Authors: M. John Harrison
Epstein gave the assistant an intent look, then, when she didn’t respond, went on to tell her, ‘This alien was at the window the exact moment Toni arrived in the alley.’ Reno
had come from the direction of the noncorporate spaceport, the retrieved material showed: it showed him running. Then, as he drew level with the house, someone attacked him, straight out of the
doorway downstairs. ‘Toni’s looking back over his shoulder. He’s so agitated he doesn’t present with his usual careful grooming. He’s scared of something we
can’t see. A woman comes up off the ground so fast you can barely see her, and shoots Toni in the armpit with a Chambers gun. From some angles it looks as if she’s coming up
through
the ground.’
‘And?’
He smiled.
‘And she’s you,’ he said.
The assistant stared at him without replying. Her nose caught the smell of bird plumage, musty and deep. She recalled how the alien lay on the bed looking up at her helplessly, surrounded by
drifts of its own feathers and whispering, ‘I
am
here. I
am
.’ They had drilled its skull. What a place, she thought, to end your weird life. As if she was considering
evidence the subtlety of which would be lost on Epstein, she walked to the window and stared down into the street. If she ordered up the right combination of overlays, she could examine Toni Reno
both in his present condition and as he had been when she was first called to the alley off Tupolev. She consulted her forearm, down which the ideograms flowed Chinese black and chiminy red,
solid and definite in the grainy crime-tourism air. It was raining again, but now the rain took no account at all of the hanging man. It rained through him. Epstein came and stood at her shoulder
so that he could look into the street too.
‘I don’t want anything to do with this,’ he said. ‘The footage goes straight to your office, my people hold off on a report.’
When she failed to reply, but only gave him that oblique smile of hers, he knew this was the most difficult part of his day. Even the fifth floor managers at Sitecrime were frightened of her.
They said she had no personality, they said she had no empathy: they said she didn’t understand people. Epstein knew all these things to be true. What happened to him next would depend on
how skilfully he could back away from what he had discovered.
‘I’m just a uniform,’ he emphasised. ‘This is your issue.’
The assistant did not dispute that.
All across the Halo, alliances collapsed. Mounting crises in the Pentre De, Uswank and Frand-Portie systems broke into open conflict. Then war was everywhere and it was your
war, to be accessed however it fitted best into your busy schedule. Seven second segments to three minute documentaries. Focused debate, embedded media. Twenty-four-hour live
mano a mano
between mixed assets in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, or a catch-up of the entire campaign – including interactive mapping of EMC’s feint towards Beta Carinae – from day one.
In-depth views included: ‘How They Took the Pulsed-Gamma War to Cassiotone 9’; ‘The Ever-Present Threat of Gravity Wave Lasing’; and ‘We Ask You How You Would Have
Done It Differently!’ People loved it. The simulacrum of war forced them fully into the present, where they could hone their life-anxieties and interpret them as excitement. Meanwhile,
under cover of the coverage, the real war crept across the Halo until it threatened Panamax IV.
Rig Gaines, suddenly uncomfortable with events, not to say his place in them, rode the
Uptown Six
down to Alyssia Fignall’s archeological project, hoping he might persuade her to
leave the planet with him before things took their inevitable turn for the worse. He didn’t imagine she would.
The weather was hot, her house empty. In the cloister he found a note she had left: ‘Rig, when the rains come, something beautiful happens here.’ It didn’t look like rain.
The stones were hot to the touch. Rather than arriving with the sunlight, heat seemed to generate itself between the eight rhyolite pillars around the fountain and spray upwards from there.
Gaines sat all afternoon waiting for Alyssia, watching the glare move across the smooth oval cobbles. At four o’ clock, the sky clouded over. After a few grand but silent flashes of
lightning, it seemed nothing else would happen. But by five it was pouring with rain.
‘Jesus, Alyssia,’ Gaines said. He went out to look for her, and was promptly drenched.
