Context Read online

  Why did the Seer send for me? No matter...

  Tom stepped inside.

  This time, I’ll get the answers I require.

  Lev-throne, hovering, in the great round chamber.

  ORACLE KILLER. The wizened young/old Seer bowed his head forward. DO YOU SENSE DEATH?

  Tom, not knowing what to make of this, turned sideways on, crouching slightly on the floating step.

  YOU THINK—an electric glimmer in the Seer’s eyes — I’M THREATENING YOU?

  ‘You mean you’re not?’

  The skull-like throne dropped lower.

  YOUR GIFT TO ORACLE D’OVRAISON ... WAS AN UNEXPECTED SURPRISE. IF YOU’LL FORGIVE THE TAUTOLOGY.

  In fact Tom had simulated an entire personal reality for Gérard d’Ovraison. From a certain moment onwards, the Oracle’s foreseen future—which he had been reporting as truecasts all his life until that time—was a fake, a world of rich, deeply interwoven, implanted perceptions generated by Tom’s modelling ‘ware, using algorithms which could never be reified, fulfilled, in the realspace universe.

  But in mu-space’s fractal dimensions, logic as well as physics grew more subtle and capable, and the limitations of this reality’s mathematics, as outlined by Gödel’s Theorem, faded into insignificance.

  ‘I gave the Oracle what he deserved.’

  Redmetal poignard, sinking in to the hilt.

  Tom controlled his breathing: proven logosophically to be the one natural process which links the unconscious to the conscious mind, a bridge between autonomic and central nervous systems, the only function where thought and non-thought can share equal control. Since antiquity, both mystic and fighting disciplines have used breathing techniques to combat uncertainty and fear, but only a logosopher could fully understand the reasons why that worked.

  He waited.

  ENTANGLEMENT—the lev-throne spun a full circle — IS THE ROOT SYSTEM BENEATH THE COSMOS.

  Tom’s leg was not healed yet. But adrenaline would power the attack, if that became necessary: three lev-steps, jump into space, knife-hand to the throat as he reached the Seer.

  YOU WON’T BELIEVE—tricons tinged with ironic blue, as the helm-throne retreated once more—UNTIL YOU SEE.

  ‘See what?’

  Sapphire lightning curled and spat.

  The air pulled apart.

  Molecules, growing into great glowing shapes, rushed past as he fell into reality. Deeper, inwards ...until space-time’s fabric unravelled, and Tom slipped inside the weave.

  Twisted spheres of Calabi-Yau geometry.

  Illusion.

  The sometimes compactified, sometimes limitless extra dimensions of realspace: at ultra-magnification, each geometric point—formerly a tiny, infinitesimal sphere -became a twisted, curlicued complex knot which Tom perceived with a sense beyond sight. He was becoming aware of the world’s hidden aspects, the hyperdimensions whose existence human beings can infer but never truly experience.

  And then a vision:

  Her features are a little softer; her hair is long. An old, old ribbon of scar on her left hand which was never there before.

  She is wearing a military uniform of unknown allegiance.

  ‘I would like,’ she says, to a committee of senior officers, ‘to make a full report—’

  Twist, plunge.

  Elva!

  He might have screamed.

  Again:

  Elva spins round, graser pistol in hand, just as the chamber door-membrane denatures and falls apart. Uniformed figures burst in upon her, and she struggles but they are overwhelming her, as five more enter, reinforcements, holding back to train their weapons upon her -

  No!

  — until a one-armed black-clad figure leaps through an archway, kicks low, hits a second trooper three times before anyone perceives his presence, takes out a third trooper with a high spinning kick -

  ‘Elva. Didn’t you know I’d come back for you?’

  — and laughs, mad and triumphal, as the others come for him.

  And spin.

  Twist.

  Elva! The new Elva, the one who lives...

  There was a sense of being torn apart—no, being torn away ...from Elva, from everything, and he reached out yelling but it was too late because the world was rushing past, a great flood of implacable geometry, her image dwindling, slipping away, as atoms shrunk to normal size and reality shivered into being all around him ...

  The Seer’s chamber.

  ‘Come back—’

  And then he was sprawled face down on the hard lev-stone, arm outstretched towards the illusion of Elva, the future-vision—in which his love still lived—vivid in his mind, while the floating lev-step on which he lay seemed a cold, hard illusion scarcely worthy of consideration.

  His entire body trembled once, shuddering uncontrollably.

  Tears tracked down the Seer’s cheeks.

  Tom, sitting up as the shock symptoms eased, stared at him.

  ‘Seer? Why are you so ... ?’

  Young/old features, bathed in blue light as lightning continued to crackle and jump around the chamber’s flanged walls.

  YOU THINK LIFE MEANS SO LITTLE, TO ONE WHO CAN SEE?

