Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  Thus, Filipa arrived on Belladonna in the blink of an eye. And José was standing next to her, smiling. But when he spoke, his words made no sense. He stared, but he did not see. And he tried to move, but he could not move.

  Later, she learned that the cells in his body had been replicated intact, but without cell membranes. So as he tried to move, his body turned to mush. And he sagged and slurped to the ground in a wet heap of organic matter.

  He didn’t die in front of her, he was already dead. José was no longer human within the first trillionth of a second of the teleport process. He was just misaligned cell-meat.

  But Filipa told me she would always remember the moment he looked at her and smiled, and started to speak, as if his body were stubbornly trying to live.

  “Tell me about your happier memories,” I said, using my “gentle” intonation now.

  But Filipa didn’t answer me. She just stared blankly: and I deduced she was lost in memories of that moment, when José smiled and tried to speak, and then turned to pathetic slobbering mush in front of her.

  The Saloon was getting crowded. A tall man with a metal skull entered, followed by an entourage of bodyguards. Filipa was serving a beer to two women at the far end of the bar, but she whistled, and I caught it and followed her gaze across. And I checked my database for background information on Abraham Naurion, Mayor of Lawless City, formerly a farmer on Mars, convicted of mass genetic manslaughter and banished to Belladonna.

  The man indicated by Filipa didn’t in fact resemble the photograph in my database, and he was six inches taller than his official height. But that was body morphing for you. These days, no one ever looked like what they used to look like.

  I eased my way across. It was busy now, and I had to squeeze my way past drugged and drunk partygoers who mostly wore tight leather body harnesses with bare midriffs and arses and breasts. Thus, my progress through the crowd was slow, and replete with inadvertent intimate contacts.

  I remembered, but I did not feel: Lust.

  “I’m a detective officer of the Galactic Police,” I told the Mayor, once I had reached him.

  “You don’t say! Join us,” said the Mayor, smiling.

  He beckoned to his two lady friends; I photographed them with my eyes, and ran a swift records check. One was a prostitute, the other was the Chief Financial Officer of the City Council. Neither was armed, and I discounted them. I was more wary of two heavy-set men who stood behind the Mayor, arms folded. They were both ex-mercenary soldiers, and their job was to protect the Mayor at any cost.

  “I’m taking you in, you big ugly motherfucker,” I told the Mayor, with carefully calibrated rudeness.

  “What?”

  “You heard,” I snapped. “You’re under arrest.”

  “What charge?” The Mayor was almost flustered.

  “Corruption.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t prove anything against me! You – what?”

  “I said no,” I clarified. “I’m arresting you, without evidence. I’m banking on a confession. You look like a guy who’s gonna crumble easily. So come with me, now.”

  “What if I refuse?”

  There was a terrifying pause. I looked at the Mayor with my black empty eyes.

  “Then I can kill you for resisting arrest,” I pointed out, slowly, and longingly. And, finally, the Mayor saw my logic.

  “Why don’t you interrogate me here? The beer’s better.” The Mayor beamed.

  “Don’t get smart with me, metal-head!” I sneered. And I towered intimidatingly over the Mayor.

  The Mayor stood up from his bar stool. He was nearly seven feet tall, half a foot taller than me, and his shoulders were as broad as wings. I wondered if he was bio-engineered to fly.

  “Sure, I’ll come with you,” he said mildly.

  “Hey,” said one of the girls, the accountant, a blonde with the face of a reptilian alien skilfully tattooed over her own.

  “I won’t be long,” the Mayor reassured her.

  “Don’t bank on it,” I advised him.

  “You can’t do this, you fucking robot tyrant!” said one of the Mayor’s bodyguards, and I flicked a glance at him. The bodyguard glanced away. My glance, I have been told, is full of nothing: few men, even very dangerous men, can withstand it.

  The second bodyguard looked away too, a sideways glance that was his letter of resignation.

  I led the Mayor out of the Saloon. All eyes were on us.

  Outside the Saloon, the twelve moons of Belladonna Christmas-treed the sky once more.

