Secret Harmonies Read online

  By the same author

  FOUR HUNDRED BILLION STARS

  First published in Great Britain 1989

  by Victor Gollancz Ltd,

  14 Henrietta Street, London WC2E 8QJ

  © Paul J. McAuley 1989

  Published in the USA under the title Of The Fall.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  McAuley, Paul J.

  Secret harmonies

  I. Title

  823'pr.914 [F] PR6063.A12/

  ISBN 0 575 04580 9

  Photoset in Great Britain by

  Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

  and printed by St Edmundsbury Press Ltd,

  Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

  But els in deep of night when drowsiness

  Hath lockt up mortal sense, then listen I

  To the celestial Siren’s harmony…

  Such sweet compulsion doth in music ly,

  To lull the daughters of Necessity,

  And keep unsteedy Nature to her law,

  And the low world in measur’d motion draw

  After the heavenly tune, which none can hear

  Of human mold with grosse unpurged ear.

  John Milton, Arcades

  To every ω-consistent recursive class of formulae there correspond recursive class-signs r, such that neither ν Gen r nor Neg (ν Gen r) belongs to Flg χ (where ν is the free variable of r.)

  Kurt Gödel, On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I

  Contents

  PROLOGUE: Understanding the Aliens

  PART ONE

  The Body in the Beach

  The Dingo

  In the System

  Rebels without a Pause

  Landing Day

  Scorpio Rising

  The Shepherd

  Of the Fall

  The Blue Brother

  Something Wild

  PART TWO

  In Limbo

  Tracking Song

  The Wall

  Insurgents

  Undecidable Propositions

  Prospero’s Island

  The Gates of Wrath

  Untangling Hierarchies

  Prisoners

  The Source Cave

  Ghosts in the Machine

  PART THREE

  Slaves

  Against Entropy

  The Ambush

  The Vault

  Rendezvous

  Underground

  The Dead

  Endings

  L’ENVOI: A Wreath of Stars

  PROLOGUE

  Understanding the Aliens

  The shoulder of the last valley shrugged free of the forest and at last the three riders gained the high plain, an empire of red grass sparely punctuated by clumps of wind-sculpted thornbush. Eastward, the Trackless Mountains rose above a colourless haze, snowcapped peaks reflecting chiselled planes of sunlight.

  David de Ramaira reined in his horse and stretched in the saddle. Despite therapy, he had not quite regained muscle tone lost during years of coldcoffin sleep. A tall, slim, brown-skinned man, he looked around with a delighted grin, his heart quickening as it had when he had first woken in the reception centre and realised that he had made it. Another world.

  “Magnificent,” he said. “Magnificent country.” To his eyes, the plain of red grass glowed with surrealistic intensity beneath the cloudless indigo sky, something to do with the spectrum of Tau Ceti perhaps, the soft orange sun so different from the star of Earth.

  The guide from Broken Hill, Jonthan Say, shrugged. “Soil too thin to farm,” he said.

  “How far is the village?” de Ramaira asked.

  Jonthan pointed out a gleaming line that in the heat seemed to be layered between red grasses and dark sky. “That there’s the lake. The abo village is a ways around the shore.” His hair, a halo of spun brass, was matted with sweat; and sweat glistened on his bare chest, darkened the thighs of his faded jeans where he gripped the saddle of the bay mare. Fifteen, sixteen years old (they still measured age by the years of Earth, here), imbued with coltish adolescent grace. When he noticed de Ramaira’s stare, he jogged the mare and rode on to catch up with Lieutenant McAnders, who as usual couldn’t be bothered to wait. The boy’s dog circled wide through dry red grass. After a moment, de Ramaira flicked the reins of his own horse, a stolid gelding, and followed the others toward the lake.

