Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  But, no. No!

  I found myself, once more, trapped by doubts.

  I thought about what I had witnessed at the original crime scene, and I wondered how I could have failed to see its true, dire implications. I had become obsessed with finding the motive for the murder, and the identity of the murderer. But now, it seemed obvious that the real mystery was the murder method.

  The sights I had seen that day were appalling. And the consequences of the atrocity that had taken place were more appalling still.

  What infernal powers did the anciens possess! Why had no one on the planet been aware of these powers? And how could they make themselves so taken for granted that even I, with my immense database and astonishing powers of observation and logical deduction, did not realise they were in charge?

  And, most terrifyingly of all, what kind of beings could execute their enemies with a weapon that scrambled reality itself?

  I applied all my critical and logical powers to this key question, and reached an irrevocable conclusion.

  I was doomed to lose. No matter how hard I tried, I stood no chance against an enemy of such malicious and sanity-threatening omnipotence.

  “You’re Aretha’s mother?” I asked.

  “I am,” said the tall, raven-haired, black-skinned beauty.

  “Sing for me.”

  And Aretha’s mother sang, a liquid song of joy and ecstasy, and I felt the warmth of the sun and the heat of love and the uncontrollable twitch of desire.

  Aretha’s mother was naked, and her skin was moist with a dew that mingled with her sweat, and she looked so much like her daughter yet older and wiser and more sensual, and she smiled at me, then snarled like a wolf, and I felt a spasm of lust, and

  And then I woke.

  “Is your mother still alive?” I asked, casually.

  “Yeah sure. She still sings at the Blue Note, sometimes,” Aretha told me.

  “What does she look like?”

  “Short, fair hair, mixed race, light skin, quite pretty, but nothing special.”

  Aretha frowned, clearly wondering why I was asking such strange questions.

  “Does she look like you?” I said, casually.

  “Not a bit. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” I lied.

  I was having a whole terrifying series of recurring dreams now. And my dream of having sex with Aretha’s singer mother was the most frequent and vivid of them.

  But why? What did it mean? Did it mean anything?

  “Make love to me again,” said Livia, and I stifled my horror and disgust.

  “Sure thing,” I said. “Just give me a moment.”

  We were both naked, floating in mid-air on an invisible bunk, in full view of the other anciens. But no one looked at us; no one cared enough to do so.

  Livia was an insatiable lover, but totally impossible to please. I had never given her an orgasm; I had never even made her smile.

  Only a robot, I mused, could make love to a woman like that.

  “Everything will be just the same as it was before,” I said.

  Annie Grogan stared at me with hate in her eyes.

  “I’m supposed to work for you?”

  “I have a deal with the President,” I lied. In fact, the President now worked for me. “I’ve already taken over the protection rackets, the brothels and the Houses of Pain. Now I want to start up your brother’s saloons and robbery teams again. There’s a system; this is how things work.”

  “You were sentenced to death.”

  “I got off for good behaviour.”

  “My brother was your friend, you evil bastard.”

  “Yeah, I know. I took him down. I’m moving in. Get over it.” I gave her my flinty stare, the one that made hard men flinch, and she flinched. “You’re lucky I’m letting you and the rest of your family live,” I said, trying to find a sliver of solace for her, and failing utterly.

  There were tears in Annie’s eyes.

  “You piece of fucking shit,” she told me.

  I grinned, nastily.

  “Don’t water the whiskey, okay?” I said. “Your brother did that; it caused a lot of grief.”

  I flew solo in the cable car above the city. The car moved at one-tenth of lightspeed, so fast that I could see nothing and no one. And I gloried in the fact that, from the ground, I was totally invisible. A blur in the corner of the eye; a hint of something that might possibly have been glimpsed, but not truly seen.

  I flew on the cable car from spire to spire, and back again, until I had woven my invisible web over the entire city.

  An old-fashioned nujazz quartet were playing a warm, sensual twenty-scale improvisation. It felt like sunshine, if sunshine were champagne, and could make love. The instruments were all virtual: the four jazzists sang and waved their hands and blew into mid-air and the result was a cacophony blended with perfection.

  I was back at the Blue Note, Fernando Gracias’s old club, which I had taken over and refashioned as a retro music palace. I’d tried to get Blind Jake and Pete and Joni and Marcus to play there, but they’d declined on the grounds that I, Tom Dunnigan, had caused the death of their mentor Fernando Gracias, and old wounds heal hard.

  I now sat in the snug with President Naurion, who was an anxious pale man these days. The horrors of the Gang Wars had shaken him badly, and his hopes of using the Presidency to “make a difference” had been casually crushed by the anciens. He had become, despite his bulk, timid and fearful.

  “I have a question,” Naurion said to me sneeringly. “Here you are, you own this club, you act as if you own me. But who the fuck are you?”

  “The anciens trust me. That’s all you need to know.”

  “Yeah? Dooley Grogan was my friend. So was Billy. So was Fernando. Kim and I went way back. All of them, they earned their place in this society the hard way. What gives you the right to take over their livelihoods?”

