by Guy Haley
A spur of the track led under a scaffold gateway in the yacht club’s fence. He stopped, his foot sinking in the mud. Seven sailing boats of varying sizes, only one big enough to merit a cabin, were tied to two short piers among the reeds. A shabby hut stood close to the head of the piers. No smoke came from its iron chimney, and the blinds over its windows were drawn.
Dariusz leaned his bike against the hut, and walked to the bank where the piers extended into the water.
“Hello?” he said. His misgivings prevented him shouting. “Hello?” he tried again.
“Pan Szczeciński?” A man appeared from the cabin of the largest boat. He was big as a bear, but his expression was warm. “You came, then?”
Dariusz was instantly on his guard. “Where is the man I spoke to in the bar?”
“Browning?” The man shrugged. “Who knows? None of us have ever met him. That is for the best, in this venture. I am Arkadiusz Żadernowski. Please” – he gestured to the boat – “if you would come aboard for your lesson. You may ask what you like and speak what you will as we sail; Juliana will not reveal your secrets.” He reached down and tossed a bright orange life-jacket at Dariusz. “For your safety.”
Arkadiusz offered his hand, but Dariusz declined to take it. He jumped from the pier and landed easily.
“You are comfortable on boats? You will make a good sailor.”
“I have spent a great deal of time on boats while working, but know little of any of this...” He gestured helplessly to the profusion of lines and winches that cocooned the furled sail.
“Then I will teach you. Let us commence. As you have good balance, perhaps you would help me untie Juliana.”
Together they untied the boat. Arkadiusz activated a noiseless electric engine, and guided Juliana out through the channel of clear water onto the Lesser Lake.
“We will head out into the main lake,” he explained.
He had Dariusz help him to deploy the sail. There was only a slight wind blowing, but the canvas filled readily, and pushed them at a pleasing speed over the dark surface of the water. Arkadiusz killed the motor. He steered the boat and told Dariusz what to do, and the engineer was too cautious to question him. He relaxed into the task; he enjoyed physical work.
The land drew in slightly to either side at the narrows of the Lesser Lake, and then they were on the expanse of the Greater Lake. Only then did Arkadiusz stop his sailing instruction.
“We should be safe out here. Sorry for all the subterfuge, but you understand, I’m sure. Best keep your voice low and face turned down. If anyone is watching us there’s still a risk they can grab our conversation via direct acoustics or have someone lip read us.”
“Sure.”
“I’ve been told to keep this brief. Please don’t ask anything about our organisation; we work in cells, and I don’t know anything to tell.” Arkadiusz smiled, but there was little humour there. Anyone defying the Pointers could expect little mercy. “As Browning should have said, we can make sure that you and your son get onto the colony fleet. That mood drug thing? Forget about it. Gone. We will do this in exchange for a small service.”
“That’s what concerns me,” said Dariusz.
“And so it should. I’ll get right to the point, Pan Szczeciński. We are opposed to the promulgation of the current system. If we let this poisonous inequality out into the stars, then large portions of humanity will spend centuries working for a lot of undeserving pigs. The current crises have forced this on us, making us a hard, uncaring society mindlessly supporting the elite, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. We are not opposed to the colony effort; we just want to level the field a little.”
“How?” said Dariusz.
“Knowledge is power, my friend. At the heart of every one of the colony ships is a central computer – the Systems core, they call them. An organic, android unit. We’re proposing a little – ah – reprogramming.”
“You want me to interfere with the central units controlling the colony ships?”
“Not those – well, not entirely. It’s the central data cores, the colonies’ libraries, we’re interested in; the sum of human knowledge in a bottle. A very useful thing, but controlled by the Pointers completely. We want to reengineer the Systems core to make this information free, let it out and about so anyone can access it; and we want to keep it that way. It’s simple, really. All the colonists will be implanted with top of the range inChips. All that stops them interfacing freely with the cores is the Pointers. We want to introduce a virus that will disable their security protocols on your ship, then broadcast it to the rest. Call it an attitudinal adjustment for the colony brains.”
