The Rig

by Roger Levy

  The deadground lay before us, and the officials set about preparing the small rocket for its flight. As they did, the skyscreenery came alive and the flaked messages of condolence hung in the air, trembling and spectral against the makeshift shield. Most were small greetings and reminiscences from people who had known Solaman. There were messages here from people living all over the System (except, of course, from Gehenna or the unsaid planet), and there were a number of mentions of my father as a close friend of Solaman, though none of my mother, Solaman’s sister. Twice there was reference to me as having given him joy, which stung and watered my eyes. Some of these messages were in the form of words scrolling across the sky, while others were images of the reader’s face, sombre or nervous as they spoke.

  And then the amphitheatre was still and entirely soundless; Spetkin Ligate’s face was shimmering before us.

  I glanced at Drame, who sat like stone. He hissed, ‘Get him away. How did he get here?’ His voice rose, though only Madelene and I could hear him, as Ligate’s image began to speak. And then Drame fell silent and sat back. He was right to. It was better to appear aware that this was going to happen. I glanced down and saw people at the screenery, trying to disengage it.

  Ligate said, ‘Oh, Ethan, Ethan!’

  Ethan sat immobile. Madelene started to move, then winced and held still. I noticed Drame’s fist around her wrist, twisting it, holding her. She went pale.

  ‘Oh, Ethan. First Saul, and now Solaman. And of course you lost your wife, too, Ethan. I almost forgot about her – but then, so have you.’ A pause. ‘Madelene, it’s good to see you.’ The image nodded, as if it were something more than a threedy. A brief thrill of muttering ran around the amphitheatre and there was silence again. Ligate was continuing.

  ‘I am grateful for this opportunity to address you all. Ethan, you’re well, I trust? I hope you’re guarding your remaining loved ones. You can’t afford to lose any more, can you?’

  I was reminded of Father Grace at a Gehennan funeral, chiding the survivors, warning them of the horrors to come should they not observe the commands of the Babble.

  ‘Who is there to look over Alef’s shoulder? And Pellonhorc, your son? Are you watching him closely enough? Whose interests is he looking after?’

  Ligate’s face swelled as he said, ‘As you would be remembered, Ethan.’ His face gleamed like polished copper. ‘Remember Saul. Remember Solaman. They are gone and gone. You too will be memory, Ethan, and sooner than you imagine.’

  The swollen face turned, side to side, the image distorting against the star-cracked sky. ‘All of you here at the deadground are witness to this.’ His voice became softer. ‘More than one of you is already with me.’

  There was a moment’s perfect silence, then Ligate carried on. ‘Until Drame’s own release, I shall accept and absolve any more of you who wish to come to me.’ Silence again, and then Ligate’s voice stiffened. ‘But respond swiftly, for as soon as Ethan Drame has been released into death, that door will be closed and you will be abandoned.’

  A dizzying fizz of light, and Ligate’s image disappeared.

  All around the amphitheatre, people began to chatter.

  Drame rose slowly to his feet. The chatter shrank away. As the next message of condolence flared in the sky, Drame unholstered a weapon from within his long mourning coat and took slow aim at the projection tablet, and fired. The tablet cracked and split, and the message vanished.

  ‘Spetkin Ligate,’ Drame whispered. He didn’t need to speak more loudly. There was no other sound in the deadground but the hiss of the shield above us. Everyone was listening.

  ‘Ligate talks of memory.’ Drame scythed his hand through the air. ‘But where is he? Is he here? No, he is not.’

  Drame tilted his head as if expecting to be contradicted. He spread his arms wide. ‘We are here for our friend Solaman. For Solaman.’

  A few people nodded.

  ‘Solaman is no longer here. He is memory. But his memory will remain. Ligate is not here, is he?’ Drame drew a long breath and roared, ‘LIGATE!’

  He waited. Silence.

  ‘SPETKIN LIGATE!’

  Silence again.

  Drame let his voice fall. ‘He isn’t here. Of course not. He promises you that I will soon become memory, and that you can join him before that time.’

  He waited. There was a perfect silence.

