Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  Oh, and we can’t even murder our way clear of it early. The deliberate killing of thinking beings (or thinking machines for that matter—there is a reason we really don’t want to see any progress in AI) generates huge thaumic fields that can be used for, for want of a better word, necromancy. And if we don’t use the power, someone—or something else—will.

  “There’s a prison near a city in the north of Iran called Mashad, I don’t know where exactly, they put me up in an airport hotel overnight, then shipped me there in an Air Force helicopter—it’s called Vakilabad, and it’s near the border. They get a lot of drug traffickers there. Well, mules: illiterate, dirt-poor Afghan refugees who cross the border on foot with half a kilo of heroin in their pockets. There’s no fence on the frontier, and no signs to tell them that the Islamic Republic of Iran has the death penalty for possession of twenty grams and that they won’t get a defense lawyer.”

  Which is what gave our delightful Home Secretary cold feet about cooperation. See, here in the UK twenty grams of heroin is good for a slap on the wrist if you’re an addict; maybe a six-month sentence if they think you’re dealing. A mule caught entering the UK with half a kilo is going to get somewhere between a five- and eight-year sentence, with time off for good behavior and deportation at the end. Scragging them is seen as a bit of an overreaction. Especially as HMG is signatory to a whole bunch of treaties requiring us to work towards the abolition of the death penalty worldwide.

  Mo takes a much bigger mouthful of whisky, closes her eyes, and swallows. Then she starts spluttering. I take her tumbler and refill it, wait for the coughing to subside, then offer it to her.

  She continues, quietly and with remarkably little affect. “Vakilabad is a large prison, and there is a shed in the prison with a substantial roof beam running its length. They hang people from the beam; they make the prisoners stand on tall stools, then kick them away. It can take sixty bodies at one time, they told me, and although they seldom fill it up they use it every week. It’s the world’s largest gallows: they’re very proud of it.”

  She puts her glass down. I hug her for a while, speechless with the horror of it.

  “My contact was a man named Ahmad, from the VEVAK. What I thought I was getting into was a straightforward decontamination job—clearing up a battlefield from the Iran-Iraq War where there’d been a huge human wave attack, followed by a haunting. And that’s what Ahmad seemed to think, too, when he met me. It was all fairly laid-back at first, until a bunch of Pasdaran special forces troops turned up, led by a lieutenant—that’s the Revolutionary Guard. And they told Ahmad that the real problem was that the governor of Vakilabad prison had been unable to carry out any executions for nearly a month because a Djinn, an evil spirit, had . . . well.” She’s shaking. “I need another nip,” she adds, pulling free and picking up her tumbler again.

  “A Djinn?” I ask, then bite my tongue again: it’s not my job to prompt her. She’ll spill when she’s good and ready.

  “Well, there was a bit of an argument, and I nearly stamped my foot and told them it was a breach of protocol, but you don’t want to get into a pissing match with the local equivalent of the Waffen-SS. Ahmad said later that he’d had a bad feeling about the assignment from the start, thought it was a whitewash for something, but he didn’t like to say . . . So anyway, they piled us into a couple of Toyotas and drove us from the airport to the prison: a horrible place. It smelled of shit and despair. Once inside we were taken directly to this shed. The death chamber. I was . . . afraid. You know? You can never be quite certain what the revolutionary guards are planning because they are entirely rational, within the constraints of a belief system that is based on crazy and mutually contradictory axioms. But they gave me the VIP treatment, tea and refreshments, and they let me keep my instrument, so . . .

  “We got to the death chamber. There were four bodies hanging there, and they were clearly dead, but not in the manner prescribed by law. The execution party had left in a hurry: three of the stools were still upright. The victims were levitating, Bob, hovering just below the beam the ropes were tied to, and their eyes were glowing—you know what I mean? The bioluminescence thing? Luminous worms in the darkness. They were all quite dead, and the smell was atrocious: they’d been floating there for a week, chanting: ‘Aw der hal amedn aset, aw der hal amedn aset.’ Over and over again. Through dead men’s throats.”

