alt.human (39 page)

And then, crashing through the trees with a bulbous purple caul wrapped around his head, came Skids, groaning and mumbling in words that could not be distinguished, drool trailing from his mouth and his eyes staring mad.

I
STOPPED HIM
, took him in my arms, smothering him with a jabber of soothing, calming clicks.

“!¡
concern | alarm
¡! What is it?” I asked. “What’s happened, sib?”

He stared at me, then jerked free, stumbled, sprawled on his knees.

Frankhay went to him, flipped him onto his back and started tugging at the caul.

Hope clawed at the clan-father, trying to stop him. “No! If you pull it off you’ll kill him!”

Frankhay eased back.

“!¡
calming
¡! What is it, Skids? What happened?”

My old sib peered up at us, his hands wrapped protectively around his cauled head. “!¡
shocked | outraged
¡! Their ’singer,” he said. “The Singer of the City... It’s not their guardian. It’s their
prisoner
!”

Chapter Thirty-Six

S
KIDS HAD RECOGNISED
the marks of cauls on the heads of the citizens of Harmony.

He had gone under the caul back in Laverne. He had been hooked on the symbiotic relationship with the caul, almost so hooked he had never emerged, the fate of so many wraiths. He had learned moderation just in time, though, had learned to balance the highs of communion against the need to survive in the physical realm.

But the pull would always be there, a chemical pull in his blood that never died.

That day, he had followed Alya to a room that was not her home, and there he had seen a tank containing a colony of growing cauls.

When she had gone, he broke into the room – another of the skills he had learned in his time living on the streets of Constellation – opened the tank and took a caul for himself.

He would commune with the Singer of the City. He would find that ethereal high once again.

Barricading himself into a room off one of the foyers, he took the caul and draped it over his head. Instantly, he felt the suckers binding, the needle-like tendrils prising holes in his skin, the sudden rush as the caul entered him, infusing his blood with its phreaked excretions.

A starsinger’s presence should flood your senses. It should burst into your perception in full chorus, swamping your senses with the All, a single, snapshot explosion of all that is within the ’singer’s demesne.

The human mind cannot grasp this.

The human mind can only perceive a minuscule fraction of what it is to be a starsinger.

To the starsinger the All is known, but a human can only know that it is known.

The caul is a bridge between what the human mind can know and what it can know to be known, and it does this in a perception-blowing mind-fuck of a brain-chemical rush that shatters most who come to know it.

The presence of Harmony’s starsinger when Skids donned the caul was a mere whimper, a presence smothered by a layer of... Skids didn’t know what. Something had deadened the ’singer. Something had confined it.

“!¡
distraught
¡! Do you remember that voice, Dodge? Down in the level below ground. That was it, the ’singer, trying to get through to us.”

“!¡
struggling to grasp
¡! What’s happened to it?” I asked. “Why is the ’singer like this?”

“!¡
indignant
¡! It’s trapped. Imprisoned. Somehow they’ve controlled it, the people here. Somehow they’ve got it contained, and they’re using its powers to keep this bubble reality going to protect them.”

“!¡
factual reporting
¡! Not them,” I told Skids. “The citizens of Harmony are being controlled by watchers.”

“If a starsinger can create realities,” said Hope in a quiet voice, “how do they control a starsinger?”

I had been wondering the same thing.

Saneth stepped forward and commanded our attention. “!¡
teaching junior scholar
¡! If the real can be unsung,” the chlick said, “then so, too, can the known be unknown. The starsinger can only sing the known.”

“!¡
earnest
¡! What doesn’t it know?” I asked.

“!¡
factual reporting
¡! You,” said Saneth. “All of you. Humankind carries a spark of difference to all that is known. A latecomer, a novelty. The ’singers suppress you, but they are a guardian race, they would do you no harm. But you are unknown, unpredictable. You stop the song of the All.”

