Take No Prisoners (28 page)
Authors: John Grant
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Fantasy, #Short Stories (Single Author)
She remembers to dress before she goes to the bank.
The cheapest of the autoharps is £39.99, so that is the one she buys. Her return fare on the bus has cost her £6.30 and she is stuck in Chagton for four hours with very little to do and very little money to do it with. She has an early lunch at a bad and unlicensed café called – incredibly – Ye Olde Tea Shoppe: a leathery omelette with a side-serving of ambiguous-looking mushrooms, which latter she wisely decides to leave. Then, with her heavy and uncomfortably shaped brown-paper parcel under her arm, she visits the local church because there's nothing else to do.
The place is tiny – Chagton is only a village, after all – and it smells of a mixture of must and children's urine. It is almost unbelievably silent, as if someone had deliberately shut off the noise of the traffic outside. On the walls are bad portraits of medieval saints, their faces turned bilious by the polychromatic light scattered across them by the stained-glass windows.
She smiles at the portraits.
She smiles as she kneels before the altar, placing the packaged autoharp in front of her, so that it's no longer clear to whom she's praying.
Hours pass.
She catches the bus home and endures an hour and a half of a visiting Spanish student shouting at full bellow into her left ear, but she doesn't mind because at last she's beginning to understand the right notes, and their intensities, that can be put together to create the chord she remembers. A harpsichord would have been better, she reflects, but an autoharp will do just what I want it to. A piano would have been wrong, as would a clavichord. No, I can put picks on my fingers and pluck the strings of the harp until it produces the sound I demand of it.
The stop is close to her cottage. She gives the driver a polite "thank you" as she clambers down onto the pavement, smiling at him as he drives away.
She's fifteen.
No, she's not. She's twenty-one.
The driver carries the memory of her dark-eyed smile for precisely seventeen minutes and forty-six seconds, because that's when he has to stop next, and the woman who buys a ticket from him wipes away everything.
She's twenty-one and the fucking sticky tape won't break. In the end she gets the sharp knife from the kitchen and attacks the tape like a thuggee, cutting it into little pieces with a gleeful malevolence. She tears away the brown paper, feeling its rough edges cutting her fingers, to expose the false ebony of the autoharp. She runs her right hand over the strings, and finds that they're massively out of tune.
Off to the garage to fetch the pliers.
Off to the bedroom to fetch the tuning-fork.
It takes a while, but now she has an autoharp that's properly tuned.
She puts the picks on her fingers, so that it looks as if her hand has become an offensive weapon: she can pluck at the strings of an autoharp or she can pluck at the strings of someone's throat. The instrument lies in her lap, quiescent, a box at her mercy. It regards her blackly.
She holds up her armored hand.
~
Despite what the priests say, I'm not really a pretentious person. (Of course, I'm not a person at all, but that's by the by. It's very difficult learning how to be an individual rather than a person, but over the billennia you get used to it.) I'd prefer to be loved rather than worshiped by the multitudes of creatures that were brought into existence, on their different worlds or drifting through space in the warm gas clouds, when I touched the string-that-isn't-a-string. In fact, if I were given the choice again, I'd leave the string-that-isn't-a-string alone. It was a trap left for me by the she/he/it that was here before me. She/he/it must have giggled at my anticipated predicament, before she/he/it brought about my omnipresence.
Can you remember your own birth? Almost certainly not: very few people retain anything more than recurring dreams of struggling through claustrophobic damp passages. But I can remember my birth quite clearly – that's one of the advantages of not being a person. First I was not. Then, an instant later, I was. It was as simple as that. I was everywhere and I knew everything, and I could feel the sound of the stars as they went sadly and emptily in their courses. It was their sorrow which moved me to touch the string-that-isn't-a-string, so that I gave them purpose.
Who was the she/he/it that went before me? On the world where the woman sits with the autoharp, they describe the she/he/it as a fallen angel, but that cannot be right: there are no angels, because I decided I had no need for them. The humans have created angels in their own minds. I have often wondered if, after all this time, it might be fun to create some angels to surround me, but the effort seems hardly worth it.
I can do a lot, but not everything at once.
It would be nice if I could discover who she/he/it was.
It would be nice if I'd never brushed the string-that-isn't-a-string, because then I wouldn't have to worry about the creatures that send their prayers to me.
