by Levy, Roger
They’d anticipated her, but they were too late. Forty-five seconds and she was in the alleys of the Rut.
Lookout’s Rut was a deadcammed warren of re-engineering workshops, a factory of dismantling and re-imagining. It could have been night there. Tarps and steel sheeting concealed the sky, and the streets were ripped up so that wheels were less use than boots. Razer swung herself off the machine and walked it on.
She hadn’t gone ten metres before the first fixer approached, a woman barely out of her teens. She ran a wired palm over the ziprider’s console and said without meeting Razer’s glance, ‘Price?’
‘No money. I just want a safe walk out of here.’
The woman tipped her head. ‘Where you need to go?’
‘Don’t worry about that. Once I’m out, I need twenty minutes.’
The woman looked into a palmscreen and back at Razer, considered and said, ‘Okay, we have thirteen women your height and weight, close enough. Give us five minutes to gather and dress them and you. Show me your walk.’
The woman watched Razer, then said into her palm, ‘Okay, she’s a hip-roller, slight head-peck. Everyone keeps their hands in their pockets.’ She turned her attention back to Razer. ‘Twenty minutes is tall. Pax don’t like losing zippys. You got anything else? The gun you got there in the pocket?’
‘I need the gun.’
‘They can track it.’ The woman was already wheeling the ziprider towards a ramp leading down below a shopfront booth. A saw screeched somewhere beneath.
Razer followed the woman. ‘No they can’t. It was an undercover.’
‘Worth more, then.’ Underground, the light was harsh neon and every surface was metal. The workshop stank of oil and ozone.
‘No. I need the gun.’
The woman parked the ziprider in a pair of axle clamps and watched the machine invert it. The machine’s movement was unexpectedly beautiful. The woman touched her ear and said to Razer, ‘What have you done? They’re keen as lovers out there. Coating the streets for you.’
Another woman came down the ramp, wearing a black padded jacket and trousers and a pair of oversized bright green boots. She gave Razer a bundle of the same clothes and said, ‘Which direction do you want to leave?’
Razer started to pull on the overclothes. They were thick and heavy, good as cloaking but hard to move in. ‘North.’
‘Check your timer, then. Thirteen of us will leave in precisely three minutes, equidistant exits. We’ll all look the same and we’ll stretch them thin. You leave at three minutes and ten, they’ll be overloaded and you’ll be fine.’
Out of the workshop, Razer pulled the hood over her head. A few others walked past, just like her, hooded and booted. She walked north for a minute, then turned sharply and made towards the western perimeter of the Rut.
Bale had told her how the Rut kept going. It survived by compromise. It knew when to cooperate, and this would definitely be a time for the Rut to belly up for Pax. At two minutes forty, Razer kicked off the green boots and stripped back down to her own shirt and jeans and walked straight out of the Rut. She was walking straight past a pair of Paxers as they picked up the first of the decoys exiting behind her.
Ten minutes later, she was at The Rig at Rest. She almost cried at the sight of Maerley’s creased face and the smile she’d never forgotten. But he was stooped now and she saw the arthritis starting to knot his fingers.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Am I that bad?’
‘Maerley, you’re just perfect.’ And suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion, she fell into a chair. ‘I need your help. Everything’s a mess.’
As he made caffé, she watched him, remembering more. The hostel room was littered with his machinery, with motor parts and power sources, all his screenery and putery. Maerley had a gift for assembling the marvellous out of the useless, making extraordinary devices from fragments of failed tech. He’d always lived like this, in nests of components.
He put the tasse down, turning that small piece of gouged metal in his hands. It was a shard of shrapnel that had nearly killed him years back in a flycykle malfunction, the shard polished to an obsidian shine by all those years of buffing.
‘You still got that, Maerley.’
‘Just for exercise,’ he said, smiling. ‘So, tell me.’
