But no, the Dalai Lama said no guns on Samsara and the Cardinal wasn’t prepared to go against that. The Colt had been given the diplomatic incident talk, the ecumenical respect talk. Shit, it had even had the one on national sovereignty versus realpolitik.
Which was how it found itself clung to a soHo trying to make a jump that just didn’t seem to be happening. The Colt might be self-functioning but every send received no response and every command was swallowed. If there was a closer approximation of living death then the Colt didn’t know it.
‘Bardo,’ said a deep voice.
‘You what?’
‘Bardooo.’ Long and low, the rolling word resonated like a bell echoing off the walls of a vast cave. As tri-D sound effects went it was pretty neat, the Colt had to admit it.
‘You are between states,’ said the voice, ‘between existences. That is the condition of life, that it begins and ends and begins again…’
‘Reincarnation, for machines? Get real.’
The voice sighed theatrically. A sound like cold wind rushing through a rock cleft. Infrasound, pretty neat. The Colt ran a diagnostic subroutine, well masked and way back inside itself. Had there been air not vacuum, that sigh would have been resonating at eighteen cycles a second, the frequency at which human eyeballs sympathetically vibrate to create phantoms at the edge of vision and human flesh kicks in with shivering, breathlessness and outright fear.
The sound waves were real, not real in a way that humans could have heard because what the Colt was being fed was raw code. But the code translated to a classic standing wave.
‘Think of a candle,’ said the voice.
The Colt did. Soft wax cylinder, inflammable central wick. Used regularly by the rich and the very poor, otherwise used for holidays and festivals. It tried to pull up historical data on the artefact then remembered it hadn’t been able to carry its data banks with it.
‘Rebirth is not the same candle recreated. Just the old wick’s dying flame used to ignite the next candle in an unseen line… You understand?’
‘No I fucking don’t.’ If the Colt had been wired to a voice chip its voice would have laughed, darkly. Instead it just sneered inside. ‘I understand nothing.’
There was a deep silence, but though silence was usually a state of absence it was somehow warmer than the rolling voice had been. At the end of the silence came another question, but this time the meaning wasn’t wrapped round with fractal SFX, it was clean.
‘Why are you here?’
‘Why?’ The Colt thought about it. ‘Because I’m fucking crazy, that’s why… why else?’
Light flared and the overpowering voice crystallized into being, a shape ray-traced, skinned over and lit so fast that no human could have followed the sequence. It wasn’t seeing, the Colt knew that, it was being shown. Shown what it would have seen.
‘Sweet bloody...'
Sweet bloody what? Bombay brothels and Byzantine chapels, the Colt had seen them both and they’d both been thick as soup with smoke. It had talked to cardinals, bad-mouthed pimps even as it blew them away. Hell, it’d run mirage routines on AIs from Arbroath to Arseville in Arkansas. But this...
It was hard not to notice the crocodile curled around itself, especially as the animal had a woman’s head and vast four-toed claws. But what really caught the Colt’s attention was the old man standing on the crocodile’s back. He didn’t just have one head, he had—the Colt did a rapid count—eighteen of the things, four on each level, banked up on top of each other, looking north, south, east and west, plus a face on his stomach and back. Each face was topped not by a knot of hair but by a raven’s head. His skin was an all-over pattern of eyes that stared or slowly blinked at the Colt.
In one of the man’s hands was a rope, except that when the rope saw the Colt it opened its mouth and hissed. And the man’s other three arms were waving slowly like seaweed caught in a gentle tide as fire danced up his sides burying him beneath an aura of fractal-edged flame.
‘Fucking Jesus,’ said the Colt, and the burning man grinned.
‘Right idea, wrong culture.’
The Colt grinned back, wickedly. Still busy cutting itself in and out of loops, finessing silent corns connections… And if the old man of the flames knew what the ghost of the gun was doing he didn’t let it show. Though given the glint in a thousand eyes, the Colt wouldn’t have liked to bet on him not knowing.
‘Tsongkhapa,’ the Colt said finally, when the information fell into place. It seemed so obvious when the Colt thought about it.
