redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  ‘It happened, it just didn’t get shown,’ Axl added furiously, ‘get used to it.’

  defMoma finally focused on Axl’s face. ‘You supported the Army of God?’

  Axl shook his head, feeling Kate stiffen. ‘Far as I‘m concerned, Joan was a fucking lunatic who got stuffed and turned to kitty litter on camera. I just don’t know why everyone’s having trouble accepting it.’

  Yanking Kate to her feet, Axl pushed back his stool, hearing it scrape in the ground. ‘Party time,’ he told her.

  ‘You know that woman?’ defMoma nodded towards a struggling Kate.

  ‘Nah,’ said Axl, sliding his free hand down to Kate’s arse and cupping one buttock. ‘But I plan to.’

  Laughter and obscenities followed him out of the Inn, and kept coming right up to the point he turned the corner into darkness and Kate Mercarderes suddenly yanked up her skirt, pivoted on one bare foot and used her other to kick Axl’s head hard enough to knock him off his feet.

  That didn’t just rate synth, it got crashing, speed-metal chords.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Time Out

  ‘ Taekyon,’ Rinpoche said, dropping from the night sky. Adding, ‘tae kwon do,’ when Axl looked blank, though that could be reverb howing inside his head. ‘Sweet Jesus. Can’t you even duck?’

  ‘Rinpoche,’ said the silver monkey offering Kate its paw. ‘And you’re Katherine Mercarderes. Aged twenty-seven years, four months, five days. Born Mount Olive hospital in Rome. Natural carriage, natural birth, no artificial womb. No foetal augmentations/genetic rewrites. Confirmed hereditary predisposition to stress, anger and depression. Forty-three percent chance of developing breast cancer by the age of forty. Educated from six to eighteen at the Vatican by Jesuit tutor Father Sylvester. Currently in protected exile on the island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily...

  ‘. . . yeah right.’ The monkey’s face lost its distant look as it peered deep into her eyes. Whatever it was looking for, it found in there.

  ‘Retinal match,’ it stated firmly. ‘Unless those are new, of course?’

  Kate slowly shook her head and the monkey sighed.

  ‘That was irony.’

  ‘So,’ said Rinpoche turning to where Axl still sat in the mud, ‘You found Kate Mercarderes, who wasn’t on Lampedusa. Now what? Planning to keep her?’

  ‘No chance.’ Kate came uncoiled like a spring, pivoting again as she drew back one foot to kick Axl in the head.

  Axl needn’t have bothered ducking. Rinpoche came up fast and hard, his paw closing round her ankle, locking it solid. No restraints could have held Kate that tight.

  ‘Later,’ snapped the monkey. ‘You can kick him later.’

  ‘I should have let Clone kill you.’ Kate spat the words at Axl. ‘Back at Escondido when he wanted to.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Axl coldly, climbing to his feet. ‘Maybe you should. While you had the chance. Because, fuck knows, your family’s been responsible for enough killing.’ He put up one hand and lightly touched Kate’s face the way visitors used to touch his when he was a kid, the way he really used to hate.

  She flinched. He used to do that too.

  ‘So what’s one more,’ Axl asked as he reached behind him to pull the revolver from his belt, ‘I mean, after all those others… ?’

  The gun was loaded, unfired. There wasn’t a safety catch to release because the model wasn’t that sophisticated and Rinpoche hadn’t bothered to create one while giving the gun a make-over because Axl never used them anyway.

  Axl spun the revolver once round his finger, fast forward so the handle snapped back into his hand with a satisfying slap and the muzzle finished up pointing straight at Kate’s stomach. The soundtrack died, kicked mute by significance override.

  Even Rinpoche stopped breathing.

  ‘Did you enjoy hitting Mai?’ Axl asked the frozen woman. ‘Did it help your stress? Make you feel all gooey inside?’

  ‘I apologised to Mai, afterwards…’ Kate said softly.

  Gun still to her gut, Axl patted Kate’s cheek softly. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘bet that made her face less sore.’ Kate had tears in her eyes and she was biting the inside of her lip without knowing it. He’d gone out from Cocheforet nearly blind and returned with someone else’s eyes. She was afraid of him.

