by Levy, Roger
—Hi, Timezup. Thanks for the offer. I’m afraid I can’t write about anyone I want to, though you do sound amazing. TruTales employs me, and of course I have an AI that sends me on assignments. -Yes, I call it Cynth. I’m lucky my AI knows me so well. But then we’ve been working together for almost ten years. -Of course, Cynth will certainly be aware of you, so you never know!
—Hey there, Vortic. Two questions? Okay, just this time. And I see you’re new to Kestrel Dust. So, here goes. How did I get this job? Well, if you think this life’s for you, you can check the advice [link here] but if you mean me in particular, I was just lucky. I didn’t apply. Cynth found me. No link to anything there, I’m afraid, since it’s a time in my life I don’t really like thinking about. Maybe one day I’ll go back to it, and I suppose it might all be out there if I turn out to have a neurid and I end up in a sarc. And your other question: why do I write? Two words: curiosity and dissatisfaction. Of course, if you look in my archive, you’ll find I’ve given a lot of answers to that question over the years. It depends on how I feel when someone asks me. And that’s your lot for now, but please keep reading Kestrel Dust!
—Hi, Rift/drifter. What can I say to that? I suppose all of you are my family. You, and Cynth. Though that’s a love-hate thing!
Enough. She signed off, suddenly exhausted.
Bale and Tallen. Maybe Cynth was right, it was just coincidence. She’d never known Cynth to be wrong.
* * *
Delta
From this distance, Delta thought, the bay was like a roughly simmed sea. It was so thick with sarcs that the water was little more than a frothy webbing about them, and their slow heaving was unsettling to observe. These were the sleepers summoned in by vote, waiting to be picked up by drones and loaded into containers and shipped on to the hospitals where they would be restored and returned to the System with new identities, since their old lives were known in every detail.
Delta and Bale were standing high above the town, just within and below the arc of the shield, looking down and seaward. The wind bullied them. Delta said, ‘You could have been somewhere out there, Bale.’
He didn’t answer.
‘What’s wrong, Bale. You’re alive.’
‘You know what I thought for a moment when I first woke up in the hospital? I thought I’d been through AfterLife.’
She laughed. ‘Hundreds of years gone and you in the future.’ Her face changed, mock-upset. ‘And me dead.’
‘Not just you. Everyone.’
At the dock, rows of cranes nodded slowly up and down, lifting the tide of arriving sarcs from the water and swinging them into great containers. The breeze carried the muted noise of engines and the occasional tang of metal on metal. The containers moved on railed sleds to and from the ferry station, endlessly arriving and departing.
‘Anyway, who’d vote for you to come back, Bale?’
‘When I die, there’s going to be nothing to pour into a sarc, and that’s fine with me.’
Delta shook her head. ‘I came to see you in the hospital. I was there when you were brought in. You and Tallen, you had a whole floor to yourselves. It was quite a thing. He had a squad of medicians all of his own. You should have seen them arrive, all gloved and gowned and putered up. But whatever they did for that guy, you’re the one who saved his life.’
‘If you say so. I don’t remember. There was a lot of screenery in the hospital. Racks of it. That’s why there were no more beds. His medicians looked more like techs.’
‘What do you expect? They were neuromeds.’ She closed her eyes and let the breeze play on her face.
‘I can’t work it out. What happened down there, Delta? He was about to kill me. There was nothing to stop him. So why am I alive?’
‘Why are you alive? I don’t believe this, Bale!’ She groaned. Why did he always have to be like this? ‘You killed the K. The case is closed. You go home and take a month’s leave, then you come back to work. Is that so hard?’ She stared furiously at him. ‘It was slippery and he lost balance. You were lucky. Your reflexes must have been good, too. You managed to stab him before you lost consciousness.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Forensics reconstructed it.’ She tried to stay patient. He had to listen. ‘They had a hard job of it though. It was a mess down there. Shit everywhere, and the sea backing up. But it all made sense in the end.’
