Afterwar

by Lilith Saintcrow

  The opposition didn’t have any funding, of course, and everyone knew that the Company was backing the winning team. But any fleeting disappointment he may have felt when they crumbled to a crushing defeat and the prime minister declared, “Too long our enemies have hidden behind human rights as if they were extended to all!” was lightened by the fact that his identity had held. He had voted as Theo Miller, and it hadn’t made a difference, and no one had called his bluff.

  He’d still somehow felt it would work out all right in the end.

  When they shut down the newspapers for printing stories of corruption and dirty deals, he’d signed the petitions.

  When they’d closed the universities for spreading warnings of impending social and economic calamity, he’d thought about attending the rallies, but then decided against it because work would probably frown on these things, and there were people there who took your photo and posted your face online—saboteurs and enemies of the people—and besides, it rained a lot that month and he just needed a morning off.

  By then, of course, it was a little too late for petitions. Company men would run for parliament, Company newspapers would trumpet their excellence to the sky, Company TV stations would broadcast their election promises and say how wonderful they were. They would inevitably win, serve their seven years in office and then return to the banking or insurance branches happy to have completed their civic duty, and that was that. It was for the best, the adverts said. This was how democracy worked: corporate and public interests working together at last, for the greater good.

  When it became legally compulsory to carry ID, £300 for the certified ID card, £500 fine if caught without it, he knew he was observing an injustice that sent thousands of innocent people to the patty line, too skint to buy, too skint to pay for being too skint to buy. When it became impossible to vote without the ID, he knew he lived in a tyranny, but by then he wasn’t sure what there was left to do in protest. He’d be okay. If he kept his head down. He’d be fine.

  He couldn’t put his finger precisely on when parliament rebranded itself “The People’s Engagement Forum,” but he remembered thinking the logo was very well done.

  Chapter 5

  In the Criminal Audit Office, Dani Cumali clears away the remnants of a cucumber sandwich.

  In the ancestral home of his family, Philip Arnslade stares at his mother’s dribbling form and blurts, “Well so long as she’s happy!”

  On the canal, Neila is pleased to discover that she’s not actually squeamish about head wounds at all.

  By the sea, a man who may or may not be a father rages at the ocean.

  In the past the man called Theo cycles home from a team bonding experience, and is terrified of the face he has just seen. He didn’t try to talk to Dani. Didn’t meet her eye again after that initial moment of shock. Fled without a word, chin down, expression fixed in stone. Half ran to his bicycle and pedalled away without bothering to tuck his trousers into his socks.

  The queues at the Vauxhall Bridge toll weren’t as bad as he’d feared, and the walls of Battersea Power Station were a brilliant cascade of colour bouncing back off the clouds promoting the latest reality TV escapade, huge painted faces pouting brilliant crimson lips into the dark.

  He went the long way round, past the giant glass towers of the river, then south, towards houses growing lower and cracked, overgrown front gardens, laundrettes with beige linoleum floors, churches in sloped-roof sheds proclaiming a new Jesus of fire and redemption, a criss-cross of silent railway lines and budget gyms above kebab shops for the men with vast shoulders encasing tiny pop-up heads.

  He circled several times before pulling up at the stiff black gate in the crumbling red-brick wall. He couldn’t remember what Mrs. Italiaander, landlady folded in fuchsia, had said to him when he came through the door—she’d said something and he’d even replied, they’d maybe even had a whole conversation—but the memory of it slipped away in a moment.

  He sat on the end of his bed and looked around the room, and saw as if for the first time the paucity of character it contained.

  A wooden figurine of a woman dancing.

  A painting of light across a misty sea.

  A couple of 1950s films where everyone knew what to say and exactly how to say it.

  A fern that refused to die.

  With Dani Cumali’s face overlaying his vision, these things suddenly seemed trivial, pathetic. The revelation jerked him almost to laughter, as the man somewhere beneath Theo Miller, who still faintly remembered the real name he’d been born with, and the hopes he’d had as a child, stared at the farcical illusion of Theo Miller he’d created and realised that in all his efforts to be anonymous he had in fact ceased to be a person whatsoever. The laughter rolled through him for half a minute, then stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and he stared again at nothing.

