Streetlethal

by Steven Barnes

  She licked her lips, his words triggering off something she didn't like. She gritted her teeth and walked slowly to the right, hands balled up into fists.

  "Come on," he said gently. "There's an audience out here. You're on stage."

  "They came to see you. Just you. Unclench your fists. Raise your chin a little—be nice to the people."

  "Aubry—"

  "I'm not here. But the people are." He paused, and his voice was wheedling. "Come on, Promise. Just a little bit."

  She swallowed hard, trying to deal with all of the warring emotions within her. Then, almost unbidden, her body began to move. The spotlight followed her as she did.

  Promise took one halting step, and then another. She stopped and cursed herself, kicking off her workshoes. Her bare feet twitched at the touch of cold, smooth metal. She could feel every sanded blister, every slight depression, and she found her balance. She found herself humming a tune, something she couldn't recognize. The sound of it vibrated through her as if an entire orchestra were playing, as if a huge, adoring audience were clapping along enthusiastically.

  And she danced. At first her body hated her for moving without a warm-up after so many injuries and so many weeks of disuse. She felt bones clicking into place, felt muscles protesting and stinging her with flashes of pain.

  Once, just once her ankle started to turn under her, and she stopped, furious with herself, looked up into the light and opened her mouth, surprised to hear nothing come out.

  Aubry spoke first, invisible behind the glare of light. "Go on," he said quietly, his voice carrying perfectly in the auditorium. "You're doing fine. Really."

  She tried to find a negative answer, but couldn't. Her body was starved for movement. Once it started feeding, it refused to stop.

  So she swayed her body in time and countertime to a rhythm that existed only in her memory. Guided by Aubry's inexperienced hand, the spotlight followed her like a clumsy partner, now brightness, now shadow, at first an irritation, then accepted in the flow of the dance.

  Memories swarmed up out of the darkness. Memories of other dances and other audiences: Las Vegas, and the first few months after Plastiskinning. The joy of being special, one of the few Exotics who believed in themselves and their craft enough to make their costumes part of their flesh. She was, then, more than a dancer. She was Dance itself.

  She showed the hungry crowds things that they had never seen before, showed the movements she had learned from her Sisters in Coven, Oregon's feminist commune, a lifetime before—dances meant for women's eyes only, in celebration of life and fertility. But there were times when a small, still voice whispered to her that she was her own betrayer, whoring the only part of herself that was still pure.

  She moved faster now, spinning, leaping to float back to earth, and her bones didn't click and her ankle didn't turn. As she remembered the good times, the heat poured outward from her chest until she felt herself to be composed not of flesh but of energy that flickered and leaped like an electric arc.

  She tried to stay in that place, in that time, but could not, and the rest of the memories tumbled out unbidden, the harsh memories, the bad, condemning ones, and her eyes began to burn. When she opened them her sight was blurred, her limbs suddenly wooden. She wanted to stop, but the momentum carried her along.

  She danced, now in shame, in a dark, cold place inside her that was beginning to expand like a bubble. Within that bubble glowed the faces of her strong and centered sisters, who mourned her as one dead for loving a man named Jamie.

  Jamie. Friend, lover, agent, betrayer....

  Go Exotic, Promise. That's the ticket. ...

  Listen to that crowd! They love you. I love you baby... .

  ...just temporary. Listen, there are too many Exotics on the market right now...

  Dammit, believe what you want. I invested that money. For both of us. If you want to get your skin out of hock, we will. Just give me some time.

  I'm sorry, but I'm not here right now. But if you'll leave your name and number — well, you know the routine. Get back to you doubletime, angel.

  There was sound, the sound of soft footsteps approaching. She looked up, barely realizing that she had stopped dancing. She wiped her eyes, feeling the wetness on her hand with disgust.

  "You were beautiful, Promise."

  It was Jamie's face, Jamie's voice, although Jamie was white and clean-featured and carried himself like royalty.

  Jamie/Aubry's face wavered in her vision, half-smiling in that knowing, sexy way of his that always made her feel weak, that always convinced her that her sisters had lied, that there was nothing sweeter than lying in a man's arms, feeling his body, his hands...

