Scratch Monkey

by Charles Stross

  “Fine.” Ang is rummaging in a sack of props from Stuff Central. He pulls out clothing, boots, headgear, all kinds of shit. “Hey, dig this ... “

  He begins to strip and we follow suit, rummaging for appropriate gear. I make damned sure that I have a powerknife stashed in the top of one stocking and a plastic machine pistol in my bag. When we finish, I have the small consolation of seeing that the others look just as uncomfortable as I am. “Ready?” asks Ivan. We nod. Ivan sidles up beside me and wraps an arm round my waist, tries to kiss me: I turn my cheek and he backs off. The whole deal is weird: I don't like it and I don't feel like letting it get to me either.

  “Let's go,” says Eri, looking uncomfortable.

  “Yo!” agrees Ton.

  Ivan lets me go, looks at me strangely. I shrug back at him: “Lead off, boss,” I say. We troop downstairs and out to the waiting truck that will take us to the monorail station. It's a cold morning, and the leaves lie in brown heaps on the ground. The clouds overhead are grey and dismal. Just right for battle.

  I don't see much of Dragulic on the way in – or of Vladigrad on the way out. I'm under cover, my hackles raised, just concentrating on not freaking when we drive past checkpoints. The guard wear grey uniforms and hold bullet guns with the nervous readiness of men who have seen too many of their colleagues shot. Our vehicle is a groundcar powered by a steam engine, dull green paint peeling from dented metal slab sides. The railway station is a looming stone edifice, fylfot banners dangling listlessly above the platforms. We make our way through on foot, Ton Ang and Eri carrying our luggage, Ivan leading. I guess my tension is totally in keeping with the environment, a loud, jabbering space crammed with stinking life and unhealthy clattering machinery. Soot drifts down from the roof like black snow as we make our way to the carriage.

  Three hours later we clatter into Dragulic. Blinds cover the windows, because dusk settles early and the city is blacked out – an optical curfew against marauding light-seekers. We don't talk much during the journey. Ivan is reading a newspaper, which is something new to me: I try not to gape at it as he blips out a steady trickle of wisdom bulletins, articles, enemy propaganda. They call us aliens and claim to be winning the valiant struggle to free the hero-race from the agents of interstellar imperialism and digital necrophilia, the usual tired litany of implausible bullshit. The rest of the news is about battles won and spies executed, factories built and nations enslaved. It's a glimpse into a repugnant view of reality: fascism has its own warped logic. I just hope I never learn to understand it from the inside.

  When we leave the train we bundle straightaway into another steam carriage, this time a dull black vehicle with comfortable seats and an obsequious driver. We rumble through the twisting streets until we arrive at a big house in a residential area. We've arrived.

  The building is concrete with big floor and ceiling spaces, constructed to accommodate peacetime subsystems which this culture never quite developed. Razorwire threads the hedge like glittering dew, and my head comes alive with the mindless hum of perimeter sensors as we go inside. Stasi have no wisdom, barely got computers – big steaming edifices of sintered glass and copper, the most advanced tools they'll allow themselves – but can check out radiation emissions. Once the front door shuts and the car drives off Ivan gestures; we dump kit and roll through every room in regular search mode, nerves on fire and guns in hand. But there are no surprises and the microsensors Intelligence primed the place with say it's clear ... we're safe.

  An hour later I'm lying in a hot tub of water on the first floor. The room's tiled with baked clay and the bath is made of tinned metal, but so what! There's a boiler to heat the water, and a flush lavatory – luxury by local standards. I feel that if I lie in it for long enough I might make myself clean again. My gun's near enough to grab and I make a splash getting it when the door slides open and Ivan comes in. “How are you feeling?” he asks.

  I don't even think about it. “Dirty. Raw. Getting better. How would you feel?”

  He squats down next to the tub, avoiding the puddle on the floor, crosses his legs. He's wearing a camo suit, I realise. I put the gun down carefully. “I don't know,” he says. “Nobody ever tried to rape me. Death, I guess, I've seen, but –”

  It's the way he says it. I think I can forgive him now, whatever I thought five minutes ago. He doesn't understand, probably never will, but that's not his fault. “I'm sorry. I was way spooked by it. The way they didn't even wait for me to say something –”

  He looks at me sharply then glances away. “We live and learn,” he says. Quietly: “I'm glad you made it.”

