In Heaven and Earth (4 page)

Slowly, as he gazed at
imaginary stars, he began to notice streaks of silver across the
sky, sparkling like meteors.

Each one left a trail of
shimmering light that slowly covered the sky in gleaming cobwebs.
Reuben watched it quietly until it began to cover the stars. Then
he reached up and grasped a handful of threads, willing the scene
around him to change.

This was the skill that
had made him pass the simulation so easily, the one which others
struggled to acquire. He was the master of his own
dreams.

He found himself in a
version of his own infirmary, one where the corners of the room
didn’t quite meet and where the wall screen was webbed with
silver.

“
Connect with
your counterparts in the patient,” Reuben said. In the simulations,
he had always found it better to give verbal commands. It kept his
whims and feelings out of the interface more effectively. “Project
image of patient’s mind.”

The projection
came up on screen immediately. The nanites were a damn sight faster
than the
Juniper’s
computer. Amused, Reuben crossed to the wall, zooming in until
he was looking straight at the damaged patch in Vairya’s memory.
Little silver specks scuttled across the screen, but Reuben ignored
them for the moment. This was a much clearer image than the best
the ship’s scanners could do.

He could now see that the
gleaming inside of Vairya’s skull was formed of countless tiny
scales, overlapping and gleaming. Light flickered across them in a
ceaseless rainbow ripple. In the damaged corner, a whole streak of
scales had gone dim, blackened in places. They had not been
entirely destroyed, though, so he touched each one on the screen,
highlighting them.

“
Nanites,
repair selected cells,” he commanded and then took a careful breath
as he issued the truly dangerous command, “Replicate as necessary
to complete previous command.”

The little silver dots
stilled for a moment, before they all converged on the damaged
area. Within seconds, the burnt cells had vanished below a roiling
spread of silver.

If this was all that was
needed to heal a man, Reuben could understand why the scientists of
Old Earth had found this technology so seductive. Why was it that
every generation had to learn again that you shouldn’t trust
anything which seemed too good to be true?

On the screen, the silver
dots were shifting away from the damaged area, like iron filings
repelled by a magnet. Reuben frowned as they revealed the same
damage, barely altered. A few of the cells were gleaming again, but
most were still dull. As Reuben watched, a thin line of light
appeared around them, gleaming with the same play of colours as the
lights that swirled across the rest of Vairya’s mind.

One of the silver dots
crept back towards the damage, only to bounce off the shining
barrier.

Interesting. Not so easy,
after all.

Time to see if he was
completely alone in here. Imagining a com chip in his ear, he
asked, “Eskil, can you see what I’m visualising?”

Eskil’s voice came back
with a slight echo of distance. “No, but I can hear you loud and
clear. You’re speaking out loud.”

“
Get your scan
up and zoom in.”

“
On it, but
give me a clue what… oh. That’s odd.”

“
And not my
doing. Is he still completely out?”

“
Yeah. Looks
like his brain is fighting back. Could be an inbuilt
defence.”

“
Find out for
me. I’m going to try something different.” He turned his attention
back to the screen. “Nanites, form a spearhead and break through
that wall.”

They rushed to obey, but
even their most concentrated attack merely recoiled from that
thread of light.

“
Nothing I can
find anywhere about defence protocols,” Eskil said, “but no one
really knows much about the TC4s.”

Reuben grinned up at the
screen, relishing a challenge. “I’ll have to be creative,
then.”

Eskil cleared his throat,
and asked hesitantly, “Have you considered that it may be
psychological? If he’s suffering some form of traumatic amnesia, he
may well be subconsciously fighting the memory.”

“
Do cyborgs
have a subconscious?” Reuben wondered.

“
I think you’re
about to find out.”

Reuben pondered
that, regarding his screen, and grimaced. This infirmary was just a
mental projection, albeit a comfortable one, but it was
his
imaginary landscape.
If Eskil was right, he needed to see what was in Vairya’s mind, not
his own.

“
Nanites,” he
murmured. “Cease hostilities. Show me what Vairya is
dreaming.”

Signal to signal, brain
to brain, imagination to imagination, he and Vairya were joined
right now. This was the place where science and magic became one,
and it both scared and fascinated him.

The projection of
Vairya’s brain vanished from the screen. In its place, a new
picture appeared, like something out of an ancient painting or
fantasy vid. A walled city stood among green fields, its white
walls gleaming like pearl in the sunlight. Around it, an army had
gathered, knights in gleaming silver armour riding up and down on
metallic horses.

How bizarre.

Nonetheless, Reuben’s
next move was obvious. Taking a deep breath, he stepped through the
screen, into Vairya’s dream.

Chapter Three

IT DIDN’T feel like a
dream. The grass was crisp beneath his feet, and he could feel a
cool wind gusting past his cheeks. Behind him, the door to a large
tent flapped and billowed.

The silver knights had
all turned to line up before him in perfect rows. They all wore
visored helmets and metalled gauntlets, with not a hint of skin
showing.

“
Nanites,”
Reuben said, and they all saluted, hands clanging off their
helmets.

There was something
disturbing about the way they had no faces, and Reuben wished that
Vairya’s imagination had pushed them into a different shape. They
were supposed to be mindless and functional. The hint of humanity
this shape gave them just emphasised how inhuman they really
were.

“
Cease the
attack,” he told them. “Take a flag of parley to the
walls.”

Three of them immediately
wheeled and rode off, the banner they carried changing colour as
they moved. Another swung down from its saddle and offered Reuben
its horse.

