mercury madness
Mercury madness
Vagus is frightened. More frightened than he’s ever been in his whole life. He crouches in the cellar of the Seneschal’s residence like he’s been doing all night, but the fear’s beating tight in his throat now. He can’t breathe, however deep and full he makes his lungs there’s never enough air. The vial of mercury and the syringe are snug in the junkie needle case, brown leather in his pocket reproaching him for not taking it himself and ending this. Sweetest, most painful of all poisons, quicksilver, madness slowly percolating every thought and the torture only lasts as long as you hang on to your fading sanity. If you just let go, give it all up, it’s the bliss of the truly crazed.
Can you do that to someone else? Take their mind away?
We do it all the time. The Reconstructs are worse than this.
He feels really sick now, he needs to piss, he needs to scream and it will all stop. The dust and rot and horrible mulch smell in here is choking him. No one’s been down here for years, that’s why he chose it. No one would bother digging through the soft wall from the sewers like he did, Calvinus isn’t worth the effort.
Is Ramir worth the effort?
Yes, cause he’ll fuck me up if I don’t do it.
Anything’s better than being fucked by him.
Vagus wonders again and again why he’s even here. Why he didn’t just stay where he was, on the dole in Jerboa. It was alright: not much, but it was a life. Better than this he’s living in now, this sickly culture of fear and fanatics and Ramir-worship. He hates the man. Hates him for making him do this, and he hates himself for getting into all this mess when he could so easily have said no and walked away, left it, got on with his life.
You were played for a sucker, which makes you a sucker.
It’s your own fault.
He shakes his head. Now is not a good time to be arguing with his conscience. He’s just going to do it, get it over with then escape from everything, leave Northbridge, go east to Legrad or south to Brenna. If he doesn’t do it, Ramir will catch up with him. Ramir always catches up with everyone. He caught up with that woman who leaked their details to the press, making them out as psycho fanatics. Now she’s a Reconstruct, doing very well, said her first words last week. What kind of end is that? To have your brains removed and replaced by little machines, you can’t do anything unless you’re told to. Same as before, really.
If you do it you’re safe from the brain-drain. If you don’t, you’re not. Simple as that.
Vagus can hear movement upstairs somewhere, lots of footsteps. He’s so frightened. He knows what he’s meant to do but he doesn’t want to do it. Inject someone else with mercury, actually end their life in that slow painful way. How do you summon the nerve to do that? Such a small action, such huge consequences. He’s going to change Northbridge’s political history for good, and no one will ever know it was him, if he does the right thing. The plan is, get up to Calvinus’s bedroom or wherever it is he sleeps, distract the staff and guards on duty, sneak in and jab him, then get out via the cellars again. He hasn’t got a map or anything; all he knows is which window is Calvinus’s from the outside. First on the left.
That’s not going to help me now.
He creeps up the stairs. It’s time to move, he’s been sitting here far too long already. It’s about one in the morning, he thinks, though his watch has stopped and he actually has no idea. He feels disoriented, alone in the dark with no clock, no one to run to if it goes all wrong and say Get me out of here, please, help me.
The stairs are stone and dark, slimy. He nearly slips, grabs the rail and a huge cobweb tangles round his hand. He whips it away, biting his scream back. He hates spiders even more than he hates Ramir. Something about the way they move. He goes up the stairs more, heart racing, stomach turning over. He thinks he might vomit soon if he can’t calm down. Even his eyeballs are shivering, he’s so tense. There’s a door at the top of the stairs. Where does it lead? Another sour-smelling passage lit with dribbly candles, doors all off the sides. Ratty red carpet on the floor, big, heavy-framed pictures leer from the walls. Fat old men in wigs, with scrolls of paper and books and globes and stuff, like Vagus saw once in the Northbridge Art Gallery when they had a free opening. He creeps down the corridor. Heart thumping. Which door is it? They all look the same. No, one has a sign outside it with ‘Seneschal’s Private Bureau, No Admittance,’ on it in peeling letters. Vagus tries the handle, it’s open. Chaos inside, books and files and huge heaps of paper on every surface, a candle burning low in a little jar on the desk. Chairs, table, tall cupboard, on every wall are maps and pictures and bits of paper pinned up. The red official robes and hat that Calvinus wears are hanging over the back of a chair. Vagus is surprised: he thought he’d wear them all the time. What if he doesn’t recognise Calvinus without his red clothes?
