The Night's Dawn Trilogy (220 page)

“I wish they’d stop,” Gari said as more shouting sounded through the bedroom door. “I can’t think right with so much noise.”
She was sitting at a table in the living room, trying to concentrate on a processor block. Its screen was full of text with
several flashing diagrams, part of a software architecture course. The level was one his didactic imprints had covered five
years ago; Gari was only three years younger, she should have assimilated it long ago. But then his sister had something in
her genes which made it difficult for laser imprinters to work on her brain. She had to work hard at revising everything to
make it stick.

“Girl’s just plain arse backwards,” Digger shouted some nights when he stumbled home drunk.

Jed hated Digger, hated the way he shouted at Mum, and hated the way he picked on Gari. Gari tried hard to keep up with her
year, she needed encouraging. Not that there was anything to achieve in Koblat, he thought miserably.

Miri and Navar came in, and promptly loaded a games flek into the AV block. The living room immediately filled up with an
iridescent laserlight sparkle. A flock of spherical, coloured-chrome chessboards swooped around Jed’s head every time his
eyes strayed towards the tall AV pillar. Both girls started yelling instructions at the block, and small figures jumped between
the various spheres in strategic migrations, accompanied by a thumping music track. The projector was too damn large for a
room this size.

“Come on, guys,” Gari wailed. “I’ve got to get this stuff locked down ready for my assessment.”

“So do it,” Navar grunted back.

“Cow!”

“Dumb bitch!”

“Stop it! You played this all yesterday.”

“And we haven’t finished yet. If you weren’t so
thick
you’d know that.”

Gari appealed to Jed, chubby face quivering on the threshold of tears.

Miri and Navar were Digger’s daughters (by different mothers), so if Jed lifted a finger to them Digger would hit him. He’d
found that out months ago. They knew it too, and used the knowledge with tactical skill.

“Come on,” he told Gari, “we’ll go down to the day club.”

Miri and Navar laughed jeeringly as Gari shut down her processor block and glared at them. Jed shoved the door open and faced
his tiny worldlet.

“It’s not any quieter at the club,” Gari said as the door shut behind them.

Jed nodded dispiritedly. “I know. But you can ask Mrs Yan-dell if you can use her office. She’ll understand.”

“Suppose,” Gari acknowledged brokenly. Not long ago her brother had been capable of putting the whole universe to rights.
A time before Digger.

Jed set off down the tunnel. Only the floor had been covered in composite tiling, the walls and ceiling were naked rock lined
with power cables, data ducts, and fat environmental tubes. He took the left turning at the first junction, not even thinking.
His life consisted of walking the hexagonal weave of tunnels which circled the asteroid’s interior; that entire topographic
web existed only to connect two places: the apartment and the day club. There was nowhere else.

Tunnels with gloomy lighting, hidden machines that made every wall in Koblat thrum quietly; that was his environment now,
a worldlet without a single horizon. Never fresh air and open spaces and plants, never
room
, not for his body or his mind. The first biosphere cavern was still being bored out (that was where Digger worked), but it
was years behind schedule and ruinously over budget. At one time Jed had lived with the faith that it would provide him an
outlet for all his crushed-up feelings of confinement and anger, allowing him to run wild over fresh-planted grass meadows.
Not now. His mum and Digger along with all the rest of the adults were too stupid to appreciate what possession really meant.
But he knew. Nothing mattered now, nothing you did, nothing you said, nothing you thought, nothing you wished for. Die now
or die in a hundred years time, you still spent eternity with a sprained mind which was unable to extinguish itself. The final,
absolute horror.

No, they didn’t think about that. They were as trapped in this existence as the souls were in the beyond. Both of them trekking
after the low income jobs, going where the companies assigned them. No choice, and no escape, not even for their children.
Building a better future wasn’t a concept which could run in their thought routines, they were frozen in the present.

For once the dreary tunnel outside the day club centre was enlivened with bustle. Kids hurried up and down, others clumped
together to talk in bursts of high-velocity chatter. Jed frowned: this was wrong. Koblat’s kids never had so much energy or
enthusiasm. They came here to hang out, or access the AV projections which the company provided to absorb and negate unfocused
teenage aggression. Travelling the same loop of hopelessness as their parents.

