Hotwire

by Simon Ings

  Sunlight.

  A woman’s sex.

  An avenue of palms.

  Images haunted him. A red-haired, skull-headed wraith. A silver bird. Bondage in a chrome room: he remembered that, a recent and recurring dream. He was bound with plastic bands, kevlar restraints, medical gear. The air throbbed: half-heard malicious mutterings. Motors. Pumps.

  The dream ended abruptly. He found himself strapped to a seat with velvet rope. Dayus Ram, that cruel chrome whale, had digested and excreted him, a blind, still-breathing turd, into some louche, flock-wallpapered corner of itself, a tangle of heavy furniture, mouldings and mirrors. So – this was Limbo.

  Gloom.

  Despond.

  Foul poisons through a straw.

  ‘So fucking dark.’

  ‘You’ve lost an eye.’

  No human voice. He held his breath.

  ‘My friend?’

  ‘Who’s there?’

  A squeal – of fright or of delight? ‘Why, you can talk!’

  ‘What is this place?’ he mumbled, abject.

  ‘My mother’s womb,’ it said.

  ‘Your mother’s . . .’

  Something brushed his arm. He flinched.

  ‘My friend? Friend, what’s your name?’

  He dreamed his arms and legs were free but he was too weak to move them, release himself, escape.

  He woke up, bound but strong. Quickly he undid the ropes around his wrists, his waist and his feet, and explored the room. He found a door and opened it – and woke up, tied to the pallet as before.

  He dreamt he woke up, went to the door, turned to the pallet – and saw himself still lying there, asleep.

  He dreamt he woke, did not turn round, opened the door at last and found himself floating up to a ceiling that became a sky: below him, a foreign country vanished the moment he swooped down to explore it.

  His dreams became lucid. He found he could control what happened in them. He sat for hours beside himself, watching himself sleep. He touched his sleeping self’s wounds. One eye lost, the socket caked with blood and sleep. A stump for a finger. There were many wounds in his side. He explored them, spirit hands moving through his flesh as though it were a reflection in a dark and sheltered pool. His wounds ached, in a pleasurable way. They sucked at his fingertips, greedy for communion. As he touched them, each wound evoked an image. When he stroked himself, dreams showered his mind.

  These were dreams his body knew were true:

  A silver bird.

  Red hair.

  A mountain-top statue, arms extended to embrace all contradictions.

  A word: Redentor.

  Vivisected, transformed, redeemed, his flesh was his self’s storehouse, a priceless aide mémoire.

  Sometimes he dreamt he lay still on the pallet, blind, too weak to move. Sometimes he lay still on the pallet. And sometimes he dreamt.

  He spent a long while sleeping. Days and days. She sucked milk from the pig and spat it into a plastic bottle. She fed it to him through a straw. The usual magic took effect. His multiple wounds grew soft and puckered. Tiny polyps. Nipples. Mouths. They shrank and disappeared.

  The finger stub melted. The useless bones above it bled away. Day by day the remaining digits splayed and thickened, making up for what was lost.

  The milk’s action on the empty socket was less satisfactory. It became a tangled knot of gristle, pierced by spiny hairs.

  The wound at his groin healed well enough. But nothing in that region made much sense to her, and she couldn’t tell how well it had been mended.

  He tossed and turned on the couch. She tied him down more firmly.

  She bathed his bad eye with milk. Eventually the spines fell away. The scrunched and horny scar tissue softened and bled. New lids formed, edged with soft red lashes. She freed them from the gluey sleep which bound them. Calmed by the milk’s goodness, the new eye worked painlessly.

  It was bright green.

  Whatever it was had saved him, it was young. Girl’s build. Her skin was dry and fragile, stretched tight over her skull. The tissue round her eyes was black. Her face was fixed in one expression: anxious and haunted. She had large teeth in receding, bright red gums, like a sheep.

  Her breasts were not so worn. They looked odd – so smooth beneath that scrawny neck – as though they’d been tacked on.

  ‘Come here,’ he said, trying to disguise his gnawing fear of her. ‘Come here, and sit by me.’

  She came towards him.

  ‘Release me.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No, no. You’re mine.’

