Supplejack

by Les Petersen

  It didn’t take long for me to get just as drunk as the rest of them. I blessed the Doc and Trandy and all the others who had fallen in the battle with the military because I’d brought my problems to Haven. I raised my glass for them many times and then spent countless hours trading stories with Shotgun in the feasting hall. Sam stood by the door most of the time, sipping slowly away on some sort of jungle juice, which could fell a bison and she watched everything I did and listened to every word I said. I tried for all I was worth to ignore her. Barb came and sat beside me, shared some of my drink and gave me some food to keep me going. Eventually she helped me stagger back to the life-raft. There I fell asleep under one of its wings because it was the only place not filled with new faces that clapped me on the back, or sobbing drunks who thanked me for fighting off the Mils who had killed some of their family and friends, or the blazing fire of the Sure-shot Sam’s accusing eyes.

  I woke in the morning to find Barb lying beside me, spooned inside the curve of my body. She was fast asleep and, by the smile on her face, dreaming happy dreams. The blanket, which I assumed she had pulled over us before she had gone to sleep, was as scratchy as an old dog. When I sat up carefully to get it off me, but not her, I found someone had removed most of my clothing. Barb remained sleeping as I got up, retrieved my trousers, which were folded nearby and my shirt, which dangled off the Razor-air engine of the life-raft’s wing. The shirt needed a wash, but I pulled it on to cover the bandages around my chest. The slice in my side had bled a little through the night and I wondered what I’d done to tear the stitches. Not only that, but my right shoulder was as itchy as all hell and I scratched at it while I looked for other pieces of my clothing.

  I could not see my boots anywhere, so I hobbled around the area, stepping over sprawled bodies and wandered off a little further into the bush and relieved myself, then headed back into the encampment to find someone who knew how to cure the broken engine in my brain. It seemed to be blowing a piston out the side of my skull as I walked and throwing sticky oil down my throat with each heartbeat. I felt like I should be donating my liver to the brewery industry.

  Shotgun sat in front of a small bark-covered bower a few hundred meters east of the life-raft. He had on only a pair of trousers and one sock. He gave me a bleary look and a wide grin, which turned greener as he looked at me. He closed his eyes and slowly brought his hands up to hold on to his head. “Oh, for God’s sake sit down, will you? If I look up for any longer I think I’ll break in half.”

  “Well, at least you are not going to die alone,” I confessed as I sank down next to him, secretly happy to find him in just as bad a state of affairs as I was in.

  Shotgun lowered his hands slowly and lifted his chin without opening his eyes. “St Peter had better lock up the ambrosia when we turn up; that’s all I’ve got to say.”

  “You’ll drink by yourself. I won’t make it to the pearly gates ‘cause I’m already pickled better than any onion.”

  He started to smile, but froze his expression when it hurt him. We sat with our eyes closed, without saying anything else, sharing the warmth of the morning sun shining through a break in the trees; listening to the awakening bush creatures and to the groaning of those who found life existed after the party. Maybe we looked like a pair of monks encamped on a mountain side, or maybe a pair of drunks who had fallen off a passing tourist bus, but we shared the space without any need to converse. I think conversation would have made us both violently ill.

  A shadow fell across my face and I opened my eyes to find Sure-shot Sam looking at me. She was wearing army fatigues and was carrying a long rifle the like of, which I had never seen before. From the look of her I would have said she had just come off watch. “You two enjoyed yourselves last night,” she remarked, a half smile on her lips. “It was good to see you relax for a while.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what she was getting at. She looked as sober as a shark. “Did you come here to see if we were still alive, or to get some fuel for your motor vehicle? Give me a can and I’ll fill it as soon as I find my legs.”

  She grinned, the friendliest action I’d seen her perform. “You two want breakfast?”

  Shotgun turned his head to face me. “If she suggests greasy food, I’ll swear at her and you spit.”

