Slaughtermatic (15 page)

Dante was staring at the terrace flagstones, numb. And he’d promised the Kid they’d get some answers. ‘So I pass some facile test and get an audience.’

‘
Don’t understand me too slowly. Very few people know about this sanctuary - the plans were publicly available only briefly, through an innocent mistake. The architect thought I was a government agent. I rather quickly replaced them with the plans of an office building. The outer elevator only rises to the fourth floor - anyone trying to go higher has no business doing so. Accounts are processed for each of the concerns which are supposedly based here. There are countless safeguards - the beauty of the tower is that its battlements are internal.’

‘
Why didn’t you get out of Beerlight altogether?’

‘
Because there is no more infernal amusement than the spectating of civilization’s bind. With the necessary defences and discipline it is possible to observe and draw conclusions here. You know there are whole states in which original thought is no longer possible - cerebral deserts, the Fadlands. When I was a young man that absence had already swallowed the states of Panic and Ohio. Terminal’s going the same way - and can’t you feel it around the burnt, ragged edges of Our Fair State? A virulent blandness is sterilizing even the underworld. Nothing has any flavour. You’re like one of the old stylists, Cubit, which makes it all the more tragic.

‘
And the other reason is that, to be honest, I’ve become obsessed with apes. Those chimps downstairs are absolutely unbeatable, believe me. When I do finally quit this place I’ll give them their freedom and laugh fondly through my tears.’

‘
All right, how’d you fake
the hit? There’s no denying you’re notorious for being dead.’

‘
Same way you did. Time breach. And hired Parker for the day.’

‘
Folded time and sacrificed your other half?’

‘
Well there’s the worm in the gun, Cubit - you shouldn’t mistake knowledge for information. You know after the fold there’s a natural and a timetripper - one’s stable and one isn’t. It’s the tripper who’s unstable, Cubit - you. You’re the one should have burnt in the cop’s firestorm. Now don’t get upset - sit down.’

Dante had stood and adopted the second-stage scorpion
vrischikasan
posture in defensive surprise. He relaxed gradually, sat down as though medicated, and looked for his grail glass - he had pitched it against the wall. ‘Why are you saying this?’

‘
When you looked in the book - what did you see?’

‘
Me escaping from a bodyvan and running round like a moron.’

‘
And I’ll bet part of the story was that this was some other Cubit, not yourself? Why did you experience his exploits and not one of your own? Because you’re no longer valid in the world.’

‘
And you are?’

‘
Good point - but I won’t be destabilizing into a flurry of molecules in a few hours’ time. You worked on contaminated data, Cubit - messing with time’s too dangerous for people to know how easy it is. A scientist once created a device which could undo time manipulations, but he was killed - probably by those who thought they’d be less well off if the natural order was restored. Also invented a car fuelled by depression apparently - guy by the name of Professor Guppy.’

‘
What happened to the device?’ Dante demanded. ‘The time straightener?’

‘
Boosted a few weeks before the hit - by Billy Panacea, burglar extraordinaire, despite there being a dozen guard dogs on the premises. Nobody knows where he stashed it. The plans burned. It’s absurd but really Panacea’s the only man who could untangle the mess. An opportunist fool. He’s in the Mall of course, which nobody’s been able to hack. Listen, Cubit, it’s a bone-shattering shame but there it is. We’ve both been driven to perform somehow a crime which is unclassifiable. We’ve paid a price. Life’s like that. Dust and a plan.’

‘
Damn
you and your dust!’ shouted Dante, bolting up. ‘I don’t believe a word of it! Fall apart? Fizz into a swirl of atoms? It’d be the ultimate indignity, like dying in a dodgem car! Go to hell!’ He turned and stormed off.

‘
Cubit you bastard!’ shouted Gamete, standing appalled and astonished. ‘What you’re feeling’s the last flush of attachment to the world, the last hope of effectiveness in it! You’ve got hours! You’re ripping at the seams!’

3

TELL ME

‘
Tell me about your first crime.’

‘
I was too young to remember.’ Rosa sat up and pushed the tangle of rubber tubing from the bed. Propping a sawn
-off metabolic rifle out of harm’s way, she started pulling on her shockware. ‘We’re getting outta the loop, Danny.’

