by Paul Moomaw
“Hypothetically speaking, of course.”
“Oh, of course. And it also might be that some of those governments might not want others of those governments to know that they were engaged in such a search. And they might hire a very private party to do the searching for them. They might even offer such a searcher money for this hypothetical service. A wealthy government such as the Americans, for instance, might offer something on the order of $75,000 just for accepting the job, and perhaps an equal amount upon its successful completion.”
I kept my mouth shut. It didn't look as if I could tell him anything he didn't already know, anyway.
“Now, my government is not a wealthy government, Mister Blue.” Beg shook his head woefully from side to side. He reached over and fingered the sleeve of my jacket.
“Silk, isn't it? So very nice. My country was once renowned as a land of silk.” He spread the lapels of his own seedy jacket. “No more, as you can see. We must sell all of our silk to wealthy nations, like you and the Brazilians. But although my government is very penurious in dealing with such of its agents as myself, it might undergo a remarkable transformation in the case of a hypothetical person such as we have been discussing."
He pulled out a long, amber cigarette and fired it up, and revealed the source of the cloying perfume that seemed to surround him wherever he went. It made me want to gag.
“Do you suppose you could move downwind?” I asked. “That stuff is a little more than I can handle."
“Of course,” Beg said. “So very sorry.” He got up and moved to an empty table on the other side of mine.
“Now,” he said, taking a long drag on the cigarette, “assuming this hypothetical missing person, and a hypothetical searcher, my government might be willing to offer somewhat more than $75,000, perhaps even double that, in the case of a fortuitous mis-delivery.”
“With an equal amount at the other end."
“Oh, absolutely.” He offered me a slow, conspiratorial wink. “And in such a delicate matter, it would of course be especially desirable that such a fortuitous mis-delivery not be connected in any way to any official bodies."
“Such as your government?"
Beg threw back his head and laughed. It was a loud, hard laugh that shook his ample midsection.
“Oh, you are so perceptive, Mister Blue. You can obviously see that there are wheels within wheels, orbits within orbits, and invisible entanglements everywhere.” He wheezed a little from the laughter and touched a finger to the corner of his eye.
“At any rate,” he said, all business again, “such would be the offer, if we were discussing anything other than a hypothetical situation."
“That could be very tempting if such a hypothetical person really existed."
“It would certainly tempt me,” Beg said with a rueful smile. “Irresistibly. But I, of course, am not a hypothetical person. I am only a poor, hard working representative of an impoverished, overpopulated country."
I finished off my drink and stood up.
“It really is a shame that I still don't, of course, have the slightest idea of what you're talking about."
“Hypothetically speaking, I'm sure, Mister Blue.” He smiled happily, but at the same time he gave me that look again, the one the rollerbabies didn't see. He was still smiling, and smoking, and looking as I walked away.
I left the Wall and grabbed a subway back to my plex. I have a scrambler on my vidcom, and I wanted a private talk with Stuart.
It strikes me sometimes how little I know about the man who keeps me in life's little luxuries. He lives in the hills above Santa Fe, or says he does. I only know that when we meet, although it's always in that city, we never meet at his home or in an office, but in a restaurant, or in the hotel room he always reserves at his expense at the La Fonda. I don't even know if Stuart is his first or last name, for that matter. And yet I got my taste in good whisky, preferably Scotch, from him. And my fondness for silk and linen and other natural fibers. I appreciate his reserve, as well. I like distance. I learned its value on my seventh birthday, when a party crasher with a long knife snuffed the life from my mother, and my father, and whatever part of me had ever wanted to get close to people.
Stuart was home, or wherever he is when he takes a call, his regular features composed in a careful smile that still managed to reach all the way to his pleasant, gray-blue eyes, blond hair always just right without looking just-so, and the same, perfectly tailored charcoal suit. Sometimes I think he only owns one suit.
I told him I had dealt with Nordeen, and everything was ready to go.
“I ran into that Chandra Beg guy again, too.” I told Stuart about the encounter, and Beg's hypothetical offer to a hypothetical me.
“Interesting,” Stuart said. “I did some checking around. There's nobody named Chandra Beg in this country right now, as far as the immigration people know. And all of the Indian government's agents, official or otherwise, are accounted for. There's not a one in Los Angeles. There was a Chandra Beg in New Delhi, until about two months ago, but he wasn't with the Ministry of Science. He was with a security agency.”
“Was?”
Stuart nodded. “Was. He had been under what amounted to house arrest for several months. I couldn't find out why. Two months ago he and the man who was supposed to be guarding him disappeared. They found the guard floating face down in the Ganges. Nobody has seen Beg since.”
He held up a holocube portrait. “This is my Chandra Beg,” he said.
“Mine, too.” The big nose and the little mouth, puckered up like the iris of a space-lock, were unmistakable.
“I'll let some people know,” Stuart said. “Enjoy Mexico."
I was packing when I smelled Beg again. I picked up my jacket, which I had tossed onto a chair when I first got home. It stank of Beg's perfumed cigarettes. I had to run it through the quick-clean twice before the smell disappeared completely.
