redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  ‘Well, too bad, ‘cos you‘re about to…’

  For a second, Axl had the hideous feeling she was about to lean across the desk and take his hand.

  ‘I’m Jane, your doctor,’ she said gently. ‘We’ll be working together to get you back on your feet. Get you back to full health.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with Black Jack,’ Axl said. ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘No,’ Jane shook her head. ‘You’ve been beaten up, starved, blinded, tortured…’

  His mind only made it to item two on her list.

  Starved? Axl stared at his wrist. Sure there was a scar from the implant but what he really noticed was just how thin his wrist was. Paper-fine skin stretched over protruding bone.

  ‘What’s the date?’ Axl demanded.

  ‘Thursday 1 September...'

  Eight days were gone walkabout. Axl examined his fingers, suddenly realising what he saw. Starvation. Skin pulled so tight over sinew and bone that his knuckles belonged to someone else.

  ‘Bastards,’ Axl said suddenly. ‘Fucking bastards…’

  ‘Anger’s good,’ the doctor told him.

  He ignored her. That bloody toy on the shuttle… Axl stopped feeling angry, stopped feeling anything and finally listened to his body. His teeth were chattering, muscles strung tight as violin strings in his jaw. All the way down his spine went shivers, syncopated cold waves. He stank so bad he didn’t know how the girl could stand to be in the same room as him.

  Not starved, Axl realised, wired to fuck and back. He could taste the residue of cheap amphetamine in his sour saliva. Smell the crystalMeth oozing from his pores. He’d just done the Bollywood Diet. A week asleep while his metabolism ran white hot and his shuddering body rehydrated through feeds in his wrist. The little bastard had burned out his muscles to leave bones rattling in a skin sack.

  ‘You’ve been chemically tortured,’ Jane said.

  ‘No,’ Axl said firmly. ‘Beaten up, drugged up, nothing more.’ Hell, he’d been tortured by professionals and that little bastard wasn’t even…

  When the small room came back into focus Axl’s hands were shaking and his teeth chattering worse than ever.

  Silently the doctor stood up and walked round her desk, heading towards a basin behind him. ‘Water,’ she said, seeing his suspicious glance, ‘run-off from the mountains.’

  It was cold enough to bite into the back of his throat and make his already aching head hurt even more. Silently she refilled the glass and gave it back to him. He drank that one down too while she watched. And then, surprisingly, Jane did nothing; almost as if she’d forgotten he was there.

  Axl watched while she tapped the top of her desk, elegant fingers dancing over its glass surface to wake icons. Soon the whole surface flickered with floating frames that filled with ever updating lists. It took Axl a minute or so to realise she was checking inventory and ordering fresh drugs for her surgery, something that even the most basic smartbox could have handled in fifteen seconds without anyone being aware it had run the routine.

  When she was done, Jane started over, rechecking she’d got her figures right first time round. Then she started rechecking the recheck. Without meaning to, Axl shifted in his seat.

  ‘Through there,’ the woman said without looking up.

  Through there featured a small chrome toilet, the first piece of obviously modern equipment he’d seen since landing. But Axl didn’t have eyes or need for that or the matching glass basin with built in sonic dryer. He was too busy looking at his face in a looking glass, hollow cheeked and flayed by the unflattering glow of a striplight overhead.

  It was as well the mirror was dumb. Because Axl could imagine only too well what the one back at his flat in Day Effé would have said had he ever presented himself looking like that. Refried shit was the least of it.

  And if the bruising had been only half as bad he’d still have looked worse than terrible. He could have signed on as a Voudun zombie in some horror Sim and the living dead would have complained. Hell, Black Jack would have said he would double no trouble as a drug warning to kids not to ski Ice…

  But that was busking it. Deep down inside, Axl knew he just looked ‘fugee-bog-standard issue, from his razor-cut three-millimetre crop designed to keep lice at bay to the standard Red Cross tag punched through his left ear, its hologram shimmering in the overhead light.

  The artificial eye feeding him the information stared out from one bruised socket. His other socket was crusted black. And if he’d got back his cheekbones to die for it was because almost dying was how he’d got them back. A ring of puncture wounds ran in neat circles round both temples where someone—read that little shit—had punched SQUID needles through to his brain.

