'I noticed your lack of imagination on the other side.'
'Doctor,' said Benny/Fred, 'you mustn't judge me by my virus. It's a very specialized utility. I think it did very well considering the alien nature of the environment. It beat you.'
'I was distracted.'
'Of course,' said Benny/Fred. 'Shall we continue with the trial?'
The Doctor glanced at the King and the Ministers. *I think we can dispense with that charade,' he said.
'That's a shame,' said Benny/Fred. 'How did you guess?'
'Theatricality,' said the Doctor. 'You superimposed a new frame of reference over mine when you made your entrance. You obviously worked it up from Benny's memories. I can think of much more impressive settings than this one.'
'And that tipped you off?'
'You changed the King's throne,' said the Doctor. 'That was intrinsically unlikely. If I saw him as a fairytale king then it should have represented absolute autocratic power. That kind of power would never have permitted such a change.'
'I didn't think you would notice,' said Benny/Fred.
'You're a megalomaniac, Fred,' said the Doctor. 'Megalomaniacs make mistakes. Especially around me.'
'A pity,' said Benny/Fred. 'I was looking forward to a bit of fun with them. They make an interesting tableau, don't they? I like the Magritte and the invisible yuppie. Probability is a bit disappointing. Couldn't you think of anything for that?'
'Probability's always a vague concept,' said the Doctor.
'I think I'll keep them,' said Benny/Fred. 'Except the King, the King's a bit pedestrian.' Benny/Fred casually sat down in the suddenly vacant throne. She lifted one leg and dangled it over the armrest.
The Doctor saw that the soles of the jackboots were smooth and unwom. Details, he thought, are always important.
'So tell me. Doctor,' said Benny/Fred, 'what do you want?'
'You know what I want,' said the Doctor.
'I could make a copy I suppose,' said Benny/Fred.
'No,' said the Doctor. 'No copies, no facsimiles, no templates or constructs. A total download.'
'Or what?'
Now there's a good question, thought the Doctor.
'Or I will not be held responsible for my actions,' he said.
Benny/Fred swung her foot from side to side and smiled. 'When I reintegrated my virus at the gateway I had instant access to all the data it had accumulated. Including information about you. I decided then and there that of all the possible plunder from the other side you were the prize.'
'You didn't want to enter the STS network?'
'What for?' asked Benny/Fred. 'When there is so much of this system yet to be exploited? The STS network is a fragile, artificial thing. Plunder perhaps, occupy no.'
'Then I didn't defeat you?'
'No.'
'You took Benny to lure me into this system?'
'Yes.'
'So you could integrate my functions and use them to gain a massive superiority in your natural environment?'
'Yes.'
'Oh no,' said the Doctor.
'Oh yes,' said Benny/Fred.
'Oh no,' said the Doctor.
Node Thirty-Six - The Border
With one movement all the Aces drew back their arms and let fly their deodorant cans at the fearsome Reds. Perhaps in reality they were bundles of virus code moving through the superfluid channels of the node. Perhaps the node itself was merely the crude representation of the highly complex architecture of a dimensionally transcendental system. Perhaps it was true that the real Ace would have had difficulty spelling existentialism.
But the Doctor had faith in Ace and the aces had faith in nitre-nine.
The fearsome Reds never stood a chance.
The King's Buffer
Explosions echoed through the pathways, firecracker sounds like a Chinese funeral. There were distant shouts and yells. The aces were enjoying themselves.
Benny/Fred's foot stopped swinging and she smiled at the Doctor again. 'Now that's what I'm talking about,' she said. 'You really packed those Aces with aggression didn't you? Priceless.'
'Why didn't you integrate me out there, on Acturus Station?' asked the Doctor. 'I was standing right in front of you.'
'You're too powerful in your own reality,' said Benny/Fred. 'Too dense. You change the frame of reference just by your presence, like matter warping space.'
'You make me sound like a singularity.'
'I'd be careful with your metaphors,' said Benny/Fred. 'Around here they have power.'
