by Jones, Raya
Surtr was saying, ‘I’m glad you’re my brother.’ He laughed to see me frown. ‘You are. You are technically my brother.’
‘What technicality would that be?’
‘The same technicality that made Fairweather my sister,’ he asserted. ‘She was a clone of Ingrid, one of my father’s wives. You are the clone of my older brother’s wife.’
‘Which makes me technically your sister-in-law? Fairweather was your sister because you shared a surrogate mother and grew up together.’
‘I know that. You are my brother because she died.’
He got up and strode back to the water. This time I joined him. We strolled down the beach, stopping by rock pools, and I told him the names of tiny creatures that lived in them. The low tide made it possible to walk for a long distance along the water. Further down we had to scramble on rocks and rough gravel. There were caves. Surtr indicated the largest. ‘Can I go in there?’
‘You don’t have to ask permission.’
‘Is it safe, I mean.’
It was. Surtr took a look inside, then came out and sat down with me at the cave’s mouth. I enjoyed his excitement about the place as if I owned it. ‘Do you like my planet, Surtr?’
His face glowed. ‘I love it here.’
‘One day all this will be yours.’
His face clouded. ‘Not if he gets his immortality. Here, this is for you.’ He gave me a string of pearls containing Wye Stan 7’s record of my captivity in Cy City.
I put it in my pocket. ‘Thanks. But you didn’t come here just to give me this. Start talking,’ I said as politely as I could. ‘Please.’
‘I don’t know where to start. There’s something I must tell to you, Al, but you’re not going to like it. What will you do when I tell you what you don’t want to hear about Freedom Cordova?’
‘I’ll listen to what you have to say.’
He nodded, looking away. ‘It scares me how you stood up to what my brother unleashed on you. He let you have it full blast and it didn’t affect you.’
‘It affected me badly.’
He shook his head. ‘You felt it but it didn’t affect you. It didn’t get to you. You’re untouchable. You blocked him also on the Moonrat and he wasn’t even targeting you there. He intended to kill the captain to teach them a lesson for stealing our androids. But you blocked him and killed the ship instead. Gertrude was right. There’s something dark and powerful about you.’
‘Gertrude?’
‘The other Ingrid clone, the one you met in Ground Zero.’
Ingrid was Wye Stan 5’s wife before Surtr was born. She was from a marginal branch of the clan. The marriage was advantageous for her family. In return for being the official wife, she could have anything she desired. She desired a child in her own image, and was allowed to raise her clone, Gertrude. But the marriage didn’t last. She and her infant were exiled from Olympia. A few years later Wye Stan 5 gave another Ingrid clone as a gift to Ella to have as her own child. Ella named her Mandy. This was Fairweather.
I protested, ‘You can’t hand out clones like they’re your property!’
‘Yes we can. All clones in Cyboratics are Wye Stan’s property.’
Wye Stan 5 continued to provide for Ingrid in her exile on condition that neither she nor Gertrude tried to reclaim clan status. When Gertrude was nineteen, she came to Olympia on her own initiative. She was apprehended and put in cryonics. Fairweather and Surtr didn’t know about her at the time. Surtr learned about her existence only after Fairweather’s death, when Wye Stan 7 made him a consolation gift: Gertrude reconstructed as Mandy.
I protested, angrily, ‘Like replacing an android? You can’t do that!’
‘Yes we can,’ Surtr said bitterly, ‘but he doesn’t see why having the technology to do it doesn’t give him the right to do it.’
If Surtr accepted the gift, Gertrude would have arrived in Piramesse believing that she was Fairweather fresh from Olympia after several years in cryonics. But sooner or later she was bound to discover that ‘she’ had lived in Piramesse previously, ran off with me, and died. Wye Stan 7 shrugged off such glitches. As far as he was concerned, she could stay permanently on medication and have her memories readjusted over and over. Gertrude was already confused by the ‘Deceased’ stamp on the Mandala gallery and personal entries she didn’t recognise. She contacted Harvey Schmidt on her own accord, Surtr told me. ‘Strange how she picked you out of all private detectives in the universe.’
