by Roger Levy
On the screen, Harv’s display was moving gently, a soft breeze giving it texture and tone. She noticed the border of another image intruding at the edge of the screenery, and pulled it into view. Another message from him. A new one.
This was a stand of acacias. The delicate leaves and slender, wand-like branches were as beautiful as everything Harv created, but they were not quite sharp. This was unlike Harv, obsessed as he was with detail. She started to tell it to self-correct, then caught herself and said, swallowing the last mouthful of porridge, ‘Show error detail.’
The acacias faded to leave a soft saffron mist drifting across the screenery.
She sat straight. Harv hated saffron. It was a joke between them that he’d never use the colour. ‘Hey, Harv,’ she whispered. Then, pushing her plate away and wiping her sleeve quickly across her lips, she said, ‘Open error detail.’
The mist coagulated into text. It took her a few minutes of scrolling through the notes and screenpics to work out that she was looking at Tallen’s personal comms history.
Why send this separately? And why now? Had he found something in it?
She opened Tallen’s day-to-day and glanced through it.
Q – I hope you’re the fixer i need. I have a two month old valorator that won’t remain stable longer than an hour. Can you fix it?
A – It may just be overheating. I’ll get back to you, but have you tried…
The messages went on and on. The record had to mean something. Harv wouldn’t have risked slipping it out to her otherwise. But the messages were no more than the comms files of a techfixer.
On her cam screens, a red light came on and went off again immediately. She looked up and saw Razer exit the doorway below and vanish down the street. There was nothing else, but she checked everything again, then got up to curtain the tank. The room dulled.
She looked at Tallen’s AfterLife history. He spent just over an hour a day there, which was normal enough, and he took a day to consider before he ever voted, which was longer than average, and he rarely browsed the ParaSites.
She found his RECEIVED UNSOLICITED and scrolled briefly through the usual offers of travel deals and health supplements along with the ParaSite come-ons. Nothing there.
She scanned the dates of his day-to-day. The files went back a few months, but they stopped at the day of the Fleschik event. That final day started with a string of techfix enquiries, none of which had been responded to.
She looked at the last message Tallen had sent. It was from his day-to-day, on the morning of the event. Tallen had answered a request for a fix with a message that he was going out and would reply when he was back. Delta imagined him saying it as he closed his screenery for the last time before walking out and encountering Emel Fleschik. Poor bastard.
She scrolled back from there and saw a string of similar replies from Tallen.
I’m going out briefly, but I’ll answer when I’m back.
Thanks for the work. I’ll get on to it when I have a moment, which should be soon.
Tallen had been a busy man. She continued methodically to work back. Something about this was nagging at her. She went on. Other than to respond with the simple acknowledgements, the last thing he’d actively done was to register with StarHearts.
Now she stopped and returned to Tallen’s RECEIVED UNSOLICITED. StarHearts were always throwing out bait. Delta’s own BurnBox was full of ParaSite baitmail, but this was more. Someone had spent a great deal of effort trying to hook Tallen on StarHearts.
An alert told her one of the streetcams was down. She ignored it. Her backups were good. She went back to Tallen’s later responses to fix-requests and realised they weren’t his usual style. There were none of his usual quickfix suggestions, ‘Have you tried…’
Yes. She had something. She checked the timings of the atypical sends. Every one had gone out exactly fifty seconds after receipt of the initial comm.
The skin on her neck was tingling. He hadn’t used an instant auto-response. He’d been trying to give the illusion he was still there when he wasn’t.
Or someone else had.
She found the last of the non-fifty-second responses and cross-checked. The last time Tallen was definitely at his screenery was just after he’d sent the StarHearts registration.
That was it! As soon as they’d hooked him on StarHearts, they’d swept him up, and they’d done it two days before the Fleschik event. They had planned it all, whoever they were. They’d had him for two days. That was why they’d chosen Tallen, the loner. It had to be someone who wouldn’t be missed even for that crucial time.