Delta had no idea whether Bale was taking in anything she said. He was impossible. He’d always been impossible. And she was stupid for caring. Did she really imagine that this experience might have changed him?
He said, ‘And Tallen?’
‘He was really ripped up. Lucky as you, Bale. Even luckier with that neuromed team carrying out research here on Bleak.’
‘Why would the K take him down there? Razer said he didn’t take anyone else.’
‘He was crazy. Who knows? Case is closed. Please, Bale.’
Vast cloud shadows stroked the bay of sarcs below them. The cranes rose and fell, the containers rolled, and in the distance was the sea.
‘Yeah.’ Bale sighed.
Delta relaxed. ‘Yeah,’ she said. She couldn’t make out any of the rigs from here. They were far away, where the sea and the wind fought. Everything on Bleak was conflict.
‘Hell, I was drunk,’ Bale said, eventually.
She grinned. ‘You were indeed.’
‘That was bad luck. Don’t you think?’
‘Yeah, it was.’ She caught herself, adding sharply, ‘What do you mean? How?’
‘I don’t know, I’m not sure. Something about it. It was like he wanted me down there, wanted to be followed. Like –’ He paused. The breeze brought a screech of metal up from the bay. The sound trailed mournfully away. He said, ‘I’ll check it.’
‘It’s closed. Didn’t you hear me? You keep screwing up, Bale, and this time you screwed up again, but you were lucky. You had some good luck, Bale. Take it. The K slipped in the shit and you’re a hero, and now it’s closed.’ She took a deep breath, the ammoniac air up here, close to the shield, burning her throat. ‘Hell. I knew this would happen.’
‘What?’ he said.
‘Okay. I wanted to be nice. Why can’t you ever be? You scared the hell out of me, you know that? You know how worried I was?’ She stared out at the sea. ‘I don’t know why I should give a damn about you if you don’t give a damn about yourself.’
He stood up, restless. Delta wondered whether he was going to walk away. ‘We’re friends, Bale. I didn’t want to be saying this, but you’ll be hearing it from Navid anyway. Your suspension ended a month ago. You’re currently on unpaid leave pending investigation for being drunk on duty.’
The bright sky was behind him and she couldn’t make out his expression. She added, ‘It’s bad. But just go home, take a break and it will all go away. Navid said so. Please, Bale.’
He rolled his shoulders, stretched his back and his legs. When he was done, he said, ‘I see it, fine. You’re just here to pass on a threat, Delta. Well, listen. I wasn’t on duty. It was a crashcall. Vox could have decided to leave me out of the link but didn’t. Then you could have stood me down, but you didn’t do that either. I had no choice and you know it. If I hadn’t responded to the crashcall, I’d have been suspended for that.’
‘You took your gun, knowing you were drunk.’
‘It was disabled, remember? Useless. If I’d known I was that drunk, I wouldn’t have taken it.’
‘But you didn’t know, which makes it worse. You see what I’m getting at?’
‘Yeah, I see. Clear as words.’
‘Please don’t be like this.’
‘Is this an official conversation?’
‘No. Bale, please –’
‘Fine. Just tell me what you’re not here to tell me.’
She turned her back on him. Inland was the ferry station where the container sleds came from and returned to. One of the hospital barges was ready to leave and she watched it star
t to rise on its stalk of flame. She almost turned to face Bale again, to tell him about that night at her end of the crashcall, but what would that have achieved? It had been odd, but there was nothing suspicious about it.
Below, the barge continued to rise. The rumble came a moment later and lasted well after the barge had diminished to a sliver of grey and then vanished altogether. There was water in the wind, and she wiped it from her cheeks. ‘Hell, Bale. I’m not being subtle. The case is over, so forget it. We all did what we did. We were all lucky. Just be a hero, take your break, and come back to work. Please.’
‘One last question.’
‘As long as it is that.’
‘You know about Razer.’
‘That isn’t a question.’ Yes, Delta knew about Razer. Since Razer had turned up, Bale had spent all his time off with her, when he wasn’t in the Chute. This was the first time Delta had had Bale to herself for… how long?
