The Reality Dysfunction
“And you’ll be here as well.”
“Genevieve Kavanagh, silence that evil tongue this instant.”
Genevieve danced across the grass. “He’s handsome, he’s handsome!” she laughed. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you, especially in those dresses you wear for the dances.” Her hands traced imaginary breasts over her chest.
Louise giggled. “Devil child, you have a faulty brain. I’m not interested in William.”
“You’re not?”
“No. Oh, I like him, and I hope we can be friends. But that’s all. In any case, he’s five years older than me.”
“I think he’s gorgeous.”
“Then you can have him.”
Genevieve’s face fell. “I’ll not be offered anyone so grand. You’re the heiress, after all. Mother will make me marry some troll from a minor family, I’m sure of it.”
“Mother won’t make us marry anyone. Honest to goodness, Genny, she won’t.”
“Really truly?”
“Really truly,” Louise said, even though she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it. Truth to be told, there weren’t that many eligible suitors for her on Kesteven. Hers was an invidious position: a husband should hold equal status, but someone of equal wealth would have his own estate and she would be expected to live there. Yet Cricklade was her life, it was beautiful even in midwinter’s long barren months when yards of snow covered the ground, the pine trees on the surrounding wolds were denuded, and the birds buried themselves below the frostline. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving it. So who could she marry? It was probably something her parents had discussed; her uncles and aunts too, most likely.
She didn’t like to think about what the outcome would be. At the very least she hoped they would give her a list rather than an ultimatum.
One of the butterflies caught her eye, a geneered red admiral sunning itself on one of the grass blades. It was freer than she was, she realized miserably.
“Will you marry for love, then?” Genevieve asked, all dewy eyed.
“Yes, I’ll marry for love.”
“That’s super. I wish I were as bold.”
Louise put her hands on the top rail of the fence, looking across the gurgling stream. Forget-me-nots had run wild on the banks, their blue flowers attracting hordes of butterflies. Some time-distant master of Cricklade had released hundreds of species across the grounds. Every year they flourished, invading the orchards and gardens with their fluttering harlequin colours. “I’m not bold, I’m a dithery dreamer. Do you know what I dream?”
“No.” Genevieve shook her head, her face rapt.
“I dream that Father lets me travel before I have to take on any of my family responsibilities.”
“To Norwich?”
“No, not the capital, that’s just like Boston only bigger, and I’ll be going there anyway for finishing school. I want to travel to other worlds and see how their people live.”
“Gosh! Travel on a starship, that’s stupendously wonderful. Can I come too? Please!”
“If I go, then I suppose Father will have to let you go when you reach your age. Fair’s fair.”
“He’ll never let me go. I’m not even allowed to go to the dances.”
“But you sneak past Nanny and watch them anyway.”
“Yes!”
“Well, then.”
“He won’t let me go.”
Louise grinned down at her sister’s petulant tone. “It is only a dream.”
“You always make your dreams come real. You’re so clever, Louise.”
“I don’t want to change this world with new ideas,” she said, half to herself. “I just want to be allowed out, just once. Everything here is so duty-bound, so regimented. Some days I feel as though I’ve already lived my life.”
“William could get you away from here. He could ask for a star voyage as a honeymoon; Father could never refuse that.”
“Oh! You impudent baby ogress!” She aimed a lazy swipe at her sister’s head, but Genevieve had already skipped out of range.
“Honeymoon, honeymoon,” Genevieve chanted so loudly that even the nearby horses looked up. “Louise is going on honeymoon!” She picked up her skirts and ran, long slender legs flying over the flower-laden grass.
Louise gave chase, the two of them giggling and squealing in delight as they gallivanted about, scattering the butterflies before them.
Lady Macbeth emerged from her final jump insystem, and Joshua allowed himself a breath of silent relief that they were still intact. The trip from Lalonde had been an utter bitch.
