Mortal Remains

by Christopher Evans

  She cradled the womb in both hands, awash with a confusion of emotions and glandular secretions. Blood drained from her head, and she dropped to her knees.

  Something touched her shoulder, startling her. It was her cloak, cowering, wagging its tail uncertainly. She put an arm around its shoulders, crying, letting it nuzzle her neck.

  Above, in the pink sky, she saw a rising streak of light slanting straight to the heavens. Tunde’s ship, she prayed, carrying him safely with the womb to the shrouded landmasses of Venus.

  “There, there,” she said, patting both the cloak and the womb as she watched it depart.

  • • •

  I surfaced again from sleep, and found myself in the same place as before. The white room.

  I still had no strength and could only lie there, sluggish in thought. This time I realized that I was thirsty, my mouth dry. But no one came to give me a drink. Stillness and silence surrounded me.

  Slowly I breathed, drawing in air, hissing it out through my nostrils. The air had no smell, or else it was the smell of sterility. I couldn’t tell where the light was coming from, but at least it didn’t hurt my eyes any more.

  When I mustered the effort, I found that I was able to look down. A white sheet covered me to the neck. At first it was weightless, but even as the thought registered I began to feel that it was wrapping itself around me, tightening, restricting. Panic swelled up in me again. I laboured for air, weakly gasping. But it was useless; I couldn’t even move. As I sank down into darkness I was certain I was dying.

  Two

  “… chances are,” Metin was saying, “he’s down in the docking bays checking out the merchandise. You know Pavel—always an eye for a bargain.” Metin looked up from his wristlink optic. “We didn’t know you were coming in on this flight.”

  “I had to return early. I need to see him.”

  “I’ve bleeped him. He’ll call in soon enough.”

  They stood in the crowded concourse of the transit station, interplanetary passengers milling about or riding slidewalks to terminals.

  “Anything else we can do for you in the meantime?” Metin asked.

  Tunde gazed out through a portal, where the chrome and ebonite strut of a docking bay bisected the downy white of Venus. Hesperus was one of the larger Venusian transit stations, a regular stopping-off point for Tunde on his travels. He knew its staff—and its comforts—well.

  “Is Ushanna here?”

  Metin checked his comlink again, a studied frown creasing his forehead. He was short and plump, a physique rarely chosen.

  “She finished her term a couple of months back. But we’ve got a new girl. Jaslynn. Very pretty, same sort of type. Accommodating, you know?”

  Tunde stepped aside to let a group of Martian tourists pass. The hubbub of the crowd was regularly interrupted by flight announcements and passengers being paged.

  “How old is she?” he asked.

  “Twenty-two, it says here. I hear she’s one of our best.”

  He peered at Tunde expectantly. Tunde shrugged in acquiescence.

  “Delta fifty-five. She’s free at the moment.” Metin winked. “I’ll call ahead, make sure she’s ready and waiting.”

  Tunde was already striding away; he could only take so much of the smaller man’s fake and sleazy camaraderie.

  He found an empty levelator pod next to one of the main viewports where passengers were thronging to watch a cargo-ship unfurl its solar wings like a gigantic black butterfly. It made Tunde feel giddy, so he averted his eyes and entered the enclosed pod gratefully. He murmured his destination, and the pod put on a Chrysian pastorale to swamp the sound of Flight Central giving details of shuttles and baggage handling. For once Tunde did not object to the music. He felt a little deflated, grubby in more than one sense.

  Delta sector’s hermetic salmon-pink corridors provided a sticky intimacy that was perfectly appropriate for a red-light district. A woman with zigzagged black hair—probably Tritonian—took Tunde’s place in the pod as he emerged.

  She winked at him as she passed, looking dishevelled and sated. “That feels a whole lot better, I can tell you.”

  The pod whisked her away. Tunde saw that the doormouth to cubicle fifty-five was already open, the woman waiting there for him.

  She was tall and dark-skinned, dressed in a black stripsuit, gold hair cut short like Ushanna’s. Not a double of her by any stretch of the imagination, but striking enough in her own way.

