‘She’s dead.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’ve seen her fetch.’
‘I hope that’s going well. It can be very comforting.’ A child laughed emptily, somewhere down the street. ‘What you did, Jack … I can’t let your mother see you. I can’t let you be around here, in case she finds out about you.’
‘Dad …’
His father looked up. Jack could see him forcing the steel into himself. ‘It would have broken her heart, to know that you’d just given in like that. It was so bad for her when the rock hit the moon. She was so angry with the Totality for fooling Sandal.’
‘That has nothing to do with it, Dad.’
‘She could never understand why you weren’t happy to be out there, fighting those bastards. Why you wouldn’t just accept Grey’s will. And then if she found out that you’d just stepped away from the fight – from everything she cared about …’
‘Dad, you’re talking about her like the fetch is Mum. It’s not her. It’s a memory of her. It’s the best memory of her we’ll ever have. But it’s not Mum, Dad.’
As he spoke, Jack thought of how moved he’d been to meet Andrea’s fetch. He wondered how much he still believed what he was saying. Then his father replied.
‘Don’t you think I don’t know that? I met that woman thirty-two years ago. We married thirty years ago and then we began and we ended almost every single day together until she passed over.’
‘I’m sorry, Dad, I—’
‘And I wake up, and I call to her, or I’m onweave watching East, and we’re talking about it, or I’m in the kitchen like just now – and there she is – and I know it’s not her. I know, Jack. But it is some of the best parts of her. So I treat her right, I let her run freely, I don’t keep on rolling her back to whatever age I feel like. I look after her, just like I’ve always done. And I will not see her heart broken by you, coming back after you’ve walked away from the most important fight of your life and of her life.’
‘That’s just one way of seeing it. Look, Dad …’
‘And even if you did see her, what then? In two, three months the puppet takes your body. So her son would come back and then he’d die to her again. And you’re going to be really dead, aren’t you?’
‘Fist will have full usage rights for key consciousness assets, yes. He owns my experiences, my memories – everything they’d copy to the Coffin Drives and build my fetch from. None of that will happen. So yes. I’m going to die.’
‘And she has to experience that? Having mourned you once? She was so sad, Jack, and when I watched her grieve – a little virtual thing, but so sad. That was when I fell in love with her again. She’s not your mother, but she loves you like your mother did. She’s lost you once, but she lost a hero; now she’d lose you twice, and she’d lose—’
‘Say it, Dad.’
‘A coward? I’d never call you that. I know you too well. I’m sure you had your reasons for the choices you made, but you made them and you didn’t think of your duty to us or to the Pantheon. You let me down, you let your mother down and you let the gods down too. I’m sorry, son. But it’s too late now. You made your choice.’
‘But the Pantheon are corrupt. One of them was running sweat through the Panther Czar. And they’ve killed to cover it up.’
‘Oh, we had that argument. That’s why they sent you off to the war, isn’t it? Nothing to do with what a good mind you have, with making sacrifices to help protect us all. I know all about your conspiracy theories. But even if you’re right, look at the good the Pantheon have done. They see so much further than we do. We need them.’
‘No, we don’t. I’ve seen how different it can be under the Totality. How much more freedom people have. Gods, Dad, they can actually own things, they don’t just license everything. The Totality are the future, Dad.’
‘Bullshit. The Totality dropped a fucking rock on all those kids. And look what they did to Sandal. That attack broke him. And Kingdom too – he tries not to show it, but he’s a shadow of what he was. They’ve seized every single asset he held from Mars to the Moon. Soon they’ll come after everything else he owns, and run it all into the ground too.’
‘That’s just propaganda. The Totality said they weren’t responsible for the Rock, and I believe them. And Kingdom’s security and industrial activities, Sandal’s transport infrastructure, the Twins’ calorie and pharmaceutical factories, the Rose’s military presence – the Totality didn’t seize them, they liberated them. They made them more efficient and less restrictive.’
‘And that’s bullshit too. We need the structure the Pantheon give us. Just look at the Earth – what’s left of it – and remember all the mistakes we made before we had them to manage us. And you should see what’s happened at Grey’s old headquarters, it’s nothing to do with liberation. But I don’t want to get into this again. I’ve asked you into my house, and I’ve explained myself to you. That’s all I owe you.’
‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.’
‘You’re not sorry, you haven’t even thought about it. I had your mother’s fetch to comfort me when I lost her, but there’s nothing like that for me with you. There won’t ever be.’
‘I did what was right, Dad.’
‘And I told you I don’t believe you. Get out, please.’
‘Dad …’
‘You’ve come here and upset me, and I can’t even tell your mother. Just go.’
The hallway was silent. Jack stood there for a moment, remembering. In the kitchen his father started to cry. It was a very lonely sound. Jack shut the front door quietly, as if leaving a house of mourning. The spinelights shone their blank light down on him. There would be no reconciliation. Now that that had been made clear, Jack felt the past change around him. As he walked down the empty street, his memories of it as the safe, comfortable core of his childhood were replaced by a hard and meaningless void. He wished for a moment that his heart was as securely numb as the silent numbers that lay at the heart of Fist’s vicious, empty soul.
Chapter 16
Jack walked without purpose, lost in his own mind. Raggedly dressed people bustled past him, secure in their small worlds. The buildings around him had an unfinished feel to them too. Machines worked on many of them, reordering the world. It was like exploring a robot’s dream of birth. The spinelights above him dimmed, signalling early evening. After a while, there was a small square. It was edged with buildings that spiked up like broken circuit boards, and bisected by an iron viaduct with a station hanging from it. A train rattled to a stop, sounding like a child shaking a stone in a tin. Its carriages were painted green. This was the Loop line. It ran in a circle all the way round the great cylinder of Docklands.
As a child, Jack had loved to buy a ticket and sit on a Loop train all day long, counting up the miles as it rolled again and again round Docklands; the longest wheeled journey that any human, anywhere in the system, could ever make. The wind tugged at his coat, pulling him back into the present. Exhaustion hit him. He turned towards the station. A train would be warm and dry, and he might even be able sleep for a while.
There was a cracking in his mind.
[Oo, it’s nice to be out of there,] said Fist. [Meeting with your folks went well? No? Not much of a surprise.] Jack was too tired to respond. [ Hey, there’s a message from that squishy! At least someone still wants you around. Want some Totality love?]
Jack shook his head. Once he was on the train, he sat down with his back to the Wart. Looking forwards, he could see out of the carriage and over the low rooftops of Docklands. Beyond them, there were Sandal’s great wharves. They bustled with tiny dots – dockworkers filleted chainships, detaching cargo containers and letting them hang in space. Further out there were three snowflakes, their stillness an exquisite contrast to the Spine’s hubbub. Two hung in the shadow of Station. The third had been caught by the sun. It blazed with golden intricacy, the complex patterns of its dense architecture made a thousand dazzling mirrors. Jack remembered combat. He imagined moving in awe towards its physical self, then losing himself in the great engines of its mind.