I
left Neil at his laboratory and wandered back to the house alone, through the neat orchards, each tree exactly in its place, pruned to the correct number of buds, watered to the perfect depth of moisture.
Then up through the cow paddock, (the pale-purple beasts gazing at me, faintly curious in case I’d brought some treat) then over the ridge through the trees to home.
The bark crackled underfoot. The leaves drooped in their oily haze above me. It looked a good house from up here—solid stone that had weathered almost two centuries, the fall of one society and the rise of another, and countless lives within it.
No, not countless, I thought. I could count the generations that had lived in my house if I wanted to. There must be records of all the past inhabitants. But it was my house now, and Neil’s, the man who lay beside me in the night, and for now at least that was all I wanted to know.
The garden had flopped somewhat in the heat. I’d planted more than we had water for, so Neil had informed me, but I’d ignored his advice because I hadn’t really understood it. There had never been a water shortage in the Virtual gardens I’d designed. You never even thought of water as something that might run short in the City. Water was just there, running out of the tap or seeping through the permeable membrane of your splash tub.
I’d ordered more water storage tanks from the City. They were sitting in the sheds up at the farm. We’d have to install them ourselves. While I could hire specialised labour to build my beach, no City dweller was going to work on such a low prestige project as installing Outlander water tanks, and while there was plenty of labour in the ‘burbs, no one with sense employed a ‘burbs’ gang if they couldn’t keep up extreme supervision. And in this season everyone at Faith Hope and Charity seemed to have too much work to bother them with my not-absolutely-necessary tanks—after all, they wouldn’t fill until the drought broke and it rained again.
I’d water the garden in the evening, when the soil was cooler, I thought. Neil had explained that was the best time: less evaporation, more uptake from the roots. The garden looked dusty too. It would be lovely if it rained.
It was still a jolt, sometimes, to realise that I couldn’t just program up a rainstorm. This was RealLife, and the rain would have to be RealLife too.
I clicked the gate shut behind me, as a disincentive to the Wombat (he could call at the back door now without going through the garden and eating the bits he fancied on the way) and made my way into the house.
It was cool in the house, that bone-deep coolness that only stone houses seem to have, storing the cold in their walls to breathe it out into the heat of the day. I made myself a cup of tea in the Ultrawave and took it into the living room, where I could look out over the garden and up the hill. And see Neil perhaps, if I stayed there long enough, as he strolled back from his laboratory and orchards.
Something was bothering me, niggling me. Pieces of
information floated around in my brain, but my mind no longer worked fast enough, enhanced with the databases of the whole city, to put them together.
It didn’t feel right. The whole affair at the Tree had left a bitter taste, and it wasn’t just that Len had died. Len who I had feared, then liked, then feared again. I felt I’d betrayed them, though that was ridiculous. I couldn’t possibly have betrayed them by failing to find an outside killer, when it was one of their own to blame.
Sometimes, at four o’clock in the morning, with the moon hanging like a pale-faced accuser outside the window, and Neil snoring beside me, I wondered what Len’s final moments had been like. Who had killed him? How? Was Gloucester just the grim accuser? Or had he slain the slayer too, as he had done with Tam? Did Eleanor look on? And Dusty and Emerald? Please God, I thought, let the cubs have been asleep.
What was it like—what unbearable horror was it—to see your son accused and executed? But it was bearable. You had to bear it. Did Eleanor still consult in her Virtual island in her study? Did Emerald still make scones? Or were they grieving, grieving, grieving for the dead?
Perhaps, I thought, cradling my tea in both my hands as though to warm them although the afternoon was still hot, if I’d been conscious I could have persuaded Gloucester and the others to spare Len. But to what end? What did you do with a werewolf killer? There are no prisons in the Outlands, nor could his family be relied upon to keep him locked in a room for the rest of his life.
And the City? What did they care about the Outlands? Except for Michael and he had acted on his own, without City backing, and for all I know had been reprimanded
for it. Or if not reprimanded—for as far as I knew he had broken no laws—he would be suffering the sidelong glances given to someone who had temporarily broken from the City norm.
