Context (76 page)

Or the lonely death: face down
upon broken flagstones, or shuddering beneath the suicide implant’s pain before
the interrogators could get to work.

It was a war within a war, of
which Tom caught only glimpses; but those snatches of detail drew him with a
terrible fascination.

During
his second half-year at the Academy, he steered the course of his work in a
different direction, making it known that he could help in the briefing and
training of agents. He had been a LudusVitae senior executive, after all.

At the same time, he trained when
he could with the special instructors—those who taught penetration agents
disciplines where physical arts and covert tactics merged: tailing techniques,
situational gymnastics (with particular application to escape-route vectors),
stealth climbing, silent killing.

He even learned to swim.

Even to himself, Tom pretended
his reasons were something like Jay A’Khelikov’s, that time when Jay wrote a
surprisingly lyrical and emotional poem: to understand what the operatives were
going through.

But there was a part of him that
knew that self-serving rationalization rarely tells the whole story: that
teaching frustrated him; that he was no closer to finding Elva.

And it was Jay, for reasons which
had nothing to do with military advantage or tactical gain, who finally
enveloped Tom in that shadow war.

They
were deep inside the Labyrinth, an extended cubic multi-level volume within the
Academy’s core, where corridors were uniformly grey, square in cross-section
and carpeted in the same dull blue.

It was a place for hushed voices,
for drawn-out planning sessions behind sealed doors: a hive in which
code-makers and -breakers worked in solitude or quiet teams; a warren where
plans could be hatched—the assassination of a once-friendly ruler, the
kidnapping and interrogation of a noble Blight sympathizer—which would never
stand up to public scrutiny.

Bleak tactics: but they were all
that stood between civilization and the darkness, in a world where everything
was sliding into Chaos, and even the Academy’s own Oracles -under heavy guard
at the Labyrinth’s core—were unreliable.

In Jay’s depressing cuboid
office, Tom sat down to have a chat, sensing that Jay had a favour to ask, not
dreaming where it might lead.

Jay
leaned back in his soft lev-chair, hands behind his head.

‘Have you seen my Lady Sylvana
recently, Tom?’ His tone was a shade too offhand.

‘No.’

‘Right. Forget I said anything.’

It was not the first hint that
she might like to talk to him, merely the least subtle.

‘How’re your spacetime hackers
doing?’

‘You wouldn’t believe the budget
for coupling resonators, but otherwise, great.’

‘Glad I could help.’

‘My codebreakers think you’re a
genius, Tom.’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve
only ever met one true genius. There were some big brains at the Sorites
School.’

‘Fat minds?’ Jay sketched the
tricon for ‘phospholipid’ in the air.

‘I’ll say.’

It was a biochemical pun, for
minute changes in fat chemistry—the brain being largely structured fat—separate
human sentience from Terran chimpanzees.

‘But Avernon’s the real thing,
Jay. I mean it.’

‘Subject closed. Although I hear’—with
a wink—‘you gave the general a hard time on the matter.’

‘That I did.’

Tom
had met with Corduven on three occasions during the past year—each time in
crowded meetings with little opportunity for private discussion, where matters
of strategy, and the creeping Blight, hung too heavily for badinage.

But Tom had taken the opportunity
to remind Corduven of Lord Avernon’s coup in developing metavector theory: such
a mind was the most valuable resource they could gain.

‘I’ll think about it,’ was all
Corduven had said.

Perhaps Tom’s latest work would
make him reconsider.

When
Tom—still a servitor—had been facing the Review Committee who held his future
in their hands, his presentation had at first been stumbling, halting. But
Avernon, in excited private discussion—needing someone to talk to—had given Tom
a preview of his new approach; and Tom used that to dazzle the three Lords
Academic with his own extrapolations, spun off from the basic theory, and
helped gain his ascension to noble status.

Tom applied metavectors to cosmic
timeflow, in a rush of enthusiasm which barely registered the Lords’ Academic
lack of surprise. For
they already knew
his findings—and more—despite
the new techniques in his derivation. It was Tom’s first hint that whole areas
of logosophical endeavour were forbidden, even to most Lords.

For history and cosmology were
always restricted: kept hidden from a populace who ought not to dwell on thoughts
of other worlds, nor on the dramas of Nulapeiron’ s founding, lest they wonder
how things might have been different, or could become so.

So,
yes, Tom knew the difference between ability and obsessive drive on the one
hand, and genius on the other. For he had glimpsed the magical workings of
Avernon’s mind, and remained in awe at the flashes of poetic insight such an
intellect delivered.

I’m no Avernon.

And yet, and yet...

Something
about the Academy’s atmosphere, despite its warlike purpose, had reawakened in
Tom the fire of logosophical exploration. Perhaps the clandestine nature of the
Labyrinth’s operations lent extra plausibility to Avernon’s vector-on-vector
approach, which invoked yet another layer of indirection between
qualia—
perceived
reality—and the underlying stuff of the universe-as-is.