redRobe

Chapter Thirty-Six God's Fist

Outside the dining room someone slammed a door loudly, and inside the room silence settled. One of those embarrassed, awkward silences that happen when a person you don’t like or hardly know has said too much.

There was a gap opening between them, almost visibly. A gap bigger than the hand’s breadth of floor that either could have stepped over. Except Kate didn’t know how—or if she even wanted to—and Axl didn’t dare.

Axl desperately needed to say something, but his major problem was he had no idea what, because the truth didn’t seem like an intelligent option… Falling for the person you intended to betray wasn’t an area that any episode of Black Jack had ever covered. And though everyone knew about Stockholm Syndrome, Axl had a nasty feeling he’d just been memed with its flip side.

No matter that Kate wasn’t beautiful. Nor was he. She wasn’t, even that clean. Her black hair needed washing. She smelt of rose water over sweat as if she hadn’t had the time recently to bath. And there were scratches on both wrists and blisters on her fingers, painful evidence that she wasn’t used to manual work. Her hands trembled so hard it looked like she was headed straight for the brick wall of a sulphate come down, except drugs weren’t her style.

This was the woman who’d hit Mai, Axl reminded himself. And if Rinpoche was right and somehow the Pope really was here in some form, rather than just being data on some memory beads, then this was who he’d need to pressure for the information.

It made no difference to the way he felt.

And he wanted her approval so badly his stomach hurt and he could taste the need like blood in the back of his throat.

In a second she would turn away from him, find a reason why she needed to be in some other room. And the slowly-tearing spider’s web of understanding that had briefly been spun between them would finally snap. He could see it in the tension seeping back into her face. All that held Kate there now was politeness. Inside her head, she had to be inventing excuses to go.

By the afternoon they would be worse than strangers. If she thought of him at all, it would be as a killer, as what was left if you took away fame from a child star. No more than the wind-blown husk of that blue-eyed, deadly blond boy. And all the half misremembered rumours would shoulder their way out of her subconscious to push aside what fragile sympathy she had for him.

That he was a clone Kate already half believed. And if not the Cardinal’s bastard then surely Axl had been his catamite, the old man’s bum boy. Or else Axl somehow had his claws into the old man: as if it was him and not the Cardinal who only had to pull back his thin lips to reveal sharp teeth.

That’s the way it would go, Axl just knew it.

And she wouldn’t even come close to getting the rumours right, to digging far enough through the shit to hit real truth. Because no one else but the Cardinal knew that. All of it had to be visible, Axl knew that. Why else did anyone think he hated mirrors so much? Or loved guns, for that matter…

‘Come with me to the village,’ Kate suggested, standing up.

Axl stared at her.

‘I need to check the situation. PaxForce…’ Her voice trailed away. She’d seen and heard enough of them in action the previous night to be scared of what she was going to find at Cocheforet.

Axl nodded, suddenly understanding her jumpiness, cursing himself. ‘You need me to go as your bodyguard.’ He didn’t make it a question, just a simple statement.

‘If that’s the way you want to think of it. Though Clone won’t like the idea.’ Kate’s smile was so slight Axl thought he’d imagined it. ‘Wait here while I get changed…’

She returned to the dining room wearing black jeans and heavy leather boots that buckled across the ankle. On top she wore a vest, black enough to swallow light and fitted so exactly it had to be grown for her alone. Spider’s silk could stop a knife. Better than that, bullets could be extracted by pulling on the threads they’d wound-up on their way in.

If Kate noticed Axl register how tightly her vest fitted or the fullness of her breasts she didn’t say anything, merely shuffled herself into a loose black jersey.

‘Are you ready?’

As if checking, Axl touched his hand to the small of his back, feeling for the wooden handle of his revolver. Yeah, ready and willing. Hell, he’d been both for as long as anyone could remember…

Scrub that. Half his life he’d been so drunk or wired the only person to believe he was ready for anything was him. Just as he’d always believed that deep down he was rational, well-mannered and emotionally balanced, no matter how untrue all that was turning out to be.

