Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  It was gone midnight by the time Rick returned home, but as he rounded the spinney in the elbow of the path to the house, he saw that its half-sunken windows were all ablaze with light. Cath turned from the treacher as Rick came into the kitchen. Her eyes seemed smudged in her white, heart-shaped face. “I thought you were in for an all-night soul-searching affair. What happened?”

  Rick pulled a chair from the table nook. “It was embarrassing, kind of,” he said. The canvas went taut with his weight. “So I got away as soon as I decently could. How was your family?”

  The panel of the treacher slid open. Her back to Rick, Cath said, “It didn’t last long. We all agreed, for once.” She set the cup on the table. “Here, I’ll get another. How was it embarrassing?”

  Rick watched as she carefully studded the code. Small domestic tasks weave us in, fill the chinks in the wall against the machinations of the outside world. He said, “Actually, you might have enjoyed it, the party at least. But de Ramaira had set me up to act as some sort of oracle to a couple of his students.”

  “Mm-hmm. I said that that man was only using you. He uses everyone—that’s the way of Wombworlders, isn’t it? I thought that’s why your people came to Elysium, to get away from that.”

  Mount Airy. Strange to think the workshop was still there, three hundred kilometres to the east. The concrete floor black with oil and gritty with swarf, oiled steel sheets leaning against the wall beside racks of red bar-steel, the forge squatting like a fire-bellied toad beneath the inverted flare of its hood. Run by his brothers, now. After his parents and his sister had been killed, when their cushiontruck had been caught in a sudden rainstorm and swept a hundred metres down a sheer talus slope, Rick had turned from Mount Airy for the opportunities offered by the University. But that had not been so long ago that he did not still feel the pull of the familiar things there. He said nothing, however, watching Cath carry her own cup to the worn contour chair in front of the big window which with the night beyond it reflected the light of the kitchen like a black mirror.

  As she sat, carefully smoothing the pleats of her formal white bodice, Cath asked, “Who were these students? What did they want?”

  “De Ramaira has a protege now, you know.”

  “I thought that was you,” Cath said demurely.

  “Very funny. Anyway, the guy dumped the three popular theories about Landing Day on me—”

  “Just three? I’ve heard a lot more than that.”

  “He said he had sampled and come up with the three most popular. All to do with some sort of mechanical failure. I might add. Anyway, it was pretty obvious that de Ramaira had asked me along to give my verdict on this poor kid’s half-baked ideas.”

  “And of course you shot them all down.”

  “Well, I did explain about the probabilities.” Best to keep Web’s crazy idea about using the relay station to himself. Rick thought—nothing could come of it, anyway.

  Cath smiled. “You can’t be too popular with de Ramaira right now.”

  “I guess not.” Rick sipped his coffee, then said, “Listen, you didn’t have an argument with your family, did you? You don’t seem very eager to tell me about it.”

  “Not an argument,” Cath said. “But what they had to say makes things difficult for me.”

  “Oh?” Something was settling heavily inside him, some final weight.

  “You see, my father gets to know certain things because he is on the public committee. And if it’s something that might affect the family he feels he has to let us know. That’s why we had the conference tonight.”

  “It’s bad?”

  “I don’t know. It depends what’s behind it.” She looked down and said, “The City Board has informed the public committee that anticity feeling might be stirred up at the All Colony Council, and that Arcadia might suffer if it continues to bring in produce. Which it will, of course. It can’t afford not to. Daddy thinks some of the settlements are planning something. Something bad.” When she looked up, the unforgiving tightness Rick knew so well was crimping her mouth, sign of the remoteness that even at the height of their lovemaking could not hold her quite still, abstracted from anything Rick might be doing.

  “Is that what you think?”

  “It’s not a question of that, Rick. I can’t shake my obligations. My family wants me to go home awhile.”

  “So how long…God, isn’t this pretty ridiculous?”

