The Pure Cold Light (17 page)

Peat opened her mouth to reply, and an alarm klaxon blared so loud it seemed to have blasted right out of her. The principal stared up at the center screen. The scene had changed automatically, the system targeting the source of the alarm.

They beheld another classroom, almost identical to the one where Angel Rueda taught. Except that this one showed a twitcher hanging by one hand off the podium and a girl standing up in the center aisle. She had a black pistol in her hand, still pointed at the dying twitcher. Her classmates had spilled back from her on either side like the parted Red Sea. Peat typed again. The wedge flashed a warning sign that did not deter her. She pressed a code key at the side of the beveled board, and within moments a grayish mist was spewing into the classroom. The klaxon shut off. The danger had been contained.

“Tear gas?” Lyell asked.

“Absolutely. Where did she get a pistol?”

The alarm shrieked again. Peat found herself confronted with multiple images. Classrooms and hallways and one black screen flicked into view on the main monitor only to be bumped aside by the next and the next. “My God, it’s a riot. Somebody’s
armed
them. Look at all of them!”

“What about Rueda?”

“You think it’s him? He’s armed, too. Twitchers all are. Print-fixed weapons of course, precisely to avoid this kind of situation—”

“No, I mean call up his
room
.”

A hidden intercom began to buzz insistently.

Somewhere within the fortress, something exploded. The floor shuddered. A distorted roar blasted out of the overhead speakers.

The main monitor pinpointed a fisheye scene of total chaos—students stampeding into a cellblock corridor while, behind them, black smoke billowed out of a room. Two bullgods fell beneath the crush. So did most of the front line of students. The back line pushed, and the middle churned. More fell on top of the first group, jumped, trying to get over them, more often stepping onto them, tripping, falling, adding to the melee. Their screams clashed with the snap of gunshots.

Peat typed more instructions, sealing off sections of hallways as fast as she could. Gates swung shut. “I’m not going to be able to contain this until I know how many there are. There could be a hundred guns in there. Who would have done this?”

“Look, Chikako,” Lyell said, “this is going to sound like a colossal leap, but if I don’t get to Rueda right now, we might not ever find out the answer to that.”

The images of hallway chaos shifted to a secondary monitor and another classroom scene erupted in the middle.

Another twitcher lay dead, her blood sprayed on the wall behind the podium. Students were doing their best to trash the rest of the room. One of them was trying to tear the bloody LifeMask from the woman’s head. The principal’s eyes narrowed coldly. “There’s an entrance in the lounge you came through, takes you to the private galleries. Use that. Remember—Three-F.” She added, “First, though, you tell me why.” In the monitored classroom, gas spewed out of the walls.

The desk phone began to ring.

“He’s the real target. All of this is a blind. They want him.”

Peat paused only a moment, her strange eyes reading Lyell’s expression. She typed quickly, eyes on the main monitor.

No image came up. The screen went black and a message flashed along the bottom. The camera unit in Rueda’s classroom had been disengaged from the system. Without hesitation, Peat gassed the room.

“It’s too late then, isn’t it?” said Lyell. “They’ve killed him.”

“You
know
who armed them,” Peat accused her. “You knew all about this!”

“I thought it was bullgods they’d armed. I thought there was more time, a lot more, maybe days. I thought it was going to fall out differently. And I couldn’t be sure where you stood.” She headed around the desk. “Will you still be here when I get back?”

“I’ll be here until you’ve told me everything. Now go, I’m busy.”

The ringing of the phone never stopped. The sound chased her as she ran. The overhead flourescents flashed like lightning. The clerks had vanished, every one.

The exit opened automatically. No one remained in the lounge. Half-eaten muffins and a tipped over cup of coffee suggested the speed of their departure.

The third door off the room was locked when she tried it, but a second later some mechanism within it thunked loudly and the door slipped ajar.

On the other side was an elevator cage that might have been as old as the prison. She rode it up to a platform—a railed circular walkway off which branched seven gloomy corridors. Tiles inscribed in Roman numerals designated each one. She circled until she came to the one marked ‘III’, then ran on into the unknown.

