Montezuma Strip

by Alan Dean Foster

  It was larger than Crescent’s, and emptier. No charming domestic scenes floating above this desk. No expensive colorcrawl on the walls. Noschek had been a bachelor. Barely out of Design School, top of his class, brilliant in ways his employers hadn’t figured out how to exploit before his death, he’d been the object of serious executive headhunting by at least two European and one Russian multinat in the three years he’d been at Parabas.

  Hypatia’d read his history, too. As she looked around the spartan office her voice was muted. “Nobody becomes a Senior Designer before thirty. Let alone at twenty-five.”

  Cardenas called up the pictures they’d been shown of the vacuumed Designer. Noschek was tall and slim, still looked like a teenager, a beautiful Slav with delicate features and the soulful dark eyes of some Kafkaesque antihero. Something in all the holos struck Cardenas the instant he saw them but he couldn’t stick a label on it.

  The Parabas box was approximately the same size as Gen-Dyne’s. Noschek’s key was Delphi Alexander Philip. The voice of the wallscreen was deep and resonant, instantly responsive to his sponging, as he scanned the meteoric career of the young Designer. Parabas’s Security team had been at work ‘round the clock. Some of the information would reveal itself only when Hypatia was out of the room. The South Americans might be cooperative but they weren’t stupid.

  Each time Hypatia left she took Charliebo with her for company. She liked playing with the dog and the hair she scratched out of him gave Parabas’s cleanteam fits. Each day brought them closer together. Her and Charliebo, that is. Cardenas still wasn’t sure about her and himself.

  It didn’t matter whether she was present or not. Three days of hard sponging saw him no nearer any answers than when he’d stepped off the induction shuttle from Nogales.

  On the fourth day the screen went hostile and nearly took him with it.

  He was sponging off a hard-to-penetrate corner of Philip, down in the lower right corner of the box. Hypatia had gone outside with Charliebo. Biocircuits spawned the same steady, sonorous flow of information he’d been listening to for hours, revealing themselves via concomitant word streams and images on the wallscreen. If he’d been watching intently he might have had time to see a flicker before it declared itself, but as usual he was most attuned to aural playout. Maybe that saved him. He never knew.

  Wind erupted into the office, blasting his thinning hair back across his head. On the screen the visual had gone berserk, running at ten speed through emptiness, reason gone, bereft of logic and organization. A dull roaring pounded in his ears. Dimly he thought he could hear Charliebo frantically howling outside the door. There was a hammering, though whether outside the screen-secured door or inside his brain he couldn’t tell. He pressed his palms over his ears, letting the vorec spill to the floor.

  Something was coming out of the wall.

  A full-sense holo, a monstrous alien shape thick with slime and smelling of ancient foulness, an oozing shifting mass of raw biocircuitry-generated false collagen that pulsed slowly and massively, booming with each heave. Reflective pustles lining its epidermis bristled with raw neural connectors that reached for him. The hammering on the door was relentless now and he thought he could hear people shouting. They’d have to be shouting very loudly indeed to make their presence known through the sound-dampened barrier.

  He tried to block out sight and sound of the ballooning apparition. The door was security sealed to prevent unauthorized access. Where was the override? It was manual, he remembered. He fought the sensorial assault, tears streaming from his eyes, as he struggled to locate the switch.

  Bits and pieces of the false collagen were sloughing away from the nightmare’s flanks as it drifted toward him. The amount of crunch required to construct a projection of such complexity and reality had to be astronomical, Cardenas knew. He wondered how much of Parabas’s considerable power had suddenly gone dead as it was funneled into this single gate.

  As it drew near it became mostly mouth, a dark, bottomless psychic pit that extended back into the wall, lined with teeth that were twitching, mindless biogrowths.

  He stumbled backward, keeping the desk between the projection and himself.

  Near the center of the desk a line of contact strips were glowing brightly as a child’s toy. The expanding mouth was ready to swallow him, the steady roar from its nonexistant throat like the approach of a train inside a tunnel.

