He came back at the end of the afternoon, just after the concierge had switched on the lights in the foyer. She was working through the accounts in her office, her desk beside the little window so she could keep an eye on what went on. When the door hissed, she glanced up and (beyond the overlay of figures which her compsim projected on her sight) saw him walk briskly past toward the stairs.
The concierge wondered what he had been doing that afternoon, wondered, not for the first time, if he could possibly be a spy. She needed advice, she thought, and switched off the accounts and called up her dead mother.
There was a moment of white light, white noise, as the compsim routed through the matrices, searching for the subfile where the residue of her mother was stored. Then the world returned and the old woman’s disembodied face was floating in the air before her. Although the withered lips did not move, words crept into the concierge’s brain like sparks over a dying fire.
—My daughter, it’s been so long.
“Really, Mother, it’s only been a week since I talked to you. I told you about how Harry had to go to work on the wall, don’t you remember?”
—Time goes so slow here, I forget the days. Harry is building a wall, you say?
“The defensive wall, for the war.” Poor old thing, she was wearing thin. The dead didn’t last forever. Memories and personalities slowly bled into one another, degrading into a common, formless gestalt. And her mother hadn’t taken very well in the first place. Still, she always gave sound advice, even now. The concierge drew a breath and launched into an explanation of how she was worried about her new tenant, how out of place he was. “It seems silly, Mother, but I can’t get the thought out of my mind that he might be a spy or something.”
—It is important to win the war, Daughter.
“So I ought to tell the police about him?”
There was a pause. The mask of her mother’s face flickered, as if blown by an electronic breeze. When she spoke, her voice was more forceful than it had been for years.
—He is nothing to worry about, Daughter. He has his place in the scheme of things.
“I hope you’re right, Mother.”
—A mother knows best, Daughter. Tell me about the world. It’s so dark in here, only voices for company.
So the concierge talked about her friends and her husband and the war for a few minutes before she switched her mother off and returned to the accounts. Not enough, she knew, but the dead were never satisfied.
Perhaps ten minutes later a tall dark-skinned man in a white raincape came in. Leaning at the little window, he said, “I’m sorry to trouble you—”
The concierge saw the brass badge pinned to the collar of the man’s cape and felt a thrill of alarm, as if she had been pierced at her core by a delicate barb of ice. “Oh,” she said. “Oh. My husband, it’s not my husband.”
The man looked puzzled, and then he smiled and touched his badge. “I really should take this off when I’m not on duty. I’m sorry, I must have startled you. No, I’ve been told that a Mr Florey is living here?”
The concierge laughed, a gush of shrill relief. “Yes, yes. He’s been here three days now. He’s not in any trouble, is he?”
“I’m just visiting. Really. Can you tell me his room number?”
She could tell him at once. She prided herself that she never needed to look up the room number of any of her tenants, no matter how quickly they passed through.
“Many thanks. I’m sorry that I startled you.”
“Oh, no, really…” She put one hand to the side of her neck as the delicate heat of her confusion spread to her face. The man smiled, and started toward the stairs.
The concierge sat still for a whole minute. Nothing happened. She stripped the compsim’s interface band from her wrist, shut the little window, and went through the connecting door into her apartment. Her mother was right, she thought. It was nothing to do with her. In this war you couldn’t afford to worry about strangers.
The unlit corridor was floored with frayed raffia matting. The air smelled of cheap disinfectant. A buzzing fluoro over the landing threw de Ramaira’s shadow, distorted by the flare of his rain-cape, on the walls. As he walked the shadow grew larger and fainter until he passed through it into the deeper gloom at the end of the corridor. The muted sound of the evening newscast scratched behind all the closed doors except that of room 2C. An unpainted door like the others, wood grainy and pitted. No name card in the holder beneath the iron numberplate.
De Ramaira made a moue of distaste. To come to live in such a place, in these times…he wouldn’t have thought that Rick Florey had it in him to be so melodramatic. He knocked. After a few moments there was a fumbling on the other side and the door opened a crack.