“That’s all?”
Arkadiusz huffed out his cheeks. “Well, no. Not quite. There’ll also be another dataset encoded into the virus, one targeting the Zheng He, the wormhole ship. It would be better for us all if that wormhole is never opened. We’ll be in for a hard time of it here, but it’s for the best. I’m sure you’re well aware, Pan Szczeciński, that we are approaching a point of ecological crisis, but I don’t need to tell you that, do I? You’re a geoengineer. If we can disrupt the colony effort, the Pointers’ll have nothing to prop up their rule back here. Revolution, my friend. And if we’re unsuccessful here, we hope you’ll be able to export yours back to Earth, in time. The Pointers’ rule won’t survive in both places.”
“Two acts of sabotage, then, one bigger than the other.”
“Yes. I understand it is a large thing to ask of a man. Feel free to decline.”
Dariusz’s strength drained from him. “If I do, there’s no way you’ll leave me alive. My God.”
Arkadiusz cleared his throat in embarrassment. “Do not invoke God, Pan. He can do little, and is in the pay of the elite. When the people have money, they have confidence; when they have no confidence, they hope; when they have no hope, they pray. This is why our time is one of religion. The Pointers control that too.”
The boat continued its progress over the lake. The mist was dissipating.
“How do I deliver this virus?” said Dariusz.
“That’s actually the least complicated part. You carry it inside you as a retrovirus. The big weakness of an organic system is that it’s susceptible to infection. We’ll set it up so that you get woken nice and long into the voyage. You get up, infect the computer with a drop of blood, then go back to sleep as if nothing happened. I know what you’re thinking – they’ll check – but we’ll hide it well, and we’ll try and fix it so they don’t find out you did it. No point offering you a new life if they execute you when you get there. By the time they realise their security has been compromised, it’ll be too late, especially once the Pointer’s more, ah, stringent colony government protocols become common knowledge. So, you can have your revolutions on your new homes, and when it becomes clear that the wormhole will never open and there’ll be no paradise for folks to flee to, we can live through hell and finally get ours. I think you get the better deal, personally.”
Weak sunlight broke through the mist. They were heading back.
“You have until we get back to the marina to decide.”
Ten minutes? Less? thought Dariusz. “What will you do with my body?”
“Nothing. You’ll leave, you just won’t get far. InChip malfunction leading to aneurysm. I am sorry, it has to be this way.”
Dariusz fixed his eyes on the approaching headlands that nipped the neck of the Lesser Lake.
“I’ll do it,” he said eventually.
Arkadiusz grinned broadly. “That’s fantastic,” he said, relaxing visibly. Dariusz wondered how many other candidates they had for the role. Not that many, he thought.
“On one condition,” he added. “I want my wife as well as my son to come with me.”
Arkadiusz frowned. “We thought you would ask this question. In truth, I am not sure that can be done. Your son is no problem, a bright kid, stable, good physical scores, healthy genome. The wife? No, you know she’s unstable, got a
higher than fifteen on her basic psychs. We can fix a misdemeanour, but fake medical documents, especially when they’ll be testing and retesting the training programme? No way.”
“You knew I’d ask that, and you still asked me before you’d looked into it.”
“I did not say that. We are looking into it, but we are running out of time. You must consider leaving her behind. For what it’s worth, I’ll make sure she’s okay.”
“No. Absolutely no way. No deal. Get in touch when you have a definitive answer. If you can’t arrange passage for my family, you can pull the plug on me any time, can’t you?”
Arkadiusz became emphatic. “I have to have a firm yes or no from you before you leave.”
“Contact your superiors, then.”
“I can’t. Cells. One way communication.”
“Then no deal.”
“It’s a break in protocol.”
“Find someone else, then.”
Arkadiusz was quiet for a moment. He spun the wheel one way then another, lining the prow of the Juliana up with the pier. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said eventually. “I make no promises.”
