The Scioneer

THE SCIONEER

Published by Peter
Bouvier at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Peter
Bouvier

For Abigail

Cover art designed by
Steve Clement-Large at
www.mydogateart.blogspot.com

Special thanks to
Martin Moth

Smashwords Edition,
License Notes

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Chapter 1

Lek
Gorski
had waited too
long. Twenty years too long to be precise. He pressed his forehead
against the cool windowpane of his high-rise flat and tried to
recall better times. He thought about Crystal. Where was she
tonight? Dancing in The Shangri-La perhaps, or working upstairs in
the Swinging Hammocks. The city lights of London beckoned Lek down
to the party, but it was already late and the electricurfew sirens
would soon break the silence. His room was stifling. For a moment,
he considered another hour in the Dynagym on Tooley Street – it had
been weeks since he had managed to work up a free day – but he had
drunk too much Juniperus already that evening and his head ached.
Instead, he drained his glass and lit a dozen or so candles around
the room before lights-out.

This
room, which had once been only his place of work, his laboratory,
had become over the years his home and sanctuary from the madness
of the city streets. Madness which he in part had created. He knew
that much. Beatlemania, he thought to himself, I see the evidence
every time I step outside. He looked around the room: the clinical
equipment and scientific apparatus which had once filled the
stainless steel shelves had given way in time to jam-jars, spice
racks, knick-knacks, and souvenirs from lonely trips to Paris and
Prague he’d rather have forgotten. Still, better times than this.
The candle wicks sizzled in the humidity.

When the
energy crisis hit, a decade ago now, Lek found himself avoiding the
dangers of the city after dark by staying later at his desk, and
scribbling notes and chemical formulae by candlelight. He
maintained, at the time, that buying the zed-bed was unavoidable,
but in reality, he was happy to leave behind that rat-hole in the
Peckham Projects and his landlord’s extortionate rent.

If money
was an issue then, it certainly wasn’t now. Lek Gorski was a man of
simple tastes, or at least, he let himself believe he was.
Naturally, the company paid for all his work needs – alco, base,
extracts, hypos, mice – but they also covered all his personal
costs: everything from the candles and gin, to restaurant bills,
presents for selected friends on his approved list, and holidays.
He even had his own company biorg to drive. For a man who had known
poverty as a boy, the idea of a life without financial concern was
not to be ignored. He wished now he had walked away then. If only
he could turn back time and tell his cocky nineteen year old self
what he was getting into. Instead, he was trapped: just like one of
his own white mice, spinning on the wheel in the small
hours.

Lek
push
ed open the window.
The night air was thick and offered no respite from the heat
indoors. No surprise for October in London. He thought about
throwing his empty glass down into the great, greasy river below.
He wouldn’t see or hear the splash from this height. The notion of
throwing himself out of the window flashed across his mind, but his
brain summarily dismissed the idea as a solution to an impossible
equation. Would anybody see or hear that splash? Would anybody
care? Pechev, thought Lek. Only Pechev.

He
gingerly made his way to the
bathroom, swearing as he barked his shin on a low filing cabinet.
He washed his face with cold water, pulled his hands across the
stubble on his cheeks and ran his fingers through his mop of dark
brown hair. From the rooftops, the sirens sounded. His reflection
was sorrowful. I should go to one of those beautox parlours, he
thought. I’m too young to look this old. Just then the
electricurfew cut in and the room was pitched into
darkness.

The howling
began instantly.

Chapter 2

If there
was one thing Lek understood, it was drugs. He had been studying
the properties and interactions of elements, compounds, acids and
alkalis since the day his father had presented him with a second
hand chemistry set, nearly 35 years ago. Little had he known back
the
n that his childish
experiments – watching sodium fizz through water, and making his
own fireworks from strontium - would lead in time to a PhD in
biomedicine and another in pharmacology. Doctor Gorski indeed. So
when he woke up with a headache throbbing behind his eyes and a
mouth that tasted of copper and ash, he knew exactly what he needed
to take.

Lek pored
through the
contents of
his extensive medicine cabinet like a barman inventing a new
cocktail; his long fingers moved across the jars and bottles like a
virtuoso. He pressed his own carefully chosen mixture of chemicals
into pills and washed down a handful of them with a ginseng
espresso, then showered, laser-shaved for the first time in days
and squeezed some Optimax into his eyes. After a second espresso,
he felt like a new man. Just as well: he had been summoned to a
meeting with Pechev and he needed to look his best.

By eight
o clock, the sun was already burning through the perma-ash clouds,
and the sky had taken on a heavy violet hue. Between songs from the
twenty-twenties, the Retro AM weathercast predicted temperatures
tipping three hundred Kelvin. Lek picked through his wardrobe for
something smart and light; something which wouldn’t show great dark
patches of perspiration when the heat and his nerves got the better
of him in front of Pechev. He settled on a white linenine short
suit without a shirt, and snakeskin flip-flops – simple and
classic.

He picked
up his battered briefcase of papers, base graft extracts and sample
scions and headed out. Before leaving, he lingered in the doorway
for a moment, surveying the contents of his sad little laboratory
apartment. His eyes fell upon an old framed photograph of his
parents, standing outside a holiday cottage on the coast of
Norfolk, many years ago. His father: frowning into the sunlight,
his square smile like a bright blade. And Lek’s mother, looking
wistful as always, clinging to her husband, her dark hair blowing
in the breeze. For reasons only his subconscious understood, Lek
raised his fingers to his lips and blew them a kiss before closing
the door. In the apartment opposite, somebody was playing Chopin on
an electric pianola. Lek smiled and made his way downstairs. The
lifts didn’t work before nine.

