by Neal Asher
‘Why aren’t you allowing me a direct link to Tarjen?’ he asked.
Geronamid gulped down a large dripping lump of flesh. A disembodied voice replied, ‘You may record, and you will be allowed to transmit that recording once you leave here, should that be what you wish to do.’
Salind tried to locate the source of the voice then quickly gave up. Geronamid was speaking and he needed to know no more than that.
‘Okay. .’ He nodded towards Garp. ‘What are you doing to him?’
‘Downloading information to my evidential submind,’ Geronamid replied.
‘Inadmissible evidence in a Banjer court and irrelevant after the Polity amnesty comes into effect, so why are you doing it?’
‘Curiosity. In my position wouldn’t you want to know?’
‘Yes. . What do you intend to do to Garp? Your seizure of him was illegal you know.’
‘I will do nothing to him, and my seizure was not illegal.’
‘He committed a crime here. He killed that acrobat. Surely he’s the province of the Banjer police.’
The allosaur jerked its head up from the remains of its meal and abruptly paced toward Salind. He had to suppress the urge to turn and run. Now, the voice issued from its bloody mouth.
‘The acrobat was called Houdini Friend. My friend.’
‘Okay,’ said Salind, swallowing drily. ‘But that still doesn’t change-’
Geronamid interrupted. ‘The reif committed no crime as it is just an artefact which, since the recent seizure of Garp’s remaining estate, has become the property of the Banjer government. The reif is under a destruction order and will duly be handed over for incineration.’
‘I note you refer only to “the reif” and not to Garp. What about him? You accused him of murder yourself.’
‘The murderer is whoever loaded the subversion program into him. He had no knowledge of what he was doing,’ Geronamid replied.
‘Surely that is evidence you could pass on to the police?’
‘Why?’
‘So the real murderer can be caught,’ Salind suggested.
‘You have been here for two weeks, and have learned nothing in that time?’
‘I have not unlearned the necessity of due process, of. .’ Salind trailed off as the allosaur turned away, apparently losing interest in him. It looked at Garp.
‘Ah, praist,’ said the AI.
‘Why am I here?’ Salind asked, feeling at once foolish and angry.
‘Worlds must join the Polity of their own free will. There must be no hint of coercion.
Eighty per cent of the population must vote for entry. That’s eighty per cent of the entire population.’
‘Yes, I am aware of the charter.’ Salind struggled to keep his face straight.
‘Voting on most worlds is through net encryption — absolute anonymity, your vote registered by the click of a button.’
‘Polling stations,’ said Salind, getting some hint of where Geronamid was leading.
‘Yes: polling stations. The government of Banjer managed to foist polling stations on us.
Their argument being that five per cent of the population is without net access. We estimate that probably forty per cent of the population will be too frightened to vote.’
‘So there’ll be a void result. Why then are you here?’
‘In some cases Polity intervention is allowed: humanitarian disaster, cases when widespread corruption in the governing authorities can be proven, and when widespread coercion is being used.’
Salind felt his scalp crawling. ‘Are you saying that the Polity intends to intervene here?’
‘That can be hugely damaging unless sufficiently justified. Such tactics can lead to rebellion against the “AI Autocrat of Earth” and not necessarily on the world on which we have intervened.’
Salind stared at the allosaur for a long moment as he chewed over that euphemistic word
‘intervention’, then shook his head in annoyance — he’d been trying to read the creature’s expression.
‘What do you intend, then?’
‘My overall intentions I will make available to the free press when I am ready.’
‘Then why the hell am I here?’
‘You are here because you were first onto the story of Garp and because he wants you to know the rest of it.’ The allosaur swung towards the reif. ‘You see, there is no evidence that Soper was responsible for loading the subversion program into his aug, but there is plenty of proof available of her other crimes. Should you choose not to broadcast this conversation and so alert her, you can go with him to obtain this proof. Conveniently, Soper will be visiting one of her praist factories in a few days’ time — one of eight hundred such places run by the Tronad.’
There it was: justification. Geronamid had not admitted the Polity intended intervention here, but the hint stood as wide as a barn door.
The allosaur swung back to Salind. ‘It is well to remember that if not Soper, then certainly someone in the Tronad ordered the assassination attempt on me. Not because they thought it might succeed, but because the attempt in itself would bring home to the ruling council here on Banjer just how vulnerable they are and so stiffen their resolve to keep the Polity out.’
The Tronad was the main power here, not the Council?
Salind said, ‘But you are sending Garp for destruction.’
Geronamid paced away and swung round with his snout poised over the reif. ‘Garp is not there,’ he said, then swung his snout towards the blank Golem. ‘Garp is there.’
