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Authors: John Meaney

BOOK: Absorption
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His physical wake-up routine was complex, moving his limbs through clover-leaf patterns, rolling on the floor, neither dance nor yoga nor fighting yet with elements of all. It had been a while since anyone had bullied him; but he remembered the humiliation.
 
Slapping a glob of pine-scented smartgel on his chest, he walked around the room, touching each wall in turn, tapping the orange quickglass bed with his foot, saying farewell. As the gel wriggled across his skin, cleansing and exfoliating, he checked the tu-ring on his middle finger. Above it, a tiny real-image holo ninja sprang into being, holding a scroll that spread out into an old-style FourSpeak lattice, listing the templates stored inside: his favourite holodramas, his furniture design - if he wanted his new room to look like this one, then it would - and his clothing, all his artefacts besides childhood toys. Those, he was leaving here.
 
All the information he needed was in his tu-ring. He was packed, ready to go.
 
After pulling on a suit of clothing, he tuned the fabric to dark-blue edged with yellow, and hardened the slippers’ soles, suitable for outdoor walking. Then he tapped his tu-ring, and pointed at the quickglass bed, subvocalizing a command.
 
The orange quickglass shivered, grew viscous, and melted into the floor, absorbing the smartfabric duvet. Some people changed their living environment daily; but his room’s configuration remained static in normal times. Dissolving the bed was a gesture, marking a transition.
 
An adult at last.
 
He went down to breakfast. Mum smiled at him, waving a bowl of peach rice.
 
‘You need to fuel up. Big day, isn’t it?’
 
‘I guess so, Aged Parents. Dad, are we going in to the city together?’
 
But his father’s eyes were solid white, the smartlenses opaque, lasing images against his retinas. Even over breakfast, he was hard at work.
 
‘Carl, have words with your upstart son, why don’t you.’
 
‘Sure.’ Dad’s smartlenses cleared. ‘Plasma. Negentropy. Custard. How am I doing?’
 
His eyes looked grey now. That was no more the truth than white opacity had been.
 
‘You’re confused,’ said Roger. ‘I can beat you this morning.’
 
‘Suicide chess, seven dimensions. Most negative points in two minutes to win.’
 
In 2- or 3-D, it was a fast game, offering pieces to the opponent to take, the objective being to get rid of your pieces as quickly as possible. Given a vulnerable opposing piece, you had to take it; but if there were several, you got to choose, and that was part of the art. Seven dimensions could slow the game right down, or cause cataclysmic high-speed reversals, depending on the game-flow.
 
‘Deal.’
 
Mum said nothing as they worked on virtual boards visible only to them, Roger flinging around his yellow pieces with subvocalized instructions, failing to hold back the onslaught of red attackers he was bound to take, unable to avoid the tide dissolving before him.
 
When the game popped out of existence, Mum put a bowl of rice in front of Roger.
 
‘He’ll take you in to Lucis City anyway, never mind.’
 
Roger looked at Dad, and they both shook their heads.
 
‘Mum, you’re a genius.’
 
Part of the game had been to mask their body language. Without access to their shared virtual holo, Mum should have been unable to work out who won - though the odds were against Roger.
 
‘I try to keep up with my favourite son,’ she said.
 
‘You know I’m your
only
son.’
 
‘That’s right, isn’t it? Fair enough.’
 
Dad smiled. The banter was familiar.
 
‘But there’s no such thing as—’
 
‘—a fair fight,’ Roger and Mum said together.
 
‘Keep that in mind’ - Dad smiled with one side of his mouth - ‘in the big, bad world.’
 
Mum let out a breath.
 
‘I’ll remember.’ Roger blinked, misting his smartlenses. ‘I—Whew. Is it time we got going?’
 
‘You haven’t finished your—’
 
‘I don’t think I can. When I get there, I’ll eat. Promise.’
 
‘You’re not too big to get a clip around the ear.’
 
‘No.’ Roger smiled at her. ‘And I never will be.’
 
Dad’s hand clapped his shoulder.
 
‘Spoken like a man.’
 
‘Goodbye, Mum,’ said Roger.
 
 
The aircab ascended in a spiral, the house and its blue surrounding flagstones diminishing below. In the Conjoined Calderae to the north, giant silver guardian fish leaped from dark waters, hunting pterashrikes. Overhead, stretched a lime-green sky with golden-cream clouds.
 
They passed over a scree slope leading to the nearest hypozone. Far from its natural habitat, a purple native slimegel followed a slick track, moving by laminar flow, sheets of tissue looping like caterpillar tracks. Once out of poisonous oxygen, it would split apart to form a fast-moving herd of fist-sized blobbers.
 
‘That’s a big one,’ said Roger. ‘Near to budding.’
 
He meant generating a sub-organism, a daughter herd.
 
‘How can you tell?’ Dad touched his shoulder. ‘You belong here, son, in a way I never will.’
 
A tight claw of tension squeezed Roger’s torso.
 
Then why don’t you let me leave?
 
Because there were other places he could venture, far beyond Lucis City, beyond the world of Fulgor, even beyond the universe. But this was a hired aircab, and for all of Dad’s capabilities, the stakes were too high to discuss confidential matters here. If he’d wanted to raise the subject, he should have done so at home.
 
