Authors: Al Robertson
Movement was visible throughout the Coffin Space, but it was difficult to tell if it came from people or from the wind snatching at loose metal. Jack couldn’t make out the geography of the city. There were no roads. He imagined tight alleys and passages squashed between rickety houses. Remembering the city’s inhabitants made him see it as a great, overfilled cemetery, graves and tombs squashed together, coffins tipping against each other where the earth between them had subsided.
Fist skipped down the dune. ‘Come on!’
Jack imagined all the dead he’d ever known, clustered in the squalor before him.
‘Come ON! Let’s go meet some fetches!’
Jack let himself slide down the dune and set off towards the nearest of the bridges.
‘That’s interesting,’ Fist shouted back at him. ‘They manage time differently on this side of the dunes.’
It was indeed difficult to measure its passing in that empty landscape. Jack had a sense of an endless march towards the bridge, between the river, the dunes and the shifting clouds above. Step after step jarred through his body, telling him that he was moving forwards, but nothing seemed to change. Fist paced beside him, for once silent. At various points Jack said something, but Fist said nothing in response, leaving him unsure whether he’d only imagined speaking.
Suddenly, they were standing on the bridge.
‘I didn’t realise we were so close to it,’ said Jack.
‘We’ve been here for an hour or so.’
‘But we’ve only just arrived.’
‘I suppose there’s not much point giving the dead a shared sense of time.’
Jack clutched the bridge’s handrail. It was hard and cold. He clung on to it, fearful that he was imagining this too, that he would suddenly find himself trudging again through the wastes of Coffin Space.
Fist peered over at the city. ‘I still can’t see anyone moving around. Slackers.’
They started walking across. The river was in full spate beneath them, but no sound rose from it.
‘Listen to that, Jack.’
‘There’s nothing.’
‘Exactly! The beach wasn’t bad, but this bit of the simulation’s really cheap. You’d think they’d treat the dead with more respect. No wonder they’re all still in bed.’
They crossed the peak of the bridge. Two figures were standing at its end, one short, the other tall. There was an empty space between them that implied a missing third.
‘Were they there just now?’ asked Fist.
‘I don’t know. I think it’s the first time we’ve seen them.’ Jack shook his head. ‘This is hard work.’
They continued their walk. Whenever Jack found himself becoming spatially confused, he’d watch the pillars that supported the handrail go by. He usually managed to convince himself that he was actually moving forwards.
‘I don’t know how they stand it, Jack.’
‘No wonder they always love coming out to visit.’
The two figures became more distinct. One was only about a third the height of the other. Both were bundled up in dirty rags. It was difficult to tell their sex. Jack wondered if they were just statues posed to ward off or welcome strangers. There was nothing else visible that could have been a person – or rather, as Jack reminded himself, a fetch. Again, he imagined being trapped here perpetually. He idly wondered when his sanity would leave him. It occurred to him that this environment might not allow that much change, that even the relief of madness would be impossible.
‘We’ve got to get out of here, Fist.’
They reached the end of the bridge. As they came closer to the figures Jack saw that they had white sheets draped over their heads. They did seem to be human, or some recreation of something human, for each was pointing down with one white hand. The hands shimmered oddly, never quite settling down into a final, fixed image of themselves. ‘Posers,’ said Fist.
The wind rattled through the streets of the city, dancing between the pillars of light that speared down from the clouds. Blank windows and empty doors stared out at Jack and Fist. Flickering lights lit some of them, as if a thousand televisions had been left turned on in a thousand empty rooms.
Jack walked towards one of the figures. It didn’t move. He found himself next to it. It was the taller of the two. There was a white sheet in his hand. A shimmer of a face was looking up at him. It contained all ages; sometimes a baby, sometimes a child, sometimes a young adult, sometimes haggard and old. It shifted between versions of itself so quickly that it was difficult to read, but then some sort of stasis was achieved and there was one face looking up at him.
‘Oh,’ breathed Jack. ‘It’s you.’
