Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  “Looters.” Rick stepped up to the woman, forgetting in his anger the rifle she held. There was something funny about her face…a slackness. Her eyes were not quite focused, her mouth sagged open. It was unnerving, but he said, “Looters, am I right? You want the cruiser to carry that thing of yours?”

  The woman’s mouth convulsed, as if she was having trouble shaping words. But when she spoke her voice was quite clear, although flat and falsely deep. “I arranged for the cruiser to be brought here, Dr Florey, and did my best to make sure that Dr de Ramaira would be in it. I need him, you see, more than I need you or the others. That is why he was shot, to ensure that he cannot escape.”

  “She’s crazy,” Jonah Rivington said. He asked Miguel, “How about you, friend? You going to tell us what’s happening?”

  “He’ll tell you…maybe if you ask him.”

  “Him?”

  “The blue brother.”

  Rivington said. “They’re both crazy. No offence meant of course.”

  “Wait a minute, Jonah,” Rick said. “If they’re crazy, how did they know our names? Or David’s for that matter.” He said to the woman, “You know us, right? Are you from Cziller’s group? You saw us there?”

  “I know everyone in the world, Dr Florey, alive and dead. Otherwise I could not do my job.”

  “I think you’ll find that you’re not talking to a person, Rick. Or not a person in the formal sense.” De Ramaira was sitting up, holding his wounded leg. His face seemed thinner than ever, a worn knifeblade he turned to the woman. “Is this part of your plan too? You control the aborigines underground, and these people. What are they bringing you?”

  “You will see soon enough, Dr de Ramaira. Miguel, help him into the cruiser. Mr Rivington, I think you should drive. I would do it better, but I must make sure no one tries to escape. I need you all, at the moment.”

  Rick went over to help as the ragged little man, the dingo, lifted de Ramaira to his feet. Rick said, “David, you know what’s going on here? Who are these people? Police agents?”

  “No. Or not in the way you mean it. The woman, you’ve seen the way she is.”

  “Like she’s drugged.”

  “You and your puritanical mind. She’s been cored, Rick. Wiped clean and another personality imposed. Some countries used to do it on Earth to the worst of their criminals. Christ, be careful, huh?” De Ramaira winced as he was lowered into the backseat of the cruiser. Sweat stood on his forehead, despite the cold.

  “Another personality? Who, David?”

  “Why, Constat, of course.”

  “That’s a joke, right?”

  The dingo spoke up. “He’s right, friend. Dr Florey, I call him the blue brother, like a bunch of blue lines in my head. A piece of him’s in me, too.”

  “Then you can tell me where we’re going.”

  “I…don’t know. He just rides inside me, doesn’t control me. Not now.” For a moment, the dingo was quite still. Then he said, “He tries. But without the little machine, the compsim, he gets weaker.”

  De Ramaira was watching as the woman stood over Rivington, rifle at the ready, as the tall man folded himself into the driver’s seat. He said, “You know where Constat lives, Rick.”

  “Sure. Under the police headquarters.”

  “Well, that’s where we’re going. Underground.”

  27. Underground

  The cored woman sat next to Rivington, interfaced with the cruiser’s compsim. She held a pistol at his head and gave monosyllabic instructions as he drove the police cruiser through the bubble-suburbs. It was a complicated circuitous route, evading the dozens of shifting firefights that were slowly advancing toward the city centre.

  Miguel confided to Rick, “She’s being run by the real blue brother now, through the little computer there. He knows the safest way.”

  Sandwiched between de Ramaira and the dingo in the back of the cruiser, Rick said, “The piece of Constat in your head is getting messages too?”

  The dingo cocked his head, “Not without the compsim. But he knows the plan, see. He can guess the details.”

  “And we’re included in this plan, huh?”

  The dingo shrugged. “He won’t tell me that. He says I’m not to be trusted anymore.”

  “Soon you will know everything, Miguel.” Constat’s deep, precise voice came from the cruiser’s radio, reverberating in the cabin. “Soon you will be connected too, and I will be able to deal with you properly. As for you, Dr Florey, I overheard your conversation with Dr de Ramaira last night. There is an old surveillance network in the house left over from Dr de Ramaira’s early days in the city, when it was suspected that he was a spy for the Colony Board. I know what you wish to do, and I agree with your reasoning. It is simply that the execution of your plan is at fault. Better that you help me, one way or another.”