  “No! Damn it, Rick, don’t think that!” For a moment he was afraid that he had touched off her temper, but she added calmly, “Look, I have a feeling that if you don’t do something positive this time it just won’t turn out right by itself. And I’m not going to wait around for something to happen. By then it’ll be too late. Daddy and the Greats are all agreed for once, it’s the sensible thing to do.”

  The Greats were the stored personality matrices of Cath’s great-great-grandfather and great-grandparents; Rick knew better than to argue against them. Cath took the advice of her ancestors as seriously as anyone in the city.

  Cath added, “Maybe you ought to consider going home as well, if there really is going to be trouble. It might not be easy for noncitizens here, if there is.”

  “I can’t do that. There’s nothing for me there, and I have my work here.” He couldn’t explain that to leave Port of Plenty would be to betray the trust he felt the city had shown him when he had been offered tenure at the University. “I can’t understand why we’ve become frightened so easily. You see, nothing has really happened, but people are acting as if a war has been fought and lost these past five days. Now this—what are you running from? Why does everything have to change just because one lousy load of settlers hasn’t turned up on time?”

  “You could call it a contingency plan,” Cath said. “Anyway, surely it’s sensible to follow the advice of the City Board—they own most of the computing power after all. If Constat’s run up a red projection about the All Colony Council, I prefer to believe it. And if the settlements act against the city, they’ll act against Arcadia too, because it’s not possible Arcadia will side with them.”

  “And you think I should do the same thing.”

  “It’s just a suggestion, Rick.”

  “Of course. But when are you leaving?”

  “I’ll catch the noon coach tomorrow. It should be nothing more than a long weekend.”

  “You gave the impression you’d be gone longer than that.”

  “Well, I thought I’d prepare you for the worst. If I go early, perhaps I can come back early too. Maybe at the end of the All Colony Council. If there’s no trouble they won’t have much to discuss, with no new technology to fix prices on and no new settlers to locate. Anyway, it’s time I had a holiday.” Abruptly, she drank the rest of her coffee and got up from the big chair to give her cup to the treacher.

  Rick lifted his own cup to his lips, but the coffee was cold now. Everything he could possibly say snagged around the fear that he might be wrong, that he should also flee. Yet he truly felt that there was nothing he could do but stay. Nowhere else would support his research, and there was nothing else he wanted to do. Grimacing, he completed the motion, and drained the bitter cup.

  7. The Shepherd

  The news about Landing Day and the missing colonyboat washed like a tidal wave through the settlements of the peninsula, rumours colliding and rebounding in its wake. The news reached even the wandering dingos. Miguel Lucas heard about it from a shepherd, a few days after he had escaped from Lake Fonda.

  Miguel had followed the river away from the settlement until it had bent to the west; then he had crossed it and continued northward, paralleling the distant, misty line of the Hampshire Hills. The grassland was less open there, patched with expanses of thornbush. Feather-branched trees clumped around small scummy washes, often no more than centimetres deep, but water enough. Animal life abounded. Miguel saw solitary slope-shouldered antelope, herds of Muir oxen, mire boars. Parabirds roosted noisily around the shallow washes. O
nce, he had to make a long diversion around a packrat colony; the little creatures could strip a man to his bones in minutes, faster than his flesh could poison them. There were rabbit colonies, too. Miguel caught half a dozen at a time in his snares, eating all he could and drying the rest.

  And of course there was a proliferating maze of abo paths, changed since the last time Miguel had passed this way. The abos continually reshaped the lines they laid on the land. Twice, Miguel passed by an abo village. The sites of these never changed, constant nodes in the everchanging web of paths. Gripped by his newfound curiosity, Miguel assiduously recorded all he saw, carefully mapped the villages and the paths around them into the compsim’s memory while the communal buzz of their inhabitants rose toward the indigo sky. A lulling hypnotic sound into which it seemed, senses blown open by snakeroot, he could fade entirely. Coming down, returning to his own merely human senses and thoughts, left him chastened and cheerless.