Dante Two watched her operate the beautiful machine of her musculoskeletal system. She kicked aside a rubbersheathed caulking hammer. She held his breath with a love which abandoned the human context.

‘
You get healing while I spray the copcar and knock off the roofsparker - we don’t wanna draw fire.’ She leaned over and left him a kiss like a Miles silence.

Alone in the railcar, Dante Two watched the ceiling. He was having a mild infinity crisis, toxic beauty zinging like neon under the skin. Prolonged arterial love had left contusions in his flesh and garnets in his heart. Two psychoses twenty-five years in the making and this was what they made together - a pharmaceutical romance so deep it needed an airtank.

The popcorning of his brain segued into the spackle of gunhits and splash of powdering glass. Something outside.

There was a gunfight going on out there - he sat up, handcuffs snapping tight, and fell back again. At least a dozen rapid-firing Hecklers. He’d seen Rosa hook up her Sauer and Dartwall and these were letting rip. She was giving away bullets like they were coming into fashion. She was berserking. Dante Two nearly came just listening to it. Then someone winged a gasket which flew to pieces like a nail bomb, exploding a window and shredding a curtain in a turmoil of sparks. Something was on fire in here.

He’d no idea where the keys were. The cuffs were attached to a bar of the bed’s headframe. He twisted over and pulled up the mattress - he’d have to use one of Rosa’s torture instruments to unscrew the nuts. There was a thing like a torque wrench she’d been using on his head - he awkwardly wrestled this from the sheets and applied it to the lugs. Screams from outside. Their tone of surprise could mean only one thing - the brotherhood. Amid the multiphonic fusillade something like a fluorescence bomb went off, denting the side wall and rocking the railcar. The carpet was on fire, the wetware nutrient tank thundering like a boiler.

The bedhead clattered loose. He hauled it up and staggered through the smoke, lunging at what he alone considered a window. Flames climbed the stock of the metabolic rifle and the air exploded with enhancer drugs. Dante Two went towards the light.

Submission to causes is what befell the gods, thought Parker. But was love a cause? His heart was swelling like a cancer.

Rosa Control, of the blank badge and leather hair. She was a sweet breeze drifting through the tumbleweed streets and flapping saloon doors of his mind. Her enamel skin, primitive hardware and fiery talent for the fostering of grief put him a breath away from mercy. She was exceptionally dangerous.

He was staring absently into the window of the Drilliac store which stood on the site of his old gun emporium. What a killer dies with me, he thought. He was the true spice among those whose business was the hastening of people’s latter end. Should he turn up at her doorstep, percussion cap in hand? Maybe a poem about flowers and bugs? He could barely write - what were the tenses? I will knife, I am knifing, I have knifed. It was useless - she’d punch him in the throat.

But a life lived with fear is a life lived with clarity. Anyone with the courage of his convictions for manslaughter would act. Is it a crime to want to connect with someone without a speeding bullet as the go-between? he raged. This was Beerlight and at a deep level he knew the answer.

But wasn’t he wanted anyway?

Dante climbed out of the caved-in elevator and over a stripped tank, emerging into Deal like a longcoat gunslinger. It was a cold crime scene, old news, steamers newted by the HAARP jag. Various droll tanks and blooper emplacements sat in the streetway, targeting straightfaced at empty air.

A cop sitting on the hood of a tank bit into a hotdog and looked up in time to see the man who shot him - a death-pale guy in layers of black like the curled pages of a burnt book.

Dante ditched the pistol, climbed in and started up, spinning the tank and heading downtown with the dead cop lying on the hood.

Four miles from the Mall bunker, Benny and Corey started arguing. As a side-effect of strobe hypnosis in the Mall, Benny’s perceptions were flaring to beat the band. ‘Value’s based on rarity, demand and ease of replacement,’ he asserted, driving. ‘So depending on your relationship to a person, that person can be worth everythin’ or nuthin’.’

‘
Oh, silly,’ Corey laughed. ‘That’d mean people would do
horrible
things.’

She found herself sitting on the roadside, the car pulling off in an eruption of dust.

