Memory Seed (4 page)

CHAPTER 4

Zinina checked her augmented kit. It consisted of satchels made of leather and aluminium, individually numbered and tied to a Citadel record. Only revellers failed to carry them in the city, and only revellers failed to understand their worth. Zinina added extras to her kit; a length of nylon rope, two sachets of chemicals to make more rope if need be, various lamps, and a wallet of pyuter gadgets designed to circumnavigate irritating Citadel routines.

It was midnight. Into the rainstorm she stepped, a subdued Graaff-lin at her side. Zinina pulled the draw-strings tight on her hood, checked the ‘ready’ light on her rifle, and headed out into the alley.

They splashed up Hog Street. A unit of defenders, grime streaking their exhausted faces, jogged by on some errand. On walls Zinina noticed sniffer slugs – the great foot-long black products of some subterranean sewer in Ixia Street – following the slime trails of snails, noticing too how they trapped their prey, crushed their shells and ate them. Up above she noticed the orange spark of a hang-glider engine. And, far away, glimpses of black in the softly glowing sea indicated the arrival of giant turtles to the shores of Kray.

They hastened north, passing through the Mercantile Quarter, then making along Culverkeys Street until they arrived at the border of Kray’s least populous area, the Gardens.

Nearby lay nine dead solar mirrors and Kray’s ailing Power Station. This was an old area. Zinina stamped her feet and waited for Graaff-lin to catch up.

She smelled menthol. It was just a sweet hint in the melange of methane and rot, but she recognised it. She peered through the rain. A few hooded figures splashed along the street, but nobody she recognised.

The moment passed. Thunder rolled far off. Graaff-lin slipped from a passage and ran up to her. ‘You beat me to it,’ she said with a thick cough. Zinina noticed an antibiotic pad clipped to her mouth and two aerated lozenges in each nostril, a sure sign that Graaff-lin was ill. She wondered if her spluttering, pale, wasted-looking companion was up to the task ahead.

‘Are you fit?’ she asked.

‘Yes. It’s the sudden chill. I’m wearing a heated jumpsuit. I’m sorry I stopped, but I had to put this pad in my mouth.’

Zinina nodded. ‘Got all your pyuter things? Odds and stuff?’

‘I am ready,’ Graaff-lin replied.

Zinina led Graaff-lin to a narrow passage and pointed out the concrete rubbish dump. ‘This is a dead end. See that rusty steel cover? It’s our way in. Follow me.’

Graaff-lin did as she was bid, swallowing a handful of pills while Zinina produced an iron rod to prise out the cover. Sheets of green water hindered Zinina, but most of it swirled into the hole created as she pulled up the cover. ‘Jus’ jump,’ she said, shining a bacteria torch into the hole. ‘It’s only a couple of yards. Go on, I’ll follow.’

Once Graaff-lin had entered Zinina followed, pulling back the cover behind her. She looked around. In the azure light of her torch she saw rusty pyutons, wood cases, streaks of mould, and a quantity of water in puddles. The place seemed not too decayed, though, which came as a relief.

‘I’ll light a lamp,’ Graaff-lin said. Yellow light merged with the blue.

Only one exit presented itself. This led into a similar room, dryer but dustier, and looking back they could see clouds of dust rising and settling. ‘On into that tunnel,’ Zinina said, leading the way. For five hundred yards they walked, until they entered a third room with no exit bar a trapdoor. This Zinina hauled up. She dropped herself into the room below.

‘How far now?’ Graaff-lin asked.

‘Long way. Come on.’

The fourth room, a chamber that, judging by the smashed wall-mounted screens and the long, centrally placed table, seemed once to have been a meeting place, led into a fifth room. This too had a trapdoor. Zinina lay on the chilly concrete and listened at the plastic cover. A low hum. There seemed also to be a higher-pitched buzzing.

She looked at Graaff-lin. ‘Let’s wait, eh?’

A nervous Graaff-lin approached and crouched by Zinina, her knees creaking. ‘Why? Is everything all right?’

‘Sure it is. But I can hear the grumble of auto-pallets and other light stuff below. I’d rather wait ’til the tunnel’s clear.’

‘And the tunnel below us now is the one leading under the Citadel?’

‘Yeah. There’ll probably be quite a climb at the end. It’s basically a service link.’

Graaff-lin stared into Zinina’s eyes, and Zinina caught a sudden glimpse of the aamlon’s religious intensity. ‘Just how did you come to know of this secret entrance?’

Zinina shrugged, shifting her kit into a more comfortable position. ‘I was Citadel Guard, y’know. When you work in the Citadel you trade secrets. Secrets are the currency over there.’