  "Promise? Are you—"

  "All right? Hell no. Not now, not ever again."

  Aubry was standing too close to her, and the urge to reach out and touch him was too strong.

  She pushed him away, her fingertips burning at the contact. "Just get away from me, Aubry."

  He was silent when she expected him to speak, impassive when she expected anger or sadness or mockery, or any of the other things that he had shown her in the past few weeks. But there was nothing, just the beginning of the gargoyle expression he had worn when she first met him.

  "You don't have to be alone," he said quietly, "but if that's the way you want it—" He didn't finish the sentence, just turned and walked away. She watched him go, his head high, his muscular shoulders relaxed and moving smoothly in coordination with his steps. And she knew, perhaps for the first time, just how badly she was hurting him.

  "Aubry—" she whispered.

  He continued up the aisle and out the doors.

  She spent the next hour polishing and repolishing. The auditorium was presentable now, ready for service as a schoolroom or showplace. She stepped down off the stage and walked backward to gain perspective, proud of the job she had done— they had done—wishing suddenly that Aubry were there to share it with her.

  A large bony hand clasped her shoulder and she spun, anger and joy mingling in the same instant, arm raised to brush Aubry away.

  "Very nice," Warrick said. He walked back up to the remote controls and turned the spotlight off, darkness immediately swallowing everything in his face except the jutting cheekbones and the gleam of his pale eyes.

  She swallowed nervously, wondering if he wanted her to say something. "Aubry wants to be transferred away from you," he said finally. "I agreed. I have a change of duty for you, also You seem to be finished here. Please, follow me."

  Still silent, she removed her smock, draped it over the back of a seat, and followed Warrick out of the room.

  They took the elevator down another level, and as she saw die immense Christmas tree rising out of sight she finally spoke. "Where is he?"

  "Aubry? Should I tell him that you asked?"

  Pain. "N-no..."

  'Then it wouldn't be fair to tell you, now would it?"

  There was no light in the elevator. As they passed between floors, the cubical went totally dark. She could not remember ever feeling so alone.

  The elevator bumped to a halt, and the doors sighed open.

  Although the new room was large, it was by no means another level of the shopping complex. The ceiling was high, and she guessed that the room had once been used as a storage area. Now it was filled with row after row of hydroponic tanks, greenish algae floating in some of them, irradiated with sunlamps that cast a reflected greenish glow through the glass walls.

  He barely glanced at them as he guided her past. "We can't get fresh vegetables through our contacts in the Maze, and the transportation lines to northern California are often cut. I believe in self-sufficiency, so we grow a micro-plankton, spirulina, down here on the basement level. You'll work here for a while."

  She looked around in confusion at the tanks which sloshed ever so gently in response to their passing footsteps. "Why me? I don't know anything about this kind of stuff."

  "I have a reason," he s
aid.

  They walked on past row after row, and finally some of the tanks were filled with rooted plants growing on crushed rock in nutrient broth. Some of them were common vegetables: onions, carrots, cabbages, and peas.

  After she passed those, there were tanks filled with soil. A small man with an unhealthily pale complexion worked at one of them, pruning something, his tapered fingers straightening a bent stalk. His back was badly twisted, almost humped, and he was mumbling happily to himself as Warrick and Promise approached.

  The small pale man clucked to himself for a moment, then looked up. "Kevin!" He looked at Promise with a speculative expression that she didn't find entirely comforting. ^ 4 And this must be the young lady who brought us the spores."

  "Spores?" Promise asked.

  "Promise, this is Emil. You'll be working with him for the next few days."

  "Shouldn't be longer than that, no not much longer at all." He walked away from them, wagging his head, still talking to himself, and evidently finding the conversation scintillating.

  "You're not going to leave me down here with him, are you? I mean, I don't want to end up holding conversations with the little shrubs "

  "Don't let Emil throw you—he's brilliant, he really is, and we're lucky to have him. He's one of the few people down here who could do better topside than he can here."

