The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  In any event, the mood on the dock was sombre, dissolving only very gradually into a chemically fuelled abandon that never got much beyond slurred and maudlin. The realities of the kidnap raid on Mitzi Harlan’s entourage and the resulting firefight in the back streets of New Kanagawa were too bloody and brutal to allow anything else. The fallen were too evident by their absence, the stories of their deaths too grim.

  Mari Ado, cooked in half by a Sunjet blast, scrabbling with the last of her strength to get a sidearm to her throat and pull the trigger.

  Daniel, shredded by shard blaster fire.

  The girl he’d been with at the beach, Andrea, smeared flat when the commandos blew a door off its hinges to get in.

  Others I didn’t know or remember, dying in other ways so that Koi could get clear with his hostage.

  ‘Did you kill her?’ I asked him, in a quiet moment before he started drinking heavily. We’d heard news items on the voyage south aboard the rayhunter - cowardly slaughter of an innocent woman by Quellist murderers, but then Mitzi Harlan could have been blown apart by an incautious commando and the shoutlines would still have read the same.

  He stared away across the dock. ‘Of course I did. It’s what I said I’d do. They knew that.’

  ‘Real death?’

  He nodded. ‘For what it’s worth. They’ll have her re-sleeved from a remote storage copy by now. I doubt she’s lost much more than forty-eight hours of her life.’

  ‘And the ones we lost?’

  His gaze still hadn’t reeled in from the other side of the baling dock. It was as if he could see Ado and the others standing there in the flickering torchlight, grim spectres at the feast that no amount of alcohol or take would erase.

  ‘Ado vaporised her own stack before she died. I saw her do it. The rest.’ He seemed to shiver slightly, but that might have been the evening breeze across the Expanse, or maybe just a shrug. ‘I don’t know. Probably they got them.’

  Neither of us needed to follow that to its logical conclusion. If Aiura had recovered the stacks, their owners were now locked in virtual interrogation. Tortured, to death if necessary, then reloaded into the same construct so the process could begin again. Repeated until they gave up what they knew, maybe still repeated after that in vengeance for what they had dared to do to a member of the First Families.

  I swallowed the rest of my drink and the bite of it released a shudder across my shoulders and down my spine. I raised the empty glass towards Koi.

  ‘Well, here’s hoping it was worth it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I didn’t speak to him again after that. The general drift of the party took him out of reach and I got pinned with Segesvar in a corner. He had a pale, cosmetically beautiful woman on each arm, identically draped in shimmering amber muslin like paired, life-size ventriloquist dolls. He seemed in an expansive mood.

  ‘Enjoying the party?’

  ‘Not yet.’ I lifted a take cookie from a passing waiter’s tray and bit into it. ‘I’ll get there.’

  He smiled faintly. ‘You’re a hard man to please, Tak. Want to go and gloat over your friends in the pens instead?’

  ‘Not right now.’

  Involuntarily, I looked out across the bubble-choked lagoon to where the swamp-panther fight pits were housed. I knew the way well enough, and I supposed no one would stop me going in, but at that moment I couldn’t make it matter enough. Besides, I’d discovered some time last year that once the priests were dead and re-sleeved in panther flesh, appreciation of their suffering receded to a cold and unsatisfyingly distant intellectual understanding. It was impossible to look at the huge, wet-maned creatures as they tore and bit at each other in the fight pits, and still see the men I had brought back from the dead to punish. Maybe, if the psychosurgeons were right, they weren’t there in any real sense any more. Maybe the core of human consciousness was long gone, eaten out to a black and screaming insanity within a matter of days.

  One stifling, heat-hazed afternoon, I stood in the steeply sloping seats above one of the pits, surrounded by a screaming, stamping crowd on its feet, and I felt retribution turning soaplike in my hands, dissolving and slipping away as I gripped at it.

  I stopped going there after that. I just handed Segesvar the cortical stacks I stole and let him get on with it.

  Now he raised an eyebrow at me in the light from the torches.

  ‘Okay, then. Can I interest you in some teamsports, maybe? Like to come down to the grav gym with Ilja and Mayumi here?’

