by Al Robertson
Chapter 21
Jack left the tunnel by a service door, successfully avoiding any InSec involvement, and made his way back to Harry and Andrea’s house. When Andrea opened the door she was ten years younger. ‘Hello,’ she said, smiling politely. ‘You must be Jack.’
‘Andrea?’
‘Yes. Come in, Harry’s told me a lot about you. It’s good to meet you.’
She was dressed in dead fashions. Harry must have rolled her back. She was now too young to have met him. For the first time, Jack felt the true loss of her. It hit him like a punch. He staggered.
‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘It’s been a tough day, I bet!’
‘No. I’m fine. Tired. I can come in?’
‘Harry’s waiting for you.’ She led him towards the sitting room. ‘Kitchen’s in there for a cup of something,’ she said brightly.
Jack could barely nod. It was as if the past had been reformatted. Every smile of hers – so bright, so friendly, so clearly impersonal – tore at his heart. But he couldn’t let Harry see his pain.
Harry asked about Nihal. When Jack told him what had happened, he made no effort to hide his irritation. ‘You should have that little bastard under control by now. I told you, my case, my rules.’ Jack forced Fist to manifest but he said nothing, turning his head away from both of them. Jack asked why Nihal was so scared when he mentioned Harry. ‘He wasn’t scared of me. He was scared of you two.’ The answer felt like an evasion, but Jack didn’t want to push it. This time, Harry’s anger had a cold, quiet heat to it that scared him. There was a silence. Jack decided to change the subject. It was impossible not to ask about Andrea.
‘Shouldn’t you just let her run?’
Harry exploded.
‘Who the fuck are you to tell me how to run my relationships? Why are you even asking?’
Jack wanted to threaten Harry, to force him to restore her and not touch her again. But that would make the depth of his feelings clear. He wasn’t sure what the repercussions of that would be, or if he was ready to deal with them constructively.
‘You just fucked up big time,’ continued Harry, ‘you and that idiot puppet. Fuck knows why anyone’s scared of him. You should let me mesh with him now, I’d sort the little shit out. And I’d be much better at using what he’s got to get what we need.’
[ He’s not getting anywhere near me. I’ll eat your brain before I let that happen.]
‘That’s impossible, Harry. The cage.’
‘The cage, the cage. One more thing that stops you doing what needs to be done, and once again it isn’t your fucking fault. You’re a fart in a fucking hurricane, you are.’
In the end, Harry let himself flicker out of existence with a curt farewell. He was – he said – going to use ‘his sources’ to try and find out about the assassin, but hadn’t been optimistic. ‘That was our one chance to get to Yamata. It’s back to square one, buddy.’ Andrea had shown Jack out. He’d barely been able to look at her. He wondered how she’d recover her older self; how she experienced the sudden loss of so much rich living. As he walked away, he heard her start to sing someone else’s song. At that age, she hadn’t yet written any of her own. There was nothing but potential in her voice.
Back at the hotel, he tried to call Corazon. She didn’t answer. He left a message asking her to contact him urgently. He waited for a day, but there was nothing. Thoughts of Andrea tore at him like panthers. It was impossible to distinguish the sense of loss he felt for the woman he’d known so long ago on Station from that he felt for the fetch he’d been so close to while imprisoned on Callisto. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, he made his way to the spot where the body of Bjorn Penderville had been found. It was a kind of masochistic pilgrimage, a means of securing at least part of the past and confirming that it too could not just be deleted.
The murder scene was an empty dock on one of the jetties that floated in space above the open maw of Docklands. Jack let himself hang in the void, floating just past the wharf’s airlock door. The sound of his breath whispered in his ears. He remembered his parents taking him to play in similar docks as a child, carefully introducing him to vacuum suit usage and the hazards of space. Now he wore an adult suit. It allowed no touch or smell. There was only vision to show him the universe. Off to his left he could see bustle – a newly arrived chainship was being disassembled. The wharf to his right was quiet. A command module hung against it like a disembodied head, waiting for a new body to be fitted. Snowflakes hung beyond Station’s shadow. The sun set them ablaze, diagrams sketched on vacuum with an elegant precision far beyond anything that the Pantheon could hope to achieve.
