Crashing Heaven Read online

  ‘I always dreamed of coming back home,’ he said, wistfully. ‘But when we arrived on-Station, I couldn’t look up. I couldn’t bear to see no stars, just the Spine and the rest of Homelands curving round behind it.’

  Fist ignored him. He moved to the wall, his hands eddying across it, caressing the virtual structures that underpinned the room. ‘I’m going to get full overlay going,’ he said. Jack looked up, away from the stars. ‘Is that safe?’ he asked.

  Fist sighed. ‘Fuck’s sake, Jack, have some faith. I’m using the hotel server to mask our call to your old messaging space. As long as we don’t go further into the weave, it’ll look like you’re just using a keyboard and a screen.’

  ‘Does anyone even have those any more?’

  The walls and the ceiling rippled out of existence as the room’s overlay systems meshed with Jack’s mind. He was standing in the ruins of a garden, at the edge of a pool made of darkness. A full moon hung above it, suffusing tangled flowerbeds, overgrown paths and broken archways with a soft, forgiving light. In the distance, there was a small hill. A little temple set on its peak, classically Greek in style, shone like a silver button. A figure that could have been a statue stood next to it.

  The garden had a vague, tumbled beauty to it. Remembering how it looked when he had tended it daily, Jack sighed. He thought of the farewell party he’d thrown. The few friends and colleagues who’d turned up had pretended to be proud of him. He was going to fight the Totality, to avenge the dead children of the moon. But as the drink flowed, their relief that their patrons hadn’t blessed them with similar postings began to show through.

  Fist emerged from an archway on the other side of the pond, his wooden shoes clacking on paving stones like hooves. Jack’s library had been through there. He was sure that, in surrendering to the Totality, he’d broken the conditions of his media content licence. The library would now be empty, a lifetime of reading, watching and listening lost.

  Fist’s red painted lips slid into a grimacing smile. ‘Don’t move, Jack,’ he called over. ‘Haven’t switched you to lucid weavestate yet. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy watching you bump into walls, but got to protect my future property.’

  He closed his eyes for a moment. Jack imagined him frowning in concentration. The puppet’s face was too rigid to show such a subtle emotion. Jack wondered how Fist would cope with a real, human face, when the time came. He felt briefly pleased that he could set Fist’s gleeful anticipation aside and think about his own death so dispassionately. Andrea had pointed out how passive the puppet’s role in it really was. Now Jack usually tried to imagine that he was suffering from a disease that would take his life in an efficient and entirely impersonal way. That hadn’t always been easy, but it was something that – most of the time – he could manage.

  The landscape shimmered briefly and then was still. ‘There!’ chirped Fist. ‘Motor neuron management systems patched in. The Night Hag’ll activate automatically from now on. You’re fine to move, it’s all just subjective.’

  Jack took one experimental step, then another. The weave reached deep into his cerebrum, making imagined action seem entirely real. It was a sensation he hadn’t felt for seven years. Once, it had permeated his life. It had taken a long time to learn how to leave it behind, to let go of all that it had underpinned. The experience of that letting go had helped him as he’d grappled with the greater loss he would soon face. That, and the promise of some small happiness with Andrea, in the few months that remained to him.

  ‘Now we’re here,’ Fist said obliviously, ‘let’s get social!’ He skipped over to a roughly hacked block of soft white limestone that stood at the heart of the garden. ‘That was your dad, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Fist affected an archaic accent. Jack didn’t recognise it. ‘He’s blocked you good and proper, guv’nor. Want me to try and open him up? You can surprise him.’

  ‘I’ll do that in person.’ Jack ran his hand over the rough, cold stone. The scrape of it was so convincing. He remembered being a child, rubbing small hands over his father’s stubble, fascinated by the way it prickled at his skin. He sighed.

  ‘Let’s find Andrea.’

  ‘She’s locked you out too, Jack.’

  ‘She hasn’t. She’s the only one.’

  ‘She might as well have done.’