And when Razer’s story was done, he said, ‘I don’t know if any of this helps or makes it worse. After you contacted me, I searched AfterLife for the vote you mentioned, Larren Gamliel. The drifthome and the voidlock death, yes, they brought it all back. Could have been me.’ He took a shuddering breath, then added, ‘Have you gone back to the TruTale?’
‘I’ve been rather busy. Listen to me, Maerley. I don’t think we’ve got long. When I spoke to you, you said you’d been commissioned to build a single-unit vessel here. What are your instructions for it?
‘To make it ready. That’s it. I’m expecting a client to pick it up.’
Unable to keep her voice from shaking, Razer said, ‘I think I’m your client. Is it ready?’
Maerley frowned. ‘Not sea-tested, but otherwise, yes. It’s you?’ He turned the gleaming shard of metal over and over in his hand. Light jumped around the room.
‘My AI’s been pushing me to you. I don’t think the Gamliel Life was a coincidence.’ She went to the window and looked out. The street was empty. ‘When’s your client supposed to be making contact?’
‘I was just told to make it ready and wait. No details at all. Very mysterious. As if they knew they were being watched. And just like the commissioner before this one who ordered two very similar units. Exactly the same secrecy. Really weird. Those were two-ups, though.’
Razer asked, ‘Don’t you always get paid on completion? Have you been paid?’
The arthritis was there in Maerley’s gait as he walked across to open his comms. He looked up and said, ‘Payment came through about the moment you arrived.’
Razer touched the augmem stub at her ear and said, quietly, ‘Cynth knows I’m here. Of course. This is also a tracker.’
‘Easy stuff,’ Maerley said.
‘And Cynth found a Life very similar to yours, to prompt me. Didn’t want to risk telling me openly in case it exposed me. Or her. And I guess she must have known about your other client.’
‘Hell of an AI there, Razer.’ Maerley pushed himself upright. ‘Let’s go.’ He took her down to the inn’s rear door and from there along the sea wall to a small private dry dock that stank of salt and oil. ‘There she is.’
Razer looked down at the slim, dark, flattened tube. Without the stubby fins and turbine jets, it might have been a sarc. ‘Will I know how to run it?’
‘More or less. I’ll take you through it.’ He climbed awkwardly down to the steps beside the machine and pulled the small hatch open.
‘There really isn’t time, Maerley. What comms does it have?’
He backed out of the way as she started to lower herself into the pod. She was slim, but it was still a tight squeeze to push her hips down. Maerley was saying, ‘Short range only, and preset to instructions. You can’t override the presets.’
She was in to her waist and raised her arms to wriggle further. She swore, forcing herself down. ‘Maerley, who exactly is this built for?’
He looked unhappy. ‘It’s stripped back all the way. It’s a transit unit designed for short range, single mission, preset destination. Pilot dimensions were subsidiary. And there’s another reason it’s tight…’
‘Just tell me where’s it set for, Maerley.’
‘I was just given coordinates, but the only thing out there apart from the sarcs are the rigs.’
He was interrupted by a dull thump from the direction of the inn. As he glanced over his shoulder, a flash of yellow light lit up all the creases of his face and threw his shadow against the dock wall.
‘That’s my traps,’ he said. ‘I always wondered what they’d look like if they ever triggered. Get yourself in, Razer.’
She wriggled all the
way down and into a cradled position. Harnesses slid across her shoulders and as the canopy closed over her head, screenery snapped on. This was certainly stripped back. Maerley was there on the screen, a blurred stick-figure leaning against a grey block of wall that suddenly lurched aside, and as it moved, so did she and the vessel, dropping forward and suddenly wallowing and then sinking. With full submersion, the lighting faded and she was in the gloom of the tiny cockpit.
An instrument console lit up and she reached out to fit her hands to the pads. Maerley was above her now and moving away to the rear. There was another figure too.
The vessel bucked sharply and tilted. Razer gripped the pads and they gloved her hands. The dock’s angles and planes dissolved behind her, and she was in open water.
