As he lets them pass, he feels his stomach, churning and growling in an overwhelming lust for food. The thought of eating fills his mind so thoroughly that the smell of cheap soy-dogs and slice’n’fry coming from the kiosks makes him salivate. He buys himself two soy-dogs with kraut and mustard, wolfs those down, then gets a double order of slice’n’fry, too, heavy on the vinegar to mask his own scent. He eats the crunchy slabs of protein flakes and eggplant slowly as he walks along, the helmet of his suncloak tipped back, heading toward the second cheap hotel where he has a room and more stashed gear. Yet even though he acts indifferent and casual, he is constantly aware of being looked at, wondered and whispered about by everyone he passes.
Just as he turns down a side-street, he glances at the container of food and nearly yelps aloud. The waterproof plastopress carton is disintegrating under his touch with long holes the size and shape of his fingers. He dumps it into the first recycler he finds, out behind a two-story gray building where a three-dee sign flashes with endlessly changing lines of mah jong tiles. As he turns away, he hears the swish of a cloak behind him and spins around to find a small child, draped in a miniature suncloak, all dirty, patched, and torn. He can see the kIDs face through the faceplate: solemn eyes, somehow disappointed.
“You dint want to eat that?” the child says.
“Why? You want it? Sorry, but it’s spoiled. Make you real sick if you ate the leftovers.”
“Oh. Okay. I won’t then.”
As Tomaso strides past he considers giving the child some spare change, but he’s afraid that the coins would spread whatever this disease is. Yet the image of those disappointed eyes, a child going hungry, haunts him, pulls at him, threatens him with the memory of the boy’s voice screaming as the boy’s hands pound and pound on the blood-smeared door. He turns around only to find the child already gone. When he runs the back of one hand across his forehead he realizes that he’s broken out in a cold sweat.
At the hotel he has a piece of luck. The service door at the back is standing propped open with no one around but a donkeybot, loading crates of paper napkins onto a dolly. He slips past, finds the fire stairs, and gets up to his room without seeing anyone. Although he left the hotel’s door-card at the desk when he went out, he has a copy that he duplicated himself on a very illegal device so he can let himself in without having to ask a clerk. He locks the door behind him, turns around—and realizes that the room’s been searched. It’s a near-professional job, with everything put neatly back where it was found, and a thin film of dust carefully blown around, too, in an even layer, but he left a crumpled fragment of transparent plastofilm on top of his duffel bag, where it would look like a bit of dropped trash, and that fragment is now lying on the floor. Doubtless these clever amateurs hadn’t even noticed it.
When he goes through his things he finds nothing taken, and he never carries anything incriminating, such as weaponry or faked papers, in the kind of luggage that he leaves in hotels. It’s quite possible that the searchers concluded that whoever rented this room is not the man they are looking for, if indeed they’re even looking for him and not some drug dealer who’s reneged on a deal or a conman muscling in on someone else’s territory. By then the tiny room reeks of vinegar in spite of the best efforts of the air conditioning. When he takes still another shower, all his body hair rinses away with the soap. As he watches it puddle in the drain, he feels like screaming.
Another change of clothes, this time a nondescript pair of jeans and a loose pullover shirt, suitable for prowling around the city while he looks for Mulligan so he can kill the only person left who can identify him—if indeed this clumsy amateur psychic can even break through the lock Tomaso put on his mind. Although he doubts that Mulligan can, he is going to take no chances. Then he’ll be on his way to the Rat Yard to track down the female alien, and his job will be over. He wonders if maybe he should sic his three tame crazies on the female—he could call her the Devil’s wife, he supposes—but it would be far safer to do the job himself.
He’s just pulled on his boots and settled the knife inside the left one in its hidden sheath when someone knocks, calling loudly for Mr. Svensen, the fake name under which he’s registered. Soundlessly Tomaso gets up, drifts back toward the blind side of the door, cocks his foot and retrieves the knife as the knocking sounds again. For a moment there’s silence; then comes the sound of a card being slipped into the door slot. He waits, unnaturally immobile, until the door swings open and a young black male steps boldly inside, followed by a cleaning bot. Tomaso’s taking no chances. He glides forward, flings his right arm around the man from behind and slits his throat neatly, right to left, with his left hand. As the corpse falls, the ’bot slides forward mindlessly to start mopping at the mess. Tomaso punches its stop button and steps back.
For the briefest of moments he wants to dabble his hands in the man’s blood and wipe it all over himself. The urge is so strong and so revolting that he nearly gags. He spins on his heel to avoid looking at the corpse and merely stands for a moment, breathing hard, feeling his heart pound, and picking up that signal again: the eater. It wants the blood, this eater, not only wants to roil and wallow in it, but it somehow seems to feel that the blood is its due, that Tomaso is withholding something to which it is entitled. The junk food he ate earlier threatens to reappear. He breathes deeply, quietly, makes himself think of the neutral image of the night sky over Arden, his homeworld, until his stomach settles. Even though he’s regained control, he knows he has to get out of that room. In the strip of mirrortile over the dresser he examines himself carefully: just one tiny drip of blood on the left cuff of his jeans. The suncloak will cover it. Being left-handed is a real advantage to a man in his trade; by slashing from behind he can give the police a false picture of his kills and force them to make several different kinds of incorrect assumptions that inevitably slow their investigations to the point of futility. He wipes the knife clean on the bedspread, takes the suncloak, checking to make sure that the laser pistol is still in its hidden sheath, and heads out, leaving the luggage behind, deciding that he’ll never come back for it. He has other clothes stashed in a rented locker down at the main gravtrain station, along with a laser rifle broken down and disguised as a piece of holofilm equipment, and he also has plenty of money to buy more if he needs to.
