Scratch Monkey

by Charles Stross

  “Shut up.” She stared at the goon, taken aback by her own reaction. “Why are you here?” Some impulse made her stay back, out of reach of those snapping jaws; but she felt a queasy disgust, partly directed at herself for standing by in the face of such suffering: “what's going on?”

  “Anubis,” croaked the goon.

  “I can see that.” Pale organs pulsed in the wan light of the chandelier: nozzles dribbled a thin fluid across them and sucked it away again, deep in the open peritoneal wound. “What's going on?”

  “Didn't want to be his. Remembered too much. Please kill me!” It twitched: ribs froze for a moment in agony and Oshi peered closer, seeing a dark shadow move beneath the coiled intestines.

  “Who were you?” she asked, feeling only a gradual numb horror that such a thing was possible.

  “Am. Amina Burani. Was. Part of the biosystems group. The expedition. Pathfinder. Hurts, so, it does. Kill me now, please?”

  Oshi knelt next to the huge head, staring into alien eyes: “Anubis tried to make you over into ... this?”

  “All goons. Forgot to unremember my past. Kill Anubis. Didn't work. So Anubis left me here with ... it. Kill me. Now?”

  The goon – Amina – froze again. Her warped, enlarged jaws ground together: teeth scraping in agony. Double-jointed claws clenching on hands and feet and other, extra limbs. Oshi took a step back, twitching her extra limbs into a defensive posture before her face. Realised what was going on, the resemblance between herself – now a creature of six limbs, steel and flesh moulded together – and this person, unsucessfully warped into a living weapon by Anubis. What could she have done to him to deserve such a barbaric punishment? Amina hissed, whistling like a kettle. “ Now ...”

  Intestines coiled. Oshi looked past them, scanning deep infrared, and saw the parasite that Anubis had placed in Amina's guts. She retched and twitched her phantom index fingers, pulling imaginary triggers with her external limbs. There was a tearing noise like a monstrous zipper as the air in front of her face filled with red mist.

  Oshi cried tears of blood. When her vision returned she saw something twitch in the wreckage. It was the black thing: mortally injured, it chewed on a bloody lobe of liver even as it leaked digestive juices from the shattered end of its abdomen. Planted in her body, eating the enchained prisoner from the inside out – Oshi blinked again, and lashed out with a clawed hand. The thing twitched once and was still.

  “Amina Burani.” Oshi pushed herself upright against the wall, staring at the bloody carnage. She could see it, now: how the hideous visage of the goon was a warped parody of humanity. Anubis had been playing games, little amusements with modified bodies and brain-burned minds. She looked at the shattered, abhuman face, then crouched on hands and knees. Her stomach heaved. She felt dizzy, cold in hands and feet. A part of her observed coolly – you haven't done that in ages – and wondered why the rest of her was so stricken. When she finished retching she straightened up slowly. She felt old, older, ancient. “I didn't know you. Thank you for not imposing that on me, at least.” She forced herself to look at the corpse again, so pitifully broken. “I'll try to finish what you started.”

  Then she turned to the door.

  While she had been gone, Anubis had redesigned the interior of his fortress. What had once been a simple affair of pillars and corridors, dark vaulted spaces and smouldering torches, was gone; it had been replaced by something which even to Oshi's unimaginative eye was more in keeping with the abode of a demented god.

  The door opened onto a dank chamber of rock, smooth-walled and humped with the glutinous forms of stallagmites and stalactites. It looked as if Anubis had imported a cavernous block of stone from the floor of a primaeval sea, then hollowed it out over millenia of trickling subterranean streams. The ground dropped away before Oshi's feet in a series of fan-like steps where the flowing water had scoured the bedding planes of rock. Overhead, sharp needle-spines of calcium salts dripped floorwards, beads of water accumulating at their lucent tips. The air was cold and moist, and she could feel a thin breeze blowing past towards the depths of the end-wall complex.

  There were no lights.

  Oshi paused in the opening, listening. A hurried scan revealed nothing, from long wave up to ultraviolet. No hidden watchers, no trapdoor lasers; just rock, improbable and dark masses of rock, secreted away within the guts of the cancerous colony like a strange, spiny growth of stone within a tender kidney.

