by Jay Allan
Baxter coaxed directions from his palm omni as pedestrians and bikes and rickshaws oozed past. I frowned, watching the crush of traffic reflected in a diner window. Tukwila’s people bore as many hues as its advertising—there were no self-segregating neighborhoods here; when you signed up for a samtown, you went wherever the database told you—and within the flood of skin tones, it was easy to pick out the angry-browed, brown-haired white guy hip-checking his way through the crowds.
“I think someone’s following us.”
“Yes,” Baxter said, “he probably just wants to beat us and take our money.”
I stretched my hands and wondered how much kung fu would come back to me in a pinch. Baxter could have warned me our entrepreneurial quest would include forays into samtowns.
At least it was a change. I’d set up several corporations over the years, some to obscure the transfer of my money from one identity to another, others for legitimate reasons, like attending parties to meet ladies in fancy dresses that squashed their chests into amazing shapes, and apart from the initial rush of world-conquering enthusiasm, every incorporation was a boring, stressful, patience-straining process. Call someone with money. Call your lawyer while that someone talks to his lawyer. Read through eighty identical applications for every position. Discuss, for seven consecutive hours, what you want from your name, and how it will look in the context of your market (mine and Baxter’s: NightVision Resources, decided after an all-night roundtable had reached the conclusion that “KnightVision” was too crusadery). In other words, if you’re opening a pet shop, you wait for the quote from your turtle distributor to arrive; if you’re opening a trading firm, wait for London to get back to you, then wait for Chengdu to open so you can get back to them with London’s response, then wait for them to wait to get back in touch with London.
In the meantime, kill self.
Baxter’s company was more of the same, only magnified by its international, interplanetary scope, its naive ambition, and its simple bigness. Since our mile-high meeting with Marcedes, and Baxter’s revelation of the true difficulty in operating in the Belt, we’d secured NVR’s upstart capital from Lee Jefferson, the woman behind Lasting Solutions—and the 44th-richest person on Earth. From the very start, I’d suspected she wanted to spread her influence beyond the atmosphere, and I’d been saving her for the late game, when our pitch would be most polished. And this time, I came armed with the ability to explain why we would succeed where others had not. She had agreed at our first meeting.
Naturally, that had set scores of smaller wheels in motion. Not all of them driving in the same direction. And the difference in scope between arranging my long-ago pet shop and in establishing an asteroid outfit was the difference between masturbation and a badly-refereed stadium orgy.
At least Baxter and I stayed out of the quotidian details. We were the scouts, the investigators, the rangers. Our realm was the legwork. Instantly, I’d discovered I missed being out in the turbulent fringes. Places like Tukwila.
Baxter snapped his omni shut. “There we are. Four blocks away.”
He laid out the route and I turned my shoulder and started crowdbreaking. Throughout the month of our partnership Baxter had cruised through everything with unshakable aloofness, but as we cleaved through the milling crowds of coffee drinkers, discount shoppers, drug seekers, and aimless wanderers, he looked utterly lost. It’d taken me half an hour to convince him you don’t take a minicar into samtowns. Most of the time you’re okay, but you never know when the spark of wealth will set off an roaring brushfire of jealous violence.
We turned a corner and plunged into a makeshift market of tarps, stands, stalls, and carts. Coffee and grilled meat perfumed the air. A thin white man in a long dirty coat glided up to us. A toothpaste ad flashed on the back of his hand.
“Smoke?” he chanted in a mantra. His eyes shifted back and forth like a shark on the prowl. In front of a veggie stand—its cardboard signage promised it was homegrown on local rooftops—two black guys steered us toward their pile of celery, broccoli, and tomatoes.
“I thought no one was supposed to have a job here,” Baxter said.
“They don’t have to. But our generous uncle only covers room, food, doctors, and school, not the stuff selling on that guy’s face,” I said, jerking my chin at the microbike ad playing on a passing dealer’s forehead. “Plus you need all these waiters and bartenders and tattoo artists...it might be the dole, but there’s a lot of business going on here nonetheless.”
