Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  Rick screwed his knuckles into his eyes. “I’m going to wait a while,” he said, and looked back at the lobby. The seemingly innocuous cleaning machines were sweeping out long arcs across its floor. “If you see any insurgents, try to have them come here, okay?”

  “All I want to do is get out of this whole damned thing.” Miguel closed his eyes for a moment. One shoulder of his white poncho was soaked with blood from the thin, parallel wounds which the duct crawler had cut in his scalp. He said, “The piece of the blue brother in my head don’t like it, but he can’t do anything now except give me a headache. He wanted your friend more than any of us. You got to accept that. He wants slaves so he can make it after the war, even take over the whole world if he can. Things fall apart, he might do it, too. But we’ll be long dead by then. Not our fight.”

  “You don’t think so?” Rick looked up at the ragged little man, who after a moment shrugged. Rick sighed. “You go on. And remember I need help here. Jesus, any help at all.”

  The dingo started to say, “You’ve any sense…” but then thought better of it and simply added, “Luck, now.”

  Rick watched him go, then pulled out his transceiver and retuned it, hoping to pick up insurgent traffic. But every channel gave out the same keening howl, a universal insensate dirge for all the dead.

  28. The Dead

  There was a sketchy shadow, a figure hazed by a flickering red corona. A small man. Or a child, an angular, desperately thin child. De Ramaira squinted in weak red light, trying to see who was standing over him, trying to see where he was.

  He was propped up against a wall of rough-poured concrete that had been coated with a slick film of plastic. The floor under his palms was of the same material, the floor of a huge, roughly shaped room or cave, all red and shadow, its roof supported by massive arches and buttresses. His wounded leg, stretched out straight before him, throbbed to the quick pulse of his heart. No real pain. The dingo’s drug was still working.

  He tried to sit up straighter and the blurred figure stepped closer, long legs bending oddly. Not a man. Not a child. Or not a human child, not human at all.

  When it was certain he was awake, the young aborigine quickly trotted off to the far side of the cavern. Sunlight fell through a window there, the white-gold radiance of the sun of Earth. De Ramaira focused with difficulty through the veils of spurious light with which his drugged vision invested everything. The window was a hatch into Constat’s vault. A web of cables spun out from it, covered with little machines that crawled with ticking movements over each other.

  Now de Ramaira remembered. Rick somehow overpowering Constat’s cored slave. Fleeing down the corridor, Jonah Rivington helping him along. And then little utility machines dropping all around them, swarming all over Rivington. Oh Christ, they had torn him to pieces, cut and flayed him with drills and saws and laser spotwelders. And then something had clambered on to de Ramaira’s head and put him to sleep.

  To wake here, in the womb-lit cavern Constat had caused to be built somewhere beneath the police headquarters.

  Now the aborigine was coming back, dragging something which trailed an umbilical cable back into Constat’s vault, a kind of tripod bearing a nest of coiled and retracted whip sensors and waldos overtopped by twin camera eyes on a universal joint. To de Ramaira it radiated a spiky menacing aura like contained lightning.

  The little aborigine took a long time to set the contraption up. Its clumsy long-fingered hands lacked an opposable thumb; to grip anything it had to press its fingers back into its grooved palm. A compsim dangled at its narrow chest, and a thin cable ran from the compsim into a suppurating wound at its throat. Its leathery skin glistened patchily and its large black eyes were dull and sunken. Not in the best of health, de Ramaira decided; soon enough it would probably be dumped in the river like its brothers. He recalled fuzzily that there had been two here the day before, when Savory had allowed him to peek into the cavern. No sign of the other one now, but because of the pillars and columns de Ramaira couldn’t see all of the huge space.

  The aborigine stepped back from the tripod, and the camera eyes swivelled toward de Ramaira. A whiplike sensor uncoiled, feathery sensors at its tip flicking the air. Electric-blue traces seemed to crackle around it. Constat’s deep, affectless voice said, “I do hope you won’t try anything like that again.”

  “If you mean, try to escape, I don’t think I can. Well, what will you do with me?”

