No Life But This (21 page)

‘And they love it so much,’ Quin said. ‘That’s why they’re bombing it.’

‘I didn’t say they loved it,’ Rose said. ‘I said it was someone’s
attempt, feeble though it may have been, to solve a problem that had been going on since the colony was founded.’ She swallowed. ‘Actually, I think it was my mother’s. This looks like her version of charity. Very glittery.’

‘I’m not in the least surprised,
Fitzroy
,’ Quin said.

Rose went white. ‘Are you blaming me for this?’

‘Should I be?’

For a moment, Rose’s mouth hung open in bewilderment.
‘I was stuck on Earth in a thrice-burned stasis chamber when all this was thought up!’ she shouted, her voice more tortured than I’d ever heard it.

‘Waiting for the next diamond necklace,’ Quin said. ‘Well, this is it, princess, a glittering diamond jewel, crowning your greatest achievement – a warren of hunger and blood.’

‘So what do you want me to do?’ she cried. ‘Tell me something sensible,
and I’ll see it’s done!’

‘Quit acting like it’s all just part of the
status quo
!’

‘It
is
the
status quo
!’ Rose shouted back.

I grabbed Quin’s arm. Rose was red with indignation. ‘
Give her a break, Quin. How is she supposed to fix it? She’s rich, she’s not a fairy godmother. She can’t just wave a magic wand and fix a flawed society. It took her six months to quit vomiting every time she ate.
What do you want? She’s only seventeen.’

‘And you said she’s older than she looks,’ Quin snapped. ‘Let her explain.’

‘I can’t just fix it, Quin,’ Rose said, trying to sound reasonable. ‘Xavier can’t either. He’s tried before. He says it blew up in his face. The colony isn’t run by us, not really.’

‘Right,’ Quin said. ‘With the UniCorp logo on everything including the ice-cubes.’

‘That’s a
very old conceit they just keep up for appearances. The colony is really run by the ruling families of the submarine cities – people like Jamal’s family. It’s like a tributary. All hail the king, but the real ruler is the governor. Right now, the city captains hold a nominal loyalty to UniCorp and therefore to me and Xavier. But if we start pushing them too hard in the wrong direction, they’ll break
that tie.’

And they could do it, too. Europa wasn’t like the other colonies. Because of the ocean and the plankton, their resources were a thousand times beyond the other colonies.

‘And if Europa breaks its tie with UniCorp,’ Rose went on, ‘you know what would happen next. Callisto and Ganymede and Titan would be cut off, or at the complete mercy of their monopoly. Right now there have to be
some concessions between the colonies, or the trade would suffer, as the shipments are controlled by the corporation. But without that, the ships would be controlled by the richest moon – and that’s Europa. They’d have ultimate power over everything. People – would –
die
, Quin. Once you control the supply of food, you control everyone.’ She looked down. ‘My father taught them that, too.’

She
looked ashamed. She’d been just as dominated by her father as the poor here in this colony. And it was UniCorp’s policies with the Global Food Initiative that had poisoned the grain and caused the wide spread sterility that had been the final blow of the Dark Times. Control the food. Control everything.

‘And I should accept the word of some last-gen corporate apologist?’ he asked.

‘That’s not
fair,’
I signed to Quin.

‘Look, I’ll talk with Xavier,’ Rose said. ‘You’re right, Quin. Okay? Happy? You’re right! It’s just a slow process – it took a disaster to change things on Earth, and a third of the population died. We’d rather avoid that here. But you’re right. We weren’t looking at the villages; they were so pretty and efficient. My mother was good at that. Designing things that drew
the eye. Distracting people. Painting things over.’ She gave a rueful laugh. ‘I got my artistic impulses from
somewhere
, anyway.’ She’d gone white again. ‘And you’re wrong, Quin. This isn’t a diamond necklace, it’s just ice. I hate it here.’ And she started to cry.

I folded her into my arms and kissed her temple. The poor girl was wondering how many years she spent in stasis while her mother
designed places like this to cover up the inequities caused by her father’s callous business practices. There was one four-year stint when she was seven. Before that, she had no idea.

‘I don’t buy it,’ Quin said. ‘And I can’t believe you’re on her side, Otto!’

‘
Whose side should I be on?’
I signed back.

‘What do you mean? Your own! Have you looked around? These aren’t just the poor. These are
our people.’

