The Solway
Some Night or Other, 2224 A.D.
It’s one of those confusing scuffles, over so quickly and who knows how it got started but one guy is behind Miles with a knife and Zed knocks him to the ground. It’s not a punch; it’s a shove and not even a hard one, but enough to unbalance the man and down he goes, fatally smashing his head open on a corner of the pool table. Zeds’ karmic clock utterly runs out of minutes and seven Nefs appear from nowhere for his body, forming an inward circle as their last rites are intoned and Miles batters in vain at the unyielding giants, desperate to see his friend, unable to accept what has happened even as the walls reflect the blue flash of atoms rejoining the universe. He scrabbles at the ground where Zed lay, trying somewhere in his mind to tear up the floorboards that surely must be hiding him. First Jenny then Jimbob kneel and hold him in a sickening pain wracked silence of guilt and horror.
Sometimes when you think you’ve lost everything and you’re just about hanging on by your fingernails, there goes something else and it takes your tenuous grip with it. He’d spent all this time driving himself into a hole over Anna but the pain of losing her was a lesser sadness, a duller ache in which comparative relief was found whenever he could tear his mind away from the events leading up to Zed’s death; could he have done anything differently? Of course he could; he could have done everything differently, but not now.
The Igniters had been ignoring calls from Christiana and things came to a head one evening during another local show. A lone gunman at the back of the crowd fired into the air, at which point his rifle jammed and the entire room made for the exits. Miles could hear police pulling up outside, local Infantry too for something like this; he stepped down from the stage through feedback whining propellant scented air toward a panicking insurgent who is struggling to re-arm himself. Miles became aware of a need to die; for it all to end here and for nothing to matter any more. The French have a name for it; l’appel du vide is the voice which calls you to jerk the wheel on a crowded skyway or jump in the path of a speeding maglev, and now it is calling Miles across a deserted dance floor. He spreads his arms as he approaches the man and the click of a rifle getting its act together reaches his ears; the strangest things whip up in your mind when you know you’re dead, and it occurs to Miles he’s about to be martyred for rock & roll. Anyone who calls suicide a cowards’ way out has clearly never tried kicking away that chair; Miles has been there but this is different. A beatific smile spreads across his face which is fully the most terrifying thing the gunman has seen in his entire life. In the eyes of a homicidal maniac Miles sees the reality of humankinds’ ultimate oneness so clearly for just a fraction of a second; overwhelmed with love he embraces this shared soul and speaks softly into the shaking mans’ ear.
“Brother, you are confused; let me enlighten you.” The insurgents head explodes as a sniper takes him out; his rifle clatters to the floor and a decapitated neck spits blood to the ceiling which rains for a second before the heart stops and a suddenly heavy corpse slides slowly through Miles’ arms to the floor staining crimson as it goes. One more warrior soul no longer believes but knows, absolutely and for certain now.
Well thought Miles, blinking gore from his eyes as his arms are cuffed behind him; that was a rush! It was rare for anything to elicit any kind of feeling these days; nice to know it still could. A trooper is cheerily congratulating another on her shot; Sergeant Wesson of the Port & Sunlight Constabulary is not impressed.
“Who told you to blow his bloody brains out? What if this dickhead here moved?”
“Yeah well” shrugged the trooper, nudging the body with a boot as if hopeful it may get up for another try “didn’t though, did he?” The Royal Naval Outer Infantry are to finesse what sledgehammers are to nuts, but the copper had to admit they’d nailed the bastard with no collateral damage. It would have been nice to have something to interrogate is all; sure you stop one of these psychos, but there’s always another to take their place. Wesson is a detective to his core, driven by hope that with enough investigation we may one day find out just what everyone’s problem is. This Ravenscroft kid needed keeping an eye on; he was turning into a regular angel of death, and people with nothing left to lose can be very unpredictable.
As time went on Miles got worse; often he’d stand motionless in front of the mic as the band played, his guitar hanging uselessly and feeding back as he stared into space. It was like being over the limit for driving but more over the limit for living; he couldn’t sing when his stomach had been pumped and forgot the words half the time, so Jimbob and Jenny were increasingly taking over vocal duties. Blue Cheer got him to what work he occasionally found; combined with alcohol it made him crankier than ever and he’d jack himself up with stolen Ultra every few days to get a few hours sleep, always too little and always too late. After a while the band stopped telling him when they had a gig; venues welcomed the New Igniters with a sigh of relief and Miles stayed home and drank.
Down and Out on Bd
Miles didn’t look for work these days. One by one the services were cut off; the Combined Heat & Power Co. do not mess about and he was denied those requisites fairly early on, but the BMC still ran the water and the previous proprietor had ensured there was no physical way of denying a home sanitation.
