Steel Sky (37 page)

“Only that I don’t wish to mislead you.” The Deathsman stands and stretches. He looks down at Edward, his unpleasant face almost obliterated by the bright light from the panels. “You know, one of the perquisites of being a Deathsman is that we have the prerogative to seize our client’s records, if we wish. To learn about a client’s life gives his death so much more beauty and meaning. Do you keep a journal, Edward?”

“No.”

“A pity,” the Deathsman sighs. “Well, I think that’s enough chat for one day. I should move on before I lose my pallor.” The Deathsman nods his bony head, smiling his lopsided smile, and limps away.

CONTEMPLATING THE INFINITE

Orel coughs, and feels sputum and blood come loose in his throat. Suppressing the urge to gag, he holds it in his mouth long enough to stand up and spit over the edge of the pit. The air deep in the tunnels is cleaner than that in the Hypogeum, but something in it is still corrosive enough to burn his throat. He wonders how long they can survive here before the carbon monoxide kills them.

He looks at his ident — the strange and beautiful ident given to him for no logical reason he could discern.
How frustrated the Rats must have been when they couldn’t remove this shiny bauble
, he thinks as he turns it over to check the time.

Nearly ten chronons. They have been here nearly ten chronons.

He lodges himself in a crack in the rock as tightly as he can fit and puts his head between his knees, thinking.

It isn’t possible. It simply isn’t possible that they should still be alive. After a century and a half, the fumatory should have infiltrated every crevice of the tunnels no matter how distant from the Hypogeum.

Unless the tunnels go on further than has been suspected. Much further. Clean air must be leaking into this cavern from . . . somewhere else.

He coughs again, and pain lances through his chest. With no time to control himself, he disgorges what feels like the entire lining of his throat over his boots. He sits with his head hanging between his knees for a long time, waiting for the agony to subside. His mouth swims with the coppery taste of blood. He cannot bear the pain of swallowing, so he just opens his lips and lets it drip from his mouth. He breathes raggedly, knowing that he is inhaling his own death.

Don’t let the fear take over
, he thinks.
If you want to survive, you have to stay calm. You can’t fight your way out of this. Thraso proved that. You have to
think
your way out.

He hears a commotion at the other end of the pit. The Rakehells are talking and moving around. Then he sees what has them so worried. A trio of Rats, silhouetted against the cave fires, is approaching the pit.

The Rakehells shuffle back, but the Rats are not carrying any weapons. In fact, the arms of the two smaller Rats are full of dreadlock vines and other things carried from beneath, in the manner of gifts.

A moment later, Orel sees his supposition confirmed. The larger Rat touches the two others, running its fingers subtly along their arms, and they walk along the pit, dropping their burdens over the edge as they go. When their arms are empty they return to the larger Rat, and the three return the way they came.

The captured Rakehells cautiously move forward.

“It’s food!” says one, pulling a thick leaf from a dreadlock vine and chewing on it.

“And water,” says another, holding a sloshing leather pouch.

The Rakehells push forward eagerly, but Orel holds back. He would dearly like a drink of water, but he doubts the Rakehells would be eager to share with him. Besides, he is more concerned with the Rat behavior he has just witnessed.

They’re keeping us alive,
he thinks.
So our meat will be fresh later. They can plan ahead.

And the way the big Rat touched the smaller two . . .

He told Thraso the Rats couldn’t be intelligent because they didn’t have a language. But that was assuming language had to be
spoken
.

Maybe I was wrong,
he thinks.
Maybe I was wrong about a lot of things.

He is contemplating this idea, considering how it might offer him a glimmer of hope for survival, when he sees something even more astonishing.

Among the pile of gifts the Rats have dropped is a tangle of colored wires and glittering metal. The Rakehells either have not noticed it, or do not care, being more concerned with filling their bellies.

Orel crawls forward and plucks the metal thing from the pile. The nearest Rakehell glares at him sullenly, but does not try to stop him. Orel scuttles back into his crevice and examines what he has found.

They kept the shell,
he thinks,
and discarded the inside, thinking it was just dead weight.
He turns it over in his hands. All the parts are here, and the battery is still partially charged. A few of the connections are loose, but he quickly reconnects them.

Hardly believing his good fortune, he slips the mechanism over his head: a working sonar helmet.

THE SHORT, COLD CHRISTMAS

The library is small — there are perhaps a thousand books here at most — but it possesses a quality that makes Second Son pause before entering. Despite the hermetically sealed doors, the luminous wallstrips and the homeostatic air control, the library conveys an overwhelming sense of antiquity. Most of the books here date back to the days of Koba’s rule. Some are as old as the Eternity Riots. There are even a few that Orcus claims are older than the Hypogeum itself, but Second Son isn’t sure he believes that.

The room has thick walls, no dark corners, and several security cameras. Second Son feels his pulse and breathing slow, calmed by the quiet dignity of this place. The library is a sanctuary of sorts, where the dangers of the world outside can intrude only when safely pressed between pages.

