Black Glass

by John Shirley

  “I ... thank you. Terrence.” Her voice was very small. Tiny.

  She turned and hurried from the room.

  He got up, angrily looked around for his coat, found it, and went up to the chopper, thinking, I wonder if she’s heard too much, living with me. I wonder if she should be taking one of these chopper trips ...

  He went to the roof, and saw that Targer was in the pilot’s seat of the big Slakon-logoed chopper, its hull gleaming in the bright lights of the rooftop. Halido was hunched nervously outside its open hatch, the wind of its blades whipping his hair. Neighbors in an adjacent high rise had complained of the lights and the noise from his copter pad, but Grist had bought their building and kicked them out.

  Grist hurried up to the chopper, ducked unnecessarily under the blades—he could never keep from doing that—and climbed up the little metal stairway. The passenger cabin of the chopper was comfortable, trimmed in brass and dark wood, like a first-class private jet cabin, but with seats facing one another around the side bulkheads, and one cushy seat with its back to the pilot’s cab. Grist sat with his back to Targer, strapped himself in, gestured for Halido to get inside. Saw Halido hesitate. Grist gestured again, angrily. Halido glanced off across the roof at the city lights, the rising full moon, then got in the chopper, to Grist’s right. Targer spoke to the system and it closed the hatch, muffling the engine and rotor noise.

  “Where to, Mr. Grist?” Targer asked.

  Grist spoke over his shoulder. “Oh hell—just take us up for now. Due west till I tell you different.”

  Within seconds, the chopper had lofted into the air. A passing nausea, and then they were comfortably chopping through the haze to the West.

  “Where uh—where we headed?” Halido asked.

  “Catalina,” Grist said. “Shall we watch some television while we wait?”

  Across from him was a sheet of clear glass that seemed to hang in the air in front of the farther bulkhead. It wasn’t floating, but this high-end model’s supports were so exquisitely made it was hard to tell. He activated the TV and the sheet of mediaglass became a semi-3D television image. SNN. Slakon News Network. Formerly CNN.

  A black-Asian sports commentator with short-cropped hair and a wide face was interviewing a buffed-out Scandinavian type, in an expensive golf shirt. The buff guy was smiling, showing an intricate platinum grill across his teeth that spelled out MIAMI. Under his image his name and specialty appeared:

  BJORN WILLCANSER, Steroid Stylist

  “One of those steroid designers for the big teams,” Grist commented, refusing to make eye contact with Halido. “My father would’ve shit a brick, if he knew these guys were standard now. Look at that suit—if he opens his arms wide enough it’ll rip. Why doesn’t he get one to fit? It’s gotta strain at the seams I guess, he likes it that way. He’s a walking advertisement for his product.”

  “Sir–” Halido began. “Candle slipped past us only because we didn’t have enough personnel–”

  “You’re raising your voice, Halido.”

  “No—it’s just the chopper noise, sir–”

  “Quiet, I want to hear this.” Grist turned the TV up so he could hear it over the chopper noise. It was the quietest chopper around, once the door was closed, but it was still a big whirring machine, going to make some noise, he reflected. Ought to hire engineers to improve them, make it quieter yet.

  “They made the right choice,” the Steroid Stylist was saying. “You can’t go with some standard mix of steroids and GH, that kind of thing, and expect to compete. You’ve got to have the cutting edge. You’ve got to think about neurological complications. Does Miami want to have its players gouging out people’s eyes on the forty yard line, like Dorf in the Raiders did?”

  “What I’m saying, Mr. Grist,” Halido went on, leaning toward him, “is that I did request more help and people didn’t show up on time–”

  “Did I not ask for quiet?” Grist snapped. “I’m curious about this. Maybe ...”

  “Does Miami want to pay a big fine,” the Steroid Stylist went on, “do they want to have to pay to have some guy’s eyeballs grown in a vat, all that transplant time and expense? They don’t. They want precision. And that’s what I’m about, Tyrell. Precision. I play these bodies like a piano and I get the tune I want–”

  “We have a line of beauty steroids, but athletic steroids—I’m not sure we’ve gotten into that,” Grist said, thinking aloud. He repeated the thought into the notes function of the mini-PDA on his wrist.

