by Levy, Roger
His eyes were closed, and she had the feeling he was talking to himself. This was just Paxer bartalk. She waited, though. No matter how bad a day had been, Navid never showed up at any bar. It suddenly struck her that she had no idea what sort of a life Navid had outside of Pax.
‘We have to be patient with it,’ he murmured.
She wondered how Navid felt about AfterLife. Was this speech not for her at all, but rather for the voters of future centuries, if he should make it to the sarcs? She’d heard enough arrested crimers come out with these calls for understanding, and she’d made her own pleas, too, sober as well as drunk. She figured most people did. Not Bale, of course. He was always too bloody sure of himself, and now he was beyond even AfterLife.
Navid began again. ‘The System is nowhere near stable. It’s still young. Resources are poorly distributed among the worlds. Administrata need the flow of dolors, and money and power are awkward to manage. Yes, there is huge, organised corruption, but the System needs corruption. It needs corruption in order to survive. To evolve.’ He rubbed his eyes and looked at her as if she had just appeared. ‘In years to come, there may be enough stability that the corruption can be addressed. You see?’
‘Everyone knows this, sir,’ she said.
‘But we don’t acknowledge it here, at Pax. Outside this office, you’ll never hear me say it. Our job is to control the small crime, to make sure the corruption remains high and distant. We just tidy the streets and stare down at our feet. That’s why I was sent here to Bleak, eight years ago, because I didn’t understand that. Now I understand it. I don’t look up. From time to time we raid a bar, flush out the Rut, and that’s about it. Peace. What’s happening here, now –’ He paused. ‘Well. It will leave us again.’
He swept a hand over his desk. ‘You, Officer, you could move on. I did what I could for Bale, but he wouldn’t see it and wouldn’t be saved. I don’t know exactly what happened to him, and there isn’t any point in thinking about it.’ A sigh. ‘Listen to me, Delta. You won’t get anywhere and, far more importantly, it won’t get you anywhere either.’
‘No, sir. I understand.’
‘You have to decide what you want to do in this life. I like it on Bleak because the crime stays small here and there isn’t much for me to ignore.’ He glanced at the window again, almost wistfully.
Delta nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘This thing now,’ he said, ‘it will fade away. I don’t know how or why it came here, but it will go, and Bleak will return to normal. You understand me?’
Delta said, ‘Yes, sir. Completely.’
‘Good.’ He stood up decisively. ‘Personally, I’d like you to stay here on Bleak, but the decision has to be yours. I just want you to be fully aware of the complexities of promotion. Without the distraction of Bale, I think you could go far.’
‘Thank you, sir. I think so too, sir.’
‘Good.’ He seemed at the same time anxious and relieved.
‘Could I see the report, then, sir?’
‘Harv will key you in to the archive for an hour. That should be long enough for you.’
‘Sir.’
‘The hour has started, Officer Kerlew.’
She ran.
The archive was two levels down. The rumour was that Harv slept there, that he’d spent his life overlaying a gardenscape on his archive. He talked about weeds and pruning. No one was ever really sure if he was talking about his records. She waved back at the monitor as he waved her through the air shower.
She settled herself before the screens while Harv, wherever he was, accessed the audit report for her. Maybe Navid was right; maybe it was best to keep your eyes down. Day up and day over, Navid did a good job, didn’t suffer threats and didn’t sleeve bribes like some of them did.
Harv’s unshaven face came up on the screen. No one, it was said, had seen Harv face to face for years. There were stories that he had, over time, changed his appearance and looked quite different from his presented face.
‘We’re there,’ he told her, yawning widely. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ He faded away, his mouth half open in another yawn. Delta believed in Harv exactly as he showed himself. No one would choose to manifest themselves like that.
The report opened against a billowing field of lavender, cloud-shadows flowing over it like purple Rorschachs. It was generally accepted that Harv was crazy.
While the lavender bloomed and the shadows began to fade, Delta imagined herself in a sarc, with none of her thoughts or memories protected. She knew she should live as if there were no AfterLife, or as if her body might not be salvageable, but she never could, always feeling guilty when she did something she shouldn’t. It was ridiculous. She was probably no more morally sound than Navid, and no less conscientious than Bale.
