Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  After about twenty minutes he passed a latticework metal tower, rooted in a concrete base, that rose higher than the trees. A red light flashed at its tip. Twenty minutes more and it was too dark to walk; the waning moon wouldn’t be up for a couple of hours yet. Miguel risked a small fire, more out of habit than necessity, and set a can of water in it to boil. Then he lay back and took out the compsim and ran through the files he’d made on the abos, strings of words scrolling up his vision, blotting out all the night except for the flicker of the fire. Botched words that had failed to capture the feeling he had had under the drug, the feeling the abos’ singing gave him, of a truth, a great truth, just beyond his grasp.

  He came out of the files to sprinkle seeds into the seething water in the can, skimmed off the scum when the brew had boiled up, and set the can to one side to cool a little.

  Rather than review his poor efforts, he called up the suicide’s extensive array. He still hadn’t explored all of it, but by now the names and shorthanded intrigues were familiar territory. As he read in them, as in a novel, it came to seem that there was a presence behind the words, as if someone was standing at his back; he actually looked around, saw nothing but trees receding in the dusk beyond the words projected on his sight by the compsim.

  But out of some other darkness a voice spoke, a warm baritone, startlingly intimate.

  —Do not be afraid, Miguel. I mean you no harm. I will help you, if I can.

  “Who are you? How do you know my name?”

  The text of the dead man’s files wavered as if blown by a wind, faded from Miguel’s sight. For a moment he could see nothing but velvety darkness. Then a skeletal geometrical shape rushed at him, blue lines blindingly brilliant. At the same moment a tingling paralysis spread up his arms. Miguel jerked against it and knocked the can into the fire. The brew sputtered on the hot stones of the crude hearth, and the acrid stench of burning herbs brought him to himself. He spread his stiff fingers and managed to let go of the compsim.

  The ordinary night, stars spread beyond the reaching spires of the trees. Water spitting into steam in the fire. Something was shrieking down in the deep valley.

  And there, far off through the trees, the winking red light of the relay tower.

  That must be it, Miguel thought. Somehow he had interrupted traffic between the city and the mines at Cooper’s Hill. He picked up a twig and used it to switch off the compsim. And then panic rushed through him. In a kind of frantic fever he stamped out those embers the brew hadn’t drowned, bundled together his possessions. He almost left the compsim lying there, but on impulse picked it up, holding it with only the very tips of his fingers, and packed it away.

  Then he started off through the dark forest, following the ridge north and west. No time to rest this night. It was possible whoever or whatever he had disturbed had managed to get a fix on him. It was possible that he was being hunted again.

  8. Of the Fall

  The next morning, Rick went down to the University as usual, although it felt strange to be following his accustomed route among trees and discretely placed houses while back at the house Cath was packing so that she would be able to catch the noon coach to Arcadia. His unease grew during the lectures he had to audit. All three were for first-semester courses, large and impersonal, but while he waited to take questions after the recorded expert had finished playing on the big trivee stage, Rick saw that many more students were missing than usual. Not only Cath was worried, it seemed.

  Rick hurried back to the house after the last lecture. He and Cath had an early lunch, sitting companionably at the scrubbed wooden table in the kitchen. The picture window was filled edge to edge with pale sunlight and the patchwork colours of the surrounding trees, all turning now. Cath had opened a bottle of white wine; they clinked glasses in an unspoken toast. As he loaded the treacher with used tableware, Rick asked, “Have you settled all you need to?”

  “Nothing much to settle. Think of it as a holiday, Rick, and don’t be so serious.”

  “You were serious enough, last night.”

  Cath changed the subject. “I caught the morning newscast. The All Colony Council has opened session.”

  Rick turned from the treacher. “Anything happened?”

  “Not exactly. A few settlements haven’t sent representatives, if that means anything.”

  “It depends who they are. The Collectivists?”

  “No, they’ve arrived. Bird-in-Hand, I think. Oh, and New Covenant. At least most of them are talking.”