All along, perhaps for the first time ever, Bale had been right.
Okay. Next question. Why did they want him on StarHearts?
Another cam went out. This time Delta checked it, and checked the other one too. Her backups were fine and live, but this was unusual. She went to the door and checked it was locked. It’d be easier to break through her wall than her door, and the wall was metalled with a triple-star impact rating
Delta cleared the screen, letting it return to the expanse of flowers.
So Decece had monitored Tallen’s responses to the StarHearts bait. Decece had known Tallen walked on the beach every night, and Decece had killed the local cams.
Fleschik’s spree had been, what, a diversion? No, he must have been an essential part of the plan. Tallen had been abducted from the beach and precisely prepared, over the period of two days, for the opportunity to have life-saving neurosurgery once he was rescued by Bale in the course of the murder spree.
Had they just needed a guinea pig for experimental neurosurgery? Why not simply abduct a drifter? Far less risk in that. The AfterLife killer had done it for years before getting caught.
All those murders. And the neurosurgery hadn’t even worked. What a hopeless, terrible mess. And why complicate it with StarHearts? Why not just take Tallen?
‘And why send me this now, Harv?’ she muttered.
Another cam went, this one an internal. Delta pulled her weapon from the wall and armed it. Decece had killed the cams for Tallen’s abduction, but Delta was at home and she had backups. If he thought he was setting her up, he was going to get a big red surprise.
She remembered Decece leaning over her as she spoke to Bale, as she was about to stand him down, Bale’s bloodscreen reading in front of her. Decece’s breath was almost choking her as he said, ‘I want Bale out there. You need everyone, Officer.’
‘Yes!’ she said aloud. Of course he’d been ice-hard. He’d been ops-controlling the ops controller. She’d been his dummy, as good as if he’d been in her head.
It was all clear to her now. StarHearts was the key, not the distraction. Nothing at all had gone wrong with Tallen’s surgery. She’d been looking at it from the wrong perspective altogether. They wanted someone neurologically prepared and acceptable to be employed to work on a rig. That couldn’t be a drifter. Tallen had come out of the hospital and gone straight to Ronen. Why would he do that unless the impulse had been planted? They might even have told him it was his best hope.
She checked her gun. It wasn’t about Tallen at all, or about experimental neurosurgery. It was the rig they were after. And they needed Tallen pre-registered on StarHearts because StarHearts was to be their comms route to him on the rig.
But what else had they planted in him? What did they intend him to do there? And what use was a rig to anyone?
A final glance at the screen, and she noticed one more unopened flower from Harv. But there was no time to look. Another cam went. Delta sent the small tulip to Razer, then went back to the cams, substituting her own backups for all the street and corridor cams. She checked her locks again. Then she went to the window in the main room and looked out, feeling uneasy. There was movement across the road, a shred of pale green plastic tumbling over the ground, and a figure briefly in the shadows, there and gone. She went back and checked her own camview of that section. Nothing. She ran it back at doublespeed. Her
chest thumped and she swore aloud. There was nothing happening on the image. No movement at all. She looked at the empty windblown street again, then back to the empty camview where there was no breeze at all.
On the other screen, she looked at Harv’s message again. She whispered, ‘Hey, Harv. Why did you send it just now?’ She tried to reopen the message, but the attempt erased it. A moment later, the screen died.
Her palms were sweating. She unlocked and opened the door, weapon in hand. There was no one in the corridor. She took a few quick steps along it and ran straight back inside, locking the door again. She brought up the corridor camview and rolled it back twenty seconds and watched.
Empty. She wasn’t there. Her putery was down, and all her cams were locked. She was blind outside.
She checked her Pax and personal comms. Both were down. Checked her wrist. Nothing functioning there but her pulse, and that was hammering.
