redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Kate nodded sadly and dug her chin into his bare shoulder.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘why would you?’

  Why indeed, thought Axl and was worried to discover that he already had one answer. Rinpoche was still up there circling somewhere. Water cascaded down to the foss pool. The scent of pine carried in through her bedroom window and at his back stood Kate Mercarderes.

  All it would take to remix his life was to turn round and swap the resinous scent of pine for that of Kate. Her smell was warm, almost childlike but he could change that too, if he tried, for the musk of semen and secretions.

  His call, but her party. Axl turned.

  Kate looked into his eyes and didn’t smile. Not then and not when his hand went up to touch her bottom lip, sliding down her perfect skin to rest lightly against her jaw. ‘Who are you, really?’ She asked Axl.

  ‘Me. I’m broken.’

  Kate’s lips twisted and she smiled. They kissed then, her arms up around his neck until Kate broke free and stood at the window. ‘Do you see what I see?’ Kate asked him over her shoulder. ‘Do we look at the world through the same eyes?’

  She stood with her back to him, her body visible like a shadow through the thin cotton of her white nightdress until Axl moved in close and wrapped his arms tight around her. It was a small step from there to letting his fingers stray to one full breast, the memory of her nipple coming erect staying with him as his fingers touched her throat and Kate’s head went back, eyes closing.

  He could kill her, or not. He could admit this was the first woman he’d really loved, or he could just go. Leaving was always an option. Axl was good at that.

  ‘What would it take to make you stay?’ Kate asked softly, then froze when she felt the sudden tension in his body. Only by now Axl knew her well enough to know that if she was cross it wasn’t with him.

  She didn’t protest when he kissed her neck, just below her left ear. Letting his hand smooth its way back down her body, brushing once more over her nipple.

  ‘Again,’ she said and so he did, fingers tracing a soft circle around the fullness of her breast, spiralling in until his fingertips just brushed the puckered flesh around her nipple, then closed in, tugging gently.

  Kate sighed.

  Somewhere around the age of twenty-three Axl gave up notching. Partly it just felt too childish, but mostly it was because he couldn’t decide if his tally wasn’t enough or was way too many. Plus around then his quality control got fucked over by 4-MDA, not to mention crystalMeth. And once ruffioes and zidifel got jacked into the mix, it was keep it up all night, crash out come dawn and wake not remembering whether or not you’d just had the fuck of a lifetime.

  But now…

  Very slowly, so slowly that at first Axl thought he imagined it, Kate pushed back against him, softly rocking her hips so the muscles of her buttocks tensed and relaxed as he pushed against her.

  She said nothing when Axl reached round to undo the pearl buttons on the front of her nightdress, not touching her body as he slipped the light cotton over her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. And as Axl slid his fingers softly down her bare stomach, Kate kept silent, only raising her right leg slightly to let his hand twist into her silken body hair and gently trap the hood of her clit, softly closing on the tiny fold of skin and the swollen bud beneath.

  There’d been a kid back in Alphabet City who used to take her knickers off, and not just for Axl. T-shirt too, if you could afford it. That was where he’d learnt how to touch and where. Fifty cents let him stand at the end of a foam slab as she wanked herself with glistening fingers. A dollar bought viewing space between her open knees.

  It didn’t matter that her nails were rimmed with half moons of dirt and her wrists decorated with dark slashes of scar tissue, those were never what Axl was looking at. She’d been thirteen, maybe fourteen, certainly older than him. He couldn’t remember her name now, but then Axl wasn’t sure she’d ever told him.

  Part of Axl could have stood like that forever, with Kate’s head rested back against his shoulder as she bit at her bottom lip, not quite muffling the sigh that rose to a gentle moan. But that part of him didn’t win. It never did.

  ‘Kate ...?’

  She opened her eyes, then closed them again as Axl’s fingers slid free and smoothed between wet and swollen lips.

  Between her simple wooden bed and the window was five steps, and with each step Axl kept waiting for her to tell him to stop, to protest, to do anything but let him walk her across to the white cotton sheets and the thrown-back quilt.

