She leaned toward him confidingly and took his left hand in hers: “If we succeed, I can give her back to you, Franz. There’s a medical replicator in the medical suite aboard the CG-52. My support ship. It’s expensive and against normal operational procedure, but they can clone her a new body and download her into it. You can have her back again if that’s what you want. As long as you’re willing to do some things for me.”
“Things?” Franz felt himself leaning toward her, drawn by the terrible force of her will and by the abominable hope she dangled in front of him. Bring Erica back? In return for … what? His stomach churned with hope and dread.
“They’re not the sort of jobs I can give an ordinary subordinate. They’re jobs that only someone who’s lived among feral humans for several years can do.”
“What jobs?”
She pulled his hand close, placing it palm down on her thigh. “You fell in love, didn’t you? That’s still supposed to be possible for us, but I’ve never heard of two ReMastered who did it to each other at the same time. So you’ll have a better grasp of how to use the phenomenon to manipulate ferals than anyone else here.” She smelled of floral extracts, and something else: the musk of power, sebaceous glands expressing pheromones that were only switched on in alpha ReMastered.
It was exciting and frightening and made him angry. He dropped his glass and pulled back, away from her. “I don’t want—”
She was on her feet, then leaning over him. “I don’t care what you want,” she said coolly. “Unless it’s U. Erica. In which case you’ll do as I say with a shit-eating grin for the next three months, won’t you?”
He stared at her breasts. Under the thin layers of silk he could see her nipples, aureoles flushed and crinkled with dominance. The dizzying smell was getting to him. His own traitorous hope prevented him from resisting. “Love is a grossly underrated tool within the Directorate, Franz. You’re going to teach me how to use it.”
“How—”
“Hush.” She pulled up the skirts of her gown, bunched them around her waist, and sat down on his lap. He couldn’t get away, much less force himself not to respond to her dominance pheromones. He grew stiff and felt his face flush as she unbuttoned his comic-opera jacket and rubbed her breasts against him. “I want you to teach me about love. It’s going to take a few sessions, but that’s all right — we’ve got time for a first lesson right now. How did you do it with her? Did she start it, or did you, or was it something else?” She began to work at the buttons of his trousers. “If you want to see her again, you’ll show me what you did for her…”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
The Times of London — thundering the news since 1785! Now brought to you by Frank the Nose, sponsored by Thum und Taxis Arbeitsgemeinschaft, Melting Clock Interstellar Scheduling Specialists PLC, Bank Muamalat al-Failaka, Capek Robotica Universuum, and The First Universal Church of Kermit
LEADER
Let’s talk some more about the Moscow disaster and its inevitable fallout — this time from the point of view of the people at ground zero, staring down the flight path of the oncoming bullets. These people are edgy and unhappy, and you should be, too — because what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and if we allow this slow-motion atrocity to set a precedent, we might be the next bird on the block.
New Dresden is not a McWorld: it’s a shitty little flea hole populated by pathologically suspicious Serbs, bumptiously snobbish Saxons, three different flavors of Balkan refugee, and an entire bestiary of psychopathic nationalist loons. The planetary national sport is the grudge match, at which they are undisputed past masters. I say “past masters” for a reason — they’re not as bad as they used to be. The planet has been unified for the past ninety years, since the survivors finished merrily slaughtering everyone else, formed a federation, had a nifty little planetary-scale nuclear war, formed another federation, and buried the hatchet (in one another’s backs).
For most of the past forty years, New Dresden has been ruled by a sinister lunatic, Colonel-General Palacky, chairman of PORC, the Planetary Organization of Revolutionary Councils. Most of Palacky’s policies were dictated by his astrologers, including his now-notorious abolition of the currency and its replacement with bills divisible by 9, his lucky number. Palacky was a raving egomaniac; he renamed the month of January after himself and fixed the rest of the calendar, too, except for November and December (his mother-in-law got August, for some reason). However, toward the end, he became a recluse, seldom venturing beyond the high iron gates of the presidential palace. There he presided over an endless party, providing fire-eaters, wrestlers, tribal dancers, drag queens, and prostitutes for his guests, while dwarfs balancing silver platters loaded with cocaine on their heads patrolled the corridors to ensure all his protégés had a good time. Needless to say, the palace gates were topped with the decaying skulls of those army officers and PORC delegates who disagreed with the Colonel-General over such fundamental policy issues as the need to feed the people.
