Chapter THIRTEEN
The Mandrake AI read the stack-stored soldiers we’d bought as three-dimensional machine-code data, and instantly wrote off a third as irretrievably psychologically damaged. Not worth talking to. Resurrected into virtuality, all they’d do would be scream themselves hoarse.
Hand shrugged it off.
“That’s about standard,” he said. “There’s always some wastage, whoever you buy from. We’ll run a psychosurgery dream sequencer on the others. That should give us a long shortlist without having to actually wake any of them up. Those are the want parameters.”
I picked up the hardcopy from the table and glanced through it. Across the conference room, the damaged soldiers’ data scrolled down on the wall screen in two-dimensional analogue.
“Experience of high-rad combat environments?” I looked up at the Mandrake exec. “Is this something I should know about?”
“Come on, Kovacs. You already do.”
“I.” The flash would reach into the mountains. Would chase the shadows out of gullies that hadn’t seen light so harsh in geological eons. “Had hoped it wouldn’t turn out that way.”
Hand examined the table top as if it needed resheening. “We needed the peninsula cleared,” he said carefully. “By the end of the week it will be. Kemp’s pulling back. Call it serendipity.”
Once, on reconnaissance along a ridge on the slumped spine of Dangrek, I’d seen Sauberville sparkling far off in the late afternoon sun. There was too much distance for detail—even with the neurachem racked up to maximum the city looked like a silver bracelet, flung down at the water’s edge. Remote, and unconnected with anything human.
I met Hand’s eyes across the table.
“So we’re all going to die.”
He shrugged. “It seems unavoidable, doesn’t it. Going in that soon after the blast. I mean, we can use clone stock with high tolerance for the new recruits, and antirad medication will keep us all functional for the time it takes, but in the long run…”
“Yeah, well in the long run I’ll be wearing out a designer sleeve in Latimer City.”
“Quite.”
“What kind of rad-tolerant sleeves you have in mind?”
Another shrug. “Don’t know for sure, I’ll have to talk to bioware. Maori stock, probably. Why, want one?”
I felt the Khumalo bioplates twitch in the flesh of my palms, as if angry, and shook my head.
“I’ll stick with what I’ve got, thanks.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“Now you come to mention it, no. But that isn’t it.” I jabbed a thumb at my own chest. “This is Wedge custom. Khumalo Biosystems. They don’t build better for combat than this stuff.”
“And the anti-rad?”
“It’ll hold up long enough for what we have to do. Tell me something, Hand. What are you offering the new recruits long-term? Aside from a new sleeve that may or may not stand up to the radiation? What do they get when we’re done?”
Hand frowned at the question. “Well. Employment.”
“They had that. Look where it got them.”
“Employment in Landfall.” For some reason the derision in my voice seemed to be chewing at him. Or maybe something else was. “Contracted security staff for Mandrake, guaranteed for the duration of the war or five years, whichever lasts longer. Does that meet your Quellist, Man-of-the-Downtrodden, Anarchist scruples?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Those are three very tenuously connected philosophies, Hand, and I don’t really subscribe to any of them. But if you’re asking, does it sound like a good alternative to being dead, I’d say so. If it were me, I’d probably want in at that price.”
“A vote of confidence.” Hand’s tone was withering. “How reassuring.”
“Provided, of course, I didn’t have friends and relatives in Sauberville. You might want to check for that in the back-data.”
He looked at me. “Are you trying to be funny?”
“I can’t think of anything very funny about wiping out an entire city.” I shrugged. “Just now, anyway. Maybe that’s just me.”
“Ah, so this is a moral qualm rearing its ugly head, is it?”
I smiled thinly. “Don’t be absurd, Hand. I’m a soldier.”
“Yes, it might be as well to remember that. And don’t take your surplus feelings out on me, Kovacs. As I said before, I am not actually calling in the strike on Sauberville. It is merely opportune.”
“Isn’t it just.” I tossed the hardcopy back across the table, trying not to wish it was a fused grenade. “So let’s get on with it. How long to run this dream sequencer?”
According to the psychosurgeons, we act more in keeping with our true selves in a dream than in any other situation, including the throes of orgasm and the moment of our deaths. Maybe that explains why so much of what we do in the real world makes so little sense.
It certainly makes for fast psychevaluation.
