Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, the Official Pirate Edition (2 page)

I need a new approach. I ignore the logic of the dream, ignore the other people, and get off the bench, sweeping aside the pile of masks and seating myself cross-legged on the floor. No one says anything about it. I rest my hands on my knees, close my eyes, and focus on my breath.

One, two. Inhale, exhale. One, two.

I get distracted by the guys stomping around me, by the vibrations of the engine that I can feel through the deck, but I bring my mind back to my breath. One, two. Inhale, exhale. I feel the Jenny settle onto the ground and as the doors crack open the familiar smell of the Mexican desert washes over me, making me lose focus again, but I bring my mind back to my breath.

One, two. One, two. One, two.

The details of the dream and my dread of it keep tugging at my attention and I lose my grip, lose my focus, again and again, and have to bring it back.

The doors slide open wide and the guys tumble out in an undisciplined, drugged gaggle, laughing and hooting, like a pile of evil puppies. I know what they’re about to do. I know every unspeakable detail and those details bang on the door of my attention, but I keep my eyes closed and force myself to re-focus on my breath.

Felon approaches me and bellows over the sound of the rotors, which are slowing now but haven’t completely stopped.

“Burroughs, what the 
fuck
 do you think you’re doing?”

I ignore him and remain where I am.

“Burroughs!” He grabs my arm and tries to pull me upright, screaming in my ear. I focus on my breath. “God
damn
 it, what the hell is the matter with you?” One, two. One, two. “This is dereliction Burroughs—you know the penalty for dereliction in the field?”

I feel my adrenaline kick up a notch when he ratchets one of his flechette launchers. The situation still 
feels
 entirely real and I begin to doubt myself, which is when the thing I’ve been waiting for finally happens: my alarm goes off.

The intermittent buzzing of the alarm goes on for a while before the dream finally begins to disintegrate, Felon’s voice crackling and spitting like bad comm as his apparition comes apart. I allow my eyes to open an instant too soon and out the door of the Jenny I see the desert for a moment, glowing green through the nightvision filter of my visor, before it’s replaced by my bedroom.

I look at the clock: 6:00 a.m. I say “I’m awake” and the alarm stops. I sit up in bed feeling shaky, covered in sweat. I throw the covers off and strip off my t-shirt and underwear, walking to the mat in the corner.

I’ll shower later. I’ve got a new client to meet today—a big one—and work to do. I need to collect myself. I sit down naked on the mat and re-start the process of meditation that I began inside the dream. I begin the Mosquito Meditation—nothing less is going to do the trick today.

Who would want to kill him? Even I don’t actually give a damn if he lives or dies and I’m paid a lot of money to care. I’ll try to keep him alive because it’s my job, because I have a reputation to protect, but about his death itself I would feel nothing, truly nothing. The attempt on his life must have been about money because I can’t imagine him arousing anyone’s passion.

He’s tall, but fat. His receding hairline gives his face a round, moonish look, eyes buried deep within folds of skin. His hair would be grey except that in a quaint, old-fashioned touch of vanity he dies it pitch black. By turns he stalks around the manse like a ghost, totters like the drunk he is, or charges like a stumbling bull, bellowing his head off. This is Max Prince in the flesh—the doughy, pale, puffy flesh. His T-shirts can barely contain his belly, like a ham shoved into a pair of panty hose. Sometimes he forgets to dress at all and wanders around in his pajamas or, on one occasion, a white dress shirt and nothing else. His hair is inevitably in disarray and his nails are always dirty. His breath is noxious.

But his eyes are still bright blue and clear, even if you can barely make them out through the sponge-like flesh that surrounds them. Blue like jewels, just like they always were. In a bygone era he was slim, sexy, and famous—an actor and singer at the top of the entertainment industry. Now he resembles one of those antique pornos that are printed on paper. If you cut away all the intellectual bullshit about how a three-hundred-year-old copy of Hustler represents a form of authentic American folk art, what you have in your hands is a well-thumbed nudie magazine with the sheen coming off the pages. He’s like that. Once he was beguiling in a trashy way, now you don’t want to touch him without gloves. Once he got people sweaty, now he’s just greasy and unpleasant.

