He had to explain what a parachute was.
“Folk jumping out of planes and floating down under silk umbrellas?” She obviously did not believe it.
“It’s true!”
“As true as folk walking on the moon?”
“They did walk on the moon—that is true.”
“Lawrence! Anyway, the reason I asked about Naclaski is because the guns around North Ken basin have been banging away something awful recently. Rosa was telling me in her last letter.” Rosa was Sarah-Kelly’s sister-in-law. “North Ken is right by the Grande Enceinte and all its forts. There’s the White City fort and the Ladbroke fort. Rosa says they’ve been banging away at two o’clock in the morning. I’ve never heard any plane flying at night, so what are they shooting at?
“They were probably shooting at radio trucks. Radicals have got more active recently with trucks out on the public drains around London and other big cities. They beam their ‘for the people’ crap and then beat it to a new location before the Naclaski scanners can pin-point them.”
“How do you mean, pin-point them?”
Lawrence hesitated. Strictly speaking, their talk was drifting to a level of detail that outsiders did not need to know. He sketched an explanation. Several scanners would fix the direction of the radio truck, then by drawing all the fixes on a map, the lines would converge at the truck’s location. However, it took five or ten minutes to gather all the fixes, estimate the truck’s speed, calculate the target point and then load the guns and get them laid.
Sarah-Kelly arched back laughing, showing the roof of her mouth.
“You beat any Naclaski gun,” she said, leaning against him. “Load the gun and get it laid… Did you ever do that?”
“Load the gun and get it laid?”
“Work in one of these gun companies.”
As he did not answer after a couple of seconds, she added:
“I know you don’t like talking about your work, but I do hear things. You talk in your sleep—did you know that?”
“It’s been said before.”
“Why do you keep going on about ‘brushes’?”
An electric shock of raw fear stabbed his bowels leaving his legs trembling. A ‘brush’ was slang for interception of surplus flow by a patrol barge. It meant a prevention.
“I don’t know. Perhaps I should take up painting. Come on, let’s find a café and warm up, this wind is like a knife.”
“It don’t seem that bad to me.”
Months later in the Value System, the conversation returned to haunt him. Sarah-Kelly might be untutored but she was smart. She would not forget that conversation. It was a time bomb. Any glory trooper who served near a flotilla of patrol barges could use their eyes. They could see ammunition boxes hefted off the quay before a patrol and empty ones tossed into trucks after a patrol. Although only barge crews and senior officers knew exactly what went on, a far wider society could hazard a pretty fair guess. Just one hint, just one sneer in Sarah-Kelly’s hearing could provoke her curiosity. She could use her eyes too. She could use her charms to find out more.
The conversation churned around and around in Lawrence’s mind through shift after shift of the Value System. What else had he muttered in his sleep? His imagination conjured all sorts of permutations, until by Wednesday he was becoming trapped in a psychotic cycle of reinforcing conviction that Sarah-Kelly knew everything and was writing a letter to the Great Judge Morton Aldingford. With his separation knife, he sliced and cut at a cadaver, barely seeing what he was doing, working by pure habit. Sensing someone behind him, he twisted the head off the cadaver and whirled about, shoving the head out to be taken.
He was offering the head to SMS London. The gorilla-like man was making one of his rare tours of the Separation Shop, wandering about with a forbidding expression, tapping his cracker pipe against his thigh. Lawrence’s pumped-up outrage vanished. He threw the head behind him and snapped to attention, shoulders hunched and eyes down.
“I apologise, Senior Master Sergeant London. I was not thinking.”
The seconds ticked away. His eyes fixed on SMS London’s crate-like boots. The cracker pipe ceased its tapping against the thigh and hung still, very still. Lawrence could hear the man’s breathing. SMS London was several inches shorter, in all other dimensions he was a giant. The breathing was slow and steady. Silence gradually fell over the entire Separation Shop. Lawrence listened to that slow and steady breathing.
SMS London cleared his throat.
“Carry on, Big Stak.”
“Yes, Senior Master Sergeant London.”
