The Red Queen (46 page)

‘God,’ I said. ‘Is Ahmedri with the androne?’

‘Unit A walks alone,’ said God. ‘The man you have designated Technician Ahmedri left when it began to walk again.’

I cursed myself for failing to have God give it some sort of instruction that would stop Ahmedri leaving.

‘Wait,’ Ana said. ‘Elspeth, you told us Ahmedri spoke of hearing your voice – and then you said he was wondering aloud if he had got it wrong. He must have been sure he got it wrong when Unit A started to walk and did not speak.’

I slapped my head. ‘Of course! I only told God to make it speak when it was in Subio or Westside. I should have made it talk as soon as it moved.’ Praying Ahmedri was close enough, I bade God have it speak in my voice again as loudly as it could, and to turn around for good measure. God made no response but immediately the androne turned and began bellowing out my little speech in my voice. I could see nothing but dunes, and for all that I loved the desert, I felt a terrible weariness at the thought that we had lost Ahmedri again.

‘Look!’ Dragon cried, after long moments when Ana and I had turned away.

We spun back as one to see a figure rise slowly but deliberately above the horizon. It was far away, but the long-legged walk was indisputably Ahmedri’s. We watched as he came slowly closer. He was alone but I felt certain someone or something watched from a hidden place, to see what happened.

‘So, Monster, you choose to speak again in the voice of the woman I seek, to lure me back,’ Ahmedri said in his deep voice, when at last he was close to the androne. ‘What have you done with her?’

‘Oh, look at his hair!’ Dragon cried. ‘His face!’

‘God, can you make it so that technician Ahmedri can hear us?’

‘The conduit enabling this needs maintenance, User Seeker,’ God said.

I scowled and thought for a moment. ‘All right God, have the androne greet him in its voice. Have it use his name and say that he is safe, that he will not be harmed, that the woman he seeks is waiting with Ana and Swallow and the others for him. Have it say that he must bring all of his companions with him. Tell him the androne will wait and then lead him and whoever is with him to where we are.’

God made no response, but I heard the androne boom out the words I had spoken in its masculine voice, only addressing Ahmedri as Technician Ahmedri. The tribesman looked astonished, then his eyes narrowed. ‘Did you not take Elspeth Gordie and the others prisoner?’ he asked.

‘They were salvaged by Unit B,’ the androne said.

Ahmedri nodded and said he would not lead it to his camp. The androne must bring him safely to me, then he would see about the others. He was careful not to name or number his companions, and while I lauded his caution, it also maddened me.

‘Let him come directly here,’ said Dameon softly. ‘He will not risk the others, no matter what is said. Have God alert Swallow and make the androne bring Ahmedri directly to him.’

I nodded reluctantly, reminding myself that there were things I needed to do before we left Midland. Then I bade Unit B lead me to Sector C.

Ana, Dragon and Dameon asked if they might go down with me.

‘What of the screen?’ I asked.

‘Tash will watch it,’ Dragon said blithely.

‘God can help her answer any questions if Ahmedri asks the androne anything, and if they can’t answer, God can ask us,’ Ana said.

I had misgivings about leaving Tash to cope with God and the androne leading Ahmedri, but it seemed I was alone in them, so I shrugged and said I would be glad of the company. Ana triumphantly produced thin jackets out of the bundles they had brought, saying God had recommended them, claiming they were light but would keep us far warmer that the layers I was wearing. I said I did not want to experiment on myself, given how cold the place was where we would go. Dragon and Dameon layered up clothes as I had done, but Ana shrugged, abandoned her overshirt and pulled on the thin jacket.

The false lighting in the city showed late afternoon as we made our way back down to Sector C, accompanied by the androne, which I was trying for Ana’s sake to remember to call Hendon. At the last minute Dragon had asked Tash if she wanted to come, but the Speci girl had refused, saying she feared the elevating machines; she was more than content to sit and watch the screen. She had been fascinated from the first by the vision screen showing the desert, and I wondered now if this was because it was her first untrammelled view of the world.

‘Do you think she will truly be all right alone there?’ I asked Dragon as we endured the long descent in the lift that would bring us to the frozen level where Miryum lay.

