neoAddix
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Tottenham, London 1993
There is not one person, indeed, not one living being that has not returned from the grave.
Tibetan Book of the Dead
'Life is very dangerous and few survive it.'
William Burroughs
Alex Doloroso
Outside the wind was mostly blue - thin strips of pale blue that twisted between the riverside buildings, one thread running into another like circuit tracery or the veins in a human arm.
The girl shuddered, sweat dripping down her face, her mouth open in a long silent scream.
Then she woke.
There was blood between her thighs. And on the sheet. And streaked across the lower back of her thin white nightdress.
If her mother - or father - had been alive. Or if the previous Pope hadn't decreed human biology to be an improper subject for a child of gentle background. In fact, if she'd been anything other that what she was, the only grandchild of a minor prince growing up alone in the imperial Paris of Napoleon V, she might have known that thirteen was really rather late for her first period.
As it was, she remained ignorant. The twenty-second century was big on ignorance.
So Maxine did what she always did when some fact puzzled her, she slid an ancient Encyclopaedia Napoleonika disc into her tatty Sony ROM-Reader, and punched in 'find/relate'. The Reader was old Thai silicon-punk retro, complete with miniature qwerty keypad, but it wasn't nearly as difficult to operate as the makers had once pretended.
The manufacturers had intended for the information to be displayed on the ROM-Readers tiny screen, but Maxine was in a hurry so she pulled the information straight into her mind, scrolling it passed the inside of her eyes. She had no idea how she performed that particular trick, but as long as it worked that didn't worry her.
Rapidly Maxine scanned diagrams of ovaries, uteri, fallopian tubes - digesting reproductive statistics, medical probabilities, a potted history of contraception. It seemed the stained nightdress wasn't the disaster she'd imagined. She wasn't bleeding to death at all...
Later, after she'd rescanned the entry under 'menarche' and carefully hidden away the tarnished silver circle of her stolen Napoleonika disc, the girl washed herself down using a cotton flannel and cold water from the jug on her marble wash stand. Then she folded up the sheet and dropped it, along with her soiled nightdress into a wicker laundry basket.
As she did so, Maxine de Pommerol Melusine wondered whether to tell Grandpa about the bleeding - and decided not.
Instead, come breakfast she'd call Razz. Which would be enough to upset Grandpa in itself. It never failed to horrify him that his quiet, studious granddaughter sought out the company of someone so obviously her inferior. What he didn't realise Maxine thought crossly, kicking her heels against the edge of her wooden bed, was that Razz and she had a lot in common - starting with their shared hatred of the man who owned Razz, Grandpa's lawyer Mr Rosary.
Luckily for Razz, Mr Rosary spent much of his time in Mexico, Japan and Megrib, too busy researching old documents to worry about what kind of trouble Razz got into back home.
Which was just as well.
Perhaps it was a by-product of her mirror-like silver skin, vat grown at an expensive clinic in Budapest and Pantone-matched to the chrome trim of her old retrofitted Kawasaki 500i; or maybe it was the angry glint in her bug-eyed silver contacts. Whatever it was, Razz had a way of attracting trouble. Exotics always did.
And with her shoulder armour of cultured lizard skin layered over genuine shark cartilage, and her virally-enhanced reflexes, Razz was as exotic as exotics got.
A rich shit's plaything, was how Razz put it.
Maxine sighed heavily. Menstrual blood, organs of reproduction - at least she now understood the theory. But what she really needed was a guide to the practicalities, and if anyone knew what to do about that sort of stuff it would be Razz...
As she drifted back into slumber, the young girl hit a familiar blizzard of white static; like a storm of electric snow or a ROM-vid run swiftly in reverse. Tumbling through it, she found herself floating down towards a city she'd never visited, but had seen night after night in her dreams.
