To Hold Infinity (27 page)

Her words coalesced in midair, a fairy string of golden text, as she spoke.

“—when, during a superlative display of light and music at the height of the Aphelion Ball, a malfunctioning holo-projector array
went wild, wreaking utter carnage…destroying the house and killing or maiming many influential guests, among them Neliptha Machella, mayor of Lucis City. Endit.”

Yoshiko opened her mouth to interrupt, then stopped herself.

Maggie said, “I'm going to send this, as a teaser. Then we can put together a longer version. They've got a reedit option in the contract, the bastards, but it costs them to invoke it. If I make the report good enough, they won't have to.”

“You just go ahead.” Yoshiko thought about Rafael, seeing his charming face in her mind's eye, keeping her intuition to herself. “I'll wait till you've finished.”

Maggie, after all, needed facts—and glamour—but not supposition.

Yoshiko sipped from her daistral, watching while Maggie fastened her h-mail bundle together with ribbon-tying gestures, and pointed with a decisive forefinger. The message was sent.

A half-smile tugged at Maggie's face, but faded instantly. She picked up her daistral from the drone's back.

“Blueberry. My favourite.” Her voice was hollow.

“Oh.” Yoshiko frowned. “You know—I think I may have seen blue lights in the ballroom. When the place went dark, as Xanthia's dance started.”

“What kind of—? You mean recording lights?”

“I'm not sure.” Yoshiko thumbed her wrist terminal back on. “Command mode. House system video logs—” She specified ballroom images, and a twenty-minute time-stamp range. “—Two-minute intervals.”

A string of ten cubes, each with tiny moving images appeared.

“
Mrra
?”

Yoshiko rubbed the lynxette's head. “We're ignoring you, aren't we?”

“Try this one.” Maggie pointed at the first cube. “Oops. Too early.”

In the enlarged display, Yoshiko could see her own tiny figure among the happy people performing the line dance. She crushed the cubic holo volume with a gesture.

Maggie pointed at the third cube, which expanded to a metre-wide volume. Inside, a hundred Luculenti were wheeling about the tiny robed figure of Xanthia. The fairylike figures of her four attendants were delicate, reality in miniature.

“This is gr—” Maggie looked up. “Sorry.”

Yoshiko nodded numbly.

A cruciform pattern, the wheeling dancers, Xanthia the hub about whom they danced—

Jump. Maggie's fingers flicked. Jump forward. Jump.

—faster and faster, to the dance's climax. The music, though muted, rose to a distant crescendo. The dancers' feet were unseen tiny blurs; the floor a silver grid on endless black, hanging half a metre above the real richly carpeted floor of Yoshiko's room.

The tiny Xanthia's upraised arms, flung up in agony and despair. A blinding pillar of white light—

“Stop,” said Yoshiko, and the display froze into stillness.

“What?”

“Rafael—”

“Unclear command.” The house system's voice was Lori's, and Yoshiko shivered involuntarily.

“End command mode. Sorry, Maggie. Er—Look, he's there, at the edge. See?”

“Right. Allow me.”

Maggie's twisting hands caused the still display to spin and zoom with sickening speed, giving Yoshiko a sensation of vertigo as they fell towards the frozen Rafael.

Maggie gestured, and the replay continued.

Rafael's face was pulled into a half-smile, half-grimace, of intense suffering—or something else. His dark eyes, hooded, held a hungry look even in holo. Then a huge tremor shook his body, and a creamy look of satisfaction filled those eyes—

Rafael disappeared, along with all the other holo cubes.

Gone.

“Shit!” Maggie looked angry.

“What happened?”

“I don't know.”

“Command: house system, initial display.”

Nothing happened.

“Probably the engineers, damn it.” Maggie pinched the bridge of her nose, then drank some more daistral, obviously not tasting it. “Brought the whole damn system—Oh, look. There we are.”

“Your previous interaction ended abnormally,” the faux-Lori's voice informed them. “Do you wish to recover the previous session?”

