redRobe

Chapter Twenty-Eight Outriders

Two facts saved Axl’s life. The first was that everyone from Kate to Clone was too busy searching for the missing bits of the dead Pope’s mind to want the added complication of killing him.

Axl didn’t know that, just as he had no idea he was the person with Pope Joan’s missing memory stuffed deep in the piss-drenched pocket of his greatcoat. But then splitting Joan’s senses into five and stringing the memory beads on the wires of a kid’s dreamcatcher had been Father Sylvester’s way of keeping them not just safe but also anonymous.

The second thing that prevented Clone slitting Axl’s throat was that Mai still wore a thong. True, the scrap of smart-silk was all she did wear, but it was enough to save him. Axl had few-to-no illusions about that as Clone herded him down the kitchen stairs, never quite touching Axl. As if to touch him might trigger violence the huge man wouldn’t know how to control.

Not until Axl reached the bottom stair did he hear the first ringing slap and Mai’s loud four-letter reply. Axl wanted to go back for the kid but Clone crowded right behind him, fingers clenched into vast fists as if the ox-like man was fighting his need to use them. It took a minute for Mai’s swearing to subside and then even her sobs faded to leave only slaps that came hard and rhythmic, meted out in absolute silence as if the woman delivering them was too furious to speak.

‘Poisonous little bitch, isn’t she?’ Axl said. Not surprisingly the mute didn’t answer. So Axl took down his coat from a peg and shrugged himself into it, PaxForce piss and all. He had a feeling Kate wasn’t going to want him staying at Escondido any more.

When the woman finally came downstairs Axl got a chance to swear at her to her face, but he might have been as mute as Clone for all the response his insults got. When she spoke it was to dismiss him.

‘I don’t know who you are,’ Kate’s voice was glacial, colder even than her face. ‘But you’re a coward and a liar. I don’t believe you were ever one of us. To abuse Juanita like that, a child…’

‘Her name’s Mai,’ said Axl hotly, ‘and the kid’s a whore.’ He wanted to add, and what’s with this us? But it was already too late.

Kate gave Clone an abrupt nod and the huge man bundled Axl outside into the ever present, early-evening drizzle that was such a feature of Cocheforet’s microclimate. It took the Clone and Axl forty minutes to reach the inn and the Clone didn’t take his knife point out of Axl’s back the whole way.

And now the drizzle was gone, the air was thinner, Cocheforet was a morning’s ride behind him and Axl still wasn’t sure which cut deepest, being accused of abusing a kid or being told he was a coward and liar. And he had no intention of stopping to wonder why both insults hurt so badly.

Somewhere ahead was the carrion ground. Which, given the Clone’s permanent snarl as he rode beside Axl, wasn’t a reassuring thought. The man’s wide face was set hard like concrete and Axl had a nasty feeling that if Clone got his way, he’d be joining those other bodies. And the crude-looking revolver that Tukten, the Tibetan boy from the Inn, carried in one hand was the weapon for the job.

The sullen Tibetan brat did nothing but look at the revolver and whistle tunelessly. That Tukten distrusted Clone was obvious, but the boy made it clear he liked Axl even less. And from the way Tukten stared around him, nervously scanning the sky or peering ahead of him across the high plateau it was equally obvious the boy would rather be anywhere than where he was and doing anything except whatever it was he was doing.

But it wasn’t until the three riders were far enough onto the bleak plateau for the swirling black specks in the grey sky ahead to be identifiable as vultures that Axl worked out that Tukten was terrified of the scavenging ground. Which explained all that tuneless whistling.

A couple of hours was what it took Axl to reach that conclusion. A couple of hours during which his bladder grew tight as a drum, cold wind leached warmth from his face and the air got thinner and the vegetation ever more sparse, if that was possible. But still they rode a narrow track, in silence except for Axl’s abortive attempts to talk to the boy. It would have been easier to empathise with a stone.

Empathising with the Clone wasn’t an option. Clones didn’t do empathy any more than they acknowledged blood ties. How could they, without getting landed with sending 3000 birthday vid-mails every month? And if you were a clone of a clone, what was the relationship to whoever held the ur-genetic template? Axl didn’t know ... He made a point of not watching the daytime newsfeeds.

