Jon Grimwood - redRobe

Joan was fifty-five. So her brain would have processed the equivalent of 300 million books. Which sounded big but came out as around ten terrabites of memory, not remotely hard for five chips.

But dreams are like feelings. Just as you can’t chip the flickering dendritic matrix that ties emotionally-rich events into a shifting web of neural connections, so it’s impossible to hardcopy the rush that kicks in during REM sleep when the frontal lobes shut down, emotional centres fire up and the brain swims with acetyl-choline.

‘What if she didn’t love me?’ Kate said. ‘What if I downloaded Joan’s memory beads into a blank and it knew it loved me but couldn’t remember why?’ I couldn’t take that risk ...'

‘You’ve got hard-form back-ups for Joan’s senses. And you’ve got her dreams as well?’ Axl didn’t know whether to be shocked or seriously impressed.

Kate nodded. ‘Everything except Joan. Because she didn’t believe in clones…’ Kate caught herself. ‘Oh, she believed they were human. God knows, she fought for equal rights…’ Her voice was harsh. ‘But not for herself. She didn’t believe in back-ups.’

‘But the memory beads ...'

‘History.’ Kate’s laugh was as bleak as her words. ‘Back-up for the Vatican library. Joan believed in history. That, and the essential goodness of the human race.’

‘And the dreams?’

‘Sheer luck,’ said Kate. ‘Joan suffered nightmares. Father Sylvester flew in from San Lorenzo to do a dreamlift. I thought it would give her a week or so of peace.’

Axl looked appalled. He didn’t intend to, but he couldn’t help it.

‘He was going to return them when she got back from Mexico. Only it didn’t happen, did it?’

‘No,’ Axl could comprehensively say it didn’t. Joan got ripped apart by a pack of consensually-hallucinating street kids and Kate got landed with Joan’s dreams, and back-up of her vision, smell, sound, memory and touch but no blank Joan to load them into.

‘So now you know,’ said Kate and headed for the door. Adding over her shoulder, ‘I’m going to shower.’ She didn’t say it would be good if you were gone when I get back. But the message was there in her voice and in the way Kate didn’t meet Axl’s eye as she shut the door. Leaving him alone and still naked on her bed.

And he would have gone too, back to his room or out of that house, up into one of the higher valleys or even off Samsara altogether, whatever she wanted. Except that he took one last look around her room, imprinting it onto memory and that was when he found the bug.

PaxForce issue, Intel-chipped.

Mai wasn’t in her room. She wasn’t down in the kitchen with Louis, either.

‘Mai?’ Axl demanded, but Louis just scowled. Whatever he thought of Axl spending the night with Kate, he made it obvious he didn’t think much of Axl coming straight down afterwards asking for Mai.

The little fat man hit the nearest wall, bounced off it into a pine table and was clutching his hip before he even hit the tiled floor.

‘Where?’ Axl demanded, picking up a knife. A sabatier-black handle and brass rivets, French-made-for refugees they had more than their share of home comforts.

Louis took one look at the blade and began crawling backwards out of Axl’s reach. He knew just how fine a cutting edge the sabatier carried, having sharpened it in the first place.

‘Where’s Mai?’

‘Down in the village.’ The little priest was almost crying.

The door slammed behind Axl and he was gone. He skidded down a grass bank rather than go round by the path, his boots cutting long gouges into slippery earth. Sweet fuck, the only question that really needed answering was why hadn’t he seen the bug earlier. . . ?

Because his mind was in his balls. It was obvious, wasn’t it?

A small silver mosquito, wired for sound and vision. Fibre-optic eyes so small as to be almost invisible. Wings that doubled as solar panels and six tiny metal legs that let it cling to the wall near Kate’s bed. Basic stuff.

So why the fuck had it come as such a surprise? Waxy leaves whipped into his face as he slid between bushes but Axl hardly felt them, though his hands flipped up to protect his face all the same.

If that mosquito hadn’t been in shadow it would have been able to escape. But all that voice-activated broadcasting of what it had heard and seen had drained its power and not enough light could reach that wall for its wings to do more than mark time.

And besides, the Colonel had made one mistake. The bug was a low-valley model, not designed for this altitude or temperature. That was what made the thing easy to catch. It was also what made Axl notice it in the first place. Only, noticing the thing too late was no better than not noticing it at all.

‘Mai?’ The front room of the Inn was crowded with sleepy conscripts but it went quiet the moment Axl crashed through the door. The sabatier still clutched in his hand saw to that. Ketzia didn’t know where Mai was, or if she did she wasn’t saying.

Axl left the Inn with a couple of Tibetan women and a handful of grinning conscripts tagging. It took Axl all of two minutes to outrun his audience.

Maybe they’d expected him to cut Mai’s throat when he found her, Axl had no idea. He only knew that whatever they expected the conscripts were a whole lot less bored-looking than when he went in through the Inn door.

The corporal on the Z3 gyroByke had problems with the idea of handing over her Honda, so Axl left her flat on her back in the street thinking about it. Though it was a push to her shoulder, not a chop to her throat with the sabatier, that put her there.

Getting soft in his old age, Axl decided, wondering what the old revisionist version of his Colt would have said. But he didn’t really have time to worry about it. No one did, not now. He needed to get to Mai before the Colonel did. How long that took depended on how obsessively Colonel Emilio had PaxForce stripping out bug data for key words.

Mai wasn’t in the stables either, though Axl’s horse was, so at least she hadn’t stolen the animal to try crossing the high plateau by herself. Nor was Mai around the jumble of open-fronted shacks behind the village that passed for its market, though half a dozen conscripts were.

The conscripts scattered, dropping the crudely-beaten Tibetan bangles they had no one to give to and striped rugs they’d leave behind. Been there, done that, ditched the T-shirt. Violence, rape and shopping for souvenirs. It had to be something the sergeants taught at boot camp.

The Inn, the stables and the market all empty of Mai—he had to face it, wherever the girl was, it wasn’t in the village.

Cold mud slid from the Honda’s back wheel like shit off a shovel as Axl hit a skid turn at the end of the row, but a military-grade gyro kicked in on cue and the bike kept him upright, tracks biting grass as he left the market and raced straight up the valley side. In reality, it was a mountain wall so high that human vision failed long before the snow-lacquered slopes gave way to graphite grey walls that stopped only after they’d long since left the thinning air behind, and met the cold emptiness of Samsara’s upper atmosphere.

Down near the base of that wall, Axl slid between spindly firs and hung a shaky right to skirt a huge clump of thorn.

‘Make a noise, make it obvious…’ That’s what his old sergeant used to say. Axl doubted if she’d ever seen a lapwing—he certainly hadn’t—but that’s what this manoeuvre was named after; if setting yourself up as a moving target rated being described as a manoeuvre.

Birds rose from the tangle of thorns in an explosion of feedback and a goat that stood on a nearby ridge vanished like someone had hit delete. The grass got ever more yellow the higher he raced, the air thinner, the soil turning to grit that ricocheted from beneath the Honda’s churning back wheel.