by Carl Sargent
Serrin hated Manhattan. Its soul was deader than any city he’d ever known. It swept away its poor and hopeless, its disabled, handicapped, troubled people, its blacks and Hispanics and Puerto Ricans into decayed sumps of suburbs-if they were lucky. What about the street shamans? he wondered. How could any totem breathe life into a soul when the very essence of a place was dead?
“A dollar for your thoughts.” Looking over his shoulder at the woman who sat down beside him, he suddenly broke into a broad, beaming smile.
Barbara! What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same! I'm just finishing college.”
“Hey, that’s great!” He was genuinely delighted. “And how is delightful Lafayette? And Judy?”
They had met in Serrin’s birthplace, not long after he’d been shot up bad in the Renraku business. For some reason, he’d decided to use a little of the money they’d paid him to spend a few weeks in the place of his birth. Not that he had any roots there; his parents had traveled too widely and too often for that. It was just to see what the city was like.
“Oh, I moved from there not long after you went to Japan. Figured I couldn’t stick around much longer. I met a good man in Syracuse, he looked after us real well. John and I were together five years, but after he got sick with cancer, I drifted around awhile before ending up here. Put myself through college. And Judy’s doing real well. She sells some of her stuff in the Village. She’s a really bright kid.”
He was glad. Trying to get by as an unmarried mother with a half-caste child in Louisiana hadn’t exactly been a bed of roses for her. The child had been clever, sensitive, vulnerable, and he had feared for her. Serrin hadn’t been in much shape, physically or emotionally, to do much about it himself, but it was good to know Barbara had picked up the pieces.
He studied her as she sipped her coffee. Passing through her thirties had been good for her; she wasn’t so painfully thin, the lines around her eyes and mouth looked like they came from laughter and smiles. At least, in fair measure. Her hands were the same as ever, great knuckled fingers more like a man’s, well-suited to sculpting the pots, ceramics, and oil burners, all the little things she made.
“What about you?” She wanted his news, but he hardly knew where to begin.
“Well, I’m only in town a couple of days, but I always like to come here whenever I am,” Serrin replied, gesturing around at the huge station. “Just like to sit and watch it all. Watch the world go by. I guess I’ve been doing that a lot, one way or another. Hey, I got something for Judy!” He reached into his pocket and brought out the little toy. He pressed the small control panel in its back and placed it on the ground.
It was a Beefeater, a toy soldier with black pants and a red jacket and the impossibly large, furry black hat of a real Tower of London guard. The toy jerked into life and began to march, high-stepping it along the floor while holding its ceremonial rifle over one shoulder, swinging the other arm along to the marching rhythm. After a dozen steps it swiveled in a perfect U-turn and marched all the way back again. Barbara burst into delighted laughter.
“Oh, that’s priceless!” She picked up the hand-sized doll, giggling with pleasure. “Thank you. Jude’ll love it.”
“It has an optional feature. You can get it to sing God Save the King while it marches if you like. I guess Judy’s too old for this stuff now, but it’s genuine Olde England.” He chuckled.
She grinned, clasped the toy and hugged him. “Got time for some conversation during your stay?”
“You betcha. Hey, you want to show me Judy’s stuff?”
* * *
Most of the day had gone by the time they finally said their goodbyes, Serrin taking Barbara’s number and promising to call. Judy had remembered him. She was fifteen now, painting cards and murals and even getting a commission for a couple of posters. She had her mind set on compgraphics and Matrix sculpting. She still had the same gifts and sensitivity Serrin remembered, but now she was worldly for a kid of fifteen. Somehow that disappointed him. It was as if Manhattan was already beginning to take her over. He hoped she would hang on to what she'd started out with. The disappointment made the goodbyes less difficult, though.
Thus it was after dark when he started making the calls from his hotel room. It was a long shot, and he had called Seattle, Philly, DeeCee, and half of California Free State by the time he roused Kerman.
The bleary-eyed face stared unhappily at him through the static. “You fraggin’ pointy-eared SOB. What you wake me up for?”
