Madlands

by K. W. Jeter

  “I still don’t get it. Why would Canal Ultime do something like that?”

  Harrison put on his corporate wisdom look. “There’s a couple of good reasons. One is that if they stuck to the original payment schedule, they’d bleed Identrope dry. There’s no way he could come up with the kind of money that the original contract calls for. In that sense, Identrope would be a victim of his own success.”

  We had gotten back into the old rubble section. Late enough in the day that the rusting cliffs had us deep in shade.

  I was trying to read whatever lay behind Harrison’s smooth face. “So what’s the problem with that? Canal Ultime could just renegotiate the contract with Identrope. That kind of thing’s done all the time.”

  “They had a better idea. At that point in CU’s thinking, the actual cash revenue coming in from Identrope was a negligible factor. The spin-off effects from Identrope’s broadcasts were much more important. Their research showed a tremendous pull-through factor; your audience tends to spill over into watching all the rest of CU’s programming. If they segment the Identrope broadcasts throughout the day, they can jack up their networks’ total viewing audience by four to five hundred percent. Believe it; they went through a period of experimenting with time slots, and I’ve seen the reports that came out of that. It’s solid numbers. So the decision was made to clam up about the spin-off effect. Better to underreport Identrope’s ratings, and forgo the additional revenues that would technically be owing to them, than to give somebody outside the company—namely Identrope himself—that knowledge about how dependent they were on him.”

  Now it was all coming clear. Feed in enough points, and you can predict where the line is going.

  I nodded, right on Harrison’s wavelength. “So if one person’s that important—the way Identrope supposedly is—and you can eliminate that person . . .”

  “Exactly, Mr. Trayne. We’ve put quite a bit of deliberation into this. At one point we were debating the advisability of having you killed. That might be where our friend Geldt got the wrong idea. A certain faction on the New Moon Board of Directors felt that your participation on Identrope’s broadcasts—the choreography, the maintenance of the dance troupe—that that was the critical element drawing in the high audience numbers. And certainly your death would have had an effect, at least on a short-term basis. But the consensus finally was that you weren’t absolutely essential to Identrope’s operations. Your style and methods were well enough established by this point that you could be replaced, probably by one of the dancers in the troupe. Some research of our own had established that you’ve already turned over quite a bit of responsibility to one individual. So even though there were some points in favor of that particular action—for one, you would’ve been much easier to get to than Identrope—the vote finally went against having you killed.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It wasn’t anything personal. We try to keep things on a strict business level.”

  Strict business, all right . . . “So you took another vote and decided to ice Identrope.”

  Harrison nodded. “I’m sure you can see the logic of it. With Identrope gone, the broadcasts end. With the broadcasts eliminated, the spin-off effect from them is over. Major audience drop-off for Canal Ultime. That’s our window of opportunity. We’ve got our unjammable satellite already up, so there’s no quick and dirty way CU can get back at us. CU’s advertisers and other programming sources see what’s happening, viewers disappearing from CU’s networks, and we snap them up. Maybe even more than fifty percent. That big one hundred market share could be ours in a couple of months.”

  “You’re forgetting something. Fifty, one hundred, whatever—it’ll be a much smaller market. If Identrope’s broadcasts are what draws them in, you get rid of those and the audiences are going to shrink back down.”

  A shrug from Harrison. “We’ll deal with that afterward. Corporate planning can only go so far. It might be something that you and I will want to talk about after the event. Maybe there’ll be a place for you in a new programming venue. At any rate, our feeling is that all of a small pie is better than none of a big one.”

  “Yeah, well—” I looked around at the reddening metal. “You’re also forgetting that you’re talking about me being definitely out of one job; there’s no maybe about it. If I do this little thing for you. How much do you think you’re going to be able to pay me, to make that worth it?”

  “We’re prepared to make you a very lucrative offer, Mr. Trayne. I’m not talking about a mere lump sum payment for services rendered. An ongoing slice of the action—that’s what we’re prepared to cut you in on.”

  Slice and cut—the man liked to talk bloodthirsty. “What kind of slice are we looking at?”

