Slow Bullets

by Alastair Reynolds

  “It’s all right. You can search me for knives.”

  I ought to have felt jubilant, that we had Orvin back in our care. But so much had changed since he slipped away into the ship. We had learned too much from Murash, and I had been unkind to Prad. All I felt was a kind of empty satisfaction that one task was now completed, and that we could move on to the next.

  I washed myself and met Yesli, Spry and Sacer with their new prisoner. It was the same room where we had spoken to Murash, and I had wondered if they might have allowed Murash to be present as well, to offer her outsider’s viewpoint. But it was just the four of us, and Orvin. They had tied him to a chair, doubling the restraints. He looked tired, and there were heavy bruises on his face. His eyes were red and puffy, the lids swollen. He seemed to have difficulty focussing.

  “There was some resistance,” Sacer said.

  “I can see.”

  “Is it definitely Orvin?” Spry asked. “I know he mentioned you by name, before he got away from us. But there could always have been some mistake.”

  “No,” I said, with joyless certainty. “It’s him. It’s not another man with the same name and it’s not someone pretending to be Orvin. This is the man who put a slow bullet into me, set to work its way to my heart, and then left me to die.”

  “Are you going to argue with her story?” Yesli asked.

  Orvin had some trouble answering. He moved to open his lips and spat out a wad of blood and shattered tooth.

  “What would be the point?”

  “Now would not be the time to test our patience,” Spry said.

  “Fine then.” Orvin gave a sort of defeated sigh. “I met this woman during the war. Whether or not the ceasefire had been declared was an irrelevance. We were in the field of battle, cut off from central authority. She strayed into my sector. I detained her and subjected her to routine questioning, before we were forced to move out.”

  “That’s a fucking lie.”

  Orvin gave an uninterested shrug. “Prove it.”

  “Scur doesn’t need to prove anything,” Spry said. “She warned us you were dangerous and you showed it when you killed Crowl.”

  Orvin smiled. “So Scur is what she calls herself now? Well, I’m sorry about Crowl. I couldn’t help that, though. It was that or face lynch justice.”

  “Tell that to the mess the auto-surgeon left when it tried to patch up Crowl,” Yesli said. “Better still, why don’t we let you be the one who tests out the auto-surgeon next time? You look like you could use a spell in the surgeon.”

  “If you want me dead, I can suggest some quicker and easier ways of going about it.”

  “Is that what you want?” Sacer asked. “Execution? You know, we might actually be able to arrange it. Be easier for the rest of us, not having to share our resources with you.”

  “Congratulations, in that case. I’ll buy you a few days by dying sooner.” Orvin forced his puffy-lidded eyes wider, in mock surprise. “Oh, you think I didn’t know the state of the ship? You think I’m so stupid that I haven’t grasped that we’re going to die up here, very slowly, as our systems fail one by one? That there’s no possibility of outside help? That the merciful thing would have been for us all to stay in hibo, until the ship rotted around our frozen corpses?”

  “We’re going to make it,” Yesli said. “We have a plan. The ship’s damaged, it’s true. It’s losing memory by the day, by the hour. But it can still keep us alive, and Prad says we may still be able to make a skip, to reach another solar system. We even have a plan to conserve the vital memory sectors. I’m telling you this because I want you to understand that the rest of us have no intention of dying, and we wouldn’t be doing you any kind of a favour if we killed you now.”

  Spry said: “Regardless of your guilt, we can’t afford to lose a useful pair of hands. There’s work to be done here—unimaginably hard work, and lots of it.”

  “So the best I can hope for is forced labour?” Orvin laughed, and drooled out another wad of blood and shattered tooth. “You think you can persuade me to do something I don’t want to, is that it?”

  “I could,” Scur said.

  He looked at the three members of the Trinity. “Well, Scur—let’s call her that—may have a point. If you are serious about not losing a good pair of hands, I’d keep her well away from me. I don’t think justice is uppermost in her thoughts.”

  “I’m better than you,” I said. “I was during the war, and I am now.”

  “You think you are,” Orvin said. “But if you were alone in this room with me, and I was still tied down, and you had a knife? Or a slow bullet injector, and a slow bullet? Would you be able to stop yourself?” He was looking at me with an almost friendly smile now, thick-lipped and lopsided as it was. “Be honest with yourself, as one soldier to another. We both know what hate feels like. It hasn’t gone away just because we spent a little time in hibo. It’s like a light filling you up from inside. It’s leaking through your skin.”

  I wanted to deny him, but I knew better than to attempt a lie. It would have been obvious to all concerned.

  I so very much wanted to slip a knife into him, between the ribs, and to twist it, and to make him squeal, and to keep him alive for as long as possible while I prolonged the agony. The slow bullet would have been much too civilised for my tastes.

  I smiled. “You’ve got me.”

  “As long as we’re on the same page,” Orvin said.

  ______________

  A little later I met with Yesli and asked her what the Trinity had in mind for Orvin.

  “I was concerned that he might turn out to have friends,” Yesli said, rubbing at her brow. “Who knows? He’s a war criminal by our reckoning, but when you have a ship full of war criminals, that doesn’t mean much.”