Bale said, ‘Razer turned up in Lookout just before all this sparked. And she was with me the night before the K-event. And you haven’t mentioned her. Every time she comes up, you go quiet.’
‘Still not a question.’
‘Something’s going on here, Delta. Is she a Paxer?’
For the first time since the crashcall had kicked in, Delta smiled. ‘Sometimes, Bale, you get it so totally wrong.’ And the sound of her empty laugh echoed as she walked away down the mountainside.
Fourteen
ALEF
SigEv 17 A past and a future
I was gradually introduced to Drame’s business practices. The process of transfer was delicately done. Solaman kept setting me tests, and the tests became increasingly complex, each problem containing more factors and variables. Occasionally the extra information I asked for, or my solution, surprised even Solaman, and I had to wait while he left to clarify the ‘detail’ with someone else.
Months of teaching and conversation passed, and the day came when Solaman said I was to be moving on.
‘I’ve enjoyed teaching you, Alef, more than you realise. Far more than you can know.’ I thought he was going to stop there, but he nodded to himself and said, ‘Your father was very proud of you. He told me about you. He –’
Solaman paused and looked at me. He was weeping a little and I had no idea why. The tears from his left eye followed the contours of his face and he licked them from the corner of his lip, but the tears from his right eye skirted the mark beneath it – the mark was raised again – and disappeared, never reaching his lip. I was fascinated by this, and a little scared. The salt water sank away into a deep fissure in the cheek that I had thought was just a crease.
I asked Solaman, ‘Did you know my father well?’
He took a while to collect himself. On the screenery in the corner of the room were the programs we used when we were problem-solving. I played with them while I waited. My eyes were tuned to them so that once I enabled screenery with three steady blinks, I could summon and shift information by a series of protocols; left or right eye winking, long-blinking, wide-eyeing. When the screenery was not enabled, it trawled the Song randomly. Solaman thought the stimulus it provided to be invaluable.
‘You remind me very much of him, Alef,’ he said, startling me out of a financial datafield. I blinked it off and found him still crying, though he seemed unaware of it. His right eye and the fissure seemed part of a self-contained circuit of tears.
‘Tell me something about him,’ I said.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Why did he go to Gehenna?’
There was a long pause, and then he sighed. ‘You ought to know it all, Alef. Or maybe you do know it already.’
I said, firmly and stupidly, ‘I know that Ethan Drame is a criminal and my father was working for him. Why was he doing that?’
I had never asked Solaman this before, just as I’d never asked him about the terrifying mark on his cheek. I didn’t want to know the answers. I had lain in my bed at night, night after night, until I had invented and polished a flawless story. In this story, my father and mother had tried to escape Drame’s clutches and nearly succeeded, but he had hunted them down and blackmailed them, threatening their lives and mine; and my father had been steadily building a dossier against Drame to take to Pax. But now I thought I was ready for the truth.
Solaman said, ‘Yes.’
He seldom sat down, preferring to pace, but now he did. ‘I’ll start at the beginning. You were born here on Peco, Alef. Not on Gehenna. But the story really begins before that.
‘Your father was very special,’ Solaman began.
He spoke slowly, as if the words coming out were on delay; it was like he was formulating them very carefully, a few sentences ahead. ‘He didn’t fully understand people. Your mother understood him, though, and they both loved you, Alef. Saul wasn’t anything like Ethan. He was never interested in the consequences of the work he did for him.’ Solaman paused and examined me carefully. ‘It wasn’t that he didn’t care. You have to remember that he couldn’t project what emotional capacity he had beyond his immediate environment. Do you understand, Alef?’
I didn’t, fully. I’d never heard Solaman talk like this, about emotions. He didn’t seem to be saying my father was a bad man, or that he was a good man. It was that he had been a straightforward man, which I knew, but Solaman was making it complicated, saying my father was neither bad nor good. I wanted him to be good.
‘Ligate and Ethan were always rivals, but they cooperated from time to time. On one such occasion, before you were born, when your parents still lived here on Peco, Ethan took advantage of Ligate, and Ligate responded forcefully and then went into hiding. Everything was disrupted for a while, and it took a long time for the business to recover.’
