The Mocking Program

by Alan Dean Foster

  The tears and tints began to flow again. Cardenas let them come, admiring the startling play of colors within her skin, before putting an end to the weepery with another question.

  "What about this business of his, his big project? Did he ever talk about it, ever mention the names of partners or existing concerns?"

  Reaching down, she picked up a beach towel and used it to wipe her eyes and nose. Behind her, the simulated sea washed the synthetic shore, suffusing the apartmento with the artificial scent of marooned kelp and crystallizing sea salt.

  "Wayne never said anything about partners. I guess maybe he didn't need any, because he had access to the money of this other woman, the woman he was living with. Apparently she had plenty. I didn't worry about him, about us, taking it for our own use, because he told me she had stolen it from her husband."

  Cardenas was watching her closely. "Did Wayne ever mention the husband?"

  Coy shook her head. "No, never. Just a daughter, the girl he and the woman were living with. Wayne talked about her a lot. I guess he thought she was kind of special, even though she wasn't his."

  "He didn't talk about the woman?" Cardenas was puzzled.

  "No, not the woman. He never talked about her, unless it had to do with the money he was going to take. Just about the girl. Katey— no, Katla, that was her name. The special project? He was never real clear on that. Said something, once, about wanting to keep me under a shield of ignorance. It all centered around the girl." She shook her head. "Don't ask me why."

  Cardenas was now as intrigued as he was confused. "Brummel's big business deal revolved around Katla? Katla, the twelve-year-old, and not Surtsey?" He saw neither need nor reason for now to bring up the name Mockerkin.

  She shrugged. "That's what Wayne told me. Hey, I didn't press him for details. It was enough that he said we were going to get married and go to this place of friendship. Or Friendship place. He'd get real dreamy-eyed talking about it. Said it was warm, and beautiful, and private. Just wouldn't tell me where it was."

  "What kind of unusual business could someone like Wayne be working with a twelve-year-old girl?"

  Rising, Coy Joy apathetically began to slip into a new dress. Her body was a symphony of sinuous movement and subdued, internally generated color. Cardenas's blood pressure had finally diminished to something approaching normal.

  "I dunno." She raised one leg engagingly, using both hands to smooth the diaphanous material against her skin. The mood music that had been playing continuously in the background had, mercifully, finally stopped. "He said she was a tecant, but he didn't go into details. Said she had done a lot of work for her father."

  So shy little Katla Mockerkin was a technology savant, Cardenas mused. One who had been working with her father, The Mock. While the nature of that labor remained a mystery, Cardenas began to understand why Cleator Mockerkin might be anxious to regain custody of his hijacked offspring. Irregardless of the nature of that work, it was manifestly one that had caught the interest of Wayne Brummel. The abilities of a natural tecant could be extremely valuable to someone involved in complex business dealings. With tecants, as for example with intuits, age was not necessarily a limiting factor where natural ability was concerned.

  "He didn't discuss the character of the business at all?"

  "I told you." Reflecting her annoyance as she fastened the dress, angry red stars appeared as blotches on the still-exposed portions of her body. "He didn't go into detail with me about anything except the two of us, our relationship, and this Friendship place. He never talked business beyond what I've already told you." She rested her face in her hands. "I didn't want him to talk about anything except us." Taking a deep breath, she composed herself as best she was able. Except for occasional flare-ups of blue and gold, her skin color had returned to normal.

  "That's gone, now. All gone. Him and us, Friendship; everything." She glanced in the direction of an artfully concealed chrono.

  "You've still got time left that you paid for. You sure you don't want to . . . ?"

  Her words as she spoke them to him now were as hard, as cold and drained of emotion, as any Cardenas had ever encountered. Even if he were inclined to pursue some nonpolice activity with her, her tone would have killed any interest he might have had.

  "No." His reply was full of empathy as he rose from the sand. "You've done everything I've asked of you."

