Context (10 page)

‘As I thought.’ Ro double-blinked
her left lens to max zoom. ‘Gramps was flying.’

By hand, too. Good for you,
Gramps.

Albrecht sucked in a breath.

‘Father Mulligan’s waving,’ he
said, and lifted a tentative hand in Gramps’s direction.

Mother waved too, though facing
the wrong way. Nothing new: Karyn McNamara had been blind since before Ro’s
birth.

Your timing sucks for once,
Mother.

‘Listen,’ she said, as Albrecht
was preparing to dive. ‘I’ve got to tell you—’

‘What?’

In a rush: ‘I’m going to
DistribOne, Arizona. An UNSA internship.’

Albrecht stopped. The hydroplatform
rocked, and for a moment it looked as though he might fall in. Then he sat back
down.

There was so much he could say: that
she had tagged her name onto the h-mail petition going around the schoolNets in
protest at the United Nations’ growing power; that signing on with their space
agency smacked of hypocrisy. And he knew her mother well enough to realize that
Karyn would not approve. But all he managed was:

‘That’s in AmeriFed.’

‘Yes.’ Ro felt miserable. ‘My
exam results were good enough—’

‘But you’re just starting your
second year.’

‘The internship runs in parallel.’

She was studying with the
Technische Netteninstitut von Zürich, but it was instantiated in EveryWare:
location was irrelevant.

Albrecht blinked rapidly.

‘Shit.’ Ro swallowed. ‘This isn’t
easy.’

‘It seems easy enough for you.’
And then a bitter non sequitur, designed to hurt: ‘Violet eyes are passé, you
know.’

He threw himself into a graceless
dive, splashing her.

‘Al—’

Hugging herself for warmth, she
watched him strike out for the shore.

‘I’m
sorry.’ Grandfather spread his hands wide. ‘I didn’t think to bring a towel.’

‘That’s OK.’ Ro stood on tiptoe,
kissed his leathery cheek.

She had swum directly to the
beach; her clothes—a bright pink jumpsuit, neatly folded—and towel were on the
stone jetty, half a klick away.

‘How was Adelaide?’ she asked.

‘Getting hot. We trained on the
beach.’

He had the thick wrists and
forearms of a lifelong aikidoka.

‘For God’s sake.’ It was Mother,
trying to get a rise out of Grandfather. ‘Ro? Shall we meet back at the school?’

Grandfather—Father Michael
Mulligan SJ, PhD, DSc — grinned, and shrugged his heavy shoulders. He really
looked like a friendly bear.

‘Your fault,’ he said. ‘She’s
annoyed because your strand’s offline.’

Ro nodded towards the jetty. ‘I
left it with my stuff.’

They would in fact approve: both
reckoned that young people leaned too much on EveryWare.

‘So you missed the news.’ Mother
stood with her hands on her hips.

Silver sockets, where her eyes
should have been, glinted in the September sun.

‘What news?’

‘Your canton-reg has come
through.’

Ro fell silent.

So I’m a voting citizen now.

And she no longer needed anyone’s
approval to work abroad.

At
the jetty, she performed a towel dance: wriggling out of her swimsuit, kicking
it aside, pulling on the pink jumpsuit. Grandfather had flown Mother back to
the school, and there was no-one else in sight, but you never—

A bush rustled, and she grew
still.

Nothing.

Shaking her head, Ro slipped her
boots on, then wound her golden infostrand necklet-wise round her throat.
Picking up her towel, she began to climb the uneven hillside path.

It passed close to dark
rhododendron bushes and
someone grabbed her
but she moved very fast,
clamping the wrist and dropping him—
watch it—
ignoring her attacker’s
yell as she struck hard with her knee, tracking the vectors by reflex—
no!—
and
pulled down at the last moment, smashing collarbone instead of throat.

You moron.

If she had struck a few
centimetres higher...

‘Christ!’—Albrecht, down on his
knees, his face white — ‘Ach... I think you’ve broken my wrist. And my chest

‘I nearly killed you.’ She turned
away from him.

‘But you have to—’

Over her shoulder:
‘Help is
EveryWare.
Isn’t that what they say?’

And Albrecht’s strand was a
subcutaneous implant.

She began to climb.

‘Comeback!’

White
buildings, low and square beneath the Alpine sky. Deserted gardens: the nuns
must be at prayer. The Angelus.

Will I miss this place?

Through the Zen garden—always,
the Fibonacci swirls leaping into her mathematical awareness—and into her room.

‘Damn you, Al.’

She threw her damp towel into a
corner.

Making me feel like a freak.

In the bathroom, she thumbed on a
mirrorfield.

Violet eyes—no longer
fashionable, apparently—stared back at her. In the irises, minuscule Lissajous
figures slowly orbited. Hiding her true appearance. Albrecht was one of the few
who knew ...

‘Damn you all.’

She dabbed at her eyes, and the
contacts came out.

‘Every last one of you.’

And stared at herself: her eyes
their natural jet-black—no surrounding whites, just pure obsidian—then smiled,
entirely without humour.

Black on black, like the depths
of space.

Inhuman eyes.

<ENDS>>

~ * ~

7

NULAPEIRON
AD 3418

Sturmgard,
with its dark, high caverns, lined with statues of the warrior dead: seated
rows of brooding figures, their stone broadswords splashed with incongruous
bright shades of mutated fluorofungus.

A light drizzle fell.

Looking up, it was impossible to
tell where the rainfall began. Somewhere between the black shadows crowding the
ceiling’s apex and the brighter lit alcoves below, silvery drops condensed into
existence, slid down towards the walking pilgrims.

‘But the district legato approved
my—’

Behind Tom, an unfortunate
freedman’s complaint was shut off. The hall’s guards, not known for their
tolerance, barred whomever they pleased.