He didn’t see what was so wrong with watching a fake window. It couldn’t have been a real one anyway. Like all of LunaWorld except the actual dome, the MMS was dug into bedrock, sealed safely away from the sucking vacuum of the surface. It was easier, cheaper and faster to dig out the space you needed and let the overhead rock take the strain. You did away with the problems of radiation, too.
“Mr Valmont?” The thirty-something woman standing in front of him was Luna-born. Wasp-waisted from where low gravity kept her guts from pressing down into her abdomen and with pert breasts that would never know the need for a bra, but her arms were muscle-withered and her face puffy with water retention.
No amount of working out could help, unless you were rich enough to afford weekly membership of an artificial-gravity gym, and that meant going orbital. Fixx knew, he’d seen the holoAds in the Arrivals Hall.
“Yeah, that’s me.” Like it was going to be anyone else. She was desperate to tell him how difficult it had been to find him a room, Fixx could see that from her harassed face, but he didn’t need telling. Half of Europe had fled into exile and credit alone wasn’t enough to find you living space on Planetside, not these days. Whatever electronic strings LISA had tugged, it had impressed and irritated the hotel in equal amounts.
“I want to thank you,” said Fixx, looking into her grey eyes, and smiled. “I know how impossible it must have been.” The woman waved away his thanks hurriedly, butttushed all the same. She was old enough to remember him when had been famous.
Leaving the South African family still trying to check in, Fixx followed the woman into a lift, dropping five floors to level minus five. His suite was vast but filthy. Grey dust frosted like chalk across a glass table in the centre of the main room and in the bedroom it covered the grey enamel bedside locker. The bed was themed, like the rest of the furniture in the suite. And while the puffed satin headboard was undeniably hideous it wasn’t anything like as bad as the bedside lamp that had gold tassels that swung when brushed.
“It’s great,” Fixx said warmly and the woman looked reassured.
“If there’s anything you want,” she said, “anything I can provide...” She stopped, realized how he might interpret that and blushed, backing for the door before Fixx had time to reassure her that he was fine. Listening to her steps in the corridor outside, Fixx shrugged. Okay, so his reputation had been bad, but that bad...?
Hanging his cloak in a dark cupboard so that it would go to sleep, Fixx clicked on the screen and called up the LunaWorld shopping channel. The clothes on offer were dreadful but he didn’t care, not once a lisping voice had assured him that they could be delivered direct to his hotel door.
In the corner of the room was a hotel minibar, the kind that said Have a nice stay everytime you shut the door and Please shut me every time you left it open for longer than ten seconds. Inside the minibar was a Snickers, a see-through bag of Hershey’s Kisses, three packs of honey-roast protein and five different types of Coke. In the enamel locker a Gideon Bible was stacked on top of a copy of the Torah. On top of the Bible was a Koran. All were untouched.
“Protein,” Fixx suggested, offering Ghost the bag. The kitten licked one of the honey-roast lumps and sneezed, tripping off the edge of the bed. “Hey, I’m sorry.” Fixx scooped the bundle of fur lightly off the floor and propped Ghost on a lacy pink pillow. He needed to find Ghost a shit tray and something cat-like to eat. Actually, he didn’t, not when he thought about it. Fixx flicked the vidphone onto vox and called up room service.
Food for Ghost was no problem, but the hotel didn’t have a real bar, at least not one that sold anything stronger than beer, so God knew what reception would do if he rang through and asked them to arrange a few rocks or a couple of lines of wizz. So he called up the desk again and asked for someone to catsit Ghost instead.
His new clothes weren’t ready yet, so Fixx dug his cloak back out of the cupboard and checked out through LunaWorld’s perimeter gate into Aldrin Square, Planetside’s biggest space and a pedestrian-only zone. From ceiling to polished rock floor was maybe forty-feet, and from one side of Aldrin Square to the other was roughly half a mile. Alleys led off from the edge of the square in all directions and between the alley entrances were tourist shops cut into the rock. In the centre two rows of tired palms were turning yellow, despite strip lights set almost exactly overhead. Cleaning droids scuttled by and so did two English tourists, heads down as they scooted through on their way to a girlie bar. Down one of the nearby alleys was Washington Plaza, the heart of Planetside’s red-light area. Except that everything in the Plaza was as packaged up and sanitized as London’s Soho or 42nd Street and Times Square back in Manhattan.
