It was a long way to fall.
A fall like that would break your back, grind your vertebrae flat, shatter ribs. The absence of pain scared her, it indicated such a massive trauma as to put the whole body into shock. Better to breathe shallow and wait for help.
Waiting for help, like the shelter, packed in with the stink of vomit, urine and fear. The small children screaming in terror as the lights went out. Benny pressed up against the porthole, the silhouette of her mother burnt on to her retina, bright rainbow flashes as the radiation conflicted with the shelter's preservation field. An adult voice behind her called out the survivor statistics on the deep transmitter. 'Shallow breathing exercise, children,' said teacher from somewhere near the back, 'help's coming.'
Benny moved, she didn't believe in teacher no more.
There was no pain as she got up but when she ran a hand down her side to check for broken ribs her skin felt dry and cracked. She picked at a flap just above her hip and a long strip peeled away, an oily purple under the xenon lights. Not her skin then, but something that she'd been coated in, perhaps during the cave in. Her coverall was missing its sleeves and most of the back. What was left was glued to her skin.
Benny looked up the shaft at the rectangular hole above and tried to remember which antique tribe used to paint themselves blue.
She realised that she was standing in an inverted T-junction, horizontal shafts leading off to the left and right. The same concrete walls, inset conduits and xenon strips as the shaft above her.
Concrete walls, she thought. Not a station then, a planet or an asteroid base - the shafts had the look of service tunnels, lighting strips with hard edges, not the diffusion units she was used to. An old-fashioned style, someone had mentioned time travel but how far back?
She remembered a series of boxes within boxes, infinity nesting within the finite, a control room that seemed almost a parody of technology. A figure standing at a console. It too was transdimensional - something monstrous crammed down into a parody of human flesh.
The light came down on her from above, brilliant and ecstatic. The weight of it pressed her down on to her knees. Benny felt as if the light shone right through her like an x-ray laser, heating up her insides and making silhouettes of her bones.
And all the children were there, from the shelter and the long dorm at the academy. Faces as yellowed as the ancient porcelain of the doll that was centrepiece of the trophy cabinet. All those fit young bodies running into the forest, clean limbs and bright eyes waiting for her, waiting for the airburst and the butcher's knife.
Again Benny came out, still standing beneath the shaft, the cold still making the floor vibrate beneath her feet. She felt awfully alone, a deep mammalian need for human contact, for warm skin and the sweet wash of pheremones. Homesick for night-time in the long dorm with the murmur of sleeping children.
Maybe time travel fucks with your mind, thought Benny.
Piraievs
Rain fell on the pitted tarmac of the Akti Miaoulis, it rattled off the rusting steel of the ferries that listed in the grey water of the harbour. A party of archaeologists ran past the tavema, holding sheets of newsfax above their heads to keep the rain off. Kadiatu watched them splashing through the puddles towards the derelict customs house.
'We were talking,' said the Doctor, 'about the meaning of life.' He pushed a square of feta cheese around his plate. They were sitting out on the tavema's veranda which gave them an unequalled view of the crumbling docks. Rain drummed on the thatched roof overhead.
'We were?' said Kadiatu. 'Are you sure?'
The Doctor poured the remains of their second bottle of ouzo into his glass. 'Of course I'm sure. I'm always sure.' He looked around the table. 'At least I'm sure that we need another bottle.'
Kadiatu ordered another bottle of ouzo.
'Do you believe in fate?' asked the Doctor.
'No,' said Kadiatu.
'Pre-destination?'
'Only in game shows.'
The landlord's daughter arrived with the ouzo and thumped it down on the table. Kadiatu managed to grab it before the Doctor and poured herself a drink.
'So why are you here?' asked the Doctor.
Kadiatu held up her glass. 'To get drunk.'
'Why here?'
'Cheapest bar I know.'
'Why am I here then?' asked the Doctor.
'I thought you wanted a drink.'
The Doctor finished his glass and poured some more. 'I never drink,' he said. 'I'm famous for my not drinking.'
'How many bottles so far?'