  Hit the release. The voice that screamed at him was a tiny, fading squeak. His own. The yellow strip. He extended a shaky hand. He thought he touched the right strip. Or maybe he fell on it.

  When he regained consciousness he was lying on the floor staring at the ceiling of Vladimir Noschek’s office. Someone said two words he would never forget.

  “He’s alive.”

  Then hands, lifting him. The view changing as he was raised. He broke free, staggering away from his saviors, and they waited silently while he heaved into a wastepail. When someone pressed a mild sting against his right arm he looked around sharply.

  There must have been something in his expression that made the man retreat. His response, however, was reassuring. “No combinants. Just a pickmeup. To kill the nausea and the dizziness.”

  He managed to nod. The Brazilian turned to whisper to his companion. Like images drawn on transparent gels Cardenas saw collagen teeth bursting before his retinas as the afterimage of the monster continued to fade from his memory.

  “You scared the shit out of us.” Hypatia was watching him carefully. She looked worried.

  Something heavy and warm pressed against his legs. He glanced down, automatically stroked Charliebo’s spine. The shepherd whined and tried to press closer.

  “What happened?” one of the medicos asked as he closed his service case.

  Somehow Cardenas managed to keep down the anger that was building inside him. “It was a psychomorph. Full visual, audio, collagenic presence. The works. Sensorium max. Why the hell didn’t somebody tell me this was a tactile screen?”

  “Tac…?” Both medicos turned dumbfounded stares on the east wall. It was Hypatia who finally spoke.

  “Can’t be, Angel. Designers aren’t given access to tactile. Nobody is. Uses too much crunch. Besides, that’s strictly military stuff. Even somebody as valued as Noschek wouldn’t be allowed near it.”

  The chief medico looked back at him. “No tactiles in Parabas S.A. I’d know, my staff would know. You sure it was a psychomorph?” Cardenas just stared at him until the man nodded. “Okay, so it was a psychomorph. I don’t know how, but I’m not in a position to argue with you. I wasn’t here.”

  “That’s right, compadre” Cardenas told him softly. “You weren’t here.”

  “You gonna be alright?” The same stare. The medico shrugged, spoke to his assistant. “So okay. So we’ll sort it out later. Come on.” They left, though not without a last disbelieving glance in the direction of the now silent wall-screen.

  As soon as the door shut behind them and sealed, Hypatia turned on him. “What’s going on here? That couldn’t have been a psychomorph that hit on you. There isn’t enough crunch in the whole Parabas box to structure one!”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking,” he told her quietly. “But it was a psychomorph. The most detailed one I’ve ever seen. I do not want to see it again. It was a trap, a guard, something to wipe out the nosy. It almost wiped me.”

  She was watching him closely. “If it was as bad as you claim, how come you’re standing there talking to me instead of lying on the floor babbling like a spastic infant?”

  “I—felt it coming. Intuition. Just in time to start closing down my perception. I can do that, some. When you’re blind for six years you get practice in all sorts of arcane exercises. I sidestepped it right before it could get a psychic fix on me and managed to cue the door. It must have cycled when you all came in. They can’t fix on more than one person at a time. Takes too much crunch.”

  “I thought that kind of advanced te
ch was beyond you.”

  He met her gaze. “Did I ever say that?”

  “No. No, you didn’t. I just assumed, you being a duty cop and all—people do a lot of assuming about you, don’t they?”

  He nodded tersely. “It helps. People like to think of cops as dumber than they are. Some of us are. Some of us aren’t. I don’t discourage it.”

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Fifty-three in two months.”

  “Shit. I thought you were my age. I’m forty-one.”

  “Part of it is being small. You always look younger.”

  “What kind of a cop are you, anyway, Cardenas?”

  He was searching beneath the desk, straightened when he found the vorec mike. “A good one.”

