by Brian Craig
By now they had come through a short stretch of corridor to the threshold of a different kind of room. It was an office of sorts, with computer screens and keyboards, but it had no chairs. Instead it had a thickly-cushioned carpet on which one might squat in order to use the machines. Yokoi removed his shoes before entering. The Kid had bare feet already—all he was wearing was a light robe which the girls had presumably put on him when they brought him out of the sensurround.
The girl unrolled a kind of huge cushion, and helped the Kid to lower himself on to it. Once there, supported on one elbow, he felt a lot better.
“Tea,” said Yokoi to the girl, abruptly. She bowed—far more deeply than Yokoi had bowed to Kid Zero, and left the room.
The Kid’s thoughts were just beginning to catch up with him, now that he didn’t feel quite so bad.
“You smuggled me out of America?” he asked, not quite able to believe what he had heard.
“Certainly,” said Yokoi, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “There was no safety for you within its borders. GenTech is powerful everywhere, including my own homeland, but it is most powerful of all in America.”
“Where are we now, then?” asked the Kid, not entirely convinced that he wasn’t being fed a pack of lies.
“Antarctica,” Yokoi informed him lightly.
Oddly enough, the absurdity of it made it more believable. If Yokoi had been lying, he’d never have expected the Kid to swallow a whopper like that.
“I’ve never been south of Brownsville,” said the Kid—and then, just to show that he still had some of his wits about him, he said: “This is Mitsu-Makema’s doing, isn’t it?” The Kid knew that horrorshows were M-M products, and only a corp of that size would have the organization or the motivation to snatch him out of the jaws of GenTech’s trap.
“I have the honour to serve Mitsu-Makema,” Yokoi confirmed. “I hope that you too will soon have that honour.”
The Kid made no immediate response to the job offer. His mind was on other matters.
“Did you leave Lady Venom behind?” he said, in response to a sudden pang of anxiety.
“Indeed not,” answered Yokoi. “Our agents are very efficient. They were careful to leave nothing behind to indicate what might have become of you.”
The Kid blinked at the implications of that. “They brought Pasco and the mercy boy along too?” he queried.
“Mr Pasco and Mr Preston are here—they must be awakened soon, for the sake of their health, but they will be securely imprisoned. In the meantime, we are conducting some experiments of the same kind as the one in which you have recently participated. Mr Pasco is a very interesting subject—he obviously has an extensive knowledge of horrorshow tapes. I fear that we must take careful precautions with respect to the rattlesnake, Zero-san. I must apologize.”
The Kid had noticed that Yokoi did a lot of apologizing. He had also noticed that the politeness didn’t extend as far as not doing the things for which he would later have to apologize.
The girl returned, bearing a tray. There was tea, but no biscuits.
“I don’t have the disc,” said the Kid, while he watched Yokoi pour. He wondered why the liquid looked so pale and anemic. “But I guess you know that,” he added.
“We know that you hid one copy,” said Yokoi evenly. “We know also that two others were recovered by GenTech, and that the fourth was given by you to Enrico Andriano. Andriano escaped, by the way. The vehicles which were sent by his friends to Melendez were decoys—he made his way on foot to a more distant point of rendezvous. His masters now have the disc in their secure possession—I do not know whether they will succeed in unlocking the data without triggering its destruction, but I think they might.”
“Do you know who those masters are?” asked the Kid, sipping the hot tea from his cup. He didn’t like the taste much, but he liked the feeling of it sliding down his throat.
“Oh yes,” said Yokoi, but did not elaborate.
“And you want me to tell you where I hid the fourth copy, so you can have a crack at it yourselves?”
“Certainly,” said the old man, who was sipping his own tea in a seemingly reverent fashion. “But there is no hurry—no hurry at all.”
That, after all that he’d been through, seemed the greatest absurdity of all. Kid Zero couldn’t help but laugh—and though he didn’t like the way his laughter sounded any more than he liked the taste of Dr Yokoi’s tea, he loved the way it fell in his guts
2
There was nothing to be seen from the viewing-tower but mountains of ice overlaid by snow. There were no buildings, no chimneys, no oil-rigs, and no penguins. The sky was an even shade of grey, lightened in the north by the light of an invisible, low-lying sun.
