Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

by Steven Erikson

  GANTRY: They’d be smarter heading straight to export though.

  BACKLOW: You mean in terms of economic strategy?

  GANTRY: Well, either way, I mean. Say they ramp up everything internally, with these new engines. That means they get a jump on the rest of us globally—by the time we’re ready with a, say, a Boeing version, there won’t be any markets left to sell it to. The Chinese will have sewn it all up. Or say they go straight to export. Same result. We’ve got to get going on this, don’t we? Problem is, we don’t have slaves chained to the machines, do we?

  BACKLOW: I am unaware of slaves being used in China—

  GANTRY: Guaranteed, Doctor. It’s a communist country for crying out loud!

  BACKLOW: Excuse me, McKenzie, but you’re still thinking old school on this—

  GANTRY: Old school? What do you mean by that?

  BACKLOW: Well, you’re looking at this as if it was simply one more new product on a traditional Market Scaffold, slotting in like, oh, I don’t know, a new iPhone or MS Office-VR. Unfortunately, that scaffold is pretty much in pieces—this is what has become brutally clear to us at the Institute. Free Market competition—the very basis of our capitalist economics—is based on aggression. But our natural acts of competition—for example, outbidding other companies for, say, mining exploration rights, oil prospecting, logging—well, that’s all been impacted. It’s not as obvious as not being able to punch someone, or shoot them, or drop bombs, for that matter. But the ethics of the new paradigm are clearly pointing us toward a broader theme of—

  GANTRY: Now you’re just complicating things, Doctor. Using big words to cloud the issue. The simple fact is, the Chinese are beating Americans to the punch. The President needs to step in—did you hear his last Press Gallery? He’s like a chicken without a head! Sending an astronaut up there—for what? Forget the damned astronaut! What we need is those magic engines put in attack ships and those ships—a whole fleet of them—blazing into the sky, to hunt down and wipe out these aliens. We need America to win back our planet! Let the Chinese chew on that for a bit!

  BACKLOW: You think that will work?

  GANTRY: We’ll damn well make it work! Aggression you said? Well, we know all about aggression. Just get us riled and we’ll show ’em all about aggression!

  BACKLOW: Yes, and how well has that worked thus far?

  GANTRY: It’s our scientists who’ve let us down. We should fire the lot of them. And now it turns out they were probably all working for the Greys on the moon. Charges should be brought against them—

  BACKLOW: I’m sorry, who?

  GANTRY: What? The scientists, of course! Hiding in their labs working on baby embryos or whatever it is they do when we’re not looking. Now thank you, Doctor, this has been a real eye-opener. You just go on advising the President or whatever. After the break, folks, we’ll be here with Reverend Richard Fallow, who has made a call upon our great nation for a National Day of Prayer—with God’s help maybe we can drive the alien communists right off the planet, maybe right out of the universe. We’ll be right back.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Go back to the beginning of everything and you must face a choice. Mind before matter or matter before mind. Which one for you? The spiritualists will say the former; the materialists will say the latter. And neither one has an answer for what came before the beginning of everything. Before the Singularity. Before the Word. Curiously, between the two, we don’t know what precedes a Singularity, but we do know what precedes the Word. A single, drawn breath.”

  SAMANTHA AUGUST

  UN Refugee Camp outside of Gambola, Republic of Congo, June 8th

  The smoke from countless cook-fires was thin but pervasive, suspended like humanity’s own breath. It spanned the camp for as far as Kolo could see, from where he perched on a rickety stool beneath the awning of the temporary bar. Hunched over his lukewarm beer, he kept his head turned, eyes on the bright sunlit world and all the people passing back and forth on the lane, many singing as they carried food-packs and bundles of artificial wood.

  His own tribe was somewhere out there, now broken up, now nothing but memories of a brutal time, when everything was a struggle and death stalked them all like a bush-ghost from the forest. He’d long since abandoned his weapons, and the heavy knife at his belt was getting dull from shaving kindling from the odd blocks of wood that came from no tree he knew.