  Been there, felt that. . .

  Axl casually reversed the revolver and held it handle first to the silent woman: standing there until she finally reached over and took the weapon from his grip.

  ‘Well,’ he said, as he lent hard into the muzzle of the revolver, ‘you going to shoot me…’

  How else was he going to get that bloody timecode to stop?

  The problem, Axl decided watching Kate’s haunted face was that she really didn’t know whether she was going to or not. Kate had been running on empty for so long she didn’t even know it. And she needed another decision to make about as much as she needed the gun Axl had put in her shaking hand.

  Saying he’d been there was glib, but it was also true.

  She stared at him in the night-time darkness of a small ‘fugee village in a high valley on the edge of an immeasurably large hollowed-out wheel at some Lagrange off the edge of Earth. While around the outer rim of that wheel spun strips of prayer cloth that streamed out through the void, endlessly chanting.

  She had a gun pointed at his gut finger tightening on the trigger, and all he wanted from her was an apology. How stupid was that… His thoughts were shredded, fractured like glass. Added to which he was cold, his spine hurt and his thighs were raw from a whole day in the saddle.

  ‘Look,’ said Axl as a clicktrack fed back in, thin as a baby’s heartbeat. ‘Do you want to shoot me or not?’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Forgiveness Comes Xtra

  The silver monkey wasn’t keen to leave, claiming it was now Axl’s bodyguard. But it went after Axl threatened to rip its wings out at the shoulder if it didn’t take itself elsewhere. Both Axl and Rinpoche knew he couldn’t make good on that threat, but the silver monkey went anyway, sucking at its teeth in disgust as it clambered onto a PaxForce 4track to give itself a better take-off.

  The night was getting late in more ways than one. And the wind that ripped down the narrow valley brought them cordite and the sound of shooting as drunken conscripts lit the dark sky with tracer. A wooden house was being noisily demolished for kindling. Off behind the village, a woman’s scream got chopped off, abruptly.

  And behind it all, the heavy beat of some kid knitting up Tokyo Techno, all looped snare-fills and Korg samples stolen from ad jingles for products so old no one remembered what they were. The deck was UN-issue. But then it had long been accepted that you couldn’t go to war without a decent soundtrack. Though Axl still thought it was cheap not to provide the kids with their own inbuilt sound systems.

  You got better results that way, too—and it didn’t upset the neighbours.

  Rinpoche didn’t go far, of course. Just high enough to hang out of sight in the darkness, not so far it let Axl out of sound range. Both Axl and the silver monkey knew that was how it was going to be. Kate didn’t, but shock had wound her so tight she couldn’t have watched her words even if she’d known.

  Shock at seeing Axl remade. Shock at getting herself trapped in that inn. But most of all, her face was sucked hollow by the shock of suddenly thinking she knew where the memory beads were, then discovering Clone was wrong and she didn’t.

  ‘I could have killed you, you moron.’ Fury coated each word with acid.

  Axl shrugged like he didn’t care. Actually, he didn’t but that wasn’t why he shrugged. He still hadn’t forgiven Kate for Mai or what she’d said.

  ‘I saved your life,’ said Axl, ‘back there in the Inn…’

  ‘Did I ask you to interfere?’

  ‘No,’ Axl’s words were matter of fact. ‘You thought I was dead.’

  Kate looked up at that. Face suddenly still. She’d told Clone to take Axl across the plateau. She hadn’t
wondered too hard about whether he’d actually do it.

  ‘Tae kwon do isn’t enough,’ said Axl. ‘You get into a stand-up, knock-down with PaxForce and you’ve lost before it starts. Mai might have fronted them out, but you ... If I hadn’t got you out of there, you might not have ended up dead but you’d have wished you were.

  ‘You owe me,’ Axl said, when Kate glared at him. ‘Deal with it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kate, ‘I will.’ She didn’t sound at all convinced.

  In fact, she sounded worried and scared. Somewhere up the side of that valley, in a shambling monastery was an underage Japanese whore who’d fuck anyone to get away from the woman stood in front of him, even the PaxForce.

