by Claire North
“Give that here! Give it now!”
I have never seen Georg so angry. He snatches the thing from me and shoves me back with the palm of his left hand, open, a moment away from a slap. Cradles the microdrone to him like a mother holding a child and does not look me in the eye as he storms away.
Five minutes later, it is as if nothing has happened, and neither of us mention it again.
Ten minutes before the Vien Assembly ratified the Equal Knowledge Act, allowing unrestricted access to every heretical server in Temple’s vaults and de-criminalising previously heretical actions such as stock buybacks and unfettered logging, large numbers of guardia started to appear at the gates of the major temples across Maze. They were joined by even larger numbers of Brotherhood militia members, ringing their bicycle bells as they circled, like vultures above the bloated carcass. The moment the fastest watch on the keenest leader hit 8 p.m., they clattered through the gates, some chanting revolutionary slogans, some too focused on their tasks to bother. The Medj didn’t put up a physical fight. The richest and most joyfully inept were long fled, and though pious remainers were threatened, the militias had been ordered to avoid a scandal, play nice, show that they were here for the people.
“We will defend our people’s right to choose their own lives against any aggression from the Provinces or Council,” Antti proclaimed. “This is a great day for Maze, a great day for freedom.”
On the edge of the river, the land is turning sickly yellow. In summer, it doesn’t rain, or sometimes it rains too much. In winter, the ice crawls up the windowpanes, sealing you inside; or there is no ice at all and when the spring comes the mosquitoes swarm in black clouds over pools of muddy water, growing fat and crimson. Is this the curse of the kakuy or the consequence of the new factories Antti has authorised, producing ever cheaper, ever more futile goods to purchase and display as a sign of wealth – and therefore worth – in this strange new world?
Perhaps the kakuy are angry, but they have never spoken to us in a human tongue, so why should we care? Lesser creatures are dumb; humans have always known this.
Temple servers are only powered up when needed. The most heretical information is kept in isolation from all networks, cut off far below the shrines. Caverns hollowed in the earth keep the worst of summer heat from the drives; walls of dry clay are raised against the damp, fans gently turning to keep cold air flowing. The original antiques are in sealed, airless cases, historical remnants to be studied, marvelled at and displayed for curious scholars of the Burning Age. Shelves of recovered history are catalogued neatly along oiled wooden shelves.
Social sciences 456.91-468.99 – gender/sexual discrimination, genital mutilation, reproductive rights.
Social sciences 551.51-559.88 – segregation, racial supremacy, replacement theory.
Social sciences 671.99-672.10 – election tampering, “fake news”, “fake media”.
Anyone can request access to a heretical server at any time, and usually their request will be granted. They can take notes, copy diagrams, read essays by leading scholars of the Burning Age on eugenics and wealth, terror and market manipulation, and afterwards be offered a nice cup of tea and asked what they thought about it all.
“Would you like a comfy chair?” Old Lah would ask, as I worked my way through pictures of migrants drowning in a raging sea. “I find it best to go for a nice walk after.”
Only the truly terrifying – the chemical structures of nerve agents, the construction of incendiary weapons, the design of off-shore oil rigs – were kept entirely out of sight.
“It’s embarrassing, if you think about it,” Lah would say. “We hide this from ourselves, not because knowledge is good or bad in and of itself, but because we are still so young on this planet. We are still children; still fascinated by playing with fire. In our minds – in our very DNA – we are still starving, driven by the terror of not having abundance. We must have more, and more, and more, in order to be safe, even when the truth is that we have more than enough. The reward we feel when we have more, more! It is intoxicating. I have been… intoxicated.”
This was a strange confession from my teacher, who, seeing my raised eyebrow, beamed. “A good spy should understand passion. Georg Mestri is an addict of victory and the game; you must understand what it is to be an addict too, if you are ever going to get near him. When things are bad, we want them better. When things are good, we find ourselves wondering – what more? And what will I lose if I do not get more now? It is a trait that pushed mankind across the oceans and out into space – what is out there, what else? It is one of our most beautiful qualities and has for millennia served us well in finding new ways to live better. But like all things, it is neither good nor bad, but what we make of it.”
Then I wondered, how long had Temple inquisition been eyeing me for recruitment? How many years had I spent thinking myself an academic, while they had been planning to put my life on the line?
In Vien, the temples fell.
Some members of the militia had knives. Others had hammered nails into a stick or brought heavy clubs fashioned from bits of old furniture or tumbled tree. One woman sported a pair of fabric scissors, waving it with such glee one would think it a battle axe, having perhaps decided that if she could not muster the same kind of armaments as the rest of her peers she might as well make up for it with enthusiasm. In the Temple of the Mountain Lake, the Medj were beaten bloody, one dying a week later in the clinic, not because they resisted, or said anything particularly snooty to their attackers, but because the dozen or so militia who climbed the five hundred steps to their open door had expected a fight, had been primed to fight, had been fired up with a cry of “They may kill us, but they will never take our freedom!” or words to that effect, and, when faced with a polite invitation to drink tea before committing vandalism, had no idea what to do with their energy, so had the fight anyway for something to do.
A few altars were desecrated; a few images of the kakuy smashed.
