by K. W. Jeter
He made no reply. Above several paragraphs of dense type, the leaflet was headed Get GIT!
“ ‘GIT?’ What the hell’s ‘GIT?’ ” demanded Sikes.
“Man, I told you it was gonna be good.” The detective who had spoken up before turned a heavy-lidded gaze toward them. “It stands for Grazer Intellinomics Training.” He tapped the side of his head. “It’s like a mind thing.”
“ ‘The new science of cerebro-perceptual control,’ ” George read aloud. “ ‘Truths as ancient as the pyramids, yet also the next step in humanoid evolution . . .’ ”
Sikes groaned, pitching forward until his brow hit the top of his desk with a thump.
“ ‘A revolution in the management of interpersonal relationships—’ ”
“Please . . . no . . .” With his head still down, Sikes feebly raised a hand as if drowning. “I can’t take it . . .”
There was a certain mild sadistic pleasure to be gotten here, noted George. Or perhaps masochistic. “ ‘Transform and achieve new levels of mastery in any individual’s sexual endeavors—’ ”
“Huh?” Sikes raised his head and picked up the cassette lying in front of him. “All that’s in here?”
“Hell, no,” said the detective across the aisle. “The man’s not gonna give away all his see-crets for nothing. That’s just a taste of his eternal wisdom. You sign up for the whole twenty-tape course and extra additional seminar sessions conveniently located at a hotel in your neighborhood, then you wind up in the same exalted state as His Enlightedness. Like, Stud City.”
“Oh, sure.” Officer Zepeda stood in the aisle between the desks. “As if Grazer’s pipe laying has gotten him in the Guinness Book of World Records. In his dreams, maybe.” She walked on with an armful of file folders.
“Hey.” The detective spread his hands wide. “Would the man charge for something if it wasn’t for real?”
“In a second.” Sikes flopped back in his chair. “Come on, George, let’s get out of here. I think there’s a beer bottle somewhere with an important clue on the bottom.”
George frowned. “It’s a little early for that sort of thing, don’t you think?”
“I just want to sit in a dark place and look at a bottle of beer. And reminisce about when I was younger and stupider and didn’t have so many worries.” Sikes stood up and rooted through his pockets for his keys. “Come on, be a pal.”
He hesitated for a moment, then picked up the stack of memos and dropped them back into his In box.
Six blocks from the station, they found a window-less establishment that was like a cavern fitted with torn red Naugahyde. Or it found them; the car, with Sikes behind the wheel, had been drawn to the place as if it were some dingy black hole in space.
“Used to come here a lot.” True to his word, Sikes had taken one hit from the long-neck Bud that the bartender had set in front of him, then he had pushed it aside. “Cheaper’n therapy, and you don’t have to worry about the department shrink dropping a loony code in your personnel file.”
For the sake of appearances, George had ordered a White Gold; some off-brand, even lumpier and more clotted, filled the glass. It tasted oddly good, even at this hour; the temptation to drink it all was hard to resist.
“I understood that humans believed friends were best suited for that purpose.” He took another sip of the sour milk. “To talk over one’s troubles with.”
“Naw, they just get in the way.” Sikes prodded a row of peanuts into line on the bartop. “When you’re absolutely bent on feeling sorry for yourself, the last thing you want is somebody trying to cheer you out of it. Or somebody who’s got troubles even worse than your own.”
“Matt—what do you have to feel sorry about?” The gloomy tone in his partner’s voice worried him. “You do an important job that you’re good at and that you even sometimes enjoy; your promotion chances are excellent—you’re a clinch to pass the Detective Two exams this time—”
“Cinch,” interjected Sikes. “The word is ‘cinch.’ And I’m glad you’re so confident about those exams.”
“Whatever.” George pressed on. “You’re surrounded by friends who hold you in esteem; and you’re in a warm, supportive relationship with a female of considerable personal and intellectual attainment—and one, I might add, with a high degree of physical attractiveness.”
“Yeah . . .” Sikes nodded. “Cathy’s not chopped liver, that’s for sure.”
