reMix

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  None of which was high on Brother Michael’s worry list. With the door shut, LizAlec pulled herself from his mind, leaving him naked with terror. Now he was on the other side of the glass door, beating at the grille with his fists, his screams of abuse mixed with pleas for his life.

  LizAlec shut down her mind and when that didn’t work scrabbled at the keyboard until she found a way to kill the sound. Now he just looked like some character from a tri-D, one where the audio card had crashed.

  “You really going to kill him?” It was the first thing Lars had said to her since he arrived with the goat. In fact, LizAlec had got round to wondering if he even recognized her. But of course he did. There weren’t that many fifteen-year-olds aboard The Arc with English, African and Uzbek DNA in them, especially not ones he’d tried to rape.

  “No,” said LizAlec, “I’m going to blow him into space.” Like there was a difference...

  Lars grunted and when she looked again he’d gone back to rubbing his chin in the fur of the goat’s neck. The sandrat didn’t even look up when she toggled the key to depress the chamber and open the airlock’s space-side door. Brother Michael exploded into the Big Black on a rush of air, his arms and legs flailing like those of a puppet. His heart flared in blind panic, and his mouth opened as its final scream was ripped out of his lungs by the vacuum.

  “Welcome to hell,” LizAlec said softly and those were the last words Brother Michael ever heard. Twelve to thirteen seconds is what it usually takes for a vacuum victim to black out. Though small children often only manage five. And there’s a ninety-second window during which it’s theoretically possible to pull someone back into a pressurized environment and revive them, with a medium-to-good chance they’ll recover fully.

  But there was no one to pull Brother Michael back — and there was no way LizAlec was going to let him die that quickly.

  At plus thirteen seconds he was paralysed, but still conscious: the outward rush of water vapour was already freezing his nose and lips. Traumatic convulsions racked his body at plus-fifteen seconds and then paralysis set in again, seconds later. Inside the soft tissues of Brother Michael’s flesh and inside his veins water vapour began to form, distorting his flesh. LizAlec couldn’t have kept him alive beyond this, not even if she had wanted to. But she was going to keep him conscious until death. And that’s what she did.

  A spider’s-silk overskin might have prevented embolism, but Brother Michael didn’t have one, so instead water vapour pooled inside him until his skin distended to bursting. He was panic-stricken, beyond thought. Already his heart rate was in decline. At plus-forty seconds his blood pressure plummeted until pressure in his veins matched that of his arteries. Brother Michael’s heart still tried desperately to beat, but blood could no longer flow.

  LizAlec never felt Brother Michael rupture open, because that was the point she let go of his terrified, gibbering mind — and felt it scrabble gratefully out of existence.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Welcome to Insanity

  What did LizAlec believe in? She believed in herself: at least, she did now. Believed, too, in the voice, low and hollow in her head. The voice that told LizAlec justice wasn’t always just, but it was dangerously satisfying.

  Maybe even addictive.

  “Get out of here,” LizAlec told Lars, but he just stared at her.

  “Go,” she told the sandrat, her feet locked firmly to the steel floor of the cathedral. She could feel the electricity that worked the soles, sense the field emanating from the bottom of her shoes. Come to that, she could feel fields emanating from the lectern, from the altar lights, even from the black-glass pulpit.

  The whole cathedral was a mess of shimmering EMFs that conflicted, overlapped, reacted with each other.

  “Get out,” LizAlec insisted. “Seal the safety doors on your spar, tell the others but don’t tell the bodyguards, okay?”

  The boy looked blank.

  “If you don’t lock the doors,” said LizAlec, “the goat will get hurt...”

  She should have realized that that was all it would take. Lars folded the bleating animal tightly in his arms and backed towards the Otis. He had no idea what LizAlec was planning to do, and he cared even less. She was a freak, all strange eyes and cropped hair. The girl’s edges were too sharp, the colours around her flashing bright like the skin of an epileptic chameleon. Every time he looked at LizAlec, her outline had changed.

