When the River Ran Dry

by Robert Davies

  Reclined in the soft padding of his seat, Ricky rubbed his face, allowing vision to clear and blinking reflexively as slender, metallic arms withdrew a crown of input contacts slowly from his brow. It took a moment or two for the images to fade before he tapped sequential controls to open the long access panel upward with a hiss. The session consumed nearly two hours, but a deep, quiet satisfaction buoyed him as he paid the administration fee and walked quickly for a side exit onto Barrington Road.

  Ricky scowled and blinked upward; the rains returned and with them, the familiar smell of wetted streets and rivulets of dirty water coursing steadily toward the storm drains. Thick fog hung motionless in the air, persistent and always clinging even to those most protected places, hastening the decay and corrosion that seemed forever ahead of Novum’s plodding repair crews. The narrow divide between mega-towers, built astride pavements and walkways in the last years of the Resurrection, made cliffs of glass and steel in all directions, holding the moisture in place as if stopped in time. It dripped in endless streams from overhangs and sky bridges, gathering in gutters with the garbage and refuse, but Ricky didn’t notice.

  MPE searchlights played slowly across the shimmering surface from ten stories above, sweeping long shafts of cool blue light through the intersections where shift workers scurried for their pod trains. The beams held position once or twice, allowing the Watchers to identify and record land cars and taxis huddled in groups, or parked illegally in the rare, precious spaces where nothing had been built. They said it was different in the Old Time when people came and went without scrutiny, but Ricky ignored them and meaningless remembrances made by those who weren’t alive in a past they evoked as though the words alone would win them some measure of admiration. He looked upward to the cloud layer and another world beyond where the stars glittered above the haze—the Uppers enjoyed a different view that night, and one not meant for street people.

  The evening crowd was thinning, but the afterglow of his time with Neferure held him tightly, making it difficult to shift from the alternate life he left inside a Starlight theater. The sensation eased at last, returned to a numbing reality waiting on the streets outside—patient and always there.

  For those who were willing to meet its steep cost demand, Starlight remained the most popular diversionary software in the whole of Novum and a miracle of intuitive technology. But from it, a way to enhance the entertainment value of adventure simulations had been derived by enterprising marketers who understood its true potential. A full decade since it came online, the sophisticated, stunningly realistic program had become something more than a novelty. Now, it was a compelling, even unavoidable way of life for many seeking refuge from their ordinary existences in the teeming swirl of a metropolis still defining itself a century after the Fall.

  So long as they could pay, most subscribers had been granted a Starlight account regardless of social station, willingly giving themselves over to its lure and promise of adventure; a secret hideaway from reality where one could do—or be—anything. Without content limits or restrictions, Starlight was a safe, discrete place to live out a virtual fantasy so realistic, some found it difficult to continue away from the privacy of an experience cocoon.

  Despite fervent pleas from pockets of anti-technology zealots disappointed by Novum’s evolution away from the economic and cultural hegemony Abraham Standvor wanted it to be, more and more embraced Starlight each year. But with the phenomenon, nagging problems of addiction and social decay had become chronic. Ricky didn’t count himself among them, holding stubbornly to an illusion of control; he could enjoy it or not as he chose, but he was sure the decision was always his.

  When he crossed the square, his thoughts were only of her. Ricky looked at the vacant streets but saw instead lingering images of pathways along the quiet Nile that always led to Ma’at Palace, or perhaps a chariot ride home to the General’s headquarters and the tents of his soldiers. It never rained there and the skies rarely brought even a hint of cloud. Winters in Thebes produced only longer shadows; there was no bone-chilling wind and snow that made Novum a frozen, icy wasteland. The Palace, caressed each day by calm waters flowing slowly on their way north was a better place, he decided, and one not congested, noisy and covered in filth. In every way, the Sector (and Novum) was the inescapable example of contradiction as an overcrowded, yet lonely nightmare. At Ma’at, he thought silently, they understood who he truly was and Neferure knew him better than anyone.

