by Jerry
New contracts, it was rumored.
New blood back on Earth, some said.
I didn’t notice it until Julee changed. Hadn’t cared. I worked the big line in Tanaka Main, sorting with a quick eye and hand the flawed chips among the perfect. I’d done it for years, since my 18th turning, and it was rote for me, a kind of habit almost like breathing. Julee used to work the line, too, but they pulled her six cycles ago and put her to work in the new crystal division.
She couldn’t talk about it.
“Part of my new contract, Turk,” she said. “More credits but I have to keep quiet.”
I teased her but it did no good.
She turned more than quiet, though. She turned forgetful. The girl I’d grown up with, the girl I’d pledged to, the woman I was to marry grew vague and listless, restless and unhappy in some way I couldn’t explain. Then the unhappiness disappeared and she seemed almost her normal old self. Her face glowed with some inner light, like a child with some new knowledge. And she began to forget the old. I was the old.
It was killing me.
The steel Blues plowed through the crowds around the vendors, and I moved off from the shadow, skirting the booths and stands, keeping them between me and the steel men of Tanaka. Their great eyes seemed to search for me as I worked my way toward the first boulevard that led to Crystal City.
“New cards today. Don’t begin your shifts until you pick up your new cards!”
The foreman’s voice was a red-faced shout as he worked his way down the on-shift line. Kepler was old enough that his fringe of hair had turned almost white, giving him a sainted look in the light from the overheads. Julee had taught me about saints from her old world book of religion. She’d also taught me of demons.
“Isn’t it pretty, Turk,” Kepler said, handing me the new card. “Hold it to the light there, and twist it just a bit. That’s it. See how the holo comes up?”
I held the card in my right hand and turned it in the light, watching the City grow on its slick, synthetic surface. All the buildings of Tanaka Corporation lay sprawled in my hand, even the Gothic spire of the business office. It rose from the card like a magic trick, glimmering dark blue in the clear air.
“That’s something, huh?” Kepler said.
“Why do we need new cards?”
Kepler stopped. He was a short, little man, but his eyes were hard. “Security,” he said. “There’s been thefts.”
“Not from my line.”
He stared at me. “No. You’re a good boy, Turk.” He patted me on the shoulder, almost affectionately, then moved on down the line.
I stared at the card again, searching out the place where Julee worked. Usually worked. That morning, when I’d stopped by, she sat in the comer of her father’s sitting room, staring blissfully at the light.
“Julee? Are you going to work?”
No answer. She turned, though, her head at an odd angle in the light that streamed through the window. Her eyes, I thought, searched for something. But it was something she’d lost on the inside. As if a thought had gotten away from her and she was busy chasing it around inside her mind.
“She’s been sick,” her father said from the door to his bedroom. “I’m calling her in, Turk.”
We stared at each other, Julee’s father and I, with nothing more to say. He’d never liked me. Never liked us, much, as a pledge.
The buzzer growled, two short blasts.
“Move to the line,” Kepler said. “Insert your new cards first. And remember to use them in the clocks next shift or you won’t receive credit!”
I moved to the head of the line and fitted the card in the slot. In front of me, my window opened and I stuck my hands through the transparent places, into the flimsy waldoes. The helmet came down from the line machine and I pulled it over my head. The world turned blue. In front of me, on the conveyor, the magnified surfaces of the silicon chips floated by. Through the helmets optics, I searched each for tiny flaws. There. A diode out of line. I manipulated my robotic hands—fingers as slender as needles—and plucked the chip from the batch, tossing it farther in, where it would be picked up and recycled.
Over and over.
In the left comer of my helmet, the shift clock blinked away my life.
Ri had not yet risen when I came off shift, and the bay around Crystal City rolled dark and ominous. The City was connected to the Outlands by a narrow steel bridge. I carded out at the big ornate gate, passing between two Blues. They twittered in their own high-pitched computerese as I passed, barely taking notice of me.
