by Eric Brown
A silver ambulance, with Phoenix Line emblazoned along its flank, drew up on the cliff-top. Two uniformed men climbed from the cab and came down the steps, and the woman allowed herself to be walked away without so much as a backward glance.
He followed, burdened with grief for the woman. He crossed the greensward towards his chalet and, as the vehicle started up, he recalled her words of yesterday, when she had said that they were very much alike. Fuller realised that, of course, they were. He also realised their difference: the woman was condemned to existence with the full and terrible knowledge of her inhumanity, denied release by her programming and unable to regain that which she once had been.
Fuller thought of the city, of the life and the energy there. He turned and watched the silver vehicle drive from the estate, carrying away the woman who was no longer human.
* * * *
Big Trouble Upstairs
I’m on the Barrier Reef pleasure ‘plex, looking for a year-wife. Someone small and dark this time—Oriental maybe. The jacuzzi lagoon is foaming around me and my lover, a cute Kampuchean fluxer, when my handset goes ber-leep. I wade into the shallows, the kid big-eyed on my hip, and take the call.
“Sorry to come between you and your fun, Isabella.” Massingberd stares up from the back of my hand, playing the chaperone. “But you’re on.”
The spacer senses the goodbye and lays a soft cheek against my breast. I enter her head, tone down the love I’ve been promoting thus far, damp her synaptic fires.
“Give it me, Mass,” I sigh.
“You’re gonna love this one,” he begins, and gives me a big wink.
There’s a laser-slayer loose on the Carnival Sat, wasting innocents like mad-crazy. The bastard zero’d the security team first, along with the mechanical defences—and he has a dozen workers imprisoned on the satellite, to pick off at his leisure.
“It’s your kind of job, Is. You’re going in there alone.”
“Say, thanks...”
“A shuttle’s on its way,” he says, and signs off.
Soo-Lee clutches me. “Isabella...”
“There’ll be other times,” I say. But not with me... Why do I do it—why? It was love at first sight. I felt that yearning, gut pang the second I set eyes on Soo-Lee a week back. She was picking scabs from her new hand-jack on the beach outside my villa. Of course, she wouldn’t have given me a second glance, but I have ability.
Ten years ago I tested psi-positive and had the cut—but the operation went wrong. It was too successful. Instead of coming out plain telepathic, I emerged mega-telepathic. Which meant that, as well as being able to read minds, I had the power to control a subject’s thoughts, make them do just whatever the hell I wanted. Pretty neat, okay.
I was the first of a new line.
We’re a dozen now, closely supervised.
And I have this thing about kids. Whenever I see one I like I get in there and tamper, fix, and soon they’re all gooey-eyed, eager.
This past week on the ‘plex we made a striking couple: an anorexic, slit-eyed Enginegirl and a six-six eighteen-year-old Rwandan Watusi with scarified cheeks and dreads. That’s me.
The love I promote is doomed, of course. I can’t sustain that degree of adoration in a subject for long. The past few years I’ve instilled ersatz-love for the period of a six-month or one-year marriage contract—then withdrawn. It’s kinder that way, to both parties. A year is long enough to live a lie, even when you’re in love.
I dump Soo-Lee on the golden sand and sluice apathy around her frontal lobe, and by the time I step into my villa she’s beginning to wonder what she ever saw in me. Soon Isabella Manchester will be nothing more than a pleasant event in the memory of her youth, and then not even that.
Massingberd knows. He was the only person I could bring myself to tell. He once asked me why I didn’t turn my ability on myself. “Why don’t you cure yourself, Is? Fix your head so you don’t lust after these kids...”
It’s no longer illegal, but oldsters like Mass have throwback morality.
“‘Cos if it wasn’t kids it’d be women or men. I’d be no better off, just the same. I need love, okay? I guess I’m insecure. I can’t change what I am because of why I am-” And stopped there.
I didn’t even know Massingberd well enough to tell him why I am.
“I need love and it’s so easy for me to get it,” I’d often say. “But how can that be love?”
* * * *
Skip six hours and I’m aboard the shutt on autopilot, heading away from the plane of the ecliptic towards the Carnival Sat. And mine’s the only vessel going thisaway: all the other traffic is streaming Earthwards, sunlit specks corkscrewing down the gravity-well like gene-data on a DNA helix.
From this far out the satellite is an oblate spheroid, a yuletide bauble set against the Pleiades. The lower hemisphere is in darkness—the maintenance section that keeps the whole show ticking. Above, the working end of the Sat is a fuzzy golden blur. Closer proximity provides resolution: I see avenues and arcades, rides and sideshows. One big fun city down there.
Massingberd’s saying: “... carved up two hundred Japanese and American tourists before the emergency shuttles could get the rest out. There’s around a dozen workers still in there, plus the killer.”
