The Rig Read online

  A long slow breath left Tallen. A sigh, Bale realised. Without physical movement, everything was harder to read.

  Tallen said, ‘I just wondered.’

  Bale thought he could change the subject now. ‘You asked me about remembering. I’ll tell you something. You remember people mostly by their walk, not their profile or their height.’ He remembered telling Razer that, and the way she filed it away. ‘You recognise gait at a distance. It’s usually quite distinctive. People don’t realise that.’

  Tallen said, ‘I never saw anyone coming or going. Just there. I remember pain. At least I think I was feeling it. I can’t be sure of anything. Not even the order of it. Or else I remember it in the wrong order. Even the street didn’t sound like a street.’ He paused. Bale was getting used to the pauses now. Tallen was like a driver stopping at every intersection to check it was clear. And Tallen was off again. ‘They say nothing you remember is true. As you remember it, you change it. You add, you filter, you lie to yourself through time.’

  ‘That’s not something we like Justix to know, Tallen.’ Bale forced a grin. ‘Let a Justix know that, you’ll drop our jail-take right down.’

  Tallen said, ‘My mother told me no woman would have a second child if they remembered the pain of birth.’ Another pause. ‘After he’d stabbed me the first time, I looked from his face to the knife. Neither was anything much. He had a few days’ stubble. His hair needed a wash. I think he was tall, but I was probably falling back and looking up. The shield must have been behind him, giving him a huge halo. It seemed incredibly bright. The knife looked small and skinny, but they say it was long, what they call a boning knife, judging by the wounds. Deep. I’ve seen the surgical graphics, the reconstructions –’

  ‘Are you sure you want to talk about this, Tallen? All this headstuff?’

  ‘The headstuff helps me.’

  ‘You know you’re crying,’ Bale said. ‘Is that helping?’

  ‘Actually, it’s itchy on my neck and I can’t wipe it. Can you –?’

  ‘There’s an isolation warning above your bed. You want me to call someone?’

  ‘Wipe my cheek, Bale. It’s not going to kill either of us if you do that.’

  Bale hobbled to Tallen’s side. Close up he could see a hash of broad scars already turning pale, puckering his right cheek, and a long track of stitches running like a sickle from his left eyebrow to the top of his ear and around the back of it, reappearing at the angle of his jaw and heading down his neck. At Tallen’s collarbone the tidy stitches stopped and the staples began. Where the staples hadn’t quite pulled Tallen’s body closed, there were browning curds of blood and the dull gleam of metal beneath.

  Before Bale could get anywhere near Tallen’s face with the wipe, a beeper sounded and a nurse was there, snatching the tissue from Bale’s hand, shouting at him. ‘The hell do you think you’re at?’

  ‘Wiping his face.’

  ‘You don’t go anywhere near him. This sign not big enough? You certainly don’t touch him.’ The nurse turned to Tallen, professionally furious. ‘And you. You have no rights here. You get any of these ports infected, you’re personally liable. I know you understand that, so don’t you look at me, Mr Tallen. I’m not losing my job for you, no matter how much you want to die. And you, Mr Bale, you see this line on the floor? This line means do not cross. This sign means do not touch this patient. You are only here because the medics feel it would help you both, but one more time like this and you’re both isolated. You hear me?’ She wiped the skin of Tallen’s face, navigating around the struts, then used another wipe to clean the framework with equal care.

  Bale watched her leave. ‘That’s a nurse?’

  ‘That’s a company nurse. She’s looking after their investment.’

  ‘What was that about you wanting to kill yourself?’

  ‘Her manner of speaking.’

  Twelve

  ALEF

  SigEv 14 Arrival

  Coming out of hypersomnia was not like emerging from true sleep. I sat up, instantly alert, to see the captain’s ridge-browed eyes inches from mine, which startled me. I pulled back from him and looked round to see that the other beds were still down. He had roused me first.

  He was staring at me. ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘I’ve never had anyone remain brain-up in rv more than half a day. You stayed the whole time. You sure you’re okay?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ The technician at his side handed me my clothes, and I pulled them on as Janquile went to raise Pellonhorc, who sat up shivering and dressed himself quickly.

