Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (25 page)

35

I
t took four days for Bruna to organize everything so she could leave. It was a confusing and contradictory time. As Carnal had predicted, the business of the technohuman copies had exploded into the open and become a huge scandal. Whenever she and Clara were out in public together, people pointed at them and formed circles around them with shameless curiosity. Never mind the incessant persecution by the media, especially the reporters from Enrique Ovejero’s program. He was one of the stars of the small screen, a wretched character given to sensationalism. But the two Huskys were equally antagonistic toward the media and three times as menacing when they combined forces, as if the sum of the two of them was a multiplying effect and so greater than the mere addition of their two individual selves. So when they refused to answer, journalists tended to disappear quickly.

The young replicant showed a surprising desire to spend the bulk of her time with Bruna.

“It’s really useful to meet yourself, only older. I can learn quite a lot,” she said with that clear common sense she possessed and which Bruna might also possess, but which must be buried somewhere among her complex worries and angst.

Clara was visiting Bruna when Lizard turned up unexpectedly.

“Ah . . . the news had already reached me that you’d found another Husky,” he commented when he saw the young rep, and gave her a slow, blatant once-over.

Lizard’s arms, his smell of cedar, his weight against her during the cold, sad, heartless fuck in the toilet in Oli’s bar. Bruna felt a slash of bitter jealousy slicing through her stomach. She’d could have thrown Clara out the window. Or better yet, Lizard.

“What do you want?” she asked the inspector curtly.

“To talk about the case. You don’t come to see me. So I come to you.”

“In fact I was actually thinking of coming. I want you to remove this stupid emergency calling device you put on me. You said it could only be removed with a machine you’ve got at the Judiciary,” said Bruna, pointing at the fake scar stuck to her right arm.

“I’m delighted you’re not going to need it.”

“You know what? I’m sure it’s a lie,” Bruna said, lazily scratching the scar. “I’m sure this isn’t an emergency calling device but a locator. I’m sure you put it on me to monitor me.”

“I assure you that’s not the case. Look up the device, and you’ll see. It’s called InstantSOS. Why don’t you believe me?”

Bruna looked at him. He really did seem sincere. As sincere as all liars, it had to be said.

“I can’t quite convince myself that my safety is so important to you,” Bruna said.

“I’ve always looked out for you. Put me to the test.”

“I already have and you failed.”

“Fine. Let’s drop it,” Lizard grunted. “I’ve heard via Preciado Marlagorka how things went for you and that tactile you took with you to Labari.”

Bruna’s heart gave a small jump of perverse pleasure. “What’s the matter? Are you jealous?”

“You’re asking for it, Husky,” said Lizard as his fleshy, solid face turned red with fury.

“Hey, hey! I’m Husky, too, and I haven’t said a word,” said Clara.

Lizard ignored her. “Marlagorka has given me the picture the two of you brought back. I didn’t tell him that you and I had already analyzed it. We’re studying it again to see if we find anything, but we haven’t had any luck so far.”

Bruna said nothing.

“If you knew anything, you’d say, wouldn’t you?” asked Lizard.

“Uh-huh.”

“Otherwise, it would amount to obstruction of justice.”

“Of course.”

The inspector sighed again. “Fine. Preciado Marlagorka is carrying out an investigation inside the Ministry to try and find the mole. But you should know that he himself isn’t free of suspicion. He doesn’t strike me as a trustworthy character.”

As soon he said this, Bruna decided to ask Marlagorka for money to go to Finlandia.

“We’ll talk again. I liked you more when we were collaborating,” said Lizard before he left, slamming the door behind him.

“He’s hot, your inspector,” commented Clara, and then she raised her hands in a gesture of peace. “Cool it, cool it. Don’t look at me like that. If you can’t even trust me—and remember, I am you—who can you trust? What’s happened in your life? You really are complicated compared to me.”

In the end Bruna did visit Marlagorka at the Ministry, and she told him about the map but not about the message. The Director-General decided to hire her officially as a detective and pay for the trip. Bruna in turn hired Clara as a bodyguard; the rep already knew the North, and together they formed a powerful pair. And at the last minute Deuil joined them.

“We made a good team on Labari, and I’ve developed a taste for this adventure. But on top of that you’re important to me. I want to be by your side,” said the tactile.

He sounded deeply sincere, as sincere as all the big liars, so Bruna rashly said yes. Anyway, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have a third ally if they really were going to enter hell.

