“It seems funny to me, the way you knew where the cops were.”
“He has his own luck,” Lovine rumbled.
“If you ask me, he has voices in his head, the way he’s always mumbling into his beard. We shouldn’t trust anyone we don’t know. Especially not some crazy dingo who talks to himself.”
“Who else would he talk to, in-country? It is his way, that’s all. Now be quiet, Jonas, or I will have you provide the diversion instead of riding to the attack.”
They had ridden more than a dozen kilometres from the ravine, and the sun had set by the time they returned. Lovine called the insurgents together. As they assembled around a bonfire on the apron of rock outside the cave, the man who operated the radio held a whispered conversation with Lovine, telling the big man something that made him frown. Miguel sat to one side, his hands wrapped around a mug of soup someone had given him, watching the insurgents settle in a semicircle. In the leaping firelight they looked like a pack of ragged predators, eager and hungry.
Lovine stood with his back to the fire and spoke quietly, his deep voice just louder than the crackling flames and the rush of the stream, a trick to make sure that everyone listened intently. He said that they had finally found what they were looking for, and described the cops’ camp. There were a few cheers at that, which Lovine hushed by raising his hands, palms out, above his head. “That is not all I have to tell you,” he said. “You all know that Stoy Matthews here—” he gestured at the radio operator “—spends most of his time listening to the air, even though we don’t speak with other groups, nor they with us, because just as we can listen to the cops, so they can listen to us. But Stoy’s patience has been rewarded, my people. He tells me the leader of all our forces, Theodora Cziller, has put out a message. In code of course, but its meaning is clear. She has ordered that all groups make haste to move on the city perimeter.”
Lovine waited, stroking his bushy beard, as speculation ran its course through the insurgents. “Yes,” he said at last, “exciting news. But we have been searching for almost two weeks now, and at last we have the enemy in our grasp. I have told you that the camp we found is almost due west of us. To get to the city we must travel south and west. Even if we leave now, it will be two days before we reach the city, a long march and perhaps we would arrive too late. It seems to me that the camp of our enemy would not be much out of our path, and I for one do not wish to leave them at our backs. What do you think?”
There was only a moment before all the insurgents began to clap and shout their approval.
It was almost midnight by the time the insurgents had broken their camp and carried everything up the narrow path to the rim of the canyon. Lovine moved among his men and women, dividing them into three groups: those on foot who would set up the diversion and two mounted parties which would actually attack the cops. Lovine told Miguel to ride with him in the first of those parties; that Jonas would lead the other was only small consolation to the dingo.
The trek to the edge of the forest was long and cold and slow. There was little light. The large moon was waning, a sliver of tarnished bronze only fitfully revealed by streaming clouds. Like the other riders, Miguel let his horse, a placid swayback mare, pick its own way among the tussocks and unexpected hollows. Those following on foot had to manage as best they could. The insurgents talked quietly among themselves, and several flasks of liquor were circulated. Miguel got a couple of shots of something called heart of wine. Its false warmth helped dull the symptoms of his fear.
Once, the riders at point scared up something which ran in panic among those following behind, something long and fast and sinuous, almost as big as a man. Someone took a shot at it, the noise and startlingly bright muzzleflash making even Miguel’s solid mount jink. As people calmed their horses, Lovine rode through the ranks and scolded the trigger-happy woman in two short bitter sentences before ordering the others to move on. After that, talk was more muted, and Miguel didn’t get another chance at the heart of wine.
The moon was setting in their faces by the time they reached the valley. There was a long wait while the diversionary party made its slow circle to the other side of the river. As he waited, shivering with more than cold, Miguel contemplated escape with hopeless longing. He knew that if he tried to run now, his blue brother would certainly stop him, and Jonas might well make it an excuse to kill him.
Lovine’s other lieutenant, Mari, who was standing nearby and stroking the muzzle of her bay stallion to calm it, told Miguel, “The waiting is the worst part, I’ve found. Once you’re in action there’s no room for fear.”
“Rather not find that out.”
