Snodgrass and Other Illusions - By Ian R. MacLeod Page 0,57

it on nights like this, the darkness had a glow to it like something finely wrought, finally polished, a lustre and a sheen. You could believe in God. You could believe in anything. And the tripwires were still just visible, the vanishing trails like tiny shooting stars criss-crossing this arid limestone plain as they absorbed the endless transmission. They flowed towards the bowl of darkness which was the hidden valley, the quiet waterhole, the flyers sleeping in their beds in St. Hilaire, dreaming of thermals, twitching their wings. Tom wondered if Madame Brissac slept. It was hard to imagine her anywhere other than standing before her pigeonholes in the bureau de poste, waiting for the next poor sod she could make life difficult for. The pigeonholes themselves, whatever code it was that she arranged them in, really would be worth making the effort to find out about on the remote chance that, Madame Brissac being Madame Brissac, the information was sorted in a way that Tom’s computers, endlessly searching the roar of chaos for order, might have overlooked. And he also wondered if it wasn’t time already for another bottle, one of the plastic litre ones, which tasted like shit if you started on them, but were fine if you had something half-decent first to take off the edge…

A something—a figure—was walking up the track towards him. No, not a fluke, and not random data, and certainly not an ibex. Not Madame Brissac either, come to explain her pigeonholes and apologise for her years of rudeness. Part of Tom was watching the rest of Tom in quiet amazement as his addled mind and tired eyes slowly processed the fact that he wasn’t alone, and that the figure was probably female, and could almost have been, no looked like, in fact was, the woman in the dark blue dress he’d glimpsed down by the lace stalls in the market that morning. And she really did bear a remarkable resemblance to Terr, at least in the sole dim light which emanated from the monitors inside his hut. The way she walked. The way she was padding across the bare patch of ground in front of the tripwires. That same lightness. And then her face. And her voice.

“Why do you have to live so bloody far up here Tom? The woman I asked in the post office said it was just up the road…”

He shrugged. He was floating. His arms felt light, his hands empty. “That would be Madame Brissac.”

“Would it? Anyway, she was talking rubbish.”

“You should have tried asking in French.”

“I was speaking French. My poor feet. It’s taken me bloody hours.”

Tom had to smile. The stars were behind Terr, and they were shining on her once-blonde hair, which the years had silvered to the gleam of those tripwires, and touched the lines around her mouth as she smiled. He felt like crying and laughing. Terr. “Well, that’s Madame Brissac for you.”

“So? Are you going to invite me inside?”

“There isn’t much of an inside.”

Terr took another step forward on her bare feet. She was real. So close to him. He could smell the dust on her salt flesh. Feel and hear her breathing. She was Terr alright. He wasn’t drunk or dreaming, or at least not that drunk yet; he’d only had—what?—two bottles of wine so far all evening. And she had and hadn’t changed.

“Well,” she said, “that’s Tom Kelly for you, too, isn’t it?”

The idea of sitting in the hut was ridiculous on a night like this. And the place, as Tom stumbled around in it and slewed bottles off the table and shook rubbish of the chairs, was a dreadful, terrible mess. So he hauled two chairs out into the night for them to sit on, and the table to go between, and found unchipped glasses from somewhere, and gave them a wipe to get rid of the mould, and ferreted around in the depths of his boxes until he found the solitary bottle of Santernay le Chenay 2058 he’d been saving for First Contact—or at least until he felt too depressed—and lit one of the candles he kept for when the generator went down. Then he went searching for a corkscrew, ransacking cupboards and drawers and cursing under his breath at the ridiculousness of someone who got through as much wine as he did not being able to lay his hands upon one—but then the cheaper bottles were all screw-capped, and the really cheap plastic things had tops a