‘Ambassador’s in the cube, yeah?’ I asked, trying to keep the mounting concern out of my voice.
‘I think there’s a ghost of him in my neural ware.’ My eyes widened. ‘Relax,’ she said, seeing my response. ‘Its scary, a bit, but all he does is help me with the things I can do. He doesn’t control the way I feel or how I think.’
‘He?’ I asked. She shrugged.
‘Just started thinking of him like that.’ I wasn’t sure how I was feeling about this. I was pretty worried and also jealous of the incredibly intimate relationship she had with this male entity.
‘So you want to have me thingied?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘That thing where they drive demons out.’
‘Exorcised?’ I’d seen it done in the schemes and the Rigs. Usually some wannabe hacker, who’d gotten in over their head when they’d had their first vision and brought something back in their cheap neural ware. Sometimes their religious revelations were just too much for them to handle.
‘Yeah, I really do,’ I said honestly.
‘Why?’ she asked as she took the whisky bottle back from me and took a swig from it. I couldn’t help but think of that as a dumb question.
‘What do you mean why? You have an alien living in your head,’ I said, sounding more reasonable than I felt.
‘So? You didn’t have time to get to know me before, so maybe me is me and Ambassador.’ This was making my head hurt. ‘I’m hoping that’s the Morag you want. Unless you’re like every other fucker, and you don’t know me, and you’ve just made this image of me in the shape of what you want in your head.’ She was looking at me accusingly.
‘Fucked if I know, darling,’ I said laughing. ‘As far as I know it’s you I want.’
‘Well that me comes with an alien in my head, so judge me like you would anyone else you meet. Decide whether you trust me or not,’ she said, and I realised I did. Despite the fact that I probably didn’t trust anyone else other than maybe Mudge. ‘You realise you’re probably the first man I’ve ever actually wanted to have sex with?’ she said. I had to laugh. ‘Don’t laugh at me, you bastard.’ She slapped me on my bandaged wound. My scream caused a lot of the assembled cyberbillys to look our way. Morag was giggling.
‘You shouldn’t say things like that to men,’ I said through gritted teeth as the pain subsided.
‘Why not?’
‘Makes us even more full of ourselves.’
‘I want to be honest,’ she said. ‘Because I need you to know that and bear it in mind.’
‘Half my skin’s falling off,’ I said.
‘Somebody had just set your head on fire the first time I met you; besides, your skin’s not that pretty anyway. Just put it down to me being less shallow than you are.’ And then she kissed me. ‘We need to go somewhere,’ she told me.
I was searching through the boot of our car for the bivouac and the ultrasound rat deterrent. Isn’t romance in the wasteland grand? I found what I was looking for and closed the boot. Mudge was stood there.
‘Pagan okay?’ I asked.
Mudge nodded. ‘We’re getting drunk, taking the night off. You?’
‘Same. We need some privacy.’ Mudge smiled.
‘What, you don’t want Rannu to come and watch you? Hell, Buck and Gibby would probably join in if you ask them nicely enough.’
‘Well, I’m never going to have another erection,’ I said.
‘Probably sterile from the radiation as well,’ Mudge said grinning. Then it hit me: what if I wasn’t capable? Mudge must’ve read the expression on my face because he started laughing.
‘You utter bastard.’
‘Funny thing is you probably would’ve been fine if I hadn’t put the idea in your head,’ he said, laughing more.
‘I will be fine,’ I insisted, but this just made him laugh harder. I turned to walk off.
‘Hey, Jake.’ He knew how much I hated that name.
‘What?’ I said, turning on him, but he was serious now.
‘You sure about this, man? She’s very young.’ I thought for a while. Maybe I was being selfish, but I would be dead soon anyway – that was assuming we didn’t get killed by Rolleston or anyone else. I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t. I guessed my motives were about as pure as you could hope for in the situation. Not that pure, but I didn’t think I was taking advantage.
‘Yeah,’ I said. Mudge nodded. I turned to head back to the fire and Morag.
‘Jake?’ I stopped and took a deep breath before turning back.
‘Mudge, you’re preventing me from getting to a beautiful young woman who wants to have sex with me.’
‘Despite the fact you’re half man half tarmac at the moment?’
‘I can shoot you. Besides, you should be down on your knees thanking God for people who’ll have sex with ugly men,’ I said. He grinned, then his face hardened again.
‘When we’re done with all this, we’re going to come back here, to Crawling Town, take care of unfinished business, yeah?’ I could’ve told him that he didn’t have to but it would’ve been a platitude and it would’ve pissed him off.
‘Yeah,’ I told him.
It was on the second floor of one of the terraced flats near a big hole in the floor. It wasn’t the most romantic place ever. We were after all in the middle of a polluted wasteland. I put down a groundsheet and set up the bivouac. Morag switched on a lamp – she didn’t have my low-light vision after all – and unrolled two of the sleeping bags and connected them together.
‘Do you want to know me?’ she asked as she pulled something out of her bag. I took a closer look. It was a highly illegal biofeedback device, basically a box with eight wires extending from it, each wire ending in a plug. They were used either to enhance sex or as a torture device. The box was effectively a small sense machine. Each of us would feel what the other one did. It was about the most intimate thing I could imagine. I could fight in a hundred different firefights but it took a teenaged girl to really frighten me.
‘Where’d you get that?’ I asked.
‘New York.’ That figured. I swallowed and then nodded.
It would be a waste of time trying to describe what it was like to be surrounded by her and then feel what she felt, to feel every touch and its reflection echoing. We remained joined after, just holding each other. It was the release I’d sought but never received from the booths, the loss of self but without the dislocation. It felt like becoming more than just me.
It was only after that it occurred to me that I had given Ambassador access to me. It was only in the morning that my mind had to sabotage this. I guess I just couldn’t accept something so good happening to me.
21
I could hear Them singing. How could I hear Them singing in vacuum? It wasn’t in my ears. It wasn’t even in my head. It sounded like wind blowing through impossibly loud chimes, somehow discordant and beautiful at the same time, a choir of off-key angels.
They/It was beautiful as well. From where I hung in space I could see Their spires rooted deep into the asteroid, towers of a bioluminescent, coral-like material. They looked like a huge and perfectly still, tranquil city. I hung in space, naked and whole, no machinery in me any more, watching Them/It.
A whisper that came from deep within imparted to me that this was Them, that this was all They were. That this had been Their existence and They had been content because They had never known or wanted more.
I thought I could watch Them for ever and listen to Them for ever. Something at the back of my mind wondered how I could be in vacuum again and not be dying. I saw a flash image from a nightmare. Cold, so very cold, veins exploding, blood leaking around the plastic that filled my eye sockets. Gone again as I forced it down, a memory from another time, another life, and I just hung there and watched and listened.