A Bitter Shade of Blindsight Read online

  This book is an excerpt from Dreamlode, which is copyright © 2004 by John Meaney, all rights reserved.

  “A Bitter Shade of Blindsight” copyright © 1996 by John Meaney, first published in Interzone, August 1996.

  Dreamlode ISBN: 1-931305-86-2

  Scorpius Digital Publishing

  PO Box 19423

  Queen Anne Station

  Seattle, WA 98109

  http:www.//scorpiusdigital.com

  C O N T E N T S

  A Bitter Shade of Blindsight

  John Meaney

  Dreamlode, by John Meaney

  Scorpius Digital Publishing Catalog

  A Bitter Shade Of Blindsight

  TWO HUNDRED DAYS and sleepless nights after we burned the children, I led a different kind of Chantway, a new kind of tale. Black space strung with silver stars like pearls, and hanging there, like a baleful eye, the scull-gate’s golden frame. I could not show the tachyon split, not literally; instead, I caused a maelstrom of chaotic colours like the worst peyote nightmare to spill across the hogan’s interior. And I showed Balance, an emerald world which glowed with promise, and then…

  Trembling, I cut the holoprojector. The hogan’s interior remained dim, but green pre-dawn light streaked the patch of sky that hung above the smoke-hole at the ceiling’s apex, casting a pale eldritch light across the proud faces of the elders of my clan. My maternal aunt, Josephine Begay, or Grey Woman, looked at me, and in the strange light her eyes were deep dark pits, seeing deep into my spirit and surely knowing me for the evil thing I was, or had become.

  All night I had spoken, sometimes chanting, sometimes singing, but I had not revealed the worst of what we’d done, of what I had done, on the world we called Balance. I knew, suddenly, that this was not the place for expiation, for the restoration of harmony.

  “That is all, I think.” I spoke in English, now, as the trance-state left me. This wasn’t the twentieth century: most of the elders were as fluent in English as in Navajo.

  In the shadows, Red Woman sighed. “That was a part-ceremony to end them all, my daughter.”

  There were nods of agreement among the elders, and I accepted their verdict. I could not go on. There was more, far more, for me to tell them and, let’s face it, it needed to be followed by a Ghostway, and that was a ceremony I surely could not survive.

  A flap was thrown back from the doorway, and I squinted. Golden sun was creeping over the mesa’s edge.

  “You’re finished, aren’t you?” said my nephew, Dave. A straight backed youth now, not the child I had known.

  “We’ve finished,” I said.

  “Good. The cops are here.” He nodded, and ducked back outside the hogan

  I powered down the holoprojector and stuffed it into my backpack. I pushed the pack aside, and crawled out of the hogan on my hands and knees, and got stiffly to my feet. A small flyer was coming from the east, out of the dawn.

  “Cops?” I asked.

  “Tribal Police,” said Dave. “I scanned ‘em.”

  “You should be in bed. Haven’t you got school today?”

  “Nah. I’m way ahead.”

  The flyer dipped down below an outcrop, stayed out of sight for a while, then rose up into view, and headed straight for us. I could make out the insignia on its blunt grey nose.

  It dropped into a landing, a fast but not showy manoeuvre, kicking up a cloud of red dust. I pulled my bandanna up around my nose and mouth.

  The cockpit liquefied and made a slight popping sound as the man crawled out through the membrane and jumped to the ground.

  “Hi, Cly,” said Dave.

  “Hi. Howya doin’?”

  His voice was deep. He had the narrow waist of the Dine’é, the people, and his wide shoulders strained the olive uniform of the Navajo Tribal Police. A heavy standard-issue blaster hung at his left hip. He shifted his belt’s weight in what looked like a gesture of habit.

  “Ma’am.” He tipped his hat.

  “Hi,” I said, loosening my bandanna and letting it lay back around my neck. I liked his manners, at any rate.

  Watch it, girl. Some kinds of trouble you don’t need, right now.

  “There’s been a bit of an accident back yonder.” He looked back at the outcrop. “A camel-drover called it in. Some, ah, Anglo guy.”

