Resolution (48 page)

Five minutes later, Tom was cleansing his face and hand with wood-scented smartgel. As he scraped it off, it crept back into its pewter container, leaving him feeling fresh. A mirrorfield shimmered into existence, allowing him to check that his tunic was in order, his half-cape hanging straight.

Then Tom noticed that there was another way out of this place, a door directly opposite the way he came in, and he knew that he should step through it.

Elva can handle things.

Maybe it was a subconscious desire to see more of the realm his true love had made her own. Perhaps Tom could not bear, for the moment, to return and see Lord Khaliran’s strained fatigue as he worried about his daughters’ Fate. There had been too many families split up by—

A hand outstretched on a flagstone, cold and unmoving.

Then Tom shook his head and the image was gone.

They‘re dead. Khaliran’s daughters are dead.

Tom could not know that. How could he? Yet... he was certain, as he walked through the membrane, that the young women had fought back, choosing to die rather than to be Absorbed.

What am I doing here?

In front of Tom, an iron grille set in a circular opening swung back, revealing steps formed of alternating green and blue minerals. They led down to a piazza paved with chequered quartz and lucite blocks, where a small group of fit-looking men and women had congregated at the centre. They drew Tom’s attention: all dressed similarly (though not identically) in dark, sober, functional clothes.

Other people were moving around, rushing on business, buying minrasta cakes from a floating vend-stall - this place must lie beyond the Palace proper - but the dark-clothed group was different.

Elva’s people?

There was a conspiratorial closeness to the way they stood, but not overtly so. Something was bothering Tom ...

A tingling spread across his neck, rose up between his shoulder blades.

Down in the piazza the group was breaking up, splitting away in ones and twos into the crowd, making their way to exit corridors, while the lean young man who was the leader turned and—

Sweet Fate no.

—revealed, in one easy athletic movement, the abbreviated left sleeve which depended from his left shoulder.

Then he was striding fast towards the widest exit.

Who are you?

Was gone.

By the time Tom recovered enough mental equilibrium to move, there was no point in trying to follow the one-armed man. Besides, it was irrational. The pure coincidence of someone whose Fate had been hard and similar to Tom’s own ... was no reason for pursuit or confrontation.

And yet, and yet...

He was their leader.

It looked so very much like a clandestine cell. Not of the Absorbed. Maybe not even an intelligence organization. It just felt like—

Tom shook his head.

I
don’t know what it felt like.

As he retraced his steps, with the iron grille swinging shut behind him, weird thoughts and odd emotions twisted inside Tom’s mind. What had impelled him to visit this place, at just the right moment to catch that unsettling glimpse of someone so like himself? And why did it seem so familiar, when he had never been in this realm before?

It doesn‘t matter.

Elva looked up and smiled as Tom entered the conference chamber; and everything was perfect.

~ * ~

31

NULAPEIRON AD 3426

They made love and slept and made love again, and in the morning, Tom and Elva went shopping; but there was more to the walkabout than procuring a few goods. Elva, as Liege Lady of this realm, could have ordered her servitors to acquire anything she wanted; strictly, no-one could force her to pay within her own borders.

As they passed through airy arcades and trading halls on the Secundum Stratum directly below the Palace, Elva exchanged greetings with merchants and ordinary freedfolk, all the while gauging the mood of her populace. It was something Tom should have done, back in his brief period of rule in Corcorigan Demesne. Yet he had always felt uncomfortable with old manipulative techniques which reinforced the status quo.

Some revolutionary I am.

Tom had wanted individuals to be free, not treated as chattels. Now they were to be Absorbed into a vast entity which would consider them to be no more than microscopic cells among the trillions which formed its distributed self.

‘I’m going to visit the armoury.’ Elva touched his arm. ‘Why don’t you head down to the Tertium Stratum? Ginvol and Arkin can accompany you.’

Elva made a subtle head movement, and two Halberdiers in civilian clothes came out of the crowd and stood before her.

‘Downstratum?’ said Tom.

‘There’s a place called Voort’s Warren. I don’t know how many dramacrystals they have in stock, but it’s a vast number. Thousands.’

‘Ah.’ Tom smiled.

There’s no time for frivolity.

Yet this was what made people human: the small, civilized things.

And there’s no danger imminent.

Tom was growing to trust his instincts, and in any case he knew that Elva needed time to think about how they were going to conjoin their forces, and where they were going to live. He nodded to the two Halberdiers. ‘Show me the way—’

Yes. This is right.

‘—and I’ll try not to stay browsing too long.’

Elva smiled. ‘You’ll bore them rigid, but that’s all right.’

The Halberdier called Ginvol gave a discreet bow. ‘The floor hatch is this way, my—’

Tom was already headed in the right direction, as if he were intimately familiar with this realm, though this was his first time here. He found his way among the trading hall’s pillars and aisles with a certainty whose origin he could not have named.

Two hours of browsing musty racks in low-ceilinged chambers lit by mutated crimson fluorofungus: that was Tom’s idea of a good time. As he paid for the small sack of crystals - the store’s owner raising his eyebrows at the breadth of Tom’s interests - one of the Halberdiers sighed, then reddened as Tom looked at him.

‘Beg your pardon, sir. I didn’t mean—’

‘No problem. Why don’t we go somewhere where we can sit and have some daistral?’

‘Er...’

The other Halberdier spoke up: ‘There’s a good place nearby. Mad Molly’s Meeting Mall, though I don’t know who Molly is, or was. Probably died decades back.’

Tom looked at the storekeeper, who shrugged. ‘I don’t know who Mad Molly was either,’ said the man, ‘but it is a good place to eat.’

‘Well then,’ said Tom. ‘That’s decided.’

There was a bustling energy in Mad Molly’s Meeting Mall which Tom enjoyed. Occasionally, faint scents of ganja escaped from membrane-sealed booths at the rear, but airplants quickly swallowed the vapours, cleansing the

Tom sat with Ginvol and Arkin at one corner of the noisy, twenty-sided chamber, while servitrices moved among the tables, taking orders and delivering food. There were no tabletop terminals or house drones here: this was the personal touch.