Pet Noir

by Katharine Kerr

  “Say, Del, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s God going to pay for me? You know?”

  “What he paid when John killed the Devil, I suppose. Whiskey in big old glass bottles.”

  “Is that all John got, just whiskey? I mean, killing the Devil was a super big thing to do. Seems like God could’ve given him something more valuable than that.”

  “It no pay, white boy, questioning God.” But she pauses at her work and runs a hand through her hair while she thinks. “God did give us some other stuff. A real nice laser cutter, for meat and stuff like that, and a power pack for it.”

  “And the jewel.” It’s Blue-Beak, coming back in with the drum full of water. “Dunt forget that big old jewel.”

  “A jewel?” Mulligan arranges a look of astonishment. “A jewel from God himself? Hey man, that’s magnifico. Dunt suppose you could let me see it? Sure would like to.”

  “No see why not. Either God’s going to buy you or you’re going to get dead, so you no going to be telling no one else bout it.”

  Bizzer puts the drum down and rummages through the miscellaneous trash while Del finishes making coffee. He’s starting on his third heap by the time she pours it out into cracked mugs. When she brings Mulligan his, she unties his hands so he can hold the hot cup.

  “You try anything, and Blue-Beak and the Wild Man will beat you black-and-blue.”

  “I no going to cause trouble. Promise.”

  Mulligan sets the cup down on the floor beside him, then rubs his aching wrists and tingling fingers before he tries drinking. The coffee’s almost gone when Blue-Beak Bizzer finally gives a whoop of triumph and holds up a bright red case, about twenty-five centimeters square, made of some shiny, metallic substance that Mulligan’s never seen before.

  “Here it is,” the lizzie says, ambling over. “Take a good look, white boy.”

  When Bizzer flips open the lid of the case, Mulligan gasps in sincere astonishment. Inside is an enormous wedge of crystal glass, cut into an asymmetric ten-sided polyhedron in the Hopper style, with a murky blue area, about the size of a fingernail, buried deep in the center.

  “Oh hey man, that’s something! Dunt suppose I could like touch it?”

  “Go ahead,” Blue-Beak says. “You no going to break it just by touching it.”

  As soon as Mulligan lays one fingertip on the crystal he can feel its pulse, a rhythmic surge of energy pouring out of the center. He leans closer, squinting, and sees a tiny but obviously mechanical implant in the blue area.

  “Bet you something,” Mulligan says. “God told you to put this out in the sun every now and then.”

  “Sure did.” Del strolls over to have a look. “You sure know a lot, white boy.”

  “I’m, like, a real good guesser. Tell you something else. That’s no jewel, that’s glass.”

  “You talking shit now. It’s a jewel.”

  “Glass.”

  “Jewel. God no give his people dumb old glass.”

  Mulligan was hoping she’d draw just this conclusions. He turns to Blue-Beak with an innocent smile.

  “What do you think, dude? Glass or jewel? Want to make a bet?”

  “You got nada to bet with, dude.” Bizzer clacks his snout in the lizzie equivalent of an unpleasant grin. “But I say jewel, just like Del says. Hey, Wild Man! Stop eating all the bacon and c’mere.”

  Wiping greasy fingers on his beard the Wild Man comes over and turns a critical eye on the crystal.

  “Huh,” he says at last. “Funny, it does kind of look like glass, now that you mention it.”

  “Bullshit, man.” Bizzer looks personally insulted. “You talking bullshit, you dope.”

  “Watch your mouth, you worm-eating reptile,” Wild Man snaps.

  Bizzer clacks his beak again.

  “There’s an easy way to find out, y’know,” Mulligan says brightly. “If you drop a jewel, it won’t hurt it one little bit.”

  “Yeah, he’s right.” Wild Man takes a step toward the lizzie. “Gimme that thing.”

  “No going to!”

  Del shrieks, but too late. Wild Man pounces, Bizzer hits back, and the crystal goes sailing half across the room to drop with a crash and a thousand splinters onto the floor. Immediately Mulligan feels profoundly relieved. Although he wasn’t consciously aware of picking up the device’s output before, he can feel its absence; the experience is similar to wearing a pair of shoes that are just a little too tight all day, reading out the discomfort, and then sighing in relief when you kick them off and realize that you almost gave yourself a blister.