Blackjack was a kid’s show. US skins over Japanese-designed frames, cheap Chinese coding. WarChild was a battlefield soap that used real meat. That was the truth.

‘Sure,’ said Axl, holding the door open for Kate. ‘I am now.’

Axl knew next to nothing about Samsara, he realised as his boots slid on mud and he grabbed a rhododendron branch to stop himself falling. Then Axl released the branch, slid another few yards down the slope and grabbed another. Getting down the narrow path was easy once you got the hang of it.

Samsara was cold, obviously. The air was thin, ditto. And most of it seemed to be mud. That last fact hadn’t made it into Dr Jane’s chirpy little induction show back at Vajrayana. Oh yeah, and it was bound round with enough international law to keep the ‘fugees almost safe. Though that wasn’t the result of a freak outbreak of humanity, even Axl knew that.

Straight media manipulation, based on a one-sentence pitch by the Dalai Lama, had sold Samsara to the UN. No more refugees. Not on Earth anyway. The rest was sleight of hand and window dressing. And the media he manipulated was CySat.

Ninety-eight percent of the world watched the same shit, day in/day out, and CySat had provided it for as long as anyone could remember. Which demographically was about fifteen minutes. SickWard, FirstTime, SpacePup3 were the staples that delivered viewers to ad agencies worldwide, albeit using semiotically-tailored local plotlines, relevant franchise references and genotypes overlaid onto basic rayframe v’Actors. So Sammi the wacky Moslem rich kid with the lovingly-restored Mercedes 612 in the Bangladeshi version of FirstTime was the HondaGRZ-driving teen software millionaire Ryuchi in the Japanese version, was Leo the spoilt New York…

But over and above that, CySat had always provided political muscle. Drop a frag hag like Passion with her little flying camera into a war zone and three hours later a significant slice of the world were vid-mailing congress or parliament with demands that whatever Passion’s Passion was complaining about be stopped, immediately…

Courtesy of CySat nV starving kids to death and blaming famine or refusing to let HelpFirst air freight them medicine and calling it sanctions had become vote losers. Samsara solved that problem. It also got the Dalai Lama out of Beijing’s hair and gave Indonesia, Texas and the Ukraine somewhere to ship those dissidents too high-profile to kill. It was small wonder the UN vote was near unanimous.

As solutions went, it was right out of this world.

‘What are you thinking?’ Kate asked suddenly. She’d stopped to let Axl go ahead and was looking down at where he stood on a broad ledge, one hand gripping a bush. Ahead of him the track was even softer underfoot, the path muddier and the overhanging rhododendrons so thick the branches twisted around each other like flash-frozen serpents.

He didn’t want to answer, but he did anyway. Kate had that effect.

‘About Samsara.’

‘You hate the place that much?’

‘Hate it?’ Axl hesitated watching Kate slide down the track towards him, her fingers finding and releasing overhead branches in quick succession. Kate was using a different way down to the village, one less obvious than the main track but a lot steeper.

‘I don’t hate Samsara,’ Axl told Kate. ‘I wouldn’t want to live here, but I don’t hate it.’ And that’s where that conversation would have died—Axl decided later—if the zipped-tight, self-contained Kate Mercarderes hadn’t lost her footing, boot heels gouging dark scars into leaf mould as she fought for balance.

She might have kept upright, she might have fallen, but Axl caught her anyway. Whipping out his right arm as she flailed past. Pain ripped up Axl’s arm. For a split second it looked like the branch he gripped might crack. But the man didn’t even notice. He was far too busy watching Kate.

Fury?

Embarrassment?

Axl didn’t know what painted her face a sudden red and didn’t much care. Very slowly Axl shifted towards her and when Kate didn’t back away he rested his forehead against hers, ridiculously softly.

As needy as some teenage kid.

‘You all right?’ Kate asked. Her breath smelt of tsampa.

