Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  The woman who seemed to be leading the little group started down the slope toward de Ramaira. The others had stopped, and de Ramaira thought he heard Rick shout something. He gestured with the pistol, and the woman stopped. She wore a fleece coat and denim trousers, carried a hunting rifle. There was something funny about her face, something dead. As if she was wearing a mask. A pistol hung by its lanyard from her belt; the hunting rifle flicked from side to side like a seeking eye.

  De Ramaira dropped his own weapon with a deliberately ostentatious gesture and raised his hands a little above his shoulders. Every centimetre of his skin quickened in anticipation. He said foolishly, “Excuse me…”

  The rifle stopped moving. Her face still without expression, the woman put a bullet through de Ramaira’s thigh.

  26. Rendezvous

  Rick and Jonah Rivington left de Ramaira’s house just before dawn. Neither of them had had much sleep. Unused to the soft swaddling warmth of a bedplate, Rick kept waking from muddled dreams to the noise of distant gunfire, and at last he got up, although the unpolarised window of the dusty room still framed nothing but darkness, and went down to the basement kitchen. Jonah Rivington was already there, drinking coffee.

  As Rick asked the treacher for milky tea, Rivington said, “I’ve been watching the trivee. David’s got that thing rigged to catch the cops’ channels. Seems as if things are moving nicely for us.” He sketched the insurgents’ advance in the dust on the top of the huge wooden table. South along the coast from Jones Beach, a pincer movement from the east, out of the forested hills. “I reckon they should overrun the University before the morning is out. There’s not much resistance there anyway, seems the pounding they’ve given the suburbs worked.” Rivington yawned, quick and oblivious as a cat. “Want me to fix breakfast? The service core doesn’t hold much for that treacher thing to work on, but there’s some real food about.”

  “I don’t know if I could eat,” Rick said. His stomach fluttered with nervousness not much soothed by the customary tea.

  “Me neither,” Rivington said. “But we ought to try. Going to be a long day.” He grilled ham and toasted some stale bread, and scrambled some of the real eggs Rick found in de Ramaira’s larder. They ate as much of it as they could, and cleared up before leaving as a gesture of respect to their sleeping host.

  “I still think we should kidnap him,” Rivington grumbled, as they started down the narrow street in near darkness. “That guy is like a national resource, he goddamn well better make it out.”

  “I left him a message. Maybe he’ll catch up with us at the University. Don’t worry about it, he’ll be okay.” Rick was walking a pace behind Rivington, shivering slightly in the sharp cold. He had left his overcoat behind and was masquerading as a member of the VDF in case they were challenged. Rivington was supposed to be his prisoner. The ruse, and a pistol and Rick’s transceiver, were all the protection they had.

  The city was stirring in the darkness, grumbling in its sleep like a giant beset by minute but voracious predators. Gunfire crackled in the distance, punctuated by the explosions of mortar rounds. Once or twice, Rick and Jonah Rivington had to duck into doorways as cushiontrucks or police cruisers sped past, headlights glaring. They kept to the back streets as much as they could, taking a circuitous route that would cut through the abandoned bubble-suburbs to the University.

  The sky was at last beginning to lighten. By now the gunfire was so near that Rick could distinguish each shot. Rivington showed no sign of noticing it. He loped along with the wings of his leather jacket flapping, checking out the shadowy palisades of evergreen bushes that screened each dome from the road. The domes here had been scarcely touched by the fighting, no more than a few cracked or missing octagonal panes.

  Rivington had just reached an intersection when a bullet kicked fragments of concrete centimetres from his feet. Rick dodged into the nearest bushes and a moment later Rivington almost landed on top of him as another shot chattered through branches. Together, they crawled deeper into the thickets, worked their way around the curved base of the dome.

  “Maybe he’s just covering the intersection,” Rivington whispered hoarsely. “We get across the next street and we’re away.”

  “Yeah,” Rick whispered back. His throat was dry and his heart seemed to have enlarged and grown lighter, fluttering at his throat.

