The Pure Cold Light (16 page)

The bullgod led Lyell through a narrow door and into a room off which half a dozen similar doors opened. He crossed the room and entered one of them. Inside was a curving wall that rose up into total darkness. It might have led to one of the corner bartizans or the central rotunda. Metal steps led up the side of it, but the bull walked past them, to a door that unlatched electronically just as he reached it.

They stood in a small entryway, a room that clearly could be sealed off. The bull halted before the armored door on the other side of the enclosure. The door stood ajar. “Dis the twitchers’ lounge,” he said sharply. “I don’t go in. Principal’s on other side—you’ll be met.”

Lyell nodded.

The bullgod stepped back to let her pass. As she did, he observed, “You look strong.”
 

She turned on him, exasperated by this last comment after walking the gauntlet. Then she saw his scarred face was flushed, and his eyes cast down. He was embarrassed. He was shy and flustered. She wondered if he had ever spoken to a woman up close before. There must have been some who would have given him the opportunity.
 

“I’m not so strong as you,” she said. “Thank you for the escort.” Before he could get any ideas from that, she pushed her way into the so-called lounge.

***

It was not a large room. Seated around cheap folding tables, a dozen people in softly glowing LifeMasks looked up at her. She thought of pictures of apostles that had adorned the Sunday school classrooms of her childhood. The same smiles, the same generous earmarks of divinity.

One of them, at a desk beside the door, got up and bowed smartly.
 
He reached for her hand and shook it. “My name is Mr.
Ong
,” he said, and chuckled. “I’m in charge of these goats. You’re to go right on through and no bother.” Ong’s mask was grinning delightedly. His hand was hard and calloused.

At the other end of the room, the second security door hung ajar. There was a third metal door in the wall on her right, closed.

Lyell passed among the happy artificial heads. One of them could easily have been Rueda. How would she ever spot him among the artificial idiot smiles?

For all of the faces at peace, some of the bodies, the hands at least, were trembling. A few had missing fingertips. One arm was absent altogether but invisibly filled out its sleeve from the beyond.

Their hands were rough, hard. Some of the nails were broken, some hands scabrous. She tried to recall what Rueda’s hands had looked like. She’d been so absorbed with the face, but she had checked his hands, his wrists. She didn’t think they matched any she saw here. How many twitchers would already be in their classrooms? How many lounges might be strewn through the complex? Her map hadn’t indicated any of them.
 

She passed through the second door, and heard it shut heavily behind her. The sound reverberated as if through many tunnels.

She stood at the head of a conduit between two rows of partitioned cubicles. The air was smoky, misty. The overhead lights barely fired. A few fluorescent tubes flickered here and there in an erratic pattern, but most, apparently, had burned out and never been replaced.

Lyell walked between the cubicles. Shadowy clerks turned to face her, poised like animals caught in the light of desk lamps and terminal screens. The equipment looked a good twenty years out of date, with big monitors as bulky as dictionaries. She thought that if she were to make a sudden move, the figures would all dive out of sight.
 

The fluorescents ahead flared briefly, revealing scratches in the mottled black stone at her feet. The sound of her footsteps ricocheted like bullets off it. A dozen invisible people seemed to be walking ahead of and behind her. Weird, crisscrossing echoes.

Like a freighter’s prow bearing down upon her out of the fog, the principal’s desk loomed into sight. On each side of it stood high folding screens covered in Japanese brush paintings of waterfalls and brightly plumed birds. The frames were black lacquer, as was the triangular desk. The arrangement appeared to be an origami construct spotlighted under recessed fixtures and magnified to seem larger than it was.

The screens must have disguised an air-filtering system; the moment Lyell stepped between them, the smoky atmosphere vanished and the air smelled as clean and moist as a rain forest.

The ICS-IV principal, Chikako Peat, reclined behind the desk. She rested her stockinged feet on the top, and she was smoking an aromatic cigarette from a holder as long as her forearm. A bank of thin monitors dangled immediately above the desk, their shifting images like rainwater reflected upon the woman’s face. She glanced from the monitors without turning, giving Lyell a stare out of the corners of her heavy-lidded, almond-shaped eyes. It made her seem both mischievous and haughty. The irises of both eyes looked violet, but that might have been a result of the monitors. She had rounded cheeks, a flat nose, and full, painted lips. Her face was as perfect and smooth as a mask, but she, unlike her teachers, did not wear one.

