Till You Drop Page 4

  Ngggg rested one of his own hands over that of the bloodtaker. "That I hear; that I see; that I know. The burdens of life are many, let us not carry more than we must. Let the past eat the past."

  "And the Union?" Orlandus asked. "Does it still exist, as more than a name?"

  The greyman took his hand from Lanto, laid it on the younger bloodtaker's shoulder. "A union, young Cousin," he said, "is not a name. A union is the action of its members."

  ***

  "Nice chap, I thought," said Orlandus, on the train back to London.

  "Ngggg is not a chap," Lanto replied.

  "You know what I mean," said Orlandus.

  "Yes," said Lanto. "I know what you mean."

  ***

  Economics evening class. DI Pipe found it all very interesting; more than that, very satisfying. Working it out, stage by stage, as if it were a criminal investigation. Establishing modus operandi, looking for motives, separating definites from probables, understanding, above all, who gained when someone else lost.

  A crime could be taken apart, if you had the skill to do it. Its parts could be looked at, labelled, and ultimately reassembled. A good crime mechanic could study the bits, and work out how the whole thing worked. To DI Pipe’s delight, it turned out that economics was just the same.

  When he was working on a long case, every night he would make a summary, just for his own use, in his private notebook. He would write out all he thought he’d learned about the crime so far, and then he would set about reducing it, reducing it, reducing it, until everything he understood was contained in just a few lines. He was doing the same thing, of course, after each evening class.

  1. To survive, a company must make ever-increasing profits.

  2. The only ultimate source of profit is the labour of the employee.

  3. In a recession, the employer must take more labour from the worker, or he will go bust. The simplest way of doing this is to increase the worker’s hours, while reducing his pay.

  4. No matter how much profit employers extract from employees, they will always - must always, by nature of the system - demand more. By definition, there can never come a time when capital is sated.

  Pipe was a policeman, and he obeyed orders, but he liked to know why these orders, why these orders now; he liked to know what it was he was doing, why he was doing it, and in whose benefit he was being required to act. And economics told him all that.

  He looked forward to his evening class, all week. His notebook summary was two pages at the moment, but he was confident he could get it down to one after a couple more lessons.

  ***

  The irony took a little while to occur to Orlandus, but once it had he was full of it.

  "You must admit, Lo, it is funny," he said.

  "I should like to hear of something, anything, which does not cause you amusement, Cousin," said Lanto, quietly; there is something about the dusty atmosphere of a London gentleman's club which persuades even the strongest of personalities to speak quietly.

  "Our libraries," Orlandus persisted, "are found in the abandoned libraries of the Fearful. Our hospitals, in their abandoned asylums. But when the Nighthood has need of a gentleman's club - well, no adaptation is necessary. The gentlemen's clubs of the Fearful are, by their nature, already full of the spirit of the undead, and are therefore perfectly suited to our needs. I have no doubt that the leaders of the Monsters’ Union find this place entirely comfortable."

  "And I have no doubt, Orlandus," said Lanto sternly, "that a display of youthful flippancy would not be the best way of making our point to those leaders."

  "Don't panic, Cousin," Orlandus laughed. "I'll behave."

  "I hope so," said Lanto. He looked around him, in the oaky entrance hall of Ludd's, until his eye fell upon a triumvirate of elderly gentlemen standing at the far end, apparently engrossed in study of a very poor painting of a giant bull. "Unless I'm very much mistaken - "

  "Impossible!" Orlandus objected.

  "You'll let me know when this good behaviour of yours begins? I should hate to miss it."

  "Don't nag," said Orlandus.

  "Unless I'm very much mistaken, that is our party over there."

  The two bloodtakers glided over to the group Lanto had indicated.

  "Good Night," said Lanto, very quietly, a hint of an interrogative in his tone.

  One of the three men turned round. His face was webbed with what Orlandus thought, just for a second, were pink cobwebs. His breath was rich with meat and wine. He studied Lanto for a moment, his eyes crinkling in non-recognition.

  "Ah, yes," the man said at last. "Going already? Goodnight, then. Hope we'll see you again." With which, he returned to his companions, and the giant bull.