Prayers I can't respond to, however much I'd like to.
All I hear is the agony of suffering people, and there's nothing I can do to ameliorate their pain.
To tell you the truth, it doesn't keep me awake at nights. They create their own pain – it's nothing to do with me. I'd like to help, of course, but in all honesty it's none of my business. All I did was touch the string-that-isn't-a-string, and listen to the sound it made. I just unwittingly started life off on its course. Sentience was an accident I couldn't have predicted – if I'd known that such a thing could exist outside myself I'd have stayed well clear of the string-that-isn't-a-string. Although I've come to the point where I can revel in the pain of a sentient creature, my pleasure hurts me.
Soon I will die.
It is a comfort to be aware of that.
~
She will plunge her hand down and create a chord. That first time it will make a sound so disagreeable her lips will curl in distaste. The second time it will be little better.
The third time it will be different. The chord won't be quite right, but there'll be something about it that she finds reminiscent of the one she heard during the years she was away from herself. Maybe it would be better if she amended the C
#
to a straight C, or ...
She'll experiment for a while, you know, until she gets it right.
Mouse
All of the doors in the complex suddenly plunged to the ground, like the blades of an array of guillotines. Makreed, the botanist, had been just about to step through one of them, and he watched with astonishment in the split second before the light failed as the front of his foot was pulverized. He staggered back, wondered briefly why it was he felt no pain, then fainted.
A while later he swam back to consciousness – experiencing as he always did after fainting the sensation that somebody was scrubbing his face both inside and out with lukewarm carbonated water. He lay on his back for a few seconds, seeing nothing but a swirling pattern of light that seemed to have no purpose to it, speculating about where in the universe he might be.
The pain from his foot brought the memory back and he screamed.
His entire right leg was an edifice of pain. Intellect told him that the source of the agony was the wreckage at the leg's end, but he was unable to distinguish it from the rest. Quite separate from the sensation of pain he could sense that somebody – who? – was manipulating in some way what was left of his foot. In the depths of his struggling mind he
knew
he'd been maimed for life – although at the same time there was a cooler voice inside him telling him his foot could be restored, if only he could get himself to a chirurgeon in time.
A new sensation, one he could tell apart from the rest: a throbbingly tight pressure at the back of his knee. In a way it hurt worse than the pain.
"Hi there, Makreed," said a soft voice.
He didn't recognize it, and so as a matter of principle he screamed again. If this was the afterlife the succeeding Incarnate Ones so often and so solemnly promised their people, he, Makreed, had just decided he wanted nothing to do with it. Too much pain. Perhaps he was doomed to spend all the rest of eternity suffering from the anguish of the blow that had definitely killed him.
He noticed that the effort of screaming temporarily took his mind off the pain, so he did it again.
"Shut up, please," said the voice. "This place echoes, you know. You're deafening me. I'm having enough difficulty bandaging up your goddam foot without having to cope with punctured eardrums."
Makreed controlled himself. It wasn't as easy as he'd thought it would be. His shoulders twisted, the muscles around the base of his neck tightening, as he pulled the new scream back into himself.
Think of something else. Distract yourself. At least now you know you're not dead.
He tried to recall which member of the team had been immediately behind him just before the doors had closed. That person must have been fairly close to him, because the chambers down here were quite small. His recollections were muzzy; his visual memory had never been up to much, and at the moment all the pictures in his mind kept crumpling out of existence before they'd properly formed. But he knew it must have been a woman behind him – he could tell as much from the sound of her voice as she worked on his foot. Bandaging it, as she'd said. She must have applied a tourniquet around his knee, or perhaps she was just pressing down on the blood-vessel with her thumb.
He permitted himself a moan.
"That's better," said the invisible woman. "Keep it at that level."
"Who are you?" he said.
"Qinefer."