'This is the fourth,' said the Doctor.
The Doctor was silent for a while, intent on the bottom of his glass. Behind them, from the tavema proper came the sound of dominoes clicking on starched linen. Kadiatu could feel the drink slowly unknotting her stomach. Across the harbour the dirty white apartment blocks clambered through the rain and up the hills to Athens.
'So why are you here?' asked Kadiatu.
'I'm celebrating,' said the Doctor without looking up.
'What are you celebrating?'
'A birthday.'
'Yours?'
'Not exactly.'
'Whose then?'
Kadiatu saw his eyes again as he looked into her face.
'The universe,' he said.
Kadiatu snorted.
'You don't think the universe has a birthday, do you?' said the Doctor. There was an angry edge to his voice. 'Well, it does. In exactly ten minutes the universe will be thirteen billion five hundred million twenty thousand and twelve years old.'
'Maybe we should get it a cake.'
'No,' said the Doctor, 'that wouldn't be a good idea.'
'Why not?'
'You'd never fit all the candles on.' The Doctor poured them both another drink. 'You'd think,' he said, 'that it would be old enough to look after itself
'I always thought it did.'
'You wish."
Kadiatu watched through her drink as the Doctor drained his glass. 'Why do you have two hearts?'
'Because I'm the anomaly, the spanner in the works, the fly in the ointment, the cheese grater in the goldfish bowl.'
'I know what you are,' said Kadiatu.
The Doctor smiled at her and tilted his chair back until ii balanced on two legs. 'Do you', he said, 'really?'
'You're the butterfly wing.'
'I'm nothing of the sort,' said the Doctor rocking back and forth. 'I'm just an old man getting drunk.'
'You're not drunk,' said Kadiatu, 'you're not capable of anything as simple as getting drunk.'
'No?'
'You're just behaving in the manner of someone getting drunk.'
'In that case,' said the Doctor, 'why am I about to pass out?' The Doctor vanished from sight. There was a crash as the chair hit the tiled floor.
Kadiatu carefully stood up and looked over the table. The Doctor was lying on his back, still in the chair. His eyes were closed. He was singing softly to himself, his slurred voice curling upwards like cigarette smoke.
'Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you ...'
Nowhere
Although she knew it to be a lie, the memories Bernice had of her father were always tinged with the golden light of late evening. He smelt of the cologne her mother would synthesize in the kitchen, smiling to herself as she tapped out the puter code. A secret smile with one comer of her mouth higher than the other. The cologne would go into the engraved pewter bottle that had once belonged to her grandmother. When her father went away into space her mother would fold the bottle carefully into his clothes as she slipped them in his vacuum-resistant carryall.
When he left he let Bemie walk with him as far as the transmat. His big gentle hand holding hers as they walked through the sculpture park that fringed the married officers' quarters. She'd wanted him to take her to the play area with its twisted swing and cushion grass but he said he couldn't.
When he came back then, she'd demanded.
Yes, he sai
d, when he came back.
He waved goodbye to Bernice from the transmat's staging platform. The last golden light of the evening lighting up his face, gleaming off his polished silver cap badge.
It was the last time she saw him.
Bernice ran home to her mother whose face had become suddenly grey and pinched.
Lay down your troubles.
The last dying light, changing the silver into gold.
Lay down your troubles, and let me fill you up with certainty.
'Yes,' said Benny, 'certainty.'
The Stop
Zamina bought herself a bag of kola nuts at Tbiisi Central before grabbing the Char'kov-Warazawa-London feeder train She chewed through two waiting for her Central Line connection at Kings Cross. The bitter nuts helped keep her awake and take the semen taste out of her mouth. She waited incognito amongst the commuter crowd, a shapeless tan folding-coat over her working clothes, day-dreaming that she too was travelling back to some arcology on the Plains of Elysium instead of outsystem to the Stop. Everyone groaned loudly when the hologram said 'Unavoidable Delay', all of them made suddenly equal by the vagaries of public transport.
