Context (67 page)

‘XenoMir?’ Ro wondered whether
she should have used the older name: XenoDom.

‘Da.’
He looked pleased.
‘Vyi
rabotayetye zdyes?’

Ro shrugged, with an exaggerated
grimace. Embarrassed at her linguistic limitations, though she did better than
most.

And we expect to understand offworld
species?

Behind her, the TDV disgorged her
luggage, and whispered into motion.

She picked up her two bags and,
while the policeman benevolently watched, carried them up the broad granite
steps, through the immutable stone entranceway, and into a gleaming foyer
furnished with polished marble.

That
evening, in her private room in the Residence—part of the ancient university,
situated north of the city proper, above the Yeltsin Hills; there was a bus to
shuttle UNSA employees back and forth between campus and XenoMir -Ro tried to
relax, could not. Despite the time lag, sleep would not come.

Her bed was built into the wall
fittings: everything of rich, panelled wood. Old, heavy, sliding doors
separated her study-bedroom from the bathroom, and the whole suite from the
corridor outside.

The indoor warmth was comforting,
if intense. Beyond the windows, grey-looking snow fell like silent ash in the
gathering darkness.

She tapped her infostrand—currently
the golden wire was wrapped necklet-wise round her throat—and directed it to
pass images to her desktop. Sitting at the wooden desk, she smiled as its
crystalline surface inlay cleared, and presented an image which seemed to
stretch downwards, inside the desk: virtual holos, rather than real.

‘Play the seminar.’ Her voice
sounded tired. ‘Start from bookmark two.’

It loaded at the point where she
had stilled it. Professor Davenport’s image was static for a split second, then
the replay began:

‘...
like Lord Kelvin, in the
nineteenth century, declaring that there was nothing remaining for physicists
to do, except add the last decimal place to all that had been measured.

‘Similar hubris was invited two
centuries later, by cosmologists who believed they had deciphered the history
and future of the universe. This, at a time when the Hubble “constant”—essentially
what we now refer to as the Dullaghan bubble-function—had never been
satisfactorily measured; when every theory assumed that at least ninety per
cent of all matter was invisible quintessence (or “dark matter” as they
charmingly termed it) which had never been observed, and whose nature no-one
knew.’

There was laughter from the
corridor outside. For a second, Ro was tempted to investigate. But she did not
feel like company.

‘And the lambda function was
assumed to be a cosmic antigravity-repulsion constant, even though observation
showed it must be smaller than its theoretical value by at least one hundred
and twenty-three orders of magnitude... No other estimate in the history of
science has been so badly..:

She sat down on the bed, killing
the lights with a gesture. In the desk, Prof Davenport’s image was no longer
visible, but his comforting voice droned on.

‘...
flatland, for example, by
considering a polka-dot balloon. Inflate the balloon, and every dot appears to
be the centre of cosmic expansion. Yet no-one considered that, though the
balloon-surface inhabitants are two-dimensional beings, the balloon must exist
in a three-dimensional context. For those charming fictitious characters, so
too for us.

‘When Gus Calzonni finally made
her “intuitive” leap from quintessence-matrix brane-harmonics (and inflationary
cosmic evolution) to mu-space theory, wherein the realspace multiverse itself
was draped across the fractal landscape of the mu-space continuum, it caused a
shockwave through the scientific community.

‘It was not just that the values
of every fundamental constant were derived from a single fractional
coefficient. Gus herself knew from the very beginning, though it took decades
and hundreds of researchers to prove it, that mu-space was more than a
mathematical construct: in fact, an underlying and immeasurably greater reality
through which we might travel.

‘Popular biographers, as she
became an immensely rich and influential public figure (though not daring to
publish until after her death), picked up on her rumoured but highly unlikely
genealogy—that Gus, known more formally as Augusta Medora de Lauron (using the
surname she preferred, taken from her seventh and final husband), was descended
via illegitimate lines from Ada, Countess Lovelace, the world’s first
programmer, and therefore from Lord Byron himself. Despite all evidence to the
...’

At some point, Ro drifted off to
sleep.

When
she woke, a tiny scarlet flag seemed to be drifting above her: a newswatch
netAgent, signalling an item of personal interest in EveryWare. She waved the
holo away, unwound the infostrand from her neck, and dumped it on the wooden
bedstand on her way to the bathroom.

Afterwards, showered and dressed,
she shoved the info-strand into her jumpsuit pocket, and went to look for
breakfast.

Perhaps I’ll see an alien today!

Ro hurried down the broad stairs,
into the ancient dining room.

‘Hey, Ro! How’re ya doin’?’

It was Zoë, the teaching
assistant who (slightly drunk) had told Ro about the Zajinet, on the day one of
the xenos had disappeared ... For a second, Ro’s disorientation increased, as
though she were back in Arizona.

‘Er, hi, Zoë. I didn’t realize
you were going to be here as well.’

But Ro could not remember having
seen her in DistribOne recently.

‘Pulled some strings. I’m not
living here, though.’ She gestured at the crowded dining hall. ‘Too noisy. I’ve
an apartment in Strugatski Prospekt.’

‘Very impressive.’

Ro looked for coffee, could not
see any. People appeared to be drinking black tea. There was a samovar on the
counter, along with the cooked dishes.

‘I need some breakfast.’ She
started to head for the queue. ‘Have you already had ... ?’

But Zoë had not moved. Gravely: ‘You
haven’t checked the news, I take it?’

‘No.’ Ro looked at her, feeling
suddenly cold. ‘Should I have?’

‘Saarbrücken Fliegerhorst’—Zoë’s
voice dropped almost to a whisper, but Ro clearly heard every dreadful word—‘was
destroyed by a micro-tak last night.’

‘That’s awful.’ She did not know
what to say.

‘I’m sorry... Security-reg
confirmed...’ Zoë swallowed. ‘Luís Starhome was there. He—’

‘No, he’s in Tehran.’

Denying reality.

It can’t be.

But she remembered his h-mail,
his stopover for initial training.

No...

‘You’re saying he’s dead.’
Flatly. As though there were no emotion great enough to cover what she felt.

‘God, Ro. I’m sorry. I know you’re
...’

Luís is dead.

How could she lose what she never
had?

The room spun around her.

Oh, my love. My Luís
—

But he was not hers, and never would
be.

Not now.

Luís...

<>

~ * ~

37

NULAPEIRON
AD 3420

It
was a return to noble life. Everything was the same; everything was different.

The physical surroundings brought
back memories of Palace Darinia: vast halls and galleries on many levels
(though contained within the Primum Stratum), walls and ceilings of dark
lustrous mother-of-pearl or softly luminescent jade. Deep carpets of royal blue
flowed through long hallways, carrying the noble-born effortlessly along,
allowing them time to appreciate the precious works of art they passed, the
intricate crystalline glowtrees which floated overhead. There were series
within convoluted series of fountains and ponds, labyrinthine sculptures in
their own right, within which fantastic artificial lifeforms swam and glowed;
colonnades and quiet quadrangles, where small moss gardens provided places for
silent meditation, isolated by quaint antisound hushfields from the sounds of
young scholars and older folk engaged in logosophical debate; airy malls,
formed of clean utilitarian lines at one moment, but whose walls would flow
viscously, perhaps creating intricate spars and buttresses, extruding dainty
footbridges, or sinking inwards to form niches in which noble statues stood.
Gargoyles lurked playfully at odd junctures within the moving architecture.