Valhai (The Ammonite Galaxy) (8 page)

GRACE FOUND IT hard to sleep, finally fell into a deep dream just when the rest of Sell would be waking up, and then woke up feeling awful some scant three hours later. Even breakfast did nothing to improve the day, so she moved to her school area to figure out if whoever had been talking to her the previous night had been using some kind of code.

It took her a while, but then one of the combinations of letters she tried gave her a word which made sense. They were using each finger to represent three letters, and perhaps one number, starting with the little finger. So the word they had been transmitting was ‘hello!’ Interestingly, it was in Kwaidian, so it turned out that her studies had come in useful, after all.

She practiced the code for an hour or two, until she felt confident enough to be able transmit and receive messages with a reasonable degree of accuracy, and then decided to see if a couple of hours on the music squares would help drive the sensation of fuzziness away.

Grace was no expert on the squares, although she enjoyed the combination of music and exercise that they gave her. It wasn’t until nearly an hour later that she realized that the squares were ten wide and eight deep, which meant that the code could be applied to music if she were to ‘repeat’ each finger on a square.

She gave a huge leap, to try and recreate “hello” in sound. It was difficult, but not impossible. The sound resonated around the Squares chamber. Excited, she tried to make a whole sentence out of the squares. At last she managed ‘my name is Grace’ before collapsing on the floor, exhausted.

“Keep.” She instructed the automated recorder. It would never be a popular dance in Sell, but it did give an extra dimension to the exercise.

She decided to finish her workout by running twenty laps around the floor perimeter, the standard Sell distance for her category. Even that was nearly too much for her, and she found her chest was heaving and her heart beating frenetically when the sound of the front lift disturbed her.

Dripping with sweat, and feeling anything but welcoming she went to the reception area. Vion was standing in front of the lift. As he saw the state she was in he raised one eyebrow, but said nothing.

“Do you want the interscreen back? I’ll go and get it.” She turned in the direction of her office.

Vion stopped her by holding up one hand. “Not the reason I came,” he said. “I think my skyrise will be able to manage with one interscreen less. I’d like you to keep it . . . you never know when it might come in handy.”

“Thank you.” She looked at him questioningly.

“Do I have to have a reason for the visit?” he asked plaintively.

“Definitely.”

Like a little boy caught out, he grinned. “Well, I had better own up then. I was curious to hear what you found out.”

She smiled. “I got nowhere.” She explained all the digging she had done, and the questions that in the end she had had to ask her own brother. “—Who refused to answer me. Said he was too busy,” she finished up.

Vion stroked his chin thoughtfully. “I can’t believe that we would have anybody killed,” he said slowly. “Can you?”

“I have no idea. But why are there no records of the rest of them? Can you think of anything good to account for that?”

His eyes rested on the black circles under hers. “You need more sleep, Grace. You mustn’t get obsessed about this.”

“That is just what I think somebody should do! If we all sit around pretending stuff doesn’t happen . . . what do you mean, obsessed?”

“We don’t know each other very well . . . yet,” he said. “and maybe I’m stepping out of line, but it seems to me that you have a bit of a stubborn streak right down your backbone.”

She glared at him.

He laughed. “Don’t bite me, Grace, I was just saying what I think. Don’t hold it against me please.”

She relaxed. “All right, but I would like to know who gave you the right to insult me . . .”

“You think I was insulting you? Not at all; it was, in fact, a compliment. I am so very tired of talking to people who never question anything about Sell or their own lives. It feels sometimes as if we have created a race of mindless robots. My fellow Sellites, present company excepted, have genetically modified themselves into unquestioning acceptance of their own excellence, and so have become rather less than the better examples of higher animals.”

“Oh.”

His mouth twitched. “Oh, indeed. How do you feel about it?”

She tipped her head on one side, considering. “I haven’t really thought about it . . .” And then laughed at herself. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it? That we never pause to think about anything? Well, I could never put my finger on it, but I always felt that something was wrong somewhere, and now that you have mentioned it, yes. Yes, I think you are right. What a terrible thing to say, though.”

He agreed, “It is. Don’t think it is a comment I throw out lightly. I have actually thought about this for a long time. It seems to me that as a society we have stagnated. Fifty generations have adhered to the First Valhai Votation, and that left no room for adaptation. It made our society infirm.”

“You can’t have told anybody else?” It would be reason enough for an Investigative Commission of Ethical Correctness.

He shook his head. “Now you see why I told you it was a compliment. It means that I have placed a great deal of trust in you.” And on that note he made his way back into the lift. Like the Cheshire cat, his grin seemed to stay in the air after he left, evaporating little by little. Grace felt ashamed. Perhaps she should have returned that trust, have told him about the sign language.

She had certain household chores to do, it wasn’t until late afternoon that she found herself sneaking out again in the back lift. This was becoming a habit. She smiled. It still felt audacious to be sneaking out onto bare planet, and she knew that she would be in trouble if anyone else found out. They could call a tribune within a couple of days, and the least severe penalty would be to restrict her biosigns to interior locks only. As it was, she only used the terrace lock on the ground floor, and no-one was to know if she was simply sitting on that terrace for a few hours or actually on bare planet.