She had traded a life as a rich madam in the Overcity for this job. Lyell had met her once before, in her old job. She placed Chikako Peat at twice her apparent age and extraordinarily well-connected in the upper governing levels of SC-Philadelphia.

“We know each other, don’t we?” the principal said.
 

“I once went seeking someone you’d employed.”

Peat exhaled a stream of smoke that plummeted almost at once to the ground. “Yes. As I recall, you found her.”

“You’d moved her to another establishment with which you were connected. But, yes, I found her.”

Peat nodded in recollection. “Did her family ever take her back?”

“Why would they? She’d made it into the Overcity. They’re just lowly shopkeepers in a laborers’ quarter outside the walls. They can’t even come inside without a permit. They only wanted to know that she was all right.”

Chikako Peat laid down the cigarette holder on a tray near her feet. “What’s your assessment? Was she all right?”

Lyell leaned on one of the screens. “I’m looking for someone again,” she said.

“Why don’t you sit? Will I have to hide this person from you, too?”

“You didn’t have to the last time.” Lyell took a seat beside the desk.

“As it turned out. As it turned out, I’m the one should have gone into hiding. The corporation chose to shut me down shortly after your visit. I hope this isn’t going to be a deja vu experience.” Her eyes flicked again across the suspended monitors. Her irises were violet, almost lavender.
 

Lyell followed Peat’s glance to the screens, partly visible from her position. “You don’t seem to be very busy.”

“With paperwork, you mean. That’s what all the clerks are for. Reports. Transfers. Death certificates.” She pursed her lips. “There are over a dozen new twitchers going into classrooms today—right now, as we’re talking. Statistically, fewer than half of them will survive the course. I don’t care particularly to be sending people to their deaths, but that’s inevitably what I do every day. How busy must I be?”

Lyell answered, “When I found out you were here, I thought to myself how much power you must wield to get yourself such a cushy job.”

Peat’s smile curled with irony. “Nothing like it,” she said. “I was given a choice between this position with limited prominence but continued residence inside the Overcity, or else whoring in a lunar or martian colony. Until then I thought exactly what you do—that I knew enough about too many people’s predilections, and that would protect me. I suppose it did, after a fashion—they didn’t have me murdered. They rightly suspect that I have recordings cached away which could damage, perhaps end, a few careers. That tempered the verdict slightly; but you cannot bargain with the likes of ScumberCorp. If you don’t like the offer, then you don’t like the offer.”

“Another company?” Lyell suggested.

Peat laughed. “What a novel idea.”

Lyell nodded. It had been the same with her father. “My visit was unrelated to your change of fortune. I didn’t work for them.”

Peat leaned forward, touching the edge of the desk. A section of desktop slid back to reveal a small keyboard beneath the surface. At the same time a thin wedge angled up out of the desk behind it. “You are—” she leaned forward to read from the embedded screen “—a social placement officer, an interoffice interloper who decides who’s behaving and gets released, who isn’t and stays bound to this hell on Earth a little longer.”

“It says all that?” she asked amusedly. Nebergall had taken care of her long-standing ID. Inside the school system was the one place where the concept of truancy still meant something, however. She carried a court-appointed officer’s biocard in her belt bag as backup.

Peat smiled. “I
know
placement officers, Miss Lyell. I deal with them routinely. Little gods. They never bother with missing persons. On the whole, I would say they prefer to have people missing.”

“I had a different job back then. Same as you.”

Chikako Peat withdrew her feet from the desktop. “What is it you want that you had to come here in person instead of applying to the
phonet
?”

“There’s a new teacher—”

“Twitcher. The nons—that is, the students—call them twitchers. It’s a grim but accurate epithet, I think. The name has taken root, as with the term ‘bullgod’ that they attached to their guards. Clever children.”

