“Girl’s just plain arse backwards,” Digger shouted some nights when he stumbled home drunk.
Jed hated Digger, hated the way he shouted at Mum, and hated the way he picked on Gari. Gari tried hard to keep up with her year, she needed encouraging. Not that there was anything to achieve in Koblat, he thought miserably.
Miri and Navar came in, and promptly loaded a games flek into the AV block. The living room immediately filled up with an iridescent laserlight sparkle. A flock of spherical, coloured-chrome chessboards swooped around Jed’s head every time his eyes strayed towards the tall AV pillar. Both girls started yelling instructions at the block, and small figures jumped between the various spheres in strategic migrations, accompanied by a thumping music track. The projector was too damn large for a room this size.
“Come on, guys,” Gari wailed. “I’ve got to get this stuff locked down ready for my assessment.”
“So do it,” Navar grunted back.
“Cow!”
“Dumb bitch!”
“Stop it! You played this all yesterday.”
“And we haven’t finished yet. If you weren’t so thick you’d know that.”
Gari appealed to Jed, chubby face quivering on the threshold of tears.
Miri and Navar were Digger’s daughters (by different mothers), so if Jed lifted a finger to them Digger would hit him. He’d found that out months ago. They knew it too, and used the knowledge with tactical skill.
“Come on,” he told Gari, “we’ll go down to the day club.”
Miri and Navar laughed jeeringly as Gari shut down her processor block and glared at them. Jed shoved the door open and faced his tiny worldlet.
“It’s not any quieter at the club,” Gari said as the door shut behind them.
Jed nodded dispiritedly. “I know. But you can ask Mrs Yandell if you can use her office. She’ll understand.”
“Suppose,” Gari acknowledged brokenly. Not long ago her brother had been capable of putting the whole universe to rights. A time before Digger.
Jed set off down the tunnel. Only the floor had been covered in composite tiling, the walls and ceiling were naked rock lined with power cables, data ducts, and fat environmental tubes. He took the left turning at the first junction, not even thinking. His life consisted of walking the hexagonal weave of tunnels which circled the asteroid’s interior; that entire topographic web existed only to connect two places: the apartment and the day club. There was nowhere else.
Tunnels with gloomy lighting, hidden machines that made every wall in Koblat thrum quietly; that was his environment now, a worldlet without a single horizon. Never fresh air and open spaces and plants, never room, not for his body or his mind. The first biosphere cavern was still being bored out (that was where Digger worked), but it was years behind schedule and ruinously over budget. At one time Jed had lived with the faith that it would provide him an outlet for all his crushed-up feelings of confinement and anger, allowing him to run wild over fresh-planted grass meadows. Not now. His mum and Digger along with all the rest of the adults were too stupid to appreciate what possession really meant. But he knew. Nothing mattered now, nothing you did, nothing you said, nothing you thought, nothing you wished for. Die now or die in a hundred years time, you still spent eternity with a sprained mind which was unable to extinguish itself. The final, absolute horror.
No, they didn’t think about that. They were as trapped in this existence as the souls were in the beyond. Both of them trekking after the low income jobs, going where the companies assigned them. No choice, and no escape, not even for their children. Building a better future wasn’t a concept which could run in their thought routines, they were frozen in the present.
For once the dreary tunnel outside the day club centre was enlivened with bustle. Kids hurried up and down, others clumped together to talk in bursts of high-velocity chatter. Jed frowned: this was wrong. Koblat’s kids never had so much energy or enthusiasm. They came here to hang out, or access the AV projections which the company provided to absorb and negate unfocused teenage aggression. Travelling the same loop of hopelessness as their parents.
Jed and Gari gave each other a puzzled look, both of them sensitive to the abnormal atmosphere. Then Jed saw Beth winding through the press towards them, a huge smile on her narrow face. Beth was his maybe-girlfriend; the same age, and always trading raucous insults. He couldn’t quite work out if that was affection or not. It did seem a solid enough friendship of some kind, though.
