The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  ‘That’s very kind of Larry.’ She fended off a bovine gaggle of shoppers grazing amidst menswear, hopped half to a halt and dodged round them. ‘And kind of you to call me. So what have you got?’

  ‘What I’ve got, Ms Ertekin, is your third shooter for Joaquin Ortiz.’

  She nearly stopped again, in clear space. ‘Is he alive?’

  ‘Very much so. There’s a hole in his shoulder, but otherwise he’ll be just fine. Got into a fight in a bar over in Brooklyn, pulled a piece, and it turns out the place is full of off-duty cops.’ Williamson chuckled. ‘You believe that luck?’

  ‘Not a local boy then?’

  ‘No, he’s from the Republic, someplace out west. Dirk Shindel. Right of residence in the Union, he’s got a grandparent up in Maine somewhere, but no official citizenship. We can’t put him at the scene with genetic trace, but he’s copped to it anyway.’

  ‘How’d you manage that?’

  ‘We’re sweating him pretty hard,’ Williamson said casually. ‘Got one of the homicide psych teams on it. Thing is, our boy Dirk was all fucked up on hormone jolts and street syn when the Brooklyn thing went down. You know what a cocktail like that’ll do. He’s babbling like a snake handler.’

  Along her nerves, Sevgi felt the subtle thrum of her own decidedly non-street syn dosage. She summoned a dutiful chuckle. ‘Yeah, seen that before. So what’s he said about Ortiz?’

  ‘Said a whole lot of stuff, I can file it over to you if you want. Boils down to he was hired out of Houston by some front guy he’s never met, friend of the other two in the crew. Quite a lot of money, which I guess for a hit on a guy like Ortiz you’d expect, but it doesn’t explain why the low-grade hires. Shindel says he’s whacked guys before, in the Republic, but the psych team think he’s lying. At best, they reckon he was maybe a driver or a back-up man.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘Yeah, Leroy Atkins. That’s the guy your, uh, enhanced friend put down with the machine pistol. Turns out he’s got some record in the Republic, but strictly spray and run stuff. Cop I talked to in the Houston PD said he thought Atkins might have upped his game in the last couple of years, gone out of state for the work. Nothing they can touch him for, it’s just street rumour and implied Yarashanko links from some West Coast n-djinn Houston rent time on. Same with the other guy, uh, Fabiano, Angel Fabiano. Houston resident, some gang affiliations down there. Been doing time since he was a kid, but they never got him for worse than possession of abortifacients with intent to sell, and some aggravated assault. But Houston reckon he might have upgraded as well, he’s a known associate of Atkins.’

  ‘Okay.’ Disloyalty for Norton snaked in her, deep enough to force a grimace onto her face. She asked anyway. ‘Did Shindel have anything to say about Marsalis?’

  ‘Marsalis? The thirteen guy?’ Pause, while Williamson presumably scrolled through the report. ‘No. Nothing here outside of we would have brought the whole thing off too, that fucking nigger twist hadn’t been there. No offence.’

  ‘No offence?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Williamson’s tone shifted into sour amusement. ‘One of the psych team’s the same colour as me. This is one sensitive Jesuslander we’re dealing with here.’

  Sevgi grunted. ‘Probably the syn talking. He tell you how they ended up outside my front door?’

  ‘Yeah, he was pissed about that too. Told us they’d been watching Ortiz for weeks, mapping his moves. Seems he always went by this coffee house he liked on West 97th, they were going to track him across there on the skates and light him up outside. The skates, that’s an old Houston sicario standby, apparently. Good for city-centre hits where you’ve got high-volume, slow-moving traffic. Anyway, the way Shindel paints it, Ortiz breaks his routine and heads up town suddenly, they go after him but it nearly kills them to keep up. By the time they get to hundred and eighteenth, they’re panting like dogs, they just want to get this thing finished.’

  ‘Very pro.’ She could hear the lightness in her own tone. The vindication of Norton blew through her like a cool breeze. She even found a smile for some face-painted idiot who collided with her coming round a support column and then backed off all apologies and smiles.