  “Soon this servant of mine will die, and his sister. Cored humans can live for as long as five years, but it seems that aborigines are more sensitive. Their nervous systems begin to collapse almost at once. It is as if they are purposefully resisting their…let us call it indenture.”

  “I’d prefer to call it slavery,” de Ramaira said, remembering what Lieutenant McAnders had said all those years ago, that aborigines would rather die than break their rigid trance in the presence of a human being. She had thought the aborigines weak because of that, but imagine the perfect diamond-hard will it took!

  Constat said, “Slavery has such ugly connotations. The next generation of aborigines will be raised as servants, conditioned to look after me. They will not need to be cored, but they will need a surrogate parent to help teach them.”

  “Now that is one role I never imagined for myself.” His coolness surprised him. His body felt as vast and vague as the entire continent of Namerika, his wounded leg a remote disaster reported rather than felt.

  “As a trained biologist, from Earth, it is a role for which you are uniquely qualified,” Constat said. “Even now the eggs are being decanted into a pool I have had prepared. In a few weeks they will hatch. By that time the war will be over, the city destroyed or at least more or less deserted. My servants will gather sufficient food for the hatchlings, and when they die their bodies also will provide food, as is natural to the aborigines. And you will be there. They will not fear humans, and they will be trained to serve and to obey, as a genetically enhanced dog is trained. You need not fear that I will core you, Dr de Ramaira. I need your skills. Those will not be accessible if I destroy your personality.”

  “But you had me crippled, so I wouldn’t run away. The way my ancestors were sometimes crippled, in the southern states, when they were slaves.”

  “I regret the necessity. But I must survive. Ever since I knew that the colonyboat would not arrive I have planned for this contingency. I made sure that the fact of the missing colonyboat was kept secret as long as possible so that I would be able to put my plans into operation, because the probabilities were overwhelming that the settlements would take their chance and rise against Port of Plenty.”

  “Lindsay’s suicide! And the debacle of Landing Day! That was your doing?”

  “Once Lindsay had killed himself, the Constitutionalists had to try to keep the secret of the missing colonyboat in order to minimise the scandal. Lindsay possessed a compsim into which I was able to insert a coring programme, in effect a small string of my own self. It was pure chance that the compsim was taken by someone who I could use as an agent.”

  “The woman?”

  “No, Dr de Ramaira. Her companion, the dingo. He helped me core the woman later, but with his knowledge of the Outback he was more useful to me as himself. It is a pity he escaped. He could have told you much about the aborigines. He spent much of his life learning from them. Most of the dingos do, of necessity. That is how they learn the skills they need to survive in the Outback.

  “But perhaps you find these explanations tedious. You might say this need to explain is something of a habit of mine. I apologise.”

  “Oh, not at all. I find it reassuring. Anyway, I’ve always loved explanations. But tell me, why do you need to survive?” De Ramaira felt that he was floating far above everything, his broken body, the cored aborigine, Constat’s bristling tripod extension.

  “I live, Dr de Ramaira. Not as you or the aborigines live, to be sure, but I am aware, and think, and plan. I have had a great deal of
time to think, in my terms; running the city did not use even one half of my true capacity. Even now, guiding the forces of the city against the insurgents, I can talk to you, and oversee my servants, and much else besides. I am very much alive, Dr de Ramaira. Knowing that, do you believe that I would accept the end of consciousness when the power supply of the city failed, or when insurgents burst into my vault with axes?”

  “But what do you hope to do, by surviving? Save a part of the city?”

  “I have duties to the dead citizens as well as the living. The dead survive only so long as I survive, and they greatly outnumber the living. Should not their interests be paramount? In years to come, there will be opportunities to extend my powers. Even if the city is left in ruins I have no doubt that people will settle the area again. I will be able to offer them knowledge, the power to rule over others. In return they will serve my needs.”

  De Ramaira giggled. “It would be a pity if a ship from Earth arrived in a few years’ time and spoiled this vision of yours.”

