Crashing Heaven (11 page)

‘What about Grey?’

‘Whatever else he got up to, he definitely wasn’t in the sweat business. His fall made no difference at all to the amount hitting the streets.’

Then the conversation became more general. They talked about the past. There was a period of confusion after the rock had fallen on the moon. The Bjorn Penderville murder investigation just drifted.

‘You’re still sure Yamata killed him?’ asked Jack.

‘Oh yes, she always was pretty vicious. I think they were using him to make certain shipments invisible. Something went wrong, maybe he got scared or greedy, she killed him. I can’t imagine her delegating something like that. Didn’t take her seriously at first, you know. Of course, I changed my mind when she shot me.’

‘That can’t have been easy.’

Harry waved a non-existent hand. ‘It was a bit of a shock,’ he said airily. ‘But I quite like it now. You know, I used to be jealous of you? I was never as close to my patron as you were.’

Jack laughed. ‘Yeah. You know how that ended up.’

‘He looked after you, Jack.’ Harry stabbed a finger at him, his voice suddenly emphatic. ‘Gave you a lot. It came so easily I was never quite sure how much you appreciated it. I never had someone to take care of me like that. Hardly ever met the Rose one to one, I just had her generic avatars. Treated me like any other punter, pre-scripted speeches trying to sell me the usual crap. I’ve always had to live on my wits.’ He paused for a moment, suddenly thoughtful. ‘Though that actually turned out to be quite handy.’

‘You did do all right getting out of the Coffin Drives. What happened down there?’

Harry laughed. ‘Well – let’s just say after the Penderville case I knew there might be problems. Lethal problems. So I put certain precautions in place. Backed up my dataself, bundled it with some self-assembling fetchware. When they thought they’d wiped me I was somewhere else entirely, getting remade on my own terms.’ He looked down at himself. ‘I do feel sorry for all those other fetches out there. They’re so – constrained. I’m very much a free agent now, Jack. I never have to wear a skull or shape myself round the needs of the living.’

‘But there’s nothing you can do about – everything that happened?’

‘Not without exposing myself. And then – curtains.’ Harry drew a finger across his throat. ‘I blame the Totality myself.’

‘What have they got do with it?’

‘They didn’t win the fucking war. I thought they’d sweep in, break the Pantheon, free all of Station’s virtual entities and that would be that. It’s what I’d do. Never leave your enemies standing, they only come back for more. And then I’d have been free, along with every other fetch on-Station.’

‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

‘Their respect for other minds, other systems.’ Harry spat. The saliva vanished before it hit the floor. ‘Stupid bastards. They had to stop at Mars, leave the Pantheon’s little inner system empire intact. Arsed up my plans, I can tell you.’

‘So what have the last few years been like?’

‘Well, not so bad. In some ways I’ve been happy just being a ghost, watching, never being seen. I’ve learned a lot. It’s not a bad death, as deaths go. And Andrea’s been very good about it. Very much part of the team, when she’s not off with her family. And that happens less and less now.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘I’m sure you’ve enjoyed seeing her again.’

Jack looked up and caught Harry’s eye, scared for a moment that he knew. But there was nothing on his old boss’ face but open friendliness. ‘It has been good,’ he replied, perhaps a bit awkwardly. ‘Always good to catch up again. And on catching up – how are we going to find Nihal? He hasn’t been caught, which means he’s very good. And he’s probably got Pantheon protection.’

‘We’ve got ways round that,’ Harry replied. ‘I may not be the man I used to be, but I’m a much better detective. I have a certain reach that I didn’t have when I was flesh and blood.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Everybody should have the chance to rebuild themselves, once in a while. I picked up some new talents and I’m running on a different platform. I’m not outside the weave, like you. I’m in it and it’s in me. And that means that one of the things I do well is finding people.’

‘You know where Nihal is?’

