Jon Grimwood - redRobe

He stank worse without his clothes, but that was quite normal. For a minute Jane considered removing the grime and sweat from his skin with a simple dusting of nanites, but rejected the idea. Most ‘fugees were too scared of nanites to want them near. He could shower later, before he picked up replacement clothes.

‘Okay,’ said Jane as she ran her fingers quickly down his front, feeling for scars and swellings. ‘I’m starting the examination now ...' She was talking to the clinic AI. ‘Knife wound to the right chest, looks old. Newer operation scar over lower bowel area. Bullet wound, low-calibre and non-explosive, in through right thigh and out right hip… Relatively recent.’

‘That was five years ago,’ interrupted Axl.

‘Patient heals slowly…’ Jane added it to her observations without pausing. A quick touch to Axl’s shoulder was all it took to make him roll onto his front. ‘Star-shaped cauterisation to right shoulder, not instantly identifiable.’

Axl could have told her that was a holiday souvenir from Belize, ceramic frag from someone else’s home-made pipe bomb, but he didn’t feel like interrupting her again and certainly not to talk about the one time he got really sloppy. His WarChild contract had been running out then and he’d missed a simple trip wire slung across the entrance to a deserted holiday hotel. Three-quarters of Axl’s input to that episode had involved him getting shipped to a field hospital outside San Porto. His personal rating had dropped eleven points.

‘Liver, both kidneys…’ Her hand slipped casually between his buttocks, cupping his balls. ‘Both testicles, one new…’ She nodded to herself, made another note, revising the odds upwards. Having both kidneys was good, if surprising.

Running her fingers up the man’s spine to check each vertebra, her finger reached his skull and then found the grey ceramic plug, recessed into its mounting and level with his skin…

‘Shit…’ She bent close, so close that Axl could feel her blonde hair brush his shoulder, soft as angel’s breath. ‘They spiked you…’

She was shocked.

Really shocked.

Axl twisted his head to look up into blue eyes made enormous by tears and pity. And despite himself, he smiled. No one came close to the Cardinal when it came to pre-planning and detail.

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…