De Ramaira tried to stand, but his wounded left leg buckled under his weight. The drug cut the worst of the pain, but it still made him dizzy. He pushed up on his good knee and reached toward the aborigine. It tried to stop him, but it was too weak. He brushed aside its hands and tore the compsim from its chest, and it fell forward on its face.
As de Ramaira half-crawled, half-hopped toward the earthern ramp which led up to the world of the living, a thin figure, the second aborigine, ran toward him through the red murk. De Ramaira turned to face it and then the aborigine he had freed sprinted past and knocked its brother to the ground.
De Ramaira didn’t stay to see what happened, but hobbled up the ramp as quickly as he could. The dusty yellow light of the corridor’s ceiling panels hurt his eyes. Half-blinded, he groped past what was left of Jonah Rivington’s body, fell inside the elevator, against the cruiser.
But the elevator’s control panel was dead.
One of the aborigines was coming down the corridor. De Ramaira looked around for a weapon, but then saw the aborigine was the one he had freed. Blood streamed from the wound in its throat, where the compsim’s cable had been torn away, but it didn’t seem to notice. It stooped cautiously into the elevator, huge black eyes on de Ramaira, then reached out with spidery fingers, plucked at his sleeve. It made a hollow breathy humming.
De Ramaira followed it, clutching at the edge of the elevator doors. It pushed at the door of the emergency stairs, turned to him again, its song mapping the path to freedom.
The sudden knowledge was like a blow. The lieutenant’s gift was unpacking inside his head like one of those folded pellets which when dropped into water spring into a flower, a paper rose or chrysanthemum. All the dry careful scientific measurements and observations of Webster’s raw data collated against the instincts and empathy of the dingo by Constat’s vast processing arrays. De Ramaira understood their songs now, the everchanging unending mantras by which they fixed the everchanging world. And here and now, the aborigine child trying to help him escape.
De Ramaira sat down in an untidy heap, his leg really hurting now. He wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe the adrenaline had burned the drug off. The aborigine stooped over him. “I can’t,” he told the uncomprehending creature. Blood from its wound spotted his face.
Inside the elevator, from the cruiser’s radio, Constat said, “My precaution was necessary after all. You will be returned to me soon, Dr de Ramaira. This time I will have you.”
The voice gave him a final impetus. De Ramaira dragged himself into the elevator on hands and the knee of his good leg, pulled open the cruiser’s door. The yellow crate, there beneath the back seat. De Ramaira reached for it—and jerked back, hand burning with pain when the little machine which had been hiding there crushingly clamped around his fingers. He swung his arm and smashed the thing—a cleaner—against the side of the elevator and felt another drop on to his back, and then a slicing pain as the aborigine pulled it away.
One-handedly, De Ramaira turned the broken cleaner on its back and began to unfasten its powerpack. The aborigine was methodically smashing the other machine to flinders and Constat was saying something, promising the world if only de Ramaira would help, honeyed lies. The powerpack came free just as a welder dropped from the ceiling on to the aborigine and burned away the top of its head. De Ramaira flung himself into the cruiser and slammed the door shut, jerked up the lid of the crate.
Layered packages wrapped in waxed paper. Inside each package was a slug of TDX, like slippery clay. Sparks showered over him as the welder began to burn through the cruiser’s roof; something else smashed into the windscreen, but although the laminated glass shattered in a web of light, it did not break. No time for thought. De Ramaira picked up the powerpack and jammed its terminals into
Rick had twice glimpsed cushiontrucks carrying insurgents across one or another of the streets that led out of the square, but he had chased after them in vain. They had driven on toward the fighting in the industrial area by the docks and Rick had returned to the glass doors of the building to look in frustration at the half-dozen machines that were endlessly patrolling the lobby. There was little he could do without help. Already he had exhausted the rifle’s magazine, taking potshots at the machines. Although he had put a couple out of action, others had taken their place almost at once. He would take a few steps inside, but then the machines began to move toward him, and he would have to back away.
It was a standoff. They were only cleaners and maintenance machines, but he had nothing to fight them with. He was thinking about looking in the police headquarters for something he could use against them, when all at once they stopped moving.
He watched them for a long time, certain that it was some kind of trick: he’d get halfway down the stairs and the machines would ambush him. Still, he was nerving himself up to do it when he heard the sound of another cushiontruck. He looked around just as it turned the corner on to Fifth Avenue, heading toward him.
Rick started to run toward it, across the empty vehicle park, dodging past the statue of the first governor and running on toward the slowing cushiontruck. And then he was on his hands and knees, thrown by a sudden violent heave of the ground. Smoke billowed from a jagged trench that had opened beyond the police building, and then the street was filled with the sound of glass crashing down from broken windows.
Rick got up and turned and ran back toward the building. The little machines inside the lobby were still not moving. He dared open the doors and step inside. Nothing. He began to stamp them to pieces, one after the other, and that was how the insurgents found him, a young man in VDF coveralls methodically smashing defunct cleaning machines in the high, gleaming, lobby of an abandoned office building.
