Vicious Circle Read online

  “Please don’t use that nickname, Felix,” she said. “You know how I feel about it. So yes, things here are excellent. It’s such a strong team now, we’ve got to the point where they won’t be needing me anymore.” Her eyes gleamed as she said this: even as a joke, she couldn’t quite get that one out without an edge to it. As if she’d ever let go of her little empire without a good sprinkling of blood and hair on the walls.

  “On the acquisitions side,” she went on smoothly, “we’ve got three loup-garous—including one who’s able to possess and shape insect hosts. The identical twin zombies from Edinburgh are with us now: that was quite a battle, but I was able to prove to the hospital board that we could offer them a higher standard of care. We can also chart their decay molecule by molecule with the CAT imagers, and see how far it follows a parallel course in the two different cadavers.”

  “Unless the dead rights bill gets through its third reading,” I said. I couldn’t resist; it was too pat a straight line.

  J.J. didn’t go for the stick, though. She passed her hand through the air in front of her face, pushing the unwelcome topic effectively to the sidelines. “I know a lot of people in Westminster, Felix,” she told me. “There’s no way the bill is going to pass. Not in this form, and not in this session. It would be chaos. Oh yes, eventually some measure of legal status will be accorded to the dead. There’s already talk of bringing me in as a consultant on the next bill, after this one hits the rocks.”

  I almost laughed at that. Could we consult you on this sheep problem, Professor Wolf? Instead, I said, “So you think it’ll be voted out?”

  “Timed out,” said J.J., with just a hint of malevolent satisfaction. “They’ve only set aside two days for the debate, and there are forty-seven amendments coming down from the Lords. The government won’t invoke the Parliament Act for something this contentious, so they’ll run out of time and shelve it until the winter session. And then the process will begin again with even less momentum. Trust me, this will run and run. And when they do finally agree on legislation, it will be drafted in a form that allows us to carry on with our work without fear of legal challenges. That, in fact, will be one of the primary desiderata of any act: the government doesn’t want anything to tie their hands at this point.”

  “Which point would that be, Jenna-Jane?”

  “The point where the dead have begun to rise in uncountable numbers, and when it’s starting to look as though the demons of hell are herding them.”

  I shrugged. It was a theory, like any other: I’d heard them all in my time. “I thought the demons went wherever they got a whiff of fresh food.”

  “I know what you think, Felix. We’ve discussed it on several occasions. You have a dangerous tendency—in my view—to underestimate the potential threat that the dead pose. In the past, that tendency was tempered by your professionalism: your ability to ignore all irrelevant avenues while you were working on a specific task. From what I hear, though, there’s been a certain . . . erosion of that quality in recent months.”

  She was looking at me closely, appraisingly. She paused, as if she expected me to respond to the allegation.

  “It’s good to know that you’re still taking an interest in me,” I said blandly.

  “Always, Felix. Always.”

  “Listen, Jenna-Jane.” I was trailing the field in the small-talk stakes, so I might as well cut to the chase. “I need to speak to Rosie. There’s something I want to ask her about.”

  J.J.’s eyebrows rose. I knew they did because I saw the crease appear and then fade again on her forehead. The eyebrows themselves were gray, like the hair on her head, and pencil-sliver thin so they couldn’t be seen unless you were right up close.

  “I’ll add you to the roster,” she said, mildly.

  “I meant tonight.”

  J.J. smiled a tight, pained smile. “That would be more difficult to arrange. We have a formal booking system now, and the time slots for tonight are entirely filled. Probably the earliest I could fit you in would be in about three or four days’ time.”

  “I just need a couple of minutes. Couldn’t you squeeze me in as someone else is clocking off?”

  She shook her head with an expression on her face that was indistinguishable from genuine regret. “No, I’m afraid not, Felix,” she said. “Everything goes through one of the oversight boards, and I can’t preempt their decision. Even for a friend.” She paused, frowned for a moment in thought, and I waited for the other shoe to drop. “For a colleague, though,” she said, “it would be different. If you had an active and current attachment to the unit, I mean. I could stretch a point then, and be reasonably sure that the board wouldn’t smack my hand for it afterwards.”

  It was a bitter pill to swallow, but then again if all she wanted was a promise I could be every bit as radiantly insincere as she could. “Well, I’m pretty busy right now,” I said, “but when I’ve got an opening, I could maybe come over and do some chores for you.”

  Jenna-Jane nodded enthusiastically. “Excellent,” she said. “There’s one thing I’d love to have you do for us.”

  “What’s that?” I was already standing, trying to hustle her on to the next stage in the proceedings, but when it comes to immovable objects and irresistible forces, J.J. can play both ends against the middle.

  “You can persuade your friend Rafael Ditko to sign himself into our care.”