  I glanced across the two confected women and collected a dutiful smile from each one. Neither seemed chemically assisted, but still it felt bizarrely as if Segesvar was working them through holes in the small of each smooth-skinned back, as if the hands he had resting on each perfectly curved hip were plastic and fake.

  ‘Thanks, Rad. I’m getting kind of private in my old age. You go on and have a good time without me.’

  He shrugged. ‘Certainly can’t expect to have a good time with you any more. Can’t remember doing that anytime in the last fifty years, in fact. You really are turning northern, Tak.’

  ‘Like I said—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. You half are, already. Thing is, Tak, when you were younger you tried not to let it show so much.’ He moved his right hand up to cup the outer swell of an ample breast. The owner giggled and nibbled at his ear. ‘Come on, girls. Let’s leave Kovacs-san to his brooding.’

  I watched them rejoin the main throng of the party, Segesvar steering. The pheromone-rich air stitched a vague regret into my guts and groin. I finished the take cookie, barely tasting it.

  ‘Well, you look like you’re having fun.’

  ‘Envoy camouflage,’ I said reflexively. ‘We’re trained to blend in.’

  ‘Yeah? Doesn’t sound like your trainer was up to much.’

  I turned and there was a crooked grin across Virginia Vidaura’s face as she stood there with a tumbler in each hand, I glanced around for signs of Brasil, couldn’t see him in the vicinity.

  ‘Is one of those for me?’

  ‘If you like.’

  I took the tumbler and sipped at it. Millsport single malt, probably one of the pricier western rim distilleries. Segesvar wasn’t a man to let his prejudices get in the way of taste. I swallowed some more and looked for Vidaura’s eyes. She was staring away across the Expanse.

  ‘I’m sorry about Ado,’ I said.

  She reeled in her gaze and raised a finger to her lips.

  ‘Not now, Tak.’

  Not now, not later. We barely talked as we slipped away from the party, down into the corridors of the wet-bunker complex. Envoy functionality came online like an emergency autopilot, a coding of glances and understanding that stung the underside of my eyes with its intensity.

  This, I remembered suddenly. This is what it was like. This is what we lived like, this is what we lived for.

  And, in my room, as we found and fastened on each other’s bodies beneath hastily disarrayed clothing, sensing what we each wanted from the other with Envoy clarity, I wondered for the first time in better than a century of objective lifetime, why I had ever walked away.

  It wasn’t a feeling that lasted in the comedown panther snarl of morning. Nostalgia leached out with the fade of the take and the groggy edge of a hangover whose mildness I wasn’t sure I deserved. In its wake, I was left with not much more than a smug possessiveness as I looked at Vidaura’s tanned body sprawled in the white sheets and a vague sense of misgiving that I couldn’t pin to any single source.

  Vidaura was still staring a hole in the ceiling.

  ‘You know,’ she said finally. ‘I never really liked Mari. She was always trying so hard to prove something to the rest of us. Like it just wasn’t enough just to be one of the Bugs.’

  ‘Maybe for her it wasn’t.’

  I thought about Koi’s description of Mari Ado’s death, and I wondered if at the end she’d pulled the trigger to escape interrogation or simply a return to the famil
y ties she’d spent her whole life trying to sever. I wondered if her aristo blood would have been enough to save her from Aiura’s wrath and what she would have had to do to walk away from the interrogation constructs in a fresh sleeve, what she would have had to buy back into to get out intact. I wondered if in the last few moments of dimming vision, she looked at the aristo blood from her own wounds, and hated it just enough.

  ‘Jack’s talking some shit about heroic sacrifice.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  She swivelled her gaze down to my face. ‘That’s not why I’m here.’

  I said nothing. She went back to looking at the ceiling.

  ‘Oh shit, yes it is.’

  We listened to the snarling and the shouts outside. Vidaura sighed and sat up. She jammed the heels of both hands against her eyes and shook her head.

  ‘Do you ever wonder,’ she asked me, ‘if we’re really human any more?’

