Sacrifice of Fools (36 page)

There’s music somewhere deep in the Shian town, a little feeble, a touch fragile. Roisin Dunbar’s car rolls through a moraine of wind-blown trash: paper cups, styrene chip boxes, kebab bags, wooden chip forks. The fast-food vans make big money out of on-heat Shian needing to eat every twenty minutes. Among the disposables are articles of clothing: lost, discarded, ripped off; body ornaments and pieces of jewellery; streamers, aspirin packets, empty mineral water bottles, musical instruments, flags, banners, emblems.

‘It must have been some party,’ Roisin Dunbar comments.

‘It is.’

The Volks folks have taken themselves off their stand outside the sacred space. Too close to the
kesh
winds. Dunbar stops the car. Gillespie uncaps the quarter bottle of vodka he bought at the offie, offers it to Dunbar. She downs a slug, winces, downs another.

‘I’ll be OK as long as traffic branch don’t stop me,’ she says. ‘They are complete bastards.’

Gillespie finishes the rest of the bottle. He waits until he can feel it tickle the base of his brain. He goes to the north entrance. Dunbar is at his back. Gillespie can feel the powers contained in the sacred space moving over his skin like shadows.

—
Thetherrin Harridi,
he shouts in Hot Narha. Birds explode upwards from their roosts on the rusting cranes. —
Andy Gillespie calls. Must speak.
A calling out. High noon in Shian town. For the time it takes a ship to move up the channel to the sea, nothing happens. Then the north door opens. Gillespie shakes out the
genro
staff.

‘What is that?’ Dunbar asks. The rising wind flaps her coat tails like wings.

‘Tool of the trade,’ Gillespie says.

‘Mr Gillespie,’ the warden of the sacred space says. She is dressed in long greys but her face bears the dusty white marks
oikesh
decorations. ‘And Detective Sergeant Dunbar.’

‘I’m representing my client, Ounserrat Soulereya,’ Gillespie says. ‘I’ve got some questions I need answered, and under your law a
genro
may be refused no reasonable request. Can we come in?’

‘You want to talk with me in the sacred space?’

Yeah. Because even though you keep the thing and run it, even you aren’t immune to its effects and you’re going to find it harder to lie to me in there than out here. Me, I’ve nothing to hide, and nothing to lie about. The
hahndahvi
can blow right through me.

It’s nothing like it was like last time. It probably never is; always something different to everyone at every occasion. The presiding spirit today is a slightly edgy expectancy. Tense, bass line of something-awful-is-going-to-happen, high notes of thrill. Knot in the stomach. Hitchcock
hahndahvi.
He looks at Dunbar; by the expression on her face he can see it’s something altogether other for her. All things to all people. Like a good god should be. Or maybe it’s really done with mirrors. Reflects back on you your own dominant mood. Like most gods are. Tricks of the lighting.

‘I know about the Fool Slayer,’ Gillespie says. The acoustics lend his voice a sonorous ring. Authoritative. ‘We worked it out. Me and Littlejohn. It was the
genro
Saipanang gave it away. We know about Sounsurresh Soulereya and her family, what you did with the bodies at South Side of the Stone, how you thought you could hush it up. And we know who did the job at Annadale Flats. We know you’ve someone out there, hunting for the real killer, taking out anyone who knows too much.’

‘You know a lot,’ Thetherrin Harridi says. The perspectives shift behind her, making her at once far away and immensely tall. She seems to lean over Andy Gillespie with his stolen staff like a redwood tree. ‘You are to be congratulated. I advised the Council of the Nation that they could not possibly hope to keep this an internal Shian affair, especially after the killing of the religious. But some of us are less trusting of humans; they have good reason.’

Gillespie fights down the dread rising like bile in his belly. It’s all inside your skull. It’s just stuff. Head-games.

‘You were for us?’

‘Mr Gillespie, none of us are “for” you. We are for ourselves. Some of us think that our interests are best served by rapprochement with humanity. Some of us disagree. Some of us resent having to share this world with other sentients. The Shian are a hunting species. We are a proud species. We have great achievements behind us. We do not like to be second-class citizens, refugees who have sold their inheritance for land that we could have taken. And we could, Mr Gillespie. When the fleet picked up your radio broadcasts in flight and it was discovered that World Ten had given rise to a technological civilization, there was a motion to reduce human civilization to a level at which we could achieve technological dominance. It could have been simply achieved: moving the fleet into earth orbit and focusing the Mach drive fields on the tectonic plate boundaries would have generated seismic activity sufficient to destroy ninety-five-per cent of your industrial capacity. Likewise, cometary heads could have been manoeuvred out of the Oort cloud into impact orbits; after fifty years the ecosphere would have stabilized sufficiently for colonization. The colonial council of Nations was brought out of stasis to debate and vote upon these motions. They were rejected. The margins were exceedingly narrow.’

