by Roger Levy
‘For me or for everyone?’
‘I don’t know. Either. Both.’
He looked carefully at her. ‘I don’t know what he’s been saying, but I don’t think it’s good for you to talk to Alef.’
‘Tell me. What would you do?’
‘I wouldn’t want to deal with it alone. I’d want to talk to someone.’ The light played over his brow and he said, ‘I’m someone. Talk to me.’
‘You’re a good man, Tallen. Tell me, is there room for two people in the cage up on deck?’
He smiled. ‘I don’t need that any more.’
‘It’s not for you.’
* * *
Five days ago, when she had been crawling along the deck in the swimrig, Razer had only been thinking of clinging on. Now, deafened by wind-shriek and drenched by the waves, she yelled with the life of it.
‘What do you think of this?’ she shouted.
Beside her, his shoulder wedged tightly against hers, Alef said nothing.
‘You said you loved playing with water.’ She had to stop and take a breath. The water came at them from every direction. Only the contact of each other’s body was any small protection.
‘With my father. When I was a child.’ The strangeness of his voice was lost in the need to shout, and his speech patterns seemed almost normal.
‘What about your mother?’
‘I loved her. She baked cookies.’
The sea sluiced across the deck. Lances of brilliant sunlight raked the metal, made the struts shine, and gave rainbow halos to the cappings of the pipes.
‘How do you feel, to remember them, Alef?’
‘Sad. Good.’
Great waves poured over them and sieved away. Razer caught breath, and yelled, ‘I can remember them with you. I can help.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’re important.’ She coughed brine.
‘They are only important to me,’ Alef yelled, his voice high and cracking.
The sea ebbed fiercely and the rig seemed to tip. Between the waves, Razer managed to shout, ‘You said I was important to you. Do you remember that?’
He didn’t answer. The water rushed back and swamped them and Razer choked and felt she was drowning. Alef moved, shoving himself at her, and his hand was over her mouth. She tried to push him back, thinking he was going to suffocate her, but then realised he was shielding her mouth and nose from the water.
‘Thank you, Alef.’
‘I don’t know what to do.’
Did he sound different, or was it just a hoarsenesss from the effort of making himself heard? She tried to say something but had no breath, and Alef lifted his face to the drowning sky and screamed, ‘There is no one to help me.’
‘Will you let me help you?’ And the rising hard sea smashed into her.
For long minutes, water was everywhere. It seemed like chaos, but Alef’s hand was there a moment before each wave crashed through the cage and struck them. She put her own hand around his shoulders to steady them both, and he didn’t resist.
‘Please help me,’ Alef cried.
‘Yes, Alef. Yes.’
* * *
The thrummer was somewhere up above in the thunderous heavens. Razer didn’t know where Tallen was. Alef was somewhere beneath them in his sarc, and he was all around them on the Song.
AfterLife rolled across her screenery. Perhaps all those lives were lies, but they were full of the truths of people’s lives. Did it matter if they were jumbled? We all live jumbled lives, Razer thought. It’s the connections between us that matter.
She had started on her telling of Alef’s Life. How astonishing it was that this man had created such a thing as AfterLife; that this sole man had utterly changed the System.
Alef had made Razer what she was, too. He’d put her life at risk, but she’d survived. Alef had made her a teller of tales, and in return she would tell Alef’s story. One day his existence would be revealed, and there needed to be a story in place for that time.
But how to tell it? Not as Alef was telling it to her, with all the murders, and betrayals, and terrible truths. The pure facts would show him as a monster, and the extraordinary way his mind worked was impossible to convey.
She might have told it as a TruTale, through her own eyes, but he deserved more than that, and so did the System.
Across her screenery, the Lives scrolled on. The Song played itself for her. TruTales, HeartSearch, LifeTalk, all the other ParaSites displayed themselves. Razer marvelled at Alef’s creation. One communication in four passed through an AfterLife platform. Two of every three minutes spent on the Song involved AfterLife. How could Alef, so unique by birth, so wounded by life, have understood the workings of the System and the needs of humanity so perfectly?