“Is that supposed to be good or bad?” The human phrase had always puzzled George. A whole vocabulary of endearments and compliments existed in the Tenctonese language, based upon the attractiveness of organ meats, similar to the humans’ use of ‘honey’ and ‘peach.’
Sikes didn’t hear the question; he had sunk lower in his brooding thoughts. “Yeah, you’re right—what’ve I got to complain about?” He rubbed his eyes. “Maybe I’m just tired . . .”
“That could be.” George felt a twinge of sympathy, based on the load of fatigue that he was carrying around himself. The bar was so dark and warm in a humid, spilled-beer way; it would have been easy for him to have laid his head down and gone to sleep, sitting right here on the wobbling chrome stool. He pulled himself fully awake with an effort. “I take it you’ve been studying hard? For the exams?”
His partner shrugged. “Off and on. I’ve got most of that stuff down so cold . . .” Sikes watched his own fingernail tapping against the side of the beer bottle. “Hell, it’s not the Detective Two exams. It’s not Cathy, it’s not anything. I’ve just been . . . having trouble sleeping lately. Don’t know why.”
Trouble sleeping . . . His partner’s words echoed inside George’s head, as though the bar’s dim interior had been transported there. He sipped at his glass. The sour milk now tasted flat and unexalting; he could barely swallow it.
“That’s odd . . . you should say that . . .” Brows creased, George studied the glass in front of him.
Sikes glanced round at him. “What do you mean?”
He was on the verge of telling Sikes; the words were on his tongue, ready to come out. A confession, a plea for sympathy, an acknowledgement of some bond between himself and his human partner, he didn’t know. Perhaps just a simple statement of fact. That his sleep had been troubled as well. He could see, even without closing his eyes, the shadowed image from his dreaming, the arms outstretched against the light of another world; he could hear his name being spoken, like the pronouncement of a fate from which even his waking couldn’t save him . . .
He stopped himself from speaking. He swallowed the words into the clot that had already formed at the base of his throat.
“Nothing.” George managed to shake his head. “Nothing . . . I just . . . never mind.”
Still looking at the glass on the wet-ringed bar, he could feel Sikes’s gaze upon him growing sharper. Sikes would be trying, he knew, to tune in on that silent telepathic wavelength that grew between partners. Right now, that frequency was jammed, but it didn’t stop Sikes from attempting to figure out what was walking around inside George’s skull, the word that he had almost shouted aloud from the depths of sleep, the name that could be put to the hidden face that had whispered his.
“Ah, screw it.” Sikes pushed his barely touched glass of beer farther away. He dug a couple of bills from his wallet and laid them down on the damp imitation-woodgrain surface. “I knew I wasn’t thirsty. Come on, let’s blow this Popsicle stand.”
They emerged from the bar into hammering sunlight, both of them squinting and blinded until they could fumble their shades on.
Sikes didn’t say anything more all the way back to the station. Sitting at his own desk again, George felt an obscure guilt knotting in his gut. As though, helpless himself, he had let his partner down somehow.
C H A P T E R 4
“YOU’RE WHAT?”
Cathy didn’t bring her gaze up to meet his. She sat at the table in their apartment’s kitchen area, her hands laid out flat, as though to stop them from trembling.
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br /> He didn’t wait for her to reply. “Is this some kind of joke?” If it were, it didn’t seem very funny to Sikes. It was just stupid.
“That’s what the doctor said.” Cathy spoke to her hands, as though she were having this conversation with them. “That I was pregnant.”
“Yeah, right.” He turned away from the table, took the two steps necessary to reach the refrigerator, pulled it open and glared inside. Unseeing for a few seconds, it took him that long to decipher the visual clutter of bottles and plastic containers. He finally recognized the six-pack of Rolling Rock, right next to an opened and resealed packet of raw ox spleen tidbits. As he elbowed the fridge door shut and twisted the cap off the cold green bottle, through a sheer act of will he forced himself to lighten up. “Christ, sweetheart, you really had me going there.” He leaned against the sink’s edge and tilted the bottle to his mouth. “Must’ve been a harder day than I thought—I usually don’t fall for these gags quite so easy.”