Yet as he hurries down nearly-deserted sidewalks, it occurs to him that going into a shop and talking with a clerk could be dangerous. Although he never catches anyone at it, all his psychic faculties, as well as his plain old common sense, tell him that he’s being stared at wherever he goes, for the very simple reason that the morning heat is making him stink of rancid vinegar.
Chapter Six
Rejuv drugs have trapped the Mayor of Porttown behind the face of a boy of twenty, smoothly handsome though pale, with blond hair and blue eyes that radiate the innocence of a young animal. He’s slender, too, and as supple as a boy, sitting cross-legged at the moment on an over-sized pale blue divan among understated gray and lavender silk pillows. Everything in his “office,” the den in his suite of rooms above the brothel he owns, whispers quietly of the best of taste and the sparing of no expense, from the easel paintings brought from Old Earth (a Matisse and the last surviving Frank Stella in private hands among them) to the blue and green rugs woven on the carli home planet long before that species took to deep space. He has insisted on giving Lacey a shot of fine brandy in a cut crystal snifter, and he holds a drink of his own in slender fingers. His smile is an odd mixture of pride and defiance, a challenge to make some comment on his wealth or on the way he earned it. Since she’s too used to the game by now to give in, she tosses off a mouthful of the brandy as if it were cheap beer. The ploy works; he speaks first.
“How much did my guards squeeze out of you in baksheesh to let you in?”
“Oh, about a hecto of Sarahian weed—a bit here, a bit there.”
“Want me to get it back for you?”
“Nah. Good joke—I
got it from the cops for free, told’em I was going to spread it around for information.”
He laughs under his breath, giving her such a charming smile (so carefully calculated to show just the right amount of perfect teeth, the corners of the eyes, too, crinkling just so) that she can easily imagine rich old men showering cash into his lap simply to keep him smiling.
“Okay,” he says. “I heard you were working for the police these days.”
“With the cops, buster, not for them, and don’t you forget it.”
“Yeah? Must be something pretty heavy going down.”
“Maybe. Tell me, Richie, how do you like this idea? Porttown under martial law, a couple of Army boys on every corner, a surveillance satellite in permanent orbit, listening in every time a damn toilet flushes.”
The boy’s eyes widen, the soft boy’s mouth purses to an Oh.
“Cut the sarcasm,” Lacey snaps. “You think I’d lie to you?”
Richie shrugs in an elaborate pantomime of ignorance and has another sip of his brandy. Lacey follows suit and waits; with time she can always wear him down. Yet it hurts to watch him, to see him look so young and remember him as even younger, nine years old, in fact, crying while trying not to cry when she shipped out with the Fleet. I’m going to come home soon, Richie—an empty promise, as it turned out, because another Border war erupted, and it was five years before she saw her younger brother again, her little brother as she thinks of him still. And she wonders, still after all these years, if perhaps his life would have been different if she’d stayed home and never enlisted, because she was the only one in the family who could ever handle him, the only one who had his confidence and his respect. If her father’s neglect and his ugly little life as a petty criminal had ruined her sense of self, she supposes that it must have hurt his only son far more deeply. She could, perhaps, have seen it then, but she was after all only seventeen herself, and only twenty-two when she came home on leave at last to find him hustling his behind in the Bazaar, as wild and defiant as the young animal whose amoral soul his eyes mirror now.
“Okay,” he says at length. “And just why is the government going to declare martial law?”
“Long story. You hear what happen to Sally Pharis?”
Another elaborate shrug, but his painted eyelids flicker in interest.
“Ah c’mon—are you telling me that a leather girl got herself offed, and it was important? Happens all the time, man. If you get into bondage, it can go too far real easy.” A perfectly timed pause. “It pays good, though.”
“Yeah, Sally always said so.” She adds a casual pause of her own. “She no died cause some john got too excited.”
“Yeah? Why, then?”
“I’m no hundred percent sure, but here’s my best guess. We got a professional here, a killer working for the Lies. He killed a carli named Ka Gren. Did you hear about that on the news?”
“Course.” The mask is beginning to slip; Richie leans forward a little. “And Sally was in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“Yeah, she saw him right afterwards, man. Little Joe Walker told the police that she was right near the scene of the crime.”
“The scene of the crime. You sound like a holopix.”
“Watch your big mouth.”
“You going to belt me one if I dunt, just like you used to? You probably would, yeah, bodyguards or no bodyguards.” His eyes drift to the panel that marks the door into the hall. “They no dare touch you, anyway.”
