'It means nothing to me one way or the other,' he said, haughtily. I looked around his small, smoky shrine-space; there were three-dimensional holographic images of his fraction-God ranged about the walls, a third of a body with a spear through it, a face in agony, a rainbow.
'Perhaps,' I said, 'in this place, you feel removed from it.'
'Now that you have completed what you were commissioned to do,' he said, 'I will stop receiving wealths on your account. I assume you will be travelling away and we will not meet again.'
His hostile tone baffled me a little; but then I reasoned that his action, that of his people, had been against the tenets of his partial god, and that here – in the shrine – it troubled him. I assumed that he was guilty. Or perhaps he simply did not like me. My hair, untended by dotTech, was long and dredlocky, my skin dirty and covered in scars.
'Have you heard?' I asked.
He shook his head. This was not out of the ordinary, dear stone. It is possible, very rarely, to transmit messages at faster than light, but a message is a pattern of information and that degrades very easily in the quantum turbulence of faster-than-light travel. If the news of my success were indeed being transmitted around t'T the surest way of passing on the news would be an actual, human messenger. And Agifo3acca was not in the habit of receiving visitors. Perhaps, I reasoned, he was merely pleased that I had returned and he trusted me to have carried out the activity his warrior people had required.
I left him then, and wandered some more about his spaceship.
I am not sure what I expected, exactly. I had been promised an explanation, the identity (and more importantly) the motive of my employers. I think I expected my AI to reappear – after all, its circuitry was still there, inside my head. But nothing happened. I ate, slept, wandered. I bumped into Agifo3acca once or twice a day; it was plain that he now considered our business together concluded, and hoped (without saying as much) that I would simply leave. I might have left too, except that I did not know where I wanted to go. Everything felt at a loose end.
I went to the green room and summoned up the holographic representation of Tag-matteo; I am not sure why. Perhaps I thought it could give me some answers. But it was only hostile and insisted upon its ignorance. 'I'm just data,' it would say. 'Data and processing. I'm not sentient – only programmed to respond according to certain static paradigms. If you ask me a question I can only answer with data. But these questions you are asking me now, they do not provoke a meaningful answer in me.'
It was after this that I began to have the bad dreams. In fact, I have had them ever since that moment. They are not guaranteed to turn up every single night, but they are persistent. I wake up sweating, worn out, aching, crying. How many dead! So many!
I could not bring myself to leave; but I avoided crossing paths with Agifo3acca. That was easily done in so enormous a spacecraft. I began studying Agifo3acca's data files, merely to distract myself from the misery that pressed increasingly from inside me.
I spent a week in the library of that ship; downloading and accessing files. Dear stone, I felt the weight of what I had done come increasingly upon me.
2nd
Dear Stone,
Let me move quickly over what followed. Think of it, dear stone, as a sort of coda to the whole set of events. After so many deaths, did one more death mean very much? It's a statistical nonentity, a single 'one' when set against sixty million.
How to tell it? Until this narrative, I do not believe even the greatest minds in the whole of the t'T have pieced together the whole story. I am doing humanity a service by telling the tale.
Agifo3acca's blood was – no. Before that.
He was in his dining space, having eaten shortly before retiring for the night. This made him sluggish. I am not sure whether this was a consideration in my mind when I came to see him. As I set my eyes upon him my only thought was to ask him questions.
'You must explain it to me,' I said.
'Explain?' he said, in his accented Glice.
'You must. I was promised an explanation.'
'By whom?'
'My employers. Promised an explanation for what I had to do. For why I had to do it.'
He looked at me steadily for a while. 'I cannot provide you with one.'
'I assumed,' I said, circling him carefully, and hefting the metal spar I was carrying from hand to hand. 'I assumed that there was some council of Wheah elders, some war cabinet, that made the decision. I assumed that it was part of a larger plan, a war plan, an invasion. Perhaps to distract attention. That's what I assumed.'