Jed and Gari gave each other a puzzled look, both of them sensitive to the abnormal atmosphere. Then Jed saw Beth winding
through the press towards them, a huge smile on her narrow face. Beth was his maybe-girlfriend; the same age, and always trading
raucous insults. He couldn’t quite work out if that was affection or not. It did seem a solid enough friendship of some kind,
though.

“Have you accessed it yet?” Beth demanded.

“What?”

“The sensevise from the hellhawk, cretin.” She grinned and pointed to her foot. A red handkerchief was tied above her ankle.

“No.”

“Come on then, mate, you’re in for a swish-ride treat.” She grabbed his hand and tugged him through the kids milling around
the door. “The council tried to erase it, of course, but it was coded for open access. It got into every memory core in the
asteroid. Nothing they could do about it.”

There were three AV players in the day club centre, the ones Jed always used to access vistas of wild landscapes, his one
taste of freedom. Even so he could only see and hear the wonderful xenoc planets; the AV projectors weren’t sophisticated
(i.e. expensive) enough to transmit activent patterns which stimulated corresponding tactile and olfactory sensations.

A dense sparkle-mist filled most of the room. Twenty people were standing inside it, their arms hanging limply by their sides,
faces entranced as they were interacted with the recording. Curious now, Jed turned to face one of the pillars square on.

Marie Skibbow’s tanned, vibrant body lounged back over a boulder five metres in front of him, all flimsy clothes and pronounced
curves. It was a perfectly natural pose; such a Venus could only possibly belong in this paradisiacal setting with its warmth
and light and rich vegetation. Jed fell in love, forgetting all about skinny, angular Beth with her hard-edge attitude. Until
now girls such as Marie had existed only in adverts or AV dramas; they weren’t real,
natural
, not like this. The fact that such a person actually lived and breathed somewhere in the Confederation gave him a kick higher
than any of the floaters he scored.

Kiera Salter smiled at him, and him alone. “You know, they’re going to tell you that you shouldn’t be accessing this recording,”
she told him.

When it ended Jed stood perfectly still, feeling as though a piece of his own body had been stolen from him; certainly something
was missing, and he was the poorer for it. Gari was at his side, her face forlorn.

“We have to go there,” Jed said. “We have to get to Valisk and join them.”

The hotel sat on its own plateau halfway up the mountainside, looking out across the deep bay. The only buildings to share
the rocky amphitheatre with it were half a dozen weekend retreat villas belonging to old-money families.

Al could appreciate why the owners had made strenuous efforts to keep the developers out. It was a hell of a sight, an unspoilt
beach which went on for miles, tiny fang rocks at the front of the headlands stirring up founts of spray, long lazy breakers
rolling onto the sands. The only thing wrong about it was that he couldn’t get down there to enjoy it. There was a lot of
time pressure building up at the top of the Organization, dangerous amounts of work and too-tight schedules. Back in Brooklyn
when he was a kid he’d sit on the docks and watch gulls pecking at dead things in the muddy shallows. One thing about those
gulls, their necks never stayed still, peck peck peck all day long. Now he’d surrounded himself with people that took after
them. Never ever did his senior lieutenants give him a break. Peck peck peck. “Al, we need you to settle a beef.” Peck peck.
“Al, what do we do with the navy rebels?” Peck peck. “Al, Arcata is pulling in the red cloud again, you want we should zap
the bastards?” Peck peck.

Je-zus. In Chicago he had days off, months on holiday. Everyone knew what to do, things ran smoothly—well, kind of. Not here.
Here, he didn’t have a fucking minute to himself. His head was buzzing like a fucking hornets’ nest he had to think so hard
on the hoof.

“But you’re loving it,” Jezzibella said.

“Huh?” Al turned back from the window. She was lying across the bed, wrapped in a huge fluffy white robe, her hair lost beneath
a towel turban. One hand held a slim book, the other was plucking Turkish delights out of a box.

“You’re Alexander the Great and Jimi Hendrix all in one, you’re having a ball.”

“Dozy dame, who the hell is Jimi Hendrix?”

