by Greg Bear
Out same door, ten minutes later, comes Harmony C. Eventide, six-foot even (one of the false heels was cracked, so I stuck both of them under a lot of paper towels), brown hair (not even my hair dresser knows for sure), oh so dapper and of his time, attired in the bad taste that is oh so tasteful, a sort of man with whom no Business Men would start a conversation. Took the regulation ’copter from the port over to the Pan Am building (Yeah. Really. Drunk.), came out of Grand Central Station, and strode along Forty-Second toward Eighth Avenue, with a lot of things that weren’t mine in a small briefcase.
The evening is carved from light.
Crossed the plastiplex pavements of the Great White Way—I think it makes people look weird, all that white light under their chins—and skirted the crowds coming up in elevators from the subway, the sub-subway, and the sub-sub-sub (eighteen and first week out of jail, I hung around here, snatching stuff from people—but daintily, daintily, so they never knew they’d been snatched), bulled my way through a crowd of giggling, goo-chewing schoolgirls with flashing lights in their hair, all very embarrassed at wearing transparent plastic blouses which had just been made legal again (I hear the breast has been scene [as opposed to obscene] on and off since the seventeenth century) so I stared appreciatively; they giggled some more. I thought, Christ, when I was that age, I was on a goddamn dairy farm, and took the thought no further.
The ribbon of news lights looping the triangular structure of Communication, Inc., explained in Basic English how Senator Regina Abolafia was preparing to begin her investigation of Organized Crime in the City. Days I’m so happy I’m disorganized I couldn’t begin to tell.
Near Ninth Avenue I took my briefcase into a long, crowded bar. I hadn’t been in New York for two years, but on my last trip through ofttimes a man used to hang out here who had real talent for getting rid of things that weren’t mine profitably, safely, fast. No idea what the chances were I’d find him. I pushed among a lot of guys drinking beer. Here and there were a number of well-escorted old bags wearing last month’s latest. Scarfs of smoke gentled through the noise. I don’t like such places. Those there younger than me were all morphadine heads or feebleminded. Those older only wished more younger ones would come. I pried my way to the bar and tried to get the attention of one of the little men in white coats.
The lack of noise behind me made me glance back.
She wore a sheath of veiling closed at the neck and wrists with huge brass pins (oh so tastefully on the border of taste); her left arm was bare, her right covered with chiffon like wine. She had it down a lot better than I did. But such an ostentatious demonstration of one’s understanding of the finer points was absolutely out of place in a place like this. People were making a great show of not noticing. She pointed to her wrist, blood-colored nail indexing a yelloworange fragment in the brass claw of her wristlet. “Do you know what this is, Mr. Eldrich?” she asked; at the same time the veil across her face cleared, and her eyes were ice; her brows, black.
Three thoughts: (One) She is a lady of fashion, because coming in from Bellona I’d read the Delta coverage of the “fading fabrics” whose hue and opacity were controlled by cunning jewels at the wrist. (Two) During my last trip through, when I was younger and Harry Calamine Eldrich, I didn’t do anything too illegal (though one loses track of these things); still I didn’t believe I could be dragged off to the calaboose for anything more than thirty days under that name. (Three) The stone she pointed to . . .
“. . . Jasper?” I asked.
She waited for me to say more; I waited for her to give me reason to let on I knew what she was waiting for. (When I was in jail, Henry James was my favorite author. He really was.)
“Jasper,” she confirmed.
“—Jasper . . .” I reopened the ambiguity she had tried so hard to dispel.
“. . . Jasper—” But she was already faltering, suspecting I suspected her certainty to be ill-founded.
“Okay, Jasper.” But from her face I knew she had seen in my face a look that had finally revealed I knew she knew I knew.
“Just whom have you got me confused with, ma’am?” Jasper, this month, is the Word.
