Adrift in the Noösphere (3 page)

Through gritted teeth, she was saying in my inload, “Damn it, Bobby, are you all right? Your vitals look okay. Hang on, I'll be with you in a—”

They hauled me inside again and this time the lift took us down into the basement.

“On my way,” Moira told me. Then, in a softer tone, she said, “Bobby, honey, you done good. Real good. Nine million lives spared. Oh man. When I spring you, we are going to have a party, baby.”

§

“You are the worst kind of terrorist,” Director Vermeer told me in a chill, shaking voice. “In a matter of seconds you destroyed not lives but the very meaning of lives, the certified historical foundation that—”

“So the Martian logs are entirely destroyed?” I tried to rise; two overweight but chunky-muscled guards held me down. At least the functionary I'd stripped of his outer garments wasn't in the room. His pilfered clothing had been taken away and I suppose returned to him, or maybe held for some kind of forensic examination. I'd expected the place to be swarming with firefighters, ladders, gushing hoses, media cameras. No such thing. Evidently the vault room's internal fire protection systems had done the job, but not in time.

“Entirely incinerated, you barbarian.”

“Thank dog for that!”

“And blasphemous mockery on top of this devastation, ‘Professor' Chop.” I could hear the inverted commas. “Oh yes, I wasted no time checking your absurd alibi. The University in Suva has no record of you, no faith exists called Chronosophy, nor is there any Albert M.—”

I chopped him off. “True. I had to deceive you to gain access to those festering Martian plague vectors. You have no idea how lucky you are, Director. How lucky the entire world is.”

“What fresh nonsense is this?”

“In two days' time you'd have—“ There was a knock at the door of the curator's office, a long narrow room decorated with holograms of flaring galaxies, rotating, peeling, multiplying nucleic acids, two lions mating rather terrifyingly again and again in a loop, and other detritus of Installations and Exhibitions past. A woman with a floral skirt down to her wrists said apologetically, “Pardon me, Director, but there's a police Inspector here to speak to the, the prisoner.”

My heart sank. I looked up gloomily, and Moira, in full police uniform worn upside down, but with a peaked cap covering her short red hair, said, “Good afternoon, Director. With your permission, I'd like to speak to this man in private for a moment. Then we'll be taking him across to Police Headquarters where he will be charged with this heinous offense.” She was carrying my backpack.

“Very well, Inspector. I hope to hear a full accounting in due course. This arson is the most egregious—”

My wife shepherded him to the door, and shooed out the guards with him. “Please take a seat, Mr.... What should I call you?” she said for the sake of the Library staff milling on the other side of the closing door. It clicked shut.

“I think you could call me ‘Bobby,' honey. Delighted to see you, but how do we proceed from here? We can't just stroll out and take a tram to the Botanic Gardens.”

“The machine's out the back. No sense mucking around.”

“Who did you clobber, by the way?”

“Some poor cow downstairs. Had to drag her into the loo to get her uniform off her. She's trussed up in one of their quaint cubicles. Someone's bound to find her, if you'll pardon the expression.”

Moira was hyper, on the verge of babbling; she always gets that way when she's pulled off some amazing exploit.

“Okay, sweetie.” I stood up, groaning, and she marched me toward the door in a stern and professional gait. “Lay on, MacDuff.”

The lift took us back to the ground floor, where the director hovered, literally. “We have transport waiting at the back entrance,” Moira told him. “Let's keep this as low profile as possible, no sense getting people hysterical. The brain drain is under sedation, he'll give me no trouble.”

We made our way briskly through confusing corridors to the back, me giving a glazed fish eye to anyone we passed. There was no vehicle, of course, but the drab graveled back space was relieved by a handsome rosebush in a large wooden pot. Nobody was watching us. It's amazing what an air of authority and slight menace can do. We entered the disguised time machine and Moira, in the pilot's seat, took us forward a year. It was three in the morning when we emerged, so the place was deserted. But the city lights were bright in the crisp air, and from somewhere to the northeast we heard music and laughter. No plague. No epidemic of murderous nanomites from Mars. Another horrible future with its teeth pulled, made safe for humankind. Hooray, hooray.

“What's up, sweetie? Let's go back to 2099 and put our feet up.” She started to snigger. “My dog, Bobby, you were a class act with your legs jammed into a sweater and your boof head sticking out of some guy's fly. Come on, what's up?”

“Candidly,” I told her, feeling dreary, “I'm feeling dreary. How stale, flat and unprofitable are the uses of this world.”

