Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  —There will be danger passing soon. You must find a place to hide.

  Miguel stopped, scratched and sweating. “What’s going on?”

  —You must hide. Hide!

  The steep slope was too exposed, so Miguel climbed to the top and plunged into the forest. He had gone only a little way when he stumbled out onto a wide track. Long pools of water had collected in the rutted red clay, blankly reflecting the ribbon of indigo sky framed by the margins of the forest.

  —Hurry, the voice said, and Miguel ran across the track, mud sucking at his boots. He threw himself into the undergrowth and found shelter beneath the slanting trunk of a dead tree, held up by the press of its living fellows, from which curtains of creepers hung to the ground. Miguel crouched on wet black moss inside the creepers, his breath raw in his throat. Cold air filled with the earthy smell of things returning to mulch, the sad, palpable odours of the year’s end. Every leaf, every spine, every twig, tipped with a clear drop of water.

  —Listen, the voice said.

  Nothing but the beating of his heart and the hush of the forest. Then, faintly, the drone of a helicopter, growing louder, resolving into the roar of its engine and the slashing clatter of its blades as it skimmed the treetops overhead. Branches danced in its wake, the pulpy leaves of the creepers in which Miguel crouched stirred and shook, even as the noise of the helicopter dwindled.

  “How did you know that was coming?”

  —You do not use your senses properly, Miguel. I do. Now you must wait, quietly.

  Minutes passed. Miguel was chewing a piece of stringy dry rabbit meat when his right hand crept down to his pack. He couldn’t stop it. It pushed under the flap and closed around the compsim. Before he could ask what was happening, he heard a distant rumble of engines and a moment later three overlanders one after the other flashed past the scrim of trees and creepers. The thought came to him that they were looking for him.

  —No. They are chasing an insurgent raiding party that mortared the east gate of the city last night.

  “How do you know all that stuff? You plugged into the cops’ radios?”

  His hand, suddenly, was his again. It tingled with soft electric needles.

  —In a manner of speaking, the voice said. You must go on now.

  Following the churned muddy trail, the going was much easier. Miguel reached the edge of the forest by the afternoon of the next day.

  It was raining.

  Solitary flat-topped trees, their bulbous trunks raised on arched roots as if standing on tiptoe, dotted the beginning of the Outback. The grasses were losing the crimson colour of summer from the edge of their leaf blades inward, so that the winnowing breezes cast rippling patterns of red and green over the rolling land. The trail Miguel was following arrowed eastward. Something was gleaming there at the horizon’s edge, obscured by drifting veils of rain but becoming clearer as he walked on. No need for the voice to warn him. He began to circle to the north, climbing a gentle rise so that at last he was able to look down at the cops’ camp, a safe kilometre away.

  It wasn’t much, two round tents of a thin, glistening material which dimpled in the breeze, half a dozen overlanders. Smoke from a huge fire billowed over the red and green grassland.

  Miguel found his hand once more moving to clasp the compsim inside the pack. He shivered and asked the rainy air, “So now what?”

  —You will go on, Miguel. The police have chased the insurgents as far as they dare. It is too dangerous for them to go any farther, for they are unsure of the disposition of the insurgent forces and fear that they might be led into an ambush. But you are a man of the Outback, Miguel. You will be able to follow the insurgents quite safely.

  “Are you crazy? There’s a war on, isn’t there? Why should I get caught up in that?”

  —So many questions, Miguel. I am not insane or deluded. You will be quite safe, I am sure. The insurgents will meet you as a brother, as I met you as a brother. I do not want you to fight them, or to join them in their struggle.

  Miguel rubbed his wet beard with his free hand. Frustration kinked in his chest like a twisted rope. “So I just follow them around, is that the idea? Walk in on them, and say I just want to hang out with them. They won’t believe that from a dingo. I don’t need people, man. They will know that.”

  —You may tell them what you will to make them accept you.

  “They shoot spies, in a war. I used to read stuff like that when I was a kid, stuff from Earth.”

  —You will not be a spy, but a…recruiter.

