Only Forward

On the floor there were about forty bodies, mainly adults, though there were a few babies too. Many were missing their clothes, and each body had its face cut off to reveal dry bone below. Most were made up distinctively, with blue lipstick smeared across the remains of the gums, and green eyeshadow around the decaying eyeballs. All the women had screwdrivers sticking out of their abdomens, and all the men had their hands power-stapled together.

I thought at first the babies had been set on fire, but as we neared the other side of the room I noticed a change in the general condition of the bodies. They got older and more rotted, and also more obviously chewed. This particular human being was storing his kills and eating the oldest ones first, the babies cooked, the adults raw and seething with maggots. I wondered where he was now: out in Red somewhere, trawling for more, stocking up for the winter. I’m a broadminded guy, but honestly, some people.

We made it to the steps and went up to the fourth floor. All was quiet. Just before we stepped onto the fifth Ji froze and listened.

‘Okay,’ he whispered. ‘End game.’

Bij and another guard stepped out first. A rocket shell zipped between their heads and straight through the wall behind them. Rather than flinch, they sublimated their irritation into blasting the shit out of the room with Crunts. When they judged it clean we joined them.

What was left of the office showed signs of habitation, and of preparations for an assault. Empty gun cases lay piled around the room, bits of food, clothing. A dim light shone from the office beyond, and Ji strode towards the door, leaving us behind. There was a tiny sound from behind some crates in one corner of the room and acting purely instinctively I threw myself into a roll and came up just in front of Ji, gun pointing into the darkness. The flicker of a laser sight appeared on Ji’s chest and I fired five bullets into the shadows. The last gang member toppled slowly out onto the floor. Ji looked down at me and nodded.

With the guards behind us we kicked the door open. The office was empty apart from an armchair, with a table beside it supporting a lamp that cast a pool of luminous light. Someone was sitting in the chair.

‘Hello, Ji,’ said a voice I recognised. ‘Hi, Stark. Hey, nice shirt.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ bellowed Ji, as we stepped closer to the chair. I peered at the bulky figure lounging aggressively in it, observing its air of incipient violence and the green numbers on its forehead.

‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ I shouted. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Snedd!’ yelled Ji, slightly more calmly. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’

‘Well,’ said Snedd, clicking his fingers, ‘that’s sort of a greeting, I guess. Drinks?’

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ I said again. It was the only thing which seemed appropriate. I might have gone on saying it for days if Ji hadn’t changed the subject. Abruptly he grinned, and shook his brother’s hand.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Alcohol. And you better have a good explanation for this.’

A small and very frightened-looking man of about seventy appeared from out of the shadows, bearing a tray with a pitcher of alcohol and several glasses on it. He set it down soundlessly on the table and disappeared again.

‘Snedd,’ I said as Fyd poured the drinks, ‘you could have killed us all.’

‘Oh crap,’ said Snedd. ‘They weren’t supposed to be fighting you at all. As soon as I heard who was coming I told everyone to run for their own safety. I only know one person more dangerous than me, and that’s Ji. Thanks very much, by the way: I spent two weeks building up that gang and you’ve wiped them out in five minutes. Cheers.’

‘Cheers yourself, bastard,’ said Ji, and we drank.

A word of explanation is probably in order here. Snedd is Ji’s younger brother. Apart from the fact that he swears slightly less and has green numbers on his forehead, they are almost exactly alike. I know Snedd from my time in Turn, when Ji and I were working together. I hadn’t seen him in eight years, and hadn’t expected to ever again.

Snedd has numbers on his forehead because he was condemned to death. Largely for the hell of it one night he broke into Stable Neighbourhood, and unfortunately he was caught. Stable is one of the Neighbourhoods that maintains an absolute blockade on the outside world. Nobody is allowed in, and nobody is allowed out. All information on the outside world is blocked, and the inhabitants have no idea what exists outside their world.

