by John Varley
* * *
—
But I decided I’d better leave Sherlock behind. I knew where I was going.
Ms. Blue Suede Shoes’s neighborhood was overdue for some urban renewal. It was reachable only on a train that clattered a bit as it wobbled down the rails, one of a series of small malls strung out along the rail tunnel like . . . well, pearls is not a good analogy, unless it was the ones that were cast before swine.
These were the abodes of people with absolutely no marketable skills that could lead to a job, or no inclination to get a job. Society guaranteed them air, housing, water, and food.
But the air didn’t have to be odor-free.
The housing needn’t be more than a cubicle with a spigot for metallic-tasting water (shower and toilet down the hall, and cross your fingers that either of them worked), and a microwave.
The food was edible. That was the best that could be said for it.
As in any place where things were in short supply, there was a thriving black market in anything people might desire. The economy was largely barter, off the books.
Any cop was familiar with places like this. A high percentage of our work always took us to slums like this.
I smelled moldy socks and sweaty armpits. I wondered how often they washed or changed the air filters around here? Weekly? Yearly? Decadely? I know that’s not a word, but it somehow seemed right for this neighborhood.
I found Delphine’s level, then her corridor. It was narrow, as they tended to be around here. There were a couple of grubby, naked small children, maybe four or five, playing with a scruffy lion cub. There was a disassembled playbot beside them. It had not been taken apart carefully. I wondered if they planned to take the cub apart when they were through.
I stepped around them. The lion cub’s hair stood on end, and she hissed at me as I passed. The children actually looked more feral than the little lion.
* * *
—
Ms. Shoes’s apartment was at the far end of the corridor, what people referred to as the “bedrock” end, though there was not much chance it was actually up against the Lunar bedrock. If you went through the fire-escape door at the end, you would almost certainly find yourself in a stairwell, with another door on the other side of the landing that led to the end of another corridor.
The door leading to the cubicle of Delphine RR Blue Suede Shoes was plain, and slightly battered, as if someone had tried to get in without a print. I’m sure he left in frustration.
Beside the door was a large canvas bag, an old-fashioned duffel with a drawstring pulled tight.
I pressed the plate and faintly heard, “Well it’s one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready now go cat go!”
“Well, it could have been worse,” I muttered. “It could have been ‘Hound Dog.’” Anyone alive in Luna is familiar with at least half a dozen Elvis songs because the Church of Celebrity Saints makes sure you encounter at least one every day.
In one of my old detective books and movies, the shamus would take a step back and kick the door open with his black-leather wingtip. If he tried that on a Lunar door, he could break his ankle. Even an abode as humble as this one would have a pressure door that sealed tighter than a constipated frog’s ass, as Mom used to say during breeding season.
If the door looked really sturdy, a fictional detective would get out his trusty picklock. Even if this door had a pickable mechanical lock—which it did not—I wouldn’t know how to pick it.
But one legacy from my time as a cop was knowing how to bypass a touchplate even if you don’t have the right fingerprint. It’s known as a Universal Passcode Unit. Cops call them jimmies and can check them out when serving a warrant. They are supposed to be returned to the property master after they’ve been used, but they are one of those items that somehow keep going missing. Most cops can figure out a way to take one home and never return it. I had done so, and I still had it.
I held the UPU against the touchplate and let it do its thing.
It was taking long enough that I began to get nervous. No matter that they are called universal, jimmies are not capable of picking the highest-security locks. There are systems that will alert the local precinct if someone attempts an unauthorized entry. Very few private residences have them, and it didn’t seem likely that there would be one here in the suburbs of Irontown, but I couldn’t be sure. Sometimes people engaged in illegal activity have their own systems, and they don’t report to the police. They send out a silent signal to some very large and very nasty folks who specialize in knocking heads together. Or removing them. Painfully.
I was about to beat it down the hallway when there was a click and the door opened inward a few inches. I pushed it open slowly.
I pushed the door open all the way. The light came on automatically, a very dim overhead panel.
The room was all but empty.
Lying on the floor, up against the far wall—all of eight feet away from me—was a slab of foam of the type you would find if you removed the ticking from a mattress. Lying on top of it was a pillow and a neatly folded blanket. There was a single folding chair.
That was it for furniture. In one corner was a sink. A mirror was on the wall behind it. There was a built-in table against another wall, with connections for power and cyber access.
Ah, well. I got the duffel bag from the hall and dumped its contents on the table. I sat down on the chair and started going through it.
It didn’t take long. There were a dozen plastic food trays from various restaurants that delivered. I learned that she had a weakness for Chinese, which would make sense, given the last job she had worked. For variety she occasionally had a box from the neighborhood taco shop. Every once in a while, donuts for dessert.
