The Rig

by Roger Levy

  Her heart jumped. ‘Bale –’

  ‘Just listen to me. Paxers use the Chute a lot, Razer. There was a guy I rode with a few years ago. He was better than good, but he was trouble. He left Pax and Bleak, and we heard he’d become a crimer. His name was Millasco.’

  The walls were flying past. She went to auto, concentrating on Bale.

  ‘After I came out of hospital, someone wearing gold NTGs tumbled me in the Chute. And then Navid, just before he pushed me, told me I’d been warned.’

  ‘By Delta. You told me about it.’

  ‘No, not by Delta. Navid had no idea she’d said anything to me.’

  ‘So he meant what happened in the Chute?’

  ‘I think so. I think Millasco is back on Bleak. Gold NTG boots were always his marker.’

  ‘Bale –’

  ‘I think he was Fleschik’s partner. I think they had me set up for this all along. They made a kill just by where I was, so I’d be the one to follow. I think Millasco killed Fleschik. Delta told me there was an audit team at Pax. They knew my record ahead of time. You see? They used the cams; they knew I was drinking that night.’

  ‘So I’m responsible? I didn’t get you drunk, Bale. You did that all by yourself.’

  She waited for Bale to laugh that away, but he didn’t. She thought of Cynth telling her to stay with Bale. Now wasn’t the time to tell him that, though. She thought about telling him she may have been dummied, but this wasn’t the time for that either. The possibility that she may have been involved in the event somehow made her even more angry at him.

  They flew in silence for a minute, then Bale said, ‘They’d have had me, drunk or not. Either way, I came out on the street, they used Delta to get me to the alley and down the sewers.’

  ‘Why would they do that, Bale? It’s too complicated. There’s no reason.’

  ‘You’re right. I’m not that important.’

  ‘At least that’s one delusion we don’t need to worry about.’

  To her relief, he fell silent. Razer nilled the auto and settled into a rhythm of small spins and turns, Bale keeping pace with her, trailing and anticipating her moves, pointing out air currents and eddies, letting her dip her fins in them and get used to steering clear. He watched her throw out lines to check her speed and made sure she knew when it was safe to retract them without risk of getting tangled and when simply to cut them and let them perish in the wind. He said, ‘Once they’re cut loose, they’re designed to molecularise in half a second. You’ve only got about one-fifty em of line on each hand and foot, and you’ll average ten em each shot, so retract it if you can, but don’t risk it if you aren’t sure. If you run out of line, it just makes flying awkward, but if you tangle, you die.’

  She was barely listening. She loved the way the lines flicked out and dragged in fine curves, the way she could time a line-retraction, the beautiful whipback of it, to straighten her out of the turn. She loved everything about this.

  ‘You’re not bad,’ he said, and they flew on, swirling around each other in tight helices and plunging away again. Several times he dropped back, disappeared briefly, then rejoined her, the comms losing even its background hiss in his absences. She was concentrating too hard to look for him, and having too much fun.

  Then he was at her side and talking again. ‘The dead, they were nothing too. I’ve checked them all. They were no ones. Tallen’s a no one too. Why did they let him survive?’

  ‘Just give it up, Bale. You’re crazy. Let’s enjoy this.’

  ‘What happened to him was different. He has to be the key, Razer.’ He swooped away and back again.

  ‘This is all insane,’ she said, angry with him for spoiling the joy of it all, angry at herself, too, for not telling him she might be involved. ‘That’s it. You’ve shown me the Chute. You’ll make a great guide. If the ride doesn’t scare them enough, you can tell them your stories.’

  ‘I know you’re a part of it, Razer. I can’t fit you into it, though. You finding me here, that’s too much of a coincidence.’

  ‘Happenstance, Bale,’ she said, uncomfortably. ‘You’re grinding the facts you like to fit some grand fantasy. It’s no better than god logic.’

  ‘You were in the bar, talking to Tallen, before we met. You were talking about AfterLife.’

  ‘Everyone talks about AfterLife. I talk to lots of people about it.’

  ‘Not to me, you didn’t. Not that quickly.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be comfortable with it. Like I was questioning you. I want to go back now, Bale.’

  ‘We can’t. Only forward, to the end.’

  ‘This is stupid.’

  ‘It’s a test.’

  An eddy caught her and she spun, corrected, and said, ‘A test? What do you mean?’

  ‘If you’re part of it, Millasco won’t want you dead, Razer. He’ll just want me, because I’m still asking questions.’

  ‘And if I’m not part of it?’ she said uncomfortably.

  ‘Then you’ll know I’m right.’

  ‘How will I know that?’

  ‘Easy. If I’m just a drunk who’s lost his job and won’t accept it, why is there a rider behind us wearing gold NTGs?’

  Twenty-eight

  ALEF

  SigEv 31 Consolidation

  I went from the bar to The Floor to find it guarded by Belleger’s men and the building in a state of flux. People were leaving and being removed. Some were injured, some dead. All of this had been planned and carried out by Pellonhorc, and I had suspected nothing. None of it had been foreshadowed in my weave.

