ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Market Forces has had a long and varied evolution, from nasty idea to short story, to screenplay, to the novel you now hold in your hands. Along the way, it (and its author) has incurred a few debts. In chronological order, then, so near as I can recalclass="underline"
Thanks to Simon Edkins for the original thought-provoking sneer: they think they live in a jungle, don’t they?, and to Gavin Burgess for sharing his knowledge of some of the more feral business training procedures out there. Thanks to Sarah Lane for seeing the potential in a moth-eaten unpublished short story, for pushing me into building a screenplay around it, and for all the unflagging enthusiasm and hard work she poured into the project along the way – great movie producers are made of this, or should be. Thanks also to Alan Young for substantial anecdotal inspiration over the years, and for reading the raw product with an economics consultant’s beady eye. Thanks, as always, to my agent, Carolyn Whitaker, and my editor, Simon Spanton, for excellence in the field of making me pay attention to detail. Thanks to everyone on the Gollancz team for making the fifth floor a great place to hang out. And finally, most of all, thanks to my recently acquired wife, Virginia Cottinelli, for her patience in sharing with me the contents of a Master’s programme in Development at the University of Glasgow, the getting of which was already costing her more grief than any paying student should have to put up with.
A list of books that proved inspirational during the writing of Market Forces is appended at the end of the novel, should the reader be interested. They are too many to list or talk about here, but they are too important not to mention at all. On a lighter note, Market Forces also owes a rather obvious debt of inspiration to the ground-breaking movies Mad Max and Rollerball, both of which made a massive impact on me at an age when legally I shouldn’t have been watching either.
BOOKS CONSULTED
Note: the views expressed in Market Forces are in no way intended to represent the views of any of the authors listed above.
BLACK MAN
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother
MARGARET ANN MORGAN
Who taught me to hate bigotry, cruelty and injustice with an unrelenting rage, and to despise the hypocrisy that looks away or makes comfortable excuses when those same vices crop up closer to home than we’d like.
I miss you
‘It seems feasible that over the coming century human nature will be scientifically remodelled. If so, it will be done haphazardly, as an upshot of struggles in the murky realm where big business, organised crime and the hidden parts of government vie for control.’
‘Human, to the discontinuous mind, is an absolutist concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil.’
PROLOGUE: HOMEWARD BOUND
Gleaming steel, gleaming steel…
Larsen blinks and shifts slightly on the retrieval cot as it tracks under a linear succession of lighting panels and lateral roof struts. Recognition smears in with vision, blurry and slow; she’s in the dorsal corridor. Overhead, light angles off each metal beam, sliding from glint to full blown burst and back as she passes below. She supposes it’s the repeated glare that’s woken her. That, or her knee, which is aching ferociously, even through the accustomed groggy swim of the decanting drugs. One hand rests on her chest, pressing into the thin fabric of the cryocap leotard. Cool air on her skin tells her she’s otherwise naked. An eerie sense of déjà vu steals over her with the knowledge. She coughs a little, tiny remnants of tank gel in the bottom of her pumped-out lungs. She shifts again, mumbles something to herself.
…not again…?
‘Again, yes. The cormorant’s legacy, yes, again.’
That’s odd. She’s not expecting another voice, least of all one talking in riddles. Decanting’s usually a wholly mechanised process, the datahead’s programmed to wake them before arrival, and unless something’s gone wrong…
So you’re the big expert on cryocapping now, are you?
She isn’t – her entire previous experience comes down to three test decantings and the one real deal at journey’s end on the voyage out, whence, she supposes, the déjà vu. But still…
…more than three…
…it is not more, it is not…
The vehemence in the retort has a ragged edge on it that she doesn’t like. If she’d heard it in another person’s voice, a test subject’s voice, say, she’d be thinking sedatives, maybe even a call to security. In her own thoughts, it’s suddenly, intimately chilling, like the realisation that there’s someone in the house with you, someone that you didn’t invite in. Like the thought out of nowhere that you might not be wholly sane.
This is the drugs, Ellie. Let go, ride it out.
Gleaming stee–
The retrieval cot bumps slightly as it takes a right turn. For some reason, it sets off a violent jolt in her pulse, a reaction that, drugged, she labels almost idly as panic. A tremor of impending doom trickles through her like cold water. They’re going to crash, they’re going to hit something, or something’s going to hit them, something massive and ancient beyond human comprehension tumbling endlessly end over end through the empty night outside the ship. Space travel isn’t safe, she was insane to ever think it was, to sign up for the contract and think she could get away with it, there and home again in one piece as if it were no more than a suborbital across the Pacific, you just couldn’t—
Let go, Ellie. It’s the drugs.
Then she realises where she is. The autosurgeon’s folded arachnoid arms wheel past in one quadrant of her vision as the cot slots into position on the examination rack. A qualified relief seeps into her. Something’s wrong, but she’s in the right place. Horkan’s Pride is equipped with the finest automated medical systems COLIN knows how to build, she’s read it in a Colony News digest, the whole shipboard AI suite was overhauled a couple of weeks before she left. And, look, there’s a limit to what can go wrong with a cryocapped body, right, Ellie? Organic functions slow to a chilled crawl and so does anything hostile that you might be carrying.
But the panic, the sense of inescapable nemesis, won’t let her go. She feels it dull and insistent, like a dog worrying at an anaesthetised limb.
She rolls her head sideways on the cot, and sees him.
More familiarity, sharper now, jolting through her like current.
Once, on a trip to Europe, she went to the Museo della Sindone in Turin and saw the tortured image printed on cloth that they keep there. She stood in dimness on the other side of the bullet-proof glass, surrounded by the reverent murmurs of the faithful. Never a believer of any sort herself, Larsen was still oddly moved by the harsh and hollow lines of the face staring back at her out of the sealed vacuum chamber. It seemed a testament to human suffering that completely short-circuited its divine pretensions, that rendered the devotions paid it beside the point. You looked at that face and you were struck by the sheer stubborn survivability of organic life, the heritage of built-in, bitten-down defiance that the long march of evolution had gifted you with.