CHAPTER 3
UBU TRIED TO MOVE, AND INSTANTLY HIS BACK AND ABDOMEN WENT into seizure. Agony tore at his body. He couldn’t find the strength to cry for help.
He’d already screamed his throat out. After the beating hadn’t produced the desired results, the guards had employed glitch rods. Ubu could still smell his burned flesh.
He waited for the spasms to end, then took a ragged, shaky breath, trying not to choke on the blood that had pooled in his mouth. His lips, smashed over and over against his teeth, had been badly torn.
The place where he was lying was hard. A cool breeze dried the blood on his skin. His eyes were swollen shut and he couldn’t see.
Ubu tried to move again. Claws of pain tore at his belly. This time he passed out.
He awoke to feel Beautiful Maria’s hair falling like down on his face. Ubu managed to open a single eye and saw Maria crouched over him. Dried blood smeared her unrecognizable face. At the sight a softer anguish filled Ubu’s heart. He wanted to close his eye and weep.
“Can you stand?” Maria asked. Ubu couldn’t answer. He tilted his head to let congealing blood run out of his mouth, then tried to get to his hands and knees. Maria’s cool hands helped him. The guards had given him the boot more than once, and Ubu’s scrotum shrieked in remembered pain. Somehow the spasms didn’t take him away again.
Ubu squinted through his one eye, saw waffle-patterned metal flooring, harsh fluorescent lights, color-coded pipes that hugged the walls and ceiling. The Monte Carlo hadn’t wanted to sully its main entrance by throwing two bleeding gamblers into the street. Instead Ubu and Maria had been dumped in one of the utility tunnels running along the outer rim of Angelica Station. Ubu’s brain reeled as he tried to remember whether he wanted to go spinward or anti-spinward to get to Runaway, but Maria had already chosen the direction.
At first Ubu crawled, Maria’s hand on one arm to hold him steady and offer encouragement. The pain from his groin sent a wave of vomit into his throat, but he bit it back. After he had more confidence in his body doing what he asked it to, he tottered to his feet. Pain stunned him, made him bend over with racking coughs.
Maria dragged him on, holding his hand. Her grey jacket was gone; one of her feet was bare; there were burn marks and bloodstains on her torn shirt. It was his plan that had done this to her, Ubu realized. Guilt clutched at his throat. He took a sobbing breath and staggered on. Pain eddied listlessly through his body, then turned sharp as a hammer struck his kidneys. He stifled a scream.
A blast of heat rose through the patterned metal grate. A compressor roared in the depths below Ubu’s feet.
“I’m sorry,” Ubu said. Beautiful Maria gave no sign that she heard.
There was the soft hiss of a pressure lock, and they crawled under a narrow lintel into twilight. Music hummed in the distance. They were home, on the Fringe.
They looked like a pair of Mudville tourists who’d got themselves pounded by locals, and snickers followed them to the beltway conveyor. The fading gravity lessened Ubu’s pain. He clutched Maria’s hand and took the lead as they stumbled over the low-gee surface to Runaway’s entry port.
Once inside the ship they headed straight for the sick bay. It was very well equipped, and both Ubu and Maria had fastlearned emergency medicine. Ubu took a cup from the chest and tore away the plastic sanitary envelope. He rinsed out his bloody mouth, swallowed endorphin analogs, a pill to reduce swelling, Blue Heaven. Maxim, distressed, stood in the doorway, lashed his tail and yowled.
Beautiful Maria took a cup in her trembling hands, tried to swallow a pill, gagged it up. She clutched the sink. Clumsily Ubu tried to caress her matted hair. Maria fell to her knees, sobbing. There was nothing left in her, he realized: she’d got him here on the last of her Red Nine and now she was done. He took a sterile cloth from the emergency kit, knelt by her side, and washed her bloody face. She submitted, clenching her teeth in pain.