  I stayed on The Floor with my people as Pellonhorc fed the details of Ligate’s network into my putery. As we organised the data, I became calmer. Unlike Pellonhorc, who seemed to abhor stability, I coped badly with change. His reliance on me was reassuring, though. I was safe, and my work, while its load was significantly greater, remained. And Pireve was there, too. She appeared especially relieved at my return.

  I seemed for the first weeks to have lost my hard-won powers of empathy. The trauma of those minutes in the midlock brought my parents’ deaths back to me in a vivid manner, and I could not come to terms with the fact that I had failed entirely to predict Pellonhorc’s actions.

  So I worked. The challenge was immense, and I was grateful for it.

  While it took a long time, most of the new business was easy to incorporate. As in any merger, there were redundancies. There were also some shortlived efforts at local management takeovers, and other actions of concern. As soon as I identified these, Pellonhorc dealt with them. A few small organisations were resistant, and these swiftly and utterly vanished. Ethan Drame, in the same situation, would simply have killed or mutilated a few people and turned the businesses back to us, but Pellonhorc had everyone killed and the businesses obliterated, regardless of loss. Word spread that there was no mercy. This made my calculations and extrapolations more straightforward. The weave stretched and ripped, but the damage was done in a few months and we began to rebuild.

  Pellonhorc let it be known that Ligate had died in an accident and that Ethan Drame had been injured and might not be returning. Over time, might not became would not, and everything started to settle. After all, these were businesses accustomed to the unexpected. With Pellonhorc at the head, there was still an air of danger, but there was also a sense of absolute certainty. With his father, the threat had always been that he might do something out of proportion and with no warning. He had been volatile. His empire had been built purely on threat and death, and whenever that had misfired, he had corrected it by more of the same. He had always said that one could be extremely successful in business if one was prepared to kill without warning or compunction.

  Pellonhorc had his father’s ruthlessness, but he had also learnt to plan meticulously. He possessed something else as well, though – something all his own. All that Ethan Drame had ever wanted was more. His son had a definite goal.

  This was quite clear to me. It was t
here in the single-minded way he had used his father against Ligate, and Ligate against his father. I hadn’t seen that coming and neither had they. Neither of them had been able to read him, and nor had I. But my mistake was to assume that his goal was power and wealth. It wasn’t.

  Months passed, and then the first year of Pellonhorc’s rule had gone by. My mind was still numb, but my brain was sharper than ever.

  There were constant threats to the business, but nothing of any significance. What had created Pellonhorc created imitators, but he was the most successful, and perhaps what had created him had been a unique conjunction of extraordinary elements.

  And I am not – nor was I – blind to the fact that I was a crucial part of his design. It was my brain that held it together. I had fooled myself that I’d been preparing to destroy his father, and now I told myself I was actually holding Pellonhorc in check. Without my influence, I convinced myself, there would be an immense bloodbath.

  But in reality, whenever for a moment I took my attention from The Floor, I acknowledged to myself that I was more terrified of my friend than I had ever been of Ethan Drame.

  After that day at the house, I never talked to him about his father, and never mentioned Ligate. Ligate’s death would not have been easy, and it was obvious enough that even if his father had not bled to death where we had left him, Pellonhorc would have exacted a long-anticipated retribution for his terrible treatment of his own son.

  Gradually, my life eased. On The Floor, my friendship with Pireve grew stronger. She frequently seemed to need my help, though it was usually clear that she knew all along what she was doing. One evening we left The Floor at the same time, and that evening we slept together, and after that we began to associate with each other outside The Floor more frequently. Our relationship slipped quite quickly from being of small consequence to me, to being of significance to everybody around me. I was probably the last to realise its actual depth.

  During this time, the borders of the city crept closer towards the house Ethan Drame had been building. Eventually the city’s shield incorporated the house and Pellonhorc moved into it. This event was reported throughout the Song and marked a Systemwide acknowledgement of his power and influence. He was described as a successful businessman and entrepreneur. I was mentioned too, as his inseparable friend and partner. There was one brief reference to me as ‘the power behind the throne’, which troubled me, and I had it excised.

  There were women in Pellonhorc’s life, too, though they never lasted long, one way or another. Pellonhorc started to talk of his empire going on forever. He talked of death generally, and of his own death, though I paid no real attention to this.

  My weave was growing more complicated, now, as was my life with Pireve. Pellonhorc never mentioned her, though I was sure he was aware of our association.

  My father and Ethan Drame had always taken advantage of the various laws on different planets, just as law-abiding businesses did, though those businesses lacked our range of actions. But Pellonhorc went further, bringing lawmakers, bureaucrats and politicians into his organisation. They were given gifts of money and they were listened to. When they had problems, the problems were solved for them. It’s a pleasure. You’re a friend. They were asked for nothing in return, and then they were asked for small, effortless favours that flattered them, and then they were asked for more awkward favours and rewarded well for that. And gradually they discovered that the larger favours were not so hard to carry out, and the rewards considerable. They also discovered that the people around them who might have been expected to object to some of these favours failed either to object or to exist.