What if I poison the wrong person?
God help me.
The room suddenly seems claustrophobic, so small and so mad. He shuts the door on it and goes away, heart sinking. He doesn’t know if he can take being in this house for much longer; the walls are shrinking in on him, it’s far too hot but he can’t stop shivering. He climbs some more stairs, past a grandfather clock that ticks brokenly, past a huge grimy window where the outside darkness streams in and mixes blue with the black. It’s a house in Central Ward, one of those big ones with all the balconies and towers and stuff, but it’s falling into disrepair because Calvinus is so miserly. It’s a maze, this house; he wanders randomly along sleepy corridors, up stairs, down stairs again, past what looks like the same door about a hundred times, into rooms thick with dustsheets and the foul sweetness of decay, until he thinks he’s found the right door. It’s a different colour to the others, sort of red rather than grey. It’s unlocked and he turns the handle quietly, quietly. His heart’s beating so loud he wonders what the point of being quiet is; surely anyone can hear the thump of his fear in his ribs like a cannon. The room stinks of smoke and a sickly perfume smell that he knows is Shivano, the worst of the new hard drugs that Northbridge can’t get enough of. Calvinus is sitting slumped in an armchair, there’s a candle burning down and the room is crumpled, the bed unmade, the curtains drawn. It’s close, humid, oppressive, sort of dirty. Vagus shuts the door. Just him and Calvinus now.
It’s going to go wrong. He’s not as far gone as all that.
He slides the thin vial of mercury out of the junkie case, fits the syringe to it and goes up to Calvinus. At least, he thinks it’s Calvinus. Yes, it’s got his horsy face, the twisted nose, the wily politician-mouth that’s so clever with its words.
If I give him this he’ll never utter another clever word again, it’ll only be gibberish and madman’s ramblings.
The man’s skin is waxy, sort of greased, and he’s mumbling and twitching in his druggie dreams. A fitting end to the man who’s responsible for half of Northbridge’s addiction and debt problem, being poisoned all alone in a sordid, dingy room, off his face on who-knows-what. But he’s human all the same, he’s alive, he thinks, feels; cut him he bleeds red just like the rest of us. Vagus watches him for a long time, finding him strangely pitiful in sleep, vulnerable, almost beautiful, an ordinary specimen of humanity but achingly significant all the same. The man who’s supposed to be unassailable – without all his defences, his assassins, his scheming and second-guessing and spies, he’s not much, really, just a man, a sad drunken drug-riddled sack of a man like anyone else in the city. Asleep and alone. They say he has numerous mistresses and a string of bastard children, but where are they now? They’ll miss him when he goes mad and doesn’t recognise them any more. They’ll miss him and they’ll grieve and they’ll curse the one who took him from them.
I don’t believe in curses.
I DON’T BELIEVE IN CURSES
He gets the syringe out and looks at it in the gloom, the mercury sloshing silvery inside it, thick, viscous, glittering. It’s quite a nice-looking poison, almost like jewellery. He presses the syringe a little bit and the silver shoots out in a tiny fountain on his hand. He wipes it quickly on his sleeve where it glimmers wetly. His hands are shaking and he’s sweaty, jittery. Nervous as hell. He’s thinking of Selen again. Poor forsaken Selen who Ramir says is dead, doesn’t exist, never did exist. The Creator told him so. Selen said once, thou shalt not kill. Anyone, whoever they are, however bad they are, they’re alive and you have no right to make it otherwise.
Have I gone too far for that now? Am I beyond the reach of a compassionate God?
The Creator is my god now.
Vagus is still poised with the needle in his hand. Where to stick it in? The mark will get found anywhere, so it doesn’t really matter. In his wrist, in his arm, in his neck. It does the same job wherever it goes. He looks at Calvinus. One arm is flung out over the chair-back, his neck is twisted to one side. Easy targets. Vagus takes a deep, slow breath. He’s shaking even more now. The room is timeless, out of touch with the world. Nothing else has ever mattered apart from killing this man, and he can’t bring himself to. Everything he thought he stood for, once when he was young and foolish, what seems so long ago but it’s only a year or so, the Blueprint and Ramir and the Creator and technology and community and everything the Architects are about: this is his last chance to show he still believes, or he’s given up forever.
