by Carl Neville
Waterston
Altborg has demanded the most extraordinary confection in the most exacting proportions and immediately sent his own chef in to assess the appropriacy of the meal. Waterston watches him discreetly now as he takes his place at his humble table, seeming slightly confused by the backwardness of the world he is encountering. Perhaps it was the same at home, he found the necessity of a knife and fork, of raising a glass to his own lips, an insult of a kind, a reminder of his own shackled materiality — how dare matter still exert its demands on him! Perhaps he has truly become one of the first immortals, sees the world around him in all its time-boundedness and decay and has to be drugged to make it tolerable. Perhaps this is the awfulness of immortality, to feel stained, assaulted, immersed and half drowning in the endless putrescence of the universal entropy. Waterston inspects him closely, he remembers once being in an accident. Nothing very serious, luckily, when they were all on the coach up to Castleford, giving support to one of the People’s Militias there and a group of saboteurs, plainclothes police, army, they never knew who, threw a concrete slab off a bridge ahead of them. There were no seatbelts of course at that time and they were going at a fair clip. The driver stamped on the brakes. The sense of everything slamming to a halt and the moment expanding as bodies, cups, papers, bags swum through the air. Perhaps that was what immortality was like, the headlong flight down time’s one-way street suddenly stalled and a terrifying moment of arrested momentum in which everything past and future swirled in a great vortex, the pitiful drugged immortal at the centre, queasily imprisoned.
What god beyond God…
Or… perhaps Waterston was only seeing what he wanted to see. Why would Altborg need such a balanced diet anyway if he is to live forever? He seems to be taking no pleasure in the food. Eating slowly, chewing each mouthful diligently, his bodyguards standing silently at his side.
Tereza
All the time she is trying to just relax a little bit her ROD keeps beeping at her so that she can’t even enjoy the couple of pints of IPA she has served herself, though she doesn’t really see why she should still be on call now the investigation has been handed over to someone else. It seems she is being blackmailed essentially by the Health Department. Well she is glad she didn’t have to give Franklin the news but still it seems she has to go down and check on the detainee whose action-needed signal has not been picked up on. But indeed whose responsibility has it been to pick up on it? Katja appears to have the responsibility for that but she hasn’t noticed her being nagged at to respond, and anyway if Tereza wants another pint of IPA she better go and at least look in on PRB 2003701 before her ROD locks up and her access to the Canteen bar is compromised. She turns over how she should respond to the message in a way that exonerates her and makes it clear that this is Katja’s failure, experiences a satisfaction that she won’t deny herself at the little bit of if not trouble then at least loss of face, of reputation, that she has engineered for her, because twenty four hours really is quite an oversight, isn’t it, she thinks as she unlocks the door to PRB 2003701’s room and…
Fuck.
Dominic
Barrow has replied to Abhishek’s message: If not Tom and Helen who? and is awaiting Abhi’s response. Perhaps not, perhaps he has already connected the dots and is on his way to the airport, is sending a message to have Dominic stopped as he attempts to board.
He settles his hands back in his lap and interlaces his fingers. A slight film of sweat. Feels his heart thud and a surge of something feral and panicked go through him, leak out of his armpits, and there is a slight musk rising up from his shirt collar.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have killed them. The Mantis made me do it. Will that be an acceptable defence?
He takes a slightly deeper breath and tries to control his heart rate, flicks his eyes up to the clock above the podium, two minutes that have seemed extraordinarily protracted. He remembers the time he took a Red Star at the Hub and felt as though he had lived and died, cycled through a thousand lives, and when he returned he had been away for seven minutes.
His thoughts are racing, all kinds of ideas, fears, sensations, intuitions that the virus blocked swirling in, now it is almost fully depleted.
Busies himself with his ROD checking departmental updates, looking as though he is following protocols and sees among them that PRB 2003701 has hanged himself.
Left unattended, departmental investigation launched.
Tom, I, he says out loud, then stops himself.
A chime. Looks up from his ROD.
The flight is ready to board.
Waterston
He is sitting quietly in the Main Hall in Lumumba House listening to the woman behind him, bit of an accent, Russian, hard not to feel some thrill in its grain, talking about a recent theatre trip, Safety for the Apes, which she is telling her largely silent companion she found insulting but also tolerably amusing.
Well he is tolerably amused by this odd propensity of the older Russians to speak like characters in a Bernard Shaw play. He wonders whether Solchenko meant McFarlane when he made his observation about their not having killed enough people, and if that hadn’t been a rebuke pitched at Bewes somehow, for pleading for McFarlane’s life for his and Jennifer’s daughter’s sake, arranging their safe passage to the States. The document was drawn up and only Bewes was prepared to put his name to it. That made him enemies, lost him respect, meant that after the Breach he devoted himself to lesser things. Perhaps they should have let Barrow go about his work fully then, he was burning with revenge, yes, appropriate word after what happened to his parents, good union people from the docks, at the hands of royalist thugs. A horrible irony, if McFarlane is somehow behind this assassination, not knowing that it was Bewes’s intervention that saved him.
