The Reality Dysfunction

  “Pat, bring Octan back. I think we’ve got our man.”

  Reza kept the snatch mission simple. The team activated their hovercraft again when they were back on the Quallheim east of Aberdale and started searching for a tributary fork on the south bank. According to the map stored in his guidance block there was a modest river which ran south through the jungle, coming from the mountains on the far side of the savannah. It took them five minutes to find it, and the hovercraft nosed over the clot of snowlilies guarding its mouth. Plaited tree boughs formed an arched screen overhead.

  “After the snatch we’ll keep going up this river and out onto the savannah,” Reza said when they had left the Quallheim behind. “I want to get him and us out from under this bloody cloud as quickly as possible.

  We should be able to access the communication satellites as well once we’re clear of it. That way if we can extract any useful information it can be delivered straight up to Terrance Smith.”

  If Smith is still up there, Kelly thought. She couldn’t forget what the woman in Pamiers had said about the starships fighting. But Joshua had promised to stay and pick them up. She gave a cynical little sniff. Oh yes, the Confederation’s Mr. Dependable himself.

  “You all right?” Ariadne asked, raising her voice above the steady propeller whine and the rambling thunder booms.

  “My analgesic blocks are holding,” Kelly said. “It was just the size of the burn which shocked me.” She resisted the urge to scratch the medical nanonic packages.

  “Adds a bit of spice to the recording, a bit of drama,” Ariadne said.

  “Speaking of which, you’re not going to blow us out, are you? I mean, we are the good guys.”

  “Yeah. You’re the good guys.”

  “Great, always wanted to be a sensevise star.”

  Kelly accessed her Lalonde sensevise report memory cell file and turned her head until Ariadne was in the centre of her vision field (wishing the combat-boosted could produce some halfway decent facial expressions).

  “What did you learn from the sample you took from the houses?”

  “Nowt. It was dust, that’s all. Literally, dry loam.”

  “So these ornamental buildings are just an illusion?”

  “Half and half. It isn’t a complete fiction; they’ve moulded the loam into the shape you see and cloaked it with an optical illusion. It’s similar to our chameleon circuit, really.”

  “How do they do that?”

  “No idea. The closest human technology can come is the molecular-binding generators starships use to strengthen their hulls. But they’re expensive, and use up a lot of power. Be cheaper to build a house, or use programmed silicon like you suggested. Then again”—she tilted her head back to focus her sensors on the cloudband above the trees—“logic doesn’t seem to be playing a large part in life on Lalonde right now.”

  The hovercraft eased in against the crumbling loam bank. Ryall was standing among the qualtook trees above the water, waiting for them. Reza jumped ashore and ruffled the big hound’s head. It pressed against his side in complete devotion.

  “Jalal and Ariadne, with me,” Reza said. “The rest of you stay here and keep the hovercraft ready. Pat, monitor us through Octan. If we blow the snatch, I suggest you keep heading south. There’s a Tyrathca farming settlement on the other side of the savannah. It’s as good a place as any to hide out. This snatch is our last stab at completing the mission. Don’t waste yourselves trying to gather further Intelligence, and don’t attempt a rescue. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Pat said.

  Jalal and Ariadne joined Reza on the top of the bank. The big combat-adept mercenary had plugged a gaussrifle into one elbow socket and a TIP rifle into the other; power cables and feed tubes looped round into his backpack.

  “Kelly?” Reza asked ingenuously. “Not wanting to come with us this time?”

  “It took eight generations of cousins marrying to produce you,” she told him.

  The three mercenaries on the bank activated their chameleon circuits.

  Laughter floated down to the hovercraft out of unbroken jungle.

  Fenton watched the little clearing from under the sloping lower branches of an infant gigantea. The light here wasn’t the pure solar white of the villages, but the universal redness had veered into a pale pink shade. A log cabin had been built in the centre, not the kind of frame and plank arrangement favoured by the colonists but a rugged affair that could have come straight from some Alpine meadow. A stone chimney-stack formed almost all of one side, smoke wound drowsily upwards. A lot of trouble had been taken to transform the clearing; undergrowth had been trimmed back, animal hides were stretched drying over frames, timber had been cut and stacked, a vegetable plot planted.

