The Abyss Beyond Dreams

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘Come on up,’ Bethaneve ’pathed.

  The inside was more timeworn than the outside, with a stone stairwell that echoed to the sound of his feet. With whitewashed walls and a grimy roof lantern high above, the air was noticeably cooler than the square outside. He climbed up to the third floor. Bethaneve opened the door and beckoned him across the small landing, her ex-sight sweeping round.

  ‘Nobody followed me,’ he said.

  ‘The Captain’s police use mod-eagles,’ she replied. ‘Mod-dogs and cats, too. There are rumours of other adaptations we’ve not seen before.’

  He almost said: So how do you know that, if you don’t know what they look like? But for once he had the smarts to keep his mouth shut.

  The flat was as bare as the stairwell outside. Its walls had been painted a pale green decades ago, and had faded further under layers of dust and dirt. Dark floorboards creaked under his feet. There was no furniture. Javier was lying on a mattress in the back room, covered by a thin sheet. Coulan sat on a fold-up chair beside him. The young man looked exhausted, his hair limp, stubble shading his chin and cheeks, shirt criss-crossed with streaks of dried blood.

  ‘Hey, you,’ Javier ’pathed. There was a strong seepage of distress within the simple thought, despite his tight shell. The amount of tissue bruising was worrying. On his dark skin, the swelling was like a purple and bronze stain, leaving every limb puffy and discoloured. Wounds still leaked pustulant fluid, though they were drying out and scabbing over. Both eyes were completely swollen shut from the bruising, and his cheeks had ballooned out as if his mouth was full of nuts.

  Slvasta smiled and held up the satchel he’d taken from the office’s deployment bunker. ‘Brought you something.’

  ‘Is that amanarnik?’ an incredulous Coulan asked.

  ‘I got hold of some phials, yes. Clean bandages and dressings, too; they’re important.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Coulan’s hand was trembling as he took the satchel. ‘He spends so much energy fighting the pain.’

  ‘Ha, you don’t have to tell Slvasta about pain,’ Javier ’pathed. ‘This is just a few bruises. You had it worse, right?’

  ‘The doctors kept telling me it wasn’t as bad as kidney stones,’ Slvasta said. ‘I pray to Giu every night I never have any of those.’

  ‘Doctors!’

  Coulan knelt beside his lover and prepared a syringe of amanarnik.

  ‘I don’t know the dosage,’ Slvasta said.

  ‘Don’t worry, I do,’ Coulan said.

  ‘He’s like a walking encyclopaedia,’ Javier ’pathed. ‘Despite that, I still quite like him.’

  Clearly fighting back tears, Coulan slid the needle into Javier’s arm. ‘There. That should shut you up. Honestly, the whingeing I’ve had to put up with . . .’ He caressed the big man’s sweat-soaked forehead.

  It was only a short while before Javier sighed. A profound sense of relief pulsed out from his thoughts. ‘Oh, wow, that feels better.’ A minute later he was asleep.

  ‘I’ll change his dressings while he’s out,’ Coulan said. ‘I don’t want to risk infection. There are some nasty germs on this world.’ He smiled up at Slvasta. ‘Thank you so much. Without you . . .’ he choked.

  Bethaneve put her arm round his shoulders, and gave him a reassuring hug. ‘He’ll be okay, the big old fool.’

  ‘Yes.’ Coulan started to busy himself with the satchel.

  Bethaneve inclined her head, and Slvasta followed her out. The front room was a lot bigger, with warm afternoon sunlight streaming in through the big bay window. Like the rest of the flat, the room was devoid of furniture or decoration. There was a single mattress on the floor, covered by a rumpled sheet. Bethaneve sat on it and patted her hand for him to join her. He did, with a sigh of his own.

  ‘You did good,’ she said. ‘Strike one against the system.’

  ‘And the system strikes back even harder.’

  She put her hand on his cheek. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘My friend. My one and only friend in the office, Arnice. You remember, the major who got burnt by a firebomb?’

  ‘I remember him, yes.’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Oh, Slvasta.’ She hugged him tight. ‘I’m so sorry. But you said the burns were pretty bad.’

  ‘It wasn’t the burns,’ he said hoarsely, and told her what had happened.

