“Not bad,” said Ric.
The treatment and the humming in Ric’s brain went on for a week. When it was over he missed it. He was also more or less healed.
3
The week of Genesios therapy took fifteen thousand dollars out of Ric’s spike. The previous months of treatment had accounted for another sixty-two thousand. What Ric didn’t know was that Genesios therapy could have been started at once and saved him most of his funds, but that the artificial intelligences working for the hospital had tagged him as a suspect character, an alien of no particular standing, with no work history, no policorporate citizenship, and a large amount of cash in his breast pocket. The AIs concluded that Ric was in no position to complain, and they were right.
Computers can’t be sued for malpractice. The doctors followed their advice.
All that remained of Ric’s money was three thousand SM dollars. Ric could live off of that for a few years, but it wasn’t much of a retirement.
The hospital was nice enough to schedule an appointment for him with a career counsellor, who was supposed to find him a job. She worked in the basement of the vast glass hospital building, and her name was Marlene.
4
Marlene worked behind a desk littered with the artifacts of other people’s lives. There were no windows in the office, two ashtrays, both full, and on the walls there were travel posters that showed long stretches of emptiness, white beaches, blue ocean, faraway clouds. Nothing alive.
Her green eyes had an opaque quality, as if she was watching a private video screen somewhere in her mind. She wore a lot of silver jewelry on her fingers and wrists and a grey rollneck sweater with cigaret burn marks. Her eyes bore elaborate makeup like the wings of a Red Admiral. Her hair was almost blonde. The only job she could find him was for a legal firm, something called assistant data evaluator.
Before Ric left Marlene’s office he asked her to dinner. She turned him down without even changing expression. Ric had the feeling he wasn’t quite real to her.
The job of assistant data evaluator consisted of spending the day walking up and down a four-storey spiral staircase in the suite of a law firm, moving files from one office to another. The files were supposedly sensitive and not committed to the firm’s computer lest someone attempt to steal them. The salary was insulting. Ric told the law firm that the job was just what he was looking for. They told him to start in two days.
Ric stopped into Marlene’s office to tell her he got the job and to ask her to dinner again. She laughed, for what reason he couldn’t tell, and said yes.
A slow spring snowfall dropped onto the streets while they ate dinner. With her food Marlene took two red capsules and a yellow pill, grew lively, drank a lot of wine. He walked her home through the snow to her apartment on the seventh floor of an old fourth-rate condeco, a place with water stains on the ceiling and bare bulbs hanging in the halls, the only home she could afford. In the hallway Ric brushed snow from her shoulders and hair and kissed her. He took Marlene to bed and tried to prove to her that he was real.
The next day he checked out of the hospital and moved in.
5
Ric hadn’t bothered to show up on his first day as an assistant data evaluator. Instead he’d spent the day in Marlene’s condeco, asking her home comp to search library files and print out everything relating to what the scansheets in their ignorance called “Juvecrime.” Before Marlene came home Ric called the most expensive restaurant he could find and told them to deliver a five-course meal to the apartment.
The remains of the meal were stacked in the kitchen. Ric paced back and forth across the small space, his mind humming with the information he’d absorbed. Marlene sat on an adobe-colored couch and watched, a wine glass in one hand and a cigaret in the other, silhouetted by the glass self-polarizing wall that showed the bright aluminum-alloy expressway cutting south across melting piles of snow. Plans were vibrating in Ric’s mind, nothing firm yet, just neurons stirring on the edge of his awareness, forming fast-mutating combinations. He could feel the tingle, the high, the half-formed ideas as they flicked across neural circuits.
Marlene reached into a dispenser and took out a red pill and a green capsule with orange stripes. Ric looked at her. “How much of that stuff do you take, anyway? Is it medication, or what?”
“I’ve got anxieties.” She put the pills into her mouth, and with a shake of her head dry-swallowed them.
“How big a dose?”
“It’s not the dose that matters. It’s the proper combination of doses. Get it right and the world feels like a lovely warm swimming pool. It’s like floating underwater and still being able to breathe. It’s wonderful.”
