Aurora in Four Voices Read online

  "Hot enough?" Crankenshaft asked.

  It was excruciating, but Jato had no intention of letting on how much it bothered him. He simply shrugged. "What will you do? Put your model into shock because he objects to freezing?"

  A muscle under Crankenshaft eye twitched. He went back to work, ignoring Jato again. However, the room warmed and the burning in Jato’s muscles cooled. Either Crankenshaft had lied or else the drone had delivered an antidote with the poison, probably in a bio-sheath that dissolved after a few minutes in the blood.

  Over the next few hours the wind dried Jato’s clothes. Silicate came in once to bring Crankenshaft a meal on a stone platter. Jato wondered about her, always attentive, always silent. Did she create her own art? Most Dreamers did, even those who worked other jobs. Silicate’s only occupation seemed to be waiting on Crankenshaft. But then, Jato doubted Crankenshaft would tolerate artistic competition in his own household.

  Finally Crankenshaft stood up, rolling his shoulders to ease the muscles. "You can go," he said, and left the studio.

  Just like that. You can go. Get out of my house. Clenching his teeth, Jato slid off the cone and limped across the pool, sore from sitting so long. After coaxing his boots on under his wet trousers, he went to a door in the corner of the studio where the window-wall met one of the thermoplastic walls.

  Icy wind greeted him outside. He stood at the top of a staircase that spiraled down the cliff Crankenshaft owned. The city glimmered far below, and beyond it ragged mountains stretched into the darkness. Millennia ago a marauding asteroid had struck the planet, distorting it into a blunt teardrop that lay on its side, its axis pointed at Quatrefoil, the star it orbited. Although Ansatz was almost tidally locked with Quatrefoil, it wobbled enough so most of its surface received at least a little sunlight. Night reigned supreme only here in this small region around the pole.

  Crankenshaft’s estate was high enough to touch the transition zone between the human-made pocket of calm around Nightingale and the violent winds that swept Ansatz. Yet despite the long drop to the plateau, the staircase had no protection, not even a rail. Another of Crankenshaft’s "quirks." After all, he never used these stairs.

  Jato grimaced. When he came willingly, Crankenshaft always had a flycar waiting to take him home. Today he would have to go back inside and ask for a ride, a prospect he found as appealing as eating rocks.

  So he went down the stairs, stepping with care, always aware of the chasm of air. Around and around the spiral he went, never looking around too much, lest it throw off his balance. He wondered how he would appear to someone down in the city. Perhaps like a mote descending a stone DNA helix on the face of a massive cliff.

  The helix image caught his mind. It would make an intriguing sculpture. He could go to the library and find a text on DNA. It would have to be a holobook, though, rather than anything on the computer.

  Before Jato had come to Ansatz, his computer illiteracy hadn’t mattered. As the oldest son of a water-tube farmer on Sandstorm, he hadn’t been able to afford web access, let alone a console. Although everyone here in Nightingale had access to the city web, it did him little good. However, he had figured out how to tell a console in the library to print books.

  He doubted he would try the helix sculpture, though. Reading could only give information, not talent. One thing he had to say for Crankenshaft: the man was brilliant. Jato could never imagine him giving away his stratospherically-priced work for a Dream. Besides, what Dream would he find pleasant? Pulling wings off bugs, maybe.

  Jato scowled. A few Dreamers high in Nightingale’s city government knew Crankenshaft had set him up. They framed him for a crime so brutal it would have meant execution or personality reconfiguration anywhere else. Imperialate law was harsh: an escaped convict fleeing into a new jurisdiction could be resentenced there for his crime. That often-denounced law was intended to ease the morass of extradition problems that arose as more and more planets came under Imperial rule. But it let Crankenshaft blackmail him; if Jato escaped Nightingale, he was subject to death or a brain wipe.

  Crankenshaft’s work was known across a thousand star systems. He was a genius among geniuses, and on Ansatz that translated into power. Whatever he wanted for his art, he was given.

  Including Jato.

