Evensong

by Love, John

  “Jewish scum,” he whispered, hoping ridiculously that Levin might remember and hesitate, but there was no reply. Levin couldn’t speak anymore. Or, Anwar guessed, even form thoughts that might become speech. Everything was gone. A container was all that remained.

  Normal time for him and Levin, heightened time for everyone else, which meant they blurred and flickered. Anwar kept landing Verbs, and Levin kept not noticing, and Anwar kept getting parts of himself broken, and broken again before they’d had time to reset. He blanked out the physical pain, that was easy, but he couldn’t blank out the spiritual shock.

  “...And Levin’s face,” his memory replayed, “when he realised he couldn’t defend himself. There wasn’t enough left of him to...”

  Spiritual. Worse than physical obliteration, it was spiritual. They’d taken everything he was. His identity. His soul. And remade him as a thing. It would burn out and die soon through operating at such a heightened level, but that didn’t matter. Olivia would die sooner. And they could always steal another Consultant and make another thing. They seemed to be good at it.

  Another Verb. He was good at Verbs. Open hand to the throat, fingers locally hardened, perfectly executed. It didn’t work. Wasn’t noticed. More Verbs, and more, and each one brought damage to him without him doing any of his own. His right forearm was broken, and his left upper arm was still resetting, too slowly. He ignored both, and willed them to keep functioning, because for the first time in his life, he had someone to fight for.

  It didn’t matter what he felt for her, or didn’t feel, or whether any feelings were real or could have a future. Just to be fighting to protect someone, not to abduct someone or sabotage something, felt strange. And this time he was fighting a real opponent, one that out classed him, and he was fighting not to disable but to kill. That felt strange too. She did it all the time, faced real danger and bared her teeth at it, but he’d never had to.

  He looked back at her, but she was focused on Levin, and there was the strangest expression on her face. Almost of recognition, or understanding. She hadn’t moved from the table. Levin was now closer to her, and the only reason he hadn’t already reached her was that he’d paused to destroy Anwar piece by piece.

  More Verbs. He had nothing else to try. Nothing else was vulnerable. Levin didn’t seem to notice. But all those Verbs, more than he’d landed in his previous missions put together, and Gaetano’s throat shot, had to have some effect sometime.

  Then Levin executed a classically elegant move, the only one either of them had done. It was a mighty swivelling roundhouse kick—a Circumnavigator, Consultants rather preciously renamed it—which didn’t only break bones, but did something worse. It hit under Anwar’s heart and ruptured his major cardiac muscles. He went flying through the doors of the Signing Room and out onto the mezzanine. He could feel the start of cardiogenic shock, and again the sound of water rushing in his ears which he’d once read—where did I read that?—was the sound you heard when you started to die.

  Somehow he managed to get up. He stood shakily on the mezzanine, looking back through the pale wood double doors into the room where Levin was moving—slowly for him, a blur to everyone else—for Olivia.

  Gaetano and others were getting off shots. Levin didn’t notice. Whoever made him probably didn’t care about gunshots: they’d made Levin into a thing that had only one job to do and could then expire. When you had trillions, you could afford to make things and throw them away.

  “Shoot for the neck! Shoot for the throat!” Anwar shouted, but he was shouting out of heightened time to people still floundering in treacle time, and they didn’t hear. Relativity, not of light, but sound. Most of them missed, anyway. Levin was too fast.

  Olivia still stood at the table. Levin could have turned to her and finished her, but instead came out on to the mezzanine to finish Anwar. She was his prime target, but he had time and advantage, and to finish his secondary target would take only moments. Even at heightened time.

  Anwar willed his heart not to go into shock, not yet, because he’d decided to gamble. Whoever did this to Levin probably knew about Anwar by now, about his mediocre ratings and cautiousness. But that was then. Brighton had changed him. And I have someone to fight for.

  He was standing on the mezzanine, his back to the balcony, when Levin came for him.

  Anwar gambled: a tomoe nage. If he mistimed he’d die, but he was dying anyway.

