Expatria: The Box Set (41 page)

CHAPTER 17

Hermann had told Stopp that they were expanding the Ephesian mission house. He hadn't told her they were also building what looked something like three more. The original mission house seemed to be in regular use now: Ephesians swarmed around its entrances, actives and evangelicals, the menials relegated to their own private routes, wide enough for their passage, screened for reasons—Stopp presumed—of taste. A director was there, too, or at least a trifax; her autonome draped in the gold and green finery of the Ephesians. A group of evangelicals was performing some kind of contest before their leader, chanting and jostling, producing great peals of laughter from an attentive audience.

From her hiding place in the big gum tree, Stopp could see it all. They had cleared more of the overgrowth to make room for the new mission houses. Now there was an empty space stretching almost up to the axis of Ark Red, over a hundred metres from ground level.

The three new buildings were still only shells, each as large as the first. Menials worked more openly there, unhindered by their superiors. Stopp watched them, mesmerised by their co-ordination.

She had let herself drift, in the days since the trifax conference at Strawberry Fields. It was easy to hide in Ark Red. But there had been no word from Decker or Dippso and finally she had decided that she had been out of circulation for too long. What if it had all been some kind of mix-up? What if next time she was in Yellow the Terrans would merely glance at her and say, 'Just another midget,' instead of chasing after her again? She had decided to find out: she couldn't hide for ever.

It was fascinating, looking out over the construction site. Where once Stopp had filled hours watching puff rats stalking frogs and finches and fritillary butterflies, now she felt she could spend just as long watching the funny antics of the evangelicals and above, or more, the poetic motions of the menials, working as if governed by some higher aesthetic impulse which tied their movements together into unity.

She dragged her eyes away. She didn't like to get like this. She knew it was a means of avoidance, a way of distracting herself from her purpose. Escapism was never the answer. She heard the phrase in the voice of Kasimir Sukui and she wondered if he had ever actually spoken those words or if it was simply her mind playing games. She didn't know. She didn't really care.

She turned and pulled herself back through a tangle of vines. She would go to the Complex and see what had been happening.

~

'Stopp-two-pees.' ArcNet rolled up onto the screen and Stopp made her selection.

Lui Tsang was sitting in the Happy Hobo Eaterette. His pack was on the table in front of him, giving Stopp a panoramic view of the restaurant's interior—the clusters of tables, the traders in for a drink, the workers resting their bones on the wooden benches.

Her trifax slotted into the space next to Lui. 'Hi,' she said. 'My name's Stopp.' She knew how difficult it was to remember all the different people—the links with Expatria had thrown up so many new names and faces.

'Well hello,' he said glumly. 'Decker said you'd been lying low since we crossed with GenGen, said you were playing safe. How's life been?'

She told him briefly where she had been, what she had been thinking. 'Right now,' she finished up, 'it seems like it's all been blown up, like it's not really so important.'

'Listen, Stopp. We both heard them say they were putting people down here that they didn't want us to know about and then they chased you for hearing it. It's not been blown up at all, you're being sensible. Come on, let's go.' He stood and slung the projector across his back. Stopp's image trailed him out into the street, passing through stalls and pedestrians, cutting suicidally across a torrent of bicycles that were heading in all directions at all speeds at all costs.

'Listen, Stopp, Salvo Andric has finally flipped. If ever Alabama City needed a Kasimir Sukui then now's the time. But they say Sukui's sick so we have to tame the lion on our own. There—will you look at that?'

His hand shot out, pointing at a group of evangelicals, standing tall above the crowds, fixing people with their hypnotic gazes, waving their bibles in the air and thumping them in punctuation to their sermons. Stopp upped her volume with a flick of the roller, filtering out the sounds of the street, the crying animals, the hooting of bicycle horns.

'You can see how we live among you for your own sake,' said the nearest one, casting his deep blue gaze around the listening crowd. His tone was challenging, taunting. He was daring them not to listen. 'You who will become our imitators, you who will imitate the ways of the Lord, you who will learn to follow Corporate Law. You will become models for those who follow. You must fit yourself into the template. Look to those who work hard among you, who are over you in the Lord: We dare to tell you the gospel, in spite of strong opposition. The All must always triumph!'

