Merrial stood by the table for a moment, reached up behind her head and removed a clasp from her hair, so that the two narrow braids fell forward and framed her face. Then she lifted the chain with the talisman, and the other, finer silver chain, from around her neck and deposited them on the table.
The place smelt of woodsmoke and pot-pourri and the bunches of flowering plants stuffed into carelessly chosen containers in every available corner. The wooden walls were varnished, and hung with an incongruous variety of old prints and paintings—landscapes, ladies, foxes, cats, that sort of thing—and tacked-up picture-posters related to the project. An open door led to a tiny scullery; a curtained alcove beside it took up the rest of that end of the room. I presumed it contained the bed.
But it was to a big old leather couch in front of the stove that she drew
me first. She half-leaned, half-sat on the back of it, and began unbuttoning my shirt, then explored my chest with her lips and tongue—and teeth—as I applied myself to undoing the fastenings down the back of her dress, and working my boots off. As I kicked away the right boot the
sgean dhu
clattered to the floor. By this time she had unbuckled my belt, and with a shrug and a step we both shed our outer clothes, which fell to the floor in a promiscuous coupling of their own. Merrial stood for a moment in nothing but her long silk underskirt. I clasped her in my arms, her nipples hard, her breasts warm and soft against my chest; and we kissed again.
We moved, we danced, Merrial leading, towards the curtained alcove. She pulled away the curtain to reveal a large and reassuringly solid-looking bed. I knelt in front of her and pulled down her slip and knickers, and kissed her between the legs until she pulled me gently to my feet. I managed to leave my own briefs on the floor.
We faced each other naked, like the Man and the Woman in the Garden in the story. Merrial half-turned, threw back the bedcovers and picked up from the bed a long white cotton nightgown, which she shook out and held at arm’s length for a moment.
‘I won’t be needing
that
tonight,’ she grinned, and cast it to the floor, and me to the bed.
I woke in daylight, and lay for a minute or so basking in the warm afterglow, and hot after-images, of love and sex. Rolling over and reaching out my arm, I found that I was alone in the bed. It was still warm where Merrial had slept. The air was filled with the aroma of coffee and the steady ticking of the clock—
The time! I sat up in a hurry and leaned forward to see the big timepiece, and discovered with relief that it was only five o’clock. Thank Providence, we’d only slept an hour and a half. With the same movement I discovered a host of minor pains: bites on my shoulder and neck, scratches on my back and buttocks, aching muscles, raw skin …
The animal whose attacks had caused all this damage padded out of the scullery.
‘Good morning,’ she said.
I made some sort of croaking noise. Merrial smiled and handed me one of the two steaming mugs she’d carried in. She sat down on the foot of the bed, drawing her knees up to her chin to huddle inside her sark, its high neck and long sleeves and intricate whitework giving her an incongruous appearance of modesty.
I sipped the coffee gratefully, unable to take my eyes off her. She looked calmly back at me, with the smile of a contented cat.
‘Good morning,’ I said, finding my voice at last. ‘And thank you.’
‘Not just for the coffee, I hope,’ said Merrial.
I was grinning so much that my cheeks, too, were aching.
‘No, not just for the coffee. God, Merrial, I’ve never …’
I didn’t know how to put it.
‘Done it before?’ she inquired innocently.
Coffee went up the back of my nose as I spluttered a laugh.
‘Compared with last night, I might as well not have,’ I ruefully admitted. ‘You are—you’re amazing!’
Her level gaze held me. She showed not the slightest embarrassment. ‘Oh, you’re not so bad yourself, colha Gree,’ she said in a judicious tone. ‘But you have a lot to learn.’
‘I hope you’ll teach me.’
‘I’m sure I will,’ she said. ‘If you want to stay with me, that is.’ She waved a hand, as if this were a matter yet to be decided.
‘Stay with you? Oh, Merrial!’ I couldn’t speak.
‘What?’
‘Nothing could make me leave you. Ever.’
I was almost appalled at what I was saying. I had not expected to hear myself speak such words, not for a long time to come.
‘How sweet of you to say that,’ she said, very seriously, but smiling. ‘But—’
‘But nothing!’ I reached sideways and put the mug on the floor and shifted myself down the bed towards her. Without looking away from me, she put her mug down too, on a trunk at the end of the bed, and rocked forward to her knees to meet me. We knelt with our arms around each other.
‘I love you,’ I said. I must have said it before, said it a lot of times through the night, but now there was all the weight in the world behind the words.
‘I love you too,’ she said. She clung to me with a sudden fierceness, and laid her face on my shoulder. A wet, salt tear stung a love-bite there. She sniffed and raised her head, blinking her now even brighter eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘I’m happy,’ she said.
‘So am I.’
She regarded me solemnly. ‘I have to say this,’ she said, with another unladylike sniffle. ‘Loving me will not always make you happy.’