Jasper is the pass/code/warning that the Singers of the Cities (who last month sang “Opal” from their divine injuries; and on Mars I’d heard the Word and used it thrice, along with devious imitations, to fix possession of what was not rightfully my own; and even there I pondered Singers and their wounds) relay by word of mouth for that loose and roguish fraternity with which I have been involved (in various guises) these nine years. It goes out new every thirty days; and within hours every brother knows it, throughout six worlds and worldlets. Usually it’s grunted at you by some blood-soaked bastard staggering into your arms from a dark doorway; hissed at you as you pass a shadowed alley; scrawled on a paper scrap pressed into your palm by some nasty-grimy moving too fast through the crowd. And this month, it was: Jasper.
Here are some alternate translations:
Help!
or
I need help!
or
I can help you!
or
You are being watched!
or
They’re not watching now, so move!
Final point of syntax: If the Word is used properly, you should never have to think twice about what it means in a given situation. Fine point of usage: Never trust anyone who uses it improperly.
I waited for her to finish waiting.
She opened a wallet in front of me. “Chief of Special Services Department Maudline Hinkle,” she read without looking at what it said below the silver badge.
“You have that very well,” I said, “Maud.” Then I frowned. “Hinkle?”
“Me.”
“I know you’re not going to believe this, Maud. You look like a woman who has no patience with her mistakes. But my name is Eventide. Not Eldrich. Harmony C. Eventide. And isn’t it lucky for all and sundry that the Word changes tonight?” Passed the way it is, the Word is no big secret to the cops. But I’ve met policemen up to a week after change date who were not privy.
“Well, then: Harmony. I want to talk to you.” I raised an eyebrow.
She raised one back and said, “Look, if you want to be called Henrietta, it’s all right by me. But you listen.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Crime, Mr. . . . ?”
“Eventide. I’m going to call you Maud, so you might as well call me Harmony. It really is my name.”
Maud smiled. She wasn’t a young woman. I think she even had a few years on Business Man. But she used makeup better than he did. “I probably know more about crime than you do,” she said. “In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t even heard of my branch of the police department. What does Special Services mean to you?”
“That’s right, I’ve never heard of it.”
“You’ve been more or less avoiding the Regular Service with alacrity for the past seven years.”
“Oh, Maud, really—”
“Special Services is reserved for people whose nuisance value has suddenly taken a sharp rise . . . a sharp enough rise to make our little lights start blinking.”
“Surely I haven’t done anything so dreadful that—”
“We don’t look at what you do. A computer does that for us. We simply keep checking the first derivative of the graphed-out curve that bears your number. Your slope is rising sharply.”
“Not even the dignity of a name—”
“We’re the most efficient department in the Police Organization. Take it as bragging if you wish. Or just a piece of information.”
“Well, well, well,” I said. “Have a drink?” The little man in the white coat left us two, looked puzzled at Maud’s finery, then went to do something else.
“Thanks.” She downed half her glass like someone stauncher than that wrist would indicate. “It doesn’t pay to go after most criminals. Take your big-time racketeers, Farnesworth, the Hawk, Blava
tskia. Take your little snatch-purses, small-time pushers, housebreakers, or vice-impresarios. Both at the top and the bottom of the scale, their incomes are pretty stable. They don’t really upset the social boat. Regular Services handles them both. They think they do a good job. We’re not going to argue. But say a little pusher starts to become a big-time pusher; a medium-sized vice-impresario sets his sights on becoming a full-fledged racketeer; that’s when you get problems with socially unpleasant repercussions. That’s when Special Services arrive. We have a couple of techniques that work remarkably well.”
“You’re going to tell me about them, aren’t you?”
“They work better that way,” she said. “One of them is hologramic information storage. Do you know what happens when you cut a hologram plate in half?”
“The three-dimensional image is . . . cut in half?”
She shook her head. “You get the whole image, only fuzzier, slightly out of focus.”
“Now I didn’t know that.”
“And if you cut it in half again, it just gets fuzzier still. But even if you have a square centimeter of the original hologram, you still have the whole image—unrecognizable but complete.”
