“Ten groats,” the small man retorts instantly. “You are – ?”
“Your wholesalers.” I can hear his cheeks stretching as he smiles. The dust motes before my eyes are as large as boulders. Everything feels like ice. “We've come to town to ensure the effective delivery of your new tool. If you'd care to make the invoice for the carpet out to my demesne and see to its immediate despatch I'm sure collection of the device can be achieved ...”
“That will be satisfactory, sir. Madam?”
I turn round, force my face into a neutral expression. “Yes?”
The little man looks puzzled, a trifle perturbed. “It is true that when you – leave – you will not hand us over to the superbrights?”
“Does it worry you?”
He grimaces. “If you know of them – “
I turn away. “Please let's go,” I say to Ivan: “I don't feel well.” I shiver slightly and he looks concerned. But it's not fear that's making me feel unwell, it's something I didn't realise I had, until now; a violent rage, burning fit to make me kill if I stay here another instant. A rage against this little man: this fellow of the zombie rapists in the rubble –
“Sure,” he says. “Hey, you wait outside and I'll just give this man my card. That'll be satisfactory?” he asks the shopmerchant.
“Oh assuredly.” The carpetseller is grovelling as I duck through the awning and stand on the pavement, looking up at the afternoon sky. It's pale blue, streaked with wisps of cloud. The heavy air rubs grit against my cheeks and my nose itches from the pollution. But my pulse is winding back down and I'm breathing deep gasps of relief because I know at least one thing now, even if I can't stop my fingers from itching for death: I'm not a coward. Next time I meet some of our estwhile allies, nothing is going to save them.
Down in the basement, the big machines twitter to each other like deranged sparrows. Carmine and gold bubbles shimmer like the iridescent scum on a cess-pit contaminated by heavy metals: the fingers of the Von Neumann constructors expand like damp rot, creeping through the damp earth, robot kilns pouring out a steady stream of venous blue ichor that climbs the walls of the subterranean space and spreads into a spiderweb of hot, corrosive glue.
The system is booting through complexity levels, bringing itself up slowly – each stage fabricating the next generation of micromachines in turn – and is not yet ready for our purposes. That's about five hours away. When it's functional, when we have a network stretched beneath the entire city, we will take control of the Dreamtime nanoencoders in everyone's brain and forcibly upload their personalities into the Afterlife. This is our part of the preparations for the strike against the Politburo, a preliminary stage. For the second stage we are collecting interesting isotopes from the granite intrusion beneath our feet. I sit in the room above, curled up in a soft armchair, my mind fixed on the smells and tastes and sounds of the city. A river of senses swirls past me in soft currents of synaesthesia.
Up on the big hill, I can hear the grind of the anti-aircraft radars as they scan the horizon, searching for intruders. The Politburo is a constant hum of activity, Party delegates pouring in and scampering away under constant escort by faceless hordes of Stasi soldiers. The civil war grinds on in the distance, Revenants – the living dead, death cultists who believe in the Dreamtime – chewing away at the edges of the Partei. They work in uneasy alliance with the local democratic resistance and the distant fighters of the unconquered territories. I hear the sound of gunfire in the distance: I know where the unmarked graves lie by the roadsides. I feel omniscient. The network of sensors lies thin upon the city, but it is a technology so advanced that the Partei barely understands it's existence. It fills them with a nameless dread and horror, angst made physical at the thought of the terrible judgement which, in their guilt and hubris, they believe will be visited upon themselves when they die.
This thought pleases me. I don't like these grim-hearted fanatics. Their obsession with procreation, their manic dream of ubermensch, their vicious xenophobia and phobic materialism: all these things repel me. I don't ask why Distant Intervention takes such an interest in them as to wish to destabilise their conflict-riven entire society ... but I have no reason to ask such questions, any more than a fish asks why it swims in water. All I look forward to is their downfall, so I can go home and forget about the lunatics in the midnight wasteland, revenants of a dark pursuit.
Somewhere far away a door slams. I glance up, shift my attention to my eyes: Ivan stands before me. “Yes?”