“When you can see that mountain top over there,” said Junichi Tanagawa. pointing to the highest of the ice-peaks, “it means that it will snow very soon.”
The Kid fell for it. “And what if you can’t?” he asked.
“Then it’s snowing already.” The Japanese didn’t bother to laugh at his own joke—not, at least, with his mouth; it was impossible to figure out what his wrinkle-surrounded eyes were doing.
Tanagawa was even older than Yokoi. He was far more wizened and far more westernized. He wore a very severe grey business-suit and a neat blue tie, and he sat in a leather-clad reclining-chair, behind a beautifully-polished desk. Kid Zero had often heard the expression “boardroom suits”, but it had been meaningless noise until now. Now he knew what a director of a multinational corp actually looked like—one such director of one such corp, anyhow. He couldn’t help but feel flattered to be in the same room as a man like Tanagawa; that the room was in a secret establishment less than forty miles from the south pole and that Tanagawa was being nice to him added further dimensions to his sense of privilege—and to his awkward suspicion that it was all too good to last.
He’d been given a nice room with a private can and a shower—not to mention a PC he didn’t know how to use and a TV set which didn’t seem capable of tuning in ZBC—and the three meals he had eaten there since the previous evening had all seemed to his untutored palate like ambrosia washed down with nectar. He’d tried hard not to let his enjoyment of it all be spoiled by the suspicion that someone would eventually turn up with the bill, but he hadn’t quite succeeded.
“Of course,” said Tanagawa, in a regretful tone which sounded honest, “the time may soon come when the peak will no longer be there, and we will have to change the saying to refer to rain. Sixty per cent of the ice-cap has already melted into the sea. This is the last of the world’s unspoiled wildernesses, Mr Zero. Dr Yokoi tells me that you have a certain affinity with the idea of unspoiled wilderness.”
“This is a little too wild for me,” said the Kid, coming away from the viewport in order to take a seat opposite his host. “Forests are more my style. This is more like the Great Western Desert—peace bought with hostility. Isn’t the Antarctic Argentinian territory?”
“Not all of it, by any means. The Argentinians have expanded from their Weddell Sea bases to annexe the old Queen Maud Land and the Victoria Land Coast, but this particular spot is still technically part of the Australian Territories, and it is too far into the ice sheet to interest even the hardiest of Latin American adventurers. Not that it would matter if this were Argentinian territory, of course—Mitsu-Makema has an interest in the affairs of every nation on earth.”
It was all Greek to the Kid, whose knowledge of geography was rather limited, but he wasn’t about to admit as much. “Why build an installation way out here?” he asked, trying to put on a show of being clever. “The heating bills must be pretty high.”
“Social responsibility,” said Tanagawa mildly. “All the corporations conduct scientific research of a potentially hazardous nature, and all of them locate their most sensitive establishments in places where the environment is relatively hostile to life. That is why GenTech has recently taken to locating the establishments r
esponsible for its most adventurous biotechnological research in the North American desert and the high Andes. Chromicon has similar stations in the Sahara and Siberia; we have others in the Australian outback. We are particularly proud of this establishment—and the problem of heating it is not so very awkward. Our nuclear reactor is readily supplied with fuel by local uranium, and ice is a very efficient insulator.”
“This is where your BioDiv does its hairiest work, then? And where Dr Yokoi and his friends are trying to upgrade horrorshow booths into fully-fledged dream-machines.”
“Dr Yokoi is a visionary,” said Tanagawa smoothly. “We are very proud of him—as proud as GenTech are of the legendary Dr Zarathustra. We are realists, and must admit that GenTech are our superiors, for the moment, in advanced biotechnological research—but we feel that this disadvantage is compensated by our superiority in cybernetics and its associated technologies.”
The Kid had no particular difficulty with the long words. He was an intelligent person, and although he had only the vaguest idea what cybernetics might be he reasoned that it had to refer to Yokoi and the horrorshows. “And you want me to offer you further compensation, in the shape of Zarathustra’s data-disc?” he said—not because he was in any rush to get to the point, but simply because he hoped it would show how clued-up he was.