I mumbled some appreciative m’s.
“Each pinpoint of photographic emulsion on a hologram plate, unlike a photograph, gives information about the entire scene being hologrammed. By analogy, hologramic information storage simply means that each bit of information we have—about you, let us say—relates to your entire career, your overall situation, the complete set of tensions between you and your environment. Specific facts about specific misdemeanors or felonies we leave to Regular Services. As soon as we have enough of our kind of data, our method is vastly more efficient for keeping track—even predicting—where you are or what you may be up to.”
“Fascinating,” I said. “One of the most amazing paranoid syndromes I’ve ever run up against. I mean just starting a conversation with someone in a bar. Often, in a hospital situation, I’ve encountered stranger—”
“In your past,” she said matter-of-factly, “Isee cows and helicopters. In your not too distant future, there are helicopters and hawks.”
“And tell me, oh Good Witch of the West, just how—” Then I got all upset inside. Because nobody is supposed to know about that stint with Pa Michaels save thee and me. Even the Regular Service, who pulled me, out of my head, from that whirlybird bouncing toward the edge of the Pan Am, never got that one from me. I’d eaten the credit cards when I saw them waiting, and the serial numbers had been filed off everything that could have had a serial number on it by someone more competent than I: good Mister Michaels had boasted to me, my first lonely, drunken night at the farm, how he’d gotten the thing in hot from New Hampshire.
“But why—” it appalls me the clichés to which anxiety will drive us—“are you telling me all this?”
She smiled, and her smile faded behind her veil. “Information is only meaningful when shared,” said a voice that was hers from the place of her face.
“Hey, look, I—”
“You may be coming into quite a bit of money soon. If I can calculate right, I will have a helicopter full of the city’s finest arriving to take you away as you accept it into your hot little hands. That is a piece of information . . .” She stepped back. Someone stepped between us.
“Hey, Maud—”
“You can do whatever you want with it.”
The bar was crowded enough so that to move quickly was to make enemies. I don’t know—I lost her and made enemies. Some weird characters there: with greasy hair that hung in spikes, and three of them had dragons tattooed on their scrawny shoulders, still another with an eye patch, and yet another raked nails black with pitch at my cheek (we’re two minutes into a vicious free-for-all, case you missed the transition. I did) and some of the women were screaming. I hit and ducked, and then the tenor of the brouhaha changed. Somebody sang “Jasper!” the way she is supposed to be sung. And it meant the heat (the ordinary, bungling Regular Service I had been eluding these seven years) were on their way. The brawl spilled into the street. I got between two nasty-grimies who were doing things appropriate with one another, but made the edge of the crowd with no more wounds than could be racked up to shaving. The fight had broken into sections. I left one and ran into another that, I realized a moment later, was merely a ring of people standing around somebody who had apparently gotten really messed.
Someone was holding people back.
Somebody else was turning him over.
Curled up in a puddle of blood was the little guy I hadn’t seen in two years who used to be so good at getting rid of things not mine.
Trying not to hit people with my briefcase, I ducked between the hub and the bub. When I saw my first ordinary policeman, I tried very hard to look like somebody who had just stepped up to see what the rumpus was.
It worked.
I turned down Ninth Avenue and got three steps into an inconspicuous but rapid lope—
“Hey, wait! Wait up there . . .”
I recognized the voice (after two years, coming at me just like that, I recognized it) but kept going.
“Wait. It’s me, Hawk!” And I stopped.
You haven’t heard his name before in this story; Maud mentioned the Hawk, who is a multimillionaire racketeer basing his operations on a part of Mars I’ve never been to (though he has his claws sunk to the spurs in illegalities throughout the system) and somebody else entirely.
I took three steps back toward the doorway.
A boy’s laugh there: “Oh, man. You look like you just did something you shouldn’t.”
“Hawk?” I asked the shadow.
