by John Shirley
Here was the lab. He put his hand on the door’s opening panel—and it resisted him. It was firmly locked. So now what?
Then he heard a click from within the door. He tried it again, and this time it opened.
Inside, in a cluttered, musty electronics lab, with rag ends of food on greasy plastic plates between stacks of cryptic gear, he saw the object he was looking for—Claire had sent him a picture of it. It was a holotank with some kind of little platform inside.
A robotic cart rolled up to him, as he approached the work table with the holotank on it. “Available transport,” said the cart, in its androgynous voice.
Chewing the inside of his cheek nervously, Pup unhooked the devices, and, grunting, lifted them into the compartment in the side of the cart.
“Who the hell are you and what the hell do you think you’re doing?” came a reedy voice from behind.
Pup straightened up, turning to see a blotchy-faced fat man in a cargo pants, sandals, and a sauce-stained tee shirt emblazoned CompleteAndUtterDespair.mesh, glowering at him from the doorway. He had a security badge stuck to his tee shirt with the name SYKES on it.
“Mr. Grist sent me for this gear,” Pup said, his heart pounding.
“That’s drop-call, troll. That’s my equipment you’re fumbling around with. That’s a one of a kind object. It’s as much the hardware as the software—you’re not taking it anywhere. You just stay there, I’m going for security.”
“But he did send me for it ... just ask Spaulding at the gate. He spoke right to Mr. Grist.”
“Did he?” Sykes came into the room. Stopped a few steps away, looking thoughtful. The door closed behind him. He looked at the empty place where the holotank and hard drive had been. “An image of Grist on a screen, you mean?”
“It was on a comm, yeah. So?”
“So that was probably a semblant.”
“So what?”
“So it wasn’t really an authorized semblant—at least I doubt it. It was probably the ...” Sykes broke off, shook his head. “Never mind. Put that thing back and get out of here. You’ve been manipulated by a ... a rogue program, let’s put it that way. Get out or face arrest. You see that comm. there? I’m going to call Mr. Grist ... the real-deal this time.”
Okay. So the image of Grist was some kind of faked semblant. This guy was obviously the technician, the engineer, who’d worked up the equipment he was supposed to take. He would know. But Pup didn’t care. “Sykes—I don’t think so.” Pup had twenty grand in his account that hadn’t been there the day before and he had a lot more WD coming. And other things, too. She’d promised him a lot of things. So, he was probably working for some competitor of Grist’s who was using a faked semblant. Whatever. The money was just as good, whoever it came from.
And Pup drew a pistol from his coat pocket. Charged ammo, 9 mil.
Sykes stared at the gun. “You don’t understand what’s happening here ...”
“Don’t matter. I’ve been paid and paid good. And I don’t have any way to restrain you, keep a big guy like you from raising the alarm. So ... sorry.”
It was surprisingly easy to pull the trigger. To shoot the fat guy down. It took three bullets before Sykes actually fell, convulsing from the charges.
The convulsions quieted and the big guy lay on his back, gasping, twitching, face gone white, blood welling up in the three chest wounds in rhythm with the pumping of his heart. Very red, that blood. Quite a bit of it. Welling up, streaming down over his chest, onto the floor; a growing scarlet puddle.
Should put another one in him. Pop one in his head.
But suddenly the gun felt very heavy in Pup’s hand, as he watched the supine fat man gasping, choking, trying to speak, eyes darting desperately back and forth as if he were trying to spot something vital on the ceiling. Pup couldn’t quite lift the gun up to fire again. So he put it in his coat pocket, and turned to the cart, angled it toward the door. The cart rolled itself along, steered by gentle pressure from his hands.
He steered the cart through the door, leaving wheel-marks on the floor in blood as he passed through the puddle around the gasping fat man.
SUCK IT UP, DON’T YOU WHINE, GOTTA FACE IT:
CHAPTER NINE
Candle couldn’t tell if Zilia was glad to see him or not.
