Secret Harmonies
Page 28
At first, de Ramaira had been amused by the house’s quaint lack of environmental conditioning, of most kinds of automation (the richer households of Port of Plenty actually employed human servants: the waste!), its rigidly fixed quota of rooms and their unsophisticated handmade furnishings. Later, he had become exasperated by the inconvenience of having to do most things for himself. But after more than a dozen years of exile he had grown into it like a hermit crab into its borrowed shell. He had hardly a thought in his sleep-befuddled head as he went down the narrow staircase and along the hallway, pulled back clunky mechanical bolts and opened the door.
And stepped back from the two apparitions on the doorstep, for once lost for words.
Richard Florey smiled and asked, “May we come in?”
De Ramaira recognised Florey’s companion after a moment’s startled blinking. He said, “I think you had better, before someone sees you. Jonah, you rascal, I haven’t seen you for years.”
“Wish I could have come at a better time,” the tall settler said, stooping as he stepped through the door. His curly hair was as unkempt as ever, though touched with grey now. He was unshaven. “Damn, I didn’t expect to ever be back here again,” he said, and embraced de Ramaira while Richard Florey carefully closed the door.
They sat in the study, Richard Florey in the old diplothere-hide chair across from de Ramaira’s accustomed seat, Jonah Rivington on a stool in the shadows behind Florey. De Ramaira sipped neat rum and listened to Richard Florey’s account of what had happened to him since he had quit the city, the plan he and Rivington had put together.
“Well,” de Ramaira said, when the story was finished. “I suppose you have a part for me in all this.”
Florey swirled the rum in his own glass, then drank it down. He had a lean and hungry look, and lounged in the big chair with raffish confidence, no longer the effete, unprepossessing scientist. His overcoat was stained and torn and his boots were spattered with mud. He said, “We started out thinking that we should save machines, research equipment, and so on. But then I remembered your time vault, and all you had told me. Knowledge is far more portable than hardware, and more useful too, in the long run. To begin with, we’d like to have a copy of all that’s gone into the vault. The city wants to pass on its knowledge to the future. What better way than to give it to its direct successors?”
“The city hasn’t lost, yet.”
“Not yet,” Jonah Rivington said from the shadows, “but soon, right? We couldn’t have gotten to you, David, if our patrols hadn’t knocked holes in the city’s defences.”
“Yes, of course. I suppose I’ve been expecting an end to this for some time…but it’s still a surprise.” He drank a little more rum. “Well, you know I’ve never had much sympathy with the city, Rick. Nor it for me, come to that. You said that you wanted everything in the time vault? Well, that’s easy enough, I have copies of the database right here. Is that all you want of me?”
“Come with us, David. Come with us now. Help us.”
“That’s not really possible. I still have to seal the time vault.”
“If you give us a copy of the database, does the time vault matter? Forget about the distant future, David, it’s what’s going to happen in the next few years that’s important.”
“That’s right,” Jonah Rivington said.
“The problem with all you colonists, citizen and settler alike, is that you have no sense of history. Do you know, this was once Eljar Price’s house? This was his study, once upon a time. He must have planned the expeditions to Contra-America in here, and that last, fatal trip to the South Pole. On Earth, the house of someone as prominent in history as Price would be a museum. Here…it’s just another house.”
“If I know you, there’s a moral you’re about to make.” Absently, Rick traced the ladder of bookshelves beyond de Ramaira. Books leaning in disorderly rows, piled in tottering towers and stacks, tier upon tier of books, rising to the stained, sagging plaster of the ceiling. More here than in Mount Airy’s library. Maybe they had once belonged to Eljar Price, too. Their sweetish, dusty odour filled the room. It made him feel sleepy.
