Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  Rick sighed. “I guess. You want I should programme dinner for you?”

  “Oh, I’m going out later,” she said, closing her eyes.

  De Ramaira called early in the evening. “I’ve a small discovery to announce,” he told Rick.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I looked up the details of Lindsay’s so-called suicide in the back files of the newscast service, then got out my maps. It turns out that the relay station is almost in a straight line between the city and the place on the coast where the cops found his body. So he could have called at the station first, to perpetrate whatever damage you were called out to repair.”

  “But he didn’t. There was nothing wrong with the station.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I was kitted out like Eljar Price, given a police escort and driven fifty kilometres into the Outback, and all Constat told me was thanks for nothing. If Lindsay was at the station, he didn’t do anything.”

  De Ramaira worried at his hair. “So much for that, then. You might have told me before.”

  “You didn’t ask. You just went galloping off—”

  “Tilting at what turns out to be a radio telescope in full working order. Well, I suppose that whatever it was that Lindsay ran from will surface of its own accord eventually. Check you.”

  “Good night,” Rick said, and switched off.

  Later, alone in bed—Cath had not yet returned—Rick found that sleep eluded him, a space over which his active mind lightly skimmed. His thoughts turned about the encounter in the Outback, the dislocated sense of the man’s talk, the knife, struggle as nauseously intimate as rape. He tried to counter this with the thought that he was safe in the harbour of home, returned to reassuring routine, the prospect of his research. Things hold, blind faith. But repetition soon devalued this to a meaningless groove from which his mind skipped, circling his central fear once more.

  He must have fallen asleep, for Cath’s return woke him. In the darkness he sat up expectantly, but she went past his door into her own room. Then silence. Rick lay back, and once more his thoughts began to circle.

  Things had changed.

  4. Rebels without a Pause

  The dogs came racing up the track as Miguel neared Lake Fonda’s perimeter fence, a half dozen big black-and-tan German Shepherds barking fierce imprecations. Miguel stood still as they circled him, hands held up so they could see he carried no weapon, meant no harm. One turned and ran off toward the settlement, and Miguel asked the others, “It’s okay to sit, huh? Sun too much to stand in.”

  “No ’rouble,” one of the dogs growled.

  “I don’t mean trouble to no one. Don’t you remember me, huh? I was through here a year, two years ago.” Slowly and carefully, Miguel sat in the dust. Presently, the dogs sat too, watching him alertly, pink tongues lolling from their black muzzles. It was a little past noon, the orange sun burning high in the deep, indigo sky. The wide ditches either side of the track were dry, and the turned earth between the endless rows of corn was like soft, bleached dust.

  The escort from the settlement was a long time coming. Miguel thirsted for the flat insipid water in his canteen, but the canteen was in his pack, and he wasn’t going to ask any goddamn dog for permission to get it out. So he sat and sweated in the relentless heat, thinking of the aborigine village he had passed the day before, the secret places scattered around it like rooms in the vast mansion of the landscape. He had plenty of time to think, a whole hour before someone came out to meet him.

  He was taken to the settlement’s commons, seated at one of the long tables and served bread and thin, cold beer while a woman and two men of the central committee, which was what the settlement of Lake Fonda called its governing body, asked about his travels.

  He remembered the woman, iron-grey hair brushed back from her long face, from before, although she had been subordinate to old Ella Falconer then. The two men were new to him. One handled most of the talking, and seemed genuinely interested in what Miguel had to say; the other put on a show of disdainful boredom, and shook his head when Miguel started to talk about the aborigines.

  “Only a guy like you would waste his time with those animals.”

  Miguel shrugged.

  The woman said, “Get off his case, Hamilton. Where do you think he learned about the spices he sells? Right, Miguel?”

  But Miguel wasn’t sure if it were true or not. Sometimes, when he hid near a village, watching the aborigines go stiffly about their business among the round huts, things just seemed to pop into his head, out of the peace that descended as he let their continual buzz trance him out. Chewing the gummy snakeroot extract helped. In that state it was as if he could smell out the few wild plants that weren’t poisonous to people. So far he hadn’t made a mistake. But this was too complicated to explain even if he had wanted to, so he just shrugged and smiled nervously.