  ‘As Envoys?’ I shrugged. ‘I try not to buy into the standard tremble-tremble-the-posthumans-are-coming crabshit, if that’s what you mean. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head irritably. ‘Yeah, it’s fucking stupid, I know. But sometimes I talk to Jack and the others, and it’s like they’re a different fucking species to me. The things they believe. The level of belief they can bring to bear, with next to nothing to justify it.’

  ‘Ah. So you’re not convinced either.’

  ‘I don’t.’ Vidaura threw up one hand in exasperation. She twisted about in the bed to face me. ‘How can she be, right?’

  ‘Well, I’m glad I’m not the only one caught in that particular net. Welcome to the rational-thinking minority.’

  ‘Koi says she checks out. All the way down.’

  ‘Yeah. Koi wants this so badly he’d believe a fucking ripwing in a headscarf was Quellcrist Falconer. I was there for the Ascertainment, and they went easy on anything it looked like she was uncomfortable answering. Did anybody tell you about this genetic weapon she’s triggered?’

  She looked away. ‘Yeah, I heard. Pretty extreme.’

  ‘Pretty much in complete defiance of every fucking thing Quellcrist Falconer ever believed, I think you mean.’

  ‘We none of us get to stay clean, Tak.’ A thin smile. ‘You know that. Under the circumstances—’

  ‘Virginia, you’re about to prove yourself a fully paid-up, lost-in-belief member of the old-style human race if you’re not careful. And you needn’t think I’ll still talk to you if you cross over to that shit.’

  The smile powered up, became a laugh of sorts. She touched her upper lip with her tongue and glanced slantwise at me. It gave me an odd, electric sensation to watch.

  ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘Let’s be inhumanly rational about this. But Jack says she remembers the assault on Millsport. Going for the copter at Alabardos.’

  ‘Yeah, which kind of sinks the copy stored in the heat of battle outside Drava theory, don’t you think? Since both those events postdate any presence she might have had in New Hok.’

  Vidaura spread her hands. ‘It also sinks the idea she’s some kind of personality casing for a datamine. Same logic applies.’

  ‘Well. Yeah.’

  ‘So where does that leave us?’

  ‘You mean where does it leave Brasil and the Vchira gang?’ I asked nastily. ‘Easy. It leaves them scratching around desperately for some other crabshit theory that’ll hold enough water to let them go on believing. Which, for fully paid-up neoQuellists, is a pretty fucking sad state of affairs.’

  ‘No, I mean us.’ Her eyes drilled me with the pronoun. ‘Where does it leave us?’

  I covered for the tiny jolt in my stomach by rubbing at my eyes in an echo of the gesture she’d used earlier.

  ‘I’ve got an idea of sorts,’ I started. ‘Maybe an explanation.’

  The door chimed.

  Vidaura raised an eyebrow. ‘Yeah, and a guest list, looks like.’

  I shot another glance at my watch, and shook my head. Outside the window, the snarling of the panthers seemed to have settled down to a low grumble and an occasional cracking sound as they ripped the cartilage in their food apart. I pulled on trousers, picked up the Rapsodia from the bedside table on an impulse and went through to open up.

  The door flexed aside and gave me a view onto the quiet, dimly lit corridor outside. The woman wearing Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve stood there, fully dressed, arms folded.

  ‘I’ve got a proposition for you,’ she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  It was still early morning when we hit Vchira. The haiduci pilot Sierra Tres had got out of bed - her bed, in fact - was young and cocky, and the skimmer we lifted was the same contraband runner we’d come in on. No longer bound by the need to appear a standard, forgettable item of Expanse traffic and no doubt wanting to impress Tres as much as he impressed himself, the pilot opened his vessel up to the limit and we tore across to a mooring point called Sunshine Fun Jetties in less than two hours. Tres sat in the cockpit with him and made encouraging noises, while Vidaura and the woman who called herself Quell stayed below together. I sat alone on the forward deck for most of the trip, nursing my hangover in the cool flow of air from the slipstream.

