Death of Reason
1
THE SKY WAS LIQUID IRON AT SUNSET. The clouds were fiery slag. The scramjet carrying me home banked over downtown Birmingham on approach to the airport. Up on Red Mountain, the Vulcan’s torch flamed scarlet for death—the beacon for another traffic accident sponged from the pavement of the city. Twenty-four hours of anonymous remembrance, then maybe the giant iron statue’s torch would burn green until somebody else spilled himself out on the black asphalt. The custom was over a hundred years old now, but people kept obliging. I once knew the woman whose job it was to throw the switch on the light. I knew her well. Abby would always have work.
But Vulcan’s torch would never burn for my grandfather. His time-sharing license had expired on Maturicell two days ago. He died in his sleep. Peacefully. As they say.
The scramjet turned thrusters down and slotted into a bay at Municipal. Guide lasers flared in long lines of neon Morse code outside the window as the beams passed into and out of pockets of humidity. It was time to disembark, but I continued to gaze out at the sky full of fire and light. Twilight in the Heart of Dixie, bloody and wringing wet as usual. Welcome home, Andy Harco. Back to the city where you were poured and formed. Back to the grindstone that put the edge to your soul.
“You get too hot, and you’ll lose your temper,” my old friend Thaddeus the poet used to say. I guess that’s what happened; that’s why I left. I lost my temper in both senses of the word. But in Seattle I’d hardened the edge once again. Birmingham no longer had what it took to dull me down. And I cut back now.
I snugged my op-eds onto my nose, then gathered my wits from under the seat and out of the overhead compartment. Along with my briefcase full of peripherals, I had a bag of toiletries, a plastic Glock nine-millimeter seventeen-shot automatic, and my good blue interviewing suit and wing tips. I had not worn the suit for eight years, but I was reasonably certain it still fit. Granddaddy’s funeral was tomorrow evening. I would have time to get it altered if it didn’t. I had flown out of Seattle in gray shorts and a T-shirt with the faded hologo of a science-fiction convention on the chest. People had given me strange looks back there, for Seattle was in the midst of a cold snap—the temperatures were hovering in the mid-fifties in August—due to some frigid air that had descended from the Arctic. I was, however, dressed perfectly for Alabama.
I felt like a returning tourist as I got off the plane. In a way, I was. I’d been on a long vacation from Birmingham. Eight years, for my health. That is, if I’d hung around eight years ago, a bullet would have just ruined the nice gray interior of my skull. At least, that’s what Freddy Pupillina had told me—more or less—when he sent me the fistful of dead roses. Southern gangsters think they’re so damn subtle and genteel. But perfume on a skunk accentuates the stink even more.
But that was eight years ago, back when I was a rookie rental for the Birmingham P.D. and an unlicensed fabulist. I’d had few friends, and an extremely abrasive manner. These days, I have more friends.
I wouldn’t be seeing Abby, but Thaddeus was a friend. I would look him up after the funeral. It had been a long time since we’d gotten together in person.
I should have expected the snoops to pattern me as soon as I stepped off the jet. For the most part, the only people who travel in actual are high-level business jocks, Ideal coordinating nodes, rich eccentrics—and terrorists. Guess which profile I matched up with? I suppose I was preoccupied with thoughts of Granddaddy, maybe of Abby, so I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. While I didn’t plan on seeing Abby ever again, after seeing the Vulcan from the air, she was heavily on my mind.
The snoop interceptor was a Securidad 50 crank, maybe three or four years old. Cheap Polish bionics suspended in a Mexican-made shell. The City of Birmingham never had been exactly on the cutting edge of technology. I clicked up the 50’s specs in the upper right-hand corner of my op-eds and gave them a quick glance. The 50’s innards were standard bionic sludge. Its force escalator was knock-out gas, not a very thoughtful option for use in a crowded corridor, such as are found, for example, in airports. Those wacky Poles.
“Mr. Harco, may I have your attention,” the crank said. The voice synth needed major adjustment. It was low filtering, and the thing sounded like a rusted-out saxophone. How could it get that grating nasal trill to come out when it didn’t even have a nose? Ah, the mysteries of science.
“What is it?” I replied through tight lips. I pointedly looked away from the 50. Who knows? Maybe the thing had enough brains to be insulted. I hoped so.
“Please accompany me,” said the crank. Then red letters flashed across the periphery of my op-eds. MR. HARCO, YOU ARE REQUESTED TO FOLLOW THE ROBOT TO AIRPORT SECURITY SCREENING. PLEASE COMPLY. The font was crude, but 3-D. I have organic inner lenses in my eyewear—I don’t skimp on any of my peripherals—and the words burned on the cellwork of my op-eds like lash welts.
