by Robert Reed
“Stay for as long as you need.”
She’ll need some way out of Brulé. Some means that Minus can’t find and trace. The clock is running, she thinks. Five months is an honest figure. She has plans. Living with Dirk meant time where she could dream up solutions to all of her problems. And that was with a quarter share of the fortune. Three IA quiver chips. Now she has twelve and maybe all of her partners are dead, the Magician and the Quito boy included, and what she feels isn’t joy and she won’t call it greed…no, she’s not greedy…but she is a creature of opportunity and she won’t give up what she has earned for herself. Five months to save myself, she thinks. Somehow I’ll do it.
Outside, out past the living railing of the balcony and down, she can see a woman emerging from the apartment below the Gardener’s. Chiffon wants to ask about the neighbors. Does Steward know them? How well? What do they know about him? What damage can they do? This neighbor woman is a firm kind of fat, youthful but not pretty. Her bland face is thick with emotion and red like some fruit. Someone’s talking to her from inside the apartment. The voice is odd. Chiffon blinks and sees a dark figure in the doorway for an instant, the skin black hyperfiber and the entire man enormous. A real stew of humanity, she thinks. A cyborg from Morning and an assortment of Terrans, and then there’s the Gardener who hates birds. Brulé is more tolerant than it lets on. It must be if it lets scum like Dirk make a home here, however temporarily, and she sighs and turns to Steward and thanks him once again.
He shrugs, lost in thought.
“Do you know how good sanctuary feels?” she asks.
He says, “Mostly,” and sets down the globe. He is completely fooled, and helpless, and he wants to help this poor hurting Flower more than even he knows. She knows the symptoms. She sees them in his face, his asking, “So what’s his name?”
“Whose?”
“The guy with the rude prick.”
She says, “I can’t tell,” and looks at him. There is something in his expression, in his posture, and she asks, “What is it?”
“Nothing,” he lies.
So she uncrosses her legs and uses her dress like a fan, shaking it, spreading a cocktail of bare-knuckled pheromones through the air. She has the distinct impression that he’s contemplating something, that he’s got some crazy nonsense in his head, and she arouses herself in a moment and invites him to come to her on his fine long sofa and tell her his concerns. She calls him “Lover.” He takes a deep breath and holds it and touches a corner of one shelf, saying, “Five months,” with a reverent tone.
“Come here.”
He crosses his arms on his chest and seems to hug himself, straining, the fibers of his muscles standing out, and her saying:
“Why not join me, love. I won’t bite.”
He says, “You know, sometimes I forget you’re a Flower.”
And she says, “Well, I’ll have to remind you more often,” and she reaches, taking him and pulling him close enough so neither can see the other’s face.
4
The IA class of quiver chips is distinctive for having no distinctions. It is plain; it is white and smooth; it has no marks besides tiny IAs on both sides; it is no larger than the nail on the average thumb, nor any thicker, yet any one of the chips, filled to capacity, would make a Kross prince salivate. It is worth that much…
—excerpt from an economics text, available through World-Net
I ate a lovely, quiet dinner with one of the Quito crime lords. She was a handsome older woman, small and fragile in appearance. She had cooked the meal herself. We sat on pillows and looked out her windows, all of Quito below us. Or so it had seemed. She asked about my travels. She asked intelligent, perceptive questions about many subjects. I was charmed. I have no reservations about making that claim. She was a thoroughly charming dinner hostess, her jokes subtle and her smile quite genuine, and the height of our evening was more intimate than this account can give. Suffice it to say that I left full of honest joy, glad for the opportunity and wholly unconcerned about the supposed line of work to which she had dedicated her life…yet several days later, by chance, I met someone who was familiar with the woman and her various reputations. He asked me about the events of the evening. He listened while I related some of the high points, his expression distant and quite sober and his head nodding steadily as if my story was one he had heard several times in the past. Finally, as if in pain, he admitted to me that he did not consider her such a good person. Indeed, there was one story told about the woman. True? He couldn’t say. Did I enjoy the meal she served? Was there a meat dish? What kind of meat was it? I couldn’t remember. And he paused, shaking his head, then muttered some crazy nonsense about her enemies and their sad fates…
—excerpt from a traveler’s notebook available through System-Net
Minus is a thickly built man made thicker with some selective tailoring and several kinds of strength training, his hands broad and strong with squat fingers and his face flat and square and centered on a triangular nose. His wide lips are caught up in a perpetual grin, self-assured and humorless. He has a thick beard and masses of hair on his bare chest. The pigment inside each hair has been deleted by tailoring—a trait common to certain Quito neighborhoods—and inside the hairs’ hollow spaces grows a wide assortment of algae colored metallic green and sky blue and sharp violet and violent red. The actual pattern of colors changes from day to day. The effect is heightened because Minus has no pigment in his skin. He is milky white with cold pink eyes gazing out at the world from behind a chaotic rainbow.