Besides, the City didn’t imprison either. They used psycho surgery or permanent psycho–physical Linkage, and if the person wasn’t quite the same as they had been before, well, that was the desired result. But even if the City could have been forced to take an interest, they would never have accepted a Proclaimed modification like Len for treatment.
No, there had been nothing I could or should have done. I had tried, I had done my best for them, and if the result wasn’t what any of us had wanted, that wasn’t my fault.
And yet…and yet…
I finished the tea and went out to water my garden.
It was late. A mopoke boomed across the hill. Night air seeped through the window. The world was dark and still.
Neil paused in the middle of hanging his shirt neatly on the chair. ‘Danny?’
‘Yes?’ I put my book down beside me. It was a new printout of a recent City Linkwork. It didn’t seem to have lost much with its music and subliminals shorn away. Sometimes words are enough.
‘Have you given any more thought to what Dr Meredith offered?’
‘To have my modification restored? Yes, of course, I’ve thought about it.’
‘Well?’
‘I’m still thinking about it.’
‘I just wondered,’ said Neil mildly. He slid into bed beside me, but for once remained on the far side of the bed.
‘Neil? What’s up?’
‘Just thinking too,’ he said.
‘What about?’
‘You and Michael.’
‘All right, what have you been thinking?’
‘The predictable, I suppose,’ he said frankly. ‘Was it so much better with him?’
‘What? Sex?’ I had a sudden memory of Dusty saying ‘Truenorms are so…so constant about sex.’
I shoved memory away and the book onto the bedside table and hauled myself up on the pillows. ‘I don’t know how to answer that,’ I said slowly.
‘I know. That’s what troubles me.’
‘No, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just…it’s so hard to put what Michael and I had into words. Because we didn’t use words, most of the time. Or just…I suppose you’d call them shorthand words: words mixed with feelings, images. A language of our own.’
‘Which I don’t speak.’
‘No. You don’t speak it. And nor can I any more. But I think we have something more.’
Neil said nothing.
‘All right, you asked for it.’ Some part of my brain yelled at me, ‘Hold everything! Think before you tell him!’ but I carried on anyway. ‘On a…let’s say a Richter scale of orgasm, the experience of making love as part of the Forest was higher on the scale…’
‘Much higher?
I hesitated, then plunged on. ‘Yes, much higher. It had to be. Each thing my body felt was felt by the person
Linked to me. Everything they felt was Linked back. So in pure explosive terms, it was better. Stronger anyway.’
‘Same thing,’ said Neil.
‘No, it’s not the same thing. In terms of enjoyment, making love with you is a million times better.’
‘Why?’ asked Neil.
‘Why? I don’t know…yes, I do. It’s because it’s just the two of us. It has an intimacy that I have never known before and that has its own intensity. We have to try harder, so it’s better in the end.’
‘You make it sound like a programming project,’ said Neil. ‘Or doing your homework at NetSchool. Work makes you free.’
‘I don’t mean it to sound like that.’ I hunted for the words. ‘Neil, you enjoy things more than any person I have ever met. You make me…concentrate on being with you. And that’s what makes making love with you so good.’
‘Not my spectacular technique?’ He was smiling now.
‘Well, that too.’
‘I do my best,’ said Neil modestly. He was definitely closer in the bed now.
‘You know,’ I said, holding him back from me for just a moment. ‘I suppose it all boils down to the fact that when I think of the times I’ve made love, I remember the times with you, not Michael. It was good with Michael, but after it was done, it didn’t last. It wasn’t…well, part of our lives, the way it is with us. There are no memories—not the sort of memories you like to smile at days later, years later I suppose.’
‘Let’s make some more memories then,’ said Neil. He was grinning now.
‘Danny! Danny, wake up!’
‘What? What is it?’
Neil lay down beside me again. ‘You were muttering in your sleep.’
I tried to wake up fully. ‘I’m sorry. I must have been dreaming. I was dreaming.’
‘What about?’
‘Confused.’ I glanced out the window, at the moon dancing along the tops of the trees. A breeze had sprung up since we’d fallen asleep and the night was full of leaf songs and the creak of the gum tree outside the bedroom window.
