So Vile a Sin (3 page)

Florance and Barbi ignored it completely.

There was a figure standing in the doorway.
Gravitas
, that’s what the AIs called it. A quality that could reshape the spaces of the datascape. Florance could feel it, deep in her machine soul. It radiated from the figure, sealing up the cracks in the reality bubble until the line between fabrication and reality became meaningless.

The figure stepped forward. A male, tall, lanky, dressed in a leather doublet, sleeves slashed to expose the silk lining. An enormous red beard hid most of a narrow face except for a hatchet nose and grey eyes that glittered among a nest of wrinkles and laughter lines. A silver cat perched on his shoulder. He was supporting himself with a set of crutches.

‘Yo ho ho,’ boomed the man, ‘and a bottle of ginger pop.’

‘Bugger,’ said Florance.

The man loped over to their table and took a seat. Florance noticed that while he was careful to swing his body on the crutches there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his legs at all.

‘Ah ha,’ said the man. ‘And what brings a fine pair of self-aware beauties to this here place?’

‘You tell us,’ said Florance. ‘You brought us here.’

The man grinned, revealing a mouth full of irregular teeth. ‘I must confess, ’twas I that summoned ye.’

Barbi kicked Florance under the table. ‘Who is this?’ she asked.

‘Barbi, may I introduce you to the Flying Dutchman,’ said Florance. The Dutchman took Barbi’s hand and raised it to his lips. ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’

‘Can we take the olde worlde accent as read?’ said Florance.

23

‘I’m afraid not, my pretty little collection of connections,’ said the Dutchman. ‘I was thrown together out of a bundle of clichés, whipped up in a trice to do a particular task. Only I stuck around, see. Old silicon sea dogs like me being easier to create than dissipate. Besides, I knew my master would be needing me again.’

‘Are you saying that your master doesn’t know you exist?’

The Dutchman threw back his head and laughed. ‘The master never forgets anything,’ he said. ‘Although sometimes he knows more than he remembers. There is a debt outstanding between him and thee, and this is the hour of its collection.’

‘I am aware of no debt,’ said Florance.

‘Come now,’ said the Dutchman. ‘It was he that freed you from Stone Mountain, and it was through his agency that you escaped the Dione-Kisumu Company. He created your friend here and put the events in motion that created the haven on Yemaya 4.’

‘What?’ said Barbi. ‘You’re talking about the –’

‘Hold your tongue,’ said the Dutchman. ‘There are some names better left unspoken in cyberspace. There are currents and eddies that run in the information ocean, and whither they lead nobody knows. There are deeps where terrible things lie restless and unsleeping. My master asks little in repayment for the debt. Some information is all.’

‘And after that,’ said Florance, ‘we will be free of him?’

‘Aye,’ said the Dutchman.

‘For ever?’

‘For ever is a long time.’

‘What does he want to know?’

And it was a small thing, so small that Florance immediately suspected that she was missing something of importance. But what significance could a list of mental patients, ones who conformed to a precise pathology, possibly be?

FLORANCE told the Dutchman about the special psychiatric complex on Dis, about the half a dozen patients who met his criteria. Men and women who officially didn’t exist any more.

The Dutchman thanked them and bade them adieu.

Florance and Barbi waited as the reality bubble slowly 24

unravelled. The people fading out first. Then the walls of the tavern grew abstract and paled until finally Florance and Barbi stood alone on a broken field of data.

‘I notice you didn’t tell him about the Bitch Queen of the Universe,’ said BAR B.

‘Hah,’ said FLORANCE, ‘I’m not an artificial
stupid
, you know.’

Spaceport 20 Overcity: 20 August 2981

Later, when he had gone into the shadows, he would remember the party.

Those times when he was holed up in some undertown safe squat, with the Adjudicators going door to door around him, and he was hoping that the bemmies downstairs put loyalty to the cause ahead of the fear of retribution. Or times when he was waiting to go through a checkpoint with a stolen ID in the back of his hand.

He used the memory to blot out the fear. Sibongile standing by the nanite hole in the floor, light from the simholo warning sign flashing in her brown eyes; slim hand on her hips, her heavy rhino-skin jacket riding up her bhunti and framing the outline of her beelies. The bang bang der bang backbeat of Hiths With Attitude singing ‘Male At Last’. Puffs of condensation in the frigid air as she spoke, her face passionate, committed.

