Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  “which”

  “strangely”

  “fit”

  “together”

  “to form”

  “a something”

  “yeah, a something”

  “truly, a something”

  “that feels”

  “yeah that feels”

  “yeah, that truly feels, inconsequentially yet epiphanically”

  “apt,” Blind Jake concluded.

  I marvelled: how did these four musicians know when to say their word, to make it all add up to a complete sentence?

  “What you don’t do,” said Blind Jake, with a flinty smile, “is start from A at the beginning of the dictionary, and then just plough the fuck, pardon my Pohlian, on.”

  And he glared at me, though his eyes were somewhat to one side of their intended target.

  “I was just,” I said stiffly, “getting the hang of it.”

  And then the fastwords really flowed, really fast:

  “We”

  “understood”

  “that”

  “Tom”

  “and”

  “hey”

  “a”

  “guy’s”

  “got”

  “to”

  “start”

  “somewhere”

  “but”

  “the”

  “joy”

  “of”

  “random”

  “and”

  “the”

  “beauty”

  “of”

  “random”

  “is”

  “that”

  “it”

  “ain’t”

  “no”

  “use”

  “fucking”

  “being”

  “logical”

  “and”

  “it”

  “ain’t”

  “no”

  “fucking”

  “use”

  “thinking”

  “too”

  “hard”

  “’cause”

  “you”

  “just”

  “got”

  “to”

  “fucking”

  “let”

  “the”

  “random”

  “fucking”

  “flow.”

  “And there’s no doubt about it,” concluded Jake.

  “Yeah, I get that,” I said, angrily. They all stared at me kindly.

  “I do!” I insisted. “I really do.”

  “Sure you do,” said Blind Jake.

  And I started to speak, but then I stopped.

  And I paused.

  And the musicians heeded my pause, for some considerable time.

  “Mellifluous,” I said, after a long long while, and paused again, and then continued: “Capricious, eccentric, deranged, doolally, Doric, eccentric, exaggerated, essential, insane, exquisite, astonished, captivated, eldritch, prelapsarian, antediluvian, antiquarian, quiddity, quondam, incandescent, fallacious, terpsichorean, bacchanalian, ballyhoo, calypso, cloud.”

  A silence followed: the words lingered, like (in my opinion) fireflies that have spontaneously blown up in mid-air yet remain as floating ash and clouds of smoke, for reasons that my metaphor cannot explain.

  “And is that how you feel? How you really deep-in-your-heart-and-soul feel?” enquired Blind Jake.

  “It’s how I feel,” I asserted, brimming with pride and truth.

  “Then,” said Blind Jake approvingly, “we consider your random to be truly… apt.”

  It was a lazy afternoon. I drank sweet wine beside the fountain that was blossoming water in the ornately statued inner courtyard of Kim’s palazzo. And the harem girls and the gigolos draped themselves elegantly on couches, and told stories of past lovers and past lives.

  “I could live like this,” I grinned to Kim. She was clad in a soft loose robe made of colours so rich they seemed alive, and she smiled down at me warmly.

  “Name a dream,” said Kim, “and it can be yours.”

  “Another wine would be nice.”

  Kim clicked her fingers and a harem girl got up and slinked across to the banqueting table. She returned with a full carafe of sweet wine. The girl was true-young and naked and shy and she smiled at me. I smiled back.

  “What a Sheba!” Kim purred.

  “She’s real ginchy,” I conceded.

  “But?”

  I shook my head.

  “Sex doesn’t appeal?” asked Kim.

  “Up to a point. It gets tiring.”

  “I agree,” said Kim. “Although, you should try the Ibrahim.” This was the speciality of the house: twenty-four hours of non-stop pleasure, with a different lover each hour. It was named after an Ottoman ruler who famously employed this mode of relaxation.

  “Maybe one day,” I said, though the prospect revolted me.

  “My whores all seem to like you,” said Kim.

