Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five
QUANTUM GRAVITY: 5
THE BONE
Justina Robson
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
For Laszlo
It’s a bit odd to have some final thoughts at the start of a book but as this is the end in a series of five I’d like to take
the opportunity to thank everyone who stuck with me throughout the long cycle of Quantum Gravity’s creation. It was made over
a period of five years in which my entire real life got turned inside out. I don’t credit that bit to anyone but myself, incidentally.
In no particular order then; thanks to Stephanie Burgis-Samphire, who gave me the first encouragement all those years ago
and who is always there with sage advice and a big heart. Here’s looking at you kid!
Thank you Simon Spanton, for being a sensitive and encouraging editor. Thank you Lou Anders, for being an inspiring and cheerleading
editor. You guys rock.
Thanks also to John R. Parker, my agent, who went indie and started a new agency during QG whilst still keeping track of all
the important details. Go team Zeno!
And finally thanks to you, the reader. I hope that you find this book to be a satisfactory conclusion to the story. I had
a lot of fun writing it but mostly it was made with you in mind.
Zal woke to the strobing flicker of orange light. It shattered the pitch darkness of the night, accompanied by the sudden
whining scream of metal grinding on metal. His ears flicked with hurt at the offence and the hot chemical stink of burning
bit his nostrils, sharp and fresh even though he’d been in the room for hours. He pulled his noise-cancelling headphones off
the useless place they’d slid to on his neck and sat up silently to resume his spying.
Sparks jetted in the shape of a small firework flare and lit the unprotected face of his wife as she bent to her task. They
leapt into her cropped black hair and briefly illuminated its scarlet streak as it consumed them. They showered onto her pale
skin and finished their brief, brilliant lives there before falling away as motes of black dust; all passion spent in that
single gesture. Well spent. He saw one dart straight into the liquid surface of her eye as if it were trying to give her an
artist’s impression of a wicked glint against the stormy blue iris and its peculiar lilac ring. She blinked and it was gone.
Where they cascaded into the front of her short floral sundress they vanished entire and whole. The hem of the dress shed
soot onto the raw concrete beside her knees.
Her arms, slender and muscular, were vibrating with effort. In place of one hand was a large steel vice and in place of the
other a spinning borer. The vice held the blunt mass of the engine block she was working on. She had it braced against the
floor at a precise angle as she redrilled the cylinders with her other hand. Under her persuasion the antique thing had a
resonance that made his inner ears vibrate to tones he hadn’t heard in half a century. Elves were sensitive to sound and ultrasound,
and he was particularly good with harmonics. His body told him that whatever care she put into her labour she was still as
likely to break the old Ducati block as mend it. It was old, old metal
that had endured years of use and huge temperature swings and its matrices were close to shot. She would know that herself
of course – her machine-perfected hearing bettered his – but it made no difference to her. She had to try and she had to do
it the right way, which meant attacking it with the antique brutality of metal tools and risk destruction when she could have
plasma-gunned or light-cut it without any trouble or danger in a fraction of the time. The sound made him shiver with old
remembered joy.
Zal waited for a pause, enjoying his admiration of her, and darkness returned. The yellow and orange spark fountain was replaced
by a blue and green afterflare in his mind’s eye. Against it her hands and face became a lime silhouette, the dress a yellow
tatter whose vines and roses suddenly twisted into a face of its own – wickedly grinning. The dress smiled at him and winked
and he didn’t know if it was the faery’s equivalent of ‘hello, darling’ or ‘fuck you’. He’d met too many faeries. There was
no way to know the answer and they’d never tell. Like the elves, they liked their games too much to give anything away.
In the sudden silence he found his amusement at playing his own game had worn thin. He took an audible breath and spoke into
the darkness, ‘Can’t sleep?’
He heard a sigh. The drill briefly whirred and went quiet again in a blurt of annoyance.
‘Darn, I didn’t even know you were there.’ She spoke with the gritty burr of someone who hasn’t used their voice in many hours
and added a snort of disgust. ‘There goes my theory of a soul-link between us through which I’d know your every move. How
long’ve you been here?’