The chlick turned to Hope, then. “!¡
non-confrontational | gentle
¡! You are an experiment, Hope Burren. The Hadeen watchers would eradicate the unknowable in order to preserve an order in the All; the non-Hadeen would use the unknowable to control the known. Condense a mass of humankind, the spirit, the soul even, and it is as a weapon against those who rely on all being known.”

“!¡
understanding
¡! The starsingers,” I said. “A weapon against the ’singers.”

“!¡
approving
¡! You, Hope Burren, are a bridge to that condensate. In your head you carry a non-Hadeen watcher, a benign morph whose only function is to act as that bridge, channel those presences.”

I saw the wave of revulsion that passed around our small group when Saneth said Hope carried a watcher, saw the reflex movement of Frankhay’s dagger arm.

“It’s me?” said Hope. “I’m the one imprisoning the starsinger?”

“!¡
matter-of-fact
¡! Not you,” said Saneth. “But one, or many, like you. You are not the first experiment of this nature.”

“!¡
practical
¡! How do we free the starsinger?” I asked.

Saneth paused, and then finally answered. “!¡
bearing an unpopular truth
¡! The starsinger will be freed when the condensate of humankind is destroyed. If there is no condensate then those of the nature of Hope Burren cannot channel it and contain the ’singer.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

“!¡
TENTATIVE | MUSING
¡! S
O
what is this mass of humanity?” I asked. “The condensate. Is it
us
? Are you telling us the only way we can free the starsinger is by destroying humankind?”

“!¡
disappointment for junior scholar | frustrated
¡! If it were humankind, that is what I would call it and not something else,” chided Saneth. “!¡
instructing junior scholar
¡! The condensate is the essence of you. It is all of you.

“Humankind is a novelty, a new race which emerged long after all was known, all colonised, all niches filled. There was no space for a new sentience to emerge, and yet humankind evolved to fill the gaps.”

I looked around our small group, and wondered how much longer our kind would have.

“!¡
matter-of-fact
¡! While the Hadeen-watchers would wipe you out as an affront to the order of the All, the non-Hadeen have been harvesting you, mapping and indexing and organising you.”

“!¡
impatient
¡! To use as a threat against the starsingers,” said Skids. “To control them. But how? How have they done this?”

“!¡
instructing junior scholar
¡! It is in your blood,” said Saneth. “They read you, map you, capture the essence of what it is to be human.”

I understood. I knew what Saneth was leading up to.

“!¡
dawning comprehension
¡! Our pids,” I said. “That’s how they capture us!”

“!¡
approval for junior scholar
¡! That is the mechanism.”

“So how do we destroy it?” I asked. “The condensate. Where is it?”

Saneth paused, before finally saying, “!¡
difficult truth
¡! It is in the All. It runs through the All. It is...” – another pause – “!¡
frustration | struggle to articulate
¡! Your language does not have an adequate concept even to allude. How to eradicate something that is embedded in the fabric of the All...?”

T
HAT NIGHT WE
reverted to the ways of the journey.

We settled together in the largest of the rooms allocated to us, and posted guards through the night. Suddenly this paradise felt like a prison.

The citizens of Harmony had left us alone that evening. This was not unusual, but still it felt as if they knew that we knew. Every small detail cranked up our paranoia.

I managed to doze a little, and then it was my turn to take watch.

I found my way to the room’s arched doorway carefully, even though I knew the others weren’t sleeping either.

Outside, the atrium was lit by a soft glow from high up in the spire. Trees clumped in dark blobs, a few flowers picked out as if luminescent. Frogs piped from the waterways and bats flitted through the shadows. It was like the most peaceful of summer evenings.

Frankhay sat a short distance away on the grass.

There was something about his pose that looked awkward, and I approached tentatively.

Closer to, I saw that he sat with elbows on knees, one hand supporting his chin. The hand with the dagger blade.

I rushed to him, dropped to my knees, reached out...

The whites of Frankhay’s eyes flashed as they turned to me.

He dropped his hand, said nothing, and I settled back on my heels, calming myself.

