‘What the Fate’s going on, Strostiv?’

  ‘My Lord, someone’s coming after you with false—’

  Then militiamen were spilling through the doorway, with a nine-strong group of blue-skinned clone-fighters in their midst. The clones’ hides were like lapis lazuli; their eyes were the colour of blood.

  Behind them, a nervous-looking Lord entered the eatery.

  ‘My L-Lord C-Corcorigan?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  The Lord lifted a crystal in his shaking hand, glanced up at the greystone warriors in their protective formation around Tom and his companions, and tried to speak, but failed. Beside him, the militiamen’s officer cleared his throat.

  ‘Lord Frindolivaunt? D’you want me to announce the charges?’

  ‘I... Y-Yes.’ Frindolivaunt handed him the crystal. ‘Please.’

  ‘These are capital charges, my Lord Corcorigan.’ The officer cleared his throat again. ‘In the matter of murder, of one Gérard d’Ovraison, Oracle—’

  An excited buzz rose among the frightened diners. The name d’Ovraison was on everybody’s lips at the moment.

  ‘—and we offer new forensic—’

  ‘Stop!’ Strostiv was causing a holo image to appear. ‘Read this. You may not bring this charge to bear.’

  Frindolivaunt paled.

  ‘But I-I’ve b-been assured th—’

  It’s a distraction.

  The thought must have occurred to Elva in the same instant, because she, too spun into motion. Frindolivaunt was a dupe. If whoever was manipulating him knew about Corduven’s vengeance-waiver, then they knew also that these charges could not be made to stick.

  ‘There!’ shouted Elva.

  ‘No!’ The militia officer yelled the order. ‘Clone-warriors, stand down!’

  A blue-skinned female warrior broke from her group, snarling as she cocked her wrists and graser implants glistened - move it - as Tom ducked and rolled, poignard out now and ready - now - then lunging to the attack but Elva was in front, blocking the attack as three graser beams spat simultaneously, and then Elva was down.

  ‘NO!’ howled Tom.

  Elva’s shot had burned a notch on the female warrior’s shoulder; before the woman could do anything more, her own clone-siblings lunged forward as one, their fists arcing down. Sixteen beams lanced into her. She died.

  Then the clone-warriors pointed their hands towards the ground, bowed their heads and froze. It was some kind of capitulation but Tom could not care because this was Elva lying on the polished floor, charcoal burns on her clothes, her skin whitened. Elva was not moving, but he could not lose her now, not—

  ‘Tom.’

  Kraiv’s huge hands were holding him.

  ‘She’s alive.’ Adam snapped orders to the greystone warriors. ‘You, you, and you, let’s lift her. There’s no time for anything else.’

  As they picked Elva off the ground, Tom started forward, but Kraiv held him back.

  ‘Tom,’ he said urgently. ‘You’re the target. If you accompany her…’

  For a moment, Tom fought, but then the words made sense and he stopped, almost fainting with the sudden impossibility of what he faced.

  Why now?

  Kraiv was right. Anyone associated with Tom Corcorigan was at risk. Now that he had some small power, his enemies were afraid; but the whole world was in danger...

  In that moment, it seemed there was only one thing he could do. Tom grabbed Kraiv’s wrist, squeezed that immense bony joint as hard as he could - actually hurting Kraiv like that was out of the question - and gave him a serious look.

  Then, in a sour, strange tone, Tom said aloud: ‘I was leaving her anyway. Why’d she have to be so damn foolish?’

  Adam looked astounded as Tom brushed past him, past Strostiv, past the crouched warriors - oh, Elva, my love - and headed for the door, ignoring his accuser and the militiamen who simply stared. None of this was covered in their orders of the day.

  Outside in the cavern, Tom ducked off to one side, alert for more enemies, seeing none. Too scared for Elva’s life to cry, he stalked dry-eyed along a roundabout route back to their quarters. There, he let himself in and sealed the doorshimmers, then sat down in a chair with Elva’s favourite dartbow in his lap, and waited for the news.

  The ancient wisdom goes: The warrior, when attacked, steps forward.

  Elva was a warrior. She had reacted superbly, acting to save Tom. By any means, using any subterfuge, Tom would achieve the same for her. Elva should not be a target because of him.

  Always...

  Yet if she pulled through this, what he had to do might break both their hearts.

  ... and forever, my love,

  ‘Frindolivaunt,’ said Adam later, ‘is still apologizing. Lady V’Delikona’s investigators are trying to trace the people who passed him the information, but no-one’s holding out much hope ... And he tried to visit Elva in the med-centre, but took the point when I told him he was the last person we could trust inside.’

  Adam had not left Elva’s side until Lady V’Delikona’s personal Halberdiers were guarding her, stationed in chambers above and below and to every side. Two squadrons of armed arachnasprites were roaming the approaches.

  ‘What about the clone-warriors?’ said Tom.