  “Is this about the Sheriff’s son?” the Mayor asked, casually.

  “It concerns the murders of Alexander Heath, Andrei Pavlovsky, Jada Brown, Sara Limer, and Fliss Hooper, at 43 Lafayette, Canton 4, Bompasso,” I explained.

  “I had nothing to do with that.”

  “You know they were murdered?”

  “Hell, we’ve all seen the police footage.” The Mayor grinned. “Someone fucking butchered ’em, right?”

  “That’s correct,” I said. “Now tell me: who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why were they killed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A robot police cruiser glided to a halt in front of us. I beckoned the Mayor to get in.

  “I can have you terminated,” the Mayor pointed out. “I still have connections on Earth. I can bribe some bureaucrat to have your licence to exist revoked. They’ll wipe your database and feed you into a crusher. No more rebirth. I could kill you! Don’t you fucking know that?”

  “I do know that,” I said, in bleak tones, and the Mayor got it.

  Death held no terrors for me.

  “Ah,” said the Mayor, and he got into the cab.

  Five hours later the Mayor was released without charge.

  Mayor Abraham Naurion had proved to be a pliable and garrulous witness. He had told me everything I needed to know about the gangs and their leaders and their foibles and friendships. The Mayor had also calmly admitted to taking bribes from all the gang leaders, and he shamelessly condoned the culture of crime and corruption that existed on Belladonna.

  The Mayor was in a chatty mood when he finally left my custody. “I’m a realist,” he said.

  “And what does that mean?”

  “It means there is no justice in this fucking universe,” he told me. “So don’t waste your time looking for it.”

  A hundred years ago, I cleaned up Lawless City.

  It was a dangerous, but a glorious time. I was programmed to bring law and order to the Exodus Universe planets, and back in those days no one queried my methods. I arrived to find Belladonna was in the grip of frontier frenzy. Bitter wars were being fought between rival ranchers. The city of Bompasso was considered fair prey by rival raiding parties. All the houses were fortified, and the citizens carried guns and wore forcefields as a matter of course.

  At one point, I fought a pitched battle with the local gangsters, running through the houses in a Fourth Canton street to get cover from their explosive bullets – punching and kicking my way through interior walls to get from one end of the terrace to the other.

  Fifty-five gangsters died that day, judicially executed by my guns. Afterwards, I convened a meeting between the rival ranchers and city gang bosses. I imposed a set of land registry decisions upon them to determine who should own what. I passed judgement on all those who I felt deserved to die for their crimes against humanity. And I either executed the guilty ones or (if they were still on the loose) hunted them to death. Then I imposed democracy and freedom and a new civil service structure.

  And then I left.

  But, as I had learned from the City Archives, and from my long conversation with the Mayor, in the years after my departure more and more “immigrants” from the planets of the Solar Neighbourhood had continued to flood into Bompasso. And the governments of Earth and Kornbluth and Pohl and Cambria and all the other planets of huma
n space continued to use the rest of the infinite Universe as their trash can.

  For nowadays in the Solar Neighbourhood – this idyllic, civilised, peace-loving sector of space – murderers are no longer executed or imprisoned or brain-fried. Serial killers and psychopaths are no longer subject to personality reversals. And genocidal maniacs are no longer interned in centuries-long hibernation. In this new and liberal regime, all offenders get a second chance, somewhere, in what bureaucrats called the Remote-Zones of the Human-Habitable-Universe; and which the transportees called: The Exodus Universe.

  Somewhere like Belladonna. A planet colonised by convicts and felons, where the dregs of humanity clustered and festered.

  The Mayor had told me about Dooley Grogan, who had arrived in Lawless City nearly forty years ago: the celebrated Butcher of Lyra. Dooley bought a tech-store, then a liquor store; then he went into the drug and shebeen business. And now, he was the undisputed king of brutality in Lawless City, as well as controlling all the robbery gangs in Belladonna’s other major cities.

