Secret Harmonies Page 18

  Children, Rick thought, plucked from play and pitched into the real world. But his scorn was diluted by envy. So simple for them, to know their place in the city, to know what was wanted of them. He felt a touch of nostalgia, for the manual work he had done as a boy in the rice paddies, the balmy sunlit hours in the lush cradle of the valley below Mount Airy.

  It was too cold to loaf around outdoors for long. Rick went back into the hut and was working through the coding of an equipment order, a heater wafting warm air around his ankles, when someone knocked on the frame of its doorway. “So this is where you’ve been hiding,” Max Rydell said.

  “Well. What are you doing here?”

  “Come to net you. Though really I’m in charge of a survey party—checking that all the pieces of the wall are being built in the right place. Half the VDF are so wired they’d dig a ditch rather than put up an earthbank, and not know the difference. Mind if we step outside? I’ve left my boys to get on with it by themselves. Does them good once in a while, but if I’m not careful they’ll start goofing off.”

  It had rained that morning; the wide ruts in the muddy road were filled with ochre water. The crane’s jib swung overhead, dangling a load of planks. A cop, her hands stuck into the belt of white coveralls, was watching a gang of labourers plant proximity mines in the cleared ground beyond the half-constructed defences. The edge of the forest seemed drably naked. Trees were folding back their feathery branches, creating vistas of fretted shadow.

  “They seem to be getting on with it,” Rydell said, looking toward the eastern end of the wall. Two young men crouched over a laser sight on a tripod, while a third, the bell of yellow raincape swinging, knocked a marker stake into the ground.

  “You said something about coming for me?” Rick said.

  “Coming to take you away from all this. Right. Professor Collins told me he’d done a little favour for you: I didn’t realise how little.”

  “Collins wants to see me?”

  “Hell, no.” Rydell looked at Rick curiously. He was unshaven, and his black hair had grown out in tangled curls. He looked leaner, half a dozen years younger. Clearly, the war suited him. “You really haven’t heard? Man, you’re moving up. Savory himself wants to see you, and I’m your chauffeur.”

  “Savory?” The shock was cleanly vertiginous.

  “Come on. I can’t leave these guys too long.” Rydell led Rick to a cushiontruck, relating gossip about common acquaintances from the University. Rick hardly heard him. As he started the truck’s motor, Rydell said. “Y’know, it looks as if this phoney war might be breaking up at last. I’ve heard that Cziller’s forces are moving from their training grounds. Heading through the farmlands past Paradise by all accounts. I guess we’ll be mobilising too.”

  It occurred to Rick that Rydell thought that he must know why Savory wanted him. He said, “I really don’t know what Savory wants from me.” The truck began to slide forward, leaving the little construction site behind.

  “Whatever it is must be better than slogging about in the mud. Keeps us busy, but that’s about ail. I hear that the cops will be happy as long as there’s some place for defensible fire at each of the key roads. It’s not as if they expect the whole perimeter to be completed. Anyway, no one seems sure what the insurgents are planning, though I bet Constat has it worked out. The random factor seems to be that woman, Cziller.”

  Indeed, no one in the city knew much about the insurgents’ general, Theodora Cziller. She had arrived on Elysium some thirty years ago, one of the founding settlers at Broken Hill, had gone on to become captain of one of the coastal packet-boats which operated out of Freeport. It seemed that she had never been involved with the separatist movement, and how she had risen so far and so fast through the informal ranks of the insurgents was a mystery. It was said that she had been a mercenary back on the Wombworld, had fought for one or other of the little Central American countries which had lost their independence in the succession wars against Greater Brazil. But that was only a rumour. What was indisputable was that she had pulled together all the factions of the insurgents into something resembling a coherent army.

  Steering the cushiontruck down the narrow road inside the fence, Rydell said, “Maybe Savory has you down as an assassin, Rick.”

  “Don’t joke about it. I’ve discovered that anything is possible where Savory’s concerned.”

  “Whatever. Maybe you’ll let me know, huh?”

