Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Indeed not.

  Almost absent-mindedly, Moz reached forward and found the older boy’s testicles, soft plums wrapped in silk. For a moment he was tempted to crush them but instead he made do with a cloth-creasing twist. And it was Moz who kicked, though first he had to force himself to his feet.

  It was a blow weighted with years of anger, a fat crystal of cooking speed and frustration that Malika’s sulkiness had somehow soured what Moz felt for Celia.

  “Moz!” Malika said.

  He heard her but Moz kicked just the same, feeling his toes curl as they sunk into Hassan’s stomach.

  Everyone in the street halted like God froze time and then Georgiou burst from the café, a cloth still in one hand.

  “What are you doing?”

  Moz expected Hassan to buckle over and fall to his knees, clutching his gut. And that later when Hassan had recovered, he’d round up Idries and some of the others and come looking for Moz, making the streets around Riad al-Razor a bad place to be for a few weeks, maybe even a month or so.

  What actually happened was that vomit sprayed from Hassan’s mouth. A fountain of black coffee, mint tea and half-digested cake splashing onto Moz and making Malika step back with a jump. And the stench as Hassan crumpled to his knees suggested this wasn’t the only orifice to void.

  “Shit,” said Georgiou, suddenly sounding distinctly local.

  “I reckon so,” said Moz.

  CHAPTER 27

  Lampedusa, Wednesday 4 July

  “Whatever.” It would have to do.

  Using a square of cigarette packet, Prisoner Zero smeared his stink along the base of a wall, filling the gaps. They were going to kill him before he had time to skim all the walls; the prisoner had worked this out around dawn.

  “Prisoner Zero.”

  It was a sergeant. One who didn’t like him, as opposed to Master Sergeant Saez, who actually hated him. Prisoner Zero found it hard to tell Saez and Kovacs apart because both had bull necks, cropped hair, skin ripe like midnight and similar thousand-klick stares. What Prisoner Zero saw when he looked at the two marines was not their scowls or skin tone, but uniforms.

  They both wore a weird kind of jungle fatigue. Something mud-coloured, like it was designed for a forest where everything had begun to die. Unless, of course, it was meant to be desert camouflage, in which case it matched no stretch of sand or gravel Prisoner Zero had ever seen.

  He was meant to stand now. This had been explained to him.

  Master Sergeant Saez would come in first and shout his name, Prisoner Zero then had to stand, stare straight ahead and stay silent unless spoken to. This last part was easy enough. As for the rest…Sergeant Saez continued to demand that he come to attention but had long since stopped believing it was going to happen.

  Knocking someone down was easy. Making them stand up to order was far more difficult.

  “Attention.”

  Prisoner Zero turned his back on the noise of his cage being unlocked and concentrated instead on the square of cardboard as it skimmed over mesh in confident sweeps. Small rebellions were all he had left.

  The outraged shouts never came. Instead Prisoner Zero became aware that someone stood right behind him, watching. Tossing aside his cardboard paddle, Prisoner Zero paused to admire the result. Something was still missing, that much was obvious. Unfortunately, he was having trouble working out what.

  “Fermat,” said Katie Petrov.

  “You’re right,” a voice said, sounding impressed. The owner of the voice was a balding Italian in grey uniform. He was probably of normal build and height, but standing between Sergeants Saez and Kovacs, he looked both short and thin. Wire rim glasses magnified washed-out blue eyes.

  “I’m Dr. Angelo,” said the man in Arabic. “Have you finished?” Elegant fingers gestured at shit smeared across the wall of the cage. “If not, then please do.”

  Sergeant Kovacs had taken away Prisoner Zero’s stub of wire the previous evening during an unscheduled search of his cage. This was one of the reasons the prisoner was behind. It had taken him most of the night to find a loose weld and work free a stubby length of wire.

  Producing the wire from his mouth, Prisoner Zero slashed an equation into the lattice. It was famous and he used it only to fill space, adding a less famous equation (which was at least two centuries older) and improvised a third which linked the first two.

