Context (39 page)

Her birthplace.

And the drifting crimson
streamers, like nebulae, of vast dimensions. Where place and time vary
according to scale, not velocity.

Where logic was complete, and all
that was true could be deduced.

Home.

Where self-reflexive recursion,
and infinite paradox, might be resolved.

It called, it called, to the
aching void inside her.

Mu-space.

Infinite and infinitely complex,
it sang.

It beckoned.

Home.

For
three nights, they performed the Sing, and Ro’s spirit soared free.

At the third night’s end, they
carried her outside, and laid her down on the supportive ground. Cold air
washed over her, as she stared up into the still-dark sky where silver stars
shone. Only a touch of lime in the eastern skies bespoke the coming dawn.

‘You saw deeply.’ One of the men,
his voice serious.

‘That I did.’ She looked up at
him without smiling.

He nodded, and walked away.

Luís reached out his hand—the
touch of his smooth skin was like fire: a burst of pleasure, intense and
prolonged—and helped her to stand.

Breakfast—eggs
and beans cooked over a real fire—tasted heavenly. They sat cross-legged on the
reddish sand, eating in easy silence. Behind them, the horses, saddled up,
patiently waited.

She watched him: the controlled
gestures, the centred calm.

Some fine day, I’ll make you lose
control.

Inwardly smiling, she poured him
coffee from the self-heating chemoflask.

Afterwards,
mounted, they took Quarrel and Bolt to the sandstone mesa’s edge and looked
down upon the wide, flat desert below. DistribOne was a tiny distant cluster.

Leaning against her saddle’s
pommel, Ro said: ‘The
bilagáana
world.’ She used the Navajo term for
Anglos, not knowing whether it was value-neutral or derogatory.

‘And mine.’

There was a Teutonic exactness to
his speech. Ro assumed he meant it was
one
of the cultural worlds in
which he lived.

Luís slid down from his saddle.
Reins in hand, he walked—lean and athletic, his every movement, magnet-like,
drawing Ro’s gaze—to the mesa’s edge. The sheer drop seemed not to bother him.

From his saddlepack, Luís drew a
silver/turquoise bracelet, and fastened it round his wrist. Infostrand: like
Ro, he had been offline for three days.

He tapped a silver conch on the
bracelet, stared intensely—a lased-in display, invisible to Ro—and nodded once
as he tapped the bracelet off.

‘Bad news?’ asked Ro.

Luís looked at her with dark
unreadable eyes.

‘Not for me.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Ro swung her leg
back and dropped from the saddle. ‘What do you mean?’

She walked up to him.

God, I want you.

Standing centimetres apart.
Proximity: she was aware only of him, of his strength and presence and sheer
desirability.

‘I’m going to Tehran,’ he said. ‘That
message confirmed what the Sing told me.’

For a moment, Ro could only
stare.

Then, ‘What’s in Tehran?’

But, spirit sinking, she knew the
answer before he spoke:

‘The stars.’

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23

NULAPEIRON
AD 3419

They
ended their holiday a day early.

Some homecoming.

It hung there, in a man-shaped
basket floating vertically in the gloom: blackened, roasted flesh. Hanging
above the piazzetta’s black and white squares; once a human being, now flensed
and burned, with the cooked-meat stench pervading the still air.

Behind Tom, Mivkin turned away,
retching. Jasirah was stumbling back into the tunnel from which they had come.

Abomination.

There were others, floating in
two rows. Sixteen black/red forms, some with viscerae spilled forth and burst,
glistening like liquid pain where pale beams of light filtered through from the
larger piazza. And then
one of them moved
and Tom, too, dropped to his
knees and vomited clear bile.

Tom
cast aside his cloak, stared upwards into the gloom.

‘What are you—?’ Quilvox stopped.

But it was Ryban, the quiet
sneaky one, who surprised Tom. From within his broad sash, he brought out a
long narrow blade, and proffered it hilt first.

‘I’d be honoured, my Lord.’ His
voice was a low whisper, but it charged the air.

‘You know.’

‘Looking at you now’—with an
ironic half-smile—‘I recognize you, at last.’

‘My thanks.’

Tom took the stiletto, slid it
inside his tunic, and ran lightly to the nearest wall and jumped, reaching up
to grab. There were shallow grooves cut into the polished rock, and he used
them, moving quickly. Reaching the ceiling, he stepped out onto a glowcluster—it
bobbed once, beneath his weight -then vaulted onto the first floating lev-cage.

Its occupant was truly dead,
teeth bared in a death rictus where the face was burned away. Denatured white
slime nestled in the cooked eye sockets.

Tom leaped to the next cage.

No life inside here, either. But
this one had torn the flesh from his fingers against the wire-thin bars,
scraped down to the gleaming bone, before death claimed him. Tom could not
imagine pain so great that he would rip himself apart in the effort to escape.

And then the next.

Seventeen cages in all. Tom
remembered the schachmati-playing merchant, and the living men who had been his
game pieces, facing the noble Viscount Trevalkin. And in the piazza, instead of
holiday atmosphere, the grim mood of spectators who had sensed that something
beyond their ordinary experience was about to happen.