by John Meaney
Rafael disappeared, along with all the other holo cubes.
Gone.
“Shit!” Maggie looked angry.
“What happened?”
“I don't know.”
“Command: house system, initial display.”
Nothing happened.
“Probably the engineers, damn it.” Maggie pinched the bridge of her nose, then drank some more daistral, obviously not tasting it. “Brought the whole damn system—Oh, look. There we are.”
“Your previous interaction ended abnormally,” the faux-Lori's voice informed them. “Do you wish to recover the previous session?”
“Yes.”
The string of holo cubes reappeared.
As before, Maggie pointed at the third one in the row.
Dancers whirled in cruciform configuration. Maggie gestured, and the display twisted, focussed on bare marble floor, a pillar's base.
“Yoshiko—”
Jump. The image jumped back in time, restarted. Spinning dancers, Luculenti feet stamping authoritatively in time, the blinding white pillar of light, then a sickening moment as the viewpoint flew rapidly round the ballroom's periphery, passing through the ghostlike figures of onlookers, through a miniature of Yoshiko herself.
“Give me all object rights to the video logs, Yoshiko. Right now.”
Yoshiko did not argue. “Command: grant Maggie Brown, this physical location, all rights to current video objects.”
“Authorities granted,” said the system in Lori's voice.
The music climaxed and every dancer fell to one knee and Xanthia was gripped by some impossible agony.
“Command: download current objects.” Maggie pressed her wrist terminal.
Tiny Luculenti, running to help Xanthia, were impaled on beams of scarlet light, and fell.
“What's going on?”
Once more, Xanthia flung up her arms and white light burst brilliantly into being.
“Got it.” Maggie's voice was grim, as she indicated her bracelet. “Saved the coverage as it is now. Bastards can't edit it any more on me.”
“Edit it?”
“Yeah, watch.”
Maggie froze the display, moved the timestamp back to the moment when a white shaft of light erupted into being, and froze it again. Then she took the viewpoint in a long, slow trawl around the ballroom.
There was no sign of Rafael.
“Who? Who could get into the house system?”
“Well, there aren't many possibilities.” Maggie looked grim. “The proctors?”
“I don't know.”
“Or Rafael? He looked like he might have some tricks up his sleeve.”
Rafael.
“Perhaps.”
“Well, I'll tell you one thing.” Maggie crossed her arms, and leaned back. “Everyone else was either frozen in terror, or running for dear life. Whatever he was up to, it wasn't either of those things.”
“No,” said Yoshiko slowly. “I'd have to agree with you there.”
“Right.” Maggie's tone became brisk. “I'll start editing the copy I have left, ready to hit the NewsNets in depth. What do you reckon?”
“Yes. Good move.”
Maggie got to work then, while Yoshiko watched, feeling useless.
After a while, the lynxette, Dawn, stirred on the bed. Yoshiko realized she had been curled up on it asleep.
Rubbing her gritty eyes, Yoshiko used the bedside terminal to order feline food. When the food arrived, the lynxette jumped down, sniffed at the bowl on the drone's back, then leaped back up onto the bed, curled round, and went straight to sleep.
Maggie looked up, snorted with laughter, then got back to her work.
Yoshiko flicked the bedside terminal back on.
Blue. Shifting patterns of unbelievable complexity: a raw and alien beauty, as unknowable yet alluring as whalesong.
The Luculentus mind.
The look in Rafael's eyes, when he had seen the image from the doorway. Was that look an artefact of her own shock, of memory distortion?
She shook her head. She had seen it, the sudden black anger rising inside him. The cold calculation. Though Yoshiko was confused in a strange culture, shocked and injured and in dire need of sleep, she was not hallucinating.
“Command mode,” she said. “Request real-time call to Luculenta Xanthia Delaggropos.”
“That ident is not currently available. Do you wish to log a message?”
“No. End command mode.”
Maggie frowned at the interruption, but said nothing.
Mail status. Icon: incoming h-mail. Lori must have set up some regular link to EveryWare, checking for messages.