The town square he found empty but for some children, who ran about in front of him laughing and calling ‘La Cava! La Cava!’ in excited voices. He followed them into the covered
market. That was deserted too. All over the Halo, people sell each other ordinary things, from empty bottles to leather belts. Here the stalls offered drip trays and shoes, ten inch holograms of
very fat children wearing lace. Then loaves of bread like large smooth stones on a beach. Then meat. Strips, strings and slivers of meat. Long thin slices of meat hung up like translucent
shower-curtains, with a sour iron smell. ‘Hey kids,’ called Gaines, temporarily unable to locate them. ‘La Cava!’ they called. The market was a dark, confusing maze. A
workman’s café offered sesos rebosadas, sautéed brains, eaten standing up. His nostrils were full of that idea until the children led him into the light on the other side, and
a different smell took over. Rain poured from the market eaves. The kids beckoned. Gaines stood looking out but suddenly found it impossible either to move or to describe what was happening in
the second, smaller square which now revealed itself.
It was under two or three feet of water. The town sewers had backed up. Thigh-deep in putrid water, in which circled all kinds of waste from foecal matter to shattered packing crates, people
had gathered to dance. Their clothes, stinking and soaked, clung to them. They were wading and chanting in groups, lifting their legs high, bending down to splash each other with diluted shit, as
if this was an afternoon at the beach. Some of them were kneeling in it. Some were neither kneeling nor standing, but were leaning into one another, clasped together, obviously fucking. Gaines
had his ideas about the world, but none of them covered this. He saw Alyssia right in there with them, laughing and beckoning to him. The children were tugging at his hands and grinning. Gaines
pulled back as hard as he could and eventually broke free. As he ran off through the market, he thought he could hear a low booming sound somewhere deep under his feet.
It rained for eight hours more. Gaines didn’t want to sleep. He spent all night in the cloister, piped into an FTL router he had left in orbit; then, when the rain stopped and the sun
came up, sat by the fountain until the morning heat began to dry him out. A little after ten, Alyssia Fignall arrived back. She looked tired, but clean and happy. She seemed full of energy.
‘Rig, you’ll burn up out here,’ she laughed, taking his arm. ‘Come in and have breakfast. I bought some bread in the market.’
Gaines shook his head.
‘What’s the matter?’
When he didn’t answer, she let go of his arm and said: ‘I knew it. I knew it! Rig,
this is how they celebrate their contract with the world
.’ She had been looking
forward to seeing him, but he didn’t understand anything. The town was another kind of spiritual engine. How could she explain? Under the market lay a chain of limestone caves. It was
typical karst country. Run-off from the nearby hills filled the system up within an hour of the rain starting, but as soon as the water reached a certain level some kind of airlock released
itself. ‘The system drains as fast as it fills. The sewage runs away. The rain washes everyone clean, then they hold a wonderful party in the town, with fireworks and food, to celebrate.
Everyone clean and fresh and in their best clothes. They’re dirty then they’re clean again, Rig, don’t you get it?’
She pulled at his arm again, but he wouldn’t move.
‘How is that different to what the original inhabitants did, up on the hilltop there, whoever they were, a hundred thousand years ago? How is it different to your fucking war?
‘Come on, Rig, how different is it?’
Gaines stared at her. A year and a half ago, she had written to him, ‘The bird cries here grow stranger and stranger. I sit and count the pillars around the fountain, while the tourist
rockets lug themselves into the air above me like suitcases full of cheap souvenirs. I love it so. Oh Rig, please come!’
‘I just need to deal with this call,’ he said.
Alyssia gave him a look of death, to which he replied with one of his vague smiles. ‘I can see that there’s a lot of difference between us on this,’ he said. ‘I can see
you’re disappointed.’ Suddenly the dial-up had his full attention. ‘What? What do you mean, “changed again”?’ Just as he got rid of whoever it was, the
Uptown Six
, which had been skulking around the Panamax L2 point since it arrived, tapped its fusion drive briefly and dropped out of orbit, coming to a silent halt fifty feet above the
house. Alyssia stared uncomprehendingly up at it, then at Gaines.
‘Get that foul thing out of here,’ she said. ‘I don’t want it near me. Not today of all days.’
She walked into the house.