  My face froze, and so did I, halfway between sitting down and standing up. In the end I went for standing up, because it got me a bit of distance from her.

  “Sorry,” I said. “That one’s not on the table.”

  “Isn’t it?” She was all innocent inquiry. “I had a call from Dr. Webb a couple of days ago. He seemed to feel that it might be better for Mr. Ditko to be in an environment that’s more directly and intentionally geared towards dealing with the kind of problem that he faces.”

  “J.J., no offense, but in here Rafi would be the problem. You don’t distinguish between the carrier wave and the signal.”

  Jenna-Jane seemed hurt. “That’s a rather opaque metaphor, Felix. And it’s very far from the truth. I’m aware that Ditko and the demon inside him are two distinct entities. I’m probably more cognizant of what that means than you are, and better able to understand the mechanism by which it works. I would never confuse your friend with the passenger he has the misfortune to carry.”

  “No? So you wouldn’t, for the sake of argument, be tempted to try stabbing Rafi with a pitchfork to see if Asmodeus bleeds?”

  Jenna-Jane’s disguise is close to being perfect, so there was no sign of anger or frustration on her face. She just shook her head, as if that harsh remark were the latest proof that she was never meant to live in a world as cruel and unfeeling as this.

  “My first concern would be Ditko’s well-being,” she said, solemnly.

  “It’s not negotiable, Jenna-Jane.”

  “Then neither is Rosie, Felix. I’ll add you to the roster, and you’ll get a call within the next few days. Unless, of course, someone on the oversight board has any doubts about your suitability.”

  “And are you on the oversight board, Jenna-Jane?” I asked.

  “Yes. Of course. I’m one of four faculty members, balanced by three—”

  I raised my hand to stop the flow. “Thanks,” I said. “I get the picture. Give my regards to any of the old gang you still see.”

  “Of course.”

  “And fall downstairs and break your neck while you’re doing it. The next time I drop in, I’d love to see you in a persistently vegetative state.”

  “Felix!” I walked out on that tone of reproach—identical to the one I’d walked in on. I didn’t want to see the expression that went with it.

  What I did see, on my way back to the guard post, was one of those alarm points with its sternly worded notice. It gave me an idea that was hard to resist. I smashed the glass with my elbow and hit the button. A deep, two-tone whoop sounded from all sides at once. I kept moving, dredging up my memories of the unit’s floor plan. There ought to be a corridor off on my right somewhere up ahead.

  There was. Tu
rning into it, I saw a whole lot of people running toward me, some of them in the dark blue uniforms of the security staff. I braced myself, but they ran on past me without giving me so much as a glance. A second wave followed a hundred yards farther on, and then I turned into a short side corridor with just the one door at the end of it.

  It was locked. I hammered on it and yelled “Open up!” as loud as I could over the continued mad-cow mooing of the alarm. There was the sound of a bolt drawing back, and a surprised face appeared in the gap as the door was pulled open. It was another man in uniform, two inches taller than me and a lot heavier.

  “She’s got to be moved,” I shouted, pointing past him into the ward.

  “Moved?” He looked surprised and alarmed. He didn’t budge out of my way, though: he wasn’t going to buy the bridge without looking over the design sketches. “Where to? What’s going on?”

  “Out into the yard. There’s a fire.”

  He looked less convinced than ever. “A fire? That’s the breach alarm, not the—”

  Enough is enough. I brought my knee up into his stomach, and then as he went down I spun on my heel and gave him a roundhouse punch behind the ear that laid him out on the floor. There was a fire extinguisher in a niche to the right of the door. I hooked it out and held it ready in case he got up again, but for now he was in dreamland. I felt a little bad about it, because he was only doing his job, but on the other hand, anyone who sticks around in Jenna-Jane’s company on the basis of that excuse has got to be skating on ice so thin you could melt it with your breath.

  I pulled him inside and closed the door, after glancing back up the corridor and finding to my relief that it was empty. It wouldn’t be for long.

  Rosie grinned when she saw me—a lazy, wicked grin.

  “Felix Castor,” she said. “I had a dream that we were married.”

  “I’d give you a dog’s life, Rosie. I’m not domesticated.”

  “Ah, but in the dream, I was the man and you were the woman.”

  “It would still hold. I’d whore around. I know my own weaknesses.”

  I pulled a chair up next to her bedside. The body she was wearing right now was a new one on me, but that wasn’t surprising; like I said, it had been a while. It was a young lad with dark, curly hair and a volcanic spill of acne across his left cheek. He was fully dressed, lying on top of the covers: maybe on some level he was listening in on the conversation, but Rosie was in the driving seat. She usually is.

