Chapter 6
It was raining when I met Theodosius Rhode, the man who would be king. The rain did not clear the smoke and dust of destruction, merely thickened it into running rivulets of filth across the blasted city.
I was sitting on the same landing strip where for so many years I had directed incoming and outgoing traffic, with five hundred other souls who had rebelled, or not rebelled, or just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We were underdressed for the cold, arms wrapped around knees, chins tucked into chests, shoulders pressed to our neighbour in the hope that like some winter mammal we might feed on each other’s heat.
There was a kind of kindness, transgressive, intimate, in our huddling.
We had not been told exactly where we were going, were not permitted to speak. Our collars, the markers of our crime and shame, pressed into our throats, pushing down, a bloody weight digging into bone.
Yet through the cold, the shock, the shame, I knew enough of the rhythms of this place to know that someone special was arriving.
Vehicles cleared, blast walls raised, overhead traffic scurried out to a safe distance.
Thus I was only somewhat surprised when the Shiniest yacht I had ever seen came into port.
Many outside the Mdo struggle to understand what makes an object of lesser or greater Shine.
They think it is merely about displays of wealth, lavish and ostentatious flares of precious metals, and debtors kneeling at a Manager’s feet.
This was far Shinier than that. The surface of the ship seemed to shimmer and change as it moved, sometimes the colour of the reflected sky, sometimes the deepest black where it passed through pools of shadow.
It had neither the cheap electric whine of a standard passenger craft nor the guttural roar of your usual spacefaring vessel, but rather seemed to purr on a lilting, musical note as if the engines were on the verge of ecstasy at being deployed.
There were, I felt sure, windows – real, actual windows – all along its surface, but they were so well integrated into its form that I could not tell, and when it landed, the light that emerged from its belly was not the harsh white of the loading ramp, but a soft, almost intimate glow, which seemed to promise far more fascinating secrets in its hidden depths.
The ship was not gaudy, but rather a declaration of skill, of engineering and artistic mastery that was beyond the glittering dreams of the middling Shine who thought that all diamonds were the same and therefore the best diamonds were lots of them.
I knew it was a ship for Executives even before the first Corpsec team began to descend, and then I was certain.
The way the bodyguards moved, the slight pop-jump of their motion as their displacement fields carried them – now a single pace, now five at a go, so that they seemed to lurch like images across a broken screen before settling, not quite of this earth, not quite on it.
The damage a displacement field causes to a body that wears one for too long is always fatal, but the Shine promised great rewards for your descendants, and what other paths were there? What else was a parent to do?
When members of the Antekeda Board began to descend from the warm interior of the ship, I thought I recognised some of them from the more sycophantic talk shows – Senior Management, members perhaps of the Executorium itself.
Even in the debtor’s collar, even waiting to be banished to another world and work until we died, the collective mass of condemned turned to look, to wonder, to be awed.
Then hé emerged, and though hé was then merely Junior Management, hé was hypnotic.
Physically, hé was taller than any man I had ever seen, generations of genetic selection and extensive, costly postnatal enhancements woven through his strong bones, flawless, untouched-snowdrift skin.
Though fashions of physicality have always fluctuated a little across the Shine, the male archetype of taller, stronger, tougher – this has been in style since the first crop grew in the dust of Ko-mdo.
I do not entirely trust my own memory, but in pictures of that day hé was wearing a grey suit with a high collar and the small silver badge of hís Venture directly above the heart.
The long curved scar of Management ran across hís face from left to right, chin to forehead, cutting through hís nose and denting it where it had ruptured bone.
Hís left eye, as the scar passed through it, had its famous golden iris, and hís head was shaved at the top to reveal the little ridges of other career scars – scars of entrepreneurship, of leadership, of creative endeavour, of maximum profit, of advanced learning.
More scars would be added down the years as hís prestige grew, burned into hís body with honour in pain.
From the back of hís head, a long tail of metallic-silver hair ran down hís spine, bound up with simple leather ties, and as hé stood on the landing pad, talking with other Executives, hís hands were clasped neatly behind hís back, slightly arcing hís spine and tilting hís chin upwards, so that hé seemed to gaze down from even loftier heights upon those hé spoke with.