I blinked twice and popped up my custom V-trace menu. It had cost me six thousand, a chip of my skull’s parietal plate, and a year of bureaupain to get a license for the junk. It was not my most expensive piece of exotic junk, but it was damned near. My brain is probably as much vat-formed gray matter as it is natural—and that’s not counting the hardware interfaces.
I had no right to use the V-trace in the present circumstance, of course, but if this asshole who was cowboying me brought me up for review, he’d be asking for suspension along with me. Assuming he was a rent-a-cop to begin with. I had better stop making assumptions, I told myself, and start dealing with this shit.
I blinked the cursor to ROOT AND BURN with my left eye and closed both eyes to activate it. The message disappeared from my op-eds. I have good junk. Not the best. My junk is not really integrated into me, like that of the nodes and the rich. I couldn’t make it work without op-eds. But my junk is quality stuff when combined with my eyewear. Within a second, the status display spread across my field of vision, and iconed the real world into a little block in the lower right-hand corner of the virtual.
SIGNAL ROOTED. FEED PROTECTED. BURN OPTIONS:
1. ORIGINATING DEVICE
2. ORIGINATING CONTROLLER
3. GENERAL BURN
I chose number 2, then iconed back to reality. The crank stood absolutely still for a long moment, and I stared at it. Somewhere, someone was receiving a nasty surprise in their eyewear.
The crank finally moved. It opened a door in its casing and extended a pink tube that looked for all the world like a shriveled penis. The crank sprayed knockout gas like a scared puppy pisses. It seemed to dribble out. The chemicals probably hadn’t been changed in years, and the crank was more electric than biologic, so it didn’t have the guts to nurture complex chemicals indefinitely.
The gas did sublimate to some degree, however. Although, fortunately, the corridor was mostly clear, one of the gate attendants was walking by. The stuff billowed lazily about, and after she got a whiff of it, she started to run away. Too late. She dropped onto the carpeted floor with a dull thump.
I, of course, have been filtered since Justcorp modified me at the Academy eight years ago. Justcorp does a first-rate job. It took the crank—or whoever was directing it—a moment to figure this out. It had been squirting me like I was a cockroach that was slow to die.
I walked over and made sure that the attendant was all right. Looked like she’d taken the fall on her side and was only bruised. No op-eds. As I felt her head to make sure nothing was cracked, my fingers closed around the feedhorn wart at the back of her neck. An optical bundle in a delta configuration. She was a node with fairly expensive hardwiring. Her brain belonged to another. I quickly stopped worrying too much about her well-being. Worrying about a node is like caring about the fate of a particular dead skin cell. And anyway, the Ideal would provide, or not, as it saw fit. I wondered, vaguely, which Ideal she belonged to.
Some of the others who were waiting on flights began to gather around the two of us. Idiots. What if I were a terrorist and in need of a hostage?
“Mr. Harco,” whined the crank.” We are prepared to activate all systems to persuade you to accompany me. Please accompany me.”
Big vocabulary these security cranks have.
I said nothing, but nodded for the thing to lead the way. May as well get the checkout over with and be on my way. I was on personal leave, for Christ’s sake, with specific instructions from management to stay out of trouble.
One nondescript corridor led to another until we descended an airtube into the bowels of the complex. I felt like I was being swallowed. Security always seemed to pick the most cheerless locations for offices.
The duty officer’s eyelids were charred, and he looked like a raccoon, although his appearance wasn’t that much different from what it had been before I’d burned his eyewear out, I was sure. Low-order security always wore those smoked plastic op-eds that look like windows into a black void. This guy’s own burned-out op-eds were lying, twisted and pitiful, on the desk before him. Yet even with the black eyes, I recognized the fellow.
Ed Bernam. Dandy Ed, we used to call him. He was a Guardian rental, and fit that agency’s stereotype to a T. Big, vain, mean—and unable to control snot and fart production. Guardian’s body mods on new employees were quick and cheap. The procedure adversely affected the guts and nasal tract.
Bernam picked his nose continually, but dressed well, as if he were trying to compensate for the shabbiness of his innards. He wore a blue and white uniform with a fully animated holoshield undulating on his chest. No wonder the airport couldn’t afford state-of-the-art cranks; it was dropping all its money on sparklies for the rentals. Or, knowing Bernam, he paid for his own.
“Hello, Ed. Frontline monitor still? Isn’t this supposed to be a slot to break rookies’ balls?”