  He was her prisoner. Fresh from the chrome laboratory, he was too tired to rage against such tender restraint. ‘Sit closer by me then,’ he said, flexing in his bonds of velvet rope.

  He couldn’t focus properly yet. He had no real idea of where he was. So much had happened in so little time, sometimes he thought he must still be on board the Clipper, and this some nightmare bleeding into strange, more gentle, eerie dreams of young girl-flesh—

  A girl. She was a girl. No monster. No homunculus. Here in Snow’s place: a girl.

  ‘Sit by me,’ he begged. ‘I need to focus on something.’

  He recognised in her some vague resemblance to pictures he had seen before: ‘You’re Snow’s.’

  ‘Who’s Snow?’

  ‘The Massive makes things run here.’

  ‘Massive?’

  They spoke quite different languages. Only the simplest statements passed between them unconfused.

  ‘Untie me.’

  ‘No.’ She said it soft as though her refusal were a boon, a special promise: ‘No.’

  She spoke of ‘Ma’ sometimes. He said, ‘That’s Snow.’

  ‘Her name is Snow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is she?’

  ‘A personality. A human once, now Massive-scale. She found a way to wed her self with bigger minds than hers.’

  Slowly, hour by hour, they began to build themselves a shared vision of the world around them: ‘Womb’, ‘Massive’, ‘optics’, ‘brain’s fire’. They almost understood each other.

  ‘Let me go.’

  Almost.

  ‘No, no.’

  His new hand scared him: three-fingered, hairy, like a bear’s paw. He did not recognise his fingers, so thick had they become. Like her breasts, his hand looked out of place, stitched on. ‘The milk’s doing,’ she told him, proudly. She brought him a mirror. (On some Massive scale, a tiny part of Dayus Ram’s brain hiccuped, missing the usual synapse.) She held the glass before him so he could see himself. ‘You’ve got one of my eyes!’

  He stared, appalled, at his mismatched face.

  ‘Let me go!’

  ‘No, no.’

  He tried not to show his fear.

  He’d guessed already that her foul ‘milk’ must be good for him. He knew from what Lucia’d told him that the radcount was high on board Dayus Ram; so high he should not by rights have survived more than a couple of days without his golden suit. Somehow, something was saving his tissues from damage. It could only be the milk.

  If only it were not so revolting!

  ‘My guts are shot,’ he complained. ‘I can’t hold it down.’

  ‘The milk will help that, too.’

  ‘Milk?’ He hawked and spat yellow phlegm over the parquet floor. ‘Is that what you call it?’

  He told her about the golden suit. ‘It will do as well as milk,’ he told her, hoping it was true. ‘It was in the room. Please take me there.’

  ‘No, no!’ For the first time she raised her voice, not angry but fearful.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘let me go. I’ll fetch it myself.’

  ‘You’d be burned,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘My sister guards that room. She’s there – all the time.’ Bursting into tears, the girl-thing fled the room.

  Sister?

  ‘Sister?’ he shouted after her. ‘What sister?’

  A distant sobbing was al
l her reply.

  He began to lose patience.

  His growing frustration recalled him to himself. How long had he lain trussed up like this, depending on some monster’s whim? What was he doing? Why did he feel such abject trust in this pale, ugly approximation of a girl? Not wanting to think himself softened by Dayus Ram’s torture, he blamed the milk. The milk it was, weakening his will as it restored his body to health!

  I must grow hard again, he thought, without conviction. He’d been reduced to this infantile state for so long, first butchered then wet-nursed, it was hard for him to remember what he’d been.

  It’s the milk, he told himself. When she fed him he spat out the straw.

  Undaunted, nursely, knowing best, she pressed her mouth to his and forced the milk in with a kiss.

  The touch of his lips against hers excited her. Day after day Rosa kissed him, thinking the novelty would eventually die. It didn’t. His rough lips were like doors, guarding some novel emotional landscape.

  She kissed his skin as she bathed him, kissed his wounds to make them sound. She never left his side now but slept beside him on the floor where she could smell him and hear him breathe. Not an hour passed but she thanked Ma for this new warm toy: her friend. ‘My friend,’ she whispered, feeling his heart-beat under her cheek. ‘My treasure!’