You’re wandering, Axl told himself. No surprise really. Too much chang maybe or the after-effects of poppy potion, those were the options that looped through Axl’s mind. That it was lack of oxygen meeting exhaustion and exertion didn’t occur to him. And as for last night’s vision. That was seriously somewhere Axl wasn’t allowing himself to go.

His own mare was struggling to draw breath. Yet the other two rode animals unaffected by the thin air. Small dirt-grey ponies with thick coconut-matting coats that stank of oil. He’d half expected them to be riding yaks.

‘I need to stop,’ Axl told Clone who said nothing, just wrapped his huge hand tighter round the bridle of Axl’s mare and yanked so hard the animal almost stumbled.

‘Can’t you do something,’ Axl asked Tukten. ‘I have to stop.’

Axl couldn’t manage the boy’s trick of standing in the saddle, unbuttoning and pissing against his horse’s neck so steam sprang from its skin, but pissing wasn’t the only reason he wanted to dismount. The fact was Axl couldn’t think properly with the mare’s spine banging into his arse with every step. And Axl needed to think and quick, if only because what he was refusing to think about kept pushing itself to the surface.

Mostly, what he needed to get his head round was what Kate, Clone and Louis had been looking for. And not just them. Ketzia, too, she’d been looking. He’d stumbled down the valley track from Escondido into Cocheforet, passing under dark tangles of rhododendron grown so thick that there was only just room for one person to pass at a time and the path was black as night. The Clone was behind him as always. And when the man’s eyes weren’t boring into the back of Axl’s neck they were scanning the gravel as if the key to everything might just be lying there.

And then there was the ‘vision’. Axl didn’t believe in real visions, his own or those seen by others. Schizophrenia, B-alvarius specials, fucked-up levels of serotonin, neural flares that flamed the fern-like structure of the cerebellum with dazzling corona, faulty REM. mechanisms that overlaid real life with narcoleptic fantasies. Those he believed in. And then there were the mechanical kind…

Delivered by Clone to the inn, Axl had slammed his way through the front door, pushed past the bearded landlord and stamped up the rickety steps to his attic room, slamming the door behind him so hard that plaster flaked off the damp chimney breast.

It didn’t make him feel any better.

The shutter was open, the fire was out and his mattress was soaked with drizzle that had come in through the unprotected window. A maggot-white lump of dried yak cheese stood crusted on a plate by the bed, his uneaten supper from days before. The bread that went with it was already spored green with mould.

Axl wouldn’t miss Cocheforet but life wasn’t as simple as just leaving. The Cardinal would have spies on Samsara. It wouldn’t be that long before the hip and run of rumour told him Axl had failed. Not long enough, anyway. Not nearly long enough…

Aware just how close he was to screwing up big-time, Axl stood in his attic room and kicked the two main problems round in his head. No hint that Kate knew anything about the missing money or was planning to set up some little papal court in exile. Nothing worthwhile to offer His Excellency as a counterweight to failure.

Added to which, he was hungry, cold and in deep shit with the villagers. Not a good place to be. And the only problem he could deal with immediately was hunger. Axl dug into his pocket for his knife, planning to scrape mould from the bread. Only its blade caught on Mai’s soulcatcher, scratching one of the memory beads.

And Axl found salvation.

The shock threw him across the room so hard Axl slammed sideways into the far wall, almost dislocating his shoulder. Invisible bands bound his chest so tight he couldn't draw breath and his heart froze with shock. He was dropped into darkness so cold that every muscle locked solid.

The woman had skin that shone white and her head was thrown right back, nostrils flared wide, her mouth open in prayer or ecstasy. Blank eyes turned blindly to some gilt heaven. She was…

St Teresa d’Avila.

A statue which didn’t really rate approval, no matter that it was famous.

And then the marble figure and the knowledge were gone.

He stood in a city at the top of a flight of stone steps and the air was heavy with incense and honeysuckle. And the world was briefly in colour again.

‘Michaelangelo was so kitsch,’ said the voice in his head. ‘Or maybe it was Paul Three.’

