Context (32 page)

‘Ach, no. Just an administrator,
who was able to help Karyn at... an opportune moment.’

It was you.

Ro knew who this woman was.

You got Mother her ship.

When Dart Mulligan had been lost
in mu-space, Pilot Candidate Karyn McNamara—his lover—had undergone the viral
rewiring, and persuaded Ilse Schwenger, then a divisional director, to upgrade
a newly commissioned ship: a solo search and rescue mission. The designated
Pilot had been bumped off the schedule, and Karyn—Mother—had taken his place.

And she was already pregnant with
Ro.

Mother had never said exactly
what occurred, but there had been blackmail involved, and Machiavellian
intra-UNSA politics. Mother and Gramps furnished material which Schwenger
utilized to destroy her enemies’ careers, while advancing her own.

And Mother had gained the ship
she needed.

‘Walk with me.’ Schwenger took Ro’s
arm.

‘All right.’

They strolled past a Long March
rocket. Neil followed.

‘You look,’ said Schwenger, ‘a
great deal like your mother.’

Several years younger,
Ro realized,
than when you met
her.

Less experienced, more easily
manipulated.

‘But I don’t have my mother’s
eyes.’

The
Pilot, three inches high, stood up in the tiny open-topped ship and said:
‘Entering
mu-space now!’

Shaking her head, Schwenger
replaced the toy on the glass-topped counter.

‘Tasteless. But what the visitors
want.’

There was a single attendant, a
superfluous youth: the souvenir shop’s AI could handle everything.

‘Uncle Cho might find it amusing.’
Ro tapped her golden strand, and placed the order. ‘When will it be delivered?’

‘Um, right away,’ said the youth.

Since Chojun Akazawa was in
Jakarta, that meant a local replica would be created and delivered, but that
was OK.

Ro took a last look around.
Candies—amber ‘mu-space’ jelly stops with embedded liquorice stars; chocolates
shaped like the UNSA logo—and child-sized uniforms. Infocrystals which she
would have liked to browse through, if she had been on her own.

‘I remember Chojun. He helped
your mother.’ Schwenger bent close to Ro as they left the shop, as though
sharing an intimacy. ‘Furnished the technical data for the field generators.’

They were in a carpeted corridor.
Like the rest of the complex, it was nearly empty: just a few uniformed staff
in the atrium at the corridor’s end.

‘It didn’t work, though.’

Ro knew that Mother had tried
everything to free Dart, Father, from the mu-space energy pattern which held
his ship. But it had threatened to engulf them both, and Dart had deliberately
collapsed his protective event-membrane when he realized that Karyn was in
danger. Even as his bronze ship imploded, disappearing in a myriad glowing
shards, Mother had escaped, and broken through to realspace.

In stress-induced, agonizing
labour.

‘Pilot Dart Mulligan,’ said
Schwenger, ‘learned that Karyn was pregnant. Did you know that? He interfaced
to your mother’s internal systems. He knew.’

‘No-one told me.’

Father. You killed yourself for
me?

‘And the breach birth must have
been terrible.’

Ro looked at her.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Ah... Well, I’m sure you’re old
enough to know. There were ... complications. When your mother returned to
real-space—to random coordinates—she was already in labour, and only a
caesarean would do. She used the internal robot arms on herself.’

‘How?’ Ro’s voice sounded small
to her own ears.

‘They have laser cutters, you
know. And internal pre-processors, to keep on going even when the Pilot has
lost consciousness ...’

There was a bench by the wall,
and Ro crossed to it and sat down, feeling shaky.

She cut herself open.

Drifting, alone and in pain, in
dark endless space.

Sliced herself. To produce me.

Afterwards,
as Neil saw her to a waiting air-taxi, she took hold of his sleeve.

‘Armstrong?’ She used his
forename for the first time. ‘Why was I brought here?’

Ilse Schwenger had left her
sitting on that bench, after a polite farewell.

Neil shook his head. ‘I’ve no
idea.’

It was written throughout his
being, in unmistakable body language: he liked her, disliked his task—to report
back on what he had observed—and knew nothing of the political machinations
which lay behind her being here. He was complicit, but only to the extent of
following orders whose purpose he did not understand. And both of them knew her
meeting with Ilse Schwenger was no accident.

Just what did I learn here today
?

She felt the pressure of Neil’s
gaze, intent upon her, as she slid into the air-taxi’s cool interior and the
gull door lowered into place. She waved, sat back. But in her mind was the holo
image of a single chesspiece on a floating board, and the grotesque thing which
lay on the floor beneath it.

Anne-Louise. Did someone kill you
for a reason?

Then the ground dropped away, and
the taxi was high above the long yellow runway. It arced over the glass
buildings, acceleration kicking in, and zoomed upwards, leaving PhoenixCentral
far below.

<ENDS>>

~ * ~

19

NULAPEIRON
AD 3418-3419

Tom,
cross-legged upon his sleeping cot’s rough ochre covering, shut down the bulky holoterminal
beside him. Reckless, perhaps, to have borrowed the terminal from the
merchanalysis hall, not to mention invoking the crystal’s functions, but
suddenly he did not care if they threw him out of the Bronlah Hong, or worse.

He sealed the crystal inside the
stallion talisman once more, and looped it round his neck. Looked down at the
cot, and knew he could not sleep just yet. Returning the holoterminal could
wait until morning.

Slipping through the faded drape,
he walked silently along cold grey flagstones—there were mutterings and other
sounds from the alcoves he passed, but most of the men would be asleep already,
worn out from a long working day—until he reached a cross-tunnel, and headed
towards the nearest security station, looking for someone to talk to.

Behind the granite desk, a huge
black-skinned, square-bearded housecarl stood chuckling. His copper helm hung
from his belt like some grisly warrior’s trophy, and sweat was trickling down
his forehead. His hand, as he wiped away the drops, was twice the size of Tom’s,
maybe more, and his shoulders were massive.

‘What’s up?’ said Tom.

‘Caught what you might call an
interloper’—shaking his head, grinning—‘from the freewomen’s washchamber.’

‘Sweet Chaos.’

‘Heard the loudest scream you
could imagine. One of the women had gone in, found this bedraggled flashdust
addict washing himself from a drinking flagon.’

Tom could not quite share the
amusement.

Cold flagstones beneath his
stinking, shivering body. The feet of passers-by, disturbing his dayshift sleep
— too dangerous to close his eyes at night. Dark extended memory gaps.
Scratching his ever-itchy scab-encrusted skin. The hunt, always, for more
booze, for the sweet hot liquid dragon which could make him feel alive...

Lost years.

‘Poor guy.’

‘I guess.’ The big carl’s
expression grew kinder. ‘He was dressed again in his rags by the time I got
there. Smelled bad ... But he’d been beaten, and cut. You could tell. I told
the proctors, when I handed him over.’