  Huddled in the shade at his feet, amidst rotting lemon peels and spilled beer, was Neela, as silent as ever. When the heroin had run out he’d plied her with gin, but now the gin wasn’t working either, although there’d been none of the usual convulsions and fever, the wild panicked eyes and the shivering. Even so, she stayed with him, and he didn’t know why.

  His thoughts had journeyed far. They had gone into the bush, where the spirits of old still remained. His thoughts were like children, lost and frightened in the deep forest. And in their wanderings, in the cold, damnable sobriety of his nights, they had come upon the ghosts of the men, women, and children he had slain, revisiting the moments of their deaths that stood so bleakly in contrast to his life. Each instant was punctuated by a gunshot, or the spattering rain of blood as he plunged or slid his knife through flesh.

  A child’s thoughts struggled with words. A child’s thoughts remained formless things, and he could not help but think of his own thoughts as young, fragile things, for they had led him to a new place, one he had never known before now. The faces of his slain looked upon those thoughts with pity, and that stung. For as with any child, shame was the deadliest enemy.

  He had never before felt shame. There had only been need. When the soul is starving, every meal becomes a bounteous feast, and it mattered not if the taste was bitter, if it was dirt and sweat, or blood and the tears of people on their knees begging for their lives. Each morsel was savored, and this, he now realized, made starvation itself an addiction. A soul that knew hunger knew hunger forever. Or so he had believed.

  His tribe was gone. His thoughts were lost. And now his shame huddled at his feet and refused to go away.

  Kolo could barely look at her. But looking inward was worse. Something clung to him on the inside, and it stank of recrimination. He wondered if this was what he had never before felt. He wondered if this was guilt.

  The beers couldn’t get him drunk. The weed stole the rest from his sleep. But his belly was full with real food, and that old other starvation—the one to do with power—had withered into dust and blown away, like a spinning spirit racing down the road. He’d lost his tribe only to find himself in another, in this camp filled with people who used to be his victims, who now laughed and sang and danced and spoke of God’s unblinking eye and sure hand.

  The sprawling camp itself was changing. Longer pieces of the artificial wood were now being used to build more permanent shelters—since the rains were coming. Heaps of perfectly shaped slate had appeared and roofs were being assembled, in a style Kolo had never seen before.

  No murders, no gangs, no drugs, no thieving. Even money seemed pointless. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d heard an argument.

  Was it all as simple as this? Food and shelter in abundance, and from these two simple, basic things, peace?

  Neela stirred at his feet and he looked down. She had sat up, her huge eyes fixed upon the street scene in the sunlight. Absently, she reached up to curl one hand over his left wrist, and then she spoke in her tiny voice. “We need to walk.”

  “We don’t,” said Kolo. “We’re safe. You’re safe. There are schools here now. I think—”

  She pulled herself upright, still gripping his wrist. “We need to walk.”

  “Walk where?”

  “Malawi.”

  “What?”

  “We need to walk to Malawi.”

  “Why? It’s the same there. Here and there, all the same.”

  “Buy a cart. For food and water, and blankets,” said Neela. “Then we walk.”

  “Why?” Kolo demanded
again, some of his old anger stirring awake.

  She looked up at him. “To save you,” she said.

  He laughed bitterly. “Girl, I’m no man to be saved.”

  “You are.”

  “Who are you going to save me from then?”

  “From me.”

  A child’s thoughts often struggled with words. But sometimes they cut to the heart.

  Baltimore, Maryland, June 9th

  Jeff worked for the power company five days a week. He used to be on call as well but too often he’d showed up drunk on call-outs after six PM, and his boss, who could have fired Jeff, had instead cut him out of the emergency response unit. A man with a mild case of the shakes was a man made weak and not one to cause a fuss, so Jeff had gotten the shit-jobs.

  But at least it was work. Besides, he’d been in the habit of swallowing his anger and humiliation and bringing it home, which kept things well out of the spotlight as far as his employers were concerned.

  These days, when he came home from work, he hardly spoke, ate whatever she’d made for him without complaint, and then retired to the bedroom once Sally was put to bed, where he’d weep himself into sleep.

