by Roger Levy
Since the laws of Gehenna prohibited almost every device that might have helped them move with less effort, or to see, or to locate deletium vents more efficiently, the workers were forced to bump and stumble along the swamp floor, searching for faintly luminescent filaments of deletium dripping up through the heavy, sulphurous swamp. If they found one, they stopped and signalled along the winch cable, and an extraction pipe was lowered to them down the cable. Still virtually blind, they had to seal the awkward, thickly shielded pipe to the mouth of the vent, trapping the deletium stream.
This was body-breaking labour. Miners spent no more than an hour a day trudging the swamp floor, unless they located a deletium source. If they did – and the average location rate was one source for every three point eight hours spent searching – they were not winched out of the swamp until the source was in flow. This alone could take three hours.
Many workers died down there, or shortly after surfacing, of heat exhaustion or dehydration or atmosuit failure or acute radiation sickness. Workers with low location rates were suspected of deliberately failing to flag vents. Such workers sometimes failed to surface alive at the end of their shifts, or else fell back into the swamps or onto hard land while being winched back up. These were logged as suicides, and some of them perhaps were.
The average sentence crimers received for the swamps was a year, and the average survival rate there was just over five months. You didn’t need putery to calculate the chances of completing a sentence. And yet they kept coming to the swamps of Gehenna. They died and kept coming.
The reason they kept coming was that the many workers who vanished forever in the swamps without being declared suicides were recorded as missing, and the crimers celebrated them as escapees. By comparison, there was no possibility at all of escape from an eight-decade sentence served in a sealed, high-orbit prison hulk. So to many convicts, the swamps of Gehenna represented some insane form of hope.
We were constantly warned to beware of escaped crimers. There were even reports of sightings. Escaped crimers were one of the Lord’s most potent weapons against sinners. These sightings of escapees, reported eagerly in the System, only encouraged more crimers to volunteer for the swamps. They also very effectively encouraged Gehennans to obey the strictures of the Lord. It was another twin-win situation.
* * *
On my last day, warnings of escaped deletium workers issued from the kitchen comms as we were eating our breakfast. My father and mother exchanged looks as the News Preacher said, ‘A group of five armed and extremely dangerous crimers have escaped from the deletium swamp and are believed to be making their way towards JerSalem. They have thus far successfully evaded all attempts to apprehend them. All JerSalemites in the area are advised to be vigilant and to examine their consciences until the crimers have been recaptured.’
There was something more forceful than usual about the News, and it was particularly odd that a location should be specified. I wondered why crimers would head this way. The rocket station they would need to reach to escape Gehenna was far from JerSalem in the other direction. Had one of our community sinned so terribly that the Lord had to target us this way?
I discounted this, as it was without logic; if they were the Lord’s instruments of punishment, why were we being warned, rather than told to submit to them?
Considering the minuscule statistical likelihood of our encountering the escapees, my parents were unaccountably agitated. My father opened the screenery he kept in the main room and hunched down in front of it. He swore, which was unlike him, and closed it again, and glanced at my mother, shaking his head.
My mother visibly trembled. She said, ‘What, Saul?’
I remember her tone. It wasn’t confusion, or surprise, or even shock. It was simple despair. She knew instantly what had happened, what was going to happen, just as if she were a sinner awaiting the Lord’s righteous vengeance. I felt sick at her helplessness. I’d never seen her like this before.
He said, ‘Compromised. I’m going to the shop.’
‘Maybe it’s nothing.’
He hesitated, then said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and was on his feet and gone.
My mother kissed me, hugging me close and for a long time. We both pretended she wasn’t crying. I didn’t know what to do, so I waved goodbye and left for school. There was an image in my head of the pit opening beneath the arkestra, and the looks on the musicians’ faces as the ground was taken from beneath their feet.
