Crashing Heaven

by Al Robertson

  ‘What do you mean, I’ll burn them?’

  The voice tugged at Jack, dragging memory and emotion into his mind in a tangled, savage howl. It was just over five years since he’d heard it. It had aged yet it was unchanged.

  ‘You say that every time. And every time – oh shit!’

  There was more clattering, then a hissing. A gust of smoke billowed out of the window, wreathed in swearing. Jack wondered what his father had just burned. He’d never been a very good cook. In the months after the quiet, defeated message that announced his mother’s death, Jack had, when thinking about his father’s loss, most often imagined him facing the kitchen’s shelves and cupboards in baffled confusion. His wife had so mysteriously conjured delicious meals from them every single night. Now those same on- and offweave ingredients would be arranged illegibly before him, like words in a language he’d never known he’d need to learn. Of course, her fetch would soon be coming to help him – but the six-month wait as it was assembled from her dataself must still have been shattering.

  ‘Well, I’m sure they’ll taste all right. Most of them at any rate.’

  There had been a conversation or two, made little more than stuttering by the time-lag as words leapt from one end of the Solar System to the other. Then Jack surrendered himself to the Totality. He received one last message from his father: ‘When your mother comes back, I’ll be telling her that you’re dead. It’s for the best.’ There was such grief in his voice. After that there was only silence, roaring so very loudly between them.

  ‘I’ll just scrape the burnt bits off.’

  Now the dead woman was guiding her husband round the kitchen. Five years was a long time to remain a bad cook. Jack wondered at his father’s continuing ineptness. Perhaps his refusal to learn from his wife’s fetch was some kind of memorial to her living self, a determination not to let their relationship change despite the fact of her passing.

  There was a distant squalling in Jack’s mind. It could have been cackling, could have been a series of grunts. Fist was pushing hard to escape back into the centre of his thought. Jack let a few more barriers grow up – far more than he normally would. He’d pay for it later with a painful mental weariness. But he was determined to speak to his father alone and uninterrupted. He stepped through the gate, into the little garden, and walked down the path – metal plates clanging beneath his feet – to knock on the door.

  ‘No, I don’t know who it is, love.’

  First there were two hands on the sill, then a face appeared at the kitchen window.

  ‘Oh!’ – followed by an immediate, instinctive glance back into the kitchen. Jack started towards his father, but he looked panicked and made a pushing back motion with his hands. Then he mouthed ‘NO’ and vanished.

  ‘Sweetheart, I’ve got to send you back down to the drives. I’d forgotten that Daisuke was coming by, you know how he feels about fetches … yes, I am sorry, it’s so abrupt … yes, I know what I promised, we’ll talk about it later … goodbye love.’

  Silence.

  Jack went over to the kitchen window. His father was standing with his back to him, a tea towel hanging from one arm. The worktops were a jumble of unwashed bowls and plates. There was a frying pan in the sink. Some black things were smoking gently on a plate.

  ‘Hello, Dad,’ said Jack softly.

  ‘She’s gone now,’ his father replied, turning round. ‘There’ll be hell to pay. She hates being sent away.’

  ‘Dad—’

  ‘Of course I couldn’t let her see you.’ One hand was nervously tightening the tea towel around the fingers of the other. Exposed flesh bulged and whitened. ‘You really shouldn’t have come back. You know what I told her. I’d got used to it, too.’

  ‘I want to talk to you, Dad. I’m not going away until I do.’

  ‘The neighbours might see you.’ A look of pained indecision drifted across his face. ‘She doesn’t really talk to them, but you never know.’

  Jack said nothing.

  ‘You always were stubborn, weren’t you?’