‘And this is one of yours?’

‘I know the tunnel from the other end, and I later found out where those meeting shelters back there came out. This tunnel goes under the Andromeda Quarter and reaches the Power Station.’

As Zinina placed her ear to the cover once again, Graaff-lin reached out to stroke her neck and head. ‘You are a lovely woman, Zinina. Did you really work as a guard?’

Zinina paused, looked into the aamlon’s eyes. ‘I just did the job to get closer to the centre of things. And for the safety, of course.’

‘I am not sure it is safer within the Citadel,’ Graaff-lin mused, her eyes taking a faraway look.

‘Everything I’ve told you is true,’ Zinina said, wanting to make the most of the feeling that had come upon them.

‘Yes, we’ve both got the same aim. To find out
more.
Come on.’

Zinina sprang to her feet and pulled up the cover. A metal ladder allowed them to descend.

Immediately the atmosphere of the tunnel attacked them. It was hot, with a strong chemical smell that seemed to make the place as dead as an oven. All around them cables were strung, some as thick as tree trunks snaking across the floor, others thin or just bare wires. And everywhere there lay glittering junction boxes, hastily screwed repairs, and piles of rubble. A glinting monoline ran along the bottom. Pin-point lights added to the illumination provided by the bacteria torch and the lamp. It was a claustrophobic place, chaotic and unpleasant. They began to walk, but soon the heat made Zinina’s jump-suit unbearable. Graaff-lin was sweating, and her face was flushed dark in the blue light, as though she was bruised.

‘Gotta take this off,’ Zinina gasped. She flung aside her protectives and struggled out of the one-piece, folding both and stowing them on a power converter, then pulling her boots back on. Graaff-lin did likewise, and Zinina was surprised to see that her underwear was rather more colourful than her personality. In fact, it seemed of jannitta origin. Zinina, by contrast, wore a single vest garment, grey and sweaty. Graaff-lin was very thin, her hip-bones clearly defined, her thighs thin, ribs showing, and Zinina found it hard to mask the revulsion she felt at the sight. Graaff-lin showed no womanly belly, and Zinina wondered if the aamlon was sterile. Most probably she was. They walked on. In underwear and high boots they both looked silly, and they laughed at one another.

After an hour Zinina was disconcerted to see a black hatch that signified the entrance to the Citadel. She had never walked this tunnel – and now Graaff-lin had spotted the confusion that plagued her.

‘Zinina, I thought you remarked that we would climb up underneath the Citadel?’

‘I did… we should have. We must be at the same level as the ordinary city, unless there’s been a tiny slope up all the way.’

Graaff-lin pointed. ‘That is the correct hatch?’

‘Sure. I know it. I’ve seen plans, pictures. See that number? Hatch DDG/54. That’ll take us into the Citadel pyuter zone.’

Graaff-lin seemed unconvinced.

‘Look,’ Zinina said, adopting a wheedling voice, ‘I’ve seen this hatch lots of times. There’s a little tunnel, then we drop down into a chamber. I’ve never been inside, but it’s there. We’ve come this far, we gotta go on.’

‘All right,” said Graaff-lin, ‘but you go first.’

Zinina pulled off the hatch, reached inside for the security bud, and squeezed to disable the alarm. She jumped inside, trying to impress Graaff-lin with her physicality in order to reassure her, and turned to help her friend up.

‘That’s it. Just follow me,’ she said.

Zinina crawled to the end of the tunnel. There was a hatch at the end, which she pushed off.

‘Rien Zir! The whole place is gold.’

She jumped out of the tunnel into a chamber like the inside of a honeycomb. The floor was pitted, and the chamber’s three exits seemed to lead off at odd angles. It was as if the place had been moulded by the work of some giant insect burrowing at random. The walls, which on one side were thin enough to be translucent, were covered with cryptic bas-relief designs in such a way that the surfaces were all mellow ochre, but the raised edges were crimson. Looking close by a wall gave the strange impression of the structure curving in the opposite direction to that of reality.

The chamber was empty. Zinina took out a purse of miniature catseyes and placed one at an exit. ‘This is so we don’t get lost,’ she explained.

Graaff-lin produced a map pyuter from her kit and clipped it to her bra strap. ‘This will map us automatically. I thought we agreed to use it?’

Zinina, who distrusted much technology, particularly the older things that nobody knew how to work any more, glanced at the pyuter. Sceptically she replied, ‘If you don’t mind we’ll use both methods.’

