Bodyguard

by William C. Dietz

  “I’m looking for a bandana and a ball cap.”

  “Big spender, huh? Well, take a look over there.”

  We left five minutes later. I had to admit that between the bandana and the hat, you couldn’t see any of my telltale white hair or highly reflective scalp. Not exactly foolproof, mind you, but better than nothing. And, safely wrapped in her new saronglike bandana, Joy was a lot less noticeable as well.

  We paused by a rock garden. I said, “So, how ‘bout a job?”

  Joy twirled and admired her reflection in the water. “There’s an opening for a metallurgist on sub-level six.”

  “Funny. Very funny. I need a real job. One I’m qualified for.”

  The ensuing thirty seconds of silence signaled how many jobs I was qualified for. Finally, when I was about to give up, she spoke. “There’s one job that you’re qualified for…and the pay’s pretty good.”

  I picked her up. “Really? What is it?”

  She looked me in the eye. “They need a bouncer at a nightclub called Betty’s.”

  It took the better part of half an hour to find Betty’s. Like most establishments of its kind, the nightclub was located in a seemingly run-down section of the asteroid known as “Old Port.” I say “seemingly,” because the seediness was somewhat calculated and about as genuine as the bird calls emanating from the surrounding jungle. And, since drinking, gambling and fornicating are often associated with night, even the street lights were kept artificially low.

  There were lots of joints, lots of miners, and lots of Zeebs to keep an eye on them. I checked to make sure my bandana was in place, stepped over a drunk, and made my way down the main drag. Dealers offered me dope out of the sides of their mouths, whores signaled me with sign language as old as their profession, and everybody else got out of my way. It pays to be big sometimes.

  Like its neighbors, Betty’s was housed in what had been a processing plant of some kind. Noise, light, and the smell of booze leaked out through a variety of holes and beckoned us in. We accepted. I sidestepped a pair of whacked-out miners, stepped through the swinging doors, and took a moment to check the place out.

  Betty, or an interior designer from hell, had taken full advantage of what was already there. The floor consisted of not-so-smooth native rock. Huge, rusty-looking I-beams held the ceiling up. A stage consisting of odd-sized cargo modules occupied the far end of the room. A fifty-foot bar took up most of the right-hand wall. It was made of hull metal and rested on a string of clapped-out mining carts. The floor was packed with miners, spacers, dealers, pimps, whores and scam artists of every description. I noticed that the furniture was made out of metal and looked damned near indestructible. I strolled over to the bar. A human was in charge and had two robotic assistants. I waved him over. He wore a brightly flowered shirt, black suspenders, and red pants. He plucked an empty off the bar and tossed it towards a recycle bin. “Yeah? What’ll it be?”

  “I’m looking for the owner or manager.”

  The bartender was in his early thirties, had slightly dissipated features and a somewhat arrogant manner. “What for?”

  “You need a bouncer, and I’m interested in the job.”

  The bartender looked me up and down like a butcher appraising a side of beef. “You’re big…but size ain’t everything.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I agreed patiently. “Can I see the owner?”

  “That would be me,” a soft, rather melodious voice said. I turned to find an absolutely beautiful woman standing before me. She had black hair, black skin, and a bod that wouldn’t quit. Kind of like a full-sized, flesh-and-blood Joy, clad in a long black evening gown rather than a bandana. Her dress was covered with black sequins. They shimmered with reflected light.

  I took the ball cap off and held it in my hands. “My name’s Max. I’m looking for a job.”

  The woman smiled. “Good. My name’s Betty and I’m looking for a bouncer.” She held out her hand. I took it, got lost in her eyes, and barely remembered to let go. Joy climbed up on my shoulder, and Betty smiled as if seeing herself in the miniature robot.

  A ruckus started on the other side of the room. A pair of men stood, exchanged words, and started to square off. Betty gestured with her head. “Fights are expensive, Max. Break it up.”

  I nodded soberly, placed Joy in a pair of well-manicured hands, and made my way across the room. My goal was to get there in a short period of time but do it in a low-key, almost casual way. The usual pre-fight war of words was well under way by the time I arrived. I interrupted. “Good evening, gentlemen. Having a good time?”

