Alita

by Pat Cadigan

  Since the first moment he’d seen her Vector had been curious as to what she was like in bed. As he became better acquainted with her he formed his own ideas about it, and she hadn’t surprised him. Had she been a very different person up there in Zalem, that Dyson Ido would fall in love with her? Or was he one of those sad fools who had a type? Maybe they were all the same up there—neurotic, pretentious and unreachable. He wouldn’t have been surprised.

  Vector took a few moments to de-opaque the window and look out at the night view of Iron City. Seeing it like this, he could almost forget it was really just a toilet for the aristocrats in the sky.

  Okay, that was a bit harsh. Trashcan was more like it, or junk yard. He had come to this place very young, but even then he had wondered what kind of people built a city around a better city’s rubbish.

  It hadn’t taken him long to learn the answer—he was a quick study—and it was the same now as it had always been: people with the souls of jackals and hyenas. Carrion eaters that survive on some better, stronger animal’s leavings.

  And what did that make him?

  He smiled; that was an easy one.

  I’m the King, baby. I’m the Emperor, the Lord High Commander, and the jackals and hyenas worship me as their god. Anyone screws with me, I don’t have to kill them—I have someone to do it for me and I pick my teeth with their bones.

  There was only a partial view of Zalem from here but it included the waste chute. Refuse poured out of it as he watched.

  More riches for me. The Emperor acknowledges your tribute. Thank you and good night.

  Three centuries since the War of Whatever and still no one knew much about the place—well, almost no one. The one in his bed wasn’t talking, but she didn’t have to. Vector knew people and he knew life, and he was pretty sure that things up there probably weren’t a whole lot different than they were on the ground. The only difference was, up there they had nicer things and no one went hungry unless they wanted to. In Vector’s opinion, any place where people starved themselves in the midst of plenty was corrupt all the way through.

  Vector knew little about Zalem; most of his contact came by holo from Factory bureaucrats who looked too wispy to cast a shadow, although that may have been his screen. They called to tell him what Zalem wanted—more avocados, not so many grapefruit, larger cucumbers. But Vector knew damned well they weren’t in charge.

  The first time he’d seen the man in charge was shortly after he’d taken over in Iron City, which the man in charge had helped him with. Even then they hadn’t had much contact but he’d known the man had been watching him and he liked what he saw. Vector hadn’t merely known that, he’d felt it, especially after he’d consented to letting the Factory install the identity chip. The chip saved a lot of time and trouble—it was like having a universal master key to all the locks that mattered. In some cases, literally—he no longer had to carry key cards or remember entry codes.

  But even better, the chip provided a connection between himself and the man in charge, whom he thought of as the Watcher, even after learning his name was Nova. The first time Vector had seen the Watcher on his screen had been on a conference call about quarterly production figures; the Watcher had been sitting silent, off to one side, but Vector had known who he was. It wasn’t hard to guess why—he and the Watcher were two of a kind. He knew the Watcher had been around for a very long time—an impossibly long time, if the stories were true. Maybe he’d been waiting for someone like Vector, someone who saw things from the same angle, heard what he heard and knew how the music was going to change, and knew what to do when it did.

  Although to be honest, Vector thought the Watcher had it easier. When he gave an order, everybody up there gladly went along with it so they could keep all their nice things. What had happened to the distinguished lady cyber-surgeon in the bed behind him was their worst nightmare.

  Thinking about it that way, Vector could almost have felt sorry for them. But he’d never been able to muster up any pity for people who were happy to serve in Heaven when it was so much better to rule in Hell.

  He turned to look at the distinguished lady cyber-surgeon—correction: his distinguished lady cyber-surgeon, she belonged to him now just like the view, the penthouse and anything else he cared to call his own. Iron City itself was, for all intents and purposes, his. From his penthouse atop the main Factory building, he ran the show—any show, every show, all shows great and small, from Motorball to marketplaces. Nothing happened without his say-so. And so it would continue, because he knew how to keep things functioning. It was actually very simple, down here in the dirt: just enough bread and a plethora of circuses. Circuses made people forget they wanted more bread. Keep the circuses coming thick and fast, and after a while people would choose circuses instead of bread.

