It was this:
One-shot cultivars were queuing outside the tank farm in the Pierpoint night. Ten or a dozen of them stood about in the falling snow, stamping their feet and cocking their short reaction guns. They wore stained leather trousers, laced together over a three-inch gap all the way down the outside leg, and leather bolero vests. Their breath condensed like the breath of great dependable animals in the freezing air. Even their shadows had tusks. Their huge arms were blue with cold, but they were too fucking hard-on to care about that. 'Hey,' they told one another, 'I wish I'd put less clothes on. You know?' The entry pattern was this: they rushed the door of the twink parlour in twos, and the kiddies inside shot them down from behind the coffins.
It was bedlam in there in quite a short time after they killed the Hi-Lite girl, with the flat fizzing arcs of reaction bolts, the flicker of laser sights in the smoke, and a rich smell of human fluids. The front window was out. Big smoking holes were in the walls. Two of the tanks had fallen off their trestles; the rest, alive with shocking pink alarm graphics, were warming up fast. To Tig Vesicle it seemed that the whole issue revolved around Tank Seven. The kids had given up on getting it open: but they weren't going to leave it for anyone else. Seeing this early on, Vesicle had crawled as far away from it as possible, and got in a corner with his hands over his eyes, while cultivars rushed through the smoke, shouting, 'Hey, don't bother to cover me!' and were picked off. The kids had a tactical advantage there: but down on firepower, down on your luck, and they were being pushed back. They shrieked in their gluey argot. They pulled new guns from beneath their rainslickers. Looking over their shoulders for another way out, they got shot: in the legs, or the spine, and they were soon in a condition the tailor couldn't cure. Things looked bad, then two things happened:
Somebody hit Tank Seven with a short reaction shell.
And the Cray sisters appeared in the tank farm doorway, shaking their heads and reaching for the pieces in their purses.
Chinese Ed and Rita Robinson were on the run somewhere in the weeds in back of the burning carwash. Hanson was dead, Ed guessed, and the DA too, so there would be no help from that quarter. Otto Rank had the high ground. He also had the 30.06 he had taken from Hogfat Wisconsin's kitchen after he tortured and killed Hogfat's teenage daughter. It was the way he laid her out that was the missing piece of the puzzle, Ed thought. I should have seen that, but I was too busy being the smart dick. Not seeing that was going to cost two more lives, but at least one of them was only his own.
Ed's head got too far above the weeds. The flat crack-and-whip of the 30.06 cut across the drowsy afternoon air. Some birds flew up from the river bank a quarter of a mile away.
Sixteen shots, Ed thought. Maybe he's low on ammo now.
Ed's ramrod Dodge was where he had left it parked, on the service road the other side of the lot. They weren't going to make it that far. Rita was shot. Ed was shot too, but not as bad. On the up side, he had a couple of shells left in one of the Colts. He ran harder, but this seemed to open Rita's wound.
'Hey, Ed,' she said. 'Put me down. Let's do it here.'
She laughed, but her face was grey and defeated.
'Jesus, Rita,' Ed said.
'I know. You're sorry. Well you shouldn't be, Ed. I got shot with you, which is more than most girls get.' She tried to laugh again. 'Don't you want to make it with me in the weeds?'
'Rita… '
'I'm tired, Ed.'
She didn't say any more, and her expression didn't change. Eventually he put her down in the weeds and began to cry. After a minute or two he shouted:
'Otto, you fucker!'
'Yo!' said Rank.
'She's dead.'
There was a silence. After a bit, Rank said:
'You want to come in?'
'She's dead, Otto. You're next.'
There was a laugh.
'If you come in-' Rank began, then seemed to be thinking. 'What is it I do?' he called. 'Hey, help me out here, Ed. Oh, wait, no, got it: If you come in I see you get a fair trial.' He put a shot where he estimated Ed's skull had last been. 'Guess what?' he said, when the echoes had died away. 'I'm shot too, Ed. Rite shot me in the heart, long before she met you. These women! It was point-blank, Ed. You make anything of that?'
'I make suck my dick out of it,' Ed said.