  ‘I’m not from here,’ he kept telling her. As if she’d not guessed!

  She asked him his name.

  ‘Ajay,’ he said.

  ‘Ah-jay.’

  ‘Adge-eye.’

  She said it again.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Adge-eye!’

  He said, ‘I must return. How do I leave?’

  She shook her head. She knew of no way out.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘you don’t know what to look for.’ He explained to her where the hangars were, what commands would open the hidden doors, what routines unseal the emergency capsules from blast-proof storage. He’d committed all this to memory years back, knowing Lucia’s information was too precious to simply carry around on a disc or a bead. ‘Will you go look for them? For me?’

  Delighted, she obeyed.

  Once she was gone he summoned his energy and fought his bonds. The girl-thing was no captor and her ropes were easily untied.

  Now he was free, he wondered what to do. Explore the station? Find a way out? But the girl was doing that. She seemed as keen to leave as him! Find food? He did not know where to start, and after all, if it was milk he wanted, the girl would bring it him if he asked. Find data for Herazo? Again, where to look? With some persuasion, the girl was sure to guide him where he needed most to go. He stood there, wrapping the brocade ropes around his hands; free, but without the least desire to escape. He felt a fool. He wandered round the room a while, stretching his stiffened limbs, and then, yawning, went back to the seat. He sat down, yawned again, lay down, and, at last, slept.

  A dreadful cry woke him. Starting up, he found the girl wrapped round him on the couch. She was weeping, her gaunt face blotched red and stained with tears.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s my sis,’ she said, and squeezed him even tighter. She didn’t seem to care that he’d broken free.

  ‘Your sister?’ he urged.

  ‘She’s not moving any more!’

  She led him down corridors encrusted with cold, heavy ornamentation, over carpets so heavy no footfall sounded, past prints and pictures under glass, mirrors, glass bowls and chandeliers, towards Ma’s workshops. She spared him the sight of the serried slabs – his flesh and hers, replicated and experimented upon – and took him instead down the shaft she had found in the exit ramp. At the foot of the stair, she pointed to what looked like a heap of white sheets, carelessly bundled and dropped.

  ‘Be wise,’ she begged him. ‘Find what’s wrong with her.’

  He rubbed his hands together, feeling the sweat on his palms, the three, hairy outsize fingers of his right hand, thick and horny-nailed like some B-movie claw. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I overpowered her,’ she sobbed.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She found me freeing you.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Days and days ago.’

  Slowly, reluctantly, he edged forward. He saw that his first impression was quite wrong. What he saw was not cloth but skin, whiter than white, rolling in fatty folds around each overburdened joint. The corpse was so fat, it took a moment for him to see that it was human. The face didn’t help: its swollen, muscular mouth looked more like a snout, the lips slightly parted to reveal snapped black horse’s teeth.

  ‘She never looked like that,’ sobbed Rosa, standing behind him, using him as a shield. ‘She shone through cloths of gold!’

  Obviously it was dead. Such pallor never visited the living. He heaved the corpse over. Its back was blotched an angry purple where the blood had sunk and burst the capillaries. He let the body go: it rolled onto its back. Belatedly, he noticed the corpse’s sex: the breasts that, but for blackened nipples, looked like mere rolls of fat; its hairless genitals, the lips barely matured.

  ‘She was so beautiful,’ Rosa wailed.

  Ajay sank to his haunches, staring blankly at the corpse: this unexpected prize.

  Was this what Rio wanted?

  ‘She’s dead,’ he said.

  Rosa blinked at him. ‘Dead?’ Her eyes did not waver from his.

  ‘Dead,’ he said again, uneasily. ‘You do understand?’

  Very slowly, Rosa closed her eyes. Ajay waited for her to say something. Anything. The silence dragged on for ages. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last, needing to hear a voice, if only his own.

  Rosa began to shake. Tears formed at the corners of her eyes. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t. It was an accident. I didn’t mean it.’

  She began to cry.

