Out on Blue Six (33 page)

It made everything so right and so wrong.

All hugged up in slick silver, his chromium jangle-bangles clanking on his arms, the King of the Darkland’s stretch-plastic-covered ass felt like a block of marble by the time they came off the tram. Cold stroke numb stroke sore from five hours
straight
on wet steel up on Number Two converter. Two sasses; one em, one eff: had to be them. Didn’t look like soulers. A jiggle into his whisper tooth called off the other brors (no doubt every bit as cold stroke numb stroke sore stroke
bored
) as the King of the Darklands, but just for safety he watched them through his scanshades before making rapprochement. Let them be themselves a little, see how they settle out. The eff: nice for a tlakh. Score probability flashed up in his field of vision: under one percent, shug. Pity, nice ass, must be a dancer, prancer, neh. Check em: matter of professional discretion … wow, gosh, whistle, check and recheck that, shift scanspectrum up one, down one, in one, out one; Sainze but that em is
positeevely
throwing off biofrequency transmissions—what the, how the, why the …

Uh oh, no questions, no queries, seel voo play, that was the agreement, there’s Love Police (and
worse
(?)) interested in this em and this eff so be sure you find them first. Lurv Poleece … better not leave them looking lost too long … The King of the Darklands uncoiled from Number Two converter in a flex of lithe silver.

No questions asked, and none answered, best way to do business, but Sainze, that tlakh mustn’t’ve heard of the agreement because she kept chipping, chipping, chipping in her two fennig-worth, and shug, what she expect
him
to know, he’s only doing a favor for a bror, no questions asked, none answered. Pick up a couple of sasses and bring them to the Heartbreak Avenue settling plant. At least that em knows something about agreements, save breath for walking stroke climbing stroke crawling, still, why does the King of the Darklands
still
get this funny feeling off him like he’s something which almost shouldn’t be there at all? Wad! What this tlakh ass about now?

“Where are you taking us? This isn’t the Geno fermentation plant.”

“Sorry, sib, but new orders. Say take you to Heartbreak instead.”

“Why? Is something wrong? Tell me, something’s wrong, that’s it … Hold on, how can I trust you are who you say you are? How do I know you aren’t another Love Police agent?”

I mean, shug … Once again that em had the right idea.

“I think we’ll just have to trust him, that’s all. If the worst is going to happen, it will happen. This is the kind of place you’ve got to trust other people.”

Well, that’s sure as taxes, em! Let’s go, shall we. Cross the Talleywalk, up the stairs onto the gantry along the side of the freegee chromatography tanks, thank all you Sainze, not far now …

“Look, will we be there soon, wherever it is you’re taking us?”

“Sib, you’re there now.” Open the door to the tank and good shoot to the both of you.

The open door threw a wedge of gray cloudlight into the tank, across the faces gathered around the dull globe of a heat bulb in the center of the-makeshift plastic floor: three faces, one Scorpio, one athleto, one tlakh, one brother, one twin. Her fear of confined spaces was overcome by the sheer delight of seeing those three faces again. She threw herself onto her brother, squeaked little exaltations of delight and joy and pleasure and wonder and “Oh Yah, oh Yah, oh Yah, it’s so
good
to see you, so good, and you, too, M’kuba, and you, Pyar, so good to see you; now tell, where are the rest, eh?”

The tank smelled of mold and plastic and, somehow, a long lack of its own gravity.

“Thunderheart and Devadip and Winston and Josh, are they out on a show already?”

The heat bulb was plugged into a ceiling socket by an extension coil and gave the only light, dim and red and intimate.

“Kelse, where are they? I really want to see them …” Her brother, her twin, lifted her hands from his shoulders, took them in his own hands. “Eh, Kelse … M’kuba, where are the others?” Suddenly suspicious, suddenly fearful.

“The Love Police got them.” V. S. Pyar’s voice.

“M’kuba, come on, tell me, eh?”

“He’s telling you the truth.”

“Kelse, brother, you wouldn’t fool me, tell me what’s happened.”

“The Love Police have them.”

The universe staggered, knocked loose from its moorings; it punched her hard, in the heart.