  “Mr. Grist—if you’ll look at the phone records–”

  “Oh Christ,” Grist said, shaking his head. “Halido you need to calm down, I’m going to make us a drink.”

  He muted the television, got out of his seat belt, turned to wave a finger in front of a sensor. The bulkhead opened, and a small wet-bar extended gently into reach. He hummed to himself, picking out two highball glasses—careful to pick them at random, because he could feel Halido watching him closely. He took a canister of ice out—only this was the one he’d had prepared earlier and there was only one cube in it. He shook his head, tsking, and put the cube into a glass; he put the canister under the ice dispenser, got more ice, and used tongs to put the new ice into their glasses, noting carefully which one he’d put the first cube in.

  He was enjoying himself.

  “Rum and Coke for you, right? I’ll have the same.” He made them each a rum and Coke. Halido was watching closely to see that the drinks came from the same bottles for both of them. “I grow the cola berries for this cola in my own hot houses,” Grist said, straight-faced. Then he grinned. “I always tell people that. You’d be amazed at how many believe it.” He handed Halido his glass. A specific glass.

  “Now, let’s drink to new beginnings,” he said, toasting Halido and giving him a weary smile as if to say, You’ve got one more chance.

  Halido relaxed a little, and drank from his rum and coke, glancing out the window. They were well out over the sea now. “We’re heading to Catalina? Is that it, out there? No, that’s an oil rig ...”

  “How could you mistake an oil rig for Catalina?”

  “The haze, sir.” Halido had another sip. “And it’s kind of dark out there even with the moon.” Sip. “Mr. Grist, I just want to say ...” One sip more. “... that I have a plan for–” Halido broke off, staring. The glass dropped from his nerveless fingers. His jaws worked soundlessly; his mouth gaped like a fish in murky water. He tried to speak.

  “I guess we’ll never know your plan, Halido,” Grist said, sipping his drink. His own drink was safe—the first “ice cube” had been a tasteless material that melted instantly on contact with alcohol; it contained a transparent quick-dissolve capsule infused with a paralyzing toxin. “But we can guess at the quality of your plan. It was something stupid. We can figure that much, I believe.”

  Grist sipped a little more rum and Coke, put the glass on the bar, sent the bar back into the wall compartment.

  Halido was sitting there, gaping, making ack ack ack sounds. “You’re wondering,” Grist said, “why I did it this way. So elaborately, putting a paralysis agent in your drink myself, dealing with your execution myself. Because I enjoy it—and because I want Targer to see it, naturally. I will reward him hugely if he solves these problems for me—Can you hear me up there, Targer?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “I’ll reward him either way. Hugely. This is one kind of reward you’re getting, Halido. Targer hopes to earn the other kind. The pleasant kind.” Grist stood up, and stretched. Then he took Halido by the collar, dragged him over to the red-edged emergency escape hatch on the other side of the cabin. He leaned Halido against the escape hatch, and Halido twitched a little, which was all the resistance he could manage. His eyes were pinning; his lips were drawn back in terror. He was drooling. Really, Grist found it repellent. But fascinating. “There is a special feeling of engagement with life, when you end another man completely,” Grist said, straightening up to look at his han
diwork. He grunted, bent and shifted Halido a little, centering him against the door, to make sure. “Yes, a special feeling—you appreciate life more when you end another man’s life personally. And there is a certain high to it. I’ve always had a weakness for certain highs. I try to get them in a healthy way when I can—you know, in a way that doesn’t harm my brain or liver. So here we are—I’m doing work I could easily have delegated. And as I said—it’s instructive to other personnel.”

  He returned to his seat, and strapped himself in. Looked at Halido for a moment, twitching against the emergency lock.

  Then he said, “Targer? Anyone around to observe us?”

  “No, sir. Don’t see any other aircraft, or boats. We’re five miles out, should be far enough.”

  “Tilt the chopper a little to the starboard.”

  “Aye aye.”