Lawrence dropped and crawled under the separation table to retrieve the head. By the time he emerged, SMS London had moved on. There was no more surging of outrage in Lawrence’s head for the rest of that shift, nor the rest of that day, nor any other day. He knew he would get no more chances to learn the lesson: staying alive in the Value System meant concentration, discipline. Do not anguish over things in the outside world. You will not last. From that shift on, he became the guardian over his own thoughts; his very own thought police.
He wondered how long he could sustain it.
*
At the end of that week, he had an idea, an exciting, vast idea, the kind of vast idea that captures the mind of a young man in despair.
It came to him on Saturday afternoon when he was waiting in the queue to get paid. What had destroyed him? Liars. A bunch of liars. They succeeded because there were enough of them to be credible. So, he had vanished into the Nameless Gone.
What could destroy the Value System? Telling the truth! All it needed was enough people to say the same things. Suppose five value reached the Central Enclave? Through his father, Lawrence could arrange formal depositions. Five independent statements, consistent in detail, had to convince any doubter that the Value System did exist and really was as despicable as described. Imagine this evidence presented to the Westminster Assembly. It would create a sensation. Captain Prentice Nightminster and his henchmen would be tracked down and hanged. The ultramarines would be shunned. It would change the face of the world.
For a desperate head of value, this dream was narcotic. Lawrence stood in line to be paid, dazed by the audacity of it, barely aware of his surroundings.
To each value Under-sergeant Brummie pushed a pile of curved plastic chips, the currency of the Value System. Some piles were larger than others. Value received bonus payments for greater effort, encouraging others, or being in positions of leadership.
“Your pay this week is thirty-two nails, Big Stak. You have worked hard as usual,” Master Sergeant Ratty said. Lawrence scooped the pile of curved plastic tokens into his pouch.
“Thank you, Master Sergeant Ratty.”
The curved plastic chips were human fingernails, yanked from the hands of the slaughtered. It baffled the mind to imagine the derisive yelp of laughter with which The Captain had dreamed up a currency of fiat fingernails for his Value System. It had his warped, necrophiliac humour stamped all over it. Normally Lawrence blew them buying drinks for others on Saturday night and chucked away any leftovers. From now on, he would save them—fiat fingernails were evidence in a way the ear tag was not. On some sovereign lands, the natives were tagged just as they were here in the Value System.
He could destroy the ultramarines and whoever owned this land. It was not that the sovereigns who made up the Westminster Assembly would give a hoot about the Value System. On the contrary, they would probably admire its quite staggering impudence. What mattered was the façade, appearances. Who turned flesh into gold and was careless enough to let it become public knowledge was a fool who had to be consumed by a convulsion of pious outrage. The fact that this outrage gained land and gold was only an added bonus that left a sweet taste in the mouth.
He got his vengeance and he got his life back. He might even get Sarah-Kelly back. This had to be the way. It all hinged around ‘credible evidence’. Either it convinced, or
it did not. There would be no in-between—and no mercy for the loser.
Chapter 9
The Dining Hall jostled with value jumping to the banjos jangling and guitars braying and fiddlers digging and diving into the swoops and arcs of De Stulna, the most popular band in the Value System. Lawrence tap-danced along the edge of the tarted-up ‘gamers’, as the homosexual value were known. Yellow tights and purple mini-skirts spun past his shoulder. The gamers were a turmoil of flailing arms and kicking legs, churning the darkness like sea-weed under foaming breakers. A scrawny-necked figure pressed its face on Lawrence’s bicep, leaving a white stain of mascara. It was Yip-Dog, looking like a bat out of hell. Lawrence strained a smile and slipped away.
A hand tugged his sleeve. It was big Mirror-Face, the man with the looks of a worn-out actor. He tipped Lawrence a shot of clear, oily liquid and bade him sit beside Spiderman. The liquid was distilled at the Factory from potatoes. It went by various names, including ‘stiff’, ‘acid’ and ‘killer’. The pure whammy skinned your throat, so you took it watered down, if at all. Generally, Lawrence kept to lager, which was still pretty strong, even if it attracted such monikers as ‘milk’, ‘suds’ and ‘pish’. It cost only two fingernails a pint as against ten fingernails for a beaker of stiff. He needed to swell his scrotum of fiat fingernail wealth.
“Be merry,” Mirror-Face said.
