The Skinner (19 page)
Authors: Neal Asher
Frane seemed affronted as he drifted from hallucination to memory.
OUTSIDE PARAM FUNCTION: CEREBRAL PROBE ERROR
.
Cradling the cleanser against his belly, Keech heaved himself to his feet. ‘I’ve got to get help,’ he said.
‘Not one of your favourite pastimes,’ said Francis Cojan, standing at his side.
Keech glanced at the man and saw that he was young, athletic, and smiling, not at all like the last time he had seen him.
‘You need friends to help you. Keech doesn’t believe in friends.’
Keech turned to see Alphed Rimsc on his other side. It was only his voice that Keech recognized, the man’s face having been mostly eaten away by the diatomic acid Keech had put in his
suit’s oxygen supply.
‘This is not real, you’re all dead.’
‘Really, where you should be,’ said Corbel Frane, waving a finger at him. ‘I mean, how long has this been going on – seven centuries? Are you mad? How many lives has your
vendetta cost?’
Keech gestured at him with a grey claw. ‘That’s not something
you
would think! That’s me!’
He was about to shout out again when he suddenly realized he was utterly alone on the beach.
‘Shit,’ he said, and gazed down at the two green lights on the cleanser.
REPEAT ERROR MESSAGE
, he instructed.
OUTSIDE PARAM FUNCTION: CEREBRAL PROBE ERROR
.
In his organic brain – cross-referenced to AI emotional emulation – he got in the nearest he could get to a cold sweat.
DETAIL
.
The reply did nothing to ease that feeling.
Capillary blockage to organic cerebrum/Agglutinate balm/A1 viral fibre/Ox-3 starvation.
PRESENT DETAIL
.
NOMINAL
.
That made him feel no better. Cradling the cleansing unit while it continued labouring to clear his fouled balm, he returned to his scooter and slumped down with his back against it. He’d
just come as close as it was possible, for a walking corpse, to having a stroke.
Underneath accreted layers of time, perversion, and monstrous deed after monstrous deed, there lay an earlier self that Frisk knew would be horrified at what she had since
become. She even found a certain perverse pleasure in that fact – more pleasure than she was extracting in
this
present pursuit.
The ancient Prador to whom Ebulan himself had been first-child during the Prador/Humanwar,had maintained that human flesh gained added piquancy from extended suffering. So it was that humans
force-grown for meat began to be slaughtered by slow and excruciating factory processes. When they had fled to the Prador Third Kingdom, she and Jay had found satisfaction of their perverse
instincts in the holding pens and slaughterhouses there, but only some. For force-grown humans did not have time to acquire the life experience to truly appreciate the horror of their
situation.
In later years, after Jay had departed, Frisk had continued to find satisfaction there, but it had decreased as eating human meat had become less fashionable amongst Prador kind. With fewer and
fewer force-grown humans available, sometimes years might pass between each sado-sexual release for her. She had tried human blanks before, but always been frustrated.
And thus it was now. The blank, of course, remained utterly indifferent to the things she was doing to him. She realized this was a pointless exercise, but could not restrain herself from
carrying it through to the end. Under instruction from his thrall unit, he grew an erection and pumped away at her while she cut and burned him. But because he was also ancient Hooper, the burns
quickly scabbed and slewed away, and his skin closed back over the wounds she made like a layer of oil over water, his expression changing not one whit as she inflicted this abuse on him. In the
end she grew bored and frustrated at his passivity, and pushed him away. How she wished things were still as they had once been.
‘Move back to the door,’ she instructed.
The blank pushed himself off her and stepped back as instructed. Lying back, she remembered the games she and Jay had once played: the screams of both agony and ecstasy ringing through the pens,
the quintessential pleasure of watching some favourite plaything coming to realize that he or she was no longer favoured, and faced only a future of agony and death, then consumption by the Prador.
She remembered how, with the correct drugs and techniques, they could extend such an individual’s life for days – even after removing their entire skin. Heady days, now gone for
ever.
