Expatria: The Box Set (52 page)
Read Expatria: The Box Set Online
Authors: Keith Brooke
CHAPTER 31
The figures hung above him, the crowd all about. They were much like the avatar of Maxwell Riesling he had seen in Newest Delhi, although their dimensions had been magnified. Riesling was there, along with other figures Kasimir Sukui could not identify. He watched them moving, contorting, many of the minor figures splitting as Riesling had already split.
It was fascinating, it was pyrotechnic, but the cultural significance was lost on Sukui. He looked at the people around him. They were struck with awe, their faces pale, lax, their eyes widened, fixed on the apparitions above their heads. Some of the evangelicals were crying.
At first everyone had been struck motionless but now they were moving again, the animal that was the crowd had begun to stir, to twitch.
Sukui had been attempting to talk to the Roman director. 'Please,' Sukui had said, 'I fear that the diplomatic process is under a degree of strain. The good lord, the Prime Salvo Andric of Alabama City is gravely concerned at the means by which the Holy Corporation has attempted to insinuate itself into his city. Please, Director Roux, would it be possible to arrange for some kind of conference? A process of rational discussion and negotiation?'
The director had looked at him strangely, a cutterette looking at a fish carcase.
And then the avatar had appeared.
Now, Sukui could see the director zig-zagging erratically through the disarrayed crowd. His autonomic floater appeared to be under little rational control. It could only be the operation of chance that meant the vehicle had not struck anyone: as Sukui watched, a sobbing evangelical had to leap out of the director's path.
Sukui shook himself. He had to remember that he was not merely an observer, he was a participant. Like anyone else, he too could be hit by Roux's insane manoeuvrings.
He retreated onto the pavement and sheltered by a heap of debris alongside a mixed group of Charities and Death Krishna novices. They were pointing and laughing at the ever-contorting avatars, the novices running burning daggers across their outstretched tongues with a practised cool.
The avatar display was splintering, now, and this appeared to be mirrored by the gathered members of the holy staff. Many of them were screaming as the images above them twisted together into a huge, weltering mess of distorted human features, surmounted by the split skull of Maxwell Riesling, his manifold brains squirming to an irregular pulse.
Sukui looked at the nearest active, twitching on the ground, and it was then that he realised that this was more than some extreme form of religious ecstasy or panic.
He crouched and stared into the active's face. An Ephesian; that division usually looked so cheerful, it seemed wrong that this woman should now look so pained. She was not even looking at the display above the street; her eyes were glazed over, her skin glistening with perspiration.
To Sukui the display was simply a collection of figures, cast out of light. Trifacsimiles, he had learnt to call them.
He wondered what the display must mean to this Ephesian, to
any
Terran? He knew they were augmented with technological implants, that their genetic inheritance was monitored, manipulated from the moment of conception. One of these factors was clearly the cause of this intense response.
Director Falheit had settled down on her floater, saliva spread over her face, her eyes staring like this Ephesian's. She did not appear to be breathing. Others that remained in the street were in various states of distress: the actives were suffering more than the evangelicals, but all were having trouble in remaining on their feet, all were moaning, gibbering, hyperventilating.
It was fascinating.
Sukui felt the awe he felt when he tried to understand the sea or the behaviour of crowds, only it was even closer this time, the understanding, the knowledge. He wondered what the watching Krishnas and Charities must think of it all: their potential oppressors had simply collapsed before them.
Finally, the mass of avatars began to close in, to diminish in stature until all that remained was a tiny figure, a shrinking midget with the split skull of Maxwell Riesling mounted on its hunched shoulders. After a second or two that, also, disappeared.
Kasimir Sukui looked around, wondering what had happened to RoKatya and Slide. Maybe if they were still in the cellar the Roman had missed this display, maybe she had been saved its agonies. But that was most improbable: there had been more than sufficient time for them to have emerged, for her to have experienced it all.
He wondered what had happened to Director Roux and then, as if the thought had summoned him up, the director appeared on his floater. His head was flopping from side to side, his eyes uncoordinated, brimming with tears. His autonome was heading jerkily into the middle of the street, emerging from a side alley that had been cleared through the rubble.
The director looked up and for an instant his eyes met Sukui's. And then the floater accelerated across the street, directly at Sukui.
The group he was standing with spotted the approaching autonome at the last moment and they split up with sudden cries and yells. Sukui stepped behind a pile of boulders, snatching a young novice from the director's path.
'Lada!' cried the boy, struggling in Sukui's arms.
Sukui looked back to where he had been standing just as the autonome smashed into a rock and went spinning past a small girl, the one the boy was calling to.
Lada had been looking at Sukui and the boy and the near miss with Roux took her completely by surprise. She yelled, she jumped, she missed her footing. Sukui released the boy, who went running to his friend, but Sukui's eyes were fixed on the girl's burning dagger, spinning through the air, landing in the rubble, its blade sinking into the heart of a patch of parchment moss.