  Her avatar was a few minutes’ walk away, at the end of a pathway lined with more boulders. They had once been elegantly correct representations of Jack’s many friends. Distance made regular contact with the few who’d stayed in touch after he left Station almost impossible. They had in any case without exception blocked him when he surrendered to the Totality. For a moment, Jack wished that the past could be remade. But only today and tomorrow could ever change. He moved on towards Andrea’s avatar. When he found it, he spent a while just gazing. It was a perfect image of her living self. He thought of the last time he’d seen her, singing in a nightclub off Kanji Square. He remembered her final touch. She’d wiped a tear away from his face.

  Hurt had carved age into her face, etching light new lines across it. Her relationship with Harry Devlin had not always been easy, but she’d loved him enough to turn back to him when the rogue mind’s rock hit the moon. Security had suddenly seemed so very important. She’d told Jack that she was going to make a fresh start with her husband a week or so before he left Station for the Soft War. It had been such a sudden, final end to their affair. Jack wondered how Harry’s death had hit her. She’d never responded in depth to Jack’s questions about her loss. He’d assumed that, even four or five years later, the hurt went too deep.

  She’d at least given him the basic facts. Harry had been shot in a Kanji backstreet. He’d always relied on an extensive network of informants. It was assumed that one of them had been turned and killed him. The assassin was never caught. Jack remembered Pierre Akhmatov and his nightclub, the Panther Czar. He wondered what other stones Harry might have turned over, what dangerous knowledge could been waiting beneath them. He’d always seemed unkillable – so vital, so alive, so rooted in the world around him. It was difficult to think of him as a fetch, sketched into being from the whispering traces that his life had burnt into the weave. It was impossible to imagine its presence offering Andrea any sort of consolation.

  The eyes of her avatar were closed. Without thinking, Jack took her hand and initiated a call request. He imagined her seeing his image flash up, wondering whether to talk to him. For a moment he let himself feel hope.

  ‘Honestly Jack, I don’t know why you people put yourselves through all this.’

  There was nothing. Andrea’s hand remained cold and dead. Jack squeezed it again, then let it go. It fell back to hang beside her hip. Her face was in shadow. He kissed the tip of a finger and touched it to her cheek. A chill shook him. Perhaps she was with another lover. But they talked about everything. She would have mentioned that. He imagined her thinking of his return home – one more man who would love her, then die. Perhaps that was why she’d cut him off so suddenly and totally. But she’d always been so ready to face the fact of his death. He forced both thoughts from his mind. Something was wrong. He needed to find her. ‘We’ll see InSec tomorrow, then we’ll start looking,’ he told Fist.

  ‘I’m bored,’ grumbled Fist. ‘What about the temple? There’s someone up there who’d just love to see you. We can tell him how impressed we were with his little followers.’

  ‘No, we’re not going to see Grey.’ Jack was surprised by his own anger. ‘Not now. Not ever.’

  ‘You’re the boss.’

  ‘Let’s just go back to the hotel.’

  The puppet slapped his hard little hands together. The garden slipped away, and Jack was left once again standing in a squalid little hotel room, consumed by lonely hunger, with the heavens hanging lost beneath him.

  Chapter 4

  Jack stood on the roof of Customs House, looking towards the great circular cliff of the Wart. The whole clutter of Dock
lands’ habitable space arched up and away to his left and right, then came together again far above him on the other side of the Spine. Many of the buildings were either half-completed or half-ruined. There were a dozen or so burned-out patches, some taking up little more than a few square metres, others extending for a street or more.

  Jack looked straight up, trying to see past the spinelights, but they dazzled him and he winced away. He imagined Andrea, out there somewhere, and remembered her talking about Kingdom. ‘He built Station,’ she’d once said. ‘I hate to admit it, but that’s pretty bloody impressive.’ Standing within it now though, Jack still felt trapped. Fist jerked him out of his reverie.

  [ Remembering the gods, Jack? I’d love to have a crack at them.]

  [ For once, I wouldn’t stop you.]

  [ That does make a change.]

  A black InSec flyer whined carefully down on to a landing pad, crouching back into mass as its engines died. There was movement within then a door opened.

  ‘I’m Lieutenant Corazon,’ said its pilot, climbing out. ‘Assistant Commissioner Lestak’s assistant.’

