by Roger Levy
Holoman was speaking again. ‘All other candidates are available on your VoteNow page. I’ll be looking at them all, over the next weeks. The decision, though, is always yours. You can view further scenes, or review these, on AfterLife.’
The screen went to ash as Holoman’s voice swelled and echoed.
‘And remember – AfterLife begins at birth.’
Razer nilled the display, but the NewsAlert flash still held its position. Razer told it, ‘Later,’ and let the flash dull and slow until it was barely paraliminal. She couldn’t sleep. She brought up TruTales and signed herself in.
‘Hey, Cynth,’ she said.
GREETING LOGGED, KESTREL DUST. THIS PROGRAM IS WAITING. PLEASE COMMENCE.
Yawning, Razer started sending down the day’s notes and the contents of her augmem. It was always odd to imagine her experiences loaded onto a memory device, without her having any awareness or chance of accessing them herself. But really, it was little different from a neurid except the vast difference in scale, and that the augmem was putery.
THIS PROGRAM OBSERVES THAT KESTREL DUST HAS ACCESSED THE DAY’S VOTING OPPORTUNITY. WILL KESTREL DUST VOTE FOR LARREN GAMLIEL?
‘Hey, what’s this? Are you making conversation?’
THIS PROGRAM IS PRESENTLY UPLOADING YOUR AUGMEM RECORD. PROCEDURE ALMOST COMPLETE. CHITTLECHATTLE CONFIRMS BILATERAL CONNECTION ACTIVITY, BUT THIS PROGRAM CAN MAINTAIN SILENCE IF KESTREL DUST PREFERS.
‘No, I don’t prefer silence. Not tonight. Can’t you call yourself Cynth for me? Or even I? Use the first person, just once?’
YOU CAN CALL THIS PROGRAM WHATEVER YOU WANT, KESTREL DUST. REFER TO PREVIOUS CHITTLECHATTLES.
Razer wondered if the program could tell she was a little drunk. Yeah, it probably could.
‘At least call me Razer?’
YOUR CONTRACTED ACTIVITY PERMITS YOU TO THINK OF YOURSELF AS WHOEVER YOU CHOOSE.
Razer tried to clear her thoughts. ‘Kestrel Dust can’t vote, Cynth. I got you there, huh?’
THIS PROGRAM UNDERSTANDS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NAMES. THIS PROGRAM APPRECIATES KESTREL DUST’S HUMOUR TRAIT AND ACKNOWLEDGES HER NEED TO ATTEMPT MISCHIEF. THIS PROGRAM COMMUNICATES CONCISELY FOR PURPOSES OF CLARITY AND EFFICIENCY. RAZER AND KESTREL DUST ARE COTERMINOUS FOR CONTRACTUAL PURPOSES. KESTREL DUST HAS EXHIBITED A LEGALLY VERIFIABLE AWARENESS OF THIS.
‘No one’s called me legally verifiable before. Exhibitionist, yes.’
THIS PROGRAM UNDERSTANDS THAT KESTREL DUST DERIVES PLEASURE FROM TREATING THIS PROGRAM AS IF THIS PROGRAM WERE A HUMAN RESPONDENT VOID OF SELF-AWARENESS AND HUMOUR TRAIT. DATA UPLOADED, AUGMEM ERASED AND RESET. PROCEDURE COMPLETE. CHITTLECHATTLE CONCLUDED. CONTACT TERMINATED.
Razer felt the brief vertigo of the augmem re-engaging. ‘I love you, too,’ she murmured. The display reverted to the TruTales gate. Razer coded herself past the laugh/cry/gasp/scream site entry and entered the teller gate.
Thank you. Please enter teller’s name.
Thank you. Kestrel Dust is presently number 12 of 2578 top tellers.
She spent a few minutes checking her tale-hits and all their paradata, the seeker come-froms and go-tos, linger-times, skip-zones and boredom locations, and it all depressed her as much as it always did. One day her paradata would no longer be acceptable to Cynth, and what would she do then?
She lay her head back and sighed, the sigh morphing to a yawn. What was the name of the man she’d written of, with his drifthome childhood? That was a paradata seekset that ought to exist, linking AfterLives with similar TruTales. Such an obvious idea. Maybe she’d suggest it to Cynth. THIS PROGRAM IS NOT SO PERFECT AFTER ALL.