  Beneath the form-fitting material of the dress, her lethargic shrug was barely perceptible. "I've told you everything I can remember. There isn't anything more. Now there never will be." Lower lip quivering, she tried very hard to smile. "If you really don't want me for anything else, I could really use the next hour to myself."

  "Why don't you just quit for the night?"

  Her response was more of a twitch than a laugh. "Yeah, right," she replied tartly. "I'll just go up to whoever's running the front desk now and turn in my timer for the rest of the evening."

  "I can get you off." The Inspector uttered the claim with quiet confidence.

  "Why bother?" Her tone was brittle as she headed for the door that led to the bathroom. "I'm already coged." Whether from indifference, numbness, or house rules, she did not bother to close the door behind her.

  On his way out, Cardenas made sure to strew compliments in his wake. It was all he could do to help her, since she would not let him arrange for her to take the rest of the night off. No one accosted him as he stepped outside the entry to the Cocktale and started up the street in the direction of the tube station. It would be light out soon. As he left the sextel behind, he was more mystified than ever. Clearly, it was more than the chance to live on pilfered funds that had drawn Wayne Brummel to Surtsey Mockerkin. It was her daughter. Knowing that, it followed naturally that it was twelve-year-old Katla who The Mock really wanted back.

  What business was she involved in, this quiet girl whom her former sochemates had spoken so well of? What work had she been doing for her father? A versatile, talented tecant could do many things.

  In this instance, enough to get other people killed.

  In spite of all his street and spinner work Cardenas was unable to come up with a single reliable, pursuable lead as to the whereabouts of Surtsey Mockerkin and her daughter. If they were hiding somewhere in the Strip, their identities were not registering on any of the usual trackers. Official inquiries through customary channels had turned up nothing. Mother and daughter had vanished utterly from public ken.

  Which meant they were hiding out somewhere. Unless The Mock's minions had already caught up with them. Or some other interested cartel like the Inzini, or the Ooze. The extraordinary and unexpected interest in Katla Mockerkin made the Inspector only that much more anxious to find her. What kind of business would someone like The Mock entrust to the care of a twelve-year-old, even if she was his own daughter and an acknowledged tecant?

  Running and hiding from someone like The Mock would require intelligence, street smarts, and plenty of money. It was now evident that Surtsey Mockerkin possessed all three. Having eluded the attentions of her dangerous and no doubt enraged husband for this long, she was clearly determined to continue doing so. The fact that she was not specifically hiding from the police would not make the job of finding her any easier.

  At least he now had some idea of why she was running. Knowing that allowed him to adjust his search parameters accordingly. But it was rapidly becoming plain that if he was going to find them before The Mock, he was going to have to seek help outside official channels.

  It was one reason why he repeatedly turned down the array of desk jobs he was offered at regular intervals. Nice, safe assignments in climate-controlled cubicles that would allow him to spend the remainder of his years until retirement in comparative comfort and safety. Nice, dull, boring assignments that were suited neither to his soul nor his temperament. It was not so much that he loved the street as that he could not seem to do without it. The Strip was in his blood. That was only appropriate, he knew, since he
had left so much of his blood in the Strip.

  Which was why, not to mention how, he found himself striding imperturbably down an unmarked, unnamed street in a corner of the Strip as far removed from the comforting lights of downtown Nogales or Sanjuana as Mocceca's Mall was from the dark side of the moon. The pose and posture he adopted were deliberate. Look too purposeful in such a setting and you risked making yourself a target. Appear lost, and you became a target by default. But affect an air of nonchalance, and the brains behind the eyes that invariably tracked your progress from corners and crannies, windows and zipwalls, would pause to reflect.

  Here, they would conclude, was someone who flashed confidence like a gun, and loaded it with attitude. So while some might covet his clean clothes and hidden assets, the furtive inhabitants of the Bonezone hugged their hiding places and let him pass unmolested.