  An hour later, as Ricky closed the door to his flat, he made the calculations in his mind: At eighty-thousand tokens per year, Premium Starlight membership and the unlimited hours privilege it offered was out of the question and such a luxury would remain forever beyond his grasp; only those above—the Uppers, their obedient Bosses, or perhaps even Antonelli—could ever accept so steep a payment obligation. Still, the hours he needed with her were never enough and changes would be made; more money had to be found.

  At once, he thought of Elden Fellsbach. Retired or otherwise, the former chief architect of exploratory software that would become the Starlight simulation’s programming still held sufficient influence to make an arrangement for additional time at any theater in Novum. It wasn’t necessary before, of course, but the need had never been so great or compelling. He couldn’t bear to hear the loneliness in Neferure’s voice, wondering aloud why the time between visits had become lengthier—their desperate, intoxicating encounters fewer. In the morning, Ricky thought with a satisfied grin, he would return to the old man’s apartment on the 80th floor, deep inside Marshall Center. Though it had been months since their last visit, Elden would have the answer.

  By mid-day, the mist turned to a downpour. Ricky watched news feed images of a slow-moving weather system, obliging him to throw on a cloudy, plastic rain cover that forever leaked through its hood and down the back of his neck. The muggy air would only make worse his misery from body heat trapped inside a vinyl cloak with nowhere to go, but as he turned for the door, a chirp from his communicator sounded suddenly at his wrist; it was Vinnie Bayle, no doubt calling to check on an order for a case of expensive Topaz in half-liter bottles Ricky promised to find at a discount. He touched the comm’s tiny faceplate and answered with a dull voice to imply he had been awakened; an old trick, meant to convince an unwelcome caller the moment was inconvenient.

  “Hullo?”

  “Slider, it’s me.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Have you seen the info-nets this morning?”

  Ricky had, but there was nothing of interest beyond dire warnings of flooding near the river and at least four of the active canals up to the north already saw their banks threatened.

  “No,” he lied.

  “Turn it on; you need to see this.”

  Vinnie was easily impressed by street news, but the moment was ill-suited for idle distractions that seemed forever captivating to his childhood friend.

  “I was just on my way out; what’s on the ‘net that’s so important?”

  “Just turn it on,” Vinnie insisted; “this is big.”

  Ricky waited through a public safety message about the perils of wandering too close to the freight tracks until a video image showed two men being led away in handcuffs to a waiting MPE sky van. He recognized them at once, suddenly alert with a powerful, electric sense of urgency. An unseen commentator’s voice told of arrests and charges filed for possession of forbidden contraband in violation of municipal laws. As a camera drone hovered nearby, the men in custody turned and Ricky squinted in disbelief at the faces of Geraldo Espinoza and Benjamin Courtnall as they each stepped through the van’s narrow hatchway. A headline runner at the bottom of the vid screen showed their names and the sector where MPE officers found them in their hidden quarters.

  “I’ll call you back,” Ricky said in reflex, tapping off his comm’s link.

  Others, held by the entertainment value of a rare spectacle, would have looked only at the prisoners or heavily armed MPE
troopers, but Ricky knew better. Instead, his attention went quickly to the surroundings in order to gauge the images and scan them for clues. The blackened, cinder-covered dirt was uneven and strewn with mud puddles, but he looked closely at ancient, ramshackle buildings beyond, clad in cheap, tin panels and treated in the usual, drab shades of anti-corrosion paint. Rooftops, gently sloped with corrugated shingle plates, betrayed the structure as one of many in the seldom-used warehouse district where a few of the old surface factories stored machinery and out-of-date merchandise in a thin, desperate hope market fluctuations would one day return the forgotten goods to a status of value. Ricky looked again; it was years since they ventured into the Industrial Zone, but he knew at once where the arrests were made, smiling at a secret well-hidden, but now exposed.