  They pushed around the curve of the dome through dense prickly evergreens, but when they reached the edge of the bushes someone took another potshot at them. Rivington took the pistol and let off a single loud shot in reply; and a concentrated burst of fire tore into the shrubbery. He and Rick hugged the dirt as shattered twigs and bits of leaves rained down on their backs. The broken foliage released a dusty, menthol odour.

  “Maybe that wasn’t so smart,” Rivington said, when it was over.

  “More than one of them.”

  “I reckon.”

  They were marooned in an island of vegetation, separated from the other islands around each dome by a road or a wide strip of grass. Rivington stretched out on his belly, resting his chin on his folded arms, and suggested they wait it out. “Maybe they’ll get bored. Or maybe some of our guys will come along.”

  “Or maybe they’ll come over here and check us out.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you not to look on the dark side of things?”

  The sky brightened, a single sheet of cloud. Gunfire still sounded in the distance, but the mortar barrage of the inner city seemed to have ceased. Rick took out his transceiver and scanned for any transmissions the snipers might be making. There was plenty of traffic, encrypted messages from compsims and talk in clear between insurgent units that was mostly garbled by the feedback interference put out by the cops. But there was nothing coming from the immediate vicinity.

  “The front will roll on by,” Rivington said, as Rick put the transceiver away. “No need for us to hurry.”

  “Sure.” But sooner or later, Rick thought, either he or Jonah Rivington would have to risk showing themselves, to find out if the snipers had gone. He was nerving himself to suggest this when Rivington said, “Listen up.”

  It was the sound of a cushiontruck. They wriggled forward, reaching the edge of the bushes just as the vehicle smoothly slid to a halt at the intersection. A man was fiddling with a mortar that had been bolted to the truck’s loadbed, while a woman rested a rifle on the roof of the green-painted cab (on the door, in white curlicue script mostly obscured by mud, the single word Arcadia). The man fed a round into the mortar, and as he ducked from the hollow clang and puff of smoke, Rivington pushed through the bushes. The woman jerked her rifle around, then relaxed. Rivington stepped up and said something to her, then motioned to Rick. “These good people are running interference,” he said. “Seems we might have run into some of their friends doing the same.”

  “You’re lucky we didn’t drop one on you,” the man by the mortar said.

  The woman was staring at Rick’s coveralls. “What are you guys? Some kind of spies?”

  Rivington gave a brief explanation of their mission, and the woman shrugged. “Far as I know the University’s still there. The advance went either side of it. I wondered why.” She told them to watch their step, there were rogue cops about as well as insurgent scouts. Then she banged on the roof of the cab. The cushiontruck swivelled on a blast of air and swept away. Rick and Rivington started off in the direction from which it had come.

  Soon after that, they came upon the bodies.

  There were three of them, two men and a woman, sprawled casually in the middle of the street. None could have been older than twenty. They wore oversize quilted overcoats dyed in violent patterns and hung with loops of heavy chain, very trash aesthetique, very irrelevant. All three had been shot in the head at close range. Someone had taken the trouble to pin to the chest of each corpse a sheet of paper scrawled with a single word, looter.

  “Who do you think?” Rick asked.

  “Cops. Has to be. We’re all
of us looters in the Liberation Army, right? That’s our basic creed.”

  One of the men had long blond hair, wet with blood now. There was a fleshy crater where his right eye had been. His overcoat had fallen open to show a fluorescent green vest, its mesh stretched over his bony chest.

  “Come on,” Jonah Rivington said. “I’ve seen enough of this fucking war already.”

  As they neared the University, the proportion of ruined domes increased. Plastic panelling had melted into strange organic shapes, or burst outward like a smashed flower. The streets were littered with debris, cratered from the random bombardment. Once, they found themselves wading through a sudden swift-flowing river, then passed the fountain from a burst main which fed it. Once, they passed a dozen domes burning in unison, throwing up a reef of dense black smoke. And once or twice they saw distant groups of people picking their way through the ruins in the opposite direction, toward the embattled heart of the city. One of these groups loosed a burst of tracer bullets in their direction which chopped out the crowns of a group of native golden-rod trees, showering Rick and Jonah Rivington with fragments of dry plumes as they fled.