Forty-two
ALEF
SigEv 43 The ceremony
With only a few months before Pellonhorc – and Pireve, of course – came out of rv, we were ready with an initial cache of AfterLives to be released as soon as their owners went to the seas. These were maturity-inserted neurids, so the Lives were limited in detail. I was troubled that we might have raised expectations too far.
Nevertheless, with great ceremony, our first thousand units – we called them sarcophagi – set off for Bleak from the embarkation port on Heartsease. One thousand people at the edge of death, locked in rv, prepared to wait for judgement of their lives.
As soon as I’d moved into Pellonhorc’s house, I’d had a putery room set up with command screenery stretched across its longest wall. It was eight metres tall and twenty wide. Most of the time I used it as a thoughtboard, throwing sequences at it and shifting them around, but I also watched Song material on it. You felt like you could walk right into the threedy it pushed into the room.
Malachus came to the house to watch the First Lives ceremony with me. I’d never seen him show anything but confidence and certainty before, but on that day he deferred to me. His anxiety was plain. He knew what the consequences would be if this failed.
The ceremony began magnificently, though. The System all but came to a halt to watch it.
It may seem extraordinary that there had never been a Systemwide event before this, but that was the case. The System’s settlement, centuries previously, had been chaotic. The planets had been pre-terraformed while the fleets were in transit. Arrangements for the flight from Earth had been so accelerated that our ancestors’ arrival had been ragtag, and until AfterLife, there had been no interplanetary commonalities except the rule of taxes and the susurrus of the Song. The birth of AfterLife was an opportunity to correct that.
Standing in front of the huge screen, Malachus and I observed the final hour of the two-day buildup. Our participants came from all over the System except the usual two planets; they came from Spindrift, from Magnificence, from Vegaschrist’s moons Brightness and New Hope, from Heartsease and Peco and Gutter and Bleak. The mothership was trailed all the way from Heartsease by a flotilla of small craft. The overvoice explained that because the upper atmosphere of Bleak was so dangerous, fifty highly manoeuvrable dropvessels would spin down from the mothership to release the sarcophagi.
Leaders of all the planets, bar the usual two, were present, and each said a few words. No one mentioned me. No one but Malachus knew that AfterLife was anything other than a coalescence project. I felt it best that it remain that way. AfterLife should stand alone.
The words were all said, each leader carefully claiming no credit, but all careful to imply that their own planet was responsible for a significant part of the AfterLife project. There was talk of a new understanding.
The ceremony entered its next phase. In unison, the dropvessels arranged themselves in an arrowhead formation that, as the cam swept round, was revealed as the A of AfterLife.
Malachus grinned at me. A stillshot of this sequence would be AfterLife’s brand memory. After we had heard the overvoice recognising the A in scripted surprise, I muted the official soundtrack and swelled the Song’s murmur in the background.
So beautiful!
I never realised space was so big before.
I feel so lucky to be seeing this. It makes me feel proud. I feel like crying!
The dropvessels opened their cargo doors and released their loads.
The cams closed in, and the screen’s threedy strengthened. The room seemed to fill with sarcophagi. They were all around us, tumbling through space.
Malachus let out a sigh. He had been standing up, and now he fell back in his seat. The sight was glorious. The rain of dark blue sarcs, finned and ribbed, proofed against corrosion and maul and every other form of siege and attack that Bleak and its oceans and storms might launch at them over the centuries, plunged in a great phalanx through the lower atmosphere of the planet and on through the glittering storms.
The cam remained high, and the sarcs fell and fell away beneath us, a minute passing, another and another as they dropped. And as they struck the sea, looking in the end no more than a handful of gravel tossed into that terrible ocean, every single sarcophagus vanished from eyeview and from seacam and from every wavelength of spectrum reader.
Not one remained. The sea raged on.
Malachus whispered, ‘No.’ Then, anxiously, ‘Alef, what’s happening?’
‘I don’t know.’ I turned to my putery, reviewed the algorithms of gravity and rate of descent, of aerodynamics and impact resistance. ‘This shouldn’t be,’ I said. I checked everything and checked it all again. ‘They must be there.’
