Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  “Everyone except the settlers the cops rounded up and put in that prison camp.”

  “Infiltrators,” Janesson said, nettled. He pushed away from the cluttered desk. “I’ll show you around after we’ve eaten. I should have left half an hour ago, but what the hell. I’ve nothing better to do.” As they stepped outside, he added, “We’ve a couple of cops as security detail, but they’re not our worry. A sergeant comes by to check up twice a day.”

  The two women had powered up the excavator. Now, one of them was shouting instructions to it, putting it through its paces. Its legs flexed and straightened as its scoop swivelled with fluid grace at the end of its hydraulic arm. The other workers clustered around a trestle table which had been set up in the lee of a half-built plank wall, where a fat man was handing out canisters.

  As they walked toward the table, Rick asked Janesson, “Has this place…ever been attacked?”

  Janesson stopped in the middle of the road, one boot awash in a muddy puddle. “No, not here,” he said. “You must be thinking of the Eastgate mortar attack. That was, what, two days ago? Yes, two days. This was just a wide spot in the road then.”

  What had been chill was now heat, the dumb certainty of it all. And hadn’t Janesson more or less intimated that he knew what was going down. Goddamn, Rick thought, looking around unhappily. Goddamn Savory, why is he doing this to me? For the first time, he noticed the brow of the University hill, small and far beyond the tame forest within the city’s perimeter. Paradise lost, its autumn colours vivid in the hazy light.

  It was dark by the time Rick got back to the city, to the rooming house. He saw an edge of light gleaming beneath the door of his room as he walked down the murmurous shadowy corridor, and pushed it open, expecting David de Ramaira. Lena turned from the window and smiled. “We weren’t sure when you finished work. The woman downstairs said we could wait here.”

  Web leaned forward on the sagging couch. “We told her it was official business, see.” His gaze was dark with defiance, but his voice was edgy, nervous.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Lena added.

  “No, sure,” Rick told her. “Just lately this sort of thing has been happening to me all the time.” He closed the door and leaned against it.

  “I said it wasn’t a good idea,” Web told Lena. “You really think he can do anything for us?”

  Lena took a step toward Rick, fists in the pockets of her leather jacket. Her hazel eyes shone mischievously. “I didn’t think you’d be living in a place like this. Is it really your style?”

  “Who told you I was living here? Dr de Ramaira? You said you came here for my help, Web. I suppose this is all to do with that crazy idea of yours, right?” When the boy didn’t answer straight away, Rick added, “Look, I’ve already told you what I think about that. I haven’t changed my mind.”

  Web looked at his hands, pressed together in his lap. “A lot has happened since then,” he said. “It seems to me that it’s more important than ever to find out whether the ship didn’t arrive because of a one-off accident, or because of something more serious back on the Wombworld. A whole bunch of people think the same thing, Dr Florey. It’s not just my idea anymore. We believe that if we can show that nothing has changed on the Wombworld, everyone will accept that what happened was just a minor glitch. That another ship will arrive, on time. That Earth hasn’t abandoned Port of Plenty and Elysium. That if we can show this, the war might grind to a halt.”

  “And what do you want me to do? I can’t repeal the laws of physics, Web. Unless there’s something aimed at us, you won’t be able to pick up much of anything but Sol’s radio noise. Maybe Jupiter’s. Maybe some of the big military radars too, but that’s all. You won’t be able to resolve any single transmission; the telescope dish simply isn’t big enough.”

  Web opened his hands and looked up at Lena. “You see what I mean? He won’t even think about it.”

  “If you knew that already, why did you come to see me?”

  “I thought the war might have helped change your mind, you know? But I should have known, you being from a settlement.”

  Rick pushed away from the door, feeling contempt widen into anger. “What do you mean by that? That I’m not to be trusted? Come on, Web, look at me. Look at me, goddamnit!”

  Lena said something, but Rick was too angry to take any notice; he grabbed Web’s shoulder, pulled.

