“I’m a hundred and fifty and I feel just as good as I did the day I went on.”
“I’ll bet you can’t even remember. No one remembers.” Her eyes are on the gun again, but they come up off it to look at me. “But I do. Now. And it’s better this way. A thousand times better than living forever.”
I make a face. “Live through your kid and all that?”
“You wouldn’t understand. None of you would.”
I look away. I don’t know why. I’m the one with the gun. I’m running everything, but she’s looking at me, and something gets tight inside me when she says that. If I was imaginative, I’d say it was some little bit of old primal monkey trying to drag itself out of the muck and make itself heard. Some bit of the critter we were before. I look at the kid — the girl — and she’s looking back at me. I wonder if they all do the trick with the hat, or if this one’s special somehow. If they all like to put hats on their killers’ heads. She smiles at me and ducks her head back under her mother’s arm. The woman’s got her eyes on my gun.
“You want to shoot me?” I ask.
Her eyes come up. “No.”
I smile slightly. “Come on. Be honest.”
Her eyes narrow. “I’d blow your head off if I could.”
Suddenly I’m tired. I don’t care anymore. I’m sick of the dirty kitchen and the dark rooms and the smell of dirty makeshift diapers. I give the Grange a push, shove it closer to her. “Go ahead. You going to kill an old life so you can save one that isn’t even going to last? I’m going to live forever, and that little girl won’t last longer than seventy years even if she’s lucky — which she won’t be — and you’re practically already dead. But you want to waste my life?” I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff. Possibility seethes around me. “Give it a shot.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m giving you your shot. You want to try for it? This is your chance.” I shove the Grange a little closer, baiting her. I’m tingling all over. My head feels light, almost dizzy. Adrenaline rushes through me. I push the Grange even closer to her, suddenly not even sure if I’ll fight her for the gun, or if I’ll just let her have it. “This is your chance.”
She doesn’t give a warning.
She flings herself across the table. Her kid flies out of her arms. Her fingers touch the gun at the same time as I yank it out of reach. She lunges again, clawing across the table. I jump back, knocking over my chair. I step out of range. She stretches toward the gun, fingers wide and grasping, desperate still, even though she knows she’s already lost.
I point the gun at her.
She stares at me, then puts her head down on the table and sobs.
The girl is crying too. She sits bawling on the floor, her little face screwed up and red, crying along with her mother who’s given everything in that one run at my gun: all her hopes and years of hidden dedication, all her need to protect her progeny, everything. And now she lies sprawled on a dirty table and cries while her daughter howls from the floor. The girl keeps screaming and screaming.
I sight the Grange on the girl. She’s exposed, now. She’s squalling and holding her hands out to her mother, but she doesn’t get up. She just holds out her hands, waiting to be picked up and held by a lady who doesn’t have anything left to give. She doesn’t notice me or the gun.
One quick shot and she’s gone, paint hole in the forehead and brains on the wall just like spaghetti and the crying’s over and all that’s left is gunpowder burn and cleanup calls.
But I don’t fire.
Instead, I holster my Grange and walk out the door, leaving them to their crying and their grime and their lives.
It’s raining again, outside. Thick ropes of water spout off the eaves and spatter the ground. All around me the jungle seethes with the chatter of monkeys. I pull up my collar and resettle my hat. Behind me, I can barely hear the crying anymore.
Maybe they’ll make it. Anything is possible. Maybe the kid will make it to eighteen, get some black market rejoo and live to be a hundred and fifty. More likely, in six months, or a year, or two years, or ten, a cop will bust down the door and pop the kid. But it won’t be me.
I run for my cruiser, splashing through mud and vines and wet. And for the first time in a long time, rain feels new.
SNOW IN THE DESERT
Neal Asher
A sand shark broke through the top face of the dune only to be snatched by a crab-bird and shredded in mid-air. Hirald squatted down, turned on her chameleonwear, and faded into the violet sand, only her Toshiba goggles and the blunt snout of her singun visible. The crab bird was a small one, but she had quickly learnt never to underestimate them. If the prey were too large for one to take, it would take pieces instead. No motile source of protein was too large to attack. The shame was that all the life-forms on Vatch were based on left helix proteins, so to a crab-bird human flesh was completely without nourishment. The birds did not know this and just became irritable as their hunger increased. The circle was vicious.
The bird stripped the shark of its blade-legs and armoured mandibles and flew off with the bleeding and writhing torso, probably to feed to its chick. Hirald stood and faded back into existence; a tall woman in a tight-fitting body suit webbed with cooling veins and hung with insulated pockets. On her back she carried a desert survival pack, for the look of things. The singun went into a button-down holster that looked as if it might only hold a simple projectile weapon, not the formidable device it did hold. She removed her goggles, mask and hat, and tucked them away in one of her many pockets before moving on across the sand. Her thin features, blue eyes, and long blond hair were exposed to oven temperatures and skin-flaying ultraviolet. Such had been the way of things for many weeks now. Occasionally she drank some water; a matter of form, just in case anyone was watching.
He was called, inevitably, Snow, but with his plastron mask and dust robes it was not immediately evident he was an albino. The mask, made from the shell of an Earth-import terrapin, was what identified him to those who knew of him, that, and his tendency to leave corpses behind him. At last count the reward for his stasis-preserved testicles was twenty thousand shillings, or the equivalent value in precious metals like copper or manganese. Many people had tried for the reward and their epitaph was just that; they had tried. Three people at the water station, on the edge of the Menilar flat, were waiting to try. They had weapons, strength, and skill, balanced against the crippling honour code of the Andronache. Snow had all the former and no honour code. Born on Earth so long ago even he doubted his memories of the time, he had long since dispensed with anything that might get in the way of plain survival. Morality, he often argued, is a purely human invention only to be indulged in times of plenty. Another of his little aphorisms ran something along the lines of; if you’re up shit creek without a paddle, don’t expect the coast guard. His contemporaries on Vatch never knew what to make of that one, but then Vatchians had no use for words like creek, coast, or paddle.
The water station was an ovoid of metal mounted ten metres above the ground on a forest of scaffolding. Nailing it to the ground was the silvery tube of the geothermal energy tap that provided the power for the transmuter; the reason it was possible for humans to exist on this practically waterless planet. The transmuter took complex compounds, stripped them of their elementary hydrogen, and combined that with the abundant oxygen given off by the dryform algae that turned all the sands of Vatch to violet. Water was the product, but there were many interesting by-products; strange metals and silica compounds were one of the planet’s main exports.