  ‘It’s an easy promise, isn’t it? It costs nothing and it means nothing. It’s a promise that he can keep easily enough. He can keep it all his life, because he will be my memory before I am his.’ He looked slowly, steadily, around the amphitheatre, and then said, slowly and steadily, ‘Does anyone here doubt that?’

  He waited. His calm was extraordinary.

  Then he whispered, ‘Spetkin Ligate’s promise is worth less than his piss. I shall give you Ethan Drame’s promise.’

  He held up a single finger. ‘One person brought this message to Solaman’s release. Maybe I might have discovered who that person was, had I not destroyed the projector. Maybe not. Did I destroy it in fury? No. Shall I tell you why I did it?’

  No one moved. No one dared. He said, ‘I destroyed it to safeguard their identity, so that I could make a promise to them. This is my promise. Against Ligate’s piss-promise of safety to all of you, I promise just one person, the person who acts for Ligate, that you may leave now in guaranteed safety. This is Ethan Drame’s word.’

  He was like a preacher. Word, he had said, as if it were an equation or a proof. How could anyone not have believed him?

  ‘Go. Leave in safety and join him.’ He paused, then made a great gesture with his arms and said, ‘Or stay! Only come to me later, privately, and you will have my unconditional pardon. I give my word to this, as everyone here witnesses, and –’

  I realised that his voice had gradually been rising, and now it reached a crescendo as he said, ‘– I have never broken my word.’

  He was quick and he was cunning, was Ethan Drame. He had turned the attack around. From a challenge on his home ground, following the loss of one of his most precious tacticians, he had confirmed Ligate as an untrustworthy coward and declared himself a man of honour.

  Naturally, no one left the amphitheatre, but the cleverest part had been Drame’s final gesture. Of course the agent would not take up the offer of secret confession and forgiveness, but it would appear to everyone else at the deadground that they might. And if more than one person here was an agent of Ligate, they would no longer trust each other.

  He let all this sink in, and then he said, mildly, ‘So, Ligate? Are you here? No? What was it you said? Hmm?’ He put a hand to his ear and waited, then whispered into the emptiness, his words drifting clearly around the arena, ‘I can’t remember what you said. You are barely in my memory.’

  His voice grew once more. ‘And after I have destroyed you, Spetkin Ligate, I shall destroy even your memory.’ He raised his hands, palms up, then suddenly turned them over and said, ‘There will have been – nothing.’

  The tumultuous applause began as he sat down, and it carried on for some minutes. The ceremony of Solaman’s release was a small thing after this drama. The rocket went up with a fizz, its afterburn etched briefly on our retinas as a symbol of his memory in our thoughts, and that was it. For all their ludicrousness, I preferred the pomp of Gehennan funerals.

  * * *

  SigEv 27 Trust

  Drame left with Madelene. When I reached my flycykle, Pellonhorc was there, leaning casually against the dark curve of its cockpit. He said, ‘My machine’s broken down. I’ll travel with you. I’ll drive. Your driver can wait with mine.’ He left me nothing to say, so I sat down and let him lift us into the air. Below us, people were swarming out of the deadground gates.

  As we rose above the arena, I said, ‘What happened to your flycykle?’

  ‘It was sabotaged. Clever.’

  He glanced at me and saw I didn’t understand. ‘Ligate’s making my father think one of us is against hi
m. You or me, Alef. If Ligate makes me travel with you, my father will wonder if we’re both in league with him.’

  ‘You didn’t have to come with me. You could have waited for your machine to be fixed, or returned with someone else.’

  ‘We’re childhood friends. More suspicious if I hadn’t done this.’

  He was right. Always he was ahead of me. ‘Who is it, then?’ I said. ‘Who brought the message? Who sabotaged your flycykle? Who’s the spy?’

  ‘You’re the thinker, Alef. Madelene?’

  ‘She has nothing to gain. She already has everything.’

  ‘Ligate could be blackmailing her. If it was Madelene who betrayed my mother’s location to Ligate, to get her killed –’

  ‘Her face is unhappy more than fifty per cent of the time,’ I told him. ‘I think she was happier as a mistress.’