Agifo3acca had gone very still. His eyes were on the metal spar. I had found it in one of his lumber-rooms, a discarded piece of metal a metre long. And I had sharpened up its leading edge with a laser; now it was sharp enough to cut flesh quite easily. I was naked, and had painted my body with red ideograms. I can no longer remember why I did this. But the important thing was to get an explanation from Agif.
'I assumed my AI – I really thought it was an AI, to begin with – but then I assumed it was a communication device through which these Wheah war-leaders, or perhaps you, were communicating with me. Using me to do what you needed doing.'
'AI,' repeated Agifo3acca, his eyes still on the blade I carried. 'I do not understand what you are saying,' he said.
'No,' I said, as if humouring him. 'But I have consulted your databases since then.'
'My data is not secret,' I said.
'Perhaps you should have made it secret,' I said. 'I thought that there was a whole conspiracy amongst the Wheah. I imagined a large-scale invasion, but there is no invasion planned. Is there!'
He shook his head.
'Your databases make it clear that you have had no form of communication with any other Wheah for sixty-seven years.'
'Sixty-seven years,' he said. 'Yes.'
'I wanted to see the large picture,' I explained, tossing the blade from hand to hand again. He flinched when I did that. 'I wanted to believe that so large a crime must have a large reason for it. But it didn't, did it? I assumed it was something planned by the whole Wheah, but it wasn't. I see that now. It was you – wasn't it? It was you. Just you by yourself.'
'I do not understand what you are saying,' he said.
'You could talk to me in my brain, if you wanted to,' I pointed out. 'But if you want to play this some other way, then that will do.'
He stared at me.
'I have been wandering through your ship, trying to understand why you want to have such a crime committed. Perhaps you can tell me? I am asking as politely as I know how.'
'I do not understand what you are saying,' he said.
'Very well,' I said. 'I'll tell you what I think. I think it has something to do with the Gravity Trench. That is why you made me use technology related to the Trench – technology you had uncovered in your researches, and which you presented to me through the disguised form of the hologram Tag-matteo – to do the murder.'
'Murder,' echoed Agif. There was a slight hint of a question about the way he said it.
'Maybe your mind has been warped by your years of studying the phenomenon. Maybe you wanted to extend your experiment. Is that it?'
He flicked his eyes from my weapon to my face, and when he realised that I was waiting for an answer he said: 'I do not understand what you are saying.'
'Oh, of course not,' I said, sarcastically. 'But do you know what I think? I think you do know what I am saying. I think you wanted to see what happened to life forms if they were sucked into this strange form of gravity. You believe that the aliens who – you say – created the Trench then disappeared into it. You wanted to see what happened when an entire population of people were compelled to pass into that strange form of gravity. That's what I think.'
'I must ask—' he began to say, slowly, but I interrupted him.
'But you knew it would kill them, didn't you! You knew that they would die. Most of them died in the atmosphere, or suffocated to death. Some few w
ere in the orbitals, but there the collapse of those structures would have squashed them to death. None of them survived – that was why you wanted me to do it. You knew they would all die, and your religious beliefs prevented you from committing the crime. You persuaded me to do it, to do your murder for you.' I was feeling quite heated now.
'I must ask you—' he started again. But that was the point at which I lost all my control. I screamed. I hurled myself at him with my sharpened spur, and made a sweeping cut. The metal sliced through his material and into the flesh of his arm, where he twitched it before his body in a pathetic reflex action of self-defence. But my blow overbalanced me, and I stumbled forward, falling painfully to my knees. Agifo3acca, wailing with the pain of his arm, lurched to his feet and blundered past me. By the time I was on my feet again he was through the door; only the whisk of his disappearing coat-tails around the door-jamb.
I howled. I wanted his death.