These acts of clemency, how might they be punished? Well…
Perhaps Solchenko was right. Altborg has taken his place at the podium, his turn to make a formal address to the assembled crowd, a collection of worthies and general citizens democratically selected to attend from the councils.
The male half of the couple behind him is expressing some, to his mind rather prejudicial, anti-American attitudes, a friend of Evans’s perhaps: they have no ideas of their own, no philosophy they have produced, no great thinkers compared to ours in the former Europe, they are degraded stock, criminals who butchered an original genius that the land they colonized possessed and if not for us would have relapsed into barbarism all the sooner, it is only our pressure that has kept their system tolerable, but these thieves, barbarians, now will have a planet of their own, the Red planet, this is the one they must conquer, a symbolic conquest, proof of their maniacal drive, they imagine themselves to be titans, but in all matters that truly concern life they are mere pygmies.
Altborg gazes out above the heads of the audience, seems to be almost distracted.
Borges! He remembers the poem, Bewes liked it, more literary than Waterston ever was, of course why Jennifer and he were more suited, why he got on with McFarlane too, he did undoubtedly, they were close at the start but time, time…
Borges/Altborg. Probably some association of the two names. Yes. His mind still working, slower perhaps but tenacious in its truffling away
He is moved to recite those lines to himself.
God moves the player, he in turn the piece
But what god beyond God begins the round
Of dust and time and dream and agonies
Altborg speaks: We have a series of unconditional demands, he says.
Louise
ROD Geolocation Cache: London
Latitude: 51.478540
Longitude: -0.024440
Location: “London” Resolution Way.
9:57. Made it with a few minutes to spare.
He turns, jogs backwards smiling, stops for a second then steps sideways into the flat. Everything paused quietly in the moonlight, her shadow trailing almost reluctantly behind her.
He wants her to enter and she knows sh
e is incapable of resisting. Time slows.
Cross the threshold, sister.
She enters and pauses, controls her breathing. There is a Passocon open on the table, papers scattered all around. She should wait for backup, why has he come here, when he knows, must know, she is in pursuit, boxed himself in?
She became a trout, a trout all in the brook
A square of dark corridor through the doorway, the sense of a tremendous tautness to the air as she takes a step forward and senses the shadows on the floor shift almost imperceptibly
And he became a feathered fly
And caught her with his hook
She goes into the bedroom, whole body tensed but aware somehow that he is not there. Stops, pivots, a presence in the other room now, he has doubled back on her somehow. She pauses, can sense he is still close to the front door and that she has space to manoeuvre, her hand goes back in her belt to a can of spray, microfibres that will concuss him.
Pause.
She steps out through the doorway, one arm extended, into a crouch, and there is a man she has never seen, young, sunglasses and a cap, wearing clothes she finds unfamiliar, holding a knife he has pulled from the kitchen drawer, he looks startled, unwell, one side of his face frozen stiff.
Who is this? The man who lives here, come home, realised someone is in the flat, grabbed a knife to protect himself?
She drops her arm with the outstretched spray and takes few steps forward to explain the situation and most importantly to escort him from a dangerous area.
Citizen, she says and gets no response, takes another step closer, eyes on the half open doorway.
Help yourself.
I need the last part, he says and lunges at her with the knife.
Waterston
Unconditional demands, well, well.
Let me demonstrate, please look at your RODs.
He extends his arms, opalescent cufflinks gleaming in the light, a pause, then he claps his hands once. The screens go dead, the lights flicker, the ROD blinks off then on again, time/date flashing 7:54
Gentlemen, he says, all your systems are now under our control, PRB and Co-Sphere wide.
Waterston sits stunned, the whole world fallen into an abyss.
What god beyond God?
Welcome to Year Zero, Altborg says.
Dominic
Almost immediately he takes a Nanivar to help him sleep, his first taste of US pharms. He will close his eyes here and wake on the other side of the Partition. Confused impressions run through him as the plane climbs and the drug takes hold. A few hours over the Atlantic and they will be into American comms space, the control of the plane will shift over to the US and they will be drawn ineluctably in.
Everything done now yet doubts still nag at him. He imagines suddenly that the smile of acceptance on Bewes’s face as he drank the glass that Dominic offered was his final act of service to the anti-Co-Sphere forces, it was all one huge subterfuge, how he had exiled McFarlane so he could act as an intermediary, used his grandson to funnel information out and finally arranged for his own assassination when he was in danger of being exposed, and Squires perhaps understood this and…
… perhaps he isn’t the spy, perhaps his grandfather was and has used him, and that finally this is why he was killed…
Is that plausible? No. Relax, let the Nanivar and the plane’s guidance system take over now, your job is done. Altborg at any moment will…
Another thought rises in his mind suddenly, the hour’s delay, what time is it? If they demonstrate their ability to reset the whole security system, then his plane, he realises, will simply fall from the sky.
The Nanivar swirls in, he tries to rouse himself, but even if he could, what difference would it make? That’s right, he was due to be into American space, across the Partition, by the time of Altborg’s little demonstration. No, the plane will be fine, won’t it? He wants to ask the colleague sitting beside him, but what question could he ask? He will close his eyes, the dark will fold over him and either he will never awake, or if he does he will be reborn to life everlasting.
