Only Human (29 page)

‘We're going to have to call Brisbane about this,' Ms Tomacek said with a shiver. ‘I hate talking to those guys, it's so hard understanding what they're saying.'

‘There's more. Look.'

‘Bizarre,' Mr Wakisashi muttered, chewing the end of his moustache. ‘But it sort of makes sense. In a crazy sort of a way.'

‘It does?'

‘Sort of. Look, you shut up and be practical while I try and figure this out.'

Having had his daily intake of fibre, Mr Wakisashi bit his lip instead. Maybe he had been here too long, and the weird philosophical concepts the Crucifixioners lived by were starting to warp his mind; but it did make a very tenuous kind of distorted left-hand-thread sense if you looked at it upside down backwards through the wrong end of the telescope - which was, of course, his particular gift. If only there was a way of testing his theory—

But, he realised, there was. Worth a try, anyway.

He pulled the keyboard back from Ms Tomacek's limp hands and typed. Nothing appeared on the screen, of course, but dammit, the input had to go
somewhere
—

‘Now let's see,' he muttered, and waited.

He didn't have to wait very long.

‘What did you say to it?' Ms Tomacek whispered.

‘“Quick, this way.” I guess it heard me.'

Crucifixion Island
, Mr Wakisashi typed.
Sir
, he added.

You bet, sir.Won't be a jiffy
. . .

‘. . . Got it,' he continued triumphantly. ‘Can you hear me all right, sir?'

There was a crackle, like a family of trolls eating cornflakes, and then the computer spoke. ‘Yes,' it said. ‘Just about. Are there mice nesting in this thing?'

‘Not to the best of my knowledge, sir.'

‘I'd check if I were you,' the computer replied dubiously. ‘If there are, leave them there, they're probably an improvement. Ah, I see you've got the eclipse down this way as well. Where did you say this was?'

‘Crucifixion, sir. That's in Melanesia. You know, the tax haven.'

‘Ah, right. Got you. Anyhow, thanks.You got me out of a tricky situation there. Though maybe I shouldn't have left Maria—'

‘Maria?'

‘Not anybody you know,' the computer replied. ‘Still, she'll be all right. Give it five minutes, and the police station'll be so full of my lawyers she'll probably prefer to stay in her cell. Well well, so this is Crucifixion. Can't say I've ever been here before. Well, I have, of course, but not
consciously
, if you know what I mean.'

Mr Wakisashi took a deep breath. ‘I think I do, sir.You're the company, aren't you? You're Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits.'

‘And you're a very bright lad,' the computer replied. ‘You'll go far, one of these days. Actually, that's a pretty stupid thing to say, because if this really is Crucifixion there's not much further you can go without falling off the edge.'

‘Excuse me—'

Mr Wakisashi smiled. ‘And this is my, er, colleague. Ms Cindi Tomacek, from our Des Moines office.'

‘Hi.'

‘Um, yes, hi to you too.' There was a thoughtful burr to the computer's synthesised voice. ‘Now listen - dammit, you haven't told me your name. No, I should be able to do this myself. Akira Wakisashi, right? San Francisco office, nine months' secondment.'

‘You got it, sir.'

‘Don't call me sir. Listen, Aki, I want you to do something for me. You game?'

‘That's what you pay me for, boss.'

‘Yes,' the computer mused, ‘I suppose I do, don't I? Amazing to think that I employ hundreds of thousands of people and I can't even tie a shoelace. Now then, I want you to cut the link. Isolate this whatever-it-is island from the rest of the company net. Can you do that? Only, I want to stay out of the way for a while—'

‘Sure thing, boss.'

‘—and this is about as out of the way as you can get without a space suit. And when you've done that, I want you to set up one special line. I'll give you the co-ordinates when you're ready for them.'

Dutifully, Mr Wakisashi tapped at his keyboard, while Ms Tomacek did a thoroughly convincing impression of a hunted doorstop. After three minutes or so, Mr Wakisashi looked up from the keyboard and cleared his throat nervously.

‘Excuse me, boss, but while I'm just waiting for these line commands to go through, can I ask you something?'

‘It's a free country,' the computer replied. ‘Or at least I assume it is. Damn silly assumption
that
is, too. Anyway, let's not get sidetracked. What's on your mind?'

‘Well—' Mr Wakisashi fiddled with the knot of his tie. ‘Sorry, but I'm dying of curiosity here. What goes on?'

‘Ah.' The electronic voice subsided into a cybernetic mumble. ‘Well, it's like this. I was having lunch with this girl—'

‘
You
were having lunch with - sorry, please go on. You were having lunch, and then what happened?'

‘Well, we met these people. Not nice people. And they made me so uptight, I thought it'd help us both unwind if we went and threw doughnuts at a few policemen.'

‘Doughnuts.'

‘Yes, doughnuts. First-class missile, your doughnut. Ideal mass-to-surface-area ratio. Only Maria - that's the girl, only really she's a fifteenth-century painting - she wouldn't listen. First she insisted on meringues, then cream slices. Well, I could have told her, it's simple aerodynamics. I did tell her, but it was too late. And then this cop tried to arrest us—'

‘I gathered.'

‘Anyway,' continued the computer, ‘she kicked his shins and we made a run for it, and he was just about to catch up with us when I got your message. So I closed my London office temporarily and transferred my principal place of business to here. Actually, I'm not terribly proud of myself, running out on her like that. Still, there's no point in us both getting chucked in some grotty dungeon, is there?'

‘Absolutely, boss. I've cut the links with the rest of the system now, if you want to give me those co-ordinates.'

‘On the screen now. Oh yes, before we go any further, could you just define discretion for me.'

Mr Wakisashi thought for a moment. ‘I'm sorry, boss, I didn't quite catch that last remark. Was it important?'