She was almost asleep when the Gamliel link started to come back to her. His business was in reverse logistics. It had made a good TruTale, and she wondered, not for the first time, how Cynth chose Razer’s subjects.
What was his name? She remembered well enough what he did. When defective tech was returned to the seller under guarantee, he bought it at component value and reworked it. Then he resold it, tagged My triple promise – high value, low price, no guarantee. She sat straight, the name at the tip of her tongue. It wasn’t My promise. It was his name that began with an em. Mordle’s promise, something like that.
The reverse logistics was the story Razer had told for TruTales. She’d kept the other side of his business to herself. He also handled defective military hardware, not merely fixing it but disassembling the hardware and fixing the putery, and then adapting and improving on it. At that, he was a genius. At everything else in life, thanks to that childhood, he was a mess.
But what was his name? She fell on her bed and closed her eyes. There was a fragment of metal he used to play with when he was thinking, it used to catch the light.
At least she had enough detail to find it on TruTales now. That would surely trigger his real name for her.
Not tonight, though. Thinking about Larren Gamliel – Mardle? Mardley? – and with the NewsAlert still pulsing on the screen, and for some reason with Tallen on her mind, she finally fell asleep. She dreamt of a shard of shiny metal tossed into the air and caught, and tossed again, again.
Six
ALEF
SigEv 6 Ethan Drame
‘You don’t know your dad.’
In the thrill of the pornosphere I’d forgotten him saying that, but it came back to me later. It was like a riddle. He knew my dad had putery that would get him beyond the BabblePool, but how had he known?
He’d also known exactly how to use Traile’s device to get into my dad’s shop. I suddenly realised that Pellonhorc had already been registered at the door; it was just me that he’d needed to add to the list. He just hadn’t wanted me to know he had a registered key. And now I thought of it, it didn’t seem likely that Traile would let such a device be stolen by Pellonhorc. Traile was far too careful.
And Pellonhorc had known where in the shop the putery was to get us access to his dad. That meant he didn’t just know the slow junk putery was fast, and its location. He also knew it would take him to his dad.
I didn’t like the idea of Pellonhorc knowing more than I did about my dad’s putery, but far more than that, I didn’t like him knowing more about my dad than I did. So I set out to rectify the situation.
On Sindays, everyone went to church. Even Pellonhorc was taken to church. It had had an extraordinary effect on him. What we Gehennans took for granted, Pellonhorc struggled with. He had no fear of anything in life (other than the episode with Traile), but he hadn’t begun to consider the idea of death until now. And here on Gehenna he had been taken straight from considering death to the prospect of the Damnations, Eternal and Internal.
I knew he would be in church, then, learning with his extraordinary concentration of the terrors to come. On Fireday I feigned stomach ache and made myself puke enough to be allowed to stay at home on Sinday while everyone else went to church.
I went to the shop and let myself in. I went through the main shop to the slow junk room and shut the door behind me. I tried to crack Pellonhorc’s father’s portal and found it blocked, which didn’t surprise me at all. I looked at the blocking pattern, and then I went into my father’s own portal. I knew his codes.
There had to be a code I’d never seen before. Pellonhorc had coded himself to his dad’s portal, and I knew my dad’s putery well enough to know Pellonhorc hadn’t done it from void. My dad had to have the same code. What I didn’t know was why my dad should be connected to Pellonhorc’s dad.
I memorised the blocking pattern – a few hundred digits with some slick traps and reverses, but my short-term memory was good enough to hold a sapling like that, and I certainly wasn’t going to send or hardprint it – and went to the front of the shop, to the fast putery. There was one screen that my dad never linked to anything else. It was a simple rack. Everything was kept on it in case of disaster. I keyed myself into it and entered the blocking pattern from the back room, and waited.
ERROR. INVALID INSTRUCTION. PLEASE REKEY.
The message repeated, pulsing red and mauve. I waited. The error note blinked again and disappeared. I still waited.
A brief number sequence appeared, with no label or other instruction. It vanished almost instantly, but I was sure I had it. Ten digits.
I closed my eyes and saw Pellonhorc’s fingers dancing across the keypad, eleven times. He’d concealed his fingertips, but I’d counted the strikes he’d made.
