Far from the Light of Heaven

by Tade Thompson

  Thank you for your letter.

  I am touched that the familial bonds are so strong between you as someone without siblings myself.

  I can tell you that Michelle’s ship, the Ragtime, came through here and was safe and sound. It has continued on its way to the planet Bloodroot. Unfortunately, I did not get to meet her. I would have loved to since she sounds like such a fascinating woman.

  As soon as the ship comes out of longsleep and I can make contact, I will confirm her health and wellbeing.

  Sincerely,

  Secretary Yemi Beko.

  A lot more sentimental than Beko is used to, but she needs to tug at their heartstrings now just in case she will need to console them and break bad news about their sister.

  She formats and seals the message.

  “Lagos,” says Beko.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Message for the relay pouch.”

  “Very good.”

  Beko exhales and rises, thinking of taking a bath.

  “Ma’am, urgent message from the relay. It’s interactive.”

  Semi-autonomous messages. Wave of the future. Programmed with sender personalities, a number of responses and explicit points-of-view, they can save a lot of negotiating time, though Beko is not a fan.

  “Play it.”

  “Are you in charge?” Gruff voice, male, unhappy, no distortion.

  “Identify yourself,” says Beko.

  “My name is Cole of the starship Sinistral. Are you in charge?”

  “I run the—”

  “I don’t even care. Where’s Yan Maxwell?”

  “Who?”

  “Did you service a ship called the Ragtime?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s Yan Maxwell?”

  “The quintillionaire?”

  “No, the tooth fairy. Maxwell’s IFC is rigged to send signals back to us. We’ve not received anything that reassures us that he is okay. What have you done to him? Is he hurt?”

  “I think we got off on the wrong foot,” says Beko.

  “Look, I don’t know what kind of operation you’re pulling over there, maybe some kind of Black-on-Black nigger violence—”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, you better get your shithole space station right. I am authorised to reduce you to shards. I don’t care that you have sovereign status in your little floating African utopia. I will fuck you up with particle beams and MaxGalactix has a whole army of lawyers to make it legal. Find Yan Maxwell before I get there, or Space Station Lagos will be no more. I guarantee you. You think Lagos is a country? Big deal. Mr Maxwell is a fucking planet. Harm cannot come to him. Find him, or your little Afrofuturist outpost will have a very short history. Sinistral out.”

  “Nothing more from the relay, Ma’am,” says Lagos.

  Beko sighs and massages her temples. The anger needs to exist but be controlled, channelled. She breathes. “I regret all the life choices that brought me to this moment.”

  “Cabinet meeting?”

  “You know it. In one hour. No exceptions.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Earth

  The First and Final Galactic Journey of Jeremiah Brisbane

  The Tehani camp is surrounded by mountains, pine trees and a perimeter of private security operatives in airtight armour with respirators. The land, the rivers, the infrastructure, the people, their corpses, all belong to MaxGalactix. This is where Jeremiah Brisbane started the journey that led him to the Ragtime.

  Brisbane is not originally Tehani, and he came here trying to be good. He signed his life and dead body away when he entered camp. He does not know if he succeeded, but it is likely he will die with them in the next few years. He used to go to church, part of a dwindling few in a world overrun by hyperadvanced technology, back when he was younger, when his parents were building a template of morality. Esse quam videri; to be, rather than to seem.

  How to be good.

  Be tall, lean, with sandy hair and a good complexion. People ascribed goodness to him as soon as he smiled at them. He obeyed his parents and he obeyed the church, and this was good. But this only satisfied him until his adolescent thoughts became more complex. Being good cannot be about obedience. In fact, after reading Arendt, Brisbane concluded that being good can be about disobedience. Blind obedience is not a virtue.

  So he observes his parents, and sees their works, their good deeds, their love, their sacrifice for others. He contrasts this with his wayward older brother, with whom he shares a room for a time. Kenny would sneak out and return just before dawn, time spent, according to him, having sex.

