redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Fury?

  Embarrassment?

  Axl didn’t know what painted her face a sudden red and didn’t much care. Very slowly Axl shifted towards her and when Kate didn’t back away he rested his forehead against hers, ridiculously softly.

  As needy as some teenage kid.

  ‘You all right?’ Kate asked. Her breath smelt of tsampa.

  ‘No, I’m not.’ Axl opened his mouth, then shut it again. Crunch time. What he was about to do was fuck-wit stupid. Flayed, flesh-cut-back-and-stripped-to-the-bone dumb. But when had that ever stopped him?

  The mind threw up walls for a purpose, to keep shit in or keep light out, it didn’t much matter which. Kicking them down went against everything Axl believed in. There was the stuff in there Axl didn’t admit to himself. He’d have to be an idiot to tell it to some woman he hardly knew…

  ‘Look,’ said Axl. ‘You really think you know the truth about that kid… ?’ About me, he meant.

  Her head flicked up in that defiant gesture Axl had begun to recognise, then she caught herself. ‘What would I know?’ She said it sadly.

  ‘The press releases had me down as a ghost. Do I look like hollow?’

  Yes. No. Kate started to shake her head, hesitated… I don’t know. Yes, probably. She’d been born, grown up and educated within the walls of the Vatican and in all the twenty-seven years of her life she hadn’t met a single clone, other than Clone that was. And he was Marne release #2.1 of a combat model, which was different. She wouldn’t recognise a batch-reared ghost if she walked through a crowd of them. That was the point. The only real way to tell was strip out some DNA and check for the copyright line.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes it does,’ said Axl as he stepped back because that was the only way he was going to get through the next few minutes. Though he didn’t look like someone stepped back and he didn’t feel like it either.

  ‘I’m not a clone.’ Axl held up his hand to stop whatever Kate was about to say. ‘I’m…’ Much worse were the words he was choking on.

  The deep green of the rhododendrons began its slow spin around him: the glimpses of the distant sky seemed higher than ever, a far cold blue that had to be impossible. All he really wanted to do was sleep, to put his head to the damp leaf mould and let in the darkness. Forever if possible.

  Conditioning, Axl thought, and wondered drunkenly why he hadn’t realised it before. ‘You know what I am?’

  She didn’t.

  ‘I’m a fucking foetus,’ Axl said through gritted teeth and promptly blacked out, the wet earth he’d wanted to embrace coming up to meet him as his brain hit a system fault and clicked out the lights.

  Kate sighed.

  * * * *

  When Axl came to his head was in Kate’s lap, and she was stroking his cheek with one finger, following the line of a cheekbone. What he thought was a two-beat drum track was just his heart.

  ‘Oh, you’re with us again.’ She dropped her hand quickly.

  ‘Yeah. Looks like it.’ Axl struggled upright and got as far as kneeling before he felt sick again. Waves of nausea pulling at his gut.

  ‘You were telling me all about being aborted,’ Kate’s voice was neutral.

  ‘I was what… ?’

  ‘You told me everything,’ said Kate. ‘The whole fucking lot.’ It was the first time he’d heard Kate swear.

  Her dark eyes were locked on his face, not cold or fierce but lit with sympathy that was almost unbearable. Everything else about her was studiedly casual. Rigorously non-threatening. Just how odd it was to be crouched opposite a woman who was worried she might make him afraid, Axl couldn’t begin to tell her.

  ‘I really told you?’ The blackness that had been crawling around the edges of his sight blew away as if it were smoke and Axl no longer felt sick. Inside his ribs his heart kicked back into a regular rhythm. There was no way Axl could know it, but his body levels of cortisol and the catecholarnines began to fall. All he knew was that his soundtrack slowed, softened slightly.

  ‘So when did you find out?’ Kate asked. She sat back on her heels and casually scratched the inside of one thigh, then blushed when she caught him watching. ‘You going to tell me or not?’

  He did.

  Eighteen weeks of womb time was what he got. That’s what they told him at the home anyway. Enough to produce tentative REM and thumb sucking, but leave him the wrong side of the survivability line. That was how long it took the kid to get her shit together enough to book a clinic. The clinic was a charity job, obviously enough. Cash wasn’t something she had a lot of, they’d told him that too. Made sure he knew freebase came first and getting rid of him came second. The home wanted him to know how lucky he was good people had come along.

