Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Just open the damned ... thing.’

  ‘Hey,’ she said, sounding impressed. ‘The doctor has his limits after all.’ She unscrewed the cap, extracted the wadding from the top and passed the bottle back to Quillon. Without preamble he splashed it over his fingers, the blood still gushing from the wounds, the sting of the disinfectant like liquid fire where it touched.

  ‘Damn,’ Quillon said, but this time in response to the pain, not his irritation with Meroka. He poured more, and this time almost passed out as the antiseptic fluid penetrated the wounds, sinking its own chemical teeth into his flesh.

  ‘You need someone to stitch those cuts?’ Meroka asked.

  ‘No.’ He forced authority into his voice, even though he was almost weeping. ‘Cut a length off those bandages. At the bottom of the case. Please.’

  To her credit she was fast and efficient, shouldering the volley-gun while she worked, scissoring off a strip of bandage, cutting the strip into two and helping him wrap one strip around his thumb and the other around the index and forefinger, so that he could still retain some use of his hand.

  ‘Pins in the upper compartment,’ Quillon said.

  Meroka secured the bandages, and then did something Quillon hadn’t been expecting, which was to pat him on the shoulder, almost maternally. ‘Sorry for the lecture. Guess it was surplus to requirements.’

  ‘Somewhat.’

  ‘You going to be all right?’

  ‘Given our circumstances, I suspect I’ll be doing very well if it’s this wound that kills me.’

  ‘Still need to keep an eye on it - fuckers’ve been known to keep dead meat lodged ’twixt their teeth, turning rotten, just so’s they can poison people when they bite.’

  ‘Information that, strangely enough, you neglected to mention earlier.’

  ‘You’re the doctor. Guess I just assumed you knew what you were doing.’ She dug into her coat and produced a small pistol. ‘Take this. I think you’ve about exhausted the possibilities with the angel gun, unless you’re planning to shove it down someone’s throat and choke them with it.’

  Quillon took the pistol awkwardly with his bandaged hand.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  They walked on.

  Meroka reloaded the volley-gun as she strolled, one of the burning wagons looming ahead, its wooden and fabric skin all but consumed, leaving only a sagging metal frame that was itself beginning to succumb to the fire. The frame, Quillon realised, was one of the cages they had seen when the caravan passed. The blazing heat from the other wagons was now almost unbearable, but he held his bandaged hand up to shield his face, gun pocketed so that he could carry his bag, and advanced as close as he dared. Meroka was only a little way ahead, shielding her own face with one hand and holding the volley-gun in the other.

  ‘They got out,’ she called, above the roar and hiss of the fire. ‘Door’s open.’

  ‘You think someone let them leave?’

  ‘Could be, if there was anyone around who wasn’t already blacking out.’

  ‘Someone other than the Skullboys, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah. Or they all just broke out. Amazing what you’ll do when burning to death is a real possibility.’

  Quillon nodded, although - having seen how secure the cages looked - he doubted that any amount of adrenalin-fuelled strength would have made enough of a difference to the captives. It was much more likely they had been freed by bystanders, locals with a grudge against the Skullboys.

  ‘I hope all of them got out.’

  Meroka walked on a little further, pushing the volley-gun’s barrel ahead of her, then said, ‘These two certainly didn’t.’

  The wagon in question had come to rest in the ditch at the roadside, sufficiently far from the other vehicles that the flames had, at least until recently, managed to avoid it. Its rear wheels were now ablaze, the spokes columned in fire, tongues of flame beginning to lick along its chassis. Before very long the whole thing would be alight, the fire engulfing the cage resting on its back. For now, though, the flames had yet to reach the cage and the two people inside it were still alive.

  It was the woman and child. Quillon remembered the birthmark on the back of the woman’s head, and then she turned to face him. She was exactly as he remembered her from the night before: the same tattered, sleeveless dress, the same combination of thinness and hard-earned strength, the same hairless head. She was staring right at him, and the child - could have been a girl or a boy - was still at her side. He expected the woman to say something, to call out to them and ask to be freed, but instead she just kept on staring, her deep-set eyes emotionless and her strong jaw clenched in resignation, as if she had long ago reconciled herself to never leaving the cage. Even the child - a girl, Quillon decided - had a look of defiant acceptance, as if she had been studying her mother intently, learning to stare at the world with the same blazing refusal to show weakness.

