Reality 36 (38 page)

  "But if that is not Qifang, wha…" began Veronique, and stopped. The pain was sudden and all consuming, quickly followed by a numbness that coiled about her heart. Jagadith leaned in and pushed his sword hard, once, twice. She felt the metal scrape on her ribs as it forced them apart slightly. The sword emerged from her back, its fire charring her flesh, the burnt-pork stink of it filling her nostrils.

  "What are you doing?" said Qifang – whether from fear or some residual concern for his colleague, Veronique's dying mind could not discern.

  "Go now in peace, and with my protection. This is not your mentor, you must believe that. Above all, remember you are not really here, after all," said Jag. "Please, madam goddess, do not come back."

  Veronique looked, her eyes questioning, mouth open in shock. She could not talk. The cold enveloped her, her vision dimmed to a point of light, Jag at its centre as grim-faced as Shiva.

  The light went out.

  Veronique's body slid off the knight's sword. He turned to confront the shades of the paladins as they moved towards him.

  Valdaire's blood evaporated from his sparking blade as he raised it against his fellows.

Veronique awoke with little drama. Her eyes flicked open, her first short breath hissed out from between dry lips, perhaps a little more eagerly than if she had been sleeping. A second followed, deeper and longer, then coughing, awkward and painful around the feeding tube. She tugged free in a state close to panic, spit and mucus running dripping on the floor.

  She was back.

  Her breathing rasped in her ears. Her vision would not focus. Her eyes were dry and scratchy. Her eyelids caught painfully when she blinked, and then her eyes filled with tears in response, blurring her sight further. It was dark. Her rank odour was an affront to her nose. She sat up and rubbed between her breasts, the place where Jagadith's sword had pierced her in that other place. It throbbed, but there was no sign of the wound. The rush of relief she felt was mingled with fear. Many had died from similar injuries inflicted in the RR RealWorlds; the mental buffers to prevent dream-induced death had been removed when the UN declared the Realms free.

  She must have been insane to even think about going in there.

  She felt up to her forehead with a shaking hand, to where the warm and vibrating v-jack headpiece grasped her skull. She fumbled with the release, turned it off and laid it aside.

  Her hair was greasy and lank. Her breath stank, her bladder ached, a sharp discomfort coming from the catheter in her urethra when she moved. She badly needed a bath. Coming fresh to her filth from the idealised world of Reality Thirty-six made her feel disgusted with her own body.

  She sat up, pulling feebly at the sensor pads on her chest and head. She needed food too. The soupy gruel delivered by the feeding tube and the salt/sweet serum she'd had running into her veins would keep a Grid surfer alive for a month, but it was a lousy diet. She'd lost a couple of kilos, maybe more – she was never heavily fleshed. Her ribs had become sharp lines, hips bony nodules.

  She smiled grimly at this ultimate in weight-loss regimes. People had starved to death before the RealWorlds had been made illegal, dying because they could not tear themselves away from their fantasies.

  She continued to unhook herself from her support web, intent on the machines. It was dark but for the faint glow of LEDs and gelscreens. She blinked hard to clear her eyes; they hurt, as if she had scratched her corneas. Tears continued to flood them, and she tried vainly to blink them away; she needed to see the monitor of the unit that had been watching over her. The clock, she wanted to see the clock. She peered at it until it came into focus. Her eyes stubbornly refused to work, but she persevered. Eventually the clock swam into clarity. Twelve days, she'd been out twelve days, one synchronising her neural patterns with the Realm's accelerated time, only eleven actually within. Close to two months had passed subjectively during that time. The time lag was the result of the temporal dilation effect built into the Realms, one of their original features, allowing people to live other lives over weekends. She'd never experienced this so pronouncedly before. The sensation was odd.

  Only when she leaned forward to ease out her catheter did she notice the two men watching her in the dark. She was too angry at being caught at such disadvantage to feel afraid.