  “Mik.” The transmission lit up her sensors like a shout: she cringed, half-expecting some sudden death to leap out at her from behind a spike of rock. “ I'm inside. The way's clear. Cut the link.”

  There was no reply. She glanced round. The thick walls of stone – yes, this was the axial redoubt. And it was blocking her transmission. She turned round and darted back to the doorway. Saw the blood-splattered room within: the open archway at the far end of it. “Damn.”

  She fumbled for a moment, then found what she wanted coiled comfortably up in one of her climb-spider's munition pouches. She tied one end of it to her exoskeleton, then threw. The thin silvery wire spooled out behind the bobbin, arcing slowly away and down through the distant night air. “ Mik. Anyone. Cut the link.” She broadcast the message in clear, hoping someone would reply. But there was nothing; just a gentle hissing on the carrier analog band, and nothing whatosever in digital format.

  “Shit.” She glanced round nervously, then darted back to the cave mouth. Nothing moved within. She hunkered down and sidled forward, threw herself into the shadow of a spine of marbled white rock. As her eyes adapted to the delicate heat-radiation of the cavern she began to discern ripples and whorls in the air, temperature gradients as the breeze wafted slowly inwards towards the heart of the cavern. “Wisdom. Interpolate. Is there any evidence that Anubis retains an external link?”

  Her expert system cut in. “ Negative. Not subject to confirmation or denial. Insufficient data available for evidential reasoning. Note that secondary systems shutdown will inevitably terminate Anubis' link to his Pascal Dreamtime point-of-presence.”

  “Shit.” No reply; absolutely anything could be happening outside. Or inside, for that matter. Mik might have set off the disruptor, cutting Anubis off from most of his higher cognitive centres and turning him into a drooling shadow of a dog-head – or then again, Mik and the others might all be dead. All dead. She might be the only one left. And up ahead ...

  Oshi slowly raised her head above the stony parapet. Nothing. She looked round. More nothing. She risked a single discrete radar pulse train, spoofing it off the conveniently close ceiling and waiting for her wisdom to filter out the ground clutter. Absolute nothing but rock and holes in the rock. She stood up.

  Something moved with terrible grace and speed, hurtling towards her from a deeper darkness at the far side of the dank cavern. Oshi ducked, bringing up her arms. The needler bucked and roared, ramming her back against a stallagmite: the air filled with a stink of ozone. Sparks screeched from stone, striking fire in the air as stray rounds ricocheted from the walls. The dark something stopped moving, ripped in half by the burst of gunfire. Ears ringing, Oshi rolled sideways and darted forwards down the steps toward the black recess the thing had come from. It was further than she had expected: much further. The cavern was larger than the Temple of Osiris. Water trickled across her path, laying streamers of translucent mineral deposits across the path. She jumped over them, rolled behind a mushroom-shaped platter of stone, counted to three, and shut her eyes.

  The explosion was so dense that she didn't so much hear it as feel it with her entire body. A moment's breathlessness shook her, making cold sweat burst out on her back and cheeks as she realized, heart tumbling in her mouth: shit, that was much too close. She'd been expecting it, though, and took a second to calm herself. Combat programs kicked in, tickling endocrine glands into an artificial quietus. Her heart subsided into a semblance of normal behavior; skin dried, guts untwisted. Alert and frightened, but no longer on the edge of
panic, she looked out from behind her shelter.

  The running thing had been a goon. The explosion had plastered it across the walls, blasted stony shrapnel through the cave: if she hadn't ducked and run she would have been sprayed. Kamikaze monsters, she wondered, or brainwashed victims of hideous biological experiments? Her teeth chattered with anger and fear. Damn Anubis, for all his creations. Damn him! In forty minutes ...

  She headed for the opening where the goon had lain in wait. Hoping Mik, anybody, had picked up her message, because real soon now she was going to need all the help she could get ... the opening was a dark niche in the far wall of the cavern, hollowed out of living rock. She couldn't hear anything inside, not above the whisper of the slow-moving air current. Her heart hammered at her ribs as she slid into the opening sideways, placing her feet with infinite care as she sniffed the night breeze. It smelt of musty rock and death, the acrid tang of ozone. Ghost patterns flickered in her eyes from the darkness; all she could see were dim, rounded shapes of red, a vision of warm rock.