  "I think we'll ask someone, don't you?" said Orlandus, struggling against a giggle, as they walked briskly away from the three elderly clubmen.

  "Well," said Lanto, stiffly, "they looked like monsters."

  "My point exactly," said Orlandus, catching the eye of a passing steward.

  "Help you gentlemen at all?"

  "Mr Knight's party?" Lanto asked him.

  "Ah yes, sir. If you'll follow me. The other gentlemen have already arrived."

  ***

  The bloodtakers had not been impolite enough to ask, but if they had asked - How in hell does a greyman become convenor of a branch of the Monsters' Union? - he would have told them.

  During the union's long years of torpidity, Ngggg had caused his name to be listed in a directory which was rarely updated. He had done so entirely in the knowledge that his gesture was provocative - in the unlikely event it should ever be noticed - and meaningless, if meaning were to be judged by actions resulting. There were no actions resulting; there was, in reality, no union.

  The depths of a greyman are unknowable even to the greyman. A greyman can no more read himself than he can be read by others. Only from the outside can we deduce - and this, necessarily, without primary evidence - that somewhere in Ngggg there lived a belief, or at least a feeling, that the convenorship had to be occupied, however nominally, by someone. And that if no-one else occupied it, then that only left him. That one day, it would matter that the branch had a convenor. That the union slept, but the sleeping can be woken.

  He would have told them this, if they had asked. But his telling would have been perfunctory, and devoid of self-analysis. Greymen rarely converse, and when they do they shrug a lot.

  ***

  Private Room Three at Ludd's was very private. It was reached via three quite separate staircases, two corridors, and more sets of double doors than Orlandus felt inclined to count.

  The steward knocked lightly on the big, darkwood door. "Drinks are inside, gentlemen," he told Orlandus and Lanto. "It's serve-oneself in Private Room Three."

  "Thank you," said Lanto, as the functionary nodded slightly - not quite a bow - and withdrew.

  The door was opened, precisely on cue, by a figure so tall, and so elegantly elderly, as to make even Lanto seem, thought Orlandus, like a Halloween teenager.

  "Good Night, Cousins," he said. "My name is Reynold."

  "We are Lanto and Orlandus," replied Lanto. "We wish you the night."

  "And all that is in it," the aged bloodtaker replied, now opening the door wide, and gesturing the two newcomers inside.

  There were seven men in the dim room. Six of them sat around an oval conference table; the seventh - Reynold - took his place, and said: "Please be seated, Cousins."

  This courteous and yet imperious remark produced in Orlandus an almost irresistible desire to reply that he would rather stand, thank you. “Puffed up arses,” he thought. “Bet they call themselves The Council of Seven!"

  Lanto and Orlandus sat.

  "Will you drink?" asked Reynold.

  Orlandus opened his mouth to say that a rum and black wouldn't be unwelcome, but was swiftly eclipsed by Lanto's formal: "We will not drink." Orlandus felt a slight prickling of embarrassment; even he should hav
e known enough about Nighthood etiquette to realise that one does not take food or drink in the presence of one's superiors.

  Reynold glanced at his six companions, and began: "Cousin Ngggg has communicated with us."

  "His is the night," said Lanto.

  “Oh get on with it,” thought Orlandus.

  "And-all-that-is-in-it," said Reynold with a dismissive flap of a manicured hand. "He informs us that you are ... dissatisfied with the conduct of the International Brotherhood?" This statement was a question, of sorts; clearly intended to allow those ill-mannered enough to engage in dissatisfaction a chance to deny the charge.

  But Lanto, in his own way, was finding their reception as annoying as was Orlandus. He chose his next words carefully, but they were not words of retreat. "I would not say dissatisfied, Cousin. But we are a little uncertain."

  "Uncertain?" said Reynold.

  "In the dark, you could say," said Orlandus, with a smile that might be interpreted as an attempt to lighten the mood, or as an essay in incivility, depending on your point of view.

  "The union," Lanto continued, "seems to us to be currently enjoying a period of quietness."

