They both look as if they’ve been through hell, don’t they, Gance? But never mind, their suffering is nearly over. They’re here with me now, Gance. Like the rest of us they’ll die at midnight. This will be your last chance to say goodbye to them.
I know you won’t let us all down.
~ * ~
“How do you kill a lobster?” Thumb asked Gance.
“I don’t know. Throw it in a pot of boiling water?”
“No. If you look at the back of the head where the carapace meets the thorax, there’s a small natural cross mark. Stab a knife in there and it severs the spinal cord and the thing dies instantly. It’s the end of the world as your crustacean knows it. Now the question we have to ask is, when it’s so easy to kill the lobster without causing unnecessary pain and suffering, why do most people just toss it in a pot of boiling water and watch it thrash itself through a painful death?”
“You tell me.”
“I’m still trying to work it out, darling, but I think it’s something to do with the human condition. Where’s your ride, anyway? I’m getting cold.”
“Here it is now,” said Gance, pulling a black leather glove onto her left hand.
“It’s gone dark,” Thumb said.
“Just keep quiet. Jesus doesn’t know about you.”
Bats clattered behind the broken windows of the shopping mail’s abandoned atrium. The creatures congregated in void spaces of the mall’s roof, where the slow leak of CFCs from the stacked piles of abandoned freezers and refrigerators collected and generated an area of warmth.
Their high-frequency chattering made her cuticles tingle.
Gance stepped out from the shadow of the shabby colonnade as the cab approached. Its riding lights were a dim glow. A clammy wind was blowing in from the east. Somewhere over the European Shelf it had picked up a freight of macro-spores, and now it was shedding them in a localised fall. The flakes spun off across the empty carpark, deliquescing into slush-pools where they landed.
The cab rolled to a halt and Jesus Hitler wound down the window an inch to check it was Gance. Gance scowled at him, and punched at the door handle.
She climbed in beside him, brushing flakes out of her hair.
“What’s the score, Gance?” Jesus asked.
The engine stalled as he tried to move away. He twisted the key three times in the ignition. The starter motor whined and groaned and then the engine finally fired.
Jesus pulled a cigarette out of the pack on the dash and offered it to Gance, but she brushed his hand aside brusquely. He took one himself and tried to light it from a plastic disposable lighter. Nothing happened. He threw the lighter aside in disgust.
“Fucking move,” she said. “I’m late enough already.”
Jesus shrugged. “Take it easy. Where are we going?”
“I told you.”
“The levee? You’re serious? Your last night on Earth and you want to go to the levee?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve bought into that paranoid shit, Jesus. A good Russian Orthodox Jew like you?”
“It’s true. The world ends at midnight tonight. Everything is all lined up and Alcephus is on its way. You know why that big ball of rock is called Alcephus? It’s from the Arabic—al cifr. The big zero. That’s what’s waiting for all of us, babe.”
Gance shook her head tiredly. “We had all this crap before with the Billennium,” she said. “We’re still here.”
“Yeah, but this time even the Pope is saying kaddish.”
“Look, if it’s Armageddon tonight, why aren’t you curled up somewhere frying your brains?”
“You know how it is—gotta make a living somehow. Why ain’t you?”
“Same reason.”
~ * ~
They drove across the city. The vast edifice of the levee loomed up ahead. Cityside, it was a blur of animated neon and coruscating advertising displays.
From a third of a mile above, Gance heard the deep-throated doppler-descending roar of an incoming HTOL freighter, then the abrupt silence as its ram-jets cut out and it hit the runway strip; the noise was replaced with a low subsonic rumbling which she felt deep in her bones.
Then suddenly they were plunged into darkness as they arrowed into the narrow eastbound tunnel that transected the massive earthwork.
They emerged from the tunnel into a darker, shadowy environment. The eastern face of the levee was dark in contrast with the city-side. Feeble lights flickered across it like evanescent transient demons.
They entered the network of causeways that threaded through the lagoons of the tidal basin. Gance directed Jesus towards the arm of the levee that curved away to the south. Jesus’s vehicle lurched and faltered at every slight gradient it encountered. The night sky was thick with clouds, obscuring any view of the web far above.
There was a small cut-out fir-tree shape made of cardboard dangling from the cab’s rear-view mirror. It smelt faintly of an odour Gance could not place. She flicked it with her finger.
“Where did you get this, Jesus?”
“A guy I know makes them.”
“What’s the smell?”
“Does it smell?” Jesus said. “I never noticed.”
Gance took the two Polaroids out of her top pocket and showed them to Jesus Hitler.
He studied them, steering with one hand as they rattled across a rough pontoon that straddled one of the many creeks and inlets. “Cute girls,” he said. “Who are they?”
“They’re my sisters.”
Jesus squinted sideways at her. “I can’t see no family resemblance,” he said.
“Sisters under the skin,” said Gance. “The guy I’m going to see tonight claims he’s holding them. But they’ve been dead a long time. They both got caught in that Sarin incident in Geneva twelve years ago. What do you make of that?”