  I shook my head. The action almost made me bring up whatever I’d eaten during the night. “You do the spitting. I’d burn down half the trees if I so much as belch. How about we just gesture rudely?”

  Sam laughed and walked away.

  About half an hour later Shotgun grunted a few choice words and we got up and wandered off to the small stream that flowed through the north end of the encampment. About three hours later we came back from sitting in the stream and soaking our heads. In all that time we hardly said a word.

  I slept most of the rest of the day. Barb woke me at about two in the afternoon and helped me change the dressing on my side. She also pointed out that the itching in my shoulder was from a tattoo I’d demanded to be given during the revelry of the night. She told me how their artist had used only natural inks and a long spear as the monks of Tibet had. No local anaesthesia, no tattoo gun. Each prick of the spear had been blessed by the crowd who had gathered to watch my initiation. They made a whole new celebration of it. More of their weed-killer down the gullet. No wonder I had the head of a baboon instead of my own.

  She held up a mirror so I could look at the tattoo and I saw etched into the flesh of my shoulder blade the image of a globe caught in the branches of a tree. I wondered how I could’ve ever suggested it, until she explained how all the others had come up with the image. She said it wasn’t a tree, but the Supplejack vines being pulled along by the world.

  I felt uncomfortable with her hovering around, doing things for me, sharing my space, so I went back to sleep while she cleaned my clothes for me.

  The scarf code was the most interesting thing that came of the raid. When I tagged it in the next morning, then wrapped it in a burst of inspired coding and added a copy of my DNA string matched through the Mannum pathology, I had found the location of the Baeder Box. Someone had tried to hide it in Spain.

  I logged into the atlas and cross-referenced it down to within a few meters. Seu Vella, a cathedral in Lerida.

  Almost directly south of Salàs del Pallars. I saw a connection almost immediately.

  While I was thinking over the coincidence, the holoface blurred in one corner and an intercom screen came alive. The Guide was standing there, holding up her hand as if she was in a class or something. “Excuse me, Jack.”

  “Yes?”

  She reached into her suit jacket and pulled out an envelope. “I have a message from Handel, for you.”

  For a moment I didn’t recognise the name, but then I remembered Shahn had chosen that particular name after she had had the Cut. I sat still for a moment. You don’t invite nasty memories into your life unless you really are a sadist., but then again, I thought, Shahn had had many opportunities to send messages to me in the past and had left me alone. When Sansan ran a check on it and gave me the all clear, I asked the Guide to put it through on the life-raft’s screen.

  It was DivX and pure feed. No interaction. A way to keep things distant and unemotional. A method of running a stream at someone and refusing to listen to their reactions. Pure Hollywood.

  Before I ran the feed, I sat there looking at her. Still trying to see the real her under all the masculinity. She was sitting on a divan with her…his legs tucked up under her, leaning back against a pillow and holding a small globe in her hands. The kind of model Michelangelo would have used for one of his works on the Sistine Chapel. About the size of a coffee mug. She wore a full beard that looked as if the crows had picked some of it for their nest and her face had the tattered look of the bone weary and emotionally exhausted. She was still into her art kick by the state of her clothes – a denim shirt with more holes in it than a fisherman’s net and her scuffed and dusty cowboy boots. Her jeans sti
ll had traces of paint on them. Not attractive., but her eyes still blazed the way I remembered: the cold blaze of evaluation, as if she had taken you apart and was reading your entrails to divine the future. I had the distinct feeling she was staring at me and reading my face the same way I was reading hers, even though her image was frozen in time.

  I hit the play button.

  She lifted a hand and wiped a loose tendril of hair out of her eyes – a nervous habit –and glared at the camera. For a moment she didn’t say anything, just turn the globe around in her hands and watch the camera rolling until someone off-screen prompted her. She nodded to whoever it was and then gave me a little corner-turning smile.

