Grazing The Long Acre (23 page)

Grace put her arm around Orlando’s shoulders, and they drank deep of the beauty out there, the undiscovered country. As much as they pretended they’d come to space to make their fortunes, they had their own craziness.

‘The sad thing is that we’re no nearer,’ said Grace, softly.

‘We can’t ever get there. Deep Space destroys people.’

‘Deep Space is like living in a fucking underground carpark with rotten food. And non-local transit is going to be like—’

‘Getting on the Eurostar at Waterloo, and getting off in Adelaide.’

‘Only quicker, and some other constellations, instead of the Southern Cross.’

‘It’s not even real,’ sighed Orlando. ‘That. It’s a tv picture.’

‘It’s
sort
of real. Nitrogen is green, oxygen is blue. The spectral colours mean something. If we were there, our minds would see what we see now.’

‘You sound like Jack Solo. Let’s go back to the shack, and watch a movie.’

They tidied the wrecked cabin a little, and ate a meagre supper. They didn’t fancy going back to the saloon, but luckily their emergency rations had not been touched. One of the sleeping-nets turned out to be in reasonable shape, once they’d lined it with their spare cabin rug. The Panhandle entertainment menu was extensive, (as rich as the food was poor); and they’d tracked down a wonderful cache of black and whites, so pure in visual and sound quality they must have been mastered from original prints long lost on earth. They put on
Now Voyager
, and settled themselves, two exiled Scottish sparrows in a strange but cosy nest, a long, long way from the Clyde. Their windfall of information could wait. Sobered by their interview with the big boys, they were afraid it was a bust: stolen goods too hot to be saleable.

‘So it’s come to this,’ grumbled Orlando. ‘We came all this way to huddle in an unheated hotel room, watching Bette Davis try to get laid.’

‘That’s extreme tourism for you. Never mind. We like Bette Davis.’

 Bette emerged from her Ugly Duckling chrysalis, and set off on the cruise that would change her life…Orlando wondered, mildly, ‘What would anti-information be, Gracie? I’ve never heard of that before.’

‘It would be more information, like, er, minus numbers are still—’

‘Not like anti-matter? Like, you’d explode if you touched it?’

‘The robot hands didn’t explode…Hey, we’re not going to talk about it.’ But immediately, with a shudder, she added, ‘God…I’m scared. Draco talks like a serial killer. He talks like one of those notes that serial killers send to the police.’

‘He is one. A bulk-buy, government-sponsored, son of Sam.’

The movie projection shivered.

A tall, broad-shouldered figure wearing scanty combat gear materialised in front of the black and white picture. It was Sara Komensky, Draco’s virtual babe.

The aliens stared in horrified amazement. The bot wrapped her arms over her bazookas of breasts, bizarrely like a real live young woman mortified by the excess.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Er, Draco doesn’t know I’m here.’

The aliens nodded. ‘Right,’ croaked Orlando. ‘Of course.’

The warrior girl appeared to look around, her little mouth an Oh!, of surprise.

Draco’s quarters were in First Class, and probably a bit smarter.

‘We’ve had burglars,’ said Grace. ‘Usually it’s better than this.’

‘It’s cool,’ said the bot. She shrugged. ‘I’ve seen worse bunkers. I’ve been with Drac a while you know. We…we’ve been in some tough spots. Jungles, bombed out cities, volcanoes, icefields of Uzbekistan, polluted oil platforms, all kindsa shit.’

‘Sure you have.’

Sara strode up and down, which didn’t take her long, and turned to them again, her strong hands clasped on her bandoliers, the muscles in her forearms tight. ‘You got to help me. You see…Drac. He’s not good at the joined-up thinking, it’s the combat drugs, they wrecked his brain. He doesn’t get that this is our last chance. He took the Lottery option because it was imprinted on him. He’ll take a risk on some lousy half-viable co-ordinates and kill himself, that’s what’s meant to happen. The government don’t terminate toy-soldiers direct: it wouldn’t look good. They just make shit-ass sure people like Drac don’t survive long in the real.’

‘That’s rough,’ said Orlando. ‘I’m sure he’s a truly good person, deep down. But what can we do? We haven’t any viable numbers. Y-you can check.’

‘He’s
not
a good person,’ said the bot. ‘But if he goes, I go too.’

‘Huh?’

