Context (103 page)

<Story>>

[19]

Gritty-eyed,
unable to sleep, they gathered in the main conference room: a bellied-out
section of bluish tubular corridor. There was a ragged energy in the air, the
unspoken communal thought keeping them awake:
We‘re going home.

Lila was perched on a crate,
holding the comms pad. Not long now.

Ro pushed her way through. ‘Lila,
you’re missing two people.’

‘I know.’ Anger darkened Lila’s
eyes, and she flicked back her hair—now lustrous green, and long—from her face.
‘Anita and Oron.’

“They’re staying in the city,
they said. For good.’

‘They’ll need—’

But just then the comms pad
squawked into life.

‘Pilot Vaachs to Diplomatic
Settlement BD3. Confirming rendezvous as scheduled.
’

There were cheers as Lila
answered, ‘That’s terrific, Pilot. Our thanks. There will be twenty people
boarding, with this cargo.’ She appended the manifest, sent it with a gesture. ‘We’re
leaving two people behind. Gone native.’

‘That doesn’t sound like a good
idea, BD3. Though I’m not sure about your arithmetic. Doesn‘t that leave
nineteen personnel?’

‘You know where they are?’ Lila
whispered. ‘Oron and Anita?’

Ro nodded.

‘Well, then.’ She spoke into the
comms pad. ‘Our replacements will have to dig them out. And there are twenty
departing: this is not a mistake.’

‘Negative on the stay-behinds,
BD3. There are no replacements. This is a full evacuation, as per your
regulation X-nineteen. Orders file appended.
’

‘Shit.’ Lila put down the pad,
and looked around the room. ‘Any volunteers for an arrest party? We have two
assholes to collect.’

Ro
led the way, with a sense of fatalistic acceptance: she would pay the price for
her revenge. The others in the party, experienced though they were, had to
concentrate, connected to Ro by smartrope and hanging on whenever the
flickering overlays—white sky replaced by corn-yellow and blue stippling,
smeared blood-red, then white once more—grew too surreal.

Anita and Oron, env-suited, came
surprisingly easily. It was not just the news that all humans were being
evacuated; they were subdued, and Ro sensed that the Zajinets blamed them in
some way for what had happened. But the gazes they turned on Ro were liquid
with dark malevolence.

‘She damaged him irreparably,’
Anita said. ‘The new union, the remake of a being, and she spoiled everything.’

‘Your Zajinets’ — Ro’s voice was taut
with bitterness — ‘are responsible for dozens of deaths on Terra. Why do you
think we’re being evacuated?’

‘You—’

‘No.’ Lila brandished a
wrist-graser Ro had not seen before. ‘Shut up, everyone. Recriminations later.’

‘But—’

‘Let’s just get out of here
alive.’

So I didn’t kill it.

She had aimed, with her
mathematical intuition, to destroy only one pattern-within-patterns: one group
personality, among the many, the supergroup, which comprised each Zajinet But
at a time when it was—mating? reproducing? reincarnating?—somehow re-forming
itself, in conjunction with the other, its former accuser.

It made no sense.

But she had effectively
lobotomized the one responsible for Luís’s death. For Anne-Louise.

They hurried through the shifting
streets, observed by hovering Zajinets who offered no greeting, but made no
move to stop them.

Departure.

A wide space had been cleared
before the twisted silver-blue tubes of the settlement, of Watcher’s Bones, and
the cargo was piled up ready to go. The gathered humans watched as autoshuttles
drifted down in triangular formation from the dark rippling sky.

Cargocrabs loaded crates, while
the people—one group led by Lila, the other by Bruce’s imposing bulk—lined up
for the two shuttles whose holds were made over as passenger cabins: lined with
grey carpeting, filled with sleep-couches for the mu-space voyage.

‘OK, everyone. Let’s go home.’

They were silent as they climbed
aboard, casting glances back towards the shifting, changing cityscape, noting
the absence of any formal deputation. No farewells; no replacements to be
greeted.

Terrans were no longer welcome
here.

She
watched the others lie back. Fluffy Matheson winked at her, then placed his
delta-band on his forehead and slid into immediate sleep. All around her,
people were closing their eyes, relaxing.

But Lila and the slightly built
but hard-looking Jared were watching Ro, and both of them were armed.

‘See you on Terra,’ said Ro.

She lay back, thinking:
Twenty
minutes. Remember.

And slept.

And
dreamed.

Of liquid golden space, of black
spongiform stars embedded in infinite amber, with crimson nebulae, like
streamers of blood, here and there amid the vastness.

Then, after twenty minutes (as humans
reckon the passage of linear time) she awoke, and found what she had deeply
known all along.

The dream was real.

There
was something trance-like in the way she drifted through the shuttle, past
Matheson’s and Lila’s and Jared’s sleeping forms. Golden space seemed to
overlay everything, as though she swam in a fractal sea, while the shuttle’s
rectilinear outlines seemed faded, a little transparent, and softer to the
touch.

But the door mechanism worked,
and it rose up, revealing the great cargo hold beyond.

Amber warmth pouring out to the
infinite beyond.

It was a siren-song and she
ignored it, concentrating on her purpose so that she did not lose herself in
beauty.

Her hand, as she waved it before
her face, seemed to replicate itself in series, until she held it still and
there was only one hand, and she was herself once more. A small private joke:
her stay among the Zajinets, her enemies, had helped to prepare her for this.

But why were they her enemies?

Golden space.