And then it turned its back and walked out, leaving the door half-open behind it.
Outside, the crowd sounds became louder. Zeb looked up at the window. It was too high for him to see anything but sky and the street light. The light had been on for some hours. How much more night was there? He needed the night.
Something crashed against the glass, and again. It rang harshly with the blows but didn’t break. Zeb waited for more, his hands half raised to cover his face, but nothing else seemed to be coming. The crowd had quietened, too.
It was a watchful quiet. Patterns, patterns …
Zeb threw himself at the cell door. He was halfway through it when there was a dull orange flash and a hot concussion that emptied his chest. A gust of searing air crashed through the doorway, slamming the door violently closed behind him. He bounced off the opposite wall of the corridor, and staggered crabwise until he fetched up, wide-eyed and panting, at a turn in the corridor with his back against the wall.
There was a long, still moment. Then the building shook, and the cell door and a section of the wall around it exploded outwards on a blossom of flames and crashed across the corridor.
Zeb was turning by the time the blast hit him.
He became conscious of noise. His lips were pressed against something cold and his mouth was full of dust. His shoulder hurt.
He lay still, listening. There was nothing but the slow, surging sub-noise of blood in his ears. Each surge throbbed painfully through his head.
He raised himself cautiously on to all fours and waited until his head stopped swimming. He wanted to spit, to clear the harsh grit from his tongue, but that would be noisy and anyway he had nothing to spit with. Instead he wiped a finger on his shirt and swept it round his mouth, flicking the biggest crumbs of building away.
Then he stood up.
There was still no sound. There was light, but not much; dull yellow ceiling globes flickered uneasily every few metres, but their glow barely reached the floor. Towards where his cell had been, they were broken and dark.
His first thought was to prefer light, even if it was grudging. He turned and began to follow the corridor away from his cell. He had no idea where he was going. They had brought him in half conscious; the building could have been all corridor as far as he knew.
The walls were a bare grey material that glowed a sickly orange under the lights. No signs, no directions, no indication of a way out. No change.
After ten minutes he stopped.
He could blunder round the place for ever. And the longer he was in here, the more night he used up and the more likely he was to meet someone.
Of course, there was one way out. It might be full of people but then, it might not.
He turned and began to retrace his steps towards where his cell had been, navigating partly by the muscle memory in his legs and partly by the thickening dust and smells of burning. Not just burning building – there was a sweet undertone that he didn’t recognize. At the last corner he halted and listened as hard as he could.
Silence, as far as he could tell. He braced himself and began to move his head a little out from the corner.
And froze. Not silence. There had been a soft rustle. He strained his ears – again; another rustle, and then a sound like a throat being cleared.
Zeb thought for a moment. Then he shrugged. It had always been possible. He scanned the floor at his feet, located a piece of wall-rubble about half the size of his fist and picked it up as quietly as he could. Ready to run, he lobbed it out into the open corridor and waited, his heart banging.
Nothing at first. Then the throat-clearing again.
Zeb crouched down and moved forwards very slowly until both eyes were clear of the corner. He paused for a moment, and then stood up. He had found the people after all.
It was difficult to be sure, among the demolition, but he could see at least five bodies. They were sprawled outwards from the blast hole as if they had been sprayed, and his mind filled in the pattern – they had been in the cell when the second explosion had happened.
That accounted for the sweet smell. He felt his throat convulsing.
The rustle came again, and he saw one of the bodies move slightly. He edged up to it and crouched down.
It was – had been – a young female. Short hair on one side of her head, but the other side was an ugly mat of blood and peeled skin and pale, shattered bone, and the pool beneath her was black and shiny in the dim light. One arm was twisted into an impossible shape, and her eyes were closed, but somehow she was still alive. For one breath, two breaths, three, her chest rose and fell, and from this close to her he could hear the bubbling and creaking of shattered ribs.
Then she took one more breath, and this time her eyes flicked open for a second, gazed sightlessly and closed. The breath left her and didn’t return.
Zeb kept station with her for a moment. Then he shook his head, stood up, and picked his way carefully out through the rubble and the bodies, trying not to breathe in the smells of burnt flesh and burnt hair.
There was a ragged, roughly circular hole in the outside wall of the cell, about as high as he was. Humid night air drifted through it, and the hazy beam of the street light picked out swirls of dust disturbed by his feet. He stopped a couple of paces short of the hole and listened again.
Still nothing – no crowds, no sirens.
Zeb didn’t understand. He took another step towards the hole.
Then something grabbed his ankle.
He went down, landing on his side on a pile of rubble. He had time for a single yelp of pain before someone was on top of him. He glimpsed a hand opening, and then his eyes were full of dust and he screwed them shut. Blows landed on his face, his arms, his chest. He tried to grab one of the swinging fists but found his own hand caught instead; he felt his thumb seized and forced back agonizingly.
It broke, and he howled with pain. There was laughter, and his other thumb was seized. He flailed desperately with his crippled hand, found a face and jabbed as hard as he could with stiffened fingers.