  She pauses for another suck at the water of life and I follow her example.

  “I asked Ahmad. ‘It means, he is coming,’ he explained. Ahmad was clearly just inches away from crapping himself with fear. ‘Now please would you banish the Djinn that is haunting gallows so these fine fellows will let us go?’”

  She transfers her whisky glass to her left hand and reaches behind her with the right, to touch the violin case.

  “I demanded some more background. Vakilabad has been busy for the past few years. He wouldn’t tell me how many people they’d hanged there, but when I guessed over a thousand he didn’t correct me downwards. Seems the execution parties had been troubled by odd sounds, emanations, chills and thumps and wails for some time; they’d put it down to, well. You can guess. I checked, then, and the background thaum reading was off the scale. Executions are a form of human sacrifice, after all, and this was death magic on a huge scale.”

  She takes another sip. She’s draining the glass steadily; I reckon she’s only got ten or fifteen minutes left before she drinks herself into a stupor. What she’s telling me suggests I ought to join in, lest I have some very bad dreams, so I knock back a burning mouthful of spirit. It’s singularly disrespectful to a portwood finished single malt, but it’s too late to go back to the bathroom cabinet to check if there’s any Temazepam left—mixing drink and sedatives is dangerous.

  “I had a dilemma, love.” I feel her shoulders relax slightly. “If it had been a normal exorcism I’d have had no problem helping out. But they wanted the death chamber clearing down and neutralized so they could go back to hanging people. Nobody gave a shit about the thaum count until it got in the way of them strangling illiterate peasants. But then it was all, oh, INTERPOL will know someone who can help us out! Won’t they?”

  She falls silent for a moment. Then, fiercely: “I will not be complicit, an enabler for judicial mass-murder!”

  “I—” I swallow. “You refused? But what—”

  “I tried to refuse at first. The Pasdaran officer was really angry, although Ahmad said he understood. They had a big shouting match. I mentioned the European Convention on Human Rights and the recent EU Commission ruling on withdrawal of coordination of drug interdiction until they ceased executions and pointed out I’d be violating our own policy guidelines if I didn’t obtain a legal waiver from the Home Office first.

  “Then Firouz—the Pasdaran lieutenant—threatened to make me stay in the death chamber until I cooperated. With a Greek chorus of corpses chanting in the background and a thaum level off the scale. And he had his hand on his pistol—still holstered—and he was giving me the eye. You know? Well no, you probably don’t: you’re male. But anyway, I lost my temper. So I nodded and smiled and took out my violin and made the dead men dance.

  “The cadavers dropped, one by one. And so did Firouz. He’d threatened me, so I used his soul as duct tape to paper over the crack that had opened under the gallows.”

  She takes a final sip, draining her tumbler. I nod along with her, not trusting myself to speak. This is a part of my work, you see. The organization puts Mo in situations where the only way to survive is to become one of the monsters, and it’s part of my job to hold her together even when she does things that make me want to throw up.

  “The Pasdaran soldiers were freaked out and scared, but I took enough from their souls that they didn’t have the wits to realize I was responsible. I can be subtle when I need to. And Ahmad, he, he got it. I explained that this power doesn’t come without a cost, and that if t
hey began hanging people again—anywhere within the jail’s walls—there’d almost certainly be a resumption. ‘But what are we to do with the smugglers and criminals?’ he asked. Stop killing them, I suggested. He said he thought it was a good idea and he’d pass it up the line, which means he’ll write a report and they’ll ignore it.

  “Then the Pasdaran sergeant decided that waiting around in a haunted execution shed with a spook and a crazy foreign woman and a lieutenant who’d just died of causes unknown was a bad idea, so they shoved us all in the back of a truck and drove me back to the airport and here I am look at me I’m not shaking I’m not mad I’m just so angry I could kill someone . . .”

  11.

  BOARDROOMS AND BROKERS

  A LOT CAN HAPPEN IN A MONTH.