'It's complete pig shit,' said Lui Tsang, into his shoulder mike. 'But look at the crowd, they're lapping it up, like papyo seeds take up water. And look at this!'

The crowd was parting and a party of troopers burst through. The evangelicals offered them bibles but the troopers just prodded them with bully-sticks, guiding them towards a little wagon with sides of interlinked mesh. There were two more evangelicals already in the wagon. They looked at peace with their new world.

'They call themselves "timothies",' said Lui Tsang, as the crowds began to disperse and the wagon trundled away. 'They're Thessalonians. They come in like this and preach on the streets. There are Philemonics, too, but they don't have licences to sing on the streets so they get slammed like the timothies. The jails must be full of them but they're still coming, doing their preaching, converting more and more. The people here are in a spiritual vacuum, it's like they'll take up anything if it's put before them. A lot of the new timothies are actually natives of AC, taking off where the Thessalonians left them. Philemonics, too—people say they're snatching kids off the streets and screwing with their brains until they're converts. There's a lot of rumours about.

'I tried telling the Prime that he should leave them to it, that he wasn't getting anywhere by locking them up. Maybe he should talk. Shit, he nearly locked me up with the timothies. "If they want to talk with me," he said, "then they come and ask nicely. They don't go causing trouble in my city first of all."'

'Have you been trifax, recently?' asked Stopp.

'Sure,' he said, heading out onto Grand Rue Street, past a bunch of pageanteers. 'Every chance I get. It's sanity, it keeps me even. Your ArcNet is a wonderful piece of design. You can get into it, you can feel your way around it. The better you know it then the more you get inside. We have a scanner down here, in one of the labs. Centuries old, but as good as if it was brand new. ArcNet can run it remotely from orbit: it scans the firing of my cerebral neurones, turns them to light, links me direct with ArcNet. The 'Net has my own hologram brain map up there, like a baby psylogue. It's incredible, Stopp, it's like being born again in a hundred different bodies. I can be anywhere I want, when I'm tied in with the 'Net, I can do anything I want.'

'But what's the point?'

'I'm feeling my way.' Lui shrugged. 'I don't know yet, but I've set Grady Cesar to work for me. He's stolen an autonome, locked it into one of the overhaul modules in Ark Blue. ArcNet has taken it apart, mapped its circuitry. An autonome is almost sentient, it mimics intelligence, it can run itself if it needs to. That's how they work, they run themselves and then they get overridden by their directors whenever necessary. When you see a director's trifax, it's mostly run by a bank of delegated instructions, interpreted by the autonome, but there's a strand of the director's mind in there that's keeping tabs, guiding things.

'Listen, Stopp: it's a pattern that seems to be repeated right through GenGen. My theory is that their MetaPlex is like that: the directors running independently until one of the psylogues decides to override, like a part of the director's mind might override one of his autonomes. They can work on so many different levels at once, it's a fantastic structure. Analyse this autonome and we can identify the pattern, the key to how the MetaPlex works. The pattern's the same at all the different levels, it magnifies effect, it magnifies potential with each level of development.

'You asked what's the point and the point is this: I want to know how they work, I want to get inside them like I've been inside ArcNet. It gives us a chance. That's all I'm trying for.'

Just then a footnote scrolled up onto the bottom of the screen. 'I'm cutting out now,' said Stopp. 'If you need any help, ArcNet can find me. OK?'

She acknowledged the note and Decker rose up above her screen, ArcNet's cosmetics choosing not to wipe the tiredness from his features. 'Hi, anybody,' he said. 'Just a note for anyone's interested. I've just been with Anatek Cobal, talking to a Roman active called Turkut Bar'hat. He seems OK, he's more frank than most so we challenged him. Here it is.' The trifax faded and a picture slid up onto the screen, Decker, Anatek, and a wide-eyed Roman, all drifting in one of Station Yellow's bubble chambers.

Decker rubbed suds from his face and said, 'Where does it end? Word is that you're going to try spinning up one of the arks. You know the gees would kill us.'

'I've checked that one out,' said Turkut. 'My superior, Director Roux, assures me that it's only a rumour. We have the
Third Testament
for purposes of gravity.' He pulled down a spray of rose and rinsed the bubbles out of his face. 'Please, we have to find some kind of a bridge. Distrust isn't helping any of us.'