“These vendors of fruits and drugs, do they pay taxes?”
“Why? You thinking of moving in?”
“Things are much different on Mars.”
“Yeah, well Mars wasn’t here when the shit went down.”
“I don’t think it’s reasonable to be angry that another planet didn’t suffer the same way yours did.”
I glanced back at him, unable, as always, to tell if he was jerking me around. Taking in the street behind him, I saw no sign of the brown-haired man. I turned in time to smash my face into the shoulder of a passing Frankenstein.
The man towered over me reproachfully. “You weren’t watching where you were going.”
“Obviously.” I grabbed Baxter’s hand and ran, dodging kids involved in chases of their own, and made an awkward leap over a blanket splayed with bootlegged movies packaged with home-printed covers. The tall man stared sadly after us. I slowed to a walk, dropping Baxter’s hand. The market evaporated. To our sides, the canyon of federal housing stopped cold, replaced by warehouses and cranes and pitched factory roofs. Most of these were stained with the grime of airborne pollutants, clear archaeological evidence they predated the samtown apartments behind us.
There was no sign on the sprawling factory, no billboards on its dirty gray walls. Just a little steam trickling from its roof vents, and once we were cleared through its locked side door, a smell you never forget: gasoline. After five minutes cooling our heels in the waiting room, a bald man wearing glasses filled the doorway.
“You must be Baxter and Rob,” Felix Golbez said, in the highly informal yet completely uninsulting manner residents of the Pacific Northwest had possessed for as long as I’d known them. “Hear you want to buy my novelty shop.”
They were direct, too. Funny how regional differences preserved themselves through decades of telecommunication, internet, and globalization. Back East, it would have taken us twenty minutes to get to why we’d actually come here.
“Is that what this is?” I smiled. “A novelty shop?”
Felix waved us toward the door, the flesh of his arm wobbling. “For now.”
The factory floor showed little sign it had once been a vital organ of the vacunautical manufacturing industry. Not that I had any goddamn clue what that would look like: shiny silver rockets hanging from the walls? Robots shooting lasers at each other? In some ways, it’s easier to perceive the past, the present, and the future when you only live for 80-120 years. You’re born into the present. Everything before you is ancient history. On your passage to the future, you might go through a couple upheavals along the way, but it’s not so far separated in time to be completely unrecognizable from the “present” of your birthtime you carry with you in your head. If you were born in the early 20th century, you’d reach its end and say, “We thought rocket ships would be shiny with trim little fins. Instead, we got the Space Shuttle, and it was white and it had wings like a plane.”
Me? I was born to a time that didn’t know what space was. We didn’t know what air was! We imagined we’d someday soar on it by strapping wings to our arms and flapping. Two thousand years later, men lift off in balloons. Then biplanes. Then prop planes, jets, unmanned rockets, the Shuttle, EOJs, nannyjets, space elevators, then lumps of ignoble matter that are designed never to deal with atmosphere to begin with. At each age, I formed an expectation, and each time it was dashed. And then it was gone, buried in the past, shoved aside by a new vision.
And this happens not jus
t with technology, but with politics. Society. Economies. Morality. One big smear of time, with expectations of the future confused with memories of how that future had turned out—those memories, in turn, falsened by nostalgia, perspective, and the biological unreliability of the brain—until you can’t say for sure whether any of it was real at all.
In the shop, I’d fogged out. I did that sometimes. We stood on a catwalk overlooking large pieces of metal stamping other pieces of metal into finer shapes. Human welders blasted sparks at each other and yelled about it. Felix gestured over the whirrs, clanks, and hisses.
“—like the place as it is. Don’t see why I’d want to change it up.”
“You’ve heard of money?” Baxter asked over the roar of machinery.
