He was also coming round to realizing that the clumsy way Routesoft changed resolution wasn’t a bug in the code, it was LISA’s attempts to feed him information she thought he needed.
The feeling was kind of creepy. Especially as until then he wasn’t even sure LISA knew he was still on Luna. After all, his one great love had given him twenty-four hours to get out of her virtual hair and he was currently pushing the envelope at four days. Added to which, half of him reckoned her dues had been paid when she cloaked his shuttle to let it land and then blasted it off again for him, both without clearance.
It had been up to Fixx to find his own way off the Moon when the twenty-four hours were up. He hadn’t done it but then maybe she’d never expected him to. What she did do for him, though, was get rid of his original shuttle. She blew it for him, 205,000 klicks out from Darkside. A brief fireball no one noticed. Now that was murder, but Fixx figured he owed it to Earth not to take the risk that the shuttle was infected. Besides, where was the bio going to land it?
Back in Paris?
He’d ripped out all the streamers, trickwired the console. That way he figured the digital intelligence wouldn’t know it was getting dead until the last second. Maybe it never knew. Fixx shook his head, sliding in through the CasaNegro’s bead curtain. He left those kind of questions to kids like LizAlec. Late thirties was way too old to still be dealing with that why/what/who-are-we shit. And, anyway, he was too tired. It was time to get a beer quick, before he decided he needed something stronger.
The CasaNegro was larger than he’d expected, cleaner too. Eight or nine tables and a long bar at the far end racked up behind with dust-covered bottles. The ones that got drunk were smudged with heavy fingerprints, the others were shrouded white with grit. Above them all was a dumb sign of a neon broad who did nothing but take her bikini off and then put it back on again.
Overhead a ceiling fan thudded loud as a ‘copter blade but did little except shuffle the hot air around. Drink first, then think wasn’t on the level of I think therefore I am but it was still one of his Da’s maxims, along with Paid his taxes, died broke... The prison service should have etched that on his gravestone, except they cremated him out at Kilmainham Gaol in a job lot during a typhoid wave when Fixx was fourteen.
Fixx saw Jude before she saw him. She was behind the wooden bar, mopping down its battered surface with what looked like an old T-shirt. “Beer,” Fixx said, leaning on the bar, his elbow resting heavily on a corner of her cloth. The woman looked up in irritation and then recognized him.
“Round here we say please,” Jude said loudly, “Sweedak?”
Fixx glanced round at the silent regulars, smaller than him, most of them. Weaker, too, if the wasted muscles in their arms were any clue. But they looked drunker and besides, there were way more of them.
“That so?” Putting a nervous-looking Ghost on the bar, Fixx stepped back and sketched his trademark bow, the one that once had Sydney Opera House trashing chairs in delight. Then he picked up his kitten and smiled sweetly.
“A cold beer... please.”
In the corner a boy laughed and Jude slammed down a cold tube. Her eyes were flat with anger and a small tic pulled at the side of her mouth. He wasn’t the only one who didn’t like being mocked.
The beer was some Hispanic brand Fixx had never even heard of. He took it just the same, hooked his thumb under the top and pulled it up. Ice frosted the sides of the tube. “Open a tab,” Fixx said, pouring cold sweet beer down his throat.
Jude pointed to the sign below the neon girl which read “No tabs, no promises, definitely no credit.” Beneath it, someone had scrawled something obscene involving MickMouse dollars.
It was Fixx’s turn to shrug.
They compromised. That involved Fixx putting his platinum HKS card behind the bar, even though Jude pointed out it was useless to her unless he wanted her to sell it on to some guy who could strip out the account and run up a strictly illegal credit debt. He didn’t.
“Want a drink?” Fixx asked.
Jude shook her head, flashing him a cocktail smile: one part anger, two parts contempt. “I ain’t had a drink in years,” she said flatly, her accent even thicker than back at LunaWorld. Or maybe that was just memory.
“Why you bother me?”
“LizAlec,” Fixx reminded her.