  Bread was expensive, but you could make circuses out of anything. Even a pile of trash.

  * * *

  It was well after one A.M. when the supervisor from the Factory’s south-town distribution centre called to say she had skimmed another load of plums from the fresh fruit bound for Zalem. She’d swapped them out for green apples and altered both the packing list and the requisition form, so it would look like someone up there had a green-apple habit. Concord grapes, however, still weren’t available anywhere, and wouldn’t be for another couple of months.

  “So what’s the problem now?” Vector demanded testily. “I thought you said they finally developed a strain that’ll produce all year round.”

  “Yeah, they did,” said the supervisor. She was a middle-aged woman named Frida who was high up on his go-to list as someone who got results. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful but Vector had found her very attractive, so much so that he had nearly made the mistake of going to bed with her, which would have completely ruined her as an employee.

  “They got the grapes to grow just fine,” Frida was saying. “But they can’t get them to ripen faster without losing all the quality. I tasted the fast ones and they taste like nothing. They don’t even smell like Concord grapes. They smell like—well, nothing. Not even grass. So we gotta wait till they’re ready.”

  “And they call themselves scientists,” Vector said, his voice dripping with contempt. “Meanwhile the gutless wonders in Zalem aren’t complaining. How are any of them still alive?”

  “Nobody told them to die,” said Frida.

  That jerked a surprised laugh out of Vector in spite of everything. “You’re probably right,” he said, and told her to keep him posted before he hung up. God, why couldn’t she have been a distinguished lady cyber-surgeon, he thought just as the phone rang again.

  This time it was Myrtle, one of the pit bosses at the Motorball stadium. There had been no game tonight, just a practice session for the jobbers. Myrtle told him they had enough parts and equipment to cover everyone’s repairs tonight—but only for tonight.

  “As of now, the cupboard’s pretty much bare,” Myrtle said. She sounded tired, but she always did, even when she wasn’t. “After tonight we need a whole lotta inventory or we gotta figure out how to make servos from cardboard and spit. And we’re all outta cardboard.”

  Vector groaned. “Make a list, then copy it two dozen times and hand it out to our best suppliers, including what’s-his-name—the kid with the crew that’s always hanging around.”

  “You mean Hugo?” Myrtle said.

  “Don’t ask me, I’m not your secretary,” Vector snapped. “Just get going on this. If we come up short, it’s your head I’ll be yelling for.” He managed not to crush his phone’s screen. Then he sat and glared at it. “Go ahead, ring again,” he muttered.

  It did, making him jump. This time it was Gamot, calling from the Kansas Bar with the news that one of Vector’s Paladins had busted up most of the furniture then stormed out without paying his tab, leaving the owner close to apoplexy in the wreckage.

  “Who was it?” Vector asked wearily.

  “Wheelstein,” Gamot told him.

 
“He’s a menace!” yelled the owner in the background. Vector knew his voice; he’d heard it in the background of a lot of phone calls.

  “Tell the owner he’s not one of mine any more; I just cut him from the team,” Vector said. “Which means Wheelstein’s responsible for his own expenses.”

  He listened as Gamot relayed the message to the owner.

  “Is he about to burst a blood vessel?” Vector asked Gamot in the ensuing silence.

  “Oh, I’d say about half a dozen,” Gamot replied, making it sound as if he were talking about damage. Gamot had a lot of cool. If only he didn’t dress like he lived under the causeway. “All right, put him on.”

  A moment later the bartender’s strained voice said, “Hello?”

