Филип Керр - The Second Angel

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he said irritably. The high pressure had given him a severe headache.

‘Saving you from Rimmer.’ Ronica stood up slowly as Dallas lowered his gun.

‘Where is he?’

‘Gone.’ She jerked her head in the direction of the elevator.

‘Tell me...’ Dallas shook his head as he tried to recall the woman’s name.

‘My name’s Ronica.’

‘How did you find me here?’

‘Rimmer. He got it out of your assistant.’

‘Dixy told him?’

Ronica told him what Rimmer had said to her, about Dixy’s pet program, and how Rimmer had threatened to erase it. Dallas nodded. Perhaps a little part of him was disappointed that Dixy should have betrayed him, but he was more interested to learn that his computer assistant should have demonstrated such an attachment to a simple pet program.

‘You okay, Dallas?’ It was Gates, followed closely by Lenina.

Dallas nodded. ‘Just two of my former colleagues. Thanks, Gates.’

‘Don’t thank me, thank Lenina. It was she who spotted this lady’s footprints.’

Lenina regarded Ronica with admiration: This was the first time she had seen a rich, healthy woman close up, and she liked what she saw. The big coat, the fabulous dress, the expensive jewelry, the braided hair, even Ronica’s bloodied shoes. Seeing Ronica and envying her well-groomed appearance sharpened Lenina’s appetite to go along with whatever scheme Dallas had in mind.

Ronica glanced down at her shoes and then smiled at Dallas. ‘You never know what you’re stepping into with Rimmer around.’

‘Who ordered you to save me from Rimmer?’ asked Dallas.

‘The director. With Tanaka dead he needs you back at Terotechnology. Wants to return to the status quo, with you as head of Design. Killing Rimmer was to be my opening bid. So you’d think it had all been a big misunderstanding. An overzealous Rimmer acting on his own authority, that kind of thing.’

‘And was he?’

‘No. Rimmer was just doing exactly what Simon King told him to do, just like me. Let Rimmer find Dallas, he told me, and then kill Rimmer. If possible, I was supposed to trump the guy within your eyeshot so you’d gain the impression that the company, as represented by myself, was on your side.’

‘So why pick you and not one of those thugs who work for Rimmer?’

Ronica looked vague. ‘Fresh blood? Someone who was uncontaminated by association with failure? I don’t know. You’d have to ask the dealer.’

Dallas nodded, estimating that Ronica was telling the truth.

‘So why are you showing me your hand?’ he asked.

Ronica let out a long breath and glanced up at the ceiling before staring back at Dallas. ‘Oh,’ she sighed. ‘Well, let’s see now. I already lost the first trick. And now that I’ve looked you straight in the eye I can’t see any other tricks going my way either. I think maybe the best I can expect now is another deal. Because Rimmer is probably already on his way back to the Zone, with some story for the director about how I screwed up. So I can’t go back there.’

‘What makes you so sure that I wouldn’t have believed your story? That Rimmer acted on his own initiative. Maybe I want to go back to the Zone.’

Ronica shook her head very firmly. ‘Like I said, Dallas, I’ve looked you in the eye.’

‘Maybe I could have let myself be persuaded.’

‘You don’t seem like the type prepared to forgive and forget something like losing a family. And certainly not after less than twenty-four hours.’ Ronica paused for a moment, as her certainty about the character of Dallas gave way to a growing anxiety about her new situation: She didn’t think Dallas and his two weird-looking friends would kill her in cold blood, but what was she to do with herself now? Could she risk going back to the Zone, let alone Terotechnology? Knowing what she did, which didn’t feel like very much, was there any certainty that the director, and Rimmer, would let her remain alive?

‘I do have one question.’ She swallowed. ‘Outside the Zone is no life. No life at all. What else is there, Dallas?’ She bit her lip back from trembling. ‘I’m scared.’

‘We should all be scared,’ declared Lenina. ‘The cops aren’t about to ignore a gun battle that leaves four dead, even in a sector like this. We should leave right now.’

‘Lenina’s right,’ said Gates.

‘Four dead?’ Dallas was frowning and could see only two bodies.

‘Rimmer shot two more on the floor below,’ explained Ronica.

‘How do we know it wasn’t you who shot them?’ inquired Lenina.

‘Does she look like a killer?’ Gates asked.

Lenina shrugged. ‘I don’t know what she looks like. But she’s the one with the red shoes.’ Her admiration of Ronica was quickly turning to jealousy.

Dallas shook his head.

‘Ronica was the one who turned down the pressure in my hyperbaric chamber,’ he said. ‘After Rimmer had so thoughtfully turned it up. Isn’t that so, Ronica?’

‘Yes. He wanted to soften you up, he said. So you wouldn’t be in a state to shoot him when he came through the door.’

‘Sounds like Rimmer, all right,’ admitted Dallas.

