She spent half an hour perfecting her Callistan accent with a pedantic elocution console before leaving her quarters and hailing a slither. A convincing accent wasn’t particularly necessary for the assignment, but she liked to feel properly prepared in case of emergency.
She told the slither she wanted The Rink, a popular club out on the northern coastal waters of the city. Traffic was sparse, and they made good time. A major branchway of a coastal arboreal curved downwards and out across the reedmats, Jupiter sinking huge and molten into the sea on the western horizon. Scarecrows were calling raucously from twilit shallows as the slither pulled up at a silverslide floe. On top of it stood the ribbed dome of The Rink.
Inside, the chamber was already crowded with skaters, the mirrored floor writhing and undulating beneath them as they happily collided with one another in their bright padded suits. According to her most recent information, The Rink was a favourite haunt of her subject, one Raoul Nestorine Forster, a fugitive for the past two years.
She sent her coat and shoulderbag off to the cloakroom and walked brazenly to a broad curving bar at the back of the chamber. It was serving all manner of concoctions to minimize inhibitions and maximize the fun. Scroungedogs loped expertly between the skaters, ready to open their huge maws for anyone who wished to throw up. Social puking was yet another highly rated aspect of Ganymedan culture which defeated the esteem of most outsiders.
Shivaun cradled a firewine at the bar and surveyed the rink. Two men began talking to her, and she did nothing to discourage the impression that she was easy prey to their attentions. But her eyes remained active. She had studied Forster’s file minutely before leaving Melisande, and she was confident she would recognize him even if he was disguised. Her eyes held retina scans which would signal when she had found him. But, of course, she would have to get up close first.
She let both men buy her a drink, then another, slipping away in between to visit the cloakroom and swallow a capsule that would catalyse the alcohol into glucose. One of the men summoned skates and suits. They kitted up, and the three of them went on to the rink.
Shivaun found it a crude sport, with its bunching and buffeting, its clasping of bodies, its sweating and fevered breaths and dizzying twists and turns. But she laughed uninhibitedly, letting herself be flung from one skater to another, pawed and mauled and thrust ever onwards while the music, hectic Callistan boleros, spiralled and swirled and the rink buckled and writhed and the dogs ran slavering between their feet. The rink was responsive to pressure changes caused by the skaters themselves, wobbling and weaving according to their movements.
A side effect of the capsule she had swallowed was uncontrollable flatulence, and this only served to make her more popular with the crowd. She found herself in the arms of a man with a swarthy face and black hair sculpted flat to his scalp. He looked nothing like Forster, but pinpricks of light flashed at the back of her eyes and she knew she had her man.
The ebb and flow of the rink carried her away again almost immediately, but not before she had planted an open-mouthed kiss on his cheek. He was dressed in crimson and lavender and would be easy to find.
When the music ended, she left the rink and returned to the bar. Her two suitors from earlier soon appeared at her side, both obviously intent on a threesome. But she was busy tracking Forster with her gaze. He seemed to have a huge appetite for the dance, pausing only briefly to snatch a drink from the menials orbiting the edges of the rink, gulping it down and then rejoining the mêlée. She knew he had been a drunkard throughout his long life and had had his liver reconstituted several times.
Her suitors were becoming tiresome, a positive distraction. One of them suggested that they slip away together. Shivaun slid a hand down to his groin and squeezed, hard. He gave a strangled yelp and teetered back, staring at her in astonishment, seeing the fierceness in her face, the fearlessness and disdain. The other man saw it too. She moved through the crowd. They did not follow.
On the rink once more, she made a beeline for Forster. The undulations of the floor were less pronounced, doubtless because the skaters were much drunker and less able to stand up. Forster was in the loose embrace of another woman, but Shivaun elbowed her expertly aside and caught hold of him.
Forster was already very drunk, his lips moist, eyes glazed.
“Hello,” she said, nuzzling against him, pretending that she was just the same. She let out a huge belch. “I think maybe I’m going to puke.”
