Appeals Court Read online

  “Over here!” She thrusts a bundle of clothing at him. “Quick. Let’s go get the ministers —”

  Huw pauses while balanced on one leg, the other thrust down one limb of a pair of denim coveralls. “Do we have to?” he asks.

  “Yes we fucking do,” Bonnie says.

  Huw sees a machine like a big industrial clothes dryer just inside the cloakroom doorway. “Quick. Help me into this thing.”

  “What —”

  “My ass, or as much of it as fits. It’s an old RFID zapper, you used to get them where corporatist dissidents met and this place looks like an old Friends meeting hall.”

  “RFID zapper?” Bonnie squints at it dubiously.

  Huw cups one hand around his crotch. “It’s either that or you take a knife to my scrotum.” Bonnie shudders. “It’s OK,” Huw says. “Just cos we’re Luddites, doesn’t mean we don’t cook good technology.” Huw sits down hastily and gestures at a big red switch on the side of the machine. She flips it. Nothing seems to happen, except a green LED comes on. “Okay, fingers crossed, that should do it.” He’s relieved to have finally made some kind of contribution to the effort.

  Bonnie helps him out. “Right, get that jacket fastened we are going to hit the garage just as soon as we’ve defenestrated the perverts.” She shrugs backwards into an upper-body assembly that looks like something left behind by a SWAT team. “C’mon.”

  Huw follows her back next door, to find a bunch of blissed-out religionists lazily osculating one-other on a row of futons. “Okay!” yells Bonnie. “It’s evacuation time! Huw, get the goddamn window open and hook up the baskets.” She turns back to the coterie of ministers, some of whom are yawning and looking at her in evident mild annoyance. “The bad guys are coming through the back passage and you guys are going down right now!”

  “Eh, right.” Huw finds a stack of baby-blue plastic baskets dangling from a monofilament line right outside the window. “C’mon …”

  Between the two of them, they person-handle the dazed and tasped worshipers into baskets and drop them down the line. It all takes precious seconds, and by the time the last one is hooked up Huw is in a frenzy of agitation, desperate to be out of the building. There are indistinct thuds and stamping noises below them, and an odd whine of machinery from the hall outside. “What’s going on now?” He demands. “How do we get out of here?”

  “We wait.” Bonnie gives the last basket a shove and turns to face him, panting. “The corridors and rooms in this place, the Bishop’s got them rigged up to reconfigure like a maze. This whole sector should be walled off, you can’t find it unless you can look through walls.”

  A loud echoing crash from the room next door makes Huw wince. “Do you suppose they’ve got teraherz radar goggles?” he asks.

  “Do I — oh shit.” Bonnie looks appalled. “Quick, grab my epaulettes and hang on, we’re going down the wire!” She steps towards him, reaches around his body and grabs the monofilament with what look to Huw like black opera gloves. There’s an enormous thud from the doorway behind her that rattles the walls, and then Huw is clinging on for dear life as Bonnie drops down the wire. A thin plume of evil-smelling black smoke trails from her spidersilk gloves as they descend. “Ow.” Huw can barely hear her moan and to tell the truth he’s more concerned with the state of his own stomach, gellid with terror as they drop past two, three rows of windows.

  The ground comes up and smacks him across the ankles and he lets go of Bonnie. They fall apart and as he falls he sees a delivery van pulling away, the tailgate jammed shut around a blue basket. “Thanks a million, bastards,” Bonnie snarls, picking herself up. “Think you could have waited?”

  “No,” Huw pants, looking past her. “Listen, the Inquisition are round the front and they’ll be after us any second —”

  She grabs his wrist. “Come on, then!” She hauls off and almost drags him the length of the filthy alleyway, under rusting fire escapes and collapsing headless plastic statues of Disney cartoon characters decaptiated as graven images by the godly.

  By the time they hit the end of the alley, he’s up to speed and tugging her, self-preservation glands fully engaged. In the distance, sirens are wailing. “Shit. They’re round the other side. So much for your wait-and-get-away-later plan.”

  “That was back there,” she says tensely. “There’s a basement garage, when the building reconfigured we could have dropped down a chute straight into the cockpit of a batmobile and headed out via the service tunnels. Woulda worked a treat if it wasn’t for your teraherz radar.”

