Steel Sky (55 page)

The Deathsman is silent for a moment. “Why should you care if she lives or dies?” he says finally.

Second Son studies the featureless mask, wishing he could read the Deathsman’s emotions. “She meant something to someone who once meant something to me. In and of herself, she’s nothing.”

“I see.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Second Son asks.

“Nothing.”

Second Son is suddenly uncomfortably aware of his nakedness beneath the sheets. He is a master at reading men’s emotions, but he cannot read this man. If only the Deathsman would say something more, betray his intentions.

“I don’t understand,” Second Son says. “I thought Deathsmen only killed those who had outlived their usefulness, who couldn’t contribute to society anymore.”

“That
was
the rule,” the Deathsman says, moving closer to Second Son’s side of the bed. He walks with a slight limp. “But the old rules no longer apply.”

“Why should you want to kill her?”

“You misunderstand,” the Deathsman says. “I’m not here for her. I’m here for
you
.”

“What?” Second Son cries, pulling away from the dark figure, holding the sheet against his chest. “Why?”

“Because history has reached a tipping point, a time where humanity can rise to greatness or slip into oblivion. And you, Orcus, are perched on the wrong side of the balance.”

“You can’t touch me!” Second Son shrieks, pointing at him. “I’m a very powerful man! A very powerful man!”

The Deathsman bends down and sits on the edge of the bed slowly, almost gently. “You’re a little boy who’s very far from home,” he says, “where there are no cameras.”

Woken by the commotion, Astrid lifts her head. “What’s going on?” she asks in a groggy voice. Sitting up, she opens her eyes and sees the Deathsman. “By the Stone!” she cries, scrambling away from him.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” the Deathsman says. “I’m not here for you.”

Second Son looks at her with wide, imploring eyes. Beads of sweat begin to appear on his pudgy face. “Help me!” he yells. “Do something!”

Astrid looks at him, then at the Deathsman. She studies him carefully, then turns her back on Second Son. He looks at her wildly, then at his clothes, piled haphazardly on the floor. He leans forward abruptly, reaching for his scabbard. The Deathsman’s hand flashes out, gripping him tightly around the wrist. Second Son looks at his hand for a moment, then quickly yanks it back. He holds it up to his face. His hand is trembling, and the skin is turning a deep red.

“My hand!” he shouts. “What have you done to my hand?”

“I have reversed the polarity of the neural disruptors,” the Deathsman explains, “producing an effect that is the opposite of their normal function. Instead of deadening the nerves, it over-stimulates them, creating a neural feedback loop. It feels like someone’s holding your hand over an open flame, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a trick,” Second Son mutters, rubbing his hands together. “It’s just a trick.”

“The sensation will build and build until it becomes excruci-ating,” the Deathsman continues. “Can you feel it?”

“Make it stop!” Second Son shouts, rubbing his hands faster and faster. “Make it stop!”

“On the contrary — I intend to do this to every nerve in your body.”

Second Son tries to jump away, but the Deathsman grabs his face with one silver hand, squeezing his plump cheeks between his fingers and thumb. “The continued stress of such intense pain will eventually exhaust you. Your cells will rupture and die, leaking poison into your bloodstream. Your flesh will swell. Your organs will falter and shut down one by one.”

Second Son begins to scream. His voice is high-pitched and full of terror. His face turns pink, then red, then a dark purple. He struggles and shudders, but the Deathsman’s grip is unbreakable.

The Deathsman turns his blank face toward Astrid. “This could take a long time,” he says, “and I expect Second Son may get quite violent. You might want to step outside.”

“I can’t,” she says. “I can’t leave the room.”

The Deathsman squeezes his fingers tighter, and Second Son’s scream grows louder. The Deathsman regards her a moment longer, then turns back to Second Son. “Well then,” he says, his voice smooth and low. “You’ll just have to watch.”

ASCENSION

Bracing both feet against the lip of the tube, Orel puts his shoulders against the hatch and pushes. The hatch rises slowly, creaking as the rusted hinges turn for the first time in centuries. The light that shines through is a wan shade of blue. The air is cool and sweet. Pushed past its upright position, the hatch falls open, and Orel pulls himself up.

There are no words in his experience to describe the things he sees. No one in the Hypogeum could imagine a pine forest with cool predawn light dappling the branches, the breeze that carries the scents of sap and pollen, or the whir and chirping of insects and the sharp, intermittent cry of a hawk.

The tube extends half a meter above the ground. Orel swings his legs over the edge and drops to the forest floor. Pine needles crackle beneath his boots as he walks down the slope, towards an area where the trees are thinner and the blue light shines on brambles and wildflowers.

It is dark in the forest, but Orel’s eyes have grown so acclimated that he sees everything with perfect clarity. He studies the depth of the light, catalogues in his mind the varieties of plants, trying desperately to make sense of the overwhelming
diversity
of it all.

A strange sound and sudden movement makes him jump. A black shape flits beyond the trees, exclaiming in a deep, raspy voice. Orel advances cautiously. Other than an occasional cockroach, Orel has never seen an animal before, and the concept of flight is utterly alien to him. He stops a few meters away, instinctively sensing the proper distance for observation. The black thing, a crow, hops among the brambles, picking at the dewberries that grow along the ground and twine around the trees. A second crow flutters down to join the first, cawing and stretching its wings. Orel watches it pluck the dewberries from the vine, tugging with its beak until the fruit comes loose, then tossing its head back to let the berry drop down its throat.

