‘I was at Innenin, Hand.’ I knocked ash off the cigarette and gave him back his smile, barely used. ‘At Innenin, I heard soldiers with columns about that tall on their backs screaming for a whole spectrum of higher powers. None of them showed up that I noticed. Allies like that I can live without.’
‘God is not ours to command.’
‘Evidently not. Tell me about Semetaire. That hat and coat. He’s playing a part, right?’
‘Yes.’ There was a cordial distaste leaking into Hand’s voice now. ‘He has adopted the guise of Ghede, in this case the lord of the dead—’
‘Very witty.’
‘—in an attempt to dominate the weaker-minded among his competitors. He is probably an adept of sorts, not without a certain amount of influence in the spirit realm, though certainly not enough to call up that particular personage. I am somewhat more.’ He offered me a slight smile. ‘Accredited, shall we say. I was merely making that clear. Presenting my credentials, you might say, and establishing the fact that I found his act in poor taste.’
‘Strange this Ghede hasn’t got around to making the same point, isn’t it?’
Hand sighed. ‘Actually, it’s very likely that Ghede, like you, sees the humour of the situation. For a Wise One, he is very easily amused.’
‘Really.’ I leaned forward, searching his face for some trace of irony. ‘You believe this shit, right? I mean, seriously?’
The Mandrake exec watched me for a moment, then he tipped back his head and gestured at the sky above us.
‘Look at that, Kovacs. We’re drinking coffee so far from Earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. Stored as dreams in the mind of a machine that thinks in a fashion so far in advance of our own brains it might as well carry the name of god. We have been resurrected into bodies not our own, grown in a secret garden outwith the body of any mortal woman. These are the facts of our existence, Kovacs. How, then, are they different, or any less mystical, than the belief that there is another realm where the dead live in the company of beings so far beyond us we must call them gods?’
I looked away, oddly embarrassed by the fervour in Hand’s voice. Religion is funny stuff, and it has unpredictable effects on those who use it. I stubbed out my cigarette and chose my words with care.
‘Well, the difference is that the facts of our existence weren’t dreamed up by a bunch of ignorant priests centuries before anyone had left the Earth’s surface or built anything resembling a machine. I’d say that on balance that makes them a better fit than your spirit realm for whatever reality we find out here.’
Hand smiled, apparently unoffended. He seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘That is a local view, Kovacs. Of course, all the remaining churches have their origins in pre-industrial times, but faith is metaphor, and who knows how the data behind these metaphors has travelled, from where and for how long. We walk amidst the ruins of a civilisation that apparently had godlike powers thousands of years before we could walk upright. Your own world, Kovacs, is encircled by angels with flaming swords—’
‘Whoa.’ I lifted my hands, palms out. ‘Let’s damp down the metaphor core for a moment. Harlan’s World has a system of orbital battle platforms that the Martians forgot to decommission when they left.’
‘Yes.’ Hand gestured impatiently. ‘Orbitals built of some substance that resists every attempt to scan it, orbitals with the power to strike down a city or a mountain, but who forbear to destroy anything save those vessels that try to ascend into the heavens. What else is that but an angel?’
‘It’s a fucking machine, Hand. With programmed parameters that probably have their basis in some kind of planetary conflict—’
‘Can you be sure of that?’
He was leaning across the table now. I found myself mirroring his posture as my own intensity stoked.
‘Have you ever been to Harlan’s World, Hand? No, I thought not. Well I grew up there and I’m telling you the orbitals are no more mystical than any other Martian artefact—’
‘What, no more mystical than the songspires?’ His voice dropped to a hiss. ‘Trees of stone that sing to the rising and setting sun? No more mystical than a gate that opens like a bedroom door onto—’
He stopped abruptly and glanced around, face flushing with the near indiscretion. I sat back and grinned at him.
‘Admirable passion, for someone in a suit that expensive. So you’re trying to sell me the Martians as voodoo gods. Is that it?’
‘I’m not trying to sell you anything,’ he muttered, straightening up. ‘And no, the Martians fit quite comfortably into this world. We don’t need recourse to the places of origin to explain them. I’m just trying to show you how limited your world view is without an acceptance of wonder.’
I nodded.
‘Very good of you.’ I stabbed a finger at him. ‘Just do me a favour, Hand. When we get where we’re going, keep this shit stowed, will you. I’m going to have enough to worry about without you weirding out on me.’
‘I believe only what I have seen,’ he said stiffly. ‘I have seen Ghede and Carrefour walk amongst us in the flesh of men, I have heard their voices speak from the mouths of the hougan, I have summoned them.’
‘Yeah, right.’
He looked at me searchingly, offended belief melting slowly into something else. His voice loosened and flowed down to a murmur. ‘This is strange, Kovacs. You have a faith as deep as mine. The only thing I wonder is why you need so badly not to believe.’
That sat between us for almost a minute before I touched it. The noise from surrounding tables faded out and even the wind out of the north seemed to be holding its breath. Then I leaned forward, speaking less to communicate than to dispel the laser-lit recall in my head.
‘You’re wrong, Hand,’ I said quietly. ‘I’d love to have access to all this shit you believe. I’d love to be able to summon someone who’s responsible for this fuck-up of a creation. Because then I’d be able to kill them. Slowly.’
Back in the machine, Hand’s virtual self worked the long shortlist down to eleven. It took nearly three months to do it. Run at the AI’s top capacity of three hundred and fifty times real time, the whole process was over shortly before midnight.
By that time, the intensity of the conversation up on the roof had mellowed, first into an exchange of experiential reverie, a kind of rummaging around in the things we had seen and done that tended to support our individual world views, and thence to increasingly vague observations on life threaded onto long mutual silences as we stared beyond the ramparts of the tower and out into the desert night. Hand’s pocket bleep broke into the powered-down mood like a note shattering glass.
We went down to look at what we had, blinking in the suddenly harsh lights inside the tower and yawning. Less than an hour later, as midnight turned over and the new day began, we turned off Hand’s virtual self and uploaded ourselves into the machine in his place.
Final selection.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In recall, their faces come back to me.
Not the faces of the beautiful rad-resistant Maori combat sleeves they wore up to Dangrek and the smoking ruins of Sauberville. Instead, I see the faces they owned before they died. The faces Semetaire claimed and sold back into the chaos of the war. The faces they remembered themselves as, the faces they presented in the innocuous hotel-suite virtuality where I first met them.