redRobe

Chapter Forty-Three The Bending of Starlight

The man with the short-model Browning SLR slept fitfully. Curled up near his feet, with her face to the fire, was a Japanese girl tied by her ankles to his wrist. She was staring into the glowing embers and neither person inside her head liked what she saw. So Tsongkhapa hummed gently and soon the girl slept.

Tsongkhapa didn’t like the gun and wanted to disable it but the silver monkey he’d co-opted as a pair of eyes argued against it. Apparently the monkey had been a gun before it became Rinpoche and still felt sentimental about them. That wasn’t a stance Tsongkhapa readily identified with, but identifying with dichotamic attitudes was as much a part of his job as anything else, so he lived with contradiction. If that was an acceptable way of explaining it.

The bioClay chip controlling the readout in the man’s eye was manufactured by Seiko, it was a military model at least ten years out of date and wasn’t really in his eye at all. The point at which it would hit count zero was, in one sense at least, entirety arbitrary. But then, as Rinpoche had said while toggling the dip switches, in human terms all recorded time was.

This hadn’t been pointed out to the man. Who would have seen nothing arbitrary in the difference between reaching or not reaching the Nuncio’s cruiser before it left Samsara.

The sleeping man had 80 hours, 48 minutes, 30 seconds to make his connection. Less than three and a half days. The Sony sound system in his head was equally old but featured one or two rather neat, non-standard, modifications.

The Browning was a 148-shot snubPup, US-designed and sub-licensed to a penal factory in Korea. It was, in the words of Rinpoche, thicker than pig shit. The cord was Israeli sisal, genetically modified for strength. The girl was quarter Han Chinese, half Japanese, quarter South East Mediterranean. Her name was Mai, without a surname, at least Mai was what most of her answered to in her dreams. And though a section of her subconscious answered to a different name she was dealing with this.

The man didn’t answer to any name at all, but had set his brain to accept Axl, Berault and Borja as acceptable aliases. There was no record of those names ever having been processed by Samsaran immigration. In fact, neither the sleeping man nor the restless girl was officially on Samsara at all, though they were both quite definitely asleep by the fire.

For a space of time almost infinitely less than a second, Tsongkhapa got a flash of what might, in human terms, have been guilt. But the AI didn’t bother to track Rinpoche’s guilt back to its origin. Tsongkhapa wasn’t worried by how the two got to Samsara because Samsara was where they both definitely belonged. What worried Tsongkhapa was the implications of what they were.

The man was easy enough to categorise. Broken more or less covered it. The girl was more of a problem. And the problem wasn’t really that there were at least three different personas stacked inside her head (the man had five, four of them dead). It was the lack of legitimate connection between the first and third. The first was Mai now, the second was a simple subset, real Mai hiding. The third wasn’t Mai at all, not even Mai solarised, run as a negative or operating with the values reversed.

Tsongkhapa sighed. There was no guarantee she could be mended but he would have Rinpoche try bufo alvarius as a first option: maybe the only option, unless Rinpoche could cut a deal with Axl. And Tsongkhapa didn’t need telling that for this to happen Axl would first have to cut a deal with himself.

Unrolling the dried toad skin, Rinpoche pulled a broken razor blade from where one hadn’t previously existed and did the same for a small square of glass. The silver monkey didn’t need a lighter, it could do flame from its fingers. 5-MEO-DMT, to be taken nightly until cured. Rinpoche shrugged, whatever.

‘Hey,’ the monkey tapped Mai on her shoulder and stepped back hastily as she came awake fast, reaching into her boot for a knife that wasn’t there and hadn’t been for five years, maybe more.

The girl blinked at the animal, then glanced at Axl lent back against a rock and smiled sourly. ‘So much for standing guard.’

‘Methamphetamine,’ the silver monkey said, ‘you’ve no idea how fucking hard it is to unpick. I practically had to disconnect those neurons one at a time.’

‘You put him to sleep?’

‘Well, someone had to,’ Rinpoche said slyly. ‘How else were we going to talk?’

Later, when the giant flowers that caught the sun were beginning to open their petals, Rinpoche gave Mai the glass knife he’d casually picked from Axl’s pocket as he briefly slept and watched her face light like the dawn. Her faith in her abilities shamed him. And as she slipped the knife’s cord over her head and began to unbutton her red jacket to rest the blade between her slight breasts, Rinpoche turned away in embarrassment.

