Cronix (45 page)

Oriente reached out. “May I?”

He studied the picture, which he assumed must be a family vacation back in one of the afterworlds. He smiled and put it back in its place. Hencock picked up and stared.

“Not exactly forensic evidence of my previous life,” he said.

“How do you mean?”

“It’s a photograph of a memory,” the inspector said, still staring. “You used to be able to download and print them out in the old days. Memories, I mean. I’m not sure if we all actually looked that good that day, but that’s the way I remembered it. That’s the way I wanted to remember it, at least. It was always my favorite. Fading now, though.”

Oriente did not ask where the image might have been drawn from, which afterworld forever beyond reach of the man sitting in front of him. He would die here one day, taking all his painful memories of Earth with him. But another Hencock would wake from its deep sleep on the Orbiter that same day, knowing nothing of the suffering of the other.

“There’s one other thing which I don’t keep on the shelf,” said Hencock. He leaned over and rummaged under the straw pallet, pulling out a slim metal flask.

“I barely touch the stuff, but I seem to recall you enjoyed a drop,” he said with a stiff smile.

“Now, how did you know that?” said Oriente, passing the open flask under his nose and scenting a heady vapor of whiskey. “You weren’t spying on me, were you Inspector?”

Even after all this time Hencock looked slightly put out, then realized he was being teased.

“I read the reports,” he said. “We sometimes had a tail on you. Not all the time, but in the first few weeks. You were quite a mystery, and of course, things started to go wrong shortly after your arrival. I had to keep an eye on you. It was the least I could do.”

“I know, I know,” said Oriente. “No hard feelings.” And he took a delicate sip of the liquor, savored the burn in his throat.

“Have some more,” said Hencock. “I’ve been saving it for a special occasion, and I don’t think they get more special than this. Besides, a man your size needs a bigger shot.”

Oriente obligingly raised the flask again in salute and drank. He passed the flask to Hencock, who took a tiny sip out of politeness more than desire. He winced.

“Tell me,” began Oriente, feeling the pleasing buzz of alcohol. “When I came through the Cronix ranks, there was something strange. Lots of them looked…well, bizarrely familiar.”

Hencock screwed the cap on the flask again. “It took us a while to work that one out too,” he said. “Back in the days of the Orbiters, each body was tailor-made for a specific client: perhaps a little original genepool, bluer eyes, firmer jaw, whatever you wanted. You’d go to a stylist and work out a look, then if you wanted something really special you’d find a carpet beater earthside to dig something up. If you wanted to have kids, it was important to get decent genepool so they could inherit good traits. If you just had a pretty faced sculpted for you, it was purely cosmetic and the kids might not inherit. So the first wave of subspecies that broke out of Brixton looked like the old Eternals, because they were designed for people who had already specified what they wanted. But the bodies in deep storage, in the reanimation tanks, hadn’t had faces grafted on yet. They were blank.”

Hencock was fiddling with the cap of the flask. As if he hadn’t meant to re-open it again, he seemed surprised to find the top off again. He was clearly contemplating another swig.

“There were a few weeks when they were coming out like that, essentially faceless,” he went on. “They were the most terrifying, their faces as blank as their souls. But then whatever psychopath had been reanimating them…” here he looked significantly at Oriente, as though he might know … “suddenly decided to give them faces. Only they weren’t individualized, custom-made faces. They were stock faces, taken from the movies, as though someone had gone through the archives and looked for models. That’s why they appear familiar, because they are old screen idols.”

Hencock’s self-discipline seemed to waver and he took another slug of the liquor. He sighed, and offered it to Oriente, who politely declined: no doubt the stuff was impossible to come by.

Hencock burped quietly and smiled.

“Hell, in the past year alone I think I’ve shot three Marlon Brandos and two Brad Pitts. Bagged me a Marilyn a few weeks back, she was almost over the wall when I popped her.”

