redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  The old man barked with laughter but there was no amusement in it at all. ‘So you know the options. Accept your death sentence, which strikes me as the least intelligent choice. Or go to some hovel called Cocheforet and track down Father Sylvester and Kate Mercarderes. Then all you have to do is bring one of them back, so we can find out what the fuck the sainted Joan did with our money.’

  It was a stupid question but Axl asked it anyway, ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because you’re available, you’ve got the combat skills and you’ll fit right in on Samsara. Just another traumatised ‘fugee, tortured and blinded in Joan’s service…’

  Axl looked at the Cardinal. ‘But I’m not. . .’ And then as the guards came in, he stopped talking.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sábado II

  ‘Fresh, delicious, wholesome…’

  A taco cart stood in the middle of the Plaza de Armas, chained to black wrought-iron railings that fenced off the entrance to the metro. The cart’s aluminium sides were scuffed to a matt finish that looked like a bad acid etch but was just dust, grease and age, and its voice was tiny and uninviting, coming from a single speaker.

  But its owner didn’t need the cart to tell tourists he was there, the stink of frying onions did that for him as the late-morning wind wafted odour molecules northwards towards a line of Honda setting them down directly outside the Sagarario. The cruisers would have put the tourists down outside the Catedral Metropolitana next door, but parking was forbidden there.

  Almost all the tourists pulled a face when they caught the smell of burritos but a few always headed towards the cart, hands dipping into slack pockets to look for credit chips or loose change.

  Next to the small cart, stood its owner shovelling fried mince mixed with chocolate into a tortilla roll, using his filthy fingers when he thought the Americans weren’t watching. The meat looked obscene and smelt of gristle and fat, and yet even that was better than the over-sweet smell of the onions that went on next. Sloppy tomatillo finished it off, hiding the sludge grey of the onions. Refritos were extra.

  Sábado grinned, showing yellow teeth. He wouldn’t have eaten one even if he could. And besides the Voudun priest didn’t eat animal, not even those that hadn’t really been alive in the first place.

  Sure, he killed occasionally to make offering. But nothing bigger than a chicken and even then he didn’t take off the bird’s head with his teeth like the ignorant said. And he never ate their flesh. He left flesh eating to the Christians.

  ‘Will you take a fucking look at that. . . !’

  Sábado shushed the gun he carried wrapped in a brown paper bag like some dustout trying to hide his kit, but he did what the gun said all the same. The American girl at the taco cart had breasts like small melons and buttocks like colliding twin moons, all covered with some orange lycra-derivative that stretched in all the wrong places.

  She needed another taco the way the Colt needed a street-patois upgrade, but she was deep throating the taco like a snake swallowing a rat.

  ‘Hey, lard-arse…’

  The backpacker swung round, but didn’t connect the ripe Brooklyn accent with the skeletal black man standing a few paces away smiling apologetically.

  Sábado slapped the Colt’s mute button hard. Actually, he just slapped the whole handle through the paper, not caring if he hit mute or off. He didn’t like carrying the Colt when it was in live mode, but he had no alternative. Zocalo wasn’t his part of town and the gun was feeding him directions siphoned off from traffic lights on the corner of Correo Mayor and Salvador.

  The girl was still scowling at a Mexican policeman when the tattered old man started to walk across the huge square towards the parked-up chrome and glass cruisers and the squat, bell-topped towers of the cathedral beyond. The church was old, Sábado could sense that. Besides no one bothered to put all those fiddly bits on buildings any more, not even churches, and they hadn’t for centuries.

  And the ghosts that called to Sábado from the yellow stone of the building weren’t white or even originally European.

  They were older and darker, with a different kind of bloodiness. More savage but also more honest, if cruelty could be counted in that way. And in Sábado’s eyes it could. The old man didn’t know that Spaniards had built their ornate church with its Renaissance and baroque facade on top of the Aztec’s tzompantli, that place where Mexico’s original rulers displayed the skulls of sacrificial victims. Neither did Sábado know that the first Christian church on the site used stones ripped from the temple of Huitzilopochtli, but he could feel it. Like a wave of dark power that threatened to break over him.