It wasn’t a coincidence, I realised as he spoke. Schmidt Investigations existed before I invented a son, Harvey, who reopened it. Helmut Schmidt was a real person. He worked alone and died whilst investigating the case of someone who had been exiled from Cyboratics about the time that nineteen-year-old Gertrude arrived in Olympia. Some of Gertrude’s true memories must be pushing into Mandy’s stream of consciousness. It was Gertrude speaking when she told Harvey Schmidt that he was in Tao Ceti ‘where it happened.’ The woman who believed she was Fairweather somehow knew that something terrible had happened to her in Olympia, Tao Ceti.
Since Surtr refused the gift, Wye Stan 7 diverted Gertrude’s journey to Sol. She arrived a week before she thought she did. Wye Stan 7 kept her in Cy City for tests. Her memories of that week were suppressed before she was released to Ground Zero. When Surtr located her, he had Hans Klaus teleport her from the Emporium to a safe house in the Edges. But she escaped. Surtr didn’t know what happened to her after that. ‘If she’s still alive I’d like to give her back her true identity. Do you know where she is?’
‘I have no idea,’ I told him truthfully.
He didn’t need to come to Earth to fetch Gertrude, I thought. He had people who could do that. I remembered how he came to Alpha-10 for no practical reason after his sister died. Think motives and reasons, I thought in Fred’s voice. I watched the sea rise with the flow of the tide, and wondered what made Surtr tick.
He suddenly said, ‘We are all clones of the original. Some of my versions have been enhanced.’
‘What enhancements did you have?’
‘None. I’m the original. The seventh is different.’
I rose to my feet. ‘We’d better leave. The tide comes in very fast.’
‘We have biosuits, we can’t drown,’ he pointed out, but followed me anyway.
Surtr is shrewder than he lets on, I thought. He is Wye Stan without modifications. The original Wye Stan Pan was a man of vision but also a ruthless leader. His eighth clone has a political agenda of his own. ‘Would you like me to kill Version 7 for you?’
He stopped dead in his tracks. ‘What?’
‘You’ll be able to take his place and live here.’
‘You’ll do that for me?’ he stared at me incredulously.
‘Fred helped the seventh to kill the sixth. We’re the next generation, same story.’
‘No, it’s not! It’s not the same story at all,’ he said most emphatically.
Surtr was in no a hurry to leave. When we got indoors he checked his mail, and I calibrated the Cy City record he gave me with the record that Wye Stan 7 had given Fred.
Then we sat drinking Fred’s wine, watching the sun set and the sea become silver in the twilight. Surtr showed me a slender ring he wore, a new Luciolite prototype. It allowed him to connect to his networks. A sphere of miniature menus hovered above the palm of his hand, and his fingers deftly shuffled them. ‘Not as heavy-duty as the XT-Pro portables but a neat travel accessory,’ he said. Surrounded by the relentless murmur of the sea, we eagerly talked about technology, and didn’t mention politics. But eventually I asked what it was he wanted to tell me about Fred.
Surtr’s white suit shimmered in the deep twilight and his white face appeared ghostly. He told me that Fred and Version 7 conspired to recruit me to the Council of Nine, and had planned together what happened to me in Cy City. ‘Analyse what I’ve given you. You’ll see I’m right.’
I knew that what had passed between the two men in my presence could be in
terpreted as supporting his story. I got up and closed the window. The room became deathly silent. I spoke into the silence, ‘Did Fred spend time with him when my teleport pattern was suspended?’
‘No. I thought you’d ask that, so I’ve included a copy of the teleport log. Wye Stan 7 had no time for Freedom. We were working flat out to rectify the damage your aggressive defences caused. The jinx on April hasn’t been fixed yet.’
‘April?’
‘The andronet that was meant to go on the market after March and before May. We’ve had a lot of problems with it.’
‘It’s probably the name that jinxed it.’ The Apocalypse hit Earth in what used to be the month of April before the standard calendar was reset to zero and numbers replaced months. ‘You haven’t told me anything I don’t already know, mostly from Fred himself.’
‘Did he tell you he met my brother two months ago?’
That was news to me, but I wasn’t going to let Surtr know. I switched on the room light. ‘I don’t have any royal cuisine to offer you, sorry.’
