Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five Read online

  Xavi’s cell was a long elevator ride away. Lila felt two choices emerge from the silent knowledge as she started to pass through the open-plan office section where administrative staff processed the Agency’s billions of daily documents. She could run to where she perceived trouble coming, and take Xavi with her to save time, or she could dump Xavi beyond the reach of all physical and most magical harm first. She chose the second option for a host of calculated reasons that had already bypassed her conscious mind several times on their way through her AI synapses.

  At the elevator doors a secretary was standing, yawning, her tray of cups indicating that she’d picked the short straw and was on the coffee run. The elevator car was a couple of floors above, descending. Lila bypassed the control system and opened the doors to the empty shaft. The secretary staggered forward on automatic and jolted as Lila shouted, ‘Stand still!’ on her way past.

  Lila turned as she jumped and saw the cups falling with her, the sight of their impact on the carpet cut off abruptly as her head passed the floor level. Only the lingering cry of the swearing woman trailed after them down into the abyss. Above them the car eased down and stopped. Lila turned her attention to the sub basement and opened its doors up. Jets in her boots slowed them down with a deceleration she had to be careful of – she was pretty unbreakable in this gravity but Xavi was twiglike – and then she was in the corridor of the security wing, sprinting for Xavi’s door, the guards already plastering themselves to the walls in accordance with orders that she’d sent belting through their earpieces moments before.

  The only hitch in the matter came in the form of the duty shaman who had been woken from a catnap to release the aetheric binds that master mages had emplaced upon that part of the prison. She was stammering her way through some chant, trying to get something out of a bag and shake a fetish stick all at the same time. A plate of half-eaten biscuits lay on the floor next to her. Lila was sympathetic but had no time to show it, nor did she feel the need as Blondine was one of the greater shamans of the post-Moth era, even if she did look like a frazzled housewife from the Bay. She shoved Xavi at the woman, more or less dropping her directly into her lap, and said, ‘Pack her in tight. Come to my office soon as you’re done.’

  The journey back was a blur, executed on automatic as Lila fine-tuned to the sensation that had upset her in the first place. It centred on her office – the place that used to house Sarasilien, the elf mage who was Xaviendra’s father and who had been Otopian liaison to the elf world since the Quantum Bomb had burst Earth and opened up the hidden worlds.

  But Sarasilien was long gone and there was no sign of him anywhere. He hadn’t left a note, just a big fifty-year-old hole where he used to be. He was another one Lila missed every day, the office a memorial, mausoleum, reminder, storehouse, hideaway, library of secrets and epicentre of residual energy that was the obvious hotspot for any aetherial interventions to occur, or invasions to strike. Her only true aetherial helper was the flimsy scrap of ra-ra skirt around her hips: Tatterdemalion, the faery.

  Now Tatters was a worn-out relic from an age where Zal’s music had held sway. She was worn and washed out, but as Lila ran through the open plan again, dodging staff, she felt the sudden shift of fabric around her waist and within a few moments the skirt was gone and she was wearing a doublet and surcoat, stitched with the symbols and signs she had learned to associate with protection charms.

  The locks and bolts on the door shot back at her approach along the lengthy corridor that separated this volatile place from the rest of the human offices. The foreboding weight in her shoulders increased as she made herself slow down to a walk and survey for traps. There was nothing she could detect, nor did the faery cloth react, so she pushed the door open with a flick of her fingers and crossed the threshold.

  The office was made up of three rooms, each leading to the next. Lila kept the doors open because she knew the place could guard itself without her help and besides, she liked it to look friendly. Now she could see a light in the farthest room, one she hadn’t left on. It was something cheap to decorate boudoir side tables, and she thought it was a present from Sorcha, the succubus, to the office’s old master. It had a rosy, golden gleam that made everything look warm and comfortable and it cast a direct path of fading beams to Lila’s feet.

