Silver Screen

by Justina Robson

  The abbot had easily snatched it from Jane's possession, but it was only a matter of time before someone—me first, then who?—came for it. The abbot must try to reclaim it, and so would begin and perpetuate a war in which everyone Roy had come to despise was thoroughly implicated: his father, the Company, and other corporate interests, the nuttier of his Green friends, soft-headed hippy-shits, and the more stupid and radical side of academia.

  Since the world and everything in it was already the physical workings of that calculation, and beyond a single person's comprehension, the sheer mindnumbing pointlessness of fighting to own intellectual property rights on the thing must have made him howl fit to wet his pants. It was the supreme vengeance of a master joker. The Source didn't need to be known and transmitted because it was the deep structure of life itself, even machine life. It was perfect. Only his last act didn't quite work because, as he was now half of the Shoal, he wasn't laughing. The little sod.

  But maybe Jane was right, too, and the scatter of loose nanytes set adrift in the hopes of seeding a mechanoid world really did need the thing to help themselves survive long-term. It still seemed possible and, even if not, I was sure the Greens believed it to be so, and would hound me until they got satisfaction.

  But why was I on Roy's hit list? And why Og, who had been grating and vicious in their fights, but I thought more valued than any of Roy's sycophantic chums? And, even though he was socially artless, Roy knew enough about the human condition to realize that 901’s trial could have little chance of any other outcome than death for Nine.

  The Shoal itself suggested that he may have been a pawn in an AI conspiracy, or victim of plans really hatched by Jane and left to work themselves out after her exit. It didn't make sense. I remembered that Lula was also a key figure—901 had known that much and kept it secret. And she'd kept it secret from me. What could be so important? We, who used to eat ice cream out of the same tub with the same spoon, and she didn't tell me.

  Now, Lula and Roy had got along well; her engineering skills just about matched his theoretical ones, and they'd had a kind of admiration club going. But they never dated or had a special relationship, as far as I knew. Further, she was now homeless and jobless, thanks largely to him, and how could that action on a friend add up to any kind of victory? I felt I was somehow seeing everything, but it was all about-face. I couldn't see the one obvious thing that made it all coherent. I wished I knew where Lula was. Even thinking of her in passing made my heart clench. I felt so sure that if she was all right and able to call, she would have. I'd better figure things out soon.

  I let my hands go limp with the book open on my lap. My right-hand tremor eased a bit as it rested on my leg. I looked out of the window and saw that tiny flakes of snow were blowing in gusts across the dip in the ground where my cottage was. Across the hill in front, the path showed as a white zigzag line until it vanished behind a blasted copse of trees on my right, only to reappear alongside the small stream, winding towards me. I'd see anyone coming, unless the snowfall thickened.

  I made myself some soup and drank it, staring at the vast landscape which towered up on all sides. The ground was uneven enough that landing even the lightest helicopter would be difficult. But the people I was expecting probably wouldn't come that way.

  As the afternoon deepened into evening, I put the infuriating diary aside for an hour and picked up the comic book again. Thunder Road is a strange character. Named after some old Harley-Davidson dream of the endless highway, she isn't so much a woman as the embodiment of the lone renegade—no particular vision, no particular mission, but an incredible momentum. She doesn't even search. When she finds things, she takes them as they are. Look at Hueva Montana, the half-bird girl, and Kosuki, the man who's sometimes a horse.

  When Hueva met Thunder she was running away from a flying circus, carrying her birth-shell with her in a bag called Amber Glows The Sun, which held a deadly secret. Thunder was cruising by in her seven-league boots, passing through the town of Ivory. She wouldn't have helped Hueva, if Hueva hadn't flown into her as she came crashing through the doors of the single greasy-spoon. Then they travelled for miles together, but in the end Thunder never asked her a single thing, although Hueva longed to tell her the world; and when Hueva died, hit by one of the eternal trains, Thunder got to keep the bag. She carried it off without a word, and left Hueva's body to the vultures. The bag was still there when she met Kosuki in a sharps’ bar. Thunder had gone in to have her steel toecaps upgraded, and the bag told her that one of its secrets was about Kosuki. It implied there was a lot of money to be had, but she never tried to know that secret. Kosuki fell in love with her and her iron-shod feet and followed her to the gates of hell, but he stopped on the road when she walked straight in.