“You want know ‘bout that little girl?” Only someone like Jude could describe LizAlec as little, thought Fixx, looking at the woman’s broad shoulders. Most bars he knew had a step up behind the counter, to give the bar staff delusions of grandeur and keep punters in their place. Behind Jude’s bar a good foot had been hacked out of the tiled floor and crudely ‘creted over. And still Jude towered over everyone but Fixx.
“Yeah,” said Jude, watching his eyes check behind the bar, “Don’t want to put them off spending their money. Now you tell me ‘bout that girl, ‘bout your special friend...”
Fixx thought about it.
“Her name’s Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio,” said Fixx, watching Jude’s blue eyes. Nothing, not even a flicker of recognition, but then, no surprise either. “She got kidnapped from Arrivals Hall nearly three weeks ago. It didn’t make CySat/Luna?”
Jude jerked her chin towards a group of dark-haired boys clustered round a Sonysim. Above its surface a tiny, impossibly pneumatic American schoolgirl was stripping off her cheerleader’s outfit and doing something with her baton the makers hadn’t intended. It was LaLa from PsychoPopsycles. The gameware was ten years out of date and obviously corrupted.
“Honey, it look like t’watch the newsfeed?”
Fixx had to admit it didn’t. He took the fresh tube Jude offered and flipped its top. When he put it down again a small plate of almonds had materialized at his elbow.
“Synth,” Jude said curtly. “Still, better than t’shit they feed you up at LunaWorld.”
Fixx washed away the almonds’ salt taste with another tube, then shook his head when Jude offered a fourth.
“You seen her?” Fixx asked. He tried to keep his voice casual, but he wasn’t fooling either of them. If she hadn’t seen LizAlec then Fixx wouldn’t have been there. And if Jude really had seen LizAlec then the girl was in trouble. Bad trouble. LizAlec was many things, but spoilt was the big one. When she slummed it was for a reason and CasaNegro wasn’t her style.
LizAlec liked the Crash&Burn back in Bastille for the black clothes and the anorexic amphetamined-out would-be Warhols who hung out there in silence, touting old Thai RomReaders loaded up with Rambeau. Where LizAlec was concerned, not even terminal irony could excuse CasaNegro’s white-washed adobe walls, its chrome jukebox and kitsch neon stripper. Hacienda Hispanic definitely wasn’t her thing. Nothing but dire need would have put LizAlec through that bead-curtained door.
Of course, the real irony was that, Bastille bars apart, LizAlec’s concept of living dangerously probably ended where Jude’s idea of normality began.
“And the boy...?” Fixx said.
Jude smiled, sketched a height line just about level with her shoulders. “So high, matted hair, dog jaw, smelt...” She racked her memory for other clues. “One lung,” she said, finally.
Fixx just looked.
“One lung,” Jude repeated. “And a steel bottle, ‘bout here.” She sketched in an imaginary shape at her side, a little above her hip. “Sandrat, see. One flesh lung for air, one bottle for empty tunnels...”
“Real san’rats all dead,” interrupted a boy in combats, leaning himself against Jude’s bar. Jude frowned, but said nothing. “They’re all dead,” the boy told Fixx. “That freak was just pretending. He had two good lungs.”
Imperceptibly, Jude shook her head, disagreeing.
“And the girl with him?” Fixx asked. “You saw her?”
The boy grinned. “Yeah, pretty, or would be if her face was mended.” He glanced knowingly at the bruises stained yellow down one side of Fixx’s face.
Fixx shook his head. “Police,” he said, lightly touch
ing his cheek.
The boy nodded. That was something he understood. For a second he glanced at Jude, as if wondering how far he dared go. “I saw police this morning,” he said hesitantly. “Looking for her...”
Jude was wide awake now, her lazy boredom gone the way of the act it was. “You didn’t tell me,” she said crossly.
The boy shrugged. “You didn’t ask.” That was when Fixx finally realized that Jude was the combat kid’s mother.
“What did they look like?” demanded Fixx, getting his question in before Jude and Leon could start quarrelling for real. “Japanese?”
“Nah,” the boy helped himself to a handful of dried almonds from a saucer. “Thin guys, weird voices, both wearing...” He ran his hand across his front, indicating lapels.
“A suit,” said Fixx.
