redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Axl nodded.

  ‘Then maybe you aren’t as smart as you think…’ Red-faced and furious, he hovered on the edge of some indiscretion, some truth he wouldn’t be able to take back. And what was really interesting was the sudden flicker of doubt that stopped him going over the edge and the way both Wireframes and the fat sergeant tensed up as they waited to see what the Colonel might say.

  He said nothing.

  ‘What about the Cardinal?’ Axl asked.

  ‘You know,’ said Colonel Emilio calmly, as if he’d never started the previous conversation. ‘There’s just one thing puzzles me.’

  Only one… ? Sweet fuck, thought Axl, knowing there’d never been a day he wouldn’t have been delighted to say the same. ‘Really, what’s that?’

  ‘Just who are you betraying? I mean,’ Colonel Emilio’s smile was cold, ‘obviously you plan to betray someone. But is it Kate or the Cardinal?’ He paused, shrugged and pulled at his moustache. ‘I just thought I’d ask.’

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Zazen/Sunyata

  Ice grated over rock, reversed and looped into digital fuzz. Sonars blipped under bleak overlays of dolphin funeral cries. Every note was degraded, flat. Emptiness within emptiness. There was no chord he recognised. Nothing that he’d ever heard before. Even the snare line was gone, the noise ugly and a-rhythmic. This was what you got if you fed anger and disgust through a backing track. A meshing of cognitive and aural dissonance.

  The Colonel’s question had eaten away what little chance Axl had of sleeping. Crawling through the back of his mind like a king snake, it had disturbed cerebral undergrowth better left untouched, leaving behind its trail of slime.

  There was a bed still made up for him on the first floor. A mattress and a blanket but, unlike the Inn this time both were clean. All the same, Axl chose to spend that night sat on a wooden chair in the monastery dining room, watching his spinning timecode count itself down and keeping one eye on the overgrown slope down to the village.

  All the doors into Escondido were locked. Windows that had shutters were closed and bolted, Axl knew, he’d done it himself watched by a suspicious Clone. Only the window in the dining room by which he sat and brooded was still open.

  He would kill the Colonel. The man was as good as dead…

  * * * *

  Axl was still silently raging-at himself, at Colonel Emilio and at the Cardinal when Kate gave a tentative knock and pushed her way into the huge room to find Axl slumped in a chair, the cold barrel of his revolver resting parallel to his face. Salt tears ran unnoticed down his cheeks as he stared at mist that filled the valley and hid the pitiful village below.

  ‘The last of them just left.’ Kate said it like she couldn’t believe her own words, which she couldn’t. ‘They’ve set up a new HQ in the village.

  ‘How did you do it? I mean, why did you… ?’ She wanted to reach out and take away his gun if he’d let her. Touch his hand or shoulder, anything to stop the track of tears etched like acid into the dirt on his face. But she was afraid of Axl; and she knew he was afraid of himself.

  So instead Kate just pulled up another chair and folded her arms, tucking her restless hands into the grey shahtoosh she wore over shirt and chinos. A cold breeze blew in through the open window to make the wall tapestries of multi-armed gods ripple and sway. She hardly noticed. Nothing that had happened made sense. First the man had given her back the lost memory beads, then he’d driven PaxForce out of her house and now he was crying like a desolate, child, his face so bleak it could have been cut from ice. But if his hollow face was cold, his voice was empty of everything, even echo.

  ‘You want to know why?’ He asked. Inside his head the king snake was stirring and Axl was too tired to face it down.

  Kate nodded. Yes, she did. She didn’t operate well in the dark. Besides beyond that, she needed to know. Kate was coming to believe he really was on her side, whichever side that was. She just didn’t know why.

  ‘There was a man…’ He told her, then stopped his story before he even really got started, correcting himself. The person hadn’t really been a man, more a boy. Except that wasn’t relevant, not really.

  Axl ran through different ways of telling Kate why the Colonel had left quietly and decided events only made sense if he went back to the WarChild. Everything he’d become came out of that.

