Slow Bullets Read online

  “Murder, you mean?” Yesli asked.

  “Supposition,” Prad said. “I am just saying that there are possibilities we should not discount. One of us—I mean, one of the survivors—crew or . . . otherwise. One of us could be from the planet below.” He paused. “Except not the crew, obviously. There aren’t many of us left, and we all know each other. But would you soldiers or civilians know if one of you didn’t belong?”

  “None of us fucking belong,” I clarified.

  “I mean in the sense that there is someone who was not even from the war. Not even from our own time. Would you necessarily know? You are all strangers now.”

  “We would need to know,” Yesli said. “For the safety of the ship. For the knowledge they might have. We would need to find this stowaway, if they aren’t already dead. For the moment, that is more important than finding a war criminal.”

  “Well, you can rule me out,” I said. “Orvin knew me, and I knew Orvin. That eliminates both of us.”

  “I would not have ranked you very high in the list of suspects,” Yesli said.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered whether you knew Orvin or not,” Prad said. “You are a soldier. From our conversations, it is clear that you believe that you have a slow bullet inside you. I have no reason to doubt you.”

  “You can read the bullets,” I said.

  “Read the information in them, yes. The biographical military data, the medical histories. Even if I can’t access any of that, the mere existence of a bullet will be enough to vindicate anyone’s story. The stowaway almost certainly won’t have one.”

  “Neither will any of the civilians,” Yesli said.

  “That is true, but the military prisoners constitute by far the biggest sample of our population. We can scan their bullets very easily—display the contents on a slate, if need be. It will be much easier than our original hunt for Orvin.”

  “And if all of us soldiers turn out to have bullets?”

  “Then we move onto the civilians. They are smaller in number and more inclined to stick together. Soldiers are habitually suspicious of their fellows—especially military prisoners.”

  “You’re an expert now.”

  “I am merely making an observation, Scur. Civilians are garrulous. This is in their nature, especially when confronted with an unfamiliar situation. I imagine a stowaway would find it quite difficult to hide themselves effectively.” He shrugged. “Whatever the case, we will find them sooner or later.”

  Yesli arranged another work team to search the capsule, and soon after that they found a spacesuit of unfamiliar design, stuffed into a locker not far from the docking port. In the meantime, Prad and I returned to the main part of the ship and prepared to coordinate the reading of the slow bullets.

  “This is a distraction,” I said. “I want Orvin, not this nameless stowaway.”

  “There’s no law that says we can’t look for two things at once.” Prad was fiddling with his slate, adjusting the settings so that it could talk to my bullet. “Are you serious about Orvin—your intentions with him? Wouldn’t it be enough to hand him over to the Trinity, let justice have its way?”

  “He doesn’t deserve justice.”

  “You frighten me a little, Scur. I wonder what you’d do to me, if I ever got on the wrong side of you.”

  “I’d think of something creative.”

  Prad handed me the slate as the information scrolled across its surface. “There. Solid read. A few corrupted sectors, some anomalous parity checks, but otherwise it’s all still there.”

  I glanced at him. “Don’t you want to read it yourself?”

  “To check on your story?”

  “You only have my word that I’m here because of some mistake. Maybe I lied about that. Maybe I’m as bad as all the rest of them—the worst of the worst. Maybe you should be afraid of me.”

  “And I’m a civilian technician. I wouldn’t know one military history from another. Does it make some sort of sense to you? I want to make sure we’re reading out your bullet, and not one belonging to someone in the next room.”

  “No,” I said after a moment. “This is me.” And I tilted the slate around for Prad’s benefit. “These pictures—these are my mother and father.” Blank faces, staring into government cameras on census day. “They were good people—too good for those around them. My father made enemies, by being a good man. They got at him by getting at me—arranging my conscription, even though I wasn’t supposed to be put into the military.” I stroked a finger across their images, wishing that they looked happier. “He blamed himself for it. They both blamed themselves. And when I was injured after the ceasefire, and put on this ship . . . they’d never have known what happened to me, would they?”

  “We must all have been presumed lost,” Prad offered.

  “I wanted them to know I was all right, and that I didn’t blame either of them. It wasn’t their fault. And I wanted them to know that I’d made it through the war, that I was on my way home.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “You must have your own family, Prad.”

  “I do. Did. But there’s no slow bullet inside me. No history, no images to recall.”

  “Then it’s worse for you.”

  “I do not think it is easy for any of us. But I am glad that you have been validated. I did not doubt you, Scur.”

  “But others might have.”

  I scrolled down through the long accounting of my service history. It was all in here. Training, deployments—victories and losses. My injuries and recuperation episodes. Redeployment. Names and places I had already begun to forget.

  “The bullets are safe, I suppose. If they’ve held the information this long, they must be immune to whatever’s got hold of the ship.” I held the slate against my chest, like a shield. “This is safe—it’s always going to be there, inside me.”

  “I hope it gives you some strength, Scur.”

  “It will.”

  “But there will be difficulties ahead, I think. To an extent, our pasts are private now. They have been erased by the accident—the thing that happened to Caprice. But the bullets leave nothing to doubt. The worst of us will be known to us all.”