It took no time at all to cross the square, though Fixx slid to a halt as a gang of bladers split in the middle, wheels hissing as the kids zipped around him, laughing. Things got darker in the miles that followed, once he’d turned off the square. Lights became less frequent and those that were there worked less often. People looked more and smiled less. From what Fixx remembered of the hotel map, he was nearing the Edge.
Every city has areas that don’t make it into the Lonely Planet guides, except with warnings: for Luna it was the Edge. The Edge was where you went if you liked living dangerously or were just plain stupid. And Fixx had long ago worked out that he qualified on both counts. Besides, he wanted to check if LizAlec had come this way and LISA had said that when it came to getting out of Planetside, this was jump city.
Fixx liked that. It felt like an album title, or maybe a bad show, something that might manage one day’s hang time in a minor gallery off André des Arts. Fifteen minutes after hitting hooker heaven Fixx stumbled on a crowded Swedish bar selling frozen Alborg and even colder blondes. Fixx tossed up in his head and settled for the Aquavit, his one or two stomach-settling shots ending up as five or six big ones that left his throat frozen and his lungs sodden with alcohol vapour. By the end of the evening, he was passing round his only picture of LizAlec, asking if anyone had seen his special friend.
They hadn’t and from the sideways looks Fixx got it seemed like most of the clientele didn’t think he should, either. Too bad. Grabbing back his tattered Kodak from a boy in combats, Fixx made it to the door and out into a small square, turning left, then left again and finally ending up in a narrow tunnel. It didn’t matter that an illuminated panel set into the rock announced the alley as Mir Street. As far as Fixx was concerned, if it looked like a tunnel and smelt like a tunnel then it was a tunnel.
It was also a bit late to remember that if he’d brought floating-focus Zeiss he could have imprinted LISA’s matrix over the top of his real surroundings. All the same, he remembered it anyway, and kept on remembering it until he walked slap into a wall and all his memory shut down for a while.
Halfway back to LunaWorld, Fixx threw up in a gutter, splashing soy meatballs and undigested alcohol across the grey rock floor. A Honda droid would have got around to cleaning it up just before dawn, but the droid wasn’t needed because the rats got there first. By then Fixx was flopped on his bed beside Ghost, flicking through the twenty-four-hour newsfeeds. The passing through of Fixx Valmont, once a major CySat star, made a “Hey, guess what” newsblip five minutes before the end of the hour-long show. Which was how Fixx got to be three-quarters down an obscenely expensive take-out bottle of Aquavit before Ghost got to watch a younger, thinner, less-lined version of his new owner perform on screen.
-=*=-
The next day Fixx spent sleeping, the one after that was spent nursing the hangover he should have had twenty-four hours earlier. Working on the half-baked basis that LizAlec was perfectly capable of abducting herself from St Lucius, Fixx took his hangover out to play at LunaWorld, just in case LizAlec had done what any intelligent kid on the lam might do, lose herself among all the others.
He left Ghost with reception and let them run a swipe off his platinum card in case the kitten needed anything serious, like medical attention. He didn’t tell rece
ption he might not be back for a while but he reckoned the kitten knew from the way it scowled at Fixx when he left. If Ghost had known they were both two days over their leave-by date, Fixx figured he’d be scowling even more.
Leaving MMS, Ghost and his guilt behind, Fixx went kid spotting. He rode the big rides, hung out in the Simbars, took the new Astral Tour to watch pre-packaged groups hyperboost their endorphin levels with statistically safe, sphincter-tightening pre-packaged danger. He ate bad ice-cream with the Space Pirates, drank Coke he didn’t want at New York, New York. Looked over the kids and young girls until the LD security guards got nervous. But by the end of the afternoon he knew LizAlec wasn’t there.
He saw no trace of her and none of the kids he struck up chance conversations with had any memory of her either. Somehow, given the way LizAlec stalked forward on the balls of her feet, the way she held her head, Fixx had a feeling the boys at least would remember if they’d seen her. Her tits alone were worth dying for. Well, they were in his opinion.