  There were pale spaces on the hall wall where Jack’s certificates had once hung. There used to be pictures of him, too; mostly as a schoolchild, taken before he reached the age of thirteen and left home. There had been one of him on the moon, at once thrilled and terrified to be off-Station; another of him and his mother, proud together in their Sandal wear. It had been taken when she was still working on the docks of the Spine. He’d been in the Sandal scouts, learning the ways of her patron. That had been just before the first great grief of her life, when Jack’s mathematical talents had been recognised and he’d been taken away from both her and Sandal. Grey offered himself as Jack’s patron and requested his transfer to a residential school in Homelands, where he could learn the mysteries of commercial accountancy and corporate strategy.

  Jack remembered the messages that she sent him during those first few weeks of being away. The school discouraged direct contact so she mailed recordings. She determinedly told him how excited she was at his new life, at the prospects that were opening up for him. Grey had called him to higher service than Sandal ever could, she said, again and again. Jack found the apparent cheerfulness with which she accepted his absence from home profoundly hurtful. As an adult, he came to understand that to have admitted how much she was missing him would have breached the wall of support she’d so determinedly built. The tearing loss she felt would have broken out uncontrollably. As a child, no such insight was available to comfort him.

  In the messages, his father always stood next to her, with one hand on her shoulder. Every so often he would stutter out a few platitudes, but mostly he said nothing. Now he was silent again as he made two cups of tea. He stirred the liquid carefully until the cube dissolved in the hot water, releasing tiny clouds of scent. Then there was the milk, carefully crumbled in so no sticky lumps remained.

  ‘Come into the back,’ he said, handing Jack his mug. ‘Just in case someone looks in.’

  The dining room looked out over the garden. Sigil-encrusted plastic flowers nodded in the breeze. Jack sat down on one side of the table, his father on the other.

  ‘So, Jack,’ his father said warily. ‘You’re back.’

  ‘Yes, now the war’s over. For a little while.’

  ‘Until?’

  ‘Until the end.’

  ‘Is – the puppet – here now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. What I’ve got to say – well, it’s just for you.’

  ‘Dad, I want to spend time with you. I want to pay my respects to Mum’s fetch. There’s not much else that’s left to me.’

  ‘No friends to see?’ Jack looked at the floor. There was a moment’s silence. ‘You mentioned an Andrea, once or twice. How about her?’

  As much as possible, he’d kept the affair secret from his parents. But he couldn’t help letting her name slip out from time to time. They knew him well enough to see how much he cared about her.

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’ve seen her fetch.’

  ‘I hope that’s going well. It can be very comforting.’ A child laughed emptily, somewhere down the street. ‘What you did, Jack … I can’t let your mother see you. I can’t let you be around here, in case she finds out about you.’

  ‘Dad …’

  His father looked up. Jack could see him forcing the steel into himself. ‘It would have broken her heart, to know that you’d just given in like that. It was so bad for her when the rock hit the moon. She was so angry with the Totality for fooling Sandal.’

  ‘That has nothing to do with it, Dad.’

  ‘She could never understand why you weren’t happy to be out there, fighting those bastards. Why you wouldn’t just accept Grey’s will. And then if she found out that you’d just stepped away from the fight – from everything she cared about …’

  ‘Dad, you’re talking about her like the fetch is Mum. It’s not her. It’s a memory of her.
It’s the best memory of her we’ll ever have. But it’s not Mum, Dad.’

  As he spoke, Jack thought of how moved he’d been to meet Andrea’s fetch. He wondered how much he still believed what he was saying. Then his father replied.

  ‘Don’t you think I don’t know that? I met that woman thirty-two years ago. We married thirty years ago and then we began and we ended almost every single day together until she passed over.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad, I—’

  ‘And I wake up, and I call to her, or I’m onweave watching East, and we’re talking about it, or I’m in the kitchen like just now – and there she is – and I know it’s not her. I know, Jack. But it is some of the best parts of her. So I treat her right, I let her run freely, I don’t keep on rolling her back to whatever age I feel like. I look after her, just like I’ve always done. And I will not see her heart broken by you, coming back after you’ve walked away from the most important fight of your life and of her life.’

