Attenuation
Nick Harkaway
Short story
S onny Hall the space traveller, in the darkness of the recovery room, blinks and comes to himself. He can still see the tumbler falling from his hand, the cocktail party lit in a warm yellow haze and the girl from Heidelberg grinning at him like a cat. He can feel the slick surface of the glass slipping between thumb and finger, can pinpoint the moment when the remaining friction is too slight to prevent it surrendering to gravity. The paper umbrella drops end over end, ice cubes skitter across the polished concrete of the apartment’s floor.
He opens his mouth to say “What?”
“Hush,” the technician says, high and strained, “it’s okay. You’re fine.”
Until this moment it has not occurred to Sonny that he might not be fine, but the transparency of the lie causes him to re-examine. He feels ghastly: as if he has grit in the joints and skin and yet is somehow made of jelly. He imagines that his whole body has been transformed, is now made of whatever goes into eyeballs, and all that eyeball stuff is dry and hung over.
“You’re not fine,” another voice says firmly. “Tell me exactly what happened in London.”
He suspects there may have been Swedish whisky and – he licks dry teeth – potatoes roasted in goose fat. He can taste colours.
“Synaesthesia is a temporary companion effect,” the second voice says. “Ignore it. Did you do this to yourself? Are you making money on it? We get that. People are stupid enough to do that. Are you that stupid? Because it will kill you.”
He must have spoken aloud. That’s excellent. But this is clearly not Nieuwsterdam, not even close. On the wall, block letters read simply “Halfway”. So this is the Halfway station. They must have pulled his signal when they saw something was wrong. Is something wrong?
“He’s dissociated,” the technician says primly. The sheriff – the uniform has a star on it, and Sonny can actually hear the theme from The High Chaparral glinting off it – doesn’t care about that either.
He sings along a bit, then stops.
“Did I do wha’ to m’self?” a new voice says. It’s a good voice. It’s catching somewhat, as if the speaker has a mouthful of peanut butter, but in the flow it’s deep and buttery. A voice for the seduction of valkyries. It resonates in Sonny’s chest, plucks at his gut. Oh. That’s me .
“Your old corpse,” the sheriff says. “It wasn’t burned. It’s active. You’re in two places at once. You have attenuation sickness.”
The umbrella flies upwards, dragging the glass and the ice cubes with it. The smiling girl slips her arms around his chest and buries her face in the crook of his neck. He returns the favour, and all the lights come on at once.
Transit is last decade’s new new thing. What once was wondrous is now banal, and instead of taking time to be amazed at what it implies people complain at the paperwork, at the limited options, at the frequent flier rewards being insufficient. Transit has come of age, become ubiquitous, and now no one cares. But even a few years ago, it was miraculous. A simple enough idea, fiendishly hard to implement – until it was done. Information can be transmitted instantly across distances to boggle the human mind. The human mind itself is a clever thing made of information, a self-animating bundle of entangled strands which in the proper medium will unfold and catch the mundane physical ground and function, but which can with certain reservations be plucked out of that soil, folded up and sent. In this manner, with some preparation, a person might travel across galactic space. And indeed one can.
The logistical preparation is not trivial. It includes the creation of a conduit (vastly complicated) and the presence of a suitable host platform at the far end (relatively simple). Probes filled with durable storage technologies and microconstruction engines must be fired out to faraway planets, accelerated and decelerated more violently than any human frame could withstand. Many of them are lost, of course, but some arrive, and far away and alone create landing pads and accommodation for incoming minds. The first through are pioneers and scientists, but the second wave are homesteaders and tourists.
The greatest difficulty is in completing the transfer. The silly-string nests of information which are people are recalcitrant about leaving one home for another. They are reluctant travellers at best. Thus, two possibilities: for short trips, the original body can be made dormant, chilled and stored. Longer stays away necessitate the absolute destruction of the beautiful corpse. Age-based mortality is no longer inevitable, and population less of a concern with worlds spreading out before each wave of probes.
As transit becomes commonplace, so too it becomes a little less sterile and reputable. There are transit crooks, transit loopholes, a transit demi-monde . But the wise traveller knows one thing above all: the service provider must be of absolute probity. Absolute. Because even the slightest residue of a corpse left behind will after more than a week or so induce a jetlag of the soul, a distant echo dragging the mind back and forth between worlds, both corpses eventually dying for lack of constant anima.
The phenomenon is called attenuation sickness. It occupies a place in the culture somewhere between the tuberculosis of poets and cancer from smoking; romantic yet fractionally self-inflicted, tragic yet educational. There’s a moral sense that you had to have done it to yourself, although occasionally it can happen by chance.
Sonny Hall can’t remember doing it to himself. But then he can’t remember much of the last few days. Sitting in the grey holding room – not a cell, not a hospital suite, just how people live in the Halfway station, in rooms made of varnished composite bricks and extruded steel fittings – he stares up at the stand holding his saline and tries to put it together. He closes his eyes meditatively and waits for flashes of his recent past, but it doesn’t happen. He opens them again.
“You can use the long link relay,” the sheriff says. “Call people. That might spark something.” Sonny’s convenient amnesia annoys him. It annoys Sonny too – and he doesn’t find it even slightly convenient – but he wants memory to come spontaneously. It is a challenge, a reassertion of control. His attenuation will begin to betray him in hours, will kill him in days, and he needs to demonstrate that he still belongs to himself, that his new body – broad where the old one was narrow and brooding and physical where once he was effete – really is his and not some stranger’s. He remade himself for this journey, despite all that talk of embodied cognition – or because of it.