They both laughed. “Who do I look like?” Oriente asked. “There’s not exactly a lot of mirrors in your bathrooms here.”

Hencock squinted at him, the smile still lingering in the cracked corners of his mouth. “You? Do you remember an actor, I think he was Australian, called Hugh Jackman? Big guy, like you. Fitting, I guess.”

The inspector’s hand was trembling and he took another brief swig then shook the flask, clearly worried he’d emptied it. He screwed the top on again and looked Oriente straight in the eyes, for all the world like an interrogating officer.

“Now,” he said. “Your turn, Mr Oriente. You tell me.”

Oriente shrugged. There was so much to tell. “Where to begin?”

“Well, you can start off by telling me what in god’s name the Missing Link is doing back on Earth,” said Hencock. “Of all the people to suddenly pop up…”

“Funny you should phrase it like that,” said Oriente, pulling a straw from the mattress and picking his teeth with it. And he told Hencock, told him the unbelievable truth, that his fellow Eternals had fused in the mood pools of nirvana into an uncertain, juvenile deity which was only slowly waking up to its own power, to the realms it controlled. As he spoke, Hencock’s mouth opened wider and wider until he suddenly snapped it shut, as though he had made a decision.
Too bad you finished your hooch already,
Oriente thought.
You’re going to need it.

“And you have no idea what this thing, this deity, wants?”

Oriente shook his head. “Tilloch guessed that it wanted me here, as a liaison, or a prophet. Something that could perhaps understand it, given my background, but which was also essentially human. Since it let me come back, and since I am the first successful download in a decade and a half, I’m guessing Tilloch was probably right. But it’s a vague job description, second guessing a god that doesn’t even seem to know what it is.”

Hencock was lost in thought, staring at the little collection from his previous life.

“And do you think there’s a place in all this for us? For us humans, I mean?”

Oriente was struck by the fact that they were all just humans now, no more Sapiens and Eternals. He'd heard from his comrades on the night watch that when the survivors in London had sought refuge in the Tower, fights had broken out between the two communities, with the Sapiens blaming the Immortals for what had happened: the latter would typically throw back a rejoinder, like “Well, you were going to die anyway. It's what you wanted.” Slowly, though, their predicament had drawn the two sides together.

“That I don’t know, Inspector.” Oriente took a deep breath. “Look around you. I presume it was this self-styled deity that brought all these Cronix here, and it seems to have given them just enough smarts to organize themselves into a force that can hunt your people down. So,” he said, reluctant to finish. “I’m not sure it really wants you around, to be brutally honest.”

The blunt assessment silenced Hencock. He squeezed his eyes shut, his fingertips digging into his hairy cheeks. Oriente could almost see the man’s mind working. Eventually he spoke.

“Obviously, I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t repeat any of this to anyone outside of this room,” he said. The giant nodded, was about to offer some reassurances when the inspector started talking again.

“Isn’t there something we can do? I mean, to endear ourselves to this god of yours, to…what was it people used to do…?”

“Suck up to it?” suggested Oriente.

“Worship it,” said Hencock. “Show it we’re on its side, that we are more worthy subjects than those soulless monsters out there? Could we...I don't know, build it a temple? Sacrifice something, a goat or something? I mean, what can it possibly get out of having them overrun us, kill us all?”

Oriente shook his head. “You know, they used to say that god moves in mysterious ways. None more so than this one.”

Suddenly Hencock lurched over and grabbed the giant by his broad shoulders. He tried to shake him but it was like shaking a boulder. “Tell me what to do, damn it! Aren’t you its prophet? It must have chosen you for some reason. Tell us what to do to appease it!”

Oriente gently took Hencock’s puny arms, ropey with age and poor diet, in his massive hands, and returned them to the inspector’s sides.

