‘In short,’ Amy said, ‘we were planning to escape.’
‘To Earth,’ Bel Glise said.
‘To Greater Brazil,’ Amy said. ‘They need us.’
‘The agitators,’ Felice said.
‘The Freedom Riders,’ Amy said. ‘We have been in contact with them for several weeks now. They need our help. They know about democracy in theory, but in practice . . . We have been advising them as best we can, but the bit rate of our transmissions is very low and we can’t do it very often because of the danger of being discovered.’
‘You’re planning to walk out of here,’ Felice said. ‘And then what? Steal a ship?’
‘We plan to take control of the tent, and wait here until a ship comes to pick us up,’ Amy said.
‘The prison administration will cut off the tent’s power,’ Felice said. ‘And its air and water.’
‘We have taken care of that,’ Bel Glise said.
‘It isn’t just the four of you,’ Felice said. ‘You two, and Goether Lyle and Jael Li Lee. The four Athenians. It’s bigger than that, isn’t it?’
‘I hope you understand why we can’t tell you,’ Amy said.
‘After Goether died, Jael checked his account,’ Bel Glise said. ‘As a precaution. It took a little while, but at last he discovered a discrepancy in the look-up tables. It seems that a second party has been hacking into the surveillance system.’
‘Whoever it was, they traced Jael and killed him,’ Amy said. ‘Just as they killed Goether.’
‘Someone in the prison,’ Felice said. ‘One of us.’
‘We think so,’ Amy said.
‘Edz Jealott isn’t clever enough to work up something like this,’ Bel Glise said. ‘But he may have forced someone to do it for him.’
‘It could be anyone,’ Amy said. ‘It might even be one of the new prisoners.’
‘How do you know it isn’t me?’ Felice said.
Amy took the question seriously. ‘If you were the murderer, and if you knew about us, you would have killed me first.’
‘Amy says that you have certain skills that may be useful,’ Bel Glise said. ‘I saw something of them, I think, when you helped me.’
‘That didn’t work out too well, did it?’ Felice said.
‘You were outnumbered,’ Bel Glise said. ‘This time, you will have to deal with only one person.’
The two ill-matched women, Amy slight and fiercely vivid, Bel Glise pale and willowy, were anxious but determined. United in common purpose. Felice wondered how deep their conspiracy went, briefly wondered whether Amy had cultivated her friendship with him because she’d thought that one day he might be useful, and realised that he didn’t care. He was on the inside now. Eager to do whatever he could. Eager to serve.
‘You want me to be bait for a trap,’ he said. ‘I check Goether Lyle’s account, and follow the trail that Jael Li Lee uncovered. And then I wait for whoever is watching it to come after me. Someone who has already killed two men.’
The women looked at each other. Amy said, ‘You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.’
‘Of course I want to do it,’ Felice said. ‘It’s what I was made to do.’
Felice knew that Amy Ma Coulibaly and Bel Glise wanted his help because of what he was, not who he was. He knew that he was being used, but after six years of taking each day as it came, each day no different from any other that preceded it, he had a mission again. He would have done it even if Amy hadn’t offered to take him to Earth afterwards, to try to find a cure for his condition.
Bel Glise had modified the clinic’s blood sniffer so that he could use its link to the prison’s net - which enabled it to upload diagnostic data directly to prisoners’ files - to access Goether Lyle’s account. Felice worked all night, resurrecting a simple demon and tailoring it to the virtual environment of the prison net. Then, with the feeling that he was stepping off a cliff, he opened Goether Lyle’s account and spent a little time flipping through the objects stored there. A notepad space filled with tracts of scribblings about some kind of metatopology, written in notation as compact and baffling as Egyptian hieroglyphics. Several small and simple virtualities that modelled various n-dimensional universes. Long Q&A sessions with Brazilian mathematicians. The draft of a research presentation. The back door to the surveillance system was hidden somewhere amongst this commonplace clutter, but Felice didn’t bother to look for it. He uploaded his demon, a simple, dumb, very reliable gatekeeper that would flash a question to anyone who opened Goether Lyle’s account or checked the user log, and would run a tag-and-trace routine. Then he turned himself off and slept the last two hours of the night. He had made himself into a target. All he had to do now was wait.