The dream sequencer, combined in the heart of the Mandrake AI with the want parameters and a Sauberville-related background check, went through the remaining seven kilos of functional human psyche in less than four hours. It gave us three hundred and eighty-seven possibles, with a high probability core of two hundred and twelve.
“Time to wake them up,” said Hand, flipping through profiles on screen and yawning. I felt my jaw muscles flexing in unwilling sympathy.
Perhaps out of mutual mistrust, neither of us had left the conference room while the sequencer ran, and after edging round the subject of Sauberville a bit more, we hadn’t had that much to say to each other either. My eyes were itchy from watching the data scroll down and not much else, my limbs twitched with the desire for some physical exertion and I was out of cigarettes. The impulse to yawn fought for control of my face.
“Have we really got to talk to all of them?”
Hand shook his head. “No, we really haven’t. There’s a virtual version of me in the machine with some psychosurgeon peripherals wired in. I’ll send it in to bring back the best dozen and a half. That’s if you trust me that far.”
I gave it up and yawned, finally, cavernously.
“Trust. Enabled. You want to get some air and a coffee?”
We left for the roof.
Up on top of the Mandrake Tower, the day was inking out to a desert indigo dusk. In the east, stars poked through the vast expanse of darkening Sanction IV sky. At the western horizon, it seemed as though the last of the sun’s juice was being crushed from between thin strips of cloud by the weight of the settling night. The shields were way down, letting in most of the evening’s warmth and a faint breeze out of the north.
I glanced around at the scattering of Mandrake personnel in the roof garden Hand had chosen. They formed pairs or small groups at the bars and tables and talked in modulated, confident tones that carried. Amanglic corporate standard sewn with the sporadic local music of Thai and French. No one appeared to be paying us any attention.
The language mix reminded me.
“Tell me, Hand.” I broke the seal on a new pack of Landfall Lights and drew one to life. “What was that shit out at the market today? That language the three of you were speaking, the left-handed gestures?”
Hand tasted his coffee and set it down. “You haven’t guessed?”
“Voodoo?”
“You might put it that way.” The pained look on the exec’s face told me he wouldn’t put it that way in a million years. “Though properly speaking it hasn’t been called that for several centuries. Neither was it called that back at the origin. Like most people who don’t know, you’re oversimplifying.”
“I thought that was what religion was. Simplification for the hard of thinking.”
He smiled. “If that is the case, then the hard of thinking seem to be in a majority, do they not?”
“They always are.”
“Well, perhaps.” Hand drank more coffee and regarded me over the cup. “You really claim to have no God? No higher power? The Harlanites are mostly Shintoists, aren’t they? That, or some Christian offshoot?”
“I’m neither,” I said flatly.
“Then you have no refuge against the coming of night? No ally when the immensity of creation presses down on the spine of your tiny existence like a stone column a thousand metres tall?”
“I was at Innenin, Hand.” I knocked ash off the cigarette and gave him back his smile, barely used. “At Innenin, I heard soldiers with columns about that tall on their backs screaming for a whole spectrum of higher powers. None of them showed up that I noticed. Allies like that I can live without.”
“God is not ours to command.”
“Evidently not. Tell me about Semetaire. That hat and coat. He’s playing a part, right?”
“Yes.” There was a cordial distaste leaking into Hand’s voice now. “He has adopted the guise of Ghede, in this case the lord of the dead—”
“Very witty.”
“—in an attempt to dominate the weaker-minded among his competitors. He is probably an adept of sorts, not without a certain amount of influence in the spirit realm, though certainly not enough to call up that particular personage. I am somewhat more.” He offered me a slight smile. “Accredited, shall we say. I was merely making that clear. Presenting my credentials, you might say, and establishing the fact that I found his act in poor taste.”
“Strange this Ghede hasn’t got around to making the same point, isn’t it?”
Hand sighed. “Actually, it’s very likely that Ghede, like you, sees the humour of the situation. For a Wise One, he is very easily amused.”
“Really.” I leaned forward, searching his face for some trace of irony. “You believe this shit, right? I mean, seriously?”
The Mandrake exec watched me for a moment, then he tipped back his head and gestured at the sky above us.
“Look at that, Kovacs. We’re drinking coffee so far from Earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. Stored as dreams in the mind of a machine that thinks in a fashion so far in advance of our own brains it might as well carry the name of god. We have been resurrected into bodies not our own, grown in a secret garden without the body of any mortal woman. These are the facts of our existence, Kovacs. How, then, are they different, or any less mystical, than the belief that there is another realm where the dead live in the company of beings so far beyond us we must call them gods?”