  Janquile arranged us at the side of Garrel’s unit as its canopy rose, the polished convex shell slinging arcs of light across the ceiling. The captain seemed tense. The shell finally locked open, and a few seconds passed, and a few more. There was no movement at all from Garrel.

  Janquile stepped nervously back from the unit, and I took half a step towards the door, and then another. No one was looking at me. The rv technician leaned over Garrel’s motionless body, paused, and then tipped abruptly forward. I was concentrating more on the door I was about to dive through, but the technician’s scream froze me. I saw Garrel, half-rising, yank the man down and lock an arm around his neck. The technician’s legs danced in the air. He tried to heave Garrel’s forearm away from his throat, but his neck was lodged in the crook of the soldier’s elbow.

  With the technician’s scream cut harshly off, there was no sound in the room except the thrum of aircon. Now Garrel slowly and carefully came fully upright, holding the silently choking tech between himself and Janquile. Keeping his eyes on Janquile, Garrel stepped carefully out of the unit. The technician was not struggling any longer. His slack arms and legs slid awkwardly over the lip of the unit and his feet slapped on the floor. Garrel held the body between himself and Janquile.

  Janquile found his voice. ‘It’s okay, Garrel,’ he said. ‘Look, they’re both alive. And so are you.’

  Garrel let the tech’s body slide to the ground. It seemed by chance that the man’s head, instead of cracking on the metal floor, had its fall cushioned by Garrel’s foot.

  The captain released a long, quiet breath. Garrel flexed his shoulders and came around the unit to stand before us, examining Pellonhorc and me as if checking cargo. He was naked, but his nakedness was extraordinary. As he shifted his weight, the warp and weft of exomuscle played under his skin like the mesh of a kite in a hurricane. He was breathtaking to look at, so beautiful that it took me a moment to notice that the smoothness of the exomuscle extended down to his hips and beyond. At the top of his legs, at the crotch, he had no root. He had nothing.

  This may sound strange – it does to me from this odd vantage – but I wasn’t shocked or horrified. I was young, and at the age when I found the idea of sex disturbing. Pellonhorc and I had seen images of sex on the pornoverse, but mostly they had been of women parading together. We’d found images of men, too. Gehenna had attitudes to women, but its attitudes to men were far more explicit. Only a man’s wife could touch his root. In school and in church, we were shown pictures of men’s roots standing up, and taught how vile they were. We were taught how the touch of a man’s seed is lethal to any other man and that only marriage neutralises its poison to a single woman, his wife.

  Pellonhorc and I had watched actual sex on the pornoverse, men with women, and what I had liked about it was that the man’s root disappeared from view while he was having sex. During that time they were, man and woman, quite smooth. Garrel’s body was smooth like that.

  An explosion of coughing and choking, and then the sound of dry vomiting, broke the moment, and the technician got unsteadily to his hands and knees.

  In a cool voice, Garrel said to Janquile, ‘You should have raised me first. Not the boys.’

  ‘I felt safer letting you see them as soon as you opened your eyes. Before you could do something stupid.’ His gaze flicked across to the tech, and he added, ‘And I fel
t a lot happier knowing they were okay before I let you loose.’

  I looked at the captain’s face and I saw that the burden of Pellonhorc’s and my safety had been just as terrible for him to bear as it had for Garrel.

  ‘We’re an hour from the port. We’ve all survived. Get something to eat. I’ll say goodbye here.’ And with that, Janquile nodded and was gone along with his technician. I never saw him again.

  * * *

  SigEv 15 Peco

  The trip from the fastship to the platform and from there down to the planet was as simple as the trip up and out had been. At the hangar, a sleek grey flycykle met us, and climbing inside, Garrel said to the driver, ‘Maxy, you’re a great sight.’

  Maxy looked a little like Garrel had looked before everything had gone wrong. His gaze ranged from Pellonhorc to me and back to Garrel again, and he said, ‘Strap yourselves in,’ and then, grinning, added, ‘You’re some sort of a sight yourself, man.’

  Garrel gave a long, exhausted sigh. ‘He going to think so?’

  ‘Well, you got the boy. Not your fault what you were handling turned into a fallback op. You want to give me what happened?’

