[02] Elite: Nemorensis (17 page)

‘It’s a cover. It always was. All the ritual and the religion. The chase through the forest. The final fight. The new incumbent clambering up to break off a golden bough to prove his worth. It’s all set dressing, Myquel. All fluff to hide something stranger. Something people couldn’t – or wouldn’t – believe.’

‘Like what?’

‘But you won’t believe it either. That’s the point.’

‘Just … just tell me, okay. I shouldn’t be talking to you. Just hurry up and tell me.’

‘Is she
there
, Myq?’

‘That’s none of your business.’ Another glance over his shoulder.

Good.
SixJen nodded.
She’s near
.

‘Imagine …’ she waved her hand, mock-breezy. ‘Imagine a creature made of thought. No, imagine a
race
of them. Little invisible beasts. They make no sense if you’re thinking biologically. You have to be … more abstract.’

‘Fine. Whatever. So what?’ Trying his best to be unflappable. Failing.

‘These creatures … they live inside people’s brains. Particular people. Very specific people. They take them over and they change them. And one way they do that, Myq, is they make them stop getting older. Like Teesa. And like me.’

He blinked at that. Crazily orbiting eyes flicking up to stare straight down the lens.

‘You too?’ Voice quiet.

‘I’m almost fifty,’ she shrugged. And took the opportunity, while he chewed that down, to glance aside. The progress bar was passing 40%.

‘So … why you?’ he said, eventually. ‘Why her? Which “specific people”, exactly?’ His tone was beginning to spike with scorn. ‘And how come nobody knows about all this?’

Too much to hope
, she supposed,
he’d swallow it easy
.

‘These creatures … they live inside slaves. Escaped slaves, to be precise. That’s how it was, back by the lake – that’s how it is now. I don’t know why. Maybe they’re drawn to … what? To minds familiar with powerlessness. Minds which understand freedom, something like that. Minds that’ll do anything to escape.’

Myq’s eyes went suspicious. ‘So … you were a sl … You were like Teesa? Before?’

She nodded, just once. And then almost cried out, almost lost herself, in the flock of images that bustled up and screeched around her.

The factories!

The merthiq leaves falling for second Autumn … the men in purple coming to trade, to buy, to switch and swap the stock. Money passing from tablet to tablet: contactless life-exchange. Future decided by transactional ‘blip!’

(How long, she wondered, since she’d last thought these thoughts?)

‘New meat for the Villa,’ one said, sneering.

And oh, her mother, crying
(her mother! she’d had a mother!).
The foreman shouting, ‘Back to it, back to it!’, and the steam and the machines and …

And the landtrain whining.

And the villa growing in the distance. And the laughter of men and the glimmering of eyes and that … sinking … feeling.

Fourteen.

She was fourteen when they sent her to the fuckshop.

‘Yes,’ she said. Not a tremble in her voice. Not a curl to her lip. (
Screaming inside!
) ‘I was a slave. Imperial core-world Topaz, in the Facece system. I escaped during a minor riot aged thirty-five. I’d already been on the run six months when the … the creature came into me.’ She tapped her head and swallowed, throat unexpectedly dry. ‘That was thirteen years ago.’

Thirteen.

Years.

Of waiting.

Myq breathed out all at once. As if the spell, along with his credulity, had broken apart at the very cusp of completion.

‘This is … look, sorry, this is stupid.’ A miniature tantrum shifting across his brows. ‘I just … all I want is to know how come she’s in those photos and … and why you won’t leave us alone. That’s all.’

‘I’m trying to explain.’

‘But it’s insa—’

‘Myquel, it’s not that I won’t leave her alone. Try to understand. It’s that I can’t. No more than she could stop doing what she does.’

Running.

Exulting.

(She’s not supposed to plan!)

The trace, SixJen noticed – almost forgotten in the acrid bloom of those age-old memories – was shuffling past 60%.

‘These creatures,’ she said, ignoring Myq’s huff, his proto-eyeroll, ‘these living thoughts … these things … There are thirteen. Never more. Twelve of them are the Aspirants. Or the … the hunters, if you like. Twelve who live to chase. Circling and circling the thirteenth. We call her the runner because that’s how the game plays out, these days. Out here in the stars it’s far more of a chase than a duel. Do you see? That’s the only way it can work. But it’s the same as in that myth, Myq. The King by the Lake.