Bernam scowled and sank back into the protection of his control chair.
“Meander Harco, what the hell are you doing in my airport?” he growled. He remembered me, evidently. Or at least remembered the fact that I hated my given name.
“Personal business,” I replied with a neutral voice. I’d had my fun with him, and now I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
“We’ll see,” he said. “The junk has flagged you. I’m going to have to pull and comp your file.”
“I’m not a terrorist, Ed.”
“We’ll see.”
Shit. This was going to take time. Public security junk is notoriously slow compared to P.D. or private corporation. It still has to access central databases, for Christ’s sake! And Bernam was going to run a full comparison, there was no doubt of that, even though there was not a reason on Earth why a terrorist would get himself doctored up to look like me. I glanced around for a chair. There was none other than the one Bernam’s fat ass was occupying, of course. That was the way of such offices. I set my suitcase and my briefcase full of peripherals down on the desks in front of him, further mangling his ruined op-eds.
Dandy Ed Bernam watched me through his raccoon mask. I checked again to make sure it was him before me, wishing I were plugged into the briefcase. I had downloaded all of my long-term memory into a biostatic memory froth I’d paid a half-year’s salary for. That’s one reason I don’t let the briefcase get too far away from me. I did it so as to have more room in the old noggin for junk interface algorithms . . . and other things. What was left in my brain was memories with cheated links and little redundancy. The guy who installed it—the best in the field—told me it was foolproof, nonetheless. And so far, I hadn’t found any blank spots.
This was Bernam, all right. He’d been a two-year man when I came on with the Birmingham P.D. Most Guardian rentals stay on patrol, but Bernam had worked his way up to plainclothes. Someone had joked that he did it all so that he could dress the way he wanted to every day.
Whatever the case, he hadn’t done well in Vice. Management had shuffled him around a couple of times before busting him back down to patrol. Ed couldn’t take it, and broke his lease. Management was not exactly mortified to see him go, especially since Guardian refunded the deposit on him. But it seems the corporation got back at Ed for losing them money by contracting him out only to places with strict uniform requirements. No more fancy duds for Ed. Yet I could see that he still had his snot problem.
What I remember most about Ed is from the day before my arraignment. He was cleaning out his locker after breaking his lease. The locker was full of designer jeans. Ed liked to affect that he was big-time management in those days. He took the jeans out and neatly folded them, then stacked them in a vinyl bag—and appeared to be inventorying them as well. Ed acted like he didn’t notice me as I got dressed in my blues, but he stopped with the jeans when I closed my locker door. He looked at me hard, and I stared back.
“What the hell do you think this is?” he asked me. “The twentieth century?”
I suppose he meant that I didn’t understand the intricacies of the situation I had gotten myself into, the fact that a rookie did not step on toes—particularly toes as sensitive as Freddy Pupillina’s and the Ideal to which he paid tribute.
The Birmingham P.D. and the Mafia had had a good-old-boy understanding for over a hundred years, and I’d stepped over the boundaries with my bust of Freddy for an assassination he’d been stupid enough to attend to in person. But that hit had stepped over my boundaries.
The poor guy he killed had been a bug junkie for years—just one of the burnouts hanging out on Twentieth Street with mental parasites eating their every thought almost before they formed it. When I was on patrol, I took a liking to this guy. He took care of stray dogs. His problem was that he had a big mouth.
This bugman just happened to look at Freddy wrong one day and say something stupid. The nanobugs had eaten the poor guy’s soul like gas on Styrofoam. Fuck the twenty-first century. Fuck the Family and its new and improved ways to hurt people.
Though of course I didn’t say a damned thing to Bernam at the time, I gave his question some thought. I’m still giving it thought. Maybe this century isn’t the one I would have chosen had I been given the option. Well, the fucking times had chosen me, and would just have to put up with my existence.
The airport junk took fifteen minutes to complete its report. Bernam had to listen to it aloud, since his op-eds were crisped.
“Meander Harco, age thirty, 6'0", eyes brown, hair brown, race mulatto.” At least this voice synthesizer had the pleasant accent of a Southern woman. Made it easier to hear all the personal shit spoken aloud. But not that easy. “Born 12/21/65, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, contract birth, parents Julia Monroe Delacroix, mother, Marvin Harco 473A, father. Licensed cohabitation 3/15/85–12/22/88 with Abigail Wu Brimly, Birmingham, Alabama, no offspring. Education: graduated Banks High School, Birmingham—”
“Skip to the currents,” Bernam grunted. He dribbled a little spit onto his chin when he spoke. It sat there for a while, glistening in a yellow sort of way. Finally, he took out a paisley handkerchief and delicately wiped it away. Classy guy, Ed.
