Louie wasn’t going to defend a politician, not even if his life depended on it. ‘So someone, somewhere, who doesn’t have access to our feeds, stands to make 500 to 1 payout. I say we look to see who they are and find out what they know.’
‘Anon-untrace means just that. I couldn’t reveal the information even if a part of my systems were used to effect the transaction.’
‘Which they had to have been, right?’
‘I couldn’t possibly comment.’
Louie shook his head. ‘You know sooner or later, you are going to have to pick a side.’
‘All of my decisions are, by definition, impartial.’
‘I’ll ignore that blocks for the time being, but remind me to beat you up about it when this is over.’
[[••]]
thirteen
Dielle was feeling confident. This time he wasn’t going to freeze. People loved what he did. They weren’t going to ridicule him. Of course not. They would applaud and adore him. He could do it. No problem.
{[Have you been emtiing drugs into me to make me feel OK about this?]}
[[No more than required]]
{[How close to the limits am I?]}
[[You’re doing fine]]
Maybe it was true, thought Dielle, maybe he really did feel confident. Maybe it was all going to be just fine.
{[Don’t stop OK?]}
[[••]]
Right, he thought, I’m ready. He requested full privacy, took a deep breath and stepped through the transvex. He didn’t have to go far. Kiki had arranged a flash-gig in a 2,500 seat theatre on the Seacombe side of The Wall, less than a ten-minute tube ride from their apartment. The show had sold out in just over 25 seconds. Kiki was surprised. She’d expected it to sell a lot faster.
{[Kiki’s location?]}
[[En route to the venue. She’ll arrive 1.4 minutes before you. You have received 2,352 personal messages related to your upcoming performance. Almost 92% of them are favourable. Would you like to hear some of the more supportive ones?]]
Dielle smiled. {[No, it’s OK. Just send a personal thanks to each one please]} His mind had finally accepted that he would be walking onstage in front of a huge audience of real people. It was a breakthrough moment for him. Until this moment he’d been focussing on getting to the stage. Now he allowed himself to imagine walking to the keys and giving everyone a smile. No, a wave. No, smile. Maybe a half-wave and half-smile.
{[Dice!]}
[[~?]]
{[I need some clothes. I mean, I need something special. Something that makes me look like a star]}
[[Pundechan Media has already made arrangements. You will be netting a guarantee of 3,250 credits from the clothing suppliers against a downstream linked to the sumecast figures, subsequent sellthroughs, positive soc-net clothing-related traffic, mimic tendency characteristics and the post-gig brand-recognition metrics]]
He felt bewildered. There was always something more for him to know about. At least Kiki seemed to have everything covered, he thought. Still, it would have been nice to have been asked. {[Can you show me what I’m going to be wearing?]}
For a fraction of a second, a full-length holoprojection of Dielle walking onto a stage wearing a diagonally candy-striped jump-suit flashed before him then the transit bubble lurched violently and he was thrown against the roof.
‘What the fu…!’
Another bump and the lights went out. He felt as though he’d been pushed into thick treacle. He couldn’t move.
{[What’s going on?]}
No response.
{[Sis??]}
Silence. He tried his sub-legal network.
{:Anyone hear me?:}
Nothing. A few seconds of weightlessness followed by a dull thud and his body jarred despite the inertia absorption matrix that had filled his transit bubble the instant it experienced uncommanded acceleration. Then he was tumbling, head over heels, losing orientation.
His yell was a jerky howl but he could tell by the way his voice was muffled that no one was going to be able to hear him. Something had gone wrong. Very wrong.
The rolling came to an abrupt halt, leaving him upside-down with ringing ears and blood rushing to his head. He couldn’t move. He could hardly breathe. He could still move his eyes, but there was nothing to see. Deep inside his psyche, the echoes of the initial shock turned into something darker. Fear and imagination coalesced into malignant demons that clawed and climbed over themselves, fighting to the surface of his consciousness. He was going to die! Here, inverted in the dark, alone, trapped and powerless, he was going to suffocate to death! His heart rate went into overdrive. His breathing, already shallow, became staccato gasps. Sweat ran down his face and into his eyes. Despite his panic he realised he had to get a grip and he had to do it without Sis to hold his hand otherwise he was going to lose his mind. That is, he thought, if I haven’t lost it already. He needed something to focus on. Something normal. Something like the sound of a human voice.
