by Roger Levy
It had been Solaman standing behind me that first day here in Peco, in Drame’s office. My uncle.
He kept his hand on my shoulder, softly, as he said, ‘I couldn’t tell how you’d react, Alef. You might have ignored it or you could have broken down altogether. I didn’t want to risk that. Until very recently, I’ve found it easy to say nothing. You showed no interest. You never asked about any of it.’
I saw how the pieces fitted – no, I understood. The feeling was like the feeling I had when Solaman had taught me to analyse, to think. It was extraordinary, overwhelming. It was as though my mother’s legacy to me had finally fully arrived, without warning and thunderously. Saul had been her brother’s best friend; of course she had fallen for him. She had understood the best and the worst of him, and accepted it all. She had even been able to tolerate the terrible rigidity of Gehenna because she was already accustomed to such unwithering certainty.
Everything made sense. And with my Gehennan need for self-punishment, for following the logic path, I made myself take this further. ‘Why are you telling me now?’
But I knew the answer. I hated this terrible capacity for human understanding that my mother had bequeathed me. I didn’t want it at all. It was easier to go statistic, and I wanted to do that now. I brought up lists of numbers, only for the digits to shred away. All I could hold there were terrible, unflinching words like melanoma, sarcoma, metastasis. The Song was full of them, and of the wailings that chorused around them.
I said, ‘What is it on your cheek, Solaman?’
My uncle squeezed my shoulder gently, then took his hand away. I still felt the phantom of its touch. Eventually he put the hand to his cheek and said, ‘It’s my death, Alef.’
And his tears poured endlessly over it.
* * *
SigEv 18 The Floor
After the revelation of his disease, I didn’t see Solaman for a while. The overwhelming surge of human comprehension that I had suffered faded after that episode, though for weeks afterwards I was plagued by dreams of my father and my mother.
I had no one to talk to about the dreams. Without Solaman or Pellonhorc, I had no one to talk to at all.
Solaman’s illness catapulted me towards the life he had been grooming me for. I was to be my father’s replacement and my job was to help maximise Drame’s profits. I sat with the data until it was part of me.
Perhaps I could have walked away. I could have told Ethan Drame I would work for him from another base, like my father had, only unlike my father, I could have disappeared entirely.
Though could I have? I had my skills and knowledge, but they were mind-skills. I was not practical. While I could plan meticulously, I was clumsy where the actual, the physical, was concerned.
In any case, I had no one. There were only two people alive I cared about: Solaman and Pellonhorc.
And I wanted revenge. I wanted my vengeance to fall on Spetkin Ligate. I was too scared of Ethan Drame to consider acting against him at present. If I had been older, I might have thought otherwise, but I was still in my teens, and my thoughts were raw. I would have to bide my time.
When I next saw Solaman, he said the time had come to begin work, and took me in the elevator to the place he said I’d be based. There was a slight slur to his voice. His cheek was sinking in and it was drawing his eye down and his lip up. The thing was rooted in the hollow of his maxillary sinus, and it was like a quicksand into which his face was falling. Neither of us mentioned it. I didn’t ask if he was having treatment for it. If he wasn’t, there would be a reason, and if he was, the treatment clearly wasn’t working.
Perhaps he wanted me to talk to him about it, but I couldn’t. My new empathy wasn’t up to it. I knew about death – I had spent my childhood carrying a small coffin about with me, after all, as did every child in Gehenna, and I had seen my parents slaughtered in front of me – but I couldn’t talk to Solaman about his.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked me at the door. He had to strain in order to speak. The muscles of his face had started to fail and he couldn’t maintain lip-seal, just as he couldn’t blink his right eye. The thing growing in his sinus made him sound like he was speaking in the teeth of a terrible wind.
‘Yes,’ I said.
He pushed the door open.
They all stopped whatever they were doing. No one looked at me. They stared at Solaman.
