Chapter THIRTEEN
I awoke to the sound of the ezan being called somewhere nearby, poetry turned querulous and metallic in the multiple throats of a mosque’s loudspeakers. It was a sound I’d last heard in the skies over Zihicce on Sharya, and it had been shortly followed by the shrill aerial scream of marauder bombs. Above my head, light streamed down through the latticed bars of an ornate window. There was a dull, bloated feeling in my guts that told me my period was due.
I sat up on the wooden floor and looked down at myself. They’d sleeved me in a woman’s body, young, no more than twenty years old with copper-sheened skin and a heavy bell of black hair that, when I put my hands to it, felt lank and dirty with the onset of the period. My skin was faintly greasy and from somewhere I got the idea that I had not bathed in a while. I was clothed in a rough khaki shirt several sizes too big for my sleeve and nothing else. Beneath it, my breasts felt swollen and tender. I was barefoot.
I got up and went to the window. There was no glass but it was well above my new head height, so I hauled myself up on the bars and peered out. A sun-drenched landscape of poorly tiled roofs stretched away as far as I could see, forested with listing receptor aerials and ancient satellite dishes. A cluster of minarets speared the horizon off to the left and an ascending aircraft trailed a line of white vapour somewhere beyond. The air that blew through was hot and humid.
My arms were beginning to ache, so I lowered myself back down to the floor and padded across the room to the door. Predictably, it was locked.
The ezan stopped.
Virtuality. They’d tapped into my memories and come up with this. I’d seen some of the most unpleasant things in a long career of human pain on Sharya. And the Sharyan religious police were as popular in interrogation software as Angin Chandra had been in pilot porn. And now, on this harsh virtual Sharya, they’d sleeved me in a woman.
Drunk one night, Sarah had told me Women are the race, Tak. No two ways about it. Male is just a mutation with more muscle and half the nerves. Fighting, f*cking machines. My own cross-sleevings had borne that theory out. To be a woman was a sensory experience beyond the male. Touch and texture ran deeper, an interface with environment that male flesh seemed to seal out instinctively. To a man, skin was a barrier, a protection. To a woman it was an organ of contact.
That had its disadvantages.
In general, and maybe because of this, female pain thresholds ran higher than male, but the menstrual cycle dragged them down to an all-time low once a month.
No neurachem. I checked.
No combat conditioning, no reflex of aggression.
Nothing.
Not even calluses on the young flesh.
The door banged open, and I jumped. Fresh sweat sprang out on my skin. Two bearded men with eyes of hot jet came into the room. They were both dressed in loose linen for the heat. One held a role of adhesive tape in his hands, the other a small blowtorch. I flung myself at them, just to unlock the freezing panic reflex and gain some measure of control over the built-in helplessness.
The one with the tape fended off my slim arms and backhanded me across the face. It floored me. I lay there, face numb, tasting blood. One of them yanked me back to my feet by an arm. Distantly, I saw the face of the other, the one who had hit me, and tried to focus on him.
“So,” he said. “We begin.”
I lunged for his eyes with the nails of my free arm. The Envoy training gave me the speed to get there but I had no control and I missed. Two of my nails drew blood on his cheek. He flinched and jumped back.
“Bitch cunt,” he said, lifting a hand to the claw mark and examining the blood on his fingers.
“Oh, please,” I managed, out of the unnumbed side of my mouth. “Do we have to have the script too? Just because I’m wearing this—”
I jammed to a halt. He looked pleased. “Not Irene Elliott, then,” he said. “We progress.”
This time he hit me just under the ribcage, driving all the breath out of my body and paralysing my lungs. I folded over his arm like a coat and slid off onto the floor, trying to draw breath. All that came out was a faint creaking sound. I twisted on the floorboards while, somewhere high above me, he retrieved the adhesive tape from the other man and unsnapped a quarter-metre length. It made an obscene tearing sound, like skin coming off. Shredding it free with his teeth, he squatted beside me and taped my right wrist to the floor above my head. I thrashed as if galvanised and it took him a moment to immobilise my other arm long enough to repeat the process. An urge to scream that wasn’t mine surfaced and I fought it down. Pointless. Conserve your strength.
The floor was hard and uncomfortable against the soft skin of my elbows. I heard a grating sound and turned my head. The second man was drawing up a pair of stools from the side of the room. While the one who had beaten me taped my legs apart, the spectator sat down on one of the stools, produced a packet of cigarettes and shook one out. Grinning broadly at me, he put it in his mouth and reached down for the blowtorch. When his companion stepped back to admire his handiwork, he offered him the packet. It was declined. The smoker shrugged, ignited the blowtorch and tilted his head to light up from it.
