– Here; allow me.
Her hands and fingers moved without her willing them to; she stopped them without difficulty, making them pause poised above the gun, then let her other self – a sighing, finger-tapping presence somewhere at the back of her mind -control her again.
– It has a homing mechanism built in but I’ve switched it off, the construct said as she used Gadfium’s fingers to click the gun open, put some of the fresh ammunition in, closed the stock again, checked the weapon’s action, briefly switched on a laser-dot sight, then gave her back control.
– I very much doubt I can use this again, Gadfium told her other self, before repocketing the gun.
– So do I.
– Perhaps I ought to throw it away.
– Don’t be silly. You only throw away weapons when they might get you into trouble.
– You don’t say.
– And you’re already in deep trouble. So deep it can’t get any deeper.
– Wow. It’s a good job you’re here to keep my spirits up.
– Keep the gun, Gadfium.
– What about this knife? she asked, taking it from her pocket. It was flat; the blade was as long and broad as two of her fingers. It was wickedly sharp; slots in the centre of the flat of the blade guided it into the hard plastic sheath, keeping the edges away from the sides.
– Keep that, too.
Gadfium shook her head as she slid the knife back into its sheath and carefully put it in her pocket.
– I don’t suppose you can tell me any more about what’s going on, can you? she asked.
– Still investigating. Though I think I may now know who betrayed you.
-Who?
-… I’m not yet certain. Let me check.
– Oh, check away, Gadfium thought, and sat back, sighing. She held her hands up. They had almost stopped shaking.
The carriage hurtled through the tunnels, swaying and rattling as it took turns and crossed points. Lights flashed sporadically through the shaded windows. Air whistled.
– Where are you taking me?
– I suppose it can’t do any harm to tell you now, her other self said crisply. The carriage started to slow down. – You’ll be getting on one of Security’s secret intramural microclifters very soon and descending four levels. You’re going to the castle core, Gadfium; the deep dark inner rooms.
– Oh, grief! Where the outlaws are?
– That’s right. The carriage drew to a halt and the nearest door hissed open to darkness; a wave of cold, damp-smelling air flowed in over Gadfium. – Where the outlaws are.
* * *
3
Sessine wandered the face of the world beyond Serehfa, journeying through its version of Xtremadur to the distant Uitland, travelling across its prairies and plains and deserts and lakes of salt, through its rolling hills, broad valleys and narrow ravines, between its tall mountains and its rolling rivers and its dark seas, amongst its scrub, grassland, forests and jungles.
He soon grew used to the perverse negativity of this world, where the empty aridity of the semi-desert indicated the greatest richness and intensity of transmitted knowledge, which yet remained untappable, and where the seeming fecundity of the jungle’s congested greenery betokened impassible lifelessness, and yet radiated a kind of barren beauty.
Cliffs and mountains indicated buried fastnesses of storage and computation, rivers and seas embodied unsorted masses of chaotic but relatively harmless information, while volcanoes represented mortal danger welling from the explosively corrosive depths of the virus-infested corpus.
The wind was the half-random machine-code shiftings symbolic of the movement of languages and programs within the geographical image of the operating system, while the rain was raw data, filtering through, slowed, from base-reality, and as meaningless as static. The grid of lights available in the sky was simply another representation of the Cryptosphere, like the landscape visible around him, but mapped on a smaller scale.
The optionally visible highways, roads, trails and paths which criss-crossed the countryside were the information channels for the whole of the uncorrupted crypt. Data within them moved at close to the speed of light, which meant that viewed within the context of crypt-time their traffic appeared to move at supersonic speeds. Sometimes he stood near the great coiling highways, listening, rapt, to their eerie, hypnotic songs and staring intently at their gargantuan writhings as though trying through concentration alone to divine the meaning of their cargoes, and always failing.
The first time he saw somebody else he felt a mixture of emotions; fear, joy, expectation and a kind of disappointment that this wilderness was not his alone. He saw a light in the distance across the rocky plain he was crossing, and went, cautiously, to investigate.
An old woman sat alone, staring into a small fire. He had found no need for or way of making fire. She sensed him watching her and called out to him.
He kept his rucksack open and held in front of him and went to join her at the fire. He gave a small bow from a few metres away, uncertain what protocols might apply. She nodded; he sat a quarter-way around the fire from her.
She wore her white hair in a bun and was dressed in loose, dark clothes. Her face was deeply lined. She was sitting back against a small pack.
‘You’re new here?’ she asked. Her voice was deep but soft.
‘Forty days or so,’ he told her. ‘And you?’
She smiled at the fire. ‘A little longer.’ She looked quizzically at him. ‘So, am I your Friday?’
He frowned. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Robinson Crusoe; a story. He believes he is alone on his desert island until he sees another’s footprint, on the day called Friday. When he meets the other man he calls him Friday. We call the first person a new arrival meets their Friday.’ She shrugged. ‘Just a tradition. Silly, really.’
‘Then you are, yes,’ he told her.
She nodded as though to herself and said, ‘Another tradition – and I think it a good one – has it that a Friday answers any questions a newcomer may have.’
He looked into her old, dark eyes.
‘I have many questions,’ he said. ‘Probably more than I know.’
‘That is not uncommon. First, though, may I ask what brings you here?’
He turned his hands palm up. ‘Oh, just the passing of events.’
She nodded and looked understanding, but he felt he might have been rude. He added; ‘I made enemies in the other world, and was brought near to extinction. A friend – a Virgil to my Dante, if you will – led me away from that to whatever sanctuary this represents.’
‘Dante, not Orpheus, then?’ she asked, smiling.
He gave a modest laugh. ‘Ma’am, I am neither poet nor musician, and I don’t believe I ever quite found my Eurydice, so was unable to lose her.’
She chuckled, suddenly childlike. ‘Well then,’ she said, ‘what can I tell you?’
‘Oh, let’s just talk, shall we? Perhaps I’ll find out anything I need to know in the course of our conversation.’
‘Why not?’ she nodded. She sat up a little. ‘I shan’t ask your name, sir; our old names can be dangerous and I doubt you have settled on a new one yet. My name here is Procopia. You are not tired?’
‘I am not,’ he said.
‘Then I shall tell you my story. I am here because of a lost love, as are not a few of us here…’
She told him a little of her life before she came to be incrypted, much of the particular circumstances which led to her being in this level of the crypt, and all she thought relevant of what she had learnt since she had been here.
He talked a little in return, and she seemed content.
Mostly, though, he listened, and as he did so, learnt. He decided he liked the woman; it was very late when they bade each other goodnight and fell asleep.
He dreamt of a far castle, sweet music and a long-lost love.
In the morning when he awoke she was packed and about to depart.
‘I must go,’ she said. ‘I had thought of offering my services as a guide, but I think you may have some point to your wanderings, and I might impose too much of my own course on yours.’
Then you are doubly kind, and wise,’ he said, rising and dusting himself down. She held out her hand, and he shook it.
‘I hope we meet again, sir.’
‘So do I. Travel safely.’
‘And you. Fare well.’
Gradually he started to meet more travellers. He discovered, as Procopia had told him, that these fellow wanderers of the mirror-world, human and chimeric, were either exiles like him – some through choice, some through coercion – or those who were really no more than illicit tourists; adventurers come to sample the strangeness of this anomalous paradigm of base-reality.