redRobe

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Axl was being taught that he wanted to live. It was the old man’s present to a favourite pupil.

  Inside the passenger’s skull, his brain underwent a massive limbic surge as old as humanity. C/cholamines kicked up fight or flight energy release and a slower, amygdala-driven ripple primed his adreno-cortical nervous system for extended conflict.

  And as the burn-in alternated between targeting Axl’s neocortex with feelings of outrage or injustice and firing up his amygdala to create sudden blinding rages, sweat beaded along his hair line, ran down his forehead and dripped into the hollow of his eyes.

  In earlier centuries the effect was variously known as neuro-linguistic programming, brainwashing and conversion ... To Axl, the impotent rage and blind fear just felt like being a child again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Looking For A Little Human Understanding

  ‘Okay,’ said the Colt finally. ‘That covers what I want. Now what about you?’

  Both gun and fat little priest were in a tiny, windowless office behind the main altar, little more than a recessed doorway tilled with a simple wooden table and two ordinary-looking chairs. Blocking off the entrance was a heavy velvet curtain through which the little priest had carried the gun a couple of days earlier.

  Sábado was long since gone, glad to get away from the glances of the tourists and the worried scowls of the security guards. On the way out he stopped only once, to take a handful of white candles from a box below the wrought-iron racks. He figured the cathedral could afford it.

  ‘What do I want?’ Father Moritz turned the Colt over in his fingers and thought about the question. It made a change from thinking about the gun itself, which was what he’d been doing every waking hour.

  The barrel was warm, exactly blood temperature. But the man didn’t know if that was intentional, to stop the gun showing up during heat scans, or just because he’d been holding the weapon for so long.

  He’d owned a Colt like this once, not quite this modern, but close enough. And he knew just how much that had cost. Enough to feed a favela family for a year, two families, five families… Maybe even feed the whole district. His Colt hadn’t even been fully aware, only semiTuring but even back then the price could have paid to pipe in fresh water for a whole street.

  Father Moritz was struggling hard to be upset and disgusted, to be appalled at the waste and horror, at the destruction inherent in such an overworked bit of machinery, but that wasn’t his nature. And besides, no one could tell him about waste. As the sole inheritor of three genome patents he’d spent most of his early life trying to throw money away. And he’d grown up around beautiful, overpriced objets d’art. It would be a falsehood to deny that the Colt was stunning in its functional simplicity and the elegance of its design. That was why he’d spent forty-eight hours polishing up the tiny, understated, jewel-like diodes that constantly lit in sequence down the gun’s side.

  For a second Father Moritz wondered if the Colt was running some kind of empathy routine on him. If so, it was doing a good job.

  ‘It’s not my fault.’ The small priest’s lips twisted into a sad smile. ‘The serpent made me do it. . .’

  No, he wasn’t a child. Resting the Colt on the pine table in front of him Father Moritz quite literally sat on his hands to stop himself reaching for it again.

  ‘Well,’ said the Colt, sounding amused. ‘I want to see His Eminence. Why don’t you tell me what you want?’

  So the small priest did.

  Even the hiPower was surprised. And this was a model that prided itself on how well it understood humans.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Cabin Service

  Axl remembered screaming at the darkness, but the darkness didn’t answer him. Then he slept, only to wake and start screaming again. Until his howls faded back into the kinder darkness of sleep…

  Snapping awake, Axl tried to open his eyes and remembered too late that he didn’t have any. What he did have was a pain in his temples that defied description and blobs of sick stuck to his stubbled chin where an over-full vomitsac had ruptured part of its seal. Only what was left of the bag’s one-way valve was stopping its entire contents from floating off around the cabin.

  He would have screamed again but he didn’t have the energy and recent experience suggested he try a different approach.

  It wasn’t the same shuttle, but obviously Axl didn’t know that. He’d been swapped at Planetside Arrivals, ferried in a coffin from the Shuttle PS 1308 to a sleek purple Boeing Cruiser with discreet gold livery and a triple-hatted papal cartouche set into the door. None of the ground staff was remotely surprised when a coffin was transferred from the Shuttle to the Nuncio’s cruiser. Not when they knew the Papal Nuncio was on his way to Samsara. Being buried on Samsara was this year’s big thing, and last year’s and most probably next year’s as well.