  When did he find out? Sweet Jesus.

  ‘I always knew,’ Axl said flatly. ‘Sometimes it just meant less.’

  ‘You want to expand on that?’

  It was Axl’s turn to sigh. Grabbed from the disposal bin of an abortion clinic by a right-to-lifer hit team and grown to term in a Matsui artificial womb. Paraded as a toddler before judges, women who lunch, elderly patrons as an example of what their charity could achieve. Shit happened and mostly, it seemed to Kate, shit had been happening to the man in front of her. It was like someone just smashed a dam that held back a life’s worth of backed-up emotions. And then she realised with a shiver that someone had and it had been her.

  He was still talking, telling her how he’d been sat stealing time from a public smartbook in the annex of the NY library on 42nd, using ‘trades to pop frames almost faster than his brain could render. Worthless shit all of it, the kind of stuff all eleven-year-old boys, not just street kids hide behind ‘trodes to skim. Some animal fuck sites, Taiwanese pissing schoolgirls, cheats for getting the 6 million volt nanchuku in Mishima, the usual stuff... A bit of bomb making, some half-arsed chemical formulae for a kitchen-sink version of BetterThanlce.

  There was no site that toggled his memory, nothing meaningful like hitting on some dumb schmuck Fight For Life site, skimming the mugshots and thinking shit, that’s me... He just remembered being six and getting shown a lump of purple flesh the size of his fist, with frog-like legs and arms. Whatever it was in the glass case, it looked very dead.

  ‘You know what the blonde-haired matron said to me?’ Axl asked Kate.

  Kate didn’t and she didn’t even want to guess.

  ‘You’ve got a sister to look after.’ Next time Axl saw his sister five months had gone by. She was still small and still purple but more-obviously alive.

  In between they’d grafted her to a synthetic placenta and stitched the placenta into the pre-stretched uterus of a mother for Jesus. When that failed they fell back on a rubber womb, growing her in a nutrient and oxygen-rich solution of transparent gel.

  ‘But she was still one up on me,’ Axl said with a bleak smile. ‘I was picked up as an afterthought. When some God’s Fist commando grabbed a bucket on her way out, having slapped. a .45 through the head of an intern, nurse and receptionist at the clinic…’

  He stopped briefly, listening to a noise in the distance but didn’t really pay it the attention he should have done. He was still too busy talking.

  ‘You ever get really cross as a kid,’ Axl asked, ‘so cross you say you didn’t ask to be born?’

  Kate nodded.

  ‘Well, my mother didn’t ask for me to be born either. But the home still wanted me to demand the clinic release details so I could track her down.’ Axl shrugged. ‘Hi, you remember that walk-in, hobble-out abortion you had ten years ago… Well, the clinic got hit by Fight-for-Lifers that evening and I was the pile of slop at the bottom of the bucket. Yeah, I'm pleased to meet you too…’

  ‘Enough,’ said Kate. ‘Stop it.’ She was crying, the surface skim of water on her eyes magnifying pupils until it felt like she looked right into Axl’s head. Which wasn’t where anyone should be allowed to go.

  ‘Yeah, enough already.’ Axl stood up. Suddenly alert as a cri
mson-horned pheasant crashed into the air further down the path. Fear ate worm-like at his brain and it was nothing as wasteful as a memory: more of a dampened reflex, something hardwired. Guitar chords splintered, fast as panic.

  ‘Down,’ Axl slammed the crouching woman flat. Kate didn’t get to protest because Axl was already kneeling over her, with one knee up and one down, finding his balance as he thumbed back the hammer of his revolver and sighted in on somebody crashing through the bushes.

  Black-powder exploded. Axl’s first bullet slamming into the trunk of a stunted oak, stripping away bark to reveal splintered, glistening wood beneath. Beautifully balanced it might have been but the revolver still fired slightly wide.

  Which was just as well. Otherwise Mai would have been dead instead of just scared, shaking and white-hot furious. And then things would have been really fucked. How badly fucked, no one quite knew, not back then.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Learning To Howl...