  After the second village, Miguel increased his pace. He was near the pass which led through the Hampshire Hills to Port of Plenty, and he could almost feel the weight of all those people tugging at him, a storm grumbling below the horizon. He aimed to turn west after crossing the road to the pass, and head for the end of the peninsula. The people of the established settlements thought that they knew it all, when most of them hardly stirred beyond the sterilised borders of their fields; but the newer settlements in the west, like little islands scattered in the vast unknown wilderness, welcomed any chance visitor, even a dingo. Miguel hadn’t been down there for a handful of years now, having spent much of that time following a rumour that a bunch of people had successfully crossed the Trackless Mountains. So they had, but the city cops had hunted down their illegal farms, sent them all to the mines at Cooper’s Hill.

  Miguel didn’t like to be around people if he could help it, but he still needed them occasionally. The wilderness couldn’t provide everything a man needed. Miguel had gone dingo, but he wasn’t crazy. That kind never lasted long, in-country. So he pushed himself hard, sleeping in the hottest part of the day in whatever shade he could find, walking in the comparative cool of the night by the light of the big moon. It was waning now, but would give enough light for a dozen nights’ worth of walking yet.

  He crossed the road to the city, really no more than a dusty unpaved track worn in the grassland, without incident, and something relaxed in him. He was still frightened that the cops were hunting him, and he had still to pass the penal mines—no other way through the hills which rose and fell and rose again in ever more precipitous crags until they were cut off by the ocean in the north. But unless someone took it into their head to escape at the moment Miguel was passing the mines, he’d have no trouble. The guards looked in, not out.

  With no sign of pursuit, and Anders Pass safely behind him, Miguel slowed his pace a little, spent more time resting up in shade when the huge soft disc of the sun dominated the dark sky, fiddling with the compsim (the heft of the little machine, the ordered aisles of its memory floating in his vision, were somehow comforting), or simply dozing, lulled by the drone of the insects in the dry grass.

  So it was that he was asleep, leaning against the smooth trunk of a bottletree at the edge of a muddy pool, when the shepherd came across him.

  Miguel came awake the instant the shadow fell across his face, his pulse thudding like a startled rabbit on the run. He looked up at the man’s dusty jeans, faded workshirt.

  “Good day to you,” the stranger said amiably, after a moment. “Sorry if I gave you a start. You all alone here?” He was a grizzled sunburnt man in his forties, shrewd blue eyes netted in fine wrinkles, hair brushed back from a lined forehead. He had taken off his hat and was fanning himself with it as he looked down at Miguel. Behind him, his horse nosed at dusty clumps of grass.

  Miguel said nothing, measuring the distance between the man and his horse—and the rifle in the sheath behind the saddle—and wished that he hadn’t lost both handguns.

  The man said, “Thought I’d scout ahead, see if I could find some water. The sheep will be needing it. Fucking unseasonable weather, right?”

  A shepherd then, driving his flock from the summer pasturage in the hills to be slaughtered at some settlement or other. New Haven or Fortitude, Miguel guessed. “Too hot,” he said.

  “Too right. My dogs are tripping over their tongues. Should be along in a few minutes or so. A thousand head for Fortitude. Where you heading? No offence if you don’t want to say. I know how it is.”

  “Glad you do.”

  The shepherd nodded. “If you’re heading up into the hills, watch out. There’s a rogue sabretooth about, by all accounts. Mate of mine told me he lost near on two dozen head to it, killing for the hell of it.”

  Miguel thanked the man, Jimmy Warren by name, shared a cigarette with him to be companionable. “I guess maybe you haven’t heard the latest out of Port of Plenty,” the shepherd said at last. He ground the stub of his cigarette on the heel of his tooled leather boot. “About Landing Day?”

  Miguel shrugged.

  “Seems the ship they were expecting hasn’t turned up. When I was coming down around the bend in the estuary I was able to pick up some news broadcast that mentioned it. Knocked them all for a loop as you might expect. You didn’t hear anything?”

  Miguel was thinking about the suicide note left in the compsim. What the separatist, Bobby Richter, had said, back at Lake Fonda, was true then. That it was important for all the settlers. But not, perhaps, for him. He needed people, on occasion, but he didn’t need to share their lives.

