by Levy, Roger
‘Here is the lesson.’ He could hardly say his esses. His gums were shrouded in blood. He spat blood. ‘Let it be seen.’ A gob of bloody spittle landed on the Pull. ‘Let it be shown.’ He stopped to wipe the Pull on his red robe. ‘Let it be known through every world!’
He held the Pull high, his thumb ready on the black orb. A violinist broke away from the arkestra and launched herself at him, screaming, her instrument making a discordant sound that reminded me of the earlier tuning of instruments, but Father Sheol threw her off. The violin bounced on the orange grass.
‘We are all of us sinners. All of us, above and below and between. Our only freedom lies beyond.’
His thumb twitched on the Pull, and he drew back his arm and hurled the orb high in the air. As he hurled it clear, he stepped forward and joined the arkestra over the pit.
Now every member of the arkestra screamed and the sound was louder than the sound of their music had been. It drowned even its memory, I’m sure, for most of the congregation, as Father Sheol must have intended.
The air rushed from the cathedral towards the pit as it groaned and gave way, and the air swirled back, swollen with heat. There were flames and a roaring, a sudden rush of air and light that left me gasping and dizzied, and then the pit closed and there was silence.
On the pitch, beside the pit, all that remained were the Pull and a broken violin. Father Sheol was gone too. He had sacrificed himself.
The congregation screamed, whooped and yelled for seventeen minutes as the exits were opened, and the great censers swung across the pitch, trailing ropes of sweet incense. Hymns played us out of the cathedral; ‘Heav’n o’erwhelms Hell’s awful thunder’ and ‘We march with fear to Thee our Lord’.
My mother said nothing all the way back. My father muttered to himself. I pretended I was a puter, challenging myself to calculations.
How had such a thing been allowed to happen? Had the Upper Worlds not considered the possible consequences of sending an arkestra to Gehenna?
Now, from a distance of time, it’s quite obvious to me. The arkestra were a sacrifice, of course, but they were not merely a sacrifice by Father Sheol.
The System – all but Gehenna and the unsaid planet – was rigorously godless. While the unsaid planet had withdrawn entirely from the System, maintaining its privacy to the point where it monitored and obliterated all reference to itself, Gehenna was a sanctioned aberration. It had suited Gehenna to invite the arkestra. Father Sheol had thought to teach the Upper Worlds a lesson, but the Upper Worlds had known exactly what to expect from him. They had offered up the Amadeus Arkestra as a sacrifice. It was a perfect opportunity for the Upper Worlds to demonstrate what they saw as the insanity of godfear.
In the end, it was a lesson in the ways of humanity. In a secular system, the existence of Gehenna was vital.
But on a day-to-day level, Gehenna wasn’t a place of torment. The small community in which we lived was peaceful. There was no crime to speak of. We lived far from the deletium mines. All I knew of the mines was that sinners from the Upper Worlds were sent to work in them.
There was tax, though. As much in Gehenna as elsewhere in the System, tax was a complex burden. Every planet had its own Infratax codes, and System Administration exerted several codes of Ultratax on top of that.
Gehenna was the only haven in the entire System for a tax exemption on grounds, technically, of mental incompetence. As long as you lived there, submitting to godly writ, rejecting the pornosphere and all other trappings of secular confusion, and contributing to the export of deletium, which was unique to Gehenna, you would pay little Ultratax.
Most people employed specialists to calculate their taxes, but my father didn’t. He loved the complexity of taxation just as he loved putery with its systems and processes and its promises of certainty. Even on Gehenna, he was unusual. He loved the tax system and the Babbel equally and without question, loved how they pervaded every aspect of human existence, entirely impervious to common sense. Sitting with his friends while he fixed their putery, he would explain how they were taxed. He would advise them to avoid tax by claiming this exemption or that, and advise them how to avoid the wrath of God by this act of kindness or that.