Neil pulled me closer to him. ‘It’s all over,’ he said soothingly, not specifying exactly what ‘it’ was. Attacks by werewolves, the vampire madness that had at least brought us together, the heart and mind wrench of my Proclamation—whatever it was, I thought, Neil was right. It was all over. The night was sweet and peaceful, and the days to come would be peaceful too. Except…
‘It doesn’t feel over,’ I said at last. I fingered the scars on my neck absently. They were just red lines now. Another month or two and Elaine could apply Cellgrow and they’ve be gone. ‘It just doesn’t feel right somehow.’
‘It was right,’ said Neil. ‘There was no possible doubt about it. You saw him yourself. Everyone at Black Stump saw Len attack you.’
‘No,’ I said even more slowly. ‘They didn’t see Len attack me. They saw…a shadow, a shape attack me. Even I never saw who attacked me. It was too dark. All they saw was Len running away. My attacker was just a shadow in the night, just a smell of…’ I stopped.
‘Same thing,’ said Neil.
‘I suppose so. It’s just…you know, I was going to
say, I smelt my attacker, I smelt wolf. That wolf smell was all through the Tree, but I didn’t smell wolf when he attacked me. It’s been niggling at me ever since and I’ve only just realised.’
‘It all happened too quickly,’ said Neil easily. ‘Anyway, those floaters always smell of ionic disinfectant. Covers any other smell around.’
‘Wolf is a pretty strong smell too. Especially Len’s. He had a really doggy smell.’
‘Maybe he’d just had a bath.’
‘He didn’t like baths.’
‘He must have washed sometimes. His family would have objected if he became too whiffy.’
‘Yes. I suppose. Especially his mother—she liked things to be…human-like. Clean. Neat.’
‘Well, then,’ said Neil. He began to trace his fingers absently over my shoulder. ‘Think you can go back to sleep now?’
‘I suppose,’ I said again. ‘You know the worst thing?’
‘What?’
‘I liked him. I really did. It wasn’t just that he saved me from the Dog. I mean he frightened me at first—the wolfishness of the others just seemed—well, sort of cute. But with Len it seemed real, made my hair stand on end—literally.
‘But then on the way back from the waterfall, I talked to him. He looked wolf, Neil. But he didn’t talk wolf.’
‘Growl growl, woof woof?’
‘No, not like that. He sounded—well, nice. Like a really nice teenager, one who’ll make a good man when he grows up a bit more. Dependable.’
‘But he was a cross,’ said Neil softly. ‘Maybe the man was nice, but the wolf wasn’t.’
‘Wolves don’t murder,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s what everyone kept telling me. Wolves kill for food, or to defend those they love. Maybe it was the human in him that killed, not the wolf. There’s no other explanation, is there?’
Neil curled his body carefully around mine. Sometimes words aren’t really much help at all. ‘Sleep,’ he commanded.
But it was a long time before I dozed.
Y
ou see, it’s kind of like this,’ said the Water Sprite. She twisted a lock of her too-plentiful blonde hair.
I sat back in my seat in front of my newly installed manual Terminal. ‘Go on.’
‘It’s the octopus,’ she breathed, opening the green eyes wide. If I’d been designing her, I thought sourly, I wouldn’t have made her quite so obvious. It was too much a cliché—the palpitating breasts, the delicate skin, the little girl’s voice and those imploring eyes.
I sighed. ‘You don’t like the octopus. All right. I’ll get rid of him. I just added him at the last minute to give the kids a bit of a thrill.’
‘Oh, no!’ Her eyelashes were too long too, an almost tangled mat of blackness on the silver skin, especially when she fluttered them. ‘We just love the octopus! He’s…he’s just so kind of strong-looking, you know what I mean? And those tentacles!’ She gave a little wriggle of delight, which would have done interesting things to her breasts if I had been inclined that way.
‘You like the tentacles?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she breathed.
‘Then what’s the problem? You’d like me to give him more tentacles?’
‘Would you really? Oh…’ She seemed lost in rapture at the thought for a moment. The eyes flashed up at me again. ‘We were just kind of thinking if only we could, you know, touch him. If he could touch us…’
‘You want to touch the giant octopus?’
‘Oh, please, if it’s not too much trouble?’ She gazed at me like a little girl who was asking for an ice cream, and quite sure that she would get it.