  The flycykle nudged easily into the air, making hardly a sound. It rose swiftly and wheeled left. I looked out and gasped at our speed and at the drop.

  Garrel said, ‘Hadn’t I better save that till I see him?’

  Maxy shrugged. ‘He’s probably watching us now.’

  They fell silent. The flycykle sped on.

  I was starting to relax. We had to be on the small world Peco. I’d guessed it from its off-white caul of a stratosphere as we’d descended, and the climate – the wisps of windborne slime-algae greening the air – had confirmed my theory as soon as our flycykle had exited the hangar. And now we were hurtling above its capital, Pecovin, which I recognised from Song images. We were over its industrial quarter and approaching the financial sector.

  I found all the information in my head just as it had been in the Song. Everything I had seen in my sleep I recalled in every detail, in the sequence I had accessed it. I could shift through it at immense speed, or jump, or reverse. I could carry out several runs at the same time, as if side by side, to compare contradictory information or draw conclusions. It seemed an awesome amount of information, but of course what I held in my head was a fraction of a fraction of a percentage point of all the information contained at that time on the Song.

  Peco had originally been an Equity planet, really a large asteroid. It had mineral deposits and a manufacturing industry based on those. I knew Peco’s Gross Planetary Product and its Planetary Debt status. I knew that the building with the tall arched doors, beside which we were drifting gently to the ground, was the headquarters of the Planetary Bank of Peco. I knew the declared assets of the bank and I knew where the sums didn’t make sense. The anomalies were like lights in my head.

  The reason I relaxed was that I knew PBP was the centre of Ethan Drame’s empire. And so I knew Pellonhorc was safe. And I figured that as far as I was concerned, Drame, whether as my saviour or kidnapper, was a better option than Ligate.

  Garrel slapped palms with Maxy and got out of the flycykle first with Pellonhorc. It took me a few moments to gather my puter, and by the time my feet were on the ground, Garrel and Pellonhorc were gone. A woman was standing in the arched doorway, watching me. She was tall, and dressed in a perfectly fitted ash-grey suit that looked like she’d never be able to sit down without it ripping.

  There was no one else. I adjusted my grip on the puter. She glanced at it, then at me.

  ‘I’m Madelene,’ she said. She reminded me of the women I’d seen on the Song, her smile taut and functional, more like a twitch than a smile. ‘You must be Alef.’ She made a gesture I didn’t understand, and we walked through the atrium of the bank.

  The atrium was as high as I could see, rising in clouds of foliage from the ferns and ivies that snaked up the walls and across the ceiling. There was birdsong and the scent of something sweet and pure. It was green and wonderful. I stumbled, unable to take my eyes away.

  ‘It isn’t real,’ Madelene said crisply.

  I knew that, of course, but I had wanted it to be real. For a few moments, at least, I wanted something impossible to be as it seemed. I had a sense that I would never have that opportunity again, to believe against fact. I already had too many facts. On the Song I’d only seen images of the outer shell of the bank. Every internal dimension and detail was security-protected, so the atrium had briefly been an unknown.

  We stepped through the illusory Eden towards an elevator. I said, as we waited at the elevator door, ‘What about Pellonhorc? Where is he?’

  Madelene said, ‘He isn’t ready for his father yet.’

  The elevator doors opened. As we started to ascend, I checked the timer on my chronom. It took us twenty-three point two seconds to reach the ninety-fourth floor. Madelene looked at her nails as we rose, and rolled her lips across her white teeth. I watched the numbers on the destination display, calculating acceleration and deceleration rates, figuring speeds. I wasn’t sure how tall the building was, but I knew Pecovin had eighty-two buildings with this many storeys.

  ‘How high are we?’ I asked Madelene as the doors opened.

  She looked curiously at me. ‘Didn’t you see? Ninety-four. Top floor. I thought you were supposed to be clever.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I said what height? How many metres?’

  She raised her eyes and sighed. ‘To the floor we’re standing on, or to the top of the building?’ She glanced past me, and I turned to see what had caught her attention.