I could not imagine what she meant, and I didn’t want to. ‘Why are you saying this?’
‘Because I must,’ she said. Her voice was strained. ‘Because I have to be fair with you.’
‘Aye, sure,’ I said. ‘Well, now you’ve warned me, can I get on with loving you?’
She brightened instantly, as though some arduous responsibility had been lifted from her shoulders.
‘Oh yes!’ she said, hugging me closer again. ‘Love me as much as you like, love me for ever!’ She pulled back a little, looked down, then raised her gaze again to mine.
‘But not right now,’ she added regretfully. ‘You have to go.’
‘Now?!’ We had fallen out of our mutual dream into the workaday world, where we were two people who didn’t, really, know each other all that well.
‘Yes,’ she insisted. ‘You have to get back across town, get … washed, and ready for work and catch the bus at half past six.’
‘I can catch it from here.’
‘The hell you can. People will talk.’
‘They’ll talk anyway.’
‘People around here, I mean.’
I climbed reluctantly off the bed. Merrial slipped lithely under the covers and pulled them up to her chin.
‘What about you?’ I asked, as I searched out and sorted my clothes.
‘I’m an intellectual worker,’ she said smugly as she snuggled down. ‘We start at nine.’
She watched me dress with a sort of affectionate curiosity. ‘What have you got on your belt?’
I patted the hard leather pouches and fastened the buckle. ‘The tools of a tradesman,’ I told her, ‘and the weapons of a gentleman.’
‘I see,’ she said approvingly.
‘So when will I see you again?’ I asked, as I recovered the
sgean dhu
and stuck it back down the side of my boot.
‘Tonight, eight o’clock, at the statue? Go for something to eat?’
I pretended to give this idea thoughtful consideration, then we both laughed, and she sat up again and reached out to me. We hugged and kissed goodbye. As I backed away to the door, grudging even a moment without her in my sight, a flickering from the big seer-stone caught my eye. I stopped beside the table and stooped to examine it. As I did so I noticed Merrial’s two pendants: the talisman—the small seer-stone—now showing a vaguely organic tracery of green, and on the silver chain a silver piece about a centimetre in diameter which appeared to be a monogram made up of the letters ‘G’ and ‘T’ and the numeral ‘4’.
The table’s centre-piece was all black within, except for an arrangement of points of light which might have been torches, or cities, or stars. They flashed on and off, on and off, and the bright dots spelled out one word: HELP.
I glanced over at Merrial. ‘It’s reached the end of its run,’ I remarked.
‘Reset it then,’ she said sleepily from the pillow.
I brushed the stone’s chill surface with my sleeve, restoring it to chaos, and with a final smile at Merrial opened the door and stepped out into the cock-crowing sunlight.
and she threw her arms around him that same night she drew him down.
Death follows me
, she thought, as she rode into the labour-camp. There was something implacable about it, like logic: it follows, it follows … The thought’s occurrence had nothing to do with logic; it appeared like a screensaver on the surface of her mind, whenever her mind went blank. It troubled her a little, as did another thought that drifted by in such moments:
where are the swift cavalry?
The gate rolled shut behind her, squealing in its rusty grooves. The wind from the steppe hummed in the barbed-wire fence and whipped away the dust kicked up as she reined in the black horse. A guard hurried over; he somehow managed to make his brisk soldierly step look obsequious, even as his bearing made his dark-blue microfibre fatigues look military. He doffed a baseball cap with the Mutual Protection lettering and logo.
‘Good morning, Citizen.’
That title was already an honorific. Myra Godwin-Davidova smiled and handed him the reins.
‘Good morning,’ she said, swinging down from the horse. She could hear her knee-joints creak. She lifted the saddlebags and slung them over her shoulder. The weight almost made her stagger, and the guard’s arm twitched towards her; but she wasn’t going to accept any help from that quarter. ‘That will be all, thank you.’
‘As you wish, Citizen.’ The guard saluted and replaced his cap. She was
still looking down at him, her riding-boots adding three inches to her five-foot-eleven height.
She patted the big mare’s rump and watched as the guard led the beast away, then set off towards the accommodation huts. As she walked she pulled off her leather gauntlets and stuffed them awkwardly into the deep pockets of her long fur coat, and tucked a stray strand of silver hair under her sable hat. Hands mottled, veins showing, nails ridged: tough claws of an old bird, still flexible, but a better indication of her true age than her harshly lined but firm face, straight back and limber stride. Her knees hurt, but she tried not to let it show, or slow her down.
The camp perimeter was about one kilometre by two. Beyond the far fence she could see straight to the horizon, above which rose the many gantries and the few remaining tall ships of the old port. It had been a proud fleet once. How long before she would have to say,
all my ships are gone and all my men are dead?