I looked away, oddly embarrassed by the fervour in Hand’s voice. Religion is funny stuff, and it has unpredictable effects on those who use it. I stubbed out my cigarette and chose my words with care.
“Well, the difference is that the facts of our existence weren’t dreamed up by a bunch of ignorant priests centuries before anyone had left the Earth’s surface or built anything resembling a machine. I’d say that on balance that makes them a better fit than your spirit realm for whatever reality we find out here.”
Hand smiled, apparently unoffended. He seemed to be enjoying himself “That is a local view, Kovacs. Of course, all the remaining churches have their origins in pre-industrial times, but faith is metaphor, and who knows how the data behind these metaphors has travelled, from where and for how long. We walk amidst the ruins of a civilisation that apparently had godlike powers thousands of years before we could walk upright. Your own world, Kovacs, is encircled by angels with flaming swords—”
“Whoa.” I lifted my hands, palms out. “Let’s damp down the metaphor core for a moment. Harlan’s World has a system of orbital battle platforms that the Martians forgot to decommission when they left.”
“Yes.” Hand gestured impatiently. “Orbitals built of some substance that resists every attempt to scan it, orbitals with the power to strike down a city or a mountain, but who forbear to destroy anything save those vessels that try to ascend into the heavens. What else is that but an angel?”
“It’s a f*cking machine, Hand. With programmed parameters that probably have their basis in some kind of planetary conflict—”
“Can you be sure of that?”
He was leaning across the table now. I found myself mirroring his posture as my own intensity stoked.
“Have you ever been to Harlan’s World, Hand? No, I thought not. Well I grew up there and I’m telling you the orbitals are no more mystical than any other Martian artefact—”
“What, no more mystical than the songspires?” His voice dropped to a hiss. “Trees of stone that sing to the rising and setting sun? No more mystical than a gate that opens like a bedroom door onto—”
He stopped abruptly and glanced around, face flushing with the near indiscretion. I sat back and grinned at him.
“Admirable passion, for someone in a suit that expensive. So you’re trying to sell me the Martians as voodoo gods. Is that it?”
“I’m not trying to sell you anything,” he muttered, straightening up. “And no, the Martians fit quite comfortably into this world. We don’t need recourse to the places of origin to explain them. I’m just trying to show you how limited your world view is without an acceptance of wonder.”
I nodded.
“Very good of you.” I stabbed a finger at him. “Just do me a favour, Hand. When we get where we’re going, keep this shit stowed, will you. I’m going to have enough to worry about without you weirding out on me.”
“I believe only what I have seen,” he said stiffly. “I have seen Ghede and Carrefour walk amongst us in the flesh of men, I have heard their voices speak from the mouths of the hougan, I have summoned them.”
“Yeah, right.”
He looked at me searchingly, offended belief melting slowly into something else. His voice loosened and flowed down to a murmur. “This is strange, Kovacs. You have a faith as deep as mine. The only thing I wonder is why you need so badly not to believe.”
That sat between us for almost a minute before I touched it. The noise from surrounding tables faded out and even the wind out of the north seemed to be holding its breath. Then I leaned forward, speaking less to communicate than to dispel the laser-lit recall in my head.
“You’re wrong, Hand,” I said quietly. “I’d love to have access to all this shit you believe. I’d love to be able to summon someone who’s responsible for this f*ck-up of a creation. Because then I’d be able to kill them. Slowly.”
Back in the machine, Hand’s virtual self worked the long shortlist down to eleven. It took nearly three months to do it. Run at the AI’s top capacity of three hundred and fifty times real time, the whole process was over shortly before midnight.
By that time, the intensity of the conversation up on the roof had mellowed, first into an exchange of experiential reverie, a kind of rummaging around in the things we had seen and done that tended to support our individual world views, and thence to increasingly vague observations on life threaded onto long mutual silences as we stared beyond the ramparts of the tower and out into the desert night. Hand’s pocket bleep broke into the powered-down mood like a note shattering glass.
We went down to look at what we had, blinking in the suddenly harsh lights inside the tower and yawning. Less than an hour later, as midnight turned over and the new day began, we turned off Hand’s virtual self and uploaded ourselves into the machine in his place.
Final selection.