Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  Now Rick laughed in turn, feeling a heady mixture of amazement and relief. “I guess I’ve been dumb.”

  “It’s not uncommon. I remember one time on Jones Beach I did a pretty dumb thing, and you helped me out.”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah.” Rick followed de Ramaira through the tall doors into the cold outside air. As the white-haired cop started up the steps toward them, Rick asked, “David, what will you do? If the insurgents do take the city, I mean.”

  “Apart from blowing up the Exchange? Don’t worry about me, Rick. I have my priorities mapped out. Now that all the old hierarchies are falling apart, I hope you have, too.”

  Later that day. Rick was returning to work after a solitary lunch—Lena and the rest of the Chronus Quartet were playing at the other end of the defences—when he saw the two cops, Bergen and Yep, hurrying out of the shared office.

  Bergen said, “Trouble over at Eastgate. We’re just going to take a look. Don’t fall asleep while we’re gone.”

  Eastgate was where the Chronus Quartet had been giving its concert. Rick said quickly, “I’ll come too,” and fell in step with them.

  “Christ,” Ana Yep said. “We don’t need any civilian help, Florey.”

  “Savory might want to know—that’s what I’m here for.”

  “So are we,” Yep said sharply.

  “What is this trouble?” Rick asked. “Something to do with all that stolen stuff you’ve been looking for? An overlander just went missing, didn’t it? I would have thought it would be pretty difficult to hide.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Bergen said. “There’s no real horizontal communication in the VDF. So as long as you say you’ve got authorisation you can get away with almost anything. That overlander is probably going one way around the perimeter while we go the other. Look, if you are coming with us, just remember it’s your ass, don’t expect us to look after it.”

  “You’d probably lose it.”

  “Fuck off, Florey,” Yep said. “And whatever goes down keep out of our way.”

  “Anything you want.”

  Rick hurried with them to the vehicle park, climbed on to the back of a cushiontruck already half-filled with cops. Some eyed him curiously; all were clutching rifles. The truck skimmed along a track cut through the woods before joining the paved road down which, weeks ago, Rick had ridden in an overlander toward the Outback. Another age, light from a star. He watched trees rush past, cold wind numbing his face, and worried about Lena.

  Around him, the cops talked about sex and guns and shit-eaters, which was what they called the insurgents. Opposite Rick, a skinny cop who couldn’t have been more than twenty, with mean blue eyes and a narrow, acne-scarred jaw, kept grinding the butt of his rifle on the splintering planks of the loadbed, saying over and over that he was going to get himself a piece of action no matter what. “Oh man,” the woman sitting beside him said, “you better hope your gun is cleaner than your ass.”

  “Don’t forget to inventory your bullets afterward,” Bergen said loudly. Everyone but Rick laughed.

  At last the truck slowed, idled off the road. The cops jumped down, Rick among them, and went through a stand of feathery trees, not quite running but in a hurry. There was a smell of burning in the air. They came out of the trees and there was the gate, on one side defensive ditches, on the other overlanders parked behind a tall slope of stabilised dirt. The concrete column of the watchtower beside the gate was blackened, the windows of its platform shattered. A crater of fresh-turned earth bit into the road; three more were spaced in the cleared strip outside the fence.

  “Christ,” Ana Yep said. Then: “Where the fuck are you going, Florey?”

  The first three people Rick asked didn’t know anything about the Chronus Quartet. The fourth, her white coveralls smudged with soot, told him that the attack had happened a few minutes after the musicians had left. Rick thanked her, a weight lifting so suddenly from his heart that for a moment it fluttered free in his chest. She was safe, then. Safe.

  Bergen and Yep were behind the dirt wall, talking to a cop with captain’s bars on the breast of his coveralls. A burly middle-aged man with a faintly harassed air, he insisted that there was nothing to worry about. Half a dozen mortar rounds and a scattering of rifle shots, he said, over in less than five minutes. No one had been hurt. “A probe, is my guess. Just testing us. I wasn’t the one who called up reinforcements. You tell Savory that we handled it just fine.”