And his creation. In time – in centuries, perhaps – AfterLife might no longer need to be so all-encompassing or so protected. The System might become as the unsaid planet seemed already to be, with the truth acknowledged. But until then, there had to be a story. Alef deserved his place, and AfterLife had to be protected. If the truth was exposed now, the System would not survive it.
No. It couldn’t come out now that Liacea Kalthi had been sacrificed, that AfterLife had begun with a murder. That must be told as an accident.
It couldn’t be thought that AfterLife had been a cynical fabrication and all its believers dupes. Perhaps later there would be a time for that, but not yet.
So she would write two Lives for him. The true one – and Alef was incapable of telling it otherwise – would remain secretly in the AfterLife database. As for the other, which she had already started, when that Life was ready, Razer would open it on the database. Alef would remain in hypersomnia, and he would continue to protect his creation.
The search would go on. One day, perhaps, Alef might even develop a true neurid, and AfterLife might become a reality. And if that happened, there might be a time when Alef’s true Life could be released and he could be remembered, not as perfect, but as some kind of a man.
* * *
Tallen
From a secure gantry high on the deck, Tallen stood with Beata and Lode. The three of them together watched as the net descended from the mist and spray with its blurred, almost embryonic human form. Was it struggling for release, or was it fearing the withdrawal of the net’s security? Tallen had a sudden memory of his own arrival. How long ago it seemed. How he had changed.
Beata said, ‘We shall go down now. We need to be there to receive him.’
Tallen said, ‘You’ll start all over again. Is that right? You’ll be formed by him and for him.’ Already they were starting to lose their definition for Tallen. Suddenly he was unsure which of the humechs was which.
One of them said, ‘As we were for you. That is our program. You are a short-term device.’ Had that been Beata? Tallen felt a sense of impending loss.
Beside the descending gantry, the wriggling net was drawn down into the body of the rig. The other humech said, with Lode’s face asserting itself for an instant, ‘We shall miss you, Tallen.’
And its mirror said, with a final brief echo of emotion, ‘But we will not remember you.’
* * *
Razer
The thrummer tipped and swung. Razer watched the rig on the screenery. A few moments ago, as the transport cage had lifted them away, it had seemed vast and almost alive, shuddering and groaning, but now it was no more than a small and delicate bit of trickery. There was something brave and hopeless about its presence in that eternal fury.
It had all been like some sort of dream. Nothing had made sense down there.
She thought, Tallen? But of course there was nothing. She had missed her chance with him.
The thrummer pilot said, ‘Not my business, but how come there’s two of you?’
Razer said, ‘I was swimming, got out of my depth, washed up on the rig.’
The pilot said, ‘Yeah? Well, like I said, not my business. And you with her, don’t I recognise you?
With the skullware?’
Tallen said, ‘Maybe.’
‘Well, I just got your puke out of the webbing. Don’t make it a double.’
They were all silent after that. Razer spent a long while looking down towards the sea on the screenery. Mostly it was murk and rain, and occasionally a glimpse of flat grey, but once, suddenly, the sun punched through and there was the sea, sharp and clear.
The thrummer pilot’s voice came through again. ‘Hey, back there. You might want to look down, but be quick. I’ve never seen it this perfect.’
Razer gasped. The sea was a shifting mosaic of burnished metals and dirty whites, pricked by dots of perfect black that vanished as swiftly as they appeared – sarcs, she realised, surfacing and submerging in the brief brilliant sun with what seemed not despair or loneliness but joyful exuberance. In the lancing, glorious light, she had a vision of them as lives working unconsciously, unknowingly, together.
The sea moved; the sarcs leaped and plunged. Razer marvelled to watch it. The vast multitude of sarcs down there, the presence of each affecting every other in some tiny way and moderating the whole, like those joined voices in the church choir of Alef’s childhood, like all the communicants within the Song.