  Levin hurtled towards him. Anwar took Levin’s neck in his hands, placed a foot in his stomach—so much of what he was using was broken and hadn’t reset properly—and rolled backwards. Not a classically-executed stomach throw, but not mistimed either, with Anwar holding onto Levin’s neck as Levin flew over him. Over the edge of the mezzanine, smashing the balcony railing.

  Anwar landed on his back with his hands still locked around Levin’s neck. He didn’t let go. Levin hung over the edge of the mezzanine, dangling by the neck from Anwar’s outstretched arms, with bits of smashed balcony crashing to the auditorium below. He kept trying to break Anwar’s forearms, or break Anwar’s hands and fingers, but they were already broken and Anwar wouldn’t let go. He felt the neck snap—there was a rightness about it, like when you were hammering a post into the ground and there was a moment when it settled—and he still wouldn’t let go. He felt Levin’s legs and arms and body dancing, like someone on the end of a noose.

  Even after the snap, Levin continued trying to smash Anwar’s forearms or break his fingers, then subsided. Anwar kept holding onto him. Levin’s feces and urine poured down into the auditorium, brown and yellow against white and silver. He’d been still for a long time, but Anwar held on to him for longer. Then he let go, and Levin dropped to the floor of the main auditorium below.

  Most of the cameras had been smashed and most of the broadcasters killed, but not all. It was still going out, live and worldwide.

  Anwar said, “Goodbye, old friend.”

  Heightened time ended with Anwar’s stomach throw. Everyone still alive saw Levin die in normal time, but only another Consultant could have seen the rest of it. To everyone else it was a few seconds’ blur. The rubble and dust from where Levin had burst out of the far wall was still settling, even after Levin died. Some of those he’d killed as he burst out and hurtled towards Olivia were still falling.

  This strange relativity was why Anwar felt like he’d been laying on his back, with his broken arms still lolling over the edge of the mezzanine, for whole minutes after Levin had gone. Then, as his senses powered down, he realised that people were no longer moving at the speed of continental drift but were actually moving quickly, in fact very quickly, to gather round him.

  Olivia was one of the first. She knelt down to say something to him, but then Gaetano ran up and embraced her. She pushed him away and pointed down at Levin’s body in the auditorium. Anwar heard her calmly telling Gaetano, “Go back and kill it. Make sure it’s dead. Shoot it, in the head.” Then he became unconscious.

  13

  Even before Anwar had finished killing Levin, Rafiq had dispatched a VSTOL to Brighton. Arden Bierce was in it, among others.

  At 11:00 a.m. on October 20 Anwar was taken to the hospital on the New West Pier. They put him in the room where, coincidentally, he’d questioned Taylor Hines a few days ago, and where Hines had died. The hospital was small, but very well-equipped and well-staffed; even more so, while the summit was on.

  He hadn’t regained consciousness. He was so quiet and still in the hospital bed that he might not have been there. Sometimes, coming and going in his room, they talked about him as if he wasn’t.

  “Why aren’t you doing anything?” Olivia demanded of the hospital’s Director.

  “UNEX asked us not to. They’re sending a medical team and they want to attend to him in private.”

  “But surely...”

  “Archbishop, they expressly asked us not to look at him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they don’t want anyone to kno
w what Consultants are like inside. And in view of what he did for you...”

  “Yes, yes, alright. But I’m not leaving this room.”

  “You can tell them.”

  “I’m telling you. Last time I looked, you were still Director of this hospital. ”

  She sat by Anwar’s bedside, her body language giving every indication that she was not to be moved or trifled with. He woke once, briefly, and sank back without seeming to see or recognise her.

  By 12:20 p.m., a VSTOL had landed on the pad at the end of the New West Pier. The UNEX medical team disembarked and strode into Anwar’s hospital room. Olivia didn’t move. The UNEX doctors shother irritated glances, but said nothing and started unpacking their equipment.

