Against A Dark Background (42 page)

Miz shook his head as he took a bottle from the cooler. ‘I doubt it, somehow.’

`Yes.’ Sharrow sighed.
Actually,’ she said, putting her hand into the book’s empty casing and lifting a little of the paper-dust in the bottom.
So do L’ She let the dust run through her fingers.

What about the message Gorko’s supposed to have left?’ Zefla asked quietly, stroking Cenuij’s shoulder.
Has that gone too, if it was ever there?’

Sharrow shifted her focus from the lines her fingers made against the grey-brown dust to the three engraved words beneath.

Oh, it’s here,’ she said, staring at the sentence.
It was always here. It just wasn’t a message until Gorko used it somewhere else. But I think I know where he’s pointing us now.’

‘You do?’ Miz asked, looking surprised and pleased. `Where?’

Vembyr,’ she said.
The city where the androids are.’ She let the case slam shut.

Zefla and Dloan were both involved in a complicated groupdance in the ballroom; Sharrow left them to it. She found Cenuij at the bar and steered him towards the booth.

Cenuij stumbled and almost fell over a table as they squeezed through the crowd. He laughed cruelly and told the people at the table it shouldn’t be where it was; how dare they move a table? Who gave them authority? So what if it was bolted to the floor?

She dragged him away. `You got drunk fast,’ she said.

`Tell you the secret if you buy me a drink.’

`We have an early start tomorrow, remember?’

`But that’s why I started early this evening!’ Cenuij said, gesturing wildly and knocking somebody’s drink.
Do you mind?’ he snarled at the woman he’d bumped into.
People have to clean this floor, you know!’

`Sorry,’ Sharrow said to the woman with a smile, pushing Cenuij onwards and then following him.

`Get me a drink,’ Cenuij told her.

`Later. Come and meet my ghastly relations.’

`You mean there’s worse than you?’ Cenuij said, horrified.

They arrived at the booth; she introduced Geis and Breyguhn.

The two men exchanged formal greetings, then Cenuij turned to Breyguhn.

`Ms Dascen,’ he said carefully. He took Breyguhn’s hand and kissed it. Cenuij knew that technically Brey wasn’t a full Dascen at all; Sharrow guessed that addressing her as such was done more to annoy her than to flatter Breyguhn.

`Why, Mister Mu,’ Breyguhn said, smiling at Cenuij and then glancing at Sharrow.

Cenuij breathed deeply and seemed to collect himself.
Your sister has told me so much about you,’ he said. Sharrow found herself gritting her teeth to stop herself saying anything.
I, of course, believed every word,’ he went on,
and have always wanted to meet you.’ Cenuij smiled. He was still holding Breyguhn’s hand.
I would consider it an honour if you would grant me the next dance.’ He gestured grandly in the very general direction of the ballroom.

Breyguhn laughed and stood. `Delighted.’ She smiled at Sharrow as she and Cenuij made their way back through the shouting, laughing crowd.

Sharrow watched them go, eyes narrowed.

TEXTBEGIN UNSOURCED HOMING MESSAGE MIYKENNS/GOLTER ANON/TKEEP. COMMERCIAL MAXENCRYPT.

Ref.: COntracT #0083347100232 (TKEEP).

Please be advised Contract only partially fulfilled. Item now in our possession but only casing and already-known dedication still extant. Rest of text printed on paper which has rotted to dust over past twelve centuries. Nature of time lock on case and chemical composition of paper dust indicates this may have been intentional. Detailed examination of case and remaining contents reveals no other storage medium save (naked-eye visible) message engraved in rear of case, quote THINGS WILL CHANGE. unquote. Case believed to be late Terhama’a (Golterian) Limited, comprising precious and semiprecious stones and gold on steel, plus four diamond leaf engravings frontis. Total estimated value conservatively 10MnT. Please advise. Reply CME to one-shot homing dest. #MS94473.3449.1 [1] TEXTEND

TEXTBEGIN HOMING MESSAGE GOLTER/MIYKENNS TKEEP/ANON. COMMERCIAL MAXENCRYPT.

Ref.: OSHD #MS94473.3449.1[0]

Extant remains acceptable under Contract clause 37.1. Kindly deliver via Vessel `Victory’, Mine Seven Sub-Surface Crawler Base, Equatorial Region, NG, soonest.

