In Heaven and Earth (6 page)

HE WALKED straight into
the garden, tasting the sweetness of the roses before the stars had
faded. He stood still as his vision cleared, watching the roses
take form around him, their flowers ruffs of elegantly folded
petals and their stems twining over the rubble of long abandoned
walls.

“
A shame I’m
not the one with the headcam,” he said to the invisible watchers in
his sickbay.

“
See something
interesting?” Meili asked sharply. “A clue?”

“
Flowers,”
Reuben murmured. “There’s nothing here except flowers.”

As soon as he’d said it,
though, he realised it wasn’t quite true. There were walls here
too, low, broken, worn away by time and the burrowing roots. The
outer bailey might be the only wall which was still at its full
height, but there had been buildings within the wall once.
Intrigued, and with no one in sight to ask, Reuben turned up the
next sloping path between the flowers.

It led him onto a small
mound. From there he could see the whole southern side of the
garden.

For the first time, he
realised how quiet it was.

There were no birds here.
In all the vids he’d seen of real planets, there were animals:
birds on feathered wings and small creatures playing in the
undergrowth. He had even been to the great zoological gardens on
Sirius Station to see the descendants of the wildlife rescued from
old Earth. There were no people here, either, no happy young lovers
courting in the bowers.

In Vairya’s dreamworld,
there were only flowers, rustling sadly under the wind.

From here, Reuben could
see the pattern the walls made, and suddenly it seemed familiar.
When they docked above Caelestia, they had crossed over the
spaceward side of the city, where only force fields separated the
hollowed out asteroid and its atmosphere from the stars, and had
looked down on the city.

The streets had followed
the same patterns as the broken walls of Vairya’s
garden.

Reuben sighed.

Locked within his own
mind, Vairya had hidden the destruction of Caelestia under sweet
flowers, but he had not been able to escape it. The truth was
there, if you knew how to look.

He needed to talk to
Vairya again. Scanning the horizon, he spotted a distant glimmer of
light. It was little effort to improve his own vision until he
could see one of his nanoknights moving slowly between the rows of
flowers, bent over something. The other was a few rows away, in a
similar posture.

Reuben studied the route
to them and then began to run. He had never been a star athlete,
although he made the effort to stay fit, but the only restriction
in here was the limits of his imagination, and so he ran at
record-breaking speed, darting down long avenues and hurdling gates
with the lightest of touches. It was fun to move so freely, and he
was laughing a little by the time he reached the
nanoknights.

Then he realised that
they had lost their swords and were wielding hoes.

The laughter broke out of
him completely, surprise and delight and irritation all
together.

“
I thought
helping things to grow suited their nature better than war,” Vairya
said, stepping out into the bower. Despite his casual words, he was
wringing his hands and peering at Reuben anxiously.

“
You said,”
Reuben growled, “that you wouldn’t hurt me.” He took a pace
forwards, suddenly angry. Vairya had flirted and teased and then
thrown him to Ahrima’s mercy.

“
I didn’t
intend to,” Vairya said, stepping forwards himself (brave, then,
because Reuben knew he was intimidating in a rage). “It was just
meant to be something unpleasant from your past to see how you
react.”

“
And do I look
like someone whose past is full of light and flowers?” Reuben
demanded.

“
No,” Vairya
said and held up his hand before Reuben could continue. “And I’m
sorry. I had no idea who you were.”

“
But you do
now?”

“
I’m always
linked to the city net,” Vairya said. “I looked you up.”

“
Disconnect!”
Reuben snapped, taking another urgent step forwards.
“Now!”

“
Why?” Vairya
asked. “I like to know things. I can see the city through it, you
know, the other city. I can see the dead.”

“
Lots of them
were connected to the net when they died. Disconnect,
Vairya.”

Vairya laughed, soft and
humourless. “Oh, Sir Reuben, trying to save me? It wasn’t the net
that killed them. They were doomed before that. We were all doomed
from the moment that—”

“
What?” Reuben
demanded when he stopped. “When what happened? How did they die,
Vairya?”

“
Gently,” Eskil
murmured in his ear. “Don’t provoke him.”

“
He’s no
killer,” Reuben said flatly and took another step towards Vairya.
“You didn’t kill your people, did you?”

Vairya’s head came up,
his eyes widening with shock. “Kill them? Me? No! Never! Who thinks
I could ever hurt them?”

“
My
colleagues,” Reuben said. “Someone or something liquefied the
brains of everyone linked into the city net. Was that you?” He was
pushing hard, he knew, far too hard, but he wanted to shock the
truth out of Vairya. They needed to know what had happened
here.

“
That wasn’t
what killed them!” Vairya cried. “That was the only way I
could
save
them!”

“
By melting
their brains?”

“
By uploading
them!” The words tore out of Vairya, and then he clapped his hand
across his mouth, like a child caught in a lie. Then, very slowly,
he wrapped his arms around himself and began to rock on his heels.
“I couldn’t save their flesh, and some of them I couldn’t save at
all, but I thought I would still be able to transmit them to Sirius
or one of the other stations. Then the Enemy took the ansible
transmitters, and we were all trapped here together. We can’t get
out.”

“
What enemy,
Vairya?” Reuben asked, forcing his voice back to something
gentle.

“
The
Enemy,” Vairya whispered. “The Enemy came. They
found us again, and I had to save the people. Humanity must go on,
Sir Reuben, even if the planets and cities fall. You must go
on.”

“
Tell me about
the enemy, Vairya,” Reuben coaxed, stepping closer again. He was
almost within reach of Vairya now, and could see, for the first
time, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, too quickly
and shallowly.

