Bezile felt a mild quickening of interest. She spun the globe on its zeegee plinth so that its intricate patterns blurred. “What is he proposing?”
“He wants to talk to you. In confidence. I believe his idea is to arrange a meeting so that you can see what he has. He’s asking two million solars.”
“Preposterous!”
“That’s what we thought. He’s certainly a criminal type, that was plain from the modulations. We explained that you couldn’t possibly accommodate him. He seems quite confident he can sell the object to other interested parties if we refuse him. He intends to make a further call later today to receive our final answer.”
Bezile fell into a meditation. From Mars. The man claimed to have something from Mars. She’d heard the rumours that something important had been lost, perhaps destroyed, there. No one seemed to know exactly what, except that it might have originated from the Noosphere itself. Could there be a connection? Of course it was perfectly possible that the man was simply a charlatan, trading on such rumours. But it was not something she could pass by without finding out more.
“Make sure he has a line through to us,” she said. “We’ll listen to what he has to say. And have it fully monitored. Inform the expediters’ office. Tell them I want Shivaun.”
Luis nodded. She waved a beringed hand to indicate that he was dismissed.
The morning passed swiftly, Bezile maintaining her hectic schedule by a combination of brisk efficiency and brute psychological force. The Hyperian intercessors were worried about a certain decline in the use of the Noosphere in their region: she promised a sermon on that express subject, to be backed up by a team of mediators who would canvass citizens in their doormouths. The Abelard shrine was opened with due ceremony, and she was able to slip away before the speeches became too interminable. She managed to complete her sermon while on her way to lunch, her roller trundling through Melisande’s teeming streets while she spoke extempore about the virtues of making peace with oneself in this world before entering the next.
Lunch was a tolerable pork-of-vine pie, and it passed without any pressing municipal problem to delay her. She was doling out alms in a seedy backstreet when the call came through.
She announced her apologies to the poor who were clustered around the alms wagon, but reassured them that her staff would be perfectly able to meet their needs. Then she retreated into her roller.
Luis was speaking urgently into the roller’s console, his brow amply furrowed with anxiety. “She’s on her way, I assure you. Please wait.”
“You’re giving me the runaround,” the voice was answering back. “Maybe you don’t realize what the hell I’m holding here. I haven’t got any more time to waste.”
Bezile took the mouthpiece from him.
“My, my,” she said into it. “We are an impatient one.”
“Who’s this?”
“I gather you were wishing to speak to me.”
“You the Graciousness? Adewoyin?”
“Miushme-Adewoyin. And you are?”
There was a brief pause, then: “You sure it’s you?”
Bezile gave an irritable sigh. “Does it not sound like me? Why should I pretend?”
A further pause. “Yeah, OK, I needed to be sure. Listen, I think I’ve got something of interest to you.”
She did not dignify this with any response.
“Something hot. Very hot. Well, warm to the touch, anyway.” A snigger. “Alive, get my drift?”
Bezile motioned for Luis to leave the vehicle. Not without consternation, he departed.
“You still there?” the voice at the other end was saying.
“What is it exactly?” Bezile demanded.
“Something I think you’ll want to get your hands on.”
“That’s impossible to judge until I know what it is.”
Yet another silence. “Are we safe? On this line?”
“You would not have been given it otherwise.”
“Yeah. OK.” She heard an intake of breath. “It’s a real live embryo sac, know what I mean? A uterus.”
Bezile put her slender fingers on the domed head of the console: its blank optic was mother-of-pearl.
“I can’t see what possible interest that is to me,” she said.
“It’s got no cord, that’s why. No parent, nothing. We’re talking advanced biotec here, the kind of thing only the higher-ups would know about. Never seen anything like it before.”
The console began to purr as she stroked it. “I see. And how did you come by this … uterus?”
“By way of Mars. A friend of a friend. It was rescued from the corpse of a mothership. I paid good money for it.”
“But not as much as you require from me.”
“Two million’s a good price. There’s others that’d pay more.”
“Then why not approach them?”
“What is this? You telling me you’re not interested?”
“I’m telling you nothing of the sort. I don’t know you, or know anything about this merchandise you’re offering. I have only your word that such an object exists. Two million is a great deal of money.”
There was a muffled exchange with someone else at the other end. Then: “The Noocracy can afford it. I need a quick sale, no fooling around. There’s people I reckon would kill to have it.”
And you among them, Bezile thought. He really did sound a most unsavoury type.
Luis popped his head through the door and whispered in her ear. The man was calling from a public booth in an outlying township. He had been identified as Pavel Regio Maltazar, a small-time entrepreneur based on Hesperus Station with a string of minor convictions for larceny and procuring. He had an associate with him who was almost certainly Metin Emile Develski, a known confederate and minor criminal. His pad showed holograms of both, undistinguished faces with the crabbed features and wary eyes of the petty criminal. Luis informed her that an expediter and several politia were already in position around the booth, and both men could be picked up immediately if wished.
Bezile smiled and slowly shook her head.