De Ramaira said, “An idea of the importance of the past gives you an idea of the importance of the future. Not even Constat can accurately predict what will happen when the city falls. I mean no disrespect to your plan, of course, but knowledge is only useful if something is made of it. Many of the settlers may not want to have anything to do with the city, especially not scientific knowledge. Those who know nothing of science are apt to blame it for much, just as they used to blame the gods, I suppose, or fate. When this war is over, you can be certain that there will be a lot of burning—perhaps too much burning. I hope it’s otherwise, but it could be that civilisation will collapse despite anything that any of us can do. In that case, I like to think of someone stumbling across the time vault sometime in the future, and making something of its contents. No, Rick, you go ahead with your plan, and I’ll carry on with mine. That way we can be sure that something will survive.”
Jonah Rivington said, “But I’m right in thinking that you will give us this database of yours.”
“A copy, of course.” De Ramaira rooted among the bits and pieces, found the cassette and tossed it over.
Florey caught the fat needle and said, “We’ll take good care of it. Thanks.” Then he yawned. “Jesus, sorry. It’s been a long night.”
“Stay here,” de Ramaira suggested. “There’s room enough.”
Florey began to say doubtfully, “Well, I don’t know…”
But Jonah Rivington smiled and said, “Hey, now, thank you, David. That’s a kind thought. See here, Rick, it will save us having to get back to our own people.”
Florey twisted in his chair to look at his partner. “What makes you think it will be easier to get back to them in daylight?”
“Because,” Rivington explained patiently, “by tomorrow they’ll be here.”
When de Ramaira woke again, it was to the warm half-darkness of his bedroom and the sense that something was missing. He remembered last night’s visitation, Florey’s impossible request and Rivington’s revelation of the imminence of the city’s end, then rolled from the bedplate and, naked, padded to the window and depolarised it.
The familiar notched tumble of roofs straggled away downhill. The city’s grid stretched beneath a cheerless winter dawn. Scattered skeins of smoke rose from the embattled bubble-suburbs, but that was not unusual. What was, was an eerie calm which had swallowed the city’s usual roar, as if everyone but he had been spirited away overnight. Only the menacing staccato rumbling of the distant fighting scratched at the edge of the city’s profound silence.
De Ramaira turned away and began to dress, choosing his clothes carefully. Corduroy trousers, a mesh T-shirt and an old workshirt, a baggy woollen sweater. He pulled VDF coveralls over all this and eased his comfortable hiking boots over two pairs of socks. When he was lacing the boots, he noticed that a folded sheet of paper had been pushed under the ill-fitting wooden door.
A single sentence, pencilled in hasty capitals. See you at the University, best luck. Sure enough, his guests were gone from their bedrooms. He was quite alone.
In the cavernous basement kitchen, the treacher instantly gave up a cup of burning hot black coffee, but took several minutes to work on de Ramaira’s complicated instructions for a nutritive concentrate. Meanwhile, he stowed his survival kit in several pockets: a tightly folded thermoblanket, his bushknife and a small multiblade pocketknife, compass and waterproof map, water filter and vitamin tablets, a tiny heating cube. The hatch of the treacher opened and he took out the two dozen heavy, dark biscuits, sealed them in a sample bag.
His brain was working quickly now, but none of the tumbling thoughts clung for more than a moment. Snowflakes melting on a windowpane. He had planned so long for this that now it was happening it felt faintly unreal. He carried the cup of coffee up to the dusty living room and switched on the trivee.
Urgent disembodied voices, some with gunfire crackling in the background. A police lieutenant reciting VDF section numbers and grid coordinates. Views of the collapsed bubble-suburbs, of a ragged line of figures advancing down a smoke-hazed street, of a row of burning warehouses down by the docks…a kaleidoscope of images of something greater than the usual isolated skirmishes. Jonah Rivington had been telling the truth. This was the insurgents’ final push.
De Ramaira went to his study and pocketed his little .202 automatic and the cassette he’d recorded the previous night. And then he had all that he wanted. There was no more time for procrastination. One hand thrust into the pouchpocket of his coveralls, long fingers clenched around the automatic’s compact comforting weight, de Ramaira left his house for the last time.