There were two men and an old woman, and three dogs. Rick explained about de Ramaira and Rivington, showed them the stairwell, in darkness now. While one of the men went to fetch a light, the old woman explained that they were all from Lake Fonda, come to save what they could. “Some of the crazies on our side want to level the whole city and pour salt on it,” she said. “We don’t hold with that at all.”
The man returned with a portable floodlight shaped like a pistol, and they all started down the dark stairwell. They had not gone very far when the circle of light struck muddy water. “Musta burst the watermains,” one of the men said.
“Or hit a spring,” the old woman said, taking the floodlight and shining it across the rising skin of water and its freight of debris.
Rick peered into the shadows, then caught the old woman’s arm. Light skittered wildly. “See there! Is that a body?” For a moment he thought that one or the other of his friends had somehow survived. But it was not the body of a man.
Facedown, turning when one thin double-jointed arm caught on the stair rail, the body of an aborigine was borne toward them on the rising flood.
29. Endings
When Miguel reached the outer edge of the bubble-suburbs he spent a little time looking for stuff that would be useful to him. Most of the domes were locked. Most of the rest had been stripped of everything but rocks and plants—and with the irrigation systems turned off, ferns and bromeliads and palms were withering, carpets of grasses had turned yellow, bathing pools grown stagnant. Still, Miguel managed to turn up odds and ends of food, a first aid kit, a fringed leather satchel. Fine copper wire stripped from environmental controls would make snares. There was a fancy cigarette lighter, an apple-shaped piece of seamless black quartz that somehow emitted a clear blue flame from its top when a finger touched a smooth recess. There was a cache of clothes, from which he took black jeans and a black asymmetric shirt with pearl fasteners, a couple of sweaters that didn’t fit too badly, a quilted overcoat printed with a swirling pattern of black and gold. Of his own clothing he kept only his scuffed, splitting boots. And then it was time to leave the city, its ragged ruined suburbs.
Beyond the last, burnt-out domes was a double fence, mostly torn down. There was a wide strip of ochre
clay, and then the forest rising up to the distant saddle of the ridge.
Miguel’s boots ground wire mesh.
The satchel bounced against his hip as he started up the path into the forest, climbing slowly beneath scratching, whispering branches. Glimpses of cloudy sky were like scraps of grey velvet caught in their embrace.
It’s all fragmenting.
The crisp sound of gunfire drifting up from the city with the smoke of its myriad fires. Boulders either side of the trail, a maze running back into the trees, intimation of the fate of the city he’s leaving.
It’s all fragmenting.
Savory stands at the edge of the flat roof of a warehouse, knowing this alarms the police captain who stands beside him—snipers have infiltrated every part of the city now, even the docks—but enjoying the specious thrill. Cocking a snook at chance. Besides, the risk is small.
All of the eastern suburbs must be on fire by now. A mountain of smoke stands against the horizon, reaching out like a hand over the rest of the city. Twisting columns of smoke rise from smaller, scattered fires. The square shaft of the police headquarters still stands beyond the house-covered hill of the old quarter, white against the smoke, but not for much longer. It’s all falling apart, and he tells the captain so.
“Yes, sir.”
“In another year they’ll be fighting themselves for the spoils. In twenty there’ll be no civilisation worth speaking about anywhere in the peninsula. At least, that’s what Constat says. We’re saving what we can.” He doesn’t turn from the grim view, but holds out his hand for the compsim which the captain carries. “Thank you. Ironic, don’t you think, that we’ll have to move so far beyond the Trackless Mountains to keep the city’s ideals alive, after proscribing such movement for so long.”
“Yes, sir.”
The captain is impatient, Savory realises, as well as nervous.
“Your family is embarked?”
“Everything is ready, sir. I think we ought to move down to the dock now.”
“Then I suppose we shouldn’t keep them all waiting.”
Savory wraps the interface cuff of the compsim around his wrist and subvocalises the code which will detonate the explosives set in the police headquarters. Before pronouncing the final digit, he pauses for a moment, savouring the image of insurgents pillaging the storerooms and cells and offices, not knowing their final moment is almost upon them, his to determine as he will. Make some of them pay for all this. He says the last number out loud. Zero.
Nothing happens. The tall white building still stands, aloof amid the smoke of the ravaged city. Savory repeats the code. Still nothing. Sudden rage grips him. He rips off the cuff and flings the compsim over the edge of the roof. That fucking engineer, he should never have entrusted the task to an intellectual! After a moment he has control of himself again. He turns and tells the captain, “We’ll just have to leave it standing for future generations. It’s time to go.”
For all that Rydell is a Constitutionalist, he knows nothing of the little fleet ploughing away from the city down the choppy waters of the estuary, toward the open ocean. GEM transports carrying the City Board and their inner circle and a dozen squads of cops, and all their families, beginning the long journey across land and sea to the northern coast of the continent. Outrunning the vengeance of the insurgents, leaving the city to its fate.