“You sure he didn’t sneak out on a shuttle?”
“I had a ‘head screening every ship that left, Is.” He looks up at me solicitously. “Hey, you be careful, okay?”
The sentimental old bastard. “I’ll be fine, Mass.”
“I’m putting you through to the Director who’s still in there-”
But he’s cut off by a screenful of static. I shake my hand impatiently and the screen clears. Now another mugshot regards me—the big cartoon head, all ribbons and grin, of Minnie Mouse.
“I’m fouled up with an entertainment channel, Mass!” I yell. I’m approaching the Satellite fast and I need the Director’s talk-down. I can’t hit destination cold. I’d be easy meat for the laser-slayer.
“Massingberd!” I cry again.
“Manchester?” Minnie Mouse asks.
“Huh?” I goggle.
“Are you reading, Manchester?” Minnie’s fatuous grin belies the impatient tone.
“Reading,” I say. “Who the hell...?”
“Director Maria Da Cruz,” Minnie says, a girl’s voice muffled by latex.
“Why the fancy dress, Director?”
“You’ll find out when you get here. Frankly, your surprise cannot equal mine. I was expecting a combat squad, at least. We have a maniac rampant up here, and they send me a...” She subvocalizes the rest, not for my ears, but I make out what might be, “... a witchdoctor.”
I smile. “What’s the score, Minnie?”
“I’ll meet you at rim-lock twelve. The killer’s somewhere on the far side of the complex. Could be anywhere within an area of twenty square kilometres. My workers are in the central plaza, in the dorms. They fled there when the shooting began.” As Minnie prattles I have the weird sensation of watching a kids’ video crossed with the soundtrack of a cop show. “They’re pinned down and can’t get out.”
“Have they tried?”
“You’re joking, of course. The fire came from the far rim, and the dorms open onto the central concourse. It’d be an automatic death sentence for the first person who shows their face. You’ve got to get these people out.”
“My job is to get the killer,” I tell her. “Then they’re safe.”
“In that case I hope you’re well armed,” Minnie says condescendingly.
I have the last laugh. “As a matter of fact I don’t believe in the things.”
The Minnie head deprives me the satisfaction of seeing her face drop. She grins idiotically until I cut the link.
The shutt makes one hi-altitude orbit of the satellite and glides towards the docking rig in the underbelly, blindside of the killer. We contact with the delicacy of balloons kissing.
Seconds later I float out, cy
cle myself through the airlock and peer cautiously into the long, curving corridor. I scan for the killer’s manic brainvibes, but the coast is clear. I move inside.
Minnie stands arms akimbo, awaiting me.
Maria Da Cruz is tense and afraid, of course, but beneath this I access her identity. She’s an intelligent, lonely kid, twenty-one in a week, and in any other circumstances I’d like to get to know her better.
As it is-
“So here you are at last!” She kicks something towards me, a black rubber puddle sprouting ears.
“What the hell?”
“Get into it. Don’t argue.” She looks me up and down, appraising. “You’re tall, but you’ll fit at a stretch.”
I pick it up. A Mickey suit. I step into the booties and pull up the clinging rubber leggings over those of my onepiece. “Now, if you don’t mind telling me what all this is about?” I could take time off scanning for the killer and read her, but I’m jumpy at the thought of being fried alive.
“This allows us greater freedom,” Da Cruz says. “The killer isn’t potting cartoon characters—they’re all robots. I was in the storeroom when the killing began. I saw what was going on and dug these out. They’re the last we have in stock, from the days before actors were superseded by ‘bots.”
I stretch the torso over each shoulder and let go with a snap. Then I pull on the zippered head; my own bulges between the ears like a big egg. Mickey’s never been so tall.
“You weren’t kidding, were you?”
“Eh?” I’m having difficulty with the zipper.
“You aren’t armed.”
“Told you so.”
“Then how the hell do you hope to kill the killer?”
I give her a big smile before fastening the zipper. “An old African custom,” I say. “I’ll think him dead.” Which isn’t that far off the mark, minus the ethnic bit.
“Okay, just one more thing,” she says. “You gotta walk like the real Mickey. Like this.”
I stare at her through the gauze where Mickey’s tonsils should be. She’s strutting up and down the corridor, waving her arms, twitching her ass. If only Massingberd could see us now.
“Your turn, Manchester.”
So I strut my stuff before her, elbows working invisible bellows. “Point your boots! Swing your tail! This has to be perfect, Manchester. If this bastard so much as suspects...”
She doesn’t have to finish that line.
“Fine. You got it. Now where you want to go first?”
The thought of parading myself out there like a sitting duck—or rather mouse—gives me the heebies.
I quit wriggling and squat on my heels. The suit is tight and uncomfortable, squashing me short. “First, before I start risking my life—‘cos I don’t want to be found dead in this fucking thing—first I want to know more about the killer. Like how he managed to waste an entire security team and blow the defence system?”