Before going through it all, I looked all around the place again. I tried to imagine living there. I tried to imagine what a sad existence it must be. Or must have been, since all the signs were that she had moved out. Sitting in the chair, eating chow mein with a plastic fork. Thinking about getting out and dancing with dubious partners at a sleazy nightclub, coming home with a case of resistant leprosy . . .
It was surely possible that she had had more personal items, more furniture, maybe a touch of decoration . . . but somehow it didn’t feel like that. To me, it felt like a hideout. It felt like she had gone to ground here. I might have been reading too much into my single meeting with her, but she just didn’t seem like someone who had grown up in a pit like this.
And there was also the matter of her job. She hadn’t had it long, but I knew she must have made a salary that could have easily paid for a much nicer place in a much nicer neighborhood.
So what was she doing here?
I sighed and turned back to the discarded stuff.
There was a green tunic with the name “Delphine RR” printed under the words “No-MSG Garden,” and a high chef’s hat. I wondered briefly why chefs would wear such a ridiculous lid, but I guess a guy sporting a twentieth-century fedora shouldn’t toss stones.
There was a white apron with brown stains on it that I assumed were the remains of food.
The only vaguely personal item was a wilted bunch of yellow daisies and a cracked ceramic vase with a geometric pattern in red and black.
What was not there? For one thing, there was no matchbook with “The Frolic Room” printed on it, like Philip Marlowe might have found in Los Angeles. There was no handkerchief with the initials of the murderer embroidered on it, smelling of chloroform, as Miss Marple might have found in the drawing-room wastebasket.
In short, I didn’t see anything that a detective-story writer would have invented to guide my next steps in the pursuit of my missing client.
Which meant I would now have to look up either the address Hopper had given me a few days ago in the Nighthawk or somehow try to make a connection with the ancient Mr. Scrooge.
Which meant a trip deep into Irontown.
I shuddered and turned to go, then realized I was missing something. In the stories, when they speak of thoroughly searching a place, the mystery writers said the hero or the cops tossed it. There was almost nothing to toss in the sad little cubicle.
Just the mattress. If it had been an old-fashioned spring construction like in the movies, I would have cut it open. People apparently liked to hide stuff in there. Since pretty much all mattresses these days were slabs of foam like this one—or thinner, since with Lunar gravity it was possible to be fairly comfortable on a bed of nails—there was nothing to be done there. But the other place people liked to hide stuff was under the mattress. Misers kept their money there, or so it was said.
So I lifted it.
There was a pair of gloves. I felt sure they were the ones she had worn in my office. There was her crazy hat with the peacock feathers, crushed almost flat. And there was a piece of paper. I picked it up. I read it. It was in a lovely cursive hand:
Sorry about this, Mr. Bach.
I heard something behind me and turned in time to see the pressure door close. The next sound I heard was the distinctive chunk of the wards sliding home. Every Lunarian knows that sound from his first pressure drill as a toddler.
“Hey!” I shouted. I pounded on the door.
That’s when I heard the hiss of gas coming from the air duct high in the wall. The gas had a greenish tint to it.
I held my breath, but you can only do that for so long. I felt consciousness slipping away.
The last thing I thought I heard was the sound of barking.
fourteen
At the beginning of the Irontown raid, I did not know the pregnant woman I saw at the ice-cream parlor was Hildy Johnson, the reporter who later wrote a best-selling account of the Big Glitch. It was only later, reading her book, that I was shocked to see that I had been a part of her story. Our paths crossed for only seconds, and I doubt she remembers much about me at all. But there is no way I will ever forget it.
* * *
—
I understand it is common to lose memory of events leading up to a terrible event. In my case I didn’t lose much, but the memories are all filed at random. It’s as if the various scenes were printed out on cards, which were then tossed in the air, picked up, and stacked by a chimp. Every time I try to think of it (which is as seldom as possible) things seem to be happening in a different sequence.
I see myself firing while the reporter and her friend are spooning up their hot fudge or pistachio, or whatever, and at the same time I see Winston, the mutt, taking a big chunk out of the female cop’s leg.
For a time after firing into the apartment with my laser, I just concentrated on keeping my head down. I cursed the goddamn sergeants, Ugly and Uglier and Ugliest and Even Uglier Than That and Unbelievably Ugly, for not providing me with a projectile weapon, like most of the rest of the company had. I felt naked, exposed, with nothing to fight back with if someone came at me with deadly intent, except something that could ignite half the mall.
I almost left the laser behind when I made my break for better shelter. If I had, things would have been very different.
We can all point into our pasts and find moments like that, to be sure, but there are not many that are so clearly life-changing.
What I had chosen was a space beneath a steel structure off to one side of the open area. There was no one else there, and it looked solid enough to stop most bullets. It was a platform with thirteen steps leading up to it. There was no railing up there, just a steel framework: two upright I-beams and another beam spanning between them.
This was the Irontown gallows. Heinleiners believed in capital punishment and also felt strongly that if someone really needed killing by the community, it should be done in full view of that community, not hidden away in a prison.