“Come on, buddy.” My wife jabbed me in the ribs. She's just a little thing, but her elbow is sharp, even through a stolen blue police skirt. “Remember our motto, and be proud.”

“A stitch in time,” I said without much enthusiasm. It's the nature of our trade. You can change your future but not your own past. So you're obliged to go further and further into the day after the day after, and track down tomorrow's atrocities that can be reversed earlier in unborn histories you've never lived through, have no real stake in. Guardians of time, that's us. We can go home, sure, as far as our first time trip, but no further back than that. No way we can repair the horrors of our own past, the local history that made us: assassinations of the great and good, genocides, terrorist attacks, our own insignificant but painful goofs. It's like something from a Greek tragedy or myth, seems to me sometimes. Doomed to fix everyone else's atrocities and never get any thanks, and no chance to remedy our own mistakes.

But Moira was hugging me, and the sky was clear and filled with faint stars, through the light-spattered towers of Melbourne in 2074, which is more than could be said for some other epochs. So I hugged my wife back, and found myself grinning down at her. “Yeah. Okay. A stitch in time—”

“Saves nine,” she said. “Nine million lives, this time. Maybe our own grand-grandkids, if we decide to. So hey, let's feel good about that, eh?”

“You bet.” I said. I did feel better, a bit. “Party time it is, honey.”

And we fell away into the future, again.

The Beancounter's Cat

A humble beancounter lived in Regio city near the middle of the world. Those of her credentials known outside the Sodality were modest but respectable. By dint of dedicated service and her particular gift, she had won herself a lowly but (she hoped) secure position with the Arxon's considerable staff of publicani. Still, on a certain summer's smorning, she carelessly allowed her heart to be seduced by the sight of a remarkable orange-furred cat, a rough but handsome bully of the back alleys. He stood outside her door, greeting the smallday in fine yodeling voice, claws stropped to a razor finish, whiskers proud like filaments of new brass.

“Here, puss,” she called into the dusty lane.

The beancounter poured milk into a blue-rimmed bowl, inviting this cat inside the doorway of her little house, which was located in the noisy, scrofulous Leechcraft District. She watched the elegant animal lapping, and pressed the palms of her hands together in front of her modest but respectable breast.

“I believe I shall name you Ginger,” she told the cat with considerable satisfaction.

The orange cat sat back and licked his whispers delicately, then bent to attend to his hindquarters, raising one leg. Holding the leg in the air he gave her a sour look.

“For Skydark's sake,” said the cat, “must I abide this arrant sentimentality?” He nosed a little more, then lowered his leg and rose to all four feet, still bristling. “In any event, if you're interested, I already possess a name.”

The beancounter had fallen upon her bottom, goggling at the loquacious and shockingly illegal animal.

“You can spea—” But she cut off the rest of the banal sentence that was about to escape her mouth, which she clamped shut. The cat gave her a sardonic glance and returned to the bowl, polishing off the last of the milk.

“Slightly rancid, but what else can you expect in this weather? Thank you,” he added, and made for the door.

As the luminous tip of his tail vanished, the beancounter cried, “Then what is your name, sir?”

“Marmalade,” the cat said, in a muffled tone. And then he was gone.

§

At the sleeping hour, she sat on piled cushions in a nook, peeling and eating slivers of a ripe golden maloon, and read to herself verses from a sentimental book, for she had nobody else to speak them to her. She read these tender verses by the guttering light of an oil-fruit lamp, the blood mounting in her cheeks. Secretly she knew it was all make-believe and artful compensation for a delayed life held pendant in her late mother's service, and she was ashamed and depressed by her fate. The beancounter was comely enough, but her profession stank in the nostrils of the general company. Suitable men approached her from time to time, in the tavern, perhaps, or at a concert, and expressed an initial interest in flattering terms. Every one of them swiftly recoiled in distaste when he learned of her trade. To a handsome poet she had tried an old justification: “It is a punishment, not a life-long deformity!” The fellow withdrew, refusing her hand.

She put the verses aside and brooded for several moments on the augmented beast. Had it been lurking all this time in the forests, mingling in plain sight with its witless kin of the alleys? It seemed impossible, unless its kind were more intelligent and devious than human people. Could it have fallen from above, from the dark heights above the Heights? Nothing of that kind had been bruited for thousands of years; she had always supposed such notions were the stuff of mythology, invented and retold generation after generation to frighten children and keep them obedient. Yet her mother's Sodality teachings verged on that conceit, if you stopped listening for allegory and metaphor and accepted her teachings at face value.

Bonida shuddered, and lay down on her bedding. Sleep would cure these phantasms.

