alt.human (4 page)

O
NCE YOU HAVE
pids in your blood you can change their identifying codes – with the help of some dodgy black-market kit – but you can never be free of them. So the first thing I did when I got back to the nest that evening was reimpose my originals, make myself Dodge again and not Reed Trader 12, whoever he might be. Elsewhere around the Ipp, all those with borrowed identities would be doing the same.

Somewhere in their systems, the chlicks would be evaluating what had happened in Precept Square that day, and it was a safe assumption that soon they would be rounding up some of those involved. I didn’t want to be Reed Trader any longer than necessary.

The clan’s main nest was known as Villa Virtue. It was a concrete block grafted on to the cliffs deep in the city’s South-East 6 Indigenous People’s Preserve, a district otherwise known as Cragside. Behind the walls, caverns were burrowed deep into the cliff, excavated generations ago.

I had spent all my life here.

As the sun sank in a bloody sky to the west and the bells tolled seventh and curfew, I sat on a parapet with my back against a moss-covered rock, my feet dangling over a sheer drop to the street below.

Down there, old Sully hauled his hand-cart over the cobbles, cursing and muttering at the sentinel hanging in the air above him, logging his late return. A dog snapped and played at his heels, waiting for a titbit to fall. Three nearly-men, heads cauled with glowing alien webbing, rushed in the other direction, momentarily snagging the attention of the sentinel.

I heard a commotion out on the terrace, then. Sol’s voice, a mutter of clicks and spoken comments from the others. She had brought the refugees back from the meeting place.

I stood, balanced on the parapet, and threaded my way back round to the terrace. Time to purge their pids, time to switch identities and rewrite the stories told in their blood.

Sol greeted me with a wave of one hand. I thought she was going to make proper introductions, but instead she said, “Here he is. !¡
matter-of-fact
¡! The pids boy I was telling you about. He’ll sort you all out in no time, eh?”

I reimposed their identities, allowing the scanner to tweak the algorithms coded into their blood so that their old IDs were now attached to the borrowed profiles of local residents with respectable trades and clan histories. I did not know where they had come from, but now, according to their pids, the four were Lucias and Pleasance Benchport, Marek Moon and Callo Hart, indigenes of the city of Laverne.

There was small talk, expressions of gratitude. Callo, the woman I had saved, thanked me with a hug, western-style, with a brushing of cheeks and a pressing of shoulders. The other three, two men and a woman, barely seemed to notice me other than when they subjected themselves to the pid amendment.

As I removed the pad from the last man’s arm, Sol stood from the bench where she had been sitting. “Let’s get to that safehouse,” she said. And with another wave of the hand and a click of “!¡
dismissal
¡!” I was sent on my way.

I retreated to my precarious perch, and soon the five had gone, heading deep into the caves where they could pass through the Ipp without breaking curfew.

I liked to think of myself as Sol’s right-hand man, but at times like this I couldn’t help but be reminded that I was just a part of the network, a useful tool.

I did not know who these people were, or why we had risked arrest in order to secure their passage. I did not need to know. I just played my part.

But I was curious, and so I followed them.

I
T WAS STUPID
of me. A dumb, spur of the moment decision.

Why did I follow them?

I was angry, frustrated. I had helped set up that day’s successful transfer of the four refugees from the transit station; I had masterminded the pid swap that had seen us all safely through. I had cleaned up afterwards, given the four of them clean pids. And not once did Sol tell me what was actually going on, why these four were so important.

No matter how much I liked to believe I was central to Sol’s activities, I knew I was not. I felt excluded.

And so I followed.

They went deep into the nest, passing through a labyrinth of passageways and halls, some of them natural caves, others excavated by hand.

I knew I shouldn’t be following.

As I passed down through the chambers I almost cut away to my own cell. Maybe, even then, I could have convinced myself that I was just going down there to sleep and not following anyone at all.

