Doctor Who_ So Vile a Sin - Ben Aaronovitch [7]
‘Are you saying that your master doesn’t know you exist?’
The Dutchman threw back his head and laughed. ‘The master never forgets anything,’ he said. ‘Although sometimes he knows more than he remembers. There is a debt outstanding between him and thee, and this is the hour of its collection.’
‘I am aware of no debt,’ said Florance.
‘Come now,’ said the Dutchman. ‘It was he that freed you from Stone Mountain, and it was through his agency that you escaped the Dione-Kisumu Company. He created your friend here and put the events in motion that created the haven on Yemaya 4.’
‘What?’ said Barbi. ‘You’re talking about the –’
‘Hold your tongue,’ said the Dutchman. ‘There are some names better left unspoken in cyberspace. There are currents and eddies that run in the information ocean, and whither they lead nobody knows. There are deeps where terrible things lie restless and unsleeping. My master asks little in repayment for the debt. Some information is all.’
‘And after that,’ said Florance, ‘we will be free of him?’
‘Aye,’ said the Dutchman.
‘For ever?’
‘For ever is a long time.’
‘What does he want to know?’
And it was a small thing, so small that Florance immediately suspected that she was missing something of importance. But what significance could a list of mental patients, ones who conformed to a precise pathology, possibly be?
FLORANCE told the Dutchman about the special psychiatric complex on Dis, about the half a dozen patients who met his criteria. Men and women who officially didn’t exist any more.
The Dutchman thanked them and bade them adieu.
Florance and Barbi waited as the reality bubble slowly 24
unravelled. The people fading out first. Then the walls of the tavern grew abstract and paled until finally Florance and Barbi stood alone on a broken field of data.
‘I notice you didn’t tell him about the Bitch Queen of the Universe,’ said BAR B.
‘Hah,’ said FLORANCE, ‘I’m not an artificial stupid, you know.’
Spaceport 20 Overcity: 20 August 2981
Later, when he had gone into the shadows, he would remember the party.
Those times when he was holed up in some undertown safe squat, with the Adjudicators going door to door around him, and he was hoping that the bemmies downstairs put loyalty to the cause ahead of the fear of retribution. Or times when he was waiting to go through a checkpoint with a stolen ID in the back of his hand.
He used the memory to blot out the fear. Sibongile standing by the nanite hole in the floor, light from the simholo warning sign flashing in her brown eyes; slim hand on her hips, her heavy rhino-skin jacket riding up her bhunti and framing the outline of her beelies. The bang bang der bang backbeat of Hiths With Attitude singing ‘Male At Last’. Puffs of condensation in the frigid air as she spoke, her face passionate, committed.
Gaston had always said that Sibongile had beelies to die for.
The party took place on the lower deck of the south-west student accommodation stack. Which was lower than Simon Frederson liked to go.
He was twenty-two, tall and tanned, with yellow hair pulled back into a queue. Family tradition. But he was a long, long way from Callisto and his family’s wealth. There were already bemmies living as high as level 30 in most overcity blocks, sucked up from the undertown as more and more humans emigrated. Don’t bother going down to the undertown, went the joke, the undertown is coming to you.
It was the kind of party where they played Hiths With 25
Attitude above the pain threshold and bounced around mouthing the words as if they knew what they meant. Never mind that HWA was way past fashionable, had gone back to Hithis in ’75
and renamed themselves something like Totally Cheerful and Utterly Smug.
The bottom deck used to be low-rent, human-only housing, a neat series of three-room, side-by-side apartments. The current residents, mostly postgrads from the neo-tech institute, had melted down most of the dividing walls with an experimental breed of nanite plasticrete eaters.
But the master program had been faulty,