  ‘Still denying that the group-conditioning can be broken, while simultaneously saying that she acted on her own and contrary to their thoughts. They do act shocked, I’ll admit.’

  ‘But they killed the only one of their number’ - Kraiv’s voice rumbled deeply - ‘who could have testified for sure.’

  ‘Right. And Strostiv isn’t helping. He only says, he knew what he had to do, because he knew he had already done it. First time he’s been important enough to feature personally in an Oracular truecast ... He’s proud of it.’ Adam looked at Tom. ‘I wanted to kill the bastard.’

  Tom did not rise to that.

  Instead, he said: ‘I’m going to make some hard decisions, Adam. Can I trust you to guard Elva with your life?’

  ‘Tom? I... Yes, of course.’

  ‘And tell her that I love her. Because I cannot tell her that myself.’

  Kraiv was frowning.

  ‘No ...’

  ‘Yes. It’s the only way she’ll be safe.’

  Even Strostiv had thought Tom and Elva were cold towards each other in public, not understanding the bond that truly joined them. If that were the case, then maybe others would see it as a marriage that had not worked out, an impulse taken too far during the heady victory celebrations, when the air was pulsing with energy and the world seemed fresh because people were astounded to be still alive.

  The worst thing was, for the separation to be convincing, it must be real. That was where the danger lay: in fiction becoming fact, despite his wishes.

  It’s for the best, my love.

  Tom waited until the news arrived from the med-centre: she was on the mend, and would pull through. In the middle of the luxurious apartment, alone, Tom dropped to his knees and sobbed.

  Two hours later, in the middle of the night, his belongings were packed in a small bag by the doorshimmer, waiting to go.

  A green teardrop-shaped arachnabug dropped him at the realm’s edge, in a raw cavern where fluorofungus was quiescent, observing nightshirt. Then the arachnabug sped through the darkness, heading back towards the bright caverns of The Realm Which Never Sleeps.

  This should have been a time of triumph.

  Tom stood on a lonely crag, watching faintly fluorescent orange worms slide slowly down the stone below, heading for the cavern floor. Overhead, sleeping edelaces rustled among the stalactites.

  Am I doing the right thing?

  Something moved at the limits of his vision.

  Danger?

  Then he could see it: a blob of scarlet moving fast and growing bigger as it approached, bright beams shining for his benefit. It was an arachnasprite, speeding upside down across the cavern ceiling towards him.

  Tom picked up his small bag.

  In moments the ‘sprite was hurtling down the nearest cavern wall, its whipping black tendrils a blur of motion. Then it was straightening out, and coming to rest beside Tom. The black-clad TauRider leaned back in her saddle, and pulled off her scarlet helmet, to reveal blazing violet hair.

  ‘Thylara,’ said Tom. ‘You came.’

  ‘For you? Any time, warrior.’

  Tom hefted his bag. ‘Right.’

  ‘Get aboard.’

  Clutching the bag against his chest, Tom swung into place behind her. The scarlet carapace morphed, encasing his legs and wrapping diagonal bands across his shoulders.

  Elva ...

  Then Thylara whooped and Tom’s stomach lurched as the arachnasprite wheeled about and leaped for the vertical surface, sped up the rockface, before flipping over and racing across the cracked and broken ceiling, oblivious to the void and the waiting cavern floor below. They careened upside down past obstacles, flipped through a vertiginous arc, then sped vertically upwards once more, almost flying up the thousand-metre shaft at whose distant apex a tiny circle of lemon-yellow sunlight shone.

  ~ * ~

  21

  TERRA AD 2164

  <>

  [6]

  Rain spattered against the windows, wind shook the bushes outside, pink petals dropping to the grass. The hummingbirds were gone. Shoulder to shoulder, Kian and Deirdre watched the storm.

  ‘This is California, right?’

  ‘Unless we slipped into another reality during the night.’

  They were off-campus this year, sharing a house with three other students. Deirdre’s on-off lover Yvette had stayed the night, but left early to get to her job as a rising young architect in the city. Deirdre, at 8 a.m., had come into Kian’s room and sat cross-legged on his bed until he woke.

  Now, drinking lemon tea, and neither of them with a lecture to attend until the afternoon, they sat and watched the falling rain.

  ‘Come on,’ she said finally. ‘Back to my room.’

  ‘At last, my luck’s changed.’

  ‘Ha.’ Deirdre’s reply was automatic, but sad. ‘Just work, boy.’

  Kian, carrying his tea, followed her across the corridor and into her room: white-painted walls, everything stacked away, mussed bed which he tried not to stare at. Deirdre caught him looking, and turned away.

  ‘What’s up, sweetheart?’

  ‘Yvette, she ...’ Rapid eye-blinks. ‘She’s been offered a job in Toronto.’

  ‘Shit.’ Kian put his cup down, sat down on the floor beside Deirdre, took hold of her hand.

  ‘I knew something was ... God damn it, Kian. What am I gonna do? I can’t drop out of my course.’

