Steel Sky (5 page)

He treated her to a delicious private dinner, danced badly with her, then showed her the view from the Chandelier. By that time, despite the attention he lavished on her, she was beginning to regret accepting his invitation. Second Son was a boor. He talked incessantly about himself, and he treated his many servants with appall-ing rudeness. Finally, as she was trying to find a polite way to cut the date short, he ushered her into one of the Orcus family suites and shut the door behind them. He threw himself on her, kissing her neck and fumbling with the clasps of her dress. To this day, she doesn’t remember how she extricated herself, what she said to Second Son to make him let her go. What she does remember is Second Son lying on the floor and sobbing about his family, his dying brother, and his own powerlessness. Amarantha had listened for as long as she could stand it, then fled.

He commed her the next day. Six times. She refused to answer.

The day after that he sent a messenger. She sent him away.

The day after that he sent a different messenger. She sent that one away as well.

Finally he showed up at the electrical station where she worked. She almost felt sorry for him; she knew that it was a terrible blow to his ego for a null-class citizen to have to personally call on a person of lesser rank. She took a walk with him. They talked. Mindful of his connections, frightened by his family, she was polite and tried not to be angry. Perhaps, she thought, they could be friends.

But it hadn’t worked. Second Son didn’t know how to simply be friends with anyone. He would visit, then stare at her for long periods without saying anything. When he finally spoke, it would be long and convoluted arguments about how much he loved her, how they should be together.

She began to spend her nights at the homes of friends, hoping to elude him. Rather than giving up on her, as she hoped he would, he only increased the number of gifts and messages he sent to her.

Finally, in desperation, she told him she couldn’t stand him and that she never wanted to see him again. He screamed and threatened, displaying the famous Orcus temper. When he saw she couldn’t be moved, he stormed out, swearing she wasn’t worth his time anyway. Things should have ended there, but the suspicion that Second Son hasn’t given up so easily lingers in Amarantha’s mind. Sometimes she answers the ring of the comm only to find that the line is blank. Other times one of the cameras focuses on her, at home, at work, or in a crowd, and somehow she knows, just
knows
, that Second Son is watching her.

Cadell, who has fallen asleep beside her, begins to snore. Smiling, she tucks the covers under his chin and upbraids herself for her paranoid thoughts. Surely Second Son has forgotten her. Surely, with his marriage to his sister, Dancer, only a few days away, he has more important things on his mind.

She snuggles in close to Cadell, putting her arm around him. She closes her eyes, envisioning the sky beyond the Sky.

SILVER FINGERTIPS

Edward Penn runs frantically down the crowded, narrow hall, knocking people out of his way. He skids to a stop outside Mosley’s room. Gripping the doorjamb, he scans the room, looking for a telltale shimmering in the air.

“Is he here yet?” he asks. Mosley’s two sons stand up. Their mouths hang open, but they say nothing. The helpless look on their faces indicates that they know what his question means.

“
Is he here
?” he repeats. They look around, uncertain. The air in the room is quiet and still. Mosley, a middle-aged man peppered with lymphoma, lies asleep in the bed, his head bent in an awkward pose. He snores softly. The sickly sweet odor of human decay hangs about him.

Edward pushes past the stupefied young men and unlocks the wheels on Mosley’s bed. “Help me push him out of here,” Edward says. “Maybe we can get him to another room before the Deathman comes.” “
I am here
.”

The cold, quiet voice comes from a spot just behind Edward. He turns and sees that corner of the room darken and sink into a black hole. The hole twists and buckles into the shape of a man. Edward gives an involuntary gasp. He has been standing next to the Deathsman the whole time. He lets go of the bed. It continues to turn slowly, finally bumping to a halt against the wall.

The Deathsman stands utterly still, his body hidden within the folds of his black, floor-length cloak. His tight hood is completely featureless, without even holes for his eyes. He is more silhouette than man. The only decoration is an ornate silver filigree around his collar. “There’s been a mistake,” Edward says, keeping his voice as level as possible. “This man is in good shape, with an excellent prognosis.”