The sheriff wrinkles his nose. It’s a big nose, with long, lean nostrils. Too long, in Sonny Hall’s perception. Creepy long. Weird fingernails, too, which wrap around the finger so that as the Sheriff taps his hands on the steel desk there’s a sharp click like a dog walking. Chack chack chack chack . The sheriff is Caucasian, Sonny figures, in the sense of coming from the Caucasus mountains. He catches himself: no. The body comes from a Caucusus stemline, imported here on a probe, built from scratch. If the sheriff has a belly button, it is a skeuomorph, the conceptual legacy of an old technology.
Sonny resists the urge to examine his own stomach. Instead he looks around properly at where he is. Everything in Halfway is made from local materials, everything has a different feel from how it is at home. 3D printed replicas of Earth objects. Frank Lloyd Wright designs rendered in stone-dust and resin, injection-moulded steel. Plastics are easy. There’s no wildlife here, not really, so no furs or leathers. No cottons, either. Jars line the walls with green stuff in them: the transit station’s version of potted plants. There aren’t even insects – nothing for them to eat. No roaches. For the first time in his life, Sonny Hall is billions of light years from a cockroach.
He steeples his fingers and hopes the Sheriff will do the same. Kinesics. Sonny knows a few things about human behaviour, that is his métier. Human stress analysis and behavioural dynamics, individual and group, class II. Never bothered to finish class I. Class II is good enough for most practical purposes, and class I involves a lot of dry academic background. Boring as hell.
Class II is good enough here, too. The sheriff stops tapping and leans forward to match Sonny’s posture, to make him feel at ease. Impending death’s good for something: gravitas comes with it, free of charge.
*
When the sheriff has gone – he clearly wants to sit in, but there’s no way that’s happening – Sonny phones home. He starts with friends, or rather, with friendly acquaintances. He’s going to circle inwards, hoping that the outer limits will trigger his memory without anyone revealing things of which he ought to have first person recollections. Also, this way he doesn’t have to discuss his attenuation with anyone who will tell him he’s being brave or he’s going to be fine.
From talking to the sheriff, he already knows that his old corpse is AWOL. The brief flutter of hope that his sickness was caused by a few stray entangled bits of brain and bone was thus disposed of; this situation results from deliberate action on someone’s part. The Sheriff seems to think Sonny is personally involved, which he devoutly hopes is true. If he is, then presumably he had a plan for not dying from it, for receiving lots of money. Maybe even his amnesia is part of the plan, although if it isn’t he has to consider the possibility that the amnesia is the problem which will cause him to die rather than survive, cause him to miss some window of action to which he is committed in order to redeem the situation. This is partly why he is so keen to regain his memory indirectly – he doesn’t want to have to admit to any putative partner in crime that he has no idea what he’s doing. That sort of thing makes people nervous. Nor does he want the sheriff listening in on these discussions, though he suspects that is inevitable. That appalling nose is everywhere.
He calls the girl who brought the girl from Heidelberg – Renate! The smiling German’s name was Renate. Excellent. Early success, though he’s not sure if that’s recovery from amnesia or just something he never forgot.
“Hey, Justine. It’s me, Sonny. This is my new look.”
“Oh, wow, hey, Sonny! You look totally different.”
“New body. You think it suits me?”
“Wow. I don’t know. Yes, I think so. You look like a gangster.”
In fact, he picked this corpse to resemble an Anglo-Kenyan actor who once played Hamlet at the Olivier, but to someone like Justine anybody not entirely white was automatically a little dangerous and edgy. He wonders when he stopped noticing that a lot of his friends – a lot of people he knew, anyway – were basically objectionable. Probably about the time he broke up with Liz (or rather, about the time she caught him with… he couldn’t remember who it actually was) and she went to off on a trip around the world in a fury. Auburn Liz, hiding from the sun and doing election monitoring in Haiti or Salvador or… he doesn’t remember. Probably never knew. Angry Liz, fire in everything she did, whose chiefest attraction, he suspects was her ability to make him care about something, even if only by shouting. And who, he had realised as her letters had drifted in and he had forced himself to read about her work with the indigenous population and how they were basically treated like shit by big oil and big pharma and big agri, was a better person than he was by a mile. Which was fine, just fine, his post-breakup self had snarled into the shaving mirror. Screw better people, anyway. But he had ended up here, so maybe she’d had a point. His life had been empty and selfish, after all.
Justine clears her throat, bored. He’s been staring into space. Oops. “I was wondering if you knew how to get hold of Renate?” he asks.
“Hannoverian Renate?”
“Heidelbergian. Heidelbergerish. Whatever.”
“German. Yes, sure.” She rattles off a number. “Are you coming back soon? Are you going to look like that?”
“I hope so, yes.” In any case, you had to wait a minimum of three months between transits or risk psychological damage. Nothing like attenuation, but it was something insurers didn’t like.
He calls Renate, but she barely remembers the night at all. She’s going back to Berlin (not Heidelberg, not Hannover, right) because London is too crazy. Where is he, anyway? It’s a terrible line.
He disengages, talks to some more friends. What did I do? How did I live? How did I look to you? Were there any new faces in my life? Faces I wasn’t sleeping with?
Yes. Yes, there had been. Two men variously described as “heavy”, “scary”, “bumptious” and “rude”. Then he lucked out: Misha the Polish Artist (as opposed to Misha the Model who was also Polish and spoke Cantonese or Misha the Barman who was basically a drug dealer) had seen the men for long enough that she’d actually sketched them. For the price of a guaranteed invitation to Sonny’s homecoming party and her choice of introductions she is prepared to send him an image. A few moments later it snicks into the output drawer: low quality plastic-thread paper, like the leg of a tracksuit. Two grim faces stare up at him.
Anamnesis, he discovers, is not what it ought to be. Memory doesn’t shock or drown him; he isn’t disorientated. It’s just a case of everything working the way it’s supposed to, followed by an almost obliterating moment of realisation as he sees that it’s working and reacts. He jerks out of his chair, bangs his knee and shouts, then leans on the desk, terrified the knowledge will slip away. It doesn’t. The recollection is not fleeting or fragile. It isn’t surprising of itself. It’s just there, where he left it, like a misplaced glove lying on the carpet.
