The Rig

by Roger Levy

  I shouldn’t have let him in. I wasn’t supposed to let anyone in if there was no adult in the house, and Pellonhorc was screaming at me not to, screaming like I’d never heard anyone scream before. And he swore, too; he swore he’d do things to me that I didn’t even understand.

  You have to imagine my fear. I’d seen Pellonhorc beat a boy unconscious for no reason and still carry on beating him, calmly and steadily, until he was sure the rest of us got his message. He never lost control. And at the same time I could hear Traile’s voice through the door, steady and slow and carrying more threat than anything I could imagine.

  I listened to Pellonhorc screaming, but Traile’s quiet voice drowned his screams. I reached up and opened the door to him. The man’s eyeshades shone as he flowed past me and up the stairs. I followed him. I saw Pellonhorc’s expression through the crack of my bedroom door for an instant before he slammed the door in Traile’s face. I thought at the same time how scared Pellonhorc would have to be to think of closing the door in Traile’s face.

  But he would be safe in there until Traile calmed down. Because of the prison labourers in the deletium swamp, every door in the village, internal or external, was entry-secure. My bedroom door was no different. Anyone inside could get out, but you could only get in if you were print-registered. A rhinoceroo with a hundred metre run-up couldn’t have broken that door down.

  Except that Traile put his hand on the door handle and leaned on it, and after a moment the door made a strange screeching sound, bent, and creaked, and then burst inward. Traile rubbed his fist and glanced back at me. What he meant me to understand by that look, I have no idea. The glitter of his lenses was the same as always. I watched him go into my room and I watched his arm come back and swing casually forward. I heard a dead, flat noise, and Pellonhorc’s scream abruptly stopped.

  After an odd, still moment, Traile turned sideways, facing neither me nor Pellonhorc, and his head was bowed. I heard him swear. He brought up a cupped hand and muttered into it. His face was white and his hand was shaking. He carried on talking, then stopped and waited and talked again, this time a little more calmly. The colour returned to his face. He breathed a long breath and bent to pick Pellonhorc up, gently, in his arms, and left with him, the boy not meeting my eyes.

  Pellonhorc wasn’t in school for a week, and we never saw his cheekicheep again. I asked my mother about it, and she said it would be best not to mention it to Pellonhorc or his mother. My father arranged for my bedroom door to be replaced. I looked forward to the workmen asking how it had come to be smashed like that, so that I could tell them, but they didn’t say a thing about it. They were very polite to me, though.

  * * *

  SigEv 5 The pornoverse

  ‘Let’s go to your dad’s shop,’ Pellonhorc said, one day.

  ‘Okay. I’ll ask him.’

  ‘No. I mean by ourselves.’

  ‘We can’t do that. Anyway, why do you want to do that? He won’t mind us being there. I often go and help him.’

  ‘No. I want to show you something.’

  ‘What can you show me?’

  ‘You’ll see.’ That was one of his things, You’ll see. He used the phrase equally as a threat and a temptation. I could tell he would scorn me if I didn’t agree, but there was a way around it. I said, ‘Anyway, it’s locked. We can’t get in.’

  ‘I can get us in. Don’t worry about that.’

  I had to say okay. I told my parents I was going out to play, and I met Pellonhorc at the shop. The day was fading and our reflected faces gleamed in the window.

  ‘So, how do we get in, then?’ I said reluctantly.

  He showed me a small device that he told me he’d taken from Traile. I wasn’t surprised. I’d long ago stopped thinking of Garrel and Traile as being in any way ordinary. I wasn’t even sure they were Avareche’s cousins.

  Pellonhorc held the device to the lockplate of the door and put his hand to the palmreader.

  ‘How does it work?’ I said.

  ‘It gives us a permit. Here.’ He held my hand to the plate. ‘There. We’re both listed. We can go in any time we want, now.’

  I shook my head, looking for a way out of this. ‘My dad’ll find out.’

  ‘Only if he checks the list, and no one ever does that. Not on Gehenna.’

  I stared at him. ‘You don’t know my dad.’