He sits down in a chair opposite me and smiles. “We did it clean,” he says. “The magic carpet is coming. When the delivery van takes it away again it will be carrying a cleanup device to take care of the stink afterwards. Indigenous manufacture, of course – made from local materials.”
“Huh. Good. What then?”
He looks nonplussed. “The constructors –”
“Yeah.” I yawn and stretch, feel joints pop and muscles ache acutely – I've been in this position for hours and all of a sudden my limbs are screaming at me. “They'll do the job. One more day and the entire city will be wired for Dreamtime. We can go to full flood whenever the Boss gives the word.”
He clears his throat. “I'm not sure he will,” he says.
I'm on my feet before he can shut his mouth. “That's crap and you know it! We're here to do a number and – “ I see his expression.
“Even if death is part of the process?” he asks, drily.
“What do you mean?” I'm confused. “It's quite simple. We get the net installed and bounce them all into –”
“Uh-huh. There's a hitch.” He waits.
“Well?” I'm getting mad, now, mad with the kind of internal irritation that makes me want to scratch the source of the itch until it's raw, bloody, dead.
“Uploading the city is fine. It would get the Stasi's population base out of the way, sure. But there's a problem. Their eugenics program –”
“What's wrong?” I lean over him.
He closes his eyes. “For the past two generations they've been gene-splicing without telling anyone. There's some seriously whacked-out immunological engineering going down; it's too widespread to contain.” He tilts his head back and I lean closer until I can see the tiny veins in his eyelids, feel his breath on my throat. “It's in about sixty percent of them, Oshi. They're immune to the Dreamtime nanocoders – I guess it's what they've been looking for all along. They've got immunoglobins that stop the upload bodies before they cross the blood-brain barrier, stop them encoding neural connections, stop them period. If we go ahead and Upload the entire city, we got problems. There's a word for that kind of problem. Whether it's the Partei's fault for fucking them over or ours, someone's responsible as shit for it. Let me spell it out for you; the word I'm thinking of is –”
“Genocide.”
The situation is simple and infinitely horrible.
There have always been political organizations predicated on the search for ultimate power. National socialists, communists, whatever – once their leaders realise that they're riding a tiger and will be eaten if they fall from the saddle – clamp down hard, seeking for reins that will hold their monster in check. Night and mist swallow their enemies, vomiting them out into unmarked graves. Secret police forces proliferate, other engines of terror modulated by their fearsome enquiries. But all the same, no matter how hard they react, the leaders can't sleep easy in their beds. They know that sooner or later their opponents will realise the predicament they stand in and fight back. And now there is another fear for the leaders of totalitarian regimes: the afterlife.
Rich worlds can afford reincarnation clinics, cloned bodies prepared for the recently dead to be reborn into. But rich worlds don't get that way under merciless juntas. Rich worlds become rich by trade, learning, self-knowledge, respect for their human riches. The dictators and petty tyrants know that when they die they will live on in the Dreamtime; and what happens to them there? An old adage about camel-hair ropes and
the eye of a needle springs to mind. The fascists fear that they will be judged beyond the grave, and found wanting: or that their subjects will take comfort from the proximity of immortality, and throw themselves upon the bayonets.
(Actually, nobody waits to judge the tyrants. Superbrights are not gods in any moral dimension, however powerful they might be. As the Dreamtime expands, new worlds being added to the network, so the dead diffuse into the distance – I think. That's what they told me. Anyway, the point stands: the fears of the opressors are misplaced. But that doesn't stop them from waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the dark night, all the same. And that makes me glad, at least.)
The Stasis, the party of changelessness, think they have an answer. It's an abomination of a secondary order, not as bad as the worst excesses of the genocidal fringe, but bad enough all the same. They want to abolish the upload tools, making their subjects mortal and ignorant of perfect wisdom. We can remove the Stasis, but only by killing them forever. They are gambling upon the fact that we will not do this. Their worst viciousness is expressed in their contempt for our moral system. I'm not sure who are worse; them, or their death-worshipping opponents. But the Stasis think they can defy the agencies of the Dreamtime, the servants of the Superbrights.