  The fourth was something he’d stumbled over on his knees beside a canal. He’d lost his job by then, Prisoner Zero was pretty sure of it. There were some limits to life tenure, even at the University of Amsterdam. So much unfinished. He guessed God probably felt like that.

  And so Prisoner Zero began to sketch. A circle, multi-layered, each layer actually a circle seen from the side so that it looked like a line, except each of these circles was really a sphere. Only he lacked the ability to express that extra dimension except in his head. So he drew another circle alongside the first and separated them with a vertical line to remind himself that they were the same but not.

  He did this part mostly from the memory of a few pages at the back of an exercise book, the middle pages being taken up with chord changes for songs that never got written, much less recorded.

  “What is it?” Katie Petrov asked.

  “A butterfly,” said the uniformed Italian.

  “This is Vice Questore Pier Angelo,” said Katie. “He’s been asked to examine you.”

  “If that’s all right?” said the Vice Questore. For a foreigner his Arabic seemed pretty good.

  “I’ve worked for the UN,” said the man. “In Baghdad and Damascus.” Nodding to Master Sergeant Saez, who stood with a rifle clutched to his chest and a scowl souring his heavy face, Vice Questore Angelo added, “I’m also a Marxist, one of the few left. That’s why your friend doesn’t like me.”

  Katie Petrov smiled. “You want any help?”

  “No.” The balding man shook his head. “What I want is this room emptied while I make my examination.” He had the face of a well-bred horse, with what was left of his hair swept back like a mane behind his ears. A wedding ring on his second finger said Katie Petrov’s first impression was wrong.

  “You don’t need me to stay?”

  “No,” said the Vice Questore. “I’ll need the patient out of his cage and the room to myself. I don’t start until that happens.”

  “It’s going to be a long wait,” said Sergeant Kovacs.

  Turning his back on their squabble, Prisoner Zero examined his work and discovered that it was already dead. The sketches, formulae and equations just looked what they were, simple cold equations signifying nothing. His map of space where ice held memories and the darkness spoke in miracles was gone.

  “That’s better,” said the Vice Questore when the door to the weights room finally shut. Popping open his black leather bag, he extracted a stethoscope, a pair of surgical gloves and a small flashlight.

  “Katie Petrov demanded a local doctor. Luckily I was in the area. Dr. Petrov and I came to a mutually advantageous agreement…” There was, of course, no luck involved at all. Vice Questore Pier Angelo took a look at the cage and decided it was every bit as bad as Rome had been led to believe.

  “If you’re happy with this?”

  The Vice Questore paused to give Prisoner Zero space to reply. He’d already been warned by Katie Petrov that conversations were unlikely to be two-way events, but it seemed only polite.

  “I’m a doctor,” he said, “also a police surgeon. I opposed the Berlusconi government and for that I’ve been awarded a seat in parliament…Only in Italy,” he added with a sigh. “Parliament has asked me to report back on your health, the levels of security to which you’re subject and the conditions in which you’re held. As you can imagine, Colonel Borgenicht is not happy.”

  The last thing the Vice Questore produced was a small Leica and a roll of 400 ASA Kodak old-fashioned film. “La Stampa is reporting that you’ve been tortured. Dr. Petrov believes you are being dru
gged. As Camp Freedom is sited on Italian soil I’ve been sent to check both.”

  Prisoner Zero’s lungs were fine and his blood pressure surprisingly low for someone of middle age. His pupils reacted to light, his liver was unenlarged and when he blew through a white plastic tube the blue marker moved further than Vice Questore Angelo had expected.

  “I’ll need a blood sample,” said the man, ripping foil from a disposable hypodermic. “And, when that’s done, if you could just urinate into this.” He handed Prisoner Zero a small plastic container.

  When the actual tests were done and Vice Questore Angelo had added some chemical to the blood, dipped strips of paper in still-warm urine and spread a smear of shit over the bottom sheet of a glass slide, examined it under a small brass microscope and made notes in his book, he told Prisoner Zero to stand in front of his cage.