They sank into eye sockets. The laughter became a scream and the face was yanked back sharply. He followed the shifting weight, forcing his hips upwards and ignoring the harsh grinding of the rubble into his side, and suddenly the weight was gone.
There was a crash and a shout, abruptly cut off. Then nothing.
He waited – blinking reflexively, eyes streaming, his ribs grating with every breath – until he could keep one eyelid open for long enough to see.
Someone was sprawled between him and the hole in the wall. The head had landed on the jagged edge of the wall. The face was upwards.
What was left of the face. It looked as if it had been flayed, from the eyes to the lips. Blood was oozing from beneath the closed eyelids.
Zeb looked down at the fingers of his broken hand. There were wet, grey scraps sticking to them. The skin had peeled from the face like wet paper.
He threw up.
Shephhat City (vreality)
THE BIG FERRY gave three short blasts on its siren, and the blue haze hanging over its funnel thickened to a plume of black smoke. Even at this distance Zeb could feel in his chest the bass thrum of the engines.
Water churned under the vessel’s stern and she moved away from the pontoon, forcing her sharp prow between the press of smaller craft that choked the harbour. Everyone was trying to do the same thing – leave.
The city of Shephhat was built on six big islands and a bunch of smaller ones that formed a roughly circular cluster in the mouth of a deep fjord on the coast of the southern continent, a third of the way round the planet from what would one day be called the Peace Rift. The normal population of the city was four million. Now, three quarters of those had gone and most of the rest were following them.
It was forty-one days since the crash. For half that time, the huge thermal updraught from the dying ship had carried radioactive, chemically complex ash most of the way round the planet on lethal, ar
tificial trade winds. The winds had coincided with Shephhat’s natural rainy season, dumping thousands of tonnes of slow death on the city.
The ash was everywhere. Most people wore close-woven fabric masks if they could afford them. Fortunes had been made by suppliers, and for a while it had actually been a fashion statement to be seen with the expensive sort. But that had been before the first riots. After that, conspicuous consumption looked like a much worse idea, and soiled rags became the usual choice. By the second week of the ashfall, they were the only option left.
The riots had mainly been about food.
There was a drawn-out splintering crash from the harbour. The ferry had ploughed into a log-jam of old barges. Their flat decks were packed from edge to edge with people standing. The impact shook them to their knees, and hundreds fell or jumped into the water.
The ferry drove through them without slowing. Zeb watched people disappearing into its bow-wave and realized that in this restricted space the ship’s propellers must be drawing tonnes of water down her sides to feed their hungry thrashing.
He turned away quickly, but not quickly enough to avoid seeing the first smear of pink foam on the ferry’s wake.
‘Quite a sight, eh?’
Zeb glanced towards the voice and sighed. Keff was leaning on the harbour railing next to him. The creature had turned up every now and then, choosing its moments carefully.
It turned to him. ‘Proud of yourself yet?’
He said nothing.
‘The numbers are rising. Almost two hundred million so far. You know the amusing thing? Only about half of those are radiation deaths. The rest are starvation, conflict, water-borne diseases, all that good stuff.’ It nodded towards the harbour. ‘And drowning and being minced by propellers, of course. Well done you.’
Zeb felt his lips twisting. ‘Haven’t you got someone else to bore?’
‘Not really. No one that would be as much fun as you. You’re a personal project. Almost a pet.’ It straightened up. ‘I’ll be seeing you. Often.’
It sauntered away. Zeb watched it until it turned a corner. Then he sighed.
He had taken the decision to go nowhere very early. He had no faith in the idea of escape from Shephhat, and the only thing he wanted to escape from was Keff, and Keff would certainly follow him anywhere.
The ferry had crunched its way through the smaller boats. Wreckage closed behind it, covering the surface of the water. Another few thousand people off on their futile journeys. Most of them would be hoping to get down to the planet’s southern pole, where people whispered that the isotopes didn’t fall.
Within a few more days everyone that was going would be gone. Zeb had tried to remember if he knew anything about what had happened to them, from his past visits to the future of the vreality, but he couldn’t. Either there had been nothing to remember, or he had been too busy enjoying himself to take any notice.
He shoved himself away from the rail and walked off the promenade. For the first few days he had tried to disguise himself but now there was no need. Starvation and ingrained dust made gaunt strangers of everyone.
He had decided to see if Keff would let him starve to death. There was no food; like many trading societies Shephhat grew little and imported much, and the much had become nothing on the day of the crash. It had taken a few days for warehouses to empty, many of them into the storehouses of the wealthy – and only a few days longer for the rioters to sack the storehouses. After that there was hunger.
Zeb rode the hunger like a discipline. He walked slowly, he rested often and he kept his breathing regular to avoid becoming light-headed. Now he was walking – slowly – up the long shallow ramp from the promenade towards the tall buildings that lined the shoreline like monuments.