The air had a ripe tang to it, as though all the Krillick had died and floated to the top. They hadn’t, of course, but I’d gotten a case of the glooms thinking about Julee and how I missed walking back to the tenements with her. After traversing the bridge, I stopped at a vendor stall and bought her a Halcyion Amaranth. The flower was genetically designed to bloom with the rising of Ri, and if I hurried, I’d get it into Julee’s hands before it started to sag.
I took the first alley off Bridge Street. Around me, the tenements rose in stacked wonder. To stare up too high was to see too far into the perspective. Staring up, the buildings would look as if they’d grown together—as if they leaned upon one another for support. It was a trick of the eye, but it never failed to dizzy the looker. Only now, staring up, all I could see was the haze of light from Crystal City. Ri had not yet risen and the alleyways were dark as a nightside moat. From long years of habit, I caressed the rough stones and followed my feet’s memories down patched, brick ways. It was narrow and it was dark and it stank of Krillick and Snapper, but there was nothing to fear here. That was the truth.
Then I crashed headlong into something that was moving fast from the other way—a way wrong for this one-way alley—and a part of the truth smashed me almost flat against a tenement wall. This truth was a friend, though we squabbled often about company politics. And this friend had about him the smell of a carouser.
“Your breath is lethal this morning, Quarif.” I knew him not by his breath but his outfit. Blue helmet and goggles and silver vest. He was the man who usually led the Tanaka Blues. “How goes it?”
He held me hard against the wall, or tried to. Quarif Haifa was more than half in his cups. As he tried to focus, I could see that it wasn’t a happy intoxication. His eyes, behind the large mirrored goggles, were nearly invisible. But I could imagine they swam in a chemical sea of mournfulness. The rest of his expression said this, the way he leaned almost desperately against me, to hold me in place. Or to keep himself from falling.
“It’s wrong,” he said. And, the words out, he stood shakily and abruptly left me in the predawn darkness. Wondering. But knowing at the same time. Because surely something was wrong in our world, Quarif s and mine. Had been since Julee went to work in Experimental.
The air was cold and I shivered as I walked on toward Julee’s ten. The Halcyion Amaranth looked pale in the first glimmers of Ri, as the sunlight worked its way down the cracks between buildings. Maybe Julee wouldn’t notice its fading. She’d noticed little lately, it seemed.
She still sat in the comer. Still stared out the window. At what?
“An Amaranth for my pledge,” I said, handing her the blue bloom, which was just now bursting into full life.
She stared past it. Past me. I looked up in time to see her father standing in the doorway. He hadn’t shaved or brushed his hair, and his clothes looked slept in. He opened his mouth to say something, then must have changed his mind. He shut it with a decisive snap and turned and made his way through the door of the flat. I could hear his heavy tread down the rickety tenement steps.
Her father was day shift at Crystal City. He ran the same line I did, only he worked more in virtual. A hallucinatory job, I’d always thought. Virtuals sooner or later grew neurotic. Their eyes had a tendency to glaze over and they made strange gestures to themselves. Maybe that was what troubled the old man. His job had taken his sensibilities.
I sat d
own, near but not touching. Julee looked fragile this morning, the way a person used to sleeping at night will when they are denied their rest. Her long brown hair hung in tangles down her spine. And through her one-piece, I could count the vertebrae. Always thin, she had grown thinner.
“How are you feeling?” The words sounded too formal for pledged lovers, and I licked my lips to find them dry and slightly acid-caked from anxiety.
She turned from the window as if to sneak a glance at me. But it wasn’t shyness. Neither was Julee precocious. In her eyes there was still that haunted look, as though she stared inward in search of missing pieces.
“Julee? Did the doctor come?”
She said nothing. A small twist played with her lips, as if she couldn’t quite make up her mind to smile. One hand came out and touched me lightly on the shoulder.