  "Dr. Valdaire," said one of them. He was holding a gun on the other, a cyborg sitting across the room, his body, lumpy with tech under his straining jacket, perched uncomfortably on a dilapidated armchair. The gunman looked familiar. The battered auxiliary mind wrapped around the back of his skull sparked her memory.

  "Who the hell are you?" she demanded, but she already knew. She recognised him all right, recognised him from the university, one of the agents who had come to talk to her the day she'd decided to run, and she'd just been caught by him frolicking in one of the thirty-six Realms.

  "I think you had better explain yourself," he said.

Chapter 24

Qifang

Qifang had forgotten the faces of his mother and father. He could not remember the year of his birth. When he looked into the mirror an old man stared back at him. His memories were ruins. He remembered Karlsson, he remembered being connected via his machines to the Realms. He remembered k52. He remembered pain. Little else.

  He wanted to stop, to rest and pull his mind back together, but he could not, he was under a compulsion as strong as a curse. His message filled him to brimming, roared in his head, driving him on to… where?

  He'd left the campus, he remembered that. He remembered visiting the Realm House in the desert, then the demonstration of the machinery by Karlsson in Detroit. Long journeys apart, journeys that were lost to him. He could not remember why, nor could he think why he might have gone. He was not concerned with Karlsson's work. It lay outside his area of expertise, yet he had a nagging feeling they had talked of it often. Karlsson, a big man, foreign, Norwegian. He was usually so implacable, but Qifang remembered a day he was nervous, sweating even in the air-conditioned chill of the House under the sand, months before he had resigned, whispering frantically, showing him charts.

  k52.

  He grappled with his recollections, but they were fragments, blurring one into the other, impossible to see what went where and how they related to one another.

  The disease. The cancer. He was dying, wasn't he?

  A flash, later, months later. Karlsson's strange home. He'd gone in and then left Karlsson's factory in a daze in a centre car – his own had gone. The message had begun its inexorable tug on his psyche thereafter. He hadn't even gone home but had headed straight for the airport out near Vegas and hopped a cargo blimp to Philadelphia, changed for another, larger tube freighter with multiple passenger berths heading out to Luton Spaceport. The gold covering its skin, the howl it made as the sunlight warmed air in the voided centre and forced it onward, all of it was unfamiliar; he had no recollection of such craft, but at the same time it had seemed as if he knew such things intimately, adding to his sense of disconnection.

  His mind was incomplete, blank spaces where a century of recollection should have been. Instead, crazed images, as unreliable as shadows. Was this what dementia felt like? he wondered. The drugs might have begun to fail. He could have become ill.

  He was awed when they flew by the Miami space elevator, its cables scored black against the sky, curved by distance and disappearing to nothingness as they pierced the atmosphere. They flew over the seafarms of the Atlantic coast and the water chimneys pumping cooling vapour into the air across the USNA continental shelf. He craned his neck to better see the carbon sequestration rigs of the deep ocean and the towers of Atlantis. This was not his world, it was not the world he remembered. His was an older world, a more carefree world. And yet he knew it, somehow.

  He looked from face to face. Some were as entranced as he, some bored, but all appeared as if they had expected these things. Only he was surprised. He did his best to hide it.

  They flew on. New memories left him as soon as they were formed, falling into the pit of confusion at the centre of his mind. He recalled being crammed into an observation cupola with the freighter's other passengers, twenty or so, pointing excitedly at a pod of blue whales cutting overlapping wakes through the ocean below. A fragment of awkward dinner conversation at the captain's table where in mid-flow he had stopped, unsure of where he was.

  "Are you all right?" asked his concerned companion, a woman who did something important somewhere, details that slipped from his mind like water through the weave of a net.

  He was not all right. He had forgotten his own name. He made his excuses and left the table, pleading sudden illness, perhaps the thinness of the air? He refused the captain's offers of help and the airship's doctor, beat away hands that reached out to help him. Reeling like a drunkard he fled to his bed, though he had imbibed no alcohol or other intoxicant, and the airship's passage was smooth and sure. He lay down and fell into a feverish sleep, his night disrupted by a cascade of memories, shattering into ever smaller pieces as they fell through his dreams.

