The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  He dried himself on big fluffy Marriott towels and was putting on the cleanest of his worn canvas trousers when the door chimed. He grabbed a T-shirt, looked down at the wound and shrugged. Not much point in getting dressed. He dropped the shirt again and went to the door still stripped to the waist.

  The in-house doctor was a personable young latina who’d maybe served her internship in some Republican inner city hospital, because she barely raised one groomed eyebrow when he showed her the knife wound.

  ‘Been in Miami long?’ she asked him.

  He smiled, shook his head. ‘It didn’t happen here. I just got in.’

  ‘I see.’ But he didn’t get the smile back. She stood behind him and pressed long, cool fingers around the wound, testing the glue. She wasn’t particularly gentle about it. ‘So, are you one of our illustrious military advisers?’

  He switched to English. ‘What, with this accent?’

  A tiny bend to the lips now, as she moved round to face him again. ‘You’re British? I’m sorry, I thought-’

  ‘Forget it. I hate those motherfuckers too.’ That he’d killed one in a bar in Caracas last year, he didn’t mention. Not yet, anyway. He went back to Spanish. ‘You got family in Venezuela?’

  ‘Colombia. But it’s the same story down there, only for coca, not oil. And for longer. Been going on since my grandparents got out, and it’s never going to change.’ She went to her bag where it sat on the desk and fished out a hand-held echo imager. ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the things my cousins tell me about.’

  Carl thought about the uniforms he’d seen on the streets of Bogota a few weeks ago. A summary beating he’d witnessed.

  ‘No, I would believe you,’ he said.

  She knelt in front of him and touched the wound again, more gently now. Improbably, her fingers seemed warmer. She ran the imager back and forth a couple of times, then got to her feet again. He caught a gust of her scent as she came up. As it happened, their eyes met and she saw that he’d smelled her. There was a brief, flaring moment, and then she retreated to her bag. She dug out dressings and cleared her throat, raised brows and sideways slanted eyes at what had just happened.

  ‘There’s not much I can do for you that hasn’t already been done,’ she said, a little hurriedly. ‘Whoever glued you up knew what they were doing. It’s a good job, should heal quickly enough. Did they spray it?’

  ‘Yeah, they did.’

  ‘Do you want anything for the pain?’

  ‘The pain’s under control.’

  ‘Well, I’ll dress it again, if you like, unless you’re planning to shower now.’

  ‘I’ve just had a shower.’

  ‘Okay, well, in that case I can leave-’

  ‘Would you like to have dinner with me?’

  She smiled then, properly.

  ‘I’m married,’ she said, holding up the hand and the plain gold ring on it. ‘I don’t do that.’

  ‘Oh, hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t notice,’ he lied.

  ‘No problem.’ She smiled again, but there was disbelief etched into it and the tone of her voice said she wasn’t fooled. ‘Are you sure you don’t want any painkillers? I’m going to charge you the rate minimum, they’d come as standard with that.’

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ he said.

  So she packed up her bag, gave him one more smile, and left him to put his own dressings on.

  He went out.

  It probably wasn’t smart, but sense memory of the unattainable doctor drove him. Her fingers on him, her scent, her voice. The way she’d knelt in front of him.

  An autocab took him east from the airport, cruising broad, multi-laned streets. Most places were still open - LCLS glow from the frontages beckoned, but still seemed oddly distant, like the lights of a seafront town seen from off-shore. He guessed it was the codeine, maybe playing off something in the mesh. For a while he was happy to watch it roll past. Then, as the traffic started to thicken, he got out at random where the lights seemed brightest. An avenue named after some Cuban Repossession hero, bronze beach-head-and-bayonet plaque fixed into the brickwork at the corner. Remixed Zequina and Reyes classics splashing out of propped-wide doorways, tanned flesh flexing within or strutting the street around him. It was warm and muggy, and dress ran to billowing scraps of silk over swimwear for the women, linen or tight leather jeans and bared chests for the men. On skin alone Carl would have blended in well enough - it was one of the few things he liked about Miami - but he’d blown it with his wardrobe. Canvas trousers, the lightest of his trail shoes and a Bradbury Bubble ’97 T-shirt. He looked like a fucking tourist.