  Promise finished it for him. "But he prefers living down here, right?" Warrick nodded and looked at her questioningly. "Never mind. I just guessed."

  They followed Emil to the far end of the room, past a makeshift partition which shielded a row of four large tanks.

  Somewhat to Promise's surprise, there were lights bathing the heads and stems of thousands of tiny mushrooms. Emil saw her surprise. "Oh, yes—some mushrooms use light as part of their growing cycle, just like other plants. We have these on a fourteen-hour light cycle, and they like it just fine. On die far side of that curtain—" He pointed down the row, and only then did Promise realize that the room was foreshortened by a heavy, curving sheet of cloth."—we have the breeds that don't like light at all."

  "Are all of these for food? Or medicine, or what?"

  "Food," Warrick said.

  "Except for the ones that you brought, young lady. Come over here." Rush against the far wall there was a sterile growing chamber, cobbled together out of wood and steel and glass. "Had a hell of a time growing your strain. We got penicillums and neospora and about eighty kinds of common airborne fungi and bacteria. But I finally managed to prune out something that I'd never seen before. The pattern of mycelial growth was fascinating—"

  "My—what?" She was looking into the front glass plate of the growth chamber. There were glass dishes set in rows, something furry and reminiscent of thinnish cotton covering part of the surface. The petri dishes seemed to have been inoculated on successive days, because as her eyes traveled to the right, the cultures were more and more advanced. The "cotton" thinned out and coiled itself into what looked like veins and capillaries, crawling along the surface of some clear gelatinous substance. Two plates down, the "veins" were condensed into puffy white nodes, and on a further one the nodes had darkened.

  "Apparently this strain has difficulty fruiting on agar, so I provided it with a variety of mediums." Emil pointed at a series of jars in the case. "Rice, barley, soybeans, reduced woodchips, corn—all of it broken down under pressure to make it easier for the mycelium to catch hold."

  "And?"

  "It grows on everything. Once we licked the contamination problem, they just grew like crazy, even more easily than Stropharia cubensis, which it resembles in some ways."

  "Stro-what-what?"

  "Cubensis, genus Stropharia. Closely related to Psilocybe" Her expression was still blank. "Psilocybin mushrooms. One of the most potent natural psychoactives."

  The mushrooms that she could see were short, with thick pale stalks and rounded caps. Some sprouted as individual mushrooms, but most of them grew in clumps, so thickly clustered together that they almost choked each other.

  "And these are whatsacybin? What's this about me bringing them in?"

  Warrick spoke now. "You remember the note in Aubry's bag?"

  "Yes—the one from Maxine..." Was Max alive? Somehow she hadn't asked herself that question for weeks, but she hoped the answer was yes, that Cecil hadn't died for nothing.

  "And do you remember an odd sort of marking on the paper?"

  "Watermark? Sure. Maxie always went in for flash "

  "Not this time. It was a mushroom sporeprint, and we managed to grow the strain out. It's not psilocybin."

  Despite herself, she leaned a little further forward to get a clearer look. 'They're kind of cute, actually. They look like—" She broke off, startled at her own embarrassment.

  "Yes, they are somewhat phallic," Warrick said dryly. "Do you remember what Maxine said in her note? 'Take it with someone you could love.' It was smeared with water, but still legible. Do you have any idea what that means?"

  "No," she said quickly, too quickly, remembering that awful night in Cecil Kato's lab... the wonderment in his eyes as the computer fed him its aniaysis of the drug Warrick was watching her closely, and she sensed that he knew she was lying. "No. I don't know what this is all about."

  "I didn't think that you would. Having no preconceptions, you are the ideal person to assist Emit. You will be recording their growth patterns, experimenting with less expensive mediums." He paused. "Conducting ingestion experiments. It should be very interesting, don't you think?"

  He laughed and Emil laughed with him. Promise felt disturbingly like a bug under glass.

  Once the caps pushed their way out from under the soil, or the clumps of mycelia began to sprout in their growing mediums, the mushrooms grew with phenomenal speed.