He stood up as coolly as he could. He saw Otto Rank down at the edge of the carwash roof in the classic infantry kneel, the 30.06 up at aim, its sling tight round his elbow. Ed raised the Colt carefully in both hands. He had two shots left, and it was important he spoiled the first one. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes and squeezed off carefully. The round went ten, twelve feet wide, and Ed dropped his pistol arm to his side. Otto, who had been surprised to see him pop up out of the weeds like that, gave a wild laugh of relief.
'You got the wrong gun, Ed!' he shouted.
He stood up. 'Hey,' he said. 'Take another pop. It's free!'
He spread his arms wide. 'Nobody shoots anybody at eighty yards with a Colt.45,' he said.
Ed raised the gun again and fired.
Rank was picked up from the head end and thrown backwards with his feet in the air. He fell off the roof and into the weeds. 'Fuck you, Ed!' he screamed, but his face was half off and he was already dead. Chinese Ed looked down at his Colt. He made a gesture as if to throw it away. 'I'm sorry, Rita,' he was beginning to say, when the sky behind the carwash turned a steely colour and ripped open like a page of cheap print. This time the duck was huge. Something was wrong with it. Its yellow feathers had a greasy look, and a human tongue hung laxly out of one side of its beak.
'There will be an interruption to service,' it said. 'As a valued customer- '
At that, Chinese Ed's consciousness was pulled apart and he was received into all the bleakness and pain of the universe. All the colours went out of his world, and all the beautiful simple ironies along with them, and then the world itself was folded away until through it, try as he might, he could see nothing but the cheesy fluorescent lights of Tig Vesicle's tank farm. He erupted out of the wreckage of Tank Seven, half drowned, throwing up with disorientation and horror. He stared round at the drifting smoke, the; dead kids and stunned-looking cultivars. Proteome poured sluggishly off him like the albumen of a bad egg. Poor, dead Rita was gone for good and he wasn't even Chinese Ed the detective anymore. He was Ed Chianese, twink.
'This is my home,you guys,' he said. 'You know? You could have knocked.'
There was a laugh from the doorway.
'You owe us money, Ed Chianese,' said Bella Cray.
She looked meditatively across the room at the two remaining gun-kiddies. 'These punks aren't from me,' she said to Tig Vesicle, who had got himself up off the floor and sidled back behind his cheap plywood counter.
Evie Cray laughed.
'They aren't mine, either,' she said.
She shot them in the face, one after the other, with her Chambers pistol, then showed her teeth. 'That's what'll happen to you if you don't pay us, Ed,' she explained.
'Hey,' said Bella. 'I wanted to do that.'
'Those punks were some of Fedora Gash's punks,' Evie told Tig Vesicle. 'So why'd you let them in?'
Vesicle shrugged. He had no choice, the shrug indicated.
The cultivars were leaving the farm now, one-handedly dragging their dead and wounded behind them. The wounded looked down at themselves, dabbling their hands and saying things like, 'I could get shot like this all day. You know?' Ed Chianese watched them file past and shivered. He stepped out of the ruined tank, plucked the rubber cables out of his spine and tried to wipe the proteome off himself with his hands. He could already feel the black voice of withdrawal, like someone talking persuasively a long way back in his head.
'I don't know you,' he said. 'I don't owe you anything.'
Evie gave him her big lipstick smile.
'We bought your paper off Fedy Gash,' she explained. She studied the wreckage of the tank farm. 'Looks as if she didn't real
ly want to sell.' She allowed herself another smile. 'Still. A twink like you owes everyone else in the universe, Ed. That's what a twink is, a speck of protoplasm in the ocean.' She shrugged. 'What can we do, Ed? We're all fish.'
Ed knew she was right. He wiped helplessly at himself again, then, seeing Vesicle behind his counter, approached him and said:
'You got anytissues back there, or like that?'
'Hey, Ed,' Vesicle said. 'I got this.'
He pulled out the Hi-Lite Autoloader he had taken from the dead girl and fired it into the ceiling. 'I'm so scared I could shit!' heyelled at the Cray sisters. They looked startled. 'So, you know: fuck you!'He darted jerkily out from behind the counter, every nerve in his body firing off at random. He could barely control his limbs. 'Hey, fuck, Ed. How'm I doing?' he screamed. Ed, who was as surprised as the Cray sisters, stared at him. Any minute now, Bella and Evie would wake up from their trance of surprise. They would brush the plaster dust off their shoulders and something serious would start to happen.
