Expatria: The Box Set (51 page)

CHAPTER 30

'Have they seen us?' she said to Kasimir Sukui.

Katya Tatin was hiding in the prison building's small entrance porch, Sukui filling the doorway in front of her, silhouetted by the harsh light of Orlyons, shielding her from the street.

She looked over the old Expatrian's shoulder, saw the party of Roman actives, couldn't see Director Roux. Sugratski was looking directly at the building. His eyes stopped at the entrance, met her own, moved on. Pieter Sugratski was a friend; he had always been close to Katya and Turkut. She slipped farther back into the shade.

'They have seen me,' said Sukui. 'But that is of little concern—I am a neutral figure. I believe one of the actives has seen you, the tall, pale blond with side-burns like your own—'

'Sugratski. He's OK.'

'Sugratski,' said Sukui. 'I will remember the name. Retreat, now, while there is time and I am only an old Expatrian hesitating in a doorway and your director is consulting with a street vendor. Slide and Vera-Lynne Perse will help you. Go on. Goodbye, Vera-Lynne,' he said, raising his voice, waving back into the building. 'We will, I feel sure, meet again.'

Sukui bowed and turned and Katya slipped back into the building, easing the door shut behind her.

The guard was there, the one who had been on the door earlier. 'Where's Vera-Lynne?' said Katya, urgently, surprising the man, making him spill his mug of water. 'Or Slide? Please? Sukui-san said they would help.'

'Over here,' said a voice so deep it made her flesh tremble. 'Trouble?'

The big man was sitting in a cubicle, feet up on a cabinet, smouldering reefer tucked daintily between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

'Is there an alternative exit to this building?' she asked him. 'A back window? Something like that? I have to get out.'

'Why should I help a Terran?' Slide took another lazy drag from his reefer, let the smoke drift slowly out of each nostril in turn. 'Why shouldn't I jus' slam you up like your pals?'

'Sukui-san said you would help me. I think I've become a fugitive. Anyway—' she shrugged, then deftly plucked the reefer from Slide's hand and ground it under her heel '—if you were to lay a single meaty finger on me I would kill you.'

She kept her expression neutral, waited.

Slide looked at the remains of his reefer on the ground and then at Katya. After a moment or two he smiled. 'Come on,' he said. 'You owe me one.'

~

The first guard stopped them in the corridor. 'Slide,' he said. 'V-L's calling for you—there's big trouble out front. A bunch of Terrans are gathering in the street. Their director's there so it must be big. There's more there all the time. She's getting mad, Slide. You know I hate it when she gets like that.'

Slide patted the guard on the cheek. 'Looey,' he said. 'Tell her to go screw. No—no, she'd bite your head off. Tell her I've gone for reinforcements, OK? Come on, lady, this way.'

At the end of the corridor they went down a flight of stairs to the basement. 'Back's all heaped up with shit,' explained Slide. 'Rocks and mud and stuff like that. Come on.'

It was dark in the basement and Katya pumped some rhodol to boost her eyesight. She kept looking all around, ready for any kind of deceit, but there was none. Slide continued ahead of her, stumbling occasionally against boxes and barrels and pillars, less so as his eyes grew accustomed to the level of the light. 'Here,' he said, after about forty-five metres. He started climbing a ladder and after a few seconds Katya followed him, slitting her eyes and turning her face away to avoid the flakes of rust that Slide was kicking free above her.

She felt the ladder lurch as Slide grunted and succeeded in shifting the trap-door above his head.

Light flooded in and then Slide pulled himself clear. He reached a huge hand back in to help Katya out and she took it, for his sake, and let herself be swung up to sit on the edge of the opening.

Rubble was all about them, a few promiscuous plants thrusting out of any available gap in the debris, a fine dry mat of parchment moss binding it all together. The rubble was heaped up high, all around, shielding them from prying eyes. They seemed to be isolated but Katya knew they could not be more than fifty metres from the building. They had headed a few degrees north of east; that would put them about halfway between the prison house and Salomo's bar.

Katya edged up the bank of rubble that hid her from the Street and Slide followed suit.

Just below the top she had to stop, draw a deep breath, calm her pulse. She shouldn't be feeling like this.

Then she recognised the peculiar throbbing between her templars. Director Roux was trying to get through to her, trying to hallucinate himself inside her skull, trying to worm his way into her. But there was more, too... something she'd never felt. She tossed her head from side to side, then smiled weakly at the staring Slide. 'Women's troubles,' she said, and he turned away.

She looked over the ridge and they were all there. Directors Roux and Falheit, actives thronging together, predominantly Romans and Thessalonians, the divisions that move into new ground, but there were the others, too, the Ephesians, the Philemonics, the Philippians and the Corinthians one and two. Evangelicals made up the largest element of the gathering before the prison house; they were mixing, talking, laughing, regardless of creed, of division—what were their directors doing, letting them mix in such an undisciplined fashion?

She shook her head again, tried to free her jumble of thoughts. She wondered why they were gathering like this, why they had picked on this jailhouse first—Sukui had said there were others throughout the town.

'I'm going,' said Slide, by her ear. So loud. 'Reinforcements.'

She nodded to him as he turned and scrambled back down the rubble, heading in the approximate direction of Salomo's.

She turned back to the scene unfolding before her, wishing she didn't get so dizzy each time she moved.

