To Hold Infinity

by John Meaney

  Ha! Thanks, Mother, but I'm not a warrior. I'm the one who hid away when the school bullies were around. Who resigned and fled to another world when the pressure of work grew too great.

  Not a warrior.

  Dhana and Brevan were back in the cabin. He had no way of communicating with them—No. That was not true. The lab system was linked to the cabin. But if he went back inside, he was trapped in a building with only one way in or out.

  Move.

  On hand and knees—crawling, very brave—he reached the door, rolled through the membrane.

  Get to the lab.

  He rushed inside, tugged off his resp-mask, and thumbed the tiny terminal into life. An out-reaching gesture, with his gel-covered hands: a comms request.

  “Not authorized to function.”

  Damn.

  He did not have time to hack this bloody closed system. Why hadn't he done it earlier, when he had the chance?

  Why didn't his damned mindware make itself useful?

  Nothing.

  A scraping sound, from outside.

  Desperately, fingers flickering, he broke through into system management, found a shared notepad-function.

  Outside, a voice barked an order, the words indistinct.

  “Agrazzi raiders.” Tetsuo's voice was an urgent whisper. “Get out. Now.”

  He stabbed with his forefinger. If one of the cabin's terminals was active, his message would pop up as voice and text.

  A brush of fabric against a wall, instantly stopped.

  He had to get out of here.

  Backing away, he found himself among low rows of vats. A soft susurration, like distant breathing, filled the room. Fumes stung his nose, and he slapped his respmask back on.

  A shadow slipped past the doorway.

  Crouching down, Tetsuo duck-walked between the benches. At the rear of the lab, a ramp led downwards.

  Dead end.

  Moving quickly, he descended the ramp. In the closed cavern, the rock pool lay, brown and stagnant. Beneath the surface, dark shadows swam among fronds of underwater vegetation.

  He glanced back. From the lab, the slapping sound of running footsteps.

  Tetsuo crouched down, took a deep breath, and rolled softly over, into the pool without a splash. Murky water swallowed him up.

  A heavy funereal silence lay like a shroud upon the great ruined house.

  Yoshiko, walking along the hushed, damaged corridors, counted six sealed medical drones, scattered among various rooms. Each drone held someone who was critically injured, but not so badly that it was better to risk a flight to a med-centre. While the drones worked furiously within their blank carapaces, families and attendant medics waited. Relatives looked up with dead eyes as Yoshiko walked past.

  A small inspection team of engineers passed by, talking quietly among themselves. Most of their colleagues had left some time ago.

  There were hardly any proctors to be seen. No doubt drones had been left, surveilling the house and grounds. Perhaps the SatScan system, which people kept mentioning, would be used to keep a watchful eye from orbit.

  In the central atrium, one young proctor stood. He looked about eighteen years old.

  Rafael. Did you really cause all this?

  Yoshiko looked around in a drawing room, searching cracked tables and an overturned sideboard, until she found a palm terminal. She fetched it out to the young proctor left on duty, so he could order food or drink.

  He nodded his thanks.

  “Were you here last night?” Stupid question: his face was drawn and pale, etched with fatigue.

  “Yeah.” He swallowed. “It was awful.”

  “Have you had any sleep?”

  He smiled wanly. “I was ordered to take a few hours out, in some quarters we commandeered down that corridor. But—”

  “I know. Me neither.” Up close, Yoshiko could see how reddened his eyes were. “Was anyone you know among the, ah, injured?”

  “Yeah, Malerdy. He was my classmate at the academy.” He swallowed again. “Got hit by a chunk of falling wall.”

  My God. Young men, with their lives ahead of them, experiencing this.

  “Is he going to be all right?”

  “I'm not sure.” His voice was bleak.

  “It was a terrible thing.” Yoshiko let out a shaky breath. “You're right there, my friend.”

  His face grew grim. “Damn things are supposed to have safeties.”

  “The holoprojectors? Yes, I know.” In her mind's eye, Yoshiko could see Lori carving that magnificent statue of Diana the Huntress. “I guess it flipped into an abnormal mode of operation.”