“We all of us have our reasons for being here,” Mari said, perhaps misunderstanding Miguel. “Horizon has democratic governance, and sent only volunteers. It did not raise unwilling conscripts like some of the settlements. Most of us see the fall of the city as an historical inevitability, something that must come about if our world is ever to become our true home.”
Miguel asked why, if it was inevitable, people were fighting to destroy the city right away.
“Better that way than a slow disintegration, perhaps involving all the settlements as well. Besides Sigurd says that people only truly appreciate what they have fought for. Consecrated with blood, he says.”
Miguel could just make out the young woman’s smile. He thought to himself that Sigurd Lovine was most likely crazy, but did not dare voice the thought. The moon had almost set, and he wondered when the signal would come.
As if in answer, the black sky beyond the shoulder of the ridge was suddenly ripped apart by flares, green and orange and red trails clawing into the sky and flowering overhead in lapping blooms. The ragged crackle of rifle fire started up on the other side of the river.
All around, in livid multicoloured light, insurgents were climbing on to their horses. Miguel followed suit. As Lovine roared out the order to charge, Miguel remembered the pistol he had been given. He was still trying to get it out of his belt when, swept along with the others, his mount reached the crest of the slope and started down into the valley.
Miguel glimpsed the encampment, ablaze with harsh white lights, then the charge mounted into a gallop. A wall of freezing air smacked Miguel’s face. White light strobed around him in brilliant bursts. The horse running ahead of his trod on a mine and vanished in a sudden fountain of earth and flesh and blood. Miguel saw another rider jerk backward, her head spraying blood; the red circle of a laser guide illuminated his own chest for an instant and then flicked aside.
A moment more and his mount automatically leaped the tangle wire barricade, jolting Miguel clear to his skull as it landed, swerving from a white coveralled figure that rose in front of it. Miguel still hadn’t got his pistol loose. He pulled hard on the reins to check his horse’s headlong rush, suddenly the centre of a mob of riders and cops. Someone had the presence of mind to shoot out the autonomic guns atop the overlander and then it was hand-to-hand fighting beneath the strobing beams of the searchlights, over in less than a minute.
By the time Miguel had freed his pistol, a dozen cops lay dead or wounded and their tent was afire. Someone was methodically shooting out the searchlights. Close to Miguel a cop lay with his legs at an impossible angle, the chameleon circuits of his coveralls cycling uncontrollably, clothing the dying man in shimmering polychromatic light. Then Jonas rode up, lowered the muzzle of his hunting rifle and blew a hole in the cop’s chest. The unearthly light went out.
High on heart of wine and the thrill of victory, heedless of retribution, the insurgents built a huge fire on the smouldering remains of the tent. Although five had been killed outright by the autonomic guns, and two other had suffered broken limbs when their horses had fallen, this was clearly a victory. The enemy had been routed, an overlander captured.
Miguel sat on cold ground that was slowly turning to mud, letting the heat of the fire beat out the last of his adrenaline, half-listening to the ragged singing of the insurgents, half-listening to th
e silence inside his head. He had expected that the rest of the blue brother’s plan would be revealed, but there was nothing.
Presently, Sigurd Lovine came over and squatted beside Miguel. “They’ll be sorry by tomorrow, when we begin our march on the city,” he said, meaning the insurgents who were singing and drinking around the huge fire. “But they’ve earned it, I suppose. I’ll make sure they realise that it’s you they have to thank, Miguel. A famous victory. I am almost tempted to break radio silence to announce it, but that would be certain to bring more cops down on us.”
“They will come anyway.”
“I am not sure that they will,” Lovine said. “Or not quickly. By now there must be a dozen or more incidents like this, as our line moves forward and encounters groups of cops like this one. It’s possible that one or more of the cops got away—in this darkness and with their camouflage suits, it is quite possible. Or perhaps they got off a radio message. Also quite possible. But I think we are safe from retribution this night at least.” Lovine stroked his bushy grey beard as he stared into the heart of the dying fire, his eyes deep in shadow beneath his ridged brow.
