Xenoform (22 page)

Tec jumped as if he had touched a live electrical contact amongst the jumble on his desk and turned round. His stubbled face cracked in a relieved grin. ‘Hey, guys,’ he greeted them and they could see the frenzied intelligence that capered behind his eyes. His head was a shimmering glitter of contradictory colours.

‘Hey, Tec,’ they responded variously.

‘Come in,’ he invited, as if the process of squeezing another three human beings into the tiny room was actually an easy one. They shuffled around each other like the tiles of a sliding puzzle, Whistler ending up next to Tec and the others crammed just inside the doorway. Roberts leant against a shelving unit which shifted. A drift of tiny components and miniature electronics tools slid off the shelf and became one with the mass of similar items on the floor. Roberts looked sheepish and stood up straight. Tec held his tongue although a stripe of irate red blazed down the centre of his head.

‘So what’s up with this guy?’ asked Whistler, aware that she might not really want to hear the answer now, at nine in the morning, which sounded to her pretty undeniably like bed time.

Tec puffed his cheeks out as if to say
What
isn’t
up with the guy?
and answered in a rattling blur of something that was certainly English but that Whistler had the most inordinate difficulty in following: ‘Well, he came here via the sewer system, and frankly he was damned lucky to make it with some of the shit that lives down there, and he’s apparently on the run from some sinister agency or other, he’s been working for them, he says, but even he doesn’t know who they really are, he’s some insane computer hacker, I mean some of the stuff he’s shown me is off the scale, the guy is simply a genius, but he says there’s some
thing
in the net, he believes the people he was working for are behind it, but he also thinks he helped to
prime
it himself, somehow, and this thing might have put a virus in his head, he reckons, he was scared half to death when we let him in, if Jalan hadn’t sent him, I don’t know that we wouldn’t have let the guns eat him, I’ve been running all sorts of diagnostics on him, he’s got some fucking chip in his head that he
made himself
, but so far we haven’t–’

Whistler held up her hands to stop him. ‘Wow, Tec, man, I know you’re saying things, but frankly I’ve no fucking idea what they might be, let alone mean. As long as everything’s under control, tell me in the morning.’ She started to rise.

‘
It
is
the morning,’ said Tec, deflated, the lights slowing to a standstill on his skull.

‘
Tomorrow
morning, then,’ said Whistler, placing a conciliatory hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m done in. Take care with this guy, Tec, he sounds off his rocker.’

‘Sure,’ Tec said, smiling. ‘Junior’s chaperoning him – I’ve got vid-feed from it, but frankly it’s only a gesture. I’m sure he could just take the robot out by wireless in a thousandth of a second, but anyway he’s–’

‘Just don’t get us into anything else that’s out of our league, okay?’

‘As if,’ he answered, already turning back to his console, one hand idly finding a smouldering reeferette roach in an ashtray beside him.

‘Where is the guy now?’

‘He’s sleeping in the big room,’ said Tec’s voice while Tec’s attention was focused upon the console.

‘Where’s Spider?’

‘Playing with his mag-rifle, I think. He’s been up for hours, in his room if you want him.’

‘No, it’s okay. See you later, then.’

‘Bye,’ he said simply.

Whistler, Sofi and Roberts sloped off to their respective beds. As soon as Whistler’s head contacted her pillow her mind simply, mercifully, switched off and she fell instantly, fully clothed, into a state of near-comatose slumber.

Astalle sat on the glasspex chair next to her daughter, Izzy, and let the table surprise her with its breakfast recommendation. She reached across and tousled Izzy’s hair – a gesture of affection that she seemed powerless to stop herself from doing, even though Izzy was six now and openly objected to it. ‘
Muuumm
!’ she protested and twisted in her chair to avoid the tousling hand.

‘Morning, petal. Been up for long?’

