by Steve Perry
Shaw followed Bevins through the next pressure room, the vacuum room, and finally, was blasted by an eye-smiting actinic sterilizing light at the entrance to the main animal lab.
In the huge room, there were six people—four men, two women—working the monitors and the Healy, a medical coffin that could diagnose and repair most common human and mue illnesses and injuries. Barry was in a living-room-sized denscris cage, perched on a rock. The inside of the cage was as close to the animal’s natural environment as possible, complete with sterilized plants and insects, and while the workers could see him, the view wall was one-way—Barry couldn’t see them.
Barry was picking at his dinner, some kind of shellfish, and eating it with great relish. A viewer would think him healthy enough, and save for the small casters on his chest and head, he was unadorned.
“How long?” Shaw said.
“One hour and sixteen—no, seventeen minutes, mark, beyond Beatrice.”
Shaw nodded. Beatrice had been the longest surviving of the apes thus far, the last to die on the previous rotation.
“Hour and a quarter is hardly conclusive,” Shaw said.
“Look at him. He’s happier than a dung beetle in curlnose crap.” Bevins waved at the bank of monitors. “All systems are normal—no hypothalmic inversion, no motor or CNS neuron shorts, cardiac system okay, blood pressure dead-on normal. Beatrice was falling apart six hours before she arrested. If Barry feels even a little bad, the best tools medical science has can’t tell it.”
Shaw allowed himself to feel a small thrill of victory.
“What did you do?”
Bevins went off on a technical lark, most of which Shaw tuned out as he watched the rock ape chew up river crawdaddy and spit out bits of the shell.
“—decided that the hormone regulator might respond to R-Enzyme if we used the viral-molecular fuser to blend them. It was a last-minute decision, and there was some argument as to whether or not we would go with it, but I decided it was worth the risk.”
Bevins cast a quick glance at one of the women techs, Dr. Tenae, and Shaw made a mental note of that. Tenae was the risk-taker, Bevins the conservative, so it must have been her idea. Bevins was going to take credit for it, of course, but Shaw would see that Tenae was suitably rewarded—if Barry didn’t suddenly take a header off that rock and croak on them.
An alarm of some kind went off, a strident ringing.
“What is that?” Shaw felt his bowels twist. Come on, Barry! Don’t you fucking die on me!
Bevins frowned. “I don’t know. Everything looks fine—”
“That’s a security alarm,” one of the other medicos said. “Nothing we’re doing in here.”
“Director Shaw?” came an amplified voice.
“Yes?”
“Sir, there’s some kind of robot trying to get into the lab. It keeps bumping against the door.”
For a heartbeat, Shaw drew a blank. Then he smiled. Ah. His vouch. He had forgotten all about it in his hurry to get here. The medical robot was lit, and it followed him. He must have gotten ahead of it on his run down the stairs.
He tried to reach into his pocket for the remote to deactivate the medical robot, then remembered he was wearing skins. “Nothing to worry about,” Shaw said. “Tell Cervo to deactivate it, he has the code. Shut the door alarm off.”
The noise stopped.
Shaw looked at Bevins. “Keep me informed. If Barry so much as sneezes, I want to know about it immediately—”
“Jesu, damn!” somebody said. “Did you see that?”
Shaw jerked his attention away from Bevins. “What?”
“Watch the holoproj to your left, sir,” one of the monitor techs said. “I’ll replay it.”
Barry appeared in a small scale, floating over the ’proj. His arm flicked out, fast, and then he went back to picking at the crawfish.
“What am I looking at, Tech?”
“Sorry, M. Shaw, let me enlarge it and slow it down.”
The image of Barry blinked, then reappeared, life-size. An insect buzzed around the ape’s head, flying in a much-slowed-down spiral. Barry’s arm came up in slomo. He pinched two fingers, caught the insect, crushed it, released it, and before the dead bug hit the rock, Barry had returned to his meal.
Rock apes couldn’t move that fast. Not naturally.
Shaw grinned. Yes!