Jack imagined the cathedral beauty of their internal structures. Their physical complexity paled before the technological artistry that each one embodied. He wondered if they were much discussed in the Station. Without access to the weave he couldn’t take part in the discussion. But then, he’d seen precious little interest in the world beyond Station from any of its inhabitants. Perhaps the snowflakes merited little more than the odd, baffled mention, before the conversation returned to introversion.
Beyond the snowflakes, there was nothing. Jack thought of Andrea, then – to distract himself – he remembered the crime scene footage. Penderville had been floating a few metres away from the wharf’s airlock, tethered to it by a length of white rope. The Spine Traffic Controller’s murderer had used a diamond knife to open a tear in the back of his vacuum suit. The sudden decompression had broken him.
InSec technicians had secured the scene, while Harry had accessed local security records, checking to see who had moved through the area. The wharf to the left was not in use. Aud Yamata had been working on the wharf to the right a few hours before. Apart from that there was nothing. A post-mortem confirmed that Penderville’s death was relatively recent, taking place just over an hour after Yamata had finished up and left. There was no record of anybody else in the area. The wharf’s camera nest was no help. It had been struck by a micro-meteorite two days before. Official eyes were blind.
A small choking sound pulled Jack out of his reverie. Looking over at Fist, Jack saw that the puppet’s shoulders were shaking. He was crying. Jack was still too angry with him to feel concern, but he was curious. It was very rare for Fist to show such vulnerability. His programming was meant to ensure that aggression was his response to any threatening situation. Grief only kicked in when all other avenues were exhausted. Jack wondered what had so frustrated him. Fist was whispering to himself, muttering the same phrase over and over again. ‘Stookie Bill, Stookie Bill, keep me safe, Stookie Bill.’
Jack tuned him out and focused on his own problems. He’d always found the silence of space conducive to deep thought. He sank back into himself, letting the swash and backwash of his own breathing soothe him. He was going to run over recent events, looking for any clues he might have missed – handholds and footholds that could help him move forward. But before he could fully drift away, he realised that something unusual was happening. Slowly but surely, without any fuss, the cold and silent world around him was starting to change.
The transformation began with the stars. They were mellowing to something a little yellower, a little creamier. As each one’s colour changed so did its shape, moving from being an empty dot to become a small rip and then a tear in the darkness that surrounded them. As the tears opened up the darkness fell away, no longer an eternal, unreachable absence but rather a shredded backdrop. Fist stopped sobbing. ‘Can you see this too?’ he asked. His wooden jaw hung down in amazement as the great change leapt down from the stars to infect the interior of Station.
There’s no sound in a vacuum. But Jack and Fist both heard a vast, glacial creaking as the circular world of Docklands, stippled across with the streets of a dozen districts, the leaping movement of trains, the firefly darting of flyers and the harsh glow of late afternoon spinelight, began to remake itself. Its round mouth stretched out to form an oval. Yellow-white spinelights became kilo
metres-long shards of primary colour. Tracery grew between them, infected with the ivory white that had replaced space – for the stars had now merged completely with each other, making the cosmos finite. The universe now ended in great walls that stretched away to the left and the right, above and below, swirling with the bright patterns that had once been the lights of Docklands.
Now it was the turn of the piers and wharves of the Spine to change. They flowed into place along the new walls, becoming a series of vertical columns. As they settled into their new shapes, they lost their metallic sheen – a last memory of what they had been. Between them, shining gouts of primary colours ran together, stretching up and down to mirrored arched points. At last, these new stained glass windows found their final shape, and the universe stopped changing.
