Paradox (14 page)

For freedom's cave, by open space
,

Is strange attraction, pure love/hate:

That dreamt-of Chaos which our race

Subsumed within hardcoded Fate.

“And something-something-something,” Tom murmured to himself. “Till Destiny is wild once more/And all the—”

There was a chime, and he froze the display.

“It's me.” Arlanna's voice.

“Come in.”

He closed down the verse. Not so much that he minded Arlanna's seeing it, but she might notice the way openness and freedom recurred in his poetry.

Sometimes, now that he had an infotablet once more, he would replay the opened modules of Karyn's Tale just so he could freeze an image, rotate and magnify, and—fighting down vertiginous nausea—stare at a landscape beneath a wide blue sky.

The talisman itself was almost impossible to open, being encoded for a left-handed control gesture; the requisite contortions gave Tom finger cramps.

“I can't do this.” Arlanna almost threw her infoshard against the black tabletop.

They were in Tom's private quarters. The door membrane, for propriety's sake, grew transparent: outside, in the dorm's central chamber, Jak and the others were eating.

“What's up, Arlanna?”

“It's the very first problem in the module. Just look at it.” A sorites lattice: fifty-three triconic syllogisms linked by a network of colour-coded arcs.

“You've used concentric-context calculus before?” Tom rotated the display, pointed to a node; it unfurled into a rainbow-hued tesseract. “For functional in-drilling?”

“Not really.” Arlanna's left eye was like a jewel, turquoise flecked with amber/orange; its lack of expression made her good eye harder to read.

“Let me show you what the Captain taught me…”

Funny that the Ragged School's methods should prove useful up here in the Primum Stratum.

“Do you want to postpone this? Your friends are still at supper.”

“I know.” Tom shook his head. “I'm not hungry.”

“I noticed you've been losing weight.”

An echoing chorus of warlike cries reverberated along the corridor. Surprised, Tom stopped, nearly tipping the heavy tray.

“Heee!”

The pearly walls glowed with evening rose, and the corridor was deserted, save for Tom.

“Arrêtez!”

Maestro da Silva's voice, for sure.

Still no clash of blades.

“Pair up!”

Heart beating faster, though he could not have said why, Tom hurried to the archway and looked inside the salle d'armes.

Fifty warriors launched themselves into the air, stabbed flying kicks in Tom's direction—
“Eee!”
—and landed lightly, throwing follow-up punches.

Destiny!

Tom, sitting on a low bench just inside the archway, was riveted by the spectacle.

White/black baggy jumpsuits, lean figures throwing elbow-strikes and punches, knee-strikes and kicks, against imaginary opponents.

“Pair up again.” Maestro da Silva's voice cut through the chamber's charged atmosphere.

The tray, beside Tom on the bench, was quite forgotten.

“Faster.”

In prearranged but earnest attacks, half of the students threw long, straight punches which their opponents intercepted, turned into and redirected: the attackers flipped over their opponents' hips and landed flat on their backs.

“Faster!”

Afterwards, Maestro da Silva watched the last of his sweat-soaked students leave, then came over to Tom.

“I'm sorry to have kept you.”

“I shouldn't have stayed to watch, Maestro.”

“But if anyone asks, tell them I kept you until this time.”

Tom gave a short bow. Embarrassed and feeling shaky, he backed away to the exit.

“Mm, looks good.” Maestro da Silva checked the tray's contents, then looked back up at Tom. “Yes?”

“May I ask…What was that you were teaching, Maestro? Not fencing.”

“What's in a name?” The Maestro shrugged. “We call it phi2dao, or flow/focus.”

“But the students—”

“—Aren't noble-born. Quite.” The Maestro took a sip of juice. “It's a little rough for the gentry.”

Tom looked back into the still-electric atmosphere of the empty salle d'armes, swallowed, then asked: “Can just anyone learn the art, Maestro?”

