So Vile a Sin (4 page)

Losing a year (or had she gained it?) had frightened her so much that she’d asked for medication to be stepped up. They said that the incidence of this phenomenon was declining, but she wasn’t sure she believed them.

After lunch she would arrange the bagchairs so that they faced each other in readiness for the afternoon consultation.

They said that the routine was a good sign. They said that it was her instinctive reaction to personality fragmentation. That once she demonstrated an ability to retain a sense of linear time they could start to work on her other problems.

They liked the routine, so it was puzzling that they decided to change it two days in a row.

On the second day she had hardly finished breakfast when her doctor appeared. ‘I hope I am not intruding,’ he said.

‘Not at all,’ she said. She was a bit annoyed. She’d been meaning to punch up
Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know
after breakfast. Still, the doctor’s early arrival could herald good news.

‘Shouldn’t I clear breakfast first?’

‘I think we can risk it this once,’ said the doctor and sat down on a bagchair.

Dutifully she took her place opposite.

‘Firstly, I’d liked to apologize for breaking into your routine,’

said the doctor. ‘I know how important it is to you.’

‘I thought we might be starting a new routine,’ she said. ‘With the other doctor.’

‘The other doctor?’

‘The one who visited yesterday.’

30

‘Oh,’ the doctor hesitated. ‘That doctor. Of course.’ Another hesitation. ‘How are you feeling today?’

‘I’m not sure. Much the same as always but possibly different.

I’m sorry, that’s terribly ambiguous.’

‘Not at all, not at all,’ said the doctor. ‘I thought you might tell me your impressions of yesterday.’

‘Like what exactly?’

‘Well, for example, what did you talk about?’

‘He asked me how long I had been here and I said I didn’t know. He asked where I was before I came here and I told him –’

There was a stain just above the simcord screen. Sauce from the meatstrips she had eaten for breakfast. She checked around the room. The breakfast tray was lodged in the corner of the room; her bendy spoon was in her hand.

‘Perhaps I should have let you clear away first!’ said her doctor.

‘How long?’ she asked.

‘Twenty-three minutes. You know, I believe your episodes are shortening.’

‘Is that a good sign?’

‘A very good sign,’ said the doctor. ‘Your last recorded episode lasted just over three hours.’

She spent a few minutes picking up the tray and the soft bowls and placing them with the bendy spoon in the right place for the micro-transmat to whisk them away. The doctor said nothing until she was back in her bagchair. ‘What else did you talk about?’ asked the doctor.

‘He asked me about… well you know.’

‘The landing on Iphigenia?’

‘Yes.’

‘You still find it difficult to talk about?’

‘Yes. But it’s easier now, since yesterday.’

‘That’s good. I’m glad we’re making progress.’

‘He asked me why I thought I was here. I told him I’d gone psychotic.’

‘Psychotic,’ said the doctor, ‘is not a word we use in modem psychology.’

31

‘Of course I’m psychotic. I did things to Mbuya and Alexis and… the others. Terrible things. What else would you call it?’

‘A dysfunctional delusional episode.’

A bright rush of blood across the main screen. The ripping silk linen sound the knife made. Mbuya screaming. Mei Feng singing a song about toy dogs.

‘Would you like to talk about something else?’ asked the doctor.

‘I’d rather. What would a
functional
delusional episode be like?’

‘One that didn’t interfere with your life or those of anybody else.’

‘Would you treat them?’

‘Only if they wanted me to.’

‘How many people are like that? In the Empire I mean.’

‘Human or alien?’

‘I said people.’

‘Six million, seven hundred and six thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six – less than zero point zero one per cent of the population.’

‘Goddess,’ she said. ‘How do they survive?’

‘Many of them use their episodes as the basis of a career in the arts and sciences. Certain forms of delusional episode are associated with the more esoteric branches of physics, the ones dealing with time for example.’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘The other doctor?’

She nodded. ‘He said that there were possibilities that the human mind couldn’t cope with. That probing the true nature of the universe was like learning about electricity by sticking your finger in a wall socket. He wasn’t real, you know, this doctor.’