She would take a few canvases down to the ground floor terrace, she decided. She had not lied to Amanita. If she had had to take up a hobby then painting the planet would have been her first choice. She would spend some time actually painting down there, and that would give her an alibi if anybody started to enquire about the lock being activated. That way she could justify the use of so many face masks. It would explain away everything. She would have to splash some paint onto the canvases, but since nobody would expect her to actually be good at painting, it wouldn’t really matter. They wouldn’t be able to tell if it had taken her one hour or one week. Nothing she could paint would even register on the cost-to-bulk ratio!

Once she got onto bare planet she realized that this alibi would only work if no-one came outside to check. Her footprints were still clearly visible in the sand, and each journey could be reconstructed by them! It would take time before the signs of her passage were erased. She gave a shrug. As far as she knew, nobody had been out here for generations. It didn’t seem likely they would start now. She would use the painting excuse if they discovered them, say that she occasionally needed to step physically on to the planet to paint, and had needed different perspectives.

Once at the lake she lost no time, but knelt down beside the orthogel and placed her hands on the surface, signaling a ‘hello’ to see if anyone were listening.

“Hello!” The answer was immediate. And the area of the lake nearest to her gave a sort of heave, causing thick ripples across the otherwise smooth surface. Grace had to force herself to stay still, not pull her hands sharply away.

“Who are you?” Her fingers laboriously picked out the various letters. She needed practice at this!

“What’s your name?”

“Grace.”

“Are you Sellite?”

“Yes.”

“Then how can you help me?”

“I don’t know . . .” She thought. “But at least I can talk to you. If you want.”

“It is good to talk. I had not realized . . .” The pulsations trailed off.

“What can I call you?”

There was a long pause, as if her interlocutor were thinking about the answer. “I don’t have a name.”

“You must have.”

“No. I have none. You can call me whatever you wish.”

This seemed strange to Grace. Surely all the apprentices from the Sacran worlds were named? She thought for a long moment.

“I would like to call you Arcan, which means a secret or a mystery.”

The lake rippled. “Arcan. Yes that will be a good name for me.”

“How old are you?”

“I can’t tell. It feels like I have been here forever. But I am just learning how to speak. It is most strange.”

“You are speaking Kwaidian. You must be Sacran, at least. Don’t you remember where you came from?”

“I can only remember being here, Grace I have been here for a long, long time. But I am not unhappy. I have nothing in my memory to measure it by.”

Grace frowned. This batch of donor apprentices had only been on Valhai for about a year. How was it possible for this person’s memories to have been wiped out in such a short time? Or could one of the previous batch still be in the lake? She shivered. She didn’t know if it would be worse for them to be dead or to be alive – having been kept so for the last forty years.

“Will you help me to learn about things?” The pressure was lighter, somewhat hesitant.

“Of course. Anything you want.”

From the lake in front of her, a fountain suddenly erupted, reaching a heady five metres in height before collapsing back into the surface.

“How did you do that?” Grace signed.

“I thought it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I!” And bubbles of frustration belched out of the lake. “I just think it and it happens!”

“How long have you been able to do it?”

“Always. I just didn’t. I had forgotten a lot of things. It started again when I could talk to two of the apprentices. It all started then,” said Arcan.

“Which two? Can
I
speak to them too?” Grace asked.

“Yes, I can help you to talk to them, if you want. They are Six and Diva. Diva is Coriolan and Six is Kwaidian.”

“Good. Yes, I would love to talk to them, but maybe later on? It is nice to find out more about you for now, Arcan,” Grace decided.

“And about you,” came the reply. “Tell me about yourself, Grace.”

Grace tried to explain, and was surprised at how quickly Arcan understood everything.

“You live in one of the high buildings?” he asked.

“Yes, the 256
^th.
”

“What height?”

“I live on the 48
^th
level, just my mother and I now, since my father died.”

“I see.” Then there was a brief pause before Arcan went on. “Do you need air to breathe, like the others?”

“Yes, of course, all the animal life on both systems needs air. We are all developed from common ancestry.” It was a strange question to ask her.

“What happens if you have no supply of air?”

Grace was perplexed. “We die.”

“You decay?”

“Exactly.”

Suddenly the surface of the lake for hundreds of metres around her turned a different shade, and began to boil with bubbles for as far as she could see. Her hands were sucked out and down, trying to pull her after them. With an effort, Grace snatched her hands away and leapt backwards, screaming. The sound of the bubbles was deafening, especially after the normal silence of the whole valley. Even through the mask she could smell sulphur, brimstone.

Grace ran as fast as she could, back to the safety of the skyrise. Whoever Arcan was, he scared her to death. She had no intention of going out there to the lake ever ever again! Her heart was thumping and her breath was so ragged that the mask pack was struggling to feed her enough air. The effort to run was causing sweat to run down her face too, and she was forced to stop after a few hundred metres to rest. She couldn’t see where she was going.