by Mick Farren
'He's also built like a human fighter plane.'
'That should make life interesting for someone. Let's hope it's not us.'
Jet Ace had moved off and was looking at the bodies under the palms. 'The more I think about this, the more I believe that it would be a very good idea to kill Ravaj Taraquin.'
'A lot of people might be real grateful.'
'You think so?'
'I tell you what. If it's any help to you, we heard where Taraquin was heading.'
Jet Ace clumped toward them. 'You did?'
'He's supposed to be linking up with another warlord called Vlad Baptiste. They intend to storm the town of Idleberg.'
Jet Ace was already replacing his helmet. The electronics came back on, and his voice regained its previous heroic quality. 'I must make all speed to Idleberg.' He paused. 'You think I should kill this Vlad Baptiste as well?'
The Minstrel Boy nodded solemnly.
'Definitely.'
'Then I shall slay the pair of them.'
He bent his knees. The rocket cut in, and he rose swiftly into the air. When he was at treetop level, he turned his body to a horizontal position, stretched his arms in front of him, and sped away to the east. The Minstrel Boy, Reave, and Renatta watched him go.
Renatta shaded her eyes against the sun. 'You think he has a sex life?'
Reave laughed. 'I'd sure like to see that.'
The Minstrel Boy was peering into the distance. 'Is it a bird? Is it a plane?'
Reave looked at him blankly. 'Huh?'
Renatta smiled. 'Another arcane cultural reference.'
One of the unique aspects of the Damaged World era was the fanciful, almost childlike attitude to technology. Much of this was clearly a reaction to the fearful advances of the Thousand Years War, when the capacity for mechanized destruction outstripped all finite limits. With the coming of the nothings, technical progress completely ceased, and dependence on the Stuff Catalogue became all but total. The use of adapted templates made it possible to tailor hardware and create strange hybrids that fitted with any cultural fantasy. It was far from uncommon to find stasis settlements that had devised social orders that were based on bizarre combinations of very separated periods in history. One such was the famous preserved site at Conderecto, where archaeologists discovered the now-famous artifacts that were such a strange blend of the fourteenth and seventy-second centuries.
— Pressdra Vishnana
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Minstrel Boywaved a hand at the glowing sphere that dominated the display on the pseudosurface. 'That's Krystaleit.'
'Are you sure?'
'Sure as you can be of anything.'
'So we're going in?'
'That's the general idea.'
Billy leaned back in his berth and folded his arms behind his head. 'It's been a long time since I was in Krystaleit.'
Reave glanced up from cleaning his pistol. 'Are you sure you're not wanted there?'
Billy shook his head. 'I already told you. Not that I know of.'
Reave turned to the Minstrel Boy. 'What about you?'
'Clean, to my knowledge.'
'Renatta?'
'Nobody wants me anywhere.'
Reave grinned. 'I'm sure that's not true.'
Renatta giggled throatily, and the Minstrel Boy cocked an eyebrow. He was starting to wonder if there was something going on between Reave and Renatta. The trip from Santa Freska had been tediously decorous. Renatta had left him strictly alone, but he could not shake the feeling that she and Reave had engaged in some covert coupling while he and Billy had been asleep. He caught Renatta's eye, and she beamed at him with the same flash of promise that there had been when they had first left the Caverns in the gold submarine. He was now totally confused, but he knew that it was no time to have his concentration disturbed by romantic complexities.
'Going into Krystaleit can be a bit weird,' he said. 'It's just so big. Where most stasis settlements are built traditionally, from the ground up, with at least the illusion of land and sky, Krystaleit occupies all of its stabilized space. It's basically a vast sphere hanging in the nothings that's honeycombed with constructions on a dozen or more levels. You come in onto one of these huge ring platforms that circle the main sphere. At times of peak traffic these platforms get real crowded, and accidents do happen.
'Can you handle it?'
The Minstrel Boy shrugged. 'All I can do is try.
'Do your best there, boy. We don't want no accidents.' The decision to make for Krystaleit had come only after a good deal of discussion. There had been general agreement that the small backcountry settlements were becoming far too strange. The DNA Cowboys wanted no repeats of Santa Freska and no more psychos like Vlad Baptiste or, at the other extreme, lunatics like Jet Ace. It became a little more difficult when it was time to select one particular city as an ultimate destination. Even the little that Billy remembered about his criminal record seem to exclude him from two-thirds of the major cities in the Damaged World. Finally, Krystaleit had been chosen after Billy had assured the others that he would not be arrested the moment they rolled out of the nothings.
They came out into the middle of a funeral. The Minstrel Boy had to stand on the Saab's brakes, locking the treads, to stop them from plowing into the main procession. Angry heads turned as the Minstrel Boy backed the tank out of the way. The hundred or more mourners were dressed in flowing creations of pure spotless white. Krystaleit was one of the places where white was the accepted color of death. It was considered to be the symbol of completion, of all things made one. The mourners wore elaborate and immensely expensive costumes — high diaphanous headdresses with sweeps of muslin and lace that flowed and floated. Surprisingly, there was a lot of exposure of bare flesh, and a high proportion of the mourners were tall, long-legged, and extremely handsome women. The Minstrel Boy wondered who had died. The corpse, wrapped in a white lace shroud and wearing a gold crown on its head, was sitting upright in a litter, borne on the muscular shoulders of six identical young men in white loincloths and body paint.
