Reality Dysfunction — Emergence nd-1

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Quinn lost money on the first three fights, then picked up a wad of six hundred francs on the fourth, equivalent to a hundred and fifty fuseodollars. He handed a third of the plastic notes to Jackson, and put another two hundred fuseodollars on the next fight.

  After seven fights he was eight hundred fuseodollars down, with two and a half thousand Lalonde francs in his pocket.

  “I know her,” Jackson said as the next two sayce were being goaded on the side of the pit by their owners. One of them was an old bull, his skin a cross web of scars. That was the one Quinn had put his money on. Always trust in proven survivors.

  “Who?”

  “Girl over there. She’s from Group Seven.”

  Quinn followed his gaze. The girl was a teenager, very attractive, with longish dark hair falling down over her shoulders. She was wearing a sleeveless singlet with a scoop neck; it looked new, the fabric was shiny, definitely synthetic. Her face was burning with astonishment and excitement, the taste of forbidden fruit, sweetest of all. She was sitting between two brothers, twins, about thirty years old, with sandy blond hair, just beginning to thin. They were dressed in shirts of checked cotton, crudely cut. Both of them had the kind of thick brown skin that came from working outdoors.

  “Are you sure?” With the glare of the lights it was difficult for him to tell.

  “I’m sure. I couldn’t forget those tits. I think she’s called Mary, Mandy, something like that.”

  The sayce were shoved into the pit, and the crowd roared. The two powerful vulpine bodies locked together, spinning madly, teeth and claws slicing through the air.

  “I suppose she’s entitled to be here,” Quinn said. He was annoyed, he didn’t need complications like the girl. “I’m going to have a word with Baxter. Make sure she doesn’t see you, we don’t want her to know we were here.”

  Jackson gave him a thumbs up and took another gulp from his tankard.

  Baxter was standing on the ramp leading from the pit to the cages, head flicking from side to side as he followed the battling beasts. He acknowledged Quinn with a terse nod.

  A spume of blood flew out of the pit, splattering the people on the lowest benches. One of the sayce was screeching. Quinn thought it was calling, “Help.”

  “You done all right tonight,” Baxter said. “Break even, beginner’s luck. I let you place bigger bets, you want.”

  “No, I need the money. I’m going upriver soon.”

  “You build nice home for family, good luck.”

  “I need more than luck up there. Suppose I bump into one of those?” He flicked a finger at the pit. The old bull had its jaws around the younger sayce’s throat, it was slamming its head against the side of the pit, oblivious to the deep gouges the other’s claws were raking down its flanks.

  “Sayce not like living near river,” Baxter said. “Air too wet. You be all right.”

  “A sayce or one of its cousins. I could do with something with a bit of punch, something that’ll stop it dead.”

  “You bring plenty gear from Earth.”

  “Can’t bring everything we need, the company doesn’t let us. And I want some recreational items as well. I thought maybe I could pick it all up in town. I thought maybe you might know who I needed to see.”

  “You think too much.”

  “I also pay a lot.”

  Down in the pit a sayce’s head virtually exploded as it was slammed against the wall for the last time. Pulpy gobs of brain sleeted down.

  Quinn smiled when he saw the old bull raise its head to its cheering owner and let out a gurgling high-pitched bleat: “Yessss!”

  “You owe me another thousand francs,” he told Baxter. “You can keep half of it as a finder’s fee.”

  Baxter’s voice dropped an octave. “Come back here, ten minutes; I show you man who can help.”

  “Gotcha.”

  The old bull sayce was sniffling round the floor of the pit when Quinn got back to Jackson. A blue tongue started to lick up the rich gore sloshing about on the stone.

  Jackson watched the spectacle glumly. “She’s gone. She left with the twins after the fight. Christ, putting out like that, and she’s only been here a day.”

  “Yeah? Well, just remember she’s going to be trapped on a river cruise with you for a fortnight. You can work your angle then.”

  He brightened. “Right.”

