Against A Dark Background (54 page)

`How?’ she said.

`The person looked like an android, but it was actually a human dressed to resemble an android; they didn’t respond to my transceiver and a simple EM scan-’

`Did they go in here?’ Sharrow said quickly, jabbing her thumb towards her apartment.

‘I believe so,’ Feril said. `I thought perhaps it was somebody you knew.’

She looked back at the door to her apartment. `Wait here,’ she said. She pressed the button for the lift and heard it rumbling in its shaft.

She looked back down at the android.
On second thoughts,’ she said,
don’t wait here. Just to be on the safe side; get out of the building.’

The lift doors hissed open. `Do you think-?’ she heard Feril say as she swung into the elevator and pressed the button for the first floor. The lift descended. She checked the HandCannon.

There was nobody on the first floor, or in the lobby. She kept against the wall and went to the doors; there was no way she could get out to the street without it being obvious. She sidled back to the rear of the lobby and made her way out of a dusty office and a short corridor into a dark side-street.

She walked quickly to the corner of the building, keeping her boot heels off the pavement so they wouldn’t make a noise. She looked out. Light from the apartment block lobby cast a soft glow for a halfblock in each direction. After a few seconds, Sharrow made out a pale figure crouched in the shadows diagonally across the street, in an awninged doorway under another building. The figure - it did look like a rather bulky android - was looking up towards the top of the apartment block, and seemed to be holding something in both hands.

Sharrow sensed movement to her left, at the apartment block doors; she saw the figure in the doorway look quickly down from the top of the building to the doors.

Sharrow glanced to her left, to see Feril come out of the lobby doors and stand on the pavement between the doors and the silent bulk of the antique steam car. Feril looked diagonally across the street towards the figure crouching in the doorway, then raised one hand.

The figure brought a hand gun up and fired at Feril. The android flicked its head to one side; light flared on the stonework immediately behind it as a crackle of noise burst across the street; Feril dropped to the paving stones. Sharrow aimed the HandCannon as the figure raised its other hand and seemed to shake something. She fired the HandCannon.

Light flickered above her an instant before it burst from the muzzle of the gun. The wall beside Sharrow rippled as the gun roared. A mighty thump came through the soles of her boots and then a crushing, numbing pulse of sound rolled down over her, dwarfing the percussive bark of the gun.

She half-fell, half-dropped to,the ground, then rolled across the pavement towards the building and under the cover of a broad window sill as the blast echoed and re-echoed off nearby buildings and merged with a terrible, tearing noise. Chunks of masonry and huge long shards of glass began to fall and shatter on the street and pavement.

Dust choked her nostrils; the roaring noise filled her ears through an insistent, cacophonous ringing.

When all but the ringing stopped, she stood up, brushing dust and flakes of stone from her jacket and skirt.

She looked up through a cloud of grey, moonlit dust. The top half of the apartment block had disappeared. Most of it had fallen into the street in front, entirely blocking it and burying the lobby doors and the ancient steam car under a ten-metre-high pile of dust-clouded rubble; there was no sign of Feril.

She tried going back the way she had come, but rubble filled the dark corridor, blocking the way to the office; her little torch made a white cone in the dry, throat-coating dust. She went back out, coughing and choking, and clambered over the rubble towards the doorway where the figure had been crouching.

Whoever it had been, her shot had killed them; the metal and plastic chest bore only a small puncture mark near its centre, but there was a sticky red mess a metre up the wall behind where the person had been crouching and a slowly advancing puddle of deep; dark-red was making its glistening way across the dust and debris-strewn floor of the doorway, its thickly gleaming surface picking up little particles of drifting, coating dust as it moved.

She kicked aside pieces of rubble and pulled at the figure’s head.

The head/helmet came away after she gave it a half-twist.

A man. At first, with an odd sense of relief, she thought that she didn’t recognise him.

But then she took another look at that youthful but now slack face, and with a feeling of sadness that became anger and then a kind of despair she recognised Keteo.