'Jesus, Tig,' Ed said.
Naked, stinking of embalming fluid and punctured for the tank at 'neurotypical energy sites', a wasted Earthman with a partly grown-out Mohican and a couple of snake tattoos, he ran out into the street. Pierpoint was deserted. After a moment explosions and flashes of light lit up the windows of the tank farm. Then Tig Vesicle staggered out backwards, the arms of his coat on fire with blowback from the reaction pistol, shouting, 'Hey, the fuck,'and, 'I'm so shit!' They stared at one another with expressions of terror and relief. Chianese beat out the fire with his hands. Arms around each other's shoulders they blundered off into the night, drunk for the moment with body-chemicals and camaraderie.
TEN
Agents of Fortune
Three in the morning. Valentine Sprake was long gone. Michael Kearney stumbled along the north bank of the Thames, then hid among some trees until he thought he heard a voice. This frightened him again and he ran all the way to Twickenham in the dark and the wind before he got control of himself. There he tried to think, but all that came to him was the image of the Shrander. He decided to call Anna. Then he decided to call a cab. But his hands were trembling too hard to use the phone, so in the end he did neither but took the towpath back east instead. An hour later, Anna met him at her door, wearing a long cotton nightgown. She looked flushed and he could feel the heat of her body from two feet away.
'Tim's with me,' she said nervously.
Kearney stared at her.
'Who's Tim?' he said.
Anna looked back into the flat.
'It's all right, it's Michael,' she called. To Kearney she said, 'Couldn't you come back in the morning?'
'I just want some things,' Kearney said. 'It won't take long.'
'Michael -'
He pushed past her. The flat smelled strongly of incense and candle wax. To get to the room where he kept his stuff, he had to pass Anna's bedroom, the door of which was partly open. Tim, whoever he was, sat propped up against the wall at the head end of the bed, his face three-quarter profile in the yellow glow of two or three nightlight candles. He was in his mid thirties, with good skin and a build light but athletic, features which would help give him a boyish appearance well into his forties. He had a glass of red wine in one hand, and he was staring thoughtfully at it.
Kearney looked him up and down.
'Who the hell is this?' he said.
'Michael, this is Tim. Tim, this is Michael.'
'Hi,' said Tim. He held out his hand. 'I won't get up.'
'Jesus Christ, Anna,' Kearney said.
He went through to the back room, where a brief search turned up some clean Levis and an old black leather jacket he had once liked too much to throw away. He put them on. There was also a cycle-courier bag with the Marin logo on the flap, into which lie began emptying the contents of the little green chest of drawees. Looking up blankly from this task, he discovered that Anna had washed the chalked diagrams off the wall above it. He wondered why she would do that. He could hear her talking in the bedroom. Whenever she tried to explain anything, her voice took on childish, persuasive values. After a moment she seemed to give up and said sharply, 'Of course I don't! What do you mean?' Kearney remembered her trying to explain similar things to him. There was a noise outside the door and Tim poked his head round.
'Don't do that,' Kearney said. 'I'm nervous already.'
'I wondered if I could help?'
'No, thanks.'
'It's just that it's five o'clock in the morning, you see, and you come in here covered in mud.'
Kearney shrugged.
'I see that,' he said. 'I see that.'
Anna stood angrily by the door to watch him out. 'Take care,' he said to her, as warmly as he could. He was two nights down the stone stairs when he heard her footsteps behind him. 'Michael,' she called. 'Michael.' When he didn't answer, she followed him out into the street and stood there shouting at him in her bare feet and white nightdress. 'Did you come back for another fuck?' Her voice echoed up and down the empty suburban street. 'Is that what you wanted?'
'Anna,' he said, 'it's five o'clock in the morning.'
'I don't care. Please don't come here again, Michael. Tim's nice and he really loves me.'
Kearney smiled.
'I'm glad.'
'No, you're not!' she shouted. 'No, you're not!'