School began as normal, with prayers and confessions. There was no mention of the crimers. Shortly after the morning break, Garrel slipped into our classroom and whispered something to the teacher, who glanced in irritation at Pellonhorc. Garrel made a beckoning gesture to Pellonhorc, and then, to my surprise, also to me. Pellonhorc went straight to the front of the room, while I began to close my screenery. Garrel said, ‘Don’t worry about that, Alef. Leave it and move.’
I started to say something, but the levelness in his voice silenced me. The three of us left the school. Pellonhorc and I had to trot to keep up with Garrel’s long stride.
This is a hard memory to hold. Since that day, I have seen some terrible things. I have been part of them. One of the things I have observed since leaving Gehenna is that when we sit with someone who is going swiftly and certainly to die and nothing at all to be done about it, what we say is always the same thing. We tell them, firmly, ‘You’re going to be all right,’ and we tell them not to worry.
And that day, as Pellonhorc and Garrel and I walked away from the school, I knew in my head and heart that something unimaginably terrible was unfolding. As we left school behind us, I cracked the brittle silence and said to Garrel, ‘What about my mother and father?’
Garrel glanced at me and away, and said, ‘Don’t worry, Alef. They’ll be fine.’
I said nothing more, and Pellonhorc didn’t ask Garrel about his mother. At the school gate, Garrel had a flycykle I hadn’t seen before. It was sleek and dark and glassy, not like anything on Gehenna. The morning’s bright sky reflected off it like thundercloud. I reminded myself that Garrel wasn’t like anyone on Gehenna, and nor was Traile, nor Pellonhorc. I thought of the look that had passed between my father and my mother earlier, and tried to fit everything together, but couldn’t. I decided not to think about them.
Garrel pushed us inside the flycykle and lifted us away. Once we were in the air, he relaxed slightly.
‘Where are we going now?’ Pellonhorc asked him. I thought, from the way he said it, that this – whatever this was – had happened to him before. I added that possibility to my data, in brackets.
Looking down, I could see the school, and the church, and the rows of streets. I’d never seen JerSalem from above, but it was easy for me to synchronise my knowledge of it with this new perspective and immediately locate our house. It was on fire, as was Pellonhorc’s house opposite. Garrel brought the flycykle round in a tight circle. We were as high as the church steeple.
People were beginning to gather at the fire, and as I watched, a man standing in the street brought something long and ponderous to his shoulder. It didn’t look like a quellfire canister, and in any case the device was aiming towards us rather than at the fire, the man staring straight along the thick barrel at us. His eyes were black ovals. I wondered where Traile was.
A wisp of smoke spread from the heel of the device, and at the same time a light flashed red on the screen in front of Garrel, who swore and wheeled the flycykle round dizzyingly as the missile (I concluded) straightened its arc and closed on us. I heard a whistle and shriek as it passed by, and the flycykle shuddered in the air and accelerated alarmingly. We were now out of sight of where I had lived all my life.
‘Is my mother dead?’ Pellonhorc said in an odd, flat voice, as if referring to something that had happened a long time back.
‘Unless I hear otherwise,’ Garrel said.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, though I suddenly knew exactly where we were going. The logic wa
sn’t hard to work out. The flycykle dropped down as if following my lines of thought and sight, and whispered to stillness on the ground, just out of view of my father’s shop.
Garrel locked down the flycykle’s drive and dulled the lights, leaving only the console bright. He brought a threedy grid to the screen and hunched forward as the contours of the grid realigned to the dimensions of my father’s shop. I watched over his shoulder. I’d seen this in games, the determination of vulnerabilities, the consideration of options for swift or subtle strike. Garrel overlaid and discarded a variety of views in quick succession. Most of the data I could have told him. Entrance/exit modes – just the two doors, front and one internal, no windows. He checked the thicknesses of walls, their physical make-up, and I noted him briefly register and disregard a weakness in the flat roof at the front of the shop. It leaked in heavy rain. He checked heat sources, and there were two fixed points; one of them was muted, more orange than red. Both people, I thought, were probably seated. There were others, too, moving about, merging and parting confusingly. Garrel held this view momentarily, trying to make a body count, but was unable to and gave up. They were all in the small room at the rear of the shop where Pellonhorc and I had roamed the Song, and where I had encountered Pellonhorc’s father.