The next morning, in the refectory, Edz Jealott and a posse of lieutenants walked over to the table where he was eating. He sat back and looked straight at them. Didn’t move when one of the lieutenants leaned over and with two fingers dredged up a dollop of porridge and put the fingers in his mouth and sucked noisily.
Edz Jealott, rubbing one hand over the knot of flame-snakes writhing on his bare chest, smiled down at Felice. His fingernails were smoothly buffed and tinted with something that gave them a pearly sheen. ‘We had a nice little talk about Jael’s death, me and the guards,’ he said.
‘Despite that, they let you go,’ Felice said.
‘They knew I didn’t have anything to do with it because I was with this fine thing last night,’ Edz Jealott said, and swung a slender young woman into a tight embrace and kissed her slowly and luxuriously, moving his hands up and down her body as his lieutenants laughed and clapped. Edz Jealott pushing the woman away, smiling at Felice, saying, ‘The guards asked me to help them find the killer. That’s why we’re watching you, dead man. I thought it only fair to let you know.’
‘If I was the killer, you’d already be dead,’ Felice said, and stood and walked out, laughter and taunts trailing after him.
He took his stick out into the fields. They worked desultorily, talking about the latest rumours about Greater Brazil.
One of them, Rothco Yang, told Felice, ‘Don’t worry, my friend. When this place is shut down I will give you a good reference.’
Rothco Yang believed that civil war in Greater Brazil was not only inevitable but would also soon free them. Others in the stick weren’t so sure. The Quiet War and its aftermath had made it clear that the Brazilians were capable of anything, and it was doubtful that their European allies would be a moderating influence. And so on and so on, no end to the back and forth of discussion and argument until the shift was over and Felice marched the stick back to the barracks.
He went straight to his room and checked the gatekeeper demon. Nothing. That evening, Edz Jealott was sitting at the table nearest the door of the refectory, surrounded by his lieutenants. Everyone but Edz Jealott staring at Felice as he went past.
‘Killer,’ a tall young man said in a high mocking falsetto. Another man made a gun-shape with finger and thumb and pointed it at him; a third said that they were watching him.
‘Everywhere you go, we’ll be there.’
Felice thought about that as he ate his meal. Then he went to see Amy Ma Coulibaly, told her that Edz Jealott was planning to frame him for the murder of Jael Li Lee, and explained what he wanted her to do.
‘One of his lieutenants followed me here,’ he said. ‘I expect that one of them will be following me everywhere from now on. It’s going to make it very difficult for me when the time comes to act.’
‘Can’t you find a way to lose them?’
‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. Do you want to take the risk?’
‘I don’t want to risk revealing what we can do before it is time to do it.’
‘You already took that risk, when you set me against the killer.’
Felice watched the old woman think about that. Her face shuttered and expressionless, her eyes focused on something far beyond him. They were sitting on fat cushions in the little side room, the slate with its chessboard glowing between them.
At last she said, ‘I can’t let you control it.’
‘As long as someone takes them down, when I need it.’
‘I’ll see what I can do. Meanwhile, I think we should play at least one game, for the sake of your friend outside,’ she said, and touched the slate with her forefinger, moving the queen’s bishop’s pawn two steps, the first move in the English Opening.
Felice pretended to take no notice of the man who trailed him back to his apartment block. Back in his room, he used the blood sniffer to connect to Goether Lyle’s account, and saw with only a faint sense of shock that something had attached itself to the dumb little gatekeeper demon. A simple communication program. He checked it out, excised a few lines of code that would have revealed his location, fired it up. It immediately presented him with a blank two-dimensional space in which words began to appear, emerging letter by letter, traveling from right to left and fading away.
>>why do you ask if i was born in a vat on the moon.
>i thought i had found one of my brothers, Felice typed, hunt-and-peck on the blood sniffer’s keypad.
>> i found you. you did not find me. and i am no ones brother. if you want to know who i am meet me and find out.
Whoever was at the other end of the program wanted to get straight down to business. A string of letters and numbers unravelled. A grid reference.