  “Half of one percent of all net revenues generated by the New Moon satellite.”

  From blood talk to air talk; it didn’t mean shit to me. I decided to see how far I could push him “That’s not good enough, Harrison. I’ll need a full one percent.”

  He didn’t blink an eye. “It’ll take board approval, but I think we can swing that.”

  I had spent so much time rooting up Hollywood stuff from the archives, I knew what else to bite. “On the gross, not the net.”

  Little soft gems of sweat welled up on his forehead. “Whoa. That’s asking a lot.”

  “Gross, or I walk. You can get yourself some other boy.”

  He caved. “All right—”

  “And I want all this on a stock ownership basis, not just some contract for royalties.”

  “Sure. Whatever you want.”

  None of it meant diddly; I’d been around the block enough times to know that they could still screw me blind. We hadn’t even gotten into defining profit participation, or any of that tight creative accounting stuff.

  The dying sun stained the ground appropriately red as Harrison walked with me toward the Hudson. One ’yard rat was tongue-kissing the hood ornament as we approached, but scurried away when he spotted us.

  “One more question, Harrison.” I leaned against the Hudson’s fender and fished the keys from my pocket. “Why me?”

  “Why you what?”

  “Why me to kill Identrope? There are people whose main line of work is this sort of thing.”

  Harrison’s face stayed smooth and blank. “It’s a simple question of access. You’re tight with Identrope. You’ve been working for him for a long time. It’s no problem for you to get to him. In private.”

  “Really?” I rubbed the ignition key between my thumb and forefinger. “If I’m so tight with him—how’d you know I’d be willing to do it?”

  He looked puzzled. “But that’s why we made you such a good offer. So you would do it.”

  Little concepts like loyalty or friendship were words on tissue paper inside his skull.

  There’s always something insulting about it, when people just automatically assume that you’re the same sort of creature they are.

  I unlocked the Hudson and got in behind the wheel. Harrison tried to hand me that gun of his through the rolled-down window, but I pushed it away. “Christ, I don’t want that thing. I’ve got my own tool kit.”

  I drove away, generating a dust cloud large enough to block the sight of Harrison in the rearview mirror.

  My laughing had stopped a while back. Killing Identrope—being asked to kill him—was still a funny notion to me, but not that hilarious.

  All Harrison’s money talk had done was push, with one fingertip, a boulder off the edge of a cliff where it had been teetering for a long time. As was so often the case, somebody else’s word would be father to my deed.

  As I one-handed the steering wheel, the low L.A. skyline up ahead, I mulled over the exact spiritual ramifications of murdering this world’s—my world’s—true and bogus Savior.

  THIRTEEN

  I DROVE out of the junkyard, with the hot eyes of the rats locked on the Hudson’s exhaust pipe. Their lust for smooth metal tailed me onto the road, until
the dust cloud boiling behind blotted it out.

  Heading back to what passed for L.A., the skyline inching up in the windshield, I mulled over Harrison’s business offer. For the mere cost of my immortal soul and a laundry list of strange psychological ramifications—I could screw over myself and people who trusted me!—it seemed as though I might have cut myself in on a nice piece of change.

  Change in all the senses of the word, not just the jingling stuff in my pocket, but the winds of that other air, the breezes and tornadoes whistling holes through our meager lives. Constant mutation had been the theme song of the real L.A., ages ago, and the pseudo one had taken the melody down to the molecular level and beyond, every particle humming the grand dissolve and recombinant chorus. Nothing lasted forever, and in these parts the shelf life was traditionally measured in some range from hours to milliseconds.

  My gig with Identrope had lasted years already; I could probably have picked up the Madlands trophy for conceptual longevity, if there’d been one. I had already bucked the odds for a run way beyond the average. I couldn’t reasonably expect the deal to go on forever, though a certain mental hysteresis always led me to believe that it would be there tomorrow, and even the week and month after that. Thinking about Change was like thinking about Death, and I’d already penciled that in too on my dance card. You know the icy fist is knocking on a door somewhere, but it’s not on your street, and if it is, it’s not on your block, not yet. And other horseshit lies.

