It certainly always felt that way. We were always less than one step away from death. The feeling that my luck was going to run out if I didn’t stop doing things like this. Luck? Two gunshots. Meat that was once a person hitting a cold stone floor. For a moment I could see the appeal of the End. Then I remembered how important it was that Rolleston died.
‘Demiurge?’ I asked.
He turned his head. He seemed to be studying me.
‘The Black Wave?’ he asked.
I cursed my own indiscretion. On the other hand he’d know from my accent that I wasn’t from around here.
‘You worship it?’ I asked.
‘More venerate it as an inevitability. One war ends and another begins. This time we fight each other, and if the information the resistance is circulating is correct it seems that we did the last one to ourselves as well. There was a demon, a harbinger…’
‘In the net?’ Rannu asked.
The man nodded. This sent a shudder through me. Of all the religious experiences that people have in the net, the ones involving so-called demons are always the worst and most destructive — and not just for the hackers themselves. I remembered the boy lying on the soiled bed in Fintry, Vicar standing over him, cross and Bible in hand, trying to cast out the demonic virus in the kid’s ware.
‘He told me of the Black Wave’s coming. He told me that the Black Wave was hate.’ The man laughed. ‘Can you imagine? All these years of artifice and we finally make machines hate.’
‘So why venerate something so…’ I was searching for the right word.
‘Negative,’ Rannu supplied. It didn’t seem quite strong enough but it would do.
‘Because of its inevitability, its symbolism. Sixty years of warfare was not enough. At some level humanity wants to destroy itself. If not this war then other reasons will be found. The Black Wave is the perfect expression of this. We, as a race, have created a god and then we made it hate. How much harder do we have to work to destroy ourselves?’
‘It was a small group of people,’ I said. I couldn’t shake the feeling that history was the story of a small group of arseholes making the rest of us bloody miserable.
‘Do you oppose these people?’ he asked.
This was more difficult. Answering that had operational security ramifications. What was I talking about? I’d already sold us out. At least he didn’t seem malevolent. Rannu still gave me a sharp look when I nodded.
‘You still fight, hate, commit acts of violence and destroy other human life?’ he asked.
‘That’s…’ Now Rannu was searching for a word.
‘Sophistry?’ the man suggested. Rannu nodded. ‘Perhaps, or perhaps it’s taking responsibility, collectively, for our race’s actions.’
It seemed that nobody was going to tell me what sophistry was. Maybe it meant bullshit. Maybe that’s what Rannu had meant to say.
‘So you’re waiting for death?’ I asked.
‘In a way, but we won’t play its game. We’ll die on our own terms.’
I couldn’t make up my mind if this guy was a suicidal nut-job or one of the bravest persons I’d ever met. Not that they were mutually exclusive.
‘We still have to fight,’ Rannu said.
‘Even if it’s more futile, painful and destructive than putting one of their guns to your own head? Besides, there are ways and means of fighting. It doesn’t have to involve violence.’
His words were starting to make sense to me. He was very persuasive. Though I wasn’t sure he wasn’t twisting words out of shape to get us to think what he wanted.
‘Is this how you recruit people?’ I asked.
‘We don’t recruit people. They come to us when they’re ready. You will not join us. You are both still full of anger, hatred and fear. I can see the flames that burn around you. They surround you like a nimbus. I think you need to rage against the dark for a while longer yet.’
I had nothing to say to that. Was it insight or was it a sales pitch? I didn’t know. I did know that he’d saved our arses. I wondered if he was still fighting, like us, but used different methods. Better methods, if they worked. On the other hand, if they ever crossed Cronin, Rolleston or the others they’d be snuffed out. A more likely fate was death at the hands of bailiffs or scavengers. Their sin would be the old one of having what someone else wanted and not being mean enough to protect it. Or maybe it was all an elaborate justification for just giving up.
‘You’ll be going on your way.’ He said this with certainty. ‘You need rest before you do. When you go I would ask you to take only what you think you’ll need.’ He stood up to leave. ‘If you want anything just ask anyone. They’ll try to help as much as they can. Will you excuse me?’ He turned to walk away.
‘Thank you,’ I said. Rannu said the same. He didn’t look back at us but he nodded before he strode away.
I wasn’t drinking much. It didn’t take much. Rannu did drink but in moderation. Tonight he was matching me, tin cup for tin cup of the fermented engine oil. We were sitting under a pathetic canopy of what had once been ornamental foliage in a hole that was the dried-out remains of some kind of water feature.
The UV-lit false night was somehow managing to be cold and humid. Both of us were wrapped in borrowed coats and sleeping bags. It might have been warmer in the cave-like mansion but neither of us wanted to go inside. The cavern roof above us was enough of a prison for me.
Many of the End were dancing around the big fire listening to some kind of bass- and beat-heavy music that I suspected I would disapprove of under normal circumstances. They were just shadows where the UV light contrasted with the red and orange of the flames. They seemed unreal. Everyone was drinking heavily and taking rec drugs, and we were trying to ignore quite a large group having sex not too far away from where we were sitting. There was a sense of desperation to it all. The Ugandan poet with the staff walked among them, constantly being stopped. He took time to speak to any who accosted him. There was something comforting about him, even if he did trade on the darker side of the net. Perhaps his personable and comforting nature was the real danger, a type of seduction. I still couldn’t quite bring myself to mistrust him.
‘After Leicester, after Rolleston burned me, Ashmi asked me to stop,’ Rannu said out of nowhere. It took me a while to work out who Ashmi was. I felt a little guilty that I’d never asked Rannu about his family.
It had been Rolleston who’d betrayed Rannu to Berham, the head of the Thuggees, after Rannu had refused to break off the deep-cover operation to work for the Major. Rolleston once again teaching a lesson on why he must be obeyed.
‘I’m not surprised. Nobody wants that to happen to someone they care about.’ Of course I’d managed to avoid the whole physical torture thing by just spilling my guts. Not that it’d done any good. Two shots.
‘This is it. In the unlikely event that I live through this, I’m out. This is the last mission for me. Yangani and Sangar should have their father with them and Ash deserves her husband by her side. Though whether I deserve her is another question. I want to see my children grow up. Teach them what I can.’
‘I was surprised when Mudge told me you had a family. Surely you’ve got too much to lose to be doing all this stupid shit with us.’
‘I never had a choice.’ I turned to look at him. I didn’t understand. ‘I didn’t like working for Rolleston, but when I knew, after I found out in New York, what choice did I have? Your children judge you, is what I think. They don’t mean to — they don’t even know they’re doing it — but how could I go back to them and look them in the eyes if I hadn’t done everything I could to make a future where they are not just more meat to be ground up or just another weapon of polluted flesh? Because after we pollute our flesh with machinery we then pollute our minds with what we have to do. I know Rolleston. He would make my children slaves; he would make us all slaves. He does not tolerate dissent. It would have been like I’d done it to them myself. But this is enough.’