  “Hi, Jack. How are you? We’ve just received word Bell International has lost a fortune to a raid and if our predictions are correct it will be you who led it. It has made our position stronger and will allow us to regain ground we lost when we were taken over by Bell International. So thanks for that. New Grendel has consolidated a few holdings and we are nearing a position where we can take over Bell in retaliation for their past crimes.

  “By now you will have learnt all about the coding in your DNA strands and you will have been chased by just about everyone who ever knew you, though you won’t know much more than that. I’m here to shed a little light on it all. This is straight info dump so you’ll have to find the implications yourself.”

  She looked up at whoever was holding the camera, nodded and then looked back at the screen. She rubbed a hand over the globe in the same manner a pregnant woman rubbed her stomach. I couldn’t get over how ragged she looked. She was on her way down with that kind of look and I wanted to tell her so, but because I couldn’t interrupt her, she continued telling me what she knew. “First, the background stuff, which I’ll keep to a minimum. And, an apology.

  “Grendel Corporation is responsible for your placement into Bell. We became aware of you during a scouting mission at Flintlock. We were seeking someone to plant in Bell, someone who could carry a Trojan inside Bell International’s Mainframe. When you topped your Flintlock class for military programming, we arranged for Bell to recruit you, knowing they’d use you to mop up the last of our defences. It may seem strange to you to give Bell the tool to destroy the ruins of Grendel Corporation, but of course they didn’t know we were your patron. You see, we had already planned our re-emergence and were building the shell of a new corporation.”

  She glanced over at something or someone off camera, seemed to be taking cues about what to say and then spoke back at the camera. “How did we do it? – you might be asking me. How did we get a Trojan inside their system and create havoc without them leaping down your throat? At least I can tell you that.

  “During your induction procedure at Bell, we arranged for the security chip they put inside you to be swapped for one of our own. Ours contained a small segment of viral code to be inserted inside the Mainframe. They of course checked everything when you began working on their Net, but it appeared benign and was referred to an AI guardian to arrest. I won’t go into the techs of it – let’s just say the AI thought it was a legitimate code you had placed in there. Just before Bell was to take delivery of the Baeder Box with all our R&D, the code automatically executed and redirected the shipment. We planted a false Baeder Box for the freight, which arrived and no one was the wiser. A lot of the research and development we included seemed to be pure cut and most of it worked.”

  She nodded at her own words, licked her lips and began again. “That’s where your involvement should’ve ceased. You should’ve been able to go about your own work without anyone knowing anything about it. Except when we went to pick up the Baeder Box, it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Because somehow the DNA string you gave to Bell, which was used by the Trojan to give us the recovery point, did not contain the correct sequencing. The Baeder Box was redirected by someone else’s DNA string and went missing.”

  She sat back on the couch and just stared at the camera. I sat there waiting for her to go on with her summary, seeing for the first time I’d never really understood the woman in front of me.

  She leaned forward a little. “At first we thought you might have been discovered by Bell,” she continued, “but when they captured one of our Samurai we sent in to find out what was happening and she was tortured by them to find out where the Baeder Box was located, we knew they had discovered the switch, but nothing else. They didn’t know about you or the DNA coding at that stage, but they had learnt we had done something with the real research and development work begun by Esteve and Liberin.”

  She tapped the globe on her lap. “So somewhere, on the planet, was the Baeder Box. And in those early days we were in too delicate a position to chase after you to locate it. We were forced to bide our time, keeping a tag on you and running predictions on what you would do with the information you had stolen.”

  That statement made me angry. I let her have the blast of my guilt. “Except I hadn’t stolen it!”

  She nodded as if she had heard me scream at her. “You didn’t steal it though, did you, Jack? You were only dishonest in one area of the whole affair. You had used your father’s DNA to get past the drug test Bell ran on all their recruits: your father, who had never in his whole life ever taken anything more damning than an aspirin when his headaches grew unbearable. And the rest of the events fell into order without you ever knowing what you had done.”

