by Roger Levy
‘We’ve never let one back on a rig. That’s the truth. If they come back, they come back close enough to crazy. Now and then, someone stays out there beyond their first five. No one’s ever lasted more than seven. You still want to go? I’m just curious.’
‘Yes.’
Veale shrugged. ‘Okay. You’ve got it. You’re through.’
‘And?’
‘That’s it. We’re done.’
‘That’s it? But you know all this, how it drives people crazy. You’ve checked I’m right for it. You have to prepare me for it now. Isn’t that your job, once you’ve accepted me?’
‘No, Mr Tallen. You can’t be prepared for a rig. You can be out there a year, day up, day over, and think you know it all, and the next day, every next day, will show you something new, something worse. All I can do is warn you. So if you want to be prepared, listen to me.’ He flicked a finger on the edge of his desk and said, ‘Three things. Number one, you are not prepared for it.’
‘Your job is to prepare me.’
‘No. You will never be prepared, and the last part of my job, if you’re accepted, is to make you understand that. We used to try to prepare people, but it was worse than hopeless. If you ever get to a point where you think you’re ready for the rig, you’re only ready to die.’
He flicked the desk again. ‘Which is number two. As soon as you get to the rig, you are about to be dead.’
Tallen said, ‘I think that’s clear.’
‘Don’t be smart with me, Mr Tallen. You’re not the first and you’re not clever. Shall I tell you how I know you’re not clever?’
‘Tell me.’
‘You came here in the first place, knowing what everyone says about rigwork, and you’re still here now. If you were in any way clever, you’d be somewhere else. It isn’t smart to want to work on a rig, and it isn’t brave. On top of all that, you’re not scared. So you’re dumb too.’
Tallen shrugged.
‘But you still think you’re clever. What’s number one?’
‘I am not prepared.’
‘Yes. And number two is that you are about to be dead.’
Tallen leaned forward and flicked the desk with his own finger. ‘And number three is?’
‘You don’t need to worry about number three. It’s the easiest one of all. We’re doing it now. Number three is why you’re sitting here. You’re someone else’s number three.’ He waited for Tallen to show he got the point. ‘You’re only here, Mr Tallen, because someone else got killed. So that’s number three; because of you, someone else after you is also going to get killed. So you just worry about the first two.’
Tallen said, soberly, ‘So I’m not prepared and I’m going to die.’
‘You’re starting to hear me.’ Veale sat back. ‘Now. You want to say something?’
‘I’m not prepared and I’m going to a rig to be killed. What’s the point of me saying anything at all?’
‘That’s good. Don’t talk. Listen.’
Tallen tried to concentrate on the pen the psych was turning in his fingers, wondering if he could lunge for it. Veale had been ahead of him all along. He reckoned Veale would be prepared for anything he might try. He felt himself starting to shake.
As if confirming Tallen’s thoughts, the psych closed his hand on the pen and said, ‘Your rig allocation is in one of the worst sea regions. I don’t know what you did to him, but Hoob must have taken against you. He pushed you through and ticked you for this one. I’ll be honest with you, Mr Tallen, you test at the edge. My gut feeling is there’s something I couldn’t reach, but –’ He sighed. ‘Anyway, with an attitude like yours, you won’t last long enough for me to find your replacement. Are you still listening?’
‘You’re full of shit, Veale.’
‘Mr Tallen, you have no idea what you’re going out to. I’m trying to help you. Your rig’s seen rogue waves topping fifty metres, and it regularly sees sucking ebbs of more than twenty. In a bad sea, the topside architecture only rises to one-thirty, so you’ll occasionally be overwhelmed.’
‘Why don’t they extend it higher?’
Veale nodded. ‘You’re listening. Stability. And it’s designed to take direct hits from icebergs. You’re armed with shatter beams – they operate automatically, you’ll only be aware of them if the settings fail. The sarcs are a different matter. The current draws them into the area. They’re legally protected, so you can’t destroy them even if they threaten the integrity of the rig. In a bad sea, they can hit like torpedos.’
‘What keeps the rig in place?’