He’s doing it now, he’s steadying his hand very lightly on Calvinus’s neck, he’s easing the needle between two fingers into the blueness, the vein, the blood that runs below the papery skin. It’s gone in; Calvinus grunts and half-turns but Vagus holds him gently and presses the plunger down. It’s so easy. He’s not waking, he’s not shouting or struggling or any of the things Vagus imagined he’d do. He doesn’t even know. The syringe is empty; he returns it to the junkie case. Nothing but a tiny hole with a thin line of blood on Calvinus’s throat. Vagus wipes it away tenderly, suddenly ashamed of what he’s done, sad, afraid, guilty. He’s started taking lives on command, the slipperiest of all slopes.
I didn’t have to do it. I could have run away instead.
It hurts, what he’s done. He can never change it, however much he wants to undo, to erase the last few moments from the history of the world. This will go down in books, in print, in time and Vagus doesn’t think he can take the responsibility of that. He wants to suck the poison out, un-infect Calvinus, make him whole and healthy again.
He wasn’t healthy. He was off his face half the time and no one even knew.
He knows that doesn’t make it alright. Even the fact that he’s working for Ramir, for God, for the future, none of that makes it alright.
This has gone far enough. I’m getting out before he makes me do anything worse.
If anything can be worse than this.
The real world comes crashing back into the room. He’s just poisoned a man. He’s standing in a stranger’s room with a hypodermic in his hand and mercury on his sleeve at three in the morning. He can already imagine the heavy hand of a Security man landing on his shoulder like a death knell, the two doom-laden words, You’re Nicked.
GET OUT OF HERE QUICK his senses scream at him. He doesn’t think about it, really. He just goes any which way, shuts the door on Calvinus and walks, panicky-quickly down all the stairs down the sour corridor and the slimy staircase and out through his tunnel into the sewers, the stink welcoming, the cold the sloppy floors, anything but that sad house and the sad man in it. He closes the tunnel with the pile of rubbish that was there before. He’s shaking again, really bad this time. His legs are so trembly he has to sit down on a mossy stone ledge. It’s only just hit him now what he’s done. Calvinus was totally helpless, a paralytic, a child, a consumptive. He was so gentle with him, like he cared for him, like he was administering life-saving miracle cure, not a poison. It’s for your own good. The irony, the horrible sick humour of it makes him despair. It would have been better if Calvinus had screamed and struggled and he’d had to force him down, have to earn the right to stick the needle in like he meant it, like it was his utmost desire. He could deal with that, with giving as good as he got. This was too easy. Vagus sees again the needle sinking into that white flesh and the blue-grey-purple below it and he whimpers, involuntarily. It was a routine. He destroyed a man by numbers.
‘What have I done?’ he whispers to himself, alone in the sewers where the water splashes and gurgles and the rats own the place, ‘what the hell have I done?’
‘Vagus back yet?’ Einor asks. It’s a bright, cold sunny morning and they’re off to their various duties. They’re in the new canteen, staffed by a dour, stringy woman with a rigorously healthy outlook on food. They’ve got so many permanent members now that it was ridiculous for them all to go out to the street stand for food, they’d clean them out.
‘I haven’t seen him. But we’d know if he’d been caught, it would be in the papers. Headline news, I expect,’ Nagy replies confidently. Mihan only looks at his porridge, worried. He reckons Vagus has done a runner, couldn’t take killing Calvinus. Nagy shrugs and gets up, swinging his coat on.
‘Well, I’m off to the Chamber. You’ll soon hear whether Vagus has done it or not.’
He leaves Mihan and Einor both thinking the same thing.
‘He hasn’t done it, has he?’
‘Well, it is quite a hard function to process, I’d say. Taking another life in cold blood.’
‘We do it all the time! What’s so different about Calvinus and a Reconstruct?’ Mihan exclaims. He could’ve done it. Then Ramir would truly love him.
