Health Agent

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Black smiled. She was dry and tight but she let him in a little, more, more, her tissues still resisting him a bit like a castle door resisting a battering ram, and then he was through, gliding slickly in. Her hair was tousled on the pillow; he smoothed it clear of her forehead so he could look at her face.

  It didn’t always work out this way when she gave in to him, but she ended up holding him tighter, pulling on his bottom, stripping off her own pajama top and climaxing twice—as first he moved down her body to bury his nose in her scratchy dark blond hair (he couldn’t breathe, his brain ballooned with blood, and when she began to writhe and buck, twist into him and away from him as if in delicious agony, he was afraid as always she’d injure his neck, but he kept his mouth pressed to her) and then as he rubbed her “love button”, as he called it, with his finger and thrust into her simultaneously. But despite tonight’s success he knew better than to believe that Opal Cowrie was one to be overpowered at the touch of a button. He hadn’t won a battle—she’d shown him mercy, and taken some for herself, too.

  As she had said, they weren’t married, but she had never insisted for long that he sleep on the guest bed. There was some kind of intimate bond. Whether it had a few last scraps of romance in it, or was just the affection of friends—of two who had chosen to be companions in life—for now, Black felt sure that Opal loved him. He loved her, he felt…but the exact nature of his love was only a little less ambiguous to him than hers, now. That love was some clear-cut, easily identifiable feeling was, to him, an optimistic fantasy perpetuated by song-writers and actors, a lesser reality blown up to mythical proportions, like religion, to make the emptiness of life more endurable.

  There things stood for him, and he didn’t anticipate a change in his feelings.

  Sometimes after sex Black conked right out, sometimes he got up to listen to music, or watch VT and smoke, or read for an hour or two in a hot bubble bath…to soak off the unpleasant residue of sex. He got up, this time. Opal glanced around at him.

  “Hey,” he told her, “get some sleep, huh? You look tired.”

  “Asshole.”

  He shut off the light for her, cast her into darkness.

  He resented sleep, anyway. He’d fight it, relent only when fully exhausted. Life was too short.

  Of course, often he stayed up fighting sleep and was too tired for any kind of real enthusiasm the next day. So what was he winning by fighting?

  Still, he couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t imagine lying down to sleep with a mind and body still somewhat fresh and hungry for consciousness. How could people mechanically lie down at a precise hour, shut off like a VT? Surrender? He’d squeeze every drop he could out of his consciousness first.

  He prepared a hot bubble bath, a lava-like agony to lower himself into before the pain became delicious, and he sighed. Fixed to the pink-tiled wall facing him was a twenty-inch vidscreen. By his slippers on the rug outside the tub lay the remote control and a mug of hot mustard. He took up the remote.

  Flip through the stations? Probably fruitless despite the infinity—just boundless junk, music vids and news. He thought to call up the novel he had been wading through for the past few months but was in a slow, drawn-out part and couldn’t get past it. He considered calling forth one of the many movies in his chip collection, stored in the master vid unit in the parlor. Finally he held the remote closer to his mouth and said, “Let me see the tape from today—Bum Junket.”

  No new impressions or feelings came to him. As when he’d killed him, he couldn’t see Bum Junket’s face when the plasma bullet hit him. It was less dramatic than the fake plasma killings in action movies; again, almost gentle. I only put him out of his misery, Black reflected. Later on, soon enough, his wasting would have become more painful and horrible. He’d just made a dying man die sooner.

  Of course, he was dying, too. All life began to die the moment it was born. Nevertheless, it didn’t matter if Junket were already dying or not, so much, but that he’d been a threat to the health of the masses. That was the important thing. Black felt nothing but a general, numb strangeness in watching himself kill another person.

  Too bad, he further reflected, it had been a homosexual. Again he watched the angry gay organization spokesperson condemn the Health Agency “and its thugs.” Women’s groups, prostitute alliances (there were united organizations for every type of person except the utterly insane) would have been a little less likely to leap to the fore had it been the fugitive prostitute Auretta Here. But then, it would have been greater groups of the media instead.

  Auretta Here.