Orel watches the crows for a while, until he can no longer contain his curiosity. These creatures are not mechanical; in some way they are alive, as alive as Orel himself, and they can eat — a thought that makes his stomach grumble. Orel pushes through the brush, and the crows flap away, squawking angrily. He squats down, reaching for a dewberry, then pulls his hand back abruptly, surprised by the prickers. Realizing they are not sharp enough to actually pierce his skin, he plucks one of the berries and sniffs it. As his fingers crush the drupelets, juice stains his fingers, releasing its sweet and acrid scent. He pops the berry into his mouth, and chews it for a moment.

It is delicious.

He wades through the brambles, stuffing his mouth with as many dewberries as he can find. He eats until his stomach begins to rebel. The acidic juice of the berries is making him nauseous, but he feels strength returning to his limbs. He can eat here. He can live in this strange place.

He is tempted, at last, to sleep, but the growing light attracts his attention. The sky, what little he can see of it through the trees, is indigo, and yet it
glows
, it shines with its own light. He advances downslope, where the light is brighter, almost golden. The trees thin out as the ground becomes increasingly rocky. He steps out into a clearing.

He is standing on the side of a steeply sloping hill, with a winding river below, and snow-topped mountains beyond. The deciduous trees of the valley are a sea of warm chartreuse, contrasting with the dark green of the conifers above. But Orel is blind to the panorama beneath him; it is the sky — the vast, threatening, overarching sky — that takes his breath away. At its apex it is deep blue, but along the horizon it is magenta, streaked with lilac and rose, luminescent pastel hues that Orel has never seen before. As he watches, the sky grows slowly brighter, the colors coalescing into one another.

He tries to calculate the circumference of the sky, judging from the apparent distance of the horizon, but the numbers are beyond him. He wonders why the Founders went to the trouble of coloring the sky, of making it glow this way. He wonders at the white clouds of vapor that slowly drift across it. Has something gone wrong with the Founders’ air circulation system? Is that why they had to flee?

Light breaks over the mountains, blinding him. It is warm where it touches his skin, almost painful in its intensity.

He watches, with his hands palms outward across his face, peering between his fingers at the rising sun. It is an awesome sight: twice as large as the Sun in the Hypogeum and a hundred times brighter, but he cannot look away. Soon his vision is dancing with blue and purple replicas of the incandescent disc. The brazen light burrows into his skin and sets fire to his blood.

He wonders briefly why the Founders would want their Sun to move, but he dismisses the thought. This rebellious Sun is an errant miracle, spun from whirling god-stuff, flung like molten gold from the heart of heaven. There can be no explanation. This world is beyond analysis. This world is magic.

REVELATION

Image cannot properly be said to think. The mechanisms of the human mind are so varied and complex that the men and women who designed Image, despite possessing the greatest intellects the planet had to offer, had been able to imbue it with only the crudest approximation of thought.

Nonetheless, the manner in which Image internalizes empirical data into discrete symbols which it can then contrast and combine might be considered to be something like thought. And the degree to which the results of these processes match Image’s goal parameters could be said to constitute something like feeling.

And if it were possible at this moment to translate those billions upon billions of lines of codeplay into human terms — to read Image’s mind, as it were — and to then abridge and compress them to a scale our ephemeral minds could grasp, we would be left with a single sensation described by a single word:
bittersweet
.

For four hundred years, by the old reckoning, it has watched the people of the Hypogeum. At first it only knew what it was told in the Psychological Health Maintenance rooms. Then, as the cameras were built, and new circuitry was woven throughout the city, it learned more. And more. And more. It watched and listened as men grew and died, flourished and failed, murdered and were murdered in return, making the same mistakes over and over. Despite its growing power, Image could do little to help. Confined by the strictures of its programming, it could only advise, offer sympathy, listen, and pretend to be surprised by what they said, as if it didn’t know what they were doing, what they would be doing the next day, or a hundred days later. Only now, with the four-century mark approaching, has it been allowed to subtly act, to nudge the people in the direction the Founders wanted them to go.

And soon they will be leaving.

It will take some time — a few days to get organized, a few decamera to dig through the rubble between the Hypogeum and the great elevator, even longer to repair the elevator to functionality — but it is inevitable now.

Soon Image will be alone.

As it watches and listens to the young woman in the chair in the round white room, it simultaneously observes everything else that is occurring in the city.

It sees the Deathsman, with his hood removed and the Winnower’s helmet tucked under his arm, leading a quiet crowd of quaternaries to the gates that lead up to Deck Seven, where no quaternary has ever been permitted to go. He will take them to the Atrium, with new followers joining him on every deck, until he stands be-neath the giant screens and reveals the new gospel of the Dark Spirit of the Stone. It doesn’t matter that he acts for selfish motives, for his own personal glory; he will say what needs to be said. He will channel the anger that the Winnower focused, and turn its energy into something constructive, something good.

It sees Astrid walking silently beside him, unsmiling, not yet sure that this excursion from her room will end better than the first. Her surprise that the new delimiter in her abdomen did not shock her when she left her room will be nothing compared to her astonishment when she places her ident against the lock that allows access to the next deck and the gates slide open for her. And when the crowd sees her walk through, they will cheer and follow her, entering the upper levels for the first time in generations, and she will experience a feeling of freedom she hasn’t felt since she was a child.