  Hamilton shook his head again. The other man said, “Well, what do you have for us, Miguel?”

  They spent a good hour dickering over various packets of seeds and powdered barks, dried leaves and flowers. When he had his price, Miguel reached into the bottom of the pack and took out the two guns, the one which he had taken from the dead man’s hand on the beach, the other he’d pulled from the young, frightened cop in the river canyon a few days back. The reaction of the three settlers was all he had hoped for. “What’ll you give me for these?” he asked.

  The woman picked one up, hefted it in her big, callused palm. “Prophet’s beard, Miguel, where did you find these?”

  “I don’t need them, figured you might, for the right price.”

  “Maybe so,” the woman said, “but we’ve got to know their provenance. Understand me, Miguel? Hamilton, go get Bobby Richter, you think?”

  “You don’t want them, I can always go on to the next place,” Miguel said.

  “You’re among friends, Miguel. Count on that. Go ahead, Hamilton.”

  Miguel took a swig of beer, trying to stay calm as the woman worked the actions of the guns, stripped out their ammunition clips, dry-fired each in turn and laid them down. “Very nice,” she said.

  The second man asked, “You been near the sea recently, Miguel? Down on a beach, maybe?”

  “Listen, what are you, the cops or something?” Miguel smiled, but the settlers on the other side of the table didn’t smile back. He was getting a bad, heavy feeling from them. “I should just walk out of here maybe,” he said, and knew that they wouldn’t let him. The long room was expectantly quiet. Miguel could hear the cries of children playing somewhere outside, the hum of a generator. He took another swallow of beer. Drink helped the pain, his father had said sometimes, though Miguel had never seen his father touch anything but coffee or water. The wine of the country: that was what his father had called water.

  Miguel had finished his beer by the time Hamilton returned, accompanied by a tall young man in a rumpled black jerkin and black jeans. He looked at the guns but didn’t touch them, looked at Miguel, bright blue eyes magnified by the round lenses of wire-rimmed glasses. “You want to sell these?”

  “Look, I don’t want trouble.”

  “I’ll buy them, don’t worry about that.” The young man passed a hand over his close-cut hair; it rasped under his palm. “Have you talked about a price yet?”

  “New clothes and boots. Medicines. One of my teeth in back sometimes hurts if I chew on it. Like that seen to.”

  The young man looked at the woman, who said, “No problem with us.”

  “That’s all you want?” the young man asked.

  Miguel hesitated, then reached into his pack. When he brought out the compsim Hamilton whistled sharply. The young man’s gaze was steady. Miguel told him, “I need to be able to read in this. Need to plug into it.”

  “I knew that that was where he got the guns, didn’t I say that—”

  “Keep quiet,” the woman told her companion. She said to Miguel, “You really want to be wired, comrade? What will you do with
it? It’s no toy.”

  “I know that.”

  Hamilton started to say something, and the young man, Bobby Richter, raised a hand. “Let me talk with him awhile, please.”

  “We need to know what we’re getting into,” the woman said. “You’re only here under an obligation to the previous administration, don’t forget that.”

  “Of course. You want to talk with me, Miguel?”

  “You can give me what I want?”

  “If you need it.”

  When the others had gone, Richter leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Jesus, these people. Hard to deal with, you know.”

  “Last time I was here there was another woman, older. She understood.”

  “Ella Falconer? There’s been a rearrangement since then. A little extra kick in their perpetual revolution. You name it, they’ll rebel against it, right?” Richter laughed. “Rebels without a pause. Yeah, well. Your friend is probably working the fields now. What was it she understood, Miguel? I hear you study the aborigines. That’s what you meant?”

  Miguel shrugged.

  “I won’t press too deeply. But that compsim you have, it could be important, Miguel, important for all the settlers. If it really is Lindsay’s. You know the name?”

