The Last Dancer

by The Last Dancer (new ed) (mobi)

  Denice found her voice. "What makes you so sure I'm who you think?"

  Chandler leaned back slightly, relaxing with an apparent effort into the cushions supporting him. He gestured at Jimmy. "Your friend here, 'Sieur Ramirez. When Tommy Boone died, I lost whatever real authority I ever had inside the Johnny Rebs, but I still have friends inside, people who talk to me. Obodi questioned your friend Ramirez in front of half a dozen Rebs, and some of those Rebs spoke to other Rebs, and somewhere in that chain someone spoke to me. Ramirez told Obodi you'd been Trent's lover; that was enough. Denice Daimara, Trent's lover, eyes the color of emeralds--nobody walks around these days with green eyes unless they're real, and usually not then; it meant your eye color mattered to you. If anyone inside the Rebs had had any sense of history, Sedon would have known that the young lady being brought to him was not merely Douglass Ripper's bodyguard, not just some girl with a few years of dance and some shotokan training; Sedon would have known, Denice Castanaveras, that you were the daughter of Carl Castanaveras and Jany McConnell, and you would never have gotten within ten klicks of him. I think, Denice, you would have died on the set of that sensable in the Santa Monica mountains."

  Chandler was a pacer. A half hour into their conversation, he rose, and moved restlessly back and forth across the soft, ankle-high rugs.

  "So," said Chandler as he walked, "this is our problem. Sedon is, for whatever reasons of his own, dragging the United States, and likely Japan as well, toward an uprising we cannot win. No simulation I have run--and I have employed hardware and expert systems that dwarf the resources of any replicant AI, run by the best Player I could get my hands on--no simulation shows this insurrection possessing any significant chance of success. I got four percent once by a ridiculously optimistic set of base assumptions; usually the simulations showed less than one percent chance of success. Sedon does not have the Collective with him; he does not have the Belt CityStates with him; and he does not, in point of fact, have a good quarter of the genuine Reb power structure standing with him. And he needs them all to have so much as a one in four chance of success." Chandler snorted. "He needs me. Chandler Industries is the only institution in the System that can give him the transportation he needs to fight." He stopped pacing, turned to look at them all, and said simply, "This uprising, my friends, must never take place."

  "Assuming your projections are right," said Jimmy bluntly, "and I'm not sure I believe they are--or even that you're being honest with us--how do you suggest that this insurrection be stopped? Go to the Peaceforcers?"

  Chandler locked eyes with the young man. "It occurred to me. It's a tempting scenario in many ways; intelligence from within the PKF suggests that the Peaceforcers are chomping at the bit. Commissioner Vance, in particular, wouldn't require much in the way of an excuse to move on the Rebs." He shook his head. "It's a bad idea, though. Vance is a poor tool; he'd crack the back of the organization. We'd be rebuilding for a decade or more, and that's a thing I'd like to avoid. No, our course is clear, and you, 'Sieur Ramirez, nearly did the job for us. A shame you didn't cook the bastard's heart instead of just basting his belly a bit."

  "You're going to kill Sedon."

  Chandler nodded. "We're going to try. I've discussed this with Robert, and--with reservations--he's willing; describing William as willing is an understatement. To hear him tell it, he's waited fifty-odd thousand years for this." Chandler did not smile at the joke, if he thought it one. He turned to Denice. "'Selle Castanaveras, or Daimara if you prefer; I'd like to send you with Robert and Dvan, and I'd like to request that Ralf the Wise and Powerful aid you. I'll get you to San Diego, and from there the four of you--yourself, Robert, Ralf and William--will determine how to proceed. Your father was once part of a trio called the Three Musketeers; himself, the Elite cyborg Christian Summers, and a woman named Jacqueline who was a de Nostri. They were quite simply the most effective team the PKF ever employed. I don't have a de Nostri to offer you, and I don't have an Elite to offer you, not even one of the Jap knockoffs; but I do have Robert, who is, after your father, the deadliest human being I've ever met; and Dvan of the Gi'Tbad, who has impressed me as I have rarely been impressed in my life." Chandler took a deep breath, said quietly, "Will you do me the great favor of joining these men, going to San Diego, and cutting this motherfucker Sedon's head off?"