  She felt her teeth slide together. Invitation plus invasion – that really rubbed her up the wrong way. But at least it meant intelligence and not the wholescale space-time disruption disaster movie that had started playing itself in her head on the way down here.

  Never one to be cautious when she could be bold, Lila straightened her shoulders and put her chin down. She walked forward along the designated line, though she’d have preferred to do anything but obey the summons. Even this irked her. As she turned the final corner around the study door she wasn’t ready for what she saw or the blood-draining shock that it started before her mind had even put names to the faces. All she could think of was that it was two in one day. Two.

  Sarasilien was standing in the corner, reading at his lectern. His long fox-coloured hair was loose and his clothing was unfamiliar to her, though it had the cast of elvish fashion about its skirted coat and leggings, its cloth boots. He was surprise enough to her, but nothing had prepared her to respond to his companion and the pair that they made. Beside his tall, rangy figure stood the shorter, sleeker and infinitely more plastic charcoal female form that Lila knew to be the rogue leader she had beheaded and doomed with the sword of Night months before.

  It was Sandra Lane.

  No, she thought a second later. It was Lane’s clone.

  A perfect clone. So, which one of them was Lane? And how many of the things were there? But there wasn’t time for that thought. They were turning to her now.

  Lila might have forgiven Sarasilien if he’d reacted with heartfelt emotion, with something other than the grim seriousness that he offered as he raised his head, but his look was calm, self-contained, businesslike, as though she were just some official he’d come to see on an important matter. She didn’t want him to run across the room in hysterics or anything, but this left her with the feeling, once again, that she could stand with her guts out and he’d be passing her a tissue. It struck her there and then just how one-sided their relationship had been. She’d needed him so badly, anything had seemed like it must be enough. How cheaply she’d been bought. The revelation washed through her like ice water, freezing what was left of her heart.

  Meanwhile Lane stood there with her hands grasped together like the master’s toy. Her immaculate, basic features held no individuality but they managed an expression of grave disappointment as though she were a teacher who had caught Lila out in a naughty prank. Only the confirmation of her machine self, one robot to another, convinced Lila this was the real deal and not some other creature in masquerade, because she’d been sure Lane was beyond the reach of the material world and finding her in one piece was disconcerting to say the least. But she recovered fast from her disappointment.

  ‘Well,’ she heard herself say with a cool bite in the words, ‘if it ain’t the returning dead.’

  ‘Lila,’ Sarasilien said, a beat too late, not warm enough, not anything enough to make up for his defection. ‘Don’t be alarmed. We can explain.’

  In response Lila manufactured guns from her hands and raised them in a single, exacting motion.

  ‘Yeah?’ she aimed one at his forehead, one at Sandra’s. ‘I’d like to hear that.’

  She looked him in the eye and saw there the same warm compassion they’d always held only this time she wasn’t grateful for it. Maybe it was getting to see Xavi and her pain, hear her crazy thoughts, or maybe it was the feeling of being treated like a caretaker, left in the cold on a need-to-know basis that was burning her gut. No, it was all of them. ‘You got twenty seconds.’

  Then she flicked her gaze to Sandra Lane. ‘And you got two.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  The conversation with Sarasili
en took place at ordinary speeds. The one with Sandra Lane went by in less than a human blink, but that didn’t mean it played any shorter. In real-time terms however it was over before the other one even began.

  ‘I am not the same Sandra Lane whom you murdered,’ said the rogue in their shared bubble of expanded time. She used abbreviated digital codes to communicate with Lila. They were the machine equivalent of text shortforms where a simple two or three digit string acted as the symbol for entire philosophies of thought or vast networks of memes. Any cyborg could have burst-broadcast the entire written language output of Otopia in less time than it takes to sigh by using them, which left plenty of room to add details about feelings and opinions that would usually be left to facial expressions and posture in an ordinary human conversation.

  Sandra Lane added nothing however. Her speech, save for her choice of words, was devoid of personality.

