Fools

by Pat Cadigan

  “You know God in there?” I say. I’d ask him if he knows me, but I’m not about to let some street shit know he’s got the advantage.

  “I don’t believe in God,” he says, edging away another step. “If it’s all the same to you.”

  “You’re magnum help.” I look around, sticking my hands in my pockets. This is the upper northwest quadrant of the’ Downs, nothing much around. Late as it is, most of the hypeheads have migrated southerly, where the real stuff is. Sojourn For Truth does business mostly with slummers from the rest of the city, tourists, and daytrippers.

  “My permit goes to midnight,” the neurosis peddler says defensively. “You got a problem with that?”

  I look at him. “What’s your fuck-up, eatin’ the profits again? Dipping into your own paranoia?”

  Now he moves a step toward me with a suspicious squint. “Don’t you know me?”

  “If I wanted to know you, I would.” I turn to go and he grabs my arm. The touch sets off one of those mental alarm bells and I reach for a comb automatically, without thinking about it.

  “Heya, heya!” He jumps back. “No need for it, no need! You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “So what the fuck difference does it make?” I say, getting all brass. “I remember you, I don’t remember you, big shit.”

  He’s got this big smile on his face now, and shiny little stars flecking his teeth. “Shoulda took the paranoia when I offered. Now look at you. You’re a mess. But it ain’t too late. Get paranoid now, and it could save your life.”

  “I don’t want paranoia. I want God.”

  He jerks his head at the place. “God took the day off. Know what God does on downtime?”

  “Plays chicken with the devil.”

  “Good one.” He winks, which is too cute. “Come on, little queenie. Have a little paranoia, good for what ails you.”

  I pop a comb and give him five little wet red beads on the hand reaching for me. He howls and backs off while I trip away, wiping the comb on my shirt.

  Now, if I was a Coney Loe, where would I go? If an information junkie knows everything, where does he go to find out? I’m still wiping the comb on my shirt when I feel a funny little crackle from the left-side pocket. I reach in, and find two little pieces of paper folded over, and when I open them up, I scan three names typed out on one, all with a U after them, and half a dozen addresses written on the other, starting with Sojourn For Truth.

  I wrote something down? I can write?

  Either I’m getting talented in my old age, or Monkey Shock planted this on me when they stuck me with the cop. And on the one hand, I got no reason to think that’s how it rolled out, but on the other, I got no better excuse for finding handwriting in my own pocket. The other list, I don’t know what to think. I never heard of any of them. They could be cops for all I know, U could stand for Undercover.

  Come on, now, Marya, I say to myself, however many of me there are at this moment; let’s think a little further. The addresses could be, I am thinking now, Coney Loe’s Things-To-Do list, and how I got it I don’t know, but it could happen. Or it could be the trail to Monkey Shock—go here, go there, go this place, go that place, one more stop, splash-down, and somebody wrote it down as I went, maybe me. I feel like maybe I can write, not just pound a keyboard. That would make Monkey Shock the last address on the list, so all I have to do is go there.

  Or—I’m thinking real hard now, and I feel so genius I begin to wonder if it’s the cop in me and maybe I don’t want to unload her so fast after all—or this is the cop’s list planted on me after all, but it’s all snitch-stops. The names are snitches.

  The more I think this, the more I get this strong feeling I’m online. Snitch-stops and snitch names. That would make real sense. So I decide I’ll take them in order. Sojourn For Truth’s out; the address under that is six blocks away.

  I’m so busy thinking new thoughts, I almost walk between these two onionheads, violating the integrity of their marriage space that besides getting sucked is the one other thing I don’t want to do today. I lunge to the side just as they step apart to clothesline me with their chain, and I hit the ground between a pair of stormtrooper boots.

  I look up and the onionhead looks down grinning like he’s been waiting all day for this to happen. The other one lets go with a war cry, the call of the violated onionhead spouse, and goes for me. I roll the other way and the onionhead bellyflops on cement, pulling her spouse down on top of her. I’m gone before they untangle themselves, but two blocks away, I can still hear them bellowing.

