Tears in Rain (32 page)

And it was true that the rep was mentally asking herself just that.

“And the business of not eating dead bodies, is it a matter of principle or doesn’t it agree with you? Physically, I mean.”

“It really doesn’t agree with us. It hardens the
kuammil
. It can even kill you over time. The
kuammil
is like your soul.”

“We don’t have souls.”

“Neither do we. We have
kuammil
.”

“I mean the soul doesn’t exist.”

“Well, it was to give you a simple comparison. The
kuammil
does exist. If you like, I can give you a summary of how our bodies work.”

Bruna looked at the Omaá’s translucent skin, pinkish and bluish, throbbing, as changeable as the sky at dusk, and she shivered. It had been a while since she had been conscious of the alien’s difference—in fact, she was starting to get used to him—but she suddenly became uneasily aware again of how incredibly strange his body was. Just then, a call came through on the mobile Mirari had given her and Bruna welcomed the interruption, as she didn’t have to answer Maio, and instantly thought,
How stupid, given that he’s already sensed everything I’ve been thinking
.

She answered the call in invisible mode. The face of Serra, Hericio’s deputy, appeared on the screen.

“Why can’t I see you?” the man asked suspiciously by way of a greeting.

“I’ve rigged my mobile to prevent anyone from locating me; I don’t want any evidence of this trip to Madrid. Remember what I said about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. But I must have broken something in the process because I can’t send images.”

The guy nodded, reassured by the reply.

“Yes, we also couldn’t understand why you were untraceable.”

“It’s illegal to track a mobile.”

Serra smiled contemptuously.

“As Hericio says, there’s nothing more legal than disobeying the laws of an illegitimate system. Okay, Annie Heart, I want to talk to you. In one hour’s time, at Saturn.”

And he cut off.

An hour! The rep grabbed her travel bag and raced off to the Majestic. She went upstairs as Bruna Husky, transformed herself quickly into Annie Heart, and headed back downstairs praying to the memory of the great Gabriel Morlay that she hadn’t forgotten any detail of her disguise. When she got to the ground floor, she breathed deeply to reduce her agitation. She stepped calmly out of the elevator with a relaxed air, as if there were no need for haste, although it was almost the time the HSP deputy had set. And yes, she hadn’t been wrong in her assumption. Her tail was back, the young man from yesterday, or maybe another one—all those supremacist pups looked the same. That was precisely what they valued: homogeneity, sameness. She allowed herself to be followed as she walked with studied calmness toward Saturn. Although it was quite close to the hotel, her lazy pace meant it was twenty minutes before she was within sight of the bar, but she didn’t actually manage to enter. A car stopped beside her and raised its door with a pneumatic hiss. Serra was sitting inside.

“You’re late,” he grumbled.

Bruna settled into her seat and arranged her lips into a coquettish but contemptuous pout—the sneer of a disdainful blonde, which she did well.

“I’m not accustomed to being treated with such rudeness. I’m not one of your little foot soldiers to be ordered urgently hither and yon.”

Serra chuckled. Today, instead of a vest, he was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt made of a thin, shiny material that stuck to his artificially inflated muscles.
No doubt he wants to impress Annie
,
thought Bruna. The car was on autopilot, without a driver. He didn’t want any witnesses.

“Don’t be offended, sweetheart, it’s just work. And an element of basic caution.”

“Why are we here?”

“Here?”

“In the car. Are we going somewhere?”

“We thought it would be best if we were seen together as little as possible. We’re doing it for your sake. That’s what you want, isn’t it? All the trouble you’ve taken so your mobile isn’t traceable.”

Bruna cautiously agreed. She didn’t like the slightly sarcastic tone she thought she detected in the man’s words.

“Yes, indeed.”

“Speaking of which, how did you do it? Can I have a look at your computer?”

Bruna could feel her shoulders tensing. Did they suspect something? Worse still, did they know something?

“Of course,” she replied matter-of-factly.

And she immediately removed the thin, flexible, semitransparent device from her wrist and passed it to Serra.