“A new twitcher, then. Named Angel Rueda. His situation is not the normal—”

“I do not discuss these people with anyone,” Peat said. She splayed her hand and studied her polished fingernails. “Besides which, none of their situations could be described as normal. If they were normal they wouldn’t be here.”

“Nevertheless, there are some deeply troubling circumstances surrounding him ”

“For you or for me? I get a list of names and appointments. That’s all I know. And what does a truant officer want with a twitcher?”

The point had come that Lyell had to trust this woman. Was her low opinion of SC real or a blind? She was the principal, and it was quite conceivable she knew about the weapons Mingo had delivered. She could have requested them. She could be working for Mingo, by choice or coercion. There was the risk, unavoidable.

“Like you say, maybe that’s all you know,” Lyell began. “What you might find odd about Rueda is that, purportedly, a few days ago he caused an accident at ScumberCorp’s Procellarum facility and may be a member of a radical group within the corporation that’s been blamed for dozens of similar incidents.”

“
Xau Dâu
?” Peat said softly, her face betraying concern at last. “They would never—”

“You might conclude as I did that SC would keep someone that dangerous totally isolated. Their official report in fact says he’s been sent down to isolate him from others in his alleged group. Isolated. Yet you’ve got him on staff.”

Peat typed again on her keyboard. After a moment the report appeared on her wedge screen. She skimmed over it, lingering on the standard head-shots of Angel Rueda. “That is the same person? You’re sure?”

Lyell leaned forward. She nodded. “Yes.”

Peat scrolled some more, reading. “Nothing about the Moon at all. An ex-Orbiter.”

“What?” Lyell stood and leaned over her to read the file.

Peat continued aloud, “Suffered minor tissue loss in the phalanges of the feet and some sort of necrosis in the parietal lobe of the brain which is why he wears the cranial bypass unit. Here’s his work permit number. An employment history clearly reflects drug use, but, then, most of our twitchers are still orbiting despite swearing otherwise. We’re used to that. Nope, no job higher than temporary docker, like a million others hanging on outside the walls—not very probable lunar material here.” She gazed up at Lyell. “Why do I have this report in my system if what you say is true?”

She didn’t have an answer for that.
Why put one story in place for the likes of Nebergall and then plant this one for the school system? Obviously, because these two elements of society weren’t supposed to cross paths. Parallel lines.
She would have loved to tie into Nebergall’s
phonet
and let Chikako Peat see ScumberCorp’s news release, but that would have established a traceable link between Neeb and ICS-IV, incriminating everybody at both ends.

While she was thinking, Peat called up something else on the main monitor hanging overhead. Laid atop the shifting images of various classrooms and hallways was a list in red of numbers and names. “He’s teaching in the third cellblock, in classroom F.” The list disappeared, replaced by a different classroom image.

They viewed the room as if standing at the back on a chair or desk. The figure at the front had ash-blond hair and the indefatigable smile of the LifeMask. From this distance its luminance gave the impression there was a soft spotlight focused on his face.

From the dimness around them, Lyell heard a strangely metallic voice: “Nucleosynthesis is the making of new elements out of nuclear reactions—the kinds of reactions that occur within stars. We think the Universe might not always have been made of the same things as we see today, precisely because nucleosynthesis has added new matter to the world.”

Peat turned down the lecture. “He seems to be handling the program well enough.”

“Are all of your twitchers ex-Orbiters? Is there a reason for it?”

“It helps us. He remains asleep for all intents while he talks. The mask program disconnects higher brain functions from the speech centers. It’s been described as forced meditation. That’s why junkies and drunks—anybody who’s already wiped a good portion of their brain—are perfect candidates for this. Less resistance. It doesn’t have to be Orbitol necessarily. In fact, dipsomaniacs are preferred over Orbiters. When the lecture program takes hold, it acts as a temporary personality. You heard him talking. He sounds alert, doesn’t he? But your real Angel Rueda, whoever he is, won’t be back again until the program releases him—at the end, or in an emergency situation, where it would wake him.”

Lyell turned that information over. “What would constitute an emergency situation?”