  Lars preferred girls like Sara who kept her aura down to a few simple hues. Lars himself kept his Kirlian aura down to one colour only. He was rather proud of that. “Be safe,” said the door and then Lars was gone, safe inside the pressurized Otis, on his way back to the goat pen. Tomorrow the mammals were going out to The Arc itself. Out to the ring where Sister Aaron was making a world for them full of fields, trees, small streams. Ants cleaned up the leaf litter and worms aerated the soil, all twelve feet of it. The Arc wasn’t Eden, old or new, whatever CySat reported, but it was better than Planetside.

  Face it, anything was better than that. Time to go, thought LizAlec.

  Not that there was any point staying. The next cargo ship wasn’t due for two months, according to the lectern. Paris could have fallen by then, Lady Clare might be dead, put up against a wall by the Black Hundreds. If that hadn’t happened already. And as for Fixx, God only knew the trouble he’d be in.

  LizAlec sucked her teeth, ran one shaking hand through the stubble of her hair and wondered about getting another boyfriend, one who wasn’t so high-maintenance. It hurt her to think that Lady Clare might be right about anything, but she might be right about that.

  “Escape pod,” LizAlec demanded.

  “Situation normal,” announced the cathedral’s bioAI, speaking through a tiny pair of bioVox speakers inset into the eagle’s wings of the lectern. The voice had that irritating coded-by-number kindergarten tone LizAlec remembered from AIs at her first school.

  “There is an escape pod?” LizAlec asked crossly and walked back to the lectern to skim frames of safety data, tilting the eagle’s wings herself rather than waiting for the lectern to work out the best angle. Of course there was a pod: it was the bloody pulpit. LizAlec stared at the glass monstrosity rising like a block of black obsidian. She should have guessed from its size, not to mention the EMF field emanating from it.

  Now all LizAlec needed was some skin. Not a full balloon suit or even a half-balloon, just some basic skin, the white spider’s-silk kind.

  “Pressure skin,” LizAlec demanded and waited while the bioAI weighed up her request. It could find no obvious reason to give her one, but then there seemed no obvious reason to refuse. The skin arrived in a vacuum-sealed foil package, etched with NASA’s hologram and a shiny Tampertell copyright strap. No cheap Korean copies for the Brotherhood.

  LizAlec stripped. Not easy in zero G wearing wrong-size ReeGravs, but she managed it, albeit somewhat clumsily. After peeling the cotton smock off over her head, LizAlec lobbed the garment into the air for the pleasure of watching its material balloon out and swirl like a jellyfish. The croptop Jude had thrust at her just over a week before had rotted under the arms with sweat and LizAlec tried not to imagine what she smelt like to others, not that Lars would have noticed. Even the goats smelt cleaner than he did.

  Her knickers were vending-machine disposables and went the way of her croptop, into a waste tube. She didn’t bother trying to take them off her over ReeGravs, just ripped them apart at the side seams.

  To put on her second skin, LizAlec needed to take one foot out of her boot, push her foot hard into the tight elastic skin and get her foot back into the ReeGrav, all without overbalancing in zero G. Somehow, LizAlec didn’t see how she was going to do it.

  “Hold yourself to the floor,” said a voice.

  LizAlec jumped, tried to cover herself and then remembered the voice was in her head. Alex couldn’t really see her and even if he could, he was only a neural construct, nothing more.

  “Good,” said Alex. �
��You’re getting a grip on it.”

  Yeah, thought LizAlec... For a killer standing naked in a ring colony’s vast glass-walled cathedral talking to the ghost of her father, she was doing brilliantly. It was just a shame Lady Clare wasn’t there to be impressed.

  Hold yourself to the floor.

  LizAlec tried and failed, miserably. Every time she moved her unweighted leg, it tried floating upwards until she was almost tipped on her side. “It’s impossible,” said LizAlec, “you can’t defeat zero gravity, it’s basic...”

  “You reckon?”

  LizAlec nodded. Yes, she did reckon.

  “Throw that boot across the room,” said Alex.

  LizAlec bent to pick up her spare ReeGrav and heard Alex sigh.

  “Without touching it,” he insisted, sounding just like Lady Clare at her most patronizing.

  Fucking terrific, now she had two of them on her case. Furiously, LizAlec catapulted the heavy boot across the cathedral and was watching it bounce off a grey steel pillar before she even realized what she’d just done.