Auguste Arthur Barwing, the last private owner of the Britannia Mining Company and son of its founder was, let’s be under no illusions here, a terrible man. He was the kind of opportunistic blackgaurd who would think nothing of buying up your grandmothers’ apple pie business, running it into the ground and flogging it off to the Martians for a penny’s profit. Like the East End villains of myth and legend though, he only went after his own; other ruthless bastards were fair game, but he was a remarkably good employer. Many a Captain of Industry or Head of State suffered an interrupted meeting as Barwing personally attended to a workers’ query right there in the boardroom; his secretary was encouraged to buzz through practically anyone under certain circumstances as he could use the distraction to his advantage, but among the workforce it made him a god.
Sunday was the Lord’s Day, and the colonies tended to be more religious than the developed worlds; frontier life was dangerous and it wasn’t so long ago death had been difficult to ignore so the Lord’s Day was never worked, but Barwing gave his employees Saturday off as well and the weekend was born. Other industrialists cried foul, and even tried to make the five day week illegal as workers would abandon their duties after two whole days of licentious bawdry. Running to the authorities was a surprise move as, generally speaking, mine owners dislike governments and with good reason. Political risk is endemic in their game; if you own a factory you can always move it somewhere more favourable, but a mine is captive. You can and will be held ransom by every level of officialdom, and good luck getting any sympathy from the public. A court appearance at the time shows a middle aged Barwing, lined but not yet grey, looking faintly amused as he explains his staffing arrangements.
“Well to start with most of ‘em wanted Sunday off but there were more arriving who wanted Saturday instead, so I was running the place at half capacity all weekend and working seven days, God forgive me.
Now I love this company; I watched my dad build it up from a hole in the ground but even I’ve had a bellyful by Friday and I’d imagine most of my workers have as well. I know mining’s how we make our money, but it’s not the be all and end all; if it is then I think we should look into that.”
In practice the weekend was something of a mixed blessing; over time it became a focus, almost fetishised by the townspeople, which would have been fine but Auguste noticed a corresponding tendency to merely exist through the week. They hung such hope on two days off it couldn’t fail to disappoint, and then it was back to the grindstone on Monday. Barwing established the Tivoli Cinema, the first in the colonies, and made Wednesdays and Thursdays half price to get them all out and about midweek. The Saturday and Sunday morning kids’ shows were free
, so you didn’t even have to wake your parents, which conferred a gentler start to the day. By and large New Sunlight mellowed out, and it fair gave Auguste the creeps; he had such power over his people in so many ways, and beyond a God he prayed was there had nobody to answer to. If there was a central theme to the gruesome novels he wrote in his spare time, it was constant self-analysis; never lose sight of the possibility you may turn out to be the monster in some macabre plot twist. Even in his popular children’s books, the superficial everyhero Count Scion had a dark side and a past. These were obliquely alluded to in intricate literary puzzles; any child mentioning them in fan mail was earmarked as a shoo-in for fast track promotion come the day, if they didn’t get a better offer first.
Weekend morning cinema was free for a reason; evenings and matinees showed the latest films only a month or so after Earth, but the children’s presentations featured old public domain black and white U.S. movies. These were Barwing’s favourites, especially the completely unsuitable ones with gangsters, Nazis and private detectives; few New Sunlighters escaped childhood without a shared cultural heritage of wise guys, punks and hard bitten dames. These giants of cinematic history were preceded by a fifteen minute Count Scion serial, adapted for the silver screen some years previously. Occasionally an usher in a theatrical baddie costume would stalk the stage, twirling his moustaches and boo-ing loudly as the credits read ‘screenplay by A.A. Barwing’; this quickly became a cue for the children to cheer and throw things. Watching from the projectionists’ booth it was never entirely clear to Auguste whether they were cheering for himself or the villain, but more than once the man in the costume was Barwing, so he considered those occasions, at least, a draw.
His late father had been a self made man who couldn’t abide freeloaders; Auguste applied for a job like everyone else, and by luck was the only hopeful to wear a tie to the interview.[****] He started on the maintenance crew and if he hadn’t shown every ounce of his dads’ nous and dedication he’d be there still, but by the age of seventeen he was foreman and at twenty-five managing the entire mine. At his fathers’ deathbed he bought the company for one silver Britannia fair and square; they shook hands on the deal and Barwing senior died a happy man.
On his rise through the ranks, Auguste learned the disturbing but valuable secret very few rich people ever learn about poor people; there are far, far more of them than you could possibly imagine. He took care of the workers and their families, because when the revolution comes it’s best to have the masses on side; Auguste was nothing if not pragmatic. He reinvested profits during the good times, and eschewed the trappings of wealth for long evenings alone developing his chilling tales of the uncanny. When he died he left the mine to his country and his considerable literary royalties to the Association of Outer Mineworkers. He hoped this would stop other ruthless bastards getting their hands on his dad’s legacy, and if by chance they did there would be a well funded trade union to reckon with. His mortal remains now lie entombed beneath a mile of rubble at the very bottom of Shaft Number Nine.