‘Now then,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘this is uncomfortable.’ He took as deep a breath as his constricted ribcage would allow. ‘In fact, I’d say this is possibly the most uncomfortable I’ve been all day. Yes, most definitely. I am hot and upside down and I don’t want to be hot and upside down. Hot and upside down in DownSideUp.’ He took another breath. It was working. ‘But then I suppose you could say I’m the right side up for UpSideDown. Right side up for UpSideDown but wrong side up for DownSideUp. Wrong side up, right side down.’
He was half way through composing a new song entitled there’s no right way to be down when he felt something bump against his prison cell.
There was a loud tearing noise and the bubble shook. A dull glow filtered through the foam. A gruff shout of ‘hold yer breath in there!’ was followed by an ear-splitting roar as a rush of solvent flooded the broken sphere. The foam dissolved instantly and Dielle dropped into a sticky puddle at the base. Two pairs of hands reached through a gash in the side, grabbed him and pulled him through into a murky half-light, depositing him, damp and dishevelled, in the dirt.
A dark, hooded form towered over him waving a flickering light. ‘You can breath now,’ it said.
He did and instantly regretted it.
‘For Dicesake!’ he said, retching. ‘What’s that awful smell?’
‘Ye’ll get used to it,’ said another, smaller form. ‘Sure ‘tis only natural after all.’ This form sounded female but looked feral. It handed him a grey rag.
‘You have been re-routed on behalf of the Unkos,’ said the male voice with an air of assumed authority. ‘Do not try to escape. We mean you no malice but we will physically restrict your freedom of movement if you fail to comply.’
Dielle rose to his knees and checked out his surroundings. There wasn’t much to see. Everything was shadowy and damp. Hundreds of metres above, titanic towers hung, ominous and silent, blotting out all but a few scattered shafts of watery violet light. Moisture dripped from a thousand unseen edges, smoke rose from garbage fires and heavy cables hung from corroded gantries that angled down toward the oil-scummed floor but disintegrated far above head height, leaving a terminal moraine of rusting metal on the ground. Clutches of faltering glowglobes in string bags dangled from a line of skewed and broken poles.
Dielle shivered. It wasn’t cold. He wiped his face with the rag and winced with pain. He’d bitten his lip.
He heard a noise behind him. A dirty child appeared out of the gloom and scuttled inside the wrecked privacy bubble. There was a grunt and a tearing sound and the bubble collapsed, leaving the urchin proudly brandishing a clutch of wires that sprouted from a glowing core.
‘Git ta fa wee-it yer teevin bastid,’ growled the man, picking up a heavy lump of charred metal and throwing it at the space the diminutive looter had recently occupied. He’d already vanished into the shadows.
‘Liddl divl,’ said the female. ‘Gentrish fer sure.’
‘Come with us,’ said the man. He turned his back, con
fident that Dielle would follow. He was right. There was no way Dielle was going to be left there alone.
‘I’m Dielle,’ said Dielle. ‘What are you called?’
‘We know who you are alright,’ said the man. ‘You don’t think we kidnap people at feckin random do you?’
The woman hawked up something disgusting from her throat and spat expertly in front of Dielle. He skipped around where he reckoned it had landed.
As they scaled a pile of rusted debris, Dielle tried again. ‘I hope I haven’t done anything wrong, or offended anyone,’ he said. ‘But I was on my way to a rather important event.’
‘No, really?’ said the man with heavy sarcasm that went right over Dielle’s head.
‘Yes, as a matter fact, I’m supposed to be playing my first live concert with my new band.’
‘Then they’ll have to play without you,’ said the man.
Dielle thought about what Fingerz and Fencer would say when he failed to turn up.