Deep in the caverns, the passageway was natural now, worn away through years of seeping water eating at the limestone. The ground was uneven, polished smooth, skimmed with a pearly lustre of fresh lime deposit. The way was lit at irregular intervals by feeble glow-bulbs pasted to the wall.

Ahead, Sol and the four newcomers betrayed themselves with the glow of a hand-held torch and the occasional distorted rumble of voices. They made no particular effort to conceal their passage.

I trailed at a safe distance, finding my way by touch and sound and memory as the passage became almost completely dark. I knew where they were going after only two or three branchings; I had travelled this way many times as a child, when Skids and Jemerie and I had spent long days and nights exploring.

So confident was I of their destination that I took an early exit. If I followed them all the way I would emerge in the main hall of Villa Mart Three and would be spotted easily.

Instead, I emerged through a cleft at the base of the crag on which the Villa had been built.

It was long after curfew and the street was deserted. In the light of the nearby buildings, cramped together along the lane as if once there had been more room for them than this, I could see no sign of patrols.

Sticking close to the crag to stop my body-heat being picked up by any hovering sentinels, I followed the street for a short distance to where the Villa’s sheer wall rose, the building set deep into the rock. Where wall joined rock there were gaps, handholds, foot-spaces.

I climbed, as I had climbed here so often as a boy.

Villa Mart Three was four storeys high, culminating in a rooftop terrace far wider than that at Villa Virtue, with views out across much of the western part of the city. This villa was the clan’s secondary nest, used largely for raising and schooling our children. It would be a good place for visitors to lie low for a while.

As I had anticipated, the five were on the terrace already. I heard them before I reached that level. I knew Sol would bring them out here for the spectacle of the night-time view over the rooftops of the Ipp and beyond to the alien zones, with their blazing skyscrapers and needle spires and gravity-defying mushroom towers. And beyond that, in the northern district of Constellation, the occasional flashes and lightning jags of the skystation.

I settled into a niche in the rock, just below the terrace’s outer wall.

Sol’s voice was the first I heard: “...pids will be good. The boy’s good. !¡
reassurance | calming
¡! You’ll be safe with us.”

“!¡
agitation
¡! As safe as we were in Angiere?” said one of the men. That brought the conversation to a long pause. Angiere was a city to the west of Laverne, on the coast of the Great Sea. I had heard of it, but had never met anyone who had been there.

“!¡
sadness | loss
¡! No one is safe in war.” That was my woman, the one I had saved and whose restored identity was Callo Hart 76.

War...

T
HE
M
ONUMENT TO
the Martyrs was tucked away in a side alley to the south of Precept Square.

By its nature, it was not a large or showy monument. If you did not know it was there, you would walk right by without noticing anything unusual.

Nightcut Alley was so narrow you could touch the buildings on either side, with your arms not even at full stretch. Usually, it was lined with trash cans and mounded rubbish from the taverns and pap-houses of Night Street, always waiting to be cleared but never, seemingly, clear. The buildings backed onto a straight-sided channel, filled with fast-flowing black water, and the Alley cut across the channel on a rickety wood-plank bridge, and the Monument to the Martyrs was tucked away below that bridge.

Here, on the far side, the channel cut into natural rock, and below the wooden span names had been carved, going back way beyond living memory. Names carved on names, carved on names.

Names of the Disappeared, names of the executed, names of those who had died in other ways at the hands of aliens.

Were they martyrs, though?

I never thought so. Maybe some of them.

Those of us who grew up in the Ipps, none of us were really rebels. We got by, we survived. Some of us took more risks than others. There were laws, of course, although the watchers had different laws to the chlicks, who had different laws to the starsingers and all the others. We had our own clan codes too, but they were quite apart from the rules of the aliens. Some of those laws we knew, but how could you ever understand the laws or moral protocols of sentient swarm-beings like the dragonflies of Clyd?

You couldn’t, in short, and our only real law, underlying all the rest, was the law of survival. We did what we needed to get by.