After a time, Frankhay said, “!¡
grieving
¡! I raised him. Him and Ash. Lots of the kids in the Hays were orphans, street kids. We took ’em in, fed and washed and schooled ’em. I was close to ’em all, but those two... I didn’t favour ’em because they were like me, none of that crap. I favoured ’em because they could have been so much better.”

He waved his hand and there was that soft click and the blade emerged.

“!¡
angry | regret
¡! An’ what good does it do ’em?” he went on. “I leave Ash in the middle of a fuckin’ great forest, with that shit-head Herald up against her, an’ I let Jerra get infected with watchers and then kill him because I think he’s turned against me.”

He jabbed the blade at his neck so hard it drew blood. “!¡
anguished
¡! This is what I deserve, but it’s too good, too easy. I need to do something right, lad, d’you hear me? I need to make amends.”

I nodded.

“!¡
determined
¡! We’ll free the trapped human spirits,” I said. “The condensate. And that will free the starsinger.” For I’d realised that the condensate wasn’t just some facsimile of our kind, a human mind-map: it was far more than that. Hope had been experiencing the condensate’s anguish in her head, the chorus of voices; I had felt it when I rode with her in Saneth’s commensal and our minds had touched; we had all felt it when we fought our way through that abominable wall of flesh.

All of our kind was trapped, just as the starsinger was.

And I had just worked out how we might free them.

L
ATE IN THE
night, just as the light in the atrium was beginning to lift, Hope and I stood with Saneth by a pool fringed with hanging trees.

“!¡
tentative
¡! You say the way to free the starsinger is to destroy the condensate,” I said, and Saneth inclined her-his body in agreement. “It’s the condensate that is the problem for the starsingers – throwing together the boiled-down essence of humankind in the fabric of the All to undermine them, stifling them with the unknown.”

“!¡
approving
¡!”

“Yet the condensate...” I went on. “Hope feels it, all the time. I’ve felt it. It’s real. It’s not just a copy of what we are – it’s more than that. We can’t just destroy something so... so
human
.”

I saw from the look on Hope’s face, as I spoke, that this was true.

Saneth turned to Hope, and said, “!¡
gentle
¡! Would you have the voices stilled?”

Hope looked from the chlick to me, and back again. “I... I always wanted them to be gone. I’d have given anything to have them sucked out of my head. I still would. But Dodge is right. The voices aren’t in my head, I’m hearing them from elsewhere, from the condensate. I would never
kill
them just for a quiet head!”

“!¡
intrigued
¡! So what does the scholar pup propose?” asked Saneth.

“!¡
bold
¡! Well,” I said, “what if we could put them somewhere else instead?”

E
VEN THEN, IT
was hard to think badly of Harmony.

We knew it was a reality conjured up by an imprisoned starsinger, one tortured and smothered with a blanket of the unknown. We knew that Harmony’s citizens had been taken over, good people like Mazar and Alya who Marek had known in Angiere, now infested with alien watchers.

And yet... the air smelled sweet, the light was pure, the trees rich and green, the flowers vivid. We were surrounded by the calls of birds and frogs. Butterflies and slender damselflies flopped and darted. Fish flashed bronze and silver in the waterways.

It was Hope who first realised we were being observed, that morning.

We sat in the open by our dorm rooms, discussing what lay ahead. Hope sat slightly apart, knees drawn up to her chin. The voices in her head were a low murmur, a susurrus. She was not scared. She was not daunted.

And then she saw a pattern in the screen of leaves and vines just across the pool: eyes, the line of a nose, a mouth. And as the image emerged, it could not be unseen.

One of the citizens was hiding in the bushes.

As soon as she had seen one, she saw others. She wondered how long they might have been there, whether they were always loitering in the undergrowth, observing, whether they had done that ever since Hope’s group had arrived.

She caught my eye, gestured with a nod of the head, and it was a moment before the pattern resolved for me, too, and I saw the observers.

“!¡
alert
¡! We have company,” I said, and conversation tailed off.