I look back and wonder how someone as logical as he was could accept godly writ. Why was I not able to believe? When did I first realise how strange it was? Was it that slap on the head in the cathedral? Was it the look on my mother’s face as she saw me register her failure to defend me? Was it the irresistible tide of her genes? Did she ever believe? Or did she simply keep quiet about her disbelief?
Two
TALLEN
It’s a border planet, Bleak, and Lookout, the town where I live, is its last outpost. That’s if you don’t count the rigs, of course. Here in Lookout, people hunch their shoulders and keep their heads down, do their jobs and then take their breaks off-planet. They say monotony causes madness, but we have three seasons, so it can’t be monotony that sends people crazy here. Most people think it’s the wind that does it. The seasons in Lookout are as eventful as you’d expect considering Bleak was crash-terraformed from methane to nitroxygen inside three centuries.
Our longest season is between winter and summer, when the wind comes in hard off the sea, heading for the mountains, slapping thunder and rolling silverblack cloud in its wake. Anywhere else, they’d call it spring. We call it flux, and it’s one grand hell of a sight. Squinting out to sea, you can make out tumbling shapes in those vortices of cloud. Sometimes the shapes remind you of animals you might have seen pictures of, or dreams or faces or maps of worlds, but sometimes it’s the shape of a rig, and if it is, no matter how godless you are, you ask that the cloud doesn’t drop what’s left of it on your head. Lookout’s only once seen a falling rig, and that was well before my time, but they still talk of it when the wind’s beginning to build and they’re drinking brush brandy in Bar/red. Mostly the rigs are well anchored, though – what the riggers call semi-submerged – and they’re far enough out to sea to be unlikely to fall here if they do get torn away.
Everything in Lookout is geared around the rigs. There’s pretty well nothing here but the rigyards and their support systems.
No, that’s not quite true – there’s the sarcs, of course, and everybody in the System knows about them, but the sarcs are dropped into the sea a long way from Lookout. They’re big enough news elsewhere, but no one here pays them any attention unless once in a while one of them slips the shield and gets itself beached. Oh, there’s the Chute, too, but I’m not crazy enough to spend my time there.
During flux, Lookout shuts down so you can’t hear a thing outside the complex, and you don’t go beyond the shield until the summer, when it’s a different story. The wind drops and at the shoreline the sea is easier, smearing itself over the beach. I take my break in the summer. The weather’s relatively gentle then, and I find the brief hope it raises too hard to bear, so I pack up and head for the snows of Colder. Colder’s a few days away by slowship. I don’t sleep on the journey, I just watch Lookout fade away, or else I stare out at the stars. I used to see a woman in Colder, but she got attached to someone and I don’t see her any more. Now I take a hut high in the white hills and go walking by myself.
I come back to Lookout in the winter. Bleak has no fall to speak of. Our winter is the wind flipped around and returning to sea with a freight of rock torn from the mountains. The terraforming of Bleak hasn’t taken properly, but it doesn’t matter – like I said, the town only exists for the rigs, and they only matter as long as there’s core to be drilled, and I guess the core will be exhausted by the time Bleak falls back to shit again.
But I’ll be long dead by that time, so what the hell.
Tallen looked over what he’d set down, closed his eyes a moment, then sighed and rechecked the prompt for the third time, looking for the catch.
FINAL REMINDER. YOUR FREE [StarHearts] WELCOME-BACK OFFER IS ONLY VALID FOR TWELVE HOURS. YOU HAVE ONE HOUR REMAINING. TO R
EDEEM THIS OFFER, PLEASE REGISTER YOUR [HeartStar] PROFILE NOW. THIS OFFER WILL NOT BE REPEATED.
For a month they’d been sending him better and better deals, and he’d ignored them all, but a free offer was unheard of.
He hated the idea of being manipulated, even though he knew everyone was. It was impossible to participate in the Song without losing part of your spirit in the process. This, though, was almost impossible to refuse, even if he wasn’t in the mood for company. StarHearts didn’t come cheap.
He felt a brief rush of the usual melancholy, and wiped the whole thing from the screen. StarHearts had never done him any good before.