Flames leapt instantly into the air, the dry mat igniting almost explosively. Within seconds the flames had spread to other, nearby, clumps. A Charity spotted the fire and tried to extinguish it by beating it with her cloak but for every clump she put out many more were catching. 'I think,' said Sukui, seizing the Charity's arm, 'that we should move the casualties away from the fire.' And then he turned and started to drag the catatonic members of the holy staff out into the centre of the street, away from flammable materials. Soon, others began to follow his example, as the flames leapt higher, the smoke rising thickly, darkening the sky above. The day, he thought, would be a long one.
CHAPTER 32
The holy staff had been cut to a skeleton crew to supervise the final stages of the evacuation, but the main chamber of the core was still busy with labouring menials. Two evangelicals were on the far side, one motionless, the other vigorously rubbing his head.
Stopp hung behind a pillar and looked out over the streaming lines of little people.
'We'll be splitting real soon,' said Samizdat, drifting somewhere above her head. 'Everybody's moving out. They're going down the spokes to the three tee proper.'
Stopp smiled tiredly at him. She could see three of the spoke-mouths from where she watched. Each opening had been infilled with spun plastic and packed with rubble cladding until it was a passage no more than three metres across. Two of the other spokes had been sealed completely. 'They're really going to leave some of the menials in here after the separation?' she asked.
'Yip,' said Glori and Abbi in unison.
She looked at their smiling faces. All they wanted was to serve their beloved Max. 'Do you know that you'll die in here? They only need you to cover the transition to full autonomy. There are no food supplies—you'll have fifty days at the most and then you'll starve to death.' The two menials' smiles faltered and they looked momentarily scared, but it passed. She had seen before how the little people seemed unable to look even a few days ahead, they didn't understand the future. They hadn't been bred to think like that.
Stopp shook her head angrily and turned back to look at the chamber. She was trying to think of a way to get through to the menials when Lui's trifax sprang up beside her. 'Lui,' she said, suddenly nervous again. 'What's happening?'
'I don't really know,' he said. 'I've prised my way into the Meta', I've dropped my bomb, but I don't know what's happening. Listen, Stopp, the Meta' has all kinds of safeguards—it's real proud of its security, you can tell. But when I'm in Meta' I'm like a psylogue and it sucks me in, no trouble at all. They constructed the whole system around the psylogues: all their strengths but all their weaknesses too. They're an egotistical bunch, they'd be at each other's throats all the time if they had throats to be at.
'ArcNet's loaded the system with warped copies of me. I'm here with you in trifax, but I can only get glimpses of the real action: it's my psylogues that are doing it all now, pushing the data drug to all the other psylogues, feeding it to them, taunting them. Setting psylogue against confused psylogue. They don't know what's hitting them, only that it's their own kind that are doing it: they think they're going crazy, or that there's a crazy amongst them.
'They tried to make a broadcast to their directors on Expatria but ArcNet took that over without them realising. The 'Net fed in all kinds of iconic shit straight from the insides of the Meta', all the fighting, all the schizoid paranoia.
'It's all closed down now. There's no link to Expatria, the MetaPlex is focusing on the separation and on working out what's hit it, but the only way it can shape its thoughts is through its collective ego of psylogues so it's helpless. It's chaos, Stopp: chaos.'
'Does that mean we're winning?' Stopp looked across at the two evangelicals. They'd been joined by a third and now all three were convulsing in unison.
'Sure,' said Lui, grinning for the first time, fading away. 'But it's not over yet.'
~
'Come on.
Hurry
.' Her voice was barely audible above the blaring sirens, the warning that the evacuation must be completed soon.
The menials filed reluctantly past Stopp. It had taken all her powers of persuasion to get them into their suits. She wouldn't have persuaded them at all if it hadn't been for Glori and Abbi setting the right example.
But now they were here, the last of them floating into the air-lock. This way none of them would be left in the core; they didn't deserve to be treated like that, nobody did. Samizdat had given the little people strict instructions: once outside they were to head down the nearest spoke to the maintenance hatch which would be approximately fifty metres from the core. There they were to enter the spoke and mix with the other menials who had been evacuated. Just to be sure, Samizdat would be down there to guide the last of them in to safety.
'Good luck,' she said, as she swung the air-lock's door closed and started the cycling of the air.
She watched through the door's little window as the menials swung out into the void, their movements co-ordinated as ever. At last she felt as if she had achieved something, made her mark. She nodded at the last of them and then pushed back into the passageway and up, towards the main chamber of the MetaPlectic core.
She could move freely now: she was the only person in the core. Soon she would leave in her own suit, but she had to be sure of how Lui had done before she went.
The sirens cut out as Stopp drifted into the main chamber. The silence seemed unreal.
She stopped herself against the farthest wall, remembering that she had to brace herself for the acceleration as the core began to separate from the
Third Testament
. It seemed strange, having all this space to herself. She had not felt safe in the open for a long time now. She looked all around, tried to picture the streams of menials, the supervising evangelicals and actives. It didn't seem real any more.