The inevitable revolution — which finally came four years ago, in the wake of the Moscow scandal — saw Palacky thrown from his own executive ornithopter and installed a more pragmatic junta of bickering, but not entirely insane, PORC apparatchiks. Thus proving some point about it being bad form for any one PORCer to hog the entire trough.
Anyway, that’s the dark picture. On the bright side, they’re not as remorselessly reactionary as Gouranga, as totalitarian and oppressive as Newpeace, as boringly bucolic as Moscow used to be, as intolerantly Islamic as Al-Wahab, or … you get the picture. A planet is a big place, and even the excesses of the PORC junta can’t really damage the economy too badly. Given a couple of decades of civilization and a few war crimes tribunals, New Dresden will be well on the way to being the sort of place that rational tourists don’t automatically cross off their itineraries with a shudder.
In fact, as long as you don’t question the political wisdom of a system with sixteen secret police forces, thirty-seven ministries with their own militias, four representative assemblies (three of which are run on single-party-state lines by different single parties and all of which have veto power over one another), and above all, as long as you don’t mention the civil war, New Dresden can be a welcoming place for visitors. Just as long as your purpose in visiting is to buy the pretty rustic souvenirs and quaint quantum nanocomputers, ooh and aah at the wonderful reconstructed ethnic villages in Chtoborrh Province, and drink the fine laagered ales in the alpine coaching houses, you can’t go wrong.
Life isn’t that bad for the ordinary people, as near as I can tell. I couldn’t get close enough to be sure, because to do that I’d have to spend twenty years as a deep-cover mole. I wasn’t exaggerating the national suspicion toward strangers. It’s a survival trait on New Dresden; they’ve been breeding for paranoia for centuries. But from outside, the standard of living is clearly rising and looks pretty damned good compared to a clusterfuck like the New Republic.
These people have got automobiles — real fuel-cell-powered people movers, no messing around with boilers or exploding piston motors — and they’ve got music-swapping networks and cosmetic surgery and package holidays on the moons and seven different styles of imported extraplanetary fusion cuisine. Wealthy people have less time and energy for shooting each other to bits, so mostly the grudges fester on in the form of elaborate social snubs rather than breaking out in revolutions. And there are only 800 million people, so they’ve got a lot of potential if they can break the violent cycle of the past two and a half centuries.
And there are signs of peace breaking out. These days the secret police spend most of their energy spying on each other. They leave the civilians alone and drink in the same bars at the weekend. There are actually homegrown independent journalists there these days. Who knows? Any day now the place might be civilized …
… Except that three faceless bureaucrats are about to murder everyone.
I’m talking, of course, about whichever o
f the surviving Muscovite diplomats put their fingers to the trigger and push simultaneously. As opposed to the two of them who could, if they had the bravery to concede that the game is not worth the candle, issue a reprieve to this promising planet of nearly a billion people who are, when you get right down to it, not that much different from the former citizenry of Moscow.
Intestinal fortitude, and the lack thereof. If you’re going to appoint yourself supreme judge in a death penalty case, you should damn well make sure that you’re prepared to pass judgment and live with the consequences. And I don’t believe these cunts have got what it takes.
Which is why I’m on my way to New Dresden. I’m going to corner Ambassador Elspeth Morrow and Trade Minister Harrison Baxter and put the question to them — exactly why are they willing to execute 800 million people, in the absence of any evidence that they’re responsible for the crime of which they are accused?
Watch this space.