Tanagawa smiled, but didn’t jump at the offer. Yokoi obviously wasn’t the only one who thought that these matters needn’t be hurried. The Kid had heard from guys who had regular dealings with the yakuza that the Japanese were positively addicted to beating all around the bush before getting down to the nitty-gritty, so he wasn’t to perplexed by it.
Tanagawa sat forward in his chair. “Strange as it may seem,” he said, “we have had the utmost difficulty in discovering who you really are—or who you were, if you prefer to think of it that way, before you assumed the name Kid Zero. America’s record-keeping has suffered an unfortunate decline, of course, since the Policed Zones were sealed and the areas outside excluded from many of the privileges of bureaucratic regulation, but it is strange, nevertheless.”
“Does it matter?” asked the Kid.
“It might. Everything which interests GenTech matters to us. Anyone whose interests are opposed to GenTech’s are at least partly aligned with ours—which includes Mr Haycraft and his masters as well as yourself. We know and understand what Mr Haycraft’s masters are trying to do—but you, quite frankly, are more of a puzzle.”
“You ought to understand me well enough,” replied the Kid, with a slight coldness in his tone, “after that trick you pulled with the horrorshow. I was surprised myself when I tried to figure out how much of that little hallucination was fed to me and how much was my own input.”
“Alas,” said Tanagawa unrepentantly, “Dr Yokoi has not yet given us a perfect psychoanalytical tool. Perhaps he will, one day—but for the time being, his devices can do little more than play interesting games. Will you tell me what name you had when you were a child, and where you were born?”
“I don’t see that it would be any use to you,” the Kid countered, stubbornly.
Tanagawa didn’t frown, or make any other sign of annoyance. “Would you like to work for us?” he asked.
“As what? A hired killer, like Pasco? Or a spy, like Haycraft?” The Kid’s tone was calculated to imply that he didn’t favour either prospect.
Tanagawa didn’t reply immediately, but looked steadily at the Kid for several seconds from the depths of his dark, birdlike eyes. Then he said: “Can you not understand and sympathize with the motives which led Mr Pasco to become a GenTech employee? His present post offered him—until his present assignment, at least—the careful protection of a large organization, with all the benefits that can provide. And the previous position which he gave up in order to pursue a career with GenTech was surely preferable to your own status as a hunted criminal. Why should you not leap at the chance of a similar role within Mitsu-Makema?”
“If I were an Op,” replied the Kid soberly. “A job with a corp SecDiv would probably look pretty good. But I’m not an Op, and I never would be. I’m an outlaw.”
“By which you mean to imply,” said Tanagawa, “that you subscribe to the image of your activities which has been so carefully built up by Mr Hegarty. Do you really see yourself as a free man, Mr Zero? Can you sincerely represent yourself as some kind of mythical hero, embodying the reincarnated spirit of the American pioneer?”
The Kid laughed. “I’m just a ghost dancer, Mr Tanagawa,” he said. “Just a ghost dancer. I have it on the word of Homer himself.” For a fleeting moment he nursed the hope that Tanagawa might ask him to explain, so he could show off all that Homer Hegarty had told him about Wovoka and the massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee, passing it off as his own wisdom. But Tanagawa already knew what a ghost dancer was.
“And is that what you want for yourself?” the director asked. “Are you content to be a celebrant of hopelessness, committing yourself to meaningless rituals of bravado and revenge, in order to serve some half-formed and half-baked quasi-religious faith?”
“It’s the American way,” said the Kid cheerfully. “You heard about what they’re doing in Deseret these days?”
“Is that what you want for, yourself?” asked Tanagawa, quietly refusing to let his question be ignored. It was a good question.
“I’ll tell you where I stashed the disc,” said the Kid uncomfortably. “You’re welcome to it. I owe you that much, for pulling me out. As for the rest—I honestly don’t know what I want, Mr Tanagawa.”