  The shit that went down before WarChild wasn’t part of the story, or even him. Not now. That chapter had just been about another wrong kid in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Killer Kid. The moniker was chosen by a machine. Though the CySat PR who plucked it out of air laden with cigar smoke gave the impression it was just another flash of brilliance which had dropped into his mind. This was around the time Axl decided, he was going to take the psych tests and that if he passed he was going to sign their contract.

  ‘Do you remember WarChild?’

  She did, though she’d probably only seen it on repeats. And Axl didn’t expect her to approve.

  ‘Remember the round-faced blond kid with the Russian gun?’

  ‘The Killer?’

  Of course he was a killer, Axl thought. That was what the child was trained for. No one had told him it was wrong. So when his CO was shot on IMF orders, the kid didn’t go after the eleven-year old Guatemalan who pulled the trigger, he hit the officers of the local IMF committee that processed the order.

  It wasn’t an official WarChild response, but Axl was wired for sight and sound so 163 million viewers looked through his baby-blues as he crippled two WeGuard and then gunned down fourteen suits sat round a table made from endangered hardwood. WarChild retired him after that. He was thirteen.

  She knew who he meant, because about the only thing you could say for CySat, C3N and the other feeds that hovered round war like flies on a corpse, was that it meant everyone shared the same heroes and villains, give or take Jihad leaders and kooks like the Montana militia.

  ‘Joan said Cardinal Santo Ducque once gave him confession.’

  ‘Really?’ Axl’s smile was so thin his mouth was no more than a knife wound slashed into his jaw. Absolution was about the one choice the Cardinal had never offered—and just about the last thing Axl would have asked for. God didn’t exist for him, not the Cardinal’s or anyone else’s, come to that.

  ‘You’ve heard that the kid was a clone ...' Axl said.

  Kate looked so shocked that Axl almost smiled properly.

  ‘It isn’t true.’

  ‘How about, that he was the Cardinal’s bastard?’

  That wasn’t true either. Axl had stolen a hair from the old man’s comb and sent it with fifty dollars to a clinic in Sante Fe. The kind of place that hijacked links from genetics’ websites. He got the result two days later. No genetic pointers in common.

  ‘That one’s bullshit, too,’ Axl assured her. ‘But you know who I’m talking about?’ He paused to check she did. ‘Well, I’m the kid.’

  The pupils of Kate’s eyes exploded with shock, only to pinprick immediately with fear, as if blinded by light. And the gasp she swallowed almost choked her. He was waiting and there was nothing she could say.

  Within her silence, Kate could hear the call of circling kites and the mutter that running water makes as it slides over gravel. The air reaching her outside was cold and fresh, but oxygen-poor and stretched gossamer thin. The world, this world, felt very new and fragile.

  Axl watch faint goosebumps spreading along the inside of her wrist, while she held one hand to her mouth, knuckles pressed hard against her lips. A strand of black hair curled down her forehead where it had escaped from a steel barrette keeping the rest of her hair in place.

  Low down to the side of her neck, and just above the briefest glimpse of breastbone seen through the open collar of her shirt, beat an artery that slowed even as Axl watched it.

  She was getting her courage back. And the slow butterfly beat of her blood told him something that Kate was working her body hard not to let him kno
w. She was afraid of him, but there was no way she going to admit it.

  Instinct told her to step back. And she was fighting her instinct. Axl found himself being impressed by that. Stamping down gut reactions took training or tight self-control.

  ‘You are Axl Borja?’

  Axl nodded. And watched as Kate tried to make sense of something that didn’t, could never make sense.

  ‘I thought you were dead.’

  ‘And Hell was flipping burgers,’ said Axl, nodding again. ‘So did I.’

  Sad songs. Not ersatz, but real.

  ‘I killed someone,’ Axl added after a while, when the notes were gone. ‘People say you should never go back. Well I did. I ended up here.’

  ‘Mexico has the death penalty.’ It wasn’t quite an accusation but it was definitely a question. One that wasn’t too difficult to answer.

  ‘I have friends…’

  ‘The Cardinal?’

