‘You like her, don’t you?’ Mai said suddenly. The kid was smiling, that sad kind of half-smile that rests somewhere between regret and pity… Which was weird as fuck, Axl decided, because if he’d been Mai the only thing he’d have felt was hatred.
‘Sleep.’ Axl’s order was rougher than he intended but Mai only smiled again. ‘You could always try some yourself,’ she said.
Chapter Forty-Three
The Bending of Starlight
The man with the short-model Browning SLR slept fitfully. Curled up near his feet, with her face to the fire, was a Japanese girl tied by her ankles to his wrist. She was staring into the glowing embers and neither person inside her head liked what she saw. So Tsongkhapa hummed gently and soon the girl slept.
Tsongkhapa didn’t like the gun and wanted to disable it but the silver monkey he’d co-opted as a pair of eyes argued against it. Apparently the monkey had been a gun before it became Rinpoche and still felt sentimental about them. That wasn’t a stance Tsongkhapa readily identified with, but identifying with dichotamic attitudes was as much a part of his job as anything else, so he lived with contradiction. If that was an acceptable way of explaining it.
The bioClay chip controlling the readout in the man’s eye was manufactured by Seiko, it was a military model at least ten years out of date and wasn’t really in his eye at all. The point at which it would hit count zero was, in one sense at least, entirety arbitrary. But then, as Rinpoche had said while toggling the dip switches, in human terms all recorded time was.
This hadn’t been pointed out to the man. Who would have seen nothing arbitrary in the difference between reaching or not reaching the Nuncio’s cruiser before it left Samsara.
The sleeping man had 80 hours, 48 minutes, 30 seconds to make his connection. Less than three and a half days. The Sony sound system in his head was equally old but featured one or two rather neat, non-standard, modifications.
The Browning was a 148-shot snubPup, US-designed and sub-licensed to a penal factory in Korea. It was, in the words of Rinpoche, thicker than pig shit. The cord was Israeli sisal, genetically modified for strength. The girl was quarter Han Chinese, half Japanese, quarter South East Mediterranean. Her name was Mai, without a surname, at least Mai was what most of her answered to in her dreams. And though a section of her subconscious answered to a different name she was dealing with this.
The man didn’t answer to any name at all, but had set his brain to accept Axl, Berault and Borja as acceptable aliases. There was no record of those names ever having been processed by Samsaran immigration. In fact, neither the sleeping man nor the restless girl was officially on Samsara at all, though they were both quite definitely asleep by the fire.
For a space of time almost infinitely less than a second, Tsongkhapa got a flash of what might, in human terms, have been guilt. But the AI didn’t bother to track Rinpoche’s guilt back to its origin. Tsongkhapa wasn’t worried by how the two got to Samsara because Samsara was where they both definitely belonged. What worried Tsongkhapa was the implications of what they were.
The man was easy enough to categorise. Broken more or less covered it. The girl was more of a problem. And the problem wasn’t really that there were at least three different personas stacked inside her head (the man had five, four of them dead). It was the lack of legitimate connection between the first and third. The first was Mai now, the second was a simple subset, real Mai hiding. The third wasn’t Mai at all, not even Mai solarised, run as a negative or operating with the values reversed.
Tsongkhapa sighed. There was no guarantee she could be mended but he would have Rinpoche try bufo alvarius as a first option: maybe the only option, unless Rinpoche could cut a deal with Axl. And Tsongkhapa didn’t need telling that for this to happen Axl would first have to cut a deal with himself.
Unrolling the dried toad skin, Rinpoche pulled a broken razor blade from where one hadn’t previously existed and did the same for a small square of glass. The silver monkey didn’t need a lighter, it could do flame from its fingers. 5-MEO-DMT, to be taken nightly until cured. Rinpoche shrugged, whatever.
‘Hey,’ the monkey tapped Mai on her shoulder and stepped back hastily as she came awake fast, reaching into her boot for a knife that wasn’t there and hadn’t been for five years, maybe more.
The girl blinked at the animal, then glanced at Axl lent back against a rock and smiled sourly. ‘So much for standing guard.’
‘Methamphetamine,’ the silver monkey said, ‘you’ve no idea how fucking hard it is to unpick. I practically had to disconnect those neurons one at a time.’
‘You put him to sleep?’
‘Well, someone had to,’ Rinpoche said slyly. ‘How else were we going to talk?’
Later, when the giant flowers that caught the sun were beginning to open their petals, Rinpoche gave Mai the glass knife he’d casually picked from Axl’s pocket as he briefly slept and watched her face light like the dawn. Her faith in her abilities shamed him. And as she slipped the knife’s cord over her head and began to unbutton her red jacket to rest the blade between her slight breasts, Rinpoche turned away in embarrassment.
When next Axl awoke, dungchen trumpet filled his head and Mai was sitting next to the cooling embers of the fire, mumbling to herself. Only it wasn’t with the furious, PCP-enhanced intensity of some dustout. Her words were quiet and reasoned, though just too soft for Axl to work out who Mai thought she was talking to.
Axl wasn’t too sure what had been going on inside his own head either, but his body was bathed with sweat and he felt more tired than before he had slept.
Everybody was already awake and watching him. No one had slipped away in the darkness. Even fat little Louis had sat out the stink, the distant howl of wolves heading towards the slaughter ground and the dying down to embers of the small fire that was all there was to keep predators at bay. All of them had survived the night, hovering on the insomniac edge of anxiety-apart from Axl, who felt like sleep had crept up behind him with a cosh.
Maybe they’d been afraid he’d wake before they escaped, or perhaps it was the silver monkey sitting shaking glass straws of amphetamine from a tiny compartment in the zytel butt of his snubPup who’d kept them in order. Axl was sure he’d checked that compartment and the last time he looked it contained a cleaning kit for the Browning.
‘Have a good night?’ Kate asked.
A day came and went. Most of the time Axl rode holding Mai’s bridle, Ketzia and Kate riding close behind, like silent shadows. Occasionally they all walked the rocky track that led across the bleak, windswept plateau, leading the exhausted animals behind them.
No one talked. What breath they had was needed for breathing.
All the same, enough water gathered in pools for the ponies to be able to drink. It was grass that was scarce. What little there was looked half-hearted, yellowing and spindly, filling the flat spaces between scrub and moss-covered rock.
They did that next night without fire, Axl and Rinpoche staying awake to keep guard. Mai slept in Kate’s arms and both Tukten and Axl tried not to notice. By morning Rinpoche was gone again and Axl was so exhausted he could hardly ride in a straight line.
‘Wolf,’ said Tukten and Axl stopped. The shag-haired boy was pointing to where a grey shadow slunk between altars on the distant charnel ground.