  While Jonthan Say pitched camp, de Ramaira walked around the reed-fringed shore of the lake to the village, eager for his first glimpse of the Elysian Aborigines. Lieutenant McAnders insisted on coming with him, and for all that he had wanted the moment to himself, de Ramaira kept his peace. After all, she was head of the Office of Aboriginal Affairs and so, by extension, head of the expedition. As they pushed through crackling grasses she gestured at the case he carried and said scornfully, “You won’t learn anything new, even with those things.”

  “We’ll see,” de Ramaira said evenly.

  “Well, hell,” the lieutenant said. “You know it all, right?” She was a stocky woman, dressed like de Ramaira in the white coveralls of the Port Authority cops (but with a pistol in the power holster at her hip), hair of no particular colour cut in a bristling crewcut, mouth pursed around the dead butt of a cheroot. De Ramaira was beginning to learn to hate her.

  Toiling through long grass, they skirted a marshy arm of the lake and a skimpy line of thornbushes. And there, suddenly, was the village, round huts topping a gentle rise like a random arrangement of boulders. As he came closer, de Ramaira began to make out a faint, furious high-pitched buzz, like wasps trapped in a bottle. He stopped, set down his case and looked at the cluster of domed roofs. The restless buzzing of the aborigines hung in the hot, still air. De Ramaira wanted to deploy his remotes there and then, but the lieutenant had other ideas.

  “Hell, you ought to see them face to face. Maybe then you’ll get the idea that they aren’t worth the trouble. Lord knows I tried to tell you.” She pushed on through the grass and de Ramaira sighed and picked up his case and followed.

  The huts were surrounded by a wide band of bare earth. The buzzing stopped as soon as the two humans set foot upon this margin, as if at the throw of a switch. In his sudden rush of exhilaration de Ramaira hardly noticed: he had seen his first aborigine.

  It stood a little way from the first of the huts, a good deal taller than de Ramaira’s own two metres, and terribly thin. Its hide, mottled tan and black, shrinkwrapped its long limbs, closely modelling bulbous double joints, contoured arrowhead-shaped ribs running from narrow pelvis to neck, the long unsutured skull. De Ramaira cautiously circled the creature. Apart from the restless stirring of finely divided fronds packed in its nasal cavity, it was quite motionless, paralysed by human presence just as Webster had described. Its eyes were round and wholly black, its mouth wide and lipless as a frog’s. It gave off a faint, fishy reek.

  “Keep at that long enough and it’ll drop dead,” the lieutenant said.

  “Is that really true?”

  The woman spat out the butt of her cheroot. “Sure. They last maybe two hours and then their nervous systems burn out.” She stepped up and rapped the aborigine’s low forehead. De Ramaira winced, although the creature did not move. “Know what’s going on in there? Almost zero, that’s what. I’ll show you the Source Cave when you’re ready, but there isn’t anything to see there, either. This isn’t the breeding season, and it’s too dangerous to go in when it is, the hatchlings go for anything that moves. As Webster found to his cost. You want the truth, my father thought Webster was a damned romantic.”

  “His work is well regarded on Earth.” In defending Webster, a scientist sent especially to Elysium to study the aborig
ines, de Ramaira was also defending himself, a phylogenist sent to describe and classify Elysium’s biota.

  The lieutenant shrugged, and lighted another of her evil-smelling cheroots.

  Nettled, de Ramaira added, “If Webster had had more support, he might have been able to give a definite answer to the question of the aborigines’ intelligence.” He looked up into the enigmatic eyes of the aborigine, pupilless black holes pitted deep in the mask of its face, and wondered if its immobility was due to terrified denial of the existence of humans, of things completely outside its world-picture, or if there was a deeper reason. An expression of irreconcilable distaste, perhaps. He was vain enough to nurture the small hope that he could somehow break this fugue, reach out and make contact.