If I had known it was a gallows, would I have chosen it as a place to hide? Damn straight I would. It looked like the most solid structure I could reach without a long, long run. I’m not superstitious.
So I crossed my fingers, spit on the ground, recited the few words of the Hail Mary that I could remember from films, and started running.
I hadn’t gone more than five long steps before a bullet hit me in the vest. It was bullet-resistant, but trust me, it’s not something you want to experience. It stopped me in my tracks, and I fell backward. I could literally hear two more bullets pass above me.
So I crawled.
I could hear firing, but I didn’t want to raise my head to see where it was coming from. Trust me again, in a situation like that you want to make yourself as small as possible.
But it was taking too long. I decided getting to cover was more important than staying low. The longer I was out there, the better chance someone would notice me crawling. I would have to rely on the vest to stop the flying metal. Aware all the time, of course, that my head was not the least bit bulletproof.
Two more bullets hit me almost at once, but I managed to stay on my feet and stagger forward.
I don’t know at what point I was hit in the arm. I don’t recall feeling it. I think I didn’t even know I had been hit until I crouched under the gallows. Then I felt warm liquid flowing down my right bicep, looked down, saw the bullet hole in my tunic, and almost passed out.
But I stuck a finger in the hole in the cloth and tore it open. I saw it was more of a graze than a through-and-through, though there was a small, blackened flap of flesh dangling from the wound. It wasn’t bleeding too badly. No need for a tourniquet.
For a while it didn’t even hurt. Then all at once it burned like fire.
* * *
—
Here is where my recollections and the story told by Hildy Johnson part company. Now, I’m not about to call her a liar. She has stated that she changed certain details in her account to protect people who did not wish their names to be used. It may well be that she also altered some events for reasons of her own, again possibly having to do with secrets of the Heinleiners they do not wish to have exposed.
All I know for sure is that things could not have happened as she described them, or I would not be here to tell about it. So I was briefly a character in her story, and she was a character in mine. She would continue to be one for just a little while longer, and we would part never having known who the other was.
* * *
—
Not only was the platform of the gallows a nice grade of steel, someone had stowed some crates beneath it. They were not steel, just high-grade packing plastic, and I had no idea what was in them, but whatever it was, it seemed to be enough. I heard bullets whang off the gallows above me, and heard the softer whump when something hit one of the crates, but nothing was coming through. I was prepared to sit there barricaded behind a crate listening to whangs and whumps until the sun burned out, if need be. I couldn’t imagine what would bring me out into the open again.
Then she stumbled into my view, all four-foot-six and seventy pounds of her, looking totally lost and utterly terrified.
I guessed she was about ten. She had rather tangled long blond hair and wore the sort of blue jumpsuit common among the Heinleiners who had null-field suits implanted in their bodies. She seemed disoriented, stumbling around the field of fire like a zombie.
No one really knows just how much starch they have in them until they are faced with a situation where something dangerous must be done. That’s when you find out; you really can’t know until that moment.
Will you run, or will you go in harm’s way?
I’ll tell you this. I really wanted to run. I admit it. But I was still a cop. One definition of a cop is that he or she is the person who, when there is gunfire or an explosion, runs toward the disturbance, not away. If I stayed there, I’d no longer be able to think of myself as a cop. Or as a worthwhile human bei
ng, for that matter.
I didn’t think about it for more than a couple of seconds. I shoved one of the crates aside and sprinted toward the lost little girl.
It was at least partly luck. For a few seconds, the sounds of the fight were not so loud, the sound of bullets flying by not so frequent.
That’s when I really tried to ditch the laser. It was too bulky and heavy to be carrying around, especially if I didn’t intend to use it. That’s when I found out it had snagged on my vest. There it was, flopping around, getting in my way, and I just didn’t have the time to find out which of the many attachments of my combat uniform it had hung up on. Cursing, I got hold of it with my weakened right hand.
I was thumping along as gracefully as any three-legged camel. I was a few feet away from her when a spray of bullets landed all around her, spanging off the concrete floor. Until that moment, I would have told you that the old standby scene in action movies—you know the one, where Our Hero is bracketed by little explosive squibs that are meant to represent bullets but remains unharmed—was flatly impossible. Yet at least twenty bullets impacted before her, behind her, to each side of her, and possibly even went between her legs . . . and not a one of them hit her.
If we survived this, I thought, I’m taking her to the racetrack. She had to be the luckiest person who ever lived.
Not totally lucky, though. Though all the flying metal missed her, most of them left their mark on the concrete floor. And though this never happens in action movies, hundreds of particles of concrete grit, large and small, flew up into the air.
The smaller ones were stopped by her coverall, but she was hit by a dozen of the larger ones. None of them were big enough to make a terrible wound, but they certainly stung like hell, and she yipped and jumped into the air. I could see little spots of blood blooming on her legs and arms and one on her forehead.