He was still the age when two years’ absence means an inch or so taller.
“You’re still hanging around here?” I asked.
“Sometimes.”
He was an amazing kid.
“Look, Hawk, I got to get out of here.” I glanced back at the rumpus.
“Get.” He stepped down. “Can I come, too?”
Funny. “Yeah.” It makes me feel very funny, him asking that. “Come on.”
By the streetlamp half a block down, I saw his hair was still pale as split pine. He could have been a nasty-grimy: very dirty black denim jacket, no shirt beneath; very ripe pair of black jeans—I mean in the dark you could tell. He went barefoot; and the only way you can tell on a dark street someone’s been going barefoot for days in New York is to know already. As we reached the corner, he grinned up at me under the streetlamp and shrugged his jacket together over the welts and furrows marring his chest and belly. His eyes were very green. Do you recognize him? If by some failure of information dispersal throughout the worlds and worldlets you haven’t, walking beside me beside the Hudson was Hawk the Singer.
“Hey, how long have you been back?”
“A few hours,” I told him.
“What’d you bring?”
“Really want to know?”
He shoved his hands into his pockets and cocked his head. “Sure.”
I made the sound of an adult exasperated by a child. “All right.”
We had been walking the waterfront for a block now; there was nobody about. “Sit down.” So he straddled the beam along the siding, one filthy foot dangling above the flashing black Hudson. I sat in front of him and ran my thumb around the edge of the briefcase.
Hawk hunched his shoulders and leaned. “Hey . . .” He flashed green questioning at me. “Can I touch?”
I shrugged. “Go ahead.”
He grubbed among them with fingers that were all knuckle and bitten nail. He picked two up, put them down, picked up three others. “Hey!” he whispered. “How much are all these worth?”
“About ten times more than I hope to get. I have to get rid of them fast.”
He glanced down past his toes. “You could always throw them in the river.”
“Don’t be dense. I was looking for a guy who used to hang around that bar. He was pretty e
fficient.” And half the Hudson away a water-bound foil skimmed above the foam. On her deck were parked a dozen helicopters—being ferried up to the Patrol Field near Verrazzano, no doubt. For moments I looked back and forth between the boy and the transport, getting all paranoid about Maud. But the boat mmmmed into the darkness. “My man got a little cut up this evening.”
Hawk put the tips of his fingers in his pockets and shifted his position.
“Which leaves me uptight. I didn’t think he’d take them all, but at least he could have turned me on to some other people who might.”
“I’m going to a party later on this evening-” he paused to gnaw on the wreck of his little fingernail—“where you might be able to sell them. Alexis Spinnel is having a party for Regina Abolafia at Tower Top.”
“Tower Top . . . ?” It had been a while since I palled around with Hawk. Hell’s Kitchen at ten; Tower Top at midnight
“I’m just going because Edna Silem will be there.” Edna Silem is New York’s eldest Singer.
Senator Abolafia’s name had ribboned above me in lights once that evening. And somewhere among the endless magazines I’d perused coming in from Mars, I remembered Alexis Spinnel’s name sharing a paragraph with an awful lot of money.
“I’d like to see Edna again,” I said offhandedly. “But she wouldn’t remember me.” Folk like Spinnel and his social ilk have a little game, I’d discovered during the first leg of my acquaintance with Hawk. He who can get the most Singers of the City under one roof wins. There are five Singers of New York (a tie for second place with Lux on Iapetus). Tokyo leads with seven. “It’s a two-Singer party?”
“More likely four . . . if I go.”
The inaugural ball for the mayor gets four. I raised the appropriate eyebrow.
“I have to pick up the Word from Edna. It changes tonight.”
“All right,” I said. “I don’t know what you have in mind, but I’m game.” I closed the case.
We walked back toward Times Square. When we got to Eighth Avenue and the first of the plastiplex, Hawk stopped. “Wait a minute,” he said. Then he buttoned his jacket up to his neck. “Okay.”