The Skinner Page 5

  ‘Captain Ron,’ said someone in the crowd, and there was almost reverence in the voice.

  ‘I think you should pay the man,’ said Captain Ron.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ The tout dropped his moneybag in his eagerness to get the money out. He stooped and quickly retrieved it before counting out notes and change with shaking hands. Janer accepted the money while keeping half an eye on the Captain, who was gazing with ponderous insouciance back at the ring.

  ‘You all right there, Forlam!’ the Captain suddenly bellowed.

  A groan came from that direction.

  ‘Soon have you back together,’ said the Captain. He gazed round at the crowd. ‘Anyone found his fingers yet?’

  ‘Got ’em, Captain,’ someone yelled.

  ‘Get ’im back to the ship then and tell Roach to thread ’im up.’

  Janer just could not take in what he was hearing. He knew Hoopers were very hard to kill, but this was ridiculous. He glanced round to see Keech approaching, while the two Hoopers he had shot had moved off into the background. They seemed unperturbed by wounds that would have killed an off-worlder, but were now pensively watching Captain Ron. Janer guessed they were hoping the tout wouldn’t call for them. It did not require much imagination to guess what the result of such an encounter would be.

  ‘I’d like to buy you a drink,’ Janer said abruptly.

  With a vague smile, Captain Ron turned back to him.

  ‘Now that could work out expensive,’ he said.

  There was laughter from the other Hoopers.

  ‘Well, I’ve had a bit of luck today,’ said Janer.

  ‘All right,’ said the Captain. ‘I’ll see you in the Baitman.’ He cast a baleful look at the tout, then at his thugs, who ducked their heads and tried to appear unconcerned. ‘And he better get there safely,’ he said loudly. Then he sauntered off.

  With Keech at his side, Janer surveyed the people around him. All he could find were friendly expressions. The two thugs had already gone. The tout was slinking away, as if hoping not to be noticed.

  ‘Obviously not someone to mess with,’ said Janer.

  ‘You remember what Erlin said?’ asked Keech.

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘He, I would guess, is an Old Captain, and has authority by dint of the simple fact that he could tear your arms off.’

  ‘Yes, I remember now.’

  The Baitman was a ship-Hoopers’ drinking den, and no other off-worlders were present when Janer and Keech entered. Looks of vague curiosity were flung in their direction, before conversations resumed. Keech and Janer walked up to the bar, behind which sat a Hooper who seemed only skin and bone, with white curly hair. He was bending over a board on which chess pieces and small model ships were positioned. That he seemed to concentrate even harder on the board when they entered was obvious to Janer. He rapped on the bar with his knuckles. The barman glanced up at them with an albino’s pink eyes.

  ‘This place is for ship Hoopers,’ he said, and returned his attention to the board.

  Janer was at a loss for a moment, then he started to get angry. Before he could say anything, Keech spoke up.

  ‘Then we are in the right place to meet Captain Ron for a drink,’ said the reif.

  The barman stood upright, and only then did Janer realize how tall he was.

  ‘Ron invited you?’ He was studying them carefully.

  ‘I invited him, and he suggested here,’ said Janer.

  The barman’s gaze flicked from Janer’s face to the two hornets, in their box on his shoulder, then to the reif. He inspected Keech for a long while, with a puzzled expression, then clearly decided not to ask. He put two pewter mugs on the bar, uncorked a jug, and filled them both. Then, from a rack behind the bar, he took down a two-litre mug and filled it with the same liquid. The vessel had ‘Ron’s Mug’ engraved on it. Janer picked up the mug in front of him and took a gulp.

  ‘It is best to approach such things with caution,’ said Keech, removing a glass straw from his top pocket and stooping to take a careful sip of his own drink.

  ‘Ung,’ Janer managed.

  ‘Sea-cane rum,’ added Keech.

  ‘You can drink it?’ Janer said, once he had his breath back.

  ‘My stomach is atrophied but I have a filter system which can remove impurities from high-alcohol beverages. What is pumped round my veins is alcohol based,’ replied Keech.