Salind turned to study the Golem. While behind him it had plugged a thick optic cable into a socket in the side of its chest. Now its stance was different. It held out its skeletal grey hands to stare at them, then it gazed across at Geronamid.
‘Garp was running fully in his augmentation because viable brain tissue was being destroyed by his praist addiction. He is now a hundred per cent uploaded to this Golem,’ said Geronamid.
Salind could feel his stomach turning over and over. His fortune was made. What a story!
He had enough already to get his contract picked up by one of the Earth networks. Hell, he could even get investment for his own network. He watched as Geronamid swung its head back towards the reif.
‘The reif will go for incineration as per the Council’s request,’ the AI said.
‘About time,’ said Garp the Golem.
‘Thank you for agreeing to see me. Obviously I was wrong about this Garp character and his relationship to you. I’m not afraid of admitting to error. You’ll have heard that my story has been withdrawn from the net?’ Salind kept smiling as he studied the apartment. Soper was obviously a woman of baroque tastes. The place was full of preruncible furnishings and frankly strange decorations. He brought his attention finally back to the woman herself.
Deleen Soper bore the appearance of a sixteen-year-old girl — a sure sign she’d been using some of the less sophisticated rejuvenation treatments. She sported short-cropped blonde hair over elfin features and wore jeans and a check shirt. Her whole persona seemed that of a pretty farmgirl from some half-forgotten age. Salind knew her to be a hundred and forty-three years old, and responsible for the deaths of hundreds directly, and tens of thousands indirectly through the drug praist. He kept on smiling.
‘Leave us, Turk,’ she said, and gave an airy wave of her hand.
The butler character who had accompanied Salind from the front door all the way up the spiralling stairs of the building gave a wooden nod and departed. Salind guessed that the man’s duties probably included more than butlering — he looked as if he could crush rocks in his armpits.
‘Please, take a seat Mr Salind,’ she said.
‘My pleasure.’
Salind sat and watched her walk to an antique drinks cabinet and fill two small cups from a silver teapot.
‘Tea?’
He nodded. Now was as good a time as any to try the stuff. She placed the drinks on an occasional table and sat
in the armchair opposite.
‘Please, conduct your interview,’ she said.
Salind picked up the warm cup and sipped the drink. It tasted bitter and salty, then left an aftertaste of avocados. Like most of the preferred drinks of humankind it was an acquired taste.
‘What was your relationship with Inspector Garp?’ he asked as he placed his cup back down on the table. ‘I’d like to hear your side of things.’
‘It is a shame you did not think of that before you released your first story.’
Her expression, for a moment, had gone flat and characterless.
‘Again, I apologize. .’
Soper switched on a smile and began to talk. ‘We had, for a brief time, a liaison. I finished it because it became evident he expected more from the relationship than I was prepared to give.’
‘Like what exactly?’
Soper waved her hand at her surroundings. ‘I am a wealthy woman. My family has made a fortune from our bangroves. Garp wanted some of that and I was not prepared to give. I do not like fortune hunters. When he realized my position he then started to make accusations.’
‘He accused you of dealing in praist and being connected to the Tronad.’
Soper leant forward. ‘Ridiculous of course. Why should I deal in praist? I have no need of the money.’
‘His contention was that your family has always dealt in praist, that you made a fortune from it which you are now investing in legitimate businesses.’
‘I thought you were here to listen to my side?’
That flat and dead look again.
‘I’m sorry. Do go on.’
‘My family have owned bangroves for centuries and our fortune grew from them.’ She gestured to the drink before Salind, who took up the cup and drank again. This time the mouthful he took seemed more satisfying.
Soper continued, ‘Praist is a drug dealt in by a small minority of the criminal element of Banjer. We have always been leaders here and the holders of moral. .’
As she went on Salind accessed Argus.
Praist statistics please.
Fifteen per cent of the population are praist users. That is approximately eighty million people. It is at the root of seventy-three per cent of all crimes committed here and ninety-two per cent of all suicides. It is speculated that terminal praist users will be the first to vote for Polity subsumption because of advanced Polity medical technologies. There is no cure for praist addiction here, and most users — those who do not commit suicide — are killed before the drug kills them. In the last year of addiction — addiction lasts eight solstan years — the user becomes psychotic.
More than tens of thousands, then.
As the interview drew to a close Salind felt it less and less difficult to keep smiling. He found himself starting to see that maybe Garp had not told him all of the truth. Deleen Soper did not seem quite so monstrous face-to-face.
‘I understand,’ he said to Soper’s latest contention. ‘A cop in his position could manipulate anything. Coming from the Polity we tend to forget how much power such a police force can wield.’
‘There, you see?’