‘Hello Jack,’ said his mother. She was as she’d been when he left Station for the Soft War. He reached out and took her arms in his hands, testing the reality of her.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, his voice full of grief.
‘I know.’
Without any movement she was holding him, and he her. Something within Jack broke and he wept. He kept on apologising. She held him close, her soft hands pulling his cheek against her soft hair. She held him close. At last he was able to talk.
‘How did you know I was coming?’ he asked her.
‘The waves tell us of new fetches. We send the right person out to meet them. We felt you coming in from the sea, but you’re so different from us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Let me show you.’
‘What about Fist?’
‘Oh – your puppet. Where’s he gone?’
Jack looked around for Fist, surprised that he’d been so silent for so long. Someone was giggling. Jack remembered the sound from life.
‘Issie?’
She skipped into view, Fist dancing along with her. She shimmered with change too, but there was much less variety in her, for she’d lived barely a tenth as long as Jack’s mother.
‘I came down with Jack’s mummy. They said Fist would be here!’ she chirped happily.
Jack had never seen her true face, only the skull. It shimmered from child to baby and then back again, beaming with fresh, open joy.
‘I had so much fun playing with him! And now he’s here, and you’re here, and everything’s going to change! I might even get to go travelling like he does! Oh, wonderful!’
She skipped towards him. Jack readied himself for another hug. But then there was a bright, silent explosion. A sunbeam leapt out of the clouds, burning into being around Issie. Where she’d been standing there was suddenly only a transparent pillar of light.
Jack took a step back. Fist’s face mimicked shock. Jack felt his mother squeeze his hand.
‘What happened?’
‘Her mother called to her.’
‘Lestak?’
‘Yes. She had to go. Any one of us can be called, at any time. The light breaks through from the weave, and summons us into it, and we go to manifest in your world. To be your puppets.’
‘You’re not puppets.’
‘You find your favourite memories, and decide that that’s how you want us to be, and then we are forced to conform to that. What would you call it?’
‘I don’t know. I guess I never really thought about it before.’
Fist was nervously skirting the sunbeam. He didn’t hear Jack’s mother. ‘This is heavy stuff, Jack,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think we can use it to get out. We could try and climb up one, but I think it would break us.’
‘Can’t we get someone to summon us?’
‘Nobody knows we’re here.’
Jack turned to his mother. ‘Can we send a message out with you?’ he asked her. ‘There are some files we need to get out.’
‘We can’t speak of life here when we’re up there,’ she replied. ‘And we can only travel out with what we remember from life, nothing else.’
Jack thought of Andrea. His mother’s voice was made of memories too, patchworked together from all the words she’d ever spoken.
‘It’s the same for all of you?’
‘Yes. I’ll show you. Fist, come here.’
She took him and Fist by the hand. All of a sudden they were overlooking the city from the top of a high metal building. Looking down, Jack saw a ragged jumble of shacks, the spaces between them never quite coalescing into streets or alleys. The soft flickering that he’d noticed on the edge of the city pervaded them all. Sunbeams danced at random around them.
‘You can see where we were standing,’ his mother told him, pointing. ‘There – the sunbeam by the bridge.’ It was a mile or so away. The bridge was a dark shape against the darker river. ‘And you see all the beams that leap into the city, pulling our minds away from here, just as we’ve begun to coalesce? I’ll show you what they do to us.’ Now they were inside one of the shacks. A flickering figure stood before them. It was naked, but there was nothing obscene about its nudity. It never fell into a single version of itself, so it was never defined enough for its flesh to be seen and properly parsed.
‘So many memories, Jack, to try and control. Sometimes we come close. Sometimes one of us approaches coherence, a final
interpretation of all
the data a life has left behind, but then the
fetching light comes down from the weave and we fall
to pieces again, broken by the nostalgia of the living.’
Jack thought of Andrea’s music. It was a focus
for her memories, giving them a shape and narrative, pulling
her back to a single, self-defined version of herself.