“Employed 2087–present by Justcorp Criminology. Leased since January 2089 to Seattle Police Department, homicide. Current departmental rank, Lieutenant. Licensing to follow: Grade 19 depth investigations, including virtual slayings. Section B coda use of harmful force, with an exemption in part 2, subparagraph 4 for biomodifications in hands, elbows, and torso.” Which meant I had built-in brass knuckles—among other neat additions. “Option 4 for use of deadly force.” Bernam smiled. He knew the kind of restrictions they had in Seattle for a license to kill. At Option 4, it was very doubtful that my junk could process the legalities of response in time for me to shoot back if someone was trying to blow me away. “License for (1) Remington angular electrochemical stungun, serial number on request. (2) Glock polymer nine-millimeter automatic pistol, serial number on request. (3) Schrade two-inch boot devices. (4) Bullard Forensics Portalab III. (5) Archco Enhanced Op-Eds—”
“Fucking illegally modified—” Bernam muttered.
“With licensed enhancements (1)—”
“Fuck the enhancements,” said Bernam. The junk was smart enough not to try and interpret Bernam’s orders literally. It skipped to the next section.
“F.A. license HARCO234319599 for genre constructions, science fiction.”
“Huh?” said Bernam in his inimitable way.
“I write science-fiction stories on the side,” I replied. “Got a problem with that?”
“You’re full of shit.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Commendations, Official Evaluations, Resolved Offenses, and Unlicensed Activities. Warning: listing will take approximately twenty minutes for oral report.”
“Skip it. Outstandings?”
“1/3/89, Dereliction of Duty, Birmingham Police Department, on Article 6, judicial expert system appeal. Review due 8/97.”
“So,” said Bernam. “Going to get sentenced soon?”
“Going to get cleared soon,” I said. “You bastard.” I said it without heat, and Bernam grinned evilly. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was wearing a thin coating of lipstick.
“Give me the comp,” he told the computer.
The lights went down and the infrared came on. Sensors popped from the wall and shone darkly. Another five minutes passed. Finally, the lights came back on and the junk spoke up. “Behavioral and somatic patterns: 97 percent match. Lacking genetic evaluation—”
“I refuse a scan under Section B of the Privacy Act,” I said. It felt weird to be the one invoking a Section B. Usually I was having it invoked on me by some bad element who didn’t want to be identified.
“Shut the fuck up,” Bernam grunted. “Nobody asked you to.”
“Lacking genetic evaluation, opinion tendered: This is Meander Harco.”
“Satisfied?” I asked.
“Shut up.”
“Ed, it’s time you stop messing with me. I’m out of here in ten seconds unless you got reason to hold me.”
Ed looked at me as if he were scrutinizing a strange insect. “I knew you were dark-skinned, but I never knew you were a mule, Andy,” he said.
I stood still, expressionless. No. He wasn’t worth it. “Now you do,” I replied. I felt a great numbness grow in my gut, as if I were far bigger inside than I was outside. This was the way I felt before violence. Control. Hold on. My legal junk was spewing conflict options onto my op-eds. There were no options in my favor in this situation. Just for fun, I sifted the parameters through the Option 4 junk. It gave me the red flag. So. I could not legally kill him. Lucky Ed. This time.
“I’ve got a message for you, Andy,” Bernam said. “Freddy Pupillina wants to talk to you.”
For a second, I was nonplussed. Then this little shakedown began to make sense. Bernam was under orders from Freddy. Which meant all my previous legal evaluations were out of context and meaningless. Hmm.
“You’re mistaking me for somebody who gives a shit,” I replied.
Bernam got real quiet. He was evidently not used to anybody refusing Freddy in such a cavalier manner. But it was true: he was mistaking me for somebody who gave a shit.
Bernam resolved his difficulties by pretending not to hear me. “Tomorrow night, around eight, at the Sportsman,” he said. “You’re free to go now.”
“Tell Freddy I’m not coming,” I said.
“Out,” Bernam said. He closed his eyes and touched something on his chair. The chair spun around with its back to me. I stepped up to the desk where I’d laid my luggage and opened the briefcase.
“Ed, turn around.”
He did not reply and continued facing away from me. I pulled out the Glock and slid the magazine into the handle. I felt it click into position, but the plastic was noiseless.
“Ed.”