  But Kate didn’t say stop and she didn’t object when he pushed her gently back onto the narrow bed and poised himself over her. Instead she pulled up her legs and opened her knees to rest her heels on the edge of the mattress. With her eyes wide open and her long hair spread around her head like a fan, she looked more vulnerable, more naked than any woman he’d ever seen. So naked, it was hard for Axl to remember that she’d been head of intelligent resources, VP and deputy CEO of one of the world’s biggest metaNationals.

  Her hips moved up to meet him and Axl closed his eyes, feeling for that tiny electric jolt which came as her swollen lips closed around his glans, entrance muscles tightening around him. Pulling slowly back out, Axl slid into her again until he could feel himself fill her completely.

  She looked at him then, mouth slack with sex, her eyes distant and unfocussed. What the look meant Axl didn’t know. A memory maybe, or nothing. Because nothing was all Axl had in his head as he dropped his mouth to one swollen breast and tugged at Kate’s nipple like a child.

  It was over fast for both of them after that. One second they were ploughing against each other with that sodden slap of urgent sex and then suddenly Kate’s legs twined around the back of his and she ground her hips up into him, mewling like a kitten as her arms locked round his shoulders and he pushed down into her.

  There was just time for Axl to suck his right index finger and reach under her buttocks and then Kate’s low broken mewling segued into steady grunts that rose to a triumphant howl. If anyone at Escondido hadn’t already known what Axl and Kate were doing from the frantic creak of her wooden bed, they did now.

  ‘Well,’ said Kate as she puckered her lips into a mocking kiss. ‘That was a first.’

  Axl looked incredulous. ‘Orgasm?’

  ‘Penis.’

  Enough shock wrote itself across Axl’s face to make Kate laugh. ‘It never occurred to me that I was bi…’ Kate sounded more amused than surprised. ‘Always knew I was the other, long before I knew what the other was.’

  Axl rolled off her and tucked his legs under him to sit on the edge of her bed.

  Kate’s body hair was dark and damp, crushed flat and flecked with pearls of semen and it took effort for Axl to drag his gaze from between her open legs to her face, which waited expectantly for his question. He was ashamed to admit that he was shocked. It had never occurred to Axl that other people might not have tried both.

  ‘The other ... Is it like a feeling?’

  Kate looked at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘you tell me. Is it…’

  ‘. . . like a feeling?’ Axl glanced at Kate’s full breasts, her mouth, then back to her narrow hips and the darkness between her legs. He nodded, realising that race and sex were immaterial. You fell in love with the person. If you were stupid enough to fall in love at all.

  There were no faint scars on Kate’s body, no patches of new skin where a delicate dusting of freckles didn’t quite match. Nothing at all to say she’d had even minor elective surgery. And yet. . . he’d seen younger eyes in old women, in old men too come to that. There was something about this woman that frightened him. Some intensity burning back inside her head just out of reach.

  ‘Have you ever had a rebuild?’ Axl asked the question without thought, regretting the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. Something else he was good at. It was the wrong question.

  Axl sighed. He kind of thought it might b
e.

  The only people who looked their age were street people, his people, those who couldn’t afford rebuilds or the free-radical busting, mind-expanding chelated supplements the rest of humanity washed down by the handful without even thinking about it.

  ‘What does it matter?’ Kate demanded.

  ‘It doesn’t.’ Axl held up his hands, placating Kate. ‘Really.’ The switch he’d tripped wasn’t one he’d even realised was there. ‘I’m sorry…’

  Kate shrugged. ‘You know how absurd this is?’ Without ever quite touching Axl she manoeuvred herself around him and shuffled up to the head of her narrow bed where she wrapped herself in the discarded quilt.

  ‘I’ve got Axl Borja sitting naked on my bed and he’s saying sorry.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Axl and Kate smiled.

  ‘What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?’ Kate asked finally.

  He didn’t want to go there.

  ‘A couple of years in a freezer,’ Axl told her, sounding impossibly casual even to himself. It wasn’t the worst but he didn’t talk about that. And besides mentioning the time he’d been dead didn’t seem appropriate.

  All the same, she still looked suitably shocked.

  ‘You were in cyro?’

