redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  They also—obviously enough—also got Moritz’s original Genome patents. Not to mention his character rights to LC/GbH’s Lucifer’s Dragon. Overnight, St Peter’s was richer than San Lorenzo, the Geneticists’ base in Megrib. The games income in North America alone was worth more than the entire GDP of Saudi, which was deep in recession, but still…

  Joan was trustee. And inside Moritz’s head the numbers stopped spinning for the first time ever, leaving silence.

  For the last four decades Moritz had quietly collected alms at the cathedral door and cleaned the relics in the Sangrario, that overdressed eighteenth-century fortress built next door to Mexico’s Catedral Metropolitana. The fat little man came and went as he liked and no one worried that he might steal, because no man had less interest in money than the one man who’d had the most.

  Now, Moritz wanted something else, something even simpler. And the Colt had promised he would get it. What’s more, Moritz believed the gun.

  ‘Bonefish,’ the Cardinal said, pointing to gulls gathering over the reef. One of his bodyguards looked doubtful but, when the Cardinal raised one eyebrow, the man didn’t open his mouth to differ.

  ‘Maybe not,’ admitted the Cardinal, reaching for a fresh glass. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve been out there.’ He started to raise the Bohemian crystal to his lips, then paused as a liveried servant dashed forward to wipe a drop from its delicate base.

  His Excellency Cardinal Santo Ducque shrugged, as if to say, you see how I have to live… And then behind his shades focused golden pupils on Moritz and the small talk was over.

  ‘I’ve come to say goodbye,’ Moritz said, ‘which brings me to this ...' He slid his hand into the leather bag on his lap and pulled out the Colt. Three things happened simultaneously. The Cardinal’s face slid straight from shock to resignation, bypassing fear, Moritz grinned and the gun uncloaked, cutting its fooler loops to trip every alarm in the Villa.

  It wasn’t the bodyguards who took apart Moritz’s head, the first hollow-point full-ceramic-jacket punching a golfball size hole just below his hairline. The guards fired a split second after that first shot, their slugs adding a jerky rhythm to his dancing, already-dead body as it went over backwards. The initial shot came from the Villa’s AI, before soundwaves from the exploding security sirens even reached the Cardinal’s ears.

  Moritz’s head had no exit hole at the back, largely because there was no back to Moritz’s head, too much of his skull was scattered in sticky white fragments on the flagstones of the terrace behind him. And the heavy stink of bougainvillea had been edged out by shit, blood and cordite.

  ‘Get a doctor,’ the Cardinal demanded. ‘Full mediSoft now. I want him chilled down, his heart preserved. While you’re at it, scoop out what’s left of his brain and chill that too.’

  ‘No way,’ said a voice. And then it went harsh, street-smart and heavily Brooklyn. ‘Stop exactly where you are and no one else gets dead…’

  Both bodyguards were spinning like tops, combat ready with left hands gripping right wrists, H&K .38s held at forty-five degrees to the upper body as they looked for the newcomer. And then they all realised it was the gun talking.

  ‘Black Jack Hot.’ The Cardinal sounded vaguely surprised.

  ‘Yeah. Episode one, opening sequence. Didn’t know you were a fan. Hey. . .’ That was to the two hovering bodyguards. ‘Any closer and I’ll blow your boss to meatballs.’

  ‘Moz’ll die if we don’t help him,’ said the Cardinal.

  ‘That’s what he wants,’ said the Colt. ‘Besides, he’s already dead as dogmeat. And it’s time you got over this resurrection shit.’

  Both bodyguards looked at the Cardinal, who looked at the Colt lying on blood-splattered slabs where Moritz had dropped it, tiny diodes lighting in sequence along its exposed side, fast and rhythmic, like the click-track on some mixing deck.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ The Colt sounded cross. ‘Death was what I promised him. You can patch him up, reload his brain, grow a new reverse to his skull. Fuck it, you could grow him a new head, couldn’t you? Or do a transplant…’

  The Cardinal groaned. It had been the Vatican who did the first successful head transplant, back at the end of the twentieth century, and no one had ever let them forget it.

