Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  Ah, now I had it!

  It was Pride.

  I debarked from the space shuttle and strolled across to police headquarters.

  I liked the stark black-stoned architecture of this city, and the way some of the buildings hovered above the ground. It wasn’t, by the standards of settler cities, all that bad a place. There was an Opera House, there were theatres, there were symphony orchestras. But it was still a wild town, oversupplied with taverns, brothels, casinos, gladiatorial arenas, and wrestling rings.

  I stared at the door of the police headquarters.

  “Police Commissioner Oharu,” I said at the door, and it opened.

  “I thought you died,” the desk clerk said, and smiled at me.

  I had no rejoinder to that.

  The clerk – a tall sandy-haired man called Oliver Dingwall who had an alcoholic wife and a degree in palaeontology and, who, I decided, was not worth cultivating as an informant or ally – led the way into the secure corridors, and thence into the Commissioner’s office.

  Commissioner Oharu was a tubby and a jolly man. He was, I estimated, twenty stone plus and almost perfectly spherical and his unlined rejuved features made him look like an overgrown schoolboy. “Sit down, sit down,” he fussed at me.

  “I’ll stand.”

  “You know Sergeant Aretha Jones.”

  Sergeant Jones sat in the black armchair. She stared up at me. I stared back. She was rather beautiful, I observed, despite being, to put it mildly, a stranger to fashionable skinniness.

  “I met you two days ago,” I informed her.

  “I know,” Aretha said.

  “You were present when my previous body was assassinated.”

  “I know.”

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  “Hell. Horror. Like nothing.” Aretha’s voice was faint, slightly cracked. There was a haunted look in her eyes.

  “Why were there no cameras at the scene?”

  “There were. I had a camera in my body armour. It recorded nothing.”

  “All public and private cameras in every location on the planet failed to record. There is no visual data available for a period of twenty-five minutes in all,” Commissioner Oharu informed me.

  It was indeed very strange.

  “How could that be?” I asked.

  “We don’t know.”

  “And what,” I said, directing my blank stare at Aretha, “exactly did you see?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There was an eclipse of the sun,” I commented.

  “Artificially induced,” explained the Commissioner. “An asteroid was moved into a position that achieved a perfect eclipse.”

  I was lost for words.

  Eventually, I retorted: “An asteroid was moved into a position that achieved a perfect eclipse?”

  “That’s what I said. That’s what happened.”

  “I see,” I said, and ran a feasibility study into how one could so move an asteroid. “That is an impressive piece of orbital engineering,” I concluded.

  “This was no ordinary assassination,” Aretha pointed out. “This thing is fucking huge.”

  “I’m aware of that. My point is: no one on this planet has the technology to move an asteroid,” I explained to them.

  “It can be done with antigrav oscillators,” the Commissioner replied calmly.

  “I’m aware of that. My point is: there are no antigrav oscillators on Belladonna. It’s banned technology.”

  “Someone has them.”

  “I’m aware of that.” I processed the data furiously, but nothing coherent emerged out of my maelstrom of thoughts and hypotheses. “I want to see the bodies,” I told them, firmly.

  “I’ll take you,” said Aretha. She got up. I noted that, despite possessing a degree of plumpness, she was muscular and extremely fit, and brimming with energy. Her jet-black hair was pinned up. Her hands were large, for a woman, even in this day and age.

  She walked with me down the corridor, and tapped a wall, which slid away revealing a lift shaft. Then we stood in the lift, which took us down to a moving walkway that took us under the city streets to the morgue.

  “You say, ‘Hell. Horror. Like nothing,’ ” I observed to her, as our walkway hurtled us along the sleek purple-tile-lined tunnels. “Would you like to elaborate, or clarify?”

  “No.”

  “It all happened so fast, you didn’t really see what happened. Would that be a fair synopsis?”

  “It happened slowly; I saw what happened. It was – like nothing.”

  “More specifically.”

  “I couldn’t think. I couldn’t see. And yet I saw.”

  “More specific still.”