  Kim Ji – so the Mayor had explained – was a bio-engineered Cat Person/Dolph mongrel with psychopathic tendencies, who was also a whore of consummate ability. She saw a gap in the market and set up a host of brothels in Lawless City and twelve other cities, as well as founding her own city, Jiville, in the deserts of Duende.

  Fernando Gracias, I learned, was a former Soldier in the Cheo’s space navy. He had created a protection racket that terrorised every legitimate business in every city on the planet, and which extended to the ranches and the wilderness areas too.

  And Hari Gilles – whom the Mayor openly despised – had created his own unique niche of vileness, in which he pandered to the freaks and the sadists and the fetishists and the necrophiliacs and the “animal-lovers.”

  These four saw a power vacuum, and they swept in, and took charge. In the century that had passed since I last came to town, they had turned a civilisation into something truly barbarous.

  And they had every right to do so. It was, after all, a free society. My programmers had given me authority to investigate mass serial murder, alien genocide, AI cyber-fraud and the use of banned technology. But beyond that, I was just a tourist in someone else’s culture. I was not allowed to do what I wanted to do: eradicate evil. Instead, I was obliged to merely uphold the law, according to the rules and regulations defined by my programming.

  However, there was a course of action which would allow me to achieve my goal of liberating Belladonna.

  For I knew that if I could pin the Mass Murders (Utilising Banned Technology) of Heath, Hooper, Limer, Pavlovsky and Brown on one or all of these gang bosses – then, and only then, my programming would allow me to intervene and trash their empires. In those circumstances – and those circumstances alone – I was authorised to use full discretionary force, including pre-emptive assassination of the guilty.

  So now I needed my just cause. Without it, I was powerless to intervene, to save the people of Belladonna.

  For the unpalatable truth was this: the Four Bosses were not outside the law. They were the law, in Lawless City.

  The woman was tall, slim, naked, and bound with shackles. The man beside her was muscular, and also naked, and had been adeptly hog-tied. They both groaned with pleasure as they were kissed and fondled and whipped by the giggling girls in the hen party.

  Elsewhere, similar acts of violence and lust were being performed between paid and paying consenting adults in a wide variety of acrobatic variations. The whores, male and female, were beautiful, agile, and tireless, and capable of enduring extraordinary amounts of pain. And the paying customers were good-looking and toned, but lacked the easy grace and poise that a lifetime devoted to sensuality will bring.

  “Nice place,” I said, and smiled. That always unsettled people. My plastic face has, pretty much, the texture and sheen of human skin, but it is still plastic. And I rarely smiled, because I knew that when I did, it made my eyes look blanker.

  “It’s a service,” Hari Gilles said, defensively.

  Gilles was an eerie-looking man: thin to the point of being skeletal, extensively tattooed, with eyes that did not focus, and lips that were always moist.

  “Some people find this a turn on,” I mused, as I watched the orgies and the beatings and the whippings and the flesh-mutilations which took place to a soundtrack of ceaseless groaning and expletive barks. A curtain was pulled back and three female courtesans appeared, in richly coloured Arab robes that swirled around their naked bodies, and began to dance inside a haze of hallucinogenic mist.

  “They do, indeed,” leered Hari, and I felt – or rather, quite dispassionately, noted the presence within my psyche of: Contempt.

  “How about you? Does it turn you on?” I enquired.

  “I’m a businessman.”

  A scream rang out. The dungeon was dank and dark and steeped in evil, and bodies sweated, and semen oozed, and rain dripped from the ceilings, and rats scurried about underfoot licking blood off the black flagstones.

  And, for me, the cumulative effect of the whole ghastly mise-en-scène was curiously… amusing. How strange these humans were! How abjectly driven by their bizarre passions and obsessions!

  I had counted fourteen sexual perversions new to me since I first entered through the slimy stone corridors that led down from the House of Pain’s reception area. The stone arches of this underground cavern were pitted with metal hooks from which chains dangled. The air was thick and fuggy and rank with incense and aphrodisiac spices. And TV screens unobtrusively placed in alcoves gave the punters a tantalising fast-cutting overview of the wickednesses of the day.