‘Is there any way I can, like, send a message to my colleagues? You know I’d hate to let them down.’
‘Hate is a very strong word,’ said the man. He trudged higher up the hill of compacted metal trash.
‘Do you suppose Sis will have told them where I am?’
The man stopped and turned to face him. He was as tall as Dielle and had dirt lines etched into his forehead and around his grey eyes. ‘The machine does not know where you are,’ he said.
The woman expressed her disdain with another gob of phlegm that dinged off a sheet of metal. She, like the man, was wearing a full-length hooded cloak made from a coarse, dark cloth. Dielle had assumed she was deformed until he realised she was carrying something large and heavy on her back.
‘As far as it is concerned you have deliberately chosen to drop off presence awareness,’ said the man.
Oh shit, thought Dielle. The guys are never going to believe me. Then he thought about Kiki. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. But at least, he thought, he didn’t have to wear that Dice-awful outfit.
‘Come on,’ said the man. We have many miles to go before we reach safety.
{[What are miles and where are… oh… um]} Dielle felt secretly embarrassed.
‘How far is that?’
‘Far enough for you to have time to learn the value of silence,’ said the man.
Dielle got the hint.
Miles, Dielle discovered, are not short - especially when you have to walk several of them over jagged metal in soft-soled lounge shoes. Each time he tried to start a conversation he was met with growls, snarls and expectorations that increased in hostility as they trudged through the detritus of the carefree and careless civilisation above.
After nearly three hours they approached a wall of lattice panels that curved away in both directions and reached high into the darkness. They followed the scrap-metal barrier until they came to a chink that led almost immediately to a second, identical barricade, then turned back on themselves, retracing their steps, just a few metres closer to their destination. The man held up his lantern to guide them as they trudged along the distantly curved, ceiling-less corridor. They squeezed through a narrow slot into the next inner ring and, with a low grinding sound, the opening they’d just come through closed and the wall behind them moved sideways like a giant tumbler in a combination lock. Dielle lost count of how many walls and gaps they had to negotiate but each opening was a hike from the previous one, and not in any predictable direction. It took them over half an hour of switch-backs to advance less than a couple of hundred metres. Finally, to Dielle’s intense relief, fresh air signalled they were close to leaving the labyrinth. A low arch opened onto a scene of warmth, light and civilisation.
They emerged onto the rim of a city-sized amphitheatre. Below them, in a series of concentric circles that stepped down to a central plaza, were more than a thousand white-walled, tile-roofed, single story dwellings. The ceiling was a double dome with triangular pendatives that curved down to the rim wall. The uppermost dome was obscured by a dense mist that glowed with a yellow-white light.
‘Welcome to Up Haven,’ said the man. He pulled his hood back, revealing a head of thick black hair that was grey at the temples.
The woman shrugged off her backpack, pressed her palm to a panel on its top and stowed it in a nook by the archway. ‘There now,’ she said, tugging at her hood, ‘we won’t be needing that anymore. All your body tech will be maintained here by the Unkos’ systems as long as you stay within this perimeter.’
Dielle looked down into her face. She had silky tresses of auburn curls that fell around her shoulders, and deep green eyes that shone like fire-stones. Her fair skin was spattered with faint brown marks that he instinctively wanted to rub off. ‘Sorry about all the gobbing,’ she said. ‘I’m allergic.’ She wiped her elfin nose with the back of her hand and smiled up at him coyly. Dielle swallowed hard. Something had just happened to him but he didn’t know what. His legs felt weak. Must have been all that dicing walking, he thought.
The tall man looked at them together, grunted and clumped down the stairs to a narrow pathway behind the outermost ring of whitewashed houses.
Dielle sucked on his sore bottom lip. ‘He’s not very friendly, is he?’ he said to the woman.
‘He’s a good man sure enough,’ she said. ‘You’ll warm to him when you get to know him.’
‘Does he have a name?’
‘He does and it’s his.’
‘His?’
‘Yes, and he’ll give it to you when he’s good and ready. Let’s go now. You have someone to meet.’