  “Poor bilagáana,” I said easily. “Probably wandering round the desert without enough water.”

  The officer, Cly, looked at me sharply. Couldn’t blame him. But I was only half Anglo, and he should have noticed that.

  “Natalie’s from round here,” Dave said beside me. “Been away for years.”

  “Right.” Cly nodded. “I was born for the turquoise clan, of the tangle people. I’ve only been based here for a year or two.”

  All very friendly. I ran a hand through my hair.

  “Nice to be back,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. You’d be the astronaut, would you?” asked Cly easily.

  “Ah. Yeah. That’s right.”

  I held my breath.

  “The burned Anglo, you see,” he said, and his eyes were watchful as his voice was soft, “Was a SWSA employee. Investigative Branch.”

  “He… might have been keeping an eye out for me, like a bodyguard. The Space Agency do that, sometimes. Keeping an eye out for us…”

  He nodded. He wasn’t dictating notes, and if he had a recorder pin on his person then it wasn’t showing the small blue light which regulations demanded. But I knew he wasn’t missing anything, and wouldn’t be forgetting anything either.

  Damned IB. The gaps in Phoenix Seven Beta’s logs were probably becoming apparent after long analysis, though I had performed a virtuoso job of altering them, video logs and all, on the long solitary voyage home. And there were other inconsistencies: the medical scan they had put me through in Houston would have revealed the scars of childbirth, a fact that was missing from the logs.

  Oh, Ash, my dear dead son…

  And let’s not think what the psych reports might have said about me.

  “The village’s microwards are standard, are they?” asked Cly.

  I shrugged.

  Dave said, “Sure. I bought them myself.”

  The elders were out of the hogan now, and Aunt Josephine came up behind Dave and put her hand on his shoulder. I noted with dismay that she was carrying my backpack in one hand, strong despite her years.

  “Yá’át’ééh abíní,” she said. “How are you doin’, Cly? What’s this about an accident?”

  “Looks like some real strange resonance effect,” he said. “Guy with second-degree burns, found lying down by the perimeter. Old Kee found him and flew him to the burns unit in Phoenix General.”

  The was a hiss of sharply in-drawn breath from Dave. No-one pointed out that I had set the microwards last night. But they were designed to warn us and frighten off wandering coyotes who strayed too near the animal pens, not burn anyone who crossed their field.

  “Impossible,” I said flatly.

  “Forensic techs are on their way, but it looks like he was staking the place out and fell asleep in the micro-field.”

  I said nothing. Perhaps an Anglo would have been drawn out by the silence, and maybe that was why Cly had spoken. But the half of me that was Navajo was content to watch and listen, undisturbed by silence.

  Finally, Cly shrugged.

  “I have to get over to Kayenta,” he said. “Hey, that’s a good pack. Mind if I look?”

  “Ah — No,” I said. What else could I say?

  He crouched and ran his hand over the pack where Aunt Josephine had left it on the sand. He admired the solar panel and the in-built nav-system, the water-trap in its pouch. He was very good. If I hadn’t
been expecting it, I’d never have noticed him thumb on his scan-ring and pass it over the pack.

  He straightened up, and my heart thumped like a hammer in my chest.

  “Nice. You planning on hiking?”

  Why wasn’t he cuffing me and reminding me of my rights?

  “Yeah,” I said. “Or maybe going on horseback, up into the mountains.”

  “But you’ll be around?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ll — see you again.”

  “I hope so.”

  He tipped his hat to me and the elders, and walked back to his flyer.

  “Cly?” called out Aunt Josephine. “Why are you flying all the way to Kayenta?”

  Ye gods, I thought. He’s a police officer, and she’s interrogating him.

  “Covering for Charlie,” he said, and I knew he meant Charlie Rivers, whom Aunt Josephine had known all her life. “Bad business in Flagstaff. He’s gone to help out.”

  “Organising rescue squads?”

  “Yeah,” said Cly. I must have looked puzzled, for he added, “Corp-wars. Micro-nuke at Nihon-Tel-Com offices. You think they’d learn.”

  He meant, that ware viruses could be more effective. But not as demoralising.