  ‘Yeah, in Day Effé. It’s a long story.’ Not to mention singularly unpleasant. The kind to rate a same-day repeat and syndication on any daytime confession-fest. Then there was that other gap in his CV, when the street brats in Devil’s Kitchen rose by one member and fell by three. Axl wasn’t packed away in some pod then, but he might as well have been. Time passes like weather on the streets. It’s hot, it’s cold. Rain pisses down or it doesn’t. Occasionally it snows and suddenly even slums clean up for as long as it takes drone salters to turn virginal streets into grey slush.

  It could have been only a year he spent on the street, maybe two. Later on, the Cardinal got his New York office to check NYPD precincts, but no one knew how long the kid had been running wild and Axl couldn’t begin to guess. Too much GHB.

  He got a name change after that, a PIN number and Mexico City laminate. His own room, educational software, mediCare. Two months later he went through a back window and three guards who tried to get in his way, though he didn’t tell Kate that.

  ‘That’s it, really,’ said Axl. ‘Not much of a story.’

  ‘You know the worst thing that happened to me?’

  Axl could guess. ‘Your sister being murdered?’

  The answer Axl expected was a simple yes and maybe more tears. But he got the truth instead which was far stranger.

  ‘You still haven’t worked it out, have you?’ Kate said quietly. ‘Joan wasn’t my sister.’ And the well of silence that followed was so deep you could have tossed your entire life into it and never heard the splash.

  Inside that silence, Kate clambered off the bed in a jumble of naked limbs hidden inside a thin quilt and walked to the door. For a second Axl thought she was about to stalk out into the corridor wearing only her quilt.

  But all Kate did was take a grey shahtoosh off the brass hook attached to the back of the door and wrap its length of fine wool tightly around her. Then she walked back to the bed as if nothing had happened.

  ‘What was that about?’ Axl asked.

  ‘Joan,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t sit opposite you and talk about her.’

  Which answered his next question.

  ‘You were lovers, weren’t you?’

  ‘At fourteen my father died. At fifteen I was Joan’s unofficial private secretary. A year later I was running her whole private office…’

  Joan was twenty-eight years older than Kate. And at forty-two, not yet ravaged by lymphatic cancer but already dismissive of the flesh, of physical needs and carnal hunger until she met the pale-skinned, serious Kate. And Kate, her mother already dead and her father only just buried in the churchyard at Castel Gandolfo woke a hunger in Joan that Joan had always believed missing from her psyche.

  Those were the words Kate used. The serious language of serious matters remembered. And the naked man sat on Kate’s bed sat and listened as she talked of statues by Bellini, Gobelin tapestries and the one great love of her life.

  The artist and craftsmen she mentioned meant no more to him than talk of blow-back, azimuths and lines of fire would have meant to her. But Axl understood the rawness of those emotions that burnt behind her dark pupils, the double edged cutting sharpness of her memories as she slipped tenses from Joan is to Joan was and back again, eyes overfilling with tears.

  ‘Joan loves Samsara,’ Kate said.

  Axl looked up at that.

  ‘She always dreamed of helping fill a world where there would never be war. She’ll like it here…’

  ‘Joan’s dead,’ Axl told Kate.

  ‘No,’ said Kate.

  Then she said, ‘yes.’ And the sobs really would have started then except Kate didn’t allow herself the luxury. But once she stopped shaking, she told Axl something he should already have realised. The memory beads weren’t the key, Mai was.

  The kid carried the Pope’s dreams locked off inside her head. Sucked and dumped by some psi Jesuit. Slowly and seriously, never quite looking at Axl, Kate crouched there on her bed and told Axl about Antioch, an ancient order turned renegade and then brought back into the fold.

  ‘We got the medical data when we acquired the Geneticists,’ Kate said flatly. The deal was actually more of a reverse takeover, even Axl knew that and he never listened to the financial newsfeeds. Rome had bought out the Church of Christ Geneticist, acquiring the laboratory complex at San Lorenzo in Megrib. And with the lab came patents, outlines of projects that had failed and all the data that hadn’t been released for peer review… They also got Alex Gibson, the world’s only living God (if you left out the Dalai Lama, who disowned divinity). Though they still hadn’t worked out what to do with him.