  The chopper tilted, a little. Grist was now leaning slightly to his left. He flipped up the switch cover to reveal his arm-rest’s master controls; he tapped the combination that opened the emergency lock of the chopper. An alarm began pealing—Grist quickly turned the alarm off and watched as the door slid aside, opening the helicopter’s cabin to the naked night sky. Cold air gushed into the chopper along with the sound of humming engines and slashing chopper blades and wind. And Halido was gone, almost as if he’d magically vanished. Grist wished he could watch him fall. By the time he got the door safely closed and went to look through a port, Halido would be gone from sight. Seemed a shame. Grist would have liked to watch Halido tumbling, turning end over end in the moonlight, down to the Pacific Ocean.

  When Halido washed up on the beach, Targer would have witnesses ready, saying Halido had been depressed, talking of suicide.

  Grist felt the chill wind blowing in from the open hatch; he listened to it roar and rattle. Halido would be hitting the sea about now ...

  “Home, Targer,” Grist said, closing the hatch. “Damn it’s cold out there. A cold, cold world. Aren’t we glad we’re nice and snug in our chopper, Targer?”

  Targer didn’t answer. But Grist felt sure Targer understood.

  The morning sun was bright on the misty windows and shiny fenders of Autopia.. Candle wished he’d brought sunglasses, like Danny. His eyes were watering from the reflections.

  Some squatter with a mordant sense of humor had started calling the big squat Autopia, and it stuck They trudged past the dingey AUTOPIA sign, ripped off from the old Disneyland and propped on the back of a big wheelless pick up truck; trudged through spongey weed-overgrown lots between the clusters and rings and linkages of cars in the vast old automotive dump, kicking through trash, starting to feel warm, now that the rain had let up and the clouds had mostly blown away.

  “You sure they’re here?” Danny asked. He was wearing an ankle-length black leather coat, the seams popping at the shoulders, and he was chain smoking.

  “Not sure, but Shortstack mentioned it as a ‘safe house’ to retreat to,” Candle said. “And he’s got a connection to this place—driving that obsolete van.”

  They were surrounded by obsolete cars and vans and trucks. This was a graveyard for gas burners, one of the last junk yards of old style vehicles left—the others had been turned into cubes of scrap and sold to China. This one, southeast of Los Angeles, near San Bernardino, had evolved into another vast squat, like Rooftown, but made of cars and mostly close to the ground. Toward the end of the general abandonment of gas burning cars, they’d been piled up almost at random in places like this, to be recycled. But there’d been so many that, for a time, great tracts of land had been swallowed up. The homeless, the disenfranchised, had used this one, to set up a makeshift community.

  They’d pushed and tugged vans nose to nose, removed the engines, making them passageways; branching off them, old gutted SUVs were used as little living compartments. Compact cars were used for outhouses and storage and building scrap. The more powerful, relatively prosperous members of the Autopia community had claimed the campers and RVs. Most lived in SUVs and a couple of haphazardly constructed buildings: trucks were used as foundations for two-story structures made from wired-together pieces of cars.

  Candle glimpsed faces, half seen through the misted car windows on either side—making him think of the translucent stage panels in Black Glass. Silhouettes, dim glimpses of people, removed from direct contact by glass compartmentalization. He had a mental image of people physically trapped behind computer screens, trying to get out—and he smiled, thinking he was being influenced by Zilia’s art.

  He wished she were here. But if she were, with Danny here too, there’d be a tension that’d have to find release, and it might go lots of ways.

  They passed a group of kids throwing a battered football, tussling over it with little sense of game rules; they passed a Volkswagen bug, half sunk in the ground, that had the roof removed, the charred body of the car turned into a kind of outdoor fire pit. Ragged figures huddled near the fire—fueled by small amounts of gasoline found in gas tanks, oil from engines—and black plumes of smoke twisted, smelling of the rank childhood of industrial civilization before its toilet-training. Here and there, in the weedy lots, pieces of cars had been welded together into rusty sculptures: rough outlines of men and women dancing, children playing, a giant dog. Up ahead was a wall of cars, nose to nose, apparently unoccupied—except for a couple of teenagers in one, smoking pot and giggling. The dope plants grew out of the car’s trunk. The path threaded between two old nose-to-tail Cadillacs and into an open space in front of what looked like a big pile of cars, till you looked closer and saw it was a building. Music thumped and wheedled from somewhere in the scrappy structure.