  It made cold sense at this point, when the long run was due for termination, to cash in my trusted relationship with Identrope for a big payday. A whole gravy train of paydays, a slice of New Moon’s gross for the rest of my life. With that kind of money, I could walk away from my principles, keep walking right on out of the Madlands. I could put my checkbook where my soul used to be, write Death to Memory on the Payable To line. You could do a lot with serious grease like that. This was, of course, all assuming that everything that Harrison had talked about—all New Moon’s business plans—came to pass. But I already had the certainty, the rock in my gut, that it would, given the precedent factor of my arranging Identrope’s demise. I was the hinge of history, and which way I swung spelled fate for a whole lot of people.

  I kept on driving, musing on these deep dark things, as I aimed the Hudson’s hood ornament for the heart of the pseudo-L.A.

  Climbing up the Ivar cul-de-sac to the Alto-Nido Apartments—I left Geldt’s Hudson down on the corner, where the streetlights were brighter—I dug my apartment key from my pocket. I already had it in the lock when I heard the sounds coming from inside. They didn’t scare me, but they had me worried.

  I reached in and switched on the light. The sounds, no longer muffled by the door, were decipherable as human if inarticulate. They had a certain edge of panic to them.

  In the back room I found Geldt right where I’d left, him. Eyes bugged, the gasping sound coming from him—he’d made a heroic effort, given the limited scope of action available to him, and had chewed partway through the gag I’d stuffed in his mouth, his tongue shoving the spit-damp cloth far enough aside to allow his bleat of fright to emerge.

  Geldt didn’t even look at me as I came into the room. With his hands tied behind his back and his ankles cuffed, he’d managed to scoot himself back against the farthest wall. I tracked his sight line to the other side.

  “Christ—” I smelled it at the same time I saw it. The odor of spilled urine and worse. This mess had obviously had both a bladder and a lower intestine. But not anymore.

  It was still alive. I walked over and stood looking down at it, my sight and other senses recoiling. The mess oozed and shimmered, a puddle with a tremor. Two rudimentary eyes focused on me; the wet flesh around them was translucent enough that I could see the workings of striated orbital muscles. The whole thing had a diameter of about a meter at its widest point.

  Empty clothing under one side; I pulled them out with the point of my shoe. A shiny snot-like substance clung to the different fabrics. Pants, coat, shirt with the buttons still done up; a deflated scarecrow. And something I recognized, a faded brocade vest from a Mexican wedding suit, a thrift-store item that had been bought for forty-nine cents and worn as a joke, the joke being that it couldn’t really be from a Mexican wedding since there weren’t any holes from the traditional knife fight out in the parking lot. Eddie the Make’s joke, the ethnocentric little bastard; Eddie’s vest. He’d been wearing it yesterday when I’d been talking to him while chowing down.

  Now I felt sad. The hole went right through my heart, and it wasn’t from any knife fight. The mess on the floor was Eddie. The n-formation had hit him, just the way he’d been afraid it would.

  I fished through the empty trousers pockets and came up with the apartment key I’d given him some time back. A rare token of my esteem; I didn’t hand out keys to my place to just anybody. And the only reason I’d given Eddie a key was so he’d have a floor to sleep on whenever he didn’t have the two bucks for his regular flop at the Hotel Stanford down on Eighth and Alvarado. That had probably been the case tonight—he hadn’t looked too prosperous yesterday.

  He must’ve let himself in, thoughtfully locked the door behind himself, and left the chain off so I could get in. Likely heard Geldt whimpering and sniffling back here, came in to look . . . and that was when the n had got him.

  At least it had gotten him all at once, from the looks of it. That happened sometimes, but not very often. He’d lucked out. He would’ve hated going through a protracted multi-cancer siege, feeling his cells slipping out from underneath him one by one, waking up every morning a little less human than when he’d gone to sleep the night before. And the process had gone all the way to complete cellular anarchy, too, with no stop-off somewhere along the line, no intermediate stage like a PVC lobster or a dog with a lady’s hands.

