‘You okay?’ Nelson’s amplified voice boomed down from the ceiling.
‘Yeah,’ Paula said, climbing to her feet. ‘I’m okay.’
WHAT I KNOW REALLY HAPPENED
The court guards were utter bastards to me. After that idiot judge passed sentence they dragged me down to the holding cell while I shouted that I was innocent. They just laughed as they slung me inside. I heard them later. Deliberately. They said that the Justice Directorate had developed a suspension system that allows a tiny part of your mind to stay awake during the sentence, so you’re aware of each long year as it passes. It’s part of the punishment, knowing all the opportunities you’ve lost, the life you’ve missed.
Not true. Just another unisphere myth.
After they put me down on the bed in the preparation room. No. I’ll be honest. After they held me down. I fought them, Damnit, I’m innocent. I was a classic case of someone who went down screaming and kicking. They won’t ever forget me. It took six Directorate orderlies to hold me in place while the malmetal restraints wrapped round my limbs. And after that, I still shouted. I cursed them and their families. I swore vengeance, that in two and a half thousand years I’d become the killer they wrongly thought I was, and I’d hunt down their descendants and torture them to death.
No use. They still infused the drugs. Consciousness faded away.
I woke up. The room which slowly came into focus around me was very similar to the preparation room I’d gone to sleep in. Stupidly, I was bloody grateful that I hadn’t known all that time flowing round me. The waste of my potential lives. But I was alive. Warm. And pleasantly drowsy.
There was something round my neck which seemed familiar somehow, something from the time in my life I’d lost. Icons in my virtual vision were blinking green, showing the memorycell channels into my neural structure were wide open.
Then that queen bitch Paula Myo came in. I tried to get up to throttle her. That’s when I found I was still restrained, with malmetal coiled round my arms and legs.
‘What the fuck is this?’ I shouted. My voice was weak.
‘I had you woken,’ Myo told me. ‘I have something for you. Something you’ve forgotten.’
‘What? What is this?’
‘You,’ she said, and took off her suit jacket. Something was glowing underneath her white cotton blouse. I could see shapes moving.
‘Help,’ I cried. ‘Someone. Help me.’ The coloured shadows on her abdomen began to writhe faster and faster. My virtual icons changed from green to blue, showing incoming impulses.
‘What is that?’ I whispered in fright.
She glanced down, as if only now becoming aware of the light. Her smile made her face ugly. ‘A kind of prison, I suppose. You know, in ancient times, necromancers used to draw pentagrams to trap demons in. They thought that if they were imprisoned they could use their powers. A very misplaced notion, I suspect. In this case geometry isn’t important, I simply had to have a large receiving element. Your thoughts are big, after all. But I managed to catch them. Not all of them, just the right ones. Those that were relevant to the crime.’
‘My thoughts?’ The icons expanded abruptly, wiping out my sight. Then faces emerged through the blue mist. Four of them in some kind of dilapidated room. Faces I knew. Svein. I remembered him. I remembered . . . being him.
I was the one standing in the desert outside Ridgeview while the rest of me lived our life. It was hot out there. Bloody unpleasant, actually. The sun burned my arms and face. I took a leak against some local plant. That way if the forensic team were any good, they’d find it and confirm the Fiech body’s DNA.
Then the air traffic control data playing in my virtual vision showed me the plane was taxiing to the runway. I took a breath and got the missile ready. A simple thing really, three of me had built it in the engineering centre under the Lake Hill house. Most of the components were off-the-shelf, and the custom ones were easy enough for the bots to manufacture. We built quite a few.
The finished product was a simple blue-grey launch tube over a metre long, with a shoulder saddle and a handle. It was heavy when I rested it on my shoulder; I squatted down on the stony sand to make the weight easier. I could see the big old Siddley-Lockheed lift into the sky; with its engine rumble faint in the hot desert air. It took what seemed an age to climb up to its cruise altitude, curving round the city in a wide arc. The passenger list said it was just about full, over a hundred and thirty people. It would be quick. Death in such a fashion always is. And the passenger list confirmed the Dynasty scum were on board. The missile’s sensors locked on. There wasn’t anything else in the sky to confuse them.