  I reversed the chair so that I could rest my arms on the back of it as I sat. “That’s probably where the dream came from,” I said, indicating her body with a nod of my head. “You’re cross-dressing again, you dirty mare.”

  Rosie was still grinning: my visit seemed to have really cheered her up. Or maybe it was the bellowing alarms and what she’d seen of the fight at the door. After seven years in this place, she relished anything that was a break from routine. “I like the boys best,” she confided to me. “I stroke them, sometimes, to see if I can make their manhoods stand.” She sighed wistfully. “But it’s like trying to tickle yourself with your own fingers: it never quite works, somehow.”

  “I wish I’d met you when you had a body, Rosie.”

  “So do I, my love, so do I. There was treasure there, and I’d have given you a charter to keep all you found.”

  “Rosie, I set the alarms off so I could have a quick word with you. Jenna-Jane was trying to keep me out.”

  “The noisome bitch!”

  “Couldn’t have put it better myself. And the clock is ticking: when she twigs that it was me, which will be in about half a minute, she’s going to be in here with all guns blazing.”

  “You’d better be brief then, Felix.”

  “I will. I’m looking for another friend of yours—Dennis Peace.”

  She frowned. “Ah, Dennis,” she said. “The wildest of my boys. He’ll do himself a mischief someday, if he hasn’t already.”

  “When was he here last, Rosie?”

  “A few days ago. Sunday, perhaps, or Monday. He told me that it might be a long while before I saw him again, but that I wasn’t to worry. He had things to do. Debts, he said, that had to be paid, and some of them were bad ones that had to be paid with blood rather than with money. But he knew what he was doing, and he was safe.”

  “Safe where?”

  Rosie looked at me strangely, out of the young man’s eyes. “What’s your interest in knowing, Fix? You’re not one of those he needs to pay out, are you? I’d hate for the two of you to fight.”

  “I’m not looking to fight him,” I assured her. “But I do need to talk to him. I’m in almost as much trouble as he is, and my trouble is tied up with his in a lot of complicated ways. Maybe we can help each other. Maybe we’ll just swap information and go our separate ways.”

  She was silent for a long time. “I don’t know where he is,” she said at last, and my heart sank. Then she held up a finger as if she was asking me to wait. “Not in so many words. But he said—”

  There was a loud bang from behind me. Turning my head, I saw Jenna-Jane and three guards standing just inside the doorway. “Remove him,” Jenna-Jane snapped, and the guards squared their shoulders as they advanced on me. There was no point in making a fight of it: they would have folded me into a paper plane.

  Rosie brought her mouth up close to my ear. “He said he was staying with Mr. Steiner,” she whispered quickly, just as their hands clamped down on my shoulders and hauled me backward off the chair. They spun me round to face J.J., who was staring at me with an expression of baffled sadness.

  “You’ve really disappointed me, Felix,” she told me.

  “J.J.,” I said, “you’re only saying that to make me feel good.”

  One of the guards punched me in the stomach to show willing, and as I doubled up on a painful whoof of air, Jenna-Jane chided him as gently as she’d chided me. “No violence,” she said. “This is a place of civilized discourse. Just show him out, and bring me the tapes from this session, when they’re changed. I want to know what they were talking about. I’m sorry you were disturbed, Rosie.”

  “It was all rather exciting,” said Rosie. “Come again soon, Fix.”

  “I’m afraid Mr. Castor isn’t in our good books anymore. It’s not likely he’ll be back.”

  “Count on it, Rosie,” I wheezed.

  The guards gave me a bit more civilized discourse on the way to the front door, but nothing that would leave any marks.

  As I walked, a little shakily, back to the car I played Rosie’s words over in my mind. Staying with Mr. Steiner. Since Peckham Steiner was dead and buried, while the guy I’d briefly gotten acquainted with on board the Collective was definitely alive, that left one intriguing possibility, for which I’d need Nicky’s help.

  And maybe—you’ll have to pardon the expression—I could kill two birds with one stone.

  Fifteen

  WHAT DO I LOOK LIKE?” NICKY DEMANDED, THROWING out his arms indignantly. “A fucking flophouse? Beds for all, extra blankets on request?”

  “It’ll just be for a day or two, Nicky. Maybe less than that. She could just wake up of her own accord, anytime, and walk out of here.”

  “Take your demon slut somewhere else, Castor. You already fucked my life up more than enough for one week.”

  We were in the main auditorium of the cinema, where Nicky keeps the pump and the generator for his air-conditioning rig. I’ve never been able to work out the intricacies of his power-swapping and volt-laundering, but somehow he manages to keep about a thousand cubic meters at a well-chilled four degrees Celsius without making a needle tremble anywhere in the whole national grid. I think there’s a hamster in a wheel somewhere, running its little heart out.