  “Easy, now,” I cautioned.

  “Fucking anciens, why didn’t they make me—”

  “You’re the President.”

  “In name only. I have no power. I pass no laws. I have no government. It’s a joke.”

  “It’s a joke that amuses your masters. Let it be.”

  “It’s let be, it’s let be,” said President Naurion, slurringly, and I wondered what potent cocktail of drugs and alcohol and self-disgust was running through his veins.

  “Tell me how you got into this game,” I murmured.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “I want to know. Tell me.”

  Naurion sipped from a potent pint of misty ale – beer blended with LSD.

  “I fought in the Last Battle, you know,” he said querulously.

  “On the wrong side, yeah, I know.”

  “Whatever. I haven’t always been what I am now. I was a Soldier. Then a farmer. Then when I came to Belladonna, I became a bodyguard. To this rich kid, one of the Founders. We’re going way back now, before the spires were built.”

  I had a glimpse of a previous Abraham Naurion: the President as he had been before he became a broken man.

  “You see,” Naurion continued, “when our colony ships first arrived at Belladonna – this was something like fifty years after the first settlers got there – we found this empty planet full of kids. And they kept telling us their parents were off working. And we bought it. Then things got ugly, there were a lot of violent deaths, and we began to realise they were killing our colonists for sport. At landfall, we had a million colonists, give or take. After a year, only nine hundred thousand remained. The rest had been hunted to death for fun. The anciens were Soldiers, you see; they had state-of-the-art weaponry, body armour, One Suns. They were killing machines, and we were just a bunch of fucking convicts.

  “But once we figured out what was happening, we formed a lynch mob to deal with the fuckers. All of us were united against these fucking kids, because they were evil, and because they owned the best land. And that’s when they had their first
major cull.”

  “Cull?”

  “They still have them from time to time. It clears away the defective stock; only the fittest survive. They started a war between the factions among the colonists, and nearly three-quarters of us died. Seven hundred thousand people, give or take. We were killing each other in the streets, hand-to-hand combat, biting out throats. And the ones who remained, the leaders of the most successful gangs, we became the rulers of Belladonna. But the kids told us what to do. They always told us what to do.”

  “You didn’t think that was strange?”

  “It never felt strange.”

  “They made you a gang boss?”

  “At first. Then I became Mayor. We set up a police force. New colonists kept on coming, and we told them the way things were, and they accepted it. Then a Galactic Cop came to clean us up, and he killed a lot of people. That was about a century ago.”

  “I’ve heard about that.”

  “But he left me alive, and we started again with a new intake. The kids seemed very happy about it, they called it a new way of culling. The Cops aren’t as powerful as people think, you know. They can be manipulated.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “I’ve seen it happen. Believe me.”

  “I believe.”

  “You have kids?”

  “Well, yes. A couple. Why?”

  “I had kids,” Naurion said. “Two dead, you know about those. Three still alive, I hope, on Earth. But I can still remember.”

  President Naurion sat and stared, and there were actually tears in his eyes.

  “Go on, tell me about your kids,” I said, eventually, gently.

  “Yeah. My kids. It’s something else, right? But it’s like nothing else. Christ, when I think about what they were like, when they were babies! Red-faced and screaming and looking up at me like I was, you know, special, important, theirs. Nothing like it, yeah?”

  I nodded, not knowing.

  “And then, when they were toddlers! So full of energy. It’s like having multiple heart attacks. Kids! They’re just, well, fucking amazing. I was two hundred years old when I had my first kid; I felt like I was reborn.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked, still gently.

  “They kill kids,” said President Abraham Naurion bleakly. “That’s how they survive. They breed ’em and kill ’em and take their bodies. They’ve been doing that for half a thousand years. How do you think that makes me feel?”

  “I don’t know. How does it make you feel?”

  “I try not to think about it. I have my spot in life. I have some power. If I wasn’t loyal, they’d kill me. So I’m loyal.”

  “You’re drunk, aren’t you?” I said.

  “Every day. A bottle of whisky, a bottle of vodka, I swim through every day. And every night I take the pills and I wake up without a hangover. I get a new liver every fifty years. I’ll live forever, you know. I’m a survivor.”

  “Are you saying, I’ll end up like you?”

  “They’re grooming you, to replace me. They need a lickspittle. Someone who’ll command respect from the masses, but who doesn’t care about eating shit. That’s you.”

  “I don’t eat fucking shit.”

  “You have already. You will again. Get used to it.”

  “Eat,” said Vishaal, and I ate. This humaniform body had a full gamut of taste sensations, and I was awed at the perfection of the food. Tangs and textures exploded in my mouth, making me feel exhilarated.

  “Drink.”

  I drank a glass of wine, and was swept up in a heady rush of joy.

  “Watch.”

  The naked belly dancer undulated in front of me: and never had I seen such grace, or, in a universe full of good-looking humans, such ineffable beauty.

  “You like to live it up, don’t you?” I snorted.

