by Levy, Roger
‘Come on, Bale. Me? What do you think? You really think I’d jump?’
‘No.’ He looked serious. ‘You’d be the one.’
‘The one?’ I tried to laugh again, but I couldn’t do it. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You’d be the one who gets to the edge and holds it there. You’d be the one who stops, looks down and looks back. And then looks along the edge too, both ways. You want to see it all. That’s you. The storymaker.’
I felt more naked and exposed than I’d been with him inside me, earlier, and somehow I felt him even deeper within me now as he added, ‘You can’t stay on the edge forever, though.’
I tried to look away, but he cupped my face in his hands and turned me towards him and said, ‘Let me take you, when there’s time. I’ll show you what the words mean. Not darkspeed, of course. Not even close to the edge. But I’ll show you the Chute.’
‘I’d really like that, Bale.’
And I nestled closer and kissed this reckless, wonderful, crazy man.
There. She’d been true to the core of his story, as she was always true, since stories were all that mattered. But the rest of it… the sex hadn’t been like that at all, and in truth, the trigger for the story of the Chute and of darkspeed, for Bale, had been his need to distract himself from the sexual failure. But writing it like this, now, already seemed true enough for her.
No. She was fooling herself.
She closed her eyes and remembered it. The talk of darkspeed – that had been the sex, the intimacy, not just for Bale but for them both. The failure of the sex wasn’t only his, of course. She could never let herself truly loose any more than Bale could. She never had, never would. Darkspeed was Bale’s real sex, and the story of it – no, the telling of the story of it – was hers.
Was that so bad? She’d met crazier people. She’d had worse sex. And every time, she’d written a memory and moved on.
She’d move on now, as she’d moved on before. Maybe she could tell the story of the other man in the red bar. Tallen. It was odd for Cynth to be indecisive, offering her two stories before fixing on one. And then to ask questions about the vote for Gamliel as the AI had – Razer still couldn’t remember the man’s name. Madrow, Manler? The image of that knot of metal tossed up and caught wouldn’t leave her. Moncrell?
She glanced at the screenery. Yes, she’d move on.
TEN PEOPLE AND ONE PAX OFFICER BELIEVED DEAD
So why was she crying?
Ten
ALEF
SigEv 10 The first deaths
Something in Ligate’s eyes changed, as if a jolt had passed through him, and for the first time he moved sharply and with decision.
If you’re searching this record for an explanation, this would be its heart, I imagine. At the time, part of me was possibly even aware of the fact. I watched my parents die and I saw the effect it was going to have on me. I saw my mind conducting this analysis of the experience of seeing my parents killed. I saw myself examining this phenomenon too, and at a greater remove observing this. I examined each stage of self-observation and analysis like the intellectual scrutiny of a logic cascade.
Bodily, though, I froze. I couldn’t breathe. The next events unfolded like a series of fixed images with sluggish, blurrily linked scenes. I felt a curious cold flush as Ligate slipped behind my father and made a slow but graceful swirling movement with his hand, as if drawing a halo in the air above his head. My father jerked upright and started to groan and stopped again. A line of blood appeared at his neck, fine at first and then thickening, like the rim of a cup overflowing. His tongue came out. His eyes widened and stayed wide.
It sounds dramatic, a death described like this, but in reality it wasn’t, since there was little sound or movement. We need flailing and screams if we are to appreciate a tragedy in its fullness.
Ligate let my father go. He went to my mother and did the same thing: the halo and then the blooming red line. The wire was thin and effectively invisible; I deduced it from the line of blood and a calculation of angles.
There it was. I see that scene now like a smashed hologram, each shard – some big, some small, but infinite in number, and all of them jagged – containing the whole, the pieces scattered not in place but in time, so that I see one at the corner of my eye everywhere I look, at every moment in my life. And they are scattered not only from that point forward, but they have spread backwards, into my memories too.
This, this is the core of me, this shattering, and nothing before or beyond it was ever again quite as it might have been. It’s a curious thing.
The events continued, and now there was a proper screaming and flailing. The man at the rear door, holding Pellonhorc’s mother, sawed her throat across with a knife as she began to screech, curtaining blood down her front and winding her cry down to a mewl and then nothing as he let her body coil to the ground.