TEXTEND

TEXTBEGIN UNSOURCED HOMING MESSAGE MIYKENNS/GOLTER ANON/HOUSE (S. JALISTRE) COMMERCIAL MAXENCRYPT.

Ref.: COntracT #0083347100232 (TKEEP).

Seigneur, please see attached message from agency. Confirm property to be delivered to Nachtel’s Ghost.

Reply CME to one-shot homing dest. #MS97821.7702.1[1]

TEXTEND

TEXTBEGIN HOMING MESSAGE GOLTER/MIYKENNS HOUSE/ANON. COMMERCIAL MAXENCRYPT.

Ref.: OSHD #MS97821.7702.1[0] Destination confirmed. Please deliver to our agents on NG as advised.

TEXTEND

She walked back from the hire-bureau through the morning rush-hour of bicycles, trams and cars. The streets were busy. Unlike Malishu, SkyView didn’t actually ban private transport, though it did discourage it.

The city was perched on a plateau that stuck half a kilometre above the surrounding sea of undulating Entraxrln canopy like a vast wart on pale skin. It was a chill, raw place even though it was only a couple of thousand kilometres from the equator, and less than two thousand metres above sea level. Denied the Entraxrln’s relatively balmy auto-climate, SkyView relied entirely on Thrial for its warmth, and the sun was noticeably smaller in the sky than it was seen from the surface of Golter.

The hire-bureau was near the main funicular station where they’d first arrived in the city three days earlier, rising from the purple gloom of the Entraxrln evening to the wide glory of a Miykenns sunset in brilliant cerise. Now, commuters who had just made the same trip swept her along with them through the cool, crisp, cloudless morning.

She had sent her first message early last night and received its reply after supper. She’d asked for the confirmation from the Sea House within minutes, but hadn’t waited for a reply; there was a three hour round-trip signal delay and it was then very early morning on Golter. She doubted the Seigneur was an early riser.

She read the two replies again, waiting on a traffic island while cars whirred and trams clanked past. She raised her face to the sunlight, seeking the weak warmth with a kind of hunger after the weeks in Pharpech’s perpetual gloom. The light shone down the canyon of city street, reflecting off high glass-fronted buildings on either side, pouring onto the river of traffic and the crowds of people. NG, soonest, she read once more, and then stuffed the pieces of flimsy into a pocket.

`Why there?’ she said to herself. Her breath smoked in front of her face. She pulled on her gloves and fastened her jacket as the traffic stopped and she crossed the road in the midst of the crowd.

She watched a big seaplane roar overhead; it banked above the city as it started its approach. The plateau lake must still be ice-free. She watched the aircraft disappear behind the buildings with an expression on her face somewhere between wistfulness and bitterness.

Nachtel’s Ghost. They wanted her to deliver the book to Nachtel’s Ghost; outwards to the limits of the system, not inwards, not towards Golter, where the Sea House was. She walked back to the hotel, stopping and looking in shops and displays, making sure she wasn’t being followed. Her reflection, seen in one window, had a pinched, pale look about it. She inspected her face and saw again the message in the dust that was all that was left of the Universal Principles: THINGS WILL CHANGE.

She drew her jacket tighter still, recalling the chill granite surface of her grandfather’s tomb when it had still been at Tzant, and the freezing cold of the Ghost; the remembered fall in the remembered fall. She shivered.

Physically brave, she thought as the hired ship shuddered its way into the thin, cold, evaporating atmosphere of Nachtel’s Ghost. Physically brave.

She had left the others in SkyView. They would wait there until she had finished in Nachtel’s Ghost and decide where to rendezvous later. They’d had news from Golter; all Miz’s assets had been frozen while the Log-jam attempted to have a warrant issued for his arrest in connection with an unspecified offence within its jurisdiction. Miz had lawyers working on the case, and anyway had emergency funds he could access, but not until he was actually present on Golter. Sharrow had used up most of the rest of the contract expenses allowance chartering a private spacecraft to take her from SkyView to Nachtel’s Ghost; comm net gossip and news reports both had it that the Huhsz were waiting at Embarkation Island, and she’d been travelling as Ysul Demri long enough for there to be an even chance they knew her pseudonym.