  Constat’s voice, the same voice he had heard in his head all those weeks ago up on the platform of the radio telescope, struck fear to the root of Rick’s spine. All the dingo’s crazy talk, of possession and obscure plans working through the confusion of the war—it became real to him at last. And at the same time he realised that he had a means to disrupt the radio link between Constat and the woman it had enslaved. The dingo had let him keep his transceiver. If it locked to the frequency Constat was using to communicate with the cored woman, it would jam the link as effectively as Constat had jammed the insurgents’ radio traffic. Not yet to be sure, not while Constat’s slave held a pistol to Jonah Rivington’s head. But as soon as it was safe…he slipped a hand into the pouchpocket of his coveralls, gripped the little transceiver for reassurance. Lena. He would not be taken from her.

  De Ramaira said, “Those microphones in my house haven’t been used for years. I’m almost a respectable citizen.” His voice seemed diminished, squeezed through some obstacle. He slumped in his corner of the backseat, his wounded leg propped on a plastic crate. Blood was beginning to spot through the bandage Rick had tied around his thigh.

  Constat said, “The police switched them off, but I activated them again, Doctor. Once I knew that you three had agreed to meet at the University, I made sure that my slave and Miguel would be there too.”

  “Goddamn smug son-of-a-bitch,” the dingo said. Squashed up against Rick, he radiated a powerful odour compounded of sweat and stale urine, smoke and damp earth.

  De Ramaira said, “You said you needed me specifically. Something to do with those aborigines of yours.”

  “Eggs,” the dingo said. “Eggs in the cryostat. I collected them from a Source Cave. He wants them for something important.”

  To Rick, it sounded as if the man was in as much pain as de Ramaira. His dirty, lined face was sprinkled with sweat; he had jammed his hands between his knees so hard that the veins stood out, blue cables snaking through grizzled hair.

  Constat said from the radio, “Yes, Miguel. You are slowly overcoming the fragment within your brain, you can speak of those things. But I will return to you.”

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” the dingo said. “This piece of you inside me is like to burst my head if it could, but I told them anyway. You kill me if you want, but I won’t do your fucking work anymore.”

  “What I have in mind for you is worse than death,” Constat’s voice said.

  “Eggs…” De Ramaira had closed his eyes. His hands grasped around his bandaged thigh. “Constat wants to raise a family of aborigines. Yes, it’s becoming clear.”

  “You look like you’re hurting as bad as I am,” the dingo said, and pulled a filthy plastic bag from inside his white poncho, thrust it toward de Ramaira. “Here, take a hit. Scrape it off with your thumbnail, put it under your tongue. It’ll make the pain less real.”

  As de Ramaira did as he was told, the woman’s pistol came around, pointing at the dingo. “Go ahead,” he said. “I figure you kill me you can’t make me a slave, right?” He scraped at the dark stuff within the plastic bag with his own thumbnail, stuck his thumb in his mouth, a gesture at once de
fiant and obscene.

  “You will pay for this,” Constat said, from the radio.

  “Fuck you, man.”

  Rick asked de Ramaira if he felt any better. The Wombworlder smiled. “Better? I don’t know about that. Weirder, if that’s possible. Like the pain’s light…”He closed his eyes. “Too much light.”

  “Snakeroot,” Miguel said.

  But he didn’t elaborate further. A silence fell in the cruiser. They had left the bubble-suburbs behind; the plate-glass windows of the marts which lined Fifth Avenue were flipping past. Then the police headquarters loomed ahead.

  But the police seemed to have deserted it. The razor wire barricades were unguarded. Save for the statue of the first governor, the vehicle parks around the tall white building were empty.

  The woman told Rivington to drive around a corner, then another. The cruiser moved slowly down a narrow alley between high concrete walls, then darkness engulfed it as it whispered through a service entrance.

  “Stop,” the woman’s flat voice said.

