Expatria: The Box Set (39 page)

CHAPTER 15

Stopp felt OK, really. Except that her body wouldn't move.

She hung in Grady Cesar's sleep-net, drifting slightly in response to small eddies in the air around her. The false screen had vanished some time ago. She didn't know how long—she had slept afterwards and lost track of things.

Now she was hungry.

She tried not to think about what had happened or how close she had come to losing her grip on the outside of Station Yellow. She would not have lasted long out there but any time at all would have been too much for her, knowing her fate in the void.

Just then, she heard voices coming from Grady's workshop. Her heart started to race, despite the inertia, left by the sedative. What if he had betrayed her to the Holy Cee? Her eyes darted from corner to corner of the cubicle and some life started to return to her muscles.

She pulled at the sleep-net, but she didn't have the strength to free its catch. She tried again, but it was no good.

The door opened and it was Grady.

He drifted in, followed by Decker and Dippso. 'Stopp,
baby!
' said Dippso. 'What did they do to you?' She freed the net, and rubbed an antidote stick on Stopp's arm.

Stopp could feel the sedative being progressively wiped from her system. She wriggled free and stretched, pausing to let Grady peer at the dressing on her hand. 'You're lucky,' he said. 'You could 'ave lost your hand.' He turned to the others. 'Like I say, they chased 'er out without a suit. They'd 'ave killed her, they'd 'ave t-t-t—'

'OK, Grady. You've told us what they would have done.' Decker held his hands up and smiled. 'Don't get too high, OK? Stopp, will you tell us what happened?'

She told them but she knew it wasn't much help. She had heard fragments of an argument, she had been discovered, she had been chased.

They'd nearly killed her, that was all.

'You'd better keep a low profile,' said Dippso. 'Is there any place you could hide? We'll look out for you, but we can't be with you fourteen hours a day.'

'Ark Red. I know places in Red where no one would ever find me.

'Good,' said Dippso. 'We'll get you over there right away.'

'Grady? Will you come with us? Idi wants a multiple link,' said Decker. 'Sounds heavy. We can all take a shuttle over to Red and link up from the Zagreb Complex. That way we can get Stopp installed at the same time. OK?'

Grady shrugged and flapped his hands. He would come, although he never liked to go trifax with Expatria.

'Can we go now?' said Stopp. Suddenly she wanted to get out of Station Yellow, she wanted to be as far from Director Roux as she could manage.

~

They docked with Red and it was OK. They were the only people at that docking bay apart from a bunch of menials, so intent on their own tasks that they didn't even look at the new arrivals.

They emerged from the tunnel and the atmosphere seemed different. The sounds of the working menials seemed to be carrying more clearly, the air seemed to be cooler—Stopp remembered Hermann's dislike of the heat and she wondered if GenGen had done something to the ark's gaia to shed a few celsius.

Dippso punted herself off a nearby root system and Decker and Stopp did likewise, Grady throwing himself after them by hand, his un-muscled legs no use to him.

A few minutes later they swung into Zagreb's console bay. Stopp grabbed a restrainer and let it settle her in front of a screen. 'Stopp-two-pees,' she said. She saw the list of links, noted the cluster of names she knew to belong to Death Krishnas. Kardinal Idi Mondata was there. She spoke his name into the bone-mike she was gumming on to her jaw.

The picture slid up. Some gardens, a pool, apple trees, flowers bobbing in a gentle breeze, insects humming, birds fighting. A row of stone arches marked one boundary of the gardens, a few tens of metres distant; beyond was a golden evening sky, banded with molten clouds.

Stopp checked with ArcNet to confirm the location. She was right. They were on a hill above Newest Delhi, about a kilometre outside the city's southern limits. The gardens were part of Strawberry Fields, an ashram run by the Death Krishna novitiate, its rooms used to house orphans and novices, a resting place for wandering gurus and rishis, a retreat for the Kardinals.

Kardinal Mondata had set his projector to one side, so that his cross-legged figure appeared in one corner of the screen. Seated around him were other Krishnas, all markedly older than him, their exposed skin a mosaic of tattoos, all flowers and spiders' webs and eye-centred swastikas and sun symbols. Mondata's skin was still visible in places, a delicate shade of brown, like the biscuits Antebo Cobal used to make. The eyes tattooed onto his eyelids flashed bright in the sun each time he blinked. He looked ill at ease, there was tension drawn all over his face, marring his beauty.