  “It’s chaos,” he added. “Uncontrollable.”

  “Well actually — “I began.

  “I know, chaos can be controlled. Small changes with big results can be used for short-term control. The butterfly effect. Stochastic resonance.”

  I looked at him. He looked big and tough and dumb. Two out of three ain’t bad.

  Ma’íí the coyote, the trickster. Chaos. Two views, one phenomenon: the condensation nucleus of my understanding, as a fourteen-year-old girl, which had coalesced my twin cultural heritages.

  Aunt Josephine had known, or guessed, about the Flagstaff explosion even though she had spent the night with the rest of us in the hogan. And, no, I didn’t think she was involved in any corp-wars herself. She’d always been fey that way.

  “They’ve gotten much worse while you’ve been away,” she said to me. “The corp-wars. Much worse.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “So I gather.”

  “Welcome home,” said Cly dryly.

  I may even have managed to smile at him as he climbed back inside his flyer. He nodded as the cockpit hardened, and we all stepped back as his thrust jets kicked up another dust cloud and his flyer rose, span on the spot, and set off, heading north. The direction of evil, it is said.

  Red Woman touched my shoulder and I jumped. She was holding out a cloth-covered bundle.

  “Yours,” she said. “I took it from your pack, inside.”

  She unwrapped the bundle and handed me my blaster butt-first.

  “Thanks,” I said, checking the power was off, and stuffed it into my belt.

  “You’re welcome.”

  As though at some unspoken signal, she and the others turned and went back inside the hogan, followed by Dave — though he winked at me before he ducked into the doorway. Only Aunt Josephine was left outside.

  I unsealed my pack and reached in, felt the hard outline of the infocrystals. I didn’t think anyone had taken them. I just wanted to be sure.

  I resealed the pack and straightened up.

  “Do you walk in hozro, my daughter?” she asked.

  I exhaled, a long shaky breath. “No. Not much harmony in my life, any more.”

  “A pity. Still, it’s good you can take care of yourself, alone in the desert.” She indicated my belt.

  I touched the blaster’s butt. “Isn’t it, just?”

  “Do you plan on seeing her?”

  I could have said, which her do you mean. But there was no point in hiding things from Aunt Josephine.

  “I am naakií, the twin.” Pointedly, I added the literal translation: “The one who is two.”

  “Something joyful,” said Aunt Josephine, and her wise old face was burnished copper in the dawning sun. “Two of you, where before there was one.”

  “An abomination,” I said. “She’s alive, and I am her chindi.”

  Despite all her self-control, Aunt Josephine shivered. When a person dies, her chindi, her evil spirit is separated from her true self. If she is buried according to custom, with moccasins swapped to the wrong feet, then the chindi is confused and cannot follow the true person to the world below, but is trapped here in the world above, miserable and haunted, forever.

  “chindi,” I said again.

  “No,” she said, but she took an involuntary step back. “You can’t mean that.”

  “No, of course not.”

  I laughed then, to make light of things, and squeezed her shoulder with affection.

  She stayed with me while the sun rose, painting gold across the sweeping purple and red of the mesa, beneath a flawless blue sky, and the heat became a physical oppressive presence, beating down upon us, and I suppose I should thank Aunt Josephine for that, for staying with me, but the part of me that is bitter says no, it was from loyalty not to me, but to my other, my doppelganger, my nemesis, to the one who stole my life, the one with whom there would have to be a reckoning.

  I piloted Aunt Josephine’s old battered skimmer a metre above the ground. To my right, the stippled layers of green and black and white of a scarp slope marked the edge of the Painted Desert. Sighing, I took the wheezy old skimmer into a soft landing by the slope’s edge, tucked behind an outcrop that would provide a little shade later, as the sun began to go down.

  For a moment, a rattle behind the dashboard made me fear for the air-conditioning, but I raised my knee — supple as ever, thankfully — and gave a thumping kick with my heel. The rattle stopped. I breathed in cool scrubbed air.