Gaines still kept a hologram of Alyssia aged fourteen, wearing the uniform of some EMC youth movement, always laughing out at him, always seeking to make contact. Twenty
hours after she refused to leave Panamax IV, he stood in the
PEARLANT
control room at a loss. Activity had dropped off sharply. Since his previous visit, Case’s team, defeated by
ancient labyrinthine physics, had abandoned the containment project: instead they’d pitched a tent of filmy blue halogen light at the centre of the space, around which knots of
specialists gathered to stare thoughtfully at the figure which now occupied it.
Pearl had completed her long fall, dawn to dewy eve. She lay on her side on the allotropic carbon deck, one knee raised, the upper part of her body curved at the waist and propped up on her
elbow. In the corner of her mouth appeared a humanising trace of what looked like dried toothpaste. Something had happened to her on the way down, as a result of which she now looked partly like
a woman in a ruched metallic gown around five hundred years old, and partly like a cat. It was a different part every time Gaines blinked: sometimes the whole of the upper body was wrong,
sometimes only one arm or leg. Limbs, skin, armature, nothing fitted together – the cat’s long-muzzled facial structure under the woman’s flesh, then the other way around. At
the same time her eyes – when they were human eyes – had a film of hypnotic calm, even amusement, as if she was asking some unanswerable question, or as if you had caught her in some
very sophisticated form of déshabillé you could both enjoy; while the cat’s fur collected the light at the edges of the image, leading your gaze out into tenuousness,
turbulence and eventual transparency.
It was hard not to see the resulting chimera as a statement – a picture or statue, an out-take from one of the vanished religiocultural pantheons of Ancient Earth. Though it seemed
immobile when you first saw it, the figure was slowly writhing and moving, struggling not to become one thing or the other but to retain both styles of presentation at once. Gaines found himself
silenced by the sheer effort of will involved. He felt privy to something no one should be able to see, the hidden mayhem of events prior to the real, the effort to remain complex in the face of
the decohering and literalising forces of the universe. Beyond the arena of this struggle – beyond the knots of observers with their insufficiently imaginative physics, their failed
intuitions – the light thinned out quickly to grey; a darkness higher up gave the illusion of unlimited space against which events as consistently weird as this might unfold.
Gaines stood there shaking his head and Case asked him, ‘What do you think now?’
‘I don’t think anything,’ Gaines said.
‘Things we can tell you,’ Case offered: ‘this isn’t the Aleph, but the Aleph’s still present.’
‘How do you know?’
‘We had an operator go back over the data. What it found was this: fifty minutes before the original convulsion, the Aleph began connecting itself to the maze—’ Here, Case
brought up hologram schematics supposed to represent the six-and-four-fifths-dimension topology of the maze – ‘specifically to Sector VF14/2b, a structure of tunnels flooded with
highly tuned superconducting liquids.’
‘I remember VF14,’ Gaines said, who had come through there with Emil Bonaventure’s group in, he thought, 2422 or 23. ‘Emil believed it was focused on the Tract.’
Not that they had had time to think anything much. The tunnels were fifty feet in diameter, tiled, dank as a disused subway, curving in directions that made no sense. In some places the stuff was
like water. Others it ate into their excursion suits, or floated through them, or slushed around like warm saliva from someone else’s mouth. All he remembered was Johnnie Izzet vomiting
blood into the headpiece of his suit, and someone else shouting, ‘Fucking shit!’ Johnnie’s blood coagulated instantly it touched the visor, as if it had come out in some
transition state. Then the whole tube was alive with ionising radiation, along with something that sounded like music but couldn’t have been. Every direction was the wrong direction. Things
were moving behind them where they couldn’t see. Emil and Rig and two other men tried to drag Johnnie away but he was dead before they made a hundred yards. ‘He thought it might be
for measuring time in there.’
‘Not measuring, it turns out,’ Case said. ‘Manipulating. The Aleph sits here for half a million years. It has interesting physics, very different to ours—’
‘What’s new?’
‘—but it does nothing with them until it brings Pearl here. We’re not sure if it was waiting for her, or went looking for her, or if it found her by accident.’ He
gestured at the superposition state wrestling with its own deep refusal of identity in front of them. ‘Did it intend this to happen? We suspect not. What you see now isn’t the Aleph.
It isn’t the woman, either. The two of them are giving rise to some third kind of thing.’