  They drove into the main perimeter camp, a bleak compound in the lee of a long, curving stretch of wall. The truck overtook a group of VDF troops jogging raggedly at the double behind their instructor, and pulled up at a cluster of huts. Beyond, a helicopter sat among rotting tree stumps, its canopy glinting in watery sunlight.

  As Rick got out, Rydell said, “I meant what I said. Keep in touch, huh?” His face was almost petulant, as if he felt that something he deserved was being withheld from him.

  “I’ll see you around,” Rick said, half-tempted to suggest that Rydell take his place.

  As the truck drove off, a big cop hailed Rick from the doorway of one of the huts. Half a dozen desks were crammed inside, and Savory perched on the edge of the one nearest the door, a foot idly rapping against its side. He wore heavy boots, and a hand-tailored version of the VDF coveralls. “You’re just in time, Lieutenant,” he said.

  “What do you want?” There was a constriction in Rick’s throat; it hurt to speak.

  “I’ve had you reassigned. You’re to be my liaison officer here. It seemed a shame, somehow, to waste you on that job at the construction site. You’ll work from here, carrying out research at my personal request.” Savory gave his thin-lipped parody of a smile. “Things are beginning to move. I won’t have much time to oversee construction of the defences. Oh, don’t worry. Your duties won’t be too arduous.”

  Rick supposed that he was to thank Savory, but said nothing. He had the sensation of slow, motionless sinking.

  “Well,” Savory said briskly, and got off the desk, fussing with the crease of his coveralls. “I am giving you the opportunity to see at firsthand how we’re beginning to turn back the insurgents. Come on.”

  By now Rick was almost accustomed to follow Savory. They went out of the hut and crossed to the helicopter. The pilot was the same burly man who had piloted Savory and Rick to the prison mines at Cooper’s Hill before the fall, before the first act of war. As Rick climbed into the back he saw that the man had a pistol holstered at his hip.

  The helicopter flew east, high and fast. The forest streamed below, a quilt of textured greens and browns threaded here and there by the silvery glints of a river. Rick watched the landscape with nervous inattention, wondering what Savory was taking him to, a sickening vision of plot and counterplot conjured in his mind.

  The forest thinned out on the flanks of the Hampshire Hills. A mire boar plunged away down a slope choked with thornbushes and the helicopter dipped lower as if chasing it. Savory turned in his seat and pointed to the right. Beyond the rounded summits of the hills was a bank of black smoke, small against the cloudy sky. Savory’s voice was drowned by the helicopter’s roar. He had to say the name three times before Rick understood. Lake Fonda was burning out there.

  The helicopter landed in a bare field upwind of the fire, beside three of its sisters. So it was a big operation. Not counting one-man flitters and the brace of turboprop planes which by their historical associations were more museum pieces than working machines, almost half the city’s airforce was there.

  The first thing Rick saw as he climbed out of the helicopter was a herd of sheep penned by tanglewire, milling back and forth as a cop calmly picked them off one by one with a hunting rifle. Cops moved around the helicopters and the dozen or so overlanders. Most had switched on the chameleon circuits of their coveralls, so that unless Rick looked closely he saw only surreal fragments: a grinning face, a hand holding a compsim, a rifle jogging past the flank of an overlander.

  But the half dozen cops keeping
guard over the settlers were still in uniform white. There were a hundred prisoners at least, mostly children, a few old men and women. They stood or sat in the middle of a bare, recently ploughed field. All of them, down to the youngest child, were watching their homes burn.

  The concrete walls of the buildings still stood, shimmering in the middle of an annealing furnace glare so hurtfully bright it was no colour at all. Flames were visible only at the edges: those licked metres high. Smoke poured into the air, separate streams merging above the conflagration in a dense, dark reef that the wind shook like a cloak above the grass plain beyond the settlement. A row of shade trees burned in unison, their trunks clad in glowing charcoal, branches upraised maps of fire. The heat withered the skin of Rick’s face. There was a crackling rending roar as elements yielded to the purity of the fire. All around, ash fluttered over the fields like a kind of negative snow.

