“You’ve been casting holograms again.”
She shrugged. Her face looked positively ghostly under the pale planet. She said, when we reached the artificial lights of the city, “I did meet two friends of yours recently, Lewis and Ann.”
“The Singers?”
She nodded.
“Oh, I don’t really know them well.”
“They seem to know a lot about you. Perhaps through that other Singer, Hawk.”
“Oh,” I said again. “Did they say how he was?”
“I read that he was recovering about two months back. But nothing since then.”
“That’s about all I know too,” I said.
“The only time I’ve ever seen him,” Maud said, “was right after I pulled him out.”
Arty and I had gotten out of the lobby before Hawk actually finished. The next day on the news-tapes I learned that when his Song was over, he shrugged out of his jacket, dropped his pants, and walked back into the pool.
The fire-fighter crew suddenly woke up; people began running around and screaming: he’d been rescued, seventy percent of his body covered with second and third degree burns. I’d been industriously not thinking about it.
“You pulled him out?”
“Yes. I was in the helicopter that landed on the roof,” Maud said. “I thought you’d be impressed to see me.”
“Oh,” I said. “How did you get to pull him out?”
“Once you got going, Arty’s security managed to jam the elevator service above the seventy-first floor, so we didn’t get to the lobby till after you were out of the building. That’s when Hawk tried to—”
“But it was you actually saved him, though?”
“The firemen in that neighborhood hadn’t had a fire in twelve years! I don’t think they even knew how to operate the equipment. I had my boys foam the pool, then I waded in and dragged him—”
“Oh,” I said again. I had been trying hard, almost succeeding, these eleven months. I wasn’t there when it happened. It wasn’t my affair. Maud was saying:
“We thought we might have gotten a lead on you from him. But when I got him to the shore, he was completely out, just a mass of open, running—”
“I should have known the Special Services uses Singers too,” I said. “Everyone else does. The Word changes today, doesn’t it? Lewis and Ann didn’t pass on what the new one is?”
“I saw them yesterday, and the Word doesn’t change for another eight hours. Besides, they wouldn’t tell me, anyway.” She glanced at me and frowned. “They really wouldn’t.”
“Let’s go have some sodas,” I said. “We’ll make small talk, and listen carefully to each other, while we affect an air of nonchalance; you will try to pick up things that will make it easier to catch me; I will listen for things you let slip that might make it easier for me to avoid you.”
“Um-hm.” She nodded.
“Why did you contact me in that bar, anyway?”
Eyes of ice: “I told you, we simply travel in the same circles. We’re quite likely to be in the same bar on the same night.”
“I guess that’s just one of the things I’m not supposed to understand, huh?”
Her smile was appropriately ambiguous. I didn’t push it.
It was a very dull afternoon. I couldn’t repeat one exchange from the nonsense we babbled over the cherry peaked mountains of whipped cream. We both exerted so much energy to keep up the appearance of being amused, I doubt either one of us could see our way to picking up anything meaningful; if anything meaningful was said.
She left. I brooded some more on the charred phoenix.
The Steward of The Glacier called me into the kitchen to ask about a shipment of contraband milk (The Glacier makes all its own ice cream) that I had been able to wangle on my last trip to Earth (it’s amazing how little progress there has been in dairy farming over the last ten years; it was depressingly easy to hornswoggle that bumbling Vermonter) and under the white lights and great plastic churning vats, while I tried to get things straightened out, he made some comment about the Heist Cream Emperor; that didn’t do any good.
By the time the evening crowd got there, and the moog was making music and the crystal walls were blazing; and the floor show—a new addition that week—had been cajoled into going on anyway (a trunk of costumes had gotten lost in shipment [or swiped, but I wasn’t about to tell them that]), and wandering through the tables I, personally, had caught a very grimy little girl, obviously out of her head on morph, trying to pick up a customer’s pocketbook from the back of a chair—I just caught her by the wrist, made her let go, and led her to the door, daintily, while she blinked at me with dilated eyes and the customer never even knew—and the floor show, having decided what the hell, were doing their act au naturel, and everyone was having just a high old time, I was feeling really bad.
I went outside, sat on the wide steps, and growled when I had to move aside to let people in or out. About the seventy-fifth growl, the person I growled at stopped and boomed down at me, “I thought I’d find you if I looked hard enough! I mean if I really looked.”
I looked at the hand that was flapping at my shoulder, followed the arm up to a black turtleneck. where there was a beefy, bald, grinning head. “Arty,” I said, “what are… ?” But he was still flapping and laughing with impervious Gemiitlichkeit.
“You wouldn’t believe the time I had getting a picture of you, boy. Had to bribe one out of the Triton Special Services Department. That quick change bit. Great gimmick. Just great!” The Hawk sat down next to me and dropped his hand on my knee. “Wonderful place you got here. I like it, like it a lot.” Small bones in veined dough. “But not enough to make you an offer on it yet. You’re learning fast there, though. I can tell you’re learning fast. I’m going to be proud to be able to say I was the one who gave you your first big break.” His hand came away and he began to knead it onto the other. “If you’re going to move into the big time, you have to have at least one foot planted firmly on the right side of the law. The whole idea is to make yourself indispensable to the good people; once that’s done, a good crook has the keys to all the treasure houses in the system. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”
“Arty,” I said, “do you think the two of us should be seen together here… ?”
