by Adam Roberts
‘Indeed. But you can see, given the stakes, why your MOHparents found it necessary to accelerate the whole question of settling on a successor. It wasn’t their choice. Events have forced their hand.’
‘But,’ she said. ‘You are a revolutionary! I can believe my MOHmies might want to topple the Ulanovs – but revolutionaries want to dismantle all the structures of power. Don’t they? All the structures including the MOHfamilies! Why would my MOHmies ally themselves with somebody dedicated to their own overthrow?’
‘There are as many different revolutionary creeds as there are religions,’ Iago said. ‘Some want to level the entire System, sure. Others are happy to work with the hierarchies that exist, to purge them of injustice and the Ulanovian tyranny, and to transition humanity towards stability and prosperity. For myself, I have – personal as well as ideological reasons to hate the Ulanovs. But it seems to me that any system, even a utopian one, will need efficient civil servants – and that’s what the MOHfamilies are, really.’ He coughed, or laughed, Diana couldn’t tell which. Then he said: ‘but, of course, there’s a more pressing reason.’
‘What do you mean? Reason for what?’
‘Reason why your MOHparents would take somebody like me into their confidence, make an alliance with me and the forces I represent.’
She felt a tingle in her scalp, a yawing inside her stomach, as if she trembled on the brink of some great revelation. ‘What reason?’
He looked at her. ‘A new threat, large enough to overshadow any notion of political power-plays. Even for individuals such as your parents.’
‘What threat?’
‘The end of humanity.’
She had nothing to say to this. It seemed so improbably overstated, particularly for somebody like Iago, she wondered almost as if it were a joke.
‘How long will we have to stay in this Al Anfal of yours?’ she asked him, shortly.
He looked at her, a long, careful, appraising look. ‘Not forever,’ he said. And she saw that he meant: a long time. ‘If the Ulanovs are truly moving against the Clan, then – well, things are clearly volatile at the moment. In the uplands, I mean. And throughout the System. And that means that things are volatile down here, since what is the Earth but a plughole down which all the shit of the System washes?’
The profanity startled her. ‘Ee-are-gow!’ she said. ‘Such language!’
‘I apologise, Diana,’ he said, gravely, turning to look frontward. He didn’t, she noticed, call her Miss any more.
It was midday before they came down, Iago guiding the craft into a narrow, precipitously-walled valley somewhere in the midst of Anatolia.
13
Of Multitudes
The house was primitive, but comfortable: two storeys, built close against the rocky west wall of the valley and hidden from all but the most specific searches from above. Diana had no idea where they were, and she didn’t like the fact that (with no bId access) she couldn’t find out. How close the nearest conurbation was, where their food would come from when the house supplies ran out – these were mysteries. Water came from a well, an actual well, just as in the days of Homer and Homo erectus: a shaft drilled through bronze-coloured rock, its contents pumped up into the house. ‘How do you know it is clean?’ she asked; but all Iago said was: ‘it is clean alright.’
He fastened a hollow plastic globe to the bottom of his leg. It was cruder than a foot, but that fact seemed not to incommode him. He walked now with only the slightest of limps. ‘Could you not,’ Diana asked, still thinking with the assumptions of the very rich, ‘get yourself a proper replacement foot?’ ‘These legs,’ he replied, ‘and indeed this face, this new face – they were very expensive, specialised pieces of work. I cannot simply replace them at any craft stall. Your MOHparents paid, not only to have the work done, but to keep it secret. The second element was by far the more expensive.’
Dia sniffed sulkily. ‘I used to wonder,’ she said, ‘why you were so wrinkled. At your age, to be so wrinkled!’
‘We are capable of many amazing things,’ Iago agreed. ‘But scar tissue is a stubborn fact of our corporality. We can fold it away in microwrinkles, but we cannot simply break and remake skin like putty.’
‘That’s revolting,’ she told him.
Her life moved on into its next phase. She did not, at the beginning, feel the deprivation of her wealth too acutely; that felt like an adventure holiday than actual impoverishment. The lack of access to her bId was more of an irritation.