  “It’s because I do their accounts for them,” I told her.

  “You listen to their stories.”

  “I like their stories.”

  Most afternoons these days, before going to work, I lazed around in the secluded and private harem areas of Kim’s palazzo brothels, talking to the male and female and hermaphrodite prostitutes. They were, almost without exception, funny, giggly, and bitchy, and brimming with a sarcastic zest for life.

  Kim sat beside me on the bench, and shoved me with her arse so I’d move across, which I did. Laughter lines crinkled her eyes as she looked at me; her smile was half sceptical, half marvelling. She wasn’t flirting, she wasn’t trying to look mysterious. She was, so far as I could tell, entirely at her ease.

  “You’re a strange one,” said Kim, stroking my hair with her fingertips, with intimate ownership. “You don’t want anything. You don’t need anything. But you like people.”

  “I like some people.”

  “You’re a sweet man, Tom Dunnigan,” said Kim Ji.

  I smiled.

  “Here,” I said, and I passed her a capsule.

  “What’s this?”

  Someone started playing lute music on the sound system. It was beautiful and haunting. But I focused out the sound, so I could concentrate on reeling her in.

  “It’s a nanodevice,” I told her casually. “Swallow it. It’ll enter your blood stream, and thence, your brain. It’ll give you what you want.”

  “This is the empathy device?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s that simple?”

  “It’s that simple.”

  Kim smiled.

  She swallowed.

  “When does it start to work?” she said impatiently.

  “Give it a couple of days,” I said, amused. “And then, you’ll be a goddess.”

  Mayor Abraham Naurion, soon to be President Abraham Naurion, sipped a glass of thousand-year-old red wine and smiled approvingly.

  He was in the private dining room of his top-floor apartment, with glorious views of the city below. A small “ping” passed unnoticed by the Mayor and his five guests. Then the wine glass shattered and red nectar spilled on to the Mayor’s food.

  “Shit,” he muttered. A waiter mopped up the table. The Mayor touched the red stain on his trousers and licked his fingertips. “Nice,” he conceded, and poured himself another glass.

  “You should sue the manufacturer,” said the blonde journalist beside him.

  “Whatever.” The Mayor raised the glass to his lips. It shattered again, and this time the bullet embedded in his shoulder.

  It took a moment for him to realise.

  Then the Mayor dived to the floor.

  In the hardglass window of the penthouse apartment, two small holes had appeared.

  And in the air above the Mayor floated two near-microscopic insects: cameras shaped like dragonflies.

  These were my eyes.

  And through my dragonfly-eyes, I could see everything that was happening inside
the room. I saw the blonde scream and throw her wine glass away, and dive to the floor face down, as if hoping to avert death by not seeing it. And I saw the Mayor, blood gushing from his shoulder, crawl and shimmy his way desperately towards the open apartment door, trying to keep his body low despite his bulk, yet unable to prevent his large wiggling arse from being an easy target for a sniper’s bullet.

  It was, all in all, a comic sight, I considered: or rather it would have been, had I been possessed of a sense of humour.

  Then, from my vantage point on the roof opposite, I dismantled my sniper’s rifle, and clambered down the side wall of the tenement building, using my fingerspikes as crampons.

  Blind Jake was on stage, his hands waving in air, conjuring up wonderful sounds from invisible laser beams. Jake truly was a musical genius. I decided that I was in awe of him.

  “What do you have for me?” asked Fernando Gracias. He and I were sitting at a table near the back of the club, far from eavesdroppers.

  I reluctantly drew my attention away from Jake’s melody, and conjured up my virtual screen. I scrolled through the gallery until I reached a film recording of Kim talking to me.

  “When was this taken?” asked Fernando Gracias.

  “Two hours ago,” I lied. In fact, I had faked the footage days ago.

  “She didn’t realise you were filming her?” asked Fernando.

  “I have a hidden camera in my eyelid.”