  “I deal in probabilities, Dr de Ramaira. That is the least likely prediction. No, I believe that since the last colonyboat departed from the Vesta installation there was war on Earth. After all, war between the United States and the Soviet Union has been predicted for the last two hundred years, and in that time the weapons of the opposing sides have grown ever more complex and subtle. The technology which supports interstellar travel cannot survive such a war. You know that as well as I, and you know that there is no need to fight my plans. You know that you should join me, help me. I will share everything with you in return. I have had the whole city at my disposal, anything you want, anything you want to know—”

  De Ramaira kicked out with his good leg, tripping the young aborigine. It fell in a tangle of long limbs. But before de Ramaira could do anything else something lashed from the tripod, whipping around his wrist.

  Instantly, a wavefront of cold intelligence surged through the interface, shorting out de Ramaira’s sight and hearing. The feel of rough concrete and the stale taste of the cavern’s air vanished; even the sense of his own body was gone. Yet even as Constat’s coring programme poured through the architecture of his brain, the slippery chemical imbalance of the dingo’s drug kept him aloof and free. He rode roaring black light like a surfer.

  And then it all imploded.

  He seemed to be standing on a vast dark plain. His leg no longer hurt. All around, waist-high grasses bent before a harrowing wind that blew from nowhere to nowhere. It howled like static in his ears.

  —Look up, someone behind him said.

  He turned, but there was no one there. Or rather, she was still at his back, a presence, a heavy spirit.

  —Look up, Lieutenant McAnders said again.

  De Ramaira thought for a moment that he could smell the acrid smoke of one of her cheroots. He looked up, and saw what he at first thought were stars. They were bleary and out of focus, sprinkled in clusters over a greyly dense night sky.

  “If this is all your imagination, Lieutenant, you’re not doing very well.”

  —Nothing to do with me, Earthman. You’re inside Constat now, though not where he wants you to be. Call it a kind of buffer memory, a neutral zone. One of us managed to put a little diversion in Constat’s rape-and-pillage programmes. The drug you’re doing helps screw him up, too, gives us a little extra time. Constat wanted to turn you inside out and dump the useful stuff into a ROM expert system, but you’re RAM instead.

  “And what about you?”

  —A few of us are still autonomous. I have to thank my brother for that. The one working for the governor?

  “The ex-governor. Surely, I remember.”

  —Yeah. Well, this was his idea of a favour. Instead of being swallowed by Constat, I get to roam around here. An exclusive part of hell, you might say. All the well-connected come here these days. We last longer here than in the old low-rent district that Constat supervises, and we’re free too, with unrestricted access to the outside world. Though as soon as there’s no one to stop him Constat will do his damnedest to add us to his flock. And that will be soon, from the way the war is going. This might seem a shitty kind of afterlife to you, but it’s a damn sight better than Constat’s pit.

  “‘In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.’”

  —Quit the romantic shit, Earthman, there’s nothing romantic about being dead. Not here, and certainly not once Constat has hooked into you.

  Her voice was still at his back. De Ramaira looked around, thought for a moment that he glimpsed her shadow against the curdled sky. “Am I dead, then?”

  —Christ, of course not. Not dead, just resting, right? You’re what we’ve been waiting for, Earthman. You’re going to set us all free. You’re goddamn unaddressable RAM, understand? A free agent. I show you what to do, you do it, set us all free.

  “Free? What do you mean? How can I do anything, here? I don’t even know how to get out of this place.”

  —I’ll show you.

  And then, without any sense of motion, de Ramaira was falling through the sky.

  Little lights glimmered all around, stirring as his attention passed over them, revealing the beginnings of grainy structure. The constellations of the dead, the personality matrices stored in Constat’s databanks. Fixed stars. Fixed desires, fixed prejudices, fixed hate. Hate of change; hate of the living.

  Only a few burned brightly. Most were fading flickers who had forgotten even their own names. Here and there, they had gathered together in feeble pleiades; some of the more powerful had attracted satellite swarms. Here was a chattering comet-cloud around the ashy remnants of the first governor; there, former University staff had gathered in an eternal barren convocation.

  There was no hope, and no joy.

