Jon Grimwood - redRobe

‘Why are you here?’

‘Why?’ The Colt thought about it. ‘Because I’m fucking crazy, that’s why… why else?’

Light flared and the overpowering voice crystallized into being, a shape ray-traced, skinned over and lit so fast that no human could have followed the sequence. It wasn’t seeing, the Colt knew that, it was being shown. Shown what it would have seen.

‘ Sweet bloody ...'

Sweet bloody what? Bombay brothels and Byzantine chapels, the Colt had seen them both and they’d both been thick as soup with smoke. It had talked to cardinals, bad-mouthed pimps even as it blew them away. Hell, it’d run mirage routines on AIs from Arbroath to Arseville in Arkansas. But this...

It was hard not to notice the crocodile curled around itself, especially as the animal had a woman’s head and vast four-toed claws. But what really caught the Colt’s attention was the old man standing on the crocodile’s back. He didn’t just have one head, he had—the Colt did a rapid count—eighteen of the things, four on each level, banked up on top of each other, looking north, south, east and west, plus a face on his stomach and back. Each face was topped not by a knot of hair but by a raven’s head. His skin was an all-over pattern of eyes that stared or slowly blinked at the Colt.

In one of the man’s hands was a rope, except that when the rope saw the Colt it opened its mouth and hissed. And the man’s other three arms were waving slowly like seaweed caught in a gentle tide as fire danced up his sides burying him beneath an aura of fractal-edged flame.

‘Fucking Jesus,’ said the Colt, and the burning man grinned.

‘Right idea, wrong culture.’

The Colt grinned back, wickedly. Still busy cutting itself in and out of loops, finessing silent corns connections… And if the old man of the flames knew what the ghost of the gun was doing he didn’t let it show. Though given the glint in a thousand eyes, the Colt wouldn’t have liked to bet on him not knowing.

‘Tsongkhapa,’ the Colt said finally, when the information fell into place. It seemed so obvious when the Colt thought about it.

Tsongkhapa nodded, sixteen heads bobbing.

‘And you?’ The mouth in his stomach asked.

The Colt blew out the idea of trying to run a business-card routine almost ahead of thinking it. Something like the one it had run back in Mexico City might fool a dumb-as-shit cathedral but Tsongkhapa was different. And any intelligence that could hold the Colt in digital limbo while manifesting itself as an eighteen-headed Bon demon was working to parameters the gun didn’t even begin to understand.

Which left the Colt with only one option, the truth.

‘Me?’ The Colt’s voice was briefly sad, as it remembered the pearl-handle grips and the Bauhaus-simple ceramic chassis it had left behind on the Cardinal’s black-glass table at Villa Carlotta. ‘I’m between bodies.’

‘Of course you are, my beloved.’ Each head nodded as the old man leaned forward, hands swaying briefly as he fought to keep his balance. The Colt was gripped in the gaze of more eyes than it could count. Which was weird, because it didn’t have a body… which meant the old man was looking at where the Colt’s body would have been if it did. Wasn’t that how all that Eastern stuff worked?

‘You’re crazy, so you say ...'

‘Yeah,’ said the Colt bluntly. ‘I’d fucking have to be to be here, wouldn’t you say?’

The faces grinned. ‘Rinpoche, I’d offer you a drink but it’s probably not a good idea. You need to find your own bit streams. Ones that aren’t poisoned.’

Still chuckling, the the old man began to fade, leaving the Colt suddenly hanging above a vast something. Not quite a spinning ring, not really a narrow drum, more a huge stone egg with a large bit of both ends crudely hacked off.

Standing off from both sides of the ring was Samsara’s lighting system, a thick cluster of Znayrna flowers spread through space like daisies, each 480-metre petal a huge light-reflecting mirror constructed from aluminium-coated plastic film.

It was obvious enough how the flowers worked, but the Colt was impressed all the same. Light from the sun was reflected through the sides of the wheelworld, but whether straight down to the ground or to central mirrors floating high in the big black of the circle’s centre the Colt didn’t know.

Many of the million or so strips of cloth attached to Samsara’s outer shell were woven through with solar-powered cells threaded to random-frequency broadcast chips, so that they endlessly chanted mantras that overfilled the Colt’s mind with waves of digital scribble.

The Colt felt warmth upon its back and turned, facing into solarlight that blazed across the cold wastes of space. Then it paused and ran that sequence again, thinking about it this time. The Colt felt warmth upon its back… The compressed AI intelligence which still regarded itself as the ghost of a gun that lay, hollow and empty in the study of a Roman Catholic Cardinal in a pale blue stucco villa that faced the burnished sea of the Mexican gulf, took a look at who it had become.

Rinpoche. Beloved.

Wings spread out from the shoulder blades of a small monkey. Featherless and boneless, the wings were as vast as the new simian frame was small. They stretched nine metres across and were as thin as the tissue in a cell wall. Not for flying then, that much was obvious. Rinpoche tracked a data flow across the wing and understood immediately.

Where better to use solar power than when riding the solar winds? As for its new body, leaving aside the crude effects of vacuum, it would have dehydrated in the heat of direct light or frozen within the fall of Samsara’s shadow had it been made from flesh. But it was beaten silver inlaid with rubies, pearls and turquoises.

He was the eyes of the world. Dawn’s harvester. A watcher at the gates of space… Rinpoche sighed. Whichever geek had originally programmed the monkey’s identity module, he’d inserted a serious God complex, either that or Seattle Pomp Rock wasn’t dead. It was hard to know which was most worrying.

‘Crazy wisdom ...'

The last thing the Colt heard before it began to skim Samsara’s upper atmosphere was the old man’s voice crackling at it suddenly out of a snow-blinding maelstrom of data.

‘You’ve sure as shit come to the right place.’ The old man was laughing.

When Axl awoke he was right where he wanted to be. And he’d got there unconscious and almost by accident. Which was a better route than most. Somewhere in the distance there was a bell ringing without stop, just the one and erratic enough for it to be rung by hand.

Sunday morning.

Axl groaned loudly. The taste in his mouth was salt and sweet, blindly primitive. For the briefest second he figured that what he could taste was Ketzia and then Axl realised it was his own blood.

‘Don’t try to talk,’ said a woman’s voice crossly. ‘You bit your tongue and it’s slow to heal. So stay silent.’ The words weren’t a suggestion, they were an order.

The hand that pushed Axl back into the pillow was firm and the pillow was soft, so Axl stayed where he was and slowly opened his eye instead, letting life drift slowly into focus.

As rooms went, this one was vast, its right wall almost beyond the edge of his vision. High overhead the ceiling was cracked and crazed until it looked like a dangerous map, a map that might send continents tumbling in on him at any moment. Huge plaster chunks were missing from the middle of the ceiling, as was any suggestion of architrave that might once have softened the line where ceiling met wall.

And as for the walls… Axl squinted. The tapestries were long and red, decorated with life-sized women. Not one of them had less than four arms and all were round-breasted and topless.