Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (15 page)

"We were worried that the government would sequester our ideas."

"They only do that if the ideas are dangerous. Were any of your ideas threats?"

"No. No. Just things like that pole and some political questions. But most of them were pretty conservative. I mean, nine of us are International Socialists."

Johnson put his fingers together, making a tent under his blue and brown eyes. D'or came in with two steaming plates of bok choy and tofu under gleaming sheaths of oyster sauce. Spellman put up a hand to wave away the food but D'or ignored him. Folio accepted his serving and bided his time using his blue eye to map molecular patterns in the steam. He considered the young man in front of him.

"What brought you guys together?" he asked at last.

"What do you mean?"

"How did you meet? How did you get together?"

"About half of us knew each other from school. Trent State. Lenny Li and Brenton both went there, and me and Mylo. Laddie did too. Mylo knew Billy from boarding school and Laddie was my friend from the gym. He was a lawyer for IBC. I think Derrick was a friend of Mingus."

"Who is Mingus?"

"Mingus Black, he worked with Derry for a while. A real success story. You know, black, Backgrounder parents--but he worked his way topside and made it as a lawyer. Now he's into buying up leases for Red Raven Enterprises mainly, he really works it. He was one of the four guys who bought up the Tokyo leases and moved those half million Kenyans to Japan."

"Who else?"

"Fonti Timmerman and Azuma Sherman."

"They from Trent?"

"Azuma went there one year and then transferred to Harvard. He did a leverage with Laddie at Macso. It was a real beauty too--"

"What about Fonti?"

"Him and Brenton were friends. He's just a programmer but he's real smart and he knows how to read crystal code. He went to City College."

As the pale antique dealer gave names, Folio recorded them off the Ether with his blue eye and baby finger. He didn't read the whole files into his mind because he was concentrating on what the kid had to say.

"No Jews," Johnson said.

"What?"

"No Jews among your group."

"Is that a problem?"

"Just an observation."

"There are no Jews in International Socialism. Zionism is incompatible with social evolution."

"You got a black kid in there," the detective suggested. "We're not racist, we're modernists in the modern world."

"Then why not go all the way and accept Jews who agree with your beliefs?"

"A Jew can never fully accept International Socialism," certainty worked its way into the wan kid's words, "because of the deep symbolic knowledge his people have hoarded over the last six thousand years. They can never give up their primitive notions of how the world should be organized."

"No place for them?" Johnson asked.

"Not in our group."

For a moment the detective considered refusing to help the kid.
Why bother saving this fool?
he thought. But then he remembered that he'd been sleeping behind D'or's counter for the past eight days and that his store of general credits was almost depleted.

"Five thousand credits and you'll have to move out of your apartment."

"What?" Charles Spellman half rose from his chair.

". . . down into Common Ground, that's right."

"Are you crazy?"

"Listen, kid. You're in the middle of a full-fledged murder spree here. The cops are obviously coverin' it up because they never caught those muggers--and the cops catch everybody they want to catch. It takes a lotta money to rig an accident like that cave-in on Upper Broadway and more than that to make it look like an architectural flaw. The only reason you're not dead is 'cause they haven't gotten to your name yet. If they did you all at once somebody like the
Daily Dump
might pick up on it. I know a guy can make you a fake ID that'll put you under and safe until I can get a handle on who's doin' what and why."

"There's no fake ID in the world that can beat the Molecular Tester Device," Spellman said. Johnson noticed that he was looking even paler than when he'd walked in.

"You think they suspect people of sneakin'
into
Common Ground? They don't care. They don't check. Anybody off of the cycle is welcome into hell."

"I can't just vacate my place. I have responsibilities."

"You call in sick. I'll stay in your hole. Maybe someone'll try and check you out. That's my best bet for a clue."

"When?"

"Right now. We go to the bank and then to my friend. After that you take the Develator to Common Ground and stay there until you hear from me."

The fear in the kid's eyes delighted Johnson. He stood to his full six foot seven height, towering over the frightened fascist. He was happy to cause the young man pain, but he was happier to have a bed to sleep in and five thousand creds on his wild card.