  He grinned back at me and said, ‘You don’t know your dad.’

  And before I could react to that, he added, ‘Come on, then. Or are you chickyfrit?’

  We went into the shop and through the banks of putery and screenery with their flickering programs, the calculations that never stopped running, the probability counts and option strategies for fuel economy and speed and oxygen expenditure, and risk factors for this route and that between one planet and another. I’d understood most of it by the age of about ten, and was tweaking the programs with my dad a year later.

  I went to my own puter and started to bring the screenery up, but Pellonhorc wasn’t interested.

  ‘Here,’ he said, standing at the door to the back of the shop.

  ‘That’s just the workroom. He keeps the old putery there. It’s slow junk. Most of it doesn’t work at all.’

  ‘You think?’

  I shrugged. Pellonhorc palmed us in and I reluctantly followed him. He sat down at the front screen.

  ‘That one’s totally busted,’ I told him.

  Pellonhorc ignored me. The screen was tilted to the side and he straightened it, made himself comfortable and pressed it to go.

  ‘See?’ I told him.

  He pressed it again, then keyed a few riffs of code at the keyplate. Still nothing, of course, no point in keying dead putery, but he keyed it again, concentrating, and the screen abruptly glowed and its voice murmured, ‘Connecting.’

  ‘Hah,’ Pellonhorc said.

  That it worked at all didn’t make sense, but that Pellonhorc could bring it up made less. It wasn’t encrypted in any serious way, which was unlike my father, and Pellonhorc knew the code, which was crazy. But all I could say was, ‘What are you doing?’

  He settled himself on the stool. ‘Checking up on my dad.’

  He had never mentioned his father before, and since the time he’d beaten up the kid who had asked about him, no one else had mentioned the subject. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. Like most of the kids, I’d begun to assume his father was dead. I started to wonder about him now, though. What did he look like? How old was he? Where was he?

  I almost asked, but I held back. I was afraid the delicate friendship we had would vanish. It was possible that he would swing round and hit me. With Pellonhorc, that was always a possibility.

  The screen showed to an interior, a featureless wall of grey and nothing more. ‘He isn’t there,’ Pellonhorc said, disappointed. ‘Let’s try something else.’ He keyed again, and the screen changed to the graphic of an open gate, black and high-barred.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ I said.

  Silver words faded up, floating over the gate.

  Please register for entry to the Song. You are identified as Gehennan. Please enter personal registration passcode to continue.

  Pellonhorc keyed something, his fingers too fast for me to follow.

  Please confirm registration by plain voice.

  Confirm? Had he actually, successfully, registered to the Song? I wondered how he could have done that. But now he was stuck. His fingers hovered. I knew Pellonhorc wouldn’t fall for the lure of voice-key. As soon as you used your unscrambled voice, you became individually identifiable and permanently traceable. That was one of the reasons everyone still keyed whenever possible. Even within Gehenna’s small version of the Song, Babblepool, no one ever voiced, and we were – somehow – already way beyond Babblepool. And we’d managed it on a puter that wasn’t supposed to work at all, let alone be connected to the Song. The Song!

  I reached past him and thumbed an audio code. ‘Now tell it we’
re frequency-disrupted. Electric weather. My dad rigs all his putery to mimic that.’

  Pellonhorc keyed what I’d told him to, and after a moment the gate slowly opened and faded away, leaving the screen brilliant blue and pixelled with options. This was the Song. I’d heard of it, but never seen it and never expected to.

  As I gasped, Pellonhorc smiled in triumph. He held a hand high, and I shrieked and slapped it hard. The sharp clap and sting of our palms was like the sealing of a bond between us.

  We spent about an hour there, looking at all the sex sites we could wriggle into. I was impressed by his navigation, and he was clearly impressed by my ability to trick the sites into letting us in.

  Pellonhorc controlled the screen. He lingered on certain types of image, asking what I thought of them, of the participants. Many seemed about our own age, though they were far more practised than I was, or – I assumed – Pellonhorc. My comments of admiration and disgust apparently pleased him and I came home exhilarated, not so much by the great swathes of flesh and friction as by the freedom we’d had to roam. And also by the unexpected switch in the relationship I shared with Pellonhorc.