She finished the nuts as the train pulled out of Oberon and spent the last leg of the journey carefully folding the brown paper bag into smaller and .smaller squares. Zamina always kept her bags, saving them until she had a kilo or so to flog down at big market. They were out of the commuter belt now and the carriage was half empty and filled with a grim silence. When the train slid into Lowell an old voicebox always said: 'This train terminates here.'
Terminate was the word. People seemed to pull themselves out on to the platform, reluctantly admitting that this was where they were well and truly terminating.
Roberta was there, propping up the wall by the pawnbroker concession in the ticket office. A half-naked catfood monster was heaped in a fetal position on the concrete beside her, a line of spittle drooling from a slack mouth. Roberta was idly poking the monster in the back with the toe of her boot, considering whether to roll him or not; sometimes even a derelict had something worth stealing. Roberta wasn't happy about waiting all this time for Zamina but two were better than one walking the Stop.
There were more catfood monsters on Main Street. Clumps of them at regular intervals down the sidewalk. 'Got any scrip?' they mumbled as Roberta and Zamina walked past.
'Fuck off,' said Roberta to each of them in turn.
A detox crew in grubby whites were zipping up a body bag on the comer of Main and Percy. Yellow tape was strung out round the crime scene while a battered forensic scanner bobbed uncertainly over the area. A couple of housing authority cops kept a wary eye on the gawkers. Target visors restlessly scanning the blank white faces of the crowd. A detective with a bone-weary stance and a scraped-off masai haircut watched over the drone as it sniffed the ground.
'Ute's dead,' said Roberta as they crossed the road to avoid the cops. 'Happened back of the depot, some kind of structural collapse - really weird.'
The back end of the depot was Dixie territory, Ute was straight-up Afrikaans. 'What was she doing out of area?' said Zamina.
'You know,' said Roberta, 'nothing legal.'
At least half the skylights were out on Williamsberg Avenue creating an evil twilight in the lead up to the projects. Roberta didn't say much as they turned down the walkway to block fifty-six, keeping a wary eye on the shadows. Blocks twenty to ninety-four were solid Afrikaans and Der Broederbund generally kept the streets clear of any action they weren't running themselves. Still there was always the possibility of a raiding party by the Dixie Rebs or Le Penn Freikorps. A couple of girls could get themselves slotted forgetting that.
Zamina and Roberta's flat was on level three, up an evil-smelling concrete stairwell. Roberta lit the way up with a billy-lamp. Holding the heavy vulcanised rubber cylinder above her head, ready to use it as a club if she had to.
'I saw Zak,' said Roberta halfway up the stairs, 'doing it to some monkey in Pei Hai park.'
Zamina said nothing and kept going. Roberta didn't like Zak, didn't like him for proving her wrong. Roberta told the future for pin money, spreading a pack of cards on a scarf of irkutzi silk. Regular cards, not tarot, she had a special pack that came from an extinct casino in Las Vegas, each card neatly punched through the centre. Roberta said they did that when you won big, to kill the luck and to stop you marking the cards. Once when Zamina was stoned she had a vision of a cowboy standing on a high desert plateau, shooting the cards as they tumbled through the air. She knew they did it with a hole punch but sometimes when she was on the edge of waking the cowboy would walk into her dreams on booted feet, lucite and snakeskin burning in a desert sunrise.
Patterns, Roberta said, everything was in the patterns, the relationships between one card and those around it. Like the patterns contained within neural networks, the variegated webs that made up the brain. Roberta had spread the cards for Zak one day and told him straight out that he would die young in the Stop.
But Zak had walked away from the program, from Roberta's sharp little synopsis of life and death in the ghetto, and Roberta had never forgiven him for it.
'Don't you want to know about it?'
Zamina didn't, but she knew Roberta would tell her anyway. There in a grotty stairwell, where the cold moisture slips down the puff concrete walls that are etched with graffiti. About how there she was - trading favours for money in the Constitution Day crowds in Beijing, finishing off a trick in Pei Hai park when she saw Zak with some free squeeze. The slow urgent motion of their bodies drained of colour by the moonlight.