She turned her damp face toward him. “I’m not joking, Matt. It’s true; the doctor did tell me I’m pregnant. And he showed me the test results and things. And . . .” On the table, her hands grasped each other, twisting and squeezing, the knuckles turning white. “And . . . I know it’s true. I can feel it.”
“Okay . . .” Sikes slowly nodded. He had taken another hit of beer. The effect inside him was little more than a hiss of steam, as though he had poured the beer onto a black stone cooking in the desert sun. “So exactly what is it you’re trying to tell me?” He felt vastly unamused now. “Because, you know, pregnant isn’t something you get out of a catalogue. You can’t sit in front of the TV and order it off the Home Merchandise Network.” As though from a distance, he could hear his own voice, and it sounded like another person, the one he’d been the last year with his ex-wife, the two of them piling into each other like tanker trucks full of sulphuric acid.
Cathy at least wasn’t playing that game. “Matt . . . please,” she said miserably. “Don’t . . .”
There was no stopping himself now. “Because if you’re pregnant, you didn’t get pregnant by me. Because that’s impossible.” The beer bottle was about to break into green splinters in his fist. “You’re a Newcomer, remember—”
“Matt . . .”
Just as it used to with the other person, the one he’d thought was safely dead and would never come back, a black roaring noise welled up inside his head. “—and I’m a human. All right?” The last few months with his ex-wife, it had always been like this, blind shouting and feeling as though his blood pressure would pop his chest open like a paper bag. “And a Newcomer female can’t get herself knocked up by sleeping with a human male. There’s just no way. Jeez!” He slammed the bottle down on the counter, the beer foamed up the neck and sizzled over his hand.
Cathy laid her head down on her arms and began weeping, great ache-filled sobs that wrenched her shoulder blades together.
Sikes stood watching her, a dark tide pulling back from his heart, leaving mute and broken debris behind. He had been a couple seconds away from the final question, the last one he’d shouted at his ex-wife—So who is he? Who’s the guy?—in the bad days of his past.
The roaring noise had died away, letting him hear Cathy crying. That was one thing, at least, that Newcomers and humans had in common, especially the women; you hurt them, they cry. Way to go, he told himself bleakly. He felt like the proverbial ten pounds of mandrill shit.
He wiped his beer-soaked hand on his trousers leg. For a moment, the urge swept through him, to go and lean over Cathy, to kiss her on top of her head as he had done so many times before, to grab her shoulders and pull her up from the chair, to turn her and hold her tight against himself, kissing her tears and trying to stop any more from coming . . .
He couldn’t. The dead and never-dead past, and all the bad memories that went with it (his ex-wife hadn’t cried when he’d asked her that last, fatal question; she’d laughed) held him back. Sikes pushed himself away from the counter and headed for the apartment door, a long way distant.
Every step rang on the bare floor like a nail driven into his heart. When he pulled the door shut behind him, he could still hear her crying.
Looking at his father was like looking in a mirror. One that showed him something that he didn’t particularly want to see.
The argument between Buck Francisco and his dad had reached that point, like a temporary lull in a driving storm, where both sides seemed to have run out of words. They had reached that stage quickly, within ten minutes of the first verbal shots being fired. There had been nothing to hold the two of them back, to keep the row from reaching maximum velocity and destructive capability. Buck’s mom had taken his sister Emily and the baby out to the nearest shopping mall; he and his father had the big empty house all to themselves. And their tempers.
Here we go again. Buck slumped down against the sofa cushions, gazing at the dead big-screen TV on the other side of the room as his father came back from the kitchen.
“All I’m trying to say is—” His father was keeping his voice carefully controlled, much lower in volume than it had been just a minute ago. He had a popped-open can of MelloWhite lo-cal sour milk dangling in his hand, “—That this is our home. It’s our world now, Buck. It’s the only one we have.” His voice strained with a pleading tone. “What’s the point of not trying to fit in?”
Buck glanced over at his father. Right now, George Francisco didn’t look like the shining Tenctonese success story that everyone else thought he was, the tough, bright Newcomer vaulting his way through the ranks of the L.A. police bureaucracy. Right now, the knot of his plain rep-stripe necktie was tugged loose at his collar, the rest of his inevitable white shirt wrinkled and pulled from his trousers’ waistband. He must have had a hell of a day. His suit jacket was tossed across the back of one of the dining room chairs, like a discarded gray rag, For a moment, Buck felt a twinge of pity as he looked at his dad, with his perpetual load-of-troubles expression and tired eyes, more tired now than he had ever seen them before.