Jack was standing in the nave of a cathedral, an open space carved from soft limestone that stretched before and behind him, to his left and to his right. He looked up. There was a great open tower above him. Looking down, he saw himself looking curiously back up. He was no longer wearing a vacuum suit. Two Fists hovered nearby, one right side up above him, one upside down beneath him.
Jack took a step. Ripples rolled out from his feet, shuddering through the perfect, liquid mirror that was the whole floor of the cathedral. They died down as Jack looked down past the two small human bodies, down into the great gulf of cathedral space beneath him, down at pilasters running down walls, down at great illuminated windows, emblazoned with great luminous images of men and women and gods; down for a hundred kilometres towards fan vaulting that could span moons. He shuddered with vertigo.
‘Pantheon,’ breathed Fist.
‘Oh yes,’ said Jack, awed.
Only one part of the world remained unchanged. Snowflakes gleamed in the cathedral space like stars, each duplicated in its liquid mercury floor. A moment of surprise, as Jack realised that they must be interfacing with this great Pantheon illusion. They were either strong enough to break through the image that had been thrown over the world, or somehow complicit in its creation. Then anything but an astonished awe left him as a thousand voices leapt into being and an invisible choir started to sing.
There was a soft, high keening drifting over a deeper bass rumble, the two alternately twining around then leaping away from each other. Deep beneath them an organ droned, its long, slow chords lending weight to the sadness emerging from their great pulses of harmony. The reflection below Jack shimmered in time with the music, until the voices fell silent and the mirror-floor stilled. Then one vast chord came crashing in as the organ and all the voices howled in unison, filling the nave and its reflection with a great, tectonic grief. All that had gone before had only been an introduction. The full choir was an infinity of voices, beating at the air with note after note as the organ raged on beneath them.
A figure glowed into being high up in the distance, hanging before the single great round window that burnt at the heart of the cathedral’s apse. ‘She must be kilometres high,’ thought Jack. White fabrics drifted around her. Her face was covered. She carried a pale, dead weight in her arms. Limbs hung down from it. There was a head, tipped all the way back. The woman and her burden started moving towards Jack, falling into human scale as they came. The music subsided into one endlessly sustained note. Cries of grief cut through it, hacking away at its simple purity like so many blunted knives.
‘What does this mean?’ whispered Fist.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
The woman reached Jack. As she came to a halt her robes began to fold themselves away, wings that were no longer needed. She drifted down, delicate feet extended. When she landed she staggered slightly and Jack understood how heavy her burden was. She walked the last few paces, rippling circles spinning away from her feet, until she stood before him. The last of the white fabric rippled away, revealing her face. It was East. Her eyes were rimmed with red. Tears had pulled makeup down her cheeks in long black tracks.
‘You involved her,’ she spat, her voice harsh with grief and rage. ‘It’s because of you.’
For the first time, Jack looked down at the body. Out of uniform, it took him a second to recognise it. He wanted to be mistaken. Fist hovered in closer and peered at the corpse. When he spoke, it was the first time in days that he’d sounded cheerful.
‘Well, Jackie boy, you’ve missed your chance with her for good.’
A bullet had punched a small neat hole in the corpse’s forehead.
There could be no doubt that Corazon was dead.
Chapter 22
East called a rectangular stone block into being and gently laid Corazon’s corpse on to it. Reaching up, she softened their surroundings, making it seem that sheets of gauze hung between the little group and the cathedral’s great empty spaces. There was a sudden sense of intimacy.
‘Where is she?’ asked Jack.
‘InSec broke into her apartment a few minutes ago. She hadn’t turned up for her shift.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘One of my favourites. I didn’t even know.’
‘I’m sure she had faith you’d come for her.’
‘No. You don’t understand. She was one of the ones I loved, one of the ones I was taking most care of. I watch them all the time. I am always present to them. I thought she was in bed, asleep. Then the image of her in my mind flickered, and there she was, dead. I reached out and touched her. Her body was already cold. They’d hidden her from me for hours.’