Speaking slowly and as clearly as he could, he introduced me to the team I was to work with. He introduced me by my name and also as Saul’s son. He introduced the twenty-eight of them to me by name, one by one, and I remembered every single name, and not one of them, it turned out, remembered mine. All we had in common at that moment was that we knew Solaman was saying goodbye.
He didn’t say it, of course. He made his introductions, and then he said, ‘I’ll be gone for a few days. I’m due a break from all of you,’ and they nodded.
As he turned to go, I turned after him, but he whispered, ‘Later, Alef.’ The door closed itself silently behind him, leaving me inside and him out there.
I can’t remember the rest of that day. I got to know them, though. The room in which we worked took up an entire level of the building. They – we – called it The Floor.
It took a while to get used to. Some of us would sit down as we worked, some paced constantly. There was little talk. Threedy screenery hung in the air like wisps of soft dark glass, pale numbers and words briefly glowing and fading again as information changed. There were charts and maps, exchange rates, share prices, margins of profit and loss. Only the changes mattered to the twenty-nine of us; the rest of the data we held in our heads, to varying degrees. Some specialised in planetary industry, some in law, others in accountancy and tax and business infrastructure. All the skills and specialities overlapped so that none of us was isolated or indispensable, and someone with specialised knowledge was always at hand.
No one on The Floor had ever met my father. They had communicated with him by screenery from his little shop on Gehenna (though they had never known where the shop was). By their initial reaction to me, I knew how special my father had been. Solaman had been more loved, perhaps, if that’s the word, but Saul had been the leader of the team, and it took me little time to see how much they missed him.
* * *
SigEv 19 The weave
It took me about a week to assimilate the overall situation. I visualised Drame’s interests as a funnel-shaped four-dimensional weave that reflected through itself repeatedly. It was interestingly complex, the dimensions in which it existed including regulatory parameters that varied from planet to planet, and with time.
The weave needed constant repair and reweaving, and we twenty-nine were at its heart, feeling the vibrations of tax law and economic judder and even natural disaster transmit from one strand of the weave to another. Our job was to anticipate what might be anticipated, to adjust to the disruption and to repair the weave and extend and even strengthen it.
At no point did I take charge of The Floor, but it was simply accepted, over a period of a few weeks, that prime authority had been passed to me.
I didn’t question the origin of Drame’s business opportunities. I noticed, of course, that he bought into hugely profitable businesses with minimal investment, and that the markets for businesses in which he had an interest became, at the point of his entry, suddenly keen to buy their product and uninterested in negotiating on price. If you knew nothing about Ethan Drame, you’d think he had the golden touch. If you knew enough, you’d know he had the touch of death.
Nevertheless, on the whole, Drame’s empire functioned legitimately. Laws were used where it was advantageous to the business to use them. Solaman once told me about this – he said that for most businesses, the laws were the roads on the map, while for us they were roughnesses in the terrain.
I didn’t notice the passage of time. What seemed like hours were days, and what I thought were weeks turned out to have been months. In that way, two years passed
. I had a room in a nearby building where I slept. It was all I needed. Sometimes I had to be reminded to eat, and sometimes I was so tired that I had to be accompanied back to my room to sleep.
I started to shave. I ate and slept. I worked on The Floor. I had no time to think for myself, or at least I gave myself none.
Of course it was a criminal enterprise. I had never thought otherwise. But I replaced some of Drame’s excessively direct methods with tools of finance and law. He even encouraged this, where it reduced business risk. Directness, though, was one of Drame’s favourite words. He liked such euphemisms. They made him feel like a businessman or a politician. I would stand in his office while he was – as he called it – negotiating, with – as he called them – colleagues. He had a voice that could carry enormous meaning. It was low and vibrant, almost a monotone, and he would pause between words so that their weight would hang. I shall take direct action. I can reach you. I am tenacious. The threats enclosed in these phrases carried a greater force, somehow, than if he were simply to have said, ‘I shall kill your family,’ or, ‘You will never be safe from me,’ or, ‘I shall not stop until you are dead.’