I keep a probe out for the killer. I have a range of just over a kilometre, though it’s getting weak by then. We’re quite alone at present.
“The security unit? The killer sprayed them with Procyon animalcules. They reduced the unit to slush one hour before the fireworks began.”
“Yech! And the mechanical defences? The ‘bots?”
“Deactivated beforehand. That should have set off an alarm in computer control, but that’d been fixed too.”
“Whoever the killer is, he sure knows his stuff. Could it be someone who works here?”
She shrugs. “Why not? We employ nearly twenty thousand permanent staff.”
“Most of them evacuated with the trippers? So that leaves only the dozen workers holed up in the dorms.”
“Plus the killer.”
I think about it. “Has there been any shooting since the dozen staff made it to safety?”
“No...” Da Cruz is getting my drift.
“So perhaps, just perhaps, the killer is a worker. He or she hides with the others after the firing’s through -providing an alibi.”
“You think that likely?”
“At the moment anything’s possible,” I say.
Da Cruz pushes herself from the wall with a practised rubber bounce. “Any more questions?”
“Yeah... how come a girl as young as you gets to be the Director of an outfit as big as this?”
That stops her in her tracks.
“How do you know how old I am?”
“I’m well informed,” I tell her. “Well?”
She shrugs. “I work hard.”
“You must be very talented.”
She’s suddenly uncomfortable, under the Minnie suit. I read that she was a solitary kid, bullied at school, whose only way of showing them was to succeed. But there’s still something lacking, I read. Success isn’t all.
I have the almost irresistible urge to go in there and help her out, ever so gently. But I restrain myself. This is neither the time nor the place—and there’s work to be done. Besides, I’m getting to the stage where I need real love, love that isn’t forced.
“Lead the way,” I say.
“Where to?”
“The workers’ dorm, or thereabouts. I can do my stuff at long range.”
She regards me. “Okay. You ready?”
We cake-walk into the open, beneath the arching crystal dome, along with a hundred other cartoon characters. They’re operating with an attention to duty that could be mistaken for macabre celebration of the surrounding carnage.
The fear I feel at our vulnerability is soon replaced by horror. Gobbets of human flesh occupy parks and gardens, tree-lined boulevards and exhibitions and fun-rides. Families lie in messily quartered sections, each chunk still grotesquely parcelled in the appropriate portion of clothing. Lower halves of once human beings sit in the seats of whirlers and spinners, still whirling and spinning in mechanical ignorance of their dead cargo.
And—this somehow makes the slaughter all the more tragic—robotic Mickeys and Minnies, Donalds and Plutos move from body to lasered body, patting dismembered heads, shaking lifeless hands, posing for pictures never to be taken beside the lacerated remains of Junior and Sis.
Da Cruz continues galumphing along. She’s seen it all before. I slow and stare aghast until I hear a, “Psst!” and see a tiny gesture from Minnie up ahead. I quicken up and join her, strutting like a fool.
We leave the boulevard, cross a facsimile Wonderland and come to the croquet lawn. The Queen of Hearts strides around and calls imperiously, “Off with their heads!” And by some ghastly coincidence the Alice ‘bot stands, hands on hips, her head removed by a freak sweep of this killer’s laser.
Da Cruz ducks behind a hillock and points. “There,” she says, indicating the entrance of a large rabbit burrow.
I close my eyes and concentrate on the workers’ dorm beneath this make-believe world.
“What are you doing?” Da Cruz asks in a whisper.
“Just casting dem ol’ black spells,” I jape.
I make out eleven minds down there. I go through them one by one, discarding each in turn as innocent. All I read is fear and apprehension and, in a couple of cases, even hysteria. I’m looking for the bright brainvibes of a maniac. This bunch is clean.
“You a telepath?” Da Cruz asks in a small voice as I open my eyes and clear my head with a shake.
“Something like that,” I tell her. “I thought you said there were a dozen workers? I scan only eleven.”
“Over there.” She points a white-gloved hand beyond the burrow to a hulking structure moored in a white, simulacrum river, part of another facsimile. I recognize it. The steamboat from Huck Finn. “He didn’t make it to the dorm,” she says.
I concentrate, get nothing. There’s a blank where the person should be. The boat’s within range, and there’s nothing wrong with my ability as I can still sense the eleven down the rabbit hole.
“There’s no-one there,” I say. “You sure-?”
Then I glimpse movement.
; Between balustrades I see a guy sitting on the steps of the upper deck. He’s garbed in ancient costume: cloak, frilled shirt, tight breeches and big-buckled shoes. He’s there, okay.
Fact remains—I scan nothing.
“I don’t get this one bit,” I murmur. “You see a guy over there? Or am I hallucinating ghosties?”