His mother had no such resource to draw on.
‘How
can you speak to me so clearly? Why aren’t
you like – this one?’
Jack waved towards the shimmering figure.
It seemed to be aware of his presence. A thousand
ages of the same head turned towards him. Compound eyes
tried to focus.
‘Your father’s never rolled me back,
so I’m more structured than most. And the attention
of all the rest of us is on me, holding
me together. We’ve never had a visitor like you.
If you can escape, you can tell them about all
this.’
Fist had let go of Mrs Forster’s hand,
and leapt on to the windowsill. While she’d been
talking, he’d been scanning the city. Now, he turned
back.
‘You mean – they’re all like this one? None
of them ever resolving?’ he asked.
‘None of us ever
can.’
‘Motherfucker.’ He turned to Jack. ‘It’s bad enough
being yourself and then getting reprogrammed. This lot don’t
even get that far. I wish I could give them
all a feather like Andrea’s, without getting fried by
the fucking Pantheon. I wish they could all become more
than just puppets. The living really are a shower of
cunts.’
‘But – nobody ever knew,’ said Jack. ‘The Pantheon never
show us any of this.’
‘They wouldn’t,’ Fist shot
back angrily.
Suddenly they were at the lakeside. There were
maybe fifty metres of black, muddy earth between the city
of the dead and the silent lake. Streams running out
of the city and into the depths had carved soft
lines in the mud. A richly stagnant smell hung in
the air.
‘So many don’t even get to exist
as fetches,’ said Jack’s mother. She gestured towards the
great pile of dark blocks at the heart of the
lake. They had a hard, rough texture to them, tumbled together as if by a child bored of its building blocks.
‘What is that?’ Jack asked her.
‘It’s the prison. Some come to the bridge, but are snatched away and enclosed before they can even find a word to speak.’
‘That’s where Penderville is,’ said Jack. ‘And Grey’s peace protesters.’
‘We met some of their children,’ Fist explained. ‘They’re locked away, too. Just not quite as finally as this.’
‘Each of those blocks holds a weave presence?’ continued Jack.
‘Yes,’ his mother confirmed sadly. ‘Each one’s labelled with name, date of decease – everything.’
‘So all we need to do is open them up. Fist?’
‘Fuck yes. It’s not a god, but it’ll do for now.’
‘And that’ll set alarm bells ringing. The Coffin Drive admins will run diagnostics, and they’ll need a two-way link for that. They’ll see us, and we’ll be able to talk to them. I think we’ve found our ticket out of here.’ Jack turned back to his mother. ‘Can you take us to the prison?’ he said.
Before she could reply, there was a dazzling shock. Light burned out of the sky and exploded around them, catching Jack within it. He felt that he’d been lifted out of himself. A shape that could have been a face hovered before him. It resolved and became deeply familiar. It was his father. He was crying. Jack had never seen him looking this vulnerable. He wanted to reach out to him, but there was nothing to reach with. He’d lost his body in the white light.
‘Get out!’ yelled his mother. ‘Quickly! Before it’s too late!’
Jack felt a huge strong push, and then heard Fist shout ‘Fuck!’ He stumbled backwards. A white pillar blazed in front of him. His mother’s rags lay scattered just by it, fading under the hard light. She’d been called away.
‘That was pretty fucking Oedipal,’ said Fist, picking himself up off the ground. ‘Knocked me over, too. No damage, though!’
‘I’m fine too,’ Jack replied. ‘Thanks for asking.’
‘Well, that’s all we’re going to get from her,’ Fist continued obliviously. ‘At least for the moment. And who knows what sort of state she’ll be in when she gets back!’
Joy and grief pulsed together in Jack. He’
d found his mother and then lost her again so
quickly. He so wanted to see her again, but to
do that he had to escape the Coffin Drives and
then best Kingdom. He pushed emotion to one side, forcing
himself to focus on the practicalities of the situation.
‘We
need to get to that island.’