  This comic paints hell as the world without senses, only information. There are fifteen straight, blacked pages, devoid of images. Each page's blackness is built of slightly overlaid layers of minuscule type which required a special magnifier to read—supplied with the comic as a cheap cardboard holder containing a plastic lens. The lens is utterly puny, and when I first picked it up I thought what a tightwad enterprise it was that had ruined the comic by not providing something with a chance of working. But hold the lens over the page and it isn't a magnifier at all. It's a light filter.

  The black isn't all the same. Some of the ink is capable of reflecting red light at a very low level you wouldn't notice by merely looking at the page, but the filter enhances it dramatically. In a series of frames invisible to the naked eye, you can see Thunder stride to the heart of the machine—this hell is only one of many she's been in, and being an information hell it's a cybernetic world—where she and it have a kind of fence and parry, a three-dimensional game in which they trade secrets, and the higher the stakes, the bigger the secret. Now you see Thunder in a very different way to her upper-world identity. Her all-covering hat and coat vanish, and she's this adult-sized little girl underneath in huge army boots. All she's got with her is the bag, Amber Glows The Sun. Well, you can tell that the bag is somehow going to top whatever the computer has up its circuits.

  The thing about Thunder is her face. She's got this hard, levelling kind of stare, not at all the sort of thing you could see on a kid's face. It's the way you might imagine the face of God on Judgement Day and it never changes. Whatever Thunder knows, whatever she's seen, it's all there in this red-sketched nightmare—the only time you realize that in every other frame you've only ever seen a part of her face at any one time. So she and the machine fight it through, and it turns out that Thunder doesn't know any particulars about anybody, but she knows the whole of the story—everything that happens, she sees it coming, as inevitable as the trains in the desert.

  Finally, the computer offers to tell her of her own end, and she offers to trade for it the secret of whatever is in Amber Glows. This is because Thunder wants to die. But all there is in the bag is the dried-up bloodied eggshell from Hueva Montana's birth day. This does top it, because Thunder's end isn't the end of everything. The egg proves that life will go on, no matter what individuals die or are lost, and that the moment of birth is the first step into entropy, chaos, and death.

  Well, some secret! But the computer, being a machine, hadn't had this revelation, and it takes the loss and lets her out. She doesn't get to die that day. However, that isn't all. The pages have another trick to play. Turn the lens over and you get a faint green/cyan light bleeding through.

  I stared at this the first time and thought it might be a mistake. There are lines and marks, but they don't seem to make anything on any page. However, they do look like they might be a part of a picture. They aren't random.

  I didn't get to the bottom of it until I remembered something Roy had said about my knowing the key to the Source. He had said that I had seen it “a thousand times.” That could mean anything familiar, but Roy rarely spoke in colloquial terms like that. With numbers he was unusually precise. I thought maybe he meant I had seen it
at least that many times. I was pondering this when my gaze crossed the cover of the comic book again. The title of the series of stories which ended with this chapter was written in small print so as not to obscure the picture on the front, or overshadow the chapter title—“Descent.” But the title of the story as a whole smacked me right in the eye—“Persistence of Vision.”

  I grabbed the lens in my trembling right hand and with the left one put the book under a strong light, and I let the pages riffle off my thumb as close as I could get to twenty-four frames per second. What I saw made me jump back and let go of the book. There it was, less than a second's worth of lurid green drawing, which flashed at me from the edge of the page.

  Thunder's face. And she was laughing.