  I wondered where Aunt Josephine’s loyalties truly lay, and where the powers of Investigative Branch ran out. Neither of them could stop me from reaching her, my enemy and progenitrix — but Aunt Josephine, at least, knew that I was carrying a weapon through a Disarmed Zone.

  The IB had no search and seizure powers, but they could keep an eye out on TrafficNet, and if they were really bright, they might choose to check whether the occupant of Aunt Josephine’s flyer was the owner.

  I pulled the blaster out of my waistband — damn, it hurt where it had dug into me — and laid it on the seat beside me. Then I polarised the cockpit to darkness, and settled back to sleep.

  And dreamed…

  …Of a golden eye hanging in space, Io in the background. Beside me, in the small control room — small compared to the vast hold and biome and fuel tanks behind the rear bulkhead — Mai-Li runs through the system checks yet again, delicate hands fluttering like butterflies through the holo-displays with a speed and elegance of control gestures beyond anything I have ever seen, while Robert scans breakpoints and traces and compares results. I, in nominal and rather temporary command, have the go/no-go decision, and so time on my hands to brood while the golden opening in space grows ever larger.

  This is my first interstellar. Phoenix One has flown five times before, with five different crews. Did they all feel like this, when the scull-gate drew near?

  Soon, it fills the viewscreen. The pulsing diaphanous rainbow hues of the displays, the figures and text scrolling through the air, the musical hum of auditory output and commands, all fade as the moment approaches. Small and red, blinking down the bottom right corner of my vision, the name of the ship hangs in the air before me.

  Phoenix One.

  Tiny itching sensation, back of left hand. An ant, a fugitive from our in-ship biome behind me, crawling over my rather bloodless hand. I hate insects. Very un-Navajo, I raise my right hand to crush it out of existence —

  “Don’t.” Mai-Li’s soft voice.

  She’s right. Ignore. Decision point approaching. The golden rim of the scull-gate grows beyond the edge of my vision as we get close. Now.

  “Go,” I say.

  A tearing golden light rips us apart and our scullied particles split, riven in two, and I pray with all my might, to the Old Testament Yahw
eh of my father’s race as to the Holy People of my mother’s tribe, and the golden lights seem to last forever, and then they go out.

  Cool black. Normal space. Before me hangs Io. The small red ID still reads ‘Phoenix One’.

  “We’re okay,” Mai-Li laughs, a silvery, tinkling sound.

  I crush the ant as it crawls onto my armrest. Mai-Li, overcome with relief, says nothing. Then we begin the fall to Io, adjusting our approach for the swing-round that will kick us back towards home, towards Earth, where our friends and families, our familiar homes, are waiting…

  I woke in darkness, shivering, and a bitter silent laugh sounded in my mind. Cramps shot through me as I shifted in the seat. Damn Aunt Josephine. Why did she have to buy such a small flyer? Hardly the place for sleeping…

  And the real memory came, then, not the wishful dream, and for a moment I remembered the Phoenix’s control room so deeply I felt I was aboard again, felt the cool smoothness of my command chair’s upholstery, the subtle polished smell, the familiar humming and chatter, the underlying deeper vibration of the drive, and Mai-Li and Robert…

  …The golden light burns brightly for an eternity, and then it is gone.

  Black, cold space.

  For a moment, the red ID still shows ‘Phoenix One’, and my mind plays a trick, tells me Io is still there, or that we’ve swung round and it’s out of sight.

  There’s a kind of whimpering sound from Mai-Li, and her soft face is etched with fear.

  The red characters crawl, and the ID rearranges itself.

  Phoenix Seven.

  “Oh my God,” says Robert.

  “Looks like we’re it, kiddies,” I say, but I feel something cold clutch at me as I say it.

  “They did it.” Mai-Li. “They really did it.”

  They. Already,

  they are behind us, though they are in fact ourselves. We’re the scullied partner, tachyon duplicates dropping back to normal reality a precisely calibrated — I hope — number of light-centuries away from Earth.

  There’s a distant blue flash, unexpected, and a video volume expands to analyse the anomalous radiation, and just for a moment there is an awful twisting of perspective, an emerald globe somehow pulled apart and curved in a way beyond imagination.