Four decades ago Max Prince was known as the Mad Prince because of his outrageous conduct, especially his prodigious appetite for expensive drugs and disposable women. The women were starlets, debutantes, and cashiers from the local corner store. They were the mothers, daughters, and sisters of his business partners and friends.

There was no end to it. Screwing six women a day, he ingested every drug known to man—from natural psychedelics to hyped-up synthetic amphetamines—in quantities that would have killed an ordinary man, and washed it all down with vodka straight from the bottle. No matter what he did, though, he remained charming in his raffish way, and he never forgot his lines or was late on the set. His singing never suffered. On talk sims, chatting with the host and flirting with the other guests, he was sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes entertainingly arrogant, sometimes seemingly candid. Mostly he was funny and good looking and as a result we forgave him everything.

He destroyed stuff. He would trash a hotel room, tearing down the drapes and using the curtain rod to smash everything that was breakable. He would take offence at the color of someone’s parked car for reasons no sober person could interpret and use the heavy decorative cane he affected in those days to knock out all the windows, finishing with powerful blows to the hood that would make it buckle and cave. His keepers and managers would cheerfully pay for everything, sweeping up in his wake. They paid off the girls too, as well as their parents, abortionists, and psychiatrists, and greased the palms of the law so that the drugs he took never became a career-threatening issue. A good parasite—that is to say a well-adapted one—does everything it can to ensure the survival of its host, and his staff were good parasites, smoothing the way for him and keeping him out of trouble while drawing outrageous salaries.

Now he’s a has-been. He’s still known as the Mad Prince, but for more literal reasons and only to his staff since almost no one else bothers to talk about him. He’s used drugs and alcohol for so long and to such a degree that his emotions, his personality, and his thought processes have been deformed into something monstrous, alien, unknowable. And he continues to get wrecked, every day, all day. He’s paranoid and isolates himself in his estate, Cloud City. He’s certain that 
they 
are after him, after his famous self, after his money, after his very skeleton if they can get it.

He never appears in public, not that the public would care anyway, and spends most of his time reliving old escapades in the sims, jacked into a full-sensory replay of what he once was. Sometimes he uses the commercial studio productions he acted in, romantic comedies and action dramas, but more often he plays home-made recordings, recreating his drunken hijinx and his encounters with women. Time and again, stoned out of what’s left of his mind, he solves the same crimes, woos the same starlet, or fucks the same groupie. He is a man going in circles, his body bloating and inflating like a parade balloon while his mind dwindles away, shriveling to a barely functional, raisin-like core of irrational thought.

You may wonder why Fat Max is fat at all, why he’s a chronic alcoholic, why he’s even getting old. There are surgical solutions for all of those problems, after all. It would take less than a day at a price he wouldn’t even notice. The fact is, though, that Max is too paranoid to let anyone near him with a knife or a laser. He won’t allow his 
ka 
to be decanted because he believes that someone (he’s not sure who—
them!
) will erase it before he’s safe in his new shell. Or they’ll tamper with the shell in some insidious way, rewire the nerves or screw with the glands, in order to sap his will and turn him into a celebrity zombie who hands over his money and property to his new masters. So, ironically, one of the richest men in the world, one of those most able to afford immortality, is so afraid of someone 
else
 killing him that he’s killing himself by refusing to take advantage of modern medicine. My head hurts just thinking about how easily he could buy what I want so badly. I can’t allow that to distract me, though. For some unfathomable reason someone really has tried to kill him and he still has plenty of money to buy big-time protection.

All the income he made when he was younger has been carefully invested and this nest-egg produces more wealth in a week than most people will ever see in a lifetime. He has teams of brokers and market analysts and lawyers who work long hours to keep it that way, all while taking a healthy percentage for themselves. It’s in everyone’s interests that he continues to prosper. My job, like everyone else’s, is to make sure that he does.

I’m not sure where he’s wandered off to now, but when I first arrived and Cyril Dancey, the head of the day staff, introduced us, Max looked me up and down with a critical, bleary eye. I couldn’t decide if he liked what he saw or not and Dancey didn’t decode his master’s scrutiny for me, if in fact he had any idea what Prince was thinking.

