by John Meaney
Jed, along with his colleagues Angus and Al, had destroyed that other Sanctuary’s systems before getting clear of the place when the planet fell, but the superstructure would have remained intact. Now any humans on Fulgor were components of the global gestalt Anomaly. He wondered if they used the buildings, or stood about outdoors in herds, uncaring of physical comfort.
Ants in a group mind. Cells in a body.
The Vachss Station Sanctuary entrance folded inwards, and the two autodocs slid inside, Jed following. As things sealed up behind him, the welcoming committee came forward: Clara, not huggable while working, with her boss Pavel Karelin, plus a hatchet-faced woman unknown to Jed.
‘Dr Sapherson will be on hand as we wake them up,’ said Pavel. ‘Tannier has already been conscious for a period after leaving Molsin, so we’ll do him first.’
‘And the other?’ Jed placed a hand on the autodoc.
‘You talked to Leeja Rigelle, not to mention rescuing her. Perhaps yours should be the first face she sees.’
‘I’d only just said hello when everything went to hell. There’s no actual, er, relationship. Although she was more than friendly with Roger.’
‘Friendliness is good.’ The tiny muscles of Clara’s face moved when she smiled.
‘This Roger—’ began Sapherson.
‘Not available,’ said Pavel.
Clara looked satisfied at the way he cut Sapherson off. No love lost, then.
‘We’ll tell Leeja Rigelle, when she wakes up,’ said Clara, ‘that Roger sent his love. Wishes he could be here, sort of thing.’
Sapherson said, ‘Why reassure her? The more off-balance she is, the easier she’ll be to question.’
‘She’s not a prisoner,’ said Pavel.
Clara stared at Sapherson with loathing.
‘I’ll make myself scarce,’ said Jed. ‘Just in case some of that classified stuff comes up, things I’m not meant to know.’
‘Yeah,’ said Clara, still focused on Sapherson. ‘That might be best. When people learn a little too much, it doesn’t always turn out well.’
Sapherson looked away.
I am so not going to ask.
Jed headed for an inner doorway, hoping that the on-board systems could produce a decent cup of daistral.
‘Leeja thought Tannier was a bad influence,’ said Clara later, when she and Jed were sitting up in bed together, drinking daistral. ‘When they met first, that is. Tough cop, getting Roger into trouble. But she’s beginning to mellow towards him. To Tannier.’
‘And her world being destroyed? How did she cope with that?’
‘Ah, not well,’ said Clara. ‘Not well at all.’
They hugged, side by side, careful with the daistral, thinking of all the ways the universe could rip people apart from each other.
‘I’m glad I found you.’ Jed kissed her ear.
‘That’s just what I was going to say.’
‘You want to know how glad?’
She smiled, putting down her drink.
‘Show me, show me.’
Pavel and Sapherson departed the next day, leaving Jed and Clara with the opportunity to spend delightful time together – ‘They owe me leave, but this counts as work, which is even better,’ she told him – but after three more nights, it was time for her to go as well.
‘Just a few more days here for me,’ said Jed. ‘I’ll be back in Labyrinth in no time.’
‘You’d better be.’
The Sanctuary resident was a Pilot called Draper, one of the Shipless and an expert in xenoanthropology, busy turning his study of Haxigoji culture into his life’s work. Draper’s girl-friend was a non-Pilot, an Earth-born bioengineer, pleasant enough company when they dined together, the four of them, before Clara left: Jed and Clara, Declan Draper and Emma Mbaka. Several hundred tonnes of export goods were due, later than scheduled, to be shuttle-lifted up to Vachss Station over the next few days. With the original Pilot pick-up cancelled, Draper was arranging for Jed to get the business, taking these and other products to Finbra V, Yukitran and Earth.
‘They’ll expect a discount, what with you being here already,’ Draper had said.
‘Perfectly reasonable,’ Jed had answered.
‘And you’ll deliver my report to Far Reach?’
‘Of course I will.’
