Psykogeddon (16 page)

All the same, even in this hunched-up state, there seemed to be something slightly
off
about Defane's body in a purely physical sense. It was nothing as blatant as a Fattie piling metric tonnes on a birdlike skeletal frame, but there was some subtle sense that this was a body that had been made to do things for which it wasn't suited, put through contortions that were wrong for its basic frame, over a period of years.

Of course, this sense of wrongness might have had more to do with the blood and other matter smeared over her face than anything else.

She had bitten her lips and tongue, doing not quite enough damage to make it worth Psi-Division personnel, afraid as they were of whatever communicable mental disease she now had, coming in to fit her with a mouth-guard. Then, by the look of the holding-cell wall, she had smeared her own blood on it, then rubbed her face against the wall to daub herself.

The result, in the end, looked as if she had been trying to put on a mask.

"You dare," said Psi-Judge Sela Defane with a cold and murderous calm. "Don't you dare."

Her voice was slightly mushy, due to the self-inflicted damage to her mouth, but Karyn could hear what she said perfectly - automatically reading the speech-centre impulses being sent to the damaged lips and tongue.

"What?" said Karyn. Not because she hadn't heard; she just didn't know what Sela meant.

"Don't you dare put your grubby fingers in my head," said Sela. "I know where they've been."

"What?" Karyn said again. "I've never..."

"The fingers you
think
about," said Psi-Judge Dela Defane. "Don't put the fingers in your mind in me. Don't you dare."

"I... just want to talk," said Karyn, making absolutely drokking sure she didn't do the thing she sometimes did with other Psis who she actually liked, of actively synchronising speech-centres to some extent. "I want to know about the body you read."

"What do you want to know about the body I read?" For all the world it was as if Sela Defane was a transputer-routine. Ask a question and you get an answer - but you only get what you ask for. Garbage in, garbage out.

"What happened to you?" Karyn said. "What happened to you when you read the body?"

"I felt... I saw..." It wasn't as if Defane was groping for the right words in any human way. It was more in the nature of attempting to access information, looking for data-files that simply were not there.

"What do you mean?" said Karyn.

"It was like the world wasn't there," Psi-Judge Sela Defane said at last. "It was there but it wasn't real. It was like a copy of it, right down to the last detail, so it didn't matter. I could do what I wanted. I could do what I liked..."

Across the public chamber from the Chief Judge's private offices were cells designed for those rare occasions when the Chief Judge was directly involved in dealing with a prisoner. Since the Justice System operated, for the most part, on the principle of Instant Justice, administered by the Judge on the spot, these cells had not actually been used in months.

The last time this cell had been used, in fact, was to detain a would-be assassin who had somehow managed to evade the guards - and for that matter every other Judge in the Halls of Justice - and attempted to blast the Chief Judge with a Screaming Meatgun.

The SJS were swearing blind that it was impossible to discover precisely who the would-be assassin was, particularly since he had, unfortunately, committed suicide by way of a bomb-implant that had resulted in the almost complete vaporisation of his body, shortly after being placed in their care by Hershey after she had taken him down.

This had, however, been the impetus for the Justice Department to start dealing with Screaming Meatguns slightly more seriously than they had before. So that was all right, then.

In one of these cells, alone with Efil Drago San, the worst single day of Barnstable Wheems's life was getting worse. The façade of confidence and equilibrium he had worn in public for the hearing was deserting him by the second. He had been given barely an hour to prepare for the hearing, and five minutes into that hour he had come to the conclusion that he was completely out of his depth.

His expertise, such as it was, was in evading the Law by a variety of statutory hand-waving techniques. When it came to the processes of Criminal Law -
International
Criminal Law - he wasn't waving his hands by any stretch of the imagination; he was drowning.

He'd only gotten this far by sheer bluff. It couldn't last.

And then there was the matter of Drago San himself. Efil Drago San was the first actual criminal Wheems had ever met - his job, after all, was to keep his rich paymasters from ever being defined as criminals in the first place.

And if you're going to meet your first actual criminal, it is probably better for the nerves if that criminal is not a mass murderer with a death count score in the thousands.

It did only a little for Wheems's peace of mind that the man's paraplegic floater was still without power, Drago San having been manhandled into this cell by way of a pair of burly techs and a heavy-duty gimbal-rig.

As it was, Wheems stayed back against the far wall and out of reach of the hugely strong arms under the fat. As far as he knew, Drago San preferred to kill at a remove, by some device or by delegating the matter to some minion, but there was no telling what he might do while stuck in a cell, with only the option of a single person on which to slake his thirst for killing.

And that, broadly, was what this private conference with his client was about.

"That is an entirely unethical suggestion," Wheems said primly. "I cannot be party to-"

"Oh, give it a rest, Wheems," said Drago San wearily. Now that he was out of the public eye of the hearing-chamber, his façade of catatonia had left him, and he was entirely in possession of himself.

"You're no doubt thinking that these walls are simply packed with monitoring and recording devices," he said, "busily monitoring and recording away, as a matter of course. You're probably right, as it happens - in the fact that they exist, but not that they're busily monitoring away and recording."

He smiled a little gloatingly, which seemed, to Wheems, to be something of his default state, whether he was actually smiling or not. "For somebody who makes such a good living besting the Judges at their own game, you seem to have a profound paucity of understanding as regards the innermost workings of their minds."

"Why don't you enlighten me, then," said Wheems, in much the same way that one cannot allow fear to show to an angry dog. If dogs had still existed.

