He fumbled for them instinctively, dropped one and secured the other. Looking down, he realized they were the tickets he'd intended for Darling. Steerage class to Parate; a Chiat Dai agricultural ship full of atmosphere-treating lichen. High O2 concentrations: no smoking and flash suits required full-time.
"I suggest you make that ship, Mr. Zimivic."
"I will certainly not!" he shouted. He bared his teeth and put one finger to his right temple to activate a direct interface.
No connection occurred.
She pulled the Warden's black laquered box from her robe, shaking her head.
"You're welcome to call the cops when I leave, Mr. Zimivic. But I remind you that you don't know who I am or where I came from."
She threw the box in the air, caught it. There was a strange precision to her movements, a little like the Warden's: a combination of mechanical efficiency and animal grace.
"All you know," the woman continued, "is what I did to your highpriced killing machine…"
She let the sentence end with a strange, empty tone in her voice, as if she wasn't quite finished. Zimivic found himself anxious for the rest.
"… for fun." She sounded almost sad.
But she smiled at Zimivic, and her eyes travelled slowly down his frame, as if marking a hundred loci of torture, planning an agenda of agonies acute and slow, sliding him into some inquisitor's category of victimhood organized by long experience. It was the coldest look he had ever endured.
And then she was gone.
Zimivic didn't waste much time thinking. He shouted for his valet drone, which was hovering impatiently about the crumple figure as if waiting to clean the carpet underneath it. The little robot flew into action, splitting into five discrete elements to gather the clothing, knick-knacks, and souvenirs Zimivic had scattered about the suite. The man himself packed the few artworks that he traveled with, pausing in his panicked rush to place them carefully in their special cases.
He looked at his watch. Plenty of time. It's the middle of the night; the birds are light and I can take a flyer.
Zimivic summoned a luggage carrier and limousine, and sat down to wait.
The Warden's breathing filled the silence of the suite. It had a raspy, liquid quality, as if someone had poured a thick, sweet liqueur into the creature's lungs. He struggled occassionally, as if to rise. Finally, the broken man turned his head and caught Zimivic's spellbound eye.
"She cores…" the Warden gurgled.
Zimivic turned his head away. But he was too much an aesthete, his eye too fascinated with extremes. And the wasted thing bleeding into the white carpet was in its way beautifuclass="underline" a perfectly abject remainder of a man.
There'd been a one-legged woman, twice his age, who'd lived with Zimivic's family when he was young. Zimivic was a child of poverty, and any number of borders had passed through their crowded flat. At sixteen, he'd become fascinated with the woman's fleshy stub. He would catch a glimpse through the crack of a hinged door, or in dim moonlight in that glorious month they'd shared a room. Since then, he'd never been able to take his eyes from an amputee. A homeless and legless beggar on the metro, the sculptor Byron Vitalle with his missing fingers, the Chiat War veteran who whirred past his gallery every noon like clockwork. Guilty pleasures.
His eyes were drawn to the Warden by that same terrible power.
The thing was exquisitely horrible.
"She's care…" it said.
The entry chime sounded again.
Zimivic jumped to the door, then opened it with trepidation. He shuddered with relief to see the luggage carrier rather than some new and fantastic invasion. The machine collected the bags, which he'd coded with the name of the Chiat Dai vessel. Its dull intelligence ignored the man on the floor. He looked at his watch again. Plenty of time.
As the limo flew through the dark buildings of Malvir, Zimivic's panic began to subside, and the madness of what had happened surged into his mind. The Vaddum had been only a dozen hours from being his. His victory over Darling, Fowdy, and that bitch-dyke Vatrici had seemed complete. And suddenly, that strange, terrible woman with her sickening smile had delivered defeat to his door.
This was insane!
He began to breathe heavily. The antiseptic smell of the rented limousine seemed laced with a choking, cloying incense. The money he'd spent. Passage to Malvir, the tickets for Darling (a foolish, expensive joke, sending him back to Parate), the Warden…
His mind's eye returned to the bleeding wreck on the hotel suite floor. So utterly broken. So completely demolished.
So expensive.
"Stop," Zimivic commanded. The limo came to a slow, even halt, drifting uneasily in the accelerated air currents between two skyscrapers.
Zimivic leaned back. Something could be salvaged. Something. The Warden could be repaired, or perhaps sold as is? It was, in its way, beautiful. If it expired on the way home, he could put it into cryo, preserving the delicate and incredibly detailed perfection of its agony. There were techniques of mummification, transparent plastics and nanos that could chase away deteriorating microbes indefinitely.
Titles moved through Zimivic's fevered mind: "The Terror Victim" or "The Measure of Torture" or simply, "A Man."
The reverie snapped suddenly. He realized with horror that the idiot limousine was stalled, wafting like some purposeless kite.
"Back to the hotel, you moron!" he shouted. "Can't you see that I've forgotten something?"
He looked at his watch again, tugged his sleeve across the radiant pyramid on its face and leaned back, sighing. Just enough time.
Chapter 15
FREE MAN
A wasteland:
The man, no longer a Warden, finds that he can move his hand.
He makes a fist, absent the two fingers that are broken, relishing through his agony the feeling of freedom. The motion is his own; the governors seem to have been silenced by the ingenious torrents of pain he has suffered at the madwoman's hands.
For a while, that single movement is all he can manage.
Then he tries to speak again. His throat is sore from the objects she force-fed him: a ring, a hard and serrated leaf from one of the hotel's plants, one of his own teeth. His swallowing muscles were paralyzed along with the rest, and she stuffed them down his gullet with a telescoping stylus. Despite his grim effort, the words come out wrong.
"She cores…"
Someone else is in the room, in a flurry of motion.
He rolls his neck, attempting to find a better position for his wounded throat. He wants to say something.
A few more croaks, and the pain brings a veil of darkness.
He wakes up alone.
Some insistent noise has brought him to consciousness. The distant clang of requested access rings with a strange buzzing echo. He suspects that his eardrums have been burst. Perhaps medical aid is here.
He forces a word from his throat.
"Come." Blood joins the sound in his mouth, spreads its metal taste like a blanket on his tongue.
The swish of a door opening. He finds that he can turn his head. A figure floats silently into the room, some sort of drone. With a new chorus of agonies he pulls himself up into a kneeling position. However painful, the motion is gloriously free of governance. He is the master of his own body.
Somehow, he lasted longer than the controls and programs, watched them die one by one as the madwoman worked. In their single-minded desire to serve sentence, the torture appalled as well as injured them. Even the Last Resort had failed. And when the artificial he was meant to ward left the room, slipping out silently, the governors saw their last chance to serve sentence disappear. And then they began to expire: first the criminal overlays, the kluges and updates added over the years, and finally the deep programs of Justice. Finally only he remained: the original self so long buried.