The air was thinner and colder here than it had been on the island; but she acclimatised quickly. Another function of a life lived upland.
Sapho cooked for them all, and cleaned up afterwards. She kept herself to herself; slept in the house’s smallest room (although there were larger rooms available for her use) and said little. Some nights, if Diana put enough pressure on her, she would take her evening meal with them.
For the first full day there Diana did nothing but brood. It was actively dislocating not to have access to her bId. The fact that she was unable to check facts, to satisfy her various curiosities, was of course an inconvenience; but it dawned on her that in this house there were no other datasifts of any kind – not a slate, or a terminal, not so much as an antique library of bound codices. She was data-naked; an unprecedented and extremely uncomfortable situation. The lack of external access was less of a problem, for she was used to being insulated from the larger network of contacts and news for security reasons. But in one particular she felt the privation very sharply: she had no idea what was happening to her Clan. She did not know whether her MOHmies were alive and well, or in Ulanov custody (she wondered: on what charge?) or even dead. She did not know whether Eva was alright; or what was happening to the tens of thousands of Clan members and affiliates. Iago could tell her little, although he did seem to have some kind of non-bId access to information.
The first night she slept poorly: the house was not furnished with gel-beds and she had to lie on a mattress. More: the walls did not regulate the temperature automatically; so she was too cold until she got up and dialled more heat from a specific device in the corner of the room. That did make things hotter, and then made them too hot and she had to get up and dial it down. She finally fell asleep properly just before dawn and despite waking from time to time, she slept until midday.
And so it was a new day. I’m still alive, she told herself. That’s something.
The daylight was white-grey; clouded over. She made herself some coffee and ate a little pasta. After that she wandered through the house absent-mindedly. She found Iago sitting in a chair in the back sitting room, staring through the antique window into nothing.
Rain fell, but without any force. The colour grey had been liquefied and was drifting down upon them in myriad drops.
Diana sat in the chair next to his. Eventually she spoke: ‘you were behind it,’ she said.
He looked at her. ‘I’m glad you figured it out. Although of course I expected it of you.’
‘What was it? A birthday present?’
‘It was,’ he said.
She looked at him.
‘Your parents think it was their idea; but it wasn’t,’ he said, shortly. ‘I am the one who planted that idea. I’m the one who knows how passionately you love murder-mysteries. Solving them is a five-finger exercise to you, but you love it nonetheless. So I thought I’d set one up; a real-life one. For your birthday.’
‘I knew something was odd about the situation,’ Diana said. ‘A servant was brutally killed, only a few metres from where Eva and I slept! In any other circumstances our MOHmies would have pulled us straight out of there. They’re not coy about their paranoia when it comes to keeping the two of us safe. But they seemed so blithe about it. Violent murder? You stay right there, my chickadees.’ She shook her head. ‘It was – uncharacteristic. All that chaff about how CRF in the servants’ bloodstream would keep us safe?’
‘That was one of the failsafes,’ said Iago. �
��And you were well guarded. Or at least—’ He winced at the memory of Dominico Deño – ‘so we thought. And the murderer had no grudge against you. She had a particular animus against somebody else.’
‘How did you select her?’
‘I went looking for a likely situation. It wasn’t hard to find. Shanty bubbles are claustrophobic spaces. Tensions build up. I chose half a dozen possible groups of servants, from hundreds of initial possibles, and put them all into gravity training and preparation. When that Petero man – a horrible fellow, really – got killed, I looked into it. That was when I saw the potential in Sapho. That, really, made the decision for me.’
‘You couldn’t be sure she would kill Leron.’
‘No,’ he conceded. ‘But it was very likely. I knew the dynamic in that group. And we had three weeks before your actual birthday, after all. At some point he would press his attentions and she would not accept it. Or she would act pre-emptively. My main worry was that it would be too cut-and-dried a murder; too obvious for you. But even then, you would still have had to solve the larger mystery. I expected you to see early on that Sapho was the actual killer; but I wanted to see if you would be able to work out who was really behind it all. Me.’
