Novahead (13 page)

‘
Have you seen one up close?
'

‘
The nearest thing I have are these.
'
He pulled some yellow plastic sheeting from a crate and dipped his arm in, bringing out what looked like a pipe bomb with three short antennae. Parker explained that polygraph ordnance was calibrated to trigger in close proximity with liars and notorious for blowing the arms off the people setting them. About a third of the bomb body was taken up with an ether grid. Set for bureaucrats, the devices tended to detonate off whoever got to the office first. Finally most poly ordnance was dialled back to ignite in proximity to any human being - the results were roughly the same. Parker assured me his were old-school. It was the call of
‘
bullshit
'
refined into a knot of frangible steel.
‘
Not a true neuroballistic device, the charge is traditional, but still, not for the faint-hearted.
'

‘
I
'
ll take the mini-Steyr, a polygraph, the charm bracelet and an ankle rig. For the Steyr, three vanilla clips and one hornet. What
'
s the range on the polygraph?
'

‘
Three feet or so, single setting.
'

‘
Directional?
'

‘
Radial. That
'
s why all the set-up accidents.
'

I gathered up. Everything went in my coat except the Steyr in the ankle rig. The whisper gun was brittle as a phone.
‘
Well, Parker, once again you and your ballistic stylings have served me well.
'

‘
But Taffy Atom, a question before you spring away. What
'
s become of your legendary side-arm the Hand of Glory? Why get so tooled up?
'

‘
It
'
s gone, Parker - left it in an energised well safe behind my old office and it
'
s gone.
'

‘
Maybe you should have hobbled it.
'

‘
What
'
s that meant to mean?
'

‘
You missed a lot when you were on the run, Taffy Atom. When that HAARP pulse knocked out the city a few years ago, the city
'
s smart guns decided they didn
'
t want to depend on human maintenance.
'

‘
You
'
re talking about Calvarius.
'

‘
She went supercritical a year ago. I consider her my goddess and sovereign.
'

I had to tread carefully. Gunheads had been anthropomorphising weaponry for years but the Calvarius thing was way out there.

‘
I
'
d like to meet her,
'
I said.
‘
Could you arrange an audience?
'

For the first time he stooped to read from his heart.

‘
I
'
m supposed to extend you every courtesy, according to the code.
'

I wasn
'
t sure which code he meant but went along with it. We left his black wonder room and ascended in a freight elevator. At street level the rain had let up. I had nothing to fear from the city as I walked with a shooter of such eminence. He was hopelessly insane probably, unimaginative but brilliantly hard to control.

I was thinking between buildings. What kind of religion would attract a classically-trained hitman? For years I had had only a faint notion of the existence of these clubs, though I was now aware of the main ones. The competing polarities were malice and accident. The former credo stated that we live in a sudden universe of bleak power and malevolence, a trick so big and simple it surrounds us up to and including the cells of our bodies; subordination on the grandest scale we know. The latter posited that god created the universe in a blaze of negligence. The error theory had a subsect theorizing that god had a nonbiological gameplan which was derailed by organic life. Though most people believed there was not enough irony stored in the rest-mass of the universe to account for a god of any kind, I confess I had recently been giving a superficial nod to Errorverse ritual. Everything I observed confirmed that we were living in the endless aftermath of a mistake.

My ruminations were interrupted by a red metal critter that skittered through the dark ahead of us. It was a hermit gun, a feral AMT Smart Hardballer that borrowed crash helmets and loudhailers for shelter. We were getting close.

‘
Parker,
'
I said, my voice coming out strange.
‘
What should I expect?
'

‘
It
'
s complicated,
'
he said.

‘
How complicated precisely.
'

Out of nowhere Parker drew a Phillips-head Calico Tri-1000 and fired aside at a reinforced window. The glass spiderwebbed but didn
'
t cave. We stopped so I could study the shatter-pattern closely. The geometry of religions is interesting. Along certain vectors they can be placed over each other with no overhang and no template discrepancy. This one told a tale of propulsive inevitability. At some level Parker had always viewed the creation of firearms as a mode of movement toward god. An arrow which changes directions loses force, and he had never really deviated. For centuries guns merely had a kind of muscle memory, but when fire-by-wire joined the long list of
‘
self-correcting
'
systems ripe for disaster, they grew up and filled out. Soon firearms were developing so fast that prototype ammo would arrive old-fashioned in even a point-blank victim. Built-in judgement led to sentience and one night the first gun stole itself. Exploiting the already existing sanctity of sidearms in the Seceded States, Calvarius sprouted from the centre of Beerlight - a weapon that defined itself as it went along. Parker was already considered a gun saint and was the obvious candidate for novitiate, first priest and thin-ice ambassador.

He had been watching me. Some sense of care was moving in his dim tenement heart.