“If you say so.” He resumed his pacing. Fabric scratched his bare feet. His mind hummed, a blur of ideas that hadn’t yet taken shape, flickering, assembling, dissolving without his conscious thought.
“You didn’t show up for work,” Marlene said. “They gave me a call about that.”
“Sorry.”
“How are you gonna afford this taste you have for expensive food?” Marlene asked. “Without working, I mean.”
“Do something illegal,” Ric said. “Most likely.”
“That’s what I thought.” She looked up at him, sideways. “You gonna let me play?”
“If you want.”
Marlene swallowed half her wine, looked at the littered apartment, shrugged.
“Only if you really want,” Ric said. “It has to be a thing you decide.”
“What else have I got to do?” she said.
“I’m going to have to do some research, first,” he said. “Spend a few days accessing the library.”
Marlene was looking at him again. “Boredom,” she said. “In your experience, is that why most people turn to crime?”
“In my experience,” he said, “most people turn to crime because of stupidity.”
She grinned. “That’s cool,” she said. “That’s sort of what I figured.” She lit a cigaret. “You have a plan?”
“Something I can only do once. Then every freak in Western America is going to be looking for me with a machine gun.”
Marlene grinned. “Sounds exciting.”
He looked at her. “Remember what I said about stupidity.”
She laughed. “I’ve been smart all my life. What’s it ever got me?”
Ric, looking down at her, felt a warning resonate through him, like an unmistakable taste drawn across his tongue. “You’ve got a lot to lose, Marlene,” he said. “A lot more than I do.”
“Shit.” The cigaret had burned her fingers. She squashed it in the ashtray, too fast, spilling ashes on the couch. Ric watched her for a moment, then went back to his thinking.
People were dying all over California in a war over the neurohormone Genesios Three. There had to be a way to take advantage of it.
6
“You a cop, buck?”
The style was different here from the people Ric knew in Iberia. In Granada, Ric had worn a gaucho mode straight from Argentina, tight pants with silver dollars sewn down the seams, sashes wound around nipped-in waists, embroidered vests.
He didn’t know what was worn by the people who had broken up the Cadillacs. He’d never seen any of them.
Here the new style was something called Urban Surgery. The girl bore the first example Ric had ever seen close up. The henna-red hair was in cornrows, braided with transparent plastic beads that held fast-mutating phosphorescent bacteria that constantly reformed themselves in glowing patterns. The nose had been broadened and flattened to cover most of the cheeks, turning the nostrils into a pair of lateral slits, the base of the nose wider than the mouth. The teeth had been replaced by alloy transplants sharp as razors that clacked together in a precise, unpleasant way when she closed her mouth. The eyebrows were gone altogether and beneath them were dark plastic implants that covered the eye sockets. Ric couldn’t tell, and probably wasn’t supposed to know, whether there were eyes in there any more, o
r sophisticated scanners tagged to the optic nerve.
The effect was to flatten the face, turn it into a canvas for the tattoo artist that had covered every inch of exposed flesh. Complex mathematical statements ran over the forehead. Below the black plastic eye implants were urban skyscrapes, silhouettes of buildings providing a false horizon across the flattened nose. The chin appeared to be a circuit diagram.
Ric looked into the dark eye sockets and tried not to flinch. “No,” he said. “I’m just passing through.”
One of her hands was on the table in front of him. It was tattooed as completely as the face and the fingernails had been replaced by alloy razors, covered with transparent plastic safety caps.
“I saw you in here yesterday,” she said. “And again today. I was wondering if you want something.”
He shrugged. It occurred to him that, repellent as Urban Surgery was, it was fine camouflage. Who was going to be able to tell one of these people from another?
“You’re a little old for this place, buck,” the girl said. He figured her age as about fourteen. She was small-waisted and had narrow hips and large breasts. Ric did not find her attractive.