  Annie felt pity, but they were slow drips, softly sizzling on the heat of a decade’s worth of rage. She had lived with fear and confusion for as long as she could remember, and while the fear was gone the confusion remained, caged like an animal awaiting slaughter. Cornered, it hissed and snarled, bared sharp teeth and lashed out with long claws to slice empty air. At other times it simply curled up as if wanting to die.

  Back and forth in her mind she went, and in the wake of Jeff’s inability to hurt her anymore, what should have been a growing strength within her instead left her feeling, if anything, even more helpless.

  Did she want to leave him? Take Sally and flee? But where would she go? Her mother was dead, her father in a hurry to join her and besides, he’d done his own share of beating on his children, and worse. Her older sister had run off and Annie had no idea where she’d gone, and that betrayal remained unforgivable.

  Besides, Jeff loved her. Or at least what passed for love for her husband: a thing full of control, domination and possession. Loved her like a master his slave, maybe. But that hardly mattered, did it, for the slave? Once the chains were snapped. What slave would stick around, when every memory was the razor slash of a loving whip?

  She didn’t know what kept her here. She could still recall, vividly, that sheet of spitting bacon fat she’d slung from the frying pan. How she’d wanted that burning liquid to reach his face. In that instant, she’d wanted so much pain from him, a single moment to answer every bruise, cracked rib, puffed up eye and jaw, the yanks on her hair, the fingernails digging into her arms. The kicks.

  She would have gone to jail for that, her only regret losing Sally. And that was the most frightening thing about that instant. She would have thrown her daughter away, just to get even.

  Meanwhile, Jeff huddled on the bed and bawled his eyes out, making as little noise as possible so as not to wake Sally. Annie would stand in the doorway, looking down on him, trying to work out what she was feeling.

  The television said this was happening everywhere. Divorces were through the roof, as women took their children and ran away from the bastards they’d married, and those bastards couldn’t hunt them down, couldn’t stalk them, couldn’t get near them. All the fear was gone but its legacy remained, with nowhere to go. People, it turned out, weren’t as forgiving as might have been expected.

  She wasn’t ready to forgive her husband. She wasn’t ready to comfort him, either. For now, she’d let him bleed, no different from what he used to do to her after a night’s beating. It wasn’t a frying pan full of bacon fat, but as far as getting her own back, it would have to do.

  Besides, she already had one child. She didn’t need another. Too many husbands were red-faced little children inside, turning wives into mothers they could beat up. Now they were orphans.

  All those people on Fox wringing their hands and talking about the breakdown of the American family because of abortion rights or gay marriages or whatever—well, none of those things stood a chance in the face of what truth could do. The ugly truth of men who’d never grown up. And now they’d lost their private playgrounds and there was no one left to bully.

  Was she now supposed to offer up a comforting arm?

  Fat chance, and Fox and its cry-babies could boo hoo all the way to the bank for all the good it would do.

  Jeff. Poor Jeff. Time to grow up.

  Los Angeles, June 9th, 1:26 PM

  Anthony was out on bail. The bail had been one dollar, the judge’s eyes blinking like an owl’s and a small smile curving his bloodless lips. Anthony remembered looks like that, from teachers and other assholes. It always arrived when the bastard knew that Anthony was helpless, that he couldn’t do nothing to hurt them.

  So he was out and the public defender, who looked a lot like his buddy Paulo’s sister, with that black hair like silk and those dark, dark eyes—she just shrugged and said it was getting like that on everything. Just Anthony’s bad luck that the shut-down had come when it did, right in the middle of hitting a bank. If they’d delayed the attempt, she said, even one day, they would’ve seen what was going down everywhere. They wouldn’t have bothered.

  A day earlier, and they’d all be dead. He was lucky, she said. But he didn’t feel lucky. He felt like a fool. Old Stubbs the bank guard had been right. The whole plan had been stupid. Those masks didn’t even have holes for their mouths. Nobody understood a fucking word they said.