  He was silent for a moment, then he shook his head.

  “I studied holoprocessor tech at the academy.” He bit his lip. “It's supposed to cut out in a medical emergency. And I never saw anyone have a fit like that before, either. Didn't think Luculenti—” The emphasis was bitter. “—suffered from that kind of thing.”

  “No.” Yoshiko was thoughtful. “You would think neurological disorders were cured by their implant tech, wouldn't you?”

  The young proctor shrugged.

  “Some kind of feedback from the array when it blew. Hardware failure. Would you believe it? That's what they're saying.”

  “Oh,” said Yoshiko. “I see.”

  “Million-to-one chance. No one's fault.”

  She knew that look in his eye: the stunned certainty of mortality. She had seen the look in her own reflection, but this boy was far too young to have to deal with that reality.

  All youngsters—bursting with vitality, like Vin—think unconsciously that they will live forever, and that's a true and honest part of life's cycle. They should not be confronted with its inescapable demise. Not while their dreams are still forming.

  This young man's dreams would be nightmares, for a long time to come.

  “Take care,” she said.

  He nodded, thoughts turned already inwards.

  Earlier, an older proctor had informed Yoshiko that the forensic sweep was finished, and she had ordered the domestic drones to begin the clean-up.

  Now, she no longer had to pick her way among piles of rubble to reach the ballroom's main entrance, though the great bronze doors remained bent and battered.

  The ballroom's floor was gleaming marble once more. The rubble gone, smashed flagstones replaced or repaired with femtotech construction. Clouds were reflected in the shining surface, criss-crossed with black shadows: monomer filaments still held up the walls.

  More of the domed roof was gone. Unsafe segments had been cut away.

  The house drones might be able to throw a smartfilm across the gaping hole. Perhaps she should log on, at least check whether rain was due. There should be some sort of cover, she thought, before night fell.

  Night. Another night—

  Glancing ruefully at her tu-rings—they still glowed dull orange, unable to interface with Skein—she activated her wrist terminal.

  The sun shone brightly from Hermes's copper helmet, and his ankle wings fluttered gaily.

  Curling her finger, Yoshiko saw the message was from Maggie, and she touched the icon and watched it unfurl.

  “Hi, Yoshiko.” A starburst grew into being beside the image of Maggie's head. “The item's on InfoBurst Five, if you want to see. It hit the NewsNets as soon as I sent it.”

  The starburst was a link to the news item.

  Yoshiko stared at it, then looked up at the torn roof, screwing up her courage. Could she bear to see last night's tragedy again?

  When attacked, a warrior steps forwards. Sensei's words.

  Her fingertip pierced the icon.

  Black, and freezing. Vision was a cold blurring of light.

  Smartgel covered his eyes: protection, but no visibility, not in these opaque waters.

  Don't breathe.

  A tiny flood of silver bubbles escaped his resp-mask, and streamed to the surface.

  It's not designed for this. Not enough dissolved 02.


  A shadow rippled over the pool. A man's arm?

  Distant murmuring. Voices? The water's lapping obscured all sound.

  Broken shadows. People, looking into the pool.

  Holding tightly to cold, slippery rock. Keep still.

  His head began to pound.

  A tiny beep sounded, inside his mask. He pressed the mask to negate the request, hoping his movement could not be seen.

  Can't risk it.

  The mask wanted to flip into short-term emergency mode, electrolysing the water. The rush of expelled hydrogen would be a giveaway.

  Headache.

  Getting harder to breathe.

  A wheeze overlaying every intake of breath.

  Temples pounding.

  Vision growing dark.

  Something touched his cheek.

  Don't—

  Tendrils, exploring.

  —move. For God's sake.

  Something soft crawled across his hand.

  Just don't bloody move.

  Blackness falling.

  In perfect synchrony, a hundred revellers danced their intricate steps.