As the procession wound its way to the edge of the nothings, the mourners sang a high, wordless chant that steadily grew in intensity. When they finally halted at the very edge of the non-matter, the song had reached the level of coordinated screaming. The Minstrel Boy had expected that after due ceremony, the corpse would be ejected into the nothings and the funeral party would return to the business of the living. Thus, it came as something of a surprise when nothing of the kind happened. The young men carrying the litter simply walked into the nothings without the slightest hesitation. Two by two, they smoked and vanished and became one with the non. There was a sustained sigh as the corpse itself and the last pair of bearers disappeared. Then the voices picked up a theme that was more jaunty and rhythmic, and the procession started back the way it had come. The Minstrel Boy wondered what had been done to the six young men to make them sacrifice themselves in such a seemingly pointless manner. Brainwashed or drugged or in the throes of some metaphysical madness? It was possible that they had been specifically created for nothing more than the funeral — mere products of the stuff receiver — and that nobody looked on their deaths as a loss. He was reminded that human behavior in Krystaleit could be exceedingly perverse at times.
Reave must have also been remembering. 'You have to watch your ass here in the big city. Krystaleit can be a lot of fun, but it can also get deeply weird. You have to be ready for it.'
The Minstrel Boy engaged the Saab's drive and slowly followed in the wake of the returning funeral. The platform, despite its size, was more crowded than the Minstrel Boy ever remembered seeing it before. Hundreds of people and all manner of vehicles came out of the nothings in a constant stream. A high proportion of the incoming travelers looked scared and exhausted, as though they were on the move not for the fun or adventure of it but from force of circumstance.
'What the hell are all these folks? Refugees, or what?' Reave asked.
T
hey were passing a ragged family of four with pinched, depressed faces who appeared to be lugging all their worldly goods with them.
Billy peered through the port. 'Refugees for sure. There have got to be a lot more of these raider warlords causing trouble out there, more than just the two we've happened across.'
'I suppose you could call us refugees. I mean, we're avoiding the raiders just like everyone else.'
'Yeah, but we've got class.'
'Let's hope we've got enough class. All these refugees may make it hard to get into the city.'
The Minstrel Boy grunted. 'Looks like we're going to find out soon enough.'
The nearest way off the platform was through a high hexagonal arch. The funeral party was heading that way, and the Minstrel Boy saw no reason why they should not do the same. The only snag was that the entrance was guarded. It was flanked by two giant figures in ancient suits of powered battle armor that must have dated back to the Thousand Years War. The suits were scarred and battered, with crude welded patches and areas discolored by old, old blast wounds. The MEWs built into their right forearms were more than capable of vaporizing the Saab without leaving a trace. Any weapon with that kind of capability had to date back to before Stuff Central.
The Minstrel Boy frowned.
'This is looking kind of serious,' the Minstrel Boy commented.
The hulking metal troopers only stood and intimidated, watching the shuffling lines through impassive visor slits. The real business of vetting the new arrivals was conducted by a half dozen militia men in drab gray uniforms toting much more modest sidearms. A movable barrier restricted the free flow of vehicles and pedestrians through the arch and into the city itself. As the funeral party approached, the barrier was raised and the people in white were quickly waved through. Once they were inside, though, the barrier came down again, warning lights flashed, and the laborious process of questioning every arrival resumed. A long line immediately formed, and inside the Saab everyone settled down for a long wait.
'Okay, listen up.' Reave seemed to be falling more and more into the leadership role. Since he did it so well, Billy and the Minstrel Boy were content to let him. 'There are a couple things we all ought to remember about Krystaleit. The most important thing is their credit system. Everything here is based on that.'
Renatta frowned.
'Credit? Why do they need credit when everything comes from Stuff Central?'
'Control. Always someone who wants to control everyone else.'
'So we don't have any credit. What's going to happen to us?'
Billy took up the story. 'In normal times, credit was granted to most new arrivals. You were assessed on the value of your vehicle and whatever you might have brought with you, credited accordingly, and issued with a temporary crys.' He glanced out the port. 'Unfortunately, they seem to have raised the basic qualification level.'
Outside, almost half the people who approached the barrier were being turned away.
'There's one other kicker in the system. Something called the Personal Value Minimum. When they first figure out your credit, you're given what's known as a base number. It's like your real bottom-line value, calculated on your age, skills, physical condition, sexual utility, how smart you are, all that sort of thing. A biode can work that stuff out real fast. The trouble starts if you ever run through that last line of credit and hit the zero. That makes you an indigent, and indigents become property of the city. They literally own your ass.'
'And what can they do with your ass once they own it?'
Billy smiled grimly. 'Anything they like. Anything from impressed servitude to dumping you straight into the nothings without an SG. Of course, they have to catch you first, and there are a lot of places to hide in Krystaleit.'
'You sound like you know this from firsthand experience.'
Billy laughed. 'I came close, but I never quite hit the zero.'
