Prophet Margin (8 page)

"Then you'll go down for aiding and abetting," he said, returning her stare. "We couldn't have got through customs without your help. I thought you were doing us a favour."

"Hah. 'Favour'," She said the word in much the same tone a Trilaxxian Stud breeder might have used to discuss donkeys. "Don't be ridiculous. I'll just tell them you abducted me. It'll make a great story. Loads of free publicity."

"Uh-uh." Johnny shook his head. "Phone records. That call I made from the Doghouse, remember? The one where you said you'd meet us at the spaceport, help us out, renew old friendships, blah-blah. I believe the words 'smuggle you out through the VIP lounge' featured at one point. The station's AI records all calls."

She smirked and brandished her middle finger.

"Wow," said Johnny. "Good comeback."

"Look closer." Something metallic flickered on the finger's knuckle. "Series 4000 dermally implanted microphone," she presented a chipper grin. "Comes complete with one hundred minutes free call time, cerebral phonebook, suite of games and a top notch signal scrambler.
Nobody
records me."

Johnny nodded, impressed. "You got me then."

"Looks that way."

"But you brought me here anyway. Could have handed me over in the airport."

"So?"

"So you're after something."

"Who isn't?"

"I already told you we can't pay you, so that's not it-"

She flicked a hand. "Pfft. Money."

"So, what then?"

"Exclusive access."

Johnny scowled. "More interviews? Lady, that fly on the wall thing covered the lot. I told you: I find people, sometimes I kill them, then I get paid. End of story. If you're looking to make a follow-up you're going to be disappo-"

"The... ah...
other
kind of access."

Nobody moved.

"Um," said Kid Knee.

"The other kind?" said Johnny.

The journalist rolled her eyes. "Look, people don't want documentaries any more. They don't give a sideways sneck about the Plutonian pigmies or the Liberacii Gaycolonies or whatever. People want excitement. Danger. Titillation." She coughed, embarrassed.

Johnny shrugged, lost.

She almost snarled. "My ratings are diabolical, okay? I need some scandal."

"Scandal." Johnny suddenly spotted where the conversation was going with crystal clarity.

Reggo took a deep breath. "The only show I've made this year which even got near to all that 'inform, educate and entertain' bollocks was the one about Strontium Dogs. People
like
freaks. It gives them something to... to..."

"To hate?"

"Ish. But they
love
to hate muties. And they love it even more when they can compare all that freakiness with razor sharp gorgeosity in the shape of
moi
."

"I'm still not getting this." Johnny lied.

"Oh, for sneck's sake! My agent thinks it would be a good career move if I had a stain or two on my record. And muties are fashionable at the mo."

Johnny swallowed. "Right," he said.

"Right."

"So, you want to... ah..."

She shuffled her feet. "It would just be once. With a camera drone watching, of course."

"Of course. Um. Here?"

"Well, perhaps one of the studios would be warmer."

"Warmer. Right. Uh." Johnny pointed towards the nearest of the buildings. "What about that one?"

Reggo swivelled in her spot. "Yes," she said, observing the unimpressive lovepad. "Yes, that looks fi-"

Zzk.

She crumpled to the ground with a sigh. Johnny deactivated the electronux he'd smuggled onto his fist. A single tap on the forehead was all it had taken to introduce Miss Nickle Reggo to slumberland.

Kid Knee turned from the unconscious reporter and fixed Johnny with a disbelieving glare. "What," he said, barely able to speak, "are you
doing
?"

"Close call, that," Johnny said.

"She... she was going to-"

"Come on. Studio 72." He strode off, leaving Reggo where she was.

"You're mental, Alpha."

"Shut up. It's this way."

"She was throwing herself at you, man! You're deranged!"

"Not on the job, Kid."

"Whaaaat?"

"It... impairs focus."

"You're snecking joking, right?"

"Look, just shut up."

"Couldn't we at least bring her with us? I'm not gay!"

"Nor am I!"

"You know, I always wondered about you and Sternhammer."

"Shut up."

"That big beard he's got, it's a dead giveaway."

"Shut up."

"And you gotta admit, that helmet of yours is kind of suggestive."

"Shut
up
."