  Tom shook his head, not understanding.

  ‘I don’t—’

  GO WELL, MY LORD.

  That was when the ceiling fell in.

  It enveloped him. From among the panels, a glassine section dropped, instantly forming a block which imprisoned Tom, yet allowed him to breathe.

  He raged, but could not move inside a cocoon which was soft and translucent but absolutely massive. Like an amber-trapped insect, he was totally without power or control over his situation, and it stripped him of dignity and purpose, leaving only fear.

  Elva!

  Trapped, he could just make out the Seer—

  Then Tom stopped, and shivered. He ceased his struggles.

  Outside, something strange was happening.

  A ripple at first, a disturbance in the air which became substantial, a flickering of black flames pushing reality apart, and everything seemed very odd and distant but Tom knew that this was not a dream.

  Dark Fire ...

  And then it began to grow, that light-sucking conflagration, those flames without heat which seemed the inverse of every fire Tom had ever seen. To grow, to spin ... to advance towards the Seer, whose helm-throne hung unmoving at the great chamber’s centre, heavy with acceptance of his Fate.

  Thunderstorm-black, space-black, the disturbance spun faster, accelerated beyond tornado speed, with flickering hints of impossible twistings, mind-bending geometric transformations beyond human comprehension, strange hints of bright scarlet amid black flames whose appearance denied any understanding of the Chaos-driven processes which had given them birth.

  The very air shivered apart.

  Get out of there, Seer!

  But there was nothing the Dark Fire’s poor intended victim could do to save himself.

  Spacetime itself became fractured, and for a moment Tom thought he glimpsed scarlet-clad human figures within the impossible maelstrom ...then something reached out, enveloping, and the Seer’s scream pierced even the thick imprisoning smartglass: a voice finally made real, in the moment of his final agony. And then the blackness grew absolute, spinning faster but shrinking now ...

  Sweet Fate, Seer.

  ... dwindling to a point...

  You saw it coming.

  ... flickered ...

  Why didn’t you get out of here?

  ... and was gone.

  But Tom knew better than anyone how Fate could envelop the most driven of people, and he pressed his hand uselessly against the glassine prison, knowing that he would have to wait for release, and that there was no good he could do for anyone right now.

  Outside, the helm-throne floated intact, but the torn red meat scattered around its interior, glistening wet and steaming with diminishing heat, was long past bearing any resemblance to humanity or to life.
/>
  ~ * ~

  11

  NULAPEIRON AD 3418

  Silver bubbles floated past him as he dreamed.

  My Lord ...Resonance of almost-words, beyond the emerald sea. Warm languor. Friendly femtocytes, gentle as kisses, within his wounds.

  ‘Lord Corcorigan.’ Slipping away. Chill air, waking him. ‘Welcome back.’

  Tom coughed, sat upright in the tank as green gel sloughed off.

  Xyenquil held out a robe for him.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that they’ll be questioning you again.’

  As he helped Tom on with the robe, he clucked his tongue and added: ‘The new limb, my Lord, is growing nicely.’

  On a smartnacre chair sat Feldrif, thin and dark. Behind him stood Ralkin Velsivith, thoughtfully rubbing the amber below his left cheekbone. The ovoid jewel was the exact same hue as Feldrif s eyes.

  The doorshimmer was guarded by two big men, muscles swollen with testosterone and growth-factor implants, who stared ahead and said nothing.

  ‘It just...engulfed him,’ Tom was saying. ‘The Seer, I mean.’

  Velsivith remained silent.

  ‘Where did it come from?’ Feldrif s tone was sceptical. ‘Through the chamber wall? Or did it simply appear?’

  ‘It just —I don’t know.’

  Velsivith: ‘And could you describe this, ah, phenomenon again, please?’

  ‘Like a vortex. But strange perspectives ... What do your holologs show?’

  Feldrif leaned forward. ‘Why do you ask that?’

  In the previous interrogation, Feldrif had been the polite one. But this time the others were absent, and Tom had all along thought that his civility had been a role, ready to be discarded when the situation called for more direct means of questioning.

  ‘Because ... Your deepscan must keep an archive.’

  ‘And how do you know so much about our security?’

  Tom shook his head, saying nothing. A pain was beginning to throb over his left eye.

  They had already admitted they had deepscans in the Seer’s chambers, when they had talked to him after Elva’s death.

  Elva, my love...

  ‘Look.’ Feldrif crossed his arms. ‘You’re in a great deal of trouble, Lord Corcorigan, so I suggest—’

  ‘Yeah?’ Tom’s near-patrician accent dropped away, revealing the harsher tones of his childhood in Salis Core. ‘Or maybe you are, for losing the resource you were supposed to be protecting.’