Perhaps, as a Pilot without a ship of his own, Draper’s anxiety to have full disclosure on any commercial deal, to show he was not receiving kickbacks, came from his dependence on others and his position in Sanctuary. But Pilots living in realspace were generally nervous. Schenck and his mu-space renegades were gone from Labyrinth, but no one knew how many Pilots still working among ordinary humans, whether undercover or openly like Draper, had been part of the conspiracy.
Everyone was under scrutiny, and Admiralty observers were everywhere, deconstructing history, reading between the lines. Every now and then, it was whispered, people disappeared for questioning, and did not necessarily return.
A few hours after Clara’s departure, Jed was in a diamond-windowed lounge watching space tumble past. Different portions of Vachss Station rotated in different ways – spars along longitudinal axes, larger sub-assemblies of nodes and arcs around their individual centres – forming a kaleidoscopic mandala, something to watch while he thought about Clara.
His tu-ring beeped, and he acknowledged the request.
‘Got an arrival,’ Draper said in a virtual holo. ‘Dropping off refugees from Fulgor. An unscheduled arrival.’
‘Sounds unusual.’
‘Says he picked them up while making a delivery on Berkivan-deux. They wanted to come here. Weren’t being treated well where they were.’
‘Poor bastards.’
All Fulgor survivors had been double-checked by Admiralty teams for trace of Anomalous influence, but paranoia was understandable.
In the holo, Draper shrugged. ‘Holland didn’t go into detail.’
‘Holland? That’s the Pilot?’
‘Guy Holland, Labyrinth-based.’
‘Don’t know him, but never mind,’ said Jed. ‘I’ll pop over and say hello.’
He considered taking Tannier and Leeja along: survivors of Molsin having something in common with refugees from Fulgor. It seemed a good idea, so he made the call, arranging to meet them in Receiving Lounge 17A. They must have been keen enough, because by the time Jed reached the lounge, Tannier and Leeja were already there, standing next to each other with shoulders almost touching.
Survivors together.
It seemed Tannier had already got to know some of the long-term station residents. He introduced a tall slim man called Vilok, who greeted Jed by pressing palms in the manner of someone from Hargdenia Polity.
‘We’re not the only ones interested,’ said Vilok, ‘in an unexpected arrival. See there.’
Through the far entrance, several Haxigoji were entering: six or seven antler-racked males, eight or ten females (or perhaps some young males), all in a group. Their fur ranged from cream to dark chocolate beneath their ornate, brocaded tunics and trews. Half again as tall as humans, with double thumbed hands and amber, horizontally slitted eyes.
By the standards of xeno evolution, they were practically identical to humanity.
In fact Clara, before leaving, had shown him holos of Vijayan embryos, so like their Terran counterparts, clumps of cells that twisted early on into a topological cylinder. She had shown off by quoting a centuries-old Earth scholar: ‘”It is not birth, marriage or death but gastrulation that is truly the most important event in your life.”’
Thinking about her, Jed took several moments to process Vilok’s tension as he focused on a virtual holo emitted from his tu-ring. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Pilot Holland is being . . . prevented from leaving his ship.’
He shared the holo: Haxigoji were crowding a flexible corridor whose far end was a smartmembrane placed against a visiting ship’s hull.
‘And the refugees?’ Jed glanced at the H
axigoji here in the lounge. ‘They’re still on board the ship?’
‘They’re almost here. Came directly from the hold via another—’
Jed ignored the holos, because the Haxigoji were moving towards an entrance from which a confused-looking group of people were emerging. No . . . They were converging on a single member of the group, a dark-skinned young man with an odd expression and disjointed gait, who stopped and said to the xenos: ‘My name. Is. Rick. Mbuli from. Ful-gor.’
Jed’s skin crawled.
I’ve heard that name before.
The Haxigoji were shuffling from left foot to right foot and back, over and over, in a form of agitation that appeared to surprise Vilok as much as Jed. But the name . . . And there was holo footage Jed had watched, he and Roger mulling over all that had happened.
Vilok said: ‘Why have they switched off their torcs?’
He meant the Haxigoji; Jed understood.
No.
It came to Jed that the Haxigoji were psyching themselves up to attack a human for the first time ever, but if they were right then the danger was immense.