  A month ago I was back in the office, recovering from the avalanche of virtual paperwork generated by the aftermath of the GOD GAME RAINBOW mess (not to mention the still-unfolding headache of the COBWEB MAZE working group and BLOODY BARON process—our very own happy fun mole hunt), trying to get a handle on my new roles and responsibilities, having Pete’s mentoring program dumped on my desk, and worrying about the doghouse Mo was making me sleep in.

  Now I think things with Mo are patched up—at least insofar as they can be, when she’s still having screaming gallows-chamber nightmares three times a week. Hell, I’m having nightmares about what she did, and we’re both resorting to alcohol as a sleeping aid more often than is strictly healthy. I’d go and scream at her supervisory board if I thought it would do any good, but the problem is that somebody has to do these jobs, and if not Mo, then who? So I confine myself to writing a stiffly worded memo petitioning them to please fucking ease up on her for a while, because if she gets another assignment like Vakilabad there’s a good chance it will break her. And then I pace her with the whisky bottle each evening.

  Meanwhile, Andy is drifting from abandoned store room to temporarily vacant cubicle like a damned soul in exile, clutching his laptop; Pete is getting his teeth into the MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY job, prototyping Facebook awareness campaigns and an official Laundry Twitter feed,* and I am attending too many committee meetings.

  In addition to GOD GAME BLACK, GOD GAME RAINBOW, COBWEB MAZE, and BLOODY BARON, they have dropped another fucking committee process on my head. For my sins and because I discovered a wunch of bankers suffering from the syndrome to which we’ve assigned the keyword OPERA CAPE, I have been seconded to the shiny new exploration phase of DRESDEN RICE, and if you think that code name sounds like it has something to do with the V-word, have a cigar. It’s a sign that not everybody in the bureaucracy is taking our new photophobic colleagues entirely seriously, because it’s a really big security no-no to give a project a moniker that bears any relationship whatsoever to its subject matter. Breaches compartmentalization or something. But for some reason all you have to do is utter the word “vampire” and people around here pull out the pointy plastic choppers and the opera cape like they’re some sort of joke.

  It’s not, actually, very funny. It’s like turning up for work one morning at the Met Office and discovering that the earnest people who bring us the shipping forecast are all jovial Young Earth creationists who think Global Warming is a conspiracy by climatologists who are trying to use it to get rich. Or discovering that the Department for Trade and Industry is run by a Reiki practitioner whose special advisor is an astrologer. Or like finding out that the Ministry of Defense is lobbying for the urgent renewal of our strategic nuclear deterrent because it is vitally important to be able to nuke the capital of the Soviet Union at five minutes’ notice.* For some reason we seem to have a screamingly huge organizational blind spot—a part of our remit that nobody even believes exists.

  But be that as it may, I am jointly assigned as a humble junior manager in External Assets and as private secretary to DSS Angleton. And as a junior manager it is my fate to sit in on the committees my bosses can’t be arsed attending. Consequently I don’t have time to investigate our organizational case of macular degeneration right now because I’m up to my eyeballs in meetings. I don’t even get to goof off from the boardroom antics—I have to summarize for them. It’s like being forced to test a hideous new role-playing game in which you play at being gray-suited office minions trapped in a hellish world of paper-shuffling and boardroom presentations (mediated by frequent dice rolls) without meaning or magic. And because of the fucking DRESDEN RICE committee other people are laughing at me! Speaking as the former laugh-a-minute guy around here, I’ve got to say that it stings.

  So, while I’m busy spending up to six hours in committees every day—yes, the beatings will continue until morale improves—let me give you a whistle-stop tour of the highlights of what’s been going on in the New Annex since last month, in the shape of a clichéd movie montage.

  • • •

  KNOCK KNOCK.