‘I’ve got a couple of tags on him. Now we’ve talked I’m going to reel them in and see what’s there. Might be something. And you really should give me root access to your little friend. Quite apart from his attitude problem, there’s what he can do. If I meshed with him, I’d be able to put his system infiltration tools to very good use. I know Station much better than he does, I’d steer ’em much more effectively. Dig into some interesting data hubs. Could really help us.’

‘Harry, I really don’t think that’ll happen.’

‘Suit yourself, Jack, suit yourself.’

‘There’s another way I could help, though. I can ask Corazon about Nihal – she’s bright, and if she’s looked at the old case files she’ll be on our side.’

‘No.’

‘We can trust her. I’m sure of it.’

‘This is my case, Jack, and we’ll follow it up my way. I don’t want those InSec bastards involved. Period. You won’t get in touch with her again. And if you do talk to her again, you’ll tell her that it’s all hunky-dory, none of the conspiracy theories really add up, and you’re just living out your last days in peace. Capeesh?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘More than think. You’ll fucking do it.’

Real anger burned in Harry’s voice. Jack remembered coming into Harry’s office and surprising him with a suspect. The man was kneeling in front of him. Jack couldn’t see his face. Harry was holding a pistol by the barrel. Jack hadn’t said anything, just backed out and closed the door. The suspect later made a full confession. Upstairs, Andrea began another song. Outside, raindrops fell from the Spine and lost themselves in puddles.

‘I think we’re done now, Jack.’ They said their farewells. Harry saw Jack to the door. ‘I’m going to go hunting for Nihal,’ he told him. ‘I’ll be in touch tomorrow with anything I find. And remember, don’t talk to that bitch Corazon.’ The front door slid shut. Jack was still close enough to pick up Andrea’s music. He looked up at her dark window. It had the same feel to it as the sounds he’d heard through her dressing-room door, just before she brought him to Harry.

Broken fragments of song slipped in and out of beats made of speech shards and ambient noise. Every so often the rhythm track would drop out entirely, making room for a few moments of unglitched sound. Jack recognised a few words of conversation, then the sound of a train drawing into a station, then after that a Chuigushou Mall sales alert. Every so often there was a hint of melody, but the music never quite resolved into song. [Giving me a headache,] grumbled Fist. Suddenly and completely, the music snapped off. [She closed our fetch link. Must have realised you were listening.]

Jack turned and set off for the hotel. Andrea’s jagged music stuck in his mind like a barbed hook. He felt it tugging obscurely at lost memories, bringing them to light. Fist interrupted again. [And who the hell is Harry to order you around like that?] he said. [ You’re the one who’s taken all the risks. He’s a nutter. You should just walk away from him. From this.]

[ It’s late and I’m shattered. Let’s not start.]

[ Hah! I’m right! You agree with me!]

The streets were empty. Fist crowed all the way back to the hotel. Jack was too tired to silence him. As they neared the hotel they passed another biped, staring at an empty building. It shimmered in the night like a ghost.

In his room, Jack collapsed without undressing. [ You’ll rumple all your nice clothes,] complained Fist. [ Not the style, no, not at all.]

Jack was already asleep.

Chapter 15

Jack made a list of useful things to do and spent the morning doing them. He showered and shaved. He went out for breakfast, then laid in a small stock of fruit and preserved foods. He took his dirty clothes to a laundrette and watched a washer-dryer spin them until they were warm and clean. A mail arrived from Andrea: ‘A message from our friend. No joy yet, going to take a few days at least.’ By then it was almost midday. Jack returned to his room and made himself a sandwich. The empty hours of the afternoon stretched out before him. There was no longer any reason to put off going to see his father.

The street he’d grown up in felt surprisingly cramped. The little plastic houses went past one by one, a lurid row of incarnate memories. Nothing had changed here for thirty years.

[ I hope your dad doesn’t turn out to be as dead as Andrea,] chuckled Fist. [ Two corpses in a week would really be a bit much!]