  “Huh. Well so am I.” I splash some more, rubbing coarse soap into my armpits. The water's hard; a thin, greasy slime floats on top of it. “We begin surveillance?”

  “Ton swept the garden. Eri's shooting scenery for hologram panes. Once we've got the windows lined we can start building.”

  “Be a relief.” The small construction robots we brought are lined up in the living room like so many silver roaches, quiescent, waiting to be told to go forth and multiply. “What's the neighbourhood like?”

  He yawns. “Civilised as you can expect in this shithole. I guess we can start going out tomorrow, when it looks clean. We're slated for a visit then, anyway – got to link up with a supplier to keep us in food and shipments of gear, then activate. Link up with the resistance.”

  “The – “ Everything goes red. “ Shit.”

  “It's them. Yes. Look, the two who tried to do you ... they're dead. Look, this is a big deal, Osh. You want to punch out now?” He's next to me now: he reaches out and gently unpeels my fingers from the squashed lump of soap. “Hey, that stuff's rationed, you know that? A month's supply.”

  “Oh. So sorry. You just caught me – “ I blink and catch his eye. So much waiting. I stand up and catch him around the neck and we kiss, and don't stop. I'm dripping all over him but I can't stop, won't stop. “Damn. These savages. Why can't we just off them straight, without this messing around?”

  “You know why,” he says.

  “Yeah.” I let go of him, reluctantly. “Towel?”

  He passes me a towel: big, soft, the first bit of local fabric I've come across that doesn't feel like sandpaper. I shiver into it because the air in the room's cold – you have to burn carbonaceous rock to make it warm. “Leave the bathwater,” he says. “I need it myself.”

  Some admission. I drop the towel and cast around for the clothes I dumped on the chair in the corner, but they're native stuff and I don't particularly want to feel like a local right now. “Panes up outside?”

  “Yes.” Ivan is undressing. I pick up my gun and head out the door. I'm naked and it's chilly, but the telltale spectral blur on the windows tells me that Eri's been through, got the bedrooms camouflaged already. The hologram panes in the window make the place look empty from the outside, even if you've got an army stashed away indoors. I wander over to the bags we dumped on the bed and unroll one of them. More native junk. Gaah. I jump on the bed – sprung with iron, I figure – lie flat on my back, close my eyes, and try to think of wisdom. It pours through my brain like water, depositing an ugly silt of memory on the way. And yes – the whole thing is as bad as I ever dreamed it could be. Now I see why the Bosses have such a big presence here, are sending down a whole blasted army: it's more of a mess than I could begin to imagine. All the death cult nonsense ... there's a reason for it. And it's dirty. A nasty little secret thing that's happened before on half a dozen worlds-turned-cancer, and is trying to happen again here.

  It's the Stasi, of course. Power corrupts, and the promise of absolute power leads to absolute corruption. They know what they want, and that's why they're fighting us. They don't have enough power yet, even though their slave-camps are full and they're slaughtering the other peoples on this hapless world like a demented shark loose in a school of swimmers. No indeed. They know what they're trying to do: and Distant Intervention, dedicated to maintaining Dreamtime access for eve
ryone without prejudice, must always oppose that course of action. The Stasi are trying to cut Miramor Dubrovnic free of the afterlife. Because that way lies absolute power ... the power of total death.

  That night I set up the Von Neumann machine and get it breeding. It's a baroque design, a myriad of metallic cockroachs that whisper and scutter against each other, sensors tapping and pinging, searching for corners in which to go sessile. I think someone decided it would be less obtrusive than the usual, robot bulldozers and a solid-volume renderer the size of a blast furnace. (How's that? A stealth factory?) The thing will go off underground and start breeding, copying itself with mechanical enthusiasm.

  I kneel on the floor barefoot, wearing a native dress, my hair bound up in a ponytail, locked into my wisdom so tightly that I can barely see the room around me for information. That's okay: I can feel what's going on around me, the humming whisper of activity, drones spawning in the shadows. Raw shapes splatter across my field of view, graphs constructing themselves to my command. With only limited intelligence the constructors need guidance. They cluster into turret shaped machine-hives, three of them, then dig down through the floor and tap ceramic roots into the city ducts that run beneath the house. We're on top of a granite escarpment, rich in uranium isotopes. A draft blows through the room when they tap a sewer, then stops abruptly as they plug it. It's obsessive work; I only break concentration when I develop a bad cramp in the muscle of one calf.