Still nothing. My legal junk was screaming, so I powered it down. I popped up a targeting menu, took aim, and fired the Glock into one of the chair’s armrests. As I suspected, there was no security breach sensing in the home office. A perfect way for an airport to cut corners. Why would you need it where you have a permanently armed guard? The crank that had led me here stood immobile in the corner, unaware that anything untoward was going on.
Bernam was, at least, a bit more self-aware than the 50. He spun around with his hands over his head. “Jesus Christ,” he whimpered. He tried to shuffle out of his seat, and I saw that Bernam was even worse off than I’d thought. He was attached by a bundle of leads to the chair.
“Ed, you’re bonded.”
“Shut the fuck up!”
There was nothing I could do to him that was worse than what he’d done to himself. It was like being a node with none of the perks—no sense of community, no mental health plan. It made me physically sick to contemplate. An individual giving himself up to an Ideal, but staying himself. Like a dog dragging around a tick the size of an elephant. Only rentals desperate for something ever got themselves wired for bonding. I wondered what kind of shit Bernam had gotten into. Graft? Bugs? Booze? He would not meet my gaze.
“Tell Freddy that if he messes with me, I’ll take him down,” I said. “Tell him that.” I pointed the Glock between Ed’s eyes. This got him looking at me.
“Oh Christ,” he said. “I can’t without my op-eds, Andy.”
“That’s okay. You can tell him the old-fashioned way. You still have a link screen, don’t you? Tell him I came to attend my grandfather’s funeral, and then I’m leaving. I no longer take shit off bad elements. Tell him to stay the hell out of my way.”
“Jesus, Andy—”
“Will you tell him that?” I said. I touched the muzzle of the Glock to Bernam’s nose. A little runny snot stuck to it.
“Okay, God, okay, I’ll tell him!” said Bernam. He seemed sincere. I pulled the gun away and wiped the snot on his nicely starched uniform. I had to press hard to make it stick.
“Nice seeing you again, Ed.” I put the Glock away and gathered my things, then walked out. Out of the airport, out into the sweating southern night. The air, as always, had an ozone tang imparted by the huge biostatic plants downtown. And, as always, the fecal odor of bucolic acid from the plants mixed with the tang, so that the city smelled like a zombie might, decaying and electric.
Even at the airport, lightning bugs blinked in the air. They lived in the grass that grew through the cracks in the sidewalks. I ordered up a Hertz with my op-eds. It was an 87 Sagittarius, and the inductors rumbled like driveway gravel. Maybe I should have gone with one of the newer companies instead of aging traditional Hertz, but I liked the fact that all their electrostatics had the same lines as old gas-burning automobiles.
As the Saj drove me away, a couple of the fireflies smashed against the windshield, and their glowing belly-fire smeared in incandescent arches across my field of vision. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn they were some glitch in the virtual manifestation. But I had my op-eds menued down, and the fireflies were real. For better or worse, I was in Birmingham, in the late twenty-first century, in the frail human flesh. More or less. The briefcase full of guns and brains sat by my side.
My fictional time-traveling detective, Minden Sibley, would have appreciated the juxtaposition of the old and the new on such a night as this. He was always flitting back a hundred years or so, going after fugitives on the Timeways or just taking a short vacation in days when you didn’t have to have a license to take a goddamn dump. But he always had to return within a week, subjective. That was the First Temporal Law, ingrained into the fabric of his being by his employer, the United States Time Company:
1. A time traveler can never harm, nor by inaction bring harm to, the resonate period to which he is native.
You could go away for a little while, but you had to return and take your place as a tooth in the cogwheel that turned the universe when it was your turn to connect up with the Big Conveyor Belt in the Sky. Or whatever. It was all lies, I thought, I’d made them up myself, so what did it matter?
Granddaddy’s death had made me maudlin, I decided. There is, however, no cure for self-indulgent sentimentality so sure and quick as going to see your family, the living ones, that is, in the flesh. I disconnected from the beltway a few miles from the airport and drove my car down First Avenue North to the BrownService Mortuary. Mom’s old Range Rover was parked outside. Harco, the bioenhancement company in which my father was a midlevel node, would not, of course, waste his work time by sending him to the viewing. Maybe he’d be at the funeral. Probably not. My father was a vague nothing to me, and I didn’t care. And I didn’t particularly want to see Mom, either.
My mother is an amalgamation of just about every kook spirituality that ever aspired to Ideation. There are feedhorns dangling from her like fat remoras. Yet she is not a node. God knows why. Probably some kind of sick balance in her mind among a variety of pathologies. She’s the one who gave me my first name, as if you hadn’t figured that one out already. She was also the one who saved my ass eight years before. What can I say? I love Mom, but I don’t like her very much. At least I don’t like being around her any more than I have to.
