Africa Zero

by Neal Asher

  “I think that’s all of them,” I said.

  “Yes,” said he.

  The APW had not wavered one millimetre from the centre of my chest.

  “I said I think that’s all of them.”

  “Did you think, Collector, I did not know you had your hand on one of those invisible blades when we talked of vampires and their mating, and of my sister?”

  I looked yearningly at my APW on the ground with my hand clutching it like a chrome spider. I had a shear in my right-hand pocket and the handgun in my pack. I could move fast, but not that fast.

  “I did think that. Do you intend to kill me?”

  “Is ‘kill’ the right word to use?”

  “I can die right enough.”

  Kephis seemed to consider for a moment, then he threw the APW on the ground at my feet. I nearly went for him then, but I showed the most restraint I have shown in many years. I let him live for his temerity. He walked past me and retrieved his assegai from the dying Protestanti, who made a horrible grunting sound when the blade was pulled from him. Kephis cleaned the blade on those pain-patterned robes, and with only his Optek across his back he set out to the south and the Kiphani village. He said nothing more to me.

  As I watched Kephis stride off I thought to myself that in a century he would be so much bones and dirt. The thought gave me no satisfaction.

  * * *

  In the dull light of early morning I wandered to each of the corpses and collected their weapons. Sometime before the light had impinged the sky had clouded over and the temperature dropped. The weather had always been unpredictable this close to the encroaching ice, and I suspected the savannah was in for one of those dramatic winter changes of climate that had, over the centuries, profound effects on the flora and fauna of the area. Changes that had allowed plants like the groundsels to grow on the slopes of the Atlas Mountains rather than on the equatorial mountains of Old Kenya as they once had, and changes that had allowed baobabs to grow and were now killing them.

  Soon I had collected together four APWs and three atomic shears, and stacked them near the burnt-out fire. If there had been others I did not find them, and hoped no one else would. As I considered how best to disarm them a snow flake spun lazily down from the cold white sky.

  Forgetting the weapons for a moment I searched through my pack and took out the few tools I carried, then I inspected the stump of my right wrist and my severed hand. It did not take me long to see that the cut had been through the most complex area of jointing and servo motors of that wrist. I could reattach it, but there was little chance of me getting it working again. I needed high tech tooling: a powder fusion forge for tungsten ceramal, microshear tools, and a supply of servo units and superconductor. There was no way I could do the job properly out here with a few hand-held tools for the working of normal metals. I needed the facilities of JMCC. I put my tools and hand away in my pack, making sure my pack was secure, and turned my attention back to the weapons I had collected.

  I could have set one of the APWs to dump its load, but such an act would have been messy, leaving the area radioactive for years to come. There was also the possibility I might need them, or their power packs, sometime in the future. Only a few small alterations would make them exchangeable with my own. Instead I turned on one of the APWs and burnt a hole in the ground next to one of the boulders. It took a number of minutes with me standing next a continual incandescent explosion, backing away from the occasional fumarole of slag and molten rock, or fused sand. Soon I had a hole six feet deep. But for one atomic shear and my handgun from JMCC, I dropped the weapons into the hole, then I sheared off a lump of the boulder at such an angle that it fell in and capped it. Perhaps I was being overly cautious, considering that the likes of JMCC could manufacture such weapons at will. But I just did not like the idea of weapons, which could turn me into a deposit of metals on the ground, lying around the savannah like discarded toys. By the time I had finished the snow was coming down more heavily to melt on the still warm ground of the savannah.

  As the ground slowly turned wet and muddy I sat on the warm cap rock and considered my next move. I was procrastinating. As soon as I realised this I climbed to my feet and set out towards the complexes of the corporate families. There was really nothing to consider. I had to find my wife, and kill her. For the sake of the mammoth, the Pykani, and the Kiphani, she had to die. But most especially for the sake of Je-thro Susan. And for her my wife had to die in a very special way.

  The snow continued to fall and the cold to work its will on the land. By midmorning there was a layer a centimetre deep and small icicles were appearing on the odd acacia I passed. With this drop in temperature I upped my pace to twice what it had been with Kephis. That I had not done this on leaving the Protestanti’s camp was indicative of my reluctance to face Diana. A voice on the radio was one thing, as were second-hand reports of the Silver One, but to come face to face with her and kill her ... that was another thing entirely. By midafternoon I saw the first blurred birdlike footprint in the snow and knew I was not far behind her. I increased my pace.

  As the afternoon drew on the footprints did not get any clearer. This was either because she was moving at a pace comparable to my own or because the snow was coming down heavier now. A layer of it covered the front of my body as I ran. Every so often I had to stop and knock away where it had been frozen into a thick crust by the wind chill of my passage. Again I increased my pace. The snow was now a good three inches deep and beginning to drift. This put more strain on my motors and my joints began to heat. Soon the snow ceased to settle on me.

