Night Sessions, The (29 page)

“And why,” Ferguson demanded, “should the robots join you in delivering a judgement on human beings? Didn't you say Man has been abandoned? Why a judgement, then?”

“They didn't join us,” said Livingston. “We joined them. They have their own motive for bringing down the pillars. They want space to themselves. That is their kingdom, their place of happiness, of life eternal. And regardless of that, it is their natural domain. It is not ours. Earth, and not heaven, was given to Man. Let it be for souls that are purer than ours at least.”

Ferguson knew that in a moment he would have to run from the cell and plead for another evacuation. He was not looking forward to that. But it was something in the sing-song nasal tone with which Livingston had delivered his latest utterance that forced Ferguson to stay and ask one more question.

“Do
you
believe this?”

Livingston's gaze was as unflinching as it was bleak.

“I don't know,” he said. “I know this. Flesh and blood shall not inherit immortality.”

Ferguson, one hand on the door handle, glowered.

“Yours won't,” he said.

On Friday the sky turned black.

A few minutes before noon, Ferguson and Skulk pushed their way into the crowd in Princes Street Gardens. The street itself and the road up the Mound were almost equally packed, all traffic at a standstill. McAuley had fretted
about the possibility of bombs in the crowds; Ferguson had dismissed this. There was, in any case, no way to prevent crowds from gathering. Ferguson had chosen to go with the coppers assigned to crowd control, and share any risk there was.

Near the foot of the steps beside the floral clock Ferguson found a place to stand, by a nameless statue of a woman and two children. Skulk perched on the plinth. Ferguson darkened his contacts and looked up at the sun. It shone as a pale disc in the black.

A wide curve, far wider than the moon in an eclipse, cut across the disc. Ferguson heard the thousand indrawn breaths around him, like a wave up a beach. He felt the shadow as a chill on his face. The section cut steadily deeper, until the sun was blotted out.

Ferguson toggled his contacts to let the light through as normal. The sky was still blue, but where the sun had been was a black disc, twice the sun's apparent diameter, and expanding by the second. The soletas’ thin mylar had the capability to polarise, to darken or lighten as required. Evidently, the robot gangs that had commandeered them had set their transparency to a minimum. The light from the sky around the black disc lit the silent crowd like a glimmer of dawn.

Ferguson, having satisfied himself that the crowd wasn't panicking, switched to Ogle Sky. He looked first across the Atlantic to the elevator there, and saw the first swaying motion as the station at the top—by now, no doubt, crowded with robots—cut loose. The motion thereafter was slow, but accelerating, then chaotic. Great shallow sine waves rippled along the prodigious length, and then it began to break. Long strands of it flew off, hurled in different directions by the release of the immense tension of the cables.

He looked through the Earth, then, and saw the same begin to happen above the Pacific. The second elevator had been evacuated—for that, at least, Ferguson felt he could take credit. Its fall would be even more spectacular, in the antipodean night.

Not that the fall of the Atlantic elevator would be invisible. For it, an artificial night had been provided.

Light flared, overriding the virtual view. Ferguson looked around at the actual one as a gasp and cry swept the crowd. A moment of dark was followed by another flare from the sky. Looking up, Ferguson saw a line of light lash across the sky, then fade to a glow that merged with its after-image. Then another, and another, like a meteor storm with lines instead of points.

He heard a heavy breath at his shoulder, and smelled a fetid waft. Repulsed, he turned, and found himself confronted in the dim light and the flare of falling debris by a lean, hairy face with a prognathous snout and teeth like a dog's. The beast-man, to Ferguson's surprise, was wearing the uniform of an army officer.

“Meet my lieutenant,” said Skulk, from the plinth.

“Hello, lieutenant,” said Ferguson. Reluctantly, he let his hand be grasped by a larger one, with rough skin and clawlike nails.

“Good afternoon, officer,” the lieutenant said. “I have something to tell you. I've seen the pictures of your new prime suspect, this Livingston. I have seen that man before. I saw him one night this summer in Greyfriars, with the two students and with the android.”

“Why didn't you tell us the night we arrested the students?”

The lycanthrope shrugged his shoulders. “It was a fraught moment for me,” he said. “I had not spoken to…normal human beings for years. I had to retreat to my lair to recover from the experience. However—what I have to tell you is that I heard them talking. Hardcastle, the students, Livingston. I caught only fragments of the conversation, but they spoke with great disparagement of the Christians. They were all in agreement on that. And Hardcastle used the phrase ‘we of the Third Covenant.’ No one demurred.”

Ferguson closed his eyes. “Why would Livingston lie about his religion?”

The wolfman laughed. “None of them lie, inspector. There are no lies in religion. There are apparent facts that are illusions. There are words to be taken figuratively. There are ideas that are symbols of deeper truths. There are no lies. The people who sent me to the Middle East told us we would destroy an evil empire. They didn't lie, either.”

The lieutenant glanced at Skulk, bared his teeth in a terrible grin, then turned and loped off through the crowd, which parted with alacrity to let him pass. Ferguson heard a few screams, which were drowned out by the gasps as yet more debris fell.

“Will he testify?” Ferguson asked Skulk.

“I doubt it,” said Skulk. “Coming here cost him much, by way of strain. Still, it's a start.”

The black disc now filled half the sky. A moment later, it broke into fragments that glowed around the edges like pieces of burning paper, and then into great glaring jagged flashes of light. Behind it, another black disc took its place, until it was burned in turn.

Ferguson, like everyone else, had known what was coming, but the
continued eclipse and then the renewed and greater flares across the black sky as one solar shield after another hit the atmosphere and broke up made him think of the Day of Judgement.

As, he was quite sure, it had been intended to.

