, after all.”

  “The fellow I saw wasn’t interested in that. He thought that the encounter I had out there was significant in some way, only he didn’t bothe
r to tell me just what he thought it meant. Want a drink?”

  “Not while I’m working.” She was still plugged into her compsim. In the beat of silence, Rick thought that she meant that he should leave, but then she asked, “Who interviewed you?”

  “Someone called Savory,” Rick said, and saw her reaction, thinking, why does everyone think he’s important?

  She said, “You have been seeing people. He’s in line for assistant governor, if the Constitutionalists make the next election.”

  “Oh. De Ramaira said something like that as well.”

  “Look, you know if you go around with that Wombworlder you’ll get yourself in trouble, Rick. I know we agreed not to meddle in each other’s lives, but it reflects on me, too!”

  Rick shrugged, unsettled by her sudden change in mood. He feared her temper. Sometimes she flared up uncontrollably, arms flailing, face pinched white, bloodless. He said, “If other people think they have to avoid him then that’s their problem. But I don’t have to be a part of that. You might not think that there’s prejudice here, but I’m from a settlement, I’ve seen things differently.”

  “I’m from a settlement too.”

  “Arcadia isn’t really a settlement, you know that.”

  “What was that you said about prejudice?” She was smiling now.

  “I guess. Anyway, I did get two places in the amphitheatre today, so it wasn’t a total loss. Is that all right?”

  “Of course! I asked you about that weeks ago. You know I’ve always wanted to see the Landing from there. My father has tried over and over to get into it, but never has yet.”

  “Not even this time?” Cath’s father was halfway through his first term on Arcadia’s public committee.

  “Arcadia isn’t really part of Port of Plenty, despite what the other settlers think.” She smiled, perhaps at the thought of out-reaching her father’s small ambition. “Daddy used to say that the City Board and the University had it sewn up between them. We got to see it from the beach, of course, but it isn’t the same. It’s really good of you, Rick. Are you over your day, now? I really have to get this work finished.”