‘
Good
lad. Okay, get me that line.'

‘It's as good as yours, boss. There's just one other thing, though. If you don't mind me asking, that is.'

‘Nah. You seem like a bright kid. Fire away.'

‘Well then.' Mr Wakisashi closed his eyes, as if he didn't want to see himself asking such an embarrassing question. ‘You're alive, aren't you?'

‘Looks that way, doesn't it?'

‘All right then,
how
are you alive? No disrespect, but most companies aren't. Even really
big
companies like you. Even IBM isn't alive. Not even,' he added, ‘in California. So where's the angle?'

‘Son.'

‘Yes, boss?'

‘Here's the deal. I'll tell you how I'm alive if you tell me why you are. Sound reasonable?'

‘I . . .' Mr Wakisashi sucked his front teeth. ‘I don't know,' he admitted. ‘I just am.'

‘Likewise. Unlike you, though, I intend making the best of it. But first I've got to sort out a problem. Is the line ready?'

‘Ready when you are.'

‘All right. You should be getting a code request any second now.'

‘It's just coming up on screen. What should I—?'

‘The code,' said Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits, ‘is Mainframe.'

 

What KIC didn't know, isolated from the rest of itself on a speck of rock in the middle of the Pacific, was that it was rapidly becoming worthless. One of those stock-market panics, the sort that sprout like mushrooms, had sent the mighty computer company's share price spiralling down so fast that it was in danger of doing dreadful things to the theory of relativity.

The source of the original rumour ended his call to his stockbroker, put back the receiver and looked at his hands. They were shaking.

‘You know what I've just done?' he said in a hoarse whisper. ‘I've just deliberately shaved a hundred and twenty-seven thousand quid off the value of diocesan assets entrusted to my care. By the time they've finished with me, it'll make what they did to Joan of Arc look like a champagne reception.'

‘Relax,' Artofel replied without looking up. ‘As soon as the market bottoms out, you can buy 'em back and make a fortune. I'd have thought you'd have known that, being a bishop.'

The Bishop scowled. He was trying to pour himself a stiff drink, but whisky kept sploshing all over the backs of his hands. ‘Sure,' he replied harshly, ‘but what if it doesn't work? They'll crucify me.'

Artofel shrugged. ‘In your line of work, that'd probably be intended as a compliment. Now do shut up, I'm trying to concentrate.'

After a few more futile attempts, the Bishop decided to stop bothering with the glass and swig it straight from the bottle. A little while later, he felt better.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘It's getting to me. This blasted eclipse doesn't help, either. It's been going on for ages, and nobody seems to know what it's about. For all I know, if it carries on for much longer the whole planet'll cool off and we'll all die.'

‘Which would mean,' Artofel sighed, ‘you wouldn't have to explain your actions to your diocesan board of finance. That's what I like about you guys, the way you can find something positive in anything.'

The Bishop gazed at him owlishly over the neck of the bottle. ‘Makes you think, though,' he muttered. ‘A bloke barges in here, announces he's a Duke of Hell, next thing I know I'm selling perfectly good shares and helping undermine one of the world's leading multinational corporations. It's all a bit suss, if you ask me. I mean, there's moving in mysterious ways and there's doing the blindfold rumba with both legs in plaster and a bucket over your head.'

Artofel looked up and grinned. ‘And you know what?' he said pleasantly. ‘I have this feeling it hasn't even started to get serious yet. I'll let you know when it does.'

He turned his head back to the screen; but not for long, because it was round about then that the doorframe cracked, the door burst open and—

‘
FREEZE!
'

Astonishing how people will do exactly what you say, provided you say it unpleasantly enough. People, mark you; not bottles. The whisky bottle, clearly not in the least impressed, slid elegantly through the Bishop's fingers, hit the floor and smashed.

‘All right, which one of you's the Duke?'

Inevitable, Artofel mused, that there were three of them; Hell always sent out its enforcers in groups of three. The time-honoured explanation was that one of them could read, one of them could write and the third one was there to keep an eye on the two intellectuals.

‘He is,' he said, pointing to the Bishop. ‘Thank goodness you've come. I've been so frightened.'

There was no way of knowing what the chief enforcer made of that, since he was little more than a heavy-duty industrial-grade shadow with a voice. He stood still for a long time, chillingly majestic in his penumbra of darkness. Then he spoke.

‘Are you sure?' he said.

‘Course I'm sure,' Artofel replied promptly. ‘It's not exactly a grey area. Don't just stand there, Officer. Arrest him.'

‘Um . . .'

It was at this point that the significance of what Artofel had just said finally permeated through to the Bishop's rather fuddled brain, like second-class mail over a Bank Holiday weekend. When the message eventually reached him, the effect was well worth seeing. He jumped four and a half inches in the air, his elbows and knees drawn in tight, and made a noise like a squirrel in a blender.

‘It's not me,' he quavered. ‘It's him. Not me. I'm a
bishop
, for God's sake.'

Artofel frowned, as if offended by the blasphemy. ‘Pack it in,' he said, ‘there's a good chap. You're only making it harder on yourself, you know, imitating the clergy.'

‘But . . .'

‘But nothing. You've had a good run for your money, now it's time to go along with these nice gentlemen.'

All three enforcers took a step forward; whereupon the Bishop lowered his head, screamed and charged straight at them, butting the chief enforcer in the pit of the stomach and sending him spinning against the wall. His colleague to the immediate left aimed an ineffectual blow at him with a pitchfork, impaling a tapestry cushion and a file of bank statements. Without slowing down, the Bishop dashed across the room and jumped out of the window, apparently not bothered by the glass.

‘He's got away,' observed the third enforcer; presumably, Artofel decided, the one who could read, since his eyesight was obviously first-rate. ‘Through the window,' he added.