The second picture showed a man standing in what might once have been a road, but which was little more than a pot-holed trail, curtained on either side by jungle. The man was walking towards the person taking the picture, a huge black weapon slung over his shoulder. He wore a shirt and a bandolier, and though his build and age were more or less the same as mine, his face was not quite the same. Behind the man, there was what seemed to be a fallen tree blocking the road, except that the tree ended in a bloodied stump, and much of the road was covered in a thick impasto of gore.
“Dieterling,” I said, the name springing from somewhere. “Miguel Dieterling.”
And knew that he had been a good friend of mine who was dead now.
Then I looked at the third picture. There was no trace of the intimacy of the first about this image, or even the dubious triumph of the second, since the man did not seem to be aware that his picture had been taken. It was a flat-image, taken with a long lens. The man was moving quickly through a mall, the neon lights of stores blurred into hyphens by the panned exposure. The man was slightly blurred too, but sharp enough for recognition. Sharp enough for acquisition, I thought.
I remembered his name, too.
I picked up the heavier of the two envelopes and allowed it to empty itself on the bed. The sharp-edged, intricately shaped pieces that fell out of it seemed to invite me to fit them together. I could feel the thing squeezed into my palm, ready to be used. It would be difficult to see; pearly in colour, like opaque glass.
Or diamond.
“This is a blocking move,” I said to Amelia. “You’ve immobilised me now. I may be taller and stronger than you, but there’s nothing I can do at this point which won’t cause me a lot of pain.”
She looked at me expectantly. “What now?”
“Now you take the weapon from me.” I nodded down towards the little trowel we were using as an ersatz weapon. She removed it from my grip softly with her free hand, then flung it away as if it were poisoned.
“You’re letting go too easily.”
“No,” I said. “With the pressure you’re putting on that nerve, it’s all I could do not to drop it. It’s simple biomechan ics, Amelia. I think you’ll find Alexei even easier to deal with.”
We were standing in the clearing before the chalet in what passed for late afternoon in Hospice Idlewild, the central filament of the sun turning from white to sullen orange. It was an odd kind of afternoon because the light always stayed overhead, imparting none of the flattering face-on glow and long shadows of a planetary sundown. But we were paying it little attention anyway. For the last two hours I had been showing Amelia some basic self-defence techniques. We had spent the first hour with Amelia trying to attack me, which meant touching any part of my body with the edge of the trowel. In all that time she had not succeeded once, even when I willed myself to let her through my defences. No matter how hard I gritted my teeth and said that this time I was going to let her win, it never happened. But at least it demonstrated something, which was that the right technique would almost always beat a clumsy assailant. She was getting closer, though, and things had improved when we reversed roles for the second hour. Now at least I was able to hold back, moving in slow enough for Amelia to learn the right blocking moves for each situation. She was a very good pupil; achieving in an hour what normally took two days. Her moves were not yet graceful—not yet hardwired into muscle memory—and she telegraphed her intentions, but neither of these defects would count much against an amateur like Brother Alexei.
“You could show me how to kill him, too, couldn’t you?” Amelia said, while we took a breather on the grass—or rather, while she caught her breath and I waited.
“Is that what you want?”
“No; of course not. I just want to make him stop.”
I looked across the curve of Idlewild to the tiny, dotlike figures toiling in the cultivation terraces on the far side, hurrying while there was still enough light to work in. “I don’t think he’ll come back,” I said. “Not after what happened in the cave. But if he does, you’ll have an edge on him—and I’m damn sure he won’t come back after that. I know his type, Amelia. He’ll just fixate on an easier target.”
She thought about that for a while, doubtless pitying whoever would have to go through the same thing she had. “I know it’s not the sort of thing we’re meant to say, but I hate that man. Can we go through these moves tomorrow again?”
“Of course. In fact, I insist on it. You’re still weak—although you’re well ahead of the curve.”
“Thanks. Tanner—do you mind if I ask how you know these things?”