  ‘Why do you always use a straw?’

  Keech gestured towards his mouth. ‘My lips, though having enough elasticity to mimic speech, do not have enough to form a seal.’

  ‘You’d dribble,’ said Janer.

  Keech gave a measured nod.

  Janer went on, his curiosity piqued, ‘How do you speak, then?’

  Keech tapped his half-helmet augmentation. ‘It’s generated from here. With what little movement my mouth does have, the illusion is completed,’ he said.

  Janer nodded, then took another, more cautious sip of his drink. He noted how the barman had not made a move on his chessboard since the commencement of their conversation. Understandable, as this had to be a fascinating interchange.

  ‘What about taste?’

  ‘A saporphone imbedded in the roof of my mouth transmits taste information to the mimetic computer in my aug and to what remains of my organic brain.’

  ‘But you can’t get drunk?’ said Janer.

  ‘No, I cannot, but I don’t feel that to be a disadvantage. In most situations I find it advisable to keep a clear head.’

  Keech imparted this information with clinical detachment. Janer studied the reif as he thought carefully about his explanation. Keech was partially alive, since he had some functioning organic brain. The part that was not functioning was made up for by a recording of his previous living mind being run as a program in his augmentation. Thus it came down to the fact that Keech was a corpse made motile mainly by AI-directed cyber systems.

  ‘Why don’t you implant in a Golem chassis?’ Janer asked.

  ‘This is my body,’ said Keech, as if that was answer enough, and returned his attention to his drink. As Janer watched him, the Hive mind took the opportunity to interject. ‘The cult of Anubis Arisen believes physical life to be sacrosanct and that the life of the body is the only life. Perhaps Keech believes that too, though I doubt it.’

  Janer did not get a chance to ask the mind to explain that comment, as Captain Ron just then crashed into the Baitman like some stray piece of earth-moving equipment.

  ‘Good sail to you!’ said the Captain, stomping up to the bar and taking up his mug to drain it in one. He slammed the mug down on the bar so hard the timbers leapt. The barman waited for dust to settle before refilling the mug. As it was being refilled, Janer noted that it had a bloom on its metal surface identical to that left on ceramal after it has been case hardened. Obviously simple pewter would not prove suitably durable.

  ‘That hits the spot,’ said the Captain.

  Janer looked on in awe, wondering about the durability of this man’s intestine, before carefully taking another sip from his own mug.

  ‘I have to thank you for your intervention back there,’ he said, blinking water from his eyes.

  ‘Don’t like cheats.’

  Janer gestured to Keech. ‘You and him both,’ he said.

  Ron looked at the reif and nodded, his expression slightly puzzled. Keech, Janer supposed, would be a puzzle to most Polity citizens, let alone the denizens of an Out-Polity world like this.

  Ron drained just half his mug this time and Janer dropped a ten-shilling note on the bar.

  ‘Got anything smaller?’ asked the barman.

  ‘Just keep pouring,’ said Janer. He felt drunk already, but warily slid his mug back on to the bar. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘drinks all round.’

  ‘You told me to remind you if you ever did this again,’ the Hive mind whispered to him.

  ‘Shaddup,’ said Janer and Captain Ron gave him a puzzled look. ‘Sorry, not you.’ He pointed at
the hornets on his shoulder. ‘Them.’

  ‘Hornets,’ said Ron. ‘Insects don’t do so well here.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘The filaments clog up their air holes.’

  Somebody laughed at this, and when Janer looked around he found that others in the Baitman had gathered behind them, and that the barman was pouring more drinks. He drank some more from his own mug and noticed subliminally that Keech had retreated into the background and was now carefully seating himself at one of the tables. The reif might appear fragile in this company, but Janer now knew how deceptive that appearance was.

  ‘Not as clogged as your air holes, you old bastard.’

  Janer glanced to one side to see Erlin standing at his shoulder.

  ‘Erlin!’ bellowed Ron. He reached past Janer and picked her up, but carefully. Janer noticed that the Hooper showed not a trace of effort. He might as well have been lifting an origami sculpture.