  The man who had done it was a well-built thirty-five-year-old with inflamed ginger hair, wearing a thick red and blue check cotton shirt and mud-caked black denim jeans. He was working at a sturdy table outside his front door, sawing up wood with old-fashioned manual tools. A half-completed rocking chair stood on the ground behind him.

  Fenton moved forwards surreptitiously out of the shaggy gigantea’s shade, but keeping to the cover provided by bushes and smaller trees ringing the clearing. Between thunder broadsides he could hear the regular stifled ripping sound as the man planed a piece of wood on the table. Then the sound stopped and his shoulders stiffened.

  Reza wouldn’t have thought it possible. The man was a good fifty metres away, with his back to the hound, and the thunder was unrelenting. Even his enhanced senses would have difficulty picking out Fenton under such circumstances. He and the other two mercenaries were still four hundred metres away. Nothing else for it ... Fenton cantered eagerly into the clearing.

  The man looked round, bushy eyebrows rising. “What’s this, then? My, you’re a roguish looking brute.” He clicked his fingers, and Fenton trotted up to him. “Ah, you’ll not be on your own, then. That’s a shame, a crying shame. For all of us. Your master won’t be far behind, I’ll warrant. Will you? Came down on the spaceplanes this morning no doubt, didn’t you? That must have been a trip and a half. Aye, well, I’ll not be finishing my chair this afternoon then.” He sat down on a bench beside the table, and started to change, his shirt losing colour, hair fading, thinning, stature diminishing.

  By the time Reza, Jalal, and Ariadne walked into the clearing he had become an undistinguished middle-aged man with brown skin and thin features, wearing an ageing LDC one-piece jump suit. Fenton was noisily lapping up water out of a bowl at his feet, mind radiating contentment with his new friend.

  Reza walked over cautiously. His retinal implants scanned the man from head to toe, and he datavised the pixel sequence into his processor block for a search and identify program. Although the earlier phantom lumberjack image had vanished, Reza saw the roots of the man’s black hair were a dark ginger. “Afternoon,” he said, not quite sure how to react to this display of passivity.

  “Good afternoon to you. Not that I’ve seen anything like you before, mind. Not outside a kinema, and perhaps not even there.”

  “My name is Reza Malin. We’re part of a team employed by the LDC to find out what’s going on down here.”

  “Then with every ounce of sincerity I own, I wish you good luck, my boy. You’re going to need it.”

  An ounce was an ancient unit of measure, Reza’s neural nanonics informed him (there was no reference to kinema in any file). “Are you going to help me?”

  “It doesn’t look to me like I’ve got a lot of choice, now does it? Not with your merry gang and their big, big weapons.”

  “That’s true. What’s your name?”

  “My name? Well, now, that’d be Shaun Wallace.”

  “Bad move. According to the LDC files you’re Rai Molvi, a colonist who settled Aberdale.”

  The man scratched his ear and gave Reza a bashful grin. “Ah now, you’ve got me there, Mr. Malin. I must admit, I was indeed old Molvi. Charmless soul he is, too.”

  “O
K, smartarse, game over. Come on.”

  Reza led the way back to the hovercraft, with Jalal walking right behind their captive, gaussrifle trained on the back of his skull. A couple of minutes after they left the clearing the pink light began to dim back into the same lustreless burgundy of the surrounding jungle. As if immediately aware of the abandonment, playful vennals slithered into the trees around the edge of the clearing. The more venturesome among them dared to scamper over the grass to the cabin itself, searching for titbits. After quarter of an hour the cabin emitted a vociferous creak.

  The vennals fled en masse back into the trees.

  It was another couple of minutes before anything else happened. Then, with the tardiness of a sinking moon, its surface texture leaked away to reveal a starkly primitive mud hut. Tiny arid flakes moulted from the roof, resembling a sleet of miniature autumn leaves as they scattered over the grass below; rivulets of dust trickled down the walls. Within twenty minutes the entire edifice had dissolved like a sugar cube in soft, warm rain.