She wondered if they ever became conscious in the sarcs. AfterLife claimed it was impossible, but there were stories.
The shadows were gone and the breeze was quietening. The lavender was almost ready for her.
She couldn’t change. She was who she was, and that was all there was to the whole thing. AfterLife might be just a faint hope, but sometimes faint hope was enough.
The lavender paled and was gone. She opened the audit report, scrolling down to the realtime analysis of her own actions during the event, layering the narrative with the auditors’ comments.
‘– Here the operative Delta would have been advised to liaise with the parameds instead of attempting to pattern-analyse, which is more efficiently performed by putery –’
She left that running and initiated a sub-program – Harv had it as a bed of spatulate ferns – and leaned forward as it opened.
Here it was: not the final report but the technical introduction with details of the audit’s processes. She started to work through the walls of text, not sure exactly what she was searching for.
When she looked at the time, half an hour was gone and she’d found nothing. This was no good. There had to be something here.
She tried to go deeper, but everything deep was blocked to her. Her eyes were stinging with sweat. She wiped it away with the back of a hand.
Ten minutes left. She carried on until a field of swaying corn swelled and blew across her screenery, shutting her down. Harv’s face appeared, seemingly completing the yawn he’d begun an hour ago. She threw herself back in the chair and said, ‘I need another level of access here, Harv.’
‘Sorry, Delta. Ask Navid, not me.’
The screen filled with lavender. She closed her port and sat at the dead screen for a few minutes before standing up and stretching. Then she sat again and said, ‘Can I access some unrestricted data?’
Harv’s face ghosted over the billowing field. He blinked. ‘Subject of?’
‘Does it matter? I said unrestricted.’
‘So that would be general unrestricted, or unrestricted within Pax.’
‘Am I under observation, Harv?’
Another pause. ‘Not that I’m actually aware of.’
Not actually. He was warning her. ‘Within Pax, Harv.’
She just caught the sigh as he said, ‘Okay. I still need your subject.’
‘Streetcams.’
‘That’ll be my chrysanthemums.’
They came up, delicate and quite, quite beautiful. Where did someone like Harv get such artistry? She resisted the urge to ask him why chrysanthemums. He usually answered such questions with, ‘because geraniums are seasonal’, or something equally meaningless. ‘Nice colours, Harv,’ she told him.
‘Thanks, Delta. They’re a new strain. Bit more resistant to some of the bugs.’
She wondered if everything he said came in some weird code.
She spent a few minutes checking general cam locations and concentrations, then slipped a thorough search around the shore area into a few random trawls around the town.
She closed the archive down again, watching the chrysanthemums fade. The lavender returned, along with Harv’s face.
‘T
hanks, Harv. Hey, one thing – you remember those auditors?’
‘You kidding?’ he said with sudden venom. ‘They took me apart. Left one hell of a mess.’
‘Anyone in particular?’
‘Oh yeah. Spotty one. Shame I won’t ever be around to unvote the bastard.’
‘Likewise. What he do to you?’
‘Had to dig up and replant half my perennials. They trampled the beds, cross-pollinated the exotics, swamped my irrigation channels. Left me with weeds, slugs and aphids.’
‘Harv, please. Just once.’
‘They opened everything and closed nothing. Their search programs hadn’t been disinfected. No respect. I was still cleaning up when Fleschik appeared. Everything was running slow, half my maps and history corrupted or inaccessible. Some stuff I still haven’t located again.’ Harv took another long breath. ‘Anyway. I made a complaint.’
‘Did you? I didn’t hear about that.’
‘I think that’s how we got our ten-ten report. Navid dropped my complaint; we got the bullshit bonus. Between you and me, Delta, if I’d been running in full bloom, sunshine and springtime, I reckon we’d have had Fleschik before his third kill.’ He closed his eyes. ‘And we’d still have Bale irritating the shit out of us.’
‘It wasn’t that killed Bale,’ Delta said. ‘Not your fault.’