  ‘. . . but do you think he’ll thank you for it,’ demanded the Colt. ‘The fuck he will.’ The Colt was flipping lights faster now, opening dialogue not just with the houseAI but with the Villa’s titanium gate, persuading it to lock out the CCPD hovers that were tearing up the narrow blacktop towards it, demanding access.

  The gate wasn’t making any decisions. That wasn’t its job. No matter what the CCPD reckoned they’d seen on satellite.

  ‘Chrysler Mark Three hovers, armoured and running in battle readiness,’ the Colt told the Cardinal. ‘You want to let them in?’

  The Cardinal just looked at the gun.

  ‘It’s your Villa, your AI, your pet corpse ...' The Colt’s voice changed, becoming stentorian, overtly dramatic. To make the point he ran a chord crash ahead of the opening words. ‘Cardinal kills benefactor. Maximillia under pressure to act…

  ‘Or did the poor, muddled man try to kill you? After all, his fingerprints are all over the handle. I’ve got his neural patterns logged on file as owner. Fuck it, I’ll even go on oath in court if you want…’

  The gun paused, its tone sardonic. ‘Oh, you lot don’t believe machines can take oaths, do you? A bit of a fucking pity really.’

  ‘Tell the house to let them in,’ the Cardinal told the gun. ‘And tell it to wipe any embarrassing vid-transcripts accidentally.’ His Excellency looked at the gun. ‘Presumably there’s a price for all this?’

  ‘Isn’t there always? But you can afford it.’

  The Cardinal grunted. ‘You saw poor Father Moritz turn that gun on me?’

  Both bodyguards nodded.

  ‘Good,’ said the Cardinal as he stood up and stretched, fingers interlinking above his head, thin lips pulling back over long yellow canines. CAT scans and lie detectors wouldn’t be involved. Hell, it wouldn’t even make the news. In fact, if the CCPD weren’t gone in thirty minutes leaving him to deal with the gun and the body, then he was losing his touch.

  The Cardinal adjusted his tiny pebble glasses against the evening glare and glanced at the Colt, considering. He was the Cardinal. And the Cardinal could do what he wanted. That was what Mexico had always believed… Somehow these days it was the Cardinal who felt less certain of the fact.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Body, Speech, Mind, Diamond

  Om Ah Hum Vajra ...

  Out beyond Luna, out even beyond the Arc, the Wheel of God spun in space, telling off endless prayers. Around the 1500 or so miles of its outer rim were attached three million scraps of calligraphy, each gummed in place at the top right corner. They were the prayers of the faithful, written in Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, and woodblocked onto rice fabric by Buddhist monks. Each tiny script had been fixed in place by a hired gang of Deacon Blues, space dwelling salvage rats subcontracted by the Dalai Lama.

  There were longer streamers—some of merely human height, others at least a mile long—weighted at the end with small lead seals. These were prayers too, convoluted mantras endlessly repeated on each ribbon and then repeated again as the wheel’s edge spun them in a vast circle. Further off, huge steel drums hurtled through space, seemingly unattached to the wheel, their long lengths of monofilament so fine as to be invisible. In each drum were more prayers. As well as simple steel drums there were elaborate canisters of beaten silver, chased around the sides with complex, swirling representations of demons and the Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhism’s great masters.

  Inside the silver canisters were all the names of God, printed out onto silken ribbon. It had taken a bank of Cray3s at CalTek at least forty-seven years to track down all the names and ten minutes to spit them out.

  This was Samsara, the Wheel of Life, the Wheel of God.

>   Here was Tibet reborn from the carnage of the Second Sino War. It was a place of duty and of prayer, but most of all it was a safe haven, recognised as such by the UN, WorldBank and the IMF. All ‘fugees had right of entry. They had to get there first, of course, but that didn’t lessen the principle no matter how much it limited the number.

  Unlike the original Tibetan wheel, Samsara had no visible spokes and no hub; it rotated about itself, creating both surface pseudo-gravity and enough momentum to trap most of the new world’s atmosphere within the long central valley and the high, vertiginous mountains of its edges. What atmosphere bled away into space had to be replaced, but that was Tsongkhapa’s problem. And Samsara’s central AI didn’t trouble others with its problems.