I fired the missile. The bloody launch tube slammed into my shoulder. If I hadn’t been bracing myself it would have knocked me down. The roar of the solid rocket booster was obscenely loud. For a couple of seconds I was overwhelmed. It was like being hit on the side of the head. Smoke was seething all round me. I crouched, staggered about. Then I recovered enough to stand still and look up into the wide open sky. The hyper-ram had kicked in, which made the missile just about impossible to see.
I expected the explosion to be bigger. This was just a white pinpoint flash, no fireball. But behind the blaze, the plane started to disintegrate, tumbling out of the sky. Dark fragments twirling away from the main body.
There was no way I could move. Actually, my whole nest of bodies froze up as I watched the spectacle. There was something obscenely beautiful about the sight, and better still was the knowledge that I had created it. If I could do this, I could do anything. I’d be able to force through Merioneth’s Isolation now. I had the courage and determination.
The first fragments hadn’t even reached the ground when I turned and hurried down to the shore where the boat was anchored. This point was critical. The whole area would be swarming with people. The unisphere was already flinging out alarms. Rescue crews and police would be dispatched within minutes. And any local citizens nearby would no doubt rush to help. My Volkep body released the warning message into the unisphere as I reached the shoreline.
After that it was a quick trip across the sea to Ridgeview. I waited on the station platform for my train back to Earth. It was an eerie experience. Everyone round me was accessing the unisphere reports of the plane crash. Nobody said anything, they were all too shocked at the disaster just outside town.
When I got back to Sydney I took a cab straight back to the apartment. The rest of me were a pleasant sensation of reassurance as I took the memory wipe drugs. The Volkep body took the array necklace from my neck, and smiled proudly. I could feel the connection with myself reducing, darkness replacing the joy and colour of my true memories. One contact remained, a single thread of experience: the alibi trip to Ormal. Damn, that stewardess was great-looking, I wish I hadn’t been so wrapped up on a mission.
Then I was alone. And the drugs kicked in, I knew nothing more.
Then I was without one of me. Just for an instant I felt regret. But I am many. The loss of a single body is irrelevant. That’s what I am, a New Immortal. That’s why I am. I continue even after the loss of one, or more. I live.
I was shivering when the glare of colour and sensation subsided into simple knowledge. Paula Myo was looking down at me, pulling her suit jacket back on. The flare of activity within her OCtattoo was subsiding.
‘Bitch!’ I couldn’t sense me. For the first time since I nested I was devoid of myself. One body with a single mind, completely alone.
‘Goodbye,’ said Paula Myo.
‘No. No!’ a Justice Directorate orderly had entered the room. He was carrying an infuser. Paula Myo nodded at him. ‘Carry on,’ she ordered.
‘Why have you done this to me?’ I cried. ‘This is inhuman!’
She turned in the door, her face blank as she stared at me. ‘You are the person who committed the crime. The whole person, now. This is your sentence. The sentence you tried to avoid. Justice has prevailed.’
The orderly pressed the in
fuser against my neck. I screamed, my mind crying out to the rest of me, to help me, to comfort me. There was no answer.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER
Nelson Sheldon was waiting in the entrance hall of the Justice Directorate as Paula came out of the lift. ‘How did it go?’ he asked.
‘Successfully. The true Dimitros Fiech is now serving his sentence.’
‘Shame about the rest of him.’
‘Not really.’
‘Oh?’
‘When suspension was first introduced, the Justice Directorate examined the idea of leaving convicts aware while their bodies slept. It was abandoned almost immediately. The experience was too much like sensory deprivation. The minds went insane very quickly under such circumstances.’
‘So how does that help us?’ Nigel asked curiously.
‘Dimitros Fiech is now unaware of his predicament. He’ll sleep soundly for the next two and a half millennia, and he’ll be offered extensive therapy when he gets out – assuming the Commonwealth is still around. Meanwhile on Merioneth . . .’