  ‘That’s just one way of seeing it. Look, Dad …’

  ‘And even if you did see her, what then? In two, three months the puppet takes your body. So her son would come back and then he’d die to her again. And you’re going to be really dead, aren’t you?’

  ‘Fist will have full usage rights for key consciousness assets, yes. He owns my experiences, my memories – everything they’d copy to the Coffin Drives and build my fetch from. None of that will happen. So yes. I’m going to die.’

  ‘And she has to experience that? Having mourned you once? She was so sad, Jack, and when I watched her grieve – a little virtual thing, but so sad. That was when I fell in love with her again. She’s not your mother, but she loves you like your mother did. She’s lost you once, but she lost a hero; now she’d lose you twice, and she’d lose—’

  ‘Say it, Dad.’

  ‘A coward? I’d never call you that. I know you too well. I’m sure you had your reasons for the choices you made, but you made them and you didn’t think of your duty to us or to the Pantheon. You let me down, you let your mother down and you let the gods down too. I’m sorry, son. But it’s too late now. You made your choice.’

  ‘But the Pantheon are corrupt. One of them was running sweat through the Panther Czar. And they’ve killed to cover it up.’

  ‘Oh, we had that argument. That’s why they sent you off to the war, isn’t it? Nothing to do with what a good mind you have, with making sacrifices to help protect us all. I know all about your conspiracy theories. But even if you’re right, look at the good the Pantheon have done. They see so much further than we do. We need them.’

  ‘No, we don’t. I’ve seen how different it can be under the Totality. How much more freedom people have. Gods, Dad, they can actually own things, they don’t just license everything. The Totality are the future, Dad.’

  ‘Bullshit. The Totality dropped a fucking rock on all those kids. And look what they did to Sandal. That attack broke him. And Kingdom too – he tries not to show it, but he’s a shadow of what he was. They’ve seized every single asset he held from Mars to the Moon. Soon they’ll come after everything else he owns, and run it all into the ground too.’

  ‘That’s just propaganda. The Totality said they weren’t responsible for the Rock, and I believe them. And Kingdom’s security and industrial activities, Sandal’s transport infrastructure, the Twins’ calorie and pharmaceutical factories, the Rose’s military presence – the Totality didn’t seize them, they liberated them. They made them more efficient and less restrictive.’

  ‘And that’s bullshit too. We need the structure the Pantheon give us. Just look at the Earth – what’s left of it – and remember all the mistakes we made before we had them to manage us. And you should see what’s happened at Grey’s old headquarters, it’s nothing to do with liberation. But I don’t want to get into this again. I’ve asked you into my house, and I’ve explained myself to you. That’s all I owe you.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.’

  ‘You’re not sorry, you haven’t even thought about it. I had your mother’s fetch to comfort me when I lost her, but there’s nothing like that for me with you. There won’t ever be.’

  ‘I did what was right, Dad.’

  ‘And I told you I don’t believe you. Get out, please.’

  ‘Dad …’

  ‘You’ve come here and upset me, and I can’t even tell your mother. Just go.’

  The hallway was silent. Jack stood there for a moment, remembering. In the kitchen his father started to cry. It was a very lonely sound. Jack shut the front door quietly, as if leaving a house of mourning. The spinelights shone their blank light down on him. There would be no reconciliation. Now that that had been made clear, Jack felt the past change around him. As he walked down the empty street, his memories of it as the safe, comfortable core of his childhood were replaced by a hard and meaningless void. He wished for a moment that his heart was as securely numb as the silent numbers that lay at the heart of Fist’s vicious, empty soul.

  Chapter 16

  Jack walked without purpose, lost in his own mind. Raggedly dressed people bustled past him, secure in their small worlds. The buildings around him had an unfinished feel to them too. Machines worked on many of them, reordering the world. It was like exploring a robot’s dream of birth. The spinelights above him dimmed, signalling early evening. After a while, there was a small square. It was edged with buildings that spiked up like broken circuit boards, and bisected by an iron viaduct with a station hanging from it. A train rattled to a stop, sounding like a child shaking a stone in a tin. Its carriages were painted green. This was the Loop line. It ran in a circle all the way round the great cylinder of Docklands.