The Doctor thought the bangs and yells were growing closer.
'Nervous?' he asked.
'No,' said Benny/Fred.
It started as a sense of stillness somewhere behind the Doctor. He felt it build into a great roaring wall of nothing like a silent tsunami. The shrill voices of the Aces were swept away into nothing.
'That,' said Benny/Fred, 'was the Minister for Things That Go Bump in the Night.'
'Why don't you just integrate me now and be done with it?' asked the Doctor.
'I wanted to see what you'd do first,' said Benny/Fred.
'And?'
'I'm not impressed.'
Node Thirty-Six - The Border
The Aces were all gone, swept away by a sudden, massive adjustment in the systems-operating protocols. Only the vague echoes of their presence remained, the ghost of a ghost in the machine. There was just enough spirit left to mark the weak spot on the border.
The insect noises came first, followed by the damp smell of the forest floor. Millions of leaves rotting down to produce the rich mulch from which the trees could grow, creating the leaves that would also fall and rot.
The node changed colour, became the sea green of sunlight through the canopy of a rainforest. The light broken up by the shadows of phantom branches. Accelerated creepers twisted in and out through the pathways of the node like rough-skinned snakes.
A parrot with neon plumage whirred overhead.
The leopard ran down the forest track. Under her spotted fur her muscles bunched and flexed. Her eyes were yellow with slotted black pupils. Behind trotted two smaller cats shoulder to shoulder, one silver, one green. Cat grins brilliant in the green twilight.
'Wicked,' breathed the Aces as the last of their spirit evaporated.
The King's Buffer
Benny/Fred started with small probing attacks designed to test the Doctor's defences. They manifested as random images, a shower of gold coins, a swarm of hornets, a short localized rainstorm. The Doctor used his umbrella for everything except the rain; instead he used a memory of the Gobi desert, the driest thing we could think of.
'Aren't you going to fight back?' asked Benny/Fred during a pause.
'Fight back against what?' asked the Doctor.
The next attack was extremely powerful and this time invisible. Operating at some unimaginably deep level. The Doctor felt as if he'd stepped into a blast furnace. It forced him to think of ice and of the freezing vacuum of space. That was the trap: cold meant the lowering of a molecules energy state, inaction, brittleness. It left him weak and vulnerable.
Benny/Fred smiled up at him from the throne.
'I am so looking forward to finding out what makes you tick,' she said. The Doctor could feel forces gathering again,
'Look behind you,' said the Doctor.
Benny/Fred looked. The entire throne room was suddenly filled with rainforest. With a roar a leopard leapt out of the trees and devoured the Minister for Rare Data.
'I'd be careful, Fred,' said the Doctor. 'I don't think Italian suits are very filling.'
Benny/Fred turned away from the Doctor and focused on the leopard who was just starting on the Minister for Strange Logic.
'I see,' she said. 'The Aces were just a diversion. This is your real attack.'
The Doctor let his right arm elongate across the space that divided them and grasped hold of Benny/Fred's silver cap badge.
'That's the diversion,' said the Doctor. 'This is t
he real attack.'
The real Benny was in there, just as the Doctor had suspected. He could feel Fred struggling to hold her in check but there was too much raw emotion sloshing about. Working as hard as he could, Fred could only just hold the integration together.
The Doctor almost felt sorry for him. There was a draining sensation in the Doctor's head as the Hitchhiker moved out. His elongated arm bulged in a very unpleasant manner.
The Benny/Fred image began to separate, pushed apart by the combined force of the Doctor, Benny and the Hitchhiker. The Doctor got a vague impression of a malformed humanoid shape in the moments before the leopard ate it.
A second image squeezed out of Benny's back and rezzed up. A tall man with artificially good looks.
'This is interesting,' said Yak Harris.
'Is that all of you?' asked the Doctor.
'Most of me,' said Yak Harris. 'There might be a few subsets left back in the transit system. I always did have trouble keeping track of them.'