The icon unfurled. Eric Rasmussen's head and shoulders appeared in the display.
“Hi, Prof.” A broad, red-bearded grin. “Just thought I'd let you know—I've got a fair amount of leave saved up, and we station crew get to hitch a ride real cheap.” He hesitated. “Er—I'll be on Fulgor in a day or two: mail me at this handle. Oh, yeah. Did I mention about diving being better than freefall? How about buying a couple of snorkels, or decent resp-masks?” Despite the confident tone, the colour was rising in his cheeks. “Er—Endit.”
Eric.
Yoshiko flicked the display into oblivion.
She stared at the wall, seeing nothing.
“Looks like you got a friend.” Maggie glanced sidelong at Yoshiko, before continuing her work.
“I guess so.”
“Was he coming on too strong?”
“I'm a bit surprised. I barely know him. It's—nice of him to call.”
“You don't have to sound so pleased about it. There.” Maggie grunted, giving a thumbs-up gesture to finalize the editing. “Done it.”
She leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms, and Yoshiko could hear her joints popping.
“Drink?” Yoshiko asked.
“Yeah—Wait. What time is it? Bloody hell, it's morning.”
“You've been at this through the night.”
“Well, yeah, I guess I have. God, I have to go.”
“You should rest.”
“Gotta go.” Maggie shook her head. “I need to see Jason, make sure he's not worried, though the staff at Xanthia's house can take good care of him. Actually, the house itself is quite capable of looking after him—”
“Oh, no.”
“Yeah, quite.” Maggie looked bleak. “What am I going to tell Amanda? I don't even know if the poor kid's mother is still alive.”
“Xanthia's ident is unavailable for calls.” Yoshiko bit her lip. “Still doesn't mean—”
“Doesn't look good, though.”
“No, it doesn't. Look, the proctors will have been to see Amanda. Other Luculenti.”
“Probably,” said Maggie. “But I've still got to go.”
“Yes, of course.”
Yoshiko stood up stiffly. Maggie almost staggered as she levered herself upright. Together they went out of the room and took the corridor through now-familiar debris to the central atrium.
A phalanx of small blue maintenance drones was waiting at the edge of the foyer, ready to clear away the rubble. Yoshiko would have to check with someone in charge, before giving the drones permission to proceed.
Maggie stopped a young proctor, who looked half dead with exhaustion.
“Any chance of a lift back to Lucis?” she asked. “To save me getting a taxi?”
“Uh, sure.” His voice was heavy with lack of sleep. “There's a flyer just leaving.” He pointed out the doorway. “If you rush, I'll tell them to wait for you.”
“Done.” Maggie gave Yoshiko a quick hug, and kissed her cheek.
They looked at each other wordlessly, then Maggie nodded and hurried out, and down the steps. The young proctor spoke into his comm-ring, telling the flyer crew to wait for a minute, they had an extra passenger.
Maggie waved from the flyer door, a small figure, then disappeared inside. Yoshiko watched the flyer depart, feeling very small and old and alone.
Glass and ceramics crunched beneath her feet as she walked through the foyer and into the ruin that had so recently been a magnificent ballroom, full of happiness and cheer.
It was open to the sky, and bitterly cold. Predawn cast dark green streaks across the heavens, and the slender monomer strands were stark black against the coming morning. Here and there a drone slowly crawled, a small grey friendly shape, but the silence was absolute.
She had no tears.
Her breathing felt thick, despite the clear, cold air. Despair lay upon her, bowing her shoulders with its weight.
Empty, empty inside.
No tears at all. Nothing.
Numb, numb, numb.
Rafael enjoyed dying.
He walked with a light, bouncing step, almost floating, from his flyer to his Lucis town house. Inside, he summoned a couch to rise from the floor, lay back, and put his feet up.
Ah, Xanthia.