  Camera flash lit the room. Only then did the Italian begin his examination for evidence of torture. “What are these?” he asked eventually, pausing at scars on Prisoner Zero’s stomach.

  Silence was his answer.

  “Were they done here?”

  The prisoner shook his head.

  “Interesting,” said Vice Questore Angelo. “Most people in your position would have said yes whatever the truth.”

  There were five burns in all, three on Prisoner Zero’s left thigh and two on his abdomen. All of them less than two weeks old. Nodding to himself, Vice Questore Angelo discounted an old bruise at the base of the prisoner’s spine and a pale cicatrix on the inside of one arm. “Who punched you in the kidneys?” he asked suddenly.

  As ever Prisoner Zero said nothing.

  “You test positive for blood in your urine.”

  When the prisoner stayed silent, Vice Questore Angelo shrugged, became aware that this was not very professional of him and decided that was too bad. He was getting to the bit covered in Dr. Petrov’s off-the-record talk on their way in. “All right,” he said, raising his camera, “now show me your hands…”

  CHAPTER 28

  Razor’s Edge, CTzu 53/Year 20

  Flash/no flash.

  Doc Joyce claimed to be the man who’d fixed five miles of diamond-hard neon tube to the far wall of RipJointShuts and he refused to tell anybody how to turn the thing off. So it just sat there and illuminated the darkness with its message.

  “Welcome to Tomorrow.”

  The interesting thing about this, apart from the fact the sign gave visitors something to head for in the gloom of the fourteenth level, was that it spoke to anyone who got close enough, repeating its mantra inside one’s head.

  A town of about three hundred (barely half of them recognizably human), RJS was old, marginally dangerous and had briefly been famous some years before when the newest emperor manifested in a hut several levels above and Doc Joyce, owner of the local bar and a cut-price slice merchant, went on the feed to announce that he’d birthed the boy, his brother and the mother.

  He might even have been telling the truth.

  A plaque at Doc Joyce’s place (put up so visitors would know that this was the place the Emperor’s mother came for advice), announced that RipJointShuts was the oldest inhabited shanty town on Heliconid, a thousand years being mentioned.

  Inventive as the dapper little man was, he still got the scale wrong by a factor of four. People had been squatting in RJS for over forty centuries. Pretty impressive for a town that didn’t officially exist on a sliver of steel that was meant to be uninhabited.

  Near the bottom of the Razor’s Edge, that endless tear down the side of Heliconid and a day’s hike into the interior of level fourteen, stood an abandoned cargo container, in the shadow of the Tomorrow sign. This was Schwarzschilds, Doc Joyce’s bar.

  Few tourists came to drink and fewer still came back. Schwarzschilds made it into the guides but most of what was written was third-hand, hearsay taken from hearsay.

  A smaller cargo pod, barely a tenth of the size, had been abandoned millennia before at the back of Schwarzschilds. Some of those who described the pod said it looked like a calf following its mother. Others, less whimsical, thought it looked like something the bar had shat.

  It was inside this smaller container that a naked fifteen-year-old girl swapped half a kidney for a completely new set of shoulder sinews. Unusually, Tris did this before her own got ripped. She’d seen too many drop queens reduced to shuffling crabs on the level.

  As having her shoulders rewired cost less than she’d expected, Tris used the other half to get her arms and legs restrung, ending up with all of her sinews upgraded to full-drop status with the tensile strength of the new sinews making a mockery of those they replaced, obviously enough.

  Underestimating the obvious was to give Tris the most terrifying twelve hours of her short life. A week after the operation, with the original scars long since healed, Tris took an updraft to the top of Razor’s Edge and dropped the full seventeen levels in a head-whirling handful of minutes, feeling her life zip through her fingers and across her back as she touched only twice, kicking off into nothingness and waiting until the last minute to use her diamond gloves.

  The sinews worked perfectly. It was Tris’s shoulder muscles which did a really embarrassing first-time-out crackle and pop.

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

  If Tris had known a worse curse she’d have used it. All she could feel was white pain. A shock so absolute it was more or less indescribable. One that put all her previous experiences of feeling sick to shame.