  ‘She may have imagined otherwise.’

  The ground spun past. Half-completed roads, exposed pipes and cables, sulphurous pools. ‘Maybe there’s no one,’ I said. ‘Ligate could have tricked someone into carrying the message innocently, without even knowing they were doing it.’

  ‘It’s possible. My father would never believe that. He’d rather believe it was me. Maybe it was. I didn’t check all the messages I was given. If I was Ligate, I’d have used me if I could.’

  I could see Pecovin’s shield ahead, glittering like the lees of a galaxy. We’d be there soon.

  ‘Your father told me to take the day off,’ I said. ‘You?’

  ‘I leave again this evening.’

  We hit the shield, and he swung the flycykle round as we ground through it, so that we clung to the disturbance for a few seconds and continued to skim the inner edge. I knew we were untrackable in the magnetic flux. The flycykle shuddered. I glanced at the readings, all of them blinking MANUAL OVERRIDE. PLEASE EXIT SHIELD NOW. Pellonhorc was bumping the flycykle steadily along the shield without any of the putery. His voice was even. ‘I have an apartment my father doesn’t know about,’ he said.

  I stared rigidly out of the window. I wanted to shout at him, Come away from the shield, but I knew how he’d react to that. As steadily as I could, I said, ‘This flycykle might be monitored. There might be ears.’

  ‘There’s nothing now. I checked while I was waiting for you.’

  On my left, through the shield, I could see the deadground shivering, the colours separating and merging. On my right was Pecovin tilting and yawing like a city in a dream. I fixed on the console, which was now rapidly blinking, EXIT SHIELD IMMEDIATELY and beeping in phase with the script. I said, ‘He’ll be suspicious. This may not be a good idea. And I think I’m going to puke if we don’t crash first.’

  ‘You won’t puke. You never puke.’ We screeched on, losing height.

  I had puked at the deaths of my parents, and Pellonhorc had seen it. As a child, I had puked at some of the things he had done to animals. He only ever remembered what he wanted to, while I remembered everything.

  Pellonhorc’s hands shuddered with the effort of controlling the handstick. He said, ‘My father’s always suspicious. He’d be more suspicious if I didn’t act suspiciously. I’m a bad influence, Alef. I have to act like one.’

  I closed my eyes. I couldn’t work him out. This was how it had always been between us. I tried to make simplicity out of complexity, and he turned the simple into the complex. Pellonhorc was the only person who ever baffled me. When we had been children, his complexity had mostly been his own confusion, but now it seemed honed and deliberate.

  He took the flycykle low and came away from the shield a few metres from the ground, hard and fast, dropping it to a stop in an apartment block’s underpark. It was a cheap premoulded hulk. I could see the advantage for him in a premould. There was nowhere to hide bugs or cams.

  His apartment was bare, and we sat on steel chairs at a steel table. He heated some saké and stirred powdercaff into it. It tasted foul.

  ‘It doesn’t matter who the traitor is, Alef,’ he said. ‘If it’s you, I’m not interested.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ I began to say, but he waved me to silence.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter. Though if it were Madelene and I find out she had my mother killed…’ He squeezed the saké glass and looked at me seriously. ‘We’re in danger, you and I, Alef. My father might behave stupidly again.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘He murdered Ligate’s family. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘That was an accident.’

  ‘Apparently not. Ligate and my father used to do business. Ligate did a small stupid thing, and my father found out and did a very big stupid thing. And now we have this.’

  He sipped the black drink, watching me.

  ‘What do we do?’ I said.

  ‘You wait for me. Keep going to the bar. I’ll be in touch.’ He stood up. ‘This is a big game, Alef. The biggest. You might think you’re a player, but you’re not. You and I, we’re just part of the stakes. Don’t ever think otherwise.’ He waited for me to nod, then said, ‘I’ve heard stories of people being killed in the Eden String near Vegaschrist, businesses going down, my father making mistakes. You know anything about that?’

  ‘How do you know about it?’

  ‘Don’t try to play with me, Alef. Do you know what I do? Where I’ve been?’