  “So nothing will happen after all,” he said.

  Cath’s face was composed, closed up. “We’ll just have to see, I suppose. I should go now.”

  She didn’t look back as they started down the hill in the hot, dry sunlight, and that reassured Rick: she knew that she would be coming back. They walked through the campus and parted company on the path beside the Department of Architecture building.

  “I’ll phone tomorrow,” Cath said, hefting her grip. “But probably I won’t know any more than I do now.”

  A couple of students, bearded boys, glanced at her as they passed, and with a sudden detachment, something to do with the unaccustomed lunchtime wine perhaps, Rick saw Cath as they must. An elegant slim woman, her yellow silk dress with its flared collar token of her wealth and style. Obviously, she was not for them. She was on her way to somewhere else, on her way up.

  He said, “Take care. Have a good journey.”

  “You take care too,” she said, and stepped forward and brushed his cheek with her lips. If she had asked him, he would have gone with her there and then. But she shouldered her grip and started down the path, and he went on to the Engineering building, to his work.

  All afternoon Rick had charge of a practical class in multiphasic circuitry, and so there was little time to brood. When the last discussion had broken up and the equipment had been cleared away, he went down to the common room. Most of the staff had already left, but when Rick turned from the vendor, a paper cup of milky tea burning his fingers, Professor Collins came toward him.

  “I thought I’d convey a little advance news about next budget,” the professor told Rick.

  “Something’s wrong?”

  Professor Collins inclined his stately head. “There is to be a certain amount of revision regarding support of students from the settlements. Previously, of course, the Board has sponsored the education of citizens and settlers alike.”

  “Sure. Me, for instance.”

  Professor Collins said, “It seems that this may no longer be the case. The Board wishes us to become less dependent on external funding. Settlement students may have to pay their own way, and we must make some rationalizations. Probably the teaching load will be increased.”

  “I don’t mind auditing extra lectures, if that’s what it’s about.”

  “There may also be cutbacks in practical programmes. I mention this because the application you put forward requires a hefty capital expenditure.”

  “Well, if I get it through, the data from the high-altitude experiments will keep me occupied for a half a dozen years at least. I won’t be thinking of more tests until then. I hope that was clear in the application.”

  “You haven’t heard about your, um, balloon, yet, have you?”

  “It should come through any day.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry it’s out of my hands, but I’ll do my best to chase it up if you haven’t heard, let us say, by the end of the All Colony Council. But do bear in mind what I’ve said when you’re planning further experiments. It will be easier to get the applications through all the administrative nonsense.”

  It was the nearest thing to a warning that Rick had ever been given. But he did not feel chastened. Rather, he felt that, once again, he had escaped.

  Strangely, Rick slept soundly that night, but with morning came a return of the sense of loss he had numbed the evening before with hour after hour of watching trivia. As if Cath’s absence had invoked haunting echoes in th
e sunlit rooms.

  Although it was Saturday, he had a lecture to audit. The walk to the campus revived him. A fresh breeze was blowing through the trees, autumn wakening widening circles of restless rustle, a sense of expectancy as if the hill were a thousand-masted ship about to set sail.

  The lecture was in the Department of Agriculture, to second-year biotechnicians. Afterward, mindful of Professor Collins’s warning, Rick decided to begin a revision of his research plans. He would keep to this path no matter how it turned.

  As he approached the entrance to Engineering, a stream of students began to emerge into the fresh sunlight. With a small shock of recognition Rick saw Lena among them, and then she saw him and called, “Dr Florey, right? Do you believe this?”

  “How are you?”

  “Glad the weekend’s started. I’ve just spent two hours being told about the plumbing of the hydroponic station.” Her smile was as Rick remembered, a brief thrilling flash that wholly transformed her face. Under a scuffed black leather jacket was the same creamy asymmetric blouse that she had worn to de Ramaira’s party. A black skirt clung to her thighs and then flared out in a swirl of ragged ends.