'Give me a break,' said Zamina.
'I'm just getting to the good bit,' said Roberta. A flash of silver amongst the discarded clothes. Roberta creeping over. timing her movements with the hoarse cries of the woman. reaching out a hand to snatch at the bright metal tube.
'What are you going to do with it?' asked Zamina. Moneypens being a difficult prospect at the best of times. 'She's bound to report it stolen.'
'Got to be worth something though,' said Roberta as they finished the last of the stairs.
She was waiting for them outside their flat, a bundle of rags just like any other catfood monster that ever died on a cold landing in the projects. Later Zamina would ask herself how far you could twist the patterns of life to create a coincidence like that. Roberta would have put it down to accumulated karma, just another way in which the fates conspire to fuck you up, but by then Roberta was already dead.
'Hey you,' said Roberta, 'go die on your own porch.'
'Wait up,' said Zamina, 'it moved.'
'So what?'
Zamina squatted by the bundle. It was a woman in a ripped-up jumpsuit. The skin through the rents in the material was coated in a dried layer of blue paint. Zamina sniffed the air cautiously, expecting the usual cocktail of sweat, faeces and cheap protein.
'Let's take her inside.'
'Are you crazy?' said Roberta. 'It'll stink the place out.'
'She don't smell of nothing,' said Zamina, but it wasn't true. The woman smelt of dry dust and snakeskin boots, she smelt of the high plateau of the coyboy's desert. 'Open the door.'
Roberta unlocked the door but didn't help Zamina drag the woman in. As her shoulders crossed the threshold the dried blue paint on the woman's face gently cracked and she smiled.
'I have come to save you all,' she murmured.
'A schizie,' said Roberta. 'That's all we need.'
STS Central - Olympus Mons
They left Old Sam back at the office, jacked into a Hitachi with strict instructions to flatten his alpha waves if he even threatened to wake up. Banked and tranked as Dogface put it. Lambada had wanted Old Sam put on ice for the duration, but it wasn't much of an argument - what they'd seen in Acturus Station was too fresh in their minds.
And there was still no media response to events so far. Even The Bad News Show had shifted smoothly to a standard security raid in some Melbourne township. Local cops banging do
wn doors, wristwired suspects lying face down in the dirt. It could have been edited together out of archive footage.
Only the high-clearance data links gave it away. VIP shuttles and cop-wagons racing down feeders and freight lines, screaming priority signalling overrides that fouled up the network from Thethys to Mogadishu. Sirens echoing down the long non-tunnels of the system. All of them converging on Reykjavik, coagulants on their way to stem the haemorrhage in the body politic.
So the floozies rode the big elevator up to Central in silence until halfway up when Dogface couldn't stand it any longer and asked just how long it took to put together an interim government.
Nobody knew.
When they got to Central, Ming looked almost grateful to see Dogface and anyone glad to see Dogface, thought Blondie, is in big trouble.
They sat around the big analysis tank in the conference room. Credit Card was scaling down the reconstruction of the Stunnel initiation, a twenty-digit time code flicked past microseconds in the left-hand comer.
'There,' said Ming and the simulation froze.
Inside the tank was a simplified three-dimensional representation of flow channels around Acturus Station. The Stunnel carrier wave was a silver thread entered from the top left-hand comer and belled out into a disc at the station gateway. The station itself was a transparent block in the shadow grey that was used to depict 'solid' installations. A spider web of power conduits surrounded the gateway in shades of blue, the lighter the shade the higher the loading. At the point of initiation the web was the colour of summer lightning.
Dogface unfolded his arms and stuck his finger into the jack at the base of the tank. The timecode flicked back a couple of digits and then forward again. Blondie had no idea what they were looking at.
'Enhance that,' said Dogface.
Credit Card thought about it and the silver line of the Stunne' thickened suddenly. Acturus Station was pushed out of the tank by the change of scale. Closer in the Stunnel looked like tube made of open-weave carpet, silver threads weaving in and out representing the shifting multifrequencies of the carrier wave.
'Jesus,' said Lambada softly.