“Wake you up? Are you kidding, it’s five-fifty.”
“Yeah, well it’s only three-fifty here, you scumsucker. When did I ever get out of bed before five?”
Serrin grinned. “You missed a beautiful day. Here I am in the Rotten Apple, walking in the winter sunshine and admiring the poseurs and wannabees in the Village. And you just sleep your life away.”
“Look, chummer, life starts at midnight. Spare me the drek. What you want?”
“Kerman. I’m involved in something in Britain. Old London town. Funny thing is, it rings a bell and I can’t place the connection. I had to get out of the Smoke for a couple of days so I flew over to see if I could check out a few things with some people. I didn’t think of you till the last moment, or I’d have come back just to see your sweet smiling face in the flesh.”
The man was yawning affectedly. “Yeah, yeah. What do you want?”
“All right. What do you know about Jack the Ripper?”
Kerman was not amused. What the frag should I know? You’re the one who’s been in London. Didn’t he go a-merrily butchering over there a century or two ago?”
“Yeah But it may be that someone’s getting into some very accurate re-creations. That’s NFP, so keep it to yourself for now, please. Funny thing is, I seem to remember some crazy Jack stories in Seattle two, three years ago. I was only in and out of the city then, didn’t pay any attention, and missed the full version. You remember anything?”
Kerman rubbed his chin, avoiding the unpleasant spot on it, and screwed up his face in concentration. “Yeah. Got it. There was some madman serial killer around. Nothing special in that, but I remember mutterings about the Ripper. Story wasn’t around long. There was a big Mitsuhama/yakuza story that broke right after, if I remember right, and that pretty much took over. Look, can I get back to you on this?”
There was a whining “Hun-ee, come back to bed” from somewhere behind and to the right of Kerman, clearly audible over the phone.
Serrin grinned at Kermans wince of discomfort. “Sure. But make it this evening. I haven’t got long.”
* * *
It was three and a half hours before the return call came. Serrin was eager for it; tracking down the Manhattanites on his list had yielded little more than some desultory invitations for drinks and the usual litany of polite “how ya doin’s.”
“Pointy!” Shaven, bathed, and resplendent in a dinner jacket and bow tie, Kerman beamed at the elf over the telecom screen.
“Hi, there, chuninier. Hey, you’re looking good.”
“Naturally. But no time to waste. Here’s how it pans out. Know about Global Technologies?”
Serrin recalled the small skillsoft and simsense corporation in Seattle, but couldn’t remember any details.
“Yeah. What of it?”
They’re the only lead I could get. Rumor associates them with the Ripper thing, but who knows if that’s just a little bit of street slander. If I believed ten percent of what I hear about Renraku, I’d have to believe they were run by baby-eating Satanists who drink nuclear waste for breakfast and piss it out in the water supply. But my source is good on this. For a little something, I could give you a name and address in Manhattan that might get you further. Can’t make any cast-iron promises, but it’s interesting.”
Serrin groaned audibly. His credsticks were running low uncomfortably fast. “Hey, you sleazeball, what about that Atlantean business? Hell, you ripped me off big-time on that o
ne. If we’d split it, we’d have made fifty thou apiece for that fake drek we sold ‘em.” The Atlantean Foundation probably still believed the “artifacts” were genuine. That scam had been a real joy.
“That’s business, ear-features. Five thousand gets you a name and something to check out.”
“What? You fraggin’ vampire,’ Serrin squealed, and they got down to some serious haggling. By the time Serrin had cleared a credit transfer of three thousand, he got a name he should have remembered himself, and cursed his corrupted-disk memory.
It was past ten at night, but SoHo only really came alive around then anyway. He had never seen Her Ladyship, and the telecom got a pre-recorded from a troll who looked more machine than meat. Okay, what the hell, Serrin decided, the security rating’s good. Let’s give it a whirl.
