by Levy, Roger
Someone had once said to her: the first thing you do when you stop running and get that first moment to take stock is listen to the first thing in your mind, because no matter how stupid it seems, it’s the most important thing. And the second thing you do is say to yourself, ‘Now what?’
She took a long breath of the acrid morning air. The first thing was: she should have checked Decece was dead before leaving him. Stupid.
She turned her back to the sea and gazed at the streets. Now what?
But the fact that she knew exactly what to do made her no more comfortable at all. She had to get to The Rig at Rest and see Chorst Maerley. It wasn’t far across Lookout, but it wouldn’t be easy with the streets alert for her.
Cynth had set Maerley up for her, or maybe set her up for him. But why would Cynth be doing that? Cynth could simply have told her Maerley was here on Bleak, and to see him for a story.
Another possibility struck Razer. Was Cynth hiding something from her, or from someone else?
And another. What exactly was Cynth?
Forty
ALEF
SigEv 41 Revelation
The third readout, of course, wasn’t a failsafe either. It was our unborn baby’s. That was why Pellonhorc hadn’t given me a final warning of the consequences of failure, before entering his rv. He hadn’t needed to. He had my wife and my child.
I can’t remember running. I have no idea how I got back to my place. I remember forests growing and dying, countless leaves counted, more of them, and more.
For a long while, I was crazy. In the end, exhausted and desperate, I escaped to the Song and in its crowded void I raged and cried, my misery multiplied and amplified until the entire Song echoed with it.
My love has been taken from me. I am empty. I am nothing.
All I wanted was to cry out in the darkness, and I did that, my grief booming and thundering, but after a time I became aware that there were other voices, that there were replies.
>No one can say anything to help you, Nameless. There is nothing. I am sorry. All you can do is carry on and wait for hope. Tell us your name.
There were hundreds and thousands, tens of thousands, of answers like this. They all carried names or codes, but I couldn’t identify myself and risk being traced. Mad though I was, I knew I still had to function, to bring Pireve back and to see my child born. I had to do what Pellonhorc wanted.
But I couldn’t do that. I still didn’t know how to finish the task! I was lost in despair and without hope. I used the putery of my great databases to fill the Song with untraceable, echoing wails of desolation. My terrible voice, uncoded and with no place of origin, scythed through the Song. I was the impossible. I was a wind, a tide, a sourceless flare of light. For a month, the System spoke only of me. They searched for me but found only the stars. My name, the name they called out to answer me, was Nameless.
>Time is the only thing, Nameless. But I am here.
>And I am here, Nameless. Tell us about it. Tell us and it will help.
Of course I couldn’t tell them. I roared and I screamed my loss, but I could say nothing. Yet they persisted.
>Then only listen. Listen to my story, Nameless. I live on Gutter and I had a brother who died, and a father who went away…
>And here is my story, Nameless. I live on a driftship, alone. Everyone else aboard is dead. The ship’s contaminated and no planet will take me, no other vessel dock with me. I have food and drink for years, and I have the Song, but I’m alone.
>You have us, Driftship. We are here.
>Nameless, are you still there?
And in the end, to all of this, I lowered my voice and answered.
>Always.
All those stories of sadness, hope and despair. The Song was suddenly flooded with them. Without intention, I had triggered something extraordinary. Because I understood every fault and nuance of the coding, I hadn’t opened myself up in a tiny way or in a small place, as they had, each one of them, and been ignored; I had done it everywhere. I drew all the pain and the yearning to me, and in answering me, those in pain drew themselves to each other as never before.
I couldn’t respond properly, but I retained everything. I didn’t think. I sent it all to my database satellites and stored it away. All the pain, the desperation, all filed away. It was like sweeping dead leaves.
And then, after a few weeks of this occupation, I gradually returned to my senses and to my task. With Malachus’s agreement, I moved myself to Pellonhorc’s house, where I could visit Pireve every day. I developed a routine of waking at four in the morning and going to Pireve. She was so very beautiful, her skin cool and perfect. The unit’s hood, once open, exposed her down to the shoulders, so I had to imagine her belly with our baby inside. Once I touched the inward curve of her neck, but the tightness and temperature of her skin disturbed me too much, and I never did that again.
I talked to her, telling her what I was hoping to do that day. Sometimes I’d tell her a story I’d heard on the Song the night before, or I’d tell her what I had achieved the day before and how it was all going. Then I’d say goodbye, blowing a small kiss at her, and close the unit. I tried all the time not to think about Pellonhorc beside her, the two of them shoulder to shoulder, but every time, as the hood closed down, I glanced at him and felt uncomfortable.
At five a.m., I would start my work, and at midnight, for an hour before I slept, I became Nameless.
Trying not to think too much about Pireve when I wasn’t with her, I structured my time carefully. First, there was Pellonhorc’s cancer. I set up more research teams, and Malachus made sure they were funded by the Whisper. There were now hospitals and laboratories throughout the System working on nothing but the analysis of specimens of cells grown from Pellonhorc’s cancer.