He’s steering a private floater, thinking for the countless time that he never trusted the girl. Not from the first. He remembers them calling her a fancy Flower, a truly exceptional Flower, but he hadn’t liked the way she worked with Dirk. Not from Minute One. In no time she had had him crazy. He was like a young bull again. More than once Minus thought about going to him and asking if he could check out the brothel, say. In case. Only he knew what Dirk would say. He would say no, don’t, and don’t worry about me either. Worry about you. If we’re going to get a real home someday, Dirk would say, you’ve got to get on it. Find someplace worth living and get us in the door. All right? Understand me? All right?
It was stupid, his waiting like he had. In the end, entirely on his own initiative, Minus had checked out the Flower’s origins. Just to make sure. He didn’t plan on telling Dirk, and the funny part of the story—easily the funniest part—is that he had cleared her and the brothel on that very same day.
She was designed and grown and trained in the very best facility in Quito. Someday, or so said the brothel owners, the Chiffon series would become the emblem of worth to every aging stud, equivalent male and androgynous versions soon to be added to the stable. This was nearly the first one. Was there a problem? asked the brothel. No problem, he told them. My boss is just acting crazy sometimes, that’s all. And the brothel took that as a compliment. They said that if that’s a problem, maybe they should tone down the future Chiffons. Maybe a little?
All right, Minus told himself. I was wrong to worry. Where’s the big harm if the old shit’s happy? She came to us with nothing, after all. She was a Flower, after all, and they’re tailored and trained to be sweet and harmless. So all right, so long as she doesn’t tell him how to run the business, what is the trouble with Dirk having a playmate?
Nothing, he thought.
Everything’s sweet and fine.
At least it seemed so. But somewhere someone got a case of shaken will. Minus had seen it happen before. A few questions and satisfactory answers, and maybe the issue seems cleared. Only one of the parties gets nervous. He or she gets to thinking, asking if someone’s on their trail, then finally deciding that if that’s the case it’s best to make a break and hope to get clean away.
The brothel had this kid. The Magician.
A genius with tailoring the new nucleic acids. Last night, too late to give them warning, the kid packed up and left Quito. Minus was paying a co
uple AIs to watch the brothel and its people, in case, and they noticed the Magician’s leaving and traced him through the night, watching him change names and put on new disguises and all sorts of ding-brained shit like that. They sent out an alarm, too. Early this morning, Brulé time, the kid was cornered on a fast-shuttle making for Luna. A couple of hired muscles had owed Dirk a favor, and so they did the work. It was way too late to catch the Flower, of course. That’s the ugly truth of it. But the kid was caught and the muscles poked him twice, growling, and he melted. Just melted. Between the tears, he used some goofy story about a group of thieves forcing him to build a special Miss Luscious Chiffon, then he squirted the Ghost of some girl into the Flower’s head somehow. Crazy as it sounds, parts make sense. Minus tries to imagine meshing two entities, a Flower and a true person, and he’s sure it’s never been done before. Nowhere. And of course parts of that story are lies. Like the poor Magician being forced. He knows that without having to ask. But he’s told the muscles on the scene to talk to the kid with sweet words. Make him believe that they believe him and that he’s alive to stay. Let him talk. Minus guesses that he’ll tell everything without anyone having to ask questions. Give him room and the time, plus encouragement, and they’ll know everything soon enough.
