by Alex Thomson
An Abaddon Books™ Publication
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First published in 2018 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
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Copyright © 2018 Rebellion. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78618-145-9
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
For Nicki
1
Hell
THE ASTEROID’S OFFICIAL name is Mizushima-00109, but all of us know it simply as ‘Hell.’ One of the Overseers must have called it that once, as a joke, and it stuck. I can’t remember ever knowing what the word meant—it was just the word for the black chunk of rock and metal where we lived, used in everyday speech, as in “Has anyone ever mapped out Hell’s south-western ridge?”
Then one cycle, I was reading one of Mr Lee’s books—a Dickens, I think—and the word cropped up, and I had to ask him to explain to me what Hell was. He says the Overseer who first called the asteroid Hell was being ironical, but I don’t buy it. Us, the Overseers can bear. And the work is tolerable for them—a distraction. But Mizushima-00109 itself… they really, really, viscerally hate it. A big, dumb, pitiless lump of metal. Its toxic atmosphere, its pale sun. You can see why they hate it—for them, it’s a constant reminder of where they are not: Earth. For the rest of us, though—the Ays, the Bees, the Jays and we two poor Ells, it’s all we’ve ever known.
Hell. Home.
I STARE OUT the cabin window, and watch as time creeps imperceptibly past. The others, they can’t do this, they have to fill their time somehow. Like the Ays, pacing up and down along the tunnels, shadowboxing, muttering—or the Jays, with their chess marathons. Even Lily, my sister, she gets bored eventually. But I can do this for hours, just sit and stare and empty my mind.
I’M OFTEN ALONE here—with only two of us, it’s unusual for both of us to be on a Leisure shift at the same time. The cabin is designed for six—so the extra space has become a communal dumping ground for broken machinery and rubbish. All in all, we have the same amount of personal space as the others; which is to say, not a lot. The Overseers each have their own cabin, but you wouldn’t know it, listening to their gripes. Not that I begrudge them their space—I wouldn’t know what to do with it all.
Outside, the stars inch infinitesimally further to the right. There is a particularly bright one, which is surely not a star but Mars, six light minutes away. And one of them, somewhere among the multitude, must be Earth.
Just a few cycles ago, I was in the Leisure cabin while Mr Reynolds gave an astronomy lecture to anyone who would listen. He was pointing towards the window covering the wall, identifying various constellations, when his finger stopped dead.
“There,” he said. “Earth. I’d know it anywhere.”
I couldn’t see where he was pointing, and in any case, I’m sure he had no clue what he was talking about. Of the three remaining Overseers, he’s the one who misses the comforts of Earth the most. Even when he’s out on the surface of Hell, he’s like a caged animal, glowering, kicking out at stray chunks of ore. And I’ve heard him before, saying he should never have come here, he made the wrong choice. But Mr Ortiz stared at him and he shut up.
As for me, I will miss Hell when the Collection Ship comes, in around six hundred cycles. Something about the way it’s so magnificently indifferent to us, and our work here. So self-contained—you could walk the entire circumference, if you were so inclined and had a limitless air supply, in a dozen cycles. Two and a half orbits we’ve been here, six Earth years of life. But it never gets old—it’ll always be home.
Earth, though… some of the brothers and sisters—especially the Bees—can’t wait, they spend hours of dull conversation about what they’re going to do there. But Earth terrifies me. Even after millennia of living there, we still don’t understand it, can’t control it, can’t survive on great swathes of its surface. What have we been doing all this time?
Mr Lee says I worry too much.
A rustle startles me and I glance over to where Lily is stirring. She pushes her sheets aside and sits on the bunk. My own boggy morning face stares back at me.
“So,” she says.
“So,” I reply.
She grabs a grey boiler suit and pulls it on, up to her waist. “I have a work shift commencing in one hour and twelve minutes,” she says, looking up at the clock.
“I have a sleep shift commencing in one hour and twelve minutes,” I say. Sometimes we play a game, to see who can be the most boring—if you quit the conversation or say something original, you lose. But this cycle, I can tell she’s not in the mood. She slumps back down on the bunk, and I go to sit behind her. I lift up her nightshirt and start to tickle her back. It helps her to wake up. Both of us have our eyes on the Earth clock—irrelevant to the short cycles of Hell, but as good a way as any of measuring time, and it gives a vague comfort to the Overseers. I note the time—when our situations are reversed, I will get the exact amount of back-tickling time in return.
“Leila,” she says, “my head hurts. I mean, it really hurts.”
I don’t respond. The headaches are part of life.
“Why don’t the Overseers’ heads hurt like this?” she says. “Why just us?”
“Could just be the pills they take. Or maybe they do feel it, but they just have a different pain threshold.”
“Oh, sure, you think they wouldn’t make a fuss?”