  “My radar?” Huw says, hating the squawk in his voice. He swallows his ire as he looks into Bonnie’s fear-wide eyes. “Right.” he says. “We need transport and we need to get past the Inquisition shock-troops before we can get to the out of town safe house. If they’ve ringed the block and they’ve got radar they’ll see us real soon —”

  “Shit,” says Bonnie, her grip loosening. Huw looks round.

  An olive-drab abomination whines and reverses into the alley, reversing towards them. Cleated metal tracks grind and scrape on the paving as an assault ramp drops down. It’s an armoured personnel carrier, but right now it’s only carrying one person, a big guy in a white suit. He’s holding something that looks like a shiny bundle of rods in both hands, and it’s pointing right at them. “Resistance is futile!” shouts Sam, his amplified voice echoing off the fire escapes and upended dumpsters. “Surrender!”

  “Shitfuckbugger piss,” says Huw, glancing back at the other end of the alley. Which is blocked by a wall conveniently topped with razor wire — Bonnie might make it with her spidersilk gloves but there’s no way in hell he could climb it without getting minced. Then he looks back at Sam, who is pointing his minigun or X-ray laser or whatever the hell it is right at him and waiting, patiently. “Surrender to who?” he calls.

  “Me.” Sam takes a step back into the APC and does something and suddenly there’s a weird hissing around them. “Ambient antisound. We can talk, but you’ve got about twenty seconds to surrender to me or you can take your chances with them.”

  “Shit.” Bonnie’s shoulders slump. “Okay,” she calls, raising her voice. “What do you want?”

  “You.” For a moment Sam sounds uncertain. “But I’ll take him, too, the cad, even though he doesn’t deserve it.”

  “Last time you were all fired-up on handing Huw over to the church,” Bonnie points out.

  “Change of plan. That was dad, this is me.” Sam raises his gun so that it isn’t pointed directly at them. “You coming or not?”

  Bonnie glances over her shoulder. “Yeah,” she says, stepping forward. She pauses. “You coming?” she asks Huw.

  “I don’t trust him!” Huw says. “He —”

  “You like the Inquisition better?” Bonnie asks, and walks up the ramp.

  Sam backs away and motions her to sit on a bench, then throws her something that looks like a thick bandanna. “Wrap this round your wrists and that grab rail. Tight. It’ll set in about ten seconds.” Then he glances back at Huw. “Ten seconds.”

  “Shit.” Huw walks forwards, sits down opposite Bonnie. Sam throws him a restraint band, motions with the gun. “Fuck it, tie me up, why don’t you.” The assault ramp creaks and whines loudly as it grinds up and locks shut. Sam backs all the way into the driver’s compartment, then slams a sliding door shut on them. The APC lurches, then begins to inch forwards out of the alleyway.

  Over the whine of the electric motors he can hear Sam talking on the radio: “No, no sign of suspects. Did you get the van? I suspect that was how they got away.”

  What’s going on? Huw mouths at Bonnie.

  She shrugs and looks back at him. Then there’s another lurch and the APC accelerates, turns a corner into open road, and Sam opens up the throttle. At which point, speech becomes redundant: it’s like being a frog in a liquidiser inside a bass drum bouncing on a trampoline, and it’s all Huw can do to stay on the bench seat.

  After about ten minutes
the APC slows down and graunches to a standstill. “Where are we?” Bonnie calls at the shut door of the driver’s compartment. She mouths something at Huw. Let me handle this, he decodes after a couple of tries.

  The door slides open. “You don’t need to know,” Sam says calmly, “‘cuz if you knew I’d have to edit your memories, and the only way I know to do that these days is by killing you.” He isn’t holding the gun, but before Huw has time to get any ideas about kicking him in the ‘nads Sam reaches out and hits a switch. The grabrail Huw and Bonnie are tied to rises towards the ceiling, dragging them upright. “It’s not like the old days,” he says. “We really knew how to mess with our heads then.”

  “Why did you take us?” Huw wheezes after he finds his footing. Bonnie gives him a dirty look. Huw swallows, his mouth dry as he realises that Sam is studying her with a closed expression on his face.

