Resolution (19 page)

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[3]

Hot dry air; the babble of vendors -
¿Le gustan? Los màs baratos
... - and holo ads; spicy scents of onions and seared meat cooked on kerbside stoves; the confusion of bright colours. Headmasks and ponchos. Polished guitars. Cheap statuettes of the Blessed Virgin reciting the Hail Mary in overlapping Anglic, Español and Russki.

The dense slam of Mexican poverty.

A coffee-skinned couple, faces webbed with sun-blasted lines, smiled up from their squatting position, revealing stumps of teeth. They offered tortillas from a tiny solar pan, while a metre away thermoacoustic-drive vehicles slid past.

Ro looked back through the border shimmerfield. On the other side, the wavering image of the ground-cab which had brought her here moved farther away, into visual chaos.

Jesus Christ, Ed. Why are we meeting here?

Someone clutched at her sleeve but she twisted and walked away.

Further into Nogales proper, there were few gringos from the Arizona side. A clean-skinned Mexican girl looked up from the corner of a whitewashed building, saw Ro approaching, and turned away with a sassiness already tinged with disillusion.

Behind a church called Santa Teresa stood an open courtyard, and Ro walked inside. A half-door swung inwards at her touch, and then she was in a bare, clean storage room.

Nothing alerted her senses. No detectable surveillance.

‘Shit. I don’t like this.’

Ro let out a slow breath. Then, without using her hands, she sank to the ground in a corkscrew motion, finished sitting cross-legged on dark-grey stone.

And closed her eyes.

Calm now.

Time to wait.

Yesterday morning she had been in the Zurich Pilots’ School, sitting in an easy chair in the anteroom to the Mother Superior’s office, one leg thrown over the chair-arm, reading a two-century-old novel in hi-res flatscript projected from her infostrand.

Every time Ro chuckled, Sister Olivia, sitting at the anteroom’s desk, looked up and frowned. But the story was funny, with surprisingly modern touches. It began with a Latin aphorism and an extended Goethe quotation, though most of the original readership would have been monolingual, in Anglic.

Even the strange-looking
Ich sah
reflected a topical concern, as the current movement to remove the literary Past Historic tense from Français, following the Deutsch tradition, had resulted in controversy and even one death as two academics pummelled each other with leather-bound books in a Sorbonne courtyard.

‘The Reverend Mother won’t be long.’

‘Good. Excellent.’

Ro read a bit more. For all the absurdism, the short tale had relevant points to make about the nature of time and of human conflict, encapsulating a tragedy which the inhabitants of Dresden recalled to this day.

The pinched-faced nun let out a sigh.

‘She’ll see you now.’

‘Thank God for that.’

The Reverend Mother Mary Sebastian, aka Jill, sat with her feet up on the glass-covered desk. Opposite her, Ro did the same.

‘You didn’t get on with my predecessor, did you, Ro?’

‘Before she attained Motherhood, she was in charge of facilities management, and I was living here and in my teens.’ Back when Pilots-to-be came here to be trained by Mother, learning aikido and Feldenkrais body awareness - skills which would stand them in good stead when their eyes were removed during surgery: in those days Pilots traded their realspace senses for those which were virally induced. Back then, only Ro possessed the natural ability to perceive another universe. ‘I used to take the piss.’

Jill smiled at the antique idiom. ‘I hope you gave Sister Olivia more respect—’

‘Not much.’

‘—though she is a prissy little bitch, I’ll grant you that. And I will be confessing that lapse.’

‘Tsk, tsk, Jill.’

‘I’ll tell you this. Old Misery out there won’t hear anything said about the kids. Even the ones who are pains in the ass.’

‘Like me.’

‘Just as you no doubt were. But listen’ - Jill dropped her feet from the desk, growing serious - ‘there are people in the Order who want the kids out of here. And since that means losing income from UNSA, we’re talking serious dislike.’

‘Is that anything new?’

‘You know they’re talking about you as the link between two species? You personally.’

‘The kids aren’t actually my offspring. Besides Dirk and Kian.’

‘But there’s something of you in all of them. The general public doesn’t know much more than this: that the difference between
Homo sapiens
and
Pan panicus
is one per cent of DNA. So it doesn’t take much to form a new species.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Jill. It’s one-point-six per cent, and the differences are spread throughout the whole goddamn genome, including control loci, not just one or two isolated genes. Chimps are close relatives, but not
that
close.’ Ro shook her head. ‘And the general fuckin’ public doesn’t know the difference between algorithm and data, because DNA is both and what matters is exactly which—’

‘Whoa.’ Jill held up both hands. ‘Peace. I’m just telling you that the bishop is wavering, all right? If the Pope made an announcement either way, the uncertainty would be over ... but she’s keeping quiet on the issue.’

Ro shook her head.

‘I don’t believe the kids have souls. But I don’t think you or anyone else has one, either. Shit. Can the Vatican even
spell
“emergent properties”?’

‘Only the Jesuits. But, “falling revenue from church collections”? Or “rising dissatisfaction among congregations”? They can spell those just fine.’

That was yesterday, in the cool, rational surroundings of her Alpine home, far removed from the hard air and stifling heat of Mexican noon. Even meditating in the shadow-painted storage room, eyes shut against the hammering white light reflected from the courtyard outside, Ro was aware of a harsh edge to reality, the faintest hum as a beetle flew to the nearest wall.

Then she was standing, though her eyes remained shut.

Three aircars. Drawing close.

Ed was supposed to come alone.

‘Shit, shit, shit.’

Ro opened her eyes and popped out her contacts, then flicked the lenses aside. If there was to be any kind of action, she wanted no mistakes.

Two flyers circled low, out of sight behind the rooftops, their sound muffled by the quotidian cacophony of the town. They settled down. Ro imagined armed men spilling forth, running to surround this courtyard.

Wait.

Finally, the smallest of the flyers was overhead, a white speck in a baking azure sky. It hung for a moment, then descended in a puff of hot dust. A pale unhealthy figure stumbled out.

‘Ed. God damn it.’

Monsignor Edwin Grayling winced at every step, and Ro wondered at the state of his feet. Beating the soles was unsophisticated but effective. They had been careful to leave no cuts or bruises on his face.

Why? You think I wouldn‘t notice something was up?