  “Look what you’ve done, you assholes!” Del howls. “When he get home John’s going to be mad as mad.”

  “No reason,” Mulligan says. “God cheated you, dint he? All they did was, like, find it out.”

  Del cocks her head to one side and considers him for a moment.

  “Maybe so,” she says at last. “But I no going to be the one who tells John when he get home.”

  “I’m going to do it,” Wild Man says in a soothing sort of voice. “The white boy here, he got a point.”

  The three of them amble away, Del to cook, Bizzer to sweep the fragments of the crystal under another pile of trash, Wild Man to crouch down and stare off into space with such profound concentration that Mulligan supposes he’s trying to think something through for the first time in a long while. Mulligan finishes his coffee and arranges a vacant sort of expression while he desperately tries to contact Nunks.

  oOo

  Although like everyone else in the household Nunks is exhausted enough to sleep for hours, he wakes up suddenly in the late afternoon, thinking of Mulligan. Since his species is never drowsy—either they’re awake or asleep, across a hard line—he comes instantly alert, remembering his dream, that Mulligan was inside a glass sphere and trying to break out, pounding on the transparent wall until his hands bled. Nunks gets up, shaking himself and reaching for his pair of hair brushes, while he considers the image. He suspects that it’s perfectly true in its own symbolic way. Once he’s brushed himself, he settles into his armchair and sends his mind out to the Rat Yard.

  For some minutes he sits quietly, picking up only the constant murmur of the broken minds out in the Yard. Very distantly, very faintly, he is aware of Mrs. Bug, who seems to be sleeping, wherever she is. All of a sudden, the glass sphere breaks. He can translate his feeling no other way than into his dream image: Mulligan’s psionic prison has just shattered. Hardly daring to move he focuses his mind and sends out a beam of concentration until at last he hears Mulligan screaming his name over and over.

  Little brother! [joy] You are where now?

  [elation, gratitude] Underground tunnels. Built
  Tunnel where? You know/not know?

  In the Rat Yard. Not knowexactly. [relief, agony, fear, relief]

  We track >find you.

  Hurry! [terror] Crazies have me/think psychic enemy is God> give me to God >>he kill me. All this> soon real soon>

  I get Lacey >tell her. Stay with me, Little Brother >keep mind contact up >>very low level enemy not hear.

  As soon as he’s on his way, running across the garden, it occurs to Nunks that he has no words with which to explain. He can wake Lacey and Sam, of course, but how is he going to tell them about Mulligan? Briefly he moans, clenching and unclenching his hands; then he steadies himself and hurries up the stairs.

  In the office Sam Bailey, wearing only bright red underwear, is stretched out on the sofa with one arm over his face while Buddy hums to himself at the desk, his sensors turning Nunks’ way.

  “Shall I wake the programmer?”

  Nunks nods a yes and hopes that the comp unit can register the gesture, then grabs Sam by the shoulder and shakes him. With an oath and a hard punch into empty air Sam sits up.

  “Oh. Nunks,” he mumbles. “Just you, huh? What’s wrong?”

  Here is the crux, and Nunks moans again, waving
his hands desperately in the air while Sam stares at him as if he could master psionics by sheer force of will.

  “If I may interrupt?” Buddy says. “Are you trying to tell us something about the Mulligan unit?”

  Nunks nods yes again just as Lacey appears, tucking a spotless white shirt into a pair of blue shorts.

  “If you will allow,” Buddy says. “I can activate a short program that I have prepared. It should greatly simplify matters by distinguishing between and eliminating logical sub-sets of events and possibilities.”

  “Go for it, Buddy,” Lacey says. “And is there any coffee?”

  “My housecomp sub-function activated the brewing unit just before I woke you.”