  ‘Right,’ Williamson agreed. ‘Not quite Houston’s finest, it seems.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yeah.’ The New York detective hesitated again. ‘So like I said, I talked to Kasabian. He told me you’d want to know. Was going to hang onto this until you were back in town, but then I caught you on that newsflash out of the Rim this morning. So I figure the Rim, that’s where Ortiz is from originally, maybe this ties in to whatever you’re dealing with out there.’

  The press conference, hastily called in a deck-level government garden amidships, her dry lack-of-progress report buffered by wooden professions of co-ordinated effort from RimSec and the Cat’s security services, a brief, sonorous pronouncement from a local political aide - it all seemed to be sliding into the past at alarming speed as well. She made a fleeting match with the feeling she’d had on the highway out of Cuzco, the sense of time slipping through her fingers. Marsalis at her side like a dark rock she could maybe cling to. She grimaced. Shouldered the image aside, like another drowsy shopper getting in her way.

  ‘Well, listen, detective, I appreciate you taking the trouble to hand me this. See if I can’t return the favour some day.’

  ‘No need. Like I said, saw the newsflash. Lot of talk about agency co-operation in America these days, a lot of talk. I figure maybe it’s time there actually started to be some too.’

  ‘I hear that. Can you wire the Shindel file across to RimSec at Alcatraz? I’ll pick it up there later.’

  ‘Will do. Hope it helps.’

  The New York patch clicked out, took Williamson’s accent and the winter city with it. Left her with the star-static almost-hush of satellite time, and then nothing at all.

  ‘Nothing. That’s what I’m telling you.’

  Carl shook his head irritably. ‘Matthew, I told you this guy just doesn’t feel right. Are you sure?’

  ‘I am better than sure, Carl. I am mathematically accurate. Tom Norton’s associational set is as close to perfectly behaved citizenship as it’s possible for a human to get. The worst blemish I can find is a data-implication that his brother may have helped him get his job at COLIN. But you’re talking about a good word in the right ear, not outright nepotism. And it’s years in the past, no sense of a continuing influence.’

  ‘You certain about that?’

  ‘Yes, I am certain. In fact, the data suggests that he and his brother don’t get on all that well. Same-sex sibling relationships are often combative, and in this case the Nortons seem to have resolved theirs by living at opposite ends of the continent.’

  Carl stared at the hotel window, where evening was already starting to shut down the sky. His reflection stared back, hemmed him in. He put a crooked elbow to the glass and leaned on it with his forearm over his head, fingers stroking through his hair. It was something Marisol used to-

  ‘And the New York hit? The fact he was the only person who knew where I was sleeping?’

  ‘Is coincidence,’ said Matthew crisply.

  He met his reflection’s eyes in the glass. ‘Well, it doesn’t feel much like it from where I’m standing.’

  ‘Coincidence never does. It’s not in the nature of human genetic wiring to accept it. And as a thirteen, you have your own increased predisposition towards paranoia to contend with as well.’

  Carl grimaced. ‘Has it ever occurred to you Matt, that-’

  ‘Matthew.’

  ‘Yeah, Matthew. Sorry. Has it ever occurred to you that for a thirteen, for someone who doesn’t connect well with group dynamics, paranoia might be quite a useful trait to have?’

  ‘Yes, and evolutionarily selective too.’ The datahawk’s didactic tone had not shifted. It almost never did; didactic was part of the way Matthew was wired. ‘But this is not the point. Human intuition is deceptive, b
ecause it is not always consistent. It is not necessarily a good fit for the environments we now live in, or the mathematics that underlie them. When it does echo mathematical form, it’s clearly indicative of an inherent capacity to detect that underlying mathematics.’

  ‘But not when they clash.’ Carl leaned his forehead against the glass. They’d had this discussion before, countless times. ‘Right?’

  ‘Not when they clash,’ Matthew agreed. ‘When they clash, the mathematics remain correct. The intuition merely indicates a mismatch of evolved capacities with a changed or changing environment.’

  ‘So Norton’s clean?’

  ‘Norton is clean.’

  Carl turned his back on his reflection. Leaned against the window and looked around the room that caged him. He recognised the reflex - seeking exits. Stupid, there was the fucking door, right there.

  So use it, fuckwit.

  ‘Does it ever bother you?’ he asked into the phone.

  ‘Does what bother me, Carl?’