  “As my associate just explained, Wheelstein is no longer one of my mine,” Vector said smoothly, “which, I’m sorry to say, means he’s uninsured.” He waited a beat to let the bar owner’s blood pressure hit three hundred over two hundred, then added, “However—as a goodwill gesture because so many of my guys drink there, send me the bill and I’ll cover half of it.”

  The bar owner made a strangled noise that could have been “Yes”.

  Gamot came back. “Anything else?”

  “No,” Vector said. “Now get out of there before he tries to make you call back and ask for more.” He hung up and called the pit boss back to tell her to cut Wheelstein and backdate the paperwork by twenty-four hours.

  “Sure thing, boss,” Myrtle said. “What about all the stuff in his locker? Guy’s, like, a hoarder.”

  “Can you eat it?” Vector asked.

  “Hell, no.” Myrtle sounded incredulous now as well as tired.

  “Then whatever you do with stuff you can’t eat, do that.”

  “Oh.” Myrtle sounded a little sheepish. “Okay.”

  Vector hung up and made a note to pay only a fourth of whatever figure the bar owner sent him, which would be about half of the actual cost. Bar owners were always trying to bleed him. Next case.

  He sat at the desk and waited. A minute went by in silence, and then another. He checked the time. It was after two-thirty. Stupid o’clock, sometimes known as suicide o’clock, when things usually went quiet and stayed that way until sometime between five and five-thirty.

  Vector swivelled around in his chair and looked out of the big windows. They had the best view of Zalem. When he first got the desk he’d put it facing the windows, then realised it would put his back to both doors. It made him feel too vulnerable.

  By contrast, putting Zalem behind him felt like it was not only his but it was backing him up as well. Which, considering his arrangement with the Factory, wasn’t too far from the truth.

  While he and Chiren had been having dinner in here, she hadn’t been able to go more than a minute without looking at the view, and he knew that it wasn’t Iron City she’d been so captivated by. She obviously had no idea how much her longing showed. She was homesick. Poor thing. Who could have blamed her? Iron City was a hell of a comedown from what she was used to. He was going to have a hard time making her see that just because you lived at ground level didn’t mean you were in the dirt. Handmade designer clothes, fancy food and the penthouse would have turned any other woman’s head. But Chiren was homesick.

  Of course, maybe he could use that to his advantage, he thought suddenly. If she thought he’d send her back to Zalem in exchange for making his Paladins into champions and his champions into winners—that just might do the trick and put a little more hustle in her bustle. Or even a lot more.

  She wouldn’t be the first person he’d promised to send to Zalem. He’d never have to deliver—he always found a way to show an eager would-be traveller how they’d failed to keep their part of the bargain, rendering the deal null and void. With Chiren, he wouldn’t have to worry about that for a long time. Meanwhile, he could work the hell out of her and she’d be only too glad to do it. He probably wouldn’t even have to pay her except in clothes and food and a place to live—oh, and act like he cared just often enough to make her think he did. He could even say I love you if he had to, although he doubted it would ever come to that.

  Chiren was so bitter and wrapped up in herself, she might not catch on for decades.

  Damn, how could someone so brilliant and intelligent be so blind and stupid? Maybe it was losing her kid that had ruined her. But that wasn’t the whole story. If her daughter had still been alive, she’d have still been miserable because she wasn’t in Zalem.

  And even if her daughter had been alive and she’d still been in Zalem, she’d have found something to be unhappy about. Maybe that was what Dyson Ido was for. Except things hadn’t worked out that way.

  Which was his lucky break, Vector thought, smiling at Zalem’s shadow in the night sky.

  * * *

  High overhead, above the clouds, the man leaning on the railing at the very edge of Zalem smiled. He was enjoying the show.

  CHAPTER 8

  Ido hoped this would be one of those rare nights when he was tired enough to sleep. He’d kept the clinic open an extra three hours for everyone in need, triaging them into three categories: Urgent!, Today For Sure and Mañana. Chiren had done him no favours by leaving. She hadn’t even offered to find someone to fill in for her. If he didn’t get some help soon, he might have to put Hugo in a nurse’s uniform.

