Parallax View (12 page)

Webber took the hand, shook.

“I am the Aga of Rhaqalle,” the man said. “I must say, you are not what I expected: a man who travels so far out of obligation to one who has departed. I had expected a romantic, or perhaps an obsessive. You are, if you will forgive my directness, an ordinary man.”

“Nicole meant a lot to me,” he said. “I wanted to learn why she came here.”

The Aga smiled. “You are ready for enlightenment? If not, then all you will perceive is sand and poverty. I see that I am right: you see the sand and wonder why your lover should choose such a place to live and die. Nicole saw beyond the sand.”

Seeing
beyond the sand
was as good as he had ever come up with. He saw now that his journey had been futile: if he had been equipped to understand what it was that Nicole had sought, then such a trip would never have been necessary.

The Aga gestured at Webber’s guide. “Rani will fetch the ashes,” he said. “He will bring them to your room. I pray that enlightenment finds you in the end.
Salaam aleikum
.”

Webber allowed himself to be led away by Rani, the guide. As they passed from the cool precincts of the mosque, and into the searing heat of the day, Webber paused. “I wonder,” he said. “I learnt that someone is staying here, an acquaintance of a friend. Would you be able to show me where he is staying? His name is Helebron – the artist from Xyré.”

Rani nodded. “Sure,” he said. “I show you to Helebron.”

Rani took him through a succession of side streets and alleyways, and across a bustling market until they came to a courtyard. Rani pointed towards a square white building, much like any other in this oasis town. “The room at the end is his,” he said. “You want me to wait?”

Webber thanked him, then approached the open door arch set into the end of the building. Doors opened off a long corridor, but he ignored them until he reached the end. He knocked, and almost immediately a deep voice sounded, in a tongue unfamiliar to Webber. He pushed the door open.

The room was dim, and when his eyesight adjusted he made out tables and chairs fashioned from a dark old wood, all laden with... Webber fought his surprise. The rectangular room resembled more the work place of a taxidermist than the studio of an artist. Perhaps a hundred small animals – lizard-like creatures, birds, a vast selection of scorpions like the one Webber had seen earlier – filled the chamber. Each tiny sculpture was flawless, just as the sculpture of Jade Powers was flawless.

“Yes?”

A seated figure looked up from behind a desk. It was the man from the interview: Helebron of Xyré. He was in the process of examining a chunky beetle in the palm of his hand. His withered old features made him seem somehow less alive than the crystallised menagerie surrounding him.

“My name is Axel Webber. We have a mutual acquaintance.”

The artist watched him silently.

“Kandy Powers. She says... she claims that you killed her daughter.”

“Powers, yes,” said Helebron. “She killed my son. A fair exchange.” Disconcertingly, he glided out from behind the desk. He was seated in a powered invalid carriage. His body beneath a grey djellaba was hideously emaciated, useless away from the paltry gravity of Xyré. “She’s here?” he asked. “She sends only a messenger?”

“She doesn’t know I’m here. She wants to see you. She wants an end to her torment.”

Helebron turned away, his face looking suddenly skull-like in relief. “Powers has suffered only a fraction of what I suffered,” he said. “Her daughter was not tortured before her death, Mr Webber. All Kandy Powers has suffered is the pain of loss, not the knowledge of what her child has endured.”

Casually, Webber reached into his jacket and withdrew the handgun. “You disgust me,” he said. He levelled the gun. A slight tightening of his forefinger and the artist would torment Kandy no more.

Helebron stared at him contemptuously, then brushed a hand across the controls of his chair, manoeuvring himself behind the desk again.

Webber was left aiming at empty air. He could not kill a man, even one as despicable as Helebron.

“You are right,” said the artist, matter-of-factly. “It is time for the suffering to end. ‘Sugar and Spice’ has achieved its goal. I am not the ogre you think me.”

Webber was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

Helebron’s eyes flicked around the room. “Choose one of my works,” he said. “Pick it up. Go on.”

Webber reached for one of the scorpions on a nearby shelf. As his fingers neared it, he experienced a frisson, a charge of vitality and then, as his hand closed around the object, he sensed only emptiness, death.