  "I'll think about it."

  "If you don't go," Chandler said evenly, "Robert won't go. And I don't imagine your AI friend would help us either, and I don't have a Player available who's capable of dealing with Ring. Denice, we need you."

  "Perhaps. But your need does not create a sense of obligation in me."

  "You need us."

  "That's what I need to think about."

  Chandler gazed at her a moment, and then the ghost of a smile touched his lips. He inclined his head slightly. "I should know better than to try to bargain with a Castanaveras. I'd like an answer soon."

  "You'll have one."

  Jimmy Ramirez looked back and forth between the two of them. "What about me?"

  Chandler snorted. "You don't even have your other foot. You're staying right here."

  "I don't think so."

  Chandler smiled at Jimmy. "I have someone who wants to see you."

  * * *

  24.

  At Phobos CityState, on June 8, 2076, row upon row of SpaceFarers' Collective ships lined the moonlet's rocky, uneven surface, an honor guard of some eighty ships lined up beneath the distant sun; more spacecraft than Trent had ever seen together in one place before, or would, he suspected, ever see again.

  Belinda Singer, whose skill and wisdom and energy had helped keep the SpaceFarers' Collective intact for half a century, was dying.

  Doctor Rinerson said, "She's been waiting for you."

  Eric Rinerson was a short man with a slight tendency toward fat. Otherwise he was what his name might have implied, a pale Caucasian genotype with blue eyes. He had stood alone with a pair of medbots, the other side of the surface airlock, as Trent cycled through into pressure. There were easier accesses to Phobos City-State General Hospital--most of Phobos City itself was pressurized these days--but not for a man who did not wish even his presence on Phobos known.

  Trent hated the melodrama of it worse than the inconvenience, but it was a simple truth: when you had five million Credits on your head, assassins were everywhere.

  Rinerson continued to wait patiently as Trent stripped his p-suit off and hung it on a hook by the airlock entrance. He knew Trent well; he had treated him seven years prior, when an eighteen-year old boy had been delivered into his hands suffering from a broken leg, cracked ribs, a knee that lacked sufficient cartilage to make a decent toothpick; a punctured lung, and residual death pressure damage to the lungs, eyes and ears.

  Trent pulled on a pair of magboots, and clicked them to the corridor floor. "She's been dead in every real sense of the word for nearly two days," Rinerson said as they walked down the corridor together. "But she wanted to see you before she let go."

  The medbot was a small thing whose head came up to Trent's belly button. It had three arms and six legs, and it spoke in gentle, simple sentences. "Belinda Singer," said the medbot, standing in front of the door to her hospital room, "is dying."

  "I heard," said Trent. "It's why I'm here."

  "You may see her if you do not disturb her," the medbot continued. "She is a very sick patient."

  "Dying, you say."

  "Very sick," the medbot cautioned.

  "Say you understand," Rinerson whispered.

  Trent stared at the medbot. "I understand. I will not do anything to disturb her while she dies."

  The medbot's metal head bobbed up and down, a programmed imitation of a human nod. "That will be very good."

  The room was larger than Trent had imagined. White glowpaint lit the room brightly, gleamed off the medbots standing next to Belinda's immersion chamber, off the half dozen pieces of medical equipment Trent recognized and the larger collect
ion that he did not.

  Rinerson waited at the door.

  Trent moved forward into the brightness. In an abrupt absurd flash of memory, the room on Luna came to him, the room where a dozen Peaceforcers, Vance and Melissa du Bois among them, had watched him walk through a wall. It had been about this size, and lit like this, with this dispassionate white clarity.

  Belinda Singer had undergone what Doctor Rinerson called total systemic failure. She could not speak or breathe or see; her heart had long since ceased pumping. She looked like a potato that had begun to grow, floating in some clear solution that Trent knew was not water, tubes sprouting from her at every orifice; her arms and her legs were gone, amputated to prevent the spreading of poisons from the tissues in her extremities, the extremities dying from lack of oxygen as her heart failed and the thin tissues of veins and capillaries collapsed. She'd had seven strokes that even the nanoviruses cruising her blood stream, on the other side of the blood/brain barrier, had been unable to prevent.