9
Finding the place where Weems was staying had been easy enough for Sola. He had a gated hotel cube near the river on the eastern edge of the old Casino District, past the floating city of faux-paddle wheel gaming houses that had sucked in people looking to lose their money for hundreds of years. The cubicle was on Dauphine Street, near the intersection with Mandeville, part of a new, high-tech renovation that gleamed like a dull mirror under the semitropical sun. It didn’t look as if it belonged there, the renovation, among the older structures. It looked like a stainless-steel cancer.
Four hours after she had arrived, as she stood in the warm shade of some leafy tree she didn’t recognize, Sola realized that bagging Z. B. might not be quite so simple. Apparently this section of the city was a mecca for tourists. To the west and slightly south were the French Quarter—Vieux Carré—Jackson Square, and all kinds of historical this, that, and the other that caused a fitful stream of outlanders clad in colorful, silly clothes and sporting expensive cams to mill back and forth among the sites like some kind of vapid herd animals.
The town here smelled of mold and fish, and the river, while probably much cleaner than it had been in centuries, was not a place you’d want to swim. The water was muddy, the flow was fast, and, so she had read in the hotel handout, was only still here through the grace of the local Army Corps of Engineers. Apparently the Mississippi would rather go to the Gulf of Mexico by jumping the levees men had constructed down its length and pouring itself into the nearby Atchafalaya River, which would have left New Orleans high and dry. Well, drier, at least. There was still the big lake, Poncho-something, to the north. And high wasn’t really an option, since the place was so low and flat and the water table so close to the surface they couldn’t even bury the dead back when that was in vogue—they’d had to entomb them above the ground. Apparently the first settlers here had tried planting coffins, only to see them bob to the surface after the first hard rain, of which there was plenty.
Why, hello, there, Tia Sarah. Didn’t like it under the ground? Decided to come back for a visit?
Sola shook her head. She knew what Weems looked like, in theory. He could be disguised, of course, but she had his ear patterns and somatotype logged into her spotter scope, and the instrument was good enough to give her a dimension check, height, weight, morphologics, so—in theory—she could get past a simple skinmask. Unless he bothered to change his ears and wear padding to alter the look of his somatotype, she should be able to get a match if she saw somebody who looked like him.
But as another batch of lookielookies shuffled past her, the problem represented itself yet again. When you had a hundred people on foot coming or going every few minutes, it was a bitch to try and scope all the ones who might be her target.
Shit.
Sooner or later, she’d probably spot him. She had snapped still holos of everybody who had entered or left the building so far and none of them were him. But she had to pee, she was getting hungry, and she was cooking in the summer heat and humidity despite the tree’s shade, sweat soaking into her clothes, making her sticky and stinky.
Ah, the exciting, glamorous life of a documentarian. Nothing like it.
If she left to attend to her distractions, that would be the moment Weems came or went. If she stayed put, then, of course, so would he. That was how it always worked. No justice in the galaxy. She had been around long enough to learn that. Timing was all.
At that thought, some deity apparently decided that she deserved a favor: From out of the locked steel gate ambled Z. B. Weems, easily identifiable from her images of him, nothing more to disguise him
than a pair of dark glasses, and those probably for the purposes of eye protection rather than deception. He was fit, dressed for the weather in shorts, flexsoles, and a thinskin top, and looked just like thirty other men in sight at the moment. Blink, and he’d vanish.
There was a scar or a good facsimile of one on the outside of his right knee, visible across the street, which certainly would convince anybody not a medic that he needed the thin gray cane he carried. The cane had a rounded crook at the grip, with a black silicone cap on the other end, nothing fancy. It just looked functional. Something a man who maybe couldn’t afford a regrow to repair a torn ligament might use until his fortunes improved.
Hallelujah! Thank you, Jesu!
Sola made sure she looked in another direction, quickly. She was aslant to him, and far enough away that he might not notice her at all on the crowded street, but that was not a chance she was going to take, not after her last couple of encounters with Flexers. This one wasn’t going to spot her, no way.