  “Then you had better tell me just what it is you want of me, mister, how it is you’re inside my head. You’re some machine programme, right?”

  But for once there was no reply to his question. Miguel found that his hand had let go of the compsim. He shook it to get rid of the prickling sensation and said, “I’ve taken enough shit from you, mister. Been walking these two weeks without any word as to why. So unless I get an answer I’m just walking away. Hear me!”

  There was no reply. Miguel waited a few minutes, hunkered down out of the blowing drizzle as best he could. He chewed a strip of dried meat, watched the distant tents, the billowing smoke. The blue brother was silent. Nothing inside his head but his own thoughts.

  At last he shouldered his pack and began to walk away from the camp and the trail he was supposed to follow, and felt the kink in his chest slacken. To the east, the grassland stretched to the tremendous grey horizon; to the west, studded with the flat-topped trees, it fell away to the forest, no more than a dark line marred by drifting falls of rain. Miguel climbed a steep slope and found himself looking out across a shallow valley through which an ochre stream ran swiftly toward the forest, combing the lush grass that grew along its banks.

  A dead tree raised its broken branches by the stream. Its trunk had been split, by lightning perhaps. As Miguel started toward the stream he thought that he saw an aborigine pull itself through the riven tree trunk and drop down to the grass.

  The naked figure, tall and stooped, painfully thin, waited beside the swift water as Miguel, wondering, came down through the rocky outcrops of the slope. Miguel saw old ridged scars between its legs, darker than the rest of its mottled skin, and knew it to be what other men called a shaman.

  When Miguel reached it, the aborigine raised both hands to its shoulders. Its long arms bent in two distinct places. It said, “This way is not for you.”

  Its voice was the distillation of the communal buzz that hung in the air of any aborigine village. Miguel waited for the miracle to happen again, and as he waited the mask of the aborigine’s face seemed to waver like a flag suddenly caught in a breeze. Slow black lightning crawled down the sky, consuming the aborigine’s tall thin figure, and the land seemed to tilt like the deck of a vast ship.

  When Miguel came to himself, it was no longer raining. He sat up, shivering in the cold breeze that blew across the stream. It was near the end of the day. The air seemed to hold a stain of darkness; Miguel could no longer distinguish the distant line of the forest from the sky.

  As he stood, he remembered the aborigine. But the figure was gone. Only his own footprints were pressed into the long grass.

  “You,” he said, to the darkening air.

  —Yes, Miguel?

  “You did that, didn’t you? To show me that I can’t escape. To show me—”

  Darkness again, but it was the darkness of his own despairing anger. He was on his knees, shivering violently. Mud and grass were caught in his broken fingernails; his throat ached from the noise he had made.

  —I am with you, Miguel. I am imprinted in certain neurons of your forebrain, as much a part of you as any of your memories. But I am also a part of someone greater. When you return to the city I will be whole again and all of the plan will be clear.

  “I don’t know, mister. I just don’t know if I’ve gone as flat crazy like the people of the settlements always reckoned I was.”

  —I helped you escape. Is that not proof
enough? But there will be more when you catch up with the insurgents. When you have recruited help there you will know the next part.

  “Can’t you tell me now?”

  —There, Miguel, there under the red rock. Shelter in the shadow of the red rock, and I will tell.

  Miguel was seized from within. His body scuttled sideways, flung itself beneath a slab of soil-stained limestone which jutted from the slope. Clumsily, it plucked the thermoblanket from his pack and wrapped it around its shoulders. And then it was still, looking out from the shadow of the rock.

  The stream at the bottom of the slope and the empty landscape beyond vanished. In their place, Miguel saw himself, dressed in silken clothes and standing on the balcony of a high building, looking out over tremendous crowds that worshipfully bayed his name. And he saw a great white city spreading out over the peninsula’s spread hand, climbing the Trackless Mountains, conquering the continent’s dusty heart; and saw himself again, lounging in slothful luxury and attended by voluptuous, naked women; and then in strange armour of flexible steel at the head of a great army of men and aborigines: and more, much more, a dizzying succession of visions each melting seamlessly into the next until at last there was only darkness.