  In the end, tired of the flickering he don’t belong glances from the local streetlife, he ducked off the main drag and sank himself in the gloom of a club called Picante. It was seedy and half empty and no closer to his fantasies of how his evening would turn out than the screen ad he’d seen outside the bar in Garrod Horkan 9 was to Caribbean reality. In the back of his mind, there’d been this vague storyboard of images in which he met the latina doctor - well, a close substitute for, anyway - in some classy salsa bar full of dance-lights glittering off cocktail glasses and good teeth. Segue to the easy, low-light surroundings of some other more intimate place, equally upscale, and then the home straight to her place, wherever that might be. Fresh sheets on a big bed and the cries of an uninhibited woman in the throes of orgasm. Fading out, satiated, in the shadowed, temporary comfort of a strange woman’s night-time home.

  Well, you got the shadows, he admitted to himself with a sour grin. Picante ran to a couple of LCLS dance panels not much bigger across than his hotel bathroom, a traditional straight-line bar, and wall lighting that seemed designed in kindness to the handful of fairly obvious prostitutes who hung around the tables, smoking and waiting to be asked to dance. Carl got himself a drink - they didn’t have Red Stripe, he settled for something called Torero, then wished he hadn’t - and installed himself at the bar near the door. It might have been professional caution, or just the odd comfort that being able to see the street outside gave him, the sense that he didn’t have to stay here if he didn’t want to.

  But he was still there, nearly an hour later, when she came in and parked herself beside him at the bar. The barman drifted across, wiping a glass.

  ‘Hi. Give me a whisky cola. Lot of ice. Hey there.’

  This last, Carl realised, was directed at him. He looked up from the dregs of his latest beer and nodded, trying to calibrate in the dim light. Trying to decide if she was working.

  ‘You don’t look like you’re having a whole lot of fun there,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t?’

  ‘No. You don’t.’

  She was no doctora from the Marriott - her features were sharper and paler, her body curves less generous and her mestiza hair less groomed. No wedding band either, just a scatter of cheap and ornate silver rings across both hands. Bodice top made to look like it was sculpted metal too, clasping her to just below the armpits, mid-thigh skirt in dark contrast, the inevitable wrenching heels. There was taut coffee-coloured flesh on display, thighs below the skirt, shoulders and the slope of pushed-up breasts above the bodice, belly button slice between where the two garments didn’t quite meet - but no more than street standard in this heat, didn’t have to mean anything either way. Make-up a little on the heavy side, a little caked in the pores on the side of her nose. Yeah, she was working He stopped trying to kid himself, hung for a moment over his decision like a skydiver in the hatch, then let go.

  ‘I just got in,’ he said. ‘Business trip, I’m still kind of wired.’

  ‘Yeah?’ She tipped her head on one side, crossed her legs in his direction. The skirt slid up her thighs ‘You want some help with that?’

  Later, elsewhere, and helped out of his tension like it was a tight pair of leather trousers he couldn’t take off alone, he lay slumped up against the headboard and watched her move about in the white-blasted cubic environment of the en suite. From the foot of the
bed to the open bathroom door wasn’t much more than a metre, but it felt as if she’d stepped off into a parallel universe. Her actions seemed to be taking place at a profound distance and even the small bathroom noises, splash and swill of water, click of make-up utilities, were all somehow muffled as if he was staring through a thick-glassed observation panel into some cramped vivarium in an alien-world zoo.

  Come see the humans.

  See them mate in authentic surroundings.

  A grimace twitched through him, too deeply buried to register in the muscles of his face.

  See the female’s post-coital douching ritual.

  Another buried tremor of intent told him to get up off the bed, get dressed and get the fuck out. There was really nothing else left to do. She’d run his wafer as soon as they got through the door - swiped it up the crack in the reader with the same clinical competence that she’d later employed to spray-coat his swollen cock and slot it inside her. Then he got some basic pay-per-view tricks - sucking her own fingers as he thrust into her, squeezing her own breasts as she rode him - a couple of well-timed posture changes and a crescendo of throaty moaning until he blew. Now street lighting and a tree outside made yellowish swaying shadows across the wall and ceiling of the darkened room, the alkaline smell of recent sex seeped out of the sheets tangled around his waist, and suddenly he felt old and tired and very slightly ill. The wound in his side had started to hurt again, and he thought the dressing might be coming off.

