Memory Seed by Stephen Palmer Page A

shoulder.
    ‘My temple. The Dodspaat temple is part of this system.’
    ‘I don’t follow.’
    Graaff-lin moved away from the pool. ‘I must have been mistaken. I was trying to find out if the Portreeve’s plan controlled individual people. I ignored the Portreeve and the Red Brigade and there seemed to be a connection with my temple. No, it cannot be. Anyhow, I have lost the link. It’s like trying to build a house with the aerial seeds of dandelions–’
    ‘Sssh!’ Zinina hissed, grabbing Graaff-lin’s arm. She had heard a clunk from the next chamber. In seconds she was standing alert, rifle ready. ‘Stay here.’
    Graaff-lin nodded, fear in her face. Zinina ran silently to the archway and peered around the wall, but saw nothing. It was another pyuter room. She scanned the nooks and crannies. Was that a movement? She caught a glimpse of something the size of a rat. Something metal.
    She relaxed. ‘Just some pyuter vermin,’ she whispered to Graaff-lin.
    ‘Let’s at least–’
    ‘Don’t raise your voice. Shush!’
    Graaff-lin paused. ‘I said, let us at least – oh! What’s that?’ She pointed behind Zinina.
    Zinina turned to see shadows on the wall – the grotesque shapes of creeping units with spider legs, and chunkier things on wheels. ‘Run,’ she said. ‘I’ll follow you and pick up the catseyes. Quick!’
    They ran. In ten minutes they were back at the hatch, faces and bodies flushed, Zinina frightened, Graaff-lin gasping for breath. The creeping machines had not managed to follow them. Too late, Zinina realised that they had left the plastic map behind.
    ‘Quick, into the tunnel.’ They would have to trust to luck that no pyutons or survey teams were working.
    They crawled along the connecting passage and into the service tunnel, dropping down into what seemed an even more chemical-laden atmosphere. Judging from the smell of sparks and steel something had trundled along the monorail. Sweat flying, they ran back along the tunnel, Zinina looking over her shoulder every minute to check for further automata, until fifteen minutes had passed and she began to relax.
    Halfway back she caught sight of a body up ahead. In the gloom, with cables everywhere and shadows confusing her vision, it seemed immobile. She gripped Graaff-lin’s shoulder and pointed. ‘What’s that?’
    ‘I cannot see,’ Graaff-lin replied, squinting. ‘We had better be careful.’
    Closer, Zinina was able to see that the body of a young woman, dressed in an emerald coloured one-piece and low boots, lay close to the monorail, but how she came to be there and why she was unconscious, or dead, was impossible to determine. The costume was not that of any defender Zinina knew. With utmost caution, she approached.
    She bent over the figure. The woman was breathing.
    ‘I can hear rumbling,’ Graaff-lin whispered.
    Zinina placed her ear to the rail. ‘Carts,’ she said. ‘About forty seconds away. Big loaders by the sound of it, but only two or three of them.’
    ‘Will they see us?’
    Zinina scanned the tunnel. No time to lose. ‘It’ll be pyuter-run, but them carts have owl eyes. Quick, behind that power thing. Help me carry the woman.’
    Twenty yards away a large converter stood, cables sprouting from it like the leaves of a palm. They hauled the woman across, hid her under cable-nets and a fragment of tarpaulin, then crouched behind the converter. The carts, three of them, rumbled by, a large black disk on the front that Zinina knew to be the pyuter eye. Once the gusting air had died down she stood up.
    ‘Now,’ she said, ‘who’s this woman?’
    ‘It is surely too dark to see,’ Graaff-lin complained, ‘and dawn will soon come. Let’s just climb out of this awful tunnel.’
    ‘We’ll have to carry her.’
    ‘Of course.’
    The final half-hour was difficult, with the heat, the acrid atmosphere, and the fear of further carts or pyutons combining to cause plenty of curses and grunts of exertion. Zinina