  I flicked a finger in the air, and an image appeared. Kim was looking straight at me – in other words, to camera.

  “Are you okay about this?” asked Kim.

  “Consider it done,” I said, voice muffled, off camera.

  “And how will you administer it?”

  “It’s easy. A dart in his neck, when his back is turned. I’ll do it during one of the gigs. When Fernando is listening to music, you could blow his chair into smithereens and he wouldn’t notice.”

  “It has to look like natural causes.”

  “It will. I used to do this for a living you know.”

  “I know,” said Kim, and smiled.

  I freezeframed.

  “Proof enough?” I asked Fernando, casually.

  “Films can be faked,” said Fernando Gracias.

  “Oh for pity’s sake!” I retorted. “That’s Kim. You can run an iris-recognition check. You saw her talking. How could that be faked?”

  It was pretty easy, in fact. The face belonged to Kim, the eyes belonged to Kim, but the lips and voice were a computer construct designed by me, with state-of-the-art SN technology.

  “I guess so,” said Fernando Gracias.

  I felt a surge of triumph; this was a planet full of technoidiots. It made my life so much easier.

  “What is this fucking poison anyway? What in Jesu’s name could kill me and leave no trace?” Fernando asked.

  “It’s RNA, and it wouldn’t kill you. It would just stimulate into activity a gene you already have.”

  “What gene?”

  “It’s the gene that, sooner or later, will give you dementia.”

  Fernando Gracias shook his head, amazed. “I have that gene?”

  “I took a DNA sample from you at the club. Off a whisky glass you drank from. Kim had it tested. Yeah, one day, your mind will turn to mush.”

  “I’ve seen it happen,” said Fernando Gracias, bitterly. “My uncle had it. Rejuve can’t help. The body never dies, but the mind – fuck.”

  “Kim doesn’t want me to kill you, just to take away everything that defines you. Your mind, your memories. You’d still be you, but you wouldn’t know who you really were. She’s one cruel bitch.”

  “So why are you double-crossing her?” said Fernando Gracias.

  I stared at him, and suddenly I looked lost. Love and hate and confusion spread across my face; my cold assassin’s features were disfigured by raw ugly emotion.

  “Ah, that,” said Fernando Gracias, with a mocking smile.

  “I would have done anything for that fucking whore,” I whimpered.

  “So, you want me to kill her for you?”

  “Make it hurt.”

  Fernando Gracias thought about that. He smiled again. Fernando always smiled. He was a cheerful man. But this particular smile sent a shudder down my spine.

  “No problem,” Fernando said, coldly.

  Later, when Fernando had gone, I drank whisky and listened as Blind Jake sang a ballad in harmony with Pete Mullery. Jake’s voice was a husky baritone growl, Pete had a pure soaring tenor. They sang a song about the end of the world, the end of humanity, but they made it beautiful.

  My database told me the song was based on an ancient poem by an unknown author. According to legend, as told to me by my database, it was transcribed by a particle physicist who received the poem as a communication from another dimension. However, my database also informed me that musical authorities were united in considering this to be a lie perpetrated by the record label, to boost sales. It clearly succeeded: for two years this had been top of the charts in twenty-four solar systems.

  Jake and Pete alternately sang two separate melodies in a haunting fugue, except for two verses which they performed in contrapuntal unison. The song told a chilling narrative of death and destruction, yet their voices told a story of musical harmony and union. I mused on the irony of that.

  Pete played his real harp, and notes coalesced in the air like raindrops on glass.

  And Jake waved his right hand, and electric guitar chords began to play. And then he counted time with his left hand, and snare drums and percussive cymbals and double-bass glissandos formed a counterpoint to the dual-voice singing.

  They sang; I heard; it was sublime:

  “Hear my song,” sang Blind Jake.

  “My tale of woe, and joy,” sang Pete.

  “the end of hope,” sang Blind Jake

  “and the death of heroes,” sang Pete.

