Synaptic Manhunt (7 page)

‘Think, be calm, use your intelligence. What is this thing?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t think.’

‘Where does it come from?’

The Minstrel Boy could no longer speak. He waved his hand in the direction of the cone. His legs began to give way and he clung to Jeb Stuart Ho. Ho gently pulled him back to his feet.

‘We must go to the cone and make this thing cease.’

‘No! No! No!’

The Minstrel Boy slipped into uncontrollable hysterics. Jeb Stuart Ho slapped him hard across the face, and he fell silent. Jeb Stuart Ho took him by the arm and, half supporting him, began to lead him towards the cone. They stumbled for about a hundred metres. The mind-wrenching fear seemed to grow stronger. Then the Minstrel Boy groaned and sank to his knees.

‘I can’t go on.’

‘The superior man faces his fear and in facing it overcomes his weakness.’

The Minstrel Boy fell on his side. He rolled over and pulled his knees up to his chest.

‘I … can’t … do … it!’

Jeb Stuart Ho knelt down beside the Minstrel Boy.

‘If you don’t strive to overcome it, it could kill you.’

‘I don’t care!’

The Minstrel Boy lay still with his eyes tightly closed and his face contorted. Jeb Stuart Ho stood up, and began walking up the side of the cone by himself. Each step became an inhuman effort. The fear had become a physical force. His legs were leaden. It was like wading in sand. He stumbled frequently. As he neared the top, it became almost more than he could bear. The sky glowed an evil, menacing red. The rock appeared to reflect it, and danced with flame. The force battered at him like a hurricane. Black hallucinations, flapping like murderous bats, swooped at the edge of his vision.

He reached the top. The force became absolute torture. It was pushing at him so hard that it seemed to be tearing the flesh from his bones. It screamed around him like monsters from some awful hell. In front of him, in the very summit of the cone, was a circular depression. Lying in it, on a bed of soft sand, were nine gold eggs. Each one was about half the height of a man. Jeb Stuart Ho knew immediately that they were the source of the power. His instinct was to destroy them. His hand went to his gun. It was like moving in slow motion. Inch by inch his fingers moved towards his belt. All the force seemed to be concentrated on his right arm. It was filled with a burning cold that gnawed at the bone and muscle. His fingers curled round the butt. That too was deathly cold. His fingers froze to it. As he slowly drew the gun from the holster, it felt as if the flesh of his hand was being ripped apart. He slowly raised the gun. Its weight seemed unbearable. The muscles in his arm felt like they were going to snap. Gradually the gun came in line with the clutch of eggs. He eased back the trigger. The scream around him rose in pitch. It felt as though his ears had started bleeding, maybe his very brain. The eggs seemed far away. His vision tunnelled. He desperately hauled on the trigger. It would hardly move. He began to black out, then, through it all, he heard the Minstrel Boy screaming.

‘Don’t! Don’t! For god’s sake don’t do it! They’re only trying to protect themselves.’

It suddenly all fell into place. Jeb Stuart Ho touched the half formed entities inside the gold shells. He felt the power of the scarcely developed minds. He felt their fear and their vulnerability. He was awed by what they might become. For an instant everything hung poised. The gun fell from his fingers. He sank, crosslegged, to the ground. He forced his mind to be calm. The beings’ fear still washed over him, but it was no longer aimed directly at him. He gathered all his strength and slowly directed peace and gentleness. He meant them no harm. He projected that as hard as he could. Veins pumped in his forehead as he tried to thrust his way through the fear.

He reached them. His thoughts penetrated through to the beings in the eggs. They seized on his projections as something new and strange. They dragged it out of him with a greedy hunger. They were insatiable. He hung on to stop his mind being dragged from him. He begged them to stop, but their infant greed demanded more and more. Jeb Stuart Ho reached his final limit. His consciousness was drained away.

The world went black. His body toppled, and rolled down the side of the cone like a discarded puppet whose strings had been cut.

He woke up to find the Minstrel Boy wiping his face with a damp cloth. He grinned at Ho.

‘Shit, Killer. I really thought you were dead for sure, this time.’

Jeb Stuart Ho raised his head.

‘How long have I been here?’

The Minstrel Boy shrugged.

‘Maybe a couple of hours.’

‘What happened?’