  After the whine of the cruiser’s motor had died, there was a moment of silence. No light but the checklights of the compsim in the dash, just enough to sketch the shadow of the woman’s arm and the pistol she held at Rivington’s head. Then there was a sudden growling hum, a jerk that settled to a smooth sinking motion.

  Rick felt the dingo stir beside him. De Ramaira said, “A cargo elevator. Well, Rick, I told you that we were going underground.”

  “Where are all the cops?” the dingo asked. “Never thought I’d want to see one of the bastards so much.”

  “Off fighting us,” Rivington said. “Guess I wouldn’t mind seeing one either.”

  “It’s a good question, though,” Rick said. “You’d expect to see some cops around the headquarters, even now.”

  The woman’s voice said, “The police have evacuated the area, Dr Florey, in readiness to destroy their headquarters as soon as the enemy captures it.”

  “Ah,” de Ramaira said. “Rydell’s explosives.”

  “Yes, planted on the orders of Mr Savory. He believes that he may yet save the city by this plan, and also rid himself of my troubling presence. I admire the economy if not the sentiment. However, I have had the charges moved so that only the part aboveground will be demolished, and at a time of my choosing, not Mr Savory’s. The rubble will protect and hide me just as your time vault will be hidden.”

  “Rydell would be miffed, if he knew,” de Ramaira said.

  The elevator slowed, stopped. There was a light metallic pattering on the roof of the cruiser, various discrete ticks and rustlings in the darkness in which it was sunken. Then the door ground open, spilling drab yellow light.

  The woman ordered everyone out and unplugged from the compsim even before Rick could switch on his transceiver, let alone begin scanning. She stood aside as her prisoners clambered out. Rivington turned to help de Ramaira. When Rick went around to join him, the woman told him that he and Miguel would carry the cryostat.

  “I just want to help my friend here.”

  “The other will aid him,” the woman said, and gestured with her rifle. A puppet, Rick thought, controlled from within. If only she would hook up to the real Constat again, I might have a chance. Suppose she doesn’t. Jesus, what will it feel like when Constat cores me?

  The woman herded them along the service corridor which curved away from the freight elevator. Bare concrete walls and floor, luminous plastic panels in the ceiling. Some of the panels had been torn from the ceiling; Rick glimpsed quick shadowy movements in the hollow darkness beyond. Yoked to the dingo by the awkward burden of the cryostat, he had let go of the transceiver to keep his balance. De Ramaira hobbled in front of him, leaning on Rivington and looking all around with a goofy smile.

  The corridor made a dog-leg turn. A ragged hole had been torn in one of the walls. Packed earth sloped down in dim red light.

  “I would guess that Tartarus lies below,” de Ramaira said. He let go of Rivington and leaned back against the wall, his wounded leg stiffly raised.

  Miguel shuddered so hard that the cryostat swayed in its sling. Beside him, Rick shrugged off his half of the burden and fumbled for the transceiver in his pocket.

  “That’s where we go?” Rivington had stooped to peer down the slope. He stepped out of the way as Constat’s slave pushed past.

  She ducked through the tunnel’s arch and a little machine dropped from the roof and clung at her breast, looping something around her wrist with a motion too fast to follow. Immediately, the woman’s stiff posture melted. She turned almost gracefully, and smiled. The machine, a remote of the kind used to maintain ducted cables, had interfaced her with the compsim which it cradled in its many wire-thin limbs. The woman said, her voice a throaty approximation of Constat’s, “Now I see you all again. Soon you will join me.”

  “You really want us to go down here,” Rick said and stepped forward. He had to be as close to her as he dared. The interference would probably only cause a momentary loss of control, in the instant of switching back to the analogue of Constat which had been burned into her brain. His whole skin tingled with anticipation.

  “Take up your burden,” Constat’s slave told him.

  “Is it safe to carry it down there?” Rick dared to step beside her, and in the same moment convulsively switched the transceiver to scan the kilohertz-wide band which carried all compsim traffic.

  De Ramaira said, “Don’t argue with Charon,” just as the woman pushed at Rick with the barrel of her rifle. Then she paused and her head went up. Rick grabbed the rifle with one hand and ripped the compsim away with the other.