Miguel thought of compsims, and of the blue brother, and wondered whether any messages the cops might have tried to send would have gotten through. He was the centre of a web of deceit so vast that he could only glimpse the beginnings of a few strands.
“I do wonder what they thought they were doing out here,” Lovine said, at last. “There is all manner of strange equipment in their vehicle. Medical from the look of most of it, not that we have much need of that, praise God.”
“It might come in useful later,” Miguel said. He was certain that the blue brother had had the equipment brought out here to help its plans. All I need is down there. Had the cops known what they were embroiled in? Probably not. And now they were dead. Miguel shivered, and Lovine patted his arm kindly and told him to rest.
Strangely, Miguel found sleep almost as soon as he had wrapped himself in his thermoblanket, sudden as falling over an unexpected edge. Then he was walking among sleeping insurgents in the last light of the dying fire, clutching the compsim in both hands. Or rather, he was riding his body as it walked under its own volition, as a passenger rides a vehicle.
He stooped over an insurgent—it was Mari—and pressed her fingers around the compsim. Her whole body shuddered under the blanket which covered her, and then she relaxed. A voice, his own, whispered to her, told her to rise. Moving as jerkily as a badly worked puppet, she cast aside her blanket and stood. Drool glistened on her chin, and she had pissed herself. After a careful search the same process was repeated with the radio operator, Stoy Matthews, and he and Mari stumbled after Miguel to the overlander.
Miguel, or his body, put away the compsim and began to clamber up the overlander’s ladder. But just as he reached the top Jonas stooped over the edge and grasped his wrist. The flare of pain almost brought Miguel to himself, and he knew then that this was no dream, that he was being ridden by the blue brother.
“You son-of-a-bitch,” Jonas said with a kind of fierce joy, and hauled on Miguel’s arm. But Miguel’s free hand came up like a striking snake, his knife slashing Jonas’s fingers. A moment more and Miguel was on the roof on top of Jonas, slashing at the man’s throat until the knife grated on his spine.
Drenched with blood, Miguel heaved the body over the side of the overlander and followed Mari and Stoy Matthews into the cabin, buckled himself into the driver’s seat. Miguel had been inside an overlander only once before, after he had found the dead man at the beach, but his hands and eyes knew what to do.
The overlander’s motor whirred into life. Through the windscreen Miguel glimpsed insurgents scattering in all directions in the darkness, some for their horses, some for their guns. But the overlander shot forward and left them behind, smashing through the tanglewire perimeter and roaring up the slope beyond without a pause. And running on under the blue brother’s control, into the Outback.
18. Untangling Hierarchies
The city’s Exchange was a square building with a tall facade of warmly coloured limestone at the southern end of Market Avenue. Although it had been closed since the beginning of the insurrection and the gold reserve dispersed (trading with the settlements had been based on a complicated credit/power rate, transacted through imaginary movements of gold bullion in the same way that a token dealt the changes in a citizen’s finances), and despite the early hour, a cop was on duty at its door when de Ramaira took Rick to see the time vault.
As the guard unlocked the tall double doors, Rick said, “They really are taking this seriously.” Like de Ramaira, he was wearing grey coveralls, and his VDF badge was pinned prominently on his chest.
Inside, shafts of light dropped through slit windows high in the creamy walls, picking out a patch of rich maroon carpet at the foot of a diplothere-hide couch, the face of a stopped mechanical clock, a diffuse spot no bigger than the palm of a hand on the frosted glass that ran over the grilled windows in the partition which divided the huge high-ceilinged room.
“When I come here, I always think that I should be wearing a frock coat and a top hat,” de Ramaira remarked. “But I prefer this retro stuff to the fake natural style, anyhow.”
“It hasn’t changed since I was here, ten, eleven years ago. With a trading caravan from Mount Airy. Where is everyone?”
“Oh, on the defences. The conversion work is not of the highest priority.”
De Ramaira opened a door in the partition. Rows of polished bare desks, the dead eyes of compsims. From the ceiling hung a huge projection fin which had once displayed the everchanging credit status of every settlement. A steel door stood ajar in the far wall, and lights came on as de Ramaira stepped through it. A narrow stair led down to a square, concrete-lined room. Rows of metal lockers had been pushed into a corner to clear a working space now littered with discarded tools.