I shook my head. These were not our people. Apart from ourselves, we had no people. I signed something to that effect.

‘You can’t see anymore,’ Quin said, and he sounded contemptuous. ‘Look at yourself. Just look at yourself. Not your skin, not what the scientists did to us. Just look.’

‘What do you mean?’
I signed.

‘He means you,’ Rose said quietly. ‘I’ve been noticing it since
we got here. Whatever embryo they adapted came from here. You’re of the same race. If you weren’t an EP raised on Earth, you’d look just like them.’

I considered this. There was something about the shape of their eyes, their build, their bone structure. Certainly the hair was the same. But I felt no close connection. Clearly nothing like what Quin was feeling.

‘And you don’t see it,’ Quin said.
‘Really. Oh, burn it, what has she turned you into?’

Rose went red. ‘It wasn’t me,’ she said hotly.

Quin glared at her. ‘You’re poisoning him. Nabiki knew it,’ he said. ‘She could see it happening even before she broke it off.’

‘
Who?’
I signed.

‘Nabiki,’ Quin said.

I stared at him in blankly.

‘Nabiki?’ he said. ‘Your ex?’

I had no idea who he was talking about.

‘Nabiki Sato. Seventeen,
Asian, fights like a tiger in the sack?’

I was totally bewildered. My own memories had faded under the sea of Xavier’s.

‘You know. Bad tempered, beautiful, contradictory? You used to describe her as having layers of thought?’ I barely remembered Nabiki. It took a moment before my own memory surfaced. The memory was distant, when it came, and couldn’t touch me.

But Quin was on me, now. ‘You
don’t remember, do you. Do you remember anything? Una. Una Prime, they numbered her 11. Took five days to die. Spent the last day moaning as if she could feel each cell dying one by one? 18? Went into convulsions? 63, just didn’t wake up? Penny, Tristan? Your sisters, waiting for us on Earth? Anything?’ His eyes were bright as he advanced on me. ‘71, just screamed for an hour, and they had to tie
him down, because the drugs did nothing? 42? Tell me you remember 42!’

(
Leave him alone, 50!)
She shouted at him, but of course he couldn’t hear her.

‘42? Bled out from a brain haemorrhage in front of you and nearly took you with her! And those of us left fought like hell to keep you alive, because the scans showed you were brain dead. It took us three days to wake you, and I spent the whole
bloody time feeling useless while Tristan and Una and all the ones with your stupid bloody gift tried to call you back from nothing, and all I could do was stand like a sentry in your doorway keeping the vultures from pecking at your corpse. And you don’t remember any of this, do you!’ He grabbed me by the head and shouted at me both mentally and physically.
‘DO YOU!’

I was bewildered, swaying
with shock, and Quin’s desperation raked at me. Rose lunged forward and grabbed at him. ‘Leave him alone!’

‘What have you done to him, you whore?’ Quin shouted, backhanding her in the face.

My shock evaporated in an instant as Rose fell backward. She looked up. A thin line of blood trickled from her nose, glaring like a crack on her upper lip, starkly beautiful against her pale skin.

Now I
had memories of Quin – Quin shouting and rampaging, destroying the common room in a fit of passion. Quin, bullying freshmen students this last summer at UniPrep. Quin, twelve years old and terrifying, raging at me, until I’d knocked him down and he kicked my leg out from under me, snapping my tibia and dislocating my knee. Quin’s face, harsh and heartless, so deeply, painfully angry. So angry it spilled
out into everything he touched, every emotion he ever had. I’d never understood that anger before. Even 42’s anger was never violent like Quin’s.

But there were other memories which invaded me, or which I had embraced. Xavier was in me somewhere, and Xavier understood it. And he knew – though he didn’t want to – where it could lead. I grabbed at him. ‘
You leave her alone!’

Quin shook his head.
‘Nabiki saw this,’
Quin said silently, his thoughts as violent as his nature.
‘She saw it months ago. From the moment you touched that whore. And now you’re even worse. I can’t believe I encouraged you.’
He didn’t say it, or even think it in words, but it was there. He wanted her dead. He wanted Rose dead and Mr Zellwegger dead and Jamal’s entire family. There was no thought of mercy. No thought
of justice. Only boiling hatred and rage. Quin’s deep, passionate devotion to me and Tristan and Penny, to the simple ones, to all of us, had been twisted, expanded, and had suddenly encompassed this whole village, probably the entire moon. They were
his people
, and he had been ripped from them, kept from them, while he was genetically mutilated and they were economically tortured. And he blamed
Rose, and Mr Zellwegger most of all.