She started walking, blended with a group of tourists, and watched Weems peripherally. As luck had it, he turned and headed up the sidewalk in the same direction. He touched the cane’s tip down often enough so it appeared he needed its support. A good beginning, saving her from having to turn around or cross the street.
Her cam was inside her handbag, the gel lens peering through a tiny opening, and she subvocalized her commands to the instrument. The heads-up on the inside of her own polarized glasses showed a mob. She ordered the cam to stabilize and zoom, centered it on Weems, and started recording. It wasn’t action stuff, but it was good background, and with him filling the frame, it was a sequence she could use under opening credits. At the very least, she would have footage of him more current than anything anybody else had. She was already ahead of the game.
Mentally, she started writing the voice-over: “Meet Zachary Bretton Weems, out for a stroll in the picturesque terran city of New Orleans. He looks just like any other tourist, maybe a bit less fit than most with his walking stick, and you’d never guess to look at him that he is the deadliest man in the galaxy, the champion player of the Musashi Flex, that loose agglomeration of duelists who fight for fame and sometimes money . . .”
Too sugary? Too pat? Well, that was the easy part, the writing, she could do that anytime. Once she had the visuals, the words would come. Anybody could write.
Later, she would figure out a way to approach him, get an interview, maybe even some scenes of him fighting, but she didn’t want to rush it. She was platinum at the moment, and gleaming in the sun. Best to enjoy it while she could.
Mourn didn’t know how long the woman had been following Weems. He didn’t spot her until Weems sat down at an open-air place called Cafe Du Monde and ordered coffee and one of the sweet confections the locals called beignets, but it was her, Sola, the girl from Madrid. He smiled at the memory. She was tenacious, he had to give her that. She had found out that Weems was here, and was now shadowing him. Being cautious about it, too, but that was no guarantee she hadn’t been spotted—Mourn had tagged her, and he couldn’t claim any more skill at detecting tails than her quarry.
At the moment, Mourn was across the narrow street, inside a little shop, loading a handbasket with pecan pralines, whatever the hell those were, with plenty of cover. He could barely see the two, and if they looked his way, they wouldn’t be able to see him, not enough to ID him.
He did note that Weems had his cane with him. It was hooked on the edge of the table a few centimeters away from his right hand. He had gone to the carbon fiber, so it was said, because he hated putting dings in his custom-made hickory or snakewood sticks, made for him by a master canesmith and fighter named McNeill. McNeill made the carbon-fiber jobs, too, but reportedly under protest—they were just so . . . plain and ugly. Still, while the customer wasn’t always right, when you supplied the weapons for the top-rated Flex player, it didn’t hurt your sales, so plain and ugly he wanted, plain and ugly he got.
Weems had bashed enough heads with the carbon-fiber suckers and never broken one of the canes, so the old saw about form following function seemed valid enough.
But here was the woman, who, far as he could tell, didn’t have a clue Mourn was here. Of course, she wasn’t looking for him, she was focused on Weems, that was her error. Maybe Number One hadn’t tagged her or Mourn yet. He would, eventually, no question of that. You simply could not tail somebody of his caliber for very long without being burned, not unless you did it electronically and from a distance. One person alone doing a sub-rosa surveillance had only a limited time before a hinky target would see him. Or her.
Mourn himself had no intention of staying on Weems that long.
He knew what Sola was up to, given their visit, but he didn’t know how she was going to play it, and it was a risky thing for her, though she probably didn’t know how risky. Weems liked his privacy, more than most players. He lived for the contest, and all the rest of it was, as he had been heard to say, rat feces, as far as he was concerned. He might not take kindly to being watched by a spindoc, even one who planned to make him look good. He didn’t care how he looked.
Well, it was not Mourn’s biz. He had come to check Weems out, strictly strategic and tactical stuff, that was all. He’d mark the man’s moves, try to get a sense of what he was about, and move on. Whatever happened to the woman was her problem.
