Tony Ballantyne - CAPACITY

“I’m frightened,” Peter said. He was gasping for breath. He looked at Helen. “Helen, I’m sorry. Really, I’m sorry. Make her stop. I get the point. What you said was true, Judy. I can see that now. I never wanted to know what they did to them in the processing spaces.”

“To them ? Don’t depersonalize it, Peter.”

“To Helen,” he cried. “I admit it. Just stop it now. Please.”

“Stop what?” Judy said.

“Stop making me feel what Helen must have felt when she drowned. I understand the lesson.”

“What lesson?”

“Of how awful it must be to die in that way.”

“That isn’t the lesson,” Judy said.

“It should be,” Helen whispered, eyes filling with cold hatred.

She couldn’t relax. She was sinking down, her legs slipping forward in slow motion as if she had slid on ice and was falling backwards, her arms flung wide. Her head rolled back, resting itself on the mud behind her like a pillow. She wondered if she could feel her legs rising up from the sucking earth. She was doing what she was supposed to, wasn’t she? Cold wind on her face. Now she was beginning to panic. Then she saw someone coming along the duckboards. A man in a red-and-white candy-striped jacket. He carried an umbrella in one hand .

“ Help ,” Helen called . “ Over here! Help !” Her whole body was held in a soft, cold grip. Her left hand clenched cold mud, uselessly .

The man heard her cry and came towards her .

“ I’m drowning ,” sobbed Helen . “ Use your console. Get help .”

The man stopped on the walkway, leaning on his umbrella, and looked down at her. When he spoke it was in a puzzled voice. His words chilled her fear and replaced it with a sudden pang of sadness so deep she felt like crying .

“ Why should I ?” he asked .

Peter gave a whimper. “That’s horrible.”

“How do you feel on hearing that?”

“Alone. Abandoned. That someone has so little humanity…Didn’t he understand how she felt?”

“All too well.”

Mud was forming a circle around Helen’s face. She was looking out into the world of life from a cold, sucking grave .

“ Please !” she said. She was looking up at a tall man with brushed-back hair, and she could hear the sluggish rhythm of the mud as it sucked her down. The man placed the tip of the umbrella on her forehead, and a dribble of muddy water ran into her mouth. She coughed and spat, but more water ran into her mouth straightaway. She tried to say “ No ” and choked on yet more water. And then there was just pressure on her forehead as the umbrella tip pushed her down. She saw mud all around her, curling down towards her in a slow wave. She closed her mouth and felt mud slide over her nose. She took a last despairing breath and registered the man on the duckboards gazing at her, then the soft brown wave folded down over her, then that was it. Buried alive. Sinking deeper into the darkness. Her chest was starting to hurt. She so wanted to breathe…

“…slipping down into the earth, oh it’s so bright up there and so dark here below and there is no breath holding holding not breathing dragged away from the light…” Peter was rambling. He opened his eyes and, with some surprise, seemed to see where he was. He was gasping for air.

“Okay, stop,” he panted. “Stop! I get it now.” He couldn’t catch his breath. Nor could Helen. She found that she was rubbing her face, rubbing her nose, clearing it of imaginary mud. She wanted to spit, to wash her mouth out.

Peter was hyperventilating. “I never saw it before,” he gulped. “That was the reality, wasn’t it? That’s what it was all about. That was what I was doing. All the time on the ship, and I never realized.”

He wouldn’t look at Helen. Instead, he gazed at Judy, looked at the floor, did anything but look at Helen.

“I never knew.”

“You never wanted to know.”

“I never did.” He looked around his apartment, studiously avoiding Helen. He looked at the pictures and sculptures that decorated his room. “All of this, art and comfort, I wrapped myself up in it. I never allowed myself to see what suffering was like. I retreated from the real world-”

And, for the first time that day, Judy really lost her temper. It was genuine, Helen was convinced. She could feel that anger, focused by the effect of the pill. Judy’s voice was so cold and disparaging that Helen cringed.

“The real world? You…you wanker . You’ve always lived in the real world, whether in the atomic world or in this processing space. Don’t try to dignify or excuse or explain what you helped create by saying that it is the real world!”

“That’s not what I meant-”

“Isn’t it? Do you really know that? Or has the great lie infiltrated you and you don’t know it yet?”

“What?”

“Okay, Peter. Break’s over. Let’s feel what it was like at the end.”

Judy stood up, turned to face Helen. “You’ll probably want to step into the next room for this part,” she said. Helen felt a wash of emotion from Judy that filled her with a mixture of horror and delight. She was going to take it all the way. Helen wasn’t so sure if that was part of Judy’s original plan; she was taking Peter’s comments personally. Helen walked from the room as Judy stared down at Peter, her black eyes glittering.

Peter’s bedroom was dominated by a huge picture window that looked out to sea. The Shawl hung high up in the blue sky, the sun lighting up one side in a harlequin pattern. How far up into the sky did it reach?

From next door she could hear low voices, she could feel the edge of a wave of emotion. She didn’t want to think about it. Instead, she thought about the Shawl. Judy had said that someday you would be able to walk along the Shawl all the way to the moon, to Mars, to Jupiter. Was that possible?

A message flashed up on her console. It was time to return to the lounge.

Peter was slumped on the sofa. Judy was examining one of the erotic sculptures that stood on a wall shelf: a woman sitting in the lap of a man, her legs wrapped around his back.

“Do you like this sort of thing, Helen?” she asked. Helen barely glanced at the sculpture, too busy staring at the man on the sofa.

“Will he be all right?” she asked.

“Oh, yes.”

Pity , thought Helen. Too late she remembered the red pill of MTPH, still in her system. Judy gave her a thoughtful look before directing her attention back towards him.

“So, Peter, we’ve almost finished. I’ve just got one more question. We know how the processing space was put into operation. What I want to know now is how the interface with the clients of the Private Network was to be made.”

His voice was a dull monotone. “Some of the clients had themselves loaded in there before the processing space was even launched. They were planning on taking a long holiday. The other ones would interface via secure directed pipes. The long-timers would leave that way too when they were finished.”

“That’s what we thought,” Judy said, glancing at Helen. “So that will be our lead to Kevin. Social Care will be performing a forensic on the impression made of the processing space before it totally collapsed. There will be some clues left as to who has been in there; VRep patterns are pretty good at retaining their integrity. One of them should give us a lead to the people who set that place up.”

Helen nodded. “Good,” she said.

Judy replaced the erotic sculpture on the shelf and moved calmly to the middle of the room. The violent emotion she had displayed earlier had completely evaporated.