  ‘This whole thing.’ He gestured as if Matthew could see him. ‘Jacobsen, the fucking Accords, the Agency and the enforcement. Having to be licensed like some fucking hazardous substance.’

  ‘To the extent that personal identification records are a form of social licensing, we are all licensed, base humans and variants alike. If the type of licensing reflects certain gradients of social risk, is that a bad thing?’

  Carl sighed. ‘Okay, forget it. I’m asking the wrong person.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, no offence, but you’re a gleech. Your whole profile is post-autistic. This is an emotional thing we’re talking about.’

  ‘My emotional range has been psycho-chemically rebalanced and extended.’

  ‘Yeah, by an n-djinn. Sorry, Matthew, I don’t know why I’m fronting you with this stuff. You’re no more normal than I am.’

  ‘Leaving aside for a moment the question of what exactly you would consider to be a normal human, what makes you think you would receive a more valid answer from one? Are normal humans especially gifted in discovering complex ethical truths?’

  Carl thought about that.

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ he admitted gloomily. ‘No.’

  ‘So my perception of the post-Jacobsen order is probably no more or less useful than any other rational human’s.’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s just the big fat point.’ Carl grinned. There was a solid pleasure in catching the datahawk and his hyper-balanced mindset out, mainly because he didn’t get to do it very often. ‘This isn’t about rational humans. The Jacobsen Report wasn’t about a rational response to genetic licensing, it was about a group of rational men trying to broker a deal with the gibbering mass of irrational humanity. The religious lunatics, the race purists, the whole doom-of-civilisation crew.’ For a moment, he stared off blindly into a corner of the room. ‘I mean, don’t you remember all that stuff back in eighty-nine, ninety? The demonstrations? The vitriol in the feeds? The mobs outside the facilities and the army bases, crashing the fences?’

  ‘Yes. I remember it. But it did not bother me.’

  Carl shrugged. ‘Well, you didn’t scare them like we did.’

  ‘And yet Jacobsen was not a capitulation to the forces you describe. The report is critical of both irrational responses and simplistic thinking.’

  ‘Yeah. But look who ended up in the tracts anyway.’

  Matthew said nothing. Carl saw Stéphane Névant’s lupine grin, rubbed at his eyes to make it go away.

  ‘Look, Matt, thanks-’

  ‘Matthew.’

  ‘Sorry. Matthew. Thanks for the check on Norton, ’kay? Talk to you soon.’

  He hung up. Tossed the phone on the bed and got rapidly dressed in the least used and bloodied garments from among his limited wardrobe. He let himself out of the hotel room, paused briefly on his way past Sevgi Ertekin’s door, then made an exasperated noise in his throat and stalked on. He waited ten impatient seconds at the elevator, then stiff-armed the door to the emergency stairwell open instead and went down the steps two at a time. Crossed the lobby at a fast stride, and went out into the city. He walked a single block to get the feel of the evening, then flagged down an autocab.

  The interior was low-lit and cosy, an expansive black leatherette womb with slash-narrow views to the passing street. In the gloom on the front panel, an armoured screen blipped into life and showed him a rather idealised female driver interface. Generic Rim beauty, the classic Asia-Hispanic blend. Pinned dark hair, a hint of a curl in it, chic high collar jacket. Something of Carmen Ren in the features and the poise, but machined up to an inhuman perfection. The voice was an Asia Badawi rip-off.

  ‘Good evening, sir. Welcome to Cable Cars. What will be your choice of destination this evening?’

  He hesitated. Sutherland, he knew, would not have been impressed with this.

  Sutherland’s on fucking Mars.

  ‘Just take me somewhere I can get in a fight,’ he said.

  Switched off and careless from jet-lag, long sleep and yesterday’s combat, he never noticed the figure on the corner that watched him leave the hotel, or the nondescript teardrop that slid out from parking on the opposite side of the street and dropped into the traffic behind his cab.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Dougie Kwang’s week had been shaping up for shit ever since it started, and tonight didn’t look any better. He was three games down to Valdez already, stalking the angles of the table, pumping violent, crack-bang shots to take his mind off it all. The technique - if you want to call it that, he fumed - mostly just rattled the balls in the jaws, and they sat out more often than he sank them. He knew his anger was the exact reason he was losing, but he couldn’t shake it loose. There was too much else gone to shit around him.