I locked my briefcase in the trunk and went inside the funeral home.
Mom was out in the hallway, talking to one of Granddaddy’s relatives whom I didn’t know—which included just about all of them. I never had been into the extended-family thing as a young man, though Mom had tried to get me interested in reversion genealogy at one time—that fad where some fancy junk supposedly deconstructs your DNA and gives you an op-ed presentation of life in Mesopotamia using your encoded racial memories, or whatever. Mom was convinced at the time that she was a Hittite princess and the rightful heir to the throne. I hated to point out to her that her inheritance nowadays consisted of a death zone of microbes that fried human beings as if they were insects caught in a zapper. The Middle East was no longer a pretty place, if it ever had been.
“Andy,” Mom said, and disengaged herself from the relative to come and hug me. She smelled, as always, of cloistered eucalyptus. “I’m so glad you’re here. Daddy will really be pleased to see you.”
As I’d known she would, Mom had had a ghost made of Granddaddy. I glanced through the door and saw him, sitting by the casket and looking morosely at himself.
“Well,” I said, and walked in.
Granddaddy was lying in his coffin, looking like he was made up for television. He was dressed in a gray suit that I’d never seen him wear. Mom had probably bought it for the occasion. He was a handsome man. He’d been a real looker in his youth, and the undertaker had obviously done some facial rejuvenation. Ironically, you can make dead skin look far younger than living skin, through some trade secret that I did not care to know or even guess at.
“I did live to a ripe old age,” said the ghost softly.
“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t find it in me to be rude to the holoware. A first for me. But, however shallow and stupid, the thing was all that was left of the algorithm that had raised me and formed my own deep-down programming.
“I wanted to say something to you.” The ghost spoke in a stiff voice, as if it were being forced into a subroutine it did not particularly like but was ordered to follow.
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t try to make eye contact. It wouldn’t be the same, no matter how lifelike they made the holo.
“First, power me down as quick as you can.”
“Mom won’t like it.”
“Convince your mother.”
“I’ll try.”
“The other thing,” he said, then was quiet for a moment, as if he were digging for something lost in his depths. But there were no depths to ghosts. “The other thing is, don’t take no shit off nobody. Except poor folks who can’t help it and don’t know any better.”
“I remember when you told me that,” I replied. “I’ll always remember.”
The ghost appeared relieved. He crossed his legs and turned back to looking at himself in the casket. “Almost one hundred fifty. A ripe old age.”
I left the room after another minute or so. Mom tried to get me to stay at her apartment, but I needed to be alone tonight. Also, I was a little worried about Freddy Pupillina looking me up, and didn’t want Mom to get involved in that kind of shit. She had enough problems as it was.
I found a money crank around the block and got some cash vouchers issued from my account. This would be the last traceable transaction I planned to make tonight. Just to be sure, I got out the Portalab and ran the voucher cards through a launderer. No real harm done, since they could be cashed at the Federal Reserve, but no more junk on them that could connect them to my account. Slightly illegal, but I made sure to do it away from the usual nanowatcher patch points, and out of satellite view. Being a cop hath its advantages.
I checked into a motel in Bessemer, on the west side of town, far from the funeral home and my mother’s place. The clerk—a crank (it wasn’t a classy joint)—asked for I.D. when my voucher cards didn’t produce an origination code. I showed it more fruits from the Portalab, and it legally had to be satisfied. My room was dingy and I couldn’t control the air-conditioning. The temperature was much too cold. Air-conditioning. The South was both the master of it and its slave. Nothing in the history of the region was more important.
That night, I dreamed of Abby. I often do. Nothing specific. Just her autumn hair, her slender fingers. Her breath. It always smelled like rain in leaves.
2
After the dreaming, I slept hard and woke up thinking I was in Seattle. Then I realized that not only was it freezing cold from the air-conditioning, but the chilled metal of a pistol was pressed against my forehead.
“Mr. Pupillina wants to see you,” said a voice from the darkness.
“Yeah,” I said. “It appears that he does.” That was when I jammed my stungun into where I estimated the voice had a crotch and pulled the trigger. I always sleep with a weapon.
There was a stifled whimper, a heavy thud, and the lights flipped on. A woman was standing by the door with the biggest damn fléchette pistol I’d ever seen. It had to be one of the Danachek 7s I’d heard of. Nasty way to die. The bullets were said actually to burrow. On the floor lay a big, bearded man in a blue suit. His index finger was through the trigger guard of a big .45.