Then, without warning, hé looked at us.
Seemed to note our presence.
Said a few words, then turned.
Came towards us.
We had already been beaten into silence, but at hís approach, a few of the bolder called out, raised their bound hands in entreaty. Someone cried: “I am innocent!”
Another: “I know things! I have things I can tell!”
The Shine does not invite its people to go quietly into darkness, for all that is where the vast majority of us go.
A few entreaties set off a great many more, since we were taught never to be outdone even in humiliation, and soon the whole pack of us were yapping and wheedling at hís feet, promising extraordinary lies, ridiculous impossibilities if hé would merely deign to gaze upon us with kindness – just kindness – just this once.
There is nothing Shinier than having power to change another’s world and choosing not to use it.
Hé assessed us as hé might have regarded the contours on a map of some distant land.
I would like to say that I sat in bold defiance, an innocent man cruelly betrayed by the system.
In truth, I tried to think of something I might do that would catch hís eye, something that would make me special, make me the one hé chose to save, but my mind was blank, everything I could say strikingly banal.
Perhaps it was this – my uncanny silence, my sealed lips – that caught hís attention.
For a moment, as hé gestured hís guards to pull me up, haul me forward, I felt an impossible flutter of hope.
Perhaps there was mercy, perhaps I had a chance, and I knew with absolute certainty that if they took this collar off from around my neck and told me to go free, I would not look back or think twice on my peers, kneeling in the rain.
When hé spoke, hé had the accent of Yu-mdo, or another world I had never visited, never even really thought about. I had always imagined that our leaders would sound exactly like me.
“What’s your name?” hé asked, voice soft enough to seem unthreatening, clear enough to cut through the cries of my tethered debtor-kin.
“Mawukana na-Vdnaze, sir.”
“I have a question. I want you to think carefully about your answer. What is the one thing the Venture could have done in Heom that would have prevented this? This violence, this disobedience. Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear; I have people for that.
Just tell me the first thing that comes into your head. Just the truth.”
The iris of hís golden eye dilated as hé examined me, and I imagined it seeing straight through skin and bone to my racing heart.
I thought longer than hé had ordered, as is always my way, and when I realised hé was growing bored with my stupidity and indecision, I blurted: “If there had been hope, sir. If people had thought it would get better. If they had really believed.”
Later – after I was dead – I would look back on these words and judge them harshly. Not because they were wrong – not at all. They simply lacked Shine.
Hé understood.
Hé nodded.
Hís fingers brushed the silver badge of hís Venture, the marker of hís state, and I didn’t know if it was a comforting thing – a reassurance for himself, a habit that had been ingrained – or something else. I found the gesture fascinating, and then it passed.
“Thank you, Mawukana na-Vdnaze, for your candour.”
A flick of hís fingers; I was pulled back towards the line, back to the debtors, back to a life of indentured labour I knew not where, my life a column in an accounting book.
I struggled, called out: “Sir, I was not a rebel!” and hís fingers twitched again, and hé looked at me.
There was, I thought, almost kindness in hís mismatched eyes, a thing almost like regret.
Then hé reached out, touched my face, my neck, feeling perhaps for the scars of my labours – found the twin cuts on my left ear – then ran hís fingers down to the back of my left hand, where a single electrical burn was etched into the skin.
It was the scar I had been given on the day of my one and only minor promotion, and I had never earned any more.
“Tell me,” hé asked, studying the thin, neat line of ridged white. “Did you love someone?”
“?… What?”
“In the city. When it burned. Was there anyone there you loved? Someone you left behind?”
Only later did I understand hís question.
For if I had loved someone who had been buried in the ruins of Glastya Row, surely that love would make me a creature of vengeance, a rebel regardless of what I had been before.
And if not, then most likely I was also unloved, and my life would pass without significance.
Theodosius Rhode, Chief Operations Officer of Antekeda, the man who would one day lead the Executorium into its bloodiest, most savage of days, saw my bewilderment, smiled with only a little regret, let go of my hand, turned and walked away.
Later – much later – I learned that my mother had died in the bombings. My father vanished in a security sweep, his final fate unknown. But by then I had died a couple of times, and the news didn’t have as big an impact on me as I felt it should.