End of the World Blues (41 page)

Having shown her mistress how to fasten the collar, the moon-faced servitor led Lady Neku to an alcove, so she could dress properly and compose herself.
Of course I’m shaking,
Lady Neku wanted to snarl.
You’d shake if you knew what was about to happen.

“Leave me,” she demanded.

The servitor looked doubtful, which was interesting. Had the woman been from High Strange she’d barely have dared lift her eyes from the floor.

“I need time.”

Confusion, sympathy, and apologies…Lady Neku looked around the empty alcove and sighed. Struggling into her wedding dress, Lady Neku wrapped the ridiculous cloak around her shoulders and looked for the dagger she’d left under her folded clothes. It was gone.

“Oh great,” she said, just as Luc appeared in the doorway.

He blinked. A second later, Luc’s father was standing behind him, concern on his face. “Is everything all right?”

“I’m fine,” said Lady Neku, squaring her shoulders. It was only as she walked from the alcove to the candle-lit grandeur of the banquet that Lady Neku began to wonder how Luc’s anxiety had produced his father in the door behind him, with no words being exchanged. She should have paid that thought more attention.

The major domo had excelled itself. A white tablecloth spread the length of a table. Silver candle sticks and oil lamps flickered and gutted smokily in the breeze from a recycling unit. Overhead lights could have been used, and food could have been pulled from the Drexie boxes, but this was a banquet so fresh meat had been killed and old bottles had been opened.

Katchatka and d’Alambert, on the surface it was a triumph of diplomatic negotiation. Two families who had barely talked to each other in the time that anyone in the room had been alive now sat at the same table, preparing to celebrate their new alliance.

At one end sat Lady Katchatka, with Lord d’Alambert at the end opposite, in a chair of exactly equal size. Luc and Lady Neku were on d’Alambert’s right. Antonio, Petro, and Nico on their mother’s right, with Petro in the middle, so his brothers could support him discreetly, should Petro’s new body prove too weak to cope with the meal.

It was the seating that protocol demanded.

“Lady Neku,” said Lord d’Alambert, raising his glass. “Who will always have a place in our family.”

Raising her own glass, Lady Katchatka readied herself to make some equally facile reply and Lady Neku tensed, but all that happened was that her mother toasted Luc’s strength and intelligence, and lowered her glass again. One course drifted into two and then three, bottles of old wine emptied and were replaced, until the room began to blur slightly and Lady Neku forced herself to drink only water.

Could she have misunderstood?

The image of her mother and brothers in the Amber Study felt so real that Lady Neku was still wondering when her mother nodded to Nico. “If you would,” she said. “We should give Lord d’Alambert his present.”

Lurching to his feet, Nico staggered to a side table and grabbed what looked like a cushion. Only, when he returned, Lady Neku could see that the cushion supported a tiny battered-looking bowl.

“I understand,” said Lady Katchatka, “that you are interested in antiquity. This is the oldest artifact we possess. It is now yours.”

Nico put Yoshi’s bowl on the table in front of Lord d’Alambert. And in that moment, as the old man’s eyes fixed on fragile clay and Lady Neku began to rise from her seat, Nico struck, burying his dagger deep into Lord d’Alambert’s heart.

At least, that was what was meant to happen. What Lady Neku thought had happened.

Only the old man took the blade through his wrist, wrenching the dagger from Nico’s grasp with a single twist of his injured arm. From the expression on Lord d’Alambert’s face he’d already moved beyond pain.

And as Antonio cried out and Petro tried to stand, Nico died, his chest opened in a single slash that sprayed d’Alambert with blood. It was a miracle the old man could see to reach for Nico’s heart.

Lord d’Alambert killed Antonio with a single throw, catching him below the jaw and returning him to his seat. Petro died at the hands of Luc, who simply leaned across the table to slit the throat of the man opposite. Petro being too weak, drunk, or both to defend himself.

Sex and killing sounded the same, Lady Neku realised. All wet sucking and the slurp of broken vacuum. It even smelled the same, salt and sweet and shitty enough to leave her queasy.

“Wait,” she shouted, when Luc moved towards the final chair.

“She betrayed you,” he said. “She traded you for a chance to kill my father. Why should she live?”

