Steel Sky (32 page)

“I don’t have to. If the Winnower is a god, then he will come because he knows I need him. If he is a man, then Image will know where in the Hypogeum he is. It sees everything the cameras see. Or do you think the Winnower is a god?”

“He’s a man!” Second Son shouts. “A foolish, misguided man!”

“Image,” says Amarantha, “is the Winnower supernatural or mortal?”

“I am not permitted to divulge personal information about the citizens of the Hypogeum,” the simulated intelligence answers.

“Then he’s a man?” Amarantha presses. “A citizen?”

Image is silent for a moment. “I cannot comment on that,” it says finally.

“But you know all the citizens of the Hypogeum, and you know where they are,” Amarantha says.

“I see whoever is in view of the cameras.”

“And if the Winnower is a citizen, and he is needed in court, you could call him, correct?”

“I would try.”

“Then call the Winnower.”

“I cannot.”

A moment of silence follows. Finally it is broken by a shrill giggle. Amarantha turns the volume of Second Son’s monitor down as far as it will go. She looks up at the ceiling. She had thought her plan was foolproof.

“Where is he, Image?” she cries. “Where is the Winnower?”

“I do not know.”

THE EATING ROOM

Edward Penn wakes up suddenly in bed, drenched in a cold sweat. The room is utterly black. He flails around for the light; nothing is where it should be. Then he remembers where he is. Living on Deck One, he has never experienced such darkness. His head is pounding. With trembling hands he shakes the woman sleeping next to him. “Wake up!” he says. “Wake up, damn it!”

He feels her rouse and turn toward him. “What is it?” Her voice is groggy.

“A light!” he says. “I need light!”

She turns again and slips away from him. His fingers are left groping at empty air. “Where are you?”

The room fills with green light. Astrid is standing by the bed with a glowstick in her hand.

“Where’s the bath?” he asks.

“Over there,” she says, pointing.

In the opposite corner of the room is a tiled depression, a hole in the floor with a spigot over it. He stumbles to the corner and vomits into the hole. The nausea ebbs away, but the pain in his skull remains. When he is done, he rinses his mouth and spits what is left into the hole. “A drink,” he says. “Bring me a drink.”

“You mean alcoholic or not?”

“A
drink
, damn it! Alcoholic.”

She shrugs and reaches into the cabinet. She pulls out a bottle and climbs across the bed to bring it to him. He takes the bottle and drains it. “Vasodilator,” he explains, wiping his lips. “To get rid of the migraine.”

“Are you on drugs?” she asks.

“Sort of.” Already he can feel his blood vessels opening. The throbbing in his head subsides as the alcohol flows through his veins. “I’ve been developing a compound designed to enable people to breathe the fumatory, at least for short periods of time. It’s still experimental. It increases the oxygen-carrying capability of the blood and breaks down carbon monoxide and other poisons in the bloodstream. I’ve been testing it on myself.”

“That’s why you’re sick?”

“Well, the fumatory causes its own effects, but yes, the serum has side effects. The problem is the profusion of erythrocytes in my blood. My hematocrit is off the charts. If I don’t take an anticoagulant regularly, I’m at risk of cerebral embolism . . . a stroke. There may be some other problems, too. I’m still working on it.”

“You’re not going to die here right now, are you?”

He smiles wryly. She is totally uninterested in his welfare; her only concern is that he might inconvenience her by dying on her bed before he has settled his bill. “Not right now,” he says. “But I’d better get back to my office and run some tests.”

“You’re leaving already?”

“Would you miss me if I left?”

“Of course I would.” She stretches out across the bed, casually displaying her naked body. “Guys as smart and handsome as you don’t come by that often, you know.”

He smiles again. Surely she is lying, or at least exaggerating, but she says it with such easy charm that he doesn’t care if she is sincere or not. “Then come with me,” he says. “I’ll show you the Chandelier.”

She sighs. “I told you, I can’t leave. This is my place. I come with the room.”

“Let me take you away. I can give you a better life.”

“I can’t leave, Edward. That was part of the deal, when my agent got me the room and paid for the resculpting. The room is tuned to my biofrequency. I can’t leave it.”

“Astrid, I don’t know what kind of superstitious foolishness your agent’s been feeding you, but as a trained physician I can tell you there’s no such thing as a ‘biofrequency.’ He’s scamming you.”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried? The moment I walk out that door my gut starts churning. And the further I walk, the worse it gets. I’ve never made it further than a few meters.”

“Then we’ll leave the way I came in. Through the vent.”

Astrid looks at the hole in the wall, and Edward sees the first real emotion she has dared to reveal to him, a glimmer of hope. “That might work,” she says.

“I’ll show you the Chandelier,” he promises. “I’ll show you the river. I’ll show you the Sun. You’ve never seen the Sun, have you?”

She shakes her head.
No
.

“Will you come with me?” Edward asks.

She stands and looks around the room, eyes darting from one knickknack to the next. “I’d need to bring some things with me . . .”

He stands behind her and puts his hands on her shoulders. “Don’t bother. It’s a long way, and it’s hard to carry things through the vents. I’ll buy you whatever you need when we reach the upper decks. We’ll get you a whole new wardrobe.”

She turns her head and looks at him, but her eyes are reluctant to rest on his. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yes!” He grips her arm. “Yes. Come with me.”

Without answering, she steps away and pulls a small, transparent cube from the wall. Flecks of paint come with it. Edward can see that the room has been painted many, many times. Astrid holds the cube in both hands and stares into it. Blobs of colored light roll and jump slowly within. “I wonder if I should bring this,” she says. “It’s the only thing in the room that’s really mine. Samael gave it to me. Everything else was already here when I came.”