The authorities in Stable don’t mess around. The penalty for incursion into their Neighbourhood is death by DNA expiration. The culprit’s DNA is altered so that the body dies exactly one year from the date of sentence: every physical function just stops and the chemicals that make up the body fall apart. It’s quite a common method of execution in civilised Neighbourhoods, and a few go the whole hog and graft display tissue onto the foreheads of executed criminals in the shape of digital numbers, to give a read-out of how many days the guy has left. Some people think this is unnecessarily bloody-minded, but the Foreheaders don’t mind too much. Often it gets them served quicker in restaurants because the staff can see the guy doesn’t have much time to waste. Especially in the last week, when the numbers flash on and off in bright red.

Also, you can work out what the time is by looking in the mirror, which is kind of useful if you don’t like to wear a watch.

‘Shouldn’t you have been dead for quite a while now?’ I asked Snedd.

‘Yeah,’ he laughed. ‘But you know me. I work things out. I found out how to get the clock to recycle, so at the end of each year I get another year. It’s always kind of a tense moment when the read-out gets down to 00:00:00:01, but it’s worked so far.’

‘Did Ji know you were still alive?’

‘Yeah,’ muttered Ji, ‘but I was trying to forget. What the fuck are you doing here, Snedd? And what the fuck are you doing building up a gang?’

‘I got bored,’ he replied. ‘Thought I’d come into business with you for a while.’

‘With me?’

‘Yeah. I didn’t want to just tag along: thought I’d bring something of my own to the party. And now you’ve killed them all.’

‘Snedd,’ I asked, ‘was it just the gang you were bringing, or did you have anything else?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Stark’s looking for someone,’ said Ji, helping himself to more alcohol. The old man circulated, passing out nibbles to the bodyguards.

‘An Actioneer called Alkland has been stolen,’ I said, looking Snedd in the eyes. ‘ACIA think the gang might be holed up in Red somewhere.’

‘No,’ said Snedd, shaking his head. ‘For a start, it isn’t me. Also, I did a lot of digging in the last couple of weeks, trying to find an angle on this Neighbourhood, something to build on. I cased everybody out, learnt where the power lay. The only gang here that could have a halfway decent stab at a stunt like that belongs to my brother.’

‘There’s no one here from Turn?’ I said, puzzled.

‘Only us two.’

‘Shit. He isn’t here then.’

‘No. But I did hear something that might interest you.’

‘What?’

Snedd looked at his brother.

‘Tell him whatever you know,’ Ji nodded. ‘We can’t do anything with this. This is Stark’s kind of problem.’

‘Okay.’ Snedd took a piece of spicy chicken from the plate the old man was handing round. I passed on that, but took another turn at the avocado dip. ‘It’s virtually nothing, anyway. I heard that someone from the Centre came through here a couple of days ago. I don’t know who had him: there was no word on that.’

‘How could you have found that out?’ Ji asked irritably. ‘I put the word round and there was nothing.’

‘Ah, but that’s just it,’ said Snedd smugly. ‘I didn’t put the word out. The word came to me. Whoever had him was looking for me. They tried in Turn first, then somehow traced me here.’

Ji laughed. ‘Why the fuck would they want you?’

‘Well, that’s what I wondered. If they wanted the hardest man around, they’d go straight for you. The most organised, straight for you. So that’s not what they wanted. They wanted something I might be able to give them, that you couldn’t.’

‘And what’s that?’ I asked, beginning to suspect the answer.

‘I think they wanted to know how to get into Stable Neighbourhood.’

Pretty soon afterwards we relocated to BarJi, and the après-fight party was in full swing when I left. It’s rare that the leaders of both gangs are involved, so the atmosphere was unusually good. Once the news gets out that there are now two of those lunatics, the other gang leaders in Red are going to get very nervous indeed. Fyd shook my hand at the door, which, though it nearly broke my fingers, was kind of nice. Being on the right side of him struck me as a good place to be.

I reached the Department of Doing Things Especially Quickly just before 9.00 p.m. The elevator was now reciting the history of the Department the way it was supposed to, which made me glum until I realised it was making up all of the dates.

‘Way to go,’ I whispered to it as I got out. ‘Fight ’em from within.’

‘Right on,’ it whispered back.