  “We’re not all war criminals.”

  “I’m sorry.” I could tell that Yesli was tired, overburdened with too many new responsibilities and worries. “I just mean, it could have been worse. But there’s no support for Orvin. Quite the opposite. Poor Crowl had his friends, and even those of us who didn’t know him very well remember what happened in the auto-surgeon. That debt has to be paid, is the feeling. While it isn’t, there’s a sense of unfinished business.”

  “Spry seems to think otherwise. He said we couldn’t lose another pair of hands.”

  “Well, there’s another way of looking at that. It’s true that Orvin can still be of use to us, in the conserving of the memory.”

  “Go on.”

  “After his execution, we can skin him. Make paper from his flesh, ink from his blood. I’d even let you make the first cut, if it meant that much to you.”

  I shook my head. “That wouldn’t work for me.”

  “Too macabre?”

  “Too easy. He’d be dead already.”

  ______________

  The trouble started with an argument between two adjoining work parties, over who had claim to one section of the wall. The argument turned violent, and then spread to nearby parties. It became a confused, confined brawl, and it packed the corridors so tightly that it was many minutes before any of the Trinity’s peacekeepers had a chance to break things up. Prad and his people did their best to stop it reaching further, by closing internal doors and turning corridors dark. But by then blood had been spilled. By its nature, any tool sharp enough to mark metal was also sharp enough to cut flesh. There were stabbings and gougings. Someone lost an eye.

  After the brawl had been cleared, and the mess cleaned up, I went with Yesli to see what all the fuss had been about.

  “I don’t know why they would fight over a wall,” Yesli was saying. “We’ve barely touched the ship! Why would they fight now, when almost all the walls are still blank? Leave the fighting until we’re down to the last corner!”

  “That’s why,” I said.

  The words had been scratched shallowly into the metal, passage after passage running along six or seven metres of wall. The scratched letters gleamed with a hard
silver purity. It was done quite neatly—better than some of the mandatory texts—but the work still betrayed the evidence of several different hands having taken their turn.

  “This is free inscription work,” Yesli said, frowning. “I don’t recognise the words, but—”

  “I do,” I answered. “This is the start of the Book. Our Book—the one read by the people of the Peripheral Systems.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I know these words, Yesli. I grew up with them.”

  “I didn’t have you down as a staunch believer, Scur.”

  “I’m not. But my parents both were.” I waited a moment. “I spoke to Prad about this. He told me that there were no copies of the Book in the shipboard memory. They’d been lost to the corruption.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “I think so.” But the tone of her question left me unsettled. “You’re saying Prad lied? That the Books—ours or theirs—are still in the memory?”

  “I doubt that the Books have survived. But I think Prad or one of the other technicians may have been responsible for their deletion.” Yesli paused. “He wasn’t ordered to do that, but I can’t say I’d have disagreed with his decision. Whoever did it, it was the right thing. The Books are too divisive.” She looked at me sharply. “You see that, don’t you? These people wouldn’t have come to blows over some poetry or scientific knowledge. They came to blows over the Book. Your side, their side—their stupid differences of interpretation.”

  “The Book is beautiful, Yesli.”

  “But it will kill us. Yours or theirs—makes no difference. The knowledge has to go. We can’t save it. We’ll be making a terrible mistake if we do.”

  “Someone committed these words to memory,” I said. “Who knows, maybe the whole thing. I learned passages, parables, but there are people who made it a life’s work to know the entire Book.”

  “I’m not saying it isn’t a wonderful act of devotion. It is. And I’m sure there is tremendous grace and power in these words. Tremendous wisdom and humanity—as well as ignorance and superstition and foolhardiness. All that’s the best and worst in us. But that doesn’t change anything. Someone lost an eye over this, Scur! We’ve a chance to put these divisive words behind us now—why in all the worlds wouldn’t we?”

  “What are you proposing?”

  Yesli rubbed a finger along the bright-cut inscriptions. “These words aren’t scratched very deeply. They can be polished out, the wall made new.”

  “And the people who did this?”

  “They’ll be warned against doing it again, but I doubt that we’ll push for any actual punishment.” She took a step back, touched a finger to her chin like an art critic at a gallery. “These inscriptions are very well done, aren’t they? We couldn’t afford to lose good scribers like these.”

  “They won’t let go of their beliefs that easily.”

  “They will if we make them,” Yesli said.

  Half a day later the Trinity issued an edict. The inscribing of religious content was expressly forbidden unless otherwise authorised as part of the mandated texts. No one was to use their free inscriptions for this purpose. If they were caught doing so, they would be compelled to polish the walls back to their former blankness, on top of their normal allocation of mandatory texts. There would be no exceptions, no favour given to the people of one Book over the other.

  I do not know what Spry, Yesli and Sacer expected of this decree. Meek obedience? If so they did not properly grasp the extent to which the Book permeated the narrow little lives of grunts like me. I was surprised by Spry in particular. The war had taken him too far above the common soldiery.

  It was a serious error of judgement.

  The hunt for Orvin had united us, temporarily. The search for Murash had offered another focus, and now the scribing provided another. These distractions had been sufficient to make women and men of different allegiances work together, or at least tolerate each other’s company. Allies and enemies, friends and criminals—soldiers and civilians. We had found cause to put our differences and suspicions behind us, for the moment.