She called for Lui but he didn't appear. He must be too involved elsewhere.
And then the core started to separate and she realised that she had chosen the wrong wall to brace herself against.
She clung to a grab-rail, but it was no good. Her grip faltered, she slipped, she began to tumble relentlessly down the wall, colliding with rails and all the irregularities that had been irrelevant in zero gravity.
Her speed was increasing.
She didn't know how to stop, how much farther she had to fall. She had no way of guessing the acceleration, she only knew that it was more than she had ever had to cope with before.
She fell, she screamed, she hit the floor, and her world went a perfect black.
~
When she came too, Lui's ghost was beside her, concern all over his features. 'I feel so helpless,' he said. 'I can see your leg's bust but I can't do anything but look. Can you move, Stopp? Can you still get out? You've got to still be able to get out, for Jay's sake.'
She smiled at him. She found his self-pity touching.
She tried to move, but she couldn't. She tried to push herself up on one arm and this time she managed it.
'It's only a quarter gee now,' said Lui. 'It was point six at peak. Give it fifteen seconds and the acceleration will be over.'
She rested. At the count of fourteen the gravity suddenly dissipated and Stopp had involuntarily pushed herself away from the ground. A wall of pain hit her as the motion pulled at her body. Her legs felt fluid, not right. She bit on her lip, tasted blood, wished the pain would stop. 'How's it... going?' she said, as Lui's trifax followed her out into the chamber again.
'The psylogues are still fighting it out,' he said. 'I've left them to it. My own psylogues are in there keeping things stirred up, occupying all the Terrans. The Meta's paralysed, it's helpless, Stopp, completely and utterly helpless.'
'So what's going to happen? Have we beaten them?'
'Sure,' said Lui. 'We've beaten them. While they were all in there fighting it out—seeing who's the craziest of them all—I slipped into the guidance system and reset the separation parameters. I screwed with the timing of the accelerations, Stopp: now the core is on a different course altogether—it's on a tightening spiral, it's going to twist down into the sun. Before I came out I laced all the guidances and the back-ups with a heavy dose of the data drug. The course is fixed, Stopp, not even the MetaPlex can change it. It's all going to burn up.'
'Yippee!' said a small voice from the mouth of one of the core's many passageways. 'We've beaten 'em. Yippee!'
Stopp groaned and looked over to where Samizdat was emerging from a doorway, swimming energetically into the chamber, smiling and laughing all over his face.
'We've won!' he kept singing. Then, as he drew closer to Stopp, he said, 'We beat 'em, Stopp. So how do we get out? Where's your shuttle?'
~
Why did her legs have to hurt so much when she hit him? The twisting motion of her body, the sudden jerk as her fist made contact with the boy's jaw. It was as if a retaliatory bolt of pure agony had leapt across from Samizdat's startled eyes, down into her body, her legs.
She swam clumsily across to where he had hit the far wall, every movement hurting. She wished he hadn't looked so surprised.
She reached him, checked him over. He was OK, she hadn't done any serious damage. She wondered how long he would remain unconscious. She hoped it would be for long enough, she would hate him to wake too soon—he was only a child, he could be frightened so easily.
Blacking out the pain of her movements, she dragged Samizdat behind her. They came to a passageway she recognised, the one she had used to enter the core.
The air-locks were just like the ones in the orbital arks. When the inner door was open you could prise the seal away to reveal a cavity that ran around the inner mounting of the door. Stopp removed her suit from this cavity and pressed the seal back into place.
She looked at Samizdat, glad that he had grown no bigger. Her suit was only a small one.
It fitted him well. She checked his breathing one last time before she sealed the mask and checked that the homer on the back of the little jet unit had been activated by the boy's unconsciousness. She pushed him into the lock, closed the door, set it to cycling. As the outer door opened she saw the backpack come to life, its jets nudging Samizdat gently out along the tunnel, heading for the starlit blackness beyond. The homer would get him back to the vicinity of Babeloah and then it would call up assistance for the boy. He was sure to be OK.
~
'I feel like I'm going
with
you,' said Lui's trifax as Stopp returned to the chamber.
She looked up and saw that he had been joined by several of his ghosts, his psylogues. 'You are,' said one of them.
'Lots of you are,' said another.
He ignored them. 'I wish I could do something,' he said. She could see that he was crying, down in Alabama City.
'You can,' said Stopp. 'You can go. You'll be here with me in any case—your psylogues will. Go on.
Please
.'
He looked at her, managed a weak smile. 'Goodbye,' he said, and faded.
She watched him go, one Lui amongst several. She wondered if it had all been worth it, if anybody would even notice what had happened out here in the MetaPlectic core. She hoped she had done some good, that was all, that she had made some kind of impression.
With Lui gone, his psylogues began to argue with each other, ghosts of the other demented psylogues flickering up into the chamber from time to time, forever arguing.
She watched them for a while and then she turned and headed back towards the air-lock. She wondered how far she could get without a suit, wondered if she dared try.