Psykogeddon (7 page)

FOUR

"
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable.
"

- Adam Smith

Wealth of Nations

An hour later, Dredd was back in Sector Nine.

Sectors Two through Nine were, naturally enough, arranged around Sector One in a square, three on a side, so the trip was not exactly a gruelling one.

His destination was of another and somewhat more salubrious nature than the street and its accumulated shanty-settlements like Cantilever City. Shangri La Towers rose bright and pristine, their spire-like forms unsullied, courtesy of a monomolecular coating on which no contamination could gain a purchase.

Nothing stuck to Shangri La. Things just slid right off.

The Justice Department personal flier, built along the same general lines as the floaters in the Iso-block, hovered over one of the cupola-like residential structures that capped the Towers. Inside, Dredd switched the PA-unit to the frequency of the Shangri La civil-def security.

"Official business," he said. "This is Judge Dredd requesting permission to enter Shangri La."

"You got a warrant, lawboy?" said Shangri La civil-def security, in not exactly the most courteous of tones. "'Cause if you wanna arrest someone here, boy, you know you gotta make it stick."

Dredd bit back his anger to the point where it only came out as barely-suppressed loathing. "It's not that kind of business," he said. "I'm not here to arrest anyone. That's why I'm
requesting
rather than ordering. For the moment."

The Justice Department and Shangri La existed in an uneasy equilibrium of tension. The fact that their lawyers kept them technically - and scrupulously - on the right side of the Law meant that for the most part it was not resource-effective for the Justice Department to actively go after the ultra-rich Shangri La inhabitants.

With other, far more serious battles to be fought in the Mega-City, it was simpler just to look the other way and leave the Shangri La inhabitants to their own devices in their sinecure. Leave them to stew in the juices of their own little world.

It couldn't last, of course. At some point the Shangri La inhabitants would come to believe that they were above the Law and actively flout it. Then the Justice Department would decide that a lesson needed to be taught and stomp them flat. It was only a matter of time before Shangri La pushed the Judges too far.

But today was not that day.

"Okay, Dredd," said the civil-def security. "You can come in. We got nothing to hide."

"Nothing I'm going to see, at any rate," growled Dredd.

"You said it, Lawboy."

Down below, a landing gantry was extending. Dredd touched the cyborg pilot of the flier on her shoulder. "We're going down."

"Gotcha." The cyborg's hands flew across her console, almost too fast for the eye to catch.

Unlike the operator of the floater back in the Iso-block, field-operational pilots were living human beings, artificially enhanced to jack their reflexes off the human scale. They had achieved their cyber-synthesis from the opposite direction.

There was, apparently, quite a self-enclosed community of them in their quarters back in the Hall of Justice. "Apparently", because they tended to keep themselves to themselves so far as was possible, only emerging when they were needed to fly their Mantas or personal fliers such as this.

The flier descended to hover over the gantry. Dredd shot the drop-hatch and swung himself down.

"Wait for me here," he told the pilot, raising his voice a little over the hum of turbines. "Somebody asks you what you're doing in their space, you ask them just how far they want to push it. These drokkers aren't some other country, however much they like to pretend."

"Gotcha," said the pilot.

Dredd strode along the gantry, through open double-doors and into a pushily decorated reception area, where a number of armed and armoured Shangri La civil-def security men levelled their impactor-blasters directly at his head.

An hour earlier, back in the Iso-block, the observation floater orientated itself in the air to face a particular monocarbon cube. Through its crystal-clear face the cell within could be seen in perfect detail.

The feeding tube and ablutionary arrangements hooked to the life-support systems situated behind the edifice of the cube-bank, and at least kept the inmates alive.

The cell could have been seen in perfect detail, had not the vast majority of it been obscured by the body of the inmate.

A monstrously fat and toad-like man, the pendulous weight of his bulk spilt over what, at first sight, appeared to be a large and highly-polished silver bowl where his legs should have been.

This was in fact a null-grav invalid-floater, operating on the same principles as the observation-floater on which Dredd was standing, and indeed the same principles that kept the Iso-cube bank floating fifty metres off the ground.

It was integral to the man, fused to his spinal column, and any attempt to remove it would have killed him, so far as any and every tech-analysis had strongly suggested.

The self-sustaining hydrofusion power cells, however, had been removed. The curve of the bowl rested on the floor of the Cube, and the only thing that prevented the man toppling over, like a Weeble without the wherewithal to get up again, was the fact that the cramped and one-size-fits-all nature of his cell held him effectively wedged.

The man squatted there, immobile, seemingly staring into space. The inner walls of the cell were one-way polarised, giving observers a view in, but the inmates no view out.

Clipped to the one wall was a set of goggles, designed to project moving lights and abstract shapes onto the retinas to stave off isolation-psychosis. They were still in their vacuum pack; the man had, obviously, never so much as used them.

"Take the polarisation down," Dredd told the cyborg floater operator. "Let him see what's happening."

There was no direct sign, from either the cyborg or the walls of the cube, that anything had happened.

Abruptly, though, the man's face animated. He turned to look directly at Dredd and his face split open in what was, to all intents and purposes, an open, friendly and unreservedly charming smile.

"My word!" Efil Drago San exclaimed, with every evidence of delight at meeting some warm acquaintance after far too long a time. "To think you'd make the time to come and visit me in my present, alas, sadly reduced circumstances! Such thoughtfulness shines out, don't you know, like a beacon of hope in a naughty world. And how are things with you, my dear chap?"