  “I think I got us what we need. Although God’s Brother knows what kind of weapons they sell in this dump. Crossbows, I should think.”

  Jackson turned to face him. “I still think we should stay here. What do you hope to do upriver, take over the settlement?”

  “If I have to. Jerry Baker isn’t going to be the only one who brought a Jovian Bank disk with him. If we get enough of them, we can buy ourselves off this shit heap.”

  “Christ, you really think so? We can get off? All the way off?”

  “Yeah. But it’s going to take a big pile of hard cash, that means we’ve got to separate a lot of colonists from their disks.” He fixed the lad with the kind of stare Banneth used when she interviewed new recruits. “Are you up to that, Jackson? I’ve got to have people who are going to back me the whole way. I ain’t got space for anyone who farts out at the first sign of trouble.”

  “I’m with you. All the way. Christ, Quinn, you know that, I proved that last night and tonight.”

  There was a note of desperation creeping into the voice. Jackson was insisting on having a part of what Quinn offered. The ground rules were laid out.

  So let the game start, Quinn thought. The greatest game of all, the one God’s Brother plays for all eternity. The vengeance game. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go see what Baxter’s got for us.”

  Horst Elwes checked the metabolic function read-out on his medical block’s display screen, then glanced down at the sleeping figure of Jay Hilton. The girl was curled up inside a sleeping-bag, her facial features relaxed into serenity. He had cleaned the nasty graze on her leg, given her an antibiotic, and wrapped the leg in a sheath of epithelium membrane. The tough protective tissue would help accelerate natural dermal regeneration.

  It was a pity the membrane could only be used once. Horst was beginning to wonder if he had stocked enough in his medical case. According to his didactic medical course, damaged human skin could rot away if it was constantly exposed to high humidity. And humidity didn’t come any higher than around the Juliffe.

  He plucked the sensor pad from Jay’s neck, and put it back in the medical block’s slot.

  Ruth Hilton gave him an expectant stare. “Well?”

  “I’ve given her a sedative. She’ll sleep for a solid ten hours now. It might be a good idea for you to be at her side when she wakes up.”

  “Of course I’ll be here,” she snapped.

  Horst nodded. Ruth had shown nothing but concern and sympathy when the sobbing girl had stumbled back into the dormitory, never letting a hint of weakness show. She had held Jay’s hand all the time while Horst disinfected the graze, and the sheriff asked his questions. Only now did the worry spill out.

  “Sorry,” Ruth said.

  Horst gave her a reassuring smile, and picked up the medical block. It was larger than a standard processor block, a rectangle thirty-five centimetres long, twenty-five wide and three thick, with several ancillary sensor units, and a memory loaded with the symptoms and treatment of every known human illness. And that was as much a worry as the epithelium membrane; Group Seven was going to be completely dependent on him and the block for their general health for years to come. The responsibility was already starting to gnaw at his thoughts. His brief spell in the arcology refuge had shown him how little use theoretical medicine was in the face of real injuries. He had swiftly picked up enough about first aid to be of some practical use to the hard-pressed medics, but anything more serious than cuts and fractures could well prove fatal upriver.

  At least the block had been left in his pod; several other items had gone missing between the spacepo
rt and the warehouse. Damn, but why did Ruth have to be right about that? And the sheriffs hadn’t shown any interest when he reported the missing drugs. Again, just like she said.

  He sighed and rested his hand on her shoulder as she sat on the edge of the cot, stroking Jay’s hair.

  “She’s a lot tougher than me,” he said. “She’ll be all right. At that age, horror fades very quickly. And we’ll be going upriver straight away. Getting out of the area where it happened is going to help a lot.”

  “Thank you, Horst.”

  “Do you have any geneering in your heritage?”

  “Yes, some. We’re not Saldanas, but one of my ancestors was comfortably off, God bless him, we had a few basic enhancements about six or seven generations ago. Why?”