“Where are your gods now?” snarled one, pissing on the image of the kakuy of the fields, bringer of harvest, basked in sun. “Why don’t they come now?”
“They are not our gods,” replied the Medj politely, as the stink settled into the woven straw mats, dribbled down the red-glossed walls. “Gods think humans are special.”
I supervised some of the robberies from my telephone in Georg’s office. I had, after all, arranged much of the logistics, writing guidelines to local militia groups on how to handle the stolen drives and the best way to get them to the Assembly in one piece for analysis and distribution. My phone rang throughout the night, from journalists demanding statements from Antti – “Does this mean we’re going to be rich?” one asked – to late-running militia members trying to work out if they could still be useful in this new rebellion.
“I brought some matches?” piped one voice optimistically. “And a pint of acetone!”
“Go home,” I sighed. “I’m sure everyone appreciates your effort.”
On the other side of the office, Rilka, Antti’s private secretary, typed furiously at her desk, scurried back and forth, peered through the window, poured herself a shot of something alcoholic from a little flask in her pocket, typed again, ran to answer the door, ran back, sat down, stood up, and finally proclaimed: “But we’re living through history!”
I had not spoken to her since the night began, and felt that this was perhaps a continuation of a conversation that had been inside her head all evening and which had grown so animated it had to happen out loud. I looked up from my desk and saw, to my astonishment, that there were tears in her eyes. I reached into the drawer, pulled out a clean cloth hankie, offered it to her. She hesitated, then crossed the great carpeted gulf between us, took it, daubed gently at the corners of her eyes, hesitated, rubbed a little more vigorously, held out the limp piece of cloth. “Can I keep this?” she asked.
I nodded.
“It’s history,” she explained. “We’re making
a better world.”
I thought she might blow her nose on the thing, and keep that too, the immortal bogie of freedom. Instead, she folded the hankie into a little triangle and slipped it into her tunic pocket. Our eyes met, and for a moment both she and I contemplated a future in which Georg walked in to find us entangled on the office floor, clawing at each other’s clothes, and both she and I concluded that he would probably be mildly amused at the display. Before I could do anything with this revelation, she spun on her heel and returned to her desk with the dignity of an emperor accepting a lesser king’s surrender on the battlefield.
The first of the bad news didn’t start to arrive until dawn, trickling in from the temples of the forest and the sands. These obscure shrines had no telephones of their own, so the militia had been forced to send a cyclist into the towns to make the call.
“There’s nothing there!”
“What?”
“There’s nothing there. The server rooms are empty. They took everything!”
“What do you mean, they took everything? What are you saying?”
“I’m saying there’s nothing there!”
By the first glimmer of a new day, word had started to spread, and a few enterprising militia members with school-level archaic German had powered up some of their stolen drives and were eagerly looking through them for information on autonomous facial recognition systems, predictive policing, weaponised nanotechnology and long-range ballistic missiles.
I had been a woman; now I was a man, old and frightened.
There haven’t been any children for a long time now. Melanie doesn’t know why that is.
“What in the name of burning sun is this?” demanded one, who had an inflated enough sense of her own importance to ignore my polite requests to hang up and let me handle some of the other calls flooding into my office. “The box said ‘material science – industrial’ but I’m just getting books about zombies! Fucking zombies!”
As birds sang their dawn chorus, oblivious to the history they too were living through, I sat outside Georg’s office as Antti and a number of other seniors from the Brotherhood screamed abuse at him, each other and the day in general. A small round window crowned the top of the stair. If I looked at it, I could not moment-to-moment see the sun rising nor measure the changing colour of the sky. If I looked away, even for a few seconds, then looked back, it seemed as if everything had changed, now, and again, and again, and now. Across Maze, the temples burned and the hearths looked nervously towards the edge of the forest, which suddenly seemed nearer and blacker than it had been before. Best to cut it down, they said. Best to play things safe.
The door to the office slammed open and men stormed out; the last one toyed with slamming the door shut, but to do so would have required breaking his stride and might not have achieved a suitable effect, so he left it hanging half-open. I stayed where I was until I heard the downstairs door close behind them, then rose and let myself into Georg’s office.
He stood, where he always stood, as he always stood, facing the window and the rising day. I waited, hands clasped, in front of his desk. At last he said: “They knew we were coming.”
When I first trained to be a spy, I would stand in front of the mirror and remember how it felt when the forest burned and the river roared, reach out for Vae and miss her flailing hand, don’t let go, don’t let go, and tell myself, It’s your fault. In time, I could do this, and meet my own eyes as the fire raged in the cauldron of my mind, and see no flush of colour nor any change in my breath, but was merely the mountain against which the wind must break.
I am kin of sky and earth. The earth holds me, and to the earth I will return, and whatever happens now, the forest will grow.
Then Georg said: “I thought we had them all. Temple must have their own.”
I am the mountain, but when I leave this place – if I leave this place – I will shake down to my very roots.