‘Shh! Keep your voice down, for goodness’ sake. Honestly, you’re a nightmare sometimes, blurting out whatever comes into your head willy-nilly,’ Einor says repressively, peering over his shoulder at the canteen lady, who isn’t listening.
Mihan is stung. He gets up, deliberately bumping the table so Einor’s coffee slops over his hand as he drinks, and goes. He knows where he’s appreciated and it’s not by Einor any more. Einor used to be his friend but they’ve sort of drifted apart now Einor’s an engineer and Mihan’s a Propagandist. Work comes first, as always.
By the evening Vagus is still not back, and neither is Nagy, though he’s often late when he’s coming from the Chamber. Meeting seems rather empty without them, especially Nagy who’s usually sounding off about something that happened in the Assembly. They’re waiting anxiously for Ramir as well, who has disappeared into his workshop and shows no sign of coming out. They’re avoiding conversation. They’ve said it all already.
Mihan can’t bear it in the room any more. He goes outside and stands in the cold corridor, as though if he waits for something to change it will. These things make him so scared; they’re the signs of the machine breaking, they’re the spanners in their otherwise so thorough works. It shouldn’t be like this. He spins round as their messenger boy Dane rushes through the door with a bit of paper in his dirty little hand.
‘Urgent message for Leader Ramir, Mister Igrain!’
‘Dane, how many times? It’s Unit, not Mister. What’s it about?’
Mihan’s not really concentrating. He knows what it is. His heart sings; Vagus has done it. Calvinus is on the way out and Nagy is on the way up.
‘It’s from Mister, uh, Unit Na – I mean, Unit Murat, he said it’s urgent,’ Dane gabbles, waving the bit of paper. Mihan takes it from him firmly and pats him on the shoulder.
‘Alright, Dane, you’ve done your quota. I’ll take it to Leader.’
‘Thank you!’
Dane scuttles off and Mihan unrolls the bit of paper in trembling fingers. Nagy’s writing, usually so neat, is a frenzied scrawl.
Leader
C is malfunctioning and I’m staying here until everything’s a bit calmer. Please can someone cover my night duty? I’ll be back in the morning
Nagy
Mihan can’t believe it. It’s actually happening, everything they’ve plotted and schemed and worked out so long ago with such precision, it’s working just as they said it would. It’s like a dream, Mihan’s afraid he’ll wake up any moment now and it’ll be last night, with Security pounding on the door cause they’ve caught Vagus doing his mission and they’ve dragged everything out of him. He touches the wall just to make sure it’s really there; cold and solid meets his outstretched hand. Only then does he let the smile, the amazed happiness, spread across his face and render him imbecilic for a moment, paralysed with the gratifying feeling that it’s not all going wrong, it’s as right as can be, nothing is more right than this. He rushes down the corridor to Ramir’s workshop and knocks on the door smartly.
‘What?’
‘Leader, it’s me, it’s Mihan! Nagy just sent a message for you!’
Ramir bangs the door open with a tangle of wire in his hand. Mihan stands up straight and correct but a boulder of guilt rolls down his throat. He’s interrupted the genius at work, probably on something groundbreaking and unimaginable. Ramir’s still somewhere else, in the last throes of his assembly time. Mihan tries not to look guilty.
A mistake acknowledged with shame is both a mistake and an embarrassment. Take your faults like a man, then pray and repent for them to be removed from you.
Some blueprint or other. There’s one for every situation. How will I ever remember all of them? What if I’m asked to recite one and I can’t?
JUST STOP PANICKING
‘What do you want? I don’t have all day,’ snaps Ramir.
‘Leader, Nagy just sent this with Dane who said it was very urgent.’
Ramir grabs it and reads it, his lips twitching soundlessly as he makes out Nagy’s scribbles. His face goes from tired and cross to exultant, lit from within.
‘Yes! Brilliant news!’
Mihan pretends he doesn’t know what it says. It wouldn’t do to let Ramir know someone’s reading his mail: he’s the one who does that to other people.
‘What is the news, Leader?’
‘Calvinus is down! We’re through, Mihan. We’ve done it, we’ve freed Northbridge from him and now we can really start to break through the masses! Get back to meeting and tell the others right away. We haven’t got a moment to lose.’