  I realised, and felt puzzled by my realisation, that there were tears in my eyes.

  When I walked home that night, I could still hear the song in my short-term memory database:

  “And thus our scribes,” sang Jake.

  “What destiny it was!” sang Pete.

  “are charged to write,” sang Jake.

  “To massacre and slaughter,” sang Pete.

  “our tales of courage and of glory,” sang Jake.

  “our father and our mother,” sang Pete.

  “in heroic epic poetry that evokes,” sang Jake.

  “the human race!” sang Pete.

  “our non-existent heroic epic past,” sang Jake.

  The song was absurd! I thought to myself, marvelling. It was a celebration of warfare; a hymn to genocide.

  But I couldn’t, for the life of me, get the song and its two damned interlocking tunes out of my head.

  The next day I didn’t go to Kim’s place. I stayed in bed, until it was time to go to work at Grogan’s Saloon.

  I still couldn’t get those two tunes out of my head.

  I thought of all the traps I had laid.

  “our tales of courage and glory”

  And I marvelled at my own cunning, and malicious guile.

  “heroic epic poetry that evokes”

  And I wondered how it would all play out; and who would die, and who would live.

  “They’re coming.”

  Billy Grogan loaded a fresh BB into his plasma gun.

  “Maybe we should talk with them,” I suggested.

  “We’re past talking,” Billy said, angrily.

  “You can’t fight these guys, Billy!” I told him, whiningly. “They’re too much for you. Why not quit while you’re ahead?”

  “Quit?”

  “There’s no shame in that,” I said slyly.

  “I’m no fucking quitter!”

  “Your father would—”

  “Don’t talk to me about my fucking father. Are you with me, or not?”

  I hesitated, for just the right amount of time.

&nb
sp; “I’m with you Billy,” I said proudly, “to the bitter end.”

  I analysed the data, and I decided that I liked Billy Grogan.

  Admittedly, he was a gangster and a killer and a thief. But he was also a good-natured man. Never violent with his friends and family. Fair, in the way he ran his business, if you discounted the criminal aspects of it. A fine sense of humour, so far as I could tell. Good company. Loyal. Devoted to his mother and sisters. Sweet with the girls, even if he was too fond of too many of them. A tough businessman, and a ruthless crook, but never petty, or mean, or sadistic.

  I had spent many nights drinking with Billy, sharing tales, talking politics, bonding. I had grown to respect him, and trust him.

  But the coming gang war would destroy Billy and his empire. That was simply a price that had to be paid.

  I assessed my data, and decided that I loathed Hari Gilles. He was a cruel man, and he ran a cruel business.

  And he was, still, chief suspect for the murder of the medics. Nothing human had killed the medics: and Hari’s assassins, Gill’s Killers, were nothing human. The Killers were fast enough to dodge a plasma blast; they could fire a thousand bullets in less than a minute and target each one; and they could, allegedly, dent hardmetal with a fingerstrike.

  And now, a hundred Killers encircled the Saloon. They were there to take, finally, revenge on Billy Grogan.

  Five weeks had passed since I had shot a security guard in Billy’s Casino, dressed as a Gill’s Killer. Four and a half weeks had passed since I had blown up one of Hari’s Houses of Pain.

  And since then – nothing at all had happened. The election had been and gone and Naurion was now President. Billy had forgotten and forgiven the murder of his security guard. Hari had chosen not to take revenge for the bomb blast at his House of Pain.

  Fernando, I knew, was seething at Kim’s supposed treachery, but he didn’t seem to have the will to act against her.

  And Kim, as she often told me, boiled with rage at the fact that Fernando had caused the suicide of her daughter. But she didn’t have the courage to wage war against him – knowing that he had the protection of the other gang bosses.

  It was all very depressing.

  However, after giving it further thought, I’d decided the situation was highly unstable, and hence, was ripe to be further destabilised. I needed, I’d concluded, to achieve a tipping-point of paranoia; and then the war would begin.