  "You would prefer something louder?" Reynold asked, to gentlemanly chuckles from his side of the table.

  "There is," said Orlandus, his mounting impatience beginning to get the better of him, "surely a difference between a low profile, and hibernation."

  Chill silence lined the walls of the room and the surface of the oval table, with a near-visible sheen.

  "Your ignorance, Young Cousin," said Reynold eventually, "is its own excuse."

  "Our ignorance," replied Lanto, his voice strong, "is the very point. It is why we are here. It is why we have requested this meeting with your committee. We are, Cousin Reynold, as you rightly say, ignorant - of many things."

  "Then, perhaps - " Reynold began, but Lanto would not give way.

  "We are ignorant, for instance, of the exact nature of this Union, this Brotherhood. We suppose that it exists to promote the mutual interest of all our kind; that it does so in the name of all our kind; that it claims the authority of all our kind. But we have little idea of how it functions, or how its collective decisions are arrived at, or who executes those decisions."

  He paused for breath or thought or both, and Reynold seized the gap.

  "And tell me, Cousin: after all your years, what has changed? What has happened, precisely, to make you suddenly so concerned with the running of an engine whose want, I suggest, you have never felt?"

  "That is not the point," replied Lanto. "The point is - "

  "The point is ambition," snarled one of Reynold's fellow committee-men. "They are young, and they would have our seats at this table!"

  From Reynold's expression, Orlandus deduced that he entertained heckles from his own side no more willingly than from elsewhere. "If so, Cousin," he said, "then they are indeed ignorant."

  He looked first at Orlandus, then at Lanto. "Is that it, Cousins? Do you seek to usurp us? Are you so foolish that you imagine, in your resentful fantasies, that this humble Council of Seven - "

  "Ah-ha!" thought Orlandus.

  " - is some seedy conspiracy of self-promotion? That we, who willingly serve, earn luxury and ease from our service? Do you imagine, Cousins, in your quite towering ignorance, that we sit like magpies upon a stolen fortune which you are hungry to wrest from us?"

  "No," said Lanto, quietly. "Not at all. Until you mentioned these ideas, I can honestly say they had never occurred to me."

  If the previous silence had been chill, that which now ensued was hot - hot with blood eager to be spilled.

  Orlandus broke the silence.

  "Just as a matter of interest, Cousins: who elected you lot?"

  Eight pairs of eyes focused on his; seven of them hostile.

  "Only," he continued, "I never got a ballot paper. You might want to have a word with the Post Office, that's the only reason I bring it up."

  "The Fearful have a word for those like you, Young Cousin," said Reynold.

  "They have many, I'm sure," shrugged Orlandus.

  "Joker - that's the word I was thinking of," said Reynold, and the way he said it suggested that he had rarely before in his many years had recourse to so devastating an insult, nor to one so exquisitely delivered.

  "Cousin Orlandus's question is nonetheless a pertinent one, Cousin Reynold," insisted Lanto. "If this Brotherhood belongs to us, then clearly - "

  "The Fearful have a word for that, too," came another agitated voice from the backbenches. "They call it activism!"

  And you, old fool, thought Orlandus, think you've outdone even Reynold in the foul language competition, don't you?

  "Activism,” said Reynold. "Yes, indeed. Thank you Cousin, the very word. Activism. But perhaps our two Cousins here are not familiar with the term? So I shall define it for their benefit. An activist is one who acts for action's sake. One who meddles with things of which he is ignorant. One who puts his own pride and ambition above the common good. One who - to use a phrase with which you may be more familiar - darns a cloak which has no holes."

  Reynold smiled and sat back in his chair. This is a man who does not engage in argument, his demeanour said, but who is used to winning discussions. He has won this one, as any fool can see, and thus it is now at an end.

  And so, at last, all nine bloodtakers in that room were in agreement on something, albeit silently. Lanto, too, knew that the meeting was at an end - and felt anger at the manner of its demise.

  Orlandus had never expected any reception other than this, and so could not claim disappointment. Even so, his cheekbones pulsed with fury.

  As he and Lanto saw themselves from the room, hoping that the steward would be there to lead them back through the labyrinth, Orlandus turned towards the committee, with one last contribution he was unable to contain.