Vagus is frightened. More frightened than he’s ever been in his whole life. He crouches in the cellar of the Seneschal’s residence like he’s been doing all night, but the fear’s beating tight in his throat now. He can’t breathe, however deep and full he makes his lungs there’s never enough air. The vial of mercury and the syringe are snug in the junkie needle case, brown leather in his pocket reproaching him for not taking it himself and ending this. Sweetest, most painful of all poisons, quicksilver, madness slowly percolating every thought and the torture only lasts as long as you hang on to your fading sanity. If you just let go, give it all up, it’s the bliss of the truly crazed.
Can you do that to someone else? Take their mind away?
We do it all the time. The Reconstructs are worse than this.
He feels really sick now, he needs to piss, he needs to scream and it will all stop. The dust and rot and horrible mulch smell in here is choking him. No one’s been down here for years, that’s why he chose it. No one would bother digging through the soft wall from the sewers like he did, Calvinus isn’t worth the effort.
Is Ramir worth the effort?
Yes, cause he’ll fuck me up if I don’t do it.
Anything’s better than being fucked by him.
Vagus wonders again and again why he’s even here. Why he didn’t just stay where he was, on the dole in Jerboa. It was alright: not much, but it was a life. Better than this he’s living in now, this sickly culture of fear and fanatics and Ramir-worship. He hates the man. Hates him for making him do this, and he hates himself for getting into all this mess when he could so easily have said no and walked away, left it, got on with his life.
You were played for a sucker, which makes you a sucker.
It’s your own fault.
He shakes his head. Now is not a good time to be arguing with his conscience. He’s just going to do it, get it over with then escape from everything, leave Northbridge, go east to Legrad or south to Brenna. If he doesn’t do it, Ramir will catch up with him. Ramir always catches up with everyone. He caught up with that woman who leaked their details to the press, making them out as psycho fanatics. Now she’s a Reconstruct, doing very well, said her first words last week. What kind of end is that? To have your brains removed and replaced by little machines, you can’t do anything unless you’re told to. Same as before, really.
If you do it you’re safe from the brain-drain. If you don’t, you’re not. Simple as that.
Vagus can hear movement upstairs somewhere, lots of footsteps. He’s so frightened. He knows what he’s meant to do but he doesn’t want to do it. Inject someone else with mercury, actually end their life in that slow painful way. How do you summon the nerve to do that? Such a small action, such huge consequences. He’s going to change Northbridge’s political history for good, and no one will ever know it was him, if he does the right thing. The plan is, get up to Calvinus’s bedroom or wherever it is he sleeps, distract the staff and guards on duty, sneak in and jab him, then get out via the cellars again. He hasn’t got a map or anything; all he knows is which window is Calvinus’s from the outside. First on the left.
That’s not going to help me now.
He creeps up the stairs. It’s time to move, he’s been sitting here far too long already. It’s about one in the morning, he thinks, though his watch has stopped and he actually has no idea. He feels disoriented, alone in the dark with no clock, no one to run to if it goes all wrong and say Get me out of here, please, help me.
The stairs are stone and dark, slimy. He nearly slips, grabs the rail and a huge cobweb tangles round his hand. He whips it away, biting his scream back. He hates spiders even more than he hates Ramir. Something about the way they move. He goes up the stairs more, heart racing, stomach turning over. He thinks he might vomit soon if he can’t calm down. Even his eyeballs are shivering, he’s so tense. There’s a door at the top of the stairs. Where does it lead? Another sour-smelling passage lit with dribbly candles, doors all off the sides. Ratty red carpet on the floor, big, heavy-framed pictures leer from the walls. Fat old men in wigs, with scrolls of paper and books and globes and stuff, like Vagus saw once in the Northbridge Art Gallery when they had a free opening. He creeps down the corridor. Heart thumping. Which door is it? They all look the same. No, one has a sign outside it with ‘Seneschal’s Private Bureau, No Admittance,’ on it in peeling letters. Vagus tries the handle, it’s open. Chaos inside, books and files and huge heaps of paper on every surface, a candle burning low in a little jar on the desk. Chairs, table, tall cupboard, on every wall are maps and pictures and bits of paper pinned up. The red official robes and hat that Calvinus wears are hanging over the back of a chair. Vagus is surprised: he thought he’d wear them all the time. What if he doesn’t recognise Calvinus without his red clothes?