“You will tell us,” he said, gesturing with the cigarette and pluming smoke into the air above me, “everything you know about Jerry’s Closed Quarters and Elizabeth Elliott.”
The blowtorch hissed and chuckled softly to itself in the quiet room. Sunlight poured in through the high window and brought with it, infinitely faintly, the sounds of a city full of people.
They started with my feet.
The screaming runs on and on, higher and louder than I ever believed a human throat could render, shredding my hearing. Traceries of red streak across my vision.
Innenininennininennin …
Jimmy de Soto staggers into view, Sunjet gone, gory hands plastered to his face. The shrieks peel out from his stumbling figure, and for a moment I can almost believe it’s his contamination alarm that’s making the noise. I check my own shoulder meter reflexively, then the half-submerged edge of an intelligible word rises through the agony and I know it’s him.
He is standing almost upright, a clearcut sniper target even in the chaos of the bombardment. I throw myself across the open ground and knock him into the cover of a ruined wall. When I roll him onto his back to see what’s happened to his face, he’s still screaming. I pull his hands away from his face by main force and the raw socket of his left eye gapes up at me in the murk. I can still see fragments of the eye’s mucous casing on his fingers.
“Jimmy, JIMMY, what the f*ck…”
The screaming sandpapers on and on. It’s taking all my strength to prevent him going back for the other undamaged eye as it wallows in its socket. My spine goes cold as I realise what’s happening.
Viral strike.
I stop yelling at Jimmy and bawl down the line.
“Medic! Medic! Stack down! Viral strike!”
And the world caves in as I hear my own cries echoed up and dawn the Innenin beachhead.
After a while, they leave you alone, curled around your wounds. They always do. It gives you time to think about what they have done to you, more importantly about what else they have not yet done. The fevered imagining of what is still to come is almost as potent a tool in their hands as the heated irons and blades themselves.
When you hear them returning, the echo of footsteps induces such fear that you vomit up what little bile you have left in your stomach.
Imagine a satellite blow-up of a city on mosaic, 1:10,000 scale. It’ll take up most of a decent interior wall, so stand well back. There are certain obvious things you can tell at a glance. Is it a planned development or did it grow organically, responding to centuries of differing demand? Is it or was it ever fortified? Does it have a seaboard? Look closer, and you can learn more. Where the major thoroughfares are likely to be, if there is an IP shuttle port, if the city has parks. You can maybe, if you’re a trained cartographer, even tell a little about the movements of the inhabitants. Where the desirable areas of town are, what the traffic problems are likely to be and if the city has suffered any serious bomb damage or riots recently.
But there are some things you will never know from that picture. However much you magnify and reel in detail, it can’t tell you if crime is generally on the increase, or what time the citizens go to bed. It can’t tell you if the mayor is planning to tear down the old quarter, if the police are corrupt, or what strange things have been happening at Number Fifty-One, Angel Wharf. And the fact that you can break down the mosaic into boxes, move it around and reassemble it elsewhere makes no difference. Some things you will only ever learn by going into that city and talking to the inhabitants.
Digital Human Storage hasn’t made interrogation obsolescent, it’s just brought back the basics. A digitised mind is only a snapshot. You don’t capture individual thoughts any more than a satellite image captures an individual life. A psychosurgeon can pick out major traumas on an Ellis model, and make a few basic guesses about what needs to be done, but in the end she’s still going to have to generate a virtual environment in which to counsel her patient, and go in there and do it. Interrogators, whose requirements are so much more specific, have an even worse time.
What d.h. storage has done is make it possible to torture a human being to death, and then start again. With that option available, hypnotic and drug-based questioning went out the window long ago. It was too easy to provide the necessary chemical or mental counterconditioning in those for whom this sort of thing was a hazard of their trade.
There’s no kind of conditioning in the known universe that can prepare you for having your feet burnt off. Or your nails torn out.
Cigarettes stubbed out on your breasts.
A heated iron inserted into your vagina.
The pain. The humiliation.
The damage.
Psychodynamics/Integrity training.
Introduction.
The mind does interesting things under extreme stress. Hallucination, displacement, retreat. Here in the Corps, you will learn to use them all, not as blind reactions to adversity, but as moves in a game.