This, on the left, is Smayle. And that is Denton. Smayle has a particular odour, like old running shoes dipped in turpentine. Denton snuffles a lot, drugs or hayfever. They are indeed rude, and also violent and annoying. They are the unsubtle hand of someone or other. Someone with an irritatingly trite animal used as a title, predictably masculine, stupidly shamanistic. The wolf. The dog. The fox. A name to go with a silver belt buckle in an ethnic style. Celtic? Swirls and patterns? No. Foreign. Russian. Turkic. African. Chinese. Inuit. Sikh. No, no, no. Dogon, for crying out loud? Easter bloody Island? He’s running out of ethnicities he can think of, but that’s okay because it’s his own sneering he’s trying to track down here. Norse? Indian? Pakistani? Or Burmese? (Like the dogs, which turn out rather embarrassingly to be Bernese rather than Burmese, something Liz found endlessly amusing.) No, no, no.
For God’s sake, how many varieties of annoying folk art are there in the world? And how many of those are imported and touted as stylish like those sodding Native American flutes in that band at the Soho Grande? How many…
Oh.
Native American. Yes.
A coyote. Smayle and Denton work for a coyote. A mover of persons across impenetrable borders. The coyote. The one who came to the party and wanted…
Wanted Sonny Hall to loan him a corpse.
To which Sonny, hopped up on a half-dozen things and filled with a dead man’s bolshie bravado, said – unusually, given that it was money and risk and the chance to break the law in a way no one he knew had before – “no”.
Sonny finds he can’t directly remember being at the conversation, can’t recall looking at the coyote’s face or ever seeing the ridiculous belt buckle with a badly rendered doggy thing on it. But. But but but. If he concentrates on the shoulder of the man’s coat – expensive coat, really bloody expensive, handmade in the good way – he can remember what went down, as if he’d read a report of it and memorised the text. A memory of a memory. Anamnesis judo.
“I have a guy,” the coyote said. “I have a guy at the Halfway station. He’ll pick you up, make you comfortable. You don’t got to do anything. Just don’t die, okay? No stupid shit at the far end. You just stay in bed, feel like crap, take plenty of drugs and sleep through it. We bring the other guy into your corpse, then get him new papers, ship him out – that’s important. You get me? You’re okay before our job comes to an end. Only after you’re okay, then the client comes in again in his new body. It’s like money-laundering. Victimless crime. And we can’t leave you dangling because then we don’t get paid, our client is unhappy, we lose reputation. Trouble free. Client gets a new face, new name, new body, new entry to desirable first-world nations. Can go and do whatever shit he does. Transit is like being born again.”
“And what do I get?”
“Boatload of money. Free upgrade on your choice of corpse. Discount if you should ever need to be someone else. It’s a loyalty package, like AmEx. We don’t got frequent flier miles, we don’t like to see too much of that because it means the client is very hot, very careless. And we don’t work with same corpse donor more than one time for security. It’s all good. What do you say?”
And when Sonny Hall still said “no”, the coyote embraced him, called him a smart kid, and left.
I have a guy .
Meaning, a guy here. Miscommunication? Was Sonny yoinked out of the data stream here when he should have gone on to Nieuwsterdam? Is that—? No. Then he’d just be here, royally pissed off but unharmed. No. He has attenuation sickness. There’s more to this.
But now he realises he can’t assume everyone wants him to find out what it is.
“How’re you feeling?” the sheriff asks him. There’s a deputy sitting in to take notes. Like the sheriff, his corpse is Caucasian. He wonders if all the permanent staff are; if only the commercial corpses have any genetic variety.
“Woozy,” Sonny Hall replies, “and I sleep a lot.”
“Good. That’s the drugs. You need to stay calm. Call me if you start to flipflop.”
“Flipflop?”
“Did you read the stuff they gave you?”
“Not all of it.”
“Your mind may start to zap back home. They call it rubberbanding or flipflopping. A few seconds is okay. Longer than that and you can drop off the plateau – don’t ask me, I don’t know what plateau – and stay there. In the middle somewhere.”
“And die?”
“Coma. Physical breakdown takes a bit longer. So stay in bed, okay?”
“I don’t want to. If I’m going to die. I want to get out and about.” I want to fix this .
“Don’t. The more you do, the more likely you are to wear yourself down and die faster.”
With that in mind, Sonny passes over the sketch of the coyote’s men.
“These two are part of it.” At a raised eyebrow, he carries on. “They were with a guy who wanted to use my corpse for a few days. I said no.” Two eyebrows now, from query to mild scepticism. “Don’t. Don’t ask me if I’m sure about that. Turning him down is the first intelligent thing I’ve done in three years and I just now remembered it. I don’t mean to say it was virtue, either, because honestly that’s not who I am. Or who I was. I just… I was changing myself, on purpose. This trip was about a fresh start. I figured I’d do the opposite of what I wanted to do, which was take the deal for the hell of it. I said no and he seemed to feel I was…” Sonny hesitates. “It was like that pleased him. He didn’t want me to say yes, but he had to ask. I said no, so he walked away.”
“He didn’t say anything else? No threats?”
“No.”
“You restored his faith.” Sheriff humour, Sonny guesses. “And he didn’t say anything else at all. No detail about this end?”
I have a guy .
But Sonny doesn’t know who that guy might be. It might be the sheriff, for example. Even if it isn’t, he doesn’t want to have the sheriff untangle the whole ring and then remember belatedly that he, Sonny, is up to his neck in it, changed his mind after that one glorious moment of being New Sonny, fell back into Old Sonny. That would be poetic, but it would also suck.