  “One moment you and Jaynie Hooper were standing in the middle of the square, as the robot landing craft descended. Then the stars came out. So many stars. So… many, and so beautiful. The moons were silver in the night sky. I heard a singing and a roaring and for a moment I thought I was in heaven and then the – the – the – then something cut the something, the thing, the everything thing, reality was, I don’t know, split, changed, altered, and there was blood, and bodies were, and you were, I can’t explain it any more.”

  “Hallucinogens,” I suggested, “in the air, to create mayhem and confusion when the assassins struck.”

  “See the bodies,” Aretha told me, coldly.

  As we entered the morgue, I reviewed my data on Sergeant Aretha Jones.

  Divorced three times, two children, both under ten, twice decorated for bravery. No convictions for corruption, which meant nothing on this planet, because everyone paid bribes to avoid corruption convictions.

  Her stepfather Maxim had been a gangster, working for the Fernando Gracias mob, until he was killed by a drug dealer.

  Her mother Jara was a singer, and still did an act in one of Gracias’s nightclubs. Jara’s reviews were electrifying. She clearly had an exceptional talent, though her idiom was jazz and I had no taste for it.

  All this meant that Jones was compromised, an associate and relative of known gangsters. She was not to be trusted.

  A large hardplastic bubble filled the room. The entire crime scene had been preserved and conveyed away from the City Square, and reinstalled in the morgue. Part of a static walkway had been chipped off, and several flybikes had been caught up in the mêlée.

  I was initially puzzled, and then appalled.

  I recognised shards of Version 43’s body. Eyes, a face, a torso, cybernetic circuits. But they were scattered in a haze of human body parts and pieces of exploded spaceships. There were intestines, hearts pumping blood, legs, hair, muscles, all mixed together in a frozen sculpture. The engine of the flybike floated in mid-air, and had lungs. A string winding around a chunk of wall proved, on closer examination, to be a spinal cord stretched thin. Mouths were separated from faces. Sinews and muscles formed a mid-air tableau. Teeth flew like bullets. And bizarrely, many of the floating body parts must have been already static when the forensic bubble had been wrapped around them. It was as if God had clapped his hands, and frozen time and space.

  Except it wouldn’t have been God. This atrocity had a stench of evil about it. It was a vision of Hell. A horror.

  A… like nothing.

  “How could this happen?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” Aretha told me.

  I stood silent, staring, for about fifteen minutes.

  “Is something wrong?” Aretha eventually chided.

  “I’m thinking.”

  Aretha waited patiently. Eventually my thought processes returned to something resembling normal.

  “This is just so – strange,” I said.

  “Anything you say will be used in evidence. The penalty for perjury can, in certain circumstances, be death,” I said, in an eerie monotone that was designed to induce panic in suspects.

  “That’s not true,” Mayor Abraham Naurion said mildly.

  I smiled, scarily.

  That too had no impact on
Naurion.

  “If I’m forced to kill you, you should feel free to sue me,” I pointed out, acidly.

  “That’s a threat.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Is he allowed to do this?” the Mayor asked Aretha.

  “No.”

  “Are you going to stop him?”

  “No.”

  “Hell, I’ve got nothing to hide. Ask away.” The Mayor settled back cheerfully, his broad shoulders overspilling his chair, his silvery-metal skull clashing bizarrely with the coffee-coloured skin of his face and hands. The Mayor clearly had many enemies, I mused, if he felt the need to protect his brain in this way.

  I reviewed my database: Abraham Naurion was once a farmer on Mars. To save his harvest, he had used illegal genetic material, creating crops that grew without water, but which had the deadly potential to mutate into cancer-spreading predators. He’d been sentenced to eighty years of corrective therapy for his abuse of the rules governing genesplicing. By this time, his wife and children and 91,245 other people had died of fast-spreading twenty-four-hour cancer, and there was nothing left for Naurion on Mars or on Earth. So he had chosen the fifty-fifty instead.

