Context (45 page)

A pause.

‘I’ll find ‘em all, don’t worry.’
He looks at her beautiful dark eyes. ‘I promised you that.’

‘I know.’

Clint sips from his whisky
tumbler.

‘So why are you visiting me,
Juanita? It don’t happen less’n there’s trouble.’

‘Ah, my love.’ She tilts her head
to one side. ‘You know, just before they pinned me down, they... One of them
called me a wetback, you know?’ She blinks. ‘I told him I’d never seen the Rio
Grande, much less swum across it. He just looked puzzled.’

[[Ro stopped the playback, used
her infostrand to check the defunct racial epithet’s origin—from swimming
across the river from Mexico: confirmed—then resumed the story.]]

‘Cruelty comes from ignorance.’
Shade’s hand rests on the hard walnut grip of his low-slung Colt .45. ‘Least I
know my limitations.’ His forefinger rests briefly on the slender trigger. ‘And
my strengths.’

‘So what’s really troubling you,
Clint?’

Silence. Then: ‘There’s a
stranger in town, darlin’.’

Overhead, a lone eagle wheels.

‘And?’

‘Pinkerton ‘s are interested. And
that renegade creep, Slim Thatcher. An’ he’s part of Sacchi’s little net of
raiders, I’m sure of it.’

Juanita grows strangely silent,
even for a ghost.

‘Mebbe Sacchi gave the orders his
own self, about what happened to you, an’ maybe not...’

As his eyes harden, dazzling
sparks begin to evanesce about Juanita’s form.

‘But I’ve some questions ‘-he
draws so fast the Colt seems to leap into his hand, then slowly reholsters—‘that
need some answers.’

Sunset is upon the world, orange
light dripping across the desert, as Juanita’s ghost swirls apart, fades into
insubstantiality, is gone.

‘They killed you, my darlin’.
They won’t get the stranger.’

He is still leaning against the
rail as sunset slides into night.

Ro
flicked off the display.

Sacchi’s net... Zajinet?

Too facile, too contrived. Wasn’t
it? But:
Pinkerton’s...
Official agencies? The police?

Perhaps she had assumed too much,
thought that there was more encrypted within the story’s fabric than
Anne-Louise had in fact put there.

And as for the stranger ...Anne-Louise
herself? Or someone else?

I’m the only newcomer in
DistribOne.

For a long time, Ro stared at the
space where Anne-Louise’s body had lain. Then she shivered, and abruptly stood
up, knowing she could bear the empty accusing room no longer, and went to look
for human company.

But when she returned, much
later, the crystal-cassette was gone.

<>

~ * ~

26

NULAPEIRON
AD 3419

Orange
fire, red-hot liquid.

It spat.

Crackled, burned.

A glowing blob of magma fell near
Tom, but he did not flinch. He remained in lotus, seated atop his folded cloak
on the dark blue ledge, while the lava pool below swirled and glowed, bubbled
and flowed.

Thinking of nothing.

Dark Fire...

Thinking of everything.

‘Come
back tomorrow,’ Lord Sumneriv had told him at the med centre. “They’ll let you
talk to him then.’

‘And you?’

‘Oh, my good Lord Corcorigan.’
Sumneriv sniffed from a tiny pomander ring upon his little finger. ‘There is
very little I have to say to you.’

‘Whatever you wish.’

Tom had walked past the chamber
where Viscount Trevalkin lay submersed in healing aerogel. In the antechamber
beyond, where relatives of other patients waited, a strangely
self-congratulatory tricon was floating:

Thanks to our health awareness
programmes, we are pleased to announce a significant drop in mortality rates
throughout the stratum.

Tom suppressed a laugh, for those
worried relatives’ sake. Humankind’s mortality rate had been one hundred per
cent since the species began, and he foresaw no decrease any time soon.

Or perhaps not quite one hundred
per cent.

Dart Mulligan. Do you survive
still?

For once, during the effort which
had burned out half of his talisman crystal’s functions, Tom had made contact
with ... something more than human, in the mu-space continuum.

The original Dart, nearly
thirteen hundred Standard Years before—though mu-space time is even more
relative than its realspace counterpart—had sacrificed himself to save Karyn
McNamara, and his ship had been absorbed by the ravening, quasi-sentient
pattern of coruscating energies which had trapped both vessels in mu-space’s
endless golden sea.

Dart, who might have become a
god.

But the Dart with which Tom had
communicated described himself thus:

##I AM A SYSTEM-REFLECTION OF
WHAT LIES BEYOND##

Which meant... what? A self-aware
alter ego within the vast comms network which, Tom suspected, existed
permanently in mu-space?

But if a mere reflection could be
as powerful as the being Tom had talked to, what was the nature of the true
Dart consciousness, residing within the stuff of mu-space? Subsumed within the
vacuum energy of a continuum where infinite recursion is realizable, where
everything that is true can eventually be proven, where every paradox has a
final resolution.

And, if any of these speculations
were even remotely true, he wondered what other powers might lurk within the universes,
and what their capabilities and purposes might be, and whether ordinary human
beings can have any influence over Destiny when such great beings decide to
move upon the world.

Dayshift
was ending when he heard a whisper of sound nearby, and opened his eyes to see
Draquelle watching him. Her long, prematurely silver hair glimmered orange with
reflected lavaflow, and the white scars upon her face seemed to glow with an
inner light of their own.

‘Madam Bronlah sends her greetings.’
Molten rock spat in counterpoint to her soft words. ‘And asks if you would like
to make a journey on her behalf.’

Tom let out a long slow breath.
This was the payment he had implicitly promised to make.

‘As her representative?’

‘No. More’—with a tiny smile—‘as
my personal bodyguard.’

‘I see.’

‘Perhaps you do.’

Draquelle lowered her hand to the
front of her silken tunic, and undid the magseal before Tom could stop her.

‘I don’t think—’

But he had misread her
intentions.