And then he sighed to himself and brought back most of the text he had written, letting it end after the hut in the white hills. He closed his eyes and remembered Lena telling him goodbye, her open hand rising to the screenery, and him, stupidly, touching the glassy interface.
After Lena he’d sworn never to use StarHearts again, and yet here he was, drawn back once more. They knew how he thought. They knew him inside out.
Fine. When they started charging him, as they would soon enough, he’d cancel. They should know that about him too.
There had been no future with her anyway. They’d both known it. It wasn’t the fault of the program. He was never going to leave Lookout for anyone and she’d never live anywhere but Colder, and that was all there was to it.
The message to no one glittered on the screen. He restored the whole thing, all the way to ‘what the hell’. What the hell, he thought, and yessed it.
The screen glowed instantly.
—Welcome back to [StarHearts], Mr Tallen. [StarHearts] is a ParaSite of AfterLife.
—Subscriber advice follows. You are not being charged for this advice.
—You have not explained your employment. Detailing well-remunerated and/or socially respectable employment statistically raises your chance of a response.
—You have used words or phrases that may be off-putting to some [StarHearts] subscribers. Some of these words or phrases are: Monotony; Madness; Slapping; God(suffix); Hard to bear; Don’t sleep; Drinking; Used to see a woman; Got attached; Exhausted; Torn; Shit; Hell.
—Words or phrases that you may find more effective include: Love; Companionship; Warm; Kind; Sense of humour; Funny; Wealth (only in connection with yourself); Genetically stable (only in connection with yourself); Healthy (only in connection with yourself); Home-loving; Good-looking (only in connection with yourself).
—Do you wish to edit your [HeartStar]?
Tallen chose No.
—Your [HeartStar] has been posted to all subscribers for a period of one hundred charge-free hours. After this time your [StarHearts] account will achieve positive charge-status of fifteen dolors per (local calendar) month.
—You will be informed of any responses.
He tried to close the screen, but it wasn’t ready to let him do that.
—Please complete this Opportunity String before exiting AfterLife. Failure to do so will clear all details of this session and invalidate the current offer.
—Thank you for agreeing.
—Many [StarHearts] subscribers combine [StarHearts] access with main database access and access to TruTales and other payment-positive ParaSites. Do you wish to take this opportunity now or later?
Later.
—You have not accessed the main AfterLife database for twenty-nine hours and fourteen minutes. You currently have a cache of eighteen votes to cast, of which five expire in nine hours and fourteen minutes. Do you wish to vote now or later?
Later.
—Thank you. This Opportunity String is complete. You may now close –
He closed it. Leaving the screen to itself, and feeling restless and oddly guilty at having yessed the HeartSearch, Tallen shrugged on a jacket and took to the street.
He was regretting it already. What was he doing? It always made him think too much, writing or talking about himself like that. How the hell had he got to a place like this – the woman he’d met the other night in the red bar, the writer, she’d said Lookout was full of sound and fury, saying it like she’d heard the description herself somewhere. Now he had it lodged in his head, along with the way she’d said it. There had been something unusual about her, a sense of life and curiosity, and he’d wanted to carry on talking to her. He’d thought maybe she was interested in him too, but she’d turned away from him as soon as the big Paxer had come in, and that had been the end of that. Razer, that was her name. Maybe he’d see her again. Razer and the Paxer had still been there, drinking hard, when Tallen had left the bar. Most people, even non-crimers, were nervous around law officers, but Razer wasn’t.
No, Tallen shouldn’t have let himself be suckered into another HeartSearch. Look at the subscriber advice. What did he have to offer anyone? Lena had been right, and the woman before her, and all the others. And look at the insanity of where he lived. Who would live here by choice?
He walked beside the buildings, his thoughts for once extraordinarily clear. At night, Lookout was almost shadowless. The days here were strange enough, but it had taken him a year to get used to how the town was at night. Under the odd glare of the shield, the air gave no sense of depth or distance, everything seeming not distant or near, but just big or small. Your brain had to learn a new visual judgement. The buildings were no problem, but door grips were awkward, and eye-parallax was more important than focus. Getting around Lookout after sundown was like walking through a kids’ flicbook.