The conversation dragged. The other men at the table were hardened drinkers from Gang 11 who ended every Saturday night crawling across their own vomit. The tables to either side were crowded with huddles of Undead Nameless Gone. Such low-caste value kept to their own groups on Saturday nights, if they came to the Dining Hall at all. Many stayed away, holding their own little gatherings in dormitories or vacant rooms to avoid the risk of getting beaten up by a gang of drunken brutes. Lawrence sipped at the stiff. Even watered down, it left a taste of burnt sulphur. He watched the band for a while. There were five of them: two on banjos, two on guitars and one on the fiddle. They played on a stage at one end of the Dining Hall, created by pushing the tables together to clear a dance floor for the gamers. Lawrence’s mood sank. The jaunty music took him back to the street dances he raved at as a teenager on the hunt for girls. Christ, how carefree and clueless he was then. What would he be doing now, had his old life continued? Cosy in Sarah-Kelly’s flat, the two of them wrapped around one another in front of the fire, maybe giggling over a joke, or just staring into space, silent, totally content with one another. Lawrence’s guts twisted in outrage that by now Sarah-Kelly must have found another man and at this very moment could be… But he had to expel such thoughts from his head, or he would go mad. He had to be dictator of his own mind.
Spiderman reached across and prodded his shoulder.
“Cheer up, Big Stak. This lot are good.”
De Stulna means The Stolen Ones in Swedish. Its members were all Swedish travelling players. One evening they were performing at a dance hall in Liverpool—within its central enclave, where they ought to have been safe. The next morning, they were arrested by ultramarines on charges of gang-rape. The ultramarines had no formal authority within the enclave, apart from such ‘formal authority’ as their pistols and arrogance gave them. A good band was a major asset to the Value System, after all.
Lawrence pulled Spiderman closer.
“I want you to escape with me,” he said.
“Are you an idiot?”
“They can’t hear us.”
The rest of the table was deep in its drinking spree. Lawrence persisted:
“With a 10% chance of success—would you be interested?”
“There’s no chance of success,” Spiderman said.
“How do you know?”
“Nobody has ever escaped from here.”
“There’s a first time for everything.”
Spiderman gave him a pitying look.
“You should be over that kind of thing by now, Big Stak. Even if you get through the marsh people—and you won’t—you can’t escape the ultras. They’re in every town and city, on every sovereign land, in every industrial asylum. They organise the gravel trade, the road beating, the water carrying, the wall-building, the earth-moving, the man-hauling… Where are you going to hide?”
“Ultras a hundred miles away won’t give a toss.”
“Of course they will. Catching Fog on the run is good gold.”
“You’re afraid of freedom.”
Spiderman was silent for a few minutes, while De Stulna played on his eyeballs. He eventually said: “There’s no freedom for us, Big Stak.”
Perhaps freedom became dreadful after so many years of suspended pre-death where past and present blended into one soothingly certain future.
“You told me your dad’s a judge,” Spiderman said. “That’s pretty high up. Won’t he come looking for you?”
“I ditched the whole family a decade ago. They were arseholes then, I don’t suppose they’ve changed much.”
Lawrence sighed, his mood dropped through the floor of his stomach again. How alluring the peace of death was at this moment. Every year, he had received a Christmas card from brother Donald. It usually arrived in the middle of January, addressed to “Lawrence Aldingford, employee of General Wardian glory trust”, with a multitude of stamps and notes added as it got tossed through the corporate mail system eventually to the correct hands. How easy it would have been to post a card back, just once. How late it was now.
“Do you think The Captain picks suckers for the Value System?” he asked.
“Of course he does. His population is a fine blend. The bulk are dross with obedience ingrained on their souls as a survival instinct—born slaves. Then you’ve got us lot, the top crust—we make good slave-drivers. At the very bottom are the treats, the kid-fuckers and toy-boys. The Captain pulls them in as little presents for cunts who’d otherwise make trouble. It’s an open secret the gangs scoring the highest performance get the most treats. Gang 7 were top in September, so they got that repugnant little scumbag who came in with you.”
“Zeta727.”
“You’re probably the only one who can still remember him.”
“Mark Chetley Gnevik.”
Spiderman glanced around. No one had noticed the real name spoken, amid all the shouting and the music.
“It’s up to you what risks you want to take, Big Stak. If you want my advice, don’t play with fire. There are some habits you don’t want to get into.”