  ‘Those people!’ she said in dismay when he’d finished. ‘He was one of them, and they were going to use him like that?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Somehow they had wound up pressed together, holding each other. ‘That little shit Davalta, who served Arnice with the summons, he didn’t even care. Suicide was actually more convenient for them. Now everything can be blamed on my friend, and nobody will clear his name. Jaix will try, but they’ll stall her and discredit her, I know it. If she ever does get her day in court, everyone will have forgotten. This whole disturbance, everything that happened, will be blamed on Arnice.’

  ‘They can’t blame the Wurzen nest on him.’

  ‘No. That was the district governor, who conveniently for the Captain is swinging from the end of a mob’s rope. Nothing will change. Everything will carry on as before.’

  ‘Not you,’ she said with conviction. ‘I know you won’t give up. You won’t, will you?’

  ‘Give up what?’ he asked bitterly. ‘Trying to get the regiments to use terrestrial horses instead of mod-horses on a sweep? Yeah, that’s going to change everything, isn’t it? It’s just so petty, a pitiful act of bureaucracy. I am pathetic. I can’t change a Uracus damned thing. I might as well join them, all those families and officials that rule this world. That way, if I’m going to live a worthless life, at least I’ll be comfortable doing it.’

  ‘Stop it. Stop thinking like that. I can’t take them winning. They always win, Slvasta, every time. They broke my friend, they killed yours, and there is never any justice, not for people like us. Why? Why can’t they be brought down? Why can’t the world change?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, stroking her neck. ‘I’m just messed up by Arnice. I won’t give up.’

  ‘Promise me! Promise, Slvasta.’ Her face was pushed up against his. Desperation and urgency were swelling out from a mind which no longer had any shell.

  He kissed her. ‘I promise.’ He kissed her again. ‘I promise I won’t give up.’

  Her hands were fumbling with his shirt. He used his teekay to lift her dress off. They fell back onto the mattress, touching and caressing skin as it was freed from the restriction of clothes. When they were naked, she straddled him, surrounded by bright sunlight pouring in through the bay window behind her. He used his teekay to pull her down, impaling her. The sunlight seemed to flow around her, turning his world to a glorious white blaze as she cried out. Then she was riding him, letting him into her thoughts to reveal her body’s secret demands, pleading with him to perform them. He responded with equal intimacy, sharing his physical appetite. And a completely uninhibited Bethaneve used her hands and mouth and tongue and teekay to delight him in all the ways he’d always fantasized she would.

  He held nothing back from her, and felt no shame in exposing himself in such a fashion, for she reciprocated with equal enthusiasm.

  All that afternoon in the hot light they made love on the slim mattress, intent on just one thing: satisfying each other’s cravings. And all the while, thoughts churned in his mind, notions he’d thought impossible. Everything was free for consideration now, liberated from his reticence, rushing out of its cage amid the sunlight and joy.

  *

  ‘I’m scared,’ he told her eventually.

  Bethaneve was lying on top of him, hot sweaty skin pressed into his. The smell of sex in every breath. The feeling of intimacy was unsurpassed.

  ‘Don’t be,’ she told him. ‘This will happen again and again. As much as you want. Because I want it too – you know that. I held nothing from you.’

  ‘Yes. I know. But that’s not what scares me.’


  ‘Then what?’

  ‘What we both know and are too afraid to say.’

  ‘Then say it. To me. You can say anything to me.’

  ‘If there is to be change, I know of no one who is going to bring it about.’

  ‘So many want it. Someone will—’

  ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Not someone. If this is to be done, then we must do it. Right here. Right now. This is where it begins. This is the revolution. We will organize, and we will overcome.’

  Bethaneve lifted herself up so she could look into his eyes. Her own were moist with emotion. ‘I am with you to the very end,’ she swore. ‘Whatever that brings us.’

  BOOK FOUR

  Cell Structure

  1

  Slvasta resigned his commission the week after Arnice committed suicide. He gave no reason, nor indication of where he was going. On his way out of the Joint Regimental Council building, he paid a quick trip to the forward deployment bunker, where he quietly removed a couple of pistols and four boxes of ammunition, carrying them out in a satchel he fuzzed. Just as he expected, no one questioned an officer.

