Context (74 page)

She halted the display.

Why?

The conference room was empty,
unsettling; she sat at an unchanging desk beneath a slow-morph green-tinted
window. Outside lay Moscow’s ancient grandeur.

But Luís—

Hot tears as she confronted the
thought: Luís would never see anything again. He did not
exist.

It was implacable reality; it was
the great terrible truth which could not be denied.

Details: lime-tinged sunlight
falling on the desk; a tiny greenfly (escaping the building’s nanocleaners),
legs splayed, upon the desktop terminal-pad; from somewhere, a soft white-noise
macromachine hum; the faint traces (to Ro’s preternatural hearing) of distant
conversation.

The physical world, surrounding
her.

Reality.

Luís was dead.

There
was a knock and her heart leaped—
Luís!—
while the small rational part of
her knew it could never be.

When the door concertinaed open,
it was Zoë who was standing there. Her normally youthful face was solemn,
revealing hard lines Ro had never noticed before.

A black armband circled her left
sleeve.

‘Ro? Are you OK with this? If you’re
not up to—’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘We’re using an official vehicle,
but unmarked. Leaving from the basement garage.’

‘Security?’ Ro glanced at the
news feature again, at its dry description of the airbase’s devastation. Its
content, its enormity had not changed. ‘All right. I’m ready.’

She waved the holo out of existence.

‘There are new security
protocols.’ Zoë led the way along a winding corridor. ‘We’ll talk about them
later.’

They came out into an atrium;
grey evening lay upon the slowly deforming skylights high above.

Something flickered.

It rolled then: elephant-sized,
it walked/flowed into the atrium. Like a collection of stony blobs hastily
thrown together into an organic sculpture, the ungainly mass lumbered past a
group of workers in civilian jumpsuits. It might have slowed as it neared Ro.

She focused her unusual vision;
at small scale, the Zajinet still seemed to be formed of many components:
pebbles and (squinting into the microscopic region) grains, all shifting and
vibrating within the overall matrix.

<<... node is
reinforcement: interference joy ... >>

<<... deadly, like the
other sweetened death ...>>

<<... visual field
prey/predator fascination ...>>

<<... swift ambivalence in
roiling calm ...>>

Ro snapped her senses back to
normal as the big thing lumbered past, turned left into the lab area, was gone.

‘Are you all right, Ro?’

‘Did you— Never mind.’

Because she knew, suddenly, that
what she had just seen was for her eyes only. For a fraction of a second, as it
had rounded the corner, the Zajinet’s gross form had grown insubstantial, and
its true core had flared with brilliance.

A tracery of burning crimson,
touched with fiery sapphire.

Demonic fire.

It
was not the only memorial service.

Dislocated impressions. Hymns
echoing back from the old stones, fading. The bearded, dark-robed priest
intoning his prayer to the standing congregation. Incense upon the heavy air.

No, this was not the only
service. There would be mourners at UNSA centres across the world, wherever
there were people who had known Luís, or any of the others who had died in Saarbrücken.

Stained brass candelabras hung on
soot-blackened chains from the shadow-wrapped vaulted ceiling. It was an
ancient church. There were no pews; in this chill climate, no-one sat or knelt.

‘Mi spaminaem Luís Starhome’—
the priest’s words, in any
language, were meaningless: symbols devoid of referent; maps of a nonexistent
territory—
‘maladoy muzhchina, talantliviy y energichniy
...’

Zoë, wrapped in heavy coat and
scarf, looked frozen. Her skin, always pale, seemed brittle and bloodless.

Death is waiting for us all.

Zoë joined in with the
congregation’s prayer responses. Her command of Russki, to Ro’s untutored ear,
seemed perfect.

It seemed to drone on forever ...And
then it was over, and Ro did not know what to do. The local babushkas and
younger folk had gone, save for one old woman standing in prayer, her wrinkled
face screwed up with concentration: a tense and private communication with her
God.

The remaining UNSA staff filed
out.

‘Come on.’ Zoë’ touched Ro’s arm.
‘We’d better go.’

Darkness
was gathering. Patches of snow looked blue-grey, surrounding the basilica.

Everything was cold as death.

There was a cemetery: iron-black
trees stark against the fading sky; square dark mausoleums; narrow pathways.
Before one grave, shocking against the monochrome world, a bright red bloom.

Ro, ever the mathematician,
mentally plotted the equations: the straight-line geometries of the graves, the
blossom’s fractal spreading. But in the vaults and cathedrals of her mind, her
grief was harder to map: an absence of feeling, a black sink absorbing emotion.

An absence with a name.

Luís...

A gentle touch upon her arm.

‘Ro?’

Ro shook her head.

For a moment there were two white
disks in the dark sky. Blinking ... She wiped away cold tears she had not known
were there. One moon, with Venus (higher, this evening) a small bright steady
light.

‘There’s humanity out there.’ Zoë,
looking up at the stars, might have been addressing herself rather than Ro. ‘Only
a few of us, but a beginning.’

But still we die.

‘We have an embassy of our own,
you know’—Zoë’s breath steamed on the air—‘on the Zajinet homeworld. If it
is
their homeworld.’

Ro turned away then—
I’m not
interested—
and trudged alone through the snow, climbing to the top of a
small ridge. Below her, the lights of Gorky village were a distant invitation.

Finally someone, not Zoë, called
Ro’s name, so she plodded back down to the UNSA bus which was waiting to take
them back: to Moscow, to the mundane environment of work.

To a world without Luís.

Seven
days a week, Ro threw herself into her routine.

It kept her busy: rising at dawn,
she would drink half a litre of water and go outside, running sprint-intervals
along the Yeltsin Hills while Moscow proper lay below, to the south, as though
rising inside an ancient impact crater. She used kali sticks against the proud
birch trees, in her weapons drill. She alternated: fighting skills one day,
strength training the next.

Occasionally, an early riser
would see this slender woman performing chin-ups from a tree branch, or deep
knee bends with a small boulder clasped hard against her chest, though it was
midwinter and bitterly cold. Inevitably, such an observer would stop a moment,
then shake themselves—no sane person would perform
zaryadka,
morning
exercises, in the freezing outdoors—then quickly hurry on across the campus
cobblestones.

However hard Ro tried, she was
never too fatigued to think, and to remember.

He didn‘t want me.

A knowledge which did not help.

We would never have been
together.

And so, her real work: banned
from direct xeno access -however good she might be, she was still only an
intern—she correlated all the data she could garner, talked to the researchers
in the so-called coffee lounge (where the real brainstorming inevitably took
place, over disposable cups of lemon tea more often than coffee), and spent
long solitary hours immersed in holo phase-diagrams in the cramped, tiny office
a grumpy administrator had allocated her. (In fact, she suspected that it was Zoë
who had persuaded the man to grant a private office to a lowly intern.)