  “I’ve just been auditing a telemetry lecture over in Agriculture, so I know what you mean.” They had stepped off the path on to the level lawn that stretched to the half-sunken facade of the Department of Photonics building. Overhead, gauzy figures of cloud lapped half the indigo sky.

  Lena asked, “By the way, did Jon catch you?”

  “Now, I thought it was Web who wanted the technical advice.”

  “Jon meant to see you before he went.”

  “Where has he gone?”

  “Back home for a while.” Lena was no longer smiling. “In case something happens to the settlement people staying here.”

  “Yeah, the guy I’m sharing a house with has gone back to Arcadia for a while, too.” The lie concealing Cath surprised him. He added, “I’m from Mount Airy, you know, but I’m still here.”

  Lena brushed back one wing of black hair, the sleeve of her jacket falling back to reveal the dozen silver bracelets at her wrist. “I suppose things will sort themselves out,” she said.

  “Right,” Rick said. “That’s what we all hope. Maybe I’ll see you again?” And that surprised him too, though he had been wanting to say it.

  “I’m not hard to find,” Lena said as she turned to go. “You take care now. Don’t let the vigilantes find out you’re from Mount Airy.”

  “I’m not ashamed of it,” Rick called after her, and went on through the empty foyer of Engineering. The encounter had pleasantly excited him, buoying him toward anticipation of Cath’s promised phone call.

  The flag was up on his office terminal. Rick read the short, formal message, then sat down and read it again. His application had been accepted. Strange to think it had been working toward him through all the upheaval, a reaffirmation of the essential solidity of the world. It came to him that Professor Collins had known about this all along, that the warning yesterday had been meant to temper the flush of success. All right. He wouldn’t go up to the roof and shout about it. He would be careful, just as everyone seemed to be advising him these days.

  For the next hour. Rick immersed himself in figures and charts, refamiliarising himself with details of technique that had grown hazy in the fallow weeks since he had sent in the application. The experiments involved injection of sodium ions into the high reaches of the atmosphere to create artificial auroras whose size and decay characteristics would supply clues to the behaviour of the ionosphere. Not an original idea, but it was only a means to an end. His real interest was the deep question of what caused Elysium’s climate to oscillate between its present Earth-like state and that of an Arrhenian swamp, hot and dripping wet, just as Earth oscillated between temperate and glacial episodes. The deepest question of all, of course, was whether Elysium really had such a thing as a climate, with its implication of occasional deviations from a normal state caused by an external force—changes in Tau Ceti’s behaviour, for instance. As an alternative, Rick believed that variations in conditions on Elysium could be the summation of chaotic oscillations in the nonlinear dynamics of its weather systems, more or less independent of external input. To find if that was true, it was necessary to know how often the world tipped from hot and wet to cool and dry—Rick had first met David de Ramaira when he had the idea of trying to measure those cycles from sudden transitions in the fossil record. That hadn’t panned out: so little was known about Elysium’s palaeontological history that only the most recent transition could be dated with any accuracy. Now Rick was approaching the problem at an angle, by looking in the ionosphere for chaotic behaviour independent of Tau Ceti’s activity. The artificial auroras were the probes for that behaviour.

  Rick had just glanced at his timetab—ten minutes before noonbreak—when someone rapped on the door, a single authoritarian stroke that rattled the pane of frosted glass. As Rick unplugged from his compsim the door opened, and the tall cop said, “Dr Florey? Mr Savory asked for you to be picked up. A little matter of identification.”

  Rick rose behind his desk. “Who am I supposed to identify?” Images shuffled through his head: the dingo, de Ramaira, Jon.

  “If we knew that, I guess we wouldn’t have to ask you, Dr Florey,” the cop said. His white coveralls seemed to fill the narrow space between the desk and the door, eclipsing the hard copies of diurnal interference patterns tacked to the wooden partition.

  “Is this to do with the job I did for you people a while back?” Rick’s mind was still turning toward the interruption from the complex, beguiling calculations of particle stripping, charge transference, spread F.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” the cop said impatiently. “I’m just here to collect you. Let’s go, huh?”