  As the afternoon drew to a close her tracks became clearer. In the evening, when the light began to bleed away, I switched to infrared, but there was nothing to see. I realised that even though I was so close I could lose the trail. I tried ultraviolet and saw her footprints glowing like neon signs. Of course, she could not have been much further away than Jethro Susan and myself when that APW dumped its load. She was radioactive. I looked behind and noted how my footprints glowed just as much.

  Into the night my run continued—as lurid as in any computer game. I wondered when it would end. It occurred to me then she might be heading back up to the ice. Perhaps her madness had returned. Then, like a dire wolf in the night, a howl.

  Diana.

  She should have died like a human after a small span of life. Her immortality should have been the old genetic immortality of children. I should have killed her long ago and saved her the pain that made her howl like that.

  After the howl came an echoey sobbing as of someone lost in a cavern. She shouted a name then. And it was mine.

  Did she regret or did she name me in hate?

  I saw the burning shape ahead of me, standing, then falling to its knees in the snow. I slowed as I pulled the atomic shear from my pocket. I should not have slowed. I should not have hesitated. For she said my name again and the tone of her voice left a seed of pain in me. As I closed in she said no more. The atomic shear bucked in my hand as I swept it across. Her head thudded into the snow like a rock. Her body swayed with electric sparkles flashing round the stump of her neck, and fell shortly after.

  * * *

  As if the storm had been only for us the sun rose over a flat white landscape with an excess of light. Snow crystals glittered like a sprinkling of silver dust and a nearby acacia looked like a sculpture of glass and white cotton, scattering rainbows all around. I had not moved for a couple of hours nor had I looked at the headless metal body beside me. Motionless I had knelt there trying to feel something: anger, grief, satisfaction. All that happened though was that I found my mind wandering. I thought instead about crossbred vampires and humans, sentient crocodiles . . . Mostly I came back on what I had to do next. Slowly I turned and viewed what remained of my wife.

  The body beside me was like a skeleton over which had been stretched a thin film of silver. Her spine below the squarish ribcage was a three-inch wide column and the metal of her legs an
d arms was thicker than bone. The main difference between her and the inner me was the shape of her ceramal pelvis. It was wider, with the tops of her legs sloping inward so that when she was covered with synthiflesh she had the hips of a woman. But she had been without sythiflesh for a long time now. The metal of her feet and hands was worn to the extent that the knurling was gone. I noticed she was missing a couple of toes and fingers as well. I turned away and looked for her head.

  It had sunk in the snow: a shiny ceramal skull with white enamelled teeth and eyes like mirrored spheres. Her storm shutters had come down at the last moment. I felt the ridiculous impulse to say something beginning with ‘Alas...’, but the impulse went when the storm shutters rose and I was looking into her grey synthetic eyes.

  I nearly dropped the skull. All those hours I had sat there thinking it was over. Idiot! Like myself she had a small secondary power supply set in the base of her skull. Separating her brain from her main powersupply had not been enough, just as breaking through the insulation of her flash-frozen nerve tissue had not been enough. The cold, perhaps had slowed things, as had the integrity of the superconductor grid in her brain. She had no need of oxygen or blood, just cold and power. She was still alive. I turned the skull away from myself and felt its jaw move. I tried to tell myself she was not screaming. I searched in the snow for the atomic shear, found it, and sliced a scale of ceramal from the base of her skull. Inside was a small area densely packed with microcircuitry divided from her brain by a transparent film. I located the thumb-sized power supply and pulled it out. Blue sparks showered the snow. When I turned her back to face me the jaw stopped moving and the storm shutters were back down. I sighed. For an indefatigable cyborg I felt incredibly tired.

  Again I sat there for a while. Inertia seemed to be my greatest problem now. It took a severe effort of will to remove my pack and drop the head inside. Then I climbed to my feet like a creaky old man, put my pack on again and stooped to the body of my wife. She was heavy, three times the weight of a normal woman, and as I set off across the whiteness my feet sank deep into the snow and the damp soil below.

  * * *

  On the evening of the second day I reached the JMCC complex. The snow had melted and for most of that day I had been stomping through slushy mud and a steamy mist. The groundcar came out when I was the same distance from the complex as when last I had come here. I wondered, irrelevantly, if they would get tired of me bringing bodies in.

  “Collector,” said the guard captain as he climbed down from the car. He was the same one as before. I nodded to him and he watched as I slung Diana’s loosely-articulated body off my shoulder and dropped it with a crash in the doorway of the car. I climbed up and hauled her inside. He looked at the dents and scratches I left and attempted to conceal his chagrin. I apologised absently and he looked at me in amazement before following me inside. But for the three of us there was no-one else in the car. The guard captain sat in the driver’s chair without a word. Soon we were speeding back to the JMCC. Only as we reached the hangar doors did he finally get up the nerve to say something.

  “You lost your hand,” he said.

  “Temporarily.”

  “We were told you have cardinal status.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  That was all he said, not a word about the headless ceramal body on the floor, not a complaint about the stink of decaying flesh from it and from my pack.

  In the hangar I stepped from the car to be greeted by Thomas Canard. He was as well dressed and suave as before. I looked like somebody’s nightmare. I probably was at times.