  The whimpering behind me went up in pitch, and I looked over my shoulder. Geldt had come to enough of his senses to realize that I was there in the room. His bugged-out eyes signaled to me.

  I went over and, knelt by my guest-in-bondage. I tugged the gag down to his chin.

  “Oh Jesus, Trayne—” He moaned my name and the Other Guy’s. “Thank God . . . thank God you came back . . . it was fucking horrible—”

  I looked at him with blank innocence. “What was?” When people make it this easy, I can’t resist.

  Geldt’s eyes looked as if they were going to come flying at me like ground-stroke tennis balls. “For Christ’s sake! Right over there . . . you were just looking at it!”

  “Oh, that.” I shrugged. “You know, sometimes these things just happen.”

  He started to gibber. Nerve sweat drenched his face. “The guy . . . he just walked in here . . . it was that guy, that Artie or something . . . he walked in here, and he looked all funny, he looked right at me . . .” Geldt’s eyes unfocused, rolling over the bumpy ground of his short-term memory. “And then . . . and then . . . he just . . . just changed. Went all like that . . . over there.” The protruding gaze fastened on me again. “Get me out of here, Trayne.” He pleaded, lips trembling. “Get me away from . . . that. I’ll do anything for you, Trayne. Anything.”

  Geldt disgusted me more than the Eddie-mess. The big wimp. It just showed what an essential novice to the Madlands he was. If he’d spent much time here at all, he’d have gotten used to stuff like this.

  “Anything, Trayne . . . you name it.”

  I was already planning on taking him up on that offer. He was, in fact, going to do a lot for me whether he offered to or not.

  My bad knee creaked as I stood up. Looking down on him from way above, I shook my head. “Afraid I can’t oblige you just yet. I need you here—”

  That got a shriek. “For the love of God, Trayne!”

  I liked the Poe reference. “Tell you what, though. I’ll take Eddie still got my respect, even if he’d slid out of the definition of human; I wasn’t going to say him out of here.” it. “Then you’ll feel better, I p
romise you.”

  Geldt tried to give me some argument on that point, but I stuck the gag back in his mouth. I went to the other bedroom, the one I used for sleeping, dumped out some books, and came back with an empty cardboard box.

  I squatted down beside what Eddie had become. Poking around with one forefinger, I found rudimentary kidneys, the coil of a simple digestive system, other bits and pieces. In the thickest part of the rippling gelatin, two fists of pink stuff bumped up against each other, with a segmented tail extending about half a meter; that was his brain and neurosystem. The eyes stayed focused on me, following my prodding investigations. I felt sure that Eddie was still in there, alive and conscious.

  There was more than just consciousness in the eyes. That little soft spark, from his brain to mine. He was pleading with me to remember my promise. He had no way to speak, except in my remembrance of what I’d told him I would do, when it came to this time.

  That was why I’d brought out the empty box. I tried to slide him into it, but that didn’t work; the floppy tissue snagged against the rough edge of the cardboard. I set the box back upright, and tried a different tack, less pleasant. I got my hands under the Eddie-mess—like snails and slugs, it looked slimier than it actually was to the touch—and folded him up like an omelette that someone had forgotten to cook. With the thinner parts brought over the middle, Eddie made a small enough package that I could pick him up on the flats of my hands and lay him down inside the box. Tenderly as possible; that was mandatory under the circumstances.

  I carried the box with the Eddie-mess in it out to the little weed-choked yard behind the apartment building. The other thing I carried out, tucked into my trousers pocket, was Geldt’s overweight cannon. For some reason, I didn’t want to use my own personal piece to do this; maybe to avoid getting bad memories tied onto something I might want to use again someday.

  Looking down the hillside, I could see the L.A. lights doing their murky dance. I’d set the cardboard box down at my feet. From inside it, I could hear the stuff that had been Eddie moving around, something like tapioca slow-sloshing in a quart mayonnaise jar. And even something like a little sigh, as though he’d realized that I hadn’t forgotten my promise to him.