Free Context by John Meaney

her.
     
    ‘Good morning to you,’ Ro
murmured.
     
    Inside the mistfield lay
DistribOne: salmon-pink block-shaped buildings, a satellite of PhoenixCentral.
Otherwise, the red desert stretched endlessly, flatness relieved only by tall
saguaro cacti like green capital psis. Like men with hands upraised.
     
    A Mexican groundsman with
sun-darkened skin, hatless, crouched on the sand, was tinkering with a battered
grey maint-bot.
     
    ‘Hi.’ Ro gave a breathless
greeting, continuing to run.
     
    He looked at her with the same
expression as the ground squirrel.
     
    They both think I’m mad.
     
    It was early—06:52, the refectory
not yet open for breakfast—but the temperature was already 27.4 Celsius. She
knew both these facts without any tech devices.
     
    Last two hundred metres, and she
poured on the speed.
     
    Pounding past the main path, she
slowed to walking pace, jogged back to the white flagstones, and lowered
herself into a hamstring stretch. The stone’s heat seeped into her muscles,
relaxing them. A far cry from Swiss winter training—
     
    ‘Jesus Christ.’
     
    A tiny scorpion scuttled across
the path, was gone.
     

     
    She
stopped in the corridor outside her room, skin prickling.
     
    Someone’s inside.
     
    Ro did not question her
intuition; it had proved accurate too often in the past.
     
    Outside the door, a small holo
hung:
     
    *** DOROTHY McNAMARA
***
    FlightScienes Dept V
     
    *** ANNE-LOUISE ST
CLAIRE ***
    PRDiv Sect Gamma3
     
    There was every chance that the ‘intruder’
was in fact the roommate Ro had not yet met.
     
    She stood there for a moment,
regarding the southwestern pastels of her surroundings—burnt orange, pale blue—and
considered. It was almost certainly this Anne-Louise; no reason to suspect
otherwise. Anne-Louise was due back from her field trip today, though this
seemed awfully early.
     
    The door concertinaed open at Ro’s
gesture.
     
    ‘Howdy, ma’am.’ A tall, rangy man
tipped his stetson. ‘Mighty pleased to meet ya.’
     
    Deep desert tan. White shirt,
narrow black jeans.
     
    Gunbelt.
     
    Ro stared, very closely. Vision
told her that a person was standing there. But as for her other senses ...
     
    ‘I really don’t think so.’
     
    Silver badge, glinting. Arizona
Ranger.
     
    ‘Well now, purty—’
     
    But Ro walked straight through the cowboy figure, which dissolved into sparkling needles, and slowly
disappeared from existence.
     
    From the floor where she sat
cross-legged, an elegant dark-haired young woman—she appeared slight, but not
fragile—looked up, smiling, and said:
     
    ‘However did you know?’
     

     
    ‘Anne-Louise?’
Ro held out her hand. ‘Vous êtes Québecoise, n’est-ce pas?’
     
    ‘Ouais.’ She held up her hand and they
shook. ‘Tu peux me tutoyer, tu sais. But I’m supposed to be practising
my English.’
     
    ‘Me too.’
     
    ‘So how did you know’—Anne-Louise
ejected a cassette wafer from her holopad, and rose easily to her feet—‘that
Clint was a holo?’ She threw the wafer.
     
    ‘Clint?’ Ro snatched it from the
air: an old-fashioned layered-crystal cassette, the type of lattice wafer that
Gramps still preferred to use. ‘You did say Clint?’
     
    ‘Clint Shade, Arizona Ranger. My
hero.’
     

     
    They
sat on their respective beds, facing each other. At the foot of each bed was a
desk. Anne-Louise pointed: on her desktop stood Ranger Shade, now just a few
centimetres tall, and frozen.
     
    ‘The hero of Black Devil Mesa. My new story.’
     
    ‘Right, they told me.’ Ro handed
back the cassette wafer. ‘You’re a storyfactor.’
     
    A Gallic shrug. ‘An unpublished storyfactor.’
     
    ‘Still…’
     
    Animated now: ‘My project’s a new
character-template shell-language.’
     
    ‘Er, that sounds good.’ There was
a squeeze-bulb of electrolyte replacement fluid on the bedside table. Ro had
placed it there before going out to run; she took a gulp now, and it felt