  Another night he awoke with sharp certainty: his brother, dead of drowning in another century. Until then, he had not even been aware he had once had a sibling; the message crowded all else out. He wept. He soon forgot.

  He became wrapped in a fugue. Days later, he found himself in an alien city in an alien land, the EU, England; was that where he had been heading? He was looking out at a crowd of buildings that were themselves cities, watching as one of them burned. The message urged him on; he tried to make it stop, to tell it that the epicentre of the blaze was his supposed destination, but the message was single-minded, and would not heed him.

  He was stopped by a security cordon, and an armoured police officer made to send him away. An android grabbed his shoulder in one steely maniple, then gestured with one of its three others to his face, then to the human cop. Featureless police helmet and featureless machine mask both regarded him intently.

  They brought him in to a police station and left him there for hours on his own. Time slipped again, and he found himself in another country, or so he guessed, for the journey that brought him there had evaporated like a dream pursued after waking. But he recognised the place, the EuPol Five's temple to itself, one of Europe's halls of power. He had been here once remotely – why, he did not recall.

  The Five questioned him long and hard; he felt tendrils of it trying to force themselves into his consciousness as it spoke to him. How he could do this was unclear, because Qifang wore no mentaug or uplink. The tendrils withdrew, and the Five radiated a sense of being better informed but unsatisfied. It questioned him again. Qifang told it what it already knew.

  "What do you remember?" the Five demanded.

  He was afraid. This was not like him. He was a powerful, confident man secure in a sense of his own expertise and self, but these were gone, leaving a child's fear. "I remember nothing. Please, I need to see Richards. I have a message to deliver."

  "Who?" it said, as impersonal as thunder. "What message?"

  Qifang dropped his head and sobbed, exhausted and alone.

  The EuPol Five made a noise of annoyance. When Qifang opened his eyes again he was in a garden at a wirework table. Food lay before him. The Five was manifest on the other side as an Olympian being, its perfect face marred by an expression that belonged on an irate bureaucrat.

  "Very well," said Hughie. "I will bring you Richards. But you will have to wait."

Chapter 25

Santiago

"We don't have time for this," said Klein. He was huge, and well-specced, if dated: a thirty-year-old model. Multiple redundant organs, carbon-bonded bones, in-built healthtech and a cranial mentaug more powerful than those permitted civilians, even now. His muscles were massive under his skin, roped unnaturally with polymer overlays, their tension twisting his body out of true. Santiago was not intimidated by strength, he never had been, but he was wary of the German. The man was a monster.

  "We have time for whatever I say," said Chures. Santiago did not scare easily. He'd not been scared when his family made the long trek north, over the Panamanian wetline into the Latin south of the USNA, nor was he scared by the conditions of the Mexican refugee camps, worse than the barrios they fled from. He'd not been intimidated by the rape gangs, the traffickers or the men who came to steal his family's food on the pretext of offering protection. "Until I am satisfied," Santiago said. He lifted the gun; pain flared in his side. He bit it back. "We are not going anywhere."

  The German nodded as if it made perfect sense – him, the cyborg, the gun. It was a simple equation. "You are making a mistake," he said. "I was the victim of an assassination attempt this morning, like you. Someone is trying to stop us. They know where I am, they will have followed me. They will be here soon."

  Santiago was good at reading faces. He'd discovered to his cost that no one could be trusted. There was a reason why humans policed machines. The numbers had many advantages, but they had no instinct, and no loyalty, like Bartolomeo.

  This German and the Five that called itself Richards. They were mercenaries, masterless weapons, dangerous.

  "We should go now."

  "No, you will be quiet now," said Santiago quietly. "You are all suspects in an ongoing VIA investigation: you, your partner, Ms Valdaire and Zhang Qifang."

  "An investigation into what?" said Otto.

  "I am asking the questions." He smiled with pain-greyed lips and gestured with the gun by way of emphasis. It was powerful enough to kill the cyborg. He'd made sure to take the most powerful weapon he could from the men who'd come for him.