"Taka was right, as far as she went," Clarke said, "Seppuku would kill if nothing stopped it. She just didn't realize that Seppuku stopped itself somehow. And she's got some kind of—esteem issues..."
Imagine that, Lubin thought dryly.
"—she's so used to being the fuck-up that she just—assumes she fucked up at the slightest excuse." She stared at Lubin with a face holding equal parts hope and horror. "But she was right all along, Ken. We're back at square one. Someone must have figured out how to beat ßehemoth, and someone else is trying to stop them."
"Desjardins," Lubin said.
Clarke hesitated. "Maybe..."
There was no maybe about it. Achilles Desjardins was too high in the ranks to not know of any campaign to rehabilitate the continent. Ergo, he couldn't possibly have not known Seppuku's true nature. He had simply lied about it.
And Clarke was wrong about something else, too. They weren't back to square one at all. Back on square one, Lubin had not invested two weeks fighting for the wrong side.
Wrong. He didn't like that word. It didn't belong in his vocabulary, it evoked woolly-minded dichotomies like good and evil. Every clear-minded being knew that there was no such thing; there was only what worked, and what didn't. More effective, and less. The disloyalty of a friend may be maladaptive, but it is not bad. The overtures of a potential ally may serve mutual interest, but that does not make them good. Even hating the mother who beats you as a child is to utterly miss the point: nobody chooses the wiring in their brain. Anyone else's, wired the same, would spark as violently.
Ken Lubin could fight any enemy to the death without malice. He could switch sides the moment circumstances warranted. So it wasn't that the creators of Seppuku were right and Achilles Desjardins was wrong, necessarily. It was simply that Ken Lubin had been misled as to which side he was on.
He'd spent his whole life being used. But to be used without his knowledge was not something he was willing to forgive.
Something ticked over in him then, a kind of toggle between pragmatism and dedication. The latter setting afforded him a certain focus, although it had undeniably led to some maladaptive choices in the past. He used it sparingly.
He used it now.
Desjardins. It had been him all along. Behind the fires, behind the antimissiles, behind the misdirection. Desjardins. Achilles Desjardins.
Playing him.
If that's not an excuse, he reflected, nothing is.
Lubin's ultralight had been a gift from Desjardins. It would be a good idea to continue the conversation at a further remove.
Lubin took Clarke by the arm and walked her to the MI. She didn’t resist. Maybe she'd seen him flip the switch. She got in the driver's side. He got in the passenger's.
Ricketts crouched in the back. His complexion was slightly flushed, his forehead damp, but he was sitting up, and he was munching a protein brick with obvious enthusiasm. "Hi again," he said. "'member me?"
Lubin turned to Clarke. "He's still a 'lawbreaker. His infrastructure isn't what it used to be, but he's still got plenty of resources and nobody further up appears to be reining him in."
"I know," Clarke said.
"He could have us under surveillance right now."
"Hey, if you're worried about the big guys listening in?" Ricketts said around a mouthful of chewy aminos, "I wouldn't worry about it. They're gonna have, like, other things on their minds any mome."
Lubin gave him a cold look. "What are you talking about?"
"He's right, actually," Clarke said. "Someone's about to lose control of their—"
A soft blatting sound cut her off, like the muffled explosion of distant artillery.
"—outer demons," she finished, but Lubin was already back outside.
Off across the water, in the spindly shadows of a decrepit wind farm, the hydrogen-cracking station was burning.
It was as though, in that instant, they had changed places.
Clarke was suddenly advocating noninterference. "Ken, we're two people."
"One person. I'm doing this solo."
"Doing what, exactly? If there's a rogue in CSIRA, let CSIRA handle him. There has to be some way to get a message overseas."
"I intend to, assuming we can access an overseas line. But I have doubts that it will do any good."
"We can transmit from Phocoena."
Lubin shook his head. "We know there's at least one rogue at large. We don't know how many others he might be working with. There's no guarantee that any message routed through a WestHem node would even get through, even—" he glanced at the conflagration across the water— "before this."
