The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  ScumberCorp’s interrogators on the Moon had described for him how he’d broken laws and harmed innocent people. Of the various misdeeds attributed to him, he recalled not a thing. All memories of his time on the Moon had been wiped clean along with his emotions. There might be other memories surviving but every attempt at prying into them had so far engulfed him in a massive phobic attack, a panic that wrapped around him like a suffocating plastic bag. When it stopped and he’d regained his equilibrium, he could not find the terror within him, could not touch the fear again … until he tried remembering the Moon.

  Of his childhood, he’d found one scene that had somehow escaped the axe. It had about it a curious transparency, as if he’d caught it just at the point where it was about to slip away forever. Like an old photograph, it had lost its color, its definition. He saw two people—his parents? There was a lake glittering behind them, but no specifics—no smells, for instance, no sounds. No names for anything. His parents had no names. He had no name.

  He tried to bring that memory into focus, as if he could take it in his hands and warm it, make it glow.

  His eyelids fluttered. His head lolled forward.

  He snapped upright, found his hands clutching the side of the podium, and took a step back. He’d been thinking of something, daydreaming about a place, but it was gone now. The thing was (and the interrogators didn’t know this), he did have memories; he just didn’t know how to hold onto them.

  He stood in front of a hostile class of children, described as “nons” because to society they were non-entities. He felt nothing either for them or their predicament. Their cruel circumstance lay before him like the ruins of his classroom; he could see it and the hopelessness to it: There was no escape, no ladder up. All of which meant nothing to Angel Rueda. For all the sense he had of it, he might have been viewing the class through the hidden camera lens.

  He drew his hand from his pocket. In his palm lay an iridescent cube no larger than a die. It contained billions of facets, each coated with information. This was his program. He dropped it into place in the lectern of the podium. A small cover slid into place over it and a green light came on. That was the last thing he saw.

  Something without substance but dark and impenetrable—what the instructor had called squid ink—enveloped his consciousness. Where he’d been an empty vessel before, he shrank now, withdrawing altogether. It was a feeling akin to the moment the phobia of remembering opened to devour him, except that it never opened. As he shrank, the program like an entity swelled into the abandoned space.

  He began to speak. “Good morning,” he heard himself say. “My name is Seraph. I’m your astronomy and physical sciences teacher.”

  “That’s twitcher, borracho!” called out one of the nons.

  The program ignored the jibe and sailed right along. He listened to its drone—his voice but not his words. He knew nothing in particular about how stars were formed, which was what he talked about. The manner of speaking, the dull cadence, belonged to someone else.

  From where he dangled, he saw the classroom as through the wrong end of a telescope, across a wide black chasm. With effort he found he could assemble what he saw into recognition patterns, but it took all of his attention to accomplish. He could see but he could not realize.

  He was saying, “Low mass stars are cooler and have very long life spans. The high mass stars burn hotter and quicker. If our Sun were a high mass star—an O star, say—it would already have burned itself out.”

  “Kinda like you, hey, twitch?”

  The class laughed.

  Unperturbed, the program continued, “Given that, we can predict that these hot O stars existing in our sky are fairly new additions to our universe, and that, right now, as I’m speaking to you, more new stars are being created.”

  Suddenly, he couldn’t see the room anymore. The black chasm pushed up like magma to block his view. Its shape conformed to something like a human head—a LifeMask without features inside his mind. The chasm spoke to him. “Angel,” it called, “Angel, do you hear me?” The voice was much louder than his own mechanical recitation.

  “Sí.” He spoke, but only in his mind, a word he had not known until that moment. His mouth continued to babble science. “Yes, I do.”

  “I feel you quite near. What has happened to you? Have you freed yourself of them?”

  Monitoring its host, the program must have sensed a disturbance in the field with which it surrounded him. Angel found himself abruptly damped down. The room vanished altogether. Only his internal self remained, pressed in, sealed shut. “¿Quien? Who do you mean?” he managed to ask.