  ‘Why didn’t anyone let them out?’ Quillon asked, as Meroka slowed, aiming the volley-gun directly at the cage.

  ‘I know,’ Meroka said, before stopping and turning back to look at him.

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’

  Meroka raised the gun until it was pointed right at the woman. ‘Turn around.’

  The woman did nothing. Her expression registered only the tiniest shift, to a kind of imperious disdain.

  ‘I said, turn the fuck around.’ Meroka altered her aim slightly. ‘Do it, or I put a hole through the sprat.’

  The child gave no sign of being in any way alarmed by having the volley-gun pointed right at her head. Either she was too backwards or uneducated to understand the significance of the gesture, or she was heroically brave.

  ‘Finger’s getting twitchy,’ Meroka said.

  The woman seemed to consider, then turned slowly around so that she had her back to Quillon and his companion. He could see the birthmark much more clearly now, the woman’s hairless skull bathed in flickering orange from the nearby fires.

  Except it wasn’t a birthmark. Or at least no birthmark Quillon had ever seen with his own eyes. It was far too regular, far too precise and geometric to be the work of nature: more like a tattoo or a brand, a mark of ownership or fealty. It was a five-pointed star, with circular dots at the tip of each point.

  ‘She’s a witch,’ Meroka said. ‘That’s what it means.’

  ‘There are no such things as witches,’ Quillon said, but with rather less certainty than he might have wished.

  ‘Maybe not. But there are such things as tectomancers. That’s what we’re looking at here.’

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘I know the score, Cutter. She’s got the mark. Makes her one of them.’

  Quillon didn’t know what to think. Until leaving Spearpoint, he had never been required to have an opinion on the existence or otherwise of tectomancers. He knew that they were poised somewhere on the brink between myth and reality; dismissed as superstition by some, accepted as a real phenomenon - albeit frightening, rarely encountered and misunderstood - by others. On consideration he would probably have admitted to accepting their reality, while balancing that acceptance with a grave scepticism as to the actual scope and efficacy of their powers. There was simply too much scholarship to dismiss tectomancers as a fiction, something made up to frighten children and the superstitious, and yet within that scholarship their gifts had almost certainly been exaggerated, blown out of all proportion by fearful witnesses and avid retellers of second-hand experience. At no point, though, had Quillon expected to actually encounter one. Even if one accepted their reality, and that some of the powers credited to them were real, it was still a given that tectomancers were exotically rare. It was said that they were born to normal mothers, mothers who did not carry the mark of the baubled star. Just as some diseases only manifested when ill-fated parents met and produced a child - the causative factor carried silently by mother and father - so a tectomancer could be presumed to be the re
sult of inherited influences that had lurked undetected in previous generations. But tectomancy was something other than a disease. Tectomancers might not have long life expectancies, but that wasn’t because of their condition bestowing any systematic infirmity. It was because they tended to be hounded to early deaths, often involving stones or pyres. They were, in other words, regarded exactly like witches.

  And he appeared to be staring at one.

  ‘Do you believe?’ he asked Meroka.

  ‘It don’t matter whether I do or don’t, Cutter. What matters is what the Skullboys and the halfwit fucking inbreeds who live out here believe. And to them there’s no doubt at all. She’s a walking bad omen. Something you lock up in a cage and set fire to. That’s why no one let her out. Too chickenshit to face the consequences of freeing her.’

  The woman turned slowly back to face them. Something in the regal bearing of her posture disarmed all Quillon’s assumptions - it was like watching a fashion model turn around after displaying some fabulously expensive item of high couture. She was inside the cage, but the thin woman in the ragged dress still seemed to have a subtle power beyond her confinement.

  ‘But we’re not chickenshit,’ Quillon said, noticing that the fire had advanced since their arrival, now beginning to lick at the bottom of the cage. ‘We can let them out. Someone has to.’