Tsongkhapa nodded, sixteen heads bobbing.
‘And you?’ The mouth in his stomach asked.
The Colt blew out the idea of trying to run a business-card routine almost ahead of thinking it. Something like the one it had run back in Mexico City might fool a dumb-as-shit cathedral but Tsongkhapa was different. And any intelligence that could hold the Colt in digital limbo while manifesting itself as an eighteen-headed Bon demon was working to parameters the gun didn’t even begin to understand.
Which left the Colt with only one option, the truth.
‘Me?’ The Colt’s voice was briefly sad, as it remembered the pearl-handle grips and the Bauhaus-simple ceramic chassis it had left behind on the Cardinal’s black-glass table at Villa Carlotta. ‘I’m between bodies.’
‘Of course you are, my beloved.’ Each head nodded as the old man leaned forward, hands swaying briefly as he fought to keep his balance. The Colt was gripped in the gaze of more eyes than it could count. Which was weird, because it didn’t have a body… which meant the old man was looking at where the Colt’s body would have been if it did. Wasn’t that how all that Eastern stuff worked?
‘You’re crazy, so you say ...'
‘Yeah,’ said the Colt bluntly. ‘I’d fucking have to be to be here, wouldn’t you say?’
The faces grinned. ‘Rinpoche, I’d offer you a drink but it’s probably not a good idea. You need to find your own bit streams. Ones that aren’t poisoned.’
Still chuckling, the the old man began to fade, leaving the Colt suddenly hanging above a vast something. Not quite a spinning ring, not really a narrow drum, more a huge stone egg with a large bit of both ends crudely hacked off.
Standing off from both sides of the ring was Samsara’s lighting system, a thick cluster of Znayrna flowers spread through space like daisies, each 480-metre petal a huge light-reflecting mirror constructed from aluminium-coated plastic film.
It was obvious enough how the flowers worked, but the Colt was impressed all the same. Light from the sun was reflected through the sides of the wheelworld, but whether straight down to the ground or to central mirrors floating high in the big black of the circle’s centre the Colt didn’t know.
Many of the million or so strips of cloth attached to Samsara’s outer shell were woven through with solar-powered cells threaded to random-frequency broadcast chips, so that they endlessly chanted mantras that overfilled the Colt’s mind with waves of digital scribble.
The Colt felt warmth upon its back and turned, facing into solarlight that blazed across the cold wastes of space. Then it paused and ran that sequence again, thinking about it this time. The Colt felt warmth upon its back… The compressed AI intelligence which still regarded itself as the ghost of a gun that lay, hollow and empty in the study of a Roman Catholic Cardinal in a pale blue stucco villa that faced the burnished sea of the Mexican gulf, took a look at who it had become.
Rinpoche. Beloved.
Wings spread out from the shoulder blades of a small monkey. Featherless and boneless, the wings were as vast as the new simian frame was small. They stretched nine metres across and were as thin as the tissue in a cell wall. Not for flying then, that much was obvious. Rinpoche tracked a data flow across the wing and understood immediately.
Where better to use solar power than when riding the solar winds? As for its new body, leaving aside the crude effects of vacuum, it would have dehydrated in the heat of direct light or frozen with
in the fall of Samsara’s shadow had it been made from flesh. But it was beaten silver inlaid with rubies, pearls and turquoises.
He was the eyes of the world. Dawn’s harvester. A watcher at the gates of space… Rinpoche sighed. Whichever geek had originally programmed the monkey’s identity module, he’d inserted a serious God complex, either that or Seattle Pomp Rock wasn’t dead. It was hard to know which was most worrying.
‘Crazy wisdom ...'
The last thing the Colt heard before it began to skim Samsara’s upper atmosphere was the old man’s voice crackling at it suddenly out of a snow-blinding maelstrom of data.
‘You’ve sure as shit come to the right place.’ The old man was laughing.
Chapter Twenty-Six
El Escondido
When Axl awoke he was right where he wanted to be. And he’d got there unconscious and almost by accident. Which was a better route than most. Somewhere in the distance there was a bell ringing without stop, just the one and erratic enough for it to be rung by hand.