  Jimmy Warren guessed that Miguel’s silence was to be taken for indifference. “Suppose it doesn’t make much difference to a freewheeling bloke like you. Wonder what my people will think of it, though.” Then he gestured off at the horizon. “Here they come now. Said it wouldn’t be long.”

  First a dust cloud, waving plumes of red against the dark sky; then the thousand-headed flock moving beneath it; then the first animals, shaggy coats dreadlocked and gritty, iridescent insects clustering around their yellow horizontally slit eyes, ambling this way and that but mostly moving toward the shallow lake.

  Four honey and tan German Shepherds loped either side of the flock. When they had corralled all the sheep around the pool, one of the dogs came over to the men and growled, “No ‘rouble, Boss. You fin’ a frien’?”

  Warren introduced Miguel, and the dog sniffed at Miguel’s knees while the dingo nervously sat still. When it was satisfied, the dog loped off to tell its companions.

  Warren built a campfire, hung a blackened kettle over it and brewed strong, bitter coffee, gave a cup to Miguel. The dingo savoured it, only half-listening as the shepherd talked about the weather and how the heat had dried out even the high pasturage, the possible effect the news of the missing colonyboat might have on wool prices. Miguel nodded now and then but said little. He didn’t resent the intrusion exactly, but he had no reserves of small talk to draw on.

  Warren went off to hunt for the dogs’ dinner, and soon returned with a rockjack slung over his shoulder. Miguel helped him to gut and quarter it. After he had fed the dogs. Warren boiled rice and dried meat in the kettle, and the two men ate silently but companionably as the sun dissolved in shimmering red lines above the western hills and insects shrilly stridulated in the grass all around.

  “You’re the guy who likes the abos, aren’t you?” the shepherd said, after a while. When Miguel said nothing, the man continued, “I remember you the last time you came through Fortitude, five, six years ago? Maybe you remember my mother, she was the doctor back then, had a look at your herbs and stuff? Dead now. Cancer.” Warren lit two cigarettes and handed one to Miguel. “I love this goddamn world,” he said, blowing out a riffle of smoke. “Don’t reckon I’ll miss anything of Earth, if we’re truly left on our own now. I guess if the separatists get their way maybe I’ll get the chance to see what’s beyond the Trackless Mountains. You even been that way? Man like you must have been all
over, I reckon. Me, though, I’d want a family along. There’s a woman I wouldn’t mind making a go of it with, back in Fortitude. I think she’d like to make a go of it too, you know. Me and her, the dogs, a few hundred head…that’d be okay, I’d say. Earth, now. No, I can’t say I’d miss it.” He drew on his cigarette, flicked the butt toward the trampled margin of the pool. “Hope you don’t mind me rambling on. Been in-country too long, I guess.”

  The next morning, dew heavy on his silvery thermoblanket when he awoke, Miguel took his leave without awakening the shepherd. A couple of the dogs who sprawled around the ashes of last night’s fire watched him go, but didn’t say a word.

  By dawn he was a kilometre away, following the trail left by the sheep back into the hills.

  Two days later, he was in sight of Port of Plenty.

  He had reached the beginning of the forest which cloaked the hills as they saddled away to the west. Early evening, the sky still indigo yet deeper, becoming translucent, the first stars pricking through. All around, tree trunks soared upward, spirals of feathery branches twisting tightly around them. Rocks spattered with lichens and stoneworts broke the forest duff like the backs of surfacing sea creatures.

  Miguel stood at the edge of a sheer cliff that rose above the broad loops of a river. On the far shore, misty salt marshes stretched to their level horizon. And beyond the final bend of the river’s course, where it widened into an estuary, was a glittering web on the eastern shore, as small in the distance as his thumbnail: Port of Plenty.

  Miguel spat over the edge of the cliff and turned and went on among the aisles of the trees, following the ridge. Too dark to try to cross the valley to the next rise now, Miguel reasoned (remembering Warren’s talk of a rogue sabretooth), but he wanted to put some distance between the city and his back.