Context (91 page)

It
was a world where nothing made sense.

The human settlement was like a
tangled pile of silver bones; but, from the lip of a balcony extrusion near its
apex, it seemed an island of stability amid churning chaos. The sky was a van
Gogh madness, purple blood swirling in turbulent turquoise waters; the cracked
ground lay still, but its hues shifted—always at the edge of Ro’s vision,
whenever she looked away.

And the buildings ...

They changed. Sometimes,
flickering, it seemed that multiple images overlaid each other. Staring at the
Zajinet city for more than twenty seconds at a time caused migraines. Beside
Ro, also beneath the balcony’s protective membrane, even Lila periodically
closed her eyes, readjusting: a protective habit after two years’ sojourn on
BD3.

And the beings ...

Foot traffic, and unsettling
flying things, passed among the fractal avenues. Their shapes morphed, flowing
as they moved; sometimes, briefly, just a fiery tracery remained, before some
new external form clad the bright-glimmering inner core.

‘We don’t even know,’ murmured
Lila, ‘whether they’re all Zajinets. One species, or a full ecology.’

Ro squeezed her eyes shut.

I don’t like this place.

A
Zajinet—the renegade on Terra—had
somehow brought her here. After the events in Moscow, the Mexican gardener who
was really an assassin, attempting to kill her—or had the target been Zoë?—her
presence in this place seemed simultaneously unremarkable and a massive, cosmic
joke.

Why did the Zajinet leave me
here?

She felt as though she was going
to be sick. Even Zoë had, in one sense, betrayed her. For it seemed obvious now
that, though the Zajinet or one of its human servants might have stolen the
crystal-cassette of Anne-Louise’s work from her room in Arizona, it was more
likely that Zoë had been the thief. Working for her masters in the intelligence
services.

Protecting Ro from a threat they
only half comprehended? Or using her as bait?

She wondered if the renegade
Zajinet was acting on its own, or whether it had allies—or enemies—here on BD3.

Why did it let me live?

Somehow it had transported her
across the light-years; it seemed that not only human Pilots possessed the
secret of mu-space travel. Yet the Zajinets had kept their capabilities secret
all this time.

‘Come on, Ro.’ A gentle touch
upon her arm: Lila, smiling softly. ‘Let’s get inside.’

The
corridors were blue-silver, tangled hollow tubes—occasionally widening out into
rooms—which formed no discernible pattern. Sometimes, if all the humans
happened to sleep at the same time, they would awaken to find the configuration
altered: old rooms disappeared (sometimes with the equipment and sparse
furnishings they had contained); new rooms came into existence. Occasionally
long-lost equipment made a reappearance. Most times, it was warped beyond easy
recognition; sometimes—though formed of solid metal—it seemed to have been
twisted inside out.

There were forty-four people
living in the settlement, and they called it Watcher’s Bones.

Ro
woke in the middle of the ‘night’, and made her way to the current designated
relaxation lounge. There was a bar (complete with cocktail-mixing AI) installed
by the wall, and a tall, bulky, florid-looking Englishman named Matheson
-usually called Fluffy—was making practised use of it.

‘Delighted to see you, old girl.’

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Take a pew.’

Ro fetched herself a fruit-juice
mix, and took a reclining seat facing Matheson—in her own mind, she could not
bring herself to use his nickname.

‘It’s a strange place,’ she said.

‘No more so’—he quaffed some of
his fluorescent cocktail—‘than the manner of your arrival.’

She sighed. ‘I couldn’t agree
more.’

Everyone in the settlement had
seen the tape of her interview, with Lila and Jared asking the questions, and AI-physiometry
displays indicating that everything Ro said was true. Or at least that she
believed it.

There were still stares: hers was
the first new face here for two Terran years, and it was nearly six months
before the next relief vessel was due to call.

‘ Y’know, on Earth’—Matheson,
old-fashioned beyond his years, never used the word ‘Terra’—‘an alien visitor
would sample grass blades, penicillin growths, mushrooms and human beings, and
see that we’re all outgrowths of the same DNA chemistry. Even oxygen is a
byproduct of life. It would be obvious, y’see’—with a wagging forefinger—‘that
we’re all of the same world.’

It was an old speech, Ro could
tell, but with a new audience. And she was interested.

‘Lila said no-one knows how many
species live here.’

‘Or even if it really is their
homeworld. The eco relationships appear senseless. But my research leads me to
believe—well, never mind.’

‘Tell me.’

‘That they’ve travelled here.
That the Zajinets possess the ability to travel through mu-space. And your
appearance here forms my vindication, old girl.’ He held up his glass in
salute, and drank to her.

‘I guess it does.’

It was hard to believe that
another species had the means to enter mu-space, and bring a frail human
captive all this way through that strange, fractal continuum, without her being
conscious of the journey.

If that’s what really happened.

She hunched up in her chair, and
shivered. All was confusion. For she could not interpret recent events’
significance, any more than her eyes could make ordered sense of the shifting,
random, chaotic cityscape outside, where her kidnapper must even now be living,
plotting its next indecipherable move.

‘I
don’t know,’ she murmured later, ‘whether Zoë’s still alive, even.’

Matheson shifted in his chair—startling
Ro: she had thought he was asleep—and spoke without opening his eyes.

‘Spook training, old girl. She’s
bound to have got out intact.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Scholar-diplomats are we.’ He
made it sound like the words of a song. ‘And we get around a bit. I’ve come
across your friend before, and she was an UNtel agent-in-charge during a little,
er, difficulty in Lhasa. Years ago.’

‘I think the renegade was trying
to kill Fyodor.’ Ro had taken to using Zoë’s pet name for the Zajinet
ambassador which was living in XenoMir. ‘But it might have been after Zoë.’

Matheson opened his eyes and
slowly shook his head. ‘I really don’t think so.’

Ro stared at him. ‘What do you
mean?’

In answer, he slowly levered his
bulk from the chair.

‘Either you’re being
disingenuous, old thing’—he stood surprisingly steadily, after all he had drunk—‘or
it’s yourself that you’re fooling. It’s time you opened those rather
distinctive, unsettling eyes of yours.’

But if it wanted me dead, why did
it bring me here?

Then Matheson steered himself
towards his quarters, leaving Ro alone in the lounge to contemplate his words
and the formless thoughts boiling in her mind, like a chemical spill in a
troubled ocean, fermenting explosively in the shark-haunted, shadowed depths
where she had not dared to look.

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