  The Bonezone was a low-priority area for patrols, "low priority" being bureaucrat-speak for "a place taxpayers don't give a damn about." Certainly Cardenas encountered no fellow federales as he wended his way deeper and deeper into the 'zone. Piles of ergonomic trash overflowed recycling bins and filled alleyways, uncollected but not unsifted. Stray cats devoid of implanted ident chips prowled and yowled among the organic garbage excreted daily by dozens of small food shops and cheap apartment buildings. Qwilk shops hawked the latest in electronic fills and gadgets, much legal, some less so, and usually but not always out of sight, unpleasant but sought-after paraphernalia that did not belong in private hands.

  It was a testament to Cardenas's guise that he was not immediately spotted and identified as a federale. The shopkeepers and restaurant owners and beggars and contemplative but wary scaves and skim artists took him for a veteran visitor, one knowledgeable and experienced in the ways of the 'zone. They harangued him openly, soliciting business or charity according to their station, but otherwise left him alone to pursue his agenda. Bareheaded and hunched forward, he advanced with hands in pockets, unsmiling and apparently lost in a world of his own. None were ready to run the risk of interrupting his fixation, whatever it might be.

  Had they known his intended destination, he would likely have drawn even less attention. In the bowels of the Bonezone, there were many cults, not all of them benign. It was the experience of professional thieves that fanatics usually made chancy victims, and in any case, carried little worth stealing.

  One of the few blessings to be found in the 'zone was the absence of the pestiferous motile adverts. There was no point in squandering good advertising money on barely-citizens who possessed little in the way of disposable income. On the distaff side there was the noise: an omnipresent drone of cut-rate electronics, buzzing sensoria, mindless street chatter, and loud, sometimes lethally loud, vit and music. Blocking out the 'zone drone as best he was able, he concentrated on finding his way through a maze of small streets and passageways long since neglected by the district public works department. Assuming the place hadn't moved, his spinner could have led him to his intended destination straight away. But pulling a police spinner would be a bad way of maintaining the kind of anonymity that kept one integral this deep in the Bonezone.

  A pair of dogs crossed his path, snarled, and continued on their way out of sight behind a darkened apartmento off to his right. The schnauzer had two artificial front legs, while its companion cocker flaunted a pair of miniature reception dishes in place of ears. Both wore broadcast collars, indicating that they were not strays. Someone had taken pity on them and, instead of having them put down, had repaired them enough to survive on the streets. Biosurge talent was plentiful in the 'zone, even if most of it was focused on procedures that would get a legitimate practitioner locked up and his license revoked.

  As Cardenas walked, he found himself brooding on the meaning of "friendship" as it had been related to him by Coy Joy. Had her paramour Brummel been speaking metaphorically of it, or had he been referring to an actual place? A check of Strip place names as well as a more exhaustive search run farther afield had found no urb, no street, no development named Friendship within a couple of hundred kirns. There was a Friendship, Pennsylvania, and a Friendship, Iowa. Even a Friendship, Manitoba. Contacting the local registries in each community had identified no recent relocations who could conceivably be taken for Surtsey and Katla Mockerkin. If Brummel had been speaking of another actual place, it lay outside the boundaries of the Namerican States.

  Was that the right passage, there, off to his left? Or was it the next one down? He struggled to remember the nexus sheet the spinner had spun. Resolutely, he turned down the first narrow lane that presented itself. If he was remembering incorrectly, the worst that was likely to happen was that no one would respond to his presence. Unless someone made him for a federale, in which case he might find himself staring down the quadruple barrel of an Ithaca spitter, or something equally unpleasant.

  The passageway terminated in a door that appeared to have been cobbled together from scraps of wood and scrap metal, but in actuality was a single sheet of cold-effused alloy sufficiently impervious to do any old-time bank vault proud. There were no handles, no windows or ports, no visible hinges. Equally invisible was the speaker that barked hesitantly at him.

  "What is the word, byte?"

  "There is no word," Cardenas replied evenly. "There are only numbers masquerading as words."

  The hidden interrogator did not reply. Cardenas envisioned acolytes on the other side of the door conversing animatedly with one another. It would take a moment for word of his presence to be passed onward.

