Living Hell (2 page)

Dygall had shaved his head a few days before the birthday party. I can’t remember why; maybe there wasn’t a reason. Maybe he was bored. (He often talked about the boredom of life on Plexus. Then, to be annoying, he would say that a military coup would liven things up.) A pale, gingery fuzz was just beginning to cover his scalp on the day of the party. The younger kids found it quite fascinating. I remember how they would ask if they could touch it, and Dygall would suddenly drop to his knees and bark like a dog, or say: ‘Be careful. It’s catching. Do you want your own hair to fall out?’ I tried to head him off, but there was no way of knowing what Dygall would do next. One minute he would be running around in circles, popping virtual balloons; the next minute he would be sulking in a corner. It was very difficult for me. His unexpected responses threw the smaller kids off balance.

But when I complained to Merrit, she simply shrugged and said, ‘Consider it a compliment. They wouldn’t have made the match if they thought you couldn’t handle it.’

Merrit was sixteen at the time. Psychologics had teamed her up with a bright and happy Little Sister, who wasn’t giving her much trouble at all. The worst you could say about Inaret was that she made a lot of noise.

I pointed this out.

‘So are you telling me,’ I asked, ‘that your getting Inaret
wasn’t
a compliment? Because she’s nice and easy?’

Merrit flashed me one of her looks. We were standing against a wall, watching the smaller kids dance with a virtual octopus.

‘Inaret is a great deal of work,’ she insisted.

‘Are you kidding?’

‘No.’

‘She’s brilliant, Merrit. She has the highest IQ on board.’

‘You think
that’s
easy to deal with?’

‘For you? Yes.’ If Inaret had the highest IQ, Merrit probably had the second-highest. She was a mathematical genius. Even before she left school, she was running stat checks for Planning and Projection. The instant she graduated, my father snapped her up. Her first Rotation Placement was with him, in Navigation, where she had been impressing everyone with her insights into cataclysmic variables. ‘Anyway, at least Inaret seems socially integrated,’ I remarked, studying the eight-year-old as she flung herself around – rather clumsily, for someone her age. (She perhaps wasn’t as well coordinated as she could have been.) ‘Nice manners. Receptive. Cheerful.’

‘Well of course she seems that way to
you
,’ Merrit retorted. ‘It’s because she’s trying so hard to impress.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Cheney.’ Merrit had a way of glancing at you out of the corners of her long, dark eyes, while her face remained expressionless. ‘You’re not displaying much insight.’

‘Huh?’

‘She thinks the world of you.’

Sure enough, Merrit had hardly finished speaking when Inaret suddenly clattered to a halt in front of me. ‘Can you be a sun?’ she asked.

‘Pardon?’

‘We’re doing a solar-system dance,’ she explained confidently. ‘You can be a sun, and we’ll be planets.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s a binary system,’ Inaret added, seizing my hand. I ended up swinging her around and around, while Caromy did the same with Haemon. It occurred to me that, although Haemon was older, Inaret did seem to be taking the lead in most things. Watching her, I began to see what Merrit was talking about. Inaret was certainly very firm in her opinions.

Haemon, on the other hand, hardly ever opened his mouth.

‘Inaret needs a lot of convincing,’ Merrit said dryly when I joined her again. ‘You can’t just tell her to do things. You have to
persuade
her to do things.’

‘Well – that’s good, isn’t it?’

‘Is it? I don’t know. It wears me out.’

‘It’s still better than Dygall.’

‘What’s Dygall doing, anyway?’

Dygall had brought a silvery insulation sheet with him. He was trying to refract energy waves, thereby distorting the image of the octopus. Inaret laughed as its head bubbled to one side. Haemon blinked his round, dark eyes in consternation.

‘Please don’t mess with the program, Dygall,’ Dygall’s teacher requested. ‘It has a knock-on effect.’

‘Don’t you think a knock-on effect might be interesting?’ was Dygall’s response.

‘Possibly. But you might frighten some of the little ones. The mimexis distinction still isn’t clear, for them.’

Naturally, Dygall wasn’t pleased. He slouched over to where I was standing.

‘It’s a coddle-fest,’ he complained. ‘Those kids
need
a bit of scaring. We all do.’

‘Is that so?’ Merrit said blandly.

‘Yes it is so. Otherwise the first alien we run into, we’ll all die of fright.’

Merrit smiled. Dygall scowled.

