Context (100 page)

Avoiding
patrols, he slept in deserted corridors, wrapped in a thin cloak taken from a
storage bin—at an almshouse, intended for the needy—and curled up on cold
stone. Sometimes, older folk took him in, fed him, let him sleep on a mat or a
spare cot; always, he left silently before dawnshift, sans farewell.

If there was an organized
resistance here to the Blight’s occupation, Tom had no way of contacting it.

A large woman, smiling at his
accent, gave him freshly made broth. But she left him, saying she had a
neighbour to visit, and something about her expression—a hint of determined
scowl, quickly hidden—alerted him.

He slipped away as soon as she
was gone, regretting the loss of warmth and comfort, but afraid that soldiers
would soon be descending upon her spotlessly clean chambers.

There
were patrols, but the border into interstitial territory was extended—with
thousands of tunnels and caverns to cover—and the place Tom chose had been
another battleground.

Quiet now, air redolent of old
slaughter, the cries of dying men and women embedded in the shattered stone,
the blackened ceilings and the riven floors, though their bodies had long since
been hauled away by grieving civilians: family members reclaiming their dead.

He moved through the caverns,
silent and grim, as though he were a ghost himself.

It
was the monks who saved him.

Am I forgiven?

There were times, as he ran, that
it seemed he was not alone: that orange-robed spirits ran alongside in
soundless encouragement. It was their zentropic drugs, not designed for someone
like Tom, which had caused his psychotic breakdown.

Tom ran on, disbelieving.

The sounds of monks collapsing,
perhaps dying.

But they saved him, nonetheless,
for the training was deep, part of his body now: a remembered discipline of
ultra-distance runs with very little food. The physical organism reverted to
that state, and his spirit kept him going when medically his body should have
failed.

And the need to revenge the other
Tom Corcorigan’s death.

Kill them all.
..

For his brother’s sake.

It
was in the fifth tenday that he reached the wild zones. After that, he lost
track: it might have been two days, it might have been twenty, thirty—he fed on
wild fungi, which sometimes brought lurid dreams even as he ran—before he saw,
beyond a raw, unfinished cavern, the smooth marble of a boulevard, the polished
copper archway and the glistening protective membrane, and the welcome faces of
startled guards.

Help me.

He tried to speak the words aloud
but nothing came out, just gasping, then blackness crashed in as the floor rose
up to meet him, hands catching him at the last moment before the world
dwindled, slipped away into the distance, and left him for an extended, welcome
time.

~ * ~

43

BETA
DRACONIS III

AD
2142-2143

<Story>>

[18]

She
did not find revenge that first night.

Could Luís’ s killer have
escaped, travelled in its mu-space vessel back to Terra? But that would make
her quest a futile one, and she could not accept that. For all she knew, Zoë
had also died, her broken corpse stretched out in that ruined lab in XenoMir,
while the other Zajinet, the ambassador, looked helplessly on.

The renegade had a lot to answer
for.

In Watcher’s Bones, day and night
were artificial periods of light and darkness: the irregular world outside
maintained its own non-rhythms where flickering overlays failed to conceal the
unsettling core reality. Though the odd-shaped planet’s centre of gravity
followed an elliptical orbit, the world itself tumbled chaotically through the
other degrees of freedom.

Ro’s ‘nightly’ excursions were
surreal: sometimes taking place beneath a sky of blazing white, though other
realities seemed to whisper of gentler worlds, before disappearing. At other
times, the night sky was a black dome in which the stars’ constellations
occasionally flickered into new patterns: a phenomenon she had not reported and
could not explain. She wondered if she was becoming attuned to the impossible
contradictions of this place.

Her own routine became fixed.
Inspired by an account of life in Spain two centuries before, she slept twice a
day, four hours at a time, using solo study-time for sleep. She would awaken
late, take her copper shaft and her palm disk, and hunt for resonance traces of
the Zajinet who was responsible for Luís’s death.

No-one looked for the missing recognition
disk; the disappearance of the lab bench accounted for everything.

In the weeks which followed, she
came to suspect, then grow certain, that she was not the only one to leave the
human settlement when everyone was supposed to be asleep. One night, finally,
she tracked two human figures beneath a quasi night sky banded with violet
aurorae. Then she caught sight of their faces, just for a moment, as they
turned beneath an archway of white light and entered the ever-shifting maze of
the Zajinets’ city.

After a while, into the third
month (now February, back on Terra, had there been a way of returning there) of
nocturnal explorations, her once-frequent migraines began to lessen, and
finally to stop altogether. Sometimes it frightened her, that the flickering
van Gogh surroundings should no longer upset her perceptions.

And, inside Watcher’s Bones when
the humans there were gathered, playing out their little social vignettes as
though to shut out the vast strangeness which surrounded their insignificant
enclave, she watched Anita and Oron, listened to their near-evangelical
interpretations of Zajinet sociology, and wondered where they went, in an alien
city, at the dead of night.