“Yes. I know you,” she said. Thai inward look again, for things lost. And then I lost her to her own thoughts.
I moved closer. “Yes, me. Remember me, Julee. We’re pledged. We’ve picked our ten and everything. It’s on the new side of the Outlands, past the steel bridge.”
Nothing glimmered in her eyes, though her left hand seemed to tighten. I picked her hand up and held it in mine. Blood curled around the hard edges of her new card to Experimental’s doors. With stronger fingers, I pried the card loose. The hand clutched convulsively at the missing card. I placed the long stem of the Amaranth there, and she crushed it in her grip, the soft thorns digging new insults into her flesh.
“You should let me clean and wrap that,” I said.
She shook her head and clutched the stem harder and pressed her face to the window. Ri streamed through the tenement cracks and painted her face with rosy heat.
“Let’s walk, then. Let’s walk past our new ten.”
Her spine went rigid, her gaze locked on something I couldn’t see.
We sat like that, in stillness, for a long time.
Hunger and fatigue finally drove me away. I wound down the familiar alleys of Old Tenement Town, making my way home. Along the way I stopped at a vendor stall and bought my breakfast. Two fat Krillick and a largo root. The vendor was old and had an artificial jaw. His crystal teeth gleamed in Ri’s bright light as he punched my credit into Tanaka’s big register.
“Have a good feast, young Turk,” he said through artificial vocal cords. His voice sounded raspy yet harmonic. His eyes glittered, even though his hand shook as he wrapped the fish and vegetable.
“Have you seen Quart?” I asked. “I mean, just recently.”
The glitter faded. The jaw lost some of its stubborn and ferocious look. “Oh, yes. Sad, that. He was beat up this morning—looked terrible. Bought his food same as you. Said he had dayshift—and he’d just come from a hard night.” The old man shook his head. “He acted strange. Not like the Quarif I know at all.”
I walked off, more puzzled than ever.
My ten looked like everyone else’s ten, except it was even older. My grandfather had been one of the original colonists off the Madagascar. They opened up the system with egg ships in tow—the first three thousand, with ten times that number in the hyb banks, and ten times that number in frozen vitro. Tanaka had built Crystal City and surrounded it with the Outlands, and those first tenement buildings were solid and squat. Mine sat almost crushed between two that were newer.
Every day of my life, I’d climbed the five flights of stairs to my rooms at the top. Every day that I could remember, at least. How much our lives depend upon memory.
Inside I cooked the old fashioned way, frying my Krillick and largo root in salt and vegetable oil. As I ate, I stared out the window, wondering what Julee saw out there. Like hers, mine faced another wall. Other windows. People’s wash. People’s lives plainly hung out on a line, and still the people were close mouthed about their personal lives. Almost unsocial. Maybe it was a defense system we all had. Even the young like Quarif and myself were self contained. But we didn’t wind up staring out windows. And we didn’t forget who we were pledged to.
My eyes burned with my loss.
My muscles were still cramped from my shift, from hunching over my equipment, and I pulled the weight system from my wall closet. Three sets of everything helped clear the kinks and replace the cramps with muscles that burned and arteries that once again sang. Usually, when our shifts coordinated, Quarif and I worked out together. When he wasn’t stoned. Only it wasn’t really like Quarif to get stoned. At least not before a work shift.
I put the pulley system back in my wall closet and stepped in for a quick sonic shower, then changed to skintights and a padded silver vest. Almost Quarif s twin in dress, I stepped down the hall, to Quarif s rooms.
His door was coded shut, but I knew the code. I fingered the numbers into the lock and went inside, softly closing the door behind me.
Gloomy. He’d curtained his windows and cut off what little light there was.
I walked through the detritus of Quarif s life. Clothes hung from a flex cord across one comer. Small kitchen. Dishes in the sink, unwashed. Smaller bathroom. Wet towel hung crookedly. Usually he grabbed a sonic—unless he’d really worked up a sweat. Huge entertainment system in the living room. Part of this was new.