  “See this,” said Vishaal, and he held up his hand. And the hand became stars: an entire universe floated in front of me.

  I spat out my wine.

  “What the—” I said.

  “We are gods,” explained Vishaal. The universe faded away, and the hand returned.

  “Bullshit.”

  “A universe was born and died in an instant, in the palm of my hand. Only a god can do that.”

  “It’s simple physics. A bud universe. Or an optical illusion.”

  “The latter.” Vishaal laughed, a tinkling laugh that echoed like knives in my mind.

  I breathed a sigh, of utter relief.

  “These creatures are like devils,” I said. “They seduce and beguile.”

  “I thought you were beyond seduction?” Aretha said.

  “I thought so too.”

  Aretha and I were walking along the esplanade, near the city’s port. I had morphed into my backup self, and had given myself an identity as Robbie Park, a cop in the Twelfth Canton, who Aretha was supposedly dating.

  The sea stretched out to a vast distance, and surfers chanced their all on the high vertical waves. A guitarist was playing on a street corner, rather skilfully. I recognised the song: “Long Time Never Bluesrap.”

  “I remember things sometimes.”

  “Remember what?”

  “A hundred years ago…”

  “You remember me then?” Aretha said, surprise and pleasure in her voice.

  “No. All of my memories of you at that time were erased.”

  “Not mine,” she said, regretfully.

  “I just remember,” I said. “Things. Colours. Sounds. Not real memories.”

  “You told me. You remember ‘moments,’ ” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  We walked on.

  “What were you like back then?” I asked her. “The same? Different?”

  “Slimmer,” Aretha said. “Sweeter.” She grinned.

  “I’m sorry you’ve become fatter and less sweet, in the course of those one hundred years,” I said, consolingly.

  “I was – kidding,” she said, affronted.

  “Ah.” I considered my options for a way out of this conversational faux pas; and concluded there were none.

  “Forget it,” Aretha said sourly.

  “Consider it forgotten,” I said, and knew that it would be, the next time I was reborn.

  “You were different then,” Aretha told me.

  “How?”

  Aretha paused. “You were still,” she said carefully, “human.”

  “Not possible.”

  She shrugged; a little half-smile contradicted me. “More of your memories were intact,” she said, gently. “You had a lot of your original personality. You were a ghost in the machine, but you were still there. And you used to tell me stuff. About your life as a human being. Your adventures.”

  “Yes, but who was I?” I mused, rhetorically.

  “I can’t tell you that,” Aretha said cautiously.

  “You know?” I was utterly stunned.

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell me!”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t. I – just can’t. It’s a promise I made to you. Either you remember or you don’t, but you can’t ever be told.”

  “I don’t need,” I replied, stiffly, “a human self. I like me as I am.”

  I realised that Macawley was becoming impatient with me.

  “What are we waiting for?” she said accusingly, hands outstretched, palms turned out, eyes goggled: the very personification of impatience.

  “I’m learning all that I can, as fast as I can,” I told her.

  “Why?” Her face radiated astonishment; amazement; contempt; scorn. I sighed.

  “So that we know their weak spots,” I told her, carefully, “as I believe I have explained, in some detail, on many previous occasions.”

  “Yeah, but like, what are their weak spots?”

  I paused. “They have none.”

  Macawley sighed, melodramatically, and rolled her eyes, and shook her head. I got the message: I wa
s a wanker.

  I held her hand and kissed it, and Macawley looked at me in some shock. “You know,” I admitted, “I feel, on occasions, strangely protective towards you.”

  “Hey! Fuck off! You’re creeping me out,” Macawley protested.

  “You’d rather I was just a robotic monster?”

  “You are just a robotic monster.”

  I laughed. “I have a theory,” I said. “About my human self.”

  “What’s the theory?”

  “I think,” I began to say, then I paused.

  And I scuffed Macawley’s hair. She was gorgeous and cheeky and incorrigible, and I sometimes felt an overwhelming urge to take her to another planet, where there was no violence, where there were no gangs, where wild children could run riot without any consequences.

  And as I toyed with this fantasy, I looked at her, and I smiled. And Macawley stared back at me, head tilted, emotions flickering fast over her face, her elf-eyes shining with curiosity.

  “I think,” I continued, carefully, “I used to have a daughter.”

  I stepped into the lift and it shot up fast into space.

  When I emerged, I was surrounded once again by stars.

  The lift journeys were brief, but I liked to use them to mull on data already in my system.

  On one such journey, early in my relationship with Vishaal, I had accessed my database for fresh information on Alexander Heath’s murder. This is a task I had initially neglected, for the amount of data I had downloaded from AI-spire was so huge, I had been unable to analyse it all. Much of it still existed as a homogeneous mass of undigested facts in my consciousness.

  But then, in the course of that lift journey, I had decided to run some systematic search programmes to uncover what the anciens knew about Alexander Heath. And very quickly – the search took about eleven minutes in all – I learned the truth about the murder case that had brought me to this planet. And later, when I asked him about it, Vishaal had confirmed all the major details.