“Stupid move. We could have arranged it here.”
“Not with freight that size. It’s company property, automatically routed on. Customs would have become suspicious if I’d tried to hold it up.”
Pavel seemed unconvinced. “How much?”
“What?”
“Don’t be fucking coy. It’s the only question worth asking. How much do you want for it?”
• • •
I came bursting out of a hot dark tunnel. The woman was standing over me, dabbing something moist and cool on my forehead. This time there was no fear, but I felt feverish.
I heard a low noise escape from my throat, and I realized that I had tried to speak and almost succeeded. A second attempt yielded nothing.
The woman pressed a sponge to my mouth, and cool water trickled into it. I swallowed greedily. My whole body felt as if it was on fire.
She swabbed my forehead again, pressed more water into my mouth. Her face was serious, absorbed in the task, as if it was the most important thing in the world. A shock of blonde hair fell across one temple, but her eyebrows were dark. A surge of sheer physical attraction overtook me then. I would have embraced her and kissed her on the lips had I been able. But I couldn’t move.
This reaction was as unexpected as it was inappropriate, and it was swiftly followed by a deep sense of embarrassment. I felt my cheeks flush hot. The woman noticed nothing.
She stripped the sheet off me and proceeded to sponge my whole body. I was naked, dark-haired, skin paler than hers. My body was that of a man in his prime.
“Don’t excite yourself,” she murmured. “It takes time. You’re going to be all right, I promise you.”
It was said with such conviction that I believed it immediately. Relief washed through me. Then I was sinking down again. I caught a last glimpse of her profile before I slipped away.
• • •
Tunde took an open-topped roadrunner from the terminus, letting the soft rain patter on his head. After forty-eight hours on Hesperus it felt wonderful to smell the egg and gunpowder air, feel its warmth and wetness, see the unbroken cloud shutting out the void beyond. Interplanetary travel had always continued to unnerve him, no matter how many trips he made, its expanses inducing vertigo, a feeling that he might fall forward, ever outward and downwards into its infinite nothingness. Only beneath the enveloping atmosphere of his home-world did he feel truly safe.
He rode the main causeway that led west across the lagoons and shallows, weaving past crowded serpentines and puffers trailing gouts of steam. Beyond the bustling traffic umbrella trees and palmbrush shimmered grey-green between quicksilver stretches of water. A leviathan was wallowing in a mere-meadow near a farmstead, its great coils entangled in water-vine, oxygen farts bursting from nodes along its flanks.
Another causeway joined his own, then split again, was joined by others as he approached the thickly settled shores of Nephthys. Swampland gave way to emerald pasture, wedges of farmland, domed settlements clustered beside streams and rivers that tumbled down from mottled mountains.
Nephthys City braided the steep arc of a bay and was home to a quarter of a million people. Tunde had been born in the slums hugging the coastal swamps but now lived in a select mountainside estate with a splendid view out over the ocean. At this height the view was picturesque, the waterfront squalor unnoticeable.
Yolande was entertaining guests when he arrived.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” was the first thing she said on catching sight of him. “You didn’t call.”
A statuesque and elegant woman, she was busy dishing out sweetmeats to her guests. They were the kind of guests she always invited: poised and well-heeled, dressed in fashionable slipstreams whose fabrics slowly shifted across their bodies, changing colour constantly. Tunde recognized most of them, though there were none he knew well.
“I got an early flight,” he said. “I thought I’d surprise you.”
“You certainly did that.”
His palm was moist on the handle of his shoulderbag.
“Are the children here?”
“They’ll be out shortly. Do you think you could possibly give me a hand with the drinks?”
It was the current vogue to serve one’s guests personally rather than use a menial; and Yolande was nothing if not fashionable.
“Give me a few minutes,” he said.