  Part II: Dream Debt

  Jato lay in bed, unable to sleep. He had dimmed the lights until only faint images of sand-swept fields softened the walls, holoart he had created himself, memories of his home.

  Even after eight years, he still found this room remarkable. He had grown up in a two-room dustshack his family shared with two other families. Here he had, all to himself, a bed with a quilt, a circular bureau, a mirror, a bathroom, and soft rugs for the floor. The Dreamers charged no rent and gave him a living stipend. His medical care was free, including the light panels and vitamin supplements his sun-starved body craved.

  Tonight the room felt emptier than usual. He gave up trying to sleep and went to the bureau, a round piece of furniture that rotated. He removed his statue from the top drawer. He had come to Ansatz hoping for a miracle, to trade for a fabulous treasure. He had his own dreams then, ones he hoped to achieve by selling such a masterpiece: a farm of his own, a business, a better home for his family, well-deserved retirement for his parents, a wife and children for himself. A life.

  He had never intended to make art. Still, living in Nightingale, how could a person deny the pull to create? The statue had taken years to finish and he kept it hidden now, knowing how lacking the Dreamers would find his attempts. He liked it, though.

  To get the stone he wanted, he had climbed down windscoured cliffs below Nightingale, into crevices lost in the night-dark shadows. There he cut a chunk of black marble no human hand had ever before touched. Back in his rooms, he fashioned it into a bird with its wings spread wide, taloned feet beneath its body, supported by a stand carved from the same stone. Next he made clay copies of it. He spent several years cutting facets into the copies, redoing them until he was satisfied. Then he carved the facets into the statue and inlaid them with crystalline glitter.

  Dreamers used elegant mathematical theories to design their creations. Jato knew his was simple in comparison. The geometry of the facets specified a fugue in four voices, each voice an aspect of his life: loss, of his home and life on Sandstorm; beauty, as in the stark glory of Nightingale; loneliness, his only companion here; and the dawn, which he would never again see.

  Holding the statue, he lay down in bed and fell asleep.

  The bird sang a miraculous fugue, creating all four voices at once. Jato held it as he ran through Nightingale. The pursuing Mandelbrot drone gained ground, until finally it whirred around in front of him. Fractals swirled off its surface and turned into braided steel coils. They wrapped around his body, crushing his chest and arms, silencing the bird. He reeled under the icy stars and fell across the first step of the SquareCase.

  He wrestled with the coils until he worked his arms free, easing the pressure on the bird. It sang again and its voice rose to the stars on wings of hope.

  The fractal coils fell away from his body. As Jato stood up, the spacer appeared, walking out of the shadows that cloaked the SquareCase. She toed aside the coils and they melted, their infinitely repeating patterns blurred into pools of glimmering silver. The bird continued to sing, its fugue curling around them in a mist of notes.

  The spacer stopped only a pace away. Her eyes were a deep green, dappled like a forest, huge and dark. She brushed her fingers across his lips. Jato put his hand on her back, applying just enough to pressure to make the decision hers; stay where she was, or step forward and bring her body against his.

  She stepped forward…

  The Whisper Inn was a round building, graceful in the night. Holding his bundle, Jato stood at its door, an arched portal bordered by glimmering metal tiles.

  "Open," he said.

  Nothing happened.

  He tried again. "Open."

  S
wirling lines and speckles appeared on the door and a holo formed, an amber rod hanging in front of the door. A curve appeared by the rod and rotated around it, sweeping out a shape. When it finished, a vase hung in the air with the rod piercing its center. Soothing pastel patterns swirled on the image.

  "Solid of revolution complete," the door said. "Commence integration."

  "What?" Jato asked. No door had ever asked him to "commence integration" before.

  "Shall I produce a different solid?" it asked.

  "I want you to open."

  Silver and black swirls suffused the vase. "You must calculate the volume of the solid."

  "How?"

  "Set up integral. Choose limits. Integrate. Computer assistance will be required."

  "I have no idea how to do that."

  "Then I cannot unlock."

  Jato scratched his chin. "I know the volume of a box."