  Arden walked in behind the doctors. It was the first time she and Olivia had met or spoken directly.

  “Archbishop, the doctors will need you to leave when they finish these preliminaries and start the main treatment.”

  “Why?”

  “They’ll be doing deepscan procedures. Projecting holograms of Anwar’s internal structure. They can’t risk anyone seeing it. I’m sorry.” When Olivia said nothing, Arden added, “Depending on what they find, it should take about three hours. After that, you’re welcome to return.”

  “You’re on my ground here. You don’t tell me when to come or go.”

  “Consultants don’t get medical treatment in front of outsiders. There are no exceptions. Don’t you want him treated here, as quickly as possible?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. If he survived that, in the Signing Room...”

  “Archbishop, they will not treat him in front of you. If you won’t leave they’ll just take him back to Kuala Lumpur and treat him there, or inflight.” She paused, and knew instinctively what to say. Don’t persist with No, offer something Olivia couldn’t get unless she said Yes. “Don’t make them take him away. Let them treat him here. Then you can say goodbye to him properly.”

  They made eye contact, and Olivia nodded. On her way out, she said, “Please let me know when the treatment is finished. I want to come back straightaway.”

  “Of course.”

  They worked on him. They’d done this before. They were entirely dispassionate, like technicians.

  Within a few minutes they’d completed the preliminaries and started the deepscanning. A life-sized hologram of his entire structure, his bones and muscles and internal organs, was projected onto the air at the foot of his bed. They studied it at different depths and from different angles. It stood there like his soul, recently gone from his body. The doctors gave it their full attention and ignored his real body.

  They projected local magnifications from the hologram of those major bones that had been broken by Levin: ribs, clavicle, radius, ulna, tibia, fibula, metacarpals, phalanges. And his sternum, which together with his upper ribs had been shattered by Levin’s mighty kick on the way to its main target, his heart.

  The texture of the bones, in such high close-up, was granular and fibrous, particularly at the open edges where they’d sheared. The breaks, on images so big they looked like pieces of furniture, were spectacular. But they were resetting and regenerating as expected, and surgery wouldn’t be needed on them; just time.

  The magnifications of bones retracted back into the hologram, and it turned itself inside out and projected another magnification, this time so enlarged it filled most of the room. It was Anwar’s heart, where they expected to find more serious damage; they’d magnified it so much it almost made the room into an immersion hologram whose workmanship Anwar, if he’d been conscious, would have admired.

  It wasn’t a human heart. It was denser and heavier and had much larger muscles, formed in a much more intricate pattern over its surface. But it was organic: no mechanical or electronic components.

  They studied the damage done by Levin’s mighty Circumnavigator kick, and decided it needed closer examination. They ramped up the magnification, as Anwar might have ramped up his senses, and the perspective changed. The image enlarged until it assumed the dimensions of the room’s floor and walls and ceiling. The doctors walked through it and around it, conversing quietly.

  The muscles were torn by the pressure waves of the kick, as the doctors expected, but they needed to know the extent of the damage. The transverse dark and light striations on the muscles, normally regular, were turned almost into graffiti by the concussion. The surface of Anwar’s heart was damaged structurally like the white and silver wall Levin had burst out of, but this damage was done by Levin bursting in, not out. Eventually they concluded that it wouldn’t heal as quickly as the bones; regeneration of all that torn muscle tissue would be much slower and more complicated. It might take all of another day.

  This was how they made Consultants. A few seconds more in the Signing Room and Anwar would have died like Asika. But a few seconds after Levin had died Anwar’s molecular defences, always first to the scene of any trauma, had begun working. By the time the doctors reached him, resetting and regeneration and healing were proceeding as expected.

  The UNEX doctors concluded their deepscan, and Anwar’s hologram disappeared. They’d been told en route that a Consultant had been seriously injured, so they’d come prepared for extensive surgery, and they were lazily relieved that it wouldn’t be necessary. They formally handed him back to the hospital with instructions about mild sedation and food and drink intake. They departed at 2:45 p.m. on October 20, taking Levin’s body with them in the VSTOL.