Garrel and the men to his sides were moving too, but as Ligate – a shooting weapon in his good hand – took aim at me, a shrill, piercing scream came from the other door, the door that opened to the main part of the shop.
Pellonhorc was standing there with a pipgun braced unsteadily in both hands, whipping a silent stream of pips across the room. Garrel and the two men beside him dropped to the floor quickly enough to avoid the arc of pips, but the man who had killed Pellonhorc’s mother was snagged and fell dead on her body. For an instant, Pellonhorc let his gun hand falter, and stared at his mother’s body. Then he raised the pipgun again.
Ligate was moving his own gun towards Pellonhorc but the pip stream from Pellonhorc’s weapon was faster and Ligate’s needles only stitched across some screenery up on the wall, the glass screeching and blowing in. Ligate crumpled.
Garrel swung an elbow up hard into the chin of the man on his left, the man’s jaw cracking, an eyeshield detaching and spinning brightly across the room. He lay clutching his face. The other man had a blade, but Pellonhorc’s gun removed the arm that held it.
Garrel yelled, ‘Out!’ and pushed us through the door and closed it behind us. One of his eyeshields was cracked. He said, ‘Wait there. Do not move. This time you listen to me. Do you understand? Do you understand? Wait for me. I have to work out what we do. Trust me. I’m trying to save us. All right?’
Pellonhorc was shaking. I was vomiting. Neither of us was going anywhere.
Garrel went back into the office and closed the door again.
Coughing bile, I told Pellonhorc, ‘I don’t think we can trust Garrel.’
Pellonhorc didn’t answer.
I said, ‘Who was Ligate?’
Pellonhorc didn’t move. I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and went to the counter. I brought the screenery up and watched Garrel in the back room. He was nodding at some screenery, but I couldn’t see the image, and the audio was down so I couldn’t hear anything. Garrel then went to all the bodies and checked them methodically. He took a ring from Pellonhorc’s mother’s finger and held the ring up to the screen, then pocketed it. If it wasn’t Drame he was talking to, who was it?
As Garrel came back towards the door, I returned to Pellonhorc’s side. I didn’t know what to do.
‘We have to be quick,’ Garrel said. He looked at Pellonhorc, who showed no sign of having heard anything, and then at me. ‘Alef, you have to get the data.’
I waited for him to tell me what data he was talking about, but he was waiting too, and I saw he expected me to know.
‘Come on, boy,’ he said. ‘Quickly. We need to take your father’s work.’
I said, as if I believed Garrel was loyal to Drame, ‘Ligate’s dead. We’re okay.’
‘Ligate?’ He was astonished at the idea of it. ‘That wasn’t Ligate in there. It was a dummy. Ligate would never risk himself in flesh, any more than Drame would.’ He broke off and said, more softly, ‘You’ve never seen Ligate, have you? He doesn’t look anything like that. It was just his voice. He was no more in that room than Drame was.’
I felt stup
id. Of course. The slowness of reaction. He’d dummied one of his men, and only relinquished motor control at the very end, leaving his soldier, the dummy, to do the killing. But he’d have been there behind the man’s eyes. Until the soldier died, Ligate would have seen everything.
I put my hand to my mouth again, as if I was going to vomit, but I was thinking. Garrel was trying to confuse me. What he’d said made sense, but he was still almost certainly Ligate’s spy.
And another thing; whoever Garrel was loyal to, if I were no use to him, he’d probably kill me. It made sense for me to cooperate.
Why, though, would he imagine I knew my father had worked for Drame?
‘Come on, boy.’ Garrel looked at me, then knelt down and took my hands in his thick armoured gloves. The gloves were sticky with blood, but they were warm, too, and the enfolding and unexpected warmth made me start to cry. He didn’t know what to do now, and swore. ‘Didn’t you know anything of what your father did? You must have known something.’
I shook my head, wiping my eyes.
Garrel took a long breath and his forehead closed into wrinkles. The fractured eyeshield fell like a black tear and clicked once on the stone floor. I’d never really wondered what was behind those shades. Where his eye should have been was a ball of puckered pink scar tissue stitched with sensors.
