Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  And I lunged at the Bandersnatch, and gouged out its eye with the knife, and stuffed the burning brand into the bleeding socket, then cut off its tongue, then was knocked off balance, and fell under the hooves and horns and scales of the beast.

  Once I was trapped underneath the monster, and hence invisible to the crowd, I felt liberated. The great beast tried to bounce up and down on me, but I was impervious and seized the moment to engage my disruptor-pulse eyes and fingerspikes, and I literally burned and clawed my way into the belly of the beast.

  Once inside I felt stomach acids burning away at my pseudo-flesh, and blood was starting to pour out of my blood-sacs, and I continued to slash and burn until I had traversed the full length of the monster and scrambled out of the creature’s mouth, past its jagged teeth.

  I rolled out on to the sawdust. Luckily my burns didn’t go deep, not down to the metal. So when I stood up I was stark naked and direly scratched and bathed in blood and the crowd was stunned into silence and then I raised my arms again and the crowd ROARED.

  And two gladiators were running towards me with swords and they threw them and I caught them and the Snake-Birds were upon me, but I was thrusting and slashing and kicking. One Snake-Bird wrapped around my torso and began to squeeze my ribs, and I struck at my own body with the edge of the sword to cut the beast in half and gashed my own shoulder in the process. Another Snake-Bird wrapped around my neck and thrust its spitting head into my mouth, and so I bit the head off and spat it out. And then I ran over to the Diamond-Hound and scooped up acidic sand and rubbed it in the creature’s skin and the snake recoiled and fell off me.

  My fingers were now bare to the metal but I clutched my sword tight to conceal that fact, and attacked the Shiva, which had arms like swords and a tongue of iron that lashed like a bayonet. I lopped the arms off the creature, then cut off its head, then thrust a blade into the eye of the One-Horn, then stabbed and hacked with my two swords at the Sand-Leopard and the Great-Beetle-Thing and the two Kongs, until finally all the creatures were dead. And I raised my arms in triumph and the crowd roared, once more.

  And the Gates opened again, and another vast horde of monsters appeared, and I laughed, confident I could not be killed by creatures such as these.

  Then the earth beneath me began to tremble. Puzzled, I renewed the fight. And I leaped and slashed and lunged with my swords to kill the beasts that were attacking me.

  But suddenly the ground exploded and a massive one-eyed head emerged. And a new monster scrambled slowly out of the soil, and my database swiftly explained that this was a New Amazonian Cyclops. Six arms, and

  Lasers for eyes.

  The eyes flashed and twin columns of fire hurtled through the air towards me, and I hurled myself out of the way. Behind me, a monster squealed and screamed as the laser beam burned it alive. I checked my database again: it estimated that one blast from this laser beam would burn the clothes and flesh off me instantly, and my cyborg identity would be revealed.

  Two blasts and my body would start to melt.

  And three blasts from this laser-eye would cause my cybernetic brain to cease functioning.

  The creature, it appeared, could actually kill me.

  I longed for a plasma gun, or a smart missile. My swords were no use, I was too far away to throw them, and the monstrous forty-foot-high creature dwarfed me. And though it took a few seconds for the beast to recharge its laser eye, that still didn’t give me enough time for me to attack it. Instead, I was forced to leap wildly around the amphitheatre like a vampire dodging shafts of light.

  The crowd began to boo. I mused, very briefly, on the transitory nature of popular success.

  Then the other gladiators began walking around the edge of the amphitheatre, circling around the huge beast. And I began to hope.

  And Claudio, the black gladiator, suddenly sprinted, running behind the Cyclops, and slashed at the backs of its legs with his sword. The beast roared and swatted at him with its leg, but Claudio was gone.

  Then a spear was thrown and it penetrated the creature’s scales and it roared again and peered around.

  And I seized my moment and with one sword in my teeth and one in my hand I ran at the beast as the gladiators harassed and stabbed at it.

  Claudio nimbly dodged a claw, then missed his footing and was engulfed in a laser beam that lit his flesh like a match.

