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  ‘Enjoy that? I did! Coming up now, Razer, part two of the show – a new vote!’

  She drained the last of the caffé, feeling fully alert at last.

  ‘But first, some more facts.’

  She slumped. Every time, she thought. She never learnt. But no one ever did. The same need to trust came out, over and again. As much in the small matters as the big.

  ‘It is only on a clinical judgement of your imminent death that AfterLife medicians are authorised to check for an active neurid. If you turn out to be neurid-positive, you are placed in rigor vitae, settled into a sarcophagus, or sarc, and dropped into the ocean on Bleak, and your Life is uploaded from your neurid onto the AfterLife database.’

  Music swelled. ‘And then, Razer, after a year, ten years, perhaps after a pause of a century or more, when a cure or new medical technique becomes available for your predicament, it’s up to –’ he grinned and spread his hands as the camview withdrew to make him a dot in the sudden backcloth of stars. Chords of triumph swelled until, into the abrupt silence of the music’s end, he yelled, ‘– to all of you!’

  Despite herself, Razer felt her heart thudding.

  ‘At that point of potential return, Razer, your threatened life, and the lives of others in precisely the same predicament, will be listed for ballot. And anyone can vote, for anyone. Only I, Holoman, cannot vote. The ballot is not, I repeat not, a competitive choice. When you vote, you vote for a second chance, or against one, for as many or as few ballotees as you wish.’

  Irritated with herself for continuing to watch, Razer brought up Holoman’s current viewing data. Thirty-seven per cent of the available System was watching with her. She scanned the breakdown and extrapolata. Within the next fifty hours, eighty-nine per cent of the System’s adult population – with the normal two planetary exceptions, Gehenna and the unsaid planet – were projected to have seen the show and started voting. It never ceased to astonish her. Administrata elections struggled to draw half this much engagement.

  ‘How do you make your voting decisions? It’s easy and it’s fun. You simply examine their lives. Were they – are they – kind or hateful, loving or cruel? Do you feel benevolent or not?’ And a whispered aside, ‘But remember, if your own neurid is a true neurid, you may be judged on your own judgement, one day.’

  It was quite extraordinary, Razer thought. AfterLife, the one thing that united the System, was so simple that it was almost banal. It was beyond politics and goddery, and it was the one tax burden that no one resented.

  And its existence gave Razer her living. Through her work with TruTales, one of its ParaSites, it paid for her to travel the System, to listen and imagine, to create narrative from chaos. Perhaps that was the most remarkable thing about it, that she could live off the back of it, and by nothing more than telling stories. AfterLives were true, but they were messy. People went to TruTales for comfort after the troubling truths of AfterLife. And thanks to her own skill and to the selections and guidance of her AI, Cynth, Razer was one of the best tellers.

  Holoman’s tone had become businesslike. His hair was shorter and neater, his expression stern as he said, ‘All votes are independently checked. The ballot is completely open and beyond corruption.’

  As she listened to people’s lives and composed her stories, Razer often wondered what life might have been like back on Earth, when you could expect to live beyond fifty and to enjoy fair health for much of that time. What would their stories have been? Might they have guessed at such a future as this? The irreversible radiation sicknesses, the autoimmune diseases, the constantly shifting metaviruses, neocancers and reaction-toxicities? The savage mortality and general blight? The simple hardness of everything?

  Back on Earth, they had imagined that the future would bring cures for everything, that eventually technology would outstrip nature.

  She yawned, sleepy at last. How wrong we always were.

  Four

  ALEF

  SigEv 2 My father’s tax bill

  Shortly after we returned from the cathedral, my father’s routine tax demand was mis-delivered and opened by mistake by one of our neighbours, Josip Farlow. The story goes that Josip nearly fainted at the scale of the error. The legend of Saul’s tax bill became a folk tale on Gehenna. A parable, even.

  The story goes like this.

