‘Shoot yourself,’ suggested Axl. ‘You know it’s what everyone wants.’
The timecode now read -00.19.59 and flashed neon bright. And the ragged Elektrika mix feeding his aural nerves was wound so tight there was nowhere left for its step-fed chord changes to go…
Axl didn’t need the special effects, he knew he was late.
Minutes later, tourists scattered in a fruit market built under the walls of a monastery as Axl slid into a skid turn on damp cobbles and gunned the Honda between two stalls, grabbing a green pear on his way past.
The bpm plummeted, temple bells echoed over chanting. Without needing a cue, he’d hit the human touch.
The pear was hard and unripe like the soil that produced it, blistered across its belly from grubs eating its skin, but the skin wasn’t polymer and no Monsanto trademark ran down the inside of its core. The pear tasted sour and slightly woody, but Axl finished it anyway. There were people watching.
Weird as it might seem, he was going to miss Samsara. Seasons happened. Whichever way you looked at it, the place had USPs other destinations couldn’t imagine. You didn’t have to be rich to get in for a start. Though even the Dalai Lama would have trouble keeping the metaNational out once the atmosphere thickened and the temperature got hiked. Unless, of course, Tsongkhapa kept the place like it was. Axl could go for that. . .
Up ahead the market street split, two narrow lanes leading into shadow. Axl flipped right at random. No reason. Gunning the Honda, he ripped up the middle of a long incline steep enough to have pedestrians hunched forward as they walked. The walls either side were high and bare, windows beginning two floors above street level. The only breaks were sunken doorways that the peds stumbled back into as Axl raced past them.
And then the narrow street ended. Chopped off abruptly by a white wall at least five-feet thick if the depth of the open arch cut into it was anything to go by.
‘-00.29.59,’ read his timecode, but he’d been trying to ignore it since the readout flipped over to black fluoro, nine minutes, fifty-nine seconds ago.
Each tread in the stairway ahead dipped in the middle from centuries of constant use, except that was impossible and the steps had to have been cut or grown that way.
Axl could go on, or go back and try to find another route. For once instinct, conditioning and the backing track weren’t feeding him any clues. Twin halogens lit automatically as Axl nudged the Honda through the arch, then blipped the throttle again until the gyrobike began to climb, monoshocks eating up the concussion of each step.
Under-trained conscripts, yeah. Dubious ethics, ditto doubled. You could say what you like about PaxForce, but they did source the best kit. Back in the jungle that had been one of the reasons Axl made a point of stealing it whenever possible.
Axl grinned sourly. He was shattered, his limbic system was in neuropeptide free fall, his mind trying to hang onto dopamine like it was some brat refusing to give up a dummy.
Chances were Axl was going to need a new leg, or at least a splice from the knee down. And when those morphine crawlers shrivelled up and died he was going to be in such pain he hadn’t felt anything like it, at least not since last time.
And yet...
Axl blipped the Honda’s throttle and bounced up over the last step, landed heavily and felt ABS and gyro cut in a split second after the back wheel started to slide on marble. He was upright and roaring down a darkened corridor before he’d even had time to worry about hitting the ground. Above him filigreed lamps hung on long brass chains from a high ceiling. Tapestries smothered both walls, flicking by so fast that Axl could get no sense of what they showed, only that red and gold predominated.
The steady thud of his engine should have roared off the walls but it was missing, swallowed to a low thud by the tapestries. Inside his head an African Sanctus soared into high chant and steady drums. That made no sense to Axl either. He just assumed the sound system he was running had nothing else suitable.
Every hundred paces a wild-eyed man or woman would appear, blue skinned with lips pulled back to show curved tusks that sprouted from a heavy bottom jaw. The figures were elaborately carved and painted. Bon was what Tukten called them back in the village, and for all Axl knew that was what people called them here too.
And wherever here was they employed monks to open doors for gyrobikes. At least, that’s how it looked to Axl. Just as he began to hit his brakes—the wooden door embossed with an eight-spoked wheel rushing towards him too fast to ignore any longer—an old man in orange robes stood up from a three-legged stool to push half the door open just enough for Axl to ride through into freefall.
And he was juddering down a long flight of stone steps in a whine of synth and self-adjusting gyro, daylight blinding his eyes before he realised with shock that the monk had nodded to him.
The back of the Potala stood stark and quietly magnificent behind Axl. If not so awe-inspiring as when seen from the front then still impressive enough. But it was the sign to the airport that crashed chords and wrote a manic grin across Axl’s tired face.