‘Was he a simularity projection like me?’

‘Maybe
real
isn’t the word. Maybe I should have said
alien
. He sat there, in your chair, but I could tell he was restless – after a couple of minutes he started to pace up and down, up and down.

He asked me about my nightmares. He was very interested in my nightmares.’

‘Did you have an episode while he was there?’

32

‘I can’t remember. I may have done. You know I can never remember afterwards.’

‘Did you tell him about your nightmares?’

‘Yes. I told him about the one where I’m married with children.

Have I told you about that one?’

‘No.’

‘I’m on a colony world somewhere. I’ve left the navy and I’m married and we are expecting our first child. I am in bed and…

my wife brings me breakfast because I’m the one carrying the child. Nothing much happens. We just chat about things that need doing to the house, how work is going. I’m a surveyor – I remember that. I’m pretty sure that the landing on Iphigenia never happened. That’s it really, very domestic.’

‘Who were you married to?’

Mei Feng.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the doctor. ‘I’m afraid I upset you again.’

‘How long was it this time?’

‘You were restrained for three minutes and twenty-two seconds

– the episodes are becoming much shorter. Do you remember anything about it?’

‘No. Was I telling you about my dream?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I am not here to interpret your dreams – only you can do that.

What do you think your dreams represent?’

‘I think they are alternative lives.’

‘Alternatives to what?’

‘Being locked up here. Some of the lives are better than others, but they’re all things that
might
have happened.’

‘Is that what the other doctor said?’

‘Yes. He also said that having the dreams and the episodes were a good thing.’

‘Why?’

‘Because otherwise my head would explode.’

33

Kibero Patera, Io: 31 December 2981

The dress was unique: a one-off exclusive from the House of Scheherazade. A simple strapless sheath of burgundy silk that clung to Genevieve’s body from armpit to ankle. Panels cut in the fabric exposed precisely delineated strips of her skin, at waist, thigh and the underside of her breasts.

She wore matching slingbacks with eight-centimetre force-field spikes. Her shoulders were dusted with sparkle, her lips and nails painted gold and silver. A single glittering circle held her yellow hair in its elaborate style – an ancient compact-compact disc made into a clasp, an inch across and five centuries old.

The fashion thread of the TopTenPercent media feed later described it as a statement, daringly high-tech in a scene given over to ethnic bad. ‘Retro dela retro,’ said the pundits. ‘What the well-dressed concubine wears to the ball and of course, darling, it eliminates any chance that she’ll wear the same dress as the Duchess.’ (That would have been impossible. Genevieve had already cleared the dress with the event fashion coordinator.) She spent the flight to Kibero sitting carefully upright so as not to crease the dress. A solitary splash of colour among the tasteful grey upholstery of the Ducal shuttle.

There was colour outside the shuttle as well: the ochre, yellow and chrome green of Io herself. The only Galilean moon never to be terraformed and the only planetoid of any size to fall within the fiefdom of baronetcy.

The pilot interrupted her thoughts to point out an active volcano visible to starboard. Genevieve turned her perfect face to the window and watched the plume of sulphur dioxide rise over the limb of the moon as the shuttle began its final descent.

There had been a castle built of grey stone by the sea, and around the castle a town of narrow streets and steep slate roofs. Every tenday Genevieve and her father had ridden out, horses’ hooves sparking on the cobbled streets, to sit in judgement in the villages and farms. There had been banquets and games and falconry.

There had been laughter and music.

34

She had been raised to believe in the ancient ideals of the nobility. But it had all been taken away by the rise of the Liberal Reconstructionists on Tara. Genevieve had never understood it –

her father had always been a just man.

She’d heard the castle was a municipal health spa now.

Anybody who is anybody, they said, spends New Year’s Eve at Kibero.

The ball was held on a wide balcony that jutted out of the caldera’s rim. Standing at the white marble balustrade, it was possible to look out over the rolling grasslands of the caldera proper.