  The old man crossed himself, kissed a small chamois bag that hung on a human sinew round his scrawny neck and opened his mind. As always, if there were gods waiting for riders then he was there to carry them. But the wave washed over Sábado without sweeping him away and the old man kept walking.

  The Zocalo was crowded and it would be even more crowded later on. Saturday was the most popular day to visit the cathedral and by that afternoon the square would be packed with visitors wall to wall. Sábado wasn’t worried. He intended to be gone long before then.

  Japanese tourists parted around Sábado without even knowing they’d done so, streaming both sides of him as he walked through their middle, only half-noticing the tiny visCams most of them wore like transparent lenses over one eye. He would appear in a dozen slickly-edited versions of their holiday, skimmed off from optic nerve, saved as a .vis file and uploaded that night while they slept. And none of them would know who he was or even remember having put him in vision.

  ‘Keep it quiet,’ Sábado said, tapping the Colt’s voice button. ‘Comprende?’

  The hiPower kept silent, which the Voudun priest decided to take as agreement or as near as he was going to get.

  ‘Okay,’ muttered Sábado, reaching the cathedral door and looking doubtfully at a little round man in a black cloak who pushed a silver tray in his direction. On the salver was a jumble of coins and credit chips, so Sábado took five dollars.

  Ignoring the monk’s surprise, Sábado stepped through a small wooden door cut into a far bigger one. Instantly he felt the Colt shudder as it picked up a weapons alarm inaudible to human hearing.

  ‘Fuck it.’

  The Voudun priest glared at the tattered paper bag he held, fingers already reaching for the off button.

  ‘Do that and we’re really fucked,’ warned the Colt. ‘So shift your arse and take us somewhere quiet. Before the cathedral gets a fix on us.’

  Sábado did what he was told, slipping around an oncoming Texas couple holding hands and sidestepping a group of sombre Korean politicians. He could feel the little man from the door standing somewhere in the crowd behind him. Not shocked or angry, more interested. As if a man who thought he’d seen everything and more, suddenly realised he hadn’t.

  All along the back of the cathedral candles burnt in rows on black wrought-iron racks and the welcome smell of melting wax mixed with the dust of old incense.

  ‘Turn right,’ insisted the gun and Sábado stepped into a tiny side chapel to let by a group of adolescents who trailed after a guide, ignoring the simplified history shot into their ear beads by a hidden Toshiba smartSat.

  Only a teenage girl with cropped orange hair and her ears surgically cut away to streamline her head noticed Sábado so he smiled back and filled her mind with a sudden twist of naked limbs. She went slack-jawed with shock, then grinned. She was still smiling when she caught up with her group. The Voudun priest wasn’t sure what her sweetest memory had been, only that whatever it was she definitely liked having it played back.

  ‘In there, quick,’ said the Colt. So Sábado slid around the base of a stone pillar and took a short cut through to an even smaller side chapel.

  ‘Now fucking kneel.’

  The Voudun priest started to protest and then shrugged, dropping to his knees on a padded rail in front of a plaster statue of a young Indian girl with gold sp
ikes coming out of her head. Virgin de las nivas. She had the same smile as the kid with orange hair.

  ‘Okay,’ said the Colt crossly. ‘Let’s lose those fuckers while we’ve still got time.’ The gun hummed to itself, a rapid electronic murmur of bleeps and static, running a sympatico programme as it skimmed up and down the length of the cathedral’s defences, looking for some leeway. Nothing. The cathedral security system had the digital teeth of a Rottweiler and the stunted, obsessive, emotionally-anorexic brain to match.

  In turn the Colt spat out that it was willing to gut an Islamic orbital bank and donate the entire proceeds to the charity of the AI’s choice, that it could let the AI have devastating insider leverage on both the new Emperor and her mother and that it was seeking sanctuary under the 3rd UN Turing amendment.

  All were lies and all were rejected. In total, the transaction took .129 of a second. Sábado got the idea the gun beeped to itself.