“Hello, Rick,” de Ramaira said. “It took a hell of a time to trace you, even through the VDF.”
Florey, his silhouette halved by the edge of the door, said, “I guess you’d better come in.”
The square room was filled with shadows. A sagging bed in one corner, a table beneath the window, a couch that faced a set of cupboards and the clean delta-wing of a trivee. Raffia matting covered the floor, torn here and there to show red tiling beneath. A musty, cold room.
“Do you want something to drink? I can run to tea or coffee,” Rick asked.
“I’ve just had dinner.” De Ramaira sat on the lumpy couch, his raincape folding stiffly. “So. How long have you been here?”
“Three days, now. After the University was closed the houses on the hill were requisitioned. I spent a week sleeping on Max Rydell’s floor before I found this; anything halfway decent had been taken by people from the suburbs. There are rumours that the insurgents are going to bomb the outskirts with their—what do you call them?”
“Mortars.”
“I guess you would know that.”
“Oh, I still have my tap on the rumour circuit. The problem is sorting signal from noise.”
“Right.” Rick sat on the corner of the bed and picked up the cassette reader lying there, flicking its switch back and forth so that light blinked under his chin. Then he looked sideways and said, “I see they even got you.”
“What?” Then de Ramaira remembered the badge pinned to his cape. “I really should take this off, I’m not even on duty. The concierge thought I’d come to arrest her, I do believe, when she first saw me.”
“I think she thinks I’m a spy.” Rick laughed. “Maybe I am. I just don’t know who I’m working for.”
Rain rattled suddenly on the dark windowpane. The initial calm of the fall was ending as suddenly and as violently as it always did at this latitude, dissolving in a flurry of storms that would eventually clarify into crystalline winter. In the forests around the city, trees were folding away their delicate branches, and thousands upon thousands of parabirds were scattered over the choppy water of the estuary, resting midway on their long northern migration. In the salt marshes, gravid amphibians lay torpid in their burrows, the embryos which would devour them before winter was out just beginning to quicken. Wind fluted in the discharged pipes of mortarweed and rain washed the mud banks, ceaselessly pocked the surfaces of the sluggish streams. The slow locking of the year.
Rick put down the cassette reader and got up to switch on the light. Shadows scurried like cockroaches beneath the furniture (but then de Ramaira remembered that there were no cockroaches on Elysium). In the naked fluoro’s harsh light, the room looked even shabbier. Rick said, “They tried to put me in limbo, you know. At least, I think that’s what was going down. Maybe they don’t trust me, I don’t know. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get into something, finally got to see Professor Collins, had him put in a word. I’ve an interview in a couple of days.”
“I’m glad to hear it. I thought you were hiding in here, licking your wounds.”
Rick sat on the bed again. “Hiding from the vigilantes, maybe. Wandering around this city is getting to be dangerous. So what are you up to, anyway? Digging ditches like th
e rest of the University people?”
“Yes, I heard all about that. At last my friends in Agriculture have found their true vocation! Luckily, I’ve managed to persuade the City Board to take up an idea of mine—although given its speculative nature, I’m surprised that they agreed. I put it to them that we—the city—might not win this war. If that happens, if you can believe it, Constat predicts that civilisation won’t survive. A ninety-five percent probability.”
“Wow,” Rick said simply.
“Precisely. So I said to the Board, just supposing, this is a hypothesis and so forth, but just supposing that the city loses the war, and just in case civilisation does collapse, why don’t we condense our technological knowledge and save it in a time vault for the benefit of future generations. I’ll admit that it isn’t an original idea. Time vaults are an overabundant inheritance from the Age of Waste back on Earth; you practically can’t dig a hole for opening some mouldering trove of twentieth-century trivia. Anyhow, along with everything else, I want to include details of communication technology.”
“And this is where I come in?”