“
The Enemy is
the enemy is the enemy-enemy-enemy,” Vairya babbled and then jerked
to a stop. To Reuben’s dismay, he stuttered, “It could happen
again! Again. It could… again. Again… againagainagain. It could
happen— happen—”

“
Shit,” Reuben
said. “Lost him.”

“
He’s run
away?” Eskil asked. “What the hell was that, Coop?”

“
I got some
answers,” Reuben pointed out as he strode back to the nanoknights.
He took one of their hoes, not without a slight struggle, and
lugged it back to Vairya, the nanoknight watching him forlornly
from a distance.

“…
again. Again…
againagainagain. It could…”

“
I’m only doing
this because this is an imagined landscape, and I think this will
be more psychologically effective than an imaginary sedative,”
Reuben muttered, to assuage his conscience, and hit Vairya over the
head with the hoe. Twice.

Vairya’s babble trailed
off into a yelp of pain, and he fell over.

Reuben cast the hoe aside
in relief and knelt down next to him, settling him into a more
comfortable position and checking the swelling on his
head.

“
That hurt,”
Vairya complained.

“
If it had been
a real farm implement, I could have killed you.”

Vairya turned a little to
blink up at him, wincing. “Was that supposed to be reassuring or
not? I can’t quite tell.”

“
Just
honest.”

“
Honesty,”
Vairya said acidly, “is overrated. That really fucking
hurts.”

“
Only in your
imagination,” Reuben said, gently pushing Vairya’s hair back from
the swelling. “You’re quite capable of thinking it
away.”

Vairya’s hair was very
soft, and curled around his fingers in golden twists. Reuben
reminded himself very firmly that this was an illusion.

Out of the corner of his
eye, he saw the nanoknight sidle forwards and reclaim his hoe.
“You’ve even corrupted my knights.”

“‘
And they
shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into
pruning hooks,’” Vairya said. “Not the other way round.”

“
It goes both
ways,” Reuben said mildly and failed to take his hand away. “A
ploughshare can easily be melted down to make a sword, and they
were, throughout history.”

After a moment, Vairya
muttered, “Such a shame you’re a mindless thug. I usually
appreciate a well-read man.”

“
Thug, I will
accept, but not mindless. You are no longer hysterical, and you are
about to finish what you were telling me before you crashed,
weren’t you?”

“
No,” Vairya
said. “I wasn’t.” He propped himself up a little against Reuben’s
leg, as if they were out on a picnic somewhere, and stared at the
sky. He rubbed his head and said, his voice suddenly bleak, “Oh, I
remember now. I
remember
. Sir Reuben, do you know how
to build a new ansible?”

“
No.” Reuben
followed his gaze up. There were clouds drifting across the blue
arch of the sky, and as he watched one began to reform, billowing
into the silhouette of a charging knight armed not with a spear but
a hoe.

“
Then you
should leave, all of you, while you still can. Wait for the Fleet
to arrive, and then tell them to drag Caelestia into the heart of
the sun.”

Reuben took a deep breath
and picked a cloud of his own to shape into a little dog, yapping
at the knight’s heels. “Why? What happened here that was so
terrible? Was it a plague?”

“
Worse. Leave,
Doctor. I can look after Caelestia in its final hours.”

“
If we leave,
you will come with us.”

Vairya’s knight went
galloping across the sky, and little dark wisps of cloud suddenly
formed into wolves, pacing forwards. “I only had one task here, Sir
Reuben. I was sent to protect them. I failed. I have no
future.”

Reuben turned his terrier
around to snarl defiance at the wolves. “Bullshit.”

“
Truth.” Then,
before Reuben could argue him down, Vairya asked brightly, “Have
you ever actually seen a bull? I never have.”

“
No,” Reuben
said, grimacing. “I’ve never worked on a farm platform,
thankfully.”

“
Hark at you,”
Vairya cried, but his humour sounded brittle. “All judgemental,
aren’t you, Sir Knight? Nothing wrong with a good honest
farmer.”

“
Says the
walking archive.”

“
Says the
gardener,” Vairya corrected smugly. “I like flowers. They don’t
have expectations.”

“
You convinced
me,” Reuben said easily. There was something rather nice about
this, lazing around in the sunshine with an interesting man to keep
his mind busy, and if he could lull Vairya into honesty this way,
it would be even better.

Vairya snorted. “You’d
hate it. You’re not a gardener, Sir Reuben. You’re too much of a
hero.”

Reuben’s shoulders
tensed. “That’s not funny.”

Vairya sat up, so they
were face-to-face. “It wasn’t a joke. I know who you are, Reuben
Cooper. They sent me a real knight errant, didn’t they? A hero to
save the lost prince.” His tone was bitter.

“
I’m just a
doctor, and I’m sorry if that’s not good enough for you, but you
get what—”

Vairya caught his sleeve,
his eyes wide and startled. “I’m not mocking you, man. I admire
what you did. Courage like that is rare.”

“
Courage?”

“
Yes. Or are
you not Dr Cooper of Rigel, the saviour of his people?”

Reuben laughed, staring
up at the clouds again so fiercely his eyes stung. “That’s what
they call me in other systems. In Rigel, I’m the Great
Betrayer.”

Chapter Five

“NO YOU’RE not.” Vairya
knelt up enough to lean between him and the sky. “I’ve got access
to the most up-to-date newsfeeds and footage from everywhere in
human space. Did you know there’s a statue of you in—”

Reuben put his hands over
his ears.

Vairya tried to peel them
away, leaning around Reuben, who tried to push him back, and they
both went tumbling across the grass of the bower.

The lawn conveniently
extended just before they rolled into the briars, and Vairya
slammed his hands down on either side of Reuben’s head to stop them
rolling any further.