‘Even so,’ Harv said. ‘Nor Navid’s. Not yours either. This was some shitty little shit trailing a shitstorm. Bale was always going to be taken out, just a question of how and when. Going like this, it suited him: a big mystery that’s probably nothing but smoke. Just his style.’ Harv surprised Delta with a laugh. ‘I’d have loved to see Bale’s Life.’
Delta found herself laughing too. ‘All his crap.’
‘Yeah.’ Harv’s gaze flicked away and back again. ‘Listen. Not much I could do, Delta, but I picked a few flowers for him.’ Harv’s face and the lavender disappeared, and there was a wreath of black orchids and red tulips. The wreath spread and grew, taking over the small screen she still had open and spreading to all the screenery in the room, all of it burgeoning with brilliant flowers, the colours deepening and the tulips spreading their petals until they drooped and fell, leaving bright yellow stamens to glow like stars in a violet sky.
‘It’s beautiful, Harv,’ she said quietly. ‘Really, it is.’
‘Thanks. I’ll copy it to you. Shame for it just to wither here. When you think of him, you can take another look at it. Take care, Delta.’
‘You too, Harv. And thanks.’
Thirty-four
ALEF
SigEv 37 Logic
Immediately after seeing Drame and Ligate, I took Pireve from The Floor, found an empty office, sat down with her and told her what I’d seen. For a moment she was quiet, then she said, ‘Did he tell you anything about this seeding?’
Pireve was, of course, a little like me, so it was understandable that she didn’t especially react to the news that Drame and Ligate were still alive, nor to their condition. She was simply being practical. I said, ‘It might be a virus to be released simultaneously on every planet. I know him, though. There will be more than one delivery system. Maybe one to ensure successful initiation, and a failsafe to prevent accidental triggering.’
Pireve was the only living person I could freely talk to. I had lost everyone else to death or madness. She was the one true thing. She had become everything to me. Her face was so beautiful that I wanted to cry. I had my perfect love, and the contemplation that she might be taken from me was impossible to bear. I had to remain steady for her.
‘Maybe it isn’t a virus,’ I said. ‘Maybe explosive devices. Maybe everything.’
‘And he’d destroy the whole System? Even the unsaid planet?’
‘So he says. And Gehenna. Especially Gehenna.’
‘Do you believe him?’
‘Always.’
She put her hand over mine. ‘Just keep calm, Alef. He could be bluffing. You say you know him, but you don’t. He’s always been the only one you couldn’t predict.’
She was right, of course. ‘But I can’t take the risk. He’d expect God to call his bluff. I think he’d almost want God to.’
Pireve squeezed my hand. ‘You have to stop him. And you can, Alef. You have to believe that – we have to believe that.’
I wanted to cry at the trust she had in me. She put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me on my lips, then sat back and said, ‘Think, Alef. Do you have any idea how it might be triggered?’
‘He told me that. A neurotransmitter implanted in his head. He called it his deadman’s switch. When he dies, it stops transmitting and the seeds open.’
‘What if he’s out of range of the receiver?’
‘It checks regularly. It allows occasional silences. There’s a period of grace.’
‘If the transmitter fails?’
She was only asking all the questions I’d asked myself already, over and over again, but the sequence of her logic calmed me. ‘There’s a human chain. Transmission failure alerts a human connection. They check back to Pellonhorc. If he fails to respond within a certain period, the seeds open.’ I shuddered at the memory. ‘He was telling me this as if he was telling it directly to God. He’s changed, Pireve. What he’s done to his father and Ligate, it’s insane.’
‘No,’ she said almost furiously, taking her hand away. Then, her voice settling, ‘No. We mustn’t think like this. It’s the cancer. He’s relying on you. He needs you, Alef.’ She reached forward and kissed me again. ‘He believes in you, and so do I.’
‘I love you,’ I whispered. ‘I won’t lose you.’
She smiled at me, her face radiant. She was like a Gehennan madonna.
‘Then you have to save him, Alef.’ She leant forward again, kissed me again. ‘If anyone can save him, and save everyone, and save us, you can.’