  ‘Shit.’ This time the Colt dug deeper, hardsphere in its handle spinning like a psychotic gyroscope as the gun mined software it had hidden away for emergencies. UN PaxForce agent—rejected. WorldBank auditor (with unlimited access to funds at Hong Kong Suisse)—rejected.

  There had to be something… Doctor on edge of C3JD breakthrough, famous free-form nanetic artist, leading member of Mexico’s U2 Masonic lodge—all rejected. The gun didn’t even bother to offer up midWest tri-D evangelist or liberation theologist. . .

  The house AI was closing in. Tracking back the Colt’s offers as the gun bounced his business cards off smart lights or the small silver guides that floated effortlessly above the tourists, even double bouncing between neon-clad automated confessionals.

  Archbishop of Karachi—rejected.

  They were pinpointed to the right side of the nave, forward of the transept, which didn’t give them too many hiding places. Slowly but certainly suited guards were moving up towards their chapel, politely stepping around tourists and showing no haste or worry, nothing that might upset that day’s paying visitors.

  Defecting Russian Mileetsia general—rejected.

  The guards wore wrapround Raybans and discreetly padded jackets that mixed kevlar mesh with plates of 99.7% pure biopolymer chitin that overlapped each other like fish scales. The kevlar ran a tsunami program, soft to the touch but able to harden instantly into a rock-hard carapace. Not that the guard got many chances to try the tsunami out for real, baseball-bat-wielding thugs were a rarity in the Metropolitana.

  Commissar in Exile from Red Tibet—rejected

  ‘Sweet fucking Nazarene,’ the gun dug to the bottom of its store of business cards and pulled out one it didn’t even know was there. The card was large and white, or it would have been if it were real. Hand-engraved text embossed onto a perfectly-smooth china clay surface, its gently-scalloped edges dusted with gold leaf. The Colt didn’t bother to read the ornate print, just bounced it straight at the Metropolitana’s AI without even a pretence of re-routing.

  The guards stopped dead, listening to a suddenly barked order in their ear beads. They weren’t talking to each other when they spoke into the small mikes slicked to their throats, as Sábado had thought. It was the AI they were reporting in to. And just as the guards listened when the building told them where to look, so they stopped when ordered.

  For a second or two they stood, eyes blinking and puzzled, ten paces from where Sábado knelt over a brown paper bag. And then they moved off again as a now-softer voice inside their heads sent them back to their little mezzanine just above the main door.

  ‘Welcome,’ said a soft voice from a speaker set in a nearby confessional. Its tone was cultured, almost urbane.

  ‘Which one of you is a Papal nuncio?’

  Sábado looked at the paper bag in his hand.

  ‘I’m a Voudun priest,’ he said shortly. ‘Try the gun.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Vision Off

  ‘. . . shit out of my arm.’ What began as a scream trailed off into recognisable words, hysterical with bitterness. First he’d lost his soundtrack and now his sight had been stolen. Inside Axl’s head, white noise clashed with a raging, fiery blackness as he went through fear into fury. Despair would come later. As yet, Axl was too angry to understand fully what he’d lost.

  All he knew was that they’d finally come out of heavy Gee. And he only knew that because gravity had stopped trying to pulp him against the back of his fucking seat.

  Axl usually left the swearing to his Colt but the gun was missing, along with his eyes. Tracks like dried yolk still ran faintly from empty sockets. Most of it had long since peeled away in dirty flakes, but enough had remained to turn the stomachs of those guards who’d dragged him from the VIP lounge at Paris Charles de Gaulle toward the boarding gate for Boeing Shuttle PS 1308, destination Planetside/Luna.

  No man had been less looked at or more noticed.

  Now he was safely aboard the shuttle, sat alone in a VIP cabin at the back, with only the shuttle’s AI in the control room behind him. VIPs used to sit at the front, until statisticians pointed out that as both airplanes and spacecraft crashed or burnt up from the front, the intelligent place to sit was at the back.

  But the only thing Axl cared about, besides his missing sight was pain from a surgical tube plugged into a ceramic socket in his wrist. The edges were raw where they folded out over cut-away flesh and fire lanced up Axl’s arm everytime he tried to bend his fingers.