  Wundawari’s shipment never made it through MTC in Jakarta, Wundawari herself was now banged up in an Indonesian jail on trumped-up holding charges until some scummy Seattle-based rights lawyer she used could wire across and get her out. The money was gone. Write it off, the Seattle guy advised dryly down the line, what you maybe claw back from the Maritime Transit guys in compensation, you’re going to be paying me in fees. Dougie might have called him on that one, but Wundawari wouldn’t do the time, and both he and Seattle knew it. She was too soft, came from Kuala Lumpur money and a whole creche of spoilt-brat connections down in the Freeport. She’d pay whatever Seattle wanted.

  On the street, things were no better. Alcatraz station were coming down hard and heavy all over the fucking place, big-ass RimSec interventions at levels those guys mostly didn’t bother with. He still couldn’t find out why. Some shit about a factory raft bust last night and the fallout, but none of his few bought-and-paid-for touches inside the RimSec machine ranked high enough to know any more than that. More importantly, they were too fucking scared of Alcatraz to risk sniffing around any closer. End result was, he couldn’t move shit anywhere north of Selby or west of the Boulevard, and even in the yards at Hunter Point, he was getting heat he didn’t need. And the border had been sticky for fucking months now. None of the gangs he knew could get more than the odd fence-bunny across, mostly strait-laced white girls out of the Dakotas that took fucking for ever to break in and even then didn’t play too well to popular demand.

  Mama was still coughing. Still wouldn’t take her fucking pills.

  Now Valdez was lining up in the wake of another too-hard-too-fast fuck-up, two spots floating nice and loose over open pockets, clean back-up angles everywhere, and then the eight ball doubled into the side, one of Valdez’s favourite cheap trick shots, he’d do it with his fucking eyes closed if he wanted. Another fifty bucks. He’d-

  But Valdez frowned instead and lifted his chin off the cue. Got up and came round the table to Dougie, eyes narrowed.

  ‘Hey, pengo mio. You say Elvira wasn’t working tonight?’ He nodded across the gloom to the bar. ‘Because if that ain’t work, then you got a problem.’

  So Dougie slant
ed a glance across the gloom to where Valdez was looking, and like the rest of it wasn’t fucking enough, here’s Elvie on her stool with her back to the bar, elbows down and tits cranked out in that red top he bought her back in May, legs making all kinds of slit-skirt angles on the frame of the stool, and all for this big black guy draped over the next stool and just looking her over like she’s fruit on some Meade Avenue street stall.

  Too fucking much.

  He hefted the cue up one-handed through his own grip, a half metre down from the tip where it thickened, reversed his hold and carried it low at his side across to the bar. Elvira saw him coming, made that dumb fucking face of hers and stopped gabbing. Dougie let the silence work for him, came on a couple more steps and locked to a halt a metre and half off the black guy’s shoulder.

  ‘That’s a mistake you’re making, pal,’ he said, breathing hard. Anger slurred through his tone like smeared paint on a cheap logo. ‘See, Elvira here isn’t working tonight. You want some cheap fucking pussy, you’d better come around and see her another fucking day. Got that?’

  ‘We’re just talking.’ The black guy’s tone was low and reasonable, almost bored. Weird fucking accent as well. He didn’t even look at Dougie. ‘If Elvira’s not working, I guess she’s free to do that, right?’

  Dougie felt the weight of the day come down on him like demolition.

  ‘I don’t think you’re paying attention,’ he told the guy tightly.

  And then the black guy did look at him, a sudden switch so his eyes collected Dougie’s stare like third base snapping up a low ball out at Monster Park.

  ‘No, I am,’ he said.

  It stopped Dougie dead in his tracks, knocked him back and kept the cue at his side, because at some level he couldn’t quite nail he knew this guy was actively looking for what came next. It felt like a skid, like ice under his wheels when he least expected it. He knew he had to keep going. No one much in the place tonight but Valdez was watching, so was the barkeep and a couple of others. Whatever went down, street-feed would have it out to everyone by morning, he had to fuck this guy up. But the ground under his feet had shifted, was no longer safe, he couldn’t fucking read this guy or what he’d do.