He didn’t know how to
ride, but since the horse was metal and the whole scenario subject
to his imagination, he dragged himself up the horse’s side and into
the saddle, jerking the reins in the direction of the
castle.

With a soft whirr of
cogs, the horse carried him in that direction.

It was only a few minutes
before he arrived at the gates of the city, but it gave him time to
survey the landscape around him. It was an odd place. For the most
part, it looked like something from an ancient picture: castle,
blue sky, ploughed fields rising in gentle curves, cobbled road
placed at an aesthetically pleasing angle across the
fields.

All across the fields,
however, thin stakes of glass rose towards the sky, glittering in
the sunlight and confusing the eye. They struck Reuben as ominous,
for all they should have been fragile, and he was glad none stuck
out of the road. All the same, he directed his iron horse to the
middle of the road to avoid them, and shuddered when a wind shifted
through them, making them hum and moan in a way that set his teeth
on edge.

He was glad to reach the
gatehouse of the citadel, where his nanoknights were waiting for
him, their white flag streaming in the wind.

On the wall over the
gate, a lone man in a white surcoat was standing, his blue cloak
flaring in the breeze. Reuben shaded his eyes with his hand and
looked up at him.

Vairya looked back at
him.

In the infirmary, he had
been a body and a medical puzzle. Now, staring down at Reuben with
the wind stinging colour into his cheeks and tousling his fair
curls, he looked like a man, and a damned pretty one at
that.

“
Hello,” Reuben
called to him. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Vairya didn’t seem to
have heard that. Instead, he stood straight, a cold expression
settling on his face. “Sir Knight, I am Vairya, lord of this
castle. Wherefore do you besiege us with such strength of
arms?”

What the fuck? Sighing,
Reuben reassessed the situation. They were in Vairya’s mind, after
all, which combined a dose of amnesia with memories of all of human
history. If he had to operate within the bounds of the scenario to
win Vairya’s trust, so be it. He had seen enough silly vids set in
the ancient era.

“
Lord Vairya, I
greet you in the name of the Sirius Protectorate, whom we both
serve. I am Sir Reuben, late of Rigel, Knight-Chirugeon. As a
penance for my sins, this geas has been laid upon me: I may not
pass by any man who suffers a wound or sickness without offering
him my service until he is healed once more.”

“
Oh, well
played,” Vairya said, his eyes bright and his mouth tilting into a
grin, “but that’s really not what a geas meant. You’re muddling
your myth cycles.”

Reuben crossed his arms
and glowered. “Nonetheless, I swore an oath. Let me in so I can
treat you.”

“
What of your
fierce warriors? Are they your bodyguards, good knight?”

Vairya was laughing at
him. Irritated, Reuben dug out a smirk of his own. “You mean my
orderlies? Absolutely essential to the healing process.” He was
starting to enjoy this.

“
Orderlies in
armour? How original.”

Reuben shrugged one
shoulder. “Believe me, the first time you get punched by some
convulsing idiot, you see the need.”

“
Invalids,”
Vairya said, his voice dripping sarcasm. “Such a
nuisance.”

“
Damn right.
Some won’t even let me in their gates.”

Vairya raised his brows.
“Gracious me, Sir Reuben, I begin to see why someone might have
laid a geas upon you.”

“
Some people
just don’t appreciate my bedside manner. Let me in, Lord
Vairya.”

“
So you can
show me your bedside manner?”

Oh, so the little shit
was going to flirt with him. Unimpressed, Reuben crossed his arms
and glared. “Because you’re sick, and I have siege
weapons.”

As soon as he said it, he
wondered if he had pushed his luck too far. People tended not to
recognise his sense of humour. They were more likely to take him at
face value and hate him.

Vairya, after a second of
incredulity, collapsed into a fit of laughter, leaning hard against
the battlements. The laughter lit him up, and Reuben had to bite
back a smile of appreciation. For someone who had been designed as
a glorified database, he was too pretty for his own
good.

When Vairya stopped
laughing and stood up properly, he said, “I will let you in, and
two of your orderlies, but know this, Sir Knight: mere medicine
alone will not cure the Dolorous Wound I have suffered.”

He left the wall, and
Reuben rocked back on his heels to wait. Something about that last
comment had tickled his memory. It had been something he read, in
those long months in witness protection when he had nothing to do
but wait for the trial and read his way through over three
millennia’s worth of literature. In the cold, clean isolation of a
room in space, he had been drawn to old stories, the passion,
violence, and colour of knights and heroes, devils and the doomed,
the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of dying empires, the raging
against the dying of the light of those who could only reach the
stars in their dreams. When he had finally been set loose to live
his own life again, he had been more educated, if no wiser. All he
had learnt from his reading was that people were still stupid in
the same old ways, no matter the era or the technology they
wielded.

It had been oddly
comforting at the time, when he was face to face with the price of
his own hubris, but there had been times since when he wondered if
he had missed something.

By the time the wicket
gate creaked open, he had chased down the reference, and he didn’t
bother to hide his incredulity. “The Dolorous Blow was suffered by
the Fisher King in Arthurian myth. You, on the other hand, just
have a particularly irritating head injury.”

“
Irritating to
me or you?” Vairya inquired, holding out his hand.

“
Both.”

Vairya laughed again.
Closer up, he looked subtly different to the body in the infirmary.
Everyone did, when they were projecting their own self-image, but
there was so much more life and mischief in his face that he looked
like his own brother. “Do come into my city, Sir Reuben. We are
honoured to have you as our guest.”

“
The honour is
all mine,” Reuben said, remembering some manners, and waved to two
of his nanoknights to follow him inside.