Context (35 page)

She placed her right foot upon
the pedal—

‘Ro?’ It was Degas herself,
standing in the doorway.

‘Yeah? I mean—’

‘Can you come back inside for a
moment?’

Puzzled, Ro dismounted, and
walked back to the gym’s blue-painted door, not bothering to re-lock her bike’s
safeties—it was a hassle. She positioned herself so that she could keep the
bike in sight but Degas swung the door firmly shut, blocking off the outside
world.

‘The thing is ...’ Degas paused,
then: ‘I was a cop’s wife for fifteen years, y’know?’

Ro did not want to ask what had
happened to him. She remained silent.

‘Are you in some kind of trouble,
girl?’

Ro shook her head. ‘Not that I’m
aware of.’

Degas frowned.

‘Look . . .’ Ro, feeling uneasy,
stepped past Degas and pushed the door open.

Her new bicycle was gone.

‘Shit!’ She crouched, ready to
run in pursuit—she could hear the thief, already out of sight around the corner
and pedalling hard—but a firm grip caught her sleeve and swung her back inside.

Ro’s fists clenched ...but she
did not intend to fight Degas.

‘Cool it.’ The warning was
unnecessary. ‘If the bike’s been pinched, you might be better off.’

‘What... do you mean?’

‘Someone—a Mexican, no-one I know—brushed
by the bike earlier.’

Ro stared at her.

‘So?’

‘So if he wasn’t dropping a bug
on you, I’m your maiden aunt.’ A quick smile. ‘And I ain’t no maiden.’

Bugged?
Ro did not know what to make of that. She took a taxi—ground-TDV—back to
DistribOne. In the morning, clear-minded, she would decide whether to report
the bike stolen.

Professional surveillance ...

Something to do with Anne-Louise?
The notion made her shiver.

She tapped her strand to pay the
taxi, then slid out into the pleasant warm night air. Above, the black sky hung
over the desert, studded with silver stars. Before her, inviting, DistribOne
was a fairytale oasis in the wilderness, bedecked with orange-white lights.

In the refectory, Ro ordered
decaf coffee from the AI. Gradually, she became aware of a low buzz of
excitement. In one corner, several students were gathered around a
holo-display, watching a news bulletin. And two carafes of wine, one almost
empty, stood beside it: an impromptu party.

‘What’s up?’ she asked.

A teaching assistant called Zoë—Ro
had seen her around, was envious of her clear, creamy complexion and lustrous
grey eyes—looked up from an armchair and giggled.

‘Illegal aliens,’ she said. ‘Well,
one of them, at least.’

The others, ignoring Ro, huddled
closer to the holo.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Got loose. Not sure it was even
supposed to be’—Zoë hiccoughed—‘here on Terra. Zajinet embassy’s getting a
roasting.’

In the image, an anti-xeno
demonstration was in progress. The protesters’ holo banners flickered and broke
up. Accidental beat-frequency effects, with the camera-scan cycling out of
synch? Or a subtle form of censorship?

But it was still possible to
infer what they read, and few of the slogans would win prizes for originality:
Aliens
go home,
or
Earth for Earthers, space the Xenoes.
Even
The Only
Good Alien Is A Dead One,
and the nearly humorous:
I love Xenoes...
curried and hot, with rice on the side.

‘Xenophobes’ once referred simply
to those who fear strangers. Now it was a polite term for wrongthinking bigots
who blamed beings of different appearance and mentality for the inadequacies
and failures of their own pitiful, misery-drenched lives.

The only thing Ro could not
understand was why this particular demonstration was occurring, and why the
news was so important.

‘What,’ she asked slowly, ‘is a
Zajinet?’

‘Huh?’ Zoë leaned closer,
peering, and Ro could smell alcohol vapour upon her breath. ‘Just got here,
yes? Well’—Zoë half-stumbled from the armchair, but caught her balance before
Ro could grab her—‘you’d better come with me.’

‘I don’t think—’

‘Ah ... Right. New girl. Not
authorized.’

Ro stared at her. ‘Why don’t you
show me anyway?’

‘No
bilateral symmetry even.’ Zoë spoke with alcoholic over-careful enunciation. ‘It’s
not that common, on life-supporting worlds.’

Around them, the lab was
blanketed in gloomy shadows.

‘Surprising.’

Ro did not have access to UNSA
xenofiles, and xeno visitors were generally kept out of the public eye. Of the
thirty biocapable worlds, only a handful had sentient species. Two had
interplanetary spaceflight; it was rumoured that the Zajinets might be a third
spacefaring species, but no-one knew for sure.

A holo grew into being.

‘They don’t look like much,’ said
Ro.

Red network, fractally branching.
A pattern in light.

‘That’s their core form.
Internal.’ Zoë’s diction was improving. ‘They usually look more like this

The image flickered.

It might have been a garden
decoration, an impromptu sculpture of heaped boulders and stones, save that it
was the size of an elephant, and it moved. Somehow the separate inorganic
clumps held together as the whole ensemble stumped about, then glided along a
shining path formed of metal, or perhaps of ice.

‘Kind of a shell they build
around themselves.’

‘Ugly-looking.’ Ro gestured for
explanatory text-tesseracts, but the display did not respond: she really was
not authorized.

‘Well, they all look like that.
They’ve got ambassadors in Moscow and Tehran. What do you think?’

‘About what?’

‘Interesting enough for project
work? We need good researchers.’

‘I guess,’ said Ro.

A chance to work with aliens?

But she was an intern, still a
student.

No way they’ll give that work to
me.

‘Le ... less ... Uh, let’s go
join the party.’

Ro
muttered to herself. Aware that she was sleeping, face down on the bed. And
then the muted chaos of overlaid whispers in the dark:

<<... arcs joining: and
entropic diffusion extends ...>>

<<... white, she survives
the pearly nascent...>>

<<... burgeons the nexus:
sweetening death ...>>

<<... yet cold as matrix
overdrives her future ...>>

Ro jerked awake. An unsettling
dream?

But neither the whispered sounds
nor the half-sensed images faded as she sat bolt upright in the darkness.

<<... she sees!...>>

<<... sensitive, this one
...>>

<<... affirm! confirm!...>>

<<... aware: beware...>>

Emerald fire, incandescent in the
night shadows: a twisted dendritic network of glowing, burning lines. It was a
nightmare, fiery in the darkened room, hovering over Anne-Louise’s empty bed.

‘Ah!’ Ro threw her sheet from the
bed. ‘Get back!’

She rolled sideways, moving fast,
head pounding -

It disappeared.

— then stopped, almost falling
over.

It’s gone.

Trembling, she sat back on her
bed. Sweat covered her. Scalp prickling, stomach heaving ...but there was
nothing here. The shadowed bedroom was empty now, save for a dead person’s bed,
a quietness which seemed more empty than the void, and the burning afterimage
in her memory of an eerie inhuman ghost which surely could not exist.

<>

~ * ~

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