  At the junction with the main road at the edge of the campus, the police cruiser turned away from the city and picked up speed. A convoy of cushion trucks heading toward Arcadia loomed into view as the cruiser topped a rise and the cop switched on the siren and accelerated past. Now there was forest on either side of the road.

  When Rick asked where they were going, the cop said, “To the airfield, Doctor.”

  “What for?”

  “If you want my guess, you’ll be going on to some place else.”

  Half a kilometre from the east fence, the cruiser slowed and swung down a minor road, running beneath a close canopy in a rush of sunlight and shadows. Bright insects flicked from its path. Then the open glare of the airfield’s level sweep of concrete, the orange dome of a hangar rising against the rough line of the surrounding forest. A helicopter was framed in the gape of the hangar’s clamshell doors.

  The cruiser accelerated toward the hangar, stopping with a neat half-turn, like a flourish, in its shadow. The cop got out and went around to open the passenger door. This unexpected courtesy revived Rick’s hopes. It would seem that he was needed, not merely wanted. As he scrambled out, the helicopter’s rotors began to revolve above the bubble of its cabin. A mechanic glanced incuriously at Rick as she went past.

  There was a wooden hut just inside the hangar and Savory stepped out of this and walked toward Rick, his smile in place like a mask. “I’m glad you could come,” he said, and clasped Rick’s hand in a moist, unwelcome grip.

  “I can’t claim any credit for that.” Rick’s anger was built on Savory’s presumption.

  The politician looked up at Rick, blond hair brushing the severe collar of his jacket. “I apologise for taking up your time,” he said, “but in the opinion of the Board the man you saw in the Outback has become a matter of security.” He smiled. “Actually, I presented the case with that bias. At any rate he has been spotted again. Or let us say that someone has been spotted, out near the mines at Cooper’s Hill. That’s why we need your help. I’m hoping for a quick, positive identification.”

  “You’ve caught him?” The noise of the helicopter had settled to a blurring roar. Rick had to repeat
his question before Savory understood.

  “Let us say that the matter is in hand.” Savory reached inside his jacket and pulled out a sheet of yellow paper. “As this is a security matter, and because these are troubled times, protocol requires you to sign this. Congratulations, by the way. Most noncitizen irregulars from the University will make third lieutenant at most. You’ve gotten a first.”

  Savory spread the paper on the roof of the cruiser. It was a printed form of the kind used for legally binding contracts in a tradition that predated the arrival of Constat, filled in completely except for the last box. The spare details of Rick’s life. Fixed. The form fluttered against the white-painted metal like something alive, a condemnation, a trap. To sign it would be to seal himself to the city, and he was reluctant to take that final step. So far, things had flowed without the need for decision.

  Rick said, “Do I have to accept this?”

  Savory squinted past the cruiser and the helicopter. The forest margin rippled beyond glaring concrete. “You would have to come along in any case, but afterward I’m afraid that you would have to be interned. This is a time of emergency, and the mobilisation bill will conscript—in name only at the present—every able-bodied citizen. The forms will go out Monday. You have been called up a little prematurely, to help me out.” He smoothed the fluttering yellow paper. “You needn’t worry. No one will be called to do anything unless the city is attacked. Until then, everyone will be on standby.”

  “Who do you expect will attack the city?”

  “Oh, there have always been those outside the city who have looked upon us with envy, I’m sure you know that, Dr Florey.” Savory glanced obliquely at Rick, then at the paper. “Have you a pen…? Of course you have.”

  Rick slashed his signature in the empty box, with no feeling for the commitment.

  Savory folded the form and said, “Now we had best board the helicopter, Lieutenant.” This invocation of Rick’s spurious new rank seemed to enlarge the gulf between the present and his childhood, a gulf as great as the distances between stars. His sister and his parents like specks of mica fixed in formless black. His dour taciturn brothers fixed too, locked into their inheritance, the grim clangorous forge from which he alone had escaped.