A forest was a smudge on Io’s close horizon. Genevieve could see animals moving about, a glimpse of something big and grey among the trees. Above, the dome gave the illusion of a clear blue sky. Jupiter was a vast indigo shadow directly overhead, the sun an improbably small point of brilliant light. You couldn’t see the far wall of the caldera at all.

Other guests were looking out as well: a party wearing formal suits and sashes marked with corporate symbols. Genevieve recognized the chair of IIe Aiye, a core system conglomerate with defence interests. She was talking to a small man wearing a purple IMC sash.

Genevieve caught a woman from ElleryCorp watching her. The woman turned away and whispered something to her companion.

Gossip no doubt. About the Duke of Callisto’s new concubine.

An aristo. You’re kidding me! I swear it’s true. A provincial
family, but old. Who would have thought Walid had the time for
such things? What does his wife think? Do you really think he
cares?

‘Lady Genevieve, I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you.’

Lady Leabie Susan Inyathi Forrester, fifteenth Baroness of Io, was a slender dark-skinned woman with black eyes. Platinum, silver and amethyst were plaited into black hair, pulled back to accentuate high cheekbones. A cloak, no, a blanket made of some non-synthetic material, was pinned at the shoulder with the azure and blood-red sigil of her family.

35

‘My Lady.’ Genevieve curtsied politely. ‘My Lord Walid sends his apologies but he is detained by a meeting of the Imperial Council. He promises faithfully that he will make all efforts to arrive before the festivities conclude.’

The Baroness laughed. ‘Politics, eh?’ she said. ‘Who needs it?’

Genevieve felt herself flush. She wasn’t sure how to answer.

‘The Empire must be governed –’

‘Of course it must,’ said Lady Forrester. ‘Let’s just be thankful that people like Walid are willing to do it. Now, there are people I want you to meet.’

She linked arms with Genevieve, who realized that what she’d taken for sleeves were in fact an interlocking mass of blue and white bracelets.

Genevieve found herself being gently but firmly drawn into the social whirl, the chatter about clothes and who’d been promoted or demoted and the state of the Empress’s health. ‘What do you think of the palace?’ asked her hostess.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Genevieve.

‘Built by the fifth Baron in 2870,’ said Lady Forrester,

‘although each of us have added to it in our time. I’m particularly proud of the animals. We created them, you know. Terran species from before the Dalek invasion. Worked them up from a genebank that one of my ancestors salted away for a rainy day.

Amazing what you can turn up in the family vault, isn’t it?’

‘Amazing,’ said Genevieve.

A library: a Centcomp search engine or discrete database. A smart system to allow the systematic access of information via puterspace. A technology refined over a millennium until a single human being, providing they had the proper funds and clearance, could learn anything known by the human race.

Genevieve was one of the few members of her generation who knew a library could be something else as well. That it could be a room full of physical information storage, books, disks, cubes.

Information you could touch with your hand.

Like the library she found in the palace at Kibero. A narrow, high-ceilinged room to the south of the main hall. A row of three 36

identical rosewood federation tables running down its centre, shelves lining the walls from floor to ceiling.

Genevieve reached out and let her fingertips brush against the lucite dust covers of the nearest books, marvelling at the antiquity of some of them. There was a smell of paper dust and ancient wood. On Tara, the door to her father’s library was always locked and screened, forbidden to strangers and curious children. The books in rigid order: subject, author, title. Pinned to the shelves behind screens of industrial diamond. Part of the inviolate heritage of the Gwalchmai family, like the blue flags and berets hung in the great hall, icons and relics to be displayed but never touched.

In the library at Kibero the books were clearly in use. There was a pile on the nearest table, mostly poetry: Sassoon, Naruda, Baldrick’s
Listen to the Song I Sing
. A Penguin edition of Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart
lay on top of a pile of optical discs, yellowing pages held open by an empty disc cover.

A set of sleeve notes were propped up against the antique fiche viewer embedded in the table top –
for colored girls who have
considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf
.