  The vase faded and a box appeared. "Commence integration."

  "Its volume is width times height times length."

  Box and rod disappeared.

  "Open," Jato said.

  Still no response.

  Jato wondered if the Innkeeper had his door vex all visitors this way. Then again, Dreamers would probably enjoy the game.

  "Jato?" the door asked.

  "Yes?"

  "Don’t you want to enter?"

  He made an exasperated noise. "Why else would I say ‘Open’?"

  Box and rod reappeared. "Commence integration."

  "I already did that."

  "I seem to be caught in a loop," the door admitted.

  Jato smiled. "Are you running a new program?"

  "Yes. Apparently it needs more work." The door slid open. "Please enter."

  Muted light from laser murals lit the lobby. As the floor registered his weight, soft bells chimed. Fragrances wafted in the air, turning sharp and then sweet in periodic waves.

  The Innkeeper’s counter consisted of three concentric cylinders about waist height, all made from jade built atom-by-atom by molecular assemblers, as were most precious minerals used in Nightingale’s construction. The Innkeeper sat at a circular table inside the cylinders, reading a book.

  Jato went to the counter. "I’d like to see one of your customers." He knew the spacer had to be here; this inn was the only establishment in Nightingale that would lodge sun-dwellers.

  The Innkeeper continued to read.

  "Hey," Jato said.

  The Dreamer kept reading.

  Jato scowled, then clambered over the cylinders. "The offworld woman. I need her room number."

  The Innkeeper rubbed an edge of his book and the holos above it shifted to show dancers twirling to a Strauss waltz.

  Jato pulled the book out of his hand. "Come on."

  The Innkeeper took back his book without even looking up. A whirring started up behind Jato, and a Mandelbrot globe bumped his arm.

  "I owe her," Jato said. "She gave me a dream."

  That caught the Dreamer’s attention. He looked up, his translucent eyebrows arching in his translucent face. "You come with Dream payment?" He laughed. "You?"

  Jato tried not to grit his teeth. "You know payment has to be offered."

  "She is in Number Four," he said.

  Jato hadn’t actually expected a reply. Apparently the unwritten laws of dream debt overrode even the Innkeeper’s distaste for talking to large, non-translucent people.

  Old-fashioned stairs led to the upper levels. As Jato climbed, holoart came on, suffusing the walls with color. He glanced back to see the holos fade until only sparks of light danced in the air, mimicking the traces left by particles in an ancient bubble chamber.

  No one answered when he knocked at Number Four. He tried again, but still no answer.

  As he started to leave, a click sounded behind him. He turned back to see the spacer in the doorway, light from behind her sparkling on the gold tips of her tousled hair. She wore grey knee-boots and a soft blue jumpsuit that accented her curves. The only decorations on her jumpsuit were two gold rings around each of her upper arms. A tube trimmed each of her boots, running from the heel to the top edge of the boot, an odd style, but attractive.

  "Yes?" she asked.

  Jato swallowed, wondering if he had just set himself up for a rebuff. He tried to think of a clever opening that would put her at ease, perhaps intrigue or even charm her. What he ended up with was the scintillating, "I came to see you."

  Incredibly, she stepped aside. "Come in."

  Her room was pleasant, with gold curtains on the windows and a pretty rumpled bed that looked as if she had been sleeping in it.

  Jato hesitated. "Did I wake you? I can come back later."

  "No. Now is good." She motioned him to a small table gleaming with metal accents. Its fluted pedestal supported two disks, the upper joined to the lower along a slit that ran from its center to its rim, a style common in Nightingale. The only explanation Jato had ever extracted from a Dreamer was, "Riemann sheets." He had looked it up at the library and found an opaque treatise on complex variable theory that apparently described how the sheets made a multi-valued expression into a mathematical function.

  After they sat down, he set his bundle in front of her and spoke the formal phrases. "You gave me a dream. I offer you my work in return."

  She watched his face. "I don’t understand."