  “Hello,” she said. A wide-mouthed smile. “You’re Tunde, yes?”

  He merely nodded.

  “I’m Jaslynn. Good to meet you.”

  He let her usher him inside. The cubicle was dominated by a big contour bed which began to fluff itself on sight of him. It was dark flesh-pink, the same colour as the room. The colour he’d specified when he’d first started making use of the facilities here and had his profile put on record.

  “Drink?” Jaslynn said brightly, going over to the cocktail waiter.

  “No thanks. Are you new here?”

  “My second month,” she said, stroking the squatting waiter’s lumpen head. “You’re one of our regulars, right? OK with you if I have something?”

  “Go ahead. Can I see your medical?”

  The waiter dished her out a petrol-blue liquor in a spiral glass. With her free hand she produced her medical certificate from a hidden pocket of her suit.

  Tunde took the disk and thumbed its vocal. According to Pavel the whores were checked every ten days. She was clean.

  “You want to see mine?” he asked.

  She shook her head, smiling again. “Metin knows you. That’s fine with me. Want to get on with it?”

  Her pupils were dilated, as if she were avid for him. “Sure.”

  She set the drink down, came over and began stroking him, nuzzling his face with her mouth. The liquor on her breath was minty, strong.

  “Anything special you like?” she asked as she peeled his shirt from his shoulders. “Metin says whatever you want—as long as you leave me in one piece.”

  She gave a laugh that was a come-on—complicit, completely decadent, yet at the same time with a hint of nervousness, as if she was afraid he would want to go beyond the usual limits. She had a strong, sensual face which promised every sort of lewdness. She wouldn’t stop him from doing whatever he wanted. Tunde was already aroused.

  “What do you suggest?” he said.

  “We’ve got something new since you were here last. Languor.”

  “Languor?”

  “It slows things down. Stretches them out. Makes the pleasure last, you know?” Her hands were everywhere, expertly stripping him. “You’ll never want it to end.”

  Now her head began to slide down his chest, his naked belly.

  He pulled her up. “Tell me why you do this,” he said.

  It was out before he knew it: he hadn’t meant to ask.

  She barely blinked. “I do it for fun. For the sheer pleasure of it. Down on Venus I’m the daughter of a high priest in the Church of Moral Purity. Sex only within sanctified monogamous marriage. I’m positively virginal. Then I come here and let men do whatever they want with me—”

  There was no expression on her face. Tunde sighed, then grabbed her wrists and dragged her over to the bed. He pushed her down, pinioning her, then began to peel each strip of the suit away. The panels made a satisfying tearing sound as the bed spread itself to accommodate them. Everywhere she was as ample, as full-bodied, as he required. She was laughing, urging him on with hoarse whispered obscenities.

  Tunde knew it would be over in minutes—perhaps even seconds. But as he entered her, she reached over and picked up something from the bedside table. She put it to his mouth.

  It was a small thing, like a tiny black snail.

  “Languor,” she said, parting his lips, pressing it into his mouth, her fingers crushing the shell against his tongue.

  The shell dissolved instantly, and a fragrant penetrating vapour swamp
ed his senses, blotting everything out. Then, when the black mist receded, he found himself moving slowly within her—infinitely slowly, his ferocious desire paused to such an extent that he was able to relish its urgency, each sensation stretched out, flesh within flesh, the only kind of contact that made him feel as if he was truly alive.

  He could hear Jaslynn moaning in pleasure as she moved beneath him. At the back of his mind he remained lucid, but outside, within the cubicle, he was hazily, contentedly drowning in extended desire. She was gripping his arms, writhing beneath him in rhythm with the bed, mouth open, neck arched. He surrendered completely to pure sensation, let it go on and on, this passion, hunger, rage, revenge …

  … and then the drug abruptly released him, and he surged out again into real time, surged into her with a huge groan as she cried “Yes! Yes!” and thrust herself hard against him.

  He slumped across her and did not move for a long while. Neither did she. Eventually the silence was broken by the console announcing a call.