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Chapter 3
The Greater Los Angeles Institute of Accelerated Learning had seen better days. Brain dumps were developed originally for government use, officially to polish the language skills of diplomats, but mostly to prepare spies, covert agents and soldiers on guerrilla expeditions. The need for that died down as a world beaten up by its own foolishness and pollution realized it could no longer afford even low-level wars. The money was needed for simple survival as the air got dirtier and the oceans began the inexorable rise that everyone had predicted and no one had really believed in. The denial finally ended when coastal cities started washing away. It is hard to stick your head in the sand when the sand lies under six feet of water. For a while, as the technology went public, brain dumps became a fad, and people vied to impress their friends with sudden increases in knowledge. But the technique is expensive and causes some initial disorientation and discomfort; and the new knowledge fades away after about a year, although no one knows quite why. These days, brain dumps are used when necessary—there will always be spies, after all—and the people who provide them no longer live in fat city.
The Los Angeles Institute was located at the upper boundary of what was the hillside town of San Gabriel until the middle of this century, when an earthquake send most of the buildings sliding down into the bottom of the valley, and the government of Greater Los Angeles annexed what was left as the price of helping the residents re-build. Now it was mainly working-class plexes, with a string of shops along the main street, and a couple of gone-to-seed parks. There was no subway service. The ground was too shifty. Even some of the buildings had developed a tilt that, in an age less hungry for housing, would probably have resulted in their being torn down. To get there, you could take a bus, which was slow, crowded and cheap, or drop some major cash and hire an aircar. Although I take advantage of Stuart's generous pay to give myself some small luxuries, I am basically a frugal man. On the other hand, the government was giving me an expense account. I hired the aircar, but I compromised with my frugal half
by promising myself I would take the bus back to town.
The Institute faced one of the parks. The building was a tall cylinder of shiny blue plastic with no visible windows, the product of a fairly recent fad for walls that appeared solid from the outside, but sported large expanses of visalloy that, when an electrical current was passed through it, developed a greater or lesser degree of transparency, depending on how many volts you used. The aircar deposited me on a broad concrete terrace in front of the building.
“Am I to wait?” it asked in a dulcet-toned, female voice. I told it no, and it waited patiently for me to punch in my credit account number a second time, chuckling to itself while it confirmed that this number was the same as the one I had given it when we started. “Thank you. I hope you had a nice ride,” the voice said in a husky purr. The safety harness unlocked and slid away, the door opened with a whisper, and I stepped out into the smoggy air.
“Please step away from the vehicle,” the aircar commanded, this time with an authoritative male voice. I turned and walked across the concrete to the Institute's entrance, and the aircar rose buzzing from the ground and beetled off to its next destination.
Inside, the main floor was mostly open space, designed to impress, with a wide expanse of blue marble that you had to cross to get to the check-in counter on the other side. A single staff member lounged behind the counter, looking bored. He wore an electric blue, one-piece suit that I took to be the company uniform; but he had combated the enforced conformity of dress by having decorative surgery on his face. The skin was a field of red, blue and yellow diamonds, like a harlequin suit. One of his over-sized eyes was brilliant green, and the other fluorescent orange. A lot of people are making that kind of surgical statement these days. I don't really understand their motivation. Maybe I have just never been that bored with my life.
The man straightened up and smiled as I approached, and his eyes began to spin slowly in their sockets, one clockwise, the other counter-clockwise. I had to admit it was an impressive display. “Can you shift those things into reverse?” I asked.
His smile widened. “Sure,” he said. The eyes came to a halt, and then each started turning in the opposite direction. “I got the idea once when I visited the Twentieth Century Pavilion. They had a holovid from the fifties of a woman dancing with nothing on except tassels on her nipples, and she could make them do that.” He glanced down at a screen imbedded in the counter. “You will be Mr. Blue?"
I nodded, and he stepped out from behind the counter. “I'll show you to the learning chamber,” he said, motioning me to follow as he headed toward a bank of elevators. “You'll love the view, unless the pollution is too bad today."
“It's been worse.” I followed him into the elevator, the door closed, and we rose silently to what the numbers glowing on an overhead panel indicated was the thirtieth, and top, floor. The door opened again and we stepped out into another expanse of marble and steel. The far wall was all visalloy, offering a full view of sky and the brown hills that wrinkled their way east toward the desert.
The learning chamber itself was smaller, with gray carpet and pale blue walls, but its outside wall was also of visalloy, curved into a giant bay window, and facing west toward the ocean. A recliner chair sat on the floor right at the window, offering the occupant a hundred and eighty degree view.
“Grab a seat,” my guide said. “Your teacher will be with you in just a few minutes. She's finishing up with someone else right now.” He nodded and left the room.
