by Levy, Roger
But I did notice that of the dozen and one people we saw, not one glanced at us. They looked away, or ahead, or aside.
I grew used to the reaction later. I became conditioned to it. Eventually I expected their fear to the degree that the rare ordinary glance, or incurious flicker of eye contact, tensed me with anxiety. It’s a pathologic logic path.
The shuttle locked to the fastship, we stepped out onto the great floor of the transit deck, and there were people again. They paid us no attention, but this time it was because they were occupied with preparations to leave. There was bustle and chatter and, if not a wealth of colour, at least shine and shadow, the grime of machinery and the primary colours of alert and alarm. I looked at Pellonhorc and put my palm on his arm. He was rigid but breathing almost evenly, and he answered my look with a thin smile that disappeared instantly. I mouthed, ‘Are you okay?’ and he shook his head.
Garrel said, ‘Captain. Thank you for picking us up. I’m Garrel.’
I hadn’t noticed the captain until then, but he must already have been standing there as we stepped from the shuttle. He glanced briefly at the three of us. He must have been wondering what to say. What had he expected? We stood there; a soldier with one cracked eye and one exposed retinal implant, and at his sides a virtually catatonic child and a runt clutching the carcass of a puter as if his life were held in it.
The officer pulled himself together quickly enough. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m Captain Janquile.’ He was a hardweathered man, the skin of his face broken and blackened, and his eyes set as if everything he had ever encountered had surprised him, but none of it for more than an instant. Whoever he was, whether he was Drame’s or Ligate’s ferryman, I imagined that to be trusted with Drame’s son, he must be one of the best.
‘We’ve got five minutes to be clear,’ Janquile said. ‘I’m bodystopping you all for the trip. We’ll be two weeks, and you might as well bank the time.’
People were in motion around us, like a torrent flowing past a boulder. A few of them glanced at us, though only if they were out of Janquile’s eyesight. Garrel started to say something, but the captain didn’t even raise his voice, continuing, ‘Save your breath, soldier. You take my orders or I don’t take you anywhere.’
‘I can’t let the boy out of my sight,’ Garrel said.
Janquile gestured at Pellonhorc. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘Not for you to worry about.’
‘I’m not worried. I just need to know he’s safe for rv.’
‘He is. No drugs or ‘plants.’ Garrel put a hand on Pellonhorc’s shoulder. ‘He’s just in shock. Shut him down totally – as long as you don’t leave him exposed to his thoughts, he’ll be okay. Might even do him some good.’ He glanced at me and added, ‘You can sleep this one whichever way he wants it. I have to stay awake, Captain. I’ll keep out of your way, but I don’t sleep. Not ever.’
Janquile’s face didn’t change. ‘You go into rv. Those are my direct instructions.’
The two men stared at each other for a short, electric moment, and then Garrel grinned abruptly as if it were all in jest, and glanced up into the dust that ghosted the deck’s high canopy. ‘He doesn’t trust me! After all this, he still doesn’t trust me?’
He looked at Janquile again and waited, and I realised that Garrel, cold-headed and hard-handed in battle, was quite out of his depth here, and close to panic.
Who didn’t trust him, I wondered. Whose name were they avoiding? Ligate or Drame?
The captain didn’t respond. I stared from one to the other, trying to work out the balance between them.
An officer came up to the captain and murmured in his ear. Janquile said, ‘Acknowledge it, then lock all comms. I’ll be with you in eight.’
The officer left, and Janquile turned back to Garrel.
‘How do I know I’ll wake up?’ Garrel grinned again, less convincingly, and it was plain that he’d given up.
The captain turned on his heel. Garrel hesitated only a moment, then followed him, with me and Pellonhorc moving alongside. Janquile halted, waiting for us at a low oval doorway, and motioned us ahead. The corridor beyond was too narrow for more than two to walk side by side. I went first into the ship’s belly with Pellonhorc. I could hear the captain talking to Garrel behind us.
‘In this business,’ Janquile was saying, ‘how do any of us ever close our eyes and know we’ll open them again? You’ve just got it set out plainer, Garrel.’ There was only the crack of our feet for a while, then the captain added, ‘I was told your arrival wasn’t certain. I was told you had to have the boy. That if you didn’t –’ The sound of our feet again. I calculated the differing beats at our various stride-lengths, how long it might be before we were all planting our left feet in precise synchrony – one hour and twelve minutes. The few crewmembers we passed flattened themselves against the walls and saluted the captain.
Eventually Janquile broke stride, raised his voice and said, ‘Turn left here.’ He tapped Pellonhorc’s shoulder. I steered the two of us into the next corridor. The booming, squeaking and and ticking noises of the ship were muted here.
We walked on. The captain lowered his voice and said to Garrel, for the first time gently, ‘You got this far, soldier, so maybe the odds are still good for you.’
‘That’s not reassuring,’ Garrel said.
‘I wouldn’t insult you. The truth is, my instructions are to get you there safe, all of you. I’ve got a narrow course to chart and the possibility of action along the way, and I don’t want any extra shit, so I want you asleep, just like my orders say.’