“Are you in the vicinity of Melisande?” she enquired innocently.
“There or thereabouts,” Maltazar replied. “Maybe you’ve even got this call traced by now. But what I’m offering isn’t with me, so if you try anything you’ll never get your fucking hands on it.”
Bezile recoiled ostentatiously at the vulgarity.
“What an extraordinary suggestion!” she said. “You must realize, though, that I can’t possibly take any of this on your word alone.”
“Who’s asking? Your console take replies?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’ll fax you one of what I’ve got. Call you back in an hour. I’ll be wanting an answer, don’t forget.”
The line went dead.
Bezile replaced the mouthpiece, then waited as a digestive rumbling began to issue from the throat of the console. A brief glow suffused its flattened facial façade before its belly yawed open.
Bezile reached inside and withdrew the object.
It was warm from transmission, accentuating the impression of a real living thing. Bezile found it rather grotesque, as indeed she did everything connected with the messy and distracting business of reproduction. She had avoided anything remotely connected with insemination throughout her seventy-five years, and fully intended to continue to do so. But there was no doubt that the uterus was indeed unusual, quite unlike the common run of growth-bags.
Luis was still standing in the doorway, patiently awaiting instructions.
“Make sure they’re followed,” Bezile told him. “Is Shivaun in charge?”
Luis checked his pad and nodded. Shivaun was an experienced operator whom Bezile used regularly: she was both efficient and discreet.
“I want you to contact her,” Bezile told Luis. “She’s to meet us at Hidukei’s. Arrange for the money to be available.”
Luis was predictably aghast at the idea that they
would actually stump up the money, but she shooed him away without further explanation.
Bezile was in good heart as she and her entourage set off for Hidukei’s home. Evening had drawn on, and the jumbled polymorphous habitations of the city, the largest on Venus, were beginning to glow with soft pastels while people hurried homewards through the rain. Beyond the city the volcanic slopes of Daphnis and Chloe rose in the twilit distance, their peaks forever lost in the clouds. Hidukei was an old gene-master, and Bezile was confident he would be able to tell her what she needed to know about the uterus.
Hidukei lived in an elaborate mansion which soared above the candelabra plantations on the lower slopes of Pelleas. The air was resinous here, everything cloaked in warmsnow from the cloudlets whose shifting forms could sometimes be glimpsed in the lower atmosphere; they metabolized sulphurous compounds and excreted them as polymer sleets which the candelabras collected in their bowled suction flowers.
Hidukei’s house was perched like an ice crown on a frosted pillar high above the trees. The milky resins the candelabras produced were harvested and used as building materials, lightweight but strong, which could be moulded into fanciful shapes. Bezile rode a levelator upwards, adjusting her ceremonial robes and studying her forthright middle-aged countenance in the mirror until she was satisfied she had achieved the right expression of serene and compassionate authority.
The old man and his extensive family were gathered on the balcony at the front of the house. Bezile was greeted with extreme courtesy and ushered into his presence. He sat, black-robed, in his death chair surrounded by the youngest members of his family.
Hidukei had made the decision to enter the Noosphere in his ninety-second year, eight years before he was legally obliged to. Since then he had undergone formal thanatosis which had removed the anti-ageing codons that were everyone’s birthright. This was not essential, but his family had always been strictly orthodox in their interpretation of the rites of passage. Over the past year he had gently decayed into a wizened and white-haired old man, though mentally his functions were undiminished.
For days on end preceding, there would have been many reunions and confessionals, private moments of profound emotion between himself and his descendants as he squared outstanding accounts and ensured that his passage into the world of pure mentality was free from unresolved family conflicts. And today there would have been a celebration tinged with sadness as his lineage bid him their final farewells.
Everyone was naturally very nervous, except for Hidukei himself. He greeted Bezile warmly, taking her hand in his own withered fingers and kissing it. He had aged considerably since she had last seen him, but she was used to that. This was perhaps the part of her duties that she enjoyed most, ensuring that those whose time had come were granted a secure place in the afterlife.
She asked the family for a few moments alone with her charge, and they promptly filed away into the house. The moment had arrived for Hidukei to admit any outstanding conflicts or sins and so finally free himself from the bonds of physicality; and she, in return, as his death attendant, would request a small favour which he would grant so that his last corporal act was charitable.
She leaned close and whispered, in the informal manner which she reserved for those penitents she knew personally: “Well, old man, it’s your chosen time. Are you fully prepared?”
He looked up at her from the enveloping black folds of the death chair. “Indeed I am.”
His voice was strong and forthright. In his prime he had been head of Artimatas-Franklyn Multiplasm, a planet-wide corporation that supplied bioforms to every sector of society. She had first met him when she was a fledgling sub-arbiter, and their friendship had survived the inevitable occasional conflicts between business and spirituality, the sacred and the profane.
“Do you have anything to confess?” she asked.
“Only that my ambition sometimes outweighed my humanity. For that I ask the forgiveness of this world.”
“It is granted. Nothing more?”
