She

by Peter Gifford

“Sure, I’ve met her. Once. And if Allah still walks with me it’ll be the last time too. I wouldn’t go back there again for all the little coloured tiles in Istanbul. You wanna hear about it? Why should I tell you? You come in here like you own the place, asking me about things that happened in some other life, why should I start spilling the beans to you now, when I’ve keep it to myself so long? I’ve got myself nicely set up too, thanks very much. I get the tourist trade, and who’s to know if those photos on the wall are real after all? Except maybe you of course. I can see you ain’t no tourist ...

“Alright, I get it. You can put that away. Seems it’s your lucky night anyways, ’cause I’ve just closed up and I’m in a talking mood. And I’ve picked you already, did so when you walked in the door. You’re Pakir’s son, ain’t you? I can tell by the way you punched open that door. Looking for a fight, just like Pakir. Looking to make a name for yourself.

“Set down here, that’s right, and I’ll pour you a glass of synthitea. Yeah, I can get the real stuff, but I’m fresh out. Make like a tourist for a while. I’ll bring you a neon hookah too if you like. Hah! Things have changed. The tourists have got dumber, the carpets cheaper, the old ways have slid away like lokum on a summer’s day.

“Get on with it you say? Ay, just like your father. Pakir was never one for taking in the scenery, he wanted action, he wanted to be the best of the best, and back in those days the best was ready for the taking. It was back in ’49 — well, you know that — after the MidEast Alliance ran out of steam and the NewCrusaders had got enough support for a storm of the city. Those old walls came in handy again that day. You know the history, I know, but bear with me, because not everyone knows why the NCs picked that day to hit the walls.

“We all felt it when the seismos went off. Even the rug sellers stopped mid-pitch, I can tell you, those that were still up and at the job. It was late you see, late enough for the Topkapi to be closed for the day and an innocent-looking boy in his late teens to be in way over his head. Not your father, boy, me! I had to start somewhere, didn’t I? And I had talent in those days, that’s right, raw talent with the guts to match it.

“I remember the shudder going through the city well, because right then I had my skinny hand reaching through the gap between two motion detectors and my fingers grazing the scabbard of the Topkapi dagger. Oh yes, I was that close, and don’t you go leaning back in your chair like that. Besides, I keep telling you, things were different back then. None of your anti-grav molecular frisson fields, oh no, just basic technology, laser motion detectors and good old-fashioned guards armed with high-caliber Halberg 88s.

“Anyway, there I was, a moment from history, then a moment later there was a low, long rumble, like the noise my old dad used to make when he woke up on the couch, and then the shocks came, big enough to throw me back smack bam into a cabinet full of antique frenicules. They can make a noise when they hit the ground I can tell you. I knew the game was up, and presumably so did every guard within a day’s run. But as I lay there picking copper flakes off my secondhand black plastisuit (bought that day in the Thieve’s Quarter section of the Kapali Carsi) and waiting for the thugs to come and beat me up, I realised all wasn’t right in the city of Istanbul. I could hear sirens, even shouting, in the distance, and the echos of that low rumbling hadn’t been dispelled by the crash of falling frenicule fragments. Maybe I had a chance after all. I pushed myself off the floor, grabbed the first thing that looked like loot and headed for the door.”

Out in the street schmachma was at industrial levels. I’d sprinted through the Topkapi grounds and over the wall without so much as a ’hey you!’ and was heading for the Galata Bridge, where I had a getaway boat moored. But before I was two streets off the Topkapi hill I realised I wasn’t going to make it. The city was in chaos. People were filling the streets like sludge in a storm drain, gooms lay overturned and on fire, it looked like the power grid was down, and I could hardly see through the smoke and flashing emergency lights. Before long I was bashing luckless locals over the head just to make some kind of progress through the crowd. You’ve heard how many people died that night haven’t you? Well I was in the thick of it. I could feel blows to my body as I pushed and punched, trying to get to the shopfronts so I could climb up above the madness. Then, just when I felt I was going down, a hand reached from above, Allah himself come to save a poor thief like me. Well not quite, it was your father. There he was, grinning like a devil from his perch on a shop awning, reaching down to haul me up out of the sea of sinners. Well I wasn’t about to start pleading innocence. Up I went, beating of frantic hands as Pakir hauled me up to safety. And without a word we were off over the rooftops, heading down to the waterfront.