  He was a well-liked Mayor, a liberal, who had built schools and theatres and had tried to instil a moral code into his lawless people. He took bribes from all the gangs, but never favoured one above another. And thus he was able to run a cash-rich administration without the need for taxes.

  “We have evidence,” I said, “sufficient to arrest you for rape and multiple murders. Would you like an attorney present?”

  “I am my own attorney.”

  “We have a witness statement from a prostitute called Jaynie Hooper who alleges you raped and mutilated her, and then murdered her sister Fliss Hooper and Fliss’s four friends, including Alexander Heath.”

  “That’s an unsubstantiated allegation from a dead witness,” countered Naurion; “it’s not sufficient evidence on which to charge me.”

  “True. But we have also minute but significant forensic traces of your DNA in her vagina.”

  The Mayor laughed. “That’s easy as hell to fake! All you need is a spittle sample from my beer glass, and you can clone the DNA and spread it on a condom. That scam’s been run a thousand times; a judge would laugh you out of court.”

  “I’m aware of that,” I conceded.

  “Do you have film footage of me committing either rape or murder?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you have an independent witness corroborating Jaynie’s statement?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have no case.”

  “I agree.”

  “Come again?” said the Mayor.

  Aretha, too, was astonished, and looked at me in rage.

  “I agree with you,” I said. “There’s no case to answer. You’re innocent, in my view. My predecessor was duped. Jaynie was a liar; you are an innocent man.”

  “How can you say that?” Aretha said angrily.

  I stared into her eyes, and Aretha flinched.

  I turned my attention back to the Mayor. I smiled, to indicate that he was not under suspicion and could relax now.

  “You did know Jaynie Hooper though?” I asked, casually.

  “Of course.”

  “And you paid her for sex?”

  “Hell yes.”

  “How much?”

  “Is that relevant?” the Mayor appealed to Aretha.

  “Answer the question,” I said.

  “A million scudos.”

  “A lot.”

  “For a year. She was a companion, not just a whore.”

  “You pay for companionship?”

  “I sure do.”

  “Did you rape her and cut off her limbs?”

  “No.”

  “Can I have a word with you about this?” Aretha said coldly to me.

  “No you may not. Jaynie alleged that you severed her limbs for sexual thrills. We have it on record that you have downloaded amputee porn.”

  “I’ve heard that allegation. It’s bullshit. It was mainly Latina porn, on a hundred-movie download. I was only twenty, for Christ’s sake, and I didn’t watch any of the really pervy stuff.”

  I nodded.

  “So the question is: why would Jaynie lie?” I asked, in the same friendly tones.

  “Jaynie was crazy; she’d do anything she was asked to do,” said the Mayor, sourly. “Some bastard suckered her. I felt sorry for her, to be honest. I went to see her in hospital once her limbs had grown back and – well. She wasn’t the same woman. Look, guys, I don’t blame Jaynie for lying about me. She was earning a dishonest buck, the same as the rest of us. But I do want to find the bastard who paid her to lie about me, and who killed her. Any help you want, you got it.”

  “That’s very much appreciated,” I said. I reached in my bag and took out a bottle of 200-year-old Cambrian whisky. “Let’s take a drink.”

  The Mayor grinned, and tipped the water from his glass on to the floor and poured himself a glass of rich malt. “Join us?” he said to Aretha.

  “No,” she said sullenly.

  “And you?” he said to me.

  “I don’t in fact drink,” I informed him.

  “I figured as much. So you believe me then?”

  “I believe you. I think you were framed.”

  The Mayor nodded. “Why?” he marvelled. “And more to the point, who?”

  “Those are the two things I need to find out.”

  The Mayor grinned, and sipped some whisky.

  He smacked his lips, and sipped some more.

  Then the Mayor started to cough. He spat out the whisky. “Fucking—” he said, and toppled over. His head smashed against the desk. The metal skull scraped and scarred the wood.

  “What the—” Aretha said, shocked.

  “We haven’t got long,” I said. “Name your price.”

  “—fuck are you—?”