‘Yeah,’ Andy Gillespie says. ‘But you didn’t and we’re here and you’re here and we’re stuck with each other.’ He’s shifted weight on his feet, but that’s enough to move into a new emotional focus. Concentrated ballsiness. He’s not taking this from anyone. ‘Who is it, Thetherrin Harridi?’

‘I do not know.’

Gillespie takes another step forward, moving through moods, pushing Thetherrin into the deep mysteries around the south door.

‘But you must have some idea. Your hunter has to have some trail to follow.’

‘A profile, Ms Harridi,’ Roisin Dunbar says. ‘Give us the same trail. We have a law here, you know. It’s different from yours, we can’t just blow each other away because some angel-thing in our heads tells us it’s a good idea, or to save the honour of your Nation.’

‘You kill each other by the millions for the honour of your nations,’ Thetherrin Harridi says. ‘And your law gives you full permission. Our way, I think, is the saner. There is a little blood, and it is always personal. There is no collateral; there are no innocent victims.’

‘The children,’ Gillespie says. ‘What about the children?’

‘Where do you get this idea from that children are innocent?’ Thetherrin says. ‘Children are terrible creatures. They treat each other with cruelty and injustice and blatant tyranny. They inflict pain without thought, both physical and mental. It is the same with your children, I have seen how they are with each other. Any difference, any imperfection or deformity, is mercilessly exploited. They make victims of each other. They have no kindness or compassion. They are not innocent, neither yours nor ours. They are terrible, yet we will go to any length to protect them.’

‘And the killer?’ Roisin Dunbar asks. In her beige policeperson’s coat, she’s cold, a shiver in the soul. She doesn’t know if it’s the architecture of the sacred that’s put it there, or the truth behind Thetherrin Harridi’s words. Our young are aliens to both of us. We imagine that because we necessarily passed through childhood ourselves we can communicate with our children, but they are as alien to us as the Shian are.

‘Little more than a child itself,’ Thetherrin says. ‘Are you authorized to negotiate?’

‘The law doesn’t negotiate.’

‘Ours does. It is what our law is, negotiation. If I give you the information you need to find the Fool Killer, the Queen’s Island Hold will recall its hunter and you will blame the Soulereya death on the Fool Killer.’

‘You have got to be kidding. I can’t make a deal like that. There is no way we could agree to that. Your hunter killed one Outsider and seriously wounded another. We have a law, it’s called Withholding Evidence. You can go to jail for a long time for it. Ask Gillespie what it’s like for an Outsider in jail.’

‘I do not need to ask Gillespie,’ Thetherrin Harridi says. ‘The
genro
Mehishhan was once a lover of mine, on another world.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Andy Gillespie says.

‘His communications with his children counted you and Eamon Donnan as his lovers,’ the Outsider says.

Andy Gillespie knows that Thetherrin is using the Shian sense of the word. ‘It’s over,’ he says, sadly. ‘They’ve got you. Tell her.’

Thetherrin is silent for a long time. The dimensions of the sacred space stretch its few seconds into a long pause. Things flock in the edges of the humans’ vision. Then the Outsider says, ‘Sergeant Dunbar, were any of the bodies you examined in this position?’ She clenches her fists, places them on the middle of her belly a few centimetres apart.

‘The adults at the Welcome Centre. Why? What does it mean?’

‘At the end of the hunt, when the quarry is run down, there is a moment when it knows that it cannot run any further, that escape is impossible, that all its skills and evasions have been bettered and that death is inevitable. It cannot run, and it will not fight, for the prey does not hunt the hunter. So it turns to its hunter and goes gladly to the blade. That is a moment of most pure and intense love between hunted and hunter. Death is a joyful culmination. The mystery of the hunt is celebrated. My fellow Harridis in the Welcome Centre understood that they could not escape the hunter, and so gave themselves gladly to it. This is the gesture of it, a baring of the heart for the knife. I am making it to you, Detective Sergeant Dunbar.’ Thetherrin shifts a step. In those few centimetres she seems to grow in stature. Miles high. Towering.