  Forget discovering Ione Saldana existed, forget discovering Laton was still alive, this was the ultimate interview. For this Collins would make her their premier anchorwoman for the rest of time. For this she would be respected and lionized across the Confederation. Kelly Tirrel was the first reporter in history to interview the dead.

  And as the dead went, Shaun Wallace was agreeable enough. He sat on the rear bench of the lead hovercraft, facing Kelly, and stroking Fenton the whole while. Jalal kept a heavy-calibre gaussrifle levelled at him. On the front bench beside her, Reza was listening intently, making the occasional comment.

  The trees were thinning out as they raced for the end of the jungle. She could see more of the red cloudband through the black filigree of leaves overhead. It too was becoming flimsier; there were definite fast-moving serpentine currents straining its uniformity. Strangely, for there was no wind at ground level.

  Shaun Wallace claimed he had lived in Northern Ireland during the early twentieth century. “Terrible times,” he said softly. “Especially for someone with my beliefs.” But he had just shaken his head and smiled distantly when she asked what those beliefs were. “Nothing a lady like yourself would want to know.” He died, he said, in the mid-1920s, another martyr to the cause, another victim of English oppression. The reason the soldiers shot him was not volunteered. He claimed he hadn’t died alone.

  “And after?” Kelly said.

  “Ah, now, Miss Kelly, afterwards is the work of the Devil.”

  “You went to hell?”

  “Hell is a place, so the good priests taught me. This beyond was no place. It was dry and empty, and it was cruel beyond physical pain. It was where you can see the living wasting their lives, and where you drain the substance from each other.”

  “Each other? You weren’t alone?”

  “There was millions of us. Souls beyond the counting of a simple Ballymena lad like myself.”

  “You say you can see the living from the other side?”

  “From the beyond, yes. ’Tis like through a foggy window. But you strive to make out what it is that’s happening in the living world. All the time you strive. And you yearn for it, you yearn for it so hard, lass, that you feel your heart should be bursting apart. I saw wonders and I saw terrors, and I could touch neither.”

  “How did you come back?”

  “The way was opened for us. Something came through from this side, right here on this sodden hot planet. I don’t know what the creature was. Nothing Earthly, though. After that, there was no stopping us.”

  “This xenoc, the creature you say let you through; is it still here, still bringing souls back from the beyond?”

  “No, it was only here for the first one. It vanished after that. But it was too late, the trickle was already becoming a flood. We bring ourselves back now.”

  “How?”

  Shaun Wallace gave a reluctant sigh. He was quiet for so long Kelly thought he wasn’t going to answer; he even stopped stroking Fenton.

  “The way the devil-lovers of yesterday always tried to do it,” he said heavily. “With their ceremonies and their pagan barbarism. And God preserve me for doing such things, I used to think what I did before was sinful. But there’s no other way.”

  “What is the way?”

  “We break the living. We make them want to be possessed. Possession is the end of torment, you see. Even with our power we can only open a small gateway to the beyond, enough to show the lost souls the way back. But there has to be somewhere waiting for them, some host. And the host has to be willing.”

  “You torture them into submission,” Reza said bluntly.

  “Aye, that we do. That we do, indeed. And, mark you, there’s no pride in me for saying it.”

  “You mean, Rai Molvi is still there? Still alive inside you?”

  “Yes. But I keep his soul locked away in a dark, safe place. I’m not sure you could call it living.”

  “And this power you mentioned.” Kelly pressed the point. “What is your power?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Magic of a kind. Though not a witch’s magic with its spells and potions. This is a darker magic, because it’s there at a thought. So easy, it is. Nothing like that should be given easily to a man. The temptations are too strong.”

  “Is that where the white fire comes from?” Reza asked. “This power you have?”

  “Aye, indeed it is.”

  “What’s its range?”