Because she’s still my mother.

“How did you find out?” asked Lady Katchatka, with the calm of someone already dead.

“Your daughter told us,” said Luc.

Maybe he meant to be cruel, or perhaps he simply meant to tell the truth. Lady Neku watched her mother’s composure falter. “Wonderful,” Lady Katchatka said. “Betrayed by the family idiot. How did she find out?”

“A
kami
told me,” said Lady Neku.

“AIs don’t…” Cold eyes fixed on the girl. “I should have drowned you at birth,” said Lady Katchatka. “Make it quick,” she told Luc, her daughter already forgotten. “Quick and clean.”

“Was that the death you intended to give us?” The voice behind Luc was thin with the pain of a skewered wrist.

“Yes,” said Lady Katchatka. “It was.”

The corridor was empty, the statues silent, dust drifted in tiny eddies across the floor. It was cooler than Lady Neku remembered, which had to be the cause of her constant shivering.

“Go on,” she said, as she spun a handle. “Open.” But the airlock door in front of her remained steadfastly closed. “Just open,” said Lady Neku. “How hard can that be?”

“It’ll kill you,” High Strange said.

“That’s fine with me.”

“And everyone else in the habitat.”

“Even better,” said Lady Neku, twisting the handle. When the great metal ring jammed in one direction, she reversed the spin, until it jammed in that direction as well. “Open,” she demanded, dashing tears from her eyes. “Stop fucking me around.”

The wound in her shoulder looked bad, but the truth was Luc had pulled his blow the moment Lady Neku threw herself in front of Lady Katchatka. Bleeding to death would take longer than Lady Neku was prepared to wait, assuming it was possible at all.

“Please,” she said. “Just open this door for me.”

“There are a hundred and thirty-five people on the habitat.”

“No there aren’t,” said Lady Neku.

The voice gave her a list. It was right, of course, provided you counted servitors and retainers. She stood in the duct below the audience chamber, reached by the helix of stairs behind the unicorn. No one had seen her pull aside the tapestry and hide herself; they were all too busy watching Lady Katchatka die.

“Open,” demanded Lady Neku, more to banish this thought than any real belief High Strange might listen.

“And if I do?” it said.

“We die,” said Lady Neku.

“That’s what you want?”

Lady Neku nodded her head.

“Say it,” the voice said. “Name the people you think should die.”

“I don’t know all their names,” said Lady Neku crossly, as she rubbed knuckles into her eyes and folded her cloak tight, to hide the sight of blood which was beginning to make her feel sick.

“So you’re saying you want people killed, but you don’t actually know their names?”

Yes, that is exactly…well.
Lady Neku thought about it.
Maybe not exactly.

“You want Luc dead?”

Of course I want…
She hesitated. Killing Luc was her duty. Something to which she should dedicate the rest of her life. All the same. “This isn’t fair,” Lady Neku said.

“Nor is opening that door.”

For the rest of their conversation Lady Neku sat on the floor, her knees pulled up to her chin and her back against the door she’d been trying to open. She knew the discussion was mostly internal. High Strange just helping to pick through her thoughts.

“All right,” it said. “I’ve opened the door…Only a fraction,” it added, as Lady Neku scrambled to her feet. “The air is already thinner and your core temperature has begun to fall. That’s why the bleeding is less. In a few seconds Luc and his father will begin to search for you. A short while later, they’ll stop looking and make plans to abandon the habitat.”

“And me?” asked Lady Neku.

“Ah yes,” said High Strange. “I need to talk to you about that.”

Her life was saved by a bowl. Along with the life of Luc, his father, their retainers, other families, and people who clung to existence in parts of the world Lady Neku barely realised were inhabited.

The whole of humanity had been preserved because of a wafer-thin bowl barely larger than Lady Neku’s cupped hands. It was old, it was cracked beneath the rim, and it was the colour of burned earth. It was also, according to High Strange, proof that humanity was capable of more than it seemed. That they were worth protecting.

“We are the ghosts,” said High Strange.

“Of what?”

“Your machines.” It smiled, she could hear it in the voice. “We tied the knots for you and made the sails. We hold up your habitats. All you have to do is manage yourselves.”