“Just what I said. And those guys.”
“So you think he was happy you said no and then he just went right ahead and, what, stole your corpse?”
Sonny shrugs. Just minding my own business, officer .
A few moments later a bell chimes to tell everyone that it’s the end of Tuesday.
He sleeps and dreams he’s flying through space, appallingly slowly, catching up with his body, except that he has two and is slowly stretching like bubblegum. When he snaps, he dies. This is apparently all he can dream about, because it happens over and over again. A little after midnight he gets up and takes himself to the Halfway transit station bar.
Sonny takes a seat at the counter before asking himself whether he actually wants a drink. He doesn’t, specifically; he just doesn’t want to dream again.
“Getcha something?”
He stares at the bottles behind the bar. No chance of a chablis, for sure.
“What’s good?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
Sonny considers, then orders a plain vodka. The traditional recipe – carbohydrate mush with a few unknowable things floating in the vat – isn’t far off what’s upstairs in the fabrication levels. He wonders whether he could actually come to think of this place as home if some emergency stranded him here properly. Eat at the canteen, read books and eventually find a fellow refugee for some physical friendship, keep algae for pets. He glances at the vodka.
The glass slips from between thumb and finger. The German girl smiles and—
Attenuation.
He’s in his own body, his old, persistent corpse, familiar aches and narrow shoulders. He screams as he finds he’s restrained in a slick plastic sack, wrapped from ankle to shoulder. Giant spider! Mummification! Dark rites! There’s a blindfold over his eyes – no, something worse: slick and organic and luke-warm, little circles the size of the orbit resting on each eyelid. Suckled on, it seems. He wriggles, feels the restraints give a little, gritty slime sluicing around his arms. Body farm! They’re coming for my kidneys! But what sort of organ thief would impede access to the body with this sheath? So then: cannibals! He screams, or barks, and there’s a sound of running feet. Light returns, a solicitous face.
“Mr Hall?” The blindfolds are removed. A nurse or an orderly. Long fingers removing… cucumber? “Are you all right, Mr Hall?” A cave-like room with towels and a sink. Candles. And this is… a massage table?
“This is a spa!” Sonny Hall cries in outrage.
“Yes, Mr Hall,” the orderly says – no, he’s a bloody massage therapist, Sonny can smell the jasmine, Liz used to rub it on her neck when she was stressed, part of the healing knowledge of ancient somewhere-or-other. The orderly’s face distorts like a soap bubble, but no, that’s the universe going past. Black space and white suns. The ice falls up to meet the umbrella—
And he’s back.
“You should have told me you were attenuated,” the barman mutters irritably, “I’d have given you a plastic cup.”
Sonny Hall in the sheriff’s office, slamming his big hand against the desk.
“In a spa! Whoever has my corpse is in a spa! Okay? They’re not doing anything. They’re taking a holiday! With my life! He even called me ‘Hall’. The bastard’s using my ID. My credit cards, for Christ’s sake!”
The sheriff sighed. “He’s not. We tried that. Your cards have gone dormant. So he’s using his own money and your name. Still, it’s something.”
“I’ll say it’s something. You can find him. You can trace my cards and find him!” Sonny is what they call ‘excited’, meaning furious. The sheriff looks a little bit impressed, which seems good until Sonny realises he is bleeding from the nose, and – yuck – from the corner of his left eye.
“Don’t do that,” the sheriff says.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t get excited. It increases the frequency of the attacks.”
“Well, then I’ll learn something, won’t I? Maybe I can even place a phone call, get him arrested. Or killed. That would be great. I could jump off a building.”
“If you die while you’re in residence, you die. The new corpse won’t save you. It’s not like you snap back here. You just die. Okay? We’ve got this, Mr Hall.”
“Are you serious? It’s fine for you to be cool, isn’t it? You’re not the one—”
Sonny Hall gets excited. The sheriff turns out to be right.
It’s London, he knows that. He can see buildings he knows. He’s in a chair. Nice chair, but durable and washable. Hotel chair. Hotel! He lunges for the bedside table looking for a notepad. Yes, by the phone. The Calista! 55 Burton Street, in the West End. He’s excited, will that keep him here or send him home? His corpse – his old body – hurts. Of course it does, it’s been inhabited by someone who isn’t used to his musculature, his skeleton. Everything has been strained and overworked by inappropriate nerve impulses. Make yourself at home, you bastard .
The Calista. Yes. The Calista. He reaches for the phone, foggy. Something has been written on the pad, a doodle almost, words in a spiral made by pressure through the page above. Ghost words. The room turns as he tries to read. Has he been drugged? The – call him a squatter – the squatter must know Sonny came back for a few moments earlier. Has he deliberately incapacitated himself? But he can’t spend the whole time like this and still do what he came to do. Can he? Sonny has visions of deliberate inoculation with a terrible disease, a terrorist attack using his own body as the delivery mechanism.
Mind you, if it’s something like that, maybe the disease will kill his corpse and he’ll be okay. Unless he’s in res at the moment of death, of course. Has the squatter checked out? If not, is he here now? Unconscious, or trapped in a body abruptly responding to its natural owner?
His fingers have dialled the police number. He gives the name of the hotel, and the address, tells them what’s going on. Victory! He relaxes – and doesn’t go back. How many minutes? Is he stuck? Is he about to die just before he can be rescued?
Because that would be—
Sonny Hall, at the Halfway station, washing the blood from his cheeks and coughing, already knows it hasn’t worked. The sheriff tells him why.
“There’s no Calista Hotel in Burton Street.”
The easiest way to stop Sonny from taking any more direct action, like running out into the street: persuade him he has already succeeded. Oh, yes, help is on the way, sit back and wait… A fake notepad. Drugs or alcohol to make him sluggish. He wipes his mouth and doesn’t bother to wince when his hand comes away red. It seems baroque. “Motives,” he says.