  “My God,” said Black, sitting up in the bath, crossing his legs and holding the remote to his lips again. “Give me my filed stories on Auretta Here.”

  He sat rigid and watched the screen flicker with light, a blizzard blown against a window. Somewhere invisible hands flipped at a crazy speed, but precisely, through his chip collection. It took only seconds. The first story he’d taped on Auretta Here came on, the initial minute or so missing since he’d originally caught it in progress. Black was rapt, and awake.

  A very attractive young woman sat in an armchair facing the camera, and was speaking in a haughty, tight voice, one stockinged leg hooked over the other. She wore huge black sunglasses as a disguise. She was a (dyed) blond. She was in someone’s apartment and thus wasn’t wear a coat.

  “I am a free person with a mind and a will and a body that belong to me, and nobody…”

  This wasn’t the one. Black couldn’t remember how many of her vids he had on chip, but he was sure he had the one he was thinking of. He told the VT to fast-scan. People flitted by, spoke and gestured at comical speeds.

  “Wait!” The water of the tub sloshed against the sides. “Go back a few tape minutes, then let it play.”

  Uh-huh. There she was. Black cracked a smile like that which had both frightened and captivated Bum Junket with its suddenness.

  “See?” said Auretta Here in a tone of sarcastic disgust, dangling a strip of condom packets from her pocketbook. “I make my customers wear these. But I have to have money to survive…and I want to survive until a cure can be found for this thing…”

  She stood outside this time, her breath clouding. It was a blasted lot, looking like a bomb had leveled an old building. Maybe one had. Behind her was a charred sign for some kind of shop in Asian characters.

  Yes, it was cold, and her (dyed) blond hair fell to the fuzzy shoulders of a short coat of silvery-blue fur.

  Auretta Here was the woman struck with the arrow-camera in Toll Loveland’s movie Cupid of Death.

  Blond hair, black glasses, fur coat, even blue jeans. She was dressed for her death now and didn’t even know it.

  A scrap of paper blew into the scene, around her knees. No; it was a large white moth. He remembered that detail now from when he’d seen this before, but why hadn’t he asked himself then—where did a summer insect come from in the winter?

  As surely as an artist leaves his signature in the corner of his painting, Black realized, Toll Loveland had sneaked his signature, a moth, into this—one of his movies.

  *

  He hadn’t woken Opal up, and had waited until today to tell Nedland. After all, this was only one of many, many cases the agency had to deal with.

  In Black’s helicar, gliding low over the tops of congested early-morning ground traffic, Opal said, “I didn’t know if Bum Junket’s extermination would scare her into turning herself in, or scare her deeper into hiding so she’d stop with the damn vids. Or, for that matter, if it will scare people into cooperating, or scare them away from HAP.”

  “Both. People react differently.”

  “Seeing us liquidate Junket may give other people the idea that it’s alright for them to kill the infected. Is that it with Loveland? Why pick her to kill?”

  “Ask an art critic. I don’t figure him for a vigilante—why tape her and mail her vids to her lawyer, then? It doesn’t make sense. Yet.”

  “W
ell, we don’t have to be afraid that she’ll go deeper into hiding, now. But with her murdered, we’ll be seeing her old vids on VT all over again. Let’s hurry up and bag Loveland so they can get on with the inevitable VT movie about her.”

  “It may turn out to be a movie about him.”

  Jose in the guard shack waved them through the back gate, his mask-like face attempting a smile. An ex-health agent, he was lucky to have a face again after losing it during a terrorist attack on the HAP-operated air factory. A weaker plasma than Black and Opal had in their revolvers, but enough to eat a face to the bone. They’d cloned Jose a new face, and it was good for what his insurance company was willing to pay, but he’d remained too shaken up for field duty. Black thought about Vern Woodmere for a moment while lowering his car into a clear spot.

  The turquoise building was small by Punktown standards—some of the city’s spires lost in the clouds, even from the highway looking like columns supporting the sky—but loomed over them as they approached it in its freezing dark shadow. “I need a coffee before we tell anybody anything,” Opal stated.

