city blues 01 - dome city blues (11 page)

No, that wasn’t quite true.  I’d been caught in several downpours, in a real rain forest, at Iguazu, in Argentina.  But that was an experience so far removed from the make-believe forest in my shower as to seem like something from another planet.

At Iguazu, we’d worn snow cammies, because the dappled grays had blended in with the dying vegetation better than green jungle camouflage.  The sky had been the color of old concrete and the dead leaf mulch had been thick under our boots.  We’d slathered our skin with protective ointments against rain with a pH factor so low that it bore little resemblance to water, and we’d been damn careful not to swallow any.

A psychiatrist would probably say that Program Six was my way of denying Argentina, or that showering in a rain forest signaled my refusal to face the realities of our ruined ecology.  Personally, I think it was simpler than that.  I think I just liked it.

After my shower, I was half way through shaving when I decided to call Ms. Winter.  I was naked except for a towel around my neck and shaving cream on half of my face, so I selected voice-only for my end of the call.

It took her about six rings to answer.

She had a wild, disheveled look.  Her hair was mussed, her cheeks were puffy, and her eyes were rimmed with red.  For a second, I was afraid that I’d caught her with a client.  I reached for the disconnect, thankful that she couldn’t see my face.

She let out the tiniest sniffle and I jerked my hand back from the button.  This wasn’t the aftermath of passion; she’d been crying.

She tried to focus on the phone, her eyes bleary.  “Who is it?  Can I have video please?”

“It’s David Stalin.  You can’t have video, I’m naked.”

She sniffed again and tried to smile.  “Is this an obscene phone call, Mr. Stalin?”

“No.  I called to invite you to lunch.  My place, around one...  If you like seafood.”

This time she did smile.  “A call from a naked man who wants me to come over to his house.  This
is
an obscene phone call.  My day may be looking up.”

I angled the camera so she could only see me from the waist up and switched it on.  “If I’m going to make an obscene call, I want to get it right.”

She smiled as soon as she saw me.  “I didn’t know that anyone still shaved that way.”

I touched my cheek and grinned when I felt the smear of shaving cream.  “I’m a little old fashioned.”

Her grin matched mine.  I was glad to have chased her tears away, even if only for a few moments.

“You’re not old fashioned, Mr. Stalin.  I think you like to do things the hard way.”

“About that lunch...” I said.

She ran her hands through her hair.  “Are you asking me out on a date, Mr. Stalin?”

“No,” I said.  “Not at all.”  I paused for a second.  “I’ve got a friend coming over, and I thought you might like to join us.”

It was her turn to pause for a second.  “Okay,” she said.  “One o’clock?  Do you want me to bring anything?”

I shook my head.

“One, then.”  She hung up.

I washed the rest of the shaving cream from my face and punched up John’s number.

The phone screen filled with the logo for Neuro-Tech Robotics: the winged staff and entwined serpents of a medical caduceus laid out in drab green and striped with shiny foil runs like a circuit board with no components attached.  Hundreds of tiny data chips flew in from random corners of the screen and affixed themselves to the circuit board until the letters NTR were spelled out in silicon.

“Good morning, Neuro-Tech Robotics, how may I help you?”  The voice was flatly artificial.  It belonged to the AI that ran John’s company offices on Hawthorne Boulevard.  John had never bothered to give the AI a name, or even the rudiments of a personality.  As far as John was concerned, his research needed every byte of memory that could be squeezed out of his computer’s data cores.  When he had to address the machine, John just called it
Mainframe
.

I didn’t bother with niceties, because I knew that Mainframe was programmed to ignore them.  “Let me speak to John,” I said.

“One moment, please.”

Ten seconds later, the NTR logo was replaced by John’s face.  He smiled when he saw me.  “Hey, Sarge! 
Que pasa
?”

“I’m just getting ready to throw a pan on the stove.  Got time to join me for lunch?”

John looked back over his shoulder at a partially disassembled surgical robot.  “I’m kind of in the middle of something here.  Can I take a rain check?”

I gave him an exaggerated grimace.  “I’d rather you didn’t.  I’ve got a guest coming, and I don’t want her to think I’m hitting on her.”

John’s eyebrows went up a millimeter.  “A lunch guest?  It’s about time you let a woman into that mausoleum.  Who is she?”

“Sonja Winter.  The woman from Falcon’s Nest the other night.”

John’s eyebrows went up again.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said.  “And she’s probably thinking the same thing.  But it’s not like that.”

John grinned.  “You need a chaperon?”

I sighed, and then grinned myself.  “Okay,” I said.  “If that’s what you want to call it.  I just want to make sure that she doesn’t think I’m trying to get into her pants.”

“Here’s a stupid question for you,” John said.  “Why
aren’t
you trying to get in her pants?  That woman is a knockout!”

“Fine,” I said.  “She’s a knockout.  Are you coming to lunch, or what?”

“I think I can make a window in my schedule,” said John.  “What time?”

“About one o’clock.”

John narrowed his eyes as though trying to look past me.  “Did you call her just before you called me?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Why?”

He nodded at something over my shoulder.  “Ask her how she liked the show.”

“What show?”

