Africa Zero (12 page)

As
the ground slowly turned wet and muddy I sat on the warm cap rock and
considered my next move. I was procrastinating. As soon as I realised this I
climbed to my feet and set out towards the complexes of the corporate families.
There was really nothing to consider. I had to find my wife, and kill her. For
the sake of the mammoth, the Pykani, and the Kiphani, she had to die. But most
especially for the sake of Je-thro Susan. And for her my wife had to die in a
very special way.

The
snow continued to fall and the cold to work its will on the land. By midmorning
there was a layer a centimetre deep and small icicles were appearing on the odd
acacia I passed. With this drop in temperature I upped my pace to twice what it
had been with Kephis. That I had not done this on leaving the Protestanti’s
camp was indicative of my reluctance to face Diana. A voice on the radio was
one thing, as were second-hand reports of the Silver One, but to come face to
face with her and kill her ... that was another thing entirely. By midafternoon
I saw the first blurred birdlike footprint in the snow and knew I was not far
behind her. I increased my pace.

As
the afternoon drew on the footprints did not get any clearer. This was either
because she was moving at a pace comparable to my own or because the snow was
coming down heavier now. A layer of it covered the front of my body as I ran.
Every so often I had to stop and knock away where it had been frozen into a
thick crust by the wind chill of my passage. Again I increased my pace. The
snow was now a good three inches deep and beginning to drift. This put more
strain on my motors and my joints began to heat. Soon the snow ceased to settle
on me.

As
the afternoon drew to a close her tracks became clearer. In the evening, when
the light began to bleed away, I switched to infrared, but there was nothing to
see. I realised that even though I was so close I could lose the trail. I tried
ultraviolet and saw her footprints glowing like neon signs. Of course, she
could not have been much further away than Jethro Susan and myself when that
APW dumped its load. She was radioactive. I looked behind and noted how my
footprints glowed just as much.

Into
the night my run continued—as lurid as in any computer game. I wondered when it
would end. It occurred to me then she might be heading back up to the ice.
Perhaps her madness had returned. Then, like a dire wolf in the night, a howl.

Diana.

She
should have died like a human after a small span of life. Her immortality
should have been the old genetic immortality of children. I should have killed
her long ago and saved her the pain that made her howl like that.

After
the howl came an echoey sobbing as of someone lost in a cavern. She shouted a
name then. And it was mine.

Did
she regret or did she name me in hate?

I
saw the burning shape ahead of me, standing, then falling to its knees in the
snow. I slowed as I pulled the atomic shear from my pocket. I should not have slowed.
I should not have hesitated. For she said my name again and the tone of her
voice left a seed of pain in me. As I closed in she said no more. The atomic
shear bucked in my hand as I swept it across. Her head thudded into the snow
like a rock. Her body swayed with electric sparkles flashing round the stump of
her neck, and fell shortly after.

* * *

As
if the storm had been only for us the sun rose over a flat white landscape with
an excess of light. Snow crystals glittered like a sprinkling of silver dust
and a nearby acacia looked like a sculpture of glass and white cotton,
scattering rainbows all around. I had not moved for a couple of hours nor had I
looked at the headless metal body beside me. Motionless I had knelt there
trying to feel something: anger, grief, satisfaction. All that happened though
was that I found my mind wandering. I thought instead about crossbred vampires
and humans, sentient crocodiles . . . Mostly I came back on what I had to do
next. Slowly I turned and viewed what remained of my wife.

The
body beside me was like a skeleton over which had been stretched a thin film of
silver. Her spine below the squarish ribcage was a three-inch wide column and
the metal of her legs and arms was thicker than bone. The main difference
between her and the inner me was the shape of her ceramal pelvis. It was wider,
with the tops of her legs sloping inward so that when she was covered with
synthiflesh she had the hips of a woman. But she had been without sythiflesh
for a long time now. The metal of her feet and hands was worn to the extent
that the knurling was gone. I noticed she was missing a couple of toes and
fingers as well. I turned away and looked for her head.