Graaff-lin agreed, but was clearly irritated.

They walked into the next chamber. There was a sweet odour in both chambers – not honey, rather something more herbal, that reminded Zinina of her days patrolling the Citadel. She wondered if it was a drug. ‘I wonder if we’re far under the Citadel,’ she mused. ‘Nobody except them in the Red Brigade is supposed to know how many floors there are underneath the streets. I reckon we’re right in the heart of the place. I reckon this whole tumulus is bubbly inside, don’t you?’

‘It certainly might be.’

They explored further, Zinina dropping catseyes at the borders between chambers. As they penetrated further, the rooms began to contain things, pyuters mostly, or so Graaff-lin said. There were clusters of giant mushrooms with perspex tops, spirals of ultramarine weed hanging from the ceiling and pulsing with light – optical processing units, Graaff-lin said, grown from the seeds of mutated banana trees – and there were many screens, each individual, each flickering with multiple layers of information, like the turbid depths of a river. Zinina pressed her eyes against these screens to see the deepest layers possible, but she always received the impression that much more knowledge dwelt inside the velvety disks.

Graaff-lin settled in a chamber that contained a pool surrounded by mushroom-pyuters. ‘I think it is time to tap into their sources,’ she said.

‘Go ahead,’ Zinina encouraged, sitting cross-legged to keep watch, a thrumming needle rifle in her lap.

Silence fell. Graaff-lin spoke to the pyuter networks, pressing portions of the perspex occasionally, but mostly communicating in aamlon. Zinina recognised many words because of their similarity to Kray tongue. She kept one eye on a small screen nearby, mounted on a pole.

Graaff-lin didn’t speak for a minute, then said, ‘This is becoming very complex. I’m not sure what I’ve discovered... What time is it? Is it time to go?’

‘An hour or so left,’ Zinina replied.

The minutes passed. Zinina estimated that the night had three hours to run. She looked around. The nearest wall was eggshell thin, light from behind making it glow and sparkle like jaundiced opal. She turned her gaze to the screen. A sentence flashed by.

‘Graaff-lin?’

‘Mmmm?’

‘I thought it said “dwan” just then.’

Graaff-lin paused. She seemed tired. There were black circles under her eyes, and those eyes seemed to have lost their shine. ‘It may have. Wait, there may be a lexicon. I suppose I could ask.’

‘Yes, ask.’

‘A dwan, apparently, is a garden for noophytes.’

‘And what’s a noophyte?’

‘I don’t know. It is not listed. But look at this map.’

Zinina moved closer to the screen. ‘This is the Citadel, this circle here. What do you suppose all these lines are, radiating out from it?’

‘Dunno.’

‘I think they’re pyuter mainlines. I’m going to take a copy of this.’

Graaff-lin rummaged through her kit once more and produced a sheet of plastic, which she shook the dust from. ‘This will copy the screen. It’s the old saliva type. Would you, er, mind?’

Zinina did not follow. ‘Mind what?’

‘Just spit on it. I’ve got a touch of ‘flu, you see.’

Zinina spat on the plastic, and was disconcerted to see a faint green trail as the saliva fell. Graaff-lin shook the sheet and the fluid spread like a drop of oil on water. Then she pressed the plastic to the screen, waited, and pulled it off. There was a crackle of static.

‘There.’ Graaff-lin held it up to the light. A colour copy of the pyuter image had been made.

‘What else have you discovered?’ asked Zinina.

‘These noophytes seem to be repositories of knowledge. But information is limited. It is almost as if the noophytes navigate the shafts and lodes of data in this place, and have a say in how it exists.’

Zinina shivered. She felt cold. ‘You mean they’re alive?’

‘I think probably not, although one seems to have been given the name Laspetosyne... Laspetosyne, the name means nothing to me. Most likely they are gargantuan memories that have some sort of defence system. This makes a sort of sense. She who controls knowledge controls people. Knowledge is domination, Zinina.’

‘Look some more,’ Zinina urged.

Graaff-lin did so. As the hour came to a close, however, she gasped, and sat back from the mushroom she was talking with.

‘What?’ Zinina said, clutching Graaff-lin’s shoulder.

‘My temple. The Dodspaat temple is part of this system.’

‘I don’t follow.’

Graaff-lin moved away from the pool. ‘I must have been mistaken. I was trying to find out if the Portreeve’s plan controlled individual people. I ignored the Portreeve and the Red Brigade and there seemed to be a connection with my temple. No, it cannot be. Anyhow, I have lost the link. It’s like trying to build a house with the aerial seeds of dandelions–’