Jon Grimwood - redRobe

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.