The naked figure of Dante Two staggered over the wasteland outside of town, dragging the bedhead behind him. Talk about conspicuous. While he was attached to this it would be obvious to everyone he was not only alive but in a loving relationship. He may as well have had a rifle target pinned to his back.

He had to get as far from Beerlight and the cops as possible. Rosa would be doing the same and she hated clingy men. Alaska, home of the moose and the Department of Defense’s test zone.

Spanned from the jagged horizon to the city’s confusion ran a rail track. Dante knew there was an armoured artillery train due, bound for the brotherhood’s compound. The timetable was horribly familiar from a past headcrime involving this same train. He had tied a number of chefs to the rails in the hope that the driver would speed up and hit the real obstacle placed further along, jumping the track. In the event the driver mistook the chefs’ ridiculous hats and overalls for those of white supremacists and slammed on the brakes. Dante Two had had to run for his life.

Lying on the ground with the headframe on the track and the cuff chain draped over a rail, he waited. All in all the heist had not been a success. He only hoped the other guy had got a swatch of the book - anything would be more enlightening than his own so-called adventures. Was that a train coming?

4

PLACE IS KINDA QUIET

‘
Place is kinda quiet cuz the boys are baggin’ and taggin’ at the Hall. Lotta snipers died of excitement. Surprised you weren’t there yourself, Rose - busy with somethin’?’

Rosa regarded the fat fucker who sat opposite. Any more meat on his face and his head would bang to the floor. A stack of burgers threw an Olympian shadow over the table as Blince systematically emptied Rosa’s ammo into a tin bucket. An armed slabhead stood behind him at the locked cell door.

He voided the Sauer. ‘I got a sneaky admiration for you, Rose. Keep yourself to yourself or somethin’ and I like that. But you mollified eighteen o’ my men with these here firearms - what were you thinkin’? Not only is that murder but it makes you a goddamn accessory. Bren Dartwall .33. Whattya need with these little armour-piercin’ fishies, Rose?’ Blince emptied the finned flechettes from the hand cannon and dumped them into the bucket. ‘I presume you could see what you were doin’ when you liberated ’em? So you’re a material witness into the unbelievable bargain. Speakin’ o’ which, we found a lotta stuff at your place, stolen at rockbottom prices. And a lotta blood. You wouldn’t be dockin’ a fugitive, would you?’

He stared at her, pouch-eyed. She stared back in the grey, faded, well-worn shock of meeting an idiot.

‘
Well - the web thickens. How old are you, Rose twenty-five, twenty-six? Time to consider puttin’ up your guns and dyin’ into society. You got the right to a lawyer - guess you heard the bang as we drove out here, one of our rollers ran into Harpoon Specter on Radio Street, they’re showin’ him a bandage right about now. He’ll be by later but I’m sure we don’t need to get overtechnical re the legal position.’

There was no response.

‘
A word to the wise, Rose - this prince among men you’re protectin’, this fine one - he’s cost a lotta lives. My boys, all them innocents at the bank, who knows who else. Your friends ain’t here to help you - Jones bought the farm when Parker newted the den, Findley the Kid’s dead at the Hall - yeah, they all shot him. In a manner that was almost a threat - before the Carny had ’em rollin’ in the aisles. But the hubcap o’ the matter is this, Rose. I know Danny Cubit hosted the fashionable events in Deal last night - his kinda soaraway blankopathic don’t need a motive, only a pretext. And it weren’t too shabby, I’ll give him that. But Rose’ - and he regarded the tabletop of empty guns awhile for the purpose of suspense - ‘if you don’t let rip re the facts of his present location you’re gonna find yourself on the wrong end of a power tool. Seems Cubit wove in a couple o’ transgressions invisible to the common herd. Time shit. And books, Rose - books. I found stuff in that deposit hatch I’ll never forget - a hand sat on top o’ some volume like it was swearin’ to tell the truth, the shockin’ truth and nothin’ but. Sent the whole sick jamboree to the Pentagon, they’re wise to this time shenanigan. Our Fair State’s still aligned to the powers, little missy, and I’ll have you know as well as I do they can screw up better than anyone. But that’s so much flyin’ glass - I need you to tell me what you were doin’ durin’ Cubit’s installation number.’