‘That’s easy,’ she laughed. ‘I can tell you why. If you’re interested.’
Rimmer said nothing as he started the electric motor and stamped irritably on the power pedal. The car moved forward, silently picking up speed.
‘Are you interested?’ she asked, smiling, making him work for an answer. She could see he was biting his lip in an effort not to admit that he was.
For a few more seconds Rimmer attempted to retain control of their conversational game, trying to force her to react to his moves instead of the other way around.
‘Go on then,’ he snarled finally. ‘Don’t make me have to seek absolution from a priest before you tell.’
‘Absolution? For you?’ It was her turn to sniff with contempt. ‘There’s certainly no time for that. I’ve a good idea you’ve more wrongs than most to own up to, Mister Rimmer.’
‘The job is not without its amusements.’
‘I thought so.’
‘Think what you like.’
‘I shall. Thinking what I like has always afforded me the greatest of pleasure.’
For several minutes, they drove in silence. Rimmer hadn’t said where they were going, but it was somewhere north — somewhere that was clearly outside the CBH Zone[72]: You didn’t need documentation to get out, but you needed to be in possession of a CBH to get back in. The very idea of leaving the Zone gave her an uncomfortable feeling of vulnerability.
‘Well,’ said Rimmer, breaking the silence. ‘Are you going to tell me, or not?’
‘Sure,’ said Ronica. ‘It’s like this. I asked him if, in return for paying lip service to his holy rood, he might advance my career at a slightly more urgent pace.’ The drug was really taking effect now: Her whole head was humming, as if she’d had an electric shock. ‘Anyway, he said he would, and asked me if there were any particular areas in Terotechnology where I thought my talents might lie. And in between anthropophagous mouthfuls, I suggested Security. Like I say, I enjoy bondage and that kind of thing. Well, naturally he was just a little disappointed that I hadn’t suggested Design, because that’s his thing. However, he was able to keep a stiff upper lip just long enough to cede unto me his many-headed florescence.’
‘You mean you sucked his cock,’ said Rimmer.
‘Yes,’ she said, and they both started to laugh.
‘You know, you’re all right,’ said Rimmer, who was thinking that she must have been sent by the director to spy on him. And if for any reason things went badly wrong again, then he might have to arrange some sort of fatal accident for Ronica.
‘Thanks,’ she said. If things worked out as she expected, then the man still laughing with her had maybe less than an hour before she blew his brains out. ‘Where are we going?’
‘A hotel.’
‘But we’ve only just met. What kind of a girl do you take me for?’
‘The hyperbaric kind of hotel. Where sick people go to get themselves oxygenated, not laid.’
‘I know what they get. A little color in their cheeks. A chance to breathe easy at night. But it’s all just air today, gone tomorrow.’ She shrugged. ‘Do you ever give them much thought? The bad bloods?’
‘Can’t say I do,’ admitted Rimmer.
‘Oh, I think about them a lot. It makes me feel good to know that there are so many people worse off than me. Kind of the philosophical opposite of utilitarianism. Social schadenfreude, I suppose you could call it.’ Ronica stared out of the car’s bullet-proof windows at the moonlit people she had been talking about. Only a few minutes’ drive had taken them out of the Zone and into a less salubrious part of the city. There was little traffic on the road, but still plenty of people walking around: the living dead, as she thought of them.
‘Look at them,’ she spat. ‘Like walking Gothics. Restless gossamers. Two A.M. and there are still thousands of them abroad on the streets, like vampires out for an evening stroll. The poor fucking bastards.’
‘You’ve got a nasty mouth,’ said Rimmer.
‘That’s not what the director said,’ she murmured, delighting in the image of herself and the director she was creating for Rimmer’s benefit. ‘If you’re nice to me, maybe I’ll do the same for you.’
‘I wouldn’t recommend it,’ said Rimmer. ‘Been a while since I had a wash, what with trying to kill Dallas and his family.’
‘Thanks for the advice,’ said Ronica, her nose wrinkling with disgust. ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’
‘But hey, I’m always nice to people.’ Saying this made Rimmer laugh out loud again.
‘You know, I can’t tell if you’re immoral or amoral, Rimmer.’
‘I have the same problem myself.’
‘You’re a moral eunuch, then.’
‘Comes with the job. Perhaps you should give that some thought yourself.’
‘My morals are really very simple,’ said Ronica. ‘I would never do anything that might interfere with my progress within the company.’
‘Sounds to me like you’d be better suited to a career in the Church.’
‘If this one doesn’t work for me, then maybe I’ll give it a try. I look good in black.’
Ronica sank down into the capacious warmth of her thick lambskin coat. Glancing out of the window, she caught sight of a swarm of rats feasting on a dead body lying on the roadside. ‘Ugh, I hate this part of the city. Whatever is Dallas thinking of coming to an area like this? It’s so far from the Zone.’
‘That’s the whole idea,’ chuckled Rimmer, as the car’s automatic steering system narrowly avoided a collision with a man wandering like a zombie up the center of the road. ‘The most unlikely place is the most secure. Or so he seems to have thought.’
‘How did you find him anyway?’
‘I persuaded Dixy, his Motion Parallax assistant, to tell me.’
‘That can’t have been easy.’
Rimmer told her about the dog, Mersenne.
‘So then, no computer is an island, entire of itself, either,’ observed Ronica. ‘That’s interesting.’
‘I think Dixy was just programmed that way,’ said Rimmer, and pointed at the flashing routefinder. ‘Looks like we’re nearly there.’
‘Good. So promise me you won’t make a meal of it,’ she said. ‘The sooner you blow his brains out, the sooner we can get back to the Zone and healthy civilization. Just driving through this shit heap makes me feel like I’m going to catch something awful. Bubonic plague, Ebola, Lassa, smallpox.’
Rimmer laughed, as if enjoying her discomfort, but at the same time, he wondered how much of it was genuine. Even in her evening clothes and smelling as sweetly as any genetically engineered bloom, the well-muscled Ronica looked more than equal to the task at hand.
‘I thought I would read him a bit from the Bible first,’ teased Rimmer. ‘Execution style. The book of Exodus, I think. That always offers a fairly conclusive text.’
‘Not much consolation there, I’d have thought.’
‘Precisely my idea. So what’s your favorite bit in the Bible?’
Ronica shrugged. ‘I dunno. The head of John the Baptist? No, wait. Gershon’s foreskin. That got hacked off with a stone. Pretty much anyone’s foreskin, I guess. That’s usually my favorite bit. In the Bible. And anywhere else.’
‘I think I’m beginning to understand just what the director sees in you,’ admitted Rimmer.
The car drew up to the Clostridium Hotel. Rimmer switched off the engine and sat back in his seat. ‘Well,’ he said, with the air of a man who might have just arrived somewhere nice for a holiday. ‘We’re here.’
‘I’ve got to pee,’ said Ronica.
‘What?’