  Something came together in Miguel’s head. He saw that to get what he wanted he would have to tell the truth. He said, “The man was dead when I found him. Nothing on him to name him.”

  “This was by the sea,” Richter said. His glasses flashed when he leaned forward, hands flat on the table.

  “Sure. I buried him in the sand there, said a few words over him.”

  “And that’s where you got the guns and the compsim.”

  “Yeah. Well, one of the guns.” The story came out in little pieces, the man dead on the beach against his overlander, the cops in the helicopter and the other cops who came after him in the river canyon, how he had managed to frighten off one of them, get his pistol. As he talked, Miguel felt a pressure easing inside him, a lightening of what he only now recognised was fear. He had been afraid ever since he had seen the helicopter coming in over the sea.

  When Miguel had finished, Richter picked up the compsim, turning it end for end. Miguel asked, “You can fix it so I can use it? Wire me up?”

  “I can arrange that, Miguel, but you would have to come with me to have it done. You know what it involves?”

  Miguel wrapped his right hand around his left wrist. “They plug in here.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that. There is an interface, yes, just beneath the skin. Little wires go from the interface into your brain, to your visual area just here—” Richter touched the back of his head—“to the auditory and motor areas as well, so you can talk to the compsim or anything it’s connected to, and so the compsim can talk to you and display data directly. You follow me? The interface grows these wires, organic electron paths, once it has been planted, but growth has to be guided. There has to be a computer checking and cross-matching every neuron path or at best you would receive nothing but garbage, at worst you’d end up an insane cripple. With supervision that hardly ever happens, even with the bootleg equipment we have to use. But it can’t be done here, Miguel. They don’t even have the interfaces, let alone the transplanting hardware. I must be the only one with an interface in the whole settlement here, and I’m just a visitor.”

  “I know what you are, man, don’t worry.”

  “Are you on our side, Miguel?” the young man said softly. “Do you want to see the settlements free? An end to the city’s imperialism?”

  “I’m not against you. I just live my own life, you know. All I ever wanted.”

  “That’s what all of us want, in-country. The name I mentioned—Lindsay. It didn’t mean anything to you, did it?”

  Miguel shrugged.

  “He was someone in Port of Plenty, someone important. Like Anna or Hamilton here. From what you say he killed himself; that’s something the cops have been trying to prove was murder. Maybe they’re after you, Miguel. Did you think of that?”

  It was the root of his fear.

  “We can help you, if you need it. There may be information in this compsim that can help our cause. Perhaps a clue to why Lindsay killed himself.”

  “You plug in. Plug in and tell me that!”

  “Is that why you want an interface? To find that out?”

  “Yeah. And to use it. You tell me why he did that to himself, and you give me a plug too, okay?”

  “There are compsims and compsims, Miguel. Different kinds. Most of them are made in Port of Plenty. But there are some that come from Earth. New settlers bring them on the colonyboats, and the city takes them. Steals them. Important people like Lindsay get them. This one is from Earth, and it is what’s known as a transducer. It sets up patterns in the peripheral motor nerves, superimposes its own impulses. Into your hand say, up your arm, into your brain. You don’t have to plug in to use this one, Miguel. You just need to hold it in your hand and know how to ask it the right questions. I can try to do that, if you’ll let me. It’s your responsibility, you see. We don’t steal.”

  “Yeah. Yeah.” The words rasped in Miguel’s throat. He reached across the table and grabbed Richter’s hand. The young man looked up from the compsim, blue eyes round with surprise behind the round lenses of his glasses. “I want you to do that,” Miguel told him. “And you teach me too. Teach me that stuff.”

  Miguel was left alone in the commons for an hour. Richter went off to talk the matter over with Lake Fonda’s committee, and a guard was placed on the other side of the door. Miguel’s eager expectation soon faded. He was unused to being shut in and paced up and down nervously, stared out of the narrow windows at the settlement’s dusty, deserted main square, paced some more. By the time Richter returned, Miguel was almost ready to make a run for it, guard or no guard.