  Black inserted his badge card in a slot by the outer door, which slid open obligingly. A small foyer with potted plastic plants. As the door slid closed behind them, the cold air was shut out, unwelcome. And as the door slid shut, a whooping alarm sprang up like an invisible beast pointing its finger at them, jumping up and down, startling Black as he was slipping out of his overcoat.

  Opal looked to him. The whoop was a major scan alarm.

  Black didn’t advance to the next sliding doors, knowing they were locked. In moments two security guards appeared through the clear plastic, planted themselves threateningly, showing no sign that they recognized these two, though Black and Opal recognized them. A voice entered the sealed vestibule.

  “Please enter the door opening on your right.”

  A door had indeed glided open, and there a man in a white jumpsuit, white gloves and gray boots with a fish-bowl helmet over his head smiled thinly and beckoned them with his arm. “In here, please,” he said, again not admitting that he knew them. They knew him as Pablo, a scan technician.

  “What is it, Pablo?” Black said, not moving yet. He’d gone through standard decontamination countless times, coming or going, but they had been stopped before they could even get that far. Only upon returning from an investigation at the site of a major biochemical leak or something of that nature had this ever happened to him before—not first thing in the morning. Greenberg—their chemical spill, he thought. He’d gone from Greenberg to the police station to home, no decontamination but for a bubble bath.

  “Please come in.”

  Black followed Opal when she began to move. “What is it, Pablo?” she said this time.

  “The scan reads mutstav six-seventy STD.”

  “What, in one of us?” Black stopped face-to-face with Pablo. He looked ready to fight, as if wrongfully accused of a crime.

  “In both of you,” Pablo said. “Inside, please.”

  FIVE

  There wasn’t much on the walls of the little conference room. Montgomery Black stared at a picture titled Steamboats Passing at Midnight (On Long Island Sound). Currier and Ives. A faraway, simpler time. Things now were better in some, even many, ways. But they had been content then with Currier and Ives, hadn’t needed a Toll Loveland. The picture was on a calendar.

  Nedland was on the vidphone, finished up his call when Detective Churchill Jones was admitted into the room. Coffee in hand, Jones nodded to Black and Opal in greeting. “I’m terribly sorry to hear about this—it’s awful.”

  “It was in the moth that bit Agent Black,” said Nedland, standing up as Jones sat down. “One of the moths released during the show; a blood-drinking type. I just sent a crew down to Greenberg to spray for any that are left, and hopefully to take a few specimens alive.”

  “Yes, good, we’d need them for evidence come a trial.”

  The murder weapon, thought Black.

  “One bit Agent Black, and then the disease was passed on to Agent Cowrie in his semen.”

  “I see,” said Detective Jones, obviously a little surprised and embarrassed. “Were agents Beak or Woodmere bitten?”

  “Beak was, but he’s nonhuman, not of a threatened species. He’ll get sick but the virus won’t take, and will die of its own. We’re printing up circulars to distribute through the art community and running some newspaper articles in the hopes of alerting the others who attended the Pandora’s Box show and Loveland’s earlier show The Godfucker. Yesterday on Block Avenue agents Woodmere and Beak investigated a dead mutant found in a vacant lot, with a ticket stub for The Godfucker in his wallet, as you know. Genetic disruptor drugs, encoded invader chromes. Mr. Loveland really wants to reach out and affect his audience.”

  “Infect his audience,” said Opal.

  “M-670 renders less dramatic results to its victims than what he did to the man on Block Avenue, but the attraction with M-670 is its highly communicable properties and its uncanny resistance to treatment. Probably he didn’t think that it would be discovered so quickly, but then he had been told that health agents would be at the show for security, due to the show’s location. And anyway, even if we can locate all the other people who saw the show, by then the infected will have probably passed the virus on. It takes hold fast, incorporates itself into the genetic material of the victim, and essentially becomes part of its host. If Black and Cowrie had come here directly after the show, we could have destroyed the virus with little cellular damage to Black, and Cowrie wouldn’t have become infected. But it had too many hours to sink in and do its thing while they slept.”