Sure, I thought. I bet no man has said ‘no’ to you in your whole life, including good old Theo. I bet she could even persuade Neil to plant his apple orchards in wiggly lines if she wanted a change of scenery.
‘Actually,’ I said. ‘It’d be a lot of trouble. An enormous amount of effort and resources.’
‘Oh!’ The too-full mouth drooped.
‘In fact,’ I added relenting. ‘It’d be technically impossible. The octopus isn’t real. He’s a hologram.’
‘Oh, we know he’s not real.’ A charming giggle. ‘That’s half the fun. I mean we wouldn’t let a real octopus…well, you know.’
I didn’t, and I wasn’t going to speculate.
‘You can’t give a hologram substance.’ I informed her.
‘But the seagulls—one crapped on Ping’s nose yesterday—we could feel it and smell it, but the seagulls are kind of, not real are they? That’s what gave us the idea.’
Good shot seagull, I thought. I wondered if I could program them to crap every time the system sensed a Water Sprite…but no, that was ungenerous. ‘The seagulls are Virtuals,’ I explained. ‘You’re chipped, aren’t you?’
She nodded.
‘Well, then, when you’re in range of the beach’s control system I can program any Virtual signals I want you to receive. You can hear and see and smell the seagulls, just like they’re real. But the octopus is just a hologram. You can see him, but not touch him. And he can’t touch you.’
She wrinkled the smooth silver forehead. ‘You mean if we leave the beach we won’t see the seagulls?’
‘Exactly. Just try it one day. The beach will be there, because it’s real, but you won’t be able to smell the seaweed or the salt water, because those smells are just Virtual programs. You won’t be able to see the seagulls either. But you’ll still see the octopus if he happens to be about, and the distant horizon, because they’re holograms.’
‘I see,’ she said despondently, though I suspected she didn’t. ‘You can’t…kind of Virtual the octopus can you?’
‘I’d have to redo him entirely as a Virtual.’
‘Oh!’ another long deep breath. ‘
Could you
?’
‘Well, I
could
. It’d be an enormous amount of work though.’
‘Oh, thank you! Thank you! You have no idea how wonderful it will be.’
I looked at her sourly. She had taken my half refusal for full agreement. It would take days to programme a Virtual giant octopus. And anyway…
‘Look,’ I said. ‘He still won’t be a
real
octopus. He’ll only do what I program him to.’ And how, I wondered, could I possibly guess what the blasted Water Sprites wanted him to do with his bloody tentacles? Though I probably could guess.
‘I’m sure you’ll do it perfectly. Just perfectly!’ The wide eyes were shining as though her genetic creators had sprinkled in generous helpings of a gene labelled ‘Eye shine. Use with no discretion’.
Shit, shit, shit, I thought. Just what I wanted: a fortnight spent working out an X-rated program for octopus and Water Sprites.
‘Well, we’ll see,’ I said. ‘I’m not promising anything, and it’ll take at least a few weeks even if I can manage it.’
‘Oh, we can wait. Waiting makes it kind of better sometimes, doesn’t it? And he’s just, well, you know. Kind of gorgeous. So strong and…and…’
‘Tentacley.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Another voluptuous sigh, a luscious smile and she was gone.
I sat there at the Terminal, so deep in thought for a while I forgot to turn the screen off.
Of course there
was
no way to give a holo form. A holo wolf, for example, couldn’t tear your throat. Even a Virtual could only make you
think
it had been torn out, though that could be enough to kill from shock.
My injuries had been real. So had Brother Perry’s, Andy Anderson’s and the Patriarch’s. You need a real killer to inflict real injuries. But it still made me think…
My fingers clicked on the controls. It was a clumsy way to use a Terminal, but I was getting used to it. I had to concentrate even to type in Michael’s comsig, one I knew even better than my own.
I got the default program first of all, a random walk through a sculpture garden. It was a new default since I’d called him last. Then suddenly his face emerged, with his office wall as usual behind. At least that was the same, a mountain Virtual I’d created for him two years ago, and that he’d liked so much he etched it into Permanent. We’d climbed that mountain in Virtual once, the two of us, but I’d programmed it so that one step took us a hundred feet, and each second lasted for an hour. Ten seconds Realtime took us to the top, but we’d climbed all day by then…
‘Dan!’ This time the smile was pleasure, as well as surprise.