2

"You wanna take some more vig and do me again, baby?" Tana Lynn whispered in Folio Johnson's ear.

"Again?" he moaned. "Honey, thatta be seven times. I'ma start comin' red if I do that shit again."

"It'd only be six," the ecstasy girl said, pouting. "And I love it when you make that little noise like you were crying."

"Next time I'll put on the rec-chip and you can listen to that while I heal."

"Can we get somethin' to eat, then?" Tana asked.

"Order whatever you want," Folio said, crawling out of the great round bed. "But charge it to the apartment. I don't want to spend my cash."

She had fine features and dark skin, blond hair, and green eyes. When Folio had met her at the West Side DanceDome a few days earlier, he thought she was an Egyptian heretic. But when he took her out that night she'd told him that she was Ethiopian.

"They kept us in a field outside Addis Ababa," she'd told him, "but then a Peace Corps guy named Lampton put me in a bag and brought me here. By the time I turned eleven he wasn't attracted to me anymore and gave me to this guy named Jim. Jim put me to work cleaning his sister's house and his. It wasn't so bad, really. They let me study and I learned commodities trading. It was kinda weird, 'cause the day I moved out to my new place Jim told me that Lampton had paid him to kill me." __________

After Tana ate she went to sleep. Johnson sat out on the deck of Charles Spellman's two hundred first floor apartment. He stared at the red-tinged night sky and studied the information provided by his excellent eye.

He had downloaded the information of all ten Seekers while talking to Spellman, but absorbing that information into his brain took time. It was especially hard because the men had lived such boring lives. Everyone but Mingus, the black Backgrounder, was completely unremarkable. After an hour he went back into the apartment. The entertainment room's lasers were on. A 3D image of a shifting moonscape was being projected. The usual noise dampeners that this image used to simulate the silence of space weren't engaged, or Folio wouldn't have heard her from the bedroom. At first he thought that she'd gotten tired of waiting and was masturbating to take the edge off the vig she'd taken. He peeked around the corner of the door to see if she wanted him to join in. The man in the skin-tight glossy emerald one-piece had his hands around her throat. Tana was struggling but weakly. The detective had his knife out in a heartbeat. The targeting system of the eye was instantaneous, and so the hurtling blade severed the assassin's spine in less than a second after Folio had seen him.

The Ethiopian's eyes were bloodred but she was breathing and semiconscious. The dead man was white, with long, micro-braided eyebrows. Folio quickly stripped off the assassin's suit, leaving the corpse nude. The man was bald, with no tattoos, ID jewelry, marks, scars, or defects. Other than his exceptionally well-conditioned physique there was nothing to distinguish him except for his hands--they had six fingers each.

"Assassin synthy," Tana wheezed over Folio's shoulder. "German issue," he agreed.

"I thought they weren't allowed in the U.S."

"I guess they are--sometimes."

New York's last private detective turned his attention to the blond Ethiopian's neck.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Yeah, yeah. I had rougher make-out sessions when I was fifteen."

"You don't look much older'n that now."

"I'm twenty-four and I been on my own since I was sixteen," the woman said. "And this ain't the first dead man I've seen."

"You weren't his first either," Johnson said.

"There's nobody who hates me that bad," Tana said. "And even if there was he wouldn't have the millions it'd take to buy a test-tube assassin."

"No. They were after the dude lives here."

"I thought this was your place."

"It's time for you to go home, girl," he said.

"The fuck I am," she replied. "I have to know why that man tried to kill me before I can sleep."

"Okay. We'll talk for a minute, but not here."

Folio went to the bathroom and got a fiber swab. He dipped the swab in the assassin's wound and then wrapped it up in tissues.

Then he looked up at the ecstasy girl and said, "Let's go."

__________

Tana Lynn lived in a commune deep in Harlem. It was called the Mau-Mau and proclaimed the ethics of the Third and Fourth Black Radical Congresses. On the way there, Folio stopped at a communications booth and notified the police that there was a dead man in Charles Spellman's apartment.