  Intention made it to his motor system. He sat up and swung his legs off the side of the bed. In the bathroom universe, the toilet flushed. For some reason, the sound speeded him up and by the time she came out, he’d found his trousers and was stepping into them.

  ‘You going?’ she asked dully.

  ‘Yeah, I think it’s that time, you know.’ He hooked his shirt off one arm of the couch and shouldered his way into it. ‘I’m tired and you, well I guess you got places to be, right?’

  Silence. She stood there, looking at him. He heard a tiny clicking sound as she swallowed, then a wet gulp. Abruptly he realised that she was crying in the gloom. He stopped, awkward and half way into his shirt, peering at her. The gulp became a genuine sob. She turned away from him, hugging herself.

  ‘Listen,’ he said.

  ‘No, you go.’ The voice was hard and almost unblurred by the tears, schooled by the trade he supposed. She wasn’t milking for effect, unless her method acting ran better to grief than sexual ecstasy. He stood behind her, looked at the untidy ropes of her hair where it had frizzed in the damp heat.

  Images of the back of Gaby’s head coming apart.

  He grimaced, put his hand on her shoulder with a hesitation that should have been broad farce after the cheap intimacy he’d purchased from her twenty minutes ago. She flinched slightly at his touch.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

  It ricocheted off the corner of his mind, and for a moment he thought he’d misheard. Then, when she didn’t repeat it, he took his hand off her shoulder. She’d fished the Trojan spray can from her bag with the professional dexterity of a blindfolded circus performer, used it on him the same way. There’d been a coolly reassuring comfort to watching her do it, a sense that he - idiot grin - was in good hands. Now the same idiot part of him felt betrayed by this admission of previous error, almost as if she was accusing him of having something to do with it himself.

  ‘Well,’ he said experimentally. ‘I mean, can’t you. You know.’

  Her shoulders shook. ‘This is Florida. Been illegal down here for decades now. You gotta go to the Union or Rimside, and I don’t have the parity payments on my medicode for that. I could sell everything I own and still not have enough.’

  ‘And there’s no one here who-’

  ‘Didn’t you hear me. It’s fucking illegal, man.’

  A little professional competence, a sense of being on his home ground, asserted itself. ‘Yeah, legal’s got nothing to do with it. Not what I meant. There’ll be places you can go.’

  She turned to face him, palm-heeling the tears off one cheek. The streaks it left gleamed as they caught the street-light falling into the room. She snorted. ‘Yeah, places you can go, maybe. Places the governor’s daughter can go. You think I have that kind of money? Or maybe you think I want to risk a back alley scrape-bar, come home bleeding to death inside or collapse from enzyme clash because they were too cheap to run the specs right. Where you from, man? It costs a lot of fucking money to get sick around here.’

  It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her to fuck off. It wasn’t his problem, he hadn’t signed on for this shit. Instead, he saw Gaby’s head come apart again and, as if from a distance, he heard himself saying quietly:

  ‘How much do you need?’

  Fuck it. He derailed his rising irritation at the girl, at himself, retargeted it north and east. Let fucking UNGLA pay for something worthwhile for a change. Not like they can’t afford it. Let that piece of shit di Palma query it if he fucking dares.

  When he’d calmed her down, stopped her crying and stemmed her protestations of gratitude before they started to sound hollow, he explained that he’d need a datapoint to download the credit to wafers she could use. That might mean going back to the hotel. At that, she clutched his hand and he guessed she was terrified if she let him out of her sight, or at least out of the neighbourhood, he’d change his mind. She knew a datapoint that was secure a couple of blocks over, one of her clients from downtown used it now and then. She could show him where it was, right now, she’d get dressed, wouldn’t take a moment.

