Chapter 28
I was in the audio archive when it happened.
Thousands of years of music had already been beamed off-world, but there was always more – so much more.
Here, the oral history of the deep-sea divers of the Yellow Isles; there the sound of a jungle bird famed for its mimicry, calling out “Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?” This is the song the first peoples sang when the last terraformer left this world; this is the sound of the plague doctor who survived the first scourge, when a should-have-been-harmless virus from another planet killed nearly a sixth of the nascent population.
“I need you to listen,” Gebre declared, and for a moment it was there again, the terror, the deep-down, loveless, never-to-be-loved terror that had been with ter since the day te was born. “Maw. It’s incredibly important that you listen.”
I asked ter what te wanted me to remember, the lesson te wanted me to take with me when all this was gone.
I thought perhaps te would say that in the moments in which these voices lived, they brought joy, knowledge, inspiration, togetherness.
That they touched the lives around them, which flourished and grew, and that if everything leads to death then surely it is in these moments of living, these precious moments of being alive, that we find meaning, purpose, joy.
Just this once, te did not. Even Gebre sometimes needed to mourn, and be afraid.
I kept on thinking I should say so many things – and then there were too many to say.
So we walked without speaking between walls of memory banks that ran up and down the hollow expanse of the hall, punctuated here or there by headsets and the occasional not very comfortable chair.
The great cavern of the archive only had one window, long and narrow as it faced the sea, tucked in from exposure to the elements, muffling the sound of the growing storm outside.
When I heard the first gunshot, I thought perhaps it was thunder.
Then I heard another, and it was inside the building, the rumble of displaced air from a high-power weapon snapping through the archive. Gebre seemed perfectly comfortable ignoring it, engrossed in a story that would never be heard again – but I caught ter sleeve, hissed: “Listen.”
“It’s the storm.”
“No. Listen.”
Te stopped.
Te listened.
We waited.
From a headset hanging off the wall, a voice proclaimed the history of their home, of how they had once been seafarers, how much further down there was to go and keep on going…
Then it came again.
A snap-crack somewhere within the building, and this time the gunshot must have been near the great winding throat of the place, that long corridor curling through the hillside, because it caught the sound and bounced it down and down like a kind of apology.
My fingers tightened on Gebre’s arm, and I whispered: “Gunfire.”
Te opened ter mouth to say of course not, of course it isn’t, but even as te tried to speak the words, te couldn’t quite believe them, and instead breathed: “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Numberless?”
“I don’t know.”
The interface in its little white box sat on a low table by Gebre’s side.
Te hadn’t let it out of ter sight, hadn’t put it in the truck – it would be the last thing te did, and perhaps after, I thought, te might take Grace.
Perhaps that was why te still clung to it.
The interface, the archive – these were the things still keeping ter alive, and it seemed to me that despite everything, Gebre didn’t want to die.
Te crept to the door. Te was not comfortable creeping – an elder academic who’d spent ter whole life marching into rooms with a declaration of “I am here, now listen!”, te tried ter first few steps on tiptoe, then clearly decided it was too undignified and absurd for words, so merely shuffled to the open door.
Stuck ter head outside.
The wind whispered down the great wide corridor, stone designed to sing, a low hum whispering of the growing storm outside, the press of thickening air against the building’s fat black walls.
Listened.
In the archive behind us, a voice, tinny, still played through a discarded headset. In the corridor: a change of note, a soft rising in pitch of the breeze, a sudden tickle of cooler, damper air as somewhere further up the throat of the mountain, a door opened. A drop as it closed again.
“Perhaps…” murmured Gebre, but I clicked my tongue twice, motioned for quiet.
A figure appeared at the top of the corridor.
The distance made them small, hard to fully pin down.
Just a lone stranger – perhaps an archivist, perhaps one of the dawn-singers moving towards us.
But Gebre’s eyebrows furrowed – te did not instinctively recognise their form – and I saw the glint of an exoskeleton, made of far more moving parts than the grudging mechanical aid I wore.
Braces were twisted and woven in a liquid metal around arm and leg, culminating in a crown of silver barbs where a control interface pierced through skin and bone directly into the skull of the user.
There was stuttering quality to their steps, a motion as if now they were here; and now they were not, but a few paces further on without having seemed to lift a toe.
Now they were far off; now they were closer, a stop-start dancing down the great belly of the cliff towards us.
I had seen displacement fields before, but not for a long, long time.
Then the figure lurched forward, raising a metal object in their fist. I grabbed Gebre by the waist and hauled ter back through the door.
The snap-pop of something striking the wall where our heads had been arrived a razored moment before the bigger, grander vroom of the sound, wall sizzling in a hot blackened splat where the projectile had struck.
The bullet was little more than a pellet, accelerated to such speeds that it burned the air it passed through, ripped craters through rock, the heat of its impact singeing my skin and the boom of the shock wave a hard punch to the chest. I looked for a door control, and Gebre was already there, slamming ter palm into a panel and sealing it with a heavy scraping of bolts sliding through stone, before turning to me, eyes wide as the moon, shoulders rising and falling, breathless.
“Who was that?” te hissed. “Who was that?”
“Shine. They are Shine. There’ll be more than one. The door won’t stop them for long; is there another way out?”
“How are they here? How are they here?”
“I don’t know. Gebre, is there another way out?”
For a moment te just stared at me, too many questions, too much impossibility playing on ter mind to process my words.
Indignation, too – this was ter sanctum, ter sacred place, the place where perhaps te had intended to die, and now there was an intruder in it, someone disrupting ter final plan, the plan te had been making since almost the day te was born.
I caught ter arm, pressed my hand against the white box te still clutched to ter chest, and something – not about the solidity of me, but the solidity of it, of this thing with meaning – brought ter back.
“Yes,” te blurted. “There’s another way out. ”
I clicked my tongue, and followed.
Behind us, like thick caramel drooping in the heat, the door began to melt.
Different corridors, not meant for public consumption.
Narrower, winding ways, utterly anonymous, branching off to specialist rooms for radio-imaging, quantum probing, restoration, staff toilets.
I knew we were going deeper into the Institute, hated how loud our footsteps were as we clattered along, tried not to look back, didn’t see anyone else as we descended.
Down here the sticky damp of previous storms was a cold, slithering presence, pools of water splashing beneath our feet where the ocean had leached into the building, the shuddering of the storm outside whistling through open vents and tiny fissures in stone as if it were a great tentacled thing hungry to prise its way inside.
“There’s a door to the cliff path two floors down,” Gebre whispered – we were both whispering now, even though the world was shaking in the gloom, shadows and dusk in this twisted maze. “You can take it to the outside, climb up it, circle back round to the van.”
I looked back, saw no one behind us, clicked in agreement.
The lights down here were on low power, pools of thin grey, their efforts nothing next to the encroaching dark, the familiar touch of it, the familiar place where possibility and imagination blurred.
There was safety there, in that dark, a terrifying, murderous kind of safety, and the thought of it nearly choked me.
A sound behind, cutting through the rising shriek of the compressed air of the storm – heavy footsteps, moving not quite right, a slip-side of armour in displacement field, a jagged twist in a shadow behind us that vanished as soon as it was seen.