He loved to relive the moments of his deaths. Though Xanthia's body might—or might not—be physically functioning, her brain had been randomized when his infiltration code invoked the deepscan routines, and she had died even as her thoughts and memories were replicated into his cache.
Worshipful Luculenti dancers, all subordinating their kinaesthetic senses and motor control to her/his wishes. Yes, Xanthia had been his kind of woman. He felt the dancers all around her/him. Closing his eyes, he began to replay the whole Sun-Wheel Dance in exquisite stereo, with his Rafael-body and Xanthia-body perceptions overlapped and mingled, giving gorgeous depth to the whole experience.
She/he stood at the darkened ballroom's entrance, feeling the headdress's weight, the gown's soft folds. Deep in command interface with the projector array, she/he caused twin lines of lambent blue flames to lick across the shadowed marble floor, awaiting her/his entrance.
Accompanied by sweet young Luculentae girls, she/he made her/his appearance, slowly walking between the flames. All around, a spellbound audience in the darkness, tiny blue sparks of distant light—
He froze.
Damn it! Those tiny blue lights were not part of Xanthia's illusion.
He was a fool.
He had been so enraptured by Xanthia, so drawn to her, that he had failed to realize those sapphire sparks were the house system's scan signs, not stars created by Xanthia's wonderful imagination.
Immediately, he shifted into Skein—
No.
He withdrew, knowing it was too late. If the evidence had been already spotted by proctor techs, then they were lying in wait for outside interference. If not, then he still dared not try access via Skein, where LuxPrime techs could possibly, if they and their AIs dug deeply and cleverly enough, find audit trails of his accessing the house system remotely.
Perhaps if he went back to the Maximilian estate, so he could use short-range fast-comm access to the house video logs, not involving Skein—But the surveillance now might be so tight that even he might fall to erase all his traces.
Think.
Let's see. If he had been recorded in the video logs, how would he appear? Frozen? Joyful? Perhaps he could fake a medical history: some quasi-epileptic condition that might fit. Something normally controllable, but not cured by LuxPrime mindware.
A dangerous ploy: a deep medical scan would reveal his links to a plexcore nexus two orders of magnitude greater than normal. The alternative was to play a passive game, to wait and see if the proctors would come to him.
A frisson of fear ran light fingers up his back.
Delicious.
The game was becoming interesting.
It was now twenty-four hours since Yoshiko had woken up and performed her early morning training on the lawn, eager and fearful of the evening ahead.
The lynxette, Dawn, was tucked up on Yoshiko's bed in the loaf-of-bread position, eyes squeezed tightly shut.
Yoshiko let out a long, slow breath. Her eyes were gritty with lack of sleep—but she could not face the inevitable dreams to come.
Old, old, old.
Outside, it was not yet fully light. The still-unfamiliar length of the day, something over twenty-seven hours, wasn't going to help her readjust.
She waved open a cupboard space, to reveal her naginata and holoprocessor, both in their carry-cases, and the gym bag containing her other training gear. Tiredly, she rubbed her eyes.
In her youth, thirty, forty years ago, if she had pulled an all-nighter, she would still work out the following day as energetically as if she had had a full night's sleep. Not this time. That was all too long ago.
At Yoshiko's age, daily training was a habit—beating back the twin dragons of laziness and despair, fighting them a day at a time—or else you didn't work out at all. But you had to be sensible about it.
Despite the inhibitors which were killing all pain in her left arm and the cast which was supporting it, her arm was not OK: it was still healing up inside. She should rest. That would be the sensible thing.
Sensible.
What, truly, in this strange and wonderful universe, constitutes appropriate behaviour?
Slowly, she slid off the loose black suit and the scarlet blouse—rumpled now, and quite inelegant—and tossed them across the chair which Maggie had been sitting on.
She took the gym bag from the cupboard, pulled out a leotard, and put it on.
Then she began to stretch slowly, painfully, her mind too tired to think at all.
Turning back to the gym bag, she examined the magbracelets for power training, put them back in, and instead took out a folded black-hooded jumpsuit. She shook it out, then pulled it on.