The stinking shit.
He’s a genuis, they say. You know a genius, thinks Minus, because he can talk for days and not repeat himself. Most people don’t have an hour of original noise in them.
And afterward, the interrogators will pat him on the back and offer him congratulations—“Isn’t it better getting that garbage off you?”—and maybe the kid, this Magician, will break into a weak little smile. Sometimes stinking shits have an easy giggle, he thinks. A giggle and a want to believe. And one of the muscles beside him will take the opportunity to break him into pieces, no warnings given, and Minus has already told them what to do with the body.
Take it to that brothel, to the nursery, and dismantle him.
Pipe the pieces into the nutrient tubes; feed the Magician to all those pretty young Flowers.
The Flowers will grow fast under the influence. Those atoms that belonged to the Magician will keep laughing among themselves, or so Minus likes to think, and they’ll become part of some new Miss Chiffon and spread lust and joy throughout Quito and the world. It’s a perfect end, he tells himself. He has half an urge to have them record the event. It’s not something you want recorded, of course. But then it’s not every day when you get so many billions stolen from you, either. Or when you can punish one of the ones responsible.
The center of Brulé is the tackiest tangle of square and weathered old buildings. He hates this town, looking ahead to the tall broad building where Dirk rents an entire floor. Beyond it is the narrow tower where Dirk is waiting for him now, suffering a good deal of embarrassment at the proxy hands of a Quito physician. He was sleeping with a thief, after all. There’s no telling what slow-acting toxins she might have carried, or the diseases encapsulated in her hair, or even subtle corrosives mixed with her breath and laid inside her ex-lover’s lungs. He’d left Dirk several hours ago, business needing his attention. Now he’s steering the floater toward the pad on top of the tower. Don’t push the speed too high, he reminds himself. This is Brulé, not Quito. They’re out of their element here, in foreign country, and it pays to keep that in mind.
Minus thinks about Quito. Someday, somehow, he intends to go home. Dirk’s no young man, and if Minus can stay with him and keep him safe until he can die in peace…well, he figures he’ll pocket a lot of the man’s wealth by default. Then it’s back home as a rich man, buying some sprawling home in the Galapagos district and retiring. It sounds good to him. When he was younger, he remembers, he thought about getting into Dirk’s own line of business. He was stupid. Dirk’s got this knack that Minus won’t inherit. Never. Dirk got his money and power because he understands people and plays them and gets what he wants from each of them. He has a skill. All the money they whittled off the others…and all the while Dirk making alliances, playing games, making sure that he’d be able to get out of Quito untouched. That’s what Minus admires and can’t hope to do for himself. Play the game and then trick the other players to let you stand and leave the table. That’s tough. It doesn’t happen much in Quito. Until yesterday, the only trouble left for Dirk and him was to find a new home with enough to offer. Brulé was a stopover. Nothing more. So far Luna and Titan and Kross have turned them down, as have the Belters. It was politics. It was Dirk’s reputation. And so Minus has been spending his days finding other possibles. Little worlds. Man-built worlds. Whatever. Draw up a profile and bring it to Dirk and stand back and wait for his judgment; then if the thumb goes up, start to investigate the chances and the costs.
Lately Dirk’s been talking about building his own world.
He can afford it, sure. He could buy a comet out in the Oort Cloud, terraform it anyway he wanted, then spend his last years in peace. Sure. It had all sounded pretty good to Minus. He remembers imagining what those billions could do if they were applied with brains and skill—Dirk rich enough to hire both things—and he remembers the way Dirk sat there with the damned Flower on his lap, her hands stroking him all the time and her voice cooing in that special way, and all the time she was thinking that there were quiver chips somewhere close. Hidden but close. And she was waiting, watching, knowing her chance would come.
Minus hates quiver chips.
Wealth shouldn’t be locked up in one place. Even if it’s illegal. Even if it’s protected. Even when it can’t be traced, and even when it’s been the mainstay of this business for better than a thousand years. In old times, he thinks, it was cash. Paper money. Gold. Jewels. But the legal money today is glass and computer coded. Gold is bulky and too cheap. And jewels are manufactured in orbit—made huge and perfect and suitable for furniture and kitchen counters. Which leaves people of opportunity with nothing but quiver chips. Tiny, yes. But utterly vulnerable.