An hour later, in Sector Nine, the Shangri La civil-def security men stood easy, their guns held as though for parade-inspection. This meant that the guns were not, now, aimed at Dredd, but the civil-def men weren't exactly putting them away, either.

"The Lady Proconsul has granted you an audience," said the squad-leader.

"The what?" said Dredd.

The rich inhabitants of Shangri La were forever coming up with titles and little hierarchical rituals for themselves, as if it mattered a drokk in any real world.

"Honoria, Lady Proconsul of the Eastern Tower, Lady Slocombe," said the squad leader, with the cheerful roughness of someone who thinks he has the upper hand, though with no idea of how bad things could suddenly get if he put so much as a word wrong. "You want anything here in Shangri La, you talk to the Lady first."

Dredd considered simply telling the creep to go drokk himself; a Judge with just cause could go anywhere and everywhere he liked within the Mega-City walls.

Forcing the situation at this point, though, would cause needless complications. Better to wait until the Department got around to doing something about Shangri La Towers once and for all.

"Lead on, then," he said, keeping the anger out of his voice to the point that it was merely evident rather than overwhelming. "Take me to this Lady Slocombe of yours."

The security squad took him through access corridors and halls, which were lined with everything from colonnades and antique Classical statuary, to gemstone-woven tapestries, to ancient, genuine glossy-paper posters from before the War, screen-printed on actual paper and held up with actual and provenance-certified blu-tack.

Horded treasures from the burnt and irradiated remains of the past. The objects had no actual value in themselves; the value lay in all the time and effort spent in locating, retrieving and preserving those relics that had somehow survived in an intact and pristine condition. Some people made a big thing about that.

Every door Dredd passed was closed, with an air that they weren't going to be opened any time soon. They met no other people. Dredd got the impression that he was being very carefully shepherded away from anything of which he might take notice, anything on which he would be forced to take action.

At length, they came to a big set of double-doors flanked by periwigged footmen. The footmen smoothly swung the doors back, and Dredd stepped into an audience chamber.

Actually, it might more properly have been called a
boudoir
writ large. It was all plush velvet drapery and gilt, gilded statuettes of nymphs and satyrs, burning sticks of musky incense - the chemical components modified, no doubt, to keep them from falling foul of the Justice Department Proscribed Substances list.

Reclining on a day bed, attended by a pair of well-muscled young men in jockey shorts, who fed her slivers of crystallised fruit from little silver plates, was a woman of what some might call a certain age - and which others, with slightly more clarity if less goodwill, would point out as decidedly
un
certain.

Years of cosmetic surgery and bootleg rejuve-treatment had taken their toll. The dry skin stretched over frail bones gave her the aspect of having at some point been mummified.

She could have been of any age over a hundred. The voluminous winceyette nightie and the bright purple fright-wig were the most natural things about her.

There was nothing frail, however, about her voice.

"You there, young man!" she ordered with the piercingly rude tone of command of the terminally over-bred. "It's about time one of you damn Justice Department chappies got your finger out and came here. I put out the order for one of you Judges simply
hours
ago."

Somebody from Shangri La Towers actually calling the Justice Department for help would have been notable, but if anyone had noticed it they hadn't told Dredd.

"What the drokk are you talking about?" he said.

"Why, the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton!" Lady Slocombe exclaimed, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. "My closest companion. She's been missing since last night, and not a soul has seen a trace of her."

A certain amount of light began to dawn. Lady Slocomb was under the impression that Dredd was here to investigate a Missing Persons case. And the fact that she thought Judges had the time and resources to investigate every Missing Persons case they came across just showed how out of touch the inhabitants of Shangri La were.

"Well, to be missing in any official sense," Dredd began, trying once more for some minimum semblance of diplomacy, "a citizen has to be out of contact for more than forty-eight hours."

"Don't give me that, you jumped up little functionary!" The obliviousness of Lady Slocombe was reaching dangerous proportions in every sense.

Insulting a Judge was not exactly a crime, as such - unless the Judge in question decided to define it as Verbal Assault Calculated to Cause an Affray. The tone of Lady Slocombe, so far as Dredd was concerned, was coming dangerously close to crossing that line.

"The Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton," Lady Slocombe continued, "would never leave my sight for so much as an
hour
. Why, even when I rub her up the wrong way, she merely shoots up the curtain and hisses at me from the pelmet."

Dredd looked at her as the wheels, at last, began to turn. "We're not talking about any kind of person at all, are we?" he said.

Lady Slocombe looked back at him with scorn. "The Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton," she said, "is my
Felis domesticus
. A pure-bred Abyssinian Blue. Suitably modified, of course, to withstand the rigours of our poorly misused world."

For a moment Dredd stood stock still, hands clenched inside their gauntlets.

"Let me get this straight," he said at last. "You think I'm here to investigate the unexplainable and mysterious disappearance of your drokking cat?"

"Yes, of course," said Lady Slocomb. "The Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton is my cat. What else would she be? Some foul fiend has had her away - so what are you going to do about it, eh?"

FIVE

"
An idle, light, evilly deceitful and proud fellow who whispers insulting jests basely and obscenely, and is rightly called by the people by the name of Mimmus..."

- Milo