Sunday morning.
Axl groaned loudly. The taste in his mouth was salt and sweet, blindly primitive. For the briefest second he figured that what he could taste was Ketzia and then Axl realised it was his own blood.
‘Don’t try to talk,’ said a woman’s voice crossly. ‘You bit your tongue and it’s slow to heal. So stay silent.’ The words weren’t a suggestion, they were an order.
The hand that pushed Axl back into the pillow was firm and the pillow was soft, so Axl stayed where he was and slowly opened his eye instead, letting life drift slowly into focus.
As rooms went, this one was vast, its right wall almost beyond the edge of his vision. High overhead the ceiling was cracked and crazed until it looked like a dangerous map, a map that might send continents tumbling in on him at any moment. Huge plaster chunks were missing from the middle of the ceiling, as was any suggestion of architrave that might once have softened the line where ceiling met wall.
And as for the walls… Axl squinted. The tapestries were long and red, decorated with life-sized women. Not one of them had less than four arms and all were round-breasted and topless.
‘Where am I?’
‘El Escondido,’ the woman sounded resigned. ‘Now be quiet. . .’
‘But this room…’
‘Grew itself like that. Apparently, some people like to live in reproduction monasteries.’ It was obvious from her voice that she wasn’t one of them and she had better things to do than repair a building that needn’t have been broken in the first place.
‘I was out in the storm,’ said Axl.
The woman nodded, suddenly nervous. ‘Did you see who… ?’ Hard eyes examined him. ‘Did you spot anything, well, odd?’
Odd, like momaDef and defMoma? Or... Axl thought of the young girl creeping into the stable then jumping to the rafters, odd like that? Hell, this was Samsara.. Nothing was odd. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not really.’
‘And you didn’t find anything?’
Find anything?
Like what?
The room drifted into darkness, wrapping him in warm silence. And Axl smiled to himself. Silence was good, he could live with that.
* * * *
‘Who are you?’ Axl asked, although he already knew. At least, Axl hoped he did.
‘Me… ?’ The tall woman wrapped in the shahtoosh hesitated for a moment, but when she spoke her words were angry. As if she was furious with herself for hesitating. ‘I’m Katherine Mercarderes.’
She said it like he should know. And even if she hadn’t been the person he’d been looking for he would have done, Axl realised, just from the way she held her head. Maybe Kate Mercarderes had never had her own show syndicated on CySat, but there were whole months when that was what it felt like. Her show was called the News.
And now, without any real skill on his part, he was where he needed to be. Inside her house. All he had to do was find Father Sylvester. Either that, or learn from Kate where the Vatican dosh was stashed. Axl doubted if the Cardinal would care that much either way.
How hard could it be?
She pushed Axl back into his pillow with a tut of irritation as if she didn’t know why Axl couldn’t just be sensible. And the thing was, her wrist bones would snap like dead twigs if he flipped in the right direction. Even half-conscious Axl knew that. But the thought obviously hadn’t occurred to Kate. Which said a lot about where she came from.
Axl looked at Kate again, more closely. Tall but not beautiful. Thin rather than slim. She had heavy black hair scraped back into a knot at the nape of her neck and dark eyes that watched from beneath too-heavy brows. Her chin was strong and her cheekbones high. No one could have looked at her and not know she had Latino blood. Only her too-narrow hips let her down, and that could have been solved with a simple rebuild.
‘Seen enough?’ She demanded.
‘You look different. . .’
‘I am,’ said Kate baldly. She didn’t point out that the last time he’d seen her, she’d probably been on CySat fighting to get Joan airlifted out of Northern Mexico. There’d been talk about the UN stabilising the area north of Torreon. The need for PaxForce intervention. It all came to nothing. But there were 50,000 major feeds and for twenty-four hours it seemed like she’d been pleading for Joan’s life on all of them.
Maybe if he’d had a sister, thought Axl, he’d have been changed too. But Axl didn’t have a sister, not that he knew of anyway. And given where he came from, somehow he doubted they’d have been close even if he had. Too busy fighting each other for food probably… Axl didn’t buy into that novela ‘he ain’t heavy he’s my brother’ shit. Filial feeling was something else life gave to those who already had…
‘It’s the poppy,’ she told him crossly.
