Absorption (49 page)

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Authors: John Meaney

BOOK: Absorption
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He gathered himself.
 
‘Helen,’ he said to Lieutenant Eisberg.
 
‘Yes, Keinosuke?’
 
‘Ignore my mood. Have you two good people you could spare?’
 
‘To go with you?’
 
‘Right. To the Via Lucis Institute.’
 
‘What’s there? I mean, besides all the Skein experts and plexweb designers and shit.’ For the first time, she almost smiled. ‘Is there anything actually
useful?
’
 
‘A history lesson.’ He gazed around the grounds. ‘I need to find out what happened a hundred years ago.’
 
‘Talk about tracing root causes.’
 
‘Tell me about it.’
 
 
Alisha had been set up. Roger, dear Roger, had told her about the Zajinet Research Institute - without him, she probably would not have found it. Rafaella Stargonier, had she been sufficiently interested, almost certainly
would
have discovered the place - and probably obtained more useful data from the Weissmann woman.
 
This was a strange place.
 
‘Another glass of daistral, miss?’ It was a pliable, smooth humanoid shape that gestured with its caricature hand and spoke. ‘She shouldn’t be too long.’
 
‘No, thank you.’
 
Alisha was sitting on soft quickglass, in a cylindrical quickglass chamber whose walls were translucent, predominantly ice-green, and filled with complex shapes of blue and violet, along with continuously rising bubbles. The roughly humanoid shape was a quickglass extrusion, part of the surrounding system. Call it an exotic accessory; but Alisha did not like it.
 
Am I even in the same building?
 
Having taken part in that mannequin thing, pedalling the construct through the parade, she had been exhausted. Had it not been for Stef’s persuasion beforehand, she would never have agreed. It was only when they were struggling en route that she put together all the hints: Stef had subtly (or not so subtly) made sure that Roger was taking part.
 
Matchmaking. That was a set-up, but not one she minded. Roger was sweet and she herself was too uncertain to make the first move - she might be only weeks away from upraise, a reward for hard work and capability, but that did not help. The countdown to upraise was terrifying; and the thought of how different she would be afterwards . . . that was a barrier to friendship, never mind romance.
 
For a few seconds, when everyone climbed from the mannequin, sweaty and tired, there had been an opportunity to speak to Roger. But she had walked away, wanting to think things through, knowing she was too tired to make reasonable decisions. And then, she had caught sight of Luculenta Rafaella Stargonier, who had smiled and seemed eager to talk, though not for long.
 
Far too eager. Why didn’t I spot it?
 
She looked at the quickglass person-shape, and changed her mind.
 
‘I
will
have that daistral, thank you.’
 
‘Coming up, miss.’
 
Rafaella - she had insisted Alisha use her first name - arranged this meeting to ‘catch up on your findings,’ and allegedly so Alisha could see what a successful Luculenta could achieve by way of commercial sidelines. Twenty minutes ago, she had entered the foyer of Aleph Tower, where a human employee had led her to a conference room to wait. What had been unexpected was the way the room descended, a bubble through quickglass, and opened into this waiting area, some ten metres (she estimated) below ground.
 
But it wasn’t the location, it was the decor that was strange: weird geometric shapes and rising bubbles within the wall, the person-shaped extrusion that offered drinks . . . and now handed her a goblet morphed from its own hand. Alisha snapped the goblet free, looked at the daistral inside, then set it on the floor.
 
‘Is everything all right, miss?’
 
‘Fine. Thanks.’
 
For a soon-to-be Luculenta, she had been slow on the uptake. It wasn’t just Rafaella, it was creepy Dr Helsen playing games. Realspace hyperdimensions weren’t some academic topic chosen at random: there was something going on.
 
Why would Helsen want Rafaella to be thinking about hyperdimensions?
 
Something to do with Zajinets?
 
The woman at the Institute, Ms Weissmann, had raised the subject of teleportation, then ruled out Roger’s hypotheses about the mechanism, leaving only one: the Zajinets could project themselves along the Calabi-Yau hyperdimensions of realspace.
 
But she had also said that teleportation was beyond the reach of current knowledge. Surely Rafaella could not think it was possible to discover the Zajinets’ technique?
 
Maybe that’s it.
 
It would explain her . . . shiftiness. She would want to patent the concepts and bring a first application to market before anyone else got hold of the knowledge, or even knew of its existence. That made commercial sense.
 
She looked down at her untouched daistral.
 
‘Shit.’
 
‘Miss?’
 
‘Nothing.’
 
I really
am
slow on the uptake.
 
Missing a night’s sleep and doing that crazy mannequin thing might be contributing factors, but not a good excuse. She should have realized last night, not now.
 
Weissmann’s a Luculenta.
 
All the signs of it had been there. How could anyone miss the way she—?
 
Something moved.
 
‘Hello, Alisha.’
 
It was Rafaella Stargonier, her long black hair twisting as if in wind, though the chamber’s air was still. She reached out a fist, and Alisha touched it with hers.
 
So Rafaella was real. She had risen up through the quickglass floor so fast, Alisha had thought she might be holo.
 