‘It’s true!’ he insisted. ‘We need a few mimexic monster programs. To toughen us up. We have to be
prepared
.’

‘We are prepared,’ I pointed out, as mildly as I could. ‘That’s what Planning and Projection is for. All the possibilities have been taken into account.’

Dygall snorted. I knew what he thought of P&P. According to Dygall, no colonisation plan could be complete without guns. He had said, over and over again, that security on board Plexus was a farce, because there were no firearms of any description. He had even been caught downloading weaponry blueprints from the history database.

Teillo, I remember, had been very amused by this. ‘That boy,’ he’d chuckled, ‘is a genius at pushing buttons.’ In a funny sort of way, I knew what he meant. For all Dygall’s noise, he had never actually
built
a flame thrower. Nor had he sabotaged a mimexis program, or designed his own search-and-destroy robot. As I said, he liked annoying people. And one way of annoying people is to challenge their most deeply held beliefs.

No one would have been allowed to join A Crew if they had regarded violence as a solution to anything. Naturally, Dygall’s attitude worried everybody. As for Dygall, I think he enjoyed all the extra counselling he received for his destabilising tendencies. He always did like to be the centre of attention.

‘For my party,’ he suddenly declared, ‘I want an historical set piece. The Battle of Waterloo or something.’

Merrit rolled her eyes.

‘Oh, I’m sure the little ones will love that,’ I remarked.

‘The little ones won’t be allowed in here,’ said Dygall. ‘It’ll just be me and you and . . . I think you should come, too.’ He nodded at Merrit. ‘You’re obviously bored.’

‘Is that so?’

‘I can tell by your hair. Only a person who’s very, very bored puts so much time and effort into a hairstyle.’

Merrit had long, straight, black hair, which she wore in a complicated pattern of fine plaits. I think her mother used to arrange it for her. When I saw Merrit flush, I knew that Dygall had gone too far.

Merrit was rather sensitive, you see. She couldn’t laugh things off – and she didn’t know Dygall all that well. She didn’t understand that he would say whatever popped into his mind. He was never intentionally cruel, I don’t think. Just tactless and impatient.

‘You’re a good one to talk about boredom-related hairstyles,’ I said to him quickly. ‘How long did that lunar landscape on your own scalp take you to finish?’

Dygall put a hand to his head. ‘Next time,’ he replied, in tones of deep satisfaction, ‘I’m going to leave bits. I’m going to write my name in my hair.’

And that was when reality intruded. Even as Dygall spoke, Firminus opened the chamber door. He approached Haemon’s father, and they exchanged a few words.

Suddenly, the program faded. We were all left standing in an empty beige-coloured compartment.

‘I’m sorry, everyone,’ said Firminus in his calm, dry voice, ‘but we’re going to need this chamber. We have to run a few charts.’

The little kids groaned. Merrit and I frowned at each other. Firminus worked in Navigation; he wouldn’t have interrupted Haemon’s birthday party to run a few star-charts unless our course required urgent analysis.

‘Do you need me, Firminus?’ Merrit inquired.

‘Not at present, Merrit, thanks all the same.’ Clearly, Firminus wasn’t prepared to give us any more details. ‘I apologise for the interruption.’

‘Oh, we were nearly through,’ Haemon’s mother replied. She sounded genuinely unconcerned. ‘Haemon’s had a great time, haven’t you, honey?’

Haemon smiled shyly, and nodded. Like his mother, he was very sweet-natured. And he didn’t know enough to be worried. None of us did, at that stage.

We didn’t realise it was the beginning of the end of everything.

CHAPTER
TWO

Dad didn’t come back to our cabin for supper that night.

We always used to eat supper together, if we could – Dad, Mum and me. Mum was very firm about that. Even though we could have ordered our rations from any food dispenser on Plexus, she insisted that each evening meal should be a ‘family’ one. Looking back, I can see why. My parents were busy people. They were both Senate members. Dad was on the Navigation Executive Committee. Mum filled an identical role for MedLab. Unless they had a firm schedule, and stuck to it, family time was likely to slip away from them.