  ‘Or we can walk on, because this isn’t our problem.’

  ‘I think it’s just become our problem.’

  ‘Like that Skullboy, the one who nearly bit your hand off back there?’

  ‘This is different. I was wrong then, but I’m right now.’

  The woman kept staring. She had said nothing yet. Perhaps she was incapable of speech, but Quillon had the feeling she was observing them, witnessing their exchange without a shred of doubt in her mind as to how events were going to run. She would speak only when it suited her, and perhaps not at all.

  ‘Cutter, listen to me. There’s a lot of superstitious horseshit surrounding tectomancers. Like how they can part waves, walk on water and heal the sick. But if only one-tenth of it’s true, this is not something to be messed with lightly.’

  ‘So it’s superstitious horseshit, apart from the bit that happens to be true?’

  ‘Don’t mock me, Cutter. I’ve seen enough weird shit out here to know that you don’t get to pick and choose what you believe in.’ Meroka paused and looked to her right. A figure came stumbling out of the screen of smoke between two burning wagons, his arms reaching before him, moaning softly. It was a Skullboy, his helmet gone and his eyes gouged out, leaving only blood-clotted sockets. Snot and drool spilled from his nose and mouth. Meroka aimed the volley-gun and fired a single shot, blowing the Skullboy’s right leg away below the knee. ‘Maybe they can alter zones,’ she went on as the figure crashed to the ground, ‘maybe they can’t. Way I figure it is, it don’t really matter what they can and can’t do. It’s what people believe, what they project onto them. Just because of what people think they are, tectomancers are a magnet for all kinds of trouble we’d be better off avoiding. And that’s before we deal with the powers they do have.’

  She jerked the gun at something else in the smoke, squinted at whatever figment she had seen, then eased the barrel back towards the cage.

  ‘From what little I know of the matter,’ Quillon said, over the whimpering and groaning of the fallen Skullboy, ‘it’s not going to make much difference to the power of a tectomancer whether they’re in a cage or not.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning that woman is no more dangerous to us freed than she is caged. Meaning we should have the courage of our convictions. We’re not going to walk away from here and leave a woman and child to burn to death.’

  ‘There are at least two other options.’ Meroka hefted the volley-gun. ‘This is one of them. I’m sure you can find another in that box of yours, you look hard enough.’

  ‘Kill them?’

  ‘Way I see it, we’d be doing them a favour.’

  Quillon thrust the medical bag in Meroka’s direction, not bothering to wait until she had her hand on it, the bag dropping to the ground as soon as he let go. ‘I’m going to release them. If you have a problem with that, shoot me now and be done with it.’

  ‘Can’t say it isn’t tempting.’ Meroka watched him with slitted, venomous eyes, as if she really was only a twitch away from killing him. ‘What you planning on using to bust that cage open, anyway? Sarcasm and fingernails?’

  Quillon picked his spot and climbed into the wagon as far from the burning end as possible, avoiding the worst of the flames, but still singeing the palms of his hands against the fabric. He coughed and righted himself, placing a steadying hand against the side of the cage. The metal was itself beginning to warm.

  ‘I am what she says,’ the woman said, her voice commanding and calm, as if it would have been remiss of her not to confirm Meroka’s fears. ‘I am a witch. I have the gift of tectomancy.’

  There was a hinged latch securing the door of the cage, which would have presented no difficulties were the latch not also padlocked. Meroka, Quillon realised, must already have seen the lock.

  ‘Can you pick a lock?’ he called down. ‘Honest answer, Meroka.’ She grimaced, as if the answer itself caused her anguish. ‘Not in the time you’ve got.’

  ‘You should heed her warnings,’ the woman said. ‘There is a power in me beyond your understanding. Let me out, and everything changes.’

  ‘You may believe that,’ Quillon said.

  ‘And you don’t?’ the woman asked, her voice almost masculine in its deepness, her searing calm beginning to unsettle him.

  ‘If you are a tectomancer, your being caged shouldn’t make any difference to your abilities.’