  She was a little shorter than Jack. She wore a dark, anonymous uniform. Her scalp was neatly shaven and dotted with tightly tattooed weave sigils. East’s silver logo flared out on the crown of her head. ‘I have to handcuff you. I’m sorry, it’s regulation.’ She helped Jack into the flyer and leant over him to snap in his seatbelt. There was an awkward silence as she fumbled with straps.

  ‘Docklands is in bad shape,’ said Jack. ‘Surprised nobody’s rebuilt after those fires.’

  ‘Those are void sites. Where terrorist bombs went off. The gods left them like that to remind us why we were fighting.’

  She took the pilot’s seat.

  ‘Did they catch any of the bombers?’ asked Jack.

  ‘When Grey fell. Very naïve of him to think they were peace protesters.’ She completed the flyer’s start-up checks. ‘Ready to go. No distraction from that creature of yours while I’m flying, please.’

  [So very firm,] whispered Fist. [ I’m rather enjoying being bossed around by her.]

  The flyer lifted straight up. As it levelled off just below the Spine, Corazon closed her eyes for a moment and reached up to touch her East logo.

  [ What’s that all about?] said Fist.

  [ We’re alongside the Pantheon icons. She’s acknowledging her patron.]

  [ Tell me you didn’t kiss their arses like that.]

  Corazon finished her brief observance and set the flyer moving forward. She was a deft, efficient pilot.

  ‘We’ll be there in twenty minutes or so.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘You’ve been away for a long time. A shame to return like this.’

  ‘I can live with it.’

  They passed through a space designated for container storage. Several hundred hung in canyon walls around them. Other flyers sped along above and below them, pilots and passengers visible in each. Without overlay, they all occupied indistinguishably battered machines, faded carbon-fibre frames showing like lightly tinted bones through body shells that were palimpsests of replaced and resprayed panels.

  ‘You’re in the care of East?’ Jack said.

  ‘Through my father, yes.’

  [ Here’s someone who didn’t let their parents down, Jack!] cackled Fist.

  Jack winced.

  ‘Are the handcuffs too tight?’ asked Corazon.

  ‘They’re fine.’ Jack shifted in his seat. ‘Unusual to find one of hers working in InSec.’

  ‘East called me to it. I followed.’

  ‘What did you think you were going to be?’

  ‘A journalist.’

  Jack let the silence run on.

  ‘Working for InSec is more satisfying than I ever thought it could be.’

  ‘No doubt,’ replied Jack. ‘I knew Lestak, years ago. You’re young to be working for someone like her.’

  ‘I passed second in my class at the Academy.’

  ‘East chose the right path for you, then.’

  ‘As Grey would have done for you.’

  Jack snorted.

  ‘He was a good patron, once,’ Corazon snapped. ‘He certainly honoured you. You rose as quickly as I’ve done.’

  ‘And then he exiled me and fell. The Pantheon are far from good, Corazon. They’ll screw you if they need to.’

  Corazon’s light, friendly manner frosted over. ‘Grey’s been punished. The rest still put us first.’ There was a moment’s silence, then she continued, ‘I’m with you in an official capacity. Please use my rank when you address me.’

  ‘I was called to serve in InSec too. Will you do me the same favour, Lieutenant Corazon?’

  ‘I can if you want me too, Parolee Forster.’

  [ Touché, Jack,] giggled Fist. [ I do like this one.]

  Corazon’s defence of the gods was so clearly rooted in a very personal sense of gratitude. Jack remembered his own relationship with Grey. The god had done so much more than steer his career. He’d been a mentor and a friend, helping Jack leap the hurdles and manage the pressures that his fast-tracked life created. Jack hadn’t understood that Grey’s very personal attention was a privilege, not a right, until his Soft War posting showed him how quickly and absolutely a god could lose interest in one of his creations.

  All of a sudden, shadows took them and they were flying through darkness. They’d entered the hollow interior of the Wart. ‘So they still haven’t blessed this place with spinelights?’ asked Jack.