“I mean, they might just feel it differently. It’s like… if you put your fingers in your ears, noise is all muffled, right? But the noise is still there.”
“So?”
“So it could be the same with pain. The pain’s there, it just depends how you perceive it.”
Lily twists round and stares at me. “Leila?”
“Yes?”
“Shut up and tickle.”
I shut up and tickle. After a bit I say, “Who else will be on your work shift?”
“Do you care?” she replies. “Juan? Judas? Jupiter? Does it matter?”
She is enjoying the tickle. I can feel her back relaxing and loosening its knots.
“Just making conversation,” I say brightly, which is what she says to me when I moan. In some of the books I’ve read, twins have a kind of telepathic understanding—they don’t need to say the mundane stuff, it’s all unspoken and understood. Lily and I, we don’t have that, we’re always having misunderstandings and asking each other to spell out exactly what we mean.
With one hand I knead her shoulder blades, and she purrs with pleasure. This will all be paid back to me. There is silence for a few minutes while I work on her.
“Leila,” she says, eyes closed. “What do you think happened to our sisters, really?”
; According to Mr Lee, our four sisters did not grow properly. Out on the ship, in the vats, some piece of machinery had failed during the process—or perhaps it was human error. Nobody seemed to know. They were never even named.
“What do you mean, ‘really’?” I ask.
“I was talking to Mr Lee about it—I swear he doesn’t have a clue what happened. He gets all vague, tries to change the subject.”
“He probably doesn’t understand—he’s not a scientist, is he?”
Lily gives an exasperated sigh. “It doesn’t make sense, Lei. I can believe an accident happened. But why send down just two Ells? They must have had more Ells on the ship—or at least four more of another similar Family.”
“So?”
“So he’s lying about what happened. Why would they allow this to disrupt the whole group dynamic, and mess up our work timetable? Nobody benefits.”
In one sense, she was right—the work was disrupted: Ells were responsible for transportation of ore from the excavation sites back to the depots, and the categorisation of the ore. But with just two of us, much of that work had to be offloaded onto the others, who found it hard enough just to keep up with their quotas. And yes, the group dynamic had been skewed—hundreds of hours had been spent testing and theorising to come up with the best combinations to send to the different asteroids. For Mizushima-00109, that was six Ays, six Bees, six Jays and six Ells. You don’t have to be a genius to realise that missing four Ells would blow those theories out the water.
But, despite all this, Lily had failed to take into account the difference between theory and practice. Reading books had prepared me for this—the messy gulf between what should be, and the eventual compromise. Lily imagined chrome vats on a humming spaceship, production lines churning out brothers and sisters, supervisors directing them this way and that with prim efficiency. Me, I saw the flickering light bulb, the boredom, the unspoken sense of This’ll have to do.
Fiction. I swear, it turns you into a cynic.
“It was just a cock-up,” I say. “Mistakes happen.”
I feel like I’ve had this conversation before, word for word. Though it could just as easily be a conversation I’ve had with myself, in my head.
“I’m going to get to the bottom of it,” she says, like I knew she would, for we are stubborn if nothing else. “Something stinks here, Lei, you know it does.”
“Well, good luck with that. I’m just not sure what you think you’ll find on Hell.”
“I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but I’ve got to try, for our sisters. Just like if something happened to me, you’d look out for me.”
“Yeah, well.”
Lily wriggles and arches her back, trying to direct my fingers to the most ticklish spot. “That’s it… right… there.” A pause. “I wish we were like the other families, Lei. You know, a six.”
I sniff. “I like it, the two of us. Lil and Lei.”
“Poor Jays, though,” she says.
This is a long-running source of controversy on Hell. Jays and Ells were always intended as sexual partners, but how does six divide into two? The Ays and Bees have always paired off as planned, with no difficulties. Even when Avery died last orbit, a tunnel collapsing on him, the dynamic survived. Six can, just about, go into five. Especially when you have identical sisters. Lily is desperate to know the practicalities of how they manage it, but was too shy to ask one of the Bees; and now the moment has passed.
The Jays and Ells, though—that’s caused a lot of argument and gossip, in a small community like ours. Mr Lee fought our corner: he has always been brutally, unquestioningly loyal. He would never allow for the two of us to be passed around between the six Jays like some kind of inverted harem. And equally, it would never work for us both to choose one Jay and pair off exclusively with them; it would twist the dynamic beyond breaking point. So we co-exist, six Jays and two Ells, in that hinterland of the ‘least-worst’ scenario. Another This’ll have to do.
And after a while, it doesn’t seem so bad.
On Hell, opinion is divided regarding this unsatisfactory state of affairs.