  It made Axl want to know why.

  ‘Why didn’t you send Mai to look for the beads?’ Axl asked, though he already knew the answer. Because Mai would have run away. That’s what all of the kid’s night trips to Cocheforet were about. And that other stuff in Kate’s bedroom. Axl wasn’t stupid enough to think Mai had been at all interested in him. Okay, maybe he had been at the time, but not afterwards. Kate was holding Mai at Escondido against her will and the kid wanted out.

  ‘She your servant?’ Axl asked. The reformistas didn’t believe in servitude.

  ‘No,’ Kate said coldly, ‘she’s not indentured.’

  ‘But she’s not free, is she?’

  The shake of the woman’s head was so small as to be almost imperceptible. She made no attempt to hide the fact that the truth tasted bitter. Her eyes were hollow, unblinking. Her chin jutted forward but her cheeks were sunken with increasing worry and lack of sleep. She looked older and much less certain than she had twenty-four hours before.

  What Axl didn’t know about REM sleep, alpha-states and conscious dreaming hadn’t yet been discovered. He knew when someone was staying awake because going to sleep was worse. And he could spot all the signals in her face, like someone had erected a neon sign above her head saying ‘Empty’

  Unwelcome thoughts guttered behind her dark eyes like candle flame, as ready to go out as to flare… Kate needed those memory beads, and yet there was no clone readied to take Joan’s memories. No shrine already formatted and waiting; there couldn’t be, because Cocheforet had no power. That much Axl knew.

  Which meant Mai was the key.

  Joan might have suddenly gone on CySat to declare herself Pope of the hollow people, but she was still CEO of UnitedVatican, whether she had liked it or not. And until recently UnitedVatican’s core statement had included the fact that clones were without souls.

  Joan couldn’t have ordered herself a clone anymore than she could have announced a sudden conversion to Islam. Some things just couldn’t be done, not even by a Pope. Although not understanding that point was regarded by the reformistas as Joan’s greatest strength.

  ‘I’ll see you back to the house,’ Axl told her as he slid one hand under a reluctant elbow. All it would take to cripple her was a quick and dirty thumb jab into a nerve running up the inside of her arm. And from the way Kate stared ahead it was obvious she knew that. ‘We can talk on the way...'

  They didn’t, though. Barefoot and frozen, Kate just stamped on through the drizzle, her feet squelching in the mud. And by the time they’d reached the bridge Axl realised that if he didn’t break her silence it wasn’t going to get broken... So he stopped dead and let go of her arm.

  ‘Just listen,’ he said.

  For a moment it looked as if Kate would storm ahead but she stopped herself, still not looking at Axl. In another world and another time, in someone else’s story, he would have been less than zero to her. At most a peon in the lower reaches of what ever multinational she would have inherited.

  But this was Axl’s story and whether she liked that or not he was standing beside her in the darkness. And what he wanted from her was an apology. The problem was, Axl realised, an apology for what? For hitting Mai, a kinderwhore he only thought he knew because he saw too much of himself in the kid? For not trusting him? She was right not to ...

  Crunch time. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ Axl said, pushing one cold hand deep into his pocket.

  Kate shook her head, raindrops running down her neck. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you don’t.’

  Closing his fingers around the dreamcatcher, Axl pulled the small circle from his pocket and offered it to her. ‘Are you really telling me you don’t want this?’

  The face that looked up at him was frozen with shock. Hope and fear flickering across it as she tried to frame the question Axl knew she needed to ask. There was no attempt to deny the memory beads were hers, that they were what she, Ketzia and Clone had been hunting for so desperately.

  She would pay his price, whatever it was. That much went without saying, but she wanted it said anyway.

  ‘There’s a price?’

  Axl smiled. ‘Of course there’s a price.’

  ‘We’re not rich.’

  ‘Not now.’ The jibe came out more bitter than Axl had intended but Kate didn’t even notice. She was too busy thinking.

  ‘What money we have is yours.’

  ‘I don’t want money. You know perfectly well what I want.’

  Axl saw Kate’s chin go up. ‘Mai’s a child,’ said Kate defensively.