  Jaslynn answered it, and Pavel’s vulpine face filled the screen. He spoke directly to Tunde.

  “Give you enough time, did I?” A coarse chuckle. “Metin tells me you have something urgent.”

  Tunde’s wits were dull with the drug. He sat up slowly.

  “I need to talk to you. Somewhere very private.”

  “My office. Fifteen minutes, OK?”

  Tunde tried to blink his dazedness away. “All right.”

  “Give you what you wanted, did she?”

  The question was asked with only academic interest. Jaslynn lay on her belly among the tatters of her stripsuit, ignoring both of them. Tunde wanted to tell him to mind his own damn business, but that was precisely what he was doing.

  Tunde rose and stumbled into the latheratory. Jaslynn had his clothes laid out on the bed when he emerged, pressed and fragrant: she had put them in the laundrovat while he was bathing.

  “I hope you’ll come again,” she said, pressing herself against him as he made to leave. “You were wonderful. The best I’ve had.”

  He wanted to shake her at that moment, to shake the real person out. He turned and fled.

  Outside a pod was open. It whisked him through the tunnels to the central sector of the station. Metin was waiting at the other end to escort him through.

  Pavel’s office was a cluttered windowless chamber tucked between freight blisters and plasmachinery workshops at the very centre of the satellite. He was a creature of the nooks and crannies of the station, carrying out his dubious or wholly illegal activities while managing to evade the notice of the customs officials who ostensibly controlled everything on Hesperus. A big-boned man with shifty green eyes, he squatted in a bucket seat surrounded by cartons and crates of his latest booty.

  Tunde accepted a seat opposite him, then waited while he and Metin inspected a handful of Callistan gemstones that had been hidden in a consignment of antique vases. The gemstones, naturally luminous, shone pale rose and ice-blue in the dim light that Pavel favoured in his “office”. An ancient titanium drinks dispenser stood in one corner next to a squat mechanical cleaner that scouted the floor for dirt or insects with its trumpet-shaped nozzle.

  “So,” Pavel said without looking up from his palm, “what have you got for me?”

  “Something very special,” Tunde replied.

  Pavel put a pear-shaped stone between his teeth and bit on it. The stone broke.

  Pavel spat the piece into his hand.

  “What the hell is this?”

  Metin spread his pudgy arms helplessly; he knew nothing about it.

  Pavel’s face was dark with anger. He swatted furiously at a suckerfly that had found its way into the room, then screamed at the cleaner to deal with it. The machine went into overdrive, raising its trumpet and scurrying about the room chasing the fly. Pavel sat rigid, watching it, until the fly was sucked down into its chrome-plated belly.

  Pavel returned his attention to the fake gemstones.

  “I paid good credit for these,” he said. “I think we need to have an earnest discussion with our friend Wai Ling. Her ship left yet?”

  The question was addressed to Metin, who spoke to his wristlink. A curved section of the chamber wall blinked into transparency. Tunde saw a mothership suspended in space, a cetacoid with its vast black fins wafting in the solar wind. A thick feedline looped from its mouth to the end of a docking strut so that it resembled a gargantuan fish caught on a line. Tunde had done a lot of fishing in Venus’s fertile seas as a child, before his whole world turned sour.

  “It’s not due out for thirty-five minutes,” Metin announced.

  “Fetch her,” Pavel said. “Make sure there’s no fuss or damage, get my meaning?”

  Metin merely grinned and hurried away without further ado, giving the cleaner a perfunctory kick in its ribbed backside as he went.

  Pavel set the jewels aside. “Get us some coffees, will you?” he said to Tunde. “Make mine an Ishtaran spiced.”

  Tunde went over to the machine and punched up two. He was still a little woozy from the drug. While Pavel ordered some pastries over his comlink, the dispenser bleeped and rumbled, then delivered.

  The drinks were in flimsy white cups. Pavel took his from Tunde.

  “So,” he said, “let’s hear what you’ve got.”

  Tunde settled himself on a crate.