  ‘Careful, Ron,’ said Erlin. ‘I’m only a ninety Hooper.’

  ‘You’ve come back for Ambel?’ said Ron, still holding her off the ground. After a moment, he realized what he was doing and carefully put her down.

  ‘I have. We’ve unfinished business. Do you know where he is?’

  ‘Last heard, he was out at the Sargassum.’

  ‘Who’s going out there?’

  Ron grinned at her. ‘The turbul’s good out there this season,’ he said.

  Much of the rest of the evening was a blur to Janer. He remembered Keech joining in a conversation about Jay Hoop, the ancient piratical founder of Spatterjay after whom the planet was named, and he remembered later finding himself lying under a table. There was also a vague memory of being slung over Ron’s shoulder, a long walk through darkness, then puking over a wooden rail into an oily sea. Then blackness.

  3

  In emerald depths the frog whelk, crippled by the leech that had wormed inside its shell to feed upon it, had lost all its survival instincts as it crawled painfully along the stony bottom, through forests of sea-cane and prill-peppered waters. Said instinct being the minimum requirement for plain existence in this savage sea, it did not last long, of course. Crawling into what it thought was a flock of its fellows, it sank down like a weary pensioner and uncoiled its eye-stalks. Only when it observed the patterns of those shells surrounding it, and sensed the vibration thrumming through the seabed, did it realize its fatal mistake: the whelks surrounding it were hammer whelks. Panicking, it thrust down its foot and tried to leap away, but such was the damage done to it by the leech that all it managed to do was tip itself over. The hammer whelks closed in on this unexpected bounty extruding feet like brick-hammers to pound their victim’s shell. Soon the water clouded with chyme, small fragments of flesh, nacreous glitters of shell and one slowly turning eye-stalk, like a discarded match – which was snapped up by a passing turbul.

  Keech paid his hotel bill and, with his hover trunk in tow, he left the Dome and made his way into the Hooper town. As he walked, he saw Erlin walking ahead of him, also with her luggage in tow and Janer’s stacked on top of it. Rather than catch up with her he turned down a side road and took a track leading out of the town into the dingle. Either side of the track, peartrunk trees quivered to the movement of small leeches in their branches, and frogmoles chirruped and burped from little pools in the centres of ground-growing leaves as big as bedspreads. A stand of putrephallus plants broadcast their presence before they came in sight, and Keech turned off the anosmic receptor in his nose. Attracted to the bright red tips of the stinking plants, a couple of baggy lung birds flapped about and honked noisily. They looked to Keech as if they were about to fly apart, like something ill-made by an apprentice creator. They were sparsely covered in long oily feathers between which showed purplish septic-looking flesh. If these birds had the appearance of anything recognizable, it was of half-plucked crows that had been dead for a week or more. He moved on, down the slope of the island via a path of crushed quartz spread over black packed earth, and out beyond the edge of the dingle and on to a strand of green sand scattered with drifts of multicoloured pebbles. There he ordered his trunk to settle and open, and he began to remove its contents.

  Keech’s muscles did not work, in fact none of him worked, except for half of his brain and one eye. Completely stripped of his flesh, the AI Keech would still exist – a skeleton with motors at his joints and other pieces of hardware affixed to his bones and, of course, the aug. The items of Keech’s survival therefore consisted of his cleansing unit and two spare power cells for the cyber mechanisms that kept him moving. Along with these items, he now removed a black attaché case, a pack of clothing, and a small remote control. These had filled only a small portion of the trunk. Keech closed the lid, stepped back, pointed the remote and pressed a button.

  The trunk rose half a metre from the ground and the lid split in two along its length. These two halves, along with the adjoining sides, folded down into cranked wings. The front then folded itself down at forty-five degrees and from its top extruded a curved screen. From under the seat, now exposed in the centre of the trunk, a steering column and control console whined forwards and up into position below the screen. Keech stepped in to detach cylindrical thruster motors from each side of the seat – revealing the AG motor underneath – and to reattach them at the ends of the wings. The back of the trunk tilted out to make a luggage compartment and Keech put his belongings in this before mounting the hover scooter thus created. He would have smiled had he been able to. He pressed a touch-plate on the console and spoke.