But Mr Zellwegger was Xavier. And Xavier was me. There was a part of me that saw Quin’s hatred as hatred of me. Xavier knew how to hate as surely and violently as Quin did. With a roar of fury – a roar that came out whispery and dolphinish – my arm went up and bashed Quin in the jaw.

As always when I hurt someone with my fist I felt the blow as strongly as
if it had happened to me. As unpleasant as that was, it was only mental and not physical damage, so what tended to happen was a surge of adrenaline that slowed everything down and made it hard to catch me. The more I hurt my opponent the better I fought – and the longer it took me to recover afterward. I’d become something of a pacifist from the age of twelve, after that terrible fight with Quin
when he had broken my leg, and my pain returned to him had nearly stopped his weak heart. I had realized there was really nothing that could justify my fighting someone. In hurting them, I only hurt myself.

Quin reeled, flying backwards in the low gravity, until he crashed into the wall. He made a dull thud against the mock wood, and when he looked up, his eyes were lit with a fanatic joy. He
snarled as he leaped at me. Rose screamed. The two of us grappled. Despite my headache, the roaring in my ears, and my own somewhat quiet nature, my madness was on me in full. I was Xavier, and I knew what it was to suffer loss, and this zealot had just called my Rose a whore, and he wanted her dead. I wanted him broken. Broken beyond repair.

I rolled him over and started hitting him, hard as
I could, again and again and again, pounding so hard into his face I heard the bones click in my hand. Quin’s nose had broken again, and blood streamed down his face. I was winning. The pain swirled through me, both mine and Quin’s, and I was nothing but rage and pain. But without warning Quin twisted, bringing his knees up into my stomach, and kicked me off.

On Earth, I would have fallen onto
my back a few inches from him, scrabbled back into the fray, and we would have been at it again within seconds. In Europan gravity, the moment I left the influence of the Norway Chalet's grav mats I was launched several feet into the air, hit the ceiling, and then crashed into the wall. The breath was knocked out of me, and I couldn’t focus.

‘Both of you! Someone, help!’ Rose was screaming down
the corridor, and had been for some time. It was only then that help arrived, in a form none of us had expected.

A shiny, dead-eyed Plastine pushed past Rose and grabbed Quin before he had a chance to go at me again. Rose screamed as her nightmare descended. I was woozy from the blow, and I could barely understand what was going on. Quin was purple with rage, and he did not stop shouting. ‘What
did you do?!’ he roared at Rose. ‘What did you do to my brother?!’

‘It wasn’t me,’ Rose kept saying. ‘It wasn’t me.’

I tried to find my feet, but my body said no. No, we’re just going to rest here for a while.

‘Get your pet monster off me!’ Quin shouted.

The Plastine said something in its cold, machine voice, but it wasn’t in English, and none of us paid attention. I stopped paying attention
to anything for a while as I tried to put myself back together, both mentally and physically. Neither of my personalities seemed up to the challenge just then, and it was actually 42 who started issuing orders, like a command sergeant. (
Get up. Use your legs, then your stomach muscles. Support with your arms. Come on, we need to move.)

When I found my way to my feet, the chaos had increased.
Xavier – the real Xavier – had come into the room, alongside another Plastine and two uniformed guards. Quin was still shouting unintelligible curses. Rose was crying, trying to explain between shouting back at Quin. Her face was a mass of red, flushed and bloody. She hadn’t bothered to wipe her lip, but the blood had smeared over her cheek, and was still trickling a little. Ultimately Xavier said
something to the Plastine holding Quin, and it set him down automatically. Quin made a lunge as if he was about to hit Xavier, but the other Plastine moved, and Quin thought better of it. With a curse, he backed off through the door, throwing a rude gesture for good measure, and then ran. I could hear his feet for only a few seconds on the rayon-carpeted floor.

Rose came to me then, holding the
side of my throat and caressing my cheek with her thumb. ‘You okay? Otto, look at me, are you okay?’

I wasn’t okay. Physically, I was bruised and woozy, but uninjured. But Quin’s rage had shattered me, and I wasn’t sure who I was. I didn’t seem to have any memories at all. I knew I loved Rose, but that seemed to be it. I sobbed without tears and let my head sink onto her shoulder.