‘What do you usually eat?’
‘When he’s away I have pot noodles.’
‘I don’t believe I’ve ever had that,’ said the 28-year-old vice-president of Cyboratics, almost excitedly.
Over pot noodles, we compared our lives. He told me about the palaces that Wye Stan 5 had built. As a child, Surtr always fancied being based in Asgard, Cyboratics’ place in Sirius B. I told him about places in the Ronda system, and what it was like in the CSG academy. He told me what some of the other students whom I used to shadow in school were doing now. It was small talk, the kind you’d have with a schoolmate you haven’t seen in ages. It was like having a normal private life. I heard myself say, ‘Stay the night. You can sleep in Fred’s bed.’
‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ he laughed. ‘Can I sleep in yours? You can sleep in his. You must come to Piramesse when this is over.’
‘You’ve made me this invitation before.’
‘No, that was my brother. You know that. You called him afterwards.’
The illusion of a private life evaporated. ‘Do you share everything?’
‘We shadow each other a lot, but we have a private life too,’ he said. I tried to imagine Wye Stan 7 having a private life. He was so shadowy and reclusive, very little of what he did could be called a public life. Surtr was saying, ‘I tried to shadow your conversation with him but he cut me out when you mentioned my sister.’
I set a replay of the conversation to project against the backdrop of dark sky and sea. Watching it, Surtr’s face became the public face of Wye Stan Pan, unsmiling and aloof. My projected image told the older Wye Stan, ‘I guess that’s the closest to first-names basis we can get…’ and next to me the younger Wye Stan winced ever so slightly a fraction of a second before his older clone winced ever so slightly.
‘There’s something else he didn’t share with you, Surtr.’ I downloaded Fred’s record of the Cy City encounter and found the moment when Wye Stan 7 twists his ring and the blank walls of that room come alive with my dying web. You had to look very closely on Surtr’s copy to realise that something was missing. Now for the first time Surtr saw me tell Wye Stan 7 that I’d never seen a sweep so swift, and saw his older clone respond to me. Fred and I talked about that exchange afterwards. Those moments too had been edited out of Surtr’s copy.
‘Bloody Version 7,’ Surtr muttered.
‘Fairweather was trying to protect you from him.’
He looked at me as if suddenly angry—angry with me for making him remember and angry with himself for what he couldn’t forget. There were tears in his eyes, as if no time at all had passed since the day he sat in my hotel room in Apha-10 crying about his sister. ‘It was my fault,’ he said now, just as he said then. But now he told me the rest of it.
Throughout their childhood and youth, his big sister was always with him, giving him guidance, like a voice of consciousness. He continued to share everything with her when he took up his post in Piramesse. A few months later, a serious transgression by someone in high management was uncovered, and Fairweather helped Surtr to think about how to handle it. Surtr insisted that she was present when Wye Stan 7 contacted him regarding the matter. He had no idea that Wye Stan 7 wanted him to witness the man’s execution. The brother and sister were made to watch a man become empty-eyed and insane before collapsing lifeless. That man was light-years away in Sirius B. ‘Physical distance doesn’t seem to make a difference, and it’s not done through cyberspace,’ Surtr said. ‘My sister made up the story about the land of the dark sun. The rays of the dark sun, we called it. She couldn’t get over it.’
‘Did you?’
He looked away, his voice faltering. ‘Not really. But it helped to see you blocking it. It wasn’t just the horror of what we saw that my sister couldn’t get over. It was what he’s made clear to me. He won’t hesitate to execute me the same way if I don’t play along.’
‘She didn’t play along.’
He nodded, and spoke with difficulty. It occurred to him that it wasn’t suicide. He couldn’t tell me about it at the time. He didn’t know yet that Freedom existed and that I was special to them. Surtr was brought into Wye Stan 7’s confidence after returning from meeting me in Alpha-10. He wanted to warn me as soon as he learned about Freedom, but he was too scared of his brother. And then I left anyway. ‘Of all the remote places in the galaxy you had to go where Freedom Cordova lived. It made me wonder whether you already knew.’
‘Knew what?’
‘It was Freedom who made my brother enter the land of the dark sun.’