He waited to see if I was following. I said, ‘Then?’
‘Ethan – well, Ethan Drame is tenacious. He told your father that he wanted to mend the damage between himself and Ligate, so your father developed a scheme that would benefit both Ligate and Ethan. Saul couldn’t locate Ligate, but by using financial transfer patterns he managed eventually to track Ligate’s family down. He had a wife and five children.’
I nodded for him to go on.
‘Saul imagined that Ethan would simply contact Ligate through his wife and children, and make peace. Instead, Ethan killed them all.’
I had a sudden vision of my parents in my father’s workshop, about to die. I closed my eyes against it and grew a tree of prime numbers, but its leaves withered. Solaman waited until I opened my eyes again, and he said, ‘Well. Your father was suddenly confronted by the consequences of his work.’
He looked at me until I nodded for him to go on.
‘Ligate declared war. Ethan was forced to retrench and fight. Saul had a breakdown. I had to take over from him, alone, but it was hopeless. We needed Saul, but Saul couldn’t do anything. He was no use to Ethan.’
‘You?’ I said. I had thought Solaman was just my teacher.
‘I was your father’s aide, Alef. I’m quick, but beside him I was like your father beside what you could become. I don’t know precisely what it was that shattered Saul, the deaths or the putery of war or the scale of the rebuilding, but Saul was shattered, that was for certain.’ He took a breath, looking away from me. ‘Ethan was focused on his empire, and your mother took the opportunity to tell him she was leaving Peco with her husman and child. You were almost a year old, Alef. She made a deal with Ethan. The deal was that if Saul recovered, he would work for Ethan again, but that they would never return to Peco. She told him that if Saul didn’t get away from here, he’d never recover.’
‘I don’t see the difference. Here or on Gehenna, what’s the difference? And why Gehenna?’
‘Your mother thought Gehenna would be a safe haven from both Ligate and Ethan. And it would be a place where no one would point you out, Alef.’ Solaman almost smiled. ‘You were already obviously special. She chose Gehenna carefully, Alef. While Saul might be able to s
tay unnoticed in his putery anywhere in the System, you were another matter. It was clear that you’d swiftly draw attention wherever you grew up. She wanted the best chance for you to be normal and unnoticed, and that led her to Gehenna. And Gehenna would teach you about good and bad. That was important to her.’
‘Evil,’ I said instantly, surprising myself as much as Solaman with my sharpness. ‘Good and evil.’
‘Evil. Your mother didn’t quite appreciate how… how raw life would be on Gehenna. She imagined simplicity. It was hard for her. But Saul adapted well, and you thrived, so she accepted it.’
‘You know her as well as you know Saul,’ I said.
‘I should do, yes.’ The loop of tears began again. ‘Tell me, Alef. Why do you think someone like your mother might fall in love with a man like Saul?’
Love! The idea of this puzzled me. And the word coming from Solaman, a man in many ways similar to my father. I shrugged.
He leaned forward, though. ‘Can’t you see it, Alef? Can’t you see it?’
I realised it was a real question, a test he was setting me, like those other tests, but quite different. And I guessed the clue was in the question.
I stared at him. Can’t you see it?
I went back to the beginning, to first principles. How would she have met Saul in the first place? Saul had spent his life here, with Drame, so she must have met him here. And she had understood him, and how could you understand a man like Saul?
It was to do with looking.
I began to get there. It was in front of me; you would understand a man like Saul because you are like him yourself, or else because you know people, or someone, like him. And since she wasn’t like Saul –
Can’t you see it?
I looked at Solaman, who was still weeping with his right eye, though his left was dry. I saw Solaman crying, and I could see my mother crying. That same tilt of the corner of the mouth as they sobbed.
I said, ‘She was your sister, Solaman.’
He nodded.
A minute passed until I could say, ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
He put his hand on my shoulder. This was the first time he had ever touched me. My uncle. My family.