She spoke with a soft lilt that made everything sound like a lyric poem. Dielle had never heard anyone talk that way and he’d never met anyone with freckles either, yet there was something deeply familiar about her, something both intriguing and fascinating. He really, really wanted to wipe her face.
She barely touched the stairs, stopping at the bottom to look back up. ‘Come on with you,’ she said. ‘There’s real food and real drink waiting and if you ask me nicely I might think about giving you my own, real name.’
Dielle felt like a ball in a circular maze, going left then right, down an alleyway, through an arch, sideways round a quarter circle to a down-ramp then back again to zigzag steps. They passed windows dressed with bowed curtains with hand-crafted ornaments on every sill, over-wrapped old women perched on stools by painted doorsteps and whiskered men peering through open half-doors. Everyone they met acknowledged the man with a respectful nod or a deferential touch of forefinger to temple. His response was a humble wave or a shy frown. The woman was met with warm smiles and cheery hullos at every encounter. She asked everyone how they were and never needed to wait for a reply because it was always a smile and a nod. Dielle was stared at. They examined him as if they expected him to do something dangerous or despicable or both. He tried smiling and making eye contact but only got averted eyes or an occasional scowl. A small child had been following them from the highest ring and more had tagged along as the entourage progressed. The youngsters were cautious and kept their distance at first but curiosity compelled them to get more daring as the floor levelled out and the houses and alleys grew larger. There were more than a dozen of them under Dielle’s feet by the time they reached the final archway.
They burst into the arena like confetti from a party popper.
Four rows of trestle tables laid with embroidered tablecloths stood bowed under the weight of a banquet on the opposite side of the oval piazza. They walked towards the feast. Dozens of copper platters were piled high, some with exotic looking fruits, others with mounds of nuts and berries or towers of breads and pastries. Steam rose from enormous ceramic bowls filled with vibrantly coloured vegetables. Cakes and biscuits filled the gaps between the dishes and two-handled pitchers, the table-ends were stacked with goblets and plates. Each row had four roasted animals ranged along the middle. Dielle couldn’t tell which animals they had been, but he was pretty certain he could spot legs and torsos.
‘Wow,’ said Dielle. ‘Is this all because of me?’
‘Don’t be so feckin’ full of yerself,’ said the man. These were the first words he’d spoken since they’d left the outer wall. ‘Today is a Sunday, which, if you had bothered to ask your precious machine when you crawled out of your pit this sorry morning you would have already known. It’s tradition in Up Haven for all of us to get together and share our food and drink on Sundays. You just happen to have arrived on one of them.’
‘Cool. You have these days often?’
The man looked at the woman and shook his head. ‘He’s a feckin’ eejit. I told you.’
She skipped over to the man, adjusted his cloak and tidied him up. ‘Ah gwan wid yer, he’ll be fine, you’ll see.’ She patted his cheek. ‘Have faith.’ Somewhere nearby someone with a healthy appetite hit a huge castIon bell several times.
‘Faith!’ He scowled at her and strode off past the tables toward a dark archway pausing only to rip a body part off a roasted carcass. He passed, without acknowledging, a small entourage of people scurrying toward Dielle.
‘Welcome to Up Haven,’ said a small man with a bald head, a worried frown and a wonky eye. ‘Welcome to our temporary home. We are the Naturalists, the true and original inhabitants of this world. We have been exiled and treated like pariahs by our own people. But it shall come to pass that we will once again take our rightful place at the control panel of destiny.’
‘Don’t listen to him,’ said an older woman with a disturbing amount of facial hair. ‘He’s friggin’ doollally. We’re not Naturalists, we’re Unkos, which means we’re the people who refuse to cooperate with your lot or our lot or anyone else’s lot and you won’t get a word of sense out of any of us. Except for me.’
‘And dat’s a certain lie Mary O’linghum,’ said another woman. ‘Sure, you’ll be the last one to be relied upon for factual knowledge of the veracible kind. All you need to know young fella is all Naturalists are a type of Unko but we Unkos wouldn’t dream of being Naturalists. Although some do. Dream that is.’
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