‘How is he?’ was the best I could manage.
‘He’s not good, but then you know that. Worse now since he’s met his younger brother. Since Demiurge hurt him, God knows first hand that he wants to commit deicide and hates him. Did you know that? They programmed Demiurge for hate. Why would you do that?’ Her tone was flat. No emotion.
I had no answers for her.
‘I was thinking about what Pagan said about Cronin and Rolleston being programmed, being malfunctioning tools of the Cabal. Just another weapon in the arsenal,’ she continued.
I was lying on the catwalk looking up at the curve of the Tetsuo Chou ’s hull. I propped myself up and took a swig of Glenmorangie and passed the bottle to Morag. She accepted it, wiped the top of the bottle and took a swig herself.
‘They could have designed them for anything. They could have made Rolleston want to protect, to help. They could have made Cronin want to try and make things better for everyone. Surely that would profit everyone in the end? Instead only a few can profit because control is what’s important. Instead they program for hate. I just don’t get so much suffering for such abstract reasons, and I think we’re going to die because of it,’ she finished.
I had nothing for her. Nothing I could tell her. When she said that she thought she was going to die I felt cold. I felt something bad happen to my stomach and bile burn the back of my throat. It had been Morag who had thought it was going to be all right going to Maw City.
‘I think maybe it’s always been that way,’ I said. ‘Powerful people make decisions and others pay for them. The decisions are either incomprehensible to most people, who just want food, shelter and safety for them and theirs. Mudge reckons it’s simpler than that: he thinks it’s all lies to justify greed. Or possibly sexual inadequacy.’
There was neither warmth nor humour in her smile. She rolled onto her side, propping herself up on her elbow so she could look at me.
‘God, I hate you,’ she said. I preferred it when she was shooting at me. ‘We are not all right. Things are not good between us, and what you did was fucked up for so many different reasons.’
I couldn’t look at her. Even looking away it was like her eyes were burning me. They were judging me. I had been found wanting and couldn’t face their glare. I heard her start to cry. I turned back to look at her. Her face crumpled as she let out a dry sob. I sat up as she crawled over to me. I held her so tightly it must have hurt her. I felt her shake with each sob. She bit me, dug her nails into me.
‘I promised myself I would be strong,’ she finally said, angry with herself. ‘It’s not me. It’s Ambassador. He’s so lonely. So far from his people.’
She was carrying the pain for two.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She looked up at me. ‘You bastard!’ she spat, so angry again. ‘I hate you and I think you’re the only thing I have really got out here. You know what I did back in Trace’s office…’
‘You saved us, then again with the mech,’ I said.
She hit me. She put power into it but it was at an awkward angle; I was still holding her.
‘You put me into a corpse, back in the Freetown, that mech driver you made me jack into, you fucker. You put me into a corpse after I’d killed for the first time. I killed and then you made me feel the consequences in a dead man’s head.’
I stared at her, appalled. I felt like all the blood was draining from my body, leaving a bag of skin filled with metal and plastic. I’d had no idea.
‘And you’d already made it so I couldn’t talk to you about it.’
She’d killed on the Atlantis Spoke as well, when she’d hacked their systems and used automated weapons to take out a Walker, but it hadn’t been so immediate. She didn’t watch the consequences in front of her eyes. She didn’t end up wearing their blood, and as a result I don’t think she’d faced up to it, and I wasn’t going to bring it up.
‘This is very fucking touching, but some of us are trying to have sex!’ Mudge shouted from his compartment.
Morag’s head whipped round at the voice. She looked so angry, searching for someone to blame. I don’t know why Mudge and Merle had turned off the white-noise generator but I knew why Mudge had shouted. He wanted us to know that everyone not tranced in would hear us. It was a warning. Moments later Morag understood.
‘C’mon,’ she said and took my hand. Hers felt tiny surrounded by the composite material of my prosthetics. The tactile sensors offered my nervous system the facsimile of touch as she dragged me towards her compartment.
Inside was dark. Various things were scattered around on the floor, and I’m sure I stood on some of them as she dragged me down to sit on the smartfoam mattress. I switched to lowlight and illuminated her in green as she came towards me with a jack, reaching behind my neck for one of my plugs. I caught her wrist in my hand.
‘Are you going to kill me?’
She shook her head but didn’t get angry.
‘Let go of me now.’ I did. ‘You don’t know me at all, do you? Now we do what I want to do.’
I felt the jack click into my plug. I watched Morag disappear.
I knew this place. It was a jazz club in New York from about a hundred years before the FHC, before the city was flooded. It was called the Cotton Club and at the time booze had been illegal. So of course it flourished. All the greats had played here: Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.
The place was subtly lit, filled with smoke. Tables were set around a dance floor in front of the raised stage. More intimate booths were set into the wall. There was a fully stocked bar against the back wall. The place was empty. Like the tea room, even the smell was right. Or at least how I imagined it would have smelled — wood with alcohol soaked into it, tobacco smoke.
‘I made this for you. I played down some of the more racist parts of the decor,’ Morag said.
I turned at her voice. She was dressed like a flapper. She wore a tasselled dress that came down to just above her knees, some sort of fabric skullcap/hat thing and a string of pearls.
I looked down at myself. I was wearing spats and a linen suit of the era. I even had a hat. Morag would tell me the hat was called a panama.
‘When?’ I asked.
She looked away from me. In here she — we — could cry.
‘After I found out.’
‘Why?’
She smiled as she wiped away the tears. ‘So you could practise without the others killing you.’
I smiled. ‘Can I hold you?’
She did nothing, said nothing for what seemed a very long time, and then she nodded. I moved to her and wrapped my arms around her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to her. ‘I’ve no reason, no excuse; all I’ve got is that I love you and I won’t hurt you again.’
She looked up at me. ‘Why are you sorry?’ she asked. I opened my mouth to say for cheating and then closed it again.
‘I’m sorry I abandoned you,’ I told her.
I should have trusted in her, been in this from the start. She nodded and pushed me away.
‘People — men — have hurt me before, I mean physically. I’m used to it. Is this what you want? Because we can do it in here. It’s okay in here. It’s not real.’
I looked at her in horror. She held her arms out away from her body and suddenly she was drenched in blood. I stumbled away from her, horrified. I bumped into a chair and fell back onto the floor. I wanted to vomit.
‘No, Morag, please!’
I wanted the image gone. It felt like a horrible warning from the future, the sum result of Morag’s association with me. Her bloodied visage walked towards me and I recoiled from her. I didn’t think she was really offering this. I wanted to think it was a lesson, but maybe it was revenge. My back hit the wall and I curled up and closed my eyes.