by Roger Levy
His shoulders tensed and he began to pull on the rope.
‘Help me, Alef,’ Pellonhorc hissed.
Calo was phenomenally powerful. He began hauling Pellonhorc off the floor towards him. The loop was still around his neck, but the tension was beginning to ease and the big man was breathing again in short rattling bursts.
‘Alef! Do something!’
I panicked. I grasped the quivering chain at a point midway between Pellonhorc and Calo, took a breath and managed to twist a loop of it around my fist, instantly feeling the two lives pulling against each other.
And at the same time I realised I had trapped myself between the two of them. I could pull either way, but I couldn’t pull out.
Calo mouthed, ‘Alef.’
It was tempting. Pellonhorc was dying. He would die anyway. I could finish it. But I threw myself against Pellonhorc, my extra weight grinding Calo’s head on the table. He was an arm’s length away from me, eyes bulging terribly and his bloated, purple tongue filling his mouth. I continued to heave. He choked a little and went abruptly limp.
‘Stop,’ Pellonhorc cried out.
I slumped, my hand damp with sweat and still tangled in the loose chain.
‘Look!’ Pellonhorc said, gasping and sitting up.
Calo coughed feebly. A hand twitched and caught the chain again, but without any strength.
‘In his eyes,’ Pellonhorc whispered. ‘Did you see anything? Alef!’
Calo’s head lifted fractionally and bumped back against the table. He put a hand towards his throat and dribbled a little, his saliva red and frothy.
‘Pull again, a little more,’ Pellonhorc told me. ‘Not too much.’
I leaned back hard on the chain, with all my strength. I think I was sobbing.
‘No! Too much,’ Pellonhorc cried again, but I kept pulling until long after Calo had stopped moving. I pulled until Pellonhorc stopped screaming at me to let go.
After I had disentangled the chain from my fist, I stumbled from the room and went straight home to Pireve. I couldn’t sleep. All night my hand pulsed and shot with pain. I thought of Calo’s neck wrung like an animal’s and his legs running in air. If I closed my eyes, I saw his eye sockets, but there were no eyes there, only two purple tongues reaching out towards me.
The next morning, I went straight to Pellonhorc’s office. He was sitting at the desk, quite relaxed, the chain coiled on the desk. My hand was swollen and aching, etched around with the chain’s helical weave.
‘I’ve dealt with it,’ he said. He was calmer than I’d seen him for a long time. ‘They’ve all been replaced.’
‘There will be others,’ I told him. ‘Next time you’ll be weaker.’
‘I know.’ He looked directly at me. ‘I’ve been thinking about going into rv while you find a cure.’
For a moment I didn’t believe what I’d heard, and then I started to gabble, explaining it all over again. He raised his good hand and said, ‘I’ll need a guarantee that the rv won’t fail and I’ll need a guarantee of the research going ahead, even without you, Alef. A guarantee.’
I nodded, though I had no idea how I could do that. ‘Yes,’ I told him.
It was not quite a lie, since I was sure I’d be able to do it. I couldn’t actually lie to him, but as long as I could see a grain of truth, I could extrapolate, just as I did when I communicated with people in the Song.
Pellonhorc said, ‘The seeds will be released if the rv fails.’
I sat there, trying not to think about Calo sitting in the same chair, and said, ‘I’m your friend, Pellonhorc. I can make sure it works.’ I held my hand out towards him.
He said, ‘You aren’t my only friend.’
I pulled my hand back. I had nothing to say. How had I not seen that?
‘But the seeds could go wrong,’ I told him. ‘An accident. Anything.’
‘Indeed. You realise what would have happened if Calo had killed me last night.’
He must have seen in my face that I hadn’t considered it – that the seeds of death would have been released if he had died. A single, small death in this room, my entangled hand deciding it, and I hadn’t even thought of it. I had even momentarily considered –
I flexed my fist painfully. An image of Pireve dead entered my head, and I felt physically sick for a second.