  “If you’ve filed with Constat, he’ll know,” Bergen said.

  Ana Yep had been looking off at the scorched watchtower. Now she asked abruptly, “Think they’re gone?”

  The captain shrugged. “Who can tell? I’ll send a patrol out if nothing happens within the hour.”

  Yep looked at Rick. “Had enough vicarious thrills, Florey?”

  “Sure.”

  Bergen said something to the captain and both men chuckled; then Bergen and Yep began to walk back toward the cushion-truck. Rick followed, still buoyed by relief. He had tested the perimeter of his safety and nothing had happened. Ahead, a cushiontruck rounded the clump of trees, its engine whistling shrilly—no, the whistle was coming from the sky, an abrupt descending shriek.

  Rick threw himself to the ground a moment before the mortar round blew a fountain of earth over the cushiontruck. Then he was running behind Bergen. Everything was at angles to everything else, like a jumbled sheaf of pictures. Something flew past his ear with a wicked crack, and he fell into the trench, smacking his elbow on the way down.

  Bergen was crouching beside Rick in the waist-high trench. A moment later Yep slid down too, the chameleon circuits of her coveralls matching the red clay. “Christ,” she said, panting.

  Three explosions shook the ground at measured intervals, like a giant taking random footsteps. The whole surface of Rick’s body tingled, nervous target. In between the thump of incoming mortar rounds he could hear someone shouting what sounded like commands farther down the trench, but he couldn’t make out the words.

  “They’ve any sense,” Bergen remarked, “they’ll stay hidden and shell the shit out of us.” The explosion of another mortar round punctuated his words; when its smoke had blown away, the watchtower had been decapitated.

  Yep half stood, reds and browns slithering over her coveralls. “I can see fuck-all out there, that’s for sure.”

  “Well they surely can see you.”

  “You’re as full of shit as those fucking farmers,” Yep said, but she ducked down again. “And for Christ’s sake switch on your coveralls. You may look pretty in white, but let’s not have something they can zero on.”

  “Whatever you like,” Bergen said, and fiddled with a control on his belt. After a moment a wave of reddish brown, the colour of dried blood, began to spread up his chest, down his legs.

  Yep wiped her mouth. The corners looked pinched, dirty white. It occurred to Rick that she was as frightened as he was. She jerked a thumb to indicate the dirt wall on the other side of the road and said, “Those guys aren’t risking anything.”

  Three more rounds pounded the wide strip of earth behind the ramparts; a fourth, falling wild into the woods behind the gate, fountained smoke and fragments of branches above the treetops.

  In the sudden silence afterward, Bergen said mildly, “Personally, I don’t blame them.”

  The silence stretched, and for a while it seemed that nothing more would happen. Smoke rose from the place in the woods which had been hit. Bergen plugged into his compsim, but complained that something must be down somewhere, he wasn’t getting any traffic at all. Rick sat with his back against cold clay, his head quite clear but with nothing to work on but his fear.

  Then vapour plumed around the overlanders behind the wall as one by one their motors were started. Eventually, a cop crawled along the trench with three rifles. Rick was given one, to his surprise, together with a heavy cardboard box of shells. The rifle was familiar; the automats only had templates for the one model, a high-powered breec
hloader more suited to bringing down a Muir ox than to trench warfare. Of course, the insurgents wouldn’t have anything better, unless they had started to hand-make guns as well as mortars. A war of amateurs.

  The woman who had brought the rifles said, “They’ll be staging a pull-out over there in a few minutes. The plan is to sneak back through the woods and bear on the farmers’ flank if they try and take this position, cut off their line of retreat. We’re the bait in the trap, like it or not, so no firing unless the order comes. And don’t worry if you see someone waving a white flag, we want to make sure those mother-fuckers really hang themselves out.”

  “They’ll be hanging us out,” Bergen said. “Well, what the fuck. Is this enough excitement for you, Florey?”

  “It’s not exactly what I had in mind when I came out here.”

  “No shit,” Yep said.

  “You guys remember, no firing until the Word,” the other cop said, and started back to her own position.