“Now,” said Helebron. “Observe!”

The artist waved his arm in a theatrical manner – performed, Webber thought later, to hide some other movement responsible for what happened next.

Suddenly, the scorpion squirmed in his grip. He opened his hand, saw the viciously arched tail. He jerked his hand away, so that the creature dropped to the floor and scuttled off, disappearing through a crack in the wall.

He stared at Helebron. “You can do this for Jade?”

“That is why I brought the piece to Serenity,” said the artist. “It is time to end this thing... as long as Powers meets my conditions.”

“Which are?”

“First, that she should truly repent, admitting her responsibility for what happened to those four innocent boys. And secondly, that her confession and Jade’s revival should take place in public – an item of performance art, if you will. If she is the artist she claims to be, then she will see the symmetry of this: what began as a pretence of art, should end as a pretence of art. We will, no doubt, be blessed with excellent reviews.”

Webber was lost to his thoughts as Rani led him back to the Lodge. Kandy had said that she was prepared to beg, but Helebron was asking for more than that. She had said how sorry she was, but did she really repent having created the work of art in the first place? He remembered the trace of pride in her tone when she had told him of the power of her creation: she regretted its consequences, not it conception. But surely she would go through with Helebron’s scheme if she knew her daughter would be revived? Surely she would accept almost anything if it meant that Jade would be returned to life?

Kandy was asleep when he returned. He decided not to wake her. Let her rest while she could. He stripped off, wrapped a towel around his waist and went along to the shower on the next corridor. The jet of water was feeble, but enough to sluice the layers of dust and sweat-salt from his body.

When, at last, he turned the water off, he thought he smelt burning. He dismissed it, started to towel his hair. When he had finished, he tied the towel around his waist again and twisted the door-catch.

It wouldn’t move. He tugged harder, but it was stuck. And the handle was hot to the touch.

He tried to force the door with his shoulder, then bracing his back against the wall he kicked at it with the sole of his foot. Wood splintered. This time when he leaned on the door it creaked open, leaving the catch in place.

Someone had welded the lock with the blast from a laser...

He hurried back along the corridor.

The room was empty. Legs weak, he staggered across the room to his heaped clothes. His jacket pocket was empty. Kandy had taken his laser handgun.

He pulled on his trousers and shoes, buttoning his shirt as he ran down the stairs and out into the street. He tried to recall the way to Helebron’s studio.

He set off in what he hoped was the right direction.

Soon he came to a crowded thoroughfare he was sure he recognised, although lit by the moons and the lights of the houses and stalls it appeared altered. He crossed the street, barging past haggling traders, forcing his way through a torrent of pedestrians.

He recognised a coffee parlour, with a line of old men sitting on the step outside. He plunged down a covered alleyway, past stalls laden with kettles, tambourines, mousetraps and soap powder. At the next junction another group of old men sat around an open fire, their pots of boiling syrup sweetening the air. He realised that he was lost.

He tried to retrace his steps, then stopped to ask a young boy if he knew where the artist Helebron was staying. The child stared up at the strange offworlder, then ran away giggling.

Seconds later the boy returned with another youth. “Helebron,” Webber said urgently. From his pocket he pulled a hundred dollar bill, all the cash he had on him. The older boy’s eyes bulged. He gabbled something at the other boy, took Webber’s arm and led him back along the street.

When they reached the courtyard Webber thrust the note at the boy, then ran through the arched doorway and along the corridor.

The door to the artist’s chamber was open. Webber made himself stop, breathe deeply.

When he entered the room he saw that he was too late. The old man lay slumped across his desk, a slick of blood gathering around his mouth. Another victim of Kandy Power’s art. All around the room, the frozen animals looked on disinterestedly.

Helebron’s fingers were curled around the butt of a small laser handgun.

Robbed of all emotion, Webber backed out of the room.

As the muezzins raised their cry for evening worship, he retraced his route back to the Lodge, losing his way only once, and then not for long.

Webber halted in the doorway of their room. Kandy was leaning over her bag, packing. She looked up, said, “Axel, I’m sorry. I can’t stay here. I can’t...” She stopped when she saw his expression.