Squatting down, I looked through the system. Standard holo receiver. Sensi-round feely system.
Inside a rounded cabinet I found a codelocked compartment.
Getting tricky in your old age, Quarif, old friend? I tried the standard code. Didn’t work. Thought of what else it could be. His bank number, which I knew because I sometimes made deposits for him, as he did for me.
Click.
My gaze stuck, then drifted away. I didn’t like what my eyes could see. Pretty little crystal cubes for the holo and feely, but something insidious in a black case next to them. Vein poppers. Air syringes. Laid flat like little darts all in a row. All labeled with some kind of code.
I tried the crystals first.
Julee’s face loomed in the air in front of me. Typical holo trick, only why it was Julee I had no idea. The sounds were not typical at all, but were subsonic, an electric buzz that made my skin tingle all the way through the muscle to the bone. A kind of sexual ecstasy ran through my chest and abdomen.
I shut it off.
Quarif. You wharf rat.
I eyed the poppers. I hated the things. On any comer in any shadow in the Outlands, one could purchase poppers. But not Quarif. Why would he indulge in injectable drugs? He was a health freak; we worked out together.
Shakily, I held one up to the light.
Tiny cylinder. Microscopic hole in one end. Just press it to any vein and . . .
No.
Except I recognized the code on the barrel, but I couldn’t remember from where. Then I remembered. I’d seen the same numbers just a few hours earlier, on the new card Julee had pressed so tightly into her hand. I remembered the thin line of blood, as if clutching it, she could absorb it. And I had to know. Remembering that much—her haunted look and her slipping into her own mind—I had to know. I leaned back against the big shifter, letting it form around my body, and pressed the microscopic end to the flesh on my inner elbow.
It hissed.
Or did I imagine that?
I closed my eyes and let the shifter caress my back. The inside of my head exploded. Suddenly, there was a bright, red morning sun and a sandy beach. The sun was already warm, and the water licked at the wooden pier that extended out into the bay. I could hear a sand sifter as he rustled beneath the white pebbles beneath our bodies. Julee was pale, except where the sun had touched her skin and raised the color. Her embrace was warm and full of promise as she whispered in my ear. The scene shifted and I saw myself, broad through the upper body from the workouts. My short brown hair rustled in the breeze off the bay.
“And then we’ll redecorate our ten,” Julee was saying. And her words moved along my synapses like sparks. Her touch and her smell and . . .
And it would have fooled me, if I hadn’t
really been there and known better. If I was Quarif, or any citizen, I would have lived the memory in full detail. But I had my own memory of that day, and it differed, as all memories probably do, from Julee’s. The light looked slightly brighter in hers, and the day felt slightly warmer, and the words were wrong. Or my memory of the words were wrong. They were probably right, I realized. For this was Julee’s memory. The real thing. What her brain held. Extracted and packed into a chemical neurotransmitter that now fled down the gateways of my brain.
“No!” I heard myself scream.
Such an invasion of a life. My life, her life. Our life. Julee how could you? And I realized she could not, would never, that it had to be something else, something they were doing in Experimental without her knowledge.
I shook my head, but the memory ran on. Lodged there. Mixed with some euphoric that made my limbic system buzz with false happiness.
When it eased enough that I could move, I gathered all the little darts with Julee’s code imprinted on the barrels. Next to the holocubes lay Quarif s spare pistol. The weapon was double-stacked, with sonics on the bottom, for stun, and a powerful laser on top, for kill. The butt felt warm, even through my gauntlets.
I left in a sprint, not even bothering to shut Quarif s door. Old men stared as I ran through the Outland Bazarr. “Turk!” one called, as I ran past. But I didn’t hear the rest of his words.
Running and thinking, one automatic and one a process I tried to concentrate upon. Julee, by the window, her eyes looking out but looking in? As though she’d lost something important in her own mind?