Ends (Times Leader)
Frank stretched his arms toward the ceiling of the breakfast room and yawned tremendously. He had slept in, and had a mild hangover. Still, it was better than being hagridden by memories of the incident in the bar the night before. For which he was grateful.
The breakfast lounge was like the other dining rooms — only slightly smaller, with a permanent heated buffet and no bar or cabaret stage against the opposite wall. That late in the morning it was almost empty. Frank helped himself to a plate, loaded it down with hash browns and paprika-poached eggs, added a side order of hot blueberry bagels fresh from the fabricator, and hunted around for a free table. The sole steward on duty wasted no time in offering him a coffeepot, and as he dug into his food Frank tried to kick his tired brain cells into confronting the new day’s agenda.
Item: Transfer point with Septagon Centris Noctis. Passengers departing and boarding. Hmm. Worth staking out the bulletin boards in case? Next item: See to transmitting latest updates. Spool incoming news, read and inwardly digest. Then … fuck it, eat first. He poured a measured dose of cream into his breakfast coffee and stirred it. Wonder if anything’s happened since the last jump?
It was the perpetual dilemma of the interstellar special correspondent — if you stayed in one place, you never got to see anything happen up close and personal, but you could stay plugged into the network of causal channels that spread news in empire time. If you traveled around, you were incommunicado from the instant the ship made its first jump until the moment it entered the light cone of the destination. But what the channels paid Frank for was his insights into strange cultures and foreign politics. You couldn’t get those by staying at home; so every new port of call triggered a mad scramble for information, to be digested into editorials and opinion pieces and essays during the subsequent flight, and spat out at the net next time the ship arrived in a system with bandwidth to the outside universe.
Frank yawned and poured himself another cup of coffee. He’d had too little sleep, too much rum and whisky, and faced a day’s work to catch up on preparation for the liner’s arrival at New Dresden. Septagon was so connected and so well covered that there was no real point going ashore there: it was a major data exporter. But New Dresden was off the beaten track, and directly in jeopardy as a result of the slow-motion disaster unfolding from Moscow system. When he got there he faced four days of complete insanity, starting with a descent on the first available priority pod and ending with a last-minute dash back to the docking tunnel, during which he had to file copy written en route, gather material for two weeks’ worth of features, and do anything else that needed attending to. He’d checked the timetables: he figured he could make the trip with two and a quarter hours to spare. Okay, make that three and a half days of buzzing around like a demented journalistic bluebottle, released on a ticket of leave in the middle of a promising field of diplomatic bullshit — it was a good thing that New Dresden wasn’t uptight about pharmaceuticals, because by the time Frank was back in his stateroom he’d be ready for the biggest methamphetamine crash in journalistic history. Which was precisely what you deserved if you tried to cover four continents, eight cities, three diplomatic receptions, and six interviews in three days, but c’est la vie.
Stomach filled and coffee flask emptied, Frank pushed back from the table and stood up. “When do we push back?” he asked the air casually.
“Departure is scheduled in just under two thousand seconds,” the ship replied softly, beaming its words directly into his ears. “Transition to onboard curved-space generator will be synchronized with the station, and there will be no free-fall lockdown. Acceleration to jump point will take a further 192,000 seconds approximately, and bandwidth access to Septagon switching will be maintained until that time. Do you have further requests?”
“No thank you,” Frank replied, slightly spooked by the way the ship’s expertise had anticipated his line of questioning. Damn thing must be plugged in to the Eschaton, he thought nervously. There were limits to what anyone sane would contemplate doing by way of artificial intelligence experiments — the slight ethical issue that a functioning AI would have a strong legal claim to personhood tended to put a brake on the more reckless researchers, even if the Eschaton’s existence didn’t hold a gun to their heads — but sometimes Frank wondered about the emergent smarts exhibited by big rule-driven systems like the ship’s passenger assistance liaison. Somehow it didn’t seem quite right for a machine he’d never met to be anticipating his state of mind.