‘That’s what Version 7 has told you?’
‘I know it for a fact. Come with me to Piramesse and you’ll be free of Freedom.’
I didn’t respond. He went on, ‘You think I’m my brother’s puppet. That’s not true. I’m not the boy I was when we first met, Al. I have a lot of autonomy and power. I’m the one who actually runs Cyboratics. All the previous presidents retired when the next Wye Stan got to the stage I’m at, but he won’t. He’s not interested in keeping the succession. He wants to stay forever as himself. I’m the true unadulterated Wye Stan. I want my nation back.’
‘I don’t do corporate politics and I definitely don’t do Pan politics.’ My voice sounded cold and remote.
His cheeks flushed. ‘Sorry. I guess you’d like me to leave.’ He started to rise.
‘No, stay please, I mean it.’
He sat back down. ‘Then hear me out. Your Fred is the key to… to… Terrible things happen around him. His presence in Cy City disturbs the natural order of things. The insulated room where you were held had been prepared for him. It was heavily shielded, but even that wasn’t enough. My brother had to travel a safe distance from Cy City to meet with him two months ago.’
An Angel of the Dark Sun, I thought, remembering Fred’s invisible shadow persuading me in another voice, spoken in another dimension… I shook the mental kaleidoscope, and a vivid memory came into focus: his broken voice telling me about Version 7’s experiments, the moment when all Fred’s masks fell off.
After Surtr retired to my bedroom I lay awake on Fred’s bed waiting for something to happen. I thought how my relationship with Fred was the closest I’ve had to a private life, and yet it was tangled up in agendas within agendas. A few hours later I sneaked into my room. Surtr was fast asleep. I went outdoors and hid my rucksack, fully stocked up, by rocky outcrops nearby. Then I returned to my room. He was still asleep. I lay down on the floor wearing an active headband, and closed my eyes to continue waiting.
Eventually the intruder alert blipped in my ear. The headband projected a 360˚ sketch of the immediate vicinity, picked up by Fred’s cameras. Several red dots were moving into strategic positions around the chalet. I shook Surtr awake and whispered that there were hostiles outside and we had to get past them. ‘Your car is equipped with a PertNet, let’s jaunt there,’ I said, speaking loudly for the sake of eavesdroppers, but
indicated my pert. I had configured it to ride the field used by the resort’s staff.
No sooner than we materialised in the moonlit cove, a loud explosion lit up the hollow where his car was parked. Surtr gawked at the glow of the flames as if mesmerised. I hurried him to deep shadow at the foot of the cliff. Then his attention shifted to the sea, and he exclaimed enthralled, ‘How beautiful!’
It was high tide. A calm sea lapped gently at the shore with small waves laced with white foam. A sparkling line across the dark water reflected the light of a full moon low on the horizon. I urged him to duck underwater, reminding him that someone had just blown up his car believing that he was inside it. He ducked underwater as soon as it was deep enough. The whiteness of his suit blended with the surf.
We swam to the cave. The tide reached into it, but deeper inside the floor rose and we could let down the oxygen hoods. It was pitch black. I stopped Surtr from switching on his suit’s light. It could be detected from the sea. There was a way through to an inland exit. I groped my way in the dark, and he followed me closely.
When we crawled deep enough, taking a few turns, I let him switch on the light. Soft monochrome glow emanated from a chest stripe, illuminating his face strangely and making him appear terrified. The tunnel was too small for us to stand up. He crouched behind me, his light casting restless shadows on walls closing in on us. ‘Are you sure you’ve taken all the right turnings?’
‘Yes. I’ve practised this route.’
‘I don’t believe this is happening to me,’ he murmured.
It was the crack of dawn by the time we emerged inland. The hilly skyline was clearly outlined in the east. Only early birds and small mammals were around. My headband started to pick up images as we reached within range of Fred’s surveillance. The only activity was where Surtr’s car had been. Soon we could see it from the hillside. We crouched behind rocky outcrops. There was no trace of the car. Maintenance androids and robot utilities were replacing the damaged turf. They worked at great speed, laying strips of fresh grass that would seamlessly blend into the surrounding meadow. We watched them gather their tools and vanish.