Paradox (40 page)

“It's about time.”

The technician did not look up as Tom lowered the stallion on its black cord to the desktop and let go.

“What's he been doing with it?” the young man added, checking the depths of his display.

“Bedtime reading, I guess.”

“My Lord!” He jerked upright, face paling as he looked up at Tom. “My apologies, sir. I—”

“It doesn't matter.” Tom clapped his hand on the fellow's shoulder and looked around. The place was long and wide, low-ceilinged, and mostly in shadow: deserted workstations, holodisplays cycling through intricate routines no-one was observing. There were only two other people in a work chamber designed for fifty. “It doesn't look like any of us can sleep.”

Not when dead children wait in my dreams
.

“Ah, well, my Lord. That's because we're making progress.” Swivelling on his seat, the technician waved subsidiary display volumes into being. “Look at this displacement algorithm…”

Tom let him talk for a few minutes, and followed as best he could. After asking a few questions—which the technician was kind enough to pretend were not totally naive—Tom congratulated him on his progress, and left.

There was no particular need, in his own demesne, to carry the crystal around inside his childhood talisman, but it seemed appropriate. One thing that everyone agreed on, though, was that it was never going to be repaired.

Instead, the hundreds of men and women working in Tom's palace were engaged on a clandestine reverse-engineering project, trying to decipher the comms relay's design from femtanalysis of its components and topology. Later the emphasis would swing the other way, as they started to manufacture their own crystals.

But that step was a year away, at least.

Will this never end?

“Sweet Fate!”

Jammed into the tiny space, arm wrapped around his knees, Tom felt sickened as the dark blue ceiling and floor outside the view slit suddenly spun around and they plunged down, then sideways.

“One minute.” Elva's voice, muffled by her helmet.

“I hope so.”

Crammed in behind the control seat, Tom swallowed bile as the black arachnabug spun, actually
leaped
across a sunken pit, and whipped into a narrow, twisting tunnel.

“We're here. Broke a world record or two, I'd say.”

“And my bones.”

Bright light burst into the small cabin as they came out into a wide hall and Elva threw out all tendrils to halt progress. They swung sickeningly for a few oscillations until the tendrils damped them out.

“Everybody out,” Elva said, knowing that Tom would have to follow her.

“After you, please.”

She popped the bug, swung her legs over the side, and lowered herself on a threadlike descent fibre to the ground.

Ignoring the muscle cramps, Tom grabbed another fibre and followed.

Some twenty executive officers, with various aides, were in the hall. Zhao-ji was there, raising a hand in greeting, and Viscount Vilkarzyeh
was already hurrying over, bootsteps clacking across translucent violet flagstones.

“Tom. Good to see you.”

“Hi, Alexei.” They clasped wrists. “Mind telling me what the fuss is all about?”

Looking around, Tom counted three Planning Council representatives: Dr Sukhram, a big woman called Galvina Chalviro, and the blocky man whom he still knew only by his codename, Sentinel.

“There's no rush,” Vilkarzyeh was saying, “now that you're here.”

“Nice to know.”

In one corner, a small buffet had been set up. Tom was relieved to see Elva refuse wine and opt for gripplejuice; if the journey back was even half as fast as the outward trip, she would need her wits about her.

“Really, Tom, they've just brought forward a meeting which would have been held anyway. In three tendays' time.”

“I see.”

“With the beta-net blown we've got to—”

“With the
what?
”

Tom swung round quickly and Vilkarzyeh flinched. Then he stepped back and coughed, covering his embarrassment, and said quickly: “Not my decision, Tom.”

Fist clenched, Tom scanned the room—

Limp body. Elva laying the dead child down
.

—as scarlet pinpoints blossomed everywhere—

Small hand disappearing beneath the turbulent flood
.

—even on Elva, and Tom squeezed his eyes shut until yellow fluorescence appeared and the tacware overlay went away.

Then he stalked across the room, leaving Vilkarzyeh behind, to the buffet beside Elva.

“Tom? What's the—?”

Picking up a shot of dodecapear vodka, he tossed the hot spirit down his throat in one go. He coughed, blinking away nascent tears.

“Destiny!” said Elva. “That's the first time I've seen you drink alcohol.”

It burned nicely inside him.

“Today I need it.”

“Why?” Keeping her voice low, trying to calm him.

“Lord A'Dekal's counter-terrorist Chaos-blighted think-tank.” Tom had been to three major sessions now, worked there for days at a time, even brought back some of their material to his own demesne. “I showed them, these bastards”—gesturing at Sentinel and Dr Sukhram, who were staring in his direction—“all of Corduven's infiltration plans. You know they were ready to crack open half our courier lines in this sector?”

Frowning, Elva nodded.

