The Naked God

by Peter F. Hamilton

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  The walls of the prison cell were made from some kind of dull-grey composite, not quite cool enough to be metal, but just as hard. Louise had touched them once before sinking down onto the single cot and hugging her legs, knees tucked up under her chin. The gravity was about half that of Norfolk, better than Phobos, at least; though the air was cooler than it had been on the Jamrana. She spent some time wondering about Endron, the old systems specialist from the Far Realm, thinking he might have betrayed them and alerted High York’s authorities, then decided it really didn’t matter. Her one worry now was that she’d been separated from Gen; her sister would be very frightened by what was happening.

  And I got her into this mess. Mother will kill me.

  Except Mother was in no position to do anything. Louise hugged herself tighter, fighting the way her lips kept trembling.

  The door slid open, and two female police officers stepped in. Louise assumed they were police, they wore pale blue uniforms with Govcentral’s bronze emblem on their shoulders, depicting a world where continents shaped as hands gripped together.

  “Okay, Kavanagh,” said the one with sergeant stripes. “Let’s go.”

  Louise straightened her legs, looking cautiously from one to the other.

  “Where?”

  “Interview.”

  “I’d just shove you out the bloody airlock, it’s up to me,” said the other. “Trying to sneak one of those bastards in here. Bitch.”

  “Leave it,” the sergeant ordered.

  “I wasn’t …” Louise started. She pursed her lips helplessly. It was so complicated, and heaven only knew how many laws she’d broken on the way to High York.

  They marched her down a short corridor and into another room. It made her think of hospitals. White walls, everything clean, a table in the middle that was more like a laboratory bench, cheap waiting room chairs, various processor blocks in a tall rack in one corner, more lying on the table.

  Brent Roi was sitting behind the table; he’d taken off the customs uniform he’d worn to greet the Jamrana, now he was in the same blue suit as the officers escorting her. He waved her into the chair facing him.

  Louise sat, hunching her shoulders exactly the way she was always scolding Gen for doing. She waited for a minute with downcast eyes, then glanced up. Brent Roi was giving her a level stare.

  “You’re not a possessed,” he said. “The tests prove that.”

  Louise pulled nervously at the black one-piece overall she’d been given, the memory of those tests vivid in her mind. Seven armed guards had been pointing their machine guns at her as the technicians ordered her to strip. They’d put her inside sensor loops, pressed hand-held scanners against her, taken samples. It was a million times worse than any medical examination. Afterwards, the only thing she’d been allowed to keep was the medical nanonic package round her wrist.

  “That’s good,” she said in a tiny voice.

  “So how did he blackmail you?”

  “Who?”

  “The possessed guy calling himself Fletcher Christian.”

  “Um. He didn’t blackmail me, he was looking after us.”

  “So you rolled over and let him fuck you in return for protection against the other possessed?”

  “No.”

  Brent Roi shrugged. “He preferred your little sister?”

  “No! Fletcher is a decent man. You shouldn’t say such things.”

  “Then what the hell are you doing here, Louise? Why did you try and infiltrate a possessed into the O’Neill Halo?”

  “I wasn’t. It’s not like that. We came here to warn you.”

  “Warn who?”

  “Earth. Govcentral. There’s somebody coming here. Somebody terrible.”

  “Yeah?” Brent Roi raised a sceptical eyebrow. “Who’s that then?”

  “He’s called Quinn Dexter. I’ve met him, he’s worse than any normal possessed. Much worse.”

  “In what way?”

  “More powerful. And he’s full of hate. Fletcher says there’s something wrong about him, he’s different somehow.”

  “Ah, the expert on possession. Well, if anyone is going to know, it’ll be him.”

  Louise frowned, unsure why the official was being so difficult. “We came here to warn you,” she insisted. “Dexter said he was coming to Earth. He wants revenge on someone called Banneth. You have to guard all the spaceports, and make sure he doesn’t get down to the surface. It would be a disaster. He’ll start the possession down there.”