Sara’s little pearly teeth caught her sweet, pouty underlip, ‘Listen, assholes, you come from the same place I come from. Are you made of information, or what? Don’t you have anyone switching you on or off? Me, I live in the chinks, same as you. Are you so fucking free?’ Her huge blue eyes snapped with frustration. ‘Okay, okay, I get that you can’t trust me. But you two know something about the Fulcrum-’

‘We don’t know
anything
,’ protested Grace, hurriedly.

The big baby-blues narrowed as far as the graphic algorithm would allow. ‘Yeah, but you do. I’m with the Panhandle sys-op. We’re like that.’ The bot released her bandoliers, and hooked her two index fingers. ‘I can’t get inside your heads but
I know you’ve been where the sys-op can’t go
…All it would take would be one drop of that silver jizm. One nugget of the good stuff, he’d be set for life and you’d never have to be looking over your shoulders. I haven’t told him, I swear. This is between you and me. Now I gotta get back. Think about it, is all I ask. We’ll talk again.’

She vanished.

Orlando and Grace shot out of the net, scrabbled in their belongings for the spygone (a gadget that had often been useful on extreme tourism trips) and bounced around the room wildly, searching cornices, crevices, the toilet, anywhere. They found nothing. It was uncanny, how could Draco be using his bot like that, wireless, from another deck, without a receiver in here??? Unnoticed, the movie had continued to play. ‘The projector!’ howled Orlando. They flew to disable the entertainment centre, dumped it outside in the corridor; switched off the lights and the door lock for good measure. Switching off the air and gravity would not, they decided, improve the situation: even if they knew how. Finally they collapsed on the floor. Grace dragged their gravegoods whisky flask out of the litter.

‘What can we do?’

‘We are fucked,’ gabbled Orlando, grabbing the precious reserve of Highland Park from her and knocking it back. ‘We are fucked to all shit! We have the stolen suitcase full of cocaine, the one that belongs to the Mob—’

‘No it doesn’t! It belongs to
us
!’

‘N-no it doesn’t! Suitcases full of cocaine, dollar bills, anti-information, they always belong to the Mob. And they’re onto us. There’s nothing we can do except dump the goods in a shallow grave and run for our fucking lives.’

‘But we can’t run. We can’t get off here until the Slingshot.’

‘We c-could try and gone-in-sixty one of the Deep Spacers’ asteroid hoppers?’ ‘Except we don’t know how, and if we did they aren’t equipped to get back to earth. We’d just die more slowly…’

The Panhandle was not supplied with lifeboats. Most of the prospectors and all of the support staff were totally dependent on the Slingshot, which was not due for three months. There must be a lifepod for the Supercargo, keyed to his identity…but forget it. That would be a single ticket. Grace saw a faint hope. ‘Maybe…Maybe Drac
doesn’t
know? Maybe the bot was telling the truth?’

‘Get a grip. That was an interactive videogram, Gracie.
That was Draco
we were
talking to
, for fuck’s sake! What did you think?’

‘Are you sure? I hear you, but I don’t know, it just didn’t…’

Someone knocked on the door. They went dead still, forgot to breathe, and stared at each other. Grace got up, quietly, and keyed the lights.

‘Come in,’ said Orlando.

The door opened, and Lakey the fat lady appeared, in her power chair.

‘Your lock’s broken,’ she told them. ‘You should complain to Eddie.’

‘It isn’t broken,’ said Grace. ‘We switched it off.’

Lakey looked around, the Veronica Lake fall of gold swinging. She didn’t seem as surprised as Sara the bot had been, to see the state the place was in.

‘Can we help you?’ inquired Grace.

‘I’m here because we want to talk to you.’

‘Everybody wants to talk to us,’ said Orlando. ‘Is your chair in this?’

‘My chair has the brains of a hamster. I mean, some of us.’ The chair hissed. Lakey leant from it to peer at drifted socks. ‘You two disappeared this morning. You left the sys-op screen. We think Eddie took you through the Wall, and now you know something that will cost you your sweet little tourist skins, unless you get some help.’

‘What is the Fulcrum?’ said Grace.

Lakey’s body was a wreck, but she still had the remains of tough, old-fashioned natural beauty in her dropsical face; and in the way she smiled.

‘You just spilled all the noughts and ones, little lady.’

‘I truly don’t know what you mean.’

‘Give me a place to stand,’ said Lakey, ‘and I will move the world.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘To me the fulcrum means nothing. To you, it means life or death. You guys had a nerve, coming out to the Pan. Do you even care what non-local has done to our culture, to our heroes? This our fucking patch, the only one we have left…There’s a maintenance bay, one junction centrewards of the observation deck, where the food machines go to get pulled apart when they die. You better be there, at ohfourhundred hours standard, or else…Do you know what
burial at sea
means?’