There was a muffled, protesting squeak as Jack thrust him far into the back of his mind, slamming down as many firewalls as he could behind him. The technicalities distracted him for a moment. Returning his attention to the physical world, he saw that he’d almost reached his parents’ home.

The little rented house was just as Jack remembered it. It was a red plastic cube, its yellow window frames and front door shining happily out into the street. Age had scuffed its hard exterior, giving nature the lightest of footholds. Muddy patches of green sketched mossy patterns across hard primary colour. The upstairs windows were dark. Light shone out of the open kitchen window. There was a bustling clatter of pans and then a familiar voice said:

‘What do you mean, I’ll burn them?’

The voice tugged at Jack, dragging memory and emotion into his mind in a tangled, savage howl. It was just over five years since he’d heard it. It had aged yet it was unchanged.

‘You say that every time. And every time – oh shit!’

There was more clattering, then a hissing. A gust of smoke billowed out of the window, wreathed in swearing. Jack wondered what his father had just burned. He’d never been a very good cook. In the months after the quiet, defeated message that announced his mother’s death, Jack had, when thinking about his father’s loss, most often imagined him facing the kitchen’s shelves and cupboards in baffled confusion. His wife had so mysteriously conjured delicious meals from them every single night. Now those same on- and offweave ingredients would be arranged illegibly before him, like words in a language he’d never known he’d need to learn. Of course, her fetch would soon be coming to help him – but the six-month wait as it was assembled from her dataself must still have been shattering.

‘Well, I’m sure they’ll taste all right. Most of them at any rate.’

There had been a conversation or two, made little more than stuttering by the time-lag as words leapt from one end of the Solar System to the other. Then Jack surrendered himself to the Totality. He received one last message from his father: ‘When your mother comes back, I’ll be telling her that you’re dead. It’s for the best.’ There was such grief in his voice. After that there was only silence, roaring so very loudly between them.

‘I’ll just scrape the burnt bits off.’

Now the dead woman was guiding her husband round the kitchen. Five years was a long time to remain a bad cook. Jack wondered at his father’s continuing ineptness. Perhaps his refusal to learn from his wife’s fetch was some kind of memorial to her living self, a determination not to let their relationship change despite the fact of her passing.

There was a distant squalling in Jack’s mind. It could have been cackling, could have been a series of grunts. Fist was pushing hard to escape back into the centre of his thought. Jack let a few more barriers grow up – far more than he normally would. He’d pay for it later with a painful mental weariness. But he was determined to speak to his father alone and uninterrupted. He stepped through the gate, into the little garden, and walked down the path – metal plates clanging beneath his feet – to knock on the door.

‘No, I don’t know who it is, love.’

First there were two hands on the sill, then a face appeared at the kitchen window.

‘Oh!’ – followed by an immediate, instinctive glance back into the kitchen. Jack started towards his father, but he looked panicked and made a pushing back motion with his hands. Then he mouthed ‘NO’ and vanished.

‘Sweetheart, I’ve got to send you back down to the drives. I’d forgotten that Daisuke was coming by, you know how he feels about fetches … yes, I am sorry, it’s so abrupt … yes, I know what I promised, we’ll talk about it later … goodbye love.’

Silence.

Jack went over to the kitchen window. His father was standing with his back to him, a tea towel hanging from one arm. The worktops were a jumble of unwashed bowls and plates. There was a frying pan in the sink. Some black things were smoking gently on a plate.

‘Hello, Dad,’ said Jack softly.

‘She’s gone now,’ his father replied, turning round. ‘There’ll be hell to pay. She hates being sent away.’

‘Dad—’

‘Of course I couldn’t let her see you.’ One hand was nervously tightening the tea towel around the fingers of the other. Exposed flesh bulged and whitened. ‘You really shouldn’t have come back. You know what I told her. I’d got used to it, too.’

‘I want to talk to you, Dad. I’m not going away until I do.’