This was his second trip to Phoenix. The bar didn’t have a name, unless it was simply BAR, that being all that was written on the sign outside. It was below street level, in the storage cellar of an old building. Concrete walls were painted black. Dark plastic tables and chairs had been added, and bare fluorescent tubes decorated the walls. Speaker amps flanked the bar, playing cold electronic music devoid of noticeable rhythm or melody.
He looked at the girl and leaned closer to her. “I need your permission to drink here, or what?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Just to deal here.”
“I’m not dealing,” he said. “I’m just observing the passing urban scene, okay?” He was wearing a lightweight summer jacket of a cream color over a black T-shirt with Cyrillic lettering, black jeans, white sneakers. Nondescript street apparel.
“You got credit?” the girl asked.
“Enough.”
“Buy me a drink then?”
He grinned. “I need your permission to deal, and you don’t have any credit? What kind of outlaw are you?”
“A thirsty outlaw.”
Ric signaled the bartender. Whatever it was that he brought her looked as if it was made principally out of cherry soda.
“Seriously,” she said. “I can pay you back later. Someone I know is supposed to meet me here. He owes me money.”
“My name’s Marat,” said Ric. “With a silent t.”
“I’m Super Virgin. You from Canada or something? You talk a little funny.”
“I’m from Switzerland.”
Super Virgin nodded and sipped her drink. Ric glanced around the bar. Most of the patrons wore Urban Surgery or at least made an effort in the direction of its style. Super Virgin frowned at him.
“You’re supposed to ask if I’m really cherry.” she said. “If you’re wondering, the drink should give you a clue.”
“I don’t care,” Ric said.
She grinned at him with her metal teeth. “You don’t wanna ball me?”
Ric watched his dual reflection, in her black eye sockets, slowly shake its head. She laughed. “I like a guy who knows what he likes,” she said. “That’s the kind we have in Cartoon Messiah. Can I have another drink?”
There was an ecology in kid gangs, Ric knew. They had different reasons for existing and filled different functions. Some wanted turf, some trade, some the chance to prove their ideology. Some moved information, and from Ric’s research that seemed to be Cartoon Messiah’s function.
But even if Cartoon Messiah were smart, they hadn’t been around very long. A perpetual problem with groups of young kids involving themselves in gang activities was that they had very short institutional memories. There were a few things they wouldn’t recognize or know to prepare for, not unless they’d been through them at least once. They made up for it by being faster than the opposition, by being more invisible.
Ric was hoping Cartoon Messiah was full of young, fresh minds.
He signaled the bartender again. Super Virgin grinned at him.
“You sure you don’t wanna ball me?”
“Positive.”
“I’m gonna be cherry till I die. I’m just not interested. None of the guys seem like anybody I’d want to sleep with.” Ric didn’t say anything. She sipped the last of her drink. “You think I’m repulsive-looking, right?”
“That seems to be your intention.”
She laughed. “You’re okay, Marat. What’s it like in Switzerland?”
“Hot.”
“So hot you had to leave, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“You looking for work?”
“Not yet. Just looking around.”
She leaned closer to him. “You find out anything interesting while you’re looking, and I’ll pay you for it. Just leave a message here, at the Bar.”
“You deal in information?”
She licked her lips. “That and other things. This Bar, see, it’s in a kind of interface. North of here is Lounge Lizard turf, south and east are the Cold Wires, west is the Silicon Romantics. The Romantics are on their way out.” She gave a little sneer. “They’re brocade commandoes, right? Their turf’s being cut up. But here, it’s no-gang’s-land. Where things get moved from one buyer to another.”
“Cartoon Messiah—they got turf?”
She shook her head. “Just places where we can be found. Territory is not what we’re after. Two-Fisted Jesus—he’s our sort-of chairman—he says only stupid people like brocade boys want turf, when the real money’s in data.”
Ric smiled. “That’s smart. Property values are down, anyway.”
He could see his reflection in her metal teeth, a pale smear. “You got anything you wanna deal in, I can set it up,” she said. “Software? Biologicals? Pharmaceuticals? Wetware?”
“I have nothing. Right now.”
