by Paul McAuley
The next morning, in the refectory, Edz Jealott and a posse of lieutenants walked over to the table where he was eating. He sat back and looked straight at them. Didn’t move when one of the lieutenants leaned over and with two fingers dredged up a dollop of porridge and put the fingers in his mouth and sucked noisily.
Edz Jealott, rubbing one hand over the knot of flame-snakes writhing on his bare chest, smiled down at Felice. His fingernails were smoothly buffed and tinted with something that gave them a pearly sheen. ‘We had a nice little talk about Jael’s death, me and the guards,’ he said.
‘Despite that, they let you go,’ Felice said.
‘They knew I didn’t have anything to do with it because I was with this fine thing last night,’ Edz Jealott said, and swung a slender young woman into a tight embrace and kissed her slowly and luxuriously, moving his hands up and down her body as his lieutenants laughed and clapped. Edz Jealott pushing the woman away, smiling at Felice, saying, ‘The guards asked me to help them find the killer. That’s why we’re watching you, dead man. I thought it only fair to let you know.’
‘If I was the killer, you’d already be dead,’ Felice said, and stood and walked out, laughter and taunts trailing after him.
He took his stick out into the fields. They worked desultorily, talking about the latest rumours about Greater Brazil.
One of them, Rothco Yang, told Felice, ‘Don’t worry, my friend. When this place is shut down I will give you a good reference.’
Rothco Yang believed that civil war in Greater Brazil was not only inevitable but would also soon free them. Others in the stick weren’t so sure. The Quiet War and its aftermath had made it clear that the Brazilians were capable of anything, and it was doubtful that their European allies would be a moderating influence. And so on and so on, no end to the back and forth of discussion and argument until the shift was over and Felice marched the stick back to the barracks.
He went straight to his room and checked the gatekeeper demon. Nothing. That evening, Edz Jealott was sitting at the table nearest the door of the refectory, surrounded by his lieutenants. Everyone but Edz Jealott staring at Felice as he went past.
‘Killer,’ a tall young man said in a high mocking falsetto. Another man made a gun-shape with finger and thumb and pointed it at him; a third said that they were watching him.
‘Everywhere you go, we’ll be there.’
Felice thought about that as he ate his meal. Then he went to see Amy Ma Coulibaly, told her that Edz Jealott was planning to frame him for the murder of Jael Li Lee, and explained what he wanted her to do.
‘One of his lieutenants followed me here,’ he said. ‘I expect that one of them will be following me everywhere from now on. It’s going to make it very difficult for me when the time comes to act.’
‘Can’t you find a way to lose them?’
‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. Do you want to take the risk?’
‘I don’t want to risk revealing what we can do before it is time to do it.’
‘You already took that risk, when you set me against the killer.’
Felice watched the old woman think about that. Her face shuttered and expressionless, her eyes focused on something far beyond him. They were sitting on fat cushions in the little side room, the slate with its chessboard glowing between them.
At last she said, ‘I can’t let you control it.’
‘As long as someone takes them down, when I need it.’
‘I’ll see what I can do. Meanwhile, I think we should play at least one game, for the sake of your friend outside,’ she said, and touched the slate with her forefinger, moving the queen’s bishop’s pawn two steps, the first move in the English Opening.
Felice pretended to take no notice of the man who trailed him back to his apartment block. Back in his room, he used the blood sniffer to connect to Goether Lyle’s account, and saw with only a faint sense of shock that something had attached itself to the dumb little gatekeeper demon. A simple communication program. He checked it out, excised a few lines of code that would have revealed his location, fired it up. It immediately presented him with a blank two-dimensional space in which words began to appear, emerging letter by letter, traveling from right to left and fading away.
>>why do you ask if i was born in a vat on the moon.
>i thought i had found one of my brothers, Felice typed, hunt-and-peck on the blood sniffer’s keypad.
>> i found you. you did not find me. and i am no ones brother. if you want to know who i am meet me and find out.
Whoever was at the other end of the program wanted to get straight down to business. A string of letters and numbers unravelled. A grid reference.
>>do you know where that is?
>i can find it.
>>come alone.
>of course.
>>or else i will find you later on and deal with you.
>i understand.
>>in two hours. i have a little business to take care of first.
>please don’t do anything until we have talked.
His words faded left to right, like a wave collapsing on a beach. There was no reply.
It was a little after midnight. Trusty Town’s dome was polarised to black; its street lights dimmed to a residual glow that showed only the shapes of things. The whole place seemed to be asleep, quiet and still apart from the whirr of a drone high in the dark air and the gliding whisper of Felice Gottschalk’s slippers as he walked across the big plaza. Stopping when men and women stepped out of the shadows either side of the entrance of the tunnel that led down to the main airlock.
The soft slap as a man thumped his palm with a weighted sap.
The snap as a shock stick sparked a sudden star.
A woman’s nervous giggle.
A teasing falsetto: ‘Killer killer killer . . .’