“So our clean-up teams could have taken out every one of Corduven's intelligence people.
Every single one of them.
” He was raising his voice again, so he made an effort to bring the volume down. “I handed it to them on a plate, that's all.”

“But that's great news, isn't it?”

“It should be.” Tom bit back a curse. “Except Vilkarzyeh says our network's completely blown, regardless.”

Elva's face grew pale, and Tom wondered how many people she knew among the courier lines.

“Maybe some of them—” he began, then stopped.

At the room's centre, one of the aides had gestured lozenge-shaped lev-stools into formation, and Sentinel was calling the meeting to order.

They wanted to discuss the long-range future first.

It was very impressive: outline constitutions, local cultural variables factored in, a global cellular-automata network; it was the LudusVitae organization writ large, reworked into a framework for all governments in the planet.

“And you'll be playing a key role, Tom.” Sentinel, trying to forestall his questions. “As one of our first ambassadors to the existing power structure”—with a nod, too, in Vilkarzyeh's direction—“you could eventually expect a sector chairmanship, in my opinion.”

Nods of agreement among the executive officers.

I didn't start this to become a—

But then, why did he start this?

It's not just a technical project
.

Wishing he could be back with his technicians.

“Why,” he asked, forcing rationality into his tone, “does a cellular structure need leadership at this level?”

“People will still,” said Vilkarzyeh smoothly, “need guidance from the top.”

“Of course.” Tom stood up.

“I think,” Sentinel began, “we should postpone—”

“My point precisely.” Tom enunciated his words carefully. “I'd like to see the new local-sector courier-network chart.”

“That's on the agenda.” Dr Sukhram gestured at a vertical stack of tricons.

“What I would like to see”—voice veering out of control—“is the new network,
compared to the old one.
So we can see the names, pardon me, the
codenames
of the dead.”

A surprised murmur rippled through the seated ranks.

“Tom, I think you should sit down.”

Who had spoken? Tom glanced around, then back at Sentinel.

“I've been to counter-terrorist meetings for five tendays”—
betraying Corduven, my friend
—“walking a tightrope you wouldn't believe, doing my best to appear a productive member of their team without giving anything away…”

“Please sit down, sir.” One of the junior aides.

“
You let them die.
”

His voice echoed back from the too elegant hall.

“We had to.” Dr Sukhram, rubbing the yellow tattoo across his face. “There was no choice.”

“The Planning Council—” Sentinel began, but Dr Sukhram continued talking: “It's a paradox, Tom.”

For a moment, there was nothing Tom could say.

Then, “
What?
What kind of superstitious—?”

“Just as surely as predestination,” said Dr Sukhram, “traps both the Oracles and us. If we'd acted on the information you gave us, then
they would have known you were the source.
You, or someone else in a very small group. It wouldn't have taken them long to work it out.”

Icy chills swept across Tom.

My fault
.

Like the dead child. Like Mother, sliding back into eternal death.

My fault again
.

All the nerve-straining effort to appear calm before his former noble friends, to smile as he plotted their destruction at the hands of his people, while his people were busy betraying their own—

Had it gone wrong after he killed the Oracle, when he joined LudusVitae? Or much earlier?

“Tom.” Elva was touching his sleeve. “Let's get out of here.”

“Good idea. Oh, by the way, Dr Sukhram—”

“Yes?” Trying to remain civil.

“Watch your back. Vilkarzyeh wanted to use me as a scapegoat: presenting terms while the combat's in full flow, when surrender will be the last thing on their minds.” He looked at Vilkarzyeh, whose face was blotched with white and red. “Without me, he'll need someone else to betray.”

Sentinel was on his feet, calling to Tom even as the others were pushing their seats away—bobbing slightly in the combined lev-field—making room for him to leave. “Where are you going?”

“Does it matter?”

He tossed his cape back over his shoulder and headed for the arachnabug, still parked in one corner, hanging from ceiling and wall.

“
Everybody back.
” Elva's voice.

He stopped and turned, and saw that she was between him and the assembled meeting, covering them with her graser pistol.

Of course. They expected betrayal.

“Get the Chaos out of here, Tom.” Briefly, over her shoulder, then jerking her attention back to the others. “No twitching, anybody. Let's not have any mistakes.”

He reached up, and a black fibre whisked him upwards.

“You've chosen the wrong side!” the other senior officer, Galvina, called out to him.

I don't think so
.

With a thump, he slid into the control seat. The all-black cockpit closed around him, seat spreading liquidly around his torso and chin to hold him in, as the control organ grew like a webbed gauntlet around his hand, joined to the front panel by a narrow umbilical.

Dead girl
…

There might have been shouting from the hall but it was too late now, as Tom made a fist and the arachnabug whipped forwards, then sprang up, speeding along a near-vertical shaft, and made the dizzying turn into a main thoroughfare.