  Josip was convinced that Saul would be quite unable to accept that the Tax Administration could have made such a mistake. He thought Saul would have a breakdown and crash, like putery. Not knowing what to do, he went to Father Grace, and Father Grace went to Marita, who had no idea what to do either.

  In the end, they convened the church committee, whose technical advisor was Saul. Father Grace initiated a conversation about printing errors in Babbel translations, and at the end of the meeting, Josip passed the tax bill to Saul with an apology for mistakenly opening it. Josip also made a light comment at the obvious printing error and offered to mediate with the Tax Administration on Saul’s behalf, to arrange for the error to be corrected.

  Saul examined the bill and said nothing at all.

  The table was silent around him.

  Father Grace made a joke about Saul’s equally vast knowledge of Tax and the Babble, and of the occasional inevitable errors in both.

  ‘Thank you, Josip,’ Saul eventually murmured. And he folded the paper and put it into his pocket.

  ‘What will you do?’ someone asked, a little anxiously.

  ‘It’s a tax bill,’ Saul said, shrugging. ‘I’ll have to pay it, of course.’

  This was a response no one expected. As soon as Saul left the meeting, Father Grace called Marita and told her to contact him if she needed help, adding that frankly he wasn’t sure what the best thing might be to do.

  Marita tried to behave as if nothing was wrong, which was easy, since Saul did the same. A few days later, she asked him what he had done about the tax bill, and he told her he’d paid it.

  Everyone in JerSalem waited anxiously for the situation to escalate, as it had to. Tax had made a mistake that hadn’t been corrected, and Saul had clearly sent them a payment that, purely by being submitted – as Saul, of all people, would be quite aware – irrevocably validated the mistake. But, of course, he had made the payment without possessing anything within several decimal points of the funds to meet it.

  The whole of JerSalem buzzed with concern. Saul must have assumed, with his faith in Tax’s certainty, that if they had asked for it, he must have it to give them. The error must be his.

  Everyone knew what would happen. Pax would send a prison van to Gehenna and haul him away.

  But months passed and no one came for Saul. There was a sense of apprehension for a long while, and then everything settled back, though not quite how it had been before. Saul would fix people’s putery and they would insist on giving him something for the work, where in the past they had not. Saul wouldn’t take money, so they gave things that could be sold. They didn’t give them to Saul, but to Marita. They called Saul to sort out trivial problems, just to give Marita something against the future.

  And then, at last, another letter came for Saul, marked TAX. The postman delivered it immediately to Father Grace, who opened it.

  It was a receipt for payment, in full, of the tax bill. Father Grace resealed the letter – the preacher saying a prayer of thanks, no doubt – and passed it on to my father.

  The general conclusion in the village was that it had been an elegant and logical mechanism for Tax to correct their original error; the idiocy of the demand had only been brought to light when my father’s payment didn’t clear. In order to save face, Tax had pretended that both correct demand and correct payment had taken place, and in this way balance was restored. For the villagers, Saul had shown up the heretic System for the fools everyone knew them to be.

  My father, quite unknowing, became something of a hero. Father Grace made a sermon about turning the blind stupidity of the godless against itself, a sermon whose precise po
int everyone in JerSalem but Saul understood, and normality returned to our village.

  Until the arrival of Pellonhorc.

  * * *

  SigEv 3 My first puter

  After school I often spent my time in my father’s shop, helping him with the putery.

  Programming was quite effortless for me. Picking it up was not like learning to read, but like learning to talk. My brain, like my father’s, was configured ideally for the task. It was as simple as that. The games we played together were not the father/son pastimes of assembling towers of plastic blocks or shoving balls with our feet. We played with screenery and putery. While I was still bellied in my mother, my father devised a system that would model my first sounds as visual symbols, and he surrounded my cot with screenery. I swiftly learnt the sounds that pictured rudimentary faces, and within my first few months I was learning the elaborations that might make the face on the screen smile or wink or blow bubbles. As my language became complex, the symbols became less crude, the programming opportunities more intricate. Before I could walk, I was choreographing simple rivers. My father and I would play with the digital water. He would throw rocks into it and I would predict and calculate the effect on the flow. It made us both laugh.