Ubu coaxed her to her feet and began to take off her clothes. His teeth ground in anger. Breath went out of him in a cold hiss. The bastard with the glitch rod had paid particular attention to her breasts. Tears poured down Maria’s swollen face. Ubu started a warm shower and helped Maria into the cubicle. Her mouth opened in a silent cry at the stinging impact of the water. Ubu turned on the soap tap, and foam boiled white on her shoulders. He followed her into the wide cubicle without bothering to take off his clothes.
He washed her carefully, cleaning the cuts, then dropped his own clothes to the bottom of the cubicle and washed himself. Soapy water pooled around their ankles as Ubu’s clothing blocked the drains. Ubu turned off the soap tap and rinsed in clean water. Quiet sobs rose from Maria’s throat.
Ubu wished he would be able to forget this, the blows, the cries, Maria’s torn body and ceaseless tears. Other people’s memories faded with time, but never Ubu’s: Pasco had wired him for permanency and he recalled everything, every sight, sound, his life coded indelibly in his brain to rise from the past like Pasco’s hologram parading the corridors of his ship.
He looked over her carefully. She could stand and walk: no leg or pelvic bones broken. “How are your ribs?” he asked, then saw she was carrying her hand carefully. “Let me see.” He took her hand. “Here? These two fingers?”
“Hurt. The wrist, too.”
He X-rayed the hand and wrist on the portable machine and kicked in the analysis program. Ubu was informed that the fingers were just sprained, but that Maria had chipped one of her wrist bones. The injury was not critical, but might hamper free movement in the future. He gave her a hypo of a hormone that was supposed to help knit bones.
Maxim called from the doorway as Ubu led Maria from the shower and loaded a pair of chaks with medication, stuff to hype the immune system plus everything he’d given himself. He fired it all up her nostrils. He took the emergency kit in one hand and led Maria to her bed with the other. Blue Seven was beginning its lazy swim through his mind. His hands moving carefully in the first tentative touch of the drug, Ubu disinfected Maria’s cuts again, then sprayed neuflesh over them. Maria’s eyes fluttered shut. Breath eased through her bruised lips. “I’m sorry,” Ubu said, and kissed her temple where the soft hair rose from the pale warm skin, the unmarked interface between black and white.
Leaving a trail of water on the deck, Ubu dragged himself to his new sleeping cabin— the old one was still littered with clawed confetti— and fell into the rack. Maxim hopped into the rack and settled between his knees, purring in a purely defiant way, tail still lashing. Ubu’s body warmed with sleep.
“I’m in a great mood today!” Pasco said brightly. Ubu opened his eye. Pasco stood naked in front of the bed, grinning and scratching himself. The recording had been made at least eight or nine years ago— the figure in the hologram was clean-shaven.
“Do you know why?” Pasco asked. “I’ll tell you.”
Shut up, Pop, Ubu thought.
“Because I’ve figured out something, that’s why.” Pasco’s smile was brilliant. “We can make ourselves a fortune!”
Ubu decided that it would hurt too much to lean out of the rack and turn off the holo projector. He shut his eye and tried not to listen.
“I’ve just figured out what Beautiful Maria can do! She really is a witch!” Pasco laughed. “Once I’ve trained her abilities to their full potential—” He snapped his fingers. “The money will just fall into our hands! We can’t lose.”
“Oh, Jesus Rice,” Ubu said.
“We just have to find the proper applications, that’s all. This Consolidation business was beginning to worry me, but not any more. If we can just hold out a few more years, the money will start rolling in!”
Pasco began to sing, a chirpy sentimental ballad called “Today My Dreams Come True.” Pasco couldn’t remember all the lyrics and filled in the blanks with nonsense words. Ubu hoped he wouldn’t attempt the instrumental break, but he did, doing a bad imitation of a sizer guitar.
Sadness rose in Ubu’s chest like a welling pool of blood. He wished he could cut himself off from sorrow, just touch a switch and cease feeling, the same way he could turn off Pasco’s hologram. Instead he listened to the off-key singing and hoped Blue Heaven would turn it into a brainless swaddling dream, all harmless fluff like the lyrics of the song, preserve him from the bite of his memory, his own certainty that Angel Station was the place where all dreams died.