“Thanks.”
This time the smile is an honest one, tinged with melancholy.
“So okay, Bobbie, this dude killed Sally to shut her mouth. What’s that got to do with me?”
“He’s hiding in the Bazaar, most likely. Chief Bates has three days to find him, before the troops come in. Are you going to put up with the Army just to save some Outworlder’s ass?”
Richie smiles with a perfectly done wryness and looks away, nodding in half-humorous agreement.
“Nah,” he says at last. “You got me, all right. So what do you want? This dude’s head in a bag?”
“All of him, and alive if you can. Bates has a few questions to ask him, like who’s paying his bills. Now, I no savvy much about him. He’s a Blanco, and he’s got this weird infection on his hands for sure, and maybe some other places. He smells like spoiled vinegar. That’s your tip-off, the smell. And he’s dangerous. If I’m guessing right, he got psi as well as being a trained pro.”
“She-it, big sister! You don’t ask much, huh?”
“Like I say, you want the Army in here, asking where you get your cash and demanding a cut? What are you paying your goon squad for, anyway?”
“You got a point, but I think I’ll put out an open contract on this dude, get a lot of eyes looking for him all at once. It’ll be faster—”
At her belt Lacey’s comp link beeps. With an apologetic nod in Richie’s direction she slips it off and punches in.
“Programmer?” Buddy sounds so humanly alarmed that she wonders if he’s on the verge of serious malfunction. “We have had an unfortunate occurrence.”
“You what? For chrissake, man, lay it on me! I mean, continue to transmit message.”
“Some hours ago, Mulligan and Nunks took your skimmer and went to the Rat Yard. Now Maria informs me that they are in grave difficulty.”
“What!?! How does she know? Try starting at the beginning, Buddy, and fill in more detail.”
“Maria is a latent psychic. She has received a strong feeling of danger and despair from Nunks and an exceptionally strong premonition of danger concerning Mulligan. Now, as for the skimmer, I am uncertain of its condition, but—”
“Screw the skimmer! No, don’t take that literal. I mean, the skimmer’s condition is of no importance. Why did Mulligan and Nunks go to the Rat Yard?”
“To rescue a sentient they call Mrs. Bug. Captain Bailey informs me that she seemed in some danger. It was the captain, by the way, who insisted I call you.” Buddy’s voice develops a pronounced sulk. “He threatened to magnetize my cubes if I didn’t.”
“Good for him. Why did you let’em go out there alone? Do they have a gun?”
“They have no weapons that I know of, programmer. I had no way of stopping them. Using his psionics, Nunks can unjam any lock that I can electronically secure.”
“Well, that’s true. But jeezchrist, Buddy! Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
Over a faint hissing of static she can hear Sam’s voice in the background.
“I have made an error, programmer,” Buddy says. “I have malfunctioned. I grovel at your feet in an agony of abasement. I wrap my circuits in frayed insulation, I spit upon my own data cubes, I—”
“Enough! Tell Sam I’m on my way. We’re going to check your subsidiary drives when this is all over.”
Lacey powers out to find Richie watching her in as much anxiety as he can allow himself to show.
“How are you going to get out to the Yard if this Mulligan guy copped your skimmer?”
“Oh jeezus, I no savvy! Rent a car, I guess.”
“Take too long. Lend you one of mine.”
“Thanks. Hey, man, you’re a prince.”
“Nada but the best for you.”
There is something in the light-hearted way he says it that hints at pain underneath. No matter how urgent the situation, she refuses to waste the first honest moment they’ve had since her retirement.
“Hey, Richie? I’m sorry I left you behind, but the Fleet was the only chance I had. At first, I was just an enlisted man. No could bring you along like an officer’s kid or something. I would’ve if I could’ve.”
He looks away so sharply that she’s afraid he might cry.
“I know,” he says, his voice a whisper. “Ah for chrissakes, that was too fucking long ago to worry bout.” He picks up a comm unit, disguised as a crystal rose, from the edge of the divan. “Hal, make sure the dove-gray Bentley is charged, and bring it round the front. My sister n
eeds it for a while.”
Never in her life has Lacey driven a skimmer like the Bentley. As sleek as a lick of butter on the outside, it has blue sheriki skin upholstery on the inside and real wood on the instrument panel as well. So smoothly does it fly that she finds herself hitting the speed limit before she realizes it. When she pulls up in front of A to Z, the few sentients around in the first false dawn-light goggle and gape in amazement. Before she goes in, she makes sure she sets the alarm.
Sam is waiting, pacing back and forth just inside the gate. When she lets herself in, she sees Rick and Maria hurrying down the outside staircase to join them.
“Lacey, you got to do something about that Goddamn AI unit,” Sam bursts out. “I had to argue, four, five minutes before the filthy thing called you!”
“Yeah, it got a malfunction, all right. Maria pick up any more from Nunks or Mulligan?”
“Nunks is frantic, thinking Mulligan’s hurt or something. Maria no can sort it all out; she no capable of picking up much more than feelings.”
“Cojones de diablo! Okay, you got a laser?”
“Sure do.”
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