It
had sunk in the snow: a shiny ceramal skull with white enamelled teeth and eyes
like mirrored spheres. Her storm shutters had come down at the last moment. I
felt the ridiculous impulse to say something beginning with ‘Alas...’, but the
impulse went when the storm shutters rose and I was looking into her grey
synthetic eyes.

I
nearly dropped the skull. All those hours I had sat there thinking it was over.
Idiot! Like myself she had a small secondary power supply set in the base of
her skull. Separating her brain from her main powersupply had not been enough,
just as breaking through the insulation of her flash-frozen nerve tissue had
not been enough. The cold, perhaps had slowed things, as had the integrity of
the superconductor grid in her brain. She had no need of oxygen or blood, just
cold and power. She was still alive. I turned the skull away from myself and
felt its jaw move. I tried to tell myself she was not screaming. I searched in
the snow for the atomic shear, found it, and sliced a scale of ceramal from the
base of her skull. Inside was a small area densely packed with microcircuitry
divided from her brain by a transparent film. I located the thumb-sized power
supply and pulled it out. Blue sparks showered the snow. When I turned her back
to face me the jaw stopped moving and the storm shutters were back down. I
sighed. For an indefatigable cyborg I felt incredibly tired.

Again
I sat there for a while. Inertia seemed to be my greatest problem now. It took
a severe effort of will to remove my pack and drop the head inside. Then I
climbed to my feet like a creaky old man, put my pack on again and stooped to
the body of my wife. She was heavy, three times the weight of a normal woman,
and as I set off across the whiteness my feet sank deep into the snow and the
damp soil below.

* * *

On
the evening of the second day I reached the JMCC complex. The snow had melted
and for most of that day I had been stomping through slushy mud and a steamy
mist. The groundcar came out when I was the same distance from the complex as
when last I had come here. I wondered, irrelevantly, if they would get tired of
me bringing bodies in.

“Collector,”
said the guard captain as he climbed down from the car. He was the same one as
before. I nodded to him and he watched as I slung Diana’s loosely-articulated
body off my shoulder and dropped it with a crash in the doorway of the car. I
climbed up and hauled her inside. He looked at the dents and scratches I left
and attempted to conceal his chagrin. I apologised absently and he looked at me
in amazement before following me inside. But for the three of us there was
no-one else in the car. The guard captain sat in the driver’s chair without a
word. Soon we were speeding back to the JMCC. Only as we reached the hangar
doors did he finally get up the nerve to say something.

“You
lost your hand,” he said.

“Temporarily.”

“We
were told you have cardinal status.”

“Yes,
I do.”

That
was all he said, not a word about the headless ceramal body on the floor, not a
complaint about the stink of decaying flesh from it and from my pack.

In
the hangar I stepped from the car to be greeted by Thomas Canard. He was as
well dressed and suave as before. I looked like somebody’s nightmare. I
probably was at times.

“Welcome
back, Collector.”

He
looked in the door of the car then gestured to a number of personnel who had
foolishly been standing by looking as if they had nothing to do.

“Take
that to Jenson in Cryo.”

I
held up my only hand. “Wait a minute.” I unhitched my pack and removed the
metal skull. Putrid brown fluid ran out of it. “This goes with it.”

A
woman in coverall and with black hair, cropped like Jethro Susan’s had been,
took the head with her face twisted up in disgust. I saw her grab up a piece of
plastic to wrap it in as soon as she could. It took four men to carry the body
away.

“It
won’t be too damaged, will it?” asked Canard.

I
shook my head. “It was a clean cut at the neck with an atomic shear. Once the
old tissue is removed it’ll be usable. The head is only a fancy case. The
important subsystems and their software are in the main body, still under
power.”

He
nodded. “There should be no problem. I’d suggest you go with it to have your
hand seen to, but I suppose you want to speak to her first.”

“Speak...?”

