Fractions (59 page)

‘All the same,' said Wilde, ‘he sounds like a good bet for your case.'

‘Sure, which is why I didn't expect Reid to agree. But he did. Great. Trouble is, I didn't know you'd be involved. Shit.'

‘Why is it a problem?'

‘Because Eon Talgarth doesn't like you very much.'

Wilde put down his drink and stared at her. ‘What? I never heard of him. What's he got against me?'

‘Oh, nothing personal as far as I know.' She shrugged. ‘He's from Earth, he was in the labour-gangs, he was in the ship. So you could have harmed him somehow – he's never said. But when he was an abolitionist, he used to argue against the idea which a lot of people here have, that you were some kind of hero and great anarchist thinker and represented an alternative to the sort of ideas that Reid implemented when he set this place going. He said you were an opportunist, that you made all kinds of dirty deals with governments – and with Reid, and that any conflicts between the two of you were just personal rivalries.'

She spoke in a light-hearted, say-it-ain't-so tone. Wilde tilted his seat precariously back and rocked with laughter.

‘It's all true, every word!' he said. ‘I'm amazed there are people here who say I was a hero and a great anarchist thinker. Ha-ha! This Eon Talgarth has got me bang to rights.'

Tamara's mouth turned down slightly. ‘It's not really true, is it? That you were always an opportunist?'

‘Absolutely,' Wilde said. ‘Only the other day – by my memory, of course – a woman I was once in love with told me I was responsible for the last world war going nuclear. By that time in my life, bearing in mind I was ninety-three years old and had taken a lot of flak for various…controversial decisions, I didn't even take offence.'

‘But if…' Tamara considered the implications. ‘That would mean you were to blame for –'

‘The whole fucking mess!' Wilde said. He looked about him and waved a hand. ‘Everything that has happened since the Third World War is
all my fault
!'

‘That,' said Tamara, ‘is what Eon Talgarth thinks.'

‘He could be right,' Wilde said with a shrug. ‘I don't think so myself.'

‘Oh, neither do I,' Tamara hastened to add. ‘And neither do most people, abolitionists or not. In fact, some people think you're, well…'

She hesitated, embarrassed.

‘What?' Wilde leaned forward, cigarette in hand, daring her. ‘Something more than a great anarchist thinker?'

‘Yes,' Tamara said. ‘They think you're, well, still alive and out there somewhere. People say they've seen you, out in the desert.'

‘Do they indeed?' Wilde sucked in smoke and blew it above her head, in a long sigh. ‘Now that's really interesting, because the robot Jay-Dub claims to be another…implementation of me, and to have been around since before the first landing here. I wouldn't put it past its capabilities to throw a fetch, or to appear as me on screen.'

‘Aha!' said Tamara. ‘According to the message I got from Invisible Hand, Reid claims he has evidence that Jay-Dub hacked into Dee, and he holds you responsible.'

‘Me?' Wilde said. ‘Well, Jay-Dub said nothing to me about anything like that. What a surprise.'

‘Yeah,' said Tamara. ‘AIs are devious bastards, aren't they?'

‘Devious and dangerous,' Wilde said. ‘Wouldn't trust them an inch, myself.'

Tamara laughed.

‘OK,' said Wilde, ‘I reckon we need to fill each other in a bit. Us humans gotta stick together.'

Tamara recounted what had happened the previous evening, and that morning, and some of the background. Wilde kept smiling when she spoke about abolitionism. Then Wilde went over what had happened to him, and what the robot had told him. Tamara listened, sometimes wide-eyed, sometimes frowning. When he'd finished she sat silent for a moment.

‘What a bastard,' she said at last. ‘Growing a clone of your wife's body and using it as a gynoid. Jeez. Guess he didn't expect to see you again.'

‘Maybe,' Wilde said dubiously. ‘He must've known about the robot, though, surely? Could the robot have seen Dee before?'

