Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Enough shock wrote itself across Axl’s face to make Kate laugh. ‘It never occurred to me that I was bi…’ Kate sounded more amused than surprised. ‘Always knew I was the other, long before I knew what the other was.’

Axl rolled off her and tucked his legs under him to sit on the edge of her bed.

Kate’s body hair was dark and damp, crushed flat and flecked with pearls of semen and it took effort for Axl to drag his gaze from between her open legs to her face, which waited expectantly for his question. He was ashamed to admit that he was shocked. It had never occurred to Axl that other people might not have tried both.

‘The other ... Is it like a feeling?’

Kate looked at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘you tell me. Is it…’

‘. . . like a feeling?’ Axl glanced at Kate’s full breasts, her mouth, then back to her narrow hips and the darkness between her legs. He nodded, realising that race and sex were immaterial. You fell in love with the person. If you were stupid enough to fall in love at all.

There were no faint scars on Kate’s body, no patches of new skin where a delicate dusting of freckles didn’t quite match. Nothing at all to say she’d had even minor elective surgery. And yet. . . he’d seen younger eyes in old women, in old men too come to that. There was something about this woman that frightened him. Some intensity burning back inside her head just out of reach.

‘Have you ever had a rebuild?’ Axl asked the question without thought, regretting the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. Something else he was good at. It was the wrong question.

Axl sighed. He kind of thought it might be.

The only people who looked their age were street people, his people, those who couldn’t afford rebuilds or the free-radical busting, mind-expanding chelated supplements the rest of humanity washed down by the handful without even thinking about it.

‘What does it matter?’ Kate demanded.

‘It doesn’t.’ Axl held up his hands, placating Kate. ‘Really.’ The switch he’d tripped wasn’t one he’d even realised was there. ‘I’m sorry…’

Kate shrugged. ‘You know how absurd this is?’ Without ever quite touching Axl she manoeuvred herself around him and shuffled up to the head of her narrow bed where she wrapped herself in the discarded quilt.

‘I’ve got Axl Borja sitting naked on my bed and he’s saying sorry.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Axl and Kate smiled.

‘What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?’ Kate asked finally.

He didn’t want to go there.

‘A couple of years in a freezer,’ Axl told her, sounding impossibly casual even to himself. It wasn’t the worst but he didn’t talk about that. And besides mentioning the time he’d been dead didn’t seem appropriate.

All the same, she still looked suitably shocked.

‘You were in cyro?’

‘Yeah, in Day Effé. It’s a long story.’ Not to mention singularly unpleasant. The kind to rate a same-day repeat and syndication on any daytime confession-fest. Then there was that other gap in his CV, when the street brats in Devil’s Kitchen rose by one member and fell by three. Axl wasn’t packed away in some pod then, but he might as well have been. Time passes like weather on the streets. It’s hot, it’s cold. Rain pisses down or it doesn’t. Occasionally it snows and suddenly even slums clean up for as long as it takes drone salters to turn virginal streets into grey slush.

It could have been only a year he spent on the street, maybe two. Later on, the Cardinal got his New York office to check NYPD precincts, but no one knew how long the kid had been running wild and Axl couldn’t begin to guess. Too much GHB.

He got a name change after that, a PIN number and Mexico City laminate. His own room, educational software, mediCare. Two months later he went through a back window and three guards who tried to get in his way, though he didn’t tell Kate that.

‘That’s it, really,’ said Axl. ‘Not much of a story.’

‘You know the worst thing that happened to me?’

Axl could guess. ‘Your sister being murdered?’

The answer Axl expected was a simple yes and maybe more tears. But he got the truth instead which was far stranger.

‘You still haven’t worked it out, have you?’ Kate said quietly. ‘Joan wasn’t my sister.’ And the well of silence that followed was so deep you could have tossed your entire life into it and never heard the splash.

Inside that silence, Kate clambered off the bed in a jumble of naked limbs hidden inside a thin quilt and walked to the door. For a second Axl thought she was about to stalk out into the corridor wearing only her quilt.

But all Kate did was take a grey shahtoosh off the brass hook attached to the back of the door and wrap its length of fine wool tightly around her. Then she walked back to the bed as if nothing had happened.

‘What was that about?’ Axl asked.

‘Joan,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t sit opposite you and talk about her.’

Which answered his next question.

‘You were lovers, weren’t you?’

‘At fourteen my father died. At fifteen I was Joan’s unofficial private secretary. A year later I was running her whole private office…’

Joan was twenty-eight years older than Kate. And at forty-two, not yet ravaged by lymphatic cancer but already dismissive of the flesh, of physical needs and carnal hunger until she met the pale-skinned, serious Kate. And Kate, her mother already dead and her father only just buried in the churchyard at Castel Gandolfo woke a hunger in Joan that Joan had always believed missing from her psyche.

Those were the words Kate used. The serious language of serious matters remembered. And the naked man sat on Kate’s bed sat and listened as she talked of statues by Bellini, Gobelin tapestries and the one great love of her life.

The artist and craftsmen she mentioned meant no more to him than talk of blow-back, azimuths and lines of fire would have meant to her. But Axl understood the rawness of those emotions that burnt behind her dark pupils, the double edged cutting sharpness of her memories as she slipped tenses from Joan is to Joan was and back again, eyes overfilling with tears.

‘Joan loves Samsara,’ Kate said.

Axl looked up at that.

‘She always dreamed of helping fill a world where there would never be war. She’ll like it here…’

‘Joan’s dead,’ Axl told Kate.

‘No,’ said Kate.

Then she said, ‘yes.’ And the sobs really would have started then except Kate didn’t allow herself the luxury. But once she stopped shaking, she told Axl something he should already have realised. The memory beads weren’t the key, Mai was.

The kid carried the Pope’s dreams locked off inside her head. Sucked and dumped by some psi Jesuit. Slowly and seriously, never quite looking at Axl, Kate crouched there on her bed and told Axl about Antioch, an ancient order turned renegade and then brought back into the fold.

‘We got the medical data when we acquired the Geneticists,’ Kate said flatly. The deal was actually more of a reverse takeover, even Axl knew that and he never listened to the financial newsfeeds. Rome had bought out the Church of Christ Geneticist, acquiring the laboratory complex at San Lorenzo in Megrib. And with the lab came patents, outlines of projects that had failed and all the data that hadn’t been released for peer review… They also got Alex Gibson, the world’s only living God (if you left out the Dalai Lama, who disowned divinity). Though they still hadn’t worked out what to do with him.

What she was telling him sounded incredible, Kate admitted that. But she wanted Joan back, not for the world but for herself. Get yourself cloned and any half-decent clinic could suck up memories from a soul chip and spit them back into a fresh cortex. Feelings were something else. And the problem with straight copying was you know what happened to you, maybe even why it happened. What you didn’t get from a soul chip is what you felt while it was happening. It brought a whole new meaning to cognitive dissonance.