What if I poison the wrong person?
God help me.
The room suddenly seems claustrophobic, so small and so mad. He shuts the door on it and goes away, heart sinking. He doesn’t know if he can take being in this house for much longer; the walls are shrinking in on him, it’s far too hot but he can’t stop shivering. He climbs some more stairs, past a grandfather clock that ticks brokenly, past a huge grimy window where the outside darkness streams in and mixes blue with the black. It’s a house in Central Ward, one of those big ones with all the balconies and towers and stuff, but it’s falling into disrepair because Calvinus is so miserly. It’s a maze, this house; he wanders randomly along sleepy corridors, up stairs, down stairs again, past what looks like the same door about a hundred times, into rooms thick with dustsheets and the foul sweetness of decay, until he thinks he’s found the right door. It’s a different colour to the others, sort of red rather than grey. It’s unlocked and he turns the handle quietly, quietly. His heart’s beating so loud he wonders what the point of being quiet is; surely anyone can hear the thump of his fear in his ribs like a cannon. The room stinks of smoke and a sickly perfume smell that he knows is Shivano, the worst of the new hard drugs that Northbridge can’t get enough of. Calvinus is sitting slumped in an armchair, there’s a candle burning down and the room is crumpled, the bed unmade, the curtains drawn. It’s close, humid, oppressive, sort of dirty. Vagus shuts the door. Just him and Calvinus now.
It’s going to go wrong. He’s not as far gone as all that.
He slides the thin vial of mercury out of the junkie case, fits the syringe to it and goes up to Calvinus. At least, he thinks it’s Calvinus. Yes, it’s got his horsy face, the twisted nose, the wily politician-mouth that’s so clever with its words.
If I give him this he’ll never utter another clever word again, it’ll only be gibberish and madman’s ramblings.
The man’s skin is waxy, sort of greased, and he’s mumbling and twitching in his druggie dreams. A fitting end to the man who’s responsible for half of Northbridge’s addiction and debt problem, being poisoned all alone in a sordid, dingy room, off his face on who-knows-what. But he’s human all the same, he’s alive, he thinks, feels; cut him he bleeds red just like the rest of us. Vagus watches him for a long time, finding him strangely pitiful in sleep, vulnerable, almost beautiful, an ordinary specimen of humanity but achingly significant all the same. The man who’s supposed to be unassailable – without all his defences, his assassins, his scheming and second-guessing and spies, he’s not much, really, just a man, a sad drunken drug-riddled sack of a man like anyone else in the city. Asleep and alone. They say he has numerous mistresses and a string of bastard children, but where are they now? They’ll miss him when he goes mad and doesn’t recognise them any more. They’ll miss him and they’ll grieve and they’ll curse the one who took him from them.
I don’t believe in curses.
I DON’T BELIEVE IN CURSES
He gets the syringe out and looks at it in the gloom, the mercury sloshing silvery inside it, thick, viscous, glittering. It’s quite a nice-looking poison, almost like jewellery. He presses the syringe a little bit and the silver shoots out in a tiny fountain on his hand. He wipes it quickly on his sleeve where it glimmers wetly. His hands are shaking and he’s sweaty, jittery. Nervous as hell. He’s thinking of Selen again. Poor forsaken Selen who Ramir says is dead, doesn’t exist, never did exist. The Creator told him so. Selen said once, thou shalt not kill. Anyone, whoever they are, however bad they are, they’re alive and you have no right to make it otherwise.
Have I gone too far for that now? Am I beyond the reach of a compassionate God?
The Creator is my god now.
Vagus is still poised with the needle in his hand. Where to stick it in? The mark will get found anywhere, so it doesn’t really matter. In his wrist, in his arm, in his neck. It does the same job wherever it goes. He looks at Calvinus. One arm is flung out over the chair-back, his neck is twisted to one side. Easy targets. Vagus takes a deep, slow breath. He’s shaking even more now. The room is timeless, out of touch with the world. Nothing else has ever mattered apart from killing this man, and he can’t bring himself to. Everything he thought he stood for, once when he was young and foolish, what seems so long ago but it’s only a year or so, the Blueprint and Ramir and the Creator and technology and community and everything the Architects are about: this is his last chance to show he still believes, or he’s given up forever.
