Context (95 page)

They have mu-space ships!

She knew, but she was going to
keep that knowledge to herself. At least for now.

All
around the humans on the dais, the remaining Zajinets, clothed in a variety of
abstract-sculpture conglomerate forms, began to depart, drifting outwards from
the hall’s centre. Each timed its egress with a wall’s flickering out of
existence, so that no actual openings were necessary.

There was an air of anticlimax.

Behind the dais, the humans’
large personnel carrier, a blank-windowed converted TDV, opened its opaque
doors. Quickly, they began to move inside with a shivering eagerness, desperate
to return to the settlement they normally despised.

You should‘ve killed me, Zajinet.

It brought her here, but let her
live. To avoid a murder charge, instead of kidnapping, in the strange trial
they had just witnessed? The trial from which it had gone free.

But it was responsible for
Anne-Louise’s murder.

And for the death of Luís, the
man she loved.

You really should have killed me.

A
woman called Anita—normally to be found in the company of Oron, a
skimpy-bearded sociologist—pushed her way through the noisy gathering to Ro’s
side.

‘Did you feel it?’ Her dark
brows, which almost met in the middle, were raised in amazement. “Their prayer
energy. It was seventh level, at least.’

‘Amazing,’ said Ro.

‘Would you like to talk it over?’
Anita’s face had grown flushed, as though the invitation were sexually illicit.
‘Oron’s waiting in my room. We could—’

‘No, thanks.’

‘But you’re simpatico, Dorothy. I
can sense it.’

Only Mother calls me that.

‘I need to meditate on it,’ said
Ro. ‘I’m going to pray alone.’

‘Ah, ah. I see.’ Anita withdrew,
confused. ‘Talk to me later.’

Much later.

Ro stood at the periphery, until
the excitement began to die down, and the group broke up slowly of its own
accord, as people began to drift back towards their work.

But
there were some diehards for whom the distraction had been too much. There was
boisterous laughter, and a booming voice called along the silver corridor’s
curved length:

‘Hey, Fluffy! You up for a game
of ping-darts?’

Matheson shook his head. ‘Sorry,
old thing.’ He started to clap a hand on Ro’s shoulder, stopped himself. ‘I’m
going to buy this girl a drink.’

In the otherwise deserted bar, he
fixed two drinks in plastic cups, and he and Ro sat down on opposite sides of a
small round table.

Both drinks were juice-mixes.

‘On the wagon?’ asked Ro.

‘After this morning, no chance.
But it’s a bit early, still.’

‘You’ve been out in the city
before.’

‘I didn’t like it then, either.’
He blew out a long breath. ‘And they weren’t discussing the welfare of one of
my friends, that time.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You, old girl’—he raised his cup:
a mocking toast—‘were the focus of today’s proceedings. Couldn’t you tell?’

‘That’s not true.’

Not from the energy flows. But
their implied regard -inasmuch as they had focused attention: their entire
minds were also their sense organs—had indeed been directed at her from time to
time.

‘Bit of a blistering argument,
among those two fiery Zajinets. I’d love to know what was really going on.’

Has he worked it out?

Ro set her cup down, and spoke
very quietly.

‘It was a trial.’ And, with
bitterness: ‘But the guilty party went free.’

She was sure of it.

That
night, Ro prowled the empty corridors of Watcher’s Bones, until she came to the
area known as Sparks. There was a lock system, but Ro spent only seconds
examining it. She stood before the sensor panel.

Golden scintillations.

It was more complex than the
locking plates she had subverted in Arizona, but she could feel the ebb and
flow of energy, the tiny flux-knots of power—

A blaze of golden light.

Yes.

Fading ...

Then her eyes were shining jet
once more, a glistening black, and the security door was folding open.

In a long cupboard, six empty
env-suits hung like shadowed spectres. None of the gauntlets bore a processor
disk, though each palm held an empty socket.

Damn, damn.

But she analysed the layout, saw
in her mind the quiet movements of the senior researchers, Lila among them.

If I were a disk, where would I
be?

She waved open a lab-bench
drawer, and found the disk. She pocketed it.

Then a strange sound/not-sound
pulsed through the air.

There was a folding/unfolding in
the shining wall before her, as her surroundings began to reconfigure -

It’s not supposed to happen when
someone’s watching.

— and, galvanized, she took the
opportunity and pushed with all her might, impossible strength in her narrow
frame, and the spacetime disturbance caught hold of the lab bench and sucked it
into presumed oblivion, while Ro leaped back to safety.

She laughed quietly, surprising
herself, as the wall shivered into its new configuration and solidified.

Now no-one would know she had
stolen a palm disk.

Off
to one side lay evidence of an experiment in construction: a jumble of
processor blocks, a pile of narrow copper tubing. It seemed an omen, for Ro had
been thinking that a metallic conductor would make the best weapon.

There was a length of copper
which was the right size for a
bo,
the fighting staff of aikido with
which Ro had trained since childhood, and that was the one she picked.

Forgive me, Father.

She did it occasionally: talked
to Dart, to the dead father she had never known, who had sacrificed himself in
mu-space—subsumed within the quasi-sentient energy pattern which had held his
ship and threatened Mother’s—to save his lover and his unborn child.

It was the only form of prayer of
which Ro was capable.

You would not approve of this.

No answer rang back from the
empty metal corridors as she broke into a silent jog, the copper pipe held horizontally
in her hand, like a spear-carrying warrior who was used to moving long
distances, fast, while conserving her true strength for the waiting
battlefield.

<>

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