‘Leave me,’ she instructed the blank, and turned over on to her stomach as the door closed behind him.
Of course, now she was coming back into human-habited space, there would be a surplus of material for her delectation. Most of them would be Hoopers, true, but they would be Hoopers with minds,
and even though durable, they could still be made to suffer – it was all a matter of technique. She understood herself well enough to know that her imminent return to the scene of her most
ghastly crimes was not really about Jay or Keech – it was about boredom and
need
.
Feeling movement on her leg Frisk rolled over and batted away one of the many lice that occupied the ship. As she donned her environment suit, she tried to imagine a future where she could
continue to let loose the full extent of her malice and have it
responded
to. She tried to relish the prospect, but imagination had become dull, and interest lacking. In this she found
another source of anger.
Standing up, she said, ‘I will just have to work at it.’ But the words seemed to be sucked away by the coldness of the ship surrounding her.
‘I
will
work at it,’ she said, and smashed her foot down on the louse, crunching it into the floor.
The cloud of disturbed silt, broken shell, gobbets of flesh and yellowish chyme now covered five square kilometres of seabed, and when one edge reached the oceanic trench
it waterfalled into the cerulean depths. On a good day for glisters, this waterfall would have descended upon certain entities down there and elicited only the waving of siphons like hollowed
trees, the contemplative thump of a fleshy foot capable of tipping boulders to see what might be for lunch underneath, and the blink of a slot-pupilled eye the size of a dinner plate. Today was
a bad day, however. The monstrous whelk – which had as its minuscule kin both the hammer and frog varieties, for it was into his kind that they tranformed upon surviving long enough to
finally become sexually active – had not had a particularly good day himself, nor week either. For longer than had seemed fair, a deepwater flesh-eating heirodont had hunted him through
the boulderfields that were his natural home below and, of necessity, he had escaped into the deep crevices found higher up the face of this underwater cliff. Below, encountering such tastes in
the water would merely have whet his appetite for one of the huge filter-worms that lived underneath the boulders. Those worms were now far out of reach, and the source of this taste was very
close. Rolling out masses of tentacles, with skin so thick and fibrous even leeches could not penetrate, he hauled himself up the face of the cliff and went to dine.
He was on the deck and prill were coming over the rail. There was no one else on board but something shadowy and insectile steered the ship down an avenue made in the sea by
the reared trumpet mouths of giant leeches. He backed away from the prill but his fear was more of the leeches and the way their mouths were watching him. Too late he realized he had backed up
against the mast and his fear twisted its knife in his gut. He looked up and the sail shrugged at the inevitability of it all before it dropped on him. He tried to run but just could not move fast
enough. Sheets of pink-veined skin enfolded him and dragged him down. Only then did it occur to him how ridiculous this whole situation was and that he was dreaming. He woke with the twisting fear
in his gut, turning to a gnawing hunger.
Janer opened his eyes and immediately sat upright. He looked at his bandaged hand and flexed it. It was stiff and slightly sore, but not half so painful as he expected.
‘How long?’ he asked.
‘
You’ve missed a day and we are now halfway through a second
,’ the mind replied.
‘I’ve got the virus in me.’
‘
Five per cent of visitors here end up infected. The ones uninfected are those who take precautions. You took none, though you were advised at the runcible terminal and took the
information pack on offer. Did you scan it?
’
‘No,’ said Janer.
‘
You wanted to end up infected
,’ the mind stated.
‘Perhaps. Not consciously anyway. Fait accompli now. What are the disadvantages?’
‘
There are few. If you spend sufficient time away from reinfection during your first century, the virus will die in your body, and as it breaks down, will cause most of your major
organs to fail. Your sensitivity to pain will be greatly reduced, though some might not consider that a disadvantage. You’ll be more susceptible to certain fungal infections. There are three
known diseases that would kill you in a protracted and painful way, whereas before you would have survived them . . . There is a long list and it is in the information pack you took.