He liked his women blowzy and coarse, she knew that from his profile. Before absconding he had been a professor of moral philosophy and thanatology at Themis University on Ishtar, but had devoted his “retirement” to far less elevated pursuits.
“Throw up here often?” he said with a snigger.
“Only in the right company,” she retorted.
They swirled around together for a spell. He was wilting, so her timing was perfect. His face gleamed with sweat, and she could feel the heat of his hands through her waterveil.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you here before,” he remarked.
“I come and go,” she told him.
“You live round here?”
“What is this—the first degree?”
He laughed and said, “At least let’s hear a name.”
“Delphine.” She manoeuvred him towards the edge. “Shit, I think I need to sit down.”
He joined her at a table, ordering more drinks. She had a spectral, colours swirling in a fluted glass.
“That stuff will blow your head off,” he told her.
She took a big enough gulp to let a trickle of it run down her chin. She wiped it away with the back of her hand. He grasped the hand across the table and licked it.
She laughed. “That your party trick?”
“I’ve got others.”
“Want to get out of here?”
He seemed surprised and not a little suspicious of the suggestion. “Are you in a hurry?”
She made light of it. “I follow my instincts. You only get one life, that’s what I say.”
She deliberately didn’t look at him, taking a slow draught of her spectral, annoyed with herself for pushing him too fast. On the edge of her vision, she saw him raise his glass and drain it.
“How about another?” he said.
She belched. “Sure. Why not?”
He dragged her back on to the rink for a few more dances. He was so drunk she practically had to hold him upright. He was slobbering against her, and she wondered if he was going to pass out and ruin it. But then he said, “I think you’d better take me home.”
She got him out of his skates, summoned her coat and shoulderbag and helped him outside. There was a couple waiting ahead of them at the slither stand, but a two-seater came down the branchway and they boarded it, leaving Shivaun alone with her charge. He had fallen asleep against her and she knew she could finish it easily and efficiently, without him even knowing. But that wasn’t her way. She liked to play things by the code, ensure they passed on in full awareness of the fact.
Europa was up, its silver disc broken by the trees. Flashmoths twinkled and flittered in the darkness. A voice behind her said, “Well, look who it is.”
The two men who had been flirting with her earlier came out of the shadows. They had obviously been waiting for her.
Shivaun didn’t give them a chance to say anything further. She darted up, chopping the closest of the two across the windpipe with the back of her hand.
The first man staggered back, croaking and gurgling; the second fled. Shivaun saw a psycle coming down a moonlit branchway, a high-spirited quartet clutched together on its back. Forster was slumped, still asleep, where she had left him. She slapped his cheek to wake him as the psycle pulled up and its passengers clambered off.
“This vehicle yours?” she asked them.
“For hire,” the psycle announced. It extracted payment from the four with its tongue.
She managed to get Forster into the front saddle
. The controls were a set of nodules along the creature’s scrawny neck. She had no idea how to use them.
“Autopilot,” Forster blurted. “Full speed ahead!” He murmured his address, then slumped again.
The psycle spun around and set off at an alarming pace back up the branchway. Shivaun had to cling on tight while at the same time holding on to Forster to make sure he didn’t slip from the saddle. There was a constant raucous hissing as the creature sucked in air through flapped nostrils and vented it through its rear end.
As before, there was little traffic on the branchways, but despite this the psycle contrived two near-misses, one with a coach-roller full of sleepy tourists, another with an enormous roaster that had settled itself for the evening across an intersection and fled with feral steamy barks as the psycle’s rear wheel nipped one of its toes on the turn. Shivaun had to admit that it was an exhilarating ride.
Forster’s house was on an outlying archipelago of Kuiper rock, part of a relatively new settlement of drab boxy inorganics, obviously thrown up in haste as temporary housing for Lysithea’s ever-growing population. Only the shortage of dry land constrained growth, and stony asteroids were constantly being imported to provide more terra firma for Ganymede and its sister worlds.