Just go!

Pushing his fist forwards, forcing the arachnabug to maximum speed as the tendrils became a blur.

“You're going to be all right.”

Concerned faces, somewhat blurred.

“Give him room.”

He stood up and everything tilted—broad square tunnel, busy with foot traffic and lev-cars—and he would have pitched forwards but strong hands caught him.

“Thanks,” he managed to say.

“I think you're lucky.” It was a broad-faced woman who spoke, and he followed her gaze: the black arachnabug was flat against the junction wall, half of its tendrils hanging in limp coils.

Destiny. How fast was I going?

Fast enough to miss the turn, even with all the safety routines.

Passers-by must have pulled him clear but he could remember nothing—
What's the matter? Not heard of retrograde amnesia?
—or even estimate how long ago the crash had happened.

“Don't worry, son.” An older man. “Medics'll be here soon.”

It wasn't medics Tom was concerned about. “Thanks, but I have…have to get moving.”

“I don't think—”

But he had already shaken them off, mumbling something about his boss—drawing sympathetic looks among the shaking heads—and stumbled away into the crowd.

He was jostled—“Sorry”—but the thoroughfare's teeming streams of people could only help him. This was the Secundum Stratum of a wealthy demesne, and under other circumstances he would have been impressed, and stayed to look around.

Uniforms.

Two pairs, working their way through the pedestrians, headed for the wrecked arachnabug. Tom had to get clear before they came back looking for him.

“Hey—”

“Excuse me.”

A migraine beat heavily over his left eye but he could see it now: almost hidden between fern-surrounded pillars and spraying fountains, the shining silver disc.

It spun as soon as it sensed his weight, and took him down to the next stratum.

There, he made his way through more utilitarian corridors to the next hatch—plain ceramic-and-steel here—and descended once more. Hurrying, he found the next, and made his way down again. Fifth stratum.

Head pounding mercilessly, he stumbled along a dark, raw tunnel, making horizontal distance, trying to get ahead of the pursuers, real and imaginary, who even now were hunting him down.

It was the beginning of Tom's descent.

“Ganja, my friend?”

Tom shook his head.

“Suit yourself.”

The tavern was shadowed, warm with bodies but not in social atmosphere: it held a certain grimness Tom could not define.

Dead girl—

“Golden Angel,” he told the barmaid, and drank half of it down straight away.

He had walked all through the night and most of the morning, tried to sleep in a deserted service tunnel, but moved on again when the migraine returned. Now it was late evening, and he would have to do something to force himself to sleep.

Small white hand, limp. Dead-doll eyes
.

Drank some more. Ordered a second glass.

Hot and hard, it hit the spot.

Many hours later, he went back out into the cooler tunnel air, and the sudden change in conditions made him vomit.

Damn
…

Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he continued to walk.

When he reached the demesne's border, he saw the patrols and smiled to himself, feeling cunning. Backtracking his route, he found the thing—
see, I remembered
—gestured, and half stumbled down the spiral staircase to the stratum below.

Chuckling, thinking himself very wise, he watched the slats rise back into the ceiling.

There were guards here, too, but he took a narrow side tunnel, confident he would bypass them soon.

Awoke, with stiff joints and cold muscles.

He was huddled in an alcove, cape pulled around him—
not writing poetry, oh no
—and early-morning activity was beginning: cleaners, kitchen staff fetching fresh food for the restaurants and freemerchants' kitchens, market traders—
I remember, Father
—going to open up their stalls.

Everything had the bright, dislocated quality of his childhood memories.

The strangest thing was, he thought, that there were few servitors. The term itself was not used this far down, though some men and women were indentured in conditions that might as well have been servitude.

More egalitarian than up above, all the same.

Breakfast was a bowl of cheap broth, which he ate at a public bench. His cred-slivers would need to be conserved; here, his thumb ring was more a liability than a source of credit.

Are your people looking for me, Corduven?

Fragments of Sun Tzu—on the importance of intelligence agents—flashed across Tom's semi-logotropic awareness, and were gone.

LudusVitae, too, of course. Looking for him. Bound to be.

It was night-time. In the darkness, Tom had thought he would be able to sleep. But fear prickled across his skin when he saw groups of men with silvery steel and amber woven into their skin—and, occasionally, young titanium-clawed women with longblades at each hip and coldness in their eyes—haunting the corridors. He realized that here it was safer to sleep when it was bright.

Perhaps he should make his way to Lady V'Delikona's demesne, where public halls and tunnels were kept brightly lit constantly, and there was no consensual night.

But that would take many tendays on foot. When he tried to plot a mental map across the demesnes, the migraine would return, pounding above his left eye.

Another day.

Two or three nights had passed since the arachnabug crash. Already, he was losing count.

