by Roger Levy
Immediately he was on his feet, hurling me over, and my face was in the earth. I tried to push back, get up, but he knocked my elbow away and twisted my right arm hard, locking it straight and almost dislocating my shoulder. I screamed.
‘Shut up, that’s nothing.’ He didn’t release me but adjusted his position until he was steady and comfortable behind me, holding me down, keeping my arm locked straight. Along with the pain, I could feel his calmness. It was terrifying. ‘Open your fist, Alef. Open it or I’ll break your fingers. I will.’
He was sitting across my shoulder blades, keeping my trapped arm along the ground, his boot on the point of my elbow. I could hardly breathe. My head was wrenched to the side so that I could only see my left hand, which was quite free, though there was nothing I could do with it but scratch at the earth.
‘Open it, Alef.’
I did so. I didn’t say anything. I felt the point of the stick settle itchily in my palm.
‘You or me, Alef. You think you know about pain? Who gets it, then? Choose.’
As I tried to get the breath to speak, his weight adjusted and he pushed the stick into my palm. The pain was instantly unbearable.
I screamed, ‘You. You!’
He let me go, jumping to his feet. I rolled over and cradled my hand. My shoulder throbbed. Sitting crosslegged, Pellonhorc put his left hand on the ground, palm up, and the stick back in the heart of his palm, as if we had simply erased the events of a few moments ago. He was completely calm. He just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t think I can push it all the way through with one hand. I’ll hold it. You get a stone to bang it with.’
I said, ‘This is really stupid. No.’ I was shivering. I had no idea what to do.
‘Then you hold the stick and I’ll get a stone and bang it. You decided, remember. Or do you want me to put it through your hand?’
I shook my head. A thought came to me and I just let it out. ‘Anyway, we can’t. It’s blasphemy. Like Our Lord crucifixed.’ I had forgotten how all this had started, how it had got to here.
He frowned at this and after a moment said, ‘You’re right.’ He examined me carefully, as if he suspected I might have been trying to trick him, then continued to look at me with a kind of respect. His face abruptly cleared. ‘Yes,’ he cried out, ‘it is!’ And then he leapt to his feet and punched the air and yelled, ‘It’s gone!’
I couldn’t work that out. I had no idea what had gone, but something certainly had come and gone inside Pellonhorc’s head. Something terrible had surfaced and submerged again, and somehow I felt responsible for both.
He yelled, ‘Come on!’
He was at the mound again and furiously working his stick into the deep hole he’d made. I sat hugging my knees, watching him. He was concentrating utterly, as if nothing had happened. Maybe nothing had, I thought. But my palm was stinging, and threads of blood beaded its lines when I clenched and opened my fist.
For a long time he stabbed and scraped with all his strength. I didn’t join him. Usually we scratched a few centimetres off the surface and that was the best we could do, enough to draw a hissing trail of ants out of the mound. We’d provoke them and lead them to a stream if we could, and then we’d leap across it and watch them mill around at the water’s edge. After that we’d wander off to one of the cesspits.
‘Hey, Alef! Here!’
He’d broken deep into the bulge in the mound, and opened it wide. It was quite hollow, and inside the umber cavity lay the motionless body of a small bird. The creature was in perfect condition. Its wings were vivid red and yellow, its beak bright orange, and its eyes even glittered in the sudden light.
‘How did that get there?’ Pellonhorc said.
‘The ants are scavengers. Maybe they swarmed into its nest and dragged it back here and walled it in. A bird’s unusual, but they can overcome mousels as big as your fist.’
He stared. ‘How could they do that?’
I was often astonished at what he didn’t know. But he could never believe I was quite so ignorant of anything beyond Gehenna.
‘Scout ants locate a prey for the colony,’ I told him. ‘If it’s a mousel den, they summon an army of stinger ants who climb over each other and block the entrance with their bodies. Then they swarm inside, filling the den like whamfoam, ground to roof, wall to wall. The animal can’t escape. The ants paralyse it with stings, thousands of stings, and ferry it back to the mound where workers carry it up the wall and encase it.’
‘But this is a bird. It could have flown away from the nest.’
‘It could have been protecting its young.’
‘Stupid bird.’ He kept looking at it, and said, ‘It’s dead anyway.’
‘No, it isn’t. Look.’ Its beak was open, faintly quivering as, every few seconds, an ant crawled inside the mouth and disappeared.
