Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (2 page)

“If you reps don’t know how to control yourselves, you’ll have to be exterminated like mad dogs,” he spat out venomously.

His little poisonous dart meant nothing to Bruna. She was used to being treated with contempt by humans and, if truth be told, she despised them in return. What was significant was that the
fieras
had stopped kicking people. They were now behaving with the caution typical of naughty children who’d had a fright.
Cowardly humans.

The other travelers were identified and allowed to go, but they left Bruna on her knees for some time. The traffic through the control point was still suspended; the security forces were removing fallen bodies on both sides of the plexiglass wall. The few individuals who had managed to jump the wall and get into Zone One were returned to Zone Zero. Near the wall, not far from Bruna, a girl of about nine or ten was struggling in the grasp of a
fiera
.

“She’s dead! She’s dead!” the child was screaming.

She must have been referring to the dark, motionless bundle lying on the ground beside them. The guard grabbed the girl by the wrist and lifted her in the air. She screamed and tried to kick him. He headed for the gate with the child, who was twisting and turning as she dangled like a fish in its death throes. It was obvious he was going to toss her onto the other side.

“Nooooo! I don’t want to go baaaaaack!”

Another media drone appeared in the sky. The girl redoubled her efforts and managed to get the little plane to hover over them, humming and vibrating like a bumblebee.

“Nooooo! You can’t expel meeee! I’m a minor! I’m a miiinorrr!”

The guard who was dragging her along stopped, unsure about what he should do.

A
fiera
walked up to Bruna and said, “You can leave, but you’ve been reported. We’ve added a civic misdemeanor to your record. They’ll get in touch to impose the appropriate penalty. I hope they take away your license.”

The voice indicated the guard was a woman—the body armor gave away nothing. A female with callous eyes. Bruna grunted and stood up. Just then a rocket blew up the media drone. A splinter hit her left eyebrow, cutting it open.

“Dammit.”

Her eyebrow was bleeding, and there is almost nothing as unpleasant as being blinded in one eye by your own blood.
And on top of that,
thought Bruna,
the scar might disfigure the perfect line of my tattoo.
She liked her tattoo. She was feeling more and more angry. In four strides she reached the guard who was shaking the child and, without even stopping to think, grabbed the girl’s other arm.

“She belongs to me. That’s what I came to find in this Zone Zero. My assignment.”

“What?”

“My client’s daughter was kidnapped. We think it might be this girl,” Bruna said.

“That’s nonsense.”

“It’s true! It’s true, it’s true, it’s truuue!” yelled the girl.

The other guards approached, among them the officer who had told Bruna she could go.

“The girl doesn’t go. She isn’t authorized.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Bruna. “I’ll pay her residence fee for three months in a Green zone right now. That way she can leave. I’ll assume responsibility for her. When we find out whether or not she’s the daughter of my client, we’ll act accordingly.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. The child hung like a rag between the hands of the replicant and the guard.

Eventually, the
fiera
who seemed to be in charge spoke: “Don’t take me for a fool. I don’t believe you. But those fucking media people have already got pictures of the girl. Which means they already know she’s a minor, and we can’t expel her without going before a judge. So why not? Take her. You’re saving us work. You pay her fee, assume provisional custody on the register, and clear off. I’m sick of the sight of you.”

Bruna hurriedly finalized everything on her mobile. As she accepted legal responsibility for the girl, she felt her anger and desperation build. What was she doing? Why was she complicating her life like this?

“Let’s go,” she grunted.

“Not so fast,” said the
fiera
. “I have to put a tracker on her first.”

With shocking efficiency the guard grabbed the girl, held her firmly under her left arm, and fired a tracker chip into her thigh. It all happened so quickly that by the time the girl started to howl again she was already back on her feet.

“Tomorrow you must present yourself with her at the Center for Minors in your region. Now go.”

Bruna took the furious child by the hand and started to walk. According to the girl’s record, her name was Gabi Orlov, she had been born in Dzerzhinsk, and she was an orphan. She’d been born in June 2099, which meant that she had just turned ten. She spoke good universal English, of course; anyone born after the Unification of the Earth in ’96 had been educated in the standard language. Bruna glanced at her out of the corner of her eye: a wide, flat face that was a little Tartar-looking; a surly, glowering, insistent expression. Not a trace of tears on her dirty cheeks.

“That body that was lying on the ground, was it a relative of yours? The one you were saying was dead.”

“No.”

“Do you speak Russian?”

“No.”

Bruna rubbed her left eye to get rid of the blood. It had gotten into her eye and was stinging. Suddenly, she was overwhelmed by an unexpected wave of anguish that almost left her breathless. By the great Morlay, what on earth had she done?

“Listen, I’m not going to look after you. I’ll find you a good place, someone to take care of you, but don’t expect anything else from me.”

The girl made a sarcastic, scornful noise, part laugh, part explosive cough. “Expect something from you? From a rep? I want nothing to do with you. You die too quickly.”

“Have a good trip! Come back and visit Zone Zero soon!” merrily chirped a fake electronic voice.

