Flesh and Blood (11 page)

W
e slept then. The floater seats were wide and long enough to stretch out on, and the cushions served as pillows. There was no need for blankets. We were doubly insulated, by our suits and by the air-conditioning as we sped over the silent plain.

I hadn’t thought I’d sleep at all. But I suppose body and mind can only take so much before exhaustion shuts you down.

It was dawn when I woke. I thought the light had woken me, till I realised the floater was weaving instead of zooming straight along. It must have been the change of movement that woke me.

I glanced over at Neil. He was awake, and watching me.

‘Have you been awake long?’

‘No. I’d kill for a shower.’

‘Me too. This suit stinks. So do I.’ I sat up. We were moving through trees now. I pulsed up the time. Ten past four. ‘We should be approaching the Burbs soon. Do you want a drink?’

‘Coffee, please.’

I pressed for two coffees and sat back. There was no way I could wash my face or do my hair in an isolation suit. So I sipped at my coffee and watched the scene outside instead.

The Burbs have no true boundaries. They’ve grown haphazardly over the years, a dormitory for those the City allows in on temporary permits to do the work no
Citysider wants to bother with and that can’t efficiently be automated — routine machine maintenance; cleaning the shit from babies bottoms while a KinderTech does the more satisfying playing and cuddling.

I suppose only one in ten people in the Burbs actually works in the City. The rest are workers’ families or traders who supply their needs.

The Burbs have no formal streets either — few if any Burbanites could afford a floater and people and dikdiks can squeeze through narrow passages between shanties where a floater couldn’t fit. There is no such thing as public transport outside the City. A track one hour may be a market the next, or new arrivals might build shanties overnight.

This means there are no set routes for floaters to follow. They have to search out paths and backtrack when they dead-end.

Isolated shacks came first, plasticrete faded to grey, some with gardens around them, some gathered together so they might have been called utopias if only they’d been independent of the City for their credit.

Gradually the shacks grew closer together. There was no room for gardens now. Most Burbanites need to walk to work and living space close to the City is jealously guarded.

With the plague, of course, there was no work in the City at all. I wondered how the Burbs were coping with their source of income shut off.

We soon found out.

We saw the bodies first, piles of them. I stared. ‘Neil, look!’

‘I’m looking,’ he said grimly, eyeing the bonds around each body’s wrists and ankles. ‘It appears they know about the zombie effect here at any rate.’

‘Then surely they must have known in the City …’ I began, then stopped. No, it would never occur to the Citytechs to study the plague on their doorstep. The City concerned itself with the City. Even Michael had asked an exile — me — to help, to monitor the non-CityNets, instead of stepping out into the Burbs himself.

It’s real if it’s Netted, I thought. It’s real if it happens in the City. But the rest is below their notice.

A child ran out in front of the floater, causing it to swerve to one side. She yelled something and held out her hand. She wants food, I thought suddenly. That’s what she’s calling for. But by the time I’d realised that we were past her.

The shacks were even closer together now. We’d reached another dead end. The floater began to backtrack, then stopped. I turned around.

People. Blank faced, so at first I wondered if they were zombies. Then I realised they were simply desperate. They needed medicine, they needed food, and our floater could provide at least one of those.

I’d never heard of a floater being threatened in the Burbs before. Burbanites are too dependent on the City to antagonise it. But the City had abandoned the Burbs now. Things were different.

‘Neil …’

‘I know.’

The crowd was only metres away from us. There was no way the floater could dodge them. The faces stared at us, calculating, working out the best way to attack.

I glanced at Neil. He nodded, and pulled the uplift lever. The floater rose perhaps a metre, then stopped. Someone in the crowd laughed. The laughter spread, but there was a grotesque edge to it. We were privileged in
our air-conditioned floater world and they were not. But now they had us.

I looked up. A net stretched from one rooftop to another. It looked like plastic and probably was. It would be easy enough to cut even with ordinary scissors. But to do that we’d have to leave the craft.

Floaters run on solar-charged batteries, which means they don’t have much power, far less than old-time cars which had to push their way across the friction of roads and other surfaces. Floaters ride on a cushion of air. You don’t need much power to displace air, certainly not enough to shove through a plastic net.

They were around us now, thirty or forty of them, tens of hands, massed faces jeering and laughing, as though to have caught us meant far more than the rations they might find inside. Hands pulled at the doors, but for the moment the seals held.