There were people behind Felice, too, but he pretended to pay no attention to them, standing with one hand in the pocket of his blouson as the light over the tunnel entrance grew brighter and Edz Jealott stepped forward, barefoot and bare-chested in baggy white trousers. He smiled at Felice and said, ‘We know where you’re going. The barracks, right? And we know what you’re planning to do.’
‘Killer killer,’ came the falsetto from the shadowy figures on the left.
A murmur of agreement all around. Edz Jealott snapped his fingers. Zhang Hilton stepped up to him, handed him two pairs of red work gloves, and stepped back into the shadows.
‘We could kill you where you stand,’ Edz Jealott said. ‘But that would be no fun at all. Our kind of justice is not just about dealing with the bad guys. It’s about style. Here. Take a pair. We’ll get it on, just you and me.’
Felice was completely calm. Living in the moment. ‘Do you really think the guards will let you do this?’
‘I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to put you down in a fair fight. And then I’ll turn you over to the guards. After that,’ Edz Jealott said, ‘you’ll very definitely wish I’d given you an honourable death. A manly death.’
‘Which he doesn’t deserve,’ Zhang Hilton said.
‘My friend is pissed off because you put the hurt on him the last couple of go-rounds,’ Edz Jealott told Felice. ‘But he has nothing to worry about. I’ll beat you down, but I promise I’ll do it very scientifically.’
Felice said, ‘Did someone tell you I was coming here? Was it an anonymous tip?’
He was wondering if the killer had set him up.
Edz Jealott laughed, looking around at his lieutenants. ‘We’ve been watching you. We said we would - weren’t you paying attention? And it’s obvious where you’re going, and why.’
‘All of this is your idea.’
‘What did I just say?’ Edz Jealott tossed a pair of gloves at Felice’s feet. When Felice didn’t pick them up, the big man shook his head and said through his smile, all teeth and clenched muscle, no emotion in it or in his dead gaze, ‘We can do it bare-knuckle if that’s how you want it, killer. But we’
re going to do it.’
‘No, we’re not.’
All the time Felice’s left hand had been inside his blouson pocket, gripping the keypad and comms package he’d dismounted from the blood sniffer. A crude phone, set to send a signal as soon as he pressed any key. He mashed one now, with his thumb.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then everyone around him fell down, muscles locked, shuddering and shivering like so many clubbed fish. Felice had phoned Bel Glise, and she had used the back door into the prison’s surveillance system to send signals to the implants of Edz Jarrett and his lieutenants, informing them that they had strayed beyond the tent’s perimeter.
Felice stepped amongst the stricken men and women, picking up a cosh and a couple of shock sticks, waiting until the implants had run through their thirty-second cycle and everyone around him relaxed and drew in sobbing breaths and groaned and swore. As if they had smashed down from a great height and found themselves dazed and badly hurt but still alive.
Edz Jealott was trying to push to his knees. Felice swung the cosh in a short swift arc that connected with the big man’s temple with a hard pop. Edz Jealott pitched forward on his face. Felice straddled his shoulders and put a foot between his shoulder blades and grabbed his jaw with one hand, fitted the palm of the other over his ear, and twisted his head up and around and broke his neck.
He knew that Amy Ma Coulibaly would think he had killed Edz Jealott out of revenge, but he’d done it for her. To help her realise her dream of securing the prison until the revolutionaries came and freed everyone.
Zhang Hilton and several others had managed to get to their feet. Zhang Hilton spat a mouthful of blood, wiped his chin with a shaking hand, and told Felice that he was a dead man.
‘I’m a ghost,’ Felice said.
He turned his back to the man and walked away down the tunnel. Ten minutes later he was outside, riding a trike down the switchback road to the vacuum-organism fields.
The grid reference was at the centre of a small eroded crater close to the edge of the tent, four kilometres south of Trusty Town. Felice felt foolishly confident, his head filled with a fat, contented hum, as he drove along the perimeter road. He was free, just for a little while. Off the grid. Bel Glise had explained that it was a little like blind sight. The drones and cameras of the surveillance system saw him but the tracking AIs didn’t register his presence, and a demon painted him out of every visual feed, so the guards couldn’t see him either.
It wouldn’t last, of course. The guards must have discovered that their system had been hacked by now, and despite Bel Glise’s reassurances they might set up a work-around at any moment. Or armed squads might be sent into the tent to search for the trusty who had killed a man, then walked into the airlock complex and apparently vanished. And even if they didn’t find him, he couldn’t return to Trusty Town unless it was to surrender to the prison administration. His only hope was to try to live out on the farm. A ghost. An invisible man. Sneaking into the barracks for food and water and fresh air tanks every night; hiding out along the cliffs and rock slides of the rim for the rest of the time, hoping that the revolution would come good. But it was a pretty threadbare hope, and Felice didn’t have much faith in it.
Meanwhile, it was good to be in action, doing what he had been trained to do. If the killer hadn’t lied about the rendezvous he would have plenty of time to familiarise himself with the terrain and make his preparations.