The deputy took the machine, turned it over in his fingers a few times, and switched it off and turned it on again. The mobile restarted and the screen welcomed Annie Heart, and Bruna mentally thanked Mirari for her impeccable work. At that moment she realized with horror that she was carrying her own mobile in the pocket of her elegant trousers. In all the rush, she had forgotten to leave it in her hotel room when she was getting changed. And on top of that, she now couldn’t remember whether or not she’d switched the mobile off. And if a call came in? A sudden wave of anxiety left her in a cold sweat. Luckily, Serra was too busy inspecting the computer, because the rep was convinced that her expression had changed. Vaguely, on the other side of her anxiety, she sensed that the man was saying something to her
that she hadn’t managed to pick up. She breathed deeply and felt the powerful cocktail of antistress hormones that strengthened her combat rep body kick in. An invisible line of lucid calmness descended through her body like a curtain of water extinguishing a fire. She put a smile on her face to distract him. Just in time. The deputy turned his face toward her and looked at her.

“Aren’t you going to tell me?” he asked.

“What?”

“I was asking you how you did it. If you try to cancel the GPS and you don’t have an authorization code issued by a judge, the machine self-destructs.”

Bruna reflected coldly for a fraction of a second and decided what she was going to say.

“Well, you see, it’s quite complicated. You can only do it in parallel sync with a central computer. You connect the mobile peripherally and then you type a virtual port link into your mobile’s IDD; you manipulate the values until you access the residual profile of the HTC and the apex code. You can do this with a cryptorobot, but it’s slow and difficult. Even though I used some special algorithms, I still needed to search through millions of numbers before I found the code...Are you with me?”

Serra nodded yes, even though his expression clearly showed that he’d become lost in the tangle of words. Bruna had no idea what she was saying, but she had assumed that the supremacist wouldn’t be able to work that out.

“So, what you do is trick the mobile into thinking it’s part of the mainframe.”

“You seem to know a lot about all that.”

“Well, I am a professor of applied robotics.”

The man scowled and gave her back her mobile. The rep adjusted it on her wrist while she thought about the other mobile she was carrying in her pocket; she had to get out of the car as quickly as possible.

“I see we’re going round the block. Are we waiting for someone? Why did you make me come?” she asked.

To sniff around in my hotel room in the meantime
, she answered herself. Which wasn’t a problem. Having anticipated that possibility, she had scattered the likely contents of a basic suitcase around the room. In reality, the fact that Serra had made the appointment in order to be able to search her belongings was a reassuring supposition; it meant her plan was working.

“It’s just a security procedure. You have to understand our caution. The party finds itself in a very difficult position thanks to this puppet government,” said Serra.

“That’s precisely why I want to see Hericio. I’m beginning to think that you talk a lot but don’t actually do anything. Like all the others,” said the android.

The man stiffened.

“You don’t know what you’re saying. You know nothing.”

“Oh no? What don’t I know? What are you good for, apart from appearing on the news spouting big words?”

It was such crude bait that Bruna didn’t expect the man to bite, but sometimes you get information in the most ridiculous way. Not this time. Serra frowned, annoyed, and touched the panel in front of him. The vehicle stopped next to the sidewalk and opened the door.

“We’ll give you a call,” the man grunted.

“It had better be soon. Tomorrow or the next day. I leave town on Sunday,” Bruna answered imperiously; the cover Mirari had provided wouldn’t last much longer.

Serra didn’t answer. The car shut its door and sped off again. The detective watched it disappear and repressed the urge to take her mobile out of her pocket; it was possible that her tail was still nearby. Above her head, the public screen was showing dreadful images of combat androids slaughtering humans. They were old tapes from the Rep War. “Are you going to allow this to happen
again?” the soundtrack kept repeating on a continuous loop over the massacre.

Back in the hotel, the detective took off Annie with a sigh of relief. This dual-personality work was eating at her nerves like acid. She checked and found that her own mobile had not only been switched off but deactivated. Then she put the power source back in its place and switched on, and instantly there was a call from Lizard. The policeman must have left his automatic reconnect activated.

“What are you up to, Husky? You’ve been switched off and untraceable for hours,” he grumbled.

“Why are you so irritated? Because I get away from your bloodhound surveillance, or because you’re concerned about my well-being?”

Bruna had fallen back on a very old trick: when you are asked a question you don’t want to answer, reply with another question—an annoying one if possible. So she had behaved according to the manual, but she felt that she was gliding unstably over the words like someone slipping on ice. She felt she really wanted Lizard to answer. To reassure her that, yes, he was worried about what could happen to her in this world, which was ever more dangerous for her. But he didn’t say anything like that.