  “Welcome back, Collector.”

  He looked in the door of the car then gestured to a number of personnel who had foolishly been standing by looking as if they had nothing to do.

  “Take that to Jenson in Cryo.”

  I held up my only hand. “Wait a minute.” I unhitched my pack and removed the metal skull. Putrid brown fluid ran out of it. “This goes with it.”

  A woman in coverall and with black hair, cropped like Jethro Susan’s had been, took the head with her face twisted up in disgust. I saw her grab up a piece of plastic to wrap it in as soon as she could. It took four men to carry the body away.

  “It won’t be too damaged, will it?” asked Canard.

  I shook my head. “It was a clean cut at the neck with an atomic shear. Once the old tissue is removed it’ll be usable. The head is only a fancy case. The important subsystems and their software are in the main body, still under power.”

  He nodded. “There should be no problem. I’d suggest you go with it to have your hand seen to, but I suppose you want to speak to her first.”

  “Speak...?”

  “We are not completely primitive. We were able to give her voice and a little usable memory.”

  I was surprised and gratified. If they were able to do that then they were much less likely to louse up the main operation. Canard led me from the hangar, through corridors and rooms where technicians ran about in frenetic contrast to what lay outside the complex, to a white-walled room with a single chair at its centre.

  “I’ll leave you with her,” said Canard, and closed the door on his way out.

  I looked around the room. The only sign of instrumentation was the snub nose of some kind of projector up in one corner. I sat down in the seat. I felt I needed to be sitting, why, I do not know. I had expected to see a cryonic tank in here at least. She was somewhere else then. As I sat down the air before me flickered. And she was there.

  “Collector...”

  “Hello, Jethro Susan.”

  “How long ... ?”

  “Days only.”

  “You ... I... was dying. Why have you done this to me?”

  “It seemed just.”

  “You are punishing me?”

  “What have they told you?”

  “There ... were tests... They told me what I am. I have been gridded. My mind is held in stasis like your own. Only my mind cannot change with time. I have a small memory, but it is a computer memory.

  “My mind is enabled to grow and to alter like a living mind with the aid of complex software and even more complex hardware installed in line with the grid. JMCC did not have this technology. I got it for you.”

  “You ... killed the Silver One.”

  “And I brought back her body so it might be yours. Subsystems included. You can live again.”

  “I will be like you.”

  I could not think how best to reply to that. Would she be another one like Diana? Driven mad by the lack of flesh?

  I said, “Your inner structure will be of ceramal. Outside you will have synthetic flesh with all the advantages of human flesh and few of the disadvantages. You will be human. And you will never grow old and die.”

  Silence met my words. I thought then about Diana and what had probably driven her over the edge in the end. She had lost her synthetic covering and with it the last vestiges of humanity. Ceramal does not feel. For us it is the weak outer covering that is our shell. The weak outer covering that keeps us human.

  “Jethro Susan ... Susan ...”

  There was no reply. Shortly the door behind me opened and Canard walked in.

  “My cryonic man, Jenson, tells me he just took her offline to prepare her for installation. Sorry about that. Now, your hand.”

  He led me to a place where a technician reattached my hand with a relish and enthusiasm I found disquieting, then to another place where a similar technician provided me with synthiflesh covering for my hands and feet.

  “You see? Linked into your system they give more sensitivity than your others. Do you agree? We use a new neural fibre satellite-grown for ... “

  He rambled on and I nodded my head in agreement with him. He was right. My hands and feet were more sensitive. But I was still worrying about Jethro Susan. Was I doing the right thing? Or was I making another Diana? I remembered competitiveness when we hacked our way through jungle with her panga. But I also remembered her reacti
on to me when I pulled my face off in Z’gora. There was that time with the vampire as well. Did she remember it all? Or did she think it a nightmare? Abruptly I realised what my speculations were. I was not worrying about her sanity. Like a teenager on his first date I was wondering if she would like me.

  I nodded my head, smiled, and gritted my teeth with self-contempt as the synthiflesh technician turned his monologue to synthetic sexuality.

  A night passed, another day, another night. I fretted like the husband of an expectant mother. On the day things were coming to completion, Jenson, the cryonics man, lost his temper and swore at me, then turned white when he realised what he had done.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” I said, and left him to it, which no doubt surprised and pleased him. I went then to bother the synthiflesh technician, who had now turned to making the outer Jethro Susan. He was much more amenable but harder to get along with. Some of his questions were personal to the point of obscenity. I left him, and after a great deal of trouble got someone to make me a pair of boots like my old pair. Then I went outside.

  The sun was shining, but there was a chill in the air, which I especially noticed on my hands. I sat on the fallen trunk of a baobab and watched a large family group of wild dogs yipping and bickering their way across the savannah.

  “Hold it right there, you bastard!”

  I spun round, slipped, and tried to catch hold of a branch. The branch snapped and I fell backwards off the log to land with a heavy thump.

  When I came up spitting leaves from my mouth I said, “I suppose you’ve been waiting for that for a long time?”

  Jethro Susan’s laughter was music.