‘She said she must get used to it for she had discovered that she was alone when she least thought it,’ Dragon said, looking puzzled.

Dameon said that what Tash had been feeling was a perfectly natural sorrow for the loss of a world of values and traditions that she had obeyed and honoured. As always, his calmness calmed me, and I thought it was no wonder Rushton had always valued him so highly as a counsellor. Then I wondered if he dreamed much of Rushton, and if he had seen him on the slave block. Fleetingly, I thought of the wariness and caution in Rushton’s eyes as he retreated beneath the selling platform, his stillness in the shadows under it. What had it been that had so terrified the slaver and his audience?

Be safe, my love, I thought.

‘It will pass,’ Ana said.

‘True sorrows do not pass like clouds or inclement weather,’ Dameon said softly, gravely, and all of us looked at him then, into his gentle, serious face, his grave blind eyes that saw more than any seeing eyes ever saw of matters of the heart and spirit. He was lit by the soft diffuse blue light that Ana had asked God to provide in the elevating chamber and in all elevating chambers we used in future. ‘Sorrows are absorbed over time, and you reshape yourself around them
. How
you absorb them makes you what you are, for good or ill. I think the only true and right way is to take our sorrows into us bravely and wholly, knowing they will hurt, and accepting that sometimes pain is unavoidable. It is when grief is suppressed or hidden that it does harm.’

There was such calm grief in his words that I curst Balboa to the depths of my soul for winning such a heart and then betraying it.

‘Like me,’ Dragon said, unexpectedly. ‘I couldn’t bear remembering my mother’s death and so I hid it from myself. That was cowardly and it ended up swallowing me . . . until you came to find me, Elspeth. You brought me out just as you will bring Miryum out of her sleep.’

The shining love and absolute trust in her face in that moment, in that close proximity with all of them watching me, almost undid me. How could I ever measure up to such radiant faith, knowing as I did that I had to enter her memories, no matter what it cost. It was a relief when Dameon spoke, drawing their eyes.

‘Dear child, you have been anything but cowardly in your life,’ he told Dragon. ‘You have endured such sorrow as a little child as would have crushed most adults. And you did not hide the knowledge of your mother’s savage death from yourself. Kella said it many times and so did the futuretellers; you encysted the memory carefully, because while you could not face it as a child, you always intended to face it. You were wise enough to know you were too young then, and one day, you did dare it. It was a brave and dangerous thing to do, and it is only because you are who and what you are to us all that Elspeth went into your dreams to find you, risking herself. Risking all she is and must do.’

I noticed then the shining blue-lit tears running down Ana’s expressionless face, and I thought Dameon was right. Our sorrows did truly shape us.

‘Level C,’ God announced, as the elevating chamber came to rest.

The doors slid open with a sibilant hiss and we stepped out into the freezing darkness, sending the wraiths of mist into slow spirals above the pallid blotches on the dark shining floor. Knowing the blotches were human beings locked in cryopods and frozen, I felt a shudder of revulsion, but the others moved out into the vast space as I had done the first time, not noticing much else. The androne’s light, extinguished in the elevating chamber after Ana asked God to light it, now flowed out in a bright wedge, whitening the coiling vapours and turning them opaque.

‘Ye gods it is truly icy here,’ Dameon muttered. ‘I am glad you warned us to wear heavy clothing. Yet even so we still won’t manage to stay down here for hours.’

‘I feel cold on the legs and face but my body is quite warm,’ Ana said, obnoxiously. She caught my expression and laughed at herself shamefacedly, but the laugh faded almost at once, for this was not the sort of place for laughter.

Dragon said nothing. Ever brave as she seemed to be in the ghostly houses and dwellings of the Beforetimers, she was already moving out into the misty dark, looking for the cryopods. And it was she who first realised, even as I had done, what the blotches on the floor were. Seeing her look down and then drop to her knees, Ana remembered what I had said and hastened to kneel over another blotch, scrubbing at the shining floor.

‘It is glass but it is so cold there must be ice under it,’ she muttered. Then, ‘I can’t make out the faces.’

‘The androne can use its headlight,’ I said.