  I grabbed hold of the diary, stuck the greenish lens against my eye, and ran Roy's pages under my thumb. There it was. He had a fat diary, full of scribbling almost to the last page—there must have been about two hundred and forty of them completely filled, which gave me a ten-second burst of shifting characters. Doubled, due to his marking both sides of the paper, that was twenty seconds in which fragments of symbols and letters flashed in and out of existence in a random sequence like fireflies winking in the twilight. Only by layering the whole thing in memory could it be read, or by seeing it evolve at twenty-four or twenty-five frames per second in the flicker, but the pages didn't flow at the right rate for that to be possible. The paper was too flimsy. I alone could read it.

  When I had it, I shut the book and straightened my back from its painful hunching. I sat down in my chair again and sat there dumbfounded, the cardboard lens carrier twitching in my hand like a butterfly's wing.

  The first half of the writing was the Source equation. It was big—five pages each visible for two seconds—and it contained several symbols I didn't recognize. The second half was a simple message written in English, and even spelled correctly.

  It said: “In the beginning was the Word.”

  Great wit, Roy.

  I sat a long time with nothing much going through my mind. Certainly nothing of note. I watched the sky change, the pale grey snow-clouds thinning and separating to reveal pale blue sky in the west and darker to the east. I watched my zigzag line and saw a figure come along it, dark against the snow. It stopped often, once or twice looking in my direction with the aid of binoculars that caught the orange sunlight, but mostly to rest and catch its breath. As it got closer I put the lens away with the comic in its protective cover, and put some water on for tea.

  I also took the knife out of my pack and put it in my pocket.

  Then I opened the door and looked out into a blast of icy air as he managed the last fifty metres, breath bursting from his mouth in explosive clouds. Og's blood had started the trail which led, via genetic identification, a little research, and some netnews, to me. I'd known he'd have to try for it again.

  “Hello, Mr. Croft,” I said. “Come in.”

  He paused on the threshold, puzzled by my attitude, but then smiled in a practised way and stepped inside, past me. I closed the door behind him and, after he had taken off his coat, hat, and gloves, offered him the armchair while I finished making the tea.

  “Miss O'Connell—Anjuli,” he said, rubbing his red hands together, “I'm pleased to see that at least someone is capable of behaving in a civilized manner in this affair.”

  “I've never seen the need for any other kind of action,” I said sweetly, recalling how he had waved Augustine's severed hand in the air. I carried the pot and two mugs to the little table, and then opened my one refrigerated can of fresh milk. I poured us both full measures and sat on the window ledge, leaning on a cushion, as he sat back in his chair and blew on his tea.

  “I assume you've come for the diary,” I added, and gave a nod of my head to where it was sitting on the mantelpiece above the fire.

  “Yes.” An array of frowns played across his heavy features. I thought Mrs. Croft must have been a fine-boned woman, to have produced Jane and Roy out of their combination. He looked at me questioningly alert, checking to see how much resistance I was going to put up.

  “Well, there it is,” I said. “Help yourself.”

  He glanced between me and the book several times, clearly surprised. “I must say I expected you to put up some kind of resistance,” he said, after a moment or two and another sip of tea. His tone was becoming increasingly hearty as he figured that he was going to have an easy time of it, and not have to make an unpleasantly direct attempt at killing me.

  “I've read it,” I said. “I don't need it any more.” I cradled my mug close to my face with my left hand, concealing the heavy shake of the right by wedging it securely between my crossed thighs, as if it was cold.

  Croft glanced at me suspiciously—a darting pale-blue stab of primeval mistrust. “Roy told me when he was at school that there was a girl there with a perfect memory. That was you?”

  I nodded.

  “Then I must ask you—” he lowered his mug and gave me a look of extreme seriousness, which unconsciously combined itself with disapproval and no small amount of jealous spite; a common expression brought on by fundamentalist mentalities “—did you find what you were looking for?”

  “You mean the Source?” I said. “The Word?” I knew perfectly well that he did, and didn't wait for his nod. “No. As you'll see, most of it is written in a personal code. What English that there is mostly refers to work and ideas. If it is in there at all, then it's in a form I can't find. I've studied it hard.”

