by Jerry
B
B
B
Blue bulbs, cruciform.
Darkness.
“Pure! It’s clean. Come on, Jones.”
WWWWWWWWW
WWWWWWWWW
WWWWWWWWW
WWWWWWWWW
WWWWWWWWW
White sodium glare washed her features, stark monochrome, shadows cleaving from her cheekbones.
R RRRRR
R R
RRRRRRRRR
R R
RRRRR R
The arms of the red swastika were twisted in her silver glasses. “Give it to him,” I said. “We’ve got it.”
Ralfi Face. No imagination.
Jones heaved half his armored bulk over the edge of his tank, and I thought the metal would give way. Molly stabbed him overhand with the Syrette, driving the needle between two plates. Propellant hissed.
Patterns of light exploded, sparming across the frame and then fading to black.
We left him drifting, rolling languorously in the dark water. Maybe he was dreaming of his war in the Pacific, of the cyber mines he’d swept, nosing gently into their circuitry with the Squid he’d used to pick Ralfi’s pathetic password from the chip buried in my head.
“I can see them slipping up when he was demobbed, letting him out of the navy with that gear intact, but how does a cybernetic dolphin get wired to smack?”
“The war,” she said. “They all were. Navy did it. How else you get’em working for you?”
I’m not sure this profiles as good business,” the pirate said, angling for better money. “Target specs on a comsat that isn’t in the book—”
“Waste my time and you won’t profile at all,” said Molly, learning across his scarred plastic desk to prod him with her forefinger.
“So maybe you want to buy your microwaves somewhere else?” he was a tough kid, behind his Mao-job. A Nighttowner by birth, probably.
Her hand blurred down the frond of his jacket, completely severing a lapel without even rumpling the fabric.
“So we got a deal or not?”
“Deal,” he said starting at his ruined lapel with what he must have hoped was only polite interest. “Deal.”
While I checked the two records we’d bought she extracted the slip of paper I’d given her from the zippered wrist pocket of her jacket. She unfolded it and read sirently, moving her lips. She shrugged. “This is it?”
“Shoot,” I said, punching the RECORD studs of the two desks simultaneously.
“Christian White,” she recited, “and his Aryan Reggae Band.”
Fairtful Ralfi, a fan to his dying day.
Transition to idiot-savant mode is always less abrupt than I except it to be. The pirate broadcaster’s front was a failing travel agancy in a pastel cube that boasted a desk, three chairs, and a faded poster of a Swiss orbital spa. A pair of toy birds with blown-glass bodies and tin legs were sipping monotonously from a Styrofoarm cup of water on the ledge beside Molly’s shoulder. As I phased into mode, they accelerated gradually until their DayGlo-feathered crowns became solid arcs of color. The LEDs that told seconds on the plastic wall clock had become meaningless pulsing grids, and Molly and the Mao-faced boy grew hazy, their arms blurring occasionally in insect-quick ghosts of gesture. And then it all faded to cool gray static and an endless tone poem in the artificial language.
I sat and sang dead Ralfi’s stolen program for three hours.
The mall runs forty kilometers from end, a ragged overlap of Fuller domes roofing what was once a suburbanartery. If they turn off the arcs on a clean day. a gray approximation of sunlight filters through layers of acrylic, a view like the prison sketches of Giovanni Piranesi. The three southernmost kilometers roof Nighttown. Nighttown pays no taxes, no utilities. The neon arcs are dead, and the geodesics have been smoked black by decades of cooking fires. In the nearly total darkness of a Nighttown noon, who notices a few dozen mad children lost in the rafters?
We’d been climbing for two hours, up concrete stairs and steel ladders with perforated rungs, past abandoned gantries and dust-covered tools.
We’d started in what looked like a disused maintenance yard, stacked with truangular roofing segments. Everything there had been covered with that same uniform layer of spraybomb graffiti: gang names, dates back to the turn of the century. The graffiti followed us up, gradually thinning until a single name was repeated at intervals. LO TEK. In dripping black capitals.
“Who’s Lo Tek?”