For a start Joshua found he neither liked nor trusted Quinn Dexter. His intuition told him there was something desperately wrong about him. Wrong in a way he couldn’t define, but Dexter seemed to drain life from a cabin when he entered. And his behaviour was weird, too; he had no instinct, no natural rhythm for events or conversation, as though he was working on a two-second time-delay to reality.
In fact, if Joshua had met him in the flesh back down on Lalonde’s spaceport he probably wouldn’t have accepted him as a passenger no matter how much money was stashed in his credit disk. Too late now. Although, thankfully, Dexter had spent most of his time alone in his cabin down in capsule C, venturing out only for meals and the bathroom.
That was one of his more rational quirks. After he’d come on board, he had given the compact bulkheads a quick suspicious look, and said: “I’d forgotten how much mechanization there is on a starship.”
Forgotten? Joshua couldn’t work that one out at all. How could you forget the way a starship looked?
Yet the oddest thing of all was how inept Dexter was at free-fall manoeuvring. Had he been asked, Joshua would have said that the man had never been in space before. Which was ridiculous, because he was a travelling sales manager. One who didn’t have neural nanonics. And one who wore a frightened expression the whole time. There had even been occasions when Joshua had caught him flinching from some sudden metallic sound rattling out of the capsule systems, or the creak of the stress structure as they were under acceleration.
Of course, given Lady Mac’s performance during the voyage, that part of Dexter’s behaviour was almost understandable. Joshua had experienced enough nasty moments on the flight himself. It seemed like there wasn’t a system on board that hadn’t suffered from some kind of glitch since they boosted out of Lalonde’s orbit. What should have been a simple four-day trip had stretched out to nearly a week as the crew tackled power surges, data drop-outs, actuator failures, and dozens of smaller niggling malfunctions. Joshua hated to think what was going to happen when he handed over the maintenance log to the Confederation Astronautics Board’s inspectors, they’d probably insist on a complete overhaul. At least the jump nodes had functioned, though he’d even begun to have his doubts about them.
He datavised the flight computer to unfold the thermo-dump panels and extend the sensor booms. Fault alerts jangled in his mind; one of the thermo-dump panels refused to open past halfway, and three booms were jammed in their recesses.
“Jesus!” he snarled.
There were mutters from the rest of the crew strapped into their bridge couches on either side of him.
“I thought you fixed that fucking panel,” Joshua shouted at Warlow.
“I did!” the answer thumped back. “If you think you can do any better, put on a suit and get out there yourself.”
Joshua ran a hand over his brow. “See what you can do,” he said sullenly.
Warlow grunted something unintelligible, and ordered the couch’s straps to release him. He pushed himself towards the open hatchway. Ashly Hanson freed himself, too, and went after the cosmonik to help.
Sensor data was coming in from the booms which were functional. The flight computer started tracking nearby stars to produce an accurate astrogation fix. Norfolk with its divergent illumination looked unusually small for a terracompatible planet. Joshua didn’t have time to puzzle that, the sensors reported laser radar pulses were bouncing off th
e hull, and a voidhawk distortion field had locked on.
“Jesus, now what?” Joshua asked even as the astrogation fix slipped into his mind. Lady Mac had translated two hundred and ninety thousand kilometres above Norfolk, way outside the planet’s designated emergence zone. He groaned out loud and hurriedly datavised the communication dish to transmit their identification code. The Confederation Navy ships patrolling Norfolk would start using Lady Mac for target practice soon.
Norfolk was almost unique among the Confederation’s terracompatible planets in that it didn’t have a strategic-defence network. There was no high-technology industry, no asteroid settlements in orbit, and consequently there was nothing worth stealing. Protection from mercenaries and pirate ships wasn’t needed; except for the two weeks every season when the starships came to collect their cargoes of Norfolk Tears.
As the planet moved towards midsummer a squadron from the Confederation Navy’s 6th Fleet was assigned to protection duties, paid for by the planetary government. It was a popular duty with the crews; after the cargo starships departed they were allowed shore leave, where they were entertained in grand style, and all the crews were presented with a special half-sized bottle of Norfolk Tears by the grateful government.
