Context (66 page)

<Story>>

[11]

Holo,
with soundtrack by Borodin:

It is in the depths of icy winter—
Ro kept the narrative as text:
she could read it ten times faster than listening to voiceover—
beneath a
crust of fresh white snow, that Moscow (more properly, Moskva)—
she touched
the word: it sounded from the speaker as
‘Maskvà’—paradoxically reveals its
character.

Layer upon layer of history: like
winter clothing, peeled off in the warmth indoors, we reveal a proud people—superstitious
yet secular, intellectual and family-loving — who have suffered greatly ...

Leaning back in her cushioned
seat, Ro regarded the smartcart in the aisle beside her.

‘Quelque chose à boire?’
The device had noted her Swiss
citizenship; Ro’s canton-reg mistakenly listed her primary tongue as
français:
a piece of misinformation destined to spread through EveryWare.

‘Non, merci.’

To her other side, the window
overlooked blue skies, with grey cloud cover nestling below, hiding the
winter-bound countryside.

..
. fodder for gulags, when
the secret police would knock upon the doors at night, arresting innocents for
sedition. In the one country which suffered most in the TwenCen war against the
Nazis, where every family was touched by bereavement, a national paranoia
ironically replicated the worst of—

She minimized the holo, maximized
the other: the message she had read no more than two dozen times since boarding
the flight and checking her h-mail.

Bronze warrior face, the too-long
black hair.

‘I’m sorry,’
he said again, in re-play.
‘I think
you’re expecting too much of our, ah, friendship. Forgive me if I’m out of
line, but I’m not comfortable with this.’

Her stomach contracted once more.

‘Tomorrow, I leave for Saarbrücken,
for two weeks’ initial training.’
He
mispronounced the narrow ‘ü’.
‘If I’ve misunderstood, you can contact me
there, before I go on to Tehran.’

Sick inside, skin tightening, Ro
touched the miniature Luís Starhome: just an insubstantial holo, pure light and
quite intangible.

Can I lose what I never had?

Was this the way poor Albrecht
suffered, when she rid her life of him?

‘Otherwise, I think it best’—
his warrior’s face was grave,
rather than contrite—
‘that we not talk again. Endit’

The holo stilled, winked out of
existence.

Endit.
Yes, he had ended what he had
never started.

Ro blinked rapidly, re-started
the other holovolume.

...
wide imperial streets,
cupolas and minarets still prominent, stolid kremlins rubbing shoulders with
the latest in leading-edge bioarchitecture
—

Ro checked the aisle, tempted to
summon the smartcart back. Something to dull the pain ... No.

There were few other passengers.
Up front, the big payers in luxury class were partying or working: too blasé
actually to enjoy the flight. Under other circumstances, Ro would have been
thrilled; now she felt dislocated in space, unnerved by despair.

—
though Sakharov ‘s statue
has been removed, and the site has reverted to its former name of Dzerzhinski
Square, the dark ghosts of Beria and Dzerzhinski himself have thankfully not
returned. The iron fist in the iron glove no longer haunts Muscovites. Where a
grim dark cube once stood, headquarters of the feared Komityet Gosudarstvennoi
Bezopasnosti—KGB—now grows the magnificent flowering bioarchitecture of XenoMir,
home to alien ambassadors and UNSA’s finest research scientists. It is situated
opposite the well-known
—

The hypershuttle banked, arced
down into the cloud layer.

Sheremetyevo spaceport, and the
whole of Moscow’s grandeur, were laid out beneath her.

UN
troops, armoured with flak jackets and bearing sonar-scoped lineac rifles,
escorted her to a waiting TDV. Their boots crunched through the heavy snow.

‘S’il vous plaît.’ A
sergeant gestured her inside.

‘Merci.’
She slid onto the cold bench seat
as the heavy gull door swung down, clicked shut.

‘Welcome to Moscow.’ The onboard
AI spoke in English. ‘We will shortly be—’

‘Shut up.’

A smartcart slid her luggage—two
carryalls—into the TDV’s stowage compartment. The soldiers nodded, stepped
away: apparently, their duty was fulfilled.

The vehicle slid into motion.

She had a glimpse of her fellow
shuttle passengers, all queuing for taxis like normal civilians, and wished she
was among them. Not important enough to be escorted all the way, but not
allowed to remain anonymous.

...
of the recent outrages,
UNSA personnel are required to follow code-orange safety protocols at all
times.
She tapped on her golden-wire infostrand, cranking up the audio.
Please
keep EveryWare-Assist in permanent pre-load whenever you are travelling out
of...

There had been anti-xeno
demonstrations in Tehran, Dublin, Saigon and Reykjavik. Ro shook her head, and
silenced her infostrand. She hoped that Sergeant Arrowsmith and the forensic
scientist, Hannah, were safe: both had taken indefinite leave, and gone to stay
with distant relatives.

As for her, if there was some
conspiracy which threatened her, she was safer surrounded by UNSA security, in
a city where paranoia had once been a way of life, than wandering around the
desert, exposed.

Outside, Moscow’s wide
snow-bordered boulevards slipped past.

Among
the grand old granite buildings—bigger and more imposing than Ro had expected—was
something new: a glistening black corporate pyramid, large enough to contain
maybe two thousand employees, visibly reconfiguring itself. Ro pressed her face
against the TDV’s blue-tinted armour-glass, watching the biobuilding slowly
recede into the distance behind her.

Then she flopped back into her
seat, let out a long breath, and smiled despite her dark mood. Perhaps this was
going to be interesting, after all.

Outside, a cold grey rain began
to fall, mashing at the snow.

Over
glistening wet cobbles, the TDV hissed into Red Square. Crimson reflections—from
the giant floating holo:
—dripped
across the ground, and the soaking membrane which coated St Basil’s Cathedral.
The largest of its cupolas was striped with the exact shade of mint-green that
the scarp slopes showed in the Painted Desert—

Ro shook her head.

The TDV slid past the Kremlin’s
long red walls, behind which golden cupolas brightly shone. Then the vehicle
hissed across a wide boulevard, circled an imposing block of grey architecture,
and settled to the ground before a building such as Ro had never seen in
person.

It was approximately globular,
rearing high overhead: a myriad black window facets embedded in a motile white
web. The biobuilding was slowly but—as Ro slid out from the TDV—visibly
deforming, morphing. Endlessly cycling through its configurations.

There was a policeman, in green
thermal suit, with wide Slavic features beneath his heavy helmet.