Not here.
Clara was away and safe, but there were others here, hundreds on board and an entire inviting world below, and that could not be allowed to happen, not another Anomaly, not again.
Now.
Fire exploded from Jed’s tu-ring – not a feature of normal rings, not at all – and Mbuli’s head detonated into strawberry spray, spattering everywhere; but that was not enough, so with tightened fist Jed kept the beam directed, playing up and down along the corpse, obliterating it, while sending a coded signal for Draper to get here now, and be ready with a smart-miasma capable of spreading through a room and hunting down every human cell with a given DNA sequence, because nothing of Mbuli could be allowed to persist.
Automated beam weapons, designed to be highly visible threats, swung down from the ceiling, while security personnel were already entering the lounge; but as Jed powered off his tu-ring’s weapons, his viewpoint was blocked: over a dozen Haxigoji were moving between him and the security team, forming an arc with their backs towards Jed.
Protecting him.
Their torcs were still switched off, but a soft scent of triumphal rose petals rose from their bodies: a vote of thanks and approval for what he had done, whatever the legal consequences.
He hoped that Clara would not be disappointed.
THIRTEEN
EARTH, 2034 AD
Lucas and Jacqui trailed Gus and her friend Ives into the Mexican restaurant. At a table just inside the door, a stocky, grizzled, bearded man was telling his grey-haired female companion: ‘A galaxy is like an M&M. The sugary coating is a dark matter halo.’
‘And the central black hole,’ the woman asked, ‘is the chocolate centre?’
Jacqui looked at Lucas and winked.
‘No, see, there’s a hundred billion stars, order-of-magnitude approximation’ – the man might look like a lumberjack, but he answered much as Lucas might have – ‘making up the whole of the visible galaxy. All of that is your chocolate centre.’
‘But I thought there was a—’
‘You’ve then got ten per cent of the stars comprising the bright bit in the middle, your actual galactic core. That would be like a tiny lump inside the M&M, at the centre of the chocolate. And the black hole would be microscopic. Smaller, in fact.’
Only in Pasadena.
Actually, come to think of it, any university town.
As the four of them were shown to their table, Jacqui said, ‘Seems like your kind of place, Lucas,’ and Ives smiled at them both. He was very tall, elegant in a tweed jacket with an honest-to-goodness bow tie whose spots were tiny spiral galaxies. He was also Gus’s oldest, closest friend.
Once they were seated, the waiter came over for their drinks order. Ives stared up into the young man’s eyes while discussing his choice in soft Spanish. After the waiter had left, Gus said: ‘He’s too young for you, darling,’ prompting Ives to answer that he knew as much, darling Augusta, but the truth was that she was jealous.
‘I hate it when you’re right,’ she told him.
Ives was a mathematician, a topologist with a sideline in topoi logics, a very different field, whose work on knots had once threatened to revolutionise both string theory and M-theory, by taking a traditional approach to analysing knots – focusing on their context, known as not-knots, and who says mathematicians have no sense of humour? – and applying it to the hyperdimensional twists known as Calabi-Yau manifolds. As a visiting lecturer in Oxford, during a sabbatical from MIT, he had befriended a precocious young student called Augusta ‘Gus’ Calzonni, and their collaboration produced both the computer game that kick-started Gus’s fortune – Fractal of the Beast – and her mu-space theory which, if mu-space turned out to be physically real instead of purely mathematical, might some day revolutionise humanity’s place in the universe.
Waving fingers, before his eyes, jolted Lucas back to Earth.
‘—images in your head,’ Gus was saying.
Holy crap.
His stomach rocked as his eyes refocused.
‘Eyeballs triangulate on a point in space,’ explained Ives, ‘when you’re strongly visualising. It’s a shock when some bad person’ – he patted Gus’s hand – ‘breaks up the virtual image like that.’
Gus smiled. ‘Sorry, Lucas. You were miles away, and I couldn’t resist.’
‘It’s because of the entorhinal cortex,’ said Ives, ‘And the neurons forming the spatiotemporal array inside it, which are geometrically quite fascinating.’