Right at the start LISA had told him that LizAlec was not registered at any Planetside hotel. The AI had checked that out as the X3 was coming in to land. And even using military-grade visual recognition software, a rapid scan of Planetside’s m/wave cameras produced nothing. If Planetside was out then so was Chrysler: its very exclusivity made it too hermetic for strangers. Which left Islamabad, Voertrekker, half a dozen private craters and Fracture. Fixx didn’t doubt that he’d find her, however impossible that seemed, it was just the slight matter of timing. If true genius was the ability to come up with two good ideas and also see both sides of any argument, then Fixx was off the scale. His whole life had always been connections, digital, social or neural.
Fixx shivered. He was standing in the queue for SpaceWarp again, late afternoon having slid into evening. Twenty-four-hour daylight was illegal on Planetside though at LunaWorld the rides still stayed open round the clock. But the overhead sky was dimming again to signify the start of late evening. If you were using melatonin to reset Circadian rhythms, now was the time to take it.
Next door to SpaceWarp was a long glass-fronted bar called the SanRat. It looked loathsome. Slide guitar slid from the wide doorway, its oily notes as thin as any kid’s whining. Over the door was a sign in cracked enamel, riddled with fake bullet holes. The block letters announced that for the convenience of LunaWorld’s patrons, alcohol wasn’t on sale. And, in the window, adults who’d paid to sit there surrounded by tired and irritated kids looked like they hated every aspartamine-sweet minute of it.
Time to get a Bud and that meant going back to his hotel. Either that, or go find another bar. Fixx ducked under a barrier, ignoring the angry shout of a guard, and pushed his way out of the SpaceWarp queue. The kids were welcome to their ride. All he really wanted was a cold Bud, a bed that didn’t have pink frills and maybe...
That woman over there.
Fixx stopped dead and took another look, but the badly dressed blonde had stopped watching him and was examining the poster for SpaceWarp as if she’d never seen a physical-reality ride before, as if listening to the poster took up all her attention. And then Fixx realized she wasn’t listening at all, she was still busy watching his reflection...
Police?
It was possible, but then again, maybe not. Five-ten, maybe taller, mid-weight, badly-cut blonde hair: she didn’t look neat enough to be brass, and he’d never have noticed her if she was street-level. Or maybe he would have, but not that easily. Unless, of course, she wanted him to notice her.
Fixx sighed. It was one thing for Lady Clare to say go find LizAlec, Fixx thought, pushing his way towards the woman, quite another for LISA to expect him to have been able to do it in twenty-four hours. He wasn’t looking forward to the next time he had to talk to her. Three steps took Fixx to the still-burbling poster. “Look,” Fixx said, “you can’t listen to the fucking thing for a fourth time. It’s not that interesting...”
Washed-out blue eyes met his, held his gaze. Fixx was impressed. He was all in favour of first impressions and his was that this wasn’t the kind of woman who slapped, she punched. Much like LizAlec really, except LizAlec didn’t yet know it while this woman did. From the tiredness in her face, Fixx reckoned she was getting bored with living up to the mark.
Paper print dress, the kind without sleeves, unwashed hair, cheap make-up, she also didn’t belong in LunaWorld and that much was obvious from the way guards were hovering, as if desperate to shepherd Fixx and the woman away from the rest of the ice-cream-eating, Coke-slurping queue.
“Out at the Edge you?” Her accent was so thick that Fixx could, hardly grasp what she was asking, if it actually was a question.
“You? Two night back?”
Two nights... Yeah, Fixx had it, she was talking about that over-chromed brothel, the sinbin that offed him more dead presidents for a take-out bottle of Alborg than he usually had to live on for a month back in Paris. Fixx nodded. “You got it.”
“Kodak?” the woman demanded.
Fixx handed over his tri-D of LizAlec, noticing that the blonde’s nails were chipped and worn; and not even purple Candy could hide the half-circles of grime beneath.
“No water,” the woman said shortly, following his eyes. “All goes to places like this. Sweedak?” She nodded around her, not bothering to keep the contempt from her voice. “This your friend?” she asked, watching him carefully.
“Yeah, special friend.”
“An t’boy?”
“Boy?” Fixx said, surprised. For a second they glanced at each other, and then the hangover swallowed Fixx, leaving him staring blankly over her shoulder at a distant ride.
That LizAlec should have set up her own kidnap didn’t surprise him. That she set it up with someone other than him...? Fixx shrugged. He was too old and too ugly to worry about getting his feelings hurt, wasn’t he...?