25
Serrin found the place easily enough. The house looked like an architectural impossibility; narrow, seeming to lean a little on one side, its five stories looking like almost too many to stand upright. The ground-level floor was a florist’s shop, but it was closed now. Didn’t find too many fresh flowers in Manhattan these days. There wasn’t much to indicate what went on in the floors above the shop. Serrin rang the ancient intercom by the side door. It buzzed into life.
“I’m here to see the Lady. Name’s Serrin Shamandar. She doesn’t know me personally, but I need some information and I can pay.”
There was a long pause. “Just a minute,” the distorted voice boomed. “I’ll have to confer with Her Ladyship. She don’t take many visitors.”
The link clicked into silence.
It was ten minutes before the voice was back again.
“You may come in to discuss the possibility of an appointment, but be warned that we take serious precautions against any form of magical assensing or spell use. Any action suggesting active spell use will be construed as a hostile act and you will be dealt with accordingly.”
Well, of course I know there are countermeasures, Serrin thought. Think I didn’t try assensing already? He was about to voice a curt rejoinder when he realized he’d been listening to a pre-recorded message. The door swung open before him, and an array of cameras tracked his long and painful passage up the five flights to the top floor. Spirits, hadn’t these people ever heard of elevators?
When he finally dragged himself up the last set, he was breathing hard. Before him was a heavy steel door; he touched the detector panel to trigger it into scanning mode and stood back. Within seconds, the door opened.
Most serious runners in Manhattan knew of Her Ladyship, but few had ever seen her or set foot inside her domain. She never left this place, existing as an information sponge, soaking up everything and anything. Even top corporations came to her when desperate for a lead from her deranged mind. Her information was so vast and so valuable that no one dared harm her, for fear of what tidbit she might have stored away only to be revealed if she were killed. The place was said to be the weirdest cybercomplex outside of the really heavy corps. In Manhattan that had to be very weird indeed. Serrin was braced for the expected, but not to encounter anything like the troll.
Looking upward from the metahuman’s enormous feet, which had to be at least size eighteen, Serrin didn’t register anything too odd about the steel-reinforced boots or the heavy olive-green pants. It was only when the troll took a step forward that he heard the hiss of the hydraulics. Across his chest, looking for all the world like a row of military medals, a row of sensor panels and lights blinked a neon mantra.
Heaven only knows what’s chipped into his autonomics and respiratory systems, the elf thought. The troll’s arms looked as if they were made of liquid chrome, shiny and unbelievably flexible metal. It was a touch of absurdity that he had one fleshy hand and one of the same flowing metal.
But it was the metahuman’s head that really startled Serrin, It wasn’t the cybereyes that were strange, but the filamentous network of fine, intermeshed metallic strands and what looked like monofilament optical fibers radiating out from them and flowing around the troll’s facial musculature and forehead, His mouth gleamed with metallic lips and his voice betrayed the existence of a fine voxsynth at work in his throat. The troll had no external ears, but concentric rings of carbonized steel and mono-filament that suggested a level of chipping and cyberware that Serrin would never have dreamed existed.
All that was enough to startle the image. What really scared him, though, was the gun in the metal hand. It looked like a taser, but was linked to a pack bulging with chiptech on the troll’s hip. Once those hooks were in you, who knew what they might do to your body? Serrin was so scared he began to put his hands up.
“Just a standard precaution,” the troll said in a husky voice. “If you have any weapons, please hand them over now” Serrin gave up his little hold-out, apologizing that he felt safer on the streets with it. The troll ignored him as he took the pistol away. It was a comical moment, a thin elf handing over a puny little hold-out to this gigantic troll arrayed in armor and defenses, but Serrin wouldn’t see the humor in it for many hours.
“Please sit down.”
Now that he had edged through the doorway Serrin could see a little more of his surroundings. The decor was a bizarre clash: oil paintings behind security glass-a Rembrandt, if he wasn’t mistaken-and more anonymous Dutch landscape works, a cabinet stuffed with elven crystal work from Tir Tairngire, and a Ming vase on a pedestal. Truth be told Serrin didn’t know whether it was a Ming vase or not. He’d tagged it that mentally because Ming was the only dynasty name he could remember. Interspersed with the art were surveillance vidcameras, sensor systems, sprinkler systems, and a pair of wall-mounted autofire crossbow pistols that swiveled to face his chest as he sat down in the rooms only chair. None of it made him feel very safe and secure.