Edward has seen these cubes for sale in the Atrium. They are cheap trinkets, part of a forgotten fad among tertiaries, but she doesn’t know that. “We can bring it if you like.”

“No,” she says, dropping it on the bed. “Leave it for whoever the room eats next.”

LOGIC AND POWER

“Sorry, you’re not cleared for this deck.”

Cadell stares through the horizontal bars at the clop standing on the other side. The clop looks back, his face shadowed in the small booth. His crimson eyeband is squeezed between bushy eyebrows and fat cheeks.

“What did you say?” Cadell asks.

“Machine says you’re not cleared,” the clop repeats, his thick lips pursed.

“That’s ridiculous. I’m a primary. I’ve walked through this gate a thousand times.” Cadell points to the stripe on his shoulder.

The clop shakes his head. “Machine says no.”

Cadell slaps his ident against the identification plate again. Again he sees the negative red light illuminate the clop’s eroding face.

“Your machine must be malfunctioning,” Cadell says.

“Can’t be. Had it checked yesterday.”

Cadell presses himself up against the bars. All the force he can muster doesn’t move them a micron. He feels something like panic driving him into a frenzy. How could he have been so stupid as to leave Amarantha, even for a moment? “Listen,” he says, “I don’t have time for this. My wife needs me . . .”

With an effort, the clop stands and squeezes out of his booth. Cadell has finally succeeded in bothering him.

“I mean, not my
wife
. . .” Cadell shoves his arm though the bars. “Look, you can read my ident manually, can’t you? I’m a primary, I swear!”

The clop takes a quick step backward and pulls out his gun. “You want to get shot?” he says. Cadell yanks his arm back in. “Because I’ll shoot you,” the clop continues, warming up to the idea.

Cadell realizes he is going about this the wrong way. He is treating the clop as if he is stupid, but he isn’t. Cadell is arguing logically, but to the clop this isn’t an issue of logic. It’s an issue of power, of relative status. By insisting on logic, Cadell is only making the clop mad.

Cadell hurries out of the booth and maneuvers into the line waiting at the next booth over. The man at the front of the line begins to object, but Cadell pushes past him and the bars of the booth snap shut behind him. He puts his ident against the panel. The bars in front of him slide open.

The clop lumbers toward the booth. “I’d like to read your ident manually,” he says.

Cadell pushes him out of the way and bounds up the stairs. As he reaches the landing, he looks back briefly. The clop has his gun pointing in Cadell’s direction but seems reluctant to pull the trigger. Cadell feels a prick of regret. He would never have believed he was capable of assaulting a clop.

He turns the corner, leaving the clop behind, and keeps running.

A QUESTION OF CHARACTER

“She did not want to admit to her boyfriend that she was still in love with me,” Second Son is saying, his small face bobbing up and down across the monitor. “The attack of the Winnower exposed our tryst, but it also gave her a ready-made excuse. She told him that I had assaulted her, tried to rape her. He saw in her story an opportunity to advance himself politically by bringing a suit against me. That’s really why we’re here today. Not because this woman was hurt — clearly she wasn’t — but because her boyfriend has allied himself with my political enemies.”

Amarantha sits with her arms folded across her chest, watching him talk. She has finished her presentation, but she does not want to leave while Second Son is still making his argument. She is allowed to stay as long as she can stand it, and she intends to wait him out.

Second Son gets to his feet. There is not much room in the examination booths, but somehow he manages. He clasps his hands together behind his back and takes a deep breath, playing it up for the camera. “Later in my presentation, I will present an episode in which Miss Kirton and her boyfriend discuss how they would like to see my family stripped of its prestige and the cameras ripped down. But first I’d like to call up an episode from 324.17.5, in Domus 412, Sector 12, Deck 7.”

Amarantha strains to recall when and where that was, what Second Son could possibly be thinking of. Then it hits her. “Oh, no,” she whispers. “No, you can’t do that.”

“It’s an episode relating to the character of the plaintiff,” Second Son says with a smirk.

“Personal history isn’t relevant!” Amarantha objects, her voice rising in fear. She doesn’t remember the exact date that Second Son has asked for, but the episode is from her bad times, when she was living in the lower decks with the group of tertiaries.

“
I would never do such a thing,
” Second Son repeats to her. “Those were your words. You brought up the issue of character yourself. You made it relevant.”

“Image!” she pleads. “You can’t let him!”

“I’m afraid he is correct.”

The episode begins to play on the monitor. Amarantha is lying naked on a dirty bedspread, musth dripping out of one ear. Her eyes are unfocused. A man lies beside her, his hands on her breast. Another man is behind her.

“That was years ago,” Amarantha says, unable to make her faltering voice rise. “I was just a kid. My boyfriend had dumped me. My father was dead.”

Image says, “The veniremen will take those things into consideration.”

The men slide closer to her, touching her with their hands, their mouths. The movement of other people, just beyond the edge of the viewing area, becomes apparent. The men move languidly, with intermittent bursts of sudden activity. She responds sluggishly, sensual only in the grossest sense of the word.

He lets the pictures run for a long time.

THE PUNISHMENT

“Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all.”

Horsen curses out loud, though the room is empty. Why not? No one is willing to come near him, so why shouldn’t he curse at no one?

“Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em.” He chants it over and over like a mantra.

He sits slouched in a large chair in one corner of his domus. An empty bottle of oddka lies on the floor by his side. Occasionally he lifts the soft gun he stole from work and points it at the triple-locked door. “Zip!” he says, pretending to fire it. “Zap!”

He imagines his wife walking through the door. “Zip!” He imagines his friends walking in. “Zip!”