  The lieutenant led de Ramaira around the dozen or so widely spaced huts, pointing out bowls made of grass stems woven so tightly that they could hold water, crude stone-tipped spears, bone knives lying beside the flayed carcass of a mire boar. The huts themselves were identical, four or five metres in diameter and half as high at the apex of their domed roofs, built of mud-plastered panels of plaited grass and reed. Here and there, the village’s inhabitants stood or squatted like so many skeletal statues. The lieutenant ignored their presence, and when de Ramaira asked if there were any children she said dismissively, “The little fuckers run off into the grass. They’re not worth the trouble of tracking down.”

  “There are a few hours of daylight left. I’d like to see if the children come back, get an idea of the way these creatures move. They will return to normal, once we’ve gone?”

  The lieutenant assured him that he’d soon have his fill of the aborigines’ normal behaviour, and left him alone to play, as she put it, with his remotes. De Ramaira lay in the long grass outside the village until sunset, interfaced with a compsim so that he could send one of the little machines buzzing about the huts at will, the pictures of the aborigines that its avid camera eyes transmitted blooming one after the other on the inside of his eyelids like the giddy distortions of a bad trip.

  As the lieutenant had promised, the aborigines soon began to move once they had been left alone, jerking out of their paralysis and resuming their communal buzz all at the same moment. They walked with a curious stiffly bending gait, long arms hanging loosely, narrow head tilted back. It reminded de Ramaira of something, but it was a while before he made the connection. The rigid gait of the aborigines was like that of the figures of ancient Egyptian friezes. They even looked a little like something dug up from some sandy grave, long dead and dried out and…distorted.

  De Ramaira watched as two aborigines butchered the mire boar carcass with almost ritualistic elaboration, squatting close to their work so that the double joints of their knees bent above their heads. Meanwhile, children, exact miniatures of the immature adults, played at chipping pebbles or bones, or chased each other among the huts; while the only aborigine which could be easily distinguished from its fellows, by a ridged web of scars at its crotch, sat cross-legged at the centre of the village. Like a dried-up spider, de Ramaira thought. Webster, noting the presence of one of these mutilated aborigines in every village, had called them shamans. Really, he had not been strictly objective in many of his interpretations.

  The orange sun sank lower, deepening the shadows of the huts. At last de Ramaira recalled the remote and returned to the camp. A fire had been lit in a hearth of pebbles and the lieutenant sprawled beside it reading a book. It was the book de Ramaira had brought with him: a leather-bound volume with its title, The Report of a Reconnaissance of the Trackless Mountains, 2057, stamped in gold on its cover. Printed books, like smoking tobacco and marijuana, had been revived during the colony’s first years; unlike smoking, however, they had quickly lapsed into a curiosity.

  The lieutenant, not at all embarrassed at having been caught with evidence of having gone through de Ramaira’s kit, said, “There’s some odd stuff in here.”

  “Odder to me than to you, surely.” De Ramaira dumped the metal case which housed the remotes. “Where’s Jonthan?”

  “Hunting for his dog’s supper.”

  “And you’re not hunting with him?” Twice on the ride up from Broken Hill, the lieutenant had broken away to fruitlessly pursue some beast or other through the tangled valley forests.

  She smiled and said, “He’s some catch, right?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” de Ramaira said, stung by the implication. The lieutenant would have read his file as a matter of course, but he didn’t like to be reminded of it. “If you’ve quite finished with my book, I’d like to check up on a couple of things.”

  The lieutenant closed the heavy volume, but made no move to hand it over. “Why did you bring this, Doctor? This is as close to the Trackless Mountains as you’ll get.”

  “Is it? I’d like to explore them one day, and see what’s beyond them, too. I’m an ambitious man, Lieutenant. Describing the plants and animals of this little peninsula is nothing to the chance of exploring a whole world.”

  “Ambition is all very well,” the lieutenant said, “but there are limits.” She looked at him. “I wondered why you insisted on coming out this far when there are abo villages nearer the city.”