  The coffee is finished at the same time as Buddy’s program flashes onto the screen. Nunks is amazed by its elegance; it reminds him of a qualitative analysis of a chemical substance, a clever list of yes/no questions that lead to if/then situations—is the Mulligan unit inoperative? If yes, go to question fifty; if no, proceed to two—that sort of thing. In only a few minutes he manages to convey that Mulligan is alive, captured by enemies, and being held in an unknown location to which, however, he has an important clue. A quick bit of revision on Buddy’s part helps him get across the idea of the original underground living quarters of the colonists.

  “Maps,” Buddy says. “We need a certain specialized map that I believe exists in a data bank here on Hagar. If you will excuse me for a moment?”

  On his screen flash numbers, a couple of names: access codes to the main computer of the University of Freehaven, a city some eighty miles away. For a moment the screen is blank; then data begins to feed in, pages of words scrolling too fast to read, bits and pieces of holos and diagrams, each one stamped with those mysterious letters, NASA, and finally, a section of a map.

  “Can you contact Mulligan and transmit this data to him?” Buddy says. “Perhaps he can recognize where he is.”

  Nunks shakes his head in a helpless no and turns his hands palms up.

  “You cannot transmit pictorial data?”

  He again says no, relieved that the comp unit picks up things so quickly. When he sends his mind out, he finds Mulligan on line.

  Little Brother. You describe/not describe where you now are now.

  Describe: round room eighteen meters across. Has: trash everywhere; sliding door in gray plastocrete wall; ninety degrees from that, tunnel mouth. They burn fire in tunnel; smoke goes away easy MUST BE: opening to outside.

  At that last detail Nunks feels a surge of pure hope. By gesturing and pointing his way through the maps and Buddy’s program, he finally manages to find a place that matches Mulligan’s description well enough, the old assembly hall of the colonial governors. The maps are complete enough for Buddy to give them its location to within a kilometer; once they are there, the smoke should do the rest, provided, of course, the fire is still burning.

  “Then we’re on our way,” Lacey says. “Sam, wake Rick, get him up here to guard Maria. Oh yeah, you better put some clothes on, man.”

  “I happened to have that in mind,” Sam does his best to sound dignified. “Okay, Buddy. You did good. Keep it up, hear?”

  “I shall do my best to continue operating to your satisfaction, but of course, my programmer is the one who sets the standards of my performance.”

  “Hey, you arrogant piece of—”

  “Enough, Sam,” Lacey cuts in. “He happens to be right, but there no is any time for fighting about it now.”

  With a scowl of wounded dignity Sam grabs his clothes from the floor and stalks out in the direction of the bathroom. Buddy hums briefly, then emits a series of clicks.

  “Operation concluded, programmer. A contingent of police officers will be meeting you near the rehydration project.”

  “Buddy! How did you manage that?”

  “I have been planning it while you slept. I simply broke into the automated duty roster and assigned various units to certain duties, including helping you, and just now I moved that task up to emergency priority. Since the task had been on the list for some time, and was thus familiar, the duty officer accepted its validity. My tie-in with Police HQ comm indicates that a squad is even now signing out special vehicles. I have also fed the police the coordinates of Mulligan’s probable location.”

  “Super bueno, pal.” Lacey pats his casing. “Just real fine. Okay, Nunks. We’ll get Mulligan out of this mess for you real fast.”

  Nunks wishes he could mouth-speak just so he could make some sarcastic comment. Of course she’s doing all this only for him—of course. He wonders, as he so often does, at the amazing human capacity for self-delusion.

  oOo

  “What do you mean, my men are already heading toward the Yard?” Bates is so angry that he’s bellowing. “Who the hell gave that order?”

  “You did, sir.” Sergeant Parsons shrinks back as if he’s trying to meld with the wall. “I mean, uh, it sure looked like you did. It got all entered onto comp nice and proper with your keywords and everything, honest, sir.”

  Bates is about to bellow again when he remembers Buddy. When he was enjoying a joke at the PBI’s expense he’d forgotten that if Buddy could access the carefully encrypted PBI files, breaking into the police force’s bottom-of-the-line system would be as easy as calculating a square root.