  “Rather than boring, quotidian sex, I fucked her like a third wife,” Kenny says. Maybe he forgets, but he repeats these exact words when recounting his conquests. They are boring to Jeremiah Brisbane, but he listens to the varying tones in Kenny’s voice, his body language, the story beneath the words. He doesn’t think Kenny is happy or good. It is all, as King Solomon said, meaningless.

  Kenny was sweet as a child, their mother liked to point out. Maybe a demon possessed him at the point of puberty?

  It is unclear to Brisbane why being good matters so much to him. The reason is lost in his childhood memories. When he read Emerson, he found himself agreeing that the essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. But the problem is how to be virtuous. All Brisbane can find is contextual goodness, relative virtue, barely concealed self-interest; nothing universal.

  Being good would not be enough. He’d have to stay good, and, life being what it is, he’d be drawn into some form of evil or anti-goodness at some point or the other. Then, when his life is examined, he wouldn’t be considered good. The pressure of living is the pressure of the reader of a story who wants something to go awry, otherwise what’s the point?

  Question unanswered, Brisbane decides to become a teacher. He trains for it, and then thinks of the most remote place he can go to practise his calling.

  At the time, the Tehani were looking for knowledge workers to support their Exotic mining and processing business. Brisbane applied.

  He felt good.

  “Does anybody know?” asks Brisbane.

  Two of the kids in Brisbane’s class didn’t make it, no notes from their parents.

  Is it bad that he is happy because it’s only two? A week earlier had been the worst: an average of five students a day disappeared. And “disappeared” is often, but not always, a euphemism for “died”. The others are dying.

  All Brisbane’s students look older than he does. It’s amazing that they even still come to lessons and don’t lose themselves in dissipation, this being the Last Days and all. None of them seem inclined to answer the question, though.

  “Anybody?” asks Brisbane.

  Ah, someone raising a hand. Eddie Shaw. Good kid. Wait, no, that’s just a muscle spasm. Damn.

  “All right, people, just think. What Clever Else said wasn’t particularly clever, but she was able to infect the others – the maid, the servant, her mother – with a deep sadness all predicated on the theoretical fall of a pickaxe. Else was infective, spreading sadness like a virus. Then she was never seen again because she could not remember who she was.”

  No reaction.

  They’re sick, they’re dying, and they don’t care about The Brothers Grimm and their fairy tales. The plenum of proof is written on all their faces, and in the empty seats, which outnumber the full ones.

  “We can try another story next week. Which one would you like?”

  They file out like zombies, not saying a word.

  Brisbane can’t blame them.

  One of them stops and tugs at Brisbane’s sleeve. Myra.

  “Cleverness… didn’t mean the same thing back then as it does now,” she says. Then she’s gone.

  What a waste. A generation of minds, gone. Brisbane himself has seen the telltale wrinkle of the skin on the inner crease of his elbow. Given time, he’ll be as wizened, as skinny as anyone in the Tehani commun
ity. He can’t stop thinking about death, but that’s probably on everyone’s mind.

  He packs up his stuff and leaves the school after his children. The sun bears down like it’s trying to purge the land, like some biblical shit. But it won’t work. The poison is here to stay, and it will be here long after government-backed private security forces incinerate the last bodies and remove the topsoil. It’ll be ironic if they choose to load it into a rocket and blast it into space – collision course with the sun, back to sender. Safest bet.

  He walks briskly, just short of a run, down to his home. Five years he’s been in Tehani, and this house, built for him by the miners, represents… all the promise. Dashed, as it turns out.

  It’s like that ancient song. Brisbane can never leave. The skies are constantly criss-crossed by drones, a complete lack of subtlety on the part of MaxGalactix.