  As if from a great distance the voice answered, “Pensan matar….”

  “Wait,” he called, but the presence evaporated, taking with it his new language.

  He was wrestling against the shackles of the program when the first shot went off.

  The speech aborted. The program flung him into full command of himself. He pitched forward as if thrown into his body. Reeling to stay upright, he clung to the podium. The room tilted and came back to true like the deck of a ship on rough seas. His rubbery legs braced against collapse.

  At the back of the room, a tall Latino non turned to face him. The kid held a nasty, short-barreled black gun. He had fired a burst high into the back wall, blasting a line of tiles. One tile had splintered, revealing a pocket of embedded, ruined electronics. Somewhere, distantly, a klaxon was honking.

  “Hey, hey, twitcher,” the non said, “it’s lights out time for you. You’re the guest of honor today and I collect bigtime. Adios.”

  The non stalked him down the aisle. Others to either side crouched down, some terrified, others grinning.

  The non raised the black gun to take aim.

  Angel drew his pistol and shot the non through the bridge of the nose. The body kept marching, but the head snapped back; a net of bloody tissue erupted out behind the kid, and all at once he seemed to slide. His left foot snapped up too high. His dead arms flailed as if grabbing for balance. The gun spun away, skittered two rows and banged off a desk leg.

  More alarms went off, much closer. An explosion shook the whole room. A chunk of wall plaster jumped to the floor. Some of the kids screamed. A few leaped to their feet as tear gas jets around the ceiling hissed to life.

  In the confusion, a second kid dove for the black gun. He grabbed it and came up firing at Angel, who promptly shot him down. He’d been watching the weapon, anticipating a second attack, with what instincts he could not say. They mean to kill, the voice had warned. Didn’t they, though?

  The second killing ignited the class. Shrieking and coughing, a herd of them scrambled for the door. Others, too terrified to move, crouched under their desks. The gas settled like a gauze over the room, thickening. There must have been a dozen alarms going off, so many they sounded like a single throbbing horn.

  The nons threw open the door as a second explosion rocked the foundations. Tiles fell out of the walls. The first non to the door was shot as she stepped into the hallway. Some of the murderous barrage pinged off the door.

  “Stay in here!” Angel ordered. He choked and lowered his head for a second. The mask filtered some of the sting from the gas. It would be worse for the nons. He heard the door slam shut, and glanced up. His eyes were flooding.

  Trapped, the students bent double, covering their heads. They retched and cried, glared hatefully at him, glared as if he were the cause of this nightmare.

  He had to act. They could not stay here. A few minutes more and he would be blind and sick on the floor beside them, where anyone could pick up the gun and succeed where the first two assassins had failed.

  He could think of only one reasonable alternative. He hoped Peat wouldn’t kill him for it.

  He waved his gun toward the gallery door and said, “Come with me!” He glanced back at the second non he’d shot, to make sure the black gun hadn’t taken a walk, then ran past his students to the steel door.

&nbs
p; It didn’t open.

  He looked at the shattered tiles in the back of the room. The non assassin had done a very good job. No one on the other end of the monitor would know he had survived, and without knowing that, they would never open the door.

  He hammered, his fist thundering against the metal. When that didn’t work, he called to unseen microphones, “This is Seraph! Let me out!” The class huddled around him, wheezing and sobbing. The noise from the hallway jumped in volume as another student risked that exit again. Resolutely, he pounded away with both fists.

  The door clicked open. For a second he couldn’t believe it. Then he launched himself against it before it latched again. The door swung out, struck some obstruction, but yawned the rest of the way open. He wedged himself in place to keep it from closing and dragged the nearest kids into the dark gallery. He counted a dozen of them. Where the rest were, he couldn’t be sure. They could be lying unconscious in the middle of the room for all he could tell—the gas had thickened to an impenetrable soup. He could hardly make out the shape of the podium.