  “Well, I dint give it,” he says, as calmly as he can. “But it’s too late to call’em back now. Only thing we can do is go out there after’em. I mean, I’m going to go out. You get some sleep, Sarge. You look like you’re dropping where you stand.”

  “I’m good for a few more hours, sir.”

  “Oh yeah sure. Get some sleep, and get it now. I’ll be calling you, maybe, in about three, four hours.”

  Bates trades the fancy chief’s car for an all-terrain skimmer and sets off at about twice the speed limit with the siren roaring and the lights flashing, soaring high over Polar City to cause as little danger as possible to the incoming sunset commuters. Once he’s left the city airways behind, he drops down closer to the road and throws the throttle wide open. Below him dust roils from the spray of compressed air, a murky river in the gathering twilight. Finally, over the constant chatter of his sound-link with HQ, he begins to pick up communications between the leader of the expedition to the Rat Yard and the other three drivers in his squad. He flips the unit on and cuts in.

  “Sergeant Nagura? The chief here. Where are you guys heading?”

  “Uh, I think we’re going where you told us to, sir.” She sounds worried. “On your order sheet it says Nova Station, sir, and some civilians are going to meet us there, too.”

  “You got it exactly right, Sarge.” Briefly he wonders why he’s covering for a damn AI unit, but he knows that Buddy’s set things up so that he’ll look like a fool if he doesn’t play along. “I got visual contact with you now. I’m going to come with you, after all, so I’ll just get in line.”

  “Check, sir. Glad to have you along, chief, I no mind sayin. It sound like something big’s happening.”

  “You’re right about that, yeah.”

  About halfway around the rehydro project, a short side road comes into the main highway, and as they skim round to it, Bates can see a beautiful gray Bentley parked in front of the white plastofoam huts housing the formidable array of solar monitors that will, at least theoretically, give Hagar plenty of warning if its red-giant sun begins a build-up to nova state. Seeing the car makes him wonder if Lacey actually is the sentient behind this call, but as the police caravan lands, she gets out of the Bentley and strides over to meet him. With that irritating schoolgirl’s smile, she offers him her hand.

  “Oh say, chief, I sure am glad to see you! What made you change your mind and come help us?”

  Again he’s faced with the choice: admit that Buddy made fools out of both him and the police comp, or play along. He shakes hands.

  “Ah well, priorities change. Now. Where the hell is Mulligan?”

  Third Interlud
e: the Prey

  All afternoon, Tomaso has been prowling around the edges of Porttown in search of Mulligan. Since he can read another psychic’s mind-print from up to a kilometer away, he was expecting that finding him would be easy, but for hours he’s been aware that even as he hunts Mulligan, half the ghetto is hunting him. They may not know exactly who he is, but he’s managed to pick up enough mind signal on the one hand and idle chatter on the other to realize that someone called the Mayor of Porttown has far too much information about him for safety’s sake. From what he knows about Polar City, he can guess that he’d be better off in the hands of the police than in those of this mysterious mayor. The police, after all, can always be bribed. He has to be careful, therefore, about where he goes, sticking to the semi-respectable areas where he has a chance to blend in with crowds or duck into public establishments that have a back door as well as a front. In the worst areas of Porttown, proprietors look askance at sentients ducking through their establishments, and even the entrances to the Metro stand too far apart to offer a ready refuge.

  Wherever he walks, the eater walks with him, a constant murmur of greed in the background of his mind. Food—always thinking food, drooling and lusting when it smells stale soy burgers, rumbling and complaining every time they pass a slice ’n’ fry without buying—it merges with his rage, finally, to eye the passers-by and turn them into so many cuts of meat. Assassin he may be, but a cannibal, no, and by sunset Tomaso is so revolted by these constant, intrusive thoughts of roast lizzie haunch and barbequed human ribs that he talks back, telling the eater to shut up and be quiet, threatening it with antibiotics and laser skin-peels and any other medical execution he can think of. Although he starts by making these threats psionically, as he turns a corner into a dead-end alley he passes two young lizzies and realizes with horror that they are staring at him—because he’s talking to himself aloud.