by Levy, Roger
My archives were just as much an escape for me as was the Song. I could become so absorbed in them that, briefly, I could forget everything else.
But reality always returned.
Life was unfair. Even though I had no faith, I would catch myself crying out to God, as I had been taught to do as a child on Gehenna. And even though I had no faith, it comforted me.
I cried out, How can it be like this? I was married to Pireve, and in a just System I should be happier than I had ever been. On my occasional visits to The Floor, I would catch myself in a moment’s dream, just observing her at work. She’d talk to people, and they would talk to her. She’d touch them on the upper arm, and occasionally on the bare wrist or hand. There were smiles between them and prolonged eye contact. Sometimes there was tension in their voices, sometimes pleasure. I understood all of this, and I knew what it meant, the ebb and flow of interpersonal engagement. I could do it myself now, without awkwardness, and with Pireve I often did it without realising I was doing it. I had changed so much since I had met her, and I was still changing.
I realised I was reflecting upon myself! Of course I knew there was still something different about me. On Gehenna I had made the transition from being aware that I was different from most people in a single respect, to knowing I was different in a major respect. And then with Solaman I had gone from not knowing what I lacked, to thinking I knew it. And from there I had made the transition to being able to mimic it. Now, with Pireve, I was starting truly to comprehend people.
Pireve. When I thought of her, it was in a way that made my brain catch. I would whisper her name to myself. Pireve. Oh, how I loved her.
Yes. I finally understood love, and Pellonhorc was going to end it all. I loved Pireve, and unless I did something to help Pellonhorc, she and I would die. So, of course, would the entire System, but that meant nothing of great significance to me.
Pellonhorc was still refusing to have any treatment for his cancer. I carried out a research trail on the Song and unearthed estimates for timescales by which a cure would be found, and discovered that one could define and propose research pathways by asking a series of simple questions.
Do we understand every aspect of the disease mechanism?
If not, do we have the information we need to understand those we don’t?
If not, do we know what technology we need to obtain this information?
If not, do we understand the problem of how to develop this technology?
And so on, for each facet of the problem. There were many facets. The questions were simple enough, but they multiplied exponentially. Just like his cancer cells – it struck me – each question was a cell that divided into two questions, then four, eight…
Even my brain could not retain the responses to more than about fifty doublings of the questions. And in Pellonhorc’s case, the situation was made more complex by the fact that, since he was having no treatment, the problem – the cancer – was progressing in a unique way. While Solaman’s cancer had grown steadily but locally, Pellonhorc’s was spreading in his blood cells and through his nerves, as if it was adapting to each barrier. He developed a slight limp, and his left arm was losing strength and hung slack at his side.
At the end of every day, before going home to Pireve, I met Pellonhorc in his office. We never discussed the business any more. Every evening I asked him if he’d started treatment, and every time he told me he had not and would not. One evening, he said he needed to get out, and we walked to the bar, Pellonhorc leaning heavily on my arm. People nodded and smiled at him, though they kept a cautious distance and never held his eye. At the bar, our table was free. I think it was always waiting for us. I had never arrived there to find it occupied.
As we sat with our drinks, he said, ‘So, Alef, how’s your research going?’
‘Slowly,’ I told him. He didn’t react, and I went on. ‘The new epigenetic cancers are problematic. Yours especially so. All the in vitro treatments on comparable cells have resulted in the neoplasm swiftly adapting.’ In fact these had been his own cells, harvested by Pireve from his corset on a day he’d been in such pain that she’d been permitted to help him with it.
The medicians were fascinated by Pellonhorc’s neoplasm. They had never seen anything like it. One of them had described it to me as the perfect killer, and I had had to point out to her that such a thing would end up with nowhere to go, which was hardly a mark of perfection. Where, by comparison, would the Whisper be without the System?
I told him, ‘If we leave it, it grows; and if we intervene, it mutates.’