When next Axl awoke, dungchen trumpet filled his head and Mai was sitting next to the cooling embers of the fire, mumbling to herself. Only it wasn’t with the furious, PCP-enhanced intensity of some dustout. Her words were quiet and reasoned, though just too soft for Axl to work out who Mai thought she was talking to.

Axl wasn’t too sure what had been going on inside his own head either, but his body was bathed with sweat and he felt more tired than before he had slept.

Everybody was already awake and watching him. No one had slipped away in the darkness. Even fat little Louis had sat out the stink, the distant howl of wolves heading towards the slaughter ground and the dying down to embers of the small fire that was all there was to keep predators at bay. All of them had survived the night, hovering on the insomniac edge of anxiety-apart from Axl, who felt like sleep had crept up behind him with a cosh.

Maybe they’d been afraid he’d wake before they escaped, or perhaps it was the silver monkey sitting shaking glass straws of amphetamine from a tiny compartment in the zytel butt of his snubPup who’d kept them in order. Axl was sure he’d checked that compartment and the last time he looked it contained a cleaning kit for the Browning.

‘Have a good night?’ Kate asked.

A day came and went. Most of the time Axl rode holding Mai’s bridle, Ketzia and Kate riding close behind, like silent shadows. Occasionally they all walked the rocky track that led across the bleak, windswept plateau, leading the exhausted animals behind them.

No one talked. What breath they had was needed for breathing.

All the same, enough water gathered in pools for the ponies to be able to drink. It was grass that was scarce. What little there was looked half-hearted, yellowing and spindly, filling the flat spaces between scrub and moss-covered rock.

They did that next night without fire, Axl and Rinpoche staying awake to keep guard. Mai slept in Kate’s arms and both Tukten and Axl tried not to notice. By morning Rinpoche was gone again and Axl was so exhausted he could hardly ride in a straight line.

‘Wolf,’ said Tukten and Axl stopped. The shag-haired boy was pointing to where a grey shadow slunk between altars on the distant charnel ground.

‘And there,’ Axl muttered, ‘and…’ Oh, sweet fuck. Axl was about to point again when a flash of sunlight kicked him suddenly awake, an adrenaline rush snapping his eyes wide open with a squeal of violin. Someone was watching them from a low wooded hill on the far side of the charnel ground and Axl had a nasty feeling he knew exactly who it was.

‘Problems?’ Kate asked unkindly, drawing alongside. She was holding Mai’s rein, though Tukten still stood at the pony’s head holding its bridle. They’d spent a lot of that morning scowling at each other and pulling the bewildered animal in opposite directions.

Axl shook his head, wondering why anyone would bother with field glasses. But no sooner was the question asked than Axl knew the answer. Samsara didn’t provide PaxForce with GPS, no chain of spySat hung up there running stealth mode. If anyone wanted to track him they weren’t going to squat at some satellite-feeding JCIT deck, focusing in close enough to see if he’d shaved, while their thumb hovered over some floating trackball that picked out options between blind and vaporise.

PaxForce wanted Mai and so did the Cardinal. At least, he wanted Joan and if the kid really did have Joan’s dreams stacked up inside her head…

‘It’s getting messy, isn’t it?’ The voice was amused, kind but a little contemptuous. It was Mai all right, but not really any version he knew. Her clothes were the same, that red jacket, mud-splattered felt trousers. The childish mouth was still both downturned and pouty and her hips soft with puppy-fat but her expression was more intense. And if Axl didn’t know better, he’d say her eyes had changed colour. Or maybe it wasn’t a hue change, just a rearrangement of the fractal dust that made up her iris pattern. Whatever was looking out at him, it wasn’t a fourteen-year-old girl, or not entirely.

Axl found himself nodding. Yeah, messy was one way to put it. If his guess was right, Colonel Emilio and half a dozen conscripts were camped in the other side of the charnel ground.

And if they weren’t armed to the teeth they were still a hell of lot better-equipped than his group.

‘Your group?’ Mai snorted. ‘You think half the people here wouldn’t slit your throat in the night if they got the chance?’

No, he didn’t. Without intending to Axl glanced over to where Kate crouched, retying the laces of her Caterpillars while she pretended not to be trying to listen in.

‘She’d be first in the line,’ Mai’s voice was regretful. ‘You hurt her, you know. . . And just because you’re broken doesn’t mean that everyone else is ... Of course,’ Mai nodded at Kate, ‘it doesn’t mean they’re not either.’