  “Personal autonomy,” Sam says quietly, taking Huw by surprise. The big lummox doesn’t look like he ought to know words like that. “Dad wanted to turn you in ‘cuz if he didn’t, the Inquisition’d start asking questions sooner or later. Best stay on the right side of the law. But once you got away, it stopped being his problem.” He swallows. “Didn’t stop being my problem, though.” He leans towards Bonnie. “Why are you on this continent?” he asks conversationally, and produces a small, vicious knife.

  “I’m —” Bonnie tenses, and Huw’s heart beats faster with fear for her. She’s thinking fast and that can’t be good, and this crazy big backwoods guy with the knife is frighteningly bad news. “Not everyone on this continent wants to be here,” she says. “I don’t know about anyone else’s agenda, but I think that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. That’s practically my religion. Self-determination. You got people here, they’re going to die for good, when they could be ascendant and immortal, if only someone would offer them the choice.”

  Sam makes encouraging noises.

  “I go where I’m needed,” she says. “Where I can lend a hand to people who want it.Your gang wants to play post-apocalypse; that’s fine. I’m here to help the utopians play their game.”

  Huw has shut his eyes and is nearly faint with fury. I’m a fucking passenger again, nothing but a passenger on this trip — the alien flute-thing in his stomach squirms, shifting uncomfortably in response to his adrenalin and prostaglandin surge — fucking cargo. For an indefinite moment Huw can’t hear anything above the drum-beat of his own rage: carrying the ambassador is fucking with his hormonal balance and his emotions aren’t as stable as they should be.

  Sam is still talking. “— Dad’s second liver,” he says to Bonnie. “So he cloned himself. Snipped out this, inserted that, force-grew it in a converted milk tank. Force-grew me. I’m supposed to be him, only stronger, better, smarter, bigger. Kept me in the tank for two years plugged in through the cortex speed-learning off the interwebnet then hauled me out, handed me a scalpel, painted a line on his abdomen and said ‘cut here’. The liver was a clone, too, so I figured I oughta do like he said less’n I wanted to end up next on the spare parts rota.”

  “Wow.” Bonnie sounds fascinated. “So you’re a designer ubermensch?”

  “Guess so,” Sam says slowly and a trifle bashfully. “After I got the new liver fitted Dad kept me around to help out in the lab. Never asked me what I wanted, just set me to work. He’s Asperger’s. Me, I’m just poorly socialized with a recursive introspective agnosia and a deficient situational relationship model. That’s what the diagnostic expert systems tell me, anyway.”

  “You’re saying you’ve never been socialized.” Bonnie leans her head towards him. “You just hatched, like, fully-formed from a tank —”

  “Yeah,” Sam says, and waits.

  “That’s so sad,” Bonnie replies. “Did your dad mistreat you?”

  “Oh mercy, no! He just ignores … well, he’s dad. He never pays much attention to me, he’s too busy looking for the alien space bats and trying not to get the Bishop mad at him.”

  “Is that why you were taking Huw into town?” asks Bonnie.

  “Huh, yeah, I guess so.” Sam chuckles humourlessly. “Anything comes down in the swamp, you betcha they see it on radar. You came down in dad’s patch, pretty soon they’ll come by and see why he hasn’t turned you in. So you can’t really blame him, putting on the holy roller head and riding into town to hand over the geek.”

  “That’s okay,” Bonnie says calmly, as Sam shows some tension, “I understand.”

  “It’s just a regular game-theoretical transaction, y’see?” Sam asks, his voice rising in a near-whine: “he has to do it! He has to tit-for-tat with the Church or they’ll roll him over. ‘Sides, the geek doesn’t know anything. The shipment —”

  “Hush.” Bonnie winks at the big guy. “Actually, your dad was wrong — the Ambassad — the shipment requires a living host for communion.”

  “Oh!” Sam’s eyebrows rise. “Then it’s a good thing you rescued him, I guess.” He looks wistful. “If’n I trust you. I don’t know much about people.”

  “That’s all right,” Bonnie says. “I’m not your enemy. I don’t hate you for picking us up. You don’t need to shut us up.” She looks up at where her wrists are trussed to the grab rail. “Let my hands free?”

  Sam listens to some kind of internal voice, then he raises the knife and slices away at Bonnie’s bonds. Huw tenses as she slumps down and then drapes herself across Sam’s muscular shoulder. “What do you want?” Sam asks.

  Bonnie cups his chin tenderly. “We all want the same thing,” she says. Sam shrinks back from her touch.