  Night now, the lip of the rock a shadow against the starry sky. Miguel found that he could control his body again, and drew the thermoblanket around himself.

  —You will be my good and faithful servant, Miguel, the voice said. Serve me well, and all I have shown you will be yours. No man could ask for more.

  “I just want to be left alone, mister. That’s all I’ve ever asked. I don’t need armies or any of that stuff. That’s what you want, not me. I’m just a dingo, is all.”

  Miguel’s body stirred, against his will. He tried to cry out, but even that had been taken from him. He was a helpless passenger as his body scrambled from beneath the rock, stuffed the thermoblanket away and shouldered the pack. As it set off, the voice of the blue brother tolled in his head, angry and eager.

  —You will serve me, one way or the other. East, Miguel. East, after the insurgents. That is our way now.

  13. The Wall

  The cop told Rick, “You’ve been iced so long that right now all we can give you is a temporary position.”

  On the other side of the frame desk, sitting in a canvas chair, Rick nodded and leaned forward a little more. It was difficult to hear what the soft-spoken woman was saying over the rumble of heavy machinery and the relentless percussion of a piledriver outside the site office.

  The cop interfaced with her compsim for a moment, then said musingly, “Communications? I’m pretty sure that’ll find some use eventually. Right now…” She began to sift through a pile of yellow flimsies. The shaft of sunlight which fell through the plastic windowpane glistened on stray wisps of her tightly bound blonde hair. “You understand that we try to fit everyone into an appropriate position, Dr Florey. In your case, though, we’ll have to give you something to do until a better alternative reveals itself.”

  Rick nodded to show that he understood. To understand is to forgive. The cop bent to the litter of papers. “Okay. You should be glad to hear you’ve drawn something pretty easy—” Something roared past, momentarily blotting out the sunlight. “Pretty easy, for now, at least. You’ll be in charge of supply liaison for the construction sector on the northeast gate link, sector twenty. It’s not too far, see it?” She turned in her chair and tapped the big map on the wall. “Maybe two klicks from here as the perimeter road goes.”

  “I see,” Rick said.

  “You just get the requirements on the right forms and pass them through channels. Make sure the materials get there on time. Sound easy enough?”

  Rick wondered if he was expected to thank her. What he really wanted to do was just walk away from it, but where would that leave him? Vulnerable. Exposed. “Okay.”

  “You’d better get your ass down there. You have the afternoon shift, one to six. Says here you’ve no religious affiliation. Monday’s your rest day.”

  “I’m only working half the day?”

  “Believe me, I don’t want to put you on half-schedule. People are needed all over, even on jobs like this. But there’s nothing I can do about it, it was requested by Savory himself. You don’t know that? Now, if you get down to the site, the supervisor already on duty will fill you in. Most of the trucks go in that direction; one’ll give you a lift. Good luck to you, now.”

  “Thank you.”

  But the cop had interfaced with her compsim again, and didn’t look up when Rick went out into frail autumn sunlight.

  The hut was beside a muddy road in the shadow of part of the defensive wall, a five hundred metre long slope of polymer-bonded dirt that rose steeply to its crown of tanglewire. At the far end, a digger, like a gigantic yellow-and-black striped crab on its dozen or so articulated legs, was sending up a slow fountain of earth.

  Rick took it all in with a nervous attention quickened by the revelation of Savory’s continuing interference. The man seemed to feed off the war, battening on confusion and dislocation, growing into an obscure shadowy menace which Rick encountered at every turn.

  Rick caught a lift from a big ground-effect barge which drove slowly down a track barely wide enough for it, cut in a straight line through the woods inside the perimeter fence. At last the track opened on to a long clearing crisscrossed with the slim trunks of felled trees. The mesh of the perimeter fence had been stripped from its tall posts. Blackened tree stumps stood in a waste of ashy mud beyond. A gang of grey-clad figures was working with powersaws at the edge of the forest; a tree toppled from the press of its fellows, feathery branches thrashing as if in agony.