Back then, of course, I didn’t really appreciate this. Family life didn’t interest me. I was seventeen; when I turned eighteen I would receive my own cabin. Not a
family
cabin (the family cabins were always quite large), but a cabin nonetheless. Sloan Molyneux, my designated Big Brother, already had his own cabin. He’d had it for two years. It wasn’t one of the spares – it had actually belonged to a deceased crew member – but it was still wholly desirable, in my opinion. Of course, there wasn’t much you could do to stamp your personality on any part of Plexus. Not if you hadn’t boarded the ship with a few souvenirs from Earth. On Plexus, there were very strict rules about property, and very few personal possessions. Pointless energy consumption was also frowned on. That’s why Sloan hadn’t arranged any knick-knacks beside his bed, or installed a pretty picture on his Interface Array. But his cabin, despite its standard fixtures and fittings, still seemed to reflect his character – perhaps because his character was so calm and controlled.

As for me, I had plans for my cabin, when I finally got one. I was going to grow a plant. (That was allowed, provided you cleared it with Sustainable Services.) I was also going to hang up my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s wristwatch, which I would be receiving on my eighteenth birthday. And I was going to invite Caromy to inspect my new quarters. That was definite.

Perhaps, when she saw that I had finally grown up, she would look at me in a different way.

On the day of Haemon’s party, however, I was still living with my parents. Our cabin designation was C9A69 (cabin number nine, A deck, sixty-ninth street). Cross- passages joining the tubes were always called streets, when I was young. As for the tubes, they were our highways. They contained the tracks for our On-board Transport Vehicles (OTVs), which used to carry us from one point to another around the entire circumference of the ship’s drum. By slapping the little red panel at any junction – wherever a street met up with a tube – you could make the next OTV that came along stop for you.

There were never any accidents involving OTVs. I once saw Yestin fall off a platform into the path of an oncoming vehicle, and it stopped instantly. That was when he was still having dizzy spells; after that, my mother insisted that he stay well away from the platform edges, unless accompanied by someone of superior height and weight. But he was safe enough, really. We all were. The long-range sensors on the OTVs, and their extraordinary hair-trigger braking mechanisms, ensured that no one was ever hit.

I think there were twenty On-board Transport Vehicles altogether: five for each tube. The port-tube OTVs travelled clockwise; the starboard-tube OTVs went anti-clockwise. You could catch them in either direction on both A and B decks, continuously. And if you wanted to get from the port to the starboard tube in a hurry, every street had a street shuttle.

The street shuttles were like mini-OTVs. They weren’t enclosed, though. And they didn’t contain seats. They were just moving platforms with hand-grips. It’s amazing to think how easy we had it then. Imagine! A special vehicle, just to carry us from one end of a street to the other! Not that most of us used street shuttles. We were supposed to walk as much as we could – and sometimes we even ran. Sometimes the younger Shifters would
race
the street shuttles, which weren’t very fast. That was one of the attractions of racing, I guess; the fact that you would generally win, if you were competing against a street shuttle.

It was always hard to stop the little kids from running in non-designated areas.

Speaking of non-designated areas, my family’s cabin was in a residential pressure cell with a lot of other large cabins. Haemon’s family lived on our street. Yestin’s family lived just above us, on B deck. Our cell wasn’t far from pump station number two, with its air pump, its filtration pump, and its photosynthesis machines. Oh – and it didn’t take us long to get to the Health Centre, either. That was in an open deck cell, free of streets and bulkheads. On both decks of this pressure cell there were courts and gymnasiums, and enough open space to kick a ball around.

Not that you could just wander in to play ball whenever you felt like it. Access to the Health Centre was strictly rationed, so that everyone received enough ‘free-motion’ exercise time. Competitive sport took place on Sundays, and you could watch the games if you felt like it.

Everything had been carefully thought out for our comfort and convenience. I can hardly believe that now. I can hardly believe we were so important.

Why didn’t I savour it while I could?

Anyway, when I arrived back from Haemon’s party, my mother was already in our cabin. She was doing three things at once: loading the laundry dump, studying the Interface Array, and talking to someone at MedLab. In those days, Plexus had a very complex communication system. You could log on to the Visual Interlink Network (VIN) wherever there was an Interface Array, and the visuals would pop up like a window on a wall. (We used to call it Vindow, because of this portal effect.) There was also a voice patch sewn into the collar of every garment, which allowed you to talk to any person on board. The ID bands around our wrists did more than monitor our vital signs. Each one contained a genetic signature that served as a lock-in code. By tracking our genetic signatures, CAIP – our Core Artificial Intelligence Program – could route signals from one person to another.