  "When," he said, the sweep of his gaze encompassing all seven, "did any of you lot ever darn a sock, let alone a cloak? Tossers!"

  "And that's your idea of best behaviour, is it, Orly?" murmured Lanto.

  But he smiled as he said it, and placed his arm along the younger man's back, as if to protect him against attacks from behind.

  ***

  They weren’t dead. That was the thing Josie had to keep telling herself, because really that was the whole point. Her three new colleagues had all committed ropetirement, successfully, but they weren’t dead. They weren’t dead any more; perhaps that was a better way of putting it.

  They had names, anyway - that was a help. The bloke was Ahmed, the older woman was Cheryl, and the younger woman was Kat. Of the three, Cheryl seemed to be adjusting the best - if adjusting was a word you could possibly use about someone who’d decided to kill herself, gone through with it, died, and was now working nights, for no pay, unloading grocery boxes from a delivery bay and unpacking them in a chilly storeroom.

  “No pay?” said Josie, as she and Cheryl manhandled a pig-sized package of frozen gammon steaks onto a countertop.

  “We’re on parole, see?” Cheryl slashed the box open, and began tossing its contents into a chest freezer. “It’s against the law to commit suicide, so when they bring you back, first thing they do is, they do you for that.”

  “They actually prosecute you?”

  Cheryl nodded. “Oh, yeah. Ten years imprisonment, that’s what I got. But when they restart you, you’re in hospital for a few weeks, you see? While they’re checking if it’s all worked, I suppose, all that. And legally, that counts as time served. Then they let you out on parole. Become a useful member of society, see?” She began slicing up the empty box, and chucking the pieces into the skip. She was a good worker: rhythmic, careful, able to chat-and-do simultaneously. It hadn’t surprised Josie at all when Cheryl had signed her membership forms. The staff who gave a damn about getting the job done properly, they were invariably the likeliest union recruits.

  Neither of the other two had joined. Ahmed did his work, answere
d politely when spoken to, managed a Good Evening at one end of the shift and a Good Night at the other. She had no complaints about Ahmed; came in, did his work, went home. But he obviously didn’t want to be there, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. Nothing wrong with that: probably applied to eighty per cent of the people Josie’d worked with on this job over the years.

  Kat had never said a word, not one. Not one since being restarted, according to her mother, who delivered and collected her. The overdose had done something to her brain, the mother reckoned. Something irretrievable had gone. “But they don’t care, do they? As long as she can still work.” Which she couldn’t, in fact, couldn’t do a thing, but Josie wasn’t going to tell anyone. Had no idea what might happen if she did. So she just stood Kat in a corner for her ten hours, out of harm’s way, and made sure she had a glass of water at regular intervals. That was the best she could do.

  Cheryl was different. Strong, for a woman in her eighties. All there, too - well, apart from a bit of her throat and a big lump out of her left wrist. Bright, friendly. Ideal colleague, really, and Josie was glad to have her.

  But, all the same … no wages? How long was it going to take before the whole bloody workforce was on no wages? God knew, there was no shortage of ropetirement victims ready to be restarted. Josie had two of them in her own family: an old uncle, and a second cousin, about poor Kat’s age, who’d left a note: “I can’t face another forty, fifty, sixty years of this. No point waiting to do this when I’m old, why not do it now?”

  Maybe people would stop killing themselves, once word got out about Restart. That’s what it was supposed to be, presumably - a deterrent. But maybe they wouldn't: that detective, Pipe, had told her that people could only be restarted under certain circumstances. If you could arrange to be decapitated, or for your body to be burned up, or to be undiscovered for at least seventy-two hours, you could stay dead. Desperate people would always grab at a chance, no matter how slight.

  “Cheryl?” They were on a ciggy break. In all honesty, Josie could do little enough for her members as union rep, but one thing - in her shop, there were regular breaks. They were illegal, against contract, and contrary to the European Free Enterprise Constitution, and if anyone wanted a fight about them they were more than welcome to come and have a go. “Do you mind me asking?”