  Pete is not expecting anyone to come knocking on his office door. Or rather, the door of the temporarily vacant office to which he has been given a key and in which he has had installed a PC, a chair, a desk, and a bookshelf full of Aramaic concordances. When it comes, Pete is holed up inside, in jeans and a polo shirt, swearing mildly at a web design application as he hunts for typos and grammatical infelicities in the copy he has spent the past weeks laboriously updating from the MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY brochure.

  Pete looks up. “Come in?” he calls.

  The door opens. It’s Andy, escorting a gawky late-teenage stranger on the usual office disorientation tour, wherein they meet loads of strangers and instantly forget their names, merely retaining a vague impression of organizational complexity gone to seed. Intern, Pete thinks instantly, then with a flash of mortification: Am I going native already? He’s been here for five weeks; it feels like forever and he’s itching to get back to his parish. However the bishop has clearly been nobbled, for he’s sent a circuit priest to pick up the ropes without any complaints or queries; this is England, where the Church is notionally still part of the state, and there’s probably an Office of Occult Coordination tucked away in Canterbury to handle embarrassments like this. At least Sandy is being understanding, and HR are fine with him taking time off work to accompany her to the antenatal clinic.

  Pete is desperately aware of his lack of contact with the pastoral concerns of his people, like a nagging awareness that he’s not getting enough vitamins in his diet; but the Laundry is more than capable of pandering to his guilty pleasure, offering glimpses deep into the fascinating patch of applied linguistics that he has tried to build an academic career in. (This Enochian metagrammar thing they’ve been working with demands to be contextualized with the variant proto-Aramaic dialects from which it strikes disturbing echoes.) But instead, they’ve given him this training-wheels web design assignment . . . it’s a learning experience and it’ll probably come in handy when he goes back to the parish newsletter, but it’s not work.

  “Pete? Hi, I’d like you to meet one of our newest recruits.” Andy smiles warmly as he oozes into the office and somehow migrates into the ratty visitor’s chair without disrupting the pile of yellowing government posters stacked precariously in front of it. “Alex, this is Dr. Peter Wilson, also a recent recruit. Pete, this is Alex Schwartz. Um. Alex is also a doctor, although his PhD is in theoretical mathematics, not Aramaic lexicography. Alex, Pete is a vicar by trade.”

  Alex, standing beside the door, attempts to fade into the wallpaper. He looks barely old enough to be out of school, much less to have earned a PhD. There is something, Pete realizes, that is not quite right about this picture. The body language is remarkably stand-offish. Maybe he’s an atheist or something? Pete composes his face: “Right now I’m learning to be a web designer,” he says as disarmingly as possible. “What brings you here?”

  Andy clears his throat. “Alex is a member of a quantitative analysis research group who inadvertently stubbed their collective toe on something significant, so we’re taking
them through the usual in-processing and orientation while we work out what to do with them—basically, health and safety training. Then we and they can decide whether to release them back to what they were doing before, on inactive status, or find a more permanent role for them within the agency if they’re so inclined. Bob told me you were working on MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY, which is a rather low-hazard task, and I was thinking you might want to take on an assistant, for mentoring—”

  Gosh, I’ve only been here a few weeks! If they’re asking me to mentor someone, they must be really overloaded with new fish! Pete leans back and, while directing his eyes at Andy, tries to build up a picture of Alex using only his peripheral vision. The wallflower is braced against the side of the filing cabinet. Pallid skin, dark hair, the remains of what must have been a hideously embarrassing adolescent acne attack barely visible on his jawline. If he had better fashion sense he could make a pretty run-of-the-mill goth, but he’s dressed head to toe in M&S office weeds, and hasn’t even discovered the if-everything-you-wear-is-black-it-always-matches trick. He’s seen the type before—they’re all too common on Divinity degree courses: otherworldly, head stuck in a cloud of theory and trainer laces tangled together at ground level. Someone ought to take him in hand, but Pete is brutally aware that with a parish to get back to and the responsibilities of impending fatherhood he just doesn’t have the spare energy for the job. “That’s interesting,” he says to Andy. “What does the mentoring job entail?”