  ‘This is monitor Sable Keech registering AG transport on Out-Polity planet Spatterjay,’ he said.

  From the console a mild voice replied, ‘According to my records, monitor Keech, you are dead.’

  Keech paused for a moment – that was a very quick interception by the Warden.

  ‘That is correct,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I’m glad we’ve cleared that one up,’ said the AI Warden on the distant moon of Spatterjay. ‘But perhaps you can provide some further explanation?’

  ‘My monitor status remains unchanged I take it?’

  ‘It does.’

  ‘Then I am not required to give an explanation.’

  ‘No, you are not.’

  ‘I’m a reification,’ said Keech. ‘I would have thought you’d already found all that out, if not when I first came through the runcible gate, then at least when I crossed the Line to come out here.’

  ‘Yes, I see that now. I don’t monitor all inward runcible traffic unless it comes with an attached record. The Dome gate was being run by one of my subminds at the time, and it did not see fit to inform me of your arrival. I must have words with it.’

  Keech let ride the fact that he thought it unlikely that he had not come through with an attached record.

  ‘I am clear to use AG transport, I take it?’ he asked.

  ‘You are, monitor Keech.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Keech.

  After running a diagnostic on the console, he thrust the column forward and, blasting up a cloud of sand, shot out over the sea.

  With something of smugness in its attitude, the Warden observed the planet through a thousand pairs of artificial eyes. After a brief scan, it refined this fragment of its attention to just one pair of eyes and the complex little mind that operated them. On an atoll on the opposite side of the planet from the main human settlements, and where no human had set foot, waves lapped gently at a beach of jade and rose-quartz pebbles. Below the pellucid waters off this beach, the stony bottom was alive with movement. Swarms of infant hammer whelks shifted in a slow and intricate dance, their shells glinting like coiled pearls, and leeches oozed between them searching for softer prey. A disturbance where the bottom dropped into emerald depths had the whelks clamping themselves safely to the stony bottom and the leeches turning as one to investigate.

  Out of boiling foam rose the baroque shape of a seahorse the length of a man’s forearm, leeches hi
tting its iron-coloured skin and falling away. It rose from the sea and, seemingly balanced upon the surface with a coil of its tail, it slowly revolved and took in its surroundings with topaz eyes. Only someone with a very sophisticated underspace detector could have heard the communication that followed, and even then it would have taken a mind superior to that of the Warden to decode it.

  ‘SM Thirteen, you were instructed to transmit yourself to Dome Gate One for your assigned watch, and I see now that this did not happen,’ said the Warden.

  ‘Sniper took that watch. He had some business to conduct through the local server. And I have my so very important studies to complete,’ replied the Warden’s thirteenth submind, from its odd drone body.

  ‘Why then have I received no report from Sniper?’

  In the pause that followed, the Warden considered then rejected the idea of subsuming Thirteen, of reintegrating the little mind with itself in order to get at the truth. But the Warden had found from long experience that an amount of individualism in its subminds allowed them to originate insights it never experienced by itself.

  ‘Nothing of significance to report?’ suggested SM13.

  The Warden sensed agitation in the little mind and allowed it to stew for a few microseconds.

  ‘The arrival of a dead monitor pursuing a seven-century vendetta I do consider to be worthy of note,’ it said.

  ‘Well that’s not my fault,’ said the seahorse drone. ‘Take it up with Sniper. It wasn’t my decision to employ an obsolete war drone, even if it was once a hero.’

  The Warden did not answer this. It withdrew and did a brief search in the local server. That SM13 and the war drone Sniper both had accounts with the Norvabank evinced in it some surprise, though only some. The third account it found there, by tracking past transfers, gave it more than some surprise. It would have to watch this situation very closely; it might lead to questions about the rights of humans to exist on Spatterjay.