Pellonhorc wasn’t looking at me. I followed his gaze, but he was just looking at the other people in the bar. He had his good hand under his jacket, and I knew he was massaging the growth.
I said, ‘How long do the medicians say you have?’
‘He has a few months.’
Although there was music in the bar (it was jangling and barely mathematical) and the air was filmy with smoke and thick with the smell of visky, these things were always muted in our corner. I was never sure whether this was out of fear or respect, or whether Pellonhorc made sure he (and perhaps I, too) was shielded everywhere he went.
I started to tell him about the research cascade, but he waved me down. ‘I knew I could rely on you. He made you His agent. How long? Just tell me how long.’
‘To arrest it, to simply stabilise you –’
He raised the glass with his poor hand and let it drop on the table so that the visky jumped over us both. A waiter started to wipe the mess away. Pellonhorc slapped him viciously with his good hand. When he’d gone, Pellonhorc hissed, ‘I’m not interested in being stabilised. I want it reversed. He knows that. And after that, I want to live on and on.’ He sat back and watched me. ‘You understand? No death, Alef. I’m not chancing it. I’ve had enough of Him.’
I picked up my own drink and threw it back in a single burning swallow. I hadn’t slept for a week and I didn’t care what Pellonhorc wanted. I wanted a life with Pireve.
‘Let me finish,’ I said, and waited to be sure he was listening. I was trembling – I’d never spoken to him like this before – but he had to listen. ‘It will take about eighty-five years for a cure. And now you want to live forever?’ I shrugged, though I was still shaking. ‘I suppose it’s possible. But you’ll need to wait in rv until forever’s ready.’
He almost spat his response, ‘You expect me to go into rv? For that long?’
‘An hour or a year in rv, does the difference matter? You’re asleep. You came from Gehenna in rv and didn’t notice it.’ I was also remembering Pellonhorc talking to his father, trapped in that terrible cocoon of pain, telling him, ‘Does it matter? You’ll be dead.’
I waited. I couldn’t tell if the pressure, in Pellonhorc’s mind, was on me or on God. I said, ‘Is it what happens while you’re asleep? The Whisper has enough money and power. It’ll still be there when you return, and bigger. I’ll set up safeguards.’
‘I won’t go into rv indefinitely. That’s just what He’d want.’
‘So come out in eighty-five years. Be cured of this first, and then you can think about forever. I’m setting up the medical foundation now. All my calculations say there will be a total cure for your cancer by then.’ The alcohol and lack of sleep had made me reckless. I added, ‘And I’ll start parallel research on forever.’
The stink of his visky eddied towards me. ‘What if the rv unit fails? Power failure, sabotage, stupidity. It’s a long time.’ He tossed the rest of his drink back and winced. ‘Eighty-five years is two lifetimes. From Earth to the System took less time, and half the sleepers were lost.’
I reached across the table and took his limp hand in the way I’d seen Pireve take the hands of troubled workers on The Floor. He flinched, but left his hand in mine, flaccid and cold. I wanted to draw back. The feel of him was not pleasant.
‘He has given me this gift for this moment. For you,’ I said solemnly, using words I’d heard o
n the Song in relation to shards of crystal being hawked as cures for radiation poisoning. ‘If you know Him, then you know He gave me my brain. You have to trust me. This will work.’
‘Eighty-five years. He’ll use the time to track down all the seeds and destroy my business. You imagine I’d let Him do that? My father won’t let Ligate go. Why would I let God go?’
I was in danger of losing everything. I forced myself to be calm and said, ‘This isn’t letting him go, Pellonhorc. This is waiting for a cure.’
The music had changed, and I could hear some maths in it.
He said, ‘I’ll be forgotten, left to sleep until the rv fails and I die. No. I’ll let the seeds open now.’ But there was less certainty in his voice. My talk of a cure, of a fixed number of years, even if in rv, had reached him.
I softened my voice and said, ‘I can do it, but you have to be reasonable, Pellonhorc.’ I could see I was close. ‘You have to go into rv. You know I’m doing everything possible. Leave the seeds in place. Be reasonable. Please.’
