Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  Impatiently, de Ramaira brushed the switch of the recorder and sank back in his armchair. That would never do—the assessor of everything going into the vault was a politician, after all. No, it would be far better to start the whole thing over. It was not shaping into an introduction at all, but a weasel-worded apologia for the “official history” that the Constitutionalist Party wanted to seal in the vault, vainglorious propaganda for a cause already in its last days.

  De Ramaira carried his glass of rum and milk to the narrow window of his study. The streetlights were off again, but they had always been irregular in the old quarter. Perhaps it meant nothing. The larger of Elysium’s two moons had yet to set, but it was so obscured by clouds that the night was relieved only by a scattering of lighted windows around the bleak park. De Ramaira could just make out a faint gleam of frost dappling the frozen mud.

  Soon, less than four weeks, it would be New Year. He had never become accustomed to Elysium’s swift-turning seasons. A pang of buried regret passed through him: Earth. “Ah, sweet objectivity,” de Ramaira said, and the sound of his voice in the quiet, dimly lit room surprised him.

  He turned from the window and his glance fell on the blue folder on the low table beside the armchair. If it wasn’t for the war, the implications of that, now, would be truly frightening. As if, de Ramaira thought, a man on the eve of his execution should find a suspicious lump in his groin. It was what he should be working on while there was still time, instead of fooling around trying to second-guess Savory.

  He looked back at the darkness pressing at the cold glass of the window, thinking, not for the first time that day, of Richard Florey. Somewhere out there, in the vast dark wilderness beyond Port of Plenty. Ah, but that way out was closed now—the Port Authority cops had shot the courier more than a week ago. It had not been a route de Ramaira would have chosen in any case. Too much had depended upon others.

  There now, that was quite enough. De Ramaira settled himself in the armchair again. There was more than enough to do, and little time left.

  It was almost certain that the insurgents would overrun the city before the New Year. Their advance, across the abandoned half-completed perimeter defences and into the bubble-suburbs, had been slow but sure. The city, enveloped, was now slowly being digested. The police, white coveralled lymphocytes, were too few to prevent the inexorable incursions, while the VDF troops were no use at all, falling back in disorder at the beginning of even the smallest skirmish. The citizens had had it too soft for too long, believed too deeply in the proper compartmentalisation of authority. The insurgents had no such compunctions. They fought as they had to, and fought well.

  There. De Ramaira drank half the remaining measure of rum and milk and set the glass beside the little recorder. The introduction had to be finished and approved by tomorrow if the time vault was to be sealed on schedule, ready for burial at the end of things. And there was the other problem, its endless subtle ramifying possibilities so much more interesting than the pussyfooting compromises over the vault and its contents, awakening a puzzle that had had to be abandoned ever since he had walked away from the aborigine village in the Trackless Mountains all those years ago.

  De Ramaira sighed and, with a cloying residue of guilt at his prevarication, reached out and tripped the recorder’s erasure switch. There was a soft burring as the field randomised the tagged molecules in the cassette. He didn’t want to start over, not yet. Instead he switched back to recording mode and began to dictate a letter to himself about the day’s revelation.

  It had begun innocuously enough, with a request from the VDF general office that de Ramaira give a briefing on the time vault to Colonel Savory. It was something de Ramaira had been expecting for some time. He’d given such briefings to most of the City Board by then, whether or not they were directly involved in it, and, as head of the VDF, Savory was more involved than most. So without any qualms, de Ramaira had collected the appropriate documents and presented himself at the Port Authority headquarters.

  Savory was a burly man perhaps ten years older than de Ramaira in physiological terms, with a handsome, arrogant face and cropped blond hair. He wore an immaculately tailored version of the by now ubiquitous grey coveralls that de Ramaira himself was wearing. They were alone in the large, sparely furnished office. Winter sunlight streamed through wide windows which gave a view across the city to the forested hills beyond. The office was on the top floor of the twelve-storey building, high above everything else.