-00.37.00. No one could say it wasn’t pushing the envelope, but as yet the envelope wasn’t ripped in two. Or the readout wouldn’t have been happening because the SS St Bernadotte would have gone. That was how Axl read things anyway.
At the cargo gates to the airport was a human guard. Not just a token human, but the kind that actually flicked switches to lower a section of sonic fence. And as Axl came racing up, the man hit the switch and waved. Without thinking, Axl flipped a return wave and then he was past the perimeter, racing towards a vast yurt, constructed from a single transparent vat-grown sheet of goat’s skin held taut by chromed metal guys as thick as a child’s wrist.
The yurt was Samsara’s Departure Hall and beyond it Axl saw the Nuncio’s cruiser, already cleared for take-off, a group of saffron-robed lamas standing around it and staring in his direction.
Whatever Axl had been expecting, this wasn’t it. One of the monks waved frantically and Axl realised that whatever the hell else was expected of him, neither sneaking or blasting his way aboard the austere, purple-lacquered cruiser was part of the menu. The Boeing had exclusive written all over it, from the near silence of its engines as they fired up to the elongated slow-glass bubble sat atop its nose like a freshwater pearl.
‘Borja,’ Axl said as he slid the Honda to a halt and dropped it where it stopped, back wheel still spinning. ‘Axl Borja.’ The Swiss Guard at the base of the moving walkway actually stepped back and saluted.
‘You brought the girl?’ The booming voice echoed from the cruiser’s doorway, where an obese Namibian dressed entirely in purple stood staring down at Axl.
Axl was already shaking his head before he wondered, which girl, the kid or Kate? And what had happened to wanting Father Sylvester? Synth-loops looped, feeding on themselves. Didn’t matter either way. He was into the signature tune.
‘No,’ Axl said, ‘No girl, just me.’
Chapter Forty-Eight
PoV Free
The first thing Axl noticed about the Nuncio’s cabin was the mahogany panelling. Second he spotted Bronzino’s painting ‘Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time’, commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence in 1545, though Axl just saw a naked boy with wings cupping the breast of an older woman. Finally, he realised the sound track was gone. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or upset.
The Nuncio fed him while the engines finished firing up. Not nutrients, chelated vitamins or worse still, luke-warm plates of Tsampa and buttered tea, but a vast platter of beef, carved from the side of a huge joint that already sat steaming on a silver salver.
Maybe the Church really had streamlined itself into austerity but, if so, no one appeared to have told the Nuncio. Blood-dark Barolo came from a tall wine jug, hammered from silver and embossed with vine leaves that curled from its elegant base up through its round belly to a narrow fluted top which was closed by a single silver leaf that hinged at the stalk.
‘The Two Sicilies, nineteenth-century, pre-Risorgimento,’ the Nuncio told Axl, dropping crumbs from his mouth to his expansive lap. After the beef they ate syllabub and washed down slivers of basalt-like parmesan with a wine so sweet and thick it stuck to Axl’s teeth.
Outside they were preparing for the Boeing to take off, but that was still ten minutes away. Time enough, the Nuncio said, to eat parmesan properly. And as Axl sipped the wine while sucking the slivers of hard cheese to soften them, he could feel spiders crawling over his leg. At least he assumed the medicare box at his feet had got around to converting ants into spiders. The ants had gone in first, tiny metallic pincers stripping away dead flesh from the edge of the gash, then they’d excreted some kind of mite so small as to be invisible and so dedicated all it could do was repair cell walls and die. The spiders did the macro work, like stitching or spinning strips of new skin.
It was battlefield stuff, crude but reusable. Not what Axl would have expected the Nuncio to carry and undoubtedly not what he kept for his own use, assuming he paid as much attention to the Church’s dislike of nanetics as he did to its exhortations to poverty.
Food, wine and the smallest of talk about who was doing what at the Vatican filled the time, the gossip as unreal to Axl as any newsfeed half seen on a feed across a crowded bar. But the Nuncio said nothing about Joan, soulcatchers or any coming conclave. Nothing about the Cardinal, either. And the only thing the Nuncio didn’t offer Axl was new clothes or a shower.
Axl had a nasty feeling that lack of soundtrack and no shower fed back to a cryptic comment of the Nuncio’s when Axl first clambered on board. The Nuncio’s arm had gone round his shoulder, avuncular maybe, but still steering him away from the open doorway.
‘This is dead space,’ the Nuncio announced waving one arm at the ornate interior of his cruiser. ‘Looped out/PoV-free.’ Then he stopped, looked carefully at Axl.
‘You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?’
Axl didn’t, so he said he didn’t and the Nuncio nodded, black eyes glittering in a face round and black as a total eclipse.
‘Good.’