  “We’ll have to deal with it. Openness, transparency.”

  Prad nodded. “But rather easy to say, when you have objective proof of your own innocence. Would you have been so eager to allow me to read the bullet, if you knew it revealed some awful crime you’d committed? Some terrible atrocity or moral failing? That you were a war criminal, a butcher, a defector or traitor?”

  He was right, but I had no good answer for him.

  ______________

  We do not choose our friends in life; life does that for us. Prad and I had nothing in common beyond our intertwined fates on Caprice. We had known different lives before the war and different lives during it. He had never been asked to kill someone, or hate someone for wearing a different uniform or believing in the words of a different Book. That was a difference which nothing could bridge.

  But he was the first person I had spoken to since my awakening, and we had worked together to achieve that first flimsy truce. That was enough to force a bond between us. I felt I had more in common with Prad than with many of my fellow soldiers. Regardless of what side they had been on during the war, they had all done something to merit being on this ship—violated some rule or other. Some of those infractions might be minor or excusable—some might even, under the circumstances of combat, be morally justifiable.

  But the point was that none of us could be sure. We were free to invent our pasts, to lie about what we had done or perhaps failed to do. On the contrary, though, I could be perfectly sure of myself. And I could be sure that Prad was just a technician, as innocent in his way as me. It meant that I found it easier to trust this man than any other soldier or civilian aboard the ship, save for the other crew. And I think Prad, being naturally fearful of the soldiers who made up the bulk of the awakened, was glad to have me as a re
ference point, a reassurance that warriors such as I did not automatically hold people like him in contempt.

  “We can work together,” I told him, when his doubts were surfacing. “It’ll be hard, but we have no other choice. Fundamentally, we’re all just human beings, caught up in some shit we didn’t ask for.”

  “I have heard that soldiers are different,” Prad said hesitantly. “Different from engineers and technicians like me, at any rate.” There was a sort of diffidence in his voice, as if I might take offence at this generalisation.

  “In what sense?”

  “You soldiers tend to be believers. Many of you read the Book, one version of it or another. Is this not the case?”

  “And it isn’t like that with you and your colleagues?”

  “Most of us, no,” Prad said emphatically. “Of course I have known some technicians who were religiously inclined. But even then I never sensed that they took the writings all that seriously. It was more that they came from a family of believers, and they did not want to disappoint their elders or give up a custom too readily.” After a moment he said: “Some of these people were even my friends. It was never against the law to have religious leanings, even in the technical staff of a Hundred Worlds starliner.”

  “Well, it’s not too different for soldiers. Yes, many of us do read the Book—our version of it or theirs.”

  “The differences seem slight to outsiders.”

  “If you decide that these things matter at all, then so do the differences.”

  “And you, Scur—someone who took the differences seriously?”

  I allowed a silence before answering—I did not want Prad to think that any of this was simple or beneath consideration.

  “My parents both read the Book,” I said. “They were believers, if you want to call them that. But it was not the only thing in their lives. My mother taught me Giresun’s poetry—that was against the law. My father was also very open minded. He liked to mention that many of their prophets were our prophets, and vice versa. That many of the commandments were alike, word for word. Besides, it was never clear-cut: some of our side were allowed to read their Book, and some of their side were allowed to read our Book. Nothing is as simple as some people make out.”

  “But if your parents were believers, did you not follow their example?” Prad was squinting now, as if trying to follow a difficult calculation.

  I shook my head. “I was schooled in the Book, made to memorise whole parts of it. So were we all. In that sense, the Book is part of me. I feel an affection for the language that I can’t even begin to explain to you.”

  Prad nodded for me to continue.

  “There’s also a lot of common sense in it,” I went on. “Just basic good advice for living a decent life, being kind, thinking of your neighbours and so on. My father was a devout man, but also honest in his business dealings. He took that from the Book, even though it brought trouble on us as a family.”

  “Then the Book can damage, if you follow it too literally.”

  “Perhaps. But there are also many parts that can help you when you have a difficult decision or are facing an unpleasant time in your life.”

  “But you do not, at heart, believe in its literal truth.”

  “If I ever did, I don’t remember when I stopped believing. But that doesn’t mean that I disowned the Book. The language was still as beautiful as ever, the wisdom just as comforting. When Orvin caught me, he thought he would hurt me by hurting my Book.”

  “Did he?”

  “Less than he hoped for, but yes. I still did not like to see him doing what he did.”

  “This seems like a very enlightened attitude,” Prad said. “I sincerely hope that it is shared by many of your fellows. If it is, there may yet be a chance we may be able to rub along.”

  “There will always be true believers.”

  “None of you came with your Books,” Prad said. “You had no possessions, nothing with you except the clothes you were wearing when you went into hibo. And there are no physical copies of the Book anywhere on this ship. Trust me: I would have seen them. What will the believers do now, without their scripture?”

  “Learn to live without the Book,” I said. “Just as we’ll have to learn to live without many other things.” Easier said than done, of course. But then I thought to add: “The ship’s memory.”