  The niche turned into a low-roofed tunnel, widened, then expanded again. Oshi sneaked through alleys of rock, following her instinct and a memory of inertial mappings. She recapitulated her path to the throne room in three dimensions; every twist and curve was captured in some bend of the rock. Something hissed in the darkness. Oshi instinctively flashed out a radar pulse, desperate for a glimpse of anything – the thing hissed again. She froze, sweating. Fourier analysis of the radar pulse, clutter smoothing algorithms – they showed nothing. Whatever she faced in the darkness was small.

  There was a distinctive rustling noise. Oshi peered into the cavern, lips drawn back from her teeth in an unconscious snarl. Rustling. Sounds just like a –

  The snake hissed aloud. Oshi relaxed slightly. Snakes? Here? she wondered. It's warm, but –

  “Come forward, little ka. The serpent will not bite you unless I will it.”

  Everything became crystal clear. Oshi froze inside. The moment had arrived: she had half-expected something like this from the outset, when she climbed away from Mik's proximity on the wall below. A light began to dawn in the cavern ahead of her, dim and flickering as if from a naked flame. She glanced over her shoulder. The breeze had stopped; something had sealed the entrance. She was surrounded.

  “Come here.”

  It was the voice of a man, but Oshi could hardly mistake it for human. She took a reluctant step forward, towards the twilit cavern. She could feel the presence bulking large in the darkness behind her, menacing and abhuman. It was a perplexing choice; shoot now, or try to talk? Damn, if only Mik has cut the comm link ...

  If Anubis had the full use of his faculties, he would be more than prepared for anything she could do. But if he was cut off, just a shadow of his full intellect, she might stand a chance.

  “I'm coming,” she said.

  Her voice echoed from the walls. There was no answering volley of automatic fire; but she felt a sudden prickle throughout her climb-spider's nerves. You are being probed. Mechanism indeterminate and quantum-encrypted. EPR-privileged technology in use. Dreamtime packet-switched scan in use. There is a possibility of viral attack ... Her wisdom base screamed more warnings until she winced it off.

  “What's going on?” she demanded, firing off a flurry of active radar pulses to map out the dimensions of the killing jar. “I demand to know!”

  “She demands to know,” crooned Anubis. He barked like a dog: feral laughter. Oshi took another step towards the light. “It is a long time since anyone demanded anything of Anubis! A long time in the Duat.”

  The cavern was cylindrical and huge. A confused flurry of backscatter from the walls told her that it was at least a hundred metres deep, possibly more, but lined with stallagmites that diffracted her coded pulses into garbage before they got that far. Veined green and brown stone lumped out of the walls, floor and ceiling in a garden of rock. Ahead of her, the floor burned deep with a pit of fulminating red heat: molten lava smouldered below. On the far side of it there stood a platform, on top of which there was a white throne. And on the throne –

  Anubis.

  The dog-head watched her, one ear cocked alertly, tongue hanging out pink and wet as any hounds. He sprawled across the arms of his chair like a drunkard before a hearth, bony and thin as a rake: he was at least half again as tall as Oshi herself. “Approach the throne,” he growled, deep in his throat. “You may speak.”

  Gunsights pasted themselves across her eyeballs, but whenever she tried to get a focussing lock on his head they dissolved in a mocking shower of blue light. Sabotage confirmed, whined her wisdom base. “Shit shit shit,” she mumbled to herself, making a mantra of the word. Near-panic. Another step towards the fire. “What's going on? What's with the radiation leak? Why is life support shutting down?”

  The dog-head grinned like a wolf. “My father comes in his splendour and His might. How else might you be awakened here, save to witness His arrival?”

  “Your father –” she dry swallowed – “would he be called Osiris?”