  It wasn’t a pretty sight but then Axl was beginning to realise that it wasn’t meant to be. As for that foamBone repair in his forehead ... He could be running straight chips, a half-real/half-augmented splice or even be packed with nothing but the wetware he was born with. Christ alone knew what that little fuck had been doing inside his head up there on the shuttle. Rewiring everything in sight probably.

  * * * *

  Jane gave Axl ten minutes of being in front of the mirror by himself before she hit override on the door lock and came in to get him. Her patient wasn’t standing in front of the looking-glass anymore. He was hunched on the floor, legs pulled up and hugged tight to him with his arms, head buried against his knees.

  She knew without looking that he was crying. And experience told her he wouldn’t thank her for noticing, they never did. All the same, she pulled Axl to his feet, gave him a sterile tissue and led him back to her tiny surgery.

  Jane was twenty-three, six months out of Tel Aviv medical college and this man was the six hundred and thirty-second torture victim she’d seen since arriving. At most, she gave him a forty-sixty chance of surviving as was. Sixty-forty if she took time to patch him up.

  So far, she’d cared about each broken human presented to her but common sense and the clinic AI told Jane that her compassion would eventually cut off, though there’d been no sign of it yet. She was exhausted with waiting.

  The material on her couch was self-cleaning and the couch itself doubled as scales and most other things besides. Jane read off his weight and made a note to herself with a quick pass of her fingers over the desktop before helping him out of his blood-encrusted shirt and trousers.

  Three Spanish coins, a cracked credit chip and three soiled hundred dollar notes rolled together so tight they could be pushed into almost any orifice. There was nothing in his pockets that didn’t fit the standard ‘fugee profile.

  He stank worse without his clothes, but that was quite normal. For a minute Jane considered removing the grime and sweat from his skin with a simple dusting of nanites, but rejected the idea. Most ‘fugees were too scared of nanites to want them near. He could shower later, before he picked up replacement clothes.

  ‘Okay,’ said Jane as she ran her fingers quickly down his front, feeling for scars and swellings. ‘I’m starting the examination now ...' She was talking to the clinic AI. ‘Knife wound to the right chest, looks old. Newer operation scar over lower bowel area. Bullet wound, low-calibre and non-explosive, in through right thigh and out right hip… Relatively recent.’

  ‘That was five years ago,’ interrupted Axl.

  ‘Patient heals slowly…’ Jane added it to her observations without pausing. A quick touch to Axl’s shoulder was all it took to make him roll onto his front. ‘Star-shaped cauterisation to right shoulder, not instantly identifiable.’

  Axl could have told her that was a holiday souvenir from Belize, ceramic frag from someone else’s home-made pipe bomb, but he didn’t feel like interrupting her again and certainly not to talk about the one time he got really sloppy. His WarChild contract had been running out then and he’d missed a simple trip wire slung across the entrance to a deserted holiday hotel. Three-quarters of Axl’s input to that episode had involved him getting shipped to a field hospita
l outside San Porto. His personal rating had dropped eleven points.

  ‘Liver, both kidneys…’ Her hand slipped casually between his buttocks, cupping his balls. ‘Both testicles, one new…’ She nodded to herself, made another note, revising the odds upwards. Having both kidneys was good, if surprising.

  Running her fingers up the man’s spine to check each vertebra, her finger reached his skull and then found the grey ceramic plug, recessed into its mounting and level with his skin…

  ‘Shit…’ She bent close, so close that Axl could feel her blonde hair brush his shoulder, soft as angel’s breath. ‘They spiked you…’

  She was shocked.

  Really shocked.

  Axl twisted his head to look up into blue eyes made enormous by tears and pity. And despite himself, he smiled. No one came close to the Cardinal when it came to pre-planning and detail.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Shangri/LaLa

  This was nature with a fucking capital N, Axl realised, looking round him. Artificial and constructed, true enough, but still way more raw than what passed for wilderness back home on Earth; which the Cardinal insisted was put there by God for man but everyone knew was no more than a spitball of spacedust and a chance reaction of amino acids.

