Supplejack

by Les Petersen

  Cloud cover was down to three hundred meters and we skipped into it and stayed there, surrounded by grey air, which drizzled against the cockpit window while the engines ticked like an old electric heater warming up. I traded reality for cyberspace and began marshalling the team for the task ahead. Sansan and the team ran radar and stealth checks on the nearby clouds and GaZe clocked navigation points off the flight chart. I dropped into the atlas and looked around the country between Lerida and Salàs del Pallars, then called up an encyclopaedia and for the rest of the first leg of the journey I researched Seu Vella and the city it stood in.

  Four hours later we bedded the cruiser in a private hanger in Begkulu, Sumatra. Su Lin, the owner, was a little man, just over a meter tall, with skin the colour of baked apples. He grinned like a maniac when I was introduced to him and gripped my hand and pumped it like he was winding up a windlass. I couldn’t help liking the guy, so I dropped the holoface and chatted with him about the weather while Sam gave his quartermaster a list of weapons and supplies she wanted.

  “You her new man,” Su Lin told me when Sam had left to inspect what they could give her. When I tried to tell him that I was just a friend, he said “She make you very happy. Good strong arms and nice body. Keep you close. Bang long time.” He gave me one of those toothy smiles and nodded as if he was trying to shake his head off his shoulders.

  I had to agree with the comment about the body. I grinned and nodded also. “Yes. Very strong woman.”

  Su Lin nodded and grinned, then shook his head. “Her last man not a man. He too much soft. You big and strong. Just what she needs. You warrior.”

  Even though I was pleased about the warrior comment, I changed the subject as quickly as I could. “You have this place for long?”

  He grinned again. I had the impression he always smiled, even when he was trading nuclear warheads. “I win this aerodrome last year in card game,” he said, though I guessed he’d won it in another manner. Most probably in a small war. “We supply guerrilla forces all over Asia with number one best munitions,” he explained. “You want tour?”

  I didn’t really want to leave the shelter of the hanger so I shook my head. “Next time, thanks, Su.” I really wanted to know whether he was a drug baron, as well as an arms merchant, but some things you do not ask.

  “You want tea?” he asked, unable to read my mind and being a good host.

  I nodded. “That would be wonderful.”

  He tapped a button on his shirt and his holoface popped up, closing his face over with the image of Groucho Marx. When he finally dropped the holoface, he motioned me back into the hanger toward a small office set against the north wall. An aide followed behind us carrying a tray that had appeared from nowhere and when we were seated Su Lin clapped me on the shoulder and chuckled about Sam taking me on a ‘big bang honeymoon’.

  “She wear you out,” he said. “You have hard man all day, all night, all day. I can give you new one if old one fall off.” He laughed so hard he almost fell off the chair. I couldn’t help, but laugh along with him.

  Two hours later Sam and I departed for Galle on the southern end of Sri Lanka. Su Lin gave us a big wave and another grin and wished us the well on our journey. “You come back when you have child,” he said, thinking we would have a child in the natural way. Sam looked at me and then at Su Lin and said we would. When she looked down at the instrument panel, Su Lin gave me the age-old gesture for making love with a forefinger poking the circle of thumb and forefinger of the other hand. I grinned at the action.

  We cleared the tarmac, raced out over the Indian Ocean and curved slowly north toward Sri Lanka.

  Two hours later we were cruising over the Indian Ocean at 3000 meters. Altocumulus at 5000 meters. The sea beneath us the colour of copper sulphate. Sam checked the Drone warriors she had purchased, dropping them from a bomb bay in the tail of the cruiser and guiding them through a series of aerial manoeuvres – ten of them, most the size of a beer keg, but one as large as an armchair. They warped through different shapes, each tested firing tubes by unleashing tracer rounds, which burnt up after five hundred meters.

  “You listening, Jack?”

  “Yes, Sam.”

  “We can put our PAN entities into these things and give them free will. Just like having them mobile in Cyber. You want to try it and see how they go.”

  “What if we lose one, or they run out of fuel?”