  The streets outside were pretty much deserted, the neighbourhood was low-end semi-residential and at this hour people were either inside or downtown. There was alloy shuttering on all the shop fronts and bright yellow decals announced the anti-tampering charges lurking in the metal. A couple of bars were still open, showing dim neon signs over corner doorways like weak urban lighthouses. Outside one, a flock of aspiring street thugs propped themselves against walls and perched on parked vehicles, staring dangerously at the few passers-by. Carl felt the mesh come gently, suggestively online. He ignored it and avoided gazes instead, put an arm around the girl’s shoulder and picked up the pace a little. He heard the boys talking about him in a densely arcane dialect of Spanglish as they fell behind. It didn’t take much imagination to work out what was being said. Fucking tourists, fucking foreigners, fucking our women. The age-old plaint. He couldn’t really blame them. Then they were lost round a corner and instead music floated down from a window jacked open for the heat, clumpy Cuban jazz that sounded like someone playing the piano with their fists.

  The datapoint was a blunt concrete outcrop two metres tall and about the same wide, swelling from the wall of a commercial unit like some kind of architectural tumor. It was fitted with a solid tantalum alloy door. Heavily grilled LCLS panels set into the top of the structure threw down a pale crystalline light. Carl stepped into the radiance and felt, ludicrously, like some kind of stage performer. He punched his general access code into the pad and the door cycled open. Old memories and scar tissue from Caracas made him usher the girl inside and bang a fist on the rapid-lock button as soon as they were both in. The door cycled again.

  The interior was much the same as secure modules he’d used the world over, an iris reader mask on a flexible stalk, a broad screen edged with an integral speaker and set above a wafer dispenser, a double-width chair moulded up from the floor, presumably for obese patrons rather than courting couples. The girl, in any case, stayed discreetly on her feet, looked pointedly away from the screen. She really had been here with clients before.

  ‘Hello sir,’ said the datapoint chattily. ‘Would you like to hear the customer options available to-’

  ‘No.’ Carl fitted the iris reader over his head, blinked a couple of times into the lens cups and waited for the chime that told him he’d been read. Idly he wondered what would happen if he ever had to do this with a black eye.

  ‘Th
ank you, sir. You may now access your accounts.’

  He took the credit in ten limited-load wafers, reasoning that the girl wouldn’t want to trust a clandestine clinic with a single upfront payment. As he handed them to her in the cramped space, he realised that he didn’t know her name. A couple of seconds after that, the second realisation hit home, that he didn’t really want to. She took the wafers in silence, looked him up and down in a way that made him think she might try to give him a gratitude blow-job there in the cabin. But then she muttered thanks in a voice so low he almost missed it and he wondered if he was, after all, just one more sick-headed fuck with an overactive imagination. He thumped the lock stud again and the door cycled open on a compressed sigh. He followed her out.

  ‘Okay, boy! Get your motherfucking hands up where I can see them!’

  The yell was off to his left, the shapes that jumped him came from both sides. The mesh leapt alive like joy. He grabbed an arm, locked it and hurled its owner towards the dying echo of the voice. Curses and stumbling. The other figure tried to grapple with him, there was some technique in there somewhere, but . . . he yanked hard, got a warding arm down and smashed an elbow into the face behind. He felt the nose break. Pain wrung a high yelp from his attacker. He stepped, hooked with one foot and pushed. The one with the broken nose went down. There was another one, coming back from the left again. He spun about, fierce grin and crooked hands, saw his target. Blocky, slope shouldered, fading pro-wrestler type. Carl feinted, then kicked him in the belly as he rushed in. Sobbing grunt and the solid feel of a good connecting strike, but the big man’s impetus carried him forward and Carl had to dance sharply aside to avoid being taken down.

  Then someone clubbed him in the head from behind.

  He heard it coming, felt the motion in the air at his ear, was turning towards the attack, but way too late to get clear. Black exploded through him, speckled with tiny, tiny sparks. He pivoted and went down in the crystalline light around the datapoint. His vision inked out, inked back in. Another blunt figure came and stood over him. Through the waltzing colours that washed up and down behind his eyes, he saw a gun muzzle and stopped struggling.