  How the Tehani signed a contract like the one they did baffles Brisbane, but him being employed by the Miners Association put him under the umbrella agreement. Which means if he gets contaminated by the products of the processing plant, he has to remain within the Tehani Community, even if this means death. This is couched in the language of harm prevention or spread of contagion blah blah blah, but it’s damage control. It’s the story they’re concerned about, not the health of the nation. Meanwhile, Yan Maxwell is safe in his space station on Mars or wherever it is that he lives these days.

  He sips water from a glass he left on the counter and starts to contemplate dinner. A church bell goes off and keeps ringing for longer than Brisbane would have thought necessary to call the faithful to a midweek service. Town hall meeting, then.

  He hunts through a cupboard for a bag of nuts. There is nothing fresh in Tehani, and the choices are dried or packaged. The trees are devoid of leaves and trunks that should be brown are a sickly beige or incongruous red. There is virtually no grass and the wind blows dust about, giving all the buildings a blasted look. The town hall has no walls and is a roof held up by intricately worked pillars. The chief sits in his place, and the other corners contain the priest, the doctor and a space for Brisbane – traditionally the scribe, but a teacher will do when there’s no writer.

  This meeting must be special, because the rest of the townspeople are not present. Just three old people, made older by the toxin in their system.

  “Your honour,” Brisbane says. He bows slightly.

  “Jeremiah. You’ve been here how long now?”

  “Five years.”

  “And you are one of us.”

  Brisbane went through the rites two years back.

  The ceremony had been difficult for him, but it was the natural end of his time as a tourist or a visitor. He is Tehani. As the line in the pledge goes, I am a defender of Tehani children and oldfolk. I will take up arms against external aggressors and submit myself to the rule of the council. I am blood of Tehani blood.

  “We need you,” says the chief. Her speech is dysarthric and it takes all of Brisbane’s self-control to avoid completing words for her.

  “Anything,” says Brisbane.

  “We are dying. In a year, two years, no Tehani will be left, not even you. You are the least exposed and will most likely be the last to die.”

  Likely to be true. Brisbane waits.

  “We have decided. We do not want our name, our way of life, to die in vain when they sanitise the news and this land after us.”

  “We need an instrument of vengeance and a word of caution to other communities like ours,” says the doctor.

  Brisbane’s stomach growls, and he hopes the chief doesn’t hear.

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking,” he says. “You want mercenaries?”

  “No, Jeremiah Brisbane. We want you.”

  The Tehani community, all 7922 of them left, invest all their assets in Brisbane. This is a lot of money. The camp doctor gives Brisbane a number of addresses. “Any one of them will do what needs to be done.”

  “And I’ll survive?” says Brisbane. “I can’t do vengeance if I die on the operating table.”

  “You’ll live long enough.”

  Of course, there is a tunnel. They’re miners. This is their most basic skill, the quintessence of mining. It takes two days to walk, crawl and swim away from Tehani underneath the corporate security guards. At this stage of Tehani decay, only Brisbane is strong enough to make it. He encounters the rotting bodies of those who tried before him.

  He emerges in woods, mud forming a birth caul, muscles shaking from exertion and from cold. It has been years since he has been in the outside world. He hears the splash-gurgle of a nearby stream and heads for that. It is also freezing, but he doesn’t hesitate. He washes all the muck off and stands leaning into the wind to dry. He has dried apricots to chew on and some water to drink. He heads north in the forest. After an hour of walking, his clothes are dry and his water, apricots and energy are all gone. He isn’t entirely sure where he is going.

  His IFC alerts him to a short-range broadcast. Care packages that hunters left for other travellers. Potable water. Food. A map download with GPS. Three and a half hours brings him to a hotel – or, rather, a bar that has rooms. The girl at reception looks about fifteen and has a Portwine Stain. She smiles at Brisbane, which is remarkable given how he looks. She hesitates a little when he asks for a room – saddle weary and asthenic as he seems – but an IFC scan shows he is worthy and then some. She mistakenly broadcasts her single status and apologises.