‘She is the Rex Nemorensis. And she has to die.’

‘I-I don’t see h … This is crazy. It’s crazy.’

‘Think of it as a mating ritual. Think of the chasers as … horny idiots. Males sniffing for a fuck.’

‘You mean … You mean like you? You’re male?’

‘Yes. Abstractly speaking. Or rather, the thing that lives in here is.’ She rapped her stump against her temple. ‘Same as that man in the nightclub. Same as all the others.’ Secretly, out of sight of the camera, she touched the fresh stump of her wrist to the puckered scars along her left arm. It hadn’t been easy, adding fresh ones. It had taken time and care and a knife carefully clamped by the auto-surgeon – against its bleated protests. But she’d done it. The final four. The FIA man and the three he’d already claimed.

Eleven scars:
No. More. Competition.

‘All they can think about, these males, is catching her. It’s all they are, Myq. I said it before: they’re living ideas. Conceptual life. Truly alien. And the funny part is,’ (
it’s not funny
), ‘they didn’t come from up here, in the stars. They were with us all along.’

Myq wiped at sweat. Glanced round as if hunting for an escape. SixJen juggernauted blithely on – noting the tracer at
[87% ]
– refusing to break the flow.

‘Now these males?’ she said. ‘They’re more like … incomplete ideas. They’re dull and they’re dead and there’s no room, Myq,
no room
, for anything in their poor little souls except desire. They want … they
need
… to be completed. And for that they need her.’

The boy quite abruptly stopped moving. Eyes finally still. Fixed on hers.

The first traces, she was sure, of belief. Of horror.

And (
oh, poor boy
) of jealousy.

He wants her all to himself
.

(On her seventeenth birthday, SixJen remembered –
stop thinking, stop remembering, stop stop stop –
the consortium of young businessmen who owned her, all self-declared VIPs with stupid haircuts and Latin-accent affectations, including the nephew of a senator and a Petty-General’s ward, borrowed her from their own brothel as part of a deal sweetener with some visiting corporate sleazesuits. One of them, in a dark corner of a smoky boardroom, bit her so hard as he came that she needed stitches.

The deal collapsed in the shouting match that followed. It was the first time she remembered ever feeling important.)

Not a twitch on her face. Not a notion of the recall.

‘But the female?’ she said. ‘The female
burns
. That’s her living idea. She’s … she’s chaos and ecstasy and instinct. She infects. You’ve seen that, haven’t you?’

Half a nod. He looked like he might cry.

‘She consumes the world, Myq. It pours out of her. All the people you’ve seen … animals, plants. Screwing, fighting. That’s how she feels
all the time
. We call it the Reward. And none of us … nobody can imagine how good it is.

‘But here’s the dichotomy … See, part of her wants it to go on and on forever. Always escalating. Always running. Always fucking, always fighting. That’s the part, I think, you love. And you do love her, don’t you Myq?’

As if a spell had been uttered, as if that one loaded word were enough to tip him into an abyss, a single tear broke from his eye as he nodded.

‘But the other part of her? Ohhh … that wants nothing more than to be mated. To be caught.’

The tracer chimed. She showed no reaction, barely sparing it a glance.
[SIGNAL TRACED.]
Astronavigational coordinates scrolling by. She slowly stretched out her left hand, her only hand – still clumsy with inexperience – and dialled a set of commands.

On screen the boy swiped to dry his cheek, a late flicker of defiance in his voice.

‘Well, that’s … that’s where you’re wrong. Teesa’s fine as she is. Doesn’t want to be … mated by anyone except me, thankyousoverymuch.’

The poor kid was actually blushing.

‘You’re thinking too mammal, Myq. That’s not how it works. You’ve got to … to open your mind. There are some very strange life-cycles out there in this world.’

A hint of a frown ghosted at his face. ‘Life cycles …?’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s …’ Another slow tear. Another wipe. And there – deep in his eye – she saw it. The final mote of acceptance. ‘I think she tried to tell me about this stuff herself,’ he whispered.

‘Oh?’ SixJen pretended curiosity. Finger hovering above a control. ‘What did she say?’