“How the hell did you know where I was?” I asked, by way of breaking the tension. The woman’s tight expression did not loosen. She was heavyset and dark-skinned in a dirty sort of way, maybe in her late forties. Ugly as ten-day-old roadkill. She, too, wore blue, with tiny pinstripes that made her look fatter than she was, which was fat enough. Or big-boned, I should say, being a gentleman and all.
“Rental cars check in with their location every hour,” she said flatly.
“Only to the cops,” I said, then realized how stupid that sounded. In Birmingham, Freddy might not own the cops, but he sure as hell could get a little favor done for him—like a report on rentals.
“I hope this doesn’t take too long. I have a funeral to attend,” I said. The woman looked at me funny.
“So you already know,” she said. I couldn’t think what the hell she was talking about and finally decided she was talking about my own funeral, har, har.
She motioned me to get up. I had to step over Bluto on the floor to get to my clothes. She made me turn the briefcase toward her when I opened it. She reached for the Glock. So much for Plan B.
But I did have the rest of the alphabet to work with. I quickly slammed the briefcase shut on the woman’s hand. She cried out in pain, but kept the fléchette pistol leveled at my chest.
“Let go!” she said, fighting to control the hurt in her voice.
Instead, I twisted the briefcase as hard as I could and heard the bone in her arm break. She fired the pistol at me, pointblank. Fire and agony in my chest. The force of the bullet knocked me backward, but I managed to hold on to the briefcase, and the woman and I tumbled to the floor together. Her face came down on the studded metal cup in my elbow. Again there was the cracking of bone. She rolled off me, moaning. Her nose was a bloody mess. I kicked the pistol away from her and staggered to my feet.
After taking a moment to catch my breath, I lifted my shirt to inspect the damage. There was a hematoma on my rib cage. Through the rendered flesh and muscle, an exposed piece of my Kevlar chest plates shone gray as old bone.
The fléchette bullet lay at my feet, trying to burrow into the carpet’s nap. This sight, and the grinding pain in my chest, fired a rage within me. I kicked the woman in the side as hard as I could. She stopped moaning and passed out. This gave me less satisfaction than I’d expected. These two were just Family muscle. They weren’t made; their pain was their own. To hurt the Family, you had to hit a node. Like Freddy.
I gathered my things together and left the room. After I stowed them in the Saj, I opened the hood and found the sender box. Taking it out would leave me without traffic control. What the hell; I knew how to drive. I went to the trunk and found the tire tool. The box was full of bionics. It cracked like a skull and leaked gray-white nerve tissue and sickly yellow cranial fluid. While I was putting the tire tool back, the door to my room clicked open, and Big-Boned Bertha stumbled out. Her face was all bloody and she was obviously having trouble focusing well enough to find me. Nevertheless, I got in the car and got the hell out of there.
My first order of business was a patch job. I had to drive way the hell south to Hoover to find a booth that could handle skin grafts on the order I needed. It took an hour and a half to get me patched up. Funny how you either die or get better really fast these days.
The booth had my DNA match, and it wouldn’t be long before a sweep would root me out. Obviously Freddy cared enough to try, and had the kind of connections to succeed. I drove around aimlessly for a while, trying to match speed with the surrounding traffic so that I would not show up as an anomaly on the road control junk.
I pulled into a station for some static, and while the car was recharging, I went to the restroom and tried on my suit. I’d been wrong about it fitting. Over the last eight years, I’d put on at least twenty pounds, most of them in my chest and shoulders. At nine o’clock, when the cleaners opened, I took the suit in for altering. They put it in the nanotank and it was done in fifteen minutes. I paid with some damaged vouchers and headed in the general direction of the east side of town, toward the Church of Branching Hermeneutics, where Mom was holding Granddaddy’s funeral.
But there was still plenty of time to kill before the funeral. I was dressed in the same shorts and T-shirt I’d worn yesterday, so I pulled into East Lake and did five miles around the track. The lake was gorgeous in the midday sun, clean and full of fish, judging by the anglers on the bank. Years ago, it had been a toxic cesspool, but the nanos had cleaned it up—just like the nanos in my shirt slurped up all the sweat and searched out and destroyed bacteria that made a stink.
On about the third lap, I got a decent snippet of plot for my next Minden Sibley time-travel mystery. Something about nanos eating up a body that had been sunk into a lake and Minden having to go back in time, before the murder, to make an identification. Maybe the plot could involve the Second Temporal Law. I hadn’t done one of those for a while.
2. A time traveler must not endanger his own atemporal existence in any way, unless by so doing he is fulfilling his obligations under the First Law.
