‘Garp was running fully in his augmentation because viable brain tissue was being destroyed by his praist addiction. He is now a hundred per cent uploaded to this Golem,’ said Geronamid.
Salind could feel his stomach turning over and over. His fortune was made. What a story!
He had enough already to get his contract picked up by one of the Earth networks. Hell, he could even get investment for his own network. He watched as Geronamid swung its head back towards the reif.
‘The reif will go for incineration as per the Council’s request,’ the AI said.
‘About time,’ said Garp the Golem.
‘Thank you for agreeing to see me. Obviously I was wrong about this Garp character and his relationship to you. I’m not afraid of admitting to error. You’ll have heard that my story has been withdrawn from the net?’ Salind kept smiling as he studied the apartment. Soper was obviously a woman of baroque tastes. The place was full of preruncible furnishings and frankly strange decorations. He brought his attention finally back to the woman herself.
Deleen Soper bore the appearance of a sixteen-year-old girl — a sure sign she’d been using some of the less sophisticated rejuvenation treatments. She sported short-cropped blonde hair over elfin features and wore jeans and a check shirt. Her whole persona seemed that of a pretty farmgirl from some half-forgotten age. Salind knew her to be a hundred and forty-three years old, and responsible for the deaths of hundreds directly, and tens of thousands indirectly through the drug praist. He kept on smiling.
‘Leave us, Turk,’ she said, and gave an airy wave of her hand.
The butler character who had accompanied Salind from the front door all the way up the spiralling stairs of the building gave a wooden nod and departed. Salind guessed that the man’s duties probably included more than butlering — he looked as if he could crush rocks in his armpits.
‘Please, take a seat Mr Salind,’ she said.
‘My pleasure.’
Salind sat and watched her walk to an antique drinks cabinet and fill two small cups from a silver teapot.
‘Tea?’
He nodded. Now was as good a time as any to try the stuff. She placed the drinks on an occasional table and sat in the armchair opposite.
‘Please, conduct your interview,’ she said.
Salind picked up the warm cup and sipped the drink. It tasted bitter and salty, then left an aftertaste of avocados. Like most of the preferred drinks of humankind it was an acquired taste.
‘What was your relationship with Inspector Garp?’ he asked as he placed his cup back down on the table. ‘I’d like to hear your side of things.’
‘It is a shame you did not think of that before you released your first story.’
Her expression, for a moment, had gone flat and characterless.
‘Again, I apologize. .’
Soper switched on a smile and began to talk. ‘We had, for a brief time, a liaison. I finished it because it became evident he expected more from the relationship than I was prepared to give.’
‘Like what exactly?’
Soper waved her hand at her surroundings. ‘I am a wealthy woman. My family has made a fortune from our bangroves. Garp wanted some of that and I was not prepared to give. I do not like fortune hunters. When he realized my position he then started to make accusations.’
‘He accused you of dealing in praist and being connected to the Tronad.’
Soper leant forward. ‘Ridiculous of course. Why should I deal in praist? I have no need of the money.’
‘His contention was that your family has always dealt in praist, that you made a fortune from it which you are now investing in legitimate businesses.’
‘I thought you were here to listen to my side?’
That flat and dead look again.
‘I’m sorry. Do go on.’
‘My family have owned bangroves for centuries and our fortune grew from them.’ She gestured to the drink before Salind, who took up the cup and drank again. This time the mouthful he took seemed more satisfying.
Soper continued, ‘Praist is a drug dealt in by a small minority of the criminal element of Banjer. We have always been leaders here and the holders of moral. .’
As she went on Salind accessed Argus.
Praist statistics please.
Fifteen per cent of the population are praist users. That is approximately eighty million people. It is at the root of seventy-three per cent of all crimes committed here and ninety-two per cent of all suicides. It is speculated that terminal praist users will be the first to vote for Polity subsumption because of advanced Polity medical technologies. There is no cure for praist addiction here, and most users — those who do not commit suicide — are killed before the drug kills them. In the last year of addiction — addiction lasts eight solstan years — the user becomes psychotic.
More than tens of thousands, then.
As the interview drew to a close Salind felt it less and less difficult to keep smiling. He found himself starting to see that maybe Garp had not told him all of the truth. Deleen Soper did not seem quite so monstrous face-to-face.
‘I understand,’ he said to Soper’s latest contention. ‘A cop in his position could manipulate anything. Coming from the Polity we tend to forget how much power such a police force can wield.’
‘There, you see?’
Soper sat back and sipped her drink. Salind sipped his own. It had been topped up twice.
Perhaps it was going to his head.
‘What do you think of my collection?’ Soper asked him.
‘I think it’s wonderful, Deleen.’
Soper stood. ‘But you haven’t seen it all.’
As he also stood, Salind felt a dizziness wash through him. He blinked and seemed to see rainbow haloes around various objects in the room. Soper conducted him around the apartment.
She told him about the grandfather clock replicated about an original pendulum, and showed him carvings from banoak coral that would not have looked out of place in a Pharaoh’s tomb. She showed him lurid paintings and boasted their value. Then she finally came to her most prized possession.
The drowning jar had been the favoured punishment for criminals in the early years of the Theocracy. Criminals were sealed inside to drown in the preservative the jar contained. This one was a fat urn-shape standing four feet high. The man still inside the jar, she told him, was the predecessor of the Banjer reifs, but from the wrong side of the law. She giggled and he laughed with her — surprised at how easily the laughter came. The man, with his bulbous eyes and protruding tongue, shifted and scratched at the inside of the jar. He looked like the reporter who had stood behind Merril in the arrivals lounge. Next, the butler was opening the street door for Salind, and he then walked under a sky that was a sheet of skin flayed from the back of a giant.
He stood on a bridge and gripped the rail, his mouth dry and bitter and terror rising up inside him. The drowned man was coming to drag him back to the jar and there to pull him down into a clammy embrace. And now Geronamid stood over him with treels oozing out of holes in its allosaur body. Salind started screaming, and didn’t stop until a hydrocar pulled up and Geoff leapt out to press a pressure hypodermic against his neck. Then he blacked out. It took him a day to recover from the praist-based hallucinogen. And of course there was no proof that Deleen Soper had administered the drug.