He let out a slow sigh, and in that moment was just a man, not a statue carved in marble. Then he straightened again, turned, clapped his hands together. “By this evening – everyone who has attended any meeting on the bill, everyone who signed to read it, everyone they know, their friends, contacts, addresses. A wide net first, then we start eliminating candidates.” I hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours, but now was not the time to mention it. “I’ll need to see the chief of staff, defence and army chiefs by 2 p.m. Get me a meeting with the Council Ambassador too, see how much time we can buy. And a pastry. Raisins, I think.”
This pronounced, he turned away again and resumed his contemplation of the war to come.
Here I am.
Sleepless at my desk.
My face hurts.
My body hurts.
I find words are difficult to concentrate on, a thin, shark-toothed gauze over my eyes.
I read whole pages, and nothing has gone in, just words passing by.
I find myself inclined to laugh uproariously at nothing at all.
I feel incredibly sad at the smell of fresh pastries hot from the oven.
I sit at my desk, and systematically begin an investigation into my own nefarious espionage activities. For a long time, I wonder whether to include my own name on the list of suspects. I was, after all, present and correct at many of the key meetings. I carried the locked briefcase to and from its destination, supervised people signing in and signing out to read the documents therein. I unlocked it several times in transit, when alone, to photograph its contents for Nadira. I should absolutely be on the list of suspects, as indeed should Georg himself. But it seems so obvious as to be absurd, so I leave both his and my name off and instead systematically trawl through hundreds of pages of notes to construct a list of everyone else in the world at large who might be an inquisition spy.
I give him the list at 4 p.m., and he doesn’t look at it, but nods once and says: “Break-ins are also a possibility. Get me a full security review.”
I return to my desk. Sometime later – I do not know when – I wake at it. The sun has long since set. I have pins and needles in one hand, where it served as a pillow, and in a foot, where it dangled awkwardly beneath my chair. I am probably going to be sacked but, straightening up, find that someone has draped a blanket across my shoulders, tucking the sides in around ribs and knees so it won’t fall off while I slumber. I have no idea what to do with this act of kindness, and when I check what new data has been uploaded to my inkstone while I slept, I find that Pontus’ stolen document is there.
Here I am.
Photographing the appropriate page of the appropriate document to send to Nadira.
The film that comes from my camera is no bigger than a pill you might swallow without water. It is stored in a little black capsule for transportation and left behind a drainpipe near Judastrasse.
The document is about autonomous military drones. I will flag a number of ways in which it is inauthentic to Georg later – later – when some of the fuss has died down. When Nadira has the information she needs to find Pontus. When Pontus can no longer find me. I do not know what unique error has been introduced to this text to mark the betrayer. A comma that should have been a full stop, perhaps. A minor typo on a long, fiddly word. I find, to my surprise, that I hardly care, and I make the drop-off on the way to collect Georg’s morning pastry.
Chapter 18
Jia did not declare war on Maze, not even when the temples burned.
“We can resolve this peacefully,” her voice juddered, tired and old, over the radio. “We are all kin of sky and earth; children of the sun and moon. We can find harmony again.”
The other Provinces shifted uneasily. Shamim and the Medj of the Delta made their more forthright feelings clear. “We have seen evidence of fossil-fuel mining. We have seen evidence of wasteful butchery. We have seen evidence of ideological mass consumption. We have seen the temples burn. The kakuy do not care for the borders of the Provinces. The kakuy will take vengeance upon us all.”
In Lyvodia
, on Maze’s eastern flank, Ull was noticeably silent.
The Brotherhood radio reported a few Medj fighting back, attacking officials, endangering the public. Even those few stations that were ostensibly independent reported with disgust the hoarded wealth, precious items and luxuries found in the halls of many of the shuttered temples, and they were right. The rot was deep; the Medj had failed, and though the clouds tumbled and the earth turned, the kakuy did not come for Vien.
“How many lives do you think an archive is worth?” asked Georg, fingers tracing a map of the Provinces spilling across his desk, dancing over the old mines at Martyza Eztok, the sealed vaults of Isdanbul.
“In the burning,” I replied carefully, “there were surveys done of how many lives you would be willing to end for a cause. If, say, by dropping a nuclear weapon that killed a million strangers – the elderly, children – you could save twenty thousand soldiers of your own nation, would you do it? The answers were disproportionally yes.”
“And what about Temple?” Georg wondered, and I thought for a moment I saw Lah sitting beneath the cypress tree, wondering the same thing. Perhaps in another life they would meet and break bread and find in each other interesting conversationalists; Georg could have made an excellent priest. “Are they pragmatists, or sentimental?”
“Both,” I replied. “They are pacifists; it is written in their scriptures that the kakuy hate war above all else. They are also pragmatists. When mankind warred, the destruction disturbed the kakuy, roused them to anger, and the kakuy crushed city and army beneath them with no care for whose side was pious and whose was not, seeing no distinction in the petty squabbles of humanity – just a pestilence on the earth.”
Georg clicked his tongue in the roof of his mouth, flexed his ankles and rolled his wrists. “It sounds exhausting, believing so much and so little.”
It is, says Lah, as wind ripples the water of the lake. Medj need to be idealists, to see the light in all things. But unlike the gods of old, the kakuy walk amongst us, real and mighty, and we need pragmatists too. Tell me, have you thought about joining the inquisition?