The gallery stretched ahead with no apparent end. It smelled of millennial mildew. As she ran, Lyell noted the occasional camera snout overhead, tracking her. She hoped it was Chikako Peat.

To her right, along a wall of crumbling plaster laid over stone, lay the classroom doors. To the left, the other wall alternated sections of plaster with translucent panels of thick glass embedded with chicken wire. The glass had been smeared over with paint and dirt. An oily blue light leaked in around the edges. She thought sourly that it had the kind of ambience Nebergall would love.

She passed doors A, B, and C. She crinkled her nose at a new smell, initially slight but even so acrid. Tear gas, leaking into the gallery. How was she going to get through Rueda’s classroom if it was full of gas? By the time she took twenty steps, she would be in blind agony.

Rooms D and E passed. Her nostrils stung now. The door ahead was bathed in a dull blue splash of light. She called up the picture of the room as she’d seen on the monitor, figuring that she might make the podium, even with her eyes closed and her head down. In any case she had to risk it.

The door clicked open even as Lyell reached for it. She was thanking the invisible principal when it swung straight into her face and clobbered her off her feet.

Chapter Thirteen: License to Teach

He knew exactly how his class felt about their new teacher. They had murdered the last two. The bullgod who escorted him to his room told him about it just before abandoning him outside his door in the shadowy gallery. The bull slapped his shoulder. “Hope you can shoot, Tex,” he said, “the last two before you couldn’t make the
grade
!” Braying, he walked off into the shadows.

Angel turned to the door. It unlatched automatically for him.

Inside, all conversation ceased. The instant he stepped through, twenty-three steely gazes fastened in him like hooks. No one spoke or moved as he approached the graffiti-covered podium.

The entire room—if not the entire building—reflected the Overcity’s disregard toward the incarcerated nons. The wall tiles were broken and crumbling. Mildew grew where leaks had been patched or ignored. In the back lay a pile of broken furniture—desktops and shattered terminal screens, chairs that had been twisted into abstract shapes resembling a tubular sculpture. In one corner sat an engine block that must have been twenty years old. Rust in a brown puddle had spread out slowly from under it. The only thing, in fact, in obvious good condition was the door he’d entered through, but that was steel plate, difficult to damage beyond the odd dent.

He unlocked the podium by typing in a code on its number pad. The podium’s processor connected to the thirty desks in the room. Each one had a small flip-up screen—provided it hadn’t been broken—and likewise a keyboard.

Angel’s introduction had been etched into small program cubes he carried—three of them, two as backups. The lecture was interactive.

The program could field any relevant questions and ignore nonsensical ones. Should the mask perceive an emergency, the podium relinquished control instantly—at least, that was what it was supposed to do. In any case, he should have enough awareness of events unfolding around him to override the program if need be. So he’d been told. A lot of what happened rested on untested promises.

The final safety net consisted of a hidden camera focused on him. He’d been warned by his instructor that some twitchers, embarking upon their first lecture, experienced cold sweats and an unshakeable terror of certain death as they went under. Angel looked for these elements in himself and found only a blank wall, a strange detachment from the events unfolding. Fear as an option had been occluded by the cranial bypass unit, the
crab
. He wondered how the podium’s program would recognize an emergency when it gauged such things from his emotions, and he had none.

ScumberCorp’s interrogators on the Moon had described for him how he’d broken laws and harmed innocent people. Of the various misdeeds attributed to him, he recalled not a thing. All memories of his time on the Moon had been wiped clean along with his emotions. There might be other memories surviving but every attempt at prying into them had so far engulfed him in a massive phobic attack, a panic that wrapped around him like a suffocating plastic bag. When it stopped and he’d regained his equilibrium, he could not find the terror within him, could not touch the fear again … until he tried remembering the Moon.