‘No, I’m not.’ Axl opened his mouth, then shut it again. Crunch time. What he was about to do was fuck-wit stupid. Flayed, flesh-cut-back-and-stripped-to-the-bone dumb. But when had that ever stopped him?

The mind threw up walls for a purpose, to keep shit in or keep light out, it didn’t much matter which. Kicking them down went against everything Axl believed in. There was the stuff in there Axl didn’t admit to himself. He’d have to be an idiot to tell it to some woman he hardly knew…

‘Look,’ said Axl. ‘You really think you know the truth about that kid… ?’ About me, he meant.

Her head flicked up in that defiant gesture Axl had begun to recognise, then she caught herself. ‘What would I know?’ She said it sadly.

‘The press releases had me down as a ghost. Do I look like hollow?’

Yes. No. Kate started to shake her head, hesitated… I don’t know. Yes, probably. She’d been born, grown up and educated within the walls of the Vatican and in all the twenty-seven years of her life she hadn’t met a single clone, other than Clone that was. And he was Marne release #2.1 of a combat model, which was different. She wouldn’t recognise a batch-reared ghost if she walked through a crowd of them. That was the point. The only real way to tell was strip out some DNA and check for the copyright line.

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes it does,’ said Axl as he stepped back because that was the only way he was going to get through the next few minutes. Though he didn’t look like someone stepped back and he didn’t feel like it either.

‘I’m not a clone.’ Axl held up his hand to stop whatever Kate was about to say. ‘I’m…’ Much worse were the words he was choking on.

The deep green of the rhododendrons began its slow spin around him: the glimpses of the distant sky seemed higher than ever, a far cold blue that had to be impossible. All he really wanted to do was sleep, to put his head to the damp leaf mould and let in the darkness. Forever if possible.

Conditioning, Axl thought, and wondered drunkenly why he hadn’t realised it before. ‘You know what I am?’

She didn’t.

‘I’m a fucking foetus,’ Axl said through gritted teeth and promptly blacked out, the wet earth he’d wanted to embrace coming up to meet him as his brain hit a system fault and clicked out the lights.

Kate sighed.

When Axl came to his head was in Kate’s lap, and she was stroking his cheek with one finger, following the line of a cheekbone. What he thought was a two-beat drum track was just his heart.

‘Oh, you’re with us again.’ She dropped her hand quickly.

‘Yeah. Looks like it.’ Axl struggled upright and got as far as kneeling before he felt sick again. Waves of nausea pulling at his gut.

‘You were telling me all about being aborted,’ Kate’s voice was neutral.

‘I was what… ?’

‘You told me everything,’ said Kate. ‘The whole fucking lot.’ It was the first time he’d heard Kate swear.

Her dark eyes were locked on his face, not cold or fierce but lit with sympathy that was almost unbearable. Everything else about her was studiedly casual. Rigorously non-threatening. Just how odd it was to be crouched opposite a woman who was worried she might make him afraid, Axl couldn’t begin to tell her.

‘I really told you?’ The blackness that had been crawling around the edges of his sight blew away as if it were smoke and Axl no longer felt sick. Inside his ribs his heart kicked back into a regular rhythm. There was no way Axl could know it, but his body levels of cortisol and the catecholarnines began to fall. All he knew was that his soundtrack slowed, softened slightly.

‘So when did you find out?’ Kate asked. She sat back on her heels and casually scratched the inside of one thigh, then blushed when she caught him watching. ‘You going to tell me or not?’

He did.

Eighteen weeks of womb time was what he got. That’s what they told him at the home anyway. Enough to produce tentative REM and thumb sucking, but leave him the wrong side of the survivability line. That was how long it took the kid to get her shit together enough to book a clinic. The clinic was a charity job, obviously enough. Cash wasn’t something she had a lot of, they’d told him that too. Made sure he knew freebase came first and getting rid of him came second. The home wanted him to know how lucky he was good people had come along.