  Some time after midnight, Eri joins me in the room. The click and titter of the machines is fading as they enter sessile phase, cannibalising their own bodies to make the big underground placentories that will spawn the next generation of constructors tomorrow. Eri kisses me on the cheek: “go to bed now,” she whispers in my ear. “I'll look after them.”

  “Watch?”

  “Mine. Check. Go now ... “ I rise silently and pass her my gun. Jagged red lines bisect my field of vision. I tumble upstairs and undress in the chilly bedroom, crawl under the covers next to Ivan. He's snoring softly. I lie on my back and dream of troubled metal machine nightmares that snip and whirl a lethal gavotte beneath the sewers, while overhead the tumbrils roll towards a bloody hill on the horizon.

  In the morning, Ivan wakes me with an urgent, speechless demand. I make him put in the contact lenses and we make love like beasts, clawing each other as we scrabble towards a dislocated climax. I stare into empty eye sockets as he comes, the hologram contact lenses masking his expression. Afterwards I feel depressed, empty, gutted by a deep lassitude like a swamp-driven fever caught from a windswept marsh. I feel as empty as his eyes look. Judging by his brooding silence Ivan is disappointed, possibly angry with himself. Or maybe it's me he's angry with: it's hard to tell when I can't see his eyes. I've been called sick and worse, but I've found the lenses are the only thing that makes it possible for me to lie with a man and enjoy the experience. For some reason, men seldom appreciate this.

  He stands by the shrouded window, looking out across the city: I lie on my side facing the door, hands wedged between my thighs, knees drawn up. I don't know why it's got to be like this, I really don't, and I don't think Ivan does either. It wasn't like this upstairs, on the station, in the training camp where we met. He must be under a lot of stress. That must be –

  “Hey, look at this.”

  I'm too demotivated to demur. Shedding a trail of twisted bedding I arrive behind him, stare past his shoulder at the prismatic distortion of the chameleon panes. He passes me a pair of wire-framed spectacles and I fumble them onto the bridge of my nose, fingerprinting one lens with a mousy smear.

  The windows clear as if by magic and I see the sun rising across the stony grey landscape of factories, brick houses, and the rising red gantries of the Stasis engineers. The ground drops away beneath the window and I can see buildings all the way to the horizon. I gasp when I see the hill in the distance, the building that squats at the crest like a monstrous toad. “That's what we're here to deal with,” he says, pointing. “Death's embassy. I didn't realise we'd be stationed so close ...”

  I prop my chin on his shoulder and it's as if what happened five minutes ago was never, an un-event, just aother aborted nightmare consequence of our locale. For who could feel good, living in the shadow of that monolith? Death's embassy, indeed. “The Politburo, out there on their hill –”

  “Don't say it.” He touches a finger to my lips. “Time to get dressed. We ought to check the constructors. And then there's Fiancre to meet ...”

  We dress in silence, native costume and hidden weapons. Downstairs, Eri and Ton Ang are eating breakfast in the kitchen. A great bowl of stewed grain sits bubbling on the cast-iron range. The floor is stone beneath my boots. “Today is a working day,” says Eri. “I guess we'd better check out the market if we're going to look real to the neighbours. We could eyeball the escape options while we're about it.”

  “I say we have enough sensors in place,” says Ang, shrugging. “We don't need to go out ...”

  “If we stay here we break emcon briefly every time we download from the surveillance remotes. I'd rather minimise that risk. Also, we'd look odd to the neighbours. We want them to think we're ordinary people. Oshi –”

  I flip my wisdom: “constructors have about a day to go before they get enough mineral sources to go exponential and start filtering for U-235. Once that happens we should reach criticality in something like,” one hundred and twenty kiloseconds “forty hours. Then all bets are cancelled, is that the idiom? We'll have a live reactor. Enough power to wrap up our end of things.”