Wasn’t he?
Fixx shook his head. How come Lady Clare hadn’t thought this through? She’d watched the kid grow up. Why hadn’t the snotty bitch reached the same conclusion, that it was a set-up, that LizAlec was on the lam....? Lady Clare was bright, cynical. She must have got to this conclusion before him, so what made her reject it?
“A boy?” Fixx kept his voice neutral. Only his eyes betrayed what he was really thinking.
“San’rat,” said the woman.
“From the Moon?” Fixx asked in disbelief.
Jude smiled, not kindly. “Honey, where else you get san’rats?”
“You’ve actually seen her...”
Jude began to nod and thought better of it. “You her special friend?” There was a world of ironic emphasis on that special.
“I’m a friend of her mother’s,” Fixx said, surprising himself.
Jude thought about it. “She in bad trouble, t’girl?”
“Yeah, big trouble. People want her dead.” As lies went it wasn’t inspired but the blonde woman had no way of knowing it wasn’t true.
“Jude,” said Jude, thrusting out her hand. Fixx shook. “I got a bar,” Jude said, “in Strat, t’CasaNegro. You come see me sometime, we talk, maybe...” Dodging round an approaching guard, Jude was gone before Fixx even realized she was leaving.
“My Kodak,” Fixx demanded hastily.
Jude didn’t answer him, but somehow Fixx didn’t expect her to.
Chapter Eighteen
Christ on Crutches
The ship stank. The kind of stink you get if you put twenty flea-bitten goats in a stainless-steel pen and then tie them down with neoprene mesh so they can’t float away in free fall. Why even the Family would want to ship animals from Planetside to Seattle, fuck alone knew. But as to why they didn’t take the Kobe option and put the goats in suspended animation, LizAlec knew that. The brotherhood didn’t believe in recreational drugs, nanotechnology or extopian solutions and who was she to question the word of God?
LizAlec smiled sourly, remembering Fixx’s insistence on an inverse link between IQ and absolute faith. The mo
re you believe the less you think. Not surprisingly, that never got taught at St Lucius, either.
Briefly, LizAlec wondered what kind of crap the amulet-wearing Lars believed in, and then decided she didn’t care enough to find out. She was bored with Lars and his creepy, clanky steel lung, bored with staring at goats, hungry too.
They were in an air vent hung over a hold, that much was obvious. And the hold had been walled off into three pens, two small pens divided between the goats and ten black, bristle-backed pigs. There was also a larger pen for six of the ugliest cows LizAlec had ever seen.
All the animals stank: the pigs less than the cows, surprisingly. At least, it surprised LizAlec, who’d assumed the cows would be the cleanest.
“Less animals, more shit,” Lars told her baldly, and he was right. The leathery-skinned, thin-hipped cows in the pen next door were crusted in their own excrement, huge scabs of dung drying to cake on their hides. Only the pigs still looked vaguely pink. Every hour a woman with wide hips and protruding buttocks stamped into each pen in turn and vacuumed clean the air with a huge hose.
She didn’t look happy with her job, but she never swore, not even when the DustBuster broke one time and spat everything out of the other end again, much like the animals.
“Family,” LizAlec told Lars, who just looked puzzled.
“Yours?” His voice sounded doubtful.
LizAlec grunted with frustration. Being trapped for hours in the hold of a filthy cargo shuttle with some slack-jawed retard had worn her patience so thin it was practically transparent.
No,” LizAlec said abruptly. “Family.” She said it like the retard should know what she was talking about, which she figured he should. “Oh fuck... Forget it.” She crept forward and looked down through an air vent at the goats. She was sure one or two were looking back at her.
They’d started out in a cupboard, locked into a tiny side room by Leon, the combat kid, who only just remembered to click the oxygen/atmosphere on before jumping shuttle and heading back to Fracture. It was Lars who’d prised off the grille to a ventilation shaft in their original hiding place and wriggled up, leaving her trapped and almost crying until frustration slid into skin-slicked fear as LizAlec remembered the bioSemtex worm wrapped away inside her skull. Just how far Lars had to wander before he broke the connection and splattered her brains against the utility-green walls of the tiny cupboard wasn’t something LizAlec liked to think about.
reMix Page 14