He seemed to see pleasure, anxiety, irritation, determination flicker across her face, all in little more than a second, as she encountered him outside the door to her loft stairs, her multicolored hair protected from the evening drizzle by a plastic-fiber hoody of emergency-orange. On a strap over one shoulder was a green military-material carry-bag.
“I probably shouldn’t be coming here,” Candle said, sticking his hands self-consciously in his coat pockets. “Some stuff has happened. I almost got shot. Someone near me did get shot. Cops and corporations might be looking for me.”
“Slakon?”
“Yeah. I haven’t found Danny yet, either. So what good am I to you? But I thought ... you might want to hear about it. I don’t know why.”
She took a few moments to digest that, looking at the halo of precipitation around the streetlight. Finally she said, “You can’t come in here. This place has to stay as safe as I can make it. My work’s here. We’ll have to go somewhere else. Come on. There’s a self-op freight train we can take. My brother’s an inspector for Slakon Freight ... You don’t have, like, luggage or something?”
“No.”
“That’s right, you come with invisible baggage. Okay, Candle, come on. This way.”
“You can call me Rick, you know. Or Richard. I’d rather give ‘Dick’ a miss though.”
She didn’t answer, walking around the corner of the squat old warehouse building; he followed, both of them glancing behind, looking for drones. He wished he had the little palm sized detector Shortstack had used ... And he wished Shortstack had thought to use one in the black stock market room ... would it have saved Monroe? Would it have detected an unmoving drone?
Another block along, the street dead-ended in railroad tracks. A self-op freight train was sitting on the track, chugging softly to itself, idling. No one was visible through the windows of the locomotive’s cab. Most trains now were remote control or self operating.
They crossed a moraine of broken rock, the cinders crunching under their feet, walked to within five yards of the train. Tons of living machine, breathing out a redolence of ethanol and ozone. Zilia glanced around to see they were unobserved—as much as you could ever tell, anymore, whether you were unobserved—and took out a small folding palmer. She thumbed its keyboard, stared into the little screen, nodded to herself. “All ready for us.” Her thumb flicked again, and the device made a chiming sound. A metal hatch on the side of the freight train clicked and folded open.
They climbed up steel rungs to the cab, Candle feeling an adolescent frisson as he felt the vibration of the idling engine. He’d never been in a train cab before. They clambered into the claustrophobic cab, found it fusty and cluttered with someone’s discarded empty beer cans: Guinness Chocolate Ale. They sat on seats that were there only for emergency manual-control. Zilia threw a small switch and the door shut; almost immediately, the train lurched into motion and rumbled slowly down the tracks, north.
“It’s like it was waiting for us,” Candle said, squirming to get comfortable; leaning back, finding a padded shelf to lean an elbow near the left side of the train. It was warm in here; the windows were beginning to steam up.
“Kinda was waiting for us,” she said, pulling back her hood, absently straightening her hair with expert flicks of her hand. “My half-brother Jeff works for the Slakon Freight division. So while they’re looking to catch Rick Candle they’re giving him a ride away from them—all at the same time.”
He looked around the cab; most of its inner surfaces clustered with instrumentation he didn’t recognize. There was a monitor with a divided image, the tracks ahead and behind, endlessly spooling and unspooling for the camera.
“That’s a pretty hypnotic TV show,” she said, nodding toward the monitor. She glanced at him, seemed to pick up the concern on his face. “You worried they’re watching us in here? Nah, relax. No interior camera is turned on; no monitoring of us in here at all. Don’t worry about that. Jeff’s got me covered. I take the train up to my place out northeast of town. Takes a couple hours. Slow most of the time, but free. And—I just love riding in this thing. I can make it stop when we get there, using the code he gave me. Long as it’s not much behind schedule, no one notices. They just assume its robot engineer waited for some obstruction on the tracks to pass. I was heading for it when you came so—good timing.”
“For once,” he said. “My timing hasn’t been so great lately.”
He had to tell someone. He told her everything. Told her about the undermarket, Shortstack, Nodder, the raid, Shortstack’s wounding. Monroe’s death.
“Oh fuck. You saw that? Her head getting shot away?”
“Yeah. Earlier today.”