  "A beautiful dream." He wondered if he sounded as awkward as he felt. "This is what I have to trade." Pulling away the wrapping, he showed her the bird. Giving it up was even harder than he had expected. But it was a matter of honor: he had a debt and this was the only payment he had to give.

  As she sat there staring at his life’s creation, his face grew hot. He knew the wonders she had seen in Nightingale. The bird was pitiful in comparison.

  "It makes music," he said. "I mean, it doesn’t make the music but it tells you how to make it."

  She looked up at him. "Jato, I can’t accept this." An odd expression crossed her face, come and gone too fast to decipher. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was awe. Then she said, "Regulations don’t allow me to accept presents."

  Through the sting of her refusal, he realized what she had said. "How did you know my name is Jato?"

  "After we talked, I looked up your Ansatz records."

  He stared at her. Those records were sealed. That was the deal; as long as he did what Crankenshaft wanted, his records remained secret and he had his relative freedom on Ansatz.

  Somehow he kept his voice even. "How?"

  "I asked," she said. "The authorities had to let me."

  Like hell. They were supposed to say No. Had his presence become so offensive that they decided to get rid of him despite Crankenshaft? Or maybe Crankenshaft no longer needed him.

  Then it hit Jato, what else she had said. Regulations didn’t allow her to accept gifts. Regulations.

  Of course. He should have recognized it earlier. The gold bands on her jumpsuit were no decorations. They denoted rank.

  "You’re an ISC soldier," he said.

  She nodded. "An Imperial Messenger. Secondary Class."

  Jato stared at her. Secondary was equivalent in rank to colonel and "Messenger" was a euphemism for intelligence officer. He had almost asked a high-ranking spy-buster to smuggle him off Ansatz.

  ISC, or Imperial Space Command, was the sole defense in known space against the Traders, whose military made a practice of "inviting" the settled worlds to join their growing domain. All settled worlds. Whether they wanted to join or not. The Traders based their economy on what they called "a benevolent exchange of work contracts designed to benefit both workers and the governing fellowships that hold their labor contracts," one of the more creative, albeit frightening, euphemisms Jato had heard for slavery. The Imperialate had formed in response, an attempt by the free worlds to remain that way. That was why so many colonies, including Ansatz, had joined the Imperialate despite the loss of autonomy that came with ISC’s autocratic
control.

  He spoke with a calm he didn’t feel. "Are you going to turn me over to ISC?"

  "Well, no," she said. "I just wondered about you after you followed me up those strange stairs."

  Relief swept over him, followed by distrust, then resentment, then embarrassment. One of his few comforts on Ansatz had been his pleasure in creating the bird. Now every time he looked at it he would remember how she rejected it.

  As he rose to his feet, an emotion leapt across her face. Regret? It was mixed with other things, shyness maybe, even a fear of rejection. It went by too fast for him to be sure.

  She stood up. "May I request an alternate gift? Something that wouldn’t violate regulations?"

  He had no alternate gifts. "What do you mean?"

  "I’d like to see Nightingale." She hesitated. "Perhaps you would show it to me?"

  She wanted a guide? True, he was the best candidate; the Dreamers would never deign to offer such services. But most people would prefer no guide at all to a convicted murderer.

  Of course his records said he was "cured." Besides, rumor claimed Messengers had enhanced speed and strength. Perhaps she was confident enough in her abilities that she didn’t see him as a threat.

  "All right," he said.

  "Well. Good." It came again, her beguiling flash of shyness. "Shall we, uh, go?"

  He smiled. "It would help if I had a name to call you."

  "Oh. Yes. Of course." She actually reddened. "Soz."

  "Soz." He gave her a bow from the waist. "My pleasure at your acquaintance."

  Her face softened into a smile. "And mine at yours."

  They walked down to the lobby in awkward silence. Outside, they strolled through the Inn’s rock garden, where tall lamps made shadows stretch out from human-sized mineral formations. The arrangement of rocks looked random, but it had an underlying order calculated from chaos theory.

  As they followed a path toward the city proper, Jato tried to relax. Conversation had always been his stumbling block. In his adolescence, he had discussed it with is father while they were weeding a field.