They reached the marina in silence. They tied up Juliana with minimal words. Arkadiusz leaped over the side of the boat without looking back, unlocked the hut and went inside. The sound of muffled conversation came from within. He came back out a few minutes later, his mouth set.
“Okay,” he said. “We can try. It’ll be hard, but not impossible. You go whether or not we can manage it. I promise we will try our hardest. Do we have a deal?” he held out his hand.
Dariusz hesitated.
He thought of Danieł.
“We have a deal,” he said, and clasped the other man’s outstretched hand.
CHAPTER FIVE
Atlantic City
LEONID WALKED ALONG the New Jersey shore, cool winds tangling his hair. His nose ran, and he let it, snorting back the snot like a commoner. His tutors would be outraged. Fuck them, he thought. Fuck them all, and all their pointless etiquette. His hands were buried deep in the pockets of a coat that, should his mother see him wearing it, would have had her retreating to her room for a month. It was a coat of the kind real people wore, bought for durability, suitability, and cost. He had been pleased with the purchase when he’d made it. It was authentic. Now it pissed him off, clinging to his conscience as the fraud it was. He could buy a million coats like this, or the company that made them. For all he knew, he owned it already. There was nothing he could do to distance himself from the fact that he was a Pointer. He would never want for anything. That made his rage worse, and flavoured it with guilt – every person he passed on the street would sell their children to have what he had, what he hated.
He made his way slowly along the Pleasantville seawall, a broad, sloped revetment of earth and caged pebbles. Care had been taken to landscape it, but could not overcome the ugliness of its components. A herringbone walk of bricks covered the top. Out to his right were the Lakes and Absecon Bays, although they had ceased to be bays sometime in the last century. The salt marsh they once contained was deep under the water, the two bodies of water joined into one through all but the lowest tides. He supposed the old names stuck because of the human need for continuity, pretending like nothing ever changes, like his grandfather swapping Peters back to Petrovitch.
On the other side of the water were the Jersey Bars, the remnants of old Atlantic City. Windowless buildings stuck up from rubble, streaked with birdshit and rust. Lights twinkled in the scrofulous little settlements built on the larger islands. The wind carried the taint of refuse and sewage from them.
There were many people out on the revetment, despite the unpredictable weather, and for this reason Sunday night on the walk was his favourite time; crowds brought him anonymity. So often isolated in his rarefied existence, he was never left alone. He found a richer isolation in the crowds. Among the teeming poor, he was free.
He leaned on the sea-facing railings of the walk and closed his eyes. All up and down the bars, the bells of buoys rang, warning of the reefs of yesterday’s streets. The bells merged with the waves and the babble of the crowds, and the clashing discord of music from the broadwalk’s streetstalls and the tech of people aggressive enough not to employ acoustic dampers. They brashly let their music leak out into the world, a blend of come-ons and fuck-yous. The trick was telling them apart.
Leonid breathed in the scents of processed food and body odour, the chemical tang of the sea. He let his mind roar with it all, disengaging his inChip’s functions so that his brain could wrestle with the raw, unprocessed data.
Leonid loved it, the chaos and sheer exuberance of the world beyond the fences of the rich. The hairs on his arms stood up.
The approach of the limousine quashed his spirits. He pretended not to see it, the blunt-nosed shark prowling through the masses. The crowd recoiled from it, recognising it for what it was. They had nothing to fear. It had only one prey.
Leonid pushed himself from the railings and walked faster than before, hunched low.
He could not hide, not in a crowd, nor in a desert, not anywhere. He was hunted, he’d been hunted all his life.
The car pulled level with him. A window opened.
“Get in,” his father said.
Leonid did not look at him. He kept his eyes fixed ahead, taking in the pale evening sky, the lights, the people.
“I’m thinking, father.”
“Get in, Leonid.”
“No.”
The car kept pace with him. The poor, the real people, got out of its way as it trundled along the walk.