  Shit. She stopped the boot dead so it just hung there.

  “Now,” said Alex, “instead of flinging your shoe across the room, throw yourself at the floor, gently.”

  LizAlec did and found she was standing steady, her bare unbooted foot planted firmly on the marble tiles. It wasn’t gravity, not really, but it was a good imitation. All it took was, was what...?

  “The intelligence not to stand around naked looking for logic.” Alex sounded amused.

  “Yeah, right.” LizAlec rolled on the first piece of skin, feeling the spider’s silk tighten up her legs and over her stomach as molecular chains bound themselves around areas of potential stress. The suit fitted neatly up over her breasts and finished under her arms, sealing itself to her skin. The second piece went over her shoulders and down to her wrists, leaving LizAlec to thrust her fingers into gloves and roll them up until they sealed themselves tight.

  All that was left was a two-part, full-head face mask, but there was no way LizAlec was going to use both bits, though she knew she should. She’d already suffocated once that morning. The thought of smart silk tightening over her mouth was more than LizAlec could handle. Stupid or not, some prices were too high to pay. In the end, LizAlec compromised with herself by struggling into the balaclava section without first fitting the underlag that sealed off nostrils and eyes.

  She was done.

  “Computer...”

  The screen lit to show the bioAI was listening.

  “The dome’s about to blow out.”

  Diodes flared all along the eagle’s wing as the system ran emergency checks and came up with nothing. The bioAI was about to explain to LizAlec that she was in error, when LizAlec strode into the middle of the transept, stood below the pulpit and spread her arms.

  Strung between metal pillars, the glass walls rose all around her and hung overhead in the ceiling vault of the vast cathedral. What they were built from was marketed as SlowGlass, but was really a radiation-resistant polymer designed to play back on one side anything it saw on the other. But LizAlec didn’t know that — at least not consciously — and what she saw was so close to what there was outside it made no difference.

  Besides, she was too busy concentrating.

  Closing her violet eyes, LizAlec felt the crystal walls as sound, echo-locating her new senses against each constricting wall, feeling the walls hold solid as she pushed her mind against them. The cathedral was built to retain pressure far greater than the single atmosphere it now contained. Ribs of titanium alloy ran outside the glass walls, like fluid Art Nouveau pillars, as if Gaudi had started designing in liquid metal. Except the elegant metal tracery didn’t hold the cathedral up, it held it in, safely containing the glass walls.

  “Just do it,” said the voice of Alex. “Don’t think about it. Do it...”

  Reaching up to grip the rings to which she’d been bound only half an hour before, LizAlec did, punching out a harmonic so high that even she couldn’t hear it, throwing the notes in all directions, feeling the internal lattice of the crystal walls scream under the vibration until cracks appeared and molecular bonds broke.

  Vast sections of wall spun like oversized shrapnel into the void, almost taking LizAlec with them. All the warmth, all the air, everything that made space briefly human went in a single gulp as void and vacuum ripped out pews and prayer books, pulled the lectern from the floor. Banners, the simple altar, a fish tank, Brother Michael’s metal chair, everything exploded away into space as the void tried and failed to pull LizAlec after them. Her shoulders burnt with agony as she clung to the rings. Sheer will power held her feet to the floor.

  “Welcome to insanity,” said the voice in her head. “You’ll find it runs in the family.”

  Bitter cold ripped warmth from LizAlec’s body, a cold so absolute it was almost literally beyond her imagining. Breath was dragged from her lungs, her chest tightened in agony. LizAlec could feel Death waiting.

  So she let go. Of the rings that held her to the pulpit, of her identity, of her mind.

  For a second, as the dying wind pulled at her body, LizAlec thought she was about to join the vanishing detritus; but even as she was pulled off her feet, the pulpit cracked open and metal tentacles caught LizAlec and dragged her towards an opening pod.

  Nine seconds from grab to go was the safety margin LockMart allowed, but the pod had her bundled into a chair and was sealing itself within two. By the time LizAlec’s pod had cleared the shattered cathedral, another pod was already in position, rising from the floor. But there was no one else to rescue so it remained resolutely shut.

