here moved farther away, into visual chaos.
Jesus Christ, Ed. Why are we meeting here?
Someone clutched at her sleeve but she twisted and walked away.
Further into Nogales proper, there were few gringos from the Arizona side. A clean-skinned Mexican girl looked up from the corner of a whitewashed building, saw Ro approaching, and turned away with a sassiness already tinged with disillusion.
Behind a church called Santa Teresa stood an open courtyard, and Ro walked inside. A half-door swung inwards at her touch, and then she was in a bare, clean storage room.
Nothing alerted her senses. No detectable surveillance.
‘Shit. I don’t like this.’
Ro let out a slow breath. Then, without using her hands, she sank to the ground in a corkscrew motion, finished sitting cross-legged on dark-grey stone.
And closed her eyes.
Calm now.
Time to wait.
Yesterday morning she had been in the Zurich Pilots’ School, sitting in an easy chair in the anteroom to the Mother Superior’s office, one leg thrown over the chair-arm, reading a two-century-old novel in hi-res flatscript projected from her infostrand.
Every time Ro chuckled, Sister Olivia, sitting at the anteroom’s desk, looked up and frowned. But the story was funny, with surprisingly modern touches. It began with a Latin aphorism and an extended Goethe quotation, though most of the original readership would have been monolingual, in Anglic.
Even the strange-looking Ich sah reflected a topical concern, as the current movement to remove the literary Past Historic tense from Français, following the Deutsch tradition, had resulted in controversy and even one death as two academics pummelled each other with leather-bound books in a Sorbonne courtyard.
‘The Reverend Mother won’t be long.’
‘Good. Excellent.’
Ro read a bit more. For all the absurdism, the short tale had relevant points to make about the nature of time and of human conflict, encapsulating a tragedy which the inhabitants of Dresden recalled to this day.
The pinched-faced nun let out a sigh.
‘She’ll see you now.’
‘Thank God for that.’
The Reverend Mother Mary Sebastian, aka Jill, sat with her feet up on the glass-covered desk. Opposite her, Ro did the same.
‘You didn’t get on with my predecessor, did you, Ro?’
‘Before she attained Motherhood, she was in charge of facilities management, and I was living here and in my teens.’ Back when Pilots-to-be came here to be trained by Mother, learning aikido and Feldenkrais body awareness - skills which would stand them in good stead when their eyes were removed during surgery: in those days Pilots traded their realspace senses for those which were virally induced. Back then, only Ro possessed the natural ability to perceive another universe. ‘I used to take the piss.’
Jill smiled at the antique idiom. ‘I hope you gave Sister Olivia more respect—’
‘Not much.’
‘—though she is a prissy little bitch, I’ll grant you that. And I will be confessing that lapse.’
‘Tsk, tsk, Jill.’
‘I’ll tell you this. Old Misery out there won’t hear anything said about the kids. Even the ones who are pains in the ass.’
‘Like me.’
‘Just as you no doubt were. But listen’ - Jill dropped her feet from the desk, growing serious - ‘there are people in the Order who want the kids out of here. And since that means losing income from UNSA, we’re talking serious dislike.’
‘Is that anything new?’
‘You know they’re talking about you as the link between two species? You personally.’
‘The kids aren’t actually my offspring. Besides Dirk and Kian.’
‘But there’s something of you in all of them. The general public doesn’t know much more than this: that the difference between Homo sapiens and Pan panicus is one per cent of DNA. So it doesn’t take much to
Jesus Christ, Ed. Why are we meeting here?
Someone clutched at her sleeve but she twisted and walked away.
Further into Nogales proper, there were few gringos from the Arizona side. A clean-skinned Mexican girl looked up from the corner of a whitewashed building, saw Ro approaching, and turned away with a sassiness already tinged with disillusion.
Behind a church called Santa Teresa stood an open courtyard, and Ro walked inside. A half-door swung inwards at her touch, and then she was in a bare, clean storage room.
Nothing alerted her senses. No detectable surveillance.
‘Shit. I don’t like this.’
Ro let out a slow breath. Then, without using her hands, she sank to the ground in a corkscrew motion, finished sitting cross-legged on dark-grey stone.
And closed her eyes.
Calm now.
Time to wait.
Yesterday morning she had been in the Zurich Pilots’ School, sitting in an easy chair in the anteroom to the Mother Superior’s office, one leg thrown over the chair-arm, reading a two-century-old novel in hi-res flatscript projected from her infostrand.
Every time Ro chuckled, Sister Olivia, sitting at the anteroom’s desk, looked up and frowned. But the story was funny, with surprisingly modern touches. It began with a Latin aphorism and an extended Goethe quotation, though most of the original readership would have been monolingual, in Anglic.
Even the strange-looking Ich sah reflected a topical concern, as the current movement to remove the literary Past Historic tense from Français, following the Deutsch tradition, had resulted in controversy and even one death as two academics pummelled each other with leather-bound books in a Sorbonne courtyard.
‘The Reverend Mother won’t be long.’
‘Good. Excellent.’
Ro read a bit more. For all the absurdism, the short tale had relevant points to make about the nature of time and of human conflict, encapsulating a tragedy which the inhabitants of Dresden recalled to this day.
The pinched-faced nun let out a sigh.
‘She’ll see you now.’
‘Thank God for that.’
The Reverend Mother Mary Sebastian, aka Jill, sat with her feet up on the glass-covered desk. Opposite her, Ro did the same.
‘You didn’t get on with my predecessor, did you, Ro?’
‘Before she attained Motherhood, she was in charge of facilities management, and I was living here and in my teens.’ Back when Pilots-to-be came here to be trained by Mother, learning aikido and Feldenkrais body awareness - skills which would stand them in good stead when their eyes were removed during surgery: in those days Pilots traded their realspace senses for those which were virally induced. Back then, only Ro possessed the natural ability to perceive another universe. ‘I used to take the piss.’
Jill smiled at the antique idiom. ‘I hope you gave Sister Olivia more respect—’
‘Not much.’
‘—though she is a prissy little bitch, I’ll grant you that. And I will be confessing that lapse.’
‘Tsk, tsk, Jill.’
‘I’ll tell you this. Old Misery out there won’t hear anything said about the kids. Even the ones who are pains in the ass.’
‘Like me.’
‘Just as you no doubt were. But listen’ - Jill dropped her feet from the desk, growing serious - ‘there are people in the Order who want the kids out of here. And since that means losing income from UNSA, we’re talking serious dislike.’
‘Is that anything new?’
‘You know they’re talking about you as the link between two species? You personally.’
‘The kids aren’t actually my offspring. Besides Dirk and Kian.’
‘But there’s something of you in all of them. The general public doesn’t know much more than this: that the difference between Homo sapiens and Pan panicus is one per cent of DNA. So it doesn’t take much to
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