Absorption (37 page)
Authors: John Meaney
‘Where does the engine go?’ asked Roger.
‘Hey, Rog,’ Stef called down from a precarious position five metres up. ‘Couldn’t stay away, then?’
Rick tapped Roger’s shoulder.
‘Glad you made it, my friend. And there’s no engine.’
‘With those joints and cable-inserts . . . isn’t it meant to walk?’
‘It certainly is.’
‘But—’
‘We’re using no artificial power. That’s the fun of it.’
‘So it
is
going to walk in the parade.’
is
going to walk in the parade.’
‘Sure.’
‘And it doesn’t have an engine.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘So you dangle it from a hovering flyer and work it like a puppet?’
‘That would be cheating.’
‘I give up. I can’t imagine—’
‘Sure you can.’ Rick turned him. ‘There’s your clue.’
Alisha and two people he didn’t know were assembling some hardware involving narrow chains and gears. Roger stared at them, then shook his head.
‘You have to be kidding.
Pedals?
’
Pedals?
’
‘There, you’ve got it.’
Roger tilted his head back, examining the shining skeleton, estimating its mass.
‘Sorry, Rick. It can’t be done. Are you sure you’ve done the calculations right?’
‘Feel those metal bones, my friend. They’re only half as dense as you think - rather like myself, ha, ha - and just because there’s no artificial power, that doesn’t stop us using superfluid bearings and a bit of smartmaterial.’
‘If you say so. Just don’t ask me to get inside that contraption. ’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ Rick looked up into the scaffolding. ‘Stef, would you order this boy to get inside the mannequin and get to work?’
‘Hoy,’ shouted Stef. ‘Blackstone, get your arse up here and make yourself useful.’
‘You tell him, Stef,’ called Alisha.
Roger laughed. He wanted to talk to Alisha, but she had already turned back to the others. They were loosening a chain loop, trying to slip it off a cog; and one of them was swearing, a streak of blood on his finger.
‘We’re all nuts,’ Roger said.
‘Finally, the boy understands.’
‘Totally insane.’
He grabbed the scaffolding and swung himself up.
By lunchtime, a headless giant clothed mannequin with hands was ready to go. Cables and chains were its ligaments and muscles, counterbalanced tension holding it upright. When they took the scaffolding away, it swayed - Stef and Rick were inside the thing - but stayed upright. Then several others, Roger included, pulled back the diaphanous ‘skin’ and clambered into the skeleton, finding their saddles.
‘Mad, mad, mad.’
‘We know that, Roger.’
‘Everyone get ready,’ called Stef. ‘And . . . Now.’
They got to work, Stef giving orders, while Rick kept himself busy on levers, switching gears and touching brakes - and the whole thing lurched into motion. The first footfall rocked Roger, then the next, but soon they had the knack of it. The mannequin was walking.
‘Time to get a head,’ said Rick.
None of them had authorization to command the roof to open. Roger would have designed a mannequin that actually fitted inside the building - but that would have been too easy, clearly. Instead, they pedalled and Rick steered, and they clomped out through the big exit, made a quick left turn - almost on the spot - and came to a halt, standing next to the wall.
Up on the roof, some more of Stef’s friends - she had obviously been socializing outside the study group - were manoeuvring a large head into position.
‘Careful.’
A magnetic bolt dropped through the hollow interior, and bounced off some part of the skeleton with a clang.
‘Sorry.’
‘Not just mad,’ muttered Roger. ‘Suicidal.’
His eyes were sore and his muscles felt detached from his body; yet he seemed to have passed beyond the need for sleep.
‘Okay, people. Pedal and step. Here we go.’
That was the beginning of an hour-long session of pedalling inside the mannequin, not seeing where they were going. From outside there was the occasional cheer, but it was not until they reached the main parade that the volume grew, indicating that they were in fact part of Lupus Festival.
Alisha was one of the team walking outside, guiding Rick by constant comms. All Roger could do was concentrate on the pedalling, far harder than he had thought it would be. High up inside the mannequin, Stef working a secondary set of pedals, her buttocks moving inside tight trousers, and it was a while before Roger pulled his attention away.
In his tired head, he seemed to hear a voice.
—
Will they really leave Berlin for Amsterdam? Oh, please . . .
Will they really leave Berlin for Amsterdam? Oh, please . . .
It took a moment to decide that he was experiencing a neural resonance of words originally uttered in another language.
—
Gavi, is that you?
Gavi, is that you?
But Rick called down: ‘Roger, sorry pal, but can you increase power?’
‘Got it.’
The auditory hallucination was gone.
I really need to sleep.
For now, he concentrated on the physical work.
Rick projected small holos down to Roger and the others: views from external public surveillance showing their own clanking progress amid a line of morphballoons, animated dancing flames (Roger kept changing his mind about how they did that), and hundreds of students in bright costumes and masks. Among the crowds on either side of the wide avenue, many wore half-masks around eyes and nose, some like butterflies and other exotica, many like wolves.
It made the pedalling easier, feeling they were part of something. But it was hard to focus on the holos when your eyes felt like dust-filled slits, and your stomach was bubbling with acid.
