Patchwerk

by David Tallerman

  He turned his attention once more to the three men around Dorric. The one close at Dorric’s elbow was definitely a technician of some sort. Though he saw nothing himself, Florrian had no doubt that the man had summoned a system interface, as he himself was now unable to do.

  Florrian had made Palimpsest’s software purposefully idiosyncratic; to do so was the simplest defence against more casual forms of espionage. An amateur might spend days riddling out its secrets, weeks convincing it to function. This man was clearly no amateur. He was a specialist, technointuitive perhaps, one of those lost creatures who understood machines perfectly and their fellow humans hardly at all. If that were the case, he might need mere hours to penetrate the machine’s fundamentals.

  The other two, the two who watched Florrian back, were killers. No other word would fit them. Nor was it the weapons they pointed that gave them away; it was in their eyes and the way they stood, the way they owned the space around them. He had seen enough of such men during his training to recognise them even if they were unarmed, even if they’d been going about some innocent task. They were framed for violence.

  It could only be a matter of time until Dorric’s technician unravelled Palimpsest’s secrets, and Florrian was helpless to stop him. What could he do against four of them? Or should that be five? He supposed he must count Karen amongst his enemies, too. Yet he couldn’t find it in himself to feel betrayed, just as he’d never been able to blame her for leaving. He’d given her nothing in those last, impossible months, and so she had left.

  Now here they were, together again, and Florrian found—almost to his amusement—that despite the circumstances, despite the immeasurable danger of the situation, he was on some level pleased to see his former wife. That thought led to another: something so integral to their relationship, yet he had never told her. “You know, you gave me the idea,” he said.

  “What?” Karen looked towards him. Her eyes were tired, her mouth drawn tight. “What idea?”

  “For Palimpsest. My machine,” he said.

  “That’s what you’re calling it?”

  “It means . . .”

  “I know what it means,” Karen said. For a moment he thought she might add, But what does it do, however she seemed content to leave it at that—as she always had been. Their growing distance, her growing disinterest, had made Palimpsest’s function an easy secret to keep.

  Now, in fact, she’d looked away once more. So Florrian let it go. What could it matter, in any case? It was too late for her curiosity to mean anything. That night, the night she’d inadvertently inspired him, when everything had changed—hadn’t that been his last opportunity to draw her into his clandestine world, instead of driving her further away?

  She had come back late—or early, rather. He’d glanced at the clock on hearing the chime of the outside door, the chirrup of the security system standing down, and noted a time somewhere in the drag between midnight and dawn. He had been deep in his work since the last evening. He didn’t remember eating. He hoped she would go to bed, not come looking for him, but only go to bed and leave him. And at first he thought that was what she’d done, for he didn’t hear her footsteps. Florrian turned back to the open slab of machinery he was working on, tried to refocus on its filigree of circuits, like a cartographer thinking his way into his map.

  Karen said, “I’m sorry I’m so late.”

  The circuits blurred. Golden threads merged and interweaved.

  “We were in Saudi Arabia,” she said. “Wadi Khatayn. There’d been a report of a leopard family in the south, but by the time we could drop in, word had got out. The Manjoro were there before us. Professional bastards . . . when they’re not poaching, they’re running guns or drugs or people.”

  Florrian clicked up the monocle interface he wore for such impossibly delicate work and knuckled his eyes. Then he flipped the monocle back into place. The labyrinthine circuitry, magnified a hundred thousand times by the monocle’s firmware, in conjunction with his own adapted retina, swam back into clarity.

  He forgot sometimes how hazardous his wife’s work was—as he forgot so much about the world outside this room. The feeds gleefully labelled her a combat zoologist, but Florrian knew that for Karen, the fact that the places she went to were so often dangerous was incidental. She went where she was needed and did what she could. She was the bravest person he had ever met; that incredible, white-hot strength of hers was one of the first things that had attracted him. He had simply never met anyone like her.