“Yes.”

The string of holo cubes reappeared.

As before, Maggie pointed at the third one in the row.

Dancers whirled in cruciform configuration. Maggie gestured, and the display twisted, focussed on bare marble floor, a pillar's base.

“Yoshiko—”

Jump. The image jumped back in time, restarted. Spinning dancers, Luculenti feet stamping authoritatively in time, the blinding white pillar of light, then a sickening moment as the viewpoint flew rapidly round the ballroom's periphery, passing through the ghostlike figures of onlookers, through a miniature of Yoshiko herself.

“Give me all object rights to the video logs, Yoshiko. Right now.”

Yoshiko did not argue. “Command: grant Maggie Brown, this physical location, all rights to current video objects.”

“Authorities granted,” said the system in Lori's voice.

The music climaxed and every dancer fell to one knee and Xanthia was gripped by some impossible agony.

“Command: download current objects.” Maggie pressed her wrist terminal.

Tiny Luculenti, running to help Xanthia, were impaled on beams of scarlet light, and fell.

“What's going on?”

Once more, Xanthia flung up her arms and white light burst brilliantly into being.

“Got it.” Maggie's voice was grim, as she indicated her bracelet. “Saved the coverage as it is now. Bastards can't edit it any more on me.”

“Edit it?”

“Yeah, watch.”

Maggie froze the display, moved the timestamp back to the moment when a white shaft of light erupted into being, and froze it again. Then she took the viewpoint in a long, slow trawl around the ballroom.

There was no sign of Rafael.

 

“Who? Who could get into the house system?”

“Well, there aren't many possibilities.” Maggie looked grim. “The proctors?”

“I don't know.”

“Or Rafael? He looked like he might have some tricks up his sleeve.”

Rafael.

“Perhaps.”

“Well, I'll tell you one thing.” Maggie crossed her arms, and leaned back. “Everyone else was either frozen in terror, or running for dear life. Whatever he was up to, it wasn't either of those things.”

“No,” said Yoshiko slowly. “I'd have to agree with you there.”

“Right.” Maggie's tone became brisk. “I'll start editing the copy I have left, ready to hit the NewsNets in depth. What do you reckon?”

“Yes. Good move.”

Maggie got to work then, while Yoshiko watched, feeling useless.

After a while, the lynxette, Dawn, stirred on the bed. Yoshiko realized she had been curled up on it asleep.

Rubbing her gritty eyes, Yoshiko used the bedside terminal to order feline food. When the food arrived, the lynxette jumped down,
sniffed at the bowl on the drone's back, then leaped back up onto the bed, curled round, and went straight to sleep.

Maggie looked up, snorted with laughter, then got back to her work.

Yoshiko flicked the bedside terminal back on.

Blue. Shifting patterns of unbelievable complexity: a raw and alien beauty, as unknowable yet alluring as whalesong.

The Luculentus mind.

The look in Rafael's eyes, when he had seen the image from the doorway. Was that look an artefact of her own shock, of memory distortion?

She shook her head. She
had
seen it, the sudden black anger rising inside him. The cold calculation. Though Yoshiko was confused in a strange culture, shocked and injured and in dire need of sleep, she was not hallucinating.

“Command mode,” she said. “Request real-time call to Luculenta Xanthia Delaggropos.”

“That ident is not currently available. Do you wish to log a message?”

“No. End command mode.”

Maggie frowned at the interruption, but said nothing.

Mail status. Icon: incoming h-mail. Lori must have set up some regular link to EveryWare, checking for messages.

The icon unfurled. Eric Rasmussen's head and shoulders appeared in the display.

“Hi, Prof.” A broad, red-bearded grin. “Just thought I'd let you know—I've got a fair amount of leave saved up, and we station crew get to hitch a ride real cheap.” He hesitated. “Er—I'll be on Fulgor in a day or two: mail me at this handle. Oh, yeah. Did I mention about diving being better than freefall? How about buying a couple of snorkels, or decent resp-masks?” Despite the confident tone, the colour was rising in his cheeks. “Er—Endit.”