‘We ought to move,’ insisted Lenina.

Gates was already heading toward the elevator.

‘Ronica?’ said Dallas. ‘That question you asked. About the Zone? I’m not sure I’ve got an answer for you. At least not yet anyway. But if you’re prepared to wait, I might make it worth your while.’

‘That sounds like you’re asking me to come along with you,’ she said.

‘Sure. Why not? I could have just the kind of deal to interest you.’

All cities possess a nefarious quarter, a dark, sequestered place, an underworld, a place ruled by crime. This particular city’s underworld was known as the Black Hole, after the very violent region of space-time that lies at the center of every galaxy — the result of an imploded star — from which matter and energy cannot escape. Unlike Hades, who, except for the story of his wedding to Persephone, has next to no specific mythology, the city’s Black Hole was the source of almost as many mysteries and legends as there are forces at work in the creation of its cosmic namesake. Not the least of these stories concerned the trio of master criminals who ruled this unpitying lower world.

Kaplan, who was also known as the Spider, was confined to a walking machine, the victim of osteonecrosis [76] Osteonecrosis. A disease characterized by dead bone tissue. caused by the frequent and inadequately decompressed hyperbaric treatments he had received prior to obtaining the black market supply of blood that had cured him of P2. He was the principal buyer and supplier of illegal blood — much of it recombinant hemoglobin substitute, or simply fake — not to mention counterfeit pharmaceuticals. In one Far Eastern country, it has been estimated that as many as half the medicines held in the dispensaries of hospitals and clinics are fakes, sold by Kaplan’s people. Even the richer countries are not immune to this murderous trade. Rumor had it that Kaplan had been married and had fathered children himself, only to murder them for their bone marrow, in a vain attempt to be cured of his osteonecrosis.

Elstein was without question the cleverest of the three, being a trained physicist as well as a gifted amateur chemist. It was Elstein who formulated Depreneyl Amitriptyline, the first of the so-called paradeisotropic [77] From the Greek paradeisos, meaning ‘paradise,’ and tropein, meaning ‘toward.’ drugs. Both Depreneyl and Amitriptyline are antidepressants: the first, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, and the second, a tertiary amine tricyclic that boosts serotonin levels. The combination of the two produces a chemically induced near-death experience supposedly allowing the person taking the drug to peek through the gates of paradise without actually dying. The novelist Wystan Hughes in his book Heaven’s Gate [78] Published 2042; cf. The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley (1954), in which that author describes his experiments with mescaline and LSD. famously described his experiences with DA. However, the drug was very quickly outlawed when thousands of near-death experiences turned out to be the real thing. Elstein was sent to a Moon colony for five years. Upon his return to Earth, he originated the Lion Cult, recruiting hundreds of thousands of people prepared to pay large sums of money in order to be able to understand what was briefly assumed to be the Final Theory in Physics — the theory explaining everything from subatomic particles, atoms, and supernovae, to the Big Bang and the Big Crunch. For years after the death of Albert Einstein, scientists struggled to create an ultimate theory that would unite gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear force in one short equation. Einstein himself described the problem thus: ‘Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But I do not doubt that the lion belongs to it even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his enormous size.’ A new cult was spawned when, for a while, it was believed that the lion had been finally captured with Hugh Van Creveld’s multidimensional Quantum Theory of Gravity. Called the Unique Theory, Van Creveld’s theorem, which its many supporters still argue has united Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and quantum theory, [79] Quantum theory accounts for a very wide range of physical phenomena and replaces classical Newtonian mechanics for all microscopic phenomena. A ‘quantum’ is a general term for the indivisible unit of any form of physical energy. The difficulty with quantum things and what makes them hard to understand — even now, a hundred years after Niels Bohr led the way in their explanation — is that their motion cannot easily be visualized. Or even imagined. Of course, one of the pleasures of authorship is to be found in making difficult concepts seem simple. One of the aims of this book has been to include my own experience of quantum things and to enable the general reader to appreciate not just the molecular wisdom of the human body but, at a more fundamental level, the matter of existence itself I make no excuse for this. As Montaigne says, ‘I am myself the matter of my book.’ proved so fiendishly difficult that it was practically impossible for any layman to understand, which is where Elstein stepped in with his essentially skeptical doctrine of Universal Apologetics, [80] Elstein’s work was based entirely on the work of the seventeenth-century French mathematician, philosopher, and physicist Blaise Pascal. ‘The incomprehension of the perplexed,’ Elstein wrote, ‘is to be overcome by means of the wager; if the theory cannot be proved then those who remain bewildered lose nothing by believing that the meaning of life, and the fabric of reality, has been explained, and in devoting themselves to living life for the present — to making heaven on earth; for if the theory is proved, then no one will have wasted any time in acting as if there was still something to be explained.’ thereby founding the Lion Cult.