When did he find out? Sweet Jesus.

‘I always knew,’ Axl said flatly. ‘Sometimes it just meant less.’

‘You want to expand on that?’

It was Axl’s turn to sigh. Grabbed from the disposal bin of an abortion clinic by a right-to-lifer hit team and grown to term in a Matsui artificial womb. Paraded as a toddler before judges, women who lunch, elderly patrons as an example of what their charity could achieve. Shit happened and mostly, it seemed to Kate, shit had been happening to the man in front of her. It was like someone just smashed a dam that held back a life’s worth of backed-up emotions. And then she realised with a shiver that someone had and it had been her.

He was still talking, telling her how he’d been sat stealing time from a public smartbook in the annex of the NY library on 42nd, using ‘trades to pop frames almost faster than his brain could render. Worthless shit all of it, the kind of stuff all eleven-year-old boys, not just street kids hide behind ‘trodes to skim. Some animal fuck sites, Taiwanese pissing schoolgirls, cheats for getting the 6 million volt nanchuku in Mishima, the usual stuff... A bit of bomb making, some half-arsed chemical formulae for a kitchen-sink version of BetterThanlce.

There was no site that toggled his memory, nothing meaningful like hitting on some dumb schmuck Fight For Life site, skimming the mugshots and thinking shit, that’s me... He just remembered being six and getting shown a lump of purple flesh the size of his fist, with frog-like legs and arms. Whatever it was in the glass case, it looked very dead.

‘You know what the blonde-haired matron said to me?’ Axl asked Kate.

Kate didn’t and she didn’t even want to guess.

‘You’ve got a sister to look after.’ Next time Axl saw his sister five months had gone by. She was still small and still purple but more-obviously alive.

In between they’d grafted her to a synthetic placenta and stitched the placenta into the pre-stretched uterus of a mother for Jesus. When that failed they fell back on a rubber womb, growing her in a nutrient and oxygen-rich solution of transparent gel.

‘But she was still one up on me,’ Axl said with a bleak smile. ‘I was picked up as an afterthought. When some God’s Fist commando grabbed a bucket on her way out, having slapped. a .45 through the head of an intern, nurse and receptionist at the clinic…’

He stopped briefly, listening to a noise in the distance but didn’t really pay it the attention he should have done. He was still too busy talking.

‘You ever get really cross as a kid,’ Axl asked, ‘so cross you say you didn’t ask to be born?’

Kate nodded.

‘Well, my mother didn’t ask for me to be born either. But the home still wanted me to demand the clinic release details so I could track her down.’ Axl shrugged. ‘Hi, you remember that walk-in, hobble-out abortion you had ten years ago… Well, the clinic got hit by Fight-for-Lifers that evening and I was the pile of slop at the bottom of the bucket. Yeah, I'm pleased to meet you too…’

‘Enough,’ said Kate. ‘Stop it.’ She was crying, the surface skim of water on her eyes magnifying pupils until it felt like she looked right into Axl’s head. Which wasn’t where anyone should be allowed to go.

‘Yeah, enough already.’ Axl stood up. Suddenly alert as a crimson-horned pheasant crashed into the air further down the path. Fear ate worm-like at his brain and it was nothing as wasteful as a memory: more of a dampened reflex, something hardwired. Guitar chords splintered, fast as panic.

‘Down,’ Axl slammed the crouching woman flat. Kate didn’t get to protest because Axl was already kneeling over her, with one knee up and one down, finding his balance as he thumbed back the hammer of his revolver and sighted in on somebody crashing through the bushes.

Black-powder exploded. Axl’s first bullet slamming into the trunk of a stunted oak, stripping away bark to reveal splintered, glistening wood beneath. Beautifully balanced it might have been but the revolver still fired slightly wide.

Which was just as well. Otherwise Mai would have been dead instead of just scared, shaking and white-hot furious. And then things would have been really fucked. How badly fucked, no one quite knew, not back then.