‘Sure,' said Tamara. ‘That kind of rig would have comms, if nothing else. And Reid's claiming Jay-Dub did hack into Dee. But the robot said nothing about that?'

‘Nothing to me,' Wilde said. ‘I definitely got the impression that it knew something about Dee, in fact it insisted Dee wasn't human even in the sense that it is, but it never gave any hint that Dee was part of its plans, whatever they are.'

‘And now it's disappeared,' Tamara sighed. She looked about, as though hoping it would reappear. ‘Presumably it doesn't know about the legal case, and it figures it's best to lie low.'

‘That would fit in with its personality all right,' Wilde grinned. ‘And mine!'

‘Let's hope it finds out before the trial,' said Tamara. ‘Otherwise it is in even deeper shit…You still want to go before Talgarth?'

‘From what you've told me,' Wilde said, ‘I don't have much choice in the matter.'

‘That's right,' said Tamara.

Wilde responded with an ironic grimace. He stood up, without saying anything, and wandered about the nearby stalls. Every so often he smiled to himself, and then he turned and smiled at Tamara, who'd silently followed him.

‘There's something about this place,' he explained. ‘I always knew there would be places like this, trash markets on other worlds. It makes me feel so homesick that I know I'm the same man I was on Earth.'

Tamara looked down and scuffed the dirt.

‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I've heard so much about Wilde, but my mental picture of him is always like – you know, those cards, posters I've seen. I know I've been sort of presumptuous, talking to you like you're as young as you look.'

Wilde snorted and slapped her shoulder. ‘Knock it off,' he said. ‘I've only come back from the dead in a literal sense.'

They went over to Invisible Hand and registered Wilde as a joint defendant, and Wilde laid a counter-charge against Reid of having been responsible for the death of one Jonathan Wilde, of London, Earth. The machine took it all in without demur, but its internal lights moved about in an agitated manner.

‘What now?' Wilde asked Tamara.

‘Well, perhaps it's time you met Dee. She's staying at my place, and it's only five minutes away from here. Ax – that's a…kid who lives with me – said he'd take her out shopping this morning.' She looked at her watch. ‘Fifteen-thirty. They should be back by now.'

‘OK,' said Wilde. He stood up. For the first time since they'd met, his face showed something less than composure.

‘Let's go.'

Ax retrieves the knife from the closed door of the wardrobe, paces back a few metres, and throws the knife again. It thuds into the door and sticks there, adding to the rough human outline of gashes that repeated throws have left in the wood. A faint groan and a banging noise come from inside the cupboard.

Dee looks up from rummaging through Parris's picture collection. She feels nauseous. It's impossible to tell if the pictures are of real scenes, or posed, or are simply computer-generated imagery. She doesn't particularly care. She wants to wipe them from her memory, and their originator from the world.

She still doesn't know if she can do it, or even stand by and let Ax do it. She doesn't know if the permissions for her lethal skills have been reset. She suspects that if they haven't, it won't be anything dramatic; no staying of her hand, no rooting of her feet; just some quite reasonable and natural-seeming inhibition, a distaste or disquiet that won't let her follow it through.

‘Haven't you done enough of that?' she asks Ax.

Ax tugs the knife out of the wood once more. ‘I suppose so,' he admits. He grins at her. ‘You get carried away.'

Dee takes her pistol out of her handbag, tucks it in her waistband and walks over.

‘Well I say finish it,' she says.

‘Fine,' says Ax.

He opens the splintered door. Inside, Parris is still hanging in his bonds. His eyes are tightly closed. Tears are running down his face, and the sticky-tape gag is slimed with the snot that the tears have brought with them and which he's blown from his nostrils in frantic snorts.

Ax traces a line with the knife's tip, along the man's bare belly. Parris's eyes open, and roll from side to side, looking at Ax and then, as if in appeal, to Dee. Blood wells along the cut. The sight of it makes Dee stop, and catch Ax's arm.

‘No!' she says. The images from Parris's collection are crowded out by images from Soldier, an encyclopaedia of injury and blood: spurting, spraying, oozing, dripping. She imagines it spattering her clothes, and shudders.