Again he reminded himself, there was nothing that Drago San could actually do, here and now, with his paraplegic floater disabled.

"You have to remember," said Efil Drago San, "that the Judges of this fair city-state tend get a little, shall we say, over-zealous about the procedures of their Law. The unkind might say they're entirely and positively fetishistic about it.

"Look at the way they dress - I mean, all that black polypropylene and padding might be just the ticket when they're riding around on their glorified scooters, but they're just plain silly when investigating murders, conducting door-to-door-searches or holding interdepartmental meetings. Even the most heavily equipped combat-troopers of history, I gather, didn't wear their combat gear when they were off the battlefield. In that respect, I've always thought the Judges of Brit-Cit had the right idea. The Brit-Cit Judge with the highest clear-up rate in the city goes around with no more protection than a grubby old raincoat.

"In any case, I digress. It's a bad habit of mine. I really should do something to curb it. I'll be talking away, don't you know, completely going off on some tangent or other, utterly oblivious to the fact that some people regard it a form of slow torture while they wait for me to return to something even so much as approaching the point.

"For some reason they seem a little hesitant about simply telling me to shut up and get to the point. I can't imagine why. I mean, it's not as if I'd take umbrage and start busily contriving some manner of bringing about their slow and excruciating deaths. Most of the time, anyway. A significant minority of the time, at least. If I really
did
go around killing absolutely everyone whom I considered would be better dead, I'd never be stopping.

"What was I talking about? Oh, yes. The point about this fetishisation of the Law is that they find themselves entirely bound up in it, as it were. It leaves no room to think about anything else. They've got it into their heads that the rules of this so-called hearing require private consultation between defendant and counsel. It would never even occur to them to break that privacy. It's like a blind spot in their minds.

"The upshot is, I believe, that you can tell me anything in here, without having to worry about how it sounds. Do, please, tell me your objection to the direction in which I see my defence proceeding, without the self-serving rigmarole of whether it's ethical or not."

"We'll never get away with it!" Wheems wailed. "They'll never stand for it!"

Some detached and coldly clinical piece of his mind realised, without really caring either way, that his voice was cracking. There was something of the quality of an upset child. "Whatever happens to you, they'll make it their business to go after me. They'll destroy me. I should go now. Rescue myself from the hearing. Maybe they'll go easy on-"

"You will do nothing of the kind, Wheems," said Drago San.

"What?" Barnstable Wheems was momentarily puzzled by the abrupt change in Drago San's tone. It took him a moment to get it.

"I've gone to quite a considerable amount of time and effort, off and on, over the years, to put myself
precisely
in this current position." The smooth inconsequentiality of Drago San's demeanour had gone completely, to be replaced by an utter, dead and vicious coldness.

His tone was entirely informative - it didn't threaten you with death, it flatly told you that you were dead. All that was left, at this point, was the quibbling over the details and how long you had left.

"I haven't gone to all that time and effort," he continued, "just to have you fall apart on me now. You're worried about what the Mega-City Justice Department can do to you? Well, believe me, that's nothing to what I, in my small way, can cause to happen. Unless you've forgotten the unfortunate incident of the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton."

Just the standard spray-and-spatter of a single living creature stabbed brutally to death, no more than that.

And this was, of course, the threat that had been hanging over the head of Barnstable Wheems all this time.

"All it will take," said Efil Drago San, "is for the Lady Honoria Slocombe to learn of the evidence connecting you to the disappearance of her cat to make your life... interesting in a wide variety of ways, if extremely short. You know how these old biddies get about their pets.

"She'll spend the last dregs of her wealth and power getting to you, even if you manage to place yourself in Protective Custody - and I have no doubt that she'll think of things to do to you, once she has you, that would not occur even to me."

Every effort had come to nothing, then. Walking away now would put Wheems back in square one. It was, however, still preferable to carrying on like this.

"Then I'll fight to prove my innocence," Wheems said. "I'll prove it somehow, because I
know
that I did not kill the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton and cut her up with a big knife and throw the bits around my bathroom."

"Ah, well, the thing about that," said Efil Drago San, "is that actually, you did."

There was another of those moments of blank incomprehension.

"What?" said Wheems.

"Physically, it was your hand on the big knife, and your brain and body making it do things," said Efil Drago San. "The fact that certain mental-conditioning techniques and mind-restructuring nanospores were involved, courtesy of an associate of mine who shall for the moment remain nameless, is neither here nor there."

"What?" Wheems said again, as this new information took its own good time to sink in. "You're telling me I was... conditioned somehow so that I actually killed the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton and cut her up with a big knife?"

Efil Drago San sighed. "As ever, you have it the wrong way round. The plain fact is, over your years of association with the Lady Honoria Slocombe, you came to loathe and despise what I believe you would passionately term 'that filthy, disease-ridden excuse for a flea-bag'. And you were none too fond of the cat, either. It took nothing more than a bare minimum of influence - light contact-hypnosis, I understand - to have you experiencing a psychotic break, abducting the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton, killing her with a big knife and enjoying it all the while.

"That was when my associates went to work in earnest, wiping all memory of the incident and actively restructuring your mind. You are, in actual fact, a slightly but significantly different person in several respects.

"A person who, for one thing, would
never
kill the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton with a big knife... and would find it impossible to even so much as imagine doing so. That's why, of course, you have been so blankly - even hysterically - sure of your fundamental innocence, without the thought that you might have, somehow, been
made
to do it even occurring to you."