He realised, though, that action within the law was more profitable to him. Direct action carried a small risk of failure, and to minimise that, such action had to be excessive and extreme, which was expensive in terms both of manpower and of the ongoing procedures needed to ensure the consequences were never investigated.
Still, direct action was taken from time to time. Drame’s empire was extensive enough, thanks to my father’s and Solaman’s efforts, that it could have carried on expanding quite legitimately, but Ligate took every opportunity to attack Drame, and vice versa, and Drame got bored if legal routes of expansion were too slow for his liking. So the business continued to expand, and rapidly, through the routes of business, bribery, extortion, murder and ruthless competition with Spetkin Ligate.
Fifteen
TALLEN
‘Why would you want to work on a rig, Mr Tallen?’
Hoob spun a pen evenly through his fingers as he talked. The pen looked sharp-tipped, which Tallen thought was a good thing, and its barrel was lightly ribbed.
Looking at the pen comforted Tallen. You could get a good grip on that barrel, drive it down firmly, he thought. And he found himself fingering the notch of the sternum at the base of his throat. He pushed the tip of his finger down inside the sternum. Drive the pen down, hard, just there, behind the notch, and he’d probably get it close to the heart. He’d have to change grip as he drove it down, use his thumb to drive it the last few centimetres…
Hoob was looking at him strangely.
Tallen dropped his hand to his lap and made himself concentrate.
‘I’ll put it another way,’ Hoob said. ‘Why would Ronen take you?’
‘I heard you take anyone who wants to go.’
‘No,’ Hoob said. ‘What you heard was that hardly anyone wants to go. You heard it’s a dead job applied for by crazies, and you think you’re not really crazy, so we’d leap at the chance to take you.’ The pen clicked on the table. ‘That’s partly true. Crazies do apply.’ He eyed Tallen speculatively. ‘We don’t take them. There are a few people who are suited for it, though, and there are many more who imagine they’re suited. Some of each are certainly crazy, to a greater or lesser degree. We filter the crazy from the not-so-crazy. So, you think you’re suited?’
‘Yes.’
‘You believe in any sort of goddery?’
Tallen shook his head.
‘Some people still do. It isn’t illegal.’ He gave Tallen a moment. ‘Not even maybe?’
‘Not even interested.’
Hoob nodded slowly. Tallen knew Hoob was waiting for him to break the silence with a truth, but Tallen had none to offer. Eventually Hoob said, ‘And you’re not in any way crazy? You think that?’ He put his pen away, inside his jacket, still staring at Tallen.
Tallen tried to meet his eyes. They’d taken his own pen at the street entrance, and Tallen hadn’t tried to smuggle in any of his other sharps, but there was a desk ornament between them, a scaled-down drill rig with a spike that he was sure he’d be able to drive across a wrist. It wouldn’t really do the trick, not swift enough or certain, but the possibility was enough.
‘I have a small problem,’ he said. ‘You know about that.’
‘Yes.’ Hoob nodded again. ‘I have a note here.’ He tapped the desktop without taking his eyes from Tallen. ‘A reference from a psych. It doesn’t mean much to me, but you have to get past me before our own psych gets to trigger your twitches, so why don’t you explain it to me?’
Tallen said, ‘May I?’ and took the ornament from the desk. It felt good in his hand. Hoob pushed his chair back and glanced pointedly up at the ceiling behind Tallen. Tallen wondered how quickly someone would be in the room if Hoob gave the signal. He guessed there would be decisive, maybe deadly force from behind, and that he wouldn’t know a thing about it. He rolled the little rig around his hand, fingering the sharp drill bit, and relaxed at the reassuring thought.
‘I was attacked. He attacked ten people. I was the only survivor.’
‘I know about that. I saw the reports. You were lucky,’ Hoob said.
‘That’s a way to look at it. I suffered neurological as well as physical damage. You know all this. You really want me to go through it again?’
‘This won’t be the last time. You’d better get used to it.’