  Axl Borja knew none of this. He was asleep in his seat, knocked flat by melatonin and kept that way by a seriously cross stewardess. He knew the back-history, of course. How, as the giant bioCrays at CalTek were sourcing thirteen regional variants on the god Zoroaster, fifty-three years before the end of the leasing agreement, a Buddhist astronomer at MIT’s observatory on Darkside picked up the first sighting of the wheel.

  Samsara wasn’t a world then, merely a hollow circle a thousand miles around its inner rim, like a huge bird’s egg with both ends cut off, if any bird could be so big that it might fly between the stars. And there were breakaway Navajo in Colorado who believed that Samsara was the remains of an egg, that there had been a bird which hatched. But then a Zen sect in Okinawa swore it was the birth sac of a vast cosmic carp and the sky was water.

  The fractured stone bubble was not spinning around itself back then, merely tumbling end over end through space like a discarded tyre. And before the Navajo, the Carp cult—or the Enquirer’s insistence it was really all being staged in an SFX studio in Burbank, California—the Dalai Lama had known Samsara for more than that. Sitting cross-legged on his bed, logged into a vidgroup when he should have been sleeping, he’d opened a flash between Darkside and CalTek and known instantly that here was Samsara, Vajrayana, the indestructible vehicle. His destiny had arrived, if such a big word could be given to a shaven-headed, slightly podgy thirteen-year-old boy.

  God-child creates world.

  In private, Cardinal Santo Ducque maintained the story was so much shit, and he was right. MIT’s observatory on Darkside had been monitoring the ring for months, watching it come ever closer. And the Dalai Lama had known to the minute when the final name of God would be collated, cross-referenced and the entire list printed out.

  But it was a good story and sometimes a fitting lie can do more good than a mundane truth. Particularly when used to raise funds.

  Lars Arcsen, leader of the Deacon Blues, brought the ring to a halt, using tugs and endless miles of monofilament. He lost thirty ships. Six hundred men and five AIs lost their lives, and when the ring finally stopped it was 50,000 miles further out than Lars had predicted.

  Which worried Lars not a fuck, since there had been thirty-six hours towards the end when Lars was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to halt the ring at all.

  And once Samsara was in position, getting it spinning properly took Lars another three months. And then came creation, except that took twenty-eight years, not six days, and no one got Sunday off to rest. Water came from the dirty ice of a captured comet, not filtered but purified by nanites that ate heavy metals. Nanites also shredded Samsara’s molecular bonds, feeding on pale sunlight as they separated out original elements, only to build them back into mountains, rocks, cliffs…

  The comet ice was split into hydrogen and oxygen, mixed with nitrogen and fed back as atmosphere. Unbreathably thin at first, but getting thicker with each passing year.

  But then, twenty-one years into creation, with the framework to this new landscape already grown, the project hit its biggest wall. Soil. Leaf litter. Loam. That broken-down biomass that gave Earth its actual name. Creating enough soil proved beyond the ingenuity of even Lars Arcsen.

  Aged seven—sat in exile in a vast apartment on West 64th that had been sandblasted down to a stripped urban shell—the brand-new Dalai Lama flipped off the browband of his birthday Sony tri-D long enough to ask one question. ‘How many people die each year?’

  Initially, WheelOfGod Enterprises expected resistance to their request for donated bodies. They ended up charging for the privilege. To start with, the whole of the West Coast America wanted to be recycled. Elderly models from Bel Air covenanted condos provided their dumb-fuck red setters could come too.

  A Hollywood actress, three face transplants on from the v’Actor still making her hit movies, had her agent hold a press call at the Dome to announce she’d be donating her body to the Wheel. But then, as her first husband bitched, what was the big deal? She’d already donated it to everyone else.

  At one time your annual salary plus post & packing on a shrub or tree secured you a place on one of the coffin ships (basically, a refrigerated Niponshi food transport too old and battered to pass NASA standards for the Luna run). It also bought you a rice-paper prayer tacked to the rim of the wheel. A street sweeper in Delhi went Wheelside for a tattered Jimsen weed and $23.60, the head of Team Rodent donated $238,000,000 and a forest of oak saplings, and still there were grumbles that it didn’t properly reflect his true remuneration.

  Turnover proved to be high on Samsara when the living finally started to arrive. The Tibetan exiles thrived, but the refugees died faster and so did the tortured. Some died of injuries, others of shock. A few killed themselves, unable to live with the silence, temple bells and slightly-distant kindness of the monks.