  The bigger of the two, a mean-looking dude with the words “Eat shit and die!” tattooed across his forehead and fists the size of miniature hams, looked me up and down. The sweet-sour stench of alcohol rolled over me as he spoke. “I’m going to rip this asshole’s head off and shove it up his ass. You got a problem with that?”

  It’s always been my opinion that actions truly speak louder than words. That’s why I turned towards number two, smiled, and side-kicked number one’s left knee. Something crunched, and he went down gushing swear words.

  Number two’s eyes got wide, like he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just seen, and his right fist went back in preparation for a roundhouse swing. I jerked my head to the side, let it pass, and sunk my fist into his gut. He bent over, barfed on his boots, and fell to his knees.

  Pain lanced up through my right leg. I turned to find that bozo number one had sunk his teeth into my right calf. I shifted my weight to that foot, back-kicked with my left, and felt his teeth tear loose. The rest was relatively easy. I bounced number one’s head off a nearby pillar, towed him over to number two, got a grip on both their collars, and dragged them towards the door. An obliging patron helped me roll them out into the street, where the Zeebs would eventually cart them away. I thanked him and followed the path of blood and vomit back into the night club. Betty was waiting for me. Joy had taken up residence on her shoulder. The nightclub owner smiled. “Your methods are rather messy, Max. I prefer bouncers who use as little violence as possible.”

  I felt my heart sink. The brain-cell shortage had surfaced again. A normal person would have used psychology, would have bullshitted the drunks out onto the street, then sent them packing. But not me, oh no, I had to kick the shit out of them, and blow off the only job I was likely to get. I looked down toward her elegantly clad feet. “Sorry.”

  “On the other hand,” Betty said levelly, “talk’s cheap and doesn’t work all that often.”

  I felt my spirits rise and dared to look up. She smiled encouragingly. “Tell me something, Max, is your little friend for sale? She looks like a miniature version of me.”

  Joy seemed oblivious to Betty’s words and toyed with one of her diamond earrings. The thoughts plodded through my mind. I needed money, that was true, and Joy would bring a pretty price. But you don’t sell friends, even if they don’t qualify as human. I shook my head. “Sorry, but Joy was given to me by a friend, and she’s not for sale.”

  Betty nodded understandingly. “Good. I like people with principles. You’re hired.”

  16

  “Once entrenched, new technology grows like an evil weed. Given sufficient time, it will overwhelm the garden of man and destroy that which sustains us. Our task is to identify the first twisted tendrils as they appear above the ground and destroy them before they can spread.”

  From an “Ecological Manifesto,” by Hans Schmidt, father of the Radical Action Committee of the group known as Green Earth

  Visiting hours started at 1000 standard and we were there when the doors opened. The women’s surgical ward was just that, a big open room with two rows of bio beds, each adjusted to meet that particular patient’s needs. Depending on what sort of surgery they had undergone or were about to have, the women lay on their backs, sides, or stomachs. Tubing and multi-colored wires snaked all around them. Most were miners, clearly identifiable by their short, easy-to-wash hair, but there wa
s a scattering of spacers, tool heads, and freelancers as well. No corpies, though, since they had private rooms with hot and cold running robots to keep them comfy. My calf hurt where the drunk had chewed on it. I limped slightly as I made my way down the corridor.

  The kid was located about halfway down the ward. Pull-out curtains screened her bed from the rest. Someone had combed her hair and given the bed permission to prop her up. Sasha was pale, and somewhat emaciated, but far better than when I’d seen her last. She managed a smile and held out her hand. It felt cold and weak. “Hi, Max. Hi, Joy. I like your dress.”

  The little android squealed with pleasure, did cartwheels up the bed, and snuggled into Sasha’s lap. I perched on the edge. “Hi yourself. Howya feeling?”

  “Like warmed-over vat slime. How do I look?”

  “Never better,” I lied cheerfully.