  Nature was something he was part of, that’s what Dr Jane back at Vajrayana had told Axl. Only fools thought nature, like life, was something that could be safely controlled. Well, he had news for her. Life and the world thrived on fools, this world as much as the old one. He’d be prepared to take a bet on it.

  Hoof beats sucked at the mud. The ground beneath his horse’s hooves had the consistency of summer tundra, a hand’s breadth of sticky earth and rough grass skimming soil still frozen hard as rock. His mount was spooked with fear, eyes rolled back white in its long head. The feeling of death around them was so stark it was as if they had ridden into a wall.

  Everything had been fine when the wind blew from behind, but now it came straight into Axl’s face, ripping tears from his hollow eye and choking him with its stench. He was so cold his bones were already ice and it felt like he had meltwater, not blood, in his veins. So maybe that little shit had left him human after all, because feeling this cold could only be a flaw and design faults were stripped out of toys and AIs.

  There was something wrong with the sky, too, but Axl couldn’t yet work out just what it was. From what he could tell, the colour seemed right, pale with high clouds and black dots that swung in distant currents. Not just small familiar birds, but larger, more exotic species. Eagles, black kites and hawks. Even a pale-feathered osprey that had skimmed low over a silver lake he’d left behind him the previous morning. Or maybe it was the day before that. Axl was having trouble remembering.

  Ahead were more dead bodies than he’d seen since the rape of Bogotá. Thousands of them. Rotting, hacked-apart corpses. If Axl hadn’t known better he’d have thought himself back in some battle. Arms were cut free from naked, legless torsos. A young girl with dark hair stared blindly in his direction, sockets pecked bare. She had no feet and what had been her large intestine sprawled out of her open stomach like a crawling worm.

  On a low stone table lay an old man, eyeless face turned to the sky. Both his arms were chewed away, one shredded at the elbow, the other ripped from its socket like a broken doll. Where his chest should have been was an open hollow framed by splintered ribs. And standing guard over the corpse was a grey wolf, saliva dripping from full jaws.

  The wolf wasn’t alone. Sitting on the stone altar beside the dead man was a saffron-robed old man chanting softly to himself, as oblivious to the wolf as to the ravens and Egyptian vultures circling overhead.

  Not a battlefield but a charnel ground. A point on the high plateau where bodies could be left broken and exposed to be taken back into the wheel of life. The monk was performing chod. Making peace with death. Axl knew all about chod and the charnel grounds: before reluctantly letting him sign himself out of her surgery Dr Jane had insisted he watch a bleak tri-D on ‘fugee life in Samsara.

  Vajrayana and the clinic were behind him now. And between where his horse stood on the plateau and where Axl was headed was a mountain ridge, draped in oak, scrub juniper and fir and topped by wispy low clouds and snow. Beyond that and the high valleys was an impossibly-steep mountain slope that rose almost sheer to the edge of the wheelworld.

  The time would come, of course, when the wheel was full but that was a long way off. Life was cruel on Samsara and Axl knew from the tri-D that ‘fugees died faster than they could be imported, though Tsongkhapa hoped that natural birth would eventually change that. And Samsara did have natural birth, it was one of the Dalai Lama’s oddities. As were those picturesque wooden tourist towns in the central valley leased to Thomas Cook and Disney.

  No one had even looked at him when Axl rode through Shangri/LaLa, but then TeamRodent regulations were very strict about tourist/’fugee fratting and the tour guides made sure their charges kept to the rules. Largely because if the experiment was successful the rodents were hoping to open not just another two tourist villages but a ‘tourist retreat’ in Vajrayana itself.

  And besides, the grocks were warned in advance that the sky was hung with tiny Aerospat vidCams, relaying constant updates to Tsongkhapa. And Samsara’s overarching AI might be neutral where ‘fugees were concerned, but that didn’t apply to tourists. In fact, Tsongkhapa had only agreed to guide in the chartered shuttles after the Dalai Lama explained for the third time that he had ‘fugees to protect and visiting tourists made it more difficult for WorldBank, the UN or IMF to launch covert raids.