  “And why do you care?”

  “I told you. I’ve met him. I know what he’s like.”

  “Worse than ordinary possessed; yet you seemed to have survived. How did you manage that, Louise?”

  “We were helped.”

  “By Fletcher?”

  “No … I don’t know who it was.”

  “All right, so you escaped this fate worse than death, and you came here to warn us.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get off Norfolk, Louise?”

  “I bought tickets on a starship.”

  “I see. And you took Fletcher Christian with you. Were you worried there were possessed among the starship crew?”

  “No. That was one place I was sure there wouldn’t be any possessed.”

  “So although you knew there were no possessed on board, you still took Christian with you as protection. Was that your idea, or his?”

  “I … It … He was with us. He’d been with us since we left home.”

  “Where is home, Louise?”

  “Cricklade manor. But Dexter came and possessed everyone. That’s when we fled to Norwich.”

  “Ah yes, Norfolk’s capital. So you brought Christian with you to Norwich. Then when that started to fall to the possessed, you thought you’d better get offplanet, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know Christian was a possessed when you bought the tickets?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And when you bought them, did you also know Dexter wanted to come to Earth?”

  “No, that was after.”

  “So was it dear old samaritan Fletcher Christian who suggested coming here to warn us?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you agreed to help him?”

  “Yes.”

  “So where were you going to go originally, before Fletcher Christian made you change your mind and come here?”

  “Tranquillity.”

  Brent Roi nodded in apparent fascination. “That’s a rather strange place for a young lady from Norfolk’s landowner class to go. What made you choose that habitat?”

  “My fiancé lives there. If anyone can protect us, he can.”

  “And who is your fiancé, Louise?”

  She smiled sheepishly. “Joshua Calvert.”

  “Joshua Cal … You mean Lagrange Calvert?”

  “No, Joshua.”

  “The captain of the Lady Macbeth?”

  “Yes. Do you know him?”

  “Let’s say, the name rings a bell.” He sat back and folded his arms, regarding Louise with a strangely mystified expression.

  “Can I see Genevieve now?” she asked timidly. No one had actually said she was under arrest yet. She felt a lot more confident now the policeman had actually listened to her story.

  “In a little while, possibly. We just have to review the information you’ve provided us with.”

  “You do believe me about Quinn Dexter, don’t you? You must make sure he doesn’t get down to Earth.”

  “Oh, I assure you, we will do everything we can to make sure he doesn’t get through our security procedures.”

  “Thank you.” She glanced awkwardly at the two female officers standing on either side of her chair. “What’s going to happen to Fletcher?”


  “I don’t know, Louise, that’s not my department. But I imagine they’ll attempt to flush him out of the body he’s stolen.”

  “Oh.” She stared at the floor.

  “Do you think they’re wrong to try that, Louise?”

  “No. I suppose not.” The words were troubling to speak; the truth, but not what was right. None of what had happened was right.

  “Good.” Brent Roi signalled her escort. “We’ll talk again in a little while.” When the door closed behind her, he couldn’t help a grimace of pure disbelief.

  “What do you think?” his supervisor datavised.

  “I have never heard someone sprout quite so much bullshit in a single interview before,” Brent Roi replied. “Either she’s a retard, or we’re up against a new type of possessed infiltration.”

  “She’s not a retard.”

  “Then what the hell is she? Nobody is that dumb, it’s not possible.”

  “I don’t believe she’s dumb, either. Our problem is, we’re so used to dealing with horrendous complexities of subterfuge, we never recognise the simple truth when we see it.”

  “Oh come on, you don’t actually believe that story?”

  “She is, as you said, from the Norfolk landowner class; that doesn’t exactly prepare her for the role of galactic master criminal. And she is travelling with her sister.”

  “That’s just cover.”

  “Brent, you are depressingly cynical.”