Thump.
Mapping out his failures: he was awful, clumsy, the worst student by far.

“Tuck your head in, Corcorigan.” Brunelow, an assistant instructor, was running the beginners through their drills.

Pain lanced through Tom's neck.

“Try again.”

Slowly he rolled forwards through a breakfall and lay on the cushioned floor, breath sawing in his lungs.

“Once more.”

Grappling: he desperately tried to hook his opponent's ankle, but again and again Tom found himself airborne, ceiling passing by in a dizzying blur, then he crunched into the mat.

“Slowly…”

Striking: blocking too late. Unable to raise his knee to the side, Tom's circling kick was slow, awkward, no higher than his partner's kneecap; in return, his partner's instep rapped neatly against Tom's temple.

Where did that come from?

The training session lasted for ever.

Abdominal exercises, finally. Here, his missing arm was not a handicap, but he could not keep up with the others.

Tom collapsed, knowing he could do no more.

“Stand up.” Unable to see through stinging sweat and fluorescent vision flashes, he hauled himself to his feet. Everyone was coming to attention.

“And breathe…”

The class cooled down, and bowed in unison.

Staggering towards the exit, every step a nightmare. “Ah, Tom.”

Hardly able to stand, Tom nevertheless turned, breathing open-mouthed, and bobbed his head in an abbreviated bow.

“Did you enjoy your first lesson?”

Heart racing, stomach sickened, coated with slick sweat and beyond exhaustion, knowing he was truly useless at this art, Tom squinted through the haze.

“I loved it, Maestro.”

Flow/focus training: every D'vaday, Ped'day and Shyed'mday, Tom turned up at the salle d'armes. After thirty tendays, he could at least perform a breakfall.

Eduthreads and logotropic studies: the house AIs furnished the training shells; Tom sped through them, gaining merit points for each exam he passed.

But Tom could load no new modules of Karyn's Tale. Following the microtak explosion, Lieutenant Milran's Dragoons, advised by Jacks, upgraded the sensor webs throughout the Palace; Tom dared not risk detection of the characteristic emissions.

By the year's end, Arlanna's intellectual explorations had begun to diverge from Tom's, as she entered the administration and fine-arts threads more deeply. Lady Sylvana promoted her from gamma-plus to beta-class servitrix. (Older servitrices resented Arlanna's unexpected new responsibilities; she responded by working harder than any of them.)

Tom's duties remained much the same.

Second year. A dozen new servitors and servitrices—part of that year's reassignment—joined Maestro da Silva's class. They were already fit and strong: Tom (with a full SY head start) could just about keep up.

His studies led him to femtopology, fractal calculus, epic theory (strategic/historical, not literary), paradoxicology and some life sciences: symbiology, cognitive algebra and emergenics.

Third year.

He began to run. Allowed to wander as far as the Palace's outer core, he found a long, deserted gallery, quite disused, which became
his running-route. The first time, he jogged, uneven-paced, until he had passed twenty shadowed archways—they occurred regularly enough to be used as distance markers—and ran faster on the way back. He stopped once, to throw up—apologizing to the Palace—then shuffled back home.

The next night, he completed the route without mishap.

By Darkday's Eve, when Corduven and Sylvana formally announced their engagement, Tom was running eight klicks every evening, in addition to his flow/focus sessions.

Returning to his quarters after that particular run, he noticed a peculiar expression on a freedman's face. Tom thought about it, stripping off his soaked tunic and running-tights in his room, then realized: it was
envy.

Waving a control gesture, he caused a section of black wall to turn mirror-bright. The reflected Tom Corcorigan was lean and spare: all sinew and muscles. Hair a shade too long. His face had a distance-athlete's gauntness; his waist was narrow.

But…Envy? With a missing arm?

The reflection's smile was grim.

He was eighteen Standard Years old.

Jak, in a curiously gentle tone, said: “Have you heard? Lady Sylvana and Lord d'Ovraison are engaged.”