As if to mock her thought, a small ship screamed overhead; she caught a glimpse of it: angular, faceted, translucent, a spectral stealth-bomber shrieking skyward from Baikonur on a jet of laser-heated steam. The trail’s after-image floated irritatingly in front of her as she turned her gaze resolutely back to earth.
One of the camp’s factories was a couple of hundred metres away, a complex of aluminium pipework and fibre-optic cabling in a queasily organic-looking mass about fifty metres wide and twenty high, through which the control cabins and walkways of the human element were beaded and threaded like the eggs and exudate of some gargantuan insect. The name of the company that owned it, Space Merchants, was spelled out on the roof in twisty neon.
As she approached the nearest workers’ housing area it struck Myra, not for the first time, that the huts were more modern and comfortable than the concrete apartment block she lived in herself. Each hut was semi-cylindrical, its rounded ends streamlined to the prevailing wind; soot-black polycarbon skin with rows of laminated-diamond windows.
This particular cluster of accommodation huts was in two rows of ten, with the rutted remains of a twenty-metre-wide paved road between them. A gang of a dozen men was engaged in repairing the road; the breeze carried a waft of sweat and tar. The men were using shovels, a gas burner under a tipping-and-spreading contraption, and a coughing diesel-engined road-roller: primitive, heavy equipment. On the sidewalk a blue-suited Mutual Protection guard lounged, picking his teeth and apparently watching a show in his eyes and hearing music or commentary in his ears.
The loom of Myra’s shadow made him jump, blink and shake his head with a small shudder. He started to his feet.
‘No need to get up,’ Myra said unkindly. ‘I just want to speak to some of the men.’
‘They’re on a break, Citizen,’ he said, squinting up at her. ‘So it’s up to them, right?’
‘Right,’ said Myra. Physical work counted as recreation. It was the intellectual labour of design and monitoring that taxed the convicts’ nerves.
She turned to the men, who waved to her and shouted greetings and explanations: she’d have to wait the few minutes it would take for them to finish spreading and rolling some freshly poured tarmac. Not offering one to the guard, she lit a Marley and let the men take their time finishing their break. She’d always insisted that her arrivals and inspections counted as work-time for the labourers.
Her spirits lifted as the Virginia and the Morocco kicked in. The labourers had their yellow suits rolled down to the waist, and were sweating even though the temperature had just climbed above freezing. Most of them were younger—let’s face it,
far
younger—than herself; dark-tanned Koreans and Japanese, muscular as martial arts adepts—which, indeed, some of them were. She enjoyed watching them, the effect of smoke amplifying the underlying undertone of lust, the happy, hippy hormonal hum …
But that reminded her of Georgi, and her mood crashed again. Georgi was dead. Sometimes it seemed every man she’d ever fucked was dead; it was like she carried a disease: Niall MacCallum had died in a car crash, Jaime Gonzalez had died—what?—
seventy
years ago in the contra war, Jon Wilde had died in her arms on the side of the Karaganda road (on snow that turned red as his face turned white), and now Georgi Davidov had died in the consulate at Almaty, of a heart attack. (They expected
her
to believe
that?
)
There had been others, she reminded herself. Quite recent others. It wasn’t every man she’d ever fucked who was doomed, it was every man she’d ever
loved.
There was only one exception she knew of. All her men were dead, except one, and he was a killer.
Even, perhaps, Georgi’s killer.
Fucking heart attack, my ass!
It was one of their moves, it had to be—a move in the endgame.
A door banged open somewhere and the street suddenly swarmed with children pelting along and yelling, their languages and accents as varied as the colours of their skins. Few of the camp’s bonded labour-force were women, but many of the men had women with them; there was every inducement for the prisoners to bring their families along. It was humane, but politic as well: a man with a woman and children was unlikely to risk escape or revolt.
Surrounded by children calling to their fathers, poking fingers in the hot asphalt, crowding around the machines and loudly investigating, the gang knocked off at last, leaving the guard to mind the newly tarred road. Myra
savoured his disgruntled look as she crushed the filter roach under her heel and stepped out into the centre of the untarred part of the street.
‘Hi, guys.’
They all knew who she was, but the only ones among them she recognised were two members of the camp committee, Kim Nok-Yung and Shin Se-Ha. The former was a young Korean shipyard worker, stocky and tough; the latter a Japanese mathematician of slender build and watchful mien. Kim seized her hand, grinning broadly.
‘Hello, Myra.’
‘Good to see you, Nok-Yung. And you, Se-Ha.’
The Japanese man inclined his head. ‘Hi.’ He insisted on taking her saddlebags. The whole gang surrounded her, flashing eyes and teeth, talking to each other and to her without much regard for mutual comprehension. They shooed away the children and led her into the nearest hut. Its doorway film brushed over her, burst in a shower of droplets with an odour of antiseptic, and reformed behind her. She blinked rapidly and shrugged out of her heavy coat, throwing it on to one of a row of hooks that grew from the curving wall.