They will have to be taught a lesson. And Oshi and her companions are here to build the tools that the teacher will wield.
It's tomorrow morning already, and I'm feeling vicious from lack of good sleep. When the door gong booms I scoop up a knife, shove it in one pocket, and scramble downstairs. Wisdom blinks a steady glow in my eye: no explosives, no Stasi breaking down the door with hammers. But there's a cart pulled by some animal standing in front of our gate, bright red and gold scrollwork running down its sides, and there are men standing beside it. “ Action downstairs,” I call, adjusting my dress. Eri is already there: and she opens the door.
“The House of Anaya Voslic? Your-humble-servant Pyotr Malzruth of Sclotcik and Son, the house of Fine Carpets. Ah, madame Voslic! Your estimable purchase awaits you on yonder wagon: which has been brought hither for your perusal. Should everything be to your satisfaction –”
I cut him off. “Bring it in. Let's see what it looks like, yes? Eri, show this man –”
Pyotr the verbose is not alone. He's brought his son along, a teen-ager who gawks at me as if he's never seen a woman before. Maybe it's just his age, maybe it's the culture – it makes me feel uneasy. I keep my expression neutral as Malzruth and his brat manhandle a fat roll of oilcloth-wrapped fabric up the steps, in through the door, into our hallway. I back up to make room for them. “Unroll it, please,” I say. “So we can see what it looks like in here.”
Eri's got her hands buried deep in her apron, holding some concealed comfort. I cross my arms and watch as Malzruth slashes the cords binding the carpet with a sharp knife. “Go outside,” he tells his son.
“But papa –” the kid glances at me, shuts up and does as he's told.
“Now,” says Eri. Pyotr nods and folds back one corner. We stare at the carpet for a long time.
“You can go now,” I say. “Return tomorrow to collect the old one. It will weigh rather a lot. You have been told how to dispose of it.”
He looks up, and I see he's red-faced and breathing hard as if he's seen his own death warrant signed. “Y-yes,” he stutters. “Good-day.” He scrambles for the doorway and Eri doesn't have to pull it to as he hops away towards his cart and the security of not having to think about the ghastly task he's just subscribed to.
“You think he knows what he's just done?” she asks, taking her hands out of her apron pockets. She rubs them together as if to dry them, mopping clean some imaginary blood.
“I think he might guess,” I shrug. “But understand? Who could?”
She shrugs, bends to take one end. “Give me a hand with this.”
“Ack.” Together we carry the carpet through into the empty dining room, floored in polished wooden tiles and windowed with deceiver panels. The primitive tactical nuke is almost finished; the Von Neumann constructors are leaching the necessary U235 out of the ground at a ridiculous rate. “Wish they could make the gadget a bit lighter.”
“Go tell it to the foundry.” She drops her end of the rug and together we unroll it in the centre of the floor, taking care not to look straight at the design on it. “Can't say I'm too bothered. Not as long as we've got our insurance.”
“Yes, but for how long?” I stare at the window frames until she comes up behind me and puts her arms round my waist and leans her chin on my shoulder.
“Think of it as evolution in action, that's what I always say,” she whispers in my ear. “Howsat for a cute option?”
“Nice,” I admit. She nibbles my lobe delicately, brushing a strand of hair out the way; I sigh and turn round, breaking her grip. “But no thanks. Please Eri. We've got to get out of here first, haven't we? I don't want to spent one minute more with that thing than I have to –”
She looks slightly agrieved. “Of course. What do you think I am, some kind of suicide fool? I'd just like to see it when it goes off. Make a pretty picture.”
“Sure.”
I blink at her, sense a curious repugnance that's almost like lust. She blinks back at me then laughs. “Come on.” We leave the dining room behind, its deadly package waiting in the middle of the floor. And then the door is closed and it's another house – and Ivan is coming down the stairs with a gun in his hand.