She was gone before Axl could reply, her hand reaching out to stroke Kate’s cheek as she went past, leaving Kate staring after her with something like disbelief in her blushing face.

‘Aren’t you going to stop her?’ Kate’s voice grated on Axl’s thoughts. He was about to ask stop who? But he didn’t need to. Mai was walking steadily towards a pile of corpses while ahead of her grey shadows raised their heads, as if they could pick up her scent over the sickening miasma of rotting bodies.

Axl grabbed his snubPup and rolled to his feet, pounding after Mai. 148 shots to a magazine and he had one magazine rammed up through the butt of the Browning and a spare tapped alongside. About seven and half seconds of full-on killing time, not like he really had bullets to spare.

Only he didn’t need the gun. Axl didn’t even need to pull back the ratchet that jacked the first shot into the breech, though he did it anyway. It was the combat equivalent of sucking his thumb.

‘Shhhh,’ Mai hissed as he ran up behind her, pumped with fear and ready to hit the ground and roll, taking out the three wolves directly ahead. ‘You’ll scare them.’

‘Scare them?’

Mai nodded and knelt briefly beside a corpse, closing the eyes on the body of a man who had one leg chewed off at the knee and was wearing his small intestines draped round his groin like a withered grass skirt. ‘They’re cleaners,’ Mai said reaching for a grey shadow. Instead of taking her hand off at the wrist, the wolf whined like a puppy and pushed its narrow skull up into her palm.

‘Fucking great,’ said Axl, ‘they’re all God’s creatures and you’re fucking St Francis.’ He stared at the broken body of a child, little more than ragged scraps of dark flesh on bones picked nearly clean.

‘You like this?’ Axl asked.

‘I don’t have a problem with it,’ said Mai. She stopped a few seconds later, put her head up and sniffed the air like one of her shadows. ‘Too much,’ she insisted, ‘too much for the horses. Cut them free ...' Behind him, Axl could see Rinpoche already slitting straps that fastened on saddles and slicing through bridles and reins.

‘That’s...'

‘A good idea,’ Mai told him. ‘Unless you plan to be a sitting target?’ She smiled grimly. ‘As opposed to a walking one…’ There wasn’t an answer to that.

‘Does all this really make sense to you?’ Axl asked Mai, feeling so tired he found it hard to think.

She nodded, smiled broadly and pointed to a blond toddler lying naked on a stone slab, his small arms and legs broken to give the vultures a head start.

It was Mai, not Axl, who led the exhausted group towards the centre of the charnel ground, walking ahead oblivious to the increasing number of bodies and their stink. The wolves stayed strung out in a line along either side of the party as if they were acting as outriders.

Mai appeared not to notice the wolves, except when one thrust its wet nose against her hand, but then she didn’t seem aware of anything really, apart from Father Sylvester’s glass blade warm between her breasts and a soft voice muttering in her head, and much of the time she didn’t even notice that. It was the daydreams that went with those mutterings that made her gasp, shake her head and shiver…

Unrelated, intense but not mine. At least, Mai didn’t think they were hers. What she liked best was the feeling of calm so deep it made her relax just to think about it. She really liked that. Liked the way her heart slowed and the knot in her stomach untied itself and faded away.

What surprised Mai most was the discovery that just because Kate had told her how lucky she was to be brought to Samsara didn’t mean it was a lie.

‘Mai?’ She felt rather than heard the question. At first she thought it came from the silver monkey now circling overhead higher than the vultures. Mai couldn’t really see Rinpoche, not by looking, but sometimes he was in her head and other times she was the one looking out through his eyes. She liked that, too.

Most of all, she liked watching herself as a tiny dot who moved slowly across a great expanse of rough grass, skirting bushes and small ponds. Mezzanine, said a voice in her head. It’s a mezzanine between Samsara’s broad central valley and the high passes. But she didn’t know that word and no sense came attached to it so that didn’t help her much, not that Mai minded.

‘Mai?' There was that question again, the one she’d forgotten she’d been asked. The kid looked round her, saw nobody speaking and wondered if it was one of the wolves. Then told herself not to be stupid.

‘Stupid is good if it helps. Crazy is better… But, do I look like a wolf?’

The bald man sitting ahead of her on an altar was wrapped in a thin orange robe. His mouth didn’t open and there was nothing to say he was the one who had spoken, but she knew it was him from the smile on his face. And besides… she just knew.

‘Like a wolf?’ said Mai, ‘No, you look like you should be cold.’

The man laughed. It sounded like echoes fading inside a prayer drum.