  Pellonhorc was an expert at all of this. He called himself, when he wanted to be amusing, a Darwinian. Perhaps if I had not been there, the organisation would not have lasted so long or become so extensive. But I made sure that nothing we did threatened the System’s stability. If anything, we encouraged trade and communication. No one became too greedy, which is to say that of course many did, but didn’t survive. The organisation was not a parasite on the System. It was a symbiote.

  The only threat to all of this was the Song, which was awash with fact and invention and rumour. There was almost as much information as there was porn.

  The quality of the information on the Song was impossible to judge. There were areas where it was sifted and classified as reliable or otherwise, but no one ever did anything about any of it.

  Our organisation grew. Only the unsaid planet remained out of our reach, and I was content with that, as they were no threat. Our operations went generally well. Occasionally a poorly managed action provoked a response from an administration or an anti-corruption committee, and the further action we were forced to take would set us back or cost us a few people. But there were always more people. There were always greed and fear.

  I roamed the Song when I couldn’t sleep, which was increasingly often. I had immense mental energy. The Song was a vast sea, stormy here, calm there, with its deeps and shallows. I rode its waves for hours. I would place a piece of false information somewhere and add comments of approval and support and corroboration, and adjust the usage parameters of the Song to give prominence to this information. And then I sat back and watched what happened.

  Night after night, I played the Song. I saw that after porn, health was the most popular topic, and I hurled myself into that field. People believed almost anything I threw out, as long as I invented data and attached a few stolen and adapted personal experiences. The more medics denounced and denied a thing, factually and conclusively, the more they were accused of suppressing the truth. The news media, only interested in the advertising its stories drew, promoted the possibility that rumour was fact.

  Day after day and tirelessly, I worked. I kept my head busy with analysis, ignored the realities of implementation. I found myself using the word when I was talking to Pellonhorc. We need to implement this.

  The organisation grew more and more powerful. I married Pireve.

  * * *

  SigEv 32 Happiness and hell

  Oh, my Pireve. I began to feel different. I began to feel, again. We were away from The Floor for two days, spending the time in Virtua. It was a strange time. I’d never been away from The Floor for more than a day before that. We woke up the second morning and she knelt astride my hips and said, ‘How does this feel, Alef?’

  ‘I love you,’ I said.

  She laughed. Her laugh was like screenery opening, with its gathering, rising peal. The first time we had sex, she had asked me that question, How does this feel?, and I told her how long it had lasted (four seconds) and how many thrusts I’d made before reaching my climax (almost two). Since then, I’d learnt to answer ‘I love you,’ whenever I was uncertain and about to go statistic with her. She told me it gave her pleasure to hear me say the words, regardless of why I was saying them. I’d also learnt to make it last longer and that the number of thrusts was less important than other things Pireve had taught me about sex.

  She said, ‘And I love you, my Alef, my alpha, my number one man.’

  We walked together. She said I had to understand her, and I said that I did.

  That laugh again. Oh, her laugh. ‘No, Alef. You have no idea! I’ll tell you what I like so much about you, shall I?’

  She said she liked me to take her hand. She liked eye contact. She liked me to explain things to her more slowly. She liked me, when she had finished telling me something, not to ask her why she had told me that. She liked me not to be quite so neat, but to achieve messyness without setting objects in the same asymmetric pattern each time. She liked me to eat my food in a way that mixed colours. She liked me to set the alarm to wake us, even though I never needed it. She liked me to tell her about the weave. She liked me to tell her why I was doing something on the weave. She liked me not to tell her quite so much.

  She asked me what it was that I liked about her. I told her I liked her to give me lists. And I told her I loved her.

&nbs
p; On the Song, I read about love, and tried to relate my understanding and experience to it. Judging by what people said, it was a sort of cancer of the emotions. I tried to make my own sense of it, and decided that up until then, my life had been numb, but now, with Pireve, the numbness had become paraesthesia, and I wondered whether that might lead to full sensation.

  The days in Virtua passed more swiftly than I had expected, away from The Floor.

  By the time we returned, Pellonhorc’s organisation had a name. It was referred to as the Whisper. Politicians were taking their orders from the Whisper. The Whisper was in control of this city and that corporation and the administrata of these planets. But Pellonhorc was not mentioned in connection with it.

  Much of what was rumoured was true. Politicians came to the city to meet Pellonhorc. The city was notoriously dangerous. Occasionally people failed to leave.

  This, at least, was what I still told myself. I found myself thinking about it, though, instead of just observing it and accepting it as I always had done. I noted the number of our associates brought to Peco to see Pellonhorc at his house. The small ship he used to have them conveyed there from the ferryport was called the Darwin.

  For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking about myself.

  I was in a state of terrible confusion, but I carried on working. I began slowly to tell Pireve about myself. About what I had done and seen. I cried, and she told me I was not a bad person.

  To remember this, to set this down, to set it down, makes me weep. To be understood, to have the worst of oneself heard and accepted. That is hard, but it is good, too.

  I carried on working, but I found it harder to separate the work that I was doing from its human consequences. I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what there was to do.

  Pellonhorc called me into his office. We talked unnecessarily about an impending legislative meeting on Prime. There were the people he trusted and the people he didn’t, and we discussed who would vote in our favour.