‘Don’t ask me. You were up there, you did it. One minute all hell was breaking loose, then suddenly it was beautiful, like the dawn coming up.’

Jeb Stuart Ho sat up. The landscape had completely changed. The ground was still grey rock, but it was broken up by clumps of green vegetation growing out of cracks in its surface. Tiny streams trickled into crystal clear pools. The sky was a deep even blue. It was as if the beings had taken apart his mind, and reshaped their environment according to what they found there. A little distance away, the lizards grazed happily on the vegetation.

Jeb Stuart Ho carefully stood up. He had expected his body to show some signs of strain after the ordeal. He was surprised to find there were none. He felt as though he had just woken from a comfortable sleep. He looked at the cone. It radiated a glow of benign contentment. His gun was still lying at the foot of the slope, where it had come to rest after he had dropped it. He walked over and picked it up. As he touched the weapon, the sky seemed to darken. The lizards looked up in alarm. He quickly dropped it into its holster and things resumed their previous calm. The lizards returned to their chewing.

The Minstrel Boy walked over to where Jeb Stuart Ho was standing at the foot of the cone. He was grinning happily. His friendliness was almost unnatural. He put his arm round Ho’s shoulders.

‘Looks like it turned out okay.’

Jeb Stuart Ho nodded.

‘It would seem so.’

The Minstrel Boy looked up at the cone.

‘I’m almost sorry to leave.’

‘We have to leave.’

‘I knew you’d say that.’

‘We should start.’

The Minstrel Boy stared at the ground. He seemed reluctant to start back into the nothings.

‘It’s like I’m thinking we ought to leave some kind of mark on this place.’

Jeb Stuart Ho looked at him in surprise.

‘Why?’

‘I dunno, just so we know we’ve been here.’

‘Surely we know that without leaving our mark here?’

‘Maybe we should give it a name or something?’

Jeb Stuart Ho gestured towards the top of the cone.

‘They must have a name for this place.’

The Minstrel Boy shrugged.

‘Yeah, maybe. I dunno.’

He put two fingers in his mouth and gave a high-pitched whistle. The lizards looked up, and began lumbering slowly towards where the two men were standing. Ho and the Minstrel Boy each caught the reins of his own mount, and climbed into the saddle. They turned the lizards and rode slowly past the cone. Jeb Stuart Ho paused for a moment and stared hard at it, then he took a deep breath and started after the Minstrel Boy.

A little grey-haired man in a quilted dressing gown tugged open the lift gate and padded across the frayed carpet of the Leader Hotel lobby, and up to the reception desk. He waited until the desk clerk looked up from his comic book and deigned to notice him.

‘Yeah?’

The little man cleared his throat, and tugged the faded robe closer round his bony shoulders.

‘Did my letter come?’

The desk clerk didn’t even bother to look at the pigeonholes behind him.

‘Nothing came.’

The little man remained where he was.

‘Are you sure? Couldn’t you check?’

The desk clerk put down his comic book and looked at the little man with cold patience.

‘Nothing came, Arthur. Just like yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that and every day you’ve been here. Nothing ever comes for you, Arthur. Okay?’

Arthur cleared his throat again.

‘I’ll try tomorrow.’

The desk clerk turned over the page of his comic book.

‘You do that.’

Arthur turned away and shuffled back to the lift. Billy Oblivion sprawled in the sagging armchair and watched the tiny drama without interest. It happened every day. Every day Arthur came down from his tiny room on the twenty-seventh floor to look for the letter that would change his life. Every day the letter failed to arrive. The lift door rattled shut and Arthur returned to the twenty-seventh floor. The desk clerk went back to his comic book, and Billy went on staring at the semi-erotic frieze that was slowly crumbling away from the dirty pink wall.

For most of its residents the Leader Hotel was the end of the line. A tall warren of tiny rooms and dim corridors that smelled of decay and urine. As long as you kept paying the rent you were wholly, totally free to overdose, drink yourself to death or simply grow numb. Billy hoped that none of those things would happen to him. He hoped that one day he’d manage to get out of the place and into something better. Billy’s hope didn’t guarantee him any protection against those fates. Most people in the Leader Hotel hoped for something, but still it happened to them. The Leader Hotel was the last stop for the non-people, the ones who, for one reason or another, didn’t have credit cards.