  Savory watched the conflagration with barely concealed glee as he described the operation to Rick. The dawn encirclement and capture of Lake Fonda, the poisoning of the fields and slaughter of the livestock, breaching of the dam and draining of the reservoir, the firing of the buildings. Perhaps that was why he had brought Rick along. Power, like love, seeks to flaunt itself. But Savory’s boastful justifications for all this destruction passed straight through Rick. The fire, the massacre of the animals, the stoic attitudes of the prisoners: they were real. They were indelible marks on the world. They could not be excused or dismissed.

  Savory went off with a group of cops to examine the destruction more closely, but Rick stayed where he was, near the children and the old people who had been left behind to care for them. While they watched the fire, he watched them. He was their witness.

  The fires burned lower, although the smoke still rose as densely as ever. Presently another helicopter flew out of the darkening sky, carrying a newscast crew. Savory repeated the performance he had given Rick, gesturing in an island of light at the prisoners, at a stack of captured rifles. When he had finished and had shaken hands with the reporter, Savory came over to Rick and told him that they were going back.

  As they walked to the helicopter, Rick asked about the prisoners. Something in his voice made Savory stop. “You needn’t worry about them, Lieutenant Florey. They’ll be let go as soon as we’ve finished here. We have no facilities to keep them nor any desire to. Let the insurgents feed them.”

  “It’s a long way to the insurgent positions, isn’t it?” Rick thought of the settlers making their way across the Hampshire Hills in the cold, dark night with no food or water, with only the clothes on their backs. Old men and women. Children. Some even lacked shoes. He said, “It seems so…harsh.”

  “That’s the way it has to be. The able-bodied are off training to fight against our forces; this may give them pause for thought, the other settlements too. A demoralising exercise. It needs to be harsh. This is the price that has to be paid to keep civilisation safe, Dr Florey. Really, you knew that all along, although perhaps you didn’t understand what it meant. But you understand now, I think.” Savory had turned to look back at the burning settlement. Something collapsed inside the inferno, sending up a sheet of flame and a whirling galaxy of embers. In the sudden leaping light, Rick saw the politician’s gloating smile.

  By the time Rick got back to the city, all the public screens were parading news of the operation against Lake Fonda, proclaiming a great victory, the beginning of the end of the war.

  At the rooming house, Rick took a long shower in the communal washroom to get rid of the clinging smell of smoke, changed into his own clothes. As he was going out, the concierge ambushed him in the lobby. “I hope you didn’t have any trouble with those young people last week,” she said, her small, anxious eyes not quite looking at his face.

  “Not really. They just wanted to ask a favour.”

  “It’s just—well, you can’t be too careful these days, can you. The stories you hear. My husband, on the wall…”

  “It wasn’t anything,” Rick said, and went on out. He remembered the last conversation he had had with her and thought, she takes me for some kind of spy! He had automatically turned toward the vending arcade at the intersection with the broad, commercial stretch of Third Avenue. But as he neared the arcade’s brightly lit entrance he changed his mind and walked on past, crossing Third Avenue and entering the old quarter’s twisting maze of little streets. He was determined to have out with de Ramaira the whole business of Web and his crazy plans.

  No lights showed in the narrow windows of the house at the top of the steep street, but de Ramaira answered the door almost immediately. He said, as if he had been expecting Rick, “I was just going out to eat. Are you coming along? Good. Just let me fetch my jacket.”

  Relief that he could still be accepted so casually washed through Rick. He forgot that he had come there to be angry. They went down the hill and wandered through the quarter’s bustling, interlinked squares. Despite the damp chill of evening, the outdoor cafes had plenty of customers, mostly in VDF coveralls. It had become chic to wear them dirty, stained, and torn. Many people had small handtools looped through their belts. De Ramaira told Rick how plans for the time vault were progressing, how curiously eager the City Board was to see it through.

  When Rick said that he had been doing some serious thinking about his own contribution, de Ramaira laughed. “You’re as bad as all the rest. It’s not as if I’m asking for a definitive thesis, just something punchy and practical. Just forget most of what you know, and the rest is easy.” De Ramaira settled the flare of his jacket’s fleecy collar around his face. “I hate the winter on this world. If there’s one thing I miss, it’s atmospheric conditioning. It wouldn’t cost much to dome this part of the city, at any rate.”