  “Yes, sir.” He held on to his exasperation, it never made the slightest impression on his supervisor. The anonymous entity who had guided the last twenty years of his life lacked many ordinary human responses. There were times when Brent Roi wondered if he was actually dealing with a xenoc. Not that there was much he could do about that now; whatever branch of whatever agency the supervisor belonged to, it was undoubtedly a considerable power within Govcentral. His own smooth, accelerated promotion through the Halo police force was proof of that.

  “There are factors of Miss Kavanagh’s story which my colleagues and I find uniquely interesting.”

  “Which factors?” Brent asked.

  “You know better than that.”

  “All right. What do you want me to do with her?”

  “Endron has confirmed the Phobos events to the Martian police, however we must establish exactly what happened to Kavanagh on Norfolk. Initiate a direct memory retrieval procedure.”

  Over the last five hundred years, the whole concept of Downtown had acquired a new-ish and distinctly literal meaning in New York; naturally enough, so did Uptown. One thing, though, would never change; the arcology still jealously guarded its right to boast the tallest individual building on the planet. While the odd couple of decades per century might see the title stolen away by upstart rivals in Europe or Asia, the trophy always came home eventually.

  The arcology now sprawled across more than four thousand square kilometres, housing (officially) three hundred million people. With New Manhattan at the epicentre, fifteen crystalline domes, twenty kilometres in diameter, were clumped together in a semicircle along the eastern seaboard, sheltering entire districts of ordinary skyscrapers (defined as buildings under one kilometre high) from the pummelling heat and winds.

  Where the domes intersected, gigantic conical megatowers soared up into the contused sky. More than anything, these colossi conformed to the old concept of “arcology” as a single city-in-a-building. They had apartments, shopping malls, factories, offices, design bureaus, stadiums, universities, parks, police stations, council chambers, hospitals, restaurants, bars, and spaces for every other human activity of the Twenty-seventh Century. Thousands of their inhabitants were born, lived, and died inside them without ever once leaving.

  At five and a half kilometres tall, the Reagan was the current global champion, its kilometre-wide base resting on the bedrock where the town of Ridgewood had stood in the times before the armada storms. An apartment on any of its upper fifty floors cost fifteen million fuseodollars apiece, and the last one was sold twelve years before they were built. Their occupants, the new breed of Uptowners, enjoyed a view as spectacular as it was possible to have on Earth. Although impenetrably dense cloud swathed the arcology for a minimum of two days out of every seven; when it was clear the hot air was very clear indeed. Far below them, under the transparent hexagonal sheets which comprised the roof of the domes, the tide of life ebbed and flowed for their amusement. By day, an exotic hustle as kaleidoscope rivers of vehicles flowed along the elevated 3D web of roads and rails; by night, a shimmering tapestry of neon pixels.

  Surrounding the Reagan, streets and skyscrapers fanned out in a radial of deep carbon-concrete canyons, like buttress roots climbing up to support the main tower. The lower levels of these canyons were badly cluttered, where the skyscraper bases were twice as broad as their peaks, and the elevated roads formed a complex intersecting grid for the first hundred and fifty metres above the ground. High expressways throwing off curving slip roads at each junction down to the local traffic lanes; broad freight-only flyovers shaking from the eighty-tonne autotrucks grumbling along them twenty-four hours a day, winding like snakes into tunnels which led to sub-basement loading yards; metro transit carriages gliding along a mesh of rails so labyrinthine that only an AI could run the network. Rents were cheap near the ground, where there was little light but plenty of noise, and the heavy air gusting between dirty vertical walls had been breathed a hundred times before. Entropy in the arcology meant a downward drift. Everything that was worn-out, obsolete, demode, economically redundant—down it came to settle on the ground, where it could descend no further. People as well as objects.

  Limpet-like structures proliferated among the crisscross of road support girders bridging the gap between the skyscrapers, shanty igloos woven from salvaged plastic and carbotanium composite, multiplying over the decades until they clotted into their own light-killing roof. Under them, leeched to the streets themselves, were the market stalls and fast-food counters; a souk economy of fifth-hand cast-offs and date-expired sachets shuffled from family to family in an eternal round robin. Crime here was petty and incestuous, gangs ruled their turf, pushers ruled the gangs.