Zenda’s office was empty, so I hung around for a while. Royn popped her head in briefly, and said that she was on her way, but could be late. I frowned to myself. Zenda is never late, not even for me. That’s another of the things I like about her.

She arrived at 9.03. In the Centre that was like turning up after everyone else had died of old age, and I let her get a drink before I said a word. She sat heavily in her chair and stared straight ahead for a moment, and then looked up at me.

‘Trouble?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, but she was lying. After a pause she stabbed the button on her intercom and barked out an instruction to someone about a meeting in four days’ time. ‘Okay,’ she sighed, ‘what do you have?’

‘Alkland is not in Red,’ I said.

‘Shit.’

‘But I think I know where he might be.’

Zenda brightened considerably at this, and shone a smile at me.

‘Good man. Where?’

‘It’s not very good news, I’m afraid. I think he might have been taken into Stable.’

‘Stable? What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Think about it, Zenda. Whoever snatched Alkland is alarmingly together. Where’s the cleverest place in the area to hide someone?’

‘Somewhere where no one can go. Shit.’ She drummed her fingers on the table for a moment. ‘I’m going to have to go higher on this.’

She picked up the phone. After a moment she spoke to someone, telling them she needed to speak with C as soon as possible. She nodded at the reply, and replaced the phone.

‘I can’t authorise an incursion into a forbidden Neighbourhood. Shit, shit, shit.’

‘Zenda,’ I asked gently, ‘what is going on?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’ She looked at me, and I looked at her and could see she was troubled, and she could see that I saw. Professional relationships are difficult, especially if you knew the person before. The better you know someone the wider the gap becomes between what you know and what you can say. There are some things you just can’t discuss in an office, not even huddled round the kettle in the kitchen area.

The intercom buzzed.

‘Impromptu Meeting time minus twenty seconds and counting,’ it barked. ‘Your participants are on their way, Ms Renn.’

Zenda stood to be ready to greet them, and then turned to me.

‘Of course, I didn’t ask if you’d be willing to try,’ she said, looking contrite. I smiled at her, trying to say something with my eyes. I think it got across, because she smiled back.

‘Thank you.’

The door banged open and C glided in, with Darv in close attendance.

The meeting didn’t last very long. I told C what I’d found out, and he agreed with my conclusions. The fact that I was still in one piece after two visits to Red and being in the front line of a gang war between two Turn psychopaths was not lost on Darv, and though he was no more polite, he seemed to accept that I was indeed the man for the job.

The job being, of course, risking almost certain execution and/ or instant death, melodramatic though that sounds. There was no question but that the job was going to go ahead, and that made me think a little. Forbidden Neighbourhoods, particularly Stable, are very, very protective of their privacy, and the Centre is supposed to respect that. If I was going to get top level go-ahead for an incursion, something pretty major was at stake. I was beginning to wonder if I knew everything I ought to, if this was just going to be a normal job after all.

‘Well,’ said C, leaning back in his chair. ‘There does appear to be only one option. Ms Renn suggested you for this job, Mr Stark. She said that not only were you the best at what you did, but also that you had never turned your back on anything once you’d started. Does this set a precedent?’

‘No,’ I said, gazing levelly at him and saying what he expected to hear, ‘and I take it this conversation never took place.’

He smiled gently, and nodded.

‘Ms Renn is a good judge of character.’

He stood and left the room without another word. Darv, grunt that he was, took the time to spell out exactly how disinterested the Centre was going to be in any trouble I got myself into, and then he left also. As I watched him go I felt unreal for a moment, was aware of the world around me. It passed. It always does.

Zenda saw me to the door.

‘Be careful, Stark,’ she said.

‘I will,’ I said, kissing her hand, feeling for once a fragile pool of intimacy in the administrative desert. ‘And if there’s anything I can do, should whatever it is that isn’t wrong get any worse, call me.’

She nodded quickly twice, and I left.

Four

On the way back to my apartment I did what I could to come up with a plan of attack. For reasons of my own I was actually pretty excited at the idea of seeing the inside of Stable, but like everybody else, I knew next to nothing about it. What little I did, including the only possible method of entry, I knew from Snedd. I had the notes I’d got him to make after being released from there with numbers on his forehead, but they were very patchy. He didn’t understand why I was so interested in the inside of a Neighbourhood I could never go into, and he wasn’t in the best of moods at the time.