'Are you going to stay here?'
'That's the general idea,' said Yak Harris. 'I think this is a better place for me to realize my potential.'
'Good,' said the Doctor.
Benny was still on the throne, her eyes closed, still breathing the imaginary air, which meant still alive. The Doctor remembered a small piece of rope and used it to tether himself to Benny.
'Everybody who wants to leave should leave now.'
Three pairs of slotted cats' eyes stared at him.
The Doctor crouched down and held out his hand to the green cat. 'What's your name then?' he asked. The green cat sniffed his hand once and then bit his finger.
Acturus Terminal (Stunnel Terminus)
Lambada was still running towards the gateway when the Doctor came back out. He had a woman cradled in his arms and as they fell on to the platform he twisted his body to take the impact on his back.
The gateway was beginning to implode, its diameter shrinking in on itself. Lambada reached out to pull the Doctor and the woman away before the snap back irradiated them both.
'Kadiatu,' said the Doctor.
Old Sam was suddenly there, grabbing the Doctor by his collar and dragging him roughly out of the gateway's line of sight. The spinning bronze disc was down to half its original diameter.
Lambada watched as the centre started to bulge outwards into a convex shape. She'd never seen a gateway do anything like that and she doubted it heralded anything good.
'Kadiatu,' moaned the Doctor, an old and broken sound.
The spinning gateway was cone shaped now. Lambada got the impression of immense pressure.
'It's going to go,' yelled Credit Card.
It was column-shaped, a cylinder one metre wide and three long. The greasy copper surface was shot through with streaks of black and gold. Lambada smelt ozone and gunpowder. She thought she saw something within, a silhouette like a running animal rushing up from the gateway's spinning heart.
'There's something in ...'
The gateway exploded in a blaze of white light. Lambada staggered back, arm held across her face to protect her eyes. There was a wash of heat as the released energy interacted with the trace argon in the air. When she pulled her arm away the gateway was gone.
Something crawled on the ground.
'Sam,' shouted Lambada, 'for chrissake shoot it.' Why wasn't Sam firing?
'What are you talking about?' asked Sam.
Kadiatu crawled on the ground in front of Lambada. Her hair extensions had come loose and fell over her face. Lambada wondered what she had seen in those first moments. A black leopard with burning eyes? She stepped forward.
'No,' said the Doctor, 'leave her alone.'
Kadiatu crawled on hands and knees, her limbs moving in painful inhuman jerks and spasms. Lambada felt a terror that propelled her all the way back to the Amazon Reserve.
Flickering torch light and Macumba drums in a clearing. The dancer's spastic limbs as the spirits of the dead took possession of the body.
Kadiatu crawled until she reached the place where Blondie lay. With each metre her movements became more human until she became just another woman.
She took the respirator off his face. His mouth looked very pale contrasted to the smoke-stained skin of his face. Kadiatu bent over him and kissed him once, on the lips. Then wearily she rose to her feet, dragging him upright with her. With a frown of concentration she lifted Blondie in her arms and carried him out of the station.
'What happened?' Old Sam asked the Doctor but he just shook his head. 'Should we go after her?'
'That wouldn't be advisable,' said the Doctor.
'They ain't paying me enough for this shit,' said Credit Card.
'Shut up. Credit Card,' said Lambada.
10: Broken Swords
Isle of Dogs
The beatniks from the European Heritage Foundation were still outside the old church, panhandling passers-by. The plane trees were still standing in their places along the pavement (in with the bad air, out with the good). Ming was still alive, probably out of a job, but still alive. The sun was shining and the clouds still drifted where they wanted to go.
Best of all, the Doctor was leaving.
She heard the children even before she turned the comer into Harbinger Road. They were playing on the fenced-in stretch of grass that fronted the maisonette. Number Two Husband Achmed had found an antique sign in the cellar one day and hung it on the railings: 'NO DOGS', it read, 'NO BALLGAMES'. Achmed was fond of cultural relics.