  Yet now, in this moment, he resented her presence. Florrian had been like a diver submerged in the fathomless depths of his work, and now he was being made against his will to surface. He resented, even, the guilt he felt at his own frustration. For he could hear the exhaustion in his wife’s voice, and under it the lividness of fresh pain; he knew she needed him to say something. “Did you save them?” Florrian asked.

  “One cub,” Karen said. “A girl. She’d dug in half under her mother’s corpse.”

  “I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say. He understood that he should go to her, comfort her, but even as he’d spoken he’d seen something: a tiny part of the solution. Suddenly his wife and everything else seemed far away. Florrian reached eagerly for the terminal controls, and in his haste, dashed his wrist against a drinking glass he’d left balanced on the work surface. By the time he registered the movement and was crouching to catch it, it was already shattering—and it was only some mindless instinct that made him keep grasping hopelessly towards the tiled floor.

  “Hell!”

  Florrian whipped his hand back, saw the jagged line of red engraved there. He eyed with hatred the particular shard that had wounded him. The cut was deep; it would only keep bleeding. It would need stitches, and that meant waking up his physician, or else paying the exorbitant fees of an all-night clinic. Either way he’d get no more work done, and the thread of his thought was broken. It was all he could do to hold in the frustration bubbling inside. “Hell!” he repeated, and by the time the word reached the air it was a growl of distilled anger.

  “Calm down,” Karen told him, fatigue adding an edge to her usual calm determination, “and wait there a moment, will you?”

  “It’s bleeding,” Florrian complained. His rage had abruptly evaporated, but now he sounded petulant even to himself.

  “Then suck it, you idiot.”

  She was out of the room before he could respond, which perhaps was just as well. Florrian pressed the stripe of red to his lips and sucked, wincing at the bitter tang and sharpened pain. Suddenly he was entirely conscious of how tired he was, how far beyond the point of overwork. He listened to the sounds of his wife moving somewhere deeper within their apartment, and for a while there was nothing but that jarring current of noise, his exhaustion and the iron-filings taste of his own blood.

  Then she was back. He hadn’t known what to expect, but the scrap of fabric gripped between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand wasn’t it. He eyed it with distrust as she marched over, deftly avoiding the glacier flow of glass fragments across the floor.

  “Hold out your hand,” Karen said, and he did. In two smooth gestures, she drew a plastic strip from its reverse and wrapped the fabric neatly over his cut.

  Florrian looked at the strip of fabric. It made no sense to him. He couldn’t even find the words to frame his objection. “But . . .” he said, and had no idea how to finish.

  “Sometimes it’s all right to just patch something up, Dran.”

  His instinct was still to resist. He was conscious of the opening in his flesh, masked but unhealed—a problem deferred.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You’re tired out and so am I. You’re not going to bleed to death. It might take a few days longer to heal this way, but it will. You won’t even have a scar. It’s okay. Not everything has to have a grand, perfect solution.”

  And she was right. There was no white light flash or chime of revelation, merely a shift somewhere d
eep in the substrata of his mind. She was right. Perhaps not about his hand, for he could feel how deep the cut was and knew it probably would scar. But completely accidentally, completely unexpectedly, Karen had gifted him the wider answer he’d been unable to find himself.

  He had been mired for so long in theory, with no thought of application. Once he’d looked out at the world and wanted to solve it, to heal its many woes. The more his goal had seemed impossible, the more he’d turned away, digging deeper into the safety of abstracts. The problems were too big; their very size made them insoluble, for he was only one man. So Florrian had found a problem he could scale his mind to and set about solving that instead.

  Yet now he understood what his machine could do . . . how it could do good. He couldn’t heal the world, but perhaps he could still bandage its wounds. What he couldn’t repair he could at least patch.

  Another revelation jolted Florrian back to the present: in a very real sense, Karen had given him Palimpsest. But the past was gone, immutable. Now she was ready to let someone else take it away from him. And that he couldn’t allow.