Lawrence just shrugged. As if it mattered. This night, fatalism was running in his blood. For the first time since arriving in the Value System, he was ready to fall into the arms of Lady Alcohol. It was dangerous to get drunk with Tricky Fingers, Buttons and the like cruising about looking for victims. He did not really care.
“That said,” Spiderman continued, “getting back to suckers, I’ve not noticed any racism, which makes me suspect Krossington is somewhere behind this set-up, but they hit gay people a lot.” He nodded at the dance floor. “Gays get a tough deal in life wherever they go. No one is going to look for them. As for the rest, they’re like us, they don’t have family, or they’re from a slum at the far end of the country. Nobody who matters is going to come looking.”
“You’ve no family?” Lawrence said.
“I fell out with ‘em a long time ago. My father was a drunken bastard. Always coming in and beating my mother up, then he’d come after us, especially me. He hated me for being a chimp. His work mates used to take the piss out of him that an ape had fucked his old dear and I was the result. So he’d come at me with the buckle end of his belt…” Spiderman’s eyes blazed with rage. Lawrence laid a hand on his shoulder.
“I didn’t mean to dig up painful memories.”
“They aren’t painful—I got the last laugh. I had an evening job hauling with a gang of spays to pay my school. They kept telling me I should get ’em chopped off, best thing I could do and all that sad crap. The carrying made me strong like a b
ull, though. I went home one evening and when he tried to get started on me, I bust his face with one punch—left him knocked out cold against the mantelpiece with blood streaming off his face like a waterfall. Best memory I have of my whole growing up. I signed up with Guards to the People the same day and never looked back. I’m the same as you. Except I miss my poor old mum, the sad cow. I like to think she left the old bastard to drink himself to death under a bridge somewhere.”
They downed a few more shots of stiff. The drinking game beside them grew ragged, the circle swayed, the toasts were shouted, humourless and repetitive, they hacked laughter at nothing. Tears streamed down their faces.
Lawrence felt a pang of guilt at having left Mirror-Face out of the conversation. The big, morose man sat slumped on the end of the bench, eyes drooped, glistening at old memories. Spiderman followed Lawrence’s gaze. He took the cue and gave the man a nudge. Mirror-Face leaped to his feet.
“I am Stanley Vihaan Patel!” he shouted.
Lawrence and Spiderman sprang around him, soothing and settling him back down, fixing another slosh of stiff whilst yelling what a jolly night everyone was having. If anyone had noticed the offence, they kept quiet about it. The tables of Undead Nameless Gone around them certainly would not be running to tell anyone.
Mirror-Face sat crying, his tears shimmering under the fat lamps. Lawrence crouched to one side and Spiderman sat to the other, their arms around their mate trying to cheer him up.
“I was so stupid,” Mirror-Face kept sobbing. Spiderman rolled his eyes. There was obviously an old tale coming. “I was so stupid to end up here.”
“Tell us all about it, big man,” Spiderman said, patting his mate’s shoulder. From his brotherly expression, it was clear this was not the first time he had heard the story. It was, though, the first time for Lawrence.
As a young countryman—the most junior officer rank in the glory trusts—Mirror-Face had been posted to a sovereign land ruled by a clan of mid-brown complexion. They were racists—they only tolerated glory officers of mid-brown tone like themselves. Guards to the People duly selected Mirror-Face as suitable. With his impressive physique and good looks, the local account-captain assigned him to the personal bodyguard of the clan’s top family, where he quickly drew admiring glances from two of the daughters. They were twins, aged seventeen. Mirror-Face’s story grew confusing. As far as Lawrence could tell, Mirror-Face began a secret affair with one of the twins behind the back of the other. Unfortunately, there came a day he encountered the wrong twin and was well into amorous clutches and disrobing—it must be said without objection from her—before he realised his error and made the idiotic mistake of apologising—a fatal reaction. The young lady guessed what was going on with her sister and denounced him as having attempted to rape her. He was court martialled. Attempted rape of a client was such a scandalous crime that the court had to set an example. It handed down ten years’ Night and Fog without possibility of re-employment by any glory trust. It was in effect a death sentence. His request to be hanged in lieu of the sentence was refused.
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