A tap on Pellonhorc’s shoulder again, and Janquile’s voice rose. ‘Stop here, boys.’
The door opened and there were the rv beds with their canopies and streamlined hulls, and their flanks inset with instruments and dials. The units were larger than coffins and smaller than shuttles, but they could have been either thing. You could wake up somewhere else, or never.
The captain stood in the doorway and said, ‘You got the boy here safely, Garrel. If you were good only for that, you wouldn’t have walked off the deck you arrived on. You may be a good soldier, but you’re just one, and I’ve got shipboard weaponry. I’m telling you this out of respect. At present, I’ve no orders to kill you. I can’t say it plainer than this. I want you asleep on orders and for my convenience. That’s all there is to it and no more.’ There was no inflection in his voice. He was unreadable.
I looked at Garrel and at Janquile; the one with cracked machine vision, the other dead-eyed and drawn. I looked at Pellonhorc, whose eyes had been filled with horror and now held nothing at all.
And in my eyes there remained everything I had ever seen, nothing lost or forgotten. It was a tide ever rising.
We stood there, all of us alone, each quite different, but all cursed by our vision.
Janquile was still waiting for Garrel to accept the open bed. He made a small gesture to indicate that time was passing and nothing done, and then he told Garrel, curtly, ‘I need to be on my bridge in two minutes. I’ve said what there is to say. You can believe me or not, as you like, but you are going to be asleep, soldier, and that’s the close of it.’
Garrel moved forward and touched the cool metal of the unit with a finger. ‘Then switch my head off too. I don’t want to be thinking about it.’
The captain nodded. He murmured with sudden gentleness, ‘Yes. That’s what I’d do, too.’
He turned to me. ‘You, boy?’
I climbed into the cushioned cocoon and said, ‘I want to know everything.’
The tomb closed over me.
Darkness.
* * *
SigEv 12 Hyperlepsy
And with the darkness, light. On Gehenna I had never been bodystopped. The technology of rigor vitae was heretical. But I was so very curious. Not knowing where we were going, I spent those millions of kils on my own journey, connected to what Gehenna called the pornoverse, and what the rest of the System called the
Song.
For days I simply drifted through it all; through the currents of conversation, the truths and assertions and facts; the fogs and mists of hope and desire, and I started to understand the workings of the Song.
And then I began to search. I caught and released filaments of suggestion, I picked apart some of the rumours and diversions, unravelled codes; I dissected and discarded, and eventually I started to identify the most reliable data strings.
And so it was that, in my first hyperlepsy, I began to search for Drame and Ligate.
And I began to learn about my father.
What I learnt about him was difficult to accept. He was my father, after all. I told myself that he’d killed no one, and in a way that was true. But I had been brought up on Gehenna, and in addition I had my own directness of thought, and the combination of those structures made the truth harder to handle. My parents were dead. I was alone. And it had been my father’s actions that had brought this upon us all.
In Janquile’s ship, threading its passage through the System, with my body seized in its physiological stasis and my mind wheeling through the Song, I couldn’t sob or scream. I could have turned my brain to sleep, of course, but I was Gehennan and trained to scourge myself.
I also needed to prepare myself for either of the fates ahead, at the hands of Ligate or Drame, and I needed to work out which it was more likely to be.
Searching for information on Ligate and Drame was not straightforward, but I hauled myself on. The Song was awash with rumour and counter-rumour. The only certainties surrounding the two men were legal investigations, and no charges were ever pursued. There were pictures of the two men, but in such vast variety that I realised images were not to be trusted.
However, what I learned about Drame and Ligate gained meaning from what I discovered about the System. It was the System that had created them.
On Gehenna, we were told little about the System’s origin. The Earth was discussed purely in terms of comparisons with Sodamned and Gloccamoral from the Babbel. We were told that the Earth had been destroyed by God in the Final Adjustment, that He had chosen us to survive, and He had permitted others to escape along with us for two reasons: as a continuing warning to us that while we had been chosen, that decision was no more than provisional; and as a message to those heretical others that they might yet repent. This, we were told, was why Gehenna – unlike the unsaid planet – maintained such contact with the System as we did.
Now, swimming in the Song, I learnt more.
It’s hard for me to tell this from the perspective of my childhood mind. Child and adult – I am both at once, and neither. These nightless days I first spent in rv, learning about the System and about so much else, changed me forever in as dramatic a way as I had been changed by the events hours earlier. The deaths of my parents changed my emotional self. This hyperlepsy changed my intellectual self.
* * *
SigEv 13 The System
When the System was discovered by Earth, the terraforming of its planets had to be funded, and worlds within the System had to be allocated to the States and Equities that could afford it or else raise the money by contract and promise. It was little different, except in scale, from the type of project that governments, corporations and Equities carried out all the time: undersea tunnels, sub-sea mining, off-planetary exploration and exploitation.
After all the negotiation and funding arrangements were complete, two primarily religious funds remained; that which bought the rights to Gehenna, and another, the name of whose observance was protected, which bought rights to the unsaid planet. The other States and Equities were secular. They acknowledged the right of Gehenna to allow contact on its own terms and to remain exempt from contributory taxes other than by agreement, and they acknowledged the right of the unsaid planet to withdraw from all contact except such as it determined necessary to pursue the legal protection of its name and observance.
