Absorption (56 page)

Authors: John Meaney

BOOK: Absorption

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No one saw the quickthread tendril descend then haul him up to the roof. He rolled sideways on to the surface as the tendril slurped back and the opening closed up.

A small holo opened, showing Alisha’s location. He transferred a mapping to his smartlenses, and blinked. Now a glowing blue line appeared to cross the roof, leading to the edge and over, with a straight three-storey drop to a highlighted cross-hair target: an innocuous portion of wall. It seemed Drone Dollies’ customers did not care to have windows opening on to the rooms where they received their services.

They can’t have done anything to her yet.

But he knew where she was. He blinked away the visual overlay, no longer needing it, then dabbed at his eyes and threw away his smartlenses. Damn what people might think if they saw obsidian eyes. For the first time in his life, he knew who he was.

From his sleeves, quickglass slithered over his hands, forming gloves once more.

He closed his eyes, visualizing, remembering his last experience being terrified by heights, knowing he had to watch himself as a detached observer in his mind.

Roger, himself, wobbles and nearly falls, walking along a too-narrow ridge in Quiller Park
. No, back up.
He is calm in the moment before he sees the trail, and starts to get afraid
. Then afterwards.
Cursing, rubbing tears from his eyes; and finally laughing, realizing he is safe once more.

It was an ancient technique but he never had the motivation to use it. He ran the memory backwards in his mind, five times over, concentrating hard, because the amygdala reacts faster than the frontal lobes, and that was where he had to change the unconscious process that the surface of the mind calls fear, making it ridiculous.

There was no time to create a new visualization of confidence, or to check if the partial neurocognitive recoding had worked. Instead, he extruded tendrils from his left glove, hooked into the roof material, then stepped over the edge, and looked down.

And for a moment, grinned.

Alisha.

He lowered himself into the abseil.

Bands of quickglass formed spirals around his torso, reinforcing the left sleeve and spreading the load, taking strain away from his shoulder. Leaning back, he walked down the wall.

It was an open atrium, and other businesses were less shy than Drone Dollies: they had windows overlooking the quadrangle below. He had the peripheral impression of people inside rooms, but whether they saw him or not, he was too busy to care. He counted steps, estimating his descent, and then he was in place.

His tu-ring broadcast its command signal, and the quickglass wall began to soften. Roger closed his eyes for a second -
shit, I
am
scared
- and brought his knees to his chest, torque keeping his soles against the surface so he squatted against the wall.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

And he thrust himself away, swinging back, before returning feet-first for the softened area -
fuck I’m insane
- and then he was sliding through -
holy shit
- and he was inside.

What he saw and smelled was awful.

Fat pale buttocks pumping, and then the man was rolling off her - ‘Oh God, oh no, I’m sorry’ - his hairy belly wobbling, while the stench of semen was awful. Roger’s only thought was:
It shouldn’t be like this.

Alisha’s eyes were rolled up, her splayed limbs limp, her clothes open.

‘I’m . . . Sorry. Sorry.’ The fat man was backing away, his limp, dripping penis not quite obscured by drooping flesh. ‘Don’t . . . Please.’

Shouts from the corridor outside, and the sound of running feet, told of security heading this way. Roger had disabled the room’s inbuilt defences; he had not thought to seal the door.

Shit. Alisha. Shit.

His left hand was still attached to the tendril, but there was slack. He pulled her up to a sitting position, clasped her hard and lifted, then backed out of the room with her, through the window, and jumped.

The wall was hardening in place above them as he and Alisha descended like a spider to the ground.

Five minutes later he was high up, on the roof of Ebony Tower, looking down at the building far below where had rescued Alisha - if it had been a rescue. She lay limp, sprawled inside the parapet, her clothes not quite wrapped around her. Now he had succeeded in what he had planned, he was clueless as to what should happen next.

I’ve always been shit at planning.

He could not look at her. Not straight on.

I didn’t think it would be this bad.

This was Lucis City, the richest city on Fulgor, and this kind of thing should
not
happen here. It should be impossible.

‘“
Should
”,’ Mum had said once, ‘
is usually code for “ain’t never gonna happen.” You
should
bear that in mind.
’

Everything was awful.

No guards had stopped him at ground level, as he walked through a square archway from the unkempt quadrangle to the street outside. They must have all run up indoors, answering the alarms on the fifth floor. But plenty of pedestrians had stopped in their tracks, scarcely able to process the sight of him carrying a near-naked mindless woman in public. Commotion followed as he entered Ebony Tower and took a flowshaft, commanding a fast ascent through two hundred storeys, and coming out on the rooftop observation deck.

There had been maybe a dozen sightseers, but they had backed away, wide-eyed, and gone down inside the building. No doubt peacekeepers would already be on their way.