‘Michael, look I hope I’m not interrupting anything.’
‘Nothing that can’t be interrupted. How’s your neck?’
‘My neck? Oh, it’s fine. Can’t feel it at all now, almost can’t see it.’
‘If those claw marks had just been a fraction deeper…’
‘Well, they weren’t. Michael, I wanted to ask you a question. Well, several questions. About Eleanor. Do you mind?’
‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘But Dan—you should try to put it behind you. It’s over now.’
‘Yes, I know. It’s just one or two things. Eleanor uses Virtual when she works with you, doesn’t she?’
‘You know she does,’ said Michael, looking at me closely as he tried to work out what I was up to.
‘Do you know what sort of installation she has?’
‘Yes. I fixed it up for her. Top of the range Elixor 12. She only had a Microbat 4 before that.’
Elixor 12 meant a fixed Terminal, not a portable. With Elixor 12, Eleanor could place herself in Michael’s office almost as though she were there. She could lecture, even feel that she was eating. She could also send whatever image she chose wherever there was a receptor Terminal set up for Virtual. My beach, for example.
But there was no receptor Terminal in my floater, and no Virtual receptor Terminal at Black Stump. No one at the controls of the Tree Terminal could have placed anything in Virtual there. Besides, I thought, I could no longer receive Virtual. If someone had projected a Virtual image of Len, I wouldn’t have been able to see a wolf in the night, even if the others did. And I had.
Which left holo.
‘Michael, the Tree has got holo capabilty, hasn’t it?’
‘Holo?’ he frowned. Michael was no fool and he knew the way my mind worked as well. He could sense the way this was heading. ‘You mean could Eleanor—or someone using her facilities—have projected a hologram of Len?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just that.’
Michael bit his lip. ‘It’s possible. Eleanor’s got a holo portable in her study. Any of them could taken it and have used it.’
‘I know. Emerald has a holo of the kids in the kitchen.’
Michael nodded. ‘Eleanor uses holo often, as a matter of fact. If there’s a meeting outside this office, for example, she harnesses up a Realtime holo image of herself and transmits it there.’
‘Holo is so easy,’ I said, ‘you just take a holoslap of Len, aim it where you want it, and zap, you have a werewolf smiling in the night.’
‘Dan, this holo stuff—anyone could have done it. Maybe someone was so sure Len was guilty they wanted to prove it to you. It doesn’t have to have been someone from the Tree. Surely they’d be the last people to do something like that?’
‘I know,’ I said wearily, ‘and even if someone did project an image of Len, an image can’t slash your neck. But I can’t stop thinking about it. Michael, promise me you won’t tell Eleanor I’ve been asking questions again. Or anyone else from the Valley. Even Ophelia.’
He frowned. ‘Danny, Eleanor and I…well, I trust her judgement. I wouldn’t risk my superiors’ opinion by working with her so closely if I didn’t. I really think the best thing to do is put this new theory to her, see what she comes up with.’
‘Michael, please. Don’t argue. I have my reasons. Just do it, all right?’
‘All right,’ he said. Whatever his relationship with Eleanor, I thought with just slightly guilty satisfaction, I still outranked her in terms of loyalty.
‘Thank you.’ I hesitated. ‘Neil suggested…Well, he hadn’t quite suggested, I thought, but it was near enough. ‘…that one day maybe you’d like to come out here for dinner, or lunch. Take a look around the Utopia. You’d like Theo, I think.’
‘With you and Neil?’
‘With me and Neil.’
He stared at me for perhaps ten seconds. Then he said slowly. ‘Perhaps. One day. Not this week or the next. But one day, yes I will.’
‘I’d like that Michael,’ I said, and found I meant it, with no sense of loss or confusion at all. I was happy, and fulfillment was at last within my reach.
And I liked Michael. After all that had happened to us, I liked him still. Loved him, perhaps, in the way I was beginning to love Theo and Elaine, even the Wombat and Ophelia perhaps. Friendly love, quite different from what we’d had before, which had neither been friendship or even love, but a combining of our personalities that had made us less than we were apart, not more.
I switched the Terminal off.