  ‘Then you know something of our ways.’

  ‘Enough to know that if I was a tectomancer, I’m not sure I’d be in such a hurry to convince people of that fact.’ He took Meroka’s pistol from his pocket, forcing his bandaged fingers around the grip and into the trigger guard, not trusting his left to aim accurately enough. ‘Stand back, please - I’m going to try to shoot away this lock.’

  The woman stood her ground for a moment, and then she stepped a couple of paces back - but it was more as if the child had made the decision for her, tugging on her mother’s dress. In the strong outline of the girl’s face he thought he could see something of the mother, the same prominent chin and broad cheekbones, although the girl did not look anywhere near as starved. He nodded and aimed the barrel at the lock, holding it only a few fingers’ widths away. Was that too close, or not close enough? He had no idea. Nor had he any idea whether shooting away the padlock was even remotely feasible. He raised his free hand to shield his eyes and squeezed the trigger. When nothing happened he realised that the safety catch must still be set. He released it and aimed the pistol again.

  The gun discharged and in the same instant - as near as he could judge - there was the ricocheting sound of bullet on metal. He stared down, hoping to see a shattered padlock, but instead he’d done little more than gouge the casing. He squeezed the trigger again but the gun didn’t fire.

  ‘Stand aside,’ Meroka said.

  He hadn’t been aware of her climbing onto the wagon, but there she was, the volley-gun at the ready.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ she said, directing the barrel cluster at the padlock, ‘I still think it’s a bad idea.’

  ‘She’s no witch,’ Quillon said. ‘Delusional, maybe. But not a witch.’ The volley-gun went off. The padlock did not so much break as cease to exist, along with a good portion of the latch. Meroka flung the rusty, blackened remains aside. The cage door creaked open.

  She aimed the volley-gun at the woman and child. ‘That’s our good deed for the day. Now get out of here.’

  The woman advanced, drawing the child with her. ‘You fear me,’ she said, directing the statement at Meroka.

  ‘Yeah. Kind of. But seeing as I’m the one with the big bastard gun
with lots of barrels, I wouldn’t push the point.’

  Meroka hopped back onto the ground, still aiming the weapon at the cage and its former prisoners. The woman had reached the door now. She was standing on the threshold, almost as if she was uncertain whether she really wanted to leave. Her feet were bare and dirty, as were the girl’s.

  The girl looked up with apprehensive eyes. ‘They’re here,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that sound?’ Quillon asked.

  It was a droning noise he had not been aware of until that moment. It was coming from above, or within, the bellying canopy of fire-lit clouds.

  ‘Skullboys,’ Meroka said.

  ‘They’re in the air now?’

  ‘They have some blimps. Don’t usually operate this close to Spearpoint, but I guess everything’s changed now. We really don’t want to be hanging around here much longer.’

  ‘The storm came,’ the mother said, looking into Quillon’s eyes now.

  ‘Yes.’ His mouth was suddenly quite dry, more than could be explained by the heat of the fires. ‘It was a bad one. A major tectomorphic shift. The people who took you prisoner fell ill because of it. Do you feel unwell yourself?’

  ‘Do I seem ill to you?’

  ‘I’m a doctor. I have drugs - medicines - that can help you and your ... I presume she’s your daughter?’

  ‘We have no need of your medicine.’ She spoke clearly enough, but Spearpointish was evidently not her native language.

  ‘Your zone tolerance must be unusually strong,’ Quillon said.

  ‘Your city wisdom means nothing to me. I am strong because of what I am.’

  ‘Yes. A witch. Well, we’ll let that pass for now. All I’m saying is, if there’s anything you need ...’ He paused awkwardly, conscious of Meroka chewing on something impatiently, waiting for the least excuse to fire the remaining barrels of the volley-gun.

  ‘Need to be on our way, Cutter.’

  ‘You have done what had to be done,’ the woman said. She stepped down from the wagon, then lifted her daughter down after her, the muscles in her arms turning firm as steel cables as she took the girl’s weight. ‘You showed courage. You have our gratitude. Now put us from your thoughts.’