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.