  What she was telling him sounded incredible, Kate admitted that. But she wanted Joan back, not for the world but for herself. Get yourself cloned and any half-decent clinic could suck up memories from a soul chip and spit them back into a fresh cortex. Feelings were something else. And the problem with straight copying was you know what happened to you, maybe even why it happened. What you didn’t get from a soul chip is what you felt while it was happening. It brought a whole new meaning to cognitive dissonance.

  Joan was fifty-five. So her brain would have processed the equivalent of 300 million books. Which sounded big but came out as around ten terrabites of memory, not remotely hard for five chips.

  But dreams are like feelings. Just as you can’t chip the flickering dendritic matrix that ties emotionally-rich events into a shifting web of neural connections, so it’s impossible to hardcopy the rush that kicks in during REM sleep when the frontal lobes shut down, emotional centres fire up and the brain swims with acetyl-choline.

  ‘What if she didn’t love me?’ Kate said. ‘What if I downloaded Joan’s memory beads into a blank and it knew it loved me but couldn’t remember why?’ I couldn’t take that risk ...'

  ‘You’ve got hard-form back-ups for Joan’s senses. And you’ve got her dreams as well?’ Axl didn’t know whether to be shocked or seriously impressed.

  Kate nodded. ‘Everything except Joan. Because she didn’t believe in clones…’ Kate caught herself. ‘Oh, she believed they were human. God knows, she fought for equal rights…’ Her voice was harsh. ‘But not for herself. She didn’t believe in back-ups.’

  ‘But the memory beads ...'

  ‘History.’ Kate’s laugh was as bleak as her words. ‘Back-up for the Vatican library. Joan believed in history. That, and the essential goodness of the human race.’

  ‘And the dreams?’

  ‘Sheer luck,’ said Kate. ‘Joan suffered nightmares. Father Sylvester flew in from San Lorenzo to do a dreamlift. I thought it would give her a week or so of peace.’

  Axl looked appalled. He didn’t intend to, but he couldn’t help it.

&nbs
p; ‘He was going to return them when she got back from Mexico. Only it didn’t happen, did it?’

  ‘No,’ Axl could comprehensively say it didn’t. Joan got ripped apart by a pack of consensually-hallucinating street kids and Kate got landed with Joan’s dreams, and back-up of her vision, smell, sound, memory and touch but no blank Joan to load them into.

  ‘So now you know,’ said Kate and headed for the door. Adding over her shoulder, ‘I’m going to shower.’ She didn’t say it would be good if you were gone when I get back. But the message was there in her voice and in the way Kate didn’t meet Axl’s eye as she shut the door. Leaving him alone and still naked on her bed.

  And he would have gone too, back to his room or out of that house, up into one of the higher valleys or even off Samsara altogether, whatever she wanted. Except that he took one last look around her room, imprinting it onto memory and that was when he found the bug.

  PaxForce issue, Intel-chipped.

  Chapter Forty

  Hill/Slope/River

  Mai wasn’t in her room. She wasn’t down in the kitchen with Louis, either.

  ‘Mai?’ Axl demanded, but Louis just scowled. Whatever he thought of Axl spending the night with Kate, he made it obvious he didn’t think much of Axl coming straight down afterwards asking for Mai.

  The little fat man hit the nearest wall, bounced off it into a pine table and was clutching his hip before he even hit the tiled floor.

  ‘Where?’ Axl demanded, picking up a knife. A sabatier-black handle and brass rivets, French-made-for refugees they had more than their share of home comforts.

  Louis took one look at the blade and began crawling backwards out of Axl’s reach. He knew just how fine a cutting edge the sabatier carried, having sharpened it in the first place.

  ‘Where’s Mai?’

  ‘Down in the village.’ The little priest was almost crying.

  The door slammed behind Axl and he was gone. He skidded down a grass bank rather than go round by the path, his boots cutting long gouges into slippery earth. Sweet fuck, the only question that really needed answering was why hadn’t he seen the bug earlier. . . ?