  Onionhead marriage is about as crazy as you can get without going up on a tower with an assault laser.

  I’m standing in front of a place called Savonarola’s Icon-Busters, which claims it can override my religious, political, or other fixated conditions, including Oedipus and Electra complexes, or just rid me of my unwanted tendency to defer to authority. There’s this big looping holo of Savonarola (I guess) in the window, panning the street like a grinning camera, all teeth and nose, and a canned voice saying, “Don’t worry … kick ass … don’t worry … kick ass” over and over.

  Now, I know what they got in there, which is about the cheapest kind of aversion therapy, where they fix it so every time you think about your father or something, you throw up or black out for a second or get a flash-migraine. What it really is, is a spank-parlor, a place for clowns who want to be punished for loving what they love. Doesn’t bust many icons, but it keeps the emergency rooms and dry-cleaners in business, not that they’re hanging by a string or anything.

  Good place for a snitch-stop, anyway. Who’s gonna figure somebody named Savonarola for that kind of aria?

  I step inside and the first thing I see is this guy sitting over in the corner on a pile of ratty old cushions who is obviously the guy in the holo. Don’t worry, kick ass. Makes sense to me. The guy looks at me, grunts, and closes his eyes. Just then, a Savonaroloid in a rubber suit comes through the curtained doorway from the back room, and when he sees me, he looks like he’s gonna puke himself. Maybe that makes me an icon now. I could get into that.

  The Savonaroloid crooks a finger like he thinks the air’s itchy and he’s got to scratch it. “Come on,” he says. “You’re overdue, you think everything waits for you?”

  Now, he’s one of those big guys, not like a man-mountain, but the kind that looms over you, with a mean jaw, ruby eyes, and nasty hair he cuts himself without looking in a mirror. Not somebody I want to argue with, even if he wasn’t already in the mood to do a little bodily harm. I follow him into the back and we go down this narrow hall. It doesn’t look familiar to me, but I keep thinking it’s supposed to. There are all these closed doors, and I can hear muffled groans and moans and just before we get to the last door, somebody yells, Nothing’s sacred, and what if it was!

  “Some of your customers really grind on it,” I say.

  “That’s not a customer.” The guy unlocks the door and shoves me inside. There’s a system on a table up against one wall and two lawn chairs and a lot of crappy sound-proofing tiles that don’t work on the walls. He jerks his chin at one of the chairs and goes over to the system, which looks like it’s built out of flea-market surplus. None of the component housings match and upgrade chips are sticking all over like little shiny warts.

  He catches me giving his pile of junk a funny look. “Hey, it works,” he says, and tosses me a pair of connections.

  “Urn … you got a tank?”

  “Don’t rush me.” He wanders over with what looks like a dog bowl and holds it out. “Okay, anytime. You pop ’em yourself, we don’t provide valet service here. In case you didn’t remember.”

  I’ve got my fingers up around my right eye and something tells me I don’t really want to do this. For one thing, I’ve never felt any special need to get spanked and for another, I can’t think of anything I worship. A jones is not an icon.

  “You wanna ice cream scoop?” he says, all sour.

  “You
got one?”

  “No. Come on, pop ’em and let’s go.”

  I get the right eye out and drop it in the tank, but the left one’s like a greased pig, I feel like I’m gonna end up squirting it through my head and out my ear. “How about just one eye out,” I say.

  He bends down and the last thing I see is his hooked pinky coming at me.

  When I felt the guy split after entering the system, I couldn’t believe my good luck—I’d hit a deep-undercover operative on the first try. His imp went into an activity loop with the spank-program and my own imp, while the part of him that was Brain Police came looking for signs indicating he was in touch with another officer. He found them easily enough—one cop always knows another. But he didn’t find me.

  The problem was, I hadn’t realized how much Hercules’ joybuzzer had screwed everything up. It was like being bound and gagged and locked in a closet, but able to watch everything through a hyper-peephole. The undercover’s confusion at my absence made ripples all over the place, but there was no way I could even signal him from my confinement.