  All this was familiar enough from newscasts. But the one thing that the trivee image of Savory had lacked, de Ramaira thought, was his aura of power, as fierce as subtly contained as the raw plasma within the magnetic pinch of a fusion generator. Seething, ruthless ambition no more than a micrometer beneath a bland unruffled surface. Clearly, Savory would be content with nothing less than the Round Office of the governor’s mansion.

  Whatever Savory wanted from de Ramaira, it was not an explanation of the time vault and its contents. He brushed aside de Ramaira’s usual presentation and said with measured distaste, “All I need to say about that is the regrettable lack of any explanation of why it was built. The Board has approved the expenditure of a large amount of credit and a grievous use of skilled manpower to realise this project of yours. I would like some mention of that to be included.”

  “I had thought that the knowledge we are going to seal in the vault might be sufficient indication of intent.” Savory’s gaze was compelling. “I suppose I could write some sort of potted history,” De Ramaira said grudgingly, feeling the first stirring of anger at this meddling.

  “I have already assigned one of my staff to deal with the history. I want you to write a general introduction explaining why the city has seen fit to sacrifice time in the middle of civil war to pass on this heritage.”

  “That might be more difficult than the actual history.”

  “Consider it a test of your loyalty, if you like,” Savory said. “You see, I find myself in a difficult position. I have need of your expertise, but you must not be insulted when I say that, as an emigré from Earth, your loyalty to the city must be in some doubt.”

  “I’ve long grown used to that suspicion,” de Ramaira said.

  “Yes. I’ve talked with some of your colleagues at the University.” Savory interfaced with the big compsim on his desk and his eyes unfocused for a moment. Then he sat back in his chair and stared at de Ramaira as if scrutinising him for the first time. He said, “When you first arrived on Elysium, you mounted an expedition to the Trackless Mountains to study the aborigines there. Have you done anything in that line since?”

  “On and off,” de Ramaira admitted. “Within the limits of proscription.” He wondered uneasily if this were leading somewhere, or whether Savory was simply seeking an advantage over him. It was not against the law to be interested in the aborigines, but it was certainly not comme il faut.

  Savory smiled dryly. “As a scientist, do you approve of the proscription? I should think that you would dislike anything that got in the way of your, ah, research.”

  So that was it. Well, he’d ridden out such taunts before. De Ramaira said, “They are the native sophonts. The moral essence of the proscription is that they can’t defend themselves from us, so it is our obligation to ensure that we don’t harm them. And yes, I approve of that.”

  “But still, you have studied them.”

  “From a distance. Within the rules of the proscription, and not with much success.” By now de Ramaira himself almost believed this lie, so often had he told it, and so unsuccessful had been his subsequent attempts at divining the aborigines’ intelligence. That time with Lieutenant McAnders and the boy and his dog, and the discovery of the shrine, if that is what it had been, of painted skulls, almost seemed like a secondhand story after all these years. De Ramaira added, “I’m a phylogenist, Colonel Savory, and there has already been a comprehensive study of the aborigines by Webster, an anthropologist who came here specifically for
that purpose. It’s true that the aborigines are interesting. After all, they’re the only other intelligent species we know of. But they are not why I came here.”

  “Not many people would say the aborigines are intelligent,” Savory commented.

  “It’s all relative. Outwardly, they may appear to lead a desperately primitive way of life, but although we can only guess at their perceptions, it is surely certain that their inner life, their way of looking at the universe, must be entirely different from our own.”

  “Why, how poetic.”

  “I suppose it is, in a way.” De Ramaira refused to be rattled, but damn Savory and his games, and damn his translucent corpse-coloured skin for that matter, and his handmade coveralls, and his necessary prejudices.

  Savory peeled the interface cuff from his wrist. “It seems to me that you may well enjoy your new assignment. Perhaps it will give you a chance to prove your whimsical notions. Let’s go and have a look at it.”