For a few moments the name made no sense. Then he put it together with an image. He was conscious of the fact that his mind was working very slowly. The trouble was that she didn't look much like Qinefers usually did. Qinefer – she was the woman whom somehow no one ever looked at all that often. She had a habit, when crossing a room, of following the line of the walls, as if afraid to expose herself to the open space in the middle. She had mid-length, curly black hair – that was the first thing he remembered. Yes, and a broad face that managed, despite its breadth, to convey the impression of delicate construction. The only thing that distinguished her was that, anachronistically, she wore spectacles; these intensified the darkness and depth of her eyes while at the same time drawing attention to the prim nakedness of the folds at the outer corners. Small breasts, hardly discernible under her blue uniform shirt; you tended to notice things like breasts on a long flight. Some of the other men on the mission had called her Mouse, because of the way she was so quiet. So self-deprecating. That was probably why he'd hardly registered her presence except for the one time he'd thought about her breasts. Just the one time, which said a lot in itself.
"Mouse," he said, then wished he hadn't.
"Yes."
She was a biochemist; the information popped into his mind. More came. The earlier expedition to the star called Embrace-of-the-Forest had reported that, astonishingly, there was a deal of evidence indicating that, millennia before, the planet closest to the dim red dwarf had given birth to what had become an advanced civilization. That life could emerge at all on a world where the surface temperature was so low had been something of a surprise; that the miserly radiation from its star, so sluggishly devoid of high-energy particles, could have caused sufficient genetic mutation to create a sophisticated lifeform within the known lifetime of the universe was so startling that the exobiologists were still revising their theories. Meanwhile, the rest of the scientists were trying to puzzle out why the creatures of Starveling, as the world had been named, had disappeared, because now the planet was manifestly barren of all but the most primitive forms of animal life. What people tried not to speculate about too publicly for fear of a blasphemy charge was the possibility that this might have been the home of the Forgotten, the vanished race whose technological feats were evidenced throughout the Galaxy by constructions great and small, from hand-sized gadgets whose purposes were too often inscrutable up to the artificial worlds that floated between the suns.
But, if this were indeed the Forgotten's home world, perhaps a clue to that race's extinction might be found here. Hence the presence of a couple of hundred scientists and their inevitable hangers-on. Among the key members of the team was a pair of biochemists: Mouse and a big blonde woman called Claire whom Makreed now recalled vaguely as having been curiously uninteresting in bed but attractively vivacious out of it. If Qinefer had had any diurnal presence in his mind at all it had been as the
other
biochemist.
"What about the people who were ahead of us?" he said weakly, his lips feeling rubbery, like the fat leaves of a succulent plant. "And the others behind us?"
"Don't think about them. For the moment the only people we've got room to think about is us."
There was a spark of coldness in the small of his back and almost immediately the pain began to recede. In the lucidity which came into his mind like a wash of clean water he realized Mouse had finally gotten around to giving him a shot of painkiller from the medikit at her belt. He wondered why she hadn't done that before.
He thanked her politely for her attentions and then drifted off into an untroubled sleep.
~
"You're a shit, you know?" Qinefer said quietly, clutching a towel to her chest as if to conceal the newly discovered slightness of her bosom. The taut vehemence with which she'd said the words made the tip of her tongue hurt; an isolated part of her was trying to tell her that the pain was merely psychosomatic, but she didn't want to listen to it. "You really are."
"What do you mean?" said Daan. He was standing looking out of the picture-window at the city two hundred meters below. The sun was bright and the sky a yellow-blue haze, as they always were on The World. He saw distant patterns of traffic moving like midges. She saw his tight buttocks and the tapestry of curly soft hair around the sharp bulges of his shoulderblades, and rubbed her fingertips together, as if trying to brush away all the times she'd touched him.
"What do you
think
I mean?" she said, her words like arrows at his back. "She could have given you dead-eyes or limpets, you clown. And that would've meant you gave them on to me. Not exactly the loving touch."
At last Daan turned to look at her. The sunshine drenching him made the hairs of his body seem to glow from their own light. He was smiling.
"I tested myself, you know," he said. Smiling.
"And the tests are only ninety-nine per cent reliable."
"That's a good level of risk."
"Not good enough. You want to spend the rest of forever wandering around with your eyes like marbles? Or limping – hobbledy hobbledy hobbledy – because your ankle-tendons have calced?"
"No. I'd euth rather than that." His grin broadened. "Yup, guess've always wanted to find out what it's like to be dead. Better than living – must be."
"And me?"
He shrugged. "We could've had fun in the afterlife together."
"I might have had an opinion on the matter. Did you ever think about that, huh? I mightn't have wanted to euth. But I wouldn't have wanted to keep on living with dead-eyes or limpets – or you – any longer, either."