‘The rig’s a semi-submerged, which means it floats, more or less. Think of it as a balloon tethered to the sea floor. It’s anchored to a base by a circumferential set of sixty chains. The base weighs close to a million tons. It won’t shift. Rarely, at least. Distance from the lowest point on the rig’s structure to the base is about five hundred em. The chains won’t break. Rarely, at least. At the centre of the base is the wellhead. You with me? Too much information?’
‘Go on.’
‘The rig’s a very simple thing. Other than structural stuff, there’s just pipes and tanks. Pipes take gas and core from the well. Subsurface tanks around the rig hold core and gas piped from the well. Core is heavy, gas is light. Core acts as ballast, gas as a buoyancy agent. You shift them around, you keep the rig stable. You deballast and re-ballast, pump or void gas to keep the rig at the right depth. The engineers call it elegant. No one else who’s seen a rig ever has.’
‘Sounds straightforward. Will I feel it move?’
‘You shouldn’t. Part of your function is maintenance of the stability putery, so if you do feel it, something’s not right. You’ll find out precisely how your job works when you get there. No training needed. The rig’s self-sufficient in energy and water, and you don’t need to worry about food. There’ll be more than enough for you.’
Veale stood up and put his hand out, which took Tallen by surprise. ‘I still don’t understand you, and I know there’s something I’m missing. I really don’t know why Hoob let you through.’ It seemed to Tallen that there was something more that Veale might have been about to say instead of what he did end with. ‘We’re done here.’
* * *
Razer
‘Hey, hero,’ Razer said when Bale’s face came up on the screenery. Then when he failed to smile, she added, ‘Are you okay?’
‘No. You feel like some air? Where are you now?’
‘The red bar. What’s happened?’
‘They’ve pushed me.’
‘They’re always doing that.’ She wrapped her hands around the thick white tasse, letting the heat fade a moment before swallowing the caffé straight down. There was a swift rush but it wasn’t enough. On the screen, Bale’s eyes had the brightness of a focused drunk and Razer was unprepared for it. Bale wasn’t a day-drinker.
He said, ‘This isn’t that.’
‘Has something happened you haven’t told me? Have you done something?’
‘Nothing special. My job.’
‘I thought you were on leave.’
‘I was using my own time. I wanted one day of theirs. One day.’
‘Hell, Bale. I thought they told you not even to use your own time.’ Then, ‘Are you sure?’
‘I told you. I’m finished.’
She could feel the eyes of the few others in the bar on her, and dropped her voice. ‘You can’t be. Not for this. Someone’s just passing shit down the line and you’re the nearest bucket. As usual, Bale. Don’t take it personally.’ She tried to grin, feeling it not quite work, and said, ‘That’s your trouble, you take it all personally. And you take it too far. Give it a week.’
‘Navid called me in this afternoon. I get two months full pay, six months half pay, but I’m already gone. They’ve cut my links.’
By now the caffé was waking her up enough to know she wasn’t helping at all. ‘That’s crazy. You can appeal. They can’t do this.’
‘They
can. This isn’t the usual shit. Navid’ll give me a dead reference if I look for a job here on Bleak, but if I look offworld he’ll give me a perfect one. They don’t want me out. They want me gone.’
‘Is this to do with –?’
He cut her off. ‘You can be at the promenade in ten minutes?’
‘Yes. I’ll see you there.’
She paid for the drinks and left the bar.
This had been inevitable. Bale was a fighter of lost causes and a lost cause himself. She’d imagined she would have left Bleak before it happened.
Now that she was thinking of leaving, she found herself as acutely conscious of the place as when she’d arrived. Odd how you got used to anything, in time. Even Lookout, an impossible town on an impossible planet. Flick off the shield and it would be gone in a moment, without trace. Bleak was more harsh and unyielding than any other planet she’d seen, and she’d seen most of them. Second by second, nowhere else in the System cost a fraction of what Bleak cost to keep going. If not for the rigs and the sarcs, it would have been abandoned to darkness and chaos. All the other planets were slowly becoming more habitable, but Bleak remained as it had first, reflexively, been named. No attempt had ever been made to fool anyone with a bright new label for Bleak.
