by John Barnes
I was hoping for ConTech company guards to burst in, any second, but Mort had said they wouldn’t have anyone covering me until I got to Saigon. They probably thought I’d already left, anyway, unless they were monitoring harbor traffic control. “I— I really don’t remember all of them,” I said.
“You want to make this difficult?” She shook me the way a cat kills a baby bird between its paws. “I could pull out all sorts of official authority, you know. I could just arrest you and throw you into the local tank and let your girl Helen figure out that you aren’t coming. I could do a lot of shit and I feel like doing all of it. You know I’m Gestapo, I bet, because that little chunk of jewshit, Geoffrey Iphwin, probably told you that, but he might not have told you that I’m with the Political Offenses Section and I don’t have to tell you what that means.”
She didn’t. The Twelve Reichs are mostly independent—they even have their own Gestapos—but within the Gestapos of each of the Reichs, the Political Offenses Section is not local. It collects whatever money it wants from the local government, but it has its own courts and judges and penal facilities—and it answers only to Party Headquarters, in Berlin. Each Reich sets its own course in domestic policy, and even to some extent in defense, but no Reich chooses how much dissent to tolerate. That decision is always made for it. Which is part of why most expats, like me, aren’t willing to live in one.
I gulped and said, “I will answer questions as much as I can but I don’t think I know anything.”
“You have no way of knowing whether you know anything. Let me be the judge of whether you know anything.” She slammed me down into the pilot’s chair, way off balance, so hard that the back of the chair bruised my back. “Now answer the questions. What are all the questions you can remember Iphwin asking you?”
I rattled off as many as I could remember, but there had been too many and I was getting confused. She slapped me on the face, clearly restraining herself, but still more than hard enough to make sure that I knew she could take out some teeth if she wanted to, then grabbed my hair and raised my head, staring directly into my eyes. “You really don’t remember, do you?”
“No!”
“No you don’t remember, or no you’re refusing to tell me?” Her voice was now quiet and gentle, almost as if she were about to get a warm washcloth and clean my face, or sit down and ask me about my feelings.
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s a good answer. Now we’re getting somewhere. Next question: what can you tell me about a man named Roger Sykes?”
“I don’t think I know anyone named Roger Sykes.”
Billie Beard hit me again, a straight down punch into one of my shoulders that made it ring with numb pain. “The man you talk to in the virtual reality bar, almost every night. The one you probably call the Colonel.”
That cleared that up; of course I knew him. “And his street name is Roger Sykes?”
“That’s right. Now what can you tell me about him?”
“Well, I call him the Colonel. We talk about all kinds of things every night. He’s retired and he lives in some little town on the Pacific coast of Mexico. We talk about fishing and boating a lot, and about flying, and ... I don’t know, male hobby stuff I guess you’d say.”
“Do you ever talk about how the American League pennant race is going, during the season?”
“I don’t know what the question means!” I was sniveling, now. The pain and fear had gotten to me. I was terrified that she would hit me again.
She stared at me, her expression blank, slowly becoming more puzzled. “Neither do I. I don’t know what that question means either,” she said. Then with a sudden, brutal slap with the side of her foot, she swept my feet from under me, causing the pilot’s chair to spin, dumping me onto the floor in a terrorized heap. “Why did I ask you that? Tell me why I asked you that!” She kicked me in the ribs.
“You just told me you don’t know why!”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Beard sat down in the pilot’s chair; her long frame absolutely drooped, and she sighed. “All right, what can you tell me about the murder of Billie Beard in Saigon?”
“Aren’t you Billie Beard?” I asked, hopelessly confused, trying to get my feet under me and to get between her and the hatch.
“Answer the question!”
I felt like a complete idiot. Perhaps that was what she intended. “I do not know anything about the murder of Billie Beard in Saigon. I am going to Saigon myself. If you are going to be murdered there—”
She lunged out of the chair and braced me against the wall. “Who the hell says I am going to be murdered in Saigon?”
“You just did! You asked me what I knew about the murder of Billie Beard in Saigon.”
“I did ask that,” she said. She had that strange blank expression that I had seen twice before, but now she reset it into a pleasant smile. “Your answers have been extremely helpful. This will look really good on your record if you ever decide to apply to become a citizen of any of the Reichs. Well, I can’t stay, so thank you very much and have a nice day.” She turned and went out the hatch before I could say a word, leaving me slumped against the wall of my own cabin, shaken and frightened. She went out with a sway in her walk like a teenager looking for a boyfriend, and gave me a flirty-little-girl “bye-bye” wave at the hatch, before going out. “Jump boat,” I croaked, “wake up extra fast.”
There were thuds, pings, clangs, and whizzing sounds all over; that’s the command you use to get the robot all the way up and running when you need to run like hell. “Secure all,” I added, and the gangway retracted, the hatch slammed shut, and the jump boat cut its own mooring line.
I dumped myself into the pilot’s chair and belted in. “Are you all right, Mr. Peripart? Do you require medical attention? What is our situation?”