He went off to his room before she could say anything further. Once inside, he locked the door and opened the shoulderbag on the bed. The womb was safe, and he was amazed that he had managed to get it out of the terminus so easily. At the last moment he had decided to hide the womb not in the belly of the extractor but deep within a funnel-shaped earvent so that it could be removed without having to cut open the beast. An official who was a regular customer for his smuggled goods had arranged for him to inspect the beast alone, and it had been a simple matter of using a long pair of forceps to retrieve the womb and carrying it through in his hand luggage. But he’d never sweated so much in his life …
The womb was loosely swaddled in a white wrap. Tunde could feel its warmth through the fabric. He zipped up the bag again, resisting the urge to pore over it and ponder its uniqueness. To him it was going to be a means of escape, and he couldn’t afford to consider it as anything more than an item of barter. He stashed it in a cabinet under the window and had the cabinet give him a new lock code with twenty-four-hour confidentiality. That would be time enough.
Yolande’s guests had congregated on the balcony, drinks and titbits already provided. Yolande cast him a fleeting critical glance, then announced that the children were ready to entertain. She had given them the grand names of Maximinian, Corisabel and Esmeraldine, and it was a constant source of irritation to her that he always referred to them as Max, Cori and Esme. The three of them now came cartwheeling out of the house and proceeded to perform a series of leaps, rolls and pirouettes to a bolero by a popular Venusian composer whose work Tunde hated.
The children were dressed in white, their movements expertly choreographed by the instructor Yolande had employed six months ago. Gymnastics was her latest passion, and her guests were suitably appreciative, applauding politely at the end of each routine while Yolande luxuriated in reflected glory.
As ever, Tunde found it sickening. Ever since the trio were born, Yolande had sought to mould them into creatures of her own design. First it had been enhancer drugs to boost their intelligence; then gene manipulation to maximize their physical development. As they grew older, she had insisted on corrective surgery to straighten a crooked nose, tuck in protruding ears, ensure a perfect set of teeth. And constantly there were the tutors and experts who attended the children, teaching them deportment, conversational skills, the psychology of interpersonal relationships. And he a powerless spectator to the whole thing.
Max was now poised on the shoulders of Cori and Esme. Suddenly the three of them vaulted backwards off the lip of the balcony. Tunde saw them arcing down through the water of the swimming pool on the level below, their white tunics trailing away to leave three perfect naked dark bodies that rose together at the centre of the blue water, arms raised and clasped together in triumph.
The applause was genuine and doubtless sincere, but Tunde found it no less tawdry for that. Yolande was a daughter of one of the oldest and richest families on Venus, and the people she invited to the house also tended to be of old and privileged stock; yet their appetites were vulgar in his eyes, the children too often served up for them as entertainment fodder.
He slipped away and went to the bathroom for a shower. He was lathering himself with a sponge when the creature extended a tentacle down towards his groin. It took a moment to register what was happening. Either Yolande or one of the children must have taught it some sexual tricks. And he was aroused; he had always had an active libido, especially when he contemplated Yolande’s ensnarement of him. He achieved a swift, passionless release from his frustrations.
“You’re disgusting
, do you know that?”
Yolande had come in. Shame flooded through him, but it was such a familiar emotion it had lost its edge. He peeled the flaccid creature from his body and let it slither to the tiled floor.
“I’m a nobody dragged up from the slums, remember?”
It was what she was always telling him. She didn’t rise to it.
“We have guests. You haven’t said hello to any of them. Or to your children.”
“They scarcely know I’m here. What difference does it make?”
“I want you out there, doing your part.”
He reached for his robe, and it wrapped itself around him. “I’m tired. I’ve been travelling for the last thirty-six hours. You expect me to show consideration to your guests when you never show me any whatsoever?”
Tunde was aware that they were about to embark on another of their many pointless arguments. In one sense he enjoyed them because they made little networks of lines form around Yolande’s eyes, the only sign of her true age.
This time, however, she didn’t stand and fight.
“I want you out there,” she said, then turned and left.
