Expatria: The Box Set (22 page)
Read Expatria: The Box Set Online
Authors: Keith Brooke
Amid the flow of oranges and blacks of the cultists, Mathias had spotted some normal clothing, a small, dark figure.
Mono
. And by her, taller, thinner, was Idi Mondata, shouting and waving his arms about, trying to give the Krishnas some sort of direction.
It was over in an instant, the mass of bodies too great for the indecisive Conventist Guards. Mathias snatched Mono from the crowd and headed for open space.
They paused near to one of the smaller archways and there they saw Lucilla, blocking the way and staring at Greta.
'Please, Lucilla, let me through,' said Greta. 'We can go away together. Please, Lucilla!'
The hippies turned their music down and the arena fell silent, the fighting over. Everybody was watching the two women in the archway.
'You killed March,' said Lucilla, her voice steady and controlled. 'You deceived me, you made me love you even when you'd taken March from me.'
'Please, Lucilla. No! I didn't kill him. It was
Matti
—you heard the judge's verdict.'
'No more lies, Greta.'
'It's true! I didn't kill him. It was the Convent, I just helped, but I didn't have any choice. They wanted Matti out of the way. It wasn't me, Lucilla. Let me through.'
Greta took a nervous step forwards and then flinched as Lucilla raised her heavy hands.
'You've hurt me more than anyone ever could,' said Lucilla. She laid a hand softly on Greta's head. 'But I forgive you.'
'What?' Greta stared at Lucilla, her face quivering. 'What did you say to me?'
'You heard: I forgive you.' Lucilla slumped and leaned on the wall, crying now. 'I forgive you, I forgive you,
I forgive you
.' It was as if she was chanting an incantation, a curse on her ex-lover.
Greta turned away, looked around at the watching faces. She was being torn apart, from the inside out, and it showed all across her face. 'No,' she said. 'No.'
Then she screamed.
'
You can't!
' She took three quick steps, still screaming, and then she threw herself over the parapet of West Wall. After a moment, her scream broke off, suddenly. Nobody looked.
Mathias stared at Lucilla, sobbing in the doorway, then he felt hands turning him, pulling his face down, a mouth kissing him briefly, gratefully.
He pulled back and Mono was staring up at him. 'Will you come with me
now?
' she said.
Mathias nodded. It was all he could do.
Expatria Incorporated
PROLOGUE
I
...
and the Lord commanded her to unplug
.
RoKatya Tatin slid the cable, reluctantly, from her left templar interface and the babble of the Order Office reared up around her. Her workbase was set against one wall of the windowless room; a dozen others were occupied by actives and special evangelicals, several of them unplugging and settling back with glassy eyes. The Max had been good, as had the previous one, and the one before that. The saints had been right there in her head—as they must have, been for each of the others—singing the company hymn, casting up hallucinations of the most vivid intensity, channelling the energies of the Good Company through her mind as if she was the only person that mattered in all existence.
She held on to that last, peaceful breath, savoured the inner tranquillity that it lent, let it slide away. She blinked at the call-up on the screen before her. 'The Lord's work is never complete,' she muttered under her breath, and passed her carpal implant over a sensor in acknowledgement of the message.
There was another disturbance in the Old Port area of Marseilles; whenever there was trouble in Bouches-du-Rhône, O-P was usually at its heart. The screen expanded to show the Place d'Accord, the pictures coming from a city police drone about forty metres up. Square buildings loomed on three sides, the fourth bounded by a partly dismantled cofab; on this deconstruction site, gangs of migrant labourers had downed their tools and seated themselves on heaps of demoulded wall units, all watching with interest what was happening in d'Accord. The Place itself was a public square, fifty metres to each side with a plasticised surface that would flash soothing rainbow reflections whenever the sun pierced the layers of smog trapped by the city's limestone boundary hills. Today the Place d'Accord was thronged with people: the usual mix of low-life residents from O-P and the neighbouring Panier district, along with numerous traders and travellers. There were market stalls scattered throughout, and in one corner there was a small cluster of shanty-town shelters, ready to be demolished when the next gang of menial hygienists came through—that could be a long time, here in the Old Port.