“Fucking hell. Jesus.”
“Weird shit sticks in my mind—like, the gunfire flipped her wig off her head. What was left of her head. Like the fliptop on a bottle. And wondering what she could feel. And ... I don’t know ...” He shook his head.
“You feel responsible. But you didn’t pull any triggers. You didn’t click ‘fire’ for any flying guns, Candle.”
“I was hired to prevent someone else doing just that.”
“Seems to me you prevented a lot worse happening.” She took off the carry-bag. “I know it’s hard to live with ... especially the same day. I’d be a basket-case, for awhile, if it was me.”
Privately, Candle doubted Zilia was that fragile. “I keep seeing it like a snapshot—bang, she’s dead—and how it looked–” He shrugged and looked at the video monitor. Track unspooling; the backs of buildings marching past on either side of the track. Hated to seem weak in front of her. But he had to talk to someone and he felt it was even more irresponsible to go to Kenpo. Put him and his wife, two people, at risk; take a chance on losing a spiritual master. And he suspected he’d been under surveillance at Kenpo’s; if he went back there after a raid that put Kenpo at definite risk. Zilia—he didn’t think they were watching her.
Could be wrong about that. Probably should’ve dealt with it on his own. Hide out in Rooftown maybe. But he suspected that Zilia would know someplace safer he could lay low. “Anyway,” he added, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the train, “I’ve got to get back by tomorrow night. To go to the Black Glass.”
“Kind of dumb to go there, isn’t it? Won’t they look for you there?” She was fishing around in the green military bag.
“I don’t know. Going to risk it. I can check the place out before I go in.”
She dug in her bag, came up with a flask. “You like absinthe? Jeff makes his own. Swears it’s the most authentic recipe.”
“Your half brother’s a resourceful kinda wanx ...”
“What we gotta do is get you into a whole ’nother state of mind. I’ve got a couple of therapeutic approaches in mind.” She shook the flask. “I already added the water and just a little sugar. You can’t drink the stuff straight.” She uncorked the flask and poured translucent green liquid into a small metal shot glass.
They drank. Licorice flavor on top; underneath were herbs he wasn’t sure of. Was that what wormwood tasted like? Interesting aftertaste ... and a glow, in his belly. Two more shots, and the glow spread, the image of Monroe’s death receded. He seemed to feel all the train’s parts, working together; had a mental image of small green creatures turning cranks inside the train, making the wheels turn, laughing in rhythm with the train’s wheels ...
He laughed, too, and was aware of Zilia grinning at him, her head slightly wobbling with the motion of the train. “Look at that. Rick Candle laughing. Don’t see that often.”
“I was imagining ... never mind.” The glow inside him seemed to expand, to fill the small industrial space around them. It occurred to him that the train was like the engine of civilization and they were man and woman hurtling along inside it, to an unknown destination. Who had laid down the tracks for the engine of civilization? He snorted. “Absinthe gives me oddball thoughts.”
“Good, then it’s working. Have another.” She handed him the flask, and pulled off her hoody. Underneath, just a torn T-shirt, faded. Resurrection Poets, Life in Death, was printed on the T-shirt, and an image of a laughing skull with a full head of lush black hair and eyeballs and lipstick painted on its teeth. Something was moving across Zilia’s skin, down across the back of her shoulders—a squid, tattooed in blue and green and pink, its tentacles pumping, swimming in that backwards way they had, across a place on her upper back laid bare by a rip in the T-shirt. It moved from one shoulder blade to the other, and back. “Do you have a moving tattoo or am I hallucinating?”
“You’re not hallucinating, there isn’t that much thujone in this absinthe.”
“I’ve seen posters with motion on them but ... not this. Nice looking squid.”
“That’s Gams the squid. She’s an image in nanosize light-nodes. You can’t see it most of the time but my face is in there where her beak is supposed to be. I can run a shifter over it and change it to two other pictures. There’s a transsexual mermaid and a goldfish smoking a pipe. I was in an aquatic phase.”
“It almost looks three dimensional ...” He found himself reaching to touch the squid.