He went into his room, dried himself, then dressed in a drab olive torsal that was certain to cut a pointed contrast to that of everyone else. His life had descended to such pettinesses, and had been like this ever since the children were born—since the moment they were conceived, in fact.
From his window he saw Cori chatting with a bronzed muscular man. Though he could hear nothing, it was clear that her conversation was not childlike, that she was holding her own, eight years old, with someone who was four or five or even ten times her age. You never knew with Yolande’s circle. He had not realized that Yolande herself was in her seventies until she had told him after the children were born. It wouldn’t have bothered him in the slightest had he known from the beginning, but she had presented it as a deliberate deceit.
That was what had started it: that and the fact that Yolande had made it plain to him that she no longer had any use for him once she was pregnant. She had plucked him out of obscurity, she liked to say, spotted him one day when a boat of hers made an emergency stop at the wharves for feeding after a day’s pleasure cruising. She’d whisked him away to her rich home and showed him the life he could lead if he would marry her. And he had readily agreed, because he found her beautiful and because she genuinely seemed to want him—and because he saw it as an escape from the sordidness of his life, from the filth and squalor of the waterfront, from a sprawling, squawling family to whom he was just another face, another mouth to feed. And everything had been fine at first; Yolande had been hungry for his passion and physicality—but only, he was later to realize, for him to provide her with children. Once she had conceived, he had become … not exactly disposable, but an ornament, irrelevant to the real purpose of her future life.
It had taken him some time to understand it. If she’d never had any true feeling for him, why hadn’t she chosen a different husband or simply purchased his sperm? He would have accepted a reasonable price. But the old families of Venus didn’t do things that way, and there had been a vogue for downcaste lovers among her class at the time. Of course, he was blissfully unaware of this. The codes by which Yolande and her ilk lived were different from his, and she would not agree to a divorce, not yet, not until the children were old enough. And if he had divorced her, he would have lost everything, including the children. They were the only reason he had stayed. Yolande’s wealth was secondary, and none of it had ever been his. She had always insisted he lived solely off the money he earned himself. That was why he had got himself involved with Pavel, in the hope of making a big killing one day so that he would be financially independent of her.
Steeling himself, Tunde went outside. It was warm and dry on the balcony, the blue-tinted weatherdome keeping away the drizzle. The children were naked in front of the guests—Yolande liked to display them in every sense of the word. Tunde knew there was no point in objecting. She would only mock him for his quaint morality and accuse him of hypocrisy. It was not beyond her to tell everyone what he had been doing in the shower, let the children hear as well. She had no shame.
Before he could begin the unrewarding chore of making small talk with Yolande’s guests, Max and Esme came to his side.
“We didn’t know you were back,” Max said, peering up into his face. “You look troubled, Father. Is something the matter?”
“He and Mother have had another argument,” Esme said. “I can tell.”
“I don’t think the two of them are well matched,” Max observed. “It’s a great shame.”
He might have been listening to adults; they were very knowing, and they spoke matter-of-factly, almost without reference to his actual presence.
“Did you see our display?” Esme asked.
Tunde nodded. “It was very impressive. Those hours in the gym have obviously paid dividends.”
“We only do it because Mother wants,” Max said.
This was unexpected. “Isn’t it fun?”
“Oh, of course. But we’ll be glad when we’re old enough to make our own choices.”
Before he could say anything to this, Cori came over and hugged him around the waist; she was the most affectionate of the three. Tunde crouched and put his big arms around all of them, but they looked self-conscious, perhaps afraid he might do something grossly paternal in front of their guests.
“What have you brought us?” Esme asked.
With a shock, Tunde realized that he had completely forgotten to get them presents this trip. They had come to expect it, but he had left Mars in too much of a rush and been too preoccupied with getting the womb safely to Venus.
“He hasn’t,” Max said emphatically.
“My trip was called short,” Tunde said. “I had to come back in a hurry.”