The defining feature of the city was new towers growing from old roots. Zeb had mentally divided them into three levels – the towers themselves, none of them less than three hundred metres tall, with the cost of habitation rising rapidly with height. They contained apartments and government offices and head offices and the best brothels. At their roots, nameless, powerless, luckless almost-people subsisted on the wastes that the wealthy let fall. In between, Shephhat’s service sector hauled itself as high above ground as it dared, to be far enough from the poor without coming too much to the notice of the rich. The best of their homes were built in between the towers, not even reaching down to touch the ground. Connection rights to a tower couldn’t be bought, but they could be leased, at an annual cost per square metre sufficient to feed and clothe ten families.
The middle levels were almost as crowded as the ground. Zeb had stayed at ground level, even though most of the towers were now vacant.
The tall buildings closed round him and the shorter ones over him, and the ground became damp. A few weeks ago it would have been soft and wet. The towers discharged their waste – all their waste – directly to the ground, where everything had once had a value.
But nothing had a value now except uncontaminated food and clean water, and since there was none of those things left in the city the rich had gone to shit on people somewhere else.
If other people didn’t shit on them first, of course. Zeb’s lips twisted.
Then someone tapped him on the shoulder.
His instincts, and what was left of his muscles, wanted to spin him round, but both were dull enough for him to ignore them, because spinning round would have meant falling over. Instead he took a couple of careful breaths and said, ‘Yes?’
‘Trying to starve yourself?’
Zeb felt his face draw into a harsh grin. ‘It’s worth a go.’
‘No, it isn’t. You can’t die, Zeb, not until I say so, and I don’t say so.’
Another breath. It didn’t seem enough. ‘Well done.’
‘Sure. Now, a warning. If you try to die – however you try to die – I will know, and I will prevent it. And then I will reward you with a death, or maybe more than one death, of my choice. They won’t last, of course. Sorry.’
‘Right. Of course you are.’
And there were shouts behind him.
This time he did turn round.
There were four of them, all male, all young, and they were running towards him. They weren’t saying anything but there was recognition on their faces. He put his hand up to his own face and felt smooth skin. The beard and the sores were gone.
He looked like his own picture again.
It was too late to run. The first man veered a little aside as he approached, swung out an arm and caught him on the neck. The force wrenched him round in a full circle, slamming him head first into a timber column. Green and purple lights flashed behind his eyes and he slumped to the ground with his face in the mud and his lungs empty.
The next kick killed him. With simple clarity he felt it land, just on his temple. He felt the bone of his skull give way, his face grind through the dried mud, the neat little click of something snapping in his neck, and then the sudden, complete absence of any feeling from his body and a draining of thought from his mind.
He expected – what? He didn’t know what happened when you died, or how good an imitation of it a vreality could manage. He did know that they were still kicking him; he couldn’t feel the blows landing but his head was wobbling and rolling on his limp neck as his body jerked.
Then they stopped, and for a moment there was quiet.
Fluid began to pool round his head. For a moment he thought someone was pissing on him, but even to his fading senses the stuff was pinkish and felt a little oily against his cheek.
Then he saw pale blue flames dancing above the fluid.
There was no pain, but he had just enough remaining sensation to know when his eyes began to melt. After that there were dreams.
At first he could guide them; he thought of Aish and saw her looking up from some work or other and smiling, and he smiled back, but she didn’t respond and he realized she wasn’t quite looking at him but slightly over his shoulder.
Then he pictured Shol and this time she was definitely looking at him, but not smiling; her brows were lowered and her face was flushed with anger. She was saying something but he couldn’t hear the words.
He was about to picture something else when he felt control being wrenched from him. Images blurred. There were flashes of childhood, deep-buried but instantly recognized; there was an early lover but not his first, and there was half a pod tumbling slowly past his vision with the clean-sliced half-body of Iverrs leaking threads of blood that bubbled in the vacuum.
Then there was a hut, no, not a hut, bigger – a low wooden building, surrounded by birds that were books, flapping their pages slowly as they circled the place, and a voice he half recognized saying hello.
Then the dreams faded and he woke, with the memory of Aish and Shol and Iverrs and the others in his mind, all dead.
He wept helplessly from his melted eyes.
Handshake Space (neutral – disputed), Left Hand Stewardship
THERE WAS A read-out in his quarters. It showed a number which was an analogue of what their real speed would have been, across the ground, if there had been any way of expressing what was meant by ‘real’, ‘speed’ and ‘ground’ for something travelling as fast as they were.
The Orbiter had repeatedly tried to explain it to him, and repeatedly failed.
He allowed himself to understand that they were going very, very fast; that their speed involved the combined engine power of thirty-one remaining ancient battleships from the Sphere’s cache, of which the smallest was two kilometres long – and that the Orbiter had never gone this fast either.
They were hanging between the ships in a latticework of fields that appeared red if he looked backwards and blue if he looked forwards. The red and the blue and to some extent even the ships themselves were illusions at this speed, but he didn’t care. He had the impression that the old vessel was enjoying itself.
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