She moved through the streets, heading for the promenade and Bale. The daylight here was always at precisely the same level. Maybe it was to give some illusion of security, of the predictability of a next moment. And the buildings – away from the sea – were uniform. That way, anything that failed was immediately apparent and instantly made safe.
Made safe. The thought reminded her of the killings and took her back to Bale again.
She felt too closely connected with it. Of course she was interested, how could she not be? She’d been drinking with Bale the night before. She felt involved, even a little responsible, which was crazy. And it hadn’t helped to see Tallen lying there in the hospital bed in that exoskeleton frame, only his jaw moving like it was gnawing away at him. The frame, so like the ribs of a coffin, had made her shudder. Not for the first time, she’d wondered if they ever returned to consciousness in those sarcs, screaming, hammering at their box like in some old story.
There was Tallen, though. She’d discovered he was out of hospital, but she hadn’t seen him again in the red bar and didn’t know where else to look. She wanted to see him. Why? Maybe she was slipping. Bale and then Tallen.
She walked on, more quickly. The streets began to gain some character as she approached the shore, qualcrete chipping and cracking, buildings dropping down to twin and then single storey. She could hear the lisping thrum a few streets before its source came into view. As she passed the last dilapidated structure she saw Bale leaning against the low wall of the promenade, his broad, solid back to her, looking out at the sea.
Twenty
ALEF
SigEv 25 Another death
A week passed, and the next. I went out more frequently at night, visiting the bar, but there was nothing from Pellonhorc. I found myself thinking of my parents. Sometimes I missed them so much. I often thought of my mother’s cookies, and of playing with the putery in my father’s shop. I remembered how we would play with water, generating and calculating the complex movements of water in streams and rivers. I still did that, when I felt especially alone.
It should have taken Drame’s convoy two weeks to reach their destination. Drame, of course, would not be on it when it arrived, but he was somewhere in hiding to preserve the secret of that.
Maybe Ligate hadn’t taken the hook. Or maybe he’d gone from Vegaschrist but evaded Belleger’s team and returned home safely. Success or failure, we should have heard by now; from Belleger if success, or from Drame’s spies in the event of failure. But there was only the continuing slow buildup of forces and weaponry around Vegaschrist and the Eden String, the steady increase in Ligate’s statistical probability of swift success.
Then Drame reappeared. The first I knew of it was a call for me to come immediately to his office. He was sitting there as if he’d never left, Madelene standing behind him, staring at me with that mix of amusement and disdain that she reserved for me. Her face, with extraordinary precision, matched a stillpic I’d used on Gehenna in order to learn how to read emotion.
Drame’s face was drawn and pale. Something had happened, that was for sure.
I said, ‘Is he dead?’
Drame nodded, but I wasn’t confident that his expression was right for such news. He said, ‘You’ve heard, then.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing came to The Floor. What about Belleger?’
Madelene cut in. ‘He doesn’t know, Ethan. He doesn’t know what you’re talking about. He’s a moron. Look at him.’
‘You’re telling me Ligate’s dead,’ I said, ignoring her. ‘But Belleger? Is he all right?’
Drame shook his head. ‘I haven’t heard anything from Belleger or our spy. And nothing of Ligate. No, Alef. It’s Solaman.’
Everything felt blurry around me. I tried for a moment to understand it. I remembered him tipping his head and saying to me, ‘What’s in a name?’ Oh, Solaman, I thought. Solicitous. Solace.
Madelene snorted. ‘He didn’t even know, Ethe. Look at him, he’s dribbling.’
‘Solaman’s dead,’ I whispered.
I tried to think about numbers, but couldn’t. I was crying weirdly, like I had the hiccups at the same time.
‘Give him a noserag, Madly,’ Drame said, but when she moved it was to flounce round the desk and out of the office, slamming the door in her wake.