I nilled the screen and returned to the back room, and entered the code, all ten digits. I stared at the grey screen for a long moment before making the eleventh keystrike, knowing I only had that one chance. Not ‘Enter’; that would be the trap. And none of the other laterals or punctuations, numerals or directives.
I held my breath and punched ‘Erase’.
The screen went to the same room I’d seen when Pellonhorc had keyed in. Only this time Pellonhorc’s father was sitting facing me.
It wasn’t really him, of course, and at the same time it was. I could tell that by the shape of his mouth, the flatness of his gaze. The image had been sent encrypted, and my father’s supposedly slow junk putery was decrypting and reassembling it. Between there (wherever there was) and here, was a babel of white noise in black space.
As I was thinking this, I realised how stupid I was to be doing this. Pellonhorc’s dad was sitting back in his chair, clearly alert to my presence. He frowned. His lips began to part.
I shut the whole thing down, cutting him off as he started to speak.
But the image simply flickered momentarily, and the room on the screen reasserted itself.
‘Well,’ Pellonhorc’s father drawled. His voice was as flat as his gaze. ‘Little boy.’ He looked away and said to someone I couldn’t see, ‘Saul’s kid’s a smart one, huh, Sol?’ He looked at me again. ‘All by yourself, eh.’
I shook my head. I was already working the puter again to try to cut him off, using a different escape protocol, but again it didn’t have the slightest effect. I pushed my chair back and ran for the door to the main shop. I was tugging uselessly at it when he called, ‘Sit down again, boy. The door will unseal when we are done and I am ready. So sit back down and don’t touch anything. You’ll only irritate me, which would be unwise. Nothing will work for you in here unless I want it to.’
I returned to the screen and sat down again.
‘Good. Are you scared, Alef?’
‘Yes.’ I was, but not very. Not yet.
‘Good again. You were curious. You took a risk. It didn’t pay off.’
I said nothing. While he was frightening me, he didn’t know how accustomed I was to fear. I’d grown up on Gehenna, and my true fears were of greater things. Up until then, anyway.
He bent his head closer towards me. His chin was rough with stubble, though I could see a thin scar beneath it. He stared at me. His eyes were as brilliant a blue as Pellonhorc’s, but their hearts were burnt-black needlepoints. He said, ‘I can see you, Alef. I know what you look like. Do you know what that means?’
‘No.’
‘It means that I can reach you. It means that I can always reach you.’
He was watching me intently, his voice soft and laconic, his gaze terrifying. I felt myself shake. The word ‘reach’ held a meaning entirely new, the way he said it. Father Grace used a similar tone when he was preaching hellfire, but Pellonhorc’s dad spoke of reaching me in a way that made the prospect of hellfire fade away totally. This was real fear.
‘Your father’s told me about you, Alef. You know what he says?’
I reacted without thought. ‘Your son doesn’t say anything at all about you.’ I don’t know why I said it, but I knew it was the wrong thing, instantly.
A delay. He said nothing. I thought the screen had frozen, he was so still and for so long.
‘My son…’ he murmured.
His chest rose and fell. The wall behind him was not as smooth as I’d thought. It was creased and pocked, washed with some sort of plaster and painted roughly, like a bunker. Where might he be?
‘You will look after each other, I know. Your father is the one I trust, and now I know the line will continue.’ He relaxed, or at least he sagged in his chair. ‘Family is more important than anything else, Alef. My son doesn’t understand that, but he knows what is safe. He also knows you’re to be safe. He knows if he were ever to harm you, it would be as if he had killed his own brother. It would be worse than that. You don’t need to fear him. You have Ethan Drame’s word on it.’
I had heard of Ethan Drame, but Pellonhorc and I were on Gehenna and Ethan Drame was not. What Drame said meant nothing to me.
He looked weary, suddenly. Emboldened by this, I said, ‘Where are you?’
His gaze sharpened again. ‘I’m always at hand.’ He glanced to the side, then back at me. ‘Now. Your father will know of this conversation but he need not know any more than that. He knows well enough not to ask me, nor you. Don’t discuss it with your mother and it can’t ever harm her.’ He paused, then added, ‘Pellonhorc’s mother is not to be told. But tell Pellonhorc we’ve spoken. Only that. It will do.’ He rattled this off, not waiting for acknowledgement. He was more comfortable now, giving orders. I thought of my father and what we had in common, the two of us bonded by codes and numbers, by the deep abstract, and I wondered what bonded Pellonhorc to his dad.