  Every hustler in the sector would hear of it within minutes, if they hadn’t already; Ricky knew time and a window to move were both shrinking. After all, he thought with a satisfied grin, it wasn’t every day two of the Bosses—the mid-level administrators who stood as functional intermediaries between privileged Uppers and the teeming, less fortunate Flatwalkers—were taken away by the cops. Things had changed since the new Commission came to power, it was said. Before, the once bullet-proof Bosses did as they liked, but now, even they had been given limits. Ricky could not have asked for so opportune a moment, watching them speed Espinoza and Courtnall away to an uncomfortable arraignment hearing in front of the city’s unyielding magistrates.

  Fumbling quickly for his bag, Ricky felt the excitement and sense of possibility begin to grow. Perhaps they pushed their chances once too often, he supposed, but that error could change his luck dramatically. How could it be, he wondered? Courtnall and Espinoza were the controlling force for the entire Sector’s undercity rackets, with soldiers, snitches and ‘sweepers’ counting in the hundreds. If two so influential and powerful could be brought down in public, their indiscretions must surely have been grave. Ricky played out the scenario in his mind, moving cautiously through a mental checklist to avoid missing crucial details; there was too much at stake for a wrong step now. He grinned openly at the image of one particular building in the news vid; the weathered structure was key, and Ricky knew it.

  The Bosses were thought by many on the hustle to have made and maintained secret places scattered throughout the Industrial Zone where no one went—dangerous places, frequented by desperate streeties who would kill lost or wayward travelers trying to make it inside the border from beyond the wire, simply for a handful of tokens or just the clothes on their backs. Still, no one found those most guarded places among the abandoned fabrication plants and disused storage buildings in all his days on the street. Some regarded it as little more than grandiose rumor, but none were brave (or foolish) enough to look and Ricky was grateful for the security an old legend had made.

  In a brief moment of fortune, the unwitting news cameras had done the work for him; Ricky had only to confirm that MPE’s hunt for evidence was concluded and he would take care of the rest. They would comb the area thoroughly, he knew, but cops were never bright enough to see the obvious; Ricky had always looked with better eyes. In the late hours, he would journey out to the Zone and poke around in places rarely discovered by the police.

  Suddenly unconcerned for the heavy rainfall, Ricky went quickly from his flat. The cityscape was hazy and dulled by sheets of rain, obscuring all but the most prominent mega-towers across the sector. In the daytime darkness made by a heavy cloud layer, even the streetlights had switched on and Ricky closed his eyes to drift away, taken by the ever-present thoughts and images from that faraway place. Was Neferure thinking of him, he wondered? Could she? There would be changes if he could manage a reconnaissance mission and bring back the riches he knew were hidden within a dank, lonely building on the edge of the Industrial Zone.

  When the train arrived at a plaza where Ninth Street crossed Moss Avenue, Ricky waited for an automatic door release to open the pod’s wide hatch, stepping cautiously onto the soaked platform at last. He went quickly through the crowd, jogging first left, then to the right as he struggled to find his pace. The lines were thinning and he found an MPE kiosk where it stood at a busy intersection. The tall, tube-shaped enclosure shimmering in the rain was perched atop a single pillar set deep into the concrete.

  A station officer leaned his elbows on an open window frame, offering directions to the Trade and Commerce Building for three travelers, but Ricky waited for them to go before hurrying beneath a conical overhang to escape the rain. Sergeant Walter Ritnour, an MPE beat cop on the Corridor for as long as Ricky could remember, noticed him at last.

  “Well, well, well; Slider Mills. What brings you all the way over here?”

  Ricky smiled and glanced behind to make sure no one could overhear.

  “Oh, just business; picking up, dropping off…the usual.”

  Ritnour eyed Ricky’s bag and said, “You wouldn’t have anything illegal in there, would you?”

  Ricky held up the empty sack.

  “Nothing at all, see?”

  “I’ll take your word for it. Now tell me why you wandered down to Ninth in a driving rain; I know you’re not here just to say ‘hello,’ are you?”