  “Sha,” she says. “You’re very handsome, Sam.” He squirms.

  Huw squirms too. Bonnie,” he says, a warning.

  Sam twists to stare at him and Huw sees that there’s soemthing wild breaking loose behind his eyes. “Come on,” Bonnie says, “over here.” She takes his hand and leads him towards the driver’s cab of the APC. “Come with mamma.”

  Huw is revolted by the sight of Sam, docilely moving past him, nimble on his big dinner-plate feet, hand enfolding Bonnie’s eyes down. He feels a sear of jealousy, and only Bonnie’s sidelong glare silences him.

  After the hatch thumps shut, Huw strains to overhear the murmured converation from behind it, but all he can make out is thumps and grunts, and then, weirdly, a loud sob. “Oh, Daddy, why?” It’s Sam, and there are more sobs now, and more thumps, and Huw realizes they’re not sex noises — more like seizure noises.

  His ribs and shoulders are on fire, and he shifts from foot to foot, trying to find relief from the agony of hanging by his wrists. He steps on their pathetic pillowcase of possessions and the lamp rolls free, Ade popping up.

  “My, you are a sight, old son,” the little hologram says. “Nice hat.”

  “It helps me think,” Huw says, around the copper mesh of the balaclava. “It wouldn’t have hurt to have a couple of these on the zep, Ade.”

  “Live and learn,” the hologram says. “Next time.” It cocks its head and listens to the sobbing. “What’s all that about then?”

  Huw shrugs as best as he can, then gasps at the chorous of muscle-spasms this evinces from his upper body. “I thought Bonnie might be having a shag, but now I’m not sure. I think she might be conducting a therapy session.”

  “Saving the world as per usual,” Ade says. “So many virtues that girl has. Doctrinaire ideologues like her are the backbone of the movement, I tell you. Who’s she converting to pervtopic disestablishmentarianist personal politics, then?”

  “One of your trading partners,” Huw says. “Sam. Turns out he’s the Doc’s son. Clone. I ‘spect you knew that, though.”

  “Sam? Brick shithouse Sam?” There’s a distant, roaring sob and another crash. “Who’d have thought he had it in him?”

  “Whose side are you on, Ade? What have you been selling these bastards? I expect I’ll be dead by dusk, so you can tell me.”

  “I told you, but you didn’t listen. There is no conspiracy. The mov
ement is an emergent phenomenon. It’s complexity theory, not ideology. The cloud wants to instantiate an ambassador, and events conspire to find a suitable host and get some godvomit down his throat.” Ade nods at him. “Now the cloud wants the ambassador to commune with something on the American continent, and there you are. How do I know the cloud wants this? Because you are there, on the American continent. QED. Maybe it wants to buy Manhattan for some beads. Maybe it wants to say hello to the ants. Maybe it wants to be sure that meatsuits are really as banal and horrible as it remembers.”

  “No ideology?” Huw says, as another sob rattles the walls. “I think Bonnie might disagree with you.”

  “Oh, she might,” Ade says, cheerfully. “But in the end, she knows it as well as I do: our mission is to be where events take us. Buying and selling a little on the side, it’s not counter-revolutionary. It’s not revolutionary. It’s just more complexity. More soup whence the conspiracy may emerge.”

  “That’s all conveniently fatalist,” Huw says.

  “Imagine,” Ade says, snottily. “A technophobe lecturing me about fatalism.” The sobs have stopped, and now they hear the thunder of approaching footfalls. Bonnie comes through the door as Ade winks out of existence, trailing Sam behind her.

  She takes both of his hands and stands on tiptoe to kiss him on the tip of his squashed nose. “You’re very beautiful, Sam,” she says. “And your feelings are completely normal. You tell the Bishop I told you to go see her. Him. It. They’ll help you out.”

  Sam’s eyes are red and his chin is slick with gob. He wipes his face on his checkered flannel shirt-tails. “I love you, Bonnie,” he says, his voice thick with tears.

  “I love you too, Sam,” she says. She reaches into his pocket and takes out his knife, opens it and cuts Huw down. “We’re going now, but I’ll never forget you. If you ever decide to come to Europe, you know how to find me.”

  Huw nearly keels over as his arms flap bloodlessly down to slap at his sides, but manages to stay upright as Sam thuds over to the ramp controls and sets the gangway to lowering.