“I’ll take care of that.”
“I’m a stress analyst,” Sonny Hall says. “Motives are stresses. There are two lines of possibility. First, I’m irrelevant. This is for profit, of whatever sort. The second is that it’s about me. I saw something, offended someone, did a deal.”
“I said I’ll take care of it.”
And that seems to be all he’ll say.
Sonny Hall asks the concierge where he can get a jug of algae for ornamentation. The woman smiles, delighted.
“We have a bioluminescent one, if you’d like a nightlight.”
Sonny is about to say no, but actually that might be rather nice.
“What colour?”
“We have rose, azure, sunset yellow.”
Sonny takes one of each, pledges to be a good keeper of the radiant slime.
Calista.
He lies on his back and lets his mind wander.
Calista has something to tell him.
Why Calista? Is that important? He doesn’t know the name, or rather, of course, he’s heard it, but it has no particular significance. He has a vague notion it may be the name of a moon. Or a line of pajamas. Was it also the name of a woman, maybe, aged 55? Well, it certainly is a woman’s name, that much is clear. Not a man’s name. He tries to be pleased with this certainty.
He remembers the notepad, the prim wording in printed dark yellow which wanted to be gold. The notepad by the bed. Fake notepad. By the phone. Cool paper in his corpse’s hands, the scribbles from something written, pressed down carelessly onto whatever was underneath.
Spirals on a notepad. Words he couldn’t read, was too foggy to read. But now he can. In his memory, they’re eerily sharp.
“Restored his faith.” Where has he heard that? Has he said it? No. No! It was his conversation with the sheriff. So the coyote’s agent here must be him or the deputy. Or there’s a bug. But somehow, words here have gone there.
I can’t trust the law, Sonny realises. Now, when I finally want to, I can’t.
He’s going to have to do something rash.
Looking for a crook, Sonny wanders up to the process levels, where the crappy jobs are. The transit station has permanent population of a few thousand, plus several more thousands cycling through every month. Small world, but not too small. He tells a twitchy kid he needs to score, then tells the kid’s mouth-breathing dealer he needs someone to talk to about something serious on Main Street and will pay for an introduction.
“Why would I tell you?” the dealer sneers.
“For the money,” Sonny Hall explains patiently.
“Which I could take.”
Sonny allows his shoulders to flex and sees the guy reassess. Then he says: “Take your profit and keep it simple.” Class II stress analysis, on a personal level. Everyone loves simple.
The contact gives him a name in janitorial. “Tell him Ryan sent you.”
Sonny Hall has no intention of saying anything of the kind. He will let his knowledge be mysterious, which is vastly more impressive than a weasel like Ryan.
“I need a ticket home,” Sonny says.
“So buy one.” The man from janitorial shrugs. The room is even smaller than Sonny’s, a cot and a table.
“I need to do it quietly.” Sonny Hall says.
“Oh.” A flicker of interest.
“I need to get back for a few days.”
The guy frowns at the word ‘back’. “Double transit can kill you, friend.”
“I know.”
The maintenance man shrugs. Sonny feels his heart beat, knows that soon he will either flipflop again or start to bleed. Or something else. The next stage can be brain damage.
“There are management issues right now,” maintenance man says. “The market is unsettled.”
“What kind of unsettled?”
“The major provider of this kind of service is in the process of being taken over. It’s a little unclear who’s in charge.”
Boardroom coup in the coyote business. Sonny feels a weird familiarity.
“This would be a simple job. I need to leave as soon as possible, but the exact timing is flexible. I also don’t care about what sort of corpse I get. Just so I can go.”
At last, the man nods.
“All right. On that basis, I can make this happen. I will have to use temporary contractors rather than my usual contacts. There may be an additional charge to cover their fees.”
“Up to forty per cent of the agreed amount.”
The maintenance man scratches on a piece of paper for a moment. Then he nods. “Acceptable.”
The non-legitimate service seems to dovetail perfectly with the main one; it feels well-practised and even banal. Everyone’s relaxed. He wonders if they know he’s that guy, if any of the freelancers are from the coyote’s team. Management issues . But why should they know? This is a transit station, a place for comings and goings. An anonymous place. And they are paid not to know who clients are, to pay no attention.
“In a moment,” the technician says – it’s a woman, Persian stemline, with wide, elegant lips and light scarring on one cheek – “you’ll experience a slight coldness. Count to ten for me, please.”
He feels it already, his mind washing out of his head into the tangle machine. It’s uglier than last time, jagged where the first transit was smooth, but it’s working. He counts: “one” and then he’s gone, riding the technician’s encouraging smile into the oblivion of transit.
Sonny Hall peers through the oil from a black lava lamp, viscous clouds washing at the edges of his vision. His taxi driver says “All right back there?” without looking.
“Fine,” Sonny says. “Little bit woozy, is all. Long trip.”
He’s wearing a slightly damaged corpse: a pale, thin-limbed body with a fused knee. He walks like the villain in an old movie. The rest of the corpse is fine, even distinguished. Young, muscular. It would have been discarded, he guesses, by whoever bought it. The makers would have supplied a new one free of charge.
He gives his own address and slumps back into the seat, tasting the air. London air, full of exhaust and biomass. The grittiness in his joints is there, and he can smell blood in his nose already. He’s doubled back on himself, attenuated twice over. The Halfway corpse is in storage.
“I have to be in three places now?” he’d asked. “You can’t just destroy this corpse, transfer my tangle directly to the new one?”
“Not so much,” the maintenance man had said. “It can cause complications.”
“Like what? Will I go mad and die? Because—”
“Like matter to energy conversion.”
Sonny Hall had to admit he would prefer to avoid that.