  Kian stared into her copper eyes. After a moment, he said straight-faced: ‘If only you weren’t a lesbian, I’d marry you in an instant.’

  Deirdre’s fingertips brushed his lips.

  ‘If only you weren’t a guy, I might take you up on that.’

  They remained sitting that way, holding hands, as the storm-sounds died and the sun brightened to cast abstract patterns of light glittering like diamonds on the rain-soaked glass.

  The holodiagram was yellow and glowing. Every time Deirdre highlighted a particular feature, a node lit up in blue and a subsidiary image opened up at the periphery, internal details scrolling past.

  Kian had work of his own to do, but today it was Deirdre who deserved his attention. An emotional analgesic: that was how he thought of her memetic engineering project ... except that, as Deirdre talked through the details of research she had shown no-one besides Professor Guillermi, Kian began to be fascinated by the intricate model for its own sake, and for what it revealed about Deirdre’s quicksilver mind.

  ‘You know we’re in a connected world: six-handshakes-from-the-Pope kind of connected.’

  ‘Not the Pope again, dear.’

  ‘She’s sweet, unlike some of her—Anyway, connectivity. Might’ve been seven by now, if it weren’t for the Changeling Plagues.’

  ‘Seven...?’

  ‘Steps removed from virtually any person in the world, chosen at random. Pay attention.’

  ‘Yes, Deirdre.’

  ‘See, if your closest friends and acquaintances were picked at random from the globe - like, you’re as likely to know a rice farmer in Indonesia as your own mother - then interconnectivity to this degree would be trivial. But reality ain’t like that. You know people you work with or live near.’

  ‘Yes, Deirdre.’

  ‘Another way is for most acquaintances to be local, but just occasionally to have a long-distance link to someone far away. Village societies are like this.’ In her holomodel, a virtual landscape showed groups of settlements: round huts with thatched roofs. ‘Highly clumped, very few travellers between them.’

  ‘Boring lives.’

  ‘Yeah, but... Watch what happens when I introduce a plague vector.’

  Kian, interested now, tracked through the mortality rates over time in the simulation, as her little virtual people fell one by one, coughing up their little virtual blood as their skin erupted with virtual sores and bubuncles.

  ‘You’re enjoying this. Kian, you’re a disturbed man.’

  ‘Mm.’

  Diseases which were both highly infectious and deadly killed entire settlements ... but did not spread to others. The plague wiped out its hosts, and died.

  ‘But... shit.’ Kian saw the unsettling implications for the real world. ‘Introduce a few globetrotting explorers from the outside ...’

  ‘And you get AIDS, Ebola, MelterBug and the Changeling Plagues, spread across the globe. That’s what actually happened.’

  ‘You’re a scary person, you know that?’

  After making more lemon tea, Deirdre handed a cup to Kian, then expanded the diagram. ‘In large populations, you get a power law network. A tiny number of people have a very high number of connections.’

  ‘Deirdre, Deirdre ...’

  ‘Including sexual partners, boyo. They’re the ones who spread endemic plagues. Same with airborne diseases. Sometimes one super-infecter will contaminate a whole country.’

  ‘Which would be good, from the disease’s point of view,’ said Kian, getting it.

  ‘It’s almost invulnerable to random attacks, this kind of network. The old World Wide Web was like that, with a small number of highly connected nodes ...’

  Kian frowned. ‘But the anarchists—’

  ‘Destroyed the Web, yes. That’s why we have EveryWare. The old kind of network could cope with random attacks, but intelligently directed offensives ... It’s surprising the Net took an entire twenty minutes to die.’

  It was impressive work, but Kian was confused.

  ‘I thought you were working on memetics, how ideas spread like viruses.’

  The display collapsed in falling sheaves of light, was gone. Deirdre turned to look at Kian, odd shadows in her cupric eyes.

  ‘Recently, Pelkovich in Warsaw and Snyder in Beijing have worked on ways to identify highly infectious memetic nodes: the human individuals and the EveryWare loci who affect the way people think.’’

  ‘They’re identifying trendsetters?’ Kian wondered why, if this was so good, strain was lining Deirdre’s face.

  ‘I examined the body language and oratory of the great manipulators; the use of scapegoats in driving entire populations to illogical and destructive acts; the hypnotic commands embedded in televisual adverts which linked polluting machines to sexual gratification ... It’s been going on for centuries.’

  Deirdre tapped the desktop. ‘The thing is, I found ways to do something new: to sugar-coat memetic presentations in ways that make them attractive to the most infectious nodes, the trendsetters, which guarantees the ideas will spread through the target population.’

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘I’m talking propaganda raised to levels no-one’s seen before.’

  Super-propaganda. Deirdre’s work wasn’t just brilliant, it was dangerous.

  ‘Professor Guillermi’s muttering about seconding me to Rand-Miti or UNSA without even finishing my degree. This work would become a dissertation which security-cleared Caltech supervisors would examine. I’d be going straight to Ph.D.!’