Moving on meant to another world, too. He had gotten what he had come to Earth to learn, the art of pentjak silat, and the only way to get better at that was to go off and practice it for a couple hours a day for ten or twelve years. Along the way, he was sure to come across some other esoteric martial art that would call to him, and probably he would try to learn it.
Mourn grinned at the thought. There were some principles in silat he hadn’t paid much mind to that he wanted to play with a little. When he had been young and strong, able to leap into the air high enough to kick a tall man in the face—and hit him three more times with both hands on the way down—he’d gloried in his speed and power. With the state of medicine, he could easily make it to 120 or 130, more if some of the newer treatments being researched panned out, but not with the reflexes and strength he’d had when he’d been 25. The idea that position and timing could compensate for what he was losing had its appeal.
Thing was, it was hard to give up the old ways. As long as the body would do what it used to do, putting that technique aside wasn’t easy. Why would you?
Mainly because you might reach for it one day and it wouldn’t be there, and that would get you killed. Best learn to fight smarter and not harder, especially when you yourself were getting softer and not harder.
Or, as the saying went: Old and treacherous may not beat young and strong every time, but that’s the way the wise money bets . . .
But whatever principles he might eventually learn, they weren’t going to be in place in this town on this day, and if he caught Weems crooked, the man would beat the crap out of him.
Mourn had a romantic bent now and again, but about some things he was a realist, and fighting was one of them. You didn’t get to be Primero on luck, and while Mourn figured there were a couple, maybe three, possibly even as many as four people in the Top Ten he could take, or at least fight to a draw on a good day, Weems was not among them. Weems could hammer him down and be half a galaxy away before Mourn woke up inside a Healy, full of tubes and hoping nothing was permanent—and that was if Weems was feeling merciful.
It would be great to call Weems out and kick his ass.
So would being able to fly by jumping up and flapping your arms, and he had about the same chance at that as he did of taking Weems in a fair contest. Weems was the best. Mourn wasn’t even close.
No, he had pretty much what he had come for. A few days to clean up his affairs here, he’d be on his way. He could stay out of Weems’s way for that long.
He went to the checkout kiosk, pressed his credit cube against the reader, and had his purchases scann
ed and debited by the din running the kiosk. The din bagged the candy and heat-sealed the biodegradable plastic bag shut. No alarms went off as Mourn exited the store.
As he made his way along the walk, a transient approached him. “Spare a stad to help a hungry flo’man?”
“Here,” Mourn said. He handed him the bag of pralines. “Sell these, they should buy you a jolt of whatever juice you need. About thirty standards worth, still store-sealed.”
The man took the package, looked at the candy through the clear plastic. “I’d prefer hard curry, but I guess this is okay.”
Mourn shook his head. Amazing how many times he had met beggars who were choosers.
What the hell, it didn’t matter. He decided in that moment that he was done here, and he started looking for a hack to take him to the port. He didn’t really need to wait at all. He’d go back to Madrid, sell his workout dummy and turn in his housing docs, grab his guitar and head for deep vac. Why not?
He saw Weems get up, collect his cane, and amble away from the table.
Something in the man’s manner rang odd, and Mourn’s gut-level instinct was that Weems had spotted his tail. Whether it was himself or the woman—or both—Mourn couldn’t tell, but in that moment, he was certain Primero was burned.
Well, said the atman voice in his mind, so what? Didn’t you just decide you were done? Find that taxi and be gone. Whatever Weems does or doesn’t do doesn’t concern you, right?
Then he saw the woman come to her feet and head for the street, and he remembered how he had smiled when she had tried to run that “I’ll-tell-your-story” con past him. If Weems had spotted her, which, Mourn had to believe was more likely than Weems spotting him, then she could be in trouble. Weems’s sexual preference was, from what Mourn knew, for women, though there wasn’t a lot more than that floating around. Maybe he might decide to lure her down some empty alley for a little fun. He’d know she wasn’t a Player from the way she moved, and like a lot of Flexers, Weems didn’t have much respect for anybody who wasn’t one. Would he thump the young woman around and then prong her, just for fun? His option.