I thought back to the documents I had found in the envelope. “I was a personal security consultant.”
“And?”
I smiled ruefully, wondering how much she knew about the contents of that envelope. “And some other things.”
“They told me you were a soldier.”
“Yes; I think I was. But then almost everyone alive on Sky’s Edge had some connection to the war. It wasn’t something you stayed out of easily. The attitude was, if you weren’t part of the solution, you were part of the problem. If you didn’t sign up for one side, you were considered by default to have sympathies with the other.” That was an over-simplification, of course, since it ignored the fact that the aristocratic rich could buy neutrality off the shelf like a new outfit—but for the average non-wealthy Peninsula citizen, it wasn’t so far from the truth.
“You seem to be remembering well now.”
“It’s beginning to come back. Having a look at my personal possessions certainly helped.”
She nodded encouragingly and I felt the tiniest stab of remorse at lying to her. The pictures had done very much more than just jog my memory, but for the moment I chose to maintain the illusion of partial amnesia. I just hoped Amelia was not shrewd enough to see through my subterfuge, but I would be careful not to underestimate the Mendicants in any of the moves that lay ahead.
I was, indeed, a soldier. But as I had also inferred from the slew of passports and ID documents in the envelope, soldiering was nowhere near the end of my talents, merely the core around which my other skills orbited. Not everything had come into absolutely sharp focus yet, but I knew a lot more than I had the day before.
I’d been born into a family at the low end of the aristocratic wealth scale: not actively poor but consciously struggling to maintain any façade of wealth. We’d lived in Nueva Iquique, on the south-eastern shore of the Peninsula. It was a fading settlement buffered from the war by a range of treacherous mountains; sleepy and dispassionate even in the war’s darkest years. Northerners would often sail down the coast and put into Nueva Iquique without fear of violence, even when we were technically enemies, and inter-marriage between Flotilla lines was not uncommon. I grew up able to read the enemy’s hybrid language with almost the same fluency I read ours. To me it seemed strange that our leaders inspired us to hate these people. Even the history books agreed that we’d been united when the ships left Mercury.
But then so much had happened.
As I grew older, I began to see that, while I had nothing against the genes or beliefs of those who were allied within the Northern Coalition, they were still our enemies. They’d committed their share of atrocities, just as we had. While I might not have despised the enemy, I still had a moral duty to bring the war to a conclusion as swiftly as possible by aiding our side in victory. So at the age of twenty-two I signed up for the Southland Militia. I wasn’t a natural soldier, but I learned quickly. You had to; especially if you were thrown into live combat only a few weeks after handling your first gun. I turned out to be a proficient marksman. Later, with proper training, I became an exceptional one—and it was my extreme good fortune that my unit happened to need a sniper.
I remembered my first kill—or multiple killing, as it turned out.
We were perched high in jungle-enshrouded hills, looking down at a clearing where NC troops were off-loading s
upplies from a ground-effect transport. With ruthless calm I lined up the gun, squinting into the sight, aligning the cross-hairs one at a time on each man in the unit. The rifle was loaded with subsonic micro-munitions; completely silent and with a programmed detonation delay of fifteen seconds. Time enough to put a gnat-sized slug in every man in the clearing—watching each reach up idly to scratch his neck at what he imagined was an insect bite. By the time the eighth and last man noticed something wrong, it was much too late to do anything about it.
The squad dropped to the dirt in eerie unison. Later, we descended from the hill and requisitioned the supplies for our own unit, stepping over corpses grotesquely bloated from internal explosions.
That was my first dreamlike taste of death.
Sometimes I wondered what would have happened if the delay had been set to less than fifteen seconds, so that the first man dropped before I’d finished putting slugs in the others. Would I have had the true sniper’s nerve—the cold will to carry on regardless? Or would the shock of what I was doing have rammed home so brutally that I would have dropped the gun in revulsion? But I always told myself that there was no point dwelling on what might have happened. All I did know was that after that first series of unreal executions, it was never a problem again.