I spent hours in rv reading the records of the contracts and the negotiations over clause and subclause.
There was a great deal of risk involved in the leaving, I learned, but the risk was comparative. The Earth, ecologically and financially, was in desperate, terminal decline, and one of the reasons for that was the inability of Earth’s population, despite the knowledge of disastrous ecological consequence, to look farther ahead than the closing of the banking day.
It was extraordinary. I read the histories and reread them, unable to believe it at first. I had been taught on Gehenna that the Lord had visited doom on the Earth as He had created Gehenna for the godfearing, but the real tale was almost equally ludicrous. If what I was reading were true, what had destroyed the Earth was not any unforeseeable disaster at all, nor any sudden and irreversible calamity. No. Predictions were made and justified and proved to be valid, and then simply ignored for commercial reasons.
Of course I was aware that this was the pornoverse – I would come to use its real name, the Song, but never quite got used to it – and that nothing there could, or can, entirely be believed.
But eventually, when the banks failed and they had to accept the Earth’s end, they acted. They tooled up and they shipped out. They came to the System.
There were seven major planets in the System and a few minor ones. It was easier to terraform these, all advantageously distributed as they were, than to attempt to work further on the planets of Earth’s own system upon which the technology had been fine-tuned.
There was, briefly, unprecedented cooperation, all driven by contract and debt and the chance of advantage and profit. The science was shared and the ships built, but it was plain to me that the crucial thing, the engine of it all, was money.
It was the money that fascinated me; no, not that, but the negotiations and the deals. The science I found bewildering and uninteresting, as I almost always have.
The resources located on the various planets were different, to begin with, and on top of this, the geological consequences of terraforming were imperfectly predictable with the analytical resources of old Earth. For example, no one predicted that Gehenna would be found to have deposits of deletium, or that such a unique resource would later be discovered on Bleak.
So, money and labour and technical expertise were lent at various rates of interest, and with various conditions attached. Financial blocs of Asia, Greater Europe and America negotiated the best choices, and had to borrow little and accept few contractual penalties. Each bloc took one or two of the main planets, Heartsease, Spindrift, Magnificence, and the twin-mooned Vegaschrist that lay at one end of the asteroid belt called the Eden String. As well as the continental blocs, there were two independent Wealths-of-Faith, one of which claimed Gehenna and the other an especially harsh planet that no other bidder wanted. The Wealth-of-Faith that claimed that planet declined to give it a name, and it became known as the unsaid planet, existing under a self-imposed and vigorously maintained isolation. It lay beyond even Vegaschrist, at the farthest limit of the Eden String, and at the very edge of the System.
I was not interested in the unsaid planet. Even if anyone survived there, it was a planet of goddery, like Gehenna.
I turned my attention back to what interested me.
In addition to the three continental blocs and the two Wealths-of-Faith, there were a number of small unaffiliated Equities. One of these took the planet Bleak, and others leased the two moons of Vegaschrist, calling them Brightness and New Hope. Finally, there were a number of asteroids, the largest of which were Peco and Gutter.
I lay there, fixed in almost precisely the same rigor vitae that had been endured by the first colonists in their long journey to the System, travelling also to an unknown destination, and I was entranced by the funding of the original adventure.
The contracts were complex and elegant. By their trails, the offers made and the counter-offers tabled, I understood the negotiators and their skills, and even the way society had worked at that time. There were provisions for problems over repayments, for
actual defaults; taxes and interest rates were agreed and fixed in advance, and while the criminal and civil laws that would be introduced for each planet were no more than sketched out, the tax systems and economic protocols, both intraplanetarily and System-wide, were defined as immutably as the laws of physics.
While the scientists and manufacturers calculated and created, built ships and reconfigured worlds, the politicians, the bankers and the brokers sat and haggled over their percentages and their rates, and made it all contractually feasible.
And so it was, I learnt, that the Earth fled its failing home and embarked upon its greatest adventure, up into the wild black yonder, each colonising entity confident in the knowledge that its investment, its profits and its losses were adequately ringfenced against all foreseeable risks of fraud and default. Only the unsaid planet existed extracontractually, in physical and financial isolation.
Of course, with such a degree of risk involved, and so much that was unforeseeable, it was obvious that nothing could be guaranteed. While the ships were still in space, thousands of sleep-years away, the terraforming of one of the worlds, Magnificence, failed utterly, with the loss of hundreds of trillions of dolors along with the collapse of banks and the obliteration of fortunes, not to mention the human tragedies on considerable scales. But this led to consolidation and imaginative restructuring of debt; humanity is almost infinitely resourceful.
I trawled the Song, and as I started to examine the recent history, I discovered the unsaid planet to have vanished progressively from all record. It appeared that any attempt at contact resulted in silence and any mention was brief. They were rumoured to be fiercely protective of their privacy. Indeed, for all that the System knew of it now, the unsaid planet might no longer be inhabited, everyone dead of war perhaps, or disease or starvation. It did not matter which, but its likely fate served as a warning to the rest of the System; cooperate or perish.