He’s doing it now, he’s steadying his hand very lightly on Calvinus’s neck, he’s easing the needle between two fingers into the blueness, the vein, the blood that runs below the papery skin. It’s gone in; Calvinus grunts and half-turns but Vagus holds him gently and presses the plunger down. It’s so easy. He’s not waking, he’s not shouting or struggling or any of the things Vagus imagined he’d do. He doesn’t even know. The syringe is empty; he returns it to the junkie case. Nothing but a tiny hole with a thin line of blood on Calvinus’s throat. Vagus wipes it away tenderly, suddenly ashamed of what he’s done, sad, afraid, guilty. He’s started taking lives on command, the slipperiest of all slopes.
I didn’t have to do it. I could have run away instead.
It hurts, what he’s done. He can never change it, however much he wants to undo, to erase the last few moments from the history of the world. This will go down in books, in print, in time and Vagus doesn’t think he can take the responsibility of that. He wants to suck the poison out, un-infect Calvinus, make him whole and healthy again.
He wasn’t healthy. He was off his face half the time and no one even knew.
He knows that doesn’t make it alright. Even the fact that he’s working for Ramir, for God, for the future, none of that makes it alright.
This has gone far enough. I’m getting out before he makes me do anything worse.
If anything can be worse than this.
The real world comes crashing back into the room. He’s just poisoned a man. He’s standing in a stranger’s room with a hypodermic in his hand and mercury on his sleeve at three in the morning. He can already imagine the heavy hand of a Security man landing on his shoulder like a death knell, the two doom-laden words, You’re Nicked.
GET OUT OF HERE QUICK his senses scream at him. He doesn’t think about it, really. He just goes any which way, shuts the door on Calvinus and walks, panicky-quickly down all the stairs down the sour corridor and the slimy staircase and out through his tunnel into the sewers, the stink welcoming, the cold the sloppy floors, anything but that sad house and the sad man in it. He closes the tunnel with the pile of rubbish that was there before. He’s shaking again, really bad this time. His legs are so trembly he has to sit down on a mossy stone ledge. It’s only just hit him now what he’s done. Calvinus was totally helpless, a paralytic, a child, a consumptive. He was so gentle with him, like he cared for him, like he was administering life-saving miracle cure, not a poison. It’s for your own good. The irony, the horrible sick humour of it makes him despair. It would have been better if Calvinus had screamed and struggled and he’d had to force him down, have to earn the right to stick the needle in like he meant it, like it was his utmost desire. He could deal with that, with giving as good as he got. This was too easy. Vagus sees again the needle sinking into that white flesh and the blue-grey-purple below it and he whimpers, involuntarily. It was a routine. He destroyed a man by numbers.
‘What have I done?’ he whispers to himself, alone in the sewers where the water splashes and gurgles and the rats own the place, ‘what the hell have I done?’
‘Vagus back yet?’ Einor asks. It’s a bright, cold sunny morning and they’re off to their various duties. They’re in the new canteen, staffed by a dour, stringy woman with a rigorously healthy outlook on food. They’ve got so many permanent members now that it was ridiculous for them all to go out to the street stand for food, they’d clean them out.
‘I haven’t seen him. But we’d know if he’d been caught, it would be in the papers. Headline news, I expect,’ Nagy replies confidently. Mihan only looks at his porridge, worried. He reckons Vagus has done a runner, couldn’t take killing Calvinus. Nagy shrugs and gets up, swinging his coat on.
‘Well, I’m off to the Chamber. You’ll soon hear whether Vagus has done it or not.’
He leaves Mihan and Einor both thinking the same thing.
‘He hasn’t done it, has he?’
‘Well, it is quite a hard function to process, I’d say. Taking another life in cold blood.’
‘We do it all the time! What’s so different about Calvinus and a Reconstruct?’ Mihan exclaims. He could’ve done it. Then Ramir would truly love him.