“Oh, Yah. Oh, dear sweet Yah. Oh, dear dear God.” First the nail in the heart, then the numbness it creates. Then the denial. She laughed, nervously. “No, no, it couldn’t be right. You’re joking, aren’t you? Couldn’t be, couldn’t be, come on, tell me, this is Josh’s idea of a practical joke, isn’t it? Hah hah, very funny, come on, Kelse, the real truth, come on, I can see you smiling.”

“You want the truth? So: the truth. They found us. I don’t know how they did it, but they found us. They were waiting for us, they knew exactly where we were going to be. We weren’t five minutes into the place when they hit us. All sides. All at once. Used ringcharges of the walls, had the doors covered, men on the catwalks, smoke, gas, sonics, I don’t really remember what, there was so much happening, all I remember is Pyar here picking up Love Policemen and throwing them out of his way, and somehow M’kuba and I got sucked along in the wake. The rest … they tranqed them and stuffed them into pantycars and took them away.” He paused, blinked, swallowed several times. “M’kuba found us this place with the help of his persona-runner friends, they all knew each other when they went out on blue six together, they gave us this place and kept a watch out for you. I didn’t know what had happened to you, I just couldn’t think about anything but what had happened to the others, you might have been captured as well, back at the Glory Bowl, we just didn’t know. But the runners kept a watch out for you anyway, in the hope you’d made it. The rest, Winston, Devadip, Thunderheart, Josh … I can’t believe it.”

Kansas Byrne slapped her brother hard across the face. She lifted her hand to strike him again, felt Kilimanjaro West’s hand around her wrist.

“There is no need for that. It’s not his fault.” Kansas Byrne glared at her brother, anger and pain and incredulity in one glance.

“Leave the man be,” said M’kuba. “There is no more Raging Apostles.”

The curving wall of the tank channeled the truth into one hard, long reverberation. Kansas Byrne spread her hands.

“What can we do?” The edge of the world was within reach. At last. It had always been inevitable; outside society the currents all flowed in one direction. It had seemed so distant, hardly even a dark smudge on the horizon as they danced and sang and played and performed and made the world a bright and dangerous place once again. All those weeks and months the currents had been running, how could she not have sensed it, unless she had deliberately willed not to do so? And now they could see it, rising up beyond the edge of the world: the final monolith, West One.

Psychological reengineering and rehabilitation center.

“What can we do?”

“M’kuba has an idea.”

The Scorpio shrugged. “Possible we might go back into Compassionate Society.”

“Oh, yes? When we threw away our famuluses, we made our choices. No way back. We going to walk up to the nearest MiniPain Bureau of Care and ask for new ones?”

“Mah sib, true we can’t go back as ourselves, as Kansas Byrne and Kelso Byrne and Dr. M’kuba and Kilimanjaro West and V. S. Pyar. But if we give ourselves up, there is a way back.”

“You mean, go to the Love Police and say, here we are, your most wanted PainCriminals, take us?”

“No. You misinterpret, sib. What I mean is, give up ourselves. Become someone else.”

“Are you talking personality erasure? Because, shug, that is no better than what the Ministry offers.”

“Hear him out.” Both of Kilimanjaro West’s hands were on her shoulders, heavy and still as marble.

“My bror persona runners think they may be able to superimpose memories, identities, histories, personalities over our own. Become these people, real people who have died, step into their places, take their names, numbers, everything, be absorbed back into society.”

“So we would cease to be. So Kansas Byrne would die.”

“In one sense.”

“Yes or no?”

“Kansas Byrne, she exist only as ghost; like a dream, like a fantasy.”

“That is suicide.”

“Brors think, I agree, that in time older, longer-established persona engrams might gradually surface, take over superimposed persona. Might become Kansas Byrne again.”

“And that is the best you have to offer me?”

“It’s a hope, isn’t it?” said the brother, her twin.

“When will we have to decide?”

“My brors running physical typing matches now. Tomorrow. Morning. Hey, sib, they don’t owe us this. This is favor, Kaybee.”

“And you’ve decided, have you, Dr. M?”

“We all have.”

“Shug. Yah blast it. Shug, shug, shug.” She sat down and swore and swore and swore and then cried a little, and no one thought to stop her because it was all the helplessness and hopelessness and fury and anguish they felt themselves.

Night. Outside, the sudden roar of gas flares, the rumble of the automated tram taking the ghosts home to their roosts, and the rain, drum-drumming on the metal separator tank. The heat bulb was stopped down to a bare glow, the tank was filled with swirling dots of darkness. And people, taking a last time alone with themselves. A last sleeping. A last dreaming. A last being oneself.