“If you say so...” Leon shrugged. “Nasty-looking people,” he added, scooping the rest of the nuts into his filthy palm. “Not good. They had...” His hands indicated a bulge under one armpit. Fixx got the message.
Chapter Twenty
Running the Loop of Redemption
“...QueCorps,” LizAlec was saying, her head bowed as she walked beside Brother Michael, the scarf still wrapped round her head. On her feet she now wore a pair of ReeGravs, small electromagnets turning on and off with the flex of each foot.
She still clanked as she walked, which Brother Michael didn’t, but it was less undignified than hauling herself round corridors in free fall, which was what she’d been doing until Brother Michael told someone to find her proper shoes.
The shuttle didn’t have artificial gravity.
“The holding company for Shanghai Orbital and Ford eeAsia. My father also has shares in CySat Beijing, Petronas 2Towers in KL. Oh...” LizAlec said, tossing in something else she remembered Anchee saying, “and he’s planning to build a health spa on Io.”
Brother Michael kept silent, but LizAlec could tell by the way he kept his step in time with hers as she clanked slowly along the corridor that she had his full attention. “We’re going to The Arc, aren’t we?” LizAlec said.
“Is that where you want to go?”
She nodded, enthusiastically. For the briefest second, she considered telling Brother Michael everything. About the kidnapping and beating. That all she really wanted to do was get back to Paris and Fixx. But instinct told her that wasn’t what the priest wanted to hear.
And the best way to handle grown-ups was to give them what they wanted: then duck and weave before they could suss out they’d been had. It worked with her mother. Actually... LizAlec paused in her stride, thinking about it: no, it didn’t. Otherwise she wouldn’t have ended up at St Lucius again. She’d still be hanging out at the Crash&Burn or Schrödinger’s Kaff trying to scam her way into Fixx’s bed.
LizAlec snorted. She didn’t buy into Lady Clare’s reasoning that she was getting shipped out to the new St Lucius for her own safety. It was for her mother’s convenience — that and to get her away from Fixx — and it didn’t have to be the Moon either, there was a perfectly good St Lucius in New York.
She could have got out on a Corps Noblique passport. True, the Reich had been closing in but even they wouldn’t have dared arrest a young girl travelling under a safe pass. Not if it was done in front of enough cameras.
Face it, no one had shot down the Paris-St Lucius shuttle, had they? Not after C3N had pre-broadcast its launch, stressing it was stuffed full of kids.
“Has Paris fallen?” LizAlec demanded without thinking, her question out of her mouth before she realized. “A friend at school...” LizAlec said hurriedly. The rest of her sentence trailed away into embarrassed silence.
“No, not yet.” The tall priest looked thoughtful, one arm sliding sympathetically round the girl’s thin shoulders. “You have family in Paris?”
LizAlec shook her head hastily. “No, my father’s in Shanghai.”
“And your mother?”
LizAlec froze, suddenly realizing she knew less than nothing about Anchee’s mother. Which, when LizAlec thought about it, told her all she needed to know. “I don’t know my mother.”
Brother Michael’s smile was compassionate. “Such is the world...”
From the way his voice trailed away, LizAlec wasn’t sure if he assumed her mother was dead or just divorced. Mind you, the Family were fundamentalist, so to Brother Michael they were probably interchangeable.
“The boy...?” Brother Michael nodded over his shoulder at Lars, who was turning somersaults along the corridor ceiling and giggling to himself. He was dribbling, too, pearl-like drops of spittle strung out from his mouth.
“He’s...” LizAlec shrugged. She was unwilling to commit to anything Lars might later contradict but, more than that, she didn’t want Brother Michael separating the two of them, not while she had that bioSemtex worm curled up inside her face.
“Lars relies on me,” LizAlec said. It was meant to sound smooth, but it came out clumsy, childlike.
The tall priest shrugged. The Arc didn’t really need a goat boy: every simple-minded Bible-belt fanatic in the US wanted a place on board. And even Brother Michael was shocked by the number of lottery tickets the Family had sold. Humbled was the word he used, but it translated the same.