  ‘We need to organize,’ Bethaneve said that evening. ‘That’s obvious.’

  Slvasta had turned up at the house in Tarleton Gardens carrying just a single suitcase that contained all his civilian clothes. It was a symbolic arrival, he thought. He’d left his uniforms behind at Number Seventeen Rigattra Terrace. Bethaneve, too, had left her lodgings on Borton Street.

  They sat on the bare floorboards in the back room, with Javier propped up on pillows which Coulan had arranged. The worst of the big man’s swelling had just started to go down, and one of his eyes was starting to open again. Amanarnik had reduced a lot of the pain, though Coulan was worried about the long-term damage to his knee.

  ‘Just how many people is this going to take?’ Javier asked.

  ‘Is what going to take?’ Coulan asked. ‘Exactly what is the aim here?’

  ‘To get rid of the Captain and the National Council,’ Bethaneve said. ‘Right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Slvasta said. ‘And then what?’

  ‘Democracy,’ she said indignantly. ‘Proper democracy, with courts that are open and honest. And government officials who are accountable. That’s for starters.’

  ‘So we have to physically kick the bastards out,’ Javier said. ‘That’s not going to be easy. They’ll put up a fight. We’d need an army.’

  ‘Or a mob,’ Coulan said. ‘We’ve just seen how powerful that can be. The Meor was hard pressed to defend the government buildings.’

  ‘You can’t control a mob,’ Slvasta said.

  ‘Don’t be so sure about that. A mob just needs the right leader.’

  ‘But if anyone establishes themselves as a mob agitator, the Captain’s police will pounce on them,’ Javier said. ‘If they’re lucky, they’ll escape with being sent to the Pidrui mines.’

  ‘So their identities need to be kept hidden,’ Bethaneve countered. ‘That’s simply a question of maths.’

  ‘Maths?’ Slvasta queried – and maybe a little too much scepticism leaked past his shell.

  ‘Of course.’ She grinned tauntingly at him. ‘What we need is separate groups of agitators, kept in isolation from each other, but using private ’paths to keep in touch. Lieutenants that don’t know each other, so they can’t betray anyone, and nobody knows us. Maybe some kind of pyramid structure, with instruction coming down from us and relayed through the groups.’ She closed her eyes, her thoughts alight with geometric shapes designated by lines and nodes. ‘Humm, let me think on that.’

  ‘I like it,’ Javier said. ‘So if we’re group one, right at the top, all we have to do is just recruit the layer of groups below us. After that, the groups we found go on to establish more groups. The layers build up.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ Slvasta admitted. ‘If only we knew someone who could organize that?’

  Bethaneve gave him an obscene finger gesture.

  ‘We’ll leave that with you, then,’ Coulan said. ‘Our official communications officer.’

  ‘Not officer,’ she said sharply. ‘Regiments have officers.’

  ‘Comrade then?’

  ‘Yes. I like that.’

  ‘Our biggest problem is going to be motivating people,’ Javier said. ‘There are so many people who just accept the status quo.’

  ‘Water,’ Bethaneve said eagerly. ‘Everyone knows how badly the water companies maintain the city pipes. It wouldn’t take much to bugger up the pump stations. The Captain’s family owns half of them. We can put it about that the failures are all down to him, squeezing profit out for himself and not spending enough to repair and replace essential parts.’

  Slvasta gazed at Bethaneve with a growing admiration. He’d never seen her this animated before; angry with the First Officer and the Captain, yes, but this – this was a whole new aspect of her. He rather liked her fierceness, and how smart she was being.

  ‘We also need to think about how to get our message out to people,’ Coulan said. ‘A reason why our way is better than the existing system.’

  ‘Money,’ Slvasta said, determined to make his own contribution.

  They all looked at him.

  ‘Everyone wants more money, right?’ he said. The idea that was blooming in his mind was only just keeping ahead of his speech, so he just let himself flow with it. ‘So we have to show them we can give them that. They have to know that opposing the Captain is going to end in better times, especially money-wise.’ He paused, slotting the aspects together, feeling a great deal of satisfaction at breathing some life into his personal goal.

  ‘Go on,’ Javier said.

  ‘There are a lot of people in Varlan on the breadline right now, and not just the ones in the Shanties. And every day there’s more drift in from the provinces in search of work. Well, why don’t we make sure they get that work?’