She was unsure whether she wanted to cry or to punch that smooth, boyish, dead face. Then just as she was about to shove the android-head helmet back over the young ex-Solipsist’s head, she saw something glint at the collar of the olive T-shirt he wore.

She drew the thin chain out.

On the end of it hung a small planet-and-single-moon locket, the symbol of an intern-grade Huhsz Lay Novice.

She looked into the youth’s dead eyes again, then let the trinket drop back to his chest. She stood up and let the hollow android head fall beside him in the doorway.

A large truck drew up in the street behind her, wheels skidding through the glass and stone wreckage in front of the main rubble heap. The truck’s lights picked out the dust-shrouded remains of the building. Two androids jumped out of the vehicle and stood looking at the pile, then moved to a section of it and quickly started to pick up lumps of the fallen masonry and throw it behind them, excavating a trench in the debris.

Sharrow left Keteo lying in the doorway and walked over to the two toiling androids, keeping out of the way of the bits of rubble they were sending flying back behind them. Another truck appeared at the end of the street and roared towards the wreckage. One of the androids stopped working when it saw her.

You must be Lady Sharrow,’ it said. It paused.
I have told Feril you are alive and apparently well.’

`You mean it’s alive in there?’ she said incredulously, pointing at the huge pile of rubble as the second truck stopped and half a dozen androids jumped out holding construction equipment.

Yes,’ the android told her as it stepped aside to let two larger androids get at where it had been excavating.
Feril is under the car, between the axles, and although trapped and a little dented is in no obvious immediate danger.’

She looked up through the clearing dust at what was left of the apartment block; dark, glassless windows revealed only a shell behind. The top four storeys had either fallen into the street or collapsed down inside the rest of the building. Timbers stuck out of the rubble like broken bones. One white chunk of plaster lay near her foot, its flowers and trellis-work all cracked and coated grey. One of the androids working at the wreckage threw away something that might have been a piece of the old steam car’s slatted roof. She shook her head.

`Tell Feril,’ she said to the android who was still standing looking at her,
that . . .’ She shrugged and shook her head and then sat down on the dusty rubble and put her shaking hands over her head as she half-said, half-moaned,
I’m sorry . . .’

`Sharrow? Thank the gods you’re alive. You have no idea how difficult it is getting reliable information out of that city. Are you all right?’

`Just fine. How are you, Geis?’

`I’m well.’

So?’ she said.
You left a message; what is it?’

Yes I did, and thanks for calling back.’ The flat image on the old wallphone in what had once been Vembyr’s Central Post Office waved a hand dismissively.
But dammit, Sharrow, I’m concerned for you. For the last time, please let me help you. I’m still at your service.’

‘And I still appreciate it, Geis,’ she told him, looking at the walls of the old curtained booth to escape the intensity of those staring eyes. `But I still have ideas of my own I want to pursue.’

Geis looked uncertain. `But Sharrow, whatever your plans might be, can they be more dependable, any safer than accepting my help?’

She shrugged. `Who can say, Geis?’

A pained look passed over his face. `I was sorry to hear about Cenuij Mu, but at least the others are still alive. If not for yourself then for their sake, reconsider.’

`We’ve thought it all through, Geis. We know what we’re doing.’

Geis sat back, shaking his head. He sighed, fiddling with something on the desk in front of him. `Well, I don’t know; now we have Breyguhn refusing to leave the Sea House.’ He looked up.
If you want, I might be able to have her taken from there, get her away from its influence to somewhere they can try to make her well again.’ He sounded eager.
Shall I do that?’

Sharrow shook her head. `Not on my account. If she’s happy, let her stay.’

Geis almost looked amused for a moment.
”Happy”?’ he said.
In that place?’

I believe it’s always been a relative term.’ She shrugged.
And maybe that’s where she feels she can best come to terms with Cenuij’s death. Anyway, as far as T understand it, it wasn’t a once-only offer by the Sad Brothers; she’s free to go at any time.’

Oh yes,’ Geis said, playing with the pen on his desk.
But it can’t do her any good, stuck in there.’

`It’s her choice, Geis.’