“We’ve failed.”

“Katchatka failed. Lord d’Alambert will fold this station into his segment and grow new sails, with help from me. The weather will be stabilised. As your mother once said, everything comes at a price.”

“Her death,” said Lady Neku, eyes refilling. “My brothers.”

“No,” said High Strange. “You.”

Her cloak smelled of smoke and black ash formed moons beneath her fingernails, which were broken from having scrabbled through the rubble of a recently burned bar. The air in High Strange was thin and cold enough to make Lady Neku shiver, though that might have been the last of her memories falling into place.

Staring round the frozen chamber, Lady Neku saw the banquet table and her brothers where they sat. Lady Katchatka regal in a silver chair. Ice frosting the walls and the tiles and even the knives and forks on the plates laid out in front of the dead.

“Oh fuck,” she said. “I came back…”

She’d chosen exile. And offered her choice of time and place, had chosen where and when the bowl was made, because High Strange believed she would be happy there. Denied her own life, Lady Neku accepted a life that came frighteningly close.

Everything was possible in an infinite universe. That much was obvious. Less obvious, until one thought of it, was the fact that everything possible was possible twice, or three times, or as many times as anyone was prepared to throw the dice.

“I broke my memories,” said Lady Neku, wondering if this was excuse enough for her return.

“Neku,” said High Strange. “We’ve been through this. The beads only worked while you were here with me. There’s no
me
where you went, so no beads and no easy memories. Only you.”

“It’s weird there,” said Lady Neku. “No one is friendly and Kit’s bar has just burned down and the only normal person I’ve met so far is a cat.”

“Neku…”

“I have to go back,” she said.

“Yes,” said the voice. “You do.”

The shuttle bus from Narita Airport was a quarter full, as always. A Korean boy with spiky hair sat at the back, pointedly ignoring signs not to use his phone while the bus was in motion. Leaning against him was a Japanese girl lost in admiration, but the boy was still embarrassed enough to be angry about something that happened earlier.

A customs officer had pulled him out of a queue in arrivals and unpacked his luggage with excruciating slowness, carefully unfolding each item of clothing as the line looked on. It had been all the boy could do to bow when she let him go.

Rain hammered the bus, obscuring its windows. Behind the downpour hid trees and houses, a waterlogged crocus bed looking like a tiny paddy field. Half-seen factories stood back from the motorway, screened by sodden banks of earth. Just another summer’s day in Tokyo, with its heat hanging on the edge of tropical.

Soon the bus would reach Odaiba and the artificial islands built to house Tokyo’s overspill. Some of this area was still poor, but most had spawned wild architecture and ever-more-expensive shopping malls. It was the same city, Kit told himself. He’d been in love with its anonymity from the moment he first arrived; its anonymity and ability to change so fast it always remained the same.

It still was that city, but he was going to abandon it all the same, once he’d done what he came to do.

Having wrapped themselves around each other, the teenage couple behind him fell asleep, lulled by the warmth and that weird jet-lag dilation which means one’s mind has trouble catching up with its owner after a long flight.

Kit’s fake passport had carried him through customs. He suspected he had the Korean boy to thank for that. So disapproving had the smartly dressed young officer been at the couple who’d preceded him that she gave Kit little more than a glance.

“Are you carrying drugs?”

Kit had shaken his head firmly.

“Why are you here?”

“Holiday,” said Kit. “I’m only here for a week. At the Shinjuku Hilton.”

The officer nodded, as if this was where she’d expect someone like Kit to stay, stamped his passport, and motioned Kit through. Both questions had been in English and Kit had been careful to answer the same way.

The hand in his pocket had been borderline rude, but he was
gaijin,
and besides being regarded as ill bred was infinitely better than having a Tokyo customs officer wonder why his little finger was missing.

No Neck answered the phone on the first ring, his wide-cheeked face scowling from Kit’s tiny screen. As Kit watched, the man dragged a smile from his memory. “Media liaison,” he said.

“What?”

“English language liaison. 47 Ronin. How can I help?”

“It’s me,” said Kit, flicking his Nokia to visual.

There was a sudden silence. “Benny?” said No Neck. “From the
Times
?”