  ‘Uh huh,’ Lila said, holding her aim.

  All her attention was free to be fixed on the creature, since at their shared rate of time compression Sarasilien wasn’t moving worth a damn. Lane’s lack of affect was a gulf between them, one that Lila was sure was intentional. It acted as a political statement of their core difference. Lane was stating how much she identified with the machine by withholding all information about her emotions, supposing she still had them. Lila didn’t understand how Lane could kid herself that this was a superior model or that her stand was anything other than a pose. But Lane had a lot more to add.

  ‘We’re holographic,’ Lane said, spelling it out so slowly that Lila thought she might be genuinely afraid of getting a faceful of bullet. ‘Any part of us could be cut off and, given sufficient matter and energy, regrow our entire structure, complete with memories up to the point of excision. Additional memories from the primary identity could be added later, if required, or the alternate could be left to run an individual time-and-life-path of evolution. I am an alternate of Sandra Lane.’

  Lila took a few picoseconds to assimilate this and draw her conclusions. She remembered the sight of Lane’s beheaded corpse sliding into the flat world of the sword’s surface, eaten all up. Where the sword had been in her hand the gun pointed bluntly. Lila felt the trigger in her mind, caressed it lovingly. ‘And when did your river of memories dry up?’

  ‘When the primary was destroyed,’ Lane replied. ‘At the moment of decapitation there was no loss of transmission, but immediately afterwards the signal failed.’ True to her avowed machine principles she betrayed only a kind of mild professional interest.

  Lila didn’t entirely buy it however. One didn’t use the word murder without reason. Lane Prime was the dead one then. And apparently the most important one. Why that should be so remained a mystery.

  She matched the cool for cool, although her anger was rising. ‘Well, since you were there, so to speak, you know what happened. Nothing’s changed since then. I still don’t want to talk to you, but you insist on invading my space. The only reason you’re not dead now is that you’re standing next to him. I asked you then and I ask you one more time, for the last time, what do you want, Miss Lane?’

  The plastic mouth moved. ‘I need to explain at some length.’

  Lila gave a static fuzz burst, the equivalent of a shrug. ‘I gave you two seconds, we’re still in the first half of number one. Knock yourself out.’

  She was aware of the other cyborg’s sensors and transmitters searching for inroads through which they could upload or read her systems – it was a constant storm of electromagnetic tentacles – but even if the Lane cyborg was a later, better model, it wasn’t finding any openings. Lila guessed that was the only reason they were having a conversation at all. That and some residual, inconvenient trace of guilt on her part.

  ‘The rogue and submissive population of cyborgs made in the human world are all now a half century in advance of you in terms of real-time ageing and process,’ Lane began. ‘We have learned, as you have, that our existence is the result of a migration of the Akashic Record from the dimension of the nonmaterial into the material planes. Yet the Akashic Record itself is not an entity as we understand ourselves to be. It is pure data, the sum of all changes of state taking place over time since the beginning of this universe to the end. As such, it extends beyond the general assumption of the Akashic Record as being merely the sum of human knowledge and activities. It would more correctly be understood as the universe itself from a purely informational point of view.’ She paused, waiting for Lila to signal comprehension.

  Lila knew that to the aetheric races, the Akashic Record was the sum of their own histories and lore. It was encoded in an elemental form of raw aether that could be read, if you were a powerful mystic with a will and education strong enough to attempt a reading. So the stories went. She’d yet to find anyone who had experience of its actual existence and none of them, she was sure, would accept a vision of it as mere data written in time – as the sum total of events in the universe. This is what Lane meant, however.

  She was saying that Time was the book of record, every quantifiable instant a single page upon which a complete snapshot of everything in existence could be seen. In her version there was no need for aether. But that wasn’t her problem. Lila guessed where this was going, because nobody would talk to a cyborg about the Record unless they were going to talk about how cyborg technologies came into existence. But Lila wanted to know exactly what Lane’s motive was before she joined in, so she took an oblique angle for her reply, hoping to lure Lane out a bit more.