  No one except Singer herself knew how old she actually was. There were no records of her prior to the year 1987. She had been born in an age when it was still possible for records to be lost, for courthouses to burn down, or be burned, and for average men and women to create and sustain new identities if they wished.

  A thin optic fiber led from the old woman's hairless skull, to a systerm against the wall. It was not an inskin--Belinda could not possibly have survived the surgery required to implant an inskin--but perhaps it was close enough.

  He closed his eyes and went Inside.

  "When I woke up this morning," said Doctor Death, "I realized that I was completely and totally perfect."

  It is midnight on the Boulevard of Dreams.

  The streets are empty, and the buildings are burning, blazing, and nobody seems to notice. Motorpigs tear up and down the Boulevard on chopped Harleys, screaming insults at one another and watching the buildings glow. Sitting at the curb in front of the Hotel Paradise, in a drop-top metallic blue '67 Mustang with the engine running, are Doctor Death and Trent the Uncatchable.

  A portly, middle-aged man wearing a ponytail and a loud sports jacket is standing in front of the Hotel Paradise's entrance, screaming at the top of his lungs at a tall, incredibly gorgeous heavy-metal musician. "Do you have any idea how lucky you are? You're in heaven--now--but you fuck up like this again and I'm sending you back to the Hell where I found you--to New York," he shrieks, "where they made you ride the subways!"

  It's all too tedious, and Doctor Death has heard it too many times before. Doctor Death is somewhere in her late twenties, with long black hair, wearing a black leather miniskirt and a black leather vest, black calf-high boots and a white silk bra. She tunes it out, staring through her mirrored silver sunglasses at the burning Boulevard of Dreams, the Motorpigs, and the news crews who are filming it all for Channel 2 Action News. The burning buildings are reflected in Doctor Death's sunglasses, movie miniatures in reverse. "Totally perfect," says Doctor Death softly. "Except that I was still going to die. I was perfect and I was going to die. I felt--"

  "Fucked over by the Karma Gods."

  Doctor Death begins rolling a joint, with great care, looking down into her lap. "Exactly. So I went driving. At sunrise. Kick the stereo in, blow the speakers right off the doors. Loud music, Hendrix, Van Halen, stuff with properly handled guitars. I hit 120 in the mist going down Pacific Coast Highway."

  Trent nods. "Truly, a perfect moment."

  Doctor Death gestures at the joint, sitting like a sacrifice on the altar of her lap. "And this is a perfect joint. Want a hit?"

  "Sure."

  Doctor Death hands him the joint and Trent lights it, tokes once and hands it back. Doctor Death takes one mighty hit, sucking the joint halfway down with one monstrous toke, and tosses it out the window. She puts the Mustang into first, still holding the clutch down, holding her breath, revving the engine until the sound becomes one immense shriek of power. She screams, marijuana smoke obscuring her face, "I hate this godless culture!" and then pops the clutch, and the Mustang screams away from the curb in a cloud of rubber smoke.

  They zoom westward down the Boulevard of Dreams, toward the ocean, weaving in and out among the gangs of Motorpigs.

  Doctor Death has to raise her voice to be heard. "Before I dropped out of high school I had a history instructor who tried to tell us what a great tragedy it was that the Greeks got conquered by the Romans. Because the Greeks were so much more civilized, they were artists." Doctor Death turns to her right, stares at Trent, not watching the road, and says intensely, "Fuck art. The Romans built roads. They were the first ones. They didn't build roads to service the empire; they had an empire because they built roads, leveled and graded, laid gravel and then stone atop the gravel. And the roads made it possible for people to go places, to meet other people and other kinds of people. It fostered the exchange of information and the development of personal freedom."

  Trent smiles. "Belinda, information is overrated."

  Doctor Death nods. "'Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not understanding. Understanding is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty and beauty is not love and love is not music. Music is the best.'"

  "Whose is that?"

  "Um. Frank Zappa."

  Trent shakes his head. "Never heard of him."

  "I always wanted to be a musician," Doctor Death says suddenly. "It's all I ever really wanted. But I can't sing."