“Perhaps we can help you to decide,” said the M-M man, with what seemed to the Kid to be unwarranted smugness. “I really am interested in your previous history, you know. Won’t you tell me something about it?”
The Kid shrugged. “I had a mis-spent youth,” he said. “I seemed to spend most of it watching TV. Not the networks—the educational stuff that schools used to subscribe to. That was what passed for looking after us in the place where I was. It was a kind of orphanage in the Houston NoGo—I guess the whole outfit lived on the survival margin. It doesn’t matter what name they called me by—it wasn’t really mine. I was a foundling, left on the steps by persons unknown. I left the name behind when they threw me out to fend for myself, and became plain ‘Kid’.
“I was taken in by the Low Numbers because Ace the Ace knew me—he was an old boy of the Institution—but that went wrong; his buddies gave me the zero when Pete Quint got killed and the Trip brothers convinced themselves that I was lousing up their luck. They meant it to hurt, but I always liked it—no half-measures, you see. All and nothing are better than not so much, and I wanted it both ways: Kid Zero, all out to put the bite on GenTech; Kid Zero stops at nothing. Once I started the vendetta, it was absolute. That make any sense to you, Mr Tanagawa?”
“You can make a fresh start now,” the man in the suit pointed out.
“Sure,” said the Kid, in a low tone. “Back in the cradle, in the garden of Eden. But what can I do for you, except be Ray Pasco in miniature?”
“You might be worth much more to us than that, Mr Zero,” said Tanagawa, quietly. “We belong to a subtler species than the men who run GenTech, and we have little interest in recruiting men like Mr Pasco.”
The Kid was unconvinced. He couldn’t see why he might be useful to an org like M-M. But then he guessed what the suit might be referring to.
“You’re interested in Lady Venom, aren’t you?” he said. “You want to figure out how I get along so well with a rattler.”
“That is so,” admitted Tanagawa. “That—in addition to the simpler reasons of security—is why you were brought here, and why you have been placed in Dr Yokoi’s hands. My role is simply to persuade you to co-operate with him. And, of course, to receive from you the location of Dr Zarathustra’s data disc.”
“Do I get paid?” asked the Kid, for the sake of curiosity.
“Of course,” said Tanagawa serenely. “I am authorized to offer you a fee of f
orty million yen—convertible, of course, to any other currency you care to name—plus a wage of two hundred thousand yen per day until such time as you or I decide that our association is at an end. Are those terms agreeable to you, Mr Zero?”
The Kid had only an approximate idea of what a hundred thousand yen was worth in dollars and cents, but the numbers were undeniably impressive. Oddly enough, it was the daily rate rather than the forty million which seemed astonishing to Kid Zero. He tried to imagine how much that might be in real terms—in terms of gallons of water or gasoline; in terms of what whores charged their clients or what the dealers charged for ammunition; in terms of the dead-or-alive bounty currently on offer to the man who could bring his head in or the prizes on the average ZBC game-show. He couldn’t help but wonder how much a boardroom suit got paid, and whether they reckoned it by the hour or the minute.
“It’ll do,” he said, trying to sound laconic. “Leastways, it’ll do for now.”
“Thank you, Mr Zero,” said Tanagawa, standing up and extending his hand to be shaken. “Thank you very much indeed.”
Because of what he was it was impossible to be certain whether Mr Tanagawa was being sincere, but he certainly sounded it. In fact, he sounded so sincere that the Kid wondered whether he mightn’t have got twice as much, if he had only bothered to haggle. He recalled that the mafia still owed him a payoff too, if he could ever contrive to collect it.
He was rich—but he hadn’t a cent in his pocket.
“Well,” he said, in an attempt to be witty, “I sure hope that Homer Hegarty and the mafia are wrong about the end of the world being just around the corner. I’d like to clock up an awful lot of two-hundred-thousand-yen days.”
“If the threatened end of civilization were not every bit as imminent as Mr Hegarty and Mr Andriano implied,” Tanagawa observed, in a curiously scrupulous manner, “nobody’s days would be worth two hundred thousand yen. As things are, alas, we may well have far more money than time on our hands—and as Confucius once observed, we can’t take it with us if and when we go.”