  About the only thing he could figure out was that I was inaccessible while my imp was in the loop with his, doing whatever it was they could possibly do together. Was Marya really the type who’d be interested in a place like this?

  Abruptly, a new piece of information squirted in on me out of nowhere—Marya had appointments with every joint on the snitch-list, except for Sojourn For Truth, because hallucinogens weren’t safe. But Marya was supposed to know this, not me, and it was supposed to have come to her only when she entered each place, where she would be engaged in some kind of innocuous activity while an undercover made contact with me. Hercules’ joybuzzer had scrambled even more than I’d thought and there was no way to put it all back where it belonged short of a turbo-job.

  I know you We got to be in here somewhere, he said suddenly. And if you’re not coming out, I guess you’ve got your reasons. I’ve been deep undercover for a month now and this is the first time I’ve been out. Savonarola picked up word about some new merchandise this morning, so I have to assume that’s why the department made this appointment for you, if you can’t come out and tell me yourself.

  He waited to see if I were going to pop up. I couldn’t even flash a color at him.

  If you don ‘t come out and talk, I don’t know what information to give you, he added with a prod.

  How long was it going to take him to figure out something was wrong? I started to get angry, which did me no good at all.

  And if you’re in trouble, he went on suddenly, I can’t help you. I’m stuck for another two months, until I rotate out of undercover intelligence gathering. As soon as we disconnect, I’m dormant till they pull me in, or until I’m contacted again.

  Our wonderful intelligence-gathering method: gather intelligence and know nothing at the same time. Someone thought that made sense. Hell, I probably thought so, when I was myself.

  All right, he said. You’ll have to try the next address on your informant list. Sorry, time’s up; they’re coming out of the loop. Good luck, whoever you are.

  That about summed it up: good luck, whoever I was.

  It’s not just his lousy technique with the eyes that makes me mad. “So what was all that?” I say, getting up off the cheesy lawn chair. “I don’t remember a thing!”

  The Savonaroloid just shrugs. “If you don’t remember anything, it’s because there’s nothing to remember. That’s not my fault.”

  “Fuck if it ain’t.”

  “Go ahead and fuck, who’s stopping you?” He’s busy piddling with all the little system components on the table. “You’re only going to get out of this what you bring to it. I can’t help it if you didn’t have anything to bring.” He looks over his shoulder at me. “And I don’t like your attitude.”

  “You’re a spank artist,” I say. “You don’t like anything.” I stomp out, up the hall to the front room. Savonarola is still sitting like a lump on his pillows. This must be what he does all day, lump out.

  I’m about to stomp off when he holds up a box. “The Savonarola home game, so to speak,” he says, “good for twenty-four hours of home treatment after in-clinic therapy.”

  In-clinic. That’s the best lie anyone’s told me all day. I know that in the box there’s this volatile bag with connections hanging out of it, and I’m supposed to plug them in and get my illusions shattered or something. Icon-busting’s a good racket—if you got no icons to bust, so what, that’s your problem and they still get their money.

  I mean to stomp on out the door, but instead I say, “You sell one of those to Anwar?”

  His whole face shifts, kinda flattens out in some way. “What about Anwar?” he wants to know.

  “Never mind. Next time Anwar drops by for a puke, you can tell him I know his dirty little secret.” I take the air, and half a block away, I start thinking again.

  What I just did was not too smart. I go into a place that’s probably a snitch-stop, and I take a treatment I can’t remember phoning in for, and when I come out of it, I can’t remember that, either. Jesus, am I getting sclerosis after all? The whole place has gotta be a Brain Police operation and God knows what they slipped out of me. Maybe all they found out was I didn’t know anything, but still, I got no memory of anything and the only ones who operate that way are the Brain Police. So—

  Wait a minute. If it’s a Brain Police operation, they should have found her, the cop.

  Hell, maybe they did. Maybe they’re following me around waiting for me to lead them to Monkey Shock.