Billy Oblivion didn’t have a credit card. He’d never had one. He’d wandered into Litz without one, found that the good life was closed to him, and wound up at the Leader. He’d been there ever since. Billy the pimp they called him now. That was on account of Darlene. Darlene had picked him up, and kept him ever since. Darlene made enough to keep them both surviving at the Leader, but never enough for them to get out. Darlene didn’t have a credit card. It had been taken away for some unspecified crime. Darlene never went into the exact details.

Not having a credit card created problems for Darlene in her profession, and Darlene’s problems automatically became Billy’s problems. Not having a credit card meant that her tricks couldn’t pay her by a straightforward credit transfer. She had to operate a kind of barter system. She fucked them, or did whatever else they wanted, and they slipped her some kind of small valuable. These she unloaded on the desk clerk, who credited them with enough to pay the rent and live. He, of course, only gave them a fraction of what the stuff was worth, and made sure they never got sufficiently ahead actually to get out of the hotel.

The previous night, however, Billy and Darlene had made more of a mess of things than usual. Darlene had had a reasonably good afternoon. She’d turned three tricks. Three tricks in an afternoon was good for her. It wasn’t that Darlene was unattractive, but here was no way she could compete with the big legitimate brothels. They creamed off most of the custom that just wanted to get laid. Darlene had to make do with the ones who were funny for lowlife. She got the ones who liked to follow a good-looking non-person back to the Leader, the ones who got an extra kick that way.

The three tricks the previous afternoon had made Billy and Darlene a shade overconfident. They’d blown all their credit on a bottle of hotel booze and a package of funaids. Darlene had been certain that if she hit the street later that night, not that night and day made much difference in the permanent dark of the city, she could make the next day’s room rent.

Of course, it had all been a fantasy. The booze and the pills had made sure that they’d become too fused to move from the bed until the house detective had come knocking with his regular morning call of pay up or quit. They didn’t have the room rent, but the desk clerk and the house detective had been very good about it. They’d let Billy sit around in the lobby until Darlene hustled up the rent. They hadn’t even made them move their stuff out, just taken away the key.

Billy waited. It was kind of embarrassing but there was nothing else he could do. The lobby of the Leader Hotel was particularly depressing. It smelled of squalor and decay. The potted palms in the corner had long ago become brown, dry mummies, but no one had bothered to replace them or even throw them out. The carpet was worn into holes in a number of places. The ancient creaking lift only worked by a miracle, and there seemed to be no logical reason why the scarred and battered armchairs that stood dotted about in lonely groups hadn’t fallen into shapeless ruin a long time ago. The high ceiling was marked with huge brown patches of damp.

Billy tried to distract himself by watching the vid that was mounted to the right of the reception desk. Its colour was blotchy and the 3D was alarmingly out of alignment. The only thing that could be said in its favour was that it worked at all. Not that he could see it all that clearly. His view was constantly interrupted by the swaying heads of three old winos who clustered around it as though it actually gave out heat. They were avidly watching one of the multiple hanging shows. Billy wondered how they managed to enjoy it so much. Everyone knew that the hanging shows were fixed.

After another hour, Billy’s patience was finally rewarded. Darlene walked in with a fat little citizen in tow. He was just the type who always seemed to go for her. Pink with nervousness and excitement, he was sweating profusely into his pale blue one-piece suit. Dark stain had formed under his armpits. It was obvious that his dry-all-day anti-perspirant wasn’t holding up under the strain.

Darlene was at least a head taller than the trick. Billy had to admit that she looked good. Her red dress scarcely covered her arse, leaving a flash of inviting thigh above her matching stockings and boots. The thin straps of her red suspenders added an extra touch of excitement. The red ensemble contrasted so nicely with her jet-black skin and close-cropped hair. There was no mistaking that Darlene was a good-looking broad. Billy was proud to have her. He loved that black skin, and he hoped she’d never make enough to get the colour change she was always bitching about.

Billy gave no sign of recognition as she stopped by the reception desk and turned pointedly towards the trick. It didn’t do for a pimp to be too much in evidence while his woman was hustling. It tended to make the tricks nervous. Darlene winked at him from behind the fat man’s back, but Billy didn’t respond. Then she went to work. She took the trick by the arm and steered him up to the reception desk.