Necropath (2 page)

“No problem. I know all fastest routes around Station. That why Dr. Rao send me.” As he spoke, his head rocked like a metronome and his grin expanded with pride. “Now we go. Follow me.”

The kid turned and waddled awkwardly along the narrow crawlspace, oiled hair steaming in the heat of the occasional fluorescent. Vaughan followed, having to bend almost double to squeeze his bulk down the corridor. The lights increased the hothouse temperature. He felt rivulets of sweat trickle down his face. “What’s wrong with Tiger?”

“All I am knowing is Tigerji is sick. Dr. Rao told me she want see you.”

The kid stopped and hauled open the wire-mesh front of a cage elevator. Above the lift, Vaughan made out the glare of the spaceport lights and the kiosk where the elevator delivered men and supplies to the deck. The stench of liquid manure in the cage indicated that the kid had brought the decoy cow this way. He stepped inside, back muscles protesting as he stood upright. The kid manned the push-button controls, and the lift dropped with a squeal of cable and pulleys.

They fell through the second deck, a dimly lit chamber occupied by the bulking shapes of quiet spaceships, and continued their descent. The kid concentrated on the controls, paying him no attention. Vaughan knew he would elicit no more information from the boy. He leaned against the mesh wall and closed his eyes.

He had known Tiger for three years—a skinny, one-legged street kid with a mind as pure and simple as a Thai folk song, a mind that filled him with joy at its innocence, and at the same time swamped him with regret.

In his mind’s eye Vaughan saw her big eyes laughing at him beneath the high fringe of her jet black bob.

They dropped into the depths of Bengal Station, falling so fast that the lighted levels flicked by between the dark bars of the decks like the individual frames of old film. Vaughan caught frozen glimpses of frenzied activity on every level. Avenues stretched into the distance, narrowing with the perspective, and even at this midnight hour each channel was thronged with citizens. Noise strobed as they descended, the collective hubbub of a thousand citizens about their business. Along with the noise came the tidal wave of their emotions; unaugmented, he was unable to read individual minds, but he caught impressions, whiffs of subtle emotion, too fleeting to probe. He likened the effect to hearing a myriad individual musical instruments in the distance, each one playing a different tune so that the overall effect was a clashing discord.

The kid brought the lift to a halt between levels. He opened the cage door and hurried along a flimsy catwalk. Vaughan followed, able to stand upright this time. He could see nothing in the blackness, and judged his distance from the boy by the strength of the kid’s mind emanations. He trailed his hands along the rails to right and left, his boots ringing on the metal walkway. The stench of oil added to the humid atmosphere, a fetid miasma he found difficult to inhale.

The boy’s diluted emotions grew stronger: he had halted. Vaughan paused behind him. Light spilled from a rectangular aperture in a broad pillar, revealing the boy swinging aside a heavy metal hatch. He climbed down, and Vaughan followed with difficulty. He was inside one of the columns that ran through the Station from top to bottom, anchoring the construction to the seabed. He climbed down a narrow metal ladder welded to the condensation-slick wall, a meagre light every five metres illuminating the way.

“Hope we don’t get caught,” Vaughan muttered.

“Maintenance fellows no problem, Mr. Jeff. Dr. Rao pays them and they say nothing. Everything okay.”

Vaughan descended until the muscles of his arms and legs tightened in pain. He stopped from time to time and stretched, then began the monotonous, measured routine again. Rather than stare at the scrolling rungs that demarcated the passing of endless seconds, and the occasional welding scars that provided visual relief, he closed his eyes.

He recalled the first time he had met Tiger. Five years ago, when he’d started regularly dropping, into Nazruddin’s bar and restaurant on the upper-deck, she was just one of the many street kids who sheltered from the monsoon downpour beneath the red and white striped Mylar awning. Their outstretched, importuning palms were at once a nuisance and a nagging reminder of his privilege.

That night a piping voice offered him chora, and a young girl came close enough for him to catch the melody of her innocent mind. He was hit by a wave of familiarity, quickly followed by pain. Her cerebral signature reminded him of Holly’s—and he was taken back years, to a time he would rather have forgotten.

He’d turned on the threshold of the restaurant and looked down at a girl of perhaps ten. The first thing that struck him was her seamless Thai face beneath the universal bowl haircut; big eyes, snub nose, lips that seemed swollen beyond sensuality to the point of pain. She wore a shrunken T-shirt and soiled shorts.

Then Vaughan saw the hatchet job some back-street surgeon had made of her amputation. Her right leg terminated above the knee in an ugly, criss-crossed pudding of scar tissue.

Vaughan had fled into Nazruddin’s, determined to have nothing to do with the girl, afraid of the emotions and memories her mind provoked in him.

She was there the following night, as if waiting for him. She leaned on a crutch, staring up at him with beseeching eyes. It was almost as if she were the telepath, could see into his mind and read his memories of the past.

“You want chora, mister?”

He had weakened, and hated himself for doing so. But her mind was so sweet, reminded him so much of Holly’s. He told himself that he would talk to her briefly, just this once, and then never again.

“You’ve got chora on you?”