It works like this:
Money in glass-form is traceable and precounted.
Taxes are an easy trick.
Seizure is too.
Money inside a quiver chip is just as real as any other, and maybe more so. The chips are recognized by World-Net as banks unto themselves, portable and impregnable and trustworthy to whoever holds them. At no time will World-Net or any other Net refuse payment from a chip. Yet they can’t be traced or taxed. Everyone has them. Or should. Even the most average person keeps a fraction of his liquid assets in them. They can’t be duplicated or counterfeited, not even badly, and any attempt to change World-Net so they would be refused…well, it would lead to chaos. Chaos, and probably economic collapse.
The chips are standard currency with Dirk and his associates.
They were stored inside a safe deemed unbreakable and invisible. Minus remembers coming home last night, Dirk behind him, and seeing their invincible safe opened and gutted and the Flower gone to parts unknown. For a minute, cunt crazy, Dirk had tried believing that Chiffon, his poor precious Chiffon, had been stolen along with his money. She wasn’t to blame! he swore. Yet then the others parts fell together, the Magician skipping and the physical evidence conclusive, and Minus took time to rub Dirk’s nose in the mess until he had to agree. The sweet perfect cunt was holding his life’s work in her perfect paws, and Minus promised that he’d get back the chips and her paws and they’d have some fun with her, then finish her, and he’d have the body stuffed and mounted at the door to their new comet home. How did that sound?
Except he doesn’t know where she might be hiding.
Except the money can buy someone a lot of freedom, too. Even for an apparent Flower on the run.
Like here, he thinks. It was wealth that made Brulé City open up to Dirk. It was the honorable Mayor Pyn with his investments, his causes, his good-hearted greed for his town. The Mayor’s favorite nonsense is the enormous mantle mines—a dream involving novel technologies and Morninger labor and the remote pros
pects of rare and precious elements being brought up from several thousand kilometers below Brulé’s deepest cellars. Minus has had to suffer through long, long promotional speeches and intricate holo plans and all the stupid rhetoric that seems to cling to such things. The Mayor has taken a certain heat for having let Dirk in the door. That’s another part of the equation. The mines are strapped for cash, and Pyn is hoping against hope to get a piece of Dirk’s money and turn into a hero. He’s doing it for his town, sure. He’s a good man, and weak. That’s what they’ve been trading on these last months. How much longer? Minus wonders. The Mayor is going to get smart. He has to. And then what happens to the two of them?
He takes the floater down to the tower, thinking that this robbery might turn out for the best. Maybe. It’ll get Dirk’s head away from Flowers and dreamy schemes. Dirk isn’t a senile fool yet. He should be able to come to some arrangement with a Luna City-State. Or Kross. Or someone. The trouble all along was Miss Chiffon. He can see it now. But a schemer like Dirk, having beaten the best Quito has to offer, should be able to pull a victory out of this mess. Sure, he thinks. Sure.
The floater lands and out he steps with a hot dry wind coming from the south. It pulls his colored beard and hair smooth against his face and body. He looks around the roof with a professional detachment. A tiny groomed forest looks sick of the heat. Below him, filling the next several floors, is Brulé’s most exclusive club—clean food and bad drinks and some private party rooms—and Minus hunches in the wind and hurries down a flight of stairs, wanting out of the burning bright sun. To get to Dirk he passes through the main bar, drawing looks even after this long. The local politicians and business types are too conservative to accept his appearance, and too reserved to obviously snub him. Minus is important. They know it. He gazes out at them and spots the Mayor himself—an average man wearing forgettable clothes and a perpetually worried expression, his life always coming apart at the seams—and the Mayor scrapes together the will to nod at Minus and offer a tentative smile. He’s sitting with moneyed women and men. Things aren’t going so well, his expression says. Minus nearly laughs. Some of his companions take the trouble to look at him—the frightful, nightmarish bodyguard—and they give a visible shudder before looking away again.