“Have you accessed it yet?” Beth demanded.
“What?”
“The sensevise from the hellhawk, cretin.” She grinned and pointed to her foot. A red handkerchief was tied above her ankle.
“No.”
“Come on then, mate, you’re in for a swish-ride treat.” She grabbed his hand and tugged him through the kids milling around the door. “The council tried to erase it, of course, but it was coded for open access. It got into every memory core in the asteroid. Nothing they could do about it.”
There were three AV players in the day club centre, the ones Jed always used to access vistas of wild landscapes, his one taste of freedom. Even so he could only see and hear the wonderful xenoc planets; the AV projectors weren’t sophisticated (i.e. expensive) enough to transmit activent patterns which stimulated corresponding tactile and olfactory sensations.
A dense sparkle-mist filled most of the room. Twenty people were standing inside it, their arms hanging limply by their sides, faces entranced as they were interacted with the recording. Curious now, Jed turned to face one of the pillars square on.
Marie Skibbow’s tanned, vibrant body lounged back over a boulder five metres in front of him, all flimsy clothes and pronounced curves. It was a perfectly natural pose; such a Venus could only possibly belong in this paradisiacal setting with its warmth and light and rich vegetation. Jed fell in love, forgetting all about skinny, angular Beth with her hard-edge attitude. Until now girls such as Marie had existed only in adverts or AV dramas; they weren’t real, natural, not like this. The fact that such a person actually lived and breathed somewhere in the Confederation gave him a kick higher than any of the floaters he scored.
Kiera Salter smiled at him, and him alone. “You know, they’re going to tell you that you shouldn’t be accessing this recording,” she told him.
. . .
When it ended Jed stood perfectly still, feeling as though a piece of his own body had been stolen from him; certainly something was missing, and he was the poorer for it. Gari was at his side, her face forlorn.
“We have to go there,” Jed said. “We have to get to Valisk and join them.”
12
The hotel sat on its own plateau halfway up the mountainside, looking out across the deep bay. The only buildings to share the rocky amphitheatre with it were half a dozen weekend retreat villas belonging to old-money families.
Al could appreciate why the owners had made strenuous efforts to keep the developers out. It was a hell of a sight, an unspoilt beach which went on for miles, tiny fang rocks at the front of the headlands stirring up founts of spray, long lazy breakers rolling onto the sands. The only thing wrong about it was that he couldn’t get down there to enjoy it. There was a lot of time pressure building up at the top of the Organization, dangerous amounts of work and too-tight schedules. Back in Brooklyn when he was a kid he’d sit on the docks and watch gulls pecking at dead things in the muddy shallows. One thing about those gulls, their necks never stayed still, peck peck peck all day long. Now he’d surrounded himself with people that took after them. Never ever did his senior lieutenants give him a break. Peck peck peck. “Al, we need you to settle a beef.” Peck peck. “Al, what do we do with the navy rebels?” Peck peck. “Al, Arcata is pulling in the red cloud again, you want we should zap the bastards?” Peck peck.
Je-zus. In Chicago he had days off, months on holiday. Everyone knew what to do, things ran smoothly—well, kind of. Not here. Here, he didn’t have a fucking minute to
himself. His head was buzzing like a fucking hornets’ nest he had to think so hard on the hoof.
“But you’re loving it,” Jezzibella said.
“Huh?” Al turned back from the window. She was lying across the bed, wrapped in a huge fluffy white robe, her hair lost beneath a towel turban. One hand held a slim book, the other was plucking Turkish delights out of a box.
“You’re Alexander the Great and Jimi Hendrix all in one, you’re having a ball.”
“Dozy dame, who the hell is Jimi Hendrix?”
Jezzibella pouted crossly at the book. “Oh, he was the sixties, sorry. A real wildcat musician, everybody loved him. The thing I’m trying to say here is, don’t knock what you’ve got, especially when you’ve got so much. Sure, things are a little rough at the start, they’re bound to be. It just makes winning all the sweeter. Besides, what else have you got to do? If you don’t give orders, you take orders. You told me that.”