  "An inch a day—maybe more," Emil said soberly. "These grow at the same rate as the others in their family, but they never get taller than about three inches." He had his hands inside a makeshift glove-box, rubber flanges and seals completely shutting out dust and stray spores. "Do you see how thick the stems are? These average an inch and a half—about twice the thickness of Stropharia. Interesting. There's something else, also. We can get the mycelium to fruit but look at this." He wiggled a thin knife under the cap of a mushroom, wedged it up and cut a pie-shaped slice. "See? The spores are there, as pretty as you please, but for some reason the caps don't mature enough to rupture the veil." He shook his head in mock disgust. "More work, just more work." He grinned at her. "Wouldn't have it any other way, though, lady. Mighty interesting friends you have here. Yes, indeedy. Have half a mind to go topside, get in touch with some people I used to know who work for the state university " He watched her out of the corner of his eye, noted the frightened expression on her face. "So Warrick was right—you do know more about these little devils than you're saying—and what you know about them doesn't make you happy at all. Not at all." He walked away, clucking to himself.

  She slammed her hand down on one of the tank covers, watching the mushrooms within vibrate in response, fighting an urge to reach in and tear every last one of them up by their pale and fleshy roots.

  Emil performed his toxicity tests on tunnel rats, grinding up the mushrooms and serving them with grain. The rats were hungry enough to eat anything, especially the moist blue-tinged chunks of mushroom that he shoved into their cages daily.

  Some of them grew weak and ulcerated from malnutrition, but when he added vitamins to their diet, none of them died. Not one. One was injured while attempting to masturbate against the bars of his cage, but aside from that die worst wounds were tiny abrasions gained by groggy rats bumping into their cage walls.

  She held a third-generation lab rat for Emil to inject, then scratched it behind the ear and slipped it back into its individual cage. All the rats were in tiny wireframe individual cages. Promise was afraid that she knew what Emil was doing wrong.

  "You're trembling," Warrick observed, suddenly close behind her. Promise tensed in sur
prise, barely subduing a startled flash of light.

  Emil clucked in disconcertion, scratching his balding head. "Kevin, I know you're right when you say that there's something queer about this stuff, but I'll be burned if I can figure out what it is. As far as I can tell, it isn't any more toxic than ordinary edible mushrooms. Not quite as nutritious, perhaps. I've fed it to them in every way I can think of. I've injected die juice directly into their brains and stomachs. That killed some of them, to be sure, but you could kill them by injecting water or air, too. Actually, you'd kill a lot more of them." He sighed, stripped of his plastic gloves and threw them into the sink. "I'm going to be honest "

  Warrick frowned, and his voice dropped in anger. "You tried them yourself."

  Emil shrugged, the bare trace of an urchin grin on his round face. "Ultimately, Warrick, I am the only one who can make a decision about a thing like that. The choice was made—and the result is obvious: I survived."

  Warrick leaned forward. "And what about your dreams?"

  "They were extremely vivid, but difficult to remember. The immediate effect of the drug isn't remarkable. A buzz. Some slight sensation of warmth in the lower body. Some interruption of intellectual faculties—a tendency to have difficulty remembering minutiae or projecting future trends. Harmless—and pleasant. I'm afraid that that is all that there is."

  Warrick rubbed the bridge of his nose, thinking. "No," he said finally. "There is something else here. I can feel it."

  He turned to face Promise, and his expression was not pleasant. "You are lying to us."

  "I—" She started to protest, but he cut her off with a wave of his large hand.

  "No more lies. I won't ask you to tell me what you know. I will ask you to explain why you refuse to tell us the truth."

  She moistened her lips. "I—" His eyes warned her not to lie. "I don't know, Warrick. I'm sorry." Despite the hold of his eyes, she turned and walked away, past the curtain, out of the room, her pace accelerating as she went, until she was at the elevator. Her heart was thundering in her chest, and her breathing was almost paralyzed with fear. She didn't want to look into her mind, to pry loose what she knew; and she wasn't sure why.