  For a second I was stunned, as this brave man burned alive before me. But after a few seconds, he was dead, and all that remained of him was a charred mass. I knew, however, that the gladiator’s brain would still be revivable, and vowed to save him if—

  I ducked a laser blast, then was at the creature and as I reached the legs, two gladiators hurled knives at me very fast and I dropped the sword from my hand and caught each dagger by the hilt.

  And then, still with a sword gripped in my teeth, using knives like crampons, I clambered my way up the creature’s leg and torso. It roared, and smashed at me with its claws, but I was too nimble for it. And then it tried to burn me off itself with its laser glare, but I was on its back now, reaching up to its shoulders… and I swung myself around and was upon its face and I slashed at it with the daggers, then dropped one and took the sword from my mouth and plunged it deep into the monster’s eye, again and again and again, and then crawled into the empty socket.

  And there, half-buried inside the skull, I hacked and hewed with my sword and remaining dagger until I felt the creature begin to fall.

  When the Cyclops hit the ground I was flung up against its skull.

  And then I clambered free.

  Inside the amphitheatre, a hundred thousand Belladonnans watched me clamber once more out of a monster – this time, emerging bloodied and triumphant from the creature’s eyeball socket.

  A hundred thousand fingers were raised; the mob had made their decision: I should live.

  I stood under the shower and blood ran down my body in rivulets.

  “Wince a bit, look like you’re in pain,” said Macawley. She was beaming at me, her green eyes glittering. A question occurred: was she by any chance finding me sexy? I was, I realised, stark naked, and beautiful, and a bloodied warrior. Weren’t human girls supposed to like that sort of thing?

  But my database, annoyingly, proved to have only sparse amounts of information on this topic.

  The water splashed my gaping wounds, and I winced.

  “Better! But don’t overdo it! Make it look like you’re, kind of like, heroically holding it in.”

  “The bleeding’s not stopping.”

  “You’ll need stitches. Hold my arm as you come out. Stagger. Make your face pale, okay? You’ve lost a lot of blood; that would really screw up your circulation. Maybe faint, yeah? You know, you’re so damn fucking lucky you can’t feel pain.”

  In fact, with admirable prudence, the designers of my humaniform shell had equipped it with plentiful pain sensors, so as to more easily enable a cyborg to impersonate a human. Thus, at that precise moment in time, with my flesh ripped and torn, my lungs clogged with alien faecal matter, stab wounds in my thighs and back and chest, and acid burns on my fingers, I was in appalling and indescribable agony.

  However, I decided it would be impolitic to mention that fact.

  “Here. Let me,” Macawley said.

  “Thank you.”

  Macawley bound my hands with bandages, to conceal the bare metal of the knuckles. I was conscious of the touch of her fingers, the warmth of her breath, as she focused on her task.

  “That’ll do you.”

  I limped and staggered back into the dressing room. The blood was flowing freely again, but the doctors were prepared for that. They had hoses to bathe me down, then swiftly started stitching my flesh together. I grimaced and groaned in seeming agony and Macawley nodded approvingly, with no notion that my agony was real.

  But I kept my focus. When my body was stitched, I stood up straight. I forced myself to grin.

  Then I passed out, and toppled to
the ground.

  I woke to find myself in a hospital bed. My alarm levels rose rapidly – I couldn’t afford to be examined by doctors. I got out of bed and fell over. My legs! I no longer had legs. Just bare stumps that oozed with maggots.

  Maggots??

  The door opened and a handsome silver-haired man walked in. “How are you, my son?” said the man.

  I was stunned. This was my father?

  But then I took a closer look. The silver-haired man had no eyes, and he had horns on his head.

  “You’ve done well, my son,” said the silver-haired man.

  And hooves. And a forked tail.

  “You’re not my father,” I said.

  “No, you are mine,” said the silver-haired man, and I knew him. He was the embodiment of Evil in the World.

  “Hold my hand,” I said, and the silver-haired man reached out his hand, and I caught it, and ate it, finger by finger.

