Mirror Space - Marianne de Pierres [60]
‘Yeah, the time thing is driving me crazy as well.’
‘So what’s happened?’
‘Nothing really. I’ve been thinking,’ said Jo-Jo slowly, ‘lemme fool around for a while; try and locate the others. I found you again real quick.’
‘Why’s it so easy for you?’
‘Not sure, but I got a theory.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Rast. ‘Anything to make the buzz go away.’
‘Back when I found the Entity, I died. At least, I think I did, and my HealthWatch records said the same. Sole did something to me. Split my mind in two when he reanimated me. The same thing happens to the tyros. It’s the only way Sole can communicate with them. It’s friggin’ weird and a pain in the arse but I think it’s helping me here. With this freak world.’
‘I heard they did something to the tyros - didn’t pick that you’d been affected too.’
‘The mind split only seems to happen to me when the crap piles up. The tyros are like it all the time, though. You get the feeling you’re talkin’ to two people.’
‘You like that now?’ Rast’s tone became tense. ‘Are there two of you?’
‘Don’t be fucking stupid. I’ll be back soon.’
Jo-Jo let go of Rast’s voice and floated back to the clamour. He thought about how Latourn and Catchut sounded. For some reason Latourn’s voice seemed easier to remember; the man had the thick, guttural tone common to Latino men. Somewhere in the kaleidoscope of sound Latourn would be suffering the same sensory deprivations as he and Randall. Catchut too. Poor bastards. He didn’t like either of the mercenaries but they were humanesque. That meant a lot right now.
He concentrated on recreating Latourn’s voice in his mind and then listened for anything in the clamour that might correlate. Again without a sense of time he had no idea how long it took before he decided he couldn’t find Latourn. Instead of returning to Randall though, he grasped the next peaking sound and let it pull him down.
At first the sound made little sense, at best a bunch of slurred vowels, at worst a noise similar to the mooing jackass. Instinctively, Jo-Jo stopped trying to make sense of the whole sound and narrowed his concentration to small segments.
He got a little thrill when he recognised a word. Soon. Another. Hasten. Then a whole jumble of them fell into his mind. But they weren’t ordered. Not that he could tell. More like an anagram or puzzle. He played with the order of them, switching them around until they made some sense.
hasten quixite OLOSS confront
He let go, then, and floated back to the clamour, waiting to pick up another peaking sound. This one took him deep into the flow before he began to hear clearly. Like the previous voice it seemed a blur until he broke it down into smaller pieces. There was something different about this one though. A kind of hard-edged tone that clipped the ends off words.
OLOSS finis soo.
A dialect perhaps? He let go of the clipped sound and found his way back to Rast.
She was crying softly.
‘Randall?’
No reply.
Jo-Jo waited while she composed herself. But the composure didn’t come and eventually she tried to talk to him between sobs. ‘Can’t - take - it.’
Curiously he didn’t feel compassion for her, the way he might have for Bethany or Mira Fedor. The connection was there - the humanesque thing - but Rast Randall had made some hard choices in life and now she was living with the result of them.
Like I am.
‘Yeah, you can,’ he said. ‘You have to. No choice.’ He waited a bit. ‘I didn’t find your crew, but I tuned in to something. Not sure what, exactly. Something to do with OLOSS and quixite. Sounds like the Extros are plannin’ somethin’ soon.’
‘Yeah?’ The idea seemed to calm her down. ‘You mean something’s gonna change?’
‘Maybe. Sounds like it. I’m gonna go dig a bit deeper, see what else I can hear.’
‘Do it!’ she said. The strength poured back into her voice.
MIRA
‘What do you advise?’ Mira asked Wanton.
The Aves had divided into small groups and flown in different directions. One group appeared to be gliding towards the mamelon