  The Trinity’s edict ripped things wide open again.

  It began with work teams refusing to scribe the mandated texts. An hour here, an hour there, might not have made very much difference. But a whole lost day was a thousandth part of the time left for us. Of the knowledge we might yet save, a thousandth part was now gone for all eternity.

  If it had gone no further than lost work, negotiation and reasoned persuasion might still have saved the day.

  It did not stop. Violence broke out again: much worse than before, and spread across much more of the ship. Believers against believers, unbelievers against the faithful. Grudge-settling for the sake of it. I was shocked by my own naïvety, imagining that the worst of these enmities were behind us.

  I was wrong about that.

  ______________

  After the first death I knew what I had to do. It might not make a difference, but it was the only option open to me.

  “I need your help,” I told Prad.

  “So we are speaking again.”

  “I’m sorry about what I said. It was unwarranted. It was just . . . anger. I had to lash out at someone. You just happened to be nearest.”

  “There was truth in what you said, though. We aren’t the same. I have known no war.”

  I nodded at the nearest monitor screen, showing the chaos that had spread through the ship—corridors and halls full of brawling people, the bloodied and slumped forms—unconscious or worse. “You’re getting a taste of it now. When this is over, if it’s ever over, each and every one of us will be on equal terms.”

  Prad looked at the screen for a long moment. “They do not seem amenable to negotiation. I see there has been another death, and several serious injuries. At this rate we will butcher ourselves by the end of the day.”

  “Do you have a slate?”

  “Of course.”

  “We need to get to the main cargo bay, where you first told us about the memory loss. Spry and the others are just about keeping order there.”

  “What do you have in mind, Scur?”

  “You know exactly what I have in mind.”

  It was difficult, making our way through the ship. Without Prad I do not think we could have done it at all. But Prad still knew more of Caprice than I expected to learn in a lifetime. It amazed me that there were corridors and service shafts still completely empty of people, their routes and access points known only to the technical staff.

  The bay was full of people, and the atmosphere was ugly. No one was actually trying to kill anyone else, though, which was an improvement on the rest of the ship. If there was a chance of turning the tide, this was the only place where it would happen.

  Yesli saw me arrive with Prad. The Trinity members and their peacekeepers were at the middle of the mob, holding a fragile order. We had to push our way through, ignoring the shouts and jostles of those around us.

  “Forget it, Scur,” Yesli said. “They may have bought the idea of blowing up the ship once, but they won’t fall for it twice.”

  “I know, and I wouldn’t dream of trying it again.” I looked sharply at Yesli. “I could have told you that order would get us into trouble.”

  “We had no choice,” Spry said. He had to raise his voice above the shouting. “Our differences will kill us. We couldn’t allow either Book to become a point of division: we’ve enough reason to hate and distrust each other already.”

  “The decree has been issued,” Sacer said. “If we go back on it now, we’ll look weak.”

  “I’m not asking you to. Let me talk to them.”

  Sacer laughed at my presumption. “What do you think you have to offer, that we haven’t already proposed?”

  “My past,” I said.

  I presented myself to the mob—there was no other word for it. Then I touched my chest, held my fist above the point where my slow bullet was sitting.

  N
ext to me Prad held the slate aloft. He tilted it so that everyone had a chance of viewing its contents.

  There was something happening here. It was enough to lower the shouting and arguing by a fraction. Now the mob’s focus was on me, rather than the Trinity.

  “You know me,” I said. “I am Scur. I was a soldier, the same as most of you. I either fought with you or fought against you—if any of that matters now.” I waited, allowing the mob to quieten even further. I did not doubt for a moment that my hold on their attention was tenuous. I had to make every word count. “I read the Book, too,” I continued. “It meant a great deal to my parents. I wasn’t much of a believer, not really. But the words were still a comfort to me during the war, when I was torn away from my home and family. Some of you will know my story, too. You’ll know of the trouble I had with Orvin, but that was only a part of it. I was never meant to be conscripted, but it happened anyway. And I tried to be a good soldier. I tried to obey the laws of war, to do the right thing. They taught us to hate the enemy, and I suppose I did. But my parents had always told me that they read about the same prophets we did. That tempered my hate. I knew, deep down, that we were not all that different. And I never liked killing.” I cast a glance at Prad, and Prad looked back at me with a questioning eye, asking that I reaffirm my readiness.

  “This is my old life,” I said. “These people were my parents. I loved them, and they loved me. These words are all that bind me to my home, to the person I was, the world I knew—the faith I was born into. And I give them up now. I am surrendering myself. From this moment, all that I was before the wakening ceases to matter. I’ll carry it in myself, but I won’t be able to prove a word of it. I could be as good as the best of us, as bad as the worst.” I swallowed, gave a nod to Prad. “Do it. And tell them what’s happening.”

  Prad touched something on the slate. He raised his own high, quavering voice.

  “I am erasing the contents of Scur’s slow bullet. She is giving up that part of herself. She is surrendering the means to prove who she was, what part she played in the war.”