The Hawk held his hand above his lap and joggled it with a deprecating motion. “Nobody can get a picture of us. I got my men all around. I never go anywhere in public without my security. Heard you’ve been looking into the security business yourself,” which was true. “Good idea. Very good. I like the way you’re handling yourself.”
“Thanks. Arty, I’m not feeling too hot this evening. I came out here to get some air…”
Arty’s hand fluttered again. “Don’t worry, I won’t hang around. You’re right. We shouldn’t be seen. Just passing by and wanted to say hello. Just hello.” He got up. “That’s all.” He started down the steps.
“Arty?”
He looked back.
“Sometime soon you will come back; and that time you will want to buy out my share of The Glacier, because I’ll have gotten too big; and I won’t want to sell because I’ll think I’m big enough to fight you. So we’ll be enemies for a while. You’ll try to kill me. I’ll try to kill you.”
On his face, first the frown of confusion; then, the indulgent smile. “I see you’ve caught on to the idea of hologramic information. Very good. Good. It’s the only way to outwit Maud. Make sure all your information relates to the whole scope of the situation. It’s the only way to outwit me too.” He smiled, started to turn, but thought of something else. “If you can fight me off long enough, and keep growing, keep your security in tiptop shape, eventually we’ll get to the point where it’ll be worth both our whiles to work together again. If you can just hold out, we’ll be friends again. Someday. You just watch. Just wait.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
The Hawk looked at his watch. “Well.
Goodbye.” I thought he was going to leave finally. But he glanced up again. “Have you got the new Word?”
“That’s right,” I said. “It went out tonight. What is it?”
The Hawk waited till the people coming down the steps were gone. He looked hastily about, then leaned towards me with hands cupped at his mouth, rasped, “Pyrite,” and winked hugely. “I just got it from a gal who got it direct from Colette” (one of the three Singers of Triton). Then he turned, jounced down the steps, and shouldered his way into the crowds passing on the strip.
I sat there mulling through the year till I had to get up and walk. All walking does to my depressive moods is add the reinforcing rhythm of paranoia. By the time I was coming back, I had worked out a dilly of a delusional system: The Hawk had already begun to weave some security ridden plot about me which ended when we were all trapped in some dead end alley, and trying to get aid I called out, “Pyrite!” which would turn out not to be the Word at all but served to identify me for the man in the dark gloves with the gun/grenades/gas.
There was a cafeteria on the corner. In the light from the window, clustered over the wreck by the curb was a bunch of nasty-grimies (a la Triton: chains around the wrists, bumble-bee tattoo on cheek, high heel boots on those who could afford them). Straddling the smashed headlight was the little morph-head I had ejected earlier from The Glacier.
On a whim I went up to her. “Hey?”
She looked at me from under hair like trampled hay, eyes all pupil.
“You get the new Word yet?”
She rubbed her nose, already scratch red. “Pyrite,” she said. “It just came down about an hour ago.”
“Who told you?”
She considered my question. “I got it from a guy who says he got it from a guy who came in this evening from New York who picked it up there from a Singer named Hawk.”
The three grimies nearest made a point of not looking at me. Those further away let themselves glance.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Thanks.”
Occam’s Razor, along with any real information on how security works, hones away most such paranoia. Pyrite. At a certain level in my line of work, paranoia’s just an occupational disease. At least I was certain that Arty (and Maud) probably suffered from it as much as I did.
The lights were out on The Glacier’s marquee. Then I remembered what I had left inside and ran up the stairs.
The door was locked. I pounded on the glass a couple of times, but everyone had gone home. And the thing that made it worse was that I could see it sitting on the counter of the coat-check alcove under the orange bulb. The steward had probably put it there, thinking I might arrive before “everybody left. Tomorrow at noon Ho Chi Eng had to pick up his reservation for the Marigold Suite on the Interplanetary Liner The Platinum Swan, which left at one-thirty for Bellona. And there behind the glass doors of The Glacier, it waited with the proper wig, as well as the epicanthic folds that would halve Mr. Eng’s slow eyes of jet.
I actually thought of breaking in. But the more practical solution was to get the hotel to wake me at nine and come in with the cleaning man. I turned around and started down the steps; and the thought struck me, and made me terribly sad, so that I blinked and smiled just from reflex: it was probably just as well to leave it there till morning, because there was nothing in it that wasn’t mine, anyway.
Aye, and Gomorrah, by Samuel R. Delany
And came down in Paris:
Where we raced along the Rue de Médicis with Bo and Lou and Muse inside the fence, Kelly and me outside, making faces through the bars, making noise, making the Luxembourg Gardens roar at two in the morning. Then climbed out, and down to the square in front of St. Sulpice where Bo tried to knock me into the fountain.
At which point Kelly noticed what was going on around us, got an ashcan cover, and ran into the pissoir, banging the walls. Five guys scooted out; even a big pissoir only holds four.
A very blond young man put his hand on my arm and smiled. "Don't you think, Spacer, that you … people should leave?"