  The woman swayed. For a moment it looked as though she was going to fall. And then she threw herself at Rick, arms flailing wildly, her broken nails raking his face. Something struck against the whole length of his body and he was on the floor, his head forced sideways as the stock of the rifle pressed into his neck. The mouth of the tunnel seemed to sail toward him, engulfing him in choking darkness.

  The next thing he knew was that he was coughing on his hands and knees while the dingo and Rivington struggled to hold the woman down. The dingo grabbed the pistol, then jerked back as the little duct crawler scrambled up his arm. Its wiry limbs raked the side of his head before he managed to pull it off and smash it to the floor. Rick crawled over and got hold of one of the woman’s flailing arms. Rivington knelt on the other, effectively pinning her. “So now what do we do?” he said.

  Behind him, the dingo, shaking terribly, raised the pistol in a two-handed grip. Then he shot the woman in the chest.

  Her whole body went into galvanic spasm, as if she had been plugged into a power socket. Spattered with her blood, Rick and Jonah Rivington scrambled to their feet and backed away. One leg bent under the other, the woman pushed up, kneeling over the widening pool of blood that poured from her wound.

  The dingo, lips skinned back from his teeth, shot the woman again. She fell over and tried to push up again. She was making hoarse, grunting sounds, reaching out for the compsim.

  Rivington kicked it out of her way, then pulled the pistol from the dingo’s hand. “I think we should get going,” he said gently. The dingo looked at him, white-faced, then broke toward the freight elevator. Rick grabbed the rifle as Rivington got a shoulder under de Ramaira’s arm, and they all fled together.

  The dingo was banging at the elevator’s control panel when Rick caught up with him. No use of course, Constat was overriding it. “The emergency stairs,” Rick said, and kicked open the door by the elevator shaft. He saw Rivington and de Ramaira were coming around the curve of the corridor and started back to help them just as a section of the ceiling’s luminous panelling gave way. In an instant, they disappeared beneath a glittering deluge of little machines.

  Miguel grabbed Rick’s arm and when he resisted shouted, “Man, they are dead! Be sure of it! Come on!”

  They started up the stairs and for a moment it seemed that they had escaped. Then
a duct crawler fastened itself around Rick’s ankle. He kicked out and it bounced off a wall and was still; Miguel shot another as it skittered toward them. Rick didn’t understand where they had come from. A crawler dropped from the turn in the stairs above, landing neatly on the end of the rifle. It managed to slice away half the barrel in a shower of sparks before Rick could swing it against the wall. Immediately, the machine dropped and caught one of the legs of his coveralls; he reversed the rifle and smashed it with the stock.

  The next moment, a dozen or more of the little remotes crashed down the stairs. Miguel managed to get off a couple of shots, deafening in the enclosed stairwell, and then a tortoiselike cleaner tripped him up and before he could get to his feet, the pistol was gone. Rick was luckier, able to sweep the little machines out of his path with the rifle.

  They ran on, and no more machines fell on them. Intent on escape, Rick forgot about Rivington and de Ramaira until he reached the top of the stairs.

  It was the lobby of some kind of office building, rising through half a dozen floors to a glass dome which shed milky light on the railings of the balconies and tiled walls. Two or three cleaning machines were patrolling one edge of the lobby. Above, vertical tiers echoed with metallic ticks and scratchings.

  Miguel wanted to get out of the building at once, but now that his surge of panicky adrenaline was dying away Rick wanted to try to do something for the others. “Leave it, man,” the dingo pleaded, but Rick shook off his grip, went back to the stairwell, leaned over the railing and shouted into the depths.

  One after another, an unending line of duct crawlers was climbing the stairs. Rick fled from their implacable advance and followed the dingo across the lobby, banged through the glass doors into cold air and dull sunlight.

  The smell of smoke. The staccato crackle of rifle fire. After the nightmare underground, the war-torn city seemed almost normal.

  Rick sank to his haunches at the edge of the sidewalk, utterly spent. The dingo stood a little way off, looking up the smoke-hazed length of Fifth Avenue, looking back at Rick. “You gotta leave them, man,” he said. “We did our best.”