‘Ah. Svein Moalem’s nest knows part of him is in suspension. And as an Immortal . . .’
‘He’ll endure those two and a half thousand years aware of the Fiech body’s state. The punishment is shared. Or rather, it isn’t, because it’s all his. Just experienced in different ways.’
Nelson smiled. ‘We can live with that.’
‘Good, because I have no intention of returning to Merioneth.’
‘Thank you for going in the first place,’ Nelson said. ‘The Dynasty is most grateful. We don’t forget who are friends are.’
Paula grinned back shrewdly. ‘I’ll remember that.’
MANHATTAN IN REVERSE
It was five days after Easter, and Paris was soaking up the heat from an unseasonably bright sun. Paula Myo, Deputy Director of the Intersolar Commonwealth’s Serious Crimes Directorate, slipped her shades on as soon as she emerged from the marbled archway of the Justice Courts. Her escort squad pushed past the unisphere reporters crammed on the broad stone stairs. The clamour of shouted questions merged into a single unintelligible burst of noise. Even if she’d wanted to comment on the verdict she would never have been heard. It always amazed her how stupid reporters were, as if any one of them could have gained an exclusive under this kind of circumstances.
Not that her opinion would’ve been welcomed by the large crowd of protestors shouting and jeering behind the cordon which the city gendarmes had thrown up across the big boulevard outside. They’d certainly picked up on the Easter theme. Glaring holographic placards demanded RESURRECT OSCAR NOW. FREE THE MARTYR. OSCAR DIED FOR US, SAVE HIM FOR OUR SINS.
Her deputy, Hoshe Finn, was standing beside the Directorate’s dark Citroën limousine which was waiting at the foot of the broad stairs. ‘Congratulations, Chief,’ he muttered as the malmetal door curtained open for her.
Paula took one last glance at the snarling faces of the protestors, all directing their venom at her. It wasn’t what she was used to. Disapproval and not a little bigotry because of what she was, certainly. As the one person from Huxley’s Haven, otherwise known as The Hive, to live in the Greater Commonwealth she had long since accepted her own notoriety. Like all of Huxley’s residents she was genetically profiled to excel at her job, which in her case was police work, a profession which normally brought a decent amount of approval for the conclusion of a successful case.
Not this time.
The long Citroën turned smoothly into the Champs Elysées, and headed for the Place de la Concorde.
‘You know, even I’m wondering if I did the right thing,’ Paula said quietly.
‘I doubted,’ Hoshe said, ‘until you brought the families into the office to prepare our case. You were right when you said time doesn’t diminish the crime. Their children still died, a real death, not just bodyloss.’
‘Yeah,’ Paula said. Doubt unsettled her. It wasn’t what she was supposed to feel, not with her psychoneural profiling. Everything should be clear-cut, with no room for messy little emotional distractions. Perhaps the geneticists who designed me didn’t know quite as much about DNA sequencing as they thought they did.
Ten minutes later they drove down into the modern underground garage that had been cut out below the ancient five-storey building which housed the Directorate’s Paris office. Secure gates unfurled behind them. She wasn’t really worried about anyone trying to physically confront her; although the number of displaced from the worlds lost during the Starflyer War was still alarming now, eleven months after the war had ended. The amount of homeless and destitute people roaming the streets was too high, despite the city authority’s sincere efforts to find them places in restart projects on the fresh worlds.
A lift took them up to the fifth floor and the open-plan office she commanded. Her team were all behind their desks, which was unusual enough. They shot her concerned looks, as if they were sharing a collective guilt.
Alic Hogan was rising to his feet. ‘Sorry, Chief,’ he said. ‘He didn’t have an appointment, but we couldn’t really say no . . .’ Alic trailed off with a subdued glance over at Paula’s own office.
The door was ajar, showing her someone sitting in front of her desk.
Paula was quite pleased with herself as she went in and shut the door behind her. There weren’t many people in the Commonwealth who could walk into the Directorate building without being invited, let alone get all the way up to the fifth floor. And fewer that would want to. She’d narrowed the probables down to a list of three – Wilson Kime was the second.