‘Rafaella, good morning. I’m glad to be here.’
 
‘Did you come alone? You were welcome to take a friend.’
 
‘I—I decided not to disturb anyone else.’
 
She had called Roger in Skein, receiving no response. Her disappointment was mitigated by how exhausted he had looked last night. He was surely off Skein by intent, catching up on sleep.
 
‘So, my little place here is somewhat exotic, don’t you think?’
 
‘Er, yes, ma’am.’
 
‘We’re on first-name terms, remember? And I want to give you the tour.’
 
‘The tour?’
 
‘There’s so much in the world that people ignore. So much wonder they could experience, but they distract themselves with trivia instead.’
 
‘Um . . .’
 
Rafaella raised both hands, and her eyes were shining as her voice become resonant.
 
‘Let me show you the world beneath.’
 
All around them, the room began to change: flowing and morphing, the person-shape melting back into the floor, the concave space reconfiguring to something like the inside of a hollow tear-drop. Alisha’s seat budded a twin, and Rafaella sat down next to her.
 
‘Here we go.’ Rafaella patted Alisha’s hand. ‘You’ll love this.’
 
Essentially they were in a sophisticated bubble, but it felt like a craft, and the illusion strengthened as they moved forwards, like a clear submarine through green waters. Then their direction dipped, as they began a forty-five degree descent.
 
‘Where is this?’
 
‘My little Alisha. Did you never ask what exists below the towers and marvels of Lucis City?’
 
All around, within the translucent depths, were straight-edged shapes and rippling streamers, a complexity of organic and geometric structures she found hard to look at - there was so much of it, all around their pseudo-vessel, like a vast biological abstract sculpture, like a giant technological organism, deep inside the organs, the lymph nodes and capillaries, the microstructures within the cells, the complex molecules of life.
 
It was like a fantasy of being shrunk to tiny size and floating through a great living body; but it was real.
 
‘There’s so much of it,’ Alisha said. ‘So . . . beautiful.’
 
‘Ah. That’s why I wanted another person to see it.’
 
‘To—?’
 
‘So I know it’s not just me. This place
is
a marvel.’
 
Alisha stared around as they continued to sink deep among nameless structures.
 
‘I still don’t understand.’
 
‘Welcome,’ said Rafaella, ‘to The Marrows.’
 
They popped into an enormous vault - perhaps containing air - their ‘vessel’ a true bubble now, lowering on a quickglass thread in a space big enough to contain several buildings, each a quickglass tower. In the distance were ranged other vaults, equally huge.
 
‘It’s like a different world.’
 
‘This is where we grow the city.’
 
‘Oh.’ The meaning of what Alisha saw became clearer. ‘It’s just so . . . Oh.’
 
‘Isn’t it?’
 
The descent stopped. Rafaella stood, and the craft-bubble’s walls shivered apart, leaving only the floor. They were now on an exposed quickglass platform suspended by a hundred-metre thread from the vault ceiling, at the centre of this huge space, far below the surface city.
 
‘The architecture above is just the tip of everything,’ said Rafaella. ‘People would know this, if they bothered to look.’
 
Alisha stood, her legs wobbly.
 
‘I . . . Can we go back up now?’
 
‘In a moment. See over there? You gave me the idea.’
 
‘I’m sorry?’
 
A row of long, silver-scaled dragons hung in place, their wings diaphanous red, their crystal eyes bulbous. Quickglass dragons. Huge.
 
‘For Last Lupus,’ said Rafaella. ‘I thought we might end Festival with something spectacular. Your little mannequin inspired me.’
 
Alisha’s bottom lip hurt. She realized she was biting it.
 
‘And you gave me the Zajinet,’ Rafaella added. ‘You have no idea how helpful that was.’
 
‘I don’t—’
 
‘My capacity for expansion is now effectively infinite. Isn’t that something wonderful?’
 
Shaking her head, Alisha found the surrounding marvels blurring as tears filled her eyes.
 
‘You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? I don’t know why, but you are.’
 
‘Oh, no. You’re thinking of the old me.’ Rafaella’s mouth turned up at the corners, but the expression was not a smile. ‘I do things differently now.’
 
Her eyes appeared to expand.
 
Oh, God. Oh, no.
 
Vampire code poured through Alisha’s plexnodes.
 
THIRTY-EIGHT
 
EARTH, 1939-1940 AD
 
The Bohr Institute, home of startling ideas, was everything it should be: stone walls, an atmosphere of grandeur, the great man’s coat of arms upon the wall: heraldic icons around a yin-yang. When Bohr had been knighted, he had chosen a superposition of classical and new, of west and east.
 
It was all very appropriate; but Gavriela found it hard to care.
 
‘Florian Horst.’ Her Danish was almost non-existent. ‘Please.’
 
In German, such abruptness was rude enough for insolence. She did not know if Danish was as formal. Perhaps her accent might mitigate offence.
 
‘You’re from Berlin?’ asked the woman behind the desk, in fluent German.
 
‘Oh, thank God. Yes, originally. You can recognize regional accents?’

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