  Corazon’s reply was sharp and impersonal. ‘Kingdom felt that there wasn’t sufficient return on energy deployed. The fusion reactors don’t really need it. Nobody ever visits the ruins. And the industrial zones are lit at ground level.’

  As Jack’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw that that was indeed the case. Soft glowing lights patterned the Wart’s floor space, hanging all around the little flyer. Exhaust flares flickered flame orange, or magnesium white. Streetlights made small triangles in the dark, regularly spaced in little clustered networks. A few tower blocks spiked the gloom, their presence defined by thin lines of small, bright windows. Squinting, Jack imagined that he could see tiny figures behind those windows. He sighed. If Fist were fully active, he would have been able to mesh with the weave systems behind every single one, reach into any room he chose to and know everything about everyone within it. It would have made the search for Andrea so much easier.

  A light flashed on the flyer’s control panel, blinking in time with a warning tone. ‘Shit,’ muttered Corazon. ‘We’re running late.’ The flyer accelerated, pushing Jack back into his seat. The entrance to Homelands was a small white circle ahead of them. It quickly expanded until it filled the flyer’s windscreen. Suddenly they’d exploded through it and out, and Lieutenant Corazon was pulling the flyer round in a tight curve through the vast skies of Homelands.

  The thin silver spar of the Spine stretched out ahead of them to the Sunwall, the great, opaque lens stretched across the rim of Homelands like a skin over a drum. It glowed with soft, golden light, casting the luminous haze that made every Homelands day seem so perfect, lighting a world divided in two by the lazy curves of the River Mèche. Residential complexes, shopping malls and business and science parks clustered on either side of it. Halfway along Homelands a circular line of spoke towers reared up, climbing all the way to the Spine. Each tower extended downwards too, passing through Homeland’s skin and out into space. Their external floors merged with the buttressing struts that supported the green-gold ring of Heaven. There was one tower for each of the Pantheon, housing their core operating companies and major subsidiaries. At this time of day, each would be filled with hard-working employees, implementing the many and varied corporate policies constantly coming down from on high. All would be working at least six days a week, eight hours a day. Most would toil harder than that. The gods demanded much from those who served them most directly, but rewarded them proportionately.

  ‘Dammit,
we’ve missed our landing slot.’

  Corazon’s cold animosity was forgotten in her frustration. She let the flyer curve round to the left, opening up a magnificent view of a quarter that Jack had once known reasonably well. Chuigushou Mall shone beneath them. The Violin Gardens estate drifted in and out of sight, redbrick walls referencing an aesthetic that had been dead for at least three hundred years.

  [Suburbia in space,] said Fist. [ The ’roid halls of Titan are far classier than this.]

  ‘So how does it feel to see your old haunts, Jack?’ asked Corazon.

  Jack was surprised by the sudden friendliness of her tone. But then, forgiveness had always been important to East and her followers. It was key to engaging with the intricate, scandalous life stories of her celebrities. A pariah one week could be a hero the next. A popular singer’s habit of attacking their partner would be forgotten on the release of a thrilling new song. A drug-addicted actor would star in a hit drama, and suddenly become a perfect parent and spouse. Of course, such rapid change had its flipside. East had near-instantly torn down as many icons as she had created. She had always been a reliably fickle entity.

  Now Jack could see the streets of Chuigushou Vale. Strips of semi-detached houses were arranged in leaf-like patterns around exclusive shopping and entertainment spaces. But even here, there were reminders of war. Burns scarred the shimmering landscape.

  ‘Void sites?’ wondered Jack.

  ‘Oh yes. The terrorists hit Homelands too.’

  Jack was oddly relieved to hear the frost return to her voice. It felt much more honest than her sudden warmth. ‘What do they look like, when you’re onweave?’ he asked.

  ‘You see the faces of dead children.’

  They flew past a cluster of medium-sized office blocks. The Sunwall’s light gilded their blank, reflective surfaces, turning them into a web of jewelled fingers. Behind them, a mixed-use landscape stretched away – start-up incubators, micro-malls, the mansions of the wealthy. For a moment, memories of the city filled Jack’s mind. All of it came to life in his imagination with an emotive vividness that the weave could never match.