He activated his tu-ring.

‘Superintendent Sunadomari?’

So even a Luculentus could look surprised.

‘
Roger Blackstone. You’re still on Fulgor?
’

‘I have Alisha Spalding.’ He moved his fist, changing the transmitted point of view. ‘We need medics.’

‘
They’re en route now. Remain on Ebony Tower.
’

The holo winked out.

Overhead the sky was filled with celebration: dirigibles and holofloats, gleaming banners, virtual fireworks, diaphanous smartkites, and now a whole flotilla of glistening silver dragons. On the streets below, revellers thronged, determined to enjoy the final day of Festival, to glory in Last Lupus.

While Roger could only watch, his thoughts hollowed out, in a world filled with absence.

FORTY-SEVEN

EARTH, 1940 AD

The birds in the oak trees knew nothing of totalitarian regimes or the cares of humans; they sang because it was spring, and to ward rivals off their territory, for they had nestlings to care about. To Gavriela, coming awake on her first morning in Oxford, it was the truest of hymns, celebrating life.

And then she saw her open notebook on the floor, the fountain-pen next to it, and the matching pencil beneath the bedside table where it had rolled.

‘What’s this?’

The pencil script and ink passages were on opposing pages, and their styles differed.

Consciousness
, she read on the right page,
is thought observing thought. Freud identifies the majority of thought with unconscious processes.

Gödel’s theorem applies only to logic systems that allow
statements about statements
. Logics may be self-descriptive like conscious thought, or not, like unconscious mentation.

Night-time jottings could be hints of profound ideas that might be recaptured; or they could be dust from the imagination, blown away by the morning.

Schrödinger’s wave equation is deterministic. The behaviour of the probability wave, moving through time, is
exactly
calculable from the initial conditions. Perhaps a deterministic, predictive psychodynamics of history is possible,
provided it restricts itself to the unconscious behaviour
of the world’s peoples.

And, further down:

The behaviour of the mob?

While the writing on the lefthand page was shakier.

High
Energy
Interstellar
Meson
Detection,
Amplification &
Lensing
Lattice

It seemed like a joke; and if the handwriting had not been hers, it would have been funny.

When she went downstairs, Mrs Wilson was in the kitchen, frying bread in lard, while Rupert Forrester was in the front room, talking to a one-armed man called Brian, who it appeared was also a lodger.

‘We’re in luck this morning,’ Brian said. ‘Old Rupert is our bus driver for the day.’

‘Don’t expect it as a matter of course.’ Rupert went to the door and checked that the hall was clear. ‘But I’ll take you both back again tonight. It’s nice to visit here when I can.’

‘He went to school with Mrs Wilson’s son,’ said Brian.

‘Oh.’

‘Now Gabby’ - Rupert gave a microsecond smile - ‘you’re going to be in Hut 27, but there’s something you need to know about that.’

Brian’s head tilted, revealing scars on his neck.

‘There is no Hut 27.’

‘That,’ Rupert told Gavriela, ‘is the thing you need to know.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘We’re codes and ciphers.’ Brian shrugged his intact shoulder. ‘It’s not just hush-hush, it’s more important than anybody knows.’

‘Even more than
you
know,’ said Rupert.

‘But where are we working?’ asked Gavriela.

‘You’ll see.’

Then Mrs Wilson called them in to eat, and for a short period it was like an ordinary peacetime breakfast, except that there was no butter, only lard; the tea was made from ground-up acorns; and the curtains that stood open were blackout drapes, to avoid light spilling out at night, assisting Luftwaffe bomber crews to navigate.

And Gavriela wondered, as she ate, how far her night-time writing could creep from rational reality before becoming signs of psychotic delusion, a mind finally cracked in a world grown mad and horrible.

FORTY-EIGHT

FULGOR, 2603 AD

Sunadomari stalked through the splendour of the Via Lucis Institute, scarcely seeing the shining kaleidoscope of holos and Skein projections, an avalanche of visual stimuli that would overwhelm an ordinary human. One holovolume that kept pace with him showed the face of Hsiu Li-Cheng, whom he would see in person within seconds; another showed Helen Eisberg with her tac team troopers, inside a flyer en route to Ebony Tower.

‘
Why’s this Alisha Spalding important?
’ Eisberg was asking. ‘
I understand she’s a victim, but what’s it got to do with your case?
’

‘It wasn’t the slimeball perverts who raped her. It was Luculenta Rafaella Stargonier who tore out her mind.’

‘
Oh. I was under the impression the murder victims were Luculenti.
’

‘Spalding is pre-upraise. She has interface nodes without true processors. Maybe that’s the difference.’

‘
And you want me to take her straight there?
’

‘Yes. Please.’

They stopped talking but kept the hololink open.