  As they approached the two-story construct, Candle saw it was wired and, in some places, welded together, with bent and battered sedan hoods and stripped pieces of tire forming a weatherstripping carapace. “That’s the new squatters place,” Danny said. “Mostly likely one your guy would be in.” He’d been here before, to cop some illegal ware; electric wires ran into the herky-jerky building at odd angles, channeling energy swiped from power poles on the other side of the containment fence.

  The entrance seemed to be a crude archway of mismatched car body sections extending from the building; inside, water dripped, and flickering lights mottled the dimness. To one side of the archway, outside, a shaggy figure sprawled bulkily in a buckling old lawn chair under an awning torn from an absent RV. The man had a gallon bottle of wine, half empty, in the grass next to him.

  The big man came from under the awning, blinking in the light, to block their way: a towering dishevel-haired bushy-bearded door guard. “He’s the Doorman,” Danny muttered.

  The Doorman wore an oil-stained, blue ski jacket that seemed to go with his bulging forehead and wild eyes and blackened teeth. He leaned on the chrome bumper from a small car, the bumper bent and twisted into a four-foot club. As they came closer he took the club in both oil-blackened hands and hefted it warningly. Candle reckoned the man was at least six-foot-seven.

  “You cain’t come inta heeah, eff you don’t belong’,” the Doorman rumbled. His accent was somewhere middle-south, maybe the “hollers” of Kentucky, Candle thought.

  “You got a way to test a buy card?” Candle asked, taking the card out, holding it up for the Doorman to look at. “I got a hundred dollars here for you on this one. I’m a friend of Shortstack’s—he’s new, so I figure he’s in this building, where the new people squat. I just want to see him. If you can bring him out I don’t need to go in there ...” In fact he’d much rather not go in there.

  “Got a way ah kin test ’er inside,” the doorman said. He snatched it from Candle’s hand. “Y’all wait here, I’ll test ’er, if it’s good I’ll find the little feller. But ya’ll come in before I say, I’ll bust yer heads, jus’ like melons.”

  “We’ll be chill,” Danny said.

  The big man ducked under the archway and went inside.

  They waited. Children whooped; the smell of sewage wafted and ret
reated; the whiff of oil and gasoline, everywhere.

  “Kind of good, this stuff is being used for something,” Candle said.

  Danny shrugged. Candle sighed, thinking that Danny had the air of a kid forced to go to a family gathering when he’d rather stay home and go virtual with his friends.

  A few minutes more, and then the Doorman shambled back out, followed by Shortstack and Rina.

  Candle smiled, seeing Rina. “Hi Rina. I was wondering if you’d stayed to keep an eye on him.”

  “I’m stuck with him,” she said, but she smiled and didn’t seem to mind.

  “Hey, she works for me, man, what else she supposed to do,” Shortstack said.

  Rina smiled crookedly at that, but said nothing.

  “How’s your hand?” Candle asked.

  “Fucked up but not too bad now.” He lifted it for Candle to see—it was encased in flesh-colored dried paste. “This’ll hold it till I get my new ginger to grow me some skin and stuff. I’ll get most of it back.”

  “How about the girls?” Candle asked. “And Nodder?”

  Shortstack shaded his eyes with his sealed-in hand to look up at Candle. “They’re all here with me, all okay. Well, Nodder’s out. You sure nobody followed you? Drones? Anything?” He peered at the sky behind Candle.

  “I’ve got a good scanner, I’ve been checking. And I didn’t tell anyone anything online or on phone or any place. You thinking of setting up the business here?”

  “No, we can’t stay here, after they realize the decoy purchases I set up over in Nevada are just a smokescreen, they’ll start checking places like this. Far as I can tell it’s working though—they’re combing the Vegas-Henderson complex for me.”

  “Thought about the business?”

  “I sent out a temporary suspension notice—but if I can find a way to get it rolling again ...” He shrugged. “I’d take the chance. Fuck those pricks.”

  “I think I’ve found someplace you can set it up—a couple hours north of L.A.” He handed Shortstack a slip of paper. “All the contact info is there—cryptography, everything. You’ll go to a neutral site, it’s only gonna be set up for like two minutes so you got to get there at the right moment, and download–”