"Why you wanna do that?" Tana asked.

"Just chummin' the water a little. Later on I might wanna catch me a fish." Tana's apartment was on the fifth floor of the huge building, midway between Lower and Middle Adam Clayton Powell Drive. The view out of her picture window was eternally night and limited to the featureless walls of the Harlem jail just across the street. Her apartment was a single large room with a thirteen-foot ceiling. She had a bed in one corner and a tiled shower with no curtain or door in the other.

"Pretty spare," Folio said.

"Good for the soul," she said.

She kissed him hard then and he leaned away from her, a little perplexed.

"What's that?"

"You killed that man the second you saw him," she said with a smile. Her eyes got large, as if she was looking at something transform before her. "You didn't hesitate, or I'd be dead now."

"Li'l somethin' I picked up in the Ukraine. You got a desk?"

Tana Lynn went to a door at the midpoint of one wall and opened it. An oak board a meter square fell out, landing against a prop that held it parallel to the floor. From under her bed she drew a metal folding chair.

"This is my chair," she said proudly. "My own property. Not leased or rented or anything. Axel Alpha made it for me in his shop downstairs."

Folio seated himself at the desk and took out the swab of blood. He held the sample five centimeters from his electric eye. It took a full three minutes to map the DNA patterns and another six to find and access the database that held the pod number to which the chromes were related.

"What is that?" Tana asked when he looked up. "What?"

"That eye."

"It was a gift from a grateful client."

"What's it do?"

"Watches out for trouble and then dives right in."

Folio could see the thrill that went through the young ex--sex slave. Her pulse quickened, and his did too.

"No, baby," he said.

"No, what?"

"I got to get to work on this job I got."

"What job?"

"I'm looking for a reason and maybe looking for a man that has that reason."

"Can I come?"

__________

Folio's eye counted nine hundred forty-two stairs from the eternal night of the lower avenues to the sunlit streets of the upper levels. The buildings that loomed over the busy business streets were clean and gleaming, while the lower and middle avenue walls were filled with graffiti and garish electric signs. Manhattan had been trisected into separate strata thirty years earlier with the architectural masterpiece of the middle, upper, and lower streets. The reason for this separation was to achieve an aboveground approximation of Common Ground. There were many New Yorkers riding the labor cycles who could not afford the high prices of Manhattan's rents and leases but who were still necessary for commerce. It was the brainchild of Brandon Brown, a City College graduate, to extend the city even further into the sky, leaving the lower levels for those who could not afford the sunlight but who still worked for a living.

"I love it up here," Tana said to her new friend. "When I was a kid I used to come up and run around until the Social Police would grab me and try to say I was White Noise. But Jim'd always come to the station and get me. He never got mad or nuthin'. Just tell me to come on and we'd go out for Macsands and maybe a vid."

"Sounds like a good guy, this Jim."

"Unless you was under his sights," Tana said. "Where we goin'?"

"Grand Central Develator."

"Cops?" For the first time Tana looked worried.

Folio nodded and smiled. "You scared?"

"I've been to Police Central before. They thought I was moving Pulse illegally. I seen what they did to the real dealer." The look in her eyes made the detective want to laugh, but he held it in.

"I won't let 'em hurt you, little girl."

__________

The last stop of Grand Central's Develator, like all Develators around the world, was Common Ground. But this particular mass conveyance device made an intermediate stop one thousand feet belowground at Police Central, the hub of all law enforcement for the Twelve Fiefs of New York. This one massive center was connected, through underground trams, to all police stations in the city. This allowed for speedy deployment of officers on a military scale.

Folio and Tana rode the great flatbed with hundreds of others. At Police Central they debarked into a long hallway filled with people seeking entrée to the Law.

Tana stayed close to Folio's side, holding on to his sinewy forearm. The mob moved slowly, funneling down from a mob to a single-file line.

"Yeah?" a woman said from behind a three-inch-thick, bulletproof pane.