The floater began to rock back and forth. The laughter grew louder. Were they trying to force us out, I wondered. How much would the floater take before it broke?

The crowd parted suddenly, then closed around us again. Someone had brought a crowbar. I watched as he jammed it into the crevice around the door and leant on it. Others joined him, pushing down.

The door buckled slightly, but held.

‘Burn them out!’ The sound was muffled but distinct. ‘Burn the bastards out!’

I turned on the outside amplifier. ‘Please!’ I called. ‘Let us through! We might be able to help cure this thing!’

Someone laughed. The others paid no attention to my claim.

Floaters don’t burn. They’re insulated too, but no insulation is perfect. If they built a fire around us we’d die of heat or smoke as the air-conditioning failed.

For a moment I wondered what the crowd would do if we opened the door; if we yelled, ‘We surrender,’ and came out with our hands up as in the best ancient vids. We could walk to the City from here …

Neil was acting as I hesitated. He pressed the forward lever; the floater shoved forward. Floaters can force their way, if they have to. But not for long.

Someone screamed, and then another, as they were pushed down and under the floater, under the feet of the crowd. I saw faces scream in the instant they were pushed under us.

The floater kept on moving.

I sat stunned. It would never have occurred to me to run people down, to injure or even kill so many. This was the other side of Outlanders, I thought: generous, helping their neighbours, but with the ruthlessness that came with a closer association with life and death. The City killed, but at second hand; someone pressed a button then went off to have lunch. But Neil — my lovely gentle Neil — killed apple pests and butchered hens and had probably helped administer an Outlands justice system that I was almost unaware of. ‘Outlanders,’ he told me once, ‘take care of their own.’

The crowd was behind us now. I craned my neck to see. Some were down — a child lay like a broken doll; a pregnant woman cradled her stomach, but her eyes were closed.

I clasped my hands around my own stomach protectively. The floater couldn’t move fast in the web of shanties. It would still only be moments till they — or
another crowd — caught us again. Neil jammed the controls upwards. The floater rose shakily till we were above the buildings, a sea of patchwork slabs of plasticrete, broken by dark gaps and protruding chimneys. The engine laboured.

‘How long can we stay this high?’

‘Don’t know. A few minutes.’

Floaters can rise over obstacles too, but again it takes too much power to maintain height for very long. Would it be long enough, I wondered, to get us in to the City?

As though in answer the floater’s hum suddenly lessened. We began to lose height.

‘Shit!’ Neil cranked on the controls. The floater stalled. We clattered down on a plasticrete roof.

Neil yanked open the door. ‘At least this way we have a head start,’ he muttered. ‘If we landed down in the street they’d have us.’

The plasticrete shuddered under my feet. For a moment I thought the roof would collapse. I gazed around. There in the distance were the City walls, the result of haphazardly joining myriad buildings over decades by patching with biocrete and plasticrete and polymer fillers.

‘Over there,’ I gasped. ‘I can see the doors.’

‘Will they let us in on foot?’

‘Only if I can Link to Michael — I should be in range of a terminal soon.’

Someone yelled below us. The words weren’t clear, but their message was unmistakable — ‘There they are!’

I hoped abandoning the floater would keep them busy while we escaped. Then the voices became louder. We ran.

N
o, we didn’t run. Running is what you do when you put one foot after another in an almost seamless sprint. This wasn’t running. We staggered over shaking slabs of plasticrete; we jumped from roof to roof. Our footsteps thundered, no-one below could have been unaware of where we were. Dimly behind us I could hear shouts of triumph as they plundered our floater.

The jumbled walls of the City grew closer, and closer still. But I could no longer see the City doors, or even the ramp that led to them. Somehow in our flight we’d been heading to one side. I stopped, my breath tearing at my throat, and tried to focus. ‘To the left,’ I gasped.

There was a gap between the rooftops to the left that went curling and snaking between the shanties. We couldn’t jump it. Nor could we go straight ahead. But if we went right then we could turn left further on.

I wanted to stop and yell to our pursuers, ‘This isn’t right! You shouldn’t be chasing me!’

No-one had ever hated me before. Even my banishment was impersonal. The floater arrived at my apartment, then took me to the Outlands.