  He sat in muddy clothes on the end of his bed, hands in his lap, and waited to be arrested. In the room next door, Marvin, Mrs. Italiaander’s teenage son, wannabe rock star, wannabe movie star, wannabe private detective wannabe martial artist wannabe somebody in a nobody world, played drum and bass far too loud and wondered if his mum had known all along that he’d stolen that fifty from her purse.

  Downstairs, Nikesh, the other flatmate, who did something for the Company, something in insurance or actuarial or—he was never very good at explaining—cooked chicken so spicy it could burn the top off your mouth and listened to radio with the volume turned right down, too low to really hear, but it was the sound of the voices that Nikesh enjoyed, more than the words they spoke.

  After a while—after the first twenty minutes of not being arrested—Theo lay back on his double bed, nearly always slept in by one, and stared at the ceiling. His room was five metres by six metres, luxurious by lodging standards. Theo had lived in it for nearly three years. He’d been renting in Streatham before, but his flatmate had got a job in something that paid more, been given a resident’s permit to Zone 1 and moved in with his girlfriend. Theo’s civil service salary didn’t stretch to a mortgage, not with prices being what they were. Not with times being so …

  … besides, he didn’t have the papers to live in Kensington or Chiswick or anywhere like that, let alone the cash, so Tulse Hill it had been, two lodgers, a mother and a child pushed into a house built for three. Mrs. Italiaander had never raised Theo’s rent. She liked the way he cleaned the oven once a month and the new shower rail he’d installed. He was a nice, quiet tenant, and that was a rare thing indeed.

  It struck Theo as likely that in three years’ time he would probably be in this same bed, on these same sheets, staring at the same crack running to the ceiling rose. This made him feel

  … nothing.

  He was masterful in feeling nothing. It was what he did best. He had cultivated the art over nearly fifteen years.

  He checked his bank balance for the fifth time in the hope it was something better.

  Wondered why the cops hadn’t come for him yet.

  Realised he had no idea what on earth he was doing with his life, or what the hell he was meant to do now.

  Having no idea what to do with himself, he did as he always did and on Monday morning went to work.

  if you enjoyed

  AFTERWAR

  look out for

  CORMORANT RUN

  by

  Lilith Saintcrow

  It could have been aliens, it could have been a trans-dimensional rift—nobody knows for sure. What’s known is that there was an Event, the Rifts opened up, and everyone caught inside died.

  Since the Event, certain people have gone into the drift…and come back, bearing priceless technology that’s almost magical in its advancement. When Ashe—the best Rifter of her generation—dies, the authorities offer her student, Svinga, a choice: go in and bring out the thing that killed her, or rot in jail.

  But Svin, of course, has other plans…

  How far would you go and what would you risk to win the ultimate
prize?

  1

  INTERVIEW

  INTERVIEWER: We are here today with Yevgeny Strugovsky, the acclaimed Rift scientist, who has just received a Nobel Prize for his work in unlocking several Rift technologies. His work has proved a foundation for most of what we know about the Rift’s treasures. Thank you so much for joining us today, Doctor.

  STRUGOVSKY: Thank you, yes. Yes.

  INTERVIEWER: You must be asked this quite a bit, but it’s a good place to start: What do you think caused the Rifts? There are several different theories, including, as it were, aliens. [Laughs]

  STRUGOVSKY: We have no way of knowing, of course. It would be irresponsible to conjecture.

  INTERVIEWER: And yet—

  STRUGOVSKY: All we can say for certain is that one night, eighty-six years ago, there were strange lights in the skies of many countries. Aurora borealis, perhaps. Then, the Event, at a very specific time.

