Peter Hamilton - Reality Dysfunction - Emergence

Tomorrow, he promised himself. We’ll all be on the ship for a fortnight, that’ll give me ample opportunity.

“I ought to be at the meeting,” he said. From where he was he could see two people standing up for a shouting match.

“Let ’em talk,” Ruth grunted. “It keeps them out of mischief. They won’t get anything sorted until after the settlement supervisor shows up.”

“He should have been here this morning. We need advice on how to establish our homes. We don’t even know the location we’ve been assigned.”

“We’ll find out soon enough; and the supervisor will have the whole river trip to lecture us. I expect he’s out prowling the town tonight. I can’t blame him, stuck with us for the next eighteen months. Poor sod.”

“Must you always think the worst of people?”

“It’s what I’d do. But that isn’t what worries me right now.”

Horst sneaked another look at the meeting. They were taking a vote, hands raised in the air. He sat down on the cot facing Ruth. “What does worry you?”

“The murder.”

“We don’t know it was a murder.”

“Get real. The body was stripped. What else could it be?”

“He could have been drunk.” Because God knows a drink is what I need just looking at that river.

“Drunk and taking a swim? In the Juliffe? Come on, Horst!”

“The autopsy should tell us if . . .” He trailed off under Ruth’s gaze. “No, I don’t suppose there will be one, will there?”

“No. He must have been dumped in the river. The sheriff told me that two colonists from Group Three were reported missing by their wives this morning. Pete Cox and Alun Reuther. I’ll give you ten to one that body is one of them.”

“Probably,” Horst admitted. “I suppose it’s shocking that urban crime is rife here. Somehow you don’t imagine such a thing on a stage one colony world. Then again, Lalonde isn’t quite what I imagined. But we’ll be leaving it all behind shortly. Our own community will be too small for such things, we will all know each other.”

Ruth rubbed at her eyes, her expression haunted. “Horst, you’re not thinking. Why was the body stripped?”

“I don’t know. For the clothes, I suppose, and the boots.”

“Right. Now what sort of mugger is going to kill for a pair of boots? Actually kill two people in cold blood. God, the people here are poor, I’m not denying it, but they’re not that desperate.”

“Who then?”

She looked pointedly over his shoulder. Horst turned round. “The Ivets? That’s rather prejudiced, isn’t it?” he asked reproachfully.

“You’ve seen the way they’re treated in the town, and we don’t treat them any better. They can’t move outside the port district without getting beaten up. Not with their jump suits on, and they don’t have anything else to wear. So who is more likely to want ordinary clothes? Who isn’t going to care what they have to do to get them? And whoever did murder that man did it inside the port, uncomfortably close to this dormitory.”

“You don’t think it was one of ours?” he exclaimed. “Let’s say, I’m praying it wasn’t. But with the way our luck is turning out, I wouldn’t count on it.”

Diranol, Lalonde’s smallest, outermost moon, was the only one of the planet’s three natural satellites left in the night sky, a nine-hundred-kilometre globe of rock with a red ochre regolith, half a million kilometres distant. It hovered above the eastern horizon, painting Durringham in a timid rose-pink fluorescence when the power bike skidded to a halt just outside the skirt of light leaking from the big transients’ dormitory. Marie Skibbow loosened her grip on Furgus. The ride through the darkened city had been sensational, drawing out every second, filling it with glee and excitement. The walls slashing past, sensed rather than seen, the headlight beam revealing ruts and mud patches on the road almost as soon as they hit them, wind whipping her hair about, eyes stung by the slipstream. Taunting danger with every turn of the wheel, and beating it, living.

“Here we go, your stop,” Furgus said.

“Right.” She swung her leg over the saddle, and stood beside him. Now the weariness swept through her, a frozen wave of depression that hung poised high above, waiting to crash down at the prospect of the future and what it held.

“You’re the best, Marie.” He kissed her, one hand fondling her right breast through the singlet’s fabric. Then he was gone, red tail light sinking into the blackness.

Her shoulders drooped as she made her way into the dormitory. Most of the cots were full, people were snoring, coughing, tossing about. She wanted to turn and run, back to Furgus and Hamish, back to the dark fulfilment of the last few hours. Her brain was still fizzing from the experiences, the naked savagery of the sayce-baiting, and the jubilant crowd in Donovan’s, blood heat inflaming her senses. Then the delicious indecency of the twins’ quiet cabin on the other side of town, with their straining bodies pounding against her first singly then both at once. That crazy bike ride in the vermilion moonlight. Marie wanted every night to be the same, without end.

“Where the hell have you been?”

Her father was standing in front of her, mouth all squeezed up that way it did when he was really angry. And for once she didn’t care.

“Out,” she said.

“Out where?”

“Enjoying myself. Exactly what you think I shouldn’t do.”

He slapped her on the cheek, the sound echoing from the high roof. “Don’t you be so bloody impudent, girl. I asked you a question. What have you been doing?”

Marie glared at him, feeling the heat grow in her stinging cheek, refusing to rub it. “What’s next, Daddy ? Will you take your belt to me? Or are you just going to use your fists?”

Gerald Skibbow’s jaw dropped. People on the nearby cots were turning over, peering at them blearily.

“Do you know how late it is? What have you been up to?” he hissed.

“Are you quite sure you want a truthful answer to that, Daddy? Quite sure?”

“You despicable little vixen. Your mother’s been fretting over you all night. Doesn’t that even bother you?”

Marie curled her lip up. “What tragedy could possibly happen to me in this paradise you’ve brought us to?”

For a moment she thought he was going to strike her again.

“There have been two murders in the port this week,” he said.

“Yeah? That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Get into bed,” Gerald said through clenched teeth. “We’ll discuss this in the morning.”

“Discuss it?” she asked archly. “You mean I get an equal say?”

“For fuck’s sake, can it, Skibbow,” someone shouted.

“We want to get some sleep here.”

Under the impotent stare of her father, Marie pulled her shoes off and sauntered over to her cot.

Quinn was still dozing in his sleeping-bag, struggling against the effects of the rough beer he had drunk in Donovan’s, when someone gripped the side of his cot and yanked it through ninety degrees. His arms and legs thrashed about in the sleeping-bag as he tumbled onto the floor, but there was no way he could prevent the fall. His hip smacked into the concrete first, jarring his pelvis badly, then his jaw landed. Quinn yelled out in surprise and pain.

“Get up, Ivet,” a voice shouted.

A man was standing over him, grinning down evilly. He was in his early forties, tall and well built, with a shock of black hair and a full beard. The brown leather skin of his face and arms was scarred with a lunar relief of pocks and the tiny red lines of broken capillaries. His clothes were all natural fabric, a thick red and black check cotton shirt with the arms torn off, green denim trousers, lace-up boots that came up to his knees, and a belt which carried various powered gadgets and a vicious-looking ninety-centimetre steel machete. A silver crucifix on a slim chain glinted at the base of his neck.