The psycle extended a rough tongue to her open palm, sampling skin. Gruff-voiced, it announced a satisfactory credit transfer. Shivaun watched it depart, white-walled wheels softly glowing in the night. It disappeared swiftly into the arboreal.
The single chamber inside Forster’s house was windowless and hermetic, the air stale. It was crammed with shelves of books, some of them reading books. Shivaun examined the shelf above the bed while Forster stumbled over to a cocktail cabinet. She punched title buttons at random, heard them announce themselves as The Rhetoric of Longevity, The Commensurate Mind, Implications of Immortality.
Forster poured himself something golden from a scalloped bottle.
“You want one?” he asked. “Aphrodisian. Works even better when you’re drunk.”
She shook her head, shoulderbag clutched to her side, surveying the chamber. It was neat, ordered, cheerless. An academic’s bolthole all right, a place for lodging rather than living.
“What’s with the books?” she asked.
“Eh? Ah, those.” He shrugged. “It’s a hobby of mine.”
He swallowed the drink down in one. She saw him straighten and regard her with renewed, lurid interest. She smiled provocatively at him.
“My God,” he said, “I do believe I’m positively bursting with desire.”
She let him wrestle her on to the bed, then slipped her hand into her shoulderbag and pulled out the needle. It was already primed. As he searched for the straps on her waterveil, she slid it into the back of his neck.
He went limp beneath her, eyes wide open. The narcotic was a motor inhibitor that paralysed while leaving him otherwise alert.
She looked down at him and said, “It’s time, Mr Forster.”
She could see the fear, the dawning realization, rising in his eyes. She got off the bed, went over to the cocktail cabinet and mixed up an antalcohol. Cradling his head in one arm, she held it to his mouth. Tears were oozing out of his eyes. He gulped it down like a child taking medicine.
She laid him back on the pillow and held him gently while she waited for the antalcohol to work. Really it made no difference whether he was drunk or sober, but she liked her clients to be clear-headed, fully aware of what was happening to them.
When she was satisfied that he had sobered up, she said softly, “You absconded from your homeworld one standard month before your terminal day, Mr Forster. You are now one hundred and two years old, is that not correct? That’s two more years than your permitted span.”
The drug rendered him incapable of saying anything. She preferred it that way; it avoided the tiresome arguments, the pleading, the abject fear when they realized that she would not be swayed from carrying out the termination.
“Your family back on Venus have been most concerned about your welfare, Mr Forster. I’m afraid they’re rather shamed by your actions—you understand the stigma, I’m sure. They asked me to tell you that they love you and want nothing more than for you to take your rightful place in the Noosphere with your ancestors.”
She heard the liquid flow as he voided himself in terror. It was degrading, she had to admit, which was why she always tried to ensure that terminations were carried out in private, preferably in a person’s own home.
“There’s nothing to fear,” she said. “Only your body will die.”
She could feel him trembling as his terror blunted the effect of the narcotic. Shivaun was aware that her words were inadequate for someone like him; he had probably spent most of his lifetime considering the philosophy of death. But no amount of knowledge could protect against the naked horror that some felt at the prospect. Yet her duties had their rituals, their verbal obligations.
“Consider your future: immortal, and in the company of those who have gone before you—parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, even your son, Maldwin, who I believe took an early death. A reunion, Mr Forster, with those you’ve loved and who have gone on to the ultimate stage of existence.”
He started to tremble, tears running freely.
“Calm yourself,” she told him. “It won’t hurt.”
She took the shades from her shoulderbag. As she was doing so, Forster began a sluggish flailing which dislodged one of the books above the bed. It fell open on the floor, the pink SUMMARY light winking on.
—must reject the claims of the Immortalists, who would rob us of our human souls should they ever find the means to extend human life indefinitely. Similarly, the Augmenters would adapt us to the varied demands of the cosmos at the very expense of our humanity, turning us into creatures who would be alien in both psyche and physiology to Homo sapiens sapiens—
Shivaun returned to the bed and gently held Forster down. “Listen,” she whispered to him. “Listen.”