It was thrilling to watch Garrel gathering information. I was almost in his head, only with him it was automatic routine, while with me it was from games, my brain processing and leaping. I knew what was coming, what all this signified. I knew it all except the end. I knew how games always ended, though.
‘Get out, Alef,’ Garrel told me, closing the screen decisively. ‘I need you. Pellonhorc, you stay here.’
‘I’m coming with you,’ Pellonhorc said.
But I was already out and Garrel too, and Pellonhorc was pushing at the door without result, his mouth opening and closing silently at us from behind the black reflected sky in the glass of the flycykle’s cockpit.
At the shop door, Garrel stopped me. ‘You wait here. I’ll come for you when it’s time. Understand? You wait. Your parents’ lives depend on it. All our lives. You must believe me.’
I nodded.
As he let himself in, he glanced at me and disabled the door’s keypad.
So he knew I’d been entry-listed. I noticed that his chest and thighs were slightly puffed up. He pushed the door closed behind him, but I trapped it with my foot just as it was about to click. I thought he might notice, but he was entirely focused ahead. I heard him walking quickly past the shelves of putery in the front of the shop to the door to the back room where all the heat was. He didn’t hesitate on the way and I heard nothing, so I guessed the main shop must have been as empty as the screen had told him it was. He simply knocked on the far door, like an appointed guest. I held my breath. After a moment, I heard the door open and close. Odd, I thought.
I could have run away. No, that’s not true. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. It was like standing at the top of a cliff-high dive board and being momentarily unable to choose between the long spindly ladder behind and the quick helpless fall ahead.
I couldn’t wait. Not with those choices. I wasn’t sure Garrel could be trusted. I took a breath. Ahead, then.
* * *
SigEv 9 Spetkin Ligate
As quietly as I could, I slipped into the outer shop, leaving the door cracked barely open behind me. I felt oddly shaky and a little sick.
My father had security cams in the rear office, of course, their feed accessible from the shop. I crouched down behind the counter and activated the small screenery there, to see what was happening.
What I saw in the fisheye view of the back room made me stop breathing. In two chairs facing each other were my father and my mother. My mother’s head was down, her chin on her chest, and she wasn’t moving. Hers, then, had been the weaker of the two fixed heat sources. She was already badly hurt.
I started to calculate from there, or tried to. I don’t know how far I had got with that when I fell apart inside and simply charged, screaming, into the back room, crashing the door open and running to her. If I had been more like my father, perhaps I wouldn’t have done that.
Someone, probably Garrel, yelled, ‘Wait!’ and everyone froze. I was on my knees, hugging my mother. From the warmth of her cheeks against mine, I thought she was crying, but the tears were sticky and not tears at all, but blood.
‘He’s a child,’ my father said from the other chair, his voice thick. I heard the creaking of wood.
Someone took my shoulders and lifted me to my feet. I looked around. Along with Garrel and my parents, there were three other men in the room. One of them was injured, his arm slung against his chest, strapped there by a reddened gauze web. Traile was not there, nor was Pellonhorc’s mother.
‘Well,’ said someone, ‘it’s the boy.’
I knew the voice, and turned to see the face of Pellonhorc’s father on one of the screens. He was leaning forward, but now he leaned back again. His face was a little drawn, as if he’d slept badly, but no more than that. His voice was easy.
The injured man said slowly, ‘Never mind the boy. How are we going to make this right? Are you going to give me Saul?’
‘It looks as though you have him already.’
‘You know what I mean, Drame. I want what he knows. What he can do.’
‘I don’t think that’s up to me, Ligate,’ Pellonhorc’s father said mildly. ‘Why don’t you ask Saul himself?’
The man called Ligate turned. His voice came out awkwardly, and I assumed his wound was making it hard for him to concentrate. He was slow-moving, too. He said, ‘Ask Saul? Saul knows what you’d do to him if he deserted you. No, Drame, you have to agree to it. I get Saul, you get your wife back, and your child.’