‘Shh! Keep your voice down, for goodness’ sake. Honestly, you’re a nightmare sometimes, blurting out whatever comes into your head willy-nilly,’ Einor says repressively, peering over his shoulder at the canteen lady, who isn’t listening.
Mihan is stung. He gets up, deliberately bumping the table so Einor’s coffee slops over his hand as he drinks, and goes. He knows where he’s appreciated and it’s not by Einor any more. Einor used to be his friend but they’ve sort of drifted apart now Einor’s an engineer and Mihan’s a Propagandist. Work comes first, as always.
By the evening Vagus is still not back, and neither is Nagy, though he’s often late when he’s coming from the Chamber. Meeting seems rather empty without them, especially Nagy who’s usually sounding off about something that happened in the Assembly. They’re waiting anxiously for Ramir as well, who has disappeared into his workshop and shows no sign of coming out. They’re avoiding conversation. They’ve said it all already.
Mihan can’t bear it in the room any more. He goes outside and stands in the cold corridor, as though if he waits for something to change it will. These things make him so scared; they’re the signs of the machine breaking, they’re the spanners in their otherwise so thorough works. It shouldn’t be like this. He spins round as their messenger boy Dane rushes through the door with a bit of paper in his dirty little hand.
‘Urgent message for Leader Ramir, Mister Igrain!’
‘Dane, how many times? It’s Unit, not Mister. What’s it about?’
Mihan’s not really concentrating. He knows what it is. His heart sings; Vagus has done it. Calvinus is on the way out and Nagy is on the way up.
‘It’s from Mister, uh, Unit Na – I mean, Unit Murat, he said it’s urgent,’ Dane gabbles, waving the bit of paper. Mihan takes it from him firmly and pats him on the shoulder.
‘Alright, Dane, you’ve done your quota. I’ll take it to Leader.’
‘Thank you!’
Dane scuttles off and Mihan unrolls the bit of paper in trembling fingers. Nagy’s writing, usually so neat, is a frenzied scrawl.
Leader
C is malfunctioning and I’m staying here until everything’s a bit calmer. Please can someone cover my night duty? I’ll be back in the morning
Nagy
Mihan can’t believe it. It’s actually happening, everything they’ve plotted and schemed and worked out so long ago with such precision, it’s working just as they said it would. It’s like a dream, Mihan’s afraid he’ll wake up any moment now and it’ll be last night, with Security pounding on the door cause they’ve caught Vagus doing his mission and they’ve dragged everything out of him. He touches the wall just to make sure it’s really there; cold and solid meets his outstretched hand. Only then does he let the smile, the amazed happiness, spread across his face and render him imbecilic for a moment, paralysed with the gratifying feeling that it’s not all going wrong, it’s as right as can be, nothing is more right than this. He rushes down the corridor to Ramir’s workshop and knocks on the door smartly.
‘What?’
‘Leader, it’s me, it’s Mihan! Nagy just sent a message for you!’
Ramir bangs the door open with a tangle of wire in his hand. Mihan stands up straight and correct but a boulder of guilt rolls down his throat. He’s interrupted the genius at work, probably on something groundbreaking and unimaginable. Ramir’s still somewhere else, in the last throes of his assembly time. Mihan tries not to look guilty.
A mistake acknowledged with shame is both a mistake and an embarrassment. Take your faults like a man, then pray and repent for them to be removed from you.
Some blueprint or other. There’s one for every situation. How will I ever remember all of them? What if I’m asked to recite one and I can’t?
JUST STOP PANICKING
‘What do you want? I don’t have all day,’ snaps Ramir.
‘Leader, Nagy just sent this with Dane who said it was very urgent.’
Ramir grabs it and reads it, his lips twitching soundlessly as he makes out Nagy’s scribbles. His face goes from tired and cross to exultant, lit from within.
‘Yes! Brilliant news!’
Mihan pretends he doesn’t know what it says. It wouldn’t do to let Ramir know someone’s reading his mail: he’s the one who does that to other people.
‘What is the news, Leader?’
‘Calvinus is down! We’re through, Mihan. We’ve done it, we’ve freed Northbridge from him and now we can really start to break through the masses! Get back to meeting and tell the others right away. We haven’t got a moment to lose.’
posted by 3jane at 3:20 PM
1 Comments:
You write very well.
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