  I shook my head. ‘No one will say.’

  ‘I’m out in the Eden String. That’s where my father sent me. I keep everything running smoothly there. Try to.’ He drained the black drink and said, ‘I know what you do, Alef; you’re the one who decides what I do.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. Didn’t know it’s you out there.’

  ‘Why would my father tell you? You might worry about me. It might enter your calculations.’

  I looked to see if he was joking, but there was no sign of it.

  He said, ‘Is there anything I should know?’

  ‘There may be a localised revolt in the String near Vegaschrist,’ I said carefully. ‘Perhaps you should stay away from there.’

  ‘No more than that?’

  Something in his voice cautioned me. I said, ‘Is there more?’

  ‘There’s rumour all across the String that Ligate’s taking control, city by city. I’m losing influence and I’m losing men. If you hear anything – if you know anything – you’ll tell me, won’t you, Alef?’

  I said nothing. I was trembling and he surely saw it.

  He said, ‘My father must know what’s going on. If anything happens, you have to give me warning. I’m his son, Alef, and everyone in the String knows that. My life is at stake. I have to go back there as soon as I leave Peco. You can’t imagine how it is. I survive on my weaponry and my wits. I hardly sleep. I am my father’s reach, Alef. Out there I’m strong because of him. As soon as he stops being strong, I’m dead.’

  I knew, as certainly as I was holding the truth from him, that he was holding something from me. But at the same time I trusted him more than I had ever trusted anyone except my parents. And I knew that he trusted no one more than he trusted me.

  And yet with all that trust between us, we said nothing further, and parted.

  Twenty-one

  RAZER

  What could she say to Bale? What was there to say?

  ‘Tallen,’ he said, looking out at the sea. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  The promenade carried on to their left and right. Every few metres were signs warning of the sea, of immediate danger and longterm risk.

  ‘You’re crazy, Bale. I thought you’d been fired.’

  He half-turned to face her. ‘Tallen doesn’t fit the pattern.’

  ‘Just because he isn’t dead?’

  ‘No. We’ve identified the K. His name was Emel Fleschik. His other kills that morning still don’t fit with Tallen. It all stinks of shit.’

  ‘It was the sewers, Bale. What else is it going to stink of? You need to think about something else. Your job’s lost and you have to accept i
t.’ She rested her arms on the warm promenade wall. It was a fine day, the high shield glittering and the cloud beyond it moving fast. There was a faint tang of ammonia but nothing more. ‘You saved Tallen. You’d rather he was dead so the pattern can fit?’

  He started walking. They passed a few other people leaning on the wall, staring out at the brilliant colours of the sea and sky. Razer automatically examined their expressions. They looked as if stunned. Bleak did that to you.

  She followed Bale down the worn steps onto the stony beach. The heat instantly came up through her boots. Where the pebbles were dry, up by the steps, their colour was muted, a range of browns and steel-greys, but further down the shore where the surf washed over them, the water made them glorious. Sulphur yellows, cobalt blues and more, elemental chromas that made the universe dull in comparison. At each withdrawal of the surf, the hot stones vaporised the water and the brilliance faded. Every new wave tumbled the stones and drew fresh ribbons of colour. It had been wonderful from the promenade, but close up, it was astonishing.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she couldn’t help saying to Bale, as if they were in love.

  Bale stopped, his boots slipping on the stones. He made a gesture at the horizon. ‘You never get used to it. You learn to look away. Out to sea, or back to the town. They –’ he indicated the observers at the wall. ‘They haven’t worked it out yet.’

  ‘Mm.’

  His face was in her way. She said, ‘Hey,’ and realised she’d been doing it herself, staring mesmerised. She looked away from Bale, at the shield-shimmering sky.

  ‘Where we are now, this is the edge of everything,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve heard that.’

  After a moment, he said, quietly, ‘Do you ever stop filing it away?’

  She looked carefully at him. It reminded her of what she liked in Bale, this abrupt swerving away before closing in on his point. He could be sharp as ice. She’d never met anyone like him, that was certain. Infuriating bastard. She said, ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Exactly what is it you do, Razer?’