At first, Katya had trouble determining why she had been summoned, then a second screen projected itself above the first, a close-in view of the shanty settlement: tattered sheets of plastic gummed together over wooden frameworks, toughened cofab walls and roofs, no doubt stolen from some site or depot. She studied the pictures, called for close-ins and new angles with a few efficient prompts from her templar implants. The pictures revealed the people from this illegal settlement to be the Farceurs, the Jokesters, the Painted Clowns; one of them was waving his arms about from the top of a rickety shelter. In the past year groups of Farceurs had been spreading out from the eastern regions of Eurecon—TransCarpathia, the Turko-Greek Archipelago—a wave of hedonistic excess, a ripple of anarchist,
atheist
petulance. As the Good Books said, the opening of the Last Millennium could never be other than chaotic—it was the role of the Holy Corporation to bring about a culture of belief before the Last Calling. These Farceurs were clearly to be found on the side of anarchy.
And now they were in the Place d'Accord, their faces garishly painted so that they looked like clowns or ancient warriors, their ragged clothes a wild excess of colour and exuberance. On their backs, nine of the Farceurs carried paint-packs and they were running through the crowd, spraying erratic ribbons of colour, giving wild cries as the people parted before them.
As she watched, Katya saw that a large part of the expensive surface—bequeathed by the Holy Corporation of GenGen under last year's district improvement scheme—had been coloured. Already a small group of eager company evangelicals were chasing after the Farceurs, trying to stop them. Katya sent one of the drones in on a low sweep of the Place, highlighting those Farceurs who appeared to be most active in the desecration and then, as an afterthought, the man giving his collaborators direction from the top of the shelter.
Almost instantly, the drone's inputs were screeing down the back-up screen: nonsense, so far, to Katya, but she knew that the data were entering the lower processing levels of the region's MetaPlex—the face-prints and voice-prints, the pheromonal outputs and retinal profiles of these Farceurs were being compared, analysed, matched up with corporate records.
She sat back and waited. Still tranquil from her recent Maxing, she nodded and smiled across at TheAndreos at the next workbase. On Katya's screen a fight had broken out, one of the paint-spraying Farceurs had been cornered by an evangelical and a handful of Spanish labourers and she was having her paint-pack beaten from her back.
After a minute or two, the analysis scrolled up, the names, the potted histories with codecalls for more detail. All four had criminal records—one had even joined the Farceurs straight from a ReEducational Camp near Genoa. Katya studied the record of the orchestrator—one Lincoln Carter—still directing from the top of his shelter. A child of the Consumerist movement in Dresden, well-educated considering his background but otherwise nothing special.
She was about to commission a local police unit to move in when another name caught her attention and she paused, prompted more detail.
Her heart began to race and she slowed it, forced a forty over ten cut in blood pressure, closed her gaping mouth and wished she had not spotted that name.
The anarchist was a year older than Katya, his facial phenotype was a blend of the Slav angularity she remembered from her pre-company-crèche childhood in Prague and a Roman sureness of expression. This man was a true rebel, he had fled the company system in his teens, perhaps wary of the implant surgery or the genetic retrofit, perhaps through some primitive fear of the Holy. He had a criminal record longer than his three friends' and was wanted by authorities in several regions. His Farceurs' name was Kernel Konrad, but his true name also appeared in his file although Katya did not need that to be sure that this anarchist was Vladi Konrad Tatin.
The crèche system was supposed to eradicate sibling ties—they were unnecessary to a believer, whose family was the entire Corporation. Katya stared for a minute or more at the various pictures of Vladi's face on the screen, and then at the spiralling disturbance on the main screen, now unable to find him.
She shook her head decisively, remembered the peace—the
oneness
—of the Max.
She was an active of the Roman division of the Holy Corporation of GenGen; she was a believer in the Three Testaments, nothing could change that.