  Arden had decided to stay for the two to three days it would take for Anwar to reach something like full recovery. She called Olivia, and left the room as she entered.

  After a couple of hours Anwar started to slip in and out of unconsciousness, and each time he woke he’d see Olivia there. Standing guard ridiculously in his hospital room like (he remembered) he’d stood guard ridiculously in the Signing Room. Every time he woke she was there. Maybe she’d brought a bucket.

  Many of the broadcasters in the Signing Room died, but not all of them. Enough survived to make sure the events were seen worldwide and live. The news channels treated it as a failed attempt on Zaitsev’s life.

  Mass killing at UN summit in Brighton.

  Battle of The Dead.

  Nineteen killed in attempted assassination of UN Secretary-General Zaitsev.

  Nineteen killed, but very few injured. Anyone not near to Levin when he burst out of the wall lived. The others, if he touched them, died.

  With so much coverage, as low-motion analysis of Anwar’s combat with Levin was inevitable. Rafiq knew better than to try to suppress it, though he refused to make any public comment on it. It was broadcast extensively and analysed by an assortment of retired military people. There were headlines like Who were they? and Battle of The Dead and Do we need things like this? Rafiq knew that inquiries would be inevitable, and was fighting on several fronts to ensure they stayed private.

  Zaitsev managed to hold things together politically. His remark about “this marvellous venue that will now have such good associations for us” was expected to come back and bite him, but it didn’t. His tone was restrained, dignified, and exactly right. He kept to a simple message, not descending into hasty speculation about who was responsible or why they’d done it. And certainly not about whether the target was anyone other than him.

  “This was a summit on water rights. Vitally important, yes, but not an explosive subject like political or ethnic or religious persecution. Not something for which any of the participants would expect to be killed. Just water rights. Civil engineering ideas. Ways to make water so readily available that people don’t have to fight over it, or die for the lack of it. A groundbreaking and imaginative business model. And a political and financial model to match. The summit succeeded, better than any of us expected. Let’s hold to that, and work as we agreed to implement it. Anything less would be a discourtesy to those who died, and to their families and colleagues.”

  Even to Anwar, who heard snatches of this
during a brief waking spell, it didn’t sound like all of it was acting. Some, maybe, but not all. And yet, all that Zaitsev would get from it would be to survive a summit most people didn’t expect him to survive. Rafiq, who wasn’t even there, would get a massive increase in UNEX’s future status and would get to make some things better in the process. What a piece of work! Anwar thought, and went back to sleep.

  He woke on the morning of October 21 feeling pretty good. His night’s sleep had been dreamless and relaxing. He’d expected it to be more troubled.

  Olivia was sitting at his bedside. He managed to close his eyes before she noticed he’d opened them, and to pretend sleep for a few minutes until Arden came in.

  “Archbishop, please take a rest. You’ve been here all night. I’ll sit with him for a while. I’ll call you if there’s any change.”

  “Thank you,” Olivia said, and actually smiled. Even she felt comfortable around Arden. Most people did.

  Anwar, as the door closed behind Olivia and without opening his eyes, said, “What did they do to him?”

  “Anwar, I’m so...”

  His eyes snapped open. “I know. But tell me what they did to him!”

  “You probably guessed some of it. They...”

  “Wait. This was your Detail, right?”

  “Yes. I called you too late...When they abducted him, we think they didn’t have the time or the ability to reverse-engineer his enhancements, so they rewired him to take away his personal identity. To make him use his abilities only in response to their orders. And everything was channelled into his physical abilities. Everything else, personality and memories and judgement and constraints, they wiped out.”

  “Like taking his soul.”

  “Yes. They turned him loose on Asika, then put him into the wall and made him go to near death to conserve energy while he waited. Then they turned him on full blast to kill her and you.”

  Anwar said, “They should just have kept him as Levin. I’d never have beaten him then....Do you know exactly how they rewired him?”