by John Meaney
Eating together in one corner of the refectory, after a chase-the-courier exercise through yet another simulated realspace city, he listened while Corinne criticised her own performance. ‘It’s all right for you,’ she added, ‘being a mudworlder and all, but I can’t get used to the lack of reality-shifts.’ In this morning’s scenario, that problem had led her to run into a setup from which there was no escape. Only Roger drawing off the opposition had allowed her to get away.
‘While a born Labyrinthian has the advantage,’ he told her, ‘that shifts and rotations are pure reflex. You never know where we might have to operate.’
That was true, particularly with the absence of Schenck and his renegade Pilots hanging over everything, forming a threat of unknown – therefore worrying – extent and capability. More than in previous training programmes, the classmates – other than the three who were Shipless – worked hard away from Labyrinth in their ships, addressing ship-to-ship combat as well as the more traditional Tangleknot training in stealth flying and unusual navigation.
Corinne stared down at her food.
‘I’d rather get back to my rack’ – her gaze rose – ‘to recover before the next session.’
‘You want a hand to debrief further?’
‘That’s what I’m thinking of, Blackstone.’
‘Come on, then, Delgasso. Let’s get to it.’
They summoned a fastpath together, stepped in as one, and fell out of the rotation in Corinne’s room with their garments already sloughing off, combat sensitivity serving another purpose as they wrestled each other, laughing, onto the bed.
And began the climb to temporary joy.
TEN
EARTH, 1954 AD
During her four weeks in Birmingham, the place had grown on Gavriela: the house in a leafy, genteel part of Edgbaston, and the redbrick campus court with the clock tower that would have looked at home in Florence. The buildings were different from the Munich of her childhood and the ETH in Zurich (always München and Zürich in her thoughts), yet inside, the labs brought back her youth: parquet floors, display cases filled with scientific instruments of brass and steel, textbooks old and new.
To celebrate the end of rationing, some of the faculty and postgraduate students travelled en masse to one of the new Berni Inns, where they tucked in to solid food that the haute cuisine critics disparaged but which, to poverty stricken PhD students, was worth every penny of the seven-and-six they paid for it.
‘Seven shillings and sixpence will hardly break the bank,’ Anders had said, before raising an eyebrow as he realised his faux pas, because if you were counting the ha’pennies then any expenditure at all was significant.
Gavriela’s enjoyment was spoilt only by the knowledge that her watch team were outside in the night, unable to eat, apart from the lucky team member who got to dine alone, behind a square-edged pillar, keeping her in view. But it was hard to keep her mind on Dmitri and the clandestine world, because something odd had been happening: at the age of forty-seven, she was falling in love – all over again – with physics.
The move of GCHQ from Eastcote to Cheltenham was pending, and if relocating to Gloucestershire was on the cards, then why not somewhere else? A theoretician over thirty was doomed, but age did not constrain experimentalists. Could she? What if she failed to make a change her metaphorical spirit needed?
‘—in the City?’ asked Patrick, a Jamaican post-doc with the most beautiful voice Gavriela had ever heard. ‘The archaeologists, I mean.’
Only yesterday she had passed a boarding-house in Kings Heath bearing the far-too-common sign: No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.
‘Which city? Birming-gum?’ She tried for a Brummie accent, and failed.
‘He means jolly old London,’ said Anders. ‘Threadneedle Street and bowler hats, don’t you know.’ Not that bowlers were unknown among the faculty. ‘And now a Roman temple.’
Too busy with the contents of the departmental library, Gavriela had been ignoring the newspapers; the conversation was making little sense.
‘The Temple of Mithras,’ explained Patrick. ‘Uncovered intact during building work.’
‘Next to one of the so called secret rivers, the underground Thames tributaries.’ Anders nodded to Patrick. ‘It is interesting.’ He smiled. ‘People are saying the place is haunted, a mysterious figure glimpsed at night, that kind of thing.’
But that was as far as the topic stretched among rational scientists, so Gavriela asked Patrick about his work with the new cryogenics equipment, investigating fluids that could flow by themselves unrestrained by viscosity, or conduct currents without experiencing resistance.
‘Stuff that spontaneously creeps up inside a flask,’ said Patrick. ‘Spooky weirdness at a dimension you can see.’
There were understanding nods all around, because solving Schrödinger’s wave equation was mechanical: as pragmatic practitioners, they ignored philosophical weirdness, and simply put the recipe to work, hoping that someday a new theory would bring forth a more reasonable metaphor. Counter-intuitive quantum phenomena, challenging concepts as basic as cause and effect, were unsettling in objects you could hold in your hand, although in this case you would need a massively insulated gauntlet.
After the meal, Anders gave Patrick and Gavriela a lift in his new Morris Minor – for propriety’s sake, dropping Gavriela off first. But she paused in the redbrick porch with the stained-glass panel above the front door, waiting for the Morris to drive out of sight, and her escort team to pull up at the kerb.
Only then, with her protection, did she go inside.
An empty house reveals itself by lack of vibration, but there is such a thing as self-deception, not to mention bombs and timers, so they went through the place – tonight they had been too overstretched to leave a watcher on guard – and at first found nothing. But during the second pass—
Oh, no. Don’t bring children into this.