Geis looked at her levelly for a while. He seemed sad and tired.
Choice,’ he said heavily. A small smile disturbed his face.
We all think we have so much of that, don’t we?’

She looked away for a moment.
Yes, terrible old world, isn’t it?’ She glanced at the time display.
Look, Geis, I have to go. I’m meeting the others. I appreciate your offer, I really do, but let us try to do this the way we know best.’

He gazed out of the screen at her for a while, his eyes moving about her image as though trying to fix it in his mind. Then his shoulders drooped a little and he nodded.
Yes. You were always so determined, so hard, weren’t you?’ He smiled and took a deep breath.
Good luck, Sharrow,’ he said.

`Thanks, Geis. And to you.’

He opened his mouth to say something, then just nodded. He reached out. The screen in front of her went grey, leaving her alone in the darkened booth.

In the grand ballroom of the east wing of house Tzant that winter there was a merry-go-round. It sat in the centre of the huge room’s ancient wooden map-floor, rotundly magnificent, gaily painted, flagbedecked and glitteringly competitive with the extravagantly carved gilt mirrors and enormous sparkling chandeliers of the ballroom. The most splendid chandelier of all, which normally hung like an incandescent inverted fountain in the centre of the room, had been removed to one of the stables to make room for the merry-go-round. The fairground ride ran on electricity and made a rich humming noise as it revolved. Sharrow liked that noise more than the music of the organ which usually played as the merry-go-round spun.

There were eighty different animals on the ride, all life-size and mythical or extinct. She usually rode on the trafe, a fierce-looking extinct flightless bird nearly three metres high with a serrated bill and huge claw-feet.

She was alone on the ride that day, hugging the neck of the trafe as the ride spun round, silent save for the room-filling boom of the electric motor. She watched her reflection sweep past in each of the tall gilt-framed mirrors in turn. The motor-hum seemed to buzz up through the wooden body of the long-extinct bird and resonate through her, intense and numbing and reassuring. Sometimes she fell asleep on the fabulous bird, and travelled for a long time through the warm air of the ballroom, between the enormous mirrors on one wall and the closed curtains of the windows facing them on the other.

She preferred the curtains closed because it was winter and outside lay the snow, blank and cold and soft.

The back of the trafe on the spinning merry-go-round was the only place she knew she could sleep safely. If she did dream while she rode the great bird, she dreamt good dreams, of warmth and cosiness and being hugged; she dreamt of her mother lifting her from her bath, of being dried in huge, delicately scented towels and carried to her bed while her mother sang softly to her.

Too often, in her bed in the room they had given her next to her father’s, she could feel the white of the sheets and see that cold absence even once the lights were out, and falling asleep within that plump whiteness - she’d have the nightmare; the cold tumbling nightmare as she emptied her lungs at the sight of her mother lying on the floor of the cable car, blood pouring from her torn body, arm coming up into her chest and pushing her away, out into the cold and down to the snow, falling away still screaming, eyes wide, seeing the cable car above her burst apart in a bright cracking pulse of sound, an instant before she thudded into the freezing grip of the snow.

‘Sharrow?’

She sat up on the bird’s back, seeing her father approaching from the far end of the ballroom. He held the hand of a little girl, perhaps a couple of years younger than she. The girl looked shy and not very pretty. Sharrow turned her head to keep looking at them as the merry-go-round whirled her round, then lost sight of them.

Skave!’ she heard her father shout.
Turn that thing off.’

The old android, standing in the centre of the ride, cut the power and applied the brakes.

Sharrow watched her father and the little girl as they came closer, walking across the map-floor, over the seagrain of Golter’s oceans and the native woods of its continents.

The merry-go-round came slowly to a stop and was silent. The bird she was riding ended up on the far side of the ride from her father and the little girl. Sharrow waited for them to walk round to her. When they did, her father smiled and glanced down at the child whose hand he held.

Look, my darling,’ he said to Sharrow,
This is the surprise I promised you: a little sister!’

Sharrow looked down at the other girl. Her father stooped and caught the child under the arms, lifting her up so that her head was above his.