Finally, they stopped somewhere on Nexus Heptagon, a wide plaza where pink snow was falling among a hundred food vendors, musicians and jugglers. Crowds milled on all sides. Some of them offered congratulations as Roger and the others limped out of the mannequin. Rick and Stef were the last to exit, after double-checking the clamps and brakes, ensuring the abandoned mannequin would remain upright.
He looked for Alisha, but she was standing with her eyes focused on some virtual image, deep in conversation.
‘Let’s party,’ said Rick. ‘Everyone, meet back here in an hour.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘What happens if we don’t pedal it back?’
‘The festival authorities will take it away to dismantle.’
‘And that’s bad because—?’
‘Look, if we’re all back and we want to pedal it home, fine. If not, that’s fine too. The main thing was to do it.’
Roger said: ‘Was that sentence semantically null, or was he just babbling?’
‘Babbling,’ said Stef. ‘Come on, everyone. Let’s find some drinks.’
She grabbed Rick and the others, pulling them into the crowd, with a wink at Roger to indicate that she was manoeuvring them deliberately, leaving Roger and Alisha behind.
But Alisha was nodding, and she moved off among the people without looking back. Not knowing whether he should, Roger followed.
Passing beneath a golden archway, he took a free glass of warm wine from a table and sipped as he walked. Real food would be better, but he did not want to lose Alisha. Nor did he want to interrupt her. He walked on, past flowsteel helical ramps leading to a temporary piazza on stilts where hundreds of revellers were dancing, the music a complex rock-baroque symphony that suddenly went discordant with an underlying
da, da-dum, da-da-da-dum, da-da.
da, da-dum, da-da-da-dum, da-da.
But the stamping feet of dancers continued, as if only he could hear the new theme.
He was among revellers who were dressed in beautifully expensive silk clothes, real fabric rather than smartmaterial, some with masks made from synthetic feathers, others with holomasks, rendering animal snouts and eyes with exquisite exactness. He bumped into one by accident - a man wearing a canine head and Egyptian robes: dressed as Horus or Osiris, or whatever - and apologized. It had distracted him, and for a few seconds he had no idea where she was, but then he saw.
Alisha was talking to a Luculenta.
The woman was tall, dressed in black and silver. No wonder Alisha had ignored her friends; even from here, in a crowd of thousands, Roger could sense the woman’s charisma.
All around was distraction: holoflames and fireworks, a thousand illuminations and—
There. Darkness, moving in impossible ways. Then gone.
I’m hallucinating.
But it seemed he was not. Just for a moment, in a gap between revellers, he spotted a pale-faced woman he knew for certain - Dr Helsen - and beside her a stocky man, who might be the friend he had seen her with before. Then the crowd moved like one massive creature, shifting position, hiding Helsen and the other man from view.
Alisha was leaving the plaza, walking with the Luculenta. Roger was tired and going crazy, so the sensible thing would be to find food and a place to sit down, maybe sleep. But his feet moved by themselves, and he continued to follow.
In this crowd, no one would notice his behaviour.
The reveller dressed as Anubis took an ice-cream from a vendor. As he licked it, the cone seemed to disappear inside his jackal’s head, the Horus holomask. After a moment, he made a gesture, and the mask faded.
Now he could eat his ice-cream more naturally. As he did so, he watched two pairs of figures leave the plaza in opposite directions: Helsen and Ranulph one way, the Spalding girl and Rafaella Stargonier in the other. Young Roger Blackstone chose to follow the latter.
The question for Superintendent Keinosuke Sunadomari was, who should
he
be watching?
he
be watching?
TWENTY-EIGHT
EARTH, 777 AD
From the camp came the sound of drumming and the cheers of dancing warriors. Tall carved poles were hung with shields. Orange light blazed from massive fires. For a temporary location, there was a lot of organization involved in setting up this place.
There was no point in asking whether anyone else heard disturbing music among the drums - Ulfr knew it was only him. His mood disquieted Brandr, the warhound occasionally growling.
It was not just that Ulfr felt no sense of celebration, either at the troll’s defeat or at the way several dozen chieftains had managed to come together in peace. For he was used to slipping in and out of dreamworld, often guided by sweet Eira back home. Since Heithrún had led him into trance the previous night, strange dreams kept recurring: of himself among warriors whose bodies did not appear like normal flesh, looking more like the crystal that topped Heithrún’s staff, with which he had driven the troll’s spirit out of its stony body.
‘If they are elves of the light,’ he said to the hound, ‘then we could do with their presence. For we have an elf of the dark among us.’
Brandr growled at the mention of Stígr. They had spent all day hunting, mostly to be alone, away from the poet’s growing tale of the travellers’ battle against the troll - the battle that, as far as Ulfr could tell, Stígr had observed while cowering beneath his cloak, tucked face-down behind a small outcrop.
During the hunt, Ulfr had surprised a young fawn who had strayed from her mother. She was within an easy spear’s throw, and Ulfr was downwind; but her legs were slender and fragile, and her big dark eyes - when she finally saw him - held a surprised awareness that reminded him of Jarl. In earlier life, not meeting his end bound to a doorpost, cut apart by axes and hammers.
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