I TIRE OF the back tickle and check the time as I call a halt. Twenty-six minutes. Lily grunts, gets up, and goes to the sink. I follow her, and watch as she washes her face. Her boiler suit is still down to her waist, and I can see the top of her brand, burnt into her hip. Reflexively, I feel a twitch in my own brand, an ugly welt that is supposed to be a 4, but looks like a smudged triangle. I press a thumb to it and enjoy the bittersweet throb, like picking at a scab.
The brands are a relic of the era when the Overseers needed to be able to distinguish between brothers and sisters, in case there were any troublemakers. According to Mr Lee, in the early cycles they started with families of thirty or so identical brothers, unbranded, and the results were often anarchic. On one occasion, the Collection Ship arrived to find the Overseers lynched, the food stores destroyed, and the brothers all dead—some by starvation, some by their own hand.
They never made that mistake again. Social dynamics programming was developed, and different families of brothers and sisters were sent to the asteroids according to the algorithms. Branding was introduced, and the Overseers took tasers, not that there had ever been a need for them on Hell. Ours was a well-behaved little mining colony.
“What are you looking at?” Lily murmurs, as she finishes her ablutions.
“Your brand,” I say. I look into the mirror over her shoulder and we stare at each other. I see my face reflected back at me all the time, but seeing two of my own face is unsettling and I look away. I suppose that’s how the others feel all the time.
She turns around and pulls up her boiler suit. “You’re a strange one, Leila.”
“Well, if I’m strange, so are you.”
“‘Well, if I’m strange, so are you,’” she repeats back at me in a silly voice.
She’s always bad-tempered in that period between waking and working—I would be just the same. We walk back in to the main cabin and collapse on our bunks at the same time.
A Jay—I think it’s Jupiter, though it could be Joseph—wanders into our cabin without announcement, and picks up two long metal poles resting against one of the bunks. He nods at us and walks out.
“Would it kill them to knock?” Lily asks.
“We could do with a lock, like the Overseers,” I say.
She picks at her lip. “Why exactly do they need locks anyway?”
“They have some private stuff, no?”
“What—in the cabinet by their cots?”
I nod. I have only ever been in Mr Lee’s cabin, but I assume it is the same for Mr Reynolds and Mr Ortiz.
“But what private stuff?” she says. “What could they possibly own on Hell that could be secret or need locking up?”
I shrug. “Who knows—maybe they’ve been conditioned that way. Must be weird for them here, after Earth.”
We sit in silence for a while, both contemplating what possible secret our kindly, fussy Mr Lee could be keeping. In the books I’ve read, characters often have a secret from their wives, or the police, or Victorian society. Here, however, the Overseers can do what they want—the Collection Ship is not coming for six hundred cycles, and until then, they’re in charge. They don’t need secrets.
I close my eyes and try to imagine a world where I’m carrying a dark secret that nobody else knows about, something nobody could have guessed about me; but I come up with a blank picture, and open my eyes.
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, and Lily is off on the way to her work shift. Technically I am due a sleep shift, but I feel restless and head out the cabin to try and shake it off. The tunnel connecting our cabin to the spine is maybe ten metres long, and lit by a single gloomy bulb. I turn left at the spine, past the tunnels to the Ays’ and Bees’ cabins, and down towards the communal areas. There are probably twelve people on base not on a work shift at the moment, and yet the silence is suffocating, apart from a dull buzz coming from som
e generator.
As I get closer to the communal areas, I hear voices and movement. I open the door and step into the Leisure cabin. Two Ays, Andy and Ashton, appear to be arm-wrestling, while Brenda is on a sofa, curled in a spiral. Brenda ignores me, while the Ays greet me and beckon me over to watch.
The two men are bare-chested, and their dark skin is glistening in the glare of the spotlight directly above them. Standing behind Andy, I can see a small pool of sweat gathering in the nape of his neck. Ashton has the edge of the contest, and, millimetre by millimetre, is pushing back Andy’s straining arm—he hits the tipping point and the arm wrestle is suddenly over. He whoops and jumps up, while Andy collapses in his chair, covering his face with long, callused fingers.
I glance at Brenda and we smirk at each other in a moment of sisterhood—this sort of display would only be possible from an Ay. Their role in the mines is the graft, the tough labour at the rock face. They’re built for it, and it seeps into their personality—strength means everything. Since they are genetically identical, they spend much of their free time working out how to get an edge over their brothers—running, lifting weights, boxing. In their cabin is an enormous, tedious chart of exactly how much ore has been cut by each brother, including Avery’s, whose tally is stopped poignantly short. Of course, not all ore is equal, and some will yield far less metal or be unusable, but that subtlety escapes them. It is all about the brute force and machismo.
As if to prove the point, Ashton, grinning at Brenda, pounds his chest and roars, “Boom! Come on!”
THE AYS TRY to assert their individuality with the most superficial of methods:
Andrew has a shaved head.
Ashton wears a pair of glasses with no lenses, lent to him by one of the Overseers.