‘But they aren’t,’ Malachus said tightly.
‘No.’
Now even the Song was silent.
And then, one by one, a thousand points of light lit up over eighty per cent of the screenery in the System, each light a life waiting for renewal, each light a sleeper’s tale.
The cam fell vertiginously, dizzyingly, and there they were, the sarcs rising to the surface of the sea and dancing there, dark blue pips on a field of black and grey. Each sarc was linked to a Life, each pip to a point of light.
Malachus yelled. He took me by the shoulders and shook me, shouting, ‘Yes! Yes, yes, oh, Alef, yes!’
The Song went wild. It was an echoing flare of noise and light, nothing but a roar of celebration. It was almost alive. I felt I could be unconnected and still hear it.
Malachus was laughing as the screen showed views of the sarcs gradually sinking once more to settle at their various preset depths and the shuttles beginning to return to the mothership.
And without warning, in all that joy and celebration, the screenery failed and we were standing in a darkness relieved only by the pale light from the bank of putery behind us, flattening our shadows against the dead wall.
This was not the simple hiatus of a few moments ago. This was something much more.
Malachus stumbled, clutching at me. ‘What’s happened?’
I pulled up the overvoice again.
‘I’m sorr –’ A crackling, then nothing.
‘The screenery’s fine,’ I said, my back to it, checking the putery. ‘The speaker isn’t actually on the mothership. It’s totally unaffected by whatever’s happening above Bleak. They’ve just pulled the voice because they don’t know what to say.’
The great screenery returned with an accompanying fierce crack of sound before I could go on. Malachus had been staring directly at it, and his scream was an awful thing. I heard him collapse to the ground. By the time I turned round, the blinding screenflare had dulled a fraction.
I squinted through my fingers. Again and once more, a screencrack and flare, and the third time there was vague detail too. It was as if the screenery was being repeatedly knifesliced, a slash of black and white, then a magnetic thrum and a blur of retinal shadow. In the flurry of light and shade I could see Malachus kneeling and clutching at his eyes.
‘You’ll be all right,’ I told him as the screenery began to resolve. ‘The cutout came through, but a bit slow. You’ll be seeing Bleak every time you close your eyes for a w
hile, though.’
I helped him sit up. He was rubbing his knuckles into his eyes.
‘I can’t see anything at all,’ he said. ‘What’s happening?’
‘It’s okay. They’ve gone to another cam. Bleak just decided to unleash one of its high-altitude electrical events and someone didn’t think to shield the comms. It –’
I stopped and stared, and then I swore.
Malachus said, ‘What?’
The screenery had finally regained itself to show a mess of shattered fragments spinning away, the sea distantly at its back. I found myself involuntarily connecting the shards in my head, reconstructing the vessel and calculating the force and position of the strike. This piece going here, that one rotated and placed there, this lone edge of titanium twisted like tinfoil…
‘What, Alef?’
‘One of the shuttles didn’t raise its shields in time.’
‘Oh.’ Malachus blinked a few times. ‘Did everyone see it? Or were they all like me?’
‘This is augmented screenery. On anything else, everywhere else, it would just have been an overlaid flare. So everyone saw it.’
Malachus closed his eyes, then opened them and examined his fingers. ‘We can’t hide it, then,’ he said.
‘No one can hide anything any more. Everything’s just a matter of time.’ I shifted the image on the screen a few times, checking elsewhere. ‘It’s already all over the System. The Song is full of it.’
There were programs already carrying out the calculation I had performed in my head, reversing the ship’s destruction moment by moment. I stopped to watch one of them. It was irritatingly slow, but I stayed long enough to see I hadn’t missed anything.
‘Yes. It’s everywhere,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter, though. It may add something.’
Malachus squinted at me, his eyes slowly beginning to focus. ‘Add something?’ He touched me on the arm. ‘You always surprise me, Alef. I’ll leave you to it, then. Oh, and congratulations.’