  “What of it?”

  “You said it contained cultural knowledge.”

  “This is true.”

  “You wouldn’t have to believe in the Book, either theirs or ours, to regard the texts as having cultural value. They must still be in the memory, mustn’t they?”

  “They aren’t,” Prad said quickly. “I am afraid they were among the first sectors to be lost, when the ship had to protect its core data.”

  “You’re sure of this?”

  “Oh yes. It was one of the first things I checked. I am very sorry, Scur.”

  It never occurred to me to think that that was a very odd coincidence, that the Books should be lost so early in the great forgetting. But then I have always been a touch naïve.

  ______________

  Just as no military plan ever survives the first contact with the enemy, so our search scheme proved hopelessly idealised.

  We thought we had struck lucky early in the operation, when one of the soldiers appeared not to have a bullet. It was a woman who spoke in a dialect similar to my own, and who appeared to have no difficulty mixing with her fellow survivors. She had offered a convincing account of her wartime deeds. When she was brought before the Trinity she seemed properly fearful, unable to grasp why she had been singled out in this manner. Perhaps our newcomer was more skilled at blending in than I had presumed.

  But Prad was wisely cautious. Yesli also noted that she was also too tall to have been a comfortable fit for the abandoned spacesuit.

  “I have a bullet,” the woman said, with fierce conviction. “I remember them putting it in. No one forgets that.”

  As it happened, there were others like her. It turned out that about one in twenty of us had bullets which were no longer working properly, no longer able to be addressed by the slates. Once we knew that it was easy enough to set up a second level of screening, using a portable medical scanner. But that was more time-consuming than the slates and it couldn’t discriminate between a dead bullet and a piece of shrapnel that had a similar size and shape. More questioning was needed, and so the Trinity appointed additional interrogators to dig deeper into the accounts offered by these questionable cases.

  One by one, all of them proved plausible.

  We continued the search. There was unrest, but that was to be expected. People were already jumpy after Orvin’s escape and the unpleasant business with Crowl. But we could not very well announce that there was likely to be an impostor among us. They would have torn apart anyone with a slightly odd dialect, a story with a few discrepancies.

  In a sea of doubts you cling to the smallest of truths. I had Prad read out my bullet again. There was much more information in it than I could absorb on a single reading. It was touching, in a way, how much my superiors had felt they needed to know about me. It was all there, scrolling across the slate. Things I barely remembered about myself. You could reconstruct half my life from the bullet’s whisperings.

  But again and again, it was the pictures of my mother and father that I kept returning to. Gone now, of course. How could it be otherwise? They were as lost to me as I was to them. I wished that I had pictures of them as they were when they were happy, before politics and war and spitefulness made a mess of our lives.

  But this was better than nothing.

  ______________

  “I don’t know what to do,” Yesli said. “Whether to punish them, or reward them for their initiative.”

  “Punish them for what?” I asked.

  “Vandalism.”

  With two search efforts ongoing—one to find Orvin, another to find our stowaway—it was amazing that our p
eople had time for anything but sleep. But in fact they had time for a great many things, including fighting and fucking and telling stories.

  Storytelling is another word for being interrogated.

  To begin with it was a way of filling the dead hours, a way of not thinking about what was ahead of us. We all wanted to know who we had to share this ship with. But as news got out—as it was bound to do—that there was someone here who did not belong—the storytelling took on a different aspect. Now it had become a form of testing. The weak among us, those who had been born with a face that just happened to look suspicious, those who had something else to hide—these were the ones who were made to go over their stories again and again, in the hope that the telling would expose some latent falsehood. It was no different in kind to the interrogations being served out by the Trinity, but at least the Trinity was trying to be methodical and dispassionate. Some of these storytelling sessions did not go well for the teller. There were no deaths, yet, but there was blood and I knew we could not afford to fall back into chaos.

  So when Yesli showed me the vandalism, I was actually pleased to see something that did not involve mutual fear and suspicion.

  Using their slates, some of the search parties had begun to dig into the ship’s slowly vanishing cultural memory. They knew that we had about a thousand days before all this knowledge would be lost, and this awareness had motivated them to preserve what they could.

  The slates, as Prad had explained, had no memory of their own. But they could selectively display any record from the ship’s total surviving memory. If this knowledge could be transcribed onto a different medium, it might yet be conserved. Clearly, we would have used paper if we had paper, and a means to mark it.

  But we had walls, and ceilings, and floors. More walls and ceilings and floors than we could bare to imagine.

  We had nothing that could mark a surface in the same manner as ink, but many tools that could scratch a line. So they took their slates, called up a record from memory, and engraved it into metal with sweat and muscle. By the time Yesli found out what they were doing, they had already covered several metres of corridor in lines both neat and less than neat. You could tell the hand of each scriber, and within each hand you could see the evidence of early clumsiness and slowly gathering ability. The first marks were scratchy, rife with mistakes. The letters and words were too large. As they progressed, a sort of confident regularity began to win through. They began to scratch in fine guiding lines, and set neat ordered words down on those staves.