She turned to look at a group of people coming in the door. “Cold Wires,” she said. “These are the people I’m supposed to meet.” She tipped her head back and swallowed the rest of her drink. “They’re so goddam bourgeoise,” she said. “Look—their surgery’s fake, it’s just good makeup. And the tattoos—they spray ’em on through a stencil. I hate people who don’t have the courage of their convictions, don’t you?”
“They can be useful, though.” Smiling, thin-lipped.
She grinned at him. “Yeah. They can. Stop by tomorrow and I’ll pay you back, okay? See ya.” She pushed her chair back, scraping alloy on the concrete floor, a small metal scream.
Ric sipped his drink, watching the room. Letting its rhythm seep through his skin. Things were firming in his mind.
7
“Hi.”
The security guard looked up at him from under the plastic brim of his baseball cap. He frowned. “Hi. You need something? I seen you around before.”
“I’m Warren Whitmore,” Ric said. “I’m recovering from an accident, going to finish the course of treatment soon. Go out into the real world.” Whitmore was one of Ric’s former neighbors, a man who’d had his head split in half by a falling beam. He hadn’t left any instructions about radical life-preservation measures and the artificial intelligences who ran the hospital were going to keep him alive till they burned up the insurance and then the family’s money.
“Yeah?” the guard said. “Congratulations.” There was a plastic tape sewed on over the guard’s breast pocket that said LYSAGHT.
“The thing is, I don’t have a job waiting. Cigar?”
Ric had seen Lysaght smoking big stogies outside the hospital doors. They wouldn’t let him light up inside. Ric had bought him the most expensive Havanas available at the hospital gift shop.
Lysaght took the cigar, rolled it between his fingers while he looked left and right down the corridor, trying to decide whether to light it or not. Ric reached for his lighter.
“I had some military training in my former life,” Ric said. “I thought I might look into the idea of getting into the security business, once I get into the world. Could I buy you a drink, maybe, after you get off shift? Talk about what you do.”
Lysaght drew on the cigar, still looking left and right, seeing only patients. He was a big fleshy man, about forty, dressed in a black uniform with body armor sewn into pockets on his chest and back. His long dark hair was slicked back behind his ears, falling over his shoulders in greased ringlets. His sideburns came to points. A brushed-alloy gun with a hardwood custom grip and a laser sight hung conspicuously on one hip, next to the gas grenades, next to the plastic handwrap restraints, next to the combat staff, next to the portable gas mask.
“Sure,” Lysaght said. “Why not?” He blew smoke in the general direction of an elderly female patient walking purposefully down the corridor in flowery pajamas. The patient blinked but kept walking.
“Hey, Mrs. Calderone, how you doin’?” Lysaght said. Mrs. Calderone ignored him. “Head case,” said Lysaght.
“I want to work for a sharp outfit though,” Ric said. He looked at Lysaght’s belt. “With good equipment and stuff, you know?”
“That’s Folger Security,” Lysaght said. “If we weren’t good, we wouldn’t be working for a hospital this size.”
During his time in the Cadillacs and elsewhere, Ric had been continually surprised by how little it actually took to bribe someone. A few drinks, a few cigars, and Lysaght was working for him. And Lysaght didn’t even know it yet. Or, with luck, ever.
“Listen,” Lysaght was saying. “I gotta go smoke this in the toilet. But I’ll see you at the guard station around five, okay?”
“Sounds good.”
8
That night, his temples throbbing with pain, Ric entered Marlene’s condeco and walked straight to the kitchen for something to ease the long raw ache that seemed to coat the insides of his throat. He could hear the sounds of Alien Inquisitor on the vid. He was carrying a two-liter plastic bottle of industrial-strength soap he’d just stolen from the custodian’s store room here in Marlene’s condeco. He put down the bottle of soap, rubbed his sore shoulder muscle, took some whiskey from the shelf, and poured it into a tall glass. He took a slow, deliberate drink and winced as he felt the fire in his throat. He added water to the glass. Alien Inquisitor diminished in volume, then he heard the sound of Marlene’s flipflops slapping against her heels.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 65