  “Hey! Hey, what—”

  Web tried to twist away, but Rick dug into the material of his coveralls and forced the young man to stand, then began to drag him to the door. Rick got the door open just as Web started to struggle, swung him out into the corridor so hard that he fetched up against the far wall.

  “Okay. Okay.” Web was breathing as hard as Rick. “Okay,” he said again. “I was fucking going anyway.” He shrugged his coveralls back into shape. “I could fucking well get you suspended, handling me like that. Kicked out of the University, right?”

  “The University is suspended,” Rick said. “But go and try it if you want to. I’m sure they’d be fascinated by your plan to hijack their radio telescope.”

  “Yeah? You’re in trouble if you tell anyone about this.” But as he said this Web started to back away down the corridor. He called loudly, “Lena, come on now. Let’s leave this asshole to his null-cee room.”

  Rick stepped aside for her, feeling sudden heat in his face, the heat of embarrassment. It had not been a particularly dignified performance. He said, “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  “He’s not really a friend,” Lena said quietly. She smiled, and suddenly Rick wanted her to stay. But she was already following Web down the corridor.

  14. Insurgents

  There were perhaps twenty of them, a ragged band that called itself a reconnaissance party. Because two or three were always off riding the flank and others were scouting on ahead, it was difficult for Miguel to keep track of their exact number. Most were from Horizon, a settlement in one of the bays that frayed the hem of the western end of the peninsula. Miguel had never visited it, but soon it seemed that he knew all about the little town, its square houses built of white stone beneath hills which rose steeply from the deep narrow bay, the seacows which its people hunted for pelts, the grapevines they cultivated in terraced fields. Horizon was famous for its wine.

  As the blue brother had predicted, the insurgents had readily taken Miguel in; but despite his obvious knowledge of the land, they treated him as a part mascot, part jester. Their leader, Sigurd Lovine, was a tall man in his mid-fifties, with bushy grey hair bound back from his lined forehead by a scarlet bandanna, a bushy grey beard that hung halfway down the barrel of his chest. Flanked by his two lieutenants, he ruled the party of insurgents with genial but firm authority. “What we are into,” he had told Miguel when the dingo had been brought before him by the surprised perimeter guards who had met him walking toward their camp, “what we are into, my friend, is serious harassment of the cops. We’re like water on a stone, right? We wear them down little by little.”

  Lovine was given to that kind of talk. Each evening he sat reading in a little leather-bound book while the camp was set up around him. Miguel, who didn’t know how to begin to help setting up the tents or tethering the horses, took to sitting off to one side of Lovine, and sometimes the man would look up from his reading and ask Miguel how he was doing, or what he thought of the group’s progress. Truthfully, Miguel didn’t think much of it. Most of the insurgents had never been more than twenty klicks from Horizon before, and the Outback was as alien to them as to any citizen of Port of Plenty. They made no attempt to cover their tracks as they slowly circled to the north, leaving a trampled swathe of grass that would be visible from the air for days afterward, and they simply camped where they chose to stop, sometimes under the cover of trees but usually not. But Miguel said nothing about this until the afternoon on the second day, when after a silence that had lasted ever since he had joined the insurgents, the blue brother suddenly spoke in hi
s head.

  —Miguel, you must tell their leader that you know of a good, safe campsite, somewhere that will make an ideal base.

  Miguel hardly faltered in his steady pace among the others on foot who trailed behind the dozen or so riders. He muttered, “This is part of your plan, huh?”

  —You’re becoming a lapdog, a joke, to these people, Miguel. You must demonstrate your worth.

  “I didn’t want to join them in the first place,” Miguel whispered fiercely, and would have said more, but just then the woman walking at his side glanced at him. He smiled at her and nervously increased his pace to catch up with Lovine’s horse.

  The man looked down when Miguel caught his stirrup, and Miguel more or less repeated what the blue brother had said about a fine and secret place to camp.

  “I guess we’re going to stop soon enough,” Lovine said. “This place is nearby? Don’t look like much of anything’s nearby to me.”