  But the main business that day was elsewhere, and when they reached the University they found that the woman had told them the truth, it was more or less untouched. The windows of the long white buildings were unbroken, the rolling lawns unscarred by craters or vehicle tracks. The hill rose serenely beyond, its half-sunken houses glittering and winking through the naked branches of the trees.

  Rivington looked around at all this wonderingly. “Cziller kept her word,” he said. “My God, Rick, it’s like the war’s a dream, or I’ve stepped into my past. The library’s over there, right?”

  Rick looked away from the hill and his own memories. And saw two people, a man and a woman, step from the shadows beneath the cantilevered platforms of the Neo-Bauhaus Architecture building. The woman had a rifle, and she raised it as she began to walk toward them.

  Two men, one clearly an insurgent, the other in grey coveralls. As he followed Mari over the lawn, favouring his sprained ankle, Miguel asked the blue brother if it was sure that these would help.

  —The woman will make them help.

  The voice was weak, so weak now. A mere whisper Miguel could almost believe was only his imagination. If only he could keep away from its lair, he might at last be free of it.

  They had walked most of the night, after the ambush. Mari led, unerringly picking a way through the dark tangled forest. Miguel limped behind, shifting the awkward weight of the cryostat from one shoulder to the other and back again. They rested only occasionally. Each time Miguel fell asleep almost at once, to be woken by the whispering, insistent voice inside his head and the woman’s voice scratching at his ear, both saying the same word over and over in a tormenting chorus.

  “Miguel. Miguel. Miguel…”

  Miguel was able to bear his exhaustion and the pain of his ankle only by keeping a sliver of snakeroot under his tongue. Walking, he fell into a kind of doze, and scarcely noticed that the sky had begun to lighten. As Rick and Jonah Rivington huddled in suburban shrubbery, pinned down by snipers, and David de Ramaira ran down the middle of the street toward the Exchange, debris from a mortar explosion pattering down around him, Mari and Miguel reached the edge of the wild forest.

  There was a stretch of ochre mud, and then a scarred bank of earth and abandoned construction equipment. Beyond that were more trees, and thin, distant smoke trails.

  —There are mines in the mud, Miguel. You must follow the woman’s footsteps exactly.

  Miguel spat an oyster of phlegm. “How does she know about the mines, huh?”

  —She knows nothing anymore. But I know, Miguel, because I generated the random pattern in which the mines were laid. And I forget nothing, unless I choose to. The insurgents have dogs to guide them. You must follow the woman.

  Mari stepped forward, and when Miguel hesitated she raised her rifle and said in a dry flat voice, “Come.”

  He had no choice. Sweating, the weight of the cryostat chafing his shoulder, Miguel followed her, planting his rotting boots carefully in her footsteps. Like the hymn his father sometimes sang while working in the fields. Only when they had reached the abandoned defences did Miguel’s fear finally unstring his legs. Despite the blue brother’s nagging, he had to rest, shivering, before he could go on.

  As go on he must, following the woman down winding paths through tamed woods on to the wide level lawns of the University. He was too tired to wonder, was too tired to be grateful when at last they stopped and took shelter in the entrance of one of the huge, clean buildings.

  Miguel must have fallen asleep, because he awoke when the enslaved woman was standing in the bright rectangle of the open door. He moved his aching shoulders experimentally, then went over to her, blinking in the morning light. Two men were making their way across the level sweep of grass. Mari walked toward them and Miguel followed, asking the blue brother if these men would help them.

  —The woman will make them help.

  Yes, it was very weak, now.

  —You already knew one, Miguel, it added. You met him in the Outback.

  The taller of the two men said genially, “We didn’t expect to find anyone here, but maybe you’d like to help us.” His leather jacket was open despite the cold; there was a pistol tucked in the waist of his jeans.

  His partner was slightly built, with thinning blond hair. He asked, “Have you seen anyone else around here? We’re expecting the rest of our group any time.”

