Courtesy of CySat nV starving kids to death and blaming famine or refusing to let HelpFirst air freight them medicine and calling it sanctions had become vote losers. Samsara solved that problem. It also got the Dalai Lama out of Beijing’s hair and gave Indonesia, Texas and the Ukraine somewhere to ship those dissidents too high-profile to kill. It was small wonder the UN vote was near unanimous.
As solutions went, it was right out of this world.
‘What are you thinking?’ Kate asked suddenly. She’d stopped to let Axl go ahead and was looking down at where he stood on a broad ledge, one hand gripping a bush. Ahead of him the track was even softer underfoot, the path muddier and the overhanging rhododendrons so thick the branches twisted around each other like flash-frozen serpents.
He didn’t want to answer, but he did anyway. Kate had that effect.
‘About Samsara.’
‘You hate the place that much?’
‘Hate it?’ Axl hesitated watching Kate slide down the track towards him, her fingers finding and releasing overhead branches in quick succession. Kate was using a different way down to the village, one less obvious than the main track but a lot steeper.
‘I don’t hate Samsara,’ Axl told Kate. ‘I wouldn’t want to live here, but I don’t hate it.’ And that’s where that conversation would have died—Axl decided later—if the zipped-tight, self-contained Kate Mercarderes hadn’t lost her footing, boot heels gouging dark scars into leaf mould as she fought for balance.
She might have kept upright, she might have fallen, but Axl caught her anyway. Whipping out his right arm as she flailed past. Pain ripped up Axl’s arm. For a split second it looked like the branch he gripped might crack. But the man didn’t even notice. He was far too busy watching Kate.
Fury?
Embarrassment?
Axl didn’t know what painted her face a sudden red and didn’t much care. Very slowly Axl shifted towards her and when Kate didn’t back away he rested his forehead against hers, ridiculously softly.
As needy as some teenage kid.
‘You all right?’ Kate asked. Her breath smelt of tsampa.
‘No, I’m not.’ Axl opened his mouth, then shut it again. Crunch time. What he was about to do was fuck-wit stupid. Flayed, flesh-cut-back-and-stripped-to-the-bone dumb. But when had that ever stopped him?
The mind threw up walls for a purpose, to keep shit in or keep light out, it didn’t much matter which. Kicking them down went against everything Axl believed in. There was the stuff in there Axl didn’t admit to himself. He’d have to be an idiot to tell it to some woman he hardly knew…
‘Look,’ said Axl. ‘You really think you know the truth about that kid… ?’ About me, he meant.
Her head flicked up in that defiant gesture Axl had begun to recognise, then she caught herself. ‘What would I know?’ She said it sadly.
‘The press releases had me down as a ghost. Do I look like hollow?’
Yes. No. Kate started to shake her head, hesitated… I don’t know. Yes, probably. She’d been born, grown up and educated within the walls of the Vatican and in all the twenty-seven years of her life she hadn’t met a single clone, other than Clone that was. And he was Marne release #2.1 of a combat model, which was different. She wouldn’t recognise a batch-reared ghost if she walked through a crowd of them. That was the point. The only real way to tell was strip out some DNA and check for the copyright line.
‘Does it matter?’
‘Yes it does,’ said Axl as he stepped back because that was the only way he was going to get through the next few minutes. Though he didn’t look like someone stepped back and he didn’t feel like it either.
‘I’m not a clone.’ Axl held up his hand to stop whatever Kate was about to say. ‘I’m…’ Much worse were the words he was choking on.
The deep green of the rhododendrons began its slow spin around him: the glimpses of the distant sky seemed higher than ever, a far cold blue that had to be impossible. All he really wanted to do was sleep, to put his head to the damp leaf mould and let in the darkness. Forever if possible.
Conditioning, Axl thought, and wondered drunkenly why he hadn’t realised it before. ‘You know what I am?’
She didn’t.
‘I’m a fucking foetus,’ Axl said through gritted teeth and promptly blacked out, the wet earth he’d wanted to embrace coming up to meet him as his brain hit a system fault and clicked out the lights.
Kate sighed.
When Axl came to his head was in Kate’s lap, and she was stroking his cheek with one finger, following the line of a cheekbone. What he thought was a two-beat drum track was just his heart.
‘Oh, you’re with us again.’ She dropped her hand quickly.
‘Yeah. Looks like it.’ Axl struggled upright and got as far as kneeling before he felt sick again. Waves of nausea pulling at his gut.
‘You were telling me all about being aborted,’ Kate’s voice was neutral.
‘I was what… ?’
‘You told me everything,’ said Kate. ‘The whole fucking lot.’ It was the first time he’d heard Kate swear.
Her dark eyes were locked on his face, not cold or fierce but lit with sympathy that was almost unbearable. Everything else about her was studiedly casual. Rigorously non-threatening. Just how odd it was to be crouched opposite a woman who was worried she might make him afraid, Axl couldn’t begin to tell her.
‘I really told you?’ The blackness that had been crawling around the edges of his sight blew away as if it were smoke and Axl no longer felt sick. Inside his ribs his heart kicked back into a regular rhythm. There was no way Axl could know it, but his body levels of cortisol and the catecholarnines began to fall. All he knew was that his soundtrack slowed, softened slightly.
‘So when did you find out?’ Kate asked. She sat back on her heels and casually scratched the inside of one thigh, then blushed when she caught him watching. ‘You going to tell me or not?’
He did.
Eighteen weeks of womb time was what he got. That’s what they told him at the home anyway. Enough to produce tentative REM and thumb sucking, but leave him the wrong side of the survivability line. That was how long it took the kid to get her shit together enough to book a clinic. The clinic was a charity job, obviously enough. Cash wasn’t something she had a lot of, they’d told him that too. Made sure he knew freebase came first and getting rid of him came second. The home wanted him to know how lucky he was good people had come along.
When did he find out? Sweet Jesus.
‘I always knew,’ Axl said flatly. ‘Sometimes it just meant less.’
‘You want to expand on that?’
It was Axl’s turn to sigh. Grabbed from the disposal bin of an abortion clinic by a right-to-lifer hit team and grown to term in a Matsui artificial womb. Paraded as a toddler before judges, women who lunch, elderly patrons as an example of what their charity could achieve. Shit happened and mostly, it seemed to Kate, shit had been happening to the man in front of her. It was like someone just smashed a dam that held back a life’s worth of backed-up emotions. And then she realised with a shiver that someone had and it had been her.
He was still talking, telling her how he’d been sat stealing time from a public smartbook in the annex of the NY library on 42nd, using ‘trades to pop frames almost faster than his brain could render. Worthless shit all of it, the kind of stuff all eleven-year-old boys, not just street kids hide behind ‘trodes to skim. Some animal fuck sites, Taiwanese pissing schoolgirls, cheats for getting the 6 million volt nanchuku in Mishima, the usual stuff... A bit of bomb making, some half-arsed chemical formulae for a kitchen-sink version of BetterThanlce.