  Florrian steeled himself. He’d let this go on long enough. If he’d thought to learn something from his former wife, it was clear he’d be disappointed; if he’d hoped for some shadow of their past affection, then even more so.

  Nevertheless, that didn’t mean Karen couldn’t be useful.

  Florrian took a step back and sideways, and even before Dorric’s two killers had time to decide if whatever he was doing was grounds enough to end his life, he had the palm of his hand against her temple.

  “There is a weapon built into the bone of my arm,” he said loudly. “Constructed out of my own body. Utterly undetectable. At the correct mental trigger it will propel a molecules-wide sliver of bone through an aperture in the palm of my hand. It will hurt me considerably, but more significantly from your point of view, it will be carrying enough kinetic energy to split my ex-wife’s skull like a rotten egg.”

  He might have expected incredulity from the two men aiming their dainty weapons at him. But they surely knew that such devices existed, and that spies were often fitted with them, and that therefore so were scientists who might be called upon to act as spies. They didn’t flinch. They didn’t take their eyes off him. But one of them said, in a voice carrying no baggage of emotion, “I can drop him before he fires, Mister Dorric. Just give the word.”

  “He won’t hurt me,” Karen said. “Harlan, please, let me talk to him.” She tilted her head towards Florrian, enough that he could once again see her face in distorted profile. “You won’t hurt me, Dran, and those men will hurt you. So please, stop being so foolish.”

  “Shut up!” Florrian roared. “I’m telling you, Dorric, you thieving son of a bitch, if one of those Neanderthals so much as . . .” Then he was moving—shoving Karen hard with his free hand, using her resistance to propel himself. And as good as Dorric’s men were, they hadn’t had his psych training; they were no match for a hanging sentence. He had shaved a fraction of an instant from their reaction times, and when they fired, the shots strummed the air beside him, close enough that he felt the sudden heat. Too slow. Too late. He was into the maze now, weaving between shapes made anonymous by the shocking green of the carrigel.

  Everything Florrian had said about the weapon in his arm was true. They had put it into him without his knowing, while he slept in chemically induced sleep, and the next day had proudly told him what they’d done. On cold nights, the core of his radius still ached with phantom pain; it throbbed now, as he thought of it. The one detail he’d neglected to tell Dorric, however, was just now the most important: if Florrian once used it, the weapon’s recharge time was such that only a miracle would allow him a second shot.

  Large as the storage bay might be, it was still too confined to hide him for long. Assuming Dorric himself kept out of the fight, Florrian was only outnumbered two to one; but those odds were meaningless, and in fact his enemies had every advantage. His best tactic might have been to get out, head to the bridge perhaps and shoot the pilot and crash the whole damned TransCon into the sea. What were the deaths of a few thousand compared to the horrors Palimpsest might unleash in the wrong hands? Yet Florrian wasn’t sure he could do such a thing—and in any case, would never make the door before they cut him down.

  That left two options: try and destroy Palimpsest, or hope taking out Dorric would be enough to deter his lackeys. Florrian had no idea what a shot would do to Palimpsest, except that it might be catastrophic; the energies held within were hardly in check, barely controlled. Also, he wasn’t certain that when the moment came he would be able to think that crucial, killing thought.

  Harlan Dorric, on the other hand . . .

  Florrian was a rational man, a creature of science and reason. He couldn’t hate Dorric for the fact that Karen had chosen him over Florrian himself. Choice had been all that kept them together, and she had exercised hers in leaving. Nor could he hate Dorric for being here now, trying to take by force what Florrian had worked so unimaginably hard and sacrificed so much to create. Such was the world they lived in; such crimes were hardly deemed crimes at all so long as the corporations reaped the final benefit.

  Florrian was a rational man. Killing Dorric might save Palimpsest from him. Killing Dorric might secure the lives—the thousands, the millions, the billions of lives—that Palimpsest would endanger.

  From a rational perspective, it was not a difficult decision. In a way it irritated Florrian that his only objection was moral. He couldn’t justify killing to himself, even when it was unquestionably logical to do so.