“You used me,” he said. He wondered how many other tourists with passes to Rhaqalle she had seduced before happening upon him.

Slowly, she resumed her packing. “He was dead when I got there,” she said. “It must have been suicide.”

“He killed himself with
my
handgun?”

Her hands were trembling. She did not look at him as she said, “Are you going to turn me in?”

In the shock of the last half hour he had made no contingency plans.

He made a quick decision, based less on logic than emotion. “No,” he said. “I couldn’t do that to you, even now. Just go.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I said go!”

She closed her bag, lifted it from the bed, and hurried past him. He wondered, as she ran down the stairs, if she felt any sense of triumph – over him, over Helebron... He wondered if she felt anything at all.

He noticed that Rani had been, as the Aga had promised. A small box sat on the dressing table, marked with Nicole’s name and the dates of her birth and death. The span of her life – just twenty-five years – struck him as tragic and unjust. He picked up the box and weighed it in his hand. In the end there is so little, he thought.

Later, he knew, when the pain had subsided, he who had travelled so little would make another trip: to Xyré, to petition the authorities for help with reviving Jade Powers – for the girl’s sake, not her mother’s.

He moved to the window, the box of ashes cradled in his hand. He stared out into the darkness and watched the auroral lights begin their flickering sky dance. Something within him had turned to ice, or rather glass.

Down below, Powers ran down the steps of the Lodge and entered the busy night-time bazaar. For a few seconds her blonde hair was visible among the crowd, and then she was lost to sight.

The Flight of the Oh Carrollian

The bond was strong, even this far from the ship.

Fluxmaster Julius Frayn stood on the hotel patio and stared out across the city. The million lights of the African capital scintillated like the massed stars of a galactic nebula. Above the cries of beggars and merchants in the teeming streets, the
Oh Carrollian’s
mental echo rang across the kilometre from the ’port, a siren song loud in his cerebellum.

On occasions Frayn felt that his status was more a curse than the great gift that others claimed.

He turned his attention from the sprawl of night-time Nairobi, alerted by a sound in the bushes directly below. A quick shadow approached at a run through the darkness. Frayn hardly had time to register alarm before he made out another figure following the first. There was a tussle as one figure wrestled the other to the ground.

“Hannor?” he called.

“Master...” Hannor’s taciturn reply reassured him.

Seconds later Hannor emerged from the shadows, frog-marching a thin man before him. Hannor was tall, his scaled body swathed in the green robe of his rank, Frayn’s Second.

“I wanted only to speak to the fluxmaster!” the thin man protested. “I mean no harm!”

Hannor marched the man onto the patio and paused before Frayn. The Cyntheran’s blunt, turtle visage jutted from the shadows of his cowl; he nodded towards the thin man, his brief gesture asking Frayn what he should do with the intruder. Frayn was closer to the alien than he was to any human, yet they only ever communicated easily in the dreamflux.

“You choose a bizarre method of approach,” Frayn observed.

The man struggled in Hannor’s grip. “I was merely taking a stroll. I saw you and hurried over – we were never introduced at the party, and I wanted to talk. Then this... this monster attacked me...”

Frayn regarded the man. “If you wish to speak to me, then speak.” He nodded to Hannor to release his captive.

The man collected his dignity, drew himself up to his full height, and met the fluxmaster’s eyes with the confidence of wealth.

Frayn had noticed him earlier, in the hotel ballroom: in his mid- to late-thirties, fashionably under-dressed in thong and knee-boots, his body skeletal, mutilated by a repeated pattern of runic scars and tattoos. Frayn recognised the symbol of the Rationalist cadre scored into the man’s chest.

He had flitted around the gathering like a bee in a field of clover: a few words here, a joke there.

So arrogant and so rich: Frayn saw no reason to revise his initial dislike of the man.

The party was still going on, somewhere in the depths of the hotel. Throbbing music spilled out across the patio.

“Master Frayn of the
Oh Carrollian
?” the man asked, more hesitantly than Frayn had expected. Almost respectful.

He nodded, looking past the man and out across the city. To be back in the cavernous interior of his ship now, reunited with Elisabetha! Away from the petty demands of the world, away from the expectations.