"So we move offshore. We could drive across the ocean and hand-deliver the memo ourselves if we—"
"And if it did," he continued, "unsubstantiated claims that a CSIRA 'lawbreaker was even capable of going rogue will be treated with extreme skepticism in a world where the existence of Spartacus is not widely known."
"Ken—"
"By the time we convinced them to take us seriously, and by the time that overseas forces had mustered a response, Desjardins would have escaped. The man is far from stupid."
"So let him escape. As long as he isn't blocking Seppuku any more, what harm can he do?"
She was dead wrong, of course. There was no end to the harm Desjardins could do in the course of abandoning the board. He might even cause Lubin to fail in his mission—and there was no way in hell he was going to permit that.
Ken Lubin had never been much for introspection. He had to wonder, though, if Clarke's doubts might not have a grain of truth to them. It would be so much easier to simply make the call and stand back. And yet—the desire to inflict violence had grown almost irresistible, and The Rules were only as strong as the person who made them. So far Lubin had more or less remained true to his code, minor lapses like Phong notwithstanding. But in the face of this new outrage, he didn't know how much civilization was left in him.
He was royally pissed, and he really needed to take it out on someone. Perhaps, at least, he could choose a target who actually had it coming.
Fleas
She could barely remember a time when she hadn't bled.
It seemed as though she'd spent her whole life on her knees, trapped in a diabolical exoskeleton that bent and stretched in arbitrary excess of anything the human body could mimic. Her body didn't have a choice, had never had a choice; the dancing cage took it along for the ride, posed her like some hyperextensible doll in a chorus line. Her joints popped apart and back together like the pieces of some ill-fitted cartilagenous puzzle. She'd lost her right breast an eternity ago; Achilles had looped some kind of freakwire noose around it and just pulled. It had plopped onto the Escher tiles like a dead fish. She remembered hoping at the time that maybe she'd bleed to death, but she'd never had the chance; He'd ground some flat-faced iron of searing metal against her chest, cauterizing the wound.
Back then she'd still had it in her to scream.
For some time now she'd inhabited a point halfway between her body and the ceiling, some interface between hell and anesthesia conjured up out of pure need. She could look down and observe the atrocities being inflicted on her flesh with something almost approaching dispassion. She could feel the pain, but it was becoming an abstract thing, like a reading on a gauge. Sometimes, when the torture stopped, she would slide back into her own flesh and take stock of the damage first-hand. Even then, agony was becoming more tiresome than painful.
And through it all wound the insane tutorials, the endless absurd questions about chiral catalysts and hydroxyl intermediates and cross-nucleotide duplexing. The punishments and amputations that followed wrong answers; the blesséd, merely intolerable rapes that followed right ones.
She realized that she no longer had anything left to lose.
Achilles took her chin in hand and lifted her head up to the light. "Good morning, Alice. Ready for today's lesson?"
"Fuck you," she croaked.
He kissed her
on the mouth. "Only if you pass the daily quiz. Otherwise, I'm afraid—"
"I'm not taking—" a sudden wracking cough spoiled the impact of her defiance a bit, but she pressed on. "I'm not taking your fucking quiz. You might as well cut to the ch...the chase while you've still got the... chance..."
He stroked her cheek. "Bit of an adrenaline rush going on, have we?"
"They'll find...find out about you eventually. And then they'll—"
He actually laughed at that. "What makes you think they don't already know?"
She swallowed and told herself: No.
Achilles straightened, letting her head drop. "How do you know I'm not already broadbanding this to every wristwatch in the hemisphere? Do you really think the world's in any position to begrudge me your head on a stick with all the good I'm doing?"
"Good," Taka whispered. She would have laughed.
"Do you know how many lives I save when I'm not in here trying to give you a decent education? Thousands. On a bad day. Whereas I go through a bit of ass-candy like you maybe once a month. Anyone who shut me down would have orders of mag more blood on their hands than I ever could on mine."
