Cronix (38 page)

His eyes readjusted, and Oriente saw they had stopped on the square of a small town in the lee of the wall. The plaza was unpaved but pleasantly shaded by eucalyptus and jacaranda. A fountain at its center splashed the refreshing melody of water in a dry land. Due north reared a large brick building that looked like a courthouse, adorned with a clock tower and tin roof. To one side squatted a solid adobe structure that, from its barred windows, appeared to be a jailhouse: around it were a few stores, some modest clapboard houses and two wooden saloons. A single street led from the square, dotted with painted wooden villas, their gardens full of flowers and swing loungers on the porches. It struck Oriente and the tributes as an unexpectedly domestic arrangement for a small regiment of armed devils.

The street tapered off into blazing desert. At the edge of the town, a boxy pyramid rose about a hundred feet, its uneven slopes split by gnarled cacti.

The ape-men tethered their mounts by the fountain. “Welcome to Devil City,” grunted Silverback in Nahuatl, as the tributes crowded in to splash their faces. They stood, mouths open and water streaming from their chins, waiting as docile as sheep for the end, some of them shivering despite the heat. None appeared to understand the captain when he added, in English, “Also known as Laredo.”

Silverback shook his massive head. “Zilla, you and Pacman take ‘em over to the chipping hall”. Then, without any further ceremony, he turned and walked back towards the wall, disappearing into a doorway just inside the arch. Most of his men followed.

The two huge Neanderthals nodded. The one called Zilla spat. “C’mon, let’s get this show on the road,” he barked, and herded the tributes towards the squat adobe building, ignoring the cries of the younger ones.

“Y’know,” he said in English to the other Neanderthal loping besides him, driving the cringing tributes with a lackluster crack of his whip, “this used to be more fun. I did a couple of tours here back in the day, and we’d really go to town on these guys. I mean, under my first commander, we’d actually get dressed up in animal hides and chase these fucking kids screaming out to the pyramid, and do the job there. Hell, we even used to rip their hearts out with obsidian blades, just for the effect, till those Indigenous Rights people started hollering that it was cruel and unusual punishment. But I think they appreciated it, you know, the ritual. It’s not like anything bad actually happened to them.” He spat again. “Now it’s just all by the book. Escort ‘em to processing, plug ‘em in and off they go. Blah. No flair, no attention to detail. No fun at all, not for us or them.”

The other Ranger walked in indifferent silence beside him, clearly interested only in getting the job done and getting out of the sun. Evidently neither had any idea that two of their charges could understand Zilla’s gripes. 1167 caught Oriente’s eye and winked: Oriente ignored him, staring at the ground ahead. The mundane functionality of Zilla’s tone went a small way towards reassuring him, though his heart was beating fit to burst. Personally, he was hugely relieved to hear there was no Aztec horseplay involved, just a clean, painless upload. Even that was bad enough.

They filed into to the adobe building. Zilla gave a half-hearted pant-hoot to hurry them along, but his aggressive ape-man act lacked conviction and he glanced self-consciously at his bored companion. It was still enough to elicit screams from the tributes.

It was cool inside. A couple of administrators sat typing, local women Oriente assumed, from the drab look of them. Zilla went and leaned over at the desk of one of them, a middle-aged matron who barely bothered to look up from her screen.

“Got a bunch of put-downs for you, Esti” he said.

“So I see. Been expecting you. How many you got there?” The woman surveyed the terrified tributes, some of whom who were looking rather confused to find themselves in an office rather than the temple of a butcher-god. Not that they knew what an office was, but the scene clearly did not correspond to what they expected of a blood-sacrifice. The woman reached under her desk and retrieved a paper form, which she slapped on the table. She jerked her head behind her.

“Aleg’s out back,” she said, returning to her typing.

“Come on,” Zilla wearily ordered his charges, all theatrics now abandoned. They huddled together and walked down a corridor. Most of the rooms were empty, the slow business of border-outpost maintenance clearly not enough to fill an entire day. At the end was a spacious, well-lit room with a number of metal-framed hospital beds. The giants led them inside, and Zilla looked around until he caught sight of a man sitting behind the door, a wrap-around helmet and visor obscuring his face. Zilla kicked the sole of his boot.