WORDS FOR THE DEAD

#3 Chryz Montellimar Fortunis Jenkins Widdiso

The last note, traditionally, lasts 39.45 seconds. I'm feeling mischievous, so I add a full three microbeats. The second aria of Faelii Spatchula's masterwork, "
Celestial Detritus"
, thus finishes with spine tingling beauty. Naturally.

I am, I admit, excited. Amongst the usual range of passion and brilliance I will this evening demonstrate no fewer than seventeen techniques utterly inaudible to human ears. That none of the groundlings will appreciate them is irrelevant: one does not protect their position as the galaxy's greatest singer by resting on one's laurels. In my hundred and fifty years of life (one hundred and nineteen of which have been spent in "artificial" realities) I have devoured the musical knowledge of countless civilisations, I have perfected the most challenging cadences and developed new techniques of my own. Next time you listen to Zagre The Konk and his Martian NoseChoir, or the FartBeat of Yollande Whippet, spare a thought for the genius who innovated their chosen artforms.

That's me.

If spending ninety-nine per cent of one's time immersed in fabricated realities sounds unsatisfying, allow me to retort. Where else may a gigabillionaire take the opportunity to indulge every vice and perversion without the tabloid press watching on? I'm assured that the real Nymphqueen of Hedon IV isn't able to perform half the "stunts" that my simulated version can, and have perfected the art of Tantric Opera whilst testing this theory to its limits.

Some people might regard that sort of fastidiousness as a manifestation of arrogance.

Peasants.

Tonight's audience, mercifully, appears well behaved. I can't see the shrieking cretins, of course, which is a bonus. They're down on the ugly little world below me, craning their necks back to peer up at the holo-projections of yours truly that the techs are scattering liberally across the ionosphere.

It's live, but not as we know it.

Speaking of which, time for the next number. Dame Bossuk's famed "laughing" version of the Cadmium Movement: a challenging piece given that I have only one mouth and set of lungs, but I'm yet to be beaten by biology.

Oh, for
my
sake. It seems I was wrong about the crowd being well behaved. Yes, here they come: hovbikes scudding across the horizon like a swarm of gnats. Bloody stage divers.

You know, at my second concert, ninety years ago, one of the little bastards actually made it onto the stage. He was about to
touch
me when the assistant-deputy-trainee-sound-engineer bludgeoned him to death with a quantum microphone stand. I had to start the seventh chorus of Zephanixxus III's "
Purple, O Purple"
all over again. I tingle merely thinking about it.

Thankfully we've improved our security since then. A flotilla of Carnagebots will tend to discourage even the most insane of thrillseekers from a stage invasion.

Ha, yes. They're turning away.

Actually... they're turning away rather fast. Fleeing, you might say. And what's that glowing thing they've left behind? Ah well. I can't be held responsible for the peculiarities of my fans. The show must go on, as they say.

Take a deep breath. Feeeeeeel the music, that's it.

A-one, a-two, a-one-two-three-f-

Boom.

SEVEN

The sky shook.

Roolán had always assumed that descriptive sentences of that nature ("the earth moved,"; "the ground shivered,"; "the stars quaked,") were the hyperbolic work of overenthusiastic authors. Not so now.

The sky really did shake. He felt it all through his body, like a highly impersonal massage from someone with cricket stumps instead of fingers.

Confined to the farmhouse by his parents, he'd smuggled himself onto the corrugated roof where he could stare upwards and watch the show undetected. Peering across the irregular surface of Shtzuth presented a bizarre spectacle: every spare inch of ground occupied by a ticket holder, sprawled on their backs (or dorsal carapaces, etc) with their eyes fixed on the sky.

Roolán's parents were charging a stupendous amount for "ground rental". He could see them in the distance, ambling about on hov-scooters selling refreshments at six times their value. Roolán had never seen them so happy.

Thus far, the show had been breathtaking, with spectral images of Widdiso hazing like supernovae across the atmosphere, haloed by a spaghetti trail of lasers. Every soaring crescendo, every orchestral dirge, every reflective breath that the maestro took was reproduced in gargantuan scale.

Clouds ceased to be the usual drab tetramethane smudges that blotted the sky and became instead nuggets of gold or sapphire, snagging at whatever luminescent artillery was sweeping past. Arcs of light lifted and fell, prismic shapes arose and broke apart, puddles of colour ran together like molten lead, here bubbling to form a brief image of Widdiso's face, there crackling in time with the orchestra's weird harmonies.