Eric.

Yoshiko flicked the display into oblivion.

She stared at the wall, seeing nothing.

“Looks like you got a friend.” Maggie glanced sidelong at Yoshiko, before continuing her work.

“I guess so.”

“Was he coming on too strong?”

“I'm a bit surprised. I barely know him. It's—nice of him to call.”

“You don't have to sound so pleased about it. There.” Maggie grunted, giving a thumbs-up gesture to finalize the editing. “Done it.”

She leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms, and Yoshiko could hear her joints popping.

“Drink?” Yoshiko asked.

“Yeah—Wait. What time is it? Bloody hell, it's morning.”

“You've been at this through the night.”

“Well, yeah, I guess I have. God, I have to go.”

“You should rest.”

“Gotta go.” Maggie shook her head. “I need to see Jason, make sure he's not worried, though the staff at Xanthia's house can take good care of him. Actually, the house itself is quite capable of looking after him—”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah, quite.” Maggie looked bleak. “What am I going to tell Amanda? I don't even know if the poor kid's mother is still alive.”

“Xanthia's ident is unavailable for calls.” Yoshiko bit her lip. “Still doesn't mean—”

“Doesn't look good, though.”

“No, it doesn't. Look, the proctors will have been to see Amanda. Other Luculenti.”

“Probably,” said Maggie. “But I've still got to go.”

“Yes, of course.”

Yoshiko stood up stiffly. Maggie almost staggered as she levered herself upright. Together they went out of the room and took the corridor through now-familiar debris to the central atrium.

A phalanx of small blue maintenance drones was waiting at the edge of the foyer, ready to clear away the rubble. Yoshiko would have to check with someone in charge, before giving the drones permission to proceed.

Maggie stopped a young proctor, who looked half dead with exhaustion.

“Any chance of a lift back to Lucis?” she asked. “To save me getting a taxi?”

“Uh, sure.” His voice was heavy with lack of sleep. “There's a flyer just leaving.” He pointed out the doorway. “If you rush, I'll tell them to wait for you.”

“Done.” Maggie gave Yoshiko a quick hug, and kissed her cheek.

They looked at each other wordlessly, then Maggie nodded and hurried out, and down the steps. The young proctor spoke into his comm-ring, telling the flyer crew to wait for a minute, they had an extra passenger.

Maggie waved from the flyer door, a small figure, then disappeared inside. Yoshiko watched the flyer depart, feeling very small and old and alone.

Glass and ceramics crunched beneath her feet as she walked through the foyer and into the ruin that had so recently been a magnificent ballroom, full of happiness and cheer.

It was open to the sky, and bitterly cold. Predawn cast dark green streaks across the heavens, and the slender monomer strands were stark black against the coming morning. Here and there a drone slowly crawled, a small grey friendly shape, but the silence was absolute.

She had no tears.

Her breathing felt thick, despite the clear, cold air. Despair lay upon her, bowing her shoulders with its weight.

Empty, empty inside.

No tears at all. Nothing.

Numb, numb, numb.

Rafael enjoyed dying.

He walked with a light, bouncing step, almost floating, from his flyer to his Lucis town house. Inside, he summoned a couch to rise from the floor, lay back, and put his feet up.

Ah, Xanthia.

He loved to relive the moments of his deaths. Though Xanthia's body might—or might not—be physically functioning, her brain had been randomized when his infiltration code invoked the deepscan routines, and she had died even as her thoughts and memories were replicated into his cache.

Worshipful Luculenti dancers, all subordinating their kinaesthetic senses and motor control to her/his wishes. Yes, Xanthia had been his kind of woman. He felt the dancers all around her/him. Closing his eyes, he began to replay the whole Sun-Wheel Dance in exquisite stereo, with his Rafael-body and Xanthia-body perceptions overlapped and mingled, giving gorgeous depth to the whole experience.