  Finally, "What do you seek?"

  "Aurilac the Wise—if he's at home and not indisposed," Cardenas added solicitously.

  "You're a fedoco." The tone was slightly accusing. The Inspector did not search for the concealed vits through which he was being observed, nor the weapons that were doubtless trained on him and could easily prevent any flight to freedom down the narrow, constricting lane.

  "I'm a searcher after truth, like yourself."

  "Is that what you seek from the Wise? Truth?" the voice wanted to know.

  "None of us have access to true truth. Not even the Wise. We can only search for it. I'm a fellow searcher." He smiled at the unseen speaker. "The Wise seeks the peace that lies in studying the places between man and machine. My work is ensuring the peace of the first. On behalf of that, we've exchanged communications previously. Sometimes information arrives in my personal box that I know comes from him. Sometimes I have the opportunity to help his Order." He leaned forward slightly. "There are those who don't like what you believe and what you do. Who consider you all borderline antisocs. I'm not one of them. I'm a friend."

  "And a voluble one, at that." The door opened to admit him, not by moving inward, but by scrolling up and disappearing into the top of the lintel. "Enter, seeker."

  "I'm armed," he warned them before stepping through.

  "We know." The door closed behind him.

  Standing in a very small hallway, he found himself bathed in a pale blue light. When it shut off, an unexpectedly voluptuous young woman clad in a single garment comprised of melted-down, thin-rolled, and recast discarded electronic components greeted him with a contented half-smile. Lights winked and flashed from her uncomfortable-looking costume, but she did not seem to mind how it bunched up and bound. Seeing his eyes wander, her smile widened.

  "It keeps those of us who strive to learn the Way alert," she explained.

  "What Way is that?" he asked as she turned and he followed her.

  "Why, the Right Way, of course. But if you are truly a seeker, as you claim, and not just another dumb, Neanderthalic fedoco, you already know that."

  "The blue light?" he inquired as they turned a sharp corner in the featureless corridor.

  "We don't fear ordinary weapons such as you bear on your person. We have ways of dealing with those. Our concern was that you might have carried, willingly or otherwise, a disruptor on your person. That would concern us." Glancing back at him, she sm
iled beatifically. "We can't have intruders spizzing our crunch."

  "I feel exactly the same way," he replied truthfully.

  The corridor opened with unexpected abruptness into a large, darkened room. The ceiling above had been removed, allowing the ranks of coil chairs to move freely between two floors. Screens glowed and heads-up projections filled much of the available space. More than two dozen acolytes of the Wise sat or slumped before the astonishing plethora of displays. Some of the attentive operators were directly wired in via contact caps, while others murmured to sensitive vorecs or fingered keyboards. The soft rise and fall of their voices as they whispered verbal commands to their consoles reminded Cardenas of muffled Gregorian chant, though the language they were speaking had as much to do with Latin as Finnish did with Fijian.

  In the center of it all, at the far end of the chamber, Aurilac the Wise reposed contentedly in a reclining lounge that pivoted in response to his murmured commands. Gray of hair and sardonic of aspect, alert of eye and swollen of body, he waved off the woman who had just finished filling his half-meter-long glycol pipe and languidly blew a cloud of aromatic smoke in Cardenas's direction. Sampling the puff with a sniff, the Inspector identified at least three different soporifics in addition to the masking fragrance.

  "Why don't you just ingest?" He halted before the lounge. If intended to give the appearance of a throne, it was decidedly cavalier in design. The young woman who had escorted him folded her hands and remained by his side. What surprises besides her undeniably attractive self lay concealed beneath the nictitating electronic garb that covered her from head to toe he did not know, but he suspected they would be potentially lethal.

  Aurilac the Wise waved the pipe like a conductor halfway through a Ravel largo and grinned. "Could. Be more efficient. But there's no aesthetic appeal in popping a pill. This is more fun, and I really think it enhances the potency." His gaze narrowed. "You're an intuit."