This was different.

Neil swerved. I followed him. We were heading straight for the ramp now, though still hundreds of metres from it. Down below I heard more yells. The news of our flight had passed as quickly below as we did above, shouted from street to street as we ran.

I didn’t dare shut my eyes to Link. You can’t run with your eyes shut, not over a motley track of plasticrete roofs. I pushed my power to its limit, and got a faint buzz in return. Not close enough to a terminal. Not yet.

‘Neil! We have to get closer to the walls!’

He didn’t ask why. He realised I was trying to get as close to a working monitor inside the walls as I could, so it would amplify my power.

The ramp was a black shadow in front of us now, as we faced it side on. I tried to Link again.

A face grew in my mind. It was hard to concentrate on it as well as watch where I was going — difficult, but not impossible, not for a member of the Forest.

‘Virtual Michael three,’ it said, smiling with that gentle blend of confidence and friendliness that was the professional Michael. ‘I’m sorry, but Michael Realtime is not available. If you like I can …’

‘Shit, shit, shit. Michael, answer your bloody comsig.’

I overrode ‘urgent’ onto my signal and added my own comsig too. It took precious seconds we didn’t have. I didn’t dare swerve further out from the walls so we could climb the ramp. The fastest in the crowd were close now. I could hear the footsteps, the pant of their breath. Or was that ours?

‘Danny! What’s …’ Michael’s voice!

‘Just program the bloody door to recognise us!’ I screeched in MindTone and in voice.

Michael couldn’t read the MindTone now, but Neil must have caught the edges of it. I saw him wince.

‘Wha—?’ Michael stopped. An instant later he said, ‘The doors will recognise you. Wait just inside.’

My chest hurt. My throat hurt.

We kept on running. Suddenly Neil was no longer by my side. I heard a yell behind me, the sound of a blow, then he was back.

The sweat trickled down inside my suit. Isolation suits are supposed to breathe out sweat, but they’re not built for running in. Out from the walls now, round to the head of the ramp. I had never realised I could run so fast, or for so long. But there were more pursuers now, heading for the ramp, to cut us off. I forced my legs to give a final burst of speed. Neil kept close to me. He would be faster than me, I realised. He was holding back to keep me safe. Neil spurted ahead as I staggered up the slope. He struck the nearest man a blow that thrust him back, as I passed him.

‘Just keep going!’ It was pure MindTone now. I didn’t have the breath to yell. But Neil caught it. I heard an echoed answer, a wave of reassurance instead of words. The footsteps pounded behind me. They
were
his.

The door grew larger in front of us.

What if it didn’t recognise us? What if we ran into the force field? The shock might kill us, would certainly injure us.

We ran through and into darkness.

Ten steps, twenty steps … now we were inside it was difficult to stop. Behind us I could hear shrieks as our pursuers met the force field and it flung them back. Perhaps they had thought that the force field was down. But the City’s force field is never down, it simply stops anyone or anything it’s not programmed to admit.

The screams became jeers; something clanged, a stone perhaps, that the force field had thrown back.

I slowed to a trot, then stopped and leant against the wall. Neil panted next to me. ‘Now what?’ he gasped.

W
e didn’t have to wait long. A noiseless displacement of air preceded an inner-City floater, small and round. It stopped, then opened.

We climbed inside. Two deep-cushioned seats, a drink dispenser and terminal, but none of the space and conveniences of the floater we’d abandoned.

The roof slid back over us. The floater rose, and drifted through the darkness. My ears popped as we went from one airlock to another. Suddenly we came out into light once more.

The last time I had been in the City the corridor holos had been the cheapies I’d grown up with, clumsy beach or desert scenes depending on the choice of the Corridor Committee, none of them matching so you went from a red Marsscape to a sunlit atoll in seconds.

Now all had changed. Suddenly we were in a perfect Virtual with scents and sound as well as images, a soothing scene of trees that immediately made me homesick for the utopia. Children played in a sunlit clearing; we could hear their laughter, and smell a subtle scent of child hair and fresh young skin.

The Mood Engineers had been at work, I thought. Anyone who needed to leave their apartment would find themselves in a reassuring world of youth and life and happiness. I wondered if they’d added subliminals too: a signal that Linked directly and subtly to the pleasure centre in the brain.