‘Yeah,’ said Izzy, nibbling delicately and somewhat disinterestedly on the corner of a piece of cinnamon toast. Astalle trusted Izzy to rouse herself in the morning and they were used to meeting at the breakfast table in this manner. Izzy was very sensible for her age and could be relied upon to take herself to the toilet and head off to the kitchen to sit at the table, which would fix breakfast for her, and watch the holo until Astalle got up. She knew that Izzy would wake her if she needed to. She had in fact done so the two previous nights, but maybe that was over now.

‘Yeah?’ A bowl of cereal rose from the table just in front of Astalle with the understated subtlety of true high-tech. Astalle considered it the sign of a quality gadget when said gadget tried to do its job as unobtrusively as possible, rather than demanding input and acknowledgement all the time. The breakfast table was one such device, and Astalle was very fond of it – it simply did its job, correctly, and never needed anything. Another by-product of her husband’s lucrative if time-consuming job at the space port. Derech was an ion drive engineer there – actually quite a wide spectrum of specialisation, and one essential to the space industry. On the downside, he practically lived at the place when the launch schedule was heavy, as now. In fact, it had never been as heavy as now. ‘How long? This still your first breakfast?’ Astalle was consistently amazed at her daughter’s ability to eat round after round of breakfast, stopping only when the day’s schedule necessitated it.

‘Few hours. First breakfast, yeah.’

Astalle noticed then how tired Izzy’s small face appeared beneath the thick mass of curls that she had inherited from Astalle herself. She leaned inside the angle of cover provided by that shock of chestnut hair and looked into Izzy’s eyes. ‘Bad dreams again, honey?’ She pulled her bowl of cereal closer and picked up the spoon, but didn’t begin to eat yet.

‘
They’re
not
dreams, Mummy,’ said Izzy, her tone suggesting that she was labouring to be polite to a truly stupid person. She looked away from Astalle, trying to see the holo that danced in the centre of the luxuriant carpet through her mother’s inconvenient physical presence.

‘No?’ Astalle was not sure how to proceed from here. For the last three nights now Izzy had slept poorly. The two previous nights she had woken Astalle from where she slept alone in her double bed, crying and uncharacteristically frightened. Last night she had clearly not bothered, for whatever reason. Perhaps she had given up on receiving help with her monster problem. The thought that her six-year-old daughter might come to a point of such resignation at her tender years saddened her deeply, reminding her that youth – not physical youth, but spiritual youth – was a fragile thing, indeed, and could be broken by the slightest knock. ‘You can come to me if you’re frightened, Izzy, okay?’

‘
Okay, Mummy.’ Izzy chewed slowly. Her dark, almond-shaped eyes were beautiful and sad in the morning light that came sheeting in through the crystal glass wall of the second-floor apartment. Cable cars glided silently past outside, their chromed skins flashing greyly in the weak sun. From Astalle’s kitchen she could just make out the forms of suited city execs crammed into the cars like toy soldiers packed into boxes. Another lightpusher was disappearing through the troposphere atop a gently curving contrail, its massive hull now barely visible as a speck of milky light. At least her husband wasn’t actually
on
one of the damn things.

Astalle dived the spoon into the cereal and began to eat, watching Izzy out the corner of her eye. The child was listless, depressed-looking. She nibbled the edge of her toast slowly, distantly. The Holo-Bobs capered brightly across the self-cleaning kitchen carpet, regarded expressionlessly by Izzy. The show was really too young for Izzy now, but Astalle endeavoured not to influence her daughter’s tastes, and if she still liked the Holo-Bobs that was all good.

After a while Izzy said, ‘The monster was outside again, on the lawn. It looked different, but it was the same monster. I know. It came right up close to the building. I couldn’t sleep after I saw it. I read some books then got up.’ She related this information dispassionately, like a news reporter, eyes focused on the holo.

‘Oh, honey,’ said Astalle, saddened, irritated and filled with simple love all at the same time. ‘Monsters aren’t real, you know. There isn’t anything out there. I know dreams can be very convincing, but–’

‘Mummy, I said I wasn’t sleeping. I was awake. I watched it,’ said Izzy in a small, dejected voice. Her tiny, perfect teeth took another nip at the corner of her toast.

‘What was it doing?’ asked Astalle, exasperated now, looking for an angle to refute her daughter’s imaginings.