  They rode an elevator down and entered the maze of narrow corridors in the basement levels. After two minutes’ brisk walking de Ramaira suspected that they were somewhere beyond the vehicle parks that surrounded the police headquarters. There were rumours of a network of passages under the city; now, as Savory led him down a staircase to another level, he could believe that it was true.

  There was a door guarded by an armed cop, who unlocked it as Savory and de Ramaira approached. Inside, the little room was packed with racks of flatscreen monitors, a miscellany of recording equipment, and a big compsim that was the twin of the one on Savory’s desk. Savory sat in the swivel chair in front of it and turned it on.

  “We’re very close to Constat’s vault,” Savory remarked as he plugged himself in. A moment later a row of monitors above de Ramaira’s head flickered, showing various views of a huge ill-defined shadowy space. Savory leaned back in the chair. “The vault is directly below this room. I had fibreoptic cables threaded through.”

  “I didn’t realise that it was so big,” de Ramaira said, remembering from some newscast or other a sealed sterile white room stacked with honeycomb wafers, Constat and his slave computers and the files which contained the encrypted residues of the city’s dead.

  “It wasn’t,” Savory said. On one of the screens the view began to change, panning over rough walls to a kind of alcove hung with a web of cabling, waldos, and camera eyes. “That’s the tie-in to Constat. All the rest has been opened up from that point. Now, let’s see if we can catch one of his slaves…Ah. There we are.”

  “Lord,” de Ramaira said.

  The slave, squatting motionless near a slumped tongue of rubble, was an immature aborigine.

  It had begun, Savory explained, with two separate investigations, one into missing construction equipment, the other into a mission to the Outback where an aborigine village had been ransacked, all its adult inhabitants killed, and the immature ones captured and brought back to the city. Those involved in the mission had been ordered to keep it secret, but one of the cops had talked with her lover, who happened to be a senior administrator supposedly privy to all war operations. He had known nothing about a mission to kidnap aborigines, and could find nothing about it when he made inquiries. Briefings had been given on tapes which were subsequently found to be blank, and personnel, vehicles, and other equipment had been requisitioned apparently without any authorisation.

  “It was as if someone had a line into Constat, which of course is the nexus for that kind of informational traffic,” Savory said. “And no one could find out where the young aborigines had gotten to.” He went on to explain that at the same time he had a couple of cops working on the missing construction materials—a routine criminal matter to which he had given only minimal attention, until the investigating cops had traced the stuff to the administration building. The drivers of the trucks which had taken it there had all been given legitimate vouchers, but again it was impossible to trace who had ordered their issue.

  Savory made a steeple with his fingers and rested it against his chin, watching the screen which showed the motionless aborigine. “By the time I put two and two together, most of them had died. There’s a tunnel that’s been driven all the way down to the docks, half a kilometre long. The bodies were put out there, and we were able to recover the last two. A surgeon up at the hospital gave them thorough autopsies. You can read his reports, of course. Quite a chance for you. I don’t think anyone has dissected an aborigine since Webster.”

  “You said that someone had managed to get an unauthorised line into Constat. Have you found out who it was? And why are aborigines involved, anyway?”

  “I said that it seemed that someone had an unauthorised line. There isn’t one.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “You’re from Earth, Dr de Ramaira. You are familiar with megacee computers. To most of us in the city, Constat is simply another of Earth’s gifts, accepted rather than understood. We forget that it is more than a very fast, very powerful computer. We forget that it is intelligent in its own right, that it might have its own desires, that it might not be as obedient as we suppose.”

  “I suppose that there is a reason why you haven’t asked Constat what it’s doing.”

  “Oh yes,” Savory said, and for the first time he seemed weary, as though suddenly conscious of a burden he had been carrying for so long that he had almost forgotten it. “When I first became suspicious of Constat, of course I tried to look into his vault using the remote camera. But that had been disconnected, from the inside. I knew then that something was wrong, for no one has entered the vault since Constat was installed. So I had some remote sensing done and that revealed a huge space excavated next to the vault. Very carefully and in great secrecy I had fine holes burned through the floor of his room and fibreoptic cables threaded through, and saw what you have seen. Except that there were more aborigines then.” He looked up suddenly, his gaze bright in the dim room. “You don’t think,” he asked, “that the aborigines could somehow be responsible for this?”