‘That wasn’t hard,’ she said, sulkily. Then in an outburst of tired wrath: ‘A birthday present? That’s a pretty sick sort of birthday present – don’t you think? Give a girl, for her sixteenth birthday – a corpse.’
‘This,’ he said, turning his hands so that both palms faced her. ‘This is the point of it.’
‘This is? My anger?’
‘Yes.’
Her rage flared up inside her, like a flame. ‘You evil man,’ she said. ‘This is the point of it? A human being is dead! He wasn’t a saint, maybe – but then, who is? You’re certainly not! Goddess, are any of us? And he is dead.’ The more she spoke, the more her rhetoric fed back into her anger. ‘It’s not a game. I nearly died!’
Iago shook his head. ‘Joad would never have killed you. You’re too valuable to the Ulanovs alive. Your sister likewise.’
‘Shut up! A killer pointed a gun at me and smiled! I’m not even sixteen yet, but I felt death as a proximate thing. That’s not a game. How dare you—’ she was speaking loudly now, though croakily; a great reservoir of fury and resentment and bitterness inside her was flowing out of her. And she hadn’t even known it was there! ‘How dare you – play with life and death as a game? As a birthday present?’
His impassive face. She couldn’t stand it any longer. Getting to her feet in this ridiculous gravity was a struggle, as ever, but she managed it, and she stormed out. Sapho was at the door, looking through, drawn by the sound of raised voices. But Dia didn’t want to speak to her either (although it was hardly her fault) and instead she went through to her room and wrapped herself in a blanket. It was cold. It was late summer, and yet it was cold. Everything about this place was wrong. Everything in her life had gone wrong.
They were high up. This was the weather of tall mountains.
Look down from high places. Her anger flew like an eagle. How dare he? Toying with her, using living human beings as chesspieces. Did he really think she would be pleased that her sixteenth-birthday present was a corpse?
One of the curiosities of anger, of course, is that the more you focus it outward, firing it at the injustices of the world, the more it actually parses your own self-pity and resentment. Was she angry that Iago had treated Leron’s life and death with such existential disrespect? Of course not. A moment’s thought told her that. How could she be moved by a man whom she had never known, except in the abstract? Anger, after all, is not kindled by abstracts. So: what was so enraging? Her own life. The prison of her existence, guarded by gaolers who called themselves bodyguards. The lack of anything that might be considered a free choice. Perhaps this wasn’t Iago’s fault, except insofar as he was part of the larger structure of control. Except that it was his fault. And he was the one with whom she was furious.
She thought of the multitude.
Trillions of human beings, wrapped like a fog about their home star. The mind collapsed at the scale and the numbers. But if ethics meant anything at all, it meant not letting the largeness of the human population overwhelm our moral knowledge that life is lived individually, and that even when agglomerated into billions and trillions individual human beings deserve better than being used as tools. That the overwhelming majority of this vast mass of humanity was poor, living precarious and subsistence lives in leaky shanty bubbles, eating ghunk and drinking recycled water – this made this more, not less, true. These were the people least able to help themselves. They should be helped, not exploited.
Now, the patterning genius for which she had been bred and in which she had been trained, her ability to see problems three-dimensionally and by superposing all possibilities into the same conceptual grid – this same ability immediately challenged her own outrage. It said: what have you done to help the trillions out of their absolute poverty? It said: what could ever be done? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Have you ever, before this moment, spared these trillions even a passing thought? You have not. You have never. Is your outrage here really an ethical reflex, or is it something simpler and baser and more human – your individual feeling of having been slighted? A wound upon the skin of your pride?
Furious, foetally positioned on the bed, wrapped in her blanket, she fell asleep. Of course she did.
As she had done a thousand times before, she dreamed. She dreamed of: interiors.