  Axl thought of the old bastard, probably still sat in his octagonal study. Staring longingly out of that stone window at tiny butterfly boats dotted like dust on the silver surface of the Caribbean, while thousands of petitioners waited for his attention in the sweltering anterooms, dressed in their best clothes.

  Friends in high places…

  This time Kate did comfort him, with a feather-light brush of her fingers against his shoulder. He wanted to tell her everything then. To warn her against himself, against what he would do in the old bastard’s name to her life and her world.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  God's Fist

  Outside the dining room someone slammed a door loudly, and inside the room silence settled. One of those embarrassed, awkward silences that happen when a person you don’t like or hardly know has said too much.

  There was a gap opening between them, almost visibly. A gap bigger than the hand’s breadth of floor that either could have stepped over. Except Kate didn’t know how—or if she even wanted to—and Axl didn’t dare.

  Axl desperately needed to say something, but his major problem was he had no idea what, because the truth didn’t seem like an intelligent option… Falling for the person you intended to betray wasn’t an area that any episode of Black Jack had ever covered. And though everyone knew about Stockholm Syndrome, Axl had a nasty feeling he’d just been memed with its flip side.

  No matter that Kate wasn’t beautiful. Nor was he. She wasn’t, even that clean. Her black hair needed washing. She smelt of rose water over sweat as if she hadn’t had the time recently to bath. And there were scratches on both wrists and blisters on her fingers, painful evidence that she wasn’t used to manual work. Her hands trembled so hard it looked like she was headed straight for the brick wall of a sulphate come down, except drugs weren’t her style.

  This was the woman who’d hit Mai, Axl reminded himself. And if Rinpoche was right and somehow the Pope really was here in some form, rather than just being data on some memory beads, then this was who he’d need to pressure for the information.

  It made no difference to the way he felt.

  And he wanted her approval so badly his stomach hurt and he could taste the need like blood in the back of his throat.

  In a second she would turn away from him, find a reason why she needed to be in some other room. And the slowly-tearing spider’s web of understanding that had briefly been spun between them would finally snap. He could see it in the tension seeping back into her face. All that held Kate there now was politeness. Inside her head, she had to be inventing excuses to go.

  By the afternoon they would be worse than strangers. If she thought of him at all, it would be as a killer, as what was left if you took away fame from a child star. No more than the wind-blown husk of that blue-eyed, deadly blond boy. And all the half misremembered rumours would shoulder their way out of her subconscious to push aside what fragile sympathy she had for him.

  That he was a clone Kate already half believed. And if not the Cardinal’s bastard then surely Axl had been his catamite, the old man’s bum boy. Or else Axl somehow had his claws into the old man: as if it was him and not the Cardinal who only had to pull back his thin lips to reveal sharp teeth.

  That’s the way it would go, Axl just knew it.

  And she wouldn’t even come close to getting the rumours right, to digging far enough through the shit to hit real truth. Because no one else but the Cardinal knew that. All of it had to be visible, Axl knew that. Why else did anyone think he hated mirrors so much? Or loved guns, for that matter…

  ‘Come with me to the village,’ Kate suggested, standing up.

  Axl stared at her.

  ‘I need to check the situation. PaxForce…’ Her voice trailed away. She’d seen and heard enough of them in action the previous night to be scared of what she was going to find at Cocheforet.

  Axl nodded, suddenly understanding her jumpiness, cursing himself. ‘You need me to go as your bodyguard.’ He didn’t make it a question, just a simple statement.

  ‘If that’s the way you want to think of it. Though Clone won’t like the idea.’ Kate’s smile was so slight Axl thought he’d imagined it. ‘Wait here while I get changed…’

  She returned to the dining room wearing black jeans and heavy leather boots that buckled across the ankle. On top she wore a vest, black enough to swallow light and fitted so exactly it had to be grown for her alone. Spider’s silk could stop a knife. Better than that, bullets could be extracted by pulling on the threads they’d wound-up on their way in.