Myquel opened his mouth. Glanced away from the lens, staring off into the spaces of his memory. ‘I-it was while we were splatting shibbolettis,’ he began. ‘She started going on ab—’

SixJen hit the control. The
The
pulsed around her. An oily lurch, a greasy static stroking its way into the air. FTL, she’d heard, often brought with it a curious sense of detachment: a spooky separation of the self from the self. But to a victim of such profound psychic constipation as her, travelling through witchspace felt strangely like the physical sensation of weightlessness, but applied abstractly to thoughts.

The rush ended. The stars re-aligned. The vidscreen, which had flickered with a succession of eerie intermediates, restored Myquel’s grainy image as if nothing had happened.

‘—d all types of weird wildlife,’ he was saying. ‘I … I didn’t give it much thought at the time, but … but maybe she was trying to let me know.’

‘You could be right,’ SixJen said, congratulating herself inwardly. The computer diligently began re-charging the drives, a new nav-solution clattering across the holo.

One more jump
.
Keep him talking
.

‘Listen very carefully,’ she said. ‘For these creatures, Myq … like the one I’ve got and the one she’s got. For our lifecycle? Fucking means dying.’

(In her late twenties … little-by-little the customers stopped picking her from the line-up.
Don’t think about it.

You know what’s coming. Stop it
.

Aged thirty-one, the owners moved her to a room at the back of the villa. ‘
Personal use only
,’ they told the madame. ‘
Take her off the market
.’

Aged thirty-two (
stop it stop it
) she had her nose broken for the first time. Three fresh scars on her upper arm, thigh, chest.

Aged thirty-three she spent two months in a ward. A ‘private party’, they told the bored praetor-cops who came to investigate. Just the senator’s nephew, five of his bestest pals, and a selection of blunt toys. No harm done.

Aged thirty-four (
stop it stop it stop it
), after her eighth hospitalisation, after her fifth skin-graft, after her third abortion, they told her she’d be sent back to the factory.
All she’s good for
, they said.

She dared to hope they were telling the truth. They weren’t.

Aged thirty-five a minor revolt broke out at a nearby cocoa plantation. Nothing to do with her. Nothing to do with anyone. The brothel was invaded; almost an afterthought. The madame murdered. The senator’s nephew and the general’s ward strung from the merthiq trees outside as burning cocoa doused the world in sooty chocolate.

The rebelling mob was annihilated two days later.

She simply wandered away, forgotten. Nobody seemed to care much about an unwanted whore.

All she’s good for.

All she’s good for.
)

‘Rex Nemorensis,’ SixJen said, chewing down on the trembling in her legs (
pain from the hand, tiredness, adrenaline; that’s all it is
). ‘You don’t get to be the priest unless you kill your predecessor.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Whichever male kills the female, Myq? They become it.’

‘That’s … that’s …’

‘It’s not mammal, no. Stop trying to understand. Maybe it’s …
oh
, maybe it’s something to do with triumph. Moment of victory. Maybe that’s what causes the jump. I don’t know. But in that second …? In that instant when the male whispers the word to open the way, when the female dies … she shatters apart. Spills into space. Twelve new males – like holy spores, Myq – go swooping off to find a likely brain … a scared little runaway slave … to bond with. ‘

‘This is insane.’

‘Yes, it is. But in that second, the male who did it, Myq? The one who caught the runner … that male finds his – or
her
, or
hisher, or herhis, or its
, because we’re past genders now, aren’t we? Because this is
my
future we’re talking about – that hunter finds their brain breaking apart too. The ecstasy pouring in. The holy reward.’

She could hear her own heart speeding just talking about it … and yet couldn’t feel a thing. So she fixed the boy on the screen with a look fit to pin him to a page and said:

‘Ask me the question, Myq.’

‘What … What if … What if none of you kills her?’
Good boy
. ‘What if she gets away? What if something
else
happens?’

‘I don’t know,’ she smiled. And meant it. ‘Honestly, I don’t. It’s never happened. Do you understand? All this … it’s been going on for millennia. At the start … oh, it must have been so easy! The priest, right there! The wood, the lake. You knew where to find him. All you had to do was challenge.

‘But the years’ve muddled it, haven’t they? Travel. Expansion. Rationalism. About the only thing that didn’t get in the way was the abolition of slavery, because there’s never been a shortage of minds which feel owned. That’s what this whole thing’s about, after all. About the way people feel. About ideas. About spreading yourself into as many brains as you can.’