§

The very next sday, the cat came back. The beancounter awoke, nostrils twitching. The brute had placed a pungent calling card on her doorstep. He sat with his back to her as she opened the door, and finally turned with a lordly demeanor and allowed her to invite him in. She put a small flat plate of offal on the floor next to her kitchen table. The animal sniffed, licked, looked up disdainfully.

“What is this muck?”

She regarded him silently, caught between irritation, amusement, and suppressed excitement. She detected no machine taint, yet surely this was a manifest or, less likely, the luckless victim of one, ensnared in the guise of a beast. She had waited all her life for such an encounter.

After a long moment, the cat added, “Just messin' wid you. Lighten up, woman.” He bent his thickly furred orange head to the plate and gulped down his liver breakfast.

The beancounter broke her own fast with oaten pottage, sliced fruits and the last of the milk (it
was
going off, the cat was right) mixed in a beautifully glowing glazed bowl in radiant reds, with a streak of hot blue, from the kiln in the Crockmakers' Street. She spooned it up swiftly, plunged her bowl and the cat's emptied dish into a wooden pail of water, muttered the cantrip of a household execration, a device of the Sodality. The water hissed into steam, leaving the crockery cleansed but hot.

“Marmalade, if you're going to stay here—”

“Who said anything about staying?” the cat said sharply.

“If, I said. Or even if you mean to visit from time to time, I should introduce myself.” She put out one small hand, fingers blue with ink stains. “I'm Bonida.”

Marmalade consider the fingers, while scratching rapidly for a moment behind his ear. He replied before he was done with his scratch, and the words emerged in a curious burble, as if he were speaking while gargling. “I see. All right.” Somewhat to her surprise, he stood, raised his right front paw with dignity and extended it. Her fingertips scarcely touched the paw before it was withdrawn, not hastily, but fast enough to keep Bonida in her place. She smiled secretly.

“You may sit on my lap if you wish,” she told the cat, moving her legs aside from the table and smoothing her deep blue skirt.

“Surely you jest.” The cat stalked away to investigate a hole in the wainscoting, returned, sat cattycorner from her and groomed diligently. Bonida waited for a time, pleased by the animal's vivid coat, then rose and made herself an infusion of herbs. “So,” the cat said, with some indignation. “You make the offer, you snatch it away.”

“Soon I must leave for my place of employment,” she told him patiently. “If you are still here when I return, there will be a bowl of milk for you.”

“And the lap?”

“You are always welcome on my lap, m'sieur,” she said, and drank down her mug of wake-me-up, coughing hard several times.

“You'd certainly better not be thinking of locking me in!”

“I shall leave a window ajar,” she told him, head reeling slightly from the stimulating beverage. She cleared her throat. “That's dangerous in this neighborhood, you know, but nothing is too good for you, my dear pussycat.”

The cat scowled. “Sarcasm. I suppose that's preferable to foolish sentimental doting. I'll spare you the trouble.” With an athletic spring, he was across the floor and at the door. “Perhaps I'll see you this evening, Bonida Oustorn, so have some more of that guts ready for me.” And was off, just the tip of his orange tail flirted at the jamb, curiously radiant in the dim ruby light of the Skydark.

Bonida stared thoughtfully. “So you knew my name all along,” she murmured, fetching her bonnet. “Passing strange.”

§

Above the great ramparts of the Heights, which themselves plunged upward for twenty-five kilometers, the Skydark was an immense contusion filling most of heaven, rimmed at the horizon by starry blackness. In half a greatday, forty sdays, Regio city would stand beneath another sky displaying blackness entire choked with bright star pinpoints, and a bruised globe half as wide as a man's hand at arm's length, with dull, tilting rings, a diminutive, teasing echo of the Skydark globe itself. Then the Skydark would be lost to sight until its return at dawn, when its faint glow would once again relentlessly drown out the stars, as if it were swallowing them.

These were mysteries beyond any hope of resolution. Others might yet prove more tractable.

The vivid, secret ambition of this woman, masked by an air of diffidence, was to answer just one question, the cornerstone of her late mother's cryptic teaching in the Sodality, and one implication of that answer, whatever it might be: What, precisely, was the nature of the ancient Skyfallen Heights; and from whence (and why) were they fallen? That obscurity was linked by hidden tradition, although in no obvious way, to the ancient allegory of Lalune, the Absent Goddess.

Certainly it had been no part of her speculations, entertained since late childhood, to venture that the key to the mystery might be a cat, one of the supposedly inarticulate creatures from lost Earth, skulking in this city positioned beside the world-girdling and all-but-impassable barrier of the Heights. Now the possibility occurred to her. It seemed too great a coincidence that the orange beast had insinuated himself into her dismal routine in the very week dedicated to the Sodality's summer Plenary. Marmalade had designs upon her.