  The loss sank slowly into her, into her heart, her bones, her every memory, colouring all inside her dirty yellow, sepia, dull grey. The world went dark and colourless, and even her new friend was powerless to cheer her or bring her hope. She cried and dreamed the day away, the next day, and the next; by then she’d lost all sense of time.

  Ajay retrieved his golden suit and went exploring. The strange girl needed time to mourn; she did not seem to mind or even notice his long absences. Days upon days he spent searching for a way out. He moved cautiously at first, battle-ready, wary of every blind corner, every door ajar. But there was no danger, now he was free among the axons of Dayus Ram’s mind. The only real danger was if he stumbled upon another ‘sister’. If he’d understood Rosa’s hints correctly, then her sister – ‘Elle’ – could talk to Dayus Ram, somehow crossing the boundary of scale. If he was seen by one like Elle, then Dayus Ram itself would see him, clear as day: a rogue bacillus, wandering its brain. Then surely Dayus Ram would act. Dispatch some white-cell to extinguish him. A silver bird, maybe.

  He crept as quickly as he dared through the levels to the low-G hangars.

  Here Dayus Ram’s ornamentation was not so overbearing, the sense of womblike enclosure less numbing. He floated through the gantries and forgotten railheads, leaving Dayus Ram’s shimmering mind far behind. The detritus of the old station had settled over time to the curving outer walls of each hangar, but the gravity in these regions was so low, his slightest scuff or kick could send a storm of trash wheeling through the air for hours: crushed cans, beads, glass, wood splinters, oily rags, cardboard and rubber scraps. He found no craft, but only their gutted remains. Stripped, skeletal, these were logic bombers such as his grandparents had flown against Moonwolf, so many years before.

  None was of use to him. Anyway, they were not designed for the stresses of a planetary descent, their hulls so thin they’d burn up within seconds on re-entry. Nor could he find any cruder escapes: life-pods, balloons, sleds, the many more or less unreliable make-shifts every spaceship carried, more for morale than use.

  Then, just as he was beginning to desp
air, he heard massive hangar doors swing open behind him. He wheeled in mid-air, stared – and grinned. ‘You,’ he sighed. ‘You again. I don’t fucking believe it.’

  Beaten, dented, scratched-up, the Clipper emerged into the light. Ajay pushed off from the rail where he was hanging and landed on the ship’s ceramic belly. He looked it over. It seemed whole enough. ‘Where’ve you been?’ he wondered aloud. He clambered round the hull towards the airlock. The outer skin seemed sound enough, but what of the inside? What of the systems, the frame; what of its countless interlacing systems?

  For all he knew as yet, the Clipper might be as useless to him now as all the other hulks. He found the airlock. The light under the handle blinked a welcome: amber-ready.

  In spite of his doubts, he could feel himself grinning at his good fortune. He’d assumed that Dayus Ram had trashed the Clipper when it sucked him in. And now he thought about it, why hadn’t Dayus Ram abandoned it? What possible value had it found in an old Moonwolf rocket?

  Unless – he withdrew his hand from the airlock handle. Unless it was trying to dupe him.

  Why save his ship, he wondered; why bring it on board? Why present it to him at this opportune time? He looked around him at the dumb, colossal machinery, looking for eyes, ears, smiles. Was Dayus Ram looking at him? Was it laughing?

  Could he trust its sudden, suspiciously apt gift?

  More worrying still, did he have a choice?

  That night Ajay comforted Rosa with a strange story. It was about his youth, and about Shama, a young woman – his sister – torn apart through his mistake, and whom he had put back together again over many years, devoting his life to the task.

  In spite of her grief, or because of it, she became caught up in the tale.

  He confessed, his hands upturned before her, begging. ‘My boss, he needs Snow’s tech, as told.’

  ‘Snow. That’s my Ma?’

  ‘Snow is manifold. She exists in many places. She has many bodies. But yes: Dayus Ram is one of them: Snow is your Ma.’

  ‘Who is she? Tell me!’ Rosa insisted.

  He could get no further with her till he did. He told the tale as simply as he could: ‘Years ago, before you were born, Snow was a human. Just a human. A neurologist, seconded to C-Ledge during the Moonwolf War.’