  When he stepped into the gallery, he found the class gathered around a tall, dark woman. She lay on the floor, leaning back against the wall, one hand cradling her forehead. Her expression was creased with pain. One eye scrutinized him from between her fingers. She muttered, “Next time, I’ll knock first.”

  With a queer feeling of recognition, he said, “I know you.”

  “You—you’re Angel?” The woman straightened up, wincing. “My God, I’d taken you for dead.” Her sight fell to the gun in his hand.

  He glanced down at it, realizing that he had killed two people with it, and that he felt no remorse, felt nothing whatsoever. His only reaction was to wonder when he had learned to shoot. “We should leave,” he commented, and put the gun away.

  One of the weeping nons interjected. “Seraph? We ain’t supposed to be in here. The bullgods’ll do us, they catch us in here. You don’t know…”

  He looked all around the gallery. No idea came to him. He’d gotten them out of the room, and that seemed to be the extent of his captaincy. “We should leave,” he repeated.

  From the darkness overhead, the disembodied voice of Chikako Peat spoke up like Jehovah addressing Moses. “He’s right, Seraph, they’re in trouble, get them out of there. Take them to classroom E. It’s not in use—there’s no gas in there and I’ll unlock the gallery door. They’ll be locked in from both sides, safe till this blows over.”

  Angel nodded to the ceiling. Before he could move, a loud report sounded from the classroom. Angel spun around and fell.

  Lyell cried, “Jesus, he’s been shot!”

  An erratic hail of bullets shattered one of the dirty glass panels in the opposite wall. A swath of sunlight sliced across the gallery floor. Peat’s voice shouted, “Get him out of the doorway!”

  Lyell grabbed hold of his foot, but he rose up on his own and slid out of the line of fire. Another burst of fire spanged into the glass and plaster. Angel kicked the door closed and climbed to his feet. Dust smoked around him.

  “They couldn’t see me through the gas,” he observed. His upper left arm was dark with blood. “It’s okay, I think—went straight through the muscle.” He touched the wound, and jumped, hissing.

  “We’ll play doctor later. Get out of there now,” said Peat. “I don’t have any more time to devote to you. And, Miss Lyell, you will have all my answers when you arrive.”

  Broken glass cracked underfoot. Angel could see the glow from the LifeMask on the wall beside him as he led the nons to classroom E. Behind them someone pounded on the door.

  When they had been locked in, he asked Lyell, “What did Chikako Peat mean, Miss Lyell? What answers do you have?”

  “She meant that I knew about this riot beforehand. I know who orchestrated it. I still don’t understand why.”

  “Oh,” he said, mildly surprised, “I thought maybe this happened every day here.”

  Lyell started to laugh. “Not every day, no. Just on the days they let Angels teach.”

  He supposed that was a joke.

  As they hurried down the dark corridor, he listened with growing unease to what she had to say.

  ***

  The doors to the teachers’ lounge hung ajar. In the principal’s office, ceiling fluorescents that were dark before had been ignited, lending dimension to what had been smoky void. The space was a huge, warehouse enclosure with corrugated walls. Where they saw entrances, the doors hung open, offering sanctuary to anyone who managed to work their way in from the chaos above. The cubicles had been sealed up like roll-top desks all in a row. In the vast room, only Chikako Peat remained.

  She watched her monitor screens, paced back and forth, and once picked up the insistent desk phone and yelled obscenities into it. The sounds of a full-blown assault echoed from the speakers above the monitors—a ghost army doing battle in an empty room.

  As Lyell and Angel neared, Peat swung around and watched them. She switched off the cacophony from the speakers, pointed at Angel’s head. “Take that damn thing off. I want to see when anything penetrates the lock on your brain.”

  He reached up with his good right arm and fumblingly unplugged the throat latch. “I thought the whole idea was to avoid that,” he said.

  “Not with me.”

  The false-face vanished, replaced by dull gray mesh, like a fencer’s mask. Behind it, his features were a smear. He pushed the mask over his head, dropping it on the triangular desktop. His face glistened with sweat, and his skin had turned milky. He dabbed at his left eyelid.