  Axl was still sighting for his second shot when Mai came to an abrupt halt, staring open-mouthed at the revolver. Very slowly, Axl lowered the hammer.

  ‘You fuck-wit.'

  Axl nodded. Agreeing with her could only save time.

  ‘You want to kill me?’

  Axl shook his head. If Mai was shaken then so was he. Slamming random shots into the undergrowth wasn’t his style. Come to that, it wasn’t any style at all.

  ‘They’ve got Clone,’ Mai gasped, holding tight to a tree trunk, jagged breath ripping her throat like broken glass.

  ‘Who’s got ...' Kate asked but Axl already knew.

  ‘The soldiers’ said Mai.

  Not PaxForce, IMF troops, or WorldBank, but the soldiers. The mute, dumb cry of civilians everywhere.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the square…’

  Axl realised she meant that patch of mud with the water pump in front of the Inn. And then he asked her the difficult one, not that the question really needed asking. It was going to be some variation on tell me.

  ‘What are they doing?’

  Mai’s answer locked in her throat. Whatever choice the Colonel had made it was enough to widen her eyes and tug down the corners of her childish mouth.

  ‘The box has got a handle…’

  Moscow telephone. ‘They’ve got him wired for sound,’ Axl told Kate, then realised she had no idea what he was talking about. ‘A hand-cranked electrical generator.’

  ‘He’s dumb,’ she protested.

  ‘They’ll have a cat.’ Matsui cats came in a box the size of a Lucky Strike packet, with no moving parts, no user skill necessary. They were entirely waterproof and shockproof. All you do is run the box across a casualty’s skull to get a down and dirty snapshot of their brain in action.

  That was what the battlefield CATscan was designed to do anyway, but its main use turned out to be something else entirely. All the tiny screen ever showed up was a flare of purple and pink wrapped across the mottled folds of a small, dirt-grey walnut, but it was usually enough.

  At least it was for any soldier who wanted a crude checksum that the person being questioned was telling the truth.

  * * * *

  Wireframes had Clone stripped naked and nailed to a rattan chair taken from the Inn. She’d also taken Leon’s cart and ripped off its back and sides so everyone could see where Clone sat shivering on the raised chair. Someone had kicked out the chair’s seat before nailing Clone in place. The sergeant probably, she looked like someone who enjoyed her work.

  Axl didn’t need to check the rest, because it was already obvious what he’d find. From the stinking mound of shit under the chair where Clone had voided his bowels to wires running from his nipples, testicles or anus. Axl had seen it before. Whatever grunts might boast drunkenly in the franchised brothels of The Last Boer, imagination wasn’t something PaxForce conscripts majored in. Even the heavy roof nails pinning his feet to the wooden cart were a cliché. Something they’d seen done on a newsfeed.

  The huge clone’s arms had been held down and his wrists crudely nailed to the wooden back legs of the chair. His balls hung through the kicked-out chair bottom, tied round with string to make them protrude better.

  Hooked through his ear lobes were a couple of thin wires that ran back to momaDef, who held in her manicured hands what looked like an old-fashioned music box with a handle on its side.

  ‘You are going to help me, aren’t you?’

  When the naked man didn’t answer, momaDef cranked the handle five or six times between her first finger and thumb and Clone arched backwards in his chair, bloody wrists tugging against the nails as his leg muscles locked and the man tried to jerk upwards but couldn’t.

  ‘Stop…’

  The lieutenant smiled when she saw Kate. And this time when she jerked the handle back into action, momaDef kept it turning until Clone juddered in his chair like a puppet.

  ‘Wait,’ Axl grabbed Kate and tightened his grip until Kate stopped struggling.

  ‘You can’t do anything,’ he told her fiercely, which was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. . . But that still didn’t mean Kate wanted to hear it.

  Up on the cart Clone tumbled back into his seat and momaDef smiled breathlessly. She had a fine line of sweat beaded across her upper lip and damp patches under the arms of her otherwise immaculate T-shirt. Something told Axl it wasn’t from the effort of turning that handle.

  ‘Now, you are going to help me, aren’t you?’