  However, he found that the thought of severely injuring Dorric rang no moral alarms whatsoever.

  Florrian stepped out of cover.

  The first thing he saw was Dorric, looking straight at him—and then Dorric, too, was moving. The second thing Florrian saw was Karen, far beyond Dorric, partly obscured by the brutalist bulk of Palimpsest—and she was moving also, though more slowly. Her eyes were wide at seeing him. In the moment it took her to note the spreading aperture in his palm, they grew wider.

  Dorric, meanwhile, was a picture of calm. He had a weapon in his hand now and it was aimed at Florrian, as though he’d perfectly predicted this attack. Florrian had never seen a man look so sure of himself. It took, he thought, a special sort of madness to stare down death with such indifference.

  For an instant the three of them were like dancers. Florrian was moving. Harlan was moving; Karen, too. Yet they all three seemed frozen; their movement prearranged, no movement at all. There was a horrible inevitableness to it, a weight of constricting possibility. Even as Florrian fired, he knew he was going to miss—just as he knew Dorric wouldn’t.

  Pain trembled up Florrian’s forearm. Blood misted, hung in the air—his own. Whether it was from his hand or the funnel of pain that had abruptly drilled its way into his chest, he couldn’t say. Beside Dorric’s head, a section of Palimpsest exploded in showering sparks. But the shot, Florrian’s shot, laden as it was with awful energy, did not stop there. And even as his momentum tore her from view, Florrian saw Karen shudder, like a tree split by lightning.

  D’ren Florein fell hard. Though the thorax chitin was soft there, pain still jolted up his arm. He rolled over, endured a vertiginous moment as he saw through the semitranslucent surface to the ground far, far below. He could just make out the city-hive’s blurred, distant outlines, towering steeples in coral pinks and lurid purples; but every line and curve was further smudged by the swarming blackness that roiled in the intervening air. The NachtSchwarm, entomological engineering gone madly out of control. The horror he had sworn to save his world from.

  Florein rolled to his knees and then let his wings carry him to his feet and forward, so that the shot that came a moment later from the centre of the room skimmed narrowly behind him. His head was pounding, a sickening, dizzying pain. His memory of the last few moments was an agonising blur. He had fired, had missed Halann D’rik, a
nd hit—he had hit Palimpsest.

  As he dashed between two rotund cargo pods, as another shot gouged a line through the nearest, spattering viscous grey fluid, Florein caught a glimpse of his creation: its surface, the crawling sheen of it, was pulsating now, rising in bumps and tendrils that folded back almost as soon as they’d formed. He’d never seen it do that before. He had no idea what it meant. But he couldn’t shake the sense that it looked angry, and knowing what Palimpsest was capable of, that nonsensical thought chilled him to the marrow.

  Florein ducked amidst a cluster of storage pods and gulped moist air. His arm hurt with a steady, throbbing pain. He glanced at his palm. Tiny black insects were crawling round the red-raw hole in his hand, razor-sharp wings safely furled, already dying and crumbling to dust as they reached the ends of their tiny, preprogrammed lifespans. It would take a few seconds more for the biomechanism in his arm to breed another burst of flechette flies; until then he was defenceless.

  Had D’rik’s thugs stopped firing? Had they lost sight of him? If they had, then it could only mean a brief respite. They had no reason to wait him out, and even if they did, Florein doubted their employer would share the sentiment. D’rik, who had never seen Palimpsest before today, was surely as alarmed by its weird activity as Florein himself.

  Sure enough, at that moment a voice called from behind him and somewhere to his right: “Are you all right out there, Florein? I hope my men didn’t do you too much damage?”

  Florein fought the urge to answer. If D’rik was willing to reveal his position, it could only be because he hoped Florein would do the same. Instead, he slipped into a crouch and moved, light-footed, to the shelter of another pod, this one beside the cargo bay’s softly pulsing outer wall.