London before the fire bombs, maybe five or six months ago. Last summer when its outer sprawl of high-rise slums was still standing, in crude concrete contrast to the sleek glass and chrome zaibatsu enclaves within its square mile. The slum towers were mostly gone now, of course, their tenants burnt out by fanatics from the Vernacular Revival Front.
Of course the metaNationals had proved tougher. Which was why they still held tight to their square mile, with its status of European financial freeport. Maxine knew all about it, she'd seen the mini-series starring Sonia Macmillan one evening in Razz's kitchen when Mr Grant was away, on CySat C3N.
If she was still falling, it was so slow now that Maxine couldn't feel the drop. As it was every night, the deserted railway station was right there below her, set slightly back from a sluggish grey river, its arched roof a mosaic of broken green glass and rusting steel girders.
Between the empty sidings of Waterloo Station and the fifty-foot wide, mile-long strip of water's edge shanty town called Thames Embankment stood a vast fenced-off builder's plot. At the western end of the plot was a man, slumped against a shed door.
There was something strange about him. And as always, at first Maxine couldn't quite work out what it was. Then she remembered.
He'd been crucified.
The New Death Waltz
But that crucifixion was already old, unused news. Digitized somewhere, gathering the binary equivalent of dust in a C3N CySat databank.
While Maxine slept, tonight's news was happening closer to home, down on the banks of the River Seine, where time froze and then stopped for Parisian tramp Louis Lepan as steel fingernails reached for his throat.
For once the dim starlight was not washed out by the glare of Coca Cola's revolving hologram, nor by the neon cross & double helix of the Church Geneticist. Communard terrorists had blown up the Rue Jacob substation, leaving darkness.
The Prince smiled, an old man's grin. He at least welcomed that night's power cut... Spearing quickly through krycoid cartilage, the Prince's fingers closed on the gnarled, stick-like column of the tramp's upper spine and snapped it like a twig.
Lepan dropped, a twitching heap of filthy rags, his opened throat bright as a scarf whose ends flowed over the cobbles, melting frost as they went. The stink of voided bowels mixing uneasily with a richer, darker scent - the salt signature of blood.
'Take this and drink,' the killer's voice was ironic, as chilly as the winter wind that fingered the bare trees lining the river bank. But that didn't matter to the kitten he called from the shadows. Skeletal, little more than a handful of bones in a purse of tattered fur, it padded past the Prince's boots towards the rapidly cooling puddle.
While the Prince smiled, and bent briefly to stroke the starving animal, the body of Corporal Louis Lepan, veteran of a hundred commando raids in Southern Megrib, and lately homeless, helpless Parisian drunk lay there like the dead meat he'd become. His pock-marked, dirt encrusted face showing no horror, not even fear. Just drunken bewilderment that death came in such a form, that it happened at all.
Almost with out being aware of it, the Prince let his silver talons reconstruct atom by atom, individual nanites flowing swiftly up the back of his hand to reform as a heavy silver bracelet. It was his fifth kill in nine months. He was tempted to keep hunting but there would be time enough later, for now it would be unwise to draw undue attention to himself...
The Prince grunted in amusement, entertained that his thoughts still used the flowery phrases of polite society, even as he stood over a dead and stinking body.
All it took was practice - and would be plenty of that. No matter how often the police bussed the unSocials out beyond the peripherique, the city's six-lane ring road, the derelicts always found their way back.
Every shit-smeared arch, every tattered graveyard and boarded-up parking lot had its unwelcome tribe of the filthy, the homeless, the dispossessed. And as yet none would be missed. Certainly not by the prefecture imperial who had more urgent matters to deal with than slaughtered tramps.
Keeping to the shadows, the Prince moved swiftly along a narrow river walk under the pont des Arts. M-wave surveillance cameras watched his every move, as they always watched everyone, but no record of presence would be made. All they could catch was a transparent, ghost-like blur as the atoms of his body flicked frequency, in a rapid and random succession. It was just one of the advantages he enjoyed over those who were purely human.