He strolled distractedly around the promenade deck on C level, barely conscious of his surroundings. C deck by day shift was a different place to the darkened night-time corridors. Elegant plate-diamond windows to either side displayed boutiques, shops, beauty salons, and body sculptors. Whole trees, cunningly constrained in recessed tubs, grew at intervals in the corridor, their branches meshing overhead. Below them, tiny maintenance ’bots harvested browning leaves before they could fall and disturb the plush carpet.
The corridor wasn’t empty, but passengers were thin on the ground — mostly they were still coming through the docking tube from Noctis orbital, the WhiteStar open port in Septagon system. Here went a young couple, perhaps rich honeymooners from Eiger’s World strolling arm in arm with the total inattention of the truly in love. There went a stooped old man with lank hair, a facial tic that kept one cheek jumping, and the remains of breakfast matted in his beard, heading toward a discreet opium den with a dull look of anticipation in his eyes. A gamine figure in black stopped dead and gaped into the window of a very expensive jewelery studio as Frank stepped around her — him, it — and slid to one side to avoid a purposefully striding steward. The ship was a shopping mall, designed to milk idle rich travelers of their surplus money. Frank, being neither idle nor rich, focused on threading a path around the occasional window-shoppers.
The promenade deck stretched in a two-hundred-meter loop around the central atrium of the ship’s passenger decks, an indoor waterfall and the huge sculptured staircases rising through it like glass-dressed fantasies. Halfway around it, Frank came to a gap in the shop fronts and a radial passage that led to a circular lounge, carpeted in red and paneled in improbably large sheets of ivory scrimshaw, with a stepped pit in the middle. It was almost empty, just a few morning folk sipping cups of coffee and staring into the inner space of their head-ups. Frank headed for a decadent-looking sofa, a concoction of goose-down cushions in cloned human leather covers, soft enough to swallow him and luxurious as a lover’s touch. He sprawled across it and unpocketed his keyboard, expanded it to full size, and donned his shades. “Right. Priorities,” he muttered to himself, trying to dismiss yet more intrusive memories from the night before at the caress of the leather. Whom do I mail first, the embassy or the UN consulate? Hmm …
He was half an hour into his morning correspondence when someone touched his left shoulder.
“Hey!” He tried to sit up, failed, flailed his arms for a moment, and managed to get a grip on the leading edge of the sofa.
&n
bsp; “Are you Frank the Nose?” asked a female voice.
Frank pulled his shades right off, rather than dialing them back to transparency. “What the f — eh, what are you talking about?” he spluttered, reaching for his left shoulder with his left hand. It was the young woman he’d seen in the corridor. He couldn’t help noticing the pallor of her skin and the fact that every item of her costume was black. She was cute, in a tubercular kind of way. Elfin, that’s the word, he noted.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, it’s, like, I was told you were a warblogger?”
Frank spent a moment massaging his forehead as, briefly, a number of responses flitted through his head.
“Who wants to know?” he finally asked, surprising himself with his mildness. Click. Physically young — either genuinely young, or just rejuved. Pale, dark hair currently a mess, high cheekbones on clear-skinned face, female. Click. Alone. Click. Asking for Frank the Nose by name. Click. Is there a story here? Click. Get the story …
“A friend said I should get in touch with you,” said the kid. “You’re the journalist who’s looking into the — the end of Moscow?”
“What if I am?” Frank asked. She looked tense, worried about something. But what?
“I was born there,” she mumbled. “I grew up on Old Newfie, uh, portal station eleven. We were evacuated after — in time—”
“Have a seat.” Frank gestured at the other side of the sofa, trying to keep his face still. She flopped down in a heap of knees and elbows and impossibly long limbs. So what’s she doing here? “You said something about a friend?” he asked. “What’s your name?”
“You can call me Wednesday,” she said nervously. “Uh, there are people” — she glanced over her shoulder as if she expected assassins to come swarming out of the walls — “No, uh, no! That’s not where to begin. Why can’t I get this right?”
Iron Sunrise s-2 Page 21