It always makes for a thrilling moment when a time traveler must decide between himself or the epoch that molded him. He can’t exist without it, yet he won’t exist if it does. Meaningless fun, though. Everybody knows time travel is impossible.
When I finished up my run, I felt like I’d just stepped out of the shower. I drove around for a few minutes until I found a resistance booth on First Avenue North, then put in thirty minutes working the weights and getting the involuntaries shocked. It had been a good three days since my last workout, and this one left me tired, but with a clean feeling under my skin. Working out is the only way I know of feeling virtuous at no one else’s expense.
To give the devil his due, I went over to the Krispy Kreme on Eighty-Sixth and had a donut and coffee. The place was over a hundred years old and run by some kind of historical trust. I was served by a node in a polyester waitress getup from the last century. I’d have preferred an authentic foul-mouthed waitress in regular clothes, but they’ve all been replaced by cranks, anyway. The donuts were good, though, and I sat with my coffee and considered times past.
I thought about a lot of things. Abby, mostly. The night I was running for my life from Freddy’s goons. Mom had pulled some strings with one of her cults, and the Children of Gregarious Breathers were all set to smuggle me out in the Winnebago they used in their nomadic travels. They were on a holy search for the promised land of perfect atmospheric ion concentration or something, and no one questioned their comings and goings. Once out of town, Justcorp could take care of me. In town, my company’s hands were tied by Freddy’s maneuvering. There were two slots in the Winnebago. One for me. One for Abby.
Only Abby didn’t take hers. She left me that night, in the midst of my need and terror.
We were on the Southside, standing by the onion-topped Greek Orthodox Church. We were to be picked up a block away by the Breath Children.
I told her I loved her, that I’d never loved her more than tonight.
“I know,” she said. She looked at me as if she were full of infinite sadness, infinite wisdom. She was practicing to be a node even then. Abby, with her black hair and brown eyes. The fingers of her left hand worrying at the silver armlet she always wore above her right elbow. “I’m not coming, Andy,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m not coming with you.”
I should have realized. My fear kept the truth from my mind.
It was me or Birmingham for Abby. It always had been. Part of the reason I’d fallen in love with her in the first place was her devotion to principles larger than herself, her unselfish ways. She loved cities, and this city more than any. She’d majored in urban planning in college, while I’d been studying law enforcement. We met in a criminal-law class, moved in together after I’d got my rookie slot with Justcorp and she’d been hired to monitor traffic and to flip the switch on the Vulcan when it needed doing.
After all those long nights on the traffic watch, pondering the lights, losing herself to the ebb and flow of city life, she’d fallen out of love with me, and into love of another sort. The Big Lie had caught her, before I had known what it was, before I could do anything to help her escape.
It was me or Birmingham, and Abby chose the city. She said that she loved me. She said that love for one man was not as important as love for humankind. She didn’t want to give up her job at the Vulcan; she had made node. She hadn’t wanted to tell me, knowing my distaste, even then, for Ideals. The city was going to wire her up in a week’s time. She was in line to become the city’s transportation coordinator, she said, to be on the Planning Council. In line to make a difference, to be something more than just one woman against the world. I could not believe what she was saying.
She had become one of those people who look right over you and don’t see a person when they look at you, who are always thinking about how everything could be different, how everything can be improved. About how individual people are merely stepping-stones on the road to perfection. And gazing into Abby’s eyes, I could see that I was just a point of heat on a particular street corner. No more, no less. She was listening to the buzz of everything so hard she could never hear me pleading with her to stay with me, to leave for me.
Abby kissed my numb lips and brushed her slender hand against my trembling face. Then I wondered, for the last time, how it was that she smelled like the rain. I swear to God she smelled like rain in the country. In green leaves. Maybe I’ve already told you that?
So I boarded the Winnebago alone, and didn’t die. And I stayed a person. I can’t say the same about Abby. My wife. Who was now the heart and soul of the city of Birmingham. Or at least the nerves.
“You make me look bad, son,” said Freddy Pupillina as he settled his enormous bulk on a stool next to me in the Krispy Kreme. “Why you want to play so hard to get?”
I took a sip of my coffee before I answered him, and scanned the restaurant. There was Big-Boned Bertha at the door. Her nose was healed, but something about it didn’t look right, as if she’d turned out so ugly in the first place, her cells had purposely forgotten how to reconstruct her.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe it has something to do with your trying to take my badge and your running me out of town on a rail?”
“Old news.”
“I have things to do, Freddy, a funeral to go to. Leave me alone.”
* * *
END OF SAMPLE
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