Almost never.
It was in the nature of a sniper’s work that one almost never saw the enemy as anything other than an impersonal stick-figure; too far away to be humanised by either facial details or an expression of pain when the slug found its mark. I almost never needed to send another slug. For a time, I thought I’d found a safe niche where I could psychologically barrier myself from the worst that the war had to offer. I was valued by my unit, protected like a talisman. Although I never once did anything heroic, I became a hero by virtue of my technical skill at aiming a gun. If such a thing were possible in any kind of combat, I was happy. In fact, I knew it was possible: I’d seen men and women for whom the war was a capricious and spiteful lover; one who would always hurt them, but to whom—bruised and hungry—they would inevitably return. The greatest lie ever told was the one that said war made us universally miserable; that if the choice was truly ours, we would free ourselves of war forever. Maybe the human condition would have been something nobler if that were the case—but if war did not have a strange and dark allure, why did we always seem so unwilling to abandon it for peace? It went beyond anything as mundane as acclimatisation to the normality of war. I had known men and woman who boasted of sexual arousal after killing an enemy; addicted to the erotic potency of what they had done.
My happiness, though, was simpler: born out of the realisation that I’d found the luckiest of roles. I was doing what I ra tionalised as morally right, while at the same time being sheltered from the very real risk of death that usually accompanied front-line forces. I assumed it would continue like that; that eventually I would be decorated and that if I didn’t stay a sniper until the war’s end, it would be only because the army considered my skills too valuable to risk in the front-line. I suppose it was possible I might have been promoted to one of the covert assassination squads—certainly more hazardous—but as far as I could see it, the most likely outcome would be a training role in one of the boot camps, followed by early retirement and the smug assurance that I’d helped expedite the war’s conclusion—even if that conclusion.
Of course, it didn’t happen like that.
One night our unit got ambushed. We were cut down by guerrillas of an NC Deep Incursion squad, and in minutes I learnt the true meaning of what was euphemistically described as close-quarters combat. No line-of-sight particle-beam weapons now; no delayed-detonation nano-munitions. What close-quarters combat meant was something which would have been infinitely more recognisable to a soldier of a thousand years earlier: the screaming fury of human beings packed so close together that the only effective way to kill each other was with sharpened metal weapons: bayonets and daggers, or with hands around each other’s throats; fingers pressed into each other’s eye-sockets. The only way to survive was to disengage all higher brain-functions and regress to an animal state of mind.
So I did. And in doing so, I learned a deeper truth about war. She punished those who flirted with her by making them like herself. Once you opened the door to the animal, there was no shutting it.
I never stopped being an expert shot when the situation called for it, but I was never again purely a sniper. I pretended I had lost my edge; that I could no longer be trusted with the most critical kills. It was a plausible enough lie: snipers were insanely superstitious, and many did develop some psychosomatic block that stopped them functioning. I moved through different units, requesting operational transfers that each time took me closer to the front. I developed a proficiency with weapons that went far beyond mere marksmanship: a fluidity of ease like a preternaturally skilled musician who could pick up any instrument and make it sing. I volunteered for deep-insertion missions that put me behind enemy lines for weeks at a time, living off carefully measured field-rations (Sky’s Edge’s biosphere was superficially Earthlike—but down on the level of cell chemistry it was completely incompatible, containing almost no native flora which could be safely eaten without either providing zero nourishment or triggering a fatal anaphylactic reaction). During those long episodes of solitude I allowed the animal to emerge again, a feral mindstate of almost limitless patience and tolerance for discomfort.
I became a lone gunman, no longer receiving orders via the usual chain of command, but from mysterious and untrace able sources in the Militia hierarchy. My missions became stranger; their goals less fathomable. My targets shifted from the obvious—mid-ranking NC officers—to the seemingly random, but I never questioned that there was a logic behind the kills; that it was all part of some devious and painstakingly planned scheme. Even when, on more than one occasion, I was required to put slugs in certain targets who wore the same uniform as I did, I assumed they were spies, or potential traitors, or—and this was the least palatable of conclusions—just loyal men who had to die because in some way their living had conflicted with the scheme’s inscrutable progress.