“I was looking for you because I got an appointment with the chancellor-priest at the Embassy of Labari. In case you wanted to come. It was you who suggested I give him a call.”

Yes, of course she wanted to. The legation was quite far from the Majestic, so she decided to catch a cab again despite her renewed intention to economize. But after wasting ten minutes standing at the edge of the sidewalk failing to get anyone to stop, she had to catch the subway. It was clear that the human cabdrivers didn’t want to pick up a combat techno, and in Madrid the cabdrivers’ union had prevented the adoption of automatic cabs like those that existed in other cities. As far as techno cabdrivers
were concerned—they seemed to have disappeared. In reality, reps were hard to find anywhere.

She arrived at the appointment feeling exhausted; it had turned into a wretched day of nonstop rushing around. The headquarters of the representatives of Labari was an enormous, very old building located on Estados Unidos de la Tierra Avenue, next to the Prado Museum. It had been a Catholic church—San Jerónimo—for centuries, until it was burned down and half-demolished during the Robot Wars. The impoverished Catholic Church, driven to the wall by its internal crises, the progressive secularization of the world, and the fact that individuals eager for certainty preferred more radical doctrines, found itself obliged to sell the ruins to a consortium that was actually a front for their most vitriolic rivals, the Ones of the Kingdom of Labari, who constructed a heavy, cheerless version of the chapel. Now, gazing at that mass painted in ritualistic Labaric dark purple, the detective shivered. That archaic, overwhelming, and severe building represented a declaration of principles, a definition in stone of intransigence.

“Come on, Bruna, what are you doing? Don’t lag behind. We’re late,” muttered Lizard.

And the rep forced herself to walk behind the policeman and into the embassy of a world on which her species was forbidden.

The interior must have been a soaring nave in its time, as the inside of Catholic churches used to be, but it was now compartmentalized like any other building, with various floors and normal living spaces. Or almost normal. As they passed from room to room, from the entrance to the security precinct and then to the waiting room, the detective felt a vague tightness growing in her chest. The height of the rooms was much greater than their width. They were, in fact, unpleasantly narrow and their never-ending walls were covered with thick, bruise-colored curtains that fell heavily from above.

“What a cheerful place,” murmured Lizard.

Just then a man came to fetch them. His head was shaved and a chain had been driven through his earlobes and hung over his chest like a collar.
Maybe he’s a slave
, the detective said to herself as they followed him. Up to that point, they hadn’t seen a single woman. Before allowing them to enter the office, the possible slave turned to them.

“Call him
Your Eminence
. That’s his title. And you must use the old polite form of address. You must address him formally. Don’t forget.”

The chancellor-priest received them in a room whose walls rose dizzily to a dark and distant vaulted ceiling. It must have been the height of the original San Jerónimo church, but the room was a relatively small space with a hexagonal floor, which made it feel like a stifling well. The purple hangings covered only the lower half of the walls, and farther up, the bare stones were lost in the shadows. The diplomat was a mature man with long, gray hair caught up in a ponytail on the top of his head in the style typical of Labaric leaders. He was seated behind a large, solid wooden table.

“The Sacred Principle is the principle,” he said pompously, using the ritual greeting of the Ones.

“Thank you for receiving us, Your Eminence,” Paul Lizard replied.

“It’s my job,” the man muttered with icy arrogance.

There was something odd about his face. At first glance, his high cheekbones, pointed chin, and elevated eyebrows—shaped like circumflexes similar to those in the old drawings of the devil—gave the impression of a long, severe, and bony face. But then you noticed the quivering chubby cheeks, the overall flabbiness of the flesh, and the roundness of his squashed face. It was as if a pudgy man with a big head were transforming himself into a thin, angular person, but the process had been halted by mistake halfway. The cheekbones, the chin, and those impossible eyebrows, which looked like two pointy little roofs, had to
be the product of a surgeon’s knife. Bruna had read somewhere that the Labaric religion didn’t allow plastic surgery solely for aesthetic purposes, but it did if the operation had a moral purpose. Perhaps endowing this flabby, insipid person with a more imposing and spiritual appearance had been considered a sacred mandate.