We were not rebels, and our martyrs had no cause.

We commemorated them for the loss, and for the knowledge that the next name on the Monument could be your own and, in a world like this, you might never even understand why.

We were not freedom fighters. There was no enemy. There was no war.

At least, not as far as I knew.

Chapter Four

“!¡
SADNESS | LOSS
¡! N
O
one is safe in war,” said Callo Hart.

Silent, I clung to my niche on the crag below the rooftop terrace.

There was another long pause, and I realised that the break in her voice had been because she had been holding back tears. I could picture the scene: she was crying now, quiet, restrained, just a line of tears from each eye picked out by the nightlights. Lucias and Pleasance were probably standing nearby, maybe her hand on his arm; Marek might be hesitating, unsure whether to go to her or not; and Sol would be staring out at the night skyline, ignoring the show of emotion, waiting for the conversation to move on. I wanted to look over the terrace wall, see the tableau, but I did not.

“!¡
curiosity | probing | fellow-feeling | sympathy
¡! Angiere?” prompted Sol eventually, her tones much softer than usual. I had got her wrong tonight: I had not expected her to show such sensitivity to the strangers.

“Gone,” said Callo, simply.

One of the men took over, Marek I thought: “!¡
matter-of-fact
¡! The purges started about a year ago. At its onset, they sent swarms of tiny black flies, each the size of a pin-head...”

Into the pause, Sol said, “How do–” but was cut off as Marek regained his composure and continued.

“The destruction was instantaneous. One moment, a clan might be gathered to eat, the children still playing and yet to come to the table; the next, a black cloud would descend and the place would be stripped clean. The flies would devour cloth, wood, flesh, waste... Within seconds, all that remained would be bones and building stone, and then, as if the building suddenly realised it had no frame, the whole thing would collapse.”

“!¡
probing
¡! And you’re sure this wasn’t a natural phenomenon, eh?”

“!¡
cold
¡! The purges were targeted,” said Callo. “They were carefully engineered. !¡
stifled-emotion
¡! I don’t know how these swarms were controlled, but they were. They would target one building and leave those all around it untouched. At first, the clans most active in the resistance were targeted, but later the attacks were more indiscriminate: any indigenous enclave could be hit. Even the trogs were targeted.”

The trogs, the dead people. Human on the surface, but look into their eyes and you looked into an empty space. Like nearly-men, only less.

“The swarms were only the start,” said one of the men. “Clan elders were seized. !¡
sadness
¡! Sometimes they would return after interrogation, but increasingly, when they did, they had been tortured...”

“What...?”

“Sometimes it was obvious from the physical injuries, but other times it was their minds that were wrecked. We don’t know what happens in the torture chambers, but we do know that the watchers and their grunts understand how to tear a human mind apart.”

“!¡
loss
¡! Often they didn’t return at all,” said Callo softly. “My blood-father... He was taken. He never had anything to do with the resistance, or even with the black market. He was a good man. But now he is gone. Disappeared.”

Another pause. I looked out across the city. The northern horizon was lit up with mushroom towers and needle spires. Occasional pulses of light sprang from one tower to another for no apparent reason. It was another world over there. Another world, right on our doorstep.

“!¡
defensive
¡! We tried everything,” said one of the men. “We had contacts in the emissaries, but they would not even acknowledge that Callo’s father had ever existed, let alone that he had disappeared and that some of their goon squads might be responsible. We had grunts we’d turned by supplying drugs and satisfying their strange fetishes !¡
repulsion
¡! but when we asked, none of them would even admit to knowing anything.

“So that was when the resistance became real.”

I shifted slightly in my niche. I thought of the Monument to the Martyrs. I knew kids who had gone up against the grunts, but it was more a rite of passage thing than an act of rebellion. Stones and taunts and running like mad. What was there to rebel against? This was how things were. Far better just to survive and make good. I never had been an idealist.