‘
It was eating the trees,’ said Izzy simply.

Whistler awoke gradually, luxuriantly, floating up towards consciousness through felty layers of increasing brightness. Usually the day’s business swarmed into her mind at the very first waking moment, but this morning she felt contented and at peace. She was aware that the world loomed uncertain and threatening around her, yet a silken calm was on her like a comforting blanket. The light in the room, synched to the natural light outside, as relayed from a sensor on the building’s roof, was pale grey and metallic – it was a cool, peaceful light – a light to reason by. Whistler lay for a while, enjoying the plushness of her thick covers, stretching her limbs into different arrangements and resting for a moment in each position, relishing the sleek, tight feel of her own body, the way the tension seemed to bleed out of her muscles, into the air and then away as she tensed and relaxed them. The strange events of the night when they had visited Haspan seemed as if they had happened to another version of herself. Her mind felt fresh and logical again.

After a while she edged herself out of bed with determined slowness: One leg out, foot on the carpet, other leg out, shuffle to edge of bed, slowly sit on edge of bed, stand. Pause. She undressed, letting her clothes slough away like shed skin, leaving them where they fell. She examined her body, amazed at how well it felt, when it had felt so tired and ill-used at the time she had finally crashed out. There was a pinched, purplish bruise above her right breast, which she hadn’t noticed before. Maybe Spake had grabbed her there in his panic. Otherwise fine. She stretched up tall on the toes of one foot and turned in a perfect, slow motion spinning kick, poised perfectly like a ballerina, full circle, and then relaxed to stand at ease again. She admired her own smooth, blue-lined, grey-skinned form in the mirror for a moment and then began to dig around for fresh – or at least
fresher
– clothes. She found matt-black plastic trousers and a khaki combat-top that didn’t actually smell bad and dressed in them. She noticed that the illuminated readout behind the glass of the mirror confirmed that she had slept for almost a full twenty-four hours.
Good
, she thought.
If being your own boss doesn’t get you a full day in bed now and again, then what really is the point?

Whistler’s stomach growled loudly, reminding her of the next pressing item of business:
Breakfast
! Yesterday’s Get-Up had long since worn off and this always left her ravenous, even without a full day of starvation. Thoughts of toast soldiers and mugs of coffee danced across her mind, calling her irresistibly towards the mezzanine kitchen.

When she headed into the corridor she noticed that the light was on in Tec’s lab. Despite her hunger she was interested enough to poke her head into the room. Tec was sitting face to face with a slightly-built young man with long blond hair. The young man was wearing some of Tec’s old clothes – Whistler recognised the T-shirt with the shifting Mandelbrot fractal – but was otherwise unfamiliar. So this was the stray they had taken in. The two men both had their eyes closed and were joined together by a tangled hi-flo. A branch from the cable led to a pile of computers on Tec’s desk. Numbers swarmed across the screens in the corner, faster than the eye could follow. Whistler leaned against the door frame and watched them. The two men were frozen in place – only the numbers on the screen moved.

Whistler stepped cautiously into the room, not wanting to distract them from whatever they were doing. Tec’s skull-lights were blinking with surprising slowness, mostly green. They gradually faded in and out, indicative of a thoughtful, calm state of mind, barring the occasional flickers of orange that died as quickly as sparks. Tec was deep in the zone. His hands lay still upon his knees. The net-connection light on the nape of his neck, unusually, was off. Whistler padded silently around him to see the face of the man he was wired to. She studied his passive features for a moment: Slightly delicate face, a day’s blond stubble, a shallow graze on one fine cheekbone. He was handsome, if a little small and thin for Whistler’s tastes. Tec and the stranger, although right there in front of her, seemed totally distant from the room, as if they sat inside a soundproof glass tank. She watched them as the numbers scrolled, feeling dreamlike, inexplicably lonely, as if she had awoken to find herself the last survivor of some terrible apocalypse. She suddenly wanted to shake the two men to awareness, make them talk to her. Where were Spider, Roberts and Sofi?