  “Location beacons on all of them. And their engines’re almost impossible to deplete. Fuelled by solar rods…last forever.”

  “God almighty. Where did they come from?”

  “One of Grendel’s constructs. Bell took them a step further and gave them AI after the take-over. Just like the Tinmen.”

  “Bell made Tinmen? I thought they were enhanced soldiers.” I hadn’t been aware Bell had made anything to do with cyborgs.

  She looked back over her shoulder at me. Raised an eyebrow. “That’s what the military told the public. And it gets worse. Remember what Loni was saying about Bell’s acquisitions…first robotic skeleton and the flexible cryogenic cage built by Tsunami Industries? Put the two together and what have you got? Walking organ banks. Give them AI and military weapons and have them self-destruct if they go down and you’ve a dispensable loyal army, which can collect organs from the enemy. And there are versions of the Tinmen who have incubator units built into their chest cavities as well. Used to clone organs for field personnel who are wounded. Self-sufficiency. Some are even modified to hold artificial wombs. That’s what happened when governments start cutting military budgets; the military start making money in other ways.”

  “Jeezus!”

  “One reason I left the forces. Another reason was they’re cloning soldiers anyway. Weren’t taking in recruitments. Wetware warriors. Like your own clones, no doubt. So, you want to try the PAN entities with the Drones?”

  I didn’t want to think about anything at that moment. Not when everything was once again going screwy on me. It was as if I had entered a world so horrendously wacky everything I looked at was just another example of the madness of humanity. Turtle Jelly, clones, Drones, organ banks that walked and talked and shot people. I could just imagine one of the Tinmen going up to someone they had shot in the heart, popping open a drawer in their torso and transplanting a new heart into their victim.

  And the worse thing about it was we ourselves were racing across the world to find a Baeder Box filled with these mad ideas to trade it for a dead child.

  “Later, Sam. I need a drink.”

  Sri Lanka and Daisy Attapattu, a wizen old brothel owner, arrived seven hours later. The weather was worsening, cumulonimbus encroaching on our flight path. We stopped at Galle for fuel, a light lunch and a half hour break to “water the garden”. Daisy said hardly a word to us while three of her girls ran hoses out to the storage tanks and manned the pumping station, though she asked me if I wanted a girl while I was in port. She left when Sam said ‘no’ for me.

  “You want to take a walk while I prep for the next leg?” Sam asked. She pointed a little north of where we had landed. “The old fort is just up through there.”

  I was glad for the break to stretch my legs and walked around the old Dutch fort facing out over the ocean. Sansan and the team were giving me historical data on the fort, battles and ships and armament alterations and myriad other pieces of information they were being fed by the local tourist authority, though I wasn’t taking it in. Eventually I tapped down the volume into silence.

  The walls of the fort were crumbled away to almost nothing, worn away by the weather, grazing animals and tourists, though the old iron cannons where still lined up like bulldogs guarding the land from ocean born pests. I was hounded for a few dollars by a flock of kids who laughed at my holoface and seemed poorer than dirt. I shut down the face completely and emptied my pockets of some change to get rid of them.

  Standing staring out over the wind buffeted shoreline, looking west toward another empty ocean
, I was reminded of the last words my mother had said before she had passed away. She had been lying on a sea of blankets, tinier and more wasted than I ever thought possible. “Now Jack,” she had said, her voice stronger than her grasping fingers, which took my young hands in hers and squeezed gently, “you get yourself a wife and family and grow old and happy. You’re too introspective. You climb out of that dark hole you are digging and you look at what the world is really like under all this science and computer stuff. You peer into the eyes of your own child and you’ll see what the world really is: a place of amazement and wonder. And don’t you ever forget: Nature is more wondrous than anything man can make.”

  How do you respond to that? Wisdom, in some peoples’ eyes., but cyberspace is life for our generation. Neither less rich or less intense than this reality around me.

  I watched a gull flying alone above a net strung up a few meters from the southern wall of the fort and let the wind dance over my body. Not thinking. Not remembering or looking forward. Just a figure in a landscape as Shahn was apt to remark every now and then.