“Comply with Surabaya harbor flight control,” I said, “unless they try to move me toward captivity. Get us to the main landing area in Cholon, first available slot. Full auto. I trust you. Just get me there, quick.”
“Yes, Mr. Peripart.” There was a little warmth in the voice, I thought; like so many robots whose owners were do-it-yourself types, it probably didn’t get to exercise its full faculties as often as it wanted to.
A moment later the jets were thumping madly, and we were zigzagging across the harbor, dodging in and out of other traffic. The Skyjump must have gotten cleared for a high-priority exit— perhaps Iphwin’s influence, perhaps even Billie Beard’s. By that point I really did not care in the slightest. I reached forward and opened the medical kit, got myself a painkiller/mood elevator ampoule, loaded it in, and slapped the jector against my carotid— the fast way in for drugs when you’re really in need. I fired once and mostly stopped hurting, but the world still felt very urgent and frightening, so I fired a second time. Suddenly I didn’t hurt at all (at least until the euphoria wore off), I had just gotten the very best job in the whole world, and I was going to go spend an ecstatic weekend in bed with a beautiful woman I adored. I had that thought and just giggled myself to sleep; by then the waves were thundering against the hull as we made a fast run up to launch.
* * * *
By the time I woke up the jump boat was circling down toward Cholon, the watery twin city that was the major jump boat port for Saigon. The old city of Saigon itself had not known war since the 1880s and was in most ways a Final Republic French city still; Cholon was a sort of twenty-first-century Chinese industrial Venice. Most people flew into Cholon for business and took a small boat into Saigon for pleasure.
Cholon had been reorganized and rebuilt around a series of wide Stillwater canals that acted as runways and harbors; the polders between held warehouses, factories, and residential districts, and on the roofs of the major buildings there were truck gardens. The result, from the air, was a grid of deep green squares, separated by broad brown water. The jump boat dropped out of the holding pattern and spiraled down to splash onto one of the canals; immediately
, responding to orders from the tower, we made a hard left into a basin that cut into one of the polders, and swung from there into a mooring hangar.
I grabbed my bags, told the jump boat to order fuel and to shut down once it was delivered, and walked out the gangplank into the hangar. I was thoroughly jumpy between having had a beating and the come-down off the painkillers, which normally induces mild temporary paranoia. The anti-inflammatory and anti-traumal drugs had taken care of the basic damage Billie had done to my body, but the mood lifters weren’t even putting a dent in what had happened to my mind.
I hadn’t worried about being randomly attacked by strangers since I was about fourteen, when I had mustered up enough nerve to get into the last fistfight of my life and convinced the class bully to look for easier prey.
Now as I walked through the big, dark, empty hangar, I was looking for something or someone to spring from behind every fuel drum and post; my heart hammered at anything in the shadows I didn’t instantly recognize. The slap of waves against the pilings sounded like a man climbing out of the water with a knife. My own echoing footsteps seemed to betray my position and draw imaginary crosshairs onto the middle of my back. I hurried, but I was afraid that I was running toward the patient stalkers who were about to leave; I slowed to a snail’s pace, but I dreaded making it easy for the unseen followers in the shadows. The whole vast space of the hangar seemed to hold nothing but terrors. I was scared that there might be someone there, with all that room to hide. Probably there wasn’t one other person in there, and that frightened me too.
I don’t suppose it took me three minutes to walk down the dock, across the unloading area, toward the yellow glare of the archway, and out the arched door into the bright Cochin-Chinese sunlight, but in that walk I died a thousand times. My teeth ached again where I had been hit, from gritting them; I was breathing as fast as if I had run a couple of miles.
When I finally passed through the sunlit arch that I had been so desperate to reach, what was in front of me was a pleasant scene of utter ordinariness: the enclosing dike, with a wide flight of stairs up to the top, and a row of Chinese shops up above. I walked up the steps, still glancing back occasionally at the dark arch into the hangar. There was a bar right at the top, and I badly wanted a drink, but I was more than late enough already, so I flagged down a pinceur—a pedicab jockey whose whole job was to grab people coming into Cholon and get them to the watercab that paid him. I was happy to be grabbed, and a moment later my luggage and I were rolling along the top of the dike, headed around to one of the many watercab slips.
A paranoid thought struck—what if the pinceur was working for them? And who were they, anyway? The German Reich, the Political Offenses network, some other enemy of Iphwin’s? And what on earth had ever made me want to work for an employer with so many enemies?
I was on the point of flagging down some other pinceur at random, and transferring, just to throw them off my tail, when the small Asian man pedaling the cab leaned back and said, “I’m hearing through my earpiece that there’s no one following us.”
I started. “Was there anyone before?”
“No, but you can never be completely sure. Two of our tails have followed for a full kilometer now, and nothing has happened. The one watching your jump boat reports nothing, either. If you’re willing to give us your permission, we’re going to go in and sweep it for bugs or anything else that our friend Billie Beard might have left behind her.”
“You’re with ConTech?” I asked.