I found this more interesting than I’d expected. While the epigenetic approach to cancer therapy had already been established when Earth was our home, the fluctuating levels of environmental radiation and the constantly mutating variety of oncogenic toxins in the System made almost every cancer an entirely unique riddle. Pellonhorc’s cancer was a nightmare to unravel. Its cells seemed to develop a response to every treatment. Nothing would wear them down or destroy them. At best, they would close in on themselves for a while before resuming their slow but relentless spread through his system. They were a perfect microcosm of their host.
Developing the organisation that would maintain Pellonhorc for all those years was the hardest task, and was mine alone. Its criteria were simple enough. There would be something to appeal to the living and something to entice the dying. Those knowingly about to die could, like Pellonhorc, go into rv and await a cure. But there had to be something for the not yet dying, too.
I struggled to find the answer to this. The organisation had to be in the thoughts of everyone, always. They had to be intimately concerned with it, day by day, year after year, before they ever needed the sea.
Night after night, I found myself returning to my databases of stories. All these people, all these lives. I already knew that they wanted more than an ending in death. But I suddenly understood that they wanted more than to live.
I was close to it. So very close.
They wanted to touch and to be touched, to be understood, to be remembered.
That eternal desire, that desire for the eternal, I already had. But I needed more than that. What else did they want?
They wanted a compassionate hearing. And… and they wanted to show their own compassion and have it acknowledged. That was what the Song had shown me.
I knew I was on to something. In the Babbel, what was it that was said? A seeing eye, a hearing ear, and a book in which all is written.
I sat in silence for perhaps an hour, turning it around and over in my head, not daring to believe I’d found my answer. But no matter how I tried to find fault, there was no mistake, no error.
* * *
SigEv 42 The program
Here was my solution: the livin
g, as well as having the future promise of the sea, would have the chance to examine the lives of those in rv. But even more than that, they would be able to judge them, so that when a cure became available for an rv category, the living would be able to vote for the sleeping to be retrieved from the sea and be saved, or to be left there.
Even to think about their salvation made me catch my breath. At one time or another, anyone in the System could be both saviour and saved. Their own lives would in the end be cared about. There would even be an encouragement to lead a good life.
The salvation of Pellonhorc alone would be the heart of this, though I tried not to consider that too deeply. Every morning as I talked to Pireve, I imagined him listening to us. As the hood opened, I could not see her without seeing him.
I had five years. Now I had my plan, I could address my one great problem.
My priority was to develop a device that would record a life far more reliably than human memory could. It had to be inert and impossible to corrupt or remove – or even to identify. For greatest effectiveness, my recorder had to be inserted into the brain at birth.
Obviously not everyone could be implanted with the device. Even the seas of Bleak could not accommodate the mortality rate of the System, not even for the eighty years I needed it to last. But everyone must be able to imagine they might be a host.
I decided that people had always accepted lottery risk; they’d accept it here.
What made the device possible was that the brain already had the capacity to store all memory. The fault within the brain was its retrieval mechanism. All we needed to do was address this.
After a great deal of research, my team identified and isolated an epigenetic trigger that affected the region of the brain responsible for longterm memory. We engineered a combined trigger and reader, and called it a neurid.
A year passed. Two. The perfected neurid could be inserted via a vaccination technique. Batches of neurid and placebo could be distributed on a double-blind basis, neither operator nor recipient having any idea whether or not the injection contained an active factor.
All my research and development was carried out in secret, in laboratories scattered throughout the System. Most of the scientists didn’t know they were working for me, and none knew what, ultimately, they were working on. We prepared an in vivo trial.
Malachus and I were getting on well. It was clear that his loyalty was to Pellonhorc, but he treated me as a friend, sympathising with me without ever mentioning the cause of my sorrow. I grew quite close to him. He had a wife and three children, and he would talk to me about them. We discussed Nameless, too, as everyone did. He told me he enjoyed being able to delegate some of the duties he used to have to carry out personally, and I understood exactly what he meant by that. He wasn’t like Pellonhorc, and even though I liked him for that, it made me worry that the Whisper might fail, with Malachus in charge.
But the Whisper simply consolidated; that was Malachus’s strength.
Another year passed, and we retrieved the data from the trial babies we had injected with neurid cells. The results were extraordinary. The first few weeks and months of infant development were grainy and incomplete, but towards the end of the year, there were voices and sounds being recorded. It was beautiful, though it made me think of my own child-to-be, which was more painful than I could cope with.
But these were just babies. I needed adults with full memories in the sea as quickly as possible.
I needed a name for the program, too. I thought of its purpose, and of Pellonhorc’s attitude to God, and I called it AfterLife. I called the memories AfterLives.
I expected the program to hit resistance here, since the neurid was assimilated far more slowly when inserted into an adult, and took time to harvest old memories as well as accumulating new ones, so that nothing of any significance could be read for some years.
But to my relief, there was an almost universal eagerness in the System to sign up for the program, with the exceptions of Gehenna and the unsaid planet, of course.
What I hadn’t appreciated was the extraordinary depth of desire for the lives of others – not for the self-told, self-pitying and self-aggrandising lives with which the Song had always teemed, but for the truth. My experience as Nameless had given me barely a glimpse of it.