  Okay, maybe that was funny. The cops thought so. The judge thought so. And that glint in the PD’s dark, dark eyes, probably showed that she’d thought so, too. Paulo’s sister never had time for Anthony. But this public defender—he thought he might have fallen in love.

  The world was full of jokes. It fucked with the head. It fucked with the heart. It fucked with good luck and it fucked with bad luck. The charges weren’t going away. They’d scared a lot of innocent people that day. He was starting to feel bad about that.

  The day was hot but, fucking miracle, it had rained last night. So it wasn’t as hot as it could have been. And somehow the air was cleaner. It didn’t have that half-dead smell that came up off the pavement like those shimmering waves that he supposed was heat.

  He knew he was going to jail. But that didn’t sound so bad now. Paulo had told him that all the shit that used to go on inside wasn’t going on anymore. No rapes, no shivs in the back. But no drugs either. That sucked. Good and bad, then. Now prison was just a fucking boarding house, roof over the head, decent bed, three meals, and plenty of people talking shit about shit. He could hit the weights in there, put on some muscle. He could get disciplined. That was a good thing, people said. Getting disciplined.

  Then he’d come out and look up Angelina Estevez, heaven’s own public defender. He’d be all cleaned and cut sharp and looking good, not heading down a bad path because all those bad paths were gone.

  So now he walked, on his little vacation before going up, and the pavement didn’t stink and the hot was not brutal hot, and there were no wildfires in the hills so the sky wasn’t hazy. There’d been rain—who could believe that? Amazing. He walked, and he felt kinda … good. Relaxed, not bothered by fuck all. Those aliens—it was an amazing world, dammit. Even the cops couldn’t beat the shit out of people anymore.

  And that was a point, what Paulo kept harping on about. The ‘Man’ was fucked. Anthony couldn’t believe Paulo used that old name for them, but he did. Probably got it from his upstate ten-to-thirty old man. Anyway, fucked and fucked up, Paulo said. The Man couldn’t do shit.

  And now the Mexicans were coming, only they weren’t coming as much as they’d been at first, when the fences went down and that whole giant wall thing turned out to be a joke. They weren’t coming so much, said Paulo, because the shit wasn’t so bad anymore south of the border. The drugs were gone, the gangs were gone, th
e killers, too. And all those car plants that went down there for cheap labor, well, they were now making those new engines, and suddenly there was work.

  He missed Paulo. His buddy had skipped bail and gone down to Mexico to get a job. How fucked up was that? People were just going back and forth and the Man couldn’t do a thing about it.

  Freedom, that’s what this was. The aliens were fucking with the President’s head, with all the presidents all over the world and all their fucking heads, too. Fucking up the cops. Armies, terrorists, dealers, fucking them all up. Hah.

  Freedom, yeah, that’s what he was feeling. And here was Sticks, sitting on the bus stop bench. Fucking one dollar bail.

  “Hey bro.”

  Sticks glanced over. “Bony Tony!”

  “Don’t call me that. I’m hitting the weights when I go in. Gonna pack some muscle.”

  “Beats brains, don’t it?”

  “You should talk. Stubbs nailed us all in like, ten seconds.”

  “They’ll hit the prisons first.”

  “Who?”

  “The bug-eyed Martians, fool. They’ll sweep us up and stick us into the mines. Weights, bro? Hah. You’ll be swinging a pick.”

  “If I am, bro, you’ll be right there beside me.”

  “Fuck that. I’m no slave. I got my way out.”

  “You going to run, man? Where? Mexico? Paulo—”

  “Paulo’s a fool, as bad as you, bro. Nothing but fools. I’m drinking the kool-aid.”

  “Kool-aid? What the fuck you talking about?”

  “They ain’t getting me. They ain’t fucking with me. There’s a bunch of us. It’s freedom or death. You want to grovel you go right ahead. Have fun in the mines on the moon, bro. Once they got you, they won’t let you kill yourself. They’ll just work you to the bone, Bony Tony. Weights, huh? Joke.”

  “You’re gonna kill yourself?”