  “Ah.” He couldn't disguise his relief, and then the doubt on its heels. “But you might, at some point in the future, reread—” he tapped his head “—and find you did know it.”

  “I doubt it,” I replied, shrugging. “My memory works. If anything were going to be triggered, it would already have happened.” I gave him a look of what I hoped was sympathetic irony at both of us being duped. “I suspect that either it isn't in there, and we've all been fooled, or that it's hidden in a way that I at least don't know anything about.”

  “Is that possible?” He was all entreaty now. I thought that if I persuaded him it didn't exist, he might be annoyed, but it wouldn't stop the others, and it wouldn't save him the unpleasant future Roy and Jane had mapped out for him as their revenge for their mother's death.

  “Oh, yes. I'm no encryption expert,” I said.

  He accepted this and cast a covetous glance at the book. To prevent his asking any more questions about who might know how to decrypt things, I went on, “But, since you're here, perhaps you wouldn't mind answering a few questions about Roy.”

  He glanced at me, again that cold, assessive flash of the eyes. “What about him?”

  “Jane told me about something Roy made for you,” I said, watching him closely. “An orrery, a model of the solar system, but altered to fit the Cosmogenist viewpoint.”

  “Mmm, yes,” Croft said after a hesitation, obviously not able to find any fault, and so unable to stall yet.

  “Well, I was wondering when he would have made that,” I said, “because when we were at Berwick he never mentioned it, and he hated that kind of mechanical toy. When he and Og…Augustine, first met, they argued about it. Roy said he would never soil his hands with lifeless things like that. Simulants, he called them.”

  “He did make it—” Croft nodded and his face animated with whimsy “—when he was seven years old. I remember he put a lot of effort into placing the sun. Finding the truth. It was very important to him.” Then darker clouds crossed his expression and his fingers clenched around the mug he was holding.

  “Was it a present?” I asked.

  That was clearly the wrong thing to say, because Croft slammed his mug down on the table and snorted. He calmed down after a few seconds.

  “I asked him to make it…as a project,” he said in a very controlled voice. “He and Jane were running wild with all kinds of unsuitable ideas. I wanted him to devote his time to something worthwhile that would, you know, hone h
is skills—he had such a talent for mechanical things.” He looked at me, appealing for support. I gave a nod, hoping my distaste didn't show. “But when he finished it…” Croft trailed off and glared into the fireplace.

  When I was confident that he wouldn't be violent but was struggling with something painful, I prompted him, “Mr. Croft?”

  “He destroyed all his toolkit!” he cried, shaking with outrage, his face reddening and spit flying from his mouth as he barked. “He gave it to me and said, he said, ‘This is how small your god is.’ How small! He said that. Seven years old and he said that to me, to my face, with such a look of…well, I don't even know what it was. And he said, ‘And I'll never make anything like that again—a fake.’ Can you believe that?” He subsided into tremors and renewed his battle of wills with the fire.

  I made a noise that could be interpreted as a type of sympathy and a knot of tension in my stomach relaxed. Just a little more. “In the diary there's a note saying Roy called you, shortly after he and Jane had finished trying to resolve the Source,” I said. “Do you remember what it was about?”

  He glared at me as if I had been sent to torment him. “I do, as it happens. He called to let me know what they had done, and to say that he could now prove me wrong. That was all they ever wanted: to argue and fight. I don't know what I did to deserve that.”

  I nodded. I understood why Mrs. Croft had hung herself. “Roy didn't have many friends, did he—before school?”

  Croft seemed thrown for a moment by the change of subject from him back to his son. “Well, no. You see, we lived in an isolated place. The only other children were members of our community. They were quite normal, which is why Roy never took to them.” Bitterness made his lips curl downwards. “I tried to encourage Jane and her brother into normal activities, Bible study and the values we all shared, but they could not stop questioning the faith…”