The mists closed to rain once more, and Razer sat back into the comfort of the webbing and caught Tallen’s eye. He seemed to be crying. She wondered whether he had seen what she had seen.
Alef was down there, somewhere, and at last he was a part of something. She wondered which was the more fantastical idea, that he had invented AfterLife, or that he had invented his tale of it.
Tallen had earphones on, locking himself away. She opened her comms.
‘Cynth?’
DOES KESTREL DUST WANT CHITTLECHATTLE?
‘Yes.’ She hesitated. ‘Alef?’
YES. BUT I CAN’T DO CHITTLECHATTLE. CYNTH CAN DO CHITTLECHATTLE. DO YOU WANT CYNTH?
‘I prefer you, Alef. What are you doing now?’
I AM ON THE SONG. I THINK I AM HAPPY HERE. I TALK TO PEOPLE. THEY TELL ME THEIR LIVES. I HELP THEM. I THINK ABOUT MY LIFE. THEY HELP ME. I THINK ABOUT YOUR LIFE. I THINK ABOUT YOU.
‘I won’t always be here. You can outlive me, in hypersomnia.’
I KNOW. I WILL CARRY ON, AS LONG AS THERE ARE LIVES TO FOLLOW. I WILL CARE FOR AFTERLIFE.
The thrummer tipped and straightened. Razer closed the comms unit and watched Tallen for a while. He was staring out of the window, oblivious to her. She would write Alef’s two Lives. She already had the bones of the truth, and now she started to reframe it, recomposing the death of Liacea Kalthi.
Eventually the thrummer came down, and at the dock, Tallen jumped out and started to walk towards the doors of the port. Razer watched as they opened for him and closed behind him.
Razer stood beside the thrummer and looked back towards the sea. The thrummer pilot jumped down and said something that was lost in the wind, and disappeared after Tallen.
The machine’s blades stopped turning. Razer gazed at the dark waters, but there was nothing to see in them. She wondered whether she had left more behind than she had gained, out there on the rig. After a while, she turned towards the port doors. Before she could reach them, though, they opened and Tallen was there, waiting.
And in the doorway, he said, ‘If you can write anywhere, why don’t you come with me? Or I’ll come with you. Either way.’
The sun behind her was bright on his face. The patches of metal on his cheeks and skull held a soft, warm glow. In the distance were the bristling rigyards and the nodding cranes, and the noise of the containers endlessly ferrying sarcs to the hospital ships was a soothing, faraway murmur.
‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘I have a story here, two of them, but when they’re done, I want to tell one about the unsaid planet. If they let me.’
Tallen laughed. ‘We’ve already started that one, haven’t we? First contact?’
Razer let him take her hand. She felt extraordinarily lucky. This was her life.
‘So, what about it?’ Tallen asked. ‘The two of us together.’
Acknowledgements
Chris Thomas for everything here that may appear to be related to oil rigs. Where it is accurate, it is Chris’s. Where it is bilge, deliberately or accidentally, it is all my own.
Miranda Jewess and Ella Chappell for seeing clearly down to the core of this tortuous rig, and everyone at Titan for having faith in me and in this tale. Julia Lloyd for the fabulous cover design.
James Lovegrove and Adam Roberts for advice, support, encouragement and friendship, and Simon Spanton, too, for those things plus particularly generous and accurate advice.
Melissa Roberti was an invaluable reader, as were many others during Anne Aylor’s legendary writing weeks in Catalonia.
Constant and ongoing thanks to everyone in the Zens, for advice, criticism, conversation and the exchange of elaborate excuses for not writing; Oana Aristide, Anne Aylor, Nick Barlay, Jude Cook, Gavin Eyers, Steve Mullins, Annemarie Neary, Richard Simmons, Elise Valmorbida.
About the author
Roger Levy is a British science fiction writer. He is the author of Reckless Sleep, Dark Heavens and Icarus. He works as a dentist when not writing fiction, and was described as the ‘heir to Philip K. Dick’ by Strange Horizons.