To his left, the beaten silver surface of the Seine, on his right a high ferro-concrete wall that rose into the darkness. Overhead a basilica of stars shone in the pitch black winter's sky, their acid brightness another bonus of that night's power cut.
An elegantly retro Mitsubishi hover skimmed silently passed him along the river's Cimmerian surface, Sanyo speakers thudding with the hypnotic beat of Tokyo rap. Rich Japanese tourists or black-silk suits from some Zaibatsu. One of them started to wave, then paused, looking puzzled as the thin onlooker on the bank seemed suddenly to vanish.
Smiling slightly, the Prince watched the hover continue downstream, on its way to an all-night New Year's Eve party in the Bois de Bologne.
Across the wide river came howls of raucous laughter, and then a thin inhuman scream that choked into sudden, startling silence. Jeering cheers followed immediately. Students from L'Ecole des Beaux Arts, blind drunk on some lethal Drexie-box mix of ethanol and synthetic aniseed. It had the all the trademarks of another lynching.
A smoke grey helicopter hung above the quartier. CySat's stark C/S logo luminous on the side of the pilot's plexiglass bubble. Not that CySat need use a real pilot. An aero-spattialle, k119 drone would have performed just as well, if not better. But the public liked knowing there was a real woman up there on their behalf, dodging bullets and coping with erratic weather conditions. And CySat couldn't risk faking the shots with some Lotusmorph talking head.
Slung underneath the 'copter, like a stunted cannon was an instant-focus Zeiss tri-D holocam, programmed to capture any movement below on infrared. It was that night's news in the making.
Three days before, shock troops from the Compagnie Imperiale de Securite had smashed the latest Sorbonne uprising in a ritual orgy of violence, to the highest ratings CySat had ever seen; and yet already Pierre Nexus, the Imperial Minister for Security had been forced to make concessions, doubling the number of state-managed, limited-function nanotech food compilers - the notorious Drexie-boxes. Within the last three hours he'd even been forced into a promise to stop tearing down the mesh of illegal CySat feeds that spread like a web between housing projects strung in a circle outside the peripherique.
If the citoyen wanted to watch CySat then Pierre Nexus was going to make sure they saw what the he wanted them to see. Strong, visual images were needed to disguise his climb-down. And CySat was happy to provide them - even to non-paying viewers. (Given CySat Europ's 48% stake in the current French government it was only commercial common sense.)
Down river again, just beyond the 120v electric street gates that fenced in the semi-tolerated, hereditary anarchy of the Quartier Latin, lights glittered as the city's power returned suddenly, illuminating the huge circular windows of the Muse‚ Napoleon, a baroque railway station turned obscenely-rich art gallery.
There was a New Year soiree in progress. Ornately-uniformed North African diplomats, silk-suited American CEOs, yakuza grandees and CySat stars, all had been politely lining up in the dark to peer at the latest mid-period Warhol in the Imperial collection.
The Prince smiled slightly. There was art and then there was Art. And his was the purest of all, and he was without doubt its oldest, greatest master.
Above him, Coca Cola's famous lasergram lit up mid sequence, beating by a split second the half-mile high, Eiffel-Tower based projection of the Geneticist's famous neon trademark. Elsewhere the Parisian night slowly turned orange until the stars faded out and the dark sky dissolved into a reflected dome of sodium streetlight.
The bitter wind was whipping at his heavy silk cloak, dragging it out behind him like a welcome shadow. He was happy to back where he belonged, killing again. It had been too long, much too long since his last round of hunting trips down here where he belonged... On the bank of the Seine at night. Here was one of the wonders of the nether world. A black, blank stretch of chipped cobbles and stunted rye-grass, haunted by weasels and feral cats. A hunting ground for owls that flitted silently in from the cemetery at Pere Lachaise, their wide eyes only slightly less well adapted to the dark than his.
This was a place that most humans had the sense to avoid.