It was almost one a.m. by the clock, but the sun was above the western horizon and laid a hazy golden glow across the wide expanse of the brown and black and deep purple fields that stretched under the tent. The road ran across flat terrain blanketed in vacuum-cemented grey-brown dust and pitted everywhere with craters from the size of pinpricks to plates and littered with stony ejecta eroded into soft shapes by aeons of micrometeoritic impacts. The bare slope of the crater rim to Felice’s left, steep cones and rounded hills of mass-wasted talus fringing its base; rough ground sloping away to his right to the boundary with one of the huge vacuum-organism fields.
He was less than a klick from the rendezvous point, the road dropping steeply to meet a gap cut into a slump of mass-wasted material, when he glimpsed a hitch of movement high in a corner of his vision. Before he could react, a taser dart struck his trike and shorted its motor. A second later, a catch net fell on him, slithering over his torso as muscular threads of myoelectric plastic tightened in constricting folds around his arms and chest. He struggled to free himself as the trike piddled to a halt, but his arms were pinned to his sides by the net and he couldn’t even unfasten the safety harness. He could only sit and watch as a figure in the black body suit and black face mask of a prison guard - a woman, slim enough to be an Outer but only a hundred and seventy centimetres tall - descended the steep side of the gap in three huge bounds, reached him in two more.
The guard ripped the shock stick and the cosh and the comms pack and keypad from Felice’s utility belt, then punched the release of his harness, dragged him out of the low-slung seat, and hauled him off the road.
He was dumped on his back near a trike parked in the shadow of a house-sized block. There was an explosive hiss at his back as most of his air supply was vented; then the guard stepped away, aiming a rail pistol at him, and said, ‘Are you alone?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Don’t hope for rescue. We’re in a dead zone here. No one can see us. Who are you?’
The guard’s voice was muffled by her face mask and the low atmospheric pressure, but Felice could hear the lilt, half-amusement, half-eagerness, that coloured it. She was excited. Aroused. Ready to kill. And she felt that she was completely in control, which meant that she might be careless - that he might survive this.
Felice said, ‘I was born here, on the Moon, and given a number rather than a name. I was trained here, and inserted in Paris, Dione, before the beginning of the Quiet War. I defected afterwards, and then I killed someone in Xamba, Rhea. One of my brothers. I killed him because he found me and wanted to bring me back. I was arrested and put in prison by the Europeans. And then I came here, as a trusty, to guard the political prisoners. Why am I telling you this? Because I think you are much like me. Because I don’t want you to make the mistakes I made.’
‘You’re one of the Peixotos’ vat creatures. A spy cut to look like an Outer.’
‘Yes.’
‘And after all these years living amongst them, you miss your own kind. You think I’m like you. You want to be my friend.’
‘You knew what my message meant.’
‘The Peixotos weren’t the only family to make spies. You’re old and used-up. And I’m the latest model, faster and stronger than you and your brothers ever were.’
‘You work for another family, then.’
‘Didn’t I just say that? But don’t expect me to tell you anything else, old man. What’s so funny?’
‘I thought the revolution would have no chance of succeeding, but I was wrong. Because the great families aren’t united. Because they’re squabbling over the spoils of war instead of doing what’s right by their country. Are you here to assassinate key workers, or to kidnap them?’
The guard stared at him through the round lenses of her face mask. Dark brown eyes, an unflinching and unforgiving gaze.
Felice dropped his own gaze, as if submitting to her dominance. ‘Let me ask you this, then. Why give your loyalty to people who consider you expendable? You have many years of life ahead of you, and it isn’t as hard to disobey your orders as you might think. You disobeyed them when you reached out to me. All you have to do is take one more step, and let me help you. If we work together, we’ll survive this. We’ll find a way to escape.’
‘Do you really think you can talk your way out of this?’
‘I’m telling you what you can do, if you choose to do it. I’ve lived amongst ordinary people a long time. Perhaps I don’t know them as well as I should, but I do know that they are very afraid of us. Not because we�
�re different, but because we’re so very much like a part of them that they don’t want to acknowledge. Because we’re their dark half. I’ve survived this long only because I have been very careful to hide what I really am. I can teach you how to do that, if you’ll let me.’
‘It doesn’t sound like much of a life to me,’ the guard said. ‘Besides, I have a job to finish. Which reminds me.’
She took a long step sideways to her trike, lifted something the size of a basketball from the box behind its seat, bowled it towards the spy.
It bounced slowly over the dusty ground and he recognised it and scrambled to his feet, struggling against the net that bound his arms, crying out in horror and despair. It was the severed head of Amy Ma Coulibaly.
‘I left the body in her clinic,’ the guard said. ‘With an amusing little message written on a wall in her blood.’
‘You didn’t have to kill her. I already know what you can do.’
‘No. No, you don’t. And you won’t live to find out, either.’
Felice was finding it hard to think clearly. Great waves of raw emotion were crashing through his head. Hate and sorrow and pity and anger. He was staring straight at the guard, forgetting to pretend to be cowed by her, stepping hard on the impulse to simply run at her and end it all there and then. But at the same time some cold part of him that was never touched by any emotion, the last of what he had once been, was studying the ground and the walls of the gap on either side, making a crucial triangulation.