Nevertheless, progress was too slow. Four years had now gone by. I still spoke to Pireve every morning, but my enthusiasm and confidence were faltering. There were always more problems. I wished she could advise me, even just comfort me. Sometimes I found myself in tears as I faced her closed eyes and perfect face. I wanted to nestle my head at her breast, to hear her gentle voice.
It was hard, but I worked and worked until I couldn’t tell waking from dreaming. Once, in a dream, I had it all solved, only to wake and find the solution gone. The walls echoed with my screams, and all the voices of the Song could not soothe me.
Malachus came to the house and told me to rest and eat. ‘Look, I’ve brought you some food. Cheese, bread, my wife’s cakes. She’s never met you, but she worries about you. You like cakes?’
He made me talk to him. He said I hadn’t talked to anyone for months.
He didn’t know about my nights. If he’d known how I raged and cried in the Song, that I was Nameless, he’d really worry. ‘I talk to Pireve every day,’ I said. My mouth felt dry, the words unfamiliar to my tongue.
‘No, you don’t.’ He picked up a piece of bread and took a bite, making sure I was watching, like a parent encouraging their child. It made me think of my mother. I was feeling increasingly fragile.
Malachus swallowed and waited. I took some bread – for my mother, I told myself – but I had no saliva and had to force it down in a lump. Malachus said, ‘You open the hood and just stand there. You haven’t said anything to her for over a year. Sometimes you don’t even look at her.’
‘Are you watching me?’
‘No, Alef. I’m watching Pellonhorc. You must know I can’t leave you alone with him. But it’s you I’m worried about.’
I felt myself slump.
‘It’s going well, isn’t it, Alef? You always say it is.’
‘It’s the time. If I had more time –’
‘You have almost a year.’ His tone changed abruptly. ‘Eat the bread, Alef, then get back to it. There’s nothing I can do. I like you, Alef, but that wouldn’t change any decision I had to make. I’ve disposed of good friends before you came along.’
He looked directly at me to tell me that. Malachus, I realised, was a good man to be running the Whisper. Command had not distanced him. He took a cake from the tray and turned to go, dropping crumbs.
I went back to work, and this time Malachus left me to it.
Forty-one
RAZER
Razer held the sticky palmscreen with her fingertips and hissed, ‘Okay, Cynth. You tell me what’s happening here.’
TALLEN IS YOUR STORY NOW.
‘What’s my story? Two people have tried to kill me. The latest told me I’ve been trained for something, and crazier ideas than that are turning out true.’ Razer glanced around. The sea was at her back, beyond the long drop of the promenade wall. She had a good field of view ahead. She slid down into a squat, so she wasn’t interrupting the line of the wall. ‘Talk to me, Cynth. Bale was right all along. I’m not a coincidence at all. I don’t believe you’re an AI. You sometimes act like one but you aren’t, or else –’ She took a breath. ‘Hell, I don’t know.’
She didn’t mention Larren Gamliel or Chorst Maerley. There was no time anyway, and what if Cynth was being monitored by whoever was responsible for all of this? Somehow she didn’t think Cynth was actually being controlled by whoever that was.
Razer nilled the connection. In a few minutes the sun would have risen enough for her to lose the protection of the shade. She started walking along the promenade, keeping tight to the wall. A few people were appearing on the streets around her, a few zipriders and mycycles. No Paxers. She kept her eyes
moving, but no one seemed to notice her.
A Paxer walked out of a side street. He glanced at the promenade but didn’t seem to have spotted her. Maybe he slowed his pace briefly. Maybe she was paranoid.
The Paxer vanished. A woman who had been casually walking towards the wall a few metres away increased her pace and turned a little too sharply in Razer’s direction. At the same time, a two-up ziprider swerved towards the point where the woman would intercept Razer. Razer waited for the ziprider to slow down, then straightarmed the woman, knocking her to the ground and rolling over her, confusing their positions, and yelled, ‘I’ve got her.’
The woman chopped an arm at Razer’s jaw, then went for a belted gun as Razer short-punched the side of her head and shouted, ‘She’s armed.’
The ziprider skidded to a halt. Razer rolled the woman onto her stomach so the dismounting Paxers couldn’t see either of their faces, and yelled, ‘Shock her. She’s got a gun. I can’t hold her.’
One of the men said, ‘I’m not sure –’
The other said, ‘Shock ’em both and we’ll sort it out later.’
Razer held the woman’s face down and shouted, ‘Fine. But do her first while I’ve got her.’
As the first charge cracked out and the woman slumped, Razer let the palmscreen fall and said, ‘Look, she’s dropped it!’
It was enough. The Paxers briefly relaxed. Razer drew the woman’s weapon and steadied it on them. ‘Okay. Jump over the wall, both of you. Right now.’
She watched them sprawl on the stones below, then swung herself onto the ziprider and headed for the area three blocks by three that Bale had told her was the Rut. He had also told her how long it took Pax to trace and track stolen vehicles, so she knew she had a count of fifty to get there. By twenty she was hearing sirens behind her, and by thirty she was hearing them from left and right too. By forty they were almost converging ahead of her.