>>do you know where that is?
>i can find it.
>>come alone.
>of course.
>>or else i will find you later on and deal with you.
>i understand.
>>in two hours. i have a little business to take care of first.
>please don’t do anything until we have talked.
His words faded left to right, like a wave collapsing on a beach. There was no reply.
It was a little after midnight. Trusty Town’s dome was polarised to black; its street lights dimmed to a residual glow that showed only the shapes of things. The whole place seemed to be asleep, quiet and still apart from the whirr of a drone high in the dark air and the gliding whisper of Felice Gottschalk’s slippers as he walked across the big plaza. Stopping when men and women stepped out of the shadows either side of the entrance of the tunnel that led down to the main airlock.
The soft slap as a man thumped his palm with a weighted sap.
The snap as a shock stick sparked a sudden star.
A woman’s nervous giggle.
A teasing falsetto: ‘Killer killer killer . . .’
There were people behind Felice, too, but he pretended to pay no attention to them, standing with one hand in the pocket of his blouson as the light over the tunnel entrance grew brighter and Edz Jealott stepped forward, barefoot and bare-chested in baggy white trousers. He smiled at Felice and said, ‘We know where you’re going. The barracks, right? And we know what you’re planning to do.’
‘Killer killer,’ came the falsetto from the shadowy figures on the left.
A murmur of agreement all around. Edz Jealott snapped his fingers. Zhang Hilton stepped up to him, handed him two pairs of red work gloves, and stepped back into the shadows.
‘We could kill you where you stand,’ Edz Jealott said. ‘But that would be no fun at all. Our kind of justice is not just about dealing with the bad guys. It’s about style. Here. Take a pair. We’ll get it on, just you and me.’
Felice was completely calm. Living in the moment. ‘Do you really think the guards will let you do this?’
‘I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to put you down in a fair fight. And then I’ll turn you over to the guards. After that,’ Edz Jealott said, ‘you’ll very definitely wish I’d given you an honourable death. A manly death.’
‘Which he doesn’t deserve,’ Zhang Hilton said.
‘My friend is pissed off because you put the hurt on him the last couple of go-rounds,’ Edz Jealott told Felice. ‘But he has nothing to worry about. I’ll beat you down, but I promise I’ll do it very scientifically.’
Felice said, ‘Did someone tell you I was coming here? Was it an anonymous tip?’
He was wondering if the killer had set him up.
Edz Jealott laughed, looking around at his lieutenants. ‘We’ve been watching you. We said we would - weren’t you paying attention? And it’s obvious where you’re going, and why.’
‘All of this is your idea.’
‘What did I just say?’ Edz Jealott tossed a pair of gloves at Felice’s feet. When Felice didn’t pick them up, the big man shook his head and said through his smile, all teeth and clenched muscle, no emotion in it or in his dead gaze, ‘We can do it bare-knuckle if that’s how you want it, killer. But we’re going to do it.’
‘No, we’re not.’
All the time Felice’s left hand had been inside his blouson pocket, gripping the keypad and comms package he’d dismounted from the blood sniffer. A crude phone, set to send a signal as soon as he pressed any key. He mashed one now, with his thumb.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then everyone around him fell down, muscles locked, shuddering and shivering like so many clubbed fish. Felice had phoned Bel Glise, and she had used the back door into the prison’s surveillance system to send signals to the implants of Edz Jarrett and his lieutenants, informing them that they had strayed beyond the tent’s perimeter.
Felice stepped amongst the stricken men and women, picking up a cosh and a couple of shock sticks, waiting until the implants had run through their thirty-second cycle and everyone around him relaxed and drew in sobbing breaths and groaned and swore. As if they had smashed down from a great height and found themselves dazed and badly hurt but still alive.
Edz Jealott was trying to push to his knees. Felice swung the cosh in a short swift arc that connected with the big man’s temple with a hard pop. Edz Jealott pitched forward on his face. Felice straddled his shoulders and put a foot between his shoulder blades and grabbed his jaw with one hand, fitted the palm of the other over his ear, and twisted his head up and around and broke his neck.