And there was the shield. During flux, the shield protecting the complex was a booming weave of magnetism and electricity. Tallen thought of it as smoke and mirrors. He believed in the shield’s existence, though, unlike the dozen or more drunks and crazies every year who took it into their heads to run through it and were swept away like that girl in the Oz flicbook his mother had read him as a child. Except that they were never seen again.
During the day, the shield was almost invisible, a troubling blur you could briefly squint at. You’d plant your feet firmly and focus on a wall, the ground, something solid. Nothing could resist that wind, but the soft, graduated shield could deal with it. At its outer edge, it was hardly there at all, merely taking the wind’s measure. A few metres in, it was rolling with the punches but starting to blunt and spread them, while a few metres deeper, it was soaking up the assault and making enough energy of it to power the complex and the shield together. The surplus stored energy was sufficient to run Lookout for the rest of the year. Bleak’s wind was an inexhaustible source of power and catastrophe.
Tallen wandered on, unable to dispel an odd feeling of being shadowed through the streets. It was just this absurd place, though. Nothing on Bleak made sense.
It was cool now and well past midnight, and the shield hummed. As always, Tallen headed down to the beach, descending close enough to the water that it lapped at his feet. The surf hissed through the stones underfoot. He preferred the shingle at night, when the brilliant sea-washed colours of day were muted to purples and scarlets.
Tonight the calm of the sea didn’t dispel his vague feeling of desolation. It was a mistake to have come out. These nightly walks were a bad habit. He should have taken a capsule and at least got himself some chemical rest.
Rocking gently from foot to foot to avoid sinking through the shingle, he wondered where his life was headed. There were more of the nearly-dead here than the living. They say you come to Lookout if you’re tired of life, and you go to the rigs when you are ready for death. The bars of Lookout were full of such end-of-everything talk. The trouble was, Tallen was starting to come out with it himself.
He thought of the woman in the bar again. Razer. What was she doing here? Most people let you know what it was that had brought them here after the first drink. Not her, though. There had been a life to her.
He reached down and stirred a finger in the slow water, watching the ripples go out to join the spiking sea beyond the shield and out of sight. Further out, he could s
ee the shield forcing coronas from the wind, reds and blues and iridescent purples, shards of colour hard as rock and gone in an instant. Beyond that there was nothing to see. Space had its stars but the sea had nothing at all. Nothing but the sarcs and the rigs, anyway.
Maybe he’d feel better when he got back to work in a couple of days. Time off in Lookout wasn’t a good thing.
He let his thoughts drift, wondering what it was like to be on a rig out there. Crazy and lonely, he guessed, with the machinery thumping day and night, and the wind and the sea. He closed his eyes, trying to imagine the thunder of the drills and the fury of the elements working relentlessly to rip you away.
And then he forgot about the rigs and tipped his head, listening. Something wasn’t right. There had been a sound, and there it was again, sharper. He pulled himself upright and started heading for home at a brisk walk.
There were definitely footsteps behind him. Tallen looked quickly back, stumbled, then began awkwardly to run.
Three
RAZER
Razer sat with Bale at a small table under a dead light in a corner of the bar, the pair of them drinking steadily. The late evening was quiet, only a few others around the place, some talking but most of them sitting and screening alone. Looking around, Razer counted fifteen screeners, which meant that, statistically, eight or nine would be on AfterLife or one of its ParaSites. She used to wonder why they didn’t stay home and screen from there, until someone had told her that AfterLife’s screentime restrictions didn’t apply to public-area screenery. It kept people social, gave them a reason to go out. It kept AfterLife popular with bar owners, that was for sure, and it kept the System’s Administrata happy.
The screeners here seemed content enough too, nodding to themselves, muttering intently, tapping the air. At least, judging by their demeanours, none of them were on porn sites. Mostly, though not invariably, they stayed home for that. Razer wondered whether any of them were linked to TruTales.