redRobe

Chapter Eleven Ghosts in the Beehive

There was a bare-arsed boy squatting by a puddle in the August sun. Tattered cotton T-shirt, no Levis or Nikes. No soundtrack in his head either, not yet. He had one small hand cupped to his mouth and was trying to drink black water that trickled away between shaking fingers. The puddle was shallow and its surface swirled with every hue in the rainbow, as beautiful as the wings of any butterfly. All the same, it tasted acrid and was half the size it had been the day before.

Memories weren’t something Axl went in for. He hadn’t had them removed, surgically or psychologically. And he didn’t buy time with some rem/Temp, the side effects were just too predictable. He handled time gone in the old-fashioned Freudian way; locked it away in the back of his head and told himself it was forgotten. So successful was he, that the memories shocked him with their newness, every single time they reappeared.

The stack system was at the back of the Port Authority Terminal. Older boys called it the hive. Rows and rows of tiny roomlets stacked on top of each other, each cell two foot high and six foot deep, all sealed at one end and open at the other. There were 120 cells in all, ten to each row and a spiral staircase that fed steel walkways on rows four and eight.

Hotter than hell that summer, more crowded too. Hot as a bathhouse said the older boys. Axl didn’t know what a bathhouse was but he didn’t tell them that.

Years back the hive had briefly been The Salariman Hotel thrown up by FujiSu, a Japanese metaNational on West 42nd for minor suits who’d suffered a hard evening’s team building at one of the karaoke dives on Times Square. But FujiSu had turned turtle long before Axl was born, leaving behind a supposedly-disposable locker hotel that had so far lasted as long as the oldest bum on Times Square could remember.

Axl lived in Row 4. Not his first choice because most mornings saw someone slumped drunk on the walkway and he had to move them to get out of his cell. Row 5 was a middle row and those were prized. Row 6 was also good but Axl wasn’t tall enough to reach the walkway overhead and swing himself up into a top row cell.

And by the time he did get big enough he was already living somewhere else…

The Cardinal’s shades rested neatly on the black glass desk. Golden pupils, as unblinking as any cat’s, stared into Axl’s eyes until it seemed to him that the burning gaze passed beyond now into the memories behind. He was…

. . . sitting in a cold café, watching his reflection in the window. Overhead was an unmoving wooden fan, resting askew on worn-out bearings. In summer the fan did nothing to cool the café, merely stirring up the hot air. At Christmas it was hung with fat strands of cheap electric tinsel, like now. The rest of the year it got forgotten and try as he might Axl couldn‘t even work out why he’d remembered the fan.

The boy sat at a plastic table opposite a tall man in dark glasses with a thin moustache and small pointed beard. Everyone in the café, including the owner and his brother, were carefully not looking at them.

Red smoke filled Axl’s mind as it rolled in from the edge of his vision, sharp flashes of memory flickering in front of his eyes as neurons charged and flared, billions of tiny electric connections made and broken in an instant. Snow. Cold. Despite the heat of the Caribbean coast, Axl shivered. Personality is a grid, whispered a voice in his head. Memories even less, just neural remembrance of the route most taken. Not even accurate, not even true…

The old Jewish tailor was nervous, thumbs twisting together as he watched the boy watching himself in the long glass. It wasn’t the black-suited youngster who worried him, it was the tall man in shades standing silently behind him, upper lip pulled back in an amused sneer. A black coat was wrapped tightly around the man, but not tightly enough to hide the crimson of robes beneath, anymore than his lip hid the tell-tale canines.

Cardinals didn’t usually visit tailors in New York’s lower Eastside. Actually, no one visited tailors anymore. A semiAI running coutureSoft could scan a body, cut cloth and stitch faster than any human. And that was only relevant to those not rich enough not to want their clothes grown to measure.

And even if Cardinals did visit, it wasn’t usually to buy silk suits for boys with slicked-back blond hair, violet eyes and cheekbones sharp enough to slice your heart in two…