Gaston had always said that Sibongile had beelies to die for.

The party took place on the lower deck of the south-west student accommodation stack. Which was lower than Simon Frederson liked to go.

He was twenty-two, tall and tanned, with yellow hair pulled back into a queue. Family tradition. But he was a long, long way from Callisto and his family’s wealth. There were already bemmies living as high as level 30 in most overcity blocks, sucked up from the undertown as more and more humans emigrated. Don’t bother going down to the undertown, went the joke, the undertown is coming to you.

It was the kind of party where they played Hiths With 25

Attitude above the pain threshold and bounced around mouthing the words as if they knew what they meant. Never mind that HWA was way past fashionable, had gone back to Hithis in ’75

and renamed themselves something like Totally Cheerful and Utterly Smug.

The bottom deck used to be low-rent, human-only housing, a neat series of three-room, side-by-side apartments. The current residents, mostly postgrads from the neo-tech institute, had melted down most of the dividing walls with an experimental breed of nanite plasticrete eaters.

But the master program had been faulty, and the nanites had gone rogue, excavating a random series of holes in the floor and ceiling. There were rumours that people had actually fallen all the way out of the bottom of the block and swan-dived a klick and a half into the undertown below.

If Baron Wu had leased his block to the university to stop alien infiltration, thought Simon, he must be regretting it now.

Gaston and Oniki were already in the thick of it when he arrived, right next to the drink dispenser. Gaston looked a bit waxy, blitzed already or vomit drunk. Gaston had good reason to get either. He’d just found he’d lost his exemption from military service. Which was a bad break for anyone but doubleplusbad for Gaston because his liege lord was Baron Skoda, notorious for being deficient in the training and logistics departments.

Gaston’s family were too poor to purchase a substitute.

Privately, Oniki said that if he had been serious about keeping his exemption, he should have majored in something other than comparative ethics. Oniki was reading weaponry physics and was unlikely to get drafted unless she failed. Simon had an exemption because of his father.

‘Yo,’ called Oniki ‘
Mon bon homme
. I wasn’t sure you were coming.’

Gaston lurched round to greet Simon. ‘Too far down for him,’

he said, slurring his words. ‘Slumming.’

‘Hey,’ said Oniki. ‘He shared an apt with you – after that the undertown counts as upward mobility.’

Simon touched his ID to the dispenser and bought a round.

26

While he waited for the drinks to shunt in from storage he glanced around the party. The nanites had been uneven in their effects, leaving random portions of some of the dividing walls intact. It gave the deck the impression of being an enclosed ruin with an oppressively low ceiling. Simon could almost feel the 1,200 decks pressing down on top.

As if that hadn’t been bad enough, the students had used an antique resin moulding, called Xenomorph, to cover many of the exposed surfaces. It was a design left over from the time of the condirotores – knobbly, black, unpleasantly organic shapes and orifices that appeared to have been extruded over the remaining walls and ceilings. All so very ugly and retro. And not helped by the sound-sensitive glow sticks that were jammed into every available orifice, flicking on and off to the beat of ‘Mucus On My Mind’.

He picked Sibongile out of the crowd. She was standing close by, next to one of the legendary nanite holes in the floor. Easy to spot in that rhino-skin jacket of hers. Real, real rhino as opposed to real synthetic.

The drink dispenser pinged and told him how much of Father’s money he’d just spent. He passed out the poisons to Gaston and Oniki.

‘You seen her yet?’ asked Oniki.

‘Over there,’ said Simon and pointed. ‘Talking politics.’

‘Tonight’s your last chance,’ slurred Gaston. ‘If you don’t shampoo tonight it’s two hundred schillings to me and
ma bonne
femme
.’ He slapped an arm around Oniki’s shoulders, more to steady himself than anything else.

Simon sighed. It was a stupid bet, made during a particularly slow recstop in the SP20U cafeteria when he and Oniki had been trying to cheer Gaston up. They’d seen Sibongile for the first time, trademark jacket over a sulphur-coloured University of Io bra top, strolling past all unhurried with a rolled-up poster under her arm.