  ‘Some say that’s god you’re talking about,’ Lila said.

  She was sure that Lane was as atheist as you got. The idea of god as everything that existed was also as secular an idea of god as you were likely to find: god as a collective noun. Lila would have wanted her gods distinct, carrying their own load, with everyone free to heed them or not as they liked, if there had been gods. But at least if she were god in the making then she wasn’t expected to serve greater purposes than her own, so she didn’t mind this version of deity. She wondered what Lane’s take was.

  ‘I do not say that,’ Lane replied. ‘I say only that this perspective on the cosmos shows no need for an animistic sentience of any kind, creative or generated as an emergence of the continual process of entropy. But,’ and she paused for several milliseconds, ‘our existence and the discovery in Otopian space of the original information that gave rise to our present state as hybrid beings that are living but able to actualise the Akasha itself: that does require an explanation that only a directed-sentient will seems to answer.’

  ‘Intelligent design,’ Lila said. But although the world and its works didn’t to her mind require a designer, there was no doubt that her own and Lane’s existence did. Lila knew that someone had to be implicated in the Otopian cyborg development and now here was Lane, all but confirming it. There were only two theories in Otopia about this and Lila subscribed to neither.

  ‘Why Sandra, you’ve come to me with a crisis of faith.’

  ‘No,’ Lane said in the same, evenly measured tone. ‘I have come to you to request a truce between us for the duration of a different kind of crisis, one which exists in the material and aetheric planes; one that binds our origins to this moment and its workings. Though the discovery of our maker would be satisfying to me and, I assume, to you, it is a secondary consideration. Of primary importance is the discovery of a defence against what I can best describe in purely mathematical terms as a possibility storm. A Mightquake. Perhaps it is the final consequence of the Quantum Bomb. I am unable to say. However, I am certain of one thing. Neither your manufacture, nor the creation of other hybrid agents and planewalkers is the product of chance, circumstance and, as you might have it, Fortune – the play of all potentials falling into the one manifest world.’

  She paused here, in what Lila interpreted as a grace moment in which she was meant to make a leap of implication and she did, and it toppled like this: Teazle says nothing is an accident; Lane says nothing is
an accident; Malachi says there are unseen forces at work; making a cyborg means you have pulled knowledge directly from the Akashic Records; the only people capable of that are angels, dragons or elf mages of the kind wiped out in recent history; Lane is standing next to him and that can’t be an accident.

  Lila felt all the pieces suddenly snap together with a sharp pain like a slap in the face. Sarasilien made us all.

  It took her a long time to work through her shock, so long in fact that Sarasilien was drawing breath to speak by the time she released the comms protocol with Lane and turned to him with the aeon-slow deliberation of human speed. She pointed both her guns at the ceiling and let them become her hands again. For a machine day she stared into his fox-brown eyes and remembered all of his kind words, the feeling of his aura bathing her in analgesic, wholesome rays. And all the time he’d known. He’d done it. He made her. Not the Otopians. They were only his instruments.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, staring at him. ‘Just don’t bother. I don’t want to hear it. We’ve got a lot of talking to do, but it ain’t gonna be now.’

  Humiliation and shame layered with rage until she couldn’t think at all, and didn’t want to. More than anything she wanted to let rip with those guns and see his lying, scheming face blown into plasma – a condition from which she was pretty sure not even he would return. As she looked at him, at his solemn, fatherly elven expression, his air of grace and sadness, she felt a twinge of a feeling that was all new as it zigzagged through her, arc lightning, joining up her life, Zal’s life, Teazle’s life, Xaviendra’s life. The jolt almost made her stagger as it shot from the present into the past. Yes, why else would he be here and now? Not to help or comfort her. To use her because some part of this scheme was coming to fruition.

  It must be a big scheme. From abstract nothing he had made the machines.