  She was inside her own pain. On the end of a rope.

  And so began the longest night and morning of Tris’s life. Crawl by crawl she made her way up the rope, knees locked tight and hands gripping on as best they could. It took eight hours to climb three levels and the rest of that day to reach Schwarzschilds.

  “Hello, Tristesse,” said Doc Joyce, when he finally bothered to look up from the mixing desk. “I wondered when I’d see you.” Doc Joyce was the only person to call the skinny Riprat by her full name. The only person ever to stand up when she came into his room.

  He’d done that the very first time she appeared in his doorway, wanting to know the prices. Tris had never forgotten. The Doc had still overcharged her but she could forgive him that. Doc Joyce overcharged everyone.

  “You busy?”

  The Doc snorted. “What does it look like?” he said.

  A creature lay on the slab, completely naked but genital-free. All secondary sexual characteristics were also absent. The navel and nipples were gone, as were any breasts that might have supported them, always assuming the patient started out female. A completely smooth, hairless groin showed no sign of labia. In fact, it showed no signs of anything.

  Two tiny horns budded from either side of the creature’s narrow forehead and, in place of hair, its depilated skull was combed with corn rows of bone plate. It was a look Tris had seen often.

  “Yeah,” said Doc Joyce. He pulled up one eyelid, twisted the unconscious patient’s skull from side to side, then shrugged. “Don’t you just hate tourists?…What happened?” he asked as an afterthought.

  “Slipped,” whispered Tris.

  The Doc’s smile was not kind. “Sure you did.”

  Tris looked at the drugged tourist.

  “God,” said the Doc, “do I need to do everything?” Tipping the creature off the mixing desk, Doc Joyce patted the slab, dislodging a spider which had been busy behind the patient’s ear. “Up you go.”

  On the floor the spider scuttled away to stand a few paces from the body. After a second or two, during which its metal legs quivered and reformed in restless twists of smoke, the spider sidled up to the tourist’s skull and went back to work.

  “Come on,” Doc Joyce said, then took pity on the girl and tossed her a spider, letting it cut free her clothes. He left her knife where it was, taped to the small of her back. Minus clothes was one thing, defenceless was another, and Doc Joyce understood that naked meant different things to different people.

&nb
sp; “Should have had the bones,” Doc Joyce said. He’d tried to sell her a set of bird-weight legs, hips and shoulder bones and had run the maths for her as he pulled each one from its vat, suggesting skin flaps between her upper arms and ribs. Tris had been shaking her head before he’d even finished.

  She lay on her front, because this was the way Doc Joyce wanted her to lie. It hurt just as much as lying on her back but had the advantage of letting Tris rest her face against the slab, which promptly adjusted itself to help the girl get as comfortable as possible. If she’d been face up, the brightness of Doc Joyce’s ceiling would have stopped her doing that.

  For reasons she never quite understood, Doc Joyce skipped the scolding that Tris had been expecting and went straight to work, his fingers cold on her skin.

  She shivered.

  “It’s a mess, Tristesse,” Doc Joyce said. “I don’t need spiders to tell me that.” Fingertips pushed into the pain across her shoulders and Tris found she was crying, racking sobs that only made her body hurt all the more.

  Doc Joyce sighed.

  When the girl turned up wanting replacement sinews he’d suggested she get her muscles upgraded in tandem and even given her a good price. This was prior to suggesting new bones. As the muscle swap would be invisible the kid’s very vocal contempt for visible modification could remain uncompromised.

  (It was noticeable that everything she’d ever had done was on the inside. Doc Joyce had his own theories on this, but then the Doc had a theory about everything.)

  Out of the thousands who came and went he remembered Tris because the very first time she came she wanted an augmentation so old-fashioned he almost did it for nothing to see if he still could. The kid had wanted her existing synaptic topology augmented with fullerenes to increase the speed at which connections could be made in her brain.

  He pointed out that it would be far easier and infinitely more efficient just to replace her organic brain with a synthetic unit, maybe something with an open connection to the feed. The kid had been adamant. What she wanted was what she’d asked for.