’
‘Advantages?’
‘
Extreme resistance to injury. Gradual increase in physical strength. Higher resistance to other viruses – some of which would kill you, had you not had this virus. And, of
course, reduced sensitivity to pain – if you consider that an advantage.
’
Janer looked at the hornet squatting on the table by his bunk. Minds did not feel pain. How could something scattered between thousands of nests feel pain? How could a mind that once thought at
the slow speed of pheromonal transfer understand physical injury?
‘Would you consider pain an advantage?’
‘
I consider anything that increases my sensitivity to the world around me to be an advantage. The unit that is with you now died some time in the night, and all I experienced was the
loss of sensory input from that world.
’
Janer more closely inspected the hornet. He hadn’t realized. He prodded it with his finger and it went over on to its back with legs in the air like a pincushion.
‘What killed it?’ he asked.
‘
The same thing you have been infected with
,’ said the mind.
‘I thought you said these hornets had been altered.’
‘
Two different alterations, one of which I predicted to have a low chance of success.
’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Janer. ‘How was it infected? It couldn’t have been bitten.’
‘
Insects, unlike humans, cannot avoid infection here. The viral spores which only take hold inside a human after a massive infusion – like through a leech bite – can enter
insects through their breathing spiracles
,’ was the mind’s sarcastic response.
‘I thought the virus didn’t survive for long outside of a body.’
‘
It doesn’t. The spores can enter when the insect feeds on something infected. They can even enter when it lands on something infected, or even flies past it. In the case of
insects it only takes a few viable spores for the virus to be established.
’
‘Why? Why so different from humans?’
‘
Obviously we are the more primitive life form
,’ said the mind.
‘Oh, you poor thing, you,’ said Janer.
‘
Of course
,’ said the mind. ‘
I meant physically, not intellectually.
’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Janer. He slid his feet from under the cover and sat on the side of the bunk. He removed the dressing from his hand and looked at the ugly wound in which it
seemed a blue ring had been tattooed. He was a Hooper now. He had the mark.
‘What do you want to do with . . . this lost sensory input?’ he asked, pressing the dressing back into place.
‘
Return it
,’ said the mind. ‘
There is still much to learn about this virus and its effect on hymenoptera physiology.
’
Janer reached under his bunk and pulled out his backpack. From this he removed a two-pack of brushed aluminium cylinders. Each cylinder was ten centimetres long and three in diameter. One end
was rounded and the other end was a spike. He took one cylinder out of the plastic wrapping, pressed his fingernail into an indentation, and a small door flipped open. He used the plastic wrapping
to pick up the dead hornet and drop it inside the cylinder. His years of being indentured, and the two decades thereafter, had enabled him to tolerate the presence of these insects but had not
relieved him of his fear of actually touching them. He closed the lid and stood. Then he went out on to the deck.
The signal bell from the scooter comunit was chiming, but Keech ignored it as he waited for the last lights to change to green on the cleanser. Shortly after the chiming
ceased, he got a message through the audio input from his aug.
‘Message for Sable Keech,’ it said.
‘What now?’ he asked.
‘Link requested from Hive transponder.’
Keech glanced back at the hexagonal box in the scooter’s luggage compartment. He’d almost forgotten about that.
‘Permission for link granted,’ he said.
First came the buzzing, and then the Hive mind came online.
‘Do you have the package?’
Keech replied, ‘I have the package, but I won’t be taking it to Janer just yet.’
The buzzing took on an angry tone. ‘We had an agreement,’ said the Hive mind.
Keech watched the last red light change to green, then detached the cleanser and carefully pushed the tubes back into place.
‘We had an agreement,’ the Hive mind repeated.
‘The agreement is off. I need to return to Coram and make use of the medical facilities there.’
‘You have a problem?’ the mind asked, injecting ersatz concern into its voice.
‘I have a problem,’ Keech said.
‘What kind of problem?’ asked the mind.