Down there, in the smoke and confusion of the fall, Rydell has taken a wound. His upper arm throbs dully where stone splinters have driven to the bone; blood sluggishly seeps through a hastily tied bandage. After he escaped the ambush, he fell in with a mixed party of police and VDF troops; now they are trapped in the ruined merchandise of a mart, the police sergeant who tended to Rydell swearing monotonously at the random shots which keep them pinned down. Their compsims aren’t working, the information net has collapsed, Constat is silent. The rear of the building is on fire and the smoke and crackling flames are making the others panicky. In a moment Rydell will say, “Well, what the hell,” and wave a sheet of paper in token of surrender.
The insurgents will disarm their prisoners and turn them loose, let them find their own way to Arcadia where, after she’s finished bandaging the VDF officer’s arm, Lena is finally able to take a break. She’s been working in the stale hot stink of the hospital tent all day. Now, sweat cooling on her body, she leans on a tentpole and looks at the darkening camp. Her legs and back ache; dried blood spots her clothes, is crested under her fingernails. Several hundred wounded men and women, insurgents and cops and VDF troops all mixed together, huddle outside the hospital tent. Lena feels as if she’s tended each and every one. They lie on pallets or sit on the cold ground, mostly silent. Their campfires flicker like a field of stars.
Lena thinks of the man she’s just tended—he’ll be lucky to keep the arm, the bandage had been tied too tightly for too long-then wonders again where Rick is. Fear clutches low in her belly. She’s too tired to fight it. And her father, and the rest of the Chronus Quartet, and Web, and Jon, she thinks of them all, and wonders again when Rick will be back. He was so stubborn about going, and now she’s afraid that he reached too far for redemption. Stay quiet and you’ll be okay, he’d told her once, and at the time she’d thought it so naïve of him.
She shivers, someone walking on her grave, and with the frisson, like Athena born from the brow of Zeus, comes the idea for the adagio around which she will build her First Symphony. A shiver of brass separating into two themes carried by the strings which weave in and out of each other, mingling and separating again just as the combatants, victors and defeated, are mingled together in the fields around the hospital. A slow crescendo gathering from the pulsing time-signatures of the double theme, the city’s final fall, coloured with a hint of the Victory Theme of Beethoven’s Fifth before crashing down in a diminuendo of minor chords which ebb into uncertain individual notes, winking out one by one. The campfires, and the fires consuming the city, guttering out as its inhabitants trek away from it, scattering across the Outback. A long hush then, from which rises, as the beginning of the last movement (this on a detuned wind organ), the communal hum of an aboriginal village…
For one moment, Lena holds it all in her mind.
And then she sees another stretcher being brought toward the hospital tent. The leading bearer holds a sticklight in his teeth, its beam striking at random across the crowded wounded. Only a few look up. Lena sighs and follows the stretcher inside. And while she works forgets her fear.
There’s no power in the University, and Rick is working by the yellow light of a hissing pressure lamp down in the library stacks, pulling out cassette files, splayed clusters of tagged needles, selecting the ones he wants and dropping them into a plastic case and moving on. His back tingles as he works. Not exactly fear, but a kind of dissociated déjà vu. The familiar library, but cold and empty and full of shadows, ranks of reading screens in the great hall so many blinded cyclops’ eyes. He’s been working for hours down in the hardcopy stacks, left by the people from Lake Fonda who are off liberating machine tools from the workshops. When at last he hears footsteps coming toward him he starts, but it is only the white-haired woman from New Horizon, Ella Falconer. One of the dogs, an alert collie bitch, pads along beside her.
Ella Falconer says, “You could work here a year and not clear everything.”
“I don’t want everything,” Rick tells her, slamming a drawer shut and moving on to the next. “Just the essential texts.”
“Well I wish you luck with your venture, Mr Florey. But I reckon machines will be more useful. Man like you must know what’s important, you could make a fortune if you selected the right stuff.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“Yeah,” the old woman says doubtfully. “You seen any one in the last hour?”
“Not a soul. What’s up?”
“It’s over,” Ella Falconer says. “More or less, anyhow.”
The news passes clean through Rick. After a moment he moves on to
the next drawer and begins to slide a finger down the index.
Ella Falconer reaches out and touches his hand. She says, “You’ve been working too long down here. You ought to get something to eat, somewhere to sleep. All this will still be here tomorrow.”
“I know it, but I just feel I ought to get it finished, you know. Just keep working, keep busy so I don’t have to think.”
“Come and get something to eat, anyhow.”
Rick is too tired to argue. He picks up the lamp and the case and follows Ella Falconer and her dog. Their mingled shadows leap around them as they walk between tiers of shelving bent by the weight of musty printed books. The dog’s claws click on the tiled floor.
“There are still pockets of fighting here and there,” the woman tells him, “but truly, it is over. We have the fusion plant and the hydroponics—we might see if we can pick anything up there tomorrow.”
“What will you do with all this stuff?”
“Set up a foundry for one thing. Anything we can’t use we’ll trade.” She holds open the door and Rick steps outside into the night. The Photonics building glimmers at the other end of the long dark lawn. The hill rises behind it, black on black. Nearby, half a dozen people hang around the back of a cushiontruck, their drunken noise almost drowning out the voice which crackles from a radio. The smell of spilled wine, sweet raw tang of marijuana smoke.
Secret Harmonies Page 32
