Absorption (27 page)

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Authors: John Meaney

BOOK: Absorption
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And then the night became strange.
 
‘
What? Where in realspace is this?
’
 
The figure was translucent, clad in black with eyes to match, and she knew the face, remembered him from dreams; but she was not the only one to see him now.
 
‘Help us,’ Gavriela said to him.
 
‘
How?
’
 
But he already had, causing the three attackers to stop, the big man tripping on something - a pile of soil beside an empty grave - and then Dmitri leaped forward, hands flashing downward then cutting curves through the air, making figure-eights; and then the second man was done as well, before Gavriela had processed what was happening.
 
The last attacker stopped, half turned, and began to run; but silver moonlight flowed through the air and then there was a
thunk
, a sound straight from the butcher’s shop when a housewife orders a prime cut; and then the man crumbled.
 
Dmitri walked forward, stood on the corpse’s back, and yanked his blade free from the neck. He wiped the blade, along with its twin in his other hand, on the dead man’s coat; then he tucked his hands inside his overcoat and the weapons were gone.
 
The jet-eyed apparition looked appalled.
 
‘
You’re one of—
’
 
Then he rippled apart and was gone.
 
 
All she could do was take this Dmitri home: whether for his protection or her own, she could not tell. Outside the front door, he took her sleeve as she had taken his earlier.
 
‘Do me a favour, Fräulein Wolf. Call me Jürgen, all right? Jürgen Schäffer-Braun.’
 
‘You said your name was Dmitri.’
 
‘It is in fact, but I’ve no idea why I told you.’ His voice slowed, his Hochdeutsch becoming crisper. ‘The truth and my identification papers have little in common.’
 
At that point she realized that his voice had evinced a trace accent earlier, under stress.
 
‘You’re a Bolshevik?’
 
‘I’m no friend of bastards like the Sturmabteilung, for sure.’
 
‘The who?’
 
‘Never mind. Are you going to knock? Or do you have a key?’
 
‘Tell me.’
 
‘You met three of their about-to-be recruits in the graveyard. The SA. Once they join up they get those stylish brown shirts.’
 
‘Oh. Them.’
 
‘What I don’t know is why they stopped dead.’
 
‘You didn’t see the—’
 
‘See what?’
 
‘I mean, you didn’t see anything either. I thought they caught sight of a ghost. That is, from the way they acted.’
 
‘Hmm. Well, are you going to knock, Fräulein?’
 
‘As it happens, I do have a key.’
 
They went inside. She did not trust him; but he should not be wandering the streets alone, not tonight.
 
But after what he did . . . With the knives . . .
 
His overcoat should have been spattered with arterial blood, but it appeared unmarked save for an ordinary grease stain near the hem. Had she imagined the knife fight, too?
 
No. It happened.
 
She had witnessed murder, but it seemed unreal.
 
‘Father, this is, er, Jürgen. He helped me earlier.’
 
‘Helped you?’
 
‘It is not entirely safe, sir,’ said Dmitri. ‘But she was only a little lost.’
 
‘Come in.’ Father’s gaze slid towards Mother, then to the ceiling, in the direction of Erik’s room where he still lay injured. ‘We’ll have some cognac.’
 
If he had his own opinion about how likely Gavriela was to be lost in her hometown, he would voice it later, not now.
 
‘That would be marvellous, sir.’
 
In the front parlour, everyone gathered, including the lovely Ilse, Erik’s fiancée who seemed perfect for him. Gavriela felt she had gained a sister.
 
Tonight’s discussion was comfortingly domestic - about the current prosperity, which Dmitri (still calling himself Jürgen) claimed was due to Anglo-American loans propping up the German economy, loans which could always be called in; while Father agreed about the international agreements but not about the likelihood of their ever failing.
 
None of it seemed to have anything to do with a world of graveyards and apparitions, orators surrounded by impossible darkness, reified visions taking root in men’s minds, or three dead bodies lying in the night.
 
‘Everyone,’ said Dmitri finally, ‘I’m so very pleased to make your acquaintance, but I must be gone. Thank you so very much.’
 
As he stood up, Ilse cocked her head, and looked from him to Gavriela and back.
 
‘You know, Jürgen, never mind Erik.
You
and Gavriela could be brother and sister.’
 
Dmitri stared at Gavriela; she stared at him.
 
‘I fear that’s no compliment,’ said Dmitri finally.
 
‘But she has a point.’ Father smiled at Ilse. ‘You have a good eye, my dear.’
 
It was nice that he approved of her.
 
Mother said to him: ‘It’s your father that Gavi follows in looks, don’t you think?’
 
‘Are you Jewish, Jürgen?’ asked Ilse. ‘It’s all right if you’re not, because unfortunately I’m Gentile myself.’
 
‘Not as far as I know.’
 
‘My ancestors,’ said Father, ‘were Vikings, I’ll have you know. Some of them, anyhow.’
 
‘I don’t see how mine could have been.’ Dmitri laughed. ‘But we’ll never know what our forebears got up to, will we?’
 
Mother frowned, disapproving of risqué humour, or the hint of it.
 