“You better hope I am! Yes. Now, relax, enjoy the view, and be aware that you’re under our eyes continuously for the rest of the trip. You can do whatever you like, and we’ve got you covered, or if we don’t chances are we’ll be in more trouble than you. Oh, and Mort at headquarters said specifically that he wanted to apologize for Beard having got through to you like she did. Those bastards really caught us flat-footed this time; it’s a lesson to us all. Now relax and enjoy the ride—your watercab jockey will be another one of us.”
“Thank you,” I said, meaning it with all my heart.
The ride took just a few more minutes, the transfer to the watercab was almost instant with the pinceur carrying the bags, and in no time we were making our way out of the tangle of Cholon and onto the Saigon River. It was wonderful to feel so safe.
I hadn’t been in Cochin-China in more than a year. The familiar pleasures were all around—the boats full of livestock, the quarreling and haggling from the floating shops, the soft blue and white of the sky against the deep green of the trees. I sat back and enjoyed the ride until we slipped through one of the watercourse tunnels for half a kilometer, then emerged from that into the bright sunlight of the interior boat pond of the Royal Saigon. The bellhops whisked my stuff up to the room, along with an apologetic bunch of flowers, as I went to see the hotel doctor and see what other repairs I might need.
“Curiously enough,” he said, after checking me over, “I believe every bit of your story because it’s completely consistent with the behavior of a Political Offenses cop, but she seems to have unusual control. I can tell by surface scan that your muscles probably ache, but she didn’t even break enough capillaries to give you any real bruises. I can spray you with some stuff to make you feel better, and we’ll squirt some gingival stabilizer in so that your teeth won’t wobble or get plaque down in there, but you’re in perfectly fine shape except for the pain itself. I suppose if you’re going to have something like this done to you it’s better to have it done by a pro.” I opened my jaws and let him run the filler around the base of my teeth; then he sprayed me all over with the painkiller. “Did she hit your groin?”
“No. Nor my testicles either.”
“Glad to find someone who still knows the difference. All right, then we won’t spray that area, because the painkiller also tends to deaden some of the pleasure response for a while, and I hate to spoil a guy’s Friday night.” The doctor stuck out his hand. “I’m the house doc here, Lawrence—never, never Larry— Pinkbourne. If there’s trouble and I turn up, I’m on your team. I have a little side line with ConTech, too, which I imagine will help you to feel better.”
“If ConTech is so ubiquitous, where was it in Surabaya?”
“It’s everywhere in Surabaya—that’s the problem. The Dutch Reich is so hostile that nobody ever gets a spare minute to do any preplanning, and every one of Iphwin’s agents is always busy. Here, things are a great deal more relaxed—there’s a sort of a detente with the Emperor in Tokyo and an even better detente with the King here. Why the hell Iphwin insists on operating in any of the Reichs, let alone the Dutch Reich, is beyond me. You’re an expat, aren’t you, Peripart?”
“Crossbred Nineteener and Remnant,” I said, “originally out of Illinois and California. You must be too?”
“You have me beat,” he said, smiling. “Hawaiian exodus on both sides of the family, and nobody knows where they came from before then. I have a few distant cousins that were Nineteeners.”
We chatted for a few minutes, as all expats do, seeing if we had any distant shared relatives or mutual acquaintances. Anymore it’s almost a relief when you don’t—if we can find unassimilated Americans we don’t know, it means our numbers haven’t shrunk as far as we might reasonably have feared. We shook hands, and I went up to the room.
The lock had already been set to my thumb, and my bags were inside, along with Helen’s—hers were mostly unpacked, since she was one of those people who don’t feel comfortable in a hotel room until they’ve homesteaded it. The note from her on the bed said she’d gone out shopping, that Iphwin’s men had already briefed her on the situation, and that she’d be back in a little while.
I stripped naked and stretched out on top of the coverlet to take a nap. Dr. Pinkbourne’s painkillers were hitting me nicely by then, so that my whole body had kind of a pleasant warm glow. I was asleep a moment later, and it seemed as if the next instant I was waking up in the middle of a long passionate kiss from Helen. Wh
en the kiss broke I sat up and discovered that she was also naked; she must have undressed before climbing onto the bed beside me, I realized in a groggy sort of way. “Hello there,” I said.
Even if I hadn’t been quietly in love with her for the past five years, I’d have liked what I saw. Helen had thick chestnut hair, and when it was loose, as it was now, it hung to her waist in a soft natural wave. Her eyes were gray-green, her snub nose was sprayed with freckles, and her mouth was wide and full-lipped above a strong chin; not everyone’s idea of attractive, but it certainly got my attention. Her body, thanks to her swimming, running, rowing, and hiking, was strong and muscular, compact more than willowy, longer in the torso than in the legs, and she had pleasantly big round buttocks and smallish, very firm breasts. Just at the moment, she was climbing on top of me, so that the thick hair formed sort of a tent around my face; she pushed me back on the bed and pressed her breast against my face. I sucked the nipple gently; her breath caught and she pinned my hands back and wrapped me in her thighs. She said, “I’m in the mood and I took the injection for the weekend. Let’s, please, before we do anything else.”