I looked at his hand on my blue uniform. "Est-ce que tu es un frelk?"
His eyebrows rose, then he shook his head. "Unefrelk," he corrected. "No. I am not. Sadly for me. You look as though you may once have been a man. But now …" He smiled. "You have nothing for me now. The police." He nodded across the street where I noticed the gendarmerie for the first time. "They don't bother us. You are strangers, though …"
But Muse was already yelling, "Hey, come on! Let's get out of here, huh?" And left. And went up again.
And came down in Houston:
"God damn!" Muse said. "Gemini Flight Control—you mean this is where it all started? Let's get out of here, please!"
So took a bus out through Pasadena, then the monoline to Galveston, and were going to take it down the Gulf, but Lou found a couple with a pickup truck—
"Glad to give you a ride, Spacers. You people up there on them planets and things, doing all that good work for the government."
—who were going south, them and the baby, so we rode in the back for two hundred and fifty miles of sun and wind.
"You think they're frelks?" Lou asked, elbowing me. "I bet they're frelks. They're just waiting for us give 'em the come-on."
"Cut it out. They're a nice, stupid pair of country kids."
"That don't mean they ain't frelks!"
"You don't trust anybody, do you?"
"No."
And finally a bus again that rattled us through Brownsville and across the border into Matamoros where we staggered down the steps into the dust and the scorched evening with a lot of Mexicans and chickens and Texas Gulf shrimp fishermen—who smelled worst—and we shouted the loudest. Forty-three whores—I counted—had turned out for the shrimp fishermen, and by the time we had broken two of the windows in the bus station they were all laughing. The shrimp fishermen said they wouldn't buy us no food but would get us drunk if we wanted, 'cause that was the custom with shrimp fishermen. But we yelled, broke another window; then, while I was lying on my back on the telegraph office steps, singing, a woman with dark lips bent over and put her hands on my cheeks. "You are very sweet." Her rough hair fell forward. "But the men, they are standing around and watching you. And that is taking uptime. Sadly, their time is our money. Spacer, do you not think you … people should leave?"
I grabbed her wrist. "¡Usted!" I whispered. "¿Usted es una frelka?"
"Frelko en español." She smiled and patted the sunburst that hung from my belt buckle. "Sorry. But you have nothing that … would be useful to me. It is too bad, for you look like you were once a woman, no? And I like women, too …"
I rolled off the porch.
"Is this a drag, or is this a drag!" Muse was shouting. "Come on! Let's go!"
We managed to get back to Houston before dawn, somehow. And went up.
And came down in Istanbul:
That morning it rained in Istanbul.
At the commissary we drank our tea from pear-shaped glasses, looking out across the Bosphorus. The Princess Islands lay like trash heaps before the prickly city.
"Who knows their way in this town?" Kelly asked.
"Aren't we going around together?" Muse demanded. "I thought we were going around together."
"They held up my check at the purser's office," Kelly explained. "I'm flat broke. I think the purser's got it in for me," and shrugged. "Don't want to, but I'm gong to have to hunt up a rich frelk and come on friendly," went back to the tea; then noticed how heavy the silence had become. "Aw, come on now! You gape at me like that and I'll bust every bone in that carefully-conditioned-from-puberty body of yours. Hey you!" meaning me. "Don't give me that holier-than-thou gawk like you never went with no frelk!"
It was starting.
"I'm not gawking," I said and got quietly mad.
The longing, the old longing.
Bo laughed to break tensions. "Say, last time I was in Istanbul—about a year before I joined up with this platoon�
��I remember we were coming out of Taksim Square down Istiqlal. Just past all the cheap movies we found a little passage lined with flowers. Ahead of us were two other spacers. It's a market in there, and farther down they got fish, and then a courtyard with oranges and candy and sea urchins and cabbage. But flowers in front. Anyway, we noticed something funny about the spacers. It wasn't their uniforms; they were perfect. The haircuts: fine. It wasn't till we heard them talking—they were a man and woman dressed up like spacers, trying to pick up frelks! Imagine, queer for frelks!"
"Yeah," Lou said. "I seen that before. There were a lot of them in Rio."
"We beat hell out of them two," Bo concluded. "We got them in a side street and went to town!"
Muse's tea glass clicked on the counter. "From Taksim down Istiqlal till you get to the flowers? Now why didn't you say that's where the frelks were, huh?" A smile on Kelly's face would have made that okay. There was no smile.
"Hell," Lou said, "nobody ever had to tell me where to look. I go out in the street and frelks smell me coming. I can spot 'em halfway along Piccadilly. Don't they have nothing but tea in this place? Where can you get a drink?"
Bo grinned. "Moslem country, remember? But down at the end of the Flower Passage there're a lot of little bars with green doors and marble counters where you can get a liter of beer for about fifteen cents in lira. And they're all these stands selling deep-fat-fried bugs and pig's gut sandwiches—"
"You ever notice how frelks can put it away? I mean liquor, not … pig's guts."
And launched off into a lot of appeasing stories. We ended with the one about the frelk some spacer tried to roll who announced: "There are two things I go for. One is spacers; the other is a good fight …"
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 27