  I soon had a puter of my own, and I’d devise my own programs for it. My father told me about secrecy and privacy, and about the difference between them and the importance of both, and he taught me about codes and encryption. We played memory games, and he was as pleased as I was when, at about six years of age, I started to beat him at them. We devised an encryption routine for my own puter. The primes I used seemed immense at the time. He asked me how I memorised them – his own visual tricks failed at the levels of complexity that my primes demanded – and I told him I thought of them as trees in leaf, great trees blowing in the wind. Each branch and twig had to be read in order of ascent from the ground, and each leaf from trunk to tip was a digit.

  I was used to the incomprehension of other children and adults, but when I saw my father trying to imagine my forests, he laughed, although it was a slightly odd laugh.

  After that, my father and I agreed a rule for my puter. I gave him an encrypted permit so that he could enter puzzles and games there for me to solve, but he couldn’t roam freely on it or interfere with my programs. I, however, had my own, greater level of encryption that allowed me full access to the puter’s capabilities.

  Of course, I see now that this was simply a tacit agreement through which, in exchange for me restricting myself to my own puter, my father could let me in the shop with him. There was no rule my father could enforce on me. It was as if, in a more normal family, a father suddenly recognised that his son had grown bigger and stronger than he was, and decided that they’d play no more wrestling games.

  I never showed him my conclusions regarding the Riemann hypothesis and the Goldbach conjecture. I wish I had. But at that age, I was only thinking he’d use them to break my codes.

  * * *

  SigEv 4 Pellonhorc

  Shortly after my eighth birthday, Josip Farlow and his family died in a terrible accident, their flycykle sliding into a methane sink, and a new family was chosen from the list to come and live in the village. The list was long. There were always people wanting to leave the Upper Worlds for the rigorous joy of Gehenna.

  Looking back, though I never thought it at the time, there were immediately a number of clues to the strangeness of Pellonhorc’s arrival. Most new families were either childless or with a child bellied in its mother, and they arrived together, man and woman. There were never unattached adults and there were never children.

  But this odd family arrived, and as was traditional, the priest welcomed the newcomers into our community at a service of celebration and mourning that began, ‘In the midst of death, we are in life.’

  Avareche, the mother of the new family, sat in the church wearing the tatters of mourning. She cried as if she were a survivor of the accident that had killed Josip Farlow’s family, rather than its beneficiary. She sobbed and gasped as if life were not tragedy from dust to dust, as we were taught, but something more unbalanced.

  There was no husman. Instead, to Avareche’s either side sat her cousins, the two men Garrel and Traile. We’d seen no one like them in JerSalem. They were dressed in dark, weaveless clothes and they sat on the hard pews with extraordinary stillness, as if they were cracked out of rock. Even then I thought how they looked like soldiers with their eyelenses glittering in the gloomy church, their hands resting palms down on their broad thighs, glove knuckles worn to silver, and their thick jackets hinting at concealed weaponry.

  And then there was the boy, Avareche’s son. Pellonhorc.

  It’s hard now to think of Pellonhorc as a boy, after all this time. He was eight years old, as was I, and he was running around the church, wild as the wind.

  No one did a thing about him. It was up to Father Grace to ask his mother to deal with her boy, but he didn’t. I wonder now how much he knew, but perhaps he was just bewildered by the extraordinary newcomers.

  Avareche sat and sobbed. It was incomprehensible to me. Her cousins sat impassive at her either side, and my mother quietly stood up and went to her. Garrel – he was the taller cousin, his earlobes fat with sensors, his waxed hair in tightly gridded bunches like the casing of a grenade – showed no sign of letting her past him, but my mother waited. Avareche made a quick gesture to her cousin, and he let my mother sit with her, though he waited long enough for the pause to be evident to everyone in the church. Everyone except Pellonhorc, who was building a tower of prayer books in the lancing light from the high window.