  ‘Oh, so you’re awake.’ The voice made a bad job of trying to sound friendly.

  Axl grunted.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’

  ‘Painkillers,’ demanded Axl.

  The stewardess ignored him and offered Perrier or hot chocolate as alternatives. Rules said no requests were to be refused outright.

  Axl, however, hadn’t been trained to the same level of social skills. ‘Painkillers are what I want. And if you don’t get me painkillers,’ he said slowly, so there could be no danger of the machine not understanding, ‘I’m going to rip you off the armrest and personally take your chips out through your arse…’ To reinforce his point, Axl shot out his hand and grabbed metal.

  He could have told the semiAI when it released his arm restraints that this was a bad idea, but he’d been unconscious at the time. And the semiAI overseeing his private cabin at the back of the Nuncio’s ship didn’t seem to be listening to him anyway.

  Quite who, at Boeing, had thought it would be a great idea to kit out each seat with its own ten-inch-high, overpneumatic, underdressed sprite able to summon bar trolleys and tea or coffee machines to order, Axl didn’t know. But judging from the diaphanous costume under his fingers and the improbable length of the legs now kicking against his wrist, he figured them for some Japanese throwback. Women, of course, were assigned male attendants, though dom, fem and neuter were always available on request.

  ‘I don’t carry painkillers, sir,’ said the stewardess through gritted teeth. If nothing else, her voice programming was a masterpiece.

  ‘Then make some,’ Axl suggested. He wasn’t stupid enough to believe the coffee, wine and food usually served before take-off was actually real. At least not really real, merely molecularly perfect. There had to be a bank of limited-function Drexie boxes someone on board.

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t have those facilities,’ said a childlike voice that was new. And, childlike or not, this time the voice carried a little more authority. It added, ‘sir,’ to the sentence as an afterthought.

  Cabin chief, Axl decided.

  ‘That true?’ Axl asked the stewardess and squeezed.

  The sprite kept discreetly silent, which didn’t improve Axl’s temper at all.

  ‘Look,’ he said furiously. ‘I feel like shit, okay?’

  There was a second’s silence when Axl was sure the cabin chief wanted to tell him he looked like shit too, but didn’t. Instead it contented itself with suggesting he let go of the stewardess.

  ‘No fucking way. Not until I get some painkillers.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not. . .’

  Axl tightened his grip on the sprite and it yelped, high and strange, like a small dog that someone had accidentally stepped on.

  ‘All right,’ said the cabin chief hastily. ‘Let’s not get upset.’

  ‘Upset!’ Tears began to well up in the corners of Axl’s ruined eyes, except he wasn’t sure if it was from pain, fury or laughter. ‘Get me some fucking painkillers or I’ll squeeze this little doll in half and then I’ll start on you.’

  That got through to the cabin chief.

  Human body wit
h semiAI intelligence, Axl decided sourly. Something pretty, blond and prepubital knowing the Vatican. Haute-design. The wetware running off what was left of its cortex, its intelligence running as a subset of the ship’s AI. Take the cabin chief away from the ship and its body would corpse.

  GenoTypz had taken about six weeks to come up with that simple modification, which was as long as it took them to lose five cabin chiefs to suits who couldn’t be bothered to do their own shopping.

  ‘What happens if I crush the sprite?’ Axl demanded. In his hand the air stewardess kicked harder

  ‘I’m sure you won’t,’ said the cabin chief, but his voice didn’t sound very certain.

  ‘But if I do?’

  ‘Then we bill you.’ The cabin chief paused and added petulantly, ‘And believe me, it won’t come cheap.’

  ‘Bill who?’ Axl demanded as he tightened his fingers. A sliver of bioChip, a simplified intelligence and some fancy nanetics might be all that made up the sprite but he didn’t actually want to wreck the thing, though she was too busy trying to bite his wrist to notice that. ‘Who gets billed?’