I hurled myself at the doorway, crashing bodily into the wall and dinting a shallow impression into the plasmetal. I seemed to be losing co-ordination, for when I bolted through the door and into the corridor outside, still screaming so hard it made my throat hurt, my legs went from underneath me and I clattered to the floor. I dropped my sword. Dazed, I struggled upright again, bent to pick up the sharpened spar of metal, only to slip again. It was then that I realised the corridor floor was slick with Agifo3acca's blood. It was splashed in a great dark puddle beneath me, and dabbles of it were on the wall. Where I had steadied myself getting to my feet I had printed a sketchy picture of a hand upon the wall.
I had never seen so much blood before; dotTech does not allow such prolific exsanguinations. Somewhere, deep in a cunning part of my brain I realised that this meant Agifo3acca was one of those Wheah who did not permit any dotTech in his body at all. Because, dear stone, there are some Wheah (the less religiously exacting) who allow a basic form of nanotechnology in their metabolisms; and some (more devout) who allow none at all. Only his travelling at a significant fraction of light-speed for so much of his life had enabled him to extend his life relative to the t'T. This meant that it would be easy for me to kill him.
My rage had been sapped a little by my tumbles; so, in order to whip up a proper frenzy I bellowed along the corridor 'You made me do your killing, Wheah! And now I shall kill you!'
I got up more carefully, and wiped the blood from the sword on my shirt; the smart fabric immediately balled and expelled the dirt.
'Agifo3acca!' I screamed, lumbering along the corridor. I was brandishing my sword over my head, so that it struck sparks from the metal roof and made a grinding noise.
At the end of the corridor I found there was no sight of my prey. Moreover the trail of blood stopped. I don't know whether Agif, realising that he was bleeding so heavily, had managed to staunch that flow in some way, perhaps by wrapping the cloths of his coat around the wound. But without the blood I didn't know which way to turn. I screamed, bashed the wall with my sword, and then lumbered away, climbing a slope and blundering through a chain of rooms. 'You must assuage these deaths you have caused,' I cried aloud. 'Don't hide Agifo3acca! You know you are responsible. You made me do the killing. You are the real murderer, not me.'
I went through six rooms in quick succession, and found nothing. Then I thought to myself that he might be trying to get off the ship. It is curious; it never occurred to me that he would try to arm himself and retaliate against me. It did not seem to be part of his nature. I thought, grimly, that if he were capable of that he would not have needed me in the first place to do his criminal work for him.
I hurried back down the slope and down the spiral to the hangar, at the base of his enormous, topple-towered spaceship. 'Blood for blood!' I yelled. 'Death for death! Your one death for the sixty million!' I was so certain that I would find him in the hangar that when I approached the entrance to it I called before me, 'Agif – I know you're in there. You must prepare to die now, I think.'
And I burst through, screaming, holding my sword ahead of me.
He was there; half-covered in foam. The foam was still oozing up around him, slowly, out of his Zhip-box. His red-stained coat was discarded on the floor, and blood was trembling out of his wounded arm. It had stained the normally cream-coloured foam a streaky pink colour, like clouds at sunset. The foam was up to his mid-chest, and down to his knees; his arms were mostly covered by it, but the stretch of arm just below the shoulder was still bare, and wet-red all over with blood. I could see the wound, a deeper red gash where the blood pulsed. And then I could see his face, utterly white, his mouth open a little way, his eyes two perfect circles dotted with two points of black. He was breathing very hard. I had him.
I started coughing; the exertion of running around and the rasping of my throat with all the yelling and screaming had agitated my bronchus. I coughed so hard I doubled over, and had to sit down. By the time I had settled my mouth, Agif was three-quarters covered by the foam.
I got up, and stepped over to him, lifting the sword to cut him about the head. I wasn't exactly sure how to deliver the final stroke. I breathed in. Agif was looking straight up at me, his eyes wide and seemingly shivering with fear. I could see the fear in him. He had positioned himself close to the sink in the hangar floor, so that when the foam was complete he would tumble easily into it and through the sphincter to outer space. I paused, dear stone.