  “I thought you people have said biting insects couldn’t transmit 670. Loveland hasn’t adapted this thing, has he?”

  “God forbid, no. No need. An insect can’t support the virus for long, a matter of hours, a day or two at most, but he could have infected the moths only hours before the show. He’s something of a genius, Toll Loveland.”

  “Mm,” grunted Jones, stealing a glance at Opal Cowrie’s clamped, rigid profile. “So he was the one who taped Auretta Here’s vids for her, then. All along.”

  Captain Nedland swivelled the vidphone’s screen, touched a button. The tape Black had sought out: Auretta Here in the ruin-strewn lot.

  “A moth,” said Jones.

  “Black spotted it at home. He made the connection.”

  “Good work.”

  Black didn’t reply.

  “The lot,” said Nedland. “See that old store sign behind her? The others off at the back of the lot? That’s the lot in Block Ave. where the mutant was found. The mutated victim was put there on purpose, rather than dying there naturally. So maybe it wasn’t contaminated while at The Godfucker, and maybe never even went—just had the ticket stub planted on it. Who knows?”

  “Playing games. He was giving us clues in Auretta Here’s vids of what he was going to do, and laughing at our ignorance of it.”

  “You’ve seen all her vids, right? Remember this one?” Nedland scanned forward. He, Black and Opal had spotted this an hour ago. Jones leaned closer, not knowing what to look for as Auretta Here stood in a parking lot speaking to the camera, so much like a movie star in her dark glasses and fur. Shrubs behind her framed the end of the parking lot, and a radically leaning pyramid sculpture poked its slanted tip over the bushes. Jones picked right up on that.

  “That’s the art museum on, ah, Hill Way…the Hill Way Galleries.” A man crossed the lot behind Auretta, hands in pockets, and curiously glanced over at the camera. “Hey!” said Jones, who had viewed Beak’s extracted memory of Pandora’s Box. Nedland hit a button to freeze frame.

  As with that film director of old, Alfred Hitchcock, Toll Loveland couldn’t resist putting in a cameo appearance.

  Nedland enlarged and centered the frame on Loveland’s handsome young face. It was smiling.

  “I doubt he’s in on this, but I’ll get a hold of Auretta Here’s lawyer,” gru
mbled Jones, disgusted by now with Toll Loveland’s antics. “Just a dupe. The question is…was Here a dupe, too, or was she in on it at least up to a point? Pardon the pun.”

  “I think,” Black spoke up quietly, “he knew her or had met her, knew she had M-670 and…”

  “Sure he didn’t give it to her to start with?”

  “No, I doubt it…why the focus on her, killing her on camera and all? She became known to him, she had what he wanted, he prompted her to go on VT to protest her rights, with her not knowing he was directing her in a Toll Loveland VT mini-series. When he was ready he took the M-670 from her to infect the bugs, at the same time killing a witness to his whereabouts and making her a part of his overall artistic statement.”

  “Is that what all this is?” Jones sneered.

  “You should try to find all of Auretta Here’s friends and fellow prosties you can,” suggested Nedland.

  “Precinct 19 is running the Auretta Here case, and P-34 is where she was hit with that dart or whatever and abducted—I called them before I left and they’ll send their people here any time now. But I know P-19 has already questioned friends about Auretta Here.”

  “But not about Toll Loveland. We can show them this vid.” Nedland gestured at Loveland’s smiling face, filling the VT screen, his smile smug and amused as if he could see and hear them.

  Jones punched the button to banish that face. If only it could be so easy. “And what about these two?”

  Pacing the tiny room, Nedland lifted the page of the calendar to view the Currier and Ives print for next month. His back to the others, he said, “Agent Black has volunteered to a daily check-in program. Agent Cowrie has opted, as is her right, for a weekly program, since she’ll be staying with her parents in the suburbs. Of course they’ve…both turned in their badges. But we’re being optimistic about a cure. Our teleporter filtering efforts will probably come to fruition, especially with people who’ve been teleported somewhere previously and already have their uninfected code in a computer. We’re trying to find codes in the past for Black and Cowrie from a few places.”