  The cabin chief’s eyes flicked briefly out of focus as he ran a seek and logged in to the ship’s bioAI, overrode client confidentiality on the basis of emergency (as defined by ASA), backtracked through a small travel agent in Zurich, a shell company in newVenice and finally a Panamanian orbital before coming up with a name.

  ‘Carlotta Villa,’ he said firmly. ‘She bought your ticket.”

  As if he didn’t already know.

  ‘She. . .’ Axl’s laugh was as grim as the darkness surrounding him and as unsteady as the slow, painful thud in his head, which felt like an out-of-balance engine but was only blood beating through his tortured arteries and veins. ‘Check Villa Carlotta. Go on, do it…’

  The cabin chief blinked as the AI it was logged into ran a check and immediately wished it hadn’t. Villa Carlotta wasn’t a who, it was a what. . . The kind of what any sensible AI didn’t want to know about.

  ‘Look,’ Axl said speaking straight to the ship itself. ‘You can give me analgesics or I can rip your toys to pieces. You’re not going to arrest me, return me or bill me. And who’s going to know, anyway?’ Pain had reduced his voice to a low growl, and it was obvious that he meant it.

  Seconds later, Axl felt the telltale cold of a pre-spray and then a subdermal syringe blasted twenty-five millilitres of co-prAxlmol into his neck. Sleep roared in but not before the pain peeled suddenly away and in that fractured moment of lucidity Axl had time to wonder about the onset gravity.

  Pulling herself out the man’s slowly relaxing fingers, the air stewardess folded away like a complex flower going into reverse, back into the arm of his seat.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Vaya Con Dios

  A week after Axl was carried unconscious from his audience with the Cardinal, a duty guard watched a small but overweight priest struggle up a steep flight of stone stairs towards the sea-facing terrace of the Villa Carlotta, carrying a leather bag in his arms. The sun was only just dipping into the horizon and every surface still shimmered with heat, even the flat silver expanse of ocean. A few boats hung on its beaten surface but they were static and desultory, dragging fat anchor chutes as the fishermen waited for nightfall. Then hurricane lamps would be lit and work would begin again as the hidden shoals swam up towards the light and their death.

  The little priest was climbing the sea stairs because he’d been forced to cut through the gardens… The hours of audience were over and he’d been refused entrance at the front door.

  Father Moritz was both hot and tired. Sweat had glued his soutane to his back. And the hours he’d spent travelling on a train from Mexico City had done little to improve his temper. He was so tired he could no longer say how tired he was. But that was lack of sleep not the journey. The journey had just irritated him. The tiredness ate at his mind like a parasite.

  Two men walked behind Father Moritz. They were the Cardinal’s guards. Dressed in black silk suits and clerical collars, but definitely guards. Their suits were lightweight and Italian, cut loose under the left arm, to allow room for H&K .38s. The wrapround sunglasses featured self-adjusting lenses that could instantly throw up a floating-focus overlay of information. It would have been simpler, neater and altogether less fuss for both men to use replacement eyes to route incoming data direct, but the Cardinal was a traditionalist.

  Rich to be sure, CEO of two metaNationals, major shareholder in CySat/nV and sole proxy for the Catholic Church in Mexico ... all of which made him a traditionalist almost by definition.

  Father Moritz smiled. Rome might have run a reverse-takeover on the Church of Christ Geneticist, but that didn’t mean the Vatican or her representatives approved of all the genetic, medical and surgical patents they’d acquired. Merger, of course, wasn’t a word the Cardinal would use in relation to Church affairs; ecumenical was. But it meant the same, and what it meant was that Vatican shares had their biggest rise on the Dow Jones for as long as anyone could remember.

  So why was Declan so worried?

  ‘Moritz.’ At the top of the steep stairs a tall man stood smiling as the fat little priest struggled his way up the last few steps.

  ‘Your Excellency,’ the man tried to kneel to kiss the ring but got no closer than dipping a knee before he was stopped by the Cardinal.

  ‘Don’t. You’ll never get up again…’

  The little priest tried not to scowl and the tall man laughed, loudly. Grabbing a glass of white wine from a wooden tray balanced nearby on the balustrade, he thrust it at his visitor.