  Mari raised her rifle. The blue brother said through her, “You will place your weapons on the ground, Mr Rivington. And you too, Dr Florey.”

  After a moment the taller man shrugged and pulled out his pistol by its barrel, let it fall. Frowning, the blond man spread his arms to indicate that he had no weapon.

  Miguel remembered, then. The river canyon. He had been wearing white coveralls, not grey, and his blond hair had been shorter and a good deal cleaner, but it was the same man.

  “Florey,” Miguel said, and the blond man looked at him with startled blue eyes.

  “Jesus. The dingo.”

  The tall man, Rivington, said, “You know this guy, Rick? Hey, listen,” he added, turning to Miguel, “we’re on the same side. All we want to do is collect some information from this place. If you want to burn it down or whatever, fine, but at least let us—”

  “Enough talk,” the blue brother said through his slave. The woman jerked the rifle—yes, Miguel thought, just like a puppet. “Miguel, see if they have other weapons.”

  Miguel found Rivington’s big-bladed knife and showed it to the woman, who told him to drop it on the ground. Then Miguel started to pat down Florey, pausing when he felt something, a little radio, in the pouchpocket of his coveralls.

  —That too, his own fragment of the blue brother said, then tried to make Miguel’s hand close around the radio and lift it out. But Miguel jerked his hand away and said, “Nothing,” clamping his teeth as a knifeblade of pain pried between his eyes. But it was bearable. The blue brother was weak…too weak to pierce the numbness of the snakeroot.

  —You will pay for this, too, Miguel.

  We’ll see, Miguel thought. He knew that the radio must be a threat to the blue brother’s plan, although not why. But simply knowing was enough to help him ignore the pain and the whispered threats in his head.

  The enslaved woman, unaware of Miguel’s internal dialogue, said, “You will carry something for me. You come too, Miguel.” She led them to the lobby of the building where the cryostat had been left, and watched impassively as the two men lifted it between them. Florey said something about its weight, wondering aloud what was in it, and was told he would not have to carry it very far, and he would soon see what was inside it.

  “Jesus, I’m not that curious,” the man said nervously.

  You should be afraid, Miguel thought, as he followed them across the wide lawn. You should both be very afraid. He hi
mself was too scared to ask what would happen. The lawn sloped up like a wave. When they reached the top Miguel saw the city for the first time.

  Huge houses, bigger than any Miguel had ever seen, each standing alone among many bare-branched trees. Then the ruined bubble-suburbs, a smashed froth of domes, some still burning with scrappy flickers of flame, and a grid of streets beyond, grey under low cloud. Near the docks, five pillars of black smoke formed an almost perfect quincunx. The worst of the fighting was there, around the twin white towers of the fusion plant which powered the city, the hectares of tubing and tanks of the hydroponic farms that fed it. Gunfire crackled in the distance. Nearer, growing louder, was the sound of a ground-effect machine: then it swept around the bend, a white police cruiser with two men inside it.

  Mari raised her rifle, clearly intending to fire a shot to make the vehicle stop. But even as she took aim the cruiser’s skirts deflated with a sudden thunderclap. It swerved up the grassy bank and rocked to a halt, blunt nose buried in the earth. The driver threw himself out, rolled to his feet and sprinted across the road, clambered over a boundary wall. The woman, the slave, let him go, watching calmly as the other man clambered out of the cruiser and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  As the woman started down the slope, the blond man, Florey, called out, “Jesus, run, David! Run!” But the dark-skinned man came forward, smiling. Casually, firing from the hip, Mari shot him in the leg.

  When Rick had finished bandaging de Ramaira’s thigh, he turned on the impassive woman. There was blood on the front of his coveralls, blood all over his hands; he smeared blood in his hair as he worried at it, trying to express his anger. “Listen to what I’m telling you. Dr de Ramaira is no cop. He isn’t on any side! And anyway, he was trying to surrender. That doesn’t mean anything to you?”

  “Rick,” de Ramaira said. He sat up laboriously, holding his thigh either side of the bandage. “Who are these people? Not friends of yours I gather.”