She had no brother.
With a flashed prompt from her templar implants she authorised two units of city police to go into the Place d'Accord and then she nodded at the screen and asked for her next task.
II
RoKatya sat in a recliner and looked out over the healing waters of the compound's pool. Her work was finished for the day and she had an hour before evening worship. 'Control of the body is control of the mind,' she reminded herself; she smiled and made her bodily indicators subside even more: relaxation was a physiological necessity.
She opened her eyes and the sun was a little lower. ThePatrische Kingston had arrived and now he sat by the gurgling pool, his head tilted to one side. His eyes were moving erratically under their lids as he refreshed himself with a few minutes' plusRem sleep.
Katya studied the lines of his naked body, each muscle in place and proportion, his skin melanised down to a nice mud-brown, gingery blond hair in a thinning mat across the crown of his head.
She let her gaze move out beyond the barriers. The GenGen complex, here on the western fringes of Aix, was ideally placed on a small rise with sweeping views across the lakes to the coastline and the industrial island complexes of Fos and Martigues. On an evening such as this it could be quite idyllic.
'More unrest in Marseilles?' Patrische had come out of plusRem.
Katya looked at him, reluctantly enjoying the sight of his body in this gentle evening sunshine. 'A few Painted Clowns in O-P,' she said, remembering Vladi's face on her screens. 'Nothing in particular. You've been working hard: the
Third Testament
?' She hadn't seen Patrische in three days and, with Thessalonian detachment, he had left no message; she had assumed that he was working on the proposal for a new voyage to Expatria.
'Hmm, no. A project to get evangelicals involved with ethnic isolates—migrant labourers, old school christians, misfits like your Farceurs if you don't clear them up first.' Patrische was a social engineer, much favoured by GenGen's local directors and sub-directors; he was quite open in his aspirations to a directorship after which, in a century or two, his psyche-profile would be subsumed into GenGen's local computational heart, its regional MetaPlex. And each MetaPlex around the world, each hardwired amalgam of all the GenGen directors, was an integral part of the All, the newest incarnation of Godhood, the new jesus born to guide His children through the Final Thousand Years towards the Last Calling. One day—there could be little doubt—Patrische Kingston would be a part of the Son of God. 'You want to screw?' he asked her, squinting in the hazy sunlight.
She didn't. 'I thought you might have been consulting for the Expatria trip.' Since the Holy Corporation of GenGen had taken over Eurecon's last remaining space science interests there had been much talk of renewing links with the colony on Expatria, if such a colony had survived. It was only proper that the company owning all rights to the planet should mount a crusade in order to disseminate the new gospel: the culture of belief must be spread to all humanity before the Last Trump could be called.
'That's still only a proposal,' said Patrische. 'The All is yet to deliver judgement. There is no certainty that I would be involved anyway, I am merely a servant to a higher cause.' There was something special in his voice as he spoke, a conviction that only the righteous could carry. It made Katya shiver in wonder.
'I saw my brother today,' she said, having judged that she should raise the issue with her lover. 'The last time I saw him was back in Prague. I was four and he was just five and he went off to crèche, crying. He was genetyped Roman, he was said to have excellent potential.' Even though her memory had not been eidetically trained back then the words keyed off a sudden rush of recall and she had to pause and calm herself. 'Now he's a Farceur. He was painting the Place d'Accord yellow today, while his collaborators painted it blue and mauve and orange. I called for profiles and then I saw that it was Vladi.'
'You sent the city police in?'
She nodded.
'Then why are you concerned? GenGen is your family.'
It was the only response he could give, yet the words—coming from Patrische—found an echo deep inside her soul.
'Your Vladi... is he an important part of this band of Farceurs?'
She thought for a moment. 'He might be.'
'Then you should use whatever means possible to return him to the corporate fold. We only have a thousand years!'
She laughed, because she was meant to, but she knew that the problem could not be so easily resolved. Perhaps she would need some kind of consultative therapy—she knew that Vladi should not be preying on her mind in this way.