  Rick thumbed shells into the magazine of the rifle, worked the bolt. Across the road there was a general roar of engines as one by one the overlanders pulled around, accelerating toward the place where the road bent into the woods. The mortars hidden in the forest started again. One round blew a spray of compacted dirt from the top of the wall and another landed just in front of the last of the overlanders, but miraculously the vehicle kept going, roaring through flying earth and smoke and making the turn, gone. The mortars walked their trajectory into the woods, but after half a dozen rounds the firing ceased.

  The forest edge rose sharply beyond the bare ground which stretched away from the fence. The trees grew so close together that their branches merged into a textured mass more grey than green; the canopy seemed in the failing sunlight to float on a tangle of shadows. Nothing moved there, nothing at all. But then, suddenly, shockingly, there was a metallic squeal of feedback and then an amplified voice:

  “Listen up out there! We don’t want any bloodshed. Please lay down your arms and indicate your willingness to surrender.”

  Bergen worked the breech of his rifle. “Lay down my arms. I’ll lay a bullet up his ass.”

  “Don’t forget that we’re supposed to let them all come out of the forest, before you charge with your rifle blazing,” Yep said.

  “I hadn’t forgotten. I just want a chance at them, is all.”

  The distant disembodied voice made its demand again. Rick said, “What if we did as they asked?”

  “The settlement minority is heard from,” Yep said. “I’m on your case, Florey, don’t worry.”

  Rick smiled at her. “All I meant was that it would certainly end the war.”

  “He’s getting at you, Ana,” Bergen said.

  “I’m trying to inject a little realism,” Rick said. “If someone had told me a year ago that I’d be crouching in a muddy trench with high explosives falling out of the sky, I’d have said they were crazy, right? And all of this is crazy, deep-down bad crazy.”

  “Sure it is,” Ana Yep said unexpectedly. “But it’s where we are, we can’t go—”

  Then there was the descending shriek of a mortar round, and they all pressed against the wall of the trench as the ground spasmed and hot earth rained down on their heads.

  Yep was the first to look up. “Someone down at the other end of this hole is waving the white flag, just like she said. Let’s hope the others are covering our flank, or we will be in deep shit when the farmers find out how insincere we are.”

  The amplified voice rang out again. “We see your signal. Some of us are going to take a walk over to get your weapons. Remember that we still have the mortars back here. We can drop those shells right on your laps if we’ve a mind. But don’t worry. We saw the cops leave you behind. We’ll look after you.”

  Bergen smiled. “The silly sons-of-bitches think we’re all VDF ripe for defecting.”

  “They’re fanatics,” Yep said. “They can’t believe anyone would hold any cause but their own. Look, here they come.”

  Two figures stepped from the shadows beneath the trees, then two more. One scanned the trenches with fieldglasses, lenses catching the setting sun, sudden sparks of orange that went out as the man turned his attention to the wall.

  Not fanatics, Rick thought, but brave and vulnerable human beings laying their lives on the line for their beliefs. He remembered Lake Fonda, and thought of Lena, too, her own bright burning conviction. He could let the moment pass, let the insurgents walk into the trap, but could he face her afterward, knowing what he had done? It was not so much, and all they could do to him would be put him in prison. It was not as if he had much freedom to lose, and when the insurgents won the war he would be free…

  De Ramaira had said it: the time had come when the hierarchies of loyalty had to be untangled.

  Yep said, “Get ready now, but remember to wait for the Word. We want to get them all, right?”

  Bergen settled his rifle on one of the sandbags at the rim of the trench. “Just one clear shot is all that’ll make me happy. Just look at those silly shiteaters.”

  Rick eased his own rifle over the lip of the trench, aiming for the tops of the trees. He had made his decision, yet he could not quite bring himself to act. Then Bergen said, “Florey, what the fuck are you—” and Rick jerked on the trigger.

  The rifle butt slapped his shoulder, then the hot cartridge stung his cheek as he worked the bolt, fired again into the air. The insurgents were running, melting into shadows. Too late, ragged rifle fire crackled up and down the trench and Bergen brought his fist down behind Rick’s ear, knocking him to the mud at the bottom of the trench.