  “I was thinking of infection. There is a kind of fungal spore here which can live in human blood. But if your family had even a modest improvement to your immune system there won’t be any problem.”

  He stood and straightened his back, wincing at the twinges along his spine. It was quiet in the dormitory; the lights were off in the centre where the rest of Group Seven’s children had been settled down for the night. Bee-sized insects with large grey wings were swarming round the long light panels that had been left on. He and Ruth had been left alone by the other colonists after the sheriff departed to examine the body in the river. He could see some kind of meeting underway in the canteen, most of the adults were there. The Ivets formed a close-knit huddle in a corner at the other end, all of them looking sullen. And frightened, Horst could tell. Waster kids who had probably never even seen an open sky before, never mind primeval jungle. They had stayed in the dormitory all day. Horst knew he should make an effort to get to know them, help build a bridge between them and the genuine colonists, unite the community. After all, they were going to spend the rest of their lives together. Somehow he couldn’t find the energy.

  Tomorrow, he promised himself. We’ll all be on the ship for a fortnight, that’ll give me ample opportunity.

  “I ought to be at the meeting,” he said. From where he was he could see two people standing up for a shouting match.

  “Let ’em talk,” Ruth grunted. “It keeps them out of mischief. They won’t get anything sorted until after the settlement supervisor shows up.”

  “He should have been here this morning. We need advice on how to establish our homes. We don’t even know the location we’ve been assigned.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough; and the supervisor will have the whole river trip to lecture us. I expect he’s out prowling the town tonight. I can’t blame him, stuck with us for the next eighteen months. Poor sod.”

  “Must you always think the worst of people?”

  “It’s what I’d do. But that isn’t what worries me right now.”

  Horst sneaked another look at the meeting. They were taking a vote, hands raised in the air. He sat down on the cot facing Ruth. “What does worry you?”

  “The murder.”

  “We don’t know it was a murder.”

  “Get real. The body was stripped. What else could it be?”

  “He could have been drunk.” Because God knows a drink is what I need just looking at that river.

  “Drunk and taking a swim? In the Juliffe? Come on, Horst!”

  “The autopsy should tell us if . . .” He trailed off under Ruth’s gaze. “No, I don’t suppose there will be one, will there?”

  “No. He must have been dumped in the river. The sheriff told me that two colonists from Group Three were reported missing by their wives this morning. Pete Cox and Alun Reuther. I’ll give you ten to one that body is one of them.”

  “Probably,” Horst admitted. “I suppose it’s shocking that urban crime is rife here. Somehow you don’t imagine such a thing on a stage one colony world. Then again, Lalonde isn’t quite what I imagined. But we’ll be leaving it all behind shortly. Our own community will be too small for such things, we will all know each other.”

  Ruth rubbed at her eyes, her expression haunted. “Horst, you’re not thinking. Why was the body stripped?”

  “I don’t know. For the clothes, I suppose, and the boots.”

  “Right. Now what sort of mugger is going to kill for a pair of boots? Actually kill two people in cold blood. God, the people here are poor, I’m not denying it, but they’re not that desperate.”

  “Who then?”

  She looked pointedly over his shoulder. Horst turned round. “The Ivets? That’s rather prejudiced, isn’t it?” he asked reproachfully.

  “You’ve seen the way they’re treated in the town, and we don’t treat them any better. They can’t move outside the port district without getting beaten up. Not with their jump suits on, and they don’t have anything else to wear. So who is more likely to want ordinary clothes? Who isn’t going to care what they have to do to get them? And whoever did murder that man did it inside the port, uncomfortably close to this dormitory.”

  “You don’t think it was one of ours?” he exclaimed. “Let’s say, I’m praying it wasn’t. But with the way our luck is turning out, I wouldn’t count on it.”