There is a single place to sit: a plush, tan chair, so unlike the furniture in the rest of the Chandelier. Second Son sinks into its thick upholstery. He pages carefully through his father’s book. His lips move as he slowly reads down the pages. Occasionally he flips back to reread something he did not understand before.

When he is done, he holds the book in his lap. His face is sallow and shadowed under the fluorescent light. He takes a deep breath, his mind awhirl with new thoughts. He has heard the story of the Winnower before, of course — it is part of the subtext of history — but the other stories in the book are new to him. The imagination, the
audacity
, with which the stories are concocted! It is a revelation, even to Second Son who knows that truth is only the framework around which history is constructed.

He puts the book away in its case. He pulls another one from the shelves. The book hisses as it is retrieved, its cover rasping against its tightly packed neighbors. Second Son turns the book over in his hands. This one is much older, with paper and binding not quite like anything else Second Son has ever seen. The spine crackles as he opens it. He turns the brittle pages and reads:

At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.

Second Son closes the book. He does not completely understand the words, but he finds them compelling nonetheless. He slides the book back into place, tucking it carefully between its siblings. He looks at the shelves. So many books! Each one a mysterious world unto itself. No wonder his father could disappear here for days at a time.

He opens another cabinet, inhaling the sweet smell of yellowing paper, of slowly burning pages. He finds a slim volume titled
A Short History of Eternity
, and opens it.

PRESSED FOR TIME

As a lower echelon worker at Central Time Standard, I have watched the new government’s Chronometric Program since its inception.

When the new government took power, they assigned each citizen a chronometer. The chronometer was an unbreakable, unremovable band of circuitry encircling the citizen’s forearm. Nobody thought much about them at the time; they seemed to be the least of the new government’s reforms. We took some comfort in the personal timepieces, whose lighted faces simulated the sunrises and sunsets our grandparents had told us about.

The real significance of the chronometers was not apparent until later, when the government revealed its Worker Efficiency Program. The government had assembled an exhaustive list documenting the exact amount of work any government employee — and we were all government employees at that point — was expected to perform in one hour. For example, in one hour a quartz tube processor was expected to process four-point-seven-two tubes, a window washer was expected to wash twenty-point-four windows, and so on. What was unusual was the government’s method of enforcing its standards.

The speed on the chronometers was variable. Through some process only upper echelon Central Time officials understood, the chronometer would keep pace with the work performed by each worker. If a quartz tube processor took an hour and ten minutes to process his four-point-seven-two tubes, his chronometer would still register only one hour as having passed. His day would not end until he had processed the requisite number of tubes. However, once he left work, the chronometer would speed up again, running faster to make up for the time lost on the job. At nine o’clock the next morning he would be back in sync with his fellow employees, and if he did not keep pace with them the process would begin again.

The workers complained, but they were powerless. Their only representatives were the men who had begun the Program in the first place. The government papers — and they were all government papers at that point — criticized them for their lack of initiative. Those citizens with white-collar jobs did not complain too loudly since the Program did not affect them.

Eventually, of course, the Program came to affect everyone. But only gradually, one profession at a time. The demands made on the workers were not extreme, so criticism was mild and uncoordinated. And the Program became routine.

Then the government released excerpts of its Chronometric Management Study. The conclusion of the Study was that under present circumstances the government simply did not have enough time to implement all its programs. It instituted the Time Tax. Twenty seconds were deducted from each worker’s day and “collected” at Central Time Standard. The excess time thus accumulated was allocated to upper echelon government employees according to the needs of their various projects.

I didn’t quite understand how this was possible, but I got used to the idea. When a project I was working on fell behind schedule, the hours of each of us working on it were extended to accommodate the extra work we had to do. Our leisure time hours were extended to compensate, but I resented doing the extra work while still getting paid for the same number of hours.

The Time Tax was raised to forty-five seconds a day. To make up for this, Time Bonuses were instituted. I was granted twelve spare hours for outstanding work at the office. I used them to sleep late on lazy mornings. I tried the Time Lottery, at which one could gamble five minutes of free time against a jackpot of thirty years, but I decided it was a waste of time.

A side effect of the Time Bonuses was that hours became staggered. A worker might come in at what according to his chronometer was nine o’clock in the morning and find some of his fellow employees already hard at work, while others were still home asleep. We got used to it. We let Image convey important messages; socializing was kept to a minimum.

Dates and calendars disappeared everywhere but in the innermost chambers of Central Time Standard. Only the Central Time computers were capable of coordinating the thousands of individual timepieces into a smoothly functioning schedule. Central Time Standard became the most powerful branch of government.

Variable time carried curious social consequences. It was considered rude to glance at another person’s chronometer and crass to show yours to someone else, but certain higher officials at Central Time Standard had a habit of expressively throwing their hands open as they talked, obliquely displaying how quickly their seconds passed. I couldn’t help but be jealous of how short their workdays must have been. Similarly, I couldn’t help but pity the lower class workers their long, dragging days.

A romantic consequence of variable time was time-sharing — a commitment more sacred than marriage in our time-starved society. Lovers would speed or slow their working pace so that their time off would coincide. They would bank spare minutes whenever they could, so they could spend long hours together later.