The troll wasn’t saying anything. Serrin began to ask timidly about an appointment, but the troll put a hand up for silence and the elf obeyed. Time ticked by and Serrin began to squirm in his chair as an eyeball-shaped sensor swiveled smoothly out from the wall beside him on a long, flexible metal arm. It scanned his face and thorax and, despite his best leg-crossing efforts, showed a definite interest in the more private areas of his anatomy. It scanned down, then up at his face, before finally returning to its wall socket.
When nearly half an hour had elapsed. Serrin began to get up, very slowly, and addressed the troll, who had remained motionless the whole time.
“Um, it’s getting very late and I really would be very grateful if-”
What happened next was utterly bizarre and confusing. The troll broke into an operatic aria, then got up, twirled a pirouette, and spread his hands wide, grinning with steel teeth. He flicked out a disturbingly large tongue and pointed to the other door in the room, which opened slowly. Serrin had no idea what the troll had been singing, but he thought it might have been Italian. Flipping his tongue back like a frog, the troll clicked his teeth when Serrin entered the darkened corridor beyond. This is good luck, he thought. They say she rarely agrees to see anyone, let alone lets them walk right in out of the blue like this.
Coming to four doors, he decided to knock at the one with a red light glowing above it. At his touch it swung motionlessly open, inviting him into Her Ladyship’s sanctum. With a mixture of hope and trepidation. Serrin walked through.
* * *
He gawked at the sight that greeted him on the other side of that door. Wall to wall, endless viewscreens, trideo, telecom, and satellite links, all downloading everything imaginable. He saw commodity price lists, air travel schedules and passenger IDs, corporate accountancy reports, a chat show with a nude female psychiatrist as host, a wildlife documentary, a cartoon squirrel smashing a cartoon dog on the head with a baseball bat, a film on Inuit society, slo-mo replays of football touchdowns, gruesome surgical operations in living color, shots from space satellites, everything in humanity’s full range of information flow. He had to shield his eyes from the constant flicker and glare.
&
nbsp; The other elf was alone in the room, a ghastly figure in the center of a great netted web of fiber cabling, pumps, pipes, feeders, and inputs of every imaginable type. A multi-stranded feeder cable pumped an endless supply of data into the middle of her forebrain. Meanwhile, fluids pulsed and pumped into myriad tubes, pipes, and filters of an I/O port complex into her hindbrain. The elf herself had only the vestiges of a body, shrunken and virtually embalmed alive. Her muscles were wasted, fingers hopelessly knotted and shriveled, but the eyes were alive, and they were real eyes. It was perhaps the only part of Her Ladyship that betrayed any functioning vestiges of her original body.
Very slowly she lowered her eyelids, with their inch-long, heavily-mascaraed eyelashes, and the flow of information through the forebrain diminished just slightly. The screens in the room dimmed.
“Ah, one of my people. An elf come to see me.” The voice was utterly flat and devoid of expression, so Serrin couldn’t tell if it was mockery or an honest expression of welcome. The face gave nothing away because it did not move; the vocal synthesizer was in sensurround, so it couldn’t be localized either. Between Her Ladyship’s lifeless arms appeared a little green and blue hologram of Serrin, dancing a jerky, mannequin-like round. Spiraling about the figure was a four-colored double helix, his DNA code, and to one side of that a continuously scrolling update on his vital signs and physical parameters. To the other side the output of a quarkspin tomographic brain scan throbbed in vivid color. He felt very frightened now, completely in the power of this obscene creature. The DNA helix was seriously spooky; someone could use that for ritual sorcery against him. He wondered where she’d gotten the code.
“Serrin Shamandar. This will substantially add to my file on you, little elf mage.” The hint of a smile seemed to play around those white lips. The eyes were unblinking, taking in his discomfort and enjoying it.