‘She’s upset,’ Drame told me. ‘The funeral’s tomorrow. You leave The Floor for the day. I’ll have you picked up.’ He looked at me. He seemed old, suddenly. ‘Your father, and now Solaman. Maybe Belleger too. We should have heard something by now. I’m going to have to take good care of you, Alef.’
* * *
SigEv 26 A funeral, a mystery, a message
Solaman’s funeral was a major event. The coming war didn’t enter my thoughts. I kept seeing Solaman in my mind, and he was asking me riddles about his name. But all I could think of was Solitude.
One of Drame’s armoured flycykles picked me up at the door of the building. We flew in convoy, Drame and Madelene in the first machine, then me, and then everyone else. There were eighty-four flycykles in all, with two hundred and fifty-five outriders.
I knew how powerful Ethan Drame was in terms of the numbers, but until the day of Solaman’s funeral, I had never seen his power manifested. The entire city was closed down. We flew above a world in mourning and fear, everyone standing on the streets and dressed in nova-white. We broke out through the city limits in a wash of pressure that rocked the flycykle, and wheeled over the deadground where Solaman was to be released.
I’d seen burials as a child back on Gehenna, rituals heavy with hymning and celebrations of everlasting life. This was very different. The flycykles landed in a park adjacent to the deadground. Because we were outside the city with its filtered air, a temporary shield had been set up, and it hissed intrusively. The ground was fissured and bouldered, though the fine dust had been blown clear. I, with my memories of Gehenna, saw it as a reminder of how tenuous our grasp of existence was. I imagine Drame saw it as mere fact, and Madelene as a threat to her heels.
And how did Pellonhorc see it?
Yes, Pellonhorc was there. He arrived at the deadground in the flycykle directly behind mine. As he dismounted, we saw each other at the same time, each of us registering the position the other held in the hierarchy. He looked a great deal older, and more than just older. He had had surgery, the sort of augmentations that soldiers had if they could afford them. His forehead was bulked out, the skin stretched and shining, translucent, and he walked awkwardly. He reminded me a little of Garrel, and I wondered whether Garrel would be here today.
‘Alef,’ Pellonhorc said, striding over to me. ‘How long has it been?’
‘Two months, five days –’
He laughed, and I stopped. I said, ‘Did you know Solaman?’
‘A little,’ he said, with a wave of his hand. ‘Now it’s just you and me, Alef.’ He squinted at me. ‘You don’t look right, you know that?’
Madelene was walking towards us. She came to a halt a few metres away, glanced briefly at Pellonhorc and said, ‘Alef, Ethan wants you to sit with us for the release.’
I nodded for Pellonhorc to come, but Madelene repeated, ‘Alef,’ in such a way that it was clear that Pellonhorc wasn’t invited.
Pellonhorc’s face emptied of all expression. ‘I brought some absentee condolences.’ He showed her a small message flake.
Madelene raised her eyes, gestured towards the release pit and said, ‘Take it to the screenery with all the others. We’ll be here all day with them. Find yourself a seat.’ Then she smiled at me. It was a real smile, but I knew it wasn’t meant for me. It was just for Pellonhorc to observe.
He turned and walked off to join the queue of people waiting to load condolences into the skyscreenery.
The entrance to the deadground was a broad arch framed by the words Beyond Death, Memory. Through the arch, we gave our names to the ushers and were guided to our seats in the amphitheatre. Drame, Madelene and I were seated at the front, metres from the release pad, where closest relatives sat. It struck me that I had no idea whether Solaman had any living relatives other than me.
I sat on Ethan Drame’s right, Madelene on his left. It took almost an hour for everyone to file in and sit down, and many came up to us – to me as much as to Drame, even though none of them realised Solaman and I were related – and told us how sorry they were, and that life is more in memory than in flesh. The releaser eventually called for silence, and said, ‘As we would have been, so we shall be remembered,’ and it was repeated all around the amphitheatre, though I only mouthed the words. On Gehenna they were heresy. Now, even though I believed in nothing at all, I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. The releaser waited for the echo to die, then said, ‘As we would be remembered, so should we be.’ The amphitheatre repeated it. I didn’t, but nor did I forget the phrase.