Behind was the empty floor of del Campidaglio, a circular Renaissance piazza paved in marble. A white wolf in a gold cage stood to the left, the symbol of Rome, shaded by a myrtle bush. And below the steps, stretching so far the eyes he was looking through couldn’t focus on the far edge, a silent crowd waited expectantly. The little silver insect hovering near his mouth wasn’t an insect, Axl realised. It was a microphone.

And again, that feeling of waiting for death. Watching the edges of the crowd as if the bullet might somehow be visible. Expecting it but knowing that here was not the place. Now was not the time.

‘What is there left to say?’

‘Everything,’ said a voice he didn’t recognise. ‘Tell them the truth. That’s all you ever…’

And then all Axl had were cold echoes in his head and a sense of loss.

Victory out of defeat, or some such shit. Sitting on the floor of the attic Axl had known exactly what Kate, Louis and Clone had lost. Exactly what he had to offer His Excellency. For the first time in days, Axl grinned.

Sure Joan was dead, ripped apart on camera. The death that had been digitised and cast out into the Web to be diced and spliced, cute-cut and mixed to music, backdrop to synth loops and sound-grabs, textured with cheap space echoes and fed back at everything from slowburn to 280bmp, was for real. Joan really got ripped apart, no faking. That really had been her blood running back into the cracked earth. Her face flash-frozen by history.

Mimetic.

Iconographic.

She’d be selling dermaPeel face creams and high-phenethylamine chocolate within five years.

But that was all the Army of God got, her body. When the soulcatcher chips had been inserted Axl didn’t know or care. Maybe only when Joan announced she intended to negotiate an end to the children’s crusade, or maybe back when she was first elected Pope. The Vatican might not approve of cloning but it had medical AIs like nobody’s business, answerable to the Congregation for Causes of Saints, better known as the Devil’s Advocates, the conclave that existed to disprove miracles.

It wasn’t novel to get wired. If anything it was a bit passé, almost retrograde. But she’d been augmented all right and he had the chips. Not augmented like an exotic, no ultra-fast reactions or night sight, nothing too obvious. Just five-sense neural backup. Each bodily sense captured in a tiny bead, not glass but crystal bioSoft, memory layered like time.

Exact emotions couldn’t be backed-up—not yet anyway, maybe never—but reactions created emotions and reactions could be stored, along with sights, smells and memories of what they were reactions to. The math was simple. Splice the senses through a transparent back-up. Putting the baby back in the bottle was more difficult, but it happened and, like most things that take place regularly enough, everyone figured if it happened that often it must be easy.

It wasn’t. A decade and a half back, Axl had flushed his own life down the tube, literally. The most satisfying data dump of his life. Two and a half years was how long he’d been beaded and central accounts for CySat’s WarChild had charged him five percent of his earnings for the privilege, even though he hadn’t wanted beads in the first place. Keep extra memories? He didn’t want the ones he had.

Those marble steps with the open-faced crowd staring up at him. Thousands of them. He’d seen that image before, from right back when it all began and Washington and Paris were rubbing their hands at the thought of a young woman in the Vatican.

Someone unworldly.

A recluse they could use.

Except they couldn’t. Because the woman who stood up to address the UN was the one thing no one had been expecting. Someone who really believed. In telling the truth. In doing what was right because it was the right thing to do. At no matter what political cost.

She was a fucking nightmare. And when she used New York to announce that killing civilians was a sin, no matter what their religion or politics ...

There’d never been a time when the victims of war were just those who fought, when wearing a uniform was an invitation to Death and being a civilian meant Death rode by. But that had been the ideal, destroyed by the balkanisation of conflict and the new crusades, not over water shortages as CIA Langley had warned but over religion, between Islam and Christianity, those followers of the Book.

Polarisation saw off humanism on both sides, leaving only harsh fundamentalist certainties that did to the differing peoples of Nigeria and the Sudan what 250 years of famine and corruption hadn’t managed—exterminated whole races.

Tough shit.

Axl didn’t do compassion and he was backpacking enough guilt for stuff he was responsible for, not to pig out on certainties he could do fuck all to change. He was, as the saying went, out of there…

The water in the attic basin was days old, filmed across its surface with dust, but Axl didn’t care. He just splashed the cold liquid onto his face and when that wasn’t enough dunked his whole head in the basin, rubbing his fingers through his hair.