—through the Noosphere we preserve the essential mind and spirit of every individual that is or was a part of humanity. The realm of the Noosphere is the true Afterlife dreamt of by our ancient forebears—
“There, there,” she said, stroking his head and smiling down at him, feeling that as an intellectual he should appreciate this fortuitous valediction. She fitted the shades over his eyes. They moulded themselves around his temples, biodisplays on the mirror lenses giving her a status report. Everything was in order, the storage nodule along the ridge of the shades winking as it readied itself to receive his psyche.
Forster made one last attempt to deny his fate, a weak spastic twitching as the narcotic began to wear off. Shivaun put one hand flat on his chest and with her other hand pressed a thumb into the recess in the temple of the shades. The ridge phosphoresced for an instant, then died. Shivaun felt Forster’s palpitating heart stop in the same instant. He went still beneath her.
The status line showed that the transfer was complete, Forster’s psyche now contained in the shades’ biocircuitry. She removed the shades and folded them into a case. Forster’s eyes remained open, staring blindly at the star-filled skylight in the ceiling. She closed them, then tidied his clothes and straightened his limbs.
“Our ancestors dreamt of Heaven or Nirvana,” the book was telling her, “a place to which the righteous and the pure might aspire. We have made our own—”
Shivaun snapped the book shut and returned it to the shelf.
The house had gone into privacy mode on their arrival, and she was not surprised to find the doormouth locked. Deliberately she began heaving hard on its lip, and the house began an ululating alarm.
It was twenty minutes before the stewards arrived. They burst in, two of them, both men, wielding pulse-pistols and quietsticks. They found her sitting calmly on the edge of the bed, her identification at the ready.
They checked the disk, regarded the dead Forster, looked at her with a certain respect and, she knew, f
ear. She carried full authorization. The details of her termination would be put on record, making her visit official, authentic.
“Anything we can do?” one of them asked her guardedly.
“I’ll arrange translation and notification,” she told them. “There’s only the body for disposal. I presume I can leave that to you?”
The man nodded.
“Then I simply require a lift back to the Prime Arbiter’s office.”
Their eagerness to oblige her belied their unease. She knew that politia officers everywhere often had to deal with the messy consequences of violence or accidents, but they rarely encountered fully dead bodies. The conversation was restrained as they drove along the city’s branchways. Shivaun found herself mindlessly counting the pendulamps that swayed gently in the darkness in the breeze of the night.
On arriving at Venzano’s, she used a shrine to transfer Forster’s psyche from the shades directly into the Noosphere. His relatives would be informed of the translation and advised that he was now accessible to them through communion. No doubt they would throw a deathday party to make the news public.
There was a call from home, but she had no time to play it. She took the tapeworm from the console and put it in her luggage.
She left a message for the sleeping Venzano, telling him that she was going on to Ananke where the second of her clients, a former zeeballer who had captained Venus, was reputedly hiding in an illegal stimstore, hiring out his memories of many successful Worlds Cup campaigns over a forty-year career. But as the hopper carried her out of the city, she directed it to take her straight to the terminus. A pilgrimage ship was docking at Amalthea within the hour, and she had already booked passage.
Flocks of whirligigs spiralled up from their roosts among the upper branches of the trees as the shuttle rose through Jupiter’s huge cinnamon dawn. It was a scheduled flight, and she was not in uniform. The scattering of other passengers paid her no heed.
Amalthea Station was a honeycomb of docking bays and transit tunnels, its innards hollowed out by rock-eaters many generations before. The pilgrimage ship was already boarding, a stately cetacoid with a huge tailfin that gleamed like graphite. Attached to its belly was the fat capsule of an automated ferry, doubtless loading coffins into the hold. Shivaun always carried more than one set of travel permits, and she presented those which identified her in a private capacity as a mourner visiting the grave of a departed. The bored official at the gate waved her through after a cursory scan.
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