“We
are not completely primitive. We were able to give her voice and a little
usable memory.”

I
was surprised and gratified. If they were able to do that then they were much
less likely to louse up the main operation. Canard led me from the hangar,
through corridors and rooms where technicians ran about in frenetic contrast to
what lay outside the complex, to a white-walled room with a single chair at its
centre.

“I’ll
leave you with her,” said Canard, and closed the door on his way out.

I
looked around the room. The only sign of instrumentation was the snub nose of
some kind of projector up in one corner. I sat down in the seat. I felt I
needed to be sitting, why, I do not know. I had expected to see a cryonic tank
in here at least. She was somewhere else then. As I sat down the air before me
flickered. And she was there.

“Collector...”

“Hello,
Jethro Susan.”

“How
long ... ?”

“Days
only.”

“You
... I... was dying. Why have you done this to me?”

“It
seemed just.”

“You
are punishing me?”

“What
have they told you?”

“There
... were tests... They told me what I am. I have been gridded. My mind is held
in stasis like your own. Only my mind cannot change with time. I have a small
memory, but it is a computer memory.

“My
mind is enabled to grow and to alter like a living mind with the aid of complex
software and even more complex hardware installed in line with the grid. JMCC
did not have this technology. I got it for you.”

“You
... killed the Silver One.”

“And
I brought back her body so it might be yours. Subsystems included. You can live
again.”

“I
will be like you.”

I
could not think how best to reply to that. Would she be another one like Diana?
Driven mad by the lack of flesh?

I
said, “Your inner structure will be of ceramal. Outside you will have synthetic
flesh with all the advantages of human flesh and few of the disadvantages. You
will be human. And you will never grow old and die.”

Silence
met my words. I thought then about Diana and what had probably driven her over
the edge in the end. She had lost her synthetic covering and with it the last
vestiges of humanity. Ceramal does not feel. For us it is the weak outer covering
that is our shell. The weak outer covering that keeps us human.

“Jethro
Susan ... Susan ...”

There
was no reply. Shortly the door behind me opened and Canard walked in.

“My
cryonic man, Jenson, tells me he just took her offline to prepare her for
installation. Sorry about that. Now, your hand.”

He
led me to a place where a technician reattached my hand with a relish and
enthusiasm I found disquieting, then to another place where a similar
technician provided me with synthiflesh covering for my hands and feet.

“You
see? Linked into your system they give more sensitivity than your others. Do
you agree? We use a new neural fibre satellite-grown for ... “

He
rambled on and I nodded my head in agreement with him. He was right. My hands
and feet were more sensitive. But I was still worrying about Jethro Susan. Was
I doing the right thing? Or was I making another Diana? I remembered
competitiveness when we hacked our way through jungle with her panga. But I
also remembered her reaction to me when I pulled my face off in Z’gora. There
was that time with the vampire as well. Did she remember it all? Or did she
think it a nightmare? Abruptly I realised what my speculations were. I was not
worrying about her sanity. Like a teenager on his first date I was wondering if
she would like me.

I
nodded my head, smiled, and gritted my teeth with self-contempt as the
synthiflesh technician turned his monologue to synthetic sexuality.

A
night passed, another day, another night. I fretted like the husband of an
expectant mother. On the day things were coming to completion, Jenson, the
cryonics man, lost his temper and swore at me, then turned white when he
realised what he had done.

“I’ll
leave you to it,” I said, and left him to it, which no doubt surprised and
pleased him. I went then to bother the synthiflesh technician, who had now
turned to making the outer Jethro Susan. He was much more amenable but harder
to get along with. Some of his questions were personal to the point of
obscenity. I left him, and after a great deal of trouble got someone to make me
a pair of boots like my old pair. Then I went outside.

The
sun was shining, but there was a chill in the air, which I especially noticed
on my hands. I sat on the fallen trunk of a baobab and watched a large family
group of wild dogs yipping and bickering their way across the savannah.