  “Heat,” LizAlec told herself. That was what the sensors keyed i iv on, body heat. Set against the cold black of the vacuum she must have burned in their vision like a flame. All the same, she’d have liked to see how The Arc’s AI was going to assimilate that little episode to its learning curve. She was still wondering about it when the little metal spiders came and began cutting away the spider’s skin covering most of her face.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Shanghai Surprise

  There were a number of things that Lady Clare Fabio expected to happen after she cut her deal with Lazlo. That Lazlo would send his goons after her anyway; that her beautiful Ile St-Louis house would soon be washed away by flood water; and that — deal or not — she’d probably still die without ever knowing if Lazlo had lied about LizAlec.

  What she wasn’t expecting was to find a Chinese general in her study, sitting at her escritoire, flipping though a leather-bound Mercurier atlas of Europe, her leather-bound Mercurier atlas of Europe. A book so valuable that Lady Clare kept it locked behind glass in a cupboard.

  Lady Clare glanced across at the cupboard and was shocked to discover that the General had forced its tiny brass lock. Not crudely enough to damage the door’s ivory inlay, but forced it all the same.

  “That was Florentine,” Lady Clare protested, nodding towards the cupboard.

  “Milanese,” the man corrected her, picking up a lit candelabra and walking over to look at the forced-open door. “A post-Risorgimento copy, but not a bad one...”

  For once in her life, Lady Clare was speechless. So General Que used the brief silence to introduce himself as Anchee’s father. He took it for granted that she would already know him as a major industrialist. Standing in front of Lady Clare and bowing slightly before putting out his manicured hand, the man announced that he’d briefly been a warlord but was now a private citizen from Shanghai.

  Lady Clare met his surprisingly gentle handshake and then sat quickly in her chair, before he had time to reclaim it. The General smiled.

  “Are you hungry?”

  It was such a stupid question that all Lady Clare could manage was a blank stare. Of course she was hungry. Everyone in Paris was starving, even the Prince Imperial. People didn’t eat grass or tree bark unless there was no alternative. “What do you think?”

  “Then let’s e
at,” suggested the General. He took a packet of hard tack from the pocket of his trench coat and tore open the foil. “Old rations,” he apologized, “but they have a high protein/carbohydrate mix, plus six minerals and four vitamins. I designed the formula myself.”

  The General took a biscuit and bit into it, catching the falling crumbs neatly in his upturned hand. Given the mildew that stained the wet floor, Lady Clare was surprised he bothered. But then, from the creases in his cavalry-twill trousers, she imagined the General was as meticulous about his table manners as he was about his dress. Old-fashioned, her own father would have called it. Though she was intelligent enough to accept that, even back then, others had regarded such behaviour as outdated, even obsessive or neurotic.

  There was a time she’d been like that: it just seemed so long ago.

  “Take one,” the General said, offering Lady Clare the packet.

  She did. It was salt rather than sweet and crumbled against the roof of her mouth. The taste was good but the biscuit was still difficult to get down.

  “Water,” suggested the General, dipping his hand into a poacher’s pocket inside his coat and pulling out a plastic flask of Canadian Spring. After two months of making do with grime-flecked rain collected from her roof, Lady Clare was shocked at how clear the water looked.

  By the time Lady Clare had drunk half the bottle and finished a second biscuit she felt exhausted.

  “Long-term hunger does that,” said the General. “Strips away the essential you. Not just your capacity to make decisions. Everything. Strength and alertness... your nerve. Why else are prisoners starved?” He spoke from experience, but she didn’t know that.

  When Lady Clare had eventually eaten a third biscuit and drunk all the water, she sat back in her Napoleon III desk chair and rested her elbows on its green-leather arms. For someone who’d spent more than half a lifetime intentionally trying to starve herself, Lady Clare found it ironic that getting three dry biscuits could make such a difference to her life. And then she realized the General’s biscuits contained more than just minerals and vitamins. Something in there was neuronal, chosen to cause hyperpolarization of her post-synaptic neurons. All across her skull, carefully selected neurons weren’t firing...