The streets were almost deserted. The few people de Ramaira passed looked haunted, and he didn’t see a vehicle until a cushiontruck loaded with VDF workers slid past the corner of Fifth and Market Avenues on a rush of air. Market Avenue diagonally slashed the city’s grid north to south; beyond a barrier of razor wire and oildrums at the intersection it still lay in deep shadow. De Ramaira didn’t see the two guards until they moved from a doorway to intercept him.
The taller man asked for his permit, and as both bent over it de Ramaira said impatiently, “I’m supervising the work at the Exchange.”
The tall guard handed back the permit and his partner, a cadaverous old man, did an absurd shuffle, hands buried in the pouchpocket of his coveralls. “You better hurry,” he said, and laughed.
“Someone’s setting the fuses? Look, is Max Rydell in there?”
The tall guard said in a slow voice, “Well, you see, I don’t know his name. We were just set here to keep people away.”
“But the vault is going to be sealed, right?”
Neither guard had a chance to answer. A stray mortar round ended its whistling arc at the next intersection and the thunder of its explosion filled the street.
De Ramaira ran, cantering up the steps of the Exchange two at a time. Bits of debris pattered all around. Black smoke boiled above the flat roofs of the warehouses.
The Exchange’s massive doors had been pushed open. The maroon carpet looked black in the wan early morning light. The tellers’ windows shone like tarnished mirrors. A single light burned above the stair down to the vault.
Max Rydell, beside the steel plug of the vault door, turned and grinned affably as de Ramaira came down the stairs. “I was wondering where you were, David. You’re just in time. Hey, who was firing at who just then? It damned near knocked me down.”
“I believe they were aiming at the police headquarters.”
“Well I hope they don’t set off my handiwork before its time. That would piss Savory off.”
“At the police headquarters?”
Rydell pushed the bunched sleeves of his coveralls further up his hirsute forearms. There were liverish pouches beneath his eyes. “Oh, just a precaution, I guess, wouldn’t want it falling into the insurgents’ hands. All those secrets. Don’t go telling anyone, now. The whole thing’s so confidential it didn’t even go through Constat.”
“To be sure.” De Ramaira thought of Constat and the enslaved aborigines. Very likely that Savory had more in mind than simply destroying secret records. He plucked at the slack wires which ran from the jury-rigged control plate to the valve-head of the argon cylinder. “Isn’t it a little late for improvements down here?”
The engineer shrugged. “Just something that occurred to me while I was working over at headquarters. Rather than rig a separate timing system for the charges, I’ve wired them to the pressure sensor in the head there. When the cylinder’s bled all its argon to the vault it’ll trip the switch.”
“You had better be certain that it will work.”
“You bet,” Rydell grinned. “Now we won’t need to hang about while the vault pressurises.”
“You do have orders to seal the vault, then. The guards up there didn’t seem to know.”
“Well, hell. Those guys don’t know shit, why should they? I’ve been here since I finished at the headquarters. Up before six, when the insurgents started their advance—at least, that’s when the orders came through my compsim. Like I said, I was wondering when you’d turn up.”
“For good or bad, I don’t have my strings pulled by Constat like you regular officers.” De Ramaira had a momentary vision of the grid of the city as a vast chessboard on which the Constat moved its pieces, the police patrols and VDF units, as oblivious to the suffering caused by its remote tactics as any grandmaster. Certainly, on Earth, as it was now in heaven, military strategy had long been controlled by state-Q, a vast complex of megacee computers. Weapons of any significance in the great standoff were so quickly and catholically destructive that on both sides their control had long ago passed from the frail fallible hands of humans. His mind skipped quickly over the thought, the pang of regret gone as abruptly as a snuffed candleflame.
He told Rydell, “But here I am anyway. Is your contraption finished?”
“It is. Would you like the honour of sealing it?”
