Context (98 page)

But there were too many people
and something, someone, tripped him and his fingertips made contact but he was
already falling.

No!

He tried to hug the sphere to
himself but it was too late and there was a pointless crack as it smashed
beneath him, and momentary despair flooded inside. Knowing that he had failed
those who had died.

Whatever the secret of the Seer’s
power—more than he had expected them to acquire: the infocrystal was surely the
scanlog which had been Tyentro’s objective—Tom had just broken it beyond
retrieval in a moment’s clumsiness the Academy instructors would have deplored.

Did they die for this?

But he would be joining them
soon—

A wordless agony.

It burns.

Crawling, trying to move.

And then he stopped, as his body
turned to ice.

What’s happening to me?

Shivering...

He was freezing now.

There was a crackling in the air,
a shaking in the ground. Yet the half-seen crowd just stood there, staring at
him. Cold flames flickered blue, were gone.

Concussion?

Come on.

Then he was on his feet again.

Get moving.

Stumbling...

People, tunics and surcoats—dark
and pastel, plain and fantastically patterned—and a blur of faces. A glance
back.

Broken shards upon the
flagstones, obscured now by the shifting crowd.

Scarlet banners, hanging.

Distant martial music: a parade,
and the promise of a thousand troops and militia, the impossibility of escape.
An advance guard, perhaps a hundred soldiers, at the crowd’s edge, already
scanning, calling the officers above, and searching for the figure which had
dropped from the balcony and into the crowd.

But in that glance ...

Shards on the flagstones, yet
nothing more. Not a single drop which might have glowed electric blue.

It’s in me.

Extracted with care, over a
period perhaps of two Standard Years. Distilled with exquisite delicacy from
the Seer’s decomposing corpse. That sapphire fluid, once subsumed within the
Seer’s entire being, was gone, absorbed.

Inside me...

A
shudder of revulsion passed
through Tom.

Mother...

He remembered the day she died,
having briefly come back to life, in her crystal sarcophagus in the Oracle’s
home. Blue fluid, fluorescing with internal light, had spilled from her mouth
and ears, pooled inside the sarcophagus as she...

What’s it doing to me?

The memory faded, but all around
him the world blurred, growing double.

Soldiers. Getaway.

He stumbled through the crowd,
aware of half-glimpsed uniforms, the glint of weapons.

Hurry...

But something strange was
happening.

This
was the theory:

In the context against which time
flowed—a motion in metatime—a strange splitting might occur. The interaction
between any cause and effect is bidirectional in time, like a handshaking
protocol of reinforcing waves.

And any wave can be refracted.

When Tom had changed the Oracle’s
perceived future, it had been (it seemed) a programming trick. It took mu-space
processors to generate an
imagined
reality, and make that the future
which the Oracle perceived.

A swap-over: everything the Oracle
had predicted, had seen in his personal future beyond a certain moment in time,
was an illusion of Tom’s creation. The Oracle’s real future was very different
in length and in quality: short and brutal, ending on the point of Tom’s blade.

And yet...

An unexpected blue fire, a
barrier igniting the air, had tried to prevent the process—as though reality
itself resisted the incursion. And then, that hallucinatory episode ...

Exiting the Oracle’s terraformer
floating high in Nulapeiron’s sky, Tom seemed to see
himself,
leaping
suicidally to his death.

It
was hard to say when the split occurred.

There was the pushing and shoving—
get
out of here
-forcing a way through the crowd, and suddenly the empty
coolness of a dank tunnel. Momentary respite: but a hundred soldiers were in
immediate pursuit, and there were thousands more behind them; already they
would be closing in from all directions, from above and below.

But in the ephemeral peace of the
moment, he turned to his left to face ...

He turned to his right and saw
...

Not alone.

It was Fate, and it was beyond
surprise: the features which were so familiar and yet so startling, seen every
day in a mirrorfield. Yet neither was surprised: it was an implacable
phenomenon, so unexpected it struck beyond their capacity to absorb shock.

There was Tom Corcorigan —

Brother...

— and there was Tom Corcorigan.

And the shared recognition in
their eyes, that death was almost upon them. Each soldier would want to be the
first to drop the escaped terrorist; there would be no mercy, no taking of
prisoners.

Does sapphire blood run in my
veins? In ours?

Prisoner, singular. They were
looking for
one
person.

Laughter, conjoined, identical in
pitch, dying fast.

‘You should go.’

A pause, a shake of the head: ‘I’m
nearest to the door. You go on ahead.’

For a moment, each Tom Corcorigan
regarded the other: the more-than-twin, sharing not love but mutual
self-knowledge.

‘I’m not suicidal, so neither are
you.’

‘It’s random chance’—with an
ironic smile which brought forth its reflection on the other Tom—‘that you’re
closer, by one pace, to escape. Divergence, my brother.’

‘The blue stuff—’

‘Needs investigation, by Avernon.’

‘We can both—’

A shake of the familiar head. ‘No,
we can’t.’

They clasped forearms, then he
made the hardest decision of all and turned to run, while he knelt and faced
the door.

He ran.

He stayed.

He
stretched lightly, loosened limbs, controlled his breathing. Regarded the stone
tunnel, dank and unlovely—and saw a tiny golden spider apparently in mid-air.
Its web, invisible, suspended it near a splotch of pale, grey-green colour on
the wall: a patch of lichen. It was life, spreading everywhere, even in these
surroundings.

And it was somehow fitting,
somehow appropriate, that the end should come in such a place.

Elva. I would have liked to see
you again.

But in a sense, he would.

He was sure of that.

Running,
with the tears unnoticed upon his cheeks, shutting down his thoughts by act of
will, focused now on sheer survival.

Take them with you.

The Enemy’s forces would be upon
him soon.

Take them, my brother.

Thighs pumping as he ran.

Take out as many as you can.