Context (16 page)

A Mexican groundsman with
sun-darkened skin, hatless, crouched on the sand, was tinkering with a battered
grey maint-bot.

‘Hi.’ Ro gave a breathless
greeting, continuing to run.

He looked at her with the same
expression as the ground squirrel.

They both think I’m mad.

It was early—06:52, the refectory
not yet open for breakfast—but the temperature was already 27.4 Celsius. She
knew both these facts without any tech devices.

Last two hundred metres, and she
poured on the speed.

Pounding past the main path, she
slowed to walking pace, jogged back to the white flagstones, and lowered
herself into a hamstring stretch. The stone’s heat seeped into her muscles,
relaxing them. A far cry from Swiss winter training—

‘Jesus Christ.’

A tiny scorpion scuttled across
the path, was gone.

She
stopped in the corridor outside her room, skin prickling.

Someone’s inside.

Ro did not question her
intuition; it had proved accurate too often in the past.

Outside the door, a small holo
hung:

*** DOROTHY McNAMARA
***

FlightScienes Dept V

*** ANNE-LOUISE ST
CLAIRE ***

PRDiv Sect Gamma3

There was every chance that the ‘intruder’
was in fact the roommate Ro had not yet met.

She stood there for a moment,
regarding the southwestern pastels of her surroundings—burnt orange, pale blue—and
considered. It was almost certainly this Anne-Louise; no reason to suspect
otherwise. Anne-Louise was due back from her field trip today, though this
seemed awfully early.

The door concertinaed open at Ro’s
gesture.

‘Howdy, ma’am.’ A tall, rangy man
tipped his stetson. ‘Mighty pleased to meet ya.’

Deep desert tan. White shirt,
narrow black jeans.

Gunbelt.

Ro stared, very closely. Vision
told her that a person was standing there. But as for her other senses ...

‘I really don’t think so.’

Silver badge, glinting. Arizona
Ranger.

‘Well now, purty—’

But Ro walked straight
through
the cowboy figure, which dissolved into sparkling needles, and slowly
disappeared from existence.

From the floor where she sat
cross-legged, an elegant dark-haired young woman—she appeared slight, but not
fragile—looked up, smiling, and said:

‘However did you know?’

‘Anne-Louise?’
Ro held out her hand.
‘Vous êtes Québecoise, n’est-ce pas?’

‘Ouais.’
She held up her hand and they
shook.
‘Tu peux me tutoyer, tu sais.
But I’m supposed to be practising
my English.’

‘Me too.’

‘So how did you know’—Anne-Louise
ejected a cassette wafer from her holopad, and rose easily to her feet—‘that
Clint was a holo?’ She threw the wafer.

‘Clint?’ Ro snatched it from the
air: an old-fashioned layered-crystal cassette, the type of lattice wafer that
Gramps still preferred to use. ‘You did say Clint?’

‘Clint Shade, Arizona Ranger. My
hero.’

They
sat on their respective beds, facing each other. At the foot of each bed was a
desk. Anne-Louise pointed: on her desktop stood Ranger Shade, now just a few
centimetres tall, and frozen.

‘The hero of
Black Devil Mesa.
My new story.’

‘Right, they told me.’ Ro handed
back the cassette wafer. ‘You’re a storyfactor.’

A Gallic shrug. ‘An
unpublished
storyfactor.’

‘Still…’

Animated now: ‘My project’s a new
character-template shell-language.’

‘Er, that sounds good.’ There was
a squeeze-bulb of electrolyte replacement fluid on the bedside table. Ro had
placed it there before going out to run; she took a gulp now, and it felt good.
‘Very ... interesting.’

‘I suppose.’ Anne-Louise shrugged
again. ‘My tutor says the primary AIs are too jokey, and the secondary
characters are too “predictably unpredictable”. I mean, what’s a hack to do,
eh?’

‘Too bad.’ Ro wound her
infostrand bracelet-wise round her wrist. ‘Um ... I need to take a shower.’

‘After which, the refectory will
be open. Good plan?’

‘I reckon so.’

Despite
the holo graffito in the physics lab washroom—
Flush twice, it’s a long way
to the refectory—
the food was in fact delicious. Ro spooned more huevos
rancheros into her mouth, swallowed, leaned back and sighed.

‘Not bad.’

‘Apart from the coffee.’
Anne-Louise nevertheless drained her cup.

‘You were on an archaeological
field trip?’

‘Right. A new find. Petroglyphs,
my speciality.’

The refectory was bright, with
floor-to-ceiling windows, and still mostly empty. There were glass-framed sand
paintings and Navajo rugs on the orange walls.

‘Archaeology, anthro,
storytelling. Interesting combination.’

A modest shrug. ‘My mother calls
me
le terrassier.
The digger.’

‘Charming. How come you’ve an
UNSA internship?’

‘Apparently
“to stimulate
interdisciplinary serendipity, and present a positive image to the academe-nets”.
That’s what it said on my application.’

‘Oh, God.’

‘C’est ςa.
Actually, it’s just money. I do
PR, and UNSA gets grant money from a humanities foundation.’

‘That’s ...’ Ro’s attention was
distracted ‘... not bad.’

Anne-Louise looked over her
shoulder, to where a lean twentyish man—bronze skin, narrow waist encircled by
a silver concho belt, wide athlete’s shoulders—was making his way, tray in
hand, towards them.

‘That,’ said Anne-Louise, ‘is Luís.’

Definitely not bad.

He stopped by their table.

‘Hey.’ Anne-Louise raised her
hand.
‘Yá’ át’ ééh abíní.’

‘And
bonjour
to you.’ He
sat down, and held out his hand to Ro. ‘I’m Luís Starhome.’

‘This is Ro,’ said Anne-Louise. ‘Cool
contacts, don’t you think?’

Ro’s skin tingled as she shook
hands, scarcely noticing the remark about her eyes, which were their natural
all-black obsidian.

‘Definitely,’ His attention was
all upon her. ‘She hasn’t challenged you to chess yet, Ro?’

‘No...’

‘Don’t let her. She’s a demon.’

‘Thanks’—Ro did not even glance
in Anne-Louise’s direction—‘for the warning.’

Anne-Louise stood up. ‘Sorry,
guys. I have to finish unpacking. Um, that ceremony at your uncle’s hogan, Luís
...’

“The Skyway?’

‘I won’t be able to make it.
Perhaps Ro would be interested?’ She picked up her tray. ‘Later, guys.’

They watched her go, then Luís
said formally, ‘I’m Luís Starhome, as I said, born for the
K’aahanáanii,
the
Living Arrow Clan, born into the Tangle People,
Ta’neezahnii.’

Ro nodded, her expression
serious, acknowledging the importance of his words. She would have to get
Anne-Louise to explain Navajo kinship relations.

‘I’m Dorothy,’ she said, ‘known
as Ro, of the clan McNamara.’

Luís’s face was a bronze warrior’s
mask.