  Ricky shook his head and laughed a little so that Ritnour wouldn’t stray from his presumption that only street business was in-play.

  “Can’t a guy stop in and bullshit with his favorite cop?”

  “Sure,” Ritnour replied, “if that was the reason for his visit, but…”

  Ricky answered quickly; he couldn’t afford to appear tentative.

  “I need to check on a few things with the door guy at the Imperial; he’s been helpful finding new customers, and I have a few minutes to kill so I ducked in here. You’re a suspicious bastard!”

  “Uh huh,” said Ritnour with clear skepticism. “I guess that’ll have to do; you wouldn’t tell me if it was something else anyway.”

  “I’m legit; nothing to hide this time!”

  Ritnour nodded and smiled, knowing Ricky’s assurances were likely half-truths at best.

  “So, how’s your mom doing? I heard she had a bad time with her shoulder?”

  Ricky felt the relief at once. Ritnour may well have suspected other intentions, but he was willing to accept Ricky’s explanation and leave it alone, at least for the moment.

  “Yeah, she fell at work and tore it when she landed wrong. The clinic couldn’t do much, so she had to wait for a slot up at the hospital. By the time those assholes called her in, her shoulder was so swollen she could hardly dress.”

  “Is she okay now?”

  “Doing a lot better, thanks. They gave her something to take care of the pain and inflammation, but she had to go back last month and they operated on her.”

  “Did she get a decent settlement, at least?”

  “They paid up pretty good if she agreed to stay on after she was better, so…”

  “No problems from the company?”

  “Not this time,” Ricky said with a smirk; “the people who run her shift at the plant stuck up for her; they made the managers cough up twice what she would’ve gotten on her own.”

  Ritnour shook his head knowingly.

  “The clinics aren’t worth shit, but I’m surprised they got her in at a Sector 4 hospital that fast; it usually takes months to even get a diagnosis.”

  “I know,” Ricky answered, grateful for the casual tone of the conversation. “I think the plant managers wanted to avoid any bad publicity, so they worked it with the doctors to see her sooner.”

  “Small favors, eh?”

  Ricky nodded and smiled.

  “So how’ve you been lately? I thought they were going to give you a desk job this year.”

  “Nope,” said Ritnour with a satisfied grin, “I refused it and asked to be left at my post right here. Can’t watch out for baddies when you’re stuck behind a goddamn desk all day, can you?”

  “Hell no!” Ricky laughed. “And anyway, this street
would go to shit if you weren’t here to keep an eye on it; everyone knows that.”

  “That’s right—all you little hoodlums and streeties need a firm hand!”

  The banter was perfect. Ritnour liked trumpeting his disdain for the bureaucrats at MPE Sector Headquarters and once he started, his mind wouldn’t likely return to more suspicious thoughts. It was the moment Ricky had been waiting for.

  “Hey, what the hell happened with Espinoza and Courtnall? The news vids said your guys finally nailed them out in the Zone at some warehouse?”

  “I heard about it this morning at our briefing. Hope you didn’t have anything in the works with those two; Investigations Section will be all over that place.”

  “Shit, I stay as far away from Bosses as I can,” Ricky said, holding up his hands in mock surrender; “I don’t want any part of them.”

  He waited for a moment, but Ritnour hadn’t taken the bait. He decided to steer the conversation gently, probing for what he needed.

  “I hear they found them inside an old storage building on the edge of the 217 Canal; the one with the green roof?”

  “Not that one,” Ritnour replied, “it was an empty machine shop. They kept some of their illegal stuff inside and our people found out about it.”

  Ricky tried hard not to smile; Ritnour confirmed the vacant building where Mister Anthony went to meet with Courtnall years before was indeed his target. He moved quickly to continue the conversation.

  “The detectives will have a good time when they get their hands on it, won’t they?”

  “They already have,” said Ritnour with noticeable pride. “I heard they brought in a dozen inspectors and really worked that place for hours.”