  But to start with, before Samsara had inhabitants, the dead got shredded into bone-filled fragments, mixed with disassemblers and sprayed over every surface, whether it stuck or not. Later, insects broke mounds of delivered bodies into mulch that got spread thin across the central valley. And then, that done, Niponshi drones hosed mulch onto the bare rock face of the mountainside which trickled down to pool again in the valleys.

  Much later, mosses were planted, trees and shrubs, starting their own cycle of growth and corruption, though the bodies kept coming.

  The Dalai Lama furnished the faith but the reclusive, obscenely-rich sandrat Lars Arcsen provided the knowledge. Few people knew where he got the skills or the technology, but then few people had ever been out to where Lars lived, surrounded by animals on a private orbital. All Lars did was take what had first been done in the Arc, and do it again, but larger. He was the one who called it all. Everyone else regarded it as a miracle.

  Entrance to the Wheel of God wasn’t down through the atmosphere. It was up through a single hole in the shell. Besides the numerous lengths of high-tensile molywire rumoured to span from one side of the wheel to its opposite, there were two reasons for this. The reason given was that entry this way kept the side effects of atmospheric re-entry out of the loop. The real reason was that it allowed the Wheel’s pacifist AI, Tsongkhapa, to screen all incoming refugees for weapons and disease.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Monosyllabic/Monochromatic

  ‘Wake now,’ said the stewardess and Axl did, into the darkness he was coming to dread. Almost half of his life hadn’t been enough to come to terms with losing his internal backing track and he knew the rest of his life wouldn’t be long enough for him to learn to face being blinded with anything other than gut-churning self pity. That knowledge was almost as sickening as being swallowed by the blackness.

  ‘Come on, wake up,’ repeated the voice.

  Just by listening he knew she was out of reach. Cramps were spreading up his left arm and he guessed she’d just pumped norAdrenaline into his wrist implant to kick him awake. It worked, he was jumpier than a rattlesnake.

  ‘We’re here.’

  ‘Where?’ Axl asked.

  ‘Where you’re going.’ Her answer was bright, accurate and utterly unhelpful. ‘I’m going to get the cabin chief now…’

  There was a sudden silence to go with the blackness. So Axl just waited, ke
eping his thoughts to a bare minimum. Which was pretty easy given the steady thud of blood in his head and a writhing ratking knot in his stomach that gnawed like hunger but was probably fear.

  Two-thirds of the human mind is taken up processing sight. And okay, not even Axl knew what was being logic-chunked through his unconscious mind, but his conscious brain knew only too well that it was missing visual input. And since over sixty percent of information stored in the brain got there via sight, his brain was missing it bigtime.

  The cabin he was in was almost completely noiseless, Axl realised. Just the low thud of airfilters lazily converting his breath back into oxygen.

  ‘You feeling better now?’ The voice of the cabin chief was polite, but not that polite. Axl flipped out a hand and grinned when he heard the overgrown toy take a quick step backwards.

  ‘Maybe not,’ the voice said petulantly. And then there was silence again.

  Outside, the Nuncio’s cruiser kept pace with the edge of Samsara, rising slowly towards the wheel while the ship waited for the opening of a steel iris to let it pass into the first of many locks. Coming into its approach, the Boeing’s AI had passed control to Tsongkhapa. Though what took control of the Boeing, moving the cruiser up through the iris, its forward speed exactly matching that of the Wheel’s outer rim, was a subset of a subset, obviously enough. A mere fragment of intelligence.

  But still it was running code it knew intimately and the Nuncio’s Boeing hung exactly in the centre of the closing lock: from outside the wheel it would have looked as if the silver, purple and gold vessel was framed by a circle of black.

  Below the cruiser the metal iris closed, vents opened as pressure was equalised and then an iris overhead unfurled like the petals of a chrysanthemum folding back into nothing. The elegant cruiser climbed a level and then that iris closed below it. Vents hissing softly as the ceiling overhead began to unfurl. There were a dozen locks, maybe more. Axl didn’t count them, he just heard the hiss of vents, each one louder than the one before as the pressure began to reach atmospheric.