Having
decided he would walk to the meeting, rather than take the
biorg,
which had begun
to smell in the heat, Lek stepped out into the underpass. Two black
urchinos were picking fat green lumps from the carpet of moss that
covered the concrete.

‘You shouldn’t
eat that,’ said Lek, ‘it’ll make your tummies bad.’

‘Yeah?
What would you know, geek?’ said the elder of the two. Lek has seen
him around, begging in the Metro, sleeping in the underpass – a
hollow cheeked sprat of a boy, wearing nothing but an oversized
‘Rabies Bites!’ T-shirt, which hung below his knees. A nice kid, in
spite of appearances.

‘Yeah – what
would you know, geeeek?’ chorused the second, who was possibly a
six, maybe a malnourished seven year old girl in a faded striped
bikini.

‘Well, I’m a
doctor, so I would know... actually’. Lek felt himself being drawn
to their level.

‘Give us
some c
red then,
Doc.’

‘Pleeease
Doc. Spare a bit of change eh?’

Lek was
only carrying twenty-cred notes and was unwilling to part with hard
cash. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I’ll treat you two to breakfast, if you
want?’

The girl
looked wary at first, but the boy – ‘My name’s Wez!’ – bounded over
to Lek’s side like an eager puppy and the two fell in behind as Lek
Gorski made his unhurried way around the building and up to the
river bank.

The
sunlight shining on the South Bank hit him like a slap in the face.
I should have had those reactalites fitted, he thought, as he
raised a hand to shade his eyes and take in the view. It had been
over a decade since the Imagine Party has breezed through the
elections with their winning ‘Let It Be’ campaign, urging the
country to let the Earth “fight back”. And the Earth had fought
back, with a vengeance: nowhere was the evidence more compelling
than here in London. Where there had once been clean lines, clear
demarcations between the council’s so-called ‘green spaces’ and the
concrete and asphalt, now the pavements were cracked with roots and
stained yellow with lichen; weeds, three feet tall, grew between
each flagstone; grass verges were havens for wild birds and
butterflies, and the Royal Parks were nothing more than overgrown
jungles. Signs reading ‘Any unauthorised cutting of vegetation is
strictly forbidden. Violators will be prosecuted.’ were forced away
from brickwork by Virginia creeper and wisteria. Huge patches of
weed and algae slipped through the fingers of wild verbena,
trailing down from the bridges, and wrapped around the mossy hulls
of riverboats and ferries. Lek noticed a swollen biorg clinging
lifelessly to a mooring rope. The clocks of Big Ben peeped out from
underneath a heavy fringe of ivy, and the Eye, long since abandoned
as a tourist attraction, was now a breeding ground for herons,
which lazily dropped from the heights to pluck fat trout and
catfish from the Thames.

The Metro
was unreliable at best, and the fetid stench of rotting vegetation,
shit and vomit emanating from the underground was strong enough to
kill a horse, so in spite of the heat, Lek was content to walk, his
two companions scurrying behind. He mulled over the possible
reasons why Pechev had asked to see him. Sure, all business these
days was conducted in person – only a few people were stupid enough
to risk their health with a mobile phone - but Pechev normally sent
one of his middlemen bulldogs: Vidmar the Scar, or Delić, reeking
of garlic, and popping goji berries like his sex-life depended on
them. Pechev never came in person, so when the message came through
the wire last week, Lek found his chest tightening and his palms
sweating at the thought of a meeting with the main man. He wouldn’t
kill me in public, Lek reasoned. Besides, he needs me. I know too
much. Perhaps I know
too
much... Lost
in his own world, Lek stumbled over a cracked paving stone and came
back to his senses. Wez and his sister, Latisha, were beginning to
complain about having to walk, and Lek was happy to be drawn out of
his morbid thoughts.

‘Doc,
where we going?’

‘Yeah,
Doc, where’s you taking us?’

‘The
Mash-Up on Southwark Street. I have to meet a man there at ten.
We’re early, but they won’t let you in without something on your
feet, so when we get there, you sit outside, and I’ll have the
waitress bring something out. What would you like?’

‘I’d like
an alfalfa-sprout slice!’

‘I want a
soya Danish and ginseng-juice!’

Lek smiled, in
spite of himself: six year olds drinking ginseng.... what was the
world coming to?

Mash-Up
was a Dutch chain of hash-bars which had cornered the Europa
market, nonchalantly beating back competition from Skunkhouse, Mary
Jane’s Coffee-Shop, and a host of other American franchises, with
its laid back attitude to marketing and customer service. Still,
nobody could complain about the quality of their product, and the
ubiquity of their logo – a heavy-lidded pothead called Shrug,
sucking on a giant joint and smiling woozily – was testament to
Mash-Up’s popularity.

There was
a thick fug inside the Southwark Street bar, but only a few
customers, all smoking hookah pipes and mini-bongs and reading the
free broadsheets. Lek ordered a chai latte with a hash-brownie to
help calm his nerves. It felt good to throw Pechev’s money around,
so he asked the waitress to give the two urchinos outside whatever
they wanted. Lek noticed a raw mobile-phone lesion as she curled
her hair behind her ear. Some people will never learn, he thought,
as he sank into a bearskin sofa, under a giant spider-plant, and
gave the kids a thumbs-up through the window. Wez rolled his eyes,
but managed to look happy at least.