“I got enough for my family,” Felix said. Another perverse Northwestern attitude, that disinterest in the ends. They call it “the means” for a reason. I wanted to show him the Wetta penthouse, the stately isolation of Marcedes’ officejet, and then see what he thought of real wealth. He smiled and shrugged. “We get by. It’s artisanal.”
I laughed. Below us, his machines and employees went on assembling internal combustion-driven automobiles. Illegal in just about every developed country on Earth. Felix skated by, our reports said, by selling the replicas for “novelty purposes,” and by selling the keys to the ignitions through a separate business.
“I don’t use the whole grounds,” Felix allowed. “I could maybe lease you part of it.”
“Converting it back to its original usage lets us skip assembling a new factory from scratch,” Baxter said. “Our prime goal is speed.”
“We have to be fast like a juiced-up Camaro,” I added.
“Camaro?” Felix laughed through his nose. “You a history buff?”
“Sort of.” We ambled along the catwalk and I stopped dead as the finished products swung into view—oversized, inefficient, and comically resource-intensive. “That is a 1965 Ford Mustang.”
“A replica,” Felix corrected automatically. He drew his chin back, inspecting me. “Want to hop behind the wheel?”
“Since 1964,” I said. Baxter cleared his throat and speared me in the ribs with two fingers. We clacked down the grated metal stairs toward the dozen-odd cars. Felix popped the Mustang’s door with an “after you” sweep. I settled behind the wheel and inhaled deeply, but the new-car smell wasn’t there. In the 1960s I’d been, quite independent of what was going on around me, experimenting with a possession-free lifestyle, and by the time I started buying things again I’d forgotten how much I wanted one of these. I stomped the gas, which of course did nothing. “Vroom!”
“I have no idea why they were obsoleted,” Baxter said dryly. I cranked the wheel back and forth, toggled the dials of the silent radio.
“What kind of mileage does this get?” I hollered out the window.
“Except for real purists,” Felix said, leaning an elbow on the glass, “we tweak the engine. Puts this one about sixty city, eighty highway.”
“Vroom! Ha ha ha!”
Baxter tapped his nails on the glass. “Rob.”
I spilled out of the car. “I’ll take it!”
Felix shrugged his beefy shoulders. “It’s already spoken for.”
“That’s a shame.” On the other side of the wall, a half dozen men welded steel, schlepped tires, and kept tabs on the relentless thrum of machines. The last arm of the American automotive industry. I slapped the Mustang’s roof. “Thanks for showing us around, man. Let us know if you change your mind, yeah?”
“You bet.” Felix shook our hands, the first time he’d done so, and showed us out.
“That, in case you were wondering,” Baxter said outside, “is exactly what makes you more valuable to us than all the lawyers, MBAs, and technoshamans in the world.”
“So valuable I haven’t been paid yet.”
He blinked up at the drizzling clouds. “Two weeks, we estimate. After three thousand years, is that so long to wait to find out who you are?” He blinked some more. “Well, is it?”
“I’ll find a way to suffer through it.”
We left the oasis of industry for the samtown block towers and the tens of thousands of government-subsidized stuff-buyers who lived there. Lately the Contract Party had been making so much noise about finally booting them off the public tit it left me with the rather insane impression they were jealous of the poorest people in the country. I didn’t see how it mattered in the slightest. Everyone on either side would be dead within a hundred years while their grandchildren changed the nation in ways that would make them spin in their graves.
I grinned at Baxter. We had Felix in the bag.
Our minicar purred through the outskirts of Tukwila. At our south Seattle office, police hung around the lobby, interviewing Sammi the doorman.
“I’m so sorry,” she called to us. “His appointment checked out.”
Baxter and I exchanged looks. After a short argument with two city cops, we were let upstairs. Our office looked like it’d been picked up and shaken. File cabinets knocked across the floor. Drawers and paperwork spilled over every surface. Computer terms smashed, the fragments of their screens glittering on the short carpet. A single ketchup handprint dribbled down the far wall—they’d even raided the kitchenette.
“Well, this is ridiculously old-fashioned.” I hmm’d. “I told you we were being followed.”