I can see you’re about to ask if I knew your father up ’til that point; well, I’d seen him around. We moved in the same circles, you know? Started off fighting in the same p-theft gangs down at the Bazaar, haggled over who’d fleece the tourist and who’d put on the sad face, practiced the shock-and-sprint routine at the baths. We both knew all the tricks. So they’d been a little healthy rivalry, but you didn’t trust anyone growing up in the Bazaar. OK, maybe a bit of active dislike. But this was one of those times you filled in the cracks with vermiculant, you know what I’m saying? He could see I wasn’t strolling about the city in a black plastisuit for my health, and I knew he wasn’t about to start saying he’d just saved my life for nothing. But right now he was a good friend to have by your side, up on the roofs watching the apocalyptic light show that the NCs were putting on for the city. Thermoblasts were lining the northern hills like giant red cauliflowers. I could see three breaches in the modern parts of the walls from where we were standing, and light blue-helmeted NC troops were swarming through the gaps like lice on a beggar’s baksidikan. Turning to the east, distant flashes etched the black silhouette of Suleymaniye’s mosque on the eye. Istanbul looked to be getting ready to change it’s name again.

Pakir gave me an dark obsidious grin and jumped the gap between two roofs, shouting above the chaos as he ran and I tried to catch up.

“You’re heading for the Bridge — don’t bother, some Traditionalist brought it down hours ago. Said it was time to separate east and west. Guess he had a point after all!”

I was running hard but noticed we’d taken a turn to the north, heading parallel to the shore.

“Don’t worry Asmet, I’ve got a plan. We’re partners now.’ He stopped and gave me that grin again. ’Partners in crime.”

We ran, climbed, jumped and ran again for maybe twenty minutes, north for a while then west, deeper into the city. The area was quieter, though I would have thought we were heading straight for the troops and the explosions. Most of the damage here seemed to be by looters. I saw a scrawny man struggling under the weight of a carpet he’d just pulled from a broken shop window. A family huddled in the opening of an alley, children open-mouthed and eyes screwed up tight. Scattered citizens ran down the street opposite to the way we were heading. But Pakir seemed to know where he was going.

I was feeling a stitch coming on when he suddenly shimmied down a drainpipe to the street. He stopped for a moment to see if I was still following, then turned and began to walk across the street like he was out for a weekend stroll. Only then, finally, did I realise where we were. Pakir was heading for an old building that we had all known since we were kids was the place you stayed away from. The old gynotorium.

You’ve heard of that place, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You would have heard how people went in and never came out, and maybe some of what happened in there, and you know the rumours about Her. The place had it’s own private army, though you never saw them, and it’s own way of doing things, and the city never asked any questions. The building reeked of decay and age-old power, and although it had always been what they used to call a Turkish Bath, nothing in there was about cleanliness anymore. Pakir was through the huge old wooden doors before I could stop him, the ancient valves swinging open at his touch. I stood in the street for a while, by myself, hearing the explosions getting closer. I tell you I would have stood there all night, only a flying goom streaked by and laid a thermoblast barely thirty yards from where I was standing. I carefully weighed up the options for a second and ducked inside the doors. At least the building was old and strong.

Inside it was dark, and immediately I felt a clinging dampness in the air. When my eyes adjusted I saw I was in some kind of large waiting room, wooden benches surrounding a central low-walled garden, and small doors leading off into what were presumably changing rooms all around the walls and at balcony level above. Pakir was waiting for me at the entrance to a corridor opposite, hands on his hips, looking as confident as you please. He smiled as I stood there just inside the doors.

“Come on Asmet, we haven’t got all night. The NCs’ll be all over the city soon, and I know a way that’ll get us out of the city in one piece.” He cocked his head towards the passage behind him. “Trust me.”

I didn’t have much choice, and I was starting to believe the stories were only stories anyway. And stories didn’t rip you into little smoking pieces the way thermoblasts did. So I followed him down the passage and into another small room, and then through another thick wooden door covered with ornate iron bosses. I got that far before I realised what a mistake I’d made. Of course by that time it was way too late.

This is what you’ve come to hear isn’t it boy? If She really existed, and what it was like in there, in the place where you went in but never came out. Well I guess this is your lucky day, ’cause I’m the only one who ever did come out. Except your father I guess. But I don’t much care what happened to him.