Tim came out of the building behind her. He was dressed, and he had his car keys in his hand. He crossed the pavement without looking at Anna or Kearney, and got into his car. He wound the driver's window down as if he thought about saying something to one of them, but in the end shook his head and drove off instead. Anna stared after him puzzledly then burst into tears. Kearney put his arm round her shoulders. She leaned in to him.
'Or did you come back to kill me,' she said quietly. 'The way you killed all those others?'
Kearney walked off towards the Underground station at Gunnersbury. His phone chirped at him suddenly, but he ignored it.
Heathrow Terminal 3, hushed after the long night, maintained a slow dry warmth. Kearney bought underwear and toilet articles, sat in one of the concessions outside the departure lounge reading the Guardian and taking small sips of a double espresso.
The women behind the concession counter were arguing about something in the news. 'I'd hate to live forever,' one of them said. She raised her voice. 'There's your change, love.' Kearney, who had been expecting to see his own name on page two of the paper, raised his head. She gave him a smile. 'Don't forget your change,' she said. He had found only the name of the woman he had killed in the Midlands; no one was looking for a Lancia Integrale. He folded the paper up and stared at a trickle of Asians making their way across the departure lounge for a flight to LAX. His phone chirped again. He took it out: voicemail.
'Hi,' said Brian Tate's voice. 'I've been trying to get you at horns.' He sounded irritable. 'I had an idea a couple of hours ago. Give me a ring if you get this.' There was a pause, and Kearney thought the message was over. Then Tate added, 'I'm really a bit concerned. Gordon was here again after you left. So call.' Kearney switched the phone off and stared at it. Behind Tate's voice he had heard the white cat mewing for attention.
'"Justine"!' he thought. It made him smile.
He sorted through the courier bag until he found the Shrander's dice. He held them in his hand. They always felt warm. The symbols on them appeared in no language or system of numbers he knew, historical or modern. On a pair of ordinary dice, each symbol would be duplicated; here, none was. Kearney watched them rattle across the tabletop and come to rest in the spilled coffee by his empty cup. He studied them for a moment, then scooped them up, stuffed newspaper and phone hastily into the courier bag, and left.
'Your change, love!'
The women looked after him, then at each other. One of them shrugged. By then, Kearney was in the lavatories, shivering and throwing up. When he came out, he found Anna waiting for him. Heathrow was awake now. People were hurrying to make fli
ghts, make phone calls, make headway. Anna stood fragile and listless in the middle of the concourse, staring every so often at their faces as they brushed past her. Every time she thought she saw him her face lit up. Kearney remembered her at Cambridge. Shortly after they met, a friend of hers had told him: 'We nearly lost her once. You will take care of her, won't you?' He had remained puzzled by this warning-with its image of Anna as a package that might easily slip the mind-only until he found her in the bathroom a month later, crying and staring ahead, with her wrists held out in front of her. Now she looked at him and said:
'I knew this is where you'd be.'
Kearney stared at her in disbelief. He began to laugh.
Anna laughed too. 'I knew you'd come here,' she said. 'I brought some of your things.'
'Anna -'
'You can't keep running away from it forever, you know.'
This made him laugh harder for a moment, then stop.
Kearney's adolescence had passed like a dream. When he wasn't in the fields, he was at the imaginary house he called Gorselands, with its stands of pine, sudden expanses of sandy heath, steep-sided valleys full of flowers and rocks. It was always full summer. He watched his cousins, leggy and elegant, walk naked down the beach at dawn; he heard them whisper in the attic. He was continually sore from masturbating. At Gorselands there was always more; there was always more after that. Inturned breathing, a sudden salty smell in an empty room. A murmur of surprise.
'All this dreaming gets you nowhere,' his mother said.
Everyone said that. But by now he had found numbers. He had seen how the same sequences underlay the structure of a galaxy and a spiral shell. Randomness and determination, chaos and emergent order: the new tools of physics and biology. Years before computer modelling made bad art out of the monster in the Mandelbrot Set, Kearney had seen it, churning and streaming and turbulent at the heart of things. Numbers made him concentrate more: they encouraged him to pay attention. Where he had winced away from school life, with its mixture of boredom and savagery, he now welcomed it. Without all that, the numbers made him see, he would not go to Cambridge, where he could begin to work with the real structures of the world.
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