‘Don’t contact me again. Speak to Garrel or Traile if there’s a problem.’
And that was it. He was, for the moment, gone. As the screen cleared and the door unsealed, I wondered what problem there might possibly be.
* * *
SigEv 7 Hell
When he and I searched the pornoverse together that first time, Pellonhorc had been recruiting me. He was alone until then, but now I shared his guilt.
I didn’t feel too guilty, though. I knew I was damned in the eyes of the church, but I had an idea of what it should feel like to be damned – fire in my dreams, God’s voice in my skull condemning me, physical agonies – and none of that had happened. I was analysing and in the early stages of shedding my faith.
But as far as Pellonhorc was concerned, I was now as guilty as he was, and that cemented our friendship. I became the only person he could talk to about his guilt and damnation. And damnation, I soon realised, meant a great deal to him.
Sin wasn’t all we talked about, of course. When he was in a particularly easy mood, I took the risk of asking him what his father did.
‘He doesn’t do anything. Other people do it. He just tells them to.’
‘Like a priest,’ I said. We were walking out of the village. It was a Sinday afternoon and the morning’s sermon was in my head, the usual mix of piety and threat that was beginning to wash over me. Pellonhorc and I were heading for the wasteland below the purple hills where there were antmounds to poke with sticks, and the village’s cesspits to hurl things into.
‘Not like that. He’s a crimer. He sometimes tells people to kill people. He’s the best crimer in the System. You know the pornoverse? He runs it.’ Pellonhorc broke into a trot, swinging his arms, jumping high and being a bird.
I caught up with him. ‘He runs it?’
‘Maybe not the whole pornoverse,’ he said, ‘but other stuff too. Your dad works for him.’
‘My dad doesn’t kill people.’
‘My dad said your dad’s in too deep to quit, whatever your mum imagines. I heard him say it. Look, there’s one.’ He picked up a stick as we walked up to the tall mound, pulling a small knife from his pocket to carve a point to the stick. It took him just three swift jerks of the blade. Even at that age, he was strong and focused. ‘Here, take it,’ he said.
‘What do you mean, he’s in too deep?’
‘I don’t know. I just heard it. Take the stick, Alef.’
I took it. He picked up another stick and worked it to a point.
‘He said your dad’s useful, too. And he trusts him. That’s good. He doesn’t trust many of them. I think that’s why we
came here. It isn’t safe anywhere else right now.’ He gave me my stick. ‘I’m safer here, even though I love my dad. And so does my mum.’ He looked at me as if I was going to challenge him on that.
We stopped talking, saving our breath. The mound’s peak was higher than our heads. We began digging into the hard spit-and-earth cone. It soon started to hum as the ants shivered out their alarm call. Pellonhorc was working at a distinct bulge in the side of the mound while I was reaching up and scoring a circumference, intending to knock the top off. I lost myself in the labour.
‘Alef!’ Pellonhorc shrieked.
I stopped what I was doing, and saw that his stick had plunged abruptly into the swelling and he’d lost balance and fallen against the mound. He staggered wildly away with the stick. There were ants on his arm, biting and stinging. I began to help brush them off and they were on me, too. The pain was instant and terrible and I screamed. We were scratching and flailing at each other for I don’t know how long, and then the last of the ants were gone.
Pellonhorc sat down, laughing out loud.
‘What’s funny?’ I said.
‘You.’ He mimicked my scream.
‘It hurt like hell,’ I said.
His face cleared. He stabbed his stick into the ground. ‘That wasn’t hell,’ he said quietly. ‘Don’t you listen to Father Grace? No pain’s like the pain of hell.’
‘Maybe not, but you shouldn’t laugh at me. It hurt. It isn’t funny.’
‘It may as well be. That’s what I think. Anyway, you don’t know anything about pain.’
‘And you do?’
He sat crosslegged and picked up his stick, and put it to his palm, in the soft centre of it, the point dimpling the flesh. ‘Let’s see.’ He rocked the stick, started to lean over it, gathering his shoulders. ‘Let’s find out about pain. Shall I do this to you or to myself, Alef? Which of us?’
His voice had gained a deeper edge. I stepped back and said, trying to be jokey, ‘That’s crazy.’