  Except I’m so scrambled from electroshock, they’re lucky to get alphabet soup from me. I’m not worth following. I decide I got to believe that as I head for the next address on the list, because the only other possibility is that the cop is riding piggyback on me and she just told them everything I know and maybe a few things I don’t, and this idea is too weird even for an old hard-core hypehead like me.

  The next address is a fetishizer. Yow! Now, why does anyone want a fetish? It’s supposed to be sexy, but how jaded do you have to be to go become a toe-sucker? The place has a lot of rooster-boys- dangling in the vicinity, which makes me think of mine, only I don’t see him.

  And then I got to pause for a second, because all of a sudden, I can’t remember him too well. When did we cook our deal? Where was I gonna meet him? There’s a small memory lane across the way and for a minute I think maybe I should go over and buy myself a good boost, get everything put in order. It oughta handle the electroshock amnesia. Thing is, it could pop up the cop, too, and I don’t want her too handy, her I want to forget and maybe she’ll go away. It could happen.

  One of the rooster-boys at the curb is grinning and getting ready to unbuckle, so I nip inside before he shakes me down for stiffing his stiff stuff. Rooster-boys are the only people in the world who expect a tip just for having a pickle in their pocket. I think.

  There’s a woman sitting behind a high desk; she’s bald except for one shiny bunch of hair sticking up like a horn just over her forehead, and she’s busy ignoring the two or three cases sitting in a little roped-off area, watching the catalog run on the wall until they get called in to get fetishized. I glance at the screens and look away quick.

  Jesus, who wants a tongue fetish? What is it with mouths today, why can’t I get away from them?

  Then I have this very weird flash, of some other woman behind a desk, spitting. The next thing I know, I’m hanging by my fingertips on the edge of this desk, dizzier than shit. One-horn takes a look and pounds my fingers with her fist, bang-bang-bang.

  “We don’t do fuck-ups,” she says. “Go down the street and get your blood changed first, if you’re so damned good-to-go.”

  “I’m not fucked up, I tripped.” I straighten up and push the spitter out of my head.

  Her expression changes from pissed to sour. “Oh. Didn’t recognize you in your make-over. I suppose you want the usual.”

  “God,” I say, “what c
heap, lousy kind of a fetish keeps wearing off?”

  “Your kind. What do you want for the money, a lousier childhood?” She points her horn at the waiting area. “Souse is busy, I’ll call you when she’s ready.”

  “But—”

  She growls. “I’ll call you. Or would you rather I whipped you?”

  “Whatever’s right, darling.”

  She starts to get up and I head for the waiting area. There are four grumpy souls who look like the day wasn’t worth it, still watching the wall because there’s nothing else to do. I take a seat that might be far enough from this funny-looking ratbag to keep from smelling her breath. She turns and looks at me and son of a bitch, she’s got flies in her eyes.

  “I’m waiting for a friend,” she says.

  I look behind me to see if she’s talking to someone else. “I care?”

  “Fuck if I know. If you had this, you wouldn’t need to come here.” She moves over a seat closer. “Listen, truth is, I was gonna give him a little extra twist in his tail, a hot fetish, but you know, maybe I don’t really wanna do that. It’s such a really fine memory the way it is.”

  “Yeah?” I have no idea what she’s talking about, but she said the magic word—memory—so I’m listening.

  “I told you, three hours in a state of grace. Can a fetish do that for you? Hell, no.”

  She told me? “Refresh my memory,” I tell her. “It’s been a long day.”

  Now she gives me a funny little look. “This guy is so incredible, words don’t do the job. You gotta be there. It really happened. Once in a lifetime thing. I’m not just eating on it, either. It’s like I got a duty to everyone who never had the experience.”

  “You remember it pretty good?”

  “Better than you remember me,” she mutters, and then goes on and on, but I’m not hearing her anymore, because I got a bad feeling about this. I’m running into people I don’t remember and doing things I don’t remember, and it’s weirder than just electroshock amnesia.