  ‘The kid’s been a whore since she was eleven.’ Axl’s kept his voice cold. ‘She didn’t have childhood. But no, I don’t want her either.’

  Kate didn’t wish to ask the next question but Axl made her. He was enjoying himself too much to give Kate any slack.

  ‘You want me?’

  In the darkness Axl grinned, he couldn’t help it. Always answer a question with a question… He might not have picked up as much as he could have done from the Cardinal, but he’d learnt that much.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Kate didn’t know and she didn’t want to think. No, that wasn’t true. Kate shook her head crossly. Actually, she knew exactly what would happen if that was his price. She would agree.

  ‘Tell me,’ Kate said finally, in little more than a whisper, ‘what is the price?’

  ‘An apology,’ said Axl.

  There was silence. As much as there could be silence with a woman shouting in the distance and drunken conscripts drag-racing unlit dirtbikes down the only street.

  Under that and the noise of rain, the muted clicktrack and wind blowing cold inside his own head, Axl could hear the stream rolling over gravel beneath their feet: and under that the drumming of her heart and the silence of a held breath.

  ‘An apology?’ Kate couldn’t keep the catch out of her voice.

  Axl nodded. ‘That’s all ...' He said it as if there was never any question he might have had another price in mind. Taking Kate by the shoulders, he turned her and himself so the faint light from a fire in the village lit his face and she could see his new eyes burning into hers.

  ‘You called me a coward, a liar. . . All I want is you to admit you were wrong.’

  ‘And then I get the beads?’

  ‘You get the memory beads anyway,’ said Axl quietly. ‘Here…’ He held the soulcatcher out to Kate.

  She was crying already inside. And when the tears finally spilled out of her, Axl watched them trail down her cold cheeks but didn’t let Kate know that he knew she was crying, just stood and stared up at the darkened valley wall, following the faint line of the foss as white water tumbled down from the high slopes. More PaxForce troops were up there, bivouacked just beneath the snowline. He didn’t think anyone in the village knew that.

  And sat closer in, wings folded tight and arms curled round the upper trunk of a fir, was Rinpoche staring back. Axl couldn’t see the expression on the silver monkey’s harrow face but somehow Axl knew he didn’t want to.

  High and haunting, a loop of flute came out of the darkness, rich with echo and loss. He knew Kate couldn’t hear it. That it only reflected what he believed she felt. But it tugged strings that rippled like Celtic harp.

  He had Kate now, ready and ho
oked. Axl just wished he felt better about it.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Build It Up...

  He sprang the rest of his trap the next evening. After a day in which Kate had finally crept to the village because she couldn’t stand the conscripts lighting fires on the tiled floors of the monastery.

  But it was only after some kid started to tag great 3-D bruises over a tapestry in the vast dining room that Axl decided to act, ripping the gloPaint gun from the kid’s fingers.

  ‘No posse marks.’

  ‘You what?’ Dressed in half-combat, kevlar flak but no shoulder armour or helmet, the conscript gaped at Axl. The man had to be mad. Civilians didn’t just march up to members of PaxForce and start ordering them around. Not if they wanted to keep both knees intact.

  Except Axl was standing with arms folded across his chest and legs apart in the doorway of the dining room, staring straight at the soldier. And he obviously expected to be obeyed. Looking at the man’s tattered shirt and ‘fugee crop, the soldier couldn’t quite work out why.

  The monastery was requisitioned. The man shouldn’t even have been there.

  ‘And get rid of this shit,’ Axl said and pointed to a pair of fourteen-buckle combat boots drying in front of a grate full of smouldering yak-dung. The leather boots were meant to be self-drying, self-sealing, self-deodorised… They weren’t, not even when new.

  Anyone with half a brain bought their own pair and the fact that their owner hadn’t said nothing good. Getting too crippled to march wasn’t macho, it was just dumb.

  ‘Whose are those, anyway?’ Axl demanded.

  ‘The sergeant’s,’ replied the soldier as if that answered everything. And having met defMoma again that morning Axl figured maybe it did. She looked like a typical fuck-wit masochist dyke to him, not that he wanted to pigeon-hole her.