Jonathan Wilde, 1953–2046: A Critical Life
by Eon Talgarth
Ax is pacing the room, heedless of Dee’s angst, talking excitedly. Dee has to run the first few seconds past her again before she catches up: ‘So we have a puzzle,’ he’s been saying. ‘A couple of weeks ago, Wilde sees you on Reid’s screen. He gives no sign of recognition, but fires off an instructionset to get you loading up information, maybe with the intention of waking you up, maybe not. Yesterday, Wilde walks in, apparently having re-juved in the meantime, sees you and freaks out.’
Dee shakes her head.
‘The guy in the pub wasn’t a re-juve of the man I saw on the screen.’
Ax frowns. ‘You sound pretty sure of that.’
‘The re-juve doesn’t change the fact that you’ve lived longer. It always shows. Not on a picture, perhaps, but when you see someone move and speak it’s obvious.’ She smiles. ‘Don’t you find?’
‘Haven’t seen enough re-juves,’ Ax says. ‘It’s not a common procedure – most people stabilise at what they fancy is their best.’ He laughs. ‘Sometimes there’s a fashion for ageing, but it never lasts.’
‘I’ll tell you this,’ Dee says. ‘The Wilde I saw two weeks ago had lived a hell of a lot longer than the Wilde I saw last night.’
‘OK, assume there’s two of him. That’s no more of a mystery than there being even one of him, because he shouldn’t be here at all. He wasn’t in the crew, or the gangs.’ He flashes her a feral grin. ‘So Reid says, or at least the lists do. The company roll. I’ve checked. But like I said, people say they see him. And now, you have proof. He’s back!’
He picks up again the picture that Dee made. She can see his hands are shaking. He lights a cigarette after a couple of attempts, and stares at nothing for a while. His facial expression slowly changes, in a way that makes Dee think of how he must have got his names: it’s hard, and sharp, and…terminal.
‘Do you know what this means?’ he says.
Dee compresses her lips, shakes her head.
‘It means he’s back from the dead,’ Ax says. ‘It means everything’s going to change. It means all bets are off.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Dee says.
Ax jabs out the cigarette and lights another. He’s still shaking.
‘People assume things,’ he says. ‘They assume things will go on just as they are. They know what they can get away with. They know what they can get people to agree to. Like, I agreed to let other people use my body, because I needed the money. And they knew I did. But because I agreed, they think that makes it all right. Some of them even knew I hated it. But I agreed to it.’
Dee suddenly needs a cigarette herself. She lights one, and her hands, now, are trembling.
‘Did Reid ever let other people use your body?’
‘Oh no,’ Dee says quickly. ‘He’s very possessive.’
‘But he used you,’ Ax persists. ‘Whether you wanted to or not.’
‘I always wanted to,’ Dee says, but her Sex–y smile hides a new and gnawing doubt as to how much that consent was worth, now, looking back. Ax watches her, and she sees him see the doubt grow.
He opens a drawer in the table and reaches in, and brings out a knife. It isn’t a kitchen-knife. It has a black wooden handle, a brass guard, and thirty centimetres of blade. Almost casually, Ax bangs the sharp point of the knife into the table and lets go of the handle, so it springs back a bit and it vibrates.
‘Now you know who you are,’ Ax says quietly. Dee isn’t sure he’s talking to her. All the shaking has gone out of his body, out of his voice, and into that quivering blade. ‘You’re a person. You’re free. Have you ever thought – what you would like to do to people who’ve treated you like meat?’
Out here, in the damp-desert flats between two arms of the city, it’s quiet even for a Sic’day morning. The only sounds are the thrum of the dinghy’s motor, the occasional hiss of a jet transport overhead, and the cries of the adapted birdlife: the lost-satellite bleep of rustshanks, the quacking of mucks, and the caw-cawing of sandgulls. Sic’day is for most folk a day when some work is done, but not much.
(Tamara has heard the opinion that the day is called that because of the number of people working – or not working – with hangovers, but this is a myth. More than a Neo-Martian century ago, Reid expressed the opinion that continuing to name the days after the gods of the Solar system would be inappropriate. Nobody could agree on other names, so the week goes: Wunday, Twoday, Thirday, Fourday, Fi’day, Sic’day, Se’nday. There are twenty-five hours and ten minutes in a day; for convenience there are twenty-five hours in the first six days and twenty-six on Se’nday. There are a hundred and ten weeks in a year. More or less. All serious chronology is done in SI multiples of seconds, reckoning from the moment the Ship’s clock came out of the Malley Mile, around 6.4 gigaseconds ago.)
Tamara’s boat bumps against the canal-bank as she drifts along under minimal power. She’s on a capillary of the Ring Canal. The shallow artificial rivulet is carrying her away from the centre of the city, towards the fields. The human quarter is on her right, the Fifth Quarter on her left. Between them is this expanse of waste, not quite mud-flat, but no longer desert, and not yet fields. In it, venturing out from the machine domain of the Fifth Quarter, can be found biomechanisms, Tamara’s habitual prey.
A sandgull descends, screaming, about a hundred and fifty metres ahead and thirty from the left bank. Tamara ups the revs and lowers her profile as other gulls dive to join it. They squawk and squabble around a black thing. The boat cuts diagonally across the canal. Tamara zooms her right eye. The black thing has a flailing appendage. A stubborn gull clings to it, taking some of the momentum out of the shaking in moments of hopping near-flight.
‘Stay,’ Tamara tells the boat’s ’bot, and it obediently idles the engine and hooks the bank as Tamara steps out, clutching a long grapple. She draws her pistol as she sprints forward. The bang of a blank scatters the gulls into wheeling indignation overhead. As Tamara’s feet thud over the damp sand and skip over tussocks of grass, the black object – a warty, rubbery ball about a third of a metre across, with at least a metre of flail – starts hauling itself towards the nearest patch of what looks suspiciously like quicksand. When she’s about four metres away Tamara feels a tickle behind the bridge of her nose. She stops and sniffs. The tickle stays constant – good. That means the radioactivity is contained, not airborne. Still, the thing’s uncomfortably hot. Not dangerous, but she has to be careful.
She circles it gingerly, getting between it and the wet area. It moves towards her: whip, tug, bounce; whip, tug, bounce. It stops. The tip of the flail rises and sways from side to side, then presses against the ground. Tamara steps forward, stumbles as her left foot comes up from the ground with an unexpected sucking noise. The rubbery limb recoils.
Tamara squats down and reaches out with her grapple, a simple mechanism a couple of metres long which has a primitive robot hand at the far end and a pair of handles for her to grasp, one-handed, and thus extend her clutch. She eases it across the ground and grabs the flail at the root. In obliging reflex, the tentacular appendage wraps around the grapple and starts trying to crush it to death.
Tamara lifts it off the ground and heads back to the boat. The biomech, evolved or designed at the interface between domains, is not a bad catch. It has senses, reflexes, and apparently a capacity to concentrate radioactives within its tough skin. Somewhere in the human quarter there’s a technician who is looking for just such a genotype, or so she hopes.