  Although the little scoundrel hadn’t been around since the night he’d limped in all beat to hell. After treating him Ido had told him to come back the next day for a check-up but he hadn’t. Well, he was a kid. He’d probably been distracted by something shiny. Or maybe he’d annoyed somebody else and he’d got his ass kicked again. Ido hoped not but he wouldn’t have been surprised.

  Once his too-long day was over, he’d considered checking the scrapyard to see if Zalem had thrown out anything useful. But then he’d taken a quick look at his accounts and his accounts said he needed to put in some time at his second job.

  The Rocket Hammer was in its case, ready for use. No matter how tired he was he was always careful about how he put it away: taking it apart, cleaning the components and inspecting them for cracks or worn places, making sure the controls were stable and there was plenty of fuel to fire it up, ensuring none of the little vents were blocked so the power was there when he needed it most and he wasn’t just holding a fancy stick in his hands. He closed the case, went to the bureau to get his gloves, and remembered he’d left them in his coat pockets. As he turned away he caught sight of himself in the mirror.

  Damn, he looked cold. It was hard to believe the man he saw there was a doctor. He looked more like someone who killed people for money and never gave it a second thought.

  Not entirely true. He thought about everything he did.

  Then he put on the dark coat and the gloves, pulled his hat low, set his glasses for night vision and wheeled the Rocket Hammer case into the elevator. He wouldn’t be the only one out hunting—he never was—but there were plenty of marks to go around.

  He was lucky—he picked up two marks in a row, both highly rewarding. They put up a fight, but he’d got good at this. Using the Rocket Hammer, he bagged the first one in ten minutes, and the second in fifteen, including the time it took to remove their heads. Both were wanted for home invasions in which a total of five people had been killed. Ido presented their heads at the Factory redemption counter and came away with close to fifty thousand credits for the night’s work. That would keep the clinic open for another week, the good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.

  Yeah, right. The good Lord was only willin’ to be absent these days, and it had been raining so much the creek had turned into a rushing river that was halfway up its banks. Any more rain and there’d be flash-flooding around the bridge again. Ido had sent a message to the Factory telling them they had to do something about the drainage upstream in the eastern part of town. They’d paved over too much land and it didn’t allow adequate run-off. He’d have thought that in this climate they’d
know better. His answer had been a form email thanking him for his input. Did Iron City even have a civil engineer, he wondered.

  Ido came back from the Factory redemption centre bone-weary after fighting, hoping he’d used up enough energy to drop dead for a few hours. The second mark had given him a hard punch in the ribs, which was going to hurt more tomorrow. Ido didn’t care. All he wanted was an intermission that would divide tonight from tomorrow instead of it being all one long today.

  The spirit was willing but the insomnia was stronger and the flesh was collateral damage. Dr Dyson Ido could heal everyone but himself.

  Not long after they’d opened the clinic together, Chiren had suggested he let her give him a mild sedative and he had absolutely refused. A drug would only make him high, not sleepy. He’d be sleepless and stoned, and he’d like the stoned feeling too much. Then he’d have a problem much worse than insomnia. Insomnia, for all its faults, was free.

  Chiren hadn’t argued; she’d seen as many addicted ex-Paladins as he had. They kept all the drugs that felt good locked up in the cellar safe and set an alarm that would notify both of them whenever it was opened. That way neither of them could yield to temptation without the other knowing. Ido was sure Chiren didn’t need the safeguard. Addiction was a loss of self-control. Chiren would never let that go. Not just for a cheap high, anyway.

  Ido had muted the alarm on his own phone but never shut it off completely. It still sent messages to her phone whenever he opened the safe; her phone rejected all of them. She’d probably thrown the phone away by now, or maybe she’d buried it in a drawer or a closet to keep the number, because it was hers. Chiren had a strict policy—whatever was hers stayed hers.