Soper sat back and sipped her drink. Salind sipped his own. It had been topped up twice.
Perhaps it was going to his head.
‘What do you think of my collection?’ Soper asked him.
‘I think it’s wonderful, Deleen.’
Soper stood. ‘But you haven’t seen it all.’
As he also stood, Salind felt a dizziness wash through him. He blinked and seemed to see rainbow haloes around various objects in the room. Soper conducted him around the apartment.
She told him about the grandfather clock replicated about an original pendulum, and showed him carvings from banoak coral that would not have looked out of place in a Pharaoh’s tomb. She showed him lurid paintings and boasted their value. Then she finally came to her most prized possession.
The drowning jar had been the favoured punishment for criminals in the early years of the Theocracy. Criminals were sealed inside to drown in the preservative the jar contained. This one was a fat urn-shape standing four feet high. The man still inside the jar, she told him, was the predecessor of the Banjer reifs, but from the wrong side of the law. She giggled and he laughed with her — surprised at how easily the laughter came. The man, with his bulbous eyes and protruding tongue, shifted and scratched at the inside of the jar. He looked like the reporter who had stood behind Merril in the arrivals lounge. Next, the butler was opening the street door for Salind, and he then walked under a sky that was a sheet of skin flayed from the back of a giant.
He stood on a bridge and gripped the rail, his mouth dry and bitter and terror rising up inside him. The drowned man was coming to drag him back to the jar and there to pull him down into a clammy embrace. And now Geronamid stood over him with treels oozing out of holes in its allosaur body. Salind started screaming, and didn’t stop until a hydrocar pulled up and Geoff leapt out to press a pressure hypodermic against his neck. Then he blacked out. It took him a day to recover from the praist-based hallucinogen. And of course there was no proof that Deleen Soper had administered the drug.
Salind woke instantly and with crawling horror suffusing him. It was the middle of the night so Argus must have woken him with a betawave stim. He still wanted coffee though. He still had a hangover from the drug and still occasionally heard fingernails scratching against glass.
‘What is it? You know I’ve had a tiring day,’ he said, sitting upright on the futon.
Geoff is on his way round to pick you up. His message is: ‘Remember the hack-and-slash job?’ There is also an untraced message: ‘Cremation complete, will join you shortly.’
‘Yes,’ Salind hissed, standing and heading for the hotel minibar. He took out an Instacup, pulled the tab on it, and by the time he had dressed the beverage was hot. Taking it with him he quickly left his hotel. Standing on the pavement under a leaden sky backlit by green moonlight, he sipped coffee until the hydrocar pulled up.
‘Give me bad news or good news, but give me news,’ he said as he got in beside Geoff.
‘It’s news, whether it’s bad or good is something for you to decide,’ said the staffer. ‘Oh, here, I have something for you.’
Salind took the small container Geoff handed him, clicked out a pill and swallowed it with a mouthful of coffee. He tossed the empty cup out of the window.
‘Tell me.’
‘We’re going to the Groves. Our trusty police force have found Merril Torson.’
‘How?. .’
‘Oh the usual way when the Tronad wants to make a point.’
They had nailed her to a banoak. The treels were in her clothing, peeking from holes in her arms and stomach. A knot of intestines hung from one such hole. Floodlights, and the red and green flashing lights on the squad cars, cast the scene in a lurid glow. The uniformed cops stood by their cars drinking tea from small flasks while awaiting senior officers.
‘She was a hack,’ said Salind. ‘But this is excessive punishment.’
‘The Tronad don’t know the meaning of the word excess,’ said Geoff, as they both stepped out onto the gravel.
‘So this is how they hit people?’ Salind gazed slowly from side to side, making sure Argus was getting everything here and transmitting it.
‘This was how traitors were killed by the underground before the civil war, and it’s now how the Tronad kill people when they want to make a point. The holes were made by whoever nailed her there. The treels have to be pushed inside before they try to feed. They just keep grinding away and pushing through in search of banoak flesh. She probably died when one of them hit an artery. It can take anything from ten minutes to an hour.’
‘You’re very well informed.’
‘We all are here. This is what happens to you if you go piss-off the Tronad. This is why very few people will turn out to vote next Moonday.’
They moved away from the car and closer to the crucified reporter. Sal
ind felt sorry for Merril and a little sad, but nothing more than that. She wouldn’t have suffered. Were they so primitive here they didn’t realize she could have shut off the pain with her aug?
‘Alright there. Keep back,’ said one of the uniformed cops as he strolled over.
Salind turned to him. ‘What’s happened here, officer?’
‘You got eyes ain’t you?’
‘A murder I take it. I think you should be aware that I know the victim.’