  Father Grace continued the service. ‘We mourn Josip and Neisha, and their children Jonie and Jess, and we give thanks for the arrival of Avareche and Pellonhorc and Garrel and Traile.’ There was silence, even momentarily from Pellonhorc at the back of the church, who stood back and squinted at his perilously tall architecture of books. Buttressed with knee-cushions, the tower was as high as his head. I watched him balance a silver censer carefully at its summit, where it caught a brilliant beam of light.

  The priest moved towards the conclusion of the service with a prayer for the unsaid planet. ‘We pray for the souls of those whose terrible faith has taken them from the possibility of salvation, that one day they may return to us.’

  Everyone knew the stories of the unsaid planet, how they had cut themselves away from the System and had destroyed the ships of any who tried to approach, and sent squads of assassins to slaughter any who mentioned their name. It didn’t seem likely, but on Gehenna little was ever questioned.

  Finally, Father Grace gestured again to the new family and said with quiet authority, ‘We hope that Avareche and her family will soon be joined by her husman –’

  Crash. Everyone jerked round at the clatter of Pellonhorc’s tower of prayer books falling and the metal-on-stone smash of the incense holder. Garrel and Traile were on their feet, I thought fleetingly, but no, they were the only ones in the church sitting down. In my memory, later, this was not true. They had stood up and turned, their fists gun-filled and aimed; they had assessed and eased back and withdrawn even before anyone else in the church had reacted in the first place.

  That marked the end of the ceremony. We all filtered out of the church, through the beams of light now choked with sweet incense. Avareche continued to sob. Everyone else – except Garrel and Traile, who must have had laryngeal air filters – coughed their way through the arched doors. Pellonhorc swung his arms about and danced.

  That was their arrival. It was a while before anyone in the village learned the name of Avareche’s husman. By the time we did find out, it was no real surprise. Even on Gehenna, we had heard of Ethan Drame.

  But it took a long time for this to come out. There was always a reason why Pellonhorc’s father couldn’t join them. It was work, transport problems, or just ‘complications’. Avareche shrugged. Garrel and Traile said nothing.

  On Pellonhorc�
�s first day at the school, one of the boys in our class asked him about his father. Pellonhorc beat the boy so badly that he was off school for a month.

  Avareche and my mother became best friends. There were inevitably things Avareche needed, and my parents helped her. It never struck me that this was more than kindness and coincidence.

  They were an odd household. There were five of them; Avareche, Pellonhorc, the two cousins and a green cheekicheep. The cheekicheep was Pellonhorc’s pet, and he kept it in a hutch. Its wings had been clipped, and it strutted awkwardly about the hutch. Pellonhorc didn’t take very good care of it, according to my mother, so it had fallen to Avareche to look after it. The creature had taken against Pellonhorc for some reason. His mother often had the cheekicheep in her arms, cradling it and idly stroking its soft plumage.

  And I became friendly with Pellonhorc. He had a wild, extraordinary charisma. When the boy he’d beaten returned to school, Pellonhorc was the first to greet him, and with genuine enthusiasm. Pellonhorc didn’t mention the beating. As far as Pellonhorc was concerned, it was as if it hadn’t happened. The boy was oddly grateful, though he was forever cautious after that.

  It was an interesting lesson for me. I think we all knew that we were in the presence of someone unique. He immediately became our leader. We took risks, climbed and swam where it was dangerous. Of course, none of us ever said no to him, and he was always the first to climb, to dive, to fight. He was without fear. We thought he was brave. He was, of course, psychopathic.

  The only people who had any control over him were Garrel and Traile. He taunted them all the time, and they ignored his taunts.

  But one day I saw Traile hit him.

  It was like this. Pellonhorc came over to our house in the afternoon, unannounced, saying he wanted to play with me. We went up to my room. He was agitated at first, and then subdued. I’d never seen him like this before. After a while, my mother answered the comms and it was obviously Avareche. My mother left, and a few minutes later Traile arrived and was knocking at our door.