Heiresses were something different. The primal couple might be chosen by lottery to go and reclaim Eden but there was always room for another suitable handmaiden. Though it obviously depended on how the trusts were set up. It was a waste of his time to fawn over some kid who couldn’t buy a set of powerblades without getting written agreement from at least two trustees.
Maybe she was being too cynical, thought LizAlec, maybe the man really was after her soul: but given the way his fingers now rested lightly on the nape of her neck, she doubted it. Cash first, LizAlec decided, and then something rather more basic.
“If we could have cabins close together?”
“Cabins?” Brother Michael asked. Beyond his shoulder, LizAlec could see Sister Rachel smile sourly.
“This is a cargo shuttle,” Brother Michael said gently. “We have two dormitories. Men to port, women starboard, just like Noah’s ark. Though I have a small prayer room, just behind the cockpit. You could sleep there, for tonight only...”
Very softly, one of the bodyguards shook her head; so briefly that for a second LizAlec almost thought she was imagining it.
“No,” said LizAlec. “I’ll sleep in the dorm.”
“No special treatment.” Brother Michael nodded to himself. “Perhaps that’s for the best.”
-=*=-
The Arc looked like nothing so much as a fat ring-doughnut with a pen pushed through the hole in the middle. Except that, instead of just hanging there, the doughnut was attached to the pen with four vast steel spars and the ten-klick-long pen was actually the Arc’s spindle, capped at the top end with a vast Gothic cathedral fashioned from glass and steel.
Far down at the other end of the spindle were the computing rooms of NilApocrypha, where every word of the Old Testament was to be referenced and cross-referenced by vast banks of parallel processors. Until God’s certain opinion — on everything — could be had at the click of a key. The “southern” end was also where the shuttle was to dock, swallowed whole by an iris-ringed door in the spar.
But that wasn’t what was impressive.
What impressed the fuck out of LizAlec, though she wouldn’t admit it, was the doughnut itself, a fat fifty-kilometre silver ring that spun twenty times an hour around the spindle, like a vast wheel rolling around a hub.
LizAlec decided to be impressed. Anchee would have been.
“It’s incredible,” she said softly.
Beside her, Brother Michael smiled.
“No,” said Brother Michael, “it’s a miracle.” The bodyguard on the other side of him sighed slightly and LizAlec realized it wasn’t the first time she’d heard that line. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. To build that...
“It’s huge,” said LizAlec. None of th
e newsfeeds had done The Arc justice in their descriptions. God, if only she had a camera. LizAlec could just imagine what CySat would pay for on-site digital grabs of the finished colony. They had shots of the squat fat drones that would haul it out into deep space and they had long-range grabs of the outside seen from Earth, from the Moon, from passing shuttles. But shots of the actual inside...?
“Fabulous,” LizAlec whispered to herself, almost shivering with excitement.
“God’s purpose always is.”
“How many people?” asked LizAlec.
“Just ten of us,” Brother Michael said, sounding amused. “Sister Aaron, myself, Brother Gerard, my two protectors and five handmaidens. We tend to our hope and the world.” Brother Michael gestured towards the distant ring. “Once the new primal couple are in place the world will be left to look after itself. Well...” Brother Michael smiled. “Perhaps with a little help.”
LizAlec nodded, watching the distant ring on one screen, while on another the cargo shuttle got closer and closer to the central spar. The man was barking, certifiably mad. “What about the animals?” LizAlec asked.
“We loaded American reptiles last month, this month it’s smaller African mammals. Of course...” His voice sounded sad, resigned...” These days it’s hard to find species that aren’t geneered, which means it takes us longer.” He nodded towards the hold. “That’s why we ended up having to buy those beasts from the Voertrekkers. But then, we don’t want sheep that produce human milk, or rice that cooks itself. We want what God intended...”
Which counted her out, LizAlec thought darkly. Though how right she was LizAlec didn’t yet know. The product of an inactivated clone and frozen sperm, especially one whose cortex was overrun with bioClay symbiote, wasn’t what the Family had in mind. As for being the daughter of Alex Gibson... The girl shivered and turned her attention back to the screen. However hard she tried, she couldn’t take in the size of that spinning wheel.
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