  “Name your price.”

  “I thought you believed the Mayor was innocent?”

  “I do.”

  “But—?”

  “But, that’s not the point.” I smiled my eerie smile. I took out a vial and opened the cap. Then I held out my hand and my fingernails grew into spikes. I inserted one spike into the vial.

  “Hold this.”

  “What’s—”

  “Blood from the morgue, taken from the corpse of Jaynie Hooper.”

  I held my spiky hand out delicately, like a courtesan drying her five-inch-long fingernails. With the other hand, I yanked the Mayor upright. I flipped his eyelid back, exposing the eyeball completely.

  Then I moved the spike—

  “No!” screamed Aretha loudly.

  But my hand didn’t waver. I touched the spike to the eyeball, very gently. Then I flipped the eyelid back. Then I did the same to the other eyeball.

  “Let’s take him downtown. We’ll order a forensic test.”

  “Blood splatter,” said Aretha, getting it.

  “Blood splatter,” I agreed. “Let’s assume the Mayor is guilty, that he dismembered Jaynie Hooper. The blood splatter would have been horrendous. And afterwards, he would have washed his hands, his arms, his scalp; he’d have stood under burning hot jets until every last forensic trace was gone.”

  “But he would have wanted to watch her scream in agony.”

  “That’s the whole point of it, if you’re a pervert, as we must assume the killer was. And flecks of blood under the eyelid aren’t easy to shift. What’s your price, Aretha?”

  “I have no fucking price,” she told him. “I’m an honest cop. I’m not going to be part of this – this – frame.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s wrong.”

  “But it solves all our problems, don’t you see?” I explained, patiently. “The Mayor is the linchpin of this entire corrupt society. He pays the gangs, the gangs pay him. If we send him down on trumped-up charges, the gang bosses are screwed. We can start again.”r />
  “But he’s innocent.”

  “Of this crime, probably yes, but he’s guilty of many other things.”

  “But not this! He didn’t rape and mutilate Jaynie Hooper!”

  “A while ago, you told me he did,” I said slyly. “What’s your price?”

  Aretha sighed. “A million scudos.”

  “Done.”

  “Two million scudos.”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  “One and a half, and I want a ranch, my own ranch, for when I retire.”

  “That’s asking a lot.”

  “Are you bribing me here or not?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  “What do we do now?”

  I hefted the Mayor on to my shoulders.

  “Let’s get this sucker processed, then we’ll go see the pimp.”

  We dumped the Mayor at the City Jail. A forensics team were already in place, and I briefed them on what they should find. On a planet like this, I had decided, it was easier to go with the flow.

  This was a city that enjoyed the night. I walked down the Morgan Boulevard and was amazed at the energy and the life. Pavement cafés and piazza restaurants and impromptu moving walkway rock gigs turned the city streets into one vast digression. My navigational aids made it impossible for me to get lost, but even so I felt as if I was in danger of losing my bearings.

  A vast neon-lit palace proclaimed: GAMBLING! NAKED GIRLS! NAKED GUYS! NAKED SEX! BARE KNUCKLE BOXING! HYPERSPACE SIMULATION! The lights were 3D and zoomed towards passers-by like fireflies trained in market trading. Music blared from every wall, creating a symphony of popular melodies that merged into a single gestalt song.

  I found it strangely appealing. The music tracks were jagged and wild and wonderful. There was a lot of laughter, and also a lot of drunken fooling about. Every fountain was filled with splashing teenagers. No one in this city seemed to sleep.

  I have an acute sense of smell, and I could smell chorizo and burger and fries and hot dogs and steaks sizzling on hot plates and fajitas and spices and the tang of wind-dried chicken hanging outside oriental restaurants.

  I passed a crowd of dangerous-looking youths, wearing tight leather trousers and kevlar-armour on their shoulders and with pierced eyelids and tattooed semi-naked bodies, and they cried, “Hi!” and slapped me on the shoulder and gripped my hand and invited me to join them for a drink. And I laughed and said no and walked on.