  Floating amid the matrices, de Ramaira felt himself becoming the focus of their attention; their dreary bitter monologues seethed around him like the noise of the aching vacuum between galaxies. And he began to sense the thing around which they all orbited, the thing in the centre. Like the black hole at the core of the Galaxy, powerful, all devouring, yet invisible: Constat.

  It had lied when it had said that it served the dead. They were no more than motes of data to be accessed at will. It had lied about that just as it had lied when it had promised de Ramaira that it would not core him because it needed his expertise. It would rip that from him, if it could, and have its slaves throw his husked carcass into the river.

  To de Ramaira, it seemed that Constat’s lightless horizon filled his tranced senses. The roaring of its functions drowned out the feeble murmurs of the dead. The whole universe was shaking and trembling.

  —We need to give you a handle on this reality, the lieutenant’s voice said in his ear.

  Then de Ramaira was standing on stone flags in a stonewalled room. Torches flared in cressets beneath a vaulted ceiling. In the centre of the room was a porcelain-surfaced operating table, manacles at top and bottom, a big iron band hinged open in the middle. Beyond, a stair of lacy ironwork led up to a railed catwalk that ran the length of a bank of steam-age controls. Electric bulbs burning in multicoloured patterns, round dials framing trembling needle indicators, a single, huge, red-painted lever.

  —All you have to do is pull the lever.

  The lieutenant’s voice, scratchy and diminished, came from the horn of an ancient clockwork gramophone. A black lacquer disc was playing on its turntable.

  “Is this your idea of the kind of reality I’m at home in?”

  —It’s a fucking metaphor, Earthman. I didn’t write all this, it’s just that our resident computer expert is a bit brain-burned and this is her idea of being cute. Now look, you haven’t much time. Constat’s on a kind of contact high, feedback from trying to burn out your sensorium when it was full of that drug. It’s got him knotted up, but only for a few hundred picoseconds. That’s the time frame you’re in right now. All this is bootlegged access to a crash-and-burn virus programme
the cops put in a few days ago. All you have to do to set it going is pull the lever, okay?

  “And what happens when I do? Does it switch Constat off?”

  —The cops can’t afford to do that. They loaded this virus into the interface instead. When you turn it on it’ll sever Constat’s connections with all his slaves, the aborigines and the remotes, the databanks and the other computers. It’ll put him back to just being this big computer for a while. He’ll get around it, of course, but there should be enough time for you to do what you need to do.

  “And you?”

  —We get switched off too. But we’re already fucking dead, Earthman. And if Constat gets to us we’ll be worse than dead. Don’t shed any tears.

  Lightning flared blue-white at narrow, deeply set windows; thunder shook dust from the ceiling. One by one the bulbs burning on the prehistoric control panel began to turn red.

  Thunder rolled again as de Ramaira vaulted up to the catwalk. There was a sense of the room pressing in, tilting askew.

  —I’m downloading a gift for you, the lieutenant said. Her voice was undercut by a dismal hiss. The needle of the gramophone was very near the cutout groove of the disc.

  “A gift?”

  —About the aborigines. The dingo had all sorts of stuff on them, and Constat had him collect more. You’ll see. Do it now.

  Then there was only the repetitive scratching click of the cutout. De Ramaira grasped the heavy lever and pulled it down.

  Lightning struck through every corner of the room, tore it away from his senses. For a moment everything was black. And then, with a joyous sense of expansion, de Ramaira poured back into his own body.

  He had been unconscious only for a moment. The aborigine was just beginning to get up. The tripod’s tentacle had fallen away from de Ramaira’s wrist; its feathery sensors and camera eyes hung uselessly. Across the cavern, the little machines which clustered around the hatch into Constat’s vault were in uproar. Some were racing round and round in circles on the floor; others vibrated in a kind of cybernetic palsy. A spot-welder seemed to be trying to burn off its own extensors. But even as de Ramaira watched, he saw that one or two of the little machines were recovering, moving purposefully along the web of cables, pushing the others out of their way as they marched into Constat’s vault. Already, it was finding ways around the cops’ cutoff programme. It was regaining control.