“Not us, boss.” She climbed a shivering aluminium ladder and vanished throught a hole in a sheet of corrugated plastic. “ ‘Low technique, low technology.’ ” The plastic muffled her voice. I followed her up, nursing an aching wrist. “Lo Teks, they’d think that shotgun trick of yours was effete.”
An hour later I dragged myself up through another hole, this one sawed crookedly in a sagging sheet of plywood, and met my first Lo Tek.
“S okay,” Molly said, her hand brushing my shoulder. “It’s just Dog.
Hey, Dog.”
In the narrow beam of her taped flash, he regaeded us with his one eye and slowly extuded a thick length of grayish tongue, licking huge canines. I wondered how they wrote off tooth-bud transplants from Dopermans as low technology. Immunosuppressives don;t exactly grow on trees.
“Moll.” Dental augmentation impeded his speech. A string of saliva dangled from the twisted lower lip. “Heard ya comin’. Long time.” He might have been fifteen, but the fangs and the bright mosaic of scars compined with the gaping socket to present a mask of total bestiality.
It had taken time and a certain kind of creavity to assemble that face, and his posture told-me he enjoyed living behind it. He wore a pair of decaying jeans, black with grime and shiny along the creases. His chest and feet werebare. He did something with his mouth that approximated a grin. “Bein’ followed, you.”
Far off, in Nighttown, a water vendor cried his trade.
“Strings jumping, Dog?” She swung her flash to the side, and I saw thin cords tied to eyebolts, cords that ran to the edge and vanished.
“Kill the fuckin’ light!”
She snapped it off.
“How come the one who’s followin’ you’s got no light?”
“Doesn’t need it. That one’s bad news, Dog. Your sentries give him a tumble, they’ll come home in easy-tocarry sections.”
“This a friend, Moll?” He sounded uneasy. I heard his feet shift on the worn plywood.
“No. But he’s mine. And this one,” slapping my shoulders, “he’s a friend. Got that?”
“Sure,” he said, without much enthusiasm, padding to the platform’s edge, where the eyebolts were. He began to pluck out some kind of message on the taut cords.
Nighttown spread beneath us like a toy village for rats; tiny windows showed candlelight, with only a few harsh, bright squares lit by battery lanterns and carbide lamps. I imagined the old men at their endless games of dominoes, under warm, fat drops of water that fell from wet wash hung out on poles between the plywood shanties. Then I tried to imagine him climbing patiently up throught the darkeness in his zoris and unly tourist shirt, bland and unhurried. How was he tracking us?
“Good,” said Molly. “he smells up.”
“Smoke?” Dog dragged a crumpled pack from his pocket and prized out a flattened cigarette. I squinted at the trademark while he lit it for me with a kitchen match. Yiheyuan filters. Beijing Cigarette Factory. I decided that the Lo Teks were black marketeers. Dog and Molly went back to their argument, which seemed to revolve around Molly’s desire to use some particular piece of Lo Tek real estate.
“I’ve done you a lot of favors, man. I want that floor. And I want the musik.”
“You’re not Lo Tek . . .”
This must have been going on for the better part of a twisted kilometer, Dog leading us along swaying catwalks and up rope ladders. The Lo Teks leech their webs and huddling places to the city’s fabric with thick gobs of epoxy and sleep above the abyss in mesh hammoc
ks. Their country is so attenuated that in places it consists of little more than holds and feet, sawed into geodesic struts.
The Killing Floor, she called it. Scrambling after her, my new Eddie Bax shoes slipping on worm metal and damp plywood, I wondered how it could be any more lethal than the rest of the territory. At the same time I sensed that Dog’s protests were rirtual and that she already expected to get whatever it was she wanted.
Somewhere beneath us, Jones would be circling his takn, feeling the first twinges of junk sickness. The police would be boring the Drome regulars with questions about Ralfi. What did he do? Who was he with before he stepped outside? And the Yakuza would be settling its ghostly bulk over the city’s data banks, probing for faint images of me reflected in numbered accounts, securities transactions, bills for utilities. We’re an information economy. They teach you that in school.
What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified . . .
But by now the pirate would have shuttled our message into line for blackbox transmissions to the Yakuza comsat. A simple message: Call off the dogs or we wideband your program.