  “There was a time,” I said – for I pride myself on my historical knowledge – “when sadistic acts that led to death were considered to be criminal.”

  “No one dies here,” Hari protested, “not really. The brain doesn’t die. Our performers are all insured, and everyone who pays our prices can afford to replace their limbs and organs. Where’s the harm?”

  I sighed. I actually had no answer to that. A hell-hole of depravity like this one always rocked my moral values, but logically, where was the harm?

  “Why?” I marvelled. “What’s the appeal of pain?”

  Hari Gilles smiled coldly; no, it was not a laugh, it was an evil snicker.

  I decided to make my play.

  And so I stared, with blank eyes, into Hari’s eyes.

  It didn’t work. Hari met my glance with a sneer of contempt.

  “You’d love to be able to experience this, wouldn’t you?” he taunted. “Because to feel pain is to be human. Whereas you, you’re just a fucking—”

  “You’re under arrest,” I interrupted, tersely.

  Hari blinked. “You’re kidding me?”

  “No, I am not, you slimy son-of-a-whore,” I snarled.

  He blinked again, and licked his lips in a swift, nervous tic – hence, the always-moistness of his lips.

  “What’s the charge?” Hari demanded.

  “There is no charge.”

  “You’re just going to arrest me, for the hell of it?”

  “You can resist if you like.”

  “What happens then?”

  I paused, and smiled again, for maximum effect.

  “I gun you down, like the vile hound you are.”

  Hari laughed, and relaxed. I felt: Rage-at-Myself. I’d overplayed my hand.

  “In my circles,” smiled Hari, “that counts as erotic flirtation.”

  I smiled a third time, eerily. I took out my right-hand gun – a dual-use plasma and explosive bullet pistol that I wear sheathed to my body-belt – and I prodded the muzzle into Hari’s mouth.

  “No one would care,” I said, “if I killed you now.”

  Hari goggled his eyes, unrattled by my taunting.

  I withdrew the gun muzzle. A few punters cried “Hurrah” and “Do it again!” at what they took to be my sexual gameplaying.

  Hari licked his lips, and swallowe
d, and smiled naughtily.

  I sighed. “Forget it. You’re not under arrest. Just tell me this – did you kill the Sheriff’s son?”

  “No. But I know who did.”

  “Who?”

  Hari’s tone was calm. His face was tattooed with magic sigils; his skin was unnaturally pale, with cord-like veins clearly visible; his body emaciated. I felt uncomfortable in his presence. He looked like a man who treated his body as an evil farmer treats his dogs.

  “The Sheriff himself,” said Hari. “He’s corrupt. So was his son. They were in a racket together, it went sour. Sheriff Gordon Heath killed his own son, and then he butchered his son’s friends to cover it up.”

  “You just made that up on the spur of the moment, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said Hari, proudly.

  Dooley Grogan’s place was an Earth-Irish theme bar carved out of the side of a mountain. Goats ran up and down the grass slopes and shat at the customers’ feet. Piped music played, and a real fountain bubbled in the centre of the bar, filled with a potent blend of gin and water. When the water splashed, it created a haze that could be sniffed and gulped, so that breathing the air in this place was enough to make you drunk.

  Dooley was a broadly built Golgothan who bragged of his Earth-Irish descent, and who ran a riotous bar. Prostitutes, male and female, disported themselves, semiclad and less than so. The heavy drinkers sat at the bar consuming beer after beer, washed down with shots of whiskey and tequila and liquid morphine. Loud insistent and addictive brainmash music blasted out at sternum-shaking levels of volume. Potent drugs in brainspray form were openly on sale, and a few of the bleary boozers had catheters in their temples or scalps.

  I felt an emotion, no, not an emotion, a pang: déjà vu?

  “I don’t know anything about any fucking murders,” Dooley snarled.

  At that moment, I felt consumed with Despair – even though this was an emotion I had previously purged from my programs.

  “Any more fucking questions, I want my fucking lawyer present,” added Dooley, with a sneer.