“Hey.” The slumped man shot upright and pulled off the helmet. “Jeez Zilla, you scared the shit outta me. I was way up in Red Rock, hunting the biggest fucking gwark you ever saw…”

Zilla tilted his head sideways at Oriente and the tributes. “Customers,” he said.

The technician scratched his neck and looked in distaste at the grubby figures in front of him. He shook his head, “I was
this close
to nailing the fucker…” he said.

“Not on company time you weren’t,” said Zilla, pulling up a chair and starting to fill in the form the administrator had given him, ignoring everyone else as he laboriously wrote down numbers, the time and date.

The tech stowed his helmet and indicated to the sorry creatures before him to lie down on the beds. They did so, one by one, resigned to whatever fate might lie ahead.

“Will it hurt?” asked one of the tributes in a tiny voice. The technician sneered. “Only if you want it to, kid,” he said as he fitted the boy with a helmet like the one he had been wearing. He went round the room, repeating the procedure with each of the young tributes.

Oriente stared up at him as he fitted his. Then the technician pulled the visor down and the world went dark.

***

The darkness might have lasted a few seconds, or many years. When he awoke, Oriente stretched and luxuriated in the soft cotton sheets, his body rested and deeply relaxed. He turned over on the soft pillow, feeling its 1,200 thread-count cover massage his face. Slowly, he opened his eyes and looked around him.

He should have been surprised, but for some reason wasn’t. Maybe they'd done something to his mood, but all he could feel was utterly relaxed. He was in large, elegant bedroom, like a provincial chateau. Simple, pale blue wallpaper and a stone chimney at the far end. French doors opened to an iron-balustraded balcony that looked out over rolling lawns ending in a cliff. Beyond stretched a sparkling blue lake, enclosed by a hazy mountain range.

Oriente got out of bed and padded across Turkish rugs and parquet flooring. His body felt limber and young, as though he had exercised before falling asleep. On the balcony he was hit by the smell of jasmine and fresh-cut grass. Stepping back inside, he saw a mirror: he was discernibly the same man he had been before he had left his forest abode near Dorking, only much younger. Clearly, this could only mean the DPP had caught up with him, that his disguise as a Mexican tribute had fooled no one. He had not expected it to.

But it didn’t seem to matter. He was intact, still knew he was the man he had been for so long. His personality had not split apart at the seams, spilling out the mangled remains of Lyle McLure and Glenn Rose. Oriente grinned in the mirror, picked up a bar of soap from the dresser and sniffed it. Lavender, with a hint of rose petal. The soap was coarse-grained with natural ingredients.

Like someone who has taken mescaline or peyote for the first time, Oriente stood and marveled at it.

“It’s real,” he said. In a burst of excitement, he pulled on a silk robe that hung from the door and rushed into a corridor lined with flower vases and watercolors, down the broad staircase to the lobby. He was clearly in a stylish hotel, and appeared to be its only guest.

Sweeping past the reception desk, he ran across trimmed lawns, falling to his knees in the middle of the green and running his hand over hand through the trimmed grass. Individual blades sprang against his palm: he dug his fingertips into the soil.

“It’s real!” he shouted. “Oh my god, it’s really real!”

He jumped to his feet, giddy with relief, and started spinning around like a dervish, silk robe flying, until he collapsed, laughing and rolling on the grass like a delirious five-year-old.

“Of course it’s real.”

A woman’s stentorian voice drifted across the lawn. Startled, Oriente sat up. A matronly figure was walking towards him, dressed in a tweedy suit. She was buxom, of indeterminate age with dark hair scraped into a tight bun. She smiled and held out her hand.

“Luis Oriente,” she said, a hint of amusement in her plummy English voice. “What a pleasure it is to meet you. I am Loretta Joyce. I’m here to show you around. Get you settled in.”