It wasn't only the holy staff, gathered in the street below. Sukui was there, attempting to talk to Director Roux and not apparently having much success. There were others, keeping a more cautious distance. Children gathered in windows and doorways, men and women on the street. The busker, Mono, was standing to one end of the road with a group of friends; near to them was a mixed group of Charities and Death Krishnas, taunting the nearest evangelicals good-naturedly, waiting for events to unfold.

They were clearly going to make some kind of demand for the release of the death squads, but Katya did not know how they would do this. Would they use force, diplomatic threats, coercion? Would they simply enter the building and demand that the doors be unlocked? The numbers were still building up, the density of the crowd increasing.

Then, just as Katya had decided that the street could hold no more people, the avatar descended.

A gasp worked its way around the gathering, a few cries. Katya had not even considered the possibility that the MetaPlex would become involved, but there he was, the Max, hanging over the crowd, smiling his confident smile, his arms folded comfortably across his chest, his body fading from the waist downwards.

It made Katya feel good instantly, just to see him. Without a thought, she pulled herself up to sit on top of the ridge of rubble, not caring if she was seen any more; she had eyes only for Maxwell Riesling.

He spread his arms, broadened his smile even further. Katya had never seen such a vast avatar: fifteen metres from scalp to waist, ten metres across the shoulders. The holy staff looked tiny before him, like ants or termites, grains of sand against a pebble. 'Darlings,' he said, in his basso voice tinged with old American. 'I am suffering from displaced... vena cava to auricle ventricle ventricle auricle to aorta, my lovely aorta.
Do times change with the changing times?
asked the poet of the prostitute.' His face split in two with a loud tearing sound to reveal a multitude of pulsing brains covered in transparent froth.

He laughed from both sides of his face as his body split down a central line and the crowd of the holy staff began to heave, to swell, to scream, thinning as a number of evangelicals ran away from the dreadful apparition.

Katya stared at the avatar, the crowd. Sitting on her ridge, she felt strangely isolated; alone with the throbbing in her head, the twinges that started in her Glory Chip and arced down each arm in turn. Her mind was doing mad things, each thought contradicting its predecessor. She praised the Glory of the Lord of the All; she wished the Max would fuck her pleasure centres, as he had done so often before, teasing her Chip with his electromagnetic prods. She remembered the Farceur, Vladi—a failure in a world of fools—killing himself through his own stupidity. She remembered giving the command that killed her brother. She clutched at her head, pleading with it to stop, no longer even sure that the thoughts—the impulses, the emotions—were her own.

When she looked up, the Max was completely divided, his two halves regenerating and, even as they did so, splitting again. Others appeared around him, around the
hims
. The saints, Stuardine, Mother Tamsin, Pasc and Florence; gruesome caricatured avatars of the directors, first Falheit and Moroni, then Roux, his twisted body stretched out, distorted back into a near-to-normal form, and then the other directors, Saluka, Dooley and Stakis. Others followed, the favourites, the senior actives who might, one day, aspire to a directorship and the MetaPlexity to follow. There was CoChicarro, PhileLucien, RoPetra, even, with a multitude of FIre leads dangling from the back of her skull.

And then there was ThePatrische Kingston.

Katya shook her head, trying to free it of a cloying blanket of muzziness. Patrische. Hanging over the crowd, one of a throng of avatars, cast down to Orlyons from the MetaPlex above.

He was swimming in the air, his arms flailing, Katya's own personal ghost. His mouth was opening and closing, his eyes bugging, swelling, staring right at her. His skin was gradually acquiring a tinge of blue.

'You should breathe,' said Katya aloud. 'It helps you to breathe more easily.'

But he didn't appear to have heard, he just continued to turn blue until his skin was the kind of blue they make flags of, a vibrant, pulsing,
living
blue. Eventually his body stopped moving, although his eye-balls continued to throb, hugely, for the rest of the display.

Katya dragged her eyes away from her former lover, stopped herself asking all those questions like why was he there? and did he have to look such a beautiful shade of blue, just when she was trying to put him behind her?

As her eyes left Patrische, she felt something snapping inside her, a door closing inside her skull, sealing him for ever into the file marked Unwanted Memory. She looked around at the crowd, the crying evangelicals, the confused actives, not knowing who they should turn to for guidance. The two directors, twitching in their rebelling autonomic floaters, their heads flopping about, their faces scored with panic.

The avatars were merging, pulling apart, contorting their forms into all kinds of freakish, flowing shapes. The sound they were making was deafening but it had no content, no words that could be understood by mortal humans.

Katya felt sick. She slumped to one side, caught herself on a boulder. Her Glory Chip was buzzing with energy. Too much energy. So much it made her want to tear it out, only she couldn't because she could never be without it now that it was so alive inside her head.

Her templar implants felt like they were sending sparks across the interior of her skull, sparks that didn't want to die, sparks that bounced all around, finding nerves to carry them, carry them down into her body, upsetting her balance, her digestion, sending pains down to the carpal interfaces on the inside of each wrist.

She raised her hands, could see through them in the strong, white sunlight. She tried to check her pulse, her blood pressure, but her templar implants were too involved in tripping out to concern themselves with such trivialities.

'Control of the body,' she croaked, making herself lie flat on the rubble, trying to fight the insane twitching that was close to possessing her entire body. 'Control... control of the... contr...'