‘Since you started taking it apart.’ Zal was referring to the latest motorbike carcase she had bought, one of several whole
relics that she’d collected over the last month. Their dismembered parts lay all around in mute explanation of her mysterious
absences. He hadn’t known what had caused her to spend so much time away until tonight. He’d wondered, until that had lost
its ‘poor me’ tang. When he’d asked she said Agency business, but he talked to her agent partner, Malachi, too often and knew
she wasn’t there. Not that sitting on the premises was important to the work she did for them but he still thought she was
lying. His demon heart knew these things. Now satisfying his curiosity by following her and exposing her secret was pretty
low, he had to admit, but after all they’d been through he
wasn’t about to let her get away without a fight. He’d rather face her anger.
She sat for a moment but ‘I see,’ was all she said in the end.
He heard the engine block meet the concrete floor as she put it down, and then the whirr and click whispering of precision
engineering tools putting themselves away. The sounds were hollow and tinny in the old garage’s bare space. A faint line above
the rollup door glowed in waxy grey, like the end of the last candle, providing the only light in the entire place. It illuminated
nothing, but neither of them needed visible light. Lila could see on every part of the spectrum if she chose to, and he was
finally the creature of darkness that his enemies had always claimed him to be, although they’d been talking about his soul
and not his body. Left without light or heat long enough Zal knew he could dissipate entirely into shadow, even in Otopia
where all aetheric processes were reduced to fractions of their otherworldly power. He hadn’t been sure that he could fool
Lila by shedding as much material form as possible and cloaking what remained of his physical self in his aetheric body, but
it seemed he’d done a good job.
He felt the cool touch of her hand on his cheek, long fingers and delicate skin where the vice had been a moment ago. Her
voice was soft, close to his face, her breath kissing him.
‘I don’t understand how you can exist without giving off any wavelengths at all. I don’t get how shadow can be anything. Darkness
isn’t a thing, it’s an absence of light.’
It used to be the case that Zal didn’t have an answer that would satisfy her scientific curiosity. He hadn’t even known the
technicalities of why he was invisible, though he’d made an effort to be so and intention was required. The scientific analysis
of aether was a demon pastime and a human obsession. He was only a demon in nature but not in the particulars. Lila was the
opposite. She knew the particulars about everything but she wasn’t a demon at heart. She was human to the core.
Zal released all intention to be invisible now and saw her start back slightly as the last of his cloaking aura vanished beneath
the surface of his skin and revealed his Cheshire cat expression. ‘Humans never used to see my aura at all, even when it was
the old me and nothing more.’
‘They
felt
it,’ she said, the expression of mixed annoyance and softness in her face convincing him that she was remembering their
first meeting. She put her hand up to cup his jaw and tilt his head towards her.
At the time, being a smug bastard full of inflated rock-star importance, he’d used her ignorance against her, to score a cheap
point and had felt her up using just his aura. He grinned at the memory himself. She snorted with laughter this time as her
fingers against his lips felt his smile. ‘And I doubt they’ll see this one unless you choose to make it visible.’ Her eyes
narrowed fractionally – a movement he’d learned was a sign that she was listening to the Signal; the constant background hiss
she was able to hear that comprised the world of machines, the full data record of everything that had ever happened and what
was possible. It wasn’t a world like this one, or Alfheim or Demonia. He didn’t know if world was the right idea. It was more
like an idea than a thing, and less like either than suited his grasp of cosmology.
He let a few seconds pass, hours to Lila, and then saw the blink of her fugue state ending. She jumped up to sit beside him
on the emptied crates and their lid of folded tarps that he’d been using as a bed. Her body was as warm and vibrant as any
living human woman’s, no heavier and no stranger. Her bare legs and arms were girlishly smooth. There were no clues as to
where the machine structure had once fitted its bulky robotic prostheses to what remained of her human body, and no trace
in her easy movements of the pain they used to cause her. They were long changed.
Since the two of them had been through the cauldron of Faery, she had been flawlessly combined, a machine of living structures
that were able to replicate any material. What vulnerability she had ended on the inside now and was hers to share or conceal
– her physical form was as close to invulnerable as anything he could imagine.
But he remembered the first time he’d seen her through the toughened glass of a recording-studio window in her security agency
girl’s suit, trousers burst at a seam, a streak of dust across her white collar. Her poppy-red lipstick had cut a streak of
rich, contemptuous disapproval straight at him like a laser beam. She came, she saw, she on the spot couldn’t stand him, so
much so that he’d felt the roots of his hair ache with the surprise of it. Then his heart had shivered with the citrus zing
of that ancient demon pleasure in opposites attracting and the simultaneous ancient call of what, if he were drunk, he’d’ve
called destiny. He fell in love on the spot and so did she, and hell, did she hate it. And so their game of seduction cat
and mouse was begun,
dishonestly, deliciously and under illusions. Since that moment his life had exploded from mere celebrity and notoriety into
the realms of the truly madly dangerous. Zal had died and been lost but even that wasn’t enough to keep him away. There were
no words for how much he loved her and he used to be good with those.