The Lady Macbeth’s main communication dish servos spun round once, then packed up. Power-loss signals appeared across the schematic the flight computer was datavising into Joshua’s brain. “I don’t fucking believe it. Sarha, get that bastard dish sorted out!” Out of the corner of his eye he saw her activate the console by her couch. He routed the Lady Mac’s identification code through her omnidirectional antenna.
An inter-ship radio channel came alive, and the communication console routed the datavise into Joshua’s neural nanonics. “Starship Lady Macbeth, this is Confederation Navy ship Pestravka. You have emerged outside this planet’s designated starship emergence zones, are you in trouble?”
“Thank you, Pestravka,” Joshua datavised in reply. “We’ve been having some system malfunctions, my apologies for causing any panic.”
“What is the nature of your malfunction?”
“Sensor error.”
“That’s simple enough to sort out; you should know better than to jump insystem with inaccurate guidance information.”
“Up yours,” Melvin Ducharme grumbled from his couch.
“The error percentage has only just become apparent,” Joshua said. “We’re updating now.”
“What’s wrong with your main communications dish?”
“Overloaded servo, it’s scheduled for replacement.”
“Well, activate your back-up.”
Sarha let out an indignant snort. “I’ll point one of the masers at him if he likes. They’ll receive that blast loud and bloody clear.”
“Complying now, Pestravka.” Joshua glared at Sarha.
He launched a quiet prayer as the ribbed silver pencil of the second dish slid out of Lady Macbeth’s dark silicon hull, and opened like a flower.
It tracked round to point at the Pestravka.
“I’m datavising a copy of this incident to the Confederation Astronautics Board office on Norfolk,” the Pestravka’s officer continued. “And I’ll add a strong recommendation that they inspect your spaceworthiness certificate.”
“Thank you so much, Pestravka. Are we now cleared to contact civil flight control for an approach vector? I’d hate to be shot at for not asking your permission first.”
“Don’t push your luck, Calvert. I can easily take a fortnight searching your cargo holds.”
“Looks like your reputation’s preceding you, Joshua,” Dahybi Yadev said after the Pestravka cut the link.
“Let’s hope it hasn’t reached the planet’s surface yet,” Sarha said.
Joshua aligned the secondary dish on the civil flight control’s communication satellite, and received permission to enter a parking orbit. Lady Mac’s three fusion tubes came alive, sending out long rivers of hazy plasma, and the starship accelerated in towards the gaudy planet at a tenth of a gee.
Chinks of light were glinting down into Quinn Dexter’s vacant world, accompanied by faint scratchy sounds. It was like intermittent squalls of luminous rain falling through fissures from an external universe. Some beams of light flickered in the far distance, others splashed across him.
When they did, he saw the images they carried.
A boat. One of the grotty traders on the Quallheim, little more than a bodged-together raft. Speeding downriver.
A town of wooden buildings. Durringham in the rain.
A girl.
He knew her. Marie Skibbow, naked, tied to a bed with rope.
His heartbeat thudded in the silence.
“Yes,” said the voice he knew from before, from the clearing in the jungle, the voice which came out of Night. “I thought you’d like this.”
Marie was tugging frantically at her bonds, her figure every bit as lush as his imagination had once conceived it.
“What would you do with her, Quinn?”
What would he do? What couldn’t he do with such an exquisite body. How oh how she would suffer beneath him.
“You are bloody repugnant, Quinn. But so terribly useful.”
Energy twisted eagerly inside his body, and a phantasm come forth to overlay reality. Quinn’s interpretation of the physical form which God’s Brother might assume should He ever choose to manifest Himself in the flesh. And what flesh. Capable of the most wondrous assaults, amplifying every degradation the sect had ever taught him.
The flux of sorcerous power reached a triumphal peak, opening a rift into the terrible empty beyond, and so another emerged to take possession as Marie pleaded and wept.
“Back you go, Quinn.”
And the images shrank back to the dry wispy beams of flickering light.