  Five

  RAZER

  Razer dozed and dreamed. The leaving of Earth had been chaotic. It had started in desperation and concluded in near despair. Razer had a sense that no one on Earth had truly believed anywhere viable would be found, and that the resources pumped into terraforming and transport were simply to provide people with a purpose through the final decades. Those who had departed had not expected to arrive, and those who had arrived had had to devote themselves to immediate survival. And so the System had begun to establish itself in an unstructured way, each planet with its own problems. Every planet had spent the first century or so looking inward in the way that Gehenna and the unsaid planet still did. Gehenna had turned to one faith, and the unsaid planet had turned to another; the unsaid planet had also retreated into such a fiercely protected seclusion that it might as well not exist. Every unexplained disaster drew rumours and suspicions that the unsaid planet had had a hand in it.

  For decades the System had possessed no structure other than what was necessary to maintain the mechanisms of trade, while Earth’s Internet had developed into the Song. There was lawlessness and corruption. The System sprawled like Earth had never sprawled.

  Her head ached, and she sat at the edge of the bed and drank water, imagining how much worse Bale must be feeling.

  Holoman was gesturing animatedly as he talked. No one in the System, other than on the usual two planets, would fail to recognise that face.

  Into this chaos, nearly a century ago, AfterLife had burst abruptly into existence, almost fully formed, and in a few years it had changed the System utterly. It struck her that the calendar should acknowledge this, that the year should be marked ‘Before AfterLife’ or…

  Maybe not. More water. And caffé.

  Nevertheless, life was still hard. There was a ruthless pragmatism now. While an Earther might marvel at some aspects of current technology, they’d find others in everyday use that had been discarded long before the Earth’s end. In the System, reliability was valued more than innovation.

  Holoman had moved on to TruTales and StarHearts and some of the other ParaSites.

  Some features of Earth life had faded. Goddery had been one of the main casualties of Earth’s end, other than on Gehenna and the unsaid planet. But goddery continued to work for those two – for Gehenna, anyway, since no one had any idea what life was like on the other place.

  And then, just as the System had been starting to disintegrate, riven by disease, despair and internal conflict, as Holoman was telling Razer again now, the neurid had been discovered. It had been a consequence of a failed pluripotent cell experiment for which some anonymous technician had accidentally discovered an almost miraculous application.

  And from the neurid had come AfterLife.

  Holoman brushed a lick of unruly hair from his forehead. ‘In just a moment, a vote! But first, today’s medical technology. A significant new advance in gene-specific heart-lung regenerative treatment means that AfterLife can offer a second chance to up to a thousand genetically appropriate sleeping subscribers who have succumbed to the N23XN meta-prion.’

  Razer was still thinking about how an Earther might look at the System. Keystrikes and caffé were the rulers of Razer’s life, and they hadn’t changed much since humanity had migrated to the System. There were other priorities.

  And people always wanted to read. It was cheap, quicker than listening and resistant to accent. Even now, the System’s formal languages remained close to those of Earth. As for caffé, everyone wanted to stay awake with the warmth of a drink.

  She finished the cold tasse and took it back to the kitchen, wiping it clean under the tap with a finger. How many caffés had she drunk, over the years? How many stories had she told?

  When she got back to the screenery, it was to a simmed view of the sea, blotblack rigs fixed in the swirling foam, sarcophagi glittering around them like sequins.

  It fully struck her that she was actually here, on the planet of the sarcs. There was little money, no comfort, not a single moment’s ease, and yet Bleak had become the most important place in the System.

  Holoman’s voice was telling her, ‘Among these are today’s potential lucky chancers. Let’s look at one. His name is Larren Gamliel.’

  The AfterLife theme played, and Bleak’s oceans crashed across the screen. Razer started to pay closer attention. Here it was at last. These were the lives. This was the stuff of AfterLife.