‘No,' she says. ‘It's enough.'

Ax glares at her, but she outstares him. He backs off. Dee sets to work, loosening, unshackling, unbinding. She steadies Parris as he stumbles out, and lets him sink to the floor. He's making noises through his nostrils.

‘Oh,' says Dee. She'd forgotten that. She stoops to rip the tape from his mouth, and as it comes off she notices that Parris has come, and more than once, even with his cock bound back. Semen is drying on his thighs.

He falls forward into a kneeling posture, and looks up at her, gasping and smiling.

‘Thank you, mistress,' he says in a low voice. ‘I deserved that, all of it, I truly did!' He looks at her with sly hope. ‘When can you visit me again?'

Dee stares at him. She takes a few steps backward, still thinking of keeping her nice new clothes clean. She turns and walks further away, past Ax, to the top of the stairs.

‘Mistress, please…' Parris calls after her.

‘Oh, fuck this,' she says.

She draws the pistol from her skirt, takes aim, and blows his head off.

The shot echoes around the circular spaces of the room and the stairwell and leaves her ears ringing. She grins at Ax, who despite his instigation of the whole thing is looking at the remains of Parris, and then at her, with a shocked pallor.

‘Now I know,' she says. ‘I do have free will.'

‘That must be very useful,' Ax says. ‘I'm a bit of a determinist, myself.'

Dee smiles at him reassuringly as she briskly gathers up her stuff.

‘Time to go,' she says.

Ax is pointlessly wiping the tip of his knife on a piece of drapery.

‘Shouldn't we, you know, clean up?' he asks. ‘Can't you see fingerprints and stuff?'

‘Oh, sure,' Dee says, fastening her cloak. ‘They're all over the place. And our skin-cells. Not to mention our images on the house's cameras.'

She looks up and smiles and waves at a tiny, hooded lens.

‘Shit,' says Ax. ‘Can you do anything about it?'

Dee flashes him a puzzled look and starts to go downstairs.

‘Of course I can,' she says. ‘But it's very important that I don't, and you know it. Come on, before somebody comes.'

Ax follows her, still reluctant.

‘Nobody's gonna come,' he says. ‘I don't think Parris had his nest video-linked to the nearest security-service.'

‘I guess not.'

Unlocking the door doesn't require any of Dee's deeper abilities. It closes itself behind them as soon as they're out. They walk down the long ramp in silence. Near the bottom a side-ramp leads to a nearby residential door. Dee scans its electronics.

‘This'll do,' she says. ‘Somebody's home.'

Ax stops walking. For a moment, he looks like a stubborn child.

‘This isn't what I meant,' he says.

Dee tries not to wheedle.

‘It's important,' she says. ‘It'll help your cause, as well as your case.'

‘I don't give a fuck about a case,' Ax says. ‘That shit is
over.
'

Dee regards him levelly while recalling the things he's said earlier.

‘The dead may rise,' she says, ‘and you may be right, but one way or another, this will all come to judgement.'

Ax stares back at her for a moment, then nods.

Together, they walk down the small ramp to the door. Dee pings the bell. They wait. A little screen above the bell lights up, a woman's face appears.

‘Yes?' she says.

Dee stands a little straighter and taller.

‘This is Dee Model and Ax Terminal,' she announces firmly. ‘We have just killed your neighbour up the way, Anderson Parris. Call you witness.'

The woman gives an exaggerated blink.

‘W-witnessed,' she says shakily.

‘Thank you,' Ax says.

‘Goodbye,' says Dee.

Then Dee and Ax hurry back to the main ramp and down steps and slopes to a level walkway, and up in a lift to a high platform, where they join a small queue of well-dressed people waiting at the air-stop to catch a flit. Ax occupies his time by tuning in to the stop's news-service. Every so often he shakes his head and smiles at Dee: no hue-and-cry yet; and uses these interruptions in his glassy trance to study a list.