‘We already knew there was Pantheon involvement …’
‘But I see everything, as soon as it happens, and I know every secret! I am the eye in every room, the ear that always hears, the mind that always knows. My newsrooms, my weavecasts, my telenovelas and keitai shousetsou and bandes dessinées and shadowplays – what are they if I can’t know that I’m watching the world, and reflecting it? How can something so important be hidden from me? What else haven’t I seen, Jack?’
A small hand grabbed his shirt. A tear grew from her eye like a tiny, transparent leaf, then dropped away down her cheek. Another joined it, then more, and she was weeping. Jack was unsure how to respond appropriately, how to comfort a god. She pulled herself in closer, both hands clutching him. Very tentatively, he moved one arm round her, then the other. Over her shoulder, Fist winked and leered. Jack closed his eyes, ignoring him.
The goddess’ hair smelt of static. Jack felt a gentle buzz as it brushed up against him. He was standing in an awkwardly formal way. She nestled in further, burying her head in his chest. Tears moistened the front of his shirt. Her body pressed against his with the softness of cinema seats. She was sobbing, and she shook with every sob. Every quiver of her body rippled against Jack. He struggled to quell a growing arousal. But then she was looking up at him, alluring as a midnight advert, and her hand was reaching down, and he was stiffening at her touch.
‘I can’t …’ he said, ‘Grey …’ but his breathing quickened as he said it.
‘He’s an old man,’ she replied, ‘fallen from grace.’ She kissed him once. Her lips snatched at his. ‘And he let you fall too.’ Her hot mouth touched his again, her tongue opening his lips, and then she was inside him. All that was divine in her took him and made him a vessel, pouring itself into him again and again and again.
Jack would never remember much of their love making. Later, he’d think back to the young man he’d seen her take in Ushi’s, after Andrea sang. The acolyte’s face had been rising towards a kind of blank perfection – a television screen, ecstatically detuning itself, finding release in the empty space that lies between channels. Jack assumed that he’d been lost in that same erasing joy.
All Fist would say was, ‘You looked as happy as a pig in shit.’
Towards the end, East let Jack find enough of himself to know that she was whispering in his ear.
‘I am remaking you, little Puppeteer,’ she breathed. ‘I’m slipping the chains from your little creature and sending you both out to be my revenge.’
‘Because of you, my Corazon is dead.’
Then she nibbled at his ear. His mouth had to sigh open and his back had to arch and press him so much deeper into her. As he entered further into her, so she dug deeper into him.
‘I’m going to make you a weapon again.’
Now she was far enough in to reach Fist. As Jack exploded into orgasm, the last of his defences dropped away and she had full access to them both. The world shattered. For a second that drifted forever he was not himself. In the distance, he heard Fist screaming, but he was too fragmented to care.
When he came round, he was lying on a stone altar next to the one supporting Corazon. East stood over him, perfectly dressed, her clothes, hair and makeup immaculate. No sign of their lovemaking remained. She was holding Fist by the scruff of his neck, her free hand clamped over his mouth. His eyes were wide with terror. His legs and arms thrashed around as he tried to free himself.
‘I’ve removed all the blocks they put on him. Be careful how you use him – they won’t know I’ve done this. I’ve made some changes to you, too.’
‘Why are you holding him like that?’
‘I saw that you’d been having problems with him. I’m going to burn him out for you.’
‘What?’ Jack felt groggily detached from himself. His mind ached. He wondered how much celestial weaveware East had forced into him. Resentment surged in him.
‘I’m going to wipe his personality structures,’ she continued. ‘He’s just going to be software. No more Fist. No more rebellion.’ Fist tried to howl. It came out as a muffled series of grunts. ‘Just say the word.’
‘Why haven’t you done it already?’
‘Fist’s leased in your name and licensed to you. I need your direct permission.’
Jack sighed. ‘Can you change the licence conditions? Stop him from taking my body?’