“I have no idea why you come here to wallow in filth, when you have the world at your feet.”
“I said, I’m thinking. I came here to think.”
“Leonid, you are twenty-nine years old, but you behave like a boy. You have responsibilities. You are late for our meeting and you are embarrassing me. You are embarrassing our family. Get in.”
Leonid rounded on his father suddenly, and the car came to a gentle stop. His father’s driver was an expert. His presence was one of the many, many things he could not stand about his father. Only Pointers had the money to pay for a human driver.
“Why can’t you leave me be for half an hour, dad? I’m just taking some air.”
His father stared at him dolefully. He was in his early hundreds, but looked sixty years younger; the ageless rich.
“You’re late for the meeting. Get in now. I will not ask again.”
A door at the front of the car opened and a man the size of a small hill got out.
“Good evening, Mr Leonid, sir,” said the man. He had the hint of an apology in his smile. He folded arms the thickness of Leonid’s waist.
“Evening, Sullivan,” said Leonid.
Leonid considered fleeing into the crowd. There was nowhere to hide – his inChip gave out his location constantly, the one function he could not turn off – but the thought of flight for the sake of it...
He could not. Leonid was terrified of his father.
The limousine’s middle door slid open.
Leonid got in.
LEONID SAT WITH his father, uncomfortable in stuffy jeans and shirt in a comfortable briefing room at the company headquarters in the Manhattan AP. Soft lights, expensive drinks, furnishings worth more than human lives. A company scientist tried his damndest not to look out of place as he delivered his lecture.
“Acceleration at that magnitude exerts an unforgivable amount of stress on the human body. For both acceleration and deceleration, a human body needs to be cushioned against the effect, and if you’re under for that, you might as well be asleep for the entire journey. It’s far more cost effective in terms of resources to keep all expedition members asleep for the whole of the voyage, it’s easier to shield them from cosmic particles, they eat less, and they won’t go insane. At relativistic speeds you’re still looking at seventeen to twenty-one years subjective time to get to the Du Bois cluster, and
that’s a significant chunk off anybody’s life. Of course, there is an additional cost in terms of the doubling up of certain members, tripling in the case of key personnel, but the defrayments there are far outmatched by the savings in having them sleep the whole way. The mass of the additional expedition members is less than the mass of supplies – or the means of generating supplies – for an animate crew. And mass, in this situation, is everything.” The scientist gave a nervous smile. He held a baton that contained his devices for presentation and explication. He played with it constantly, shifting his grip on it, passing it from hand to hand. He was as discomfited as Leonid. Ilya had that effect on everyone.
Ilya nodded approvingly, and the scientist inclined his head gratefully. Ilya had a solidity to him, a charisma that made him appear more real than everyone else in the room. He was used to being obeyed, and people obeyed him unquestioningly. They grovelled for his approval. Leonid was a shade in his presence, an inferior copy. The old man raised his eyebrows, urging Leonid to actively engage in the briefing.
“Why the redundancy?” asked Leonid. “Why the extra people?”
Ilya sneered. “Excuse me, Doctor Kernow,” he said to the scientist. He turned on his son. “All the best schools I have sent you to. And why?”
“Why don’t you tell me?” said Leonid testily. “I doubt it was for my benefit.”
“Then whose benefit was it for?” said his father levelly. “Three generations, my son – that is how long, to a historical average, that a family’s fortune will last. Five, if they are lucky to be blessed with prudent sons and daughters. Our fortune has lasted six generations. Your schooling is intended to ensure our fortune survives for another six generations, and if you are clever, which I pray you are, you will give your children the same treatment I have given you; not for my sake, not for your sake, but for the sake of our family.” Ilya leaned forward, jabbing at Leonid with a thick finger. He pronounced ‘family’ with great emphasis, turning it halfway to a growl. “There is no other responsibility than this. Do you understand me?” At first glance Ilya looked fat, but he was not. Squat and powerfully muscled, he was in the prime of his life despite his great age, a silverback of a man.