Pellonhorc went on, his tone even. ‘I have other friends, but you’re my best friend, Alef. You’re the one I really trust.’
‘I can do it,’ I said, holding back the fear that threatened to overwhelm me.
‘You have two months to show me how you will do it.’
‘Two months? I can’t possibly do it in that time.’
‘He will help you.’
I didn’t go back to The Floor. I just went straight home to think.
I had to get Pellonhorc into rv as quickly as possible, before anything else happened to him. Two months? Two months wasn’t long enough for me, but it was a long time for his cancer to progress. I’d have to come up with a solution convincing enough to persuade him into rv, but after that, I didn’t care what happened to him. All I wanted was to be able to live a life of peace with Pireve, and for our child to live their life. That’s why I’d told him I needed eighty-five years; it was on the assumption that average life expectancy in the System increased at its current rate and that our child achieved an additional ten years. It was not for a cure. The timeline for a cure for his cancer was far too complex to calculate as accurately as I had told him. There were too many variables. I simply hadn’t dared tell him that.
What did I actually need to do?
The cure would take longer than I’d suggested, but that wasn’t the main problem. I simply had to set the procedures in place. What I needed was a way to guarantee the safety of his rv during the search.
Rigor vitae was an old and established procedure. It had got some of Earth’s survivors to the System. The initial failure rate had been reduced by now to a fraction of one per cent per year, but I needed to guarantee that Pellonhorc’s unit would not be allowed to fail. Rv units needed constant attention. Nothing relying on programmed maintenance could be guaranteed over many years, and nothing relying on human obedience and memory.
I took time away from The Floor altogether to roam the Song, but this time with a focus, sifting data and information, searching for a system that would satisfy Pellonhorc.
There was nothing.
It was hopeless and I despaired. Nothing in the System or in life endured, it seemed, except for hope and greed, and hope was never rewarded.
What could I do? In the time over which I needed stability for this single rv unit, the entire System could have changed and changed again. It struck me with irony that only the idea of God had persisted throughout time.
I kept searching. A month passed. None of my thoughts stood up to examination. I wanted my father to talk to, or Solaman. And in the dark of the night, I cried for my mother.
It had all been so much easier on Gehenna. The idea of God made everything so much better. It was strange how, in my darkest times and despite my godlessness, I returned to the God of my early childhood. God was the promise of justice and reward, and I longed, I yearned for such a thing. I was as wretched now as I had ever been, and I wondered if, perhaps, the System’s attitude to goddery was wrong, and the absence of God didn’t make things, or people, any better.
Thirty-seven
TALLEN
‘You are distracted, Tallen,’ Lode said.
Tallen said, ‘I don’t feel distracted. Have I been reacting badly? Slowly?’ He looked at Lode, but Beata answered. ‘No. Your reactions are extremely fast. You seem to be indicating an increased capacity.’
Tallen didn’t feel any increased capacity. It was harder and harder every day with the constant aches and itches. And now words were coming into his head without warning. Snow and rain. And with them came a sense of doom, a fleeting desire to… to what? He tried to concentrate.
‘You
have another StarHearts request,’ said Lode.
‘I’m not interested. The one I have is enough.’ He walked on, but he couldn’t outpace the humechs.
Lode said, ‘We want to monitor your responses to another stimulus. Our analysis of your response to the first emotional stimulus has given us concern. We need a comparison, and it is your right to receive it.’
Tallen said, ‘It’s my right not to receive it.’
‘Your right to receive it is greater,’ said Beata, suddenly at his side. ‘And the safety of the rig is paramount.’
The floor seemed to shift beneath Tallen’s feet, and as it did, his left heel stabbed at him.
Lode said, ‘We mean that if the rig were to fail, you would die, and it is our paramount duty to maintain your life.’