  A FourSpeak secondary tesseract described the cultural history of the Sun-Wheel Dance, performed annually for a hundred years at the moment of the sun's greatest distance from Fulgor. In other volumes, text and phase-space diagrams provided an engineering analysis of the building's collapse—Yoshiko glanced around her, at the real ruined ballroom—while the central, metre-wide display, showed the dancers, and Xanthia's collapse.

  Blog-cubes of well-known personalities. Mayor Neliptha Machella, black and elegant. Network diagrams estimated the political impact of her death.

  White light burst through the central display, and the roof collapsed. Yoshiko's tiny figure failed to rescue Vin.

  There was no quasi-sentient AI with Maggie's face to answer questions—not up to science-documentary standard—but the audio voice-overs were in her familiar tones.

  Death.

  “Replay.”

  Yoshiko watched it through again, her face like stone. Watched, until the end.

  “Again.”

  Blossoming scarlet, Vin's temple.

  “Again.”

  Sight almost gone now.

  Desperate, mouth dry, sucking from the failing resp-mask.

  Cold, dark waters, calling him.

  Like frozen claws, his fingers hooked beneath the rock, holding him down.

  Hold on.

  The darkness was pressing down, the cold seeping in, as his jumpsuit's heaters failed. Losing energy: the energy for chemical reactions, the processes which made a mind, a soul.

  Laughable.

  Yeah, laugh. Cry. Whatever. Just hang on.

  Fingers like frozen claws.

  Here he was, a pitiable organism descended from the bacterial sea and the aquatic transparent unicellular life of a distant fragment of a far star, half dead and about to give up his molecules to sustain more life but there it was again, crawling across his face, don't move or they'll shoot you—ignore it—then sudden pain lanced through him.

  Biting his ear.

  Panicking, he pulled the wriggling thing away from him, wrenched it sharply away, tried to slam it against the rock but the resistance slowed him and it slipped away.

  He thrashed, struggling, losing track of which way was up.

  For God's sake, stay down.

  Shocking cold against his cheek: water, inside his resp-mask.

  Move.

  “Up, up.

  This way?

  Cold air.

  Slippery rock, but his grip held and he hauled himself upwards, using both hands now. He slipped but caught again, and then he was lying half out of the water, gasping for breath, coughing as acrid fumes burned his lungs.

  He resealed his resp-mask.

  Air slicing into his lungs and hurting like hell, but the pain was a gift. Life. He lay there, trembling, until he could raise his head.

  Nobody there.

  No armed Agrazzi waited by the pool with grasers trained on him as he emerged—No one. Only the wet slapping sounds of water, and his own harsh breathing.

  It was awful.

  The extended coverage showed the victims—Yoshiko recognized Felice Lectinaria, the Luculenta biologist—limping or being carried by drones to the profusion of emergency flyers.

  Felice did not look badly injured. Yoshiko, remembering that they had been due to talk privately later that night, shook her head.

  She let the cube play through. Peripheral displays covered scenes of tragedy and occasional triumph as bare-handed heroes of the moment dug bloody victims from the rubble. Dawn, the lynxette, crawled out, and rubbed her whiskers against the image-Yoshiko's face.

  Another Yoshiko caught Vin again: always, always too late.

  She looked away.

  A flash of white.

  “Stop.” She pointed to a small cube off to one side. “Current thread. Magnify by ten. Replay from origin.”

  From a corridor just off the main atrium, medics pulled a twisted figure from the wreckage, its once-elegant white suit now stained and tattered. The hat was gone, the dead man's hair in grey disarray.

  Sylvester Stargonier.

  They had moved his flyer. Brevan had told him that.

  Even if he could make his way back to Nether Canyon, there was no way out of here.

  His damned ear was stinging like hell.

  Hide. Run. Fight.

  What to do?

  He tried to slow his racing heartbeat. Can we think logically here? Just try.

  Hiding and running suffered the same disadvantages. If the Agrazzi knew of him, they would hunt him down regardless. If they didn't, but he couldn't find his flyer, he would die of starvation, possibly thirst.

  I'm scared.

