Ричард Морган: The SF Collection

She lay like some dead Viking noblewoman on a broad, carved wood platform with lines that vaguely suggested a boat. Thick tangles of grey-green insulene foam netting supported her and wrapped her over. Carl could smell the stuff as he stepped towards her, the signature nanotech reek of tightly engineered carbon plastics. He’d used the netting on Mars a lot, camping out on expeditions in the Wells uplands.

-Flash recall of sitting out in the warm glow of a heating element while the Martian night came on in all its thin-air glory, thick shingles of stars everywhere and the tiny, on-and-off tracery of burn-up from the left-over seed particles as they kept coming down, decades overdue for their date with atmospheric modification. Sutherland, staring up there at it all, pleased smile on the scarred ebony features, like all of it, the sky and everything in it, had been put there just for him. Musing, nodding along with whatever it was the young Carl Marsalis had been bitching about. Soaking it up, then turning it around so Carl’d have to look at it from an angle that hadn’t occurred to him before. You ever wondered, soak, if that doesn’t just mean……

Jurgens stirred just barely as the lights came up, but the down end of her cycle had her buried too deep for any substantial reaction. She was naked in the foam, skin taut and shiny with the adipose buildup, lidded eyes bruised and gummed shut with the secretions of the hibernoid sleep. Carl stood looking down at her for a long while, handgun at the end of his arm like a hammer. Images of the last month flickered behind his eyes like flames, like something burning down.

South Florida State. The Perez nanorack. Sevgi Ertekin beside him on the beach. New York, and the futon she made up for him. Gunfire in the street outside, the first warm crushing pressure as he flattened her under him.

Istanbul, the walk to Moda. The gleaming, glittering grins-in-darkness escaping feel to everything they did.

His mouth twitched upward in echo.

The wind across the stones at Sacsayhuaman. Sevgi leaned against the jeep at his back, the tight feeling of cover, of safety.

The road to Arequipa, her face in the soft dashboard glow.

San Francisco and Bulgakov’s Cat , the predawn view out of starboard loading. Don’t gloat, Marsalis. It’s not attractive.

Sevgi dead.

The smile fell off his face. He stared down at the sleeping woman.

Greta Jurgens is Onbekend’s?

So it would appear. A curious match, is it not? But then they do at least have in common that they are both objects for the hormonal hatred the rest of humanity seems constantly to need a target for.

The mesh surged a little in the pit of his stomach, maybe aftermath of the firefight, maybe something else. He thought of Sevgi’s eyes closing in the hospital. He stared at Jurgens like she was a problem he had to solve.

Only live with what you’ve done, and try in future to only do what you’re happy to live with. That’s the whole game, soak, that’s all there is.

He reached out left-handed. Spread the foam netting a little thicker over the hibernoid’s body, pulled it up where one pale shoulder was exposed.

Then he went rapidly back to the door and killed the bright white LCLS, because something was happening to his vision that felt like blindness. He stood a moment in the warm orange gloom, looked twitchily around as if someone was there next to him, then he slipped quietly out and closed the door behind him.

He moved along the gallery, checked doors until he found a darkened, windowless chamber with the fragrant hygiene reek of a woman’s bathroom. He stepped inside, touched the switch panel and more bright white light exploded across the pastel tiled space. His own face mugged him from a big circular mirror in one wall – sweat-streaked whitener melting and streaking, the black coming up underneath, eyes ringed with the stuff like dark water at the bottom of a pair of pale psychedelic wells. Fuck, no wonder the guys at the bridge freaked . He supposed he owed Carmen Ren for the inspiration.

Wherever she was right now.

He wondered briefly if Ren would make it, if she’d stay ahead of the cudlips and the Agency the way she had before. He wondered if the child growing inside her would make it out into the world safely, and what would happen then. What Ren would have to do to protect it after that.

He remembered the level gaze, the way she’d backed him off with nothing more than a look and the way she stood, the reek of survivability that came off her as she faced him by the tower. Not a bad set of cards to play with. He thought she might be in with a better chance than most of her male counterparts.

Mostly, he was just glad he wouldn’t be the one sent to bring her down.

In a drawer beside the basin, he found capsules he recognised – codeine married to a tweaked caffeine delivery kick. They’d do for his ribs. He ran water from infrared taps into the broad, shallow scoop of marble in front of the mirror, soaped up and started washing the white shit off his face. It took a while. When he’d got the worst off, he stuck his head under the tap and ran the water on his scalp and the back of his neck. He took one of Greta Jurgens’ pastel towels off the rail beside the basin and scrubbed himself dry with it, stared into the mirror again and didn’t scare himself so much this time.

Now let’s see if you can scare Onbekend.

He crunched up the codeine in his mouth, dry-swallowed a couple of times, tongued the clogged residue off his teeth and rinsed it down with a swallow of water from the tap. He looked at himself once more in the mirror, as if his reflection might have some useful advice for him, then he shrugged and extinguished the light.

He went downstairs to wait.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ Norton told him.

Carl walked past him around the table, eyeing up the angles. ‘Yeah, I do.’

‘It isn’t going to bring her back.’

He settled to a long, narrow shot down the side cushion. ‘I think we’ve already had this argument.’

‘For Christ’s sake, I’m not arguing with you, Marsalis. I’m trying to make you see sense, maybe stop you throwing your life away down there. Look, Saturday is Sevgi’s funeral. I can get you cleared through Union immigration, and keep the police off your back for the time it’d take. Why don’t you come?’

‘Because, as far as I can see, that won’t bring her back either.’

Norton sighed. ‘This isn’t what she would have wanted, Marsalis.’

‘Norton, you don’t have the faintest fucking idea what Sevgi would have wanted.’ He rolled the shot, shaved the angle too fine and watched it knock the object ball into the cushion and away from the pocket. ‘And nor do I.’

‘Then why are you going down there?’

‘Because someone once told me the key to living with what you’ve done is to only do those things you’re happy to live with. And I can’t live with Sevgi dead and Onbekend still walking around.’

Carl braced his arms wide on the edge of the table and nodded at the messed-up tangle of balls on the table.

‘Your shot,’ he said. ‘See what you can make of that.’

The painkillers came on fast, left him with slight nausea and then a vague sense of well-being he could probably have done without. He prowled the lodge’s downstairs space, measuring angles of fire and thinking half-heartedly about defensibility. He toyed with the piled-up weaponry on the breakfast bar, couldn’t work up much interest there either. Something was in the way.

He found a place where he could sit and look along the canyon to the jumbled rise of mountains it lay among. Sunlight knifed down over the ridges, turned the air luminous and slightly unreal. As if it was what she’d been waiting for all along, Sevgi Ertekin stepped into his thoughts.