“See if you can feel the squid’s body,” she said, with a straight face.
He touched her skin, warm and elastic, where the squid was—and the tattoo darted away, wagged a tattoo’d tentacle at him reproachfully, glaring. He laughed. “Appears that Gams doesn’t approve of me.”
“The hell with her. Touch the tattoos on my breasts ...” She pulled off her I-shirt.
“I ... don’t see any tattoos.” Her breasts were neither large nor small. There was a small mole on the right one.
“Those are tattoos of nipples. If you touch them they’ll run away too.”
He touched one of them lightly with the edge of his thumb. The nipple stiffened. “Not going anywhere.”
“My breast tattoos must’ve moved to another part of my body. Tell you what ...” She took a quick swig of her drink. “See if you can find them ...”
In a moment they were kissing. They undressed, barely interrupting a long, long kiss to do it. He saw that her hips were a bit improportionately wide; he liked that.
It was difficult, peeling their clothing off in that small space, with the train vibrating around them, but they managed, and somehow—she was nimble, adroit—she was facing him, nude, clambering aboard him, into his lap, her legs clasping his bony hips, her knees raised, and then he was inside her, and they were coupling, the motion of the train merging perfectly with theirs. The train picked up speed ... hurtling down the tracks ... its parts all working together ... and they were a soft machine inside, with their own piston, their own smoothly interacting moving parts ...
The train stopped accelerating, and, on a long straight stretch of track, kept going, going and going, chugging at the same speed, wheels turning ... moaning with the contact of metal rims on rails, roaring through the world ... on a track laid down by no one knew who ...
When Candle came, the orgasm was actually more painful than pleasurable. But it was a relief.
Four years, he thought.
“Sykes?”
Grist waited, hoping for a response. Not wanting to press it because a Filipina nurse with brittle black eyes was watching him narrowly from the doorway.
Sykes didn’t respond. He lay there, looking hopelessly beached, his breathing barely visible, in a king-sized bed in the Slakon Private Care Hospital. An oxygen mask hid much of Sykes’ face; his eyes were mostly closed, just slitted, seeing nothing. Sensors taped to his arms transmitted to monitors that beeped with dull regularity to one side. A mini-MRI scanning arm leaned vulture-like over the bed.
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br /> No one had sent any flowers, Grist noticed. He’d have some sent. Sykes could come out of this and it’d be good to soften him up so he cooperated. Especially considering the way he’d threatened the engineer.
Maybe I do resort to threats too often, Grist thought.
“Has he said anything?” Grist asked. When there was no answer he glanced at the door, saw the nurse had gone. He went around closer to Sykes. Leaned close, smelling antiseptics, blood, sweat. “Sykes? We know it was Benson who shot you, we got him on cameras all over the facility. He say why? Come on, he must have said something. Like who sent him to take the Multisemblant. He tell you that, Sykes? He say where it went and what they wanted with the fucking thing? I don’t mean to overwhelm you with questions, there, Sykes, and I know you’re all doped up, but you’re going to have to–”
“Leave that man alone!” came the woman’s barking voice from the door.
Grist straightened so suddenly his back hurt. “Listen there’s an investigation–”
“You’re not a police officer,” the nurse interrupted, matter-of-factly, bustling into the room.
“I’m the guy who owns this hospital and I–”
“The hospital is owned by stockholders,” she said sharply, tinkering with the tubes going into Sykes’ nose. “You’re a big shot, fine, then get me fired. But while I’m here you’re not going to harass a man who’s ... as sick as this one.”
She had stopped short of saying, A man who’s on the point of death. In case Sykes was listening more than he seemed to be.
Grist toyed with the idea of getting her fired, as a matter of principle. He knew that she knew who he was; that there was a seething background resentment in the middle class against the Fortune 33; against Slakon and the New Monopolies. People rarely dared to speak up directly, anymore, about corporate power. But the resentment thrived like rats in a sewer. Maybe it was time for a new PR campaign. We’re all family—and we know we need you, the way parents need their children ... No, too patronizing.