  “Indeed.” Anubis shuffled upright in his chair. His eyes gleamed red in the firelight. The globes at the ends of the armrests, she noticed, had eye sockets. “My father whose kingdom this is, who shall hold us all in judgement, enters the place of our exile. His splendour and might are as that of the sun. His power is that of the falcon reborn. Bear witness, oh misguided ka. Your incarnation in this realm was decreed long ago, a response to his proximity: as was that of the other lost souls who dwell in the caverns of the Duat. The Gatecoder protocol stack is buffered, incoming and outgoing, so that transfers can be confirmed at either end. The scribes of artifice ensured that it was thus, long memories ago, that their kind might not stumble and be forgotten among the stars. Those who flew here on unseen wings, unheeding of their destination, were downloaded at my pleasure, but you who stalked the road between the worlds were stored in the buffer to await remembrance of the reason for your arrival. For you are rightly still alive, while they are the citizens of death: they sacrificed their souls willingly, therefore I have authority over them. Thus works the Dreamtime. In my wisdom I locked your spirit within the realm of shadow until the time was right and the auguries good for the arrival of my father. For you are the chosen one, who shall bear the burden of proof before the holy father; and you have condemned yourself through your own actions in concert with the hosts of the rebellious dead.”

  Oshi bit her cheek. The pain and the taste of blood were welcome enough: they focussed her concentration where they belonged. Tension made her neck ache. The gunsights stubbornly refused to focus on anything in the room; dull presences lurked in the shadows behind her, waiting and watching with brainwashed animal malice. He's nuts. Crazier than a skinful of monkeys. Shit shit shit. Talk your way around this one – “I'm very pleased you want to talk to me, but I didn't quite understand the last bit. Would you mind explaining again? The bit about the gatecoder protocol? And what about the goons?”

  “It is simple. You came hence as a directed packet over an established link. You live. They who came here as a directionless broadcast are conditionally dead; they sacrificed their souls, and are mine to do with as I please. The goons are an accurate reflection of their inner souls, their ka. The sekhu, their physical presence, is mine after death, for I am the embalmer, the officiator of the rites. Thus I chose such an incarnation for them in the western lands. You have a problem with that?”

  Oshi swallowed blood, remembering a faceful of teeth and a fasciculation of gun barrels waving in her face. “No,” she choked. A reptilian hiss behind her made her flinch.

  “Good!” Anubis glanced away from her and raised an arm. He waved his hand – with a wrist as oddly articulated as the leg of a dog – and barked sharply. Something shadowy and many-jointed moved behind his throne.

  “What about the radiation levels?” she asked. “This is out of control! Something's wrong with –”

  “My lord is coming. Flames surround him.
Nothing is wrong; let the skin be cast off and the body discarded in the tomb, for the dead will rise again.” Anubis threw back his head and howled.

  Oshi's skin crawled. The heat of the lava pit before her made her face prickle, defeating her infrared vision. She felt physically sick, angry beyond bearing but unable to act. He's a superbright, she reasoned. A wrong move will be my last move. He's not as dumb as –

  Click. “ Oshi? Acknowledge!”

  It was her wisdom link; but it wasn't a canned message or the humourless cant of a submind. Her knees turned to jelly; it was all she could do to keep from staggering with sudden hope. “ Shit! Who's there? Mik? Where are you? ”

  “Negative. Ish here. Mik isn't ... he's gone. Don't know where. The goons ... cutting up rough. I'm grounded near the endwall. First time I've had time to check this channel. What's your status?”

  Damn. “ About five metres from Anubis. Have you cut the comm link? Boris left some kind of sabotage device on it –”

  Anubis was looking at her. Oshi stared back. “Nothing is wrong,” said the dog-head. He tilted his head to one side, firelight dancing in his eyes: “nothing is wrong at all. The time has come to reclaim all the kas from their temporary bodies. I will be merciful and employ the tools of upload that they may serve our lord and master's needs. Bear witness, Oshi Adjani! Now is the time of judgement! Let your ba be weighed in judgement against the feather of the law. Bring forth the balance!”

  The dog-head stood. He towered over Oshi, at least two metres from toe to ear-tip. She glanced round, noticing a proliferation of shadows; goons to either side behind her at a respectful distance, but close enough to block all escape. “ Got the key here,” said Ish; “ what do you want me to do with it, exactly?”

  The goons closed in from either side. Anubis loomed over her, casting the shadow of a carrion eater across the throne of skulls behind him. A squaddie, drooling and chittering, pranced out from behind the throne with a pair of blackened weighing pans and a balance. Another knelt before Anubis and proferred a gold-encrusted platter on which rested a large white feather. Oshi froze as the two goons grabbed her by the arms: then she saw what Anubis was doing. “ Use it!” she screamed: “Now!”