  Diranol, Lalonde’s smallest, outermost moon, was the only one of the planet’s three natural satellites left in the night sky, a nine-hundred-kilometre globe of rock with a red ochre regolith, half a million kilometres distant. It hovered above the eastern horizon, painting Durringham in a timid rose-pink fluorescence when the power bike skidded to a halt just outside the skirt of light leaking from the big transients’ dormitory. Marie Skibbow loosened her grip on Furgus. The ride through the darkened city had been sensational, drawing out every second, filling it with glee and excitement. The walls slashing past, sensed rather than seen, the headlight beam revealing ruts and mud patches on the road almost as soon as they hit them, wind whipping her hair about, eyes stung by the slipstream. Taunting danger with every turn of the wheel, and beating it, living.

  “Here we go, your stop,” Furgus said.

  “Right.” She swung her leg over the saddle, and stood beside him. Now the weariness swept through her, a frozen wave of depression that hung poised high above, waiting to crash down at the prospect of the future and what it held.

  “You’re the best, Marie.” He kissed her, one hand fondling her right breast through the singlet’s fabric. Then he was gone, red tail light sinking into the blackness.

  Her shoulders drooped as she made her way into the dormitory. Most of the cots were full, people were snoring, coughing, tossing about. She wanted to turn and run, back to Furgus and Hamish, back to the dark fulfilment of the last few hours. Her brain was still fizzing from the experiences, the naked savagery of the sayce-baiting, and the jubilant crowd in Donovan’s, blood heat inflaming her senses. Then the delicious indecency of the twins’ quiet cabin on the other side of town, with their straining bodies pounding against her first singly then both at once. That crazy bike ride in the vermilion moonlight. Marie wanted every night to be the same, without end.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  Her father was standing in front of her, mouth all squeezed up that way it did when he was really angry. And for once she didn’t care.

  “Out,” she said.

  “Out where?”

  “Enjoying myself. Exactly what you think I shouldn’t do.”

  He slapped her on the cheek, the sound echoing from the high roof. “Don’t you be so bloody impudent, girl. I asked you a question. What have you been doing?”

  Marie glared at him, feeling the heat grow in her stinging cheek, refusing to rub it. “What’s next, Daddy ? Will you take your belt to me? Or are you just going to use your fists?”

  Gerald Skibbow’s jaw dropped. People on the nearby cots were turning over, peering at them blearily.

  “Do you know how late it is? What have you been up to?” he hissed.

  “Are you quite sure you want a truthful answer to that, Daddy? Quite sure?”

  “You despicable little vixen. Your mother’s been
fretting over you all night. Doesn’t that even bother you?”

  Marie curled her lip up. “What tragedy could possibly happen to me in this paradise you’ve brought us to?”

  For a moment she thought he was going to strike her again.

  “There have been two murders in the port this week,” he said.

  “Yeah? That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Get into bed,” Gerald said through clenched teeth. “We’ll discuss this in the morning.”

  “Discuss it?” she asked archly. “You mean I get an equal say?”

  “For fuck’s sake, can it, Skibbow,” someone shouted.

  “We want to get some sleep here.”

  Under the impotent stare of her father, Marie pulled her shoes off and sauntered over to her cot.

  Quinn was still dozing in his sleeping-bag, struggling against the effects of the rough beer he had drunk in Donovan’s, when someone gripped the side of his cot and yanked it through ninety degrees. His arms and legs thrashed about in the sleeping-bag as he tumbled onto the floor, but there was no way he could prevent the fall. His hip smacked into the concrete first, jarring his pelvis badly, then his jaw landed. Quinn yelled out in surprise and pain.

  “Get up, Ivet,” a voice shouted.

  A man was standing over him, grinning down evilly. He was in his early forties, tall and well built, with a shock of black hair and a full beard. The brown leather skin of his face and arms was scarred with a lunar relief of pocks and the tiny red lines of broken capillaries. His clothes were all natural fabric, a thick red and black check cotton shirt with the arms torn off, green denim trousers, lace-up boots that came up to his knees, and a belt which carried various powered gadgets and a vicious-looking ninety-centimetre steel machete. A silver crucifix on a slim chain glinted at the base of his neck.