“The guy is crazy.”
“That’s what I figure. And it gives me a bad feeling.”
She took the Polaroids back from him and carefully put them back into her pocket.
Jesus braked suddenly. Up ahead was a crude counter-weighted wooden barrier painted with black and yellow slashes. Off to one side a group of men were gathered round a brazier. One of them approached the cab. He held a long skewer in his hand, with something pungent and smoking impaled upon it. Jesus wound down his window a few inches.
“We’re having a little Last Supper,” the man said, “Want to take communion with us? Care to partake of the flesh of the prophet? A man shouldn’t seek redemption on an empty stomach.”
“Fuck,” said Jesus, shooting a glance at Gance. “What now?”
“Give him money,” Gance said.
Jesus passed over some coins and the man handed through the skewer of cooked meat in return, then stepped back to raise the barrier for them.
They drove through. When they were well clear Jesus hurled the kebab into the lagoon. It spat and sizzled as it hit the water and immediately a dark shape rose to the surface in a flurry of bubbles to snap at the meat.
Eventually they drove onto the rubble-strewn beach that ran the length of the levee’s southernmost extremity. Jesus drove slowly here, threading his way through the shantytown construction of shacks and crude shelters, trying to avoid the children and dogs. By mistake he turned into a blind alley; as he reversed out, a dog ran across the rubble-strewn single-lane track. Jesus slammed on the brakes too late to avoid it. It disappeared under the front wheels and the cab jerked to a halt, doing a sideways slither as its engine seized, and slamming up against a shack constructed of something that looked like animal hide cured in resin.
Jesus stomped out of the cab and hiked up the bonnet, waving away the scent of burnt rubber and smashed dog.
“Broken fan belt,” he reported. “I guess this is as far as I take you. Do you want me to wait?”
“Where would you be going?” Gance asked, as she walked off towards the levee.
“All I need is an old pair of pantyhose,” Jesus called after her. “You
think I can’t find something like that on the night the world ends?”
~ * ~
It started to rain. The microbacterial organisms in the rain congealed almost instantaneously into a clinging film as soon as they struck her PVC jacket.
She shivered, although it was not cold. She caught a twinge from the chewed-up socket in her left armpit. The next big job she got she was going to have the thing ripped out. It was useless anyway— the protocol had been obsolete for a long time. The last time she’d tried to jack directly into a client she’d nearly fried his temporal lobe. She’d left him twitching on his futon, but not before wiping a large proportion of his collateral into an untraceable account.
There were lights up above her on the levee, but they were fitful things, too dim for her to make out anything. She took off her glove so Thumb could see.
Thumb spread a field of random nanolaser, resampled the reflections and shot it up through her optic nerve into the small area of retinal display she had put aside as an overlay. She saw a pool of muddy scum ahead of her she might otherwise have stepped in.
Thumb read the spectral analysis. “Mutated algal froth,” he said. “Cloned from something an early Mars probe brought back. Tiny single-celled plants from hell. They can strip your epidermis off within seconds of making contact.”
“Nice,” Gance said. “There was none of that stuff last time I was here.”
“It’s a changing world,” Thumb said, then, “Something coming, left field. Something fast. Duck!”
Gance ducked. A fat shape shot past her left shoulder.
“Leaping lizards,” said Thumb with a chortle. “Rat, actually. Jesus, look at the mother.”
Gance did. It was large and feral and it had wings.
“Bat-Rat,” Thumb amended. “Scramblegene job. Someone’s been playing with an outlawed morphing programme. Something else coming, now. Left field again. Slow this time. But armed and dangerous. Duck!”
Gance ducked. This time it was a narrow-spectrum spurt of laser-blast that overshot her. Thumb fed her the overlay, so she didn’t even have to turn her head, not that she had time. The laser painted the rat’s hide with a poisonous tattoo. The rat sizzled and somersaulted onto a small mountain of discarded hard-core where it fell apart, weeping into the rubble like slurry in the rain.
Thumb zeroed a grid on the laser source, and built a shape around the wire-frame that quickly took on visual flesh, betraying a slight figure holding a crude laser-rifle. The man was webbed in a dark mesh of containing clothing, and he looked corroded. He hobbled through the wash of dirt and chemical mire, crippled.
“Looks like your date,” said Thumb.
~ * ~
The initial damage had been done during the Winter War, in the dirty years after Etna had blown six million cubic metres of itself into the upper atmosphere. The military were big employers in those days; they recruited Venn the day he graduated from Huddersfield with a double first in nanotechnics, and sent him out to the desert.
He’d only been out there a month when it happened. He was in a group of six techs scheduled for basic combat training, but an order got scrambled and they were sent in the place of some boots, to test a new stinger-field laced with a prototype toxin.
It took them sixteen months to rebuild his sciatic nerve. That was when Gance first met him. She was still in Cairo then, working out of a military brothel on the Shari El Comiche, with Cleo and Athene. After every operation they were called in to clear and rechannel his meridians.