At the same time, a spark of anger bounced off the steeled hearts in Buck’s chest. His father being this worn-out was the whole problem, the reason behind the shouting match, or at least this latest installment of it. His father was grinding himself down to dust by trying to be something he wasn’t. Something that no Tenctonese could ever be.
Human . . .
Buck felt his own eyes narrowing in hatred, as though it wasn’t his burnt-out old man standing there, but one of those smug, self-satisfied terts that his father, with his suit and tie and his head aching from being used as a hammer against every wall, so desperately emulated.
“Yeah?” Buck spat out his words, like gristle found in raw meat. “And just what exactly is it you get when you ‘fit in’?”
A baffled look crossed his dad’s face. “What do you get?” He raised his arms, the can of sour milk in one hand, in a gesture that took in the living room, all the rest of the house surrounding it, and the streets and city beyond the walls. “That’s how we’ve gotten . . . everything.”
“Great,” said Buck in disgust. He folded his own arms across his chest. “You’ve sold out your Tenctonese heritage—your chavez—for an extra-wide fridge in the kitchen and a cable TV hookup with all the premium channels. What a deal.”
“The refrigerator . . .” His father’s puzzlement flipped right back over to anger, bursting through whatever resolutions he’d just made to keep his temper in check. “You listen to me, Buck. I’ve got some news for you. The refrigerator, the TV, the house, everything here—those are all nothing.”
“Is that right? Why do you have ’em, then?”
“Don’t get smart with me, young man. Your mother and your sister—even the baby—seem to have more appreciation of all I’ve done to make life pleasant for this family. And I recall plenty of times seeing you with your head stuck inside that refrigerator, rooting around for something to eat. But that’s not the point.” He
brought his voice level again, tightly controlled. “What’s important isn’t the number and variety of things this world gave us. What’s important is that this world gave us freedom.”
Buck rolled his eyes, gazing up to the ceiling. He’d heard this song before.
“You can be as cynical as you like about that, Buck; it’s still the truth.” His father set the MelloWhite can down on the dining table; he must have realized that it made an incongruous prop for a lecture of this type. “I thought you were old enough to remember. But perhaps you’ve forgotten.”
“Remember what?”
“What it was like before . . . before the Day of Descent.” His father’s voice softened. “What it was like on the slave ships, Buck. For us . . . for all of us. Your people.” He turned his gaze away, toward the sliding window that opened onto the house’s patio. In the dimming shades of twilight, the landscaping around the pool could still be seen, the split-leaf philodendrons dark and shiny, the blooms of the passion flower vine that was Susan’s favorite, drooping in on themselves as though wilted from the long day’s heat. In the sky of amethyst and smoke, a distant passenger jet banked toward LAX and the ocean. “It wasn’t like this, Buck. I’m surprised . . . you don’t remember.” His father’s voice was almost a whisper. “It was so dark, and crowded there . . . with all of us on top of one another. And we possessed nothing, not even our own lives.” A bitter smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. “You talk about all the things we have now, as if to have them were a sin in the eyes of Celine and Andarko. But you don’t seem to remember what it was like to have nothing.” He held out his hands before him, regarding them, as if they were no longer part of his body. “To be nothing. Don’t you understand, Buck? That’s what this world gave us. It gave us our lives.”
He’d heard it all before, and even now, hearing it again, Buck had to resist the tug of the passion in his father’s voice. That hope, that light, the sun spilling across the mountains that ringed the desert where the ship had landed . . . a new world. His father was wrong about one thing: he did remember what it had been like before the Day of Descent. As a child, in that dark hell, he’d lost the ability to cry. There had been no point to it; misery had been endless, the salt upon their tongues, the stifling breath inside their throats. But he’d been granted the eyes of a child again, and the tears, when he’d first looked out across that vast, empty landscape, to a horizon edged with a fiery brightness. He’d turned away from his family, to hide those tears from them.