“You’re not the Light Brother!” Quinn shouted into the nothingness. Fury at the acknowledgement of betrayal heightened his perception, the light became brighter, sound louder.
“Of course not, Quinn. I’m worse than that, worse than any mythical devil. All of us are.”
Laughter echoed through the prison universe, tormenting him.
Time was so different in here ...
A spaceplane.
A starship.
Uncertainty. Quinn felt it run through him like a hormonal surge. The electrical machinery upon which he was now dependent recoiled from his estranged body, which made his dependence still deeper as the delicate apparatuses broke down one by one. Uncertainty gave way to fear. His body trembled as it tried desperately to quieten the currents of exotic energy which infiltrated every cell.
It wasn’t omnipotent, Quinn realized, this thing which controlled his body, it had limits. He let the dribs and drabs of light soak into what was left of his mind, concentrating on what he saw, the words he heard.
Watching, waiting. Trying to understand.
Syrinx thought Boston was the most delightful city she had seen in fourteen years of travelling about the Confederation, and that included the sheltered enclaves of houses in the Saturn-orbiting habitats of her birth. Every house was built from stone, with thick walls to keep the heat out during the long summer, then keep it in for the equally long winter. Most of them were two storeys high, with some of the larger ones having three; they had small railed gardens at the front, and rows of stables along the back. Terrestrial honeysuckle and ivy were popular creepers for covering the stonework, while hanging baskets provided cheerful dabs of colour to most porches. Roofs were always steep to withstand the heavy snow, and grey slate tiles alternated with jet-black solar panels in pleasing geometric patterns. Wood was burnt to provide warmth and sometimes for cooking, which produced a forest of chimneys thrusting out of the gable ends, topped by red clay pots with elaborate crowns. Every building, be it private, civic, or commercial, was individual, possessing the kind of character impossible on worlds where mass-production facilities were commonplace. Wide streets were all cobbled, with tall cast-iron street
lights spaced along them. It was only after a while she realized that as there were no mechanoids or servitors each of the little granite cubes must have been laid by human hand—the time and effort that must have entailed! There were trees lining each pavement, mainly Norfolk’s pine-analogues, with some geneered terrestrial evergreens for variety. Traffic was comprised entirely of bicycles, trike scooters (very few, and mostly with adolescent riders), horses, and horse-drawn cabs and carts. She had seen power vans, but only on the roads around the outskirts, and those were farm vehicles.
After they had cleared Customs (altogether more rigorous than Passport Control) they’d found the horse-drawn taxi coaches waiting by the aerodrome’s tower. Syrinx had grinned, and Tula had let out an exasperated groan. But the one they used was well sprung, proving a reasonably smooth trip into town. Following Andrew Unwin’s advice, they had rented some rooms at the Wheatsheaf, a coaching house on the side of one of the rivers which the town was built around.
Once they had unpacked and eaten a light lunch in the courtyard, Syrinx and Ruben had taken another coach to Penn Street, the precious coolbox on the floor by their feet.
Ruben watched the traffic and pedestrians parading past with a contented feeling. Starship crews strolling about were easy to spot: their clothes of synthetic fabric were curiously bland in comparison to the locals’ attire. Bostonians in summer favoured bright colours and raffish styles; this year multicoloured waistcoats were in vogue among the young men, while the girls wore crinkled cheesecloth skirts with bold circular patterns (hems always below their knees, he noted sadly). It was like stepping back into pre-spaceflight history, though he suspected no historical period on Earth was ever as clean as this.
“Penn Street, guv’nor,” the driver cried as the horse turned into a road parallel to the River Gwash. It was the commercial sector of the city, with wharves lining the river, and a lengthy rank of prodigious warehouses standing behind them. Here for the first time they encountered powered lorries. A railway marshalling yard was visible at the other end of the dusty road.
Ruben looked down the long row of warehouses and busy yards and offices, only too well aware of Syrinx’s gaze hot on his neck. Mordant thoughts started pressing against his mind. Drayton’s Import wasn’t in Penn Street, it was Penn Street. The name was on signs across every building.