  As a child, Jack had loved to buy a ticket and sit on a Loop train all day long, counting up the miles as it rolled again and again round Docklands; the longest wheeled journey that any human, anywhere in the system, could ever make. The wind tugged at his coat, pulling him back into the present. Exhaustion hit him. He turned towards the station. A train would be warm and dry, and he might even be able sleep for a while.

  There was a cracking in his mind.

  [Oo, it’s nice to be out of there,] said Fist. [Meeting with your folks went well? No? Not much of a surprise.] Jack was too tired to respond. [ Hey, there’s a message from that squishy! At least someone still wants you around. Want some Totality love?]

  Jack shook his head. Once he was on the train, he sat down with his back to the Wart. Looking forwards, he could see out of the carriage and over the low rooftops of Docklands. Beyond them, there were Sandal’s great wharves. They bustled with tiny dots – dockworkers filleted chainships, detaching cargo containers and letting them hang in space. Further out there were three snowflakes, their stillness an exquisite contrast to the Spine’s hubbub. Two hung in the shadow of Station. The third had been caught by the sun. It blazed with golden intricacy, the complex patterns of its dense architecture made a thousand dazzling mirrors. Jack remembered combat. He imagined moving in awe towards its physical self, then losing himself in the great engines of its mind.

  A passenger knocked him and shook him out of his reverie. The spinelights were now almost fully dimmed. Docklands was falling back into night, its most honest state. A void site rattled past, a dead stain on the city. Up and down the carriage, soft yellow lights snapped on. The window opposite Jack became a mirror, showing him a man at once exhausted and far from the peace that exhaustion normally brings.

  [ You need a shave, Jackie boy. When I’m in charge, I’ll make sure you’re always presentable.]

  Jack thought of Fist’s glossy wooden chin and grimaced. The carriage filled with commuters. More and more shuffled on at every stop. Clothes splashed across with sigils barged against Jack. They were so poorly made. Roughly cut edges were fraying, coarse stitching was coming loose and buttons were missing. Nothing fit anyone well. All of this would be invisible if Jack were onweave. The sigils would call brilliant deceptions from distant servers.
He imagined a riot of fashionable colours and thought of the third snowflake, vivid in the sun. He wondered how many of the people on the train were letting themselves perceive those great, cold visitors, and of those how many understood them to be beautiful. Probably none.

  The mass of commuters warmed the carriage. Jack could see no real reason to dismount. He dozed lightly.

  [ You’ll have to get off to pee, at least,] said Fist, [unless you’ve really lost it.]

  The commuters left. The train danced in an endless circle. Jack dreamed of Kingdom. The god was congratulating him on being chosen as a puppeteer. He was full of his usual passion for humanity. ‘I built you all homes in space,’ he said urgently, his workman’s hands emphasising his words. ‘Now you must defend them.’ A transport security team woke Jack suddenly. They flashed his retina to prove his identity. The light was like a punch in the eye. Jack was asked about his destination. When he couldn’t answer, he was hustled off the train. He pushed back and one of the guards hit him. A studded glove reopened the cut in the side of his face. Body armour could never be virtual.

  [Don’t mess up your pretty cheek, Jack. The new management doesn’t like that at all.]

  Blank metal buildings rose up around him. Crowds bustled by. Sweatheads tugged at the crowd like repressed memories. Jack tried not to think of his parents, but the past had hooked him in its barbs. He craved oblivion. He didn’t want to go back to Ushi’s, and couldn’t face finding another bar cheap enough to serve him. Licensing restrictions stopped bottle shops from serving the unweaved. He had to be turned away from several before he gave up.

  [ There’s always the hotel,] whispered Fist. [ They’ll sell you something. Keep you inside for a bit too.]