  ‘Drink it and take a seat,’ said the Cardinal.

  Father Moritz opened his mouth and the Cardinal held up his hand, the setting sun glinting from the blood-red cornelian in his ring. ‘Whatever brings you to Villa Carlotta can wait,’ he said firmly.

  Father Moritz and the Cardinal went back a long way, definitely longer than either of them would admit. No one was left alive to know how long, the Cardinal thought sadly, though there was nothing sinister in the fact. On his side, his people lived longer than most and the little fat man in front of him was germ-cell wired for longevity. It was the least his parents could have done for a child cocooned so tight by money that anything in the world he wanted was his, except poverty.

  Quite apart from patents inherited by Moritz’s father, his great-grandmother had owned the gameSoft company LearningCurve GmB. She was on ice, pending revival, while Dad now functioned as the houseAI of his family’s mansion outside Seattle. It was years since he’d been home.

  The first thirty years in the life of Moritz Alvarez y Gates had been spent trying to spend money faster than it accumulated. To that end, most of China’s collection of Imperial mutton-fat jade got stacked up on the shelves in his New York condo, he bought the original of Da Vinci’s smiling girl and he still hit thirty tired, bemused and unquestionably richer in real terms than when he started.

  The money was spending him faster than he could spend it. At thirty-three, the age at which Alexander the Great died having conquered the known world, he was too frightened most days to leave his room.

  Around that time the Cardinal was still a street priest from newVenice doing mission work in Spanish Harlem. Seeing a CySat broadcast about Moritz’s billions he’d written to the man—pen and ink, envelope and FedEx—never expecting a reply. The amount he received by return was ten times larger than the priest had even dreamed of asking for.

  They had talked on their mobiles, then sat face to face on Moritz’s roof garden. Later on, they would walk down to Washington Square to play chess badly and, later still, to play it well, with an audience of drifters around them. Everywhere Father Declan Begley was sent by his mission, Moritz followed, buying a house for himself nearby and letting the priest use Moritz’s money as his own.

  Sexless. Unspoken. It was a love affair, never acknowledged. And there was nothing physical in it, ever. . . The Vatican had checked that out, more th
an once. But the inquisitors never made anything stick. Not even that Father Declan fed from the Latin Queens, taking only blood from the young girls, nothing more and never enough to be harmful. Moritz took nothing because there was nothing he wanted. He seemed so sexless he was almost neuter.

  In the decades that followed, Father Declan became Santo Ducque, bishop in Bogotá, then archbishop of Havana and finally Cardinal of Mexico. Moritz had his circadian rhythms modified to reduce his need for sleep, but still couldn’t burn up his wealth fast enough. When he hit an income of five thousand dollars a second his mind went walkabout for a month, refusing even to acknowledge the numbers that flashed lightning-fast direct to his optic nerve.

  So at the Cardinal’s suggestion, Moritz gave his wealth to the sole organisation with enough lawyers and knowledge of arcane banking back-history to be able to crack open the trusts. Only, even then, it wasn’t as easy as the Vatican Bank—in its arrogance—had thought it would be. Moritz’s wealth was vast, self-perpetuating, growing uninterrupted like cancer through the markets to touch everything. Water, steel, fusion, reclamation of the subSahal, reforestation of the Amazon… His money owned the very AIs that negotiated its own tax breaks.

  And there was one big problem that the Vatican hadn’t been expecting. The money didn’t want to change owners, thank you very much. It was happy shuffling between shell companies, bouncing off orbitals, living dangerously.

  It took a young nun in the St Peter’s secretariat to do what no one else had considered. Joan talked to the money direct. And her conversation was very short and simple and went as follows.

  ‘We wash whiter...'

  And the money thought about it and realised that, by definition, the Vatican’s cash was self-laundering, not to mention zero-rated and tax exempt. Joan closed the deal and the Vatican walked away with credit lines worth trillions, a forty-three percent stake in LunaWorld, fifteen percent of CySat’s original holding company, an offshore datahaven in the Bahamas and a whole string of Panamanian orbitals, that turned out to be laundering sites for Cartel drug money.