  “Well,” de Ramaira said, “this was the first Webster had fully described.” That was only part of the reason. While he had been recuperating from years of coldcoffin sleep he had pored over maps of the peninsula—about the size of California, it was the only part of Elysium settled so far—determining how far he could travel without breaking Port of Plenty’s prohibitions. He had wanted to get a good idea of the world as quickly as possible, and the week-long journey had not disappointed him. Out of Port of Plenty on a little coastal packet which had hugged a bleak sandy shore to Freeport, a settlement of low white buildings either side of a broad river, hemmed by cave-riddled limestone cliffs. Then up the river to Broken Hill on a slow steam-launch with a raked funnel, and then by horseback to the high grass plains at the foot of the Trackless Mountains. Every day he had gloried in the simple thrill of apprehension—another world!—but he couldn’t tell the lieutenant about that thrill. She would refuse to understand. She would sneer. This was nothing to her, no more than another pointless trip into the boondocks. He said, “Look, I know that Port of Plenty prohibits movement of people beyond the peninsula, but I don’t see why that should apply to me. I don’t intend to start an illegal settlement, after all.”

  “Some would call you a separatist if they heard talk like that. If the city didn’t regulate the settlers they’d be all over the continent inside a century.”

  De Ramaira had already had conversations like this, and asked the question only to needle the lieutenant. “Would that be such a bad thing?”

  “My people were here first, built Port of Plenty years before the colonyboats started arriving. We didn’t ask to have more people dumped on us. We have a right to see that our world isn’t raped. Keep quiet about your plans in Port of Plenty, or you might never be allowed out again.” She crossed to the neat cache of supplies, sorted out two cans and tossed one to de Ramaira. “Let’s eat. God knows when the boy will be back.”

  Jonthan Say didn’t return until long after sunset. De Ramaira was reading his book by the light of an electric lantern while on the other side of the campfire the lieutenant fiddled with her transceiver, the tip of her cheroot brightening and dimming like a fitful star. The boy, his dog trotting at his heels, hailed them cheerfully. He had the carcass of something like a fat blunt-headed lizard slung over one shoulder. Long tail tipped with heavy spines; the oval scales which lapped its body tufted with bright red hair. Jonthan allowed de Ramaira to perform a rough dissection—three-chambered heart and single ramifying lung, a string of half-formed eggs coiled in the abdomen like a pearl necklace—then dressed the carcass and tossed half of it to the dog. As he opened a tin for himself, Jonthan asked, “I always wondered, Doctor, why we weren’t modified so we could eat the native plants and animals.”

&nb
sp; “On Earth it’s illegal, anti-evolutionary, to modify human stock. Besides, gene-melding can only be done on the ovum before the first division horizon, not on the people who come to settle Elysium.”

  Across the fire, the lieutenant looked up from the transceiver. “You spend time out here, Jonthan, but you have to go home eventually. That’s how it has to be.”

  The boy said without rancour, “That’s how the city sees it, that we can be controlled if we have to rely on our farms and the chemicals we must buy from the city to help the crops grow. If we could live off the land…Is it true there are escaped rabbits living wild around the city?”

  “They’re all over the Outback,” de Ramaira said. “Something should be done, before they screw up the native ecosystem.”

  “Don’t give the boy ideas,” the lieutenant said, taking out her earplug speaker. “He knows what happens to people who go dingo. Right, Jonthan?”

  The boy shrugged, began to spoon up his stew.

  “Remember those people who took off from Horizon, last year? Word’s on the air that they’ve been captured; the party’ll be passing us by in a couple of days, on the way to the prison mines. Watch and learn, boy. Anyway, I’m turning in, don’t wait up long, okay?”

  De Ramaira, his fingernails biting into the blisters on his palms, watched the lieutenant strut toward the tent. He had heard cops joking about droit du seigneur, but until now he hadn’t believed it.

  “Got to keep on the right side,” Jonthan said softly to de Ramaira, “or my travel permit might get held up come renewal. Doesn’t happen all that often anyhow. But usually women more than men.”