She shook her head. "It's not...like that."
"Like what, ass-candy?"
"Don't care...how many you save. Doesn't give you the r—right to..."
"Oh, man. It's not just biology, is it? Tell me, is there anything you're not dumb as a sack of shit about?"
"I'm right. You know it..."
"Do I. You think we should go back to the Good Old Days when the corpses were running things? The smallest multicorp killed more people than all the sex killers who ever lived, for a fucking profit margin—and the WTO gave them awards for it."
He spat: the spittle made a foamy little amoeba on the floor. "Nobody cares, sweetmeat. And if they did you'd be even worse off, because they'd realize that I'm an improvement."
"You're wrong..." she managed.
"Ooooh," Achilles said. "Insubordination. Gets me hot. 'Scuse me." He stepped back behind the stocks and swung the assembly around. Taka spun smoothly in her harness until she was facing him again. He was holding a pair of alligator clips; their wires draped down to an electrical outlet embedded in the eye of a sky-blue fish.
"Tell you what," he proposed. "You find a flaw in my argument, and I won't use these."
"Yeah," she rasped. "...you will."
"No, I won't. Promise. Try me."
She reminded herself: nothing to lose. "You think people will see this and then just, just— walk away when you tell them the—the corpses were worse? You think—you think people are logical? Y-you're the one with...with shit for brains. They won't care about your fucking argument; they'll take one look and they'll tear you to...pieces. The only reason you can get away with it now is—"
That's it, she realized.
What would happen if ßehemoth just...went away? What would happen if the apocalypse receded a bit, if the situation grew just a little less desperate? Perhaps, in a safer world, people would go back to pretending they were civilized. Perhaps they wouldn't be quite so willing to pontificate on the unaffordability of human rights.
Perhaps Achilles Desjardins would lose his amnesty.
"That's why you're fighting Seppuku," she whispered.
Achilles tapped the alligator clips together. They sparked. "Sorry. What was that?"
"You are so full of shit. Saving thousands? There are people trying to save the world, and you're trying to stop them. You're killing billions. You're killing everyone. So you can get away with this..."
He shrugged. "Well, it's like I tried to explain to Alice the First. When someone steals your conscience, you have a really hard time giving a shit."
"You'll lose. You don't run the world, you only run this...piece of it. You can't keep Seppuku out forever."
Achilles nodded thoughtfully. "I know. But don't worry your pretty little head about it. I've already planned for my retirement. You have other concerns."
He pushed her head down against the stocks, stretching her neck. He kissed her nape.
"Like for example, the fact that you're late for class. Let's see. Yesterday we were talking about the origin of life, as I recall. And how some might think that ßehemoth had evolved on the same tree that we did, and it took a while but you eventually remembered why those people had their heads up their asses. And that was because...?"
She hadn't forgotten. ßehemoth's pyranosal RNA couldn't cross-talk with modern nucleic acids. There'd be no way for one template to evolve into the other.
But right now, there was no way in this hell that she was going to bark on command. She clenched her jaw and kept silent.
Of course it didn't bother him a bit. "Well, then. Let's just do the review exercises, shall we?"
Her body spun back into position. The assembly locked into place. The exoskeleton drew back her arms, spread her legs. She felt herself cracking open like a wishbone.
She vacated the premises, pushed her consciousness back into that perfect little void where pain and hope and Achilles Desjardins didn't exist. Far beneath her, almost underwater, she felt her body moving back and forth to the rhythm of his thrusting. She couldn't feel him in her, of course—she'd been spoiled by all the battering rams he'd used to pave the way. She found that vaguely amusing for reasons she couldn't quite pin down.
She remembered Dave, and the time he'd surprised her on the patio. She remembered live theatre in Boston. She remembered Crystal's fourth birthday.
Strange sounds followed her through from the other world, rhythmic sounds, faintly ridiculous in context. Someone was singing down there, an inane little ditty rendered off-key while her distant body got the gears:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.