Well, some of the rumours are true. She was there alright, lying like some kind of beached mermaid on a huge round marble slab that dominated the room. Now first I have to tell you it was hot in there — the kind of heat and damp that got the sweat dripping off the end of your nose in a matter of minutes. And her skin glistened like pearls in oil, smooth and wet, moisture dripping off her curves and into a pool that gathered around her on the marble where a shallow depression had been worn by her body, and running off into a trough that circled the slab. And she was beautiful alright. I remember I felt myself harden just looking at her, though it’s been a long time now. Above us the ceiling curved high into a stone hemisphere pierced with thick lattice work through which moonbeams and light from the distant explosions flickered. It was all kind of beautiful, if you disregarded the corpses. They were propped up around the room in the corners, thrown into pools, reclining gruesomely on slabs, all wet and emaciated with the life sucked out of them in varying amounts. And every one was linked to Her by a thin glistening cord of flesh that snaked into a thick cord attached to the base of her spine.

Around her were maybe twenty attendants, fat men naked save for dirty white sheets wound about their loins. Some adjusted the positions of the poor bodies around the room, some ladled liquid onto her recumbent form, and at least two real big bastards were standing right behind us. Pakir was struggling with a show of jollyarity but I could tell he was as shit-scared as me. I spared him a pissed-off glance and he shrugged his scrawny shoulders.

“I brought him to you Ma’am,” he said, stepping forward with his head down. If we hadn’t been sweating so much from the heat he would have been sweating buckets from fear; his voice shook like an old man laying out a prayer rug. “just like you told me to, Ma’am.”

“Hello boys.” It was a shock, hearing that voice come out of that sweet young mouth. There were long years in that voice, years of making orders and getting them carried out. “I’m so glad to see you, little Asmet.”

Now this I wasn’t expecting. Getting hitched up to her like a fourteen-year old bride maybe, but not being called by name. I could feel the rivers of sweat running through the wrinkles in my plastisuit.

“You’ve been a bad boy Asmet, you’ve taken something that belongs to Mummy, something she planned long and hard to get. And now Mummy wants it back ...” She raised herself up and rested on one slender white arm. The other traced a slippery path up the side of her body, slid under and over her breast, up her neck and pulled over the top of her shining bald head. I was as hard as a rock now, bugger the corpses.

“Yes, we worked hard didn’t we boys? I didn’t spend the last five years making deals with everyone from the Druggers to the Pres organising this NC hit just to see the little ants of this city scamper from under the boot, now did I? Though it’s been fun —” she waved a hand over to where a holoscreen floated high against the wall. I made out scenes of chaos from all over the city “ — to watch ... and when that this lovely distraction is all set to start, and my offworld friends are all eager to get their merchandise, who would come along at the crucial moment but a little dry boy from the wrong quarter of the markets, throwing all my carefully laid plans into disarray? Yes, you, Asmet, you little scamp, you ball-less boy, you fucking motherfucker, GIVE ME MY DAGGER !!!”

Well I couldn’t say no to the lady now could I? Apart from the whole sucking the lifeforce out of innocents thing — you see it now don’t you, the Altarians had far more refined techniques to keep them alive for centuries, I suppose they’d been selling her some cut down version of the biotech necessary in exchange for her feeding their little obssession for collecting — well, apart from that, she was still a damn attractive woman, and I was a young man back then, the fire of life in my loins and a dab hand at pegging stones at shopkeepers. So I whipped out the Topkapi Dagger from where I’d hidden it in my plastisuit and let her have it from twenty paces. Right up to the jewelled hilt it went, right between those perfect breasts. Your poor old father, he was still too close to her, and as I dodged those fat guards and sprinted for the door I caught a glimpse of her hugging him her close. Getting her to pull it out I imagine. He always was a dab hand with the ladies, your father. I can still see that place in my mind’s eye, always with the same strange mixture of lust and horror. And I hear her screaming as I ran out the room, screaming with that horrible voice that should have belonged to the body of someone two hundred years old or more .... “damn you, and I’m still only MIDDLE-AGED!!!!!”

So you know the story now. I got out of the city; still don’t know how, and got myself a rough passage on a trans-euro goom that sped right over the glass plains to Old London. i won’t tell you how I earned the fare. In Old London I scraped by for a while ’til I had enough for a professional musover, and with my new skill on the banjo joined a band of travelling players. You may have heard of us — Topkapi and the Slippery Women. No? Well, we were big for a while, playing refugee camps and Axis strongholds until the war petered out and I could catch a goom back to Istanbul and set up this bar. I figured twenty years was enough time for things to die down.

And now you stroll in, looking like Pakir come back to life, and no doubt looking for answers. But before you do what you came here to do, just let me give you one more thing ...“

“I know Officer, it’s a funny thing, the door was open. I know it’s kinda early for a drink, but I’m kind of a regular. There he was, sprawled on the floor with that great hole in his chest. What’s that? Did I see the murder weapon? No, officer, never saw it. A dagger you say? Well, I suppose the guy who did him in took it with him ...”