  He gestured, meaning the broken land of limestone outcrops and green and red grass which stretched to the circling horizon. It was not raining, but the cold air held the promise of rain, and the breath of the horses and their riders hung about them like smoke.

  —Half a klick to the northeast of this present course.

  “Turn northeast,” Miguel said, “and in about half a klick you’re there.”

  On the other side of Lovine, lean, long-haired Jonas leaned on the pommel of his saddle and said scornfully. “What would this fool know about defensible sites?”

  Lovine half-stood in his stirrups, looking all around, looking up at the lowering clouds. “It will be another wet night. It will do no harm to take a look.”

  Miguel half-expected some kind of ambush. That kind of simple betrayal was all he could imagine of the blue brother’s unspoken plan. And at first, it did seem that he was leading the insurgents into a trap.

  The land began to fall away steeply, more rock than grass, a vast barren jambles with the prospect of more grassland beyond. Soon the riders had to dismount and lead their horses between crumbling limestone slabs. Only thornbushes grew there, delicate scarlet sporangia nested in their hollow crowns. The voice in Miguel’s head spoke infrequently, guiding him deeper into the descending maze.

  “This isn’t leading anyplace,” Jonas grumbled. “There’s still time to turn back.”

  But Sigurd Lovine only smiled, and told Jonas to have faith, something Miguel needed as much as anyone in the party. And then they rounded a high bluff, and everything fell away.

  It was a deep narrow canyon, sheer sides dropping to a stream which flowed from a triangular cave mouth, wound among boulders and a few scrubby trees, and poured into a vertical sinkhole. Clearly, it was one of the hundreds of underground streams which ran through the complex system of caverns and passages under the Outback’s limestone shield, revealed there because the roof had fallen in.

  There was a narrow switchback path just wide enough to lead a horse down. It descended to a kind of shelf of rock which overhung the stream where it ran out of the cave. Looking at it, Lovine said, “Just one man with a rifle and enough bullets could hold an army down there ’til it starved. Miguel, this is your idea of a good campsite?”

  —There is another way out, the blue brother said, and with all eyes on him, Miguel repeated this.

  “Let’s go and look then,” Lovine said, and told his two lieutenants, Jonas and a quiet, grey-eyed woman, Mari, to come along.

  Miguel had seen places like that before and guessed what he might find in the cave, although, as Mari pointed out, nothing had used the path for a very long time. It was almost as dark as night in the canyon; the noise of the stream was very loud.

  Miguel, prompted by the voice in his head, led the others into the cave. Mari switched on her torch, its light showing a sandy floor running back beneath a vaulted ceiling. It took very little exploration to find the lake which fed the stream, and the string of limy pools which Miguel had guessed would be there. But there were only dry bones lying around the pools; they had not been used for many years. Beyond the lake, the cave began to narrow. Where the walls met, a tumbled slope of stones rose toward a grey glimmer of light.

  Jonas climbed up and vanished from sight, descending a few minutes later to report that the way out was easy enough. He dusted his hands on his jeans and said, “It comes out behind a ridge that overlooks the canyon on one side, more rock and then open grassland on the other.”

  Sigurd Lovine smiled within his bushy beard and clapped Miguel on the back. “You did well, my friend. Room enough for all of us and the horses down here, and just a few guards hidden above will keep us safe.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Jonas said. Miguel looked away from his hooded, speculative gaze.

  Within an hour, as the sun was setting somewhere behind the clouds, a fire had been built from a dismembered dead tree on the rock apron just outside the cave, and the insurgents were spreading their sleeping blankets over the sand inside or carrying bundles of cut grass for their hobbled horses. Miguel sat on a boulder a little above the flat rock apron outside the mouth of the cave, watching insurgents bustle to and fro. For the first time since it had come to live inside his head, the blue brother had not objected when Miguel had placed a sliver of snakeroot extract under his tongue. But his expanded sensitivity told him nothing about the aborigines. They had not used the place for many, many years. Even their ghosts were gone. Still, he was discomforted by all the activity in what had once been the aborigines’ place. It was faintly sacrilegious.