They were leaving the border.

2

T
hree years, ten months, and fourteen days.

It hadn’t been the best week of Bruna’s life.

The woman who had hired her to find her husband in Zone Zero couldn’t pay the second installment of her fee—one thousand gaias. The client had committed to paying it as soon as she had the money, but she was unemployed and could barely cover her residence permit. Bruna had a suspicion that this client would end up being added to her list of bad debtors, which not only had an impact on her meager income but also, to an even greater degree, on her damaged self-esteem. On the other hand, she hadn’t been able to find even a trace of the man, so she didn’t feel all that justified in demanding the outstanding fee. Bruna sometimes thought that for some reason she was deteriorating much more quickly than should be the case for her age. Was it possible for reps to suffer from Alzheimer’s? Impossible. Their genes were selected, pruned, and reinforced, but even so . . .

“Husky, Husky! You seem to be on another planet today.”

The modulated baritone voice of Virginio Nissen cut a path through to her as if it were falling down from the top of a well. Floating on top of a mattress of fine air bubbles, and wearing virtual glasses that made her feel adrift in the middle of the cosmos and submerged in the small abyss of her thoughts, Bruna had to make an effort to understand the significance of the distant words of her psych-guide. She forced herself to concentrate.

“Let’s play associations,” said Nissen. “You know the rules. No cheating. Say the first thing that occurs to you. Let’s see . . . Violence . . .”

“Suffering.”

“Suffering.”

“Violence.”

“Child.”

“Monster.”

Bruna heard what sounded to her like a muffled laugh.
Monster, yes indeed.
She’d talked to the psych-guide a little about Gabi, only to hear him insinuate what the replicant already knew about herself: that she was an idiot, an aberrant creature with the body of a technohuman and a mind packed with the overly human memories that her memorist had provided her. So she didn’t know how to handle her emotions or her sense of guilt or her damned suffering and her anger. That was why she’d had the absurd idea of assuming responsibility for the young Russian girl. For that monster who had surpassed her worst expectations, despite Bruna being accustomed to always expecting the absolute minimum.

“Friends,” said Nissen.

“Burden.”

“Loneliness.”

“Madness.”

In the end she’d foisted the young girl on Yiannis. Bruna continued to be legally responsible for her until the Juvenile Court decided the monster’s fate, but she’d persuaded the old archivist to provide accommodation for her in his home. In a moment of rare optimism, it had even occurred to the rep that Gabi might be good for Yiannis, a man whose mental backbone had been broken since the death of his little son forty years earlier and who had succumbed totally to melancholy after he had been expelled from the Central Archive. But the monster was driving Yiannis mad, which proved to Bruna yet again that any hope of happiness was foolish.

“Love,” insisted Nissen, as persistent as a terrier.

“Pain.”

“Sex.”

“Anger.”

And Lizard. Ah, that damned Paul Lizard. The inspector from the Judiciary Squad with whom she’d had a relationship six months earlier. But she hadn’t seen him for two months. Two months in a rep’s life was the equivalent of two years for a human. Two months was a temporal treasure. What a waste.

“What are you thinking right now?” asked the psych-guide.

“Three years, ten months, and fourteen days.”

“Husky, you’re not still with that?”

The professionally syrupy voice of the man couldn’t mask a hint of annoyance, a poorly repressed irritation that forced Bruna to emerge a little further from her lethargy. The rep always responded to aggression.

“If you knew when you were going to die, you’d be counting down the time you had left, too, Nissen.”

“We’re all going to die. Our way of coping with it is to forget it.”

Forget it!
The psych-guide had no idea what he was talking about. Technohumans couldn’t forget. Just the day before Bruna had come face-to-face with a rep in the final stages of her Total Techno Tumor. Normally, replicants had the decency to hide when their TTT manifested. The generalized cancer ended the lives of reps in just a few days, ten years after they were activated. TTT, spectacularly destructive, produced a death that resembled a catastrophic conflagration. Bruna remembered watching the final, ferocious battle of Merlín, her lover from her younger days. Or rather, of some four years ago. Despite the tranquillity induced by the air-bubble couch and the virtual glasses, Bruna clenched her jaws and ground her teeth.
What a scam, what a swindle, what incessant torture this little life is.
The techno she’d crossed paths with yesterday had pustules on her face, her bones looked as if they were about to break through her skin, and she could barely stand up; she was propping herself against a wall, delusional and dying. Bruna, distracted and in a hurry, almost bumped into her. It was like running into Death. Her heart shrank, and cold beads of sweat broke out on the back of her neck. She was frightened. A mad, animal fear. An almost irresistible terror. She fought against it, however, breathing deeply as she watched the techno snake her way down the street, heading toward her hideous fate. “It freaks you out, doesn’t it?” said a voice by her side, a surly mocking voice belonging to a small, bony technohuman, maybe a computation rep. Reps who were exceptionally gifted in math tended to show an arrogant contempt toward others. Although not Merlín. “Distressing to think that’s what awaits us, eh?” insisted the stranger with the incongruous smile. A twisted, malicious smile. Bruna didn’t answer. Just because she was a rep didn’t mean she had to like every other rep in the world. To tell the truth, on the whole she hated them. Of course she hated almost all humans, too. Bruna noticed that the techno was wearing a badge on her vest that flashed the letters RRM.