  In the flesh, Ethan Drame was striking. His shaved skull had a single broad indented scar stretching back from his forehead, and his eyes were extraordinary, close set and deep-browed, the irises small and intensely blue. He hardly blinked. He was a great deal taller than my father and I could see Pellonhorc in one of his mannerisms, the unconscious loose clenching of a fist. His smile, though, was easy and wide. This was one of the things that I found hard to comprehend, that he could always be as the moment demanded, no matter what else might be happening. His ability to concentrate on the necessary, to dismiss distraction, was extraordinary.

  ‘Alef,’ he said. ‘The boy Alef. Good.’ He turned and led us into an office. One of the walls was glass. The view was over the financial district. As the light caught his moving skull and fell on it from different angles, the scar seemed to deepen or to disappear.

  He sat down at the vast desk, then he put on a voice and mimicked me. ‘How many metres?’ He gestured for me to sit down across the desk from him. ‘Your father asked questions like that.’ I realised at that moment, as he looked hard at me – the boy – that all of this concern had not been for his son at all, but for me.

  ‘Madelene, get him some… what would you like, boy? Water? Juice?’

  ‘To the floor,’ I said. ‘Floor to floor.’

  I still occasionally do that, even now, so many years later. When I’m stressed or anxious, I go statistic. But at that time I wasn’t simply anxious. In hyperlepsy I’d absorbed more raw information at once, uninterrupted, than I ever had before or ever would again, and it had just hit me that I was never going to see my parents again, and that this man who was in some way responsible for their deaths was all I had to take care of me.

  Now, I find this first encounter with Drame mildly embarrassing to recall. But it fixed Drame’s and Madelene’s impressions of me as a machine-child, with no more than a machine’s predictability, its simple strengths and weaknesses.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Drame said. ‘Get him the answer and some juice. Hurry up.’

  Madelene didn’t move. She pulled her vivid pink lips tight and stared at Drame.

  His tone eased. ‘Madly, please.’

  She swivelled and left. We waited in silence for her to return.

  ‘Two hundred and sixty-three point nine four metres,’ she said, holding the glass of red ham juice. Her fingertips wer
e as round and unused as the fingers of a child, but her knuckles were white. She glanced at me and smiled. As before, it wasn’t anything like a real smile, though, not even a pornosphere smile. ‘Not including the carpet,’ she added, as if helpfully, but not in a helpful voice.

  ‘There’s no carpet in the elevator,’ I said.

  Drame laughed. ‘You won’t mock him,’ he said. ‘He’s like putery. He can’t be mocked.’

  ‘What’s the point of the stupid question?’ she snapped.

  Drame looked at me.

  ‘To get the answer,’ I said.

  Madelene put the glass down hard in front of me, causing the juice to jump out and slop onto the table, pooling thickly. I ran my finger through it like parting the Red Sea, and licked it. Madelene stared at me again and I decided not to think about her any more.

  How foolish of me. I’d imagined her a sort of waitress. I had no idea what a mistress was, no idea how powerful she was. But I know I’m blaming myself too much. After two weeks in the Song, the limited skills of perception that my mother had bequeathed me were not at the forefront of my mind. Usually I would have been able, if awkwardly, to comprehend Madelene. My mother had started to teach me the techniques I needed. I would have examined the tone of voice Madelene had used, and the words and their context, and I would have decided she was being sarcastic, and I would have reacted appropriately, and perhaps not made such an enemy.

  But maybe she was already determined to be my enemy. Our relationship predetermined. Like fate, if you believe in that. Though I don’t believe in anything.

  ‘Alef,’ Drame said, as soon as she was gone. ‘I’m sorry about your parents. Your father and I were very close.’

  ‘He never talked about you. He never mentioned you at all.’

  ‘That was out of respect, Alef. You won’t believe me, but I will miss him as much as you will.’

  ‘I have the puter.’

  He wasn’t expecting that. He was probably wondering how, and how quickly, he could coax me to it; I analyse it like that now, but at the time I didn’t see it so clearly. Even within the AfterLife program, you cannot truly look back, because facts, if you were involved in them in any way, are not facts at all. Perhaps the insights I have as I review the past become confused with perceptions of the actual time. Looking back at events changes them in your memory, and the looking back changes you now. This is another logic path. Or a logic loop. Everything here must be entirely true – the nature of the AfterLife program and the neurid is such that I couldn’t lie or invent anything – and yet…