None of you bastards have caught me yet
.

A passing youth looked at him, startled, and Tom wondered if he had spoken aloud.

“Ah, so what?” He laughed as the youth picked up the pace, and ducked into the first cross-corridor.

He sniffed once inside his tunic, and decided he really must buy some clean-gel.

My talisman!
It was gone.

But then he remembered where it was. Lying on some technician's desk, in his palace. In his own bloody palace.

Bastards
.

There were twelve of them, following him through the tunnels as the glowglimmers began to fade, so Tom did the only thing he could think of.

He stopped at the first hatch, prayed as its rusty flanges creaked into position that it would not seize up, then fell down the steps, hurrying, catching his fingers on the bent rail and feeling the warm spurt of blood.

Cackling laughter sounded from above, until the revolving steps snicked back into place in the ceiling, cutting off all sound.

Tom waited for the longest time, but no-one followed.

Spitting into a dirty puddle, he picked himself up and stumbled on.

Another tavern, at midday. Tom forced himself to order bread and cheese. Then he swilled it down with gripple-cider, feeling better than he had for days.

“Son? Are you OK?”

An old straggle-haired woman was peering at him, and Tom shooed her away. “'Course I am, you old hag.”

Later, when the tavern was closing, strong hands carried him, not ungently, outside. He slept on a bench, sliding in and out of grey, wraithlike dreams.

When the migraine was at its worst, his nonexistent left arm no longer burned.

Hey. Can't be all bad
.

“Better come back to my place first.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah.”

He had promised to buy her food, that was right.

In her tiny curtained-off alcove, she lay back on her cot without preamble, hitching up her skirt, and their coupling was swift, animal-like but intense. Then he rolled off her, and she took him to a ganja club where the food was hot and filling.

There were friends of hers, a confused jumble of faces, and he drank something whose name he did not know, but it lit up every vein and artery, every capillary in his body, with a dragon's fire.

When he woke the next morning, his ribs were bruised, and his thumb ring and high-denomination cred-slivers were gone.

“Try some of this.”

There were four—no, five—of them, sitting around the makeshift fire, drinking from the stained jar. All of them wore capes or tunics like Tom's: stained and tattered. Probably smelled like his.

So he had nothing they could want, his friends, and he was safe for the moment.

“Drink.”

Then he saw the hidden glint of a knife blade, the only clean thing here, among the folds of a dirty robe, so he muttered, “Takin' a piss,” and lurched out of the fire's illumination, down a deserted, twisting tunnel, then walked on alone.

The courtyard looked nice—shining copper glimmerglow baskets; scrubbed flagstones; whitewashed walls and ceiling—and one of the men saw Tom watching, and asked what he wanted.

“How about a job?”

Careful examination, then: “Sure thing. I'll show you.”

He lasted five days, going for long periods when he could stop his attention drifting and focus on his work. But finally the man who had given him the job pointed out his shortcomings—the poor quality of what he had achieved compared to the others: “Worth their weight in rubies, these cleaners”—and paid him off.

“Sorry,” he called out, as Tom stumbled from the courtyard for the last time.

In the tavern he saw them watching—noticing his bundle of steel cred-slivers—so he pretended to go outside to look for someone, then half walked, half jogged to the nearest floor hatch and descended once more.

Hiss of a paintstick. She was decorating his face so that it would look like hers: blue stripes, silver pentangles.

Another animal coupling. Or had that been the other girl? And back to the tavern.

Later, he lay on the floor, half sleeping, while she shared her bed with one of the neighbours who stopped, suddenly, as she asked him outright for money.

“Understanding boyfriend you got,” said the man, tugging on his trews.

Not me.
Tom turned his face to the wall.

He left when she went to the public washroom at the corridor's end.

“Look, officer.” Talking to an astymonia patrol, but it should be safe. No-one would be looking for Lord Corcorigan down here. “I just want a place to work, somewhere to clean up—”

“And get a new paint-job, sir?”

The other trooper laughed—
I forgot about the face-paint
—as they booked him for vagrancy.

He spent overnight in a cell, ate three meals the next day, and finally was taken out to see a magistrate in the late evening. His head felt fuzzy, but he was thinking more clearly than he had for a while, and as he stood before the bench he felt almost grateful.

The options were a three-tenday work detail or exile downstratum.

No choice at all.

It all flowed together.

Cold and heat, light and dark. Brief fumblings with yellow-toothed women. Jars of fiery liquid passed round grudgingly.

Always sleeping in the hours of brightness: the nights were dangerous. Without the drink, he would never have slept; but sometimes the migraines took the place of sleep, and kept him going.

Sometimes, when he awoke, there would be low-denomination cred-slivers lying beside him, dropped by charitable passers-by.