  “I don’t think you’ve ever handled anything quite like this before,” he said. “I got it in Bellona.”

  Pavel arched an eyebrow. “And?”

  “It’s with the freight. On its way to Venus by now. Akna terminus. Biological. Very hot.”

  Pavel blew on his coffee. “From Bellona, you said. Haven’t they had a big clampdown there?”

  Tunde nodded.

  “Connected with this merchandise of yours?”

  “I can’t be certain, but I’d bet on it.”

  Pavel blanked the window. “So let’s hear it.”

  Tunde shifted on his perch. “Are we safe here?”

  “Fucking count on it. EMR opaque. Think I’d use it if it wasn’t?”

  Pavel liked to think of himself as a big wheel, though really he was strictly small-time, hidebound by his own narrow horizons. Not that Tunde underestimated his capacity for violence if he was thwarted. He was about to speak when the door pulsed open and a woman entered with a tray of cakes. It was Jaslynn.

  She wore a crisp emerald and gold Transolar flight attendant’s tunic, obviously Pavel’s idea of a joke. She set the tray down on the table holding the gemstones, showing not a flicker of recognition for Tunde. Her eyes looked through him and her smile was merely one of professional courtesy. Pavel laughed, while Tunde fought the urge to speak to her, to make real human contact. She departed without a word.

  When she was gone, Pavel said, “Suit you, did she?”

  “She was fine,” Tunde said, “but you overdid it with the daughter of the archbishop and the Church of Moral Purity, or whatever it was.”

  “You want perfection, you pay premium rates.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  He knew, all right. “Is she a volunteer or a crim?”

  Pavel bit into a starcherry fancy, cream and puff pastry coating his upper lip. “Maybe she’s a fugitive killer, or maybe she’s saving for a total body reconstruct. Maybe she needs the credits to pay for her great-granddaddy’s funeral passage. Does it matter?”

  Pavel had little personal interest in the individuals he acquired for his business, or more likely he simply preferred to pretend so to discourage inquisitiveness. Strictly speaking, prostitution was illegal but tolerated provided health standards were maintained and the men and women who offered their services did so without coercion. The job was, in any case, vicarious, whores being supplied with psycosmetic drugs which temporarily imprinted fake personalities over their normal consciousnesses. Pavel was adept at offering psychoprofiles which closely matched his cu
stomers’ needs so that their fantasies were thoroughly served. The whores themselves retained no memory of their activities once the drugs were withdrawn or substituted.

  “I take it she wasn’t under the influence just now,” Tunde said.

  Pavel crammed the rest of the pastry into his mouth. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “She doubles up as one of my personal assistants. The more she works, the more she gets paid. I’ve never asked her if she does it on autopilot.”

  Tunde wondered how personal an assistant she was.

  “Isn’t it supposed to be dangerous to go straight from one persona to another?”

  A flash of irritation crossed Pavel’s sharp features. “I didn’t say she did, did I? What d’you think I’m running here? She needs the credits and wants the work. I don’t make them do anything they don’t ask for. Now, what is it you’ve got for me?”

  Suddenly he was impatient, and Tunde realized he’d better get on with it. He had known Pavel for several years, ever since he began sneaking valuable items from various worlds to Hesperus under the guise of his legitimate business. Mostly it had been minor stuff—exotic perfumes, speciality drugs, objets d’art—but this was something of a different order.

  “A womb,” he said.

  Pavel’s only reaction was to take a draught of his coffee.

  Tunde hurried on, telling him the whole story of Marea and the womb. He knew he was betraying a friendship that he had always valued, betraying a closeness that he might have cultivated if he’d been honest with her; but he was desperate. It was Vesta who had suggested the transfer to a desk job, almost certainly because they were becoming suspicious of his activities on each interplanetary trip. Smuggling—it seemed absurd to dignify his activities with such a quaint and romantic word—was a short-term game for the courier, and this was probably his last chance to make some real money from it.

  Pavel heard him out in silence, slowly crushing the cup in his fist. Finally he spoke.

  “And it’s down on Venus?”

  Tunde nodded.