There was no point going back into Red to talk to him now: after eight years, many of them spent out of his head, there was little chance he was going to remember anything new. All I could do was memorise what I had, and try to replicate his entry.

I remembered him being very insistent on one thing: if you’re going to try to break in, do it during the day. Most of the Neighbourhoods are geared for twenty-four-hour living, though activity does thin out a lot at night. It’s only places like Red that go full on all the time. But Stable, Snedd had said, shuts tight at 11.00 p.m. That had been his mistake. He’d broken in at night, because that’s what you generally do, to find himself the only moving person.

Apart from the Stable police, that is. That’s why he’d been caught, and that’s why he was a living time-bomb. He’d been lucky, too. By chance he’d been caught in a built-up area: had it been possible, the police would simply have shot him on sight.

By the time I was near my mono stop the walls of the carriage looked like an explosion in a paint factory as they strove to meet the challenge of evoking my mood. In most Neighbourhoods I have a contact, I have an angle, I have some way of protecting myself, of keeping this just a dangerous game. In the Centre I have Zenda. In Red I have Ji. In Natsci I have a guy called Brian Diode IV, who can break the security code of just about any computer in The City, given the time and enough pizza. In Brandfield I know a girl called Shelby who has a two-person heliporter, which has saved my life more than once.

And so on, and so on. In Stable I had nothing. Blending in was not going to be easy, always assuming I could gain entry in the first place, and if I didn’t, I was going to die.

Also, what the hell was going on in the Centre? I’ve known Zenda a long time, and I’d never seen her looking the way she had tonight. A little paranoia was natural in a Neighbourhood where absolutely everybody was trying to clamber over the top of everybody else, but she hadn’t been looking paranoid. She’d looked like something was worrying her, but she wasn’t sure what it was. I found that very worrying.

Also, who the hell were we dealing with? Any gang who could not only steal an important Actioneer but then sneak him into a forbidden Neighbourhood and keep him there undetected was a group of serious over-achievers. If they found out I was looking for them then the Stable police were going to be the least of my problems, and I wouldn’t have Ji or even Snedd around to help.

How do I get myself into these positions? Why do I do this job? Why do I still need this safety net, this thing to be? Isn’t it time to say goodbye now?

There was a quiet pinging sound, and I looked up to see that the walls were fading to a uniform black. I’d broken the carriage’s mood detector.

Bugger this, I thought. I had to wait till tomorrow anyway. I was going to take a break. I was going to find my cat.

I stayed on the mono to the far side of Colour, and then got off at the transfer portal. I had to go through another Neighbourhood to get where I was going, which meant buying another ticket. An attendant inspected me at the gate, checked that I was wearing quiet shoes, and nodded. I went over to the ticket office and pointed on the map at where I wanted to go. The man behind the counter nodded, and held up three fingers. I handed him three credits as quietly as I could, and he passed me a ticket. Then I tiptoed over to the platform and waited.

The next Neighbourhood along from Colour is Sound, so named because they don’t allow any. When the mono arrived it pulled up with barely a whisper, and the doors opened silently. I stepped into the carriage and sat carefully down on the padded seat. My journey wasn’t going to take that long: Sound isn’t very big, thank Christ. It gives me the creeps.

The carriage was empty. The Sounders have one hour every evening where they’re allowed to go into a small room and shout their heads off, and I was bang in the middle of that hour. I still couldn’t make any noise though, as the carriages have microphones all over the place. If you make any noise a silent alarm goes off somewhere and they come and throw you silently off the mono, and you have to walk silently down the silent streets instead, which is even worse.

So I sat and thought, trying to calm my mood and also to remember as much as possible of what Snedd had told me about Stable.

There wasn’t much. The Neighbourhood had been forbidden right from the start. When The City reorganisation had started to take place, Stable had simply built a wall all around itself, shut out the sky, severed all connections with the outside world and pretended it didn’t exist. The first generation knew it did, of course, but they were forbidden to tell their children. They were happy not to: the first generation stayed in Stable because they liked it that way.