  As befitted the name, Sunshine Fun Jetties was a place frequented mostly by tour-bus skimmers from Newpest, and the odd rich kid’s garishly finned Expansemobile. At this time of day, there was a lot of mooring space to choose from. More importantly, it put us less than fifteen minutes’ walk from the offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep at a pace that allowed for Sierra Tres and her limp. They were just opening when we arrived at the door.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said the underling whose job it evidently was to get up earlier than any of the partners and man the offices until they arrived. ‘I’m not sure that—’

  ‘Yeah, well I am,’ Sierra Tres told him impatiently.

  She’d belted on an ankle-length skirt to cover her rapidly healing leg, and there was no way of knowing from her voice and stance that she was still damaged. We’d left the pilot back at Sunshine Fun Jetties with the skimmer, but Tres didn’t need him. She played the haiduci arrogance card to perfection. The underling flinched.

  ‘Look,’ he began.

  ‘No, you look. We were in here less than two weeks ago. You know that. Now you want to call Tudjman, you can. But I doubt he’ll thank you for getting him out of bed at this time of the morning just to confirm we can have access to the same stuff we used last time we were here.’

  In the end it took the call to Tudjman and some shouting to clear it, but we got what we wanted. They powered up the virtual systems and showed us to the couches. Sierra Tres and Virginia Vidaura stood by while the woman in Oshima’s sleeve attached the electrodes to herself. She held up the hypnophones to me.

  ‘What’s this meant to be?’

  ‘High-powered modern technology.’ I put on a grin I didn’t much feel. On top of my hangover, anticipation was building a queasy, not-quite-real sensation that I could have done without. ‘Only been around a couple of centuries. They activate like this. Makes the ride in easier.’

  When Oshima was settled, I lay down in the couch next to her and fitted myself with phones and trodes. I glanced up at Tres.

  ‘So we’re all clear on what you do to pull me out if it starts to come apart?’

  She nodded, expressionless. I still wasn’t entirely sure why she’d agreed to help us without running it by Koi or Brasil first. It seemed a little early in the scheme of things to be taking unqualified orders from the ghost of Quellcrist Falconer.

  ‘Alright then. Let’s get in the pipe.’

  The sonocodes had a harder time than usual dragging me under, but finally I felt the couch chamber blur out and the walls of the off-the-rack hotel suite scribbled into painfully sharp focus in its place. Memory of Vidaura in the suite down the corridor pricked at me unexpectedly.

  Get a grip, Tak.

  At least the hangover was gone.

  The construct had dec
anted me on my feet, over by a window that looked out onto unlikely vistas of rolling green pasture. At the other side of the room by the door, a sketch of a long-haired woman similarly upright sharpened into Oshima’s sleeve.

  We stood looking at each other for a moment, then I nodded. Something about it must have rung false, because she frowned.

  ‘You’re sure about this? You don’t have to go through with it, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘I don’t expect—’

  ‘Nadia, it’s okay. I’m trained to arrive on alien planets in new sleeves and start slaughtering the natives immediately. How hard can this be?’

  She shrugged. ‘Alright.’

  ‘Alright then.’

  She crossed the room towards me and halted less than a metre away. Her head tipped so that the mane of silver grey slipped slowly forward and covered her face. The central cord skidded sideways down one side of her skull and hung like a stunted scorpion tail, cobwebbed with finer filaments. She looked in that moment like every archetype of haunting my ancestors had brought with them across the gulfs from Earth. She looked like a ghost.

  Her posture locked up.

  I drew a deep breath and reached out. My fingers parted the hair across her face like curtains.

  Behind, there was nothing. No features, no structure, only a gap of dark warmth that seemed to expand out towards me like negative torchglow. I leaned closer and the darkness opened at her throat, peeling gently back along the vertical axis of her frozen figure. It split her to the crotch and then beyond, opening the same rent in the air between her legs. I could feel balance tipping away from me in tiny increments as it happened. The floor of the hotel room followed, then the room itself, shrivelling like a used wipe in a beach bonfire. The warmth came up around me, smelling faintly of static. Below was unrelieved black. The iron tresses in my left hand plaited about and thickened to a restless snakelike cable. I hung from it over the void.