The red hot metal sinks into flesh, parting the skin like polythene. The pain consumes, but worse is seeing it happen. Your scream, once disbelief, is by now gruesomely familiar in your ears. You know it won’t stop them, but you still scream, begging—
“Some f*cking game, eh pal?”
Jimmy grinning up at me from his death. Innenin is still around us, but that can’t be. He was still screaming when they took him away. In reality—
His face changes abruptly, turns sombre.
“You keep reality out of this, there’s nothing for you there. Stay removed. Have they done her any structural harm?”
I wince. “Her feet. She can’t walk.”
“Motherf*ckers,” he says matter of factly. “Why don’t we just tell them what they want to know?”
“We don’t know what they want to know. They’re after this guy Ryker.”
“Ryker, who the f*ck’s he?”
“I don’t know.”
He shrugs. “So spill about Bancroft. Or you still feeling honour-bound or something?”
“I think I already spilled. They don’t buy it. It’s not what they want to hear. These are f*cking amateurs, man. Meatpackers.”
“You keep screaming it, they got to believe it sooner or later.”
“That isn’t the f*cking point, Jimmy. When this is over, it doesn’t matter who I am, they’re going to put a bolt through my stack and sell the body off for spare parts.”
“Yeah.” Jimmy puts one finger into his empty eye socket and scratches absently at the clotted gore within. “See your point. Well, in a construct situation, what you got to do is get to the next screen somehow. Right?”
During the period on Harlan’s World known, with typical grim humour, as the Unsettlement, guerrillas in the Quellist Black Brigades were surgically implanted with a quarter-kilo of enzyme-triggered explosive that would, on demand, turn the surrounding fifty square metres and anything in it to ash. It was a tactic that met with questionable success. The enzyme in question was fury-related and the conditioning required for arming the device was patchy. There were a number of involuntary detonations. Still, no one ever volunteered to interrogate a member of the Black Brigades. Not after the first one, anyway. Her name—
You thought they could do nothing worse, but now the iron is inside you and they are letting it heat up slowly, giving you time to think about it. Your pleading is babbled—
As I was saying …
Her name was Iphigenia Deme, Iffy to those of her friends that had not yet been slaughtered by Protectorate forces. Her last words, strapped to the interrogation table downstairs at Number Eighteen, Shimatsu Boulevard, are reputed to have been: That’s f*cking enough!
The explosion brought the entire building down.
That’s f*cking enough!
I jackknifed awake, the last of my screams still shrilling inside me, hands scrabbling to cover remembered wounds. Instead, I found young, undamaged flesh beneath crisp linen, a faint rocking motion and the sound of small waves lapping nearby. Above my head was a sloping wooden ceiling and a porthole through which low angled sunlight flooded. I sat up in the narrow bunk and the sheet fell away from my breasts. The coppery upper slopes were smooth and unscarred, the nipples intact.
Back to start.
Beside the bed was a simple wooden chair with a white T-shirt and canvas trousers folded neatly over it. There were rope sandals on the floor. The tiny cabin held nothing else of interest apart from another bunk, the twin of mine, whose covers were thrown carelessly back, and a door. A bit crude, but the message was clear. I slipped into the clothes and walked out onto the sunlit deck of a small fishing boat.
“Aha, the dreamer.” The woman seated in the stern of the skiff clapped her hands together as I emerged. She was about ten years older than the sleeve I was wearing, and darkly handsome in a suit cut from the same linen as my trousers. There were espadrilles on her bare feet and wide-lensed sunglasses over her eyes. In her lap was a sketch pad shaded with what looked like a cityscape. As I stood there, she set it aside and stood up to greet me. Her movements were elegant, self assured. I felt gawky by comparison.
I looked over the side at the blue water.
“What is it this time?” I said with forced lightness. “Feed me to the sharks?”
She laughed, showing perfect teeth. “No, that won’t be necessary at this stage. All I want to do is talk.”
I stood loose limbed, staring at her. “So talk.”
“Very well.” The woman folded herself gracefully back onto the seat at the stern. “You have involved yourself in matters that are clearly not your affair, and you have suffered as a result. My interest is, I think, identical to yours. That is, to avoid further unpleasantness.”
“My interest is in seeing you die.”
A small smile. “Yes, I’m sure it is. Even a virtual death would probably be very satisfying. So, at this point, let me point out that the specifics for this construct include fifth dan shotokan proficiency.”
She extended a hand to show me the calluses on her knuckles. I shrugged.