‘I have a better idea,’ Ana said, and raised her voice to ask God to fill the chamber with a soft warm light.

I was about to suggest she be more specific when the cavernous chamber glowed to life with a reddish light that showed me once again that Ana more correctly gauged the capacity of the computermachine than I did. She was already peering down at the face under the floor. Dragon had turned back when soft light flooded the chamber and she said in a soft but carrying voice that there must be hundreds of people lying here.

‘I wonder why they are under the floor?’ Dameon said.

‘Because they are sick,’ I said. ‘To keep anyone from accidentally coming into contact with them until God can get the information it needs from a govamen computermachine to heal them.’

‘How long must they have been lying here?’ Ana said.

‘We will never know, unless they wake, and imagine how it would be to be one of them, waking to this world,’ Dameon murmured.

My thoughts shifted to Hannah, who had ensured that God would allow me to come here. Had she known Miryum would be here, or was it simply that she had arranged for me to go anywhere, including such restricted places as Sector C? And how had she finessed such permissions in the first place, if she was only regarded as a guest user? Was it because she had known Kelver Rhonin? That news had not surprised me, but it was intriguing to imagine how much she might have told him of her own affairs, and why. And why had she come to Pellmar Quadrants at all? Was it only, as Jacob had said in his journal, that she had been interested in the project? I could imagine that a woman who had set up a secret refuge for Misfits and who had some visions of a terrible holocaust might be interested in a place aimed at rescuing survivors.

Moving deeper into the chamber, it suddenly struck me forcibly that it was almost identical to the one Miryum had taken me to, inside the sorcerer’s keep in her spirit dream. This might mean she had been awake long enough to glimpse it before being installed in one of the cryopods. But would that be done here? Wasn’t it more likely that she would be put into a cryopod in a place such as the resurrection chamber, and then brought here? But then it struck me that the shaft she had jumped down carrying my cat form was a perfect dream reflection of the long elevating chamber ride. If she had been already prepared for a cryopod with a tiny device planted in her wrist striving to render her unconscious or open to the cryopod mechanism, she might still at that point have been fighting sleep coercively. Another possibility was that she had been dreamtravelling and had seen some of what had been done with her body.

‘How do we find her?’ Ana asked suddenly.

‘God must tell us that,’ I said, and then more loudly, ‘God, what is the exact location of Technician Miryum?’ It seemed wise to speak of her in that way right from the start.

‘That data is unknown,’ God answered, and this time its voice came from all around us rather than from the lips of the androne.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked sharply. ‘How could you not know where she is?’

‘Unit B androne, which Technician Ana has designated Hendon, placed the specimen in a cryopod in Sector C after preliminary examination and healing, and following implantation and activation of a Hertz-Kraagan device in the Galon Institute in accordance with its program,’ God said. ‘Because Unit B had been operating on its own initiative while beyond my range when it acquired the woman now identified as Miryum, I was not aware that its organics had been damaged. Later routine maintenance revealed the damage and its cause; the androne had been unable to travel over tainted ground as swiftly as its program required to avoid damage, because this would have endangered the injured specimen it had salvaged. The operational command for speed over tainted terrain was subordinate to the prime command to maintain and facilitate the life of any and all humans. The damage sustained by the unit corrupted its memory bank, so that much of its journey and some of what followed leading up to the maintenance was lost.’

‘You are saying it forgot where it put her?’ Ana asked incredulously, while I was still trying to work out what the androne had said.

‘The damage which resulted in the erasure of data could be called forgetting,’ answered God. ‘It was after this incident and because of it that the search radius of the andrones was modified to prevent movement over contaminated areas that might result in further corruption of data.’

‘This must be when Hendon forgot being in Northport with Kelver Rhonin!’ Ana said, glancing at me.

We gazed around the vast chamber in dismay. ‘It would take us forever to open all of these to find her,’ I said. ‘And
how
do we get to the cryopods, let alone open them?’

‘No cryopod in Sector C may be opened here. Those to be opened must be removed to a sealed cell in the resurrection laboratory. There the inhabitant can be identified by having its implant scanned. But no anomaly can be released from cryosleep until they are able to be healed.’