With an effort, Bonida put these matters out of her mind, patiently showing her identity scars as she entered the guarded portico of the district Revenue Agency. As always, the anteroom to her small office, one of five off a hexagonal ring, stank with the sweat of the wretches awaiting their appointments. She avoided their resentful gaze, their eyes pleading or reddened with weeping and rage. At least nobody was howling at the moment. That would come soon enough. Seated at her desk, check-marking a document of assessment with her inky nib, she read the damning evidence against her first client. Enough pilfering to warrant a death sentence. Bonida closed her eyes, shook her head, sighed once, and called his name and her room number through the annunciator.

“You leave the Arxon no choice,” she told the shaking petitioner. A powerfully built farmer from the marginal croplands along the rim of Cassini Regio, and slightly retarded, Bai Rong Bao had withheld the larger portion of his tax for the tenth part of a greatyear. Was the foolish fellow unaware of the records kept by the bureaucracy, the zeal with which these infractions were pursued and punished? Perhaps not unaware, but somehow capable of suppressing the bleak knowledge of his eventual fate. As, really, were they all, if the doctrines of the Sodality were justified true knowledge, as her mother had insisted.

“I just need more time to pay,” the man was blubbering.

“Yes, farmer Bai, you will indeed pay every pfennig owed. But you have attempted very foolishly to deceive our masters, and you know the penalty for that. One distal phalange.” Her hand was tingling. Her loathing for the task was almost unendurable, but it was her duty to endure it.

“Phal—What's that?” He clutched his hands desperately behind his back. “They say you tear off a hand or a foot. Oh, please, good mistress, I beg you, leave me whole. I will pay! In time. But I cannot work without a foot or a hand.”

“Not so great a penalty as that, farmer. The tip of one finger or toe.” She extended her own hand. “You may choose which one to sacrifice in obedience to the Arxon.” The man was close to fainting. Reaching through depression for some kindness, she told him, “The tip of the smallest finger on the left hand will leave you at only a small disadvantage. Here, put it out to me.” The beancounter took his shaking, roughened hand by the nail-bitten phalange, and held it tightly over the ceramic sluice bowl. She murmured a cantrip, and the machines of the Arxon hummed through her own fingers. The room filled with the sickening stench of rotted meat and she was holding a pitted white bone, her fingers slimy. The farmer lurched away from the desk, shoving the rancid tip of his finger into his mouth like a burned child, flung it away again at the taste. His face was pale. In a moment his rage might outmatch his fear. Bonida wiped her fingers, rose, handed him a document attesting to his payment. “See the nurse on your way out, Mr. Bai. She will bandage your wound.” She laid her hand upon him once again, felt the virtue tremble. “It should bud and regrow itself within a year, or sooner. Here is a word of advice: next season, do not tarry in meeting your obligations. Good sday.”

She poured water into the bowl, washed and dried, then in a muttered flash of steam flushed away the stink of decomposition together with the scum in the bowl. The beancounter sighed, found another bill of particulars, announced the next name. “Ernő Szabó. Office Four.”

§

Marmalade the cat was waiting on her doorstep. He averted his nose.

“Madame, you smell disgusting.”

“I beg your pardon!” Bonida was affronted. From childhood, she had been raised to a strict regimen of hygiene, as befitted a future maiden of the Sodality. Poor as she was, by comparison with the finest in the Regio, nonetheless she insisted on bathing once a sweek at the springs, and was strict with her teeth brushing. Although, admittedly, that onion-flavored brioche at lunch—

“The smell of death clings to you.”

The beancounter squeezed her jaw tight, flung off her bonnet, hitched her provender bag higher on her shoulder. Without thinking, she hid her right hand inside a fold of her robe. Catching herself, she deliberately withdrew it and waved her inky fingers in front of the beast.

“It is my skill, my duty, my profession,” she told him in a thin voice. “If you have objections to my trade, I will not trouble you to share my small repast.” But when she made to open her door, the animal was through it before her, sinuous and sly, for a moment more the quicksilver courtier than the bully.

“Enough of your nonsense,” the cat said, settling on a rug. “Milk, and be quick about it.”

The audacity was breathtaking, and indeed the breath caught for an instant in her throat, then choked out in a guffaw. Shaking her head, Bonida took the stoppered jug from her bag and poured them both a draught. In a vase on the table, nightblooms had sagged, their green leaves parched and drooping.