It was a moment of choice. Had Agif stayed in his dining room, or had I encountered him in the corridor, I would certainly have killed him. I really would. And, more, dear stone, I certainly intended to kill him as I stepped through into the hangar. But for some reason, when I was actually standing over him, it did not seem the thing to do to kill him. I tried to remember why I wanted him dead so badly; and was even able to work intellectually through all the reasons – his use of me as a tool, his responsibility for so many deaths. But it did not seem appropriate, somehow, to actually bring the sword down and end his life. So I just stood there, whilst the foam bubbled and slewed up and around him, covering his feet; forming into his mouth until only his eyes were left under a veil of foam. And then it went over his head, and he was encased in it.
I could still have killed him then, of course. For a minute or so the foam was soft, and I could have simply speared him through it. Even after its surface went rock-hard, I could have rolled him to the far side of the hangar and sprayed him with solvent to uncover him. I thought of him inside the dark of the foam, quivering with fear, wondering when my blow was going to come thundering down. This thought made me feel neither elated nor pitiful.
I pushed the pod of hardened foam with my foot, and it rolled into the gap and settled slowly into the sphincter; and then, with the careful action of an airlock, it was squeezed into space.
3rd
Dear Stone,
Well, yes, I wasn't entirely sane I think. I stayed on Agif s ship all by myself for some time. I am not sure how much time. I abandoned clothes, and stopped carrying out even the basic ablutions that my lack of dotTech had driven me to. I became extremely dirty, so much so that my rank smell was offensive even to myself. I was still armed with the sword, and had painted myself in what was left of Agif s blood on the floor outside his dining room (tidybugs were cleaning the mess away by the time I got back to it). Painted and armed, I roamed from room to room, singing to myself and telling myself stories. Sometimes I grew so tired with this that I curled up and went to sleep wherever I happened to find myself. I felt the cold, having no dotTech within me, and sometimes I woke up trembling with chills. I cried. I pretended I was not human at all, but rather a hawk or a lion. At one stage I seem to remember (although it is hazy in my mind) that I tried to persuade the ship's processor to vent air from a succession of rooms. I think I was hoping to experience the rushing atmosphere that I had inflicted upon Colar; hoping to be drawn through the air. But the ship's processor refused to accede; recognising the danger, I suppose. I ate food from Agifo3acca's dining suite, telling mys
elf that I had earned it by sparing his life. For three days I ate nothing but my own hair, pulling it out of my head in clumps and chewing it in my mouth. But without the dotTech in my body to keep me healthy I got feeble with hunger very quickly, and eventually gave up this strange diet. I tried cutting my own flesh with jagged objects, and using the blood to write words and draw faces on the walls of the corridor; but the cleaning robots, the little bugs, cleaned it away. I might have been able to reprogram the machines, but I could not be bothered. I was too far gone. Without the dotTech in my body I was deteriorating severely. The dotTech.
Now we come to it, dear Stone.
I believe that after a while, which might have been two weeks, I found myself in a calmer, less manically-insane, enervated state of mind. I lay on a recliner, and stared at the webbing of the ceiling above me.
When I sat up Klabier was there.
'Wellhello,' I said. 'You are Klabier.'
She was precisely as I remembered her; her slight frame with its stalk-like limbs. Even the faint pattern of shade made by the alignment of fair hairs on her bronze skin.
'I pushed you from the top of a tall tower,' I said.
'Not exactly,' she replied. But she was smiling at me.
I turned my head away, but she was still there. That was the first indication I had that there was something unusual about this apparition. I turned back, and she was there directly in front of me. I flicked my eyes left, and her image would not be shaken from its place in the middle of my line of sight.
'That's clever,' I said, interested enough to be lifted a little from my lethargy. 'How do you do that?'
'What a sight you are,' said Klabier, shaking her head a little.
'Oh, I know. I know. I'm glad,' I said, lying down again and looking at the ceiling, 'that you did not die when I pushed you from the tower. I thought that maybe the dotTech would save you.'
Adam Roberts - Stone(2002) Page 26