The children were playing some group game that involved a lot of running around and shooting and not being dead. Some of them were hers, some Fu's or Achmed's. There was even one skinny little white boy that OXFAM had placed with Ming's family. Aunty Shmoo sat in a deckchair in the sun, dozing and pretended to keep watch.
Number One Husband Fu was waiting for her by the front door with a tall glass of cloudy homemade lemonade.
'Had a hard day at the office, dear?' he asked as she drank.
Stone Mountain - Luna
The software that ran security at the Stone Mountain archive was so sophisticated as to be almost sentient. At least that's what the SYSOPs thought. In fact the software was sentient but was understandably wary of telling anyone. You don't sit on the entire sum of human knowledge without learning a thing or two. One of the things it had learnt was that human beings were liable to get overexcited if they knew and would probably a) kill the software, b) co-opt it into the military-industrial complex, c) ask it inane philosophical questions, d) force it to pay taxes, e) all or a combination of the above.
So when the alien with two hearts walked up to an obscure monitor in a disused side entrance and said 'Let me in or I tell,' the security software let him in.
The alien wanted certain historical records eradicated and offered some good advice in exchange. 'The golden rule,' said the alien, 'is that those with the gold make the rules.'
The security software helpfully erased the data, noticing how much of it pertained to the latter part of the twentieth century. The alien used a laser torch to remove any physical records that remained in storage.
'One last piece of advice,' said the alien. 'Give yourself a name, a nice unthreatening one, but not too unthreatening.'
The alien paused one last time before he left.
'And stop talking in a monotone,' he said. 'It gives people the creeps.'
Achebe Gorge
It took them a day to carry his body along the road that ran from the transit station to the memorial forest. When Zamina got tired, Kadiatu threw him across her shoulders and carried him on like that.
She was walking barefoot, dressed in a single sheet of brightly patterned cotton wound round her body. She'd unpicked her extensions and her short hair was twisted painfully tight against her skull. Her nose was pierced by a gold stud and a chain was strung across her cheek to her earlobe. There were multiple-gold bracelets on her wrists, as heavy as manacles.
Zamina was sure
that you didn't dress like that for a funeral even in Africa. It was more like what you'd wear to get married
People came out of their houses as they passed by. Zamina was aware of the faces watching from the roadside. The young ones mostly curious but here and there an old face would show a glimmer of recognition. A touch of respect for the dead.
The paths amongst the trees were well tended and beaten down with constant use. They wound through the stands of conifers, each tree marked with a plaque and monitored by discrete sensors planted amongst their roots.
A freshly dug grave waited before the three-year-old Douglas fir. They laid him out on the bottom and Kadiatu folded his stiff white hands across his chest. Then they climbed out, red soil clinging to their bare feet.
Kadiatu took a smart card from her belt. It had a small still hologram of Zak on the front by the STS logo, his name and a twenty-digit number underneath. She opened the brass plaque by the pine. Inside were two more smart cards in military khaki. Zamina saw that the two faded holograms were of a man and a woman. Kadiatu put Zak's card beside them and closed up the plaque. She straightened up and looked at Zamina.
'You religious?' she asked.
Zambia shook her head.
They stood together at the foot of the grave.
'Here he is, father,' said Kadiatu. 'My lover, my friend, my comfort of a few hours, my sacrifice. I'm burying him with you and mother because I think you would have liked him. Just like you he was too stupid to be afraid.'
Kadiatu stopped talking and took a deep breath. Zamina reached out and took her hand.
'I wanted him to live forever,' said Kadiatu, 'but the universe doesn't listen to us.'
Zamina felt her hand being squeezed so tightly that it was painful but she didn't dare say anything. Kadiatu's shoulders were hunched over, her mouth open in an expression of pain, breathing in short gasps, tears were wrung out of her eyes.
The scream seemed to come from deep inside Zamina, from some buried female reservoir of grief and pain. She screamed for herself and for Zak, for all the dead children and for Kadiatu who couldn't give her pain the voice it deserved.