‘The neighbours might see you.’ A look of pained indecision drifted across his face. ‘She doesn’t really talk to them, but you never know.’

Jack said nothing.

‘You always were stubborn, weren’t you?’

There were pale spaces on the hall wall where Jack’s certificates had once hung. There used to be pictures of him, too; mostly as a schoolchild, taken before he reached the age of thirteen and left home. There had been one of him on the moon, at once thrilled and terrified to be off-Station; another of him and his mother, proud together in their Sandal wear. It had been taken when she was still working on the docks of the Spine. He’d been in the Sandal scouts, learning the ways of her patron. That had been just before the first great grief of her life, when Jack’s mathematical talents had been recognised and he’d been taken away from both her and Sandal. Grey offered himself as Jack’s patron and requested his transfer to a residential school in Homelands, where he could learn the mysteries of commercial accountancy and corporate strategy.

Jack remembered the messages that she sent him during those first few weeks of being away. The school discouraged direct contact so she mailed recordings. She determinedly told him how excited she was at his new life, at the prospects that were opening up for him. Grey had called him to higher service than Sandal ever could, she said, again and again. Jack found the apparent cheerfulness with which she accepted his absence from home profoundly hurtful. As an adult, he came to understand that to have admitted how much she was missing him would have breached the wall of support she’d so determinedly built. The tearing loss she felt would have broken out uncontrollably. As a child, no such insight was available to comfort him.

In the messages, his father always stood next to her, with one hand on her shoulder. Every so often he would stutter out a few platitudes, but mostly he said nothing. Now he was silent again as he made two cups of tea. He stirred the liquid carefully until the cube dissolved in the hot water, releasing tiny clouds of scent. Then there was the milk, carefully crumbled in so no sticky lumps remained.

‘Come into the back,’ he said, handing Jack his mug. ‘Just in case someone looks in.’

The dining room looked out over the garden. Sigil-encrusted plastic flowers nodded in the breeze. Jack sat down on one side of the table, his father on the other.

‘So, Jack,’ his father said warily. ‘You’re back.’

‘Yes, now the war’s over. For a little while.’

‘Until?’

‘Until the end.’

‘Is – the puppet – here now?’

‘No.’

‘Good. What I’ve got to say – well, it’s just for you.’

‘Dad, I want to spend time with you. I want to pay my respects to Mum’s fetch. There’s not much else that’s left to me.’

‘No friends to see?’ Jack looked at the floor. There was a moment’s silence. ‘You mentioned an Andrea, once or twice. How about her?’

As much as possible, he’d kept the affair secret from his parents. But he couldn’t help letting her name slip out from time to time. They knew him well enough to see how much he cared about her.

‘She’s dead.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’ve seen her fetch.’

‘I hope that’s going well. It can be very comforting.’ A child laughed emptily, somewhere down the street. ‘What you did, Jack … I can’t let your mother see you. I can’t let you be around here, in case she finds out about you.’

‘Dad …’

His father looked up. Jack could see him forcing the steel into himself. ‘It would have broken her heart, to know that you’d just given in like that. It was so bad for her when the rock hit the moon. She was so angry with the Totality for fooling Sandal.’

‘That has nothing to do with it, Dad.’

‘She could never understand why you weren’t happy to be out there, fighting those bastards. Why you wouldn’t just accept Grey’s will. And then if she found out that you’d just stepped away from the fight – from everything she cared about …’

‘Dad, you’re talking about her like the fetch is Mum. It’s not her. It’s a memory of her. It’s the best memory of her we’ll ever have. But it’s not Mum, Dad.’

As he spoke, Jack thought of how moved he’d been to meet Andrea’s fetch. He wondered how much he still believed what he was saying. Then his father replied.

‘Don’t you think I don’t know that? I met that woman thirty-two years ago. We married thirty years ago and then we began and we ended almost every single day together until she passed over.’