'Agreed,' said Anatek, her spindly body poking, here and there, from the foam. 'But it can't be ignored if there's reason for it.'

'What are you doing about all the illnesses and allergies you've caused?' said Decker, pushing further.

'Blood assays, path-analysis, all we can. Our own people suffered too, but we find it easier to treat ourselves, we know our own response thresholds to the various forms of treatment.' Turkut seemed to be enjoying the spray, he turned it on harder, breathing its scent in deeply. 'Did you know,' he said, 'that even the menials have suffered?' His wide smile seemed to indicate that this was unexpected. 'They have such sturdy immune mechanisms, they should be able to cope with anything, but instead they're getting difficult. The word "No" is not a part of the menial vocabulary, the concept is alien to them; yet over in the three tee they've taken to saying it, not doing as they are instructed, questioning commands that generations of menials have obeyed back on Earth.

'I made a joke and Roux took me at surface value: I said maybe it's the Expatrian air—maybe there's a rebel virus that's infected them!' He directed the spray into his mouth, gargled, spat. 'Right now they're taking blood samples and trying to see if that's right. Is it true, Anatek, is there such thing as an illness called "Revolution"? Is there?' He laughed and the others joined him as the picture faded politely from Stopp's screen.

~

She had to check with Newest Delhi. Lui had said that Sukui-san was ill and she had to know if it was true. Sukui had become synonymous with Expatria to Stopp; he had no right to be unwell.

Now that the Holy Corporation was established in orbit, the general fascination with Expatria had dwindled. Only a few links were in use but still Stopp could not find Sukui.

Chet Alpha might know what was wrong with the old scientist.

She spoke his name into her mike, waited as the picture slid up onto the screen. She recognised the street, the Many-Crossed Boulevard, a wide thoroughfare that passed through the heart of the Joplin quarter. A few stalls lined one side. Vera Lugube's greens, ZiZi Farraway's cloaks, the Deep Down All Nite Peep Show. A short distance away a group of Ephesians were doing a comic routine based on
The Third Testament
and a mesmerised crowd was laughing and clapping whenever they were given the appropriate prompt. Elsewhere, people hurried to and fro and animals strayed with tethers dragging behind them in the puddles and mud.

The rain was faint but persistent. Suddenly Stopp wished she was there, walking by the side of Alpha, feeling real rain on her face, a real breeze chilling her damp clothing. The dew clouds, hanging in pools in the air of Ark Red, could be nothing like this. Instead, Alpha was walking with Larinda Casales and Pom-Pom MacGrew, both Charities of the Holy Pageant, and Jeanna Lüngstrom, head of the Crusaders.

Stopp's ghost flipped up, walking by the side of Chet Alpha. Her head reached the lower part of his chest, her skin was glowing, her coloration garish, the exaggeration of her trifacsimile lighting casting beams into the air above her head, like a fluid halo. She had forgotten how Chet Alpha liked to set the controls of his projector.

'I'm Stopp,' she said to him. 'We've met before.'

'Sure, sure,' he said, shaking his head. 'All the angels come to old Chet, we've all met. Even the little ones.' He spread his arms wide, threw his head back like a wailing momma about to give her cry, belched softy. Continued to walk.

He paused at the Deep Down All Nite Peep Show, peered into the canopied shadows of the stall. A woman snapped something unintelligible at him and he backed away, bumping into Larinda, looking around in surprise. 'It's not worth a quarter,' he said. 'Not a penny. The trade's gone right down since I was revealed to, I tell you. In my time we'd never go that low... not for a quarter, no.

'Will you tell me, huh? Why is it there's no angels any more? Why? I made the Pageant out of nothing, just me and my whores is all. Now look! Our angels have left us, people don't listen. It's all fading away like shit on a window pane.'

'I'm here,' said Stopp. 'But there's so much happening up here ... Besides, people lose interest. But she didn't say that.

'I built the Pageant from nothing,' said Alpha. 'Bare hands!' He raised his fists in the air and shook them. 'Religion is an art form. It's like singing or whoring or painting. That's what it is: it's painting with people's souls, yeah! Chet Alpha? He's Expatria's first Old Master, only now nobody wants to know.' He shook his head, stopped talking.