In the bedside drawer – how had Dmitri, if it was Dmitri, known she would check there first? – she found a glossy monochrome photograph featuring a youngster and two adults, and she might have ignored it except that the schoolgirl, some eleven or twelve years old – around Carl’s age – was like her brother brought back to life: Erik’s features in feminine form.
With Ilse, Erik’s wife – widow, and it was a surprise that she had survived – standing alongside a smiling Dmitri Shtemenko, they looked like a family group. Gavriela wished she could believe it to be technical trickery on the KGB’s behalf, instead of what it seemed: Dmitri, so monstrous, in her dead brother’s place.
And Gavriela had a new family member: for niece, read hostage.
So when are you going to make your move?
But if Dmitri were intending to exert pressure on Gavriela, recruiting her for his Soviet masters, there was a way to neutralise the threat: render herself unsuitable. In operant conditioning terms she now had both positive and negative rewards awaiting, should she choose to resign: returning to her first love, and avoiding the betrayal of her adopted country.
Assuming that was Dmitri’s intent.
Term-time came and with it the end of the operation, without results, since Gavriela had said nothing of the photograph she finally burnt, an action she regretted afterwards. Back home with Carl, and with moving house inevitable even if she stayed in her current job – because of the organisation’s westward relocation – she made her decision, and went to talk to Russell Sheffield, the head of section to whom she reported.
From behind his desk, he listened to her explanation as he whittled through his unlit meerschaum with a flexible pipe-cleaner. In the past, he had often given her unused pipe-cleaners to take home for Carl: they were excellent for creating geometric framework shapes, though her attempt to explain a hypercube had been premature. Perhaps when Carl was older.
‘I found an old acquaintance working at Imperial,’ she said, ‘who’ll put in a good word for me. And they’re actively looking for researchers.’
> Lucas Krause, last seen heading off to the States with his new wife during the war, was back in London and settled down. It would be strange to have a link to her student days, all the way back to attending her first lecture and Professor Möller with the flowing white hair and the spectacular demonstration with the tall wire basket.
‘I rather considered that kind of thing myself, returning to the halls of academe’ – Sheffield looked up from his pipe-cleaning operation – ‘when I was younger.’
‘Point taken, sir.’
At least he had not insulted her by dragging out the matter of her pension, and the extent to which it might be reduced by her departing now. But she was not the only one making big decisions: the atmosphere around the place, as work-in-progress files went into archive cases for transportation to the new site, was very odd, with choppy conversations and unsettled expressions everywhere.
‘If you’re truly certain’ – he put down his pipe, stood up, and reached out across the desktop – ‘then I’ll shake your hand and wish you the best of luck, old girl.’
She stood up, and they shook.
‘You know I—’ But there was no way to complete the sentence.
‘After they kick me out of this place, I’ll be tending roses,’ said Sheffield, ‘or pushing up daisies. Certainly not good for anything else. I do believe I’m rather envious.’
Gavriela gave a sad laugh.
This was a lot like leaving home.
On her first day at Imperial, walking beneath an open window of the Royal College of Music, she heard a breath-catching rendition of a Mozart piece for string quartet. Across the road reared the dome of the Royal Albert Hall, where perhaps the students would play one day, if they hadn’t already. As for her, this was like the first day of term, a new beginning – like Carl off to school in his cap and gaberdine raincoat, satchel and plimsole bag slung from one shoulder – except that she had an old friend waiting for her in the Huxley building reception: Lucas, his once-curly hair now receded and merely wavy, controlled by hair-tonic. She could smell the Silvikrin.
‘Gabrielle.’ It was a good start, remembering not to call her Gavriela. ‘I’ll show you to your office.’
They shook hands while the porter watched, though Gavriela would rather have hugged him.
‘How’s your wife, er—?’
‘Enjoying Nebraska,’ he said. ‘Come on, we’ll drop off your coat and you can meet everyone.’
Upstairs, she found that her room was pokey, featuring a scarred desk maybe half the size of the one she had used in Eastcote, with cardboard folded beneath one leg for stability.
‘It’s wonderful,’ she said.
A stack of loose-leaf pages bore columns of figures with headings like Declination, Azimuth and Peak, along with pencil-drawn graphs.
‘Readings from the old instrumentation,’ said Lucas. ‘You’ll have plenty of your own soon enough.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Most of us really aren’t that good at stats.’ Lucas meant statistical analysis ‘Good luck on plucking meaning out of that lot, but the rest of us can’t.’
He was not really talking about the data; it was more an oblique acknowledgment of her time spent on work she could never discuss, for most of the eight years since the war, a gap she would have to fill with fiction as far as her other colleagues were concerned.
The strange thing was, as she fell asleep that night, she half-dreamed of deciphering a pattern in just such data, though not now, not yet: something do with meson detection and an equilateral triangle that could not be explained, yet neither could it be ignored. An insight she would keep to herself . . . A comforting thought, as she drifted further into sleep.
Secrecy kept her safe.