‘I met a
hahndahvi
the other day,’ she says. ‘It was not one I had ever met before. I met it at the place where two rivers join. One river ran down to the sea, the other river straight. It did not follow the curve of the world, it was not a prisoner of gravity. It flowed into the mountains, it flowed around the shoulders of the mountains, it rose up through the mountains and beyond the mountains; it flowed over the edge of the world. The
hahndahvi
that I met had sailed down this river in a boat clasped in the skin of human women and human children. The skins were of all the colours of the human races; the faces had been cut away but the scalps left whole so that the hair floated in the river like weed. The
hahndahvi
stood in the join of the two rivers, its feet were in the water. It was not at all tall; it was dressed in denim, with brass buttons on the pocket flaps. Its hair was black, its nose pointed, it had round white eyes. Human eyes. It had muscles on its muscles; ropes and knots of muscle, like cables, like the roots of trees. It could rip out the roots of trees by its own sheer strength. In one hand it carried a long club, in the other a football. It called me to it and told me it might harm me or it might not harm me; it was all a question of feeling. From across the water I told it that I had not seen its like before in my travels across the Dream Place. It answered that I should not be surprised, for it had come from another dreaming in its skin boat. In that other dreaming it had owned no form, no smell, no name. It had been shapeless fear, it had lived in the dark at the base of human brains for all history. But in this place where the rivers joined, it had a body, it had a face and a spirit and it could walk and talk and kill things, for that was its chief delight: to fight, to overcome. Then I asked it its name. Its name, it told me, was Sex and Violence.’

Gillespie waits for the kicker. It doesn’t come.

‘Nice story. So, what does it mean? That you’ve discovered men are dangerous?’

‘It is not a story, Mr Gillespie. Your archetypes are infecting our dreaming. There is leakage between our racial unconsciousnesses. You are taking from us, we are taking from you.’

‘Sex and violence.’

‘Perhaps we are more alike than we thought, Mr Gillespie.’

‘What does that mean?’

The warden of the Sacred Space does not answer.

‘Why won’t you tell me? Why does everything have to be a riddle with you?’ And he feels himself losing it, like he almost did that time in this place with Eamon Donnan. The subtle dislocations of sacred space kick out the blocks, the big ship slides. He lunges for Thetherrin Harridi. She’s fast; he’s faster. Two fistfuls of shirt pull her down to his height. Face to face. ‘I’ve had enough of your pissing around, never being straight, never knowing where you’re coming from. I’ve had enough, you hear me? I want to know how to find this Fool Killer. Tell me how to find this fucking Fool Killer or I will break you in two.’

Thetherrin Harridi blinks slowly. Her throat convulses, she spits into her hand. Then, too fast for Andy Gillespie’s anger, she clamps the hand over his mouth. Something squirms over his lips, up the back of his nose. He retches, chokes, reels backwards.

Roisin Dunbar has her gun out, aimed two-fisted at Thetherrin Harridi.

‘I’m all right. I’m all right.’

And then suddenly he isn’t.

Suddenly he is somewhere else entirely.

He is in woods, by running water. Broken light falls through the branches of conifers, reflects from the surface of the slow-moving brown water. There are shapes moving in the surface. Ducks. Mallards. A path runs by the water’s edge, following the bend of the river. Gillespie smiles. He knows this Dream Place. He used to come here as a kid. He’s in Belvoir Forest. Walk down that path and you’ll come to Annadale Flats, the city, the docks and shipyard, the sea. His
sounyok,
his private world-forest. Joggers round the bend in the riverside path, a dogwalker emerges from the trees on the far bank. The dog leaps into the river, chasing a thrown stick, dog-paddling happily in the water. Of course your dreaming is a place you know.

He can smell the water, the resinous scent of the trees.

Beats the shit out of that so-called virtual reality bollocks. Computers fake it. Lookee no touchee. The chemicals embody.

He hears movement in the branches behind him. He turns; a figure stands at the edge of the trees. It is a tall Shian, dressed in a long crimson coat. On its head it wears a tall, out-flaring crown woven from tree twigs, hung with mirrors and tiny bells like you put in budgie and parrot cages to stop them pulling out their feathers in boredom. The figure carries a short, thick-bladed hooked knife in its left hand.