  You just didn’t brew a full-scale sensorium max hostile psychomorph out of a standard industrial box, no matter how big the company. Hypatia knew that. Not unless Parabas was into illegal military design and under questioning the company reps did all but cut their wrists to prove their innocence. Cardenas believed them. They had more to lose by lying than by telling the truth.

  He was beginning to think brilliant was too feeble a word to use to describe the talents of the late Vladimir Noschek.

  But Noschek had made a mistake. By slipping something as powerful as the psychomorph into Philip storage he’d as much as confessed to having something to hide, something to protect. Ordinarily that wouldn’t have mattered because the sponger discovering it would have been turned to neural jelly. Only Cardenas’s training and experience had saved him. With Hypatia at his side he continued to probe.

  They solved the secret of the commercial wallscreen quickly enough. It was numb as a sheet of plywood—until you went someplace you weren’t wanted. Then you tripped the alert and the screen went tactile. It was one hell of a modification, worth plenty. Cardenas could have cared less. He wasn’t interested in how it was done as much as he was why. The camouflage was perfect.

  A tactile screen could spit back at you. One that looked normal and then became tactile was unheard of. The Parabas executives went silly when the medicos made their report. They wanted to take the screen apart immediately, resorting to furious threats when Cardenas refused. Gradually they gave up and left him alone again. They’d get their hands on Noschek’s last innovation soon enough.

  If it was Vladimir Noschek’s last innovation, Cardenas thought.

  There was also the possibility that the dual tactical-numb screen wasn’t the work of Noschek at all, that it had been set up by whoever had vacuumed him. The psychomorph could have been inserted specifically to deal with trackers like Angel Cardenas. Or it could be a false lead spectacular enough to divert any probers from the real answers.

  Answers hell. He wasn’t sure he knew the right questions yet.

  They’d find them.

  First he needed to know how a max psychomorph had been inserted into a conventional industrial box. Hypatia confirmed his suspicions about the requisite parameters.

  “If you saw what you say you saw, then Noschek or whoever built the insert needed a lot more crunch than Parabas employs here in Agua Pri.”

  “How do you know how much crunch Parabas has here?”

  “It gets around. No reason to keep it a deep dark secret.”

  “Assuming for the sake of discussion that it’s Noschek’s toy we’re dealing with, could he have drawn on crunch from the home office?”

  “Possible, but considering the distance it would’ve been mighty risky. Would make more sense to borrow locally.”

  “How much would he have had to steal?”

  “Based on what you describe I’d say he would’ve needed access to at least one Cray-IBM.”

  “GenDyne?”

  She laughed. “That’s more crunch than our whole installation would use in a year. No way. Though I’d love to have the chance to play with one.”

  “So who on the Strip uses a Cribm?”

  “Beats hell out of me, Angel. You’re the cop. You find out.”

  He did. Fast, using Parabas’s circuits to access the major utility files for the whole Southwest Region in Elpaso Juarez. His opto police security clearance let him cut through normal layers of bureaucratic infrastructure like a scalpel through collagen.

  “Sony-Digital,” he finally told her as the records flashed on screen. The wall’s audio checked his pronunciation. “Telefunken. Fordmatsu. That’s everybody.”

  She stared at the holoed info. “What now?”

  “We find out who’s been losing crunch—if we can.”

  They could. Word of what had happened at GenDyne and Parabas had made the corporate rounds. As soon as Cardenas identified himself and the case he was working on they had plenty of cooperation.

  It was Fordmatsu. Their own Security was unaware of the theft, much less its extent, so cleverly had it been carried out. Cardenas sourced it, though. He didn’t bother to inform them. He was no accountant and he didn’t want anybody sponging around until he’d finished what he’d come to Agua Pri for. Though no expert, he knew enough to admire the skill that had been at work in Fordmatsu’s box. Everything had been done during off hours and painstakingly compensated for throughout the crunchlines. Neat.

  “How much?” Hypatia asked him.

  “Can’t tell for sure. Hard to total, the way it’s tucked in here and there. Weeks worth. Maybe months.”