Burial at sea means when Deep Spacers chuck some miscreant out of an airlock, naked into hard vacuum.

‘Okay,’ said Grace. ‘We’ll talk. But we want our bicycles back.’

Lakey grinned in appreciation. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Six hours later, the Panhandle was deep in its night cycle. Dim nodes of minimum light glowed along the dark corridors, each node surrounded by a halo of micro-debris. The air-exchangers sighed, the aliens bounced towards the rendezvous with barely a sound. As they hit the last junction, Orlando touched Grace’s arm. She nodded. They had both heard the crisp tread of Velcro soles. Some adept of the spaceways was sneaking up behind them: and it definitely wasn’t Lakey. Without a word they jumped up, utilising their low-gravity gymnastics practice: kicked off from the wall, flew, and kicked again.

Not daring to grab at anything they tumbled into the bay, narrowly avoided collision with the hefty carcase of a meat synthesiser; and hit the industrial carpet behind it. The crisp footsteps came on, like booted feet walking lightly on fresh snow. They tried not to breathe. The maintenance bay was pitch dark, but it did not feel safe. They were surrounded by the shadow operators, disregarded life support; as if by a dumb and blind and suffering malevolence. Then something shrieked. Something fell, and a human voice started up, a series of short, horrible, choking groans-

‘That’s Lakey!’ gasped Grace, mouth against Orlando’s ear.

Silence followed. They crept forward until they could see, in the dim light from the junction, the fat lady’s power chair upended and crippled. Lakey was lying beside it, her golden hair adrift, her great body as if crushed at last by the knocked-down gravity that had ruined her bones and swamped her lymphatic system.

‘Lakey?’ whispered Grace helplessly. ‘Hey, er, are you okay?’

Something whimpered. Jack Solo’s bot was crouching beside the body, like a painted shadow on the darkness, wearing her usual grubby nightdress.
‘Jack didn’t do it,’
whined Anni-mah. She rubbed her bare arms and cringed from a blow that existed only in the virtual world.
‘It wasn’t Jack! He wasn’t here! Oh, hit me harder, yes—’

The legendary pilot’s wrist knife was on the floor, covered in blood. Orlando and Grace went over to the strange tableau. Lakey’d been stabbed, many times. Blood pooled around her, in swollen globules that stood on the carpet like grotesque black bubbles. Their eyes met…The madman must be very near, and in a highly dissociated state. He was certainly still armed. Jack Solo didn’t carry just the one knife.

‘Anni?’ whispered Grace, trying to make it gentle. ‘Where’s poor Jack?’

‘Jack is right here,’ said a voice they didn’t know.

They spun around. White lights came up. Out from among the defunct service machines loomed the gangling man, with the visor and the crooked bones of many fractures, whom they had called Blind Pew. The pop-eyed fellow they had nicknamed Joe
Cairo
was beside him, supporting his arm. Other figures joined them: one-armed Dirty Harry, a swollen-headed woman they’d called Jean Harlow, for her rags of platinum-blonde hair; and two support staff in their drab coveralls. Right now they were supporting Jack Solo. The pilot stared vaguely at the aliens, as if hardly aware of his surroundings, and muttered,
Jack didn’t do it.

‘Did he kill Lakey?’ said Grace. ‘We heard a struggle.’

‘Lakey?’

‘The lady in the chair.’

The tall man nodded, indifferent. ‘It looks like it.’

‘We were supposed to meet her here. She said she could get our bikes back.’

‘Ah, the
bicycles
…Come along. Leave that.’ He jerked his chin at the corpse, ‘The robotics will clear it away. Her name was Lana. She was my wife,’ he added, casually, as he led the way towards the observation deck, leaning on Joe Cairo’s arm. ‘For many years, when I was a pilot. But we had grown apart.’

The halfdome was still filled by the vast, silent majesty of the nebula, studded with its glorious young stars. The other prospectors and the two support staff grouped themselves around the tall man. Jack Solo still muttering to himself.

 Anni-mah hovered in the background, like a troubled ghost.

The tall man turned his back on the astronomy, and propped his gangling form against the rail, his visored face seeking the aliens. ‘My name…is immaterial. They call me L’Hibou, which means the owl. I was Franco-Canadian, long ago. These good folk have made me their spokesperson. We have to talk to you, about the information you have concerning the Fulcrum; and what you plan to do with it.’