  19. Prisoners

  The blow did not quite knock Rick out, but it stunned him for a few moments, and Bergen managed to get in two or three kicks before Ana Yep put a stop to it. “Well, you finally did it,” she told Rick, and helped him stand. “We’re going to take you in now, understand that?”

  Rick nodded. His ribs hurt as he tried to get his breath. When Bergen said something about a summary execution being too good, Yep told him calmly, “We knew something like this might happen. Now it goes through the channels.”

  When the cops in the overlanders returned, she was just as calmly authoritative with the police captain, telling him that the prisoner was in her custody and she was answerable to Colonel Savory, no one else. Rick, sitting on the cold ground, guarded by Bergen, watched the argument with detachment. They had taken his compsim from him, and the pass. He supposed that he would be taken to the Police Headquarters and charged, and then put in the internment camp with the migrant workers who had been caught in the city when war had been declared. Lena—he would vanish, and she would not know where. He must find some way of telling her.

  There was a long wait until word came that all was clear. The information net was still down. Yep got hold of a transceiver and used it to have a long conversation with someone in the city, and then she and Bergen commandeered a cushiontruck. Rick sat between them in the cab, Bergen’s pistol jammed against his bruised ribs, while Yep drove.

  They did not go into the city. Yep drove quickly and badly to the main perimeter camp, slewing to a halt outside the hospital hut. Rick said with a dull sense of foreboding, “I’m really not that badly beaten up,” but Yep merely told him to climb out and not make any sudden moves.

  A police sergeant stood in the doorway of the hut and Yep conferred with him for a moment, then told Rick to go inside. The sergeant followed, and without saying a word pushed him down the aisle between the rows of frame beds.

  Only one of the beds was occupied, by a man in coveralls who lay on top of the neatly folded blankets, one arm crooked over his face. As Rick was hustled past he saw that the man’s ankles were chained to the bedrail. And then with vertiginous shock he recognised the prisoner. It was the man he had worked with as site coordinator, David Janesson.

  The sergeant pushed Rick through the curtained partition into the brightly lit examination cubicle.

 
“Hello, Dr Florey,” Savory said.

  As always, Savory was immaculately dressed, the creases of his silky grey coveralls knife-sharp, his small feet sheathed in amphibian-hide boots, their fine scales touched with a rainbow sheen in the harsh light, not a spot of mud on them. While a paramedic rolled up Rick’s sleeve, Savory prowled around the small room. Rick’s attention was divided between him and what the paramedic was doing, which was to take an instrument like a large hollow-tipped stylus and run it over Rick’s forearm. When the instrument emitted a frantic high-pitched beeping, the man deftly jabbed its end into Rick’s flesh. Rick felt something slide out. A trickle of blood rolled down his wrist when the paramedic took the instrument away.

  Savory stopped his pacing and watched closely as the paramedic touched the end of the instrument to a glass slide. “Yes, there it is,” he said, and held the slide out to show Rick the needletip fleck of metal which glittered there. “A clever little device,” Savory said, returning the slide to the paramedic. “One that should interest you professionally, Dr Florey. It is both microphone and transmitter, cousin to the neural interface through which you run your compsim. Once injected, it grows microscopic threads that tap into a hundred or so muscle cells and inject them with a tailored retrovirus. The cells are transformed by the virus into an autonomic net which powers the transmitter.”

  Rick stepped forward angrily. The cop sergeant laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. “That medical back when I started working for you, the phoney vitamin shot. You son-of-a-bitch, you used me.”

  “Any loyal, would-be citizen, as you were before your silly vainglorious trick out there today, anyone loyal to the city would have been happy to do the same. Don’t worry about your privacy, Dr Florey. One of Constat’s slaves reviewed everything the transmitter picked up. It picked out passages containing keywords, and cleaned up the fidelity of the sound. I have only listened to the edited highlights, such as they were. You have been something of a disappointment to me. I had hoped for a little more than the silly pranks of a few students.”