  But the guard, a burly unsmiling man in dirty coveralls, followed Richter inside, and shut and locked the door. Richter straddled a bench and set two compsims on the polished wood of the long table, the one Miguel had taken and a smaller, battered machine. Miguel watched warily as Richter jacked them head-to-head. “Don’t worry,” the young man said, his glasses flashing as he looked up. “I won’t hurt your prize. Go ahead, sit down, that’s it.” He rolled the interface cuff around his left wrist, plugged into his own compsim.

  And then, eyes closed, Richter went away for a moment. Miguel sensed the withdrawal, and the sudden return. “All right,” Richter said, opening his eyes. He smiled. “A real amateur, Miguel.”

  “You have done it?”

  “It’s on the way.” Richter shook the cuff from his wrist. “Want to see what’s happening? Just touch your compsim, on the plate on its side there. Trust me, it won’t hurt.”

  Miguel trusted no one, but something, his woken curiosity perhaps, made him reach out and brush his fingertips against the shiny plate. Something instantly overlaid his sight, a glimpse of a silvery net melting into a complex surface of pure light. Miguel snatched back his hand and the vision was gone.

  “If you really want to use that thing, you’re going to have to get used to it,” Richter said, smiling.

  “All that light…it came from in there?”

  “From inside your head, Miguel. The compsim induces patterned firing in the neurons inside the visual area of your cortex. Well, never mind. What you saw was my compsim interfacing with the files of your compsim, injecting a command string that will fish out the algorithm we need to unpack the data stored there. Lindsay really didn’t deserve a machine like this, leaving it vulnerable to the simplest safecracker.” Richter took off his spectacles and polished them on the knee of his black jeans. “It’ll open any moment now,” he said, hooking the spectacles back over his ears: and as if in obedience his own compsim emitted a beep and light gathered over the projection plate of the other compsim, a tiny, blurred image of a man’s head.

  “Lindsay,” Richter said, and hushed Miguel’s question
with an upraised hand, for the little head had begun to speak.

  It was a thin squeaking voice, the kind of voice an insect might have. Even so, Miguel could sense the fear that drove its every word.

  “It’s stronger, every day it’s stronger. Taking over my head. Like the whole world is dissolving, becoming unreal. And the dreams…he’s in all of them, all the ones I remember, angry, always angry, as if it’s my fault. I can’t make the ship talk, none of us can, but that’s what he wants, and I think if he can’t get what he wants he’ll take it out on me. I should never have let him inside my head; I can feel him in there now, wanting to stop me saying this. Even if we heard from the ship he’d still—”

  Richter had, with an abrupt motion, unjacked the compsims. “Hey!” Surprise clashed with outrage at the root of Miguel’s tongue. “What are you…why did you do that, man?”

  Richter grabbed both compsims and stood. Miguel stood too, really afraid now. He was out of his depth, water closing over his head. He reached across the table and Richter danced back just as someone, the guard, plucked Miguel’s knife from his belt and jerked his arms back and up.

  “I’m sorry,” Richter said. “But it’s for the greater good, if that’s any consolation. This is like an explosive, Miguel, and in the right place it could blow away the city and the cops. We have to have it, and we’ll have to keep you safe, too.”

  A small room, bare concrete walls, a tiny barred window, a cot with a stained mattress barely covered by a thin blanket, a bucket for a toilet. Miguel banged on the heavy door and shouted until he was hoarse, tested the bars at the window, probed the walls for a flaw he could widen into an escape hole. But there was no way out. Anyway, they had taken away his pack and his boots. He lay on the cot and must have fallen asleep, for when the door opened he jerked awake, blinking in the glare of the unshaded fluorescent light.

  The old woman pressed a finger to her lips, and softly closed the door.

  It was Ella Falconer, the one-time leader of the settlement. Her lined face was thinner than Miguel remembered, her hair wholly white. She wore baggy, stained coveralls, muddy sneakers.