  INTERVIEWER: Yes, the famous Minute of Silence. Four thirty-seven in the afternoon, UTC+2. The Kieslowski Recording—

  STRUGOVSKY: Yes, yes. The point is, we cannot even begin to know what triggered the Event until we have ascertained what, precisely, the Rifts are. Rift is somewhat of a misnomer. Bubble is also a bad term; Zone would be more precise, but still not quite what we’re looking for.

  INTERVIEWER: Rift is the accepted term, though.

  STRUGOVSKY: [Coughs] Yes, indeed. The most current theory is that these … places, these Rifts, are actually tears in a fabric we cannot adequately measure. It is not Einstein’s spacetime, it is not Hawking’s and Velikov’s layer cake, it is not the Ptolemaic bubbles of earth and air. When we know what fabric is being so roughly torn, we may begin to reclaim those parts of the Earth’s surface.

  INTERVIEWER: Do you believe in reclamation, then? The Yarkers protest that it’s against God’s will.

  STRUGOVSKY: Their religion does not interest me. The human race is staring directly into the face of the infinite on the surface of our little planet. The frequencies and patterns of the Riftwalls—seemingly random, but we do not have enough data yet—have blinded us to the amazing fact that the energy for them must come from somewhere. The artifacts brought back—

  INTERVIEWER: —illegally.

  STRUGOVSKY: Legally, illegally, they are there. And they share this same quality, of clean, near-infinite energy. I say near-infinite because we have not yet managed to discern the half-life of these objects.

  INTERVIEWER: Can we say “clean” energy, though? The incidences of mutations near Rift borders, the possibility of some radiation we have no means of measuring yet …

  STRUGOVSKY: Ah, will there be those dying like Madame Curie, of invisible rays in the service of Science? It is perhaps worth the cost. Imagine a world where this energy is free, and we have reclaimed the cities that lay inside the Rifts. The implications for our lives, for the planet, even for travel to other parts of the solar system, now that we perhaps have the fuel to do so, these are what interest me.

  INTERVIEWER: I see. Can you talk for a moment about the presence of rifters? Most of the data we have has come from those who can enter and leave these zones, these tears in the fabric?

  STRUGOVSKY: They are mercenaries. It is a sad comment upon humanity that profit is pursued more vigorously than science.

  INTERVIEWER: But there are some commonalities among them, as your fellow scientist Targatsky has shown.

  STRUGOVSKY: He is a psychologist, not a scientist.

  INTERVIEWER: Still—

  STRUGOVSKY: It is the scientists who will solve the Rifts. They must be protected from the mercenaries and the crowds of … [Burst of static]

  2

  NURSERY RHYME

  How many years ago did they show?

  Threescore and ten.

  How many they come back aroun’?

  Never see them again.

  One, two three, four five six,

  We all go riftin’,

  Pick up the sticks!

  3

  EATEN THE BODIES

  First came the screaming, drowning out blatting alarms and the ear-shattering repetition of the recorded containment protocol. The long piercing shriek cut right through concrete, glass, stone, buffers, and skulls. Most of the on-duty rifters instinctively hit the ground, one or two ended up with nosebleeds, and one—Legs Martell, absolutely sober for once—going through containment passed out and almost drowned in the showers. A couple of scientists got a headache, but whether it was from the noise or the rest of the afternoon, nobody could say.

  The wedge-shaped leav* should have come over the border and inched slowly to a graceful halt right inside the white detox lines, hovering at the regulation three feet above pavement. It should have then been dusted with chemicals, nootslime,† and high UV to make sure any Rift radiation or poisonous goo was neutralized. Instead, it zagged drunkenly over the blur,* spewing multicolored flame and spinning as two live undercells tried to cope with one gyro melted and the third cell pouring toxic smoke. The dumb fucks on tower duty even unloaded their rifles at it, probably thinking it was the Return,† the aliens who left the Rift-bubbles all over the surface deciding to revisit and pick up their dropped toys, with the tower guards first in line to be grabbed for experimentation or whatever. The terrified fusillade popped the leav’s canopy and gave the fire inside a breath of fresh air

  The resultant explosion shattered every window facing the containment bay. Klaxons were added to alarms and recorded exhortations to wash twice, dust down, wash again. Someone got the yahoos in the towers to quit shooting, but by then it was too late. Any evidence of what had happened inside the blur-wall was well and truly shot to shit, and burned for good measure.