I sat down and looked around. I had ocean in front of me, a piece of the Greenhouse Wall visible to the left, and to the right, a view of the Greater Los Angeles Gliderport. A glider perched at the top of the launch track, which made a long, gleaming arc, swooping down from the top of the mountain until it almost touched the sea, and then curving up again toward the sky. As I watched, the glider tilted its nose down and began to move along the track, picking up speed as it dropped into the curve at the bottom of the track, and then flinging itself into the air, where it seemed almost to hover for the few moments before the booster jets cut in, then climbing steeply. I rode my first glider when I was a child, and I still get a thrill, watching them or riding in them. They bring out the child in me—the anticipation as the nose goes down just before the launch, the pressing of gravity at the bottom of the curving track, the shove of the boosters, and then the wonderful silence when the glider reaches altitude and the engines shut down, coming on only occasionally and briefly after that to keep the glider in its path. You can have the suborbital rockets and the intercontinental tube trains. They're fast, but sterile. Gliders make you feel like a bird.
I watched the glider climb. As it dwindled to a speck and disappeared, the door to the learning chamber opened again, and a young woman entered, wearing a trim, one piece suit and, as far as I could tell, the face she was born with. “Are you ready?” she asked. I nodded, and she began the preparations.
Nothing gets dumped in a brain dump. They don't open up your head and pour the information in. The process is simple, if unsettling even for the experienced dumpee. First they give you a sweet-flavored cocktail of drugs guaranteed to leave you happy and unconcerned about what might happen next. The tech was preparing mine now. It was blue, with red swirls. It probably could just as easily have been clear, but I suppose that in learning, as in so many things, presentation is important.
After you have settled into a comfortable glow, they inject you with their proprietary blend of designer neuropeptides to speed you up. The trick that had to be managed before the technique could be safely used was to speed up your brain functioning by a factor of at least one hundred, while leaving you heart pumping at a slow enough rate that it would not rip itself out of your chest. Then, essentially, they present the material to be learned, at tachistoscopic speeds, over and over again, and eventually by dint of repetition, it sinks into your memory and stays there for quite a while. The technology is essentially beyond my meager education, but the initial high is pretty great. After that, I can't say much, because I don't remember much until enough later that the mountains outside the big window had melted into the dusk.
“How are you feeling?” the tech asked. It took a moment to understand that she was asking anything. Her voice was a rumble, and the words crept from her mouth, slithered with agonizing slowness across the space between us, and finally crawled into my ears. I may have answered before I allowed myself to slip back into the pleasant glow of the mood-altering cocktail. When I came to myself again, things were a little more normal. Music was playing, still in a slowed-down mode, but understandable as music. I realized that I was also understanding the words, even though they were in Spanish.
“The recovery will go faster now,” the tech said. “You handled things pretty well for a man your age.”
That stung a little. I know that at fifty, I am approaching the boundary between youth and middle age, but I'm not ready for a power rocker.
“Get up if you want,” the tech said. “You'll feel a little speedy for about twelve hours, and then everything will be back to normal. You may have a headache for a couple more days, but any pain pill will handle that."
I stood up and the tech held out her hand. I reached for it, and overshot, because it was moving so slowly. The tech laughed, managed to grab my hand, and shook it. “That was my little object lesson, to make sure you understand that you're still a bit out of synch with normal time."
On the subway trip home, I spent part of the time thinking what a killer laserball game I could play right at that moment, and the rest of the time sagged out in the continuing pleasant haze. I nearly missed my stop, but caught myself in time, pulled everything together, and got off. As I left the station, I was still struck by how slowly the floatway and the other passengers moved. The street outside was almost empty. People were inside their plexes, getting their minds altered on chemicals and holovid shows. In this neighborhood of low skill laborers, that amounted to a big night out. I could af
ford something better on what Stuart pays me, but I own my place clear and free, and Stuart discourages me from moving upscale. “High visibility is a drawback in our business,” he says. I suppose he is right, but some day I may have to test that out. There are some nice places farther west with a good view of the ocean.
I didn't need to stand in front of the retinal security lock that supposedly keeps me safe from the bad guys, because the door to my plex was open. I stood in the hallway, not sure whether to risk entering, or to head back downstairs and find a telephone. I had left my own pocket phone at the plex, figuring I wouldn't need it that day.
Then two men emerged from the door and rushed me. At least, they probably thought they were rushing me; they weren't jazzed up the way I was. Remembering how I had overshot the tech's hand, I took some care to judge the first man's approach, and then put a straight right fist flush into his nose. He screamed and reeled away. I stepped into the second man, pushed him almost gently in the chest with my open left palm, just to straighten him up, and then slammed the upper ridge of my right hand into his testicles. He dropped to his knees, and then went all the way down, but he didn't scream. It probably hurt too much.
At that point it occurred to me that I had no idea if they were armed or not, and decided that, as the old saying goes, discretion is the better part of valor. I stepped past the second man and into my plex. No longer trusting the retinal lock, I slid a heavy, old-fashioned bolt into place. I decided I would definitely need to upgrade my whole security system, but in the meantime, a drink sounded just about right. I walked across to the liquor cabinet, which I keep well-stocked with fairly decent real booze—Scotch, brandy and sour mash whiskey. I started to open the cabinet and stopped as an odor assailed my nose, something I had smelled before, and recognized immediately. My two attackers were not the only intruders into my no-longer sanctum. Chandra Beg had been here, too.