On the wet roads that ran high above both sides of the river, a line of cars and diesel hovers raced their engines and grated gearboxes. Drunk, impatient or just oblivious, the traffic stopped and started its way through the late Saturday night drizzle. Like personal matter compilers, autodrive was illegal within the city, except for registered nobles. Another imperial edict that made no sense.
All of Paris was in a hurry to get somewhere else. Except for him, except down here where he could take his time, savouring the cold swirling water.
The Prince moved forward slowly, tucked tightly against the wall. Casually dulling his night vision, he increased the flow of blood to his olfactory epithelium. Little larger than a thumb nail and situated within his nasal cavity, over 35 different types of sensor studded its rough surface - five types more than was usual. It brought him odour molecules of something warm and earthy, a new scent and a new hunger.
Up ahead, hidden from the M-wave cameras in an alcove under the thick stone arch of the next bridge lay two people, engrossed only with each other's bodies. A flicker of amusement crossed the Prince's thin face. Centuries might pass but some things at least never changed.
The Prince could smell their need long before he could hear it.
'Marc... Oh God, please… Fuck me...'
The young American girl's voice was husky. Above her a stocky French boy, cropped hair and gang tattoo, used one hand to unbuckle himself in the dark. His other hand, fingers slick and probing, was wedged wetly between her salt thighs.
Hunger rocked through the Prince, stark as lightning. They were young, not tramps at all. Kids looking for somewhere to rut in peace.
The girl was maybe fifteen. Dark-haired, almost pretty in that wide-cheeked, dumb innocent mid-Western way... Though, right now, she looked anything but innocent, her head arched back, eyes tight shut, the boy's scuffed gang jacket thrust under her bare buttocks.
Her unbuttoned white shirt and rucked-up bra revealed plump, pubescent breasts tipped by large pale nipples. The superfine lavender cotton of an Italian-made Comme de Garcons skirt was scrunched round her naked hips.
She had those long hard-muscled legs that American girls get in adolescence. Tanned from melanin enhancers and smooth from radiowave electrolysis. Her knees were spread, her body ready. She stank gloriously of salt and blood, of low molecular-weight acids that signalled sweat and desire.
But there was something else that increased the Prince's hunger, that magnified it to a raw craving. Something the cocksure, arrogant boy waiting above her didn't yet know. Something Jennifer Mayer wanted to tell him.
Marc Levine hadn't bothered to strip. He didn't need to. It was mid-winter, almost midnight and he no longer cared about impressing the American girl. He didn't need to. He'd had her before. These days for him it was a simple swap, she opened her legs he gave her drugs. It was enough for him that he'd bothered to push his washed-out 501s down round his ankles.
Things would have been different if she were poor, or even not American. Then he could have slapped her around a bit, made her panhandle for him, hustling 'crypt chips or herself. But she wasn't poor, and when he'd suggested hustling she'd just stared at him.
Angrily Marc thrust deep into her and then pulled back, grinning as her scrabbling fingers tried to find his hips.
'God...' She pushed desperately up towards him, her words collapsing into a long pleading moan. That she liked the sex amused him.
Marc smiled. Rich kids were all the same. With a knowing grin, he grabbed Jennifer's narrow wrists and wrenched them savagely above her head, stretching her full body taut beneath him.
Then he stopped, poised above her.
'Go on,' he ordered. 'Beg for it.'
She did.
That was when Death stepped from the shadows.
The boy never saw him, never even looked round. Not that it would have made any difference. Nothing on earth could have saved Marc Levine from the fate that had come looking for him.
With one sickening blow, the killer sank razor-sharp nails into Marc's back. Blood bubbled up in red gouts around the killer's wrist, as rigid fingers pushed for the boy's still beating heart, found it and ripped it clean out through a gaping hole in his back.
Dead but still mid-scream, blood exploding from mouth, Marc's body collapsed twitching onto the naked girl. All Jennifer could see were Marc's terrified eyes frozen open as they stared straight at her.