‘Feynman visualised colour-coded equations floating in front of a fuzzy picture of the phenomenon,’ said Lucas, referring to his science hero. ‘Like, I asked one of my PhD students to imagine electrons in a wire, and she saw a glowing white necklace moving along it. They wouldn’t really form an exact loop, but it highlights the mutual repulsion, right?’
‘Right, but no one teaches physics’ – Gus pointed an emphatic finger – ‘by teaching students to make visual hallucinations.’
‘Exactly,’ said Lucas.
‘Exactly,’ said Gus.
Ives looked at Jacqui.
‘Hobby horses,’ he told her.
‘And soap boxes.’
‘They really can’t help it.’
And that would have been that, a friendly meal spiced up with badinage and banter, a touch pretentious but balanced by self-mockery, had not a stranger approached their table: the grey-haired woman who had been sitting near the door. The stocky bearded man, still seated, looked furious.
‘Dr Woods?’ She addressed Lucas directly. ‘My name’s Amy, and I’m a medical researcher, and I’d really like to talk to you. Just for a moment.’
If her lumberjack friend caused trouble, Lucas hoped that Gus would deal with it – of everyone at the table, she was the one who knew how to fight. The lumberjack looked to be in his late fifties, one of those guys who got tougher as they aged.
‘This thing’ – the woman, Amy, held up a small silver device – ‘is a DNA sampler, online to a wide-array sequencer in the Cloud. It only takes seconds.’ She looked at the others, then back at Lucas. ‘I guarantee to destroy the results afterwards. Delete the data.’
The logical response was refusal, but the bearded man was approaching, looking about to intervene, and some devilry made Lucas hold out his hand and say, ‘What the hell. Why not?’
‘Lucas—’ began Jacqui.
There was a pinprick, and Amy nodded. ‘Thank you.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said the lumberjack.
He had been talking about dark matter and galaxies, hadn’t he?
‘If I left it up to you, Brody, we’d never find out.’ Amy held up the analyser. ‘Five more seconds, and we’ll know for sure.’
As if they had agreed to a countdown, everyone waited until Amy nodded, told this Brody that it was true, and turned the device so Lucas could see its small display. Two strips, lab
elled alleles #1 and alleles #2, contained clusters of dots. ‘The lower one is yours,’ she told him. ‘And look how similar they are.’
‘Very nice,’ said Lucas. ‘What the hell are you showing me?’
But Ives had slipped a qPad out of his jacket, and finger-gestured to transfer data from the analyser to his own device. He tapped away, and touched his collar to enable a throat mike, allowing subvocal commands.
‘Amy, grow up.’ The lumberjack was practically growling. ‘This is unnecessary. We gotta go.’
‘Maybe,’ said Amy, ‘you should introduce yourself.’
‘Sod off.’
You could hear it now: the man was English, underneath the Americanised accent.
‘Perhaps’ – Ives pushed his chair back, allowing him space to cross his legs – ‘I might be allowed to summarise the results. I’d like to introduce,’ he went on, gesturing toward the lumberjack, ‘Dr Brody Gould. And over here, Dr Lucas Woods.’
This Brody was frowning, and Lucas felt himself do likewise.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Gus, craning to see the qPad. ‘Lucas, you won’t—’
‘What is this?’ asked Brody. ‘A sodding soap opera?’
‘Your brother,’ Ives told Lucas.
My—?
He felt Jacqui take his hand, heard her telling him to breathe.
‘Half brother, to be precise.’ Ives directed his attention to Amy. ‘You’ve livened up everyone’s day, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.’
Then Gus took command, as was her privilege and habit.
‘Waiter? Two more chairs, please. Brody and Amy, you’ll join us.’
And so they did.
An hour later, Brody and Lucas had yet to shake hands. A big mitt like that could crush Lucas’s fingers. But it seemed Brody would never use his strength against Amy, which was how she had been able to go against his wishes. ‘High school sweethearts, is what we are,’ she told everyone at the table. ‘Met in London, when my Dad was working there. Brody got stuck with me then.’