  “Very good,” purred the silver-haired man, and I had an uneasy feeling that I had just made a very big mistake.

  “Are you okay?”

  I opened my eyes. Macawley. The dressing room. The doctors.

  I marvelled. Once again, I’d dreamed a dream.

  “Hey mister, can I have your autograph?” The kid was about fifteen, with a cheerful cheeky grin. I laughed.

  “Sure.” I took the pen and scrawled my name on the back of the list of contestants on the arena’s Munera of the Day programme.

  Macawley stood, impatiently waiting. We were outside the Gladiatorial Arena now; the broad marble pillars loomed behind us.

  “I can’t read that, what does it say?” the kid complained.

  “Tom Dunnigan,” I said.

  “Is it true you killed Billy Grogan?”

  “It’s true. Heat of the moment. They sentenced me to death for it, but hey, here I am.”

  I wasn’t besieged by fans, but a healthy crowd had gathered to talk to me, the magic man who had survived the damnation of the beasts. But this kid was hard to shift. And there was something strange about him. A strange aura. And finally I realised what it was – the kid didn’t move his lips when he talked.

  “You’re a man we’d like to get to know,” said the kid, unsmilingly.

  “Who’s we?”

  “People like me.” The kid looked in my eyes, and it was a cold, old look.

  “You’re an ancien?”

  “We don’t like that term. We call ourselves City Founders. Congratulations, your prize is, you get to meet us formally.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because we want to offer you a job.”

  “I don’t want a job.”

  “You have a choice between a) and b), where b) entails the agonising death of both you and your whore of a girlfriend. Which do you choose?”

  “Maybe I do want a job after all.”

  “Go to the Barrington Hotel. We have arranged a suite there for you. We’ll see you at six.”

  “Where in the hotel?”

  “We’ll find you.”

  “Who was that?” Macawley asked.

  “That was them.”

  “The kid?”

  “Yes. The anciens have made contact.”

  Macawley’s breathing was becoming ragged.

  “Good. That’s what we wanted.”

  “I have to meet them.”

  “Do you want me to—?”

  “No. Go. Tell the Sheriff and Aretha what’s happening.”

  “Will you be okay?”

  “I am confident of success.”

  “You realise, they’ll know all about you. They’ll have downloaded every scrap of information about you – or rather, about Tom Dunnigan. If there’s even the slightest inconsistency, they’ll kill you.”

  “There will be no inconsistencies.”

  “They’ll speak to everyone who knows you on Belladonna. Plus, all the people who travelled with you on the fifty-fifty.”

  “They’ll all remember me. There was a Tom Dunnigan. He died on a fifty-fifty three months ago, but his death was concealed. I match his appearance in every respect, including fingerprints, irises and DNA.”

  “You plan ahead, huh?”

  “It’s standard procedure. Every Cop, on every assignment, has a human identity allocated in case he, or she, has to go deep undercover.”

  “They’ll talk to me, too.”

  “And you’ll convincingly tell them the partial truth.”

  Macawley and I had “met” a week ago, at a rave, and left together, drunkenly pawing each other. We had subsequently been seen in bars and restaurants together; we had booked hotel rooms together, and (with the aid of chemical sprays) had left stained sheets and the smell of musty sex behind.

  “You should go,” I told her.

  “You’ll be—?”

  “Go.”

  I went to the Barrington Hotel, on 42nd by Ochre Street. It was a spire, black but streaked with red and gold stripes. I’d never noticed it before, even though I’d been past it many times. The hotel was close to police headquarters, yet when Macawley asked Aretha about it, Aretha hadn’t been too sure about its location. I checked my database of city maps, and noted that the electronic page blurred at precisely the spot where the hotel loomed up.

  More trickery.

  I walked through the revolving doors and was greeted by a uniformed servant. The hotel was art deco in style, c. 1920s, there were gas lamps on the walls, and beautifully embossed gold lincrusta below the dado rails. The lobby was deserted. The uniformed servant – customarily known as the “porter,” my database informed me – led me to the lift.