Was there a noise in the corridor? She rechecked the locks by eye and then ran her hand over them just to be sure, suddenly trusting nothing. She brought a pan from the kitchen and swung it slowly across the window at head height. A small blue pock on the window kept pace with the pan. Not quite a dot but a teardrop trailing left to right. That was meant as a warning, to make her go for the corridor, but it was a mistake on their part. She could back-calculate a source from the incident angle of the laser.
She opaqued the window and went to her small bedroom, where she pulled on her visor and rechecked the gun. She searched her visor functions. It only had internal feeds. She was totally isolated here. No data in, no comms in. And there wouldn’t be another warning.
She turned all the lights off and matted the visor’s glass. Now she was on nightview, grained and spectral. She taped the visor’s spare lens to the pan to model a better head, then taped the panhandle to the back of a chair and moved the chair close to the window, the head in view. Then she set herself steady on the other chair with the gun, and cleared the window. She hoped they were in too much of a hurry to spot the setup.
There was a thump at the door behind her.
The sighting teardrop appeared on the glass, just long enough for her to save the image on her visor, and then the window burst and the pan cracked and the chair slammed backwards and over. The wall behind the pan threw out a paintchip cloud.
The visor’s analytics gave her a line of fire and a point of source. She locked her weapon to the visor’s feed and sent a firecharge straight back down the sniper’s sightline. A window in the far block lit up and a moment later she heard the explosion’s suck and slam.
Another thump sounded behind her and the door started to give. She punched out a quick Hi – call me to all her contacts, then belted the gun and wrapped her hands with towels, threw the emergency drop-cable out the window and jumped after it, only using the towelgrip to decelerate at the last moment.
She fell cleanly. No one there. She threw the towels into the shadows, but there was nothing she could do about the fluorescent cable, which was designed to draw attention and help. Across the block, the window was still bright with flame. The sniper would have waited long enough to scope the result, and Delta had been fast. The sniper should at least have been stunned.
She started to run. If she could get some distance from the block, she had a chance. They’d locked her apartment down but her access to Pax and to Vox should kick back in at any moment now. She just needed to get to Pax.
Thirty-eight
ALEF
SigEv 39 Death and hope
Time and more time passed, and I was no closer to a solution. Through the portals of the Song, I looked down on Gehenna, and I saw that it had hardly changed. It still seemed barbarous, and yet all I found myself recalling was the comfort of its simplicity, and I could understand why my parents had lived there. I remembered the singing in the church, and the way all our voices had disappeared, to merge into one strong chorus. The words had mattered less than the sense of being a part of something greater. Only while I sang, or listened to music, did I ever have that sense. Though I had also felt it, for a brief moment, at the cathedral all those years ago when Father Sheol was preaching and all of Gehenna was united before the judgement of the arkestra, and their deaths.
Outside of Gehenna and the unsaid planet, everyone in the System knew that their death would be the end of them. They knew that what they achieved was all that they would ever have and nothing more, and that while injustice was eternal, it would end for them in their death. They wanted more, but they knew there was no more and never would be.
And still, knowing this, they spent their lives on the Song, searching for survival after death. For the impossible.
But that was it! That was it. I suddenly realised I had found what I needed. Other than his power, Pellonhorc was no different from everyone else in the System. I simply had to offer everyone what I was holding out to Pellonhorc.
For a moment it seemed perfect, but the moment faded. The realisation of such a vast plan would surely be beyond even my power. I could only hope that what I might suggest would satisfy him enough to get him into rv.
So on the last morning of the time he had given me, and after days and nights on the Song, sleepless, I went to his office and I told him, ‘I can do it all, Pellonhorc.’
With his good hand he was winding and unwinding the chain around his fist. He said, ‘I knew it. I knew I could rely on you, Alef.’ He began to haul himself to his feet. There was a small keening sound as he rose, and I realised he’d had a motor attached to the chain, making a winch of it.
Standing, he was arched slightly forward. He looked slimmer than the last time I’d seen him, a few weeks back, and he was clearly in greater discomfort. I said, ‘What’s happened? Have you had surgery?’