Food and something to drink.

The bar was empty when Axl got downstairs. Not even the three wise monkeys were in their usual corner. No fire was lit in the grate and no one came when he called, so Axl stepped round the bar and walked through to the kitchen to find Ketzia on her knees in front of a rancid heap of rubbish. Sodden tea leaves, a broken plate, splinters of glass, animal bones, anything the goats outside wouldn’t eat.

Axl knew exactly what she was looking for. He had it in his pocket.

‘So,’ Axl said, ‘what are you looking for?’

Ketzia kept silent. In fact, she didn’t even look up. Must be invisible, Axl thought sourly. Clone had obviously been telling tales.

‘Can I help?’ Axl asked and watched Ketzia tense her shoulders. His voice was so polite she couldn’t help but know he was insulting her.

‘No,’ she said roughly. ‘You can’t. You can go back to your room.’

Axl shook his head. ‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘I need food and then I’m out of here.’ He made no pretence at being anything but pleased at the idea of leaving Cocheforet behind.

‘Out of here?’

‘Back to Vajrayana. Off Samsara.’

‘No one gets off Samsara,’ said Ketzia flatly. ‘That’s the deal. Everyone innocent gets sanctuary, no one leaves ...'

‘Maybe,’ Axl said casually. ‘Maybe not.’

‘Unless you really are a spy.’ Ketzia’s voice was suddenly cold. ‘Then maybe you can cut a deal with Tsongkhapa. If your bosses are powerful enough.’ She stared hard at the man in front of her. Like she was vid-grabbing inside her head.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Axl said lightly. ‘I’ll remind you if you don’t remember me.’

Ketzia brought him half a loaf of bread and a lump of goat’s cheese that had gone liquid down one side. It might have been the worst food she could find in the kitchen, or it might just have been what she had. Axl didn’t care, he ate it anyway, sitting at a table in the deserted bar. Washing the rough bread down with buttered tea. Then he stood up to fetch his mare.

Only Axl got no further than stepping through the door. Hands gripped his shoulders, strong fingers crushing muscle like someone just sprang a steel trap. There was no need to look round to know it was Clone, but Axl did anyway and found the ox-like man standing next to a barefoot, sour-faced Tukten, who was holding a pistol.

Nothing fancy. Wooden grips, single-action. A seven-and-a-half-inch barrel fed from a steel cylinder reamed out to take five shots. The barrel wasn’t even blued, and oily fingermarks had etched themselves onto the cylinder. But it was loaded and if the gun itself didn’t have intelligence, the wide-faced boy holding it had enough to pull the trigger if ordered.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Ketzia, coming up behind Axl. ‘You can leave at first light. This evening you stay at the Inn.’

For once it wasn’t raining when dawn broke and to begin with, as Axl stood in front of the inn and stared straight towards the vast mountain behind the village that extended if not to the sky then at least as high as the wheelworld’s atmosphere, he felt happy.

The Job was finished. Even His Excellency couldn’t deny that. What remained of Joan’s life was hidden deep in his pocket. Ready for the Cardinal to gut. The old bastard could ask no more.

The only thing to sour the taste of a job well done was the echo of Kate’s slaps. Every which way he processed the memory of what happened it still didn’t make sense. So he’d been caught groping some half-naked street kid and that was enough to make Kate Mercarderes look like she wanted him recycled into body bits? The hatred that burned from the eyes of Clone; the contempt that kept Ketzia on her knees in the kitchen, silent and facing away from him…

So maybe he was missing something and maybe whatever he was missing was big, but Axl told himself he didn’t care. He had enough. And more to the point, he had all that His Excellency could need. Who needed puzzles?

Axl’s happiness lasted as long as it took a sour-faced Leon to bring Axl’s horse and announce that Clone and Tukten would be riding with Axl to see him safely out of the valley. Now vultures spiralled overhead like soot from a fire and Axl felt less safe with each passing mile. His bladder was bursting, his throat was dry and cold clung to him like the smell of fear. And all Clone did was act like he didn’t care. Which was fine, because he didn’t.