"Hey, darling ..."
"Just fuck off, you moron. You've blown it this time. Go and redesign your life."
His smile faded. "I think it's you who should be the one to go. If you want to."
Qinefer dressed herself, gathered together as many of her possessions as would fit into a backpack, and left. She never saw Daan again, and never allowed herself again to become that close to another human being. Instead she became a biochemist.
~
The chamber in which they were trapped was about five meters long and about three meters wide and about two meters high. One of a chain of fifty or more built here underground for reasons that had yet to be ascertained, if ever, it had been constructed with geometrical precision. The height dimension had led the social anthropologists on the expedition to speculate that the original inhabitants of Starveling must have been shorter in stature than human beings, but not by all that much. Around the walls of the chamber, featureless metal boxes were placed in a neat row. Everything was covered in a layer of dust.
Makreed was cold. The pain from his foot was now tolerable, thanks to the painkiller Mouse had administered before he'd fallen asleep, but it constantly reminded him of his own potential for mortality, that it was possible for him not to live forever if he did too much irreversible damage to his body, something he normally never thought about. But at least the bleeding had stopped.
He sat with his knees drawn up, his arms around them and his back against one of the walls. He could see the chamber only in fleeting highlights as the beam of Mouse's torch swept around it. She was slowly working her way across one of the blank doors, hoping to find some pressure-sensitive patch that might open it. Makreed had little faith in her quest: she'd already searched the other of the two doors without success.
He wondered for the millionth time why he was here in the complex. He was a botanist, not a physicist. But someone among the expedition's loosely defined Powers That Be had decreed that, before they left Starveling, there should be one last prowl through the subterranean maze by all the scientists who'd been brought along. Maybe a botanist might spot something that a physicist or a biochemist wouldn't? Makreed had protested at the implausibility of the reasoning; now he wished he'd protested louder.
He found his own torch, carefully stowed in the breast pocket of his uniform, exactly where it was supposed to be, and began to flash it around him. The little metal boxes the ETs had constructed and left around the walls so many millennia ago seemed all to be much of a size; through the dust they showed a matte surface of dark green. Presumably they had had some purpose, but so far the expedition had been unable even to guess at what that purpose might have been. One popular theory was that the whole complex had been some sort of library, the metal boxes being the ET equivalent of books – but it was just a theory. Someone else had suggested it was a mausoleum. If they'd been able to get the boxes open they might have found out.
"Any luck?" he said listlessly. The darkness quenched all sparks of optimism.
"I'd tell you if there were," said Mouse.
A stupid question.
"Can I help?"
"I don't think so. On second thoughts, yes. You can help by not helping. Don't speak, and try to relax. Thirty cubic meters of air isn't going to keep us going forever. And don't even think of lighting a smokette, if you have the habit."
He swung his torch round to watch her. The air was dead down here, and it made her aliveness incongruous. Patiently, patiently, she was moving her right hand over the surface of the door, letting the fingers push against it gently every centimeter or so. The thinness of her wrists seemed somehow incompatible with the competence of her movements.
She turned and looked back at him, not moving her feet, the plastiglass of her spectacles flashing in the torchlight.
"I'd rather you didn't watch me," she said.
"Why not?"
"Let's not discuss it. The air – remember?"
~
Daan had been great that summer. Ever since she'd known him he'd been broke – or as broke as the Incarnate One ever permitted his children to be on The World – but now one of Daan's mind-songs had been bought as the theme for some afternoon series on the psychoholo that no one ever admitted they watched. It wasn't exactly the kind of fame he'd been thinking of during the past two or three decades when he'd been slaving away at the psychosynth, but the first royalty cheque had been large enough to cover comfortably any sense of outraged artistic integrity. He'd banked half the money and told her the best way of spending the other half was for them both to go south, to the Anonymous City – which he'd always dreamed of seeing – and bum around until there was nothing left but their fares home.
Qinefer had given up her job reluctantly. Well, only in some ways reluctantly. She'd liked the job but it hadn't seemed to be leading anywhere and, even if it had been going to, she hadn't been sure that was anywhere she particularly wanted to go. The Anonymous City, where the air was sullen with the redolence of glamorously unknown sins, had been a much more appealing destination. A neighbor had been willing to look after the lizards in their absence, and so they'd gone ...