“You read my mind.”
“Who else is helping you?”
“Many of my erstwhile colleagues at the University have suddenly become quite friendly. I doubt it’s an excess of wartime bonhomie. It does offer an occasional reprieve from slogging around in the mud with the rest of the VDF. And I stress the occasional. The Board considers the whole project to be of minor importance. Useful maybe, but certainly minor. So, will you help?”
“Why not? You understand though, that I’m not doing it for the city. I’m an outsider here, I guess I always will be. Once I thought it might be different, you know? Get my citizenship, have a family, die and be read into the personality matrices. Things I’ve seen since the University closed down, like the internment camp, have sort of changed my mind. But I don’t want to give up on my work, either. I’ve had an easy ride so far. Now the going is tough I can’t just give it up.”
There was something in Rick’s voice, a hard, certain edge, that surprised de Ramaira. But how could he ever really know what was going on inside these colonists? They spoke the same language, shared the same heritage, so you thought you understood them—and all along they were as alien as the aborigines. He remembered the debacle of his first expedition. The boy, what was his name? And poor dead Lieutenant McAnders, killed, and now nothing more than a bunch of codes in the matrices. After she had died de Ramaira had meant to talk with her about the expedition, about why she had let the boy go, but some squeamish reserve had held him back. Better to let the dead be. He said, “Think it over a couple of days, then come see me. You’ll do that?”
“I’ll see you around,” Rick said.
And that, de Ramaira thought, after he had said good-bye and closed the door behind him (the fluoro flickering at the end of the drab corridor, the multitudinous mumble of trivees above and below and all around), that could have meant either of two things. His boots ground concrete as he descended. We really didn’t communicate at all…we are (but this was too trite to explain anything) we are from very different worlds.
The smell of polish and the bland odour of the wet air outside rose to meet him. His sense of isolation, a scraped hollow in his chest, was enlarged by the sight of the contrived foyer, rough contours of mock stone that here and there bore shrivelled remnants of decorative plants. Poor cave. (Jonthan, that had been the boy’s name. Was he still alive, beyond the Trackless Mountains?) The small window of the concierge’s office like the dead eye of an ancient trivee. The glass door dimly mirroring the bright foyer. De Ramaira’s reflection came up to meet him, then slippingly swung away as he pulled the door open. And went out.
Rick’s breath misted the cold window as he leaned against it and squinted at the sidewalk below. The rain had stopped. Fluoros dropped glistening islands of light along the dark street. After a moment a white-caped figure stepped through the fan of light which spilled from the entrance of the rooming house.
Rick watched until de Ramaira had walked out of sight. The empty room hung at his back, and he turned to it reluctantly, seeing it for a moment as de Ramaira must have. Shabby furniture pressed to the walls as if yearning to become invisible, the worn look of inherited surfaces. The unshaded fluoro made a high buzzing sound to which his ears had long ago become accustomed; briefly, he heard it again, and the mingled drone, senseless as breaking surf, of his neighbours’ trivees. Already the house he had shared with Cath seemed no more real than his room in the undergraduate hall, or the dormitory back in Mount Airy.
Cath. What Rick had felt for her, cautious budding love, was now as dead as the withered plants in the foyer. The last of it had scaled away when he had had to pack her possessions, and most of his, for storage, when the house had been requisitioned. Here he was, and Cath only a few kilometres away, yet they could no more communicate than could Elysium and the Wombworld.
It would be easier to bear if Rick had been able to immerse himself in preparations for the defence of Port of Plenty from the amorphous but nevertheless real threat of the insurgents—even now they were engaged in skirmishes with the Port Authority police in the forests west of the city and the Outback beyond. That, along with the sense that as long as he was working he would be safe from internment, was what had driven him to fight the bureaucratic indifference of the Volunteer Defense Force. At first, he had thought that it was because he was from a settlement, and therefore not to be trusted; but then he had found that others who had come to the University from settlements had been placed as soon as war had been declared. It was not until he had finally gone to Professor Collins, who helped run half a dozen of the ad hoc committees which implemented the instructions of the City Board, that Rick had discovered that it was Savory who was blocking his placement. For what reason Professor Collins couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say, and in obtaining a placement interview for Rick he had made it clear that this was a final favour.