Jezzibella pouted crossly at the book. “Oh, he was the sixties, sorry. A real wildcat musician, everybody loved him. The thing
I’m trying to say here is, don’t knock what you’ve got, especially when you’ve got so much. Sure, things are a little rough
at the start, they’re bound to be. It just makes winning all the sweeter. Besides, what else have you got to do? If you don’t
give orders, you take orders. You told me that.”

He grinned down at her. “Yeah. You’re right.” But how come she’d known what he was thinking? “You wanna come with me this
time?”

“It’s your shout, Al. I’ll maybe go down to the beach later.”

“Sure.” He was beginning to resent these goddamn tours. San Angeles had been a beaut, but then everyone else wanted in on
the act. This afternoon it was Ukiah, tomorrow morning it was Merced. Who gave a shit? Al wanted to get back up to Monterey
where the action was at.

The silver and ivory telephone at the side of the bed rang. Jezzibella picked up the handset and listened for a moment. “That’s
good to hear, Leroy. Come on in; Al can give you ten minutes for news like that.”

“What?” Al mouthed.

“He thinks he’s cracked our money problem,” she said as she replaced the handset.

Leroy Octavius and Silvano Richmann walked in, Leroy smiling effusively, Silvano managing a glimmer of enthusiasm as he greeted
Al and ignored Jezzibella entirely. Al let the faint insult pass. Silvano was always on the level about how he hated the non-possessed,
and there was no hint in Jez’s mind that she’d taken offence.

“So what have you come up with?” Al asked as they sat in the chairs which gave them a splendid view out across the bay.

Leroy put a slim black case down on the coffee table in front of him, resting a proud hand on it. “I took a look at the basics
of what money is all about, Al, and tried to see how it could apply to our situation.”

“Money is just something you screw out of other people, right, Silvano?” Al laughed.

Leroy gave an indulgent smile. “That’s about it, Al. Money is principally a fancy method of accounting, it shows you how much
other people owe you. The beauty of it is you can use it to collect that debt in a thousand different ways, that’s how come
money always grows out of a barter economy. Individual currencies are just a measure of the most universal commodity. It use
to be gold, or land, something which never changed. The Confederation uses energy, which is why the fuseodollar is the base
currency, because it’s linked to He3 production, and those costs are fixed and universal.”

Al sat back, materialized a Havana, and took a deep drag. “Thanks for the history lesson, Leroy. Get to the point.”

“The method of accounting isn’t so important, whether you use old-fashioned notes and coins or a Jovian Bank disk, it doesn’t
matter. What you must establish is the nature of the debt itself, the measure of what you owe. In this case it’s so simple
I could kick myself for not thinking of it straight off.”

“Someone’s gonna kick you, Leroy, for sure. And pretty quick.
What
debt?”

“An energistic one. An act of magic, you promise to pay someone whatever they want.”

“For Christ’s sake, that’s crazy,” Al said. “What’s the sense in someone owing me a chunk of magic when I can work my own?
The original New California economy went ass backwards in the first place because we got this ability.”

Leroy’s grin became annoyingly wide. Al let him get away with it because he could see how tight and excited the fat manager’s
thoughts were. He’d certainly convinced himself he was right.

“You can, Al,” Leroy said. “But I can’t. This is a not-so-rhetorical question, but how are you going to pay me for all this
work I’ve been doing for you? Sure you’ve got the threat of possession to hold me with, but you need my talent, have me possessed
and you don’t get that. But put me on a salary and I’m yours for life. For a day’s work you promise to do five minutes of
magic for me; manifest a good suit or a copy of the Mona Lisa, whatever I ask for. But it doesn’t have to be you who owes
me for the day; I can take the token, or promise, or whatever, and go to any possessed for my magic to be performed.”

Al chewed around his cigar. “Let me get this straight, here, Leroy. Any schmuck with one of your chocolate dime tokens can
come along and ask me to make them a set of gold-plated cutlery anytime they want?”

“Not anytime, no, Al. But it’s the simplest principle of all: you do something for me, I do something for you. Like I said,
it’s exchanging and redeeming debt. Don’t think of it on such a personal level. We’ve been wondering how to keep the non-possessed
working for the possessed, this is the answer: You’ll pay them, but you pay them in whatever they want.”