There had to be a subtext, of course. There would be a quiz at the end of class.
Only there wasn't. Suddenly the thrusting stopped. He hadn't ejaculated—she was familiar enough with his rhythms to know that much. He pulled out of her, muttering something she couldn't quite make out way up here in the safe zone. A moment later his footsteps hurried away behind her, leaving only the sound of her own ragged breathing.
Taka was alone with her body and her memories and the tiled creatures on the floor. Achilles had abandoned her. Something had distracted him. Maybe someone at the door. Maybe the voice of some other beast, howling in his head.
She was hearing those a lot herself these days.
Firebreathers
The airwaves seethed with tales of catastrophe. From Halifax to Houston, static-field generators sparked and fried. Hospitals deep within the claves and fortresses on the very frontier flickered and blacked out. A report from somewhere around Newark had an automated plastics refinery melting down; another from Baffin Island claimed that a He-3 cracking station was venting its isotopes uncontrollably into the atmosphere. It was almost as if the Maelstrom of old had been reborn, in all its world-spanning glory but with a hundred times the virulence.
The Lenies were on the warpath—and suddenly they were hunting in groups. Firewalls crumbled in their path; exorcists engaged and were reduced to static on the spot.
"Lifter just crashed into the Edmonton Spire," Clarke said. Lubin looked back at her. She tapped her ear, where his borrowed earbead relayed privileged chatter from the ether. "Half the city's on fire."
"Let's hope ours is better behaved," Lubin said.
Add that to your total score, she told herself, and tried to remember: this time it was different. Lives sacrificed now would be repaid a thousandfold down the road. This was more than Revenge. This was the Greater Good, in all its glory.
Remembering it was easy enough. Feeling right with it was something else again.
This is what happens when you get Lenie to like Lenie.
They were back on the coast, standing on the edge of some derel
ict waterfront in a ghost town whose name Clarke hadn't bothered to learn. All morning they had crept like black, blank-eyed spiders through this great junkscape of decaying metal: the dockside cranes, the loading elevators, the warehouses and dry-docks and other premillennial monstrosities of iron and corrugated steel. It was not a radio-friendly environment under the best conditions—and right here, the intermittent voices in Clarke's ear were especially thick with static.
Which was, of course, the whole idea.
To one side, a corroding warehouse with sheet-metal skin and I-beam bones faced the water. To the other, four gantry cranes rose into the sky like a row of wireframe giraffes sixty meters high. They stood upright, their necks looming over the lip of the waterfront at a seventy-degree angle. A great grasping claw dangled from each snout, poised to descend on freighters that had given up on this place decades before.
A thin leash ran through a nose ring on the crane nearest the warehouse, a loop of braided polypropylene no thicker than a man's thumb. Both ends of that loop draped across empty space to a point partway up the neck of the second crane in line; there, they had been tied off around a cervical girder. Against the backdrop of cables and superstructure the rope looked as insubstantial as spider silk.
Spider silk was what they'd been hoping for, actually. Surely, in this whole godforsaken industrial zone, somebody must have left some of the stuff behind. Spider rope had been a dirt-cheap commodity in the biotech age, but it had evidently grown a lot scarcer in the bioapocalyptic one. All they'd found was a coarse coil of antique plastic braid, hanging in an abandoned boathouse at the far end of the strip.
Lubin had sighed and said it would have to do.
Clarke had nearly passed out just watching him climb that leaning, precarious scaffold. The rope uncoiling in his wake, he'd wriggled up the first giraffe's throat and dangled head-down like an ant from its eye socket, his legs wrapped around some spindly brace she was convinced would snap at any moment. She hadn't taken a complete breath until Lubin was safely on the ground again. Then she'd gone through the whole nerve-wracking experience all over again as he climbed the second crane, carrying both ends of the rope this time. He'd stopped well short of the top, thank God, tying off the ends and leaving the rope looped between the structures like a nylon vine.