He’d used the drug back in Canada in a bid to blot out the emanations of everyone around him. The drug had worked, though at a cost. Since the first few days of using chora, he had felt not the slightest stirrings of sexual arousal. He considered it a small price to pay for the cessation of the mind-noise that had made his waking hours intolerable. He’d had few meaningful relationships in his life before becoming psi-boosted, and the loss of his libido served only to reinforce his voluntary isolation.

The girl beamed. “Tiger can get it!”

“How much a gram?”

“Hundred roops.”

“Fifty.”

Her pretty face pantomimed disappointment. “Eighty.”

“Okay. Eighty. I’ll be inside. Right at the back.”

Her big lips slipped out of alignment with a lopsided twist. “Tiger can’t. Nazruddin’s no-go.”

“It’ll be fine. I’ll talk to the boss, okay?”

He watched her hike herself off down the street, the stump of her right leg swinging.

Thirty minutes later he was eating dhal and rice and drinking beer in the booth he had made his own. Inefficient fans turned on the ceiling like the stalling propellers of ancient biplanes, stirring the sultry air above the long tables of packed diners. The raised gallery of booths that framed the floor on three sides were reserved for high caste members or those with significant baksheesh. As a foreigner Vaughan was untouchable, but rupees talked and the restaurateur, a fat Sikh called P.K. Nazruddin, listened.

When the girl stumped through the open door Nazruddin, all belly and belligerent walrus moustache, ran around the counter flicking his dusting cloth at her. “
Chalo, chalo!”

“No problem, P.K.,” Vaughan called.

“A friend of yours?” The Sikh was sceptical.

“Ah-cha. No problem.”

The girl hobbled past the restaurateur, a smug expression on her face. She slipped into the booth, facing Vaughan, and he closed his eyes briefly as the music of her mind overcame him. She rolled a vial of blue powder across the table. His hands shaking, he opened the vial and tasted the powder on the tip of his finger. “Eighty roops?”

The girl’s gaze dropped from his face to the bowl of spiced lentils before him. “Eighty roops and meal for Tiger.”

“You drive a hard bargain.” He gestured to the waiter.

They ate in silence for the next thirty minutes. The effect of the powder, and the girl’s sweet mind cancelling the more frantic brain-vibes of the diners below, allowed him to relax.

When she scooped up the last of her rice, squashed it expertly into a ball and launched it into her mouth, Vaughan sensed her desire to leave. He was seized by a surging disappointment. More than just her mind reminded him of Holly. Her movements, the way she had of glancing at him quickly from the corners of her eyes...

She slipped away without a word and disappeared into the crowd outside.

A week later when Vaughan approached Nazruddin’s, washed out after a long shift, Tiger fell into awkward step beside him and tugged his sleeve.

His heart skipped at her reappearance. The melody of her mind was like a balm. He realised that for days he had been watching out for her.

“Chora, mister?”

“Could use a barrel load.”

They ate in his booth, Vaughan lacing his beer with a dose of the drug. The encroaching minds retreated; the world became a more tolerable place. Just Tiger’s humane mind-music remained, playing at the edge of his consciousness.

At one point Tiger looked up. “You ‘dicted?” she asked.

“Do you care?”

She frowned, eyes downcast, and shrugged her narrow shoulders.

He said, “I’m not addicted. I just use it from time to time.”

“You telepath?”

He stared at her.

“How the hell do you know that?”

She did her best to hide her smile. “Tiger knows people who know people. They see you working at the ‘port.”

“So I’m a telepath.” He regarded the girl. “Does it bother you?”

Tiger made a moue with her lips, considering. “Nope. Tiger got nothing to hide.”

After that, they ate together two or three times a week for the next five years. He sensed her need of him after the first few months, and for more than just the drug money, but he kept his emotional distance. He met her only at the restaurant and stayed with her only for an hour: by limiting physical proximity, he thought he could keep his emotional proximity in check, too. He feared giving too much of himself and receiving too much of her in return: most of all he feared the possibility of becoming so reliant on her as a source of affection that he would only suffer when she left.

Then, a year ago, she’d turned up at his apartment.

* * * *

“Mr. Jeff!” his guide’s call broke into his reverie.

Vaughan looked down. The kid had disappeared through a hatch in the wall of the column. The ladder continued downwards, diminishing in perspective. He tried to guess what level they might have arrived at, but admitted that he had no idea. He stepped off the ladder and squeezed through the hatch, then leaned against the column in the half-light to regain his breath.

“Hey...” he said to himself. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw that they were standing in a vast, low chamber that seemed to spread for kilometres in every direction, empty but for a forest of supporting columns. He was mystified. So far as he knew, every level of the station was inhabited.

He made out shapes on the floor, outlines of what looked like buildings and roadways, like some great, life-sized blueprint of a city never built. On closer inspection he saw that the lines on the floor indicated where metal walls and bulkheads had once stood.

“Where the hell are we?”

“Level Twelve-b, between Level Twelve and Thirteen. Long time ago, this upper-deck. Then they built upwards. Took down all buildings and made this level strong with extra columns.”

Vaughan imagined the weight of the city above his head, another eight levels, many millions of people. “Is all this level deserted?”