John winked at me.  “See you at one, Sarge.”  He reached out to terminate the connection.

His image was replaced by static.  What show?

When I turned around, I saw what John meant.  My camera-angle modesty was a failure.  The sliding doors on my shower stall were set to mirror-mode.  By looking over my shoulder, Ms. Winter would have had a clear view of anything she wanted to see.

Had she looked?  Probably not, I thought.  In her line of work, she saw a lot of male flesh.  I wasn’t vain enough to think mine was anything special.

I busied myself in the kitchen, digging out spices that I hadn’t used in ages.

House had come up with a couple of dozen tiger prawns, each the size of a child’s fist.  They’d probably come from the tank farms in Dome 16, but I didn’t ask.  House was in charge of procurement.  I just handled the consumption end of things.

I timed it so that the first handful of prawns went into the pan at one o’clock.  They were just beginning to sizzle when Ms. Winter showed up at the door.

House had to let her in; by then I had my hands full with the prawns.  They tend to smoke a bit when you cook them the way I do, and you have to be really careful not to scorch the butter.

She walked into the kitchen wearing a hound’s-tooth jacket over a champagne-colored jersey dress.  Her hair was pulled back and around so that it spilled over her left shoulder like a dark waterfall.  The effect was simple, but stunning.  She set her purse on the kitchen counter and smiled.  “Hi.  Am I early?”

“Just in time,” I said.  “Lunch is almost ready.”

She looked around.  “Am I the first to arrive?”

“John will probably be late,” I said.  “He usually is.”  I smiled.  “You met him at Falcon’s Nest the other night.  He was late then too.  Don’t worry; we don’t have to wait for him.”

She looked surprised.  “Won’t he think we’re rude?”

“Not at all,” I said.  “It’s the only way to get him to show up.”

Her eyebrows narrowed.

“Really,” I said.  “It’s a cause-and-effect relationship.  Like lighting a cigarette to call a bus.  That one works, by the way.  If you’re ever in a hurry, and you don’t want to wait for a bus, just light a cigarette.  The bus will show up within about thirty seconds and you’ll have to put the cigarette out.  It’s a natural law, I think.”

“I don’t smoke,” she said.

“It works for the shower too,” I said.  “If you’re ever lonely and you want someone to call you, just climb in the shower.  As soon as you’re soaking wet and your hair is full of soapsuds, your phone will ring.  Cause and effect.  You can’t stop it.”

Ten minutes later, we sat down to ice-cold pasta salad, piping-hot Cajun garlic prawns
a la
Dave, and a fairly good bottle of wine.

House was kind enough to serenade us with a little Robert Johnson.

I watched Ms. Winter’s face carefully when she first tasted the prawns.  Her look was one of total surprise.  “What’s in this?”

I grinned.  “Garlic, butter, onions, cayenne pepper, lemon, a dash of wine.  The rest of the ingredients are a family secret, handed down to me by my grandmother.  Do you like it?”

“It’s wonderful!”

I laughed.  I can be modest about most things.  My cooking isn’t one of them.

I speared a prawn and was in the act of raising it to my mouth when House played a little chime and announced John’s presence at the door.  I smiled and set my fork down.  “Told you.  It’s cause and effect.”

“Shall I let him in, David?” House asked.

“Of course, House.  And tell him we’re in the dining room.”

“Are you always right?” Ms. Winter asked.

“I’m usually right about John,” I said.  “Not so much about other things, but I’ve pretty much got John pegged.  We’ve known each other since we were kids.”

The quiet whining of John’s exoskeleton preceded his entrance into the room by about two seconds.  “Starting without me, Sarge?”

“Not me,” I said.  “It was Ms. Winter’s fault.  I begged her to wait for you, but she flat-out refused.”

“Please,” she said, “call me Sonja.”  She motioned John to a chair, and rewarded me with a mock steely-eyed glance.  She lifted a fork full of prawn.  “And since we’ve already established that I have unspeakably bad manners, I have nothing to lose by eating like a pig.”

John’s exoskeleton eased him into his chair.  He picked up a fork and tasted the garlic-prawn.  When he had swallowed, he nodded in my direction.  “I’ll bet Sarge here told you that he cooked this, didn’t he?”

John shook his head.  “Not a word of truth in it.  Sarge has a two-headed dog-boy locked up in the cellar.  The wretched little creature does all the cooking, while David here gets to invite beautiful women over for lunch and take all the credit.”

Sonja laughed.  “Is
that
how it works?”

“I don’t have a cellar,” I said.  “I keep the poor creature up on the roof, like a gargoyle.”

“I have to ask,” Sonja said.  “Where on earth did you find a two-headed dog-boy?”

“Actually, it’s John’s twin brother,” I said.  “Dog-boy got all the looks in the family, and John was so jealous that he sold the poor fellow into slavery.”

John nodded.  “At least we
think
it’s my brother.  It could be my sister.  I asked Sarge to check, but I’m not altogether sure that he knows how to tell the difference between boys and girls.”

Sonja laughed again.  She pointed her fork at John.  “Why do you always call him Sarge?  Are you guys ex-cops?  Is it
Sarge
as in
Police Sergeant
?”