Crystalline webbing, slowly thickening and fragmenting, kaleidoscopic, and there at the centre of the labyrinth a pale spot appears, grows, resolves itself until finally it is his own face, his rictus, death mask, grinning back.
The sound of a distant impact, the sound of Bewes’s office door being kicked open, reverberating out to catch them all up in its wave.
He struggles to open his eyes and thinks for a moment that the plane has stuttered, begun to plunge, remembers the last girl he will ever kiss. Her lips and teeth, their taste and feel pressed against his, her tongue soft and slug-like, her hands on his waist, his up to her face to make sure she stayed there long enough for the transfer to complete. Pushing forward against her, eager to swallow as much of her saliva as possible. That sweet, repugnant, harrowing last kiss. An American girl. All he will ever get to know of American girls, there in the dark tunnel, at his father’s bidding.
The time is 7:54.
Altborg has clapped his hands.
Rose’s Dream
I had a dream, she said, in which Crane was standing at the window of his flat exactly as he was the night I first went to visit him, his head was huge and open on one side, cross-sectioned. There was the outer shell of his brain, a thin, greyish layer outlined in black, outlined again by the brittle boundary of his skull, the centre empty. I stepped up onto the table next to him, climbed inside his head and curled up, but it was cold, uncomfortable, and so I shifted position, rolled forward and realized I could see out through his eyes. The city he was gazing on was not this one, this London, it was dark and there were distant fires burning, helicopters buzzing through the night, some landmarks I recognized, old seats of power and prestige that we have razed, new skyscrapers made of chrome and glass, citadels ringed at the base with fences, dogs, men with guns.
Something, someone was calling to me and I knew I had another self there, understood that my own life, all its volatility, my moods, the voices, thoughts, ideas, memories that assailed me didn’t come up from some hidden depth within me but were the ways that other versions of the same self, in those other worlds, impinged invisibly on mine. I was determined to go and meet myself, stood up and found I was in a cave, the caves I was taken to see as a child, patterns worn in the limestone by the slow, persistent drip, the stalactites and huge dark lakes where shoals of tiny, translucent fish flashed and angled. The tunnels lead on to deeper caves where the air was colder, the water darker still, the shapes more elaborate, the colours wilder. And so I set off. Perhaps if one was brave, pushed on, one might emerge, on the other side, in some other world, perhaps Crane’s world.
I came to a foot tunnel, dank light and dull enamel tiles greyed with age, I could have been thousands of leagues beneath the sea, my footsteps echoing and the concrete underfoot uneven and stained. I knew, in the way one knows things in dreams, Doctor, that it came out on the other side of the Thames, came up, not in this word, but in that one, the world Crane claims to have come from, the world he wrote about. And I set off to find myself there, running, almost frantic, along the darkened riverbank. I felt…
You felt? Frith echoed from the screen.
Hunted. In terrible danger, but compelled to know, and thrilled that at last I would be reunited with myself. That I would be able to take myself in my own arms and that I would be able to be an object of love for myself.
Reunited?
I know, she said, but this was not the child. I am sure of that. This was a world in which so many, all of them, were, the only word I can think of is benighted, and… She felt some tremor in Frith and paused for a moment anticipating the slip, the pun, the double meaning, he might have caught. I felt I had to know how and why we lived that way, what these other, human possibilities were. The terrors. The joys.
We?
Oh, all of us, she said, all of us, you too, we were all there, ourselves but completely different in almost ev
ery way. Souls existed and were material things and took shapes and were iterated and reiterated across an infinite number of worlds. And when I awoke and saw Barrow was there in bed beside me I didn’t recognize him, not just for a second or so but for the best part of a minute as I lay there with my heart racing, trying to understand where I was, trying to make sense of his face.
Barrow
He sends the message back, If not Tom and Helen who? shifts in in his seat as the patch calibrates, soothes. The voices in his mind modulate. He hears Frith again, tell me, and understands suddenly that every session with Frith has been the same, he has explained the same dream to him each time, the dream of his parents and the moment at the window, and always with the sense that it was the anniversary of the day they died. He will check the dream archive but knows somehow that now it will all be locked away. He half wakes to better hold onto this sudden insight as the patch responds, shrouds his thoughts, the car turning, taking more and more narrow backroads, threading through the maze of hedges and neglected fields round to the cottage, to where Goodridge has summoned him.
He remembers again jumping down from the window into the blanket stretched taut below, the neighbours’ upturned faces. That moment on the ledge, the fear, the desire to stay and die with them, smoke billowing out around him, the crackling heat, his back on one side shrivelling as the half-melted lampstand fell against him. It was the pain, the revulsion at the stench of his own charred flesh that finally galvanized him, made him jump, jump and live. A reflex, beyond his conscious control, that made him perhaps a traitor to himself, so that he sometimes imagines that half of him is still caught up there, halfway out of the open window, his back burning, the dizzying drop down into the street before him, suspended between two fears, and all of this has been a fantasy, a fevered, accelerating dream of a world that is yet to be.