  Scared, scared, scared.

  He remembered that big bugger Morio in the schoolyard on Okinawa, forearm pressed across Tetsuo's throat until he handed over all his lunch, and the sudden exploding pain in his stomach and the ground coming up to meet him and the belated realization that Morio had kicked him anyway, just because he felt like it.

  I am not a brave man.

  No one who knew Tetsuo could ever have accused him of bravery, or recklessness. So what was he doing?

  It was as though someone else was moving Tetsuo's body, and he just did not care. The head-high cupboards opened at his gesture.

  Each reagent container bore a tiny display: contents, graphic of molecular structures, concentrations, hazard warnings. He read them through twice, carefully.

  Not brave.

  Fighting was stupid, got you hurt. Had he not learned that? It got you thumped in the head, where you actually lived. Risking your brain, opposing mindless violence, when the struggle never mattered in the final analysis.

  While his thoughts were running, his hands continued to move.

  He pulled down four heavy containers of liquid reagents, moving quickly. Another cupboard held empty flasks, and he chose six of them—five blue, one red, to avoid confusion.

  Displays flickered as he poured. Precisely calibrated volumes, despite his shaking hands.

  When every flask was half full, Tetsuo took a sphere of smartgel sealant from the cupboard, tore off half a dozen tiny blobs, and dropped one into each of the flasks. Each blob melted into a thin layer across the liquid's surface.

  Getting there.

  Terminal. Where was the terminal?

  Ghostly fingers round his throat. Morio's fingers. Strength draining from Tetsuo's muscles. Open-handed slap: Morio's hand smacking into Tetsuo's head. Vision swimming, ear stinging…

  Concentrate.

  As he retrieved the terminal, he tentatively touched his ear. No blood. The pain of the bite was fading.

  Careful.

  He poured the last reagent, a complex acid, into the six flasks. Gently, so that the smartgel film remained unbroken. Then he closed the red flask, fastened it.

  He thumbed the terminal pad.

/>   “Smartgel compile: distribute.” The microwave opcodes should reach only the gel in the open blue flasks, not the red. “Time limit: thirty minutes.”

  Shut down the terminal, closed the flasks.

  Thirty minutes, before each smartgel film ravelled up into its original shape, allowing the reagents to mix.

  Not a brave man.

  All he needed now was to place them where they would do the most good. Looking around, he spotted a black and silver scarf lying on a small stool. Dhana's, left here from her last work shift.

  When attacked, the warrior steps forwards.

  He unfolded the scarf on the bench, carefully stood all six flasks on top of it, then gathered up the scarf's four corners, enclosing the flasks, and tied the ends together with a simple knot.

  Still afraid.

  His hands were very nervous as he lifted the whole bundle from the workbench.

  But, this time, I won't let that stop me.

  Was it the mindware which granted him confidence?

  It didn't matter. Mindware or circumstances, the effect was the same. His life was undergoing a sea-change, here among his newfound friends, and he was not going to allow anyone to hurt them.

  The flasks shifted as he slung the makeshift bag over his shoulder, and sweat sprang out across his forehead.

  Step forwards. Into the eye of the storm.

  Move.

  Perhaps she was mistaken.

  She touched the display with her palm, freezing it, and pointed for a biographical link. The elegantly smiling face of Sylvester Stargonier appeared. Beside it, text unfurled.

  Current status: deceased.

  “Zap playback. Main display.”

  Stargonier, too, was gone. Stargonier, with his admirable, frostily elegant style.

  Yoshiko wondered why Stargonier had risked going into the house, when he could have walked from the aviary directly outside and gone straight home.

  The wistfulness in his voice, when he suggested that Yoshiko and Maggie rejoin the party. Envy?

  Hermes interrupted her thoughts. The cherub-faced icon was an annoyance; she would have to change the system settings—

  Black-on-black eyes. Young, narrow face.

  “I'm Pilot Noviciate Edralix Corsdavin.” The young Pilot, his manner deferential. “Perhaps you remember me?”