  “The lift will recognise you and take you to your room,” said the porter.

  I got into the lift. I stared into the iris-recognition screen. The lift doors closed. The lift moved, and I lurched, and an instant later the lift doors opened.

  I stepped out. I was on the 200th floor.

  And all around, through the vast panoramic windows, I could see Lawless City. Tiny figures trotted far below me like ants. From this height, the city’s outlines were apparent: the curving walkways, the bull’s-eye piazzas, the vast patches of green parkland.

  I turned, and looked around. The floor was made of marble. The outer corridor snaked around the circumference of the spire. And there was a closed door in front of me.

  I opened the door and stepped inside.

  And I was greeted with vastness and splendour. The entire 200th floor was comprised of a single-storey mansion. Through a door to my right was a huge galleried library. And directly ahead of me was an elaborate Louis Quatorze-style bedroom. I walked inside the bedroom and saw it had fluted pilasters, hanging tapestries, carved panels and mantels, cabinets and chairs inlaid with tortoiseshell, and a king-size four-poster bed at its centre. Golden chandeliers hung from the ceiling and gilt was scattered over every part of the room like fairy dust. The shelves were intricately carved in wood, and were cluttered with porcelain bowls and Chinese vases decorated with ormolu. Gargoyles and spiders and other hidden beasts lurked in the plasterwork, and on the marble pilasters.

  And at the far end of the bedroom was another door. I walked the length of the room, admiring the heady sensuality of the colours, the rich textures, the elaborate pomegranate-tree and three-medallion patterns on the oriental carpet. Then I opened the door, and began to explore the other rooms of this palatial home.

  It was like being in a vast forest, I mused, as I wandered from room to room, and found marvels everywhere. I found a pool and sauna, there was a rifle range, there was a running track. There was a music room, with pianos and guitars. I idly picked up an ancient five-string guitar with a beautiful mother-of-pearl inlay, and knew immediately that it was made by Dominico Sellas in around 1670. I knew this without accessing my database; I just knew.

  I strummed then plucked the guitar, which was perfectly in tune, and played a swift arpeggio, then placed the guitar down. The room in which I stood was panelled with amber, wi
th baroque mirrors and gilded candelabras. Each amber wall contained an inlaid landscape, made from hundreds of tiny pieces of what my sensors told me was jasper. The scenes depicted were allegorical, and my database recognised the room as a reproduction of – or perhaps the quantum-teleported original of? – the Amber Room of the Russian Tsars, stolen in 1941 by the German High Command during World War II, and never seen again.

  My opinion of the anciens began to soar. They certainly had an extraordinary sense of tradition.

  The next room was made entirely of distorting mirrors, and I saw a thousand replicas of myself, all moving out of sync. An eerie effect.

  The next room was a Fluidist boudoir, in which soft malleable sofas and chairs merged and blended to create a room as organic as a coral reef.

  The next room was a soldiers’ billet: a bare room with a single bunk and a mobile of the Sol system suspended in mid-air. I recognised this as a comfort room for warriors. And, after the excess of gilt and ornamentation in the rest of this mansion block, this room came as a visual relief.

  I stepped towards the bed, and took my clothes off and placed them carefully on the simple wooden shelf that jutted out from the wall. Then I lay on the bed and pretended to sleep.

  My senses were attuned. I could detect via my radar that I was being surveilled by a succession of people, who stood in the doorway of the small room and watched me as I slumbered. As I’d suspected, the anciens wanted to study me. My body was bandaged and patched; healing salves inside the bandages were working their magic on my skin; I mimed the deep sleep of an athlete who has gone to the point of exhaustion and beyond.

  And at 5.30 p.m. I opened my eyes again and rolled out of bed.

  I got dressed.

  And I walked back through the maze of rooms, past the mirrors and the fluid furniture and via the Amber Room until I reached the first room, the French baroque bedroom. Then I opened the carved and ruby-inlaid door, and was back in the corridor, next to the lift.