Tallen stopped and looked from one to the other. They moved slightly apart, so that his eyes had to flick between them. He said, ‘If I do this, will you allow me to have contact with the first one?’ What had she said? Snow…
‘The first one has not requested a response, Tallen. The new one will be ready soon.’
* * *
Razer
Razer got halfway round Delta’s block and hesitated. There were too many lights out. The wind was stirring, and shreds of paper were rolling around. She wondered for a moment whether to go back and try to sort out the distrust between them, but decided to leave it.
It took her twenty minutes to get home. Her block was like Delta’s but even more dilapidated, its streetskin corroded and peeling. She stopped at the main door and glanced up at the cam. It was working, which was fine except that it hadn’t been working when she’d left. She paused on the steps, opened her bag and rummaged in it, then sighed and turned round and crossed the street, and crossed another two streets until she came to a dead cam at a corner. She slid into a doorway just beyond it and waited until the man trailing her passed by. She took off her jacket and left it in the doorway, picked up a piece of gravel and slipped it into her shoe. She detached the shoulder strap from her bag and tucked the bag under her arm, rolled the bottoms of her leggings and set out again, retracing the route to her block, her gait changed by the stone.
She went quickly inside, keeping her head down under the cam. It would take them a few minutes to backtrack and discover she hadn’t existed before the dead cam, about the same time her tail would take to realise he’d been deliberately shaken.
There was no one in her room. As soon as she opened the screen, Cynth came up.
YOU ARE LINKED WITH TALLEN. HE KNOWS FROM YOUR PROFILE THAT YOU WORK FOR TRUTALES. OTHER PERSONAL INFORMATION MAY BE ALTERED. HE IS ANONYMISED. DO NOT BELIEVE SPECIFIC RESPONSES.
‘I haven’t got time now.’
But Cynth was gone, and on the screen was, ‘Hello?’
She checked her windows were opaqued and the door locked, and went back to the screen. It was probably okay. The tail would spend a while checking outside before deciding she’d doubled back. She’d give Tallen fifteen minutes, then get out.
Before she could respond, new words appeared. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know if I want this.’
She said, ‘That’s okay.’
Without knowing quite why, she ached for him. Maybe because he said, I’m sorry. She saw his face again as she’d seen it in the bar, and then again for the brief moment in the hospital when he was in that face-cage. A lost soul. Her speciality. Leaning into the screen as if it brought him closer, she said, ‘Why don’t you just say nothing? I don’t know if we have anything to talk about anyway, but what if I tell you something about myself? How about that? You don’t need to say a word, and you can cut us off any time you want.’
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘Good. Sorry. I’m not used to talking about myself. I ask people about themselves. That’s what I do. I write for TruTales. I’m Razer.’ Her name flickered, and she knew he was seeing something different. She wanted to tell him he knew her, but it would never reach him, and the connection would be cut.
Tallen said, ‘Yes. I read TruTales. I have done, anyway.’
‘I’ve been doing it a long time,’ she said. ‘Always travelling, always moving on.’ She gathered herself. This was her story. It struck her that no one had heard it before. ‘I was always interested in people. My mother was a medician. She used to come home and tell me about the people she was treating, about their lives. There were just the two of us after my father died. I was eight when that happened.’ She remembered night, staring up at the dark sky, tears blurring the stars and her mother’s warm arms around her.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Well, it happened. We’re saying sorry a lot, aren’t we?’
Was that pause a sign of relaxation from him? She wanted very strongly to see him, to exchange an expression of ruefulness or something. She said, ‘My mother and I, we used to talk about the people. We used to invent their futures, what they’d do if they left hospital. The way she told it, they always recovered, so they could live the lives we’d invented for them. I was jealous of them at first, the way they left the hospital and my father hadn’t, and they had these lives my father didn’t have.’
Tallen said, ‘But they can’t have left the hospital, all of them.’
‘No.’
He said, ‘Are you okay? I don’t know your name. I mean I do, but –’ The words scratched themselves away.
‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘So I told stories for my friends, gave them bright futures, and then I went on the Song and started doing the same thing for people I didn’t know. And then I was contacted by TruTales, who said they’d pay me. But I had to do it openly instead of on the Song.’
He said, ‘What happened to your mother?’
Razer imagined Tallen noticing her smile. He was asking the questions she would have asked. And he was interested. He was hooked. She said, ‘My mother died.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Fourteen,’ she told him.
‘My parents died when I was seventeen.’
Flickering words. So, a definite intervention at his end, out there on the rig. She checked the time. Eight minutes gone already.
He said, ‘You like writing? How do you choose people?’
‘TruTales decides. There’s an AI. I don’t know how it selects, but I always get interesting people. Exciting lives. That’s what I do best. Lives on the edge. I’ve learnt a lot. Done a lot of things.’
There was a flicker before, ‘My life isn’t very interesting,’ came back.
‘Well, it’s tiring, what I do. You don’t get to settle, ever, and you get lots of scars. I’ve got a few pins and plates.’
She wondered if that would get through, if he would make the connection. Tallen with that head of his in its cage, their exchange of a few words in the hospital.
The corner of her screen was showing an alert. She ignored it. It was only someone sending a callme.
She said, ‘I never thought I’d want to settle. I have no real friends. Just stories.’ Her lips were dry. She picked up an unwashed tasse and licked the faint tang of caffé from the rim. Ten minutes gone. She really should start to terminate this. ‘Stories aren’t lives. They’re how we make our lives, and I don’t think I ever made one.’ No response. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes. So that’s why you’re on StarHearts? Does that mean you’re finished with stories?’
The green alert started to follow a faster beat. ‘No,’ she said.
There was a long pause. Longer. She said, ‘Are you there?’
Nothing but the pale background wash of StarHearts autoprompts. Why not ask what food he likes?
She waited. There was nothing. Were they going to cut the comm? Had they already?
Maybe he likes travelling. What’s his favourite colour?
Shit, she thought.
And then he said, ‘StarHearts is about stories, isn’t it? Finding someone’s story that you like.’
‘Oh. Yes.’ She almost laughed. She wanted to see hi
s face, and she wanted it with an unaccountable desire. It was stupid. First Bale, who was crazy, and now this man she’d hardly seen.
She checked the time. Shit. Sixteen minutes and the alert furious now. ‘Listen, I’m going to have to go. Can I call you again?’ Without waiting for an answer, she cut him off and felt oddly empty.
Cynth was instantly there.
THAT WAS GOOD. I HAVE WHAT WE NEED. BUT I ALSO SAW IN HIS STARHEARTS FILE THAT HE HAD ANOTHER RESPONSE PRIOR TO YOURS, KESTREL DUST.
Razer muttered, ‘Lucky him,’ and nilled the screen. She looked at the green alert. It was from Delta.
* * *
Delta
Delta closed the door on Razer. Stupid writer. And stupid Bale. She wanted Bale alive again so she could scream at him.
Carrying the reheated celery porridge to the table, she stared at the glittering tank of stones. She and Bale had collected them from the shore, stone by stone, over months, and then, with the tank all set, they had drunk starmagnac as they poured water into the tank. The transformation here in the corner of her room, from dullness to brilliance, had made her dumb with joy. It was the only time she had ever heard Bale laugh.
Adding the fish had been his idea. He’d confiscated them from a smuggler. They were tank-adapted and wouldn’t have survived back in the sea. Either Delta took them or they died, he’d told her as he’d poured them into her tank like a cascade of candle flames. Bale had loved the idea of a Paxer possessing a tank that would have cost anyone outside Bleak a few million dolors to acquire.
Delta wasn’t sure why she’d let Razer see it. Maybe to shock her. But would the writer tell anyone? She didn’t fully trust Razer. There was calculation in everything she said, and once it was said, she watched for the effect of the words. Just like a Paxer. And she hadn’t wanted to talk about StarHearts.