  “Ah now, Mr. Malin, that’s difficult to say. The more of you that fling it, the further it will go. The more impassioned you are, the stronger it will be. For a cool one such as yourself, I doubt it would be far.”

  Reza grunted and shifted back on the bench.

  “Could you demonstrate the power for me, please?” Kelly asked. “Something I can record and show people. Something that will make them believe what you say is true.”

  “I’ve never known a newspaper gal before. You did say you were from a newspaper, now didn’t you?”

  “What newspapers eventually became, yes.” She ran a historical search request through her neural nanonics. “Something like the Movietone and Pathé reels at the cinema, only with colour and feeling. Now, that demonstration?”

  “I normally prefer gals with longer hair, myself.”

  Kelly ran her hand self-consciously over her scalp. She had shaved her hair to a blueish stubble so she could wear the armour’s shell-helmet. “I normally have longer hair,” she said resentfully.

  Shaun Wallace winked broadly, then leant over the gunwale and scooped up one of the long-legged insects scampering over the snowlilies. He held it up in the palm of his hand; a long spindly tube body, dun brown, with a round bulb of a head sprouting unpleasant pincer mandibles. It was quivering, but stayed where it was as though glued to his skin. He brought his other hand down flat on top of it, making a show of pressing them together, squashing the insect. Kelly’s eyes never wavered.

  When he parted his hands the prince of butterflies was revealed, wings almost the size of his palms, patterned in deep turquoise and topaz and silver, colours resistant to the red light of the cloud, shining in their own right. Its wings flexed twice, then it flew off, only to be kicked about in the air by the wash of the hovercraft’s powerful slipstream.

  “There, you see?” Shaun Wallace said. “We don’t always destroy.”

  Kelly lost sight of the delightful apparition. “How long will it stay like that?”

  “Mortality is not something you measure out like a pint of ale, Miss Kelly. It will live its life to the full, and that’s all that can be said.”

  “He doesn’t know,” Reza muttered curtly.

  Shaun Wallace practised a knowing, slightly condescending smile.

  It was growing lighter around the hovercraft. Up ahead, Kelly could see the wonderfully welcome glare of pure sunlight striking emerald foliage.

  A colour that wasn’t red! She had begun to believe that red was all there ever was, all t
here ever had been.

  The hovercraft skimmed out from under the chafed edge of the cloudband.

  All of the mercenaries broke into a spontaneous cheer.

  “What is that thing?” Kelly shouted above the rebel whoops, pointing up at the cloud.

  “A reflection of ourselves, our fear.”

  “What do you fear?”

  “The emptiness of the night. It reminds us too much of the beyond. We hide from it.”

  “You mean you’re making that?” she asked, scepticism warring with astonishment. “But it covers thousands of kilometres.”

  “Aye, that it does. ’Tis our will that creates it; we want shelter, so shelter we have. All of us, Miss Kelly, even me who shuns the rest of them, we all pray for sanctuary with every fibre of being. And it’s growing, this will of ours, spreading out to conquer. One day soon it will cover all of this planet. But even that is only the first chapter of salvation.”

  “What’s the second?”

  “To leave. To escape the harsh gaze of this universe altogether. We’ll withdraw to a place of our own making. A place where there is no emptiness hanging like a sword above the land, no death to claim us. A place where your butterfly will live for ever, Miss Kelly. Now tell me that isn’t a worthy goal, tell me that isn’t a dream worth having.”

  Reza watched the last of the jungle’s trees go past as the hovercraft reached the savannah. The lush green grassland seemed to unroll on either side of the river as though it was only just coming into existence. He wasn’t really paying much attention; the strange (supposed) Irishman was a captivating performer. “A closed universe,” he said, and the earlier scorn was lacking.

  Kelly gave him a surprised glance. “You mean it is possible?”

  “It happens thousands of times a day. The blackhawks and voidhawks open interstices to travel through wormholes every time they fly between stars. Technically they’re self-contained universes.”

  “Yes, but taking a planet—”

  “There are twenty million of us,” Shaun Wallace purred smoothly. “We can do it, together, we can pull open the portal that leads away from mortality.”