Context (29 page)

Horush was gangly, hard-working,
twenty SY old but with the appearance of someone younger, with a strangely
vulnerable, almost girlish smile. If there was anyone less likely to develop
the berserker rage which carls held in such reverential esteem, Tom had yet to
meet them.

‘I’ll take Lafti’s remark,’ he
said, ‘as a compliment.’

It
was five tendays later, of uninspiring work days but increasing vitality in his
physical training, that Tom was finally invited to lunch: formal luncheon with
Master Trader Bronlah. As Tom left the work chamber in Master Grenshin’s
company, Jasirah’s gaze followed him, swollen with jealousy. For three Standard
Years she had been indentured here, her contract annually renewed, yet this
honour had never come her way.

It was a privilege Tom could have
done without.

The merchant was pot-bellied, a
white goatee framing his small red mouth, and he sat cross-legged on a floating
lev-cushion at the head of the low table, while his employee vassals, Tom among
them, knelt in twin rows facing each other, sitting back on their heels on the
rough matting which covered the greystone floor.

Rich burgundy tapestries
decorated the walls, and golden glowglobes floated everywhere. The food bowls
were of deep red and blue, so dark they appeared black except when direct light
revealed their true lustre; the food itself was varied and multicoloured
(indicating a nutritious range of bioflavins) and superb in quality.

There was no idle conversation
beneath Harson Bronlah’s impassive stare. When Tom attempted to make a remark
about the coming Anzhafest holiday, and the airblooms decorating the corridors,
Bronlah looked at him in near-autistic silence, killing the pleasantries stone
dead.

Miserable bastard.

But later, during the meal, when
Tom mentioned the new reoptimization algorithm which balanced content versus
context in a time-dependent fashion, working with many-dimensioned manifolds,
Bronlah asked several penetrating questions. Afterwards, though, with that
topic exhausted, Bronlah fell back into his emotionless, unspeaking state.

Then, as dessert was served, the
man next to Tom leaned over and whispered: ‘Senior staff only, for the next
part.’

Opposite Tom, a young (though
silver-haired) woman called Draquelle was already rising to her feet. She
nodded to Tom, causing the long white scars along her face to ripple with
reflected light.

He rose and followed her.

As
they were halfway down the exit passage, a slim hand beckoned from a shadowed
side entrance.

‘Could you attend to that?’ asked
Draquelle. ‘I really need to get back to work.’

‘All right.’

It was a vassal who had signalled,
a slim Zhongguo Ren woman, and she smiled without warmth and led the way past
dark alcoves, through velvet drapes into a wide low-ceilinged round chamber,
artfully lit by glowclusters, where an old man was reclining nude on a couch at
the chamber’s centre.

Tom was taken aback, until he
noticed another woman with pale oriental features, robed in elegant gold-chased
silk, constructing a holosculpture of the old man, with deft scoops and
caresses of her fingertips in empty air.

‘The secret of truly mastering a
thing,’ she said without looking away from her subject, ‘is to teach that thing
to another.’

Long years of servitude taught
Tom to hide his smile.

I’m here for an art lesson?

The vassal touched his arm, and
whispered: ‘Madam Bronlah has another sensor field initialized over here.’

“Thank you.’

‘There,
and there.’ She guided Tom’s wrist. ‘Oh, that’s marvellous.’

Immersed in the moment, Tom
watched—it was all about seeing, he realized: focusing attention on the old man
rather than his own movements—wiped a final control gesture, and stepped back
from the sensor-field.

It was minimalist and ghostly,
but it captured a certain feel, and Madam Bronlah was as pleased as he was.

‘You have real talent,’ she said,
though her own work was exquisite, more than Tom could ever hope to achieve.

‘My thanks.’ Tom gave a courtly
bow.

But her breath hissed inwards at
his gesture, and he knew he had revealed a nicety of noble protocol which a
lowly merchanalyst should know nothing of.

She was much younger than her
husband, and very beautiful, but those dark eyes which had been so beguiling
now masked her thoughts, as he backed out and took the nearest exit.

In his hurry to get out, he had
taken a different passageway, but it curved in the right general direction.

When
he stepped out of the passage, he was back where he had started from; but the
dining chamber was now in semi-darkness, almost deserted. Two men were frozen
in a tableau of unspoken tension, while a lacquered shellac box floated in the
air between them.

Master Trader Bronlah still sat
upon his lev-cushion. Facing him, cross-legged on the floor where the low table
had stood before, was a Zhongguo Ren man wearing a heavy surcoat and a round
pointed hat with long ear flaps. His hands rested upon his knees, and small
carved steel plates were set into his knuckles: art and weaponry combined.

‘Pardon me.’ Tom bowed. ‘Nĭmen
hăo.’

The oriental man—surely a
representative of a secret society—stared at Tom without speaking.

‘Are you still here?’ The master
trader scowled.

‘I was asked to assist, sir ...’

Tom backed away, but not before
he had seen the Zhongguo Ren adjust his tunic, caught the sight of flashing
sapphire at his throat.

I’ve seen that colour before.

The blue fluid in which his
boyhood friend Kreevil had been imprisoned, with other criminals. His friend
Zhao-Ji, too, in later years... And the lightning in the Seer’s chamber. It had
something to do with Oracles, though in what regard he had no idea.

Tom left, knowing that he had
learned nothing which should put him in jeopardy—many trading houses dealt with
Zhongguo Ren secret societies, after all—but feeling an unsettled emptiness,
which disturbed him on several levels.

Perhaps it was just the reminder
that there was more to life than mundane work, that true magic has always lain
at reality’s heart while social convention is both as real and illusory as the
chemical imperatives which rule ants in a nest—the queen’s pheromones creating commands
which are absolute but only in that context—and that while he was wasting time
in obscurity, there were Oracles and Seers and strange powers following their
own intangible and complex purposes.

And the only woman who could
bring meaning to his life was somewhere in the world, possibly in danger,
waiting to be found.

~ * ~

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