But now there was something new. Some cataclysmic lighting effect that blossomed from a single point; a chrysanthemum of light and shadow that hurt Roolán's eyes, even through the heavy cloud. Down amongst the reclining audience cheers and drunken bouts of applause rippled in vague eddies before dying down. Even those spectators who'd been sucking on kpokkian neg-cactus blotters couldn't fail to notice how the expanding fireball continued to stretch towards the horizon, now so bright that even the clouds offered no refuge for stinging eyes.

One by one, the other effects snapped away. Wobbly cloud holograms crackled then faded, auroras consumed by the roiling fire.

Then the air started to shake.

The crowd exchanged glances, muttered about how realistic modern special effects were becoming, decided that things were perhaps a little
too
realistic and started screaming.

Then the atmosphere was dappled by tumbling motes of light, the clouds ignited, the screams reached a cacophonic pitch.

And lumps of debris travelling at an eyejarring velocity shot from the sky and set about flattening the crowd.

Roolán watched a party of Pothirii hippies go the way of Krakatoa nearby, a lump of flaming wreckage striking their chilled-out patch with nuclear force. The dungworld shitcrust shattered open, frothing magmacrap boiled into the air, the ground heaved like a living thing and Roolán opened his mouth to scream.

It saved his life.

In the aftermath of the disaster, geoforensic teams estimated that ninety-four per cent of the people who had been on the dungworld when the Plasmatomic weapon detonated in low-orbit had died; mostly by being drowned in the scalding liquid shite that swept across the planet. Subjected to a sustained bombardment from above, the solidified crust of Shtzuth was broken apart, unleashing a tide of fluid excrement that swept up entire swathes of the crowd. In a commemorative issue dedicated to the disaster, the highbrow journal
BIG
ran a poll in which readers agreed that being simultaneously irradiated, burnt alive, scalded and drowned by liquid shit was definitely up there in the top ten of the Galaxy's All Time Worst Ways To Go.
⁵

^{5. Alongside old classics like "Being Swallowed Whole by a Slow-Digesting KnifePuma During its Glandular Lemon-Juice Season", "Accidentally Consuming the Blushwort Toxin" (which forces victims to relive their most embarrassing moments until so much blood has gone to their cheeks that their heart stops), and - generally agreed to be the worst of all - "Death By Karaoke."}

Chryz Widdiso's agent (whose executive craft had been shielded from the explosion by a vast container of ticket stubs) regretfully announced that the great man was not a Cloner Card carrier. "Those of us left behind," she added, through a mask of artfully made-up tearstains, "have agreed that now would be a sensible time to break his policy of 'no recorded performances'. With that in mind, there will be a retrodisc in all good dataoutlets within the next few days, priced at a mere fif... ah, hundred creds and containing all of the maestro's most enduring hits." She even managed to shed a little eyejuice, which all the journalists agreed was a very nice touch.

Stories from immediately after the disaster, when rescuers came from all around to find survivors (and take photos of themselves doing so) became commonplace. Details of unlikely escapes caused a brief flurry of excitement before becoming too outrageous even for bored columnists. One bizarre story, for example, regarded a patch of land on the eastern crust where formerly a farmhouse had stood. Despite the surrounding environs being pelted by a particularly high density of wreckage, and the entire area being consumed by magmacrap flows, rescuers claimed to have found a solitary survivor, unconscious but unhurt, in a perfectly formed bubble within the solidified dung. "It's like the muck flowed all around him," said one attentionseeker, "but couldn't get none close enough ta kill him up."

The story was, naturally, ignored.

Genuine survivors were loaded aboard mercyships, drugged to the gills by lawyers working for the Widdiso foundation, and sent as far away as possible before they woke up and started asking questions. "Who can I sue?" for example.

Local police speculated that the bombers derived from Nama's Moon - a nearby world with a reputation for criminality and a thriving market in hovbikes. Citing a lack of evidence and making comments to the effect of "it coulda bin any
one
of them bastards," the investigating sheriff reluctantly conceded that it was unlikely the true culprits would ever be found.