Resolution (15 page)

Jay shook his head, unable to speak.

‘I’ll leave you alone,’ said Tom.

As Tom walked from the bedchamber, holo images from Corduven’s past sprang into being in the air, circling the bed: happy memories, helping to ease the transition from life. Children playing in a stone piazza, one a girl with blonde ringlets and bright blue eyes whom Corduven would some day marry; another, from a later date, showed a muscular, bearded man dressed in a silken gown, and quaffing wine: Corduven’s brother Gérard, whose ability to function in normal timeflow was greater than normal Oracles’ ... and formed one of the reasons why he was able to steal Tom’s mother from her family, and condemn Tom’s father simply by foretelling his death.

Corduven.

Tom stopped in the antechamber, remembering the shock in Gérard’s eyes as Tom’s redmetal poignard rammed into his heart.

Cord, my friend.

Doorshimmers froze into place behind him.

Tom was at the outer doors when a soft female voice behind him called his name.

‘What—? Sylvana.’

She was his age, pale-skinned and blonde-haired. Sylvana blinked her tear-damp eyes. On a couch in an alcove, she was sitting with her hands clasped in her lap.

‘I didn’t see you there,’ Tom added. ‘My apologies.’

‘No need ... Jay’s with him, is that right?’

‘Um, yes.’

Tom crossed the chamber, knelt on one knee before her.

‘We’re closer than ...’ Sylvana looked at the closed doorshimmers. ‘I
was
closer to Cord than anyone. We could talk about our hates and loves. Including...’

She stopped, but her meaning was obvious.

Including me.

Tom took her hand, as he had taken Corduven’s. Hers was so much warmer, and his skin tingled in a way he did not want to remember.

‘We did make love once, Cord and I.’ Sylvana answered a question which Tom could never have asked. ‘Not too successfully. Not like you and me, Tom. I never knew my skin could burn like that.’

Tom let go of her hand. Slowly, he stood.

You‘re very beautiful.

He had thought so even on the day Sylvana had bought him as a servitor, thereby saving his life, while casually mentioning that his arm should be removed as punishment for theft. Her mother’s order confirmed the suggestion.

‘Tom. I’m sorry for ... I treated you like a chattel. Something to be bought and sold.’

‘Yet you rescued me. Let me attend the Sorites School, have Mistress eh’Nalephi as my tutor.’

Sylvana swallowed. Her throat was slender, soft-looking.

‘Tom ... Stay with me a while? My chamber is nearby.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t mean ...’

‘Yes, you do. Take care of yourself, Sylvana.’

Tom walked away with silent footsteps and did not look back.

Tom descended.

There were depths to Realm V’Delikona he had not experienced. Twelve strata down, he accidentally blundered through a security barrier - it would have stopped most people, but his thumb ring of rank had allowed him to pass - and was caught up in a bladed feud. It was Vendettenday, when laws were abrogated for a time in a tightly defined section of one stratum, and three men mistook him for a contestant.

He left them broken and bleeding in an alleyway behind a tavern. They would live.

Corduven. My friend.

Another six strata down, the tunnels grew clean once more. Tom walked, feeling a sense of dislocation, aware that he should sleep but not wanting to: this realm had no sense of the night. Instead, he found a place to sit and rest. From a cosy daistral house, he watched a small marketplace in operation; it reminded him of his childhood days in Salis Core.
Before the Oracle destroyed everything.
But that was not Corduven’s fault.

Tom and Corduven. At least they could forgive each other. Perhaps there was more on Corduven’s side, a feeling that Tom could never reciprocate; he hoped it did not cause his friend pain.

Once before, in a different realm, Tom had descended to the lowest stratum of all. Then, his head had been injured, and he had been fleeing the revolutionaries he had thought were his friends, but turned out to be more violent and vicious than the rulers they sought to displace. It was alcohol, the burning dragon that still tempted him, which had become his new false friend.

Today, Tom would climb back up. Never again would he give in. He could face everything; even his friend’s death.

Earlier, walking through the peaceful corridors, Tom had noticed a cultural meme, in that things seemed arranged in fives, and pentagonal chambers were popular here. Several small boutiques had five proprietors’ names on their banners; in the taverns, groupings of five people seemed casual, unplanned, but were more frequent than other numbers.

It reminded Tom that the proto-logosophers who founded this world had based their society on memetic engineering, seeking to depart from the Terran cultures which gave them birth. Nowadays, such a blatant cultural symbol as a preference for one number was a primitive throwback, a relic of earlier times when manipulation had been cruder and experimental.

Perhaps Tom, too, was an incidental tool in the great plans hatched by manipulative minds and developed over centuries, handed down among the ruling nobility ... or perhaps he was a man, capable of fighting for what he believed in.

Corduven ...

Tom could have faced being there at the end, but it was not his place. Jay deserved that privilege; and it
was
a privilege, though a painful one.

In the daistral shop, Tom rose to his feet, left payment and a too-large tip upon the table, and walked out into the market-chamber. Familiar scents of hemp and fabric filled his nostrils as he threaded his way among the stalls. Sweet nuts and boljicream patties on a vendor’s warm tray produced mouth-watering aromas, but Tom fought down the temptation. He stopped briefly before a table filled with secondhand drama crystals, then made himself walk on. Some other time.

In the centre of the chamber, Tom halted. Then he did something which the child-Tom, in his humble home, could only have dreamed of doing. He pushed back his cape, reached up his hand, and the noble-house ring sparked brightly on his thumb. Overhead, brass ceiling flanges arranged in a circle began to rotate.

As the flanges descended, Tom stepped aside. The metal slatted into place, forming spiral steps to the level above. All around, shocked marketgoers stared at Tom, mouths open as they realized what kind of man had been walking unrecognized among them.

I’m just like you,
he wanted to cry.

But perhaps that was no longer true. Tom looked around, gave a solemn bow, then looked up, and began to ascend the steps.

~ * ~

11

TERRA AD 2160

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[2]

The triple towers, with their slow-moving glassine spiral skyways and linking bridges, stood proud above the city, white and gold in the evening sun, framed against bruised purple storm clouds gathering in the north.

On Ellis Island, the comparatively small statue stood with its once-upraised arm broken off at the elbow and deliberately unrestored. Not long before, Ro had seen the original in Paris, now silver in its flowmetal sleeve, designed to withstand any attack short of an X-ray laser burst. There, it was an open secret that anyone thought to own xaser technology was liable to be gunned down by combat squads of the Police Judiciaire, no questions asked.