  "Bummer." There is a pause, a fragrant, burning building smoke-filled sort of a pause. A fifteen-story high rise is crumbling off to their right, and the sight is spectacular. "Let's go," says Trent, "and drive down the freeways at unreasonable speeds."

  "Deal." Doctor Death whips off down a side street, onto a freeway ramp, and then onto the freeway itself. "I was up in San Francisco once," Doctor Death says broodingly, "and they had a double looping reverse overpass U-turn freeway onramp. I've been sick with jealousy ever since."

  They weave in and out of traffic, zooming down the freeway at unreasonable speeds, the wind whipping Doctor Death's long black hair back away from her. She has to shout to be heard above the sound of the wind. "Did I tell you that when I woke up this morning I realized that I was completely and totally perfect?"

  "You did," Trent says.

  Doctor Death nods, says in a different voice, "I thought so."

  Fade to black.

  "Where are we?"

  They stood on a cement pathway, next to a small stone wall at the edge of a long drop, looking out over a huge city Trent did not recognize. An observatory loomed up into the sky beside them.

  "Griffith Park," Doctor Death said. "Los Angeles. It's 1984. The '84 Olympics have just ended." She paused, staring out over the glittering sea of light. "I am twenty-eight years old. Three years older than you are now. I don't have a driver's license or a social security card. I don't have a bank account. My fingerprints are on file nowhere in the world. I have never been arrested. Everyone calls me Doctor Death; I haven't used the name I was born with in so long I've nearly forgotten what it was." A cool breeze rose, brought the scent of growing things nearby, overlaying the distant stink of burned hydrocarbons. "Fifteen years from now, in 1999, a man named Camber, dressed all in black, is going to come to me and offer me a job. When he takes his sunglasses off I will see that his eyes have no internal structure, and no color; they are darker than the sunglasses that conceal them. And we will stand here together looking out over Los Angeles--because it is a sight he wants to see, the view from the Griffith Park observatory, of Los Angeles before the Quake." She turned to face Trent, and said softly, "He will tell me something I will not believe. He tells me other things--that I will be powerful, and wealthy, and respected; that I will die at a great age, and be mourned by many. That everything I have ever desired in my life, I will accomplish.

  "But he will not tell me the nature of the job he wishes to offer me, and the predictions--" Doctor Death shook her head. "I'd visited ps
ychics before. And he was very good, telling my fortune, but I didn't believe him."

  Trent studied Doctor Death's still features. "You were so beautiful."

  Doctor Death shrugged. "This is just my memory of how I looked, and I'm an egotistical old woman...the last thing he said to me, Trent, was, 'You will never speak of this to anyone.' And until now I have not. I'm not sure why."

  Trent thought that the sky to the east had lightened just a touch. "Belinda, I came from Ceres to be with you, because I was told you wanted to speak to me before you died. I will listen to anything you want to say."

  "You're going to be old some day, Trent. You do know that."

  Trent said slowly, "I've felt old most of my life, Belinda. When I was very young, I was already old. They call me the Uncatchable, and some of them think I walked through a wall, and some of them think I'm--" He shook his head. "--something else. But when I was very young I already knew I could die. That some day I would die."

  Doctor Death took off her sunglasses, stowed them in a pocket on her vest. "The awareness of mortality is a very powerful thing." It wasn't Trent's imagination; the sun was rising, a pale gray band of light backlighting the skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles. "I never thought about death. I knew it would come, some day, but I never thought about it. I was never afraid of it, and I'm not afraid now. I did everything I was put in the world to do, Trent. Every last thing. Except one."

  Trent waited.

  "Four thousand years ago," said Belinda Singer quietly, "the Jews envisioned a God who was just, omnipotent, and all knowing; the source of all things. Not of the universe, not equal to the universe; but the source from which the universe came. Ethical monotheism was a powerful concept, and one that led, quite directly, to the very concept of science, to the idea that the world was knowable, governed by a set of laws and rules that the mind could decipher and understand. Some scientists, with a religious bent, said that the laws of nature were merely the thoughts of the Creator.

  "A grand image," Belinda Singer said, in a voice softer than a whisper. "I was raised to believe in it. There is only one problem with it, which is that it is untrue."