There was no alarm, no bugle for help to Rubras principal consciousness. The monitor routine saw only an empty apartment waiting for Horgan.
They are coming, Dariat told the others in Anders Bospoorts bedroom. All three possessed were with him. Ross Nash who rode in Bospoorts own body, a Canadian from the early twentieth century. Enid Ponter, from the Australian-ethnic planet Geraldton, dead for two centuries, who occupied Alicia Cochranes mortal form. And Klaus Schiller, possessing Manza Balyuzis body, a German who muttered incessantly about his Fhrer, and seemingly angered at having to take on an Asian appearance. The body was now markedly different to the image contained in his passport flek the day he disembarked from the Yaku . His skin was blanching; jet-black hair streaked with expanding tufts of fine blond strands; the gentle facial features shifting to rugged bluntness, eyes azure blue. He had even grown a couple of centimetres taller.
And Rubra? Enid Ponter asked. Does he know?
My disruption routines have worked. The monitor cant see us.
Ross Nash looked slowly round the bedroom, almost as though he was sniffing a trace of some exotic scent in the air. I sense it. Behind the walls, there is a coldness of heart.
Anstid, Dariat said. Thats what you sense. Rubra is just an aspect of him, a servant.
Ross Nash made no attempt to hide his disgust.
None of them really trusted him, Dariat knew. They were strong enemies who had agreed a precarious truce because of the damage they could each inflict on the other. Such a stand-off could never last long. Human doubts and insecurities gnawed at such restraints, chafing at reasonableness. And the stakes on both sides were high, accelerating the devout need to see treachery in every hesitant breath and wary footstep.
But he would prove his worthiness as few had done before. Entrusting them with not merely his life, but his death as well. It was all so absurdly logical.
He needed their awesome powers of manifestation, and at the same time retain his affinity. Their power came from death, therefore he must die and possess a body with the affinity gene. So simple when you say it quick. And completely mad. But then what he had seen these last few days defied sanity.
Horgan and Kiera entered the apartment. They were kissing even as the door closed.
Dariat concentrated hard, his affinity strumming the new neural routines alive with a delicate harmony of deceit. The image of the twined figures was incorporated into one of them. An illusive fallacy; generated by a misappropriated section of the habitats neural cells massing ten times that of the human brain. Small in relation to the total mass of the neural strata, but enough to make the illusion perfect, giving the phantom Horgan and Kiera weight and texture and colour and smell. Even body heat. The sensitive cells registered that as they started to tug each others clothes off with the typical impatience of teenagers in lust.
Most difficult of all for Dariat to mimic was the constant flow of emotion and feeling Horgan emitted unconsciously into the affinity band. But he managed it, by dint of careful memory and composition. The monitor routine looked on with tranquil disinterest.
There was a split in Dariats mind, like alternative quantum-cosmology histories, two realities diverging. In one, Horgan and Kiera raced for the bedroom, laughing, clothes flying. In the other ...
Horgans eyes blinked open in surprise. The kiss had delivered every promise her body made. He was primed for the greatest erotic encounter of his life. But now she was sneering contemptuously. And four other people were coming into the lounge from one of the bedrooms. Two of the men were huge, in opposite directions.
Horgan barely paid them any attention. He had heard of deals like this, whispered terrors amongst the kids in the day clubs. Snuffsense. The bitch had set him up as the meat they would rape to death. He turned, his leg muscles already taut.
Somethingstrange, like a hard ball of liquidhit him on the back of the head. He was falling, and in the distance a choir of infernal angels was singing.
Dariat stood aside as Ross Nash hauled the semiconscious Horgan into the bedroom. He tried not to stare at the boys feet, they were floating ten centimetres in the air.
Are you ready? Kiera asked, her tone dripping with disdain.
He walked past her into the bedroom. Do we get to screw afterwards?
Dariat had favoured an old-fashioned capsule you swallowed rather than a transfusion pad or medical package. It was blacknaturallytwo centimetres long. He had acquired it from his regular narkhal supplier. A neurotoxin, guaranteed painless, she promised. As if he could complain if it wasnt.
He grinned at that. And swallowed, almost while his conscious mind was diverted. If it did hurt she was due for some very pointed lessons on consumer rights from an unexpected direction.
Get on with it, he told the figures grouped round the bed. Tall and reedy, they were now, mud-brown effigies a sculptor had captured through a blurred lens. They bent over the spread-eagled boy and sent cold fire writhing up and down his spine.
The poison was fast acting. Guaranteed. Dariat was losing all feeling in his limbs. Sight greyed out. His hearing faded, which was a relief. It meant he didnt have to listen to all that screaming. Anastasia, he muttered. How easy it would be to join her now. She only had a thirty-year head start, and what was that compared to infinity? He could find her.
Death.
And beyond.
A violent jerk of both body and mind. The universe blew away in all directions at once, horrifying in its immensity. Silence shrouded him; a silence he considered only possible in the extremity of intergalactic space. Silence without heat or cold, without touch or taste. Silence singing with thoughts.
He didnt look around. There was nothing to look with, nowhere to look, not in this, the sixth realm. But he knew, was aware of, what shared this state with him, the spirits Anastasia had told him about as they sat in her tepee so long ago.
Nebulous minds wept tears of emotion, their sorrow and lamentation splashing against him. And whole spectra of hatreds; jealousy and envy, but mostly self-loathing. They were spirits, all of them, lost beyond redemption.
Outside of this was colour, all around, but never present. Untouchable and taunting. A universe he was pleased to call real. The realm of the living. A wondrous, beautiful place, a corporeality crying out for belonging.
He wanted to beat against it, to demand entry. He had no hands, and there was no wall. He wanted to call to the living to rescue him. He had no voice.
Help me! his mind shrieked.
The lost spirits laughed cruelly. Their numbers pressed against him, vast beyond legion. He had no single defined location, he found, no kernel with a protective shell. He was everywhere at once, conjunctive with them. Helpless against their invasion. Lust and avarice sent them prising and clawing at his memories, suckling the sweet draught of sensations he contained. A poor substitute for intrinsicality, but still fresh, still juicy with detail. The only sustenance this arcane continuum boasted.
Anastasia, help me.
They adored his most shameful secrets, for they carried the strongest passionstolen glances at women through the habitat sensitive cells, masturbating, the hopeless yearning for Anastasia, impossible promises made in the depth of night, hangovers, gluttony, glee as the club smashed against Mersin Columbas head, Anastasias vital body hot against him, limbs locking together. They drank it all, deriding him even as they idolized him for the glimpse of life he brought.