  ‘How in Giu’s name do we do that?’ Bethaneve asked.

  Slvasta smiled round at all of them as the perfect solution bloomed in his mind. ‘By taking it away from the mods.’

  *

  It took Javier a couple of weeks to recover well enough to walk. He had to use a cane and support himself with teekay. But once he was able to leave Tarleton Gardens he got Slvasta a job at Coughlin’s stall in the Wellfield meat market. Coughlin was a hundred and sixty-three, so he relied entirely on Javier and two lads, Pabel and Ervin, as well as three mod-apes in their third decade – it wasn’t kind keeping the creatures on that long.

  Every morning, an hour before dawn, Javier would take one of the lads with him to collect their meat from the Plessey station goods yard where the night trains delivered it. Along with dozens of other stalls, they’d load carcasses – some fresh, some salted – and cart them back to Wellfield, where the meat would be cut up and packed for their clients. Coughlin had taken some convincing that a one-armed man was up to the task. But once Slvasta had demonstrated just how strong his teekay was, the old man relented.

  ‘This is a stall suspended in history,’ Javier confided when Slvasta arrived on his first day.

  Slvasta took a look around the poky clutter of huts sheltering under the massive roof and thought Javier was being generous: the stall should have been relegated to history and a new one built on its foundations.

  *

  They had to wake up at four o’clock every morning to be at the Plessey station. So getting up an hour and a half earlier wasn’t too much of a hardship. Bethaneve had tracked down the addresses of the major adaptor stables across Varlan without any trouble. ‘You just have to know which public registry to search,’ she said brightly. Slvasta hadn’t been surprised to find there were thirty-seven stables on her list; and plenty of people had smaller stables, too. There were a lot of mods in the capital.

  The Dawa family’s stable was on Hatchwood Road, barely a quarter of a mile from the riverfront in the Oxlip district. A neat block with ten-foot-high brick walls, surrounded by spindly voxin tre
es whose chaotic black and grey tufts waved about in the breeze. A six-storey townhouse stood beside the main entrance, with a neat little front garden and deftly trimmed pinku vines scrambling up the front. Inside the walls was a traditional layout of barns and two exercise yards. The birthing manger was in the middle, long enough to hold twenty-five pregnant neuts, with the hatchery at one end where their newly laid eggs would sit on clean straw. Two of the barns housed the hundred-strong herd of female neuts, where they were bred with the stable’s ten male neuts. The remaining barns were for the young mods, with specific stalls for mod-apes, dogs, dwarfs, cats, birds and horses of various sizes. Right at the centre was the adaptor stockade, where those with the talent sat for long hours beside a neut whose egg had just been fertilized and used their teekay to bring on the required traits in the embryo.

  Slvasta and Javier turned down an alley at the back of the Dawa stables and hurried along it. There were no streetlights down the narrow passage, and the nightly river mist was reducing visibility to a couple of yards. Nonetheless they both clad themselves in a subtle fuzz to deflect any ex-sight that might chance to sweep the alley. Not far from the corner, they found a sturdy little wooden door which hadn’t been opened for years. It was secured with a Ysdom lock – still the finest anti-teekay lock on Bienvenido, with multiple springs and levers designed to thwart the most skilful burglar. You could break it, of course, but the main bolt was solid iron an inch in diameter, so you had to either have the strongest teekay on the planet or bring a sledgehammer along. Either way, chances were that an assault that blatant would be noticed. They’d found that out the hard way during their first couple of attempted incursions.

  So Slvasta concentrated his ex-sight on the door’s hinges and used his teekay to turn the screws. They were old and practically welded into the wood, but he persisted. It took ten minutes and eventually they all came free, methodically winding up from the hinges, and Javier lifted the door aside.

  They crept into the stable complex, keeping up their fuzz. There were oil lamps on the corners of all the buildings. Slvasta reached out with his teekay to snuff the flames on some of them so they could slink past unseen. Then they were at the barns. That was where they split up. Slvasta crept into one of the low buildings, wrinkling his nose up against the smell of neuts and their manure. The creatures were all huddled together, sleeping on their feet. He sent his ex-sight into the body of the first, and followed with his teekay.