  “Liar,” she said equably. “They say I can bust out of here in three or four days.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I replied. “We’ll have the apartment ready by then.”

  She looked to see if I was serious. “Apartment? What apartment?”

  “The one I rented this morning,” I said importantly. “Gotta have a place to stay, you know.”

  Sasha frowned, and I saw the wheels start to turn. “That was thoughtful, Max, very thoughtful. Can we afford it?”

  This was fun. I grinned. “Yup…my job pays pretty well.”

  She looked genuinely surprised. “You’ve got a job?”

  “Sure do. I’m the bouncer at a nightclub called Betty’s.”

  I watched her absorb and process that piece of information. She looked up to where the bandana and hat covered the top of my head. “I like the fashion statement.”

  I almost said, “That isn’t a fashion statement, it’s a disguise,” and realized my mistake. I nodded wisely. “Thanks, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “A very good idea,” Sasha said seriously. “I hope you’ll continue to think along those lines.”

  I winked broadly. “Don’t worry, Mary. I will.”

  Sasha rolled her eyes at the sound of the phony name. “Good. See that you do.”

  I was about to respond with something witty when the bed interrupted. “The patient is tired. The patient is tired. Please leave now. Please leave now.” I felt a buzzing sensation under my butt. I stood. Joy ran to join me.

  “Okay, okay. I’m leaving, already. Take care of yourself, Sash, I mean Mary, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  The kid smiled, held up a hand, and let her head fall back against the pillow. She managed to look pretty in spite of the eyepatch, pasty skin, and nonexistent makeup. Sasha was tough, you had to give her that, and I felt a sense of almost fatherly pride. I forced myself to leave.

  The next couple of days developed into an almost pleasurable routine. Get up, shower, dump the fast-food containers left from the night before, drink two cups of Americano at the local expresso stand, visit Sasha in the hospital, and walk to work. Something I took seriously.

  After some rather arduous thought, I discovered it is possible to handle most troublemakers without resorting to violence. The first step is to look intimidating. That’ll control about seventy or eighty per cent of your typical barroom yahoos right off the top. That’s why I took to wearing black leathers, chrome-plated chains, and a semipermanent sneer.

  Of course, some drunks are talkers rather than fighters. Nine times out of ten you can bullshit them out the door, and as Betty likes to say, “Why fight if you don’t have to?”

  Still, real honest-to-god barroom brawlers like to fight, and build their reps on how many bouncers they wax. The best way to deal with them is to launch a preemptive strike that is so unexpected, so violent, that they never have a chance. The trick is to sort them out from the rest of the crowd, and that’s what I was working on when trouble arrived.

  The whole thing started about four hours into my shift. A few thousand miners had just come off duty, and two or three hundred of them had decided to spend some of their hard-earned pay at Betty’s. It wasn’t long before we had the usual number of arguments, squabbles, and scuffles. I sorted them out and took a break by the bar. Then something unusual happened. A set of honest-to-god, dyed-in-the-wool corpies walked through the doors, looked around, and headed for a recently vacated table.

  I was clear across the room when they entered, but it was easy to tell who and what they were from the way they moved, and the greyhound-thin zombie that tagged along behind them. It didn’t take a genius to know they’d attract trouble. After all, miners have a tendency to blame corpies for everything from pressure leaks to the quality of their sex lives. I moved in and tried to see their faces, but the combination of smoke and heavy shadow made it difficult.

  Nothing happened at first. The corpies ordered drinks, argued amongst themselves, and laughed at private jokes. Their zombie sat on the floor, rested her head against someone’s thigh, and stared into space. I wondered what she was thinking, if she was thinking, and how she’d wound up the way she was. I was still thinking about that when Betty came along.

  “The rounds,” as Betty called them, were something she was known for. They were her personal touch, the way she made her club different from the rest, and built a loyal clientele at the same time. Such was her beauty, and the personality that went with it, that everyone wanted to know and be known by her.