I glanced at Pellonhorc to see his reaction. It was the kind of thing he’d have been fascinated by. But he was sitting like Henro the God-touched, rocking gently in his limbo. Henro had been like that for twenty years, they said. I hoped Pellonhorc hadn’t been touched as thoroughly as Henro.
Garrel picked at his eye, flicking away the last of the glass. I stared and he stared back at me, the sensors drawing in and out, adjusting. Eventually Garrel said, ‘Your father ran it all, Alef. Everything must be here, and we have to take it with us. If we don’t, he’ll kill me and he’ll kill you. Do you understand?’
I said, ‘Who will?’
Garrel frowned. ‘Ethan Drame. Who else?’ He paused, and his face changed. ‘You think –?’
I realised I should have kept quiet, but Garrel just sighed. ‘This has to be quick and you have to believe me. This is what happened. They got to the house. You heard about the escapees from the deletium mines? They were Ligate’s men. They came down in a prison detail. Traile and I went to intercept them, but it turned out that Traile was Ligate’s man too. He tried to incapacitate me. He should have killed me when he had the chance. I killed him. I came to collect you, but the rest of Ligate’s team were faster than I expected. They got to your parents and Pellonhorc’s mother before we got back from the school. Well, you saw that.’
Pellonhorc moaned and rocked more rapidly for a moment, then settled back to his previous rhythm.
‘Why did you go in by yourself like that?’
‘Alef, we haven’t time.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Ligate wouldn’t kill me unless he had to. I’m worth more alive. My instructions are to protect what is Drame’s. If I can’t safeguard Drame by keeping them alive –’
‘You do it by killing them,’ I said. ‘You would have killed my parents.’
‘I would have tried not to, and in the end I didn’t. We really haven’t time for this, boy.’ Garrel looked at Pellonhorc and at me again. I could see him reviewing the fragility of his story. ‘You’ve no way of telling, have you?’ he said. ‘You just have to trust me.’
It was like the choice Ligate had given Drame. It was no choice at all. So I said, ‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ He waited. ‘So. The data, Alef.’
I smiled and shrugged. It was all crazy. Garrel said, slowly, ‘Oh. Oh, hell. You didn’t know a thing, did you?’
‘No.’
Garrel sat down heavily on the floor. ‘Then we’re all dead. Drame trusted Saul because Saul didn’t trust anyone at all. But he assumed that you –’
‘Wait.’ I realised I did know something. I had to know it. My father had never told me anything, I suppose in an attempt to protect me from his life as long as he could, but if the data were that important, he would still somehow have given it to me. It was his nature to have thought of every possibility, and this was one; the possibility that possession of the data might one day keep me alive.
‘In the office,’ I said. I moved towards the door, but Garrel said, ‘No. You’ve seen enough of that. I’ll get it. Where is it?’
I told him where to find it: my own puter. The data held where only I could reach it, within the programs my father set there for me. From death, he was safeguarding me.
Garrel came out with the puter in his arms, the small, sea-grey, heavy ribbed box with its edgeless screenery. ‘Is this all?’
‘It’s all I need.’
He hefted it and said, ‘Can we lighten it?’
I put it on the counter and pulled the screenery away, and cracked off all the conns and comms junk. The puter was now two thirds the depth and width, but its weight was almost the same.
Garrel turned it over in his hands. What remained was smaller than the copy of the Babble we had at home. He said, ‘That’s all we can strip? There’s nothing else we can dump?’
‘Other than the shell I stripped away, there’s just the information sled and its cocoon.’
‘What’s the cocoon for?’
‘Armour. Against invasion and corruption, hammer and blade, intentional or environmental.’ I tapped it with my fingernail. ‘Most of this is cocoon. I can strip it all off, and what’s left, what really matters, I could just about swallow with a gulp of water. You want me to?’
For the first time, Garrel looked uncertain. ‘What do you think?’
I wondered fleetingly whether he was clever enough to understand what he was offering me; if I swallowed it, I could slip away and run. But where could I run to? Was he dangling bait, or was the question honest?
‘Keep the cocoon,’ I said. ‘Safer.’
The overhead light flickered across Garrel’s remaining eyeshade. He picked up the puter and said, ‘Okay. Pellonhorc? You hear me? We have to go.’