  When I returned to the hangar where Sam was running a maintenance check on the cruiser, she informed me we had received a monsoon warning from her PAN. “What do you want to do, Jack?” Sam asked. “We don’t have the speed to outfly the weather, nor can we get above it with a full load. You want to stay here or try for Colombo?”

  “There’s no rush. We don’t want to break anything. We can weather it out here.”

  She nodded and put down the chart she had been holding. “Having second thoughts?”

  I rubbed my chin and answered her honestly. “Yeah. Been thinking.”

  “Okay. Daisy runs a small legitimate hostel here where we can camp down for a while. Bell will not interfere. Maybe Grendel will, but I think they too will allow us some grace in the matter.”

  “Good.”

  The rooms we took at the hostel were sealed against advertisements and the weather, but that was about the only private convenience they had. Shared toilet facilities, communal bathroom at the end of the hall, laundry in the southern wing, dining room and smoking lounge on the upper terrace. Not that anyone smoked any more, but tradition is hard to prevent.

  We shared a meal together overlooking the port and then a bottle of wine, which led to another bottle of wine. And somehow, against any wish on my part or planning on her part, we ended up sharing a bed and making love while the monsoon screamed out of the heavens and drowned every inch of the city, as if trying to wash the scourge of humanity from the earth. While the heavens were venting its anger, we lay side by side and touched each other’s heated flesh, ran hands over mounds and muscle, tasted each other, moved and moaned and swam in the torrent of sudden feeling that welled up like the sea surging against the shore.

  When we lay in close embrace later that night, while the rain hummed against the roof and the cool blades of the fan above us ticked around another ineffectual cycle, Sam nuzzled against me and went to sleep. I lay on my back and tracked the blade on its journey, listened to the rain and felt something lift out of my mind as if it had been at anchor there for so long. And in its place berthed a sense of belonging I could never have imagined before. Some moments later I too fell asleep.

  Chapter 20

  Esteve Estany was a tall, thin man with a balding pate and a one leg shorter than the other. He leant on a walking stick and watched us walking toward him; his bodyguards in their dark glasses and severely cut suits looking out of place in the rustic setting. When we had finally navigated our way to Salàs del Pallars and set down on his heliport, it had taken us four days to reach him from Galle: leaping across to Al Hudaydah on the banks of the Red Sea and then up over the Mediterranean to Paterno in Sicilia where we were requiring to stop and re-acquaint each other with our desire and passions by the weather, which had turned dark and brooding.

  “Ah, Jack Dayzen and Paula the Hunter,” he called out to us in English – I felt a little disappointed I wouldn’t be able to try out my Spanish – “how nice to meet you both. We have been expecting you.”

  Sam gave him a little bow and I raised a hand in greeting. He invited us to sit with him under a pavilion set back off the road, near a square stone tower that must have been built six hundred years earlier. When we were seated in small fold-up chairs, he poured us both thick black coffees and offered small delicacies he called stone cakes. “I baked them myself when I knew you were coming. Was it a good trip?”

  Sam nodded. “Fine, thank you.”

  “That is well. We heard you were caught in the monsoon storms and were delayed. Was it frightening?”

  Sam looked at me and gave me a wink. “Just enough.”

  “That is good,” he said, oblivious to Sam’s action. “Would you do me the honour of closing off your holofaces and your PANs and share with me an age-old tradition. Solitude of friendliness. Shut out the rest of the world and dedicate your senses to this moment with me.”

  We acquiesced to his request and when he could see our natural faces, he sat there and sucked away on his coffee and talked about how his vineyard was growing and how they were looking forward to the ski season. “Not many stay here in our little village,” he confessed. “They prefer the glorious fields of the Alps to our humble slopes, which is just as well, I suppose.” He looked out over the lake to the east. “How wondrous is God to create such beauty, don’t you think? All this random work. And yet an immeasurably complex pattern as well. Such a mind has this God, don’t you think?”

  My mother would have agreed.

