‘Joan loves Samsara,’ Kate said.
Axl looked up at that.
‘She always dreamed of helping fill a world where there would never be war. She’ll like it here…’
‘Joan’s dead,’ Axl told Kate.
‘No,’ said Kate.
Then she said, ‘yes.’ And the sobs really would have started then except Kate didn’t allow herself the luxury. But once she stopped shaking, she told Axl something he should already have realised. The memory beads weren’t the key, Mai was.
The kid carried the Pope’s dreams locked off inside her head. Sucked and dumped by some psi Jesuit. Slowly and seriously, never quite looking at Axl, Kate crouched there on her bed and told Axl about Antioch, an ancient order turned renegade and then brought back into the fold.
‘We got the medical data when we acquired the Geneticists,’ Kate said flatly. The deal was actually more of a reverse takeover, even Axl knew that and he never listened to the financial newsfeeds. Rome had bought out the Church of Christ Geneticist, acquiring the laboratory complex at San Lorenzo in Megrib. And with the lab came patents, outlines of projects that had failed and all the data that hadn’t been released for peer review… They also got Alex Gibson, the world’s only living God (if you left out the Dalai Lama, who disowned divinity). Though they still hadn’t worked out what to do with him.
What she was telling him sounded incredible, Kate admitted that. But she wanted Joan back, not for the world but for herself. Get yourself cloned and any half-decent clinic could suck up memories from a soul chip and spit them back into a fresh cortex. Feelings were something else. And the problem with straight copying was you know what happened to you, maybe even why it happened. What you didn’t get from a soul chip is what you felt while it was happening. It brought a whole new meaning to cognitive dissonance.
Joan was fifty-five. So her brain would have processed the equivalent of 300 million books. Which sounded big but came out as around ten terrabites of memory, not remotely hard for five chips.
But dreams are like feelings. Just as you can’t chip the flickering dendritic matrix that ties emotionally-rich events into a shifting web of neural connections, so it’s impossible to hardcopy the rush that kicks in during REM sleep when the frontal lobes shut down, emotional centres fire up and the brain swims with acetyl-choline.
‘What if she didn’t love me?’ Kate said. ‘What if I downloaded Joan’s memory beads into a blank and it knew it loved me but couldn’t remember why?’ I couldn’t take that risk ...'
‘You’ve got hard-form back-ups for Joan’s senses. And you’ve got her dreams as well?’ Axl didn’t know whether to be shocked or seriously impressed.
Kate nodded. ‘Everything except Joan. Because she didn’t believe in clones…’ Kate caught herself. ‘Oh, she believed they were human. God knows, she fought for equal rights…’ Her voice was harsh. ‘But not for herself. She didn’t believe in back-ups.’
‘But the memory beads ...'
‘History.’ Kate’s laugh was as bleak as her words. ‘Back-up for the Vatican library. Joan believed in history. That, and the essential goodness of the human race.’
‘And the dreams?’
‘Sheer luck,’ said Kate. ‘Joan suffered nightmares. Father Sylvester flew in from San Lorenzo to do a dreamlift. I thought it would give her a week or so of peace.’
Axl looked appalled. He didn’t intend to, but he couldn’t help it.
‘He was going to return them when she got back from Mexico. Only it didn’t happen, did it?’
‘No,’ Axl could comprehensively say it didn’t. Joan got ripped apart by a pack of consensually-hallucinating street kids and Kate got landed with Joan’s dreams, and back-up of her vision, smell, sound, memory and touch but no blank Joan to load them into.
‘So now you know,’ said Kate and headed for the door. Adding over her shoulder, ‘I’m going to shower.’ She didn’t say it would be good if you were gone when I get back. But the message was there in her voice and in the way Kate didn’t meet Axl’s eye as she shut the door. Leaving him alone and still naked on her bed.
And he would have gone too, back to his room or out of that house, up into one of the higher valleys or even off Samsara altogether, whatever she wanted. Except that he took one last look around her room, imprinting it onto memory and that was when he found the bug.
PaxForce issue, Intel-chipped.
Chapter Forty
Hill/Slope/River
Mai wasn’t in her room. She wasn’t down in the kitchen with Louis, either.
‘Mai?’ Axl demanded, but Louis just scowled. Whatever he thought of Axl spending the night with Kate, he made it obvious he didn’t think much of Axl coming straight down afterwards asking for Mai.
The little fat man hit the nearest wall, bounced off it into a pine table and was clutching his hip before he even hit the tiled floor.
‘Where?’ Axl demanded, picking up a knife. A sabatier-black handle and brass rivets, French-made-for refugees they had more than their share of home comforts.
Louis took one look at the blade and began crawling backwards out of Axl’s reach. He knew just how fine a cutting edge the sabatier carried, having sharpened it in the first place.
‘Where’s Mai?’
‘Down in the village.’ The little priest was almost crying.
The door slammed behind Axl and he was gone. He skidded down a grass bank rather than go round by the path, his boots cutting long gouges into slippery earth. Sweet fuck, the only question that really needed answering was why hadn’t he seen the bug earlier. . . ?
Because his mind was in his balls. It was obvious, wasn’t it?
A small silver mosquito, wired for sound and vision. Fibre-optic eyes so small as to be almost invisible. Wings that doubled as solar panels and six tiny metal legs that let it cling to the wall near Kate’s bed. Basic stuff.
So why the fuck had it come as such a surprise? Waxy leaves whipped into his face as he slid between bushes but Axl hardly felt them, though his hands flipped up to protect his face all the same.
If that mosquito hadn’t been in shadow it would have been able to escape. But all that voice-activated broadcasting of what it had heard and seen had drained its power and not enough light could reach that wall for its wings to do more than mark time.
And besides, the Colonel had made one mistake. The bug was a low-valley model, not designed for this altitude or temperature. That was what made the thing easy to catch. It was also what made Axl notice it in the first place. Only, noticing the thing too late was no better than not noticing it at all.
‘Mai?’ The front room of the Inn was crowded with sleepy conscripts but it went quiet the moment Axl crashed through the door. The sabatier still clutched in his hand saw to that. Ketzia didn’t know where Mai was, or if she did she wasn’t saying.
Axl left the Inn with a couple of Tibetan women and a handful of grinning conscripts tagging. It took Axl all of two minutes to outrun his audience.
Maybe they’d expected him to cut Mai’s throat when he found her, Axl had no idea. He only knew that whatever they expected the conscripts were a whole lot less bored-looking than when he went in through the Inn door.
The corporal on the Z3 gyroByke had problems with the idea of handing over her Honda, so Axl left her flat on her back in the street thinking about it. Though it was a push to her shoulder, not a chop to her throat with the sabatier, that put her there.
Getting soft in his old age, Axl decided, wondering what the old revisionist version of his Colt would have said. But he didn’t really have time to worry about it. No one did, not now. He needed to get to Mai before the Colonel did. How long that took depended on how obsessively Colonel Emilio had PaxForce stripping out bug data for key words.