He leaned in closer. ‘What are they doing?’
‘They’re being eaten by the bird. The bird can’t feed itself, so they work their way down into its stomach to be digested.’
‘That’s stupid. Why?’
‘When they first get it here, they lay an egg under the bird’s skin, deep in its thorax. The pupa of a new antrix will be developing there, growing. The body of the living bird keeps it warm and fed and protected.’
‘Like a mother.’
I looked at Pellonhorc, not sure if he was joking. He didn’t seem to be. I said, ‘Not exactly.’ I leaned forward and held my stick up close to the bird’s head. Its bright eye followed the point of the stick. The head twitched fractionally. I said, ‘It’s being eaten from the inside out by the pupa. As the pupa grows, it nibbles space around itself. The bird’s heart is beating and its brain’s still functioning. There’s no motor response from the head down, but it retains full sensory function. It’s still in this world.’
School lessons. Biology and theology. Pellonhorc was learning both here on Gehenna. ‘As far as a bird can,’ I told him, ‘it knows and it feels.’ I pulled away and said, ‘Horrible way to die. You think hell’s worse than that?’
Pellonhorc leant in close and squinted at the bird. ‘It has to be. It’s worse than anything, isn’t it? Father Grace says whatever you see, whatever you can imagine, God makes hell a thousand thousand times worse. So it’s best not to imagine, isn’t it?’ He took his own stick and twisted it hard into the bird’s body, skewering the creature and lifting it out of the mound. He shook the stick and dropped the paralysed thing. A few ants, thrown clear of the mound, scurried back towards it, but Pellonhorc trod them into the ground. He knelt to peer closely at the bird. I knew he was going to kill it. He was fascinated by the deaths of small creatures.
But he just stared. I wanted him to kill it quickly. Normally I was just relieved when he was done with his little experiments. I found them hard to watch. There was no method in them and I could see no purpose. I wanted the bird dead. Its wings shivered in the air, though that might just have been the breeze.
He rolled it over and murmured, ‘You think animals go to hell? Birds? Ants?’
‘No –’ I thought again. ‘I don’t know. They’re innocent, aren’t they? They just do what they’re designed to do. They can’t choose. Can’t be bad.’
‘But we can, can’t we?’
‘Of course.’
He poked the bird. ‘Will we go to hell if we kill it, or if we don’t kill it?’
‘It’s just a bird. You won’t go to hell over a bird.’ I wanted it dead now. Its head was trembling, its feathers lifting in the breeze. Ants were coming from the mound, summoned by the drones returning from the bird.
He poked the bird again, rolling it to and fro. ‘My dad said some people don’t deserve to die in their sleep. What if you kill someone who’s going to hell anyway?’
‘Forget about it,’ I told him. ‘Who knows what’s going to happen? God forgives us when we die.’
‘Who told you that?’
No one had told me. I was guessing. I wasn’t sure about God any more. It
was fine in church, when the chanting stopped me from thinking and the music was good, but when I thought about it, the idea of goddery was plainly illogical. As soon as you spotted the first false assumption, the whole thing unravelled like faulty puter code. Only you didn’t discuss it, not even with your parents. Not on Gehenna. But I always followed the rules in what I said, even with Pellonhorc. It was safer. While I no longer quite believed in hell or heaven, I believed in death, and I’d certainly seen that before. I was pretty sure Pellonhorc had, too, before he’d arrived on Gehenna.
Pellonhorc knelt down beside the twitching bird and whispered, ‘Where are you going, little one?’ He stared into the bird’s open eye and held the stick there, almost scratching the gleaming surface. The pupil oscillated between the stick’s point and Pellonhorc’s squinting eye.
Pellonhorc whispered, ‘Where are you going? And where will I go?’
I wanted to look away but couldn’t as Pellonhorc leaned down and drove the stick hard into the eye and on through the thin skull of the bird.
He sat back. He had done it, yet the bird was still moving. I realised before Pellonhorc what this had to mean. I drew the knife from its notch in his belt and cracked the bird’s breastbone open, and let the wriggling, plump, white-jawed new antrix out onto the ground. As it began to stretch and uncoil its wet palps, I set the flat of the blade over its abdomen and pushed down, squirting the thin viscera across the earth.
I looked at Pellonhorc. He was bent over, vomiting. That surprised me.
‘There,’ I said, when he was done puking and wiping his mouth. ‘The bird was going to die anyway. You ended its suffering. But I killed the antrix’s brood, potentially a whole colony. So I’ll be the one going to hell, not you.’