The suit formed integral boots and gloves, and she pulled the hood up so that it covered all her face except around the eyes. Then she picked up the naginata in her injured hand and the heavy holoprocessor in the other, and went outside.
Emergency workers stared at this strange figure as she walked out through the atrium, but she ignored them.
She went far out across the lawns—faintly silver beneath the burgeoning dawn—out where they melted into the black shadows, by a long stand of tall trees. She placed the projector down on the long grass, and powered it up. For now, she left the naginata in its case.
Kneeling, sitting back on her heels, she waited.
He came murderously fast.
Her shadow opponent launched a lethal open-hand strike to her neck but she caught the wrist—her suit's inducting fibres perfectly simulating physical contact—and rose to one knee, blending with the attack, entering the centre of the motion, becoming the pivot of his movement, and then her attacker was flat on the ground and she was striking the back of his neck.
Ippon. Killing blow.
Again and again he attacked. One blow after another, which Yoshiko avoided and redirected and finished with deadly force, until her breath was painful fire and her limbs turned into heavy lead.
Tired. So tired now.
Pink and gold and beautiful green, and the sweet fresh smell of morning.
Concentrate.
An onlooker would have thought her proficient, but only Yoshiko knew how off-centre and unfocussed she was in her practice. Concentrate. An old sensei's voice in her head: Become the very centre of the attack, the heart of the storm, and you will find true peace.
Then the attacker grabbed her left wrist, tugging her off-balance, but agony shot through her broken arm, breaking the pain inhibitors’ effect.
Yoshiko screamed.
She screamed as she whipped her knee into his thigh, seeing Rafael's face in her shadow opponent as she struck his throat and he fell and lay still.
Breathing heavily, she stepped back and waved the simulation into oblivion.
Rafael.
Other than pushing people aside last night, she had never used her skills outside dojo or shiai area, outside training hall or competition mat. Never had she fought in deadly earnest; never attacked a human being without control.
“Rafael.”
Her voice was pitiless,
hard and clear in the dawn's soft air.
It takes courage, my son, to move forwards into the eye of the storm.
Tetsuo stood on the research station's balcony, breathing peacefully, and watched the sun's rays strike the opposite rim of the canyon, painting the sandstone peach and gold. Even through his resp-mask, the morning air was crisp and cold.
He felt good.
The warrior, when attacked, steps forwards.
His mother's words, brought clearly back to him by a trick of memory. Perhaps he was getting old.
Would she despise him, for doing this now, not decades ago? It was not unusual for people approaching middle age to reconsider their health. Back home on Okinawa, half his contemporaries were probably downloading personal-trainer AIs from EveryWare.
Or would Mother congratulate him?
Sweat was drying into him as his jumpsuit's fabric attempted to compensate for his exertions. It had been a nice easy jog along the canyon from the cabin, but he had finished with something like a sprint up the steep trail to the dome. That had been hard, and for a while he had thought he was going to die, but now the endorphin high was on him and everything was fine.
Why did those particular words of Mother's come back to him now? He was working out—by his standards, anyway—but there was no danger. Everything was quite peaceful here.
Less stressful than his previous way of life, for sure. It did not need courage to abandon his old career: it took only common sense.
Perhaps some good had come of this, after all.
He leaned on the balcony wall, enjoying the rough feel of it even through the thin layer of smartgel which covered his hands, enjoying the sheer physical sensations of being alive.
All those years when he had turned away from Mother's path and mocked the futility of bushido training. Now—Perhaps, soon, he could send her an h-mail. Apologize, arrange another trip. For all of them: Mother, Akira, and his wife, Kumiko.
Movement.
Among the rocks. Shadows, in a narrow defile.
Raiding party?
Heart pounding, his overworked thighs trembling, Tetsuo sank down out of sight behind the balcony wall. People—he had not seen how many—were coming down the opposite side of the canyon. Agrazzi. Somehow, he was sure of it.
The warrior, when attacked, steps forwards.