He hesitated. Just as I thought I had him, he lifted his poor hand and hissed, ‘No. He isn’t being reasonable.’
Thirty-five
TALLEN
‘I always wondered what it might be like to live on Bleak.’
Tallen found it hard to focus his attention. There was no image, just the words on the blank screen, but a human being was there, somewhere, and it made him feel unexpectedly fragile. He said, ‘You get used to it. I’m too used to it.’ He couldn’t think what to say next. His words remained a moment before vanishing, to be replaced by an answer.
‘I live on Heartsease. We have long, bright nights, and in summer the stars are brilliant. I’ve lived here all my life. Have you always been on Bleak?’
Tallen said, ‘Pretty much. I was brought up in Gutter, but my folks died when I was sixteen and I had to make my own way after that. I was good with tech, fixing stuff, and I always managed to make enough to get by that way.’
Gutter turned to Spindrift, and his age to seventeen before the message went out.
‘I heard Spindrift’s beautiful. I’ve always wanted to travel. It must be wonderful. My husman died last year and I feel lonely here.’
‘Yes,’ he replied, and watched the word go, untouched. ‘I’ve never been married.’ He wanted to say more, but the idea of his words being changed was suddenly impossible to bear.
Fresh words appeared. ‘Are you still there? I hope so. It’s hard.’ A pause, then, ‘I long to see snow and rain. Mountains, ice.’
Tallen stared at the words for a long time, then replied, ‘I have to go now.’
‘Did you get that? Did I say something wrong? I’m sorry.’
Snow and rain. Mountains, ice. The words rang in his head as the screen greyed. He felt faint, but this was not the rig communicating its aches to him. This was something else.
Beata said, ‘This is more distressing for you than we anticipated. You have been affected. We shall consider our response.’
The dizziness faded. Tallen had to resist an urge to scratch his back.
* * *
Razer
Delta said, ‘The archivist smuggled this out for me. I don’t know how. Pax security is usually solid.’
Razer knew how. She could tell from the way it blitzed the screen, then cleared again. She’d written a Tale for a coder once. The deal had been that she would only use what he wanted her to use, outside the bones of his life and the thinnest skin of how he did his work. He’d told her a lot more, but she’d kept her word, as she always did. Some of the people whose Tales she’d told, it wasn’t worth the risk to cross them, and anyway, if she was true to them, they passed her along to their chancy friends. What a life Cynth had given her.
This package was a wrongsider. You set it up as a piece of code that has already slipped past the putery’s first line of defence, and you label your intended recipient as the sender. Your putery’s active defence tags its programkiller to the package and sends it straight back to who it thinks is the sender. But you’ve put the code to neutralise the killer in the package, so as soon as the recipient opens the package, the killer’s killed and the package is received and clean. Easy enough. This had to be good, though, to beat Pax’s defence.
‘No idea,’ Razer said, watching the petals open and fold back to reveal the message. The flowers were beautiful.
‘Okay,’ Delta said, sitting back. ‘There were six of them in the audit team. They arrived in Lookout five days before Fleschik had got going. They divided themselves into two groups, surveillance and personnel. The surveillance group spent the first two days reviewing the town’s streetcams while the other pulled every Pax officer’s records.
‘I started with the surveillance group, looking for unusual patterns in their research, but found nothing. They didn’t focus selectively on any single area. Between them they covered the whole of Lookout equally. They were good, seemed to have missed nothing.
‘So I moved on to the personnel group. Again, their actions were straightforward and thorough. They covered everyone fully and expertly, paying no more attention to Bale than to anyone else. Again, nothing unusual, unless it was their extreme efficiency. Everything they did was task-appropriate.’
Razer said, ‘So we’ve got nothing.’
‘I haven’t finished. If you look at them individually, the picture changes.’