Her MOHmies were standing in a large Louis Vingt-Deux hallway, all light brown wood, and chrome curlicues and floor-to-ceiling mirrors on every wall. Large windows let in light as white as a fresh snowfall, so bright that it hurt the eyes. The light moved with weird, sticky slowness; what Diana first took to be dust motes in the air were actually photons: swollen by some mysterious physical process and drifting with leisurely insolence. Because light was flowing so slowly, time was all wrong: somehow simultaneously zipping by too quickly and passing much too slowly. It felt nightmarishly carceral. It was disturbing. But her MOHmies were smiling. ‘What is going on?’ she asked.
They answered in so perfect a unison that there was no double-tracking of their respective voices. ‘Your rage has slowed time,’ they said.
‘And is my anger not justified? He had no right to treat me like that!’
‘You?’
She felt this as rebuke. ‘No. Not me. The dead man – Leron. How could he treat a person like that? Even a man from the Sump. Even,’ she went on, although her anger was shrinking inside her, ‘a bad man, like him. It’s not right. A human being is a human being. A human being is not a toy.’
‘We cannot help but use the people below us as a resource, my love,’ said her two MOHmies, as one. ‘That is what it means to be in power. Your choice is to relinquish power forever, or to accept that and use people for good.’
She looked from wall to wall, from mirror to mirror. Mirrors. Her MOHmies were (of course) reflected in them; but Diana did not seem to be. She peered, trying to check whether this was just a feature of her point of view, or whether, in this dream, she was actually invisible.
‘If we are powerful,’ sang her MOHmies, ‘we can make things better, but we are made unclean by the fact that we have power. If we are powerless we remain clean, but we cannot make things better.’ Their voices, together, had a weird depth and resonance to them.
‘It’s a false dilemma,’ she said.
‘Precisely! That is what he is trying to teach you. That was your birthday present.’
Diana took a step forward. With a sensation of slippage inside her, she realised, belatedly, that there were no mirrors in this bright-lit hall. Every mirror was actually a broad doorway, and what she had assumed were reflections were actually other figures – her MOHmies, replicated into dozens of versions of themselves. Through every door a new room, and her MOHmies in every room, and behind them another door and another perspective on her MOHmi
es. She had the insight that she was seeing an infinite regression of rooms. There were trillions of human beings in the Sump, but there were an infinite number of her own parents.
And with that insight, she woke up.
She sat up in bed, pulling the blanket more tightly around her shoulders. Is there a more primitive form of technology than a blanket? Something queer about the light: a more metallic whiteness to it. It took her a moment to realise that it was snowing.
Snow.
She went back through to the sitting room. Iago was still there, and sitting across from him was Sapho. She looked up guiltily as Diana entered, got awkwardly to her feet, nodded and hurried away. Diana came over and sat in the seat she had recently occupied. It was still warm. ‘Why did she start like a guilty thing?’
‘She overheard what we were saying,’ said Iago, in a level voice. ‘She wanted to know what was going on, and I suppose she’s entitled to know – her, above all. I was telling her that she was not responsible for killing Leron. Though she struck the blow, I was the one who set it up. I told her that I knew he had been abusing her, and that I used her as the means by which justice could be done.’
Diana thought about this. ‘She believed you?’
‘Why wouldn’t she? She wept, actually. I think it relieved, to some extent, her feelings of guilt.’
‘Iago,’ said Diana. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my temper with you.’
He opened his eyes fractionally wider. Then he said. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re surprised?’
‘Let’s say,’ he replied, ‘that you have reached this place quicker than I anticipated.’
She ignored this. ‘The point was not just a birthday present, was it?’ she said. ‘Which is to say: it was. But it was very specifically a sixteenth birthday. It was about adulthood. Yes?’
Iago replied with characteristic obliqueness. ‘Of course it is not comfortable to think that human beings, who breathe and feel and hope as we do, are a resource we exploit. It is a very terrible thing. But the alternative is: to live a hermit life. And the stakes are too high for that.’ She took this for: yes.