  Quietly, Lyell said, “He needs medical attention.”

  “He’ll have to wait in line. As things stand, the containment gates for sealing off the sections of Isis are blown, almost every one. Circuit’s are cut. There isn’t a single corridor in here left undamaged. We don’t know how many guns are floating around free, but by my count we have five dead twitchers, thirty-five dead nons and climbing, twice that many injured, and no idea how many bullgods left, because they’re too motherfucking stupid to call in and tell me!” She regained her composure before continuing. “I’ve sent home anyone I can find. I called in reinforcements the moment you left, but they seem extraordinarily slow to arrive. If I’m going to go down with the ship, I would like to know at least what sank me.”

  Lyell said, “You know there won’t be any reinforcements. ScumberCorp won’t release them till it’s confirmed his death.”

  Peat asked, “Are you Xau Dâu, Señor Rueda?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Funny, I knew you were going to say that. Maybe we should shut off that goddamned skullcap of yours and see what emerges. You get a lot of mileage out of that fucking crab, don’t you? Poor Angel Rueda, que lastima.”

  “Lo siento mucho,” he responded automatically. He knitted his brow, hearing himself speak words he didn’t know.

  “Did they bring you down from the Moon?”

  He glanced at Lyell. “Yes. I was escorted down. May I sit?”

  Peat nodded, staring into Lyell’s eyes. “So, your story is true.”

  “Would I have gotten myself locked in here otherwise?” Lyell asked. “Why don’t we leave Isis now? Why wait?”

  “It’s my duty. There’s no one else.”

  Lyell leaned forward. “Look, your duty’s done here. When the reinforcements finally come in, there will be a blond man named Mingo at the head of them—”

  “Mingo? I know about Mingo. He’s an ICSS inspector, thinks he owns the school, the assho—”

  “He’s not an inspector, it’s a cover, a blind, it gets him in places. He works for SC, sub rosa. Get me? If he finds out that you know what you know, he’s going to shoot you. Probably if he finds out that Angel’s escaped, he’ll kill you anyway, just to hedge his bets. No one is going to know that you didn’t die in the riot. No one.”

  Under the weight of that scenario, Chikako Peat’s composure finally slipped.

  “I told you,” Ly
ell said, “this entire event was concocted to eliminate him in a way that disguises what’s really going on” —she tossed the LifeMask across the desk— “the same as this thing does. Mingo will wipe out the entire school if he has to.”

  “Who in the hell are you?” Peat asked her.

  “I’m a very good pijin.”

  Peat sat back in her chair. Her perfect eyebrows arched for a moment, then dropped. She began to chuckle, and continued as she lit a cigarette. She said, “So. Now everything’s in its place. That’s what you were last time, too.”

  Angel looked from one to the other. “The last time? You’ve met before?”

  “Just like you and me,” Lyell replied. Turning, she said, “There’s an escape tunnel out of here, isn’t there?”

  “Naturally. One of the few safeguards required by a law.”

  “Does it take us into the city or route us onto a skywalk?”

  “Into the city, one way in and one out,” Peat told her. “Don’t worry, once we’re in the Overcity, I’ve got connections. We’ll be fine.”

  “Only if we survive. We’re going to need a different mask for him. I’m sure they’re watching for this one.”

  “All right, then.” Peat stood up and slipped her feet into a pair of solferino sling-back shoes. “I resign my post.”

  From across the room, a voice shouted, “Hold it!”

  Lyell turned, expecting to find Mingo in dark glasses, but it was one of the nons, a blood-streaked, bristle-headed, pink-skinned and tattooed punk. He held one of the black guns, and he came forward from between the clerical cubicles.

  “How did he get this far?” Peat asked no one in particular.

  The non gestured at Angel. He said, “He’s the one, isn’t he? I made it to that room, and he wasn’t home. Nobody got him yet. He’s mine. Yeah.” He stared at each of them, training the gun on each in turn. “Yeah, you’re all mine,” he said.