  Police made token patrols in the day, and went off-shift as the unseen sun sank below the rim of the domes above.

  This was Downtown. It was everywhere, but always beneath the feet of ordinary citizens, invisible. Quinn adored it. The people who dwelt here were almost in the ghost realm already; nothing they did ever affected the real world.

  He walked up out of the subway onto a gloomy street jammed with canopied stalls and wheel-less vans, all with their skirt of goods guarded by vigilant owners. Graffiti struggled with patches of pale mould for space on the skyscraper walls. There were few windows, and those were merely armoured slits revealing little of the mangy shops and bars inside.

  Metallic thunder from the roads above was as permanent as the air which carried it.

  Several looks were quickly thrown Quinn’s way before eyes were averted for fear of association. He smiled to himself as he strode confidently among the stalls. As if his attitude wasn’t enough to mark him out as an interloper, he had clothed himself in his jet-black priest robe again.

  It was the simplest way. He wanted to find the sect, but he’d never been to New York before. Everybody in Downtown knew about the sect, this was their prime recruiting ground. There would be a coven close by, there always was. He just needed someone who knew the location.

  Sure enough, he hadn’t got seventy metres from the subway when they saw him. A pair of waster kids busy laughing as they pissed on the woman they’d just beaten unconscious. Her two-year-old kid lay on the sidewalk bawling as blood and urine pooled round its feet. The victim’s bag had been ripped apart, scattering its pitiful contents on the ground around her. They put Quinn in mind of Jackson Gael; late-adolescence, with pumped bodies, their muscle shape defined by some exercise but mostly tailored-hormones. One of them wore a T-shirt with the slogan: CHEMI
CAL WARFARE MACHINE. The other was more body-proud, favouring a naked torso.

  He was the one who saw Quinn first, grunted in amazement, and nudged his partner. They sealed their flies and sauntered over.

  Quinn slowly pushed his hood down. Hyper-sensitive to trouble, the street was de-populating rapidly. Pedestrians, already nervous from the mugging, slipped away behind the forest of support pillars. Market stall shutters were slammed down.

  The two waster kids stopped in front of Quinn, who grinned in welcome. “I haven’t had sex for ages,” Quinn said. He looked straight at the one wearing the T-shirt. “So I think I’ll fuck you first tonight.”

  The waster kid snarled, and threw a punch with all the strength his inflated muscles could manage. Quinn remained perfectly still. The fist struck his jaw, just to the left of his chin. There was a crunch which could easily be heard above the traffic’s clamour. The waster kid bellowed, first in shock, then in agony. His whole body shook as he slowly pulled his hand back. Every knuckle was broken, as if he had punched solid stone. He cradled it with frightened tenderness, whimpering.

  “I’d like to say take me to your leader,” Quinn said, as if he hadn’t even noticed the punch. “But organising yourselves takes brains. So I guess I’m out of luck.”

  The second waster kid had paled, shaking his head and taking a couple of steps backward.

  “Don’t run,” Quinn said, his voice sharp.

  The waster kid paused for a second, then turned and bolted. His jeans burst into flames. He screamed, stumbling to a halt, and flailing wildly at the burning fabric. His hands ignited. The shock silenced him for a second as he held them up disbelievingly in front of his face. Then he screamed again, and kept on screaming, staggering about drunkenly. He crashed into one of the flimsy stalls which crumpled, folding about him.

  The fire was burning deeper into his flesh now, spreading along his arms, and up onto his torso. His screaming became weaker as he bucked about in the smouldering wreckage.

  The T-shirted kid raced over to him. But all he could do was look down in a horror of indecision as the flames grew hotter.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he wailed at Quinn. “Stop it. Stop it!”