I was joking, but he said, quite seriously, ‘No. That isn’t how it works.’
Seven
BALE
Bale woke at three a.m. with a migraine that shined up his skull like a furnace. He stumbled to the toilet and puked himself dry, washed a handful of pills down his throat with a mug of water and puked it all straight back out again. He changed tactics, chasing the rest of the pills down with visky, and this time as the puke rose he swallowed it back down. After that he sat in the dark, riding the blistering novas until about four, when at last he spun down into a black hole of sleep.
The crashcall woke him at five. He thought it was still the migraine and tried to ignore it, but the shriek grew too loud. Half-conscious, he screened in and almost choked at the image filling the wall.
The projection was split into eight frames, each rectangle colour-coded and featuring a corpse sprawled or folded on the street. Bale cracked open a vodkaffeiner and flushed it down his raw throat. It tasted mostly of bile. His teeth felt sticky.
He concentrated on the screenery, where a translucent flatmap of Lookout floated like scum over the images of corpses, incident locations colour-matched to each body.
They were all males. The images were stills, clipped mostly from Pax cams, but a few were injury-mapped images where the paramedics had arrived first. These images of the dead were overwritten with ‘TO MORGUE AFTER FORENSIC’. Every few seconds a line of text snapped across the screen and vanished: ‘NOT repeat NOT AN EXERCISE. ALL SOCS ACTIVE. INCIDENT ONGOING.’
A ninth body appeared, indigo-framed, a matching locater blinking on the map. Bale pulled his trousers on, tripping and swearing. He yelled, ‘Chronology,’ and the screen flashed a row of colours: red, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, orange, black, indigo. Then pink, and the screen put up a new pink-framed corpse and a further location.
Still swearing, Bale shrugged himself into the long jacket. The gun’s weight sobered him a little. He swung the visor over his head but held off the eyeware. The earpiece slid home and Vox was howling.
‘—OPERATIVE IMMEDIATELY. ONE MALE SUSPECT SIGHTED WITH UNCONFIRMED MANUAL SHARP WEAPON, RIDING BLACK AND GOLD JIGUMI ZIPRIDER. NO OTHER DETAILS AT PRESENT. SUSPECT UNIDENTIFIED, DISMOUNTING AND ATTACKING AT RANDOM. ALL REPEAT ALL UNITS OPERATIVE IMMEDIATELY. INCIDENT ONGOING. THIS IS NOT AN EXERCISE. ALL REPEAT ALL UNITS OPERATIVE IMME—’
Bale was stumbling through the door, the map branded in his head. Pax was just getting everyone on the streets, which meant there was no clear pattern ident.
On the street, he stopped. There was no point running anywhere. He leant back against the wall and waited there, gathering himself. Still half-drunk, he couldn’t drive. He shouldn’t have drunk the vodkaff, but it wouldn’t be registered for a while, and he needed the jolt. It didn’t matter – he’d be stood down well before it hit his blood titre. Hell, he was suspended anyway.
Feeling good now, the vodkaff unfuzzing his thoughts, he considered the kill sequence. Maybe it wasn’t premeditated, but there had to be some sense to be made of the spree. It couldn’t be seen from the flatmap, though. A ziprider could take the K anywhere. Oneways and gridlocks wouldn’t give him pause.
Bale touched his throat and murmured, ‘Desk? Who’s up? Any connection yet? Anything?’
‘Nothing, Bale. The K’s stopping, hitting, moving on. Just keep your eyes open. Someone’s got to get lucky.’
‘Delta?’ Bale said. ‘That you?’
‘Yes, this is Officer Kerlew.’ She emphasised it. ‘We’ve got nothing else. It’s a mess. Everything we’ve got’s coming through on Vox, and it’s all nilnegative. First male was found half an hour ago, knifesliced at least twenty times.’
Even on duty, Delta never used her surname with Bale. Someone must be at her shoulder, or else Delta was thinking ahead to the debriefing, to blame and discipline. That was the difference between them. She was good, though.
She was still talking. ‘The SOC officer assumed a mugging gone sour. Then two more, same and same, at ten and twelve minutes later, and someone at each SOC mentioned seeing a ziprider. The others started to come in at about five minute intervals. And –’
Delta cut out and the comms flipped to Vox’s puterised monotone.