Whatever the Engineering, it worked. I felt my pulse return to normal, my breathing steady. Beside me Neil gave an almost smile. ‘Safe,’ he said.

I nodded. Safe. Except for the plague virus that might be breeding inside us, a time bomb detonating in nineteen days’ time. Safe apart from the desperate Burbs between us and home; safe while the Outlands world I’d grown to love was shattered by sickness.

This was a respite, no more.

Along a corridor, up a lift well, along a short passage then up another lift well. The Virtual slowly changed. Scattered perfect farms, all tiny paddocks and children on fat ponies and lovers laughing in haystacks gave way to a village, idealised Medieval, cobbles and gabled roofs and jolly villagers at market tables piled with fruit.

I grimaced. The Engineers weren’t so efficient here. Anyone who knew history knew the Middle Ages were a time of plague too. Any moment now the red-cheeked villagers would disperse, the bell would toll and someone would call, ‘Bring out your dead!’

We must still be in the dormitory areas, I thought. Here in the City you’d only see the doorway whose coordinates you’d pulsed in; the rest of the corridor would remain in hologram. No-one walked in the corridors. If you wanted to walk you went to your local beach, up on Levels Three and Four, or down to your nearest parkland in Basements One and Two. Though, increasingly, Citysiders exercised in Virtual now. Why go to a ten-hectare two-storey park when you could ski Mt Everest or explore the canyons of Mars?

Up yet another lift well. I was disoriented. Living areas were mostly middle floors. This must be an Admin area or, more likely, isolation space set aside for Meditechs.
While each apartment had its own air-conditioning and filter system and was effectively isolated, at least in terms of infection, from the rest of the City, the isolation space would have double or triple airlocks, and extra waldoes probably too, for manipulating patients from a distance.

For the first time I wondered where they were going to put us. A clinic? A sterile lab?

The floater drew to a gentle halt, but it didn’t open. Instead, the floater gave a semi-rotation, then melded into what looked like a half-timbered cottage, its window box bright with red geraniums. The flowers closed around us and the scene changed.

Not a clinic. Not a lab either. This was a Realife anteroom — or partly Realife. Brocade sofas, Persian holo on the floor, the red and blue birds and unicorns subtly moving through the carpet patterns, a table with a bowl of apples, bananas, starnuts. We took Realfruit for granted in the Outlands, but here it was a luxury.

The floater door opened. A woman appeared out of what hadn’t been a door before and wasn’t thirty seconds later, but she was so gracefully done there was no jarring of the senses at all.

I laughed delightedly. Neil looked at me as though I’d gone mad. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Nothing. Just Michael’s sense of humour.’ I gestured at the woman. ‘I created her, you see.’

Neil frowned. ‘You what?’

‘She’s a Virtual. One of my best programs. The All-purpose Greeter. One of the most flexible and graceful programs in existence, if I do say so myself, even after a couple of years. Look at her features — other programs make their greeters beautiful. But too much beauty is disconcerting. This one has all the elements of beauty — the
wide eyes, the relaxed mouth — but with just a hint of asymmetry so you feel comfortable with her.’

Neil looked less stressed. ‘Dan, not in front of her …’

I grinned at him. ‘She’s not real! There aren’t any feelings to hurt! She just responds to our actions and coaxes us to do whatever she’s been programmed with.’ I turned to her. ‘Isn’t that right?’

The woman smiled. ‘Quite right, Mistress Forester. And let me say it’s an honour to meet you.’ (Aha, I thought, I bet Michael programmed that bit in.) ‘Now if you’d like to go to your separate suites we can put you through decontamination.’

‘Separate?’ asked Neil.

She nodded reassuringly. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. If one of you is infected and the other isn’t you may pass on the disease. But each suite is fully Virtualed. It will be just as though you are together.’

‘No, it won’t,’ said Neil stubbornly.

‘Yes it will,’ I said. ‘Trust me. I’m the Engineer.’

I touched the slippery white cloth of his arm. ‘The sooner we’re out of these things the better. Really, we’ll still be in contact.’

Neil looked at me strangely for a moment. Then he nodded. The woman took his arm and moved towards the door that opened to the right at the same time that she took my arm and guided me to the left (and if you think this sounds like delirium, believe me a good Virtual Engineer — me — can make it work).

I stepped through the door and found myself in my old apartment.