  Wreckage that had once been a good solid piece of antigrav equipment drifted on its two remaining cells, turning in majestic, lazy circles and burning merrily. The emergency response team had been playing Three High‡ instead of suiting up as soon as something rippled in the blur and the watching rifters hit the alert, so it took them a good ten minutes to get their lazy asses out there. They foamed the whole thing, and someone got the bright idea of setting out a triangle of dampers. When they were switched on, their flat surfaces coruscating with peculiar static-popping blue stutterlight, the leav thudded down, cracking concrete. It was too heavy, as if it had dragged a squeezer*—what the scientists called a localized gravitational anomaly, isn’t that a mouthful—out on its back.

  There are squeezers and shimmers,† and the pointy-headed wonders call them the same damn thing, when any idiot could guess you’d need to know which was too much and which was too little. Didn’t matter. They kill you just the same. Except there are stories of a rifter surviving a shimmer. You never know.

  Anyway, once the foam dripped away, the entire warped chassis of the leav was there, and three shapes glimmered through the smoke. One of them had to be Bosch from the physics department, because one of that corpse’s legs was two and a half inches shorter than the other. Another one’s pelvis was horribly mangled, but it could have been a woman’s.

  The obvious conclusion was that it was Ashe and the two scientists, with their accompanying sardies‡—who would have been in the secondary, much smaller leav—dead somewhere in QR-715. The gleaming inside the shattered leav was skeletons, turned into some sort of alloy. It took two weeks of patient work by teams in magsuits to free them from the tangle, and they were carted away to the depths of the Institute. Someone did a hush-hush paper on them—the bones were alloy, where the ligaments were all high-carbon flex with an odd crystalline pattern all over. That was the heaviness—the alloy was impervious to diamond or laserik, and incredibly dense. Whatever had crushed the pelvis of the third skeleton had to have been massive, unless it had been done before the transformation

  By then, though, the rifters had already held a wake at the Tumbledown. Anyone who wasn’t a rifter got thrown out after the first round, and the next morning saw not a few still-unconscious freaks on the tables or under them, an
d even more reeling home. Sabby the Pooka got carted to the butcherblock* for alcohol poisoning. Might as well have medicated him for grief, too, since he and Cabra’d been running with the Rat ever since she rolled into town. There was nothing to bury, science had eaten the bodies, and besides, it’s what she would have wanted.

  That’s how Ashe Rajtnik, Ashe the Rat, who held herself to be the best rifter in the world and was certainly one of the luckiest, died. After that, the higher-ups sent a commission. They discharged all the on-duty rifters, and more orders came down: Nothing went into the Rift, anything that came out was to be shot and contained. Afterward, Kopelund once told Morov he’d almost been canned, too, since he’d played loose with the regs to send in even a small research team, not to mention one with a couple leavs.

  And yet, a year later, the motherfucker in charge of the complex perched at the edge of the biggest Rift in the world was looking for someone else to go in after the Cormorant.

  * Antigrav replacement for a sled, forklift, or truck. Larger ones can be used as helicopters.

  † A neutral semiliquid (reverse engineered from glaslime) that soaks up any stray Rift energies or radiation.

  * The shimmering, sometimes almost-translucent border of a Rift.

  † Sooner or later, the aliens will come back.

  ‡ A card game.

  * A heavier-than-Earth localized gravitational anomaly.

  † A lighter-than-Earth localized gravitational anomaly.

  ‡ Slang, possibly deriving from “sardine” or “Sardaukar.”

  * Free hospital. Generally avoided except by the very poor or very desperate.

  By Lilith Saintcrow

  Cormorant Run