Pellonhorc shuddered and stood up. He looked at Garrel and then at me. The look he sent me made me scared. He stopped shaking and became peculiarly still, and his eyes set hard until they were no more readable than Garrel’s. He was not at all like Henro the God-touched, I realised. He was not overwhelmed by godfear, was not brimful of mystery. Something had been removed from Pellonhorc forever. I wondered why I was not like him, what the difference was between us.
I don’t know whether Garrel saw what had happened to Pellonhorc. Maybe his odd obedience was enough. Garrel pushed us in front of him to the door, checking carefully that I didn’t try to pick up any of the discarded elements of my puter. Smart of him, I thought, and smarter still that he caught me registering his check and nodded approvingly. Almost as if we were covering each other’s back, instead of each watching his own.
We went out of the shop. In the sharp sunlight I was suddenly aware that hardly any time had passed since Garrel and I had gone in.
A crowd had gathered in the street, though, Father Grace among them. He raised a hand, but Garrel simply told him, ‘We’re going,’ and pushed through to reach the flycykle. I heard Father Grace mutter something about donations and reparations. Over his shoulder, Garrel said, ‘You’ve seen the end of them, Father. Back you go to God, now.’
As Garrel closed the flycykle door against the crowd and sat down at the console, he murmured to me, ‘That was very smart, the way you let Pellonhorc out of the flycykle.’
I wondered whether he’d worked it out at the time, or only as Pellonhorc had appeared in the doorway shooting pips. The answer might help tell me whether he was Ligate’s agent or not. If he’d guessed instantly but kept quiet to let Pellonhorc in, he was Drame’s man.
And as we lifted away from JerSalem, heading for Pellonhorc’s father or for Ligate’s camp, it struck me that while I would be equally unsafe at either destination, Pellonhorc would liv
e or die by it.
Pellonhorc was sitting beside me, neither speaking nor moving. He had saved my life. I was letting Garrel take us to this coin’s toss of a fate, either to Ligate or to Drame, from the flycykle to a shuttle, to a ship, the stars and then the Upper Worlds, and I sat hugging my puter and could do nothing but stare into the chaos of the future.
* * *
SigEv 11 A journey
I wouldn’t hear Pellonhorc speak for days. The transfer from vessel to vessel might have been familiar to him, but for me it was astonishing. I’d never even seen a ferry station before, with its tiers of trucking vessels, let alone the silver-pocked blackness of space.
The journey began simply enough, as we moved innocuously from the shop to the ferry station, keeping to speed limits along the flycykle lanes. At a small, closed hangar, we were ushered to a dark-windowed cart and taken directly to a transfer vessel – three of us choosing wherever we wanted to sit from a thousand empty seats, and opting to sit crammed together, our thin shoulders to either side of Garrel’s bonehard forearms – that shipped us up to a midspace platform. The platform seemed deserted, though I noticed that where there were shutters, they were down; where there was dimglass, it was set to dark; and where there were doors we didn’t need to pass through, they were closed.
We went directly from the platform to the shuttle bay, jogging clunk-footed and breathless in Garrel’s wake through twists of booming metal corridors. There were health warnings everywhere. Each time we passed one, I read a few lines, and by the time we reached the shuttle bay I had memorised the vaccination requirements for every planet in the System, with the exception of the unsaid planet.
I had never left Gehenna before, so I assumed the process we followed was routine, that anyone could transfer from ground to exitspace within hours, without need for registration, security or a moment’s pause other than for the opening of doorlocks.
From the time Garrel touched the flycykle down at the ferry station to the time we squeezed into the shuttle for the brief sweeping upglide to the fastship, we saw maybe a dozen people. (Actually, thirteen. Seven were women. I’m trying to simplify this account, but I am what I am.) Those few people we encountered were present, it seemed, merely to roll us forward, through the right door, along the right path. The speed and smoothness of it was both soothing and numbing. There was no time to think until we reached the shuttle, and even there, although we were just sitting for an hour or so (seventy-eight minutes), the whine and roar, the slow slams of acceleration and braking, all denied the possibility of reflection. Not that, at that time of my life, I even understood the concept of reflection.