  He’d still had his eyes when the Cardinal’s personal doctor had punched the implant crudely into position and since the man was an upscale surgeon in a world where most surgeons were infinitely more dextrous machines, Axl could only assume it was meant to hurt.

  There was another square in the side of his skull, of crystal polymer this time, equally crude and even more visible where the Cardinal’s major domo had cropped away hair with a Braun beard trimmer to leave a leprous white patch, now scabbed round the implant’s edges with dried blood. It made him look like some cheap Tetsuo, all retro bio-augmentation, anal obsession and angst. But this wasn’t some chic tri-D cerebro games Wear from Sony and if it really was an apter, which was doubtful, Axl didn’t know why it was quite so obvious and crude.

  And it wasn’t even about making a back-up file of his core personality, although Axl guessed the Cardinal was sick enough to be amused at the thought of him ending up as a bioAI, operating some fridge door. No, if all they’d wanted was to copy him they’d have used a cloneDome, a basic Matsui SQUID.

  ‘Give me a fucking neural block,’ Axl demanded crossly, for about the tenth time. There was fresh blood in his mouth and a sour bile was etching his tongue from the last time he’d vomited into the bag now coming loose from his mouth, but mostly he just had a migraine left over from when the weight of gravity had squashed him back into his seat as the Boeing shuttle hit five G.

  On the wall in front of him, a LotusMorph he couldn’t see was explaining in very simple language how to combat the worst effects of take-off sickness. The level of language linked to gravity, so that the higher the G the simpler the talking head’s language became, as the viewer’s critical faculties crashed.

  No one answered Axl’s furious demands for a painkiller.

  Certainly not the automated flight attendant built into the arm of his seat. He knew it was a proper flight attendant and not some cheap tri-D imitation put there to fool steerage-class tourists into thinking they were getting the full treatment because it had suggested he do up the web of his belt when he first sat down. And then suggested it again, more firmly, touching his shoulder to reinforce the message.

  The attendant ended up telling Axl to buckle up for his own safety until Colonel Emilio told it a few home truths, starting with the fact that Axl couldn’t currently see the buckle and finishing with the fact that he was a dangerous terrorist who, in the Colonel’s professional opinion, shouldn’t have been allowed to live. Never mind be sent off into comfortable exile on Planetside.

  Now the flight attendant w
asn’t talking to Axl at all. And being blind, Axl couldn’t check whether there was anyone else sat near by. There wasn’t and his cabin was sealed from the outside. Not with a simple electronic lock or even a square of epoxy mesh. The cabin door had been spot soldered with self-welding nickel/aluminium flashtape: the magnatron 50-atom splutter-gun stuff that hit 1600 degrees C within milliseconds and needed cutting open.

  Ordering the door sealed was the last thing Colonel Emilio did before saluting his French counterpart with bad grace and stamping his way out of Departures at Charles de Gaulle, using the walkway to Local Flights and catching a low-altitude shuttle back to Benito Juarez, six klicks outside Mexico City. The Colonel knew that in the Cardinal’s eyes he’d somehow failed, he just couldn’t work out why. He also didn’t see why Axl had to go to Planetside Luna from Paris either, when Mexico had its own shuttle service.

  As far as the flight attendant was concerned shuttle trips didn’t get more boring than this one. The prisoner was to be secure, adequately restrained and not sedated. Plus it had orders that the man was not to arrive physically more damaged than he already was, which cut out half the sexual services usually on offer to VIP passengers.

  And the reason the flight attendant wouldn’t come through with the painkillers was that it had strict orders not to supply any medication, alcohol or recreational drugs.

  Since that pretty much encompassed the other half of its reason for existing, the semiTuring had retreated into a major sulk and was endlessly speed-watching the end of Death in Space, the episode where the cabin assistant goes on trial for saving a shuttle’s gentle, intelligent and sensitive AI rather than rescuing the craft’s whining, overbearing passengers.

  Fifteen minutes into take-off, as a complex cocktail of neurotransmitters began to feed through the tube in Axl’s wrist, the flyset beads in his ears stopped spitting white noise and started running a simple memory-burn program. Simple words were accompanied by images that were equally simple, but always hideous.