I no longer even cared whether my actions served any kind of greater good. Eventually I stopped taking orders and began soliciting them—severing connections with the hierarchy, and taking contracts from whoever would pay me. I stopped being a soldier and became a mercenary.
Which was when I met Cahuella for the first time.
“My name is Sister Duscha,” said the older of the two Mendicants, a thin woman with an unsmiling demeanour. “You may have heard of me; I’m the Hospice’s neurological specialist. And I’m afraid, Tanner Mirabel, that there’s something quite seriously wrong with your mind.”
Duscha and Amelia were standing in the chalet’s doorway. Only half an hour earlier I’d told Amelia of my intention to leave Idlewild within the day. Now Amelia looked apologetic. “I’m very sorry, Tanner, but I had to tell her.”
“No need to apologise, Sister,” Duscha said, brushing imperiously past her subordinate. “Whether he likes it or not, you did precisely the right thing by informing me of his plans. Now then, Tanner Mirabel. Where shall we begin?”
“Wherever you like; I’m still leaving.”
One of the ovoid-headed robots trotted in behind Duscha, clicking across the floor. I made a move to get off the bed, but Duscha placed a firm hand on my thigh. “No; we’ll have none of that nonsense. You’re going nowhere for the time being.”
I looked at Amelia. “What was all that about being able to leave whenever I wanted?”
“Oh, you’re free to leave, Tanner . . .” But even as Amelia said it, she didn’t sound completely convincing.
“But he won’t want to, when he knows the facts,” Duscha said, lowering herself onto the bed. “Let me explain, shall I? When you were warmed, we made a very thorough medical examination of you, Tanner—focused especially on your brain. We suspected you were amnesiac, but we had to make sure there was no fu
ndamental damage, or any implants that might warrant removal.”
“I don’t have any implants.”
“No, you don’t. But I’m afraid there is damage—of a sort.”
She clicked her fingers at the robot and had it trot closer to the bed. There was nothing on the bed now, but a minute earlier I had been in the process of assembling the clockwork gun, fitting the pieces together by a process of trial and error until I had the thing half-completed. When I had seen Amelia and Duscha striding across the lawn beyond the chalet, I had pushed the pieces under the pillow. I thought of it brooding there now, difficult to mistake for anything other than a weapon. They might have puzzled over the odd-shaped diamond pieces when they examined my belongings, but I doubted that they’d have realised what the pieces implied. Now there would have been very little doubt.
I said, “What sort of damage, Sister Duscha?”
“I can show you.”
The robot’s ovoid head popped up a screen, filling with a slowly rotating, lilac image of a skull, packed with ghostly structures like intricate clouds of milky ink. I didn’t recognise it as my own, of course, but I knew it had to be my skull that they were showing me.
Duscha sketched her fingers over the rotating mass. “These light spots are the problem, Tanner. Before you woke, I injected you with bromodeoxyuridine. It’s a chemical analogue for thymidine; one of the nucleic acids in DNA. The chemical supplants thymidine in new brain cells; acting as a marker for neurogenesis; the laying down of new brain cells. The light spots show where there’s a build-up of the marker—highlighting foci of recent cell growth.”
“I didn’t think brains grew new cells.”
“That’s a myth we buried five hundred years ago, Tanner—but in a sense you’re right; it’s still rather a rare process in higher mammals. But what you’re seeing in this scan is something a lot more vigorous: concentrated, specialised regions of recent—and continuing—neurogenesis. They’re functional neurons, organised into intricate structures and connected to your existing neurons. All very deliberate. You’ll notice how the light spots are situated near your perceptual centres? I’m afraid it’s very characteristic, Tanner—if we didn’t already know from your hand.”