‘Admiral,’ she said cautiously.
Wilson rose and shook her hand courteously. But then he was over three and a half centuries old, with manners from a bygone era; she wasn’t expecting an angry altercation. ‘So it really is true,’ he said ruefully. ‘You always get your man.’
‘Do my best,’ she said, annoyed with herself for sounding defensive. She was what she was, why should she ever apologize for that? ‘Though your lawyers were good.’
‘Best that money could buy. But you threw up a hell of a case, Paula.’
‘Thank you.’
‘That wasn’t exactly a compliment. Oscar Monroe sacrificed himself so the human race could survive a genocidal attack. Doesn’t that count for anything with you?’
‘Yes. But not at the intellectual level which I work at. I can’t allow that to influence me.’
‘Jesus,’ Kime muttered.
‘I did recover his memorycell myself,’ Paula reminded the old war hero. She didn’t go into how risky that had been. Kime’s own sacrifices during the final showdown with the Starflyer were at a level far above hers.
Millions had suffered bodyloss on the worlds invaded and obliterated during the conflict. Clinics across the Commonwealth were overwhelmed with people undergoing re-life procedures, where their force-matured clones were integrated with memories taken from their original bodies. Even so, a place could have been found for one of the human race’s greatest selfless heroes. Oscar’s personality was still intact in the memorycell she’d removed from his shattered corpse, it just needed a body to animate.
Instead she chose to put him on trial for previous crimes, namely a terrorist action at Aberdan Station decades before, which had killed dozens of innocent people. Defence council had argued that the young Oscar had been indoctrinated by extremists, that the passenger train wasn’t the actual target. The lawyer Wilson had retained was good, adding pleas for clemency from serious public figures, including Wilson himself. But Paula had prepared her case with equal proficiency. Time did not lessen the severity of the crime, she argued, and included testimony from the victims, the parents of children killed at Aberdan, all of whom were too young to have memorycells. They hadn’t bodylossed, they’d died a real death.
The judges had found Oscar guilty by three to two. He’d been sentenced to one thousand one hundred years’ suspension; as he was currently bodyless the senior judge ruled he shouldn’t be re-life
d until after the sentence was served. That was a judgement the defence team were already planning to challenge when Paula walked out of the court.
‘I hope you’re not here to ask a personal favour,’ she said to Wilson. ‘You know I can’t do that.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘What’s your next move? Appeal to the President for clemency and a pardon? I suspect you have the political clout to bring that off.’
‘Something like that. I’ll get him back, Paula. I won’t let him face the fate you have in store for him.’
‘The courts decided. That’s the trouble with this case, everyone thinks it’s personal. I don’t do personal.’
‘So you said.’
‘So what do you want?’
‘I’m here to ask a favour.’
‘Ha!’ she grunted as she sat behind the desk.
Wilson gave her a small smile. ‘Look, you need a break. We all do after what we went through on Far Away.’
‘I’m okay now, thank you.’
‘You’ve got half the human race gritting their teeth in scorn and anger when you walk past. Politically, you need to keep a low profile right now. Maybe do something else for a while.’
Paula opened her mouth ready to explain.
‘Yes!’ Kime said. ‘I know you have nothing else other than your work, that it’s how you were profiled. And that’s why I’m here. You remember Michelle Douvoir?’
‘No.’
‘One of Jean Douvoir’s daughters. She was living on Sligo when the Prime fleet hit it. She was lucky to get off.’
‘Yeah. Hoshe was there, too. He said it was tough.’
‘She didn’t want any special treatment, though God knows she could have had a mansion in any city on Earth if she’d asked. We owed her that much after what her father did. But I made sure she got to Menard; it’s one of the planets in phase three space which the Farndale company is fast-developing. Everything got accelerated after the war to give the refugees from the Lost23 worlds somewhere to stay. It’s a decent enough place, not too heavy on industry right now, of course, but somewhere she can start over.’
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