And then, trotting between two tangled banks of wild rhododendron, Axl suddenly tripped over the answer to what he’d been missing. Wetware. He found it in the body of a naked boy draped over a blood-red boulder.

Beyond the dead kid sprawled other figures. A few had been quartered with an axe, the rest clumsily disjointed by scavengers: abdomens were ripped open and coils of half-eaten viscera dragged from their bodies.

And then Axl knew exactly why he had to get back to Cocheforet.

‘Stop.’ Wheeling his mare in front of Clone, Axl put up one hand. It took all his will to ignore the revolver the black-haired boy pointed at his head but Axl managed it. All his attention was on Clone. Axl didn’t trust him but that was hardly the point. This wasn’t about trust. It was about getting back in the game.

‘I don’t want to leave without giving Kate this.’ Axl pushed a hand deep into his pocket and snapped a wire on Mai’s soulcatcher, freeing one bead. Using the cloth bag that had held his Red-Cross issue DNA chips, he trapped the bead inside and handed the bag to Clone.

‘I found this.’

For a second, Axl thought the huge man might not take the bait, but he nodded at Tukten to keep the revolver pointed at their prisoner. Because somewhere between leaving the Inn and reaching the high plateau a prisoner was what Axl had become, he had no illusions about that.

Clone’s eyes widened with shock as he peered into the bag, seconds sliding by like hidden assassins. Then, grudgingly, he let the Tibetan boy take a look. And as they stared at each other, neither had the slightest idea how close they were to being dead.

A snap of the boy’s wrist would have given Axl the revolver. One of its black-powder slugs could rip open even Clone’s thick skull. A few split brains, two more bodies, nothing that would make much difference to the charnel house around him.

But Axl wasn’t planning to kill anyone. He was going back to Cocheforet to talk to Kate, whether the bitch wanted to talk to him or not. And if losing a bead was the price he had to pay to get rid of Clone, that was fine. Axl had every intention of getting it back later.

Axl wanted to shout aloud, punch one fist into the air, all those WarChild responses he no longer allowed himself. His Excellency was going to get his prize. And he, Axl Borja, was going to bring the Cardinal back Joan herself. Had an imprint ever been tried for the crimes of its original? Why the fuck should he care? She might not look the same but let some fuckwit Vatican lawyer deal with that.

Instead of punching the air or grabbing Tukten’s revolver, Axl kept his hands relaxed at his side and watched arctic wolves casually do things to corpses that would have got AIs terminated and humans locked up as insane.

Defences could be made from anything. The wolves protected Samsara.. As did the rare white elephants, obscure mountain cranes and the last sixteen snow leopards not in cryo. One aid agency’s ‘fugee might be some metaNational’s financial terrorist, but no one got stressed at the Dalai Lama providing refuge for animals. Rumour said the animals got higher corporate donations than the starving, sick and homeless, but no one really knew. Some subset of a subset of Tsongkhapa ran the banking routines.

‘I found it in the stable.’ Axl liked the way both figures suddenly jerked their attention away from the cloth bag.

‘We searched there,’ Tukten announced. The Clone said nothing, but then he couldn’t. What he did do was stare hard at Axl.

‘Yeah,’ Axl shrugged, his voice bored. ‘Well, that’s where I found it.’

The Clone gurgled something and the boy nodded.

‘Where?’ demanded Tukten.

‘In the trough,’ Axl said, remembering a crude waterbox that took rain from a downpipe off the stable roof. That they hadn’t searched the water trough was obvious from the expressions of hope that flicked across the two very different faces.

It was Clone who reached a decision first, jerking his chin towards a track that threaded between bodies. Translated it meant, ‘you take him’. At least that was what Axl figured it meant. The boy didn’t want to, that was equally obvious. He wanted to ride back with the good news, but Clone was already wheeling his mount about, Axl forgotten.

It couldn’t be better. Not for Axl anyway who watched as Clone yanked roughly on the reins of his horse and galloped back the way they’d all come. A minute or so later he vanished behind a low bank of scrub and Axl was left alone with the Tibetan boy, who was now looking more nervous than ever.