Tallen touched the spike to his palm. ‘The physical damage has been fixed, but as I had insufficient insurance, I was only accepted for treatment as an experimental subject, on a mutual consent basis.’ He smiled at Hoob. ‘That means I consented in absentia to unmonitored treatment that MedTech agreed to provide me with at no charge and at no risk of litigation. As a result, I am alive and I have a considerable range of augmentations. I have considerably revised proprioceptory receptors and analytics extending to most industrially useful wavelengths including ionising radiation, and various other adjustments including neuromuscular ports – I can show you them, if you like –’ he slowed, but Hoob shook his head, ‘– which makes me ideal for neurodynamic machinery operations. I imagine you use neurodynamic systems on your rigs.’
‘It doesn’t give you a walk-in here at Ronen, Mr Tallen. Our workers get external systems fitted at the rig. You simply have internals, that’s all. You’re convenient but you aren’t so special.’
‘I’m told I’m faster. But once I’m engaged, I can’t disengage. I have no control. It’s a problem for me, an advantage for you. I have to trust whoever’s using me.’
Hoob nodded. ‘You chose to trust us.’
Tallen closed his hand around the model and opened it. There was a small pool of blood in his palm. He put the model back on the desk, leaving a smear of red beside it.
Hoob stared at the blood as Tallen wiped his hand with a kerchief. ‘Okay. MedTech gave you all this and then let you go. Why would they do that? They invested a lot of money in you. They’re throwing it all away because you have a, a small problem?’
Tallen shrugged. Hoob would know how unlikely that was. People like Tallen, the consent in absentia cases, carrying fortunes of experimental tech, spent their lives paying it all off in research labs or else rented out by MedTech on day-rates to companies like Ronen. Only not to Ronen itself, as MedTech’s contractual monitoring requirements weren’t exactly to Ronen’s secretive taste. Tallen had done his research.
‘You know what it is, my problem. It’s in the notes in front of you.’
‘Let’s pretend I don’t understand it.’
‘You don’t need to worry,’ he told Hoob. ‘Everything works. This is just something they hadn’t anticipated. A compulsion.’
Hoob sat back and rocked in the chair, and Tallen realised Hoob didn’t understand it at all.
Tallen gave Hoob a moment to try and work out why MedTech would let such an investment walk away. They hadn’t seemed that disappointe
d. They’d told him no experiment fails – it just gives more valuable data.
And then he leaned forward and inked his finger with the blood on the desk, and rolled it across Hoob’s notepad, leaving a perfect print, and said, ‘I have a death compulsion.’
He hadn’t yet found a good way to say it. No one reacted well to it, though he’d discovered the word death went down better than suicide. It was always the same. They were fascinated, wanting details – what was he thinking right now, what sort of detail did he consider, had he ever actually tried something – or else they were disgusted. It stopped every form of interaction. Once anyone knew about it, everything else was swept away. Tallen had walked out of the hospital after signing away any rights to compensation from MedTech and tried to go back to his work, but found he couldn’t concentrate on anything. He couldn’t talk to anyone without thinking about –
‘What are you thinking now?’ Hoob said. ‘Right now.’
‘A close second is this job,’ Tallen said. ‘It’s perfect for me. I came out of hospital, and I’d changed. I searched around and I knew this was what I needed. You don’t know how much I –’
‘But right now?’
‘I could pick up that rig again and go for you with it.’ He made himself lean back, uncontrollably trembling with the excitement of it, the possibility, the adrenaline thrill. ‘I wouldn’t make it, I wouldn’t even get close –’ Tallen glanced at the ceiling monitors. ‘You’d make your move, I’d be shot in the back, or more likely a head shot. They wouldn’t take chances with me, no matter how safe that reference says I am.’ He felt a shiver of anticipation. ‘Suicide, not murder. That’s my compulsion. I could be dead in a moment. I could do it.’ He leant fractionally forward once more and came onto his toes, couldn’t help himself, watching Hoob tense. ‘That’s what I’m thinking right now.’
‘But you won’t do it.’
Tallen thought, does he seriously expect me to say no, to undo the possibility?