Stopp had been holding her trifax back, not wanting to break the moment. She didn't think she would look right, sitting there amongst the gorse and thyme, alongside the saffron-coated Kardinals.

Then Grady Cesar flashed up next to a twisted old woman with stubble pushing through the pictures on her skull, and Stopp finally let her own trifax cast itself up next to Kardinal Mondata. Grady looked weird on the planetary surface, with his legs still bound up out of the way—he never would let ArcNet cosmeticise his image; he took the curious looks with his own challenging glower, daring anyone to stare.

Decker and Dippso appeared nearby.

'Hi, my name's Stopp,' she said quietly to the Kardinal. 'We've met before.'

Mondata looked at her image and nodded, forcing a smile. 'Sure,' he said. 'You helped Lucilla Ngota dodge clan MacFadyen. I'm glad you could be here.

'OK,' he said, louder, to the small gathering. 'We've got to talk. We need some background on GenGen. We want to know what they're doing here. I've told my fellow Kardinals what happened at the landing and after, I've told them why I don't like it. Right now we'd be grateful if you could tell us what they've done up in orbit. It might give us some idea of how they'll set about Expatria. Decker?'

'They've taken us over,' said Decker. Mondata glanced significantly around the gathering and Decker hurried on. 'I don't mean by force or anything. Nothing like that. No. It's just that there's such a lot of space in the stations up here and there's only a few hundred of us; maybe a thousand, nobody's ever tried counting.

'Twelve hundred and thirty-four,' said Stopp suddenly. ArcNet had flashed the figure onto her screen. That was unusual, the system wasn't usually that responsive. Stopp glanced across at Dippso's screen but she didn't have the message. She wondered if it had anything to do with Lui's exploration of ArcNet while she had been drugged out. She didn't know. She didn't even know how to
think
about it. 'Plus one query,' she added, as a footnote scrolled up. 'That's what ArcNet says.'

Decker glanced across at her in Red's console bay, but his trifax kept its gaze fixed on the array of Kardinals. The old woman had begun to shave the stubble on her tattooed head, wetting her scalp with saliva and flashing a blade across it with a few deft flicks of her wrist.

'Like I say,' Decker continued. 'They're outnumbering us, they're moving into our empty space, building their own enclaves in our arks and our 'spheres. There's been a lot of illness—they protect themselves from
our
pathogens but a lot of us have been hit by
theirs
.'

'What has their attitude been, though?' asked a Kardinal with a smoking pipe drooping from the corner of his mouth. 'What is their purpose?'

'Their attitude is difficult to get a hook on,' said Decker. 'They do a lot of preaching, their Philemonics sing a lot... they seem pretty easy about things. They're not pushing themselves on us or anything like that.'

'Just taking over your living space,' said Mondata.

'Their p-purpose don't cut clear,' said Grady Cesar. 'It's like they're trying to ignore us in orbit—they weren't expecting us so, as long as we don't get under foot, they play like we don't exist. As soon as someone... c-crosses them, they let loose, they chase you out into space without a suit is what they do.' Grady was getting excited but he carried on, nonetheless. 'They came to Expatria, not to orbit. Whatever they're doing, they're going to do on Expatria, not in orbit. Their purpose? You'll f-f-find that out before
we
do.'

Grady cut his trifacsimile and ripped the mike from his jaw. 'I've done my all,' he muttered. 'I'm out.' He gave one look around the console bay and then threw himself towards the exit.

Stopp returned her attention to her screen. The Kardinals were talking among themselves, Mondata animated, the others calmer, some nodding, others apparently unsure. 'They're here to take us over or they're here to screw with our minds,' said one. 'What difference does it make? They have no business with us is what I say, is what we
all
should say. We should go there and tell them, that's what we should do.'

'We should meditate on it,' said another, the woman with the freshly shaven scalp. 'Maybe a solution will be revealed to Kardinal Mondata—a new bhagavad will be written in his name!' Her tone was gently taunting, a smile was in her eyes, but Mondata did not notice.

He snatched his projector and walked away. 'We need to think,' he said. 'Let's think then.'

He slung the pack onto his back and Stopp's image fell into step by his side. They approached the row of arches, made of stone that had been severely weathered by its exposed position. The Kardinal passed under an arch and settled himself against a boulder on the other side, standing the pack on the ground. He stared at Newest Delhi, spread out before him.