“That’s perfectly all right,” Cori said. “We’re old enough not to expect presents every trip.”
Which only made it worse. He could see the disappointment, even resentment, on their faces. Eight years old, going on twenty-eight. They were almost interchangeable in the way they spoke and behaved, children already gone beyond a childhood they had never truly experienced. Only someone as rich as Yolande could have got away with such blatant gene-tampering to create them anew: there were strict laws against it. Tunde had loved them dearly from the moment they were born, but increasingly that love had become more and more academic, unsustained by a similar spontaneity of feeling from them. He had lost the battle for them.
“I bet Father’s got a lover on Mars,” Esme said.
“Maybe he’s got more than one,” Max added.
“You’re embarrassed!” Cori remarked with glee.
And he was, but not for the reasons they supposed. He was embarrassed for them, and embarrassed for Marea who had deserved better treatment. She was as fine a woman as he was ever likely to meet, but their friendship was based on a lie—his lie—that he was happily married with a perfect family. Yet in a sense the children were perfect—perfect products of their highly refined upbringing. But how could you be a real father to offspring who were always patronizing you?
“Don’t worry, Father,” Cori was saying, “we’re only teasing.” She squeezed his arm. “Anyway, you’re an adult and you can do as you please. If I were grown up, I bet I’d be attracted to you.”
“You’d sleep with your own father?” Esme said. “That’s overbounds.”
“I was speaking hypothetically, micro-brain.”
“Don’t you call me micro-brain, you … you mutoid.”
“I’d rather be mutoid than—”
“All right!” Tunde said angrily. “That’s enough!”
He had spoken loudly, and heads turned. It was Max who finally broke the silence.
“Well,” he said with great confidence, “that’s one way of announcing your presence.”
• • •
I found myself sitting up in bed, a bowl of something on a
tray in front of me. I had no memory of waking or sitting up. I had no memory of anything but the dreams and my previous awakenings. My head felt bloated, as if my brain was pressing against the inside of my skull.
The woman was sitting at my bedside, holding a spoon.
She smiled at me, then she dipped the spoon into the bowl and raised it to my mouth.
“Come on,” she said gently.
Without taking my eyes off her face, I opened my mouth. She put the spoon into it.
It was some kind of soup, salty, only luke-warm, yet it burned as it went down my throat.
I was propped up against the pillows, limp, mute. The woman fed more soup into my mouth, using a napkin to swab my lips and chin. I began to sense the soup filling my stomach, its warmth percolating through me.
I discovered that I could move my head a little. My hands were spread out on my lap. Clean, perfect, ordinary hands. By concentrating hard I found that I was able, just able, to twitch a finger.
“You’re doing well,” the woman remarked softly.
“Who are you?”
The words came out unbidden. I was startled by the sound of my own voice. It was neither familiar nor strange.
She smiled—with her eyes as well as her lips.
“You can call me Nina,” she told me.
• • •
Dawn was breaking in a grey haze as Tunde left the house. He had heard Yolande rising half an hour before and seen a light burning in the garden shrine as he stole away. She communed regularly with her ancestors, and he had often wondered how much they had influenced her obsession with programming her children’s lives.
Tunde left in great sadness, aware that he was unlikely ever to see any of his family again, whatever the outcome. He had looked in on the children before he departed and found them curled up in bed together, as innocent and as young as any ordinary eight-year-olds. That had been the most painful moment, gazing down at Cori who lay with her little finger tucked in a corner of her mouth, wanting to kiss her, to hug all three, but unable to risk waking them.
He took the padded mere-horse from the stables, stroking its mottled flanks and holding its muzzle to keep it quiet until he was a safe distance from the house. It had been his wedding gift to Yolande, and she went riding daily with her cronies in the coastal swamps. Taking it back was not just a practical act. Tunde climbed into the saddle and strapped the shoulderbag at his belly before riding slowly away, out through the weatherdome and into the drizzle.
Mortal Remains Page 4