  If Kate noticed Axl register how tightly her vest fitted or the fullness of her breasts she didn’t say anything, merely shuffled herself into a loose black jersey.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  As if checking, Axl touched his hand to the small of his back, feeling for the wooden handle of his revolver. Yeah, ready and willing. Hell, he’d been both for as long as anyone could remember…

  Scrub that. Half his life he’d been so drunk or wired the only person to believe he was ready for anything was him. Just as he’d always believed that deep down he was rational, well-mannered and emotionally balanced, no matter how untrue all that was turning out to be.

  Blackjack was a kid’s show. US skins over Japanese-designed frames, cheap Chinese coding. WarChild was a battlefield soap that used real meat. That was the truth.

  ‘Sure,’ said Axl, holding the door open for Kate. ‘I am now.’

  * * * *

  Axl knew next to nothing about Samsara, he realised as his boots slid on mud and he grabbed a rhododendron branch to stop himself falling. Then Axl released the branch, slid another few yards down the slope and grabbed another. Getting down the narrow path was easy once you got the hang of it.

  Samsara was cold, obviously. The air was thin, ditto. And most of it seemed to be mud. That last fact hadn’t made it into Dr Jane’s chirpy little induction show back at Vajrayana. Oh yeah, and it was bound round with enough international law to keep the ‘fugees almost safe. Though that wasn’t the result of a freak outbreak of humanity, even Axl knew that.

  Straight media manipulation, based on a one-sentence pitch by the Dalai Lama, had sold Samsara to the UN. No more refugees. Not on Earth anyway. The rest was sleight of hand and window dressing. And the media he manipulated was CySat.

  Ninety-eight percent of the world watched the same shit, day in/day out, and CySat had provided it for as long as anyone could remember. Which demographically was about fifteen minutes. SickWard, FirstTime, SpacePup3 were the staples that delivered viewers to ad agencies worldwide, albeit using semiotically-tailored local plotlines, relevant franchise references and genotypes overlaid onto basic rayframe v’Actors. So Sammi the wacky Moslem rich kid with the lovingly-restored Mercedes 612 in the Bangladeshi version of FirstTime was the HondaGRZ-driving teen software millionaire Ryuchi in the Japanese version, was Leo the spoilt New York…

  But over and above that, CySat had always provided political muscle. Drop a frag hag like Passion with her little flying camera into a war zone and
three hours later a significant slice of the world were vid-mailing congress or parliament with demands that whatever Passion’s Passion was complaining about be stopped, immediately…

  Courtesy of CySat nV starving kids to death and blaming famine or refusing to let HelpFirst air freight them medicine and calling it sanctions had become vote losers. Samsara solved that problem. It also got the Dalai Lama out of Beijing’s hair and gave Indonesia, Texas and the Ukraine somewhere to ship those dissidents too high-profile to kill. It was small wonder the UN vote was near unanimous.

  As solutions went, it was right out of this world.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Kate asked suddenly. She’d stopped to let Axl go ahead and was looking down at where he stood on a broad ledge, one hand gripping a bush. Ahead of him the track was even softer underfoot, the path muddier and the overhanging rhododendrons so thick the branches twisted around each other like flash-frozen serpents.

  He didn’t want to answer, but he did anyway. Kate had that effect.

  ‘About Samsara.’

  ‘You hate the place that much?’

  ‘Hate it?’ Axl hesitated watching Kate slide down the track towards him, her fingers finding and releasing overhead branches in quick succession. Kate was using a different way down to the village, one less obvious than the main track but a lot steeper.

  ‘I don’t hate Samsara,’ Axl told Kate. ‘I wouldn’t want to live here, but I don’t hate it.’ And that’s where that conversation would have died—Axl decided later—if the zipped-tight, self-contained Kate Mercarderes hadn’t lost her footing, boot heels gouging dark scars into leaf mould as she fought for balance.

  She might have kept upright, she might have fallen, but Axl caught her anyway. Whipping out his right arm as she flailed past. Pain ripped up Axl’s arm. For a split second it looked like the branch he gripped might crack. But the man didn’t even notice. He was far too busy watching Kate.