The next day—Thursday, August 15—they had their plane tickets for Jyväskylä, the main city of the Finnish region. Bruna knew that the zone had suffered greatly from the melting of the polar ice caps. Because much of it was flat and low lying, the greater portion of ancient Finlandia had been submerged. The former capital, Helsinki, had been quite seriously damaged, which accounted for the administrative shift to Jyväskylä. Since there were no regular flights to Pori, they’d have to find their own way to Onkalo once they were there.

“I told you it’s shit there, Bruna,” grumbled Clara. “I haven’t been where we’re going, but I’ve been on the other side of the Gulf of Bothnia, in the Swedish region, and I can assure you it’s disgusting. Out-and-out war, a free-for-all.”

That night, on the eve of their departure, Bruna went with Yiannis and Clara to visit Gabi, who had already been moved out of the hospital’s isolation unit and would be discharged in a few days. It was the first time Bruna had seen her since she’d been admitted, the first time since Bruna had found out about Gabi’s brutal trauma. The girl seemed the same as usual—bad tempered, impertinent, and ferocious. Bruna was so moved that she had to restrain herself from hugging the girl.

“Huh? Now there’s two of you?” said Gabi, looking disgusted. “How horrible, especially since this one will take much longer to die.”

Her abundant curly brown hair, normally a filthy and impenetrable tangle, was clean and well brushed. Bruna felt admiration for the courageous nurse capable of carrying out such a feat.

“Look, you’re on television,” said the girl.

The two reps were on the screen in the room, filmed moments before, as they were entering the hospital. The cameras had been following them everywhere, at a safe distance.

“Bah! They’ll get over it,” Bruna said.

Yes, it was a huge scandal right now, but the media and the citizens had memories as thin and crumbly as a layer of ice in the desert. Bruna knew that; it had happened to her already. Six months earlier she’d been posted on all the public screens, first as a dangerous criminal and then as a hero. It all ended up evaporating without a trace, and nobody remembered it now. Life in the public eye was a shadowy business, a racket, but at least it was written on wet sand and erased by the waves of time.

“Finish the story for me,” said the little Russian. “I haven’t forgotten it.”

“No, not today. We’ve got to go. I already told you that we’re leaving on a trip tomorrow. I’ll go on with the story when I get back.”

“No way! Now they’ll kill you where you’re going, and I’ll be left not knowing how it ends,” sulked Gabi.

“Don’t worry, that won’t happen,” said Bruna. “I can’t die until after I’ve finished telling you the story. That’s my talisman.”

The little Russian looked at her with such serious eyes, so intense. Two hard buttons in her round face. Without taking her eyes off the rep, the child grabbed a small lock of her hair and pulled it out with a single tug.

“Give me your right hand,” she demanded.

Bruna obeyed, intrigued, and Gabi encircled the middle finger of her right hand with the hair, knotting it with the quick ease of someone who’s done a similar thing many times before. Then she stared with satisfaction at the hair-ring.

“That there is a
real
talisman,” Gabi pronounced. “Don’t do anything stupid, and come back soon.”

36

J
yväskylä was a city that had experienced better times. Its spectacular buildings were two or three centuries old, but they were dirty and badly maintained. The bulk of the urban area consisted of relocation blocks, with the typical cheap emergency modular constructions that had proliferated during the period of the Plagues. They were conceived as provisional shelter for the displaced, but the subsequent Robot Wars were responsible for converting them into decrepit permanent residences.

The city was located in a Zone Two—more contaminated than the Green zones—and though it contained an important university, its inhabitants seemed to be quite old. Paradoxically, however, the city boasted a frenetic nightlife that in fact also thrived during the day, because the amusement parks, dance clubs, virtual games arcades, cabarets, and injecting dens operated around the clock. On the wide but shabby downtown avenues, the pleasure joints were lined up shoulder to shoulder like soldiers. The night they arrived, they stayed in a modest but clean hotel near the station. Bruna and Deuil ended up in bed together, but they argued, and the sex wasn’t great. Clara took an oxytocin candy and left to trawl through the town—possibly without her panties, Bruna suspected. It was weird knowing that they were so similar. In any event Bruna was happy that Clara had gone off, because she couldn’t avoid feeling jealous at the thought of her with the tactile.

The following morning Clara appeared for breakfast on time with bags under her eyes. Deuil was even more puffy eyed and even more taciturn. After their argument, he’d ended up marching off to sleep in his own room. They all wanted to leave for Pori as quickly as possible. Everyone they’d asked, both in the airport and at the hotel, had been strangely evasive about how to get there. The first thing they did was try to rent a car at the airport, but the attendant became very nervous and limited herself to endlessly repeating that the available cars weren’t allowed to travel outside Jyväskylä and recommended they go to the train station. Since the only cars the rental company had were automated and didn’t accommodate human drivers, there was no chance of renting one and then leaving the city surreptitiously. So they gave up.