  Betty started by the autotellers, worked her way down along the bar, and drifted out onto the main floor. A robo-spot tracked her progress. Smoke eddied as it drifted through the light. Canned music thumped in the background. Betty knew the regulars, hundreds of them, and called them by name. All the rest were addressed as “honey, sweetie, or darling.”

  “Murphy, nice to see you tonight…Rawlings, nice earrings. Where’d you get them? Hello, sweetie, welcome to Betty’s. Lopez, behave yourself tonight, Max is getting tired of throwing you out…”

  And so it went until she approached the corpies. I tensed, hoping things would go well and sensing that they wouldn’t. She addressed their leader. He had his back turned in my direction. Her voice was husky sweet and carried over the noise. “Hi, honey, how are you tonight?”

  “Horny as hell,” came the answer. “Why don’t you sit on my lap?”

  I saw Betty frown and was already in motion when she replied. “Thanks, sweetie, but not right now. Some other time, maybe.”

  I was halfway there when a hand grabbed Betty’s arm and pulled her down. She struggled but he held her down. “What’s the problem, bitch? You hard of hearing or something? I said sit on my lap.”

  I approached from behind, looped the garrote around his neck, and pulled the handles in opposite directions. He let go of Betty and reached for the wire. She stood and I released the handles. The garrote fell away as the man turned in my direction. That’s when I realized that we’d met before.

  It was Curt, the same Curt I’d called “pretty boy” back on Earth, though his looks had deteriorated since I’d blown half his nose away. The docs had done a good job on him, but it would take time and more operations before anyone called him “pretty” again.

  I waited for him to recognize me, but the disguise worked. You could see it in his eyes. He didn’t know who the hell I was outside of some jerk that he wanted to hurt. Yeah, Curt was pissed, seriously pissed, and he started to rise. I hit his already damaged nose, felt it break, and grinned.

  “Max! Max! Over here!” I turned to find that one of Curt’s bodyguards was on his feet. He was struggling to peel Joy off his face with one hand while reaching for his gun with the other. I measured the distance, kicked him in the balls, and watched him go down. That was a mistake.

  The third corpie, a woman this time, executed a textbook-perfect spin-kick and hit me in the side of the head. I stumbled backwards, felt the zombie hit the back of my knees, and fell over backwards. The floor hit hard. The corpie was still celebrating when the bartender sapped her from behind. She slumped to the floor.
I got up. The room tilted, swayed from side to side, and stabilized. I turned to the bartender. “Thanks.”

  He shrugged and slipped the sap into a pocket. “I did it for Betty.” I nodded my understanding.

  Some of the regulars grabbed the corpies, roughed them up, and carried them towards the doors. Curt, supported by a miner on each side, held his nose with one hand and pointed towards me with the other. Blood dripped off his chin. “Mgmpf!”

  It didn’t make sense, but I understood. He planned to kill me, or have me killed, whichever was most convenient. I shrugged. So what else was new? The bastard had tried to grease me for months now.

  The miners split into teams, vied to see which group could throw their corpie the furthest, and cheered their scores. It would have been fun to watch, except that a group of drunks had corralled the zombie and were pushing her around. She offered no resistance and bounced from one person to the next. She had a nice figure, and at least two members of the crowd were taking unfair advantage of that fact.

  I walked over, thanked the miners for their help, and sent them to the bar for a free drink. The miners grumbled but obeyed. They were afraid not to. The zombie gazed at me through vacant eyes. I took her leash, led her outside, and gave control to a Zeeb. He frowned, started to say something, thought better of it, and led the zombie towards her master.

  In spite of the fact that Zeebs aren’t exactly known for their humanitarian efforts, four of them had gathered around Curt and were loading him onto a stretcher. After all, corpies outrank everyone, Trans-Solar owned the company they worked for, and if it hadn’t been for the money that Betty paid them to stay off her back, the Zeebs would have hammered me right then and there. But they’d remember, yes they would, and the bill would eventually come due.

  I turned and went back inside. My head hurt, and one eye had started to close. It was too bad, really, because if my vision had been unimpaired I might have seen the greenies and been prepared for what happened later. But I didn’t and wasn’t.