Gibbering with fright, Jenny struggled out from beneath her dead lover, his blood splattered across her stomach and breasts. Her mouth open in a silent scream that wouldn't come. Desperately she tried to back away from the advancing figure but the path behind her was blocked.
Something the killer already knew.
At her back, the curved walls of the arch ended at a huge polymer gate, time-locked each day at sunset. There should also have been an M-wave surveillance camera - in fact, there was an M-wave camera - but it was broken and for at least six months no one had bothered to have it mended.
That was why Marc always chose this bridge. Why he always proudly regarded the arch as his. With only one way in, it reduced the risk of the police coming at him from both sides, and also made it isolated enough for Marc to deal, threaten or do what he wanted with some punter.
True, other gangs occasionally roamed the river at night, but they didn't frighten Marc. Marc always carried a pearl-handled Italian shockblade and besides, it was his proud boast that nothing ever scared him.
He also carried a pirated timekey for the gate, but Jenny didn't know that, and even if she had Jenny wouldn't have stood a chance of getting it. She looked down at the mutilated body and a frightened sob escaped from between Jenny's trembling lips. Then she looked up at his killer and her jaw went slack.
Marc's bleeding heart was clenched in the figure's hand. Death had been waiting for her full attention and now he had it. The figure stepped forward and politely offered her the bloody lump of meat.
Terrified, Jennifer refused, shaking her head.
'Strange,' the figure said in a voice that was old as sin and soft as a malicious whisper. 'I thought his heart was the one thing you wanted?'
Dark eyes held hers. They seemed to be reading her frightened, muddled thoughts. 'No?' The Prince shrugged. 'Then perhaps you want me to rid you of something else?'
Jennifer backed away until the locked gate pushed cold and hard at her back.
Death was smiling. A terrible cold smile that made her soft skin crawl. His dark eyes were burning now, spinning the world around her, further muddling her already terrified mind.
Softly the Prince touched her face. One long nail running softly across her cheek in a dark caress. Jennifer screamed, as her flesh bubbled and burnt beneath his touch.
In shock, she sensed rather than felt the hand stroke her abdomen, sensed the long fingers enter her body. Something warm and liquid began to trickle down the inside of her leg.
Jennifer looked down, but the long glistening nails had already vanished. All she could see was a thin wrist disappearing inside her.
'Ask and it shall be given you,' the voice whispered softly. And then the Prince smiled.
Anguish rocked through her. She was being ripped open. Every muscle in her body locked stiff with sheer, unbelievable shock. Jennifer's scream was animal-like, as his fingers dug deeper, long flowing talons penetrating through muscle and gristle until they found their prize.
In the two or three seconds it took her to die, she saw her unformed child, small as a kitten, ripped from her uterus.
The thin figure nodded sadly, stared at the dead teenage pimp and then glanced at the young girl. He was worthless, but she was pretty. Her whole spoilt over-privileged life had been a waste, without direction - until that moment.
Carefully, very carefully, the Prince wrapped the tiny foetus in a white silk handkerchief and put the neat bundle into his coat pocket, which sealed itself shut against the air.
Encyclopaedia Napoleonika
Then she awoke.
There was blood between her thighs. And on the sheet. And streaked across the lower back of her white nightdress.
Except that when she looked again, there wasn't. There was daylight outside and she was wearing an old cotton blouse - and the soiled nightdress was where she'd discarded it, in a rolled up ball in the wicker washing basket.
It was raining outside, huge silver puddles spreading out across the cobbled courtyard of the Hotel Sabatini, her grandfather's Parisian house. On the river beyond its heavy stone gate, an early morning barge was pushing its long, rusty container load of compacted refuse down stream to the EC matter-deconstructor at Trynan. Maxine could hear the diesels cut back as the barge started to negotiate a narrow gap under Verdun Bridge. Across the Seine the south bank was quiet and for once deserted.
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