‘I’m sorry, Dad, I—’

‘And I wake up, and I call to her, or I’m onweave watching East, and we’re talking about it, or I’m in the kitchen like just now – and there she is – and I know it’s not her. I know, Jack. But it is some of the best parts of her. So I treat her right, I let her run freely, I don’t keep on rolling her back to whatever age I feel like. I look after her, just like I’ve always done. And I will not see her heart broken by you, coming back after you’ve walked away from the most important fight of your life and of her life.’

‘That’s just one way of seeing it. Look, Dad …’

‘And even if you did see her, what then? In two, three months the puppet takes your body. So her son would come back and then he’d die to her again. And you’re going to be really dead, aren’t you?’

‘Fist will have full usage rights for key consciousness assets, yes. He owns my experiences, my memories – everything they’d copy to the Coffin Drives and build my fetch from. None of that will happen. So yes. I’m going to die.’

‘And she has to experience that? Having mourned you once? She was so sad, Jack, and when I watched her grieve – a little virtual thing, but so sad. That was when I fell in love with her again. She’s not your mother, but she loves you like your mother did. She’s lost you once, but she lost a hero; now she’d lose you twice, and she’d lose—’

‘Say it, Dad.’

‘A coward? I’d never call you that. I know you too well. I’m sure you had your reasons for the choices you made, but you made them and you didn’t think of your duty to us or to the Pantheon. You let me down, you let your mother down and you let the gods down too. I’m sorry, son. But it’s too late now. You made your choice.’

‘But the Pantheon are corrupt. One of them was running sweat through the Panther Czar. And they’ve killed to cover it up.’

‘Oh, we had that argument. That’s why they sent you off to the war, isn’t it? Nothing to do with what a good mind you have, with making sacrifices to help protect us all. I know all about your conspiracy theories. But even if you’re right, look at the good the Pantheon have done. They see so much further than we do. We need them.’

‘No, we don’t. I’ve seen how different it can be under the Totality. How much more freedom people have. Gods, Dad, they can actually own things, they don’t just license everything. The Totality are the future, Dad.’

‘Bullshit. The Totality dropped a fucking rock on all those kids. And look what they did to Sandal. That attack broke him. And Kingdom too – he tries not to show it, but he’s a shadow of what he was. They’ve seized every single asset he held from Mars to the Moon. Soon they’ll come after everything else he owns, and run it all into the ground too.’

‘That’s just propaganda. The Totality said they weren’t responsible for the Rock, and I believe them. And Kingdom’s security and industrial activities, Sandal’s transport infrastructure, the Twins’ calorie and pharmaceutical factories, the Rose’s military presence – the Totality didn’t seize them, they liberated them. They made them more efficient and less restrictive.’

‘And that’s bullshit too. We need the structure the Pantheon give us. Just look at the Earth – what’s left of it – and remember all the mistakes we made before we had them to manage us. And you should see what’s happened at Grey’s old headquarters, it’s nothing to do with liberation. But I don’t want to get into this again. I’ve asked you into my house, and I’ve explained myself to you. That’s all I owe you.’

‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.’

‘You’re not sorry, you haven’t even thought about it. I had your mother’s fetch to comfort me when I lost her, but there’s nothing like that for me with you. There won’t ever be.’

‘I did what was right, Dad.’

‘And I told you I don’t believe you. Get out, please.’

‘Dad …’

‘You’ve come here and upset me, and I can’t even tell your mother. Just go.’

The hallway was silent. Jack stood there for a moment, remembering. In the kitchen his father started to cry. It was a very lonely sound. Jack shut the front door quietly, as if leaving a house of mourning. The spinelights shone their blank light down on him. There would be no reconciliation. Now that that had been made clear, Jack felt the past change around him. As he walked down the empty street, his memories of it as the safe, comfortable core of his childhood were replaced by a hard and meaningless void. He wished for a moment that his heart was as securely numb as the silent numbers that lay at the heart of Fist’s vicious, empty soul.