Razer looked away for a moment and let her gaze settle on the tank of stones. They seemed to melt and reform as the fish streamed across them.
Delta said, ‘I remembered that when the Fleschik event erupted, the auditors stood back and observed, exactly as they should have. All but one of them.’
Razer felt her skin tingle. Delta had closed her eyes and her voice had fallen to a whisper.
‘He was the exception. Flat nose, skin pitted by sulphur acne. He had a high, rasping voice. He put his face so close to me that he was almost touching my cheek with his and he was hissing at me as I was trying to give Bale instructions. He was sweating ketones. Decece, that was his name. He irritated everyone that day. If it hadn’t been for the event, someone would have bruised a fist on him.’
Razer watched the screen as Delta opened flowers and moved them around. This Harv was good but weird. The audit team were red roses, Decece almost scarlet. Lookout was mapped as a garden.
Delta said, ‘We get these teams coming around every year and they’re failed Paxers. One or two in every team will be halfway competent, and they’re the ones you need to impress. Ten minutes tells you which those are. But these were almost all excellent. All but Decece.’
The ivy had to be streetcams.
‘Audit never puts together a team like that,’ Delta was saying. ‘They don’t have the quality. They have to distribute the best among the hopeless. But those five were really good. Just two of them could have done the job.’
‘So? And what about Decece? Was he particularly useless, then?’
Delta said, ‘We thought so. The others were passing him around like they couldn’t cope with him for more than a day at a time.’ She pointed at knots of wild foliage. ‘See? This is his activity.’
Razer still couldn’t see what was so animating Delta. It was hard to concentrate on anything other than the tank with its scintillating colours. Razer got up to curtain it. The room darkened momentarily, but the flowers grew more brilliant. Razer sat down again and tried to follow Delta’s reasoning.
‘If you examine what he focused on as they moved him around, it seems at first to be entirely random. He appears to have little application, works without any structure. The others compensate for him.’ Delta stopped. The garden steadied. The promenade was represented by the border of a pond. There was dead ivy beside it. Dead cams.
Delta said, ‘Razer, you told me you were instructed to contact Bale.’
‘He was suggested to me. What’s that got to do with this?’
‘The audit team pulled everyone’s records. Checking pers
onalities, strengths and weaknesses. Again, routine. But look, when Decece was on personnel, he went straight for Bale. Just like you did when you came to Bleak.’
‘I came to you, Delta. That way round. If I was part of this, why would I do that?’
Delta raised a hand. ‘Hold off. You know why you were given Bale?’
‘My program looks for people who live eventful lives.’
‘Well, he was that,’ Delta said. ‘I’m not saying you knew you were part of this thing, but it’s starting to look like it.’
‘And like Bale was right all along.’ Anxious now, Razer went to the window. A breeze was blowing scraps of paper across the rubbish outside, and the lights in the windows of the slotbuild opposite were flickering. The streetlights on the far side were out. They hadn’t been out when Razer had arrived. But this was Lookout, and not the best maintained part of it.
Delta was silent a moment before saying, ‘I looked at the team’s surveillance review. They were checking streetcam locations and fields of view, and there’s nothing untoward in that. But if you look at Decece when he was checking surveillance, it gets really interesting.’
Razer interrupted. ‘If they were checking streetcams, could they have ensured invisibility for Fleschik within Lookout? Found him a path?’
‘That’s one thing, obviously,’ Delta said. ‘There’s another.’
Razer found herself leaning forward.
‘Tallen didn’t get cammed on his way to getting attacked. When we all debriefed, that wasn’t flagged up as being significant. Not everywhere in Lookout has cam-cover, and not all the cams work all the time. Which could also explain Fleschik’s invisibility, like you say. But listen to this. Tallen had a habit of walking down to the sea, late at night.’ Delta was taking her time now. ‘He did it most nights. But a few days before the event, the cams along his entire route went out and stayed out for days.’ She pointed at the screen. ‘It was curious, but there was nothing statistically significant about it.’