‘Excuse me, Frau Wolf.’ Dmitri gave a Prussian bow. ‘I’m fatigued after a long day, as I’m sure you must be. Goodnight, everyone.’
 
‘Goodnight.’
 
Gavriela escorted him to the door. He went out, checked the street, and nodded.
 
‘I’ll be safe, I think.’
 
For a second, dark flecks seemed to move through his eyes; then they looked normal.
 
‘What are you going to do about tonight?’ she asked.
 
‘Perhaps a little counter-agitation. Their movement is not powerful, not yet.’
 
She had been thinking of the men he had killed; but there was the other thing as well.
 
‘The speaker tonight was persuasive.’
 
‘Ach, yes. Have you heard of Gustav Lebon? He theorized that a mob thinks with a single mind. I never quite believed it before.’
 
‘But the vision that he—that he created overhead. I mean, um, in their minds.’
 
Dmitri sucked in a breath.
 
‘So you did see it, Gavriela Wolf. I wondered if you did.’
 
‘The visions are real?’
 
‘Yes, but only some of us can.... No. Excuse me, I’ve made a mistake.’
 
His expression, half lit by the nearest streetlamp, half in shadow, was shutting down.
 
‘What kind of mistake?’
 
‘We’re different.’
 
‘What does that—?’
 
But his coat, undone, whirled around him like a cloak as he turned. Then he was striding into darkness, and for a moment he seemed to have vanished before reaching the street corner; but she was tired and in some kind of shock, her eyes barely able to focus, so who knew what she had seen?
 
She went back inside to the comfort of her family home, a comfort that once felt eternally stable, but now seemed a cracked stone fortress built on shifting ground, deep inside an earthquake zone.
 
NINETEEN
 
LABYRINTH, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
 
This was how Roger’s dream went.
 
First there was the calling, her sweet voice reaching for him.
 
‘
Help me. Roger, help me!
’
 
And the dark cemetery all around, like some nightmare from history, prompting his panicked question: ‘What? Where in realspace is this?’
 
But
she
was there, the one whose name he knew, somewhere in his mind.
 
‘
Help us,
’ she said.
 
‘How?’
 
Then the ghostly figures were in shock - because of him? - and suddenly everything changed as a cloaked figure - no, a man in a billowing overcoat - leaped
through
Roger -
am I dead?
- and his hands flashed silver with reflected moonlight, like the martial-dance motions Roger drilled over and over but had never used for real; because these were knife-blades and those were flesh-and-blood men; and in a few seconds they were dead.
 
One of them died with a thrown blade piercing his cervical vertebrae. Roger had some idea how difficult it was to hurl a weapon at a moving target; he could not have done it even if the man had been still.
 
The knifeman had saved the girl, or woman, whatever, and whatever her name was. Then he turned.
 
Blackness rotated in his eyes.
 
‘You’re one of them!’ Roger yelled, but halfway through the words something yanked the night away, the cemetery spiralled into nothingness, and he popped out of nightmare, fully awake and wondering at the content of his own exclamation.
 
His room was a marvel of silver and gold, lined with panels whose infinitely recursive designs could not be painted in realspace; and it was furnished with every convenience: food and infocrystals available through fist-sized portals in the air. By Labyrinthine standards it was economy class; for him it was luxury.
 
Against it, the memory of Lucis City and its quickglass towers became ordinary. Or perhaps all humans, including the Pilot variety, were ingrates, forgetting that most generations scrabbled in poverty and died young, that the ancestor species foraged in undergrowth and ran or climbed from predators, everything raw and immediate and simple.
 
Dazed by a change of universe and the weird philosophical notions spinning in his head, he scarcely noticed the fading memory of dream, and those awful graveyard surroundings, cooked up perhaps by his work on the Zürich simulation for Dr Helsen, the simulation that he knew with too much accuracy - for he had worked on coding characters, not historic streets and buildings - for Dr Helsen, she of the darkness, the strangeness . . .
 
When he slipped back into sleep, it was dreamless.
 
TWENTY
 
EARTH, 777 AD
 
Nine days before they left for the chieftains’ gathering, Chief Folkvar ordered Ulfr to meet him at dawn on Heimdall’s Rock, a promontory that overlooked not just the settlement but the whole valley. Using a willow-twig to clean his teeth as he walked, Ulfr wondered what was going on. Beside him, Brandr walked with his tail wagging, unconcerned.
 
Perhaps Ulfr could learn some lessons from his warhound.
 
Early though he was, Chief Folkvar was already at Heimdall’s Rock, fur-cloaked and bear-like. It was not a comparison that would have found favour, for a bear was no warrior spirit.
 
Unlike me.
 
But whoever named Ulfr could not have known his fate or character in advance. No one could anticipate the Norns.
 
‘The men are practising,’ said Folkvar. ‘I told them to.’
 
‘But not me, chief?’
 
‘I mostly practise alone, with stones and against the post.’
 
Folkvar meant small boulders for lifting and hurling, the upright oak post for straining against and striking. The post was a wrestler that could not be thrown, a warrior that could not be knocked down.

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