“Argon?” Rick rapped a black cylinder that stood upright in a trolley rack. It gave off end-stopped metallic echoes: B-flat.
“When the vault is sealed—or perhaps I should say if—argon will help preserve the records. Assuming the explosion doesn’t spring a leak in the vault’s casing.”
Rick laughed. “You’re going to blow up the Exchange?”
“Ah, but the City Board have given their approval. The charges will be shaped to collapse the warehouse next door on top of this place. At least, so I have been assured. I’ve always believed that you engineers prefer to blow things up rather than build them—now I know it’s true.” De Ramaira stepped around the litter of tools to an open inspection panel beside the round steel plug of the vault’s door. “I’ll show you inside. That’s more or less finished.”
“How long will it take?”
“Oh, they estimate about two weeks, but with the labour available these days—” de Ramaira stuck two fingers into the breast pocket of his coveralls and brought out a magnetic key “—who knows? Perhaps it never will be finished, if the rumours that the insurgents are grouping for an attack are true…Well, I suppose you don’t know any more about it than me.”
“I just work for Savory. I’m not in his confidence.”
“Who is?” De Ramaira pushed the key into its slot and punched a code. There were half a dozen metallic clunks. Then he grasped the recessed locking bar and the massive counter-weighted door swung smoothly open. “Here we are. A fit resting place for your labour.”
“I don’t know if it deserves that.” Rick had, in the end, abandoned all ideas of providing a blueprint for even the crudest kinds of transmitter and receiver. Instead, he had set down the theory of propagation and detection of electromagnetic waves as simply and clearly as he could. Any other approach, he felt, could lead to the same kind of mystification which had bedevilled those medieval scholars who had sought to understand the lost arts of the Romans and Greeks. A grasp of the fundamental laws is more important than an ability to put together gadgets. Knowledge is an abstraction won from the whirling c
haos of the universe, neither constant nor concrete. Books may be burned or buried or lost. People forget, and the narrow focus of fact widens into myth.
Rick stepped over the steel sill after de Ramaira, ducking low. Naked fluoros glared from the vault’s arch, highlights glinting on the row of steel cabinets and the white tiles of the floor. A chaste aseptic place, prospect of eternity.
De Ramaira pulled out a drawer. “This is what will happen to your contribution, after it’s been processed.”
Rick pushed back stiff plastic filecards. “Astronomy? Hey, you got time on Constat to get these done.”
“One of his slaves, yes. How did you know?”
“I recognise the font style, is all.”
De Ramaira smiled and made one of his inscrutable pronouncements.
“An astounding detection, my dear Holmes.” Then he pushed the drawer shut and said, “Th-that’s all, f-folks.”
As they walked back between bare desks, de Ramaira asked, “How are things with you and Lena? Are you making it yet?”
“Jesus, David. Haven’t you learned any decency?”
“By your standards, obviously not,” de Ramaira said insouciantly. “I’m sorry, Rick, you’ll have to forgive a poor exiled Wombworlder whose ethics are still not up to Port of Plenty’s standards, let alone the ideals of the settlements. Things are different on Earth.”
“I guess so.” Rick trailed a finger over one of the desks as he passed it, then wiped off the dust on his hip. “Actually, things aren’t exactly all they could be. Maybe she’s not quite got over your protege…Sometimes I think that she just goes out with me because I remind her of Jon.”
De Ramaira stopped. “You think she and Jon…?” And then he laughed loudly, face tipped back so that highlights ran like oil over his brown face.
“You mean they. That they never?”
“No, oh no.” De Ramaira was grinning widely. “Lena knew Jon because of his piano-playing. I went to a concert of theirs once, piano trios. Haydn, Ives. Not really my sort of thing, but I like to make the effort. It was strictly, let us say, a working relationship. Nothing more. You see, Jon was Web’s boyfriend.”
Secret Harmonies Page 21