They were all long dead now, and the sixth and seventh generations had no idea the outside world existed. As far as they knew, the whole planet apart from the area they lived in had been destroyed in a nuclear war. They could walk up to the walls and see through windows and sure enough, outside was just a barren red plain blown with radioactive sand. The windows were in fact vidiscreens maintained by the authorities whose job it was to keep things going on the way they were.

The very last thing those authorities want is for anyone to make it in from the outside: it would blow the whole thing and trash hundreds of years of desired deception. Desired, because I’m not talking about repression here. The Stablents aren’t kept in ignorance against their will. It’s all they know, and it’s all they want to know.

A couple got on the mono and tried to engage me in conversation, but as my signing isn’t too hot it was a rather stilted dose of social interaction. They’d clearly been shouting, and looked flushed and excited, obviously keen to get home and make mad, passionate, silent love. After a while they left me to my own silent devices, though they did both keep pointing at my shirt, giving me the thumbs up and smiling broadly. I couldn’t work out what they meant.

At the portal exit I stood still for a moment, gearing myself up, flexing my weirdness-resilience muscles. Sound is a weird Neighbourhood, but where I was going now was far weirder. I was going into the Cat Neighbourhood.

A long time ago, some eccentric who’d gained control of a largely disused Neighbourhood decided to leave it to the cats. The place was a complete mess, falling down and strewn with rubbish and debris. He forced the few remaining people out, built a wall round it and then died, making it irrevocably clear in his will that no one was to live there henceforth except cats.

Ho ho, thought everyone, what a nut. We’ll leave it a couple of years, and then move in. A cat Neighbourhood, ha ha.

And then the cats started to arrive. From all over The City, one by one at first, and then in their droves, the cats appeared. Cats who didn’t have owners, or had cruel ones, cats who weren’t properly looked after, or just wanted a change, cats in their hundreds, and then thousands and then hundreds of thousands, moved into the Neighbourhood.

Interesting, everybody thought.

After a while a few people decided to visit the Neighbourhood, and they discovered two things. Firstly, if you don’t love cats, they won’t let you in. They simply will not let you in. Secondly, that there was something very weird going on. The rubbish and debris had disappeared. The buildings had been cleaned. The grass in the parks was cut. The whole Neighbourhood was absolutely and immaculately clean.

Interesting, everybody thought, slightly uneasily.

The lights work. The plumbing works. People who go into the Neighbourhood to visit their cats sleep in rooms that are as clean as if room service has just that minute left. Each block has a small store on one corner, and there is food in that store, and it’s always fresh. A cat sits on the counter and watches you. You go in, choose what you need, and leave.

Nobody knows how they do this. There are no humans living in the Neighbourhood, absolutely none. I know, I’ve looked. There are just a hell of a lot of cats. Some live there all year round, some just for a few months. They chase things, roll around in the sun, sleep on top of things and underneath things and generally have a fantastic time. And the lights work, and the plumbing works, and the place is immaculately clean.

I walked down the steps from the mono portal and towards the main gate. A huge iron affair, it opens eerily as you approach, and then shuts silently after you. On the other side lies the Path, a wide cobbled street that leads into the heart of the Neighbourhood. The Path has streetlights all along it, old-fashioned lantern types that spread pools of yellow light along the way.

Cat Neighbourhood is a perfectly peaceful place, particularly at night, and I was in no hurry as I walked slowly between the tall old buildings. All around everything was quiet, everything was calm, like a living snapshot from a time long past. For a while the street was deserted, and then in the distance I saw a pale cat walking casually towards me. We drew closer and closer, and when we were a few yards apart the cat sat down, and then rolled over to have his stomach rubbed.

‘Hello, Spangle,’ I said, sitting down to give him a serious tickling. ‘How did you know? How do you guys always know?’

Next morning I was on the mono at 7.00 a.m., hotwired on coffee and feeling tired but alert. I was carrying my gun, a few tricks of the trade and nothing else.