And a word.

“Kaydoubleyou?”

“Yes?”

“Shug, I don’t know what to call you now.”

“Kaydoubleyou is fine.”

“Ahm, I was wondering … oh, shug, do you mind if we talk a little? It’s just, well, the dark, and what’s happening tomorrow, and everything … Have you decided?”

“Yes. Have you?”

“Yes. And I’m doing it. That’s why I was wondering … oh, shug.”

“What?”

“Damn you, damn you, damn you, damn you, you still have to be so shuggin’ innocent.”

“Please, not so loud, the others are trying to sleep, and I don’t want them to know.”

“Kaydoubleyou, ahm, when you said you loved me, did you mean it?”

“Of course. As far as I understand the word, yes, I do love you.”

“Well, would you, could you, could we, ahm … it’s like this. Shug, I’ve never been nervous about this before. Tomorrow, Yah, tomorrow, tomorrow, Kansas Byrne Raging Apostle, this Kansas Byrne you love, she is going to die, and I will be someone else who won’t even know who you are, and I want to know you, I don’t want to forget you, I want to remember you more than anything, I want to keep on being amazed and amused and just plain bewildered by you: you say you love me, and I know I feel something for you like I’ve never felt before, so, ah, why don’t we?”

And they did.

Afterward:

“You know, this is going to sound stupid and really obvious, but I’ve never done it with a
god
before.” Laughing into his chest.

“I have never done it before with anyone.”

“Thank you.”

“What are you going to do? You asked me, and I told you, but you didn’t tell me.”

“I’m not going to do it.”

“Why the fug not?”

“I can’t. Not and remain what I am, what I’m meant to be. Anyway, I don’t think it would work on me.”

“The Love Police will catch you.”

“Maybe. Maybe not, if they don’t know who or what I am, they won’t know what to look for, or even that they should be looking. But even if they do, I think I can still be as much Advocate from a tank in West One as here, with you, or clinging to the roof of the Babazulu Aztec Cathedrium.”

“That’s not fair. It’s not fair that you will remember all about me and I will forget about you; you will be just a ghost within the ghost that was me.”

“I’m sorry. I did not decide this lightly.”

“That doesn’t help. Strange and wonderful creature. A god.” She arched her back like a sleek, sensuous cat, warmed and comfortable between the heat bulb and Kilimanjaro West’s body. “I don’t think I will ever be happy again.”

Then
something
blew a hole in the wall with a blast and a roar and a scream and a shatter and a rush of noise and light and Kansas Byrne shrieked and shrieked and shrieked as black-and-silver creatures all red nightsight goggles and thin, weapon arms came pouring out of the night, out of the void, out of the terrifying nothing outside the separator tank: light and voices and shouts and clouds of gas? smoke?—choking, coughing, eyes streaming with tears and madly vertiginous, she jumped up, nakedly vulnerable and terribly terribly lovely and a Love Police shock beam threw her across the little nest against the curving wall and she writhed and spasmed and foamed as the charge chewed away at her nervous system; and the man who called himself Kilimanjaro West rose up with a roar and a cry and threw himself through the smoke? gas? and the din and the darkness at the black-and-silver things that had hurt his friend, his comrade, his woman, his Kansas Byrne; with the roar of a god outraged he threw himself at the Love Police and a shock charge caught him full in the chest and everything everywhere, every nerve ending, crawled with red acid ants while he hallucinated flying birthday cakes and tumbling kaleidoscopic pieces of red-brick masonry and the smell of vinegar, then everything blew up in his head like a white monobloc exploding into a universe of confusion, and then he knew nothing at all.

“S
PECIAL TACTICAL SQUAD SEVEN
to West One Central, come in West One Central; will be docking in approximately five minutes, report successful arrest of remaining PainCriminal elements of the Raging Apostles group. Request high-security team to meet us at pad to effect transfer of prisoners to sensdep tanks. Special Tactical Squad, out.”

Number two seven eight in tank two twelve.

Number sixty-six in tank three one six.

Number eleven hundred and sixty-two in tank seven twenty.

Number seventy-seven in tank … no, sorry, hold seventy-seven, number seventy-seven, seventy-seven to … ah, got it, level sixty-six.