  The sarc-strewn sea glowed as the sim of a single dark sarcophagus rose into the air and opened a crack, leaking words:

  LIFE SUMMARY

  LARREN GAMLIEL

  WARNING – recollections of certain experiences may be traumatic. Especially traumatic experiences are marked in the summary with a {grgrgrgr} sound, or a ** if you choose to text-read.

  Razer chose voice, fell back on the bed again and closed her eyes. The voice was low and slurred. Razer imagined a pocked face and skinny arms. Larren began to speak the bones of his life.

  My name is Larren Gamliel. Lar. I was born some place I don’t recall, didn’t stay there long enough. Don’t remember my parents at all. Brought up in a drifthome, remember mostly stars, looking out my little window and the stars endless as bedlice.

  Had a friend in the drifthome, boy called Bude, straggly red hair, taller than me, always blinking. We was playing hide’n’find, nine years old, I remember, and he was hid all morning. I didn’t find him, got bored and it was middlemeal. I went to middlemeal; it was meatcakes. I ate his. He was late. Actually he didn’t turn up for it.

  So after middlemeal, the alarms was going. Long story short, there he was in a voidlock, sort’v floating. {grgrgrgr} He looked sort’v sucked out. Like one of those dried fish. His eyes gone squinty.

  That about totals my childhood, I guess. I don’t think about it much.

  I got to fifteen, had to leave the home, went down planetside. {grgrgrgr} Can’t remember which planet, didn’t stay on it long anyway.

  {grgrgrgr} Didn’t stay on any of them long.

  What I liked most was the trips one to the next. That’s where I felt most comfortable, on those ferries. I guess they was like the home again. Got work as a steward once, but not for long. Stared at the stars, got reprimanded too many times.

  Planetside, I was generally in trouble, which I guess was the total of my life, really. {grgrgrgr} Stealing and drifting. What Pax call sad. That was me. I never had nothing of my own, never held onto anyone else.

  Never felt sorry for myself, though, not much anyway. I guess I was happiest in the jails, drifting up there like I was a kid all over again, in that little cell surrounded by stars. I told them not to let me go, that last time. Maybe if they’d’v listened I’d’v had more of a story now. {grgrgrgr} Killing that woman was a mistake, or an accident. The Justix explained the difference, but I never worked i
t out. All I know is I didn’t mean it and I was sorry for it. I was not responsible. The drugs was responsible.

  It’s strange, and maybe you can work it out for me, ’cos I sure as shame can’t. Why is it that everyone said it wasn’t my fault about Bude, and I still can’t help blaming myself, couldn’t all my life, and everyone says that woman was my fault, and I know she wasn’t? Can you tell me why is that?

  I done my time for her, in any case. Two days out, and then I got this disease. Is that justice?

  I know there’s nothing else, but I’d like to’v met my parents one time, my mum anyway. And I’d like to see Bude again. Maybe he’s here too, somewhere. This disease that’s eaten me up, maybe it’s not forever.

  I don’t think I had a good life so far.

  END OF LIFE SUMMARY

  Razer froze the screen.

  That was weird, she thought. Had she known this man? The name was different, of course, all the databased names were anonyms, and of course the voice was putery, but she’d once taken a story from a man almost the same as this early life – the drifthome childhood, the hide-and-find death in the voidlock – and used it in a TruTale. It had been one of her first, years back.

  Maybe it was him, though that would be a hell of a coincidence.

  No. More likely it was a common way for a kid to die. Still, it was weird.

  She restarted the screen. A NewsAlert flash was pulsing in the corner, but she stayed with the ballot.

  AFTERLIFE CHOICES.

  Please touch or interrupt at any time.

  Open Larren Gamliel’s whole Life?

  Vote on Larren Gamliel’s Life?

  Please touch or interrupt for further information.

  She wondered whether to open the life, but knew herself well enough to recognise that that would be the entire day gone. She thought a moment more, then yes-voted him. It troubled her that she still couldn’t remember the name of that TruTale source. She could see his face, though, a high forehead and deepset brown eyes, always squinting. An engineer, that was it. And not a crimer, but on the edge of it.