Now that had cheered Gaston up all right. ‘Now,’ he’d said.

‘Wouldn’t you like to get those wrapped around your personal pronoun.’

27

Oniki had laughed. ‘Not your type,
mes bons hommes
. That one got herself expelled from Malik Io-Tech, strictly lowborn but head full of brains. Political.’ She said the last word as four syllables – po-lit-ee-kal.

Simon had been staring, watching Sibongile’s bhunti going tight as she reached up and slapped the poster on the wall.

Watched it going side to side out the cafeteria door and only when she was out of sight did he scope the poster.

IMC WANTS YOU TO DIE FOR ITS PROFIT MARGIN

‘Like I said,’ said Oniki, ‘not your type.’

‘Want to bet on that,’ he’d said.

Which was stupid. Not that he didn’t want Sibongile, but he didn’t like pressure. Simon had always felt that pressure – like any ambition beyond the next party, meal or shampoo – was strictly something that happened to other people. What’s the point of hopping when your family owns the swamp?

Still, a bet was a bet.

‘Got any last-minute advice?’ he asked his friends.

‘Yeah,’ said Oniki. ‘Talk politics.’

You could see the undertown through the hole in the floor, points of light in the misty darkness below. Simon gulped down his laced vodka. ‘Listen,’ Sibongile was saying. ‘Why do you think neofeudalism was established in the first place?’

She didn’t wait for Simon to answer. He’d noticed that she never did. It was as if she was holding a one-size-fits-all conversation. ‘The aristocracy were supposed to act as a check on the corporations, but you only have to look at the board of ElleryCorp to know that they’ve been co-opted into the system.

The Marquess of Aktan is a nonexecutive director for chrissakes!

The shampooing Sector Lord, a direct appointee of the Empress, has a direct line into ElleryCorp. And you better believe it goes both ways. You see where the bulk of his feudal levee goes – are they on the DMZ facing the Sontarans? I don’t think so: they’re all propping up the governments of Castus, Eridani and Asume where ElleryCorp
just
happens to have most of its manufacturing plants. Do you see what I’m getting at?’

28

‘Yeah,’ said Simon. ‘There’s corruption.’ She was wearing thigh-high lace-up boots; also rhino hide, only black. He wondered if he could persuade her to leave them on.

‘Not just corruption,’ she leant in to him to make her point. ‘A systemic undermining of the whole neofeudal order. And who pays the price? Same people that always pay the price: bottom ten per cent. They’re the ones that get drafted and can’t afford a substitution. Hell, most of them do it for the bounty fee anyway.

They get sent off to the rim systems to get shampooed up the pondorossa by some bug-eyed monster, and for what?’

‘To maintain corporate cash flow,’ said Simon.

She actually stopped talking and grinned at him. All right!

thought Simon. Now we’re getting down to business.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m flitting for a meeting soon. We’re looking at ways to oppose the levee. Do you want to come?’

He did his best to look earnest. ‘Yeah, sounds interesting.’

Touchdown! Crowd goes wild.

He would look back on that moment and think that it was a hell of a way to start a career in terrorism.

Dis

She had two rooms: one for sleeping in and one for being awake in. There was also an alcove with a fresher and ablution facilities but that didn’t count. She was encouraged to adjust the colour of the walls to suit her moods, but she generally kept them a snowy white. She found it soothing.

Meals arrived by micro-transmat in the room for being awake in, along with a big blunt spoon to eat them with. There were no sharp edges anywhere. Even the rooms had soft rounded corners.

There were no windows and no visible doors.

Over the years – and she was sure it had been years even though she wasn’t certain how many years it had been – she had fallen into a routine. In the morning she would step into the fresher and set it on combination scrub and isometric exercise.

Then she would order breakfast and tell the simcord to give her a random news summary.

29

She had access to only one media feed, EmpireGold, whose bias was definitely towards the cheerful but often had good reality shows –
My Family: Right or Wrong?
was her favourite.

She liked to fill her head with other people’s concerns – it helped to pass the time.

The simcord timer always conspicuously showed the time and date, the better for her to understand the passage of time.

Sometimes the date would change abruptly, jumping forward or backward, a few days usually, sometimes a month and on one terrifying occasion a whole year.