The nationalised BMC still followed Barwing’s ethic and were considered one of the Alpha system’s ten best companies to work for, but there are limits to philanthropy and Miles discovered them. He wasn’t made homeless as such, but a hostel amounts to the same thing as you’re better off under a railway arch. He’d called Anna, less frequently as time passed, letting her know he was still playing, still writing; she’d started mentioning this Dolan fella and he didn’t want to hear how that story progressed. He lost contact with the band and tele’d around playing in the streets; he’d always suffered from telesickness, an affliction shared by around fifteen percent of the population, but felt so rough these days it hardly made a ripple anymore. Despite huge infrastructure costs, the teleport service was free as the information it generated had enormous commercial value. Usage was recorded in a Byzantine public ledger, and if nothing else it stopped the police asking you where you were on May the twenty fourth; they already knew where you were but critically, so did everyone else and nobody could claim otherwise. In less enlightened times such technologies would be used against the population, but this was the dawning of a period which later came to be known as the New Reform.
Miles, meanwhile, did ten days for vagrancy and was glad of the bed and board, because guitar strings trumped food; without strings there was no hope of anything. Ten days in the local nick was the standard stretch for grade three crimes; it was cheap, a fairly strong deterrent to anyone with an actual life and it gave the rozzers time to find out what else you’d been doing wrong. Grade two sentences of appropriate durations are served in traditional prisons, although some are more secure than others; 17952 Folsom, for example, is built on an asteroid which orbits the sun. To even be in a position to commit a grade one crime you need to hold a position of considerable power in the armed forces, and they have their own prisons.
Out on the streets people would ask Miles for requests, they were invariably old familiar tunes but often he’d be so dazed with hunger he’d not recognise the title, kicking himself when memory returned and bitterly regretting the loss of the few coins the song would have generated. The company provided limited out of work benefits and Miles strung these out, turning up at the office every few months or so for a payout designed to keep him going for a fortnight.
“Have you done any work in the last…” the clerk silently mouthed calculations as he furrowed his brow at the desktop interface “… since March?”
“Why? Are you hiring?”
“Your availability to take paid work was the next question, so thank you, but if we could just circle back.” Sometimes he’d get food only to find he couldn’t force it past his lips, tears of frustration and hopelessness wetting his face as he fed the birds. Starving to death can take a surprisingly long time in relatively affluent societies, as long as you’re not fussy what you eat from.
One night he awoke to the sound of gunfire in a crowded dancehall, which turned out to be fireworks and it was eleven o’clock on New Years Eve. A sudden resolve seized him; now was the time to sort it all out and rejoin the human race, he was dying and for the life of him couldn’t recollect why. He checked his pockets; there was just enough for something very cheap and non-alcoholic so he brushed himself down as best he could and headed for the Solway.
Christ but the lights were bright; he squinted his way to the bar and waited for service. The mirror showed a man he did not recognise, and searching the panoramic reflection he could not see in all those people one single familiar face. He’d lived long in the darkness, and had not lately seen himself this well lit; his was a grey and shadowy presence, a film of road grime covered his skin, clothes and the battered unwieldy guitar slung across his back. The time was twenty to twelve and he knew come midnight he would be standing alone in a still silent bubble as total strangers embraced friends, relatives and lovers all around him. He replaced his drink upon the bar untasted and left. He was just eighteen years old, but knew the end was coming when his sister paid him a call.
“Hold on, baby boy! You will definitely meet a tall dark stranger, I personally guarantee it. Do not turn from him; he is quite honestly your only hope right now.”
“Are you really here?”
“You mean like a ghost? Nah, I’m just a figment of your imagination.”
“But…” he could feel the tears welling up “…how can you tell me things I don’t know if you’re not real?” he thought she had come to take him home; he didn’t know how he could bear the disappointment. She leant forward and tapped his brow lightly with a knuckle. A memory floods Miles’ brain; his sister reading aloud from schoolbooks, his young mind struggling to absorb the paradigm shift she described. Block Time; it was Einstein’s beautiful promise of a fourth dimension where nothing is ever truly lost. Everything is merely put in a place where no thief comes near or moth destroys, and if you ever have or ever will be loved, you are loved, eternally.
Miles comes to slumpe
d outside the gates of the spaceport bus park with his guitar in his hands, a will play for food placard leans against the railings. As he resumes work on a tune based on the fiddly bit from Armageddon Jazz, he is accosted by a man so big Miles takes him for a Nef until he looks properly; an Infantry kitbag is slung across his back and until he spoke Miles had no idea he was there, or for how long he had been listening.
“You don’t play too bad for a bum; you need a job?” Miles was more or less waiting on deaths embrace, and had no time for this guy’s voice; it sounded like authority.
“Oh fuck no; this is how I supplement my trust fund.” He’s violently yanked to his feet and the stranger is screaming in his face.
“I’m offering you work, asshole! You can either stand up and live like a man or float off down the gutter; I don’t care which but you should know there’s no safety net, never has been, and you are gonna keep on falling no matter how pretty you play!” He releases his grip and Miles collapses onto his guitar, shattering the instrument; this only serves to increase the big mans’ annoyance.
“Aw shit! Am I gonna have to replace that piece of crap as well as feed your skinny ass? Come on!” Later in a café as Miles picks at his first solid food in forever, the man currently known to him as Mr. Shugga is laying down the law.
The Only War Page 8