“Moreover, we can always return to the way things were earlier.” She pointed out over the water and, following her arm, I saw the city she had been sketching on the horizon. Squinting into the reflected sunlight, I could make out the minarets. I almost managed to smile at the cheap psychology of it. A boat. The sea. Escape. These boys had bought their programming off the rack.
“I don’t want to go back there,” I said truthfully.
“Good. Then tell us who you are.”
I tried not to let the surprise show on my face. The deep-cover training awoke, spinning lies. “I thought I had.”
“What you have said is somewhat confused, and you curtailed the interrogation by stopping your own heart. You are not Irene Elliott, that much is certain. You do not appear to be Elias Ryker, unless he has undergone substantial retraining. You claim a connection with Laurens Bancroft, and also to be an offworlder, a member of the Envoy Corps. This is not what we expected.”
“I bet it isn’t,” I muttered.
“We do not wish to be involved in matters which do not concern us.”
“You already are involved. You’ve abducted and tortured an Envoy. You got any idea what the Corps will do to you for that. They’ll hunt you down and feed your stacks to the EMP. All of you. Then your families, then your business associates, then their families and then anyone else who gets in the way. By the time they’ve finished you won’t even be a memory. You don’t f*ck with the Corps and live to write songs about it. They’ll eradicate you.”
It was a colossal bluff. The Corps and I had not been on speaking terms for at least a decade of my subjective lifeline, and the best part of a century of objective time. But throughout the Protectorate the Envoys were a threat that could be dealt across the table to anyone up to and including a planetary President with the same assurance that small children in Newpest are threatened with the Patchwork Man.
“It was my understanding,” said the woman quietly, “that the Envoy Corps were banned from operations on Earth unless UN mandated. Perhaps you have as much to lose by revelation as anyone else?”
Mr.Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN Court, which is more or less common knowledge. Oumou Prescott’s words came back to me, and I leapt to parry.
“Perhaps you would like to take that up with Laurens Bancroft and the UN Court,” I suggested, folding my arms.
The woman looked at me for a while. The wind ruffled my hair, bringing with it the faint rumble of the city. Finally, she said, “You are aware we could erase your stack, and break down your sleeve into pieces so small there would be no trace. There would, effectively, be nothing to find.”
“They’d find you,” I said, with the confidence that a strand of truth in the lie provides. ”You can’t hide from the Corps. They’ll find you whatever you do. About the only thing you can hope for now is to try to cut a deal.”
“What deal?” she asked woodenly.
In the fractions of a second before I spoke, my mind went into overdrive, measuring the tilt and power of every syllable chosen before it was launched. This was the escape window. There wouldn’t be another chance.
“There’s a biopirate operation moving stolen military custom through the West Coast,” I said carefully. “They’re being fronted by places like Jerry’s.”
“And they called the Envoys?” The woman’s tone was scornful. “For biopirates? Come on, Ryker. Is that the best you can do?”
“I’m not Ryker,” I snapped. “This sleeve’s a cover. Look, you’re right. Nine times out often, this stuff doesn’t touch us. The Corps wasn’t designed to take on criminality at that level. But these people have taken some items they should never have touched. Rapid response diplomatic bioware. Stuff they should never even have seen. Someone’s pissed off about it—and I mean at UN Praesidium level—so they call us in.”
The woman frowned. “And the deal?”
“Well, first of all you cut me loose, and no one talks about this to anybody. Let’s call it a professional misunderstanding. And then you open some channels for me. Name some names. Black clinic like this, the information circulates. That might be worth something to me.”
“As I said before, we do not wish to involve ourselves—”
I came off the rail, letting just enough anger bleed through. “Don’t f*ck with me, pal. You are involved. Like it or not, you took a big bite of something that didn’t concern you, and now you’re going to either chew it or spit it out. Which is it going to be?”
Silence. Only the sea breeze between us, the faint rocking of the boat.
“We will consider this,” said the woman.
Something happened to the glinting light on the water. I shifted my gaze out past the woman’s shoulder and saw how the brightness unstitched itself from the waves and scribbled into the sky, magnifying. The city whited out as if from a nuclear flash, the edges of the boat faded, as if into a sea mist. The woman opposite went with it. It became very quiet.
I raised a hand to touch the mist where the parameters of the world ended and my arm seemed to move in slow motion. There was a static hiss like rain building under the silence. The ends of my fingers turned transparent, then white like the minarets of the city under the flash. I lost the power of motion and the white crept up my arm. The breath stopped in my throat, my heart paused in mid-beat. I was.
Not.