She had not been back to the Ghost since the crash-landing that had both saved her and almost killed her. The crippled ex-excise clipper had fallen like a meteorite through the wasted air of the small planet-moon, slowing and slewing as it spun and wobbled and disintegrated on its long arcing plunge towards the planet’s snow-covered surface. She couldn’t remember anything after she’d shouted to Miz about wanting any crater she made being named after her. Miz hadn’t heard her, anyway.

The crash report later concluded she’d probably run out of gyro-manoeuvring power ten kilometres up, while the craft was still travelling at over a kilometre a second. It had started to tumble and tear itself to pieces immediately afterwards and only luck had saved her after that. The central section of the ship -containing the combat pressure hull, life-support systems and central plasma power plant - had stayed relatively intact, reduced to a jagged, roughly spherical shape that had continued to slow as it somersaulted and shed further small pieces of wreckage like burning shrapnel through the air.

She could recall nothing of those final minutes, and nothing of the crash itself, as the piece of wreckage containing her buried itself inside a snow-wave, one of the thousands migrating across the surface of the planet’s equatorial snow-fields like sand dunes across a desert.

A crawler carrying mining supplies had been within a couple of kilometres. The crew had found her, a few minutes before it would have been too late, crushed and folded inside the steaming, radiation-contaminated wreckage of the ship, buried two hundred metres under the surface of the snow-wave at the end of a collapsed tunnel of ice and snow.

The crawler’s crew had cut her out; the medics at First Cut mine had treated the physical injuries, while specialist war-embargoed systems were brought in from Trench City, the planet’s capital, to treat the radiation sickness that had brought her even closer to death.

It had been two months before they’d even thought it worthwhile restoring her to consciousness. When she awoke the war had been over for a month and the military standard interface wafer buried at the back of her skull had been removed. The effects of the synchroneurobonding virus were irreversible, while the nanotechnology and tissue-cloning techniques that repaired the ravages of the radiation pulse were only withdrawn after the course of treatment had finished.

And - perhaps - something else had been added; the crystal virus that had grown over the years and then lain dormant within her skull until a few weeks ago, when she’d been running with the others through the dried-up tank of the ancient oil-carrier, in the Log-Jam.

Her memories of the hospital in the mine complex were hazy. She remembered the Tenaus military prison hospital much better; gradually recovering, waiting for the final peace deal to be worked out, beginning to exercise her body in the gym to restore her lost fitness, and exercising her brain whenever she could, remembering - obsessively, the prison psychologist had worried - every detail she could dredge from her memory from the age of five onwards, because she’d been terrified that the treatment had altered her, made her somebody different by destroying some of her memories.

She wanted to recall everything, and to try to assess if the memories she found buried in herself were the ones she could remember from before; it seemed like a check on the kind of alteration she feared that the act of recalling a memory itself left a memory, and that that could be compared with the experience of remembering in the present.

In the end there was no sure way of telling, but she found no obvious holes in her memory. When she’d been allowed to send and receive communications, the people who wrote to her seemed to relate to her the way she remembered. Nobody seemed to notice any change; certainly they didn’t mention any.

They had to write to her because visits were not allowed and the light-delay from Tenaus Habitat to almost anywhere else was too long for real-time conversations. She had had one phone call with Miz, calling from HomeAtLast, in orbit above Miykenns. In a way it had been the best phone conversation of her life; the minutes-long gaps while the signal carrying the words you had just spoken travelled to their destination meant that you just had to sit there looking at the screen and the other person. Calling anybody else, she’d have watched screen or read something in between, but with Miz she just sat and stared at his face. They’d had an hour; it had only really been ten minutes and had seemed like one.

Had they put the crystal virus into her there, in Tenaus? Nachtel’s Ghost seemed like the more obvious place, while she’d been hovering close to death in a state more like suspended animation than anything else, beyond stimulus, sensation or dreams . . . but perhaps it had been done in Tenaus. Why would a Tax-neutral mining company want to implant a transceiver virus in a near-dead crashed military pilot?

But then, she thought, why would somebody in a military prison hospital want to do that either?

Why would anybody?

A cold, keen wind cut out of a sky the colour of verdigris. The sun dangled like a hopeless bauble dispensing thin amounts of light. Leeward, the dark train of a departing storm trailed its snowy skirts high into the swivelling tides of light. The snow-cliff at her back reared like an enormous wave, poised ready to break on the sloped black beach of the shield volcano’s flanks.