“I…didn't know.”

What? Did I expect her to be mine?

Next night, the Darkday Festival was in full swing: everywhere, wallshimmer was muted, fluorofungus covered with heavywrap, glowclusters turned down low. After late duty, Tom had two free hours, and wander-access to the two strata below, though no farther than the Palace boundaries, projected downwards. His destination was the Caverna del'Amori, in Tertium.

“A nice massage, sir?”

Shaking his head, he wandered past the candlelit alcoves: a beguiling redhead (no!) in diaphanous green; a bulky woman sitting with her legs splayed (no other advertisement necessary); a dancing, slender blonde (motile tattoos rippling suggestively).

“Hi. I'm Lora.”

And he let her take his hand and lead him into a shadowed nook. The curtain she pulled across was threadbare, spotted with unidentifiable stains.

“A hundred mils,” she said, and accepted the cred-sliver.

He ran, feet pounding.

Only a dancer.
The refrain hammered through his nerves as he forced the pace.
Mother! You were only a dancer, weren't you?

The girl, Lora.

Tunnel-bat.

Fumbling, tugging at his clothes…He had almost gone through with it. But the simple stuffed-toy bat, lying on the cracked shelf, stopped him: a reminder of home, her home; and he had looked at her closely and seen the bruises beneath her heavy make-up.

“Take the money back, then,” she said.

A ploy? He left without knowing whether she meant it.

Run.

The gallery's shadows grew deeper: he was farther from the Palace core than he had ever been before, but still he ran.

Faster.

He noticed it first as a chill draught; but as he ran, it increased until he was running into a wind which moaned among the darkened archways.

Faster!

The vertical shaft was huge.

He ran all the way to the low balustrade and stopped, then stretched lightly, catching his breath. It was a horizontal slit, man-high,
opening onto a kilometre-wide chasm. Leaning over, he looked upwards—a strange, dizzying sensation: in the high shadows, a rainbow ripple of membrane—then down.

Movement.

It took him a couple of seconds to register what he was seeing. Half a dozen spots of bright primary colours. But they were a long way below, on the shaft's curved wall, moving slowly.

People, climbing.

Laughter drifted up. Climbing for pleasure? Vertigo clutched at him, and he pulled back from the balustrade.

Halfway back, running easily despite the distance, Tom stopped. To his left, a colonnade overlooked a sunken forum, no longer in use.

Could I
…
?

He thought through the technique, then tried it out.

Foothold, foothold
, then
let go
with his one hand and boost upwards,
catch it
, hooking his fingers into the next hold.

He fell off twenty times, but eventually he climbed perhaps four metres up the column, tried to rest by hugging the stone—arm shaking with fatigue—and painfully descended.

Slowly, he ran back to his quarters.

A woman was waiting for him: legs crossed elegantly, back rigid. Black-skinned, black-haired, with striking white streaks.

“Your chronodynamics exam showed a nicety of understanding,” she said without preamble. “Bilking-antisymmetries are contextually extensible, wouldn't you say?”

“I, er, beg your pardon?”

Drenched with sweat, fatigue-sore.

“The basis of our culture, don't you think? Time trajectories reflected in political structures?”

“Um, yes.” Tom swallowed drily. “I agree.”

He needed fluid replenishment, electrolytes, some glucose in his blood before his brain could function at this level.

“Perhaps the AIs have overestimated you, Master Corcorigan.” She stood easily. “I hope not. Report to my studio tomorrow at oh-seven-hundred.”

“Yes, ma'am. Where—?”

“You'll address me as Mistress eh'Nalephi. Your tuition starts with kenning-matrices: be ready.”

She left with a rustle of dark silks.

Tuition?

Slowly he pulled the sweat-soaked tunic from his body, then let it drop. “Sorry,” he murmured, distracted, as the black floor flowed, dragging the discarded garment towards the clean-gel.

A personal tutor?