But they didn’t do much better at the train station. The ticket-vending machines refused to sell them tickets to Pori, even though there was an option for that destination stored in the machine. They consulted the information about all the trains, and none of them seemed to stop there.

“I told you. I’m sure they’re all killing each other in Pori,” Clara said again.

But Bruna couldn’t believe that the world ended just two hundred kilometers from this big city. And apart from that she recalled what she’d been like when she was young and recently discharged; combat reps tended to exaggerate their experiences.

Bruna asked to speak to a train controller, and after a ten-minute wait they managed to hear the voice of a faceless man coming through one of the information screens.

“My name is Antonio Sarabia. How can I help you?”

“We want to go to Pori.”

Silence.

“Hi? Are you there? Hello?”

“You can’t go to Pori.”

“Do you mean that there is no train? Ever?” Bruna said, becoming increasingly irritated. “So how do we get there?”

“You can’t go to Pori.”

“By all the damned sentients! What the fuck does that mean? Pori doesn’t exist anymore? It’s become submerged? Does nobody in this damned city know how to give a direct answer?”

“Look, I’m speaking politely. I’m not prepared to tolerate such bad manners,” said the voice frostily, before the little green flashing light went out. He’d cut them off.

“Never mind. We’ll get to Pori, I can assure you of that,” roared Bruna.

She got down to studying the map and the train system on her mobile. When she was irate, her work rate seemed to increase.

“We’ll go to Tampere,” she announced after a minute. “It’s one hundred and fifty-one kilometers from here and a hundred from Pori, and it’s an important railway hub.”

So they tried to buy tickets to Tampere. But when they entered the destination into the ticket machine, it informed them that those interested in going to that destination had to go to the station’s security center.

They went. The center had a small waiting room with two men in it already waiting. Older men. They went into the office first, one by one. Then it was their turn. A small dilapidated office and, behind the table, a combat rep. This was extraordinary. It was the first time Bruna had ever seen a rep in a relatively senior bureaucratic position. There was no doubt that this part of the world was a very special place.

The rep behind the table gave Bruna and Clara a long interested look before saying, “Well, well. So you’re part of that lot, eh?”

“I guess so,” said Bruna.

“I’m not from TriTon. Damned sons of bitches,” said the combat rep. “Right, so you want to go to Tampere?”

“We want to go to Pori.”

“You can’t go to Pori. It’s on the other side of the border.”

“The border?”

“You’ll see. I guess we’re not supposed to talk about it for reasons of security or something like that. But go to Tampere. From there you may be able to cross over to the other side. We don’t have passenger trains to Tampere, because hardly anyone wants to go there. But there are two freight convoys a day. The next one leaves within the hour. You can travel on them, and it costs one hundred gaias per passenger, but you have to sign a document accepting responsibility for all risks.”

“What risks?”

“Bandits and such. Nothing that you two haven’t seen. It’s no big deal.”

“Fine,” said Bruna.

They paid on their mobiles and signed the document on the digital recognition screen.

“Good luck! If you return, don’t forget to pass by and say hi, girls,” said the rep with a half-seductive, half-cynical smile.

The train was armor plated and protected by ten combat technos armed with plasma guns. Bruna was pleased she’d brought her small but efficient Beretta Light; neither Clara nor Deuil had a weapon. They boarded a carriage with a dozen chairs screwed into the floor, in which the two humans from the waiting room were already installed. The rest of the space was taken up by small metal containers. An overly muscular rep sat down in one of the empty chairs with his gun pointing at the roof and dedicated himself to greedily devouring Bruna and Clara with his eyes. It seemed to Bruna that Clara was more receptive to the soldier than she was.

They left the city immediately, and at first the landscape visible through the screen-protected windows was nothing out of the ordinary: flat expanses, lakes, buildings. Gradually, however, the terrain became more and more waterlogged and the houses more infrequent. Then they began to see abandoned and often half-ruined dwellings, flooded fields, and roads. It wasn’t surprising you couldn’t leave Jyväskylä by car.

They got to Tampere in just under an hour, but the countryside had changed so much that they might as well have gotten off a space elevator. The station was surrounded by sandbags, as if they were expecting a siege. The city, patrolled by the army, seemed really desolate. There were few people about apart from the soldiers, most of whom were reps, and long lines of somber people outside the supermarkets.

“So? Now are you starting to believe me?” asked Clara.

Most of the hotels were closed and abandoned. They finally found one that was open. It was filthy, and the mutant who ran it had a small third hand emerging from her neck just under her left ear. The more mutants there were in a place, the more run-down and marginal it was. That was one of the golden rules of applied sociology.