ELEVEN
LUNA, 503970 AD
Crystalline and serene, Roger and Gavriela held hands as they stared up at the crimson-banded disc of Earth. To him it was the species’ birthplace, an ancestral home, but she had been born and lived her organic life there, half a million years ago.
—What do you think is going to happen, Roger?
—I’ve long given up trying to read Kenna’s mind.
Kenna had told them, pleased that they were here at this time together, that something interesting was about to occur, and they might like to view it from one of the many balconies. And so they had come outside, watching from mid-way up the titanic, complex palace that their headquarters had become over hundreds of millennia. In the beginning, electro-magnetic distortion fields had hidden the place, but for a long time, according to Kenna, there had been no need to hide.
No explanation embellished that item of information, and Roger and Gavriela knew better than to ask, because there were severe limits on such knowledge as could be taken into the past to their original minds, despite such thoughts being buried beneath layers of amnesia and misdirection, unavailable to their long-dead conscious selves.
They both remembered what Kenna had told Roger a century earlier.
—This is not the first Ragnarok Council.
—If we’re the second, what happened to the others?
—They perished in paradox. I will not allow you to fall that way.
Silver discs were growing on the planet’s surface, thirteen of them fully or partly visible, covering land or sea without distinction, then stabilising as unmoving dots.
Kenna stepped onto the balcony.
—The Diaspora has been a long time coming. Its execution is fast.
Gavriela asked:
—Humanity’s leaving Earth?
—You could say that.
Whatever craft they used would be invisible from here.
—And do Pilots like Roger still exist?
—I dare not learn the answer to that myself.
Roger was about to ask a question concerning the future, but Kenna forestalled him.
—We should wait a century for things to settle. Perhaps two centuries.
—Before doing what?
Starlight reflections painted Kenna’s crystal smile.
—Making Earth ready for the warriors to come. Our very own Einherjar.
They were perfectly adapted to vacuum; yet Roger and Gavriela shivered.
Perhaps a part of them had hoped that Ragnarökkr could yet be avoided.
TWELVE
VIJAYA ORBIT, 2604 AD
Since its construction in the decades following first contact with the Haxigoji, the orbital called Vachss Station had become a floating city, kept in geosynch orbit above Mintberg (once Mint City, its renaming a xenosemantic subtlety), one of the hubs of global Haxigoji culture. Up here in orbit, the architecture was a complex embellishment of the station’s original cage-like design, with polyhedral nodes, some the size of a single cabin, others the size of a thousand-room hotel, linked by giant spars, some of which were important thoroughfares, their corridors busy. Much of it glittered gold, due to the use of an exotic 2-D sulphur allotrope in its construction.
Everyone said the Haxigoji were a fine species, which was an anthropomorphic slant on things: their behaviour paralleled the best of human virtues, even the self-sacrificing pain involved in child-rearing, in the passing-on of knowledge. Only the manner of that sharing disconcerted human observers.
‘I find cannibalism hard to swallow,’ Jed said in Spanalian.
He was in his control cabin, on slow approach to the orbital, its image rendered in sharp-contrast chiaroscuro in the holoramic display. A secondary volume showed Clara’s face, her expression neutral. She was on board the orbital, having made things ready. Waiting for him.
‘Spanalian is not the only human language that talks about digesting knowledge,’ she said. ‘And while Faraday used the concept of “field” as a metaphor to help understand electro-magnetic phenomena, Einstein said that physicists of his day “imbibed the concept with their mother’s milk”, considering fields as real things.’
‘You’re saying Einstein was one of the Haxigoji? Never saw antlers in any of the ol
d holos.’
‘Food absorption, potentiation at the molecular level, and neural connection formation: it’s all biochemistry, and languages reflect that. Metaphor from intuition. The human brain is basically a structured lump of fat.’ Still no trace of a smile. ‘Some more so than others, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I have no idea why I put up with this,’ said Jed.
‘Because you love me.’
He looked at her lean, endurance-athlete features in the holo. Now she was smiling.
‘That must be it, then,’ he said.
‘Good.’ For a second, they stared at each other. ‘All right, we’re ready to receive them both. Check their autodoc status?’
Still lightly conjoined with his ship, Jed knew the answer without checking the tertiary holo floating beside him: like bodily sensations, he felt the signals inside the passenger hold.
‘Check,’ he said. ‘Both passengers fine and healthy, the autodocs say.’
‘Healthy.’
‘Yeah, until they wake up and remember everything.’
‘Shit,’ said Clara.
Never mind all that stuff about fields and metaphors and cannibals, keeping them occupied while the on-station facilities made themselves ready. This was the Clara that Jed had fallen in love with: hard-edged, with the kind of practical compassion only a tough person can possess.
Station management gave Pilots a great deal of leeway – the orbital’s total dependence made that a given – which they usually made little use of; but today, several tunnels were closed ‘for maintenance’ to allow Jed and the two autodocs to pass unhindered, all the way to the on-station Pilots Sanctuary. In comparison to the set-up he had enjoyed on Fulgor, the elegant walled enclosure on the edge of Lucis City, this Sanctuary would be utilitarian, but never mind: this was no holiday.