He grinned down at her. “Yeah. You’re right.” But how come she’d known what he was thinking? “You wanna come with me this time?”
“It’s your shout, Al. I’ll maybe go down to the beach later.”
“Sure.” He was beginning to resent these goddamn tours. San Angeles had been a beaut, but then everyone else wanted in on the act. This afternoon it was Ukiah, tomorrow morning it was Merced. Who gave a shit? Al wanted to get back up to Monterey where the action was at.
The silver and ivory telephone at the side of the bed rang. Jezzibella picked up the handset and listened for a moment. “That’s good to hear, Leroy. Come on in; Al can give you ten minutes for news like that.”
“What?” Al mouthed.
“He thinks he’s cracked our money problem,” she said as she replaced the handset.
Leroy Octavius and Silvano Richmann walked in, Leroy smiling effusively, Silvano managing a glimmer of enthusiasm as he greeted Al and ignored Jezzibella entirely. Al let the faint insult pass. Silvano was always on the level about how he hated the non-possessed, and there was no hint in Jez’s mind that she’d taken offence.
“So what have you come up with?” Al asked as they sat in the chairs which gave them a splendid view out across the bay.
Leroy put a slim black case down on the coffee table in front of him, resting a proud hand on it. “I took a look at the basics of what money is all about, Al, and tried to see how it could apply to our situation.”
“Money is just something you screw out of other people, right, Silvano?” Al laughed.
Leroy gave an indulgent smile. “That’s about it, Al. Money is principally a fancy method of accounting, it shows you how much other people owe you. The beauty of it is you can use it to collect that debt in a thousand different ways, that’s how come money always grows out of a barter economy. Individual currencies are just a measure of the most universal commodity. It use to be gold, or land, something which never changed. The Confederation uses energy, which is why the fuseodollar is the base currency, because it’s linked to He3 production, and those costs are fixed and universal.”
Al sat back, materialized a Havana, and took a deep drag. “Thanks for the history lesson, Leroy. Get to the point.”
“The method of accounting isn’t so important, whether you use old-fashioned notes and coins or a Jovian Bank disk, it doesn’t matter. What you must establish is the nature of the debt itself, the measure of what you owe. In this case it’s so simple I could kick myself for not thinking of it straight off.”
“Someone’s gonna kick you, Leroy, for sure. And pretty quick. What debt?”
“An energistic one. An act of magic, you promise to pay someone whatever they want.”
“For Christ’s sake, that’s crazy,” Al said. “What’s the sense in someone owing me a chunk of magic when I can work my own? The original New California economy went ass backwards in the first place because we got this ability.”
Leroy’s grin became annoyingly wide. Al let him get away with it because he could see how tight and excited the fat manager’s thoughts were. He’d certainly convinced himself he was right.
“You can, Al,” Leroy said. “But I can’t. This is a not-so-rhetorical question, but how are you going to pay me for all this work I’ve been doing for you? Sure you’ve got the threat of possession to hold me with, but you need my talent, have me possessed and you don’t get that. But put me on a salary and I’m yours for life. For a day’s work you promise to do five minutes of magic for me; manifest a good suit or a copy of the Mona Lisa, whatever I ask for. But it doesn’t have to be you who owes me for the day; I can take the token, or promise, or whatever, and go to any possessed for my magic to be performed.”
Al chewed around his cigar. “Let me get this straight, here, Leroy. Any schmuck with one of your chocolate dime tokens can come along and ask me to make them a set of gold-plated cutlery anytime they want?”
“Not anytime, no, Al. But it’s the simplest principle of all: you do something for me, I do something for you. Like I said, it’s exchanging and redeeming debt. Don’t think of it on such a personal level. We’ve been wondering how to keep the non-possessed working for the possessed, this is the answer: You’ll pay them, but you pay them in whatever they want.”