“The Brotherhood of Peace and Reconciliation thinks otherwise, Doctor.” The Deathsman’s voice is strangely atonal. His jaw does not move beneath the hood. “Please step aside.”

“You can’t have him.”

“Doctor, you may recall that you signed an agreement when you joined this hospital. My authority supercedes yours in this case.”

“I also took an oath.”

The faintest touch of impatience creeps into the Deathsman’s voice. “This confrontation is futile, Doctor, as well as unseemly. Think of the children.” The Deathsman turns his head in the direction of Mosley’s sons on the other side of the bed. The younger one has begun to cry.

“I
am
thinking of them.”

The Deathsman slips one hand silently out from beneath the black cloak. Thin, bright wires trace across it, flowing in arcane circuit patterns toward the fingertips encased in silver. He flexes his hand to make sure Edward understands the implied threat. “I will ask you once more to step aside.”

Edward faces the Deathsman silently, and considers his options. Though the Deathsman has not moved, Edward can see his jaw clench beneath his tight hood, his body tense for a confrontation. Edward will either have to back down or try to physically keep the Deathsman away from his patient. It seems unlikely Edward would win such a struggle. Equally remote is the hope that he could convince the Deathsman to walk away. The dark figure is as implacable as the murder he carries in his fingertips.

Edward turns to Mosley’s children. “There’s one more test I want to perform. Help me pull down the covers.”

“Really, Doctor . . .” But as the Deathsman speaks, Edward spins and throws a punch at his hooded face. Seemingly unsurprised, the Deathsman whispers backward, his cloak billowing around him so Edward’s fist glances off his shoulder. As if in defiance of physics, the Deathsman bobs forward again. His silver-tipped hands shoot forward. Edward manages to grab the hands by the wrists. He grapples with the Deathsman, fighting to keep the hands away from his body.

“Help me!” he shouts to Mosley’s sons. The boys watch dumbly.

While Edward’s face is turned, the Deathsman bends one hand down. Silver fingertips brush lightly against the back of Edward’s hand. Edward feels a tingle travel through his body. As if watching from a distance, he sees his arm fall to his side, numb and lifeless. The Deathsman’s free hand lunges out, cold fingertips gripping Edward around the temples.

Edward’s jaw drops. His eyes unfocus. The Deathsman be-comes two figures watching him impassively. The room rolls drunkenly as Edward’s knees buckle. Though he cannot feel it, he knows he must be falling. The room seems to bounce on his way down, and he realizes he has hit his head on something hard. Straining his faculties, he is aware of a sensation somewhere around him. It may or may not be pain. He cannot remember what it is like to feel things.

His vision goes next. The green linoleum floor, tilted like a wall, shrinks to a bright pinprick as if the universe is traveling away from him at an astonishing rate of speed. His breath leaks from his lungs. A brief surge of fear for what must follow washes over him before he finally loses consciousness and the darkness envelops him.

ALMOST ZERO

“. . . but first I have to cross half that distance, right? And then I have to cross half the distance that’s left. And then I
still
have to cross half the distance that’s left. And so on and so on. No matter how far I go, I still have half the distance left to cross. And so I have proved that motion is impossible.”

Orel Fortigan smiles. Bernie is always coming up with brainteasers like this. Maybe since they replaced his right frontal lobe with microchips, he feels a need to show what he can do with all that computing power.

They stand close together at the bottom of a narrow shaft. Despite the chill, the concrete walls drip with condensation. A single globe on the wall provides the only illumination. The air vibrates from the roar of pressure outside.

Bernie closes the access panel. His jumpsuit whispers around his gaunt body as he stands. He wipes his hands with a rag from his back pocket. “Well, am I right or am I wrong?” he asks. Bernie doesn’t open his mouth much when he speaks. The artificial voicebox they gave him when the cancer took his real one does all the work for him. Besides, if he opens his mouth too wide, you can see the inside of his face between his cheek and his carbon steel jaw.