  ‘You dare—’

  ‘Great idea.’ Velsivith brought his hands together in a loud clap. ‘You two fight it out in here, while I try to find the killers. OK?’

  ‘Fate.’ Feldrif leaned back in his chair, amber eyes glaring.

  To Tom, Velsivith said: ‘The security logs show nothing. I mean, completely blank. And that’s no mean trick.’

  ‘If the prisoner’—Feldrif indicated Tom—‘was harmless, why did the defence system trap him?’

  ‘The Seer triggered it to save me. Kept me out of harm’s way.’

  ‘Chaos.’ Velsivith cursed.

  ‘You don’t agree?’ Feldrif looked almost gleeful.

  ‘No, I do.’ Velsivith clacked a fingernail against the amber ovoid in his cheek. ‘That’s the problem.’

  Feldrif stared hard at Tom.

  Was the Seer an Oracle?

  The question ran through Tom’s mind, over and over, as his escort—twelve armed troopers—took him back to his apartments. They left without saying a word.

  Were his visions truecasts?

  Or merely possibilities?

  Elva said: ‘Boo!’

  Tom stumbled backwards, and he gasped.

  ‘Did I scare you?’ She gave a wicked grin. ‘Well, I’m a ghost, so I probably did.’

  Tom blinked, trying to focus on the image.

  Oh, Elva.

  His heart beat wildly inside his chest, like a trapped animal fighting to get free.

  ‘If you‘ve managed to open this, it means I’m legally dead, according to the local security nets.’ She drifted above the half-opened black case. ‘...And I know it’s you, Tom.’ A shrug. ‘Otherwise, this would be a different sequence, with a less friendly message. Your biosigns have registered. The less obvious compartments will open for you.’

  Tom opened his mouth to speak, then shut it.

  It’s just a recording. No interaction.

  But it seemed he could reach out and touch her, feel her warm skin—

  ‘Good luck, my Lord. You’ve always been the best.’

  The holo-Elva winked out of existence, and Tom turned away with a stifled sob.

  It was a hoplophile’s dream.

  Laid out on the bed—on Elva’ s bed—were the contents of her intricate bag.

  No smartweapons, which was good: defensive femtotech would always detect, and usually counteract, anything which was too clever. Instead, there were spin-darts and throw-chains; sticky razor-burrs; toxin-coated spit-needles and snap-blades. A matching pair of nacre-handled monowhips.

  ‘Which army were you going to take on, Elva?’

  Tiny ping-bows, currently disassembled, with exothermic bolts. Shiver-crystals—plus timers—with hydrofluoric acid cores.

  And more.

  Spikes: fast-dissolve toxic, and armour-piercing vibro. Explosive flakes. A nozzle-spray with unknown contents. A titanium-handled vibroblade. Extensible finger-claws—

  ‘That one will do.’

  Tom picked up the lightweight vibroblade.

  He walked out of Elva’s chamber without looking back.

  Naked, covered with slick sweat, he knelt, sat back on his heels, eyes squeezed shut as he prepared himself, tightened his nerves to the highest tension they were capable of. Remembering the Seer-induced vision, focusing on that future which must come true:

  Elva spinning to face the troopers who burst in upon her.

  The vibroblade was slippery in his grasp.

  Dark-clad figure, spinning kick, laughing as he saves her.

  Breathing fast and heavy, as though he were sprinting, close to the finish.

  The one-armed man who saves her.

  Crying inside, knowing he had to do it, to fulfil the Fate he had seen, which he so desperately wanted to make real.

  The one-armed man who is Tom Corcorigan.

  Now.

  Fear, making him hesitate.

  Do it now.

  The vibroblade spat into life.

  Smoke, acrid yellow/grey, and the burning pain.

  Tom screamed.

  Cutting high, so the growth-control implant was removed along with the flesh and soft, growing bones.

  Screamed louder.

  The thump as dead meat hit the floor, smoking. Roasting stench...

  Elva!

  Wave after black cascading wave of pain crashed down upon him, pounded him, buried him, smashed him. And scattered the pieces to dark oblivion.

  ~ * ~

  12

  TERRA AD 2142

  <>

  [3]

  They danced.

  Diminutive brown bodies, startling mask-faces of turquoise and brilliant white, of black and red, with fierce eyes and whiskers... But they were tiny, dancing around the bonsai atop the credenza, waving their minuscule spears and chanting, with the volume turned low.

  ‘Kachinautons.’ Sergeant Arrowsmith waved them to silent stillness. ‘Traditional.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Ro hugged herself. ‘I don’t feel too good.’

  Arrowsmith settled back in his chair, shifting his sidearm’s weight. The belt dug in below his rounded belly. But his shoulders were wide and athletic, his bronzed face strong. He had pulled his chair round to face Ro’s, so there was no desk between them.

  The air in his office was very cool.