  Clone nodded frantically even before momaDef’s fingers wrapped themselves round the handle. But nodding wasn’t enough to stop her having one last spin. Round went the handle and a noise more animal than human hissed between Clone’s clenched teeth as muscles locked across his body and watery shit squirted onto the wooden boards beneath the chair.

  That was when Clone noticed Kate standing there in the crowd. Face stricken, a thin trickle of blood down her chin from a bitten lip.

  He blushed.

  ‘Enough,’ said Axl and stepped forward. Even though he knew that now wasn’t the time.

  The lieutenant reached for the little handle and Axl repeated himself. Only this time he had the revolver in his hand, hammer thumbed back and muzzle pointing straight at her face. No, not nasty enough. With a shrug, Axl lowered the target to her stomach. Seventy-six hours was how long it took to die from a gut wound and where momaDef was concerned Axl reckoned that was too quick by half.

  ‘Look around you,’ the lieutenant said. Not that Axl needed to. His whole upper body was covered with a rash of tiny red laser dots, right down to two in his gun hand. One look at Kate told Axl the dots were all over his face too. Raghead measles was what PaxForce called his symptoms. And in most cases RhM proved fatal.

  It was a straight stand-off, the kind that used to get labelled Mexican before everyone got prissy.

  ‘What good does this do?’ Axl demanded, jerking his head towards Clone. Even to Axl the words sounded too loud.

  ‘He’s going to tell me what I want to know,’ momaDef admitted, after leaving a gap long enough to tell Axl she’d debated not answering his question at all.

  ‘Look at him…’

  The lieutenant did, reluctantly.

  ‘. . . what can that tell you?’

  ‘Where to find Father Sylvester.’ The lieutenant said it like he was stupid.

  Behind him, Axl almost felt Kate freeze, her tension so obvious it was a wonder momaDef didn’t put her up there in the chair.

  ‘You see,’ said the lieutenant, ‘Father Sylvester is here and this man is going to take me to him, aren’t you?’

  Nailed to his chair, Clone nodded, carefully not looking at Kate.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  ...In the Society of Wolves

  It looked like some picnic, thought Kate. The kind she and Joan used to take in the hills behind Castel Gandolfo when Joan was still alive. Lavender and rosemary suffusing the warm breeze as they rode across scrub-covered slopes and through a
ncient, thousand-year-old olive groves.

  But that was then and this was frightening.

  Hooves sank into cold mud or struck sparks from stones as the horses headed up track towards El Escondido. It was drizzling, but Kate had grown used to that. Surprisingly the lieutenant rode less well than Kate would have expected.

  Kate didn’t ride at all. She walked behind with Axl glued to her side like someone had splattered them both with a goo gun, not that paxForce grunts carried anything that non-lethal.

  Around the time the horses had finally arrived, the black woman with the thin, twisted dreadlocks gave a signal for her troops to find some target that wasn’t Axl. Kate didn’t know what the signal was, just that one minute Axl’s body and face were breeding red dots like lice, next moment all the dots were gone.

  Kate was shocked at how relieved she felt.

  Now she followed Clone, defMoma and the horses past rough juniper scrub and through the darkness of a rhododendron tunnel, under the twisting branches that closed out the sky over her head as if they were petrified worm-casts.

  The high-falling foss splashed away to her right, water plummeting down the valley side to the pool below. And the slight wind blowing down the tunnel into her face hung heavy with the smell of damp earth. Any hound following after their party could track them by the stink of horses and the sour undercurrents of blood, shit and fear.

  Kate shivered. For herself and for the huge naked man who stood in his saddle and rode straight-legged up ahead. They were tramping down the dead. Ground fine, unviralled and spread thin it might have been, but the earth beneath their hooves and feet had still once been flesh. But then, was that so different to back on Earth? Except there the dirt was carapaced over with concrete or marble and sterilised by history.

  ‘What?’ Axl asked.

  What was she thinking? Kate almost said, ‘about anything but Clone’. Instead she shrugged. ‘That this is all meat. . .’ She nodded at the track and the leaf-encrusted mud glued to her boots, then jumped at the touch of his fingers on her wrist.