As the taxi slows at a junction he feels abruptly nauseous, as if his stomach is trying to climb through his mouth. He manages not to be sick until the Pentonville Flyover, and gets his head well out of the window. The driver carols a horrified protest as his fare brings red-rimmed eyes back inside. A running commentary on the costs of cleaning the cab lets Sonny know he is no longer welcome, but he sits it out and overtips the man, who mutters “animals” and steams off into the flow.
On the pavement outside his home, Sonny realises he is seeing double: he can see what is really in front of him, but overlaid across it is a cheerful London scene, birds and trees. Hyde Park, for God’s sake. The squatter is feeding the ducks. A way of staying calm, perhaps, and thus avoiding the symptoms Sonny himself has brought on. Of course, the squatter presumably knows what’s happening.
Sonny shivers; he’s bone-cold, which he hopes desperately is fatigue and not phantom chill from the frozen corpse at Halfway.
He keys his entry code and lets himself into the flat, realises no one has tidied up since he left.
Sonny’s working theory of the situation has been that it is financial, some sort of deal akin to the one he was offered, possibly gone awry. He has enough of his memory back now to be confident that it wasn’t a deal with him. As he makes coffee, he considers the possibility that it is some sort of not-quite-snuff sex fantasy, a cheap – well, a very expensive – thrill for a jaded palette: borrow a body, live the self-destruction-by-debauchery dream, then bail at the last minute. A nice scenario for him, of course, because it implies his own probable survival.
But he has to admit that if he were conducting this particular perversion – and he has some experience in the area of baroque self-abuse – it would be unlikely to feature ducks.
When his thoughts take him back to the coyote, he realises he knows how to reach the man. That part of his mind is back where it always was, properly connected. He wonders if there will come a moment when the attenuation starts to affect his brain in a countervailing fashion, erasing what the anamnesis is recalling. It’s a very Sonny Hall thought, but in this corpse it feels morbid and adolescent. Apparently his new brain doesn’t really like morbid. It is not contemplative, and it chafes at inactivity.
He changes his shirt and trousers for a combination which looks surprisingly mean: an orange string vest top he bought because he had seen it in a music video, and a pair of combat trousers. He adds a shirt in case he has to go somewhere smart, but wears it with three buttons open, and finally throws a black coat over the whole muddle. The limp and the cheap medical-issue cane give him some slightly creepy weirdness, and the overall effect is like the villain from a bit of Austrian retro-noir.
Sonny von Hall.
The coyote keeps an office over a strip club. You approach the doorman, and when he tells you the prices you tell him you know Miss Melinda. He pats you down and sends you to the next floor. After that it’s just a staircase with a camera watching you all the way up. Sonny’s new corpse has well-developed muscles on both sides, so the business of lifting the bad leg is not seriously problematic. He trots upwards, cane tapping as he powers off the flexible knee. Hut-hah-tat. Hut-hah-tat . Liz, he remembers irrelevantly, was fond of traditional dancing. It had the same rhythm. He should have been nicer to her. But then, he should basically have been nicer. Note to self.
At the top of the stairs there’s a thug, not one of the ones he knows. The thug is just a little brusque and aggressive. Sonny just sneers that he has business here, uses his eyeline to convey boredom and certainty, his body to project power. More kinesics. The thug, without knowing why, falls into line.
Inside sit three men, rather than the one Sonny was expecting. The coyote looks pinched. He’s not having a good day. That could be a good thing, or a bad thing. Sonny smiles toothily.
“Hello, old friend. I was wondering if we might have a word in private.”
The coyote gives him a look which says loudly that he has no idea who Sonny might be, but given that his options right now are apparently to put his faith in the Mysterious Stranger or stay in the room with the new faces, he’ll take anything he can get. Before he can speak, one of the visitors – a thin-lipped entity in very legitimate blue flannel – butts in, for all the world as if this was a wedding party and not the denouement of some sort of coup.
“Your timing is a little complex, sir. Mr Ossman has taken us on as partners in his enterprise, we’re just working out the details. But you can speak as freely with us as you would with him.”
Ossman? The coyote’s name is Ossman? It sounds Turkish. He’s a Turkish Native American. Sonny shrugs that idea away. Okay, whatever.
“Is that fellow outside yours or his?” Sonny says to Ossman. “He’s got inappropriate hands. Or he puts his hands in inappropriate places. No one minds a patdown, but there are limits to propriety.” He has no idea where this is coming from. Pure bullshit. Attenuation combined with old boardroom chutzpah.
Ossman shrugs. “He’s a new guy. These gentlemen have a more civilised manner. I imagine they will wish to bring in their own security.” His eyes dart to Mr Blue Flannel and his sidekick. Flannel nods icily. Yes, this is a coup all right. Or a blunt-force merger, maybe. Management issues . Quite.
“Well, no disrespect to your new employees,” Sonny says with a nod to Flannel, who scowls but doesn’t seem inclined to correct this misapprehension, “but this is a personal matter.” He smiles blandly. “I’m here to restore your faith.” Will Ossman make the catch? Flannel jerks as if stung and gets to his feet, which prompts his companion to reach meaningfully into his coat.
Sonny is watching Ossman for signs of a reaction to the ‘faith’ thing, but if there is one it gets drowned in what happens next. Sonny Hall, with instincts from the corporate boardroom, figures his own obnoxious presence will cause a few things to shake loose here, but he has not factored in the differences in management style between this group and the ones he generally deals with.
Ossman sees the rapid movement of the other men and comes to some sort of dramatic conclusion. From his waistband he draws a prodigious gun, a chromed American thing, and in rising, knocks over his chair. Flannel and friend – mistakenly, in Sonny’s opinion – presume he means to renege on whatever deal they have done, and also draw. When the thug bursts in from outside the sight of three guns in the room clearly leads him to certain conclusions, and it all kicks off.