  I sat there holding my head in my hands, knowing what was coming, seeing it like an express train screaming out of the tunnel with its light fully illuminated and its horn screaming at the car that has stalled across the track.

  “We took some time to find out about your father’s DNA, Jack,” she said. And I could hear genuine sorrow in her voice. “It was only an unfortunate accident that gave us the answer, but then it was too late for all concerned. Because not only was your father dead, you had wiped the security implant so you could surf the warez sites on the Cloud. And without the Trojan’s original instructions Liberin Talbert had coded just before he was assassinated, we could not reconstruct the scenario he had designed.

  “And we were all left looking at you for the answer.”

  She sat back in the couch and worried a loose thread poking out of the seam. I sat breathing as deeply as I could, feeling my eyes smarting at the thought of my father.

  But Shahn wasn’t finished with me. She placed the globe on a table at the back of the couch and stretched her legs out. When she began speaking again I knew I was going to hear what she was doing in my life. And I’ll admit it, I was very frightened to hear her side of the truth., but I sat there and waited for her to say it.

  She swung her legs off the couch and sat right forward on the edge of the seat. She grasped her hands together, put her forearms on her knees and leaned forward. Her voice was calm and controlled, as if she had rehearsed what she was going to say many times over so she’d not break when she said it.

  “Bell took them some time to find out it was through you we had insinuated our way into their systems, because, after all, they began looking for someone who was willingly bringing about their downfall. When they had purged their corporation of all the swinging dissidents, they began to think of a blind mole somewhere in their staff and they discovered your little swap of DNA strings –, which showed them quite quickly who was our Menelaus – and when they also found out you had disabled your implant, they knew they had found their man.

  “But they could not see what had been done with you, Jack. The code was wiped from your implant and the only copy was planted deeply inside their Mainframe somewhere. So they set about creating a “breakdown” for you, Jack: giving you boring tasks and working on your instabilities and allowing you enough rope to hang yourself. They pushed you to use your active mind and your devil-guided hands to get up to mischief.”

  She sat back and crossed her legs. “We sent in SmartGuy to protect you and help you escape., but when you would not work with SmartGuy and when it looked li
ke Kren was getting the best of you, I was sent in to help.”

  She looked straight at the camera. Her eyes seeking out mine. “For four months I distracted him in every way I could. I primed you and protected you and helped you. And then you had to compromise everything I’d done by deliberately trying to get me pregnant. You stopped taking your birth control pills and tried to trap me into marriage with that stupid penis you think is the centre of the universe.”

  She sat back in the couch and spread her arms wide and rested her elbows on the back. “I’ve got a penis now. What an over-rated pieces of flesh they are.” Her eyes were shining with barely controlled tears. I drew a deep breath and wiped my eyes. The cabin hissed with the sound like a camera reel running through empty frames.

  When I looked back at the screen she was glaring at the camera and she appeared to be on the brink of anger. “So, Jack,” she said through gritted teeth that were either holding back further tears or rage, “you think I deliberately miscarried. You think I deliberately changed into a man to kill the child I carried. Well, you prick, I didn’t know until that night it all came apart inside me that I was pregnant. I thought it was all part of the process of change.”

  She wiped the edge of her mouth, smoothing off the corner of her moustache and wiping her hand along her beard. “I was suffering from it and you turned me away and sat in your moody silences. I hated you then. I hated you so much I wanted to kill you. If you had been there when I returned from the Cut, I would have carved out your heart and fed it to the next-door neighbour’s dog.”

  I could not move. She sat still for a while, regaining composure.

  “But in the last five years,” she said eventually, “I have learnt to forgive you, Jack. I was at fault for not seeing what you wanted out of life. I should’ve seen what all our interference was doing to you. You talked about having children so often I should’ve foreseen what you would try. You were an arrogant son of a bitch and you suffered far worse than I did because you had your dreams torn out where I was liberated from motherhood.”