  So when Sigurd Lovine came out of the cave, his little book in one hand, Miguel went over to him and asked if they would be moving on the next day.

  Lovine shook his head, smiling. The leaping light of the fire rouged his bushy hair, his long beard. “You have found us a good place, Miguel. Don’t worry. We’ve spent too much time wandering around in the wilderness like the children of Israel. Now we will search out the cops and deal them a heavy blow.”

  “I don’t know,” Miguel said, “I don’t know if this is, you know, ideal.” And felt his blue brother stir in his brain, a cold snake coiling and recoiling.

  Lovine mauled Miguel’s shoulder with a big hand. “Be glad that you have helped us, man. You are like the pillar of fire, guiding us here. Understand me?”

  “Sure,” Miguel said, not understanding at all and suddenly uncomfortable. The drug hummed in his head. “Gotta go,” he said, and ducked under the cave entrance. Men and women sat among their unpacked belongings, a few cleaning their rifles but most talking and laughing. Miguel wandered past them, past their tethered horses, into the darker recesses of the cave.

  The still surface of the lake was blackly reflective. Miguel squatted on the sand at its edge, careful not to disturb the fragile bones there, and gazed into the mirror of the water. If he had been able, he would have climbed the tongue of stone to the crack in the cave’s ceiling, evaded the guards posted outside, and escaped. But he could not. He was trapped there by the will of his blue brother.

  He said quietly, “You’ve got to tell me what’s going down here. I’ll still do what you want, I just need to know where it is you’re leading me.”

  But there was no reply, and no matter how he pleaded, the blue brother remained silent. Miguel was so intent on this one-sided argument that he didn’t notice Jonas until the man was upon him. Thumbs hooked into the loops of his jeans, one wing of his sheepskin jacket pushed aside to show the pistol holstered at his hip, the insurgent said, “Don’t think I’m not watching you, Miguel.”

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “What’re you doing off here by yourself? Huh?” Jonas kicked aside a long legbone; it skittered over sand into one of the limy pools.

  “Don’t. Don’t do that.” Miguel stood. Perhaps it was the drug that made him brave.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Jonas said. “What are you, an abo lover?”

  “You should leave this alone,” Miguel said. “Leave me alone too. I know about
the aborigines.”

  “Yeah, those animals are just about your style. I’ve seen you fawning on Sigurd like some scabby old hound. I don’t like you and I don’t trust you. There’s something funny about all this. If you like the abos so much, how come you let us camp in one of their places, huh?”

  “Why are you scared of the aborigines?”

  It was not Miguel’s question, but the blue brother’s. It struck Jonas like a lash. In an instant, he had knocked Miguel to the ground, and would have followed through with a kick but for Lovine’s rumbling voice.

  “Jonas! Here now, leave the man. Leave him be, I said.” Jonas stepped back sullenly as Lovine walked out of the shadows, clasped Miguel’s arm and hauled him up. “I’ll not have this kind of bullying,” Lovine told Jonas. Jonas started to say something, but Lovine waved him off. “Go on, now!”

  Jonas turned, deliberately treading a skull to powder, and stalked off toward the other insurgents.

  Lovine told Miguel, “Jonas is a good man in his way, but he is ashamed of showing any weakness before others. How did you know he’s scared of the abos?”

  Miguel shrugged because, of course, he hadn’t known. The voice of the blue brother echoed in the cave of his skull.

  —You see, Miguel. Now you are closer to Lovine than is Jonas. You see how you can trust me.

  15. Undecidable Propositions

  In the week since Rick had been assigned to sector twenty, a bank of earth more than two hundred metres long had been raised there, and now stabilising polymer was being pumped over its steep outer face. The polymer’s raw odour hung heavily over the clearing. Rick stood in the door of the site office idly listening to two labourers talk over the idea of painting the wall with patterns and slogans to frighten the enemy. It was a slow, circuitous conversation; many of the VDF draftees used bliss or fadeout to get through the unaccustomed hours of labour.