Guns are incredibly loud, but even at close range it seems that using one requires a degree of formal training and no one here has had any. They aren’t missing each other, but they are hitting limbs and ears and non-fatal bits of torso and therefore the exchange of fire is just going on and on and on. Any second now someone’s reinforcements will arrive, or the police, or a horde of concerned strippers. Anything seems possible. And then it stops. Either all the ammo has been expended or everyone is dead, or some sort of tacit ceasefire is in effect.
Sonny has not been shot. He wonders if he should feel offended, and decides he has enough trouble in his life without looking for more. He lifts his head to look around.
The thug is perforated. He has actual holes in him which go all the way through. He is not breathing, and only an idiot would imagine he will ever be getting up again.
Flannel and his sidekick are in better shape, which is to say they’re down but not dead, although in Flannel’s case that looks to be a negotiable situation and the sidekick is trying manfully to get a tourniquet around something which shouldn’t be leaking, but his own injuries include a big hole in the shoulder, so he can’t really get a lot of purchase.
“I can help with that,” Sonny offers. The sidekick stares, then nods, and Sonny grabs the belt and hauls back with everything he has. The blood slows.
A hiss reminds Sonny that he came here for Ossman, and assures him that the coyote is still alive. His gun has got lost, which is all to the good, and he’s looking at Sonny as if he cannot honestly believe no one thought to blow him away during all the excitement. Sonny shrugs a sort of apology. “I wanted to ask you something. I didn’t mean… this.”
Ossman scowls. He has three nasty looking wounds, one on each arm and one across the upper thigh. The leg appears to be frozen up. The coyote was near-missed three times, but his problem is a lack of mobility: if he can’t get out of here, Flannel’s friends and colleagues will probably show up and finish him off. Or the police, Sonny supposes, though there’s a notable lack of sirens. Looking again, Sonny sees that Ossman must have used the bodyguard as a shield. Those holes are not from Flannel’s gun – they’re from Ossman’s. He fired through his own guy.
Wow.
“Get me out of here,” Ossman says succinctly, “and get me sorted out, and I will tell you any damn thing you want to know. I will also not have you killed for this insane shit.”
Sonny finds this acceptable, and says so.
Ossman lies on Sonny Hall’s couch and moans, but the pain is giving way – assuming his experience is the same as Sonny’s – to a blue-tinted relaxation and a warm, almost lusty burn in the gut. Sonny has no idea what they have taken – he just got whatever he could score – but it’s powerful stuff. He can’t even feel the shards of ice in his joints or the increasingly frequent needle-jabs in his chest. He realises he never asked what the cause of death – the proximate cause – in attenuation was. Heart failure? Or was he just going to end up stripped out of both – no, all three – of his corpses, caught in the centre of the triangle and unable to derive sustenance from any of them, slowly withering as they did?
Screw that.
“You’re sorted out,” he says to Ossman.
“Hell, yes,” Ossman agrees. “What do you want to know?”
“What do I – I want to know what happened to me!”
“I have no idea. Who the hell are you?”
Sonny thought the coyote had already figured that out. He acknowledges that maybe that was a little self-centred.
“Sonny Hall.”
“Who?”
“Sonny – Jesus, you came to my house!”
“I go to a lot of houses.”
“You came to my house and you asked me to give you my corpse for something! And then when I said no you went away happy, and I thought I’d restored your faith in humanity. That’s what I told the sheriff at the Halfway station, and he’s your guy. And it was written on the pad in the hotel room here and I thought… I thought you must know what was going on.”
But Ossman is shaking his head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. You, I remember. I was going to use you to smuggle in a guy. Doesn’t matter now who it was. You said no, and we never go back to the well. We travel light, too, leave no trail, you get me? We don’t keep coppers on the payroll. We sure as hell don’t do conscription. It’s not a good idea for exactly this reason. I mean, here you are, right? Although incidentally you are far and away the most batshit guy I have ever met. You’re attenuated already and you come back here? That is some old-school crazy…” He chuckles admiringly, then goes on. “It’s a consensual operation, right? Victimless crime. The whole thing functions if everyone’s happy. Someone gets unhappy, it makes trouble.”
Ossman sits right up, swears in Turkish (Navajo?) as one of his bandages rips away from his skin. “Trouble. You’ve been making trouble. Lots of noise. Because this happened to you and you didn’t sign up for it. And no one profits from you, someone’s just sitting in your corpse. But that’s bad for me, so then I need friends in low places. Son of a bitch.”
Ossman glances at Sonny.
“Don’t you get it? Friends like that bastard back in my office. Morristown. Police contacts and backup and economies of scale. A professional operation, not a one-man show like mine. You’re like a walking reason to work for Morristown. I should have seen it.”
“What? Wait, you’re saying the guy in the suit—?”
Ossman looks as if he’s doing some powerful thinking. Then he sighs. “I’m sorry, man. You should have kept hold of him and asked. Make it a price for your medical attention, yes? Because no way is he going to sit down and chat with you now.”
Sonny Hall sighs. This is almost certainly true. “I hope,” he says after a moment, “that the tourniquet slips.”
Ossman grins. “Yeah.”
*
Triangulated, Sonny howls in the cold and the dark and wishes he could go home. He just doesn’t know where it is. He ought to be able to see galaxies all around him; death by transit should be spectacular that way. He should feel he’s dissolving into the cosmos. He doesn’t. He wonders if he has gone blind.
He wakes slowly, as if the space between is less than willing to let him go, and when he comes to himself he is gasping for air in not one body but two. He takes some consolation from the knowledge that his squatter is suffering now, for sure.