The programm. I had no idea what it contained. I still don’t. I only sing the song, with zero comprehension. It was probably research data, the Yakuza being given to advanced forms of industrial espionage. A genteel business, stealing from Ono-Sendai as a matter of course and politely holding their data for ransom, threatening to blunt the conglomorate’s research edge by making the product public.
But why couldn’t any number play? Wouldn’t they be happier with something to sell back to Ono-Sendai, happier than they’d be with one dead Johnny from Memory Lane?
Their programm was on its way to an address in Sydney, to a place that held letters for clients and didn’t ask questions once you’d paid a small retainer. Fourth-class surface mail. I’d erased most of the other copy and recorded our message in the resulting gap, leaving just enough of the programm to identify it as the real thing.
My wrist hurt. I wanted to stop, to lie down, to sleep. I knew that I’d lose my grip and fall soon, knew that the sharp black shoes I’d bought for my evening as Eddie Bax would lose their purchase and carry me down to Nighttown. But he rose in my mind like a cheap religious hologram, glowing, the enlarged chip in his Hawaiian shirt looming like a reconnaissance shot of some doomed urban nucleus.
So I followed Dog and Molly through Lo Tek heaven, jury-rigged and jerry-built from scraps that even Nighttown didn’t want.
The Killing Floor was eight meters on a side. A giant had threaded steel cable back and forth through a junkyard and drawn it all taut. It creaked when it moved, and it moved constantly, swaying and buckingas the gathering Lo Teks arranged themselves on the shelf of plywood surrounding it. The wood was silver with age, polished with long use and deeply etched with initials, threats, declarations of passion. This was suspended from a separate set of cables, which last themselves in darkness beyord the raw white glare of the two ancient floods suspended above the Floor.
A girl with teeth like Dog’s hit the Floor on all fours. Her breast were tattooed with indigo spirals. Then she was across the Floor, laughing, grappling with a boy who was drinking dark liquid from a liter flask.
Lo Tek fansion ran to scars and tattoos. And teeth. The electricity they were tapping to light the Killing Floor seemed to be an exception to their overall aesthetic, made in the name of . . . ritual, sport, art? I didn’t know, but I could see that the Floor was something special. I had the look of having been assembled over generations.
I held the useless shotgun under my jacket. Its hardness and left were comforting, even thought I had no more shells. And it came to me that I had no idea at all of what was really happening, or of what was supposed to happen. And that was the nature of my game, because I’d spent most of my life as a blind receptacle to be filled with other people;s knowledge and then drained, spouting synthetic languages I’d never understand. A very technical boy. Sure.
And then I noticed just how quiet the Lo Teks had become.
He was there, at the edge of the light, taking in the Killing Floor and the gallery of silent Lo Teks with a tourist’s calm. And as our eyes met for the first time with mutual recognition, a memory clicked into place for me, of Paris, and the long Mercedes electrics gliding through the rain to Notre Dame; mobile greenhouses, Japanese faces behind the glass, and a hundred Nikons rising in blind phototropism, flowers of steel and crystel. Behind his eyes, as they found me, those same shutters whirring.
I looked for Molly Millions, but she was gone.
The Lo Teks parted to let him step up on to the bench. He bowed, smiling, and stepped smoothly out of his sandals, leaving them side by side, perfectly aligned, and then he stepped down on to the Killing Floor. He came for me, across that shifting trampoline of scrap, as easily as any tourist padding across synthetic pile in any featureless hotel.
Molly hit the Floor, moving.
The Floor screamed.
It was miked and amplified, with pickups riding the four fat coil springs at the corners and contact mikes taped at random to rusting machine fragments. Somewhere the Lo Teks had an amp and a synthesizer, and now I made out of shapes of speakers overhead, above the cruel white floods.
A drumbeat began, electronic, like an amplified heart, steady as a metronome.
She’d removed her leather jacket and boots; her T-shirt was sleeveless, faint teeltales of Chiba City circuitry traced along her thin arms. Her leather jeans greamed under the floods. She began to dance.
She flexed her knees, white feet tensed on a flattened gas tank, and the Killing Floor began to heave in response. The sound it made was like a world ending, like the wires that hold heaven snapping and coiling across the sky.