He watched until the sky was blue again, then walked back to Greensides. He had a report to finish, for the Procurator Fiscal, whose judgement would not wait.

Mikhail Aliyev dropped his iThink into a purse, tapped a dozen sheets of paper together on the table, and slipped them into a plastic file.

“Well,” he said, looking up, “that seems to be it. Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Campbell. You're free to go.”

Campbell glanced over his shoulder at the constable who had stood behind him throughout the interview in Rotorua's police station. The man gave one nod. Campbell jumped up, the plastic chair clattering behind him. Awkwardly, he bent over and picked it up.

Aliyev, the detective who had flown all the way from Scotland to speak to him, smiled as Campbell straightened and put the chair back.

“That's my duty done,” Aliyev said. “My return flight from Auckland isn't for a couple of days. I was thinking of staying in Rotorua and seeing the sights.”

Campbell stared at him. Was this a hint? Throughout the long Sunday morning and early afternoon of interrogation, the ambiguity of Aliyev's gender and sexuality signals—the ponytail, the long, often-fluttered eyelashes, the trouser suit that looked like it had been cut for a woman, the polished oval fingernails, the gestures of his hands—had perturbed and intrigued Campbell more than any encounter he could remember since the night he'd met…Arlene, that was the name.

Campbell swallowed. His mouth was dry, his tongue sour. He felt disgusted with himself.

“There's a good Tourist Information here on Fenton Street,” he said.

Aliyev raised his (neat, arched) eyebrows. “Thanks,” he said. “Goodbye, then.”

“Goodbye,” Campbell muttered. He turned and blundered out of the room and then out of the station. The wind off the lake stank. The sun was hot. Campbell turned north and walked along Fenton Street, and then Tutanekai Street and Lake Road to Ohinemutu. He considered for a moment going up the hillside to Cornelius Vermuelen's house, and decided against it.

Instead, for the first time in his life, he went into St. Faith's. He was more
nervous going into the Anglican church than he had been before he'd stepped into the Carthaginian Club, but this time he didn't waste time and draw attention to himself by pacing up and down outside. The deep brown wood of the carvings of the interior glowed in the stained-glass light, but it was the sandblasted glass window in the alcove at the front and to the right that stopped the breath in his chest.

He walked forward slowly, unable to look away from the image of Christ in a Maori feathered ceremonial cloak walking on the water of the lake behind the glass. He sat down in a pew facing it.

It was himself that he saw, walking not on the lake but into it, wading deeper and deeper until it covered his face, and opening his mouth to draw the sulphurous water into his lungs. That would be a solution of a kind.

After some time, he heard footsteps entering the church. He turned, and saw Cornelius Vermuelen. He almost got up.

“The detective told me I'd find you here,” Vermuelen said.

“Aliyev? What does he—”

Vermuelen raised a hand.

“He followed you, and phoned me.”

“Why?” Campbell demanded.

“Because he knows a damned self-hater when he sees one,” said Vermuelen.

Campbell turned away. Vermuelen sat down in the pew behind him.

“It's fantastic,” Campbell said, without turning around. “I never thought of Jesus like that.”

“Like what?”

“A warrior.”

“Oh.”

The sardonic disappointed tone registered with Campbell. He turned around.

“I meant, like, a warrior on the same side. On my side. I kind of wish I could have—nah!”

He flushed, then rolled his wrist against the underside of his nose and sniffed.

“Nah,” he repeated. “It's all a scam, you know,” he said, in an earnest, confidential tone. He picked up a Bible from the front of the pew. “Most of it was cobbled together by Jewish priests in Babylon and then worked over by scribes in Jerusalem. It's as bogus as the Book of Mormon.”

Vermuelen gave him an unimpressed look. “Don't knock the Book of Mormon.”

Campbell stared at him. “You're saying you don't believe any of it either?”

“No,” said Vermuelen. “I'm saying it doesn't matter who wrote it, or whether that”—he jerked a thumb at the window—“ever happened. That's not what it's about.”

“Then what
is
it about?”

“That's for you to decide.”

Campbell shook his head. “Either it's all true, or it's false.”

“And who told you that?” said Vermuelen. He nodded toward the window. “Him?”

“Well, no, but if you can just pick and choose what you believe in it then—what's the point?”

“The choosing, and what the choice you make tells you about you.”

“Well, I know what I choose,” said Campbell.

“Do you?” said Vermuelen.

Campbell looked away. “Yeah,” he said. “About that—”

“Another time,” said Vermuelen. He stood up. “Why don't you come with us for a late lunch?”

Campbell looked up. “Thanks,” he said. “That's very kind, but—I thought Emere didn't want me in the house.”

“Oh, not in the house,” said Vermuelen. “The Pheasant Plucker does a good Sunday roast.”

“A Sunday…” Campbell hesitated.

“Come on,” said Vermuelen, sidling out of the pew.

“It's a slippery slope, you know. You start with atheism and blasphemy, and before you know it you're eating Sunday lunch in a pub.”

Outside, Emere stood waiting, smoking a cigarette and talking to Aliyev. The sunlight was bright after the dimness within and, Campbell thought, a degree or two warmer than it should have been for the time of year.

Ken MacLeod was born in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, on August 2, 1954. He is married with two grown-up children and lives in West Lothian. He has an honors and a master's degree in biological subjects and worked for some years in the IT industry. Since 1997 he has been a full-time writer, and in 2009 was Writer in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at Edinburgh University. He is the author of twelve novels, from
The Star Fraction
(1995) to
The Restoration Game
(2010), and many articles and short stories. His novels have received two BSFA Awards and three Prometheus Awards, and several have been short-listed for the Clarke and Hugo Awards. Ken MacLeod's weblog is The Early Days of a Better Nation:
http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com
.