“You belong to the Radical Replicant Movement,” muttered Bruna.

“Well, well, aren’t we observant,” scoffed the techno as the letters of the hologram on her badge vibrated.

Since the RRM leader, Myriam Chi, had been assassinated six months earlier, the Movement had done little more than blunder along, swerving more and more toward extreme radicalism.

“And now I ask myself an innocent question,” crooned the little techno, who looked anything but innocent and older than she might be, given that replicants were created with an organic age of twenty-five and lived only to thirty-five. This rep had to be close to her TTT and probably used artificial memories and other drugs prolifically. “I ask myself why reps don’t commit suicide. Why, huh? If what awaits us is definitely so horrible, why not kill yourself? You don’t know, right?”

Bruna shrugged her shoulders, although the question echoed uncomfortably inside her.

“Well, I’ll tell you, big girl: because we have a survival chip implanted in our brains so we won’t destroy our manufacturers’ merchandise, ha ha ha.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Bruna lashed back. “I don’t believe it. Anyway, we only work for our manufacturer for the first two years. After that we’re free to live our own lives. So why not deactivate it?”

The computation rep burst out laughing. “Why would you? What do they care? They don’t give a shit about us. And on top of that they’d have to spend money on the procedure and admit they’d implanted it, which is a secret. Plus I don’t think they’d like it if reps started killing themselves en masse. It wouldn’t be good for business.”

Bruna grunted and shook her head, determined not to believe that little creature of bad omens, that siren with her poisonous song.

“Come on, big girl. You’re a combat rep. I’m sure you’ve had some painful experiences. Very painful. But tell me, have you heard of any rep who committed suicide?”

The techno’s words were unpleasant, like a shower of sharp little stones, yet another fistful of possible truths that Bruna would rather not know. She searched her memory anxiously to see if she could remember any rep suicide. Nothing. No. Not one. The humans must have stolen even the ultimate freedom to commit suicide.

The memory of all that provoked a sudden wave of nausea in Bruna. She sat up suddenly on the sensory-deprivation couch and yanked off her virtual glasses. The real world returned with the force of a blow; the air bubbles wobbled sickeningly like jelly under the weight of her body. The rep sensed the psych-guide jump behind her and thought she smelled a slight adrenaline discharge. Oh yes. It seemed Virginio Nissen was also a bit frightened of her. He had an innate distrust of reps, a human prejudice that he’d been unable to suppress when Bruna moved abruptly and unexpectedly. The rep sat on the edge of the couch—flop, flop; the tickle of the air bubbles breaking like waves against her thighs—and looked at the psych-guide with his long, braided mustache. The man held her gaze. He’d already retreated behind his official healer shell.

“What’s the matter, Husky?”

“This is useless and absurd and isn’t helping me at all.”

“So you admit that you need help.”

Bruna let out a sigh that sounded more like a growl. “No. Yes, that is, I need administrative help. I need to have my sanction lifted.”

“I’m sorry, Husky,” Virginio said, shaking his head sadly, “but I can’t sign your letter of suitability. You’re still as full of aggression and violent impulses as when you arrived. It’s true that I haven’t been able to help you. We haven’t made any progress.”

“What do you mean? It’s not like that. I have no problem with my aggression. I’m in perfect control of myself.”

And that was certainly true. She wanted to beat up the psych-guide, but she wasn’t doing it.

“Nissen, I can’t continue to be suspended. I need to recover my license. I need to work. I haven’t got a cent. I regret having pushed that guard at the border, but he was an imbecile.”

“Husky.”

“Okay. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“Well, all right,” Virginio said pensively. “I’ll sign a provisional permit. Three months on probation, on condition that you visit a tactile.”

“What? A touchy-feely, a
tactile
? No way!”

“It’s not negotiable! It’s that or nothing.”

Going to a tactile was an embarrassment. Old folks abandoned by everyone went to a tactile—old men who peed themselves out of sheer loneliness. Or badly raised humans, spoiled brats who considered themselves to be the suffering center of the Universe. Or cowardly adult humans who’d gone soft in the head and were dying to have someone touch them. Anyway, tactiles were for humans, for their wretched, loud-mouthed needs, for their broken and confused emotions. For their sly sentimentality. When had a rep ever visited a tactile?

“We technohumans don’t go to tactiles,” Bruna said stonily.

“You’re wrong, Husky. Yes, you do. I’ve just sent the appointment and authorization number for your treatment to your mobile. He’s expecting you next Tuesday at 16:30. His name is Daniel Deuil. They say he’s very good. You’ll like him. It will be good for you. As you’re well aware, you’re a very special technohuman. More human than most technos.”

That was a completely unnecessary observation that Bruna found insulting.