  “Do you know the Pope came to see me some years back,” he said. “He came and sat in this very spot and spoke to his God. Such a wonderful man is our Pious Peter, don’t you think? He wanted to meet me, the man who had been created by other men, not by the will of God. He began by saying to me I must be the saddest man whose soul wasn’t created as part of two other souls; I was the closest thing to a soulless creature he could imagine. A most unique thought, don’t you think? We discussed it at great length, he and I. In the end, he saw he had been wrong…that of all my parts the most unique thing I possessed was my soul. And he saw that though I was made in my father’s image, I possess my own soul. That one part wasn’t of any other creature. Such a wondrous one this God of his is; able to grant any of us poor clones something unique to use when everything else we have is of another person’s.

  “A wondrous man indeed,” Sam agreed.

  “And this Pious Peter is such a man as should be followed by millions of faithful., but they’re taken by other pursuits and they let their science take away their faith. Such a pity, don’t you think?”

  Again, we agreed with him and he looked at both of us closely. “I see you are being gracious to an old man. And I’m talking while you are listening. You are both most charming. A lovely couple who have visited me here in Espagne for something I’m unsure of. New Grendel tell me they have set you on a task. You seek the Baeder Box, do you not?, but you have come to the wrong place. I do not know where it is.”

  Well, since he was being up front about it I decided I would be just as open as he was. “We already know where it is, Senior Estany. We have come here on another matter.”

  “Already you know where it is? So soon after you begin the search? This is remarkable. How do you find it so soon?”

  I explained how I had found it and added that it was “Just good luck, I think.”

  “Luck is not a tool for finding things like this, Jack Dayzen,” he said forcefully. “You will find this out as you grow older. Luck is something beyond the grasp of men as should be the things we experimented with in our laboratory.” Then he changed the subject. “So, what is your question of me?”

  I recounted what Shahn had said about him and about my clone. He’d revert, she had said. “What does she mean by revert, Senior Estany?”

  “And I should tell you this?” he said angrily. “And you would sell this information to those who would make more like me? So they c
an make better clones?”

  I looked at him, glanced at the bodyguards who were standing by and then at Sam. She put down the cup she had been nursing and smiled at the old man. “We do not need to know, Senior Estany. But, as I’m sure you are aware, we are being paid for this with a cloned child and if it reverts then we are paid with deficient goods, so to speak.”

  He put down his cup and stood shakily. “Come. You want to see what this reversion is? Come.”

  He led us out of the pavilion and along the road to the small township set on the hillside. At the first building we came to, a sturdy brick building that had been whitewashed so many times the plaster seemed to be flaking off it, he took us inside and into a basement area where a vault had been set against the north wall. He pointed to environment suits lining the walls and was assisted into one while we donned others. Inside the vault, we were taken past a work table with all those tubes and electronic microscopes science fiction is all about and then we were led to a glass-covered refrigeration unit. Inside was the remains of a Rhesus monkey.

  “Genetics,” Esteve Estany said, waving to all the instruments in the room, “the tool kit of mankind now nature has given over her secrets.” He tapped on the glass window and pointed to the monkey inside. “This is Magyar, my companion for the last fifteen years. Born the same year I was created. He didn’t know I was anything other than a primate. To him I was a friend and a workmate. He died at the age of three years from tuberculosis. And when he died I cloned him. He lived another three years and then died of a rare disease of the blood. I cloned him again. Once more he lived three years and again he died of an accident. Falling off the roof of my home. I wasn’t to be denied his companionship, so I put my skills to work and cloned him, giving him enhancements and immunity to everything I could. And then he died a fourth time. His biological clock ticked away for those one thousand or so days and then he died. I could not fathom from what. At his fourth death, I cloned his body twice, one I placed in storage, the other I kept with me for almost the three years, then I transplanted his brain into the second body. This new life lived only two months and then died from asphyxiation when he swallowed a banana. Sad, is it not? I have not cloned him again. It seems providence has a claim on him. He rests in peace, do you think? This I think.”