redRobe

Chapter Twenty-One Shangri/LaLa

This was nature with a fucking capital N, Axl realised, looking round him. Artificial and constructed, true enough, but still way more raw than what passed for wilderness back home on Earth; which the Cardinal insisted was put there by God for man but everyone knew was no more than a spitball of spacedust and a chance reaction of amino acids.

Nature was something he was part of, that’s what Dr Jane back at Vajrayana had told Axl. Only fools thought nature, like life, was something that could be safely controlled. Well, he had news for her. Life and the world thrived on fools, this world as much as the old one. He’d be prepared to take a bet on it.

Hoof beats sucked at the mud. The ground beneath his horse’s hooves had the consistency of summer tundra, a hand’s breadth of sticky earth and rough grass skimming soil still frozen hard as rock. His mount was spooked with fear, eyes rolled back white in its long head. The feeling of death around them was so stark it was as if they had ridden into a wall.

Everything had been fine when the wind blew from behind, but now it came straight into Axl’s face, ripping tears from his hollow eye and choking him with its stench. He was so cold his bones were already ice and it felt like he had meltwater, not blood, in his veins. So maybe that little shit had left him human after all, because feeling this cold could only be a flaw and design faults were stripped out of toys and AIs.

There was something wrong with the sky, too, but Axl couldn’t yet work out just what it was. From what he could tell, the colour seemed right, pale with high clouds and black dots that swung in distant currents. Not just small familiar birds, but larger, more exotic species. Eagles, black kites and hawks. Even a pale-feathered osprey that had skimmed low over a silver lake he’d left behind him the previous morning. Or maybe it was the day before that. Axl was having trouble remembering.

Ahead were more dead bodies than he’d seen since the rape of Bogotá. Thousands of them. Rotting, hacked-apart corpses. If Axl hadn’t known better he’d have thought himself back in some battle. Arms were cut free from naked, legless torsos. A young girl with dark hair stared blindly in his direction, sockets pecked bare. She had no feet and what had been her large intestine sprawled out of her open stomach like a crawling worm.

On a low stone table lay an old man, eyeless face turned to the sky. Both his arms were chewed away, one shredded at the elbow, the other ripped from its socket like a broken doll. Where his chest should have been was an open hollow framed by splintered ribs. And standing guard over the corpse was a grey wolf, saliva dripping from full jaws.

The wolf wasn’t alone. Sitting on the stone altar beside the dead man was a saffron-robed old man chanting softly to himself, as oblivious to the wolf as to the ravens and Egyptian vultures circling overhead.

Not a battlefield but a charnel ground. A point on the high plateau where bodies could be left broken and exposed to be taken back into the wheel of life. The monk was performing chod. Making peace with death. Axl knew all about chod and the charnel grounds: before reluctantly letting him sign himself out of her surgery Dr Jane had insisted he watch a bleak tri-D on ‘fugee life in Samsara.

Vajrayana and the clinic were behind him now. And between where his horse stood on the plateau and where Axl was headed was a mountain ridge, draped in oak, scrub juniper and fir and topped by wispy low clouds and snow. Beyond that and the high valleys was an impossibly-steep mountain slope that rose almost sheer to the edge of the wheelworld.

The time would come, of course, when the wheel was full but that was a long way off. Life was cruel on Samsara and Axl knew from the tri-D that ‘fugees died faster than they could be imported, though Tsongkhapa hoped that natural birth would eventually change that. And Samsara did have natural birth, it was one of the Dalai Lama’s oddities. As were those picturesque wooden tourist towns in the central valley leased to Thomas Cook and Disney.

No one had even looked at him when Axl rode through Shangri/LaLa, but then TeamRodent regulations were very strict about tourist/’fugee fratting and the tour guides made sure their charges kept to the rules. Largely because if the experiment was successful the rodents were hoping to open not just another two tourist villages but a ‘tourist retreat’ in Vajrayana itself.

And besides, the grocks were warned in advance that the sky was hung with tiny Aerospat vidCams, relaying constant updates to Tsongkhapa. And Samsara’s overarching AI might be neutral where ‘fugees were concerned, but that didn’t apply to tourists. In fact, Tsongkhapa had only agreed to guide in the chartered shuttles after the Dalai Lama explained for the third time that he had ‘fugees to protect and visiting tourists made it more difficult for WorldBank, the UN or IMF to launch covert raids.

On a spread of wide wings, an eagle rode the air currents towards Axl, swirled into a turn and dived, low and fast over a small distant lake, talons extended. This time it took a silver-scaled char that flapped, already broken-backed as the eagle’s claws tightened.

Maybe it was an omen, but if so then too bad because Axl didn’t believe in omens any more than in luck. Life was what you made of it. A construct. Luck didn’t come into it, ever…

Pulling on his reins with cold awkward fingers, Axl wrapped his large grey coat tightly around himself and turned to face the low mountains on the other side of the plateau. Somewhere in the foothills, next to a waterfall there would be shaggy, squat-nosed yaks weighing half a ton or more, barley fields already cut, a village and a monastery, because there was always a monastery. If you could call low, pink-painted stone shacks monastic. It would take him several hours, maybe more to find the next place. But when he did, the monks would have spare food—and if not food then buttered tea. Everyone in the bloody place had buttered tea.

Dr Jane had given Axl painkillers, a roll of surgical tape, amphetamines and a silver space blanket taken from Red Cross supplies. From the Samsara Trust he got twenty silver thalers, coins heavy enough to make a good punching weight if he put ten together and folded them into the palm of his hand, though Axl didn’t point that out to Dr Jane. He also got a steel-bladed hunting knife which had a heavy brass handle but was missing its scabbard, a long grey woollen coat that was almost rain-proof and the brown mare, a mountain pony so shaggy it could have been a misbred yak.

The blonde doctor had walked him to the edge of the city herself, after finally accepting Axl’s angry, tearful statement that he couldn’t stay in Vajrayana for treatment because what he really needed was to find other people like him, persecuted followers of Pope Joan.

Axl knew why he’d been given a horse when regulations only specified a knife, staff and woollen coat; one look at his own face give him the answer. From the blinded eye to the raw scar of a non-consensual SQUID burned into his forehead, he wore the stigmata of the damned. His very injuries made him a VIP among those who had suffered. At least, those of them who remained alive.