He rode with it, for a few heartbeats, and then he moved, judging the movement of the Floor perfectly, like a man stepping from one flat stone to another in an ornamental garden.
He pulled the tip from his trumb with the grace of a man at ease with social gesture and flung it at her. Under the floods, the filament eas refracting thread of rainbow. She threw herself flat and rolled, jackknifing up as the molecule whipped past, steel claws snapping into the light in what must have been an automatic rictus of defense.
The drum pulse quickened, and she bounced with it, her dark hair wild around the blank silver lenses, her mouth thin, lips taut with concentration. The Killing Floor boomed and roared, and the Lo Teks were screaming their excitement.
He retracted the filament to a whirling meter-wide circle of ghostly polychrome and spun it in front of him, trumbless hand held lever with his sternum. A shield.
And Molly seemed to let something go, something inside, and that was the real start of her mad-dog dance. She jumped, twisting, lunging sideways, landing with both feet on an alloy engine block wired directly to one of the coil springs. I cupped my hands over my ears and knelt in a vertigo of sound, thinking Floor and benches were on their way down, down to Nighttown, and I saw us tearing through the shanties, the wet wash, exploding on the tiles like rotten fruit. But the cables held, and the Killing Floor rose and fell like a crazy metal sea. And Molly danced on it.
And at the end, just before he made his final cast with the filament, I saw in his face, an expression that didn’t seem to belong there. It wasn’t fear and it wasn’t anger. I think it was disbelief, stunned incomprehension mingled with pure aesthetic revulsion at what he was seeing, hearing—at what was happening to him. He retracted the whirling filament, the ghost disk shrinking to the size of a dinner plate as he whipped his arm above his head and brought it down, the thumbtip curving out for Molly like a live thing.
The Floor carried her down, the molecule passing just above her head; the Floor whiplashed, lifting him into the path of the taut molecule. It shold have passed hermlessly over his head and been withdrawn into its d
iamondhard socket. It took his hand off just behind the wrist. There was a gap in the Floor in frond of him, and he went through it like a diver, with a strange deliberate grace, a defeated kamikaze on his way down to Nighttown. Partly, I think, he took that dive to buy himself a few seconds of the dignity of silence. She’d killed him with culture shock.
The Lo Teks roared, but someone shut the amplifier off, and Molly rode the Killing Floor into silence, hanging on now, her face white and blank, until the pitching slower and there was only a faint pinging of tortured metal and the grating of rust on rust.
We searched the Floor for the severed hand, but we never found it. All we found was a graceful curve in one piece of rusted steel, where the molecule went through. Its edge was bright as new chrome.
We never learned whether the Yakuza had a accepted our terms, or ever whether they got our message. As far as I know, their program is still waiting for Eddie Bax on a shelf in the back room of a gift shop on the third level of Sydney Central-5. Probably they sold the original back to Ono-Sendai months ago. But maybe they did get the pirate’s broadcast, because nobody’s come looking for me yet, and it’s been nearly a year.
If they do come, they’ll have a long climp up through the dark, past Dog’s sentries, and I don’t look much like Eddie Bax these days.
I let Molly take care of that, with a local anesthetic. And my new teeth have almost grown in.
I decited to stay up here. When I looked out across the Killing Floor, before he came, I saw how hollow I was. And I knew I was sick of being a bucket. So now I climb down and visit Jones, almost every night.
We’re partners now, Jones and I, and Molly Millions, too. Molly handles our business in the Drome. Jones is still in Funland, but he has a bigger tank, with fresh seawater trucked in once a week. And he has his junk, when he needs it. He still talks to the kids with his frame of lights, but he talks to me on a new display unit in a shed that I rent there, a better unit than the one he used in the navy.
And we’re all making good money, better money than I made before, because Jone’s Squid can read the traces of anything that anyone ever srored in me, and he gives it to me on the display unit in languages I can Understand. So we’re learning a lot about all my formed clients. And one day I’ll have a surgeon dig all the silicon out of my amygdalae, and I’ll live with my own memories and nobody else’s, the way other people do. But not for a while.