She must have seen the look on my face. She laughed. She actually laughed. ‘I’m going back to The Floor. There isn’t anything that needs you at the moment. If there is, I’ll let you know. Why don’t you go and start work?’ She touched her palm to my cheek, and walked away.
I left the building and went home, but I couldn’t concentrate.
Days passed and all I could think of was the cancer eating Pellonhorc, and the end of everything I lived for. Occasionally I managed to relax for a few minutes by calculating the movements of water in great rivers, imagining my father at my side, the two of us eating my mother’s sweet cookies, but that was the only brief respite I had. Each evening, Pireve came home and asked me how it was going, and I couldn’t bring myself to answer her. She went to bed and I sat in despair at my putery. When she had fallen asleep, I went to our bedroom and stared at her, and through the despairing days and nights I spent more and more time drifting through the Song, leaving phantom trails of advice and response.
I came back to the problem but couldn’t concentrate. What if Pellonhorc was telling me the truth, that everything would die when he died? If it was a virus, or some form of disease, buildings would remain. The Song would remain, transmitted from solar-powered satellites like some shadowy creature muttering to itself in the dark. Even with no one to engage with it, it would still carry out its algorithms, automatically checking and cross-checking, reflecting and creating and recreating.
But, for the moment, the people who nourished it still existed. I sought out their tales of anxiety and fear, their pleas for understanding. They would beg and cry out to the stars, cry out crazily for an answer.
Can anyone help me? Has anyone else out there ever experienced a vision of their dead mother telling them not to take a trip, and not going on it, and everyone who went got killed…?
The stories were so extraordinary that I sometimes found myself responding.
I have, yes. And I would tell them tales of my own. Of course, I hadn’t the imagination to invent anything, and since I wasn’t going to open my own life to them, I told them the tales of others as if they were mine, adjusting
the data appropriately. I became a sort of facilitator. The stories weren’t lies. What did it matter if the I telling them was not me?
This ministering comforted me, too. For an hour or two in every twenty-four, I was able to sleep.
In my despair, the Song became a teacher to me. Everybody yearns, I discovered. The lessons we learnt from the end of Earth might have put an end to any notion of the divine – Gehenna and the unsaid planet excepted – but that godless catastrophe couldn’t stop people yearning for something. They wanted there to be something. They didn’t want simply to die. They were like Pellonhorc in that. They didn’t want to die, and they wanted justice – no, better than that: they wanted fairness.
They could never have it. Never. No one can have fairness or justice, or even a compassionate hearing. All they can have is the promise of it – the impossible, the divine. And if they never discover it’s an empty promise, what does it matter?
But even knowing this, I wanted it too. Oh, Gehenna!
And all the time I was also thinking, what was I going to do for Pellonhorc?
I developed a routine. At night I drifted through the Song, and during the day, when the slow work on Pellonhorc’s problem overwhelmed me, I visited The Floor, though by now, the Whisper needed less of my attention.
Pireve acted as my filter, bringing me the problems no one else could see a solution to. She was more wonderful every day, and I loved her more and more deeply. She was calm and steady, and she loved me so much. Her existence made the weight of my task tolerable, even as her love made the possibility of failure unbearable.
At the same time, Pellonhorc was attending to the disciplinary aspects of the business and a number of other enterprises of his own. The seeding would have been one of these. I considered spying on him, but the risk of discovery was too great.
I also had concerns of my own. I found it possible to occupy my mind with several issues in parallel, so I could easily deal with small matters. I had a great sum of dolors, my own as well as my father’s, and I had been using the money to design new data resources. Ever since I’d been a child on Gehenna, I had always been fascinated by information and the processes of archiving it. Now, when I couldn’t sleep and was too restless to cruise the Song, I began to supervise the construction of vast repositories of data, and had their putery stacked on unmanned orbiting asteroids. These self-archiving, solar-powered satellites were powerful enough not only to hold snapshots of all activity on the Song, but with the assistance of inbuilt AIs, to cross-reference and link information to a degree that was otherwise impossible.