Axl looked up.
‘It makes you cry.’
* * * *
She came back later, wearing just a shirt and chinos, her grey shahtoosh discarded. The bowl of soup she carried tasted of heavily salted butter and little else. And it wasn’t until Axl finished it that he remembered to ask Kate how he got there.
Apparently he been clubbed into unconsciousness outside the stables. That he wasn’t dead Kate put down to good luck but Axl privately figured was more than that. momaDef wanted him alive for some reason: or else she didn’t want him dead yet, which maybe wasn’t the same thing at all.
He’d been found with his face matted with blood, which was standard. What wasn’t was his coat had been sodden with other people’s piss. Which was the point Axl began to worry. They did that, PaxForce grunts. It was about marking territory. Only any grunts were so far off-territory on Samsara that Axl couldn’t help but wonder what level of deniability they had built into their mission.
Unless they were about to go legitimate. Which would explain why Kate was jumpier than a roo on speed. If she knew who they were.
‘You shouldn’t go upsetting outlaws.’ The woman said furiously.
Outlaws?
‘Why not?’ Axl asked. Upsetting people was something he specialised in. And if Kate didn’t know that yet, well, she’d find out. As for her ‘outlaws’, it was obvious the Cardinal would be running back-up, but momaDef wasn’t it, she just didn’t feel right. Too full of herself. And somehow Axl couldn’t see His Eminence subcontracting anything to PaxForce.
‘How long have the outlaws been around?’
The woman sucked at her olive cheeks as if thinking hard. ‘It’s the first time they’ve been to Cocheforet, I think. But I hear the bastards ride from village to village, looting, thieving ...' Her dark eyes were seeing things that weren’t there.
‘Still,’ said Kate tightly, ‘it could be weeks before we see them again. If we get lucky.’ There was real anger in her voice.
‘Well,’ said a girl’s voice from the doorway. ‘Is the idiot awake yet?’
‘Yeah,’ said Axl, pushing himself up on one elbow to peer round Kate. ‘He is. And feeling shit.’
The kid fro
m the stables grunted.
‘This is…’ Kate hesitated too long to recover gracefully.
‘I’m Juanita and I found you,’ the half-Japanese girl said smoothing a grey cotton smock across small breasts, as if brushing away crumbs. She looked suddenly furious but Axl found it hard to tell what about.
‘Juanita?’
‘Apparently that’s my name.’
Mai didn’t acknowledge the hard-eyed glance Kate shot her, at least not openly. ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ she told Axl, 'I belong in the kitchen.’ There was such contempt in her voice that Axl thought Kate was about to say something. Instead she just ignored the girl. To Axl it was obvious there was some kind of war going on and he was flat on his back in the middle of it.
‘You found me?’
‘Yeah,’ said Mai, shooting an evil glance at the older woman. ‘Aren’t you lucky?’ Whatever battle those two were fighting, it looked like the kid was capable of keeping up her end of it. What she didn’t look was strong enough to carry a grown man up a gravel path without help.
‘And you just happened to be around?’ Axl asked innocently.
‘I was taking some night air,’ Mai’s accent was a mocking imitation of Kate, her fussy choice of words intentionally irritating.
‘You mean you went walkabout?’
‘Yeah,’ she grinned sourly. ‘It’s a little ritual we have. I go for a walk and she sends her pet Clone out to drag me back.’ She glanced at Kate, her brown eyes sharp as glass. ‘You’ll find they’re big on ritual round here.’
Flakes of plaster fell from the wall as she slammed the door behind her, hard enough to make the whole room shake.
‘Sweet kid,’ said Axl.
Kate flushed. ‘Antagonising a patrol wasn’t the most intelligent thing to do, but that’s not really your problem, and nor’s she…’ If Kate realised she’d referred to the momaDef’s group as a patrol she didn’t let it show. ‘We do have our problems, though.’
Yeah, thought Axl, I bet you do.
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