The double vision does not fade, and the cold in his limbs grows heavier, more pressing. Breathing stays difficult. Sonny von Hall is replaced by Sonny Hall the consumptive. Ossman looks at him from the sofa and makes a speedy diagnosis.
“You haven’t got long.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”
“I need to find my corpse.”
Ossman sucks air through his teeth. “I owe you. But I got no idea how we find your old body. No idea at all. Morristown isn’t going to tell us, even if he’s still alive. If I was going to talk to those people, I’d need backup. I got the right sort of friends for that, but it takes time to arrange.”
“And when it’s ready—”
“You will so entirely not care.”
Sonny Hall thinks about it. “It’s okay,” he says, “you’re off the hook.”
Ossman blinks. “Just like that?”
“Sure, why not? You can’t help. Don’t feel bad about it.”
The squatter is lying in a darkened room staring at the ceiling. There’s a fan going round up there. Sonny can actually hear it, electric motor whining. The designer has put a light in the ceiling directly above – stupid – so the room is flickering. Everything is flickering.
Ossman sighs. “You’re a perfectly okay guy, Sonny Hall. And this is a crappy thing to happen. They were trying to get me, they’re going to take you out. Crazy thing is, they’ve made their play. There’s nothing for them in you dying. They should just cut you loose. I’ll try to get them a message. Maybe it’ll remind someone to do the good thing. They’re bad people over there, but they’re professionally bad. This isn’t personal with you.” He hesitates. “The way I see it, I’m off the hook when you die. Or if you get back. Otherwise if you need something, call me. I’ll try.”
They shake hands, and that’s it.
Sonny looks through the squatter’s eyes at a room in this big city and wishes he knew where it might be. In cop shows, there’d be a distinctive building or a matchbook. The curtains would be enough, special curtains imported from Lithuania for one building. He can feel his mind – his anima – straining to encompass three bodies at once.
“It’s not personal,” Ossman said. Sure. There’s nothing personal about this at all. It’s just him killing me, is all. About as personal as it gets . He draws a breath, conscious that he’s struggling against frozen muscles far away. And stops sharply, his stomach flipping over and every part of him abruptly alight with understanding.
Through the nose of his original corpse, he can smell jasmine.
He finds her at the duck pond – not the one in Hyde Park but the other one, the tiny one close to where she used to live. The one they went to every Saturday.
He’s offended to realise she doesn’t recognise him, then feels ridiculous – how could she? – then startled because that means she’s not getting the visions. But of course she’s not. She’s not him. She’s just sitting in a dying body, killing him by degrees, out of – what? He wonders where her corpse is, and if she can feel the cold.
He sighs, and she turns around.
“You should go now,” he says, and sees the absolute amazement in her eyes as she realises who he is. “I don’t need to know why you did all this.”
“And what did I do?”
“You found out I was going. Got Morristown to help you mess up the coyote’s business. Win-win. You got me, he got Ossman.”
She shrugs. “Close enough.” Her shrug on his body. He stares down at himself, horrified by how thin he has become, how weak. But he realises abruptly that that’s how he always was, in that corpse: a heroin-chic, hyperthyroid plastic surgery victim in expensive clothes.
“You should go.”
“What if I won’t?”
“Why would you stay? It’s over.”
She peers at him curiously. “Sonny, I’m murdering you. You do understand that, right? You hurt me, I destroyed you, end of. It’s how most people feel, but they can’t work out how to bring it off.”
“You’ll die with me. It’s stupid.”
She shrugs. “Maybe. There have been cases where it worked out differently, but if that’s the way it is, I don’t really care. I’ve thought about this a lot, Sonny, and I really do hate you. I’m not even sure why. I just can’t stand the world with you in it.”
“I wasn’t. I left.”
“I’m feeding the ducks, Sonny. Piss off somewhere quietly, please. There’s nothing you can do. You’re not that person.”
He wasn’t. Two bodies ago, when he was in the corpse she’s wearing. But he’s different now. He wonders if she realises what she has done to herself, occupying that poison body.
“Liz. Calista. I’m sorry.” Calista Burton; the name she never, ever used. It was always just Liz, or Lizzie, and when she had to admit to having a family she took her mother’s name, Giles. She had put it right there on the fake hotel pad for him, knowing he’d miss it. Knowing she could tell him outright what was happening, and he’d carry right on not getting it. Because the old Sonny Hall never paid attention to anyone but himself.
“It’s not too late,” he says. “You can walk away.”
She laughs at him. In her face – his face – he can see a weird certainty which does not belong there, and he realises she can’t walk away after all. Calista Burton in the corpse of Sonny Hall – doing her thinking with his addled, burned out brain – has acquired his vices, his brittleness. If she were in another body, she might change her mind, but the decision to move on is precisely the one she is presently incapable of taking. He knows. He remembers.
He has arranged the signal with Ossman: a friendly wave means hold. It means get the transit station on the line and get ready for an emergency pre-empt. If he turns and walks away—
But he realises he has already done so, and does not know if it was deliberate. He hears a strange whistle and a sound like air blown across the top of a bottle. Behind him, the corpse sags, the bullet perfectly placed. What would you even call it? Not murder, surely: the death of his own body to save his life. Something else. A new crime, or a new necessity.
From a window across the park, Ossman’s rifleman waves goodbye.
Sonny Hall, space traveller, rests in the transit hostel at Halfway. He has grown used to the very bad vodka, will miss it when he leaves. He is quiet, for the first time in his life. In his little room, jars of algae glow in different colours. He even has a tentative relationship with a woman he met here, though neither of them intends it should last. They walk, and they talk, and that’s enough. He has, for the first time in his own recollection, people he can call friends without wincing.
In a few months, he is moving on, rather than going back. London, and Liz, and Ossman can stay in the past. Right now, he never wants to see the place again. And perhaps he never will. Transit is space, and time, and possibility, for ever.