Al glanced over at Jezzibella, who shrugged. “I can’t see a flaw in the idea,” she said. “How are you going to measure it, Leroy? Surely the possessed will be able to counterfeit any currency?”
“Yes. So we don’t use one.” He opened his bag and took out a small processor block, matt-black with a gold Thompson sub-machine gun embossed on one side. “Like I said, money is all accounting. We use a computer memory to keep track of what’s owed to whom. You want your magic doing for you, then the computer shows how much you’re entitled to. Same for the reverse; if you’re a possessed it shows how much work the non-possessed have been doing for you. We just set up a planetary bank, Al, keep a ledger on everyone.”
“I must be crazy even listening to this. Me? You want me to run a bank? The First National Al Capone Bank? Jesus H Christ, Leroy!”
Leroy held up the black processor block to stress the argument. “That’s the real beauty of it, Al. It makes the Organization utterly indispensable. The soldiers are the ones who are going to enforce and regulate payment on the ground. They make it fair, they make the whole economy slide along smoothly. We don’t have to force or threaten anyone anymore, at least not on the scale we have been doing with the SD network. We don’t put taxes on the economy, like other governments; we become the economy. And there’s nothing to stop the possessed using the system themselves. There are a lot of jobs too big for one individual. It can work, Al. Really it can.”
“I scratch your back, you scratch mine,” Al said. He eyed the black processor block suspiciously. Leroy handed it over. “Did Emmet help with this accounting machine?” Al asked curiously. Apart from the gold emblem it could have been carved from a lump of coal for all he knew.
“Yes, Al, he designed it, and the ledger program. He says that the only way a possessed guy can tamper with it is if he gets into the computer chamber, which is why he wants to base it on Monterey. We’re already making it the Organization headquarters; this will cement the deal.”
Al scaled the electric gadget back on the table. “Okay, Leroy. I see you’ve busted your balls to do good work for me here. So I’ll tell you what we’ll do; I’ll grab all my senior lieutenants for a meeting in Monterey in two days time, see what they make of it. If they buy it, I’m behind you all the way. How does that sound?”
“Achievable.”
“I like you, Leroy. You setting up any more tours for me?”
Leroy flicked a fleeting glance at Jezzibella, who gave him a tiny shake of her head. “No, Al; Merced is the last for a while. It’s more important you’re up at Monterey for a while now, what with the next stage just about ready.”
“Goddamn, am I glad to hear that.”
Leroy smiled contentedly, and put the accountancy block back in his slim case. “Thanks f
or listening, Al.” He stood.
“No problem. I’ll just have a word with Silvano, here, then the pair of you can get back into space.”
“Sure, Al.”
“So?” Al asked when Leroy had left.
“It ain’t my concern, Al,” Silvano said. “If that’s the way you wanna do it, then fine by me. I admit, we gotta have some kinda dough around here, else things are gonna start falling apart pretty damn fast. We can only keep people in line with the SD platforms for so long.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Al waved a discontented hand. Money for magic, Je-zus, even the numbers racket was more honest than that. He stared at his lieutenant; if it hadn’t been for the ability to sense emotions there would have been no way for him to work out what was going on behind that Latino poker face. But Silvano was eager about something. “So what do you want? And it better be good fucking news.”
“I think it may be. Somebody came back from beyond who had some interesting information for us. He’s an African type, name of Ambar.” Silvan smiled at the memory. “He wound up in a blond Ivy League body, man was he pissed about that; it’s taking up a lot of effort to turn himself into a true brother again.”
“Now there’s someone who could cash in a potload of Leroy’s tokens,” Jezzibella said innocently. She popped another Turkish delight in her mouth, and winked at Al as Silvano scowled.
“Right,” Al chuckled. “What did he want to trade?”
“He’s only been dead thirty years,” Silvano said. “Came from a planet called Garissa, said it got blown away, the whole damn world. Some kind of starship attack that used antimatter. Don’t know whether to believe him or not.”
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 169