There’s a cachet about military service in the security business. Not amongst professionals, but the clients eat it up. For that reason I’m out here at Cloud City dressed as I always am when I’m on assignment. I’m wearing California National Forces green cargo pants and military boots—the same ones I wore in combat, in fact, just in case anyone asks. My hair is still cut so short it’s almost shaved. I’m carrying a sidearm and I have a flechette-launcher on the underside of each forearm. The only difference in my appearance from when I was in the service is that I’m not wearing a jacket. Instead I have on what we used to call, back in my childhood, a wife-beater—a sleeveless T-shirt, also that distinctive shade of Forces green.

The point of the shirt is not to show off my physique, although that doesn’t hurt, it’s to show off my tattoos. They are my pedigree, and they are the thing the customers most want to see. Down my right bicep are my unit and rank insignias, rising as high as Captain. Down my left are the skill insignias: personal combat, light and heavy weapons combat, infiltration, counter-infiltration, intelligence management, and all the rest. On my forearms are the ones that really count, though, the battle insignias: the Boulder Colorado recon, the San Diego uprising, two New York infiltrations, and on and on, down to the one I wish wasn’t there—Tijuana. That’s the one that always grabs them. 
What was it like? That must have been amazing! 
That’s civilians for you. The veterans just turn away. They don’t like to think about it any more than I do, especially the ones who were there. Max may have noticed all of this or none of it—he regarded me, his face unreadable, and then walked away without speaking.

Dancey’s noticed the tattoos, though.  He’s a formal, discreet man, but his eyes repeatedly flick back to them when he thinks I’m not looking.  He’s young, maybe thirty at the outside, but he gives the impression of being old.  He’s dressed in a dark suit, crisp white shirt, and a blue-grey tie that matches the colour of his eyes.  His face is thin and pale, almost grey, although his features have clear African-American markers.  As I follow him deeper into the house, I notice that his gait is strangely stiff, adding to the impression of premature senescence.

“Get the fuck out of my fucking house!”  There goes Max now, interrupting my thoughts as Dancey leads me in the direction of the garden.

“That’s Saul, one of the cooks,” Dancey says, identifying the target of Max’s rage.  He lowers his voice politely, but he needn’t have bothered.  Max’s attention, all bluster and apoplexy, is focused on Saul like a spotlight, to the exclusion of anything else.

“What’d he do?” I ask.

Dancey just shrugs.

“Maybe nothing.  Max imagines things.” He states this matter-of-factly, fully acclimated to his boss’s quirks.

I turn and watch the show with everyone else.

“You are finished, fired. You’re lucky I don’t have you 
assassinated
.”

Max’s huge bulk stumbles down the hall from the kitchen, rebounding off the walls as Saul retreats in front of him.

“Okay, man, I’m going.” Saul doesn’t look unduly concerned, nor do any of the staff, most of whom watch for a moment and then go back to whatever they were doing.

“How often does he actually fire people?” I ask.

Dancey is expressionless.

“Saul will arrive for work tomorrow morning and Max won’t remember a thing—it’s the alcohol, the drugs. They wipe the slate clean.  In effect, all he’s done is give Saul the day off.  Since Max won’t remember, I won’t even bother docking Saul’s pay. No one actually loses their job in these dramas.”

As Saul goes out the door, Max follows him with a parting volley.

“Watch your back, you treasonous fuck. You aren’t safe!”

The last few staff members go back to work and I return to following Dancey and thinking about the defenses for Max’s house.  These consist of a high-end security system and now my company, Burroughs Oversight. I was only hired after the attempt on his life, but the security system has been in place forever.  Carmen, my tech guru, got here before me to examine it and called me with the details .

I’d expected her to find an expensive off-the-shelf package that would need serious re-strategizing, or at least technical upgrading. But what do you know? With his irrational sense of his own worth, his imaginary star-power, and his sheer paranoia, he has all the bells and whistles laid out in a lean, effective security ecology.