That was what he thought. But what Dad did next surprised him.
 
‘Let’s talk openly.’
 
‘But—’
 
‘This aircab is, well, special. We’re protected here.’
 
Beneath them, a valley was filled with striped fog, a moving tiger-skin configuration of purple and green, forming a Turing pattern: emergent properties from simple chemistry.
 
‘How protected?’
 
‘This much.’ Dad reached up and dabbed at his eyes, removing his smartlenses. ‘See?’
 
Freed of disguise, his natural eyes were obsidian, without surrounding whites. Black upon black, dark as space.
 
‘You can’t be serious.’ Roger reached up to his own smartlenses, then stopped. ‘I can’t.’
 
‘That’s a good inhibition to have, son.’
 
‘While I’m among ordinary humans, you mean.’
 
‘Yes. You
do
belong here, Roger. I meant that.’
 
‘And Labyrinth? Isn’t that where I was born?’
 
Dad looked away as if checking the sky, but if they weren’t shielded from SatScan then they wouldn’t be speaking like this.
 
‘Maybe I’ve been wrong.’
 
Roger tried to work out the right words to say, some persuasive rhetoric that would change Dad’s mind all the way. Nothing occurred to him.
 
‘You’ve had to live with secrets your whole life,’ said Dad. ‘We even wore smartlenses around you at home when you were a baby.’
 
‘I know.’ Meaning, he’d heard the stories before. ‘I don’t remember that, or the time in nursery that you had to mindwipe the teacher.’
 
‘It was a very selective amnesia,’ said Dad. ‘And you only betrayed yourself once.’
 
‘Betrayed you, you mean.’
 
There was a tightness in Roger’s voice that he hadn’t intended, a roughness of accusation.
 
‘It’s important, what we do here. But there’s something I’ve forgotten to tell you, son.’
 
‘What’s that?’
 
‘The most important things in my life are you and your mother.’
 
Such simple words. There was a directness in those jet-black eyes that Roger could not withstand. Then he rubbed his face and made himself smile.
 
‘What about your other lover?’
 
‘My-? Ah. Well.
Her.’
 
‘She’ll take you any place you like, any time. Doesn’t it make you want to fly away from Fulgor, away from everything?’
 
Dad’s answer was filled with surprising vulnerability.
 
‘You’ll never know how much.’
 
Neither said anything as Dad replaced his smartlenses and his normal expression, settled back in the seat, and closed his eyes, pretending to work.
 
 
They alighted on the edge of a piazza, in the shadow of an aqueduct. Dad paid the aircab, the fare a simple four-dimensional money matrix in the two-hundred-dimensional phase space of Fulgidi finance. Occasionally Mum or Dad complained about the complexity of buying or selling, especially if any Luculenti were involved; but Roger had never known anything different.
 
The cab ascended into the green sky, looped behind a grandiose quickglass tower, and was gone. This week’s architectural fashion favoured trompe-l’oeil illusions, and many of the two dozen towers in sight looked translucent or oddly shaped, including several that were formed from ‘impossible’ polygons, or appeared to be. Skywalks hung among the towers like necklaces, sparkling where the sunlight struck.
 
‘You’re mediating some kind of deal?’ Roger said.
 
‘Uh-huh. The more sophisticated Fulgidi merchants become, the more resourcefully they find ways to disagree with each other.’
 
‘I never thought of that.’
 
‘So often they fail to negotiate because their plans are just so twisty and complex.’
 
There was something different in Dad’s tone, as if talking to an equal. Or perhaps that was some kind of wishful thinking.
 
‘You’ve got to go straight away?’
 
‘I’m afraid so. I want to catch some of them before the meeting starts. How long have you got to wait?’
 
‘Another forty-seven minutes.’ Roger knew the answer automatically. ‘I thought I might buy myself some jantrasta, maybe some chocolate.’
 
‘Chocolate.’
 
‘Some new thing from Earth.’
 
‘Wasn’t that the name of an old programming language? Anyway, have a good first day.’
 
They hugged.
 
‘Thanks, Dad.’
 
As Dad walked away, he reformatted his clothes so that a pale-grey cloak hung from his shoulders. He walked towards a sheer ceramic pillar, support for an aqueduct, then brushed past a steel buttress. Only Roger saw what happened next.
 
Dad’s hand disappeared
inside
the solid-looking steel, came out in a fist, then tucked inside his cloak. Out in the open like this, SatScan would normally notice such a manoeuvre - but an attenuated tingling in his nerves told Roger that Dad had deployed a smartmiasma to make subtle optical shifts in light travelling upward.
 
It was called a dead-letter drop, and his parents had taught him the basics and the variations years ago; while the technique itself was centuries old. Tried and true, was how Dad described it.
 
For even espionage has its traditions.
 
TWO
 
EARTH, 777 AD
 
Ice covered the upper slopes, reflecting cold orange dawn. Above, circled two black ravens. On a wide irregular ledge, Ulfr crouched, spear in one hand, his other fist inside Brandr’s leather collar, tight against the war-hound’s bunched and trembling muscles.
 
Their prey, so magnificent, so handsome, paused beneath their ledge, perhaps hearing the beating of hunters’ hearts, or sensing their breath upon the air. Antlers raised as nostrils flared, chestnut eyes widening, searching for the source of unease.

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