Of his childhood, he’d found one scene that had somehow escaped the axe. It had about it a curious transparency, as if he’d caught it just at the point where it was about to slip away forever. Like an old photograph, it had lost its color, its definition. He saw two people—his parents? There was a lake glittering behind them, but no specifics—no smells, for instance, no sounds. No names for anything. His parents had no names.
He
had no name.

He tried to bring that memory into focus, as if he could take it in his hands and warm it, make it glow.

His eyelids fluttered. His head lolled forward.

He snapped upright, found his hands clutching the side of the podium, and took a step back. He’d been thinking of something, daydreaming about a place, but it was gone now. The thing was (and the interrogators didn’t know this), he did have memories; he just didn’t know how to hold onto them.

He stood in front of a hostile class of children, described as “nons” because to society they were non-entities. He felt nothing either for them or their predicament. Their cruel circumstance lay before him like the ruins of his classroom; he could see it and the hopelessness to it: There was no escape, no ladder up. All of which meant nothing to Angel Rueda. For all the sense he had of it, he might have been viewing the class through the hidden camera lens.

He drew his hand from his pocket. In his palm lay an iridescent cube no larger than a die. It contained billions of facets, each coated with information. This was his program. He dropped it into place in the lectern of the podium. A small cover slid into place over it and a green light came on. That was the last thing he saw.

Something without substance but dark and impenetrable—what the instructor had called
squid ink
—enveloped his consciousness. Where he’d been an empty vessel before, he shrank now, withdrawing altogether. It was a feeling akin to the moment the phobia of remembering opened to devour him, except that it never opened. As he shrank, the program like an entity swelled into the abandoned space.

He began to speak. “Good morning,” he heard himself say. “My name is Seraph. I’m your astronomy and physical sciences teacher.”

“That’s twitcher,
borracho
!” called out one of the nons.

The program ignored the jibe and sailed right along. He listened to its drone—his voice but not his words. He knew nothing in particular about how stars were formed, which was what he talked about. The manner of speaking, the dull cadence, belonged to someone else.

From where he dangled, he saw the classroom as through the wrong end of a telescope, across a wide black chasm. With effort he found he could assemble what he saw into recognition patterns, but it took all of his attention to accomplish. He could see but he could not realize.

He was saying, “Low mass stars are cooler and have very long life spans. The high mass stars burn hotter and quicker. If our Sun were a high mass star—an O star, say—it would already have burned itself out.”

“Kinda like you, hey, twitch?”

The class laughed.

Unperturbed, the program continued, “Given that, we can predict that these hot O stars existing in our sky are fairly new additions to our universe, and that, right now, as I’m speaking to you, more new stars are being created.”

Suddenly, he couldn’t see the room anymore. The black chasm pushed up like magma to block his view. Its shape conformed to something like a human head—a LifeMask without features inside his mind. The chasm spoke to him. “Angel,” it called, “Angel, do you hear me?” The voice was much louder than his own mechanical recitation.

“
Sí.
” He spoke, but only in his mind, a word he had not known until that moment. His mouth continued to babble science. “Yes, I do.”

“I feel you quite near. What has happened to you? Have you freed yourself of them?”

Monitoring its host, the program must have sensed a disturbance in the field with which it surrounded him. Angel found himself abruptly damped down. The room vanished altogether.
 
Only his internal self remained, pressed in, sealed shut. “
¿Quien?
Who do you mean?” he managed to ask.

As if from a great distance the voice answered, “
Pensan matar
….”

“Wait,” he called, but the presence evaporated, taking with it his new language.

He was wrestling against the shackles of the program when the first shot went off.

The speech aborted. The program flung him into full command of himself. He pitched forward as if thrown into his body. Reeling to stay upright, he clung to the podium. The room tilted and came back to true like the deck of a ship on rough seas. His rubbery legs braced against collapse.

At the back of the room, a tall Latino non turned to face him. The kid held a nasty, short-barreled black gun. He had fired a burst high into the back wall, blasting a line of tiles. One tile had splintered, revealing a pocket of embedded, ruined electronics. Somewhere, distantly, a klaxon was honking.