My father glanced at me. I could see the muscles in his neck straining. I thought he wanted to say something, but he didn’t. I wanted to have him hug me, to be able to cry into his chest. He looked so helpless, his hands out of sight behind his back. He was otherwise unhurt, though, and that told me of his importance here. I looked at my mother again. Only the tension of her arms yanked back at her shoulders kept her from collapsing to the floor. Her head was slumped on her chest. She was not conscious.
Pellonhorc’s father said, ‘Our families are outside this, Ligate. That was always understood.’
Ligate’s face showed nothing. ‘I always thought so. You broke the rule.’
‘Really, Ligate. Do you believe that? You have evidence?’
‘Then tell me why you sent them here.’
‘I knew you’d jump to conclusions. I wanted you to have time to consider before you acted stupidly.’
‘I’ve had time. I’ve considered. I’m offering you your family. I only want Saul. I think I’m being generous, here. My family –’ he took a breath, ‘– are all gone.’
Drame said, ‘Leaving that aside. Can I trust you, Ligate?’
‘Trust me?’ Ligate turned lethargically to Saul and said, ‘Do you trust your boss? If he tells you to come with me, will you come? Will he send his soldiers after you, to kill you?’ It was odd, the way he moved and spoke. Everything he said was sharp and precise, but the man himself seemed drugged. Perhaps the wound was worse than it seemed.
My father didn’t answer. There was nothing for him to give but wrong answers. I can see that now. This was a conversation without logic, just threat and parry. Whatever was going to happen would happen, and I can see that Drame and Ligate already knew what that was going to be. At the time it seemed like a Babbel tale, its end inevitable, full of doom.
Garrel was standing quietly. The other two men were standing to his left and right, as if the three of them were comrades.
Ligate said, ‘Give me Saul, Ethan. Give me Saul and you can keep your wife and your child.’
‘Saul knows everything, Ligate. If I give you him, you take everything.’
‘Then you should have taken better care of him.’
Pellonhorc’s father said not
hing.
Ligate went on. ‘You know, Ethan, if you hadn’t murdered my family, I’d never have found Saul. I searched and searched. And all along, he was on Gehenna, of all places. Gehenna! Why would anyone choose to live on this ball of shit? Someone like Saul, with all that he could have had.’ Ligate shook his head slowly, the expression on his face not accompanying his words. ‘And I’d never, ever have thought of looking for your wife and child here. Why would you send them to such a place?’
Garrel was Ligate’s agent. That was the only way it made sense. Ligate had had a spy in Drame’s organisation, and the spy had located Saul. Drame, in sending his wife and child to Gehenna, had given away Saul’s location. Garrel or Traile were the only possibilities.
This fitted the data. One of them had been Ligate’s agent all along. He’d told Ligate that Drame’s family were here, and revealed that Saul was here too. Garrel and Traile had fought, and one had been killed. Whichever had been Ligate’s agent would have had the advantage of surprise there. And Ligate’s agent would have brought Pellonhorc to him. Whoever had fired the missile at the flycykle simply hadn’t realised who was in it.
Garrel shifted his feet and glanced at me with open contempt. That reaction was enough for me to dismiss the possibility that the spy had been Traile.
Drame repeated, ‘Saul knows everything.’
‘Indeed,’ Ligate said, vaguely rubbing his wounded arm. ‘Your right hand is Saul.’
‘How do I know my wife and child are alive?’
‘Yes.’ Ligate nodded. ‘Let’s establish trust.’ He put a hand to his ear and muttered something, and the rear door opened. I saw Pellonhorc’s mother standing against the light, trembling slightly, a new man gripping her upper arm, forcing her to stoop and stumble forward a few steps. Her hands were behind her and there was no expression at all on her face, but her blonde hair was crusted thickly with blood. Ligate said, ‘She’s alive, then. You see her?’
Drame said, ‘If she’s hurt –’