  “Three days,” says Ivan; “don't forget that, Ang. We've got to look normal for three whole days – “ he leans over the bowl and scoops porridge into a cup. Sips at it carefully. “That clear?”

  Ang shrugs. “As you say. Who gets to play native?”

  I sit down at the table. “You and Eri, our cover says you're servants?”

  He half-smiles. “As you like it. But isn't the mistress of the household meant to go out and supervise her slaves?”

  I stare at him coldly until Eri intervenes. “It's not so bad, Oshi. Why are you so worried? It's daylight, you're armed, there're civil constraints in this place. They're only human –”

  “That's what worries me!” I stand up and walk about the kitchen, legs itching because there's no room to stretch them; “they aren't logical! Not like a fucking machine! The best way to avoid suspicion is not to be seen in the first place.”

  “To hide in full view,” says Ivan. “So, Oshi. How do you feel about coming shopping with me?” He smiles lop-sidedly and I feel my ears burning until I clamp down on peripheral circulation and twitch myself into combat-ready focus, furious at being so clearly outmanoeuvred on all sides.

  “Why?” I demand, standing still.

  “Because,” begins Ivan, rubbing his chin, “you're afraid. Is that good for you? At least tell me this, what would you do if it was someone else? What should they do?”

  I stare at him for a moment. “Okay,” I say. “But it had better not interrupt the constructors. That's what we're here for –”

  “It won't,” Ivan says. And because I can't think of a sensible objection I shut up.

  It's nearly noon and Ivan and I walk arm-in-arm through the bazaar that sprawls across a greater portion of the valley below our residence. He wears a gaudy outfit, gold frogging and epaulettes and a high hat. At his belt hangs a primitive bullet-gun, licensed by the laws of this place. My dress is characteristically dark and I carry no weapon – at least, not openly. Scrawny shopmerchants beckon from the doorways, trying to attract us: costermongers wail and warble their wares in the street in tones that remind me of funerals, the paid mourners of the rich who haunted the gravepits of Ditsan Kok, where I spent my festering childhood. Small urchins scamper and twitter in the gutters, and a police station – concrete, mirrorglass, razorwire and pointed rooftops to deflect mortar fire – bulks over the concourse at a prominent intersection. “We could do with a new carpet for the
dining room, don't you think?” Ivan asks me, one eyebrow arched, evidently getting into the spirit of things.

  “I suppose so,” I say morosely. “If you think the one we've got isn't good enough ...”

  “In here. Action.” I don't even blink at his signal, but my pulse seethes and my fingers are itching for the knife in my concealed pocket and I'm trying not to look over my shoulder as he dives into the shopfront nearest to our left. A flutter of wings startles me, but it's only a pigeon, red eyes incurious as it fumbles overhead to roost. For an instant I'm alone outside; then I turn and follow Ivan, holding my breath in an effort to control my tension.

  “Ah, sir and madame. How may I help you?”

  The small, bald man smells of cheap emollient and boiled cabbage. He grins like a monkey, squeezes his palms together, ducks his head as he steps out from behind his high desk. The shop is suffocatingly dense, crammed with intricately woven rugs. I nearly cough when I draw breath.

  “We're interested in your wares,” Ivan says casually. “May I ask where they come from?” “ Checkout the door,” he sends me, anonymous wisdom-pulses that only my nervous system is equipped to receive around here. (The Dreamtime nanomechs normally only transmit; it is not for the citizens of interdicted worlds to receive, as well, to hear the dreams and fears of their machines.) I turn round slowly, check, smell, feel the drafts – the only door is up front, and my knife is in my pocket – and nod.

  “They come from all over, good sir, but especially from up North, from Dragulic, from Nasribad, from the cis-sylvanian treelands ... can I especially interest you in a masterpiece of the Dragulian design, from a workshop lost since the beginning of the unfortunate unease – an example of what is virtually unobtainable today, executed in the original hand-woven hair in that legendary cradle of the tapestry weaver's craft?”

  “Cover now.” My hand is in my pocket and the knife clicks faintly, warm and angry. I slip into deep focus and the knife becomes part of me, not a thing in my hand any more but an extension, part of my body. “You can interest us, but only if the rug is intact,” Ivan tells the shopmerchant. “What is the price of decay?”