He leaned in towards her and kissed her gently. Her mouth was firm under his. She was still thoughtful. It took her time to
come down from being with the machines as though she had to find her way back to human through a difficult maze. He sat back.
‘I don’t feel the metal in you any more. Only the signature of the elementals bound into it, like they’re all that’s left.’
She murmured her reply with amusement and affection. ‘You would, if I were in my battle gear.’
‘Maybe.’ He leaned into her touch, resting his cheek in her hand. ‘I hope not.’ Elf senses and aetheric powers didn’t operate
well around metals.
‘I’ve refined myself,’ she said, smiling as she looked at him, not into his eyes but over his cheeks, his mouth, tracing their
contours with one delicate fingertip. ‘There are alloys that wouldn’t bother you now. Permeable matrices, tunable to the frequencies
of any aether. They vibrate to the same harmonies as a charm. You could play me, like a musical instrument.’
‘I like the sound of that.’
He hesitated, watching her watching him, content in the lull of her attention. This dancing around their changed ways felt
delicate and uncertain, a charm in itself, although for himself he hadn’t changed at all, he was still Zal, only a few particulars
were different and what did they count for? He felt he ought to correct an important point however. ‘Shadow isn’t darkness
though. Shadow is a frequency of aether. Better think of it as a kind of black light. All living things have it, and some
not living ones. It is as real as any other form of energy. It just happens that it’s of a kind not visible.’
She was not entirely impressed. ‘Energy, spirits, souls if they exist . . . I can’t fit them together. I don’t see them properly.
It’s like there’s a missing piece in the picture. Is it because they don’t emit radiant signals? And then there’s all these
priestly types talking on and on about the light. Another metaphor and nothing but? I wish I could talk to Tath. He’d know.’
Zal wasn’t sure that Tath would know or if he did that his revelations would satisfy Lila’s incomplete pattern of the universe.
Tath’s own personal bargain with Jack the Giantkiller had transformed him from a relatively simple, if slippery, necromancer
into the speaker for the dead. This position, whilst not Death itself, gave him dominion over the half-tangible regions of
transition through which the spirits of the newly dead passed on their way to their ineffable final destination, itself a
place Tath could not enter. This was a zone that bordered on the fey, but also the elemental. Zal knew next to nothing about
it even though he had passed through it himself on his way back from the brink of creation. Death herself had brought him
most of the way. It hadn’t inspired any fervour in him. Things lurked there in the grim darkness that were hungry and forsaken;
needful things without the means to grasp what they must have. Bodiless hunters. Vampires and their like, or the things that
would be vampires if they ever got the chance. They were spirits of a kind, mindless, raw. Necromancers knew to stay away
from them. He didn’t like the idea of Lila going on some hunt to find out what they were, either in the region of the near
dead or by other means.
She was talking to herself again, so gripped by the whisper of the Signal and her own need to fit everything into a coherent
whole that he could sit with her, even kiss her, even make love with her and know himself quite alone while she spun away
into the strange infinities of her mind. He feared for her in that inner space, where neither he nor anything else could go,
where she could get lost forever in the twists and turns.
‘How about the bike?’ The bike was a great sign. The bike was creative, important. The bike was sacred. The bike was something
that existed in all her worlds, something he could ride to get in. ‘Is that fitting together?’
She smiled. ‘It’s just a matter of time.’
He saw parts he thought he recognised as old Harley Davidsons but there were other lost beasts in there too, laid out all
over the floor in precise patterns with Lila-sized pathways left between their ranks. ‘What are you going to run it on? Looks
kinda petrochemical.’
‘I’m not sure yet,’ she said. ‘Might have to be petrol. Depends on whether anything else makes the right sound. Anyway, has
to be if I use genuine parts. They aren’t up to anything else.’
He didn’t mention that there was no petrol industry any more. She knew that. She’d figure something out. He wouldn’t even
have been surprised if she could drink beer and piss petrol but although that might be a hell’s angel dream and he fancied
himself one of those it
wasn’t a particularly erotic fantasy of his so he let it go and coughed, perfectly mimicking the sound of a carburettor choking
to death. ‘Care to run a diagnostic on me?’