He chuckled. “I think that covers a multitude of sins.”
Bezile winked at him. “You old rascal. Now I must ask my favour of you.”
“Ask.”
From under her voluminous gilded robe, Bezile produced the replic. She held it out in front of him and proceeded to explain the circumstances by which she had obtained it.
Hidukei’s eyes were now yellow and rheumy, but he gave the uterus a keen scrutiny. When she had finished talking he asked for a closer look. She put it into his hands.
With the sedulous precision of the truly aged, he turned the replic in his withered hands, holding it so close to his face that he might have sniffed it had it any smell.
“My favour is this,” Bezile said. “I would like to know who the makers might be of such a curiosity.”
Hidukei was still peering minutely at the womb. “This thing really exists?” he said.
“I have every reason to believe so.”
“It appears to have its own food stores,” he said, indicating paler nodules beneath its veined surface. “And active semi permeable membranes for gas exchange. As your informant surmised, whatever’s inside might well be self-sustaining.”
“But is it a human uterus?”
“It certainly has every appearance of being so.”
“Where does it come from?”
He was silent for a while. “Certainly not from the production lines of any biotec corporation on Venus. It’s either illegal—some sort of monstrosity—or from a much more elevated source.”
It was as much a question as a suggestion.
“Do you mean the Noosphere?”
His reply was slow in coming. “It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility. But it gives every appearance of being Augmented.”
He knew as well as she did that while optimal modifications to the human phenotype had always been permitted, public opinion at large was against the idea of radical changes to the genotype for fear of creating new species of human being. And the Noosphere always reflected the views of the majority through its servants. Augmentation was a heresy. Wars had been fought to rid the Noospace of their kind.
“Of course,” Hidukei went on, “it might simply be some sort of elaborate joke. At my expense, perhaps?”
For once her capacity to see the droll side of things had deserted her.
“No,” she said. “I don’t believe it is.”
A contemplative nod. “And you really have no idea where it came from?”
She shook her head.
He sat back and closed his eyes for a moment. The effort of talking had obviously drained him; he had truly come to his end. But she wasn’t quite finished with him. She checked again to ensure that they were alone, truly alone. Uncertainty was not a familiar emotion to her.
“Could it possibly be … unofficial?”
Wrinkles multiplied as he smiled. “Do you mean the Advocates? Our glorious unpredictable Julius and Orela? It’s possible. It’s impossible to say.”
His eyes closed again. She realized this was the best she was going to get and that if she delayed any longer he might abjectly die before she could translate him to the Noosphere, something that would be catastrophic for everyone concerned.
The family were watching from the mansion, faces framed in its many windows, generations in waiting. At her summons, they filed out as efficiently as they had gone in. While each of them queued to give Hidukei a final parting kiss, she delivered a short oration praising his achievements in life and assuring his flock that he would be warmly welcomed by the many ancestors who had preceded him.
Everyone now clustered around the death chair, the younger children hoisted up in their parents’ arms so they would have a view. With perfect timing, a drizzle of warmsnow began to fall and the children peered skywards in the hope of glimpsing a cloudlet. But no ripples of movement were discernible in the paleness.
Bezile stepped forward.
“We enter life naked,�
� she intoned, “and thus we go naked into the afterlife.”
She reached down and with a deft tug removed the robe from Hidukei’s body. True age had shrunk the flesh on him so that it was hard to imagine that the substance of the man still remained in such a crumpled sack of sinew and bone.
“Farewell,” she said, pulling the neural hood down over his head.
She pressed her thumb into the fovea at the centre of the hood. His eyes were open again, but the light in them died and they closed as Hidukei’s psyche was withdrawn from his body and channelled along the powerline which led to his own private shrine, from there to be translated across space to the Noosphere where he would join his ancestors and the billions of others who had gone before him.
The snow began falling more heavily. Bezile waited until the tall needle atop the shrine came alive with a brief magnesium light as Hidukei’s mental essence was translated heavenwards, then she activated the chair.
The chair’s black folds closed in over the corpse, enveloping it completely. There was a low humming, and after long moments the chair unfurled itself again. All that remained of Hidukei was a small pile of greyish dust.
One of Hidukei’s family handed Bezile an urn and a death spoon. As she transferred the ashes to the urn, she ceremonially announced that Hidukei had now joined the Noosphere and would be in eternal communion with them whenever they needed his wisdom or comfort.
Three of his surviving wives and one of their husbands immediately began wailing. They were soon joined by others. This again was another tradition of Hidukei’s particular orthodoxy, one which Bezile privately did not care for. When her own time came—and that would not be till the end of her full term—she hoped that her relations would spare themselves such excesses; but it was a personal rather than moral issue. Her task was done, and the manifest outpouring of grief made it easier for her to slip away with a minimum of fuss.
The snowfall slackened as she made her way back down the hillside to the roller. Luis was waiting for her, anxiety personified.
“He called,” he announced. “He wanted to know your decision.”
Mortal Remains Page 6