The hill tumbled sharply from where he sat, levelling occasionally into shadowed terraces of fruit trees, benefiting from the mild northern aspect. A hundred metres below, a group of children were playing with burning daggers, the yellow-robed novices teaching the commune's orphans how to douse the flames on their tongues.

'It shows your holiness,' said Kardinal Mondata, after a time. 'The novices put the flame out, the untouched burn their mouths. It's a popular game.'

'You think children should play like that?'

'They learn... they have to learn.' Idi shrugged. 'They're better off here than on the streets in Joplin quarter. Jay-Buddha, they make me mad.' He sat there shaking his head.

Stopp wondered if she should still be there, or if he'd rather be on his own. She stayed. She was nosy. 'Who? Who makes you mad?'

'The Kardinals. All sat there in their Dee Kay finery. Do you know I'm the first new Kardinal in sixteen years? Now they think I can do anything. Shit, I get a knife in my foot and now they think I'm a rishi!' He stopped himself and squinted at Stopp's trifax. 'You don't want to hear all this then you go, OK? I'll just sit here ranting to myself and maybe they'll think I'm mad and they won't keep turning to me.'

'Maybe they'll think you're having a vision,' said Stopp. 'What happened to your foot?'

'Last month. When Greta Olfarssen-Hanrahan was running things and they were going to hang Matt. I got together with Mono and some others and we took over, stopped it all happening. You know: noose around his neck, just about to drop the platform from under his feet and in we come to save the day. That kind of thing.' He grinned and Stopp's ghost smiled back. 'Fifty Conventist Guards, near to two hundred of us and no one got hurt. If I believed in miracles then that was one! It was incredible: we overwhelmed them, they didn't expect it, they didn't know what to do.

'Then, when Greta threw herself over the parapet, there was this Little Sister standing next to me. Well she turned, she hissed something I couldn't make out and then she hurled her knife at the ground. Went right through my foot, passed between all the bones, pinned me to the ground.'

'Another miracle, right?' said Stopp.

Mondata laughed. 'Sure, a miracle. You read the
Bhagavad Gita
, it says how the Lord Krishna died when he was shot in the foot by a hunter. Suddenly I'm there with this hole in my foot—my own stigmata—and they want to make me a Kardinal. Now they think I'm a rishi, a seer—it's crazy. Me? I've never even been a novice. All I wanted was to get back to my fishing business. Sure, my family have always sat on the edges of Krishna—my brother, Rabindranath, took the sutric thread when he was twenty, went to live in Mathura with the cow-girls. Me? The closest I ever got to religion was a childhood crush on my mother's statue of Lord Krishna. It's crazy.

'When I met you in Glendower I was on my way back from my ordination in Mathura. They shaved my head, they did my tattoos, they gave me my gown woven through with strands of the sutric thread. I keep away from the burning swords though, I don't want to burn my mouth.

'They chanted all of the couplets of
The Mahabharata
while they worked on my face and head. That's over one hundred thousand phrases. There were twenty-five novices, each chanting different couplets. I didn't know what they were chanting until someone told me afterwards. It took almost an entire day. They didn't even stop to drink. That was what made me suddenly see what I was doing, what it meant. I'm a Kardinal, Stopp. I went through all that and it made me see what I've become. I'm a symbol, a figurehead. Whatever I do sets the precedent for everyone else. My
dharma
, my route, is there for everyone else to follow. Shit, it's one big weight, Stopp. I have to do the right thing.'

'So what are you going to do?' She hated what he must be feeling, it did horrible things to his face. Somehow his incomplete mosaic of tattoos seemed to amplify the exhibition of his emotions, not hide them like it did for the older Kardinals.

'Rabi has an interesting angle on history,' said Mondata. 'Kalki is the last of the gods and some day he'll come down on his white steed to finish it all. He's armageddon, he's apocalypse. He's the big end. He was telecommunications, he was the nuclear bomb, he was biopathological terrorism, he was the polluted heavings of Gaia. And each time we have seen him off, saved ourselves for another apocalypse. That's what life
is
, Stopp: seeing off armageddon. When I saw their director on his white plastic autonome it made me think of Kalki on his horse. Look closer: see the way they split people, divide them into categories into their system of
varna
, the caste system in another guise. Varna is anathema to a Death Krishna, we're as equal as we'll let ourselves be. And now they want to screw our heads with their warped idea of "the Truth". What can a good lover of Krishna do?'