  Later, in the bathtub, he wonders if it was on purpose. The rot has started for him in earnest now. The skin on his belly is wrinkled like he is an old man. It seems to have accelerated since he left the Tehani. Or maybe the acceleration is because of his exertions. He uses the hotel stationery to write down a list of medical establishments the Tehani doctor gave him. All are specialists in “prosthesis and adjustments”.

  “They have all done military-grade work, and referral is by word of mouth. What you are asking for is not available on the open market, Jeremiah. But you need this for the work ahead.”

  The first is an out-of-order contact, and further searches reveal the establishment is out of business.

  The next two refuse to even speak to him and block his IFC hardware code after two tries. Number four sounds so informal and congenial that Brisbane wonders if they can do the job.

  “You understand what I am asking here?” he says. Even he does not fully understand.

  “Oh, I do. You want military-level body adjustments that would ordinarily take six years in a matter of two months. You want a containment suit, full body, that keeps toxins in, not out.”

  “With the…” Brisbane checks the notes. “Advanced Interface Agent.”

  “AIA, yes. People think that’s a myth, by the way. Okay, we should meet.”

  “You haven’t told me how much this will cost. How do you know I can afford any of these materials?”

  “One, you have this number. Two, you’re a miner, aren’t you? The containment suit is a giveaway. Your type squirrels away Rare-Earth and Exotics. This means money. I am not worried about your ability to pay.”

  “What do I call you?”

  “Carmilla.”

  It takes seven weeks.

  Brisbane is in pain, but he does not know if this is due to the surgeries or the fact that he is dying from Exotic poisoning. It waxes and wanes.

  “The AIA is quasi-experimental. It may make odd choices, but you’ll be there to override when necessary.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “It’ll be a voice in your head. You can adjust volume, gender, what name you want to use, anything. Mr Brisbane, if you get caught with any of the materials—”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do with this, but if it comes back to me I have to cooperate with the authorities.”

  “It won’t matter by then.”

  “What?”

  “It won’t get to the authorities.”

  In the wait
ing room, on the televisual entertainment, the hot news item is about Yan Maxwell. Brisbane is still groggy so he can’t fully understand what he sees.

  “What’s this?” he asks.

  “Hmm? Oh, some gazillionaire is leaving the solar system. Good riddance, I say.”

  Fuck.

  Home.

  Well, the hotel; a new one, hired for his recovery.

  If Yan Maxwell is leaving Earth, Brisbane has to get him before departure. Broadcasts say Maxwell is the richest human in history, with a fortune that changes so rapidly it cannot be accurately calculated. Tax officers must love him.

  The medics told him to wait two weeks before activating the AIA, but he panics. The system has to sync with their headquarters every few weeks for patches and Drift Correction, whatever that is.

  “Activate AIA,” he says.

  His world fills with colour and digits for five seconds.

  “Initialising…” The voice is exactly like the doctor’s. Ego. “Complete. What is your name?”

  “Jeremiah Brisbane.”

  “How should I address you?”

  “Call me Brisbane.”

  “All right, Brisbane. My name is Carmilla.” Brisbane laughs.

  “What’s funny?”

  “The name. She put her own name and voice in the software.”

  “You can change my name and the cadence of my voice. There are sixty-two personality choices.”

  “Let’s stick with what we have. Carmilla’s fine.”

  “I am currently optimising your modifications for your physique. Are you aware that you are dying, Brisbane?”

  “I am aware.”

  “Shall I modify for longevity or effectiveness?”

  “I can’t have both?”

  “One takes a toll on the other in your state, Brisbane. How long would you like to live?”

  “I just want to be able to carry out my mission for the Tehani. After that, I don’t care.”

  “What is the mission?”

  “Eliminate Yan Maxwell and broadcast a planetwide message. An instrument of vengeance, a word of caution.”

  “Pulling all information on Yan Maxwell. I have the public domain material. Would you like the private as well?”