“So you want to go to Pori?” said the mutant, avidly clutching the fifty Gs Bruna had put down on the counter as a tip. “You need a safe-conduct pass to cross the border, and it’s
reeeally
difficult to get one.”

The mutant, round and smiling like a Buddha, stopped speaking. Her third hand was as tiny as a baby’s and covered by a shiny-white, exquisitely crocheted glove. Bruna put down another hundred-G bill. The woman’s smile widened fractionally.

“It just so happens that I know the person you need. Go to the injecting den on Maarit Verronen Street and ask for Mikael the Mathematician. He’s always there. He’ll fix everything for you.”

An injecting den! It wasn’t surprising that he’d always be there, but in what state? Though he might be the owner of the joint. The legal standing of injecting dens was a matter for each region to decide. In Madrid, for example, they were banned. Bruna had seen the devastation they caused; she’d lost the odd military colleague to the destructive pleasure of those hells. Her well-trained memory stored everything that Yiannis had told her about those places. The dens were based on experiments carried out by researchers at a Canadian university around 1950. Electrodes had been implanted in a particular part of the brain of a rat, which was then put inside a box together with a lever the rat could press. Each time it pressed the lever, it received a small, brief charge that activated that zone in the brain. The pleasure zone. The rat pressed the lever seven thousand times in just one hour. They implanted more electrodes in more rats. The rats didn’t eat, even when they were hungry. They didn’t drink, even when they were thirsty. Mothers abandoned their litters; males ignored the females in heat. They dedicated themselves solely to pressing the lever until they died. Injecting dens first appeared toward the end of the twenty-first century, coinciding with the development of automatic brain nano-implant technology. The ease and safety of the method of insertion allowed any idiot to fire a nano-electrode into his brain through his nostrils. In injecting dens they provided you with the injection gun, and once the electrode was inserted in your head you could stay in the place pressing the pleasure button as many times as you liked and for as long as your credit allowed. Every twenty-four hours the attendants disconnected you, changed your diaper, provided you with something to eat and drink, gave you a quick wash, and then plugged you back in. The only thing that saved the poor wretches was the fact that it was quite an expensive vice. Not everyone could pay for a week at an injecting den. When the connection was broken, the implant was blocked, and it couldn’t be used in another den. But more than one addict had blown out his brains trying to activate it at home.

They had no trouble finding Maarit Verronen Street, which was short and dark in the twilight. The injecting den was the only public place in the area with a light on. The green door was shut. An unforgiving spotlight lit them from above like a police searchlight. They knocked. The door opened partway, and a scrawny child with dirty, tangled hair appeared, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that were enormous on him. The boy leaned defiantly against the frame and looked at them.

“What?” he asked with laconic hostility.

He can’t be ten yet. What’s such a child doing in a place like this?
Bruna thought of Gabi and Gabi’s dark past.
Broken children, childhoods violated in so many ways.

“We came to see Mikael the Mathematician.”

“What for?”

“We need his services.”

“Let’s see your money.”

Bruna showed the miniature thug a wad of gaias. The boy nodded and let them into a small, dark reception area occupied by two huge, unemotional, and stupid-looking middle-aged humans with big plasma guns on their knees. The boy shut the door and gestured to the recent arrivals to follow him. The two men didn’t even twitch; they could have been rocks.

They moved through a narrow corridor, crossed a patio, and entered a spacious, dimly lit room with about twenty pallets along two walls. Half of them were occupied by men and women lying fully dressed on top of them and who appeared to be sleeping but for the spasmodic movement of their hands pressing the buttons.

“It’s like an opium den,” murmured Deuil.

Bruna had never been in an opium den, but she had been in an injecting den, trying to remove a fellow soldier. She’d failed. These places made her ill.

“Hey, Mathematician,” said the boy, walking over to one of the bunks and raising a small lever on the wall.

A guy who was lying on a pallet in a fetal position jerked and began to press the control button he was holding in his hands faster and faster. He started to moan and sat up on the bed, pressing the button like a madman. He was about sixty, with long, graying hair as dirty and tangled as the boy’s.

“Snap out of it, man, you’ve got work,” said the boy, taking a subcutaneous injector out of the pocket of his pants and firing a hit of something into the man’s forearm.

The Mathematician became rigid, gave two or three death rattles as if he were suffocating, and then began to relax and slowly recover his pattern of breathing.

“He’s almost okay. I do it because he asks me to,” was the boy’s level-headed explanation. “He needs the money to pay for this.”

Still seated on the bed, the man lifted his head and looked at them, his eyes red, a weary expression on his face, as if he’d returned from an exhausting trip.