But at least it was a chance to escape from the limbo to which he had been consigned. Helplessly awaiting, like the victim of a sabretooth, consumption by whatever plans Savory hoped to hatch. And now there was de Ramaira’s project. Even if Rick’s placement was blocked, at least there was that. As head of the VDF, Savory had considerable power, but surely he could not stop Rick’s participating in a project ratified by the City Board.
Rick went to the irregular stack of cupboards and after a brief search through the lares and penates of his former life took out his compsim. He would make a start right now, promise of a new beginning. As he sat at the bare table, the rain began to fall again beyond the darkly reflective window.
12. Tracking Song
It had been raining steadily all day east of the forests that surrounded Port of Plenty, a clinging misty drizzle that blurred all details of the rolling grassland. It lightly touched Miguel’s face with a myriad pinpoint freezing kisses as he followed the track of the insurgent raiding party in the last light, had long since plastered his hair flat and soaked his clothes. He endured it as he had endured the summer heat, or the hunger that sometimes cramped his belly so badly that he could hardly walk. The thing in his head, the blue brother, had made it clear that he could not disobey its urging.
After it had helped him escape from the cops, it had bid him retrace his steps, eastward through the forest to the Outback. Miguel soon lost count of the days since he had become possessed. He was more conscious of his gnawing hunger than of time. Still, he learned that there were limits to the thing’s power. It had not taken control of his body again. Instead, it used threats and pleading and cajoling to make sure that he followed its plans. That was effective enough. Miguel could not escape the voice in his head, and, itself tireless, it would not let him rest until it was satisfied that he had walked as far as he could each day. But as the unnumbered days passed, Miguel was sure that it was slowly weakening or ebbing away, as water settles into sand. That was his only hope.
He had
long ago finished the food that Ella Falconer had given him when she had helped him to escape from Lake Fonda. All he had left was a dwindling supply of dried rabbit meat. Miguel tried to supplement this with edible tubers, but these, always rare, were scarcer still in that late season, and sometimes made him quickly and violently ill. He wanted to circle around, sure that he could find rabbits so close to the city, but the blue brother wouldn’t let him.
—You are in the wrong place, it told him. You must hurry.
“Let me rest a few days, then I’ll be able to walk fast enough. This is crazy. I mean, why am I knocking myself out for you?”
—Because you made a promise. Freedom has its price, Miguel, even for someone like you.
As if to underline its words, his limbs for a moment seemed to twitch of their own accord. Miguel stumbled and came to himself, clutching a trembling sapling. “All right,” he said. “I hear what you say.”
He found that it helped to chew the fibrous stems of vines, but he had to be careful not to swallow any fragments. He was down to his last portion of dried meat when he stumbled across a vast warren, a riddled close-cropped meadow dotted with dead trees, the bark at their bases stripped away. Miguel refused to go any farther until he had caught enough rabbits to replenish his store. The blue brother let him stay a day, just long enough to set a few snares and smoke the carcasses of the rabbits he caught over a slow fire. Not much of a victory to be sure, but it proved that there were limits to the blue brother’s power. Rested, his belly comfortably full, Miguel felt stronger than he had since the blue brother had wormed its way into his head. Maybe if he waited long enough, it would fade like a bad dream.
But it had ways of replenishing its strength, too.
It was near evening, some days (he couldn’t say how many) after he had left the warren. Miguel was climbing out of a dry, serpentine valley, pushing through tangled thornbushes, when the blue brother suddenly broke a long silence. Its words clanged in his head like the separate notes of a beaten gong.
Secret Harmonies Page 15