It was dirty work and sometimes the interchange and foldback made her feel as damaged as him, but she’d got to know his nervous system pretty well. She’d come away with maps and templates in her head that she would use later to refine many areas of her technique.
Venn came out on a disability pension and put in a civil suit against the military. While that was in process, he went to the Shelf and fell in with some Palermo suits who ran protection for the freight-loaders that worked the HTOL strip. It was boom time, the geo-stationary web was slowly growing towards total-knit, and all sorts of franchises were taking out leases, from one-man clone-labs to full-scale factory-farm developmental units. The freight-loaders carried rich pickings in raw materials and fabricated plants.
One day he was riding shotgun on a ten-wheeler artic as one of a two-man security team, with a pumper called Clive whose cognitive processes had long since seceded from his forebrain. Clive regularly popped at least two tendons a week. He’d had an ice-job to try to relax his skin but that had broken down and now he looked, walked and talked like a mummy. The artic was carrying a third-rate protein called oca which originated in Peru. It had mild narcotic properties and could be refined in zero-g conditions into something which slowed both the metabolism and the rate of calcium loss; it had become a staple of the web-workers’ diet.
The artic was hit by a bunch of kids who blew it off the ramp with a homemade bazooka. The pilot ended up a fine mash of pulped bone and flesh all over his own tachometer. Clive’s femoral artery was sliced and he bled to death where he fell. Venn managed to crawl away, but the kids caught him and torched him. They were pretty pissed that they’d bagged nothing more than a load of Peruvian pond-weed.
When the judgement in the civil suit came in, most of it went to pay for Venn’s skin-job.
He didn’t appear to need Gance or any of them after that; at least, he left them alone.
She heard he’d gone to ground in the levee, bought some secondhand gear—a cryo-vat, and a resonance-field moulder—and set up a molecular-diffusion lab. She’d heard all sorts of rumours, that he was producing functional nanosurgical devices—arterial scrubbers and phage-hunters—that were cheap but out-performed anything from Montreal. Then she’d heard nothing until a mule—a kid with a goatee beard—had come across her while she was shopping, handed her a package, whispered a zen blessing, adopted the lotus position and blown his arse across three aisles.
~ * ~
The rain turned to sleet. They started to climb the levee. She followed Venn. He moved quickly, despite his hobbled gait, and she scrambled behind him. They climbed ramps, traversed ledges, squeezed through barely passable fissures, and leapt from one ramshackle platform to another as they ascended. The path forked and branched endlessly and occasionally she’d find her fingers settling upon a chiselled handhold or a metal rung. The darkness of the levee closed in upon them. Her concentration was centred on following him, almost step-for-step.
Her knuckles and elbows soon became scuffed and scratched. Her thighs and leg muscles started to ache with the exertion, but Venn wouldn’t let her pause. He grasped and pulled at her jacket, tugging her on. She surrendered to his manhandling, moving almost blindly, placing her hands and feet wherever Venn directed. Eventually they moved onto a wide, flat ledge, and Venn released her. She looked down, startled at how far they had climbed. There was a peculiar radiance about the lagoons far below them that had not been apparent as she had driven across them with Jesus; they swirled with an eerie, patchy phosphorescence. She looked up: the clouds that obscured the web hundreds of miles above her were as impenetrable as ever.
When she turned around to look for Venn she could not see him at first, and then made him out, signalling to her from a cleft in the levee’s face. She followed, squeezing through a narrow opening into an area of pitch darkness.
Thumb painted in the details for her. The walls of the chamber were constructed from crudely assembled breeze-blocks held together by an expanded foam sealant that oozed and dripped in untidy hematic globules and stalactites. There were no true horizontals or verticals evident in the jointing, no right-angles, nothing flush or finished. There was crap all over the floor—straggling fronds of dried and withered vegetation, shredded paper pulped in places by dripping or wind-borne water to the consistency of a primal papier mâché. There were layers of bubble-film and carpet cut-offs, wood chippings and other nameless detritus. It looked to Gance like an eyrie only recently vacated by some huge,
disorganised and repulsive bird.
There was an irregular frame of timber on one wall, fashioned in the shape of an old, weathered, splintered wooden pallet. Venn moved towards it, released catches and tilted the construction smoothly upwards to reveal a way through. He brusquely pushed Gance towards the opening.
The space beyond was larger, cavernous by comparison.
The transition as she entered was startling; it was like moving from a dungeon into a bizarrely furnished, sumptuous rococo saloon.
The walls were hung with tapestries. She’d seen something like them before—the new immigrant cultures on the Pacific Rim specialised in them. They were formed not from strands of silk but from the filament-like forms of microscopic thread-worms. These were Methuselahs among their kind, condemned to pirouette eternally on fields of nutritious culture-media bonded to time-degrading microlaminations. Their slow random dance threw up gaudy patterns, rich with geometrical tribal motifs, bright and hard-edged, like the chevrons of honours carved into warriors’ faces.
New Worlds Page 28