He took her hand, and she pulled him to his feet with surprising strength. She led him across the lawns to a marble table on the patio by the cliff edge, shaded by a vine-leaf arbor. Before he sat down, she brushed blades of grass from his robe. He smiled at the familiarity of the gesture, then realized what she was doing: pointing out to him just how natural this place was. They sat down at the table overlooking the cliff. Gulls wheeled over the water far below.

“Surprised, Mr Oriente?” She smiled, and beckoned to a waiter hovering by the patio doors. “Two teas, please, Patrick. And bring some of your excellent scones.” She turned back to her charge. “No need to be quite so surprised. This is heaven, after all. Or as close as humanity will ever get to it.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Oriente, caressing a purple hibiscus that trailed from the guardrail. “Utterly beautiful.” He pulled the flower from its stalk and held it up to the light, gazing at its white heart and intricate striations. “My god. I never thought it was possible.”

Loretta Joyce laughed. “Did you think we all skulked around in some awful twilit simulacrum of Haiti? Really, Mr Oriente, shame on you. We can do much better than that. And this is only an entry-level world, mind you. The Hotel Revenant is a pretty spot, but believe me, there is
so
much more to see.”

“I never thought it could be so … real,” he repeated.

“Reality was always relative, Mr Oriente. Every schoolchild knows that. It’s just a question of perspective. Back on earth, people used to think when they stood up, they were actually standing
up
. Given that the planet is round and floating in infinite space, there is no up or down. We were as much standing up as we were hanging off the bottom of the planet, glued in place by gravity like a fly walking upside on ceiling. But it just didn’t suit us to think that way, did it?”

“I know,” he smiled, still taking in the scene. “But still…to see it. To feel it.” He suddenly felt rather foolish that he had feared this paradise for so long. The waiter arrived with tea and a selection of cakes, accompanied by pots of strawberry jam and thick clotted cream. All of sudden, Oriente found he was ravenous and crammed his mouth with food, Loretta gazing on with maternal approval.

“Tastes good, doesn’t it? Here, have some more tea. Earl Grey.”

It was only when his stomach was full that a memory came back to him. The last time his belly had been this stuffed he had been sitting in Aussie Bill’s desert café.

“When I came here, I was with someone. Down there, I mean, in the Zone. What happened to him?”

She stirred milk into her tea, slightly put out that her charge was still thinking about Earth. She pulled a tiny moleskin notebook from her purse and consulted it, nodding to herself.

“Ah yes, you came in with a group of seventeen tributes from Monterrey. They were redirected to a different entry point, one more suited to their needs, since all of this…” she swept her arm, indicating the luxurious grounds of the hotel… “will no doubt come as even more of a surprise to them than it did to you.”

He hesitated, wondering how he should approach this line of questioning. “But there was one who was different. He wasn’t really from Monterrey. He had come from the south, escorting me to the wall. He decided at the last minute he wanted to come with me, though he wasn’t supposed to.”

Loretta put her finger to her lips, a rather condescending look on her powdered face. “Ah yes. Well, I think you know who
she
was.”

“It was a he,” said Oriente. “I mean, he was a boy. Just a boy.”

Loretta consulted her notebook again, although she was clearly familiar with the details of the case already. “Actually,
she
was a number, Mr Oriente. 1167.
Laura
1167. And unfortunately, her profile was an uncanny match for one Laura McLure, sentenced to the Zone over a hundred years ago and banned from ever returning to the Orbiters. She was supposed to have died there a long time ago. Seems she found a way of dodging the Reaper, though I can’t imagine that will last indefinitely.”

“What happened to 1167 then?”

Loretta shrugged. “Dormition. Cold storage for eternity. Standard DPP procedure, though obviously quite rare these days. She went into a sleep down by the wall, same as you. She just didn’t wake up.”

Oriente said nothing. There was nothing he could think of to say at this point. 1167 was in some kind of limbo, neither alive nor dead. He was about to ask if there was any way of appealing the ruling when his host rang the little bell on the table. The waiter came and cleared their cups and plates away.