‘Surgery? And give Him the chance to take me while I slept? No. He is trying hard enough.’ He raised his shirt and showed me some new corset strapped so tightly around his torso that it barely let him breathe. The skin above the edge of it, at his throat, was red and swollen where the fabric had bitten deep. Wincing, Pellonhorc touched his good hand to a control at his belt, and the corset’s weave contracted visibly.
He made a small but terrible sound. I had never seen him show pain like this before.
When I could speak, I said, ‘Is that a good idea, Pellonhorc?’
He said, ‘Tell me how you’ll do it. I want to know how you’ve outwitted Him.’
‘Then sit down and listen.’ Pireve was in my mind, not Pellonhorc. I would be just as single-minded as him, I told myself.
He lowered himself into the chair, the chain whining as it let him down. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘I was thinking about rv. It can’t be you alone. A single unit couldn’t be guaranteed to last the time we need. The problem is its maintenance.’
‘Get on with it, Alef.’
‘No matter how much we plan, a lone rv unit could be forgotten over time. But a hundred thousand won’t. A hundred thousand rv units, Pellonhorc, and an organisation around them that will become the heart of the entire System.’
He started to wheeze. I couldn’t tell if he thought I was crazy, or if somehow he knew exactly what I was about to propose. I could believe anything about him.
‘I’ve located an inexhaustible energy source and a way of guaranteeing you’ll survive. This will be a vast system, but you will be the centre of it. You, Pellonhorc, and you alone, will be its hidden purpose.’
Pellonhorc was starting to smile, and I realised I had spoken to him in precisely the way he needed. I’d been telling fact, but I was describing Pellonhorc as equal to God.
‘The planet Bleak has the perfect energy source for us. It has a vast, storm-whipped sea. A motion-powered rv unit in those oceans will never fail. Bleak has the capacity, too. It can accommodate hundreds of thousands of units. And it already has an infrastructure, drilling core from the ocean beds.’
He said, ‘We’re big, but we haven’t the money for that.’
&nbs
p; I cried out, ‘That’s the beauty. We won’t pay. We’ll be paid. There will be an organisation to maintain the units and bring in your companion sleepers. It will be beyond governments and laws and administrata. It will be something that everyone wants.’
I had practised this speech for hours, practised my tone, my gestures. Pireve had watched me, coached me. I had to be like a preacher, my argument irresistible. My life with Pireve was at stake. ‘It will be System-wide, perfect and ideal. It will never be outdated or overtaken.’
He was sitting forward, cradling the slack hand in the quick. ‘On. Go on.’
There was a flash storm outside, and the sky seemed to be curdling. I saw sulphurous yellows and a slab of purple. Pireve would have gasped at the beauty, and for a moment I thought I too could see beauty there. It was like an anomaly in a datafield that suddenly made perfect sense. I found that, unconsciously, I had walked to the window. I put my hand on the glass and a sear of lightning greeted it.
Blinking against the glare, I saw Pellonhorc’s reflection, and turned back to him. ‘It will give everyone in the System – everyone – the hope of what it will give you, the chance of a cure for whatever is about to kill them. A cure for mortality.’
His voice changed. ‘What do you mean, the hope?’
‘For you –’ I said swiftly, ‘– it’s the certainty. For them, strong hope is enough.’ Pireve had told me to concentrate, that it was vital to get it all right. She understood Pellonhorc almost as well as she understood me. Oh, how lucky I was. I was not going to lose her.
He sighed. ‘That’s good. And my business?’
‘The Whisper will change and survive. The organisation I’m speaking of, that has to be under my control, but the Whisper will take most of the money, and there will be a lot of money, Pellonhorc.’
‘Will it last eighty-five years?’
‘Longer. It cannot fail.’
I didn’t say anything else. Pireve had told me how to present the story so that he would not explore its problems, and her strategy was working. He had not asked for detail. But in this silence, I found it hard not to start talking, not to tell him what there was still to be done. Not to say that I was not sure I could do it.