My memory flashes back to yesterday:
Chiaroscuro patterns ripple across the great square, jackboots prancing high beneath the scrawl of fylfot banners. Great crude missile launchers trundle behind the crunching ranks of militia, phallic tubes towed behind steam-huffing carriages. On the balcony high above the square, members of the ruling junta stand in stiff-armed acclaim above their legions.
Behind the missile launchers, a convoy of armoured crawlers rattle along on deisel power, gun turrets pointed forward in salute. A middle-aged man is intoning strange grey slogans as the monitor viewpoint pans back to take in the mobile might of the People's Army. I wince and rub at my tight-closed eyes as the bird-watcher rolls head-under-wing and blinks furiously before looking back at the scene. Behind the crawlers trails a single carriage, a high-barred flatbed holding a score of dejected figures. The scaffold awaits them, hydraulic rack and primitive TV cameras on the gibbet to send a chilly message to their allies: so perish all enemies of the nation.
I don't want to watch any more. I open my eyes and the scene fades to grey, livid shadows that overlay my visual field, staining the world with retinal violet. “I don't see the point,” I say. Really, I don't. Why should they do it? It makes no kind of sense to me.
“The revolution always devours its children,” Ivan says patiently. “It's all about total power, always has been. As long as there's hope of escape – even if the escape requires death as a passport – the Partei will be vulnerable to subversion. Only by eliminating all rational alternatives, by reducing resistance to the level of insanity, will their reign be justified. At least that's what they think – they're too primitive to take the more subtle approaches, manufactured consent and false freedom. They're trying to jam the stable doors shut before the horses bolt. It's not an easy job, with the limited tools they have.
“A Dreamtime uplink from a real-space world is a fragile beast. It depends on massive fine-grained parallelism – an invisible, submicroscopic world in parallel with our own, just a heartbeat away.
“It's designed to be resilient, of course. Cultural drift can render whole populations unable to handle such a high technology artefact, even conceptually; myths of a deity-created afterlife proliferate, even among the sophisticated inhabitants of high-level systems. At the other end of the scale, the ignorant but educated might try to destroy it unintentionally. Worlds where it has been forgotten, but other knowledge has been retained. Use of some weapons, for example – nukes are a classic case – can distort or compromise the process across
a wide area.”
The logic of the situation is circular and I don't want to close the arc, to admit that there's a reason for this if you look at it from the right angle. “You're very cynical.”
He huffs, almost a laugh. “If you'd grown up where I did –”
“So Newhaven was a luxury world, then?”
“Not exactly.” He stretches, eyeballs the whitewash wall to let the shadowplay run to its conclusion without shut-eye projection. “Newhaven was only stabilised by massive and subtle manipulation. They restricted the scope for rebellion by giving everybody a stake in the profits: prosperity breeds. So does discontent. The people here have none of the former and lots of the latter – the only way to keep a lid on it seems to the Partei to be the maintenance of a state of total terror. I suppose –” he stares at the wall and I shudder, thinking of the screaming absence of light in which I spent my childhood – “they're right. If they ever let up they'll be dangling from the street-lamps within days.”
“Huh. What did diMichaelis say about our policy, then?”
“I don't know what you're talking about.” He smiles at me as he stands up, the sarcastic swine. “Even if he were to say anything to me I'm sure I couldn't tell you because I wouldn't presume to understand it – he can be very obscure when he wants to be. Positively gnomic. Almost as bad as one of the Bosses. Leaves us poor shits to figure it out for ourselves. So you have trouble with the idea of wiping a city and re-drawing it from scratch?”
I shrug. “Seeing we've already built the bomb ...”
“Ah, the magic carpet syndrome again. The bomb. Like it's going to end all our problems. Bring the fucking stasi to our way of thinking, you know? Whoever dreamed that one up was not entirely sane.”
“Bad security and too much spare uranium floating around.” Over on the kitchen table a gunlauncher is spilling its guts, half-cleaned. Ivan works on it intermittently, whenever he remembers it's there. I wander over and check it out. “How many of us are there in this town?”
Scratch Monkey Page 21