  In the barge’s vibrant cab, the driver glanced over and raised one hand from the wheel to make a gun-shape—thumb cocked over extended forefinger—which he jerked as if in recoil. Rick nodded, and the driver grinned and cut in the airbrakes.

  After Rick had clambered down, he turned to shout up his thanks, but the barge was already beginning to rise in a roar of air and engine noise, its driver a remote shadow in the high cab as his huge vehicle accelerated toward the far end of the clearing.

  An excavator sat on folded legs beside a pile of rusty rods, its scoop resting on the ground like a mailed fist. The two women who were stripping down its power unit paused to glance at Rick. A cop in white coveralls, rifle slung over his shoulder, turned back to his scrutiny of the stretch of ochre clay and the line of the forest. Clouds were pulling across the sky, dulling the edge of the sunlight.

  Rick crossed the muddy road to the site office, his doubts blown away by the windy ride. Here, here was the real front line. The cop patrols in the forest and on the Hampshire Hills were merely precautions—and fallible, as the occasional raids on the perimeter defences showed. This was the place where a stand would be made.

  A slightly built man came to the doorway of the hut. He touched his brow in a mocking salute and introduced himself as David Janesson. “I had word of your coming,” he said as Rick started to explain. “I’m the duty supervisor here, until I’ve told you enough so you can get on with it.” A few strands of hair were combed across the island of freckled scalp that ran back from Janesson’s high forehead; he brushed his palm over these strands as he added, “What do you think of all this?”

  “There seems to be a lot going on.”

  “A week ago there was nothing here but forest either side of the fence. Now, they tell me, the first section of the ramparts will be going up tomorrow. Things move fast, we have a lot to keep up with. Yes, a lot to keep up with. Have you been told what’s wanted?”

  “Something about passing stock orders?”

  “It’ll be easy enough for someone with your background, easy enough. I’ll show you.”

  The procedure was little different from that of ordering laboratory supplies, apart from the precedence coding which had to be applied to each order.

  “You work those out from the tables,” Janesson said, pullin
g a printed plastic sheet from beneath a scattering of yellow flimsies. “The codes are modified each Friday by the updated supply situation—Constat prints those out, you see, and they send them to every sector. You understand it all?”

  “Sure,” Rick said. “It isn’t all that difficult.” The fragile bloom of his excitement had faded. There was nothing here to engage him after all. All was mud.

  “It’s like being a supply clerk in an automat,” Janesson said. “We’re just the link between the foremen and Constat. A make-weight job, more or less.” He nodded sagely. “Yes, more or less a make-weight job. I was made up to lieutenant—if rank in the VDF has any meaning—because I know the settlements along the west coast. New Covenant especially. I came here from New Covenant twenty years ago.” He nodded again. “You’re also from a settlement, I think.”

  “They must have sent you quite a dossier,” Rick told him.

  “Just the standard thing, you know. They don’t like the idea of officers shovelling mud—bad for morale—and there’s not much else for me to do right now. But as soon as New Covenant joins the insurgents—and there’s every chance it will, I’m surprised it didn’t right from the start—I’ll be out of here.”

  “Who was here before me?”

  “Oh, just me, you know, working mornings. A make-weight job, as I said. You have a speciality, I suppose, or you wouldn’t be here waiting for a real posting.”

  Suddenly, chills snarled at the back of Rick’s neck. Suppose Savory had iced him not because he was being saved for some grand plan, but simply because he was from a settlement—hadn’t Savory once implied that, as a noncitizen, Rick wasn’t quite to be trusted? Now that the protection of his University position had been removed, Rick was beginning to learn what it was like to be a settler living in the city. He asked Janesson, “How many citizens do you suppose are waiting for a real posting?”

  Janesson patted his bald spot, considering. “I don’t think it’s anything like that,” he said. “As soon as New Covenant joins the war, then I’ll be out of here. Citizen or not, inside the wall we’re all on one side. Yes, all on one side.”