Orel doesn’t mind. He’s no joy to look at himself. He is overweight and suffers from cloracne, an immune disorder that has turned large portions of his face and upper torso into a mass of pustules and raw flesh. He wears a red scarf around his neck and chin to cover the worst of it. “I’m thinking,” he says.

“Let’s do our job while you’re thinking. You said there was a problem in Gimmel Eight?”

Orel pulls his tengig out of his pocket. He presses a button and looks at the screen. “Power outage,” he says.

They climb the ancient rusting ladder and step into the deafening rumble of the main sluice tunnel. Beneath their feet thousands of cubic meters of water thunder by, raising a mist that beads on their jumpsuits. The rough concrete abutment that they have just exited is one of seven that part the river along the walkway. Under metal covers on each one are control panels containing the manual override controls for the locks. Here the water is diverted to the turbines, the sewers, and Hydroponics.

When they reach the other side, Orel activates a thick metal door. It slides open slowly with a deep and drawn-out groan. These doors are designed to hold back all the waters of the sluice tunnel in case they should overflow. Three years ago, when the Levellers threatened to jam the gates shut, flooding the entire subsystem, Orel was standing behind one of these doors. His job was to do whatever was necessary to keep the door shut. He spent a long time alone in the dark that day, sweating despite the dank cold. Fortunately, the terrorists had been intercepted. Their threat was never carried out. When the other workers came and told him he was safe, he cried with relief. He was fourteen.

Now, as they walk though the door, Orel says, “I’ve got it. Your argument would make sense if the time needed to cross each fraction of the distance was constant. In that case velocity would be constantly decreasing and time versus distance would be an asymptotic curve, never reaching its goal. But the time it takes to cross each fraction of the distance is getting smaller at the same rate that the distances are decreasing. The sum of all those times will still be finite, even if you divide the distance infinitely.”

They walk down the long, narrow tunnel that divides the power station from Hydroponics. A single, fluorescent light runs along the ceiling. Mold grows on the walls.

“But I
am
dividing it infinitely,” Bernie says. “Don’t you see? No matter how much distance I cross, there must still be a tiny distance left keeping me from my goal.”

“Not really. Because the distance left to you and the time it takes to cross that distance quickly become not just very small, but infinitely small.”

“But still greater than zero.”

“No. Because an infinitely small number is equal to zero.”

“What?”

“I can prove it.” They pass through another thick door and enter the brightly lit corridors of Hydroponics. A tiny maintenance robot rolls past them. “Let’s take an infinitely small number: a decimal point followed by an infinity of zeros and then a one. We’ll call it ‘Almost Zero.’ If we’re dividing a finite distance infinitely, we must reach this number sometime, right?”

“Okay . . . for argument’s sake, I’ll agree.”

“What’s one minus Almost Zero?”

“Hmm.” Bernie turns and looks at him. Between his ugly black metal jaw and his ugly black bristling hair, his two handsome blue eyes are crinkled in amusement. “It’s a decimal point followed by an infinite number of nines. Although, in this case, the infinity involved is actually greater by one than the infinite number of zeros in Almost Zero.”

“Good boy,” Orel says dryly. “Let’s call this number ‘Almost One.’ Now, Almost One can be expressed as the sum of a decimal point followed by an infinity of threes and a decimal point followed by an infinity of sixes — the decimal equivalents of one-third and two-thirds. So Almost One is actually equal to one. So if we subtract Almost One from both sides of the equation, we see that Almost Zero is, in fact, equal to zero. So if you keep dividing the distance infinitely, you will quickly reach a point where you have zero distance left to travel.

“And we’re here.” With a dramatic flourish, Orel punches the lock plate for the entrance to Gimmel Eight. Nothing happens. “Door’s stuck,” he says, hitting it a few more times. He smiles weakly. Reality has, once again, failed to conform to his rhetoric.