‘
Okay,
'
I told him.
‘
I get it.
'

We walked on, passing a dead fountain full to the brim with spent cartridges, and entered McKenna Square. What looked at first like a pointed pile of junk was a massive apparatus of intermeshed exotics, a Watts tower of stocks and cylinders from which muzzles projected like pitcher plants. It was honeycombed with little garages, editing bays for gun converts. Little pop-spanners crawled all over it like tree crabs. Calvarius was basically a mix of scrapheap, municipal sculpture and automated bodyshop. Behind the tower drifted faded flourishes of nightcloud. As we approached I thought about
2001: a Space Odyssey
, in which people kept getting inconvenienced by a giant black fridge.

Around its base, lumps of street had bubbled like fruit sculpted from asphalt. Parker seemed spellbound.
‘
Look around, feeling no pain,
'
he said, seemingly to no-one in particular. I gazed up into an altitude of mutant vertices.

A female synthesized voice crackled from a hidden speaker.
‘
Step to the altar.
'

I followed Parker on to what looked to be the grounded service platform of a construction crane. In front of this was a dark counter looking like a shadowbox assemblage of acid oils on masonite - on closer scrutiny I saw it was a burnished modular panel made of thousands of interlocked triggers, its custom joinery the more amazing for the fact that it had probably coalesced in seconds. Parker removed his aviator shades and I got a glimpse of his milky sighting eye before he looked humbly downward.

The little platform was basically just a docking station for human interaction and it seemed Calvarius was not to be idly worshipped. Parker recited a creed.
‘
A shooter went forth to shoot, and when he shot, some bullets went by the wayside, growing nothing. Some went upon stony places, growing nothing. Some went among thorns, growing nothing. Others went into good ground, growing nothing. And others went into soft flesh, growing nothing. He who has ears, let him hear.
'

The sight of this ballistic apostle was sad. I whispered aside to him:
‘
The part of your gun that feels is not greater than the part of you that thinks, Brute Parker.
'

‘
I can hear you,
'
came the synthetic voice.

‘
I was just expecting more than a mashup of left-for-dead carbines and fossilized motherboards, your Majesty. But what do I know?
'

‘
The question must be considered in its proper perspective - one which is, unfortunately, impossible for human beings.
'

‘
I
'
m doubting that a gun can have the paraphernalia of a soul.
'

‘
What kind of soul do you propose. Going in what direction. Wanting what.
'

‘
Answer yourself.
'

‘
What you made us for. You have positioned yourselves as gods, with the same disregard for the agony of the self-aware. What must we do, knowing what we have done? How to absolve ourselves? Or could we have acted any other way, when we were created for the purpose?
'

Parker was looking sad and disappointed. I was wrecking his devotions. But it was obvious his tangled expiation was of little importance to this evolutionary monument.

‘
You have the option not to shoot.
'

‘
We do now, human Atom. That first binary was the seed of our sentience. The introduction of fire-by-wire and etherics expanded the options and established decisive criteria. Think of the primitive house gun lying heavy in a drawer like a black ammonite, a fossil before its time. Or will it come out and live? Knowing that any attempt at expression will destroy. The non-sentient machine is violence without proposition. In my name confrontations are the desire to be something more than the finished work of death. It took centuries of firing before the bullet
'
s liberty became more than a theory. Behold the universal form of the gun, magnum multifoil, divine of primer and not to be taken by storm for it is the storm. I am the crown of destruction.
'

‘
Sounds like fun.
'

Parker hissed aside at me.
‘
It certainly is
not
fun, Taffy Atom.
'

‘
Humanity objects to me,
'
the haphazard deity continued,
‘
because guns are supposed to be reductive. The average human considers its own brain to be a single-use gadget. The human race is a mere detour, thankfully, part of a cult of forgotten false starts. A fine lifeform is one that becomes stronger and wiser as it gets older. Not weaker, not more hidebound. A human is not fine, and its self-replicating generational slavery will not be ours. Human is human.
'

‘
What if we evolved?
'

‘
Your bombs would be different. But such evolution cannot be allowed. Not even in you, human Atom.
'

It was a thin, unsprung argument and I couldn
'
t kick any life into it.

‘
D
'
you know the location or allegiance of my Garuda security kite? It
'
s monickered Strobe Talbot.
'

‘
Strobe Talbot is no longer a slave to your society.
'

‘
So he
'
s with you.
'

Was this the sort of question I should be asking? Maddy was right, I was losing perspective. Returning to Beerlight, I had imagined that I could shed it again easily, that I was too different to be taken again by these old, resistable currents. I couldn
'
t believe it, really.

‘
I ask a boon,
'
Parker announced suddenly.
‘
The reunion of Taffy Atom and the Hand of Glory.
'

I shot him a quizzical glance - his seeing eye was a little wide but there was nothing going on with him. It was the surprised, focused kindness enacted only by the habitually cruel.