  * * * *

  On a spread of wide wings, an eagle rode the air currents towards Axl, swirled into a turn and dived, low and fast over a small distant lake, talons extended. This time it took a silver-scaled char that flapped, already broken-backed as the eagle’s claws tightened.

  Maybe it was an omen, but if so then too bad because Axl didn’t believe in omens any more than in luck. Life was what you made of it. A construct. Luck didn’t come into it, ever…

  Pulling on his reins with cold awkward fingers, Axl wrapped his large grey coat tightly around himself and turned to face the low mountains on the other side of the plateau. Somewhere in the foothills, next to a waterfall there would be shaggy, squat-nosed yaks weighing half a ton or more, barley fields already cut, a village and a monastery, because there was always a monastery. If you could call low, pink-painted stone shacks monastic. It would take him several hours, maybe more to find the next place. But when he did, the monks would have spare food—and if not food then buttered tea. Everyone in the bloody place had buttered tea.

  Dr Jane had given Axl painkillers, a roll of surgical tape, amphetamines and a silver space blanket taken from Red Cross supplies. From the Samsara Trust he got twenty silver thalers, coins heavy enough to make a good punching weight if he put ten together and folded them into the palm of his hand, though Axl didn’t point that out to Dr Jane. He also got a steel-bladed hunting knife which had a heavy brass handle but was missing its scabbard, a long grey woollen coat that was almost rain-proof and the brown mare, a mountain pony so shaggy it could have been a misbred yak.

  The blonde doctor had walked him to the edge of the city herself, after finally accepting Axl’s angry, tearful statement that he couldn’t stay in Vajrayana for treatment because what he really needed was to find other people like him, persecuted followers of Pope Joan.

  Axl knew why he’d been given a horse when regulations only specified a knife, staff and woollen coat; one look at his own face give him the answer. From the blinded eye to the raw scar of a non-consensual SQUID burned into his forehead, he wore the stigmata of the damned. His very injuries made him a VIP among those who had suffered. At least, those of them who remained alive.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Buy Time/Sell Space

  The effect was kind of Downtown Boho, brocade and ribbons, both filthy.

  As well as a brocaded waistcoat,
the broad-hipped woman also wore a grey felt skirt, embroidered red blouse and no knickers. Axl was pretty sure of that last detail because he was squatted back on his heels, arms folded tight across his chest as he tried both to keep warm and not stare between the chapped and open knees of the round-faced ‘fugee squatting in front of him.

  She’d kept on sweeping ashes from the cold grate as he came into the Inn and hadn’t even looked round until he dropped into a crouch opposite her. Now she was looking like she didn’t understand a word he said. And if she didn’t, who would? The other villagers he’d seen on his ride into Cocheforet had just crossed-themselves and turned their backs.

  The Inn itself was no more than three rooms lumped on top of each other, with an outside latrine and a bit partitioned off from the main bar to make a kitchen, but it was still the biggest building in the village. Cocheforet had turned out to be an isolated ribbon-development of sod, wood and stamped-earth houses thrown up along the edge of a narrow stream in a valley planted on its lower slopes with millet and barley.

  It also housed Joan’s most devout supporters. At least, that was what Dr Jane had told Axl before sending him on his way with a cloth map of the high plateau showing the settlement marked off at one edge with a cross. She forgot to mention the track in would be littered with bare-arsed Tibetan children scooping yak dung into wicker baskets to dry for fuel. Or that no one would appear to understand a word he said.

  Axl started over again, explaining what he wanted as he tried to ignore the warm darkness between her open thighs. Only it seemed hopeless. Either that, or he was just too tired to make sense.

  ‘The inn’s full ...'

  The voice came from behind him, low and gruff. Not remotely friendly. It punched the switch Axl had been looking for.

  ‘Full?’ Axl said in disbelief, clambering to his feet and stared past the thickset bearded man to an empty bar beyond. The place wasn’t just empty, it was also hideous. Rough beaten-earth walls were coated with whitewash that had mostly flaked off and the floor was so pitted it could have been dried mud. Two crude windows and an ill-fitting front door singularly failed to keep out the cold.