  “I had a couple of visitors last week.”

  “And I thought you had forsaken everything to live the simple and chaste life of a hermit.”

  “Web and Lena. Web wanted me to help him with that crazy plan of his. You know, using the radio telescope.”

  De Ramaira stopped and smilingly asked, “And what did Lena want of you?” Light from a cafe sign, that every few seconds flowingly expanded from packed bud to fully petalled rose and shrank to bud again, turned his thin, dark face into a devil mask.

  “She didn’t say. I think she was just there to give Web moral support. Luckily she was there, or I might have beaten Web up rather than simply throw him out.”

  “That young man does have the unfortunate knack of irritating the very people he needs favours from. You threw him out? I take it that means you still don’t think much of his idea.”

  “Did you tell them? Where I’m living, I mean.”

  “What would you do if I admitted that I had?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, I guess. You’re right about Web. He really can be obnoxious. He just about accused me of being a traitor, a spy, because I’m from a settlement.” The huge fire, probably still burning out there. The stoic, silent children. Perhaps Savory had been testing Rick’s loyalty.

  “And of course, you’re no such thing,” de Ramaira said. “Come on, let’s find some place out this fucking cold that’s not jammed up with decerebrated patriots.”

  They ended up at the Inn, a favourite haunt of students. Rick hadn’t been there for a year at least, but it was just as he remembered it, a crowded, noisy, badly lit barn of a place. Blacklights defined little more than a thick haze of smoke. High stone walls reverberated with the metallic pounding of pachedu, the last music craze imported from Earth: a dozen heavily amplified homeostatic percussion instruments, clusters of seventeen pitches randomly distributed between them, which responded to the mood of a wired-in auditor who wandered through the crowd. The auditor in the Inn must have been having a hell of a good time; the pachedu was as thunderously loud as a drag-out war between a couple of scrapyards in the middle of a continent-size thunderstorm.

  Rick and de Ramaira found a niche at the central counter’s irregular rin
g, and Rick drank sour white wine while de Ramaira hungrily forked through a pile of fish-and-tomato hash. “I don’t know how you can eat that stuff,” Rick said after a while, signalling for more wine. Like everyone else in the place, he had to lean close and yell to make himself heard over the pachedu’s clattering roar.

  “Now I’ve noticed this before,” de Ramaira said. “People brought up in the city—myself included, and it’s the same on Earth—regard natural food as a luxury. Of course, on Earth the price is something else. Whereas you, presumably raised on a diet of natural food, prefer the synthesised stuff.”

  “But in the end both are made out of the same chemicals.”

  “You might say there’s no difference between holy water and the stuff you wash with. But tell that to a Catholic.”

  “Well, I guess I’m an unrepentant agnostic.”

  De Ramaira laughed; Rick could hardly hear it. He leaned closer as de Ramaira said, “Then you’ll just have to tolerate my religion. I guess you could call it Jeffersonism. Worship of the redoubtable creations of the humble farmer. Even hash. Still, it’s easier to practise here than at home, where you can only afford so-called organic food if you’ve credit above level three.”

  What tension there had been between them had at some time dissipated; but only then did Rick notice that it had gone. Rick sipped his wine and watched the Wombworld eat. The constant references to Earth made him uncomfortable. There were new lines incised either side of de Ramaira’s mouth, deep dragging grooves.

  “So tell me about the time vault,” Rick said, “Where will it be?”

  “As soon as you all write your pieces.”

  “Not when. Where?”

  “Oh. I’ll show you sometime. Actually, it’s a state secret, but I think I can trust you. Just write your contribution, is the price of admission.”

  “I really have been thinking about it,” Rick said. “The trouble is, what level of capability do I assume? No multiphasic circuits I suppose, but what? Printed circuits? Will they be able to refine selenium and germanium for transistors? Or blow vacuum tubes? If I try and cover all the bases it will make for a very long piece.”