“I am going to separate their insides from their outsides,” Baxter said, stock-still. One of the cops raised his eyebrows. Baxter was so deep in the throes of the Furies he didn’t notice. “They’ve been getting away with murder for years. It’s time to hit back.”
The escape was as sudden as a light snapping off—one night an airlock malfunctioned, drawing off security, and Arthur, quick as always, browbeat him into running away on the spot. Can you believe that? They just ran off! With no plan whatsoever! And do you know what he carried? Arthur, the gun, and some money pilfered from the scientists and lab techs.
I mean, really, did he think he was a cowboy? An outlaw? Loping through the rocks and dust, path lit by stars and two ugly little moons, he didn’t know what he was going to do when he reached the city—how little they knew then!—but if there was anyone on Mars who would help them, it would be in New Houston.
3
“We are now going to do illegal things.” Baxter stood behind his desk, eyes ready to combust with an anger that still hadn’t cooled hours later. He’d left the detritus of the smash-and-grab on the floor. Like he wanted a physical reminder of this latest insult—not that I had any clue about the ones preceding it. Baxter’s reaction, however, piqued my suspicions.
The police had taken statements and scanned the place, then moved on to real crimes. The total lack of evidence as to the criminals’ identity did nothing to dissuade Baxter from preparing his counterstrike against them.
“If you’re not prepared to do illegal things with me, you should leave and not tell anyone about this. For the sake of your integrity. If you don’t have any of that, then do it for the sake of your health. I don’t like squealers.”
I couldn’t help grinning. I had a soft spot for anarchy. To my left, Deng the graybeard PI spat a piece of thumbnail at the mess of papers and electronics. To my right, former kickboxer/kali monk and present-day security consultant Pete Gutierrez made no move at all.
“Silence means assent,” Baxter said. “No wriggling out on technicalities.” He offered a rare smile and, having twice sniffed the room for bugs, turned his omni face-up on his scuffed desk. His fingers danced across its surface and a web of data resolved in the space above its screen. Within the hologram, a 2D of the two office-trashers showed them entering the lobby and speaking briefly with Sammi. Chins tucked down, faces hidden by rain-soaked derbies, there was little to glean but their builds, which to the surprise of none were apish. We hadn’t had any cameras in our office and Deng’s DNA vacs had turned up nothing useful. All we had to show for ourselves were Sammi’s vague d
escriptions, a few seconds of medium-range video footage, and that single ketchup-print left by a gloved hand. Baxter tapped another file and an array of 3D mugshots bloomed above the terminal.
“This isn’t enough for your police to work with, but we have resources they don’t. By comparing the build and body dynamics of these men to all video records of known criminals in the greater Seattle area, we have narrowed the field considerably.”
Deng withdrew his thumbnail from his mouth. “Police know you have their vids?”
“I doubt it.”
“Just checking.”
Baxter tapped up more files, mostly plain text. “Each man’s associates, hangouts, and, when applicable, residence. Mr. Deng, you and your associates are tasked with narrowing the field to the guilty pair. Once that’s done, Mr. Gutierrez will assist Mr. Dunbar and myself in the interrogation.”
“Mr. Dunbar?” I said.
Baxter narrowed his eyes at me. “That’s you, yes.” He tapped his terminal and the holo compressed to a single fading point. “I know these men work for the Hemiterran Research Corporation, AKA HemiCo. It’s your job to find proof.”
“Done,” Deng said. Gutierrez shook our hands. Baxter transferred his intel to Deng’s omni, chatted about brute force, then saw them out. I sat on his desk, kicking my heels against its dented side.
“How did you analyze all that video already?”
“Prayer,” Baxter said.
“What makes you so sure they’re HemiCo?”
“Earthside companies don’t do things like this. HemiCo’s spent too much time outside this planet’s gravity—and its laws. These are the people who started the Cor-Wars, for the sake of Jesus Christ.”
I snorted. “That was Forsun Interplanetary.”