  “No,” de Ramaira said. “We don’t know very much about them, but that—no.”

  “Some people say that the aborigines have underground cities, that their villages are only training places for the young. Who when they are mature descend through the Source Cave to their true home underground.”

  “I’ve heard a dozen versions of that story. But you see, the Elysian quasimammals are all oviparous to a greater or lesser extent. Some lay their eggs directly into an external pouch; others in captured prey, as the sabretooths do; still others go into hibernation after they are fertilised and are slowly consumed from within by their developing young. Now,” de Ramaira said, warming to the subject, “all these kinds of necrogenetic reproduction are adaptations to the sudden change in climate half a million, a million years ago. The planet became colder and dryer so quickly that most of the quasimammalian species became extinct. The swampy habitats in which their predatory aquatic larvae had developed vanished overnight, in geological terms. Necrogenes substitute their own bodies for that lost environment. In a few million years perhaps they will have had enough time to evolve more efficient methods of nurture, something like a placenta, mammary glands. Those who lay their eggs into pouches, for instance, grow a kind of fatty tumour on which the hatchlings feed. Well. Webster showed that the reproductive cycle of the aborigines is a variation on the general necrogenetic pattern. They lay their eggs in warm cave pools and pass into a kind of coma, and are eaten by the freshly hatched young. No secret cities, I’m afraid.”

  Savory passed his hand over his cropped hair. “In a way it would be more comforting if the aborigines had taken over Constat. At least I would know what to do. But as it is I dare not disturb Constat without endangering the war effort. In all other respects the computer continues to serve the city faithfully. I have been careful not to discuss this in any place where it might overhear me—you would be surprised at the number of places that includes. I trust you will take the same care.”
<
br />   “As long as Constat isn’t bugging my house.”

  Unsmilingly, Savory said, “I will check that point. In the meantime, you may take away the autopsy reports on the aborigine bodies we recovered. As soon as you are able, I would like a summary of your speculations.” He peeled the compsim’s interface cuff from his wrist. At the same moment, the door of the small room opened behind de Ramaira.

  De Ramaira switched off the recorder. A kind of hollow lethargy spread through him when it came to thinking about summarising the report, much less speculating upon it. Ordinarily, he would have devoured the exhaustive descriptions of the aborigine corpses—whole body imaging, Spinoza charts, cell ultratopology, enzymology, residue counts and all else—but all was overshadowed by the modifications which Constat had made on their nervous systems.

  De Ramaira had only a hazy recollection of the technology which on Earth was used to control the animal labour which operated deep-ocean mineral dredges, maintained microwave collector farms and low orbit factories, recovered precious isotopes from the cores of decommissioned nuclear reactors left over from the Age of Waste, and so on. And he remembered only a little more clearly the protests which had prevented the state from using the same technology to turn felons convicted of capital crimes into decerebrated automatons, a superior alternative to animal labour. The Zombie Riots, virtually the last gasp of civil protest—he’d been a child then. But undoubtedly that was what had been used on the aborigines.

  Both of the bodies had been modified in the same way. A microprocessor had been surgically inserted in the body cavity, and it had grown delicate pathways parallel to the nervous system, ramifying throughout the brain, especially in the putative motor and sensory areas. It was clear that the implants had been only partially successful; most of the interconnections between the parasitic system and host synapses had more or less burned out, as if by massive allergic reaction. De Ramaira wondered if the aborigines had retained any consciousness after implantation. In humans the destruction of neural pathways in the forebrain concomitant with the growth of new pathways would have wiped out most traces of personality, but no one knew enough about the unlobed infolded aborigine brain.