  She stared at him. “A Cribm can crunch trillions of bytes a second. I can’t think of a problem it couldn’t solve inside an hour. There isn’t anything that needs days of that kind of crunch, let alone months.”

  “Somebody needed it.” He rose from behind the desk. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Back to GenDyne. There are some sequences I ran here I want to rerun on Crescent’s wall.”

  “What about the psychomorph?”

  He put an arm around her shoulders. She didn’t shrug it off. “I’m going to endrun that sucker so slick it won’t have time to squeal.”

  It was all there in Crescent’s Mermaid. If he hadn’t tripped the psychomorph in Noschek’s storage, they never would have found it. He leaned back in the dead man’s chair and rubbed his eyes.

  “Fordmatsu is out millions and they don’t even know it. Somebody was running one gigabox of a sequence.”

  “Noschek?”

  “Not just Noschek. Maybe he designed the sponge schematic, but they were both into it.”

  “Damn,” she muttered. “What for?”

  “Aye, there’s the rub. That we don’t know yet.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense. Why would a GenDyne Designer co-opt with somebody out of Parabas? You think maybe they were going to fracture and set up their own firm?”

  “I don’t think so. If that was their intent they could have done it by entrepreneuring. Easier and cheaper.” He leaned back in the chair and ran a hand down Charliebo’s neck. “Besides, it doesn’t fit their profiles. Crescent was pure company man, GenDyne do or die. Noschek was too unstable to survive outside the corporate womb.”

  “Then why?”

  “I thought they might’ve been doing some work for somebody else but there’s no indication of that anywhere. They did a hell of a job of hiding what they were up to, but no way could they hide all that crunch. You know what I think?” He gave Charliebo a pat and swiveled around to face her. “I think there’s a box in here that doesn’t belong to GenDyne.”

  “And Noschek?”

  “Maybe there’s one in Parabas, too. Or maybe the same box floating between both locations. With that much crunch you could do just about anything. Quien sabe what they were into?”

  “So you’re thinking maybe whoever they were working for vacuumed them for the crunch?”

  “Not the crunch, no. Whatever our boys were using it for. Haven’t got a clue to that yet.” He found himself rubbing his eyes again.

  She rose and walked over to stand behind his chair. Her hands dug into his shoulders, knead
ing, releasing the accumulated tension. “Let’s get out of here for a while. You’re spending too much time sponging. You try doing that and playing the analytical cop simultaneously, you’re going to turn your brain to mush.”

  He hardly heard her. “I’ve got to figure the why before we can figure the how.”

  “Later. No more figuring for today.” She leaned forward. He was enveloped by the folds of her jumpsuit and the heavy, warm curves it enclosed. “Even a sponge needs to rest.”

  It came to him when he wasn’t thinking about it, which is often the path taken by revelation. He was lying prone on the oversized hybred, feeling the preprogrammed wave motion stroking his back like extruded lanolin. Hypatia lay nearby, her body pale arcs and valleys like sand dunes lit by moonlight. The ceaseless murmur of the Strip seeped through the down-polarized windows, a susurration speaking of people and electronics, industry and brief flaring sparks of pleasure.

  He ran a hand along her side, starting at her shoulder and accelerating down her ribs, slowing as it ascended the curve of her hip. Her skin was cool, unwrinkled. Her mind wasn’t the only thing that had been well taken care of. She rolled over to face him. Next to the bed Charliebo stirred in his sleep, chasing ghost rabbits that stayed always just ahead of his teeth.

  “What is it?” She blinked sleepily at him, then made a face. “God, don’t you ever sleep? I thought I wore you out enough for that, anyways.”

  He smiled absently. “You did. I just woke up. Funny. You spend all your waking hours working a problem and all you get for your efforts is garbage. Then when you’re not concentrating on it—there it is. Set out like cake at a wedding. I just sorted it out.”

  She sat up on the hybred. Not all the lingering motion was in the mattress. He luxuriated in the sight of her.