“I’m not sure there is anything you can do, inspector. You remember that vision in Ludgate, all those years ago? It wanted to separate the living from the dead. Why? Tilloch thought it was because every one of you who panicked and returned to the Orbiters is a potential addition to its mind, another cell in its massive brain. The rest of you who stayed here? You’re outside, you’re the other, a potential threat, something to be controlled. And maybe it’s enjoying watching the show from up there. Maybe it’s bored already. Maybe … maybe you are the sacrificial goat.”

Oriente realized how much he sounded like Laura, the old Laura, not the diluted, deluded clones that inhabited the Zone. He remembered the message from the wolf all those years ago on Box Hill.
Laura was right
.

The fight had gone out of the inspector now, and he sat there, deflated.

“Just promise me this, Oriente,” he said. “That you’ll stay with us. Your presence here has given us new hope, new spirit, even if it is misplaced. We used to have to draw lots to find men willing to stand guard at night. Now they’re lining up to serve alongside you. You make us feel safe, even if you do look like our worst nightmare.”

The prophet rubbed his head. His plan, such as it was, had been to save Lola and her child, get out of here and start a new life somewhere far from these Cronix and their luckless victims. But how could he abandon these desperate people?

“Listen,” he said, reaching out for Hencock’s limp hand. “I’ll do what I can. I’ll stay for now, but I’m not sure if my presence here will ultimately be a security or a liability to you. If this thing does want me for something, it may resent my dallying here.”

Hencock finally seemed to rally. “Thank you, Oriente. Stay, and we’ll take the consequences. If you go now, this place will collapse.”

***

Lola was awake when Oriente returned. Her fever was gone, and Pris was brushing her hair with a tortoise-shell comb that was missing several teeth. Lola too had salvaged a keepsakes of her old life, but its lonely presence only emphasized how little these people had left.

He picked up the little girl, squeezed her and gave kissed her thick, matted hair.

“Go play with your friends a minute, Pris,” he said. “Your mother and I need to talk.” The girl skipped out of the room, singing to herself.

“Hey,” Lola said when they were alone. “Good to see you.” She squinted up at him and frowned. “Or at least, I think it’s you in there.”

“It’s me alright Lola. Didn’t I tell you I’d come back?”

She smiled, weakly, but with a hint of the old mischief. “Actually no, I don’t think you ever did. You just vanished. I never found out what happened to you.” Her expression hardened. “I was going crazy with worry. Poincaffrey said you’d been kidnapped, just as all this shit started going down.”

“I’m sorry…” he began, but she waved it away. He noticed how tired she still looked. Her once flawless skin was wrinkled and drawn. But her big blue eyes still caught him unawares, every time she looked up.

“Hardly your fault, was it?” she said. “Things just fell apart after you disappeared. Just about every last damn Eternal took the bullet ride to heaven the day that fucking thing appeared in Ludgate. Jesus, they didn’t even leave enough doctors to implant the locals with chips. Me and Poincraffrey worked round the clock to get as many done as we could. We did the women and kids first, just like in those old movies about that ship that sunk…”

“The Titanic,” Oriente said.

“Yes, that’s the one,” Lola said. “Then Poincaffrey heard that transmission had been cut. It was all for nothing. No one was getting out alive, the lifeboats all had leaks. There were still crowds of people camped outside the clinic, out in the yard, so we carried on chipping them, just in case. It gave them some hope at least. Of course, we told them not to off themselves, though quite a few already had before they officially announced that the soul poles had stopped working. We never found out how many of them actually made it…” she drifted off.

“What about Quin? Did he…?”

She stared into space for a minute, and he wondered whether she had heard him. Then she looked up. “He was so excited when you left him that recording of your adventures in the Exodus. I gave it to him, but he left it at his office. He made it to the Tower, but he fretted about the museum for years. He hadn't locked up when he fled, you know. Then, when Hencock said we'd have to abandon London once and for all, Quin decided to sneak back, salvage some of the most valuable items. I waited until the evacuation was almost finished, but he never came back.”

She started sobbing, and he knelt down to wrap her in his arms. She was frail as a bird.