‘SUSPECT K POSSIBLY RIDING ZIPRIDER PLATE 264FRR4587, REPORTED STOLEN TWO HOURS AGO.’ A pause. ‘NEW VICTIM ONE MINUTE AGO. JUNCTION OF GARNET AND MISTRAL. CODE MAROON. ALL PAXERS IN VICINITY APPROACH WEAPONREADY WITH EXTREME CARE.’
Then silence.
‘Delta?’
A quick sigh, then, ‘I hear you, Bale.’
‘I’m near Garnet and I’m on foot. How about I go there and start processing it?’
‘Sure. I have no other orders.’ She checked herself and said in a sharper tone, ‘Wait. Aren’t you suspended?’
‘Crashcall, Delta. You know that.’
‘Yeah, but –’
He lost her voice for a moment, and when she was back, her tone was slightly different again, almost strained. She said, ‘– You won’t get paid’s what I meant.’
Bale pulled his visor down all the way, finally engaging the eyeware and wincing in anticipation. He closed his eyes. His hangovers reacted badly to the abrupt starkness of the Pax worldview.
The overlay cut in. Sounds ebbed and returned, filtered and changed. He squeezed his eyes open, gently, breathed deeply and swore.
The visor was fully engaged. He was on duty, now. Street detail had been largely erased, his world turned to a cartoon of pure line; the edges of buildings and kerbs, the outlines of stationary vehicles were just grey lines thinning and paling into the distance. In this sketched city, only what the system considered worth attention was drawn to Bale’s notice. Moving vehicles took on colour that brightened with speed and proximity, and stick-drawn pedestrians only flickered into solidity as they approached Bale or if he held his attention on them for more than a second.
He took that setting down to half a second.
His skull still thumped. The eyeware was bad enough when he was fully sober. He pulled up the visor’s recognition facilities and nulled most of the list. No use flagging the usual thugs and thieves. He pulled up the vehicle options and hi-lit Ziprider, Jigumi, colour-selecting black and/or gold. Fro
m a weapon catalogue he picked knife, and out of forensic he chose visible bloodspatter. From gait he chose running, limping and other. That done, he started to trot through the cartoon city. Street sounds were distant and unreal, and the steady thump of his feet on the hard ground fed the residual thud of his headache.
He increased speed slightly, thinking maybe he could damp the hangover that way. Loping too quickly round a corner and stumbling, he swore at the visor as his shoulder scraped the sudden edge of brick.
‘You okay out there, Bale?’
‘Fine,’ he mumbled. ‘Don’t babysit me, Officer Kerlew.’
‘I’m not babysitting, Bale. You flagged an adrenaline surge.’ She broke away again.
‘I tripped.’ He wondered what was up with her. He steadied himself and trotted round the next corner, this time more smoothly. A paramedic siren flared close, woe-woe, maybe a street away. He heard Delta start to speak, but her voice cut out. Unlike her to be anything but focused, he thought. He’d never heard her cross-comm before. But then this was something fast and getting faster.
His visor flashed up an oncoming ziprider, black and red. Bale started to go for the gun, but it wasn’t a Jigumi, the rider was a girl and there was no forensic. He trotted on, heading for the siren, which was steadying, the parameds coming to a halt not far away.
‘You don’t trip sober, Bale. We can cope.’ Delta was whispering now, her voice coming and going. This wasn’t like her at all. She was like Bale, ice in a crisis, thriving on the fast stuff. ‘Want me to stand you down?’
He ignored her, optioning an arrowmap, the program footstepping him round the cartoon corner and past a gaggle of sketched pedestrians. His visor snatched flagwords from their conversations. Killed, stabbed, knife and blood. It was just chatter, though.
Delta’s voice came through again, low-toned still, but this time penetrating, pure business. ‘Bale –’
‘I’ve got it.’ He was at the head of an alley. There was blood here, the visor rendering it jewel green, but Bale was overloaded by the visor, everything in his sight and hearing registering max. After the simple view of the unaffected streets, the alley’s maxed sound and colour overwhelmed him. Beside the central dense green wellspring with its radial spatter and spraymarks, a fat-tyred yellow paramed bodyrider was kerbed with its rear doors wide. The vehicle’s system readers were bleeping and keening, tubes and wires everywhere, and the screams of the man on the ground cut through everything but the rapid rocksteady conversation of the parameds at his side. Clamp this, get me that, shit I’ve lost –