Renatta was not convinced. 'Why the hell did we come here? I don't want to become property of the city.'
'There's drawbacks to every deal. It's a good place to be if you don't screw up. Always something going on.'
The line to the barrier was moving at a snail's pace. The Minstrel Boy remembered the other times he had come into Krystaleit when there had been no lines or barriers or armored men who looked like the incarnation of sudden death. The first time had been with Old Gridghast. The old man had taken some trouble to explain the city to him:
'You don't come here looking for logic or any real social organization. It's got some of the names that go with social organization, but that's about all. It's much easier to get along in the city if you think about it as one huge organism, and a pretty unhealthy organism at that. Take the credit system. It's a perfect example. On an economic level it's a joke. There's no need for it except that it maintains the Ruling Elite like the organism's atrophied brain.'
The Minstrel Boy remembered how he had protested. 'Surely the Great Biode has to be the city's brain?'
Old Gridghast had laughed. 'More like some alien implant.'
'So what about all the cops and militia that you see every where? Isn't that social organization?'
'I find them much easier to handle if I think about them as the organism's immune system, the antibodies that attempt to protect it against destructive parasites. All you have to do is keep your head down and don't look like a disease.'
The Minstrel Boy decided not to share those particular memories with the others. Old Gridghast would be hard to follow for someone who had not been there.
They were just two cars away from the checkpoint. Reave cautioned them all. 'Here we go. Let the Minstrel Boy do the talking.'
The Minstrel Boy raised his eyebrows. 'Why me?'
'Because you're glib, and you're also in the driver's seat.'
Then they were at the head of the line. The Minstrel Boy eased the Saab up to the barrier and popped the port beside him. The armored troopers had turned to face the tank. They clearly were not taking any chances with such a heavily armored unit. Up close, the battle armor looked as old as the hills. The Minstrel Boy wondered what kind of men were inside the metal suits. The legends claimed that back in the olden days, the armored troopers had been virtual cyborgs, tank-grown semimen who were grafted into their armor for the entirety of their lives. He supposed that if someone was prepared to have the kind of surgery that had created Jet Ace, there surely could be individuals willing to be throwbacks to the war with the Draan.
Back in Litz the Minstrel Boy had watched tapes of that conflict. At the siege of Bergman's Asteroid, wave after wave of those hulking troopers, maybe a hundred thousand in all, had been thrown at the Draan emplacements, but each time they had been driven back by the batteries of huge particle cannons the methane-based invertebrates had built into the bedrock of the planetoid. The scope of the carnage had been so vast that even as he had watched the ancient images of what looked like some hell for aliens flicker across the screen, he had found it nearly impossible to believe.
The face of a militiaman appeared at the port. He was unshaven and had the look of a man who had been on duty much too long. The standard questions came out like a tired rote.
'What is the purpose of your visit to Krystaleit?'
'We just came to see the big city.'
'You always travel in a fighting vehicle?'
'Things have been getting a little hairy out in the boonies.'
'How many passengers are aboard this vehicle?'
'Four, including myself.'
'We are going to have to examine your vehicle.'
The Minstrel Boy nodded. 'Sure, no problem.'
The militiaman pointed at an area just beyond the barrier, where the road surface was painted with a yellow grid. 'You see that yellow marked section?'
'Right.'
'Pull your vehicle over there and await inspection.'
'Anything you say.'
The barrier was raised, and the Minstrel Boy moved the Saab forward.
Reave crouched beside him. 'You think this means trouble?'
'I don't know. It could just be a routine check. Not everyone turns up in a fully armed battlewagon.'
'I hope you're right.'
The Minstrel Boy maneuvered the Saab onto the yellow grid and shut down the drive. One of the armored troopers had crunched along behind them and stood covering them with his MEW.
The militiaman reappeared at the port. 'Will you all please step down from your vehicle?'
At a slight nod from Reave the Minstrel Boy opened the hatch. As they clambered out, they found that in addition to the armored trooper who was covering the Saab, there were also a half dozen militiamen pointing their sidearms at them.
'You will now please follow the flashing red line to the door indicated. Once inside, you will surrender all weapons you may be carrying to the desk officer and await questioning.'
At their feet there was a set of color-coded guide brights setin the floor. They followed the red flashing strip as instructed and were in turn followed by the militiaman and his squad. The designated door led to a nondescript room with all the worn grime that inevitably accompanies the downside of authority. The gray steel walls were plastered with routinely ugly warning notices printed in the dour Gothic script that was used exclusively by officialdom in the city. The desk officer sat behind a transparent plasteel shield. There was a small heat cannon close to his right hand, its purpose clearly to ensure full and fast cooperation in the surrender of weapons. With great reluctance the DNA Cowboys passed their guns through a security slit in the plasteel. When that was done, the desk officer glanced down at a mass/density scanner. He did not look pleased.
'The one in black has a needler concealed in his sleeve.'
Two militiamen moved in on Billy and relieved him of it. He made a helpless gesture.
'I swear to God, I clean forgot it was there.'
The one who had originally presented himself at the port looked wearily reproachful. 'This isn't a good start.'
'I'm telling you, I'd forgotten I had it.'