“You’re the engineer. I just want to put this away.” De Ramaira took the cassette from his pocket and stooped to set it just inside the high sill of the vault. Rydell checked the thick hose that ran from the valve-head of the argon cylinder to the one-way connection drilled into the wall of the vault, then leaned against the counterweighted door. The heavy steel plug swung smoothly into place. The light over the steel cabinets within went out a moment before the door closed; the last thing de Ramaira saw was the cassette he had abandoned. Then the bolts clanged home and the thick hose flexed as the pumps started up, purging the air in the vault with incorruptible argon. His duty was discharged. He was free.
Rydell grinned. “It’ll take sixty or seventy minutes to get up pressure. Then: blooie!” He clapped loudly. “Say, can I give you a lift to wherever you’re supposed to be? I borrowed a cruiser to do my rounds.”
“I have an appointment at the University.”
“There’s a coincidence.” Rydell bent to a yellow plastic crate. “You can ride along with me, okay? Give me a hand with this son-of-a-bitch.”
“What is it?”
“The rest of the explosive,” Rydell said casually. “Hell, don’t sweat. You could throw it into a fire—an ordinary one, anyhow—and all it would do was burn. TDX. It needs a voltage difference across it to make it go.” Hauling the heavy crate between them, they started up the stairs. “If you’re going to clear out your stuff, you had better be quick,” Rydell said. “The University’s next on my list.”
“Savory has got you working hard. The whole University?”
“Oh, the charges were set in place weeks ago. I just have to tamp in the fuses.” They went through the door in the partition that had once separated customer from clerk, settler from citizen. “What we need to do,” Rydell said, “is to find you a rifle somewhere.”
“Oh, I have what I need.”
Together, they stepped into the shadowy street. There was no sign of the two guards at the barrier. De Ramaira set down his end of the crate and shut and locked the heavy doors, a final neatness. Around the corner, a white cruiser sat on its black, deflated skirt.
As they moved off, Rydell grinned and said, “You know, I left the bloody lights on back there!”
“Not for long,” De Ramaira stretched his long legs as best he could in the cramped space, only half aware of the gentle roar of the motor and the blank facades of the warehouses that flipped past on either side. He held his pistol tightly inside the pouchpocket of the coveralls. The thought of what he would have to do and the presence of the yellow plastic crate of explosive in the back made
him edgy. To hide his nervousness he switched on the radio. Crackling overlapping voices filled the stale air of the cruiser’s cabin.
“Most of that’s false traffic to confuse the shiteaters,” Rydell commented, swinging the cruiser on to Fifth. They paused to let a shambling procession of press-ganged draftees cross at an intersection (not one of the men and women carried a weapon; only a few wore VDF coveralls), then accelerated away.
Soon they were negotiating the ruined bubble-suburbs, the cruiser smoothly passing over bits of foliage and stone fragments and half-burned plastic sheeting and fugitively gleaming glass shards. Only a few domes had escaped damage. Many were no more than circles of charred rubble. Then they were passing the high stone walls bordering the grounds of the houses of the rich. Trees raised stripped branches to the milky sky. Far beyond the treetops, de Ramaira glimpsed the white hospital, misty with distance, lodged like a shard of polished bone high on a grey-green ridge.
Inside his pouchpocket, de Ramaira worked his fingers around the pistol’s butt, clicked off the safety, found the trigger guard. Ahead were the ridges which bordered the University. Four figures stood at the top of one of these grassy swells, looking down at the road. Two carried something between them on a crude kind of sling. They were Rick Florey and Jonah Rivington. After a moment’s astonishment de Ramaira pulled out the pistol.
Rydell glanced at it and said, “Don’t bother shooting at them, I’ll run on by fast as I can.” Then, gruffly, “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Making sure you stop.”
“You crazy?”
For an answer, de Ramaira jammed the pistol harder against Rydell’s ear. The man flinched and said, “You got it,” and cut the motor. The cruiser’s skirts deflated explosively and it slewed off the road and gouged into the grassy slope. De Ramaira was pitched forward as it slammed to a halt. In a moment, Rydell was out of the cruiser and running across the road. By the time de Ramaira had clambered after him, the engineer was scaling a high stone wall. A moment later he had dropped neatly over the other side.