Her first deep breath was evidence enough of how effective the filter film was at keeping out the dust. At the same time, it brought a flush to her skin as her immune system rushed to investigate whatever she’d just inhaled of the nanoware endemic to the building’s interior. She followed Kim into the dining-area, an airy space of flat-surfaced furnishings—some a warning red to indicate that they were for heating, others white for eating off. The chairs were padded black polycarbon plastic. Around the walls, racked on shelves or stacked on floors, were thousands of books: centuries’ worth of classics and bestsellers and blockbusters and textbooks, as if blown from the four winds and fetched up against these barriers. It would have been the same in any of the huts. The next most common items of clutter were musical instruments and craft equipment and products: plastic scrimshank, spaceships in bottles, elaborately carved wooden toys.
As they sat down around a table Myra felt prickly and on edge. She tugged her eyeband, a half-centimetre-wide crescent of translucent plastic, from her hair and placed it across her temples, in front of her eyes. A message drifted across her retina. ‘Nanoprotect56 has detected the following known surveillance molecules in the room: Dataphage, Hackendice, Reportback, Mercury, Moldavian. Do you wish to clean up?’
She blinked when the cursor stopped on the Proceed option, took a deep breath, held it until her lungs were burning, then exhaled. The faces around the table were incurious and amused.
‘Cleanup in progress,’ the retinal display reported. Myra took a deep breath. It felt cool this time, as well as smooth.
‘So we have privacy,’ one of the Koreans said, with heavy irony.
‘Ah, fuck it,’ Myra said. ‘Happens every time. You gotta assume they’re listening.’ There was bound to be something else her current release of ’ware wasn’t up to catching: she imagined some tiny Turing machine ticking away, stitching sound-vibrations into a long-chain molecule in the dirt. She took a recorder—larger and less advanced than the one in her mental picture—from her pocket and laid it on the table. ‘And I’m listening. So, what have you got for me?’
A quick exchange of glances around the table ended as usual with Kim Nok-Yung accepted as the spokesman. He rustled a paper from an inner pocket and ran a finger down the minutes; Matters Arising started with the routine first question.
‘Any progress on POW recognition?’
Myra was touched by the note of hope with which he asked the question, the hundredth time no different from the first. She compressed her lips and shook her head. ‘Sorry, guys. Red Cross and Crescent are working on it, and Amnesty. Still no dice.’
Nok-Yung shrugged. ‘Oh, well. Please make the standard protest.’
‘Of course.’
As they ticked their way down the list of complaints and conditions and assignments and payments, Myra noticed that the whole pattern of production in the camp had changed. The intensity of the work, and the volume of output, had gone up drastically. Twenty engines and a hundred habitat modules completed for Space Merchants in the past month! Nok-Yung and Se-Ha were subtly underlining the changes with guarded glances and shifts in tone, but they weren’t commenting explicitly.
Myra looked around the table when they reached the end of the agenda. No one had complained about the speed-up. They didn’t seem troubled; they had an air of suppressed excitement, almost glee, as they waited for her to speak. She checked over again the figures in her head, and realised with a jolt that at this rate most of the men here would work off their fines—or ‘debts’—in months rather than years.
Another endgame move. Myra nodded slightly and smiled. ‘Well, that’s it,’ she said. ‘Don’t overwork yourselves, guys. I mean it. Make sure you get in plenty of road-mending, OK?’
The prisoners just grinned at their shared secret. She reached for the saddlebags, as though just remembering something. ‘I’ve brought some books for you.’
The men leaned inward eagerly as she unpacked. They weren’t allowed any kind of interface with the net, and nothing that could be used to build one: no televisions or computers or readers or VR rigs, not even music decks.
Nothing could stop Myra carrying in whatever she liked—the saddlebags were legally a diplomatic bag—but any electronic or molecular contraband would have been confiscated the moment she left. So hardbooks it had to be. The prisoners and their families had an unquenchable thirst for them. Myra’s every visit brought more additions to the drift.
This time she had dozens of paperbacks with tasteful Modern Art covers and grey spines, 20th Century Classics—Harold Robbins, Stephen King, Dean Koontz and so on—which she shoved across the table to the men whose names she didn’t know. For her friends Nok-Yung and Se-Ha she’d saved the best for last: hardbooks so ancient that only advanced preservation treatments kept them from crumbling to dust—
Rather like herself, she thought, as the books passed one by one from her gnarled hands: an incredibly rare, possibly unique, copy of Tucker’s edition of Stirner; the Viking
Portable Nietzsche
; and a battered Thinker’s Library edition of Spencer’s
First Principles.
Kim Nok-Yung looked down at them reverently, then up at her. Shin Se-Ha was in some kind of trance. Nok-Yung shook his head.
‘This is too much,’ he said, almost angrily. ‘Myra, you can’t—’